Page 21 of The Last Graduate
I couldn’t help myself. I blurted out, “No one’s chaining you down in New York.”
That was a nice and sympathetic thing to say to a boy who wanted his mum and dad and his own bed as much as I did. But I’d been overwhelmed by an instant éclat of idyllic vision: the two of us wandering the world together, welcomed everywhere by everyone, him clearing out infestations and then watching my back while I put up Golden Stone enclaves with the power from the mals he took out.
You could say I was just offering him a different future, and I had as much right to put that future on the table for him as he did asking me to come to New York, only I didn’t feel as though I did. I’dliketo have felt that way; I’d have argued myself breathless and blue if anyone else had tried to tell me I didn’t. But there wasn’t any convenient opponent around to be argued with, and on the inside of my own head, I didn’t really believe I had any right to ask Orion Lake to walk away from a future of safety and ease in the most powerful enclave in the world, just to spend his life as an itinerant bodyguard at my heels.
And even if I could squash that particular squidgy feeling, my vision would still mean asking him to walk away from his family and everyone he knew. He wasn’t saying he didn’t want togo home, he was saying he didn’t like the idea of spending the rest of his life having to go begging to Magnus Tebow every time he wanted a cup of mana. I wouldn’t have liked asking Magnus Tebow for pocket lint. I felt like a selfish beast as soon as the words came out of my mouth.
“If you just set up shop, you’ll get booked to come out and kill the worst mals the world over,” I added, as if that was all I’d meant. “Orion Lake: Maleficaria Hunter for Hire, no mal too large, some too small.”
He huffed a noise that aimed for laughter and stopped at a sigh. “Am I a jerk?” he asked abruptly. “Everyone always acts like—” He made a frustrated wave of his hand in the direction of the legions of his fan club. “But I know that’s just…”
He was being about as articulate as, well, the average seventeen-year-old boy, but I understood him perfectly. He’d been trained to think he was only good if he ran around being a hero all the time. Naturally as soon as he dared think about whathemight want, surely that made him a monster. But as someone who’s been told she’s a monster from almost all corners from quite early on, I know perfectly well the only sensible thing to do when self-doubt creeps into your own head is to repress it with great violence. “What do I look like, your confessor?” I said bracingly. “Go and do your homework so I don’t have to cobble you back together out of spare parts, and have your existential crisis another time.”
“Thanks, El, you’re such a pal,” he said, in tones of deep syrupy affection.
“I am, aren’t I,” I said, and left him to it. And then I went to my room and didn’t do any of my own homework. Instead I spent the entire time reading the Golden Stone sutras and translating more bits of it and doodling stick pictures of tidy little enclaves in my notes. Precious scampered around the desk messing my pens about and cracking sunflower seeds out of her food bowl and occasionally coming to inspect my work. She didn’t approve of the bit where I scribbled in a little stick figure with a sword killing mals; when I looked away, she slipped under my arm and deposited a dropping in exactly the right spot so I put my hand right down on it when I started writing again and squished it over my own artwork.
“It’s not like he’s any use in an enclave,” I muttered while I poured half my jug out over my besmirched hand, scrubbing it clean over the room drain. “I expect he’drathercome round the world hunting mals with me.”
But of course she was right; it was an unbelievably stupid thing to be thinking about. There were very good odds that at least one of the small handful of people in the world that I loved only had months left to live, and that one might well be me if I let myself get distracted. I’d lectured Orion about neglecting his work, but at least his hunting was to some reasonable immediate end: he actually got mana out of it, and every mal he killed in the corridors would be one less jumping at our heads at graduation time. But I wasn’t going to be building any enclaves untilafterI got myself and everyone I cared about through the doors, so I could stop wasting my time on the idea right now.
Go on, ask me how much time I wasted on it before the end of the semester. Or don’t; I don’t really want to do the gruesome tally of the hours I poured down that drain. The school rubbed it in for me well enough on New Year’s Day. The whole day was screwed on the wrong way from the very beginning: the night before I fell asleep still reading the sutras—I was starting to be able to get a vague general understanding of a new page just by sounding it out a few times—and when I woke up, they were still open on my bed. I made the mistake of looking at the page again and started sounding it out from the beginning. It felt as though it had become easier overnight; it was amazing. Half an hour and two paragraphs later, I noticed what I was doing, and had to run unwashed to catch up the last few stragglers and get into the very tail end of the senior queue for the cafeteria line. All I got for breakfast was a scanty bowl of the dried-out scrapings from the sides of the porridge vat.
“You could have bitten meusefullyfor once,” I told Precious as I came out with my unpleasantly light tray. She ignored me to keep gnawing on the dry heel of the loaf I’d scrounged for her, and only squeaked a complaint when I jumped a mile because the food service door slammed shut behind me: I had literally been the last senior to get breakfast.
That wasn’t nearly the end of it. Sudarat was queueing up along the wall with the other freshmen waiting for their turn to come, and as I passed her, she said to me, “Congratulations, El,” like she meant it.
“What?” I said. She pointed at the class standings, which had been posted up in gold letters under our class year on the big placard on the wall. I hadn’t bothered to look at them yet, since I didn’t really care which one of the twenty snarling beasts who’d been fighting it down to the wire had actually made valedictorian, and I knew I wasn’t anywhere near the top hundred myself.
Well, I was right about that bit; I wasn’t near the top hundred. My name was listed well above everyone else—next toAlgernon Dandridge Sinnet Prize for Special Achievement in Sanskrit Incantation. I didn’t even know therewereprizes to be awarded; I’ve never seen anyone get one before.
And before you ask, yes, there was an actual prize. I slunk over to the table with my allies, who could now all see in bright gilt letters just how much time I’d been frittering stupidly away, and when I put down my tray, it didn’t lie flat. Obviously I said, “Look out, clinger on my tray,” and jumped back from the table along with everyone else except Orion.
He promptly reached out a finger and zapped my entire tray with one of his stupid but highly effective lightning-bolt spells, charring the already inedible porridge into a solid cinder, and then he frowned and said, “No there isn’t,” and tipped the still-smoking tray up to reveal that what was making it lie askew was my award: a small round medal stamped out of some dull grey metal, hanging from a blue-and-green-striped ribbon with a top bar pin, apparently designed to be worn on a lapel along with my other military honors. It was only lightly singed.
“Oh, that’s really cool, El, congrats,” Chloe said, in all apparent seriousness. She wasn’t even a freshman.
I dangled the thing out to Aadhya without dignifying that with a response. “Is it worth melting down?”
Aadhya picked it up with both hands and rubbed her thumbs over the front surface, murmuring a quick artificer’s testing charm. The little relief carving—possibly meant to be Ganesh; the nose looked vaguely elephantine—glowed pink for a moment, and she shook her head, handing it back. “It’s just pewter.”
“Congratulations, Galadriel,” Liesel said to me a little coldly—she had in fact bagged valedictorian—when she went by the table a few minutes later. But what she meant wasfuck you.At least that was fair enough; if I’d spent all that time cooing at enclaver boys and doing their homework, I’d have wanted to stab anyone who’d got their name jumped up over mine for a single seminar. But I wasn’t going to be sorry for her. She was walking away from breakfast with Magnus, and she’d scored her first points with him by carrying tales of me. I suppose she’d decided to make New York her target. I wouldn’t have gone for it at the price of courting Magnus, but she obviously had a higher tolerance for soggy dishcloths than I did.
Alothigher, in fact. I came down from the cafeteria late, because Zheng ran over to me while Min held his place in the freshman queue, and told me that he and the other kids from the library seminar would try and get me something when their turn came. You rarely manage to get much more than you want as a freshman—the opposite, in fact—and that was even before the survival rate in the Scholomance rose to Orion Lake levels. But across the eight of them, they were able to rustle up a bread roll and a carton of milk, so at least I wouldn’t lose our whole free morning light-headed as well as irritated.
It was worth waiting for them, but by the time I finished, the first early warning chimes were going off delicately,ding dong death by fire coming,to remind anyone who’d missed it that the cleansing was about to get under way. I made a dash to the girls’ to get my teeth brushed and my face washed, so I wouldn’t be grotty for hours, and stopped short in the doorway aghast: Liesel was in there doing her makeup.
The use of cosmetic in here is roughly as high as it was in my first year of primary school. However low the odds that you make a mistake when mixing up your lipstick in the alchemy lab and melt half your face off, they’re still too high for most people. If you’re good enough to be sure you won’t, you’re good enough to get an alliance in a more reliable way. Dating doesn’t guarantee you an alliance any more than friendship does. But nevertheless here Liesel was, putting shiny pink lip gloss on her valedictorian mouth and dabbing a bit of it as color onto her cheeks. She’d already taken her hair out of the tight short plaits she always wore and had shaken the blond waves over her shoulders. She’d put on a crisp white blouse, actually ironed, and she’d unbuttoned it just far enough to leave a decent bit of cleavage showing, with a gold pendant hung round her neck. She would have looked nice enough for a date outside; in here, by comparison with our usual state, she might as well have stepped off the cover ofVogueto dazzle ordinary mortals.
I have to confess, I reacted atrociously. “NotTebow,” I blurted, from the door.
Her shiny lips pressed into a thin line. “Lake seems quitebusy,” she said, through her teeth, and I couldn’t even say anything to that under the circumstances; she had every right to be as angry with me as she was. Maybe shewantedto shag Magnus, who was after all heading for six feet and would himself have not looked out of place in—well, an Argos catalog, or at least a pound-shop flyer.
Yes,maybe,but my imagination has limits and that’s beyond them. So I didn’t even leave bad enough alone; I said, “Look, it’s no business of mine,” which coming out of my own mouth should have been a strong hint to me to stop there, but instead I went on, “but you should know, they’ve already offered me a guarantee.”
In my defense, that piece of information probably did matter a great deal to her. Even if Magnus Tebow was her ideal of manhood and charisma, she’d made bleeding valedictorian with three and a half years of brutal unrelenting work, and she couldn’t have wanted to throw that away on someone who couldn’t even offer her a guaranteed spot in an enclave. New York had too many eager applicants, most of them proven wizards who’d left school years ago and done significant work; there wasn’t any way they were letting their kids give out more than one guaranteed place in a year to a raw eighteen-year-old, and Chloe had made anxiously clear at every opportunity I gave her that the spot was beingheldfor me. Even if I didn’t ever take it up, that didn’t mean that Liesel would get invited after the fact.
Of course, it wouldn’t have said much for her brains if she wasn’t smart enough to make sure that she was getting a guaranteed spotbeforeshe unbuttoned her blouse the rest of the way, so even if I was handing her useful information, there was an implied insult going along with it. She took it accordingly. “How nice for you,” she said, even more furious, closed her lip gloss with a snap, swept the handful of jars and things on the counter back into her washbag, and marched out of the loo without looking back.
