All the while Orion stood in the corridor behind us and said, exasperated and plaintive, “But you barely even tried!” and other insane and stupid things until we turned on him in unison and yelled at him to shut up forever and he had the gall to mutter something—under his breath, he wasn’t suicidal—about girls.

I was grateful that we no longer needed to find a way to provide Orion with mals, because after that experience, none of us wanted to keep trying. Except him. He even went so far as to talk to other human beings to try and get more information about honeypots himself. He spent a lunch period with half a dozen kids from the Seattle enclave and a desperate expression, and came up to our study corner in the library afterwards and said, “Hey, I’ve found out how you make honeypot bait,” urgently. “The main ingredient is wizard blood. You just hold a blood drive and everyone donates…” He trailed off, I presume as he heard the words coming out of his own mouth and saw our faces, and then just stopped and sat down with a glum expression. That was the end of working on honeypots.

However, we did still urgently need the lute. And instead of getting to work on that, or at least something else useful, Aadhya had to very carefully design a garden planter, then I had to rewrite her design back into Urdu for her, also very carefully, and when the Scholomance delivered the finished product to be tested, the most useful thing she could do with it was plant some carrot tops from the cafeteria. It produced carrots roughly the size of a gnome’s top hat. We fed them to our mice. Precious ate hers very daintily, sitting up and holding it in her forepaws and nibbling it from tip to end before carefully handing back the leafy top to be planted again.

At least the planter was reasonably sure to net Aadhya a decent mark. I was less sure to get decent marks in Development of Algebra: all the readings were in the original languages, and specifically in Chinese and Arabic, the ones that I’d just barely started. Aadhya could generally figure out for me what the actual equations being described were, so I could do the problem sets, but sitting the midterm essay exam—compare and contrast Sharaf al Tusi’s explanation of polynomial evaluation with that of Qin Jiushao, including examples of usage—had been an experience worth forgetting as quickly as possible. The only part of those readings I had actually done were the names, which had been enough for me to look the authors up in the library, find out that Horner had reinvented the same process, and learn it in English instead. I’d felt so clever, too.

So I was holding my breath when I went to class that whole week. We don’t know exactly when we’re going to get our marks. Predictably, I got my safest one first: a B+, for the Proto-Indo-European seminar. Our class was now being held on the second floor, but in an even smaller room and sharing a wall with the alchemy supply room, so we were constantly hearing banging as people went in and out. Liesel glared at me through every class session with cold resentment, and mals would often attack the alchemy supply room thanks to my being on the other side, which made me as wildly popular as you’d think. Enough mals were creeping out of the woodwork at this point in the year that they’d finally started to come after people other than me once in a while, but I remained top item on the menu.

The rest of my marks trickled in grudgingly over the next couple of days: a B+ for the Myrddin seminar and a pass on my shop assignment—a sacrificial obsidian dagger, clearly intended for unpleasant purposes, which I’d chosen because it was the quickest of my options to knock off, so I could use the free time to finish the book chest for my sutras. I also netted a pass for my alchemy section, where I’d had to brew a vat of sludging acid that could etch through flesh and bone in three seconds.

The next Monday morning I finally I got my algebra results, a D, and wiped my metaphorical brow, and then just had to wait for my last mark, on my independent study. I’d really wanted the bad news already, so the whole week after midterms, I tried to bait it out: I kept my head down and focused on my desk the entire time, and then looked away for a solid thirty seconds only right in the middle of class, so there was only the one opening for it to drop, which usually gets you the mark early on. But instead it didn’t come until the tail end of the week.

Except that day I was working on the last piece of the first major working of the sutras, and I’d got so deep into it that I forgot to pause mid-class. My bolted-down desk was a monstrous thing of wrought iron—I scraped my knees on the underside every other week at least—and the only silver lining of it was having the space to spread out. I always kept the sutras right in front of me, wrapped up in a leather harness Aadhya had made me: it went over the ends of each cover, with soft wide ribbons that I kept tied down around all the pages except the handful that I was working on that day. It had a foot-long strap attached that buckled around my left wrist, so at an instant’s notice I could just leap up and the book would stay with me even if I had to use both hands for casting. I stood my dictionaries open on end above it, and I used a three-inch memo pad for my notes, which I held in my hands braced on the edge of the desk so it wouldn’t touch the sutra pages.

It’s not that the book was so fragile; it was made out of really lovely heavy paper and didn’t look like it had aged more than two months since the last bit of gilt had dried. But that was clearly because it had snuck away from its original owner roughly two months after the last bit of gilt had dried, and I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I cosseted it as much as possible. It was worth having sore wrists at the end of each class. Whenever I ran out of space on my tiny notepad—often—I just tore off the filled sheet and stuck it into a folder I kept on the side, and each night I rewrote them into a larger notebook in my bedroom.

That day I had filled about thirty tiny pages with tight handwritten notes. The bell was about to ring and I was still going when the whole folder did a sort of angry jerk and went flying sideways off my desk, scattering paper everywhere; I gave a yowl of protest and grabbed for it, too late, and then had to pack up in a hurry, expecting something to jump me at any moment. I only realized that it had been my mark being delivered when I finally had all my notes collected again. I opened the folder to stuff them back in, and the little slip of green paper was tucked in the pocket, with Adv. Readings in Sansk poking out above the top. I pulled it out and glared at the A+ with a footnote asterisk going to Special Commendation at the bottom, which was just rubbing it in: Look at all your misspent time. I could practically hear the Scholomance sniggering at me from the ventilation system. But that was just pettiness, and overall I heaved a sigh of relief; it could’ve been loads worse.

It was loads worse for other people. At lunch that day, Cora came to our table with her face tight with pain and her arm wrapped up in her beautiful yellow head tie with the embroidered protection charm, blood soaking through it in spreading dark patches. “Failed shop,” she said, her voice ragged. She had her tray held tight against her waist with her other arm, and the contents were pretty scanty. But she didn’t ask for help. She probably couldn’t afford it. She hadn’t nailed down an alliance of her own yet.