Page 16 of The Last Graduate
But I’d never cast a circle by myself before. The idea’s straightforward enough: the mana everyone puts in flows through all of us in the circle, and because everyone shares the same purpose, it gets intensified. So you just let the mana keep circling around until it builds up high enough. But just because the idea is easy to describe doesn’t mean it’s easy todo.
In fact, I realized too late it was going to be even harderbecauseeveryone else around the table was a wizard. With Mum’s spell, you can heal internal injuries with a circle of ordinary people because you don’t need any more mana than you produce just by making the effort to stay in the circle, and you just need one wizard in the mix to “catch” the mana and hold it for long enough to pour it into the spell. With a bunch of almost adult wizards, we were building up a lot of mana really fast, and I could already feel everybody else sort oftuggingon it. It wasn’t even on purpose; if anyone had deliberately tried to grab the mana for themselves, the circle would’ve fallen apart. But all of us are actively thinking aboutsomekind of magical work every minute of the day and most of the night; we’ve all got spells half worked out and artifice projects in progress and potions brewing in the lab and graduation graduation graduation in our heads, and here was all this mana to work with, and I was asking them to think about using it to save Cora’s arm instead of their own necks.
It was hard for them and hard for me. I had to concentrate ferociously hard on the healing spell while the circle grew along the sides of the table and one by one everyone a little uncertainly added their hands. Jowani and Nkoyo closed it at the end, their hands clasped behind Cora’s back, and when they did, the circle established and the full mana flow started. Everyone jumped or squeaked. I should’ve warned them, but I couldn’t actually say anything at this point that wasn’t the spell. Anyway, I didn’t have any mental energy to spare. Everyone kept hold, the mana of that choice feeding along, being reinforced over and over by all of us intent on the same goal, one that wasn’tforus, so there wasn’t much of either hope or fear to cloud the intention. And the surprise didn’t hurt, it helped, because everyone chose to stay in the circle anyway.
Well, it helped build mana. But I started to feel more or less like I’d volunteered to ride a particularly violent horse and it was doing its best to heave me off while I clung in desperation to the edge of the saddle. The mana was a building wave traveling around the circle, getting bigger as it went; I tried to cast the spell literally the first time it came by me, but it happened so fast that I missed, which meant the wave got even bigger the next time around and even more unruly: that much mana surging through everyone was extremely inspiring to everyone’s imagination. When it came back a second time, I had to make a tremendous mental heave to drag it firmly out of the circle and into the spell.
At least the words weren’t hard to remember. Mum doesn’t like complex or detailed incantations. You don’t need them when you go straight for the requirement of pure noble unselfishness. “Let Cora’s arm be healed, let Cora’s arm be whole, let Cora’s arm be well,” I said, feeling like I was gasping it out while treading in deep water, my head tipped back to keep my mouth above the surface, and the mana went roaring through me and out of me.
The spell blew the wrap off Cora’s arm with the crisp snapping sound of someone shaking out a freshly laundered pillowcase. She made a squawking noise and grabbed at her elbow: just like that, her whole arm was smooth and unmarred as if nothing had happened to it at all. She opened and closed her hand a couple of times, and then she burst into tears and put her head down on the table with her arms huddled around it protectively, trying to hide from us all while she sobbed. The yellow tie, hanging from the crook of her elbow, fluttered one more time like a banner, even the bloodstains gone.
The rule is, when someone has a breakdown, you carefully don’t pay any attention to them and just carry on the conversation until they get hold of themselves. But the circumstances were a bit unusual, and it’s not as though there were an existing conversation to carry on. Yaakov said a prayer in Hebrew softly to himself, and bowed his head, but none of the rest of us were religious, so while he had a nice spiritual moment with himself, we all just carried on being awkward and glancing round at each other to avoid staring at Cora, which obviously we all wanted to do. Jowani, who was on her left, was losing the fight and letting his eyes slant down to peek.
“What did you do?” Orion demanded, and made me jump; he’d come up to the empty seat Aadhya had left for him, next to me, and he was staring at Cora exactly the way the rest of us were trying so hard not to. “What was that? You just—”
“We did a circle healing,” I said, dismissively, which took some effort. “You’d better hurry up and eat, Lake, it’s nearly to the warning bell. Have you got your alchemy seminar marks yet?”
He put his tray down and sat next to me almost like he was moving in slow motion, without taking his eyes off Cora. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and he’d been looking unkempt even before that; his hair had grown back out to a length that required at least running your fingers through it to keep it in order—we have low standards—but he wasn’t doing even that. His Thor t-shirt hadn’t changed in four days and was more than usually aromatic, and there were lingering smudges of soot and glittery blue asphodelium powder on his cheek. I was resolutely not saying a word, because it was none of my affair and it was going to keep being none of my affair until he became so stinky that I could justify complaining purely on the grounds of sharing a table, by which point maybe someone else would beat me to it. Probably not: most kids in here are more likely to bottle the scent and sell it as Eau de Lake or something. I suspected that he’d been spending the last few weeks hunting those just-past-larval-stage mals that had started creeping out of the plumbing.
I jabbed him in the side with an elbow, and he finally jolted out of it enough to stare at me instead. “Food. Alchemy marks. Well?”
He looked down at his tray: oh, how surprising, food! Things to eat to keep you alive! That’s about as much as you can say for Scholomance cuisine. He started eating it fast enough after he got over the massive surprise of rediscovering its existence, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “No, today I guess, or Friday,” but he kept staring at Cora until I poked him again for being a rude wanker and he realized it and jerked his eyes down to his plate.
“You’ve had to see a circle working sometime, living in New York,” I said.
“They don’t feel likethat,” he said, and then had the nerve to ask me, “Was there any malia in it?”
“That’s meant to be funny, is it?” I said. “No, you aardvark, it’s one of my mum’s healing circle spells. You don’t get any return at all.”
That’s not true, at least according to Mum: she insists that you always gain more than you give when you give your work freely, only you don’t know when the return will come and you can’t think about it or anticipate it, and it won’t take the shape you expect, so in other words, the return is completely unprovable and useless. On the other hand, no venture capitalists are lining up to give me rides in their private jets, so what do I know?
“Huh,” Orion said, sounding vaguely dubious, like he wasn’t sure he believed me.
“It’s negative malia if it’s anything,” I said. Occasionally, a repentant maleficer comes to Mum for help, someone like Liu was on the way to being: not the gleefully monstrous ones but the ones who went partway down the road—usually to make it through puberty alive—and have now changed their minds and would like to go back. She won’t do spirit cleansing for them or anything like that, but if they ask sincerely, she’ll let them join her circle, and generally once they’ve spent as many years doing the circle work as they did being maleficers, they come right again, and she tells them to go and make a circle of their own somewhere.
“Maybe that’s why it feels weird to you,” Aadhya said to Orion. “Are you seeing an aura?”
“Nmgh,” Orion said with half a pound of spaghetti dangling out of his mouth. He heaved the rest of it in and swallowed. “It’s more like—for a minute, she had these really crisp edges. Like you do sometimes,” he added to me, and then he blushed and stared down at his plate.
I glared at him, completely unflattered. “And why exactly did that make you think it was usingmalia?”
“Uh” was the feeble response. “It’s—maybe it’s just power?” he tried, kind of desperately.
“Domalshave these crisp edges?” I demanded.
“No?” Under my continuing glare, he wilted. “Some of them? Sometimes?”
I stewed over it while shoving in the rest of my own dinner. Apparently I looked like a maleficaria to him occasionally? Although Oriondidn’tsee anything odd about human maleficers: he hadn’t noticed our life-eating neighbor Jack was one until after that charmer had tried to leave my intestines piled on the floor of my room. And all right, there’re so many wizards who use small bits of malia here and there, stolen from things like plants or bugs or filched from a piece of work that someone else left unattended, that Orion could plausibly have a hard time picking the hardcore maleficers out. Those of us who strictly use only mana that we’ve raised ourselves or that someone has given us freely are the minority. But still: apparently I’m visibly more of a monster than an evil wizard is. Hurrah.
And an even larger hurrah: Orion found that appealing. It sounded too much like Aadhya had been right about what Orion saw in me. I’m not some sort of pallid romantic who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself, and anyway one of the main reasons I’d been avoiding Orion’s room lately was the strong feeling that it would be for the best for all concerned if I didn’t see him with his shirt off again anytime soon, so that would be pot and kettle. But I was unenthusiastic about the prospect of being found attractivebecauseI seem like a terrifying creation of dark sorcery instead ofdespiteit.
I stewed enough over it that I completely missed the implication of the rest of what Orion had said until I was slogging upstairs to my Wednesday library session. Just short of the top stair—where my entire gaggle of freshmen were waiting for me to lead them to whatever potential doom I was scheduled to save them from today—I halted, and realized that if Orion hadn’t got his results from his senior seminar yet, it wasn’t because he was going to get an A+, since he’d been falling down on everything badly enough to forget changing his t-shirt. He was going tofail.
And when you fail alchemy, you don’t get attacked by mals. You just get to interact very intimately with your last brewing assignment, and being an invincible monster-killing machine does you absolutely no good against being doused in a vat of etching acid used to carve mystical runes into steel, which had been Orion’s midterm assignment.
I stared up the last few stairs at the eight freshmen, who were all peering anxiously back at me, and then I said, “Right, field trip today,” and turned round to lead them downstairs on a three-stairs-at-a-time rush barely short of sending them pell-mell the whole way to the bottom. I had to actually grab Zheng to stop him tumbling past the alchemy floor landing. Once I’d steadied him, I ran for it down the corridor with the pack of them behind me, as fast as their considerably shorter legs could carry them. I didn’t know what room Orion was in, so I just shoved open every lab door I saw and yelled in, “Lake?” until someone yelled back, “He’s in two ninety-three!” I turned and ran past the pack of freshmen still going the other way, all of them wheeling to follow me like a flock of confused geese. I passed the landing and went on the other way, threw open the door to 293, and without even breaking stride tackled Orion away from the lab bench, just as the bell for the start of class rang and all the complex brewing equipment at his station started to rattle and belch smoke.
The large copper vat foamed over so energetically that the whole lid got lifted off and clanged away onto the floor atop a massive and expanding column of violet foam that poured over the sides and then cascaded down from the surface of the table and over the floor, enormous black billows of smoke hissing up in its path. There was a lot of screaming and running from the rest of the students that only made things worse, other experiments going up as they were hastily abandoned. We fumbled up to our feet together, but we couldn’t see a thing; I kept a death grip on Orion’s wrist and would have walked us both the wrong way, only the freshmen all started yelling from the door, “El! El!” and Zheng and Jingxi and Sunita—I’d been trying really hard not to learn their names, but it wasn’t going very well—even made a line into the room and cast light spells to give us a path.
