And then it said nothing else; but Walden could feel its silent attention as she marked Mathias’s paper—which did, in the end, get a D. Its beaked head slid down past her wrist onto her hand, and the golden eye of the firebird gleamed. Walden was careful with the red pen. Mathias’s motivation was so low already that a solid wall of crosses and corrections would just scare him into giving up; he wouldn’t even read what she’d written. She sought out the things he had got right, and wrote next to them: good! and well done! and nicely worked out, Mathias. He had finally taken on board her feedback about his array diagrams; they were starting to look more decisive and less sketchy, and there were not too many technical mistakes. The array question that had tripped up both Aneeta and Will was a mess of rubbings out and redrawings. Walden frowned at it. What Mathias had done in the end was definitely wrong, but what was the scrawl of scribbling and crossing-out around it?

The traces were clear. He’d drawn the array incorrectly at first. Then he’d gone back at the end of the paper—using a different pencil—looked at it, and had one of his good moments: he’d known it didn’t look right, and he’d rubbed it out and drawn in something that did.

Except then he’d panicked, not trusting himself, and decided to split the difference: crossed the whole thing out, and started again underneath with a half-and-half mishmash of the two different array diagrams, ending up with something totally incoherent that Walden couldn’t massage any marks out of no matter how she grimaced at the rubric. The first attempt would have got him three out of ten, and the second attempt seven. Instead it was a zero—when an extra seven marks would have brought his grade up to a C.

Which … actually …

Let’s be positive, Saffy, even though it’s late and you’re tired! There was space at the bottom of the page, because Mathias hadn’t written enough for the explanatory paragraph. Walden used it to draw his first two diagrams again and then wrote a score under each of them. She circled the 7/10 diagram and drew a large star in the margin of the page. Next to it, she wrote: TRUST YOURSELF!!! YOU WERE NEARLY THERE!