revealing far more than anyone needed to know about the internals of an argonet. Then Liu gasped and said, “Quick! Quick!” and I realized, right, as soon as the cork disintegrated out of the bottleneck—
Aadhya whirled around and went back to work on the carbonization. Liu stood to one side of the opening, tense, putting her shield spell over the top of the shaft. A few moments later, she gave a yelp of horror: a small flock of shrikes hadn’t waited for the argonet to dissolve all the way: they’d devoured themselves a path through its body. They came flying up the shaft, whacked against Liu’s shield like sparrows flying into a too-clean window, and immediately started pecking at it violently with their iridescent-gleaming beaks.
We couldn’t do anything but keep working. Aadhya yelled, “Ready!” She levitated the crucible to the top of the opening and tipped it over, and as the liquid metal came pouring out, I called out the phase-change spell again and shoved the metal back into a single massive sheet, seamlessly stretched from one edge of the remaining wall to the other.
One shrike just managed to poke a big enough hole in Liu’s shield to wriggle itself through, and it darted through the final gap as I sealed up the wall, leaving a tail feather stuck in the seam. Aadhya was panting for breath, but she started to gasp out a shield spell of her own that would probably have been too late to keep one of us from losing at least a pound of flesh, but the shrike was flying so fast that it didn’t bother to backwing to come at us: instead it kept on going right up the stairs towards the open buffet above, chirping with excitement.
That was a bad choice: brief seconds after it had vanished, while we were gaping after it, still shaking with adrenaline, its fading chirps suddenly broke off in a loud shrilling cry and then stopped. A really awful scraping and rattling noise was coming back in its place, getting louder and louder. Before we could pull ourselves together to do anything, Orion came whipping around the corner, surfing down the stairs on a steam tray, and took all of us out like ninepins.
On the bright side, the new steel wall held up very nicely. It had taken on the faintly soapy feeling of warded artifice: the repair had integrated into the school’s overall protection spells and the damage was fixed. I could say so with great confidence, because my cheek was squashed up against the metal so hard that I could literally feel the shrieks and wails fading away as the rest of the waiting mals got chased back down, and the low gronk-chunk-gronk–noise of some kind of protective mechanism going down below.
“Ow,” Liu said, next to me.
“Yeah,” Aadhya groaned, and flopped off us. She’d had to fling herself in our direction to avoid getting knocked into her own still-hot crucible and burnt to a crisp. She sat up and looked at it in dismay: the right corner had been completely accordioned against the wall. “Oh man.”
“Um, sorry,” Orion said, standing over us. He was clutching the dead shrike in one hand and the badly dented steam tray in the other. He had been on top. “I got here as fast as I could.”
“Lake, one of these days I’m going to kill you,” I said, out of the side of my mouth that wasn’t jammed into the wall.
“So,” Liu said to me, a little tentatively, as we limped up the stairs. Orion was behind us lugging the full-sized crucible—it couldn’t be folded up again—and continuously apologizing to Aadhya, who knew how to milk an advantage and was undoubtedly going to come out of this with more than enough supplies to repair her crucible, as well as the shrike corpse, which Orion had already given to her. The beak would likely go into her sirenspider lute, and I’d already given her the argonet tooth for the tuning pegs. It was going to be monstrously powerful by the time she was done. “Your affinity—”
“Just think about the ‘love me and despair’ version,” I said.
“What?” Liu said.
“ ‘All shall love me and despair,’ ” I said. She was eyeing me very dubiously. “Galadriel? In Lord of the Rings?”
“Is that the movie with the hobbits? I’ve never seen that. Is that where your name is from?”
“Liu, I’m so glad we’re friends,” I said, partly because it felt like a safe opportunity to