by Naomi Novik
“I don’t want it,” she added. “But we also don’t want to let you buy your lives with ours. That’s what I hear seniors saying. Not, let’s rip open the school, but why don’t we make you, your class, graduate with us. Your class are the ones Orion has saved the most.” Chloe flinched visibly, and a lot of the other kids at our table tensed. “So? Are you all willing to do that, graduate early, to save the poor little freshmen? If not, you can stop”—she waved a hand in a spiraling circle, making a gesture of drama—“about how evil we are because we don’t want to die. It doesn’t help anyone. We know what we have to do, if we don’t want to pay it back with blood. We have to pay it back with work.”
Clarita turned back to Orion. “There’re more than four thousand of us in here right now. Ten times more wizards than built the Scholomance in the first place. We’ve got a little more than a week. All of us put in work, build all the mana we can, and you go down into the graduation hall and use it to fix the scouring machinery down there. And that will clear the hall before we graduate, enough that our class doesn’t all have to die. Because we’ll have paid back the debt together.” She had to raise her voice to finish: a wild babbling of conversation had erupted throughout the entire room.
Her plan certainly had a nice sound to it. If you put aside the challenge of getting to the cleansing equipment downstairs, the challenge of repairing it wasn’t insurmountable at all. We wouldn’t have to invent anything new. The detailed blueprints for the whole school that are on display everywhere include the engines that generate the walls of mortal flame for cleansing. The best artificers would be easily good enough to create replacement parts, and the best maintenance-track kids would be easily good enough to install them.
You could really hear in the changing pitch of voices in the room that everyone was beginning to get excited about the idea. If we did get the cleansing fires running in the graduation hall, it wouldn’t just be the seniors this year who saw the benefits. There would be fewer mals in the school for years, and the cleansing might run again for our graduation, and the sophomores, too.
Unfortunately, you can’t, in fact, put aside the challenge of getting to the equipment. It broke for the first time back in 1886. The first repair crew—the original idea the enclaves had for school maintenance was that paid crews of grown wizards would pop in through the graduation gates every so often and come up, ha ha—anyway, the first crew sent in didn’t come back out again and also didn’t repair a thing. The second and much larger crew did manage to get the equipment repaired, but only two of them made it back out, with quite the alarming tale to tell. By then, the graduation hall was already home to our senior resident maw-mouths and several hundred exceptional horrors—the kind smart enough to realize that once they wriggled in through the gates, they could just lie around the hall and wait for an annual feast of tender young wizardlings. And the cleansing failed again in 1888. There were wards protecting the machinery, but somehow the mals kept getting through. They didn’t have anything to do all year but sit around down there bashing on things, I suppose.
There were enough recriminations flying among the enclaves by then that Sir Alfred himself personally led in a large crew of heroic volunteers to install what he insisted would be a permanent repair. He was the Dominus of Manchester—he’d won the position for having built the school—and was generally agreed to be the most powerful wizard alive at the time. He was last seen going screaming into Patience or possibly Fortitude—witness accounts differ about which side of the gate the maw-mouth in question was on—along with about half of his crew. His “permanent” repair got dismantled again three years later.
There were a few more attempts by groups of desperate parents with graduating children, but they all just ended up with the parents dead and no repairs done. Manchester was in chaos with its Dominus and several of its council dead, enclavers all over the world were howling. People were talking about abandoning the school entirely, except then they’d be back to where they began, with more than half their children dying. In the midst of that, London enclave more or less organized a coup, took the Scholomance over, then doubled the number of seats—the dorm rooms became significantly smaller—and opened the place up to independent students. Rather in the same spirit as the seniors who wanted to bring our class along for graduation.
And it worked splendidly. The enclaver kids do make it out alive almost all of the time—their survival rate usually hovers around eighty percent, a substantial improvement over the forty percent chance they’ve got if they stay home. There are so many weaker and less protected wizards around them, and even in the graduation hall, the mals can’t catch all the salmon swimming upstream. And that’s the best solution that all the most powerful and brilliant wizards of the last century and more have been able to come up with. Not a one of them has tried to repair the scouring machinery since.
But every excited and happy and pleased face in the room, everyone looking admiringly at Clarita, the genius who’d come up with this plan, wasn’t questioning for a single moment the idea that Orion was theirs to put on the hook to somehow make it happen. Not even Orion himself, who I could see was about to nod to her as his own surprise cleared out.
I shoved my chair back with a deliberate scrape and stood up before he could do it. “Were you planning to ask nicely at some point?” I said loudly. Clarita and Orion both jerked round to stare at me. “Sorry, just wondering whether a please might ever enter into this brilliant idea of yours that depends completely on Lake here serving himself up in all our places. He’s saved six hundred lives, so now he’s meant to save more to make up for it? Can anyone here tell me even one time that he’s ever had any reward for saving any of us?” I swept a look around the room that was furious enough that the handful of kids who made the mistake of looking me back in the face all flinched and dropped their eyes. “He’s never asked me for a thing, and I’m up to eleven by now. But right, he’s to go down to the graduation hall, all on his own, and fix the cleansing machinery. One hand for the work, and the other to fight off the mals, I suppose? It seems a little awkward. How exactly is he meant to do the repairs anyway? He’s not artificer track, he hasn’t so much as done a single maintenance shift.”
“We’ll build him a golem—” Clarita started.
“Right, a golem,” I said with contempt. “Because the powers that be never thought of trying that, surely. Don’t even open your mouth in my direction, you overgrown lemming,” I snapped at Orion, who glared back, having in fact been just about to open his mouth. “No one is going to survive going in there alone, not even you, and a golem isn’t going to get it sorted before you’re overrun. That’s not heroism, it’s just suicide. And after you’re dead, we’ll all be back here—only once you’re gone, the seniors will be in a rather better position to decide for the rest of us what we’re doing about it,” which sent a low murmur going round.
Clarita had her thin mouth pressed even thinner. Yes, that particular angle had absolutely been in her head, and she hadn’t liked me dragging it out into the open. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “If he needs help, we could have a lottery of people whose lives he’s saved to go in with him. Maybe you should go, since you’re up to eleven.”
“I can do it on my own,” Orion put in, unhelpfully. “I can hold the mals off a golem.”
“It’d fall apart before you get halfway across the hall. And that’s right, I’ll go,” I added to Clarita, who frowned; she’d obviously been looking to make me back off. “But we’re not going down there alone just to get eaten for our trouble, and we’re not having any lottery, either. If this is meant to work, it’s got to be seniors going, and the best seniors at that. And then we really have got a chance to do the repair, if we have Orion keeping the mals off, and the whole school’s mana behind us.”
I don’t actually know whether Clarita had even meant her proposal as anything other than a clever hail-Mary attempt t
hat would at worst get rid of Orion. But hope is good strong drink, especially when you can get someone else to buy it for you. A bunch of the seniors from the Berlin enclave were whispering urgently among themselves; when I finished, one of them stood up on the bench at their table and said loudly in English, “Berlin will guarantee a place to anyone who goes with Orion!” He looked over at the Edinburgh and Lisbon tables, near theirs. “Will any other enclaves make the same promise?”
The question went racing around the room, being translated into a few dozen languages as it went, senior enclavers quickly huddling together to discuss, and one after another someone from almost every enclave stood up to sign on. Which changed the equation rather dramatically. The top students had all spent their Scholomance careers trying to make exactly that deal with the enclavers: their help fighting mals on the way out, in exchange for a home on the other side of the gates. And most of them hadn’t got guaranteed spots for their trouble. The top three, yes, but the rabble below that were having to content themselves with alliances and hope, unless they’d tried for guaranteed places at small enclaves, and even that would only have been available to the top ten students. That was why the competition for valedictorian was so savage.
And meanwhile the maintenance-track kids had all made a different kind of deal: the best of them would likely get homes, but they’d done loads of scut work already, and they’d be doing it for the rest of their lives. It was really their kids who’d get to be enclavers, not them. An offer like this meant a chance for them, a chance they’d given up on in freshman year.
Anyone could have told you which seniors were thinking about it and what enclave they wanted to live in, just by watching which table their heads turned to watch. There were a lot of them. Clarita herself was looking narrowly, not at the New York table, where one of the senior girls had stood up to announce that they were in, but at the table on the fringes where Todd was still sitting with his pathetic entourage of freshmen.
* * *
ALL OF US GO into the last week of school—hell week has a whole new meaning in here—with fairly detailed plans, even if we’re not graduating. Aside from final exams and papers and projects, and the increasingly excited maleficaria, all of whom are reaching their peak, it’s also the most active trading time. The seniors are all selling off every last thing they own that they aren’t using to get out of the graduation hall; everyone else is selling off things they don’t need anymore, or that they can replace with something better from a departing graduate. Everyone who can afford to stockpile goods or mana for the end-of-year trading is running around in a frenzy making substantial deals; everyone who can’t is also running around in a frenzy trying desperately to find any opportunity they can to at least make small ones.
I’d been looking forward to a bit of success, for once. Aside from the auction Aadhya was going to run for me, I’d already traded some mercury to an alchemy-track sophomore in exchange for his half-burnt blanket, since he’d got a replacement from a senior in return for a tiny vial with three drops of a vitality potion. I’d be able to unravel it and crochet myself a desperately needed new shirt while I was building mana.
Which might sound like a ridiculous thing to be worrying about at this time of year even under more normal circumstances, when every hour brings a new maleficaria eruption, sometimes literally, like the shrieker blooms that came bursting out of all the sinks in the nearest girls’ bathroom on Friday morning. But any other time of year, a new shirt would cost me six snack bar tokens, assuming I could get one at all instead of having to sacrifice half my own blanket and sleep partly uncovered, which at best guarantees you the same lacerating ekkini bites the poor or rather lucky sophomore had in a wide band above the top of his fraying and stained tube socks, and at worst gets you stung by a numbing scorpion and eaten alive. If you don’t do well enough in the end-of-year trading, you’re getting yourself into a potentially fatal hole.
Of course, now I was instead in the midst of planning to get myself into a much more potentially fatal hole, namely the graduation hall. The bright side—no, sorry, the side with a very faint hint of phosphorescence—was that I wasn’t going to have to sit a single exam. I’d already done with shop, and Liu had offered to wrap up my history paper for me; Chloe had organized a dozen alchemy-track kids to finish my and Orion’s final lab assignments, and that otherwise useless trombone Magnus had commanded people to take our maths and language exams for us. The school will come after you if the work doesn’t get done, but it doesn’t care in the slightest if you cheat. I didn’t even go to any of my last classes on Friday, except to stop by Maleficaria Studies, in possibly a morbid spirit, and stare at the giant mural of the graduation hall. The one relief it gave me was that at least I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the maw-mouths this time. The machinery was all the way at the opposite end of the hall from the gates.
I spent the rest of the day making arrangements instead. “I will get the book chest done for you, I promise, soon as we’re done with this nonsense, which isn’t nearly as important as you are,” I told the sutras, stroking the cover in apology, before handing them over to Aadhya: she was going to be booksitting for me. “I just have to help save everyone’s lives, that’s all.” Possibly a bit over the top, but better safe than sorry. The book had kept itself out of circulation for more than a thousand years, with probably dozens of enclave librarians and hundreds of independent wizards fishing for at least some of the spells in it. It was still almost unbelievable that I’d got it at all, and now that I’d actually used the phase-control spell, I was even more desperate to get on with translating the rest of it. “Aadhya’s going to look after you so well. I promise.”
“I will,” Aadhya said, accepting it carefully with both hands. “Absolutely nothing’s going to happen to the book while you’re gone. I’ll do some work on the spine of the case, make sure it’s sanded down just right to fit.” She went through a big show of putting a folded strip of silk against the back of the sutras, tucking the engraved purpleheart against that, and wrapping the whole thing back up in the satchel that I’d just taken it out of, before putting it under her pillow. She rested a hand on it and said without looking at me, “El, you know there are a lot of seniors who are willing to take a shot now that the enclaves are putting up guaranteed spots.”
It was something between an offer and a request. I wasn’t just me anymore. I was El, in alliance with Aadhya and Liu, our names in a line on the wall next to the nearest bathroom, underneath the lamp. That wasn’t a little thing. It was everything, and everything to me. And if I went down to the graduation hall and didn’t come back out, I was binning our alliance along with myself. So Aadhya had a right to push, to say that maybe I shouldn’t be taking the chance, not just with myself but them.
But I wasn’t just taking a jaunt down there for my own amusement. I’d got myself into this making a play for all our lives, and in some sense, being in alliance with me meant that they were supposed to back me, arguably to the point of coming along themselves. On graduation day, at best you have fifteen minutes between the first step into the hall and last step out the gates. You don’t sign on with someone if you aren’t willing to swerve when they yell, “Go left!” By saying anything, Aadhya was practically inviting me to ask her and Liu to come.
I hugged my knees to myself on the bed. I wanted to take the excuse, badly, and bail myself out. There was even some tiny whimpering selfish part of me that would desperately have liked to take Aadhya up on the other side of her offer. Of course I wanted her and Liu at my back, not a bunch of seniors I didn’t know, who had an excellent strategic reason to ditch me if things went badly. But I wasn’t going to put them on this line with me. I was reasonably certain I wasn’t coming back, and neither was anyone else. Ten, maybe fifteen kids, jumping into the graduation hall alone to fix the machinery? One in a hundred odds, at best. Better to have stayed in Wales, after all.
So I to
ld Aadhya, “I can’t let Orion go it alone with all the worst piranhas of the senior class. Someone’s got to watch his back for him. They’ll let him save their skins, and then they’ll cut him off the yanker and leave him down there so he does have to graduate with them. He won’t be paying attention to anything but the mals.”
I suppose the seniors really might have tried something like that. But I wasn’t really worrying about that possibility. If we actually got the machinery fixed, the seniors would probably garland Orion with laurel: they’d all be graduating through a cleansed hall, with guaranteed enclave spots. But it was plausible enough to serve as an excuse, an excuse for me to go, and her and Liu to stay behind.
And I had to go. Because Orion was going, and I couldn’t do anything about that. He’d have gone down without even a golem, the git. The only thing I could do for him, which Clarita had helpfully spelled out, was go along and give him a fighting chance. He had one now because we were going with a dozen seniors, and top seniors at that, who actually could do the repair work. And I’d only got that for him by throwing myself on the line.
I wasn’t the shining hero of the school. And yeah, everyone thought I was dating Orion, but they didn’t think I was in love with him. They thought I was using him, and clever me for doing it. People expected the worst of me, not the best; when I’d volunteered to go along, I’d made it seem like something that wasn’t completely effing insane. In their heads, if I was going, it was because I’d made the cold hard decision it was a good bet, at least for a loser girl with no prospect of getting into an enclave if she lost Orion.