Chapter 4: Midterms

Mum spent a lot of timein my formative years gently reminding me that people don’t think about us nearly as much as we think they do, because they’re all busy worrying what people are thinking about them. I thought that I’d listened to her, but it turned out I hadn’t. Privately I’d believed, on some deep level, that everyone was in fact thinking about me all the time, evaluating me, et cetera, when really they hadn’t been giving me much of a thought at all. I had the pleasure of uncovering this exciting truth about myself because all of a sudden, a substantial number of people did start thinking about me quite a lot, and the contrast was hard to miss.

In retrospect, everyone had quickly written off the weirdness of Orion Lake falling for the class loser. He was already weird by all our usual standards. Even Magnus and the other New York enclavers, offering me a guaranteed spot: they hadn’t really thought I was anything unusual; they thought Orion was choosing to be odd in yet another way. And as for my surviving the graduation hall escapade, everyone had assumed that was Orion saving me. But Liesel spreading it around that I could sling La Main de la Mort while high on eldritch vapors was one straw too many for the collective camel. And once the other New York kids did actually spend a few moments thinking about me, of course it took them less than a day to realize where all their mana was going.

That night when I left the library to go down to bed, I glanced back and saw Magnus and three friends closing in on Chloe around a couch in the reading room, the dismay on her face clear to read even from between their backs. I thought about going back, but what was the use? Was I going to ask Chloe to lie to her enclave friends, the people she’d spend the rest of her life with, just so I could keep sucking down mana from them? Was I going to beg them to keep letting me cling on? Obviously not. Was I going to threaten them? Tempting but no. There wasn’t anything else to say or do. So I just turned my back and went down, in the firm certainty that they’d insist on Chloe cutting me off first thing the next morning. Actually, that was my optimistic scenario. Really I expected Magnus to appear at my door leading a school-wide mob with not-necessarily-metaphorical pitchforks.

The thing is, I’m not actually unique in the history of wizard society; not even Orion is, really. We’re both once-in-a-generation talents, but those happen, as you might have guessed, once in a generation. It is a bit of a coincidence that we’re in school at the same time, and that we’re both fairly extreme examples. But I’m reasonably sure that’s because there’s some violation of balance being redressed on our backs. Dad nobly walks into a maw-mouth for an eternity of pain to save me and Mum; she gives out too much healing for free; I end up with an affinity for violence and mass destruction. The year before that, twelve maleficers murdered the entire senior class, so a hero who would save hundreds of kids in school got conceived. The moral physics of the principle of balance: equal and opposite reactions totting up on both sides.

The point is, wizards like us do come along every so often: a single individual powerful enough to shift the balance of power among the enclaves depending on where they land. Roughly forty years ago, a hugely powerful artificer with an affinity for large-scale construction came through the school. Every major enclave made him offers. He turned them all down and went home to Shanghai, where his family’s ancient former enclave had been occupied by a maw-mouth. He organized a circle of independent wizards to help him, personally spearheaded the effort to take out the maw-mouth, and as you might imagine was immediately acclaimed as the new Dominus, not three years out of school. It still looked like a bad deal for him: the enclave he rescued was ancient and had soaked up magic for centuries, but it was small and poky by modern standards, and at the time most of the really talented Chinese wizards headed straight to New York, to London, to the California enclaves. Even Guangzhou and Beijing had to recruit from the second string.

Well, after four decades of Li Shan Feng’s rule, Shanghai’s got six towers and a monorail inside the enclave, they just opened their seventh gateway, and lately they’ve been signaling that they’re thinking of splitting off the Asian enclaves and building a new school themselves. And that’s part of what makes Orion so important, so important that New York was willing to throw a priceless guaranteed enclave spot at some loser girl just because Orion liked her. Everyone knows there’s a power struggle coming, and Orion’s not just a top student inside the Scholomance; he’s a game-changer on the outside. No one’s going to go to outright war with an enclave that has an invincible fighter, and that’s not even touching on the resource he represents if he can convert mals into mana. And he belongs really securely to New York: son of the very likely future Domina, no less, and I’m sure he’s at least partly responsible for her being in that position. All the kids from Shanghai in here probably came in with instructions to keep a close eye on him, and gather as much information as they could. They haven’t got any less anxious about him over the last three years, while he’s been busy building a substantial fan club of all the kids he’s saved.

What I hadn’t realized, as I went down to bed, was that I was about to be promoted to game-changer status alongside him.

Chloe didn’t try to lie to Magnus—she’s a terrible liar anyway. She fell back on desperately arguing that they had to keep giving me mana or else, and went into a lot of detail about the grisly potential else, with a vivid description of my dismemberment of her cushion mals. A normal person would have been terrified to find out about nuclear bomb me waiting to go off. Magnus decided that he quite fancied bringing a tidy nuclear bomb home to his parents.

By breakfast the next morning, I’d gladly have faced any number of pitchforks instead of having to see his smug rubbish dump of a face smirking at the Shanghai kids across the cafeteria, like he’d done something clever or recruited me by hand, instead of having done his level best just last term to kill me. The Shanghai kids all looked grim and worried back, for that matter. By that afternoon, I knew for a fact that they were offering stuff to people for details about me, because they had another go at questioning Sudarat: one of them had actually offered her a power-sharer for the rest of the year, which was almost guaranteed to keep her alive that long. “Take it,” I told her bitterly. “Someone ought to do well out of this.”

I suppose I didn’t have the right to complain: New York wasn’t cutting me off after all, so I still had lovely torrents of mana coming. If anything, the other New York kids had all got more enthusiastic about building mana now that they knew where it was going. Because of course they expected to get a handsome return on investment, namely me, a massive gun tucked neatly in their enclave’s back pocket, ready for use in case of emergencies. They were all delightedly hoping to give me exactly the post-Scholomance life I’d dreamed of for years. The bastards.

Two days later, Orion said to me, of all things, “Hey, after graduation, what do you think of taking a road trip?”

I stared at him. “What?”

“The guys were talking about our doing a group road trip,” he said earnestly. “The enclave has this really great customized RV, they’d let us take it, we were thinking…” He trailed off, possibly alerted by my expression of total incredulity that there was something odd about this conversation. It wasn’t just that he had actually out-loud attempted to make concrete plans set in the future that required making the assumption that we’d all survive to appear for these plans—horribly taboo among all but the richest enclavers, and even they have the tact to avoid the topic in mixed company—but he was trying to suggest that I voluntarily spend time with the rest of the New York enclavers.

I knew he hadn’t come up with the idea on his own. Chloe had once told me with a perfectly straight face that Orion didn’t want anything except to kill mals, which was absolute bollocks, but it was the kind of absolute bollocks that I’m certain everyone around him his entire life had so strongly encouraged that it had got lodged in his own head. And the power-sharer he wore only went one way, so he had to go round killing them if he wanted mana, which all of us do. They’d programmed him really thoroughly to spend all his time thinking about hunting. The only other thing I’d ever heard him actually express wanting was me, which I choose to believe meant anyone at all who’d treat him like a person instead of a mal-killing automaton.

That was the scale of things for which he could express desire: friendship, love, humanity. But he didn’t care where in the cafeteria he sat, he didn’t care what shirt he wore, he didn’t care what classes he was in or what books he read. He did his work more or less dutifully, was polite, and preferred to avoid hero-worshippers while feeling guilty about it, and if I said, “Let’s go stand on our heads on the cafeteria mezzanine stairs,” he’d probably shrug and say, “If you want to.” He certainly hadn’t come up with the sudden desire to go on a road trip away from his enclave. He’d been fed the idea, and the idea was very clearly to get me into the New York crowd. Before they’d been worrying about someone else using me to get Orion; now they were trying to use Orion to get me.

“Lake,” I said in measured tones, “why don’t you tell Magnus actually you’d like to go backpacking in Europe with me instead. See what he thinks of that. We could do the Grand Tour! Start in Edinburgh, visit Manchester and London, go on to Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Pisa—” I was rattling off the names of every city with an enclave I could think of, and Orion got the point, scowled at me, and sloped off.

I felt pretty pleased with myself afterwards, until that evening when I went on a snack bar run with Aadhya, and Scott and Jermaine from New York passed us on the stairs and said a cheery, “Hey, El, how’s it going? Hey, Aad,” with a friendly wave.

She waved back and said, “Hey, guys,” like a civilized human being, while I delivered the coldest possible, “Hi,” in return. As soon as they were out of sight, she looked at me and said, “What now?”

I hadn’t ranted about the charming road-trip scheme to her because I couldn’t without breaking the horrible taboo myself, and being tactless into the bargain. Aadhya’s family lived in New Jersey, and while she hadn’t said outright that she’d have liked a New York enclave spot herself, it was what virtually every wizard for three hundred miles around the city aspired to, since they were all more or less working for the place anyway. “They’d like to make plans for my future,” I said, shortly.

She sighed, but once we were back in her room and eating our makeshift parfaits—strawberry yogurt out of slightly aged tubes, topped with fruit-and-nut mix and whipped cream out of a can; we’d regretfully discarded the tin of vienna sausages, which had been not merely dented but slightly punctured, with a bit of greenish ooze round the edges of the hole—she said, “El, they’re not that bad.”

I knew she wasn’t talking about the parfaits, which were fairly ambrosial by our standards. “They are, though,” I said, revolted.

“I’m not saying they’re sterling examples of grace and nobility,” Aadhya said. “They’re all kind of dickish, but they’re the same kind of dickish that anyone is when you put them in an enclave. Magnus, okay, that boy is trying way too hard to be big man on campus. But Jermaine’s a nice guy! Scott is a nice guy! Chloe is practically too nice. And you actually like Orion, who is kind of creepy—”

“He’s not!”

“Excuse you, he totally is,” Aadhya said. “Half the time he can’t recognize me unless I’m withyou. He pretends to when I say hi to him in shop, but every time his brain goes into this panicky loop like who is she oh no I’m supposed to know her oh no I’m failing at human. And it’s not just me, he does it to everyone. He could probably tell you every last mal he’s killed in the entire time he’s been at school, but us human beings all get filed under the generic category of future potential rescue. I don’t know why he can see you, I think it’s because you’re some crazy super-maleficer in waiting. Creepy.”

I glared at her indignantly, but she just huffed and added, “And you have a hard time accepting that anyone has a right to exist if they won’t jump three lab tables to save the life of a total stranger, so you guys are totally perfect for each other. But sorry to break it to you, you both still need to eat and sleep somewhere and, even worse, occasionally interact with other humans. Why are you setting every available bridge on fire?”

I put down my empty yogurt cup and pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms round them. “I’m going to start thinking Magnus put you up to this.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, he tried. I told him that I wasn’t a crazy person and I’d take a place in New York in a hot second if he offered it to me, but he wasn’t going to get any closer to bagging you. My point is—look, El, what are you even going to do?”

Aadhya wasn’t asking me to make plans; she just wanted to know what I was going to do with my life. She waited for me to offer something, and when I didn’t she said, to drum it in, “I know what I’m doing. I don’t freaking need Magnus to make me offers. I’ve sold seventeen pieces of spell-tuned jewelry out of the leftover bits of sirenspider shell and argonet tooth you gave me. They’re not just junky senior stuff, they’re really good, people are going to keep them. I’ll get my own invites. I know what Liu’s doing. She’s going to do translations or raise familiars, and her family are going to have that enclave up in twenty years. Chloe’s going to be getting her DaVinci on and putting frescoes up all over New York, and she doesn’t even really need to do that. And I know that you’re not going to an enclave. That’s it. And not-enclaver is not a life.”

She wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t say anything. My beautiful shining fantasy of the life of an itinerant golden-enclave builder withered in my mouth completely before her recitation of excellent and sensible and thoroughly practicable ideas. I couldn’t bring myself to describe it to Aadhya: I could just see her face going from doubtful to incredulous to horrified with worry, like listening to a friend earnestly telling you about their plans to climb a tall mountain, with dangerously insufficient preparation, and then going on to describe how, once they got to the top, they’d jump off and sprout wings and fly away to live in the clouds.

She sighed into my stretching silence. “I get you don’t like to talk about your mom, but I’ve heard about her and I live on another continent. People talk about her like she’s a saint. So in case it doesn’t go without saying, you don’t have to be your mom to be a decent human being. You don’t have to live on a commune and be a hermit.”

“I can’t anyway, they won’t have me,” I said, a bit hollowly.

“Based on what you’ve said about the place, I’m going to go out on a limb and say they’re justifiably afraid you’re going to set them all on fire. It’s okay for you to go live in New York with your weirdo boyfriend if you want to.”

“It’s not,” I said. “Aad, it’s not, because—they don’t want me. They want someone who’s going to cast death spells on their enemies. And if I gave them that, I wouldn’t be me anymore, so I might as well not go live in a bag of dicks. And you think that, too,” I added pointedly, “because otherwise you’d have told Magnus that you’d try and talk me into coming if he’d get you in the enclave.”

“Yeah, because that would work.”

“It might work to get you in,” I said. “He’d promise you an interview for sure.”

She gave a snort. “That’s not actually a stupid idea. Except I don’t want to talk you into New York, I’m just…” she trailed off. “El, it’s not just Magnus,” she said bluntly. “I’ve had a bunch of people asking me. Everyone knows about you now. And if you don’t go to some enclave—they’re going to wonder what you are planning to do.”

And I didn’t even need to lay my idiotic plans out before her to know without question that they’d believe in them even less than she would.

---

To further gladden my heart, our midterm grades were coming in that week. No matter how hard you’ve worked, there’s always something to worry about. If you’re going for valedictorian, anything less than perfect marks is a sentence of doom, and if you do get perfect marks, then you have to worry whether your courseload is heavy enough that your perfect marks will scale well against all the other kids going for valedictorian with their perfect marks. If you’re not going for valedictorian, then you have to spend the bare minimum of time on your actual coursework in order to maximize whatever you are actually working on to get you through graduation—whether that’s expanding your spell collection or creating tools or brewing potions, and of course building mana. If you get good marks, you wasted valuable time you should have spent on other things. But if your marks are too bad, you’ll get hit with remedial work or worse.

If you’re wondering how our marks get assigned when there are no teachers to evaluate anything, I’ve heard a million explanations. Loads of people, mostly enclavers, say with great assurance that the work gets shunted out of the Scholomance and sent to independent wizards hired for the marking. I don’t believe that for a second, because it would be expensive, and I’ve never met anyone who knows one of these wizards. Others claim the work gets graded through some sort of complicated equation based almost entirely on the amount of time you spend on it and your previous marks. If you want to really set off any valedictorian candidate, try telling them that it’s partly randomized.

Personally, I’m inclined to think we’re doing the marking ourselves, just because that’s so efficient. After all, we mostly know what marks we deserve, and we certainly know the marks we want to get and what marks we’re afraid of getting, and whenever we see bits of someone else’s work we get an idea of what they ought to get. I’d bet that the school more or less goes by the sum of the parts, depending on how much will and mana each person has put behind their judgment. Which also handily explains the bloc of self-satisfied enclavers who annually fill up the class rankings only a little way down from the actual valedictorian candidates, despite not doing nearly as much work and not being nearly as clever as they think they are.

None of these possibilities told me what to expect in the way of marks for myself, since this year I was entirely alone in the one seminar to which I’d devoted massive amounts of time and energy and passion and mana, and apart from that I was in three other small-group seminars that I’d aggressively neglected.

You’d think that marks wouldn’t matter very much senior year unless you were going for valedictorian, since we literally don’t take classes for the second half of the year. After the class standings are announced at the end of the first semester, seniors are given the rest of the year off to prep for their graduation runs.

But that’s in the nature of a grudging surrender. Graduation wasn’t designed to be a slaughterhouse gauntlet of mals. The cleansing routine we fixed last term was intended to winnow them down to a reasonable level every year before the seniors got dumped in to make their escape back to the real world. After the machinery broke four times in the first decade, and the enclaves gave up on repairing it, seniors largely stopped going to class, because there’s a point where training and practicing with the spells and equipment you’ve got is more important than getting new ones. When there’re a thousand howling starved mals coming at you from all sides, you want your reactions worked thoroughly into your muscle memory.

So the powers that be running the school at the time—London had taken it over from Manchester by then, with substantial support from Edinburgh, Paris, and Munich; opinions from St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Lisbon taken under advisement; New York and Kyoto occasionally given a patronizing ear—decided that they’d accept the reality and turned it into a deadline. And up to that deadline, the school does its best to make marks matter. The penalties get especially vicious for our last semester. Finals are the worst of it, but even midterms are generally good for taking out at least a dozen seniors.

I was relatively safe for the Proto-Indo-European seminar because I’d cheated on that one essay, which always gets you good marks. The school’s perfectly willing to let you leave dangerous gaps in your education. The only risk there was that I’d actually done some work on the thing beyond copying it out; I’d get marked down for that, although probably still not to failing level.

The translation I’d handed in for my final Myrddin seminar poetry assignment was a rotten half-baked job I’d run through in two hours, guessing wildly at the many words I didn’t know. It hadn’t left me with any spells I could even sound out, at least not if I didn’t want to risk blowing the top of my own head off. I’d got top marks on the lovely deconstruction spell I’d used on Chloe’s cushion-monster, though, which was likely to pull my grade there to safe levels.

Aadhya had helped me with the maths in my Algebra course, and I’d done a load of translations for her. Artificers don’t get language classes in their senior year; instead they just get assigned a design project in one of their other languages. Design projects are a really special fun thing for artificers. You’re given a set of requirements for some object, you write down the steps to build the thing, and then the Scholomance builds it for you. Exactly according to your instructions. Then you have to try the resulting object out and see what it does. Three guesses what happens if your instructions turn out to have been wrong or insufficiently detailed.

Having to do a design project in a second language makes it even more exciting. And in this case, Aadhya’s languages are Bengali and Hindi, both of which she knows really well, except the school swerved and gave her the projects in Urdu instead, which happens sometimes if it’s feeling particularly nasty. She didn’t know the script well, and anyway subtle differences in meaning matter quite a lot in these circumstances. You’d really like to be confident that you’re not building a blasting gun backwards, for instance.

You would also really like to build something that might be of some use at graduation, but her choices were a mana siphon, a shell-piercer, and a garden planter. A mana siphon is a flat-out maleficer tool and anyway the last thing anyone allied with me would ever need. A shell-piercer would’ve been a terrific weapon against constructs, except in the very last line of the specifications, the assignment said that the purpose of this particular one was to acquire usable miercel shells. Miercels are these self-reproducing construct mals that look rather like wasps the size of my thumb. Their shells are made of a mana-infused metal and are quite useful, but a shell-piercer of any combat-appropriate size would fracture them to tiny bits.

“You could probably sell that second one to an enclaver?” I said.

“Not until we’re out,” Aadhya said, making the face it deserved: she was right, nobody inside the school was going to buy a modestly good artificer tool. It wasn’t like the phase-control spell from my sutras, where it was so useful and so expensive on the outside that it was worth someone trading a substantial advantage in here to get it for their family’s future use. Also, there was the question of how the Scholomance would have her test it. I’m sure it would have been generous enough to provide an entire hive of live miercels to practice on.

The last option was a combination sunlamp and self-watering planter that could be stacked to make a vertical garden while using very little mana, for setting up a greenhouse in a tiny space with no natural light. It would have been very nice to have in a Scholomance room, so of course the specifications required the planter to be fifteen feet long, which meant it wouldn’t fit in even a double-wide room. After I finished translating that bit, I realized to my dismay that the one place these planters would have worked perfectly was in those small Golden Stone enclaves I’d been so energetically dreaming of setting up. It was probably my fault Aadhya had got stuck with it: spend a lot of time with your allies, and sometimes their intent can start to influence your own work.

“Sorry,” I said grimly when I handed it over for her to look at.

“Ugh, and it’s going to take forever to meld these layers of chalcedony with the sand,” she said in dismay. “And I’m still not done with the lute.”

She’d been working on the lute in her every free minute since last term, but she badly needed more of them. Aadhya’s got an affinity for exotic materials, especially ones taken from mals. As you might imagine, they have loads of power, but most artificers can’t handle them; either they just don’t work, or more likely the artifice goes wrong in some excitingly malicious way. Aadhya can almost always coax them along into her projects, but the lute was ten times more complicated than anything else she’d done. The sirenspider leg I’d given her had gone to make the body of the lute, and the argonet tooth had made the bridges and the frets, and she’d strung it with the hair Liu had cut off at the start of the year. And then she’d etched sigils of power over the whole thing and lined them with the enchanted gold leaf her family had sent her on induction day. Pulling the whole thing together would’ve been a challenge for a professional artificer with a full workbench of favorite tools, and we’d pinned a large number of our graduation hopes on it.

Senior year, you spend half your time staying alive, half your time on your lessons, and half your time working out a graduation strategy to get you through the hall. If you can’t make that equation add up properly, you die. Most teams spend a lot of time identifying their best approach—are you going to rely on speed and deflection, dodging your way through the horde; are you going to build a massive forward shield and try to bowl yourselves straight to the doors; are you going to turn yourselves gnat-sized and try to hop from one team to another and let them carry you; et cetera.

Our alliance had a very obvious basic strategy: everyone else would keep the mals from interrupting my casting, and I would slaughter everything in a tidy path straight to the doors. Perfectly simple. Only it wasn’t, because most spells can’t slaughter everything. Even La Main de la Mort doesn’t work on everything; it’s useless on the entire category of psychic maleficaria, since those more or less don’t actually exist to begin with. They can still kill you, though.

And not even a share in the New York mana pool was going to be enough to power more than one of my major workings. There were six other New York seniors who’d be in the graduation hall at the same time as Chloe, all wanting hefty quantities of mana for themselves and their own teams, and even if they didn’t mean to cut me off beforehand, they were very definitely going to ration just how much mana I could take during the main event.

So all our planning took place at one remove: how could we get enough mana for me to keep slaughtering mals all the way to the gates. The two key pieces were Aadhya’s sirenspider lute and Liu’s family spell. Liu’s grandmother had sneaked her a really powerful song-spell for mana amplification to bring in, even though she couldn’t cast the spell alone—her affinity was for animals, and anyway it usually took two or three of her family’s most powerful wizards to make it work. After a lot of careful Chinese coaching, I’d got the words down. Our strategy was, just before we sailed into the hall, Liu would play the melody on the sirenspider lute while I sang out the lyrics, and then she’d carry on playing even after I finished. With a magical instrument, the spell would keep going, and our whole team would have the benefit of amplified mana. So Liu would be in the middle of our team, sustaining the spell; Chloe and Aadhya would be on either side of her, covering her and me, and I’d take the lead.

That was the theory, at any rate. Unfortunately, the lute wasn’t quite working according to plan. We’d made one experiment with it a few weeks back while still urgently trying to make a honeypot for Orion. Liu had written a Pied Piper spell for mals with the idea that we’d do a little parade through some section of the corridors one evening, me singing and her playing, and Orion whacking the mals one after another as they popped out at us.

I’ll leave you to imagine how appealing I found the prospect of wandering around loudly calling, Here, kitty, kitty. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to lure mals. But we needed to try out the lute, and Orion didn’t quite beg and plead for us to get him some mals to kill, but he clearly wanted to beg and plead, so after Aadhya finished the last bit of inlay, we agreed to give it a go.

We bolted our dinners and hurried to a spare seminar room down on the shop level, so everyone else would still be upstairs and not in range to see us doing anything this unbelievably stupid. Orion hovered around hopefully, and this time we tied all the mice securely into their bandolier cups as a precaution. That seemed to have been a good idea, because they all set up a frantic squeaking from inside as soon as Liu started tuning the lute and I hummed the line of melody.

In retrospect, the mice were just trying to warn us. Liu hit the first notes, I sang three words, and the mals came from everywhere. The baby mals. Agglo grubs came out of the drain and larval nightflyers started dropping from the ceiling and thin scraps that looked like flat handkerchiefs that were probably going to be digesters peeled off the walls and blobby mimics the size of a little toe and a thousand different unrecognizable flabby things all started coming out of every possible nook and cranny of the entire room and converging on us like a slow horrible creeping wave swelling out of every surface around us.

“It’s working!” Orion said delightedly.

The rest of us, not being absolute madmen, all ran for the door at once, with mals crunching and squishing under our feet and more of them still coming, crawling out of tiny gaps between the metal panels and oozing from the corners and falling from the ceiling and pouring in a torrent out of the air vent and the drain. Orion barely made it out before we had the door slammed and were barricading it fervently against the solid mass of mals. Chloe rushed to seal up all the edges with an entire syringe of mana-barrier gel while Liu and I reversed the invocation and Aadhya unstrung the lute. We locked in place there staring at the door, ready to flee, until we were sure it had stopped bulging out any further, and then we all jumped up and down and shook ourselves wildly and pawed and batted at one another to get the larvae out of our hair and clothes and off our skin and onto the floor where we stomped and crushed them in a frenzy. We’re used to flicking off larval mals—it’s always satisfying to take them out that small when you have the chance—but there’s a horrific difference between one tiny digester trying very hard to eat a single square millimeter of your skin and a thousand of them speckled all over your body and clothes and hair.

All the while Orion stood in the corridor behind us and said, exasperated and plaintive, “But you barely even tried!” and other insane and stupid things until we turned on him in unison and yelled at him to shut up forever and he had the gall to mutter something—under his breath, he wasn’t suicidal—about girls.

I was grateful that we no longer needed to find a way to provide Orion with mals, because after that experience, none of us wanted to keep trying. Except him. He even went so far as to talk to other human beings to try and get more information about honeypots himself. He spent a lunch period with half a dozen kids from the Seattle enclave and a desperate expression, and came up to our study corner in the library afterwards and said, “Hey, I’ve found out how you make honeypot bait,” urgently. “The main ingredient is wizard blood. You just hold a blood drive and everyone donates…” He trailed off, I presume as he heard the words coming out of his own mouth and saw our faces, and then just stopped and sat down with a glum expression. That was the end of working on honeypots.

However, we did still urgently need the lute. And instead of getting to work on that, or at least something else useful, Aadhya had to very carefully design a garden planter, then I had to rewrite her design back into Urdu for her, also very carefully, and when the Scholomance delivered the finished product to be tested, the most useful thing she could do with it was plant some carrot tops from the cafeteria. It produced carrots roughly the size of a gnome’s top hat. We fed them to our mice. Precious ate hers very daintily, sitting up and holding it in her forepaws and nibbling it from tip to end before carefully handing back the leafy top to be planted again.

At least the planter was reasonably sure to net Aadhya a decent mark. I was less sure to get decent marks in Development of Algebra: all the readings were in the original languages, and specifically in Chinese and Arabic, the ones that I’d just barely started. Aadhya could generally figure out for me what the actual equations being described were, so I could do the problem sets, but sitting the midterm essay exam—compare and contrast Sharaf al Tusi’s explanation of polynomial evaluation with that of Qin Jiushao, including examples of usage—had been an experience worth forgetting as quickly as possible. The only part of those readings I had actually done were the names, which had been enough for me to look the authors up in the library, find out that Horner had reinvented the same process, and learn it in English instead. I’d felt so clever, too.

So I was holding my breath when I went to class that whole week. We don’t know exactly when we’re going to get our marks. Predictably, I got my safest one first: a B+, for the Proto-Indo-European seminar. Our class was now being held on the second floor, but in an even smaller room and sharing a wall with the alchemy supply room, so we were constantly hearing banging as people went in and out. Liesel glared at me through every class session with cold resentment, and mals would often attack the alchemy supply room thanks to my being on the other side, which made me as wildly popular as you’d think. Enough mals were creeping out of the woodwork at this point in the year that they’d finally started to come after people other than me once in a while, but I remained top item on the menu.

The rest of my marks trickled in grudgingly over the next couple of days: a B+ for the Myrddin seminar and a pass on my shop assignment—a sacrificial obsidian dagger, clearly intended for unpleasant purposes, which I’d chosen because it was the quickest of my options to knock off, so I could use the free time to finish the book chest for my sutras. I also netted a pass for my alchemy section, where I’d had to brew a vat of sludging acid that could etch through flesh and bone in three seconds.

The next Monday morning I finally I got my algebra results, a D, and wiped my metaphorical brow, and then just had to wait for my last mark, on my independent study. I’d really wanted the bad news already, so the whole week after midterms, I tried to bait it out: I kept my head down and focused on my desk the entire time, and then looked away for a solid thirty seconds only right in the middle of class, so there was only the one opening for it to drop, which usually gets you the mark early on. But instead it didn’t come until the tail end of the week.

Except that day I was working on the last piece of the first major working of the sutras, and I’d got so deep into it that I forgot to pause mid-class. My bolted-down desk was a monstrous thing of wrought iron—I scraped my knees on the underside every other week at least—and the only silver lining of it was having the space to spread out. I always kept the sutras right in front of me, wrapped up in a leather harness Aadhya had made me: it went over the ends of each cover, with soft wide ribbons that I kept tied down around all the pages except the handful that I was working on that day. It had a foot-long strap attached that buckled around my left wrist, so at an instant’s notice I could just leap up and the book would stay with me even if I had to use both hands for casting. I stood my dictionaries open on end above it, and I used a three-inch memo pad for my notes, which I held in my hands braced on the edge of the desk so it wouldn’t touch the sutra pages.

It’s not that the book was so fragile; it was made out of really lovely heavy paper and didn’t look like it had aged more than two months since the last bit of gilt had dried. But that was clearly because it had snuck away from its original owner roughly two months after the last bit of gilt had dried, and I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I cosseted it as much as possible. It was worth having sore wrists at the end of each class. Whenever I ran out of space on my tiny notepad—often—I just tore off the filled sheet and stuck it into a folder I kept on the side, and each night I rewrote them into a larger notebook in my bedroom.

That day I had filled about thirty tiny pages with tight handwritten notes. The bell was about to ring and I was still going when the whole folder did a sort of angry jerk and went flying sideways off my desk, scattering paper everywhere; I gave a yowl of protest and grabbed for it, too late, and then had to pack up in a hurry, expecting something to jump me at any moment. I only realized that it had been my mark being delivered when I finally had all my notes collected again. I opened the folder to stuff them back in, and the little slip of green paper was tucked in the pocket, with Adv. Readings in Sansk poking out above the top. I pulled it out and glared at the A+ with a footnote asterisk going to Special Commendation at the bottom, which was just rubbing it in: Look at all your misspent time. I could practically hear the Scholomance sniggering at me from the ventilation system. But that was just pettiness, and overall I heaved a sigh of relief; it could’ve been loads worse.

It was loads worse for other people. At lunch that day, Cora came to our table with her face tight with pain and her arm wrapped up in her beautiful yellow head tie with the embroidered protection charm, blood soaking through it in spreading dark patches. “Failed shop,” she said, her voice ragged. She had her tray held tight against her waist with her other arm, and the contents were pretty scanty. But she didn’t ask for help. She probably couldn’t afford it. She hadn’t nailed down an alliance of her own yet.

She and Nkoyo and Jowani were friends, and they’d been great help for one another for tables and walking to class, but the same reason they’d been great for that was why they weren’t a viable graduation team: all three of them were incantations-track, and doing all the same languages. And Nkoyo was going to get decent alliance offers. In fact, she probably had one already, since just that morning she’d carefully mentioned that she might sit with someone else tomorrow for breakfast. A lot of alliances happened after midterm marks cleared. But Jowani and Cora were going to be stuck until after the end of the semester, when the enclavers had got their alliances set and the leftovers sorted themselves out.

It’s not that they were loads worse as students, even. As far as I knew, they were all three somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as classwork went. But Nkoyo was a star, and they weren’t. She’d always been the one who made the friends and connections, and when you thought of the three of them, you always thought of her in the lead. They’d leaned on her social skills the whole time, and that had been good for them—right until now, when everyone thought Nkoyo, and not one of them.

Most years, that meant their odds were going to be somewhere in the 10 percent range. The rule is that 50 percent of the graduating class makes it out, but that doesn’t mean it’s even odds. The kids in enclaver alliances almost all get out, with maybe one or two members picked off each team—rarely the enclave kids themselves—and that’s roughly 40 percent of the class. So the ones who die almost all come out of the 60 percent who don’t have an enclaver on their side. Of course, even that leaves you with better odds than you get on the outside of the Scholomance, which is why kids keep coming.

If the cleansing machinery down in the graduation hall really had got fixed, if it stayed fixed this year, they might make it out after all. But it wouldn’t improve Cora’s odds any to be going into the second half of the semester with a bad arm that she’d got because she’d screwed up and misjudged the amount of effort to put into her shop assignment. No enclaver was going to look at that arm and ask her to join their team. She sat down carefully, doing her best not to jostle the wound, but once she was down she still had to shut her eyes for a few long minutes, taking deep breaths before she tried to fumble at her milk one-handed and shaky.

Nkoyo silently reached over and got it and opened it. Cora took it and drank without looking at her. Nkoyo hadn’t taken unfair advantage. She’d helped them make it this far; it wasn’t on her if she couldn’t take them the whole way, if they weren’t good enough and she had to jettison them to make it herself, like boosters of rocket fuel falling away spent while the orbital module went flying on past gravity. There wasn’t anything she could do to save them, and they’d made their own choices, getting here. But Cora still didn’t look her in the face, and Nkoyo still didn’t say anything to her, and all of us at the table pretended we weren’t looking at Cora’s blood-stained arm when of course we were.

I didn’t know I was going to say anything until I did. “I can patch the arm if everyone at the table will help,” I said, and everyone paused eating and stared at me, either sidelong or just straight-out gawking. I hadn’t thought it through, just blurting it out, but the only thing to do in the face of the stares was push onward. “It’s a circle working. No one has to put in any extra mana, it’ll work if we all just hold the circle, but everyone already here has to do it.”

That’s actually a simplification of how the spell in question operates. The underlying principle is that you have to get a group of people to willingly put aside their selves and offer their time and energy to help perform a working for someone else’s benefit that doesn’t help any of them directly. And the trick is, once you ask a particular group, if anybody in the group refuses or can’t make themselves do it, the spell fails. It’s one of Mum’s, if you couldn’t tell already.

Nobody said anything for a moment. It’s not even remotely how things work in here. You don’t do anything for anyone without some kind of return, and the return’s always got to be something solid, unless there’s some more substantial connection in place: an alliance, dating, something. But that’s why I knew the spell would work if everyone did agree. It means a lot more in here than outside to do something for nothing. Even Cora herself was just staring at me confused. We weren’t even friends; she was willing to sit at a table with me now, when Chloe Rasmussen from New York was my ally and Orion Lake himself would be here as soon as he came off the line with his tray, but she’d barely tolerated my company all those years when Nkoyo used to let me tag along behind them on the way to language lab in the mornings. She was standoffish in general, and had always been a bit jealous of Nkoyo’s company, but it was more than that: she was aces at spirit magic, her family had a really long tradition of it, and she had clearly thought—and probably still did—that I was carrying some kind of unpleasant baggage on mine.

Nkoyo didn’t say anything. She was staring at her own tray without looking up, her lips curled in between her teeth, her hands curled on either side, waiting, waiting for someone else to speak. I really wished Orion had made it to the table already, and then Chloe said, “Okay,” and held a hand out to Aadhya, who was sitting between us.

Aadhya was definitely in the sidelong-eye camp, less at the request than at me: I could all but hear her saying okay, El, are you trying to develop a martyr thing of your own now or what, but after one good hard look, she just sighed and said, “Yeah, sure,” and took Chloe’s hand and held her other out to me. I took it, and as soon as I did I felt the living line of the circle building. I turned and offered my other one to Nadia, Ibrahim’s friend. She glanced over at Ibrahim but then after a moment took it, and he took hers and reached out to Yaakov across the table.

I’d been in circles with Mum a handful of times. She hadn’t asked me very often, almost always only when it was magical harm, usually someone suffering from a spell a maleficer had put on them or a complication from some spell they’d cast themselves, or the attack of some maleficaria. Healing something like that is a lot easier if you have another wizard helping, even a kid, instead of just you and a bunch of enthusiastic mundanes who can’t actually hold mana. But she didn’t ask me a lot, because most wizards who came to her for help couldn’t keep from getting uneasy round me. They were already vulnerable, so when they looked at me they were rabbits looking at a wolf—a half-starved wolf who sometimes snapped even at the hand that fed her because it also kept her on a leash. I never really wanted to help them. They were sick and weak and cursed and poisoned and desperate, but they were still part of the pack that hated me, that left me alone and scared and desperate myself. So Mum only asked me when she badly needed the power that came from me agreeing to help anyway, because otherwise she knew I’d say no sometimes. And I’d done it, grudgingly, partly to make Mum happy, partly to try and prove to myself I wasn’t what they saw when they looked at me.

But I’d never cast a circle by myself before. The idea’s straightforward enough: the mana everyone puts in flows through all of us in the circle, and because everyone shares the same purpose, it gets intensified. So you just let the mana keep circling around until it builds up high enough. But just because the idea is easy to describe doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.

In fact, I realized too late it was going to be even harder because everyone else around the table was a wizard. With Mum’s spell, you can heal internal injuries with a circle of ordinary people because you don’t need any more mana than you produce just by making the effort to stay in the circle, and you just need one wizard in the mix to “catch” the mana and hold it for long enough to pour it into the spell. With a bunch of almost adult wizards, we were building up a lot of mana really fast, and I could already feel everybody else sort of tugging on it. It wasn’t even on purpose; if anyone had deliberately tried to grab the mana for themselves, the circle would’ve fallen apart. But all of us are actively thinking about some kind of magical work every minute of the day and most of the night; we’ve all got spells half worked out and artifice projects in progress and potions brewing in the lab and graduation graduation graduation in our heads, and here was all this mana to work with, and I was asking them to think about using it to save Cora’s arm instead of their own necks.

It was hard for them and hard for me. I had to concentrate ferociously hard on the healing spell while the circle grew along the sides of the table and one by one everyone a little uncertainly added their hands. Jowani and Nkoyo closed it at the end, their hands clasped behind Cora’s back, and when they did, the circle established and the full mana flow started. Everyone jumped or squeaked. I should’ve warned them, but I couldn’t actually say anything at this point that wasn’t the spell. Anyway, I didn’t have any mental energy to spare. Everyone kept hold, the mana of that choice feeding along, being reinforced over and over by all of us intent on the same goal, one that wasn’t for us, so there wasn’t much of either hope or fear to cloud the intention. And the surprise didn’t hurt, it helped, because everyone chose to stay in the circle anyway.

Well, it helped build mana. But I started to feel more or less like I’d volunteered to ride a particularly violent horse and it was doing its best to heave me off while I clung in desperation to the edge of the saddle. The mana was a building wave traveling around the circle, getting bigger as it went; I tried to cast the spell literally the first time it came by me, but it happened so fast that I missed, which meant the wave got even bigger the next time around and even more unruly: that much mana surging through everyone was extremely inspiring to everyone’s imagination. When it came back a second time, I had to make a tremendous mental heave to drag it firmly out of the circle and into the spell.

At least the words weren’t hard to remember. Mum doesn’t like complex or detailed incantations. You don’t need them when you go straight for the requirement of pure noble unselfishness. “Let Cora’s arm be healed, let Cora’s arm be whole, let Cora’s arm be well,” I said, feeling like I was gasping it out while treading in deep water, my head tipped back to keep my mouth above the surface, and the mana went roaring through me and out of me.

The spell blew the wrap off Cora’s arm with the crisp snapping sound of someone shaking out a freshly laundered pillowcase. She made a squawking noise and grabbed at her elbow: just like that, her whole arm was smooth and unmarred as if nothing had happened to it at all. She opened and closed her hand a couple of times, and then she burst into tears and put her head down on the table with her arms huddled around it protectively, trying to hide from us all while she sobbed. The yellow tie, hanging from the crook of her elbow, fluttered one more time like a banner, even the bloodstains gone.

The rule is, when someone has a breakdown, you carefully don’t pay any attention to them and just carry on the conversation until they get hold of themselves. But the circumstances were a bit unusual, and it’s not as though there were an existing conversation to carry on. Yaakov said a prayer in Hebrew softly to himself, and bowed his head, but none of the rest of us were religious, so while he had a nice spiritual moment with himself, we all just carried on being awkward and glancing round at each other to avoid staring at Cora, which obviously we all wanted to do. Jowani, who was on her left, was losing the fight and letting his eyes slant down to peek.

“What did you do?” Orion demanded, and made me jump; he’d come up to the empty seat Aadhya had left for him, next to me, and he was staring at Cora exactly the way the rest of us were trying so hard not to. “What was that? You just—”

“We did a circle healing,” I said, dismissively, which took some effort. “You’d better hurry up and eat, Lake, it’s nearly to the warning bell. Have you got your alchemy seminar marks yet?”

He put his tray down and sat next to me almost like he was moving in slow motion, without taking his eyes off Cora. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and he’d been looking unkempt even before that; his hair had grown back out to a length that required at least running your fingers through it to keep it in order—we have low standards—but he wasn’t doing even that. His Thor t-shirt hadn’t changed in four days and was more than usually aromatic, and there were lingering smudges of soot and glittery blue asphodelium powder on his cheek. I was resolutely not saying a word, because it was none of my affair and it was going to keep being none of my affair until he became so stinky that I could justify complaining purely on the grounds of sharing a table, by which point maybe someone else would beat me to it. Probably not: most kids in here are more likely to bottle the scent and sell it as Eau de Lake or something. I suspected that he’d been spending the last few weeks hunting those just-past-larval-stage mals that had started creeping out of the plumbing.

I jabbed him in the side with an elbow, and he finally jolted out of it enough to stare at me instead. “Food. Alchemy marks. Well?”

He looked down at his tray: oh, how surprising, food! Things to eat to keep you alive! That’s about as much as you can say for Scholomance cuisine. He started eating it fast enough after he got over the massive surprise of rediscovering its existence, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “No, today I guess, or Friday,” but he kept staring at Cora until I poked him again for being a rude wanker and he realized it and jerked his eyes down to his plate.

“You’ve had to see a circle working sometime, living in New York,” I said.

“They don’t feel like that,” he said, and then had the nerve to ask me, “Was there any malia in it?”

“That’s meant to be funny, is it?” I said. “No, you aardvark, it’s one of my mum’s healing circle spells. You don’t get any return at all.”

That’s not true, at least according to Mum: she insists that you always gain more than you give when you give your work freely, only you don’t know when the return will come and you can’t think about it or anticipate it, and it won’t take the shape you expect, so in other words, the return is completely unprovable and useless. On the other hand, no venture capitalists are lining up to give me rides in their private jets, so what do I know?

“Huh,” Orion said, sounding vaguely dubious, like he wasn’t sure he believed me.

“It’s negative malia if it’s anything,” I said. Occasionally, a repentant maleficer comes to Mum for help, someone like Liu was on the way to being: not the gleefully monstrous ones but the ones who went partway down the road—usually to make it through puberty alive—and have now changed their minds and would like to go back. She won’t do spirit cleansing for them or anything like that, but if they ask sincerely, she’ll let them join her circle, and generally once they’ve spent as many years doing the circle work as they did being maleficers, they come right again, and she tells them to go and make a circle of their own somewhere.

“Maybe that’s why it feels weird to you,” Aadhya said to Orion. “Are you seeing an aura?”

“Nmgh,” Orion said with half a pound of spaghetti dangling out of his mouth. He heaved the rest of it in and swallowed. “It’s more like—for a minute, she had these really crisp edges. Like you do sometimes,” he added to me, and then he blushed and stared down at his plate.

I glared at him, completely unflattered. “And why exactly did that make you think it was using malia?”

“Uh” was the feeble response. “It’s—maybe it’s just power?” he tried, kind of desperately.

“Do mals have these crisp edges?” I demanded.

“No?” Under my continuing glare, he wilted. “Some of them? Sometimes?”

I stewed over it while shoving in the rest of my own dinner. Apparently I looked like a maleficaria to him occasionally? Although Orion didn’t see anything odd about human maleficers: he hadn’t noticed our life-eating neighbor Jack was one until after that charmer had tried to leave my intestines piled on the floor of my room. And all right, there’re so many wizards who use small bits of malia here and there, stolen from things like plants or bugs or filched from a piece of work that someone else left unattended, that Orion could plausibly have a hard time picking the hardcore maleficers out. Those of us who strictly use only mana that we’ve raised ourselves or that someone has given us freely are the minority. But still: apparently I’m visibly more of a monster than an evil wizard is. Hurrah.

And an even larger hurrah: Orion found that appealing. It sounded too much like Aadhya had been right about what Orion saw in me. I’m not some sort of pallid romantic who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself, and anyway one of the main reasons I’d been avoiding Orion’s room lately was the strong feeling that it would be for the best for all concerned if I didn’t see him with his shirt off again anytime soon, so that would be pot and kettle. But I was unenthusiastic about the prospect of being found attractive because I seem like a terrifying creation of dark sorcery instead of despite it.

I stewed enough over it that I completely missed the implication of the rest of what Orion had said until I was slogging upstairs to my Wednesday library session. Just short of the top stair—where my entire gaggle of freshmen were waiting for me to lead them to whatever potential doom I was scheduled to save them from today—I halted, and realized that if Orion hadn’t got his results from his senior seminar yet, it wasn’t because he was going to get an A+, since he’d been falling down on everything badly enough to forget changing his t-shirt. He was going to fail.

And when you fail alchemy, you don’t get attacked by mals. You just get to interact very intimately with your last brewing assignment, and being an invincible monster-killing machine does you absolutely no good against being doused in a vat of etching acid used to carve mystical runes into steel, which had been Orion’s midterm assignment.

I stared up the last few stairs at the eight freshmen, who were all peering anxiously back at me, and then I said, “Right, field trip today,” and turned round to lead them downstairs on a three-stairs-at-a-time rush barely short of sending them pell-mell the whole way to the bottom. I had to actually grab Zheng to stop him tumbling past the alchemy floor landing. Once I’d steadied him, I ran for it down the corridor with the pack of them behind me, as fast as their considerably shorter legs could carry them. I didn’t know what room Orion was in, so I just shoved open every lab door I saw and yelled in, “Lake?” until someone yelled back, “He’s in two ninety-three!” I turned and ran past the pack of freshmen still going the other way, all of them wheeling to follow me like a flock of confused geese. I passed the landing and went on the other way, threw open the door to 293, and without even breaking stride tackled Orion away from the lab bench, just as the bell for the start of class rang and all the complex brewing equipment at his station started to rattle and belch smoke.

The large copper vat foamed over so energetically that the whole lid got lifted off and clanged away onto the floor atop a massive and expanding column of violet foam that poured over the sides and then cascaded down from the surface of the table and over the floor, enormous black billows of smoke hissing up in its path. There was a lot of screaming and running from the rest of the students that only made things worse, other experiments going up as they were hastily abandoned. We fumbled up to our feet together, but we couldn’t see a thing; I kept a death grip on Orion’s wrist and would have walked us both the wrong way, only the freshmen all started yelling from the door, “El! El!” and Zheng and Jingxi and Sunita—I’d been trying really hard not to learn their names, but it wasn’t going very well—even made a line into the room and cast light spells to give us a path.

We were still coughing horribly by the time we managed to make it out into the corridor, and I couldn’t speak afterwards until Sudarat came round, giving us each a drink of water out of her charmed portable flask, but I could and did immediately smack Orion along the back of his unnecessarily thick skull and then waggled my hand with all five fingers spread out in his face, for emphasis. He gave me a halfhearted scowl and batted it away.