And she was still on it right now. Alfie was step two. I’d wondered why she’d been so determined to hook herself a powerful enclaver boyfriend at school, after she’d already made valedictorian, but of course now I understood. It wasn’t good enough to get into an enclave. She’d recognized that when she did, she’d be starting here, in the cheap seats, and she wanted a partner with a better position on the inside. It was actually a perfectly sensible and also a really good plan, as I should have expected.
“Sorry,” I said, very grudgingly. Mum would probably have tried to sit her down for a few months of conversation, but personally I didn’t blame her for wanting revenge. I still had vivid revenge fantasies about that twat who’d shoved me in the corridor in freshman year. But I’d got this far not liking Liesel and I wanted to keep on; it felt vaguely dangerous to stop.
Liesel only shrugged. “They had power, and my mother had none. The one with power decides what is going to happen,” she said, matter-of-fact. “So it’s better to have power, and it’s stupid not to take it when you have the chance. You come in here and save the whole enclave, and you take nothing. What a grand gesture! What will you do now if a maw-mouth comes to someplace else, not an enclave, and they don’t have mana to give you to fight it?”
“I’m not going in for a career of hunting maw-mouths!” I said.
“Aren’t you?” Liesel said, contemptuously. “What else are you going to do?”
I could have done with a year of crying in the woods to answer that question, but under the circumstances, I had to say something or else get squashed flat, and I didn’t want to be squashed flat. So I said, “I’m going to build enclaves,” as if I’d decided, after all, that I was going to do that. “I’m going to build Golden Stone enclaves. Not fairyland castles and skyscrapers, just a few solid bunkrooms for kids to sleep in and a workroom or two, and it won’t take malia and generations of scheming to put them up.”
And I ought to have been grateful to Liesel, because it became the truth as I told it to her, the answer that I might easily have spent a year digging out of myself: yes, that was what I wanted to do. It was still my dream, even if it had been someone else’s dream before mine. It felt right in my own mouth and mind as I said it out loud: a dream worth chasing, a good life’s work.
“So,” Liesel said. “How many years will it take people to save the mana to put up one of your golden enclaves, and how many of their children will be eaten before they have enough? Why not tell London to give you ten years of mana, and go put up ten enclaves for children whose parents can’t afford it?”
That was nearly the exact question I’d spent my entire childhood yelling at Mum in a frothing rage, so fortunately I had an answer for it handy. “Because as soon as I start doing that, I’m not putting up enclaves anymore,” I said. “I’m doing work for London, or New York, or whoever’s got the most mana, and doing a bit of charity on the side. They’ve been trying to get my mum to turn into their private healer for years and years.”
“That is not true,” Liesel said. “Maybe for your mother, but this is not the same thing. How often will an enclave need your help? For what? If they are begging you to help because there is a monster about to eat their home and all their children, you will go anyway! You came here. That is not why you will not take their payment. You don’t take it because you think you are better than them, because you want to make them be ashamed of themselves, and so what if you could do so much more good for everyone else with their help.”
If only that hadn’t sounded quite so plausible. I glared at Liesel. “And it’s loads of good you’ll be doing for all the little people, is it? Anyway, why are you trying to talk me into bullying London for mana? You’re in London, now, in case you hadn’t noticed, and you’ve got Alfie to ride piggyback all the way to Dominus. Don’t tell me it’s because you like me.”
She glared back. “You’re not a useless person! You could make something of yourself, if you were willing to try. But not if you insist on behaving in this unreasonable way, as if you think everything must become terrible and evil the moment you make any sort of compromise.”
That took me aback; it was obviously as high a compliment as she had to pay, so apparently she did like me. In fact, I realized very belatedly, before asking me to dinner, she’d fixed her hair and her clothes again, and the curtain had been tied up on purpose to display the rigged-out bed. There was obviously a checklist somewhere labeled getting Galadriel on board and she’d jotted down thinks I’m well fit because she’d noticed me noticing her, back at school. She was letting me know she’d be happy to swap her enclaver boyfriend for me.