A Deadly Education

“He’d kept his head down all dinner even while everyone at our table talked loudly about how massively wonderful he was. I’d seen him do the same after his other notable rescues, and had never quite decided if he was making a pretense of modesty, was actually modest to the point of pathology, or was just so horribly awkward he had nothing to say to people complimenting him.”

El’s observation of Orion’s post-rescue behavior is one of the earliest signs of Orion’s characterization as an awkward, isolated young person, who does not have many true friends or confidants. This also demonstrates that El is open to seeing Orion as a person with complex feelings and motivations; many people have already “decided” about El without knowing her, and El’s thoughts here show she is a person who does not make judgments about people based on superficial observations.

“I’d explain what the void is, but I haven’t any idea. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to live in the days when our cave-dwelling ancestors stared up at this black thing full of twinkly bits of light with no idea whatsoever what was up there and what it all meant, well, I imagine that it was similar to sitting in a Scholomance dorm room staring out at the pitch-black surroundings. I’m happy to be able to report that it’s not pleasant or comfortable at all.”

This description of the void conveys how unsettling even the “safest” parts of the school can be. The school is more secure than the outside world, but it is still held together through magic and belief and this responsive black abyss they don’t truly understand. Descriptions like these, along with El’s caution when opening any doors or cabinets, help to establish the setting as one that requires constant vigilance and awareness.

“Of course, getting into New York wasn’t on the cards for me unless I pulled off something really amazing, and probably not at all given that I was with increasing passion contemplating the murder of their darling star, but there’re plenty of solid enclaves in Europe. None of them will take me, either, though, unless I come out of here with a substantial reputation and a substantial spell-list.”

Moments like these build El’s characterization as an intelligent, practical, strategic person. She exhibits great self-awareness as well as a mature insight into the ways of the world she occupies.

“I tried the creative writing track, but my affinity’s too strong. If I sit down to write modestly useful spells, they don’t work. In fact, more often than not they blow up in my face in dangerous ways. And the one and only time I let loose on the page instead, stream of consciousness the way Mum writes hers, I came up with a highly effective spell to set off a supervolcano. I burnt it straight away, but once you’ve invented a spell, it’s out there, and who knows, someone else might get it. Hopefully there’s no one garbage enough to ask the school for a spell to set off a supervolcano, but no more inventing spells for me.”

The novel uses small moments like these to inform the reader about the power and intensity of El’s affinity. In this case, as in many others, these observations establish the efforts El makes to protect other people from what she knows she is capable of. Powerful spells such as the ones El creates would be valuable, but she either destroys them or attempts not to create them in the first place because she recognizes them as dangerous. El’s experience at the Scholomance is one of fighting against what comes easily to her, and she does so only for the benefit of others.

“We’re not friends, but they’ll let me walk to class with them to have a fourth at their back, if I leave at the same time they do. Good enough for me.”

El’s social experience is one of marginalization. She is relegated to the fringes of even the most accepting social groups and tolerated only when it is convenient and useful to others. The reader should note El is a powerful witch, but no one else in the school is aware of this; because El works against her affinity so often, the other students don’t know how valuable an ally she could be. Her work in their benefit is to her own social detriment.

“It’s not that I’m ugly; on the contrary, I’ve been growing increasingly beautiful in a tall and alarming way, as befits the terrible dark sorceress I’m meant to be, at least until I presumably collapse into a grotesque crone. Boys often think for about ten seconds that they might want to go out with me, and then they look into my eyes or talk to me and I suppose get the strong impression I’m likely to devour their souls or something.”

The novel’s focus is rarely on El’s appearance, other than making note of how ragged her clothing is (due to the limited number of possessions students can bring in at induction) and how infrequently she is able to shower (due to the danger of being in the bathroom alone and her lack of friends and allies). This passage gives the reader a sense of El’s physical appeal and, in contrast, emphasizes how powerful her “vibe” must be to overcome her growing beauty.

“I can’t wheedle for a spot, it makes me too angry, and threatening makes me feel equally terrible, just in the opposite way.”

This quote does a particularly good job at demonstrating how conflicted and frustrated El is about her social situation. She craves friendship with the other students not only for emotional reasons but also for physical safety—in this world, loneliness and isolation are as dangerous as they are depressing. Something about El’s presence is off-putting to people, so she cannot easily or naturally fall in with a social group. Her other two options, as she describes here, are too upsetting. Because of this, El has accepted her marginal status with self-awareness and does her best to survive and succeed despite it.

“I’d told myself it was just common sense—going maleficer meant dying young, grotesquely. But that still ought to beat dying right now, only it didn’t. It didn’t, and if it wasn’t an option now, it was never going to be an option, and even if I survived this, I wouldn’t survive the next thing, or the one after that. There’d always been a safety valve in the back of my head: I’d always told myself if all else fails, but all else had failed, and I wasn’t going to do it anyway.”

This passage occurs immediately after Jack stabs El and tries to coax her into becoming a maleficer with him. El is gravely wounded and likely to bleed to death; she knows she could kill or incapacitate Jack using malia, but she cannot bring herself to do it. She reflects on how she’d thought she might do it in an emergency, but now she knows she never will—not even when it would save her life. This connects to Important Quote #20, in which El explains her mother’s belief that there are no evil people, only evil choices. In this moment, even though she’d be justified in reacting with violence using any means necessary, El refuses to make the evil choice. Instead, she prepares to attempt to defend herself with only the mana she has stored.

“If you’re thinking that’s why I don’t have friends, it’s a bit chicken-and-egg: anyone who doesn’t have enough friends to watch their back can’t afford to be well groomed, and that lets people know you don’t have enough friends to watch your back, which makes them less likely to think you’re a valuable ally. However, none of us spends loads of time showering, and when you want a shower, generally you can ask someone who visibly needs one themselves, and it all ends up leveling out. But no one ever asks me.”

In this section, El explains showering is a dangerous activity because there are mals that lurk in the bathroom, and you are vulnerable when you’re in the shower, unclothed and potentially with your eyes closed to rinse. She further explains alliances are important in the area of personal hygiene too. This provides an interesting look at the novel’s setting, but it is also germane to the criticism the book received regarding representation of a half-Indian character. Some critical responses argued the novel, in depicting El as having poor personal hygiene, continued a harmful stereotype about Indian people. The way this scene functions within the context of the novel is to provide more evidence about El’s isolation and loneliness as well as the widespread stakes of not having allies within the school.

“The wrappings fell off as I put it up, and before I could drape it again, a ghastly fluorescing face appeared partway from the churning depths as if emerging from a pool of bubbling tar, and told me in sepulchral tones, “Hail Galadriel, bringer of death! You shall sow wrath and reap destruction, cast down enclaves and level the sheltering walls, cast children from their homes and—” “Right, yeah, old news,” I said, and threw the covers back on.”

The magical mirror El makes for her shop project recognizes her and repeats the prophecy given by her grandmother when El was only a baby. El’s casual reaction to it is humorous, but the passage reinforces the theme of destiny within the novel.

“For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me for no reason, nothing I’ve ever done. I’ve never hurt any of them. I’ve been tying myself in knots and working myself to exhaustion just to avoid hurting any of them. It’s so hard, it’s so hard in here all the time, and what I was really glad of was having half an hour three times a day where I could take a breath, where I could pretend that I was just like everyone else, not some queen of popularity like an enclave girl but someone who could sit down at a good table and do a decent perimeter and people would join me instead of going out of their way in the opposite direction.”

This passage gives the reader a strong sense of the way El’s loneliness and isolation affect her mental state. She says, “it’s so hard in here all the time,” which is a sentiment many young readers will be able to empathize with. The nature of the school means El’s only companions are the students already within it, and those students have widely marginalized her. This small break in El’s composure shows the reader how years of isolation and rejection have taken their toll on El’s sense of self and confidence.

“When she asked to keep me out of the Scholomance, what she was offering to do was let me watch her get eaten before I got eaten myself.”

This quote follows El’s explanation of the frequent mal attacks throughout her late childhood. She knows the frequency and consistency of the attacks will eventually cause her mother’s death and then her own. This shows the stakes for El successfully getting through the Scholomance are very high, and they do not impact her only.

“And he knew it, and instead he’d actually been making an effort to hang around with me, and if he wasn’t waiting for me to turn maleficer anymore, that meant that what he wanted was—to hang out with somebody who wouldn’t genuflect to him. I hated the idea; it made him too much of a decent person, and what right did he have to be a decent person, on top of a monumentally stupid gigantic hero?”

El’s earlier indecision about whether Orion’s modesty was performative or not (see Important Quote #2) clarifies in this moment. This is also a moment where she realizes Orion enjoys spending time with her without having ulterior motives despite—or perhaps because of—her rudeness and sarcasm. This passage also shows that El is able to recognize the complexity and contradiction in other people rather than seeing them one-dimensionally or as stereotypes. This is echoed in the final chapter of the novel when Chloe apologizes for her earlier behavior and says she hopes she and El can be friends (299).

“I don’t have a very good idea of how people behave with their friends normally, because I’d never had one before, but on the bright side, Orion hadn’t either, so he didn’t know any more than I did. So for lack of a better idea we just went on being rude to each other, which was easy enough for me, and a refreshing and new experience for him, in both directions: being gracious to the little people had apparently been hammered into him from an early age.”

This passage describes El and Orion’s atypical friendship. They are rude to each other instead of nice and supportive, but it makes them both happy. The other students find it odd that El speaks to Orion in such a sarcastic, insulting way, but the lack of niceties allows each of them to be genuinely themselves and not have to play the types of politeness games their parents impressed upon them.

“I wasn’t immune or anything,’ she said. ‘But my mum also told me to be polite to rejects, because it’s stupid to close doors, and suspicious of people who are too nice, because they want more from you than they’re letting on. And she was right. Jacky W turns out to be Hannibal Lecter, and you turn out to be so hardcore you’d ditch New York and London to stick with me just because I didn’t completely rip you off trading.’”

El builds strong relationships with Orion, Aadhya, and Liu because all four of them are—or become—aware of how unreliable stereotypes and superficial judgments are. In this passage, Aadhya explicitly explains the novel’s position on the importance of getting to know a person before you make a judgment about them.

“So the end result was, I was just as knee-deep in it as I’d been a week ago when he’d white-knighted into my bedroom, if not worse. Apparently I wasn’t going to actually use his friendship to get anywhere, and he was going to be worse than useless as help himself: it was already blindingly obvious to me that he was going to be the last one out of the gates on graduation day. Meanwhile I was well on the way to successfully making myself violently, instead of just modestly, hateful to every enclave kid in the place, probably before the end of term at my current pace.”

El reflects on the changes in her situation after a week of being associated with Orion. The use of the word “[a]pparently” in the passage communicates El’s bemused surprise at her own reluctance to use Orion’s status to improve her own chances. Instead of Orion becoming a shield or connection for her, she accepts that he will be “worse than useless,” as she will have to worry about his recklessness and lack of regard for his personal safety during the graduation ceremony. El’s friendship with Orion—and her insistence on protecting him—reflects the authenticity and sincerity with which she approaches relationships.

“The greatest wizards alive can’t kill maw-mouths, and they won’t even try, because if you try and you don’t kill it, it eats you and it keeps eating you forever. It’s worse than being killed by a soul-eater and it’s worse than being grabbed by a harpy and taken to her nest to be eaten alive by her chicks, and it’s worse than being torn apart by kvenliks, and no one in their right mind would ever try it, no one, unless the girl you’d started dating a few months ago was going to die, her and someone you didn’t even know, not even a person but just a blog of cells that had barely started dividing yet, and you stupidly cared about that enough to trade a million years of agony for theirs.”

Though El never met her father, it is clear from her thoughts here she has complex feelings about his death. She downplays the strength of his connection to herself and her mom—suggesting he and Gwen had been dating only “a few months,” and El herself wasn’t even a person yet—but acknowledges how profound a sacrifice he made to save them. The reader should notice two things: first, El is capable of single-handedly killing a maw-mouth by casting killing curses on the people the creature has consumed; and second, El’s father was eaten by one of the maw-mouths who lives in the graduation hall. The reader may predict that El will battle this maw-mouth at her own graduation ceremony, perhaps “meeting” her father for the first time and killing him to release him from his suffering.

“I’ve long entertained detailed fantasies of dramatic public rescues—several of them lately featuring a grateful and admiring Orion, to be honest—and the reaction of my fellow students, bowled over and regretful they’d never seen the real me before. But the real me had just single-handedly killed a maw-mouth, with liberal use of one of the most powerful and unstoppable killing spells on the books, so if my fellow students saw the real me, they wouldn’t decide that after all I was a lovely person they should have been nice to all these years. No, they’d start thinking I was a violently dangerous person they should have been nice to all these years. They’d be scared of me. Of course they’d be scared of me. I could see that now with perfect clarity, despite the pathetic dreams I’d hung onto all these years, because I was scared of me, too.”

After El kills the maw-mouth, she is astonished and afraid of her own power. She realizes her plan to demonstrate how powerful she is in a heroic way will not result in the kind of adulation Orion receives—instead, the other students are more likely to perceive her power within the existing context of her “darkness” and the rumors of her malia use. She understands that, regardless of her good intentions or protective instincts, displaying the same level of power Orion has would make her more of a threat than she already is.

“She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.”

El’s mother’s thoughts on the distinction between evil people and evil choices helps to explain much of El’s characterization. El was raised to believe there were no evil people, only people who did evil things—this is a stark contrast to the beliefs that motivated her paternal family’s attempt to kill her. Throughout the novel, the reader sees El grappling with the option to do something “evil”—to kill Jack, to hurt or enslave the seniors attacking the stairwell, to get revenge against Magnus for the crawler—but at each opportunity, El chooses to make the more ethical or moral decision.

“And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.”

This description of the enclave system’s development shows how their privilege and attitude of entitlement has grown. Though the enclaves are meant to provide safety, El explains that once they had achieved this, they wanted more and more for themselves. The desire to keep and grow what they had creates an “us vs. them” mentality that allows the enclaves to justify their exploitative treatment of the independent wizards. Novik uses the school’s dynamics to demonstrate how the enclaves (who have wealth in the form of magic, mana, and safety) use the possibility of inclusion to get free labor and protection from the other students.

“They were desperate to keep him in the exact same way that everyone back at the commune wanted to get rid of me. He was living the same garbage story I was, only in mirror image. Trying so hard to give them what they wanted, trying to fit himself into the beautiful lie they’d made up about him, staring obediently at flash cards his mum made so he could be polite to them. But of course he couldn’t be friends with them. He could tell, surely, that they only wanted to be his friends as long as he stayed in the lie. Chloe with her big eyes telling me how wonderful he was, how they’d all tried so hard.”

In this passage, El identifies the parallels between her and Orion’s experiences—though on the surface their social interactions seem very different, El recognizes they are both isolated by their uniqueness. El cannot pretend to be friends with the other students because she knows they distrust and dislike her; Orion cannot pretend to be friends with the other students because he knows they care only about what he can do for them.

‘“No!’ I said, and was about to inform him that I was a decent human being and nice quite regularly or at least once in a while, and it wasn’t a sign I was angry, and then I realized that actually he was right, only it was his useless enclaver friends I was angry at; I was feeling sorry for him. Which I would have hated myself, with a violent passion.”

When Orion asks why El is being weird, she realizes she has been pitying him. The novel has shown how El feels about the other students’ distrust and dislike of her, but her reaction to the idea of being pitied further shows how independent and self-respecting El is. To feel sorry for someone, this passage suggests, is to think of them as weak or childish and needing special treatment. El’s typical sarcasm and rudeness to Orion represent her concept of him as an equal, and she thinks this pitying niceness is insulting and disrespectful.

“I’d been right about her not wanting the deal. She’d run away exactly the way that every enclave kid ran away when bad things showed up, letting their entourages take the hit. That was why they had the entourages, and the kids in those entourages were doing it because they were desperate for a way out at graduation, and they had nothing else to offer that would get an enclaver to recruit them. So they made shields out of their bodies, and if they lasted all the way to graduation, at least the most dedicated of them would be offered filler spots in enclave kids’ alliances. And that wasn’t okay, and she could work out for herself it wasn’t okay.”

Chloe flees during the stairwell wall repair, cementing El’s perception of her as entitled and cowardly. Chloe is too used to being able to hide behind others—Orion key among these figures, as he’d saved her life when they were both small children—and behind the walls and power of the enclave. El recognizes the enclavers’ “entourages” are just groups of students who have so little confidence in their own survival they are willing to gamble themselves as human shields for the chance to potentially join an enclave after graduation.