The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

What matters is I’d had a carefully planned timetable for building mana over my Scholomance career, and it was thoroughly wrecked.

Me everytime i plan to get work done and something goes wrong to ruin my entire schedule 😭

I had a more limited supply of sympathy and had to ration it.

But Liu was always so contained, so measured and thoughtful, and it was a surprise to hear her even that close to snapping.

It took me a few moments longer than Aadhya—three years of near-total social ostracization leaves you badly equipped for this sort of thing—but they both kept a space open until I lurched in to join the hug, our arms around each other, and it was the miracle all over again, the miracle I still couldn’t quite believe in: I wasn’t alone anymore.

They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic. As though it could make everything all right. As if the whole world had become a different place.

To cap it off, Orion didn’t congratulate me exactly, but he said, “I’m glad you and Chloe have become friends,” in an alarmingly hopeful way that was very clearly only one unfortunate literature assignment away from turning into come live with me and be my love, optionally etched onto metal with little hearts around it.

I went to my Myrddin seminar in a cloud of outrage as I realized Orion had been in there, and my leskit-clearing stunt had somehow saved his neck, so I did have to be happy I’d been able to do it, and also what had he even been doing down in the workshop with a bunch of sophomores?

She was so alive and real, her soft fur and her moving lungs and the tiny beat of her heart; she didn’t belong to the Scholomance. She was a part of the world outside, the world I sometimes found myself thinking maybe only existed in the dreams I had of it once in a while.

anger won. It usually does, for me.

I was just bitter and sullen about it, too.

They were all delightedly hoping to give me exactly the post-Scholomance life I’d dreamed of for years. The bastards.

one of the main reasons I’d been avoiding Orion’s room lately was the strong feeling that it would be for the best for all concerned if I didn’t see him with his shirt off again anytime soon, so that would be pot and kettle.

I’d never been in a moment with anyone before and I didn’t like it at all. What business did my brain have coming up with a patently stupid idea like kissing Orion Lake in the stacks instead of doing my classwork?

So now I wasn’t just a dangerously powerful fellow student, to be flattered and watched and strategized over.

Poor him: the greatest hero in generations and no evil monsters for him to fight.

But I’d been overwhelmed by an instant éclat of idyllic vision: the two of us wandering the world together, welcomed everywhere by everyone, him clearing out infestations and then watching my back while I put up Golden Stone enclaves with the power from the mals he took out.

But as someone who’s been told she’s a monster from

almost all corners from quite early on, I know perfectly well the only sensible thing to do when self-doubt creeps into your own head is to repress it with great violence.

It annoyed me more and not less because I didn’t have a good reason for being annoyed.

I should have felt proud of myself; I’m sure Mum would have told me I’d grown. I’m afraid all I felt was an even more passionate desire to drop Khamis down a maintenance shaft.

As a general rule, regardless of the specific situation in which you find yourself, at every step you must take care to preserve or widen the number of your options.

That was all I could be: the lesser evil.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feels stupid when you mean it.

I would never ignore similar good advice myself if it were given me, of course.

I wasn’t going to give in to them. I wasn’t going to give in to anyone:

“It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.”

What are you going to do otherwise?” That was a wrong question to ask, because Orion looked back at them and still clearly felt that kill them all was a perfectly valid response—

stopped worrying about doing any killing of their own. Even Orion had got over being enraged and was just standing gawking at me—in an infuriatingly starry-eyed way, in his case, demonstrating his continuing total lack of judgment and sense.

just a girl talking to myself in the hallway, a stupid girl pretending she was a hero because she was going to save a thousand kids before she then went skipping merrily through the gates, leaving behind

However many ticking minutes I had left, I’d still only ever be a girl with her finger stuck into a hole in the dike, and whenever I finally fell down, here the torrent would come.

it still wanted to be—something besides a lesser evil.

I wanted to sob for Mum, for Orion, for anyone at all to save me, and there wasn’t anyone.

Barring the one incredibly stupid glaring exception, who didn’t count.

She’d taken over gathering them, because she could read so many languages so fluently, and because unlike Liesel she didn’t traumatize people with her comments,

I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway.

You don’t have to do this alone; you can ask for people to help you,

He lunged to one side of me to take out a swinging rack of crystalline blades and then instantly whirled to the other to vaporize the billowing violet-pink cloud of a glinder, finishing the sweep in close to me, and when he grinned down at me, breathing hard and sweaty and sparkling, I laughed back, helplessly, and threw a wall of flame spiraling out round us both, a swarm of treeks exploding like tiny fireworks as it caught them, half a dozen scuttling constructs melting into glistening puddles of liquid metal, and the course was done: we were alone in the hazy sunlit warmth beneath a stand of delicate purple-red maples.

but he was real: his mouth and his arms round me and his body overheated against me, trickles of rain and sweat trapped against my cheek and his breath gasping out of the sides of his mouth even as he tried to keep kissing me, wanting me, his heart pounding so hard I could feel it through my chest, unless that was my own heart.

But Orion said it like he’d been holding it in his mouth for a year, an unreal vision he hardly believed he’d found, and I wanted to cry and also thump him at the same time, because I didn’t want to like it.

“There’s no such thing as normal people,” I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”

But I just need to know. I never had a plan except to go home and kill mals. I never wanted anything else. But now I do. I want you. I want to be with you. I don’t care if it’s in New York or Wales or anywhere else. And I just need to know if that’s okay. If I can—if I can have that. If you want that, too.

I wanted him to get on a plane and come to me, and I wanted to live happily ever after with him in a clean and shining world we’d purge of maleficaria and misery, and apparently I wasn’t a sensible realist after all, since I was leaping after that outrageous fantasy with both hands, straight into the chasm I could see perfectly well open before me.

Orion landed in the full churning current still whirling off the detritus, and the mals actually split to go around him as he just stood there, bright-eyed and not breathing particularly hard, and cracked his neck to one side like he’d just got warmed up properly. He even gave me a quick infuriating grin before he plunged back into the fray.

He turned to me and said, “El, I love you so much.” And then he shoved me through the gate.