A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(57)

    Liu looked at me, a question: was I making the offer, too? I couldn’t even make myself nod. I was on the verge of crying again, or possibly vomiting, and that was when an unholy shriek went off right by my right ear, putting half the world on mute, and the charred and twisted remnant of some mal that I suppose had been about to bite flew past me and described a lovely curve through the air to smash into an unidentifiable heap of cinders and ash on the floor.

“Are you not paying attention anymore on purpose now?” Orion demanded, coming up from behind me. I flipped him off with the hand that wasn’t clamped protectively over my abused ear.

So that left the offer just sitting there through breakfast, and we couldn’t talk about it, either, not in front of other people. It would be like snogging at the table: there are people who’d do it, but I’m not one of them. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially because I could see Liu thinking about it, too: she watched the kids who came by to take a look at the phase-change spell with a different eye. Not just idle curiosity, or getting a sense of the market, but like she was considering what their bids might be worth to her, what might come in that she’d be able to use. It had been clever of Aadhya actually to make the suggestion now, before the bidding happened: if we did go in together and let people know about it, some of the bids would be tailored to have useful things for the two of them, our alliance as a whole, not just for me personally.

    At least, it had been clever of her to do it now, if she were going to do it at all, which I still couldn’t really get my head round. But Aadhya didn’t show any signs of having second thoughts; she ate a hearty breakfast, chatted up the kids coming by for the auction—a lot better than I did—and talked about her shield holder project and the spares she’d made, which obviously got Liu to prick up her ears even more.

I couldn’t guess which way Liu would jump, though, and the offer had clearly been for a three-way alliance. But if she didn’t go for it, I decided abruptly, halfway through breakfast, I’d ask Aadhya if she’d try to find another third person to go in with us, or agree to aim for alliance without sealing the deal right away, provisional terms. That was the opposite of a power move on my part, but she already knew I didn’t have a lot of other options, so sod it.

It felt strange to have that thought, like it didn’t belong in my head. It’s always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real. Dignity was what I had instead of friends. I gave up trying to make any at about a month into our first year. Nobody I asked for company ever said yes unless they were desperate, and nobody ever asked me. The same thing has happened to me at every school I’ve ever gone to; every club, course, activity.

Before induction, I’d had some faint hope things would be different in here; maybe it wouldn’t happen with other wizards. It was a stupid hope to have, since I’m not the only wizard kid who went to mundane schools by a long shot—if you aren’t in an enclave, the sensible choice is sending your kid to the largest mundane school you can find, because maleficaria avoid mundanes. Mundanes aren’t exactly invulnerable to mals—a scratcher can shove a giant foot-long claw through your belly whether you’ve got mana or not—but they have one extremely powerful protection: they don’t believe in magic.

    You’ll say loads of people believe in all sorts of codswallop from the Snake Goddess to theologically questionable angels to astrology, but as someone who spent her formative years among the most determinedly credulous people in the world, it’s not at all the same thing. Wizards don’t have faith in magic. We believe in magic, the way mundanes believe in cars. No one has deep discussions around a bonfire about whether a car is real or not, unless they’ve taken more drugs than usual, which is, not coincidentally, the condition of most mundanes who do encounter mals.

Doing magic in front of someone who doesn’t believe in it is loads harder. Worse, if their disbelief trumps either your certainty or your mana, and the spell doesn’t come off, you’ll probably have trouble the next time you try and cast it, whether the unbeliever’s still there or not. Do that a few more times and you’ll stop being able to do magic at all. In fact, it’s entirely possible there are loads of unknowing potential wizards out there, people like Luisa who could hold enough mana to cast spells, only they’ve been raised mundane and so they can’t, because they don’t know that magic works, which means it doesn’t.

And if you’re a mal, and therefore only exist because of magic in the first place, you effectively have to persuade a mundane that you exist and function in the world, contrary to all their expectations, before you can eat them. In fact, one time towards the end of my secondary school career, an excessively ambitious yarnbogle tried to come after me in gym class; the teacher caught sight of it, was absolutely convinced it was a rat, and whacked it triumphantly with a cricket bat. When she stopped whacking, it was in fact indistinguishable from a smashed rat, even though I couldn’t have killed a yarnbogle with a cricket bat if I hammered on it all day. The reward’s not worth the risk, considering that mundanes contain essentially no flavor or nutritional value from a mal’s perspective, and so they keep well away. Which is why lots of wizard kids get sent to school with mundanes.

    But Mum really does live in the back of beyond by wizard standards—too far from any enclave to conveniently work for them or trade with them—so I was the only wizard kid I knew, and at the time I tried telling myself that the reason mundanes didn’t like me was they sensed the mana or something. But no. Wizard kids are just kids, and they don’t like me, either.