Walden did not relax, but there was a real difference between the terror of finding yourself unexpectedly facing a throng of demons and the healthy, intelligent fear you felt when the crisis wasn’t over but you knew you had good people on your side. It was truly a pleasure to watch Laura at work. It had only been two months since Walden had seen her try to take on Old Faithful, but she had noticeably improved. Her use of magical force had already been crisp and expert: Marshal-style combat spells at their best, underpinned by Laura’s own athleticism. To that she’d added something Walden didn’t expect at all, an edge of grace and precision that you never saw in a—hedge witch, said Mark’s voice in the back of her head; Walden was disappointed to hear it from herself; non-academic magical practitioner, she corrected her own thought.

Words, selves, the Phoenix murmured, selves and words.

Laura, already a very good demon hunter, had responded to losing her job at Chetwood by deciding to get better. Two months of focused work could make a huge difference to someone’s skills when they were eighteen, but you didn’t often see it happen to a person over thirty. Not because adults were incapable of learning—of course not. They were just usually a lot worse at it.

Not Laura.

Walden, after a few moments watching her demolish two substantial demons at once, hadn’t the slightest doubt. She’d been taking magic lessons: serious, academic, theory-focused lessons, with a good teacher—someone strict on form, with double expertise in invocation and evocation. Roger Rollins at Goldsmiths, maybe, elderly now but a very good magician indeed, one of the last mighty-bearded Communists left in British academic magic; he’d briefly supervised Walden as an undergrad, before he decided Oxford was still too bourgeois for him.

Of course, anyone could learn Walden’s style of magic, if they really wanted to. It was just hard work. Hard work for a child whose only actual job was going to school and learning things, and even harder work for an adult who had to fit the reading and lab time into evening and weekend classes around their day job. And expensive too, unless Laura had got the Order to fund it as prof dev somehow, which Walden doubted, because the Order of Marshals would not be nearly so eager to rent out its members as private school security if it was running a budget surplus.

Focus, whispered the Phoenix, which had learned patience for the peculiar wanderings and curlings-about of Walden’s funny little water-and-meat brain, but only to a point. It comes.

“Oh dear,” said Walden.