The handful left over were stragglers, kids who hadn’t got into any alliance yet. There aren’t many Hindi-speaking stragglers. The enclaves in India and Pakistan only have enough spare seats for half the indie kids who would like to come, so there’re brutal exams and interviews before you even get inducted, and even the worst of the kids who make it in are almost always a cut above the straggler level of Scholomance loser. But some parents will spend huge amounts of money buying seats, even if their kids can’t qualify on their own merits. Sometimes those kids turn out to be great at making friends, or sometimes they get better under the pressure, and sometimes they get lucky, and these were the ones who hadn’t.

They’d come down for the run because they didn’t have much hope anyway, so a grasp at any straw was worth it. It was a tiny bit useful just to come here and meet some kids who did have alliances, because those kids might end up with openings they’d have to fill. But they all looked deeply skeptical while Aadhya gave everybody the official lecture that they each had to help anyone they could, or they wouldn’t be welcome to run again. This boy Dinesh with really awful alchemy scars that had melted half his face—an accident it would probably cost five years of mana to fix if he got out of here—stared at her while she was talking as if she were an alien from several galaxies over.

But when we crossed the river for the first time, and the rilkes came out of the half-frozen mud on the banks and lunged with shredding claws for him and the two straggler kids next to him, he went ahead and threw up a shield over them all instead of just himself, which won me the ten seconds of casting time that I needed to finish disintegrating the massive hungerhowl erupting from beneath the ice, which was about to swallow them whole along with the rilkes and several other members of our group.

They all still looked fairly shell-shocked coming out of the gym, but one of them offered Dinesh a drink from a water bottle, and he walked away down the corridor with them. And I came out panting for breath, but nobody had got killed, and I wasn’t a twitchy wreck, either.

Orion wasn’t panting at all, just sullen and bored as he trailed out after me. “You really want to do this twice a day, every day?” he said, with a whinge to it. I have to confess I felt meanly pleased the next day during the first Spanish run when the crazy evil glaciers reared up a few minutes earlier than before, and he tripped, because he hadn’t been paying proper attention. I had to use a telekinesis spell to scoop him out of the giant toothy blue crevasse and toss him—possibly a little more vigorously than necessary—into a snowbank.

“Maybe you do need a bit more practice, Lake,” I said sweetly to him out in the hall as he irritably brushed off the snow and scowled at me. I beamed back and flicked a blob of snow off his nose, and then he visibly stopped being annoyed and started wanting to kiss me, but there were people there, so I glared him off.

The Spanish run was almost too easy to be good practice: it was an even smaller group than the Hindi one, just a handful of Puerto Rican and Mexican kids who’d heard about the plan from friends allied with New York enclavers, and one alliance headed by a kid from the Lisbon enclave who was friends with Alfie. But that made it easier to spot who wasn’t actually trying to help anyone else; three guesses who, and no prizes if you got the Lisbon enclaver on the first go. She got huffy and indignant when I told her afterwards she wouldn’t be welcome if she did it again, and that if she wanted the chance, she’d be spending her mana to patch up all the assorted injuries from the run.

“Is that what you think?” she said, sharp with outrage. “I’m following your orders now? I don’t think so. Who needs you anyway? Come on, we’re leaving,” she added to her team, except we’d just finished a course that had made abundantly clear that they needed me, very badly, and her top recruit, Rodrigo Beira—sixth in the class rankings, in sniffing distance of valedictorian—got up from where he’d been crouched on the floor gulping for air and quietly went over to start help tending one of the Puerto Rican girls who had a badly lacerated arm filled with spiky bits of ice that were melting only grudgingly. Enclaver girl stared after him, and then jerked a look at the rest of her team, none of whom met her eyes, and all of whom one after another went to help Rodrigo.

If I was feeling a bit smug afterwards, which I might have been, the afternoon took care of that nicely: when Orion and I went down with Liu for the first Chinese run, there wasn’t a single person there. We waited for nearly twenty minutes, Liu biting her lip and looking sorry. Chinese and English circles are fairly separate in here, since you can go your entire career doing lessons in only one language or the other, but a Chinese-speaking team of kids from Singapore and Hanoi had been among the crowd at the gates two days ago, and Jung Ho from Magnus’s team did lessons in a mix of Chinese and English and had promised to spread the word, which surely hadn’t needed much spreading.

Which meant, I realized when we finally gave up waiting, that someone had sent round a different word: Stay away.

“I asked around a little at dinner,” Liu said that evening. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed picking softly at the lute while I sat against the wall doing crochet in a sluggish desultory way, every stitch reluctant. I looked up at her. “The Shanghai enclave had a meeting of their seniors yesterday, about the runs. After I asked a few people about it, Yuyan sent someone to invite me to meet her and Zixuan in the library.”

I sat up and left the crochet in my lap. “And?”

“They wanted to ask me a question about how you do magic,” Liu said. “I agreed I would tell them, if they told me why they wanted to know.” I nodded a bit grimly; that was a sensible information trade—if also the kind you only carefully negotiate with someone you’re considering a potential enemy. “Zixuan asked me if you have trouble doing small spells.”

I stared at her. If I’d had to guess at his question, that wouldn’t have been anywhere on the list. I’d been braced for the one about what I’d do to get the power for my spells, if for instance I ran out of mana on graduation day, or maybe how exactly I was so good at controlling gigantic maleficaria. Most wizards don’t give a rat’s arse whether I’m bad at boiling a cup of water for tea once they see me setting lakes on fire. “I have trouble getting small spells.”

“You’ve got trouble casting them, too,” Liu said. “I didn’t realize it was important until Zixuan made me think about it, but I did notice—you remember back in August, when we were just starting to work on the amplification spell, and I tried to teach you that little tone-keeper spell first, so you wouldn’t accidentally sing the wrong tone and change the meaning?”

“Ugh,” I said, which comprehensively described that afternoon’s delights, which, yes, had lodged firmly in my memory. I had ten goes at the spell and my tongue felt like it had been clamped in a shop vise before I gave up and told Liu I’d just have to learn the bloody tones properly on pain of blowing myself to bits.