by Naomi Novik
“Why don’t you just use the mending charm?” Orion ventured tentatively, about halfway through the agonizingly boring process, after he looked round to see what was taking me so long.
“I am using the mending charm,” I said through my teeth. Even with the pliers and the drilled holes, my hands were throbbing. Orion kept watching with increasing confusion until I finally twisted down the last ragged end of wire. Then I put my hands flat on either side of the double-layered hole and shut my eyes. A basic version of mend-and-make is one of the spells we all learn, in shop class. The classes are the only way to get the most critical general spells. Mending is pretty obviously on that list, as you can’t get anything into the school but what little you’re allowed to bring in at induction. And mending is one of the most difficult spells, too, with dozens of variations depending on the materials you’re working with and the complexity of what you’re trying to fix. Only artificers really master it completely, and even then only within a specialized range of materials.
But at least you can usually do it in your own bloody vernacular. “Make and mend, to my will bend, iron thrust and steel extend,” I said—we all knew a lot of rhymes for mend and make—and mapped in seventeen knocks around the words, somewhere between the twenty-three you use for sheet metal and the nine for wire. Then I tapped into the mana I’d built up by doing all that excessively nitpicky hand work. The charm grudgingly went churning through the materials. The pieces of scrap slagged into something like a thick metallic putty, which I pushed into place to fill the gaping hole in the door, and as the surface went smooth and hardened under my hands, the doorknobs on either side made a rude noise like a belch and finally hooked themselves back together, the dead bolt shooting back into place with a solid thunk. I dropped my hands, panting, and turned round.
Orion was standing in the middle of my bedroom staring like I was an exotic zoological specimen. “You’re strict mana?”
He made it sound like I was a member of a cult or something. I glared at him. “Not all of us can pull from maleficaria.”
“But—why don’t you pull from—the air, or the furniture—everyone’s got holes in their bedposts—”
He wasn’t wrong. Cheating is a lot harder in here because there’re no small living things to pull from, no ants or cockroaches or mice unless you bring them in with you, which is awkward since the only stuff you can bring is what’s physically on you at the moment of induction. But most people can pull small amounts of mana from the inanimate stuff around instead: leach heat from the air or disintegrate a bit of wood. It’s a lot easier to do that than to pull mana from a living human being, much less another sorcerer. For most people.
“If I pull, it won’t come from there,” I said.
Orion was eyeing me with a growing frown. “Er, Galadriel,” he said, a bit gently, as if he was starting to think I was a lunatic, one of the ones who’d just gone crazy inside. I’d had a wildly horrible day anyway, thanks to him, and that was the final straw. I reached out and grabbed at him. Not with my hands—I grabbed at his mana, at his life force, and gave it a hard deliberate yank.
Most wizards have to work at it to steal power from a living thing. There are rituals, exercises of will, voodoo dolls, blood sacrifices. Lots of blood sacrifices. I barely have to try. Orion’s life force came away from his spirit as easily as a fish on a line, being tugged out of the water. All I needed to do was keep pulling and it would end up in my hands, all that juicy power he’d built up. In fact, I could probably have followed his power-sharing lines to pull mana from all his enclave friends. I could have drained them all.
Even as Orion’s face went wide with appalled shock, I let go again, so the mana went snapping back into him like a rubber band. He staggered back a full pace, his hands coming up defensively like he was ready for a fight. But I ignored him and sat down with a hard thump on my bed, trying not to cry. Whenever I let my temper get away from me like that, I always feel rotten afterwards. It’s rubbing my own face in how easy everything would be if I just gave in.
He went on standing there, hands raised, looking a bit silly when I didn’t do anything. “You’re a maleficer!” he said after a moment, like he thought he was prodding me into doing something.
“I know this is going to be a challenge for you,” I said through my teeth, still fighting back the sniffles, “but try not being an idiot for five minutes. If I was a maleficer, I’d have sucked you dry downstairs and told everyone you died in the workshop. It’s not like anyone would’ve been suspicious.” He didn’t look like he’d found that particularly comforting. I rubbed the back of my sooty hand across my face. “Anyway,” I added desolately, “if I was a maleficer, I’d just suck all of you dry and have the whole school to myself.”
“Who’d want it?” Orion said after a moment.
I snorted a laugh up into my nose; all right, he had a point. “A maleficer!”
“Not even a maleficer,” he said positively. He did lower his hands then, still warily, only to take another step back again when I stood up. I rolled my eyes and made a little jump at him with my hands raised like claws and squeaked, “Boo!”
He glared at me. I went over to where he’d put the rest of the supplies on the floor. The rest of the scrap pieces got shoved under my mattress where they couldn’t be replaced by something unpleasant during the night without my noticing. The drill and pliers got strapped securely down to the lid of my storage chest next to my two knives and my one precious small screwdriver. If you keep things strapped to the underside of the lid, then if they’ve come loose, you can see the straps dangling when you crack it a bit. I’m really systematic about checking, so I haven’t had a tool go bad for a long time: the Scholomance doesn’t waste its time.
I went to the basin and rinsed off my hands and face again as well as I could: I was down to just a tiny bit left in my jug. “If you’re waiting for a thank-you, you’ll be here a while,” I told Orion after I finished drying off. He was still standing in the corner eyeing me.
“Yeah, I noticed,” he said with a huff. “You weren’t kidding about your affinity, were you. So you’re—what, a strict-mana maleficer?”
“That doesn’t even make sense. I’m not a maleficer at all, and as long as I’m trying to not turn into one, maybe you’d better go away,” I said, spelling it out since that was evidently necessary. “It’s got to be nearly curfew by now, anyway.”
Bad things happen if you’re in someone else’s cell past curfew. Otherwise, of course, we’d all double and triple up and take shifts on watch, not to mention that seniors would be en masse shoving freshmen out of their rooms on the top floor and postponing graduation for a year or two. Apparently there was a rash of incidents like that early on, after people started to realize there was a gigantic horde of mals waiting down in the graduation hall. I don’t know exactly what the builders did about it, but I do know that having two or more kids in a room makes you a horrible magnet. And forget about running out into the corridor trying to get back to your room once you realize what trouble you’re in. Two girls just down the way from me tried it in our first year. One of them spent a long time screaming outside my door before she stopped. The other one didn’t make it out of the room at all. It’s not the sort of thing anyone sane wants to risk.
Orion just kept staring at me. Abruptly he said, “What happened to Luisa?”
I frowned at him, wondering why he was asking me, and then I realized—“You think I did for her?”
“It wasn’t one of the mals,” he said. “My room’s next to hers, and she disappeared overnight. I’d have known. I stopped mals going in after her twice.”
I thought it over fast. If I told him, he was going to go after Jack. On one hand, that meant Jack would probably cease to be a problem for me. On the other hand, if Jack denied it, which wasn’t unlikely, I could end up with him and Orion as problems together. It wasn’t worth t
he risk when I didn’t have any proof. “Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “There are practicing maleficers in here, you know. Four in the senior class at least.” There were six, actually, but three of them were openly practicing, so saying four would hopefully make me look like I had a tiny bit of inside knowledge, believable but not enough to be worth interrogating. “Why don’t you pester one of them if you don’t have enough to do looking out for the sad and gormless.”
His face went set and hard. “You know, considering I’ve saved your life twice,” he began.
“Three times,” I said coldly.
It threw him off. “Uh—”
“The chimaera, end of last term,” I supplied even more coldly. Since I was obviously going to stick in his head now, he was at least going to remember me correctly.
“Fine, so three times, then! You might at least—”
“No, I mightn’t.”
He stopped, flushing. I don’t think I’d ever seen him angry before; it was always just aw-shucks hunching and resolution.
“I didn’t ask you for your help, and I don’t want it,” I said. “There’re more than a thousand students still left in our year and all of them gagging to swoon over you. Go and find one of them if you want some adoration.” The bells rang in the hallway: five minutes to curfew. “And if you don’t, go anyway!” I grabbed my door and flipped the shiny new—well, dull new—bolt and opened it.
He obviously wanted to leave on a snappy comeback, but couldn’t think of one. I suppose he wasn’t ever called on to produce them in the ordinary course of things. After a moment of struggle, he just scowled and stalked out.
I’m delighted to report my repaired door slammed shut on his heels beautifully.
I WAS EXHAUSTED, but I spent another half hour doing sit-ups in my room and built up the mana to cast a protective barrier over my bed. I can’t afford to do it every night, but tonight I was shattered, and I needed something to keep me from being the lowest-hanging fruit on the vine. Once I had it up, I crawled into bed and slept like a rock, barring the three times I woke with warning jabs from the trip wires round my door: par for the course, and nothing actually tried to come in.
The next morning Aadhya knocked to get me for showers and breakfast company, which was nice of her. I wondered why. A drill was valuable, but not that valuable. Thanks to her company, I was able to take my first shower in a week and refill my water jug before we headed to the cafeteria. She didn’t even try to charge me for it, except watching in turnabout while she did it, too.
All became clear as we started down the hallway. “So, you and Orion did all right in the shop last night,” she said, in an overly casual, making-conversation way.
I didn’t stop short, but I wanted to. “It wasn’t a date!”
“Did he ask you for anything? Even a fair share?” Aadhya darted her eyes at me.
I ground my teeth. That was the usual rule for distinguishing between a date and an alliance, but it hardly applied. “He was paying a debt.”
“Oh, right,” Aadhya said. “Orion, are you going to breakfast?” she called—he was just closing his door behind him, and then I realized she must’ve put a trip wire on his door this morning, so she’d got a warning when he went to brush his teeth. She was trying to get in with him through me, which would have been funny if it hadn’t made me want to punch her in the head. The last thing I needed was for people to get even more of an idea that I needed him to look out for me. “Walk together?”
He threw a look at me—I glared back, trying to hint him off—and said, “Sure,” inexplicably. It wasn’t as though he needed company, so evidently he was just doing it to spite me. He fell in on Aadhya’s other side while I contemplated various forms of retribution. I couldn’t just fall out, either: there wasn’t anyone else waiting for a group, and then I’d be vulnerable. Breakfast isn’t half as dangerous as dinner, but it’s still never good to walk alone. Hope in your heart doesn’t count.
“Anything unusual down in the shop last night?” she asked him. “I’ve got metalwork this morning.”
“Um, nothing much, really,” he said.
“What’s wrong with you!” I said. You’re not obliged to go out of your way to warn others, we all have to look out for ourselves, but if you start misleading people and setting them up, you’re really in for it. That’s a long step down from maleficer in most students’ opinions. “There were five mimics hanging about as chairs,” I told her.
“They’re dead!” he said defensively.
“Doesn’t mean there aren’t more of them who were waiting for leftovers.” I shook my head in disgust.
Aadhya didn’t look happy about it. I wouldn’t have either, if I was going to be first into the shop with a potential mimic or two lingering. But at least with the information she’d be able to make sure she wasn’t literally first in, and possibly put a shield on her back or something.
“I’ll hold us a table if you’ll get the trays,” she said as we came into the cafeteria, being too clever for my own good. I couldn’t blame her, really. It wasn’t stupid to want to be pals with Orion if that looked like a real possibility. Aadhya’s family live in New Jersey: if she got into the New York enclave, she could probably pull them all inside. And I couldn’t afford to alienate one of the vanishing few people who are willing to deal with me. Sullenly I got on the line and loaded up a tray for myself and for her, hoping faintly that Orion would spot one of his enclave friends and ditch us. Instead he put a couple of apples on the extra tray, and then reached ahead of me and said, “C’est temps dissoudre par coup de foudre,” and fried a tentacle just beginning to poke out from under the steam tray of excessively inviting scrambled eggs. It dissolved with a horrible gagging smell, and a wafting green cloud leaked up from all around the tray and settled immediately over the eggs.
“That’s the stupidest spell I’ve ever heard, and your pronunciation is terrible,” I said, nasally. I skipped the now-stinking egg tray and went on to the porridge.
“ ‘Thanks, Orion, I didn’t see that blood-clinger about to grab me,’ ” he said. “Don’t mention it, Galadriel, really, no problem.”
“I did see it, and because there was only half an inch out, there was enough time that I could’ve got a helping of eggs if you hadn’t shoved in front of me. And if I was still stupid enough at the tail end of junior year to go for a tray full of freshly cooked scrambled eggs without checking the perimeter, not even your undivided attention would get me out of this school alive. Are you a masochist or something? Why are you still doing favors for me?” I grabbed the raisin bowl, covered it with a small side plate, and shook it until two dozen of them had come out one at a time. I poked them all thoroughly with my fork and went on to the cinnamon shaker, but one distant sniff was enough to tell me that was no-go today. The cream was also a loss: if you tilted it to the light, there was a faint blue slick over the surface. At least the brown sugar was all right.
I took a quick look both ways after coming off the line and then carried the two trays back over to where Aadhya had set us up at a good table, three in from the door: close enough to get out if they started to shut us in, and far enough not to be in the front lines if something came in through them. She’d laid a perimeter and done a safety charm on the cutlery and even got us one of the safer water jugs, the clear ones. “No eggs, thanks to Mr. Fantastic here,” I told her, putting down the trays.
“Was it the clinger? One of them got a senior pretty badly before we got here,” Aadhya said, nodding over at a table where an older boy was leaning half conscious between two of his friends with a series of huge bloody sucker-marks wrapped around his arm twice like a twining bracelet. They were trying to give him something to drink, but he had a clammy going-into-shock look, and they were already trading resigned anxious glances across him. I don’t think anyone ever gets used to it, but only the most sensitive flowers still b
urst into tears over losses by the time they’re staring graduation in the face. By then they’ve got to be locking down alliances and planning strategy, and however critical he’d been to theirs, they were going to have to find a way to patch it—tough with only three weeks to end of term.
Sure enough, the first bell rang for seniors—we leave meals at staggered intervals, oldest kids first, and if you think that it’s worse to go first, you’re right—and the two of them gently eased him down slumped onto the table. Ibrahim was sitting at the end of the neighboring table with Yaakov—his best friend here in our goldfish bowl, although they both know they’ll never speak to each other again if they live to get out of it—and one of the seniors turned to them and said something, probably bribing them to stay with their friend to the end. They must have had a time slot down in the gym they couldn’t afford to lose: it was going to be bad enough for them losing a member of their team this close to graduation. Ibrahim and Yaakov traded looks and then nodded and switched tables, taking the gamble. It’s not safe to skive off this close to finals, but lessons aren’t as important as graduation practice.
“Still sorry I took it out?” Orion said to me. His face was unhappy and wrenched, looking at them, although I’d have given any odds you like that he hadn’t even known the boy. No one else was looking anywhere in that direction. You have to ration sympathy and grief in here the way you ration your school supplies, unless you’re a heroic enclaver with a vat of mana.