A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,74

over. And they looked fairly grim about my visible survival. Not that I had any proof, of course, and there was Orion smugging down at me with deliberately obnoxious cheer, “So that makes eight, right?”—just asking to be told that it didn’t count because it was his own arseholish friends trying to murder me.

“Thanks loads,” I said through my teeth. “On that note, I’m going to bed.” I held my sutras against my chest—thankfully I’d been holding them in my lap—and snagged my bookbag by the one strap it had left, and stalked directly out of the reading room.

It wasn’t my way of saying thanks or of being rude, either one. I just had to get out of the library. I was angry at myself for being stupid and needing my life saved, and I was angry at the Dubai kids and everyone else, too, for thinking Orion was a perverted loon for liking unsettling me, but most of all I was angry at Magnus, and Todd, and every last one of the New York enclave kids, because they had given me an excuse, a gold-plated excuse, to do something to them. They’d deliberately tried to kill me. By Scholomance rules, that gave me a right to do something to them. And if I didn’t, then they’d assume it was because I was afraid of them. They’d think I was agreeing with them, telling them they were right to look at me and see just a piece of rubbish to be kicked out of their way. Someone who wasn’t worth as much as they were.

The tears of rage were already leaking out of my eyes by the time I got to the stairs. I was just lucky there were some other kids going down to the dorms, and I managed to keep at least one person in blurry sight along the way until I finally got to my room and clanged the door shut behind me. I started pacing the room with the sutras still clutched against my chest. It was only five steps across and turn and go back, over and over. I couldn’t meditate, and I couldn’t even try to work. If I put my hands to pen and paper right now, I knew what would happen: a spell would come out, a spell like a supervolcano.

The rotten thing about having Mum as a mum is, I know how to stop being angry. I’ve been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she’s never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it’s my own fault, because I do know how to stop.

And this time was worse, because I couldn’t make excuses for them. All these years, whenever someone took advantage of me, shoved me out of the way, left me exposed, for their own benefit, at least I’ve been able to do that. To tell myself that they were only doing what anyone would do. We all wanted to live, and we were all doing our best to make it out of here, to end up safe, no matter how mean and awful we had to be along the way. I was doing the same thing. I’d kicked a freshman out of a chair and spent mana to fix it so I could shove myself in with a bunch of kids who didn’t want me, and because I’d been sitting there being rude and mean to them, I’d scared the New York kids. They needed Orion: that little buzzer on his wrist that brought him to their rescue if they ever did get into trouble, the power he dumped into their shared power sink. What right did I have to take that for myself, eight times and counting? Why did I deserve to live more than them?

But I had an answer now: I hadn’t pulled malia even with a knife in my gut, and I’d gone after a maw-mouth to save half the freshmen instead of running away, and meanwhile Magnus had tried to murder me because Orion liked me, and Todd had destroyed Mika because he was scared, and because I had that answer, I couldn’t help thinking actually I did deserve to live more than them. And I know nobody gets to live or not live because they deserve it, deserving doesn’t count for a thing, but the point was,