A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,113

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 told 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