A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,83
tell, she didn’t even think about the answer. “Some of us are getting together work period on Thursday in the lab. The ticket is two copies of a decent spell.”
“Would that fire wall I traded with you work?” I said, struggling to match her easy tone, as if of course I was welcome, if I could meet the fee—
“Oh, that’s loads better than you need,” she said. “More like a utility spell. I’m bringing one for restoring papyrus.”
“I’ve got a medieval one for tanning leather,” I said. That was actually a section of a larger spell meant for binding a cursed grimoire that would siphon off a bit of mana from every wizard every time they cast one of the spells inside: a very clever technique for creating a mana-stealer that would go unnoticed. But the leather tanning worked perfectly well on its own, too.
Nkoyo gave a shrug and a nod, sure why not, and we were at the door of the language hall. All four of us took turns putting our homework from yesterday into the marking slot, a thin postbox slit set in the metal wall at the door. We’d timed it quite well: you don’t want to be dropping off your homework when there’s a proper crush of people coming in, because then you can end up boxed in if something jumps out of the slit. You also don’t want to be dropping it off really early, because something’s much more likely to jump out of the slit then. But if you hand something in even ten seconds past the start of the lesson, it’s late, and you’ll get marked down.
Getting marked down in languages means you get assigned remedial work that’s just the same stuff you’ve already done, for days or even weeks sometimes. That might not sound like a punishment, but as we’re all studying languages to learn spells, it’s absolutely brutal. The next time you ask for a spell, you’ll get one that has material you theoretically should be up to, but don’t actually know, and you won’t be able to move on past it until you get through your stupid remedial backlog and finally reach whatever lesson you were at before.
I handed in my Arabic worksheet and then sat down at a booth to open the waiting folder and discover my fate, which turned out to be three Arabic worksheets, along with a vicious quiz in Classical Sanskrit that was labeled as taking twenty minutes but actually needed the entire lesson. I had barely finished enough of the questions to get a pass mark when the warning bell rang. I had to scribble my name on the sheet, pile all my things into my bookbag, and carry it awkwardly with my arm wrapped around it like a basket just to get in the line to stick the quiz into the slot before the final bell. I’d have to get the three worksheets done tonight instead, eating into my mana-building time, which I didn’t have enough of to begin with.
Even that couldn’t wreck my mood, which had been whipsawing so aggressively lately that I was beginning to feel like a yo-yo. I’d got used to my ordinary level of low-grade bitterness and misery, to putting my head down and soldiering on. Being happy threw me off almost as much as being enraged. But I wasn’t in the least bit tempted to refuse when I got to the writing workshop and saw Liu looking around: she had the neighboring desk saved for me. I took myself over and got my bag down between our chairs: with someone on the other side who wouldn’t object, I’d be able to steal a few moments here and there to sort it out.
I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.
I worked on it for the first five minutes before I belatedly thought that I might want to talk to Liu, if we were friends now. “What are you working on?” I asked her, as dull as small talk can get, but at least it had the benefit of an obvious