Page 24 of A Deadly Education
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. Doyouneed 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. Thatwasalliance; 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 onpurposenow?” 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 determinedly credulous people in the world, it’s not at all the same thing. Wizards don’t have faith in magic. Webelievein 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 whodoencounter 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 thenexttime 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’tknowthat 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.
But Mum really does live in the back of beyond by wizard standards—too far from any enclave to conveniently work for them or trade with them—so I was the only wizard kid I knew, and at the time I tried telling myself that the reason mundanes didn’t like me was they sensed the mana or something. But no. Wizard kids are just kids, and they don’t like me, either.
And all right, as of five days ago, I had Orion, but Orion was too weird to count. I was reasonably sure that my one tried-and-true method of being aggressively rude wasn’t actually how normal people made their friends. But maybe I got to count Aadhya and Liu as friends, now. I wasn’t sure, and what did it mean if I could? It wasn’t accompanied by nearly the warm triumphant glow of achievement I’d always imagined as part of the experience. I suppose I was still waiting for someone to give me the tatty friendship bracelet I’d never got at the Girl Guides. But someone holding out analliance,offering to watch your back and go out of their way to save your life, that was on such a different scale that I’d obviously missed some intermediate steps.
It got me wondering about Nkoyo, too, while I walked to languages with her and her friends. I didn’t have any doubts about Cora and Jowani: neither of them liked me any more than they ever had. But the very contrast made me think maybe I could at least call Nkoyo friendly, if not a friend. I took my courage in both hands and asked her, as casually as I could manage, as if I didn’t care very much about the answer, “Do you know any groups revising for the Latin final exam?”
“Yeah,” she said, casually for real; as far as I could tell, she didn’t even think about the answer. “Some of us are getting together work period on Thursday in the lab. The ticket is two copies of a decent spell.”
“Would that fire wall I traded with you work?” I said, struggling to match her easy tone, as if of course I was welcome, if I could meet the fee—
“Oh, that’s loads better than you need,” she said. “More like a utility spell. I’m bringing one for restoring papyrus.”
“I’ve got a medieval one for tanning leather,” I said. That was actually a section of a larger spell meant for binding a cursed grimoire that would siphon off a bit of mana from every wizard every time they cast one of the spells inside: a very clever technique for creating a mana-stealer that would go unnoticed. But the leather tanning worked perfectly well on its own, too.
Nkoyo gave a shrug and a nod,sure why not,and we were at the door of the language hall. All four of us took turns putting our homework from yesterday into the marking slot, a thin postbox slit set in the metal wall at the door. We’d timed it quite well: you don’t want to be dropping off your homework when there’s a proper crush of people coming in, because then you can end up boxed in if something jumps out of the slit. You also don’t want to be dropping it off really early, because something’s much more likely to jump out of the slit then. But if you hand something in even ten seconds past the start of the lesson, it’s late, and you’ll get marked down.
Getting marked down in languages means you get assigned remedial work that’s just the same stuff you’ve already done, for days or even weeks sometimes. That might not sound like a punishment, but as we’re all studying languages tolearn spells,it’s absolutely brutal. The next time you ask for a spell, you’ll get one that has material you theoretically should be up to, but don’t actually know, and you won’t be able to move on past it until you get through your stupid remedial backlog and finally reach whatever lesson you were at before.
I handed in my Arabic worksheet and then sat down at a booth to open the waiting folder and discover my fate, which turned out to bethreeArabic worksheets, along with a vicious quiz in Classical Sanskrit that was labeled as taking twenty minutes but actually needed the entire lesson. I had barely finished enough of the questions to get a pass mark when the warning bell rang. I had to scribble my name on the sheet, pile all my things into my bookbag, and carry it awkwardly with my arm wrapped around it like a basket just to get in the line to stick the quiz into the slot before the final bell. I’d have to get the three worksheets done tonight instead, eating into my mana-building time, which I didn’t have enough of to begin with.
Even that couldn’t wreck my mood, which had been whipsawing so aggressively lately that I was beginning to feel like a yo-yo. I’d got used to my ordinary level of low-grade bitterness and misery, to putting my head down and soldiering on. Being happy threw me off almost as much as being enraged. But I wasn’t in the least bit tempted to refuse when I got to the writing workshop and saw Liu looking around: she had the neighboring desk savedfor me.I took myself over and got my bag down between our chairs: with someone on the other side who wouldn’t object, I’d be able to steal a few moments here and there to sort it out.
I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the wordpestilence,which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.
I worked on it for the first five minutes before I belatedly thought that I might want to talk to Liu, if we were friends now. “What are you working on?” I asked her, as dull as small talk can get, but at least it had the benefit of an obvious answer.
She glanced sidelong over at me and then said, “I have a song spell passed down from my great-grandmother. I’m trying to write English lyrics for it.”
