Martel let himself down into it with a sigh and crinkled a gentle, faintly rueful smile at me, an apology for being so creaky, and looked up at Alfie, who bowed a bit and said, “Sir, this is Galadriel Higgins, a friend from school. El, this is Dominus Martel…” He paused, darting a quick look at his dad, who in some way too subtle for me to notice signaled back yes, go on, I merit an introduction now too, and then added, “And this is my father, Sir Richard Cooper Browning.”
“My dear Galadriel, I understand we owe you quite an extraordinary debt,” Martel said, in avuncular tones I’d have been annoyed by, if I weren’t too busy being annoyed at Alfie. I’d noticed the mild oddness of his going by Alfie at school, like a kid in primary; his mates ought to have used his last name instead. But I hadn’t realized it was a deliberate avoidance he must have worked at. And his dad looked familiar because I’d seen that face, with relatively minor edits, staring out at me from all the articles about the founding of the Scholomance that had been plastered over the walls of the school.
I didn’t blame Alfie for not wanting to be known as whatever iteration of Sir Alfred Cooper Browning he was apparently destined to be; I’d gone to some lengths myself to avoid becoming known as the incongruous child of the great healer in the eyes of my classmates. I did blame him, even more, for making that stupid oath. My dragging him around as my personal helper, after literally wrecking the Scholomance his namesake had built, that would be really marvelous. There clearly was a family tradition of making dramatic and potentially fatal gestures in the service of your enclave, though.
“Glad to help,” I said, a bit shortly. All right, I could still muster up some annoyance for the avuncular tones, too.
“It ought to go without saying, and yet merits being said, that should you ever choose to make your home here with us, we would be delighted to have you,” Martel said, that bright-blue artifice eye fixed on my face intently, as if he were hoping to peer inside and get a look at my intentions and deepest desires. I wouldn’t have minded a peek myself, since now that I had finished with killing the maw-mouth, I was back to not knowing what to do with myself. But I did know that I very much didn’t want to move myself into London enclave.
“Thanks, but no,” I said, and several of the wizards behind him traded glances, like they couldn’t quite believe it. Why else would I have taken out a maw-mouth for them, after all?
“I understand from Alfred that you are quite committed to your independence,” Sir Richard said. “I hope there is some other way you’ll permit us to repay you.” What he meant was that he really hoped I’d let him ransom his son back—which I didn’t have any objections to, lucky for him, and I had thought of something to demand, something big enough to be worth taking on a maw-mouth.
“Yes,” I said. “The gardens.” Sir Richard frowned at me a little; everyone else was glancing round themselves a little confused, as if they thought I meant packing up the gardens and handing them to me. “I want you to open them up, so any wizard who wants can come and spend the day, if they like. The library, too,” I added, because why not? The maw-mouth wouldn’t have left any of it standing. “Not the parts of this place you actually live in; you can keep your mana store to yourselves, your council chambers, all of that place.” I waved my hand towards that awful subterranean complex. “But the rest—share it. That’s my price, if you want one.”
They were all staring at me with an odd mix of expressions. Liesel mostly looked irritated, as if it wasn’t anything she hadn’t expected from idiot me; Alfie’s had a faintly anxious edge, although seeing how his dad was likely to be Dominus soon, I thought his odds of being bought out of his debt to me were considerably better than they might have been. The others were mostly frowning in the intent way you do when you’re trying to understand what the game is, why someone’s asked for something really weird and unexpected that doesn’t make any obvious sense, and some of them were glancing back and forth to see if anyone else had worked it out.
Martel was keeping his pleasant smile lodged firmly in its noncommittal curve. “That…would be quite an undertaking,” he said cautiously, but what he really meant was please explain your bizarre request some more.
“The National Trust manage it all right,” I said. “I don’t mind your throwing people out if they piss in the waterfall.”
A woman brayed a laugh, a real jeering goose-honk of one, making everyone jump. I hadn’t noticed her before. She was standing off to one side apart from everyone else, leaning against the railing, but that wasn’t why I hadn’t spotted her: she was in a coat of tattered scraps of mismatched fabric, sewn together with ragged ends fluttering off here and there. All of the scraps were carrying a small bit of minor artifice that insisted they were absolutely fascinating and the most amazing thing you’d ever seen—a typical cheap glamour, except by putting it on a bundle of not-at-all-amazing rags and heaping them all in together, the conglomeration produced a brilliant misdirection effect where you stopped noticing them at all. Even now that she’d deliberately drawn attention, I was having a hard time looking at her properly.