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chapter twenty-seven

SNOWDROPS

“Have you seen Mark anywhere?”

Annie held up one finger; she was on the phone. Walden hovered in the doorway. Of course she technically outranked the school receptionist, by quite a long way. It was amazing what a difference there was between a school’s org chart and how things actually got done. No sensible person made Annie’s life one whit harder than it had to be.

“Okay,” said Annie, at last, hanging up. “Sorry. Parent. What did you need?”

“I was wondering if Mark was on site today.”

It was only because Walden was already on edge that she caught the very, very faint lift of Annie’s eyebrows, immediately smoothed back to neutrality. It was only because she’d stopped assuming and started thinking that she understood what it meant. Support staff always knew what was going on before the teachers did. Walden and Mark had not been as subtle as she thought. She had said to herself: Well, my sex life is no one’s business. But school was a closed environment. One’s personal judgement—or lack of it—could very quickly become everyone’s business.

“He’s signed in,” Annie reported, still very neutral, after a glance at her screen. “I haven’t seen him this side of the road. He might be patrolling. You could try the sports fields. Or Scrubs.”

“Thank you,” Walden said. “I’ll have a look.”

She paused at the roadside, looked both ways, and then turned right and walked along the hedgerow until she could cross to the opening for the school coach park. The red-and-white minibuses were lined up in a row at the far end. Walden had her warm coat on and her hands in her pockets. The final few leaves of last autumn, blackened and brittle after the January frost, crunched against the expensive gravel under her feet. There was a cluster of green spikes coming up under the trees at the far end of the car park.

Snowdrops, she thought. The first snowdrops .

She had to look in among the trees, in the shadow of the humped row of buses. Her smart black brogues got muddy. It took a while. She would have given up, if she hadn’t been fairly clear already on what she was looking for.

She found it neatly concealed inside the rotten bole of the largest tree. The experience of reaching in among the damp moss and slimy fungus was skin-crawlingly unpleasant: not just the usual eurgh of rather too much Nature without gardening gloves, but an additional frisson of You’re not interested. You don’t like this. You don’t want to look at it.

Oh, but I’m very interested, Walden told the feeling, and steeled herself. It was still very difficult. She forced her hands to grip hard around something spiked and broken and unpleasantly plastic-slick.

The school umbrella was a tattered inside-out skeleton. Its red-and-white canopy was ripped in half a dozen places. Walden turned it over. The slimy, repellent, ugh-not-my-business ward was pressed into the handle, the size of a thumbprint. She’d handed this school umbrella to Mark, and it had definitely not been a fantastically accursed object when she’d done so. He must have enchanted it as they were walking around the school site. Ambling across the marshy Games fields in the pouring November rain, making idle conversation, umbrella in hand. The thumbprint size of the ward might be a record of how he’d actually pulled it off: with just his thumb, pressing into the plastic handle like wax.

It got me in the arm! he’d said. But that injury had ceased to be a concern remarkably quickly after that day, hadn’t it? When had he punched his neat little portal back to the mundane world to drop off a cursework somewhere safe? She’d asked about the umbrella at some point, she was sure, and Mark had dismissed it. Months ago; she couldn’t be certain of anything now.

Quite impressive, really. Very impressive, even. How galling it was, to think you had the measure of a nasty man exactly, and then discover that you’d been allowed to take the measure he saw fit to share. How deeply embarrassing, to fall for the pose even as you laughed at it. Mark was a much, much better magician than Walden had given him credit for. He was at least as good as she was. He was better than she was, in some specific ways. She was an invocation specialist, which was, intellectually speaking, the show-off field. The go-big-or-go-home field. Invocation teachers teach contract law. She’d just assumed she had to be cleverer than he was. Probably she was. Probably, decades ago, she’d got better grades in all her exams.

And then Mark had made a big deal out of his evocation bona fides, passing himself off as sporty—oh, he was authentically sporty—but fading, the forty-something clinging to the athlete-magician he’d been. But that had been a lie too. This sort of subtle, understated spellwork, rooted in the physical environment, layered and bound into an object—this was instantiation. It was perhaps the most flexible discipline of magic. It was certainly the hardest to detect. You had to have a frankly dire enthusiasm for stuff to be really good at it. The original builders of the thaumic engine would have been state-of-their-art instantiation scholars.

Walden was thinking about the ward because the rest of the curse on the ruined umbrella was much harder to think about. She couldn’t actually see what it was doing. But she could feel it. It shone in the demonic plane like a lantern on a foggy night.

Here. Come here. Come here.

She remembered the minibus demon revving up to charge at her. Had Mark actually been trying to get her killed? Surely not. Surely not. After all, he’d had full access to her report on Old Faithful. He must have already known that Walden could call on the Phoenix for magical assistance in a crisis.

Here, come here, sang the luring curse, calling to any demon in range.

The demon closest by said sniffily, I am here already . Then it snapped the umbrella in half.

It used Walden’s bare hands to do it. Walden cried out in pain as the plastic spines dug into her palms. The Phoenix said, Encroaching pest. We should kill him and eat him .

“Good God, ” said Walden. “Let me think, you bloodthirsty monster.”

But she was thinking about—London. A London night, snow falling and not settling, and a sudden wild incursion. Chief Ramamurthy looking at her suspiciously, because when you had a demon problem and a powerful magician standing right next to it, you ought to be suspicious.

It just made no sense. It made no sense. Her brain kept nagging round and round the problem no matter how she tried to shove it into His reasons are not my job . She thought she knew Mark quite well. She liked Mark, in the way one liked an extra glass of wine or an entire tub of ice cream or intentionally not going to the gym after you’d nobly set the evening aside for it. Or in the way you liked good sex with an attractive person who made no emotional demands on you whatsoever: the simplest kind of guilty pleasure. But she also quite liked him, at this point, as a colleague: all his little jokes and intentional overgrown-schoolboy affect and reasonably helpful planar patrols. She’d seen him as someone fairly amusing, fairly reliable, fairly straightforward to deal with. Something familiar. A normal person.

It was just very hard to think of any reason why an apparently normal person would set so many demons loose—in central London during peak pub hours! God, in a school !—without arriving quite quickly at Is he some sort of insane evil murderer? And there was a difference, there was a difference, between being a posh dickhead and being a bloodthirsty monster. Surely there was a difference. Walden had spent her whole life in a series of elite educational institutions, circles that overlapped quite closely with the posh dickhead type. She would have noticed .

Or perhaps not. There was a lot she hadn’t noticed. She’d needed a teenager to point out the obvious possibility she was missing. Brilliant, brilliant Nikki, not even done with her A-levels, but able to think in a straight line, which was more apparently than Walden could do—stupid, stupid! She was so stupid! She felt so stupid —

This was the problem, of course, with staking your personal and professional identity entirely on being fantastically clever. It made it much harder to keep control when it turned out you weren’t.

Walden dropped the pieces of the broken umbrella. The Phoenix, simply by snapping it, had undone the luring curse as neatly as the ten minutes of counterspelling that Walden would have gone for. Ten minutes was not time she had. Mark was on the school site and apparently capable of anything. Six hundred children were also on the site. This was a child protection issue, a critical and immediate safeguarding concern. Walden should—

—get help, report to David, phone the police, call the fucking Marshals now, now, now! clamoured a voice in the back of her thoughts.

She barely heard it. Walden had had plenty of practice, these last few months, ignoring little voices in her thoughts.

— should find him, she thought coldly.

And kill him.

And eat him.

She walked along the village road half-dreaming. A white Ford Transit van went speeding past in the direction of Chetwood village, so close behind her on the pedestrian crossing that she felt the wind of it in her hair. It was doing seventy through the twenty-an-hour school zone. Walden glanced after it for a second or two. She heard the bang just over the ridge as the van developed loud, sputtering engine problems.

There were a lot of snowdrops coming up. Every January they came back, little white spikes of defiance against the cold. Though this January had not been as cold as some. It felt wrong, seeing the daffodils start to put up tall green shoots this early.

As she had the thought, the daylight chilled and clarified. Clouds etched black shapes on the white horizon. The air was crisp and hard to breathe. Walden dusted her muddy hands on her warm coat and put them back in her pockets.

Scrubs, fenced by lacework scaffolding. The dark rectangle of quasi-Brutalist ambition stark against the white sky. This place was Chetwood, as much as the old stone colonnade and the lofty chapel. Chetwood at its occasional best, with an eye on the future, embracing the startling modern innovations of concrete, the middle school, and women’s education. Universal House. Walden stood with her hands in her pockets looking up at it.

I am here, she thought. I am also here.

At eleven—thirteen—fifteen—eighteen. Leaving her bed unmade and getting told off for it. Engaged in elaborate, vital, hard-to-remember interpersonal drama with her Year Eight dorm. Dyeing her hair to ashy chemical blonde in a student bathroom. I am here. Sneaking out to summon a great demon. Taking the job interview tour. Patrolling for curfew breakers. Making a brief, friendly appearance at NQT drinks in Lilly Tibbett’s flat this year.

I am here, long before I was here : because the beauty of school was its predictability, the sheer weight of institution carving patterns into the world, stronger than blood or bone. I am here, because other children had slept in those dormitories before her. I am here, in the old boarding houses, exiled from all love, weeping with cold and loneliness. I am here, reciting principles of magic and mathematics and Latin grammar, giving adults rude nicknames whether they called themselves teachers or masters or magisters; finding small ways to break the rules of how to be, rules that changed and changed and yet remained forever the same unforgiving edifice of authority. I am here, in the masters and magisters, the well-intentioned and the cruel, the competent and the hopeless, the shattered war veteran drinking steadily in his study or the mediaeval jobbing wizard checking his astrological tables before he went back to reckoning the bills. I am here, like the ghost of the Headmaster killed by a higher demon in 1926. I am here, like a succession of imps in the staffroom photocopier.

I am here, adult and child, new and old, deeply rooted, never failing, with all the silent force of centuries of repetition.

I am here: the green fields. Here: the white sky.

Here I am, more real than real, more alive than alive.

I am here even in the January snowdrops.

She waited. She did not know what she was waiting for.

“Funny weather,” said Mark to his companion as he emerged from Scrubs’s front door. He was his usual self, smart casual, expensive haircut, very good shoes. Only slightly dishevelled, in the easy way of a man who never really lost control of appearances. Lilly Tibbett, twenty-two years old and newly qualified, who lived in a flat on the ground floor and had the makings of a very good teacher eventually, was still pink with exertion. She had thrown her blonde hair into a quick ponytail and she was looking up at Mark with the unmistakeable, pitiable gaze of the besotted.

Typical, thought someone who was neither Dr Walden nor Mark’s Sapphire nor the Saffy who had been, someone who hovered between those three selves and a fourth newly waking. Somehow, despite the surprise, it was the exact thing that she’d expected, the thing that made all the rest make sense. Was a man like Mark Daubery truly sexually inspired by the ardent pursuit of a tired schoolteacher, very nearly forty? Probably not. But was he entertained by the challenge of two-timing a na?ve and adoring twentysomething with her line manager’s line manager, when they both lived on the same not-very-large school site: oh, obviously he was.

I always liked younger women —another little joke. What a funny, funny man.

Poor Lilly obviously hasn’t the foggiest, one of the watching selves tried to think. Her own pity rang false in her ears.

Mark looked up from gently, kindly detaching Lilly’s hand from his sleeve, and saw her there. He made a joke—she wasn’t close enough to hear the joke, but she could see the expression on his face, and Lilly’s smiling, shamed reaction. Her other-self’s pity became truer. A nasty man. An arsehole sandwich. Easier not to be hurt if you knew the type. The watching person was not, she thought, hurt. No. It would take a much greater power than a mere mortal magician to hurt her.

“Afternoon, Dr Walden,” said Mark. Lilly had fled back inside, which made the watcher fairly certain that Mark’s comment had been something along the lines of Better fix your face, you look like you just got shagged within an inch of your life . Getting rid of her. Clearing the field. Mark was a person who thought in terms of conflict and power and self-interest. So, a person like herself. “Something I can do for you?”

“Walk with me,” she said, smiling.

They walked the gravel path around Scrubs, past the raised flowerbeds. The young birch tree planted at the back of the building was stark and pale against the backdrop of grey concrete and dark, gapping windows. The memorial plaque had yellow-green lichen growing over the C of Charlie’s name. Some rude child had sat on the grass eating cheese and onion crisps and then not taken their litter away with them. Walden considered the blue crisp packet thoughtfully. It caught fire, and burned for a few seconds with a white flame, before the foil unravelled into ash.

“Bit of an overreaction,” remarked Mark. “Everything all right, Sapphire?” A look of humour, self-abasement, understanding. “We haven’t misunderstood each other, have we? I hope we haven’t.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask who, exactly, you work for?”

His eyebrows went up. “Well, the Board of Governors, at the moment—”

She looked at him.

“Nothing interesting, I promise you,” Mark said. “Nothing important.”

“Mmm,” she said. She’d had a shadowy picture, and that picture was growing clearer. There would be an organisation, somewhere. Not government, she thought. Something easier to disavow. A string of initials. The good guys, almost certainly, or at least the good guys as Mark would reckon it. Something he felt proud of, enough to boast to his nephew a little. Far away, on the other side of the Atlantic, a person she’d once been had received that promise: Everything you do for us, you’ll be doing for the right reasons. For the good guys.

It was the Phoenix. That was what he cared about; that was what he was here for. The Phoenix, abstract to everyone but Walden herself—really, abstract to Walden as well—until it had destroyed Old Faithful, and so revealed to anyone who knew anything about its kind that somehow a human magician had gained personal and immediate control over power equivalent to a small nuclear warhead. Power and weakness were too attractive a combination to ignore. I’m big and slow, you might say. Come eat me.

How big, and how slow? What could the Phoenix do, and how well could Walden control it? Mark had been testing. And writing reports, probably. Just not the one he claimed he was here for.

All of this was a vague and rather distant set of Oh yes I suppose, unsurprising as Mark fucking Lilly had been unsurprising. It’s how the world works. I didn’t make it that way. But there were reasons, oh there were reasons, why a person might take the job where she would be underestimated and undervalued forever. A fear of boredom, yes. A love of the work. And a certainty: this is what I have done. Here is power, and here are power’s consequences. I can point to them. I can name them. Here is the child who knows today what she did not know yesterday. She will take her knowledge away into adulthood and find her own terrible strength there. Those are her choices. These, circumscribed, limited by ancient stone and crumbling concrete, by time and tradition and school bells and school boundaries—these are mine.

Selves came and went. They grew and grew. You discovered something to be and then you learned how to inhabit it with every inch of your being. And so you became old, and strong, and terrible.

“Sapphire,” said Mark. They were still walking together, ambling along the path that led from the back of Scrubs to the sad little patch of longer grass that had once been the old cricket pavilion. Even now, to her senses, the outlines of a triple summoning array remained burned into the mundane earth here. Twenty years ago, two children had tried to master a power far beyond them. They had got what they deserved. It was a very, very bad idea to enter into a direct contest of magical strength with a higher demon.

“Sapphire?”

The Phoenix turned back to her enemy, encroaching outsider, power-hungry pest. He was a threat to her territory, her school. She understood school as she never had before. It was part of her. She ruled here. She smiled at him.

“I’m afraid not,” she said.