Liesel visibly restrained herself from telling him to pull himself together, a tremendous effort on her part. I had no idea why Alfie had submitted to being acquired by someone who so clearly viewed him as barely suitable raw metal to be hammered forcefully into shape, and still less why Liesel had so determinedly gone after him. She was the valedictorian; she hadn’t needed to sleep with him to get a place in London, and sleeping with him wouldn’t have got her a place if she hadn’t been the valedictorian, so it had been entirely optional. She said to me, “Come. The council will want to see you and thank you.”
What she meant was, she wanted to take me down and display me to the council in triumph, more or less like her own brilliant achievement. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to submit to it. “Thanks, but no. I don’t want to be in this place another moment. Get me out of here.”
Alfie twitched a little, my insistence like a yank on a leash, and said immediately, “Of course, El—let’s get you out into the gardens, I’m sure you need some air.” He sounded sincere, but he’d shortly be regretting that vow to repay me no matter the cost. From Liesel’s scowling, she was regretting it already. I suppose it felt to her like being a hawk who’s just hooked a fish, only to have a monstrous eagle swoop down and snatch it right out of your talons. Hard luck for her. I wasn’t in the least sorry. I’d become sorry in a few days if I couldn’t get rid of Alfie, but not right now.
Liesel wasn’t the sort to bang her head against a wall; she turned to Alfie and said, if a bit ungraciously, “Go, take her out. I’ll tell the others,” making the best of it, and sailed off down the passage.
Alfie took me back the other way and turned in to the very next side corridor—thankfully no sight of the one where the remnants of maw-mouth were presumably still putrefying—and then almost immediately opened a door out into the gardens, like golden Beatrice guiding Dante towards Paradise, leaving poor damned Virgil behind.
Alfie wasn’t grudging about it at all, either, even though I’d done the equivalent of putting spurs to his side. He took me to a place where the waterfall jumped in a solid silver stream just past the edge of another terrace, so I could put my hands into it and cup the water and splash my face and press my hands cool against my cheeks and the back of my neck until I stopped feeling sick. I took Precious out of my pocket and put her on the edge of a small hollow in the rock, filled with clear water, and she rolled her whole body around in it; I would’ve liked to do the same.
Killing the maw-mouth hadn’t fixed whatever damage had been done to the enclave; I could still feel the sloshing tides of mana underneath, and through the power-sharer on my wrist. But my getting rid of it had freed up all the power and all the wizards who’d desperately been trying to hold the thing off, and they were going back to work straightaway. Even while I was standing there, the sunlamps began to brighten—in a few lurching stages, like someone turning a dimmer switch up and down a few times on their way to getting it fully turned on—and the platform itself began to feel a little more solid, somehow. It didn’t feel anymore like the gardens were about to sink under the wave; now the sensation was more like sitting at a table with one leg a bit short: you couldn’t put any weight on it or it would tip, but it was still standing, with a whole team of people working at top speed to prop it up again.
When I turned back around, Alfie had poured a drink for me out of a silver carafe like the one I’d glimpsed earlier, through the jungle of growth, so those were working again, too. Even though I didn’t want to put anything in my mouth, just the faint sweet smell of the drink made me feel better. So I did cautiously try a single sip, which washed all the sour nausea out of the back of my throat and let me take a clean, deep breath that I hadn’t quite realized I needed.
I drank the rest of it in small swallows, letting each one linger on my tongue, giving Precious drops on my fingertip to suck up, and as I neared the end, I started to feel almost calm. I don’t mean just calmed down, but calm. In a vaguely intoxicated way, but so what? I hadn’t been really properly calm in more than four years. Not even Mum’s spell had hushed me this way. Of course, Mum would have said that a month in the woods would be a better path to finding this quiet, but as I was instead here, killing maw-mouths, I welcomed this feeling, rolling down through me, tranquil and cool. The horror receded.
Alfie had sat down across from me on one of the smooth polished ordinary-looking stools, which were somehow as comfortable as armchairs, and was studying me with his long face furrowed and anxious. I assumed he was worrying about what I was going to do with this leash he’d shoved into my hands, so when he said, low, “El—I’m so sorry. It’s been so mad, we just tumbled out into the middle of…all this,” with a wave, I just waited a bit cynically for him to get around to asking me to let him out of his oath, and it took me completely by surprise when he went on, “I didn’t even ask you about Orion.”