A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)

by Naomi Novik

For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me for no reason, nothing I’ve ever done. I’ve never hurt any of them. I’ve been tying myself in knots and working myself to exhaustion just to avoid hurting any of them.

The only realistic goal for a single wizard is to distract it. That’s all Dad did. He grabbed the tentacle and pulled it away from Mum, back into the mass of the maw-mouth. He had time to turn around and tell her he loved her and loved me, the baby they’d only just realized was on the way, and then the maw-mouth got through his shield and swallowed him up.

I’d certainly done my very best to chase Orion off. If he wasn’t a towering weirdo who liked that in a person, I’d have succeeded.

“My mom told me that all boys are carrying a secret pet mal around in their underwear, and if you get alone with them they let it out,” Aadhya said. We both shrieked with laughter, and she laughed, too.