The cupboards were growing bare, and when he finally stopped inhaling partway through the last packet of half-stale crackers, I was relieved: we were an hour shy of lunch, and I didn’t really fancy going down to the commune kitchens and trying to get an early meal out of the people on rota. They’d have given Mum whatever she wanted, but I’d never succeeded before, and I was wary of what I’d do if they said no.
Then Orion rested his forehead against his hand and said, rawly, “El. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t specify, but I could have enumerated a long list of things I felt strongly he could have been sorry for. I swallowed them all. “Come have a lie-down,” I said instead, because this was what you did for someone who’d just got out of the Scholomance: you fed them a gigantic pile of food and then you put them to bed on clean sheets and then you got them a shower and clean new clothes. The same thing Mum had done for me, the same thing every family in the world did for every one of their returning graduates. And for lack of a better plan, that’s what I was going to do for him.
He didn’t tell me again that I should have left him back in the school, and he didn’t argue. He got up and followed me back to the yurt and lay down on my cot and went to sleep, on the opposite side of the yurt from Mum. I took Precious out of my pocket and left her to stand watch over them both.
* * *
I spent the next three days with my head down, following the playbook, providing regular doses of food and sleep and showers and food all while miraculously—for me—continuing to not gnaw Orion’s face off. Aadhya long-sufferingly took the van into town—after mending the peeled-open side—and got him new things from Primark: a plain white T-shirt and a pair of jeans, new socks and trainers.
Liesel spent the three days preparing mystical fortifications and defensive strategies, and having hissed consultations over the phone with Alfie, apparently wanting to establish a back channel for negotiations when New York came at us and was repulsed with one of her dozen plans. She tried repeatedly to share them with me until I finally snapped at her over the fire and said crossly—I’m not very good at taking care of people, and between Mum and Orion I was having to do a lot more of it than I ever had before—“Liesel, it’s not three days to New York! If they were coming, they’d be here.” We all realized as soon as the words came out that I was perfectly correct, and her face went baffled with indignation: how dare Ophelia not come after us.
So of course, later that day, she did.
That morning Mum had been able to sit up and walk for a short distance without getting out of breath, but she certainly wasn’t up to cooking. My and Aadhya’s joint attempt, the first night, had ended up with the fire gone out in a gush of water and all of us trying to choke down half-cooked beans. “My grandmothers always make it look so easy,” Aadhya said glumly, putting down her bowl in defeat.
So I’d had to go down to the group kitchens after all. The theory had always been that all comers were welcome to a share, none turned away hungry, and you contributed as you could; very lovely and utopian. In practice, coming down without Mum had always been my idea of purgatory: being asked sharply what I thought I was doing, taken to task over how much food I wanted, why I thought I had a right to it.
But now I had too much else to worry about, and maybe it showed on my face. After the bean cataclysm, I marched down the hill and pitched in with the washing-up that was continuously going on in the back, and afterwards loaded up our two biggest pots with rice and beans and vegetable curry, and nobody made any commentary at all. When I came down the next morning, someone even asked me about Mum, and after that I was getting regular inquiries after her, if she was better.
And that third afternoon, Ruth Marsters came in while I was there and said to me—almost as though I were just another person, with only a very faint air of resentment—“There’s a letter for you,” and handed me the envelope, smooth and creamy thick paper, the New York seal pressing it closed, addressed to Galadriel Higgins.
I took it back up to the yurt holding it between two fingers and opened it out in the woods far away from anyone else, with Precious anxiously watching at a distance in case some sort of smoke or poison came out of it. But nothing did; there was only a small note inside, wrapped around another envelope:
Dear El,
I’m very grateful to you for bringing Orion out. I hope he’s doing well. Please give him the enclosed letter when you think he might be ready to read it.