Also Alfie threw in an earnest look at me as he spoke, and I wasn’t going to be any part of that us. Just because I hadn’t wanted the entire enclave to be destroyed with every living person in it dying horribly wasn’t the same as adding myself to the roster. “Yes, who can imagine why, it’s not like you’ve been chasing them into the streets on the regular,” I said, with a sniff that went into roller-coaster loops of deep snide green. Liesel only sighed a starburst of exasperation and told Alfie, “I will be back soon.”
“Ready, then?” Yancy said, having a final swig herself. She beckoned us along after her into the labyrinth path, doing a hopping sort of dance between the stones as if it mattered tremendously which particular spot of grass she put her feet on. Liesel started to copy her almost immediately, and in a moment or three—I was having trouble making my brain work—I caught up and realized that it did matter. Each time our footsteps came down, little sparkly bursts came out, and the bursts were in different colors depending on where you landed. Yancy was very deliberately going for pale-blue bursts. I couldn’t tell how she knew which way to go, so all I could do was try my hardest to land wherever she’d stepped, which wasn’t easy when the grass sprang back up at once. Liesel and I only managed to land the right color one in two.
But even Yancy sometimes got a dark blue or a white instead, so presumably it was a bit flexible. And after capering around through maybe two labyrinth branches, I became increasingly certain that we were going somewhere, and not just to the center of the maze but somehow past it and on to a completely different destination—the same feeling as walking a long route to class inside the Scholomance, a familiar one, where you can’t be sure exactly how long it’s going to take, but you know you’re getting close, the classroom door will be on your right after the next turn, or maybe the one after that; and when Yancy said, “All right, here we go, watch your step going down,” I was perfectly ready to follow her, and did, not only down but out of the world as well.
When I’d just been swanning around a massive enclave built inside the void and out of borrowed space—not to mention having spent four years inside the even-bigger Scholomance—it might seem like nitpicking to complain about being in unreal spaces, but it very much wasn’t. Yancy had mentioned that the enclave had traded in a riding ring for the memorial plaza. When we stepped out of the meadow, we landed inside it: an elaborate pavilion where people would have sat with cool drinks to watch the riders show off on enchanted horses. Out the front I could see the ring, or rather where the ring had been. It wasn’t quite the brutal emptiness of staring into the void itself: more like looking at the void through a sheet of transparent film that someone had printed with a faint black-and-white photo of an old riding ring, and on the far side of it, there was an even fainter outline of a stable, like a set designer had done a faint pencil sketch on a black backdrop to show the painters where to work.
The pavilion itself just barely qualified as a solid surface. We were walking on old pitted wood planks, and they did look like wood, but they didn’t sound like wood. Our footsteps sounded odd and muffled instead, like we were walking across a carpet laid over a wooden floor. That kind of mismatch with reality is a blaring warning sign that you’re in a space that’s about to come apart and drop you into the void, and get out now. It reminded me forcibly of the time at school when I’d aggressively disbelieved in one of the walls—I was eldritched at the time—and the walls had obligingly started to buckle.
But Yancy didn’t seem especially concerned. She looked all around with satisfaction and even gave the front railing a pat as she went. “There, you’re holding up nicely, aren’t you?” she said conversationally, to the place. “The whole enclave might have gone into the sea, it wouldn’t drag you down. This old ruin will outlast the rest of the place,” she added over her shoulder to us. “They had Queen Elizabeth out here once, you know.”
“I thought you said they tore the place down a hundred years ago,” I blurted.
“Good Queen Bess,” Yancy said. It was absolute nonsense either way, of course. Wizards were never inviting mundanes into their enclaves, because the enclaves would’ve caved in on themselves under the burden of disbelief. Even when mundanes didn’t have science to helpfully explain the world and happily burned witches at the stake, they didn’t really believe in magic. If you believed in magic, you wouldn’t drag a witch to the stake; you’d have her lob fireballs at your enemies instead. But they didn’t believe in magic, so even if you were a witch, when they dragged you to the stake and burned you in front of an audience, you’d have a bloody hard time getting yourself out of it. In fact most witches who got caught up in the net didn’t.
But I didn’t contradict Yancy again. Liesel had poked me sharply in the back of the shoulder, and anyway I’d had enough time for my glazed-over brain to work out that the last thing I should be doing was encouraging the place to think of itself as nonexistent. But I couldn’t understand how it did exist.
Obviously Yancy and her people were propping it up as much as they could—encouraging it to keep on taking up space where they could squirrel themselves away from the prowling hordes of London’s maleficaria, even if they had to be doped to the gills to stand it. Which they absolutely did. If it hadn’t been for Yancy’s potion, I’d have been clawing at the walls for a way out. But the pavilion felt just as solid as the rest of the universe around me—in other words, not very. I was seeing whispers and wind chimes—not solid wind chimes dangling, which would have been all right; I was seeing the sound of wind chimes, and don’t ask me to describe it. My mouth tasted like having forgotten something important, and my skin was prickling with colors in harlequin patches all over.
So the stands seemed at least as likely to be real as the heat of the sun that insisted on roaring in my ears. I could imagine that it was all just the drugs, and as soon as they wore off, I’d be standing in a perfectly reasonable, perfectly real place. That let my brain believe in the place just enough to endure being here. And yes, on some deeper level I knew too well that it wasn’t real, but anyone who’s made it out of the Scholomance knows how to keep their screaming on the inside.
It was awful, but I could still understand why Yancy and her people chose to live here. The reason wizards live in enclaves—well, the reason wizards live in enclaves is because it keeps their kids from being eaten by maleficaria, but the other reason wizards live in enclaves is because it makes magic easier. All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way. That becomes loads easier once you’ve pushed yourself a tidy little nook into the void, but one of those only opens up naturally if your family spend, oh, ten generations or so puttering around, constantly doing as much magic as you can in the same place. It doesn’t happen very often.