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Then Simon, the Head of Evocation, introduced Lilly Tibbett’s NQT project: a fun new magical sports approach to Year Eight Evocation, with outdoor lessons. Everyone made interested and supportive noises and Walden made another note: refocus the school’s outdoor demon defences next time she tuned up the thaumic engines. Any loose magic attracted demonic attention, and she couldn’t think of anything more likely to produce uncontrolled bursts of magical energy than a gang of middle schoolers doing competitive spellcasting. Then she nodded to Ezekiel, not as Head of Invocation—with only two of them officially in the department, they didn’t need to waste meeting time, they could just email each other—but as senior house staff.

“Just a short one from me,”

Ezekiel said. “A reminder to check the register codes for sorcerers in your lessons. We have seven living in School House at the moment, one at the local primary and the other six Chetwood pupils, and there are a few others in all year groups except the current Year Ten. Remember to use your judgement when you respond to misuse of magic around the school, with these students in particular. Be aware that the youngest ones, especially, often aren’t doing it on purpose. That doesn’t mean be lenient —they need to learn!—but do be kind. And I’ll be running my session on childhood sorcery, what it means, and how it develops at the twilight INSET before half term; if you haven’t heard me talk about it before, this might be a good time.”

‘Sorcerer’ was the current term for the people who had once been called ‘rogues’ or ‘erratics’: people who would find themselves doing magic without ever having been taught any, who attracted demons before they knew what demons were. They were much, much rarer than laymen thought. In Walden’s opinion, most of the children noted as potential sorcerers on the school’s register were probably just reasonably talented to start with and then came from families where they saw other people casting spells. People like Nikki and Mathias—strong, wild magical talents, capable of summoning demons by accident before they ever finished primary school—were rare enough that the dozen or so currently studying at Chetwood, half of them fostered at School House and nearly all of them on scholarships or bursaries, probably made up most of England’s current population of sorcerers under eighteen.

Ezekiel’s update was the last serious point on the agenda. Walden asked for Any Other Business—there was none, of course, and most people’s expressions just said Let me out of here I need to finish my marking— and then said, “Thank you very much, everyone, we’d better stop there,”

a precise two minutes before the bell. “I’ll email the minutes round later. That was our last faculty meeting this half term—it’ll be back to departments in this slot for the next few weeks. And remember—do your risk assessments, check your wards!”

There were still a few chewy, unconvincing school croissants left, so she snagged an extra before heading back to her office across the road in Brewers. Her schedule for the day was rattling through her thoughts. She didn’t see Upper Sixth on a Tuesday, but she did have an arcane safety lesson with 10T before lunch. Write up and circulate those minutes, spend Period One doing emails and an incident report about Old Faithful’s little feint yesterday, and then observe Ezekiel’s Year Eleven. Break, lesson planning, Year Ten early lunch. And then she’d blocked out the afternoon, weeks ago, for a long session working on the thaumic engines. Everything planned and prepared. Everything under control. Nothing could go wrong.

Ezekiel, like most teaching staff at Chetwood, had a classroom that was his. It was one of the things Walden missed most from frontline teaching. Lab Three was her regular lab, but you could hardly personalise an arcane laboratory. Ezekiel’s teaching room felt like his own, with his fountain pens and notebooks on the desk, his laptop jammed into a corner, and a framed photograph balanced precariously on the stationery cupboard: Ezekiel and Ebele outside the chapel with the school choir last Christmas. He was a form tutor in the Lower Sixth, and his tutees had decorated their form noticeboard with a circus theme, featuring their own school-photo headshots stuck onto the bodies of cartoon clowns: all very good-humoured and really only lightly disturbing. They’d stuck a photo of Ezekiel in the middle as ringmaster.

The other noticeboards around the room were looking smart too: middle school posters about philosophy and religious studies, Year Ten Invocation work featuring colourful annotated diagrams of first-order summoning arrays. Walden, arriving before the bell for Period Two, went and peered at that display and discovered it was a few years old. One of the diagrams had Aneeta’s name on it. She wouldn’t point it out. Technically, displays of student work were supposed to be refreshed every academic year, but it was one of the things that always fell by the wayside. Who had the time?

Year Eleven Invocation turned up in dribs and drabs once the bell went, plumping rucksacks on desks and gossiping with each other in little knots. A few of them greeted Walden politely, which was unusually good manners with an adult they did not know well, and boded well for this year group as sixth formers next year. Chetwood’s general standards of behaviour hadn’t been affected as badly as some schools by the pandemic a few years ago—when you locked down a boarding school, it just went on being a boarding school—but most of the day pupils had been pulled out for the duration, and of course a lot of the younger children now coming up through the middle school had been primary schoolers at the time. There was a feeling among the staff that general maturity levels had slipped, a sign of children who’d missed out on key bits of socialisation.

Walden opened up the observation form on her laptop and made a note: good behaviour even before their teacher arrived. A nice set, as Ezekiel had said.

Lesson observations could be very dull. What was wanted at the end was a beautiful A4 page of admiring notes that Walden and Ezekiel could both put in their prof dev folders ahead of the next pay review cycle. After all, there were very few surprises involved in good teaching. Different people had different styles, but the fundamentals were consistent across age groups, across disciplines, across all different kinds of schools: Know your students, and Know your subject. All you could really get from an observation was a handful of ideas for things to incorporate into your own practice: activities, structures, turns of phrase.

Ezekiel arrived, unhurried, two minutes after the bell. He walked into his classroom and was instantly the centre of it. Year Eleven went silent, rapidly pulling out notebooks and tucking away rucksacks under desks, not needing to be told. Walden did a quick headcount: there were twenty of them, a medium-large set for a GCSE in a magical subject. Ezekiel waited in amicable silence until all of them were prepared and watching him, and then said, “Good morning, Year Eleven. Back to the grindstone; we’re carrying on with our magical ethics discussion. Dr Walden is joining us today,”

with a nod in her direction, “as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Let’s get started.”

Walden began her A4 page of admiring notes: Clear routines Ezekiel raised his eyebrows and glanced at the bin in the corner. The luckless Zachariah obediently got up, walked over to it, and spat out his chewing gum. “You’re not off the hook yet,”

Ezekiel said, when the boy got back to his seat. “Better make it good. Anastasia and Connie made good points. How would you disagree with them?”

“Uh, I wouldn’t?”

said Zachariah, attempting a charming smile.

“Try,”

said Ezekiel, good-humoured and patently uncharmed. “Pause, think about it. Everyone else, I want you to think about it as well. Make notes if you need to. I’ll be picking someone else to speak once Zack’s had his turn.”

Walden was busily adding to her observation notes: Use of names, strong questioning technique, praise and encouragement, behaviour management, THINKING TIME, contribution is strongly expected / not a punishment, no one gets to hide. All normal parts of a good classroom discussion, and she did all of it herself, but doing it with twenty fifteen-year-olds of mixed magical and academic ability was a lot more impressive than doing it with four talented Year Thirteens. Ezekiel clearly knew his students extremely well—picking out a confident speaker to start the discussion, getting a quiet one to expand on an established point, identifying minor misbehaviour and immediately correcting and refocusing. Zack took his thinking time and then said, “What about if someone’s unconscious and you’re trying to help them?”

“Go on,”

said Ezekiel. “Why would that change anything?”

“Well—”

The discussion kept going for rather longer than Walden would have allowed if she’d been teaching this topic. The class covered the basic exemptions to the principle of magical consent and from there dove deeper: What about medicine? Does a doctor need your consent to save your life? If a person is unconscious, can you assume they probably would consent to being helped? What if you don’t speak the same language? What if someone has a developmental disability and doesn’t understand what you’re asking? What about age, does that matter? Can a child consent to having a spell cast on them? Can you ?

A forest of hands shot up. By this point in the discussion Ezekiel was barely speaking at all, only glancing around and calling out names, occasionally injecting another question as the class wrestled the last one to a standstill. Walden was starting to pick out names and personalities: Anastasia, a tall blonde girl with a slight unplaceable accent, was loud and opinionated; Alec, a rather overweight boy with long, lank hair, contributed less often but almost everything he did say was very clever indeed; another boy, Ibrahim, loved to argue but seldom thought his point through before he started talking; quiet Connie needed coaxing and encouragement but clearly wanted to join in; Zachariah thought he was funny and was sometimes right—and so on, and so on. Some of these children would become next year’s A-level Invocation set. Walden was already hoping for Alec.

“Very good,”

said Ezekiel at last, cutting the conversation off. Walden glanced up at the clock and saw that it had been nearly twenty minutes. Much longer than she would have spent on the magical ethics topic at GCSE, when really the whole thing could be boiled down to the five bullet points listed in the syllabus. You could just hand them out on a worksheet. But Ezekiel went to the board and wrote CAN YOU USE MAGIC ON A PERSON? Then he drew five blank bullet points underneath, and said, “I want you to boil down the discussion we just had to what you think are our five most important points. You can work with the person next to you, and you have eight minutes.”

Walden got up to peer over shoulders as Year Eleven worked. The atmosphere in the classroom was focused, the conversations nearly all on topic, and Year Eleven were busily deducing the syllabus for themselves, with an air of satisfaction. She went quietly to Ezekiel’s side at the board and murmured, “ Very nice. Socratic, even.”

“I try,”

said Ezekiel.

“Stretch and challenge?”

“Wait for it.”

Walden waited, watching the students scribble their bullet points. As the eight minutes wore on, some of them—mostly the girls—got out highlighters and gel pens and started decorating their notes. Zachariah had finished early and was looking out the window. On her way back to her laptop in the corner, Walden casually read his notebook upside down and saw that although his handwriting was terrible, he had in fact written down four of the five key points he needed. Walden would not usually have trusted such a large group to do this much thinking for themselves. High expectations, she added to her observation notes when she sat down again. Open discussion—above GCSE level. She should teach a GCSE set again. It would be good for her, and it would be fun.

“Yes, Alec?”

said Ezekiel.

Alec put his hand down. “Sir,”

he said, “how are we defining ‘person’?”

“ Good question,”

said Ezekiel. “Expand it.”

“Well—what about animals?”

“Is an animal a person?”

Ezekiel asked.

“An animal could be a person,”

said Alec. “Like a dolphin, or a gorilla. If an animal is as intelligent as a person—”

“Oh, wait, what about aliens ?”

said another boy. “Could you do magic to an alien?”

“Obviously an alien would be a person!”

“Would it, though?”

“But even if an animal isn’t a person,”

someone said over this, “you still can’t just—”

“What if it’s a bug? What if it’s a worm ?”

“You mean like if an alien was a worm—”

“Sir,”

said Alec over all of this, “I was just wondering—”

“Let me ask all of you a question,”

Ezekiel said, and waited until the room was quiet, focused on him. Then he asked, “Is a demon a person?”

Walden looked up from her keyboard.

“That’s what I was wondering,”

Alec said. “Is it?”

And there was silence in the classroom. No one knew the answer. Walden would have been extremely surprised if they did know. The exact nature of demonic sapience was one of the most contested questions in modern invocation. But Ezekiel let the silence stretch—letting them think about it.

“Demons are so stupid, though,”

one girl said.

“Is a stupid person not a person?”

asked Ezekiel.

“Because,”

said Alec—no hand up, this time, and Walden thought he was too absorbed in the question to remember classroom manners—oh, he was going to be a good A-level student—“everything we do in Invocation is about doing magic to demons.”

With demons, Walden thought, but it was a fine distinction. Alec’s point was fair. “And if it’s wrong to do magic to people without their consent, and demons are people, then—”

“But it’s got to be all right,”

objected a small girl sitting near the front, “or you wouldn’t be doing it, sir.”

“Ah yes,”

said Ezekiel, and tapped his clerical collar. “I called up God and had a quick chat about the issue, and he told me it was fine.”

He smiled at the class. “Is that what you wanted me to say?”

Laughter, embarrassment. “Um—”

“Well, this is a question that the GCSE syllabus doesn’t bother asking, but I think it’s a good and important question,”

Ezekiel said. “I could give you a potted summary of my thoughts on the matter, but as it happens, we have someone in the room with us who did a doctorate on this sort of thing. Dr Walden, take the hot seat, help us out. Is a demon a person?”

Walden had been expecting it. She didn’t stand up—this wasn’t her lesson, she wasn’t the teacher—but she leaned forward in her chair, opening up her body language, as the Year Elevens craned their necks to look at her. “It’s a fascinating question,”

she said, which was filler while she rapidly thought through how to pitch what she knew into a useful mini-lecture for a class at this level. “The answer, helpfully, is both yes and no. Demonic personhood is a contested topic, because it ties into the very nature of what demons are, and that is a contested topic as well. Let me ask you all: Is a demon a human being?”

Headshakes, negative murmurs: that was an easy one. “Is a demon like a human being?”

Less certainty this time, but a general no. “I agree,”

Walden said. “A demon is not very much like a human being at all. So is a demon an animal, or like an animal?”

Even more uncertainty. Ezekiel was watching her thoughtfully. Walden answered her own question: “ No, on the whole, is the truest answer; but there are elements of yes as well. Demons are constantly experiencing one of the key pressures of the animal kingdom. In the demonic plane, they are all predators and all prey. Managing an invocation safely becomes much easier and safer when you keep those pressures in mind. Like most opportunistic predators, demons are unlikely to pick fights they are not certain to win. A trained modern magician is too much of a risk for all but the strongest demons, and they can tell; they have a raw sense for magical power and control that goes well beyond the senses we all develop in our magical practice. So to keep yourself safe, you only need to make it clear that the risk calculation of attacking you doesn’t work out in the demon’s favour. Most of the time, they accept that. After all, we have something they want. Our world is a kind of escape for them, a restful alternative to the merciless pressures of their own plane. It’s been argued that a first-order imp that moves itself into a nice safe home possessing a washing machine or a TV remote is engaging in a kind of self-domestication, like cats.”

Year Eleven looked thoughtful. A hand went up to ask a question. But Walden glanced at the clock: no, she couldn’t take up too much of Ezekiel’s lesson on tangents. She gestured hands down —a flattened palm in the direction of the curious student—and asked them all the critical question: “Is a demon alive ?”

“Yes,”

said the young man Alec, decisively.

But one of the others—a sturdy girl with glasses, Walden hadn’t caught her name—said, “No?”

When Walden nodded at her to go on, she said, “Well… MRS GREN, right? Movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion, nutrition —”

GCSE Biology in action; some of the others were nodding thoughtfully. “Demons do some of those, sometimes,”

said the girl, “but they don’t do all of them—do they? Do demons respire? Do they breathe?”

“Only when possessing something that breathes,”

Walden said. “And they don’t reproduce—at all, as far as anyone can tell. Rather, they seem to spontaneously generate in areas of high magical activity. So our answer is in fact both yes and no : demons are and are not alive, because they are life forms—we are fairly sure of that—but they are not biological life forms. In the demonic plane they generally lack physical substance altogether. Demons are magical life forms. They come from magic, and they are made from magic, and they eat magic.”

“Nutrition,”

someone said.

“Just so—but not, as far as we’ve observed, excretion. Magic goes in, it doesn’t come out. Now, obviously the demonic plane, which demons inhabit, is magical in nature. That doesn’t mean that demons are totally disconnected from physical reality. Magic is real, it is measurable, it has meaningful physical effects. But their experience of that reality is by definition nothing like ours. They are not like us . They are much more unlike us than a dolphin or a gorilla. In fact, the most useful imaginative comparison probably is an alien. The key thing you all need to remember is that demons are not social. There is no such thing as demonic family or demonic friends. Because they don’t reproduce, they don’t conduct even the very basic social negotiations that most sexually reproducing animals need in order to produce offspring. Researchers spent centuries trying to learn the language of demons before concluding—fairly recently—that there really isn’t one. Which means that any demon that manages to communicate with us in English is actually doing something terrifyingly intelligent: it’s deducing human speech from first principles, without any help, without any of the underlying brain structures that let us learn language as babies. The first-order imp which seems so very stupid to us is probably, really, orders of magnitude cleverer than any of us could ever be. It’s simply that all that cleverness is being used up on something we have a biological cheat code to handle.”

Year Eleven were truly interested now; some of them had fully turned around in their chairs to watch her speak.

“Demons are not social; they don’t form groups; arguably, ‘demon’ is barely even a useful category. Every individual demon is a species unto itself, and the only thing they all seem to have in common are the predator-prey relationship which they apply without exception to every single other living thing they encounter: demon, human, animal. Some of them share hunting strategies—you might have heard of skinner demons, a subtype of archdemon which turns its prey inside out—but that seems to be a copycat behaviour, not a meaningful relationship. All of which brings us to the personhood question. Is a demon a person? Do we need to treat it as we must, morally, treat other people? If being very stupid doesn’t make someone not-a-person, does it follow that being very intelligent makes someone more a person?”

“If a person is trying to turn you inside out, you don’t have to be nice to them,”

said the opinionated Anastasia.

“Inarguably correct. And—arcane safety—what will all demons do if you let them?”

“Eat your brain,”

chorused the class.

“Good. What I would say, though I’m by no means an expert, is that morality, the right and wrong of how human beings treat each other, is social. Therefore it is very difficult to apply the rules of morality to a totally asocial, totally amoral life form.”

“If it’s difficult,”

said Ezekiel, “does that mean we shouldn’t try?”

Walden gave him a raised eyebrow: What, even I get the Socratic treatment? His grin was a there-and-gone-again flash in his dark face. “I think that’s an individual decision,”

she said austerely. “But do bear in mind the essential principle of all invocation is the demonic contract, which works in exactly the same way as a human contract. ‘I give you this, and in return, you give me that; this we agree, and we promise to abide by the agreement.’ All the spells, arrays, and wardings you are learning are elaborate extensions of that principle. What we offer to demons, as magicians, are slices of physical reality, something which has enormous value to them. And what they offer us is power —which, of course, we must use responsibly. It all operates on that same principle of consent. ‘Here’s what I want, and here’s what I’m willing to give you for it.’ The demon is a willing participant.”

“Though bear in mind,”

said Ezekiel, “that there is almost always a power imbalance, one way or the other. Which makes ‘willing’ a tricky word.”