I hadn’t moved when Mum came in a while later. She put a small tinkling handful of things into a bowl, saying softly, “There you are,” to Precious, who made a squeak that meant gratitude and started cracking seeds. I couldn’t feel sorry I hadn’t thought about her, small and hungry. It was too far away, and I was too far down. Mum came and sat down next to my camp bed and put her hand on my forehead, warm and gentle. She didn’t say anything.
I fought her off a little: I didn’t want to feel better. I didn’t want to get up and go on in the world, agreeing that it was in any way acceptable for the world to keep going itself. But lying there under Mum’s hand, unimaginably safe and comfortable, I couldn’t help but feel stupid. The world was going on anyway whether I gave it permission or not, and finally I sat up and let Mum give me a drink of water in the lopsided clay cup she’d made herself, and she sat on the bed next to me and put her arm around my shoulders and stroked my hair. She was so small. The whole yurt was so small. My head brushed the roof at the edge, even sitting on the camp bed. I could have made it outside on one good jump, if I were stupid enough to leap out into the unknown where anything could be waiting to ambush me.
Of course, that wouldn’t have been stupid at all now. I wasn’t in the Scholomance anymore. I’d set the students free, and jailed all the mals in our place, and then I’d broken the school off the world with all of them crammed hungry inside to gnaw on each other forever. So now I could sleep for twenty hours without a care, and I could go bounding out of my yurt with a song in my heart, and I could do anything and go anywhere in the world I wanted to. And so could everyone else, every last child I’d shepherded out of the Scholomance and all the children who’d never even have to go.
Except for Orion, gone into the dark.
If I’d had any mana left to do anything with, I would have imagined the possibility of doing something for him long enough to try some more. But since I didn’t, all I could imagine was going for help to someone else—his mum maybe, who was on track to be Domina in the New York enclave—and asking her for mana so I could do something, and that was where my imagination broke down: looking her in the face, someone who’d loved Orion and wanted him home, and asking her for mana, for any of the ideas that became obviously stupid and useless as soon as I had to persuade someone else to believe in them. So I did the only thing left to do, and put my face in my hands and cried.
Mum sat beside me the whole time I was weeping, sat with me, caring about my misery without pretending she was feeling it too, or hiding away her own deep joy: I was home, I was alive, I was safe. Her whole body was radiating gladness out into the universe, but she didn’t try to make me join in or smother my own grief; she knew I was deeply hurt, and was so sorry, and ready to do anything that she could to help me, when I wanted it. If you’d like to know how she told me all that without saying a word, I would too. It was nothing I could ever have done myself.
When I stopped crying, she got up and made me a cup of tea, picking leaves out of seven different jars on her crammed-full shelves, and she boiled the water with magic, which she’d never ordinarily have done, just so she didn’t have to go outside to the fire and leave me alone yet. The whole yurt filled with the sweet smell when she poured the water in. She gave it to me and sat down again, holding my other hand between both of hers. She hadn’t asked me any questions, I knew she wouldn’t ever push, but there was a gentle silence between us waiting for me to start talking about it. To start grieving with her, for something that was over and done. And I couldn’t bear to.
So after I drank my tea, I put the mug down and said, “Why did you warn me off Orion?” My voice came out hoarse and roughed-up, like I’d run sandpaper up and down the inside of my throat a few times. “Was this why? Did you see—”
She flinched like I’d jabbed her hard with a needle, and her whole body shuddered. She shut her eyes a moment and took a deep breath, then turned and looked at me full in my face in the way she called seeing properly, when she really wanted to take something in, and her own face went crumpling into folds along the faint wrinkle lines that were just beginning at the corners of her eyes. “You’re safe,” she said, half whispering, and she looked down at my hand and stroked it again, and a few tears dripped off her face. “You’re safe. Oh my darling girl, you’re safe,” and she heaved a massive gulp and was crying herself, four years of tears running down her face.