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Walden got her cup of tea. The ten minutes she spent collapsed into an armchair in the staffroom having a not very interesting conversation about weekend plans with a German teacher were blissful. Not much. You? Oh, haha, not much —both of them fully understanding the real purpose of the ritual, which was to spend ten minutes being a human person with a name, perhaps some hobbies, and a rich inner life, not Dr This, Frau That.

Of course no one ever really had weekend plans in term time—apart from the chatty group of newly qualified teachers in the corner of the staffroom, who buzzed with the enviable energy of youth. To Walden’s eyes they looked barely older than the sixth formers. Their ringleader, blonde-ponytailed and enthusiastic, was Lilly Tibbett, who was the NQT—a newly qualified teacher—in the Evocation Department this year. Walden, as Director of Magic with oversight of all the magical departments, had sat on that hiring committee. Lilly was a talented young magician with a CV full of scholarships and prizes; almost no actual experience, but you expected that at twenty-three. She had the makings of a good teacher, which was to say she knew her stuff and she was good with people. At twenty-three, the good-with-people was mostly raw charisma, rather than skill, but charisma was a valuable place to start. Her students already called her, lovingly, Tibbs .

“Duty calls,”

said Frau Cole, as the bell went. “My bad Year Tens, so pray for me.”

“Good luck,”

said Walden. “I ought to be in a meeting.”

She had a meeting, and another meeting, and a phone call with a parent, and another meeting, and lunch with colleagues where—naturally—everyone only talked about work; and the Admissions briefing after lunch, and her direct report meeting with the Head of Instantiation, and a one-hour arcane safety single lesson with 7C.

Last on her docket was the weekly two-hour state of play with the site manager.

Todd Cartwright was a wiry man in his sixties whose bald, domed head rose gently through a shoulder-length shock of grey hair.

He had been at the school for forty years, longer than any other member of staff, a Chetwood institution.

His current title recognised what he actually did, and had in fact been doing for years, but before that he’d been called caretaker, handyman, security guard, van driver, and most importantly—and the reason Walden had fought tooth and nail to keep him reporting to her, rather than reorganised into Operations in the most recent shakeup—Keymaster.

The ancient title was as old as the school.

The Keymaster was the keeper of the school’s Great Key.

It locked the outer doors to the chapel, which were traditionally kept open, and the gigantic oaken Chetwood Gate, which was usually shut—with the postern gate open instead—to discourage country ramblers and tourists.

Some people saw the beautiful rolling grounds of a boarding school, charmingly filled with young people doing traditional outdoor boarding school activities, and just could not comprehend ‘private property,’ or indeed ‘you cannot wander around a school in term time taking photographs of the children.’ Yes, Chetwood was absurd, ancient, privileged, beautiful—but to the children who lived here, their school was not an aesthetic.

It was just life.

They had a right to get on with life without being goggled at.

Todd now had a team of friendly security people in high-vis jackets who gently explained this to unwelcome visitors.

He seldom had to bundle people off the site himself.

He still wore the Great Key on a chain around his neck every day.

Keymaster was not just an honorary position.

Walden had once had to explain this at length to a governors’ meeting.

The Victorian thaumic engines in the great room adjacent to her suite looked very impressive and did a lot of work.

But Chetwood had been here much longer than they had.

The school’s ancient boundaries and gateways were part of a much older and subtler set of protections against magical danger, and the Key secured them.

Shouldn’t it be given to a trained magician, then? she’d been asked.

Or perhaps the Chief Marshal?

On paper, perhaps; but Todd had what he called a ‘knack’ and what Walden thought was probably a spectacular untrained talent for magic.

She’d tried to suggest adult lessons, more than once, and the old man always just laughed.

In any case, his nose for the fluctuations of magic around the school grounds was second to none.

Several times now, he’d been the first person to alert Walden to a minor magical security issue before it could grow to a major one.

In the 2003 incursion, more than twenty years ago, he’d been first on the scene, before any of the trained magicians on staff, before the Marshals.

Laura Kenning would probably want to know that, and talk to him about it. Walden put it out of her mind. She’d offered to sort out that session in the school archives. It could wait until then.

Todd was in a glum mood today. He’d been in the boiler sheds all afternoon. “Two years,”

he said. “Two years of life left in those if we’re lucky. And the insulation’s gone to pot. Last time anyone looked at it was in the seventies, far as I can tell. Ten to one we’ll have to get an asbestos crew in.”

“I’m sorry, Todd,”

said Walden.

“Sorry, sorry. It’s not in the budget, they said. Took it to the Bursar, do you know what he told me? ‘Maybe next year, Todd.’ Maybe next year! Well, when those boilers go, we’ll be lucky if it’s a whimper and not a bang. Even if we’re not cleaning up an explosion, I tell you, you’ll still have ice forming up on the inside of your classroom windows all through January. You’re going to need those old fireplaces in your suite, Dr Walden.”

Todd was meticulously hierarchical—Walden suspected him of finding it funny—and refused point-blank to call her Saffy. “Meanwhile the Bursary lot are sitting in their swish offices in the new building counting pennies. The kids’ll be freezing their fingers and toes off over in Scrubs. You can tell ’em it’s a history lesson. Not in the budget! What do they think the budget’s for?”

Walden had some sympathy for the Bursar’s plight, because she’d been in the meetings and seen the spreadsheets.

Chetwood was rich, of course, with its ancient foundation and its hefty school fees.

But it was also poor, because the whole institution was just enormously expensive to run.

A boarding school was an education crossed with a hotel, and in the twenty-first century, the parents who paid eye-watering sums to send their offspring here expected the education to be first-rate and the hotel at least three stars.

Day-to-day running costs, on top of staff payroll, ate up an astonishing amount of those eye-watering sums.

And the ancient and gorgeous school site might photograph beautifully, but almost nothing in it was fit for purpose.

The oldest parts of the school—the chapel, its adjoining colonnade making up the west side of the quad, and the Old Refectory at the other end—were Grade II listed antiquities, part of the original fourteenth-century foundation.

Their cold, stony grandeur went hand in hand with the eye-watering cost of the heating bills.

The other three sides of the quad were a Georgian replacement for a previous collection of sixteenth-century buildings.

The classrooms were cavernous high-ceilinged affairs adorned with classical-ish plasterwork of dubious quality, all exactly the wrong size for twenty-eight desks and a smartboard.

Hugging the back of the chapel was School House, also a victim of nineteenth-century enthusiasm for replacing things.

In the school archives there were some sketches of the original School House, which had been a rather pleasant traditional farmhouse dating probably from Tudor times, with a substantial kitchen garden.

Now it was a red-brick attempt at Gothic fantasia, featuring a small tower which was notable for being out-of-period for every possible period the Victorian architect could have had in mind.

The school had acquired other boarding houses in haphazard fashion over the centuries, naming them after benefactors or patron saints: Kings, St Edmund’s, St Jude’s, Lady Margaret, Brewers, and New House—so called because it only dated from 1904.

The house buildings, mostly erected before the advent of modern plumbing and on the assumption that every student would be male, had become ever more inconvenient and impractical.

In the 1960s a forward-thinking Headmaster had sold them all off except Brewers and New House and used the profits to buy the school a secondary campus, an expanse of former farmland on the other side of the main road into Chetwood village.

There he erected a new boarding house, heavy on the concrete, to house the whole student body.

He named it, grandly, Universal House.

The students called it Wormwood Scrubs.

This had been abbreviated to just Scrubs by Walden’s own time at the school, and Scrubs it remained to this day.

Walden felt very fond of it despite how ugly it was.

After all, she had lived there for most of her adolescence.

She knew that the Bursar also felt very fond of it, because it was one of the few school buildings that didn’t require an expensive specialist in historical construction techniques every time something needed repairs.

With the exception of the seven young sorcerers being fostered in School House—where they had their own bedrooms—all the college’s boarding students lived in single-sex accommodation in Scrubs during term time.

The younger ones slept in dormitories of eight, graduating to smaller groups of four further up the school and double rooms by sixth form.

There was also a substantial minority of day pupils, who lived in the village and in the surrounding countryside.

The names of the old boarding houses had been retained as organisational and pastoral units; every student, day or boarding, was assigned to one.

The younger ones took house sports and the annual house point competition very seriously, though most of them lost interest, or at least felt they were too cool to admit they cared, by Year Ten or so.

Walden’s meeting with Todd ended just after half past four. He’d had nothing of substance to report except that morning’s excitement in the arcane labs, which of course Walden knew about already.

“Key picked it up,”

he said—Todd always attributed his remarkable awareness of Chetwood’s magical fluctuations to the Key, though as far as Walden could tell it had no earthly way to detect anything of the kind—“but I knew you were teaching in there, and I’d already seen Marshal Kenning heading over.”

Walden otherwise got on with Todd very well, but she wished he didn’t have quite so much respect for the Marshals.

“Old Faithful rolling over in his sleep?”

Todd said.

“Something like that,”

said Walden.

The old man gave her a thoughtful look. “Something, all right,”

he agreed. “Bit like the boilers, if you ask me. Better to sort it out before it goes bang.”

By the time Walden got out of her meeting, the school day had officially ended. There were still plenty of people about. She paused for a moment in the colonnade on the west side of the quad. She had barely had a chance to look out the window, let alone step outside, since she had started her working day at half past six that morning.

It was a glorious October afternoon. The light had that peculiar autumnal clarity that made the quad look like an antique print of itself: greens, reds, blacks, a blue and golden sky. The shadow of the chapel’s angular roof cut a neat diagonal across the lawn. A chattering line of students in scarlet uniform blazers snaked out of the door to the tuck shop in the Old Refectory and round the edges of the perfectly mowed green. Half a dozen Year Sevens were playing a game with light spells, evoking beginners’ firework illusions in pink and orange and shouting excitedly as they weaved in and out of the columns of the colonnade. Some Year Elevens walked past in a tight, conspiratorial cluster, giggling about something on a phone. Under the tightly pruned oak tree at the far side of the quad, a pair of sixth formers had claimed a favoured spot—the quad’s only bench—where they were sharing a packet of crisps. The staffroom’s outer door was open on their left, and Walden could see a group of teachers sagging into armchairs and drinking tea. At the doors of the chapel stood Reverend Ezekiel, a tall middle-aged Black man in dark gown and clerical collar. He caught sight of Walden and waved.

Walden waved back. She felt a glow of warmth for the whole scene: the buzzing, noisy, complicated, exhausting, surprising, entertaining, endlessly delightful life of a healthy school. She was well on the way to another sixteen-hour work day, she could feel it—she had marking and lesson planning still to do, there was a faculty meeting to chair tomorrow morning before registration, she needed to set up that session with Kenning and the archivist, spend an hour tuning the thaumic engines, and in fact write her own incident report on Old Faithful’s attempt this morning—but it didn’t trouble her. Walden loved her job. Chetwood was hers and she belonged here, in this place where she did good and meaningful and interesting work every day of her life. What had she spent the last two decades working for, if not this?

She thought of Old Faithful’s shadow bearing down on the arcane lab that morning. Todd was right: if the great demon was stirring, precautions needed to be taken as soon as possible. So Walden would take them. She was expert and unafraid. Come on, then, she thought, watching the children toss dancing lights from hand to hand, the sixth formers flirting, the teachers gossiping, two small birds darting in and out of the branches of the great oak tree. Something bright and sizzling curled in the back of her thoughts, and she folded her arms, making sure to catch the sleeves of her blazer over her wrists. Come on, she thought at the monster in her school’s shadow. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.

Walden was at the shiny, glass-fronted faculty meeting room in the new Bursary building bright and early next morning, early enough that she bumped into Dinah from Catering dropping off the croissants and tea urn. The meeting was due to start at 8 A.M., which gave her half an hour before the official start of the school day to run through an agenda with thirteen items on it. Everyone was going to be yawning and bleary and thinking about their lesson for Period One, and anyone on house duty would already have done Revs—as the first wake-up register of the day was traditionally known—before sending their teenage charges off to breakfast.

She sat at her laptop and gave her colleagues friendly smiles and greetings as they stumbled in and flung themselves gratefully at the tea and croissants. “Morning, Victoria—good morning, Simon—hi, Lilly—good morning—”

“How’s it going, Saffy?”

said Ezekiel, taking the red plastic chair to her right.

“Busy, busy, but I can’t complain,”

said Walden. “Did you get a croissant?”

“Can’t stand the school pastries,”

said Ezekiel. He was wearing his clerical collar, but he’d left off the gown. Tuesday morning, so no chapel service today. He pulled out a notebook and fountain pen ready for the meeting—Ezekiel resented his laptop and used it as little as possible—and said, “Are you still coming by for that observation later?”

Walden had in fact completely forgotten that they’d planned a lesson observation, but she clicked subtly to her calendar and there it was: Period Two, obs Ezekiel Y11 GCSE Invocation. “Of course,”

she said, “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Should be a good one,”

said Ezekiel. “They’re a nice set, and I’m carrying on with the ethics topic.”

Magical ethics at GCSE level was one short-answer question and a box-ticking exercise— Should you summon demons to help you commit crimes, yes or no— well, that was an oversimplification. Not much of one. Walden hid her disappointment—she’d been hoping to see Ezekiel teach something interesting—and glanced up at the clock. Three minutes past eight. “Good morning, everyone!”

she said. “Shall we get started?”

You did not expect a full faculty meeting to be a lively exchange of views. There were too many people and too much to cover. Seven Evocation teachers, four Instantiation, and two—Walden and Ezekiel—to make up the Invocation Department. Walden ran through her agenda as quickly as she could. Magical security reminders: leading, today, with the fact that Old Faithful had stirred on campus again. “Please stay aware and make sure your lab wards and risk assessments are up to date,”

she said. “I’ll be meeting the Chief Marshal for a further assessment later this week. While I’m on the subject, can I remind you all that the Marshals would really appreciate knowing in advance when there’s an elevated chance of demons. If you find yourself teaching an advanced practical that isn’t already noted on the scheme of work for that date, do please drop an email to the Marshal duty address. It makes staffing easier and it means they can get there faster in a crisis.”

Unconvinced expressions around the table—well, academic magicians tended to be dubious about the utility of Marshals. Walden was no exception. But Kenning had been undeniably very good—fast, decisive, effective—during that summoning-gone-wrong yesterday. Very good, and gorgeous.

Oh hush, Walden thought at herself. But she felt positively saintly for passing on Kenning’s tiresome complaint about schemes of work. No one could accuse her of being a problem colleague.

She rattled through the rest of the meeting, reminding Chetwood’s magical faculty about the upcoming exam board consultations, useful conferences, this year’s professional development cycle, the importance of interdisciplinary lesson observations including with our colleagues in academic subjects, and how to report a weakness in the school wards. She handed off to Victoria for a check-in; she was the Head of Instantiation and doubled up as subject lead for the middle school Magic curriculum. Walden had very little to do with the middle school beyond her arcane safety carousel, since no one started formal Invocation until the GCSE course began in Year Ten. Were Years Seven to Nine learning anything? Apparently yes, they were; and Year Nine were coming up to GCSE choices after half term. Early mutterings looked good for the magical departments. Walden made a note to herself to check the date of the Options Fair, which was when either she or Ezekiel would have to sell GCSE Invocation to their department’s potential students for next year. It was a few years since she had taught a GCSE set, but once she lost her current Year Thirteen it might be a nice change of pace to go back to a younger year group.