A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)

by Naomi Novik

If anyone tries to organize anything especially alarming, like a gang of maleficers, and other kids find out about it but don’t have the firepower to stop it on their own, they can call a tribunal, which is just a pretentious word for standing on a table in the cafeteria at mealtime and yelling out that Tom, Dick, or Kylo has gone over to the dark side and asking everyone to help take them down.

It’s only worth

calling a tribunal if you can reasonably expect that everyone else in the school is going to instantly agree that there’s a very clear, very imminent threat to their lives from the person you’re accusing.

If we did get the cleansing fires running in the graduation hall, it wouldn’t just be the seniors this year who saw the benefits. There would be fewer mals in the school for years, and the cleansing might run again for our graduation, and the sophomores, too. Unfortunately, you can’t, in fact, put aside the challenge of getting to the equipment. It broke for the first time back in 1886.

There were enough recriminations flying among the enclaves by then that Sir Alfred himself personally led in a large crew of heroic volunteers to install what he insisted would be a permanent repair.

His “permanent” repair got dismantled again three years later.

London enclave more or less organized a coup, took the Scholomance over, then doubled the number of seats—the dorm rooms became significantly smaller—and opened the

place up to independent students. Rather in the same spirit as the seniors who wanted to bring our class along for graduation.

And it worked splendidly. The enclaver kids do make it out alive almost all of the time—their survival rate usually hovers around eighty percent, a substantial improvement over the forty percent chance they’ve got if they stay home. There are so many weaker and less protected wizards around them, and even in the graduation hall, the mals can’t catch all the salmon swimming upstream. And that’s the best solution that all the most powerful and brilliant wizards of the last century and more have been able to come up with. Not a one of them has tried to repair the scouring machinery since.

the social commentary is not lost on me because wtf.

He’s saved six hundred lives, so now he’s meant to save more to make up for it? Can anyone here tell me even one time that he’s ever had any reward for saving any of us?”

exactly!! they're all so eager to let him risk his life for theirs. and it's even sadder that he was ready to do it.

“Berlin will guarantee a place to anyone who goes with Orion!” He looked over at the Edinburgh and Lisbon tables, near theirs. “Will any other enclaves make the same promise?”

“I can’t let Orion go it alone with all the worst piranhas of the senior class. Someone’s got to watch his back for him.

i love how much el has his back

All the bigger enclaves have a large mana store in the place, built over generations, which the enclavers get to pull from: they keep them hidden somewhere in the upper classrooms or the library and only the seniors from each enclave know where they are.

it could tell human beings from mals, at least well enough to let us through. I tried not to take it to heart that it seemed to have entertained doubts about me.

lol

As long as I didn’t look, she didn’t have to be dead, and I didn’t have to have feelings about Ellen, beaming at me two days ago while she told me we were going to make it.

god damn

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.

AHHHHH HE KISSED HER!!!

Reader, I ran the fuck away. It wasn’t difficult; everyone wanted to talk to Orion, to hear how he’d done it, how he’d slaughtered the mals and fixed the machinery and saved the seniors—I was fairly sure that by the end of the day, no one would remember that there had actually been any team involved at all, much less that I’d been on it. If I’d wanted to stay with him, I’d probably have had to wind both my arms around his waist and cling like a really determined ivy, but the crowd moved me away without any effort on my part at all.

“You just—you know, you get

used to things. And you don’t think about whether they’re good. Or even okay.” She swallowed. “You don’t want to think about it. And nobody else seems to, either.

“And there’s nothing you can see to ...

“Because there’s not meant to be anything you c...

and Orion kissed me,” which I hadn’t actually meant to say, but it came out, and Liu gave a squeak of excitement and covered her mouth.

literally my reaction

“I kneed him and shoved him off me so I could cast a firebreak,” and Aadhya laughed so hard she fell off the bed while Liu gawked at me, totally stricken on my behalf.

omg lol

And all of that was what induction meant to everyone. A tiny infusion of hope, of love and care; a reminder that there’s something on the other side of this, a whole world on the other side. Where your friends share whatever has come to them, and you share back. Only that had never been induction for me. It was the first time I’d ever been on the inside of it, and my eyes were prickling.

My darling girl, I love you, have courage, my mother wrote, and keep far away from Orion Lake.