Liesel could tell I wasn’t just batting it back to her. She didn’t keep going, but only studied me narrowly, and then gave a faintly irritated shrug and poured out another glass from the jug, consoling herself for my intransigence, and sat back into scowling thought. The sunlamps overhead were gently descending into night now, but not the way they had been before; the artifice wasn’t running out of power, it was just creating a different illusion. Pale delicate streetlamps began coming alight along all the paths, and new glowing bell-like flowers opening on all the vines twined round the railings. A dim green-blue twinkling had started inside the waterfall itself. More people were walking through the gardens, their low voices rising up to reach us but only in a wordless murmur that mingled with the tumbling water, and then a burst of raucous music erupted from somewhere I couldn’t see, along with a few shrieks of laughter: a discordance that managed to override the tranquility. I was willing to bet that was Yancy and her crew. It probably would be nightly raves until the official rules descended.
I thought I should get up and go, but I didn’t want to. My legs felt leaden, and my belly a solid immovable mass weighing me down in the chair, a drowsy stupor settling in. I didn’t have anywhere to go; there wasn’t any hurry for me to leave. I could just doze in the chair for a little while, or lie down on the bed and sleep until morning, or perhaps for a week, and then Precious poked her head out of the pocket and gave my thumb a hard bite, just short of breaking the skin, and I jolted loose from the compulsion and was standing up, blinking hard and breathing hard, my heart thumping aggressively. I looked down at the silver jug and shot Liesel a hard look, but she hadn’t jolted herself, the way you would if someone broke out of an enchantment you were weaving; she was just eyeing me with a frown that went to sudden hard alertness as she realized someone else was having a go at me.
She stood up. I was just wondering whether I was going to have to fight past her—even if she hadn’t been trying to trap me, the only other real candidates were London council, and presumably she would have liked to impress them—when Alfie came running up the stairs two at a time, a small carafe clutched in his hand, so cold it was dripping condensation over his fingers. He stopped, still panting, when he saw me standing, and darted a quick look over at the still-made bed—right, that answered one question; he was ready to be part of the collected set—before he looked at Liesel. “You broke the compulsion?”
“No! She got out of it herself without even trying; what fool thought it was a good idea to try to enchant a tertiary-order entity?” Liesel snapped. “Your father?”
“A what?” I said.
“No,” Alfie said, gulping air. “Martel’s behind it, and some of the others—”
“Gilbert? And Sidney? To keep him in as Dominus, so they’ll have a chance at it themselves, after all.” Liesel was nodding.
“I’m not an entity!” I said loudly, breaking into this extremely important conversation, and Liesel had the gall to look annoyed at me.
“You know you don’t cast on the baseline scale!” she said, lecturing, as if that were perfectly obvious. “You’re at least two orders of magnitude up, maybe even more. Do you want to get away, or to stand here arguing about terminology until these idiots try something else and you end up killing them when you swat them like a fly? Probably one of them is already bleeding from their brain.”
Oh, I wanted to stand here arguing about terminology violently, actually, but Alfie said, “Liesel—I don’t know where we can get her out. The garden gates are all backed up. Father’s people are trying to sort them out, and Gilbert offered to put his people on all the other gates—”
“And your father was not suspicious that he was being helpful?” Liesel said caustically.
“He hadn’t much choice,” Alfie said. “Some kind of completely jumbled word has got out about the gardens opening. People think we’ve issued an open call for enclave seats, to replace the wizards who died in the attack. We’ve got people coming over from France hoping to get in for an interview. The artifice was only just barely convinced to let outsiders in at all, and now the works are completely jammed. We’ve got wizards queued outside all the entrances. Mundanes are going to notice soon, and if that happens—”
I looked more closely down below: apart from the ongoing noise of revelry, the background murmuring had picked up considerably too, and despite the best efforts of the hanging greenery and branches to obscure the view and preserve some sense of solitude, I could catch glimpses of people everywhere I looked, in every gleam of light, on every narrow side path. The gardens were valiantly trying to accommodate everyone, but they were clearly at their limits.