A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(43)

I’ve been carrying that prophecy in my head my whole life. It’s one of the first things I remember. It was hot that day. It would have been winter back in Wales, cold and wet; I don’t remember the winter, but I remember the sun. There was a square fountain in the inner courtyard that sent up a little spray with rainbows coming through it, surrounded by small trees in pots with purple-pink flowers. The whole family gathered around us, people who looked like me, like the face in the mirror that the kids at school were only just starting to teach me was somehow wrong, and here was so clearly right. My father’s mother got on her knees to hug me, holding me out at arm’s length afterwards just to look at me, hungry tears running down her face, saying, “Oh, she looks so much like Arjun.”

My great-grandmother was sitting in the shade: I just wanted to wave my hands through the rainbows and put my hands in the fountain, but they brought me over to her, and she was smiling down at me, reaching to take my wet hands with both of hers. I smiled up at her, and her whole face changed and went sagging and her eyes clouded over white and she started speaking in Marathi, which I didn’t speak with anyone except my language teacher once a week, so I didn’t understand the words, but I did understand everyone else around me started gasping and arguing and crying, and that Mum had to pull me away from her and carry me to another part of the courtyard and shelter me with her body and her voice from the yelling fear that ate up all the welcome.

    My grandmother came and hurried us into the house, to a small, cool, quiet room where she told my mum to stay, and she threw one agonized look at me and went back out again. That was the last time I ever saw her. Someone brought us some dinner, and I forgot my own confused fear and wanted to go back to the fountain, and Mum sang me into sleep. My grandfather was one of the men who came to take me from her that night, in the dark. I know what the prophecy says because he translated it for Mum, repeated it a dozen times over trying to persuade her, because he didn’t know Mum well enough to understand that the one thing she’ll never go for is the lesser evil. So instead she took her greater evil back home and raised me and loved me and protected me with all her might, and now here I am, ready to begin my destined career any day I like.

I would’ve probably spent several more hours brooding about it, but I had too much sufficiently depressing scut work to do. I dragged myself off the bed and started the process of conditioning a new crystal to be my channel, which involved building mana by singing a bunch of long involved songs to it about open doors, flowing rivers, et cetera, while concentrating the whole time on pushing a little thread of mana in and pulling it right back out the other side. After my throat started to hurt too much to keep going, I put that one aside and got one of the emptied crystals instead and started filling it back up. But I couldn’t do sit-ups or jumping jacks, thanks to my still-aching gut, so I had to crochet instead.

    Words can’t describe how much I hate crochet. I’d gladly do a thousand push-ups over a single line. I forced myself to learn because it’s a classic mana-building option for school: all you need to bring is one tiny lightweight hook. The standard-issue blankets are made of wool that you can unpick and put back together, no other materials required. But I’m horrible at it. I forget where I am in the pattern, how many stitches I’ve done, which kind of stitch I’m on, what I’m trying to make, why I haven’t stabbed out my own eyes with the hook yet. It’s brilliant for building a truly frothing head of rage after I’ve undone the last hundred stitches for the ninth time. But as a result, I do get a decent bit of mana out of it.

It took me almost an hour of mana spilling out of the crystal before it grudgingly started to store again. My teeth were already clenched with fury by then, with a new addition of lurking anxiety: was I starting to feel evil? Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet. That would be so stupid it seemed almost likely. But I had to go on and deposit at least a noticeable amount of mana, because otherwise I was sure that by tomorrow the crystal would lock up again. And every single one of my drained crystals would have to be refilled the same way. I’d have to decide if I was going to invest the effort to rescue them, or cut my losses and just start filling the crystals I had left. I couldn’t leave the drained ones for last; if I did, they’d go completely dead and be impossible to refill at all.

I couldn’t help thinking I could ask Orion to fill some of them for me. Except if he started routinely power-sharing with me, sooner or later the rest of the New York enclave kids would block him. And that wouldn’t even be unreasonable. He got to pull on them when he needed to. That was what let him go around saving people at will, instead of worrying about whether he had enough mana today, like me and the other losers. He had to pay for that right. Of course, I could just sign on with New York myself. With Orion running around the cafeteria doing ostentatious heroics for my sake, on the heels of a weekend of what everyone else had surely assumed was serious canoodling in the library, Magnus and Chloe and the gang would probably have been relieved to lock me down at this point. And it was even more sensible on my side than it had been yesterday.

    So obviously I wasn’t going to do that. Instead I was going to spend the next month covering my entire blanket with a lovely and soul-destroying leaves-and-flowers pattern. If I wasn’t careful, I might stitch in my rage and do the soul-destroying literally. I suppose at least then I could get shop credit for it.