But first I had to take care of my own schedule, and one look told me I was in for it. I’d known going in that I’d have to take two seminars in my senior year: that’s the price you pay for going incantations track and getting to minimize your time on the lower floors your first three years. But I’d been put into four of them—or five if you counted twice for the monstrous double course, meeting first thing every single day, that was simply titled Advanced Readings in Sanskrit, instruction in English. The note indicated that it would count as coursework for Sanskrit and Arabic, which made suspiciously little sense except for instance if we’d be studying medieval Islamic reproductions of Sanskrit manuscripts—such as the one I’d acquired in the library just two weeks before. That made for a really narrow field. I’d be lucky if there were three other kids in the bloody room with me. I glared at it sitting there like a lead bar across the top of my schedule sheet. I’d been counting on getting the standard Sanskrit seminar led in English, which should have meant being lumped into one of the larger seminar classrooms on the alchemy lab floor with the dozen or so artifice-and alchemy-track kids from India who were doing Sanskrit for their language requirement.
And I couldn’t easily manufacture a conflict for it, since I didn’t have so much as a single other senior in the room to compare schedules with. Usually at least one or two of the other outcast kids would grudgingly let me have a look, in exchange for getting to see mine, and that would give me at least one or two classes I could put in to try and force the school to shift the worst of my assignments around. You’re allowed to specify up to three classes, and as long as you’ve met all your requirements, the Scholomance has to rework the rest of your schedule around them, but if you don’t know what other classes there actually are or when they’re scheduled, it’s just a gambling game that you’re sure to lose.
The Advanced Readings seminar would have been more than enough to make my schedule unusually lousy, but on top of that, I also had a really magnificent seminar on Development of Algebra and Applications to Invocation, which was going to count for languages, unspecified—a bad sign that I’d be getting loads of different primary sources to translate—as well as honors history and maths. I hadn’t been assigned any other maths courses, so my odds of getting out of that one were very slim. Then there was the rotten seminar I’d actually been expecting to get, on Shared Proto-Indo-European Roots in Modern Spellcasting, which shouldn’t have been my easiest class, and last but very much not least, The Myrddin Tradition, which was supposed to count for honors literature, Latin, modern French, modern Welsh, and Old and Middle English. And I knew right now that by the third week of class, I’d be getting nothing but straight-up Old French and Middle Welsh spells.
The rest of the slots were filled with shop—which I should have had a claim to be let out of entirely, since last term I’d done a magic mirror which still muttered gloomily at me every so often even though I had it hung up facing the wall—and I’d been put in honors alchemy, both meeting on mixed-up schedules: Mondays and Thursdays for the one, and Tuesdays and Fridays for the other. I’d be with different kids each day of the week, so I’d have it twice as hard as I already do finding anyone to do things like hold something I need to weld or watch my bag while I go and get supplies.
Up to that point, it was possibly the single worst senior schedule I’d ever heard of. Not even the kids aiming for class valedictorian were going to take four seminars. Except, as if the school was pretending to make up for all that, the entire afternoon on Wednesdays was literally unassigned to anything. It just said “Work,” exactly like the work period we all get right after lunch, only it had an assigned room. Namely this one.
I stared at the box on my schedule sheet with deep and unrelenting suspicion, trying to make sense of it. An entire afternoon of free time, all the way up in the library itself, officially reserved so I wouldn’t even have to protect my turf, with no reading, no quizzes, no assignments. That alone made this possibly the single best senior schedule I’d ever heard of. It was worth the trade-off. I’d been worrying about how I could possibly make up for all the mana I’d blown last term; with a triple-length work period once a week, I might be back on track before Field Day.
So there had to be a monstrous catch somewhere, only I couldn’t begin to guess what it was. I got up and poked Zheng. “Keep an eye on my things,” I told him. “I’m going to do a full check on the room. If any of you want to know how, watch,” I added, and all their heads popped up to watch me go over the place. I started at the air vents and made sure all of them were screwed down tight, and made a sketch on a piece of scrap paper to show where they were in the room, in case something unusually clever decided to creep in and replace one of them at some point. I counted all the chairs and desks and looked under each one; I took out every single drawer in the cupboard along the back wall and opened all the cabinet doors and put a light inside the guts of it; I pulled it away from the wall and checked to make sure it and the wall were both solid. I shone a light along the entire perimeter of the floor to look for holes, I tapped over every wall as high as I could reach, I checked the doorframe to make sure the top and bottom were snug, and by the time I had finished, I was as sure as I could get that this was a perfectly ordinary classroom.