“I hope so,” I said flatly. She could make anything she liked of that. I half wanted her to think I’d murdered Orion and left him on the floor of the Scholomance before flouncing away in triumph myself.
Only it was Liesel, so that didn’t work. “Because there was another maw-mouth,” she said, a statement more than a question. I’ve spent my whole life alarming people when I would have preferred to make a friend of them, or at least trade with them for a hammer or a pen, so of course now, when I’d have been glad to do a little intimidating, my target was impervious instead.
Also implacable. I gave up; I didn’t want to keep fighting her off, parrying her questions one after another while she went on jabbing me in every tender place. “It was Patience,” I said. “It had eaten Fortitude and was hiding somewhere in the school. It caught us at the gates just before the school broke away. And before you ask,” I added, savagely, “I tried to just leave. He wouldn’t come. He shoved me out, and then it got him, and he wouldn’t let me pull him out. That’s all the story there is, so I hope it satisfies you. I’m going now.”
Liesel opened her arms out in a grand sweep. “Are you? Where? To sit in a tent and be rained on some more?”
“I suppose you think you’ve a better idea.”
“Yes,” Liesel said. “Come and have dinner.”
As soon as she said it, I couldn’t help but recognize that dinner was, in fact, inescapably a better idea than blundering out of the enclave into some unknown bit of London, with no way home and nothing in my pockets but a mouse. Mum never bothers about anything like that. If she needs to go somewhere, she thumbs a ride, and someone stops for her. If she’s hungry, she just asks the universe if there’s anything to spare, and more often than not, someone going by will pause and offer her something to eat or invite her to their house for dinner. I’m more likely to be required to hand over exact change before the universe grudgingly allows me to buy a bus ticket and a stale bun. And I can never tell how much of it is me, scowling in resentment, and how much of it is other people, looking at a dark-skinned girl instead of my pink-and-gold mum smiling at them, and not being able to tell only makes me scowl the more.
Speaking of which, I would almost certainly have gone blundering out of the enclave nevertheless, just to spite Liesel and then myself, only she added, “Don’t be foolish. Alfie will drive you back afterwards,” and gestured to a small spiral stair that was now going up from the corner of the nook to a terrace overhead, and the smell of something indescribably good came wafting down. My best attempt would be telling you that it was like rice pudding I wanted to eat. It didn’t actually smell like rice pudding at all; the point is that I’ve never much liked rice pudding, but at school I ate it whenever I had the chance, because it was one of the best things you could get there. So now I could gladly go the rest of my life without ever eating it again, only I desperately wanted to eat whatever I was smelling up there, even if it was rice pudding.
So I grudgingly trailed Liesel up the stairs. They went a long way, enough for my legs to start to get tired, and we came out onto a little terrace in front of a small hobbit-hole chamber set high up on the enclave walls. The setting wasn’t up to the standards of the gardens below. The archway ought to have had a door, but instead only had a curtain hung across it, and the room on the other side wasn’t much bigger than the bed it contained. The only other furnishing was a small half-moon stand jutting from the wall, barely enough to hold a night’s glass of water. There wasn’t even a lamp. The terrace itself had one slightly dim globe hanging over a small table and two chairs. The main cascade of the stream and the waterfalls were far away below on the other side of the low iron railing, and we were so close to the ceiling that there was a faint sideways glitter visible through the frosted glass, betraying the sunlamp spells for artifice.
For all Liesel’s sneers at my dripping yurt, her own quarters had a distinctly shabby flavor. They didn’t even come up to the standards of her clothing. But of course, even if you’re the valedictorian with a guaranteed enclave spot—the winner of the Scholomance grand prix if there was one—as soon as you get out you’re just a brand-new graduate, with no connections in your new enclave except for the one or two other brand-new graduates who largely made it out thanks to your help and would generally rather forget that fact. You’re as low on the enclave hierarchy as it gets.