A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,111
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 that 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