“You okay?” I said to Liu. I was making sure the scissors were all right, but I also wanted to give her an excuse to take a minute: I did expect it to be a wrench for her, even if she wouldn’t start blubbing or anything.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, but she was blinking, and by the time I’d taken off half the hair, she was blubbing, in a really quiet way, tears slipping away, and a fat one rolled off her cheek and splatted on her knee.
Aadhya threw me a worried look, then said, “I can definitely manage with this much, if you wanted to stop.” Liu wouldn’t even have looked bad: her hair was so thick I’d had to cut it in layers anyway, with the crap scissors, so I’d started from underneath. You never know when a pair of scissors might suddenly go unusable, and if she was walking round with the top of her head trimmed close and a long weird mullet of hair dangling behind, anyone she asked for a pair of scissors would charge her the earth in trade.
“No,” Liu said, her voice quavery but also absolutely insistent. She was the quiet one of the three of us, usually—Aad could get plenty of heat going when she was annoyed, and if there’s ever an Olympics of rage, I’ll be odds-on favorite to take gold. But Liu was always so contained, so measured and thoughtful, and it was a surprise to hear her even that close to snapping.
Even to her; she paused and swallowed, but whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t going back in the box. “I want it off,” she said, with a sharp edge.
“Right,” I said, and went at it faster, shingling every strand as close to her head as I dared. The glossy strands were trying to tangle round my fingers even as I chopped them off and handed them off to Aadhya.
And then it was done, and Liu put her hands up to touch her head, trembling a little. There was barely anything left, only an uneven fuzz. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands over it back and forth like she was making sure it was all gone. She took a few deep watery breaths and then said, “I haven’t cut it since I came in. Ma told me not to.”
“Why?” Aadhya asked.
“It was…” Liu’s throat worked. “She said, in here, it would tell people I was someone to watch out for.” And it had worked, because you can’t afford to have long hair unless you’re a really rich and also careless enclaver—or unless you’re on the maleficer track.
Aadhya silently went and dug a leftover half of a granola bar out of a small warded stash box on her desk. Liu tried to refuse it, but Aad said, “Oh my God, eat the freaking granola bar,” and then Liu’s face crumpled and she got up and put her arms out towards us. It took me a few moments longer than Aadhya—three years of near-total social ostracization leaves you badly equipped for this sort of thing—but they both kept a space open until I lurched in to join the hug, our arms around each other, and it was the miracle all over again, the miracle I still couldn’t quite believe in: I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic. As though it could make everything all right. As if the whole world had become a different place.
But it hadn’t. I was still in the Scholomance, and all the miracles in here come with price tags.
* * *
I’d only accepted my horrific schedule for the chance of building mana on those glorious Wednesday afternoons off. Since I’d been wrong about how wonderful my Wednesday work sessions would be, you might think I’d also been wrong about how terrible my four seminars were. And then you’d be wrong.
Not one of the Myrddin seminar, the Proto-Indo-European seminar, or the Algebra seminar had more than five students in it. All of them took place deep in the warren of seminar rooms that we call the labyrinth, because it’s roughly as hard to get through as the classical version. The corridors like to squirm around and stretch a bit now and then. But even those paled in awful next to Advanced Readings in Sanskrit, which turned out to be an independent study.
I really could have used a dedicated hour a day of quiet time to work on Sanskrit. The spellbook I’d managed to get my hands on last term was a priceless copy of the long-lost Golden Stone sutras; the library had let it come in range in an effort to keep me from taking out that maw-mouth. I still slept with it under my pillow. I’d just barely managed to fight my way through twelve pages to the first of the major invocations, and it was already the single most useful spellbook I’d ever so much as glimpsed in my life.
But what I got instead was a dedicated hour a day, alone in a tiny room on the outer perimeter of the very first floor, squeezed in around the edge of the big workshop. To even get there, I had to go almost as far as you could possibly go into the labyrinth, open an unmarked windowless door, then walk down a long, narrow, completely unlit corridor that felt like it was anywhere from one to twelve meters depending on its mood that day.