Nikki had adopted Mathias when he arrived at Chetwood, and still seemed to look on him with a kind of mother-hen protectiveness. The powerful foster-sibling bond of School House, and the loneliness that lay behind it, clearly meant something to both of them. As far as Walden could tell, they had little else in common beyond a fierce talent for magic—both of them born with the rare, wild magical ability that would manifest even totally untrained, the talent that Chetwood’s scholarship and bursary funds were dedicated to supporting in one of the few parts of the school’s carefully PR-massaged mission statement that Walden was totally uncynical about. Mathias found theory challenging, but on a good day he was the strongest magician of the four. Unfortunately, his good days were rare.

Last but by no means least was Aneeta Shah, a chubby Indian girl who wore glasses with round frames. Aneeta, alone of the group, was taking a magical course in sixth form as an interesting sideline to her education, rather than the main event. It was a characteristic, very quiet, very intellectual boast that she had chosen the most difficult and least practical arcane discipline to study as an ‘extra’ on top of her A-levels in Maths, Chemistry, and Biology. The A-level Invocation class was tiny compared to Evocation and Instantiation. Most people just found it too difficult. Of course, anyone could learn magic, if they tried, but it was bloody hard work if you did not have the knack, and quite hard work even if you did. Aneeta was not afraid of hard work. Walden saw something of herself in how the young woman approached magical theory, as a complex and fascinating puzzle undertaken for its own sake. Her practicals brought her predicted grade down from the precious, coveted A* to an A. Since she was comfortably expecting A*s in all her other subjects, it was unlikely to hinder her university applications.

As for the other three: Nikki would get the A*. Will was probably capable, but that depended on whether his competitiveness with Nikki overcame his natural laziness early enough for him to do some actual work. Mathias would scrape a B if he was lucky—and that only because in such a small group, with three overachievers as his classmates, Walden felt able to dedicate a fair amount of lesson time to what was effectively private tutoring. A-levels, like the thaumic engines grinding away in the room next to Walden’s suite, were something that more or less worked, had always been there, and would be very difficult and complicated to rebuild from scratch. But every time Walden had a student like Mathias, it was impossible not to be appalled by the unfairness of public exams: two years of work by a determined, complicated, talented young person, reduced to a single brutal letter grade.