Once I had stopped blazing away, I couldn’t help but recognize he’d had every sensible reason to assume the worst of me, and apparently now he might help after all, so I did grudgingly go back to the table with him. Only he didn’t want to talk to me about how I was going to get back into the school. He just wanted to talk to me about Orion. How we’d become friends, every word we’d ever said to one another—most of which had been unpardonably rude—and everything we’d ever done vaguely in the vicinity of each other.
Mum would have approved tremendously. For me it was the slow hideous excruciatingness of a root canal performed with dull instruments and no anaesthesia. Unfortunately, now that his dad’s feelings had actually appeared, I did respect them, so I couldn’t refuse him. But he almost wasn’t grieving. He drank up everything I told him with unbearable happiness, as if I had brought Orion back to him. He hung on every word of every trivial human interaction we’d ever had, and I couldn’t help but remember Orion telling me earnestly how his father had given up his own work to homeschool him, trying to keep him from sneaking away to hunt mals; how his parents had longed for him to want anything else, to care about anything else.
I couldn’t bear it. In desperation I even aggressively told Balthasar about my plan to take Orion away, how Orion had said he’d come to Wales and set off round the world with me, trying to get him to let me stop, only even that didn’t make his dad sorry in the least. He just got almost glassy-eyed at the idea that Orion had been making plans for the future, which only made things worse.
I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. “Look, will you help me get back in?” I demanded baldly, instead of giving Balthasar the next story he was asking for, and he paused and apparently only then remembered what I’d told him I was there for in the first place, or at least took it seriously for the first time; I suppose he’d mentally filed it away as nonsense when Chloe had told him about it.
In fact, he still wasn’t taking it seriously, not the way I needed him to. “El,” he said, instead, with all the gentle kindness of someone having to break bad news, “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how much it means that you want to save Orion from this, that you care about him that much. But he wouldn’t want you to do this.” Almost certainly spot-on, but I didn’t care in the least what Orion would’ve wanted. As far as I was concerned, he’d given up the right to an opinion after he’d shoved me out the gates without asking me for mine. “It’s—the situation is complicated. Even if you’re right about what happened…” He paused as if he were trying to think through what he was going to say.
“If I’m wrong,” I said, “I won’t do anything but waste mana. But I’m not wrong. Patience got him.” I forced myself to say it. “I tried to pull him out. I felt Patience get hold of him.”
Balthasar shook his head a little. “If you’re right, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t…Killing a maw-mouth, any maw-mouth, not to speak of Patience—it’s not like killing other mals, not even powerful ones. Ophelia, Orion’s mother, she’s done research into—”
“I’ve done it three times,” I said flatly. “You can ask London if you don’t believe me. I did one at their council chamber doors just yesterday.”
I’m sure that Chloe had told him; I think Balthasar had simply been having so much difficulty swallowing the idea that I’d really cared in some way about Orion that he’d completely put aside the equally indigestible idea of my going in to kill Patience, much less having any chance of success in this endeavor. He didn’t want to swallow it now, either. In fairness to him, it was a ludicrous thing to claim. But Liesel backed me up, and slowly it went down; he sat back in his chair staring at me, and I could see his face changing as he gathered up all the bits and pieces of information about me that he’d left scattered round while he’d been thinking of me only in conjunction with Orion, and assembled them together into an alarming picture.
Or, I suppose, a potentially useful one. I couldn’t think of him as a heartless weevil anymore, but after all, it’s not some revelation that enclavers love their kids; it doesn’t stop them being enclavers. It’s why most of them became enclavers in the first place, or their parents or someone even further removed into the past. And Orion had been their game-changing mal-killer. Even if Balthasar improbably seemed to care more about Orion’s brief happiness than his long-term usefulness, the rest of New York certainly wouldn’t. For all I knew, Orion’s mum was going to have a hard time becoming Domina without him, and a replacement might have been called for.