A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,34
loud enough to be overheard at the nearby tables. I got angry all over again, and I looked at him straight-on and hissed—when I’m really angry, it’s a hiss, even if there’re no actual sibilants involved—“We didn’t.”
Which had the power of being perfectly true, but coming out of my mouth conveyed the strong implication that we’d been cavorting with maleficaria. Which I suppose Orion had been doing, in a way, so even that was also true. Everyone instinctively leaned away from me, and Magnus, who’d just received a full-on dose of angry me right between the eyes, actually turned faintly pale.
It was a really lovely meal.
AFTER MY PERFORMANCE at lunch, it was a sure bet that Orion’s enclave pals were going to pull him aside as soon as possible and give him two earfuls about why he needed to stop dating me, which would probably awaken him to the realization that we were dating. Even as irritated as I was, I recognized that my window of opportunity was closing, so as we cleared our trays, I got Aadhya aside and said, “Could we do the silver pour right now, during work time?” I think she mostly agreed because she felt she should humor an obvious lunatic. Orion just said, “Yeah, sure,” with a shrug, so we headed straight downstairs to the shop before anyone from New York could intercept him.
In the middle of the school day, the trip downstairs is loads better. Most kids still try to avoid the workshop this near to end of term, but the stairs and corridors on the way are at least lit up, and we weren’t the only ones when we got there: a trio of seniors at the back had skipped lunch entirely to keep working rather frantically on some kind of weapon they were likely counting on for graduation. We settled on a bench towards the front and Orion came with me to my project locker—I handed him the key and let him open it; that’s always a bad moment—and after nothing whatsoever jumped on us, I took out my mirror frame and we carried the rest of the supplies back to where Aadhya had already got the small gas burner going, a process that normally took me ten minutes each time.
She’d never bestirred herself to show off for me, but Orion’s presence was all the incentive she needed to put on a display, and it became clear she was even better than I’d realized. She wasn’t going to do the actual enchantments, which would’ve required her to invest mana out of her own stockpile, not something you do for just a favor in return, but she’d volunteered to hold the perimeter, which was a tricky bit of the pour. She set up the barrier around the edge, and Orion mixed the silver with comfortable sureness, even while working with an enormous array of painfully hard-to-get and expensive ingredients that I’d spent most of the last few weeks carefully collecting from the supply cabinets in the alchemy labs—roughly as much fun as getting anything from the shop supply—which he handled as if he could just get a jar of moon-grown tansy and a sack of platinum shavings off the shelf anytime he needed. He probably could.
“All right, Orion, please pour it right into the middle, from as high up as you can reach,” Aadhya said, and added to me in lecturing tones, which I swallowed resentfully, “and make sure you don’t tilt the surface more than twenty degrees, El. You want to keep the flow going into the middle, and just gently spiral it out. I’ll tell you when it’s ready for the incantation.”
Forcing an incantation into a physical material—which then preserves the incantation’s magic and makes it ongoing instead of something ephemeral—is the hard part of making artifice for most people, because the physical reality of the stuff resists you trying to muck with it, and you have to put a lot of power behind it. That wasn’t a problem for me, but the devil was in the details. As soon as my spell hit the silver, it was going to start bubbling. And if the silver hardened with the bubbles in it, there wouldn’t be much of a mirror after. I’d have to scrape the frame clean, gather new materials, and try again without all this lovely help. The proper way to do it is to ease the enchantment into the material seamlessly; that’s what good artificers do.