The Last Graduate

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.

I hadn’t allowed myself to expect that I’d even make it to this moment, so I hadn’t imagined what it would be like if I did, but even if I had, I don’t think I could have imagined that. But for a moment, I was sorry: the Scholomance had done everything it could for us, given us ungrateful sods everything it had, like that awful story about the giving tree, and here I was about to chop it down.

I had to turn back and keep the gates clear for them until they all made it through. They hadn’t asked me, they wouldn’t ask me, because that went against the rules we all understood, but I’d do it anyway, because I could.

or maybe it was just the same kind of calm as going through a crying jag and coming out the other side, where you know nothing’s changed and it’s all still horrible but you can’t cry forever, so there’s nothing to do but go on

It annoyed me more and not less because I didn’t have a good reason for being annoyed. I couldn’t even come up with anything to say about it. If I’d tried to put into words what I was feeling, it would have been something unpleasant and envious and whinging like Why should you get to make easy deals that suit you perfectly to get out of the things you don’t like with the strong implication of when I never do, which wasn’t even true anymore since I had a New York power-sharer on my wrist.

He stared down at me. The seething colors of the gateway were shining in his eyes, mottling his skin, and he leaned in towards me, like he wanted to kiss me. “Do you want to get kneed again? Because I will!” I snarled at him, in outrage.

He jerked back from me, more ordinary color flushing into his cheeks. His eyes cleared for a moment; he looked back at Patience, and then he laughed once—he laughed, a short laugh, and it was awful. He turned to me and said, “El, I love you so much.”

And then he shoved me through the gate.

All my triumph fell away from me like a long tail of ashes crumbling off the end of a stick of incense. I’d been getting ready to be proud of myself, self-satisfied: I’d done it, I’d saved everyone, I’d purged the world of maleficaria, I’d faced my greatest fear and I’d come through it. I’d been ready to go through the door and boast to Mum of what I’d done, to wait with queenly grace for my knight in shining armor to come and receive my hand, his reward and mine, and set out on our crusade to save any tarnished bits of the world that still needed to be polished up.

I actually laughed out loud, I think, I’m not sure; I couldn’t hear myself, but it felt like a mad frightened giggle in my throat.

I hadn’t expected to feel sorry. I hadn’t allowed myself to expect that I’d even make it to this moment, so I hadn’t imagined what it would be like if I did, but even if I had, I don’t think I could have imagined that. But for a moment, I was sorry: the Scholomance had done everything it could for us, given us ungrateful sods everything it had, like that awful story about the giving tree, and here I was about to chop it down. I paused, in that moment between the two parts of the incantation, and though I had to clench every hardened muscle in my gut to keep from flying apart with the potential of the spell gathered in me, I managed to say, softly, “Thank you.” Then I plunged over the line.

the bloody horrible universe wanted me to suffer, and I jumped forward into the maw-mouth. Even as the horrible surface of it closed over me, I cast La Main de la Mort with all my rage and the mana of a thousand mals behind it, and I cast it again, and again, and again, my whole face and body clenched tight, and I don’t know how long it was, it was forever, it was three seconds, it was my entire life stretched out to infinity, and then it was over and Liu was yelling at me, “El! El, look out!”

I’d asked them all to help me, and they had; I’d asked them to be brave, to do the good thing that they had a chance of doing, and I hadn’t the right to ask them to do it if I wasn’t going to do it myself.