“Aren’t you?” Liesel said, contemptuously. “What else are you going to do?”
I could have done with a year of crying in the woods to answer that question, but under the circumstances, I had to say something or else get squashed flat, and I didn’t want to be squashed flat. So I said, “I’m going to build enclaves,” as if I’d decided, after all, that I was going to do that. “I’m going to build Golden Stone enclaves. Not fairyland castles and skyscrapers, just a few solid bunkrooms for kids to sleep in and a workroom or two, and it won’t take malia and generations of scheming to put them up.”
And I ought to have been grateful to Liesel, because it became the truth as I told it to her, the answer that I might easily have spent a year digging out of myself: yes, that was what I wanted to do. It was still my dream, even if it had been someone else’s dream before mine. It felt right in my own mouth and mind as I said it out loud: a dream worth chasing, a good life’s work.
“So,” Liesel said. “How many years will it take people to save the mana to put up one of your golden enclaves, and how many of their children will be eaten before they have enough? Why not tell London to give you ten years of mana, and go put up ten enclaves for children whose parents can’t afford it?”
That was nearly the exact question I’d spent my entire childhood yelling at Mum in a frothing rage, so fortunately I had an answer for it handy. “Because as soon as I start doing that, I’m not putting up enclaves anymore,” I said. “I’m doing work for London, or New York, or whoever’s got the most mana, and doing a bit of charity on the side. They’ve been trying to get my mum to turn into their private healer for years and years.”
“That is not true,” Liesel said. “Maybe for your mother, but this is not the same thing. How often will an enclave need your help? For what? If they are begging you to help because there is a monster about to eat their home and all their children, you will go anyway! You came here. That is not why you will not take their payment. You don’t take it because you think you are better than them, because you want to make them be ashamed of themselves, and so what if you could do so much more good for everyone else with their help.”
If only that hadn’t sounded quite so plausible. I glared at Liesel. “And it’s loads of good you’ll be doing for all the little people, is it? Anyway, why are you trying to talk me into bullying London for mana? You’re in London, now, in case you hadn’t noticed, and you’ve got Alfie to ride piggyback all the way to Dominus. Don’t tell me it’s because you like me.”
She glared back. “You’re not a useless person! You could make something of yourself, if you were willing to try. But not if you insist on behaving in this unreasonable way, as if you think everything must become terrible and evil the moment you make any sort of compromise.”
That took me aback; it was obviously as high a compliment as she had to pay, so apparently she did like me. In fact, I realized very belatedly, before asking me to dinner, she’d fixed her hair and her clothes again, and the curtain had been tied up on purpose to display the rigged-out bed. There was obviously a checklist somewhere labeled getting Galadriel on board and she’d jotted down thinks I’m well fit because she’d noticed me noticing her, back at school. She was letting me know she’d be happy to swap her enclaver boyfriend for me.
Or, well, why swap; she’d love to collect the set if we’d cooperate. Her and Alfie and me, that was a recipe for world domination, much less for squashing her enemies in Munich like the cockroaches they were. I was only surprised she hadn’t yet asked me outright. Probably she was making a massive effort to be tactful because Orion had just died and maybe I wanted to waste some of my time being sad instead of following her own highly superior therapy program of meticulously planning out a campaign for victory.
And I’d been absolutely right: she was dangerous, because as soon as I realized that offer was on the table along with the tagine, I discovered I could understand why Alfie had taken her up on it. If you had everything, if you had power, and you wanted to use it—and yet you had sense enough to doubt yourself, whether you were really going to do a brilliant job of it, and also perhaps had a bit too much caution, then what more magnificent offer could anyone make you: all the brains in the world and all the drive along with them, to tell you exactly what to do and calculate out to the nth degree the best way to do it and then give you a good hard shove on top of it.
Liesel would make something of Alfie, and he really did want something made of himself. Even at school, he’d helped with the plan more wholeheartedly than almost any of the other enclavers. He’d wanted to believe, almost as much as the Scholomance itself wanted to believe, in its nonsense motto: to protect all the wise-gifted children of the world. Which made more sense now, because it had been his family’s great triumph. He wanted to live up to it. I couldn’t even look down on that ambition, although I was fairly certain that he was going the wrong way, and his actual ancestor had mostly been a scheming mastermind looking to cement the power of his own enclave.
And if what I wanted was to build as many golden enclaves as I could—Liesel was telling me she’d be willing to sign on to the project, and with all her brains and drive and ruthlessness, she’d make something of that, too. Give her ten years, and every enclave of the world would end up signed on to donate mana, presumably as some sort of insurance policy—just chip in a bit, not more than you can spare, and if a maw-mouth or an argonet shows up at your enclave gates, Galadriel will swoop in and save you. Or she’d sell them on the benefits of having satellite enclaves nearby for their commuters, dangling a taste of the better life. I could envision the shape of her whole program, even if I couldn’t have executed it myself in a century. And when it was done, there would be loads more children sleeping safe, all over the world, than I’d ever manage by plodding around to one small group of wizards at a time. And I wouldn’t have to give anything that I wouldn’t give anyway.
It wasn’t a trick, was the really seductive thing about it. Liesel wasn’t a liar; she wasn’t promising anything she didn’t mean to deliver, and she wasn’t even hiding the cost of it either. She was laying it out for me plainly: the price was compromise. To smile at enclavers once in a while when I didn’t mean it and go to their parties and make it just that bit easier for them to give me what I wanted; and why the bloody hell not, if it got me what I wanted, and what I wanted was good?
I didn’t even disagree. I thought she was right, in the general case. Only I’m not the general case, and I’ve known that ever since I was five years old with my great-grandmother, the world-famous seer, reciting my doom over my head, my glorious destiny to sow death and destruction among the wizards of the earth, shatter enclaves and murder thousands, and I know without a doubt that the first step towards fulfilling her prophecy would be made with all the good intentions in the world.