Page 29

The admission sat in the air, heavy. Nikki looked alarmed, and awkward, and also—oh, Walden knew this expression, on any student, and especially on this student, one of her best—curious.

What she said was, “There’s—I think there’s a memorial, isn’t there? And a tree.”

“I go and look at it sometimes,” Walden said. “Yes. His name was Charles Green. He was seventeen years old. We were classmates.” Nikki did not need all the gory details, any more than Walden really wanted to know about the Will situation. “We made a very stupid decision together. One of us escaped. The other one bore all the consequences.”

“That doesn’t mean you killed him,” Nikki objected.

“No, it doesn’t. Let me be precise. A powerful demon killed Charlie Green. All I did was help create the situation that led to his death. And I was your age, yes. Which is old enough to know better.” She made herself smile. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t spread this around all of Year Thirteen, by the way. I know school loves gossip, and it’s by no means a secret, but it is quite a painful story. Please do feel free to talk to Matron and Reverend Ezekiel about it, or the counsellor, of course.” She was off the point. She lurched back onto it. “What I am trying to say is—I think perhaps you and I do have enough in common that my experience might be useful to you. Charlie was left behind to die when the Marshals collapsed the incursion. They eventually went back to look for his body, and of course they never found it. You know why. And meanwhile I survived and went off to Oxford. I was in—well, about the emotional state you might expect—but I don’t think I ever had the thought, ‘Maybe I’m not safe. Maybe I don’t deserve this.’ Which says something, probably, about the sort of teenager I was, and the kind of privileged background I had.” She held Nikki’s gaze. She had her full attention now. You could always feel it when a child was actually listening. “I want to be very clear about how much I respect your thoughtfulness, your sense of responsibility. Matron told me, when she asked me to talk to you, that she thinks you are a young woman of character. I think so too. But I also want you to consider this.

“I made a very bad mistake. I was lucky enough to survive and get away. I went on to study for multiple degrees in the discipline I love—that’s the other thing we have in common, you see; I know you love magic too. I would know it even if you hadn’t just told me, because I’m the one teaching you, and it shows, it shines, in all the work you do. But my point is: I did all of that. And because I did that, because I had a terrible experience which was my own fault, and learned from it, and kept learning—because I ultimately came back to Chetwood, with my multiple degrees and my years of practice and an adult’s perspective on the kinds of mistakes teenagers make and why they make them—entirely, in fact, because I failed and then learned, I was in a position to help you that night. For that reason alone, Nikki, I don’t regret any of it.”

Nikki said, very quietly, “What if I’m not good enough.”

“In my professional opinion, as teacher and scholar and, forgive me, an extremely good magician myself: if a magician like you isn’t good enough,” said Walden, “there’s no hope for anyone. If a magician like you doesn’t deserve Oxford, then no one ever has. It’s true, there will be plenty of people there who have no idea what it’s like to live your life. Not as many as you think—something like sixty percent of Oxford undergraduates are state educated—though admittedly more of them on the Sorcery course, which tends a little posh. But I want you to know that responsible as you feel, and as admirable as it is, it is not your duty to punish yourself for the rest of your life for making one mistake—even if the mistake was very serious. Nor will you be able to avoid ever making another mistake, just by giving up the magic you love and the opportunities you have worked for. You will never meet an innocent adult. Everyone fails. Everyone . What matters is how you meet failure, and how you face up to it. How you learn.”

There was a little quiet. Don’t jump in, don’t try to fill every silence—it just makes you sound like you’re not sure. Walden had done her own share of interview prep lessons, twenty years ago. The best way to be a good communicator was to have a natural warm interest in your fellow human beings combined with fluent, justified self-confidence. The next best way was to learn about those things as a set of intellectual principles and internalise them as strongly as you could. Nikki had no way to know that Walden was thinking, My God, do I sound pompous, do I sound stupid, do I sound like the worst kind of well-intentioned middle-class fool, is she going to take a word of it on board, is she going to tell her friends all about it and laugh—

It didn’t actually matter if a teenager thought you were ridiculous. As long as they heard you. As long as they learned. Walden was a lot better at magic lessons than personal mentorship. She resisted the urge to fidget, to bring up a different topic, to cross her fingers under the desk.

“Okay,” said Nikki at length, which wasn’t Wow Dr Walden I feel so inspired, but at least it wasn’t Wow Dr Walden this was embarrassing for both of us.

“I’m not actually advising you to follow my exact path in life,” Walden said. “Believe me, no one should end up teaching at their old high school unless they’re really, really sure they want to.”

That got a smirk and the edge of a laugh, thank goodness. Walden was on much firmer ground when she could make her students laugh. “Did you want to, though?” Nikki said. “Um, unless that’s too personal. Just, you know… there’s not a lot you can actually do with a Sorcery degree, is there?”

So something Walden had said had got through. That was the question of someone who was back to thinking about doing the degree themselves. She didn’t leap at the implication. She didn’t want to push. Instead she said, “It’s quite all right. Yes, I wanted to be here. I love my career. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that teaching is the only thing a trained magician can do. A long way from it. There’s plenty of jobs for qualified magicians in government and in industry, both here and overseas. And if that doesn’t appeal, well, you’ll find that with an Oxford degree you can go almost anywhere and do almost anything. Most careers that want graduates don’t actually make direct use of what you studied. Or there’s the academic route, if you finish undergrad and can’t bear to stop. That was how I ended up with a doctorate.”

“Isn’t it weird, though?” Nikki said. “I think it would be weird, like getting stuck in a time loop—just school and more school forever.”

“School as a teacher is pretty different from school as a student,” said Walden. “Better, honestly, in the way that being an adult is generally a lot better than being a child. Though yes, there is a certain time loop element. Every year I look up and can’t believe it’s September again. I get older and the Year Sevens never do. Still, it’s a nice mix of routine and challenge. Classes might be the same, but individual students are always different. New problems arise all the time, and they need new solutions. I get a fair amount of use out of my elaborate education, and not just in the classroom. At the moment, for example, Mr Cartwright the Keymaster and I are working on the thaumic engines almost round the clock.”

“Because of that Year Nine who got possessed?”

Well, you expected children to talk about school drama, and turfing all of Year Nine out of their dorms for the evening had been dramatic. “Yes, exactly. We need to find the hole in our magical security and fix it, but the school’s wards are based on a maddeningly complicated nineteenth-century magical engine which barely anyone ever understood to begin with. So solving the problem is a fascinating magical challenge as well as an urgent security issue. I do sort of wish it hadn’t come up at the same time as mocks marking, but that’s school for you.”

Nikki looked thoughtful. “Isn’t it weird that it’s never happened before?” she said. “You’d think, if the engine’s been there since the nineteenth century, and we’ve had demons hanging around Chetwood that whole time… if there’s an obvious problem, wouldn’t it have come up already?”

“That is one of the big questions, yes,” Walden said. “There simply isn’t a natural point of failure. Or rather, all the natural points of failure were spotted long ago, because they were obvious. So we dealt with them long ago, and now none of them seem to be the problem. When you know there’s something like Old Faithful lurking, you take warding extra seriously. And I take warding seriously anyway. I could have sworn that every defence on the school site was being maintained to the very highest standard. But clearly, somehow, they’re not.”

“Maybe someone damaged the protections on purpose, then,” Nikki said. “Somewhere hard to find. Like that lesson where you rewrote the incursion ward before we came in, and none of us noticed till Matty did the safety check.”

“That’s hardly likely, Nikki,” Walden said.

“Sorry,” said Nikki, but she looked thoughtful. “It’s only because I just revised this. Initial magician error, check the alerts and redo the wards. Natural failure over time, check the alerts and redo the wards. Protection not strong enough for the local magical environment, check the alerts and redo the wards. And if it’s not any of those, then someone’s invited something in, so check the alerts and redo the wards and then call the Marshals. Right?”

“Textbook,” said Walden. “Full marks. But I do think a bad actor is the least likely explanation. That’s what you’re proposing, you realise, a magician willing and able to undermine Chetwood’s magical defences on purpose. It would have to be someone with internal access to the school site, and they would have to be very, very skilled—not just a student messing around. I did consider ‘student messing around’ as a possible explanation, but believe me, I would have caught that by now. So that only leaves, for your bad actor hypothesis, an adult magician with considerable magical skill, remarkable subtlety, and no morals whatsoever.”

“And that wouldn’t happen here, would it?” Nikki said. Her dark eyes were distant and thoughtful. Walden couldn’t tell if she was sincere or not when she said softly, “Not at Chetwood.”

When Nikki was gone, Walden did a desultory review of her workbook for the arcane safety carousel. She’d got it into very good shape years ago, but it paid off sometimes to stop and think whether your standard lesson plan was still working. And her brain needed a break from the puzzle of the thaumic engines. This at least felt like a productive way to change gears.

She flipped through the pages of the top booklet from the pile on her desk. It was the Year Seven version, so they were adorned with little cartoon magicians and demons. She was using last half term’s set—she needed to give these back to the class, actually, she’d have to look up where their form room was and drop them off. The workbook she was reviewing had been carefully, elaborately doodled on. Every cartoon demon had been given a little blue-ballpoint hat. Several of the fill-in-the-gap sections had been left blank. Hmm—so someone’s attention had been wandering badly, and Walden hadn’t caught it in the lesson. She needed to build in a little more roaming-the-room glancing-over-shoulders time for herself. Where could it go?

It took nearly forty minutes—half of that spent staring into space, rather than working.

Then something in Walden’s head went click .

“No,” she said out loud. “Come on.”

Click, click, like the pneumatic cylinders behind the walnut panels of the thaumic engine sliding home one at a time. Like a train, finally pointed onto the correct track, starting to accelerate. Walden’s brain was a powerful, finely tuned, and very expensively educated problem-solving tool. Its weakness—the difference, if you liked, between being merely very intelligent and being brilliant—was a tendency to run safely on the rails of assumption.

It’s hardly likely. It’s not reasonable.

It couldn’t happen at Chetwood.

Walden flipped the Year Seven workbook closed. The blank back cover had been adorned with an impressively recognisable cartoon of herself, dressed up as a storybook magician, with pointy hat and long beard. Very good for a twelve-year-old. She smoothed it flat with both hands. Her fingernails were glowing gold. The air in her office was cold, suddenly, with a deep, brittle chill that owed nothing to January.

Ooooo, finally, crooned the Phoenix in her thoughts. Finally, finally.

Walden shivered. The demon that lived in her skin had leapt ahead of her and drawn its own conclusions, full of fiery joy. She asked: Did you know?

It did not understand. It knew its own nature, the hunter and the hunted. It knew the taste of danger and the calculus of risk and reward. It knew hunger, and it knew power. It was power. It liked the idea of a fight. It was not, Walden thought, a reliable witness.

“What if I’m wrong?” she asked the cool, antique silence. Then the answer, because it was obvious. “What if I’m not?”

The key to a good risk assessment was not How often does this happen . It was How bad could the consequences be?

Walden thought back to the morning of December 19. The date was stamped neatly in her memory: the day after the last day of the Autumn Term. If she got up right now and walked into her flat she would see the digital alarm clock on her bedside table, with the numbers illuminated red. The first time she’d woken up, it had been a little before seven, and Mark had not been in the bed. Then she’d woken up again, and it had already been half past eight. He’d come in with wet hair, wearing only a towel. Mistimed it, haven’t I.

An hour and a half between those two wakings. The door from her sitting room into the cavernous chamber of the thaumic engines had been left on the latch. Walden never had got round to asking Todd about it. Christmas—travel—family—all of that. She’d been busy. And it was the sort of detail you forgot about. Especially when you were already trying to forget the whole associated episode, as quickly as you could.

There were two keys to that door. Todd had one. Walden’s lived in a box in her kitchen next to the teapot. It wouldn’t have been hard to find—no, not hard to find at all. If Mark had any practice with instantiation, he could probably have cast a little charm to pick it up: shaped an inquiry from the keyhole, narrowed it to the profile of whatever metals keys were usually made from, and sent it sweeping through the flat. That was if he even needed to. If he hadn’t just poked around the kitchen while Walden slept, on the assumption that the key was probably around there somewhere.

Mistimed it, haven’t I? A little joke. Mark liked his little jokes.

He hadn’t mistimed anything.

But why —

No, that wasn’t the question. Walden was not employed as Chetwood’s Director of Magic in order to play detective. Motivations could wait. She had a hypothesis. She had no hard evidence for the hypothesis beyond some rather suggestive coincidences (Mark inviting himself round for drinks and waiting until she was two gins down before they went to bed, and that only after he’d established that he could get into the engine room from her flat) and a shadowy outline that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to exactly one person with access to the school site (a powerful adult magician, subtle, skilled, no morals whatsoever…).

The wastepaper bin next to her desk was overfilled, and so was the giant cardboard box of recycling next to that. Walden had to dig a little while to find the card. Plain white cardstock adorned with the Marshals’ heraldic crest. Arjun Ramamurthy, KMGC, Chief of Incident Response (SE England). A phone number and a mar.gov.uk email address. Walden set it on her desk and looked at it.

Surely that was a bit of an overreaction. She didn’t know, after all. She didn’t know .

She wished she had Laura’s phone number.

Afterwards, if you had asked Walden to pinpoint the moment of her exact worst mistake, the decision that should not have been made, the decision that poisoned all the others afterward, she would have told you: It was here. Here, at this moment, safe in my office, with no more proof than a very bad feeling. It was when I didn’t immediately make the call or send the email.

It was when I got up and went looking for him.