A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,76

kids have at least a few decorative bits here and there, a photo or cards on display; people give pottery and drawings at New Year. I’ve never been given any, and I don’t waste my own time making them.

It didn’t feel bare to me, but I grew up in a one-room yurt with a couple of boxes under our bed and Mum’s worktable under the one round window. Except there I had the whole green world outside the door, and here this was clearly the room of a miserable loner, somebody like Mika, who couldn’t even afford the risk of cupboards. It made me even more furious, looking at it through another person’s eyes. Magnus probably had a quilt and a spare pillow, made sometime in the last thirty years by another New York student who’d passed them down on graduation day. His walls were probably covered with cheery cards and pictures people had made for him, or even actual wallpaper, if he’d wanted it enough. His furniture would be polished warm wood, with warded locks on the drawers and cubbyholes. Maybe he had a keep-fresh larder box; he certainly had a proper desk lamp. His pens never disappeared on him.

I could go and find out. Magnus would be in his room by now; it was close to curfew. I could force my way in and tell him I knew what he’d tried to do to me, and then I could shove him into the dark—not like Todd had done Mika, not all the way in, just enough to make clear that I could do it; that anytime I wanted to, I could push him in and take his lush, comfortable room all for me, since he and his enclave buddies thought that was a reasonable thing to do to another human being.

I had my hands clenched again, and I had almost forgotten Aadhya was there, and then she said, abruptly, “Did—El, did you take out the maw-mouth?”

It was like having a bucket of just-melted ice thrown all over me. My eyesight actually fuzzed out a bit, going dim: for a moment I was back inside the maw-mouth again, the horrible pulsing wet hunger of it, and I lunged for the middle of the room and threw up into the floor drain, heaving up wet chunks of my half-digested dinner burning with stomach acid. The feeling of them in my mouth made me heave again, sobbing in between rounds. I kept going until I was empty and for a while afterwards. I was vaguely aware that Aadhya was holding my hair back out of my face: my plait had come undone. When I stopped, she gave me a cup of water, and I rinsed and spat over and over until she said, “This is the last of the jug,” and then I made myself sip a little, trying to wash the last bile back down my throat.

I crawled a few steps back from the drain and eased myself against the wall with my knees pulled up and my mouth wide open, trying not to smell my own breath.

“Sorry,” Aadhya said, and I raised my head and stared at her. She was sitting on the floor just a little way from me, cross-legged with the jug in her hands. She was in her pajamas already, or what passes for that in here, a ratty pair of too-small shorts and long-sleeved top let out with cheap mending, like she’d got herself ready for bed and had been about to get in and then instead she’d come to ask me—ask me—“You did, didn’t you,” she said.

I wasn’t in any state where I was going to think through what the right answer was, or what it would mean to tell her. I just gave a nod. We sat there for a bit and didn’t say anything. It felt like a long time, but the curfew bell didn’t ring, so it couldn’t have been. I still couldn’t think at all. I just sat there existing.

Eventually Aadhya said, “I started on a mirror for next quarter. I asked Orion what he did to the pour to make it come out so great, and he said he didn’t do anything special. He’s not really a great alchemist, anyway. He’s just doing it, you know? Then I remembered you used some kind of incantation after the enchantment. So I tried to find it, except all I found was this section in my metals handbook that