At least, it had been clever of her to do it now, if she were going to do it at all, which I still couldn’t really get my head round. But Aadhya didn’t show any signs of having second thoughts; she ate a hearty breakfast, chatted up the kids coming by for the auction—a lot better than I did—and talked about her shield holder project and the spares she’d made, which obviously got Liu to prick up her ears even more.

I couldn’t guess which way Liu would jump, though, and the offer had clearly been for a three-way alliance. But if she didn’t go for it, I decided abruptly, halfway through breakfast, I’d ask Aadhya if she’d try to find another third person to go in with us, or agree to aim for alliance without sealing the deal right away, provisional terms. That was the opposite of a power move on my part, but she already knew I didn’t have a lot of other options, so sod it.

It felt strange to have that thought, like it didn’t belong in my head. It’s always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real. Dignity was what I had instead of friends. I gave up trying to make any at about a month into our first year. Nobody I asked for company ever said yes unless they were desperate, and nobody ever asked me. The same thing has happened to me at every school I’ve ever gone to; every club, course, activity.

Before induction, I’d had some faint hope things would be different in here; maybe it wouldn’t happen with other wizards. It was a stupid hope to have, since I’m not the only wizard kid who went to mundane schools by a long shot—if you aren’t in an enclave, the sensible choice is sending your kid to the largest mundane school you can find, because maleficaria avoid mundanes. Mundanes aren’t exactly invulnerable to mals—a scratcher can shove a giant foot-long claw through your belly whether you’ve got mana or not—but they have one extremely powerful protection: they don’t believe in magic.

You’ll say loads of people believe in all sorts of codswallop from the Snake Goddess to theologically questionable angels to astrology, but as someone who spent her formative years among the most determinedly credulous people in the world, it’s not at all the same thing. Wizards don’t have faith in magic. We believe in magic, the way mundanes believe in cars. No one has deep discussions around a bonfire about whether a car is real or not, unless they’ve taken more drugs than usual, which is, not coincidentally, the condition of most mundanes who do encounter mals.

Doing magic in front of someone who doesn’t believe in it is loads harder. Worse, if their disbelief trumps either your certainty or your mana, and the spell doesn’t come off, you’ll probably have trouble the next time you try and cast it, whether the unbeliever’s still there or not. Do that a few more times and you’ll stop being able to do magic at all. In fact, it’s entirely possible there are loads of unknowing potential wizards out there, people like Luisa who could hold enough mana to cast spells, only they’ve been raised mundane and so they can’t, because they don’t know that magic works, which means it doesn’t.

And if you’re a mal, and therefore only exist because of magic in the first place, you effectively have to persuade a mundane that you exist and function in the world, contrary to all their expectations, before you can eat them. In fact, one time towards the end of my secondary school career, an excessively ambitious yarnbogle tried to come after me in gym class; the teacher caught sight of it, was absolutely convinced it was a rat, and whacked it triumphantly with a cricket bat. When she stopped whacking, it was in fact indistinguishable from a smashed rat, even though I couldn’t have killed a yarnbogle with a cricket bat if I hammered on it all day. The reward’s not worth the risk, considering that mundanes contain essentially no flavor or nutritional value from a mal’s perspective, and so they keep well away. Which is why lots of wizard kids get sent to school with mundanes.

But Mum really does live in the back of beyond by wizard standards—too far from any enclave to conveniently work for them or trade with them—so I was the only wizard kid I knew, and at the time I tried telling myself that the reason mundanes didn’t like me was they sensed the mana or something. But no. Wizard kids are just kids, and they don’t like me, either.

And all right, as of five days ago, I had Orion, but Orion was too weird to count. I was reasonably sure that my one tried-and-true method of being aggressively rude wasn’t actually how normal people made their friends. But maybe I got to count Aadhya and Liu as friends, now. I wasn’t sure, and what did it mean if I could? It wasn’t accompanied by nearly the warm triumphant glow of achievement I’d always imagined as part of the experience. I suppose I was still waiting for someone to give me the tatty friendship bracelet I’d never got at the Girl Guides. But someone holding out an alliance, offering to watch your back and go out of their way to save your life, that was on such a different scale that I’d obviously missed some intermediate steps.

It got me wondering about Nkoyo, too, while I walked to languages with her and her friends. I didn’t have any doubts about Cora and Jowani: neither of them liked me any more than they ever had. But the very contrast made me think maybe I could at least call Nkoyo friendly, if not a friend. I took my courage in both hands and asked her, as casually as I could manage, as if I didn’t care very much about the answer, “Do you know any groups revising for the Latin final exam?”

“Yeah,” she said, casually for real; as far as I could tell, she didn’t even think about the answer. “Some of us are getting together work period on Thursday in the lab. The ticket is two copies of a decent spell.”

“Would that fire wall I traded with you work?” I said, struggling to match her easy tone, as if of course I was welcome, if I could meet the fee—

“Oh, that’s loads better than you need,” she said. “More like a utility spell. I’m bringing one for restoring papyrus.”

“I’ve got a medieval one for tanning leather,” I said. That was actually a section of a larger spell meant for binding a cursed grimoire that would siphon off a bit of mana from every wizard every time they cast one of the spells inside: a very clever technique for creating a mana-stealer that would go unnoticed. But the leather tanning worked perfectly well on its own, too.

Nkoyo gave a shrug and a nod, sure why not, and we were at the door of the language hall. All four of us took turns putting our homework from yesterday into the marking slot, a thin postbox slit set in the metal wall at the door. We’d timed it quite well: you don’t want to be dropping off your homework when there’s a proper crush of people coming in, because then you can end up boxed in if something jumps out of the slit. You also don’t want to be dropping it off really early, because something’s much more likely to jump out of the slit then. But if you hand something in even ten seconds past the start of the lesson, it’s late, and you’ll get marked down.