Page 25 of A Deadly Education
Translating spells is basically impossible. It’s not even reliably safe to do something like take a Hindi spell, rewrite it in Urdu script, and pass it along to someone else to learn. That would work three times out of four, but the fourth one would really get you. Song-spells are the only exception. But you don’t exactly translate them; it’s more that you write a new spell in the new language, but set to the same music and on the same theme. It’s often harder than writing a new spell from scratch, and most of the time it still doesn’t work, the same way most writing assignments don’t successfully turn into a spell. Sometimes you just get a pale imitation of the original spell. But once in a while, if the new spell is good on its own, you get an almost doubled effect out of it: whatever your new spell does, and a significant part of whatever the original spell did. Those can be really powerful.
But more to the point for me, that was exactly along the lines of the alliance Aadhya had suggested this morning. Liu added, “Do you want to hear?” and held out a tiny music player, the kind with no screen that play for a million hours on a charge. Even so, the only way you can get battery power in here is by hand-cranking, and you could use that kind of work to generate mana instead, so you don’t spend it for nothing. I put in the headphones and listened to the music—no lyrics, which was just as well, since I didnothave time to start Mandarin right now. I hummed along with it under my breath, tapping my fingers on my leg to try and beat it into my head. Even wordless, it still had the feel of a spell to it, subtle but building. I don’t know how to describe a spell song as opposed to an ordinary song; the best I can do is that it’s like holding a cup in your hand instead of something solid all the way through. You get a sense that you can put power into it, and how much. This one was deep, a well going far down instead of a cup, something you could drop a coin or a pebble into and hear an echo coming back a long way. I took out the headphones and said to Liu, “Is it a mana amplifier?”
She had been watching me intently. She gave a start and then said, “You can’t have heard it,” which meant it was a family spell they weren’t trading yet; they were probably saving it to exchange for some other piece they’d need to build an enclave of their own.
“I haven’t,” I said. “It just has that feel.”
She nodded a little, her eyes on my face thoughtful.
We walked to history together afterwards and sat next to each other at the uncomfortable desks. The history classrooms are all scattered round on the cafeteria floor, reasonably high up. The worst part of history is that our assigned textbooks are incredibly boring, and there aren’t booths like in the language labs, so you can hear every single noise everyone else is making, whispers and coughs and farts and the endlessly squeaking desks and chairs. Up at the front there’s always this droning flickery video lecture going on that you have to strain to hear, ninety percent of which is completely useless and doesn’t matter even to our grades except for a few random bits that show up for enormous points on quizzes. All the sections are either before lunch, so you’re starving and it’s hard to focus, or after lunch so you’re ready to fall asleep. I always take before lunch, because it’s safer, but it’s a slog.
Having someone next to me, actuallywithme, made class at least a hundred times more bearable. We traded off watching the lecture and taking notes in fifteen-minute chunks, and worked on our final papers in between. We’d already exchanged translations of our source materials, and I could see her using the ones I’d given her, so they’d been useful. Liu’s were good, too. I didn’t have to try to think well of her just because she’d maybe put up with me.
Liu takes history in English so she can use it for her language requirement and get more class choice flexibility, so we’ve been in most of the same sections. But we’d almost never sat next to each other before. A couple of times, if she had to get supplies and came a bit late, and it was a choice of me or someone poorly and coughing, or the boy who puts his hand in his pants all class long—he tried sitting next to me once and once only; I stared straight at him with all the murder in my heart and he stopped and took his hand out—she’d take me. But most of the time she’d walk over with whoever she’d sat with in the previous class: there are a dozen other Mandarin-speakers doing English history who were fine letting her sit next to them, even if they got a vague whiff of the malia.
There wasn’t a whiff to be had today. She hadn’t started using it again, I could tell. She still had color, and a shine to her eyes, but it was more than that: she just seemed softer, more pulled-in, a snail mostly tucked into a shell. I wondered if that was an aftereffect or if it was justher:probably her, since that’s what Mum’s meditation spell does. It didn’t really line up with the malia use. Her family might have pushed her to do it: strategically there was good sense to it, and once she’d come in with a basket full of sacrifices, probably all her weight allowance dedicated to that, she’d have been hard-pressed to do anything else.
I didn’t ask her what her new plan was, if she had one. It wasn’t like she’d been openly using malia, and we weren’t allies yet, so that was the kind of question that could cause alarm, particularly coming from the supposed girlfriend of the local maleficer-slaying hero. She might be in a tough position for graduation now, for that matter, if she didn’t go back to it. She wouldn’t have been storing mana along the way if she’d been planning all along to get a big chunk of malia out of her remaining sacrifices.
Which didn’t make her a great choice for me to ally with, but I didn’t actually care. I wanted her, I wanted Aadhya, and not just because I didn’t have another option. I wanted this thing here between us, walking to lunch together after a morning working hard side by side, a small warm feeling that we were on the same team. I didn’t just want them to help me live. I wanted forthemto live. “I’d like to,” I said to her abruptly, on the way to the cafeteria. “If you do.” I didn’t need to tell her what I was talking about. I knew she was thinking about it, too.
She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said softly, “I’m pretty behind on mana.”
So I was right: she’d decided not to go back to malia, and now she was reasonably screwed. But—she’d said so. She wasn’t letting us sign on with her under false pretenses. “Me too. But we won’t need as much with that spell of yours, and the phase-control spell,” I said. “I don’t mind if Aadhya doesn’t.”
“I can’t cast the spell yet myself,” Liu said. “My grandmother…My mom and dad are working really hard, they take jobs at enclaves a lot. So my grandmother raised me. She gave me the spell to bring, even though she wasn’t really supposed to. It’s an advanced spell, only a few really strong wizards in our family have got it working. But I thought…if I managed to translate it, maybe it might get easier.”
“If you can’t get a translation working by the end of next quarter, I’ll drop some of my other languages and pick up Mandarin,” I said.
She looked at me. “I know you can sing, but it’s really hard.”
“I’ll be able to cast it,” I said positively. Mana amplification is more or less a prerequisite for any of the monstrous spells I have, even with the loads of power they require to begin with. I’ve never got hold of anything nearly so useful as an incantation that separates out the amplification step enough that I could tease just that piece of the spell away from the bits with all the screaming and death, but the process is happening along the way.
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Then…if Aadhya’s okay, too…”
She didn’t go on. But I nodded, and we just looked at each other for a moment, walking down the corridor, and Liu smiled at me, just a little tentative wobble at the corners of her mouth, and I was smiling back at her. It felt strange on my face.
“Want to work on the history paper after lunch?” I asked. “I have a carrel in the library, in the languages section.”
“Sure,” she said. “But isn’t Orion going with you?” And what shedidn’tmean by that was whether Orion was going to be there for her to hang out with; she just meant, was there enough room for all three of us.
“It’s a monster of a desk,” I said. “It’ll be fine, we’ll just grab a folding chair on the way,” but actually after lunch Orion said to me hurriedly, “I’m going downstairs, I’ve still got some stuff to do.”
“Are you saying that because you’ve got some stuff to do, or because you’d rather lurk below than endure even modest amounts of human interaction?” I asked. “Liu’s not going to be a twat around you.” I firmly didn’t offer to ditch her for his sake: we weren’tactuallydating.
“No, she’s fine,” Orion said. “I like her, she’s fine. No, I’ve got stuff to do.”
He didn’t sound very convincing, but I wasn’t going to point that out. He didn’t owe me excuses. I shrugged. “Try not to dissolve yourself in acid or anything.”
Liu and I had a great work session: we blazed through almost half our history papers. “I’ve got a group project down in the lab after dinner tonight, but I’d do work period again tomorrow,” she told me as we left. I nodded, aglow with the thought that maybe I’d ask Aadhya or even Nkoyo to come up with me after dinner instead. I hadpeople,in the plural, that I could ask to join me in the library, and even if they said no, they weren’t really saying no, they were only saying not this time. It almost made me happier when Aadhya did cry off when I asked her at lunch, because she said she wanted to do some artifice work in her own room, and I could believe her; it wasn’t just an excuse.
“But stop in before bedtime,” she said. “We could go for a snack bar run, if you’ve got credit,” and Liu and I nodded: we’d all had a chance to think it over, it was time to talk about it, to decide if we were going ahead.
I hugged the feeling to me all through afternoon classes, and I didn’t even let it be spoiled when I saw Magnus and Chloe talking to Orion outside the cafeteria at dinner, asking him to come to the library with the New York crew afterwards. “Bring El,” she was even saying, asking him to serve me up for the next attempt on a silver platter.
“I can’t, I’m—going to the lab,” Orion said.
“The lab, huh?” Magnus said. “Not a room?”
