All right, no, I wouldn’t, and I’m pretty sure that all my sentiments will revert within a week after I get back. Anyway, it’s been made very clear I’m not welcome, except on sufferance. And maybe not even that, if I try to settle in again once I’m out of here. The commune council—Philippa’s the secretary—will probably come up with some excuse to throw me out. Negativity of spirit has already been mentioned more than a few times just at the limits of my hearing, or well within them. And then I’ll just have wrecked Mum’s life, because she’d walk away without a second thought to stay with me.

I’ve known even before I came to the Scholomance that my only chance for a halfway decent life—assuming I get out of here to have one at all—is to get into an enclave. That’s me and everyone else, then, but at least most independent wizards can find friends to club together and watch each other’s backs, build mana, collaborate a bit. Even if people liked me enough to keep me, which no one ever has, I wouldn’t be any use to them. Ordinary people want a mop in the cupboard, not a rocket launcher, and here I am struggling desperately for two hours just to turn up a spell to wash the floor.

But if you’re in a lush enclave of a few hundred wizards, and a death wyrm crawls out of the depths of the nearest cavern, or another enclave decides to declare war, you really would like somebody around who can slit a cow’s throat and unleash all the fires of hell in your defense. Having someone with a reputation for that kind of power in your enclave usually means you don’t get attacked in the first place, and then no cows have to be sacrificed, and I don’t ever have to take a psychic pummeling and lose five years off my life, and worse yet make my mother cry.

But that all depends on my having the reputation. No one’s going to invite me into an enclave or even a graduation alliance if they think I’m actually some sort of pathetic damsel in distress who needs rescuing by the local hero. They certainly won’t do it because they like me. And meanwhile Orion doesn’t need to impress anybody at all. He’s not even just an enclaver. His mother is one of the top candidates to be the next Domina of New York, which is probably still the single most powerful enclave in the world right now, and his father’s a master artificer. He could just keep half an eye out, do the bare minimum of coursework, and walk out and spend the rest of his life in luxury and safety, surrounded by the finest wizards and the most wonderful artifice in the world.

Instead, he’s been spending his school years making a massive spectacle of himself. The soul-eater behind me was probably his fourth heroic deed of the week. He’s saving every dullard and weakling in the place, and not a thought given to who’s going to have to pay the price. Because there’s absolutely going to be a price. For all that I want to go home every minute of every day in here, I know perfectly well it’s actually unbelievably good luck to be here. The only reason I’ve had that luck myself is because the school was largely built by Manchester enclave, back in the mists of the Edwardian era, and the current UK enclaves have managed to hang on to a disproportionate number of the spare seats to hand out. That might change in the next few years—the Shanghai and Jaipur enclaves have been making threatening noises about building a new school from scratch in Asia if there isn’t a significant reallocation soon—but at least for the moment, any indie kid in the UK still automatically goes on the induction list.

Mum offered to get me taken off, but I wasn’t insane enough to let her. The enclaves built the school because outside is worse. All those maleficaria creeping through the vents and the pipes and under the doors, they don’t come from the Scholomance—they come to the Scholomance because all of us are in here, tender young wizards newly bursting with mana we’re still falling over ourselves learning to use. Thanks to my freshman-year Maleficaria Studies textbook, I know that our deliciousness goes up another order of magnitude every six months between thirteen and eighteen, all wrapped up inside a thin and easy-to-break sugar shell instead of the tough chewy hide of a grown wizard. That’s not a metaphor I made up myself: it’s straight out of the book, which took a lot of pleasure telling us in loads of detail just how badly the maleficaria want to eat us: really, really badly.

So back in the mists of the late 1800s, the renowned artificer Sir Alfred Cooper Browning—it’s hard to avoid picking up his name in here, it’s plastered all over the place—came up with the Scholomance. As much as I roll my eyes at the placards everywhere, the design’s really effective. The school is only just barely connected to the actual world, in one single place: the graduation gates. Which are surrounded by layers on layers of magical wards and artifice barriers. When some enterprising mal does wriggle through, it’s only got inside the graduation hall, which isn’t connected to the rest of the school except for the absolute minimum of pipes and air shafts required to supply the place, and all of those are loaded up with wards and barriers, too.

So the mals get bottled up and spend loads of time struggling to get in and get up, and fighting and devouring each other while they’re at it, and the biggest and most dangerous ones can’t actually squeeze their way up at all. They just have to hang around the graduation hall all year long, snacking on other mals, and wait for graduation to gorge themselves. We’re a lot harder to get at in here than if we were living out in the wide open, in a yurt for instance. Even enclave kids were getting eaten more often than not before the school was built, and if you’re an indie kid who doesn’t get into the Scholomance, these days your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty. One in four is plenty decent odds compared to that.

But we have to pay for that protection. We pay with our work, and we pay with our misery and our terror, which all build the mana that fuels the school. And we pay, most of all, with the ones who don’t make it, so what good exactly does Orion think he’s doing, what does anyone think he’s doing, saving people? The bill has to come due eventually.

Except nobody thinks that way. Less than twenty juniors have died so far this year—the usual rate is a hundred plus—and everyone in the whole school thinks he hung the moon, and is wonderful, and the New York enclave’s going to have five times as many applicants as they’ve had before. I can forget about getting in there, and the enclave in London isn’t looking very good, either. It’s maddening, especially when I ought to be news. I already know ten times more spells for destruction and dominion than the entire graduating class of seniors put together. You would too if you got five of them every time you wanted to mop the bloody floor.

On the bright side, today I’ve learned ninety-eight useful household charms in Old English, as I had to slog through to number ninety-nine to reach the one that would wipe out the stink, and the book couldn’t vanish on me until I’d got to it. Every now and again, the school does shoot itself in the foot that way, usually when it’s being its most awful and annoying and petty. The misery of translating ninety-nine charms with a stinking, dead soul-eater gurbling behind me was good enough to buy me the extra useful ones.