He turned it over in his hands, looking at his mother’s handwriting for a while before he opened it, and I watched his eyes skip over it, tiny reflection of cream paper in the pupils, and then he folded it back up and creased it over and just sat there without saying anything. I held my hand out for it, and he gave it to me without the least objection, which made sense after I’d read it, because it didn’t give me the slightest information.
My star boy,
I don’t know if you’ll let me call you that anymore, but this once I will.
I know you must be angry and upset with me. You have every right to be, and I can’t even apologize, because if I had made other choices, I wouldn’t have you. So I can’t ever be sorry. I want you not to be sorry either. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you fear, I need you to believe in yourself, and if not, believe in me and Daddy. We love you and trust you, and if you need help trusting yourself, know that you can always come to us and we’ll do whatever it takes to help you.
We’ve met El. She’s an extraordinary person. I only wish I’d found her sooner. But you found her yourself instead. I know she’s afraid of me. But she’s not afraid of you. That’s a gift. I don’t think you need me to tell you to treasure it and be careful of it. I’m just happy that you have it.
Don’t be afraid. When you’re ready, come home. We love you.
Mom and Dad
I was near tearing it into shreds after the first outraged pass. I could tell there was all sorts of hook-yanking going on in there, only I couldn’t follow it, because Ophelia had planted all of her hooks years ago, out of my sight. It was like watching her trundle a wheelbarrow full of paving stones and landmines into a garden, hearing her digging busily on the other side of the hedge, until out she came to cheerily show off the delightful path she’d laid, and now I had to walk down it without any idea which step was set to blow me to bits.
“What is she talking about?” I demanded, even though I already knew Orion wouldn’t say, and he didn’t, not a word. “You’re not going back to New York,” I told him savagely. He didn’t even raise his head. I grabbed him by the shoulders and made him look at me. “We’re taking the sutras to Cardiff,” I told him. “You’re going to hunt down whatever random mals are scattered round, and I’m going to put up a Golden Stone enclave for the circle there, and then we’ll move along to the next place. Just like we planned.”
His face crumpled a bit and he said, “El…”
“Shut up unless you’ve got any better ideas.” I shook him. “You’re alive. You’re not in the Scholomance anymore. And that’s more than any reasonable person could hope for—that’s more than any reasonable person got, the last century and more, so whatever else you think is wrong, whatever else is the matter inside your head, you haven’t any excuse to moan about it. Stop trying to put yourself in the ground. You’re alive, so get on with living!” I was snarling in rage by the end of it, and he put his arms around me and pulled me close and buried his face on my shoulder. He smelled of sweat and smoke and the woods, and I put my arms around him, and he shuddered all over. Tentatively, slow and lurching, he raised his head. My breath was catching with hope as his cheek and his lips went bumping soft and warm over my skin, until he reached my mouth and he was kissing me.
Only just barely, the lightest brush, but I didn’t leave it there; I caught him round the back of the head and kissed him harder, kissed him without bothering to get my breath in between until I had to stop, gasping, and he’d got the idea by then and he had his arms round me and was kissing me wildly, kissing me all over, along my jaw and down my neck, like he’d been desperate to be kissing me all along and now had just let himself go. He yanked loose the drawstring neck of my dress and I wriggled my arms in from the sleeves and out the top of it, letting it slide down to my waist; he went on kissing me, down between my breasts, as I clawed his T-shirt out of his jeans and paused only so we could get it off over his head.
I stood up and let the dress fall the rest of the way off me. He stood up to meet me, and we got straight back to kissing while I unbuttoned his jeans and shoved them down off him, and then we stopped again to grab my dress and spread it out on a thick patch of grass in the sunlight, and we lay down together, and with his body against mine, so unbelievably warm and good, I said, gulping for air, “You absolute bastard, I could kill you,” because we could have been doing this, we could have been here together, in the sunlight and the grass and the world, instead of the horrors he’d put himself and me through. He made a choked gasp, something between a sob and a laugh, and said, “El, I love you,” and impossibly he was alive, he was here, and we’d made it out; we had got out of the Scholomance after all.