But if I couldn’t be angry, I didn’t know what to be. I didn’t even quite believe it yet really, not in my gut. I don’t mean I thought she was lying or making it up; it just wasn’t something that I could fully believe that Mum had done. She could hurt me, could make me angry. I’d harangued her for half my childhood to take me to an enclave, and she’d refused: she hadn’t been willing to make that bargain even to save my life, although she’d have died to protect me. But she couldn’t have done this. She couldn’t have put me on the hook for a summoning without my full knowledge and consent. She’d have cut her own heart out first.
Which of course was still true, and she more or less had, but that didn’t help me organize my own feelings. Just because the brakes failed instead of the driver doesn’t mean the lorry hasn’t hit you, only in this case it felt more like a star had broken the laws of physics to collapse and destroy my planet.
“I need to think,” I said. I meant it literally. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t make sense of it in any way that would let me do or say or even feel anything. Precious crept up from the small nest she’d made herself next to my pillow and curled up on my shoulder, a tiny lump of comfort, but that wasn’t any use. I didn’t need comforting. I wasn’t unhappy. I was lost in the mountains without a compass.
Mum took it as instructions. She said, “I’ll go to the bathhouse,” and went at once. I didn’t know if I wanted her to go, but I also couldn’t decide to call after her to stay. So she went and left me in the yurt alone.
It was still raining. The roof hole cover needed mending; one of the seams was leaking a little bit. Mum usually kept things in good trim, but after all, she’d spent the last four years waiting to find out if her only child was going to live. I watched each fat drop slowly accumulating until it finally plinked down softly. Mum had spent roughly half my childhood trying to teach me to meditate, how to find peace. I’d never been very good at it. Now I managed a full half hour just blank and staring at the leaking rain, although I didn’t find any peace in the process; my head was full of white noise, not stillness.
The power of inertia would probably have kept me sitting there another month, trying to find some way to feel something. Only inertia wasn’t given the chance. “So you really are just sitting here in the middle of nowhere,” a voice said. “I almost didn’t believe her.”
It took me a moment even to register that someone was talking to me. No one ever came to the yurt to talk to me; if they looked in and Mum wasn’t here, they went away again without saying anything to me, unless they really wanted her urgently, and in that case, sometimes they asked me where she was, and I ignored them belligerently until they went away. It took me another moment to realize that I recognized the voice talking to me, and that it was Liesel, and another one after that to turn my head so I could stare at her blankly.
She was standing in the doorway of the yurt, looking in at me. The last time I’d seen her had been less than a week ago, at the Scholomance gates, in the same outgrown rags we’d all been wearing by graduation. Now she was wearing a slim knee-length dress that looked like she was on her way to a party, with sections curved in on the sides that were made of some scaled fabric that gleamed like pearl—amphisbaena scales, I realized distantly; the ones Orion had got her, in exchange for her doing all his remedial homework. They were edged in a thin crust of silver and malachite beads: almost certainly some kind of protective artifice. Her blond hair shone like polished metal, grown out by half a foot and sculpted into unnaturally perfect curves that spilled over her shoulders like a glamourous image from the 1940s. She’d earnt herself a spot in London enclave—you can do that when you’re the valedictorian—and they’d evidently given her enough power that she’d kitted herself out properly.
She grimaced as she knocked off the rim of mud valiantly trying to climb onto her pristine white shoes and came inside the yurt. She looked around with a faintly incredulous expression, which got substantially less faint when it reached the leak in the roof that was still dripping in rain. “This is where you live?” she demanded.
“What are you doing here?” I said, instead of responding to that. Over the last week, even in the depths of grief and confusion, I’d been rapidly remembering the many reasons why I hated the yurt. However, I didn’t feel like confiding them to Liesel. It’s not that I disliked her, exactly. You don’t dislike a steamroller, and in fact it’s fantastically useful in many circumstances, such as when you’re trying to organize the collective exodus of five thousand kids against an even larger incoming tide of maleficaria, which she’d taken charge of for us all. You just don’t particularly want to have an intimate heartfelt conversation with the steamroller, especially if you think it might turn round and come right over you.