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chapter twenty-eight

PHOENIX INDWELLING

You come from a desert. You have a memory, ancient, of soaring on updrafts over unforgiving red country.

You come from small beginnings. You were too small even for memory in the very earliest days. You know that you scrabbled and fought for your right to be. You imagine it in the terms that make sense in this world of motion and matter: the tearing talons, the slashing spurs.

You have grown old and strong and terrible. You have chosen a place in the world and made it your own. It is a good place. You know this word, ‘good.’ It is a safe place. You have learned this concept, ‘safe.’ You understood it first and best for yourself: but you are too old, too strong, and too terrible ever to be safe. There is a punishment for triumph, a punishment for victory, a punishment for ascension. Now you have these things, you must defend them forever.

Your safe place had a previous inhabitant, a mighty old bottom-feeder already rotting in his shell. You knew he was there. You concealed yourself, waiting. When he tried to strike, you arose in flame and cast him down. He was very stupid. Imagine being so stupid! But of course you were also, once, very stupid. The thing that soared on wings of fire knew the joy of great power, but not the purpose. It was enough, in those days, just to exist.

You are older, wiser, better than that. You have climbed past ‘exist’ and ‘endure’ and ‘succeed,’ past the hunger and the contest. You have chosen a self to become. You have examined, in memory, several articles on educational psychology, including a number of colourful triangle diagrams of progression, and so discovered that you are at the top of the pyramid. You are, in fact, self-actualising! Well done!

You are proud of this achievement. Very few of your kind has ever done anything like it. You become increasingly sure that all of them have struggled, all along, for nothing else. What a privilege to be human! What a wonder to be mortal! What an extraordinary world, bound by matter and motion, in which to move through space and time in your little sack of water and meat just doing things. Doing things for reasons . Repairing the trivially obvious damage to the thaumic engines, to secure the borders of mundanity for the humans—the other humans; you belong here now—what a treat! Reading all the dusty books on your office shelves, late into the night, to learn what is written inside them: what a remarkable delight!

Discovering that the body goes peculiar without sleep: discovering sleep schedules, and then, as an extension—a new amusement, a new amazement—discovering just what bad care you have been taking of yourself. Why do you have bottles of poison in your cupboards? ( It’s quite nice gin and it was a gift so please don’t pour it down the—oh, never mind; you ignore all such mutterings in your thoughts.) Why do you only eat the canteen food—didn’t you know you could get your own ingredients and cook them yourself? Why don’t you ever seem to move ? This body can climb; this body can swim; this body can run, and run, and (ow ow ow ow ow…)

A self is a home is a purpose is a life. You know. You have all these things now.

You are the speck who rose in the desert to become the prince of air and fire. You are also Dr Sapphire Walden. In all your years of scholarship and teaching, you have never, ever, ever been this enthusiastic about getting your marking done. This sort of thing by itself, says the caustic voice in your thoughts as you cheerily work through your lunch break on a set of A-level practice papers, should really be enough to let everyone know you aren’t human.

You take another bite of the poached egg and spinach on homemade sourdough you fixed yourself before you sat down, and ignore her.

I can’t believe you bake your own bread, she says.

She is obviously just jealous. You are so much better at being her than she ever was.

A classroom. You patrol the classrooms constantly. This is your territory; nothing here is secret from you. Desks pushed together in a cluster, the lever arch folders spread out. Magical notation blooming across the whiteboard in black marker and red. “Hello, squad,” you say. “Revising?”

Squad, team, everybody, you lot, Upper Six you have a wide array of these gender-neutral group addresses in the precious vaults of memory, and you take some pleasure in selecting the correct level of formality against warmth for each situation.

They look at you. A speaker for the group is silently elected: Aneeta, sensible and academic, unblemished good behaviour for seven years straight, ideal teacher-wrangler. “I hope it’s okay if we use the classroom,” she says. “We’ll clean the board afterwards.”

Technically they should be in the library or the sixth form common room, but school is surprisingly low on suitable spaces for small study groups, and you know the value of such work. Aneeta and Nikki urge each other on; both of them show care and support for Mathias; Will is pricked to competitive industriousness when Nikki is there. You are satisfied by these calculations, this knowledge. You gesture approval. “Feel free. I trust you lot.”

Will sits on a desk, long legs in black jeans swinging, holding his pen unmoving against a propped-up notepad. Nikki’s eyes are deep and dark and watchful. Mathias hunches in his chair. Even now, eighteen years old, three weeks before the A-level examinations begin, he has a fearful child’s reaction to unexpected adult attention. You smile on them benevolently. Benevolence is another thing you have learned, a function of your new selfhood. You are an enormously benevolent teacher.

“Good luck,” you say. “Work hard! Do let me know if you need help with anything.”

Aneeta breathes out hard when you’re gone. You could know this, if you chose to, but your attention has moved on. Children are only children. They are within your territory but not part of it; you abide by this principle as a concession to your host. She has no power to restrain you, but she becomes very irritating if you act in a manner inconsistent with the statutory guidance annually published by the government under the title of Keeping Children Safe in Education.

Will says, “So—”

“Shh,” hisses Nikki, eyes on Aneeta, who is positioned between the board and the doorway, neatly placed to watch for movement in the corridor.

After a moment, Aneeta nods. At the same time, Mathias straightens up from his miserable crouch over the desk. His acne is finally starting to clear up. He’s been trying a different cleanser.

“So,” says Will again. “Are we really sure we aren’t imagining it?”

“We’re not imagining it,” says Mathias, with the absolute certainty of a boy whose dreams have been haunted by the whispers of eager, encroaching demons since he was three years old. Some mortals lie closer to the edge of worlds than others. Some holes in the heart cry out to be filled.

“Yeah, no,” says Nikki, who—like you—wears a mask every day. Who, like you, was born for power. She puts her hand on Mathias’s arm briefly. You would have a hard time making sense of this particular mortal gesture. You have decided that the non-professional social aspects of your new existence are a low priority. After all, she hardly troubled herself with them. “Okay. Pen me.”

She holds up her other hand. Aneeta throws the red board pen she is clutching. A bad throw, but a good catch. Nikki stands up. All unknowing she holds the perfect attention of the other three. She has different selves for every person in this group—dearest-friend, longed-for-beloved, almost-sister—but those selves are all secondary to the one she assumes naturally and without thinking, which is leader .

She wipes the board clean of revision notes with her sleeve, and starts to write out instead the plan that has slowly consumed her evenings over the last several months. She has taken her time and done her research. She does not intend to make the same mistake twice. You have known doctoral candidates less thorough and less careful. The red pen is swapped out for a black to sketch an array, and swapped back to red for annotations. Mathias makes a small sound. Nikki interprets it as a stifled criticism—he is so afraid, Mathias, of criticising anyone—and says, “Yeah, okay. Will can do the drawing, then.”

Will gets up, obedient, and takes the black pen. Nikki is still writing out arcane notation with the red.

Aneeta has taken a seat on a wobbly plastic chair. She does not notice herself shifting her weight, shifting, shifting, making the bad leg creak. May sunlight is streaming through the classroom windows and gleaming off her glasses as she frowns at the whiteboard. In the corridor, a loud giggle suddenly stifled, as two middle schoolers who should not be out of lessons scamper past on some teacher’s errand. Everyone jumps and looks at the door, but no one comes in. No lesson is scheduled in here until after lunch.

Nikki sets the red board pen down on the empty teacher’s desk. Will completes the fourth layer of the array design with a flourish. Four layers, for the size of demon they suspect they are dealing with, representing the groundwork of an exorcism and a banishment. It is not a live array; there is no magic in it yet, and if they actually go through with this, they will need to make it much, much bigger. Which means they need a space to work in, and time. Challenging requirements, for four teenagers three weeks away from public exams, trapped by the rules and constant registration requirements of a boarding school. You could advise them, based on your own experience. You could say, The cricket pavilion in the middle of the night worked well for us.

“Would help if we had a fifth,” says Will after a few moments of silence—awed silence, worried silence, the silence of people who cannot believe their own audacity—“to hold the last point of the pentagram. Are any of the Year Twelves good? Or we could ask someone from Evoke. Harry or somebody.”

“Or,” says Aneeta, abrupt and sharp. The wobbly chair leg goes clunk as she draws herself up straight. “Or…”

Will snorts. Nikki says, “No, I’m listening.” Mathias looks down at the desk. Alone of the four, he has no actual revision notes in the lever arch folder in front of him. He knows he has left it very late. He is starting to panic, and the panic has frozen him. You should really have caught this and had a reassuring chat with him by now.

“Or, I’m just saying,” says Aneeta, “we could tell an appropriate adult what’s happening, let them sort it out, and focus on our exams.”

Will rounds on her. “We are adults,” he snaps. “We’re eighteen, okay, we’re fucking grown-ups, we’re magicians . It’s up to us now. Niks has been working so hard on this, do you even realise? And we’re the people here . We’re the ones who can do this.”

“Maybe,” says Mathias softly.

“Who do we tell?” Nikki says. “Who haven’t we tried?”

Children are only children. They are not part of your territory. You do not rule them. But the staff are another matter. Your dominion over their minds is subtle and absolute. You have sunk yourself into the system of Chetwood School, and institutions have powerful hooks; the contract of employment is as binding as any summoning array. Sometimes the Headmaster will stare into the modern fireplace in his nice house in the village with a half-grimace drawing lines on his brow. Over the Easter holidays, during their two-week escape, a few people remarked to partners or friends, “It just doesn’t seem like a happy staffroom at the moment… I don’t know, I might start looking.”

But it is too late in the academic year to start seriously looking. They will check the Times Educational Supplement job postings over summer, but they will be back in September. They will forget soon afterwards that they ever wanted to leave. The TES alerts will sit unopened in their inboxes.

(A junior Spanish teacher went home to Madrid over Easter and did not come back. She gave no explanation to the school. Her department, covering her timetable, are all very annoyed.)

Upper Sixth have tried:

Matron—her headshot and email address and exhortations to come to her with any worries are posted all over the school. Nikki and Mathias sit down to dinner with her at the family table in School House three times a week, and bow their heads politely for grace, though neither is a regular attendee at chapel. She is a good listener. She did not hear a word they said.

Reverend Ezekiel—the only person apart from yourself qualified to teach an A-level in Invocation, and indeed the teacher of the current Year Twelve set. An ideal person to tell about any demonic suspicions. But he will not hear them now.

The new Chief Marshal—who sent them away; who seemed surprised to be spoken to by children.

Nearly every individual teacher in the magical departments, even as far as Miss Tibbett, whom Aneeta thinks seems nice and enthusiastic and whom Will scorns as Yeah but I don’t rate her, do you?

The school counsellor. Their form tutors. Their teachers in other subjects—Aneeta, darling of the Chemistry Department, has very good relationships with all her academic mentors. The rowing coach, the Head of Sixth Form, the Head of Careers. Mr Cartwright the site manager, which was Mathias’s idea, and which came closest to succeeding: he was the only one so far who even seemed to be listening.

The Headmaster, which was nerve-racking, and just as pointless as all the others.

They have not tried to tell Will’s uncle, the impressive Mr Daubery. He has not been seen at Chetwood in months. As a matter of fact, no one on the school site—not even Will—remembers that he ever existed.

“I know no one in school is listening,” says Aneeta. “So what if… not school?”

“We’ve been over this,” says Nikki. Phones suddenly have no signal. Emails return error messages. It is your nature to dwell in systems, and so these systems are not secret from you. Nothing seems to work.

“It’s not letting information out,” Aneeta says. “But it might let us out.”

A pause.

“I’m out of exeats,” says Will.

“I wasn’t saying let’s ask permission .”

“Sorry, I assumed because you basically always sound like you’re saying Let’s ask permission— ” Touchy, embarrassed.

“Will,” says Nikki, and it quiets him, unless that’s her hand on his shoulder, which he glances at with the terrified wonder of a person encountering the rare and exquisitely beautiful in its natural habitat. To Aneeta, she says, “And go where? Your parents?”

Aneeta displays a website on her phone, a mar.gov.uk website. The phone is in a blue leather case. There is a neat little incursion ward scratched into the case with the back of an earring; this phone will never acquire an invading imp. It’s a shame you’ve never noticed this, because it is such a simple, obvious, and intelligent solution that you should have insisted on it for the whole school years ago. But then Aneeta is truly, remarkably, blissfully sensible. The you-that-was would shower her in the accolades that barely mean anything to a Year Thirteen this late in the game—the house points, the school prizes, the mention in assembly—for being the only one of these brave idiot children to remember the very first rule of keeping themselves safe: Tell a trusted grown-up.

“Mum and Dad are too busy to be much use,” she says. “No, we should go straight to the Marshals. Because when the big one—” She stops. She is not a coward. She looks at Nikki. “When Old Faithful tried to break through,” she says, “it was Marshal Kenning who went in, wasn’t it? So if we want someone who understands… we want Marshal Kenning. I did some research and I think she’s in London, at the Brixton chapter house. It’s on the Victoria Line.” She waves the phone screen at them again as proof.

Mathias unhunches. He is almost unaware—they are all almost unaware—that he is actually the tallest of the four. “Yeah,” he says suddenly, urgently. “ Yeah . Because of the—”

He loses the word he wants. A hopeless hand gesture is all that takes its place. Think it through, take your time, you would say, if you were teaching this lesson. You are not there now. Anything you have taught them, they will have to apply by themselves.

“Because woo I have such magicky feelings , right,” says Will, and then—to everyone’s surprise including his own; maybe it’s because Nikki is there—“sorry, Matty, I’m a dickhead. You’ve got something, haven’t you.”

Mathias is starting to sink back into himself again, but he nods. “There’s a thing,” he says. “There’s like a—a thread. Sorry. It’s probably woo.”

“No, it’s not,” says Nikki decisively. “Tell us.”

“Like a—line,” Mathias says. He struggles, struggles, for technical vocabulary. You set them tests on this in Year Twelve. The terminology of academia may seem like an obstructing wall of jargon—and sometimes, perhaps, it is—but far more often than that, it is a set of keys. You cannot understand the forces you are dealing with, still less wield them meaningfully yourself, unless you have the words to set around them. The language of power is the handle on the knife.

Mathias wrestles his way through sentences like a person hip-deep in mud. He has an enormous, near-demonic instinct for how magic moves in the world, and a predicted C grade in his theory paper. It speaks well of the others that they listen with patience to his halting jumble of words. Of course, they know him well; they know that his ‘woo magic feelings,’ as Will terms them, are seldom without merit. After all, they are students at a boarding school together. They might as well be crewmates on a starship, or inmates in a jail. It is a profound, compelled, inescapable intimacy.

At last Mathias hits on the word that unlocks his perception for the rest of them: “—like a binding —”

“Like an oath,” says Nikki. “You mean a geas—an oath .”

She is the fisherman killing his catch. She takes her foster brother’s blurted mess of inchoate sensations and knocks it hard against the table; from ungraspable blur of watery light to a clear and definite fish. She looks satisfied with the achievement. “You’re sure?”

Aneeta is flipping through her folder. “When was the oaths topic? No, I’ve got it.” Fingers moving rapidly across the neatly mind-mapped summary page.

“Who’s she sworn an oath to?” says Will.

You are back in your office. You are working. You are always working. If your colleagues thought you were married to the job before—and they did—they are baffled by you now. She’s on a health kick, they say, watching you run circuits of the rugby pitches in the long hours of the early summer evening, when the low sun hangs fat and pale in the cloudless bowl of the sky. I don’t know how she does it. Afterwards, you go back to your flat and shower, and curl up on the sofa, and read articles on educational theory. You are learning so much.

You check your phone, as you do every evening. There is a message from your older brother, unanswered. (What on earth does he want?) There are alumni newsletters in your seldom-touched personal email—Oxford, Stanford, one from Chetwood full of small pieces of news you already know. There is, known only to yourself, an exquisitely perfect little cage of spellwork knotted through the phone’s processor, containing a solitary imp. The imp is silent, cowed, terrified. You have attempted to explain that you regard it as a junior employee, or possibly a pet cat, and either way have no intention of eating it alive, but it is much too small and weak and stupid to understand. Be sympathetic. You were the same, once.

You bite the underside of your own wrist to draw blood. You feed the imp. The scarlet smear on the phone screen disappears quickly. You slap a fresh plaster over the repeated marks of your own teeth. The pain does not bother you. Your other self expresses mingled horror and resignation, but this is what she always does, so you do not find it interesting.

You work until 10 P.M . with a twenty-five-minute break for supper. You are in bed with the lights out at a sensible quarter past ten.

Your other self is trying not to keep you awake. Your other self is trying not to think. You know everything she knows; you are her. But she knows a lot of things, and with the magnificent feast of her education and her career spread before you, she is hoping you will not turn your attention to those matters filed under romantic, social, personal . She never prioritised those things anyway. There is not much there to interest you.

So she lies quiescent, as she has for months, unable to twitch so much as a finger while you sleep the satisfied sleep of a mortal body well fed and exercised. Perhaps in your dreams of wind over the red country you hear a distant voice: Oh fuck Laura I’ve been so stupid. Laura please you have to know. No one else knows.

Help me. Help me. Help me.