A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,19

for her language requirement; she uses the room in her schedule to take writing workshop in both languages. As you can imagine, most wizard parents start their kids with a private tutor for one or the other the minute they’re born. Of course, Mum put me on Marathi instead, because of Dad. Thanks, Mum. If only all the kids from Mumbai didn’t treat me like a leper because they’ve heard whispers about my great-grandmother’s prophecy.

To be fair to Mum, I was two when she started me on the language, and she still had hopes of going to live with Dad’s family. Her own family were right out. Just before she went off to school—we don’t talk about it much, but I’m fairly certain that’s why she went to the Scholomance—she acquired an evil stepdad, literally: one of those cautious professional maleficers, on the edge of shriveling. He almost certainly poisoned her dad—no proof, but the timing was extremely coincidental—in order to glom on to her mum, who was also a really good healer, through her grief. Any spell that attacks only one person at a time is a bit beneath me, but I know the type. She spent the rest of her life taking care of him, then died of an unexpected heart attack when I was around three.

The stepdad is still doing all right last we heard, but we’re not what you’d call close. He used to send sad wistful letters once in a while, hidden inside innocuous envelopes, trying to catch Mum in turn, but when I was six, I opened one by accident, felt the mind-tugging spell, and instinctively snapped it straight back at him. It probably felt like having a splinter jammed directly into your eye. He hasn’t tried since.

After things didn’t work out very well with Dad’s family either, Mum still clung to the idea that the language would give me a sense of connection to him, at some unspecified future date. At the time, it was just another thing that made me different, and even as a kid, I already felt really strongly I didn’t need any more of those. We don’t live in Cardiff or anything; my primary school wasn’t what you’d call a hotbed of multiculturalism. One of the girls once told me I was the color of upsettingly weak tea, which isn’t even true but has occupied a niche in my head ever since, as persistent as a vilhaunt. And the commune isn’t exactly better. No one there will whisper a racist insult at you in the playground; instead I had grown adults wanting ten-year-old me to sign off on their decolonized yoga practice and help them translate bits of Hindi, which I didn’t know.

Of course, I should be grateful to them: that’s what woke me up to the idea that Hindi was more popular. When I got old enough to understand that languages were going to keep me alive, I stopped moaning about going and demanded lessons in that, too, just in time to get reasonably fluent before induction. Hindi isn’t as good for flexibility, because most of the kids who speak it also have English, so they usually ask for spells in English to have better trading material. But you want languages across the spectrum. In rare or dead languages, it’s a lot harder to find anyone else to barter with, but you’re also more likely to get really unique spells, or a better match for the rest of your request, like my stupid Old English cleaning spells. Hindi is common enough that you can find lots of people to trade with, and as it’s not one of the big two, people don’t ask for spells in Hindi, they just get them that way, so the spells are a bit better on average. I got to know Aadhya by trading Hindi spells.

At the moment, I’m studying Sanskrit, Latin, German, and Middle and Old English. The last three overlap nicely. I did French and Spanish last year, but I’ve got enough of those to muddle through the spells I get now, and they’re on the same popularity scale as Hindi, so I moved to Latin instead, which has the benefit of a really big backlist. I’ve been thinking of adding Old Norse for something really unusual. It’s just as well I hadn’t, yet, because I’d probably have been handed a book of ancient Viking cleaning incantations yesterday, even if I’d just tried a single exercise on the subject,