Aadhya and Liu had caught a flight, too, although they had five more hours in the air than I did. I’d tried to talk them out of coming: Liu had absolutely no business getting out of bed yet, mystical healing or not, and Aadhya wasn’t even in an enclave.
“We’re not coming to fight an enclave war,” Aadhya had said in exasperation; the two of them had already been in a taxi on the way to the airport. “We’re coming to help you stop one.”
“And what are you even planning to do?” I’d demanded.
“We’ll let you know soon as you tell us what you’re planning,” Aadhya retorted, and hung up on me, so I’d just settled for racing to the airport as fast as I could to get out ahead.
I didn’t in fact have much of a plan. If I tried to head off the fighting by telling everyone that I was the one heaving enclaves into the void, almost no one would believe me, unless of course I told them in a very convincing way, such as by summoning massive dark powers and thundering at them while I floated overhead wreathed in apocalyptic storm, but at best that would turn the war into all the assembled enclavers trying to destroy me, and I wasn’t really keen on the idea.
I did give some thought to doing it and then just running away to lead them all off after me, but that would have been a very temporary solution, if it even worked. This war had been coming even before enclaves had started tipping out of the world. I was only the proximate event. And in any case, that was nearly the opposite of what I wanted, because it would be effectively winning the war for New York.
As I’m not completely dim, I’d asked Deepthi for advice before I’d gone. She’d put her hands on my head and sung a soft blessing over me, and then she’d shook her head and told me, “Ophelia will be there, and I cannot see past her shadow.” So the only rough plan that I had formed was to find out whatever Ophelia was doing and stop it, on principle, and regardless of anything else happening. It had the virtue of simplicity, if nothing else.
How I was going to carry it out was a much thornier question. Deepthi and my grandmother and great-grandmother had loaded me up with golden bangles: heavy and clinking round my wrists with the work that had gone into each one: hours of meditation and focus. The love and strength of my family—my family, and I still hadn’t stopped feeling my eyes smart from the idea—were in them. But for both good and bad, they were nothing like the power-sharer on top of its oceanic well of smooth, unlimited power, the ones that everyone on Ophelia’s side would be using.
But it was the only plan I had to go on, so I got myself out to Sintra on the train—there were absolutely no other wizards on it with me; I assume everyone else was coming by luxurious private car if not helicopter—and then hiked up to the estate on foot, dodging the bored mundane security guards who had been hired to patrol the outer perimeter. It was easy enough to get into the park this time, since there were no mundanes beyond them to stop you from just walking through walls, and unlike most of the other guests, at least I knew where I was going.
I had only barely squirmed through onto the grounds when four different spells came straight at me. They weren’t meant for me personally; all four of the wizards I assume had been told by their respective enclaves to watch the perimeter and do what they could to make sure only allies made it through, and raise the alarm otherwise. They saw me coming in solo and hadn’t any idea who I was, so they all made the exact same decision: to take me out first and ask questions after. None of the attacks were killing spells; one was in fact a really clever spell of happiness that made you feel so delighted with your situation that you didn’t want to change a thing about it, and therefore stopped right where you were. But that one and the nastier spell of equally intense depression would probably have canceled each other out when they’d hit me: hazards of throwing attacks wildly in the middle of a general firefight.
The other two were of the physical variety; one strangled you until you just fell over unconscious, and squeezed down again anytime you started to wake; the other one went straight to cutting off blood flow to the brain at precisely timed intervals. I caught them all, and I was about to just send them back where they’d come from when instead I thought of Deepthi telling me, Your gift is to bring light out of the dark, and I tried to just hold them instead, as if I could take the mana out of them and use it for something else later, almost like what I’d done with the reviser spell in the Scholomance gym.
It didn’t quite work. I accidentally squashed the four workings together, which essentially turned all of them into miscastings, so instead they rebounded in bits and pieces all round, to what sounded like the discomfort of all four wizards. But I did get a few driblets of mana out of the process, enough to think that if I was only working with one spell at a time, I might be able to manage it. The attempt at least got me past that set of border guards, and into the dark and winding circuit of the gardens.