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chapter eighteen

ROMANCE

The thing about November: the days went horrifically slowly every year, and yet the awful month seemed to disappear in no time at all. Walden taught her lessons, rapidly packing in theory and practicals, somehow carving out a week in the December scheme of work to do revision before the mocks. She wrote the A-level Invocation mock examination, and a mark scheme for it. She did her share of the planar patrols, trading off with Mark, occasionally scheduling a joint patrol—even looking forward to those, a little, because Mark was now gratifyingly admiring about Walden’s demon expertise. She attended some meetings and chaired others. She did risk assessments, marked homework, delivered assemblies, spoke with colleagues, phoned parents, dealt with the constant stream of emails and the constant stream of tasks they represented; she tuned the thaumic engines weekly, and added a standing meeting with the new Chief Marshal—Laura’s former second-in-command—to her roster. She followed up with Ebele about her pastoral concerns over Nikki.

A couple of times she found herself on Facebook, looking at Roz Chan’s page. It was rather quiet these days. There were few photos. Roz and her wife lived in a pretty house in San Francisco and seemed to be doing well. Once, and only once, Walden caved and went looking for Laura, who turned out to be a few years too young for Facebook; she had, instead, a rarely updated Instagram. When Walden, at 11 P.M . on a school night, found herself looking at an eight-years-ago photograph of twentysomething Laura posing with a motorbike, she thought You are much too old for this to be anything other than embarrassing.

Walden’s career was her life. She was happy with her life, proud of her work, glad to be part of Chetwood School. She was far too busy to make a fool of herself daydreaming about romance. That sort of thing was teenager business.

In fact, while Nikki’s feelings about her academic future seemed to have settled down steadily since the start of the half term—Ebele said that she was finally seeing the school counsellor again, and a good thing too—romance, unfortunately, was in the air for Walden’s Upper Sixth.

It was hard not to laugh—it would have been very unkind to laugh—at the Will and Nikki situation. Obviously, true love was very important to a seventeen-year-old. True love in the background of a sixth form lesson expressed itself mostly through high-stakes eye contact and even more high-stakes rearrangement of the seating plan. On the days when Nikki condescended to sit beside Will, instead of her usual spot next to Mathias, Will was so obviously, smugly elated that it annoyed everyone—including, alas, Nikki herself. On the days when she walked past his desk and went to sit with one of the others, his downcast expression was almost cartoonishly pathetic. Aneeta, now clearly promoted from one of Nikki’s best friends to her very best friend, whispered with her after every lesson. Mathias looked embarrassed for everyone. The funniest part, of course, was that the whole class was obviously convinced that Walden couldn’t read the room—as if there weren’t five whole people in every lesson, all of whom knew each other very well; as if it wasn’t part of Walden’s job to pick up every change and variation in the dynamics of a group of young people; and as if this particular dynamic wasn’t older than the hills.

Of course she pretended not to know. She wasn’t a monster.

Even Mark talked to her about it. Apparently, Will had asked him for advice. “What did you tell him?” Walden asked, interested despite herself.

“I said I couldn’t help,” Mark said. “What does poor old Uncle Mark know about young love? The first time I got serious about a woman, I was twenty-eight. I did say he should probably keep her away from my sister-in-law. Shouldn’t be hard, though.”

“Your sister-in-law?” Walden could just about bring Mrs Daubery’s face to mind; they’d spoken at several Teams-call parents’ evenings. She had an impression of quality knitwear and a nice scarf, gardening gloves on the desk, along with that telltale sign of a genuinely very posh woman: clip-on earrings, not piercings.

“Racist cow,” said Mark cheerfully.

At this stage, Walden had more or less come around to Mark. His report for the governors showed no sign of materialising. He was, he said, information gathering. Walden was annoyed enough by how lazy he was being about it that she offered to set up interviews with students for him. “Or a survey, if you like,” she said. “We can frame it as a student voice issue. It is a student voice issue.”

“But then I’d have to read the surveys,” said Mark.

Unfortunately, Walden had already convinced herself. They sent the survey round at form time the following week, and got an unsurprising litany of complaints back. Bring back Marshal Kenning was the big one. Walden hadn’t realised how popular Laura was. It wasn’t as if she was friendly with the students. The Marshals did safety talks with different year groups at different times through the year, and that was about all Laura had ever had by way of formal contact. But apparently being tough and cool and photogenic and very visibly there was also reassuring.

I wish we could, she thought, and set the surveys aside with a sigh. Children bounced back quickly, but a critical incursion by a higher demon was not a small matter, and one side effect of all the arcane safety refreshers Walden insisted on was that Chetwood’s students knew very well just how much danger they had been in. Though few people were as shaken as Nikki and Mathias—Nikki visibly, Mathias shielding hard but his academics noticeably slipping—Ebele reported wobbles all across the school. Walden herself had been asked far more questions than usual by her latest Year Seven carousel group. And the influx of low-level possessions by imps had not slowed down, despite the planar patrols; the children had all noticed that too. The school, coming up to Christmas, was tired, unhappy, and on edge. You felt it in the corridors. It sizzled in the staffroom. The atmosphere every Monday-morning assembly was not just sleepy but sullen.

The Phoenix, rustling on the edge of Walden’s thoughts as it so often did now, said: Your place, your place; make it good again.

What do you propose? Walden asked it tiredly. Nine P.M. , still at her desk. The next task was slogging through the marking for a practice exam which Aneeta, unusually, had bombed. Walden could really have done without her perpetual companion. She missed the Phoenix being quiet . She’d spent some time going over the spellwork which leashed it, and confirmed to her own satisfaction that everything was still effective, unchanged, well within design tolerance. But she had never bothered creating a shut up spell, and there was no safe way to incorporate one into the tattooed designs now.

The Phoenix thought that since the children were the problem, and since Walden wasn’t getting any benefit out of them anyway—it still didn’t quite understand why she wouldn’t draw on them as part of the magical well of the school’s territory—she might as well kick them all out.

December 17 is the end of term, Walden told it. A little internal groan as she remembered the end-of-term Christmas party. The staff social committee had booked a London venue. Probably it would be fun when it was happening, but just the thought of catching the train down!

Bad there, the Phoenix said, and Walden sighed and took another mark off Aneeta’s third-order array question. The actual diagram and notation were fine, but she’d jumbled up the accompanying explanation. This was not like her. She must be prioritising revising her sciences—but a low C on a practice paper, this late in the term, was going to be demoralising, especially for a student who was counting on her excellent theory results to get her the grade she wanted. Walden turned over the page and skimmed, relieved, through the one- and two-word answers to a set of short questions. The handwriting was atrocious, but the detail was sound. Nothing left but the magical ethics mini-essay—

She paused, startled. She said, out loud, “How did you spot that?”

The Phoenix said nothing. That was suspicious in itself. The Phoenix was almost unbearably chatty at the moment. It lived in Walden’s head and had opinions on everything: questions, judgements, criticisms, and especially a fascination with any kind of human magic. Its thoughts on the thaumic engines were appallingly rude.

The chatter wasn’t dangerous. Just annoying. But—Walden flipped back a page. The red X mark and her scribbled comment— Revise this process again!— sat neatly in the margin next to Aneeta’s blue ballpoint paragraph. Her handwritten paragraph, in English. Walden said to the wood-panelled silence of her office, “Can you read ?”

Maybe, said the Phoenix, a little guilty.

“ How can you read?”

No answer.

It was unheard of. It was unprecedented. Demons didn’t have books . Walden picked up the next practice paper in the stack—Nikki’s—and flipped to the third-order array question. Nikki’s handwriting, even in the examination scrawl version, was better than Aneeta’s. She had the swirling O s and I s of a person who’d been very invested in making things pretty at the age of about nine. “What about this one?” Walden demanded.

A long suspicious silence in the back of Walden’s head. Finally, the Phoenix said, That’s fine.

It was, of course. Nikki’s diagram and explanation were so word-for-word precise you could have copied them into a textbook. Walden took the next paper: Will. “This one?”

Sloppy, the Phoenix opined. There, and there . It meant the array diagram. Will had let the exam rush get to him, and drawn it too fast; it was obvious that he knew what it was supposed to look like—his paragraph of explanation was all correct—but if he’d tried actually summoning a demon with what he’d drawn…

I’d eat him up, the Phoenix agreed.

Walden marked the diagram with a red cross, and circled the errors. For a comment, she just wrote, Can you identify the issue here? Will’s arcane notation was normally excellent, so this was an error of carelessness, not ignorance; he could fix it himself, and would, once he knew the mistake was costing him easy marks.

The paper at the bottom of the pile was the real test, because it belonged to Mathias. Walden always left him to last. Doing the most able students’ work first gave her a stronger sense of what a good paper looked like and what comments would actually be useful. Mathias was really struggling at the moment, end-of-term exhaustion and general woefulness draining his already shaky academic motivation. The Phoenix spoke up before she’d even flipped to the relevant question. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Do the crosses. Bad, bad, bad, all wrong—crosses, I said! It’s wrong! Stupid human!

Stop, said Walden.

The Phoenix shut up, grumbling. Walden could feel a tightness in her right arm. She rolled up her sleeve and saw that the image of a tattooed firebird had moved from her bicep down to her forearm. Its hooked beak and golden eye blazed out just above her wrist. She stared at it. It stared back, unblinking. “Do you remember what I said about insults and threats?”

Sullen silence.

“Yes, this is a D paper,” Walden said, “probably.”

So make it good!

“I could do this work perfectly myself,” Walden said, “because I’m a fully trained magician and this is my discipline. But that’s not the point. The question is, how do we get him to—as you say—make it good?”

Tell him it’s all bad.

“Yes,” said Walden patiently, “and then…?”

There was a long, baffled pause.

“You did want to know how I do it,” Walden reminded the demon.

Don’t understand, said the Phoenix sulkily. It didn’t like not understanding. Walden was just barely resisting the urge to start writing notes. If there had been a way to record this conversation! She had never read anything like this, she had never heard of anything like this. But—she thought of Old Faithful, speaking with Charlie’s voice, deep in the heart of the incursion.

I can think. I can lie.

And the Phoenix could read. It could learn. It could recognise, and resent, its own ignorance of a useful skill—that was what was upsetting it now; that Walden, in her funny little human body all made of water and meat, had a power it lacked. The power to control —

No, Walden told it. The power to help.

Help?

Try another tack, Walden thought. And then, with one of the rare, valuable inspirations that had once made her a reasonably good scholar, she saw a connection. The Phoenix, fighting the archdemonic minibus on that planar patrol a few weeks ago, had ordered its opponent to go and be another self.

“Imagine,” she said out loud to her office, “being another self.”

Silence from her fellow traveller. But a considering silence, not a sullen one.

“Imagine being seventeen years old—” No, that didn’t work, she felt at once; demons did not have enough of a concept of childhood . “Imagine being small,” she said instead. “Imagine being new, and weak, and surrounded by the strong.”

That got her a brief, fearsome flare of reaction. Walden thought it might be terror.

“You can get stronger,” Walden said. “But you don’t know that yet. You have no proof. You and I, who are older—we have seen small and weak things grow powerful, plenty of times. But that small self is afraid. It is too afraid to try.”

It took the Phoenix a little while to understand. The higher demon was not stupid—no, not stupid at all, Walden could tell. But it had real difficulty with the why of teaching: why be generous, why be thoughtful, why consider so carefully the precise angles and goals of the criticisms you made, why bother with any of it at all? Was Walden not afraid of raising up Mathias to take her place in her own domain? He was strong enough, or could be—

Really? Walden thought, surprised; Mathias had talent, yes, but surely any of the other three—

Of course the strongest one is the best of them, said the Phoenix impatiently . But why? Why waste your time helping the weak get stronger, when you could be growing yourself?

It didn’t buy altruism as an excuse—which was fair enough. Teaching wasn’t a career you got into for the money alone, but Walden was not marking practice exams late on Saturday night in December out of the goodness of her heart. She wouldn’t have been doing any of this if she wasn’t getting paid for it. Attempts to elicit interest or sympathy for Mathias’s own sake got her precisely nowhere. Demons didn’t care, not like that, not for each other.

“I am a teacher,” Walden said at last. “This is what I do. And I choose to do it well.”

Ah, said the Phoenix abruptly. A self.

And then it said nothing else; but Walden could feel its silent attention as she marked Mathias’s paper—which did, in the end, get a D. Its beaked head slid down past her wrist onto her hand, and the golden eye of the firebird gleamed. Walden was careful with the red pen. Mathias’s motivation was so low already that a solid wall of crosses and corrections would just scare him into giving up; he wouldn’t even read what she’d written. She sought out the things he had got right, and wrote next to them: good! and well done! and nicely worked out, Mathias. He had finally taken on board her feedback about his array diagrams; they were starting to look more decisive and less sketchy, and there were not too many technical mistakes. The array question that had tripped up both Aneeta and Will was a mess of rubbings out and redrawings. Walden frowned at it. What Mathias had done in the end was definitely wrong, but what was the scrawl of scribbling and crossing-out around it?

The traces were clear. He’d drawn the array incorrectly at first. Then he’d gone back at the end of the paper—using a different pencil—looked at it, and had one of his good moments: he’d known it didn’t look right, and he’d rubbed it out and drawn in something that did.

Except then he’d panicked, not trusting himself, and decided to split the difference: crossed the whole thing out, and started again underneath with a half-and-half mishmash of the two different array diagrams, ending up with something totally incoherent that Walden couldn’t massage any marks out of no matter how she grimaced at the rubric. The first attempt would have got him three out of ten, and the second attempt seven. Instead it was a zero—when an extra seven marks would have brought his grade up to a C.

Which… actually…

Let’s be positive, Saffy, even though it’s late and you’re tired! There was space at the bottom of the page, because Mathias hadn’t written enough for the explanatory paragraph. Walden used it to draw his first two diagrams again and then wrote a score under each of them. She circled the 7/10 diagram and drew a large star in the margin of the page. Next to it, she wrote: TRUST YOURSELF!!! YOU WERE NEARLY THERE!

Then she flipped over to the front of the paper and changed the overall grade from D to C/D. Of course no actual A-level examiner would give Mathias a C-slash-D with the benefit of the doubt. But she wanted him to see how close he was. She went back through the paper again, hunting for marks, looking now at all his diagrams—and yes, there was enough there; she couldn’t get him seven extra marks, but she could justify two, and several more comments focused specifically on his arcane notation. If he tightened it up just a little more—which he clearly could —he could hope for a low C on this theory paper in the mocks, and a mid C by the real examination in summer. A mid-C theory plus a high-B practical would get him a B grade overall.

You are pleased, said the Phoenix, the first thing it had said in twenty minutes. Walden realised that the slight ache in her jaw was a fierce little smile. She’d been certain all along that Mathias could get a B in the end, but this was the first time she’d really seen how—seen it, and known she could make him see it too. Once he believed he could succeed, he would actually try. Once he tried, it would become true. The trick of teaching wasn’t to know more than your students—it was remarkably easy, after all, to know more than most teenagers. Teaching wasn’t about being right, or being clever, or being in charge. It was about making them believe.

You manipulate his perceptions, the Phoenix said, to make him stronger. And this satisfies your nature.

“The word is inspire , usually,” Walden said. “And I suppose it does.” It wouldn’t be enough just to hand Mathias the marked paper. Aneeta would have got the point from red-pen comments alone, but you could never count on Mathias to actually read your comments, or to process them once he’d read. So she would set up a one-on-one—did she have a spare breaktime this week? Yes, Tuesday break would work, she’d skip her mid-morning coffee. They would go through the whole exam, and she’d show him: here’s what you did, here’s what you will do, here’s the grade you deserve, and here’s how you’re going to get it.

She set the pen down and leaned back in her chair with a satisfied sigh. Her back ached. A glance at the wall clock told her it was nearly 11 P.M . Intruder, muttered the Phoenix, which made Walden look again and then smile: yes, the antique magician’s clock was possessed again, yet another invading imp. Imps were perfectly manageable with a little common sense. She honestly quite liked having them around. With any luck, the staffroom photocopier would have a reasonable inhabitant again before long, and everything would be back to normal; almost as if Old Faithful had never ripped through her school at all.

There was a knock at the door.

At this time of night? It could be anything—plenty of it bad. Walden felt like she’d summoned the problem just by being pleased with herself. She was already braced for the sight of Aneeta in tears in her puffy pink coat when she called, “Come in!”

“Evening,” said Mark, poking his head round the door. “Hoped I’d catch you still awake. Marking?” He’d seen the pile of papers and the red pen uncapped on her desk.

“Just finished,” Walden said. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing at all,” said Mark. “I decided to run a late-night patrol—you never know, some demons keep odd hours—and when I was done I thought, ‘You know what, it’s fucking freezing out there and I bet Sapphire’s still at it too.’ Point to Daubery, I guessed right.” He came in and shut the door behind him. “Time to knock off for the night, come on. Any chance of a coffee?”

Oh, all right, why not. It had a bit of the undergrad feeling, someone knocking on your door late and coming in for a drink, but Walden found she quite liked the nostalgia of it all. Intruder, muttered the Phoenix again. Walden ignored it and said, “I don’t do caffeine this late, but I can fix you something. Come on through.”

Mark whistled when they went into the old Head’s flat. “Nice place. What’s through there?”

The door he was looking at was chained and padlocked. “The thaumic engines,” said Walden. “My long-term nemesis, second only to the Department for Education. Here’s the kitchen. I might have a tea. Or—” She had several very nice bottles in the drinks cabinet, and Mark had obviously already spotted them. “I’ve been victorious over my marking tonight. Maybe a G and T. You?”

“I’ll take a drop of whiskey in the coffee, if it’s on offer,” Mark said.

“I’ve got nothing special, I’m afraid,” Walden said, taking down the Bushmills. Mark waved that away, remarking that good whiskey didn’t go in coffee anyway; was Walden a gin drinker, then? What’s that—something local?

“My parents send me a bottle for my birthday every year,” Walden said, “from their nearest farm shop, I believe. They’ve gone frightfully rural in retirement. Strawberries-and-cream infusion, very girly. I rather like it. Would you like to try some?”

They had a G staffroom gossip led naturally to generalised Chetwood memories and then on to family. It turned out Mark had actually overlapped at school with Walden’s older brother John, though he didn’t think they’d ever spoken. And then—well, it was Saturday night, and Walden didn’t have to get up for chapel in the morning. One hour stretched to two. Mark was reasonably amusing company, the gin was the good stuff that Walden didn’t get to drink socially very often, and there was something charmingly silly about the student-ness of it all.

At nearly 1 A.M . they both seemed to realise at once that they were being absurd. Mark stood up with a groan. “It’s only just down the road to my rental, at least.”

Walden gave him a look of alarm. “You’re not planning to drive. ”

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said, and then glanced down at his glass with a grimace, “no, you’re right, I’m not. Shouldn’t have had that last one.”

“You’ll send that Audi into a ditch,” said Walden, “and that’s the best-case scenario. More likely you’ll end up wrapped around a tree. Absolutely not.”

“Why, Sapphire, I didn’t know you cared.”

“Some of those trees are several centuries old,” said Walden primly. “The big oak at the end of the avenue is under a preservation order. The paperwork if you splattered yourself all over it would be frightful.”

Mark laughed. “All right, all right. What are the chances of getting a taxi?”

“In Chetwood village ? After midnight?”

“Nil,” said Mark. “I suppose I’m walking. Gin jacket should keep me warm, at least.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said Walden. It was mid-December. There was frost on the grass every morning. “You’ll end up as an icicle, don’t be ridiculous. I have a spare bedroom, you can sleep here.”

Mark made all the right demurring noises and then let himself be persuaded. He wasn’t that bad, really, Walden thought. Quite manageable, if you were used to him. And quite good-looking as well.

Not that that mattered. But as she fell asleep, more than slightly tipsy and thinking as she so often did of Laura Kenning, she remembered muzzily another late-night gin, walking back from the pub afterwards. A kiss that never happened. And the admission: I do miss sex, occasionally.