I have to confess, I reacted atrociously. “Not Tebow,” I blurted, from the door.

Her shiny lips pressed into a thin line. “Lake seems quite busy,” she said, through her teeth, and I couldn’t even say anything to that under the circumstances; she had every right to be as angry with me as she was. Maybe she wanted to shag Magnus, who was after all heading for six feet and would himself have not looked out of place in—well, an Argos catalog, or at least a pound-shop flyer.

Yes, maybe, but my imagination has limits and that’s beyond them. So I didn’t even leave bad enough alone; I said, “Look, it’s no business of mine,” which coming out of my own mouth should have been a strong hint to me to stop there, but instead I went on, “but you should know, they’ve already offered me a guarantee.”

In my defense, that piece of information probably did matter a great deal to her. Even if Magnus Tebow was her ideal of manhood and charisma, she’d made bleeding valedictorian with three and a half years of brutal unrelenting work, and she couldn’t have wanted to throw that away on someone who couldn’t even offer her a guaranteed spot in an enclave. New York had too many eager applicants, most of them proven wizards who’d left school years ago and done significant work; there wasn’t any way they were letting their kids give out more than one guaranteed place in a year to a raw eighteen-year-old, and Chloe had made anxiously clear at every opportunity I gave her that the spot was being held for me. Even if I didn’t ever take it up, that didn’t mean that Liesel would get invited after the fact.

Of course, it wouldn’t have said much for her brains if she wasn’t smart enough to make sure that she was getting a guaranteed spot before she unbuttoned her blouse the rest of the way, so even if I was handing her useful information, there was an implied insult going along with it. She took it accordingly. “How nice for you,” she said, even more furious, closed her lip gloss with a snap, swept the handful of jars and things on the counter back into her washbag, and marched out of the loo without looking back.

“Well done,” I told myself in the mirror around my toothbrush. I had to rush now, since the first warning bell was going, so I scrubbed my teeth as quick as I could before dashing back out into the corridor, where I skidded right off my heels and smashed my head backwards onto the floor. Liesel had poured out the rest of her hard-brewed lip gloss into a puddle just outside the door, enough of a sacrifice to cast a clever little trip the next person who comes along hex. I knew what had happened even while I was on the way down: the moment I’d stepped on the slick patch, I’d felt the malicious intent of the spell, only it was too late for me to do anything about it.

I did manage to twist a bit falling, which either helped or made things worse, I don’t know. I didn’t die and I wasn’t knocked unconscious, I don’t think, but it was certainly bad enough. My whole head was a church bell someone had clanged back and forth with too much enthusiasm, and my elbow and hips would have been in screaming pain if screaming out loud wasn’t the equivalent of shouting, Dinner is served! to every mal in hearing range. Instead I curled into a ball like a child and shut my mouth tight over stifled high-pitched sobbing, both my hands wrapped around the throbbing back of my skull and my whole face screwed up with tears.

I didn’t move from there for much too long. The second warning bell went off somewhere behind a distant mountain range, and only the certain knowledge that I was about to be incinerated got me into motion. I levered myself onto my hands and knees and started lurching down the corridor in a three-legged crawl, still pressing down on the back of my skull with the hand that had got banged. Of course I should have pulled myself together and taken some kind of remedy, but at the time, I was still completely sure on some visceral level that I was keeping my brain from falling out of the back of my head.

Somewhere behind and above me, I heard a door bang shut loudly and footsteps coming, along the metal walkway and down the spiral stairs and into the corridor. I kept on creeping along, too slow but moving. I knew it wasn’t anybody I knew, and then I knew it was Liesel, but I still kept crawling because I couldn’t do anything else yet. Then she caught up and grabbed me under the arms and heaved me standing. Her face was still angry and flushed under the pink shimmer, but what she said, harshly, was, “Where is your room?” and she helped me limping on towards it.

We got about halfway before the final warning siren went off, and as it did, the door three down from where we were slid open and Orion came out. He froze like a deer caught stealing hubcaps in the headlamps of a police car, then noticed that I was there to fall down in front of a wall of mortal flame and die rather than to yell at him. Not that I didn’t do my best to combine the activities as he grabbed me under the other arm, but he ignored the violent wheeze I aimed in his direction and helped Liesel get me into his room just as the loud crackling went off behind us, accompanied by the first panicked scrabbling of mals starting to run. Orion paused in the door to throw a last longing look down the corridor, then slid it shut with an unhappy bang as Liesel heaved me onto the bed.

“What happened?” Orion asked, coming over.

“She fell coming out of the bathroom,” Liesel said shortly.

I didn’t fill in the additional details. Knowing she got furious enough to commit murder but also couldn’t go through with it in the end gave me rather a fellow feeling for her. “Give me a glass of water,” I muttered, and when Orion gave it to me, I took a few deep breaths to temporarily keep from vomiting and then sat up and cast the simplest of my mum’s healing charms on the water. Then I took out the little plastic bottle I keep on hand for exciting emergencies like this one, downed it, and drank the whole glass of water as fast as I could. I managed to keep it down for a count of fifteen, and then I lurched over to the floor drain and did vomit, energetically. Afterwards I rolled away and curled on my other side with a groan, but it was a conscious protest, not whimpering; I was already better.

“What is that?” Liesel said, picking up the bottle from where I’d dropped it, and giving it a wary sniff.

“Tabasco and butterscotch,” I said. That isn’t actually part of Mum’s charm; it’s my own addition, of which I’m sure she’d disapprove quite a lot, but something about forcing the horrible mixture down makes the healing charm work lots quicker. I think there’s even some kind of science behind that, worse-tasting medicine works better or whatever, but it might just be the mana from deliberately making myself swallow something that awful. It doesn’t actually have to be Tabasco and butterscotch, it just has to be absolutely vile and yet still technically edible, so you don’t waste the healing charm on being poisoned.

Anyway, after that I wasn’t concussed or in howling pain anymore, but I still felt extremely sorry for myself. I climbed back onto Orion’s bed and just lay there for a bit to recover. Liesel started talking to Orion like a normal and civilized person, getting back only mumbled and distracted answers. “If he tries to open the door, brain him with the chair,” I muttered after the third time.