A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,81

the lute for graduation. You could write some spells for it, and El can sing.”

I just stood there dumbly staring at her. Liu looked more than a little surprised, and she had a right to be. That was alliance; that was an alliance offer. You don’t give things to other people in here. When you lend somebody a pen for one class, that’s ink gone, ink that you’ll have to replace by going to the stockroom. They have to pay you back for it. That’s why you know you’re dating if you don’t have to pay it back. But you can break up with someone you’re dating. You can’t break up with your allies unless they do something exceptionally horrible, like Todd, or you all agree to split up. If you ditch an ally, even a weirdo loser girl that everyone hates, nobody else is going to offer you a slot. You can’t possibly trust someone to watch your back in the graduation hall if you can’t trust them to stick with you during the year.

Liu looked at me, a question: was I making the offer, too? I couldn’t even make myself nod. I was on the verge of crying again, or possibly vomiting, and that was when an unholy shriek went off right by my right ear, putting half the world on mute, and the charred and twisted remnant of some mal that I suppose had been about to bite flew past me and described a lovely curve through the air to smash into an unidentifiable heap of cinders and ash on the floor.

“Are you not paying attention anymore on purpose now?” Orion demanded, coming up from behind me. I flipped him off with the hand that wasn’t clamped protectively over my abused ear.

So that left the offer just sitting there through breakfast, and we couldn’t talk about it, either, not in front of other people. It would be like snogging at the table: there are people who’d do it, but I’m not one of them. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially because I could see Liu thinking about it, too: she watched the kids who came by to take a look at the phase-change spell with a different eye. Not just idle curiosity, or getting a sense of the market, but like she was considering what their bids might be worth to her, what might come in that she’d be able to use. It had been clever of Aadhya actually to make the suggestion now, before the bidding happened: if we did go in together and let people know about it, some of the bids would be tailored to have useful things for the two of them, our alliance as a whole, not just for me personally.

At least, it had been clever of her to do it now, if she were going to do it at all, which I still couldn’t really get my head round. But Aadhya didn’t show any signs of having second thoughts; she ate a hearty breakfast, chatted up the kids coming by for the auction—a lot better than I did—and talked about her shield holder project and the spares she’d made, which obviously got Liu to prick up her ears even more.

I couldn’t guess which way Liu would jump, though, and the offer had clearly been for a three-way alliance. But if she didn’t go for it, I decided abruptly, halfway through breakfast, I’d ask Aadhya if she’d try to find another third person to go in with us, or agree to aim for alliance without sealing the deal right away, provisional terms. That was the opposite of a power move on my part, but she already knew I didn’t have a lot of other options, so sod it.

It felt strange to have that thought, like it didn’t belong in my head. It’s always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real. Dignity was what I had instead of friends. I gave up trying to make any at about a month into our first year. Nobody I asked for company ever said yes unless they were desperate, and nobody ever asked me. The same thing has happened to me at every school I’ve ever gone to; every club, course, activity.

Before induction, I’d had some faint hope things would be different in here; maybe it wouldn’t happen with other wizards. It was