by Naomi Novik
Orion was still sitting on the edge of my bed as though he’d been there the whole time, and he didn’t make any move to get up. “What are you doing?” I said irritably.
“What?”
“Did you not hear the warning bell?”
“I’m not leaving you,” he said, as if that were obvious.
I eyed him. “Do you not understand the principle of balance at all?”
“It’s a theory, first of all, and even if it’s true, I’m not going to live by it!”
“You’re one of those,” I said, with heartfelt disgust.
“Yeah, sorry. Do you mind my staying, or should I leave you alone with a gut wound to be attacked all night?” I’d evidently pushed him so far he’d found some sarcasm himself.
“Of course I don’t mind.” It wasn’t going to make things any worse for me, after all. There’s a practical limit on how many maleficaria can come into your room at once, and I was already on the menu as tonight’s special offer. Having Orion around could only help. It’s very roughly the same principle that makes being inside the school during puberty better than being on the outside.
Curfew rang on schedule a few minutes later. Whatever kept the maleficaria from attacking Orion usually, it couldn’t overcome the scent of blood in the water that I was obviously giving off, not to mention the temptation of two students doubled up in a cell. There was a squabble outside the door over Jack’s body to start off the festivities, a sound of things wrestling and gnawing horribly. Orion stood there in the middle of the room with his hands flexing restlessly, listening to them.
“Why are you wasting energy? Just lie down until they come in,” I muttered.
“I’m fine.”
The noises outside finally stopped. The first rattle of my door came shortly after. Then a glistening black ooze began to seep under the door, thick as tar. Orion let it come halfway through and then framed it with his hands held up, making a diamond-shaped opening between them. He chanted a one-line water-spout spell in French and then blew a whistling breath through his hands. A torrent of water gushed out the other side, firehose-strong, and dissolved the ooze into a thin slick that ran along the cracks between the floor tiles and slurped down the round drain in the middle of the cell floor.
“If you’d frozen it, you could have blocked the opening,” I said after a moment.
He threw an annoyed look at me, but before he could answer, there was a sudden hard vacuum-popping sensation in my ears: something big had come through the air vent. He jumped in front of my bed and threw a shielding spell over us just in time as an honest-to-goodness incarnated flame erupted at the dark end of the room, inches away from the void. It bashed my desk out of the way and started lashing blows at us with a huge thrashing whip-coil tentacle of fire that splashed gouts of flame over the surface of the shield.
I grabbed Orion’s arm as he swiped a streak of dust off the top of my headboard, about to use a dust-devil spell. He yelled at me, “I’m going to kill you myself at this rate!”
“Shut up, this is actually important! You can’t smother it, you have to burn it hotter to burn it out.”
“You’ve seen one of these before?”
“I’ve got a summoning spell that raises a dozen of them,” I said. “It was used to burn down the Library of Alexandria.”
“Why would you ask for a spell like that!”
“What I asked for was a spell to light my room, you twat, that’s what I got.” To be fair, the incarnate flame was in fact doing a magnificent job of lighting the room. My room went double-height after the sophomore-year reshuffle—at term-end the school gets rid of any rooms that aren’t being used anymore—and I hadn’t seen the upper corners of the wall above my bed since. A whole bunch of agglo grubs up there were humping around in blind circles trying to get away from the light and getting vaporized in flaring-blue pops by the vermin stripe I’d tacked on the wall as high as I could previously see. “Do you want to keep arguing with me until it smashes through?”
He actually snarled wordlessly and then hit the incarnate with a magnificent incineration spell, barely four words long—all his spells seemed to be like that, ideal for combat—and it shrieked and went up into a towering pillar of flame that burnt out along with the spell. He sat back down on my bed breathing in hard gulps, but there was almost a static-electricity crackle coming off his skin: he was bursting with mana.
He didn’t break a sweat killing the next five things that made it in, including a disembodied wight that floated through the opening he hadn’t blocked under the door and a horde of little squeaking fleshy things like naked mole rats that appeared from under the bed apparently hoping to nibble us to death. He was almost glowing by the time he disposed of the last ones.
“If you have more mana than you can handle, you could put some in my crystals,” I said, as a way of fighting the urge to just claw his and my own faces off with envy.
He did actually pick up the half-empty crystal dangling from my bed, gave it a double-take, then stared at the one I was wearing. “Wait—I thought—what enclave are you from?”
“I’m not in any enclave.”
“Then how did you get your hands on Radiant Mind crystals? You’ve got two.”
I compressed my lips, regretting I’d got us on this conversational road. Mum will give her crystals to other wizards sometimes, if she gets a good feeling from them, and since Mum’s judgment on that sort of thing is fairly unerring, her crystals have developed a bit of a side reputation, out of proportion to the mana they can hold. “I’ve got fifty,” I said shortly. The crystals were what I packed instead of more clothes, supplies, tools; anything I could live without. “They’re my mum’s.”
He gaped at me. “Gwen Higgins is your mother?”
“Yes, and I don’t mind the massive incredulity at all, really, it’s why I make a point of telling everyone.” Mum is classic English rose, small and pink and blond and going gently plump in middle age. Dad—Mum’s got one photo of him that his mum gave her, from before he went to school—was six feet tall already even at fourteen, gangly with coal-black hair and serious dark eyes and a nose with just a bit of an interesting hook. She tells me earnestly all the time how wonderful it is I take after him so strongly, because she gets to still see him in me. From my perspective, it meant no one ever realized I belonged to her unless they were told. Once someone visiting our yurt spent a solid hour hinting that I might go away and stop pestering the great spiritual healer, as if I didn’t live there.
But that wasn’t why Orion was incredulous. Wizards tend to mix a lot more, since we all get jumbled in here together during our formative years, and the distinction that matters is between the enclavers and the rest of us have-nots. Orion was just shocked that the great spiritual healer had produced creepy proto-maleficer me, exactly the way everyone else in here would be, which is why in fact I make a point of not telling anyone.
“Oh,” Orion said awkwardly, and then jumped and reflexively blasted a shadow-thing that didn’t even have a chance to take enough form for me to recognize which variety it was. But he really did put some mana into my crystal afterwards, possibly as some sort of apology, or just because he was about to come apart at the seams: he filled it the rest of the way in a single go and gave a small gasp of relief after. I restrained my feelings and put it into my chest with the others and fished out a new empty one.
I managed to sleep a bit, towards the end of the night. Either the maleficaria had got discouraged, or Orion had exterminated all of the ones in range of my room; there were half-hour stretches where nothing came in. He also filled two more crystals for me. I gave him one of them, grudgingly. I’d started to feel irritatingly guilty about it, even though he hadn’t asked for anything in return like a normal person would have.
* * *
I WOKE UP the last time to my alarm going off. It was morning
, and we weren’t dead. Orion hadn’t slept at all, and he was looking faded; I gritted my teeth and then painfully shuffled myself upright and out of the way. “Lie down, I’ll fix it,” I told him.
“Fix what?” he said, and yawned massively.
“That,” I said. You can’t actually replace sleep, but my mum’s got a technique she uses on really bad insomniacs to get their third eye to close—yes, well, it’s not scientific or anything—and it usually makes them feel better. I can’t do most of my mum’s spells very well, but this one’s simple enough that I can manage it. He lay down on my bed and I had him hold the crystal I’d given him, then I put my hands over his eyes and my thumbs between his eyebrows and chanted her “inner eye lullabye” seven times over him. It worked, the way all Mum’s ridiculous stuff works. He fell asleep instantly.
I let him keep sleeping for the twenty minutes until the breakfast bell rang, and he sat up looking at least five hours better. “Help me up,” I said. There’s no such thing as a sick day in here. Staying in the residential halls all day just means that whatever things are making their way up from below for the nighttime feasting get a midday snack. No one stays in unless they’re all but dead anyway. We catch endless colds and flu, as you might imagine. There’re more than four thousand of us in here, and the incoming freshmen bring along a delightful assortment of viruses and infectious diseases from around the world at the start of every year. And even after those have made the rounds, new things crop up inexplicably. Possibly they’re just smaller maleficaria; isn’t that a lovely thought.
As I was in fact exhausted and overwhelmed, I wasn’t calculating the effect of me and Orion coming out of my room together looking exhausted and overwhelmed. But a couple of other kids who had also slept in until the bell came out the same time we did, and naturally it was everywhere by the time we arrived at the cafeteria. The scale of the gossip reached such elevated levels that one of the girls from the New York enclave dragged Orion aside after breakfast to demand to know what he was thinking.
“Orion, she’s a maleficer,” I overheard her saying. “Jack Westing disappeared last night, people found bits of his shoes outside her door. She probably killed him.”
“I killed him, Chloe,” Orion said. “He was the maleficer. He killed Luisa.”
That news distracted her enough for her to abandon her lecture on his terrible dating choices, so by the end of the day Orion was the only person in the school who didn’t know we were now unquestionably an item, and for that matter an insane, spending-the-night-together item. It was almost entertaining to see the effects. The New York enclave kids all got immediately anxious: I saw the ones from our year taking time during lunch to go and tell the seniors about it, and meanwhile enough kids from the London enclave began saying nice things to me that it became clear there was a concerted effort under way on their side.
The point being, of course, if Orion was really sold on me, I had just become a chance to poach him. And I’d previously made clear to the London crowd that I’d be interested in an invitation. Not asking openly, of course, since I didn’t want the scornful rejection that would have ensued, but I’d told people my mum lived nearish London, and mentioned I was thinking of applying to the enclave myself. Just enough to plant a seed for the future, once graduation started looming and I’d demonstrated some firepower. People are always more likely to make an offer if they think it’s going to be accepted.
Of course, it was absolutely ridiculous for anyone involved to start either panicking or courting me over a junior-year relationship of two days’ supposed standing, but that was the degree of everyone’s idiocy over Orion for you. I would have been more amused if it weren’t a repeated reminder of how little anyone valued me for my own sake. And if I didn’t still have a barely healed gut wound, which soured my mood considerably.
I didn’t let it stop me from taking advantage of everyone offering me good seats and minor bits of help all day. I needed every one to get through. I’d managed to get a bit ahead of my work over the course of the term, meaning to use the banked time to review for my final exams, but instead I had to blow it all just resting quietly while everyone else made themselves slightly more appealing targets around me. I didn’t even try to get any classwork done; I just saved my energy, and that night I spent some power out of my crystal on some very heavy-duty shielding before I fell into bed and slept the sleep of those with the Aegis Ward on their door.
The next morning, the healing patch fell off, leaving me with a very faint scar, a lingering ache, and several calculated thoughts about my looming deadline in shop class. If you don’t complete a shop assignment on time, your unfinished work will animate on the due date and come after you with whatever power you’ve put into it. And if you try and get around that by not putting anything into it, or doing it wrong, the raw materials you should have used will all animate separately and come at you. It’s quite a solid teaching technique. We get a new assignment every six weeks. My final one this year was a choice of either a mesmeric orb that could be used to turn a group of people into a frenzied mob who’d tear each other apart, or a really lovely clockwork worm that would wriggle into someone’s imagination and dredge up their worst nightmares one after another every night until they went mad, or a magic mirror that would give you advice and glimpses of the possible future.
If you can guess the sort of advice the mirror would offer me, well, so could I. Also, the mirror was at least ten times more complicated to make than the other two. But if I made one of the others, they’d end up getting used for definite. If not by me, by someone else.
I had already forged the frame in plain iron, and made the backing plate that the enchanted silver would go on. But it was a fair bet that the silver pour would go completely wrong the first dozen times I tried it. That was going to involve alchemy and incantation on top of the artifice, and whenever you try and cross two or more of the disciplines, it’s loads more difficult, unless of course you can get a specialist from each discipline to help you. Which I couldn’t.
Except today, Aadhya voluntarily walked down to the shop with me from breakfast, and took the seat next to me at one of the long benches. “I’m too tired to get anything done today, but I can’t afford to fall behind on this one,” I told her, and showed her my assignment.
“Ouf. That’s the one you went with?” she said. “Magic mirrors are for artificer-track seniors.”
“The others I got were worse,” I said, not specifying how. I could have whipped up that frenzy orb in one session with a handful of broken glass. Oh, I’d probably also have needed the life’s blood of one of my fellow students, but who’s being picky? “What are you working on?”
Her assignment was a personal shield holder—that’s an amulet you put round your neck or bind onto your wrist. You cast a shield through it, and then you can cast other things with both hands instead of holding the shield up with one. Enormously useful, and relatively quick work; looking at her workbox, I could see she was making half a dozen of them, the spares of which she’d undoubtedly trade to maximum effect. Of course, she was specializing in artifice, but even so.
She looked at me narrowly and said, “The pour would go a lot easier with an artificer and an alchemist.”
“I hate to ask anyone for help,” I said. That was certainly true. “It’s not three weeks to the end of term, everyone’s busy.”
“I could maybe spare a bit of time, if you found an alchemist,” Aadhya said, of course thinking of having a chance to work with Orion. “If you’d be willing to let me use it.”
“Anytime you like,” I said. That was a magnificent deal, and in fact I’d probably have to find some other way to compensate her, or have her angry with me, as she almost certainly wouldn’t like using the mirror after the first go, unless it came out as the kind of mirror that encouraged you to think all your plans were the most brilliant and you were dazzlingly clever and be
autiful all the way until you walked yourself into total ruin.
Of course, that still left me to ask Orion for help, which I grudgingly did at lunchtime. I thought I’d best take advantage of my brief window of opportunity before he finally worked out that we were supposedly dating and started avoiding me instead of pulling his continuing white-knight routine: he’d checked in on me at every meal yesterday in a muttering way, and he’d allowed himself to be pulled into a table with me by Aadhya and Ibrahim in turn. It was massively irritating, to the point that I almost let Ibrahim pester him all during dinner—it was nonstop “I still can’t believe you killed a soul-eater all by yourself,” and “Do you like silver or gold better as an agonist? I’d really appreciate your advice,” et cetera—except the hero-worshipping was even more irritating, so I finally snapped and told Ibrahim to shut it and stop behaving like a celebrity stalker, or find another place to sit. He did shut it, and looked embarrassed, and also tried to glare at me, but I just stared back and I’m fairly sure he got the strong sense that a monstrous and terrible fate awaited any who stirred my wrath. He flinched and pretended he’d actually just been staring into space past me.
Anyway, at lunchtime I made sure to touch my abdomen with a visible wince as I queued up in the cafeteria, and sure enough Orion pushed in—if you can call it that when the girls behind me immediately let him do it, all brightly, “Go ahead, Orion, it’s fine!” when he asked them—and said to me, “You all right?”
“Improving, now,” I said, which was true and would also stand in for flirtation, for the avid eavesdroppers. “I’ve fallen behind in shop class, though. Aadhya said she’d help me, but we need an alchemist, too—it’s a three-discipline project.”