“Mixing with that potion we drank?” Liesel said, and then she cupped my cheek and we were in bed together, alone here in this little room, floating in the void, and when I said, waveringly, “I’m not,” meaning that I still wasn’t interested in the grand alliance—which I wasn’t, although I had to admit the immediate prospect made it loads more tempting—she said peevishly, “Yes, yes; well?” meaning she’d taken no for an answer on that and was offering me a shag anyway, without strings attached.
And of course I had no business believing that; Aadhya and Liu would have yelled at me for days. The first lesson you learn in the Scholomance is that you don’t get anything you need for free, so if someone’s giving it to you, there’s a reason, and I didn’t know what Liesel’s was. But whatever her reasons, at the moment she was here, and where she was touching me it was only her hand on my skin and the faint sandalwood smell of the free soap, and there wasn’t any room left over in my head to go circling back to Orion, Orion, Orion, and maybe I was looking for a way I could shove him away, out of the gates of my mind, for at least a few minutes, because when Liesel leaned in and kissed me, I kissed her back.
And as soon as we started, I couldn’t bear to stop. It was a belly-deep relief, in every possible way. The last traces of the awful blurring drugs went fading away before the physical reality of our bodies moving against one another, the exotic wonder of someone this close to me, much harder to believe in than a thousand forgotten places. I let it fill my whole brain: the touching; the humid warm air still hanging in the room from my endless shower, miles away from the clammy coldness of the Scholomance bathrooms; the sound of our breath, quickening, and not because we were running away from something horrible. Her hands were brushing away a sticky layer of cobwebs that had resisted all the hot water in the world, her mouth warm and mint-cool at the same time.
And it didn’t have to be hard. I didn’t have to think, I could just put my arms round her and touch, and kiss, and be touched; I could have pleasure and give it back in turn. And that was easy too, ridiculously easy; I didn’t have to wonder what she’d like, because she just told me, here, or again, or yes, like so, and I didn’t have to wonder what I’d like, either, because Liesel just tried things out on me methodically, and asked me which was best, and anyway all of them were best. We moved together just like we were back running the obstacle course again, a single smooth well-oiled machine, tossing the lead back and forth between us, and I didn’t even mind whatever she was going to charge me for it. Of course something this wonderful would have a price. I didn’t care.
I was waiting for it afterwards, when we were lying crammed in on the narrow bed next to each other panting and sweaty, needing showers all over again. But Liesel didn’t say anything right away, and I couldn’t help thinking about Orion again, running the course with him, being in the gymnasium with him—a million years ago and barely more than a week, amphisbaena raining gently down outside the pavilion and his hands on my body, hearing him say my name as if I was the single most astounding thing in the universe.
My throat swelled up with longing and rage: he’d asked to come to me, he’d asked me to let him make me that promise; that had been the price he’d charged me, for this magical thing, so good and healthy and simple, and I’d paid it. I’d let him promise, and he hadn’t kept his promise. Instead he’d gone as far as he could in the other direction; he’d gone to spend the rest of eternity unreachable and screaming in the belly of a maw-mouth, in the back of my head, screaming forever, and Liesel made an impatient noise and rolled over onto me and kissed me again, and I kissed her back with desperate gratitude and let her yank me out of my head and back into my body.
We ended up having to make a mad dash for the gate in the end, despite all the time we’d had to wait. The corridors of Heathrow annoyingly insisted on remaining exactly the same length the entire time we were pelting towards the aeroplane, but I suppose that was better than if they’d stretched themselves out twice as long. We got ourselves aboard and I turned into something of a wide-eyed naif staring out the window as the ground fell away below us. Flying is one of the things you really can’t do with magic, at least not outside an enclave: only imagine how wonderful it would be to be soaring a hundred feet off the ground and then some mundane glances up and doesn’t believe you’re doing that, so rather abruptly you aren’t anymore.