I spent those three hours staring at my latest poem from Myrddin class, which strangely refused to translate itself. At this rate, soon I’d start failing my own classes. To add insult to injury, when the bell for lunch rang, Orion sat back in his chair and sighed and said, “There, I got it,” and he’d finished the entire worksheet. He’d still have to actually brew the potion, but that wasn’t a horrible burden: it was a reflex-boosting concoction that would make him even more of a terror to mals everywhere. It was an outrageously good remedial assignment. My remedial alchemy assignments are always poisons that kill instantly, kill gruesomely, or sometimes kill instantly and gruesomely.

“Good,” I said sourly, packing up. “Do you need any more help with it, Lake, or do you think you can manage the measuring spoons after lunch without supervision?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, with a glare, and then he remembered that something had almost happened and apparently he didn’t think it had been such a bad idea as all that, because he stopped glaring and blurted, “Unless you want to come,” which was horribly absurd: Want to come help me with my remedial alchemy assignment down in the lab was possibly the worst date ever and he had absolutely no business inviting anyone to do it, and I had absolutely no business even thinking about saying yes.

And I’d also promised Aadhya to help her tune the lute this afternoon, so I couldn’t say yes. Just as well. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said coolly, as I snatched up my last two books. He went sheepish and curled in, and I swept away into the aisle back towards the reading room and the stairs, silently congratulating myself on having stomped on his aspirations, except as we started to clear our trays, Aadhya said to me, “Are we still on for tuning the lute now?” and Orion shot a narrow-eyed look across the table at me like Oh so you would have said yes otherwise wouldn’t you. I avoided his eyes. He didn’t need any more ideas than he already had, and neither did I. Instead I hurried off with Aadhya to an empty classroom to work on the lute, only the instant we got clear of other people she nudged me in the arm and raised her eyebrows and was all, “Wellllll?”

“What?” I said.

She gave me a shove. “Are you dating now?”

“No!”

“Oh, come on, seriously, look me in the face and tell me you didn’t kiss at least once up there,” Aadhya said.

“We didn’t!” I said, in glad and perfect honesty, and at dinner I grudgingly gave Precious the three ripe red grapes out of the fruit cup I’d bagged that was otherwise only full of tired-looking honeydew and pale underripe pineapple chunks that stung in my mouth. “Don’t take this as encouragement,” I told her. She accepted them with smug graciousness and ate all three one after another and went to sleep in her cup with her tiny belly distended.

* * *

There’re almost no holidays in the Scholomance. They’d be a pointless fiction, but that’s not why we don’t have them; we don’t have them because we—and the school—can’t afford them. We need to be working, all the time, just to keep the lights on. So there’s only graduation and induction day, on the second of July, and the semesters are divided around the first of January, which is also when the senior class rankings get posted and the winter cleansing happens. But that leaves one extra day in the first semester, which the Americans decided was a terrible problem that obviously had to be addressed. So one day each fall, after the last of the remedial post-midterms work has been turned in—or not—we have Field Day.

It is a notable milestone in the year: it marks the start of the killing season. By then, all the mals that go into hibernation or reproductive phases after graduation have woken up and are finding ways back upstairs, or their adorable new babies have squirmed their own way up, and the competition among them gets more aggressive. Roughly one in seven freshmen die between Field Day and New Year’s, as I’d loudly and repeatedly informed all of mine, whose names had all got into my head at this point despite my best efforts. It’s never a good idea to get attached to freshmen, and doing it this early in the year was an invitation to misery, but after they’d saved me and Orion from blundering around almost choking ourselves to death, it had worn off enough of the cold-aloof-senior mystique I’d cultivated that they’d started talking to me. Even my most aggressive snappishness wasn’t discouraging them sufficiently anymore.

I gather that the usual purpose of a Field Day is to build school spirit by letting people run around doing sport in the fresh air and cheering each other on in their achievements. We don’t have any fresh air or school spirit, so instead we all gather together down in the gymnasium and cheer each other on for having stayed alive long enough to experience another Field Day. Attendance is mandatory, and enforced by the cafeteria being closed all day, so the only place to get food is the buffet that gets laid on in the gym in an enormous bank of antique Automat-style cases that are trundled out for the occasion. I have no idea where they go the rest of the time. You can only unlock them by feeding in tokens, which you can only get by participating in the various delightful games like relay races and dodgeball. To add to the festive atmosphere, normally at least one or two kids get eaten on the way down to the gym, since there are enough mals out there who can remember dates and know there’s going to be a buffet laid on for them along the stairs and corridors.

When the Scholomance first opened back in 1880, there were several really complex multilayered spells on the gym to give students the illusion of being outside in nature, complete with trees and open skies above that would go from day to night. It was the masterpiece of a crack team of artificers from Kyoto. Even at the time, Kyoto was powerful enough that Manchester couldn’t afford to just blow them off completely when the school was being constructed, so instead Manchester fobbed them off with the gym. Kyoto took revenge by making it so spectacular that everyone who got to tour the place couldn’t talk of anything else. There are several raving accounts framed up on the walls amid the blueprints, with antique photos that are supposedly of the gymnasium but look exactly like photos from a guidebook to the Japanese countryside.

No one’s seen the illusions working in more than a hundred years. After Patience and Fortitude, our resident maw-mouths, first made themselves at home in the graduation hall, and all the maintenance started being done by students, the whole thing fell apart. The plants all died so long ago that there’s not even dirt left, just the empty ironwork planters, and the color has faded out of the distant shifting murals of hills and mountains, so now they look like a landscape out of the afterlife. There’s one week in springtime when a scattering of bleached-white ghostly scraps come drifting down mysteriously—all that’s left of the cherry blossom experience. Occasionally stark bare trees sprout up, and there’s a small pagoda that occasionally appears and vanishes again. I don’t think anyone’s ever been mad enough to go inside, but if they have, they’ve never come out again to report.