A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(21)

But that wasn’t why Orion was incredulous. Wizards tend to mix a lot more, since we all get jumbled in here together during our formative years, and the distinction that matters is between the enclavers and the rest of us have-nots. Orion was just shocked that the great spiritual healer had produced creepy proto-maleficer me, exactly the way everyone else in here would be, which is why in fact I make a point of not telling anyone.

    “Oh,” Orion said awkwardly, and then jumped and reflexively blasted a shadow-thing that didn’t even have a chance to take enough form for me to recognize which variety it was. But he really did put some mana into my crystal afterwards, possibly as some sort of apology, or just because he was about to come apart at the seams: he filled it the rest of the way in a single go and gave a small gasp of relief after. I restrained my feelings and put it into my chest with the others and fished out a new empty one.

I managed to sleep a bit, towards the end of the night. Either the maleficaria had got discouraged, or Orion had exterminated all of the ones in range of my room; there were half-hour stretches where nothing came in. He also filled two more crystals for me. I gave him one of them, grudgingly. I’d started to feel irritatingly guilty about it, even though he hadn’t asked for anything in return like a normal person would have.



* * *





I WOKE UP the last time to my alarm going off. It was morning, and we weren’t dead. Orion hadn’t slept at all, and he was looking faded; I gritted my teeth and then painfully shuffled myself upright and out of the way. “Lie down, I’ll fix it,” I told him.

“Fix what?” he said, and yawned massively.

“That,” I said. You can’t actually replace sleep, but my mum’s got a technique she uses on really bad insomniacs to get their third eye to close—yes, well, it’s not scientific or anything—and it usually makes them feel better. I can’t do most of my mum’s spells very well, but this one’s simple enough that I can manage it. He lay down on my bed and I had him hold the crystal I’d given him, then I put my hands over his eyes and my thumbs between his eyebrows and chanted her “inner eye lullabye” seven times over him. It worked, the way all Mum’s ridiculous stuff works. He fell asleep instantly.

    I let him keep sleeping for the twenty minutes until the breakfast bell rang, and he sat up looking at least five hours better. “Help me up,” I said. There’s no such thing as a sick day in here. Staying in the residential halls all day just means that whatever things are making their way up from below for the nighttime feasting get a midday snack. No one stays in unless they’re all but dead anyway. We catch endless colds and flu, as you might imagine. There’re more than four thousand of us in here, and the incoming freshmen bring along a delightful assortment of viruses and infectious diseases from around the world at the start of every year. And even after those have made the rounds, new things crop up inexplicably. Possibly they’re just smaller maleficaria; isn’t that a lovely thought.

As I was in fact exhausted and overwhelmed, I wasn’t calculating the effect of me and Orion coming out of my room together looking exhausted and overwhelmed. But a couple of other kids who had also slept in until the bell came out the same time we did, and naturally it was everywhere by the time we arrived at the cafeteria. The scale of the gossip reached such elevated levels that one of the girls from the New York enclave dragged Orion aside after breakfast to demand to know what he was thinking.

“Orion, she’s a maleficer,” I overheard her saying. “Jack Westing disappeared last night, people found bits of his shoes outside her door. She probably killed him.”

    “I killed him, Chloe,” Orion said. “He was the maleficer. He killed Luisa.”

That news distracted her enough for her to abandon her lecture on his terrible dating choices, so by the end of the day Orion was the only person in the school who didn’t know we were now unquestionably an item, and for that matter an insane, spending-the-night-together item. It was almost entertaining to see the effects. The New York enclave kids all got immediately anxious: I saw the ones from our year taking time during lunch to go and tell the seniors about it, and meanwhile enough kids from the London enclave began saying nice things to me that it became clear there was a concerted effort under way on their side.

The point being, of course, if Orion was really sold on me, I had just become a chance to poach him. And I’d previously made clear to the London crowd that I’d be interested in an invitation. Not asking openly, of course, since I didn’t want the scornful rejection that would have ensued, but I’d told people my mum lived nearish London, and mentioned I was thinking of applying to the enclave myself. Just enough to plant a seed for the future, once graduation started looming and I’d demonstrated some firepower. People are always more likely to make an offer if they think it’s going to be accepted.

Of course, it was absolutely ridiculous for anyone involved to start either panicking or courting me over a junior-year relationship of two days’ supposed standing, but that was the degree of everyone’s idiocy over Orion for you. I would have been more amused if it weren’t a repeated reminder of how little anyone valued me for my own sake. And if I didn’t still have a barely healed gut wound, which soured my mood considerably.

    I didn’t let it stop me from taking advantage of everyone offering me good seats and minor bits of help all day. I needed every one to get through. I’d managed to get a bit ahead of my work over the course of the term, meaning to use the banked time to review for my final exams, but instead I had to blow it all just resting quietly while everyone else made themselves slightly more appealing targets around me. I didn’t even try to get any classwork done; I just saved my energy, and that night I spent some power out of my crystal on some very heavy-duty shielding before I fell into bed and slept the sleep of those with the Aegis Ward on their door.