But I’d never cast a circle by myself before. The idea’s straightforward enough: the mana everyone puts in flows through all of us in the circle, and because everyone shares the same purpose, it gets intensified. So you just let the mana keep circling around until it builds up high enough. But just because the idea is easy to describe doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.

In fact, I realized too late it was going to be even harder because everyone else around the table was a wizard. With Mum’s spell, you can heal internal injuries with a circle of ordinary people because you don’t need any more mana than you produce just by making the effort to stay in the circle, and you just need one wizard in the mix to “catch” the mana and hold it for long enough to pour it into the spell. With a bunch of almost adult wizards, we were building up a lot of mana really fast, and I could already feel everybody else sort of tugging on it. It wasn’t even on purpose; if anyone had deliberately tried to grab the mana for themselves, the circle would’ve fallen apart. But all of us are actively thinking about some kind of magical work every minute of the day and most of the night; we’ve all got spells half worked out and artifice projects in progress and potions brewing in the lab and graduation graduation graduation in our heads, and here was all this mana to work with, and I was asking them to think about using it to save Cora’s arm instead of their own necks.

It was hard for them and hard for me. I had to concentrate ferociously hard on the healing spell while the circle grew along the sides of the table and one by one everyone a little uncertainly added their hands. Jowani and Nkoyo closed it at the end, their hands clasped behind Cora’s back, and when they did, the circle established and the full mana flow started. Everyone jumped or squeaked. I should’ve warned them, but I couldn’t actually say anything at this point that wasn’t the spell. Anyway, I didn’t have any mental energy to spare. Everyone kept hold, the mana of that choice feeding along, being reinforced over and over by all of us intent on the same goal, one that wasn’t for us, so there wasn’t much of either hope or fear to cloud the intention. And the surprise didn’t hurt, it helped, because everyone chose to stay in the circle anyway.

Well, it helped build mana. But I started to feel more or less like I’d volunteered to ride a particularly violent horse and it was doing its best to heave me off while I clung in desperation to the edge of the saddle. The mana was a building wave traveling around the circle, getting bigger as it went; I tried to cast the spell literally the first time it came by me, but it happened so fast that I missed, which meant the wave got even bigger the next time around and even more unruly: that much mana surging through everyone was extremely inspiring to everyone’s imagination. When it came back a second time, I had to make a tremendous mental heave to drag it firmly out of the circle and into the spell.

At least the words weren’t hard to remember. Mum doesn’t like complex or detailed incantations. You don’t need them when you go straight for the requirement of pure noble unselfishness. “Let Cora’s arm be healed, let Cora’s arm be whole, let Cora’s arm be well,” I said, feeling like I was gasping it out while treading in deep water, my head tipped back to keep my mouth above the surface, and the mana went roaring through me and out of me.

The spell blew the wrap off Cora’s arm with the crisp snapping sound of someone shaking out a freshly laundered pillowcase. She made a squawking noise and grabbed at her elbow: just like that, her whole arm was smooth and unmarred as if nothing had happened to it at all. She opened and closed her hand a couple of times, and then she burst into tears and put her head down on the table with her arms huddled around it protectively, trying to hide from us all while she sobbed. The yellow tie, hanging from the crook of her elbow, fluttered one more time like a banner, even the bloodstains gone.

The rule is, when someone has a breakdown, you carefully don’t pay any attention to them and just carry on the conversation until they get hold of themselves. But the circumstances were a bit unusual, and it’s not as though there were an existing conversation to carry on. Yaakov said a prayer in Hebrew softly to himself, and bowed his head, but none of the rest of us were religious, so while he had a nice spiritual moment with himself, we all just carried on being awkward and glancing round at each other to avoid staring at Cora, which obviously we all wanted to do. Jowani, who was on her left, was losing the fight and letting his eyes slant down to peek.

“What did you do?” Orion demanded, and made me jump; he’d come up to the empty seat Aadhya had left for him, next to me, and he was staring at Cora exactly the way the rest of us were trying so hard not to. “What was that? You just—”

“We did a circle healing,” I said, dismissively, which took some effort. “You’d better hurry up and eat, Lake, it’s nearly to the warning bell. Have you got your alchemy seminar marks yet?”

He put his tray down and sat next to me almost like he was moving in slow motion, without taking his eyes off Cora. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and he’d been looking unkempt even before that; his hair had grown back out to a length that required at least running your fingers through it to keep it in order—we have low standards—but he wasn’t doing even that. His Thor t-shirt hadn’t changed in four days and was more than usually aromatic, and there were lingering smudges of soot and glittery blue asphodelium powder on his cheek. I was resolutely not saying a word, because it was none of my affair and it was going to keep being none of my affair until he became so stinky that I could justify complaining purely on the grounds of sharing a table, by which point maybe someone else would beat me to it. Probably not: most kids in here are more likely to bottle the scent and sell it as Eau de Lake or something. I suspected that he’d been spending the last few weeks hunting those just-past-larval-stage mals that had started creeping out of the plumbing.

I jabbed him in the side with an elbow, and he finally jolted out of it enough to stare at me instead. “Food. Alchemy marks. Well?”

He looked down at his tray: oh, how surprising, food! Things to eat to keep you alive! That’s about as much as you can say for Scholomance cuisine. He started eating it fast enough after he got over the massive surprise of rediscovering its existence, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “No, today I guess, or Friday,” but he kept staring at Cora until I poked him again for being a rude wanker and he realized it and jerked his eyes down to his plate.

“You’ve had to see a circle working sometime, living in New York,” I said.

“They don’t feel like that,” he said, and then had the nerve to ask me, “Was there any malia in it?”

“That’s meant to be funny, is it?” I said. “No, you aardvark, it’s one of my mum’s healing circle spells. You don’t get any return at all.”

That’s not true, at least according to Mum: she insists that you always gain more than you give when you give your work freely, only you don’t know when the return will come and you can’t think about it or anticipate it, and it won’t take the shape you expect, so in other words, the return is completely unprovable and useless. On the other hand, no venture capitalists are lining up to give me rides in their private jets, so what do I know?