I imagine it must have been disheartening for a lot of kids who’d spent their last four years working savagely to claim the one visible prize in our shared existence, only to realize they’d won nothing more than a ticket to the standing-room section, while all those enclaver kids who’d been courting them were going down to the box seats, or taking their places on the stage. You did hear about valedictorians who flamed out entirely afterwards, like they’d spent the fuel of their lives on that one burst; who stayed in the small room at the top of the stairs and never amounted to anything more.
Liesel clearly didn’t mean to be one of them. She’d already got up a delicate awning that blocked the worst of the glare, and her bed was canopied with twining white branches draped with glimmering netting. She’d coaxed or more likely bullied some of the glowing blossoms into vining up over her railing for extra illumination. She waved me to a chair at her little table, and there was another of the silver jugs waiting beside a bowl of couscous and a small blue-glazed tagine that wafted out the fantastic smell when she took off the lid. No rice pud in sight, thankfully.
Every single bite was perfect: if one was spicy, the next one was sweet, the next one salty, whatever my mouth most wanted, the dried fruits glowing like translucent jewels and the almonds crunchy, each different vegetable bursting with flavor and perfectly done, tender without having gone to mush, and each piece as smooth as if they’d been cooked one at a time with brooding care before being precisely put down, even though it was one whole thing at the same time. Despite the ongoing faint nauseating churn of the wobbly mana below, I ate three platefuls and drank two glasses of whatever was in the jug, and Liesel shoveled in her fair share, and afterwards the dirty dishes vanished themselves away, presumably to some efficient set of cleaning spells.
By the time we’d finished, there was already a bustle of activity under way in the gardens below: a set of looping paths being reshaped to wider spans, with brighter lamps and seating areas being coaxed out along their length. Sir Richard was evidently wasting no time in clearing Alfie’s debt. The first guests even appeared at twilight: a handful of slightly wary outside wizards, instantly distinguishable even from high above, because they looked exactly like mundanes, whether in good suits or dresses or jeans. They were commuters: even at a distance I could see the grey bands round their upper arms, which had undoubtedly before now been good only for getting through the service entrance, and into the workshops and laboratories where they did gobs of work in the faint distant hope of being allowed into this inner sanctum someday. Their faces, upturned to the waterfall’s spray, caught the light of the globes in their dazzled eyes, and I wondered with a sour taste in my mouth if I’d really done them any favors, or if I’d only made them want it more.
“How determined are you to be stupid?” Liesel said abruptly.
“And I suppose you think you’re being clever,” I said, waving a hand round vaguely. I don’t know if what was in the jug was actually wine, but it was willing to behave like wine once it got in me. “Signing your whole life over to get into this place, just so you can suck your blood and mana back with interest out of a hundred other wizards.”
“Very determined, I see,” Liesel said. “I am not sorry to have got an enclave place, since I am not stupid. My mother had to smile at enclavers her whole life just to keep me alive.”
“And what are you doing with Alfie, then?” I said, mean, and unjust to boot; I really couldn’t accuse her of smiling at him, as far as I’d seen. “You can’t like him.”
“Certainly I like him. He wants to make something of himself, he wants to be someone of importance.”
“And you’re going to make something of him, is that the idea?”
Liesel shrugged, matter-of-fact; so it was the idea. “He has what I need, and I have what he needs. Would it be better if I insisted on being with someone who had nothing to offer?”
“It would be better if you found someone you wanted to be with whether they fit into your spreadsheets or not,” I said tartly.
Liesel flicked this nonsensical suggestion away. “Most people are stupid, or tiresome, or they don’t know how to work. Why would I want to be with them? I only get impatient. But I don’t have to get impatient with Alfie, because he is worth being with regardless.” I screwed my mouth up at that, a bit disgruntled; it made Mum’s sort of sense, the kind where she’s always telling me that the most important thing is for a person to work out what’s good for them, even if it’s not what’s good for most people. “He does not insist on being useless, and even if he were, still it would be a good bargain, because he has everything, and I have only myself.”