Chapter 6: Spelled Dye & Mortal Flame

Nobody bothered methe last few weeks of the semester, except by sort of sidling around me warily like I was a bomb that might go off unexpectedly. Faint wafts of fresh air scented with crisp leaves and early frost were now coming through the vents at occasional moments that emphasized how awful the air was all the rest of the time. My delightful classroom up in the library got them quite often. My freshmen all took deep breaths of it while I did my best not to vomit. I saw kids occasionally burst into tears in the cafeteria when one blew into their face. Every time, people would glance at me sideways, and then pretend really hard that they hadn’t.

The Shanghai kids had all backed a mile off, and for that matter so had the New York kids. During the previous month, people had briefly started doing things like asking me to trade books or passing me a jar in lab or loaning me a hammer in the shop. I’d been irritated at the time, since I’d understood very well it was because they’d decided I was an important person worth courting. But now they didn’t ask me for anything, and if I did say, “Can I have the psyllium husks,” four kids would jump at the same time to shove whatever thing I needed at me, more often than not knocking it over and spilling it all over the floor, at which point they would collectively go into a frantic routine of apologies and babbling while cleaning it up.

I did try saying things like, “I won’t bite,” only I said it while seething, so the message that actually got conveyed was that biting would be mild by comparison with whatever I would do instead. And of course they believed me. I’d already done something horrible beyond imagining: I’d made the Scholomance worse. Top marks for inflicting mass trauma. It was even getting the freshmen, too: three of them had died in the gym during the last couple of weeks. I made clear to mine that none of them were to go near the place, but other, less-well-advised ones, kept making excuses to go down there to play fun games of keep-away-from-the-surprise-mal or get-eaten-in-the-doorway. The death toll would’ve been higher except Orion had begun patrolling the place on a routine basis to hunt for the mals that were using it as a hunting ground. I wasn’t clear on whether it counted as him using the freshmen as bait if they were the ones staking themselves out.

We’re all wary of one another in here as a general rule. Budding maleficers are at the top of everyone’s list of potential threats, followed by enclavers, older kids, the better students, the more popular ones. Any other kid could become a mortal enemy without so much as a moment’s notice if the right conditions—usually a mal planning to eat at least one of us—came along. But we knew how to be afraid of one another; what we might do to one another had sensible limits. No one would ever in ten thousand years have imagined that if someone tried to kill me in the gym, I’d respond by rebuilding the gym fantasia and creating a fresh torment for everyone in the school, including myself. I certainly wouldn’t have imagined it.

So now I wasn’t just a dangerously powerful fellow student, to be flattered and watched and strategized over. I was an unpredictable and terrible force of nature that might do anything at all, and they were all shut up in here with me. Like I’d become part of the school myself.

As if to confirm it, the mals all suddenly stopped coming after me. I didn’t know why. I spent a few weeks panicking until Aadhya worked it out. “Right, here’s what’s going on,” she said, sketching it out on paper for us to understand, on a stick-figure diagram of the school’s screw-top shape. “It takes mana to run all the wards. Early in the year, when there’s not a lot of mals, the school does this neat trick: it opens a few of the wards, aimed right at you, and uses that mana to reinforce the other wards. The mals take the path of least resistance, and voilà, you’re target number one. But by now there’s too many of them and they’re squeezing through on their own as usual.”

“And no maleficaria are going to come at you if they have any other choice,” Liu finished, as if that were obvious.

“Yeah, aces,” I said. “Even the mals agree I’m poison. Ow! Get off me, you little—!” Precious had just bit my earlobe. I swatted at her but she scampered handily across my hunched shoulder blades and grabbed the rim of my other ear meaningfully, a fairly potent threat given the stabbing pain in my first one. “No treats for you,” I told her coldly, after I took her off—carefully—and put her back into the carrying cup. But I did say, “Sorry,” to Aad and Liu in a mutter. It really wasn’t on for me to be whining about being unpalatable. I still remembered exactly how I’d felt about Orion telling me that mals never came after him.

Of course, even if the mals had gone, my hair trigger hadn’t. I was still jumping at every noise and nearly obliterating the occasional solitary fool who came bumbling across my path at unexpected moments. They were always the kind of pathetic friendless loser no one else would warn off from going into the library corridor where I was lurking or taking a seat too close to me. Just like I’d been. I’d almost have appreciated the distraction of actually being attacked.

Orion would’ve appreciated it even more. He was still grumpy about having passed up a full-grown quattria to race to my rescue. It seemed to grow in size each time he complained about having missed it. No one had seen the thing since—or rather, no one who’d made it out of Field Day alive. There were four kids who’d gone missing during the mass exodus from the gym, so almost certainly the quattria had successfully scored itself four separate meals of sobbing kid in flight, one for each mouth, and had hidden away somewhere in the depths for the next four years to digest until it split up into four separate littler quattria.

I suppose I’d traded those four kids for the ones from Shanghai who’d actually attacked me. Was that better because I hadn’t meant to do it? Or was I just being a stupid wanker who thought she was too good to look people in the face while I killed them?

I knew what Mum would say: it hadn’t been me killing them, it had been a quattria—or better yet the alchemist who’d taken four innocent baby animals and squashed them together. Alchemists make quattria because if you starve them of solid food for a month or so, then feed each one of the mouths a different reactant, you get highly useful alchemical fusions out the other end, some of which you can’t get any other way. But the quattria don’t like being starved, as you might imagine, so they break out fairly often, and then they start eating other creatures with mana because that’s the most efficient way to get enough mana to keep themselves going.

It’s always convenient to be able to blame things on people who aren’t in the room, but I wasn’t sure it made me feel any better. Fine, some vicious alchemist had bashed together a quattria a century ago and it was his fault really, but he was long dead and the quattria had eaten four people just last week.

Meanwhile Orion was scrounging around in corners for scrawny and pathetic mals that even a freshman could have taken out. He did catch a nice fat polyphonic shrieker in one of the sophomore girls’ bathrooms a couple weeks after Field Day; I understand there was a lot of non-maleficaria shrieking while he chased it through the communal showers during the evening rush, although no one really objected to him barging in on them, given the alternative had a lot more tentacles and smelled even worse than unwashed boy, which he wasn’t anymore by the time that fight ended.

The week after that, a gelidite quietly grew itself over the doors to the big alchemy lab during work period, froze them completely shut, and then started creeping steadily onwards into the room. Happily for all concerned—namely the thirty-odd kids in the room—Orion was sulkily doing his—already-late—homework in one of the smaller labs at the time, and he instantly abandoned it to be of service. Normally you can only kill a gelidite by piercing its solid core with a specially enchanted fire arrow, but Orion just started whacking big chunks off it with a metal chair and incinerating those with fire blasts before they could merge back into the rest. Eventually he took off enough mass that he could jam the remaining chair leg down onto the core, and then he heated the leg until the metal melted and ran down all over the core.

“Well, Lake, it’s not getting added to the recommended means of destruction in the textbook, is it?” I said coldly at dinner that day, when he displayed the metal globe that was all that was left of the gelidite, ostensibly because he wanted opinions on whether the thing was really dead or not. I wasn’t fooled: he was just trying to excuse himself for having left a week’s worth of lab work to dissolve on his own bench, when he could have spent thirty seconds to suspend the reaction before he’d charged heroically to the rescue.

What business of mine, you might say, and then I’d explain at length how I’d had to rescue him yetagain just two days before. He’d got to his lesson and started straight in on an overdue batch of spelled dye without paying any attention to the fact that the four other members of his senior lab section had all skived off that day. Of course all the ventilation in his lab had quietly shut itself down, and he didn’t notice, just went straight on blithely stirring up more toxic fumes for himself to inhale while increasingly vivid daydreams of pythagorans and polyvores filled his head.

The only reason I’d known in time to save his stupid useless life was because one of the other students noticed all of her other classmates were in the library working, and decided to score points with New York by scuttling over to Magnus to tell him that Orion was all alone in a lab section. She could have scuttled over to me directly: I was at the center table in the reading room at the time, with seven fat dictionaries spread out round me in a vengeful spirit. There were nine seats completely open at the best table in the reading room because Chloe and Nkoyo were the only ones there who dared sit with me. Magnus didn’t even nerve himself up to come over; he sent one of his minions to get Chloe, told her, and let her come back and tell me.

By the time I got down to the lab, Orion was hallucinating so hard he thought I was a pythagoran myself and tried to throw an immobilizing spell at me. If it had landed, I suppose we’d have died hallucinating together; how romantic. I caught it and hurled it right back at his head, and he promptly toppled over with a crash, taking out three stools on the way down. At least that got him out of my way so I could get on with vaporizing his cauldron of increasingly toxic dye, along with a substantial chunk of his lab table. Overkill, but I was vexed. I didn’t get any less vexed after dragging his lockjaw-rigid body out into the corridor. I vented my spleen by haranguing him for the next five minutes while he still couldn’t move, but he was still high as a kite and only kept staring at me glassily until I finished and then he said in a soupy way, “El? Is that you?” Then the immobilization spell wore off and he sat up and vomited purple all over my feet.

So he had no business getting himself into avoidable trouble with his classwork, and he knew it, and he could just stuff his large frosted beach ball into the nearest bin. He squirmed away from my glare and looked an appeal over at Chloe, who’d been trained up to be nice to him all her life. “Well, I think it’s probably dead, but you could try a scrying on the internals,” she said cooperatively.

“Yes, you could, if only you weren’t six weeks behind on your schoolwork,” I said through clenched teeth.

“I’m not!” Orion said. “I’m only four weeks—” He stopped himself too late and glared at me while everyone at the table, including even Chloe, made the appropriate squawks of horror at him. I smirked back over folded arms. That evening he got told off by Magnus and Jermaine, by which I mean they cornered him in the boys’ bathroom and earnestly talked to him about the need to catch up properly and how silly he was being to let his work get away from him for no reason when it could be so easily managed. I wasn’t there to hear it, but I didn’t need to be; they were enclavers.

I did see them going in after him, so I hurried to brush my own teeth and then waited in the corridor until Orion sloped out again, properly chastened; I fell in with him and said, “So, Lake, going to let your enclave pals shove your schoolwork off onto some poor sod desperate to get in with them?”

He threw me a look of outrage: having got him into trouble in the first place, couldn’t I at least have the decency to let him just look away while Magnus made his work conveniently disappear? But as I clearly couldn’t, he sighed and muttered, “No,” reluctantly.

I nodded and asked very sweetly, “Going to keep shoving the consequences off onto me?”

The right answer to that question wasn’t very hard to find, either, although he did scowl at me before handing it over. “No.”

“Good,” I said, with satisfaction, and stopped by his bedroom door and pointedly waited for him to go and shut himself in with his overdue homework.

He looked at the door and then back at me. “El—if the cleansing runs down in the graduation hall again—”

“At New Year’s, you mean?” I said. The end-of-semester cleansing isn’t nearly as thorough as the graduation day cleansing. School maintenance had to be cut back a great deal in quantity and ambition once they had students doing it instead of teams of grown professional wizards coming in through the graduation hall. One of the places where they decided to cut back was the mid-year cleansing. Only about a quarter of the walls of mortal flame go, in order to save on wear and tear. That leaves plenty of survivable escape routes available, so the cleansing really only winnows back the more mindless mals.

Of course, where a lot of the smarter ones retreat to is the graduation hall. If the machinery did run down there, then we’d very likely end up with all the mals cut down back to the nonexistent levels from the start of the year.

“Yeah,” Orion said, glumly. Poor him: the greatest hero in generations and no evil monsters for him to fight. Precious made a dismissive squeak from her cup, but lucky for him, he wasn’t in range for biting. At least he wasn’t trying to complain of it to anyone but me, the one other person who had a decent reason to dislike the idea. If the mals did get cut back that far, the school would probably be able to funnel all of the attacks right back at me again.

But I wasn’t going to commiserate with him out loud. I was in range, and I’d been bitten twice that week already. “Much difference it’ll make if you get yourself turned into goo beforehand because you couldn’t be arsed to do a few worksheets,” I said. “It’s thirteen seconds more to New Year’s, and then you won’t need to do any more classwork ever, unless you completely flunk everything. Do you need another helping?”

“No, I’m okay,” he said, although he had to drag his eyes away from the power-sharer when I waved my wrist at him. “I’ve got enough, I just—got used to it, I guess.” He shrugged away the misery of his lot with one shoulder, but he was still staring at the floor, and after a moment he brought out the real problem: “It’s not like there’re loads of mals in New York. In the enclave, I mean,” he added. “Not much gets through.”

I couldn’t help myself. I blurted out, “No one’s chaining you down in New York.”

That was a nice and sympathetic thing to say to a boy who wanted his mum and dad and his own bed as much as I did. But I’d been overwhelmed by an instant éclat of idyllic vision: the two of us wandering the world together, welcomed everywhere by everyone, him clearing out infestations and then watching my back while I put up Golden Stone enclaves with the power from the mals he took out.

You could say I was just offering him a different future, and I had as much right to put that future on the table for him as he did asking me to come to New York, only I didn’t feel as though I did. I’d like to have felt that way; I’d have argued myself breathless and blue if anyone else had tried to tell me I didn’t. But there wasn’t any convenient opponent around to be argued with, and on the inside of my own head, I didn’t really believe I had any right to ask Orion Lake to walk away from a future of safety and ease in the most powerful enclave in the world, just to spend his life as an itinerant bodyguard at my heels.

And even if I could squash that particular squidgy feeling, my vision would still mean asking him to walk away from his family and everyone he knew. He wasn’t saying he didn’t want to go home, he was saying he didn’t like the idea of spending the rest of his life having to go begging to Magnus Tebow every time he wanted a cup of mana. I wouldn’t have liked asking Magnus Tebow for pocket lint. I felt like a selfish beast as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

“If you just set up shop, you’ll get booked to come out and kill the worst mals the world over,” I added, as if that was all I’d meant. “Orion Lake: Maleficaria Hunter for Hire, no mal too large, some too small.”

He huffed a noise that aimed for laughter and stopped at a sigh. “Am I a jerk?” he asked abruptly. “Everyone always acts like—” He made a frustrated wave of his hand in the direction of the legions of his fan club. “But I know that’s just…”

He was being about as articulate as, well, the average seventeen-year-old boy, but I understood him perfectly. He’d been trained to think he was only good if he ran around being a hero all the time. Naturally as soon as he dared think about what he might want, surely that made him a monster. But as someone who’s been told she’s a monster from almost all corners from quite early on, I know perfectly well the only sensible thing to do when self-doubt creeps into your own head is to repress it with great violence. “What do I look like, your confessor?” I said bracingly. “Go and do your homework so I don’t have to cobble you back together out of spare parts, and have your existential crisis another time.”

“Thanks, El, you’re such a pal,” he said, in tones of deep syrupy affection.

“I am, aren’t I,” I said, and left him to it. And then I went to my room and didn’t do any of my own homework. Instead I spent the entire time reading the Golden Stone sutras and translating more bits of it and doodling stick pictures of tidy little enclaves in my notes. Precious scampered around the desk messing my pens about and cracking sunflower seeds out of her food bowl and occasionally coming to inspect my work. She didn’t approve of the bit where I scribbled in a little stick figure with a sword killing mals; when I looked away, she slipped under my arm and deposited a dropping in exactly the right spot so I put my hand right down on it when I started writing again and squished it over my own artwork.

“It’s not like he’s any use in an enclave,” I muttered while I poured half my jug out over my besmirched hand, scrubbing it clean over the room drain. “I expect he’d rather come round the world hunting mals with me.”

But of course she was right; it was an unbelievably stupid thing to be thinking about. There were very good odds that at least one of the small handful of people in the world that I loved only had months left to live, and that one might well be me if I let myself get distracted. I’d lectured Orion about neglecting his work, but at least his hunting was to some reasonable immediate end: he actually got mana out of it, and every mal he killed in the corridors would be one less jumping at our heads at graduation time. But I wasn’t going to be building any enclaves until after I got myself and everyone I cared about through the doors, so I could stop wasting my time on the idea right now.

---

Go on, ask me how much time I wasted on it before the end of the semester. Or don’t; I don’t really want to do the gruesome tally of the hours I poured down that drain. The school rubbed it in for me well enough on New Year’s Day. The whole day was screwed on the wrong way from the very beginning: the night before I fell asleep still reading the sutras—I was starting to be able to get a vague general understanding of a new page just by sounding it out a few times—and when I woke up, they were still open on my bed. I made the mistake of looking at the page again and started sounding it out from the beginning. It felt as though it had become easier overnight; it was amazing. Half an hour and two paragraphs later, I noticed what I was doing, and had to run unwashed to catch up the last few stragglers and get into the very tail end of the senior queue for the cafeteria line. All I got for breakfast was a scanty bowl of the dried-out scrapings from the sides of the porridge vat.

“You could have bitten me usefully for once,” I told Precious as I came out with my unpleasantly light tray. She ignored me to keep gnawing on the dry heel of the loaf I’d scrounged for her, and only squeaked a complaint when I jumped a mile because the food service door slammed shut behind me: I had literally been the last senior to get breakfast.

That wasn’t nearly the end of it. Sudarat was queueing up along the wall with the other freshmen waiting for their turn to come, and as I passed her, she said to me, “Congratulations, El,” like she meant it.

“What?” I said. She pointed at the class standings, which had been posted up in gold letters under our class year on the big placard on the wall. I hadn’t bothered to look at them yet, since I didn’t really care which one of the twenty snarling beasts who’d been fighting it down to the wire had actually made valedictorian, and I knew I wasn’t anywhere near the top hundred myself.

Well, I was right about that bit; I wasn’t near the top hundred. My name was listed well above everyone else—next to Algernon Dandridge Sinnet Prize for Special Achievement in Sanskrit Incantation. I didn’t even know there were prizes to be awarded; I’ve never seen anyone get one before.

And before you ask, yes, there was an actual prize. I slunk over to the table with my allies, who could now all see in bright gilt letters just how much time I’d been frittering stupidly away, and when I put down my tray, it didn’t lie flat. Obviously I said, “Look out, clinger on my tray,” and jumped back from the table along with everyone else except Orion.

He promptly reached out a finger and zapped my entire tray with one of his stupid but highly effective lightning-bolt spells, charring the already inedible porridge into a solid cinder, and then he frowned and said, “No there isn’t,” and tipped the still-smoking tray up to reveal that what was making it lie askew was my award: a small round medal stamped out of some dull grey metal, hanging from a blue-and-green-striped ribbon with a top bar pin, apparently designed to be worn on a lapel along with my other military honors. It was only lightly singed.

“Oh, that’s really cool, El, congrats,” Chloe said, in all apparent seriousness. She wasn’t even a freshman.

I dangled the thing out to Aadhya without dignifying that with a response. “Is it worth melting down?”

Aadhya picked it up with both hands and rubbed her thumbs over the front surface, murmuring a quick artificer’s testing charm. The little relief carving—possibly meant to be Ganesh; the nose looked vaguely elephantine—glowed pink for a moment, and she shook her head, handing it back. “It’s just pewter.”

“Congratulations, Galadriel,” Liesel said to me a little coldly—she had in fact bagged valedictorian—when she went by the table a few minutes later. But what she meant was fuck you. At least that was fair enough; if I’d spent all that time cooing at enclaver boys and doing their homework, I’d have wanted to stab anyone who’d got their name jumped up over mine for a single seminar. But I wasn’t going to be sorry for her. She was walking away from breakfast with Magnus, and she’d scored her first points with him by carrying tales of me. I suppose she’d decided to make New York her target. I wouldn’t have gone for it at the price of courting Magnus, but she obviously had a higher tolerance for soggy dishcloths than I did.

A lot higher, in fact. I came down from the cafeteria late, because Zheng ran over to me while Min held his place in the freshman queue, and told me that he and the other kids from the library seminar would try and get me something when their turn came. You rarely manage to get much more than you want as a freshman—the opposite, in fact—and that was even before the survival rate in the Scholomance rose to Orion Lake levels. But across the eight of them, they were able to rustle up a bread roll and a carton of milk, so at least I wouldn’t lose our whole free morning light-headed as well as irritated.

It was worth waiting for them, but by the time I finished, the first early warning chimes were going off delicately, ding dong death by fire coming, to remind anyone who’d missed it that the cleansing was about to get under way. I made a dash to the girls’ to get my teeth brushed and my face washed, so I wouldn’t be grotty for hours, and stopped short in the doorway aghast: Liesel was in there doing her makeup.

The use of cosmetic in here is roughly as high as it was in my first year of primary school. However low the odds that you make a mistake when mixing up your lipstick in the alchemy lab and melt half your face off, they’re still too high for most people. If you’re good enough to be sure you won’t, you’re good enough to get an alliance in a more reliable way. Dating doesn’t guarantee you an alliance any more than friendship does. But nevertheless here Liesel was, putting shiny pink lip gloss on her valedictorian mouth and dabbing a bit of it as color onto her cheeks. She’d already taken her hair out of the tight short plaits she always wore and had shaken the blond waves over her shoulders. She’d put on a crisp white blouse, actually ironed, and she’d unbuttoned it just far enough to leave a decent bit of cleavage showing, with a gold pendant hung round her neck. She would have looked nice enough for a date outside; in here, by comparison with our usual state, she might as well have stepped off the cover of Vogue to dazzle ordinary mortals.

I have to confess, I reacted atrociously. “Not Tebow,” I blurted, from the door.

Her shiny lips pressed into a thin line. “Lake seems quite busy,” she said, through her teeth, and I couldn’t even say anything to that under the circumstances; she had every right to be as angry with me as she was. Maybe she wanted to shag Magnus, who was after all heading for six feet and would himself have not looked out of place in—well, an Argos catalog, or at least a pound-shop flyer.

Yes, maybe, but my imagination has limits and that’s beyond them. So I didn’t even leave bad enough alone; I said, “Look, it’s no business of mine,” which coming out of my own mouth should have been a strong hint to me to stop there, but instead I went on, “but you should know, they’ve already offered me a guarantee.”

In my defense, that piece of information probably did matter a great deal to her. Even if Magnus Tebow was her ideal of manhood and charisma, she’d made bleeding valedictorian with three and a half years of brutal unrelenting work, and she couldn’t have wanted to throw that away on someone who couldn’t even offer her a guaranteed spot in an enclave. New York had too many eager applicants, most of them proven wizards who’d left school years ago and done significant work; there wasn’t any way they were letting their kids give out more than one guaranteed place in a year to a raw eighteen-year-old, and Chloe had made anxiously clear at every opportunity I gave her that the spot was being held for me. Even if I didn’t ever take it up, that didn’t mean that Liesel would get invited after the fact.

Of course, it wouldn’t have said much for her brains if she wasn’t smart enough to make sure that she was getting a guaranteed spot before she unbuttoned her blouse the rest of the way, so even if I was handing her useful information, there was an implied insult going along with it. She took it accordingly. “How nice for you,” she said, even more furious, closed her lip gloss with a snap, swept the handful of jars and things on the counter back into her washbag, and marched out of the loo without looking back.

“Well done,” I told myself in the mirror around my toothbrush. I had to rush now, since the first warning bell was going, so I scrubbed my teeth as quick as I could before dashing back out into the corridor, where I skidded right off my heels and smashed my head backwards onto the floor. Liesel had poured out the rest of her hard-brewed lip gloss into a puddle just outside the door, enough of a sacrifice to cast a clever little trip the next person who comes along hex. I knew what had happened even while I was on the way down: the moment I’d stepped on the slick patch, I’d felt the malicious intent of the spell, only it was too late for me to do anything about it.

I did manage to twist a bit falling, which either helped or made things worse, I don’t know. I didn’t die and I wasn’t knocked unconscious, I don’t think, but it was certainly bad enough. My whole head was a church bell someone had clanged back and forth with too much enthusiasm, and my elbow and hips would have been in screaming pain if screaming out loud wasn’t the equivalent of shouting, Dinner is served! to every mal in hearing range. Instead I curled into a ball like a child and shut my mouth tight over stifled high-pitched sobbing, both my hands wrapped around the throbbing back of my skull and my whole face screwed up with tears.

I didn’t move from there for much too long. The second warning bell went off somewhere behind a distant mountain range, and only the certain knowledge that I was about to be incinerated got me into motion. I levered myself onto my hands and knees and started lurching down the corridor in a three-legged crawl, still pressing down on the back of my skull with the hand that had got banged. Of course I should have pulled myself together and taken some kind of remedy, but at the time, I was still completely sure on some visceral level that I was keeping my brain from falling out of the back of my head.

Somewhere behind and above me, I heard a door bang shut loudly and footsteps coming, along the metal walkway and down the spiral stairs and into the corridor. I kept on creeping along, too slow but moving. I knew it wasn’t anybody I knew, and then I knew it was Liesel, but I still kept crawling because I couldn’t do anything else yet. Then she caught up and grabbed me under the arms and heaved me standing. Her face was still angry and flushed under the pink shimmer, but what she said, harshly, was, “Where is your room?” and she helped me limping on towards it.

We got about halfway before the final warning siren went off, and as it did, the door three down from where we were slid open and Orion came out. He froze like a deer caught stealing hubcaps in the headlamps of a police car, then noticed that I was there to fall down in front of a wall of mortal flame and die rather than to yell at him. Not that I didn’t do my best to combine the activities as he grabbed me under the other arm, but he ignored the violent wheeze I aimed in his direction and helped Liesel get me into his room just as the loud crackling went off behind us, accompanied by the first panicked scrabbling of mals starting to run. Orion paused in the door to throw a last longing look down the corridor, then slid it shut with an unhappy bang as Liesel heaved me onto the bed.

“What happened?” Orion asked, coming over.

“She fell coming out of the bathroom,” Liesel said shortly.

I didn’t fill in the additional details. Knowing she got furious enough to commit murder but also couldn’t go through with it in the end gave me rather a fellow feeling for her. “Give me a glass of water,” I muttered, and when Orion gave it to me, I took a few deep breaths to temporarily keep from vomiting and then sat up and cast the simplest of my mum’s healing charms on the water. Then I took out the little plastic bottle I keep on hand for exciting emergencies like this one, downed it, and drank the whole glass of water as fast as I could. I managed to keep it down for a count of fifteen, and then I lurched over to the floor drain and did vomit, energetically. Afterwards I rolled away and curled on my other side with a groan, but it was a conscious protest, not whimpering; I was already better.

“What is that?” Liesel said, picking up the bottle from where I’d dropped it, and giving it a wary sniff.

“Tabasco and butterscotch,” I said. That isn’t actually part of Mum’s charm; it’s my own addition, of which I’m sure she’d disapprove quite a lot, but something about forcing the horrible mixture down makes the healing charm work lots quicker. I think there’s even some kind of science behind that, worse-tasting medicine works better or whatever, but it might just be the mana from deliberately making myself swallow something that awful. It doesn’t actually have to be Tabasco and butterscotch, it just has to be absolutely vile and yet still technically edible, so you don’t waste the healing charm on being poisoned.

Anyway, after that I wasn’t concussed or in howling pain anymore, but I still felt extremely sorry for myself. I climbed back onto Orion’s bed and just lay there for a bit to recover. Liesel started talking to Orion like a normal and civilized person, getting back only mumbled and distracted answers. “If he tries to open the door, brain him with the chair,” I muttered after the third time.

“I’m not going to open the door,” Orion said sulkily.

“Shut up, you lunatic, you’d absolutely open the door,” I said. “What if the wall down by Aadhya’s had gone this time?”

“I’d just—have come back here,” Orion said, as if it were that simple to deal with being caught between two walls of mortal flame sweeping towards each other, each with a leading wave of frenzied mals, and no exit anywhere in between. Nobody would open the door in a cleansing, not even if they heard Orion Lake or for that matter their own mum calling on the other side. Anybody stupid enough to do that died during freshman year when they did open the door and got eaten by the myna grabber on the other side. “I wasn’t planning to go anywhere.”

I opened my eyes to glare at him. “That just means you didn’t have a plan, not that you weren’t going.”

He scowled at me and stomped off to his desk and pretended he was working on something in a notebook. Liesel made a faint snort and sat down on the bed in an open spot near my midsection. I eyed her. “What?”

She looked at me pointedly, but I still didn’t follow until she said, “And your room?” and I realized she thought Orion had actually been planning to creep down the corridor to spend the day with me. I was about to explain that Orion wasn’t enough of a moron to risk going out in a cleansing to spend the day sitting in my room getting yelled at for having gone out in a cleansing, he was in fact much more of a moron, only then it occurred to me that she was half right: if he had got caught between two walls of flame before reaching the main stairs, he would indeed have come and banged on my door for safety. And yes, I’m stupid enough that I would have opened it when he banged, even if I’d have kept a jar of leftover etching acid handy. Which meant spending the day with me had been his backup plan.

I even got confirmation: he was sitting with his back to us, but he’d got his hair buzzed lately at my insistence—let’s not talk about the state it had got into—and the tops of his ears were visible and bright red.

“Lake, if you’ve ever for a second entertained a lurid fantasy that you might possibly have it off on some occasion and that I might in any way be involved, I want you to erase even the memory of having the thought from your brain,” I said deeply and earnestly.

“El!” he squalled in protest, turning to dart a mortified look at Liesel. But it was nothing more than he deserved.

Anyway, so that was loads of fun, spending the day in Orion’s room with him and the girl who’d tried to kill me. Actually, Liesel was all right. She and I ended up playing card games; she had a deck of tarot cards she’d made herself that she carried around with her, and she taught me canasta using all the major arcana as jokers. She got a bit narrow-eyed when I kept getting the Tower and Death, but it wasn’t my fault; she was the one carrying them around and imbuing them with divinatory power.

Orion joined us a couple of times, but he kept getting distracted and going to the door to listen to the crackling as the wall rolled back and forth through the hall. On New Year’s they go several times, which in theory and not in practice makes up for the reduced number. We did hear the dying shrieks of mals a few times, and there was a scrabble at the drain at one point that made him jump up hopefully and scatter the cards all over, but it didn’t come through even when the mad muppet actually pulled off the drain cover and stuck his head close to peer inside it.

Liesel flinched away from him with her expression somewhere between horrified and just disgusted. I took the chance to scoop all the cards back into a facedown pile before she noticed that the Tower and Death had both landed faceup in my lap that time, along with the Eight of Swords, which in Liesel’s illustration was a woman sitting cross-legged and blindfolded half caught in a thicket of eight massive silver thorns in a circle pointing in at her. How encouraging.

“Why don’t you try putting out milk?” I said to Orion snidely. That technique did actually work in the olden days, when there were more minor mals that don’t need much mana to survive, and more mundanes who sincerely believed in them and were therefore vulnerable to them. If you deliberately put out a bowl of milk for the little people, or whatever equivalent gesture, they’d come and suck up the tiny bit of mana that came from your intent, and then they’d leave your house alone in order to preserve the regular supply. But most of those mals are gone now; they got eaten up by more powerful mals who consider a mundane person the equivalent of an already open packet left on the side of the road with suspicious stains and two stale crisps in it.

Orion didn’t bother looking abashed. He just sighed and put the drain cover back on and slunk back to the game, for lack of anything better to kill than time, but he didn’t even notice that I didn’t deal him in for the new round. Liesel and I played several more games, until the sixth time I turned over the Tower, and she grabbed it out of my hand and shook it in my face. “You are cheating!”

“Why would I?” I snapped at her. “Just take it out of play if you’re going to be so fussed about it.”

“I did!” she snapped back, and grabbed her case and opened it up in front of me to display its entirely empty innards to us both, and after staring into it for a moment, she collected up all the other cards and put them into the case and stashed it away in her pocket without saying another word.

After that it was awkward silence all round. I shoved aside enough of Orion’s dirty laundry to clear a rectangle of floor and did push-ups for mana, spiced up by the faint throbbing still going in my head. I was tired and sore and hungry enough that the exercise was highly productive as long as I could do it, but I ran out of steam sooner than I ran out of time and then I just flopped myself back onto Orion’s bed and lay there even more tired and sore and hungry and now sweaty, too. Liesel was sitting at Orion’s desk working on something, which I only realized was his work when he did and said, “Hey, you don’t have to…” in the most halfhearted way those words had been spoken ever.

“I have nothing else to do now,” Liesel said. “Later you can pay me back.”

“He’s guarding the room, isn’t he?” I said.

Liesel shrugged. “He’s here, too. It doesn’t count.” I rather thought it did, since he didn’t want to be in here and would have gone like a shot if we hadn’t been here, but I was the only one arguing his case. She added to him, “I will need amphisbaena scales.”

“Oh, sure, no problem,” Orion said, very enthusiastically. I scowled at him across the room, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on even metaphorically; that was a completely reasonable trade for someone doing your homework, and even if you thought it was in some way his duty to go hunt down amphisbaena for nothing, which I didn’t, that still wouldn’t mean he wasn’t entitled to get something back for taking the trouble to collect the scales.

Anyway he probably wouldn’t hunt amphisbaena for nothing; they’re only slightly more dangerous to us than the agglos, which they eat. Their worst quality is every decade or so enough of their predators get wiped out in a cleansing, and then the amphisbaena lay a bumper crop of tiny rubbery eggs in nice warm damp spots like for instance around the hot-water pipes, and when they hatch shortly after New Year’s, the babies pour out of the taps and the showerheads in droves, both heads hissing and biting. Which you’d justifiably say is in fact nightmarishly bad, but the poison isn’t strong enough to do more than sting at that stage, and it doesn’t get stronger until they’re big enough that they don’t fit through anymore. You just hear them stuck in there and hissing as you wash and hope very hard that the showerhead doesn’t break off today.

There almost certainly would be an infestation this year, now I thought about it. I’d have to pass the word, and also spend some of my crochet time making mesh bags to put on the showerheads. Liesel must have seen it coming a while ago and worked up a strategy using what was about to become an abundant resource; clever of her. Even more clever to take advantage of a golden opportunity to have Orion do the harvesting, in exchange for her doing the remedial homework she would probably knock off in the next two hours.

I sulked on the bed in completely unjustified resentment while she motored through the entire stack of worksheets with about as much effort as it was taking me to lie there. The only thing that slowed her down even a little were the places where Orion had dripped food and/or maleficaria innards on some of the questions, and she had to get him to help her reconstruct what the unspattered words had been. Actually I overestimated vastly: it took her thirty-eight minutes, and that includes the time she spent sorting it neatly into deadline order and putting it into a pair of folders for him and also tidying up absolutely everywhere.

I veered from being annoyed at her to being annoyed at Orion when he received the folders and just perfunctorily put them on the side of his desk and said, “Great, thanks. How many scales do you need?” It wasn’t effusive enough for me, much less by American standards.

“What Lake means is, he’s pathetically grateful that he doesn’t have to spend the last six months of term dodging vats of strong acid because he couldn’t be arsed to do his own homework,” I said peevishly.

Liesel just shrugged with all the weariness of a veteran of the wars—I suppose she’d worked her way through the entire time doing homework for enclavers—and said to Orion, “Can you get thirty hides? I need them at least two weeks old.”

“Sure,” Orion said blithely, and I didn’t literally gnash my teeth because no one does, do they, but I felt as if I were gnashing my teeth. With no justification in the slightest. Liesel had made a good deal for her, and so had Orion, and for that matter it was good for me, too, because I wouldn’t have to keep saving his thick plank self all the time. I didn’t even need to be worried that he was neglecting something important that would come back to bite him the way neglected assignments usually did. He didn’t need to practice his alchemy, either to graduate or for any other reason; he didn’t have any special affinity for it as far as I’d ever seen. I didn’t even know why he’d done alchemy track in the first place. New York surely had all its lab space packed with geniuses; he wasn’t going to graduate and go be a modestly competent alchemist the rest of his life.

It annoyed me more and not less because I didn’t have a good reason for being annoyed. I couldn’t even come up with anything to say about it. If I’d tried to put into words what I was feeling, it would have been something unpleasant and envious and whinging like Why should you get to make easy deals that suit you perfectly to get out of the things you don’t like with the strong implication of when I never do, which wasn’t even true anymore since I had a New York power-sharer on my wrist.

So I didn’t put it into words; I just lay curled on his bed in an unpleasant stew of cooled sweat and resentment while they discussed their happy arrangement. Orion even stopped being so distracted: even if the mals did get purged back, Liesel had just cleared his slate completely of anything but hunting and eating and sleep, with the last two as optional as he wanted them to be. She even offered to help him brew up some amphisbaena bait.

The one thing I wasn’t, at all, was jealous. I was so far from it actually that I didn’t even think about being jealous until Liesel shot me an exasperated look and I realized that she’d very much have liked to make me jealous, and would have had a strong go at it if the field had been the least bit open. I couldn’t blame her. She wanted that guaranteed spot in New York enough to have seriously contemplated both Magnus Tebow and murder for it; I certainly ranked Orion higher than those alternatives. If he had so much as taken a first glance at her cleavage, she’d have been a plonker not to make sure he got a second.

But he hadn’t, and when I realized he hadn’t, I started to feel more than a bit panicky, because he hadn’t any excuse not to be taking a first glance. I’m only mildly motivated in that direction myself and I absolutely had taken both a first and a second glance at the cleavage and the bouncy golden curls and shiny pink lips. I think anyone who wasn’t really impervious would have. If you haven’t eaten anything but tasteless slop in years and suddenly someone offers you a slice of chocolate cake, so what if you don’t especially like chocolate cake; if you were interested in food at all, you’d at least think it over before you said no thanks.

Orion had no business saying no thanks. I was fairly confident he did like cake, or at least was quite ready to give it a try, and he wasn’t getting a bite off my plate if I had anything to say about it, which I did. He ought to have at least licked his chops, even if he didn’t want to dive in, and instead he didn’t so much as drop his eyes for a peek. He wasn’t a good enough actor to have been faking it, either.

Which irritated Liesel, understandably. It was like the homework; that much bloody effort deserved a smidge of appreciation. So when the all-clear bell rang, she said stiffly, “I will be going to my room now,” and cleared out before I had a chance to jump on the bandwagon and leave with her.

“I’ll be going too,” I said in a hurry, swinging my legs over the side of the bed, and Orion came over and said, “Are you sure you’re okay?” a little wistfully and then had the unmitigated nerve to have a quick peek at my breasts, which were currently under a second-day top marred with alchemy stains and soot, with the sawn-off ends of my hair obscuring the view.

“I’m fine,” I said sharply.

“I’ll walk you back to your room,” he said.

I should just have let him; Precious was in my room. Instead I said, “I don’t need help going nine doors down, Lake,” and then my stomach growled and he said, “And you threw up your whole breakfast, you need to eat something,” and jumped to grab me a sealed muesli bar only eight years past its best that he must have been gifted by some adoring fan. It wasn’t cake maybe, but by Scholomance standards it still qualified as haute cuisine. I stupidly took it and stupidly sat there on the bed eating it—so stupidly that I have the bad feeling I did it on purpose—and obviously he sat down on the bed next to me. He tentatively crept his arm round my shoulders when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, and I pretended I wasn’t paying attention, and then he said in a faintly hopeful voice, “El,” and I told myself to shove him off the bed.

I didn’t. In fact, mortifyingly I kissed him first, and then it was all up, because I’m starving, and I do like cake, and after I’d taken the first bite I wanted another, and another after that, and I put my hands under his shirt to press them flat against his warm bare back, and it was so good to be this close to someone, only it wasn’t just someone, it was Orion, and he shivered all over and put his arms around me and I could feel how strong he was, the muscles moving under his skin that he’d built over years of fighting all the very worst things that come out of the dark. His mouth was all warm and wonderful and I can’t even describe how good it felt and how much better it made everything. I was one of those poor stupid freshmen longing inside the gymnasium fantasia I’d made, only this was real and I could really have it, inside and after we graduated and forever, and the rest of my dream along with it—a life of building and creation and good work, and every prophecy of evil and destruction could go fuck right off and I could start the rest of my life right now, and I wanted to, so much I couldn’t stop, couldn’t want to stop.

So I didn’t. I just kept kissing him and running my hands all over him and breathing in time with him, our foreheads pressed together making a warm private space between us to catch our breath in, full of gasps. Orion had a hand all tangled up in my hair, moving around like he wanted to feel the strands running over his fingers, tightening his grip and relaxing in small bursts, his own breath coming out in hard panting raspy gulps, and it felt so good I laughed a little into that open space between us and reached down to grab the bottom of his shirt.

He gave a convulsive shudder and jerked back, pushing me to arm’s length, and crackled out, “No, we can’t,” in a rawly agonized way.

I’ve been mortified in all sorts of awful ways in the course of my life, but I think that might possibly have been the worst. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to; that would’ve been all right. But he wanted to just as much as I did, and he’d nevertheless managed to stop himself, and I hadn’t, like some undisciplined yahoo grabbing at the shiny treat that I knew perfectly well would lead to complete disaster. He even heaved himself off the bed in the next moment, all but levitating to the other side of the room.

“Right you are,” I said, and fired myself out the door and into the still-lightly-toasted corridor at once.

Precious was right on the other side of my door when I shot it open, so frantic she was leaping almost as high as my waist. I caught her right out of the air and said furiously, “Will you stop? Nothing happened, no thanks to you.”

I slammed the door hard behind me and slumped onto my bed. Precious crept up my arm to my shoulder and sat there silently until I finally admitted, “No thanks to me, either,” as bitter as rotten squash. She crept closer to my ear and rubbed the lobe with the tip of her little nose and made a few comforting squeaks as I put up my hands to rub away a few leaking tears.