Page 5 of The Golden Enclaves
In justice to Liesel, however, enclaves getting attacked and destroyed left and rightwashighly significant news from the perspective of most wizards, even me. I had substantial objections to the whole enclave system, and I’d opted firmly out of joining one myself, but that didn’t mean I approved of some psychotic maleficer deliberately ripping them open allover the world and dumping a lot of otherwise innocent people into flaming ruin or out into the void.
However, that was some distance from trying todosomething about it. Staying here in a nice quiet yurt in the woods seemed like a much better option than getting involved, even with the leaky roof. “Sorry, but London will have to look after itself,” I said.
“Why, so you can grow moss along with your house?” Liesel said, cuttingly. “This is no place for you.”
“Who asked you, exactly?” I said.
“Liu did, of course,” Liesel said, taking the question literally, and then waved her hand over me and my patently absurd existence. “How would I know, otherwise? We all thought you were dead along with Lake.”
I stared at her, feeling mildly betrayed; although to be fair, if Liu’s goal had been to find someone to forcibly drag me out of a hole who wasn’t a continent away, Liesel wasn’t a bad choice. “She didn’t tell you to recruit me to helpLondon.”
“No,” she said. “She told me you were alive and sitting in a commune with no electricity and no plumbing. I didn’t need to be told this was stupid.”
“Does this sort of thing usually work for you, insulting people you’re asking for favors?” I said, although it wasn’t very heated; it came out more as a fascinated inquiry. She’d got lucky with the timing of her approach: I still wasn’t able to generate anger, so what I felt mostly was impressed by her chutzpah. I couldn’t even imagine what Liesel had in mind for me to do, unless it was along the lines of set a thief to catch a thief.
“I am not asking you for afavor,” Liesel said. “A maw-mouth broke through the wards this morning. A big one. They’re holding it off from the council room, but not for much longer. Once it gets in there, that will be the end ofLondon. No one’s willing to send help. They’re all afraid for themselves. Well?” She finished on a belligerent note, while my whole stomach turned over and wrapped itself into a small lump like bread dough being punched down.
Thatwouldbe a true disaster, no matter your feelings on enclaves: London enclave, one of the biggest and most powerful in the world, and all its vast stockpile of mana, going into the belly of a maw-mouth. The thing might get nearly as big as Patience in that one gigantic meal. And in the meantime whoever this maleficer was, ripping apart enclave wards, they would be out there, too, presumably getting ready to have another go. What a spectacular team they could become. It wouldn’t much matter if I refused to fulfill my own prophesied destiny of spreading death and disaster if instead I stood back and let the two of them sort it out for me.
That still wasn’t anything like an inducement, of course. I very much didn’t want to fight a maw-mouth. I’d have done it to save Orion, but that didn’t mean I was ready to make a regular job of it. Everyone’s afraid of being devoured by a maw-mouth, but I’m afraid of it on a much more intimate and specific level. As far as I know, I’m only the second wizard alive who’s ever survived the experience, and the other one’s the Dominus of Shanghai.
But—I had in factsurvived,and the maw-mouth hadn’t. I’m completely alone in the distinction of having killed one of them all by myself. Even the legendary Krakow incident of dubious historicity involved a circle of seven, and the purge of Shanghai had required more than forty wizards all told, building mana together for the attempt. And in fact, I’d killedtwomaw-mouths. A second very small one had come into the school during graduation, lured in by our honeypot trap—and Liesel had seen me destroy it. And that was why she was here to recruit me to come and help.
So it wasn’t an inducement, but it wasmovement:a hard shove out of the rut I was sitting in. “Well, that’s a magnificent offer,” I said, trying to fend her off. “It’s just what I’ve wanted, to risk my life fighting a maw-mouth for the London enclave. Why exactly did the council think I’d agree?”
“We didn’t ask their opinion. You think there was time to talk it over?” Liesel said. “We came for you ourselves.”
“Who’swe?”
“Alfie and Sarah are down there. I told them to wait.” Liesel waved a hand irritably in the direction of the rest of the commune. “What difference does it make? Do you want a signed contract for payment? You wouldn’t take anything before. Are you going to be a hermit your whole life just because Lake is dead? Grow up! Someone’s tearing down the enclaves of the world, there’s a maw-mouth about to devour London. This is no time for you to sit around crying.Hewouldn’t.”
I stood up in outrage—I didn’t whack myself on the roof struts again, but it was a near thing—but Liesel just folded her arms and stared me in the face and didn’t give an inch. Vicious and brilliant as usual, because I couldn’t even argue. Orion would absolutely have sailed off to help, if he’d been alive to do it. And he might have been—if I’d done something different, if I hadn’t panicked and tried to get him just to run away, the last time a maw-mouth had shown up for me to fight.
I didn’t actually say anything to Liesel. She was right, but I could still with great pleasure have slapped her. Anyway, she recognized that she’d won; she gave a short nod and turned and went out of the yurt to wait for me.
I stood there for a moment alone with the irregular dripping. I turned and stared down at the sutras on the bed, the cover a satiny gleaming in the dim light. I bent down andpicked them up and carefully packed them into their book chest and stood with it a moment, holding it in my hands. They had ridden me all the way here, back to the summoner, only Mum wasn’t going to be able to do anything with them. They weren’t healing spells. The final incantation needed so much mana capacity I didn’t actually see how it could even be cast by anyone who wasn’t me.
WasIgoing to do anything with them? I didn’t know anymore, but it clearly didn’t make sense for me to take them to London for a fight. In fact, that was a selfish incentive to go. At least it saved me having to decide right away.
“I’m going to leave you with Mum,” I said. I’d got used to talking to them. “I know she’ll look after you for me until I get back.”
Ordinarily I’d have said a lot more—I’d have fretted and told them how sorry I was to leave them for even a minute, rambled out some plans for them, anything to encourage them to stay. I couldn’t do it this time. If they vanished on me, that would save me the trouble of deciding. I didn’t want that to happen, but only just enough to do what I was doing. I touched the cover once more, then I closed the lid on them, and carried them over to the table and left them there, safely out of the rain.
Then I wrote Mum a note on a scrap of paper:London enclave’s in trouble, I’ve gone to help.I almost left it at that. I couldn’t help thinking that it would have been a decent revenge forKeep far away from Orion Lake.It still hurt like knives to think of him gone with no one missing him, the person and not the power, except me alone. What I really wanted even more was to write her a long juvenile screed telling her off for having judged Orion after what she’d done herself: I could bundle all my miseries up together and heave them out onto the page in one steaming mess.
But I couldn’t bear to do that to her, even if I almost felt I owed it to him. I stood over my scribble for a single lingering moment of sour resentment, wallowing in the fantasy of meanness, and then I added,Home soon. Love, El.
When I turned to the doorway, Precious was sitting up right in the middle of it, glowing white against the overcast sky outside and glaring up at me meaningfully. “Youdon’t make any sense to take to a fight, either,” I told her, but she ran at me and came up my leg and jumped for the lower hem of my dress, then scampered up and crawled into my pocket. I put my hand inside it and she curled up warm and small and determined within it. “All right,” I said. I couldn’t make myself take her out and put her down.
Liesel was standing impatiently on the muddy footpath, under what was pretending for the benefit of mundanes to be an umbrella but was actually some kind of artifice keeping her dry. It bobbed over between us, and we went down the hill without a single drop making it through.
Alfie and Sarah were all the way down by the main buildings of the commune, doing their best to charm the locals. It was really odd to see them, in their own impractically glamourous outfits which should’ve got dirty just walking in from the caravan pitch. They were even standing wrong, holding themselves unnaturally straight with their faces in stiff smiles. I thought at first they were simply overdoing it, trying to put their best foot forward for the mundanes; Alfie and Sarah had probably barely ever come out into the real world in their whole childhood. Being around mundanes made it hard to cast spells and use artifice, and I imagine that was especially uncomfortable for enclavers, since they had so much mana to spare that they used magic to keep off the rain when an umbrella would really do perfectly well if you even needed one.
But when we came into view, Alfie’s head jerked roundtowards me so hard that I realized he was just desperately holding the line and actually he was all but vibrating with tension. “El, so good to see you,” he said, with what could have passed for an air of experiencing a mildly pleasant surprise, unless you knew him, and then by his standards, he sounded two steps short of complete hysteria, too loud and frayed at the edges. “Liesel’s told you? Sorry to poach her like this,” he said smilingly to Philippa, who was one of the mundanes being charmed, exactly as if he were swooping past a lunch table at the Scholomance full of loser kids to carry me off to his own. Which he’d tried to do with me in the past without success, but it’s a fairly reliable method for enclavers usually, so he hadn’t lost the habit of trying.
And in this case, Philippa was there and ready to help him. She darted a look at me that was faintly incredulous—what were these ludicrously posh people aftermefor?—and said only, “I’m sure it’s nothing to us,” a bit disdainfully, as if she didn’t think much of his taste. I imagine she would have been perfectly happy for him to drop me in an unmarked ditch when he was done.
Alfie didn’t want any more permission, and not inaccurately assumed I couldn’t much want to stay anywhere in Philippa’s vicinity. He was instantly turning towards me with his arm outstretched to gather me up. I eyed him resentfully, but inertia was on his side, now. I’d come down the hill, after all. Why had I bothered, if I wasn’t going? So I went.
