A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,44
on it.” He stared at me appalled. “He would’ve needed some kind of consent to get power out of another wizard. Most maleficers do.”
Orion looked vaguely sick. He didn’t talk for the rest of the way to my desk. Nobody else popped up to bother us, and the walk was a lot shorter than usual. Normally I have to stop and read the book spines every three shelves just to make ostentatiously sure that I’m moving in the right direction, and to check the lights. That’s another trick the school loves. There isn’t any overhead to put a lamp on, so the aisles are lit up with glowing wispy mana lights that float around. They’ll grudgingly help you read the book spines, even bob along if you fly up a shelf—or climb up it, for those of us who don’t have mana to waste on floating around like giant ponces—but if you aren’t actively using them, they’ll go dim so carefully that you don’t notice until they’re about to wink out, and then you have to cast your own light, because they will go out if you keep going, even if you turn around. But with Orion walking alongside me, they all stayed bright enough around us that I could just glance over once in a while, to make sure we were still going in the right direction.
There was even a second chair waiting for him at my desk. Orion sat down without a first—much less a second—glance and immediately started unpacking his bag. I kicked his chair and made him help me look through the shelves at our backs and shine a light up and down the walls of the nook and over the legs of the desk and pull it away from the wall and push it back. “Okay, seriously, we’re in the library,” he said finally, sounding exasperated.
“I’m sorry, am I boring you with my basic precautions?” I said. “We’re not all invulnerable heroes.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to be crazy paranoid, either,” he said. “Come on, how many times have you gotten jumped?”
“In the last week? Do I get to count the maleficer you sicced on me?” I said, folding my arms.
“Until the end of time, obviously.” He rolled his eyes. “How many times have you gotten jumped before that? Five? Six?”
I stared at him. “A week, maybe.”
He stared back at me. “Huh?”
“I get jumped twice a week, if I’m careful,” I said. “If I wasn’t careful, I’d be getting jumped five times as often. I’m the class tiramisu, you spanner. The loser with a tidy bucket of mana that has to spend all her time alone. And even if I wasn’t, most people get jumped once a month at least.”
“They do not,” he said, positively.
“They really do,” I said.
He pulled up his sleeve to show me a piece of artifice on his wrist, a round medallion on a leather strap that looked enough like a watch to slip by at a first glance. He could have exposed it on any crowded street full of mundanes and nobody would have blinked. Then he popped it open, and it even was a watch, except through several tiny round windows cut out of the face, you could see into the interior where at least six layers of minuscule gears were turning, each in different metals, shifting through different glows of green and blue and violet. “I get buzzed if anyone from the enclave is in trouble, and there are eleven other kids from New York in this place right now.”
“Oh, fine, enclave kids don’t get jumped once a month,” I said. “Rank and power hath their privileges. I’m shocked. Is that what you all use for power-sharing?” I peered at it as he snapped it shut again: the lid had an elaborate engraving of a cast-iron park gate with a starburst behind it, the letters NY looped in calligraphic script around it.
“You think the maleficaria can tell?” he said. “You think they care?”
“I think they go for the lowest-hanging fruit on the vine, and it’s never one of you. Your mate Chloe has friends who offer to taste her food and get her supplies. When she does a project, she can get help for the asking from the best students in the place, and she doesn’t have to help them in return. She probably has two kids walk her back to her room at night, when she finally leaves her permanently reserved place on