I suppose I should’ve felt sorry for her, but I’d rather be sorry for someone who never had luck at all than for someone whose extreme luck ran out unexpectedly. Mum would tell me I could be sorry for both of them, to which I’d say she could be sorry for both of them, but I had a more limited supply of sympathy and had to ration it. Anyway, I’d already saved Sudarat’s life twice before the second week of classes, despite my lack of sympathy, so she hadn’t any right to complain.
And neither did I, since I was apparently determined to keep doing it.
Aadhya and Liu and I had made plans to take showers together that night. As we headed downstairs, I said to Liu bitterly, “Have you got any time after? I need to get down some basic phrases in Chinese.” You might expect that to mean things like where’s the loo and good morning, but in here, the first things you learn in any language are get down and behind you and run. Which I was going to need to stop the freshmen getting in the way of my saving them. Entirely at my own expense.
Liu bent her head and said softly, “I was going to ask you to help me.” She reached into her school satchel and pulled up her clear plastic pencil bag to show me a pair of scissors inside: a left-handed pair with the remnants of ragged patches of green vinyl still clinging on stickily around the finger holes, one blade notched and the other a bit rusty. Promising signs: they were bad enough that they almost certainly weren’t cursed or animated. She’d been asking round for someone who had a pair to loan for the last couple of weeks.
Her hair was down to below her waist, a glossy midnight black except at the very roots where it was coming in a color that anyone would also have called black, except by contrast to the slightly eerie darker shade of the long mass. Years and years of growing it out, and three of those years had been in here, having to negotiate terms and conditions for every shower we got. But I didn’t ask are you sure. I knew she was, even if only on a purely practical note. Aadhya was going to use it to string the sirenspider lute that she was making for our graduation run, and anyway, she’d only been able to get away with growing her hair that long because she’d been using malia.
But then she’d had an unexpected and very thorough spirit cleanse, and she’d decided she wasn’t going back down the obsidian brick road. So now she had to pay back three years of unreasonably good hair days all at once. We’d been taking it in turn each evening to help her comb out the truly horrific snarls that developed every day no matter how carefully she braided it.
After we were done in the showers, the three of us went back to Aadhya’s room. She sharpened the scissors with her tools, then got the box she’d prepared for the hair. I started the cutting carefully, just taking off a bare centimeter from one very skinny lock of hair held as far from Liu’s head as I could—you always want to start slow when it comes to an unfamiliar pair of scissors. Nothing terrible happened, and slowly I worked halfway up the strand, and then I took a deep breath and went in fast and cut, right at the visible demarcation line between the old hair and the new, and handed the one long section to Aadhya.
“You okay?” I said to Liu. I was making sure the scissors were all right, but I also wanted to give her an excuse to take a minute: I did expect it to be a wrench for her, even if she wouldn’t start blubbing or anything.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, but she was blinking, and by the time I’d taken off half the hair, she was blubbing, in a really quiet way, tears slipping away, and a fat one rolled off her cheek and splatted on her knee.
Aadhya threw me a worried look, then said, “I can definitely manage with this much, if you wanted to stop.” Liu wouldn’t even have looked bad: her hair was so thick I’d had to cut it in layers anyway, with the crap scissors, so I’d started from underneath. You never know when a pair of scissors might suddenly go unusable, and if she was walking round with the top of her head trimmed close and a long weird mullet of hair dangling behind, anyone she asked for a pair of scissors would charge her the earth in trade.
“No,” Liu said, her voice quavery but also absolutely insistent. She was the quiet one of the three of us, usually—Aad could get plenty of heat going when she was annoyed, and if there’s ever an Olympics of rage, I’ll be odds-on favorite to take gold. But Liu was always so contained, so measured and thoughtful, and it was a surprise to hear her even that close to snapping.
Even to her; she paused and swallowed, but whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t going back in the box. “I want it off,” she said, with a sharp edge.
“Right,” I said, and went at it faster, shingling every strand as close to her head as I dared. The glossy strands were trying to tangle round my fingers even as I chopped them off and handed them off to Aadhya.
And then it was done, and Liu put her hands up to touch her head, trembling a little. There was barely anything left, only an uneven fuzz. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands over it back and forth like she was making sure it was all gone. She took a few deep watery breaths and then said, “I haven’t cut it since I came in. Ma told me not to.”
“Why?” Aadhya asked.
“It was…” Liu’s throat worked. “She said, in here, it would tell people I was someone to watch out for.” And it had worked, because you can’t afford to have long hair unless you’re a really rich and also careless enclaver—or unless you’re on the maleficer track.
Aadhya silently went and dug a leftover half of a granola bar out of a small warded stash box on her desk. Liu tried to refuse it, but Aad said, “Oh my God, eat the freaking granola bar,” and then Liu’s face crumpled and she got up and put her arms out towards us. It took me a few moments longer than Aadhya—three years of near-total social ostracization leaves you badly equipped for this sort of thing—but they both kept a space open until I lurched in to join the hug, our arms around each other, and it was the miracle all over again, the miracle I still couldn’t quite believe in: I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic. As though it could make everything all right. As if the whole world had become a different place.
But it hadn’t. I was still in the Scholomance, and all the miracles in here come with price tags.
* * *
I’d only accepted my horrific schedule for the chance of building mana on those glorious Wednesday afternoons off. Since I’d been wrong about how wonderful my Wednesday work sessions would be, you might think I’d also been wrong about how terrible my four seminars were. And then you’d be wrong.
Not one of the Myrddin seminar, the Proto-Indo-European seminar, or the Algebra seminar had more than five students in it. All of them took place deep in the warren of seminar rooms that we call the labyrinth, because it’s roughly as hard to get through as the classical version. The corridors like to squirm around and stretch a bit now and then. But even those paled in awful next to Advanced Readings in Sanskrit, which turned out to be an independent study.