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.
But she said, “I have to tell you now,” and it was her deep, far-off voice, the one that only comes when she’s doing major arcana: when a wizard comes to her who’s trying to be healed of something really awful, a deep curse or magical illness of some kind, and she’s telling them what they have to do, only this time she was telling herself. She took my hands for a moment and held them, and then she pulled my face down and kissed me on the forehead like I was going away, and I was half sure that Mum was about to tell me that she’d been wrong all these years and I really was doomed after all to fulfill the prophecy of death and destruction and ruin that’s been hanging over my head since I was a tiny child, and that I had to leave her forever.
Then she said, “Your father’s family were from one of the Golden Stone enclaves.”
“The ones built with the sutras?” I said it in a broken whisper, not really a question. I’d known my father’s family, the Sharmas, had once lived in an enclave—an ancient strict-mana enclave in the north of India somewhere—that had been destroyed a couple of centuries ago during the British occupation. The Golden Stone sutras were old, old Sanskrit spells, and I knew they’d been used to build a whole slew of enclaves in that part of the world, ages ago. So that was a bit of a coincidence, but it didn’t seem anything bad. I was still terrified: I could feel something absolutely horrible was coming.
“Enclaves are built with malia,” Mum said. “I don’t know how they do it, but you can feel it when you’re there, if you let yourself. All of them, except the Golden Stone enclaves. Your father told me about them.”
“But, that’s good, then,” I said, high and begging; I held the sutras out to her like an offering. “There’s no malia in building them, Mum. I’ve read all of it, I can’t cast it all yet but I’m sure—” but her face was crumpling in as she looked down at the beautiful book. She put out her hand over it trembling, fingers hovering a little bit away as if she couldn’t bear to actually touch it, and then they curled back into her palm again without even brushing the cover.
“Arjun and I, we wanted to build a new golden enclave,” she said. “We thought, if we could only show everyone a better—” She cut herself off and started over, in a familiar way: she always reminds people not to explain when they’re trying to ask forgiveness, not to offer excuses until they’re invited. “We wanted to build a golden enclave. We wanted to find the sutras,” she said, and I think maybe by then I was beginning to understand, but my head was going blank, full of white noise. “We thought our best chance was there in the school, in the library. My darling, I’m so sorry. We cast a summoning spell. We summoned the sutras, and we left the payment open.”
“We thought it hadn’t worked,” Mum said. “We thought they’d just been lost or destroyed.”