Page 12 of The Golden Enclaves
And in fact it hadn’t happened. Liesel said, even more flatly, “He’s a council member in Munich.”
“What?” I stared at her. “But—”
“Do you need me to spell it out in small words?” Liesel said coldly. “His wife is the daughter of the Domina. That is how he has his seat. So he told my mother if she wanted me to have a place in the Scholomance, she would keep hush and never contact him again. I have never met him. He sent money sometimes.” The words dripped with contempt, as well they might. Money’s fairly trivial for an enclaver to produce. Even most indie wizards can magic themselves up a fifty-pound note; the real limit is that the local enclave willcome down on you if you start counterfeiting on a large enough scale to make things awkward forthem.But there’s not an enclave in the world that doesn’t have a more or less unlimited supply.
I grimaced; I didn’t like being sympathetic towards Liesel. But leaving your kid outside for mals to hunt while you live cushy in your enclave…He wouldn’t even have suffered any horrible consequences for bringing her inside. No one ever gets kicked out of an enclave for a thing like cheating on your wife, even if the Dominus might want to. That’s the sort of thing that would make a Dominus lose their job. Enclavers—with reason—expect to get away with almost anything, including reasonably concealed use of malia, as long as it doesn’t actually threaten the enclave as a whole. That’s the only bright line none of them are allowed to cross; the rest are very pliable. But Liesel’s dad certainlycouldhave lost his council seat over it. That was what he’d valued, more than her life. “That’s why you didn’t go to Munich,” I said. “Why not one of the other German enclaves?”
“What good would that do?” she said. “Munich is the most powerful of them. I need amorepowerful enclave, not less.”
“To do what?” I said, because I couldn’t help myself, although I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know.
“The exact details will suggest themselves,” Liesel said, a bit dismissively. “But I mean to acquire a position where I ammorepowerful than his wife, and then I will be able to make her sorry.”
“For—”
“Killing my mother,” Liesel said. “It wasn’t anaccident.”
She had a right to the irritated tone; as soon as she said it, the whole thing became obvious. Her dad had done his best to hide his dirty little secret, but his wife had found out anyway—presumably when he’d finally grudgingly pulled astring or two to get Liesel that promised Scholomance seat—and instead of binning her useless husband, she’d gone after Liesel’s mum, and she’dgother. And then Liesel had been forced to watch her mum sell off what was left of her life, just to get her over the finish line into the Scholomance.
It made sense to me of what Liesel was doing in ways I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted. It had been a lot easier to think she was just a bit of a shit person, ready to do anything to get into an enclave and have a cushy life of ease and power. But instead she’d just done the maths and reached the completely correct conclusion that the only way she was ever going to be able to make the daughter of Munich’s Domina feel so much as an instant’s regret was ifshewas the Domina of an even bigger enclave, or next to it. And unlike an ordinary sane person, she hadn’t looked at that solved equation and decided right, I’ll settle for the revenge of just living as well as I can; instead she’d made herself a thirty-year plan that started withstep one: become valedictorian of the Scholomance,and marched off on it.
And she was still on it right now. Alfie was step two. I’d wondered why she’d been so determined to hook herself a powerful enclaver boyfriend at school, after she’dalreadymade valedictorian, but of course now I understood. It wasn’tgood enoughto get into an enclave. She’d recognized that when she did, she’d be starting here, in the cheap seats, and she wanted a partner with a better position on theinside.It was actually a perfectly sensible and also a really good plan, as I should have expected.
“Sorry,” I said, very grudgingly. Mum would probably have tried to sit her down for a few months of conversation, but personally I didn’t blame her for wanting revenge. I still had vivid revenge fantasies about that twat who’d shoved me in the corridor in freshman year. But I’d got this far not likingLiesel and I wanted to keep on; it felt vaguely dangerous to stop.
Liesel only shrugged. “They had power, and my mother had none. The one with power decides what is going to happen,” she said, matter-of-fact. “So it’s better to have power, and it’s stupid not to take it when you have the chance. You come in here and save the whole enclave, and you take nothing. What a grand gesture! What will you do now if a maw-mouth comes to someplace else, not an enclave, and they don’t have mana to give you to fight it?”
“I’m not going in for a career of hunting maw-mouths!” I said.
“Aren’t you?” Liesel said, contemptuously. “What else are you going to do?”
I could have done with a year of crying in the woods to answer that question, but under the circumstances, I had to say something or else get squashed flat, and I didn’t want to be squashed flat. So I said, “I’m going tobuildenclaves,” as if I’d decided, after all, that Iwasgoing to do that. “I’m going to build Golden Stone enclaves. Not fairyland castles and skyscrapers, just a few solid bunkrooms for kids to sleep in and a workroom or two, and it won’t take malia and generations of scheming to put them up.”
And I ought to have been grateful to Liesel, because it became the truth as I told it to her, the answer that I might easily have spent a year digging out of myself: yes, that was what I wanted to do. It was still my dream, even if it had been someone else’s dream before mine. It felt right in my own mouth and mind as I said it out loud: a dream worth chasing, a good life’s work.
“So,” Liesel said. “How many years will it take people to save the mana to put up one of your golden enclaves, and how many of their children will be eaten before they haveenough? Why not tell London to give you ten years of mana, and go put up ten enclaves for children whose parents can’t afford it?”
That was nearly the exact question I’d spent my entire childhood yelling at Mum in a frothing rage, so fortunately I had an answer for it handy. “Because as soon as I start doing that, I’m not putting up enclaves anymore,” I said. “I’m doing work for London, or New York, or whoever’s got the most mana, and doing a bit of charity on the side. They’ve been trying to get my mum to turn into their private healer for years and years.”
“That is not true,” Liesel said. “Maybe for your mother, but this is not the same thing. How often will an enclave need your help? For what? If they are begging you to help because there is a monster about to eat their home and all their children, you will go anyway! You camehere.That is not why you will not take their payment. You don’t take it because you think you are better than them, because you want to make them be ashamed of themselves, and so what if you could do so much more good for everyone else with their help.”
If only that hadn’t sounded quite so plausible. I glared at Liesel. “And it’s loads of goodyou’llbe doing for all the little people, is it? Anyway, why are you trying to talk me into bullying London for mana? You’reinLondon, now, in case you hadn’t noticed, and you’ve got Alfie to ride piggyback all the way to Dominus. Don’t tell me it’s because you like me.”
She glared back. “You’re not a useless person!Youcould make something of yourself, if you were willing to try. But not if you insist on behaving in this unreasonable way, as if you think everything must become terrible and evil the moment you make any sort of compromise.”
That took me aback; it was obviously as high a compliment as she had to pay, so apparently shedidlike me. In fact,I realized very belatedly, before asking me to dinner, she’d fixed her hair and her clothes again, and the curtain had been tied up on purpose todisplaythe rigged-out bed. There was obviously a checklist somewhere labeledgetting Galadriel on boardand she’d jotted downthinks I’m well fitbecause she’d noticed me noticing her, back at school. She was letting me know she’d be happy to swap her enclaver boyfriend forme.
Or, well, whyswap;she’d love to collect the set if we’d cooperate. Her and Alfie and me, that was a recipe for world domination, much less for squashing her enemies in Munich like the cockroaches they were. I was only surprised she hadn’t yet asked me outright. Probably she was making a massive effort to be tactful because Orion had just died and maybe I wanted to waste some of my time being sad instead of following her own highly superior therapy program of meticulously planning out a campaign for victory.
And I’d been absolutely right: shewasdangerous, because as soon as I realized that offer was on the table along with the tagine, I discovered I could understand why Alfie had taken herupon it. If you hadeverything,if you hadpower,and you wanted to use it—and yet you had sense enough to doubt yourself, whether you were really going to do a brilliant job of it, and also perhaps had a bit too much caution, then what more magnificent offer could anyone make you: all the brains in the world and all the drive along with them, to tell you exactly what to do and calculate out to the nth degree the best way to do it and then give you a good hard shove on top of it.
Lieselwouldmake something of Alfie, and he really did want something made of himself. Even at school, he’d helped with the plan more wholeheartedly than almost any of the other enclavers. He’d wanted to believe, almost as much as the Scholomance itself wanted to believe, in its nonsensemotto:to protect all the wise-gifted children of the world.Which made more sense now, because it had been his family’s great triumph. He wanted tolive upto it. I couldn’t even look down on that ambition, although I was fairly certain that he was going the wrong way, and his actual ancestor had mostly been a scheming mastermind looking to cement the power of his own enclave.
And if whatIwanted was to build as many golden enclaves as I could—Liesel was telling me she’d be willing to sign on to the project, and with all her brains and drive and ruthlessness, she’d make something ofthat,too. Give her ten years, and every enclave of the world would end up signed on to donate mana, presumably as some sort of insurance policy—just chip in a bit, not more than you can spare, and if a maw-mouth or an argonet shows up at your enclave gates, Galadriel will swoop in and save you. Or she’d sell them on the benefits of having satellite enclaves nearby for their commuters, dangling a taste of the better life. I could envision the shape of her whole program, even if I couldn’t have executed it myself in a century. And when it was done, there would be loads more children sleeping safe, all over the world, than I’d ever manage by plodding around to one small group of wizards at a time. And I wouldn’t have to give anything that I wouldn’t give anyway.
It wasn’t a trick, was the really seductive thing about it. Liesel wasn’t a liar; she wasn’t promising anything she didn’t mean to deliver, and she wasn’t even hiding the cost of it either. She was laying it out for me plainly: the price wascompromise.To smile at enclavers once in a while when I didn’t mean it and go to their parties and make it just that bit easier for them to give me what I wanted; and why the bloody hellnot,if it got me what I wanted, and what I wanted was good?
I didn’t even disagree. I thought she was right, in thegeneral case. Only I’m not the general case, and I’ve known that ever since I was five years old with my great-grandmother, the world-famous seer, reciting my doom over my head, my glorious destiny to sow death and destruction among the wizards of the earth, shatter enclaves and murder thousands, and I know without a doubt that the first step towards fulfilling her prophecy would be made with all the good intentions in the world.
