A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,102
period tomorrow,” I said. We packed up a huge sack of soot, which is one ingredient not at all in short supply around here, and headed back upstairs.
But as soon as we got into the stairwell, we heard voices coming from below. It made even less sense for anyone to be down there in the middle of the day after yesterday’s festivities. Orion paused and turned down the stairs, going quietly, and when I followed him, everyone else did, too, even Chloe, who threw a half-desperate look at the stairs going sensibly up, but wasn’t going to go it on her own.
Footsteps started coming back upstairs towards us as we reached the senior dorm level. I grabbed Orion and pulled him off the landing; everyone followed. We all huddled in the dark of the res hall corridor as three seniors went past going up: kids I didn’t know at all, talking in low voices, “…one really good hit to those repairs,” floating out to us as they went. We didn’t really need to hear any more of the conversation.
“Or, hey, I just had an idea, we could fix the wall right now,” Aadhya said, as soon as their steps faded out of earshot.
“Yes. Now would be good,” Ibrahim agreed, hushed, as we all nodded. “Now is an excellent time.”
“You guys can take some extra mana from the pool, to do makeup work for missing class,” Chloe even volunteered.
We went down to the bottom of the stairs and started in on the work. We could see where the seniors had picked at a few of Orion’s patches already, testing them. Even without help, there were a bunch of visible strain lines and bulging deformations in the walls, like something had been pounding on them from the other side.
Aadhya fired up the crucible, got a handful of soot, and I started in on the outer wall: iron into the crucible, steel back out. I hadn’t lost the rhythm; the change rolled along just as easily as in the shop. I just kept going and was about halfway along the wall when Aadhya said, “I’m sorry, I need a break,” and I looked round to see that she was almost sagging. She put down the crucible and dusted her hands off the bag of soot, then sat down hard on the next-to-last step with a whoof of breath.
“I wouldn’t say no,” I said, and sat down next to her, although I felt fine, myself, except for being thirsty. Liu offered us a drink from her water bottle, and I could’ve finished the whole thing alone. Even my gut wasn’t hurting very much anymore. It occurred to me that I might have helped the healing along by pushing it a little yesterday: Mum’s healing spells tend to work with your own body, so if you do something that gets your own system doing things like sending over more white blood cells and building replacement muscle, the magic picks up, too. It had been only a little more than a week, so the flax patch was definitely still working in me.
The new wall panels looked starkly different next to the old ones, bright with the wavy patterns stretching all over: actually pretty. But Chloe was frowning at them from where she was sitting on the stairs next to Ibrahim. Orion was going back and forth restlessly, up the stairs and back, running a hand over the surface of the remaining old bulged wall panels, peering at the joins. Chloe looked over at him and then at me and Aadhya, a puzzled expression starting, and I thought she was about to say something, but then instead she turned and looked up the stairs and then said urgently, “Guys, I think they’re coming back.”
We all stood up. The footsteps above slowed down as whoever it was realized in their turn that someone was down here. When they finally came around the corner, it was in a tight knot ready to fight: two tall boys in the back with both hands poised and ready to cast incantations, a girl and a boy in the front crouching slightly, each with shield holders on their outside wrists, and another girl in the sheltered middle position holding the hilt of a fire whip. Those are horribly versatile because they have kinetic power on top of flame. If you’re good, you can wrap it around things and burn them off, or whip the end back and forth and knock mals—or