Page 11 of The Golden Enclaves
She made a rude sniffing noise, then said, “Don’t start crying.” I gawked at her indignantly, drawing breath, and then she hit me with it: “Everything else worked. It was only you and Lake left. What went wrong?”
I didn’t especially want to cry; I’d quite have liked to punch her, though. “Why? Keeping it in mind fornexttime we need to trap all the maleficaria in the world?” I snarled at her.
“Is hedead?” Liesel said, as if she were speaking to a small child, albeit presumably one whose feelings she didn’t care about brutalizing.
“I hope so,” I said flatly. She could make anything she liked of that. I half wanted her to think I’d murdered Orion and left him on the floor of the Scholomance before flouncing away in triumph myself.
Only it was Liesel, so that didn’t work. “Because there wasanother maw-mouth,” she said, a statement more than a question. I’ve spent my whole life alarming people when I would have preferred to make a friend of them, or at least trade with them for a hammer or a pen, so of course now, when I’d have been glad to do a little intimidating, my target was impervious instead.
Also implacable. I gave up; I didn’t want to keep fighting her off, parrying her questions one after another while she went on jabbing me in every tender place. “It was Patience,” I said. “It had eaten Fortitude and was hiding somewhere in the school. It caught us at the gates just before the school broke away. And before you ask,” I added, savagely, “Itriedto just leave. He wouldn’t come. He shoved me out, and then it got him, and he wouldn’t let me pull him out. That’s all the story there is, so I hope it satisfies you. I’m going now.”
Liesel opened her arms out in a grand sweep. “Are you? Where? To sit in a tent and be rained on some more?”
“I suppose you think you’ve a better idea.”
“Yes,” Liesel said. “Come and have dinner.”
As soon as she said it, I couldn’t help but recognize that dinner was, in fact, inescapably a better idea than blundering out of the enclave into some unknown bit of London, with no way home and nothing in my pockets but a mouse. Mum never bothers about anything like that. If she needs to go somewhere, she thumbs a ride, and someone stops for her. If she’s hungry, she just asks the universe if there’s anything to spare, and more often than not, someone going by will pause and offer her something to eat or invite her to their house for dinner. I’m more likely to be required to hand over exact change before the universe grudgingly allows me to buy a bus ticket and a stale bun. And I can never tell how much of it isme,scowling in resentment, and how much of it isotherpeople,looking at a dark-skinned girl instead of my pink-and-gold mum smiling at them, and not being able to tell only makes me scowl the more.
Speaking of which, I would almost certainly have gone blundering out of the enclave nevertheless, just to spite Liesel and then myself, only she added, “Don’t be foolish. Alfie will drive you back afterwards,” and gestured to a small spiral stair that was now going up from the corner of the nook to a terrace overhead, and the smell of something indescribably good came wafting down. My best attempt would be telling you that it was like rice pudding I wanted to eat. It didn’t actually smell like rice pudding at all; the point is that I’ve never much liked rice pudding, but at school I ate it whenever I had the chance, because it was one of the best things you could get there. So now I could gladly go the rest of my life without ever eating it again, only I desperately wanted to eat whatever I was smelling up there, even if itwasrice pudding.
So I grudgingly trailed Liesel up the stairs. They went a long way, enough for my legs to start to get tired, and we came out onto a little terrace in front of a small hobbit-hole chamber set high up on the enclave walls. The setting wasn’t up to the standards of the gardens below. The archway ought to have had a door, but instead only had a curtain hung across it, and the room on the other side wasn’t much bigger than the bed it contained. The only other furnishing was a small half-moon stand jutting from the wall, barely enough to hold a night’s glass of water. There wasn’t even a lamp. The terrace itself had one slightly dim globe hanging over a small table and two chairs. The main cascade of the stream and the waterfalls were far away below on the other side of the low iron railing, and we were so close to the ceiling that there was a faint sideways glitter visible through the frosted glass, betraying the sunlamp spells for artifice.
For all Liesel’s sneers at my dripping yurt, her own quarters had a distinctly shabby flavor. They didn’t even come up to the standards of her clothing. But of course, even if you’re the valedictorian with a guaranteed enclave spot—the winner of the Scholomance grand prix if there was one—as soon as you get out you’re just a brand-new graduate, with no connections in your new enclave except for the one or two other brand-new graduates who largely made it out thanks to your help and would generally rather forget that fact. You’re as low on the enclave hierarchy as it gets.
I imagine it must have been disheartening for a lot of kids who’d spent their last four years working savagely to claim the one visible prize in our shared existence, only to realize they’d won nothing more than a ticket to the standing-room section, while all those enclaver kids who’d been courting them were going down to the box seats, or taking their places on the stage. You did hear about valedictorians who flamed out entirely afterwards, like they’d spent the fuel of their lives on that one burst; who stayed in the small room at the top of the stairs and never amounted to anything more.
Liesel clearly didn’t mean to be one of them. She’d already got up a delicate awning that blocked the worst of the glare, and her bed was canopied with twining white branches draped with glimmering netting. She’d coaxed or more likely bullied some of the glowing blossoms into vining up over her railing for extra illumination. She waved me to a chair at her little table, and there was another of the silver jugs waiting beside a bowl of couscous and a small blue-glazed tagine that wafted out the fantastic smell when she took off the lid. No rice pud in sight, thankfully.
Every single bite was perfect: if one was spicy, the next one was sweet, the next one salty, whatever my mouth most wanted, the dried fruits glowing like translucent jewels andthe almonds crunchy, each different vegetable bursting with flavor and perfectly done, tender without having gone to mush, and each piece as smooth as if they’d been cooked one at a time with brooding care before being precisely put down, even though it was one whole thing at the same time. Despite the ongoing faint nauseating churn of the wobbly mana below, I ate three platefuls and drank two glasses of whatever was in the jug, and Liesel shoveled in her fair share, and afterwards the dirty dishes vanished themselves away, presumably to some efficient set of cleaning spells.
By the time we’d finished, there was already a bustle of activity under way in the gardens below: a set of looping paths being reshaped to wider spans, with brighter lamps and seating areas being coaxed out along their length. Sir Richard was evidently wasting no time in clearing Alfie’s debt. The first guests even appeared at twilight: a handful of slightly wary outside wizards, instantly distinguishable even from high above, because they looked exactly like mundanes, whether in good suits or dresses or jeans. They were commuters: even at a distance I could see the grey bands round their upper arms, which had undoubtedly before now been good only for getting through the service entrance, and into the workshops and laboratories where they did gobs of work in the faint distant hope of being allowed into this inner sanctum someday. Their faces, upturned to the waterfall’s spray, caught the light of the globes in their dazzled eyes, and I wondered with a sour taste in my mouth if I’d really done them any favors, or if I’d only made them want it more.
“How determined are you to be stupid?” Liesel said abruptly.
“And I suppose you think you’re being clever,” I said, waving a hand round vaguely. I don’t know if what was in the jug was actually wine, but it was willing to behave like wine onceit got in me. “Signing your whole life over to get into this place, just so you can suck your blood and mana back with interest out of a hundred other wizards.”
“Very determined, I see,” Liesel said. “I am not sorry to have got an enclave place, since I am not stupid. My mother had to smile at enclavers her whole life just to keep me alive.”
“And what are you doing with Alfie, then?” I said, mean, and unjust to boot; I really couldn’t accuse her ofsmilingat him, as far as I’d seen. “You can’t like him.”
“Certainly I like him. He wants to make something of himself, he wants to be someone of importance.”
“And you’re going to make something of him, is that the idea?”
Liesel shrugged, matter-of-fact; so itwasthe idea. “He has what I need, and I have what he needs. Would it be better if I insisted on being with someone who had nothing to offer?”
“It would bebetterif you found someone you wanted to be with whether they fit into your spreadsheets or not,” I said tartly.
Liesel flicked this nonsensical suggestion away. “Most people are stupid, or tiresome, or they don’t know how to work. Why would I want to be with them? I only get impatient. But I don’t have to get impatient with Alfie, because he is worth being with regardless.” I screwed my mouth up at that, a bit disgruntled; it made Mum’s sort of sense, the kind where she’s always telling me that the most important thing is for a person to work out what’s good for them, even if it’s not what’s good for most people. “He does not insist on being useless, and even if he were, still it would be a good bargain, because he has everything, and I have only myself.”
“What about your mum?” I interrupted.
Liesel paused, and said a little stiffly, “She died when I was inducted.”
That clearly wasn’t coincidental; it meant her mum’s death had been scheduled. You can’t always make a grand bargain like Martel for an unearned decade more of life, if you’re not an enclaver with heaps of mana to spend. But there’s another deal you can almost always make. If, for instance, you know you’ve got fifty–fifty odds of making it past your child’s induction day, there’re some shady sorts of healers who’ll help you trade your chance of survival for the chance of dying, and then at least you know when it’s going to be.
I said, a bit incredulous, “And your dad’s gone, too?” I was still tipsy enough to be indelicate, or else maybe I just had waived any tact for dealings with Liesel. In my defense, that would have made for a fairly extreme form of bad luck.I’munlucky, as wizard kids go. If your parents have survived long enough to produce you, they’re generally grown wizards in the prime of life, and there really isn’t that much that can take out a grown wizard. We’re the worst monsters there are. Even her mum must have been unlucky, to get taken out young enough to have a school-aged kid: whatever had got her had likely involved a spell going wrong, or some curse going right. Losing both parents is fairly improbable.
