There was a way he could have said those same exact words that would have been someone plastering over one of the ugly miserable wrong things that happen in the world, a parent trying to build meaning out of the worst thing that had ever happened to them. People come to Mum with those stories in their mouths all the time. She had to teach me as a kid to stop telling them that their stories were nonsense, even when they obviously were. But Balthasar wasn’t trying to believe in this story. He was just using the words as a convenient plank to get from one step of the conversation to another, as if this mattered to him just as much as that hollow nonsense conversation I’d acted out with Yancy and Liesel down in London’s forgotten underbelly.
“So how can I help you, El?” he went on. “Chloe says you were offered a guaranteed seat at school but didn’t accept it. I’m afraid I can’t renew that—”
He paused on his own, possibly because Aadhya and Chloe and Liesel were sitting at the table with us and their faces warned him, even before I snarled, “Go to hell,” on a surge of rage, and everything on the table around us shook with a wild alarmed clattering. “Patience has him. Orion’s trapped in a maw-mouth, and you think I’m here to beg a place from you? You couldn’t pay me to come live in your fucking enclave. The only good thing in it is gone.” I only stopped there because one of the water glasses fell off and shattered into pieces on the pavement.
So obviously I’d been lying when I was going on about being respectful of his parents’ greater claim to grief. I wanted to unhinge my jaw and bite his entire face off. It was almost worse than Mum talking about Orion. Mum hadn’t even known him, much less been his dad. I had to get up and walk away while the waiters came over with a tea towel and a bin to get rid of the glass.
Chloe came timidly after me. “El, I’m so sorry. I didn’t have much time to—I tried to explain—”
I just waved her off without trusting myself to say words, and then I turned round and went back to the table, once the mundanes were gone again. “I broke the school off into the void,” I said, savagely, “but it’s probably not all the way gone. I need to know where the doors are, and I need enough mana to get in, so I can kill Patience. That’s how you can help me. Unless you don’t mind Orion screaming until everyone who remembers the Scholomance is dead. And if you don’t mind that, say so, and I’ll get it some other way.”
It wasn’t fair in the least, of course. Why shouldn’t his dad be suspicious of some strange girl showing up, displaying her grief for Orion? In fact, I’m sure it’s a routine thing whenever an enclaver kid dies: other wizards from their year turning up at the enclave gates with earnest stories of school romance and promises made. But I wasn’t feeling fair. And meanwhile Balthasar was staring at me as though I’d grown a second head. He looked back at Chloe, who was only just shy of wringing her hands in anxiety, and then at me. “That’s why you want—”
Bile climbed my throat. “That’s all I can do for him now,” I said. “Sorry, did you think I was offering to bring back your perfect weapon? He’s gone, like the whole place is gone, and I can’t fix that, and I wouldn’t bring him back to you if I could, you sitting there bleating at me about how brave he was. No one’s brave inside a maw-mouth. He was an idiot who thought he had to be a hero instead of a human being, and that’s your fault, you sorry bastards, the whole lot of you.”
I wasn’t expecting him to help me after that howl, but I’d given up on him helping me anyway. I turned round and was ready to march back to Aadhya’s car and go, but he got up and intercepted me, catching me by the shoulders with the first real emotion in his face: not grief, not anger, just utter bewilderment, as though I didn’t make any sense to him at all, and he said, “You really,” and stopped there, as if the next word didn’t even matter; as if he found it impossible to believe that anyone had really anythinged Orion, and then he looked back at Chloe and said, “Orion really—？” and his voice cracked, audibly. She nodded, urgently, and he let go of me and turned away, put a clenched fist up to his mouth, which went clownishly turned-down at the corners, his whole face wrenched. As though it hadn’t meant anything to him that Orion had died, but this—this meant everything.
I could still with absolute joy have picked up a chair and smashed it over his head, because what right did he have being so astonished about it, but at least it was some kind of caring, something that wasn’t just grotesque and selfish, and when he turned back to me, his face was wet. “I’m sorry. El—El? I’m sorry. Please, come sit back down. Please.” He tried to smile an apology at me, wavering. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed—”