A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(3)

    Of course, the families of all the other students realized what had happened—because it was stupidly obvious; the idiots hadn’t let the enclave kids escape first—and hunted the dozen maleficers down. The last one of them was dead by the time Mum graduated the following year, and that was that for the Hands of Death or whatever they called themselves.

But even when you’re a sneaky little fly-by-night malia-sucker who picks his targets wisely and makes it out unnoticed, there’s nowhere to go but further down. Darling Jack’s already stealing life force from human beings, so he’s going to start rotting on the inside within the first five years after he graduates. I’m sure he’s got grandiose plans for how to stave off his disintegration, maleficers always do, but I don’t think he’s really got what it takes. Unless he comes up with something special, in ten years, fifteen at the outside, he’ll cave in on himself in a nice final grotesque rush. Then they’ll dig up his cellar and find a hundred corpses and everyone will tut and say good lord, he seemed like such a nice young man.

At the moment, though, while fighting through one page after another of extremely specific Old English household charms in crabbed handwriting, I felt strongly I could have gone for a nice big helping of malia myself. If my unshucked oats were ever being eaten by leapwinks—your guess is good as mine—I’d be ready. Meanwhile the puddle of soul-eater kept letting out soft flaring pops of gas behind me, each one like a distant flash of lightning before the horrible eruption of stink reached my nose.

I’d already spent the whole day in a deep slog, studying for finals. There were only three weeks left in the term: when you put your hand on the wall in the bathrooms, you could already feel the faint chunk-chunk noises of the middle-sized gears starting to engage, getting ready to ratchet us all down another turn. The classrooms stay in one place in the school core, and our dorms start up at the cafeteria level and rotate down each year, like some enormous metal nut whirling round the shaft of a screw, until down all the way we go for graduation. Next year is our turn on the lowest floor, not something to look forward to. I very much don’t want to fail any exams and saddle myself with remedial work on top of it.

    Thanks to my afternoon’s diligence, my back and my bum and my neck were all sore, and my desk light was starting to sputter and go dim while I hunched over the tome, squinting to make out the letters and my arm going numb holding my Old English dictionary in the other hand. Summoning a wall of mortal flame and incinerating the soul-eater, the spellbook, the dictionary, my desk, et cetera, had rapidly increasing appeal.

It’s not completely impossible to be a long-term maleficer. Liu’s going to be all right; she’s being a lot more careful about it than Jack. I’d bet she used almost her whole weight allocation to bring a sack of hamsters or something in with her and she’s been sacrificing them on a planned schedule. She’s sneaking a couple of cigarettes a week, not chain-smoking four packets a day. But she can afford to do that because she’s not completely on her own. Her family’s big—not big enough to set up an enclave of their own yet, but getting into throwing distance—and rumor has it they’ve had a lot of maleficers: it’s a strategy, for them. She’s got a pair of twin cousins who’ll be turning up next year, and thanks to using malia, she’ll have the power to protect them through their first year. And after Liu graduates, she’ll have options. If she wants to quit, she could put spells aside entirely, get one of those dull mundane jobs to pay the bills, and rely on the rest of her family to protect her and cast for her. In ten years or so, she’ll have psychically healed up enough that she’ll be able to start using mana again. Or she could become a professional maleficer, the kind of witch that gets paid handsomely by enclavers to do heavy work for them with no questions asked about where the power comes from. As long as she doesn’t go for anything too excessive—as in, my kind of spells—she’ll probably be fine.

    But I don’t have family, not aside from my mum, and I certainly don’t have an enclave ready to support me. We live in the Radiant Mind commune near Cardigan in Wales, which also boasts a shaman, two spirit healers, a Wiccan circle, and a troupe of Morris dancers, all of whom have roughly the same amount of real power, which is to say none whatsoever, and all of whom would fall over in horror if they saw Mum or me doing real magic. Well, me. Mum does magic by dancing up mana with a group of willing volunteers—I’ve told her she ought to charge people, but no—and then she spreads it out again freely in sparkles and happiness, tra la. People let us eat at their table because they love her, who wouldn’t, and they built her a yurt when she came to them, straight from the Scholomance and three months pregnant with me, but none of them could help me do magic or defend me against roving maleficaria. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. They don’t like me. No one does, except Mum.

Dad died here, during graduation, getting Mum out. We call it graduation because that’s what the Americans call it, and they’ve been carrying the lion’s share of the cost of the school for the last seventy years or so. Those who pay the piper call the tune, et cetera. But it’s hardly a celebratory occasion or anything. It’s just the moment when the seniors all get dumped into the graduation hall, far below at the very bottom of the school, and try to fight their way out through all the hungry maleficaria lying in wait. About half the senior class—that is, half of the ones who’ve managed to survive that long—makes it. Dad didn’t.