A Deadly Education

Eager to get help with her mirror project before everyone changes their mind, El gathers Orion and Aadhya to join her in the shop right after the meal. Orion mixes the silver for the mirror while Aadhya sets up a magical barrier around the edge of the frame. El needs to force an incantation into the liquid silver so the physical material can preserve the magic and make it ongoing. It is a difficult task, and El knows there’s a danger the silver will bubble as it hardens, ruining the mirror and forcing her to start over without assistants. The incantation El intends to use is one “that some Roman maleficer had worked up for crushing an entire pit’s worth of living victims into pulp” (85). It will take a lot of power, but El wants to make it look effortless so Aadhya will think of her as a powerful witch even after her strange alliance with Orion ends.

Just as El is about to cast the crushing spell, a sirenspider drops from the ceiling. El calls this “absurdly bad luck” as sirenspiders are rare at this time of the school year. Orion hurries to fight the mals, Aadhya hides under the table, and El performs her incantation flawlessly through the chaos. When Aadhya sees the smooth, perfect surface, she assumes it had to do with Orion’s alchemy, rather than El’s power and ability.

Back in her dorm, El hangs the mirror on the wall; when its covering falls off, a “ghastly fluorescing face” appears and says, “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—” (87). Unamused, but unsurprised, El re-covers the mirror, but it still “muttered things […] and occasionally burst into ghostly wailing accompanied by vividly glowing purple and neon-blue light shows” (87).

El gets very little sleep and is in such a foul mood the next morning it’s not until lunch that she realizes Orion hasn’t been convinced to stay away from her yet. Chloe, a New York enclave kid, asks Orion to look at a troublesome spell during lunch; this leaves El with a choice to tag along to the New York table or sit elsewhere. El chooses an empty table and tries to convince herself she’s glad to know who will still associate with her when Orion isn’t around. However, she’s hurt and angry about having spent three years as an outcast when she hasn’t done anything to any of the students—she has actually spent those years working incredibly hard so she doesn’t run the risk of even accidentally hurting them. El is bitter about having to work so hard when the enclave kids have resources and backup and a safe future guaranteed to them.

She remembers the first time a mal came after her: she’d been nine years old, alone in the house because a commune member had taken her very sick mother to the hospital. The mal was a scratcher that clawed its way through the door. El had screamed, thinking someone would come help her, but no one came, even though she was a child alone, and even though El knew for sure that they could hear her. El had one of her mother’s crystals in her hands; when the scratcher made it inside the yurt, El threw the only spell she knew at the creature: a cooking spell. The spell should not have worked on the metal creature. El notes, “The average nine-year-old wizard in a panic throwing a cooking spell at a scratcher would have heated it through nicely and died on red-hot blades instead of cold ones” (92). When El performed the spell, it sucked all the power out of the crystal and vaporized the scratcher completely.

El’s mother returned in the middle of the night in a panic once she was conscious enough to realize El was home alone. She comforted a traumatized and angry El that night, but the mals kept coming from then on. By the time El was 14, “they were coming at the rate of five a night,” (93). and El’s mother showed the physical strain of fighting them off every night. Where she’d been “plump and pink” before, she became thin and haggard. El’s mother had offered to keep El out of the Scholomance, but El knew “what she was offering to do was let me watch her get eaten before I got eaten myself” (93). All of this motivates El to find a place in an enclave—she knows her presence is dangerous for her mother if they’re out in the world without protection.

Bitterly, El notes most of the other students who had been sitting with her the last few days go back to their normal tables. But then, Aadhya comes to sit with her. After that, Liu and one of her friends come. Several more “moderate-loser kids” join them, and Nkoyo says hello as she passes El’s table. El knows this isn’t happening because they like her, but she’s finally managed to forge some tentative alliances. She wants to cry with relief. El and Liu discuss their classes and agree to help each other with their history papers. At the end of the meal, Orion appears and, sounding irritated, asks El if she has a problem with Chloe or Magnus. It’s obvious that he’d expected her to join him at their table.

El snaps back at him, suggesting that Orion enjoys collecting hangers-on and seeing them fight over his attention. This hurts Orion, who tells her to go to hell and walks away quickly, visibly upset. El realizes there are plenty of students who would “genuflect” to Orion for his favor, but he keeps hanging out with her instead. She realizes that this means what he wants is someone who will just treat him like a normal person and not some kind of human shield.

Feeling bad and angry at the world, El goes after him and says, “Can I point out, not four days ago you accused me of being a serial killer […] I’m justified in not grasping that you wanted me to sit with you for lunch” (98). She tells Orion that she does not, in fact, want to sit with Orion’s enclave-mates because they want to be sucked up to. Orion counters that eating lunch isn’t an “act of war,” and El tells him, “The seating arrangements are an act of war, and if you haven’t noticed, that’s just embarrassing” (98). The conversation restores the equilibrium of their relationship; Orion smiles at her and El is forced to admit to herself that she does like him.

The next day, Orion and El go to the library together; it is a popular location because it’s the safest place in the school. The seating arrangements in the library are as political as they are in the cafeteria, but El has managed to claim one of the roving study carrels in an out of the way location. The path to the carrel passes through bookcases full of scrolls and tablets in ancient, forgotten languages, which makes it a risky journey because of the school’s almost sentient nature. El notes, “If you happened to look too long at a sliver of papyrus while going past, the school might decide you were now studying that language, and good luck figuring out the spells you’d get then” (101).

As they walk through the library, people see Orion and try to get his attention. El notices this makes him uncomfortable, so she chases off the more aggressive ones with rudeness. Orion tells her he feels guilty because Luisa had asked him for protection three days before she died. As they walk, El notices the Scholomance reacts to Orion by making things easy for him: the walk is shorter and less maze-like, all the glowing lights stay on, and no mals lurk in the carrel when they reach it. El insists they carefully check it anyway. Orion tells her she’s being paranoid and asks how often she actually gets attacked by mals; he’s shocked when El tells him that she gets jumped “twice a week, if [she’s] careful,” and that “most people get jumped once a month at least” (106). Orion shows her a watch-like medallion on his wrist that buzzes whenever anyone in the New York enclave is in trouble; this is his proof that people don’t get jumped that often. El tells him that “rank and power hath their privileges” (107). Orion dismissively asks if she thinks the mals care or can tell. El explains that the enclave kids are popular, so they have people to taste their foods for poisons and retrieve their supplies and escort them so they’re not alone, power-sharers to draw on, and informally reserved spots in the safest place in every room of the school. Orion doesn’t believe it. He says that inside the Scholomance, they all have the same chances.

When they leave, Orion asks if El wants to come back the next day. El says she has to do her assigned maintenance shift. Orion says he doesn’t have one, which El knows not to be true, but the enclave kids tend to trade their shifts to a single student in exchange for a spot in their alliance at graduation; this is what the students call the unofficial fourth track: “maintenance track.” It is one of the most reliable ways to get into an enclave. It’s also a risky track, because these students have to spend time alone in damaged parts of the school, and they miss most of their coursework, so they are always in danger of failing and their repertoire of spells is very limited. Orion was not aware his maintenance shifts had been traded off to someone else. He offers to come with El and help her clean the labs for her shift.

They clean the lab and spend the rest of the weekend studying in the library together. This makes the New York kids anxious, which pleases El. She knows she should be “chumming up with all of them,” but she doesn’t (111). Aadhya asks if El has a plan and then sensibly reminds El of the need to make alliances and join an enclave for safety. El points out that no one actually wants her—they want Orion. Aadhya says she should use it while she can since El turns people off. El seethes about this for a while and eventually asks what she’s done that turns people off? She expects Aadhya to cite her rudeness, coldness, meanness, or anger, but Aadhya says, “You feel like it’s going to rain” (113). She explains that when El turns up it’s the same feeling as when you’re out in the open without an umbrella and you can tell a rainstorm is coming on. She tells El, “if you cheat a little too much, it can mess up your vibe” (114). Annoyed, El says she never cheats, but Aadhya is dubious.

El ignores Aadhya’s advice and coldly rejects a London enclave kid’s invitation to swap spells because the girl tells her she can “bring a friend” (115). Orion says he doesn’t mind being El’s ticket in, but El says she does mind. El admits to herself that she’s not in a better position than she was before Orion because, “apparently [she] wasn’t going to actually use his friendship to get anywhere,” and she is “well on the way to successfully making [herself] violently, instead of just modestly, hateful to every enclave kid in the place” (116). She thinks the obvious solution is to splash out a lot of power at an opportune moment and get a reputation for being incredibly powerful. Her time is running out, though, as graduation is approaching. The graduation ceremony involves the seniors traveling through a graduation chamber crammed full of particularly large and vicious mals who wait there for their guaranteed yearly meal. The rest of the Scholomance (except for the dorms) are purged twice a year with “massive cleansing walls of mortal flame” (116). This is supposed to happen in the graduation hall too, but “the machinery down there has been broken since about five minutes after the school opened,” and “no one’s going down to the graduation hall to do maintenance” (116).

El stews over this the whole morning as she an Orion study in the library. She notices him look behind them and realizes it’s the third time; before she can ask what he’s sensing, he gets up and runs off. El thinks to chase after him, but she knows that there’s a good chance the school would react to that by stretching the aisles out so she was running in them alone for a long time. She follows at a steady pace, but she’d been right about the school—it stretches the aisles, adding shelves between the ones that had been there before. The school starts adding bookshelves full of really ancient texts El has never seen before in an attempt to slow her down; she spots a gilded, unlabeled book and pulls it off the shelf, knowing the lack of a label means that its fresh from the void and “valuable enough to hide really aggressively” (120).

The aisles are more cooperative after that, and El tries to figure out what kind of mal or mals are attacking based on the noises she hears. She guesses there are about four. She realizes the library has begun trying to make it very easy for her to get to the reading room, which means it wants her out of that particular aisle for some reason; she turns to see what the school is trying to hide and discovers a maw-mouth. They are enormous and incredibly rare mals, and the only ones that are impossible to kill or defend against. If a maw-mouth gets even the smallest grip on you, you are as good as dead. No one knows what happens to people who are eaten by maw-mouths, but there is speculation that their consciousness never leaves the maw-mouth; the creature’s surface has the eyes and mouths of its victims, and the consciousness of those victims may continue to exist inside of it forever. There’s a theory that if you can hold a strong enough shield while the maw-mouth consumes you, you can get to its core and explode it from inside, but that’s only been successfully accomplished three times in recorded history, and all three times involved a whole circle of powerful adult wizards.

El realizes that the school wanted El to reach the reading room without seeing the maw-mouth so she couldn’t warn the other students. When the maw-mouth moves toward the stairway to the freshmen dorms, El has to choose between going into the reading room to help Orion fight the other mals—probably giving herself an opportunity to make the power splash she’d been planning—and following the maw-mouth so it doesn’t consume the entire freshman class.

It cannot be overstated how deadly and terrifying maw-mouths are. El knows following it and stopping it is likely a suicide mission. Additionally, she realizes that even if she did somehow stop it, no one would ever know. No one would see it, and no one would believe her if she told them. And if she did survive, she would have used up all of her carefully hoarded mana. El doesn’t like that she is considering these things. She knows she could run to the reading room, vaporize all of the mals with one spell, and be the immensely powerful hero. No one would know she’d seen the maw-mouth.

She turns instead and follows the maw-mouth, feeling sick. She knows she’s probably going to her death, and her mother would never know what happened to her. El cries as she follows the maw-mouth, but she steadily proceeds until she catches up with it. She activates her chain of power crystals, puts up a shield, and walks close enough that the maw-mouth can grab her and start to pull her in. It’s a horrifying experience: “It wanted to open me up and make me a part of it, mash me up into itself, and it was the disgusting horrible wet inside of dying things, never quite getting to dead, rotting and still bubbling with blood” (131). Screaming and sobbing, El pulls herself deeper into the maw-mouth as she feels all of her mana flooding into her shielding spell. When she can’t keep going anymore, she stops and casts her best mass-murder spell: “it’s just three words in French, à la mort, but it must be cast carelessly, with a flick of the hand that most people get wrong, and if you get it even a little wrong, it kills you instead. That makes it hard to be careless” (132). She casts it effortlessly again and again and keeps casting killing spells for what feels like an endless amount of time. She doesn’t feel any difference in the “putrescence” and “rot and corruption,” until the maw-mouth suddenly breaks apart, disintegrating around her (133).

El stands still as the maw-mouth’s sludge disappears into the drains in the floor. The sprayers in the ceiling turn on, washing away even more of the sludge and blood and fluids covering the hallway walls and El’s shield. She stands there, trembling and crying, feeling like she’s going to vomit. When she hears Orion yelling for her, she steps out of her shield, and it drains away into the floor drains. Orion appears in the hallway, singed and out of breath, but his concern quickly fades: “he stopped and heaved a deep breath like someone who’s been a bit worried because you stayed out too late, and now, seeing you’re fine, is annoyed.” (134). He pointedly says he’s glad she’s okay, and the fight in the library is all over. El bursts into tears and hides her face in her hands.