I had no idea why Yancy was here, though; she wasn’t a London enclaver herself. The opposite, if anything. London enclave had managed to survive the Blitz by opening up loads of entrances all over the city, so even if more than one got bombed in a night, it wouldn’t mean the whole enclave went. After the war, they’d closed most of them up again, but Yancy and her crew had worked out various clever ways of prying and wedging them back open a bit, to get into those unreal spaces I’d mentioned: some sort of vague undefined pockets between the real world and the enclave. They’d camp out in one for months or even years at a time, enjoying the shelter from maleficaria and the convenience of access to the void, until the enclavers managed to find and boot them out, and then they’d scurry away and find another spot to wriggle in through.
So I suppose she did have an incentive to save London from being devoured by a maw-mouth, only why they’d have looked to her, I didn’t quite get. But they clearly had. She said to Sir Richard, “Right, that’s us sorted, too, then. I assume we’re allowed to throw the occasional party on the green, in your charming scheme?” she asked me, in high pleasure, and didn’t wait for an answer before giving another bray. “Nice to meet you, Galadriel Higgins.” She made it sound like a sly joke between us. “Let’s have a chat sometime.” With that, she gave a wriggle that shook all the rags and tatters, and by the time my eyes would focus again, she’d disappeared down one of the paths, although singing loudly enough—just a nonsense ro ma ro ma ma, gaga ooh la la bit from an old pop song over and over—that the waterfall had to get energetic to drown her out.
There was a lot of visible irritation in her wake, with sour looks at Sir Richard. I imagined he’d been the one who’d brought her into the mix, for whatever reason. He managed his own face better, or else he sincerely didn’t mind Yancy. He just gave a bit of a sigh and said to me, in wry tones, “You don’t object to reasonable visiting hours, I hope, or it’ll be nightly raves until seven o’clock in the morning.” He hadn’t been swapping looks with everyone else; he’d just shot a questioning one straight at Alfie, and evidently he’d got enough from that direction to reach the astonishing conclusion that what I wanted was what I’d asked for.
Martel was apparently having more difficulty swallowing the idea. He had gone from polite staring to flat-out staring, and the smile had gone. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to sit here and haggle over details with them; Alfie’s oath would do a better job of negotiating for me. “You asked, so I’ve told you,” I said shortly. “Do it or don’t.”
I took off the power-sharer—I’d like to say it wasn’t a wrench to give it up, but I’d be lying—and held it out to Alfie. He took it from me with another speaking look at his father that was loud enough for me to hear too: see, I told you so. Sir Richard watched the handover with his long face furrowing a bit. I assume his grandfather had negotiated his own deal with London’s council to get it, back in the 1890s, in exchange for the keys to the Scholomance. Probably a permanent council seat for the head of the family, too. Manchester enclave had poured the best part of their strength into getting the place built; London had still got a bargain.
And they’d got a bargain this time, too. They had their enclave; their vast oceans of power, storm-tossed or not; even their secret garden was still theirs. They’d only have to endure letting other people tramp through it once in a while, and even that would only help them settle their frothing mana stores at first: getting in a bunch of wizards to stare at and believe in all of the wondrous artifice would probably be just the thing to help stabilize the place. I stood up. “You won’t mind me having a walk before I go.”
“Not at all,” Martel said. He’d pasted the smile back on at last, although it was looking thin. “Please make yourself at home.”
* * *
I didn’t go very far. All I wanted was to be somewhere alone and away from everything, and the gardens obligingly took me straight to a small nook draped with vines half hidden from the outside, green and quiet, with the pattering of a side waterfall going past the leaves. It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all. There was nothing to do in the nook but think or feel or be, and I didn’t want any of those things. I couldn’t rest; I wasn’t tired. I would have liked to be, but I wasn’t. Killing a maw-mouth in a single breath, a maw-mouth big enough to eat London, nothing to it. As long as I made up my mind to do it instead of insisting it couldn’t be done, so Orion decided to face it without me.
That was a very bad thought. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to sit here thinking it, in this garden that I’d saved instead of Orion, but it was the only thing my brain could find to think. Precious climbed out of my pocket and roamed over the beautiful twining ironwork railings and the branches, and I tried to just follow her movement with my eyes and breathe in steady waves, in and hold and a long sighing-out, but it wasn’t any use. The lovely soft drugged calm of the drink Alfie had given me had been completely crushed beneath my irritation and anger, and the more I tried to be inside my head, the more I was aware of the queasy rush of the roiling mana beneath my feet, horribly similar to the grotesque gushing wave of the maw-mouth coming apart around my legs. My stomach turned and I gave up.
What would have helped was work, but I hadn’t any to do, and if it had been the kind of work I was made for, I couldn’t have done it anyway. I’d handed back the power-sharer, and the tank was empty. So instead I got up and started doing push-ups to build mana. I was still in the very best shape of my life, having trained for the graduation five-hundred-meter dash as though my life depended on it, which it had, and my conditioning was only improved for having spent most of a week being fed and watered and loved in Wales. I did the push-ups properly, all the way down and up again, counting them off.
The poor confused garden slowly opened up the nook to either side to make slightly more graceful room around me, and when I came up from number seventeen, it tentatively offered me a tidy basket of yoga mats in the corner of the space. That would have been within normal operating parameters: surely eight or nine London wizards in expensive athletic wear got together in the early mornings on the regular for a charming group session overlooking the waterfall. They wouldn’t be building mana, though; it would just be for the pleasure of moving their bodies. They ought to come out and spend a weekend in Wales on a retreat. I ignored the basket and made my hands into fists and kept going on the bare stone, counting off my driblets of painfully built mana as they went into the spent crystal still hanging round my throat, the faintest glow starting as I hit thirty.
Round then I noticed that Liesel was standing there watching me, her arms crossed over her chest and frowning. I loathe push-ups; I’d been half wishing someone would come and give me something else to do, or at least a good shove, and Liesel was certainly the woman for that. But I went all the way to fifty before I let myself get up again, defiantly dripping sweat all over the towering iridescent gladiolas in the nearest planter. I expected her to call me a numpty; I felt like one myself, to be honest. It was too much like lugging a jug ten miles from a weak muddy stream just to water a plant that was standing next to a massive lake.
But she didn’t; she just went on studying me in an odd narrow way. I had the sensation I was on the wrong side of a pane of one-way glass, and on the other side, taking me in, was some vast clockwork machinery full of peering lenses and vibrating with the force of thirty thousand gears churning away. I didn’t enjoy it. “Did you want something else?” I said coldly. “Track down any other maw-mouths?”
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 for next time we need to trap all the maleficaria in the world?” I snarled at her.
“Is he dead?” Liesel said, as if she were speaking to a small child, albeit presumably one whose feelings she didn’t care about brutalizing.