Which was just as well, obviously. I’ve long entertained detailed fantasies of dramatic public rescues—several of them lately featuring a grateful and admiring Orion, to be honest—and the reaction of my fellow students, bowled over and regretful they’d never seen the real me before. But the real me had just single-handedly killed a maw-mouth, with liberal use of one of the most powerful and unstoppable killing spells on the books, so if my fellow students saw the real me, they wouldn’t decide that after all I was a lovely person they should have been nice to all these years. No, they’d start thinking I was a violently dangerous person they should have been nice to all these years. They’d be scared of me. Of course they’d be scared of me. I could see that now with perfect clarity, despite the pathetic dreams that I’d hung on to all these years, because I was scared of me, too.

I got up and got my sophomore-year Maleficaria Studies textbook down from the upper shelf—I checked the undersides of that shelf and the one above, and ran the back of my hand across all the books before I took it down—and found the pages on maw-mouths. There was a reference for the journal article. I found it and looked up from my desk into the pitch black and said, “I want a clean, readable, English-language copy of issue seven hundred sixteen of the Journal of Maleficaria Studies.”

I could get specific because that’s the opposite of hard to get. Journal of Maleficaria Studies might sound academic and dusty, but it’s only pretending. There’s a very passionate audience for new information on the things that want to eat us. Every enclave in the world supports the research, in exchange for a boxful of copies each month, and any independent wizard who can afford it will get a subscription; most who can’t will find others and club together to get a shared copy.

This issue was quite a recent one, not twenty years old. Orion’s mum was already on the board of editors: OPHELIA RHYS-LAKE, NEW YORK, eight names from the top of the masthead. She’s higher up now. The article on maw-mouths took up half the contents, and the historical section went into detail on the one reputable modern account of taking one down.

A double handful of wizards in the Shanghai enclave in China were scooped up and sent away by the authorities during the Cultural Revolution—not for being wizards, they just looked suspiciously rich—and the wards on the place went downhill quite fast after the sudden loss of that many prime wizards. A maw-mouth made it through the gates and ate half the remaining inhabitants in a day; the rest ran away like sane people.

So far as that goes, it was a fairly standard story. That’s how enclaves get destroyed, when they do. It’s not always a maw-mouth, but a weakened enclave is always a dangerously tempting target for the really scary mals. But maybe ten years later, the prime wizards all got back, rounded up the survivors and the surviving kids, and decided to try and take back the enclave.

That was pretty insane, since at the time the only other known cases of destroying maw-mouths had not been reputable, but on the other hand, they were playing for high stakes. Having an enclave isn’t a small thing, and it’s not like you can just decide to bang one up on a whim, much less one with a thousand years of history and wards behind it.

Reading between the lines, I could also tell there had been a case of ambition spurring the process, since “the future Dominus of the enclave, our coauthor Li Feng,” was the one who had organized the take-back. The entire group spent a year gathering mana, probably the equivalent of a thousand of my crystals. Li brought in a circle of eight really powerful independent wizards, all of them promised significant positions in the enclave if it worked, and he volunteered to go into the maw-mouth himself. He linked up with the circle and did it under all their layers of shielding, powered by all the gathered mana. It took him three days to finally destroy the maw-mouth. Two of the wizards in the circle died in the process, another two days later.

I’d wanted reassurance, but the article just made it worse. I was a sixteen-year-old with twenty-nine mana crystals I’d mostly filled up by doing aerobics. It was blindingly obvious that I didn’t have any business taking out a maw-mouth in a Sunday-morning jaunt. Maybe the Scholomance had known I had a chance, but I shouldn’t have had one. I threw the journal back into the dark and went to sit on my bed huddled up around my own knees, thinking about my great-grandmother’s prophecy. If I ever did go maleficer, if I ever did start pulling malia out of people like toffee and tossing off those killing spells of mine left and right, I’d be unstoppable. Maybe literally. Raining death and destruction on all the enclaves of the world like a maw-mouth myself, like the biggest maw-mouth ever, tearing the others apart because they were my competition.

And everyone else seemed to just be waiting for me to get going, except for Mum, who won’t even call Hitler a bad person. It’s not that she thinks he’s the product of irresistible historical forces or anything. She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.

And yes, fine, but I think after a certain number of evil choices, it’s reasonable shorthand to decide that someone’s an evil person who oughtn’t have the chance to make any more choices. And the more power someone has, the less slack they ought to be given. So how many chances did I get? How many had I used up? Did I get points for having gone after the maw-mouth today, or had I just given myself a taste of power that was going to lead me straight to a monstrous destiny so inevitable that it had been foreseen more than a decade ago by someone who’d wanted to love me?

I’ve been carrying that prophecy in my head my whole life. It’s one of the first things I remember. It was hot that day. It would have been winter back in Wales, cold and wet; I don’t remember the winter, but I remember the sun. There was a square fountain in the inner courtyard that sent up a little spray with rainbows coming through it, surrounded by small trees in pots with purple-pink flowers. The whole family gathered around us, people who looked like me, like the face in the mirror that the kids at school were only just starting to teach me was somehow wrong, and here was so clearly right. My father’s mother got on her knees to hug me, holding me out at arm’s length afterwards just to look at me, hungry tears running down her face, saying, “Oh, she looks so much like Arjun.”

My great-grandmother was sitting in the shade: I just wanted to wave my hands through the rainbows and put my hands in the fountain, but they brought me over to her, and she was smiling down at me, reaching to take my wet hands with both of hers. I smiled up at her, and her whole face changed and went sagging and her eyes clouded over white and she started speaking in Marathi, which I didn’t speak with anyone except my language teacher once a week, so I didn’t understand the words, but I did understand everyone else around me started gasping and arguing and crying, and that Mum had to pull me away from her and carry me to another part of the courtyard and shelter me with her body and her voice from the yelling fear that ate up all the welcome.