We didn’t make it quite halfway before my grandmother was running down the drive to meet us, as if she’d been lying in wait with eyes on the road: maybe those birds. She stopped a few lengths away, hesitant, looking at Mum and me with her eyes wet and uncertain too, her arms half held out, and then I felt Mum take a deep breath and let it out, a deliberate release of fear and pain, and she let go of me and stepped forward with her own hands held out. Sitabai almost jumped to meet her, reaching out to grasp them.
The first night, Sitabai and my grandfather had us to a quiet dinner in their own living room; the second night we asked in a handful of other people, second and third cousins who were just a few years older than me. The gathering size gradually ramped up over the course of the visit, until we were eating with the whole family in the courtyard on the last night.
Mum had sat and talked with Deepthi that whole morning, and then she’d gone out into the jungle, to a little waterfall cliff that my grandfather had shown us that he’d said Dad had loved. She’d spent the rest of the day there and come back with her peace—not quite intact, maybe, but expanded, I thought. She’d hugged me and whispered, “I’m glad I came.”
I wasn’t certain that I was myself, yet, but I thought I might have to keep coming back to make sure.
But I’d had to come back at least the once. I’d put it off as long as I could. I’d been sleeping with the sutras under my pillow again, just like at school. But on that last night, as the platters and the younger children all got carried off to be washed and put away for the night, I finally made myself take the sutras out of their box, and I took them over to where Deepthi was sitting in her sheltered corner of the courtyard, the breezes whispering in through slatted walls.
I sat next to her while she held the book in her lap and opened it to the back with the tidy insertion Liesel had written up, ten solid pages full of casting diagrams and new incantations. I’d spent almost a month working on it with her and Liu and Aadhya: most of it inside London enclave, grimly seasick every single minute with the hideous feeling of all their maw-mouths still lingering out there, somewhere in the world, gnawing endlessly on their victims.
“I can’t help you with Munich, but,” I’d said, on my way to asking what she’d want for helping me, and Liesel had just waved an irritated hand as if she wasn’t letting go of a years-long dream of revenge and said, “Enough. Of course we have more important things to do,” and the we in that sentence was one that I could be a part of, after all.
Alfie had talked his dad into letting us come in and look at all of London’s foundation stones, putting together a plan for replacing them. The first one in the council chamber, at the heart of that old Roman villa at the bottom, carved of limestone that had been worn horribly soft over the centuries with the Latin spells going muddled around the edges; the ragstone blocks from the Conquest and the Tudor age that now stood underneath their massive library and the green plaza of the dead children—the dead children that were, after all, only the ones they’d chosen to put on display, and not all the ones who’d died to keep the enclave up.
The biggest one was the one forged of steel, the one that was buckled down the center, deeply deformed: the one they’d built on Fortitude’s back, in 1908, to put up their fairy-tale gardens in the void. That one didn’t make me queasy anymore. All its engraved spells were gone, blurred together as if someone had melted them in a forge, but if you looked at it from a slant, you could almost make out a single word instead: STAY. As if the golden spell we’d all cast together, before the gates of the Scholomance, had gone rolling all the way down through the terrible chain of death, through Orion and Patience and whatever had been left of Fortitude, and fixed the foundation back into the void.
But there were five more besides that, the foundation stones laid hurriedly down in the midst of the war. They’d been built with less mana, so they couldn’t support more than a corridor or two on their own, but the maw-mouths had gone out into the world all the same. And they were still out in the world, somewhere. Still devouring all the victims they’d ever taken, and looking always for more.
So Aadhya and Liesel had helped me tease apart the sutras to find the lines of power in the spells, those beautiful golden lines I held in my hands as I built a new foundation, as I spoke to the void and asked it to stay. And Liu had worked out a way you could perform the spells with a chorus of casters at the center, instead of a single voice. As long as they were all strict mana.