“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 of smiling at 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 it was the 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 be better if 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’m unlucky, 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.
And in fact it hadn’t happened. Liesel said, even more flatly, “He’s a council member in Munich.”
“What?” I stared at her. “But—”
“Do you need me to spell it out in small words?” Liesel said coldly. “His wife is the daughter of the Domina. That is how he has his seat. So he told my mother if she wanted me to have a place in the Scholomance, she would keep hush and never contact him again. I have never met him. He sent money sometimes.” The words dripped with contempt, as well they might. Money’s fairly trivial for an enclaver to produce. Even most indie wizards can magic themselves up a fifty-pound note; the real limit is that the local enclave will come down on you if you start counterfeiting on a large enough scale to make things awkward for them. But there’s not an enclave in the world that doesn’t have a more or less unlimited supply.
I grimaced; I didn’t like being sympathetic towards Liesel. But leaving your kid outside for mals to hunt while you live cushy in your enclave…He wouldn’t even have suffered any horrible consequences for bringing her inside. No one ever gets kicked out of an enclave for a thing like cheating on your wife, even if the Dominus might want to. That’s the sort of thing that would make a Dominus lose their job. Enclavers—with reason—expect to get away with almost anything, including reasonably concealed use of malia, as long as it doesn’t actually threaten the enclave as a whole. That’s the only bright line none of them are allowed to cross; the rest are very pliable. But Liesel’s dad certainly could have lost his council seat over it. That was what he’d valued, more than her life. “That’s why you didn’t go to Munich,” I said. “Why not one of the other German enclaves?”
“What good would that do?” she said. “Munich is the most powerful of them. I need a more powerful enclave, not less.”
“To do what?” I said, because I couldn’t help myself, although I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know.
“The exact details will suggest themselves,” Liesel said, a bit dismissively. “But I mean to acquire a position where I am more powerful than his wife, and then I will be able to make her sorry.”
“For—”
“Killing my mother,” Liesel said. “It wasn’t an accident.”
She had a right to the irritated tone; as soon as she said it, the whole thing became obvious. Her dad had done his best to hide his dirty little secret, but his wife had found out anyway—presumably when he’d finally grudgingly pulled a string or two to get Liesel that promised Scholomance seat—and instead of binning her useless husband, she’d gone after Liesel’s mum, and she’d got her. And then Liesel had been forced to watch her mum sell off what was left of her life, just to get her over the finish line into the Scholomance.
It made sense to me of what Liesel was doing in ways I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted. It had been a lot easier to think she was just a bit of a shit person, ready to do anything to get into an enclave and have a cushy life of ease and power. But instead she’d just done the maths and reached the completely correct conclusion that the only way she was ever going to be able to make the daughter of Munich’s Domina feel so much as an instant’s regret was if she was the Domina of an even bigger enclave, or next to it. And unlike an ordinary sane person, she hadn’t looked at that solved equation and decided right, I’ll settle for the revenge of just living as well as I can; instead she’d made herself a thirty-year plan that started with step one: become valedictorian of the Scholomance, and marched off on it.
And she was still on it right now. Alfie was step two. I’d wondered why she’d been so determined to hook herself a powerful enclaver boyfriend at school, after she’d already made valedictorian, but of course now I understood. It wasn’t good enough to get into an enclave. She’d recognized that when she did, she’d be starting here, in the cheap seats, and she wanted a partner with a better position on the inside. It was actually a perfectly sensible and also a really good plan, as I should have expected.
“Sorry,” I said, very grudgingly. Mum would probably have tried to sit her down for a few months of conversation, but personally I didn’t blame her for wanting revenge. I still had vivid revenge fantasies about that twat who’d shoved me in the corridor in freshman year. But I’d got this far not liking Liesel and I wanted to keep on; it felt vaguely dangerous to stop.
Liesel only shrugged. “They had power, and my mother had none. The one with power decides what is going to happen,” she said, matter-of-fact. “So it’s better to have power, and it’s stupid not to take it when you have the chance. You come in here and save the whole enclave, and you take nothing. What a grand gesture! What will you do now if a maw-mouth comes to someplace else, not an enclave, and they don’t have mana to give you to fight it?”
“I’m not going in for a career of hunting maw-mouths!” I said.