A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(88)

    Orion’s breath was coming in short wavery gasps. I hadn’t seen him afraid down in the hall even once that I’d noticed, but mortal flame isn’t a mal: it consumes mals, it consumes anything in its path that has mana or malia to burn up. Combat magic isn’t any use against them; you can’t fight it. But to do him credit, he didn’t panic, even if he was staring down the one and only thing that he was actually afraid of; he just stood there staring at it sort of blankly, like he couldn’t quite believe this was happening to him.

I straightened up and shut my eyes, getting ready to start casting, and then had to push him off; he was trying to grab hold of my hand, which I needed rather urgently right then. “What are you doing?” I said, trying to get loose: he was being stupidly persistent about it. Yes, I really sincerely hadn’t any idea: whatever was Orion doing, trying to hold hands with me in the moment of what he thought was his imminent demise, and then as soon as I spared it that much of a thought, the answer became so obvious that I felt like a complete idiot. “You are dating me?” I yelled at him, in a fury, and he turned around with his face screwed up in pinched determination and grabbed my face and kissed me.

    I kneed him with as much energy as the situation called for, since I also needed my voice, and then pushed him down to the floor so I could turn back to the onrushing fires and conjure up my own wall of mortal flame, just in time to put it around us as a firebreak.





IT GOT VERY HOT inside our dubious shelter, but the protection didn’t need to last long. The cleansing wall rolled past us in less than a minute and went on its merry devouring way along the corridor. I dismissed my own wall—it was a bit resistant about being unconjured without getting to actually consume anything, but I managed to shove it away—and we were left there alone in the newly scorched corridor, with the faint charred-mushroom smell of burnt maleficaria coming out of every vent.

I kept standing resolutely upright and staring after the wall of flame that had passed as if I thought any moment now it might come back. It wasn’t going to: the end-of-year cleansing is quick and thorough. The walls of mortal flame start in pairs and sweep away from each other towards the next one down the corridor, all of which are placed and timed so they don’t leave any places to hide. The same time the wall had been going past us, the two walls in the stairwell had met on the landing. They’d both winked out, and the wall that had swept over us was probably finishing up a little further down the corridor. However, I was much more inclined to watch for a wall of mortal flame coming back than I was to look down at Orion, since I’d have to see his expression and might have to actually say words to him at that point.

    Then I nearly went over as the whole place began to heave and surge beneath my feet. The walls and floor outside the ring where my protective wall had been were all still scorching-hot, so I had to crouch inside the tiny space with him, both of us clinging to each other with one arm and holding out the other like a clumsy two-headed surfer trying desperately not to topple over and sear ourselves on the heated walls. At least I couldn’t have heard anything he tried to say to me. The gears were going, a hundred times louder than when I’d been safely tucked inside my room for graduation, and the stairway outside began to really move, squealing horribly. The familiar landing of our own res hall ground slowly into view and then continued on to vanish further below; it was all the way out of sight before the stairs locked into place again with a heavy clanging thump, and the grinding noise stopped.

A moment later all the sprayers turned on at once, and the corridor instantly filled with clouds of steam. We were left sopping-wet in a humid cloud of fog so thick we could barely see or breathe for a moment, but the walls were already baking off the moisture, and the hollow roar of the drain vacuums began to suck up the excess, leaving just the drowned-rat pair of us gasping in the middle of a sparkling-clean corridor. The end-of-term bell clanged away, and faintly echoing in the stairwell I heard doors clanging open in the dormitories above and below.

Beneath our feet, a more muffled grinding was still going: that was the senior dorm level winding the rest of its way to the bottom. If the cleansing machinery had run, down there Clarita and Wen and the others would come out into a nearly empty graduation hall, scorched from end to end by an even bigger wall of mortal flame. Some smaller mals would have hidden under larger ones, or under debris. Some of the sirenspiders could probably have made it, thanks to their shells. Patience and Fortitude would have survived, too; it would have taken a solid week of a direct bath in mortal flame to wear those away. But their thinner tendrils would all have burnt up, and the eyes on their surface. The seniors would be able to go straight for the gates, all of them.

    Or maybe it hadn’t worked after all, and the seniors would instead be dumped into a starving horde that had been stirred up like a nest of wasps and was waiting for them with open jaws. We wouldn’t know one way or another, not until next year. When it would be our turn to go. We’d made it to our senior year, the one in two odds we’d beaten so far. Only our chances had been modified by Orion, changing the house rules under us, and when he took hold of my shoulders, I didn’t shove him off again.

“You saved my life,” he said, sounding baffled about it. I gritted my teeth and turned to look back at him, ready to inform him he wasn’t the only one who could be useful on occasion, except he was staring at me with an absolutely unmistakable expression, one I’d seen fairly often in my life: men occasionally aim it at my mum. Not the kind of expression you’re thinking of; men don’t lust after Mum in a leering kind of way. It was more like looking at a goddess, accompanied by thinking that maybe you might get the goddess to smile at you if you, I don’t know, proved yourself sufficiently worthy, and I’d never once imagined anyone pointing anything remotely like it at me.