“Yeah, good shout,” Will said, and gave Mathias a hard slap on the shoulder. After three terms, Mathias seemed able to accept this as a gesture of friendship. At the start of sixth form, Walden was fairly sure he’d been terrified of Will.

“Was it a test?” said Aneeta, and then, watching Walden’s face, immediately decided: “It was a test.”

Walden inclined her head. “Always start with the safety check,” she said. “Every time. Don’t count on me, don’t count on the school wards. Don’t count on anything. Mistakes happen. Check, then check again. What will you do now?”

“Fix it?” said Aneeta.

“Fix it,” said Nikki.

Nikki roughed out a correction to the incursion ward on the back of her homework. Spellwriting was a fiddly business of symbols and shorthands. Technically it was a form of instantiation, though only the handful of students in the Instantiation A-level set—Nikki among them—would do much original spellwriting in school. But you could not do invocation safely without learning how to adjust within the boundaries of someone else’s prewritten spell. The entire discipline depended on summoning arrays and their accompanying layers of wards. At the secondary level, that meant memorising a selection of the vast bank of designs which already existed.

Walden could create an accurate adjustment to an incursion ward without planning it out first, because she had years of experience, but she was pleased that the sixth formers didn’t risk a freehand change. They crowded around Nikki, peering. “Looks good,” was Will’s verdict. “Let me get the paint.”

When Walden had changed the ward, she had done it by the force of her magical intention alone. That skill too was the result of long experience. Paint was easier. Will painted up the correction and then went back to the large salt-and-chalk summoning array he was drawing on the floor. The others, by unspoken agreement, let him get on with it, while the three of them wrote out and then argued about the steps for a fourth-order summoning. Will’s unshakeable self-belief was his best asset. He was the fastest in the group—and the second most accurate—at arcane notation, because he never fell into the trap of hesitant sketching. Mathias and Aneeta both did that constantly, with tentative, wobbly spellwork as the result.

“Yeah, good,” said Nikki to the finished pentagram. “Go over the upper meridian again, maybe. What do you guys think?”

Walden made a note in the column she’d labelled TEAMWORK.

“If you’re both happy,” said Aneeta.

“Matty?”

Mathias shrugged.

“Seriously, mate, you spotted that bad ward,” said Will. “Hit me, I can take it.”

“It’s really good,” said Mathias.

“Okay,” Nikki said. “Then we’re ready. Positions, guys. Dr Walden, can we have the dagger?”