Aadhya and Liesel were sitting out in front of the yurt arguing about what to do. Liesel’s expression when she saw Orion walking carefully behind me with Mum was so utterly disbelieving that it would almost have been funny if it hadn’t been very clear that what she couldn’t believe was that we were all such colossal idiots and yet had somehow survived, and that she wasn’t sure it was a good thing, either.
Orion brought Mum inside the yurt and put her down on her bed when I showed it to him, and then went out again in a hurry. I got her to drink a little water from her jug and settled her under the covers, and meanwhile he put himself at the far side of the small campfire and sat down on a log. He didn’t say a word to Liesel or Aadhya at first, until I overheard Aadhya saying to him, “Orion, don’t get me wrong, I’m super glad you’re not in mindless hunting mode anymore, but you’re still looking kind of freaked out. Are you okay?” I looked out through the doorway to listen in—I was fairly curious about the answer myself—but he only stared at her as if he hadn’t noticed she was there until then. “Yes? No? A complete sentence, maybe?” she prompted. “If you need an idea, Thanks for saving me from certain doom would work.”
“I should have stayed there,” he said flatly instead.
I surged out ready to do battle, now that Mum was taken care of, but before I could sail into him properly, Liesel said, peevishly, “You weren’t going to, no matter what we did. Your mother was organizing a search party for you.”
“What?” I said, stopping.
Liesel gestured to Orion impatiently. “You said it yourself! Ophelia did this, she gave him this power. She knew none of the maleficaria could kill him. She knew he was alive. That is why she was so insistent about keeping mana going to the school. She meant to get him out. Did you know she was a maleficer?” she demanded of him.
I’d have asked the same question, if I could have thought of a way to word it. Orion hadn’t talked very much about his mum and dad at school, but he hadn’t never talked about them. If he’d had any idea that his mum was a maleficer, he’d kept it very close. I’d certainly not had the least idea what I was going to find when I’d gone to New York.
“No,” Orion said: an odd answer. Either he ought to have said yes or he ought to have indignantly said my mom isn’t a maleficer.
“But you know it now?” Liesel said, alert to the same oddness. “What did she do to you?”
Orion didn’t answer her. He just got up and walked away. He didn’t go as far as the next pitch; he just went a few yards away to the nearest big tree and sat down on the other side of it.
“Wow, the tact, it burns,” Aadhya said.
“We don’t have time for tact!” Liesel said.
“Said like someone who never does.”
Liesel scowled at her. “His mother knows! Do you understand what that means? We were surprised. She wasn’t. She knew we would find Orion and bring him out. Most likely she has people on the way here already. She must have a tracker on that power-sharer.” She gestured at my wrist.
“She can send half of New York if she likes. I’m not letting them take him,” I said.
Liesel threw her hands up exasperated. “And what will you do when she stops the mana?”
“Okay guys, before you start yelling, allow me to point out that no one is taking Orion anywhere he doesn’t want to go,” Aadhya said. “Can we maybe worry less about evil schemes and more about him for a sec? I don’t know whether it’s his mom or killing all those mals or sitting halfway in the void, but he is not okay, no matter what your mom did to fix him.”
Liesel scowled at her; I could have scowled a bit myself. That was much too sensible and kind, when what I wanted was to shriek at Orion in fury and claw his entire face off for having put me through all of this and having the gall to—not be okay. As he clearly wasn’t.
I sullenly went inside and rummaged through the cupboards and got a bowl of Mum’s vegetable soup and half a loaf of bread and a plate heaped with pickled vegetables and put it all together on a tray and took it down to him where he was still sitting down on the slope. “Eat something.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, except he made it sound like some elaborate doom. And in fact, he didn’t actually look as though he’d lost any weight after starving in the Scholomance for nearly two weeks. As if he’d been filled up adequately some other way.
I swallowed down nausea at the thought. “Eat something anyway and see if it changes your mind,” I said, and pushed it nearer him, then planted myself on a handy stump to wait. After a bit he picked up the soup and drank a swallow out of the bowl, and then he finished the whole thing and ravened through the bread and the vegetables at top speed, leaving nothing but crumbs by the time I came back with another round of larder-raiding.