The other team weren’t as good as mine—or at least they weren’t as good as we’d become after six weeks of running the course together—but I got them all out again still alive. I did have to turn one of them to stone at one point to save her from being bitten in half, but I turned her back afterwards, so I don’t see what the problem was.

Everyone but me was waiting with enormous anticipation for that course to be swapped out, but on Monday, the next one was just as bad. All three of our cleanup-crew teams were waiting by the open doors when we came out, with their faces blankly appalled. I turned right round and did another run with them, and when we got out, there was a new team waiting—Liesel’s team. After New Year’s, she’d apparently crossed Magnus off and had instead settled for allying with Alfie, from London. I didn’t know what she had against the Munich enclave, which had three strapping senior boys to choose from if that was really one of her primary criteria, but there was presumably something, since these days Munich was a better choice than London for a German girl who was apparently viciously determined to get a seat on a top-tier enclave council before she was thirty. Unless there was something especially right with Alfie, but I hadn’t seen any notable signs of that in the last three years and change.

“El, how are you?” he said, exactly as if we hadn’t seen each other for ages and he was delightfully surprised to find me here.

I ignored him and said to Liesel, “Right, let’s go.” She nodded back coldly and we went. A woman after my own heart.

Also, she was really good. She wasn’t Orion, but she was miles better than anyone else I’d run with, even though I tried not to notice out of loyalty. Her whole team was better, actually. Even Alfie wasn’t remotely a weak link: he’d taken the middle, obviously, but he wasn’t sitting there cowering; he was using the position to throw complicated defensive spells to all sides to cover everyone else, and he was really good at it. He had fast reflexes and what must have been an encyclopedic defensive collection that he knew backwards and forward: he kept steadily pitching exactly the right spell at exactly the right time to exactly the right place, so the rest of us could just trust him and go totally on the offensive. We made it through in eleven minutes; it had taken me twenty-two on the first run with my team.

Of course, twenty-two was better than never, which is what it would’ve been for Liesel and company if they hadn’t had me along. They all flinched when we got to the homestretch and the icy ground we’d been running over abruptly folded itself up round us into towering slabs toothed with jagged spikes the size of tyrannosaur femurs, and seething with ectoplasmic vapors that suggested they had psychic form and not just physical. Alfie threw up what was the very best group shield I’d ever seen, which might have held for one or two hits, but there literally wasn’t anywhere to go.

Until I spoke the seventh spell of binding from The Fruitful Vine, which was the very first Marathi-language spellbook ever written. It was put together by a group of poet-incanters from the Pune area who wanted more spells in their own vernacular—the better you know a language and understand its nuances, the better your spellcasting is going to be—so they gathered for a writing and spell-trading session. It went so well that they formed a long-term circle and kept going, their spells went on getting more and more powerful, and eventually the collection was so valuable they were able to trade just the one book to Jaipur for enclave-building spells.

Immediately after which, their group imploded into a massive internecine fight. Most of them died and a few went to Jaipur and a couple of others renounced magic and purged all their mana and went to live in the wilderness as ascetics, and that’s why there’s no enclave in Pune. But before that, they wrote some real corkers, including this series of increasingly complex binding spells, the hardest of which really only ever gets hunted up by the sort of maleficer who wants to bind one of the more nasty mals in the manifestation category as a personal servant. Well, or by a circle of decent wizards trying to get rid of one of those mals, but you can guess why the school gave me a copy. The soles had started to come off my trainers halfway through my freshman year, and I thought I was being adequately specific when I asked the void for a spell to securely bind them back up, but no. You’d be amazed at how little call I’ve had in the last four years for a pet benibel that would need to be fed on a steady diet of human corpses, although I suppose you could accuse me of a lack of imagination.

But it was just the spell you wanted when facing a possessed entity the size of a glacier. This was my third time through this course, and I’d got the hang of doing it, so it was fairly painless as an experience; I just banged out the spell, commanded the gnashing ice peaks to lie flat, and off to the doors we went. But that didn’t make it less maddening for Liesel and her crew. The problem was, no one other than myself, no matter how brilliant or hardworking, could have done much of anything in the situation. Even if you’d got hold of the binding spell, it normally calls for a circle of twelve wizards chanting for an hour. Her face was rigid with fury when we got out the doors. I didn’t even blame her for stalking off without so much as a thank-you. Alfie was better programmed, so he did say, “Thanks, El, fair play,” before going after her, but even for him it was mechanical.

By lunchtime word had got round, and everyone started to panic. Aside from the very real danger of dying for basic lack of practice, the new course made no sense in a particularly alarming way. There are some mals as big as mountains out there in the world, but you might as well say there are blue whales in the world. If a blue whale happened to appear smack in the middle of the graduation hall, it would certainly present a challenge to us all, but it wouldn’t have got there on its own initiative. So why was something like that suddenly showing up in the obstacle course? Either the school was just throwing it at us out of nastiness, on the justification that at least one student could get past it, even if that made the course totally useless to everyone who didn’t have me along—which would be bad enough—or there was something on that scale down below.

No one else could think of any other reason why it was happening; as far as they knew, nothing had changed. I was the only one who knew what had changed. I’d changed. And the brutal courses were too obviously a response. You want to save everybody, you silly girl? Right, let’s make that harder for you: nobody gets any practice the rest of the term, so they’ll all be panicking and fumbling around down in the hall. Good luck saving them then.

I wasn’t sharing my grand plan, though, so everyone else kept laboring onward in ignorance and spreading alarm. That afternoon in the library, a couple other teams got up the desperation to ask me to do a run, and the next morning, Ibrahim did them one worse: he cornered me on my bleary way to the girls’ and sidled round the subject for nearly five minutes before I finally understood that he was trying to work out if I had any sort of opinion about him kissing Yaakov.

He hadn’t done anything wrong by Scholomance standards, not telling me. You do have to disclose any conflict of interest like that to your potential allies before you ask them to go with you and your significant other—it clearly wasn’t an accident that in his team, he was in the lead and Yaakov was bringing up the rear, the two most dangerous positions and the most separated, where they wouldn’t have a chance to ditch the others and take off together. But I wasn’t one of his allies. My name wasn’t written up on the wall with him and Yaakov, so he hadn’t owed me a thing, my opinion shouldn’t have made a difference. But here he was trying to find it out, as though it should have mattered.