A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,43

of the immediate neighbors. The really valuable ones, I even do a sketch of the spine in colored pencil. Thanks to that, I can lay my hands on almost any of them, and next year I’ll probably be able to sell the notebook off to a younger languages-track student right before graduation in exchange for some mana. That’s the value of making loads of work for yourself.

But before I found my desk, what that meant was, anytime I had to do a paper, each day after an abbreviated lunch I dashed up here, got the books I needed, hauled them all downstairs to an empty classroom, got forty minutes of work done, hauled them back up and reshelved, and did the same thing all over again to get two hours of work done after dinner. I couldn’t get a place in the reading room to save my life, even at the lousy tables in the dark corners where you have to spend your own mana to cast a light.

That was hard going for a single-subject paper where all the books were in one aisle if not in one shelf. Slogging down to Sanskrit, then all the way back through all the modern Indian languages to the main incantations aisle, and then going all the way to Old English, every single time I had to get some work done on the paper, would’ve been too much work. Instead I took the gamble and went round the back. As a reward, I found my desk. Yes, it’s underneath the walkway, but it’s got a light of its own that takes only a tiny drop of mana to start, and apart from that it’s properly tidy: solid wood with a wide flat top, heavy carved legs with open sides, no drawers, no hiding places for mals to lurk in. And it’s more than big enough for two. I’ve just never had anyone to invite.

Orion had always avoided the library like the plague, for what turned out to be the opposite reason: the moment we came into the reading room, half of the heads came up—the half facing the door—and started to smile invitations. You could just see everyone looking round at the other kids at their tables, mentally picking off the two weakest to open up a pair of seats. His shoulders hunched up. I didn’t blame him for not liking it, but I gave him a hard shove on the back for being such a drip. “Stop looking like someone’s about to bite your head off. I promise I’ll protect you,” I added, which I meant as a joke, except after we went into the stacks, three separate people tried to casually follow us, and I really did have to turn round and tell them off for being creepers. He didn’t do anything about it himself.

“I’m not going to be your personal bouncer,” I told him when we finally got rid of the third one, a girl who didn’t quite make it all the way to suggesting that Orion might have even more fun in the dark recesses of the stacks with two girls instead of just one—obviously the only reason he could possibly want to hang out in the library with me—but only because I cut her off before she got that far. “You can be rude to your groupies for yourself.”

“But you’re so good at it,” he said, and then, “No, I’m sorry, I just…” He trailed off, and then he said, “Luisa asked me. Three days before…” He stopped.

“Before Jack did for her,” I supplied. He nodded. “So since then you’ve decided that you’re under a moral obligation to bestow your magnificent favors on anyone who asks? I don’t know where you’re finding the time.”

“No!” He glared at me. “Just, I got mad and shoved her off, and then she was dead, and I didn’t even know how. And I thought that when it happened, maybe she thought I didn’t come, I let whatever it was get her, because I was still mad. I know it’s stupid,” he added. And it was stupid, mainly because he was blaming himself for the completely wrong thing. Which was quite obvious to me, and he noticed. “What?” he said belligerently.

I could have considered not telling him. I suppose that would’ve been a kind thing to do. Instead I said, “She died because after you wouldn’t go for it, she looked for somebody else who would, and Jack took her up

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