Sloppy, the Phoenix opined. There, and there. It meant the array diagram. Will had let the exam rush get to him, and drawn it too fast; it was obvious that he knew what it was supposed to look like—his paragraph of explanation was all correct—but if he’d tried actually summoning a demon with what he’d drawn …

I’d eat him up, the Phoenix agreed.

Walden marked the diagram with a red cross, and circled the errors. For a comment, she just wrote, Can you identify the issue here? Will’s arcane notation was normally excellent, so this was an error of carelessness, not ignorance; he could fix it himself, and would, once he knew the mistake was costing him easy marks.

The paper at the bottom of the pile was the real test, because it belonged to Mathias. Walden always left him to last. Doing the most able students’ work first gave her a stronger sense of what a good paper looked like and what comments would actually be useful. Mathias was really struggling at the moment, end-of-term exhaustion and general woefulness draining his already shaky academic motivation. The Phoenix spoke up before she’d even flipped to the relevant question. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Do the crosses. Bad, bad, bad, all wrong—crosses, I said! It’s wrong! Stupid human!

Stop, said Walden.

The Phoenix shut up, grumbling. Walden could feel a tightness in her right arm. She rolled up her sleeve and saw that the image of a tattooed firebird had moved from her bicep down to her forearm. Its hooked beak and golden eye blazed out just above her wrist. She stared at it. It stared back, unblinking. “Do you remember what I said about insults and threats?”

Sullen silence.

“Yes, this is a D paper,” Walden said, “probably.”

So make it good!

“I could do this work perfectly myself,” Walden said, “because I’m a fully trained magician and this is my discipline. But that’s not the point. The question is, how do we get him to—as you say—make it good?”

Tell him it’s all bad.

“Yes,” said Walden patiently, “and then…?”

There was a long, baffled pause.

“You did want to know how I do it,” Walden reminded the demon.

Don’t understand, said the Phoenix sulkily. It didn’t like not understanding. Walden was just barely resisting the urge to start writing notes. If there had been a way to record this conversation! She had never read anything like this, she had never heard of anything like this. But—she thought of Old Faithful, speaking with Charlie’s voice, deep in the heart of the incursion.

I can think. I can lie.