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You know, or can know, everything that happens in your territory.

Its boundaries are the boundaries of Chetwood School: to the lake, to the woods, to the high garden walls where former boarding houses were sold off to become detached six-bedroom character-property London-commutable mansions, to the ancient hedgerows that mark the boundaries with farmers’ fields of wheat and sugar beet and blooming yellow rapeseed.

There is a ribbon of tarmac blindness through the middle of your world, but the tendrils of your power extend over it, especially around the CAUTION SCHOOL zebra crossing.

These days, drivers cutting through country lanes to dodge traffic on the A1 do, in fact, find themselves exercising caution because of the school.

A miracle.

You know, through your extended web of defensive perception, when Years Ten to Thirteen troop en masse down the road to Chetwood village on Sunday.

A few teachers go along to supervise the ritual of the day out.

On this lovely sunny May weekend, they are mostly supervising from a big table with a green parasol in front of the pub, and though they are in loco parentis, they don’t see that as any reason to resist a pint.

Meanwhile the students slope around on the green, and hang around in the pub, and take up every table in the Chetwood Caff (cheap) and the Village Sweetheart Tea Shoppe (expensive), as well as most of the picnic tables round the back of Mutchins’ Garden Centre and Dahlia Nursery.

Occasionally a little murmur of displeased town-and-gown hostility stirs in the village—there are a lot of teenagers, and they do make the place look untidy—but you have delivered your share of stern Respecting Our Community assemblies, and the locals running the shops know which side their bread is buttered.

Very few of these children blink at paying nearly twenty quid for a burger and chips with coleslaw left uneaten on the side, and then using the change to stuff themselves with local-farm-shop ice cream from the big freezer at the garden centre.

Once Year Thirteen have their IDs, they positively throw money at the Red Lion in exchange for overpriced alcopops.

It’s important, after all, to feel grown-up.

You have not been down to the village yourself in some time.

You are inflexibly territorial.

You will not leave your school.

You are not paying attention when four eighteen-year-olds catch the London train.

They are honestly surprised by how easy it is.

They assumed they would be in trouble; they assumed they would be stopped.

But the station—a quiet country station, not on a main line—is not staffed.

They have all dutifully purchased the correct tickets from the machine, and when the guard comes past, further down the line, he will hesitate a moment over how shifty Mathias looks but ultimately decide that it’s not his problem as long as the kids have paid.

Your webs of perception do not extend as far as London. You have seen London, and it does not appeal to you: too big, too ill-defined, too difficult to control and call your own. You have found your place, and you intend to stay here for a long, long time. So you do not have even an inkling of how much danger you are in until evening registration, when it finally becomes obvious that four sixth formers have slipped the net and no one noticed.

This is a very, very, very big problem when your institution has legal and professional responsibility for the safety of those sixth formers. Now Upper Sixth Invocation are in trouble—big trouble. Now there are frantic phone calls going out to parents and to authorities, and friends and classmates are being interrogated to no avail, and ordered to place their own calls and send their own messages. In the big house in Kensington where no one else is home—Aneeta’s parents are hardly ever home, and the cleaners only come on Tuesdays—she takes out her phone in its warded blue case and grimaces at the screen of notifications.

You are frantic. Not because you are in danger (you are powerful, you are confident, why would your first assumption be danger?) but because they might be. The self you have become cannot bear it. It is a shocking downside to your new existence. You have never found anything unbearable before. You have never worried. You have never cared.

No, you don’t expect danger, even now.

You don’t sleep. The body, worried about missing children, refuses to obey your will. You did not know bodies could do that.

You have forgotten all about the oath sworn between magician and Marshal, months ago: If I fail, I submit myself at once to the judgement of the Order of Marshals and especially to the Chief Marshal Laura Kenning.

Magical oaths sworn between human beings are old magic, messy and vague and unsatisfying magic, a few sentences in the A-level syllabus. But there is a power in them which even a higher demon cannot resist. It is the power of the promise. The contract. Because no matter how carefully the forces of magic have been meticulously pinned down to scientific principles by the European academic tradition, magic is not science. Little as magicians like it, it can be divorced from logic, skill, and expertise. It can find its way through whatever tools come to hand, through coincidence and potential, through human perception and human connection.

Most serious academic magicians ignore this sort of thing—partly because it is hard to exploit, and partly because it makes them uncomfortable.

By this oath I lay my fate in her hands. If the Phoenix wakes, she shall know of it, and she shall be granted all power to act.

There is no how. There is no when. But there is a binding, full of force. You have slipped all other jesses. You cannot slip from this one.

It is the middle of the night. A demon is loose on the world.

The Marshals are coming.

Here is the knight in shining armour. ( Only the Head of the Order gets the knighthood, actually, she might say, wry, adjusting her rune-engraved vambraces.) Here she rides on her noble steed. ( She’s a Kawasaki Ninja H2, I picked her up second-hand —which does not refute ‘noble steed’; Laura Kenning really likes her bike.) She has come alone. You wouldn’t have expected that. It doesn’t make sense to come alone.

You know she is there the moment the motorbike turns off the road onto the old lime avenue. You are vibrating with wakefulness and worry. Your first feeling is relief, tremendous relief, born—you do not think of this—from the host. Feeling comes from the body and stakes insidious claims on the will. Feeling still confuses you a little. You—you! A demon of the tenth order! The prince of air and fire!—you don’t think She has come to kill me . You think Maybe she knows where the Upper Sixth have gone.

Marshal Kenning does not come straight for you. She goes to the Keymaster first. Old Todd Cartwright, up late at night watching the sinking ashes of the fire in the ancient groundskeeper’s cottage that he has made a snug little home. The polished Great Key of Chetwood is hanging from its chain on a peg beside the fireplace. He answers the knock and looks, for a moment, baffled. “Chief Marshal Kenning?” he says.

And then—just like that, in that moment of confusion, surprise, and sharp awareness—you lose him. Todd Cartwright, with his extraordinary natural sense for magic, trained not in a classroom but in four decades of practical work, is old and strong and deep in the heart of this place. It was his territory first. You are not the only being ever to look at Chetwood School and decide to stake your self entire on There is something good here, there is something worth having, and I have claimed it for my own.

Todd knows what is happening at Chetwood now. He will not unknow it again. You must either accept this threat to your power or destroy him utterly. Hairline fractures will appear through the middle of your new-forged selfhood either way.

“I was there when we dragged her out of Old Faithful’s teeth the first time,” he says, wasting no time on amazement or horror at the revelation he just experienced. “She was a good kid, you know. You don’t forget the good kids. Think you’ll get her out alive?”

“I don’t know,” says Kenning. “I’m going to try.”

“Where’s your squad?”

“They wouldn’t get her out alive,” Kenning says. “Too difficult. Marshals prioritise the innocent bystanders, not the magician who caused the problem.” A faint grimace. The Marshals, as a matter of policy, are probably right. If your sworn duty is to defend the mortal world from demons, you are not obliged to feel much sympathy for those people who—intentionally or not—go around poking demons with sticks. Kenning herself does not feel a great deal of sympathy for the predicament of a possessed magician. She is acting against her own principles tonight. The trap of human feeling works as well on a mortal will as a demonic one.

“What do you need me to do?” says the old man.

“It’s got itself in deep,” Kenning says. “Something that big needs a big system to live in.”

“It’s got the whole bloody school,” says Todd. “That’s its system.”

What you actually have is several intersecting layers of complex identity-shaped spaces, one of which is—of course—the blood and bone and water and meat of Sapphire Walden’s body; another is the mental construction, I, which she has spent nearly forty years building out of personal history and social class and multiple university degrees; a third, as Todd has immediately perceived, is the highly regulated and coherent physical-social-historical institution of Chetwood School—unprecedented, for a demon to possess something so abstract, but you are not an ordinary demon, and you know very well that abstracts are still real . A fourth space you have made for yourself, for good measure, is knotted all the way through the almost absurdly welcoming tangle of mechano-magical protections built by well-intentioned Victorians to keep you out.

(There is a fifth, as well. The fifth is a secret you are carefully keeping from yourself. To possess Walden alive you have to be Walden; therefore you cannot think too hard about the things you are doing which she would never, ever do.)

These together make a highly secure set of footholds. Rooting you out of the world will be near-impossible without the destruction of at least one of them. Of the obvious four—body, mind, institution, machine—the body is by far the easiest to kill.

Laura knows all this. So does Todd. Neither of them has any formal qualification in academic magic, but by the estimation of demons—based on what is powerful, not what is measurable—both of them are pretty good magicians.

“I’m going for the thaumic engines,” she says. “It’ll have its claws in there. My best guess is I’ll need to take them down completely to have any chance of knocking it out of her. The school’s older defences are pegged to that key of yours, aren’t they? How long do you think they’ll hold without the modern stuff?”

Todd sucks his teeth. “Hard to say, hard to say. Depends who’s holding it. Well.” He lifts the key on its chain off its peg by the fireplace and drapes it round Laura’s neck. “There you go.”

She frowns. Todd is already retrieving, from its place of honour on the table by the front door, his personal toolbox. It is a battered heavy-duty black case with a faded set of stickers on the side—Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Motorhead—and a lovingly polished steel handle. It represents an investment of years of time, money, and expertise. There is a much more extensive array of tools in the workshop conversion at the back of this old cottage, but in here lies the core, the heart, the river-channel his magic flows through. These things to him are keys to power, much as salt and chalk and the principles of arcane annotation are keys for you.

“You’ve never set foot in that engine room, Marshal,” he says, pre-empting Laura’s protest. “You can’t just go in and start smashing things willy-nilly. You’ll never do enough damage before she gets there. That old key looks after itself, mostly. You’ve got the knack, haven’t you? Just let it lead you along and it’ll tell you where you need to be.”

“Mr Cartwright,” says Laura, “I can’t let you put yourself in danger this way.”

The old man snorts. “Girl half my age tries to stop me from doing my job,” he says. “There are kids here, you know.”

…

Now you begin to know your danger. What do you do? Which way do you go? It would be trivially easy to step through the door in your flat’s living room and lie in wait for Todd’s arrival with toolbox and sabotage in hand. And kill him, and eat him . The old man you have known since you were a child. The first one on the scene, that night when Charlie died.

You were never a child.

You go on the hunt. Your enemy, your huntress, your oathbound opposite— that is the threat. Once she is gone, the danger will be over. Then you can secure your territory at your leisure.

Laura’s not stupid, so— but this thought in the back of your mind abruptly cuts off, and the little voice of a failed self starts humming an irritating advertising jingle instead. You ignore it.

It is two o’clock in the morning. You are still dressed in your daytime clothes: the body, the stupid body, would not sleep for worrying about lost children. You step into the first footwear you see, which is the green Wellington boots. It is a May evening, so you take no coat or blazer. Thus attired in smart blouse and A-line skirt and a brooch from your grandmother’s jewel box, in 15-denier tights with a ladder climbing up the thigh and in slightly muddy old boots, you set out to answer the last oath that binds you.

You are going to kill Laura Kenning.

Your eyes are alight with sorcerous balefire. Your hair and fingernails glow gold. The red-and-black outlines of tattooed spellwriting stand out stark on your arms under semi-translucent white sleeves. You look like what you are: a demon in human form.

You hunt.

…

Laura Kenning is eyeing the old key Todd handed her with some doubt. “The chapel?” she murmurs. “The big gate?”

Good guesses, both. Six hundred years ago they would have been the right guesses; there is a reason that those are the physical doors this key can unlock. But the institution endures the same way anything stays alive: by changing. The school boundaries spread past the great oaken gate decades ago. And how many people really go to chapel these days?

It feels like instinct that nudges at her, but Laura is too canny to trust anything that feels like instinct when it comes to magic. “Are you possessed, I wonder,” she mutters to the Great Key as she hangs its tarnished chain round her neck. Another good guess, but there is no demonic intelligence ruling this territory save yourself. You would have noticed a rival. “Where’s the middle of it, then?”

Where is the heart of a school? Every child will give you a different answer; every adult a different answer again. Is it in the warren of classrooms, the underground maze of wire lockers, the all-encompassing social world of the quad and lunch hall and tuckshop? Is it in the staffroom, the departmental offices, the Victorian school hall with its rows of battered benches? Is it on the rugby pitches and netball courts, or lurking amidst the ancient glamour of the mediaeval colonnade, or buried in the concrete-and-scaffolding dormitories? Perhaps there is no physical heart at all, no centre, nothing so solid; just a weight on the imagination, a dream-picture of green and gold and innocence, the lofty goals of scholarship and humanity mixed together with the sound of children’s laughter, a place of power made safe from the wicked world—

Perhaps it’s a memory. Perhaps it’s a hope. Perhaps it’s an adult’s blind fantasy. Perhaps it never existed at all.

But to you, Chetwood radiates out from a single fixed point. It is the place where all realms cross: magical and mundane, child and adult, eternal and devastatingly mortal. It is the place you began to learn life’s hardest lesson, the one you have not yet finished understanding. It is the place where consequences came for you.

Twenty years ago they planted a birch tree in memory of Charles Green. It grows here still. It will grow here, most likely, for longer than Charlie himself would ever have lived. Is the tree a reasonable replacement for the boy? He was not a particularly special boy. Few mourned him; few remember him. Others like him have lived and died largely unremarked. Realistically, the two of you would have broken up by the end of your first year at Oxford—probably, honestly, by the end of Michelmas term. As romances of early adulthood go, the master-magician Rosalind Chan was far more significant to the person you eventually became.

And yet. And yet.

You get there before Laura does. This is your school. You wait at the end of the pathway past the birch tree, standing half in the demonic realm and half in mundanity—the two blur, for you, and will increasingly start to do the same for anyone else who gets too close to you, which is a fascinating magical development and also a safeguarding issue. Have you thought, Phoenix, of what you will do if you ever become a danger to the children despite yourself? Have you realised, Phoenix, that this is already happening?

You belong here. You don’t belong here. You are the lord of this realm. You are a nightmarish invader from a hellworld you have longed to escape since you knew ‘escape’ existed. You are the prince of air and fire. You are a prisoner in a scholar’s cage of ink. You are the Phoenix, and you are Saffy, Sapphire, Walden, Doctor, and you are a fairly ordinary middle-aged woman in muddy boots.

You wait for Marshal Kenning. The burnt and blackened outlines of a twenty-year-old summoning array are scored into the earth. They glow dimly red through the neatly mown grass under your feet.

Here she is.

“Hello, Laura,” you say.

(Walden sees: she looks tired. She’s got her vambraces strapped on, her sword in her hand, and her swordbelt slung around her hips, but she’s not wearing her Marshal whites. She needs a haircut.

As it grows out of the short back and sides, her cropped fair hair is developing a little curl, right at the collar of her leather jacket.)

“Let’s not do this, demon,” says the Marshal. “We both know what’s happening here.”

“Actually, only one of us is really an expert,” you say. “Sorry. I don’t want to rub it in, but when it comes to serious magic, there is a substantial, meaningful difference between someone like you and someone like me.”

“She wouldn’t say that,” Laura says.

“Perhaps not. But she would think it.” You smile. “Did you know that?”

(Walden is cringing. Walden is dying . Yes, all right, so she can be a little—as Nikki pointed out all the way back in January, sometimes one’s worldview can be blinkered by—that doesn’t mean she really thinks she’s better than—well obviously she is in fact better than most people at specifically the skills she has spent her life mastering, but—)

Laura snorts. “I knew that.”

( I have enormous professional respect for you as a magical practitioner as well as considerable personal respect for you as a human being! Walden thinks as loudly as she can. She can almost see the eye roll she would earn in return, the little smile. Calm down, Saffy .)