A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)

by Naomi Novik

Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction.

“Do you just like fighting mals or something?” I prodded, and he flushed up again. “You’re unbelievably odd.” “Don’t you like practicing your affinity?” he said, defensive. “My affinity is laying waste to multitudes, so I haven’t had much opportunity to try the experience,” I said.

But most people can pull small amounts of mana from the inanimate stuff around instead: leach heat from the air or disintegrate a bit of wood. It’s a lot easier to do that than to pull mana from a living human being, much less another sorcerer. For most people.

I came up with a highly effective spell to set off a supervolcano. I burnt it straight away, but once you’ve invented a spell, it’s out there, and who knows, someone else might get it.

Mandarin and English: you’ve got to have one of those two to come at all, since the common lessons are taught in only those two.

Boys often think for about ten seconds that they might want to go out with me, and then they look into my eyes or talk to me and I suppose get the strong impression I’m likely to devour their souls or something.

There aren’t any teachers at the Scholomance. The place is filled to capacity with kids; there are two applicants for every spot as it is, and our dorm rooms are less than seven feet across. Anyone who gets in doesn’t need external motivation.

Mana’s annoying that way. The physical labor isn’t what counts. What turns it into mana is how much effort it costs me.

“You know, it’s almost impressive,” he said after a moment, sounding less wobbly. “You’re nearly dead and you’re still the rudest person I’ve ever met. You’re welcome again, by the way.”

People are always more likely to make an offer if they think it’s going to be accepted.

“Hail, Galadriel, bringer of death! You shall sow wrath and reap destruction, cast down enclaves and level the sheltering walls, cast children from their homes and—” “Right, yeah, old news,”

When an artifact tries to do things for you on its own, that’s a really good sign that it doesn’t have your best intentions at heart.

“But my mom also told me to be polite to rejects, because it’s stupid to close doors, and suspicious of people who are too nice, because they want more from you than they’re letting on.

“You know that feeling when you’re a mile away from anywhere, and you didn’t take your umbrella because it was sunny when you left, and you’re in your good suede boots, and suddenly it gets dark and you can tell it’s about to start pouring buckets, and you’re like Oh great.” She nodded to herself, satisfied with her brilliant analogy. “That’s what it feels like, whenever you show up.”

She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.

That’s all that magic is, after all. You start with a clear intention, your destination; you gather up the power; and then you send the power traveling down the road, giving the clearest directions you can, whether it’s with words or goop or metal.

And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.

I wanted to grab her and shake her and make her see Orion—me—for five seconds as a person. Only I knew I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, because that would cost her. If Orion was a person, he didn’t owe it to her to keep wearing that convenient little buzzer on his wrist, just in case she or any of her actual friends needed help, for nothing in return. If he was a person, he had as much right as she did to be scared and selfish, and she was supposed to pay back everything he gave her. She wasn’t interested in that deal, was she?

“There’re records in the library of inducted students and graduated students. You’ve saved six hundred lives since you started school.”

We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don’t get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it’s worth taking a bet.

“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.