There were a lot more kids at the Hindi run in the afternoon, too: Ravi and three other enclavers from Jaipur showed up with their teams, so evidently Liesel’s cooing had paid dividends after all. Still nobody from Mumbai, though; not from anywhere in Maharashtra. That wasn’t really a surprise. Back at the start of freshman year, when all of us who weren’t enclavers ourselves were in the first frantic rush of trying to make friends, the other kids started going to lengths to avoid me by the second time meeting me. But the kids from Mumbai would literally pick up and move away from me without another word as soon as they heard my name.

I don’t know exactly what they’ve heard about me. My dad’s family haven’t actively spread the prophecy round, I don’t think. If they had, surely some of those enclaves I’m supposed to darken and destroy would have taken a much more energetic interest in my well-being, or lack thereof, some time before now. So I assume all they know is that the family were going to take me and Mum in, and we didn’t last a night inside their compound walls.

Perhaps that doesn’t seem like enough to merit instantly ostracizing me, but the Sharmas have a reputation among the wizards in Maharashtra roughly like Mum’s got in the UK. They’ve produced several acclaimed healers of their own, but what they’re really known for—and how they keep their increasingly large family—is divinatory magic, with a twist. Divinatory magic doesn’t generally work out well for many reasons, but one of them is because human beings aren’t very good at predicting what will make them happy. I don’t mean if you wish for something and then get it twisted in some horrible way like that stupid story about the monkey’s paw; I mean in the same prosaic way that you can sincerely be certain that you’d like a dress you see in a shop, and you buy it and take it home, and then it sits in your closet unused for years while you insist to yourself that one day you’re going to wear it, until finally you give it away with a sense of relief.

Well, my dad’s family have seers who can tell you how to get what will actually make you happy. The most famous living one of whom is my several-great-grandmother Deepthi, who nowadays mostly gets approached in supplication by the Dominuses of enclaves that are in a difficult strategic position, who pay her in the equivalent of millions of pounds for a single brief chat. The legend about her goes that somewhere round her third birthday, she looked up from her toys while her family were idly discussing marriage prospects, and very seriously told them not to worry about it until she graduated from the Scholomance. That was quite baffling to them, since this was 1886, before the cleansing equipment had broken for the first time, and back then the school was only open to actual enclavers. Even enclave kids from Mumbai had to compete among themselves for the six seats that Manchester had begrudgingly allocated to them. Not to mention that it was perfectly obvious to them that you’d never spend a priceless Scholomance seat on a girl.

She was seven years old when London took over, subdivided the dormitory rooms, quadrupled the seats, and threw admission open to independent wizards. By then, her family already knew that if they ever did get a Scholomance seat, they were absolutely sending her, and also they were going to have to find a husband willing to marry in. No wizard family gives away a girl who can accurately tell you about significant future events that are years out.

She was perfectly right about not arranging her marriage beforehand, too. By the time she graduated, her family had racked up enthusiastic offers from virtually every Indian boy who’d been in school with her at any point during the past four years, all of whom she’d quietly given various bits of advice along the way, such as, “Don’t go to your lab section today,” on a day when their usual seat got incinerated in a pipe explosion, or “Learn Russian and make friends with that quiet boy in your maths class” who turned out to be the valedictorian and invited you to join his alliance. There was apparently even a group of boys who offered to marry her together, like the Pandavas or something. She picked a nice young alchemist from an independent wizard family outside Jaipur instead—already vegetarian and strict mana—who had two older brothers and was indeed willing to move in and join the family. They proceeded to have five healthy children, four of whom survived graduation, considerably better than the usual odds, and carried on from there. My father was apparently her cherished favorite great-great-grandchild, out of several dozen. I don’t understand why she didn’t warn him about getting too friendly with that blond Welsh girl in his senior year, although perhaps she did, and he listened as enthusiastically as teenagers ever do to that sort of warning. I would never ignore similar good advice myself if it were given me, of course.

Whatever advice Dad got, he didn’t follow it well enough, and as a result here I am, and here he isn’t. And I’m not a Sharma from Mumbai, I’m a Higgins from Wales, because thirty seconds after meeting me, Great-Grandmother pronounced my quite horrifying doom—well, horrifying for everyone else alive; for all I know, I’d find my own bliss in becoming a grotesquely evil maleficer blasting enclaves into submission. I certainly can’t claim the idea doesn’t have a lot of visceral appeal. So then Mum had to tote me all the way back to the commune because my father’s family were ready to put baby Hitler me to death, in order to save the world that I’m slated to cover in darkness and murder et cetera.

I should note that this is the same family who are so devoted to nonviolence that they turned down a priceless offer to move en masse into Mumbai enclave, because the place wasn’t strict mana and they wouldn’t cheat at so much as the cost of the life of a beetle.

You can see why their rejecting me might make the people who are familiar with their reputation look at me askance. Even lacking the details, it’s hardly unreasonable to imagine there has to be something extremely unpleasant in my future. And at that, no one’s imagining anything quite as extreme as the actual prophecy.

So I quickly stopped trying to introduce myself to any Marathi-speaking kids. In fact I’ve spent most of the past three years with a low-grade worry about what they might tell people about me, which helpfully filled all the hours where I wasn’t worrying about more immediate problems, such as whether I’d get enough to eat that day, or if something were going to eat me.

Of course, now I didn’t need to worry about that anymore. They could have stood up in the cafeteria with an amplification spell and repeated the prophecy word for word, and the people joining me for these runs wouldn’t have trusted me one jot less. They didn’t trust me to begin with; they weren’t here because they really believed I was going to save them. They were joining me because even if I was a vicious maleficer, there still wasn’t any other option for getting in any practice. Surely almost all of them were quietly making secret plans with their allies and other teams for what they’d really do in the graduation hall, and especially what they’d do if I did in fact turn out to be a vicious maleficer.

That was what made Liesel’s edict so important. It wasn’t possible to go through a run, even just one single run, with everyone round you all working to their own strengths and your most urgent needs, and not realize how much better it was than anything we could manage in a private alliance, even the very best. It was so much better that even if it turned out that I was a vicious maleficer and planning to cull some substantial number of the class, they were all probably still better off sticking to the strategy and accepting the risk of me instead of the risk of everything else down there.