A Deadly Education

by Naomi Novik

  She kept a calm face on with me, but then she went back to the trees and cried herself sick where I couldn’t see her, or at least where I couldn’t have seen if I hadn’t gone after her to scream at her even more. When I saw her sobbing I went back to the yurt and threw myself on the bed crying and determined to let the next mal that came along take me, as I was such a horrible daughter. But I didn’t do it. I wanted to live.

  I still want to live. I want Mum to live. And I’m not going to live if I try to go it alone. So I should show off and make clear to all the enclavers that I’m available to be won: a grand prize up for grabs to the highest bidder, a nuclear weapon any enclave could use to take out mals—to take out another enclave—to make themselves more powerful. To make themselves safe.

  That’s all Todd wanted. That’s all Magnus wanted. They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.

  When the enclaves first built the Scholomance, the induction spell didn’t pull in kids from outside the enclaves. The enclavers made it sound like a grand act of generosity when they changed it to bring us all in, but of course it was never that. We’re cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

  But why should they do anything else? They don’t have any reason to care about us. We’re not their children. We’re the other gazelles, all of us trying to outrun the same pack of lions. And if we happen to be faster than their children, more powerful, their children will get eaten. If not while we’re in here, when we get out, and we decide that we want some of the luxury they have tucked into those enclaves for ourselves. If we’re too strong, we might even threaten their own lives. So they shouldn’t care about us. Not until we sign on the dotted line. That’s only sensible. You can’t blame people for wanting their own kids to live. I understand it, every last bit of it.

  And I wanted to want in. I want to have a daughter one day, a daughter who will live, who won’t ever have to scream alone in the night when monsters come for her. I don’t want to be alone in the night myself. I want to be safe, and I really wouldn’t mind a little bit of comfort, and even a taste of luxury now and then. It’s all I’ve been hungry for my whole life. I wanted to pretend that all of that was fair and okay, like Orion bleating how we’ve got the same chances.

  But I can’t pretend that, because I didn’t grow up in that lie, so I don’t actually want in. I don’t want that safety and comfort and luxury at the cost of other kids dying in here. And sure, it’s not like that, it’s not some simple equation like me in an enclave means kids are dying in here; the kids will go on dying in here anyway, whether I’m in an enclave or not. But just because it’s a forty-sixth-order derivative equation or something doesn’t mean that I can’t work out which side of that equation is the guilty one.

  And I’ve probably known it all along, maybe even before I got here, because otherwise Aadhya’s right, I should have just blown the bloody doors off in my freshman year and shown everyone back then. Instead I’ve spent three years putting it off and coming up with convoluted plans for how I was going to arrange my dramatic revelation and meanwhile, at the first chance I got, I just started being as rude as I could to every enclave kid who crossed my path. I’d certainly done my very best to chase Orion off. If he wasn’t a towering weirdo who liked that in a person, I’d have succeeded. And now Aadhya saying, “I won’t tell,” like she was making me a promise, and I’d said, “Thanks,” instead of saying No, no, tell everyone!

  But if I’m not joining an enclave, I really don’t want anyone to know, after all. If people in here find out I destroyed a maw-mouth, some of them are going to look up that same journal article I read on the subject and understand what I am, what I can do. I could certainly stop being angry at Magnus then, because probably half of the enclavers would start trying to take me out. Especially if any of them pick up a whisper of my great-grandmother’s prophecy. And I still want to live.

  Filled with all these cheery and relaxing thoughts, I passed a comfortable night in which I slept perhaps three hours all broken up with marvelous nightmares of being back in the maw-mouth and wide-awake bursts of gnawing anxiety in which I contemplated my odds of making it out of here alive all on my own with my nine remaining crystals against a whole graduation hall full of maleficaria. There was a side of gnawing hunger, too; I’d thrown up most of my day’s food. My throat was still sore and painful the next morning, and my eyes were gummy.

  Aadhya had been knocking on my door in the mornings on the way to the loo. I half expected her not to come that morning, but she called round, and then Liu poked her head out and called, “Will you wait a moment?” We stopped at her door while she grabbed her toothbrush and flannel and comb, so I didn’t even have the worry of whether we were going to talk about the things I didn’t want to talk about. As we walked, Liu and I talked about our history papers instead, and in the bathroom Aadhya and I took first watch while Liu grimly attacked the mysteriously appearing snarls in her waist-long hair. She was having to pay back three years’ worth of great hair days all at once. Malia is great for your looks, right up until it really really isn’t.

  “I need to cut this all off,” she said out loud, with gritted teeth. It was the sensible choice, and not just for saving time on hair care: you don’t want to offer any mals a convenient handhold. Almost everyone in here shares the same fabulous hairstyle: half grown out after having been shingled as short as possible, as quickly as possible, the last time you had a chance to use a pair of proper scissors or hair clippers. Bringing a pair of bad ones that close to vital bits like eyes and throats is a very iffy proposition. If you’d like to know the hard-and-fast rule for telling whether a pair has gone to the bad, so would all of us. There’s a senior named Okot from Sudan, one of the maintenance-track kids, who blew most of his induction weight allowance on a battery-powered electric razor and a hand-crank charger. He’s made an absolute killing loaning it out to people over the years, and at the start of this year, he promised it to a group of five freshmen, who’ve spent all their free time since building him mana for graduation. Now he’s in an alliance with three enclavers from Johannesburg.

  Going fully shaved like that is popular if you can afford it. Dreadlocks are unfortunately not a great idea thanks to lockleeches, which you can probably imagine, but in case you need help, the adult spindly thing comes quietly down at night and pokes an ovipositor into any big clumps of hair, lays an egg inside, and creeps away. A little while later the leech hatches inside its comfy nest, attaches itself to your scalp almost unnoticeably, and starts very gently sucking up your blood and mana while infiltrating further. If you don’t get it out within a week or two, it usually manages to work its way inside the skull, and you’ve got a window of a few days after that before you stop being able to move. On the bright side, something else usually finishes you off quickly at that point.

  So the very longest anyone usually lets their hair get is shoulder-length; mine only ever gets a couple inches longer than that because no one goes out of their way to let me know when they’ve got hold of good scissors. Even most enclavers won’t bother to grow their hair. Liu’s hair had been a power statement, an anno
uncement of her family’s growing strength for anyone who met her. But without malia, it was probably going to be too much of a liability for her to maintain.

  Aadhya threw me a quick look to make sure I was still attending, then broke bathroom silence. “Are you serious?”

  “Getting there!” Liu said, letting her arms drop for a rest, panting.

  “I’d buy it off you,” Aadhya said. “I could make you something of your choice next term, first quarter.”

  “Really?” Liu said.

  “Yeah,” Aadhya said. “It’s long enough to string the sirenspider lute I’m making.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Liu said, and went back to combing the tangles out of her hair with more enthusiasm. Aadhya went back to watching. She wasn’t entitled to an answer right then: bathroom and table company is important, but it’s not like an alliance. And if Aadhya wanted Liu’s hair, there would be other kids who’d want it. Enclave kids in artifice track, making themselves top-notch weapons for graduation, and some of them with extras or maybe even an alliance slot to offer in trade.

  I thought about it hard while I took my turn in the shower. Aadhya was even more clearly my best shot for an alliance at this point. She was the only person who knew what I had going, and she at least wanted me for bathroom company. But I still was a long way from being a good bargain for her. I certainly wouldn’t have picked me in her place: if she pulled off a sirenspider lute during the first half of next term, she was sure to get at least a dozen alliance offers from enclavers. Nobody else in here was going to have a sirenspider instrument: they’re too large to bring inside, except maybe a tiny flute or something, and wind instruments aren’t a great bet for graduation. You need your breath for casting incantations and running and optionally screaming. With a prize like that, she might even get one of those guaranteed placement offers, like the one Todd and his crew had dangled to get the valedictorian. Enclaves favor applications from kids who have been allies with their kids, but they don’t actually take everyone.

  I was increasingly sure to get zero alliance offers from enclavers, and apparently I wasn’t going to take them if they did come. I couldn’t even offer Aadhya the strategy of putting together a solid small team that one of the more loserish enclaver kids would pick to get them out. If I wanted her to even think about taking the chance of going with me, I was going to have to score a lot of points between now and New Year’s.

  So when we were all done and waiting at the meeting point for two more kids to walk to breakfast, I said casually, “Liu, I was just thinking. Do you need the phase-control spell?”

  They both looked at me. Liu said slowly, “My family could really use it, but…” But they weren’t rich enough to put her in the running. She was on her own in here almost as much as we were; she’d got a box of hand-me-downs from an older cousin who graduated six years ago, but that was it, and it had been passed to her through a kid who had graduated in our freshman year, who had agreed to be the go-between in exchange for getting to use the stuff until Liu came in.

  “You could bid your hair,” I said. “Aadhya’s running the auction for me, she gets a cut.”

  It meant losing out on one of five bids, and on top of it, I’d be making Aadhya an even more appealing target for enclavers to recruit for their own alliances. A sirenspider lute strung with wizard hair would be really powerful. But it was also a chance I couldn’t pass up: Aadhya would owe me for this, and—

  “Or you could give it to me,” Aadhya said to Liu, abruptly. “And El could give you the spell. And we’d have the lute for graduation. You could write some spells for it, and El can sing.”

  I just stood there dumbly staring at her. Liu looked more than a little surprised, and she had a right to be. That was alliance; that was an alliance offer. You don’t give things to other people in here. When you lend somebody a pen for one class, that’s ink gone, ink that you’ll have to replace by going to the stockroom. They have to pay you back for it. That’s why you know you’re dating if you don’t have to pay it back. But you can break up with someone you’re dating. You can’t break up with your allies unless they do something exceptionally horrible, like Todd, or you all agree to split up. If you ditch an ally, even a weirdo loser girl that everyone hates, nobody else is going to offer you a slot. You can’t possibly trust someone to watch your back in the graduation hall if you can’t trust them to stick with you during the year.

  Liu looked at me, a question: was I making the offer, too? I couldn’t even make myself nod. I was on the verge of crying again, or possibly vomiting, and that was when an unholy shriek went off right by my right ear, putting half the world on mute, and the charred and twisted remnant of some mal that I suppose had been about to bite flew past me and described a lovely curve through the air to smash into an unidentifiable heap of cinders and ash on the floor.

  “Are you not paying attention anymore on purpose now?” Orion demanded, coming up from behind me. I flipped him off with the hand that wasn’t clamped protectively over my abused ear.

  So that left the offer just sitting there through breakfast, and we couldn’t talk about it, either, not in front of other people. It would be like snogging at the table: there are people who’d do it, but I’m not one of them. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially because I could see Liu thinking about it, too: she watched the kids who came by to take a look at the phase-change spell with a different eye. Not just idle curiosity, or getting a sense of the market, but like she was considering what their bids might be worth to her, what might come in that she’d be able to use. It had been clever of Aadhya actually to make the suggestion now, before the bidding happened: if we did go in together and let people know about it, some of the bids would be tailored to have useful things for the two of them, our alliance as a whole, not just for me personally.

  At least, it had been clever of her to do it now, if she were going to do it at all, which I still couldn’t really get my head round. But Aadhya didn’t show any signs of having second thoughts; she ate a hearty breakfast, chatted up the kids coming by for the auction—a lot better than I did—and talked about her shield holder project and the spares she’d made, which obviously got Liu to prick up her ears even more.

  I couldn’t guess which way Liu would jump, though, and the offer had clearly been for a three-way alliance. But if she didn’t go for it, I decided abruptly, halfway through breakfast, I’d ask Aadhya if she’d try to find another third person to go in with us, or agree to aim for alliance without sealing the deal right away, provisional terms. That was the opposite of a power move on my part, but she already knew I didn’t have a lot of other options, so sod it.

  It felt strange to have that thought, like it didn’t belong in my head. It’s always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real. Dignity was what I had instead of friends. I gave up trying to make any at about a month into our first year. Nobody I asked for company ever said yes unless they were desperate, and nobody ever asked me. The same thing has happened to me at every school I’ve ever gone to; every club, course, activity.

  Before induction, I’d had some faint hope things would be different in here; maybe it wouldn’t happen with other wizards. It was a stupid hope to have, since I’m not the only wizard kid who went to mundane schools by a long shot—if you aren’t in an enclave, the sensible choice is sending your kid to the largest mundane school you can find, because maleficaria avoid mundanes. Mundanes aren’t exactly invulnerable to mals—a scratcher can shove a giant foot-long claw through your belly whether you’ve got mana or not—but they have one extremely powerful protection: they don’t believe in magic.

  You’ll say loads of people believe in all sorts of codswallop from the Snake Goddess to theologically questionable angels to astrology, but as someone who spent her formative years among the most determ
inedly credulous people in the world, it’s not at all the same thing. Wizards don’t have faith in magic. We believe in magic, the way mundanes believe in cars. No one has deep discussions around a bonfire about whether a car is real or not, unless they’ve taken more drugs than usual, which is, not coincidentally, the condition of most mundanes who do encounter mals.

  Doing magic in front of someone who doesn’t believe in it is loads harder. Worse, if their disbelief trumps either your certainty or your mana, and the spell doesn’t come off, you’ll probably have trouble the next time you try and cast it, whether the unbeliever’s still there or not. Do that a few more times and you’ll stop being able to do magic at all. In fact, it’s entirely possible there are loads of unknowing potential wizards out there, people like Luisa who could hold enough mana to cast spells, only they’ve been raised mundane and so they can’t, because they don’t know that magic works, which means it doesn’t.

  And if you’re a mal, and therefore only exist because of magic in the first place, you effectively have to persuade a mundane that you exist and function in the world, contrary to all their expectations, before you can eat them. In fact, one time towards the end of my secondary school career, an excessively ambitious yarnbogle tried to come after me in gym class; the teacher caught sight of it, was absolutely convinced it was a rat, and whacked it triumphantly with a cricket bat. When she stopped whacking, it was in fact indistinguishable from a smashed rat, even though I couldn’t have killed a yarnbogle with a cricket bat if I hammered on it all day. The reward’s not worth the risk, considering that mundanes contain essentially no flavor or nutritional value from a mal’s perspective, and so they keep well away. Which is why lots of wizard kids get sent to school with mundanes.