Chapter Six
She decided the best course of action was to get really fucking excellent at fighting things with magic. And not just because
three students were now missing after her first class, and the one who had returned after being grabbed by a gargoyle was
simply not the same as he had been.
There was also her mortal enemy, making everything worse.
He had ended Hargreaves’s lecture by somehow transporting her out of the hall and into a tree outside. It had taken Anaya
half an hour to help her down, and both of them had been late to their next lecture on the history of the Underneath. Professor
Cobble had been a good deal warmer and friendlier than Hargreaves—like a human sparrow, Anaya had whispered—but he had still been displeased.
They had spent most of the lecture being pecked by invisible crows.
She still felt sore hours later.
And so it had to be done. She had to make him afraid of her. To figure out his weaknesses and use them against him. But of
course the problem was: doing something like that wasn’t exactly easy at Harrowhall. There was no student database you could
just look up. No outside internet you could use to unearth who anybody was.
The place was a closed circuit.
All she managed to really uncover was his full name and what he was mostly popular for, and even that happened quite by accident.
She went the wrong way and wound up passing a trophy cabinet, and when she glanced inside, she saw it. A picture of him in
the captain’s position of some kind of sports team. Then below, it said who the captain was.
Harker St. James.
The perfect moniker for a man like him.
Posh and pretty and cold sounding, and easily shortened to something cool. Hark, they probably cheered, on the sidelines of whatever match he was playing. Hark, his teammates most likely called, across a field for whatever sport he played. The one they called Gauntlet, she imagined—because
that seemed to be the favorite topic of discussion in the university paper she’d picked up from the shop the other day.
The very, very expensive shop, on the edge of campus, that everybody called Boddies.
But was actually called Bodlin’s. Bodlin’s, filled with everything you could want, but nothing you could afford. Wands were
out of reach, pens you could fill with magic cost a fortune, even candles and practice kits and scarves emblazoned with the
name of the university team were too much. But she had managed to get the Harrowhall Gazette, and read about the bloodbath the game against a school called Omundson had been.
Apparently, the aim of the game was to prevent the opposing team from getting anything magical through a sort of hoop, by
any means necessary. And he’d lopped off someone’s arm with a teleportation spell, before they could get the winning point.
I suppose it’s a small mercy that he didn’t do that to me, she had found herself thinking, after reading. Though of course she couldn’t be comforted by that for long. There was still
time, after all.
And now she had yet another example of how ruthless and brutal he could be. I am a goner, she thought, as she dashed down the right staircase to the dining hall. Or at least, the dining hall was what Anaya had
called it in the note she’d sent to Mina’s drawer. But when Mina got there, she discovered that those two words didn’t really
cover it.
It looked more like an exclusive club, made for expensive cigar smokers. She found Anaya ensconced in a huge leather chair,
leaning over a polished mahogany table with claw feet. And her own huge seat was just as good. It felt like sinking into velvet
butter. She groaned over it, loudly enough that Anaya laughed.
“Wait until you see what happens with the food,” she said, as she handed Mina a menu. Or what Mina thought was a menu. But there wasn’t actually anything on it. It was just a thick rectangle of cream card, with the name of this
particular dining hall at the top. North Side, it said and then below, in curlicue script: Please make your selections.
“I don’t understan—” she went to say, but before the words were out, a gentleman in what looked like full black tie arrived,
with a silver trolley. He set two salvers in front of them both, and sets of silverware, and just as she looked up to ask,
he removed both silver domes to reveal what was beneath.
Two plates of food.
And the one in front of her was exactly what she would have asked for, if someone had bothered.
As if the menu just knew what she wanted and supplied it.
It gave her two fried eggs with sunshine bright yolks, a slice of ham thick as a paving slab and still sizzling, a side of neatly cubed potatoes clearly fried in something more savory than vegetable oil.
The whole thing smelled divine—far better than anything she could have paid for.
But that was fine. This, at least, was covered under the terms of her enrollment.
And that meant she was going to eat better than she ever had in her life.
She even picked up a fork to do just that. She let it hover over the egg.
Yet somehow, she just couldn’t bring herself to stab the yolk. To spear a potato. To pick up some of that ham. Her guts seemed
to roil at the very thought, and she had to set her cutlery back down. She sat back, telling herself it was just an ordinary
lapse in appetite. That it was just early for breakfast. That she would feel hungry in a second.
But deep down, she knew it wasn’t anything of the kind.
She knew it was him.
It was the way he turned her stomach.
The stress and fear he struck into her, and how it robbed her of simple pleasures.
Though of course she couldn’t let Anaya know that. She couldn’t allow Anaya to be dragged into any of it. Sweet Anaya, who
was actually doing okay, and just wanted to enjoy her dinner. No, no, she needed to put on a show of dinner eating.
Only somehow, Anaya took one look at her fussing with her cutlery, and seemed to just . . . know.
“If you’re thinking of how to get that asshole off your back, all I know is do not use poison to do it,” she said, as she used some frankly delicious-looking roti to scoop an unhinged smelling portion of dal makhani into her mouth.
Then just as Mina was about to ask what she meant, she swallowed and continued.
“Apparently, someone tried to do that last year to take his captain’s spot on the Gauntlet team, and it did nothing to him.
He shrugged it off like they’d fed him a spoonful of sugar. ”
“And I’m guessing he wasn’t pleased once he did.”
“Well, the person who did it did not come to class the next day.”
“Did they come to class ever, after that?”
“They did not.”
She sank back in her chair. Picked up her fork again, and poked at the egg she didn’t want to waste. “This place is psychotic.
And I mean I knew it was because of the memory erasures and the liability waivers and stuff from the books. But even by those
standards—”
“Yeah. I heard two people talking before you got here. Did you know that last year, so many people died at the end of first-year
flying exam that there was a government investigation? Of course, it’s impossible for the government to find Harrowhall guilty
of anything. But still. The fact that they even managed to try.”
“We live in a really fucked-up society.”
“Yeah, I thought all the baseline inequality was bad enough.”
“Right. Here it’s superpowered. And yet somehow still grindingly dull and predictable.” Mina sighed and set her fork down.
The egg was now mush anyway. “You know he tried to pass me a note in the lecture hall? Like a bog-standard bully. I thought
it was going to be a drawing of me with a giant butt.”
“Is that something that’s actually happened to you before?”
Their eyes met over their plates. The silence spinning out, despite how not silent everything was really.
The dining hall was getting busy now. Plates clattered, chairs scraped back and forth, people yelled for their friends to join them.
Just like she’d always imagined doing when she got here, and somehow fit in.
At least I do with you, she thought at Anaya.
And somehow Anaya seemed to understand, because she reached a hand across the table. She put it over Mina’s. “We have each
other now,” she said. “When we pass notes, it’s the good kind. The best kind. The kind I used to hope I would have with someone
but never quite managed.”
“Shall we write each other’s names on our pencil cases?”
“I already have. Mina and Anaya, besties forever.”
She went to laugh at that. Yet somehow, a laugh wasn’t what came out. It sounded more like a sigh of delight. And it came
with such a strange and unfamiliar feeling. A flood of warmth, a flicker of something in the back of her mind. Like with Harker—a
sense that she was seeing Anaya but someone else at the same time.
Jyoti, her mind whispered.
But the name flitted away before she could fathom it. After a second, she couldn’t even remember what it was—and even if she
had been able to, a crash over at the end of the hall soon had her knocked out of it. Harker whipping his wand around, it
looked like. A table was currently trying to eat whoever had pissed him off.
Next time, that’ll be me, she thought, and focused back on the problem at hand.
“He must have a weakness. Some way to make him stop whatever it is he’s trying to do to me,” she said, and Anaya looked thoughtful
for a moment.
Before she delivered her answer.
“Maybe you should start with why he’s doing it.”
“Because I messed things up for him. I got him demoted essentially.”
“Yeah, but he was already obsessed with you before that.”
Mina shrugged. “Maybe I was just an easy target, then.”
“I don’t know about that. I mean you’re here talking about murdering him.”
“It isn’t murder I have in mind.”
“Then what?” Anaya asked, one eyebrow raised.
As if what Mina was thinking involved a caper of some kind.
And of course, Anaya would have been down for it, clearly.
It was the reason she shook her head. “I just want him to leave me alone.”
“So then what you need is a leave-me-alone spell.”
“I can’t even make any spell at all. Never mind one that sounds made up. And somehow, I doubt I’m going to learn, because
the last lecture I was in with him I couldn’t hear the professor over the sound of my own thundering heart.”
“Yeah, but lectures aren’t the only way to work out how to curse someone.”
“So what? I just go to the library and look it up?” She made a scoffing sound on the end of her sentence. But Anaya just stared
at her in this long and very pointed sort of way, until finally, it clicked. “Oh my god, I should totally go to the library and look it up. Why didn’t I think of going to the library and looking it up?”
“You’re not in your right mind. A homicidal magic wielder is trying to wear your intestines as a hat,” Anaya said, half laughing.
But half serious, too. It made Mina’s stomach flip a little bit, to see that worry in her dark eyes.
So she tried to brush it off.
“I don’t think you get to call yourself a magic wielder until you graduate.”
“Somehow that doesn’t seem like the thing you should be focusing on.”
She sighed. “Because the other part makes me want to barf.”
“Pity. This food is outrageous. Honestly, I’d give them credit if I didn’t suspect any authenticity is coming from whatever this dining room spell is ripping
right out of my head,” Anaya said—almost offhandedly
But it made Mina shiver, just a little.
This place took, no question about that. And in ways you barely understood until the taking was already done. The only question
was: How much could she take from it, before she had nothing left?