A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,32

thoroughly hooked Orion, and now I was using that to build myself a power base among the people who’d tolerated me on their fringes before, likely with the intention to leverage him to get us all into a major enclave. And London was actively displaying interest. That would have been a magnificent bit of strategy on my hypothetical scheming self’s part.

Chloe and Magnus—from New York—came off the line just a minute later. They had half a dozen of their usual tagalongs surrounding them, and another four holding a prime table and waiting for them, but their plans clearly changed when they saw Orion sitting with me again. They traded a quick whisper and then they came past and took the four end seats still left at our table—two tagalongs went on the outside edge, of course—leaving the rest of their uncertain crew to straggle on to the other table without them.

“Pass the salt, would you, Sarah?” Chloe said, very sweetly, by which she meant die in a fire, we’re not letting London steal Orion, and followed it up by asking me, “Galadriel, are you feeling better? Orion said Jack nearly killed you.”

I couldn’t have asked for better. Except actually what I wanted to do was dump my tray over Orion’s undeserving head, tell off Sarah and Alfie and Chloe and Magnus, and possibly set them all on fire. None of them were here for me. Chloe must have had to ask someone my name. Even Aadhya and Nkoyo and Liu—I was pretty sure they would at least have me at their tables after this; I’d demonstrated to them that when I did get an advantage, I paid my debts, and they were all bright enough to value proven reliability more than almost anything else. But as soon as Orion moved on to greener and less-likely-to-turn-violently-evil pastures, even they would relegate me back to bare tolerance. And the enclavers would make clear that I was dirt under their feet and had been lucky to have a minute when I’d imagined otherwise.

“Doing splendidly, thanks very,” I said, icily. “It’s Chloe, isn’t it? Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met.”

Nkoyo darted a look at me across the table, incredulous—you didn’t snub enclave kids, and we all knew their names—but Orion jerked his head up and said, “Sorry—this is Chloe Rasmussen and Magnus Tebow, they’re from New York,” exactly as if he felt he should introduce me to his friends. “Guys, this is Galadriel.”

“Charmed,” I said.

Alfie evidently took that as an indication that I preferred London to New York, and leaned in smiling. “You live near London, El, don’t you? Any chance we’d know your family?”

“I’m out in the back of beyond,” I said, and left it woodenly right there. They’d have recognized Mum’s name, of course, if I told them. All of them would have. I wanted to trade on her name even less than I wanted to trade on being Orion’s not-girlfriend. Anyone who wanted to be friends with Gwen Higgins’s daughter very much didn’t want to be friends with me.

So instead I spent the meal being rude to some of the most popular and powerful kids in the entire school, ignoring them to discuss the mirror artifice with Aadhya and Orion, and talk Latin with Nkoyo. We’d had a really good spell-trade the other day. I’d given her a copy of the mortal flame spell. That might sound extreme, but it’s not explicitly a spell to conjure mortal flame, it’s a sliding-scale spell to conjure magical fire. Most people love those spells, because virtually anyone can cast them successfully and you just get different results depending on your affinity and how much mana you put into it. Even if you’re a fumbling child, you can use it to light a match, and get better at casting it. Or if you’re me, you can suck the life force out of a dozen kids and then incinerate half the school with you inside it. So helpful!

But for Nkoyo, it would probably be a fantastically useful wall-of-flame spell, and she felt she had to make equal return—I didn’t argue—so she gave me a choice of two in exchange. I picked two minors she had that needed almost no mana at all: a spell for distilling clean water from dirty, so I won’t have to go to the bathroom for water as often, and another that pulls in a bunch of spare electrons from the environment around you to deliver a good heavy electrical