Aadhya was right, of course she was right, and I knew it, except if it wasn’t my fault— “Then he was a fucking wanker who died for no reason!” I said through my teeth.
“People fuck up sometimes,” Aadhya said bluntly. “You do something stupid, and it turns out to be something you can’t fix or take back. Orion made a bad call in one second in the middle of the worst fight of your lives, with Patience coming right at you. That doesn’t mean he was worthless. You’re not dumb for loving him or being sad he’s dead! You are dumb for letting Liesel bag you on the worst rebound ever,” she added, with a caustic edge, giving my shoulder a shove as she got up to finish packing. “You don’t even like her!”
I grimaced. “She grows on you. A bit.”
“Like a rashling?” Aadhya said, giving zero credence.
I didn’t have anything to wear except what was still on my back, Mum’s baggy linen work dress, and despite Liesel’s cleaning spell, it had reached the limits of what it could bear without a wash I didn’t have time to do. None of Aadhya’s shiny new purchases would fit me, but she gave me an unopened packet of knickers and went for her mum, who brought down an outfit she’d been working on, a salwar kameez in satiny thin cotton, embroidered up and down the neck opening with runes of protection in golden thread; it ought to have cost a year of mana, but she pressed it on me.
Her dad insisted on driving us all to the airport, although he looked at Aadhya anxiously in the rearview mirror several times along the way. It made me feel guilty, but I didn’t even try to tell Aadhya not to come. I wanted her too badly. I didn’t want to take her into the Scholomance with me when I went in hunting Patience—I wasn’t taking anyone in there for that jaunt—but I did want her to be outside the doors, with desperate selfishness. I wanted someone waiting for me that I’d feel obliged to come back out to.
The flight was late enough that the airport had an odd half-deserted quality, nowhere near empty but muffled, shops mostly closed and people with tired faces dragging their cabin bags along behind them. Aadhya flatly refused to leave me with Liesel for even a moment, to the point of making me go and fetch the coffee after we’d parked ourselves in the club again.
Liesel noticed. “What do you think I am going to do to her?” she said to Aadhya sharply, as soon as they thought I was out of earshot, which I wasn’t, because I’d crept round the other side of the planter to listen in, and maybe catch Liesel out at something that would give me a push to tell her to go back to London and Alfie.
Aadhya had her arms folded across her chest, glaring. “I get that you have zero shame, but she’s freaking out.”
“Yes,” Liesel said. “Are you thinking I made things worse? I promise you,” she went on, with the grim tones of experience, “to feel good in your body makes things better, even when they are very bad, and they are.”
“Yeah, and I think you’re looking to plant a hook in El while she’s messed up so you can yank on it later.”
Liesel made an impatient dismissive gesture. “Yes! You have a hook in her yourself. And why will we yank on these hooks? To make her protect us, save our lives? She will do that for strangers, for nothing. What else? You are her ally. Have you asked her to do anything for you? To make someone give you an enclave place, or an artificer contract? Why not? Because you are also a great martyr, who does not want these things?” She snorted as Aadhya scowled at her. “No! You don’t ask because you know she would say no. I tried asking myself. But she will do nothing selfish for herself, much less anyone else. And she is not wrong,” she added, in a grudging tone of having been unwillingly persuaded. “She is too powerful. Once she started, there would be nowhere to stop. So there is only one use of our hooks: to help her stop. You had better be glad that I have one, and hold tight to yours, too.”
I stopped eavesdropping and stalked off in total outrage. I couldn’t deny that I was in fact freaking out, and it was very clearly an excellent idea for me to have people around who could yank me back onto the rails if I should go off them. Only what business did Liesel have making herself one of those people, and I couldn’t help but see she’d successfully done just that. Because what she wanted, the reason she was helping me, was to stop me from going maleficer, which is the one thing I’ve been desperately afraid of doing since the age of five, and I would absolutely take Liesel’s help on that project.
I got the coffees and came back and grouchily handed them round. Aadhya was still scowling at Liesel across the table, but with the same kind of sulky annoyance I felt myself: yes, we were stuck with her, after all.
* * *
We landed in Lisbon in daylight. I hadn’t really been in New York long enough to feel jet lag, and now we were back with the sun where and when my brain expected it to be, which ought to have made me feel better, but instead it made the whole interlude recede into a chaotic nightmare that melted into the other half-remembered nightmares I’d had trying to sleep on the plane, with Ophelia stretched across them like a distorted shape floating on the surface of a murky lake. I had three voicemail messages from Chloe, and half a dozen texts asking me to call when I had the chance. I stared at them and thought of calling her, only I knew what she was going to ask me about, and what was there for me to say? Grab your things and flee the enclave straightaway? Ophelia wasn’t a threat to Chloe at all, unless Chloe started running round yelling to everyone that the future Domina was a maleficer. If anything, she was better off not knowing anything more.
Liesel headed us directly onto a train out to Sintra, and from there to a lavish boutique hotel in the middle of the town. While she and Aadhya made a room appear for us—with money, not magic—I stood in the charming lobby stuffed with antiques and watched the literal army of tourists marching on past towards the old scenic bits of the town, a tide coming in from the train and flowing up either side of the mountain road with taxis and golf carts running through the middle, carrying whoever wasn’t ready to huff their way up on foot.
At first I was only watching because it was there in front of me to look at, but after a bit I started to wonder why they had apparently put the Scholomance entrance in the middle of a tourist trap. There’re enclave entrances in New York, in London, in most of the biggest cities of the world, but that’s because people build enclaves where they already live, and mostly they live in cities, so they have to put up with all the inconvenience and difficulty and mana-expense of building entrances there, where collisions with the mundane are a constant danger.
But the Scholomance was meant to be far away from any other enclaves and hard for maleficaria to find: why hadn’t they tucked it into a truly obscure corner of the world? I understood even less when we tracked down the coordinates and found they were in the middle of an actual museum: an old historical estate, and not even very historical; the place had been built in the 1900s, after the Scholomance had already been open for more than ten years. It had to be deliberate, but it made no sense.