A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,31
mirror that encouraged you to think all your plans were the most brilliant and you were dazzlingly clever and beautiful all the way until you walked yourself into total ruin.
Of course, that still left me to ask Orion for help, which I grudgingly did at lunchtime. I thought I’d best take advantage of my brief window of opportunity before he finally worked out that we were supposedly dating and started avoiding me instead of pulling his continuing white-knight routine: he’d checked in on me at every meal yesterday in a muttering way, and he’d allowed himself to be pulled into a table with me by Aadhya and Ibrahim in turn. It was massively irritating, to the point that I almost let Ibrahim pester him all during dinner—it was nonstop “I still can’t believe you killed a soul-eater all by yourself,” and “Do you like silver or gold better as an agonist? I’d really appreciate your advice,” et cetera—except the hero-worshipping was even more irritating, so I finally snapped and told Ibrahim to shut it and stop behaving like a celebrity stalker, or find another place to sit. He did shut it, and looked embarrassed, and also tried to glare at me, but I just stared back and I’m fairly sure he got the strong sense that a monstrous and terrible fate awaited any who stirred my wrath. He flinched and pretended he’d actually just been staring into space past me.
Anyway, at lunchtime I made sure to touch my abdomen with a visible wince as I queued up in the cafeteria, and sure enough Orion pushed in—if you can call it that when the girls behind me immediately let him do it, all brightly, “Go ahead, Orion, it’s fine!” when he asked them—and said to me, “You all right?”
“Improving, now,” I said, which was true and would also stand in for flirtation, for the avid eavesdroppers. “I’ve fallen behind in shop class, though. Aadhya said she’d help me, but we need an alchemist, too—it’s a three-discipline project.”
If that sounds like a painfully bald invitation to you, well, it did to me, too, but subtlety didn’t seem called for, and indeed it wasn’t. “I’ll help,” he said instantly.
“Great,” I said. “After dinner tonight?” He nodded, and yet again didn’t ask for anything back, helpfully providing more grist for the mill. I felt simultaneously aggravated and magnanimous, so I added, “The rice pud isn’t, by the way,” and he jerked his head round and promptly went after the glutinous maggots waiting in the tray—if you put a spoon in them they’ll go boiling up it and get half your fingers to the bone unless you fling it away quick enough, in which case usually they land on a dozen different students in the line and promptly start eating whatever flesh they land on and dividing into new swarms.
Orion emerged ten minutes after I had made it out with my tray, faint blue-grey smoke following him out and his tray half empty. Everyone else behind him was also coming out with fairly minimal selections, so exterminating the maggots had evidently taken out most of the line. It wouldn’t be refilled until after the last kids from our year went through and the sophomores got their turn. I privately rolled my eyes and put my spare milk carton and second bread roll on his tray when he came over and sat down next to me: the noise and confusion behind me had made it easy to nab extras for once.
Sarah and Alfie had invited me to sit with them at the London enclave table. I wasn’t stupid enough to throw over Liu and Aadhya for them, though, so they’d actually had a quick private word and then had come with me, instead—a massive concession, which meant I was suddenly sitting at a surprisingly powerful table. Nkoyo with Cora and Jowani are networked with a lot of the other West and South African students, and Aadhya has a solid lineup of allies from the artificer track. They’re about as well positioned as you get aside from the actual enclave kids, and now I had pulled in a pair of those.
And then Orion sat down next to me again—Aadhya had carefully left herself enough room on the bench to scoot over quickly as soon as he got close enough for his intentions to be clear—and took things to a completely new level. By far the most obvious explanation to anyone looking on was that I’d