A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,26
with this sack of putrescence crawling his fingers down my ribcage towards the knife he’d jammed into my guts so he could get on with butchering me like a hog.
I’d told myself it was just common sense—going maleficer meant dying young, grotesquely. But that still ought to beat dying right now, only it didn’t. It didn’t, and if it wasn’t an option now, it was never going to be an option, and even if I survived this, I wouldn’t survive the next thing, or the one after that. There’d always been a safety valve in the back of my head: I’d always told myself if all else fails, but all else had failed, and I wasn’t going to do it anyway.
“Fuck you, Great-Grandmother,” I whispered, so angry I could have cried, and got ready to shove myself up onto the knife so I could reach the mana crystal. And then I heard the knock on the door. A knock on a school night, with everyone else sane in their own cells and study groups by then—
Talking was difficult. I pointed a finger at the door and thought, Open sesame. A stupid kid spell, but it was my own door, and I hadn’t locked it for the night yet, so it shot open, and Orion was standing in the doorway. Jack whirled round, his hands wet and red with my blood. He’d even smeared some on his mouth to make the finishing gruesome touch.
I laid my head back down and let the mighty hero get on with it.
THE AWKWARDLY APPEALING SMELL of roasted flesh was filling the room when Orion dropped to his knees beside me. “Are you—” he started, and stopped at the obvious negative.
“Tool chest,” I said. “Down the left side. Packet.”
He dug into my tool chest—didn’t even spare a glance to check the innards after he opened it—and got out the white envelope. He ripped it open and pulled out the thin linen patch. Mum had made it for me, beginning to end: she tilled the field, planted the flax, harvested it by hand, spun and wove it herself, and she chanted healing spells into it and over it the whole time. “Wipe up my blood with one side,” I whispered. His face was tight with alarm, but he looked at the floor, doubtfully. “Okay if it gets dirty. Take out the knife, put the other side on the wound.”
Thankfully, I sort of blacked out when he pulled the knife, the next ten minutes gone to confusion, and when I surfaced, the patch was on. Jack’s knife hadn’t been long enough to go all the way through me, so there was only the entry wound, and it wasn’t too wide. The healing patch was glowing faintly white, hurting my eyes, but I could feel it working on my abused innards. In ten minutes more, I was ready to let Orion help me move onto the bed.
After Orion settled me there, he heaved Jack’s charred corpse out into the corridor. Then he went to my basin and washed the blood off. When he sat back down on the bed, his hands were shaking. He was staring down at them. “Who—who was that?” He looked more shocky than I felt.
“You haven’t bothered to learn anyone’s names, have you,” I said. “That was Jack Westing. And he’s the one who ate Luisa, if it makes you feel better. You can look in his room and you’ll probably find something left behind if you don’t believe me.”
That brought his head up. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I was leery of getting shivved by a sociopathic maleficer, as I would think might be obvious under the circumstances,” I said. “Thanks for going round loudly asking questions about Luisa, by the way, that didn’t at all set him off.”
“You know, it’s almost impressive,” he said after a moment, sounding less wobbly. “You’re nearly dead and you’re still the rudest person I’ve ever met. You’re welcome again, by the way.”
“Given that you’re at least half responsible for this situation, I refuse to thank you,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment, and suddenly the five-minute warning bell was ringing for curfew. It hadn’t felt like that much time had gone by. I put my hands down and touched the patch gently, testing. Sitting up was not going to appeal for a long time. The blood had gone back into me, so I felt much better, but not even Mum’s top