Page 13

chapter eleven

REFLECTION AND TARGET-SETTING

Walden stepped through the doorway feeling tremendously relieved; the incursion was shrinking behind them, and would collapse itself before long. But outside School House there was a depressing scene of chaos. No one seemed to be in charge. The two people with direct responsibility for leading magical security at Chetwood had both been inside .

She had a whole ten seconds to take in the scene of useless milling about around the edges of School House’s lawn. There were far too many people, including an ambulance crew and an additional squadron of Marshals who seemed to be arguing with Laura’s second-in-command. Ebele and the younger children were gone, but Ezekiel was still there, his power sunk into the magical perimeter, his face a mask of effort and exhaustion. Several younger magician teachers were holding the perimeter too; they must have been woken up from their comfortable beds in the Scrubs flats. Lilly Tibbett was wearing purple plaid pyjamas and enormous fluffy slippers. Then Walden’s attention was arrested by the sight of Nikki, Mathias and Will, sitting in a glum little circle on the grass with foil first-aid blankets over them—good grief, why had no one got them out of here? At least Will seemed to be conscious—

And then she spotted the lurking figure on the edge of things whom she recognised, with a sinking heart, as a self-appointed journalist from the Chetwood Village Inquirer . Oh God, no.

Silence fell when the crowd finally noticed Walden and Laura on the steps of School House. Walden took an assembly every other week and was used to an awkward hush and a lot of eyes on her, but just now she did not feel strong enough for it, not at all. She closed her eyes for a moment.

Her school, her students, her responsibility.

“Everything is under control,” she announced, pitching her voice to carry through the night and the crowd. “The demon is dead and the incursion is closing.”

There was a further moment of silence which was, Walden realised, everyone looking at the Marshal standing next to her for confirmation. Laura said gruffly, and not quite loudly enough, “Dr Walden is correct.”

Walden looked over the heads of the crowd and met Ezekiel’s eyes. He looked not at her, but at the house behind her—which was, after all, his home. After a moment he nodded gravely, and then she saw him release the power in the perimeter and sag with exhaustion. The other magician teachers followed his lead, and slowly the protective magical shimmer dissipated. Walden breathed out.

She would have liked to go and speak to him—to thank him, to tell him what had happened, to have a moment to express how completely dreadful all that had been to someone who actually understood—but it was impossible, because the entire bloody crowd was descending on the steps of School House at once.

It took ten minutes before someone appeared with enough of an aura of power to manage the mob. The power was not magical. It was something much more effective than that. It was the power of inarguable, hierarchical, institutional command. As the crowd fell back politely, Walden looked with enormous gratitude into the face of the Headmaster. As always, David Bern had an air of profoundly reassuring middle-aged solidity. He was in his heart the quintessential Geography teacher, unshakeable as the foundations of the earth, and despite being woken up in the middle of the night to the news that his school was under attack by a higher demon, he’d had the presence of mind to put on a tie. He looked warm and professional and more than capable of dealing briskly with the journalist. The last thing any school wanted, ever, was attention from the media.

“You’re dead on your feet, Saffy,” David said firmly. “Get to bed. I’ll handle this lot.”

“Thank you,” Walden said. “Mr Bern will answer all the rest of your questions, everyone. Good night.”

Then she slipped away through the crowd. She looked for Ezekiel, but he was already gone; to his wife and to bed, hopefully. Instead Walden rescued her blazer from its crumpled heap in the grass and put it on, feeling a bit of relief when she was no longer bare-armed in the October cold with her very unteacherly tattoos on display. But she still could not leave. There were three more problems to manage, and David had given her a firm instruction with a simple glance and nod. Walden buttoned the blazer with relief and, thus armoured in good tailoring—never mind the ragged mess that Old Faithful had made of her skirt—she marched over to the gaggle of Marshals.

They were still arguing about something, now with Laura in the middle. Two yawning young men with trainee stripes on their sleeves were standing guard over the pathetic tableau of Nikki, Mathias, and Will. Mathias was fidgeting compulsively with the edge of the foil blanket over his lap. Will seemed to have given Nikki his school hoodie.

“—not possible!” said a Marshal Walden didn’t recognise, spitting it at Laura. His rank insignia suggested he was a district commander. Wonderful.

“Would you kindly explain,” she said, in her coldest and most schoolmistress-ish voice, “why you have chosen to keep these children sitting on the ground in the cold in mid-October?”

She saw the tone hit. The district commander flinched. It did occasionally happen that you triggered someone’s long-suppressed memories of getting told off at school, and Walden wasn’t above taking advantage. She raised her eyebrows at him, giving off her best impression of detention imminent . “Uh—is it Miss Walden?” said the Marshal.

“Doctor,” said Laura.

“Dr Walden… we have to keep them all under formal observation,” the Marshal said. Rallying a bit, he added, “You as well. In case—”

“I see,” said Walden, even more coldly. “Is there any particular reason this observation has to take place here ?”

The district commander admitted, in a mumble, that there was not, and suggested vaguely that the district barracks in Milton Keynes…

Walden shut that down firmly. “Since you and your squad aren’t DBS checked—in fact, I’ve seen no formal identification at all—I certainly can’t let you remove these children from school grounds. Fortunately, Laura here is Chetwood’s Chief Marshal. Perhaps you’d be good enough to take charge of the observation requirements, Laura? I’m sure the commander has a great deal to be getting on with.”

“Of course,” said Laura, expressionless. Walden thought she caught a flicker of appreciation in her eyes.

Walden went over to the huddle of teenagers. They all stared up at her. They looked extremely pathetic. She adjusted her expression from very scary deputy head to just Dr Walden, you know her . Somewhere to do a formal observation—somewhere magically secure, self-contained, and separate from the rest of the school, but with enough beds for all the exhausted children to get a decent night’s sleep—

There was only really one place in Chetwood’s grounds that qualified.

Walden wasn’t free of responsibility yet. When was she ever? “Come on, you lot,” she said. “Up you get. Sleepover in the Director of Magic’s flat.”

Aneeta was awake, still curled on the couch with her phone. She looked miserable and exhausted. When she heard them come in, she leapt up. “Nikki!” she shrieked, and flung herself at her friend.

Walden graciously pretended that she had very urgent non-teenager things to do while Aneeta hugged first Nikki, then Mathias, then Will, then Nikki again, and the four of them all talked at once about their ordeal. Laura followed her lead and helped Walden retrieve clean towels and bedsheets for the guest rooms. “How are they still this loud?” she muttered.

“‘O adolescence, adolescence, I wince before thine incandescence!’” Walden quoted, and at Laura’s blank look, said, “It’s a poem. I think about it a lot.”

The flat was sized for a small family, and Walden by herself rattled around in it a bit. Getting the two spare bedrooms ready took long enough that by the time she returned to the living room, the sixth formers seemed to have calmed down a bit. They were all still talking at once. “—can’t believe you were that stupid, ” Nikki was saying to Will.

“I thought you were going to die, Conway!” Will protested. “And I haven’t even asked you to Leavers yet so like—”

Nikki’s mouth dropped open. “You’re asking me to Leavers?”

In the pause that followed, Aneeta said in a loud, entertained whisper, “Oh my God it’s happening .”

Mathias sniggered. Will had turned violently pink.

Walden swallowed a laugh. Teenagers. You knew them so well and yet in some ways, of course, you didn’t know them at all. She’d parsed Will’s dash into the incursion as idiocy, not adolescent knight-errantry—but, after all, the two were not mutually exclusive. She knew very well how easy it was to be seventeen, in love, and an idiot. Oh Charlie, she thought. Oh sweetheart. You were so young.

“Ahem,” she said, and all four of them looked up. “It’s well past your bedtime, children.” You couldn’t call Year Nine ‘children’ without offending them, but by the time they hit Upper Sixth they always found it funny again. Walden couldn’t resist adding, though it was a little cruel, “Sort out your interpersonal issues in the morning.”

Various mortified looks as all four of them realised belatedly how loudly they’d been talking. Walden smiled to herself. What was the good of being the grown-up if you didn’t get to embarrass them a little? She sent them off to the guest rooms. She fetched them glasses of water, and old T-shirts for the girls to sleep in; the boys were going to have to make do in their day clothes, because Walden had nothing that would fit. She left Nikki and Aneeta cuddling up together in the double bed in the smaller guest room, and Will and Mathias doing rock-paper-scissors for who got the bed and who got the futon in the bigger one. She went back into the kitchen.

Laura was there.

“I’d offer you a gin and tonic,” Walden said, “but we’re in loco parentis. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep for a while yet, so if you’d like my room—”

“I’m doing a formal observation, thank you,” said Laura. “No. I’m going to sit up and observe how few demons there are in here and it’s going to make me feel a lot better. I was on a night shift anyway, I slept all afternoon, don’t worry about me. You should go to bed.”

Walden shook her head. “What I really want is a coffee,” she said. “What I’m going to have is a cup of tea. Would you like one?”

They had tea. Walden had a vast collection of mugs, because students kept giving them to her. She put the kettle on and fetched down one that said WORLD’S BEST TEACHER and another decorated with a cartoon of a cat.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Laura said abruptly. She was, Walden was coming to realise, actually rather an awkward person.

She poured boiling water over the teabags. “There’s not much to say.”

“I forgot you were an old girl,” said Laura. “The 2003 incursion—”

“Yes, I was there. I was in sixth form,” said Walden. “I admit that I should probably have mentioned it earlier. I do find it quite hard to talk about. How many sugars?”

“Two,” said Laura.

Walden had to hunt in the cupboard for sugar. Laura had definitely taken more than two when they had tea in the staffroom, so she got the whole bag and let her sort it out herself. Her own preferred brew was teacher tea: teabag mashed against the side of the travel cup for two minutes in the staffroom kitchen, splash of milk, rush off to your next lesson. She passed Laura the WORLD’S BEST TEACHER mug, sat down opposite her at the kitchen table, and took a sip from the cartoon cat mug. The tea was still much too hot. She already felt better.

Laura was still looking awkward. Walden felt she had to say a bit more. “Yes, all right, I was there. We were seventeen years old,” she explained, “and very talented. Worse, we knew we were very talented. Charlie was a School House boy, a sorcerer—you know what that means, of course you do, you’ve worked here long enough. I didn’t actually know very much about his background, I realise now. I’m sure he didn’t want to tell me. But you don’t end up as a ward of Chetwood School without a ferocious talent for magic. He was good. So was I. When I look back, I still don’t know if it was his idea or mine. There’s no excuse. We weren’t tricked into it like poor Nikki was tonight. We just wanted to see if we were good enough to summon and control an absolutely enormous demon. And, of course, we weren’t.” She drank some more tea. “It was May half term, right before our A-levels. Charlie had an Oxford offer—an EE offer, if you can believe that; he must have really impressed the interviewer. So did I, but my offer was three As. Which I knew I would make. We felt like lords of the world, magician-kings to be, masters of the arcane disciplines… you know. Children. Old enough to know better, but we didn’t, yet.”

Laura had set her tea down and was watching her gravely. Come to think of it, it was a long time since Walden had told anyone this story.

“The school was mostly empty,” she went on, “though there are always a few still here over the holidays. My parents were in Barbados. Charlie… well, as I said, he was a School House boy. We had just enough sense not to try it in a dormitory. We snuck out to the old cricket pavilion. Hence the new cricket pavilion, because in the course of trying to fight our way out, we demolished it. We failed, of course. Really, we should both have died, but the school Marshals took the very risky decision to send a team in after us. Looking back, it was very brave of them. At the time…” She shook her head. “It was already too late for Charlie. They dragged me away. I heard him screaming. And then they collapsed the incursion.”

“No wonder you don’t like Marshals,” said Laura.

Walden rolled her eyes. “Give me some credit for being an adult, Laura, it was twenty years ago. I don’t like Marshals in school because, frankly, I don’t think intimidation is the best way to persuade children to think about the consequences of their actions. It certainly didn’t work on us. Does that answer your questions?”

Laura said, “So he was your…”

“Boyfriend,” said Walden. “We were going to attend Leavers as a couple, actually, which in sixth former seriousness terms is only a few steps down from getting engaged. God knows what would have become of us at Oxford. Probably broken up by the end of Michaelmas term of first year.”

Laura said, “Oh,” and then, after a moment, “I thought you were…”

“Bi,” Walden said. Despite her best efforts, she felt her mouth twitch with amusement.

“Right,” said Laura, looking embarrassed.

“My turn for a question,” Walden said. “Why are you working for Chetwood? I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, you’re obviously extremely good, and it’s—”

“—a career dead end,” Laura said. She wrapped both hands around the WORLD’S BEST TEACHER mug. “I know. Everyone told me. Nicola Conway.”

“What?”

“Nicola Conway is why,” Laura said. “Or, well, not exactly. She doesn’t remember me. But the Conway case—I was there. Twenty-two years old, still a junior, barely knew what I was doing—but I was there. Whole family dead in a surprise incursion. Absolutely bloody awful.”

“I see,” said Walden, who didn’t.

“The thing is that it was our fault,” said Laura. “The Marshals. Oh, not officially, of course not officially, but there’s a screening program in primary schools and we should have picked up the Conway kids and had tabs on them long before it got to that point. It was both of them, you know. Nicola and her brother. I went through the records afterwards. I was strongly encouraged not to, but I did.” She made a face. “And we had Nicola on the record as one to keep an eye on—she must have been what, Year Two? And tested top of the range every year. Her brother had only just started Reception, but given Nicola’s scores, we should have been keeping an eye on him as well. But they were both out sick with a stomach bug the week the Marshals visited their primary school that year, and no one followed up. The Marshals should have done it, but they left it to the teachers to organise, and the teachers were too busy to bother. Inner London state primary, you know.”

Walden knew. Teaching was a hard job, but the version of it she did—reasonably well-paid, comfortable, straightforward, with the vast majority of students from overwhelmingly well-off backgrounds and speaking fluent English—all this was a breeze compared to the challenges many schools faced. She could see very easily how Nikki and her brother had fallen through the cracks. But at what cost?

Laura’s expression was dark. “At the end of the day, it wasn’t anyone else’s job. It was on us to do that follow-up. Such a stupid basic lazy fuck-up. If someone had followed up, it would have saved three lives. If one person had gotten a good look at just how powerful those kids were getting and how fast—all it needed was an incursion ward with an alert on it somewhere in the family home, and the Marshals would have been there in time. But no one followed up. No one cared. No one takes the outreach and prevention side of the job seriously. It’s just ‘school security.’ An easy place to put people out to pasture when they’re too old to fight demons and not ready to retire.” She sighed. “My squad aren’t bad demon hunters, you know. They’re not. Some of them were damn good demon hunters, five years ago, ten years ago. But when you’re over sixty and you know your reaction times aren’t what they were, you can’t draw your pension yet and you’d like to live long enough to spend some time with your grandkids…”

“I understand,” Walden said.

“Anyway. That’s why I got into this, and it’s why I’m still doing it. Though it was the shock of my life when I got to Chetwood and—you know, I had this picture in my head for years, this little seven-year-old scrap who just lost her whole family. Every time I wondered if I was really wasting my time, I’d remember. It kept me going. And then suddenly I’m here and she’s five foot nine and doing her GCSEs.”

Walden took a sip of tea to hide the fact that she suddenly didn’t know what her face was doing. The sudden and forceful respect she felt seemed hard to express. Instead, she said, “They do that. Grow. The passage of time, you know. It shouldn’t be allowed.”

“It really shouldn’t,” said Laura.

Walden smiled at her. The warmth of respect was still in her thoughts, and Laura’s repeated protests about Nikki’s magical studies were taking on a new tone in her memories: not obstructive, but protective. Still wrong, of course. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. “I am grateful. If you hadn’t been there tonight, I would be dead or possessed by now.”

“Still not sure about your pet tattoo monster,” Laura said.

“If something goes wrong with my leashing spells,” said Walden, “you will now, thanks to that oath, be the first to know. I don’t think it’s very likely. It’s been there for nearly fifteen years, you know.” Laura did not seem appeased. Walden changed the subject. “Do let me know if there’s anything I can do to support your career. We work together, and I do have some,” a hand gesture, “some professional capital, I suppose, to work with. I am very happy to, I don’t know, write forceful memos to district commanders and so on. You’re obviously completely right about prevention and outreach.”

“I know I am,” said Laura. But she looked pleased.

“You’ve lost out on quite a lot by sticking to it,” Walden said. Opportunities, promotion, status, respect—you got none of those when you chose the career dead end. “I admire you for it. It’s a sacrifice.”

Laura snorted. “Look who’s talking, Miss—sorry, Doctor —I-could-have-worked-for-the-Pentagon.”

Walden laughed. “I’m pretty sure my ex-girlfriend took that job. Sometimes I think about how much money she must be making by now and want to cry. Not that I do too badly, of course. But even senior management in the private sector doesn’t pay like US military R&D.” She took another sip of her tea. “On the flip side, at least I can say with confidence that I am not responsible for any war crimes. Or even any things that technically aren’t war crimes because no one has tried them yet.”

“So we can agree,” said Laura wryly, “that there are reasons why a highly qualified person might choose the job where she’ll be underestimated and undervalued forever.”

“Hah. Yes. Cheers to that.”

They clinked their mugs together. Then they sat in silence for a while, drinking tea. Walden finished hers and stood to put the kettle on again. She still felt far too edgy to sleep. She kept thinking of more things to do. The thaumic engines will need recalibrating… need to do a full boundary patrol… reset all the incursion wards… write up a safeguarding concern for Nikki—no, two, one for Mathias as well… got to meet with his TAC, is he even seeing a counsellor at the moment… sanctions… emergency assembly in the morning before the student rumours get out of hand… report for the governors… there’ll be an investigation, someone’s going to get the blame, I might—let’s not think about that.

Something reassuring to go out to parents… have to meet with David first thing… double Invocation tomorrow after lunch… why did we leave Charlie’s body in there, can I go back for it… and did I ever mark that problem sheet?

“I owe you an apology,” Laura said, while Walden was staring blankly at the kettle and writing an impossible to-do list in her head.

“What?”

When Walden turned around with the milk carton in hand, Laura was looking wretched. “I was—that was—terribly unprofessional of me,” she said. “Earlier. I apologise.”

“What?” said Walden again and then while Laura went red remembered all at once: that kiss . “Laura—”

“Look,” said Laura, shoulders squared like she’d spotted another demon to fight, “would you like to get drinks at the Red Lion with me sometime?”

Walden said, “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

Laura deflated. “Right. Of course. Sorry.”

“That’s the only pub in the village,” Walden said. “Which means it’s the student pub. So unless you want our first date observed with interest by half of Year Thirteen—plus a couple of Year Tens hiding in the corner and praying we don’t notice them—”

“Oh,” said Laura. She started to smile.

“Counterproposal,” Walden said. “Next time I have a free day—which I’m afraid won’t be till half term, but it’s only a couple of weeks off now—we can catch the train into London and I’ll take you to a little place I know near Camden Town. And then, I don’t know, we can see a film or something. It’s been years since I went on a date but I think I remember the steps.”

“Sounds nice,” said Laura. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“Me too,” Walden said. And with that, exhaustion fell onto her like a weight of stone. She looked at the mug of tea in her hands and could think of nothing worse than trying to stay awake long enough to drink it. “I think I should go to bed,” she said. “Are you sure you’re all right to sit up?”

“Sitting up for an observation is part of my job,” said Laura patiently, “which I am good at. And I was on a night shift, and I’m completely fine. I’ll write my report if you can lend me a laptop or something.”

“Of course.”

“One more thing, though—”

Walden paused.

Laura grinned at her. “I’ve always wanted to know. Did your parents really name you ‘Saffron Walden’? Like the train station?”

Walden, taken completely by surprise, started laughing. “I’ve never been able to decide if that would have been better or worse. No, no. I’m afraid it’s ‘Sapphire.’”

“Oh my God.”

“I know.” It was a beautiful, romantic, totally un-English sort of name. It belonged to someone about as different as could be imagined from the person Dr Walden chose to be. She’d always found it embarrassing.

Laura rallied admirably. “That’s pretty, though,” she said. “Like your—”

She stopped, probably because she’d noticed herself being unforgivably cheesy. Eyes, Walden finished mentally for her, and laughed. “I haven’t heard that one in a while,” she said. “There’s a reason I go by Saffy. I do prefer it.”

The truth was that she was barely even Saffy, most days. Dr Walden was the self she had made, the home she possessed, a person with knowledge and experience and power and status and a place to belong. Saffy was a compromise, because people liked you to have a human side. And of course she did have a human side. Who didn’t?

She felt very human just then, smiling at a good-looking woman in her kitchen at two in the morning. For a moment—just a moment—she was not really, not at all, thinking about her job.

“Good night, Saffy,” Laura said. “I’ll see you in the morning. And I’ll look forward to half term.”

“Likewise,” said Walden. “Good night, Chief Marshal Kenning.”

“Oh, for—”

“Laura,” said Walden, and she felt very human indeed, and quite brave, when she boldly dropped a kiss on the Marshal’s cheek, before she left her sitting in the kitchen and went to bed.