“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 was another 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, “I tried to 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 is me, scowling in resentment, and how much of it is other people, 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 it was rice 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 and the 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 once it 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.”