Work Text:
“Come in, Gitali. Won’t you sit down?”
“Auntie Deepthi.”
“Would you like some tea?”
“No. Yes. I...”
“Drink the tea, dear. And then tell me why you’ve come.”
“Don’t you know?”
“Not in the details, no. And it will help you to organize your thoughts to tell me.”
“...You weren’t here yesterday.”
“No. The Domina of Lahore asked me to visit to help her with a little problem.”
“The Domina would have come to you if you’d asked. You haven’t left the family compound in twenty years. You made the Dominus of Jaipur come to you. You made Li Feng of Shanghai come to you! And now you go to Lahore? On the day Arjun’s lover, on the day Arjun’s daughter, came to us? He was your great-great-grandson! Your favorite great-great-grandson! And you missed his child? The only child he will ever have?”
“I did. And if anyone else asks, Gitali, you are to tell them that I felt sorry for poor Juleen, who is a new Domina with a difficult problem, and that I did not foresee the problem with Arjun’s daughter. I thought she would be living here, after all, and that I would have time enough to meet her.”
“I am to tell them...”
“If they think that I did foresee the problem, and was too much a coward to be there—and Siddesh and Kavita and Renu will think exactly that—well, I can suffer their poor opinion. I am a very frail old woman, after all.”
“Auntie Deepthi. What did you see?”
“Drink your tea, dear. Eat a biscuit. Promise not to repeat this conversation unless I am dead. And I’ll tell you.”
“Unless you’re dead?”
“Yes. If I’m alive you can simply ask me to tell anyone you think must know.”
“...I promise.”
“Good. Now. Where to begin?
“In twelve years or so, a mawmouth—the very mawmouth that took Arjun—will break through the wards in the graduation hall. Perhaps a bit earlier, perhaps a bit later. And it will go up, through the school, to the top levels—the cafeteria, the library, the freshman or sophomore dormitory. And anything we try to stop it either will not work, or will result in several hundred students dying that otherwise would have lived. And I do not want to stop it. Because the only way Arjun will ever be at peace is if the mawmouth that took him dies.
“And his daughter will kill it.”
“...But she’s five! In twelve years, she will be...”
“Seventeen. Still at school, yes. Didn’t you listen to Renu? Arjun’s daughter has a great, great deal of destructive power. She could kill thousands if she wished. But what she will wish to do, twelve years from now, is to kill a mawmouth. And she will succeed, one way or the other.”
“She will? But...if she’s going to kill a mawmouth, then surely shouldn’t we help her?”
“Help is precisely what she must not have! Gitali, what do you suppose Shanghai—or Jaipur, or London, or New York—would do if they heard about a girl still in the Scholomance with the power to slay a mawmouth?”
“...Send her to kill more mawmouths?”
“Gitali, you are far too old to be so innocent. Who would they wish to send her against, truly?”
“...Each other?”
“Each other. The enclaves are always jockeying among themselves for power. Even an enclave that did not wish its rivals dead—and every enclave on Earth has at least one person on its council who wants exactly that—would want to control her to stop her being used against them.
“The way you would have it—if she comes and lives here, and we cherish and love her as we should, if she goes to the Scholomance and faces the mawmouth and calls out to her cousins for help, for the help she knows they will give, for the help they should give—then she will kill it, in view of all, her junior year. And when that year’s seniors leave and go to their enclaves, and tell their parents of their classmates, they will begin to make...preparations. Plans so that, when she leaves school, she will kill their enemies. Plans so that, when she leaves school, their enemies will not send her against them.
“I do not know exactly what those preparations will entail. I do not know if they will fail or succeed. But I do know that the result will be bad.”
“But how will she kill a mawmouth in secret? How will she get the power?”
“If she grows up alone, with no one to love or even like her save her mother? If she sees the maleficaria come for her—and they will come for her—when she is young? She will want with all her heart to find new friends, an enclave, to help her. And she will make a plan, she will stockpile mana for years, to show her classmates how powerful she is and how useful a friend she could be. And then when she makes that sacrifice, when she spends her mana not to earn her friends but to secretly save the other children...well, with such a sacrifice, her power will go far. Farther than it should have.
“Far enough.”
“And she’ll keep the secret forever?”
“Not forever, I think. But long enough. Long enough that when the enclaves try to bend her to their use, they will deal with her, and not her family.”
“Her family...”
“I think that is why I can’t see quite how it all goes wrong. But yes. If she was my beloved great-great-great-grandchild, grown up in my compound, then those preparations would come to us to try to find a way to sway her. You can guess—in this case, you can guess as well as I—how that could go wrong.
“Her cousins—the ones who will not help her, in the Scholomance—must of course not know. But more, Siddesh and Kavita should not know. They’ve sent their grandchild, Arjun’s only child, away, to grow up friendless and alone save for her mother. How cruel it would be, to tell them that she wasn’t even going to deserve it.”