Dramatic pronouncements are all very well and good, but on Monday, two hundred kids turned up expectantly for the next English run, and Orion and I started to hit our limits.
The new course itself was absolutely awful. The gym was full of plum trees on the cusp of blooming, with a soft gurgling brook winding among their roots, the last traces of ice clinging to the banks and a pale edge of frost limning the grass. Sunlight dappled down through the leaves and small birds darted around in the distance, chirps coming from amid the branches, lovely and inviting, at least until we got close enough for the trees to start savagely clubbing us with thorny limbs that shredded most shielding spells, and the tiny birds bunched up into a flock that came at us en masse and turned out to be shrikes.
I tried to hit the whole swarm with a killing spell, but it didn’t work. Just before the spell landed, the cloud of shrikes all burst apart and started attacking us separately. Orion spent the whole run weaving back and forth through the crowd, shooting them down one at a time, but I couldn’t do that: throwing one of my killing spells at a single shrike while it was flying rapidly around a person pecking at them was an excellent way for me to miss the shrike entirely, and kill the person and their three closest neighbors at the same time.
The only thing that saved it from disaster was that everyone did keep helping one another—throwing fresh shields over people who had been clubbed, picking the shrikes out of the sky one at a time if they came close enough, neutralizing the poison clouds that occasionally spurted out of the plum blossoms. I wasn’t useless, either; halfway through, the trees got inventive. A dozen of them pulled up their roots and wove themselves together into a living wicker man. It went crashing about, grabbing enormous handfuls of people and shoving them inside the basket of its own chest, and then erupted into flames with them imprisoned and screaming just as a second batch of trees followed the first.
The shields that everyone had to keep up against the shrikes were totally useless against the tree-basket-men, and even Orion couldn’t make a dent in the things. They weren’t consumed by their own fire, which was presumably psychic instead of corporeal. They just kept merrily burning on, right until I tore them all apart with a handy spell I have for constructing a ritual dark tower. It uses whatever construction materials are in the area. The people inside got dumped out, and the trees got shredded apart and reassembled into a tidy hexagonal tower of solid walls bristling with upcurved sharpened stakes placed at intervals that looked exactly as though the structure was designed to have people impaled all over the surface. Even dodging shrikes, everyone gave it a very wide berth.
Nobody died, but seven people came out with exposed bone, a dozen with severe burns, and two people had lost eyes. A couple of enclaver alchemists grudgingly shared drops of restorative tinctures, which were good enough to heal the damage once they emerged from the gym, and nobody complained if they made it out of graduation alive at the cost of an eye, but it had been a sharp lesson in our limitations. There were plenty of small, quick mals. In fact they were excellent candidates to have survived the cleansing, down below.
In the library afterwards, Magnus pulled Orion aside into a corner of the reading room for a deep heartfelt chat, out of earshot of where I’d been before I got up and quietly snuck after to eavesdrop. “Look, bro, I’m sorry to have to be saying this, I know you’re trying to move mountains here, but—we’ve got to have a plan for when you can’t,” by which he meant, a plan for leaving people behind. That was what every enclaver had.
“If that happens, I guess we’ll have to let the best-prepared fend for themselves, Tebow,” I said, sweet as a poisoned apple, from behind his back. He flinched and glared at me before he could help himself.
But the truth was everyone had that plan: how to recognize when one of your allies had gone down too hard, and it was time to cut them loose and keep going. I’d lived with that plan in my own head for years and years, and just declaring that I was giving it up wasn’t actually a solution to the underlying problem. We needed a plan to save everyone instead, and we demonstrably still didn’t have one. Magnus wasn’t wrong about that.
But we still had a better option than any of the other available ones. More kids kept joining the runs all week long, except in the still-almost-empty Chinese section. One of the former Bangkok enclavers did show, warily, and later in the week, Hideo—calming-waters did beautifully to stop his tics, for half an hour at least, which was plenty of time to do the run—brought a group of three other kids with him, a loser-alliance that he’d had an agreement to follow after in the graduation hall, with no other benefits: even the worst stragglers can get that kind of lousy deal. I think he’d asked them to come and watch him perform with the tics medicated, in hopes they’d agree to let him properly join up, and the prospect of a real fourth brought them—that, or they liked him, and wanted to be convinced.