I’m about the only kid in the school who’d swap major arcana for minor. The division is sort of vague, it’s not actually anything real we learn in class, it’s just what we think of as more or less powerful. You can argue yourself blue about whether one modestly powerful spell is major or minor. And people do! But walls of flame are very decidedly major, and distilling water and mana-cheap electric shock spells are very decidedly minor, so after I picked them, Nkoyo even threw in a few grooming cantrips—hair-plaiting, a bit of glamour, and a deodorant spell, which I suppose was a polite way of hinting that I could stand to wash more often than I do. I didn’t need the hint, I already knew, but if it’s a choice between stinking and survival, I’ll choose to stink. I’ve never had a shower more than once a week in here, and often it’s been longer.

If you’re thinking that’s why I don’t have friends, it’s a bit chicken-and-egg: anyone who doesn’t have enough friends to watch their back can’t afford to be well groomed, and that lets people know you don’t have enough friends to watch your back, which makes them less likely to think you’re a valuable ally. However, none of us spends loads of time showering, and when you want a shower, generally you ask someone who visibly needs one themselves, and it all ends up leveling out. But no one ever asks me. Anyway, I wasn’t sorry to have a few more options for putting myself together, although I don’t dare try that glamour cantrip or I expect I’ll end up with a dozen of the more weak-minded trailing me around with hopeless eyes, whining that they long only to be allowed to serve me.

We’d both come out of the negotiation satisfied, and agreeing to trade again. But Nkoyo wasn’t in any hurry to piss off London and New York, and neither was Aadhya. When I ignored the others and talked to them instead, they kept darting anxious looks around at the enclave kids. Who themselves pretty clearly didn’t know what to make of me not fawning all over them. Naturally they didn’t like it, but there was Orion sitting next to me with his shaggy head bent over his plate as he shoveled in the extra food I’d given him.

Sarah and Alfie both decided to fall back on being British and posh, which meant talking in a self-deprecating way about how difficult they were finding the work in all their subjects and how hopeless they were, when actually they were both as top-tier as you’d expect given they’d been trained from birth in one of the most powerful enclaves in the world. Meanwhile Chloe decided to play defense and kept trying to have conversations with Orion all about fun things they’d apparently done in New York. He only absently responded between bites.

Magnus didn’t talk at all. He obviously didn’t have nearly as much cultural training in the art of being woodenly polite in the face of someone behaving all wrong, and I’m sure he also didn’t enjoy always being second fiddle in his own social group: if it hadn’t been for Orion, he’d have been prime candidate to dominate our year himself. I did notice him seething, but I was too busy seething myself to care. My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time. I was just starting to deep-breaths-and-center myself back to a state of more rational civility, telling myself I really had to say something polite to each one of the enclavers at the table, when Magnus hit his own limit and leaned in. “So, Galadriel,” he said, “I’m really dying to know—how did you keep the mals out all night?”

He was implying that the way I’d hooked Orion was by finding some shielding spell that let me turn my room into a sanctuary for all-night shagging, which I’d offered up in trade for Orion bestowing the favor of his attentions on me. That was a completely reasonable assumption, of course. Which didn’t endear the remark to me any more, especially as it was loud enough to be overheard at the nearby tables. I got angry all over again, and I looked at him straight-on and hissed—when I’m really angry, it’s a hiss, even if there’re no actual sibilants involved—“We didn’t.”

Which had the power of being perfectly true, but coming out of my mouth conveyed the strong implication that we’d been cavorting with maleficaria. Which I suppose Orion had been doing, in a way, so even that was also true. Everyone instinctively leaned away from me, and Magnus, who’d just received a full-on dose of angry me right between the eyes, actually turned faintly pale.

It was a really lovely meal.

AFTER MY PERFORMANCE at lunch, it was a sure bet that Orion’s enclave pals were going to pull him aside as soon as possible and give him two earfuls about why he needed to stop dating me, which would probably awaken him to the realization that we were dating. Even as irritated as I was, I recognized that my window of opportunity was closing, so as we cleared our trays, I got Aadhya aside and said, “Could we do the silver pour right now, during work time?” I think she mostly agreed because she felt she should humor an obvious lunatic. Orion just said, “Yeah, sure,” with a shrug, so we headed straight downstairs to the shop before anyone from New York could intercept him.

In the middle of the school day, the trip downstairs is loads better. Most kids still try to avoid the workshop this near to end of term, but the stairs and corridors on the way are at least lit up, and we weren’t the only ones when we got there: a trio of seniors at the back had skipped lunch entirely to keep working rather frantically on some kind of weapon they were likely counting on for graduation. We settled on a bench towards the front and Orion came with me to my project locker—I handed him the key and let him open it; that’s always a bad moment—and after nothing whatsoever jumped on us, I took out my mirror frame and we carried the rest of the supplies back to where Aadhya had already got the small gas burner going, a process that normally took me ten minutes each time.

She’d never bestirred herself to show off for me, but Orion’s presence was all the incentive she needed to put on a display, and it became clear she was even better than I’d realized. She wasn’t going to do the actual enchantments, which would’ve required her to invest mana out of her own stockpile, not something you do for just a favor in return, but she’d volunteered to hold the perimeter, which was a tricky bit of the pour. She set up the barrier around the edge, and Orion mixed the silver with comfortable sureness, even while working with an enormous array of painfully hard-to-get and expensive ingredients that I’d spent most of the last few weeks carefully collecting from the supply cabinets in the alchemy labs—roughly as much fun as getting anything from the shop supply—which he handled as if he could just get a jar of moon-grown tansy and a sack of platinum shavings off the shelf anytime he needed. He probably could.

“All right, Orion, please pour it right into the middle, from as high up as you can reach,” Aadhya said, and added to me in lecturing tones, which I swallowed resentfully, “and make sure you don’t tilt the surface more than twenty degrees, El. You want to keep the flow going into the middle, and just gently spiral it out. I’ll tell you when it’s ready for the incantation.”