I had no idea what would happen when the information all came out. The other New York kids might decide to cut Chloe and us off from the pipe. If Orion wasn’t supplying them with fresh mana anyway, they didn’t have a lot to lose from ditching his “girlfriend.” And that could—would—be the least of it. If people worked out that the school was gunning for me in particular, they’d want to know why, and if they couldn’t turn up a reason, someone would probably decide to poke me with a sharp stick to find out. If they didn’t just decide that it was a good idea to give the school what it wanted.
So, my midterm study sessions were exceptionally cheery.
Except actually they were. The shine of studying with other people still hadn’t dulled for me. We’d cleaned up Chloe’s double-width room, and found new stuffing for the cushions—if you think we’d turn up our noses at reusing some perfectly good and comfortable cushions just because they’d previously been home to a pair of monsters and a half-digested fellow student, you haven’t been paying attention—and we gathered there almost every evening, with a little basket in the middle where our mice could snooze between getting petted and even occasionally fed a treat by anyone invited to join us.
It was almost never just the four of us. Whatever subject we wanted to cover, it was a sure bet we could get in more people for the asking. I had plenty of help for Arabic: Ibrahim and a couple of his friends were happy to come by and give me advice as the price of admission. Nkoyo came almost every night, too, and she was doing that general Sanskrit seminar I’d expected to get. Thanks to their help, I was making some real headway on the Golden Stone sutras: just that week I’d actually got to the first of the major workings.
Except, ugh, that was a lie. It wasn’t their help, not really. It was the time I had because I didn’t have to desperately watch my own back every second of the day. It was the energy I had because I wasn’t constantly scrabbling to build mana. And it was their help, too, only their help and the time and the energy all came from the same thing, and that was Chloe’s help, Chloe’s bountiful generosity, and I didn’t like it. Except of course I did like it loads, I was just bitter and sullen about it, too.
But I couldn’t manage being bitter and sullen on the day I turned the page and found myself looking at a gorgeously calligraphed heading that I didn’t need to translate into Being the First Stone upon the Golden Road to understand what it was saying: This one’s really special, with the Sanskrit incantation set in a finely bordered window on the page, every character flavored with gold leaf and paint in the main curves. Even at a first glance I could pick out bits of all the other spells I’d gone through so far: the phase-control spell, the water-summoning spell, another one I’d just finished working through that was for dividing earth from stone; they were woven together and invoked as part of the overall working.
I didn’t just stop being sullen. I stopped worrying about mana, about what was going to happen when and if my cover was blown; I stopped working on my midterm assignments and ignored the rest of my classes entirely. For that whole week, in every waking minute that I wasn’t actually stuck in session or killing mals, I was working on the sutra. Even during meals I had my head in a dictionary.
I knew it was stupid. My midterm assignment for the Myrddin seminar was a long involved piece of Old French poetry that was sure to contain at least three or four useful combat spells I could probably use during graduation. Meanwhile Purochana’s great working was on the scale of architecture and probably needed an entire circle of wizards to cast anyway. The Golden Stone sutras were meant for building enclaves, not killing off mals: it would only do me any good if I lived long enough to get out of here.
But if I did—then I could offer it to groups like Liu’s family, like the kibbutz that Ibrahim’s friend Yaakov was from: established communities of wizards who wanted to set up their own safe, sheltered places. The Golden Stone sutras probably weren’t the best way to build enclaves anymore, otherwise more of the spells would have survived into the modern day, the way the phase-control spell had, but it would be a sight better than having to mortgage your entire family to another enclave for three generations just to get access to the spells, much less for the resources you’d need to use. And Purochana’s enclave spells probably weren’t going to be as expensive as the modern spells, either. No one was building skyscraper enclaves back in ancient India: even if you’d imagined one, you couldn’t exactly call your local builders and order some steel girders and concrete.