A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,130

if you get alone with them they let it out,” Aadhya said. We both shrieked with laughter, and she laughed, too. “I know, right? But she did it on purpose, she told me to pretend that was true, the whole time I was in here, because it would be true, if I let a boy get me pregnant.”

Liu gave a shiver all over and wrapped her arms around her knees. “My mother got me an IUD.”

“I tried one. I got massive cramps,” Aadhya said grimly.

I swallowed. I hadn’t bothered; it had seemed the least likely of my many worries. “My mum was almost three months gone with me at graduation.”

“Oh my God,” Aadhya said. “She must have freaked.”

“My dad died getting her out,” I said softly, and Liu reached out and squeezed my hand. My throat was tight. It was the first time I’d ever told anyone.

We sat quiet for a bit, and then Aadhya said, “I guess that means you’ll be the only person ever to graduate twice,” and we all laughed again. It didn’t feel like tempting fate, just then, to talk about graduating like something that was going to happen.

I lay back down to rest until dinnertime, half drowsing while we talked about plans for the first quarter, how much mana we thought we could build. As Liu scribbled down budget numbers, I couldn’t help but think wistfully of the power-sharer; I rubbed my fingers around my wrist where it had been. I almost couldn’t blame Chloe, anyone from New York. All that mana just flowing at your fingertips, so much you couldn’t see the end of it. I hadn’t been able to feel the work behind it. It had felt as free as air. I’d had it for only a few hours and I already missed it.

I kept almost falling asleep again and then rousing back up. I wasn’t sure why; Aadhya and Liu would have understood, and even watched over me and woken me up for dinner. “We should think about what else we could use, and anyone else we might want to recruit,” Aadhya said. “I might be able to finish the lute early enough to make some more things first quarter. We should go through each other’s spell lists, too.”

Liu said softly, “There’s one more thing I have,” and then she got up and went out the door, and I realized abruptly with strong indignation that the reason I kept starting up was that I was waiting for another knock. I glared at the door. And a few minutes later there was another knock, but it was just Liu coming back with a small box in her hands. She sat down on the floor with crossed legs around it and opened the lid and brought out a little white mouse. It wriggled its nose and squirmed around over her fingers, but didn’t make a dash for it.

“You have a familiar!” Aadhya said. “Oh my gosh, it’s so cute.”

“He’s not a familiar,” Liu said. “Or he wasn’t. I’m just starting to…I have ten of them.” She didn’t meet our eyes: it was an all but open admission she’d been going for the very unofficial maleficer track. Nobody brings in ten mice and feeds them out of their supplies for any other reason. “I have an affinity for animals.”

Which was probably why her parents had made her do it, I realized: they’d known she’d be able to keep her sacrifices alive. And also why she’d hated it so much, even after three years, that she’d decided not to go back to it.

“And now you’re making him a familiar?” I asked. I don’t know exactly how that works. Mum has only ever had spontaneous familiars: once in a while an animal arrives in our yurt that needs looking after, she helps it, and then it hangs about and helps her for a while before it drifts away again to being an ordinary animal. She doesn’t try to keep them.

Liu nodded, stroking the mouse’s head with a fingertip. “I could train one for each of you, too. They’re nocturnal, so they can keep watch while you sleep, and they’re really good at checking food for anything bad. This one brought me a piece of a string of enchanted coral beads two days ago. His name is Xiao Xing.” She let us hold him, and I could feel the mana at work in his tiny body: he already had a kind of blue shimmer over the