A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(30)

Unless you’ve got project work you have to do—and several friends watching your back—the library is always where you want to be: it’s the safest place in the whole school. The bookcases just keep going up and up until they vanish into the same darkness that’s outside our cells, so there’s no place for mals to get in above. There’s no plumbing on the library level at all; you have to go down to the cafeteria level if you need the loo. Even the air vents are smaller. It’s musty and smells of old paper, but that’s a trade-off we’re all willing to accept. We’d spend every spare minute here, except there’s not enough space in the reading room for everyone. Nobody gets into real fights very much in the Scholomance—it’s just stupid—but enclaver groups will fight each other occasionally over a table or one of the prime reading areas with lumpy sofas big enough to kip on.

    There are a handful of smaller reading rooms, up on the mezzanine level, but each of those is claimed by a consortium of two or three smaller enclaves, the ones that don’t have enough firepower to claim a good section of the main reading room, but more than enough to keep out any outsiders who might want to intrude. Nkoyo gets invited to one up there fairly often, by the kids from Zanzibar and Johannesburg. If you’re not invited, it’s not worth going up there; on the rare occasion when no one’s there, the first person who shows up—almost certainly with at least three tagalongs—will chase you, even if there’s plenty of room. And for once that doesn’t just mean me; they’ll chase anyone, on principle: it’s too important a resource not to police it.

The only other reasonably good place to work is one of the study carrels tucked in and around the stacks, and they don’t always stay where they should. You can catch sight of one peering through a bookshelf, green lampshade like a beacon, and by the time you’ve got to the next aisle over, it’s gone. If you do find one, and you settle in to work and then doze off over your books, you might wake up in a dim aisle full of crackling old scrolls and books in languages you can’t even recognize, surrounded by dark, and good luck finding your way back before something finds you. The library is safer, not safe.

    I’ve managed to claim one of them more or less, a scarred old monster of a desk that’s probably been here as long as the school itself. It’s tucked into a nook that you’d never see unless you go all the way to the end of the aisle with the Sanskrit incantations and then go around the back to the next aisle over, which has the Old English incantations. Almost no one would go that way, for good reason. The bookcases in between are full of crumbling scrolls and carved-stone tablets in some parent language so ancient that nobody knows it anymore. If you happened to look too long at a sliver of papyrus while going past, the school might decide you were now studying that language, and good luck figuring out the spells you’d get then. People can end up spell-choked that way: you get a dozen spells in a row that you can’t learn well enough to cast, and suddenly you can’t skip over them anymore to learn any new ones, even if you trade for them. Then the spells you’ve already learned are all you’ve got for the rest of your life. It’s not really a silver lining that the rest of your life isn’t likely to be very long if you’re stuck working with sophomore-year spells. On top of that, the path goes underneath one of the walkways that connect the mezzanine-level areas, so a good chunk of it sits in the dark.

And that’s where I found my desk. I risked the shortcut last year because I made up a special project for myself: analyzing the commonalities between spells of binding and coercion in Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Old English, and Middle English. I know, charming subject, but perfectly aligned with my affinity, and it let me out of taking a final exam for languages at all. Otherwise, I’d have had five hours in a classroom full of other delicious sophomores who’d have made sure I was the one sitting in the very worst spot. The topic also near-guaranteed that I’ll be assigned the Proto-Indo-European seminar next year, which always has at least ten students in it, a good healthy size for a senior languages-track seminar. But you do need a reference or two, or more accurately fifty, to get a passing mark on a project like that. Just collecting up the books from each language was going to take me a good half hour of my every work period.

    I couldn’t just keep them—or rather, I could; I could hide them in a dark corner or take them back to my room or set them on fire; there’s no one here to stop you at the door or charge you late fees. But if you’re even a little careless with a library book, it’ll be gone the next time you want it, and good luck finding it on the shelves ever again. So I reshelve every time, and I have a pocket notebook I’ve been carrying since freshman year with the title and catalog number of every book I’ve used, a note about which aisle it was in, how many bookcases from the end, which shelf from the floor, how many books on either side on the shelf, and the titles of the immediate neighbors. The really valuable ones, I even do a sketch of the spine in colored pencil. Thanks to that, I can lay my hands on almost any of them, and next year I’ll probably be able to sell the notebook off to a younger languages-track student right before graduation in exchange for some mana. That’s the value of making loads of work for yourself.

But before I found my desk, what that meant was, anytime I had to do a paper, each day after an abbreviated lunch I dashed up here, got the books I needed, hauled them all downstairs to an empty classroom, got forty minutes of work done, hauled them back up and reshelved, and did the same thing all over again to get two hours of work done after dinner. I couldn’t get a place in the reading room to save my life, even at the lousy tables in the dark corners where you have to spend your own mana to cast a light.