Page 19 of The Golden Enclaves
My throat swelled up with longing and rage: he’d asked to come to me, he’d asked me to let him make me that promise; that had been the pricehe’dcharged me, for this magical thing, so good and healthy and simple, and I’d paid it. I’d let him promise, and he hadn’t kept his promise. Instead he’d gone as far as he could in the other direction; he’d gone to spend the rest of eternity unreachable and screaming in the belly of a maw-mouth, in the back of my head, screaming forever, and Liesel made an impatient noise and rolled over onto me and kissed me again, and I kissed her back with desperate gratitude and let her yank me out of my head and back into my body.
We ended up having to make a mad dash for the gate in the end, despite all the time we’d had to wait. The corridors of Heathrow annoyingly insisted on remaining exactly the same length the entire time we were pelting towards theaeroplane, but I suppose that was better than if they’d stretched themselves out twice as long. We got ourselves aboard and I turned into something of a wide-eyed naif staring out the window as the ground fell away below us. Flying is one of the things you really can’t do with magic, at least not outside an enclave: only imagine how wonderful it would be to be soaring a hundred feet off the ground and then some mundane glances up and doesn’t believe you’re doing that, so rather abruptly you aren’t anymore.
My gawping lasted for maybe ten minutes or so, and then I took a deep breath and turned to see what Liesel was going to say to me now, demand of me, and instead she was already asleep and even snoring a little, just barely loud enough to hear it over the burring whine of the engines. I stared down at her and then I spread out my pod seat and went straight to sleep myself, in the comfortable familiarity of discomfort: the cot narrow and hard and cold, the air stale and recirculating through a hundred other pairs of lungs, the wall vibrating with the low whining engines, incomprehensible machinery working somewhere out of sight, keeping us all alive, suspended out of the world.
I slept the entire way. When the attendants turned up the lights and started to make the rounds to bring us a meal we were calling lunch, Precious—she’d made her own way past security and got back in my pocket afterwards—had to creep out and bite my earlobe to wake me up properly; I’d been ready to stay down. At that, I might almost as well have done. The food wasn’tasbad as the Scholomance cafeteria, which was as much as you could really say for it, although they presented it with the confident triumph of someone offering you marvels of the culinary art, complete with heavy white napkins and inconvenient cutlery that repeatedly threatened to fall down and disappear into the crevices of the seat or intospots unreachable except by someone with arms like a flamingo’s legs.
Liesel and I ate it all anyway; we had low standards. She kept not asking me for anything, and I continued to feel if notwell,then at least like I had a body and it existed in a functioning world, which had seemed questionable at times yesterday. By the time we made it out of the endless bureaucratic airport queues and were blinking on the pavement in the daylight of a different continent, I was entirely grounded back in material reality. New York—or rather New Jersey; we’d landed one state over—was oven-hot and unbearably sticky, sun radiating off the black tarmac in waves, and cars and taxis blaring horns and shoving in and out to the curb in an ongoing wave that was both always the same and always different.
Aadhya pulled up to the curb in a massive white vehicle only slightly smaller than a campervan, and we climbed into the blessed relief of the air-conditioning and her arms around me, squeezing me tight: she was alive, she was here, out in the world with the sun hammering on the car windows. She’d made it out of the Scholomance, and if she had, and I was here with her, then I had, too. It was a reminder of gratitude, and I couldn’t help but feel some, even with everything else.
When the honking behind us started to reach the frenzied pitch ofno we really mean it,Aad finally let go of me and started driving with slightly alarming confidence: the car wasn’t as full-on magic as Alfie’s London race car, but it had clearly been told in no uncertain terms that she knew how to drive and therefore it was going to do the right thing for her at all times. The right thing seemed to involve a lot of honking at taxi drivers and weaving aggressively through traffic. I sat in the front seat staring out at the passing road full of cars.It looked as though someone had come through with a pump and inflated everything in the scene by thirty percent, highway and cars and all, before going away satisfied.
“Are you okay?” Aadhya said, glancing over at me. “Chloe said we could come straight in, but I can call her if you need to lie down for a while.”
I wasn’t okay, but I’d had the sleep I’d desperately needed, and I wasn’t going to get any better by going to lie down for a while. Getting to New York was the only chance I had to get anywhere near a more permanent kind of okay, and I already knew it was going to be the long way round. “No,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We hadn’t been invitedinto the actual enclave. New York was on high alert, and in any case strangers don’t normally get ushered into enclaves, unless of course the enclave is under attack by a maw-mouth and desperately needs the stranger to haul them out of a ditch. Chloe met us at a pavement café somewhere in Manhattan, I couldn’t have told you where, on a side street full of townhouses. The fortress of skyscrapers mostly just loomed in the distance, although on the corner someone had knocked down a quarter of the block and put up a complicated steel-and-grey-glass tower some twenty stories high that gave the impression of having been put down by accident in the wrong place.
Chloe was dressed properly mundane in denim and a T-shirt, much more sensible than Liesel’s somehow-still-pristine white dress, and there was an older man with her at the table whose clothes might have passed for the same at a quick glance. But if you looked just a smidge longer at the waistcoat he had on, there were more pockets than ought tohave been able to fit, and the small gold buttons on them were inscribed with tiny runes. I was willing to bet that when he touched each one, he got out exactly what he needed.
I knew that Orion’s dad was an artificer, and that Chloe was bringing him to meet us, so presumably this had to be him, but even so, I found it hard to believe. But Chloe said, “Mr. Lake, this is El—Galadriel Higgins,” after we sat down, and I had to accept that yes, he was Balthasar Lake. It wasn’t that he didn’t look like Orion. They had more or less similar noses, and the same bony wrists, and a scattering of other details. I just couldn’t see how Orion had come from him. It was like looking at a maze puzzle in a book with the beginning and the end clearly marked, and no path that made sense in between.
Most people would have said the same about me and Mum, of course, but those were only the people who didn’t understand the principle of balance, like the guests at the commune who always looked mildly surprised when they first found out she was my mum, and asked if I was adopted, and then only got even more surprised if they spent any time in my company. But any wizard whodidunderstand the principle of balance would have spent a day with us and then would nod wisely and say oh yes, of course.
Of course, both of those reactions enraged me so badly that I’d gone to great lengths at school to avoid telling anyone about her, so I was being a hypocrite, but I couldn’t help it. Icouldeasily believe Balthasar was what he was, one of the best artificers in New York enclave and therefore in the whole wide world. When we’d walked up, he’d been frowning at the building on the corner with the kind of abstract dissatisfaction that goes with fixing something inside your own head. If you’d shown me some piece of precisely balancedartifice the size of a jet and told me he’d built it, I wouldn’t have questioned it for an instant. I could tell he was powerful. Only it was a normal, expected kind of power, too ordinary to have Orion on the other side of it. Idounderstand balance, and I didn’t understand him.
Also, I’d stupidly not thought at all about what I was going to say to him. I hadn’t prepared any of those gracious empty phrases that I’d wanted so much myself. The only sentence clear in my head was:Can I please have some mana to go open up the school and kill your son?The only reason I didn’t just start blubbing again was I knew I hadn’t the right to do it in front of his dad. Orion had been my friend, my something more, mine, for less than a year; he’d been theirs for his whole life, and they’d surely sent him to the Scholomance with more hope of getting him back out than any other parents in the world.
Back in the Scholomance, I’d put together a story about Orion’s family in my head, about his enclave; about all the things they’d done to him tomakehim want to be a hero, to make him think hehadto be one, or else be a monster and a freak; all the ways they hadn’t let him be human. But now with his dad in front of me, being a human being instead of a monster himself, I couldn’t help but recognize with a sharp pang of guilt how convenient that story was forme.It had given me the right to ask Orion to walk away from his family and his home to be with me, to abandon the people who had raised him and who had hopes for him.
And even if their hopes had all been selfish, he still hadn’t died carrying out one oftheirschemes. I was the one who’d come up with the brilliant idea of saving everyone in the whole bloody school and future generations to boot, like we could do something like that without paying the price. Orionhad paid for us all, and he’d paid attheircost—his parents and his enclave, the effort they’d put into raising him and all their wishes to see him again.
So I clamped down on the quaver in my voice and grated out, “I’m sorry,” feeling even as the words left my mouth how utterly inadequate and stupid they were.
But Mr. Lake only said, remote, “Chloe tells me you and Orion worked together on this plan to lure the mals into the school.” It was unbearably polite and neutral. I would have rather he’d shouted at me, demanded to know what I’d been thinking, what sort of arrogant twat had I been to think I could make the world better, how his son had ended up the only one left behind. He ought to have been angry. Iwantedhim angry.
“It was my idea,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true—my idea had been todo something,and it had taken Liu, and Yuyan from Shanghai, and Aad and Liesel and Zixuan and a lot of other people to work out the details. But I half wanted to provoke him into a reaction. “It was just the two of us at the gates, at the end. We were about to go through, and then Patience came at us. Orion—he shoved me through.”
I had to stop and swallow down an entire tangle of feelings. Balthasar didn’t wait for me to keep going. “I’m sure you did your best,” he said. “Orion was always very brave. He would never have wanted anyone else to suffer in his place.”
There was a way he could have said those same exact words that would have been someone plastering over one of the ugly miserable wrong things that happen in the world, a parent trying to build meaning out of the worst thing that had ever happened to them. People come to Mum with those stories in their mouths all the time. She had to teach me as a kid to stop telling them that their stories were nonsense, even when they obviously were. But Balthasar wasn’t trying tobelieve in this story. He was just using the words as a convenient plank to get from one step of the conversation to another, as if this mattered to him just as much as that hollow nonsense conversation I’d acted out with Yancy and Liesel down in London’s forgotten underbelly.
“So how can I help you, El?” he went on. “Chloe says you were offered a guaranteed seat at school but didn’t accept it. I’m afraid I can’t renew that—”
He paused on his own, possibly because Aadhya and Chloe and Liesel were sitting at the table with us and their faces warned him, even before I snarled, “Go tohell,” on a surge of rage, and everything on the table around us shook with a wild alarmed clattering. “Patience has him. Orion’strapped in a maw-mouth,and you think I’m here to beg a place from you? You couldn’t pay me to come live in your fucking enclave. The only good thing in it isgone.” I only stopped there because one of the water glasses fell off and shattered into pieces on the pavement.
So obviously I’d been lying when I was going on about being respectful of his parents’ greater claim to grief. I wanted to unhinge my jaw and bite his entire face off. It was almost worse than Mum talking about Orion. Mum hadn’t even known him, much less been hisdad.I had to get up and walk away while the waiters came over with a tea towel and a bin to get rid of the glass.
Chloe came timidly after me. “El, I’m so sorry. I didn’t have much time to—I tried to explain—”
I just waved her off without trusting myself to say words, and then I turned round and went back to the table, once the mundanes were gone again. “I broke the school off into the void,” I said, savagely, “but it’s probably not all the way gone. I need to know where the doors are, and I need enough mana to get in, so I can kill Patience. That’s how you can help me.Unless you don’t mind Orion screaming until everyone who remembers the Scholomance is dead. And if youdon’tmind that, say so, and I’ll get it some other way.”
It wasn’t fair in the least, of course. Why shouldn’t his dad be suspicious of some strange girl showing up, displaying her grief for Orion? In fact, I’m sure it’s a routine thing whenever an enclaver kid dies: other wizards from their year turning up at the enclave gates with earnest stories of school romance and promises made. But I wasn’t feeling fair. And meanwhile Balthasar was staring at me as though I’d grown a second head. He looked back at Chloe, who was only just shy of wringing her hands in anxiety, and then at me. “That’swhy you want—”
Bile climbed my throat. “That’s all I can do for him now,” I said. “Sorry, did you think I was offering to bring back your perfect weapon? He’s gone, like the whole place is gone, and I can’t fix that, and I wouldn’t bring him back to you if I could, you sitting there bleating at me about howbravehe was. No one’s brave inside a maw-mouth. He was an idiot who thought he had to be a hero instead of a human being, and that’syourfault, you sorry bastards, the whole lot of you.”
I wasn’t expecting him to help me after that howl, but I’d given up on him helping me anyway. I turned round and was ready to march back to Aadhya’s car and go, but he got up and intercepted me, catching me by the shoulders with the first real emotion in his face: not grief, not anger, just utter bewilderment, as though I didn’t make any sense to him at all, and he said, “You really,” and stopped there, as if the next word didn’t even matter; as if he found it impossible to believe that anyone had reallyanythingedOrion, and then he looked back at Chloe and said, “Orionreally—?” and his voice cracked, audibly. She nodded, urgently, and he let go of me and turned away, put a clenched fist up to his mouth, whichwent clownishly turned-down at the corners, his whole face wrenched. As though it hadn’t meant anything to him that Orion haddied,but this—this meant everything.
