by Naomi Novik
There were about five different clusters of kids scattered between us and the doors, and they all turned towards him as he went past them, faces full of hope and calculation. Every single one of them running the same equations that were in my own head every single day, every single hour, and because they weren’t stupidly stubborn morons, they were all happy to be nice to Orion Lake in exchange for getting to live; they would have fought over the chance to be his hangers-on. And he knew it, and instead he’d actually been making an effort to hang around with me, and if he wasn’t waiting for me to turn maleficer anymore, that meant that what he wanted was—to hang out with somebody who wouldn’t genuflect to him.
I hated the idea; it made him too much of a decent person, and what right did he have to be a decent person, on top of a monumentally stupid gigantic hero? But it was more or less the only thing that made sense. Just standing around in the cafeteria as everyone else pours out is a bad idea, but I did precisely that for almost a whole minute, staring after him with my fists balled up, because I was still out of my tree: angry with him, and with Chloe, and with every last person around me; I was even angry with Aadhya and Liu, because they’d made me want to cry just by deigning to sit with me.
Then I went after him. He had gone to the stairs like everyone else, but instead of going up to the library like everyone else, he was heading down, alone, to do work period in the alchemy lab or something, like a lunatic. Or like someone who’d rather be attacked by mals than be gushed at. I gritted my teeth, but there wasn’t any help for it. I caught up to him halfway down the first flight. “Can I point out, not four days ago you accused me of being a serial killer,” I said. “I’m justified in not grasping that you wanted me to sit with you for lunch.”
He didn’t look at me and hitched his rucksack higher up on his shoulder. “Sit wherever you want.”
“I will,” I said. “But as you mind so much, next time I’ll tell you beforehand that I don’t want to sit with your enclave mates.”
He did look then, with a glare. “Why not?”
“Because they do want genuflection.”
His shoulders were starting to stop hunching. “It’s called sitting down together,” he said, dragging the words out exaggeratedly. “At a table. In chairs. Most people can get through lunch without turning it into an act of war.”
“I’m not most people,” I said. “Also, the seating arrangements are an act of war, and if you haven’t noticed, that’s just embarrassing. Do you think that everyone’s always trying to sit with you for your amazing personality or something?”
“I guess you’re just immune,” he said.
“Bloody well right I am,” I said, but he was grinning at me a little from under his overgrown hair, tentatively, and apparently I was lying.
I DON’T HAVE a very good idea of how people behave with their friends normally, because I’d never had one before, but on the bright side, Orion hadn’t either, so he didn’t know any more than I did. So for lack of a better idea we just went on being rude to each other, which was easy enough for me, and a refreshing and new experience for him, in both directions: being gracious to the little people had apparently been hammered into him from an early age. “I’d respond to that, but my mom’s pretty big on manners,” he said to me pointedly the next day after dinner as I yanked him away from the stairs down. I’d just told him he was a stupid wanker for trying to go and hide in the alchemy labs again.
“So is mine, but it didn’t stick,” I said, shoving him up the stairs to the library. “I don’t care if you like sitting hunched alone at a lab table like a ghoul. I get enough near-death experiences in here without creating extra opportunities.”
Unless you’ve got project work you have to do—and several friends watching your back—the library is always where you want to be: it’s the safest place in the whole school. The bookcases just keep going up and up until they vanish into the same darkness that’s outside our cells, so there’s no place for mals to get in above. There’s no plumbing on the library level at all; you have to go down to the cafeteria level if you need the loo. Even the air vents are smaller. It’s musty and smells of old paper, but that’s a trade-off we’re all willing to accept. We’d spend every spare minute here, except there’s not enough space in the reading room for everyone. Nobody gets into real fights very much in the Scholomance—it’s just stupid—but enclaver groups will fight each other occasionally over a table or one of the prime reading areas with lumpy sofas big enough to kip on.
There are a handful of smaller reading rooms, up on the mezzanine level, but each of those is claimed by a consortium of two or three smaller enclaves, the ones that don’t have enough firepower to claim a good section of the main reading room, but more than enough to keep out any outsiders who might want to intrude. Nkoyo gets invited to one up there fairly often, by the kids from Zanzibar and Johannesburg. If you’re not invited, it’s not worth going up there; on the rare occasion when no one’s there, the first person who shows up—almost certainly with at least three tagalongs—will chase you, even if there’s plenty of room. And for once that doesn’t just mean me; they’ll chase anyone, on principle: it’s too important a resource not to police it.
The only other reasonably good place to work is one of the study carrels tucked in and around the stacks, and they don’t always stay where they should. You can catch sight of one peering through a bookshelf, green lampshade like a beacon, and by the time you’ve got to the next aisle over, it’s gone. If you do find one, and you settle in to work and then doze off over your books, you might wake up in a dim aisle full of crackling old scrolls and books in languages you can’t even recognize, surrounded by dark, and good luck finding your way back before something finds you. The library is safer, not safe.
I’ve managed to claim one of them more or less, a scarred old monster of a desk that’s probably been here as long as the school itself. It’s tucked into a nook that you’d never see unless you go all the way to the end of the aisle with the Sanskrit incantations and then go around the back to the next aisle over, which has the Old English incantations. Almost no one would go that way, for good reason. The bookcases in between are full of crumbling scrolls and carved-stone tablets in some parent language so ancient that nobody knows it anymore. If you happened to look too long at a sliver of papyrus while going past, the school might decide you were now studying that language, and good luck figuring out the spells you’d get then. People can end up spell-choked that way: you get a dozen spells in a row that you can’t learn well enough to cast, and suddenly you can’t skip over them anymore to learn any new ones, even if you trade for them. Then the spells you’ve already learned are all you’ve got for the rest of your life. It’s not really a silver lining that the rest of your life isn’t likely to be very long if you’re stuck working with sophomore-year spells. On top of that, the path goes underneath one of the walkways that connect the mezzanine-level areas, so a good chunk of it sits in the dark.
And that’s where I found my desk. I risked the shortcut last year because I made up a special project for myself: analyzing the commonalities between spells of binding and coercion in Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Old English, and Middle English. I know, charming subject, but perfectly aligned with my affinity, and it let me out of taking a final exam for languages at all. Otherwise, I’d have had five hours in a classroom full of other delicious sophomores who’d have made sure I was the one sitting in the very worst spot. The topic also near-guaranteed that I’ll be assigned the Proto-Indo-European seminar next year, which always has at least ten students in it, a good healthy size for a senior languages-track seminar. But you do need a reference or two, or more accurately fifty, to get a passing mark on a project like that. Just collecting up the books from each language was going to take me a good half hour of my every work period.
I couldn’t just keep them—or rather, I could; I could hide them in a
dark corner or take them back to my room or set them on fire; there’s no one here to stop you at the door or charge you late fees. But if you’re even a little careless with a library book, it’ll be gone the next time you want it, and good luck finding it on the shelves ever again. So I reshelve every time, and I have a pocket notebook I’ve been carrying since freshman year with the title and catalog number of every book I’ve used, a note about which aisle it was in, how many bookcases from the end, which shelf from the floor, how many books on either side on the shelf, and the titles of the immediate neighbors. The really valuable ones, I even do a sketch of the spine in colored pencil. Thanks to that, I can lay my hands on almost any of them, and next year I’ll probably be able to sell the notebook off to a younger languages-track student right before graduation in exchange for some mana. That’s the value of making loads of work for yourself.
But before I found my desk, what that meant was, anytime I had to do a paper, each day after an abbreviated lunch I dashed up here, got the books I needed, hauled them all downstairs to an empty classroom, got forty minutes of work done, hauled them back up and reshelved, and did the same thing all over again to get two hours of work done after dinner. I couldn’t get a place in the reading room to save my life, even at the lousy tables in the dark corners where you have to spend your own mana to cast a light.
That was hard going for a single-subject paper where all the books were in one aisle if not in one shelf. Slogging down to Sanskrit, then all the way back through all the modern Indian languages to the main incantations aisle, and then going all the way to Old English, every single time I had to get some work done on the paper, would’ve been too much work. Instead I took the gamble and went round the back. As a reward, I found my desk. Yes, it’s underneath the walkway, but it’s got a light of its own that takes only a tiny drop of mana to start, and apart from that it’s properly tidy: solid wood with a wide flat top, heavy carved legs with open sides, no drawers, no hiding places for mals to lurk in. And it’s more than big enough for two. I’ve just never had anyone to invite.
Orion had always avoided the library like the plague, for what turned out to be the opposite reason: the moment we came into the reading room, half of the heads came up—the half facing the door—and started to smile invitations. You could just see everyone looking round at the other kids at their tables, mentally picking off the two weakest to open up a pair of seats. His shoulders hunched up. I didn’t blame him for not liking it, but I gave him a hard shove on the back for being such a drip. “Stop looking like someone’s about to bite your head off. I promise I’ll protect you,” I added, which I meant as a joke, except after we went into the stacks, three separate people tried to casually follow us, and I really did have to turn round and tell them off for being creepers. He didn’t do anything about it himself.
“I’m not going to be your personal bouncer,” I told him when we finally got rid of the third one, a girl who didn’t quite make it all the way to suggesting that Orion might have even more fun in the dark recesses of the stacks with two girls instead of just one—obviously the only reason he could possibly want to hang out in the library with me—but only because I cut her off before she got that far. “You can be rude to your groupies for yourself.”
“But you’re so good at it,” he said, and then, “No, I’m sorry, I just…” He trailed off, and then he said, “Luisa asked me. Three days before…” He stopped.
“Before Jack did for her,” I supplied. He nodded. “So since then you’ve decided that you’re under a moral obligation to bestow your magnificent favors on anyone who asks? I don’t know where you’re finding the time.”
“No!” He glared at me. “Just, I got mad and shoved her off, and then she was dead, and I didn’t even know how. And I thought that when it happened, maybe she thought I didn’t come, I let whatever it was get her, because I was still mad. I know it’s stupid,” he added. And it was stupid, mainly because he was blaming himself for the completely wrong thing. Which was quite obvious to me, and he noticed. “What?” he said belligerently.
I could have considered not telling him. I suppose that would’ve been a kind thing to do. Instead I said, “She died because after you wouldn’t go for it, she looked for somebody else who would, and Jack took her up on it.” He stared at me appalled. “He would’ve needed some kind of consent to get power out of another wizard. Most maleficers do.”
Orion looked vaguely sick. He didn’t talk for the rest of the way to my desk. Nobody else popped up to bother us, and the walk was a lot shorter than usual. Normally I have to stop and read the book spines every three shelves just to make ostentatiously sure that I’m moving in the right direction, and to check the lights. That’s another trick the school loves. There isn’t any overhead to put a lamp on, so the aisles are lit up with glowing wispy mana lights that float around. They’ll grudgingly help you read the book spines, even bob along if you fly up a shelf—or climb up it, for those of us who don’t have mana to waste on floating around like giant ponces—but if you aren’t actively using them, they’ll go dim so carefully that you don’t notice until they’re about to wink out, and then you have to cast your own light, because they will go out if you keep going, even if you turn around. But with Orion walking alongside me, they all stayed bright enough around us that I could just glance over once in a while, to make sure we were still going in the right direction.
There was even a second chair waiting for him at my desk. Orion sat down without a first—much less a second—glance and immediately started unpacking his bag. I kicked his chair and made him help me look through the shelves at our backs and shine a light up and down the walls of the nook and over the legs of the desk and pull it away from the wall and push it back. “Okay, seriously, we’re in the library,” he said finally, sounding exasperated.
“I’m sorry, am I boring you with my basic precautions?” I said. “We’re not all invulnerable heroes.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to be crazy paranoid, either,” he said. “Come on, how many times have you gotten jumped?”
“In the last week? Do I get to count the maleficer you sicced on me?” I said, folding my arms.
“Until the end of time, obviously.” He rolled his eyes. “How many times have you gotten jumped before that? Five? Six?”
I stared at him. “A week, maybe.”
He stared back at me. “Huh?”
“I get jumped twice a week, if I’m careful,” I said. “If I wasn’t careful, I’d be getting jumped five times as often. I’m the class tiramisu, you spanner. The loser with a tidy bucket of mana that has to spend all her time alone. And even if I wasn’t, most people get jumped once a month at least.”
“They do not,” he said, positively.
“They really do,” I said.
He pulled up his sleeve to show me a piece of artifice on his wrist, a round medallion on a leather strap that looked enough like a watch to slip by at a first glance. He could have exposed it on any crowded street full of mundanes and nobody would have blinked. Then he popped it open, and it even was a watch, except through several tiny round windows cut out of the face, you could see into the interior where at least six layers of minuscule gears were turning, each in different metals, shifting through different glows of green and blue and violet. “I get buzzed if anyone from the enclave is in trouble, and there are eleven other kids from New York in this place right now.”
“Oh, fine, enclave kids don’t get jumped once a month,” I said. “Rank and power hath their privileges. I’m shocked. Is that what you all use for power-sharing?” I peered at it as he snapped it shut again: the lid had an elaborate engraving of a cast-iron park gate with a starburst behind it, the letters NY looped in calligraphic script around it.
“You think the maleficaria can tell?” he said. “You think they care?”
“I think they go for the lowest-hanging
fruit on the vine, and it’s never one of you. Your mate Chloe has friends who offer to taste her food and get her supplies. When she does a project, she can get help for the asking from the best students in the place, and she doesn’t have to help them in return. She probably has two kids walk her back to her room at night, when she finally leaves her permanently reserved place on the sofa in there.” I jerked my chin towards the reading room. “You’ve got power-sharers and probably—” I reached for the bottom of his shirt and lifted it up over the buckle of his belt, which—you guessed it—was absolutely a top-notch shield holder, like the ones Aadhya was making, only by comparison hers were the equivalent of a Blue Peter craft project done by a five-year-old.
He made a little hop with a squawk, grabbing for my hand like he thought I was making a move on him, but I was already dropping the shirt again. I snorted and flicked my fingers up towards his face to make him jump back again. “In your dreams, rich boy. I’m not one of your groupies.”
“Yeah, I didn’t notice,” he said, even though he was blushing at the same time.
I settled down to my history paper, and the translations I was going to do for Liu’s. I’m pretty locked-in when I work, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Orion once I got going. Especially since I couldn’t even cut down on the number of perimeter checks I normally do. He wasn’t doing any. I stopped after I finished my outline and the first translation and got up to stretch: letting yourself go stiff in a chair is another bad idea. That was when I noticed he was just sitting there staring at the same page of his lab assignment. “What?”
“You really think other kids get jumped a lot more?” he said abruptly, like he’d been stewing over it the whole time.
