A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,7
connected to the actual world, in one single place: the graduation gates. Which are surrounded by layers on layers of magical wards and artifice barriers. When some enterprising mal does wriggle through, it’s only got inside the graduation hall, which isn’t connected to the rest of the school except for the absolute minimum of pipes and air shafts required to supply the place, and all of those are loaded up with wards and barriers, too.
So the mals get bottled up and spend loads of time struggling to get in and get up, and fighting and devouring each other while they’re at it, and the biggest and most dangerous ones can’t actually squeeze their way up at all. They just have to hang around the graduation hall all year long, snacking on other mals, and wait for graduation to gorge themselves. We’re a lot harder to get at in here than if we were living out in the wide open, in a yurt for instance. Even enclave kids were getting eaten more often than not before the school was built, and if you’re an indie kid who doesn’t get into the Scholomance, these days your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty. One in four is plenty decent odds compared to that.
But we have to pay for that protection. We pay with our work, and we pay with our misery and our terror, which all build the mana that fuels the school. And we pay, most of all, with the ones who don’t make it, so what good exactly does Orion think he’s doing, what does anyone think he’s doing, saving people? The bill has to come due eventually.
Except nobody thinks that way. Less than twenty juniors have died so far this year—the usual rate is a hundred plus—and everyone in the whole school thinks he hung the moon, and is wonderful, and the New York enclave’s going to have five times as many applicants as they’ve had before. I can forget about getting in there, and the enclave in London isn’t looking very good, either. It’s maddening, especially when I ought to be news. I already know ten times more spells for destruction and dominion than the entire graduating class of seniors put together. You would too if you got five of them every time you wanted to mop the bloody floor.
On the bright side, today I’ve learned ninety-eight useful household charms in Old English, as I had to slog through to number ninety-nine to reach the one that would wipe out the stink, and the book couldn’t vanish on me until I’d got to it. Every now and again, the school does shoot itself in the foot that way, usually when it’s being its most awful and annoying and petty. The misery of translating ninety-nine charms with a stinking, dead soul-eater gurbling behind me was good enough to buy me the extra useful ones.
I’ll be grateful in a week or two. At the moment, what I have to do is stand up and do five hundred jumping jacks in a row, in perfect form, keeping my focus tightly on my current-storing crystal the whole time, to build enough mana so I could wash my floor without accidentally killing anything. I don’t dare cheat at all, not even a little. There’re no ants and cockroaches in here to suck dry, and I’m getting more powerful by the day, like we all are. With my particular gift, if I tried to cheat on a cleaning spell, it’s entirely possible I’d take out three of my neighbors to either side and this entire hall would end up the horrible gleaming clean of a newly sanitized morgue. I’ve got mana saved up, of course: Mum loaded me up with crystals she’d primed with her circle, so I could store mana for later, and I put some away every chance I get. But I wasn’t going to use one of those to clean up my room. The crystals are for emergencies, when I really need power right away, and to stockpile for graduation.
After the floor came clean, I added on fifty push-ups—I’ve got in really good shape over the last three years—and did my mum’s favorite smudging spell. It left my whole cell smelling of burnt sage, but at least that was an improvement. It was nearly dinnertime by then. A shower was more than called for, except I really didn’t feel like having to