by Naomi Novik
But Mum really does live in the back of beyond by wizard standards—too far from any enclave to conveniently work for them or trade with them—so I was the only wizard kid I knew, and at the time I tried telling myself that the reason mundanes didn’t like me was they sensed the mana or something. But no. Wizard kids are just kids, and they don’t like me, either.
And all right, as of five days ago, I had Orion, but Orion was too weird to count. I was reasonably sure that my one tried-and-true method of being aggressively rude wasn’t actually how normal people made their friends. But maybe I got to count Aadhya and Liu as friends, now. I wasn’t sure, and what did it mean if I could? It wasn’t accompanied by nearly the warm triumphant glow of achievement I’d always imagined as part of the experience. I suppose I was still waiting for someone to give me the tatty friendship bracelet I’d never got at the Girl Guides. But someone holding out an alliance, offering to watch your back and go out of their way to save your life, that was on such a different scale that I’d obviously missed some intermediate steps.
It got me wondering about Nkoyo, too, while I walked to languages with her and her friends. I didn’t have any doubts about Cora and Jowani: neither of them liked me any more than they ever had. But the very contrast made me think maybe I could at least call Nkoyo friendly, if not a friend. I took my courage in both hands and asked her, as casually as I could manage, as if I didn’t care very much about the answer, “Do you know any groups revising for the Latin final exam?”
“Yeah,” she said, casually for real; as far as I could tell, she didn’t even think about the answer. “Some of us are getting together work period on Thursday in the lab. The ticket is two copies of a decent spell.”
“Would that fire wall I traded with you work?” I said, struggling to match her easy tone, as if of course I was welcome, if I could meet the fee—
“Oh, that’s loads better than you need,” she said. “More like a utility spell. I’m bringing one for restoring papyrus.”
“I’ve got a medieval one for tanning leather,” I said. That was actually a section of a larger spell meant for binding a cursed grimoire that would siphon off a bit of mana from every wizard every time they cast one of the spells inside: a very clever technique for creating a mana-stealer that would go unnoticed. But the leather tanning worked perfectly well on its own, too.
Nkoyo gave a shrug and a nod, sure why not, and we were at the door of the language hall. All four of us took turns putting our homework from yesterday into the marking slot, a thin postbox slit set in the metal wall at the door. We’d timed it quite well: you don’t want to be dropping off your homework when there’s a proper crush of people coming in, because then you can end up boxed in if something jumps out of the slit. You also don’t want to be dropping it off really early, because something’s much more likely to jump out of the slit then. But if you hand something in even ten seconds past the start of the lesson, it’s late, and you’ll get marked down.
Getting marked down in languages means you get assigned remedial work that’s just the same stuff you’ve already done, for days or even weeks sometimes. That might not sound like a punishment, but as we’re all studying languages to learn spells, it’s absolutely brutal. The next time you ask for a spell, you’ll get one that has material you theoretically should be up to, but don’t actually know, and you won’t be able to move on past it until you get through your stupid remedial backlog and finally reach whatever lesson you were at before.
I handed in my Arabic worksheet and then sat down at a booth to open the waiting folder and discover my fate, which turned out to be three Arabic worksheets, along with a vicious quiz in Classical Sanskrit that was labeled as taking twenty minutes but actually needed the entire lesson. I had barely finished enough of the questions to get a pass mark when the warning bell rang. I had to scribble my name on the sheet, pile all my things into my bookbag, and carry it awkwardly with my arm wrapped around it like a basket just to get in the line to stick the quiz into the slot before the final bell. I’d have to get the three worksheets done tonight instead, eating into my mana-building time, which I didn’t have enough of to begin with.
Even that couldn’t wreck my mood, which had been whipsawing so aggressively lately that I was beginning to feel like a yo-yo. I’d got used to my ordinary level of low-grade bitterness and misery, to putting my head down and soldiering on. Being happy threw me off almost as much as being enraged. But I wasn’t in the least bit tempted to refuse when I got to the writing workshop and saw Liu looking around: she had the neighboring desk saved for me. I took myself over and got my bag down between our chairs: with someone on the other side who wouldn’t object, I’d be able to steal a few moments here and there to sort it out.
I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.
I worked on it for the first five minutes before I belatedly thought that I might want to talk to Liu, if we were friends now. “What are you working on?” I asked her, as dull as small talk can get, but at least it had the benefit of an obvious answer.
She glanced sidelong over at me and then said, “I have a song spell passed down from my great-grandmother. I’m trying to write English lyrics for it.”
Translating spells is basically impossible. It’s not even reliably safe to do something like take a Hindi spell, rewrite it in Urdu script, and pass it along to someone else to learn. That would work three times out of four, but the fourth one would really get you. Song-spells are the only exception. But you don’t exactly translate them; it’s more that you write a new spell in the new language, but set to the same music and on the same theme. It’s often harder than writing a new spell from scratch, and most of the time it still doesn’t work, the same way most writing assignments don’t successfully turn into a spell. Sometimes you just get a pale imitation of the original spell. But once in a while, if the new spell is good on its own, you get an almost doubled effect out of it: whatever your new spell does, and a significant part of whatever the original spell did. Those can be really powerful.
But more to the point for me, that was exactly along the lines of the alliance Aadhya had suggested this morning. Liu added, “Do you want to hear?” and held out a tiny music player, the kind with no screen that play for a million hours on a charge. Even so, the only way you can get battery power in here is by hand-cranking, and you could use that kind of work to generate mana instead, so you don’t spend it for nothing. I put in the headphones and listened to the music—no lyrics, which was just as well, since I did not have time to start Mandarin right now. I hummed along with it under my breath, tapping my fingers on my leg to try and beat it into my head. Even wordless, it still had the feel of a spell to it, subtle but building. I don’t know how to describe a spell song as opposed to an ordinary song; the best I can do is that it’s like holding a cup in your hand instead of something solid all the way through. You get a sense that you can put power into it, and how much. This one was deep, a well going far down instead of a cup, something you could drop a coin or a pebble into and hear an echo coming back a long way. I took out the headphones and said to Liu, “Is it a mana amplifier?”
She had been watching me intently. She gave a start and then said, “You can’t have heard it,” which meant it was a family spell they weren’t trading yet; they were probably saving it to exchange for some other piece they’d need to build an enclave of their own.
“I haven’t,” I said. “It just has that feel.”
She nodded a little, her eyes on my face thoughtful.
We walked to history together afterwards and sat next to each
other at the uncomfortable desks. The history classrooms are all scattered round on the cafeteria floor, reasonably high up. The worst part of history is that our assigned textbooks are incredibly boring, and there aren’t booths like in the language labs, so you can hear every single noise everyone else is making, whispers and coughs and farts and the endlessly squeaking desks and chairs. Up at the front there’s always this droning flickery video lecture going on that you have to strain to hear, ninety percent of which is completely useless and doesn’t matter even to our grades except for a few random bits that show up for enormous points on quizzes. All the sections are either before lunch, so you’re starving and it’s hard to focus, or after lunch so you’re ready to fall asleep. I always take before lunch, because it’s safer, but it’s a slog.
Having someone next to me, actually with me, made class at least a hundred times more bearable. We traded off watching the lecture and taking notes in fifteen-minute chunks, and worked on our final papers in between. We’d already exchanged translations of our source materials, and I could see her using the ones I’d given her, so they’d been useful. Liu’s were good, too. I didn’t have to try to think well of her just because she’d maybe put up with me.
Liu takes history in English so she can use it for her language requirement and get more class choice flexibility, so we’ve been in most of the same sections. But we’d almost never sat next to each other before. A couple of times, if she had to get supplies and came a bit late, and it was a choice of me or someone poorly and coughing, or the boy who puts his hand in his pants all class long—he tried sitting next to me once and once only; I stared straight at him with all the murder in my heart and he stopped and took his hand out—she’d take me. But most of the time she’d walk over with whoever she’d sat with in the previous class: there are a dozen other Mandarin-speakers doing English history who were fine letting her sit next to them, even if they got a vague whiff of the malia.
There wasn’t a whiff to be had today. She hadn’t started using it again, I could tell. She still had color, and a shine to her eyes, but it was more than that: she just seemed softer, more pulled-in, a snail mostly tucked into a shell. I wondered if that was an aftereffect or if it was just her: probably her, since that’s what Mum’s meditation spell does. It didn’t really line up with the malia use. Her family might have pushed her to do it: strategically there was good sense to it, and once she’d come in with a basket full of sacrifices, probably all her weight allowance dedicated to that, she’d have been hard-pressed to do anything else.
I didn’t ask her what her new plan was, if she had one. It wasn’t like she’d been openly using malia, and we weren’t allies yet, so that was the kind of question that could cause alarm, particularly coming from the supposed girlfriend of the local maleficer-slaying hero. She might be in a tough position for graduation now, for that matter, if she didn’t go back to it. She wouldn’t have been storing mana along the way if she’d been planning all along to get a big chunk of malia out of her remaining sacrifices.
Which didn’t make her a great choice for me to ally with, but I didn’t actually care. I wanted her, I wanted Aadhya, and not just because I didn’t have another option. I wanted this thing here between us, walking to lunch together after a morning working hard side by side, a small warm feeling that we were on the same team. I didn’t just want them to help me live. I wanted for them to live. “I’d like to,” I said to her abruptly, on the way to the cafeteria. “If you do.” I didn’t need to tell her what I was talking about. I knew she was thinking about it, too.
She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said softly, “I’m pretty behind on mana.”
So I was right: she’d decided not to go back to malia, and now she was reasonably screwed. But—she’d said so. She wasn’t letting us sign on with her under false pretenses. “Me too. But we won’t need as much with that spell of yours, and the phase-control spell,” I said. “I don’t mind if Aadhya doesn’t.”
“I can’t cast the spell yet myself,” Liu said. “My grandmother…My mom and dad are working really hard, they take jobs at enclaves a lot. So my grandmother raised me. She gave me the spell to bring, even though she wasn’t really supposed to. It’s an advanced spell, only a few really strong wizards in our family have got it working. But I thought…if I managed to translate it, maybe it might get easier.”
“If you can’t get a translation working by the end of next quarter, I’ll drop some of my other languages and pick up Mandarin,” I said.
She looked at me. “I know you can sing, but it’s really hard.”
“I’ll be able to cast it,” I said positively. Mana amplification is more or less a prerequisite for any of the monstrous spells I have, even with the loads of power they require to begin with. I’ve never got hold of anything nearly so useful as an incantation that separates out the amplification step enough that I could tease just that piece of the spell away from the bits with all the screaming and death, but the process is happening along the way.
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Then…if Aadhya’s okay, too…”
She didn’t go on. But I nodded, and we just looked at each other for a moment, walking down the corridor, and Liu smiled at me, just a little tentative wobble at the corners of her mouth, and I was smiling back at her. It felt strange on my face.
“Want to work on the history paper after lunch?” I asked. “I have a carrel in the library, in the languages section.”
“Sure,” she said. “But isn’t Orion going with you?” And what she didn’t mean by that was whether Orion was going to be there for her to hang out with; she just meant, was there enough room for all three of us.
“It’s a monster of a desk,” I said. “It’ll be fine, we’ll just grab a folding chair on the way,” but actually after lunch Orion said to me hurriedly, “I’m going downstairs, I’ve still got some stuff to do.”
“Are you saying that because you’ve got some stuff to do, or because you’d rather lurk below than endure even modest amounts of human interaction?” I asked. “Liu’s not going to be a twat around you.” I firmly didn’t offer to ditch her for his sake: we weren’t actually dating.
“No, she’s fine,” Orion said. “I like her, she’s fine. No, I’ve got stuff to do.”
He didn’t sound very convincing, but I wasn’t going to point that out. He didn’t owe me excuses. I shrugged. “Try not to dissolve yourself in acid or anything.”
Liu and I had a great work session: we blazed through almost half our history papers. “I’ve got a group project down in the lab after dinner tonight, but I’d do work period again tomorrow,” she told me as we left. I nodded, aglow with the thought that maybe I’d ask Aadhya or even Nkoyo to come up with me after dinner instead. I had people, in the plural, that I could ask to join me in the library, and even if they said no, they weren’t really saying no, they were only saying not this time. It almost made me happier when Aadhya did cry off when I asked her at lunch, because she said she wanted to do some artifice work in her own room, and I could believe her; it wasn’t just an excuse.
“But stop in before bedtime,” she said. “We could go for a snack bar run, if you’ve got credit,” and Liu and I nodded: we’d all had a chance to think it over, it was time to talk about it, to decide if we were going ahead.
I hugged the feeling to me all through afternoon classes, and I didn’t even let it be spoiled when I saw Magnus and Chloe talking to Orion outside the cafeteria at dinner, asking him to come to the library with the New York crew afterwards. “Bring El,” she was even saying, asking him to serve me up for the next attempt on a silver platter.
“I can’t, I’m—going to the lab,” Orion said.
“The lab, huh?” Magnus said. “Not a room?”
Orion did sound like he was making up an excuse, but Magnus shot a look over at me that made clear what he thought was getting
covered up. Orion just said, obliviously, “Huh? No, not a room,” about as convincing as before.
“Yeah, okay,” Magnus said. “Galadriel going to be in the lab with you?”
“Afraid not,” I said, with a snap: if he was going to be asking about me, I felt every right to intrude on the conversation. “I’m working on a paper.”
“You want to join us in the library, El?” Chloe actually said to me outright. “We’ve got room at our table.” A sure sign of the magnitude of their desperation: enclave kids didn’t ask you to join them. At most they told you that you were welcome, with enormous condescension. Magnus himself looked highly annoyed by the necessity.
“No,” I said. Then I went on into the cafeteria without saying bye to them, and Orion actually left them to catch up to me in the line.
“You can’t tell me that Chloe was trying to get you to suck up, just then,” he said.
“No, it was a pure and generous offer straight from her heart,” I said. “Meant to go straight to mine, too. That crawler last night didn’t go after me randomly.”
“Oh for—right, they’re being nice, so now they’re trying to murder you, for no reason,” Orion said. He had the gall to sound exasperated. “Are you kidding me? You want me to come after all and protect you from the evil schemes of Chloe Rasmussen?”
“I want you to shove your entire head in the mash,” I told him, and vengefully scooped up both of the last two sausages in the steam tray. But I gave him one at the table. It wasn’t his fault he’d grown up in a hive of entitled and murderous weevils.
I was fairly gobsmacked when, after all that, Chloe actually had another go at me in the library: she intercepted me in the reading room on my way into the stacks. “Still not interested,” I told her icily.
“No, El, listen,” she said. I walked away from her and into the incantations aisle, but she actually came in after me and grabbed my arm. “Look, will you quit being a bitch for five seconds?” she hissed, which was rich coming from her, and then she added, “It’s not—don’t go to your carrel.”