by Naomi Novik
“Still sorry I was done out of my scrambled eggs,” I said coolly, and started eating my porridge.
Ibrahim’s deal turned out okay: the senior died before our first bell rang. Ibrahim and Yaakov left his body there, arms folded on the table and head pillowed facedown, like he’d just drifted off for a nap. It wouldn’t be here by the time we came in for lunch. I marked off the table mentally, along with the ones surrounding it. Some of the things that clean up messes like that will stay around hoping for another meal.
I have languages every morning: I’m studying five of them. That sounds like I’m some mad linguistics fiend, but there’re only three academic tracks here: incantations, alchemy, or artifice. And of those three, incantations is the only one you can practice in your own cell without having to go to the lab or the shop more than the minimum. Alchemy or artifice tracks only make strategic sense if you’re someone like Aadhya, with a related affinity, and then you get the double advantage of playing to your own strengths and the relatively smaller number of people going for it. If she does get out of here alive, a smart, trained artificer with an affinity for unusual materials and a lot of good alliances, she might even be able to get into New York. If not, she’s got good odds for New Orleans or Atlanta. The better the enclave you get into, the more power you have to draw on. The artificers in New York and London had the power to build the Trans-Atlantic Gateway, which means if I did get into New York, I could be back in Birmingham New Street, an easy train trip from home, just by walking through a door.
Of course, getting into New York wasn’t on the cards for me unless I pulled off something really amazing, and probably not at all given that I was with increasing passion contemplating the murder of their darling star, but there’re plenty of solid enclaves in Europe. None of them will take me, either, though, unless I come out of here with a substantial reputation and a substantial spell-list. If you’re doing incantation, either you have to go languages-track to build yourself a really good collection of spells, or go creative writing and invent your own. I tried the creative writing track, but my affinity’s too strong. If I sit down to write modestly useful spells, they don’t work. In fact, more often than not they blow up in my face in dangerous ways. And the one and only time I let loose on the page instead, stream of consciousness the way Mum writes hers, I came up with a highly effective spell to set off a supervolcano. I burnt it straight away, but once you’ve invented a spell, it’s out there, and who knows, someone else might get it. Hopefully there’s no one garbage enough to ask the school for a spell to set off a supervolcano, but no more inventing spells for me.
So that means my main source of unique spells is whatever I get out of the void. Technically I could ask for spells nonstop, but if you don’t at least read over the ones you’ve got, by the time you do go back, they’ll all be rubbish or not what you asked for or just blank. And if you read too many spells without learning them well enough to cast them, you’ll start mixing them up in your head, and then you’re sure to blast yourself to bits. Yes, I can learn a hundred closely related cleaning cantrips in a row, but my limit for useful spells is somewhere around nine or ten a day.
I haven’t found a limit for spells of mass destruction. I can learn a hundred of those just by glancing at them, and I never forget any of them. Which is lucky, I suppose, because I have to go through a hundred of those before I ever get one of the useful ones.
If you’re collecting spells instead of writing your own, languages are absolutely critical. The school will give you spells only in languages you at least theoretically know, but as previously demonstrated, it’s not particularly invested in meeting your needs. If you know a dozen languages and you leave the choice up to the school, you’re more likely to get the actual kind of spell you want. And the more languages you know, the easier it is to trade spells with others to get ones you can’t wheedle out of the void.
The big ones are Mandarin and English: you’ve got to have one of those two to come at all, since the common lessons are taught in only those two. If you’re lucky enough to have both, you can probably use at least half of the spells in wide circulation at the school, and you can schedule all your required lessons to suit. Liu’s taking history and maths in English to count for her language requirement; she uses the room in her schedule to take writing workshop in both languages. As you can imagine, most wizard parents start their kids with a private tutor for one or the other the minute they’re born. Of course, Mum put me on Marathi instead, because of Dad. Thanks, Mum. If only all the kids from Mumbai didn’t treat me like a leper because they’ve heard whispers about my great-grandmother’s prophecy.
To be fair to Mum, I was two when she started me on the language, and she still had hopes of going to live with Dad’s family. Her own family were right out. Just before she went off to school—we don’t talk about it much, but I’m fairly certain that’s why she went to the Scholomance—she acquired an evil stepdad, literally: one of those cautious professional maleficers, on the edge of shriveling. He almost certainly poisoned her dad—no proof, but the timing was extremely coincidental—in order to glom on to her mum, who was also a really good healer, through her grief. Any spell that attacks only one person at a time is a bit beneath me, but I know the type. She spent the rest of her life taking care of him, then died of an unexpected heart attack when I was around three.
The stepdad is still doing all right last we heard, but we’re not what you’d call close. He used to send sad wistful letters once in a while, hidden inside innocuous envelopes, trying to catch Mum in turn, but when I was six, I opened one by accident, felt the mind-tugging spell, and instinctively snapped it straight back at him. It probably felt like having a splinter jammed directly into your eye. He hasn’t tried since.
After things didn’t work out very well with Dad’s family either, Mum still clung to the idea that the language would give me a sense of connection to him, at some unspecified future date. At the time, it was just another thing that made me different, and even as a kid, I already felt really strongly I didn’t need any more of those. We don’t live in Cardiff or anything; my primary school wasn’t what you’d call a hotbed of multiculturalism. One of the girls once told me I was the color of upsettingly weak tea, which isn’t even true but has occupied a niche in my head ever since, as persistent as a vilhaunt. And the commune isn’t exactly better. No one there will whisper a racist insult at you in the playground; instead I had grown adults wanting ten-year-old me to sign off on their decolonized yoga practice and help them translate bits of Hindi, which I didn’t know.
Of course, I should be grateful to them: that’s what woke me up to the idea that Hindi was more popular. When I got old enough to understand that languages were going to keep me alive, I stopped moaning about going and demanded lessons in that, too, just in time to get reasonably fluent before induction. Hindi isn’t as good for flexibility, because most of the kids who speak it also have English, so they usually ask for spells in English to have better trading material. But you want languages across the spectrum. In rare or dead languages, it’s a lot harder to find anyone else to barter with, but you’re also more likely to get really unique spells, or a better match for the rest of your request, like my stupid Old English cleaning spells. Hindi is common enough that you can find lots of people to trade with, and as it’s not one of the big two, people don’t ask for spells in Hindi, they just get them that way, so the spells are a bit better on average. I got to know Aadhya by trading Hindi spells.
At the moment, I’m studying Sanskrit, Latin, German, and Middle and Old English. The last three overlap nicely. I did French and Spanish last year, but I’ve got enough of those to muddle through the spells I get now, and they’re on the same popularity scale as Hindi, so I moved to Latin instead, which has the benefit of a really big backlist. I’ve been thinking of adding Old Norse for something really unusual. It’s just as well I hadn’t, yet, because I’d p
robably have been handed a book of ancient Viking cleaning incantations yesterday, even if I’d just tried a single exercise on the subject, and then I’d be blocked until I managed to beat my way through it. The school takes a lot of liberties with the definition of “knowing” a language. It’s safer to start new ones over the first quarter so you don’t end up stuck on something near finals.
Orion walked me to my classroom. I didn’t notice him doing it at first because I was too busy keeping an eye out for the group I usually walk with in the mornings: Nkoyo and her best friends Jowani and Cora. They’re all doing heavy language like me, so we’re on almost the same schedule. We’re not friends, but they’ll let me walk to class with them to have a fourth at their back, if I leave at the same time they do. Good enough for me.
When I spotted them at the tables, they were already halfway through breakfast, so I had to wolf down the rest of mine to catch up. “Got to go in five,” I told Aadhya, to give her fair warning. She waved over a couple of her friends from the artificer track who were just coming out with trays: given my report about the shop, she wasn’t in any rush to get to class early, anyway.
I managed to get out of the cafeteria with Cora, who grudgingly let me catch up with her before going through the doors—so generous—and we were outside the doors before Nkoyo did a double-take over my shoulder and I realized Orion was right behind me.
“We’re going to languages!” I hissed at him. He’s in alchemy track. In fact, alchemy track was twice as big as usual in our year, because kids were trying to stick close to him even if they didn’t have an affinity. In my opinion, it wasn’t nearly worth the additional lab time. He did still have language class sometimes, just like we all have to do some alchemy—we do get to ask for schedule changes on the first day of the year, but if you ask for too many easy classes or try to go too single-track, the school will put you in classes other kids have avoided. But only languages-track kids get the language hall first thing on a Monday: it’s one of the big perks, being this high up when you’re a junior and senior.
He looked at me mulishly. “I’m going to the supply room.” We get building materials down in the workshop and alchemy supplies in the labs, but for everything less exotic, like pencils and notebooks, you have to forage in the big stockroom at the far end of the language hall.
“Can we come with you?” Nkoyo asked instantly. Cora and Jowani were both just gawking, but she’s sharp. And it was obviously worth getting to class towards the late end to have a big group for company going for supplies, even leaving aside Orion himself—if only I could have left him aside—so I went along, stewing. I grabbed paper and ink and took some mercury for trading and a hole puncher, and I even found a vast ring binder for my increasing pile of spells. I spotted three eyes peering out at us from a crack in the ceiling, but it was probably just a flinger, and there were too many of us for one of those to make a try.
Afterwards, Orion walked us all back to the nearest language hall, even though there wasn’t any reason. The narrow stairwell next to the stockroom does disappear sometimes—it’s not on the blueprints, it got added belatedly when they realized it was inconvenient to have to go a quarter mile back to the next nearest stair—but today it wasn’t just present, the door was actually standing wide open and the light inside was working.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, taking a risk to stay in the corridor: the others had already dashed in to claim decent booths. “Please tell me you aren’t trying to go out with me.”
It didn’t seem likely: no one ever has. It’s not that I’m ugly; on the contrary, I’ve been growing increasingly beautiful in a tall and alarming way, as befits the terrible dark sorceress I’m meant to be, at least until I presumably collapse into a grotesque crone. Boys often think for about ten seconds that they might want to go out with me, and then they look into my eyes or talk to me and I suppose get the strong impression I’m likely to devour their souls or something. Also, in Orion’s case, I’d been aggressively rude to him and nearly got him killed by mimics.
He snorted. “Want to date a maleficer?”
I had a moment of indignation over that, about to snarl at him yet again that I wasn’t, and then I got it. “You’re keeping an eye on me? In case I start doing evil things and—what, you need to kill me?”
He folded his arms across his chest and regarded me with a cool, righteous expression: enough of an answer. I was violently tempted to kick him in the goolies. One of the things people do believe in at the commune is about seventeen different forms of Westernized martial arts, and though they’re surrounded with a huge pile of mumbo jumbo about your inner center and finding your balance and channeling your spiritual force, the actual kicking and punching gets taught, too. I wasn’t an expert, but I could definitely have made Orion Lake extremely unhappy right then, given the wide-open way he was standing.
But there was a classroom full of kids behind me watching us, most of whom would have been glad for any decent excuse to completely ostracize me, and the first late bell was about to ring, at which point the door would swing shut and leave me stuck in the hallway for the whole class period. Nobody would let me in. So I had to just stalk away from him seething and take one of the empty language booths.
There aren’t any teachers at the Scholomance. The place is filled to capacity with kids; there are two applicants for every spot as it is, and our dorm rooms are less than seven feet across. Anyone who gets in doesn’t need external motivation. Knowing how to make a potion that will heal the lining of your stomach after you’ve accidentally drunk some lyesmoke-infused apple juice is its own reward, really. Even maths becomes pretty necessary for a lot of advanced arcana, and history research brings you loads of useful spells and recipes that you won’t be handed in your other courses.
So in language class, you just go to any one of the eight language halls arranged around the third floor and put yourself into one of the booths. Choose wisely; if you try the ones closest to the loo, or the really good one next to the stairs so you can get to lunch in under ten minutes, you’ll have a harder time getting a decent booth, or a booth at all. Assuming you do get one, you sit inside the soundproofed cocoon, hoping you aren’t missing the footsteps of something coming at your back, and read textbooks or work on exercise sheets while disembodied voices whisper to you in whatever language you’re studying that day. Usually they tell me horrible gory stories or describe my death in loving detail. I had meant to work on my Old English, to try and get more use out of the spells I had learned from the household charms book, but I didn’t make much progress. I just hunched over the same single page of my notebook, boiling with resentment, while my whisper tenderly recited an epic alliterative poem all about how Orion Lake, “hero of the shadowed halls,” was going to murder me in my sleep.
Which would make it self-defense when I killed him, which I gave some newly serious thought to doing: it was starting to seem like I might really have to. People seem to have no trouble convincing themselves that I’m dangerous and evil even when they aren’t actively looking for reasons. Of course, I could have killed him just by draining his mana, but I didn’t want to actually become a maleficer and then go bursting out of this place like some monstrous butterfly hatching from a gigantic chrysalis of doom to lay waste and sow sorrow across the world as per the prophecy.
The problem was Luisa, I realized abruptly. He hadn’t bought my answer about her. Just like I have a good sense of who’s using malia, what they’re doing, he’s almost certainly got a sense for—I don’t even know. Justice? Mercy? The pathetic and vulnerable? Anyway, he knew I was lying to him about Luisa, without knowing exactly how I was lying, so he’d probably decided that I really had killed her. I’d taken his question about her as a minor point, but he hadn’t. I didn’t know much about her, except that she’d been one of the deeply unlucky few who don’t have wizard parents. The ability to hold mana does pop up in mundanes ever
y so often, but usually they don’t get in here, they just get eaten. Probably a kid who lived near her was slated to come, got eaten before induction, and she got sucked up instead because the parents didn’t bother notifying the school, I can’t imagine why. So in some sense she was lucky, but from her perspective, one morning she just found herself sucked up out of her ordinary life and dumped without warning into a black hole of a boarding school, surrounded by strangers, no way to get in touch with her family, no way out, and a horde of maleficaria coming to kill her. I’m sure her plight was calculated to pull on every one of Orion’s finely tuned heartstrings.
And thanks to my own fit of temper the other night, he’s also just discovered I’m a potential dark witch of apocalyptic proportions. Put all of that together, probably every instinct he had was now going wild with the desire to put a stop to my not-yet-begun reign of terror.
Naturally that made me want to go and launch said reign of terror immediately, but first I had to sit through two hours of language and one of Maleficaria Studies, everyone’s favorite, which is held in a massive hall on the cafeteria level. We all get lumped into the room together regardless of language, as there’s no lecture. The walls are covered with a huge and vividly detailed mural of the graduation ceremony, set in the moment when the senior hall rotates down. The landing is just coming into view, and the marble hall is crammed full of the various delightful creatures waiting ravenous for the buffet to begin. We each get a textbook in our mother tongue, and read along while the current mal we’re studying comes alive off the walls and prowls around the stage demonstrating all the ways it might kill us. Occasionally the animated version will try to upgrade itself from being a temporary construct by actually killing someone in the front rows and consuming their mana.
