He and his pal Nadia, the girl who’d lent me the dictionary earlier, came to the library with me after dinner. The reading room was already filling up again, and the Dubai kids didn’t look at all happy when I came over and said, “My chair, thanks,” to the kid sitting in it. Clearly the shine was off me, at the very least. But I was right, they didn’t try to pick a fight over it, or Ibrahim and Nadia staking out places on the floor next to it. They just shuffled themselves around so the kid who’d lost the seat got another one in the adjusted pecking order and pointedly ignored us. I didn’t mind: they still talked to each other, a lot, in Arabic. I couldn’t pick out words yet, but just getting the rhythm of a language helps, and getting to eavesdrop on a big group of people talking is a fair bit nicer than having to listen to whatever the Scholomance would be pouring into my ears.

I managed to slog through my Arabic worksheet and made some notes on cards for the grammar, and then I started translating the footnotes to the phase-control spell. I’d been hoping for something useful, ideally casting tips: the older a spell is, the more likely your unconscious assumptions about stance and intonation are likely to be off, and the more powerful a spell is, the more likely awful things are to happen as a result. But instead it was all nonsense about how the phase-control spell was included only for completeness’s sake, as of course that particular spell had just been superseded by a new Arabic-language spell. Right. As far as I know, nobody’s ever made a phase-control spell that works even half as well as Purochana’s; that’s why it’s still in relatively popular circulation even though it’s in highly antiquated Sanskrit. I had a strong suspicion that this new Arabic version had been written by a senior Baghdadi wizard that the translator had been trying to butter up.

I translated every word of the flattery, hoping that maybe there would be one useful thing hidden among the rest, but no. At least doing the work definitely helped settle the book down: I kept stroking the cover, and murmuring each word I translated out loud, and by the end of the process, it was starting to feel comfortable under my hands, like it was mine, instead of just something I’d come across.

Orion came in around then from making up his lab work. The Dubai kids eyed him a little hesitantly, sharing looks I could interpret perfectly well. Even if Orion was taking away some of your advantage as an enclaver in the larger scheme of things, in the smaller scheme of things, you as an individual still wanted him sitting in your corner just in case, for example, a grab bag of mals exploded into the library again. After a moment, one of the seniors gave a quick jerk of her chin to a sophomore, who got up and said casually, “I’m going to bed. Orion, have my chair. Good night everyone,” and took off.

The rest of them also switched to English on a dime and started in on the usual round of thanking Orion for saving their lives in the library yesterday, until I broke in and said, “Give it a rest, he doesn’t need strokes. Did you manage to actually do any work today, Lake, or are you trying to be the first person to actually fail out of the Scholomance?”

He rolled his eyes as he dropped into the chair—he didn’t even notice it as anything special, it must have happened to him so regularly—and said, “Thanks for the concern, I did fine. Nobody was trying to burn my face off in the lab this time.”

Everyone in earshot—including Ibrahim and Nadia—eyed me in a sort of irritated and baffled way at the same time. A couple of the Dubai girls said something to each other in Arabic, which practically didn’t need translation. Yes, obviously Orion was some kind of masochist nutter, dating me. I had to restrain myself severely from snarling at all of them that he wasn’t dating me, thanks, and he should be so lucky at that.

I stayed for another hour mainly out of spite. I had crammed as much Arabic as I was going to absorb that day, and most of my other work required things that were back in my room, not to mention I needed to be doing some mana-building. But I just hung out adoring my beautiful book and sniping back and forth with Orion. I’d like to claim I couldn’t bring myself to go, but I’ve got quite well-developed willpower when it comes to doing necessary work. I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment: I wanted to stay until enough of the Dubai kids finally did go to bed that there was a different chair left open, so I wasn’t giving any of them anything.

But I’m more embarrassed to admit that it never crossed my mind to consider what the cozy situation looked like to someone who might be watching, for instance, from the New York corner across the reading room. As far as they could tell, I’d finally taken one of those many dangled enclave invites, Orion had in fact trotted after me, and we were now comfortably ensconced in the Dubai corner with some of those loser kids I’d recruited.

Dubai wouldn’t have been a crazy choice, at that. The enclave there is relatively new and highly international. It’s got a top-notch reputation for English and Hindi incantation, plus they recruit a lot of artificers and alchemists. Ibrahim also made perfect sense as a connecting point: his older half-brother was in the UAE doing work for the enclave already, and he’d probably get invited aboard, too, if Ibrahim helped them bag Orion. So it was an obvious conclusion for the New York kids to draw, and if I’d thought about it, their response would have been equally obvious. As I hadn’t thought, I just sat there like a prat down the pub with my mates, and didn’t pay the slightest attention when Magnus walked by to go into the alchemy aisle near us, even though he had absolutely no business going into the stacks at all when he could send any of six hangers-on to fetch him any book he wanted.

I doubt he’d have done it on his own initiative alone. They had surely been talking options amongst themselves: How do you solve a problem like Galadriel? And I bet Todd came into it, too. It was one thing for the New York kids to desert him, and another for a loser girl like me to rip into him in the cafeteria in front of everyone. And then to take Orion off to Dubai the very same day, after he’d already power-shared with me and—as Chloe clearly thought—got me an incredibly powerful spellbook.

I do have to give Magnus credit, the crawler was a really good one. It would absolutely have got me, too; I can’t even pretend. It was made of paper, a little crumpled twist covered with what looked at a glance like math equations instead of an animating inscription. The library was full of scrap paper on a good day, much less right after a massive attack that had destroyed dozens of books and thrown kids’ papers every which way, and lots of the scraps move on their own anyway. I actually noticed it moving vaguely in my direction and didn’t think about it again. I didn’t even have my usual baseline shield up, because I was sitting in the reading room in the library with a good line of sight and lots of other eyes watching, and I needed to save every drop of mana that I could. If I’d been sitting in an ordinary chair, or if I’d been working hard, with my feet planted on the ground, the crawler would have been able to get to the bare skin of my ankle, and one second afterwards it would have sent a heap of magic fibers corkscrewing into my flesh, and there wouldn’t have been anything I could do to stop it sucking the life straight out of me.