It wasn’t fair in the least, of course. Why shouldn’t his dad be suspicious of some strange girl showing up, displaying her grief for Orion? In fact, I’m sure it’s a routine thing whenever an enclaver kid dies: other wizards from their year turning up at the enclave gates with earnest stories of school romance and promises made. But I wasn’t feeling fair. And meanwhile Balthasar was staring at me as though I’d grown a second head. He looked back at Chloe, who was only just shy of wringing her hands in anxiety, and then at me. “That’s why you want—”
Bile climbed my throat. “That’s all I can do for him now,” I said. “Sorry, did you think I was offering to bring back your perfect weapon? He’s gone, like the whole place is gone, and I can’t fix that, and I wouldn’t bring him back to you if I could, you sitting there bleating at me about how brave he was. No one’s brave inside a maw-mouth. He was an idiot who thought he had to be a hero instead of a human being, and that’s your fault, you sorry bastards, the whole lot of you.”
I wasn’t expecting him to help me after that howl, but I’d given up on him helping me anyway. I turned round and was ready to march back to Aadhya’s car and go, but he got up and intercepted me, catching me by the shoulders with the first real emotion in his face: not grief, not anger, just utter bewilderment, as though I didn’t make any sense to him at all, and he said, “You really,” and stopped there, as if the next word didn’t even matter; as if he found it impossible to believe that anyone had really anythinged Orion, and then he looked back at Chloe and said, “Orion really—?” and his voice cracked, audibly. She nodded, urgently, and he let go of me and turned away, put a clenched fist up to his mouth, which went clownishly turned-down at the corners, his whole face wrenched. As though it hadn’t meant anything to him that Orion had died, but this—this meant everything.
I could still with absolute joy have picked up a chair and smashed it over his head, because what right did he have being so astonished about it, but at least it was some kind of caring, something that wasn’t just grotesque and selfish, and when he turned back to me, his face was wet. “I’m sorry. El—El? I’m sorry. Please, come sit back down. Please.” He tried to smile an apology at me, wavering. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed—”
Once I had stopped blazing away, I couldn’t help but recognize he’d had every sensible reason to assume the worst of me, and apparently now he might help after all, so I did grudgingly go back to the table with him. Only he didn’t want to talk to me about how I was going to get back into the school. He just wanted to talk to me about Orion. How we’d become friends, every word we’d ever said to one another—most of which had been unpardonably rude—and everything we’d ever done vaguely in the vicinity of each other.
Mum would have approved tremendously. For me it was the slow hideous excruciatingness of a root canal performed with dull instruments and no anaesthesia. Unfortunately, now that his dad’s feelings had actually appeared, I did respect them, so I couldn’t refuse him. But he almost wasn’t grieving. He drank up everything I told him with unbearable happiness, as if I had brought Orion back to him. He hung on every word of every trivial human interaction we’d ever had, and I couldn’t help but remember Orion telling me earnestly how his father had given up his own work to homeschool him, trying to keep him from sneaking away to hunt mals; how his parents had longed for him to want anything else, to care about anything else.
I couldn’t bear it. In desperation I even aggressively told Balthasar about my plan to take Orion away, how Orion had said he’d come to Wales and set off round the world with me, trying to get him to let me stop, only even that didn’t make his dad sorry in the least. He just got almost glassy-eyed at the idea that Orion had been making plans for the future, which only made things worse.
I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. “Look, will you help me get back in?” I demanded baldly, instead of giving Balthasar the next story he was asking for, and he paused and apparently only then remembered what I’d told him I was there for in the first place, or at least took it seriously for the first time; I suppose he’d mentally filed it away as nonsense when Chloe had told him about it.
In fact, he still wasn’t taking it seriously, not the way I needed him to. “El,” he said, instead, with all the gentle kindness of someone having to break bad news, “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how much it means that you want to save Orion from this, that you care about him that much. But he wouldn’t want you to do this.” Almost certainly spot-on, but I didn’t care in the least what Orion would’ve wanted. As far as I was concerned, he’d given up the right to an opinion after he’d shoved me out the gates without asking me for mine. “It’s—the situation is complicated. Even if you’re right about what happened…” He paused as if he were trying to think through what he was going to say.
“If I’m wrong,” I said, “I won’t do anything but waste mana. But I’m not wrong. Patience got him.” I forced myself to say it. “I tried to pull him out. I felt Patience get hold of him.”
Balthasar shook his head a little. “If you’re right, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t…Killing a maw-mouth, any maw-mouth, not to speak of Patience—it’s not like killing other mals, not even powerful ones. Ophelia, Orion’s mother, she’s done research into—”
“I’ve done it three times,” I said flatly. “You can ask London if you don’t believe me. I did one at their council chamber doors just yesterday.”
I’m sure that Chloe had told him; I think Balthasar had simply been having so much difficulty swallowing the idea that I’d really cared in some way about Orion that he’d completely put aside the equally indigestible idea of my going in to kill Patience, much less having any chance of success in this endeavor. He didn’t want to swallow it now, either. In fairness to him, it was a ludicrous thing to claim. But Liesel backed me up, and slowly it went down; he sat back in his chair staring at me, and I could see his face changing as he gathered up all the bits and pieces of information about me that he’d left scattered round while he’d been thinking of me only in conjunction with Orion, and assembled them together into an alarming picture.
Or, I suppose, a potentially useful one. I couldn’t think of him as a heartless weevil anymore, but after all, it’s not some revelation that enclavers love their kids; it doesn’t stop them being enclavers. It’s why most of them became enclavers in the first place, or their parents or someone even further removed into the past. And Orion had been their game-changing mal-killer. Even if Balthasar improbably seemed to care more about Orion’s brief happiness than his long-term usefulness, the rest of New York certainly wouldn’t. For all I knew, Orion’s mum was going to have a hard time becoming Domina without him, and a replacement might have been called for.
Maybe I was being unfair. Balthasar could instead have been thinking about my chances of success, and whether it was worth sending me in, whether I could really save Orion from agony. But there was some kind of calculation going on behind the stilling lines of his face. And I’d just spent an hour talking about Orion with him, cutting paper-thin slices of my heart to lay out on a plate, and I’d hated every minute of it, but he’d cared, he’d really truly cared, and it had, after all, made me feel better to have shared it with him, to have been able to grieve Orion with someone else who’d loved him. I didn’t want him to say anything that would make me despise him.
“That’s the only reason I’ve come,” I said, before he could say anything at all. “If the Scholomance is still there, if it can be reached, Patience is still in there. And everyone it’s ever devoured is still screaming. It won’t end for them unless I stop it. It won’t end for Orion. That’s why I’m asking. I don’t need a circle, and I don’t need help. All I need is mana and a map.”
He didn’t tell me any more reasons why I couldn’t do it, and he didn’t, thankfully, drop any hints about enclave seats. Instead, after a moment, he only said, softly, “You’d better come talk to Ophelia.”
* * *