A maw-mouth is the worst thing that can happen to a wizard. They’re the monsters that keep us awake at night. Probably every last wizard in that enormous amphitheater had made it out of the Scholomance, running past Patience and Fortitude, inches away from endless hell. All of these wizards, they’d known that something bad was going to happen in here, that Liu wasn’t going to come out again, but they hadn’t known how bad. Surely they’d told themselves a story—it was just one death, one sacrifice, for everyone’s sake. Maybe there had been a lottery, something they’d told themselves was fair.
And the eight people in this room—who wouldn’t meet my eyes when I looked at them, who’d known what they were really doing—they’d told themselves a different story: Ophelia’s story. The story that every council member in every enclave had been telling themselves for thousands of years, since the very first time someone had built an enclave out of death instead of gold. It was their responsibility to do the terrible thing for everyone else. To bear the scars of it like a burden, as if there was something noble in doing something so horrible that most people couldn’t stand doing it, for the sake of those squeamish people.
I wanted to sweep all of them off the face of the earth. But they were just ordinary people, after all. The people in this room weren’t any worse than the enclavers I’d known at school, and they hadn’t been any worse than the losers I’d known at school, except that they’d been enclavers, and that hadn’t been their choice, not really, or at least not a human choice that ordinary people made. The enclavers had been born enclavers, and the losers had been born outside, and I was more or less the only loser in the world who had chosen not to be an enclaver.
And that was a choice I hadn’t wanted myself. I’d tried not to make it. It was Mum’s choice, and I knew that at the heart, that was the choice to care about, to forgive, even the Philippa Waxes and Claire Browns of the world; even the Ophelias; the most horrid and miserable people, who didn’t deserve to be forgiven, because otherwise no one deserved to be forgiven.
And if Mum hadn’t made that choice—if she had ever chosen not to forgive someone, if she’d chosen to refuse healing and care to someone because they had been just too awful—then the worst thing that would have happened was, that one person would have gone off into the world, sick and desperate. But for me—my choice was to find some way to forgive these people, these horrible people, or sail out and start blasting the whole world bare. Because enclaves all over the world, every enclave built for thousands of years, had been made this same way. Enclaves are built with malia, Mum had said, and how right she’d been. If I was going to eradicate this one, why wouldn’t I keep going? The people in this room weren’t any worse than the people in the cold polished vaults of London, the ones who’d been so grateful for my help to fight off a maw-mouth at their gates, after they’d made one of their own and sent it roaming the world.
So why wouldn’t I go back to London and rip it down, with every man, woman, and child inside its walls? Why wouldn’t I head to New York straight after, and go down the line from there, bringing death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world, right on schedule? Just because I hadn’t watched their ceremony firsthand, just because they hadn’t picked on my own friend? That would make me exactly like these people in the amphitheater, hiding behind their comforting wall.
But I was like those people, surely. The only difference was the wall. I didn’t have one. I had to hold the power and I had to commit the act, both, inside my own body and mind. I couldn’t hand a tidy bit of mana over to someone else to do the dirty work, and I also couldn’t tell myself that I was just doing what everyone else wanted me to do, and if I didn’t, someone else would. I had to look my own selfishness in the face, each and every time. And I didn’t like doing it, did I? The wall wasn’t for nothing, after all.
And that didn’t mean they wouldn’t still do the wrong thing if they had the chance. They could tell themselves, after all, that everyone else in the world had done the same wrong thing. But I made myself look up at their faces, and look at the tears and the horror, and believe in it enough to give them a choice, the only choice I could think of.
“I’m not letting you do it,” I said. “Not if I have to bring the rest of this enclave down with all of us in it. I did it to the Scholomance and I’ll do it here. And you can’t stop me.” My voice echoed off the walls and around the massive space, ringing through the enforced silence. Nothing else broke it. I gestured to the circle of bricks, that horrible weight. “Or you can take these off her, and I’ll try to save this enclave for you. I don’t know if it’ll work. But if you’ll give the mana to me instead of using it for this, I’ll try.”