So where that left me and Liesel, I hadn’t any idea. Thankfully, this was Liesel I was dealing with, who only said with a tone that was the equivalent of eye-rolling, “What do feelings matter right now? There is about to be an enclave war. What are you going to do?” She made absolutely no secret of what she thought I should do, either. “We should all go back to London and help Alfie’s father secure control over the council and repair the damage. Then we will have one of the most powerful enclaves in the world supporting us.”
“You know I won’t, so stop suggesting it just because it annoys you that I won’t be sensible!” I said, which was accurate enough to make her glare at me. “Look, Liesel, you can make yourself Domina of London if you like, and get back at your horrible dad and his horrible wife, and odds are, you won’t be any worse than Christopher Martel or Sir Richard or them,” which made angry red color come into her cheeks, her lips pressing tight, “but I can’t, and you know it!”
“So what can you do?” she bit out, and of course I couldn’t answer that question, because I hadn’t any idea what Orion was going to do with himself, and it seemed that I couldn’t work out what I was going to do with myself in the absence of that information. I couldn’t even decide what I wanted to do. Which was infuriating on multiple levels. I halfway wanted to give Orion the letter, to make something happen, and I didn’t trust the impulse.
Mum was finally well enough the next morning to ask me to help her out to the nearest clearing in the woods, where she sat for several hours with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, and after that she came back to the yurt slowly on her own and sat down by the fire with a long sigh instead of going back to bed. But she couldn’t give me any advice. “I don’t know,” she said, a whisper, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, a chill in deep July, when I asked her what had been wrong with Orion, what Ophelia had done to her own child to get an unstoppable mal-killing machine for New York. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, I couldn’t do anything about it.”
I stared at her. “You did do something! Orion’s all right now!”
Mum looked at me, her face still a little pouchy with exhaustion, her blue eyes small and tired, but she reached out and put her hand on my cheek and shook her head a little in apology. “I couldn’t set him right. I could only give him hope. And I don’t know if I should have.” She closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and then she got up and went into the yurt and went to sleep again.
The next day when I came up from the kitchens with lunch, she’d taken Orion out into the woods with her. I went hunting them, and it’s possible that I crept more quietly than usual for the chance of listening, but I might as well have gone trampling round like elephants. He was kneeling in front of her in the woods, and she had her hands on his head, tears running down her face, and when she took them off, she said, “No, love. I’m sorry. It’s not something that I can bring out of you.”
Orion bowed his head like someone had told him he was going to be executed. “It’s just me.”
Mum looked down at him, sorry, so sorry, the same kind of sorry she is when she’s telling someone their child is going to die, and she can’t stop it. “It’s not all of you. It’s not the part of you that’s asking. The part of you that loves El.”
Orion stood up. “But it’s the part that matters.” He turned and saw me.
“What part?” I said, but he only stared at me and then shook his head and walked past me. “Lake, you plonker, bloody tell me!” I yelled after him, but I didn’t get a response.
“El,” Mum said, gentle, meaning please stop hitting my patient with a stick, but why should I, since that was the only thing that seemed to be doing any good?
I stormed after him, and as if he understood he wasn’t getting out of it, he kept going until he reached one of the inconvenient pitches further up the hill that had been abandoned, well out of sight, with the firepit overgrown and a couple of saplings going up inside through the falling-in roof of the old yurt. He wasn’t trying to get away from me, I don’t think, but I also didn’t care if he was. At least he sat down on one of the logs and didn’t get up and flee when I sat down next to him.
I probably oughtn’t have given him the letter then, either, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I didn’t actually think he was ready for it, but he wasn’t ever going to be ready for Ophelia to twist a knife in his gut. And at least I’d know what I was up against, I thought; so after a few moments of stewing, I pulled it out and handed it to him.