But Alfie looked fully prepared to pick another fight as we approached the festivities. I hadn’t been automatically inclined to care how irreverent Yancy and her people were towards any of the sacred hobgoblins of London enclave, but I have to admit, I didn’t really approve once I got a better look at this Memorial Green of theirs. It wasn’t a political monument, with self-important statues and engraved plaques. It also wasn’t a cemetery, because you don’t get bodies back out of the Scholomance. But here at the far side of the gardens, London had deliberately set aside a wide green meadow, at least a hundred meters across without so much as a single tree to break up the view, and a massive labyrinth of stones had been laid out on the perfectly green grass. Each stone was more or less the size to fit comfortably into a palm, flat and round, made of faintly translucent quartzlike stuff that reminded me immediately of Mum’s crystals. But not like the one I was wearing round my neck, with a faint sheen of mana against my skin. They were like the crystals that I’d burned out completely, fighting the maw-mouth in the Scholomance library; the ones that had slowly gone dull and dead.
I didn’t need to see the names carved into them, stained dark brown, to understand. You couldn’t send messages in or out of the Scholomance, not on paper and not in dreams; you couldn’t even get a heartbeat spell inside. If you were lucky, you got a note from your kid once a year, if they’d given one to a senior who’d survived their own graduation. But London had worked out this solution.
Alfie had surely put his name on a stone like this, and filled it up with mana he’d built himself, and then he’d cut his finger and rubbed blood into the carving until it was full. And his mum and dad had kept it with them, all four years he was away, looking at it every morning and every night. If one day it had started to go dim, they’d have told themselves it was a trick of the light. Maybe after a week they’d have started picking it up and taking it into dark corners, to reassure themselves that really it was still shining. And after two, or three, their friends would have started to be very kind to them, and one day they would have picked up the dull grey empty stone and brought it here and found an open place—there weren’t many, and in some places, the lines had been doubled up—and they’d have put down the only remains of the child they’d sent away to die in the dark.
This simple unbroken green was more expensive than ten palaces. The one thing that’s really limited inside an enclave is space. The winding paths of the fairy gardens weren’t just a lovely aesthetic choice: they had to be winding, so that the artifice could shuffle them in and out of existence as easily as possible. Having a clear view from one end to the other made that impossible.
Yancy was there with about twenty other wizards between the ages of fourteen and eighty, all sprawled out comfortably over the green and the stones, some of them drinking but most of them gathered round a big cast-iron pot set up in one of the lanes with a balefire going underneath it. It had a lid with two big stovepipe openings that were belching irregular gouts of a heavy, iridescent smoke; they caught it in big carved-bone drinking horns and put their faces inside to breathe it in. There was a massive speaker pumping out a deep bass rhythm, and a musician sitting on top playing an electric violin along with it. There wasn’t a socket anywhere I could see, but he wasn’t letting that stop him. Some others were dancing, a couple of them doing balance-beam walking on top of the lines of stones.
“Galadriel Higgins!” Yancy sang out as we came into view, and waved a silver flask in my direction, a lizard sculpted clinging round the surface and glaring at me with a yellow gimlet eye. “Hero of the hour, slayer of the foul beast, opener of the enclave gates. Come and have a drink!”
“It’s El, thanks,” I said, and was about to explain why I couldn’t, but Alfie took two steps in at them with clenched fists and broke in, “Out of curiosity, do you not know that you’re trampling over dead children, or do you not care?”
I have to admit, I didn’t entirely disagree with him. Although partly that was because the whole arrangement reminded me forcibly of parties at the commune, which no one ever told me about, and at which if I showed up started to leak people very quickly until suddenly someone was saying, “You’ll see the bonfire goes out all the way, won’t you, El?” and then it was just me alone getting cold in the dark and shoveling dirt onto the embers in a frantic hurry so I could leave before a mal popped up to eat me.