A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,4
family, not aside from my mum, and I certainly don’t have an enclave ready to support me. We live in the Radiant Mind commune near Cardigan in Wales, which also boasts a shaman, two spirit healers, a Wiccan circle, and a troupe of Morris dancers, all of whom have roughly the same amount of real power, which is to say none whatsoever, and all of whom would fall over in horror if they saw Mum or me doing real magic. Well, me. Mum does magic by dancing up mana with a group of willing volunteers—I’ve told her she ought to charge people, but no—and then she spreads it out again freely in sparkles and happiness, tra la. People let us eat at their table because they love her, who wouldn’t, and they built her a yurt when she came to them, straight from the Scholomance and three months pregnant with me, but none of them could help me do magic or defend me against roving maleficaria. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. They don’t like me. No one does, except Mum.
Dad died here, during graduation, getting Mum out. We call it graduation because that’s what the Americans call it, and they’ve been carrying the lion’s share of the cost of the school for the last seventy years or so. Those who pay the piper call the tune, et cetera. But it’s hardly a celebratory occasion or anything. It’s just the moment when the seniors all get dumped into the graduation hall, far below at the very bottom of the school, and try to fight their way out through all the hungry maleficaria lying in wait. About half the senior class—that is, half of the ones who’ve managed to survive that long—makes it. Dad didn’t.
He did have family; they live near Mumbai. Mum managed to track them down, but only when I was already five. She and Dad hadn’t exchanged any real-world information or made any plan for after they graduated and got turfed back out to their respective homes. That would’ve been too sensible. They’d been together on the inside for only four months or something, but they were soulmates and love would lead the way. Of course, probably it would have, for Mum.
Anyway, when she did find them, it turned out his family was rich, palaces and jewels and djinn servants rich, and more important by my mum’s standards, they came from an ancient strict-mana Hindu enclave that was destroyed during the Raj, and they’re still sticking to the rules. They won’t eat meat, much less pull malia. She was happy to move in with them, and they were all excited to take us in, too. They hadn’t even known what had happened to Dad. The last time they’d heard from him was at term-end of his junior year. The seniors collect notes from the rest of us, the week before graduation. I’ve already written mine for this year and given copies to some of the London enclave kids, short and sweet: still alive, doing all right in classes. I had to keep it so small that no one could reasonably refuse to just add it to their envelope, because otherwise they would.
Dad sent one of those same notes to his family, so they’d known he’d survived that long. Then he just never came out. Another of the hundreds of kids thrown on the rubbish heap of this place. When Mum finally unearthed his family and told them about me, it felt to them like getting a bit of Dad back after all. They sent us one-way plane tickets and Mum said bye to everyone in the commune and packed me up with all our worldly goods.
But when we got there, my great-grandmother took one look at me and fell down in a visionary fit and said I was a burdened soul and would bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world if I wasn’t stopped. My grandfather and his brothers tried to do the stopping, actually. That’s the only time Mum’s ever really opened the pipes. I vaguely remember it, Mum standing in our bedroom with four men awkwardly trying to make her step out of the way and hand me over. I don’t know what they were planning to do with me—none of them had ever deliberately hurt so much as a fly—but I guess the fit was a really alarming one.