But I don’t have family, not aside from my mum, and I certainly don’t have an enclave ready to support me. We live in the Radiant Mind commune near Cardigan in Wales, which also boasts a shaman, two spirit healers, a Wiccan circle, and a troupe of Morris dancers, all of whom have roughly the same amount of real power, which is to say none whatsoever, and all of whom would fall over in horror if they saw Mum or me doing real magic. Well, me. Mum does magic by dancing up mana with a group of willing volunteers—I’ve told her she ought to charge people, but no—and then she spreads it out again freely in sparkles and happiness, tra la. People let us eat at their table because they love her, who wouldn’t, and they built her a yurt when she came to them, straight from the Scholomance and three months pregnant with me, but none of them could help me do magic or defend me against roving maleficaria. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. They don’t like me. No one does, except Mum.

Dad died here, during graduation, getting Mum out. We call it graduation because that’s what the Americans call it, and they’ve been carrying the lion’s share of the cost of the school for the last seventy years or so. Those who pay the piper call the tune, et cetera. But it’s hardly a celebratory occasion or anything. It’s just the moment when the seniors all get dumped into the graduation hall, far below at the very bottom of the school, and try to fight their way out through all the hungry maleficaria lying in wait. About half the senior class—that is, half of the ones who’ve managed to survive that long—makes it. Dad didn’t.

He did have family; they live near Mumbai. Mum managed to track them down, but only when I was already five. She and Dad hadn’t exchanged any real-world information or made any plan for after they graduated and got turfed back out to their respective homes. That would’ve been too sensible. They’d been together on the inside for only four months or something, but they were soulmates and love would lead the way. Of course, probably it would have, for Mum.

Anyway, when she did find them, it turned out his family was rich, palaces and jewels and djinn servants rich, and more important by my mum’s standards, they came from an ancient strict-mana Hindu enclave that was destroyed during the Raj, and they’re still sticking to the rules. They won’t eat meat, much less pull malia. She was happy to move in with them, and they were all excited to take us in, too. They hadn’t even known what had happened to Dad. The last time they’d heard from him was at term-end of his junior year. The seniors collect notes from the rest of us, the week before graduation. I’ve already written mine for this year and given copies to some of the London enclave kids, short and sweet: still alive, doing all right in classes. I had to keep it so small that no one could reasonably refuse to just add it to their envelope, because otherwise they would.

Dad sent one of those same notes to his family, so they’d known he’d survived that long. Then he just never came out. Another of the hundreds of kids thrown on the rubbish heap of this place. When Mum finally unearthed his family and told them about me, it felt to them like getting a bit of Dad back after all. They sent us one-way plane tickets and Mum said bye to everyone in the commune and packed me up with all our worldly goods.

But when we got there, my great-grandmother took one look at me and fell down in a visionary fit and said I was a burdened soul and would bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world if I wasn’t stopped. My grandfather and his brothers tried to do the stopping, actually. That’s the only time Mum’s ever really opened the pipes. I vaguely remember it, Mum standing in our bedroom with four men awkwardly trying to make her step out of the way and hand me over. I don’t know what they were planning to do with me—none of them had ever deliberately hurt so much as a fly—but I guess the fit was a really alarming one.

They argued it over a bit and then all of a sudden the whole place went full of this terrible light that hurt my eyes to look at, and Mum was scooping me up with my blanket. She walked directly out of the family compound, barefoot in her nightie, and they stood around looking miserable and didn’t try to touch her. She got to the nearest road and stuck out her thumb, and a passing driver picked her up and took us all the way to the airport. Then a tech billionaire about to board his private jet to London saw her standing in the airport vestibule with me and offered to take her along. He still comes to the commune for a weeklong spiritual cleanse once a year.

That’s my mum for you. But it’s not me. My great-grandmother was just the first in a long line of people who meet me, smile, and then stop smiling, before I’ve even said a word. No one’s ever going to offer me a lift, or dance in a woodland circle to help me raise power, or put food on my table, or—far more to the point—stand with me against all the nasty things that routinely come after wizards, looking for a meal. If it weren’t for Mum, I wouldn’t have been welcome in my own home. You wouldn’t believe the number of nice people at the commune—the kind who write long sincere letters to politicians and regularly turn out to protest for everything from social justice to the preservation of bats—who said brightly to fourteen-year-old me how excited I must be about going away to school—ha ha—and how much I must want to strike out on my own afterwards, see more of the world, et cetera.

Not that I want to go back to the commune. I don’t know if anyone who hasn’t tried it can properly appreciate just how horrible it is to be constantly surrounded by people who believe in absolutely everything, from leprechauns to sweat lodges to Christmas carols, but who won’t believe that you can do actual magic. I’ve literally shown people to their faces—or tried to; it takes loads of extra mana to cast even a little spell for starting a fire when a mundane is watching you, firmly convinced that you’re a silly kid with a lighter up your sleeve and you’ll probably fumble the sleight-of-hand. But even if you do get some sufficiently dramatic spell to work in front of them, then they all say wow and how amazing and then the next day it’s all, man, those mushrooms were really good. And then they avoid me even more. I don’t want to be here, but I don’t want to be there, either.

Oh, that’s a lie, of course. I constantly daydream about going home. I ration it to five minutes a day where I go and stand in front of the vent in the wall, as safely far away as I can get from it and still feel the air moving, and I shut my eyes and press my hands over my face to block the smell of burnt oil and finely aged sweat, pretending that instead I’m breathing damp earth and dried rosemary and roasted carrots in butter, and it’s the wind moving through the trees, and if I just open my eyes I’ll be lying on my back in a clearing and the sun has just gone behind a cloud. I would instantly trade in my room for the yurt in the woods, even after two full weeks of rain when everything I own is growing mildew. It’s an improvement over the sweet fragrance of soul-eater. I even miss the people, which I’d have refused to believe if you’d told me, but after three years in here, I’d ask even Philippa Wax for a cwtch if I saw her sour, hard-mouthed face.