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But my heart is always standing on its tripod,
Ready for the next arrow.
– “Aimless Love”, Billy Collins
***
The month spent in the London enclave modifying the golden enclave incantations was more tolerable than Aadhya’d expected.
El looked perpetually queasy. But Aadhya couldn’t feel the writhing of the mana store that El could.
Alfie was quite palatable for an enclaver, and if Liesel wasn’t exactly charming, she made up for it with her brutal efficiency.
They didn’t see much of anyone else, and that suited Aadhya just fine. In the political aftershocks of the aborted battle for the Scholomance, Alfie’s father had finally and firmly sent Martell to an overdue retirement, but there was still some work in undermining his remaining cronies and relegating them to positions of reduced influence while he invented pretexts to promote his own supporters.
Liesel had been given a position as Richard’s secretary, though her normal duties were suspended until their little group had hashed out the final version of the enclave foundation repair spells. London would be the first trial.
They couldn’t fix all of the foundation stones–not now. London didn’t have the mana for it. After all, they still had their war debts from creating all those foundation stones in the first place. But replacing just one, a small stone that–say–held up just a single corridor that ended in a blocked up entrance to the enclave–that was something they could afford. They also didn’t yet have enough strict mana wizards in house. For now, they would hire El’s cousins to make the circle. But a few up-and-comers had been identified: hereditary enclavers safe in their position but who didn’t like their current roles, and some wizards that had joined as new graduates and never advanced but saw this as their chance. They were willing to switch to strict mana and wait out the months (or years if they’d cheated more rather than less) doing spirit building until they became spirit whole and able to form a circle themselves. So within five years if not less, London would have the skills to replace their remaining foundations; if enclaves kept having to replace their foundation stones as their maw-mouths were destroyed, then London would work hard to get the mana to do it.
Aadhya wasn’t an idealist about these sorts of things. She didn’t think Alfie’s dad was going to turn out so much better than his predecessor. Alfie himself? Maybe, with Liesel at his back to keep him on course. But it would be many years before he had any real power, and who knew what would happen in the interim.
Still, Alfie had his father’s ear, and it was only rational for the enclave to do what they could to prevent another devastating attack. Maw-mouths were becoming more active with every day now that the rest of the mals had been killed off. Now wasn’t a time when enclaves could afford weakness and London in particular couldn’t afford to lose more than they already had.
So while they couldn’t count on the London enclave long term, they had the support of Liesel and Alfie, and–for now–a place to work. Even if it did mean having to see more of Liesel.
“This is a very impressive instrument,” Liesel said as she examined the siren spider lute, “Have you found a buyer yet?”
In the aftermath of the events in Beijing, Lui’s immediate family had separated from the rest of their clan, and even though they had resettled in the Shanghai enclave, they were a little short on capital.
Aadhya wondered when Lui and El would show up so they could start the day’s work and rescue Aadhya from Liesel’s idea of small talk. They had commandeered a little conference room that wouldn’t have been out of place at a fashionable mundane hotel–sleek lighting fixtures and a beautiful wood table–though the mundanes wouldn’t have had the magical coffee pot that refilled automatically with fresh brew from the kitchen. It was actually a little poky by enclave standards–they had to bring in the snacks themselves. But that was for the best. No one bothered them.
“No, I’ve been rather busy,” Aadhya said dryly. Selling it would have been good for her reputation as an artificer. But her father thought he could get her at least some short term contracts for Boston, and there was promise of more regular work in Kolkata if she was willing to move. She wasn’t sure if she was yet–it was so wonderful to see her family, a joy that familiarity had yet to tarnish, and she already would be traveling quite a bit with El.
“We will make you an offer for it, if you still want to sell.”
Aadhya paused for a moment, and then warned, “You’d have to buy out Lui too. Do you play?”
“Alfie does,” she said.
It was a tempting offer, even without any details. Selling to Lui’s family would have been good to establish her reputation, but an artifact sold to the heir of London would make her career.
She narrowed her eyes. She almost regretted asking. But it was Liesel. So she had to know: “Why would he want it? He must have his choice of magical instruments already.”
“It’s a good instrument,” Liesel said, sounding sincere.
Aadhya kept looking at her, still suspicious.
“And,” Liesel continued, “it would establish you as an independent artificer to look out for. You would certainly be offered enough other contracts that you could choose between them.”
“Yes,” said Aadhya, “That would be a good reason for me to sell it to you, but I don’t see why you should care about that.”
Liesel huffed as if Aadhya was being unusually obtuse. “Lui is now a Shanghai enclaver. El had the support of her father’s family, who will soon have their own golden enclave. They both will be well supplied with mana and mundane money. Their families are secure, they do not need things from them.”
She paused for emphasis. “But your family are mostly not enclavers. And how long will you be content hunting maw-mouths, when you could be working and supporting your family.”
“So you’re…bribing me?”
“It’s hardly a bribe,” Liesel said. “You will be traveling the world, meeting many enclavers and independent wizards. It will be a great opportunity to make connections. I am merely helping the process along.”
Aadhya couldn’t think of a response to that, so she didn’t say anything. But she talked to Lui later, who was amenable, and so in a few days, with surprisingly little fuss, the deal was made.
Soon they’d finished and tested the revised enclave spells, and bid the London enclave goodbye.
After that, Aadhya didn’t spend much time thinking about Liesel.
Lui and Aadhya spent a good long while resting and being fed in New Jersey, and then three tense days tracking a maw-mouth through Capetown with Jowani. This was immediately followed by two horridly boring weeks staking out a circle of wizards in Siberia. They had been menaced by a maw-mouth right up until El stepped off the plane, at which point it had presumably fled into the deepest darkest hole it could find. El had indeed had the chance to try a summoning–which had not been a success, though it had brought several other horrible mals for El to kill–but eventually they had to leave without ever catching their quarry. It had been a small one, and this wasn’t the Scholomance. There had been almost no limits to where it could hide.
Their task continued in similar fashion–hopping across the globe, taking rest when they could. A week in Wales here, a month in New Jersey there. Not always all together, but there was a lot of time together too.
They went to Shanghai too–the city, not the enclave. Lui wouldn’t set foot in it until its foundation was replaced, so they met up with Jiang and Min and the rest of her family in parks and restaurants. Jiang and Min were attending the Scholomance as day-students, since they had a safe enclave bed to return to at night.
And then the first summer came, and Orion with it, fresh from guard duty at the Scholomance. And Lui and Aadhya quickly made the executive decision that the lovebirds should be left alone for their hunting.
“You don’t have to leave,” El said, somewhat unconvincingly.
“Ugh it’s fine,” Aadhya replied, flicking her fingers. “I want to see my family anyways, and you two need some time together to be disgusting and romantic.”
So she went home to New Jersey to pick up some commissions and be coddled more by her family, and it was all working great until she got a text from Liesel saying I’m in the area—have a project I’d like to discuss with you to which Aadhya conveyed her reluctant acceptance. Despite her reservations, she wasn’t the kind of idiot to turn down potential work from the London enclave.
“In the area” turned out to mean that she’d come through the transatlantic gateway that very day. So Aadhya drove the two hours up to New York, ready to be very snippy, only to meet Liesel at a wonderfully overpriced brunch restaurant with a heavenly selection. That cured the worst of her annoyance. She was also placated by a very interesting conversation with Liesel about artifice. The other woman was not an artificer by trade, but her theory was still stronger than many artificers Aadhya knew. All the same, her plans to fuel a maw-mouth detection artifice with the…residue of the maw-mouths El killed were both extremely grisly and, in Aadhya’s view, extremely unlikely to be endorsed by El herself, who would have to help with the collection.
“Come,” Liesel said, in her no nonsense way, “just because El must live in a way that is exceedingly rigid does not mean that we must do the same. Maw-mouths are a horrible thing to be put out into the world. But they exist. We will not help the people they have devoured by shying away from using their remains.”
Which Aadhya didn’t think was the point, “also,” she said, “it would be difficult to stop the effluvia from corroding the artifice,” which apparently Liesel found a more reasonable objection.
They finished their meal, and Aadhya made motions to return, when Liesel asked, deceptively casual, “Would you like to take this somewhere else?”
And she quirked her eyebrow a little, making it clear that by somewhere else she meant her bedroom.
Aadhya begged off, and fled.
***
El and Lui were less than helpful.
“I think she’s flirting with me,” Aadhya had exclaimed in outrage to the both of them during one of their regular conference calls.
Some stifled noises were coming from El’s line. Lui said, with a little confusion, “Can you just tell her you’re not interested?”
Aadhya waited a little too long to reply.
El’s stifled laughter had become a full cackle. “Well don’t turn her down on my account.”
“That’s not—“ Aadhya started to protest, and then realized that maybe had been, at least in part, her motivation.
It wasn’t that she’d been carrying a secret torch for Liesel of all people. Or even that she was overcome with lust. Liesel was pretty enough, in an obvious sort of way. But that normally wouldn’t have touched her.
It was just…she had spent four years being excessively, painfully sensible. She had calculated every mealtime decision, every conversation, every trade. Until her friendship with Lui and El, she’d done almost nothing for the joy of it. And even that had been strategic—an alliance—and while there was fun and friendship and laughter in their work periods together, there also had been work . Endless work, and strategizing, first for graduation, then for their mad plan to destroy the Scholomance, and later that crazy jetting around the world to save Orion, and then Lui, and then the other enclaves, and to stop the enclave war.
She hadn’t accepted that junior’s proposition at school. That had been sensible. But she was tired of being sensible for every minute of every day. And it was nice to be pursued. Could she be blamed for wanting something easy and fun, if it was on offer?
Possibly, she could be blamed, when the person she was considering it with was Liesel.
It wasn’t that she disliked Liesel anymore. She had a grudging sort of respect for her. It wasn’t even the hypocrisy of considering for herself something she’d judged El for accepting.
It was just that, ‘easy’ and ‘fun’ were two words that Liesel clearly had no interest in. She must have some other angle. And as appealing as the offer was, Aadhya wasn’t keen on being Liesel’s pawn in whatever convoluted game she’d moved onto, now that the project of saving enclaves from themselves was well in hand.
Just because she didn’t dislike Liesel didn’t mean she trusted her. Alfie and her clearly had an arrangement, but Aadhya suspected it wasn’t “Liesel can have her fun when she’s a continent away,” and more “Liesel can do whatever is necessary for strategic advantage.”
And Aadhya couldn’t see what the strategic advantage would be. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
***
And that was all well and good until there was a report of a maw-mouth near Frankfurt, and not only were Aadhya, Lui, and El flying in, but Liesel suddenly declared she was going too.
Aadhya complained in the group chat: Doesn’t the dominus need you? Won’t it be suspicious if you’re jetting off all the time?
Liesel didn’t bother with rebuttals. She replied: I’m already at the airport
And of course, because she was in London and the rest of them were in New Jersey, Shanghai, and a tiny commune in Wales (Orion had gone back to the school and El had gone home to visit her mom), Liesel got there first. Which left Aadhya, the second arrival, with the dubious pleasure of one-on-one time with Liesel.
“No offense,” said Aadhya, “But what are you even doing here? Don’t you have enough scheming to do in London?”
Liesel huffed as if having to explain herself went too far, “The circle that reported the maw-mouth is my grandparents’”
“Your mother’s?” Addhya asked. El had told her and Lui about Liesel’s father.
“Yes,” Liesel said.
“You never mentioned having a family,” Aadhya said. For all intents and purposes it had seemed like Liesel was alone in the world–just her, and her ambitions.
“My mother is dead. It would be exceedingly unlucky to have lost my grandparents as well. They are not so very old.”
“But then–”
Liesel sighed as if she was being slow. “You must know what most independent wizard families are like. You are part of one. They either scrape and save for years to buy themselves into an enclave, or they spend generations saving to build an enclave of their own.”
“Yeah,” Aadhya said, “So what?”
“So my grandparents are trying to be the latter. They had twelve children. Even as independent wizards, they were counting on getting two back, if not more. Instead, only my mother survived. She was the oldest. Her twin brother died at school, and she spent the next decade watching her little siblings go into the Scholomance and not come out again. They expected her to do the same. They wanted her to find a like minded wizard and settle down to having children to continue the family line. Instead she had an affair with a Munich councilmember, endangering the family’s relationship with the most powerful enclave in the country, and had only one child. She didn’t want to do what her parents did, and treat children like a resource to further the family, to be chewed up and spat out.”
Liesel paused and looked at Aadhya. “So they disowned her.”
“And they didn’t want anything to do with you?” Aadhya asked, a little shocked.
Liesel shrugged a little, “They said they would take me and raise me if she gave me up, but she wouldn’t do it. And then she was cursed by my father’s wife, and it was all she could do to survive long enough for me to make it to school. And my grandparents did nothing to help her. So I decided that I would have nothing to do with them.”
She paused again. “But that does not mean I wish for them to be eaten by a maw-mouth.”
Aadhya didn’t know what to say.
In their course of hunting maw-mouths together, they’d developed a strategy. They typically made as little contact with the local wizards as possible, except for those who already knew the secrets of how maw-mouths came to be. This time in Frankfurt was no different, at first.
Except when El trudged out of the basement where the maw-mouth had ensconced itself—the others holding shields over the exits in case it tried to make a break for it—a dower woman of maybe sixty-five came out of the neighboring house and said, “Liesel?” sounding a little tremulous.
Liesel looked at her for a moment, expression blank, and then she turned away.
The woman didn’t say anything else, didn’t try to follow. And they all did Liesel the courtesy of not asking if she wanted to go back.
***
You would think after that incident, Liesel would have clammed up again. She didn’t seem the sharing and caring sort. Aadhya thought she wouldn’t hear from Liesel again for a while.
But she was wrong.
Instead Liesel chose that moment to launch a concerted campaign.
Aadhya had better things to do than driving up to New York once a week, so she quickly put the ax to those invitations, even if she felt a twinge as she did, knowing that this would be the last of it. As soon as Aadhya made herself too inconvenient, the cost benefit equation which Liesel surely was running for this seduction, would surely tip towards the former.
However, Aadhya had underestimated Liesel’s unwillingness to admit defeat. She discovered her error when Liesel showed up at her house.
Aadhya had gone along with her father to help out with his latest Boston contract. She would meet some of the enclave wizards–connections she needed in order to build her own reputation. When the two of them got back, her mother met them at the door with an odd expression on her face.
“Your friend from school’s here,” she said, and Aadhya didn’t know what to think until she walked into the sitting room and found Liesel.
Aaddhya barely maintained her civility. “Let me show you my room,” and then she towed Liesel away from her curious parents.
“What are you doing here,” she hissed at Liesel after she closed her bedroom door after them.
“What do you think?” Liesel asked, having the nerve to sound impatient. “I’m here to see you.”
“Yes, but why? Why do you keep trying to see me?”
“May I not just want to ? Must there be some other motive?”
Aadhya gave her a look. “With you? Yes.”
Liesel didn’t say anything.
So Aadhya continued. “So tell me. Let’s get it out in the open. What problem are you trying to solve by hanging out with me all the time, and–and trying to sleep with me.” Her voice might have come out more like a squeak at the end.
Liesel stayed silent for a minute, and Aadhya thought she wouldn’t answer.
Then she sighed, “The problem is that you don’t trust me.”
“ Sleeping with you is not going to make me trust you.”
“Won’t it?” Liesel asked with a raised brow.
“I’m not El,” Aadhya replied. “Like no offense, and I love her, but she’s a little crazy.”
“Fine,” said Liesel, with a gently patronizing tone, “Then what will make you trust me.”
That stopped Aadhya in her tracks. She had to think about it.
“Knowing what you’re plotting,” she said at last.
“ We are plotting a campaign that undermines the power of enclaves across the world and will force many of them to take in more members than they want, or perish, and to change the fabric of wizarding society. Is that not enough?”
“For you? No way,” Aadhya insisted.
“Why?”
“Because where in this fits your revenge. The thing you’ve spent years working for.”
“Berlin has a maw-mouth out there,” Liesel said.
“So what–you’re going to wait to find it and then hope Berlin topples into the void once El destroys it?”
“No,” said Liesel, and her gaze looked far away, “I want to destroy her. The woman who killed my mother. I do not want to become her. But Berlin isn’t one of the enclaves whose maw-mouths went into the Scholomance. I know enough enclavers in Berlin. I asked around. So it still has foundation stones to be replaced. And when Berlin has to shell out the mana to save itself, there will be a subsequent loss of power and influence. And very possibly a change in leadership. There will be opportunities that present themselves then, if I’ve worked to put myself in the way of enough power and information in the meantime.”
She looked over at Aadhya, “Well? Is that sufficiently sinister?”
“That might take years,” Aadhya said instead of answering.
“Yes,” said Liesel, a little unwilling. “But I care more to stop what happened to my mother from happening again. There will always be bad actors willing to use curses of course. But how powerful my father was, and how powerless my mother–we can stop that. We’ve removed the stranglehold of enclave power from the Scholomance. We are forcing enclaves to spend mana to fix their stones, and to take in more people. And soon there will be small golden enclaves. And by doing all of this we are making it harder and harder for enclaves to sell their main resource—the enclave spells. Because it is not efficient to build an enclave that might be immediately cast into the void. So little by little, the enclaves will lose some of their power.”
She paused, and then seemed to shake off her train of thought. “Is that enough for you?”
“Yes,” said Aadhya, because she found that it was. “I trust you. And you don’t even have to sleep with me to get it.”
She thought her ears might have gone a little pink at her last statement, but hopefully they were hidden by her hair.
Liesel gave her a long and assessing look.
“Are you sure? It would be fun.”
Aadhya sputtered but didn’t quite manage either a “yes I’m sure,” or a “no I don’t want to sleep with you,” which Liesel noticed of course.
So she pulled Aadhya down to the bed, giving her time to pull away, and when she didn’t, gave her a slow kiss.
Then she did pull away, with a hiss, “My parents are downstairs!”
“I have a hotel,” Liesel suggested.
“Presumptuous much?” Aadhya shot back.
“I wasn’t sure of my welcome. And it’s a long drive.”
Aadhya rolled her eyes, but she let Liesel lead her out of the house, and by the time they got to the hotel, she’d even managed to fully squash the little voice in her head that said this was a terrible no-good idea.