School and not-school, private and public, and most importantly land and water; The places we belong, Walden might have said to a class, and the places we do not. Magic followed logical, consistent, learnable internal rules—until it did not; until you ran into the woolly edges where everything depended on the perceptions of the magician. It annoyed some students immensely. Walden had always found it delightful: beyond all the rules and systems so carefully worked out by so many scholars over so many centuries, at the boundaries of knowledge, a space full of beautiful mystery.

Mark came and stood next to her on the jetty. To Walden’s surprise, he furled the umbrella. The rain poured down on him, rapidly soaking his hair and face and beading on the shoulders of his Barbour, but he did not seem to mind. “Smell that,” he said. “Clean air, clean water. Does you good.”

“It’s certainly fresh,” Walden said.

A grin, less calculated and the more charming for it. “Bracing,” said Mark, “that’s the word. All right! I brought salt and chalk, but they’d be sluiced away in seconds. Be honest—do you do this to all your new hires?”

“What on earth do you mean?” said Walden, as if she didn’t know.

“Better be a serious magician,” said Mark, “if you want to impress Chetwood’s Dr Walden. Yes, ma’am, right away, ma’am! Just give me a second.” He joined his hands together and stretched them above his head. “You’ll let me off if I don’t get it perfect first time?” he said.

“Well, I—”

Mark punched a portal.

It was pure evocation, no demonic assistance involved. Walden was certain, right away, that he was in fact a specialist evoker, or had been at some point. He had the smoothness and precision of an academic magician, balanced with the confident physical self-awareness of a sportsman. The very best evokers tended to straddle the borderline between youthful athleticism and middle-aged expertise. Mark was probably just over that line. No matter how good you were, you could not sustain the same amount of magical power out of the strength of your own body forever. Mark Daubery, it seemed, had followed a common path—evocation in youth, turning to invocation as he looked down the barrel of his forties.

Evocation teachers teach PE, instantiation teachers teach design and technology, and invocation teachers teach contract law, ran a common faculty joke, and all of us think all the others are stupid and bad at magic.

Mark’s portal was a good one. It hung shimmering in the air at the end of the old jetty, taking the form of an arched doorway with a purplish curtain of raw magic hung across it. Rain fizzed and evaporated off its glowing edges. Mark glanced at her, Well? and Walden had no criticism ready.