The Slacktiverse

Last time, we cleared Act I of this third Scholomance book by retrieving and restoring Orion Lake to the state he was in before he shoved El out the door to the Scholomance and then tried to let himself degrade into nothing. Act II has come to us through Liu, who has obtained the knowledge necessary to create a modern enclave, and the process, whatever it may be, has greatly upset ner. She can’t say anything about it, because the enclave spells themselves require you to agree up front that you will not disclose their details. So Team Keep El on the Straight and Narrow is heading to Beijing so that they can rescue Liu from whatever terror awaits her.

The Golden Enclaves, Chapter 13: Content Notes: Attempted murder, descriptions of injury

The chapter opens with arriving in Beijing, and rather than staying in a fine hotel, because that is using the resources of enclavers (and yes, El does point out that she’s still wearing the New York power sharer and says “consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”), El pulls them to a hostel instead for the night, She notes that when traveling with her mother, what would usually happen is someone would ask Gwen (and El) to their house for the night, so they never stayed long in a hostel. For El, the same things happens, but in the characteristically El way: while trying to figure out how they’re going to get into Beijing enclave, there’s a street musician, and that starts having the entire party drifting off to sleep, well, until Precious pops out and bites El on the ear, breaking the spell on El and letting her see all the wizards who then start casting a net over them once they see El move. And then, Orion happens to them.

I was trying to fight off the groggy heaviness of the music well enough to work out the best way not to kill them all when Orion glanced up—not jerking free of the spell, just lifting his head from the random tourist brochure he’d picked up, as if he hadn’t been caught by it at all. He reached up and grabbed the net with a hand, and the whole thing pulled loose from the tubes and went into him as if he’d sucked it up with a straw.
I gawked at him at least as much as our unwelcome visitors did. But then one of them dropped his tube and went for another weapon. Orion got up and started to—move at him, and everything went hideously wrong. It looked as though Orion was taking a step, but there was something off about it, the air distorting around him as if he wasn’t really taking a step, he was just swimming through reality somehow and the step was only my own brain trying desperately to fill in with something that made sense.
[…El realizes that if Orion gets to touch the people, something very terrible will happen to them, and therefore, to prevent disaster and destruction, she has to act…]
I planted one foot and called an old vicious spell that someone had meant to drown an entire fishing village, drag it down into an ocean maelstrom, only I threw it in the air instead and whirled round in a circle with my hand cupping the power, a scream of protesting wind following me round. It started grabbing all of them, whipping their clothes like snapping flags, sending the tubes flying out of their hands. I turned round once more, and it was dragging them off their feet, the air starting to churn into visible streams as it picked up dust and leaves from the ground, then a couple of stray chairs in the way, and the third time round it took them all off their feet in a howling vortex, and I shoved the whole thing up and away onto the roof.
Our visitors must have herded the hostel staff and all the other guests well away from the courtyard before making their approach, but launching a tornado and dumping eighteen people onto the roof was still a bridge too far. Mundanes started to stick their heads out of the windows and doors to see what on earth was going on, which meant that none of the wizards I’d just flung onto the charming slanted roof could cast anything to stop themselves rolling straight off and plunging the two stories straight down to earth. But that was a good bit better than whatever else had been about to happen to them, even if they landed on concrete, so I wasn’t fussed.

Extremely pragmatic of you, El. Admittedly, they’d also just tried to do something to discourage El from reaching her destination and interrupting whatever else was about to happen, so I think El’s a little less inclined to want to treat them gently. But she also knows that whatever Orion was about to do, it would not have been pretty, and it probably would have been very lethal.

…Now that I think about it, however, I don’t believe we’ve seen Orion just simply absorb spells or other such things that easily. When he was going after mals, he at least had to crack them open before he could get at their malia essences. Perhaps that particular limitation’s been removed, since he had all the practice he ever needed with dealing with mals while he was in the Scholomance, with no limiters on and no need to care about being human.

Having beaten the ambush and run without a plan through several streets, eventually they all get waved into a taxi with Liu’s cousin Zheng, who doesn’t actually know much about what’s going on, other than that Liu and her family didn’t come back from the visit where the enclave spells were exchanged, and that Liu’s myna (the bird that came to find El at the beginning) keeps telling them to help Liu. Talking with the cousins and grandmother, the ones who were too young or old to get the knowledge, Liesel figures out that enclave creation involves some form of sacrifice, and whatever that sacrifice is, it’s clear that there’s been some objections to it, so nobody who could do or say anything about it has been allowed to leave. El’s not entirely sure why any of Liu’s family are being chosen for the sacrifice, the one life that will allow so many others to be saved by hiding in the void. Liesel thinks that’s not something that they need to care about right now, and her plan for getting Liu and her family out is basically to have El threaten to knock the enclave off into the void if they don’t give up Liu. El is scared that this might be the beginning of her slide into prophetic darkness, where she finally fulfills her role to “bring death and destruction to all the enclaves of the world,” but she also knows that nothing short of that kind of leverage will get someone to give up.

All they have to do at that point is get in, which is difficult to do when they can’t find the place. Then Liesel thinks that if Orion hunted mals, that would help them find the wards, and then the gate. Orion, for his part, realizes that what he thinks of as obvious information is not obvious at all.

He stared at her, his brow furrowing a bit, and then he said, “Uh, the entrance over there?” We all stared at him, and then he went past us and out of sight behind one of the pagodas, round a curve of the path that we’d tried at least twice, and when we followed him, he was standing in front of a narrow mostly overgrown footpath heading to a worn old stone pagoda that very much hadn’t been there before. He looked at us with a quality of doubting both our sanity and our general competence.
“Yes,” I said through my teeth. “This entrance over here, which we’ve been trying to find for half an hour. Lake, is it too much to ask you to pay the least bit of attention while we’re doing our best to barge into an an enclave uninvited?”
He glared at me. “It’s right there!”
“It wasn’t!” I snapped back, with grace and maturity.
“Is it too much to ask that we not try to get in?” Liesel said pointedly.

You would think, Orion, that if everyone else is looking at everything except what you’ve already seen, you could volunteer that information to the others to make the process go faster. But, of course, that requires you to pay attention more than the very minimum, which is what you seem to be doing here at this moment. Even saving friends doesn’t register more than a blip on your radar?

Eventually, all of them find their gateway, and they figure out that it’s not a gateway that you physically pass through, but instead one where you meditate your way into and through. Zheng gets it, then eventually Aadhya and El and Liesel and Orion get it and go through themselves. But it takes El a bit to calm herself down from all the emotional waves crashing their way through her before she can do it. It’s also possible that Orion ended up killing the guardian dragon set for that gate, which Zheng might have seen him do, but Orion doesn’t want to talk about it, and they don’t have time to get into the details of it. Instead, El recognizes that she’s in an enclave that naturally formed from all the magic that happened around it, before they encounter one of the residents of the area.

I was ready to have a go at bashing an opening, and then Precious gave a squeak, and I looked over to the side: the main hall was partitioned into three sections, and on the left there was an old, thoroughly-whiskered man sitting quietly at a low table, in elaborate robes like a costume out of a historical film, doing calligraphy with an ink brush under a glowing orb of light.
[…he’s not obviously hostile, but the first sign that he might be something very impressive is when Zheng says “Fuck me” in Chinese upon noticing him.…]
“Do you know who he is?” I hissed at him.
“I, uh, I think that’s the Seventh Sage of Beijing,” Zheng said in barely more than a whisper, still staring. The old man was going serenely on with his brushstrokes as if our presence and time itself didn’t matter. “The one who founded the enclave.”
“This enclave is a thousand years old!” Aadhya said in protest.
“He was the seventh teacher, the one who was here when the house left the world,” Zheng said. “They say he never died. He kept teaching anyone who came here, until one day he just disappeared. There are stories that he comes back sometimes when the enclave is in a lot of trouble, but no one’s really seen him in hundreds of years.”
“Right,” I said, grimly. I hadn’t any idea how powerful you had to be to arrange all that, but it sounded impressive. “Is there anything in these stories about what he does when he turns up?”

No, nobody has a clue, but the good thing is that the sage is here for El, and not to be hostile to her.

“I think he said—’Don’t be afraid, daughter of the golden stones’, does that make sense?”
My arms went to clutch round the sutras, which were still slung across my chest. The sutras, which my dad had wanted, because his family had lived in and lost a Golden Stone enclave. An enclave like this one, an enclave made without malia. “Yes,” I said. It made sense, but it didn’t work; if anything, I was more afraid. The old man was looking at me with a little too much gentleness, like he was sorry for me.
He told me something else, and I picked Liu’s name out of it before he held out the huge scroll he’d been painting on. Zhen caught his breath and then said, “He said, ‘This will bring you to Guo Yi Liu!’ ”
I took the scroll: the characters were stylized and I wasn’t sure of them&—the handful of Chinese spells I knew, Liu had taught me by ear—but I believed him anyway, looking at it felt like looking at a map, something meant to help you get somewhere. The old man nodded to me and said a phrase I did recognize: “Finish what you started.”
Then he added something a bit more dry and reached up and touched the glowing golden ball of light with a finger. It went out instantly; by the time my eyes had adjusted, he wasn’t there anymore, only the table, thick with untroubled dust, and the scroll hanging between my hands.
“Uh, I think he said—’I’m tired of demons in my house’?” Zheng said, doubtfully.
“Who wouldn’t be,” I muttered, as I scrambled up.

Demons in your house, the sage says? Is he talking about the people who have built these enclaves of malia, and who continue to fuel them with the same? Or is he referring to something more literal?

The scroll works by opening a portal, which El can step through, but others seem suspended in midair trying to go through. El figures the sage’s assistance is to speed her along so she can get there in time, because otherwise, whatever great working is going on would be done by the time they could make it to the space where the working is happening. And, of course, when faced with an obstacle, El is not going for subtle.

The door was locked, but I put my hands on the framing posts on either side of the doorway and spoke an incantation that a Roman maleficer had used to rip open a mystically fortified Druidic site during Caesar’s wars, so he could get at the mana store they’d kept inside. Not at all the spell you wanted when the lock on your dormitory room had jammed and you were trying to get to the cafeteria for breakfast, which was when the Scholomance had handed me that one, but I was grateful for it now, because the wooden door instantly exploded before me, spraying splinters over the chamber at high velocity.

What number of “And then I used this maleficer spell for something other than malefice” are we up to at this point? We know that El’s affinity means that the school keeps feeding her maleficer spells, and they keep sticking in her brain, but this is surely at least a dozen times where El has put someone’s malefice to a more productive use than the original caster did. We know that the school is basically a large bit of artifice, charged with a semi-sentience and a specific mission, but there are so many malefice magics that El’s been given that turn out to be useful to her in one way, whether it’s busting mals or busting doors, that it feels like the school knew what El was going to be doing in the future, and was specifically trying to equip her with the things she’d need when it became time to do the things she’d have to outside the school, against threats of the same or greater power than what she’s coming across in the school. If we asked Gwen about it, she’d probably shrug and say something about the universe working in the way that is best for itself or some other thing. It’s the hand of the author, of course, that makes all these coincidences line up into something like destiny, prophecy and all.

It also, as others have pointed out, showcases just how clever El is when she is faced with a problem and doesn’t have enough time to think about what to do about it. When she’s in the middle of doing, El is very resourceful and knows how to put her magic to best use. It’s when she has time to stop and think or get afraid of what she’s doing that she starts to have problems. El kind of works on the same principle that the dragons did in Pern: if she thinks she can do a thing, she can. If she doesn’t, it doesn’t work nearly as well. (Which she said explicitly as the way that magic works in the last book or two.) It sounds like the most powerful magic in the world is the kind of stuff that happens when you really want something to happen, and you don’t particularly care about how it gets done, or you have the outline of the spell of how it gets done, and from there, you really just want that result. Which probably means that the most powerful spells come out when someone’s life is threatened and they need a way out. Which, in a weird way, sort of suggests why the Scholomance menaces the students with mals, to try and unlock that powerful spellcasting at will. Or the creativity that comes with different spell creation.

With the door blown off, El is now in the middle of a room where we have people bound and gagged over what looks like a sewer opening, and other wizards adding bricks on top of a “disk made of blue-tinged metal” as they come through a slot in the wall. At the disruption to their ritual, the wizards try to kill El, but we all know how well that works for her by now, and instead, she turns them to stone to buy herself some more time. Which allows her to unbind Liu’s family (the bound and gagged people), who tell El that Liu is underneath all those bricks and the disk. Trying to move a brick, however, turns out to be far more difficult than El thinks, because, as she eventually figures out, each of those bricks is “thirty years or more of mana and work and longing” for an enclave, and so she’s trying to redirect someone else’s will with her own. Which is exhausting as best. El also notes that the space of the ritual is kept away from being seen.

They’d built it out of their longing for an enclave, and it didn’t really matter that they didn’t know exactly what was happening in this room. Because they did know, they had to know, that something evil and horrible was going to happen in this room. They were only over there in the other room because they didn’t want to watch. They would surely have rather been somewhere even further away, but they couldn’t be, this spell needed both their power and their intent, so they had to be here, they had to be part of it.
But they had found this way to keep their eyes shut and their noses pinched. They just had to be willing to hand over their work to these eight people, the people who were so hungry for council seats and power that they were willing to get their hands really dirty. And everyone over in that room was willing to do that, just so long as they got to walk out of that other room as enclavers, with their futures of safety and luxury assured. So they wanted their brick to stay right where it was, and that was why I could barely move it.

We are once again given a nice metaphor for how many people don’t actually want to know how the sausage gets made in their comfortable lives. The very rich and powerful, and those aiming to become very rich and powerful, are willing to do all kinds of horrible things to others to get and secure that power, and so long as the people who are affected by it are sufficiently out of sight, or non-player characters in someone’s narrative, then plenty of other people are willing to go along with it because they benefit from what the terrible rich and powerful do. The lives of people in the Global North reap the benefits, like technological gadgets, smartphones, and computers, or the privilege of having leisure time and a connection to the Internet generally free of official censorship, and the people in the Global South suffer the consequences of bad health, tiny wages, pollution, extraction, and governmental systems intended to keep the rich in power and with the wealth, and everyone else as cheap and disposable. Or, y’know, the highway systems and the political systems and the policing systems are all set up to specifically target Black and Brown people, hurt them, and confiscate their wealth through various machinations of the State, up to and including the use of violence, and white people go along with a lot of it because they believe they have a more beneficial life free of “crime” or they get “good schools” or any other of the kinds of things where it turns out that a lot of people who think they’ve made it themselves were born on third, or second, and then told they hit a triple, or a double, and that they should pay no attention to anyone telling them their advantages came at the expense of someone else, laundered through the State, or corporations that hired them for bigger wage or that gave them a more favorable loan rate (or a loan at all), or that offer them access to banking and credit and all the conveniences of modern life. It’s a different take on what magic does to people (and strongly suggests that Ophelia is right, for all that she’s very clearly a villain), rather than the way that, say, Jo Rowling’s wizards basically dismiss the nonmagical as unimportant and set themselves up as the superior ones without a trace of self-introspection or reflection that might suggest that it’s more than just Wizard Hitler and his followers that do evil to others and justify it to themselves.

Liu’s family buys more time for El and other members of the family to try and move the bricks using an exercise form that captures the other wizards and requires them to join in the exercise as they break out of their stone confinements. Unfortunately, El is still stuck with the problem that she’s fighting concentrated will. Precious helps El a little bit by illuminating the disk, which lets El understand something about the spell (“eternal life, longevity, deathlessness”) that says Liu’s still alive, but…

She was meant to die slowly. Even if her body was being shattered and her hips and shoulders had been crushed under the weight of all these bricks, these fucking bricks that wouldn’t move, and I gave a howl of rage and heaved the second brick up and over the edge. The disk even shifted slightly up, a millimeter maybe.

I realize now that this is a spell that draws into reality something that is usually figurative language: Liu is being crushed under the weight of expectation. And there’s some additional hits involved for this, because Liu, at the end of the last book, seemed determined to strike out on her own, be her own person, and not conform to the expectations of her family, not to be the dutiful daughter again. And instead of being respected for her choice, she has been put under a compulsion, and restrained, and now her community’s expectations are intended to crush her to…undeath, of a sort. She didn’t want this. She doesn’t want this, and there is magic involved and power being expended to keep her in place and to use her as the sacrifice for this spell. And also, that her family is also intended to be part of a sacrifice for this magic, with the expectations of the community set to basically erase the Liu family, with the exception of those who are part of the family that are too old or too young to be involved in this. Liu is expected to submit to being the sacrifice. Liu’s family is expected to submit to being sacrifices as well, so that the community can be safe from the world of mals and to have their own enclaves. There’s magic involved to keep everyone and put them this way, but also, I wouldn’t be surprised that there’s a certain amount of cultural and social pressure as well, to consider the good of the family/community before your own selfish desires, and when the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, to willingly give yourself up for the betterment of everyone else.

The problem is, of course, is that the phrase is “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” and the world we live in, the extractive, exploitative world that we live in, plays the first up to the hilt, but then chooses not to honor the second, whether it’s spoken by Marx or by The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton through whichever of the prophets or messiahs that someone claims to follow the words of. These enclave-building spells demand sacrifices, and people believe they provide, but they do not provide for those who are sacrificed. Utilitarianism, Ophelia’s way, says that it’s okay to make this trade, and furthermore, that people are selfish and looking to exploit others, so these grand trades are necessary to prevent the eventual destruction of magical children and adults from maleficaria. Because they work far better at scale than the Golden Stone enclaves do. A little bit of cheating here, at the societal level, and everyone benefits. Except the ones who are dead. But there’s no sense in crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying until you run out of cake.

So, when forced into the problem that El cannot move the longing and mana of the rest of the people who desperately want an enclave, El decides that if they’re going to go through with this, they have to own it.

I didn’t know what to do and I knew exactly what to do. I could have pointed at any one of them and just whacked them off the face of the earth with a careless flick of my hand, the insignificant insects that they were, troubling me. I could have sludged the marrow of their bones and let it run out of their bodies while they collapsed, writhing and screaming; the way they’d been about to do to Liu. I could have clawed their brains out of their skulls and made them into the obedient minions they had made out of everyone in that other room who’d agreed to hand her over to be mangled in the ritual.
Instead I turned to the wall with the postbox hatch in it. It was made of stone, so my Roman spell wouldn’t do, but that was all right. We were inside an enclave, and that wall was barely even there; it was a polite fiction, a curtain for all of them to hide behind, in both directions, from each other and from what they were doing. “À la mort,” I said, and waved the whole thing out of existence.
[…the unexpected-ness of it all gives El a further opening…]
I clenched my hands into fists at my side and used the stupid little compulsion spell I’d made up as a furious child, the one I’d eventually stopped using because every time I tried it, Mum gently untangled it before I could get anywhere with it, and then sat me down for a really long conversation about why we couldn’t force people to do what we wanted, which obviously every last one of these wankers had missed. “Do as I say, and not as I do, and what I want, I’ll make you,” I chanted, clearly a masterpiece of high arcana, only I pushed it out at all of them with a massive wall of New York’s mana behind it, and then I said in Chinese, “And what I want is for you to stop and listen to me, so I don’t have to kill you all!”
[…and then El works through what this spell is meant to create…]
“A maw-mouth,” I said. The words came out of my mouth small and quiet, and they dropped into the silence of the room like stones going into a deep well. “You’re making a maw-mouth.”
It was obvious once I knew. The tiny slots cut in the bottom of the cylinder, for something to come oozing out. The sewer grating where they’d tied up four people, bound and gagged so they couldn’t shield themselves against the hungry newborn monster looking for its first meal. And then it would drop through the grate while it digested. Tidy. You wouldn’t have wanted it to turn round and have a go at the council members, after all. Surely the sewer dumped out somewhere into the real world, maybe into the streets of Beijing, where it would go creeping away to hunt amongst the independent wizards of the city, all those poor bastards hovering round the enclave hoping for work.
And as soon as I knew what they were doing, I also knew why. A maw-mouth took everything. It extracted all the mana you could make, everything that came from your desperate failing struggle to keep it out of you, and it kept squeezing you forever I didn’t just get you and your agony, it got all the mana your agony could ever build, borrowed in advance. And they needed that to build an enclave…because the final working had to be done all in one go, by a single wizard.
I’d noticed that bit ages ago in the Golden Stone sutras: one voice calling to the void, in a single breath. A circle of wizards wouldn’t do. One caster only, convincing the void that no, really, this one part of it was fixed and permanent, even though the void was the exact opposite, and wanted to be nothing and everything all at once. Channeling a vast torrent of mana into that persuasion.
[…which also means that the Golden Stone sutras can only be used by an El-class talent, because of the sheer requirements it takes, and therefore some other, enterprising wizards figured out how to do it that doesn’t require El, and were willing to live with this as the result…]
A maw-mouth is the worst thing that can happen to a wizard. They’re the monsters that keep us awake at night. Probably every last wizard in that enormous amphitheater had made it out of the Scholomance, running past Patience and Fortitude, inches away from endless hell. All of those wizards, they’d known that something bad was going to happen in here, that Liu wasn’t going to come out again, but they hadn’t known how bad. Surely they’d told themselves a story—it was just one death, one sacrifice, for everyone’s sake. Maybe there had been a lottery, something they’d told themselves was fair.
And the eight people in this room—who wouldn’t meet my eyes when I looked at them, who’d known what they were really doing—they’d told themselves a different story: Ophelia’s story. The story that every council member in every enclave had been telling themselves for thousands of years, since the very first time someone had built an enclave out of death instead of gold. It was their responsibility to do the terrible thing for everyone else. To bear the scars of it like a burden, as if there was something noble in doing something so horrible that most people couldn’t stand doing it, for the sake of those squeamish people.

Before we get into how El resolves the situation in front of her, I might note that the reference to “holding a lottery” here to decide who dies might be a literary reference, this time to the Shirley Jackson short story “The Lottery”, which involved a town ritual where each of the families in the town draws lots to figure out which family has someone stoned to death, and then the unlucky family draws again to find out which of their family members dies by stoning. This might also be a reference to the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, where, barring someone volunteering to go into an arena where twenty-three of twenty-four tributes will end up dead, the two selected from the district to compete in the deadly arena are chosen by a lottery. (And the poorer you are, the more times the names of your family’s eligible children are put in to be drawn from, presumably as some twisted way of justifying that you’re “taking” additional shares from the State to try and stay alive.)

I’m sticking a pin in the part where the enclave-building spells create maw-mouths, because there will be plenty of interesting conclusions to draw later, but for now, let’s get El through another situation where she has to think on her feet and figure out what powerful magic she can use to get out of it. The answer is forgiveness. Because El realizes that most of the people in the auditorium are enclavers, or those who chose to become enclavers, and therefore because El is the only one so far who has refused the choice of being an enclaver, even though she really wanted to become one, she has to be able to forgive those who made the less moral choice. Because the alternative is to “sail out and start blasting the whole world bare.” You know, the thing that El’s got a prophecy about, the thing that will require El to turn her back and embrace the dark side to do? El works through this exact logic, recognizing that if she blows up the people here, then she’s going to go blow up London, and then New York, and every single enclave in the world, because the people in those enclaves are just like the people in this one: people who have made the choice to look away, to pretend that the child suffering at the heart of Omelas is worth the price, because of all the benefits they get from that child’s constant suffering. Yes, it’s terrible, but it’s not a child they know. And the people who knew that child best were eaten first by the maw-mouth created, so there’s not going to be anyone reminding them that they chose to sacrifice a child to become a monster so they could have their enclave space.

So El offers them a choice: either they can take the bricks off of Liu and abandon their dreams of an enclave, or they can take the bricks off of Liu and El will do her very best to use their work and longing to save and stabilize the enclave.

But one of the council members abruptly said to me, “We’ll let Guo Yi Liu out, and you can go—”
“No,” I said, in a howling that echoed off the walls of the little room, like a pack of wolves ringed round him. He shut up. “Those are your choices. Don’t bother looking for a third. I’m not letting you do it to Liu, and I’m not leaving you with this tidy pile of bricks to do it to someone else. If you don’t want me to try saving the place, you can dump them down that sewer and evacuate for all I care.”
“Most of the stored mana is ours,” a different council member said—a middle-aged woman, young relative to the others. “We chose to use it to help Beijing and not just to make our own enclave, but we are not going to give them the work of our entire family for generations—”
“You took the work of your entire family for generations and chose to use it to make a maw-mouth so shut it!” I said, but that was only a seething of outrage bubbling up and over from the simmering pot.

Which sets off significant discussion about how to go forward, with some of the students that El helped in the obstacle course runs saying they’ll give up their Beijing enclave spots if Xi’an helps stabilize Beijing, and eventually, the decision gets made without anyone saying so explicitly, because El can move the bricks “like a brick made out of lead instead of a brick made out of a black hole” and as more and more people decide against crushing Liu, the bricks become lighter and more easily moved, until they can find Liu at the bottom. And another piece of the puzzle slips into place.

she was in the bottom, naked and strapped tightly into a curled fetal positions with leather bands marked up with runes. I remembered with lurching nausea the shape I’d seen inside the maw-mouths I’d killed, the crushed body at the very center. I’d vaguely thought it was the remains of some maleficer—someone like Jack, only more successful, who’d just kept sucking people dry until they finally collapsed in on themselves to keep on devouring endlessly. I’d been afraid of becoming one of those people.
Instead it would have been Liu, kind quiet Liu, who’d only ever touched malia to save her little cousins and had sworn it off as soon as she’d had the chance, bound in there forever. Her arms had been wrapped around her, and the poor hand on top, the one she’d used for fingering on the lute, had been crushed bloody against her shoulder where it had been strapped down, and along her side there were horrible purpled stripes where her skin had been ground against her ribs, raw in places and starting to rub off. When her parents got the hood off her head, there was blood on her mouth: her shoulders and hips looked all wrong. Her eyes didn’t open.
But she was breathing, and she kept on breathing.

With the quick intervention of healers, they get Liu stabilized and take her away at El’s command, which allows El to focus on the thing she’s offered to do: to get the foundation that’s failing and reinforce it using the Golden Stone sutras. She’s never done this before. She has no idea whether it will work, but she’s going to try.

(Still keeping that pin in the “enclaves create maw-mouths” magic, because now El knows, although she hasn’t explored the ramifications of it yet, that every maw-mouth has a person at its core, and that maw-mouths are inextricably tied to the creation and expansion of enclaves, which means that when El goes munching maw-mouths, she’s also destabilizing the enclaves that have used those maw-mouths as anchor points. The previous books’ insistence on not lining up the timings of attacks is meant to obscure this realization to the reader, so they can’t easily draw the line between “El nukes a maw-mouth” and “an enclave suffers a structural attack from the Unknown Maleficer.” So, the mysterious maleficer is indeed the lady of prophecy herself, but she doesn’t know that, yet, because she’s still focused on the task at hand. She believes, instead, that the Unknown Maleficer has figured out that all enclaves have this stone weakness, and is getting at them through magical means. She’s not wrong, she just doesn’t fully understand the mechanics of it all.)

Once the broken foundation stone is brought to El, she starts in on the grand working, what would normally be part three of the Golden Stone process, but parts one and two have already been done for her.

In that moment, I knew with clear glad certainty that it didn’t matter to me how the sutras had come to me or what I’d paid for them. I couldn’t get that price back, any more than I could undo what had been done to make the enclave around me. This was still the life’s work I wanted to belong to. And I felt also, for the first time, that it wanted to belong to me; that the sutras really were mine, in a way I hadn’t quite believed in before, despite all the time carefully polishing them and cuddling them and tucking them safely in at night.
As if to agree with me, the pages began to glow with soft golden light, illuminating themselves in the dim close room. A moment later, the book tugged gently, and when I uncurled my fingers, it rose up into the air and hovered just before my eyes, freeing my hands just as the page turned and I needed them for the next part of the work.
[…there’s still a little bit of finagling that needs to be done, while the void is busily trying to reclaim the space they’re working in, but the hint comes when El manages to put bricks together and gets a feeling of solidity from them, which leads to the other people using their own strength to move the bricks and arrange them in a structure that is solid while El continues to sing the spell that will use them into existence. (There are casualties when someone drops a brick and the void eats it and then runs itself through the person that dropped it,)…]
But as soon as I finished the incantation, the last few pages of the book were turning: they whiffled to the back of the very last page, and there was one final line of Sanskrit written there in plain black ink, as if the scribe had copied it down and then hadn’t bothered to illuminate it, because he hadn’t thought it was part of the working. I’d never read or translated it, but it was so simple I could do it out of my head, and even at a glance it wasn’t remotely like the inscriptions on the disk. Nothing about deathlessness or permanence, nothing forced; it was only a request, a cry of longing, stay here, please stay, be our shelter, be our home, be loved, and after I’d sung it out in the Sanskrit, I translated it off the cuff into Chinese, as best I could, and called it out urgently.
Everyone was sagging, panting for breath, many of them clinging to each other with eyes closed or staring fixedly at the ground, all of them trying not to look at the terrible fissures opening up round us. But back in the other room across the passageway, the room where they’d tried to crush her, Liu had heard me. Very faintly I heard her voice, thready and fragile, calling it back to me.
Other people joined in, voices picking it up all round—the words changing a little as it was passed along, like a children’s game, but it didn’t matter: the meaning was the same, and everyone was saying it together. As it swept through the crowd, all the people round me taking up the chant, I called it out again with them, and golden light came welling up through the loose bricks like mortar, joining them into a single round mosaic. It reached the final border and suddenly shot out at high speed, filling into all the cracks of void and patching them up, the red lanterns coming alight all along the alleyway, revealing second and third stories on all the buildings, and a neon sign above the metro suddenly blinked into improbable existence as lights came on in the stairway going down.

And there is much rejoicing! The people are saved, the enclave is saved, there will not be a disaster this time, and everything is going to be fine. El, exhausted by the work, sinks to the ground, but offers great thanks for being able to do the thing, to the sutras, to the one who wrote them, to all of it.

And then Precious squeaked shrilly, and I jerked my head up. The council members hadn’t gone anywhere. Five of them had now stepped between me and the rest of the crowd, blocking their view, and the other three, their hands joined, were about to hit me with a killing spell.
Unfortunately, the warning wasn’t any help. I hadn’t anything left. I couldn’t even kill them. I could only just watch it coming, my arms tightening round my book, and then they were all screaming, screaming horribly, so horribly I almost could have killed them after all, just to save them from whatever it was that was happening to them, but before I could even more, there was a sort of yanking motion, and all of them were just—gone. Gone as if they’d never been there at all.
Orion was in their place, just behind them. For one moment, his face was blank and utterly unmoving, and then he looked at me, and I should have said, Fine, fourteen for you; I suppose we’re tied again, but I couldn’t say that; I couldn’t say anything like it, and he turned without a word and left, and everyone shocked and staring outside jerked back from him, pushing and shoving at everyone who’d wanted to see what was going on, a wave of empty space rolling with him through the crowd.

Endless screaming and sudden disappearance? Where have we seen those things combined before, hmm? But, much like how El hasn’t realized she’s the one causing enclave destruction, just as she’s been prophesied, by wrecking maw-mouths, we haven’t yet made it to the part of the narrative that confirms (or denies) Orion’s maw-mouth-ness so that we can understand what’s gone on here.

This segment is one of those things where I readily confess to not understanding human nature. Because the council members were helping to get the bricks in place, to save themselves. They may have been grudging about it, but they definitely let El try, since the alternative was oblivion. Now that El has saved their hides, and everyone else’s as well, and managed to get the enclave re-anchored and working, and their act of gratitude and thanks to El is to try and kill her after she’s done the great working. Since the narrative hews to El, of course, we won’t get the answer to the question that I really want to know the answer to: why? (I mean, also, because Orion ate them all up, and now there’s nobody there to answer the question in-universe.) What possible reason could they have to want to get rid of El after she’s shown herself to be good and able to do the great working? Is it because she stopped them from doing it the way they wanted to? Because she’s barged into their enclave and may have hurt some of their comrades in doing it? It doesn’t make sense to me.

This is the end of the chapter, with Liu rescued and the enclave re-stabilized and El having succeeded at pulling off a Golden Stone ritual. But now, also, El knows what the cost of making a modern enclave is, and it means that the more enclaves that get made, the more maw-mouths there will be in the world that need nuking. All of the people who have received the modern enclave spells have known this, and have gone through with it anyway. Which says a lot about both Ophelia’s belief that everyone’s going to keep cheating, because they’re going to keep rationalizing the costs, and just what it means for El’s prophecy to say what it will. (And, as I have noted, it didn’t say anything at all about what she’d do after she did this destroying.)

So, with Liu and the enclave stabilized, and the immediate threat to her survival erased, that would mean that El gets to decompress a little, right? (Well…maybe.) So next week, the fallout from this final action, and also, the next crisis.

Last time, Gwen took Orion to what is likely to be her most powerful cleansing spot, and called upon the spirit of the beings there to help pull Orion away from what he had become in the Scholomance.

The Golden Enclaves, Chapter 12: Content Notes:

It worked. It also put Gwen to the point of complete exhaustion, and that leaves El to figure out what to do, after thanking the tree for help, to help get the tree and the house and the place back into some kind of working order. Orion eventually helps some, and does the carrying of Gwen back to the hut, even though it takes them the better part of two hours to get out of the woods and back to the yurt.

Aadhya and Liesel were sitting out in front of the yurt arguing about what to do. Liesel’s expression when she saw Orion walking carefully behind me with Mum was so utterly disbelieving that it would almost have been funny if it hadn’t been very clear that what she couldn’t believe was that we were all such colossal idiots and yet had somehow survived, and that she wasn’t sure it was a good thing, either.

Best-laid plans, most logical conclusions, and sometimes people just surprise you and manage to do the impossible anyway. But all that means is that Orion’s back, and that doesn’t mean that the nuke is in any way disarmed, just that you have a longer countdown before it goes off.

After they get Gwen settled back in the yurt more comfortably, Addhya asks Orion if he’s okay, since he still looks like he’s freaking out, He repeats that he should have been left behind, and Liesel shreds that idea immediately.

“You weren’t going to, no matter what we did. Your mother was organizing a search party for you.”
“What?” I said, stopping. [El, pay attention! Ophelia said as much when you were in New York. She was only complaining that nobody but El was biting at her current offering price.]
Liesel gestured to Orion impatiently. “You said it yourself! Ophelia did this, she gave him this power. She knew none of the maleficaria could kill him. She knew he was alive. That is why she was so insistent about keeping mana going to the school. She meant to get him out. Did you know she was a maleficer?” she demanded of him.
I’d have asked the same question, if I could have thought of a way to word it. Orion hadn’t talked very much about his mum and dad at school, be he hadn’t never talked about them. If he’d had any idea that his mum was a maleficer, he’d kept it very close. I’d certainly not had the least idea what I was going to find when I’d gone to New York.
“No,” Orion said, an odd answer. Either he ought to have said yes or he ought to have indignantly said my mom isn’t a maleficer.
“But you know it now?” Liesel said, alert to the same oddness. “What did she do to you?”
Orion didn’t answer her. He just got up and walked away. He didn’t go as far as the next patch, he just went a few yards away to the nearest big tree and sat down on the other side of it.
“Wow, the tact, it burns,” Aadhya said.
“We don’t have time for tact!” Liesel said.
“Said like someone who never does.”
Liesel scowled at her. “His mother knows! Do you understand what that means? We were surprised. She wasn’t. She knew we would find Orion and bring him out. Most likely she has people on the way here already. She must have a tracker on that power-sharer.” She gestured at my wrist.
“She can send half of New York if she likes. I’m not letting them take him,” I said.
Liesel threw her hands up exasperated. “And what will you do when she stops the mana?”
“Okay guys, before you stop yelling, allow me to point out that no one is taking Orion anywhere he doesn’t want to go,” Aadhya said. “Can we maybe worry less about evil schemes and more about him for a sec? I don’t know whether it’s his mom or killing all those mals or sitting halfway in the void, but he is not okay, no matter what your mom did to fix him.”
Liesel scowled at her; I could have scowled a bit myself. This was much too sensible and king, when what I wanted was to shriek at Orion in fury and claw his entire face off for having put me through all of this and having the gall to—not be okay. As he clearly wasn’t.

Aadhya is the “heart” of the team, clearly, since she’s the only one of the lot who isn’t a high-powered spell-caster and who has had an actual normal family life for her upbringing. So she’s the one who has the greatest amount of being in tune to the feelings and actions of others. She notices that Orion’s still not on and not anywhere close to back to normal, while Liesel fights El over strategy, direction, and the fact that Ophelia Lake knew this would be the result of El’s expedition and is now putting the next part of her plan into action. Aadhya has been keeping El away from the brink of doing something terrible or trying to push everyone else away because she’s feeling too sorry for herself or that her prophetic aura is a problem, and she went after Liesel because she couldn’t understand why cold logic Liesel was sticking around with someone who wasn’t entirely integral to her revenge plans and her desire to live extremely well as an enclaver. (Not that she’s slacking in the power department, just that she needs extra time to put together things that will let her and others unleash their powers, compared to the incanters around her.)

Because Aadhya has prompted El to behave like a human and tend to human needs, she gets food for Orion and tells him to eat. Even though he says he’s not hungry, and he doesn’t look starved, like “he’d been filled up adequately some other way.” A thought that El turns aside from with a shudder, because she’s still not quite to the point where she’s willing to entertain the idea that Orion Lake is something other human, and that the magic she developed for destroying maw-mouths would work exceedingly effectively on him as well. But, once he has food and takes a bite, I suspect some long-dormant hunger of his woke up, and he starts eating properly. To the point where El realizes that the cupboards aren’t going to handle getting enough food for the rest of them, but thankfully, lunch at the communal kitchens will be happening soon, so everybody can get some food for themselves. (In exchange for some amount of work pitched in to help with the meal or with cleanup of the meal.)

Having eaten, Orion apologies. Not for anything specific, even though El has a list of things she thinks he should apologize for, and instead of relaying that list to him,

“Come and have a lie down,” I said instead, because this was what you did for someone who’d just got out of the Scholomance: you fed them a gigantic pile of food and then you put them to bed on clean sheets and then you got them a shower and clean new clothes. The same thing Mum had done for me, the same thing every family in the world did for every one of their returning graduates. And for lack of a better plan, that’s what I was going to do for him.
He didn’t tell me again that I should have left him back in the school, and he didn’t argue. He got up and followed me back to the yurt and lay down on my cot and went to sleep, on the opposite side of the yurt from Mom. I took Precious out of my pocket and left her to stand watch over them both.
[…And for three days, they prepare for New York to invade, while also taking advantage of the communal kitchens after a severely botched attempt at cooking beans…]
So I’d had to go down to the group kitchens after all. The theory had always been that all comers were welcome to a share, none turned away hungry, and you contributed as you could, very lovely and utopian. In practice, coming down without Mum had always been my idea of purgatory: being asked sharply what I thought I was doing, taken to task over how much food I wanted, why I thought I had a right to it.
But now I had too much else to worry about, and maybe it showed on my face. After the bean cataclysm, I marched down the hill and pitched in with the washing up that was continuously going on in the back, and afterwards loaded up our two biggest pots with rice and beans and vegetable curry and nobody made any commentary at all. When I came down the next morning, someone even asked me about Mum, and after that I was getting regular inquiries after her, if she was better.

I know that it’s the general gist of El’s life in the commune that she’s constantly got no allies but her mother, and everyone else is suspicious of her and dislikes her and doesn’t want to play with her, but that it extends all the way down to people getting snippy at her about food? It’s a wonder that El didn’t develop more mental issues than the ones she already has, because the commune seems like the kind of place that would load up a girl with all the social, body, and mind issues, because they’re essentially unrelentingly cruel to her, and for no apparent, logical, or nonmagical reason. It’s her own personal Omelatic hell, just that she has Gwen as her sole ally and guide.

The longer this has gone on, though, the less realistic it seems and the more I have to side-eye the explanation that the doom aura prevents anyone from liking El without putting in significant effort. It’s entirely possible that the entire commune, including the kids, have been imbued with the worst values of people who pretend to be communal and are actually intensely selfish, and who have latent racism against the brown-skinned girl in a conclave of white people, and who are fawning over Gwen but otherwise intensely hostile to El, but the completeness of it all makes my disbelief grow. There was never anyone who tried to offer El an olive branch, or be a friend, or otherwise be something other than completely horrible to her? Not in the kids or the adults? There were no opportunities for self-sabotage with El where she expected someone to turn terrible like all the others have, and eventually pushed away someone who genuinely was trying to like and be good to her? Even to the point where they’d question her choices about food and how much she took? It’s just not the thing I was expecting. Right now, Ophelia and Balthasar treating Orion the way they have all throughout his life, with neglect and like he’s a science project for them, seems more realistic than the way that El’s been completely shunned by the other members of the commune.

Moving back toward the plot, New York’s attack arrives in the form of a note to El and a letter to Orion. The note to El says

Dear El,
I’m very grateful to you for bringing Orion out. I hope he’s doing well. Please give him the enclosed letter when you think he might be ready to read it.
All my best,
Ophelia Rhys-Lake

Which El immediately recognizes as the evil trap that it is, wrapped up in a nice polite note and what might be genuine gratitude from Ophelia to El for getting Orion out, so that she doesn’t have to offer extremely valuable assets of New York to convince an extraction team to go in and get Orion out. Given the still-unconfirmed but yet likely maw-mouth part, and the way he was in full murder mode when El and company discovered him, I wouldn’t put very good odds on the extraction team getting Orion out. There would probably be several total party kills before something succeeded at getting Orion out, and I can’t imagine that it would have been good for Orion’s psyche for him to have been brought out in that manner.

It’s an evil trap, because the note pretty well guarantees that El will give Orion the letter, because the alternative will be Orion discovering the letter and knowing El withheld it from him, and that’s very likely to drive him back to New York with heartbreak and make it even easier for Ophelia to manipulate him into what she wants with him. (Not all acts of evil require cackling from a lair. If you’re amoral and without a shred of conscience or ethics, as Ophelia clearly is, then you can just tailor your communication for maximum intended effect, no matter how much the person you’re manipulating resents that you’re doing it to them.)

There’s a certain amount of living in the moment, as El describes it, where Orion gets sent out to get wood, and El, Aadhya, and Liesel set to the task of trying to bring Gwen back to health and Orion back to something resembling an equilibrium. Aadhya gets a stick to poke Liesel and El with when they start wanting to bicker with each other or interrogate anyone else. El, however, starts spending her time worrying about what her future holds, because she could decide to get started on being a Golden Stone enclave builder, or she could start trying to amass a frightening collection of weapons and enough mana to go tangle with Ophelia Lake. She assumes Aadhya will eventually go back to her family, and Liesel will eventually go back to her revenge, and Orion, well, El still wants to always keep an eye on Orion, to reassure some part of herself that he’s still alive. And also to beat him soundly about the head with a large stick, which she thinks, with what I believe is full self-poking fun at herself, is “a sign of true love.”

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 n enclave was. 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 terrible 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 right, “but I can’t, and you know it!”
“So what can you do?” she bit out, and of course I couldn’t answer the 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.

Ah, Liesel, you intend to never change. Also, this could be read as support of the theory of an aromantic, asexual Liesel. (Because ace people do have sex, but don’t necessarily get attraction feels for anyone.) Why does anyone care about her feelings when something more important is about to to happen? Or, perhaps, more accurately, why is anyone caring about feelings Liesel doesn’t have and is continuing to assume that she does?

As for what happened to Orion, all Gwen is going to say, once she’s up and about again, is that she gave Orion hope, and that she’s not entirely sure that she should have. There’s a later conversation that El overhears where Orion is asking about something and Gwen says that it, whatever it is, is not something that she can bring out of Orion. She reassures him that it’s not his complete identity, but he says it’s the thing that matters. Which, y’know, if Orion just asked Gwen if she could pull out and destroy his maw-mouth side, yeah, that’s about the conversation I would expect to go on. But Orion flees, and El pursues, and eventually, when they sit down together again, El gives him the letter from Ophelia, because he’ll never actually be ready for it, and she doesn’t want to hold on to it any more without knowing what it contains.

The letter itself is also likely a masterwork of manipulation, but even with El being able to read it, she knows she can’t do anything about what it will do to Orion.

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

Perhaps the most sinister part of the letter is the part that talks about El, and how Ophelia wishes she had found El earlier. Because finding El earlier would have given Ophelia the opportunity to corrupt El and turn her into the dark pocket nuke that El has always been afraid of becoming. And that would have complemented the endless hunger of Orion Lake perfectly.

Having seen the letter, and not having a clue about what kinds of things are being done to Orion out of this, El starts to stridently demand that Orion is going to do everything except go back to New York and Ophelia Lake, and to stop acting like a dead man and live, and that leads to Orion kissing El, and that leads to Orion and El having sex again, because El’s passion about getting Orion to stop feeling sorry for himself seems to have awoken a different passion in Orion. El is annoyed that they haven’t been doing more of that, and Orion says he loves her.

This is fine. Of course, whatever good feelings came from such a good time are immediately erased because something is going on with Liu, and she can’t say what the specifics of it are (not metaphorically). They manage to start a video call, with the help of Xiao Xiao, Liu’s familiar, and all they can see and hear is Liu crying. Liesel diagnoses a compulsion, and a strong one at that, that’s keeping any information from flowing to them, nor allowing them to try and gather information by inference. El is able to pick up what the problem is that’s causing this, at least, and the eventual consensus is that everybody’s going to Beijing, including Orion, to try and get Liu out of whatever predicament she’s in.

“She consented,” I said. “She agreed up front not to tell anyone anything about whatever is happening.” And as soon as I said that, I knew the rest. Enclaves are built with malia, Mom had said to me. “It’s the enclave spells. Beijing gave them the enclave spells, under a compulsion of secrecy, and there’s something awful in them, but Liu can’t tell us about it.”

Having decided on their course of action, to help out Liu, El and Aadhya’s ally, Chapter 12 comes to a close. So there are now two mysteries afoot: what Ophelia Lake intends to do with Orion once she gets her hands back on him, and what exactly goes into the building of an enclave that is so terrible that a compulsion spell not to reveal it is part of the costs involved? It’s not that the enclaves themselves channel malia to do it, or El wouldn’t have been able to talk about it while she was in New York. There has to be something about the method that all that malia is channeled into the creation of an enclave that produces something horrible that can’t be shared.

…I wonder if it has something to do with the correlation that we have between the destruction of maw-mouths and the damage or destruction of enclaves. Since maw-maouths are maleficaria, malficaria are generated by acts that produce malia, and enclave-creation spells use large amounts of malia to set themselves up. If we had something closer to causation in the relationship between maw-mouths and enclave destruction, we’d probably have a better idea of what the great secret is that requires the compulsion. Something like “the creation of an enclave always produces a maw-mouth, and so, by trying to create places to hide from maleficaria, every new enclave produces something that will happily eat all the wizards inside and their mana stores as a consequence of its creation.” Which would almost give Ophelia cover for her position of “everyone’s going to keep cheating, so we can only win by cheating harder.” Except for the part where that kind of cheating creates more maw-mouths in the world, and therefore, Ophelia is fine with condemning all kinds of children and adults to their own deaths for the convenience of others getting to have their own little pockets of the void. (And possibly, so is everyone who builds themselves an enclave.)

Rescue mission to Beijing, go! That starts next week.

Last time, El, Liesel, and Aadhya went back into the wreck of the Scholomance, with the assistance of a New York power-sharer, and found not Patience, the thing that El had gone in to destroy, but something that looks like Orion, ambles like Orion, and needed three tries to get El’s name right, but seems to recognize her. Is it Orion? That’s an excellent question, and not even El can really find the answer to it.

The Golden Enclaves, Chapter 11: Content Notes: Suicidal ideation

Having managed to get to the point where Orion is neither trying to close the distance to El nor trying to actively kill her, there is a hurried conference about what to do. Liesel suggests leaving Orion in the school and going to get help, which both Aadhya and El nix. The next obvious solution to all of them is to take him home to New York, which they all agree is “even more obviously wrong” than the first proposal. Liesel correctly points out that anywhere Orion goes, New York will eventually show up to reclaim him. And if not them, then someone else will come to either get him or put him down. El eventually decides that she’s going to call in the big guns on this matter: she’s taking Orion to Gwen. Even though El then immediately admits she has no idea what Gwen can do with Orion, she knows that when it comes to patching holes in someone’s soul, there’s nobody better at it than her mother, and also, El knows there’s nothing she can do that will make the situation better.

Aad was right not to trust me. I’d have immediately done anything, however stupid and reckless, to try to save him, except that I completely understood on a visceral level that I couldn’t do anything of any use. Whatever had happened to him, whatever Patience had done to him, I hadn’t a hope of fixing it. The only spell I could have cast on him that would have worked was the exact spell I’d come in here to cast: I could have looked at Orion and told him he was already dead, and he would have had to believe me, exactly the way Patience would have had to believe me. Of course Orion was dead. He’d been locked alone inside the Scholomance with half the maleficaria in the world, with the single worst mal in the world. I’d come in knowing he was dead, and I still knew it. I could have convinced him, too.
What I needed was someone to convince both of us that he was still alive, that he was still somewhere in there, smothering under the weight of a million maleficaria. And the only person I knew with any chance of that was Mum.

Since she knows she’s losing the battle of whether or not Orion’s coming out, Liesel turns her brain immediately to the mechanics and logistics of getting Orion out and then back to Wales, without setting off any panics and without alerting the entire world that a nuclear weapon is being moved from Portugal to Wales. Since they’re still in the school, there are fragments and remnants of items in the workshops, along with mal parts, which means Aadhya’s affinity for strange materials comes in handy again, and she’s able to cobble together a spell holder that can be used to mask Orion’s signature from the world. With the spell of obfuscation on him (and a little bit of having to figure out how to get it on Orion, since he insists on maintaining the same distance from El, regardless of whether she’s moving away from or toward him. They eventually leave it on a bench and tell him to put it on), El sees a little bit more of the human that threw her out, says he’s a mess, and after having a good cry, pulls herself together enough to march the party out of the school and back into the world outside. What follows is Orpheus and Eurydice, but unlike the tragedy, El does not look back.

I’m going to leave it at that, because I don’t remember most of it, actually. I got through it one minute at a time, and let each one go as soon as I’d got through it, because here came another one. They were all the same minute anyway, the minute where I could feel Orion alive and at my back, just a few steps behind me, and that feeling was the most horrible sensation in the entire universe, and I had to keep pushing on through crowds of people, mundane ordinary people on holiday, hot and sweaty and laughing or bored, children whinging for drinks, and I knew if I turned round and looked at Orion even once, I would see that he was dead so vividly that he would have been, so I couldn’t look around. I had to keep going to let him keep following me and my wide open back.
[…Hear, O gods, my desperate plea / To see my love beside me. / Sunk below the mortal sea / [His] anchor weighs upon me. / Fasten [his] tether unto me / That [he] may raise to sail free / … which is to say that El is very firmly disassociating here, “as though I had stopped being a significant character in my own life and I was only standing in the background of the scene, decorative, staring at Orion.” Until the van they rented finally returns to the compound and Gwen Higgins gets to hug her daughter, hear a jumble of an explanation, and then, perhaps most importantly, sees Orion Lake for herself, the one that she had sent a message to El to stay away from…]
He’d sat quietly unmoving the entire time we’d been driving; he hadn’t drunk any of the water we’d pushed over to him, he hadn’t eaten any of the food. He didn’t burst out of the van dramatically like the Hulk or anything now. He just came out as directly as possible, which in this case meant he peeled open the side of the van along one of the seams and squeesed out as soon as it was wide enough for him to get through. Mum gave a strangled moan of horror in her throat, recoiling, and I grabbed at her in desperation to stop her saying anything, to stop her telling me anything I couldn’t stand to hear. “It’s not him!” I said. “It’s not Orion. It’s not his fault,” trying to explain to her that he’d been trapped with all the mals in the universe and she had to help him.
Mum didn’t let me finish. “Who did this?” she said, her voice a whisper, and I was going to tell her it was Patience, he’d been locked in with Patience, but instead I said, “His mother, Ophelia Lake,” and all the other words backed up in my throat and stopped there, because as soon as her name came out of my mouth, I was sure it was the truth, even though I didn’t understand what she’d done, or how.

El has hit the nail on the head, although she doesn’t understand that Gwen is asking a very different question than the one that El thinks she’s answered. Because I suspect Gwen can see Orion’s nature more clearly than El can, and she knows that yes, that’s Orion Lake standing in front of her, and also, she knows what Orion Lake is composed of. Although there’s still no confirmation of this theory, I suspect Gwen sees Orion as the hybrid that he is, part maw-mouth, part wizard, and all neglected by everyone, with perhaps the thread of humanity brought by El into him. Something that will need careful coaxing to spark into existence again, and to restore the balance between them, after having let the maw-mouth run freely all throughout the school. The task that’s been laid before Gwen, and that she knows she’s going to need a lot of help with, is to figure out what to do with the thing that is probably screaming “WRONG” at her even more solidly than it was El. And so, Gwen leads them, not just to one of her working spots, but past the one that El thinks of as Serious Business, through some brambles that she has to convince to stand aside, all the way to a house with a yew that contains, essentially, the essence of another good witch and the things she did to help others concentrated in that path, and Gwen asks the tree and the house and the presence that’s there for help with Orion. The space has the same instinctual flinch from Orion, the kind of thing that El would want to yell into submission and knows that there’s not a damn thing she can do to influence things.

But Mum stood there looking up at the yew with her hands spread open and said, “I know. I’m afraid too. But he didn’t choose it. It was done to him.”
There was another unbearable endless silence, and then the branch in front of the door slowly creaked up and out of the way. Mum turned to Orion—the first time she’d looked at him since he’d come out of the car, and her whole face flinched all over again. Her voice barely made a whisper. “You have to go inside,” she said to him. “No one can make you. You have to choose to try.”
[…which involves elaborate charades from El trying to get him to go inside, and a terrifying moment of vulnerability…]
I was so relieved to have got him that far that I didn’t realize he was getting near me until he was there, right next to me, and he looked at me and wasn’t Orion at all. He was only hunger, a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied and that was only following me round because it wanted to swallow me up, and was hoping for a chance; was this one?
I flinched back from him, from it. I could have destroyed it. I wanted to destroy it, right now, before it could ever get near me or Mum or any living thing in the world. The only sane thing to do was destroy it, and that was what Liesel had really been trying to tell me to do, when she’d said to leave Orion in the Scholomance, or send him to New York, or just get away from him; she’d been telling me to destroy this thing that shouldn’t exist, that should never have existed, and let it go back into the void where it really belonged. The words were in my mouth: You’re already dead.
“Orion,” I said instead, despairing, wanting to make his name into a different spell, but he just stood there. […with his fate, and El’s, hanging in the balance, and only Orion able to do anything, because he has to accept the magic for it to work…]
“You said you’d come to me in Wales,” I said to him. “And you’re not here, not really, so go in there and come to me. Do you hear me, Lake? You promised me. I let you promise me, you wanker! Will you go in the bloody hut?”
I was yelling by the end of it, and in a frenzy I grabbed a stick off the ground and whacked him across the rump. He jumped a little and then looked at me with a flash of something human in his face, of Orion, and before I could react, he looked back into the hut—and he was afraid.
I’d never seen Orion afraid of anything, even when a sane person ought to have been terrified out of their mind; not of monsters or heights or late schoolwork. But he looked into the tiny empty hut, and it was him, it was Orion, and he was terrified of whatever was in there. I whacked him again in my own absolute terror, only magnified by the instant of hope. “It’s a pile of rocks, not the whole school crammed full of mals, stop being such a coward and go in there!” I howled, and maybe he heard me, because he squeezed his eyes shut, the first time he’d closed them at all, and heaved himself over the threshold.
The whole clearing went utterly silent and still. Mum gave a short deep gasp of terror, and then she came to me and took my face in her hands and kissed me on the forehead and said, “My darling, I love you, whatever happens.”

At which point El realizes that there is a second half to the miracle she’s just asked be performed, and it means Gwen is in there with Orion, as well as the powers that inhabit the yew and the house. Before El can say anything about how she didn’t realize what she was asking for, Gwen goes in with Orion as well, and the yew branches block the doorway afterward.

When you ask for a summoning, and you leave the price open-ended, you are offering anything and everything that you have to you, and as El found out when she got the sutras, that includes family members. El has kept her end of the bargain, bringing Orion out from the underworld, back to the surface, and then, even though she’s not formalized it in any way, narratively, she’s cast a summoning for Orion to come back to her, to come back from wherever he is hiding in the mass of him that is the maw-mouth, the creature of inexhaustible hunger, the thing that reality looks at and all the creatures of reality know instinctively to shun and demand of reality that it not be there any more. The words that El has come perilously close to reciting multiple times to Orion: You’re dead. You’re already dead. As she said, she doesn’t need someone to convince Orion and her that Orion is dead, she needs someone to convince them both he’s alive, and that there is something still human, still vital, a spark in the endless hunger, and that they can rebuild from there. El knows she would throw away everything in the world, and the world itself, to get that Orion back, and she’s put her mother in the middle of it.

El sleeps, because she’s exhausted, and then is awoken by a major light show coming from the house, the same kind of light and feeling that she only experienced when Gwen chose to shield her from the decision of killing El to stop her prophetic destiny.

When my eyes finally cleared, there were still a few streaks of light left: the dawn was breaking. all the leaves were coming off the yew, curling up and falling with a faint pattering. The bare branches were wizened and thin, dried up from inside, and then abruptly the lintel of the doorway cracked in two with a sound like a gunshot and came crashing down, smashing the branches across the door into kindling and cracking the threshold straight across. I lunged forward, scrambling over it inside the hut, and Mum was lying in the middle of the floor in a small curled heap.
[…Alive, but thoroughly wrung out…] and then I looked over at the one small place still shadowed by the lattice of dying branches, and Orion was standing there with his back against the wall.
Orion was standing there: it was him. Mum had done it. I could have screamed, I could have burst into tears; instead I reached out my hand to him, in joy, in longing, in the first moment of believing that the miracle might actually have happened, that I might have actually got him out, and he said, his voice hoarse and ragged, “You should have left me there.”

And that will close out Chapter 11.

What’s El’s reaction to this statement?

I could have torn him limb from limb, honestly, but instead I heaved Mum up and snarled at him, “Then stay in here and rot if you like,” and marched out of the hut.
I wanted to go straight home, but I haven’t been raised by wolves, so even though I was blazing up with all the anger I hadn’t been able to feel until relief had let it out, I didn’t keep going; I stopped outside in the clearing and turned to face the broken doorway and the yew and said, “He might be an ungrateful git, but I’m not. Thank you.”

So, y’know, El’s back to baseline herself, now that she knows that the human part of Orion is back in charge and running the place. Even though he’s very clearly unhappy about the prospect of having to be the human side again. I suspect it’s because he believed that being stuck in the Scholomance and degrading into the void was the safest and best thing that could happen to him, because that would stop him from having to worry about controlling the maw-mouth part, and also because if he faded away with the school, then he would be denying anyone the opportunity to use him as the nuke he is. Go out in a blaze of glory chowing down on all the mals, and then settle down to digest and die, safely away from anyone he might hurt, and anyone who might want to use him to hurt others. It’ll take a while, sure, and dying of starvation is not a pleasant way to go, but Orion is pretty sure that he’d be fine with it, being trapped somewhere that he can’t get out of, all by himself in the dark, until he finally faded into non-existence and burnt out the last of his reserves. He would have been grateful to El if she had failed as Orpheus and then had to erase him from existence, to do the thing that the entire world seems to have been instinctually ready to do and to want her to do.

Instead, of course, he has to keep on living, and that is the most painful thing in the world to someone who has convinced themselves that they no longer need to keep on living, and that it will be better if the world is left without them. He resents the whole thing, in its entirety, because his great plan has been disrupted, and also, because being in love with El means that she’s the person that can pull him from his great plan and get him back on some other kind of plan. To live, and to be something other than the great hunger that he is. It’ll take him some time, but with El’s help, and with no interference from Ophelia, she might be able to pull him back from the brink.

Of course, we know that’s not going to happen. Ophelia very much intends to interfere, but the question is how. For that, we’ll have to wait until next week.

Last time we saw El, she, Aadhya, and Liesel had managed to find their way to the front doors of the Scholomance, and then at the beginning of this chapter, have pushed their way inside. What awaits them? What kinds of mals, horrors, or other situation will they have to deal with upon re-entering the graduation hall they’d left in a situation where it was Orion versus Patience?

The Golden Enclaves: Chapter 10: Content Notes:

…nothing. And while that falls into the trope of “Nothing is Scarier”, the lack of mals in the graduation hall has everyone stumped.

“Where did—” Aadhya said, and just stopped there, the word echoed unnaturally loud off the marble walls, before it died away just as unnaturally into stillness. Anyway she didn’t need to finish the sentence. We all had the exact same question in our heads.
“They can’t have got out,” Liesel said, almost angrily. “All of Portugal would be swarming with mals.”
[…they keep going, and there still aren’t any mals, even with golden opportunities to get jumped in the school…]
“This makes no sense,” Aadhya said, between panting. “Patience can’t have eaten all the other mals. There were a million of them,” which might have been an exaggeration, but it had certainly felt close at the time. “Some of them would have got away or hidden.”
“It was not only Patience,” Liesel said. “The maleficaria were lured here to hunt. When we were all gone, they would have fed on each other, and the school has been devouring as many of them as it could catch with the wards.” It sounded plausible, but I could tell she didn’t believe her own words. She was only selling it the way you would an essay question on an exam when you hadn’t a clue of the real answer.
[…there’s a small scare with voices, but it only turns out to be one of the language lab headphones whispering. The headphones get unplugged.…]
“The maw-mouth in London ran from you. It knew you could kill it, even before you knew,” Liesel said as we slogged back down the stairs to the worship floor. “Patience must be hiding.”
“How can a maw-mouth the size of a barn hide?” Aadhya said.
“Maw-mouths are oozes,” Liesel said. “It could simply spread itself out between two floors.”
We all looked down at our feet with an involuntary flinch, even Liesel. “Except we already hacked up the school all over the place,” Aadhya said after a moment, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself. “Half the rooms have some floor and ceiling panels missing. We’d have seen it.”
[…which convinces Liesel that Patience and the mals aren’t here…]
“No!” Liesel said. “If Patience could get out, the others could get out, too. None of them got out. The school lingers, but the maleficaria are gone. They spent their malia to survive as long as they could, but they dwindled and faded into the void. They are gone, and Patience is gone.”
She said it with the aggressive confidence of someone trying to impose their own truth on the universe, only in this case, I understood at once that she was trying to impose it on me. She didn’t really believe that all the horde and Patience had just quietly gone into the void. She’d only decided that, to her fury, something she didn’t understand in the least had happened to the mals and to Patience, and so we weren’t going to find Patience no matter what we did. And she didn’t want me trying to do a summoning, because she was concerned about what I would offer, to set Orion free. She was right to be concerned. I’d have to offer enough to break through whatever hideous thing had happened to all the mals, which was presumably even worse than all of them lumped together.

El, of course, says she intends to try anyway, and in the process of going to the gym and opening it up, instead of finally finding Patience, El finds Orion.

Except that it’s more like something that has the shape of Orion, but isn’t.

Just about when I’d have screamed my throat raw and run at him, Liesel grabbed my arm with both hands and leaned back with all her weight, which she needed to hold me. Even as I tried to wrestle loose, Aadhya was gripping my other arm to help and putting her hand over my mouth, and Liesel hissed at me, “It’s not him! It’s a trap for you!”
It would have been a jolly good trap, too, and I’d have gone straight into it in a second, only before I could heave them both off, Orion turned his head and saw me. He stood up and came at us through the peach trees.
Liesel and Aadhya both froze into complete stillness, like a prey animal realizing it’s exposed to a hunter in full view. I felt it through their hands, still locked onto my arms. I felt it in my own shivering gut. Orion was looking right at me, and I wish it had been a trap. I wish I’d been able to imagine for even a moment that it wasn’t him, but it was. It was him. The real difference was that I wasn’t me, not in his head. He was looking at me with absolutely nothing but the utterly focused calculation that filled him when he was hunting mals, where the only thing in his head was what he had to do next.
I could have vomited or screamed, but I couldn’t, because he was coming at us, and what I mean was, he was coming to kill us.
[…El does the only thing she can, throwing out Alfie’s evocation of refusal, and that, well, that stops Orion for a little bit…]
Orion ran straight into it and was halted in his tracks. He paused for a moment, stymied, but then he put both his hands on the surface of the dome and my whole stomach heaved over, because it felt like Patience. It was just Orion, just his two hands, but that touch felt exactly like a maw-mouth enveloping my shield, trying to get to me, oozing over the surface and pushing on it to test for weaknesses.
[…there is one, and it’s that El desperately does want Orion, and that does work against an evocation of refusal…]
I would have closed up the vulnerability if I could, but I might as easily have popped open my rib cage and taken my heart out for a bit. Mana was pouring through the New York power-sharer and out of me into the dome, holding off the grotesque sucking hunger on the other side as hard as I could, the hunger that wasn’t Orion, as if he’d somehow killed Patience and then had become Patience.
I remembered with horror when I’d reached him through the scrying water, back in Wales, on graduation day—that moment when I’d tried to grab him and had got a handful of maw-mouth instead. Orion had never fought a maw-mouth before. I’d killed the only maw-mouth that had ever made it upstairs in the Scholomance. What if his power, his power that let him pull mana out of mals, had been overwhelmed by taking in that torrent of polluted malia? A century of torment and malice crammed down his throat all in one rush.
[…Which means El is eventually going to lose at refusal, but she intends to make up for it with the simple measure of bashing his face in if he gets too close to her. Which works for keeping Orion just out of bashing range…]
We all stood squared off, none of us moving. I was still gulping, cramming rage and horror back down my throat together, and he said, “Galadriel,” moving his mouth rongly around the sound of my name, breaking it into too many syllables, as if he was trying to remember how to speak. “Galadriel.” It was better the second time, and then he said it again, “Galadirel,” and it wasn’t right, it wasn’t the way Orion had once said my name, where he’d almost made me like hearing it, but at least it sounded like a human being talking.
He stopped after that, as if satisfied he’d got it right. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t come at us again, either. He just stood there, looking at me.

Oh, boy. That’s the end of Chapter 10, by the way, having gone in, had a big look at everything, found it all empty and wanting, except for one Orion Lake, who looks like a human and feels like a maw-mouth, and who has had precisely zero need to act in anything that looks, sounds, or works like some kind of human being, because he’s been in a school full of maleficaria, and he has reduced that school full of maleficaria to one.

The pieces continue to line up that Orion is at least some part maw-mouth, and a damn powerful one at that. He certainly could have tangled with all the lesser mals and destroyed them, and it looks like he managed to get Pateince/Fortitude as well in their battle. Now, mind you, El still doesn’t believe that a maw-mouth could take on human form. She has no reason to believe that, because she’s never seen such a thing, and she has no reason to believe that anyone would do something like that. And she’s very much too busy trying to make sure that this kill-mode Orion doesn’t kill them to parse through the logic of the situation: Ophelia Lake sent her, with New York mana, into the Scholomance. El believed she needed to go in and destroy Patience. Instead, she’s found Orion and nothing else in the school. El knows that Ophelia Lake has long since jettisoned her conscience as well as her anima, and therefore going into the Scholomance furthers Ophelia’s aims. Ophelia said as much. If Ophelia knows that Orion is the last thing still existing in the Scholomance, then she wants her weapon back, and she’s willing to believe that El will bring him out, and from there, do whatever repairs are needed to bring him back to a state where he’ll come home to Ophelia, and that will give Ophelia whatever leverage she needs over Orion, and hopefully, will also give her whatever leverage she needs over El as well. And, if on the off chance that Orion is dead and consumed by Patience, then El destroying Patience presumably also furthers Ophelia’s goals, but I suspect Ophelia knows that El was going to find Orion in there, and not Patience. Maybe she has one of the memorial stones of her own or something like it that lets her know that her superweapon is not dead.

Both chapters 9 and 10 are relatively short in the sense of plot points, because they’re both about the travel journey to get to the point where they get inside, and then where they find Orion, or the thing that is trying to figure out how to be Orion again. And because Orion has already eaten all the other mals in the place, there’s nothing there that can jump scare them, like they’re all expecting to have happen. Other than Orion himself, who is less a walking jump scare at this point and more like finding a place is deserted except for Pyramid Head, or any other kind of invincible antagonist that’s meant to slowly stalk you through a survival horror game. On the one hand, something that looks like Orion is alive, and seems to at least recognize El as something other than a target. On the other hand, there’s no guarantees that there’s anything left of the Orion Lake that shoved El out the graduation portal and then went on from there. If El brings this Orion out, is she bringing back the boy she fell in love with, despite herself, and just needs to be able to bring back to the surface from where he’s been locked away by the killing machine? Or is El choosing to bring out a dangerous maw-mouth, whose hunger will eventually take over again and leave El bereft of the boy she loves, and then at that point, she will just have to put him down for good?

The standoff resolves next week, and the plot moves forward again.

Last time we’d left El, she’d traveled into New York enclave, to Orion Lake’s house, and met the primary villain of the series, Ophelia Lake, his mother. She’s gone evil, and she doesn’t particularly care about it. More so, while she knows that this would be a golden opportunity to get people on the pathways of not making more mals, she says that because everyone else is going to cheat and make more mals, she’s not going to stop cheating and making more mals herself. She still gives El a New York power-sharer and the coordinates to where the physical front door of the Scholomance is, however, because El’s determined to go in and get Patience for good. Which Ophelia probably couldn’t care less about, so I suspect she expects that Patience has come out the loser in the tussle against Orion, and therefore when El goes in to get Patience, she’s going to find Orion instead. And that should be possible in one of only two situations:

1. Orion Lake is a way better fighter and caster than he has ever been, and can roast even the combined might of two maw-mouths by himself.
2. Orion Lake is at least part maw-mouth, and has brought that to bear in such a way that he has consumed Patience/Fortitude, instead of the other way around.

The Golden Enclaves: Chapter 9: Content Notes:

Aadhya volunteers herself to come along to the Scholomance, and argues for going in the morning. Liesel denies the idea of waiting until morning, is also going along herself, and Aadhya eventually gives over and starts packing herself for another trip, despite having just come back. Liesel’s continued involvement is making Aadhya wonder what’s going on, and while El gives the most obvious answer, it’s not enough for Aadhya to believe.

“El, Alfie is her ride. He got her into London enclave, now he’s going to get her on the council? No way she would risk cheating on him unless she had a crazy good reason!”
“She’s not cheating,” I muttered. “He knows about it.”
“Great, because it’s all part of some kin of plan to get at you,” Aadhya said unmercifully.
And even if I’d turned down Liesel’s alliance offer, Aadhya was fundamentally right, and I knew it. I still couldn’t be sorry, even now I felt almost pathetically grateful to Liesel for the ocean-deep release of physical release and dreamless sleep she’d given me, not to mention getting me here.
[…El knows that there’s going to be a price for it, and Liesel is waiting for the perfect opportunity for it, but she’s fine with it…]
“I’m warning you right now that if you move into London enclave and start a ménage with Liesel and Alfie, I’m hunting you down with chains,” Aadhya said. “Also if the Scholomance wasn’t literally a time bomb waiting to go, I would be chaining you up right now. El, it wasn’t your fault.” I dragged a breath in, painful in my too-tight chest, and sat up to hunch over it.
[…they talk about why Orion kicked El out and the possibility that it means he died for nothing at all, but Aadhya also tells El that her only fault in the situation was in letting Liesel be her rebound, and Aadhya and Liesel hash it out with each other in the airport as soon as they think El’s not listening…]
Aadhya had her arms folded across her chest, glaring. “I get that you have zero shame, but she’s freaking out.”
“Yes,” Liesel said. “Are you thinking I made things worse? I promise you,” she went on, with the grim tones of experience, “to feel good in your body makes things better, even when they are very bad, and they are.”
“Yeah, and I think you’re looking to plant a hook in El while she’s messed up so you can yank on it later.”
Liesel made an impatient dismissive gesture. “Yes! You have a hook in her yourself. And why will we yank on these hooks? To make her protect us, save our lives? She will do that for strangers, for nothing. What else? You are her ally. Have you asked her to do anything for you? To make someone give you an enclave place, or an artificer contract? Why not? Because you are also a great martyr, who does not want these things?” She snorted as Aadhya scowled at her. “No! You don’t ask because you know she would say no. I tried asking myself. But she will do nothing selfish for herself, much less anyone else. And she is not wrong,” she added, in a grudging tone of having been unwillingly persuaded. “She is too powerful. Once she started, there would be nowhere to stop. So there is only one use of our hooks: to help her stop. You had better e glad that I have one, and hold tight to yours, too.”
I stopped eavesdropping and stalked off in total outrage. I couldn’t deny that I was in face freaking out, and it was very clearly an excellent idea for me to have people around who could yank me back on the rails if I should go off them. Only what business did Liesel have making herself one of those people, and I couldn’t help but see she’d successfully done just that. Because what she wanted, the reason she was helping me, was to stop me from going maleficer, which is the one thing I’ve been desperately afraid of doing since the age of five, and I would absolutely take Liesel’s help on that project.
I got the coffees and came back and grouchily handed them round. Aadhya was still scowling at Liesel across the table, but with the same kind of sulky annoyance I felt myself, yes, we were stuck with her after all.

This is an entirely Liesel way of handling the problem. El is out in the world, hurting, and there’s some high probability that she’s going to try and rework reality to suit her own preferences and go full-on maleficer to try and get back Orion. So what does Liesel do about it? Get El involved in crushing a maw-mouth. Then tagging along with her and giving her bodily pleasure to help her interrupt the bad loop. Then sticking with her and continuing to be helpful as El continues on her path. She is, in fact, making herself someone that El cares about, specifically for the purpose of being someone who can haul El back from the brink if El starts running toward it. And who calls Aadhya out for having a similar hook in El to help with that, because that’s the only thing they have that can keep El from going to the dark side. It’s meticulously planned, and Liesel is right to recognize that El requires close supervision to keep her on a pathway away from darkness, and will probably fade to a more supervisory role when she’s sure that the people in the more hands-on roles will be keeping El on the right pathway. And El, of course, resents so very much that Liesel has thought all of this through, planned it out, and executed it to perfection, to the point where El can only be grumpy about having Liesel along, rather than have an excuse to tell her to go away, now that Aadhya’s there. What this series must look like from Liesel’s perspective is an open question, but a fascinating one, with how much she seems to be three steps ahead of El at every juncture.

The three land in Lisbon, grab a train to Sintra, and then run into their first major obstacle to finding the Scholomance gates, which is that Sintra, and the coordinates that they’ve been given, is right in a tourist trap absolutely full of nonmagical people who are looking on the grounds and hearing about some dude who really liked his occultism and Tarot and “primitivism”, that entire thing, with all of the colonial, patriarchal, frat-boy-with-an-Aleister-Crowley-obsession that it entails. They even go on a tour down an “initiation well,” which is apparently there for this same dude’s Freemasonry cosplay. As El puts it,

The pamphlet told us it was part of some trumped-up mystical initiation rite of Freemasonry that the owner and his mates had liked to perform. It sounded to me that they hadn’t had enough hazing in university, and in order to justify more of it to themselves as grown men, he’d had to build himself a palace and dress it up as some ponderous mystic rite that none of them really believed in, as if they could cart themselves back in time to a pagan era they’d mostly made up.

With all of that annoyance, and feeling like they’ve been punked severely, once they’re actually in the well, and therefore a little out of the heat and the crowds, El starts to twig as to why you would put the physical doors of an enclave like the Scholomance in a place that’s basically a shrine to a dickhead and his probably never-researched “beliefs” about the occult: because the mass presence of the nonmagical makes it really hard for anything that is to get in to the school through the front doors. Like maleficaria, who tend to have structural integrity issues around the presence of solid disbelief in their existence.

…which also says quite a bit about the amount of mals in the world, if even in the face of that kind of solid disbelief, so many of them manage to get themselves inside the graduation hall anyway. And what the strength of those mals are that get into the hall by managing to wend their way around all that disbelief or hold themselves together in the face of it. No wonder the graduation run has such a high fatality rate. To get through the wall of disbelief, the mals have to be pretty strong, and then they have to jostle for position with all of the other mals in the graduation hall, eating the weaker ones, hiding from the stronger ones, and avoiding the attempts at cleansing or being siphoned off into the school to test the children that should be able to destroy those mals, if they have studied well and if they are not caught by surprise or any other kind of situation that makes them less effective than their fullest selves.

El figures out where to fall off the pathway laid out for the tour groups, and eventually is met by Liesel and Aadhya, who throws up some artifice to cast light in the shadows, and they find the antechamber to the Scholomance unfolding in front of them.

You could tell there had been a massive plaza down here once, with columns and fountains carved into the walls all around: possibly some sort of protective artifice. Now they were only vague suggestions of caryatids and lion’s-heads beneath thick layers of dirt and sludge. There was a green wet dripping everywhere, a stink of mold and stagnant water, and of ruse; old scattered relics of dead maleficaria, scorched shells and cracked bits of constructs.
Across the center slab of the stone floor, they’d carved the familiar words at the heart of the Scholomance: TO OFFER SANCTUARY AND PROTECTION TO ALL THE WISE-GIFTED CHILDREN OF THE WORLD, and around them in curving patterns were monumental versions of the same spells that had been engraved into the Scholomance doors, a litany of protection. I spotted MALICE, KEEP FAR, THIS GATE WISDOM’S SHELTER GUARDS: deep letters filled with gold that was still bright despite a glaze of algae.
But the spell was cracked right through GATE, a wide dark fissure crossing the curved shape of the words. Massive slabs of stone heaved up in every direction at sharp angles, piles of crumbled shards. The whole plaza was shattered in a sunburst of jagged cracks—radiating out from the immense bronze doors of the Scholomance, which were hanging askew out of their frame in the cavern wall. It looked—well, it looked like a supervolcano spell had gone off here in the recent past.

Having discovered their destination, El declares she’s going in, and both Aadhya and Liesel declare they’re going in after her.

I didn’t argue. Maybe I’d known all along that they would come with me, and I’d only told myself that I’d stop them because it was horribly selfish to drag them along, and so I’d had to pretend I wasn’t going to do it. I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.
[…chapter break…]
We went into the Scholomance.

And yes, that’s the end of Chapter 9, where El gets to look upon her works and see just how thoroughly she wrecked the place. It’s another chapter of transitions, but it does a good job of explaining why Liesel continues to be there, and managed to make it not about her self-interest and totally about her self-interest for her to do this. There’s also Aadhya, who is trying to protect her ally against someone who would happily use El for her own purposes, only to find out that their purposes are the same, and neither of them particularly like having to admit that to each other.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that El has made a friend in Liesel, but that’s because I don’t know that Liesel necessarily makes friends of anyone, at least not until she’s completed her revenge plans. Friends are potential liabilities. (So is El, but in a “will completely destroy the world if you let her get off the path of virtue” way, rather than any kind of personal liability that might deter Liesel from her own path of vengeance.) And even while she’s helping El, there’s a good chance that this is also furthering her own plans in one way or another. If for no other reason than Liesel now knows not to get on the radar of New York when she goes for her own revenge plans.

So, next week, we get to find out who won the battle between Orion Lake and Patience/Fortitude, as El goes back into the place she never intended to return to.