He accepts the book, and gives her a small smile. "Thank you."

She smiles back.

"You're welcome. Allies, you know. I actually maybe should have handed this over before the mana crystals, but, well. I can't say I regret being concerned about your immediate safety?"

Alexei shakes his head. "It is appreciated."

"Yeah." Then she looks at her satchel. "And... there might be... something else, in our corner. If the poor beauty hasn't gotten irritated with my lack of attention and ditched me for my hubris."

She very, very carefully looks, and just as carefully removes it. Now that she's got time to look at it, wow is it beautiful. Pristine dark-green leather, lovingly stamped with intricate patterns in gold. It is, without a doubt, the prettiest goddamned book she has ever seen, and she's seen many books.

"...what is it?"

"Ignore him, darling, he's far too used to the workshop and doesn't know a proper lost grimoire when he sees one," she says, and it's to the book itself. She pets it, then sits carefully down on her bed with it and opens it to the first page.

The first page, the title page, was copied Sanskrit, annotated heavily in Arabic. Well, the Arabic's a surprise, but she'd been expecting the Sanskrit, and if she has it right, it translates to: Behold the Masterwork of the Wise One of Gandhara.

She sucks in a breath, then clutches it to her chest.

"this is the most precious creation I've ever laid hands on," she whispers, eyes wide.

Alexei... does not have Sanskrit. So he just blinks owlishly at her.

"I, um. Do you know of the Golden Stone sutras?"

He sucks in a breath through his teeth so quickly he chokes on his spit and has to start coughing violently, because he does, he does know about the Golden Stone sutras: they are the first known enclave-builder spells, from thousands of years ago.

Before they were invented, enclaves only happened naturally, accidentally. Have a group of wizards live in a single place, doing magic in it and just existing in it for enough generations, and it'd start to slip a little bit into the void. Then you help it along, push it a bit further, start using only a single entrance in and out, and it would go all the way, and that door would be the only place in the enclave that was connected to the world.

And the reason people want that, want to build an enclave with their little space-outside-of-space, is twofold:

One is that if you're not in reality it can't fight you, or at least nowhere near as much as it does outside. When you do magic you're looking at the fundamental laws that reality is built out of and saying: not you, not here; my will be done. It resists you, it complains, it needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into shape. Artificers like Alexei know this best of all, because reality resists you even further when you try to shape it permanently, to create an object that works in ways it shouldn't and that keeps doing that even when you're not actively making it with your power and your will and most importantly your mana. It is especially difficult to do any magic around mundanes, around people who don't have any magic of their own, because they don't believe in magic—not the way wizards do, not the way they believe in air or in cars, in real things right in front of them—and then it's not just reality that fights you, it's also their will. Fail to do magic in front of a mundane and your next spell will be that much harder to cast; do that enough times and you lose the ability to do that in its entirety, your own body deciding that you never had it after all. In an enclave, in the Scholomance, out in the void, it is much easier to do magic.

The other is the same reason the Scholomance itself exists: safety. There are endless numbers of creatures out there trying to eat wizards, having to consume mana because they need that mana to survive (unlike humans do) but they can't generate their own (like wizards can). What enclaves do is create a chokepoint, a highly-defensible small hole out of reality that makes the smell of magic filter out much more slowly. You can do magic in an enclave without worrying that you're about to have a pack of hungry chayenas descend upon you with murderous intent.

If this book has anything to do with the Golden Stone sutras, then, then...

His mother told him about them. They were created by a man named Purochana who, five thousand years ago, worked for the prince of Gandhara—where Pakistan and Northern India are in contemporary times. He is often referred to in medieval sources as the wise one of Gandhara, and in mundane works he's described as a villain, for some reason. But wizards who know of him know that he is one of the most important figures in history, the one who first figured out how to give people safety and power, at will, without needing to spend three hundred years in a single place and hoping it happens to you.

It was the only time she ever actually talked about enclaves, after her group disbanded and the project of creating a Russian enclave fell through, after she and her colleagues all refused to complete their dream of decades, the dream she'd taken over and whipped into shape just so that she wouldn't lose more children. All enclave-building spells are an incredibly closely-guarded secret, and Alexei suspects that that secret may be magically-enforced, with a geas being part of the price to get them at all, what with the way his mother completely stopped talking about them and could never explain why she never used them.

And while the sutras are no longer the state-of-the-art in enclave building—modern spells allow people to build skyscrapers connected to each other by monorails, hanging gardens that change shape at a wizard's whim, anything you might want with all the technological amenities you might dream of—but some of its pieces are still used to this day. Even after five thousand years of refinements and improvements and new inventions, some of these building-blocks are still incredibly useful, especially the ones that manipulate matter at a fundamental level, which have never been surpassed.

This may, in fact, be the most precious creation either of them will ever lay their hands on.

"Oh, good," she says, at his reaction. Well, not the coughing, the coughing is kind of alarming. "... Are you okay? I have water if you need some?"

He shakes his head and lifts a quelling hand. No reason wasting precious water on this, he'll be fine in a moment, and he indeed is.

"What," he croaks, "is the book?"

"I am going to need to do so much work on my Sanskrit, and probably pick up Arabic besides, but I'm pretty sure the translation of the title page is, 'Behold the Masterwork of the Wise One of Gandhara.' So, ah." She looks at the book, still held against her like it's the most precious thing in the world. "I'll need to make a special book chest. It's such a good thing I've finished shop for this term, I was going to spend the time doing something else, but this beauty needs a home of its very own and I need to make sure it'll be perfect."

He blinks loooong and slow. "It's. It's them? All of them? The sutras? Not just—it's actually them?" Alexei is typically a boy of very few words but holy shit.

"I, I think so. I should look in more depth, I just. I'm sorry lovely, you're so exciting I've just lost all my sense of manners, haven't I. I should let you properly introduce yourself, shouldn't I..."

She is absolutely crooning to the book. She even continues while carefully leafing through the pages, soft little reassurances of adoration and promises of cherishing it forever and ever and ever.

Yeah he's staring, now. "I do not have Sanskrit or Arabic, but I will help you with the case." They're allied, now, so of course he would, but he doesn't know what else to say, he's kind of in shock.

She nods, looking up from her precious, precious book to smile at him, briefly. "Thanks. I'll - I think it's proper if I do most of the work myself? But not at the cost of quality, just."

Which is to say: she'll totally do all of the annoying scut work, and request his help for the tricky bits that she's likely to mess up herself. This is a much more efficient use of their time.

He nods again.

And then it clicks. It clicks that you can't get anything for free in this school. Anywhere. The principle of balance, or something, there's a cost, there's always a cost, and sometimes it's just mana, just the effort and suffering you send out to the world, but for something like this... for the Golden Stone sutras...

He can't keep the horror from his face, at least not immediately. He doesn't know what attacked her in the library, but the way she looked, and acted, it must've been something terrible. And he can't help but have the next thought, that it may not have been enough. He doesn't know, doesn't know what it was, but for something like the sutras, what kind of price would she have to pay?

Yvette doesn't notice his concern or horror, instead focusing on reading her fantastic and incredibly valuable new friend.

It does not take particularly long for her to have her grimoire's value cemented.

An important thing to understand about magic is that lot of it is about efficiency. A student's magical education at the Scholomance is often less about how to do something, and more about how to do it well. You can get the same thing in multiple ways, but some of those ways are more wasteful than others. If you want to change one phase of matter to another, like ice to water or water to steam, the most obvious way to get there is by changing the temperature of the matter to match what phase you want it to be, and begin the typical process that matter changes phases. But 'obvious' is not 'efficient.' A lot of the mana is being fed into what's essentially waste heat, instead of just directly aiming for the end result that the wizard wants. There are obvious ways to make this more efficient; just heat up the matter itself, and nothing around it, apply or remove an amount of air pressure to make the process go faster, and so on. But if you are the Wise One of Gandhara, Purochana himself, you can figure out how to cut out the middle man, and just tell the matter that you want it to be liquid directly. No heating, no pressure, just the end result. Very efficient. His phase-control spell is old, yes, but it's really hard to improve upon that level of efficiency.

"This is the Purochana's phase-control spell," she whispers.

He's managed to school his expression again by then—he does not want to remind Yvette of whatever horrors she may have witnessed and may be yet to witness, he'll broach the subject later—so he looks up and he's... maybe a bit too expressionless but that's not unusual for him. "So it is them," he whispers back.

"Yeah. Yeah." She looks back down at the spell. "Um. We can probably... trade or auction the phase-control spell or something? You can do that, right, that's a thing you can arrange? I can probably have several copies in a week."

She is speaking like she's already learned the spell and knows how to cast it. This is because she has. Look, it just. ... It makes sense, okay? She studied some chemistry and other sciences before she was inducted into the Scholomance, so once the path has been shown, even in damned Sanskrit, then. It just sort of clicks. Granted, she wouldn't know how to translate it from Sanskrit, at least not without a lot of invested time and probably some trial and error, but. The solution is already worked out, in front of her.

He nods. "I can put the word out," he says, slowly, working the details out in his head. "...Scorpius could probably help reach more people. He speaks Mandarin. We can have an auction, the five top bidders get the spell..."

"I can make five copies," she agrees, nodding. "And we can get Scorpius to help with arrangement. That's a good idea." She speaks Mandarin too (though for the record her accent is terrible, she has so much trouble getting the phonemes right) but obviously she is a much less charming candidate.

He disagrees he's not sure he does exactly but he does still find Yvette very charming. He smiles at her, again. This may be a record number of smiles he has smiled within a single day or something.