“Sanjay and Pallavi have already got the incantations down,” I said: two of my many, many cousins, who both happened to be specialists in Vedic Sanskrit incantations. “They’ll be able to teach the others.”
Deepthi nodded, her face sad, and reached out to cup my face with her cheek. “Are you content?” she asked me softly.
I didn’t answer her right away. I wasn’t sure. I put my hand out to touch the sutras again, let my fingers stroke over the familiar pattern of the cover again; I could have drawn it with my eyes closed by now. That was still the work I wanted, the work I could have done with joy. But other people could do that work, now. And I had to be glad about that. I’d had to find a way for other people to do it, because if I was the only one, like Purochana had been, the only wizard in a thousand years able to build enclaves of golden stone, then after I was gone—everyone else would go back to the way they already had. They’d start making maw-mouths once again. And I knew that for bloody certain, because they were ready to do it now, while I was still right here.
Everyone had joined in to help during that last panic at the doors of the Scholomance, down to the most vicious and selfish council member in the world, but that was because they’d been trapped in a cavern about to come in on their heads, and it had been a matter of immediate self-preservation. But now— well, the rulers of forty enclaves had been in that cavern, with unlimited access to their enclaves’ mana stores. I didn’t know how much mana it had taken to replace all that old stolen power underneath the Scholomance, underneath the other enclaves, but I suspected most of their coffers were empty. And they wanted to refill them.
Literally the morning after, I’d been sitting up in the highest corner of the Sintra gardens, with the dust of the near-collapse still clinging to my skin, when Antonio and Caterina had come to me bright-eyed and eager to ask if I’d be willing to join them as a founding council member in a new enclave they wanted to put up. They wanted to build a sort of wizard daycare, where indie wizards who didn’t have extended family could drop their little kids off for the week and pick them up for the weekends and holidays when they had more time to look after them. If it went well, they could start one on every continent! A whole franchise of enclaves!
And they could actually do it, they assured me, because the council members of their two enclaves had offered to give them a wonderful rate on the enclave-building spells.
They went on for several minutes just brimming over with grand plans and idealism before they noticed my expression and also the simmer of storm clouds gathering overhead, and trailed off uncertainly. If it had been anyone else, I’d probably have howled them off the face of the earth; as it was, I told them to go and ask Aadhya or Liesel why that was an extremely bad idea, and they nodded and hurried away and left me to seethe my way through realizing that my career goals had gone obsolete.
If they were left to their own devices, enclaves would go on selling the same old spells, because that was how enclaves got loads of their mana. And wizards on the outside would go on buying them, because they wanted huge modern enclaves, and they wouldn’t know exactly what they were buying—they wouldn’t want to know—until they’d already poured half the mana that they’d raised over decades into the price, and couldn’t get it back out again. And then they’d get to make Shanfeng’s choice: to let their children die in the maw-mouths built by other enclaves, or make a new one of their own.
I’d tried to stop it with words, with explanations. But it was almost impossible even just to tell people about the maw-mouths underneath the enclaves. The compulsion spells were even nastier than we’d realized. All the people in charge of things like, for instance, the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, or the secret Facebook group that all the older wizards were in, were council members, all of whom had needed to sign on to the compulsions before they were allowed to attain those rarefied positions. And it wasn’t just that they couldn’t tell other people, they were compelled to hide the information. Anytime we tried to post something online, it would get taken down or altered, and our accounts kept getting locked and deleted.
And the harder we tried, the worse it got. I was on my third phone now because the two before had been mysteriously fried shortly after I’d used them to group-text a few dozen people. The only reliable way I’d found for sharing the information was literally for one of us who already knew to personally tell people, face-to-face. And we were already being called trolls and overimaginative children, to boot. It wasn’t going to be very hard for people to put that comforting wall back up, in front of their own eyes or someone else’s.