A Deadly Education

by Naomi Novik

  Dubai wouldn’t have been a crazy choice, at that. The enclave there is relatively new and highly international. It’s got a top-notch reputation for English and Hindi incantation, plus they recruit a lot of artificers and alchemists. Ibrahim also made perfect sense as a connecting point: his older half-brother was in the UAE doing work for the enclave already, and he’d probably get invited aboard, too, if Ibrahim helped them bag Orion. So it was an obvious conclusion for the New York kids to draw, and if I’d thought about it, their response would have been equally obvious. As I hadn’t thought, I just sat there like a prat down the pub with my mates, and didn’t pay the slightest attention when Magnus walked by to go into the alchemy aisle near us, even though he had absolutely no business going into the stacks at all when he could send any of six hangers-on to fetch him any book he wanted.

  I doubt he’d have done it on his own initiative alone. They had surely been talking options amongst themselves: How do you solve a problem like Galadriel? And I bet Todd came into it, too. It was one thing for the New York kids to desert him, and another for a loser girl like me to rip into him in the cafeteria in front of everyone. And then to take Orion off to Dubai the very same day, after he’d already power-shared with me and—as Chloe clearly thought—got me an incredibly powerful spellbook.

  I do have to give Magnus credit, the crawler was a really good one. It would absolutely have got me, too; I can’t even pretend. It was made of paper, a little crumpled twist covered with what looked at a glance like math equations instead of an animating inscription. The library was full of scrap paper on a good day, much less right after a massive attack that had destroyed dozens of books and thrown kids’ papers every which way, and lots of the scraps move on their own anyway. I actually noticed it moving vaguely in my direction and didn’t think about it again. I didn’t even have my usual baseline shield up, because I was sitting in the reading room in the library with a good line of sight and lots of other eyes watching, and I needed to save every drop of mana that I could. If I’d been sitting in an ordinary chair, or if I’d been working hard, with my feet planted on the ground, the crawler would have been able to get to the bare skin of my ankle, and one second afterwards it would have sent a heap of magic fibers corkscrewing into my flesh, and there wouldn’t have been anything I could do to stop it sucking the life straight out of me.

  But because I was demonstratively curled up in my nice comfy chair with my feet tucked up underneath me, it had to come up the chair leg and go over the arm. Orion happened to be looking at me in time to grab me and yank me out sprawling over the floor in front of the whole Dubai crowd, just before he disintegrated the crawler, incidentally along with three-quarters of my lovely repaired chair.

  I figured out what had happened almost instantly, especially since Magnus was just sitting back down in the New York corner. Everyone was looking over at me and Orion, the way you do when something explodes into flames unexpectedly, but he and several other New York kids were just a bit slow looking over. And they looked fairly grim about my visible survival. Not that I had any proof, of course, and there was Orion smugging down at me with deliberately obnoxious cheer, “So that makes eight, right?”—just asking to be told that it didn’t count because it was his own arseholish friends trying to murder me.

  “Thanks loads,” I said through my teeth. “On that note, I’m going to bed.” I held my sutras against my chest—thankfully I’d been holding them in my lap—and snagged my bookbag by the one strap it had left, and stalked directly out of the reading room.

  It wasn’t my way of saying thanks or of being rude, either one. I just had to get out of the library. I was angry at myself for being stupid and needing my life saved, and I was angry at the Dubai kids and everyone else, too, for thinking Orion was a perverted loon for liking unsettling me, but most of all I was angry at Magnus, and Todd, and every last one of the New York enclave kids, because they had given me an excuse, a gold-plated excuse, to do something to them. They’d deliberately tried to kill me. By Scholomance rules, that gave me a right to do something to them. And if I didn’t, then they’d assume it was because I was afraid of them. They’d think I was agreeing with them, telling them they were right to look at me and see just a piece of rubbish to be kicked out of their way. Someone who wasn’t worth as much as they were.

  The tears of rage were already leaking out of my eyes by the time I got to the stairs. I was just lucky there were some other kids going down to the dorms, and I managed to keep at least one person in blurry sight along the way until I finally got to my room and clanged the door shut behind me. I started pacing the room with the sutras still clutched against my chest. It was only five steps across and turn and go back, over and over. I couldn’t meditate, and I couldn’t even try to work. If I put my hands to pen and paper right now, I knew what would happen: a spell would come out, a spell like a supervolcano.

  The rotten thing about having Mum as a mum is, I know how to stop being angry. I’ve been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she’s never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it’s my own fault, because I do know how to stop.

  And this time was worse, because I couldn’t make excuses for them. All these years, whenever someone took advantage of me, shoved me out of the way, left me exposed, for their own benefit, at least I’ve been able to do that. To tell myself that they were only doing what anyone would do. We all wanted to live, and we were all doing our best to make it out of here, to end up safe, no matter how mean and awful we had to be along the way. I was doing the same thing. I’d kicked a freshman out of a chair and spent mana to fix it so I could shove myself in with a bunch of kids who didn’t want me, and because I’d been sitting there being rude and mean to them, I’d scared the New York kids. They needed Orion: that little buzzer on his wrist that brought him to their rescue if they ever did get into trouble, the power he dumped into their shared power sink. What right did I have to take that for myself, eight times and counting? Why did I deserve to live more than them?

  But I had an answer now: I hadn’t pulled malia even with a knife in my gut, and I’d gone after a maw-mouth to save half the freshmen instead of running away, and meanwhile Magnus had tried to murder me because Orion liked me, and Todd had destroyed Mika because he was scared, and because I had that answer, I couldn’t help thinking actually I did deserve to live more than them. And I know nobody gets to live or not live because they deserve it, deserving doesn’t count for a thing, but the point was, I now felt deep in my heart that I was in fact a better human being than Magnus or Todd, and hooray, all the prizes for me, but that wasn’t helpful when what I actually needed was reasons why I shouldn’t just wipe them out of existence.

  I went on pacing for what felt like an hour. My gut hurt, and I was wasting time and effort that could have gone into something useful like the schoolwork I should’ve been doing, or the mana I should’ve been raising. Instead I built an elaborate fantasy of how Magnus would beg my forgiveness in front of everyone and sob and plead for me not to flay him alive, especially after I tore a strip or two off just to start, and Orion would just stand by with his face angry and disappointed and his arms folded, doing nothing to help him, rejecting all his friends and his home for me. Every few minutes I veered rapidly over to feeling sick at myself and saying out loud, “Okay, I’m going to walk back and forth three more times and then I’m going to meditate,” trying to commit myself, and then I walked back and forth two more times and then I started over with the fantasy from the beginning, reworking it in my head. I even talked some of the lines out under my breath.

  I’m not a moron, I knew it was dangerous: I was on the edge of casting. That’s all that magic is, after all. You start with a clear intention, your destination; you gather up the power; and then you send the power traveling down the road, giving the clearest directions you c
an, whether it’s with words or goop or metal. The better the directions are, the more well-traveled the road, the easier it is for the power to get to where you want it to go; that’s why most wizards can’t just invent their own spells and recipes. But I can blaze a trail to Mordor anytime I want, and I still had nine full crystals in my chest, and so what if those ran out? There was loads of power to be had. After all, if Magnus deserved to die, why shouldn’t I put his life to good use?

  And that thought is exactly why I knew I had to stop, I knew I had to let it all go, or else I’d become a much worse person than Magnus and Todd and Jack all put together, and no more prizes for me. But I knew it the way you know the sixth biscuit in a row isn’t good for you and you’ll be sorry, and they’re not even really very nice, and yet you keep eating them anyway.

  That’s why I opened the door when Aadhya knocked. I did check it was her and kept well back this time, I wasn’t getting caught the same way twice, but I let her in, even though I didn’t want company at all. At least having her there would make it harder for me to keep cramming the biscuits of revenge fantasy into my mouth. “Yeah?” I said shortly but not outright rude, my idea of self-restraint at the moment.

  Aadhya came in and let me shut the door, but she didn’t answer me for a moment, which was odd for her; she doesn’t dither. She looked around the room: it was the first time she’d ever come over. It was the first time—apart from Jack and Orion—that I’d ever had anyone over, in fact. At most a few people have come round to swap things with me, and on those occasions they didn’t come in far enough for the door to close behind them. My room’s pretty spartan. I spent my freshman year turning my cupboard into wall-mounted shelves, which are massively safer than any piece of furniture that has enclosed areas and a dark underside; I got credit in shop for it. I stripped my desk drawers for the same reason, traded for metal, and reinforced the legs and top of the desk instead, which is why it survived the incarnated flame’s visit. I’ve got a wobbly and rusted metal rack on top for papers that I also made myself out of the easiest metal I could get. Nothing else, besides the bed and the tool chest at the foot that I use to hold anything important enough that it would probably disappear if I left it lying around. Most kids have at least a few decorative bits here and there, a photo or cards on display; people give pottery and drawings at New Year. I’ve never been given any, and I don’t waste my own time making them.

  It didn’t feel bare to me, but I grew up in a one-room yurt with a couple of boxes under our bed and Mum’s worktable under the one round window. Except there I had the whole green world outside the door, and here this was clearly the room of a miserable loner, somebody like Mika, who couldn’t even afford the risk of cupboards. It made me even more furious, looking at it through another person’s eyes. Magnus probably had a quilt and a spare pillow, made sometime in the last thirty years by another New York student who’d passed them down on graduation day. His walls were probably covered with cheery cards and pictures people had made for him, or even actual wallpaper, if he’d wanted it enough. His furniture would be polished warm wood, with warded locks on the drawers and cubbyholes. Maybe he had a keep-fresh larder box; he certainly had a proper desk lamp. His pens never disappeared on him.

  I could go and find out. Magnus would be in his room by now; it was close to curfew. I could force my way in and tell him I knew what he’d tried to do to me, and then I could shove him into the dark—not like Todd had done Mika, not all the way in, just enough to make clear that I could do it; that anytime I wanted to, I could push him in and take his lush, comfortable room all for me, since he and his enclave buddies thought that was a reasonable thing to do to another human being.

  I had my hands clenched again, and I had almost forgotten Aadhya was there, and then she said, abruptly, “Did—El, did you take out the maw-mouth?”

  It was like having a bucket of just-melted ice thrown all over me. My eyesight actually fuzzed out a bit, going dim: for a moment I was back inside the maw-mouth again, the horrible pulsing wet hunger of it, and I lunged for the middle of the room and threw up into the floor drain, heaving up wet chunks of my half-digested dinner burning with stomach acid. The feeling of them in my mouth made me heave again, sobbing in between rounds. I kept going until I was empty and for a while afterwards. I was vaguely aware that Aadhya was holding my hair back out of my face: my plait had come undone. When I stopped, she gave me a cup of water, and I rinsed and spat over and over until she said, “This is the last of the jug,” and then I made myself sip a little, trying to wash the last bile back down my throat.

  I crawled a few steps back from the drain and eased myself against the wall with my knees pulled up and my mouth wide open, trying not to smell my own breath.

  “Sorry,” Aadhya said, and I raised my head and stared at her. She was sitting on the floor just a little way from me, cross-legged with the jug in her hands. She was in her pajamas already, or what passes for that in here, a ratty pair of too-small shorts and long-sleeved top let out with cheap mending, like she’d got herself ready for bed and had been about to get in and then instead she’d come to ask me—ask me—“You did, didn’t you,” she said.

  I wasn’t in any state where I was going to think through what the right answer was, or what it would mean to tell her. I just gave a nod. We sat there for a bit and didn’t say anything. It felt like a long time, but the curfew bell didn’t ring, so it couldn’t have been. I still couldn’t think at all. I just sat there existing.

  Eventually Aadhya said, “I started on a mirror for next quarter. I asked Orion what he did to the pour to make it come out so great, and he said he didn’t do anything special. He’s not really a great alchemist, anyway. He’s just doing it, you know? Then I remembered you used some kind of incantation after the enchantment. So I tried to find it, except all I found was this section in my metals handbook that said using incantations to smooth the pour is stupid, because that’s trying to force your will onto the materials against their nature, and almost nobody can do it unless they’re really powerful, so you shouldn’t bother trying. It didn’t make any sense anyway. You’re an incantations-track junior, but you got assigned a magic mirror? That doesn’t happen.”

  I gave a snort, more than half a snuffle: my nose was running. It happens to me.

  Aadhya kept going, talking faster; she sounded almost angry. “That phase-control spell—you said you burned through it in a couple hours after dinner. Meanwhile the seniors who are thinking about bidding, they’re all discussing if they can learn it in time for graduation. Besides, that whole book is a crazy big deal. Luck like that doesn’t happen. You had to do something really horrible to get it, or really amazing. And you were so wiped out Sunday—and Todd wasn’t hallucinating, no way. A maw-mouth is the only thing that would have freaked him out that hard. He could survive anything else.” Then she asked, “Where’d you get the mana?”

  I didn’t want to talk. My throat was really sore. I reached over to my little box and opened it and showed her my crystals; the two cracked ones and the dull drained ones next to the primed empties and my last nine full crystals. “Push-ups,” I said briefly, and shut the box again and put it away.

  “Push-ups,” Aadhya said. “Sure, why not, push-ups.” She let out a bray of a laugh and looked away. “Why aren’t you telling anyone? Every enclave in the world is going to be drooling over you.”

  The half accusation in the words made me angry and want to cry at the same time. I got up and got my little half-full jar of honey off my shelf. I take it to meals every weekend for the chance of a refill, but it’s hard to get, so I use it sparingly. But this called for it. I whispered Mum’s throat-soothing charm over a small spoonful and washed it down with the last lukewarm swallow of water in the glass before I turned back to Aadhya and stuck out my hand down at her, mockingly.

  “Hi, I’m El. I can move mountains, literally,” I said. “Do you believe me
?”

  Aadhya stood up. “So you do a demo! You should’ve done one freshman year, just asked some enclavers to spot you the mana. They’d be fighting to have you on their teams—”

  “I don’t want to be on their teams!” I yelled hoarsely. “I don’t want to be on their teams at all!”

  I LOVE HAVING existential crises at bedtime, it’s so restful. I lay awake for at least an hour after the final bell, staring furiously at the blue flicker of the gaslight by the door. Every five minutes or so I told myself to unclench my hands and go to sleep, with no effect. I tried to get up and get a drink of water—Aadhya felt bad for me being mental, I suppose, so she’d gone with me to the loo so I could refill my jug—and I even tried doing some maths homework, and I still couldn’t fall to sleep.

  I’ve been bellowing at Mum about joining an enclave ever since I was old enough to work out that when enclave wizards from as far away as Japan are turning up at your yurt for advice, it probably means that they would be happy to have you in-house. After the scratcher attack, she even went to visit one. She wouldn’t look at London, but she tried this old place in Brittany that specializes in healing. She picked me up from school that afternoon and said, “I’m sorry, love, I just can’t,” and only shook her head when I demanded to know why. I told her flat-out I was going into an enclave after I graduated if I could get one to take me, and she just looked sad and said, “You’ll do whatever’s right for you, darling, of course.” Once—I still feel a bit sick about it remembering—when I was twelve, I even screamed at her in tears and told her if she loved me she’d take us to an enclave, and she just wanted something to get me so nobody would blame her and it wouldn’t hurt her perfect reputation. Three mals had tried for me that afternoon.