I jabbed him in the side with an elbow, and he finally jolted out of it enough to stare at me instead. “Food. Alchemy marks. Well?”
He looked down at his tray: oh, how surprising, food! Things to eat to keep you alive! That’s about as much as you can say for Scholomance cuisine. He started eating it fast enough after he got over the massive surprise of rediscovering its existence, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “No, today I guess, or Friday,” but he kept staring at Cora until I poked him again for being a rude wanker and he realized it and jerked his eyes down to his plate.
“You’ve had to see a circle working sometime, living in New York,” I said.
“They don’t feel like that,” he said, and then had the nerve to ask me, “Was there any malia in it?”
“That’s meant to be funny, is it?” I said. “No, you aardvark, it’s one of my mum’s healing circle spells. You don’t get any return at all.”
That’s not true, at least according to Mum: she insists that you always gain more than you give when you give your work freely, only you don’t know when the return will come and you can’t think about it or anticipate it, and it won’t take the shape you expect, so in other words, the return is completely unprovable and useless. On the other hand, no venture capitalists are lining up to give me rides in their private jets, so what do I know?
“Huh,” Orion said, sounding vaguely dubious, like he wasn’t sure he believed me.
“It’s negative malia if it’s anything,” I said. Occasionally, a repentant maleficer comes to Mum for help, someone like Liu was on the way to being: not the gleefully monstrous ones but the ones who went partway down the road—usually to make it through puberty alive—and have now changed their minds and would like to go back. She won’t do spirit cleansing for them or anything like that, but if they ask sincerely, she’ll let them join her circle, and generally once they’ve spent as many years doing the circle work as they did being maleficers, they come right again, and she tells them to go and make a circle of their own somewhere.
“Maybe that’s why it feels weird to you,” Aadhya said to Orion. “Are you seeing an aura?”
“Nmgh,” Orion said with half a pound of spaghetti dangling out of his mouth. He heaved the rest of it in and swallowed. “It’s more like—for a minute, she had these really crisp edges. Like you do sometimes,” he added to me, and then he blushed and stared down at his plate.
I glared at him, completely unflattered. “And why exactly did that make you think it was using malia?”
“Uh” was the feeble response. “It’s—maybe it’s just power?” he tried, kind of desperately.
“Do mals have these crisp edges?” I demanded.
“No?” Under my continuing glare, he wilted. “Some of them? Sometimes?”
I stewed over it while shoving in the rest of my own dinner. Apparently I looked like a maleficaria to him occasionally? Although Orion didn’t see anything odd about human maleficers: he hadn’t noticed our life-eating neighbor Jack was one until after that charmer had tried to leave my intestines piled on the floor of my room. And all right, there’re so many wizards who use small bits of malia here and there, stolen from things like plants or bugs or filched from a piece of work that someone else left unattended, that Orion could plausibly have a hard time picking the hardcore maleficers out. Those of us who strictly use only mana that we’ve raised ourselves or that someone has given us freely are the minority. But still: apparently I’m visibly more of a monster than an evil wizard is. Hurrah.
And an even larger hurrah: Orion found that appealing. It sounded too much like Aadhya had been right about what Orion saw in me. I’m not some sort of pallid romantic who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself, and anyway one of the main reasons I’d been avoiding Orion’s room lately was the strong feeling that it would be for the best for all concerned if I didn’t see him with his shirt off again anytime soon, so that would be pot and kettle. But I was unenthusiastic about the prospect of being found attractive because I seem like a terrifying creation of dark sorcery instead of despite it.
I stewed enough over it that I completely missed the implication of the rest of what Orion had said until I was slogging upstairs to my Wednesday library session. Just short of the top stair—where my entire gaggle of freshmen were waiting for me to lead them to whatever potential doom I was scheduled to save them from today—I halted, and realized that if Orion hadn’t got his results from his senior seminar yet, it wasn’t because he was going to get an A+, since he’d been falling down on everything badly enough to forget changing his t-shirt. He was going to fail.