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Dedication

For A. K. Larkwood

Epigraph

O adolescence, adolescence,

I wince before thine incandescence!

Thy constitution young and hearty

Is too much for this aged party.

–OGDEN NASH

Map

AUTUMN I

chapter one RISK ASSESSMENT

Doctor Walden looked glumly at the form she had to fill in. At the top it said RISK ASSESSMENT.

She’d designed the form herself, in a burst of optimism. They would have fewer accidents if people just stopped to think. It was an unfortunate truth that in the Venn diagram of ‘qualified to teach magic’ and ‘still alive,’ the overlap consisted almost entirely of people who had always been much too sensible to accidentally get eaten by a demon. Walden’s colleagues—in particular, those who were her responsibility, the loosely grouped Faculty of Magic here at Chetwood School—possessed, as a body, an admirable and well-judged lack of imagination. In the three years since she took the post as Director of Magic, she had had someone in her office once a term to weep on her shoulder and say but why would anyone ever—

Some of these people had been teaching for years, and yet they still managed to be surprised by how bloody stupid the average teenager could be, given a group of friends to impress and a fifteen-second video about major invocation that they found on the internet somewhere.

Walden’s innovations in her role as Director of Magic, so far: aggressive, highly specialised content filters on the school network—a project which had given her comrades in arms among the IT staff, and perpetual enemies among the students. Arcane safety refreshers every term for every year group, which bored the pants off the older ones but had in fact improved the incident statistics Walden tracked. And, for the teaching staff, the risk assessment form. It was supposed to lead you gently, bullet point by bullet point, through every enormously dangerous and dim thing your students might decide to do. There was a column for planning what you were going to do when the worst inevitably happened. There was a helpful checklist on the back. There was a colourful box at the bottom with a quick banishment cantrip, a basic shielding charm, and the extension number for the infirmary.