But I couldn’t bear to do that to her, even if I almost felt I owed it to him. I stood over my scribble for a single lingering moment of sour resentment, wallowing in the fantasy of meanness, and then I added, Home soon. Love, El.
When I turned to the doorway, Precious was sitting up right in the middle of it, glowing white against the overcast sky outside and glaring up at me meaningfully. “You don’t make any sense to take to a fight, either,” I told her, but she ran at me and came up my leg and jumped for the lower hem of my dress, then scampered up and crawled into my pocket. I put my hand inside it and she curled up warm and small and determined within it. “All right,” I said. I couldn’t make myself take her out and put her down.
Liesel was standing impatiently on the muddy footpath, under what was pretending for the benefit of mundanes to be an umbrella but was actually some kind of artifice keeping her dry. It bobbed over between us, and we went down the hill without a single drop making it through.
Alfie and Sarah were all the way down by the main buildings of the commune, doing their best to charm the locals. It was really odd to see them, in their own impractically glamourous outfits which should’ve got dirty just walking in from the caravan pitch. They were even standing wrong, holding themselves unnaturally straight with their faces in stiff smiles. I thought at first they were simply overdoing it, trying to put their best foot forward for the mundanes; Alfie and Sarah had probably barely ever come out into the real world in their whole childhood. Being around mundanes made it hard to cast spells and use artifice, and I imagine that was especially uncomfortable for enclavers, since they had so much mana to spare that they used magic to keep off the rain when an umbrella would really do perfectly well if you even needed one.
But when we came into view, Alfie’s head jerked round towards me so hard that I realized he was just desperately holding the line and actually he was all but vibrating with tension. “El, so good to see you,” he said, with what could have passed for an air of experiencing a mildly pleasant surprise, unless you knew him, and then by his standards, he sounded two steps short of complete hysteria, too loud and frayed at the edges. “Liesel’s told you? Sorry to poach her like this,” he said smilingly to Philippa, who was one of the mundanes being charmed, exactly as if he were swooping past a lunch table at the Scholomance full of loser kids to carry me off to his own. Which he’d tried to do with me in the past without success, but it’s a fairly reliable method for enclavers usually, so he hadn’t lost the habit of trying.
And in this case, Philippa was there and ready to help him. She darted a look at me that was faintly incredulous—what were these ludicrously posh people after me for?—and said only, “I’m sure it’s nothing to us,” a bit disdainfully, as if she didn’t think much of his taste. I imagine she would have been perfectly happy for him to drop me in an unmarked ditch when he was done.
Alfie didn’t want any more permission, and not inaccurately assumed I couldn’t much want to stay anywhere in Philippa’s vicinity. He was instantly turning towards me with his arm outstretched to gather me up. I eyed him resentfully, but inertia was on his side, now. I’d come down the hill, after all. Why had I bothered, if I wasn’t going? So I went.
Their transport was waiting on the hardstanding, looking exactly as weird as they did. Actual posh mundanes—who do visit fairly regularly—would’ve come with a Land Rover or a massive camper van, wearing raw denim and clean trainers. Their car was pretending really hard to be something between an Edwardian racing car and a 1930s American gangster car, with a ridiculously long bulbous nose and a cab that looked exactly big enough for one person to sit in comfortably.
But the racing car opened a door and let us inside, with no difficulty about room, even though there were now four of us to cram into it. I don’t mean we were suddenly in Narnia or the TARDIS or anything. You can’t actually create real space, no matter how much mana you have, and even if you’ve got some way into the void—limitless as far as anyone’s ever found out—that’s very much not a pleasant place to try to exist as a real person. Enclaves generally resort to buying up large luxury apartments in the vicinity anytime they want to expand, and borrowing that space to use internally, but the further away the real space is, the more expensive the borrowing gets. Not even London enclave would waste the gobs of mana it would take to build and use a car that would hop you into some massive physical space regardless of how far away you were from it.