And he had no business letting them put him on the end of the row, because he was one of the kids who mattered, or closer to it than anyone else here but the enclave girl. It’s widely known that Liu’s family are really close to founding an enclave of their own. They’re already a big enough group that Liu got a box of hand-me-downs from an extended family member when she came in, and she’d given Zheng and his twin brother Min each a bag of stuff out of it, with the rest to come at the end of this year. They weren’t enclavers, but they weren’t losers either. But for the moment, he was still behaving as though he were an ordinary human being, instead of a student in the Scholomance.

A buzz of noise went up from the other kids. While we’d been talking, the draft schedules had just appeared on our desks, in the usual way: you look away for a second, and then they’re there when you look back, as if they’d always been there. If you try to be cheeky and stare at your desk unblinkingly so the school can’t slip it in, something bad is likely to happen to create an opportunity, like the lights going out, so other kids will shove you or put a hand over your eyes if they catch you at it. It’s a lot more expensive, mana-wise, to let people see magic happening in a way they instinctively disbelieve, because that means you have to force it onto them as well as the universe. It’s one of the reasons that people don’t often do real magic round mundanes. It’s loads harder, unless you dress it up as some sort of performance, or do it round people who aggressively work to believe in whatever magic you’re doing, like Mum and her natural healing stuff with all her crunchy friends out in the woods.

And even though we’re wizards, we still don’t really expect things to appear out of thin air. We know it can be done, so it’s not as hard to persuade us, but on the other hand, we’ve got more mana of our own to fight that persuasion with. It costs the school much less to just slip something onto the desk while we’re looking away, as if someone had just put it there, than it does to let us watch it coming into existence.

Zheng was already trying to crane out around me to peek at the enclave girl’s sheet; I sighed and said to him, “Go and sit next to her,” grudgingly. I didn’t like it, but my not liking it didn’t change the reality that it was an obviously good idea for him to make up to her. He twitched a bit, probably more guilt: I expect his mum had lectured him on that subject as well. Then he did get up and went over to the Thai girl and introduced himself.

To be fair, she made him a polite wai, and invited him to sit down next to her with a gesture; usually you have to suck up a little more energetically to get in with an enclave kid. But I suppose he didn’t have competition yet. After he sat down, a few other kids got up and moved into the seats behind them and they all started comparing schedules. The enclaver girl was already working on her own, with the speed that meant she knew exactly what she was going for, and she started showing the others hers and pointing out issues on theirs. I made a note to have a look at Zheng’s after he was done, just in case she was a bit too helpful to her own benefit.

But first I had to take care of my own schedule, and one look told me I was in for it. I’d known going in that I’d have to take two seminars in my senior year: that’s the price you pay for going incantations track and getting to minimize your time on the lower floors your first three years. But I’d been put into four of them—or five if you counted twice for the monstrous double course, meeting first thing every single day, that was simply titled Advanced Readings in Sanskrit, instruction in English. The note indicated that it would count as coursework for Sanskrit and Arabic, which made suspiciously little sense except for instance if we’d be studying medieval Islamic reproductions of Sanskrit manuscripts—such as the one I’d acquired in the library just two weeks before. That made for a really narrow field. I’d be lucky if there were three other kids in the bloody room with me. I glared at it sitting there like a lead bar across the top of my schedule sheet. I’d been counting on getting the standard Sanskrit seminar led in English, which should have meant being lumped into one of the larger seminar classrooms on the alchemy lab floor with the dozen or so artifice- and alchemy-track kids from India who were doing Sanskrit for their language requirement.

And I couldn’t easily manufacture a conflict for it, since I didn’t have so much as a single other senior in the room to compare schedules with. Usually at least one or two of the other outcast kids would grudgingly let me have a look, in exchange for getting to see mine, and that would give me at least one or two classes I could put in to try and force the school to shift the worst of my assignments around. You’re allowed to specify up to three classes, and as long as you’ve met all your requirements, the Scholomance has to rework the rest of your schedule around them, but if you don’t know what other classes there actually are or when they’re scheduled, it’s just a gambling game that you’re sure to lose.

The Advanced Readings seminar would have been more than enough to make my schedule unusually lousy, but on top of that, I also had a really magnificent seminar on Development of Algebra and Applications to Invocation, which was going to count for languages, unspecified—a bad sign that I’d be getting loads of different primary sources to translate—as well as honors history and maths. I hadn’t been assigned any other maths courses, so my odds of getting out of that one were very slim. Then there was the rotten seminar I’d actually been expecting to get, on Shared Proto-Indo-European Roots in Modern Spellcasting, which shouldn’t have been my easiest class, and last but very much not least, The Myrddin Tradition, which was supposed to count for honors literature, Latin, modern French, modern Welsh, and Old and Middle English. And I knew right now that by the third week of class, I’d be getting nothing but straight-up Old French and Middle Welsh spells.

The rest of the slots were filled with shop—which I should have had a claim to be let out of entirely, since last term I’d done a magic mirror which still muttered gloomily at me every so often even though I had it hung up facing the wall—and I’d been put in honors alchemy, both meeting on mixed-up schedules: Mondays and Thursdays for the one, and Tuesdays and Fridays for the other. I’d be with different kids each day of the week, so I’d have it twice as hard as I already do finding anyone to do things like hold something I need to weld or watch my bag while I go and get supplies.

Up to that point, it was possibly the single worst senior schedule I’d ever heard of. Not even the kids aiming for class valedictorian were going to take four seminars. Except, as if the school was pretending to make up for all that, the entire afternoon on Wednesdays was literally unassigned to anything. It just said “Work,” exactly like the work period we all get right after lunch, only it had an assigned room. Namely this one.

I stared at the box on my schedule sheet with deep and unrelenting suspicion, trying to make sense of it. An entire afternoon of free time, all the way up in the library itself, officially reserved so I wouldn’t even have to protect my turf, with no reading, no quizzes, no assignments. That alone made this possibly the single best senior schedule I’d ever heard of. It was worth the trade-off. I’d been worrying about how I could possibly make up for all the mana I’d blown last term; with a triple-length work period once a week, I might be back on track before Field Day.