It was like walking into a door someone had just opened into my face. “I know how close you were,” he kept on, while I sat there trying to cling to the beautiful calm instead of going into squawking sobs or yelling at him in a fury—how dare he be sorry about Orion, how dare he be the first and only person who’d said anything nice or even ordinarily polite to me about Orion? “It’s such a loss. It doesn’t seem right, after everything he did, both of you did.”
And it was all stupid and transparently obvious, and hearing him say it shouldn’t have made the slightest difference, but I jerked a short clumsy nod and put down the glass and then looked away trying not to cry, half angry and half grateful. It didn’t really mean anything, and at the same time it meant everything. I knew he hadn’t really cared about Orion, he hadn’t really known Orion, and it didn’t cost him anything to say a few nice words. But it was still the few nice words you did say, the ordinary unprofound bit of decency you felt obliged to offer another human being when death knocked on the door, and he’d given it, to me and to Orion, as if we were people. Not his nearest and dearest, perhaps, but people he was willing to feel a little bit sorry for. And he also didn’t keep talking; he stopped there and just sat with me, in the unending peace and beauty, with the water gurgling past us.
Delicate flowers like deep bells slowly began to bloom on the vines, petals popping back open, and after a little longer, tiny clockwork bees started coming out to poke among them. I could hear the sound of people coming for a good bit before they appeared: another carefully engineered politeness, since surely the passageway wasn’t making their notables take a long winding path through the gardens. Probably there was some artifice slowing down our experience of time, so it seemed longer to us than to them. I reached out for Precious and tucked her away in my pocket again. The terrace itself was surreptitiously growing to make room for the oncoming crowd, and more stools and chairs wandered in on all sides with the casual air of pretending they’d been there the whole time.
Alfie got progressively straighter in his chair on roughly the same timeframe, and stood up as they came. I didn’t need him to point out his father; there was substantial overlap, although his father was older, darker, and more staid, and looked weirdly familiar, as though I’d seen him somewhere before. I wondered if he’d ever shown up at the commune, when I’d been younger. Some of the enclavers do; Mum won’t actually turn someone away who’s coming to look for healing, although she’s perfectly willing to speak sharply to them about their lifestyle, so they prefer not to. He had a really lovely suit on, pale cream with creases crisp as knives, a deep-green shirt, and a cravat pinned with a massive robin’s-egg-sized chunk of opal: dressed up for his own demise.
Liesel was with him, along with several other highly polished figures, including the Dominus of London himself, Christopher Martel: a white-haired man leaning heavily on a bronze walking stick, his left eye and a chunk of face down to his cheekbone entirely covered with an elaborate piece of artifice like a monocle. I was reasonably sure the eye underneath, although extremely well done, was artifice itself, or an illusion; he’d probably lost the real one somehow, either directly or by trading it. Healing gets harder for wizards the older you get, but even in your twilight years, you can generally shove off even the most aggressive forms of cancer or dementia for a decade or two by giving up something important like an eye, if you also have several enormous buckets of mana to spend on the process.
The ankle might have gone to the same cause, at that; he’d been in office for at least sixty years. There’s not much democracy in enclaves; they’re run like a cross between a vicious international corporation and a village full of vexatious eccentrics. Most of the denizens don’t care what the council are doing as long as everything keeps running smoothly from their own perspective, and the only people who get a significant vote anyway are the people who’ve earned a council seat, either by doing something dramatic or because they’ve cleverly arranged to be descended from a founding member. Generally a Dominus stays in the job until they retire or die or their enclave suffers some sort of major disaster.
Just like this one, and I’m sure Martel’s hours in office were now numbered—in favor of Alfie’s father, in fact, given that he’d been the one volunteering to go into the maw-mouth; that’s the sort of thing that people understand comes with a price tag attached. But it was going to take some time for the new situation to become official—especially with the enclave still more than a bit wobbly—and everyone was going to be excruciatingly polite about it in the meantime, obviously. Alfie’s dad made quite a large production of bringing the largest chair over for Martel and setting it opposite me, before taking the one that had quietly edged up for him.