A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,5
sudden the whole place went full of this terrible light that hurt my eyes to look at, and Mum was scooping me up with my blanket. She walked directly out of the family compound, barefoot in her nightie, and they stood around looking miserable and didn’t try to touch her. She got to the nearest road and stuck out her thumb, and a passing driver picked her up and took us all the way to the airport. Then a tech billionaire about to board his private jet to London saw her standing in the airport vestibule with me and offered to take her along. He still comes to the commune for a weeklong spiritual cleanse once a year.
That’s my mum for you. But it’s not me. My great-grandmother was just the first in a long line of people who meet me, smile, and then stop smiling, before I’ve even said a word. No one’s ever going to offer me a lift, or dance in a woodland circle to help me raise power, or put food on my table, or—far more to the point—stand with me against all the nasty things that routinely come after wizards, looking for a meal. If it weren’t for Mum, I wouldn’t have been welcome in my own home. You wouldn’t believe the number of nice people at the commune—the kind who write long sincere letters to politicians and regularly turn out to protest for everything from social justice to the preservation of bats—who said brightly to fourteen-year-old me how excited I must be about going away to school—ha ha—and how much I must want to strike out on my own afterwards, see more of the world, et cetera.
Not that I want to go back to the commune. I don’t know if anyone who hasn’t tried it can properly appreciate just how horrible it is to be constantly surrounded by people who believe in absolutely everything, from leprechauns to sweat lodges to Christmas carols, but who won’t believe that you can do actual magic. I’ve literally shown people to their faces—or tried to; it takes loads of extra mana to cast even a little spell for starting a fire when a mundane is watching you, firmly convinced that you’re a silly kid with a lighter up your sleeve and you’ll probably fumble the sleight-of-hand. But even if you do get some sufficiently dramatic spell to work in front of them, then they all say wow and how amazing and then the next day it’s all, man, those mushrooms were really good. And then they avoid me even more. I don’t want to be here, but I don’t want to be there, either.
Oh, that’s a lie, of course. I constantly daydream about going home. I ration it to five minutes a day where I go and stand in front of the vent in the wall, as safely far away as I can get from it and still feel the air moving, and I shut my eyes and press my hands over my face to block the smell of burnt oil and finely aged sweat, pretending that instead I’m breathing damp earth and dried rosemary and roasted carrots in butter, and it’s the wind moving through the trees, and if I just open my eyes I’ll be lying on my back in a clearing and the sun has just gone behind a cloud. I would instantly trade in my room for the yurt in the woods, even after two full weeks of rain when everything I own is growing mildew. It’s an improvement over the sweet fragrance of soul-eater. I even miss the people, which I’d have refused to believe if you’d told me, but after three years in here, I’d ask even Philippa Wax for a cwtch if I saw her sour, hard-mouthed face.
All right, no, I wouldn’t, and I’m pretty sure that all my sentiments will revert within a week after I get back. Anyway, it’s been made very clear I’m not welcome, except on sufferance. And maybe not even that, if I try to settle in again once I’m out of here. The commune council—Philippa’s the secretary—will probably come up with some excuse to throw me out. Negativity of spirit has already been mentioned more than a few times just at the limits of my hearing, or well within them. And then I’ll just have wrecked Mum’s life, because she’d walk away without a second thought to stay with me.