“Because he understood my gift,” Deepthi said, low and terrible. “The Arjun who followed my warning, who lived, would have understood that I had made a choice. That I could have saved one—and so she, and you with her, had been taken in his place. And he refused that choice. There was no future in which he let me save him. So I didn’t warn him. I only gave him my blessing, and let him go.”
Let him go despite her own grief, to have a brief time of love uncomplicated by fear, and to make the gift that he’d after all chosen eyes wide open to hand to Mum and to me, in every possible future that Deepthi could see. Her and Dad and Mum, all of them one after the other in a line putting love and courage and the deep mana of willing self-sacrifice into the universe.
They hadn’t got the sutras because they’d handed me over in trade, after all. When Mum and Dad had asked the universe to give them the sutras—huddled together in the dark depths of the Scholomance library, in the tiny circle of light they’d made for one another in that horrible place—what they’d really wanted was to find another way. To stop the horror of enclaves being built on maw-mouths. And when they’d offered themselves up, wide open, in return for that request, they hadn’t just got a spellbook. They’d got what they really wanted. A child who could destroy the maw-mouths, and lay foundations of golden stone instead.
And part of the reason they’d got what they’d wanted was that at the same time, back in New York, Ophelia had been making a terrible gaping wound in the world—tearing malia out of hundreds of lives to build her perfect, perfectly efficient tool. A new and improved maw-mouth that would go round vacuuming up all the scattered maleficaria in the world, accumulating the power they’d devoured from wizard children and pouring it back into her power bank, tidy and sanitized. And hoovering up councils of rival enclaves, for that matter. A maw-mouth that she could raise up properly and train with flash cards to know who really mattered, which people you oughtn’t eat.
“Orion,” I said, my throat tight. “How do I help Orion?”
But Deepthi only trembled a little, her shoulders hunching in: the same terrible, shuddering look that I’d seen on Mum’s face. “I cannot see him,” she said. “I never knew what she had done. I saw only the darkness.”
“I have to…” I put my hands up to my face, wiping tears away to either side. I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I only knew I had to do something. “I have to go to New York—”
“No,” Deepthi said, turning on me with a startling jerk of speed. Her hands didn’t have much strength to them, but she seized mine and closed them both around them, clutching clawlike as if she were trying to shelter all of me between them. “You must never go there again while she lives. Never. That is the place of her power, and now she knows about you. She will be ready.”
“I can’t just leave him there!”
Deepthi was shaking her head, urgent, leaning towards me; her mouth was downturned and sagging in deep folds on either side. “Galadriel. I have never been able to give you anything but pain. But listen to me. Listen: I loved Arjun. I knew what he had given for you, not only in this lifetime but in a thousand others he might have lived. I wanted with all my heart to give you and your mother all the love he could not, and so did all of us. Instead I cursed you with my own mouth, so terribly that none of our family would stretch out a hand to help you, and sent you both away in the night, alone, to live among strangers.”
I flinched, salt on the wound that was still raw, and her face crumpled as she saw it, more tears rolling down. “I know,” she said. “I know you lived in fear. Every time a cruel death came near you, I saw every one. Because of the future that I spoke over your head, my own grandson Rajiv, Arjun’s father, might have torn you from your mother’s arms that very night. He would have taken you up to the top of the mountain and still holding you in his arms, he would have leapt. I saw this. In many paths, it happened. And still I spoke. Because it was better.”
There was an absolute, iron finality to her words, like metal stakes going into the ground: nailing down the boundaries of possibility. She never let go of my hands. “If ever Ophelia tries to lure you back there,” she said, “whatever she does, whatever evil she threatens, you must not go. You must hold tight to the memory of the pain I gave you, and all the love and comfort we would have given you and never did, and know that this is true: it was better. You must never fall into her power.”