She didn’t ask me to cry with her; she looked away from me in fact, trying to keep her tears from me. I wanted to, I wanted so much to go into her arms and feel it with her: that I was alive and safe. But I couldn’t. She was crying for joy, for love, for me, and I wanted to cry for those things too: I was home, I was out of the Scholomance forever, I was alive in a world I’d changed for the better, a world where children wouldn’t have to be thrown into a pit full of knives just for the hope they’d make it out again. It was worth rejoicing. But I couldn’t. The pit was still there, and Orion was down in it.
I pulled my hand away instead. Mum didn’t try to hold me. She took several deep breaths and wiped her tears away, packing the joy out of the way, tidy, so she could go on being with me, then she turned and cupped my face with her hand. “I’m so sorry, my darling.”
She didn’t say why she’d warned me off Orion. And I understood why at once: she wasn’t going to lie to me, but she didn’t want to hurt me either. She understood that I’d loved him, that I’d lost someone I loved, in the same horrible way that she’d lost Dad, and my grief was all that mattered to her now. It didn’t matter to her to tell me why, or persuade me that she’d been right.
But it mattered to me. “Tell me,” I said through my teeth. “Tell me. You went to Cardiff, you got that boy to bring me a note—”
Her face crumpled a little, miserable—I was asking her to hurt me, to tell me something she knew I didn’t want to hear—but she gave in. She bowed her head and said softly, “I tried to dream you every night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach you, but I tried to anyway. A few times, I thought you were dreaming me back, and we almost touched…but it was only dreaming.”
I swallowed hard. I remembered those dreams too, the faint handful of near-touches, the love that had almost made it to me despite the thick smothering layer of wards blanketing the Scholomance, the ones that blocked every possible way that anything could get in—because otherwise mals would use that way, too.
“But last year—I did see you. The night you used the linen patch.” Her voice was a whisper, and I hunched up, back in that moment and seeing it with her eyes: the little cell of my room, me on the floor in a puddle of my own blood, with the gaping ragged hole in my belly where one of my especially charming fellow students had shoved a knife into me. The only reason I’d survived it had been that healing patch she’d made me herself, years of love and magic worked into every linen thread she’d grown and spun and woven.
“Orion helped me with it,” I said. “He put it on me,” and I stopped, because she’d dragged in a gasping breath, her face twisting into the memory of a horror worse than my lying on the floor bleeding out.
“I felt him touch it,” she said raggedly, and even as she was speaking, I knew I was going to be sorry I’d asked. “I saw him, so near you, touching you. I saw him, and he was just—hunger—” and she sounded sick, she sounded like she’d been watching a mal eat me alive, instead of Orion kneeling on my floor and pressing healing into my torn body.
“He was my friend,” I said in a howl, because I had to make her stop, and I stood up so fast I cracked my skull hard into a crossbar and sat down with my hands on top of my head with a squawk and started crying again a little from the jolt of pain. Mum tried to hold me, but I shrugged her arms off, angry and dripping, and heaved myself off the bed again.
“He saved my life,” I ground out at her. “He saved my life thirteen times,” and I gasped on a breath of agony: I’d never have the chance to catch up now.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t argue with me, just sat there with her eyes shut and her arms wrapped around herself, breathing through it in shudders. She only whispered, “My darling, I’m so sorry,” and I could hear she truly was, she was so very sorry for hurting me with this supposed truth of what she’d seen in Orion that I wanted to scream.
I laughed instead, a horrible vicious laugh that hurt me to hear it in my own ears. “No worries, he’s gone for good now,” I said, jeering. “My brilliant plan took care of that.” And I went out of the yurt.
* * *
I walked around the commune for a while, staying in the trees just past the limits of where anyone had a pitch. My head ached from crying and banging it against the roof and from pouring an ocean’s worth of mana through my body, and from four years of prison before that. I didn’t have a handkerchief or anything. I was still wearing my filthy sweaty leggings and T-shirt, the New York T-shirt Orion had given me, threadbare with four holes and still the only wearable top I’d had left by the end of term. I pulled up the hem and wiped my nose on it.