Page 6 of A Deadly Education
“They’re dead!” he said defensively.
“Doesn’t mean there aren’t more of them who were waiting for leftovers.” I shook my head in disgust.
Aadhya didn’t look happy about it. I wouldn’t have either, if I was going to be first into the shop with a potential mimic or two lingering. But at least with the information she’d be able to make sure she wasn’t literally first in, and possibly put a shield on her back or something.
“I’ll hold us a table if you’ll get the trays,” she said as we came into the cafeteria, being too clever for my own good. I couldn’t blame her, really. It wasn’t stupid to want to be pals with Orion if that looked like a real possibility. Aadhya’s family live in New Jersey: if she got into the New York enclave, she could probably pull them all inside. And I couldn’t afford to alienate one of the vanishing few people who are willing to deal with me. Sullenly I got on the line and loaded up a tray for myself and for her, hoping faintly that Orion would spot one of his enclave friends and ditch us. Instead he put a couple of apples on the extra tray, and then reached ahead of me and said, “C’est temps dissoudre par coup de foudre,” and fried a tentacle just beginning to poke out from under the steam tray of excessively inviting scrambled eggs. It dissolved with a horrible gagging smell, and a wafting green cloud leaked up from all around the tray and settled immediately over the eggs.
“That’s the stupidest spell I’ve ever heard, and your pronunciation is terrible,” I said, nasally. I skipped the now-stinking egg tray and went on to the porridge.
“ ‘Thanks, Orion, I didn’t see that blood-clinger about to grab me,’ ” he said. “Don’t mention it, Galadriel, really, no problem.”
“I did see it, and because there was only half an inch out, there was enough time that I could’ve got a helping of eggs if you hadn’t shoved in front of me. And if I was still stupid enough at the tail end of junior year to go for a tray full of freshly cooked scrambled eggs without checking the perimeter, not even your undivided attention would get me out of this school alive. Are you a masochist or something? Why are you still doing favors for me?” I grabbed the raisin bowl, covered it with a small side plate, and shook it until two dozen of them had come out one at a time. I poked them all thoroughly with my fork and went on to the cinnamon shaker, but one distant sniff was enough to tell me that was no-go today. The cream was also a loss: if you tilted it to the light, there was a faint blue slick over the surface. At least the brown sugar was all right.
I took a quick look both ways after coming off the line and then carried the two trays back over to where Aadhya had set us up at a good table, three in from the door: close enough to get out if they started to shut us in, and far enough not to be in the front lines if something came in through them. She’d laid a perimeter and done a safety charm on the cutlery and even got us one of the safer water jugs, the clear ones. “No eggs, thanks to Mr. Fantastic here,” I told her, putting down the trays.
“Was it the clinger? One of them got a senior pretty badly before we got here,” Aadhya said, nodding over at a table where an older boy was leaning half conscious between two of his friends with a series of huge bloody sucker-marks wrapped around his arm twice like a twining bracelet. They were trying to give him something to drink, but he had a clammy going-into-shock look, and they were already trading resigned anxious glances across him. I don’t think anyone ever gets used to it, but only the most sensitive flowers still burst into tears over losses by the time they’re staring graduation in the face. By then they’ve got to be locking down alliances and planning strategy, and however critical he’d been to theirs, they were going to have to find a way to patch it—tough with only three weeks to end of term.
Sure enough, the first bell rang for seniors—we leave meals at staggered intervals, oldest kids first, and if you think that it’s worse to go first, you’re right—and the two of them gently eased him down slumped onto the table. Ibrahim was sitting at the end of the neighboring table with Yaakov—his best friend here in our goldfish bowl, although they both know they’ll never speak to each other again if they live to get out of it—and one of the seniors turned to them and said something, probably bribing them to stay with their friend to the end. They must have had a time slot down in the gym they couldn’t afford to lose: it was going to be bad enough for them losing a member of their team this close to graduation. Ibrahim and Yaakov traded looks and then nodded and switched tables, taking the gamble. It’s not safe to skive off this close to finals, but lessons aren’t as important as graduation practice.
“Still sorry I took it out?” Orion said to me. His face was unhappy and wrenched, looking at them, although I’d have given any odds you like that he hadn’t even known the boy. No one else was looking anywhere in that direction. You have to ration sympathy and grief in here the way you ration your school supplies, unless you’re a heroic enclaver with a vat of mana.
“Still sorry I was done out of my scrambled eggs,” I said coolly, and started eating my porridge.
Ibrahim’s deal turned out okay: the senior died before our first bell rang. Ibrahim and Yaakov left his body there, arms folded on the table and head pillowed facedown, like he’d just drifted off for a nap. It wouldn’t be here by the time we came in for lunch. I marked off the table mentally, along with the ones surrounding it. Some of the things that clean up messes like that will stay around hoping for another meal.
I have languages every morning: I’m studying five of them. That sounds like I’m some mad linguistics fiend, but there’re only three academic tracks here: incantations, alchemy, or artifice. And of those three, incantations is the only one you can practice in your own cell without having to go to the lab or the shop more than the minimum. Alchemy or artifice tracks only make strategic sense if you’re someone like Aadhya, with a related affinity, and then you get the double advantage of playing to your own strengths and the relatively smaller number of people going for it. If she does get out of here alive, a smart, trained artificer with an affinity for unusual materials and a lot of good alliances, she might even be able to get into New York. If not, she’s got good odds for New Orleans or Atlanta. The better the enclave you get into, the more power you have to draw on. The artificers in New York and London had the power to build the Trans-Atlantic Gateway, which means if I did get into New York, I could be back in Birmingham New Street, an easy train trip from home, just by walking through a door.
Of course, getting into New York wasn’t on the cards for me unless I pulled off something really amazing, and probably not at all given that I was with increasing passion contemplating the murder of their darling star, but there’re plenty of solid enclaves in Europe. None of them will take me, either, though, unless I come out of here with a substantial reputation and a substantial spell-list. If you’re doing incantation, either you have to go languages-track to build yourself a really good collection of spells, or go creative writing and invent your own. I tried the creative writing track, but my affinity’s too strong. If I sit down to write modestly useful spells, they don’t work. In fact, more often than not they blow up in my face in dangerous ways. And the one and only time I let loose on the page instead, stream of consciousness the way Mum writes hers, I came up with a highly effective spell to set off a supervolcano. I burnt it straight away, but once you’ve invented a spell, it’s out there, and who knows, someone else might get it. Hopefully there’s no one garbage enough to ask the school for a spell to set off a supervolcano, but no more inventing spells for me.
So that means my main source of unique spells is whatever I get out of the void. Technically I could ask for spells nonstop, but if you don’t at least read over the ones you’ve got, by the time you do go back, they’ll all be rubbish or not what you asked for or just blank. And if you read too many spells without learning them well enough to cast them, you’ll start mixing them up in your head, and then you’re sure to blast yourself to bits. Yes, I can learn a hundred closely related cleaning cantrips in a row, but my limit for useful spells is somewhere around nine or ten a day.
I haven’t found a limit for spells of mass destruction. I can learn a hundred of those just by glancing at them, and I never forget any of them. Which is lucky, I suppose, because I have to go through a hundred of those before I ever get one of the useful ones.
If you’re collecting spells instead of writing your own, languages are absolutely critical. The school will give you spells only in languages you at least theoretically know, but as previously demonstrated, it’s not particularly invested in meeting your needs. If you know a dozen languages and you leave the choice up to the school, you’re more likely to get the actual kind of spell you want. And the more languages you know, the easier it is to trade spells with others to get ones you can’t wheedle out of the void.
The big ones are Mandarin and English: you’ve got to have one of those two to come at all, since the common lessons are taught in only those two. If you’re lucky enough to have both, you can probably use at least half of the spells in wide circulation at the school, and you can schedule all your required lessons to suit. Liu’s taking history and maths in English to count for her language requirement; she uses the room in her schedule to take writing workshop in both languages. As you can imagine, most wizard parents start their kids with a private tutor for one or the other the minute they’re born. Of course, Mum put me on Marathi instead, because of Dad. Thanks, Mum. If only all the kids from Mumbai didn’t treat me like a leper because they’ve heard whispers about my great-grandmother’s prophecy.
To be fair to Mum, I was two when she started me on the language, and she still had hopes of going to live with Dad’s family. Her own family were right out. Just before she went off to school—we don’t talk about it much, but I’m fairly certain that’s whyshewent to the Scholomance—she acquired an evil stepdad, literally: one of those cautious professional maleficers, on the edge of shriveling. He almost certainly poisoned her dad—no proof, but the timing was extremely coincidental—in order to glom on to her mum, who was also a really good healer, through her grief. Any spell that attacks only one person at a time is a bit beneath me, but I know the type. She spent the rest of her life taking care of him, then died of an unexpected heart attack when I was around three.
The stepdad is still doing all right last we heard, but we’re not what you’d call close. He used to send sad wistful letters once in a while, hidden inside innocuous envelopes, trying to catch Mum in turn, but when I was six, I opened one by accident, felt the mind-tugging spell, and instinctively snapped it straight back at him. It probably felt like having a splinter jammed directly into your eye. He hasn’t tried since.
After things didn’t work out very well with Dad’s family either, Mum still clung to the idea that the language would give me a sense of connection to him, at some unspecified future date. At the time, it was just another thing that made me different, and even as a kid, I already felt really strongly I didn’t need any more of those. We don’t live in Cardiff or anything; my primary school wasn’t what you’d call a hotbed of multiculturalism. One of the girls once told me I was the color of upsettingly weak tea, which isn’t even true but has occupied a niche in my head ever since, as persistent as a vilhaunt. And the commune isn’t exactly better. No one there will whisper a racist insult at you in the playground; instead I had grown adults wanting ten-year-old me to sign off on their decolonized yoga practice and help them translate bits of Hindi, which I didn’t know.
Of course, I should be grateful to them: that’s what woke me up to the idea that Hindi was more popular. When I got old enough to understand that languages were going to keep me alive, I stopped moaning about going and demanded lessons in that, too, just in time to get reasonably fluent before induction. Hindi isn’t as good for flexibility, because most of the kids who speak it also have English, so they usually ask for spells in English to have better trading material. But you want languages across the spectrum. In rare or dead languages, it’s a lot harder to find anyone else to barter with, but you’re also more likely to get really unique spells, or a better match for the rest of your request, like my stupid Old English cleaning spells. Hindi is common enough that you can find lots of people to trade with, and as it’s not one of the big two, people don’taskfor spells in Hindi, they just get them that way, so the spells are a bit better on average. I got to know Aadhya by trading Hindi spells.
At the moment, I’m studying Sanskrit, Latin, German, and Middle and Old English. The last three overlap nicely. I did French and Spanish last year, but I’ve got enough of those to muddle through the spells I get now, and they’re on the same popularity scale as Hindi, so I moved to Latin instead, which has the benefit of a really big backlist. I’ve been thinking of adding Old Norse for something really unusual. It’s just as well I hadn’t, yet, because I’d probably have been handed a book of ancient Viking cleaning incantations yesterday, even if I’d just tried a single exercise on the subject, and then I’d be blocked until I managed to beat my way through it. The school takes a lot of liberties with the definition of “knowing” a language. It’s safer to start new ones over the first quarter so you don’t end up stuck on something near finals.
Orion walked me to my classroom. I didn’t notice him doing it at first because I was too busy keeping an eye out for the group I usually walk with in the mornings: Nkoyo and her best friends Jowani and Cora. They’re all doing heavy language like me, so we’re on almost the same schedule. We’re not friends, but they’ll let me walk to class with them to have a fourth at their back, if I leave at the same time they do. Good enough for me.
When I spotted them at the tables, they were already halfway through breakfast, so I had to wolf down the rest of mine to catch up. “Got to go in five,” I told Aadhya, to give her fair warning. She waved over a couple of her friends from the artificer track who were just coming out with trays: given my report about the shop, she wasn’t in any rush to get to class early, anyway.
I managed to get out of the cafeteria with Cora, who grudgingly let me catch up with her before going through the doors—so generous—and we were outside the doors before Nkoyo did a double-take over my shoulder and I realized Orion wasright behind me.
“We’re going to languages!” I hissed at him. He’s in alchemy track. In fact, alchemy track was twice as big as usual in our year, because kids were trying to stick close to him even if they didn’t have an affinity. In my opinion, it wasn’t nearly worth the additional lab time. He did still have language class sometimes, just like we all have to do some alchemy—we do get to ask for schedule changes on the first day of the year, but if you ask for too many easy classes or try to go too single-track, the school will put you in classes other kids have avoided. But only languages-track kids get the language hall first thing on a Monday: it’s one of the big perks, being this high up when you’re a junior and senior.
He looked at me mulishly. “I’m going to the supply room.” We get building materials down in the workshop and alchemy supplies in the labs, but for everything less exotic, like pencils and notebooks, you have to forage in the big stockroom at the far end of the language hall.
“Can we come with you?” Nkoyo asked instantly. Cora and Jowani were both just gawking, but she’s sharp. And it was obviously worth getting to class towards the late end to have a big group for company going for supplies, even leaving aside Orion himself—if only I could have left him aside—so I went along, stewing. I grabbed paper and ink and took some mercury for trading and a hole puncher, and I even found a vast ring binder for my increasing pile of spells. I spotted three eyes peering out at us from a crack in the ceiling, but it was probably just a flinger, and there were too many of us for one of those to make a try.
