by Naomi Novik
If that sounds like a painfully bald invitation to you, well, it did to me, too, but subtlety didn’t seem called for, and indeed it wasn’t. “I’ll help,” he said instantly.
“Great,” I said. “After dinner tonight?” He nodded, and yet again didn’t ask for anything back, helpfully providing more grist for the mill. I felt simultaneously aggravated and magnanimous, so I added, “The rice pud isn’t, by the way,” and he jerked his head round and promptly went after the glutinous maggots waiting in the tray—if you put a spoon in them they’ll go boiling up it and get half your fingers to the bone unless you fling it away quick enough, in which case usually they land on a dozen different students in the line and promptly start eating whatever flesh they land on and dividing into new swarms.
Orion emerged ten minutes after I had made it out with my tray, faint blue-grey smoke following him out and his tray half empty. Everyone else behind him was also coming out with fairly minimal selections, so exterminating the maggots had evidently taken out most of the line. It wouldn’t be refilled until after the last kids from our year went through and the sophomores got their turn. I privately rolled my eyes and put my spare milk carton and second bread roll on his tray when he came over and sat down next to me: the noise and confusion behind me had made it easy to nab extras for once.
Sarah and Alfie had invited me to sit with them at the London enclave table. I wasn’t stupid enough to throw over Liu and Aadhya for them, though, so they’d actually had a quick private word and then had come with me, instead—a massive concession, which meant I was suddenly sitting at a surprisingly powerful table. Nkoyo with Cora and Jowani are networked with a lot of the other West and South African students, and Aadhya has a solid lineup of allies from the artificer track. They’re about as well positioned as you get aside from the actual enclave kids, and now I had pulled in a pair of those.
And then Orion sat down next to me again—Aadhya had carefully left herself enough room on the bench to scoot over quickly as soon as he got close enough for his intentions to be clear—and took things to a completely new level. By far the most obvious explanation to anyone looking on was that I’d thoroughly hooked Orion, and now I was using that to build myself a power base among the people who’d tolerated me on their fringes before, likely with the intention to leverage him to get us all into a major enclave. And London was actively displaying interest. That would have been a magnificent bit of strategy on my hypothetical scheming self’s part.
Chloe and Magnus—from New York—came off the line just a minute later. They had half a dozen of their usual tagalongs surrounding them, and another four holding a prime table and waiting for them, but their plans clearly changed when they saw Orion sitting with me again. They traded a quick whisper and then they came past and took the four end seats still left at our table—two tagalongs went on the outside edge, of course—leaving the rest of their uncertain crew to straggle on to the other table without them.
“Pass the salt, would you, Sarah?” Chloe said, very sweetly, by which she meant die in a fire, we’re not letting London steal Orion, and followed it up by asking me, “Galadriel, are you feeling better? Orion said Jack nearly killed you.”
I couldn’t have asked for better. Except actually what I wanted to do was dump my tray over Orion’s undeserving head, tell off Sarah and Alfie and Chloe and Magnus, and possibly set them all on fire. None of them were here for me. Chloe must have had to ask someone my name. Even Aadhya and Nkoyo and Liu—I was pretty sure they would at least have me at their tables after this; I’d demonstrated to them that when I did get an advantage, I paid my debts, and they were all bright enough to value proven reliability more than almost anything else. But as soon as Orion moved on to greener and less-likely-to-turn-violently-evil pastures, even they would relegate me back to bare tolerance. And the enclavers would make clear that I was dirt under their feet and had been lucky to have a minute when I’d imagined otherwise.
“Doing splendidly, thanks very,” I said, icily. “It’s Chloe, isn’t it? Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met.”
Nkoyo darted a look at me across the table, incredulous—you didn’t snub enclave kids, and we all knew their names—but Orion jerked his head up and said, “Sorry—this is Chloe Rasmussen and Magnus Tebow, they’re from New York,” exactly as if he felt he should introduce me to his friends. “Guys, this is Galadriel.”
“Charmed,” I said.
Alfie evidently took that as an indication that I preferred London to New York, and leaned in smiling. “You live near London, El, don’t you? Any chance we’d know your family?”
“I’m out in the back of beyond,” I said, and left it woodenly right there. They’d have recognized Mum’s name, of course, if I told them. All of them would have. I wanted to trade on her name even less than I wanted to trade on being Orion’s not-girlfriend. Anyone who wanted to be friends with Gwen Higgins’s daughter very much didn’t want to be friends with me.
So instead I spent the meal being rude to some of the most popular and powerful kids in the entire school, ignoring them to discuss the mirror artifice with Aadhya and Orion, and talk Latin with Nkoyo. We’d had a really good spell-trade the other day. I’d given her a copy of the mortal flame spell. That might sound extreme, but it’s not explicitly a spell to conjure mortal flame, it’s a sliding-scale spell to conjure magical fire. Most people love those spells, because virtually anyone can cast them successfully and you just get different results depending on your affinity and how much mana you put into it. Even if you’re a fumbling child, you can use it to light a match, and get better at casting it. Or if you’re me, you can suck the life force out of a dozen kids and then incinerate half the school with you inside it. So helpful!
But for Nkoyo, it would probably be a fantastically useful wall-of-flame spell, and she felt she had to make equal return—I didn’t argue—so she gave me a choice of two in exchange. I picked two minors she had that needed almost no mana at all: a spell for distilling clean water from dirty, so I won’t have to go to the bathroom for water as often, and another that pulls in a bunch of spare electrons from the environment around you to deliver a good heavy electrical shock. As soon as I looked at the first line, I could tell it lined up with my affinity—I imagine it would’ve been very handy for purposes of torture—and it’ll give me some breathing room in a fight, either to run away or to do a major casting.
I’m about the only kid in the school who’d swap major arcana for minor. The division is sort of vague, it’s not actually anything real we learn in class, it’s just what we think of as more or less powerful. You can argue yourself blue about whether one modestly powerful spell is major or minor. And people do! But walls of flame are very decidedly major, and distilling water and mana-cheap electric shock spells are very decidedly minor, so after I picked them, Nkoyo even threw in a few grooming cantrips—hair-plaiting, a bit of glamour, and a deodorant spell, which I suppose was a polite way of hinting that I could stand to wash more often than I do. I didn’t need the hint, I already knew, but if it’s a choice between stinking and survival, I’ll choose to stink. I’ve never had a shower more than once a week in here, and often it’s been longer.
If you’re thinking that’s why I don’t have friends, it’s a bit chicken-and-egg: anyone who doesn’t have enough friends to watch their back can’t afford to be well groomed, and that lets people know you don’t have enough friends to watch your back, which makes them less likely to think you’re a valuable ally. However, none of us spends loads of time showering, and when you want a shower, generally you ask someone who visibly needs one themselves, and it all ends up leveling out. But no one ever asks me. Anyway, I wasn’t sorry to have a few more options for putting myself together, although I don’t dare try that glamour cantrip or I expect I’ll end up with a dozen of the more weak-minded trailing me around with hopeless eyes, whining that they long only to be allowed to serve me.
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br /> We’d both come out of the negotiation satisfied, and agreeing to trade again. But Nkoyo wasn’t in any hurry to piss off London and New York, and neither was Aadhya. When I ignored the others and talked to them instead, they kept darting anxious looks around at the enclave kids. Who themselves pretty clearly didn’t know what to make of me not fawning all over them. Naturally they didn’t like it, but there was Orion sitting next to me with his shaggy head bent over his plate as he shoveled in the extra food I’d given him.
Sarah and Alfie both decided to fall back on being British and posh, which meant talking in a self-deprecating way about how difficult they were finding the work in all their subjects and how hopeless they were, when actually they were both as top-tier as you’d expect given they’d been trained from birth in one of the most powerful enclaves in the world. Meanwhile Chloe decided to play defense and kept trying to have conversations with Orion all about fun things they’d apparently done in New York. He only absently responded between bites.
Magnus didn’t talk at all. He obviously didn’t have nearly as much cultural training in the art of being woodenly polite in the face of someone behaving all wrong, and I’m sure he also didn’t enjoy always being second fiddle in his own social group: if it hadn’t been for Orion, he’d have been prime candidate to dominate our year himself. I did notice him seething, but I was too busy seething myself to care. My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time. I was just starting to deep-breaths-and-center myself back to a state of more rational civility, telling myself I really had to say something polite to each one of the enclavers at the table, when Magnus hit his own limit and leaned in. “So, Galadriel,” he said, “I’m really dying to know—how did you keep the mals out all night?”
He was implying that the way I’d hooked Orion was by finding some shielding spell that let me turn my room into a sanctuary for all-night shagging, which I’d offered up in trade for Orion bestowing the favor of his attentions on me. That was a completely reasonable assumption, of course. Which didn’t endear the remark to me any more, especially as it was loud enough to be overheard at the nearby tables. I got angry all over again, and I looked at him straight-on and hissed—when I’m really angry, it’s a hiss, even if there’re no actual sibilants involved—“We didn’t.”
Which had the power of being perfectly true, but coming out of my mouth conveyed the strong implication that we’d been cavorting with maleficaria. Which I suppose Orion had been doing, in a way, so even that was also true. Everyone instinctively leaned away from me, and Magnus, who’d just received a full-on dose of angry me right between the eyes, actually turned faintly pale.
It was a really lovely meal.
AFTER MY PERFORMANCE at lunch, it was a sure bet that Orion’s enclave pals were going to pull him aside as soon as possible and give him two earfuls about why he needed to stop dating me, which would probably awaken him to the realization that we were dating. Even as irritated as I was, I recognized that my window of opportunity was closing, so as we cleared our trays, I got Aadhya aside and said, “Could we do the silver pour right now, during work time?” I think she mostly agreed because she felt she should humor an obvious lunatic. Orion just said, “Yeah, sure,” with a shrug, so we headed straight downstairs to the shop before anyone from New York could intercept him.
In the middle of the school day, the trip downstairs is loads better. Most kids still try to avoid the workshop this near to end of term, but the stairs and corridors on the way are at least lit up, and we weren’t the only ones when we got there: a trio of seniors at the back had skipped lunch entirely to keep working rather frantically on some kind of weapon they were likely counting on for graduation. We settled on a bench towards the front and Orion came with me to my project locker—I handed him the key and let him open it; that’s always a bad moment—and after nothing whatsoever jumped on us, I took out my mirror frame and we carried the rest of the supplies back to where Aadhya had already got the small gas burner going, a process that normally took me ten minutes each time.
She’d never bestirred herself to show off for me, but Orion’s presence was all the incentive she needed to put on a display, and it became clear she was even better than I’d realized. She wasn’t going to do the actual enchantments, which would’ve required her to invest mana out of her own stockpile, not something you do for just a favor in return, but she’d volunteered to hold the perimeter, which was a tricky bit of the pour. She set up the barrier around the edge, and Orion mixed the silver with comfortable sureness, even while working with an enormous array of painfully hard-to-get and expensive ingredients that I’d spent most of the last few weeks carefully collecting from the supply cabinets in the alchemy labs—roughly as much fun as getting anything from the shop supply—which he handled as if he could just get a jar of moon-grown tansy and a sack of platinum shavings off the shelf anytime he needed. He probably could.
“All right, Orion, please pour it right into the middle, from as high up as you can reach,” Aadhya said, and added to me in lecturing tones, which I swallowed resentfully, “and make sure you don’t tilt the surface more than twenty degrees, El. You want to keep the flow going into the middle, and just gently spiral it out. I’ll tell you when it’s ready for the incantation.”
Forcing an incantation into a physical material—which then preserves the incantation’s magic and makes it ongoing instead of something ephemeral—is the hard part of making artifice for most people, because the physical reality of the stuff resists you trying to muck with it, and you have to put a lot of power behind it. That wasn’t a problem for me, but the devil was in the details. As soon as my spell hit the silver, it was going to start bubbling. And if the silver hardened with the bubbles in it, there wouldn’t be much of a mirror after. I’d have to scrape the frame clean, gather new materials, and try again without all this lovely help. The proper way to do it is to ease the enchantment into the material seamlessly; that’s what good artificers do. But you’ve got to have a sense for how the substances are reacting, and the ability to coax them along. Coaxing anything isn’t my strong suit.
So instead, I was going to be throwing power at the problem—specifically a delightful spell that some Roman maleficer had worked up for crushing an entire pit’s worth of living victims into pulp. He’d obviously had a harder time getting life force out of people than I did. On the other hand, his spell was the best option I had found for creating anything like a pressure chamber. It was a hefty 120 lines of ancient Latin and took an outrageous amount of mana, but I had to make the mirror somehow, and for Aadhya’s benefit, I was determined to make it look absolutely effortless.
When Orion finally got round to dumping me, I wanted to come out of this mess with something more than a school-wide reputation for being a bit of a slapper. Getting Aadhya on board as a core ally would do nicely. She had a big network of friends across the school, an eclectic bunch of Americans, Hindi and Bengali speakers, and fellow artificers, and she’d built that into a still-larger network of people who were glad to work with her, as a trader or an artificer. Last year she’d brokered a big deal between some alchemy-track enclavers and a group of artificers she knew and the kids on the maintenance track: that’s why the ceiling in the big alchemy lab had actually been fixed in less than a year after Orion and the chimaera had pulled it down on our heads. If I showed her that I could be a ticket straight through graduation, and she agreed to ally and talked me up, enough other people would know she wasn’t either a fool or desperate and lying. We’d get invitations to join a bigger team for definite.
As Orion let the stream go, I tilted the mirror in a circling motion, keeping the silver flowing evenly all round. Aadhya held the perimeter really clean and tight, not a single drip running out, and as soon as the last bit of red vanished—I’d painted the surface red to make it easier to see when everything was covered—Aadhya said, “It’s
ready!” I put the mirror back down on the platform, recited the mirror enchantment itself—there went half a crystal just on that—and then I put my hands on either end of the mirror, defining the space between them, and cleared my throat, getting ready to cast the crushing spell.
Which of course is when the clear tinkling noise, like melancholy wind chimes, went off behind me: a sirenspider dropping onto one of the metal benches. The seniors at the back must have seen it coming down: they were already heading out of the door, carrying their project with them. Sensible of them not to warn us. Aadhya sucked in a breath and said, “Oh shit!” as a second clangy burst of wind chimes went off, not in harmony. Two sirenspiders. That was almost absurdly bad luck: normally we didn’t even see sirenspiders the whole second half of the year, after their third or fourth molting; by now they were usually down in the graduation hall, spinning webs and eating the smaller maleficaria, getting ready for the big feast.
I got ready to turn around and change my target—I’d take having to redo the mirror in exchange for not being frozen into paralyzed horror by sirensong and having my blood delicately and slowly sucked out of me—and then Orion grabbed a sledgehammer someone had left on a nearby bench, vaulted over the table behind us, and charged them, because of course he did. Aadhya gave a shriek and dived underneath the table, covering her ears. I just gritted my teeth and dived into my incantation while Orion and the sirenspiders chimed and clanged around behind me like six pipe organs collapsing.
The surface of the mirror shimmered like hot oil, and I crushed it perfectly smooth, not a single break in my chanting even when a large sirenspider leg came flying over my head, slammed into the wall, and bounced off to land on the worktable right next to me, still twitching and chiming broken bits of a song of unearthly horrors et cetera. By the time Orion finished up and staggered back, panting, to ask, “You girls okay?” it was all over, and the silver had solidified without a single bubble into a glossy greenish-black pool, just aching to spit out dark prophecies by the dozen.