And Liu did need to be inside the enclave. Three of the top healers were working on her, taking it in turn round the clock to keep her hovering in some kind of complicated healing spell in the middle of the courtyard. It took me aback when Aadhya led me back in. I wasn’t paying much attention until then, but when we came inside, the whole house was different: the fountains had been refilled and the water was running again, a soft gurgling over rocks, and the trees and shrubs had all grown new leaves; a narrow vine was putting out flowers. And Liu was floating three feet off the ground in a glowing cocoon that one of the healers was spinning round her.
“It’s okay!” Aadhya said, when I pulled up in alarm. “It’s a regeneration spell.”
The cocoon was made of filaments of water coming up out of the stream, which were being interwoven with thin lines of fine powders coming out of two dozen porcelain jars arranged in the courtyard. Some were enormous waist-high things that I could almost have climbed inside, and others were the size of a sugar bowl, and one tiny casket made of solid gold emitted a single glowing-red grain every ten minutes out of a minuscule opening in the top. It was certainly impressive, and when I went up as close as I could and peered through the translucent shell, Liu already looked better: her shoulders and hips had straightened out, and her skin was glowing faintly and evenly all over, the livid marks gone.
I made the mistake of trying to ask one of the healers’ apprentices how much longer the treatment would take, and got an exhaustive explanation that I couldn’t understand at all. It was given to me in English, not in Chinese, but that didn’t help. The Beijing healers weren’t like Mum; they were the kind of healers who’d come out of the Scholomance, went straight for advanced mundane medical degrees, then apprenticed for another ten years to a senior healer. Anyone who emerges from the process talks in jargon so rarefied that I doubt any other human being could understand them except other wizard healers. Occasionally those sorts come to see Mum to try to understand her work, and usually go away again seething in frustration after a few days.
Except in one way it turned out they were exactly like Mum. I finally gave up on understanding what they were doing and just demanded to know specifically what hour, day, week, or year Liu would come out of the chrysalis, and they said, When she is ready.
Liesel and Aadhya both asked me—with differing degrees of tact—what had happened with Orion, what was wrong with him. I couldn’t tell them, not even Aad. I couldn’t put the words into the world. If I didn’t say them, if I didn’t think about it, I could put myself back into the story I’d already written for myself, well before graduation: a jilted girl, the school romance come to an end, ordinary and expected. Orion would be alive in New York, choosing to be there of his own free will. And I could go on with my life after all.
I suppose on some level I already knew that as soon as I tried, I’d find fairly quickly that I couldn’t. But I didn’t know what there was to be done, and I had still less idea of what I could do. Ophelia deserved to have her entire brain taken out and shredded like cabbage, but Orion was right: if she couldn’t undo whatever she’d done, no one could. Mum had already tried, and I didn’t believe there was any healer in the world who could do more for him. And I couldn’t see any way for me to be of any use at all. The only thing I could have done was the only thing I could do to any maw-mouth, and I wasn’t going to do it to Orion. He was alive, he was, and he deserved to live if anyone ever had, and I wasn’t going to look him in the face and tell him he was already dead.
But I didn’t know what else I could do. I ended up just sitting in the courtyard with Zheng and Min and Liu’s grandmother, watching the cocoon turning gently round and getting more and more angry, like a supervolcano building up pressure deep underground, ready to erupt in one direction or another. Aadhya and Liesel had both been taken off by Liu’s uncle and father to go help negotiate various terms with the rest of the new and old enclavers—as proxies for me, I gathered, which was probably just as well for everyone concerned, since seething rage doesn’t really make negotiations go smoothly.
Out of the back of the sage’s house, there were faint warm gleams of light coming out of the shutters of every house along the alleyway, and the red lanterns had dimmed, but deliberately. Everyone had been tucked into some corner or another for the night, and the enclave was starting to settle, a general quiet descending. There were even a few crickets making soft singing noises together in the courtyard, as if they’d snuck in or been brought in. You couldn’t tell what had almost happened here. Except for Liu, still floating, eyes closed, still not ready to come back out of what everyone in this place had tried to do to her.