The Scholomance is a stupid foreign tradition that has no place in a civilized society. Yes, bottle up all your children in a tightly sealed vessel where they must spend their entire transition to adulthood fighting for their lives and cutting each other down to improve their own chances, surely this will have no negative effects on their development or on the shape of the society they build once they're out. This sort of nonsense is why everyone is still upset about being rediscovered by the rest of the planet.

But the thing is, it works. Thule has a better survival rate for children in the critical period than just about anywhere else on the globe—except the Scholomance. The Scholomance beats Thule by a mile. On the outside you'll get one in twenty, in Thule more like two in twenty, but the Scholomance gets a quarter of its charges through its bloodstained halls in one piece.

And Ghyslaine is perfectly aware that in her case, it will not instill any problems she did not already have.

She pesters her parents to bargain for a spot, but gives up when it's clear they would rather light both her and themselves on fire than go begging to the foreign enclaves. Fair of them, honestly. So she proposes a different arrangement. She doesn't say it outright, of course, because one must employ some subtlety in these matters. But nonetheless it does just so happen that her parents take her on a trip to Canada, the most adequate foreign country in the world, and it does just so happen that she sneaks out of their hotel late one very particular evening, and it does just so happen that she stumbles into an induction point fleeing at top speed from a needlepine—she checked, they have those in northern Ontario too—and the needlepine does for the child she's targeting, which she expected, and one of the parents, which she also accounted for, and there is no second parent, which was among the possibilities although at the moment she rather wishes it hadn't been, and she nearly fumbles her knife which would definitely be an ironic way for this particular adventure to end, but when the moment comes she is standing triumphant with the Canadian's bags in one hand and her knife in the other, and she arrives in the Scholomance breathing hard and smelling faintly of pine.

The Scholomance is a stupid foreign tradition that has no place in a civilized society. Yes, bottle up all your children in a tightly sealed vessel where they must spend their entire transition to adulthood fighting for their lives and cutting each other down to improve their own chances, surely this will have no negative effects on their development or on the shape of the society they build once they're out. This sort of nonsense is why everyone is still upset about being rediscovered by the rest of the planet.

But the thing is, it works. Thule has a better survival rate for children in the critical period than just about anywhere else on the globe—except the Scholomance. The Scholomance beats Thule by a mile. On the outside you'll get one in twenty, in Thule more like two in twenty, but the Scholomance gets a quarter of its charges through its bloodstained halls in one piece.

And Ghyslaine is perfectly aware that in her case, it will not instill any problems she did not already have.

Her chances are good, too, even among the population of the Scholomance. She won't have any relationships going in, but she's clever and ruthless and decent at languages which around here means she grew up speaking four of them, and she's likely to be the school's sole Thulic speaker, so she'll have a reserve of spells that absolutely no one else can touch and anyone who wants to learn one will be beholden to her for any assignments they get in Thulic thereafter. A tidy advantage, all told.

She pesters her parents to bargain for a spot, but gives up when it's clear they would rather light both her and themselves on fire than go begging to the foreign enclaves. Fair of them, honestly. So she proposes a different arrangement. She doesn't say it outright, of course, because one must employ some subtlety in these matters. But nonetheless it does just so happen that her parents take her on a trip to Canada, the most adequate foreign country in the world, and it does just so happen that she sneaks out of their hotel late one very particular evening, and it does just so happen that she stumbles into an induction point fleeing at top speed from a needlepine—she checked, they have those in northern Ontario too—and the needlepine does for the child she's targeting, which she expected, and one of the parents, which she also accounted for, and there is no second parent, which was among the possibilities although at the moment she rather wishes it hadn't been, and she nearly fumbles her knife which would definitely be an ironic way for this particular adventure to end, but when the moment comes she is standing triumphant with the Canadian's bags in one hand and her knife in the other, and she arrives in the Scholomance breathing hard and smelling faintly of pine.