Naomi Novik

The one thing you never talk about while you're in the Scholomance is what you'll do when you get out. Not even the richest enclaver would tempt fate that way. But it's all we dream about, the hideously slim chance we'll survive to make it out the gates and improbably find ourselves with a life ahead of us, a life outside the Scholomance halls.

And now the impossible dream has come true. I'm out, we're all out--and I didn't even have to turn into a monstrous dark witch to make it happen. So much for my great-grandmother's prophecy of doom and destruction. I didn't kill enclavers, I saved them. Me, and Orion, and our allies. Our graduation plan worked to perfection: we saved everyone and made the world safe for all wizards and brought peace and harmony to all the enclaves of the world.

Ha, only joking! Actually it's gone all wrong. Someone else has picked up the project of destroying enclaves in my stead, and probably everyone we saved is about to get killed in the brewing enclave war on the horizon. And the first thing I've got to do now, having miraculously got out of the Scholomance, is turn straight around and find a way back in.

A Novel

The Golden Enclaves

Sophia 

“Just do me a flavor and don't come back through our doors. It's not the place for you."

 "Where is?" I said, sour as turned milk, and I turned my back on her and headed down the tunnel, past the sign with the arrow pointing EXIT.

"Make yourselves at home," Balthasar said, an invitation to go on and stab myself in the chest, just as I liked. 

"I can see you're very angry," he said, demonstrating he possessed all the observational abilities of a dead stick. 

Rina

My appearing didn't lift their spirits - it rarely does - and only added the extra layers of faint hope and unease.

Julia Rutgers

But that's like seeing a picture of a tree, and then actually climbing up in the tree with the branches going every way, the rustle of leaves and the smell and the bark under your fingers scraping and the wind going, and a thousand trees all round your tree, none of them being special and dramatic, just trees, and your tree was also just a tree being a tree, and the picture you'd looked at might be perfectly nice as its own flat thing, interesting and pretty and well composed, but it didn't have much to do with the reality of the tree.

Jiji

The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn't really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.

Katheryn

Intent doesn't matter, she'd say, when you've really injured someone else. You need to be open to their pain and anger if you're ever to make things whole between you. 

The Golden Enclaves quotes

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