Or, well, why swap; she’d love to collect the set if we’d cooperate. Her and Alfie and me, that was a recipe for world domination, much less for squashing her enemies in Munich like the cockroaches they were. I was only surprised she hadn’t yet asked me outright. Probably she was making a massive effort to be tactful because Orion had just died and maybe I wanted to waste some of my time being sad instead of following her own highly superior therapy program of meticulously planning out a campaign for victory.
And I’d been absolutely right: she was dangerous, because as soon as I realized that offer was on the table along with the tagine, I discovered I could understand why Alfie had taken her up on it. If you had everything, if you had power, and you wanted to use it—and yet you had sense enough to doubt yourself, whether you were really going to do a brilliant job of it, and also perhaps had a bit too much caution, then what more magnificent offer could anyone make you: all the brains in the world and all the drive along with them, to tell you exactly what to do and calculate out to the nth degree the best way to do it and then give you a good hard shove on top of it.
Liesel would make something of Alfie, and he really did want something made of himself. Even at school, he’d helped with the plan more wholeheartedly than almost any of the other enclavers. He’d wanted to believe, almost as much as the Scholomance itself wanted to believe, in its nonsense motto: to protect all the wise-gifted children of the world. Which made more sense now, because it had been his family’s great triumph. He wanted to live up to it. I couldn’t even look down on that ambition, although I was fairly certain that he was going the wrong way, and his actual ancestor had mostly been a scheming mastermind looking to cement the power of his own enclave.
And if what I wanted was to build as many golden enclaves as I could—Liesel was telling me she’d be willing to sign on to the project, and with all her brains and drive and ruthlessness, she’d make something of that, too. Give her ten years, and every enclave of the world would end up signed on to donate mana, presumably as some sort of insurance policy—just chip in a bit, not more than you can spare, and if a maw-mouth or an argonet shows up at your enclave gates, Galadriel will swoop in and save you. Or she’d sell them on the benefits of having satellite enclaves nearby for their commuters, dangling a taste of the better life. I could envision the shape of her whole program, even if I couldn’t have executed it myself in a century. And when it was done, there would be loads more children sleeping safe, all over the world, than I’d ever manage by plodding around to one small group of wizards at a time. And I wouldn’t have to give anything that I wouldn’t give anyway.
It wasn’t a trick, was the really seductive thing about it. Liesel wasn’t a liar; she wasn’t promising anything she didn’t mean to deliver, and she wasn’t even hiding the cost of it either. She was laying it out for me plainly: the price was compromise. To smile at enclavers once in a while when I didn’t mean it and go to their parties and make it just that bit easier for them to give me what I wanted; and why the bloody hell not, if it got me what I wanted, and what I wanted was good?
I didn’t even disagree. I thought she was right, in the general case. Only I’m not the general case, and I’ve known that ever since I was five years old with my great-grandmother, the world-famous seer, reciting my doom over my head, my glorious destiny to sow death and destruction among the wizards of the earth, shatter enclaves and murder thousands, and I know without a doubt that the first step towards fulfilling her prophecy would be made with all the good intentions in the world.
But I couldn’t help feeling the pull of it. Liesel meant it from her side; it was as fair an offer as anyone could make. We weren’t in the Scholomance anymore, but it was an alliance offer all the same, putting herself on the table, all-in, and she wasn’t a useless person either. So I couldn’t be angry at her for making it, even though I’d have liked to be angry. Instead it was only the familiar bitter taste of wanting things other people had, my face pressed up to the window of the cake shop full of easy sweetness I couldn’t buy. Alfie had said yes in a heartbeat, surely. But I couldn’t.
That wasn’t her fault, though. I put down my glass; the faint heady buzz of the wine had faded out of me completely. “I don’t think it would go all wrong the first moment that I ever compromised on anything,” I said, not rude, only final. “Not the second time, either. But I’m not going to risk doing it until I find out how many times it would take. And you’d be sorry if I did, too, even if you don’t think so now. The only tactics I’ve got are scorched-earth, so that’s what I’ll end up with, if I ever start a war. You’ll have to get your vengeance on your own.”