My grandmother came and hurried us into the house, to a small, cool, quiet room where she told my mum to stay, and she threw one agonized look at me and went back out again. That was the last time I ever saw her. Someone brought us some dinner, and I forgot my own confused fear and wanted to go back to the fountain, and Mum sang me into sleep. My grandfather was one of the men who came to take me from her that night, in the dark. I know what the prophecy says because he translated it for Mum, repeated it a dozen times over trying to persuade her, because he didn’t know Mum well enough to understand that the one thing she’ll never go for is the lesser evil. So instead she took her greater evil back home and raised me and loved me and protected me with all her might, and now here I am, ready to begin my destined career any day I like.

I would’ve probably spent several more hours brooding about it, but I had too much sufficiently depressing scut work to do. I dragged myself off the bed and started the process of conditioning a new crystal to be my channel, which involved building mana by singing a bunch of long involved songs to it about open doors, flowing rivers, et cetera, while concentrating the whole time on pushing a little thread of mana in and pulling it right back out the other side. After my throat started to hurt too much to keep going, I put that one aside and got one of the emptied crystals instead and started filling it back up. But I couldn’t do sit-ups or jumping jacks, thanks to my still-aching gut, so I had to crochet instead.

Words can’t describe how much I hate crochet. I’d gladly do a thousand push-ups over a single line. I forced myself to learn because it’s a classic mana-building option for school: all you need to bring is one tiny lightweight hook. The standard-issue blankets are made of wool that you can unpick and put back together, no other materials required. But I’m horrible at it. I forget where I am in the pattern, how many stitches I’ve done, which kind of stitch I’m on, what I’m trying to make, why I haven’t stabbed out my own eyes with the hook yet. It’s brilliant for building a truly frothing head of rage after I’ve undone the last hundred stitches for the ninth time. But as a result, I do get a decent bit of mana out of it.

It took me almost an hour of mana spilling out of the crystal before it grudgingly started to store again. My teeth were already clenched with fury by then, with a new addition of lurking anxiety: was I starting to feel evil? Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet. That would be so stupid it seemed almost likely. But I had to go on and deposit at least a noticeable amount of mana, because otherwise I was sure that by tomorrow the crystal would lock up again. And every single one of my drained crystals would have to be refilled the same way. I’d have to decide if I was going to invest the effort to rescue them, or cut my losses and just start filling the crystals I had left. I couldn’t leave the drained ones for last; if I did, they’d go completely dead and be impossible to refill at all.

I couldn’t help thinking I could ask Orion to fill some of them for me. Except if he started routinely power-sharing with me, sooner or later the rest of the New York enclave kids would block him. And that wouldn’t even be unreasonable. He got to pull on them when he needed to. That was what let him go around saving people at will, instead of worrying about whether he had enough mana today, like me and the other losers. He had to pay for that right. Of course, I could just sign on with New York myself. With Orion running around the cafeteria doing ostentatious heroics for my sake, on the heels of a weekend of what everyone else had surely assumed was serious canoodling in the library, Magnus and Chloe and the gang would probably have been relieved to lock me down at this point. And it was even more sensible on my side than it had been yesterday.

So obviously I wasn’t going to do that. Instead I was going to spend the next month covering my entire blanket with a lovely and soul-destroying leaves-and-flowers pattern. If I wasn’t careful, I might stitch in my rage and do the soul-destroying literally. I suppose at least then I could get shop credit for it.

The bell was ringing for curfew, but I kept going. Thanks to my long nap earlier, I could afford to stay up late. After another hour I finally let myself stop and put my hook away—I really wanted to hurl it violently into the dark, but if I did that, I’d never get it back, so instead I gritted my teeth and strapped it carefully back to the lid of my chest—and then I rewarded myself by sitting down on my bed with the one actual good thing that had happened to me all day: the book I’d got in the library off the Sanskrit shelf.

I’d been sure it was something special when I grabbed it, but I braced myself taking it out of my bag, just because the way my day—my week, my year, my life—was going, it would have really been more on brand for the book to turn out to have its contents swapped with a mundane cookbook or for the pages to be glued together with water damage or eaten by worms or something. But the cover was in beautiful shape, handmade of dark-green leather, beautifully stamped with intricate patterns in gold, even over the long flap that folded over to protect the outer side of the pages. I held it on my lap and opened it up slowly. The first page—the last page from my perspective, it was bound right to left—was written in what looked like Arabic, and my heart started pounding.

A lot of the very oldest and most powerful Sanskrit incantations in circulation, ones whose original manuscripts have been lost for ages, come from copies that were made in the Baghdad enclave a thousand years ago. The book didn’t look or feel a thousand years old, but that didn’t mean anything. Spellbooks wander off the shelves even in enclaves if you don’t have a really good catalog and a powerful librarian keeping track of them. I don’t know where they go when they’re disappeared, if it’s the same as the void outside our rooms or someplace different, but they don’t age while they’re gone. The more valuable they are, the more likely they are to slip away: they get imbued with the desire to protect themselves. This one looked so new that it had probably vanished out of the Baghdad library barely a couple of years after it had been written.

I held my breath turning the pages, and then I was looking at the first page of copied Sanskrit—annotated heavily in the margins; I was probably going to be forced to start learning Arabic, and it was going to be worth it, because the title page more or less said Behold the Masterwork of the Wise One of Gandhara, and when I saw it, I actually made a horrible squawking noise out loud and clutched the whole thing to my chest as if it was about to fly off on its own.

The Golden Stone sutras are famous because they’re the first known enclave-builder spells. Before them, the only way that enclaves happened was by accident. If a community of wizards live and work together in the same place for long enough, about ten generations or so, the place starts to slip away from the world and expand in odd ways. If the wizards become systematic about going in and out from only a few places, those turn into the enclave gates, and the rest of it can be coaxed loose from the world and into the void, the same way the Scholomance is floating around in it. At which point, mals can’t get at you except by finding a way through the entrances, which makes life much safer, and magic also becomes loads easier to do, which makes life much more pleasant.