The sky was coming on towards dawn, birdsong rising, and Deepthi came slowly out of the inner courtyard and sat creakily down with me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk to her. She’d shaped my entire life with a handful of words, and even if she’d done it to save me from horror, I couldn’t quite make myself be grateful. I didn’t want her doing it again.
She didn’t say anything though, just sat with me, being with me the way Mum did, and slowly a sense came growing over me that she’d gone through this before. All her life, she’d had to choose for the people she loved, knowing she might kill the love in them while she did it. My grandfather hadn’t walked out of the house last night after all, but he hadn’t forgiven her. He’d known that her prophecies sometimes came true slantwise, but he hadn’t been able to imagine that she’d say those words, condemn his son’s only child, if they hadn’t been true in spirit and not just in the letter. He would have taken you up the mountain and holding you in his arms, leapt. That was the only answer he’d found inside himself, the only way he could have borne to save the world from me.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to forgive her either. Like Sudarat might not forgive me, when she knew the truth. Like the seniors from Salta, who’d escaped the Scholomance only to find their home destroyed and their families gone.
“How do you stand it?” I asked Deepthi abruptly.
“Sometimes I didn’t,” she said. “Sometimes I’ve tried to make others choose, even when I knew that would be enough to take the choice away. And when I did that…I lived with what I had seen, when it came to be in the world. So, when I cannot bear to do that, I choose. And then I hope I have done well.”
That wasn’t especially comforting, as a road map. At least all Deepthi was doing was saying words to people; they still went off and made their own choices. I was going to be tearing down enclaves with my own hands, every time I took out a maw-mouth. Could I make up for it by putting up new ones?
I handed Deepthi the sutras and let her hold them on her lap; her mouth shaped the words of the Sanskrit as she turned the pages. “Arjun dreamed of them,” she said. “Even as a boy. Ever since he heard the story of our old home. Aaji, one day we will live in a golden enclave again. If I put him to bed, he would ask me if I had seen it. If I told him no, he would say, not yet.”
“I’ll make one for you,” I said, my throat tight.
She closed them and stroked the cover as reverently as I could have asked, although her eyes were wet. But then she reached out over them to take my hand in both of hers. “But not with this,” she said softly.
I looked down: she was holding my left hand. The one with the New York power-sharer on it. I swallowed. I hadn’t really been pulling from it. I’d put Dubai and Beijing up with their own mana, not mana taken from New York. I’d got to Mumbai on my own mana. And I’d killed the maw-mouth with my own, too. It wasn’t hard to kill them anymore, with my own new spell. Really I was just pointing out an obvious fact. Of course they were dead; they’d been crushed into jelly. Just like of course you couldn’t build a house in the void. It was a transparent lie, the same lie on both sides: the lie of deathlessness.
But…I hadn’t taken the power-sharer off, either. I’d had it there in case I needed it. Even now that I knew what Ophelia had done to help fill the mana store that was feeding this one. I slowly unclasped it and took it off my wrist. I held it in my hands, and then I flicked it out of existence. It wasn’t hard. A jerk of my hand and barely a whisper of mana and it was gone.
Deepthi gave a small sigh that was relief, as if she’d watched me get safely over a hurdle she hadn’t known for certain I would take. “Our family has mana saved,” she said. “We will build more. And when we have enough, if the universe wills, you will come back and raise it for us.”
I nodded, and then I said, “Where am I going?” because I couldn’t come back unless I left, but before she answered, my mobile rang again: Liesel calling. I looked at Deepthi; she nodded a little. I picked up. “That was quick,” I said, slowly.
“The war has started,” Liesel said without preamble. “Alfie just called me. The Scholomance has been attacked.”
“I didn’t do anything!” I said.
“Not by you! Why would I be calling to tell you?” I could all but see her exasperated expression. “Singapore and Melaka sent in a team to demolish the doors completely, so they would be released from their mana commitments. New York sent in a team to stop them, but the attackers fortified a position and called in allies. And Shanghai has declared they are coming.”