I can say from experience that it was very much like when you’ve been humiliated in the cafeteria or the bathroom in front of a dozen people, and because you couldn’t think of any clever comebacks at the time, you keep daydreaming about all the viciously witty things you might have said. As Mum had pointed out to me several times during my childhood, really what you’re doing is bathing yourself endlessly in the humiliation all over again, while your tormentor sails on perfectly unaffected. She was right, and I’d known it even then, but knowing had never stopped me before. It didn’t stop me now. I stayed stuck, going back and forth on the rails, trying to find a way to shove the train that had already arrived off the tracks somehow.
After a few more days of trying to rewrite history on the inside of my own head, I came up with the magnificent and highly original idea that maybe I could do it on the world instead. I went into the yurt and dug up one of my old notebooks from primary school that Mum had saved in a box, and I found a blank page towards the back and scribbled a few lines down, something something l’esprit de l’escalier. The idea felt very French, just like my best and most elegant killing spell, and if that doesn’t sound like a recommendation to you, I can’t imagine why.
I can’t tell you what I was thinking when I started creating a spell that would let me literally alter the fabric of reality. That sort of thing just doesn’t work on a long-term basis, no matter how powerful you are. Reality is more powerful, and it will eventually bounce your attempt off, generally disintegrating you personally along with it. But you can certainly have a nice long run—at least from your own perspective—in your own personal fantasy universe, and the longer you go and the more power you have to keep it going, the more havoc you’ll wreak on yourself and others in its final implosion. And if I’d stopped long enough to think about it, I’d have known all that: both how useless it would ultimately be and how much damage I’d do if I tried it. But I didn’t. I was just trying to find an exit from the agony, like I was in the maw-mouth with Orion, mindlessly desperate to escape.
Mum found me looking for the next line of the spell, which I was almost certainly going to find. I’m very bad at writing spells of my own devising unless they cause vast amounts of destruction and terror, and then I’m absolutely unmatched. Her tolerance for the grieving process didn’t extend to watching me tie the whole planet into knots and eradicate myself along the way. She got one look at what I was writing and tore it out of my hands and threw it into the fire, and then she went down on her knees in front of me, caught my hands tight, and pinned them against her chest. “Darling, darling,” she said, and then she freed one of her hands and put her palm against my forehead, pressing hard between my eyebrows. “Breathe. Let the words go. Let the thoughts go. Let them slip away. They’re already going, out on the next breath. Breathe. Breathe with me.”
I obeyed her because I couldn’t help myself. Mum had almost never used magic on me, even when I was exactly the howling furious storm of a child that any other wizard parent would have been spelling into calm every other day. Most wizard kids can fend off their parents’ coercion spells by the age of ten, but when I was four and screamed because I didn’t want to go to sleep, I got three hours of lullabies, not a spell to make me go quietly to bed; when I was in a kicking rage at seven, I got understanding and space and patience, even when what I would’ve liked much better was a screaming match and a good dose of soothing potion. I don’t actually advocate for this approach—in retrospect I still think I would quite have appreciated a dose of soothing potion once in a while—but it did mean that I wasn’t any good at blocking Mum’s magic, at least not instinctively, and instinct was the only thing I was running on in the first place.
Anyway, Mum’s magic feels good, because it’s only ever meant to be good for you, and I leaned straight into the relief of it. By the time I did manage to wrench myself loose, she’d knocked the beginnings of the spell out of my head and also made me feel better enough that I could recognize I’d been doing something incredibly stupid.
Not that I was grateful for her help or anything. It only made me feel worse knowing she’d been perfectly right. After she let me go, I was too unwillingly calm to storm off into the ongoing rain, but I also didn’t want to do anything unendurably horrible like talk about my feelings or say thanks for saving me from unmaking myself and blowing up the commune if not half of Wales. I had to find another way to escape, so I got out my book bag and took out the sutras.
Mum had gone to the other side of the yurt to wash pots with her back turned, to give me space. But after a while she glanced back and saw me reading and said in her peacemaking voice, which I both loved and hated passionately, “What are you reading, love?”
Of course I wanted to boast of them and show them off, but instead I just muttered surly, “It’s the Golden Stone sutras. I got them at school,” except I didn’t finish the sentence because Mum made a noise like someone had stabbed her repeatedly and dropped the plate she was cleaning to thump on the ground. I stared at her, and she was staring back, wide and terrible and frozen, and then she fell to her knees and put her hands over her face and literally howled like an animal on the floor.
I panicked completely. She was in roughly the same state of hysteria as I’d been myself, half an hour before, but I’d had her for help, and she had me, and I’m not very useful unless you’re under attack by an army of maleficaria. I hadn’t any idea what to do. I literally ran round the yurt twice looking at things wildly before getting her a cup of water. I begged her to drink it and tell me what was wrong. She just kept keening. Then I got the idea she had been poisoned by the washing-up liquid and tried to test it for toxins, found nothing, decided I had to cast an all-heal, didn’t have enough mana, and started doing jumping jacks to build it, all while she wept. I must have looked a proper twat.
Mum had to pull herself out of it. She gulped a last few times and said, “No, no,” to me.
I stopped, panting, and went on my knees facing her and caught her shoulders. “Mum, what is it, just tell me what to do, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I forgave her everything, I forgave her for not loving Orion, I forgave her telling me to keep away from him, I forgave her for making me feel better. None of it mattered in the face of this upheaval, as if my awful half-written spell had somehow already begun to take the whole world apart underneath me.
She made a slow drag of breath that was a moan and then said, “No, love. Don’t. It’s not for you to be sorry, it’s me. It’s me.” She shut her eyes and squeezed my shoulder when I was going to say something inane like no it’s all right, and then she said, “I’ll tell you. I’ll have to tell you. I have to go to the woods first. Forgive me darling. Forgive me,” and she got up like an old woman pushing herself off the floor slowly and went outside straight into the pouring rain.
I sat on the bed hugging the sutras to me like a stuffed bear, still in a restrained panic that only stayed restrained because Mum did go into the woods all the time, and came out again with calm and healing and care, so some part of me could cling to the hope that she’d come out with them again this time, but nothing like this had ever happened in my life, and the bad things in my life were always my fault. I nearly cried when Mum did come back, only an hour later, wet through with her dress plastered in tissue-paper bunches to her legs and muddied all up the front and over her face like she’d lain in the dirt for a while. I was so desperately relieved to see her, all I wanted was to hug her.