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Liesel did not manage to become Domina of London before she was thirty. She was instead, thirty-two.
I guess she had to settle for being the youngest leader of London enclave ever recorded in history. It was all my fault of course, because she’d had to spend a lot of time and energy on the Mawmouth Extermination Programme, and less on politics. Three guesses who came up with that name for our efforts.
No one else could have kept a lid on the programme for as long as she did. We’d threatened 70 enclaves into replacing their foundations by the time anyone tried anything. Enough time for her to have apparently quietly got the message across to most councils that I was not be fucked with. Which saved me from turning a lot more wizards into stone. Temporarily, of course. Most importantly, it stopped me from being woken up at all hours by assassins and barely refraining from squashing them like bugs. There had been some near saves. No one loses their Scholomance instincts.
Liesel called her ascension to ultimate enclaver status: phase 2 of the plan. Or rather she called it the Mawmouth Prevention Programme.
She was already coordinating joint enclave research involving Liu and Shanfeng and my family and a million other classmates and other contacts that she had built up over the years to find a way to expand on the golden enclave spells. We were trying to see if we could modernise them, make it possible to build bigger enclaves for the same amount of mana. Back when she won her council seat, she’d founded a training program at my family’s home for any incantation graduates specialised in singing, sponsored by London enclave. It had sped up the process of replacing foundation stones enormously. And made building golden enclaves a much more viable option for graduates. Antonio and Caterina had already set up twelve golden daycares all over the world with that free expertise.
So she was already well underway on phase 2, really.
Orion and I were invited for the ceremony, even though we weren’t London enclavers. So were Liu and Aadhya and Chloe and a whole lot more of our classmates. But not just them. There were countless enclave leaders present. That had never happened before. After all, enclaves aren't just homes, they're bastions, castles. Inviting in your most powerful rivals made you ridiculously vulnerable. They might decide to pop your wards at the wrong moment or try to drain your mana or have a go at ripping the place up at its seams.
So Liesel was starting off her reign with a never before seen power move. Not that there weren't defenses in place. She’d never be so stupid.
Listening to Alfie’s speech was horrific. He somehow managed to spin our years of terror inside the Scholomance into a lovely, heroic history lesson. Of course, nothing was exactly dishonest about how Liesel had grabbed the reins with total effectiveness for our mass mal killing plan. When he started in on me I was about ready to rip a distracting seam in the enclave's reality myself. I'd been staring murderously at the side of Liesel’s head for the past five minutes and she finally turned towards me with a devastatingly impatient expression that meant do not be so ridiculous.
At least I wasn't the only one. Half the year got mentioned. Then the mawmouth survey initiative came up, which had been public from the get-go. By now, every council knew what we were doing, even if we were still calling it a survey. But we were not going to stop. We were at a hundred and eighty foundations replaced. London had its gateways and expansions fixed ten years ago, when Liesel had wound Alfie’s dad sufficiently around her finger. By marrying Alfie. I wouldn't be here otherwise. Liu would not be here, on a mawmouth foundation.
A million other of Liesel’s accomplishments ticked by and I had to elbow Orion when I caught him falling asleep. He had no problem focusing and hoovering up the delicious canapés at the reception though. They were the best of the best cooking that one of the most powerful enclaves in the world could produce. The tables were artifice, and offered the food you were most likely to love. Liesel’s acceptance slash victory speech had come very close to saying the quiet parts out loud - the parts that every enclave council knew about. She’d proposed global restrictions on selling enclave spells. She had New York and Shanghai and all their allies to back her up on it, as well as London’s own, but it was still a crazy proposal. It was the first inter-enclave law. But I trusted her timing. I trusted her.
It was summer, and the London gardens were a fairytale of sunlight and perfect temperature, an impossible mix of lazy heat and fresh air. Liesel was shaking hands and having very important discussions in a whole crowd of people that I desperately did not want to get swept up in. But the brilliant part was that I had my own crowd of people. Liu and Aad and Orion and Yuyan and Nkoyo and unfortunately Khamis. Ibrahim and Yaakov and Chloe. Cora and Tomas and Caterina and Sarah. And a hundred more of us, most in our mawmouth sighting network. Some of them I hadn't seen in a long time, unless I'd been by to hunt. The older generation took most of Liesel’s attention for much of the evening, but she joined us to receive our congratulations once she’d battled her way through. And gotten what she wanted.
Orion and I stayed the night in her and Alfie’s enormous apartment. London really didn't skimp on Domina privileges. Then we went out for our summer holiday of more honeypot hunting. The mawmouths were getting harder to track down - sightings were becoming rarer by the year. So Liu had developed a specific mal-puller variation of our graduation spell that I could sing on my own. It wasn't as strong as when she accompanied me on the lute, but it did the job. I could admit by now that I loved this dance, this perfect synergy between Orion and me as we cleared the countryside of every mal in range. No mawmouth this year in the south of England. It would take a long time to comb the whole world. We were working on it. We were getting so close.
Aadhya employed local indie-wizards to bag up the remains of our killing sprees for her workings. She paid very well. Not us, because we didn't need it. Her workshop was based out of New Jersey golden enclave that I'd built for her myself. Her family fit - even their home had fit. She’d never run out of mana because her artifice was the best on the market. Chloe had done a beautiful warding mural of her own design. It was a place that I loved.
Liesel was pregnant.
She wanted to see the Scholomance. She’d never been back since we went to get Orion. So we cut off our summer holidays and went home.
It was a better place. It was guarded, and supplied. There was good food, good light, good blankets. It wasn't starving and the children weren't starving, anymore. Orion supplied it with mana and kept the burners working, killed the mals that tried to sneak in, and patrolled the hallways. Even the Scholomance exam deadlines had been gentled. Children still died. Not a lot. Not even ten percent. Those were incredible odds. Outside it was still two to one. And climbing, whatever we did.
But Liesel had never seen it since.
She arrived in Sintra wearing a typically stunning outfit. A knee length dress of a smooth linen-like fabric that was clearly enchanted to make the Portuguese heat a non-issue, reinforced with gold protection runes and amphisbaena scales. I wondered whether those were the same Orion had once traded her. It seemed so long ago. It was long ago. She’d let her hair flow loose in shiny golden waves and had applied only a touch of lipgloss, which was pretty casual for her.I wondered why Alfie hadn't come along, but I could guess.
When she stepped beyond the gate, she paused. Last time, we’d been hurrying. To kill Patience and then get the hell out. She stood where she had twice escaped the Scholomance, and held a hand to the door.
We gave her the grand tour. Neither of us was much of a tour guide. In fact, Orion was almost utterly useless.
But at one point he did walk us past her old room.
It had colour. The paint had been applied years ago during renovation, and the students who occupied the room now only had to touch the wall to change it. It was a ridiculously useless thing to spend mana on, if you had to hold on to every scrap in order to survive. One wall was blue and the other green. The kids whose room it was had stuck pictures and cutouts above their beds, and the space looked cluttered. There was a wealth of pencils, pens and papers spread over the desks. Even magazines. A suitcase sat under the bed. Clothes stuck out from the wardrobe, caught between the doors. Orion did a quick check for mimics, automatically. He used a bit of artifice that Aadhya had developed that was given out to kids with their standard kit.
We looked at the extensive food options and the library, the shiny new seminar rooms, the gym which was in beautiful bloom, the warning spells set on the drains and ceiling tiles. We never saw a single mal. Which made sense - we were the worst targets a mal could ever make the mistake of jumping. We heard only our footsteps and the quiet hissing of mana through the Scholomance’s veins - a bit of metal groaning. It should have been creepy. And Liesel did seem uneasy.
We went down to Orion’s room, which was on the first floor with the seniors. It had a big bed and a chair and a wardrobe. It wasn’t much bigger than a student’s. Orion Lake did not need anything more. The chair held most of his clothes. He sat down into it anyway. I sat down on the bed against the pillows, drinking my tea. Liesel kept standing, tea in hand. At least, her cup almost had enough tea in it to be called the name.
“It’s different,” she finally said.
I looked at her.
“Better,” she said.
I nodded.
She looked out of place, in her posh clothes, radiating power and confidence. She needed no protection from these walls. Not anymore.
“They’ll be safer than we ever were,” I said.
Then something terrifying happened.
Liesel’s eyes shimmered wetly, and I saw a tear drop down her cheek. I panicked. I had no idea what to do.I had never seen Liesel cry. Not in 17 years. Not in the Scholomance, not outside it, not faced with any kind of death, nor much worse than death.
I urgently looked at Orion but he looked as urgently back at me.
“Hey don't worry…I’ll be keeping an eye out, really, don't worry,” he said helplessly.
“I know,” she blubbed.
We were inside the Scholomance, but there wasn't any reason to stick to rules that kids in here didn't even know about anymore. I stood and slowly opened my arms, then slowly closed them around Liesel, to give her plenty of seconds to pull herself together or dodge. But she didn't. She cried her lungs out into my shoulder. Orion frantically hunted around the room for tissues.
After Liesel stopped sobbing and wiped her face on the towel Orion had dredged up from the pile on his chair (she would normally have recoiled with extreme incredulity), she grabbed my hand. And then she grabbed Orion’s hand.
“Thank you,” she said, with such depth of feeling I felt my own throat close up.
Then she pressed her lips to Orion’s cheek and to my mouth briefly, and walked out, closing the door to his room behind her.
She knew the way out.
We sat down together on the side of his bed. He slipped his warm arm around my shoulders.
He said in a faintly dreamy and hopeful voice “El…”, and I narrowed my eyes at him. His starry, shining eyes seemed to spell out some kind of question. When I narrowed my eyes further he said, “maybe we could try...?”
I knew what he was getting at, of course.
“Now??” I said.
He grinned at that but said quite seriously, “If you want.”
We sat, safe in the belly of the Scholomance on his bed in his room. Soon, the summer would be over, and I’d join Liu in Shanghai for a season to see if we could try and target the honeypot message in the song specifically at mawmouths. Then we’d go out into the field to experiment. And Orion would be locked away here for the rest of the year, saving kids.
“I do,” I said, and I felt I should be surprised, but I wasn't. There were another 100 enclaves still resting on deathless suffering, and likely more than a 100 mawmouths still out there. And they were still being made, even if we tried to prevent it. And there were millions of other mals out there too, hundreds born every day. But I believed - I really believed, we’d be able to keep her, or him, safe.