I pushed open the doors after the maw-mouth finished draining away down the road. They opened easily. The wards didn’t stop me, and there wasn’t a physical bar across them. I had a hazy memory of the colonnaded courtyard on the other side: the fountain gurgling, flowers exploding in profusion over the walls and climbing up the archways. When I came in now, the flowering vines had all withered, and the fountain was silent, but even as I came inside, the water made a choked splutter and then started again, a few brief spurts at first and then back into a steady shimmering fall, and new leaves and even a few flowers began to open off the woody vines.
It was empty, except on the far side, a very old woman was sitting alone in the shade under the awning, waiting for me. I crossed the courtyard and went to stand over her, and she looked up at me, her eyes and the wrinkled folds of her face full only of sorrow and not fear, and she reached out with her trembling wizened hands to close them around one of mine, the skin papery-soft and thin, all the bones pokey through it. I let her have it. I let her have it, and I didn’t howl at her, I didn’t scream. I couldn’t call her a liar, after all. She’d told the absolute truth. I was the one bringing death and destruction to the enclaves of the world. Each time I destroyed one of the monstrosities that all of them were built upon.
“Why?” I whispered, instead. I couldn’t ask anything more. I could barely make a sound.
“You already know,” Deepthi said. She was stroking my hand, gently, letting the tears drip off her face; they made dark splotches on the fabric of her sari. “To speak the future is to shape the future.”
“And this is the one you wanted to make?” I said, raggedly, groping after the shredded remains of my anger. She’d seen the future. She’d known, she’d understood, that I wasn’t going to be a maleficer, and she’d made a deliberately misleading prophecy anyway.
“This is the only one where you ever came home,” Deepthi said. “This is the only one where she did not find you, before you were old enough to protect yourself.”
“Who?” I said, but Deepthi was right; she was right, as she was always right. She’d never been wrong yet, and even while I was asking, I did know. We’ve met El. She’s an extraordinary person. I only wish I’d found her sooner. That was what Ophelia had written to Orion. Ophelia, who had made her own child into a maw-mouth, a creature that only I could kill. “I wasn’t killing maw-mouths at five!”
“She was searching for you already,” Deepthi said. “She knew you must exist, someone or something like you.” She brought my hand to her face and pressed the back of it to her cheek, closing her eyes a moment, and then she straightened up and reached out to pat a low cushioned seat that had been set next to her chair, like a footstool. I sank down on it, my knees wobbly. “She made a great working of darkness. So great she took the lives of many children to make it. A year where no one left the Scholomance at all.”
I’d heard about that year. But in the history books, it was a dramatic cautionary tale reminding us to keep a sharp look out for maleficers among us. Supposedly a dozen maleficers had banded together and revealed themselves in the graduation hall, and had taken out the entire senior class for malia to make their own escape. They’d quickly been hunted down by all the vengeful enclavers; that made it also a cautionary tale to any would-be maleficers reminding them to avoid enclavers’ children in future. And in those history books—Ophelia Rhys-Lake had been the chairwoman of the Board of Governors. She’d overseen the effort to hunt down the vicious maleficers.
And during that following year, in New York enclave—Orion had been conceived. And so had I. Because Mum and Dad had been in the next year after at school.
“You are the balance,” Deepthi said softly. “The gift that Arjun and your mother gave the world, to bring light out of the dark.”
There were tears coming down my face. Deepthi reached out and stroked my hair back behind my ear, looking into my face like she was searching it for something that she’d lost.
“I saw many paths where Arjun would come out of school,” she said. “Many things that I could have said, warnings, that would bring him home. But not for long. Because in all of them, he would still have loved your mother, and he would have seen her taken instead. And so…he would have gone back to the school. He would have gone through the doors, and let the maw-mouth take him, too.”
“What?” I said in horror. “Why?”