Chloe was dressed properly mundane in denim and a T-shirt, much more sensible than Liesel’s somehow-still-pristine white dress, and there was an older man with her at the table whose clothes might have passed for the same at a quick glance. But if you looked just a smidge longer at the waistcoat he had on, there were more pockets than ought to have been able to fit, and the small gold buttons on them were inscribed with tiny runes. I was willing to bet that when he touched each one, he got out exactly what he needed.
I knew that Orion’s dad was an artificer, and that Chloe was bringing him to meet us, so presumably this had to be him, but even so, I found it hard to believe. But Chloe said, “Mr. Lake, this is El—Galadriel Higgins,” after we sat down, and I had to accept that yes, he was Balthasar Lake. It wasn’t that he didn’t look like Orion. They had more or less similar noses, and the same bony wrists, and a scattering of other details. I just couldn’t see how Orion had come from him. It was like looking at a maze puzzle in a book with the beginning and the end clearly marked, and no path that made sense in between.
Most people would have said the same about me and Mum, of course, but those were only the people who didn’t understand the principle of balance, like the guests at the commune who always looked mildly surprised when they first found out she was my mum, and asked if I was adopted, and then only got even more surprised if they spent any time in my company. But any wizard who did understand the principle of balance would have spent a day with us and then would nod wisely and say oh yes, of course.
Of course, both of those reactions enraged me so badly that I’d gone to great lengths at school to avoid telling anyone about her, so I was being a hypocrite, but I couldn’t help it. I could easily believe Balthasar was what he was, one of the best artificers in New York enclave and therefore in the whole wide world. When we’d walked up, he’d been frowning at the building on the corner with the kind of abstract dissatisfaction that goes with fixing something inside your own head. If you’d shown me some piece of precisely balanced artifice the size of a jet and told me he’d built it, I wouldn’t have questioned it for an instant. I could tell he was powerful. Only it was a normal, expected kind of power, too ordinary to have Orion on the other side of it. I do understand balance, and I didn’t understand him.
Also, I’d stupidly not thought at all about what I was going to say to him. I hadn’t prepared any of those gracious empty phrases that I’d wanted so much myself. The only sentence clear in my head was: Can I please have some mana to go open up the school and kill your son? The only reason I didn’t just start blubbing again was I knew I hadn’t the right to do it in front of his dad. Orion had been my friend, my something more, mine, for less than a year; he’d been theirs for his whole life, and they’d surely sent him to the Scholomance with more hope of getting him back out than any other parents in the world.
Back in the Scholomance, I’d put together a story about Orion’s family in my head, about his enclave; about all the things they’d done to him to make him want to be a hero, to make him think he had to be one, or else be a monster and a freak; all the ways they hadn’t let him be human. But now with his dad in front of me, being a human being instead of a monster himself, I couldn’t help but recognize with a sharp pang of guilt how convenient that story was for me. It had given me the right to ask Orion to walk away from his family and his home to be with me, to abandon the people who had raised him and who had hopes for him.
And even if their hopes had all been selfish, he still hadn’t died carrying out one of their schemes. I was the one who’d come up with the brilliant idea of saving everyone in the whole bloody school and future generations to boot, like we could do something like that without paying the price. Orion had paid for us all, and he’d paid at their cost—his parents and his enclave, the effort they’d put into raising him and all their wishes to see him again.
So I clamped down on the quaver in my voice and grated out, “I’m sorry,” feeling even as the words left my mouth how utterly inadequate and stupid they were.
But Mr. Lake only said, remote, “Chloe tells me you and Orion worked together on this plan to lure the mals into the school.” It was unbearably polite and neutral. I would have rather he’d shouted at me, demanded to know what I’d been thinking, what sort of arrogant twat had I been to think I could make the world better, how his son had ended up the only one left behind. He ought to have been angry. I wanted him angry.
“It was my idea,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true—my idea had been to do something, and it had taken Liu, and Yuyan from Shanghai, and Aad and Liesel and Zixuan and a lot of other people to work out the details. But I half wanted to provoke him into a reaction. “It was just the two of us at the gates, at the end. We were about to go through, and then Patience came at us. Orion—he shoved me through.”
I had to stop and swallow down an entire tangle of feelings. Balthasar didn’t wait for me to keep going. “I’m sure you did your best,” he said. “Orion was always very brave. He would never have wanted anyone else to suffer in his place.”
There was a way he could have said those same exact words that would have been someone plastering over one of the ugly miserable wrong things that happen in the world, a parent trying to build meaning out of the worst thing that had ever happened to them. People come to Mum with those stories in their mouths all the time. She had to teach me as a kid to stop telling them that their stories were nonsense, even when they obviously were. But Balthasar wasn’t trying to believe in this story. He was just using the words as a convenient plank to get from one step of the conversation to another, as if this mattered to him just as much as that hollow nonsense conversation I’d acted out with Yancy and Liesel down in London’s forgotten underbelly.
“So how can I help you, El?” he went on. “Chloe says you were offered a guaranteed seat at school but didn’t accept it. I’m afraid I can’t renew that—”
He paused on his own, possibly because Aadhya and Chloe and Liesel were sitting at the table with us and their faces warned him, even before I snarled, “Go to hell,” on a surge of rage, and everything on the table around us shook with a wild alarmed clattering. “Patience has him. Orion’s trapped in a maw-mouth, and you think I’m here to beg a place from you? You couldn’t pay me to come live in your fucking enclave. The only good thing in it is gone.” I only stopped there because one of the water glasses fell off and shattered into pieces on the pavement.
So obviously I’d been lying when I was going on about being respectful of his parents’ greater claim to grief. I wanted to unhinge my jaw and bite his entire face off. It was almost worse than Mum talking about Orion. Mum hadn’t even known him, much less been his dad. I had to get up and walk away while the waiters came over with a tea towel and a bin to get rid of the glass.
Chloe came timidly after me. “El, I’m so sorry. I didn’t have much time to—I tried to explain—”
I just waved her off without trusting myself to say words, and then I turned round and went back to the table, once the mundanes were gone again. “I broke the school off into the void,” I said, savagely, “but it’s probably not all the way gone. I need to know where the doors are, and I need enough mana to get in, so I can kill Patience. That’s how you can help me. Unless you don’t mind Orion screaming until everyone who remembers the Scholomance is dead. And if you don’t mind that, say so, and I’ll get it some other way.”