The Golden Enclaves: A Novel by Naomi Novik

Author:Naomi Novik [Novik, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593158364
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

We all stayed frozen in place there for what in retrospect felt a silly amount of time, until Orion carried on not trying to kill us for long enough that we finally began to believe he wasn’t going to start again. And once we did believe that, we spent another good long while whispering to one another about what the hell we were going to do with him. Liesel made a case for leaving him in the school while we went and got some sort of help, which Aadhya rolled her eyes at, and I didn’t even bother vetoing out loud. The next obvious answer was to take him straight home to his mum and dad in New York, only that was even more obviously wrong.

“Anywhere else you would take him, New York will come,” Liesel said. “And if not, then someone else will come. Orion Lake cannot be hidden quietly away anywhere in the world.”

“I’ll have a go at it, anyway,” I said grimly. “I’m taking him to my mum.”

I didn’t have the faintest idea what Mum would do with Orion. Based on past experience, she’d want nothing to do with him, except to get me away from him. Horribly, I could even have seen her point. Orion wasn’t trying to kill us at the moment, but it felt very much at the moment. My own skin was still crawling with a visceral terror at even being in arm’s reach. It wasn’t just me, either; Liesel wasn’t taking her eyes off him, her hands poised out to her sides just ready to come up into casting position, and Aadhya kept putting her hand out in front of me every time I looked at him, I think out of the same instinct to stop someone leaning a bit too far out over a mortal cliff, a child or a drunk, someone you didn’t quite trust to keep themselves from going over.

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.

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