“How did you get into this place?” I demanded urgently, when my brain had finally lurched that far. I knew it wasn’t safe to ask the more accurate question—they must have shoved this place off into the void, how did you get it back?—but I thought I could get away with asking that much.
Yancy had sprawled out over a heap of pillows and got hold of a silver jug so much like the ones in the garden above that I was sure it had been pilfered. She was pouring herself a drink into an old-fashioned champagne cup made of elaborate green glass, and the liquid foamed and bubbled and settled down into a froth of pink mousse.
“Give us a spoon, love,” she said, in answer. I looked down at the table: at my place I had a gilt-edged teacup, slightly faded, on a glass plate, and something like a sugar bowl which had been crammed with a tiny forest of tarnished silver spoons, with delicate handles made to look like narrow branches. I slid one over to her, and she passed me the jug in return.
When I poured the liquid into my teacup, I got what looked like a crème br?lée, only when I broke the crust, underneath there wasn’t custard but the blue-violet flames you get from setting brandy on fire. I spooned a bit of them into my mouth gingerly, and then the cup and spoon tumbled down in a smash from my hands while I covered my face, trying to breathe, moans breaking out of me.
It was the taste of summer rain mixed with faint hisses: the taste of being in the gym with Orion, that last day, the very last day before graduation, stupidly kissing him in the pavilion with the amphisbaena falling from the ceiling pipes all around us. It was the taste of everything I’d been thinking in that passionate, greedy moment: that it would be better to have had him just the once, in case we died, only I’d really been thinking about in case I died, and how stupid I’d feel to have refused myself this one-last-only-real pleasure I could dig out of the Scholomance.
And I couldn’t be sorry even now, but the swallow was burning in my gut, a memory that would be in me forever, and what if maybe Orion hadn’t shoved me through the gates after all, if I hadn’t more or less traded him the promise of something he’d wanted more than his own life? If I hadn’t told him, Yes you can come to Wales, you can come to me—the promise that would only have been good if I’d lived to get to Wales in the first place—and so when a maw-mouth the size of a city had come roaring towards us, he hadn’t been willing to take the chance that he’d be the only one to make it out alive. It was the taste of that, too. The taste of Orion going into the belly of a maw-mouth, a maw-mouth that apparently I could, after all, have killed.
Yancy didn’t bat an eyelash at me whimpering agony into my hands. I suppose it was a fairly common reaction. It would have taken some bad luck for people to land in her crew, surely. They weren’t raising their own kids in here; the kids that came to them were the ones that had fallen or been kicked out of the rest of the world before they’d ever slipped through the back doors of the enclave.
When I surfaced, still shaking, Liesel was grimly eyeing her own mug without enthusiasm—a big clay cup with an octopus sculpted round it and tentacles to make the handle, with a round orange glass eye peering back at her. She took the jug and poured until it was full, though, and took a spoonful of the absinthe-green jelly she got, shutting her eyes as she did. She didn’t whimper, but she sat there absolutely rigid, her mouth and her body and her hands clasped tight around the cup in her lap, all straight hard lines as if she was caging up whatever she was feeling. Then she opened her eyes and put the cup down with a hard click on the table. The octopus unwound itself and climbed inside and started eating the rest of the jelly.
Yancy smiled at us, mirthlessly, and tipped the remnants of her own glass down her throat in a single swallow. She didn’t look as though she’d enjoyed hers, either. A toll of sorts, maybe; this place would still need mana to keep going, and London would be trying to keep it from getting any, so anyone who stopped in had to pay up?
That made sense also, except for the part about it not having fallen off into the void completely in the first place. But Yancy still wasn’t taking questions; instead she said to Liesel in the bright impersonal small-talk of sharing a lunch table with a stranger you didn’t much want to know, “So you’re the new arrival, are you? Hard luck for you, the whole place getting knocked sideways just as you get in.”
“Bad luck would be if the enclave had gone down,” Liesel said, with the severity of correcting someone who’d made a mistake in a group presentation. Her face was still rigid and remote, and she sounded mechanical more than anything else, although I could see a thin gleaming-steel thread of irritated why must I explain something so obvious surfacing out of her voice and twining away into the air to go in a ring around her head, a bit like those fairy stories where the girl gets cursed and frogs and beetles come out of her mouth when she speaks. “Now there will soon be council vacancies, and Sir Richard will need reliable allies. He cannot give Alfie a position immediately, but he can make me secretary. I am too young to have been given a position of any kind otherwise for five years at least…”
Excellent planning, but it wasn’t a match for Yancy’s tone at all. Liesel had been knocked for a loop, or else she’d never have said it all out loud anyway. Or perhaps she would have; she’d probably jettisoned all her spreadsheets of carefully planned niceties with enormous relief once she’d made valedictorian.
Yancy only said vaguely, “Oh, how nice,” very your slip is showing, darling. “So how’s your mum, El? Still gathering moss out there in the woods?”
I wasn’t ready to talk, and in fact had been giving real thought to some more howling, but the automatic programming kicked in. “She’s fine,” I said, which was a hilarious lie both in my speaking in coherent tones at all, and also about Mum, who was probably lying on her face in the mud somewhere right now, thinking about Dad gone into a maw-mouth and wondering if I was ever coming home again. “Any more trouble with—?” I left it there; I had to say something, but at the moment I couldn’t have remembered for my life what it was Mum had helped her with.
“Nothing to fuss about,” Yancy said, keeping the conversation empty of information. “Lovely weather we’ve been having lately.”
With every line, it felt more and more like an odd playacting, carrying out some sort of ritual exchange—mimicking what ought to have been happening here, what had happened here, over and over, enclavers politely smiling at each other with their teeth hidden while they jockeyed for power, for standing. I ought to have said something back, kept playing the part. But I couldn’t. I understood the idea: I was meant to want to be screaming and still keeping up the side, all to build more mana, only it was too hard. I just managed to sit there woodenly.
But Liesel had got the idea and said, “Yes, very nice,” so Yancy could say, “Shall we go for a stroll?” and I got up and followed them out.