“What about your mum?” I interrupted.
Liesel paused, and said a little stiffly, “She died when I was inducted.”
That clearly wasn’t coincidental; it meant her mum’s death had been scheduled. You can’t always make a grand bargain like Martel for an unearned decade more of life, if you’re not an enclaver with heaps of mana to spend. But there’s another deal you can almost always make. If, for instance, you know you’ve got fifty–fifty odds of making it past your child’s induction day, there’re some shady sorts of healers who’ll help you trade your chance of survival for the chance of dying, and then at least you know when it’s going to be.
I said, a bit incredulous, “And your dad’s gone, too?” I was still tipsy enough to be indelicate, or else maybe I just had waived any tact for dealings with Liesel. In my defense, that would have made for a fairly extreme form of bad luck. I’m unlucky, as wizard kids go. If your parents have survived long enough to produce you, they’re generally grown wizards in the prime of life, and there really isn’t that much that can take out a grown wizard. We’re the worst monsters there are. Even her mum must have been unlucky, to get taken out young enough to have a school-aged kid: whatever had got her had likely involved a spell going wrong, or some curse going right. Losing both parents is fairly improbable.
And in fact it hadn’t happened. Liesel said, even more flatly, “He’s a council member in Munich.”
“What?” I stared at her. “But—”
“Do you need me to spell it out in small words?” Liesel said coldly. “His wife is the daughter of the Domina. That is how he has his seat. So he told my mother if she wanted me to have a place in the Scholomance, she would keep hush and never contact him again. I have never met him. He sent money sometimes.” The words dripped with contempt, as well they might. Money’s fairly trivial for an enclaver to produce. Even most indie wizards can magic themselves up a fifty-pound note; the real limit is that the local enclave will come down on you if you start counterfeiting on a large enough scale to make things awkward for them. But there’s not an enclave in the world that doesn’t have a more or less unlimited supply.
I grimaced; I didn’t like being sympathetic towards Liesel. But leaving your kid outside for mals to hunt while you live cushy in your enclave…He wouldn’t even have suffered any horrible consequences for bringing her inside. No one ever gets kicked out of an enclave for a thing like cheating on your wife, even if the Dominus might want to. That’s the sort of thing that would make a Dominus lose their job. Enclavers—with reason—expect to get away with almost anything, including reasonably concealed use of malia, as long as it doesn’t actually threaten the enclave as a whole. That’s the only bright line none of them are allowed to cross; the rest are very pliable. But Liesel’s dad certainly could have lost his council seat over it. That was what he’d valued, more than her life. “That’s why you didn’t go to Munich,” I said. “Why not one of the other German enclaves?”
“What good would that do?” she said. “Munich is the most powerful of them. I need a more powerful enclave, not less.”
“To do what?” I said, because I couldn’t help myself, although I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know.
“The exact details will suggest themselves,” Liesel said, a bit dismissively. “But I mean to acquire a position where I am more powerful than his wife, and then I will be able to make her sorry.”
“For—”
“Killing my mother,” Liesel said. “It wasn’t an accident.”
She had a right to the irritated tone; as soon as she said it, the whole thing became obvious. Her dad had done his best to hide his dirty little secret, but his wife had found out anyway—presumably when he’d finally grudgingly pulled a string or two to get Liesel that promised Scholomance seat—and instead of binning her useless husband, she’d gone after Liesel’s mum, and she’d got her. And then Liesel had been forced to watch her mum sell off what was left of her life, just to get her over the finish line into the Scholomance.
It made sense to me of what Liesel was doing in ways I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted. It had been a lot easier to think she was just a bit of a shit person, ready to do anything to get into an enclave and have a cushy life of ease and power. But instead she’d just done the maths and reached the completely correct conclusion that the only way she was ever going to be able to make the daughter of Munich’s Domina feel so much as an instant’s regret was if she was the Domina of an even bigger enclave, or next to it. And unlike an ordinary sane person, she hadn’t looked at that solved equation and decided right, I’ll settle for the revenge of just living as well as I can; instead she’d made herself a thirty-year plan that started with step one: become valedictorian of the Scholomance, and marched off on it.