I fought her off a little: I didn’t want to feel better. I didn’t want to get up and go on in the world, agreeing that it was in any way acceptable for the world to keep going itself. But lying there under Mum’s hand, unimaginably safe and comfortable, I couldn’t help but feel stupid. The world was going on anyway whether I gave it permission or not, and finally I sat up and let Mum give me a drink of water in the lopsided clay cup she’d made herself, and she sat on the bed next to me and put her arm around my shoulders and stroked my hair. She was so small. The whole yurt was so small. My head brushed the roof at the edge, even sitting on the camp bed. I could have made it outside on one good jump, if I were stupid enough to leap out into the unknown where anything could be waiting to ambush me.
Of course, that wouldn’t have been stupid at all now. I wasn’t in the Scholomance anymore. I’d set the students free, and jailed all the mals in our place, and then I’d broken the school off the world with all of them crammed hungry inside to gnaw on each other forever. So now I could sleep for twenty hours without a care, and I could go bounding out of my yurt with a song in my heart, and I could do anything and go anywhere in the world I wanted to. And so could everyone else, every last child I’d shepherded out of the Scholomance and all the children who’d never even have to go.
Except for Orion, gone into the dark.
If I’d had any mana left to do anything with, I would have imagined the possibility of doing something for him long enough to try some more. But since I didn’t, all I could imagine was going for help to someone else—his mum maybe, who was on track to be Domina in the New York enclave—and asking her for mana so I could do something, and that was where my imagination broke down: looking her in the face, someone who’d loved Orion and wanted him home, and asking her for mana, for any of the ideas that became obviously stupid and useless as soon as I had to persuade someone else to believe in them. So I did the only thing left to do, and put my face in my hands and cried.
Mum sat beside me the whole time I was weeping, sat with me, caring about my misery without pretending she was feeling it too, or hiding away her own deep joy: I was home, I was alive, I was safe. Her whole body was radiating gladness out into the universe, but she didn’t try to make me join in or smother my own grief; she knew I was deeply hurt, and was so sorry, and ready to do anything that she could to help me, when I wanted it. If you’d like to know how she told me all that without saying a word, I would too. It was nothing I could ever have done myself.
When I stopped crying, she got up and made me a cup of tea, picking leaves out of seven different jars on her crammed-full shelves, and she boiled the water with magic, which she’d never ordinarily have done, just so she didn’t have to go outside to the fire and leave me alone yet. The whole yurt filled with the sweet smell when she poured the water in. She gave it to me and sat down again, holding my other hand between both of hers. She hadn’t asked me any questions, I knew she wouldn’t ever push, but there was a gentle silence between us waiting for me to start talking about it. To start grieving with her, for something that was over and done. And I couldn’t bear to.
So after I drank my tea, I put the mug down and said, “Why did you warn me off Orion?” My voice came out hoarse and roughed-up, like I’d run sandpaper up and down the inside of my throat a few times. “Was this why? Did you see—”
She flinched like I’d jabbed her hard with a needle, and her whole body shuddered. She shut her eyes a moment and took a deep breath, then turned and looked at me full in my face in the way she called seeing properly, when she really wanted to take something in, and her own face went crumpling into folds along the faint wrinkle lines that were just beginning at the corners of her eyes. “You’re safe,” she said, half whispering, and she looked down at my hand and stroked it again, and a few tears dripped off her face. “You’re safe. Oh my darling girl, you’re safe,” and she heaved a massive gulp and was crying herself, four years of tears running down her face.
She didn’t ask me to cry with her; she looked away from me in fact, trying to keep her tears from me. I wanted to, I wanted so much to go into her arms and feel it with her: that I was alive and safe. But I couldn’t. She was crying for joy, for love, for me, and I wanted to cry for those things too: I was home, I was out of the Scholomance forever, I was alive in a world I’d changed for the better, a world where children wouldn’t have to be thrown into a pit full of knives just for the hope they’d make it out again. It was worth rejoicing. But I couldn’t. The pit was still there, and Orion was down in it.
I pulled my hand away instead. Mum didn’t try to hold me. She took several deep breaths and wiped her tears away, packing the joy out of the way, tidy, so she could go on being with me, then she turned and cupped my face with her hand. “I’m so sorry, my darling.”
She didn’t say why she’d warned me off Orion. And I understood why at once: she wasn’t going to lie to me, but she didn’t want to hurt me either. She understood that I’d loved him, that I’d lost someone I loved, in the same horrible way that she’d lost Dad, and my grief was all that mattered to her now. It didn’t matter to her to tell me why, or persuade me that she’d been right.
But it mattered to me. “Tell me,” I said through my teeth. “Tell me. You went to Cardiff, you got that boy to bring me a note—”
Her face crumpled a little, miserable—I was asking her to hurt me, to tell me something she knew I didn’t want to hear—but she gave in. She bowed her head and said softly, “I tried to dream you every night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach you, but I tried to anyway. A few times, I thought you were dreaming me back, and we almost touched…but it was only dreaming.”
I swallowed hard. I remembered those dreams too, the faint handful of near-touches, the love that had almost made it to me despite the thick smothering layer of wards blanketing the Scholomance, the ones that blocked every possible way that anything could get in—because otherwise mals would use that way, too.
“But last year—I did see you. The night you used the linen patch.” Her voice was a whisper, and I hunched up, back in that moment and seeing it with her eyes: the little cell of my room, me on the floor in a puddle of my own blood, with the gaping ragged hole in my belly where one of my especially charming fellow students had shoved a knife into me. The only reason I’d survived it had been that healing patch she’d made me herself, years of love and magic worked into every linen thread she’d grown and spun and woven.
“Orion helped me with it,” I said. “He put it on me,” and I stopped, because she’d dragged in a gasping breath, her face twisting into the memory of a horror worse than my lying on the floor bleeding out.
“I felt him touch it,” she said raggedly, and even as she was speaking, I knew I was going to be sorry I’d asked. “I saw him, so near you, touching you. I saw him, and he was just—hunger—” and she sounded sick, she sounded like she’d been watching a mal eat me alive, instead of Orion kneeling on my floor and pressing healing into my torn body.