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I stumbled out of the guts of my greatest triumph and almost fell right back into them when I saw what was waiting for me.
This batch of freshmen did not, apparently, have the collective good sense of a stampeding group of lemmings because they hadn’t barricaded themselves inside their rooms when they heard whatever horrible noises had come from my fight with the maw-mouth.
That they hadn’t retreated back inside their rooms once they had seen what was going on, I could only attribute to frozen shock, or perhaps fatalism; once they had seen what was waiting, they would have known there was no use hoping their doors could protect them for long.
They were all still gaping now - at me, or at the horrible goop still draining from the floor, I wasn’t sure which. It was hard to care which, at the moment; it was taking all my willpower just to remain upright instead of collapsing into highly embarrassing sobs, or possibly vomiting up every calorie I’d managed to snag for the past week.
I had thought that no one would know what I had done. I had resented that fact fiercely.
Now, I was wishing equally fiercely that they would all just go away and never talk about this again.
Because they were starting to talk. Shock was starting to fade just enough for hissing whispers that sounded horribly like the ones that had drifted from the maw-mouth to start up, and I could only guess at what they were saying.
I needed to get out of here. I needed -
And that was the moment, of course, that Orion showed up, all but leaping off the last few steps as he rushed to save me from whatever monster he had imagined and that I heartily wished I had been fighting instead.
“El,” he said, eyes sweeping the corridor. The goop was gone now, mostly, certainly to the point he might not notice it, but the hordes of horrified freshmen clinging to their doorposts definitely told him something had happened.
“She killed a maw-mouth,” one of the freshmen piped up eagerly, and the rest immediately broke out in hysterical babble.
Orion looked briefly like someone had stolen his Christmas present, and I wanted very badly to hit him.
Then the expression turned to concern, which was worse. “El?” he asked again, stepping forward.
I opened my mouth to say something - anything - but all that came out was a horrible choked sob.
Orion’s eyes went the size of very uncomfortable dinner plates, but he did have the courtesy to glare at the freshmen until they scurried back enough to clear a path, and to lend me enough of his arm strength to half drag me back to my room.
That probably put paid to my hopes of getting a better reputation out of this, but at least I was safely back to my room before the collapse properly hit, so that was another one I owed him.
I ended up crying in my room for an uncomfortable length of time.
At least it was uncomfortable for me; it just wasn’t enough to make me stop. For a while, it didn’t seem like anything would be enough for that. I could only assume that it was equally uncomfortable for him, based on his expression and the ginger way he kept patting my arm as he sat two feet away from me on the edge of my bed.
He also ended up fetching me two glasses of water and refilling the pitcher, though, so I decided to forgive him for witnessing the mortifying ordeal of recovering from what I was suddenly quite certain no person had ever been intended to recover from.
He was still there when I finally quit crying and instead started staring morosely at the dead crystal around my neck. I had blown through an impressive amount of mana on that fight, and I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to recover it. The freshmen all knew what I had done, but who knew how the story had been repeated; Orion had shown up quickly enough that they might decide to just attribute the whole thing to him.
For his part, Orion apparently decided that this was the perfect time to ask the question that had presumably been raging in him since he’d found me. “You killed a maw-mouth?”
“Yes.” I didn’t want to talk about it more than that; I didn’t want to think about it. But I probably should. If there was anyone in the Scholomance who would take what had happened as a challenge and decide that he needed to go kill one of his own, it was Orion, and he needed to know what he was getting himself into and how to survive it if he did. I certainly wasn’t going in after him if he got himself eaten.
So I stumbled my way through the story and only had to stop two or three times to gag a little.
“That’s amazing,” he said when I was done.
And he was looking at me like he meant it; like I really was amazing in all my sweat-soaked, tearstained glory.
I groaned and threw myself backward onto the bed. “It was stupid,” I corrected. “I don’t know how I’m going to build that mana back up.”
Orion perked up. “I can get you mana,” he said.
And, well. He could, was the thing. He had the kind of power sharer that all the enclave kids had, and I could only imagine how much was pooled in there; he could probably top me off, easy.
I wasn’t sure how the rest of New York would feel about that, of course - I wasn’t sure if they had any freshmen to be saved - but a maw-mouth was everyone’s problem. They owed it to me, really, though my stomach curdled a little when I imagined what my mother would say if she could hear me thinking that.
All of me felt a little curdled up, actually. I had cried myself out, but part of my mind was still stuck on what I had seen, what I had felt in there. I didn’t want to imagine what it would be like trying to sleep after this.
So I didn’t imagine it. I shoved myself off the bed instead and headed for the door, only lurching a little.
Orion was up like a shot, naturally, reaching for my arm to steady me.
“Supper, Lake,” I said firmly. “Then - everything else.”
He nodded, still looking a little like a hopeful puppy.
I hated it, of course, but I still leaned on him a little as I limped my way out.
The whole cafeteria went quiet when we came in.
Judging by the people standing on tables, this was a recent development.
It suddenly occurred to me that being known as the girl who killed a maw-mouth might not be the unalloyed good I had grumpily imagined being forced to give up.
Killing a powerful mal was all well and good. You could build a reputation off that.
But killing a maw-mouth . . .
No single wizard had ever done that before, was the thing. We only had one credible account of anyone doing that, and it was the most powerful wizard of his generation, backed by a circle of other powerful wizards, and loaded down with all the mana they could beg, steal, or borrow.
And it had taken him multiple days.
And I, a previously overlooked junior, had just killed one in under an hour.
It was probably a smaller one, of course. But that wasn’t the kind of protest that was going to mean much to a bunch of frightened teenagers.
Killing the maw-mouth was good. No one would have preferred to have it lurking around. Orion might could have gotten away with doing it without doing anything more than just adding to his legend.
But Orion was a known quantity. An idiot hero known for not asking for anything in exchange, that everyone was quite sure was on the side of the angels, and not a maleficer gearing up to kill them all.
I wasn’t. I was just the quiet loner who inspired a feeling of dread in anyone who got too close to me - except, apparently, Orion, who everyone was convinced I had lured in with seduction skills unknown.
Quite a number of people had probably assumed that I was indulging in a little malia on the side.
And then I had killed a maw-mouth, and the prospect of a little anything had promptly gone out the window.
That wouldn’t necessarily stop people from wanting me for their teams, for their enclaves. People could overlook a lot for someone who could reliably kill a maw-mouth.
But that was only if they were sure they could rely on me, and that I wouldn’t go over to someone else’s team instead.
Or that I wouldn’t decide that I wanted revenge for the thousand petty slights they had carelessly paid out to a girl they had assumed didn't have the power to repay them.
And judging by the very nervous students from the enclaves in India, I might have just tipped them over whatever edge had kept them from blurting out, “Galadriel Higgins is an evil sorceress destined to kill us all, and we’ve got the prophecy to prove it.”
The smartest thing to do might have been to march right back out and barricade myself in my room, but I was going to have to eat eventually, and my mind was still too raw for complicated planning - or any planning more elaborate than contrariness, really.
So I dragged Orion toward the food line. Orion, the poor sweet idiot moppet, was still looking around with a puzzled expression, like he didn’t quite get why everyone had fallen silent when we walked in.
The crowd between us and the food parted like repelling magnets as soon as we - well, I - got close. The freshmen waved us forward with eager gratitude. Everyone else, with rather more sense, just didn’t want to get in our way.
It was all juniors in line, of course, but they backed up just like the others. This was not nearly as gratifying as I once would have imagined, especially with my stomach tying itself into knots.
I didn’t really feel like eating anything at all, but the Scholomance wasn’t going to indulge any temper tantrums on my part; I needed to regain the energy I’d lost, so I marched forward grimly and scooped up pudding and noodles and some kind of sauce I didn’t recognize.
I really should have known better than to touch that last one, but I still wasn’t thinking straight.
It turned out to be some kind of murderous blob, of course, and it went straight for my throat as soon as I plopped it onto my noodles.
Unfortunately for it, my brain was still half stuck in the endless loop of killing the maw-mouth; à la mort came out of my mouth with accompanying wrist flick before Orion could more than open his mouth for whatever overpowered spell he’d been planning.
The blob died satisfyingly. The mess it left all over my noodles was much less satisfying, as was the way the tray had fallen when I’d let it go for the wrist flick.
I stared down at it for a long moment. It wasn’t the worst thing to happen to me today by a long shot, but it was one more thing, and it was a thing I did not feel at all capable of currently coping with.
Alfie, who had been ahead of me in line before stepping back with everyone else to make way, cleared his throat and stepped forward, offering me his fully loaded tray.
I shouldn’t take it.
But I was too worn out to remember why I shouldn’t, so I just said, “Thank you,” rather stiffly and went to sit down.
I chose an empty table rather than waiting to see if everyone would scoot away from me. I realized a moment too late that I should have waited for Orion to finish loading his own tray, but it was too late now. There was nothing for it but to sit down and start shoveling food into my mouth as fast as I could.
A chair scraped beside me a moment later.
It wasn’t Orion.
It was Aadhya, and behind her was Liu.
I suddenly felt a little teary eyed again.
“That’s a hard spell,” Liu said quietly, and I almost wanted to laugh because of everything I had done that day, that was what she wanted to open with?
I was grateful for it, though. Thinking about the spell was much, much easier than thinking about the rest of it.
Then Orion was there, and Alfie, of all people; he’d gotten another tray off someone.
“I’m still not joining London,” I told him, too tired to care that this was almost certainly not the smart thing to say into the still dead quiet cafeteria.
“Quite alright,” he said cheerfully.
I eyed him warily.
“We all owe you a great deal of gratitude for what you did today,” he said. “For our part, London would have lost two of our own if you hadn’t stepped in.”
That made me feel a little better about the food. There was at least a chance it had been offered as an acknowledgement of that debt instead of in the way you’d offer a rampaging maleficer a more appealing target.
“You should have let me get the mal,” Orion grumbled. “Then I could have gotten you some mana back.”
I stared at him. So did most of the table, which was gratifying.
“Don’t you have a power sharer?” I demanded.
Orion flushed. “I can’t take power out of it,” he admitted. “Only put it in.”
The injustice of that nearly took my breath away, even with everything else currently clamoring for my attention, but I wasn’t about to press for more detail with all eyes and ears currently still on us.
“I’d be happy to help out,” Alfie chipped in, still cheery and helpful enough that either London had developed a complicated plot to entrap me, or they were still holding out hope they could lure me in.
Or he just genuinely wanted to get his debt out of the way, but I wasn’t feeling generous enough to allow for that at the moment.
A part of me expected Orion to protest this, but apparently he didn’t have a possessive bone in his body; he just nodded eagerly.
“You can’t have much left,” Aadhya whispered, eying a particular table of furious looking enclavers warily. “It might be a good idea.”
I stabbed my noodles. “I burned through half my mana stash,” I admitted, against my better judgment. I thought so at least; I hadn't had a chance to take full stock yet.
The attention of my tablemates, with the exception of Orion, turned incredulous.
“Half?” Aadhya said.
“It was a maw-mouth,” I snapped, feeling defensive.
“Just half?” she clarified.
Even Alfie looked impressed.
“I have good mana crystals,” I mumbled. It was easier to look at my food than to look at them, and I was annoyed with myself for thinking it. “Where did you think I got the power from?”
The slightly embarrassed silence that sprang up suggested that either they hadn’t thought about it, or that before our arrival the cafeteria had been busily engaged in a headcount to see who I’d sacrificed to drain malia from.
Orion, at least, was still blessedly more interested in his pudding, only looking up when the silence stretched. “I can go mal hunting after dinner if London can’t spare enough,” he offered.
“That won’t be necessary,” said a sharp voice that came from one of the people who’d been perched on the tables earlier. I vaguely recognized it as coming from a girl who was gunning for valedictorian. “I’m sure everyone will be happy to chip in.”
There was a little grumbling that suggested that everyone was, in fact, not quite happy to chip in, but no one wanted to be the one to say it.
“Especially,” she continued with a gleam I didn’t like in her eye, “if you’d be willing to help us out with another mal problem that’s been building for a while. One that the maw-mouth was only a symptom of.”
I considered, very briefly, hexing her into next week. This must have been apparent in my expression because she abruptly sat back down.
“New York will be happy to help,” Chloe said suddenly, standing up on her own seat with a slightly shaky expression that nonetheless held firm even when one of the seniors started tugging at her. “No strings.”
“As will London,” Alfie said firmly, and then all the other enclaves started echoing it, lest I decide to go run off somewhere else with my maw-mouth killing abilities after graduation.
I did not, of course, believe that for a second, but then Aadhya whispered, “I can help you check any device they give you,” and apparently I did believe that, because my chest felt tight and warm for a second before I managed a nod.
Orion was still frowning at maybe-valedictorian-girl. “What do you think she was talking about?”
Unlike a normal person, he sounded more interested than concerned.
“Eat your pudding, Lake,” I told him, a bit more of the rubbed-raw feeling from earlier fading in the warmth of my exasperation. “If you really want, we can ask her after supper.”
Which cheered him right up. “You’ll come?” he asked, tearing through the rest of his pudding with gusto.
“Someone sensible ought to come along,” I grumbled.
Aadhya and Liu, for some reason, looked a bit skeptical at this.
Orion, on the other hand, had his usual cheerful response to being insulted, which was really just further evidence that I was going to have to pull myself together and handle this because, obviously, I really was desperately needed to be the sensible one for us both.