A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,40

and snot into their food while everyone at their table pretends not to notice.

I managed to get through lunch without really embarrassing myself. Aadhya asked if she could come by and look at the mirror, and I told her she could, but I was pretty sure it had come out cursed. “Oh, seriously?” she said.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It kept trying to tell me something last night without my asking it anything.” When an artifact tries to do things for you on its own, that’s a really good sign that it doesn’t have your best intentions at heart. Aadhya knew as much, and she was looking annoyed, as well she might, as that meant she’d nearly got killed helping me for absolutely fuck-all. “I did get the sirenspider leg,” I added; I’d snagged it on my way out of the workshop, thinking of just this moment. “D’you think you could get some use out of it?”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Aadhya said, mollified: sirenspider shells are really good for making magical instruments, if you can figure out how to handle them, which she probably could, with her affinity. We talked a bit about what she might do with it, and I offered to do the incantations part for her, too, which would make us even. Liu and I talked about our final papers for history, as we’re both in the honors track—no one wants to be in honors classes unless they’re going for valedictorian; the school puts you in them against your will—and we each had to write twenty pages on an ancient magical civilization, but for a special vicious twist, one whose language we didn’t know. We agreed on a swap: I’d do mine on the two Zhou-dynasty enclaves and she’d do the Pratishthana enclave, and we’d translate each other’s primary sources.

We all paced our eating and cleared up our plates at the same time, so nobody was left sitting on their own at the table. I was still feeling weird and shaky inside when I went to bus my tray. I was glad Ibrahim was right ahead of me: I glared at the back of his head, thinking about his smirk. I desperately wanted to be angry again, just a bit angry. But he glanced back at me as he walked away, and he didn’t smirk; instead his face just fell. I stared back at him in confusion, and then Orion shoved his tray onto the rack just behind me and said, sounding irritated, “Hey, what was that about? Do you have a problem with Chloe and Magnus or something?” exactly like he’d expected me to come and sit with them.

Which he probably had. Who wouldn’t sit at the New York table if they had the slightest chance; what kind of fool wouldn’t take that over sitting on her own, wondering if anybody else was going to join her? “Oh, was I supposed to trot along behind you?” I snapped back. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d attained hanger-on status; I imagined I’d have to genuflect properly first. You ought to have a badge or something to give out to people. You’d get to watch them fight over it and everything.”

I felt just as mean as it sounded. Orion made a little half-twisting move away to stare at me, his face gone mad and surprised at the same time, blotchy on the cheeks under the greenish dots where he’d been spattered with something in his last lab session, probably. “Oh, go to hell,” he said, a little thickly, and walked away from me fast, his shoulders hunched in.

There were about five different clusters of kids scattered between us and the doors, and they all turned towards him as he went past them, faces full of hope and calculation. Every single one of them running the same equations that were in my own head every single day, every single hour, and because they weren’t stupidly stubborn morons, they were all happy to be nice to Orion Lake in exchange for getting to live; they would have fought over the chance to be his hangers-on. And he knew it, and instead he’d actually been making an effort to hang around with me, and if he wasn’t waiting for me to turn maleficer anymore, that meant that what he wanted was—to hang out with somebody who wouldn’t genuflect to him.

I hated the idea; it made him too much of a decent person, and what right did he have to be