Chapter 5: Sirenspiders

Summary

El worries that her rudeness to the enclave kids will lead them to talk Orion out of hanging out with her, so she asks Orion and Aadhya if they can help her with her mirror project immediately after lunch. The three travel to the workshop and start combining their magic powers to form the mirror. While they are trying to smooth and enchant the glass, two sirenspiders attack them. Orion destroys the maleficaria spiders, while Aadhya hides and El finishes her incantation. 

When El returns to her room and hangs the mirror, a ghostly face appears and tells her that she will bring death and destruction everywhere she goes. El is tired of such prophecies, so she covers the mirror and goes to sleep. The next day at lunch, two students, Chloe and Magnus, ask Orion to sit with them. Not wanting to look like she tags along wherever Orion goes, El sits by herself. While sitting alone, El becomes angry that she is vulnerable to maleficaria attack and that so many other students shun her, despite her having never wronged them. She also knows that even if she survives the Scholomance, maleficaria will continue to hunt her. 

When Aadhya, Liu, and some other students sit at her table, the vulnerable El tries not to cry. She tells Aadhya that the mirror is likely cursed, since it tried giving her advice before she even asked it any questions. On the way out of the cafeteria, when Orion asks El why she did not sit with him, she makes a snide remark about her not having obtained “hanger-on status.” Orion leaves upset and El realizes that Orion wants to be her friend precisely because she does not fawn over him. This irritates her since it suggests that Orion is a, in fact, a decent person. El catches up to Orion and explains that in the cafeteria, “seating arrangements are an act of war,” and they realize that they are now friends.

Analysis

In this chapter, El is once again torn between remaining independent and accepting help from others, as both of these choices leave her vulnerable. Ultimately, she realizes that collaborating with Aadhya and Orion to make the magic mirror is in her best interest, and their willingness to work with El shows that a friendship is developing between the three students. The mirror requires each of their specialties, demonstrating that alliances are often necessary even in an environment like the Scholomance that discourages trust. Each of the students does their work well, contributing to the mirror’s success. While El recites the incantations over the liquid silver, Orion defends them from attacking sirenspider mals, and El accepts his help without resentment. Although El’s secondary incantation is responsible for the mirror’s perfect surface, Aadhya credits Orion’s pour, an example of the reoccurring pattern of El’s skill and power being overlooked. Nevertheless, the creation of the mirror marks an important milestone in El’s willingness to trust other students and work in a team. 

Throughout the book, cafeteria seating arrangements reflect social hierarchies and alliances among the students and highlight the motif of constant mortal danger. Sitting alone, or at a dangerously placed table, leaves students vulnerable to a mal attack. The isolation El feels when she chooses not to follow Orion to the New York table prompts a flashback to a traumatic incident in her childhood, when she was attacked by a mal while her mother was sick in the hospital. Although El is vastly more capable of protecting herself as a junior in the Scholomance than she was as a nine-year-old left alone in a yurt, her memories of the event blur with the present, so that the anger she felt toward the adults who ignored her peril in the yurt is now directed at the students sitting at other tables. Significantly, the flashback is broken when Aadhya and Liu join El at her table, demonstrating their growing friendship and loyalty to one another. Similarly, El and Orion’s bickering in the aftermath of this incident reveals that the two have developed a genuine friendship despite their sometimes-clashing personalities.