The Scholomance Read Free Page A

those teen celebrity magazines she’d ought
to be obsessing over, if not for Mara and the lies she wouldn’t tell. Breathing
hard, making certain that Mara had heard the discrepancy in number and was
giving her full attention, she bent back over and hoarsely whispered, “ —released
to find their homes, but the tenth is given over to the Devil and detained as
payment for all the glammar learned there.’ Imagine.”
    Mara
patiently sat quiet and let Connie do the imagining for both of them. She never
expected such a ridiculous story to hold Connie’s attention, not for more than
a few weeks, much less all those years, but there it was and there it stayed. All
through high school and all through college, the Scholomance remained. Every
few months, just when Mara would dare to hope the dream was finally dying,
Connie was call her up with some new rumor, some new idle comment thrown away
on one page of some obscure book, some new ‘fact’ that absolutely must be
explored.
    The
Scholomance could only be entered once each year, or every ten years, or once a
century, or under a solar eclipse, or only after all the present students had
passed from its halls. Its magic was taught by demons, or by the half-human
sons of King Solomon, or by deathless wizards, or by the Devil Himself. Only
ten students at a time could enter its halls, only three, only fifty, only one.
    But
in all this ever-changing nonsense, one thing remained constant, anchoring the
rest of the legend to a seeming of possibility, of truth: The price of tuition
was always the tenth graduate.
    “You
really like those odds?” Mara asked once, only once.
    “Ninety
percent is better than anyone else could ever give me,” Connie answered. “Even
you.”
    And
so Mara let it go, and that was probably her second mistake, but who could
blame her for it? Who would ever believe that the Scholomance was real? How
could Mara ever have prepared herself for coming back to the dorm that night
and finding no Connie, but only a note with one line on it in Connie’s pink
pen.
    I
think I can find it.

    That
was all. Not even goodbye. And for all the good it did, Mara tried to find her,
but all of Connie’s notes and books and scrounged-up Scholomance nonsense was
gone. Asking questions and tapping at minds for three days told her only that
Connie had gone to the airport. What little research Mara was able to do on her
own placed the Scholomance in the Transylvanian region of Romania, in the
mountains, in the center of a lake, or perhaps even floating around in the sky
like a dark cloud, invisible without the full moon behind it. Fairy tales.
    Romania
was not, she supposed, a really huge country and Transylvania narrowed that
down even more, but it was still plenty big enough to hide Connie. Mara
considered flying out after her, but in the end, she did not. A chase would be
very dramatic and noble and all that, and surely it would work in the movies,
but life was not the movies. Mara could not pick out her best friend’s most
familiar and beloved mind from all these surrounding her right here in this
stupid dorm unless she was very close, and so there would be no chase, no
heroic flight to Romanian mountains, no rescue and no reunion. Connie was gone
and all Mara could do was wish her well and hope she came back on her own and
give this damned thing up for good.
    She
didn’t.
    The
days passed. One of Connie’s brothers came to get her things and left, baffled
and furious with her for not being able to tell him where his little sister had
gone (Mara could have at least shown him the note and said the word
Scholomance, but she didn’t. Connie was the only one who ever had honesty alone
out of her). Mara started playing cards to make up Connie’s half of the rent
and learned how to temper big wins with frequent, inexpensive losses so that
people wouldn’t realize how good she was. The Panic Room evolved many monitors
and lost its chair. Mara’s father had his inconvenient