A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,87
from the evil schemes of Chloe Rasmussen?”
“I want you to shove your entire head in the mash,” I told him, and vengefully scooped up both of the last two sausages in the steam tray. But I gave him one at the table. It wasn’t his fault he’d grown up in a hive of entitled and murderous weevils.
I was fairly gobsmacked when, after all that, Chloe actually had another go at me in the library: she intercepted me in the reading room on my way into the stacks. “Still not interested,” I told her icily.
“No, El, listen,” she said. I walked away from her and into the incantations aisle, but she actually came in after me and grabbed my arm. “Look, will you quit being a bitch for five seconds?” she hissed, which was rich coming from her, and then she added, “It’s not—don’t go to your carrel.”
I stopped in the corridor and stared at her. She wouldn’t look me in the face. She had a vaguely hunted and half-guilty expression, actually, glancing back over her shoulder towards the reading room. We were in dim light, but probably at least partly visible from the New York corner. I could see Magnus there on one of the settees.
“Just—come sit with us, okay?” Chloe said. “Or go to your room or something.”
“How long will my room be safe? Surely that’s going to be Magnus’s next clever idea.” I was constructing a very detailed fantasy of marching over there and flattening his nose for him: a good punch straight down from above would do it, and have a really satisfying crunch. “Or maybe not: I suppose he’d be worried about getting Orion with it, too. That would be quite the goal, taking him out yourselves while going to all this trouble just to stop me poaching him.”
Chloe flinched. “Have you said yes to Dubai?”
“I haven’t been asked to Dubai! I fixed a chair in their corner because I’m looking to pick up a few measly words of Arabic. And if I had been asked and said yes, it wouldn’t justify you lot trying to murder me with crawlers!” I added through my teeth, because Chloe had the nerve to look relieved.
“What? No! We didn’t—” Chloe obviously realized halfway through her sentence that denial wasn’t going to work, and shifted tacks. “Look, Magnus thought you were a maleficer. The crawler only had a malia-siphon spell. As long as you weren’t a heavy-duty maleficer, the worst it would do was make you a little bit sick.”
She made it sound like a noble defense. I stared at her. “I’m strict mana.” Chloe stopped with her mouth agape at me, shocked like the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her. I’m sure it hadn’t, to any of them. That crawler had been about to turn into a shiny new mal. When you make a construct with the ability to collect power on its own in any way, that’s what you’re asking for. You can wag your finger at it and tell it to be good, but if ever it can’t get power from approved sources, the odds are at least fifty-fifty that it’ll start taking it from anywhere it can get it. And since Magnus had made this one with the secret hope in his heart that it would drain evil-me dry, I was reasonably certain its odds were a lot higher. And then it would have killed me.
Chloe agreed with me, for that matter; she’d gone sickly pale, for good selfish reason: when a construct goes malicious, one of the first people it heads for is its maker, and anyone around them who might have contributed to its creation. It creates a tidy vulnerability that helps the construct suck out their mana. Not that I felt particularly sorry for her. “What’s the present waiting at my desk, a box of jangler mites?” I demanded.
She swallowed and said, a little tremulously, “No, it’s—it’s an unbreaking sleep spell. He and Jennifer were going to put a hypno spell on you and ask you questions…”
“Assuming that nothing ate me before they got there.”
Chloe did have the grace to look ashamed. “I’m so sorry, I really am. We’ve been arguing about it all week—most of us didn’t think it, everyone’s just really worried…But—if you’re strict mana, that’s—great, that’s amazing,” she informed me earnestly—yes, so amazing how her mate had nearly killed me by accident!—and carried right on from there. “Honestly, even without knowing that, most of us already wanted to