A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,37

few days. They’d decide for themselves what they wanted to do. It was just as well he wasn’t sitting with me today: I’d find out where I stood. I was glad of it.

I almost managed to convince myself. Almost. I didn’t want Orion’s help and I didn’t want him to sit with me and I didn’t want any fair-weather tagalongs sitting with me, I didn’t, but—I didn’t want to die, either. I didn’t want a clinger to jump me and I didn’t want anoxienta spores to erupt out of the floor beneath me and I didn’t want some slithering mess to drop on my head from the ceiling tiles, and that’s what happens to people who sit alone. For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me for no reason, nothing I’ve ever done. I’ve never hurt any of them. I’ve been tying myself in knots and working myself to exhaustion just to avoid hurting any of them. It’s so hard, it’s so hard in here all the time, and what I was really glad of was having half an hour three times a day where I could take a breath, where I could pretend that I was just like everyone else, not some queen of popularity like an enclave girl but someone who could sit down at a good table and do a decent perimeter and people would join me instead of going out of their way in the opposite direction.

And the reason I hadn’t planned my lunch out today was because Orion had been walking with me, so I’d assumed that I would get to pretend for one meal more, and that had been stupid of me. I’d been asking for this. If I’d hung back and waited, I could’ve joined Liu or Aadhya or Nkoyo’s tables. Maybe. Or maybe they’d have done what people have always done when they see me coming towards their tables: invited the nearest loose person to sit down, to fill in any open spots before I can get there. And if they did, I’d have asked for that, too, picking a fight with the enclave kids yesterday like I thought I was as good as them. I wasn’t. We’re all in this shitty place together, but they’re going to get out. They’re loaded up with powerful artifacts and the best spells, guarding each other’s backs and pumping each other full of power; they’re going to survive unless they get unlucky. And when they get out, they’ll get to go back home to their beautiful enclaves, walled round with spells and anxious new recruits for sentries, where you can just walk into your bedroom and go to sleep, not spend an hour each night helping your mum lay wards all around your one-room yurt just so nothing comes in to rip you both to shreds.

I was barely nine years old the first time something came at me. Mals don’t usually come after wizards in their prime, like Mum, and they don’t usually come after little ones because we don’t have enough mana yet. But Mum was ill that week; she’d got a raging fever, and after she went delirious, someone at the commune took her to hospital and left me alone. I ate our cold leftovers from the night before and huddled down in our bed, trying to sing the lullabies Mum sang me every night, to pretend she was there. When the scratching started at the wards, tiny sprays of sparks going up outside the entrance like knives on steel, I got the crystal she’d been wearing with her circle that fall. I was clutching it in my hands when the scratcher started working its way in, fingers first, long jointed things with claws like the blades of paring knives.

I screamed when they poked through. Back then, I still had the idea somewhere in me that someone would come if I screamed. I was enough of an oblivious kid that I only considered whether I liked someone, or more often didn’t, so I hadn’t really noticed yet that people didn’t like me, and I hadn’t worked out that people not liking me meant they wouldn’t sit at even a good table in the cafeteria with me, and they’d leave me alone and hungry in a yurt without my mum, and they