Yielding the same way the gym floor had yielded to me, that day with all the enclavers ready to fight each other. Yielding—to give me a chance to stop the killing. To save more children.
I hadn’t expected to feel sorry. I hadn’t allowed myself to expect that I’d even make it to this moment, so I hadn’t imagined what it would be like if I did, but even if I had, I don’t think I could have imagined that. But for a moment, I was sorry: the Scholomance had done everything it could for us, given us ungrateful sods everything it had, like that awful story about the giving tree, and here I was about to chop it down. I paused, in that moment between the two parts of the incantation, and though I had to clench every hardened muscle in my gut to keep from flying apart with the potential of the spell gathered in me, I managed to say, softly, “Thank you.” Then I plunged over the line.
I’d never completely cast the spell before, for obvious reasons. I don’t think I’ll ever cast it again. As soon as I was inside it, I knew it wasn’t really a spell for a supervolcano: that was just an example. It was for devastation, for the shattering of a world. I’d felt instinctively that it would work to take the school down; now I knew that it would.
And the mals knew, too. They did come at us, then—not to kill us but to escape. The honeypot spell had died out, and the last portals had closed; no more of them were coming through the gates. But the whole school was crammed full of them, every last nook and cranny jam-packed, and all of them could feel the end coming: the warning pillar of ash and fire going up into their sky, the spreading grey cloud.
But Orion had flipped his sword-wand-thing open into a long, whiplike length, and he was keeping the whole dais clear; any mal that tried to set so much as a toe on the steps, he killed, and none of them wanted to come up. Little ones tried to dart out through the sides; he killed them with rapid flicks that my eyes couldn’t even follow. I was chanting the final verses of the incantation, and the floor was beginning to heave beneath us. I could feel walls parting, pipes bursting, all through the school, and the low groaning of the floor as it began to separate from the dais. The seam all round was opening up, and a thin black line of empty void was beginning to show through.
The mals were going into a frenzy: they stopped being reluctant, and Orion was fighting furiously, killing them in every direction: nightflyers and shrikes diving at us, ghauls howling in the air, eldritch horrors whispering frantically. There was a squealing of metal behind me, too: the doors were starting to swing shut again. The fiery letters in the air were counting down: forty-one seconds left, and time to go. If a few mals did escape now, after we were gone, it didn’t matter. The job was done; we’d done it. I deliberately stopped on the last syllable but one, and let the spell go. The air around me rippled with the shudder of the spell traveling out—not quite finished, but so close that it would tip over to completion on its own in another moment. I laughed in sheer triumph and cast the evocation of refusal round us and shoved it outward, tumbling the mals away from me and Orion down the steps.
Orion wobbled himself, on the lowest step, and looked round wildly at the mals that had just been pushed out of his reach. “Let’s go!” I shouted to him, and he turned and stared up at me, blankly.
And then the whole floor shook beneath us, and it wasn’t because of my spell. The ocean of mals surrounding us parted like the Red Sea, frantically frothing away to either side as a titanic shape bigger than the doors themselves erupted out of the shaft and came surging towards us, so enormous I couldn’t even recognize it as a maw-mouth at first: the endless eyes and mouths so tiny they were only speckles scattered like stars over its bulk. Any mal that couldn’t get out of its way was consumed without a pause; it just rolled over them and they were gone.
It wasn’t Patience; it wasn’t just Patience. It was Patience and Fortitude. Scorched and starved, their graduation hall picked completely clean, they’d finally turned on each other. They’d chased each other through the dark underbelly of the school—the school had surely opened spaces up for them deliberately, luring them away from the gates to clear the hall for our escape—until one of them had devoured the other and settled in to quietly digest its enormous meal in peace, a century of feeding in a single go, only to be stirred up into a panic when it had felt the school beginning to topple.
All my triumph fell away from me like a long tail of ashes crumbling off the end of a stick of incense. I’d been getting ready to be proud of myself, self-satisfied: I’d done it, I’d saved everyone, I’d purged the world of maleficaria, I’d faced my greatest fear and I’d come through it. I’d been ready to go through the door and boast to Mum of what I’d done, to wait with queenly grace for my knight in shining armor to come and receive my hand, his reward and mine, and set out on our crusade to save any tarnished bits of the world that still needed to be polished up.