All my best,
Ophelia Rhys-Lake
Her handwriting was slanted and elegant and easy to read, the signature flourishing just a bit, tasteful and elegant. I glared at it speechlessly. She really was an evil monster. If she’d told me to give Orion the letter, full stop, I’d cheerfully have set it on fire; if she’d threatened me, asked me for anything, I’d have told her out loud where she could get off, and then set it on fire. Instead she’d invited me to keep it from him, as though we were chums on the same side, taking care of poor dear Orion who didn’t get to decide for himself, the way she hadn’t let him decide. It was a tidy bit of manipulation, and even seeing it plainly didn’t let me out of it.
Liesel nodded over it in admiration. “And if you withhold it, she will eventually get it to him another way, and ensure he knows you chose to keep the first from him.” She thought I ought to open Ophelia’s letter at once and read it for myself, without Orion, but I couldn’t stomach doing that; then she thought I ought to give it to him at once, and get him to show it to me, so I’d know what Ophelia was after. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that either.
Orion wasn’t wiped out physically the way Mum was, but he still wasn’t anything like okay. If allowed, he would have spent his days huddled next to the woodpile on the far side of the yurt like a goblin, trying to pretend he had been left behind in the Scholomance. I wasn’t having it, so I’d aggressively reorganized the woodpile round him, scattering crawling bugs and bark all over him, and handing him stacks of logs to hold for me and making pointed comments about how we’d need more laid in for the winter, until he actually said words, namely, “Do you want me to get you more wood?”
“That would be lovely,” I said sweetly, and handed him a hatchet.
He then brought back an armful of green saplings that he’d mangled apart, combined with some completely rotten chunks of a fallen tree, already half eaten and probably dripping termites, and I just barely managed to head him off before he popped it onto the rest of the pile. But after that, he went off into the woods on his own each morning, which seemed to me like an improvement, although I hadn’t got any more words out of him since; he only came back to eat monosyllabically on the far side of the fire and sleep again. Aadhya had got herself a long twiggy stick that she used to jab Liesel whenever the urge to start another interrogation began to come over her. It didn’t get used above five times a night.
Yes, all right, I got jabbed regularly too. If Mum had been able to stay awake for longer than it took to go to the loo, she would have approved of everything I was doing: living in the moment, one to the next, getting a meal, going to sleep, not thinking about the future. I hated it. The first night we’d laid out yoga mats for sleeping, and after that first night, Aadhya and Liesel had gone down to the commune offices and paid to stay in the nice tourist cottages instead. We were on holiday, having a rest cure after the success of our impossible quest. But it wasn’t going to last. Sooner or later—sooner—Aad was going home to her good sensible loving family and her good sensible healthy future; Liesel was going back to London and Alfie and her thirty-year plan, from which this was only a brief detour. And I was going to—？ There was an enormous blank space at the end of the sentence. I didn’t have any baseline to go back to.
I could have made one up. I could have gone over to the box on Mum’s worktable and taken out the sutras. I could have told them we’d be getting started soon, getting on with the grand project. Or I could have started building a stockpile of weaponry and bleeding mana off the power-sharer, if I was going to go back to New York and pick a fight with Ophelia. In theory, at least; I doubt that particular plan would have got past Mum if I’d actually started in on it, but I could have tried.
Or I could have told Liesel I’d go back to London with her after all. At least she’d have been well chuffed. After the letter turned up, she cornered me privately for a conversation about the future, and I let her, mostly because I was sure Mum would look at me disappointedly if we didn’t talk about our feelings at all under the circumstances, although personally I felt I’d had far too many feelings lately and would have liked to repress a lot of them. I had barely started on grieving for Orion, and now he wasn’t dead, and while I still intellectually believed in all my extremely sensible ideas about seeing other people, all I actually wanted to do right now was keep seeing him. Although at the moment that was less a romantic impulse than the literal sense of wanting to have my eyes on him regularly until the still-gibbering inward part of me calmed down and finally accepted that actually he was alive. It still felt unbelievable every time I looked at him. Also I hadn’t lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.