Page 22

chapter twenty

LONDON

The Christmas party was held at a venue in Finsbury Park, an uninspiring box of a room with gleaming chrome tables pushed against the purple-painted walls, a fake Christmas tree strung with purple tinsel in one corner, and two bored-looking young men working the bar. The thing about a work social with forty-odd teachers in more than a dozen disciplines was that they all only really had one thing in common. Once everyone had used up the what are your Christmas plans gambit, there was nothing much to do except get drunk and talk shop.

Walden, accordingly, did both.

A lot of people were interested in talking shop with her tonight, and not just classroom business either. They asked about the tattoos—even academic teachers could recognise spellwriting, when they lived at Chetwood School—they asked nervously after Nikki and Mathias, and they asked about Old Faithful. Walden had done a presentation at the all-hands staff meeting after the crisis, and she’d thought that had cleared things up. It turned out that the teachers of Chetwood were still nearly as shaken as the students. No wonder the school had gone so sullen and miserable towards the end of term. When adults were worried, children noticed.

“It was so big, right,” said Lilly Tibbett to Walden. The blonde NQT was flushed and earnestly tipsy. “I mean—I was on the perimeter—it was just so big . I could feel it trying to bulge out around me. I was sure it was going to come right for me when it came. I was sure.” She was right, Walden thought. If it had succeeded in killing Walden and breaking loose in mundane reality, Old Faithful would have spotted Lilly’s obvious uncertainty and slammed down hard on the weak point in the perimeter she represented. “I’m an evoker—that’s my thing, you know? I got an A in A-level Invo, but I dropped as soon as I could at uni. I don’t like demons. Like, the ones that skin people, and the weird-looking gross ones, obviously. But even imps, they just make my skin crawl. School has so many imps right now, did you notice? They’re just everywhere, like rats. I don’t know how you do it. We’re not getting another big one, are we?”

That was the real question, the million-dollar question, which Walden heard over and over. She was supposed to be the staff lead on this sort of thing. She hadn’t been talking to people enough. She’d gone too inwards, too focused on the rest of her job—there were so many things involved in doing a teacher’s job! Never enough time to do everything right, she thought, but this was leadership, this was core; she’d let people down. So she had the conversation over and over, tailoring it for the audience every time, technical and thorough for the magical departments, a layman’s summary for the others: Yes, it was big. I know. We handled it. Honestly, yes, we might get another one. We’d know pretty quickly if we did. There’s a plan. We would handle it again.

She kept a glass of wine in her hand, so she’d have something to gesture with. “Listen,” she found herself saying to Ezekiel, who was grave and thoughtful as he propped up the bar tonight—Ebele had joined the knot of high-energy younger people on the dance floor—“it’s not as if we can avoid the issue. There’s no way around it. Teenage magicians attract demons. A beginner is a natural target for a magical predator, and a child beginner more so—all that power, none of the common sense. Teenage magicians without protection, without any adult support, get eaten by demons. That’s why Chetwood isn’t just another boarding school. It’s necessary. You know this.”

Ezekiel, foster father of seven sorcerers, knew. He nodded seriously.

“It used to be about families,” Walden said. “People like—oh—”

“Like me,” said Mark, coming up on Walden’s other side and nodding to the barman for a fresh drink. “Hi, Sapphire. Evening, Reverend.”

“On social occasions,” said Ezekiel, “I accept Zeke.”

Walden was still talking. “There was a time when the question of whether you’d be lucky enough to survive was based purely on how much magic the adults around you knew. Which meant all that mattered was who your parents were. The old magical dynasties of England! But it’s a stupid way to run things—worse than that, it’s an evil way to run things. Just imagine how many Nicola Conways were lost to history, just because no one around them had the training, the experience, the power to save them from something that was never their fault.”

“Hey, not all of them got eaten by demons,” said Mark. “Look on the bright side. Some hedge witches got burned at the stake instead.”

“I think my wife wants to talk to me,” said Ezekiel.

Walden barely noticed him leaving. She was rounding on Mark. “It’s not right,” she snapped. “It’s not fair .”

“How much wine have you had?” said Mark.

“Oh—hush. I’m fine.”

“You look fantastic.”

“It’s Christmas.”

“I never suspected you of egalitarian principles,” Mark said. “I thought you were all professional pride down to the bottom of your magician’s heart.”

“Some of us picked a career out of the desire to do something important,” Walden said. “Something real .”

“Teaching four teenagers a niche A-level at a private school,” Mark agreed. “Makes sense.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m a meaningless sort of guy.”

“I can tell,” said Walden coldly.

“Don’t hold it against me. I might have hidden depths. Are you coming to the afterparty?”

“What afterparty?” But now Walden looked, the crowd of teachers was starting to thin: sensible people in their forties and fifties peeling off for the Tube and the train ride home, dragging out wheeled suitcases from the collection by the door as they set off for their real lives, their families, Christmas. Boarding school was a world apart. It wasn’t only the children who exited the theme park at the end of term.

“There’s a bunch of us going to head into town and find somewhere less sad than Finsbury Park to keep the party going,” Mark said. Us, as if he were right in with the energetic young crowd also starting to collect their coats and hats. He had to be ten years older than most of them, twenty years older than someone like Lilly. “Are you in?”

What was waiting for Walden at the other end of her own train ride home? Chetwood, of course; Chetwood again; the theme park with the lights off, everything shut down, a Victorian flat too big for one person to rattle around in and a school site left empty and leafless and grim. She wouldn’t be completely alone. Of course not. Ebele and Ezekiel lived in School House with their crowd of foster children; and their adult children, all successful twenty-something alumni, would most likely be home for Christmas. And Todd had his neat cottage on the avenue, and David and his wife were just down the road in the village. But to Walden just now, possessed by the ghost of eighteen-year-old Saffy, it looked like a sad and boring little life, barely enlivened by the prospect of taking the Southern Rail train down to rural Sussex to see her parents next week.

“Why not,” she said. “I’ll join you.”

It was the better part of twenty years since Walden had been on a pub crawl. She’d done it at Oxford—determined, as an undergraduate, to enjoy herself and try everything—and she’d soon discovered that hangovers were not fun and that most people were more boring when they were drunk. The friends worth hanging on to had generally reached the same conclusion, and by the time she was twenty her whole social group had largely gotten over the impulse. It had been a bit of a shock to arrive in the States for her postgraduate studies and discover her peers, age twenty-two, all still in the eager stage of Well, we’re allowed now! when it came to alcohol. She’d felt a bit superior about it—although, to be fair, twenty-two-year-old Saffy had been capable of feeling superior about almost anything. What a little monster she’d been. You’re so fucking smug, Roz had told her, witheringly unimpressed; that conversation had probably been the best and most improving thing to happen to her during her first year in California.

The crush of the weekday evening Tube—even this late, in London, it was a crowd made as much of commuters as partygoers—and the cold air and the bright Christmas lights in Leicester Square together sobered her up a bit. The younger crowd were arguing about where to go (I’m not getting the night bus all the way back from fucking Brixton; Camden is shit now; A Spoons? Are you serious?) and she and Mark exchanged looks. He was wearing a wool winter coat and a college scarf. Walden nodded at it. “What college?”

“St John’s,” said Mark. “Cambridge.”

“Oh, so you’re a thaumaturge. ” A magical degree, for obscure historical reasons, was called Sorcery at Oxford and Durham, Thaumaturgy at Cambridge and St Andrews, and Magic everywhere else.

“Guilty,” Mark said. “Trying to get my measure, Dr Walden? What about you?”

“Oxford. St Catherine’s,” Walden said. “Catz. Large and modern. It has a spectacular Brutalist building which I found quite homey after seven years in Scrubs. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about Cambridge colleges. If you’d told me you were a Christ Church man I would have been able to draw some conclusions.” Posh, mostly, which she already knew. Every college had its reputation. Sometimes it was deserved.

“St John’s is the wanker college,” Mark said helpfully. “Lots of money, has the best May Ball, and there’s a little song about it.” He hummed and then sang quietly into the London night: “I’d rather be at Oxford than St John’s, oh I’d rather be at Oxford than St John’s…”

Walden laughed. “I’m sure you’re not all that bad.”

“Not at all. I met lots of perfectly lovely girls at John’s.”

“And you were perfectly nasty to them.”

“In my defence,” said Mark, “I was twenty and I don’t know what they expected. Anyway! At this rate your colleagues are going to wrangle all night. Why don’t we ditch the work jolly? There’s a nice little cocktail bar round the corner. My treat.”

“I don’t think so,” Walden said. It wasn’t even 9 P.M . yet. Besides, a group of teachers negotiating with each other could be quite funny to watch. All of them were rather too used to being the grown-up in charge and the only sensible person in the room. It was one of the commonest pitfalls of school management, a danger David had discussed with her when he appointed her to the Director of Magic role: you could not treat adult colleagues like incompetent children and expect them to put up with it quietly. Walden, watching an argument break out over Google Maps, told Mark about this. He laughed. “I’d noticed, Sapphire. Hard not to notice. Amazing that schools get anything done at all. The clowns are running the circus.”

“Ouch,” Walden said.

“No offence.”

“What exactly do you do,” said Walden, “when you’re not generously donating your time to Chetwood?”

Mark smirked at her. “It’s classified.”

“Right,” said Walden sceptically.

“Not that classified, I admit. But it’s boring, I promise you. Special advisor stuff. The civil service hates having me around even more than you do. Ah, looks like we’ve decided on,” he tilted his head, listening, “exactly the same pub that someone suggested in the first place. Glad we stood in the cold for twenty minutes about it. Sure I can’t tempt you to cocktails?”

“Maybe later,” said Walden, and didn’t let herself regret it when Mark gave her another knowing grin. She was an adult. She knew what she was doing.

Although, honestly, she might as well have said yes to the cocktails. The pub was so crowded that the little knot of teachers was forced to break up into groups of three and four, spread across several booths. Walden found herself in a twosome, with Mark, at the bar—she gave him a sharp glance; he’d managed that rather too neatly, which suggested he’d done it before. “I need to keep mingling, of course,” she said. “I am still at work.”

“Let your hair down,” said Mark. “I don’t think anyone cares at this stage.”

“Also, I like these people,” said Walden, and set herself to proving it by sliding into the corner of a booth next to most of the Modern Foreign Languages Department. MFL were reliably some of the most sociable teachers you could meet, because few people studied a modern language to degree level unless they had at least some interest in talking to other human beings. A lot of them were expats, French and Spanish teachers shivering even inside the pub and talking longingly about their flights home. You did have to contend with the fact that the conversation across the table was conducted in an effortless polyglot medley of English, French, Spanish, German, and a little Italian—Walden’s GCSE Spanish was enough to follow parts of it, but not to join in—but the three people nearest her switched generously into English when she sat down. Mark, undaunted, joined the booth of NQTs behind her, apparently very successfully if the gust of laughter following the first thing he said to them was any guide.

And the evening proceeded convivially. Everyone relaxed enough that they did, at last, come up with some topics of conversation that were not school, lessons, mocks, public exams, how tired everybody was, how bad the canteen food was on Sundays, and the horrific behaviour of 9C. The groups in the booths mingled and split. People got up to fetch the next round and were replaced by someone else sliding into their seat. Some split off in twos and threes, or even—here was a Christmas miracle for you—got caught up in friendly conversation with strangers. Walden stood her round, and didn’t object when most of them ordered something a little more expensive than they’d been having before; she was management. She found herself eventually on the table of NQTs, who let loose a flood of questions about her tattoos: Were those real? Were they magic? Were they allowed ?

One thing to know that the sixth form thought you were an ancient crone at thirty-eight; quite another to get it from the twenty-somethings. But they were all Generation Z together, Walden supposed. She took the cheerful route: yes, real, of course allowed but who wanted to talk to children about it, and yes, of course— very magic.

“I swear I saw the bird move,” someone said.

“It’s a phoenix,” said Walden, and at the back of her mind came a susurrus, an echo, almost a harmony: I am Phoenix.

She held up her arm to show them. The Phoenix twisted its proud neck to fix its eye on its audience. It spread its blazing wings up Walden’s arm, and flexed its golden talons. Everyone started chattering at once. Half of these people were junior teachers from the magical departments, interested in the how and the why. “Illusion. It’s just a fancy evoke,” said Lilly decisively. “I’ve got a butterfly on my ankle. I can make it flap its wings.”

“Not an evocation, though, is it?” said Mark. When had he started leaning over the back of the booth? “Not an illusion at all. It’s really moving. That’s a reified demon, guys. Pretty big one too.”

Mark! thought Walden, and attempted a subtle glare—did he have to make it sound so alarming? For that manner, did he have to announce it loudly in a crowded pub? There was a little silence, which she had to rescue. None of the NQTs were invokers by calling. If they could find a decent NQT to teach invocation, Walden wouldn’t be stuck doing an A-level set on top of a management workload. “Demon summoning is the most boring arcane discipline until it isn’t,” she said, with the I’m-joking smile. “Cool, isn’t it? You’re looking at my doctorate.”

“You’re not…” said Lilly nervously.

“I’m not possessed, no,” airily, as if it were a rather silly question. “The Marshals would be here in two minutes flat if I was.”

Someone coughed awkwardly. Walden looked up.

White jacket with hi-vis strips, gleaming boots, shining armguards graven with runes and shining sword hung neatly at her hip. The square, muscular frame of an athlete; the hair short and tousled and gleaming golden, picked out by electric light against the dark rectangle of the doorway back into the December night. The band on her upper arm marked with KMV, for Knight Mareschal Venitant. A butch avenging angel, a demon slayer out of storybooks, standing in a little pool of silence and attention that could have been just the normal reaction to the police walking into a pub, but could equally have been the entire room experiencing what Walden felt just then, which was Oh come on, this is unfair, no one looks like that!

Laura Kenning glanced around the room with a swift, assessing look, saw Walden and the rest of the group of Chetwood teachers, nodded in their direction, and headed for the bar. How was she here? Why was she here?

“Laura, finally!” cried the Head of Spanish as Laura joined the group. “Still in uniform?”

“Just got off duty,” said Laura, setting her beer down. “Evening.”

And that was when it occurred to Walden that while she didn’t have Laura’s phone number and the ability to text her things like we’re near Leicester Square, come and join us, she wasn’t the only person here who had worked with her for years. Laura had been hired by Chetwood at least two years before Walden herself arrived. Lots of people here knew her well. She felt rather stupid. Also, she felt rather naked, in a sleeveless black dress and too much makeup, with the Phoenix on bold and colourful display.

“Huh,” murmured Mark as he leaned over her shoulder. “Hurtful, but I don’t blame you. Even I can tell that that is a very hot lesbian.”

“Mark Daubery,” snapped Walden. It was only when he roared with laughter that she realised she’d used her teacher voice. Mark was not one of those convenient people still haunted by the memories of schoolday scoldings in his forties, so it hadn’t worked even slightly. His eyes were crinkled with real amusement. Laura glanced over at them. Why was this so awkward? Walden would have given a lot, just then, for the armour of a sensible blazer and an old-fashioned brooch. Eighteen-year-old Saffy’s arrogant, brittle, faux-punk, and intensely sexually frustrated ghost could go jump in a lake.