The Golden Enclaves
About this book
Graduation has not delivered the future El expected, and Orion’s fate remains bound to the school. News of enclave destruction sends her through magical communities whose leaders view her power as threat, tool, or proof of an old prophecy.
The search reveals how protected spaces are made and who pays for their security. El’s relationships with family, allies, and rival enclaves become part of a decision about whether the existing system can be repaired without preserving its concealed violence.
Novik expands the series from one brutal institution to the global economy supporting it. The solution demands more than defeating a monster because the most persistent danger has been normalised as infrastructure.
The Golden Enclaves concludes the Scholomance trilogy. Read it after The Last Graduate, whose ending supplies the emotional and mechanical problem driving this volume.
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From the opening
The last thing Orion said to me, the absolute mongrel, was El, I love you so much.
And then he shoved me backwards through the gates of the Scholomance and I landed thump on my back in paradise, the soft grassy clearing in Wales that I’d last seen four years ago, ash trees in full green leaf and sunlight dappling through them, and Mum, Mum right there waiting for me. Her arms were full of flowers: poppies, for rest; anemones, for overcoming; moonwort, for forgetfulness; morning glories, for the dawn of a new day. A welcome-home bouquet for a trauma victim, meant to ease horror out of my mind and make room for healing and for rest, and as she reached to help me, I heaved myself up howling, “Orion!” and sent the whole thing scattering before me.
A few months—aeons—ago, while we’d still been in the midst of our frantic obstacle-course runs, an enclaver from Milan had given me a translocation spell in Latin, the rare kind that you can cast on yourself without splitting yourself into bits. The idea was that I’d be able to use it to hop around from one place to another in the graduation hall—all the better to save people like enclavers from Milan, which is why she’d handed me a spell worth five years of mana for free. You couldn’t normally use it to go long distances, but time was more or less the same thing as space, and I’d been in the Scholomance ten seconds before. I had the hall visualized as crisp and clear as an architectural drawing, complete with the horrific mass of Patience and the horde of maleficaria behind it, boiling its way towards us. I was placing myself at the gates, right back where I had been when Orion had given me that final shove.
But the spell didn’t want to be cast, putting up resistance like warning signs across the way: dead end, road washed out ahead. I forced it through anyway, throwing mana at it, and the casting rebounded in my face and knocked me down like I’d run straight into a concrete wall. So I got back up and tried the exact same spell again, only to get pasted flat a second time.
My head was ringing bells and noise. I crawled back to my feet. Mum was helping me up, but she was also holding me back, saying something to me, trying to slow me down, but I only snarled at her, “Patience was coming right at him!” and her hands went slack, sliding off me with her own remembered horror.
It had already been two minutes since I’d been dumped out; two minutes was forever in the graduation hall, even before I’d packed it full of all the monsters in the world. But the interruption did stop me just banging my head against the gates repeatedly. I spent a moment thinking, and then I tried to use a summoning to get Orion out, instead.
Most people can’t summon anything larger or with more willpower than a hair bobble. But the many summoning spells I’ve unwillingly collected over the years are all intended to bring me one or more hapless screaming victims, presumably to go into the sacrificial pit I’ve incomprehensibly neglected to set up. I had a dozen varieties, and one of them that let you scry someone through a reflective surface and pull them out.
It’s especially effective if you have a gigantic cursed mirror of doom to use. Sadly I’d left mine hanging on the wall of my dorm room. But I ran around the clearing and found a small puddle of water between two tree roots. That wouldn’t have been good enough ordinarily, but I had endless mana flowing into me, the supply line from graduation still open. I threw power behind the spell and forced the muddy puddle smooth as glass and staring down at it called, “Orion! Orion Lake! I call you in the—” I took a quick glance up at the first sunlight and sky I’d seen in four years of longing for them, and the only thing I could feel was desperate frustration that it wasn’t dawn or noon or midnight or anything helpful, “—waxing hours of the light, to come to me from the dark-shadowed halls, heeding my word alone,” which would very likely mean he’d be under a spell of obedience when he got here, but I’d worry about that later, later after he was here—
The spell did go through this time, and the water churned into a cloud of silver-black that slowly and grudgingly served up a ghostly image that might have been Orion from the back, barely an outline against pitch darkness. I shoved my arm into the dark anyway, reaching for him, and for a moment, I thought—I was sure—I had him. The taste of frantic relief swelled through me: I’d done it, I’d got hold of him—and then I screamed, because my fingers were sinking into the surface of a maw-mouth, with its sucking hunger turning on me.
Every part of my body wanted to let go at once. And then it got worse, as if there were any room for that to get worse, because it wasn’t just one maw-mouth, it was two, grabbing at me from both sides, as if Patience hadn’t quite finished digesting Fortitude yet: a whole century of students, a meal so large it would take a long while eating, and meanwhile Fortitude was still groping around trying to feed its own hunger even while it was being swallowed down.
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And it had been blindingly obvious to me back there in the graduation hall that we couldn’t possibly kill that monstrous agglomerated horror, not even with the mana of four thousand living students fueling me. The only thing to do with Patience was the only thing to do with the Scholomance: we could only push them off into the void, and hope they vanished away forever. But apparently Orion had disagreed, since he’d turned back to fight even with the school teetering on the edge of the world behind him.
As if he’d thought Patience was going to get out, and in some part of his stupid brutalized brain imagined that he could stop it getting out, and therefore he had to stay behind and be a hero this one more time, one boy standing in front of a tidal wave. That was the only possible reason I could imagine, and it had been stupid enough without shoving me out the gates first, when I was the only one of us who’d ever actually fought a maw-mouth before. That made it so unutterably stupid that I needed him out, needed him here, so I could scream at him at length to impress upon him exactly how stupid he’d been.
I clung to that rage. Rage made it possible for me to keep holding on, despite the heaving putrescence of maw-mouth trying to envelop my fingers, sucking on my skin and my shielding like a child trying to get through a candy shell to the better sweetness inside, trying to get to me, trying to get to every last bit of me so it could devour me down to staring eyes and screaming mouth.
Rage, and horror, because it was going to do that to Orion, Orion who was still there in the hall with it. So I didn’t let go. Staring down into the scrying puddle, I hurled murder at it past his blurry, half-seen shoulder, casting my best, quickest, killing spell over and over, the feeling of a lake of rot sloughing away from around my hands each time, until I was gulping down nausea with each breath I took, and each casting of “À la mort!” went rolling off my tongue on the way out, blurring until the sound of my breathing was death. All the while I kept holding on, trying to pull Orion out. Even if it meant I’d heave Patience out into the world with him and spill that devouring horror into the cool green trees of Wales right at Mum’s feet, my place of peace I’d dreamt of in every minute I’d been in the Scholomance. All I’d have to do was kill it, after all.
That had seemed utterly impossible five minutes before, so impossible I’d just laughed at the idea, but now it was only a low and trivial hurdle when the alternative was letting it have Orion instead. I was really good at killing things. I’d find a way. I even had a plan laying itself out in my head, the clockwork machinery of strategy ticking coolly away in the background of my mind where it never stopped after four years in the Scholomance. We’d fight Patience together. I’d kill it a few dozen lives at a time, and he could pull the mana out and feed it back to me, and together we’d create an unending killing circle between us until the thing was finally gone. It would work, it would work. I had myself convinced. I didn’t let go.
I didn’t let go. I was pushed off. Again.
Orion did it himself. He must have, because maw-mouths don’t let go. The mana I was pouring into the summoning spell was coming out of the graduation supply that was still unending, as if everyone in the school was still putting mana into our shared ritual. But that didn’t make any sense. Everyone else was gone. They were out of the Scholomance, hugging their parents and telling them what we’d done, sobbing and treating the wounds they’d taken, ringing all their friends. They weren’t still feeding me power. They weren’t meant to be. The whole idea of our plan was to sever all connection to the school: we wanted to cram it full of mals and break it off the world and let it float away into the void like a putrid balloon full of writhing malice, vanishing off into the dark where it belonged. It had been going when Orion and I had made that last run towards the portal.
As far as I knew, the only thing keeping it anchored to reality now was me, still clinging to the line of mana coming out of the school. And the only person left in the Scholomance to feed me that mana was Orion. Orion, who could capture mana from mals when he killed them. So at least in that moment, he must still have been alive, still fighting; Patience hadn’t swallowed him up yet. And he must have felt me trying to drag him out, but instead of turning round and helping me to pull him through, he drew away from me instead, resisting the summoning. And the horrible sticky mouthing over my hand pulled away, too. Just as if he was trying to do the same thing my dad had done, all those years ago: as if he’d reached out and grabbed a maw-mouth and pulled it away, letting it have him instead of the girl he loved.
Except the girl Orion loved wasn’t a gentle, kind healer, she was a sorceress of mass destruction who on two occasions had already managed to shred maw-mouths apart, and the stupid bloody fool could have tried trusting me to do it again. But he didn’t. He fought me instead, and when I tried to use my summoning hold to force him to come, abruptly the bottomless ocean of mana ran out from underneath me like he’d taken the plug out of the bath.
In an instant, the power-sharer on my wrist turned cool and heavy and dead. In one more, my wild profligate spell ran sputtering out of gas, and Orion slid out of my grip as if I’d been trying to hold on to a fistful of oil. His outline in the scrying pool vanished into the dark. I kept desperately groping for him anyway, even as the image began fading out at the edges, but Mum had been crouching beside me all along, her face stricken with worry and fear, and now she grabbed me by the shoulders and threw all her weight into shoving me over and away from the puddle, likely saving my hand from being cut off at the wrist as the spell collapsed and my bottomless scrying well returned to being half an inch of water pooled between tree roots.
I went tumbling and rolled back up onto my knees in a single smooth motion without even thinking about it: I’d been training for graduation for months. I threw myself back at the puddle, fingers scrabbling it into mud. Mum tried to put her arms around me, begging me desperately to stop. That’s not why I stopped, though. I stopped because I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t have an ounce of mana left. Mum caught me by the shoulders again, and I turned and grabbed at the crystal round her neck, gasping, “Please, please.” Mum’s whole face was desperation; I could feel her longing to get me away, but then she shut her eyes a moment and with shaking hands reached up and undid the chain and let me have it: half full, not enough to raise the dead or burn cities to the ground, but enough to cast a message spell to scream at Orion with, to tell him to throw me back a line and let me help him, save him. Only it didn’t go through.
I tried and tried, shouting Orion’s name until the crystal and my voice were spent. I might as well have been shouting into the void. Which was where the whole Scholomance had presumably now gone. Just as we’d so cleverly, cleverly planned.
When there wasn’t even enough mana for shouting, I used up the very last dribbles for a heartbeat spell, just trying to find out if he was still alive. It’s a very cheap spell, because it’s stupidly complicated and takes ten minutes, so the casting itself makes almost all the mana it needs. I cast it seven times one after the other without ever getting up off my mud-soaked knees, and stayed there listening to the wind blowing in the treetops and birds making noises and sheep talking to each other and somewhere in the distance a little running stream. Not a single echoing thump came back to my ears.
And when at last I didn’t have mana left even for that, I let Mum lead me back to the yurt and put me to bed like I was six years old again.
The first time I woke up was so much like a dream that it hurt. I was in the yurt with the door open to let in the cool night air, and outside I could faintly hear Mum singing, the way I had in all my most agonizing dreams for the last four years, the ones that always ended in a jolt when I tried desperately to stay in them for a few minutes more. The truly awful part of this one was that I didn’t want to stay in it. I turned over and went back down.
And when I couldn’t sleep anymore, I just lay on my back in bed staring up at the billowing curve of the ceiling for a long time. If there had been anything else to do, I wouldn’t have gone to sleep in the first place. I couldn’t even be angry. The only person available to be angry with was Orion, and I couldn’t stand to be angry with him. I tried: lying there I tried to think of every savage cutting remark I’d have made to him if he was here right now. But when I asked Orion what were you thinking, I couldn’t make it come out angry, even inside my own head. It was just pain.
But I couldn’t grieve him either, because he wasn’t dead. He was busy screaming while a maw-mouth ate him, just like Dad. People do like to pretend maw-mouth victims are dead, but that’s just because it’s unbearable to think about it otherwise. There’s nothing you can do about it, so if someone you love gets eaten by one, they’re dead to you, and you might as well pretend it’s all over. But I know, I know from inside, that you don’t die when a maw-mouth eats you. You’re just being eaten, forever; for as long as the maw-mouth lasts. But knowing didn’t help. I couldn’t do anything about it. Because the Scholomance was gone.
I hadn’t moved when Mum came in a while later. She put a small tinkling handful of things into a bowl, saying softly, “There you are,” to Precious, who made a squeak that meant gratitude and started cracking seeds. I couldn’t feel sorry I hadn’t thought about her, small and hungry. It was too far away, and I was too far down. Mum came and sat down next to my camp bed and put her hand on my forehead, warm and gentle. She didn’t say anything.
I fought her off a little: I didn’t want to feel better. I didn’t want to get up and go on in the world, agreeing that it was in any way acceptable for the world to keep going itself. But lying there under Mum’s hand, unimaginably safe and comfortable, I couldn’t help but feel stupid. The world was going on anyway whether I gave it permission or not, and finally I sat up and let Mum give me a drink of water in the lopsided clay cup she’d made herself, and she sat on the bed next to me and put her arm around my shoulders and stroked my hair. She was so small. The whole yurt was so small. My head brushed the roof at the edge, even sitting on the camp bed. I could have made it outside on one good jump, if I were stupid enough to leap out into the unknown where anything could be waiting to ambush me.
Of course, that wouldn’t have been stupid at all now. I wasn’t in the Scholomance anymore. I’d set the students free, and jailed all the mals in our place, and then I’d broken the school off the world with all of them crammed hungry inside to gnaw on each other forever. So now I could sleep for twenty hours without a care, and I could go bounding out of my yurt with a song in my heart, and I could do anything and go anywhere in the world I wanted to. And so could everyone else, every last child I’d shepherded out of the Scholomance and all the children who’d never even have to go.
Except for Orion, gone into the dark.
If I’d had any mana left to do anything with, I would have imagined the possibility of doing something for him long enough to try some more. But since I didn’t, all I could imagine was going for help to someone else—his mum maybe, who was on track to be Domina in the New York enclave—and asking her for mana so I could do something, and that was where my imagination broke down: looking her in the face, someone who’d loved Orion and wanted him home, and asking her for mana, for any of the ideas that became obviously stupid and useless as soon as I had to persuade someone else to believe in them. So I did the only thing left to do, and put my face in my hands and cried.
Mum sat beside me the whole time I was weeping, sat with me, caring about my misery without pretending she was feeling it too, or hiding away her own deep joy: I was home, I was alive, I was safe. Her whole body was radiating gladness out into the universe, but she didn’t try to make me join in or smother my own grief; she knew I was deeply hurt, and was so sorry, and ready to do anything that she could to help me, when I wanted it. If you’d like to know how she told me all that without saying a word, I would too. It was nothing I could ever have done myself.
When I stopped crying, she got up and made me a cup of tea, picking leaves out of seven different jars on her crammed-full shelves, and she boiled the water with magic, which she’d never ordinarily have done, just so she didn’t have to go outside to the fire and leave me alone yet. The whole yurt filled with the sweet smell when she poured the water in. She gave it to me and sat down again, holding my other hand between both of hers. She hadn’t asked me any questions, I knew she wouldn’t ever push, but there was a gentle silence between us waiting for me to start talking about it. To start grieving with her, for something that was over and done. And I couldn’t bear to.
So after I drank my tea, I put the mug down and said, “Why did you warn me off Orion?” My voice came out hoarse and roughed-up, like I’d run sandpaper up and down the inside of my throat a few times. “Was this why? Did you see—”
She flinched like I’d jabbed her hard with a needle, and her whole body shuddered. She shut her eyes a moment and took a deep breath, then turned and looked at me full in my face in the way she called seeing properly, when she really wanted to take something in, and her own face went crumpling into folds along the faint wrinkle lines that were just beginning at the corners of her eyes. “You’re safe,” she said, half whispering, and she looked down at my hand and stroked it again, and a few tears dripped off her face. “You’re safe. Oh my darling girl, you’re safe,” and she heaved a massive gulp and was crying herself, four years of tears running down her face.
She didn’t ask me to cry with her; she looked away from me in fact, trying to keep her tears from me. I wanted to, I wanted so much to go into her arms and feel it with her: that I was alive and safe. But I couldn’t. She was crying for joy, for love, for me, and I wanted to cry for those things too: I was home, I was out of the Scholomance forever, I was alive in a world I’d changed for the better, a world where children wouldn’t have to be thrown into a pit full of knives just for the hope they’d make it out again. It was worth rejoicing. But I couldn’t. The pit was still there, and Orion was down in it.
I pulled my hand away instead. Mum didn’t try to hold me. She took several deep breaths and wiped her tears away, packing the joy out of the way, tidy, so she could go on being with me, then she turned and cupped my face with her hand. “I’m so sorry, my darling.”
She didn’t say why she’d warned me off Orion. And I understood why at once: she wasn’t going to lie to me, but she didn’t want to hurt me either. She understood that I’d loved him, that I’d lost someone I loved, in the same horrible way that she’d lost Dad, and my grief was all that mattered to her now. It didn’t matter to her to tell me why, or persuade me that she’d been right.
But it mattered to me. “Tell me,” I said through my teeth. “Tell me. You went to Cardiff, you got that boy to bring me a note—”
Her face crumpled a little, miserable—I was asking her to hurt me, to tell me something she knew I didn’t want to hear—but she gave in. She bowed her head and said softly, “I tried to dream you every night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach you, but I tried to anyway. A few times, I thought you were dreaming me back, and we almost touched…but it was only dreaming.”
I swallowed hard. I remembered those dreams too, the faint handful of near-touches, the love that had almost made it to me despite the thick smothering layer of wards blanketing the Scholomance, the ones that blocked every possible way that anything could get in—because otherwise mals would use that way, too.
“But last year—I did see you. The night you used the linen patch.” Her voice was a whisper, and I hunched up, back in that moment and seeing it with her eyes: the little cell of my room, me on the floor in a puddle of my own blood, with the gaping ragged hole in my belly where one of my especially charming fellow students had shoved a knife into me. The only reason I’d survived it had been that healing patch she’d made me herself, years of love and magic worked into every linen thread she’d grown and spun and woven.
“Orion helped me with it,” I said. “He put it on me,” and I stopped, because she’d dragged in a gasping breath, her face twisting into the memory of a horror worse than my lying on the floor bleeding out.
“I felt him touch it,” she said raggedly, and even as she was speaking, I knew I was going to be sorry I’d asked. “I saw him, so near you, touching you. I saw him, and he was just—hunger—” and she sounded sick, she sounded like she’d been watching a mal eat me alive, instead of Orion kneeling on my floor and pressing healing into my torn body.
“He was my friend,” I said in a howl, because I had to make her stop, and I stood up so fast I cracked my skull hard into a crossbar and sat down with my hands on top of my head with a squawk and started crying again a little from the jolt of pain. Mum tried to hold me, but I shrugged her arms off, angry and dripping, and heaved myself off the bed again.
“He saved my life,” I ground out at her. “He saved my life thirteen times,” and I gasped on a breath of agony: I’d never have the chance to catch up now.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t argue with me, just sat there with her eyes shut and her arms wrapped around herself, breathing through it in shudders. She only whispered, “My darling, I’m so sorry,” and I could hear she truly was, she was so very sorry for hurting me with this supposed truth of what she’d seen in Orion that I wanted to scream.
I laughed instead, a horrible vicious laugh that hurt me to hear it in my own ears. “No worries, he’s gone for good now,” I said, jeering. “My brilliant plan took care of that.” And I went out of the yurt.
I walked around the commune for a while, staying in the trees just past the limits of where anyone had a pitch. My head ached from crying and banging it against the roof and from pouring an ocean’s worth of mana through my body, and from four years of prison before that. I didn’t have a handkerchief or anything. I was still wearing my filthy sweaty leggings and T-shirt, the New York T-shirt Orion had given me, threadbare with four holes and still the only wearable top I’d had left by the end of term. I pulled up the hem and wiped my nose on it.
I wanted to go back to Mum, but I couldn’t, because I wanted to ask her to hug me for a month, and I wanted to scream at her that she didn’t know anything about Orion at all. What I really wanted was to not have asked her in the first place. It was worse than if she’d told me she’d foreseen it all, and if I’d only listened to her warning, instead of pulling him into my magnificent scheme to save the whole school, he’d have made it out fine.
I could guess what Mum had seen: Orion’s power that let him pull mana out of mals, and the empty well inside him because when he took the power, he gave it away. The power so terrifyingly vast that it had forced him to become exactly the kind of stupid reckless hero who’d face an entire horde of maleficaria alone, because for every moment of his life, people had made him feel like a freak unless he was putting himself out in front of them.
He’d been the most popular boy in the Scholomance, but I’d been his only friend, because when everyone else looked at him, that was all they saw: his power. They pretended they saw a noble hero, because he’d tried so hard to fit himself into that picture, and they loved the picture: that made his power something for them, something that would help them. The same way everyone looked at me and my power and saw a monster, because I wouldn’t play along with what they wanted. But they’d loved Orion only in exactly the same way they’d hated me. Neither one of us were ever people to them. He just made himself useful, and I refused to.
But I’d never imagined that Mum, of all people—who’d never let me see a monster in my own mirror, even when the whole world was trying to convince me that was all that was there—would look at Orion and see his power, and decide that he was a monster. I couldn’t bear it that she hadn’t been able to look at him and see a person. It made it feel like she was lying about seeing me as one.