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.
That became just as clear to the kids in the Hindi run as it had to the ones in the morning, and word kept spreading. On Saturday morning there were almost eighty kids for the Spanish run, and that afternoon, the first five kids did finally turn up for the Chinese run. They were all stragglers.
There’s no single thing that marks someone out as a straggler. Sometimes it’s just bad luck—you’ve been jumped too often, blew all your mana fighting off mals, and now you haven’t anything to contribute to a shared pool. Sometimes it’s even worse luck—you’ve got an affinity for something truly useless, like water-weaving. That’s tidy on the outside, you’d make a fortune helping enclaves with their sewer lines, but you won’t have the chance, since it doesn’t do yourself or anyone else any good in here. Sometimes you’re just not very good at magic and not very good at people—you can get by with one or the other, but if you haven’t either, you’re in trouble.
I’ve tried not to think about what it would be like—the idea of having to wade into the graduation hall all alone, the mass of the crowd breaking for the gates ahead of you, a sea of people with plans and friends and weapons, warding spells and healing potions, and the maleficaria all around already beginning to rip kids out of the mass, shredding them into bones and blood—running because your only hope was to run, knowing that actually you hadn’t any hope, and you’d die watching other people going out the gates. I spent three years trying not to think about it, because I thought that was going to be me.
In this case, one of the poor bastards had developed shakes that occasionally interrupted his spellcasting, probably aftereffects of a poisoning, or perhaps just trauma. There’s no shortage of that in here. Another one of them had Chinese about as good as mine, which was a bad sign given that it was presumably the language she’d been taking classes in for all four years. It’s not actually worth it, statistically speaking, to send your kids in here if they aren’t properly fluent in English or Chinese to begin with, which generally also is a sign they’re no good at languages. It doesn’t matter how brilliant a wizard they are otherwise: they’ll be at too much of a disadvantage when they can’t keep up with their general subjects. You’re better off keeping them at home, guarded as best you can, teaching them in the vernacular they do know. But some families try it anyway.