Page 14 of The Last Graduate
Aadhya wasn’t asking me to make plans; she just wanted to know what I was going to do with my life. She waited for me to offersomething, and when I didn’t she said, to drum it in, “I know whatI’mdoing. I don’t freaking need Magnus to make me offers. I’ve sold seventeen pieces of spell-tuned jewelry out of the leftover bits of sirenspider shell and argonet tooth you gave me. They’re not just junky senior stuff, they’re really good, people are going to keep them. I’ll get my own invites. I know what Liu’s doing. She’s going to do translations or raise familiars, and her family are going to have that enclave up in twenty years. Chloe’s going to be getting her DaVinci on and putting frescoes up all over New York, and she doesn’t even really need to do that. And I know that you’renotgoing to an enclave. That’s it. And not-enclaver is not a life.”
She wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t say anything. My beautiful shining fantasy of the life of an itinerant golden-enclave builder withered in my mouth completely before her recitation of excellent and sensible and thoroughly practicable ideas. I couldn’t bring myself to describe it to Aadhya: I could just see her face going from doubtful to incredulous to horrified with worry, like listening to a friend earnestly telling you about their plans to climb a tall mountain, with dangerously insufficient preparation, and then going on to describe how, once they got to the top, they’d jump off and sprout wings and fly away to live in the clouds.
She sighed into my stretching silence. “I get you don’t like to talk about your mom, but I’ve heard about her and I live on another continent. People talk about her like she’s a saint. So in case it doesn’t go without saying, you don’t have tobeyour mom to be a decent human being. You don’t have to live on a commune and be a hermit.”
“I can’t anyway, they won’t have me,” I said, a bit hollowly.
“Based on what you’ve said about the place, I’m going to go out on a limb and say they’re justifiably afraid you’re going to set them all on fire. It’sokayfor you to go live in New York with your weirdo boyfriend if you want to.”
“It’snot,” I said. “Aad, it’s not, because—theydon’twantme. They want someone who’s going to cast death spells on their enemies. And if I gave them that, I wouldn’t bemeanymore, so I might as wellnotgo live in a bag of dicks. And you think that, too,” I added pointedly, “because otherwise you’d have told Magnus that you’d try and talk me into coming if he’d get you in the enclave.”
“Yeah, because that wouldwork.”
“It might work to getyouin,” I said. “He’d promise you an interview for sure.”
She gave a snort. “That’s not actually a stupid idea. Except I don’t want to talk you intoNew York, I’m just…” she trailed off. “El, it’s notjustMagnus,” she said bluntly. “I’ve had a bunch of people asking me. Everyone knows about you now. And if youdon’tgo to some enclave—they’re going to wonder what youareplanning to do.”
And I didn’t even need to lay my idiotic plans out before her to know without question that they’d believe in them even less thanshewould.
To further gladden my heart, our midterm grades were coming in that week. No matter how hard you’ve worked, there’s always something to worry about. If you’re going for valedictorian, anything less than perfect marks is a sentence of doom, and if youdoget perfect marks, then you have to worry whether your courseload is heavy enough that your perfect marks will scale well against all the other kids going for valedictorian withtheirperfect marks. If you’re not going for valedictorian, then you have to spend the bare minimum of time on your actual coursework in order to maximize whatever you are actually working on to get you through graduation—whether that’s expanding your spell collection or creating tools or brewing potions, and of course building mana. If you get good marks, you wasted valuable time you should have spent on other things. But if your marks aretoobad, you’ll get hit with remedial work or worse.
If you’re wondering how our marks get assigned when there are no teachers to evaluate anything, I’ve heard a million explanations. Loads of people, mostly enclavers, say with great assurance that the work gets shunted out of the Scholomance and sent to independent wizards hired for the marking. I don’t believe that for a second, because it would be expensive, and I’ve never met anyone who knows one of these wizards. Others claim the work gets graded through some sort of complicated equation based almost entirely on the amount of time you spend on it and your previous marks. If you want to really set off any valedictorian candidate, try telling them that it’s partly randomized.
Personally, I’m inclined to think we’re doing the marking ourselves, just because that’s so efficient. After all, we mostly know what marks we deserve, and we certainly know the marks we want to get and what marks we’re afraid of getting, and whenever we see bits of someone else’s work we get an idea of whattheyought to get. I’d bet that the school more or less goes by the sum of the parts, depending on how much will and mana each person has put behind their judgment. Which also handily explains the bloc of self-satisfied enclavers who annually fill up the class rankings only a little way down from the actual valedictorian candidates, despite not doing nearly as much work and not being nearly as clever as they think they are.
None of these possibilities told me what to expect in the way of marks for myself, since this year I was entirely alone in the one seminar to which I’d devoted massive amounts of time and energy and passion and mana, and apart from that I was in three other small-group seminars that I’d aggressively neglected.
You’d think that marks wouldn’t matter very much senior year unless you were going for valedictorian, since we literally don’t take classes for the second half of the year. After the class standings are announced at the end of the first semester, seniors are given the rest of the year off to prep for their graduation runs.
But that’s in the nature of a grudging surrender. Graduation wasn’tdesignedto be a slaughterhouse gauntlet of mals. The cleansing routine we fixed last term was intended to winnow them down to a reasonable level every year before the seniors got dumped in to make their escape back to the real world. After the machinery broke four times in the first decade, and the enclaves gave up on repairing it, seniors largely stopped going to class, because there’s a point where training and practicing with the spells and equipment you’ve got is more important than getting new ones. When there’re a thousand howling starved mals coming at you from all sides, you want your reactions worked thoroughly into your muscle memory.
So the powers that be running the school at the time—London had taken it over from Manchester by then, with substantial support from Edinburgh, Paris, and Munich; opinions from St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Lisbon taken under advisement; New York and Kyoto occasionally given a patronizing ear—decided that they’d accept the reality and turned it into a deadline. And up to that deadline, the school does its best tomakemarks matter. The penalties get especially vicious for our last semester. Finals are the worst of it, but even midterms are generally good for taking out at least a dozen seniors.
I was relatively safe for the Proto-Indo-European seminar because I’d cheated on that one essay, which always gets you good marks. The school’s perfectly willing to let you leave dangerous gaps in your education. The only risk there was that I’d actually done some work on the thing beyond copying it out; I’d get marked down for that, although probably still not to failing level.
The translation I’d handed in for my final Myrddin seminar poetry assignment was a rotten half-baked job I’d run through in two hours, guessing wildly at the many words I didn’t know. It hadn’t left me with any spells I could even sound out, at least not if I didn’t want to risk blowing the top of my own head off. I’d got top marks on the lovely deconstruction spell I’d used on Chloe’s cushion-monster, though, which was likely to pull my grade there to safe levels.
Aadhya had helped me with the maths in my Algebra course, and I’d done a load of translations for her. Artificers don’t get language classes in their senior year; instead they just get assigned a design project in one of their other languages. Design projects are a really special fun thing for artificers. You’re given a set of requirements for some object, you write down the steps to build the thing, and then the Scholomance builds itforyou. Exactly according to your instructions. Then you have to try the resulting object out and see what it does. Three guesses what happens if your instructions turn out to have been wrong or insufficiently detailed.
Having to do a design project in a second language makes it even more exciting. And in this case, Aadhya’s languages are Bengali and Hindi, both of which she knows really well, except the school swerved and gave her the projects in Urdu instead, which happens sometimes if it’s feeling particularly nasty. She didn’t know the script well, and anyway subtle differences in meaning matter quite a lot in these circumstances. You’d really like to be confident that you’re not building a blasting gun backwards, for instance.
You would also really like to build something that might be of some use at graduation, but her choices were a mana siphon, a shell-piercer, and a garden planter. A mana siphon is a flat-out maleficer tool and anyway the last thing anyone allied with me would ever need. A shell-piercer would’ve been a terrific weapon against constructs, except in the very last line of the specifications, the assignment said that the purpose of this particular one was to acquire usable miercel shells. Miercels are these self-reproducing construct mals that look rather like wasps the size of my thumb. Their shells are made of a mana-infused metal andarequite useful, but a shell-piercer of any combat-appropriate size would fracture them to tiny bits.
“You could probably sell that second one to an enclaver?” I said.
“Not until we’re out,” Aadhya said, making the face it deserved: she was right, nobody inside the school was going to buy a modestly good artificer tool. It wasn’t like the phase-control spell from my sutras, where it was so useful and so expensive on the outside that it was worth someone trading a substantial advantage in here to get it for their family’s future use. Also, there was the question of how the Scholomance would have her test it. I’m sure it would have been generous enough to provide an entire hive of live miercels to practice on.
The last option was a combination sunlamp and self-watering planter that could be stacked to make a vertical garden while using very little mana, for setting up a greenhouse in a tiny space with no natural light. It would have been very nice to have in a Scholomance room, so of course the specifications required the planter to be fifteen feet long, which meant it wouldn’t fit in even a double-wide room. After I finished translating that bit, I realized to my dismay that the one place these planters would have worked perfectly was in those small Golden Stone enclaves I’d been so energetically dreaming of setting up. It was probably my fault Aadhya had got stuck with it: spend a lot of time with your allies, and sometimes their intent can start to influence your own work.
“Sorry,” I said grimly when I handed it over for her to look at.
“Ugh, and it’s going to takeforeverto meld these layers of chalcedony with the sand,” she said in dismay. “And I’m still not done with the lute.”
She’d been working on the lute in her every free minute since last term, but she badly needed more of them. Aadhya’s got an affinity for exotic materials, especially ones taken from mals. As you might imagine, they have loads of power, but most artificers can’t handle them; either they just don’t work, or more likely the artifice goes wrong in some excitingly malicious way. Aadhya can almost always coax them along into her projects, but the lute was ten times more complicated than anything else she’d done. The sirenspider leg I’d given her had gone to make the body of the lute, and the argonet tooth had made the bridges and the frets, and she’d strung it with the hair Liu had cut off at the start of the year. And then she’d etched sigils of power over the whole thing and lined them with the enchanted gold leaf her family had sent her on induction day. Pulling the whole thing together would’ve been a challenge for a professional artificer with a full workbench of favorite tools, and we’d pinned a large number of our graduation hopes on it.
Senior year, you spend half your time staying alive, half your time on your lessons, and half your time working out a graduation strategy to get you through the hall. If you can’t make that equation add up properly, you die. Most teams spend a lot of time identifying their best approach—are you going to rely on speed and deflection, dodging your way through the horde; are you going to build a massive forward shield and try to bowl yourselves straight to the doors; are you going to turn yourselves gnat-sized and try to hop from one team to another and let them carry you; et cetera.
Our alliance had a very obvious basic strategy: everyone else would keep the mals from interrupting my casting, and I would slaughter everything in a tidy path straight to the doors. Perfectly simple. Only it wasn’t, because most spells can’t slaughtereverything.Even La Main de la Mort doesn’t work oneverything;it’s useless on the entire category of psychic maleficaria, since those more or less don’t actually exist to begin with. They can still kill you, though.
