The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

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.

“Comment il les a eus comme ça? J’en ai aucune idée. Putain, j’étais sûr qu’il allait crever,”

cushions—if you think we’d turn up our noses at reusing some perfectly good and comfortable cushions just because they’d previously been home to a pair of monsters and a half-digested fellow student, you haven’t been paying attention—

and if you had that, if you had safe, at least you’d have a choice.

I reacted just as I had at the time, which can be summed up as me yelling die immediately you horrible monstrosity with enormous and violent conviction.

More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression that I shoved it entirely out of reality, and I then went on from there to try and insist that a whole lot of the stuff around it should also stop this absurd pretense of continuing to exist.

I made the four other kids in my seminar extremely aware that the only thing between them and howling nothingness was a tin can held together by happy thoughts and pixie dust.

A normal person would have been terrified to find out about nuclear bomb me waiting to go off. Magnus decided that he quite fancied bringing a tidy nuclear bomb home to his parents.

The only other thing I’d ever heard him actually express wanting was me,

That was the scale of things for which he could express desire: friendship, love, humanity.

and if I said, “Let’s go stand on our heads on the cafeteria mezzanine stairs,” he’d probably shrug and say, “If you want to.”

“Half the time he can’t recognize me unless I’m with you. He pretends to when I say hi to him in shop, but every time his brain goes into this panicky loop like who is she oh no I’m supposed to know her oh no I’m failing at human.

“And you have a hard time accepting that anyone has a right to exist if they won’t jump three lab tables to save the life of a total stranger, so you guys are totally perfect for each other.

you don’t have to be your mom to be a decent human being.

It’s okay for you to go live in New York with your weirdo boyfriend if you want to.”

apparently I’m visibly more of a monster than an evil wizard is. Hurrah.

I was unenthusiastic about the prospect of being found attractive because I seem like a terrifying creation of dark sorcery instead of despite it.

“You weren’t a complete incompetent before. Are you getting senioritis or something?” That’s a highly fatal condition in the Scholomance.

We don’t have any fresh air or school spirit, so instead we all gather together down in the gymnasium and cheer each other on for having stayed alive long enough to experience another Field Day.

Ah, the advantages of being a monstrous dark sorceress in embryonic form.

I did try saying things like, “I won’t bite,” only I said it while seething, so the message that actually got conveyed was that biting would be mild by comparison with whatever I would do instead. And of course they believed me.

we knew how to be afraid of one another;

If it had landed, I suppose we’d have died hallucinating together; how romantic.

Naturally as soon as he dared think about what he might want, surely that made him a monster. 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.

Maybe she wanted to shag Magnus, who was after all heading for six feet and would himself have not looked out of place in—well, an Argos catalog, or at least a pound-shop flyer.

“If he tries to open the door, brain him with the chair,”

it occurred to me that she was half right: if he had got caught between two walls of flame before reaching the main stairs, he would indeed have come and banged on my door for safety. And yes, I’m stupid enough that I would have opened it when he banged,

Anyway, so that was loads of fun, spending the day in Orion’s room with him and the girl who’d tried to kill me.

you brew yourself a cup of nice gothe-fuck-away tea—an easy alchemical recipe every wizard girl can brew in her sleep—

But just because that was obvious and sensible didn’t mean I was going to do it.

He’s the only other living person who’s ever done it. We could compare notes. Or we could look each other in the face and just start screaming together, which feels more appropriate to me.

If that was the monstrous fate Mum had been trying to warn me away from, she’d know, she’d know the way no one else in the world would know just how horrible it would be to live with someone you love screaming in your head forever.

Sometimes when your friends are right, you’re pleased, and sometimes it’s unbearably annoying.

I had to turn back and keep the gates clear for them until they all made it through. They hadn’t asked me, they wouldn’t ask me, because that went against the rules we all understood, but I’d do it anyway, because I could.

I’d keep standing by the gates long enough to save Khamis, who I didn’t love in the least, because how could I do anything else now?

OF COURSE, NOBODY ELSE even noticed my grand noble decision to save all their lives,

I think he really liked people to begin with—a foreign concept to me—

getting mad at me isn’t safe, because it gives me permission to get mad, too.

That was all I could be: the lesser evil.

I didn’t get to have my sister, so I got you.”

because if you’re who I get instead of my sister—I can’t just leave you behind and still be a person.”

I know it’s against your most sacred principles to ask anyone for anything, and obviously we don’t have any reason to care about figuring out how you could save everybody’s lives, but maybe some of us are really bored and don’t have anything better to do.”

“Lake, I know you like your walkies, but fewer than twelve people have been eaten this year so far, and five hundred are due to be gobbled in the first ten minutes downstairs. Don’t be a twat. You can run around and play with the mals after the work’s done.”

I beamed back and flicked a blob of snow off his nose, and then he visibly stopped being annoyed and started wanting to kiss me, but there were people there, so I glared him off.

Great-Grandmother pronounced my quite horrifying doom—well, horrifying for everyone else alive; for all I know, I’d find my own bliss in becoming a grotesquely evil maleficer blasting enclaves into submission.

So if Orion wanted me more than he wanted New York, I suppose I was going to take him away, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about it, either.

“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.”

I stood staring down at him, trying to decide if he was literally insane, and whether I liked him enough to pretend he wasn’t.

I imagine they were very sorry about that a moment later, and so was I, because that made him angry, and it turned out I’d never seen Orion angry before. Not really angry. And I realize I haven’t one metacarpal to stand on here, but I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t even the one he was angry at. For a horrible moment I had the vivid sensation that I wasn’t holding the dome up to protect him anymore: I was keeping him away from them.

since I was having to work extremely hard to not kill them all—that it made a visible impression all round.