A Deadly Education

by Naomi Novik

  The whole room had gone so deathly quiet I could hear Todd’s gulping as he stared at me bloodshot. Everyone was probably holding their breath not to miss a single nuance of this magnificent escalation of gossip. I picked up my tray and turned round to Orion, who looked back at me still shut-down, and I told him, “Come on. We’re getting another table.” I jerked my head to Aadhya, too, who was gawking up at me herself, and she scrambled up and grabbed her own tray and fell in with me, darting looks at my face sideways. Orion did come after us, moving a little slowly.

  The only empty tables left were bad ones, far at the edges and right by the doors or under the air vents—obviously nobody had left the cafeteria a second early with this excitement going on—but as we were passing him, Ibrahim blurted into the still-total silence, “El, we have room,” and waved some of the kids at his table to slide over and make space for us. The senior bell went off then, and we sat down surrounded by the sudden burst of activity and noise of all the seniors jerking into motion at once, shoveling in the last of their food and grabbing their things to rush out. Todd went out with them, weirdly separate from the rest, a ring of space left round him.

  Orion sat down on the end of the bench, empty-handed. Yaakov was on the other side across from him; he picked up his napkin, hesitating, and I reached out and took it and shoved it at Orion. “You’re a mess, Lake,” I said, and Orion took it and started wiping himself clean. “Can anyone spare anything?” I put one of my own rolls in front of him, and then one after another every single one of the kids at the table started passing something down, even if it was just half a mini muffin or a section of orange, and a kid at the table behind us reached out and tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a carton of milk for him.

  The conversation at our table was completely dead at first; with Orion right there, nobody wanted to talk about the only thing anybody wanted to talk about. Aadhya was the one who got things moving; she finished drinking the milk from the bottom of her cereal bowl—in here that’s standard, not bad manners—and wiped her mouth and said, “Any of you doing Sanskrit? You’re not going to believe what El got. El, you’ve got to show them,” and I was even more grateful that I’d petted my book so much and put it in the special sling, because I’d forgotten about it completely for a few seconds, and if I’d had it in my bookbag, I am absolutely sure it would have vanished on me.

  “Baghdad enclave!” Ibrahim and two others yelped instantly, the second I pulled it out—all the kids who know Arabic can spot books from the Baghdad enclave three shelves away—and since they couldn’t talk about the real news, mine did for second-best.

  I had languages after breakfast, and Orion had alchemy. He put the rubbish from his piecemeal breakfast on my tray and bused it for me, and then just as we were going out the door, he said quietly, “Thanks. But I know you didn’t mean it.”

  “I did too mean it,” I said, irritated, because now I had to work out why I did. “Someone’s always got to pay, but why should Homicidal Todd get a leg up on anyone else? You’re stupid for letting down your side, but you’re the one who wants it to be fair. Go to your lesson and stop looking for a cwtch.” It irritated me even more that he actually shot me a grateful look before he headed for the stairs.

  Predictably, an Arabic worksheet appeared on my desk the instant I sat down that morning. There wasn’t a single word of English on it; the school didn’t even give me a dictionary. And judging by the cheery cartoonish illustrations next to the lines—most notably a man in a car about to mow down a couple of hapless pedestrians—I had the strong suspicion that it was modern Arabic, too. I should’ve got a book on Classical Arabic out of the library before going to class. When you’ve been exposed to a language you didn’t really mean to start, you’re better off giving in and just establishing some boundaries. I’d just been a bit busy yesterday.

  I’d already been resigned to my fate, though, and a Saudi girl who’d been at Ibrahim’s table that morning had a booth near me; she lent me her dictionary in exchange for a promise to proofread her English-language final paper. I copied out the alphabet into my notebook first and then started slogging away on the worksheet, copying out every word I looked up. And for a silver lining, I also couldn’t understand a single word of the venomous tirade that the booth voice poured into my ears in between grudgingly telling me how to pronounce and . I imagine it was full of particularly juicy horrors.

  There was a lot of other non-magical whispering going on around me the rest of the day, among the other kids. It occurred to me, much too belatedly, that I’d just graduated from pathologically rude bitch to enclave-hater. It’s not that we don’t all know that it’s unfair, but nobody says so, because if you say so, enclavers don’t invite you to join them on the better side of the unfair. Orion’s shine might have gone off, too, if enough enclave kids had decided that Todd was right. Maybe the two of us would end up sitting alone. That would be epic. My unpopularity massive enough to drag down Orion Lake himself.

  It didn’t look good when I first got to the cafeteria at lunchtime. None of the enclavers who’d been making up to me lately said a word; no more study group invites from Sarah today. But as I came off the food line, Aadhya got there from shop with three other artificer-track kids and waved to me on her way into the line. “Save us seats, El?” she called across the room. Nkoyo and her pals, who were a few kids behind me, heard her; I don’t know if that made the difference or not, but she said, “I’ll get us water if you do a perimeter,” and though Jowani and Cora exchanged slightly anxious looks, they followed her lead.

  By the time I’d set the perimeter and we were sitting, Aadhya and her crew were there, and they’d even got me an extra piece of cake to say thanks, the way you normally do when you ask someone to save you a place. Not that I had any personal experience before now, as people had always previously made their excuses if I asked them. Liu came, too, and sat down quietly on my other side. She was still carrying a faintly shell-shocked expression, incongruous with the actual color in her face, which had shifted at least ten degrees over on the spectrum from undead to just pale; even her hair had hints of brown in it under the sunlamp. “Did you do a UV potion, Liu?” one of Aadhya’s friends said. “You look great.”

  “Thanks,” she said, softly, and bent over her food.

  There almost wasn’t room when Orion and Ibrahim arrived from lab. A couple of people shifted to let him sit next to me without so much as a word. I was mostly resigned to that, too. After my performance this morning, people would now assume we were dating even if I tipped his soup over his head. If he did start actually dating someone, everybody would have us in a love triangle for the year.

  Todd was in the cafeteria, too. He already wasn’t being frozen out completely: a group of loser freshmen had taken seats at the end of his table. He’d probably have a new alliance in time for graduation, if his old one didn’t just swallow it and take him back and leave it to the grown-ups to deal with him when they got out. Maybe they wouldn’t. His parents were powerful and important if his alliance had the right to offer a guaranteed-in to the enclave, which they would’ve needed to get the class valedictorian. He’d tell them about the maw-mouth going past his room and they’d understand, of course he had to protect himself, and it wasn’t like he’d really committed murder. Mika was going to die anyway in a week. It made sense to trade him for an enclave kid, a kid who had a chance, a kid who had a future. Just thinking about it made me angry enough to want to push Todd into the dark myself.

  I didn’t have a concrete plan for work period, but without even saying it, I’d more or less assumed Orion and I would go to the library together again. But as we were busing our trays, he said to me abruptly, “Go ahead, I’ll find you.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said shortly. There wasn’t any great stroke of genius needed to guess what he was planning to do, but I didn’t tell him he wasn’t going to find a maw-mouth lurking anywh
ere in the school, or that he was a moron for trying. I just went on to the library alone.

  I meant to go to my desk, but when I came in through the reading room, the place was half empty. Most of the tables and squashy chairs had been badly scorched, and there was a lingering stink of smoke mingled with something smelling a bit like the cafeteria brussels sprouts. They’re the one thing that’s never ever poisoned. But even taking all of that into account, the place was unusually deserted. There were freshmen with actual seats instead of just being on the floor. After a moment I realized that everyone was probably thinking—accurately, as it happened—that if you were a hungry maw-mouth, the library would be the perfect hunting ground. Probably anyone who wasn’t desperate would also avoid the stockroom, exactly as Todd had suggested.

  It was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Move on,” I told one of the more ambitious freshmen, who’d dared to snag one of the coveted armchair-and-desk combos in the corner that was normally filled with kids from the Dubai enclave, none of whom were in evidence at the moment.

  The kid gave it up without a fight; he knew he’d been reaching. “Can I sit by you?” he asked. That was new. Probably he was betting Orion might turn up.

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and he shifted to the open patch of floor next to the chair.

  The seat back had a bad rip in the upholstery from one corner to the other, but that was why I’d wanted it. I dug the remnants of a half-scorched throw blanket out from under a sofa and got to work on it with my crochet hook. It took most of work period and a few layers of enamel off my molars, but I got the end of the blanket back into a raveled state. Then I folded it up into a pad, tied it over the rip with some stray bits of string, and sacrificed the whole thing and the mana I’d built up to do a make-and-mend on the chair back. I made sure to scribble El on the repaired bit. The unwritten rule is, if you fix a broken piece of school furniture, you get dibs on it for the rest of the term. The rule goes out the window often enough when there’s someone more powerful on the other side, but I suspected that not even enclavers were going to pick a fight with Orion Lake’s girlfriend, even if she was an enclave-hating weirdo and he turned out to be saving losers at their expense.

  Afterwards, I took out the Golden Stone sutras, petted the book lovingly for a bit, then spent the rest of work period hunting up a Classical Arabic dictionary so I could start translating the first few pages. Those turned out to be just the usual foreword bits like offering acknowledgments and thanks to various important patrons—in this case senior wizards at the enclave—and talking about how hard it had been to make a precise copy. It wasn’t what you’d call brilliantly productive, but I got some Arabic practice in, which was just as well since it was an absolute certainty that a quarter of my language final was going to be in Arabic.

  Orion never showed. He even skipped lab that afternoon. I didn’t see him again until I got to the cafeteria for dinner and he was already there alone at a table, eating like a wolf from a loaded tray: he’d clearly been first into the line, which is a great way to get plenty of food and also get eaten yourself. For most people.

  I didn’t ask him where he’d been, but I didn’t have to. Ibrahim wasn’t even in our lab section and he’d still heard that Orion had skipped class; he was asking why before he had even got into his seat.

  “I didn’t find it,” Orion said, low, after everyone else finished making the appropriate shocked noises when he admitted he’d gone hunting the maw-mouth. It was insanely stupid, even for our hero. He only shrugged it off. “I checked the supply room, the shop, all over the library—”

  I was eating on, determinedly ignoring his catalog, but Liu, who was next to me eating almost as mechanically, slowly began to lift her head from over her food as he talked, and when he finished up in frustration, she said, sounding a bit more like herself, “You’re not going to find it.” Orion looked over at her. “A maw-mouth wouldn’t be hiding. If it was in the school, it would be eating. We’d all know where it was by now. So there isn’t a maw-mouth in the school. Either Todd made it up, or he hallucinated it.”

  Everyone loved that idea, of course. “He did say he hadn’t been sleeping,” one of Nkoyo’s friends said, and by the end of the meal, the whole cafeteria had talked the maw-mouth out of existence and Todd into temporary insanity, to enormous and general relief.

  Even mine: at least they’d all stop talking about it now. And with the maw-mouth disposed of, my find became real news at last. By the end of dinnertime, fourteen kids—eight of them seniors doing Sanskrit—had come by to take a look at the sutras, and they got so excited that some other seniors who weren’t doing Sanskrit came over to express interest: they were mostly kids from wizard groups roughly like Liu’s family, just a bit bigger, starting to get into reach of the resources to build an enclave. Getting the phase-change spell for relatively cheap would be a substantial savings.

  I went back to the library after dinner pleased despite the shedload of Arabic work I still had to do. Ibrahim even volunteered to help me out with translations, in exchange for English help that he didn’t really need, which was clearly meant as an apology for being a twat previously. I took it, if a little grudgingly; I’d sat down at his table, after all.

  He and his pal Nadia, the girl who’d lent me the dictionary earlier, came to the library with me after dinner. The reading room was already filling up again, and the Dubai kids didn’t look at all happy when I came over and said, “My chair, thanks,” to the kid sitting in it. Clearly the shine was off me, at the very least. But I was right, they didn’t try to pick a fight over it, or Ibrahim and Nadia staking out places on the floor next to it. They just shuffled themselves around so the kid who’d lost the seat got another one in the adjusted pecking order and pointedly ignored us. I didn’t mind: they still talked to each other, a lot, in Arabic. I couldn’t pick out words yet, but just getting the rhythm of a language helps, and getting to eavesdrop on a big group of people talking is a fair bit nicer than having to listen to whatever the Scholomance would be pouring into my ears.

  I managed to slog through my Arabic worksheet and made some notes on cards for the grammar, and then I started translating the footnotes to the phase-control spell. I’d been hoping for something useful, ideally casting tips: the older a spell is, the more likely your unconscious assumptions about stance and intonation are likely to be off, and the more powerful a spell is, the more likely awful things are to happen as a result. But instead it was all nonsense about how the phase-control spell was included only for completeness’s sake, as of course that particular spell had just been superseded by a new Arabic-language spell. Right. As far as I know, nobody’s ever made a phase-control spell that works even half as well as Purochana’s; that’s why it’s still in relatively popular circulation even though it’s in highly antiquated Sanskrit. I had a strong suspicion that this new Arabic version had been written by a senior Baghdadi wizard that the translator had been trying to butter up.

  I translated every word of the flattery, hoping that maybe there would be one useful thing hidden among the rest, but no. At least doing the work definitely helped settle the book down: I kept stroking the cover, and murmuring each word I translated out loud, and by the end of the process, it was starting to feel comfortable under my hands, like it was mine, instead of just something I’d come across.

  Orion came in around then from making up his lab work. The Dubai kids eyed him a little hesitantly, sharing looks I could interpret perfectly well. Even if Orion was taking away some of your advantage as an enclaver in the larger scheme of things, in the smaller scheme of things, you as an individual still wanted him sitting in your corner just in case, for example, a grab bag of mals exploded into the library again. After a moment, one of the seniors gave a quick jerk of her chin to a sophomore, who got up and said casually, “I’m going to bed. Orion, have my chair. Good night everyone,” and took off.

 
The rest of them also switched to English on a dime and started in on the usual round of thanking Orion for saving their lives in the library yesterday, until I broke in and said, “Give it a rest, he doesn’t need strokes. Did you manage to actually do any work today, Lake, or are you trying to be the first person to actually fail out of the Scholomance?”

  He rolled his eyes as he dropped into the chair—he didn’t even notice it as anything special, it must have happened to him so regularly—and said, “Thanks for the concern, I did fine. Nobody was trying to burn my face off in the lab this time.”

  Everyone in earshot—including Ibrahim and Nadia—eyed me in a sort of irritated and baffled way at the same time. A couple of the Dubai girls said something to each other in Arabic, which practically didn’t need translation. Yes, obviously Orion was some kind of masochist nutter, dating me. I had to restrain myself severely from snarling at all of them that he wasn’t dating me, thanks, and he should be so lucky at that.

  I stayed for another hour mainly out of spite. I had crammed as much Arabic as I was going to absorb that day, and most of my other work required things that were back in my room, not to mention I needed to be doing some mana-building. But I just hung out adoring my beautiful book and sniping back and forth with Orion. I’d like to claim I couldn’t bring myself to go, but I’ve got quite well-developed willpower when it comes to doing necessary work. I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment: I wanted to stay until enough of the Dubai kids finally did go to bed that there was a different chair left open, so I wasn’t giving any of them anything.

  But I’m more embarrassed to admit that it never crossed my mind to consider what the cozy situation looked like to someone who might be watching, for instance, from the New York corner across the reading room. As far as they could tell, I’d finally taken one of those many dangled enclave invites, Orion had in fact trotted after me, and we were now comfortably ensconced in the Dubai corner with some of those loser kids I’d recruited.