Alfie took me back the other way and turned in to the very next side corridor—thankfully no sight of the one where the remnants of maw-mouth were presumably still putrefying—and then almost immediately opened a door out into the gardens, like golden Beatrice guiding Dante towards Paradise, leaving poor damned Virgil behind.
Alfie wasn’t grudging about it at all, either, even though I’d done the equivalent of putting spurs to his side. He took me to a place where the waterfall jumped in a solid silver stream just past the edge of another terrace, so I could put my hands into it and cup the water and splash my face and press my hands cool against my cheeks and the back of my neck until I stopped feeling sick. I took Precious out of my pocket and put her on the edge of a small hollow in the rock, filled with clear water, and she rolled her whole body around in it; I would’ve liked to do the same.
Killing the maw-mouth hadn’t fixed whatever damage had been done to the enclave; I could still feel the sloshing tides of mana underneath, and through the power-sharer on my wrist. But my getting rid of it had freed up all the power and all the wizards who’d desperately been trying to hold the thing off, and they were going back to work straightaway. Even while I was standing there, the sunlamps began to brighten—in a few lurching stages, like someone turning a dimmer switch up and down a few times on their way to getting it fully turned on—and the platform itself began to feel a little more solid, somehow. It didn’t feel anymore like the gardens were about to sink under the wave; now the sensation was more like sitting at a table with one leg a bit short: you couldn’t put any weight on it or it would tip, but it was still standing, with a whole team of people working at top speed to prop it up again.
When I turned back around, Alfie had poured a drink for me out of a silver carafe like the one I’d glimpsed earlier, through the jungle of growth, so those were working again, too. Even though I didn’t want to put anything in my mouth, just the faint sweet smell of the drink made me feel better. So I did cautiously try a single sip, which washed all the sour nausea out of the back of my throat and let me take a clean, deep breath that I hadn’t quite realized I needed.
I drank the rest of it in small swallows, letting each one linger on my tongue, giving Precious drops on my fingertip to suck up, and as I neared the end, I started to feel almost calm. I don’t mean just calmed down, but calm. In a vaguely intoxicated way, but so what? I hadn’t been really properly calm in more than four years. Not even Mum’s spell had hushed me this way. Of course, Mum would have said that a month in the woods would be a better path to finding this quiet, but as I was instead here, killing maw-mouths, I welcomed this feeling, rolling down through me, tranquil and cool. The horror receded.
Alfie had sat down across from me on one of the smooth polished ordinary-looking stools, which were somehow as comfortable as armchairs, and was studying me with his long face furrowed and anxious. I assumed he was worrying about what I was going to do with this leash he’d shoved into my hands, so when he said, low, “El—I’m so sorry. It’s been so mad, we just tumbled out into the middle of…all this,” with a wave, I just waited a bit cynically for him to get around to asking me to let him out of his oath, and it took me completely by surprise when he went on, “I didn’t even ask you about Orion.”
It was like walking into a door someone had just opened into my face. “I know how close you were,” he kept on, while I sat there trying to cling to the beautiful calm instead of going into squawking sobs or yelling at him in a fury—how dare he be sorry about Orion, how dare he be the first and only person who’d said anything nice or even ordinarily polite to me about Orion? “It’s such a loss. It doesn’t seem right, after everything he did, both of you did.”
And it was all stupid and transparently obvious, and hearing him say it shouldn’t have made the slightest difference, but I jerked a short clumsy nod and put down the glass and then looked away trying not to cry, half angry and half grateful. It didn’t really mean anything, and at the same time it meant everything. I knew he hadn’t really cared about Orion, he hadn’t really known Orion, and it didn’t cost him anything to say a few nice words. But it was still the few nice words you did say, the ordinary unprofound bit of decency you felt obliged to offer another human being when death knocked on the door, and he’d given it, to me and to Orion, as if we were people. Not his nearest and dearest, perhaps, but people he was willing to feel a little bit sorry for. And he also didn’t keep talking; he stopped there and just sat with me, in the unending peace and beauty, with the water gurgling past us.
Delicate flowers like deep bells slowly began to bloom on the vines, petals popping back open, and after a little longer, tiny clockwork bees started coming out to poke among them. I could hear the sound of people coming for a good bit before they appeared: another carefully engineered politeness, since surely the passageway wasn’t making their notables take a long winding path through the gardens. Probably there was some artifice slowing down our experience of time, so it seemed longer to us than to them. I reached out for Precious and tucked her away in my pocket again. The terrace itself was surreptitiously growing to make room for the oncoming crowd, and more stools and chairs wandered in on all sides with the casual air of pretending they’d been there the whole time.
Alfie got progressively straighter in his chair on roughly the same timeframe, and stood up as they came. I didn’t need him to point out his father; there was substantial overlap, although his father was older, darker, and more staid, and looked weirdly familiar, as though I’d seen him somewhere before. I wondered if he’d ever shown up at the commune, when I’d been younger. Some of the enclavers do; Mum won’t actually turn someone away who’s coming to look for healing, although she’s perfectly willing to speak sharply to them about their lifestyle, so they prefer not to. He had a really lovely suit on, pale cream with creases crisp as knives, a deep-green shirt, and a cravat pinned with a massive robin’s-egg-sized chunk of opal: dressed up for his own demise.
Liesel was with him, along with several other highly polished figures, including the Dominus of London himself, Christopher Martel: a white-haired man leaning heavily on a bronze walking stick, his left eye and a chunk of face down to his cheekbone entirely covered with an elaborate piece of artifice like a monocle. I was reasonably sure the eye underneath, although extremely well done, was artifice itself, or an illusion; he’d probably lost the real one somehow, either directly or by trading it. Healing gets harder for wizards the older you get, but even in your twilight years, you can generally shove off even the most aggressive forms of cancer or dementia for a decade or two by giving up something important like an eye, if you also have several enormous buckets of mana to spend on the process.