A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(63)
I’ve read about mana spurts in the cheery “As Your Mana Grows” pamphlet that Mum pushed on me, but I’ve never experienced one myself. The capacity to hold mana does expand in sudden jumps for most of us, but you don’t get overwhelmed with a surge of mana when you haven’t got enough of it to fill the capacity you already have. Chloe had obviously been in a different situation.
“I was playing—” she shaped an enclosed space with her hands, “—under the slide, with a couple of friends. No mundanes. And the lyeflies, the whole swarm, they all just came for me. They started gnawing through the shield my mom made me wear. There were so many—” She stopped and swallowed. “My friends screamed and ran out. I couldn’t do anything. It felt like mana was coming out my nose, my mouth, my ears. I didn’t remember a single spell. I still have nightmares about it sometimes,” Chloe added, and I believed her. She’d wrapped her arms around herself without even thinking, her shoulders hunched in. “Orion was walking around the playground edge, just kicking pebbles, not playing with any of us. He ran right in and burned them all off me. I thought he was the most amazing person in the entire world.”
I was trying ferociously hard to hang on to being angry, but it was hard going. I didn’t want to give her any sympathy. The one time a swarm of lyeflies came through the commune, when I was small, Mum had to sit up all day and night holding me tight in her lap, singing a shield over us without stopping until they gave up and flew onward, and if she’d lost her voice, we’d both have died. Chloe had an enclave to hide in, and a shield with enclave power behind it, and surely if Orion hadn’t come to her rescue, one of the grown-up childminders would have dashed right over to help. It was the one thing that had happened to her, the one bad thing, not the first of a thousand bad things. But—I couldn’t help but be with her in it: nine years old with mana erupting through you, being swarmed by a cloud of lyeflies, feeling them gnawing their way to your flesh—I was hunching up myself, hearing a scratcher clawing at the wards on my threshold.
But fortunately for my spleen, Chloe was going on urgently from there, saying, “I spent months after that, following him around, trying to be his friend, asking him to do things together. He always said no unless his mom made him. And it wasn’t just that he didn’t like me. All of us have tried. Some of our parents even told us to, but that’s not why, we didn’t do it to suck up to the Domina in waiting or anything. It was for him. We all knew he was special, we were all grateful. But it didn’t even register. He wasn’t being a snob or anything, he’s never mean or rude, I just—didn’t matter to him. Nobody ever mattered to him before.”
She waved a hand up and down over me, and she sounded so very sincerely bewildered. “Then he talks to you once, and all of a sudden he’s making excuses for following you around. One day he’s got to help you fix a door, the next he thinks you’re a maleficer, then he’s got to help you because you’re hurt. He sits with you at lunch, he even comes to the library when you ask him. You know how many times I’ve tried to get him to come to the library? He came with us twice, the first week of freshman year, and I don’t think he’s come up here since. We even heard he did your maintenance shift with you! So yes, we are all freaking out. We weren’t arguing over whether or not it’s worth giving you a guaranteed spot. If Orion actually liked someone, none of us would think twice, nobody in the whole enclave would. We’ve only been arguing whether or not you’re a maleficer who’s doing something to him.”
She finished up this litany and stopped defiantly, as if she was waiting for me to yell at her, but I just stood there, disappointing as usual. I was too something to speak. Not angry, exactly. I’d been angry at Magnus when I’d thought he was trying to murder me to hang on to Orion in all his strategic value, filthily and remorselessly selfish. Oh, how I’d enjoyed all that sweet crisp righteous anger, my favorite drug: I’d nearly ridden the high straight into murder. This sensation felt murky as sludge by comparison, thick with exhaustion.
I’d already worked out that what Orion wanted was someone who didn’t treat him like a shining prince; I just hadn’t understood why. Now I understood so well it made my stomach hurt. Chloe, Magnus, all of them, probably everyone in their entire enclave, had come up with this story that Orion was some kind of inhumanly heroic monster-slayer, who loved nothing more than spending all day and all night saving all their lives, who didn’t give a thought to his own happiness. They’d made up that lie because of course they desperately wanted that from him. Oh, they’d have been happy to cosset him and flatter him and give him the best of everything in return—why not, they had it to give, that didn’t cost them anything. They’d gladly hand that priceless enclave spot to me, to any rando girl Orion so much as smiled at; they’d probably have taken Luisa in just because he pitied her. Cheap at the price.
They were desperate to keep him in the exact same way that everyone back at the commune wanted to get rid of me. He was living the same garbage story I was, only in mirror image. Trying so hard to give them what they wanted, trying to fit himself into the beautiful lie they’d made up about him, staring obediently at flash cards his mum made so he could be polite to them. But of course he couldn’t be friends with them. He could tell, surely, that they only wanted to be his friends as long as he stayed in the lie. Chloe with her big eyes telling me how wonderful he was, how they’d all tried so hard.