Page 18 of A Deadly Education
“I don’t know!” Orion said. “It’s never done that before!”
“Next time,” I rasped out, “ask first.” He looked at me anxiously, and I added, “And I’mfine,” which I was, involuntarily, although I didn’t actuallywantto be fine just yet. I’ve never been on board with Mum’s whole schtick about letting the process run its course, but for the first time I got the idea. However, the Scholomance isn’t exactly a forgiving place to do any processing, and after a moment I was more or less grateful. Well, less. “Stop hovering,” I muttered, and looked away from Orion to do a quick poison check on all the food on my tray, which I hadn’t actually inspected before taking. I had to chuck more than half of it, and I was starving, since I’d missed lunch.
Aadhya gave me half of her chocolate pudding and said, “Pay me back when you have a chance,” and Cora a little grudgingly gave me the apple she’d meant to save for later when Nkoyo gave her a nudge. Orion had sat down next to me slowly and was looking a little less freaked out. Liu was still staring at her own hands, tears running in two parallel lines down her face. I’d obviously been right about her carefully rationed malia use; if she’d been using more than the bare minimum, the spell wouldn’t have been able to bring her true. She might have been even less happy about it than I was, though. Now she knew exactly where she was going to end up if she went back to using malia, and she’d have to do it again anyway, or completely change her entire strategy.
Orion didn’t stop hovering. He walked me back to my room after dinner and obviously wanted to come inside. He’d probably have stayed with me through the night again, the wanker. “And again, I’mfine,” I said. “Aren’t you worried there’s someone in need of a hero somewhere? You could always prowl the senior res hall if you’re that bored.”
That won me a glare, at least. “You’re welcome,” Orion said. “Really, no big deal, I’m up to seven times now—”
“Six,” I said through my teeth.
“This morning?” he said pointedly.
You didn’t save me from anything today,I almost said, but I wasn’t completely sure that was true, and anyway I still didn’t want to talk about it, so I just turned coolly on my heel and went into my room and shut the door on him.
Then, since I was in fact fine and now no longer in a nice comfortable dissociating haze, it was time to inventory the damage, which was pretty appalling. The crystal I’d used to channel to the rest of my store was also cracked. A full nineteen crystals had been completely drained. I had only eight filled ones left. And I wasalive,after taking on a maw-mouth, which did put things into a different perspective. I sat down on the bed with the cracked crystals in my hands, staring at them. It’s one thing to have the strong sense that Icouldcast any number of insanely powerful murder spells. It’s another to have proven it quite that dramatically, even if the only person I’d proved it to was me.
Which was just as well, obviously. I’ve long entertained detailed fantasies of dramatic public rescues—several of them lately featuring a grateful and admiring Orion, to be honest—and the reaction of my fellow students, bowled over and regretful they’d never seen the real me before. But thereal mehad just single-handedly killed a maw-mouth, with liberal use of one of the most powerful and unstoppable killing spells on the books, so if my fellow students saw the real me, they wouldn’t decide that after all I was a lovely person they should have been nice to all these years. No, they’d start thinking I was a violently dangerous person they should have been nice to all these years. They’d be scared of me. Of course they’d be scared of me. I could see that now with perfect clarity, despite the pathetic dreams that I’d hung on to all these years, because I was scared of me, too.
I got up and got my sophomore-year Maleficaria Studies textbook down from the upper shelf—I checked the undersides of that shelf and the one above, and ran the back of my hand across all the books before I took it down—and found the pages on maw-mouths. There was a reference for the journal article. I found it and looked up from my desk into the pitch black and said, “I want a clean, readable, English-language copy of issue seven hundred sixteen of theJournal of Maleficaria Studies.”
I could get specific because that’s the opposite of hard to get.Journal of Maleficaria Studiesmight sound academic and dusty, but it’s only pretending. There’s a very passionate audience for new information on the things that want to eat us. Every enclave in the world supports the research, in exchange for a boxful of copies each month, and any independent wizard who can afford it will get a subscription; most who can’t will find others and club together to get a shared copy.
This issue was quite a recent one, not twenty years old. Orion’s mum was already on the board of editors:OPHELIA RHYS-LAKE, NEW YORK,eight names from the top of the masthead. She’s higher up now. The article on maw-mouths took up half the contents, and the historical section went into detail on the one reputable modern account of taking one down.
A double handful of wizards in the Shanghai enclave in China were scooped up and sent away by the authorities during the Cultural Revolution—not for being wizards, they just looked suspiciously rich—and the wards on the place went downhill quite fast after the sudden loss of that many prime wizards. A maw-mouth made it through the gates and ate half the remaining inhabitants in a day; the rest ran away like sane people.
So far as that goes, it was a fairly standard story. That’s how enclaves get destroyed, when they do. It’s not always a maw-mouth, but a weakened enclave is always a dangerously tempting target for the really scary mals. But maybe ten years later, the prime wizards all got back, rounded up the survivors and the surviving kids, and decided to try and take back the enclave.
That was pretty insane, since at the time the only other known cases of destroying maw-mouths hadnotbeen reputable, but on the other hand, they were playing for high stakes. Having an enclave isn’t a small thing, and it’s not like you can just decide to bang one up on a whim, much less one with a thousand years of history and wards behind it.
Reading between the lines, I could also tell there had been a case of ambition spurring the process, since “the future Dominus of the enclave, our coauthor Li Feng,” was the one who had organized the take-back. The entire group spent a year gathering mana, probably the equivalent of a thousand of my crystals. Li brought in a circle of eight really powerful independent wizards, all of them promised significant positions in the enclave if it worked, and he volunteered to go into the maw-mouth himself. He linked up with the circle and did it under all their layers of shielding, powered by all the gathered mana. It took him three days to finally destroy the maw-mouth. Two of the wizards in the circle died in the process, another two days later.
I’d wanted reassurance, but the article just made it worse. I was a sixteen-year-old with twenty-nine mana crystals I’d mostly filled up by doing aerobics. It was blindingly obvious that I didn’t have any business taking out a maw-mouth in a Sunday-morning jaunt. Maybe the Scholomance had known I had a chance, but Ishouldn’thave had one. I threw the journal back into the dark and went to sit on my bed huddled up around my own knees, thinking about my great-grandmother’s prophecy. If I everdidgo maleficer, if I everdidstart pulling malia out of people like toffee and tossing off those killing spells of mine left and right, I’d be unstoppable. Maybe literally. Raining death and destruction on all the enclaves of the world like a maw-mouth myself, like the biggest maw-mouth ever, tearing the others apart because they were mycompetition.
And everyone else seemed to just be waiting for me to get going, except for Mum, who won’t even call Hitler a bad person. It’s not that she thinks he’s the product of irresistible historical forces or anything. She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.
And yes, fine, but I think after a certain number of evil choices, it’s reasonable shorthand to decide that someone’s an evil person who oughtn’t have the chance to make any more choices. And the more power someone has, the less slack they ought to be given. So how many chances did I get? How many had I used up? Did I get points for having gone after the maw-mouth today, or had I just given myself a taste of power that was going to lead me straight to a monstrous destiny so inevitable that it had been foreseen more than a decade ago by someone who’d wanted toloveme?
I’ve been carrying that prophecy in my head my whole life. It’s one of the first things I remember. It was hot that day. It would have been winter back in Wales, cold and wet; I don’t remember the winter, but I remember the sun. There was a square fountain in the inner courtyard that sent up a little spray with rainbows coming through it, surrounded by small trees in pots with purple-pink flowers. The whole family gathered around us, people who looked likeme,like the face in the mirror that the kids at school were only just starting to teach me was somehow wrong, and here was so clearly right. My father’s mother got on her knees to hug me, holding me out at arm’s length afterwards just to look at me, hungry tears running down her face, saying, “Oh, she looks so much like Arjun.”
My great-grandmother was sitting in the shade: I just wanted to wave my hands through the rainbows and put my hands in the fountain, but they brought me over to her, and she was smiling down at me, reaching to take my wet hands with both of hers. I smiled up at her, and her whole face changed and went sagging and her eyes clouded over white and she started speaking in Marathi, which I didn’t speak with anyone except my language teacher once a week, so I didn’t understand the words, but I did understand everyone else around me started gasping and arguing and crying, and that Mum had to pull me away from her and carry me to another part of the courtyard and shelter me with her body and her voice from the yelling fear that ate up all the welcome.
My grandmother came and hurried us into the house, to a small, cool, quiet room where she told my mum to stay, and she threw one agonized look at me and went back out again. That was the last time I ever saw her. Someone brought us some dinner, and I forgot my own confused fear and wanted to go back to the fountain, and Mum sang me into sleep. My grandfather was one of the men who came to take me from her that night, in the dark. I know what the prophecy says because he translated it for Mum, repeated it a dozen times over trying to persuade her, because he didn’t know Mum well enough to understand that the one thing she’ll never go for is the lesser evil. So instead she took her greater evil back home and raised me and loved me and protected me with all her might, and now here I am, ready to begin my destined career any day I like.
I would’ve probably spent several more hours brooding about it, but I had too much sufficiently depressing scut work to do. I dragged myself off the bed and started the process of conditioning a new crystal to be my channel, which involved building mana by singing a bunch of long involved songs to it about open doors, flowing rivers, et cetera, while concentrating the whole time on pushing a little thread of mana in and pulling it right back out the other side. After my throat started to hurt too much to keep going, I put that one aside and got one of the emptied crystals instead and started filling it back up. But I couldn’t do sit-ups or jumping jacks, thanks to my still-aching gut, so I had to crochet instead.
Words can’t describe how much I hate crochet. I’d gladly do a thousand push-ups over a single line. I forced myself to learn because it’s a classic mana-building option for school: all you need to bring is one tiny lightweight hook. The standard-issue blankets are made of wool that you can unpick and put back together, no other materials required. But I’m horrible at it. I forget where I am in the pattern, how many stitches I’ve done, which kind of stitch I’m on, what I’m trying to make, why I haven’t stabbed out my own eyes with the hook yet. It’s brilliant for building a truly frothing head of rage after I’ve undone the last hundred stitches for the ninth time. But as a result, I do get a decent bit of mana out of it.
It took me almost an hour of mana spilling out of the crystal before it grudgingly started to store again. My teeth were already clenched with fury by then, with a new addition of lurking anxiety: was I starting to feel evil? Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet. That would be so stupid it seemed almost likely. But I had to go on and deposit at least a noticeable amount of mana, because otherwise I was sure that by tomorrow the crystal would lock up again. And every single one of my drained crystals would have to be refilled the same way. I’d have to decide if I was going to invest the effort to rescue them, or cut my losses and just start filling the crystals I had left. I couldn’t leave the drained ones for last; if I did, they’d go completely dead and be impossible to refill at all.
I couldn’t help thinking I could ask Orion to fill some of them for me. Except if he started routinely power-sharing with me, sooner or later the rest of the New York enclave kids would block him. And that wouldn’t even be unreasonable. He got to pull on them when he needed to. That was what let him go around saving people at will, instead of worrying about whether he had enough mana today, like me and the other losers. He had to pay for that right. Of course, I could just sign on with New York myself. With Orion running around the cafeteria doing ostentatious heroics for my sake, on the heels of a weekend of what everyone else had surely assumed was serious canoodling in the library, Magnus and Chloe and the gang would probably have been relieved to lock me down at this point. And it was even more sensible on my side than it had been yesterday.
So obviously I wasn’t going to do that. Instead I was going to spend the next month covering my entire blanket with a lovely and soul-destroying leaves-and-flowers pattern. If I wasn’t careful, I might stitch in my rage and do the soul-destroying literally. I suppose at least then I could get shop credit for it.
The bell was ringing for curfew, but I kept going. Thanks to my long nap earlier, I could afford to stay up late. After another hour I finally let myself stop and put my hook away—I really wanted to hurl it violently into the dark, but if I did that, I’d never get it back, so instead I gritted my teeth and strapped it carefully back to the lid of my chest—and then I rewarded myself by sitting down on my bed with the one actual good thing that had happened to me all day: the book I’d got in the library off the Sanskrit shelf.
I’d been sure it was something special when I grabbed it, but I braced myself taking it out of my bag, just because the way my day—my week, my year, my life—was going, it would have really been more on brand for the book to turn out to have its contents swapped with a mundane cookbook or for the pages to be glued together with water damage or eaten by worms or something. But the cover was in beautiful shape, handmade of dark-green leather, beautifully stamped with intricate patterns in gold, even over the long flap that folded over to protect the outer side of the pages. I held it on my lap and opened it up slowly. The first page—the last page from my perspective, it was bound right to left—was written in what looked like Arabic, and my heart started pounding.
