“But it’s madness,” said Walden. “She’s brilliant. She’ll have a wonderful time. And she does want Oxford.” She’d done her share of the interview prep sessions, starting last summer: one-on-two tutoring sessions with Nikki and Will, who were this year’s only applicants for Sorcery. Oxford, for Will Daubery, was just an assumption. He was following in the footsteps of his father and his uncle, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and his great-great-great-aunt Gwendolyn Hornsey whose name Walden had recognised with a start as the suffragist pioneer who’d been the first female magician to study at Cambridge. If he had had any doubts about getting in, he hadn’t let them show. Sorcery was one of the less competitive courses, which meant there were only five applicants for every available place. Will Daubery had the predicted grades to get an interview and he was undeniably the sort of boy who interviewed well—one of nature’s bullshitters, polished to charming and confident excellence by a school that had been providing bullshit-polishing services for centuries. Walden had always thought his chances were high. Of course, the Chetwood background was no longer the free ticket to elite education that it had once been—and quite right too, no doubt, because straight As at an underfunded state comprehensive was a considerably more impressive academic achievement than straight As here—but Will would do well, if he got the offer.

For Nikki, though, Oxford meant something different, something more. She had only talked about it once.

My mum and dad never went to uni, she’d said.

And she deserved it. She was brilliant. It was hard to quantify the difference between a merely very intelligent student and a brilliant one. It didn’t show up in a list of exam results. Sometimes, in fact, brilliance could be a disadvantage—when all you needed to do was neatly jump the hoop of an examiner’s grading rubric without ever asking why. It was the teachers who knew, the teachers who felt the difference. A few times in your career, you would have the privilege of teaching someone truly remarkable; someone who was hard work to teach because they made you work harder, who asked you questions that had never occurred to you before, who stretched you to the very edge of your own abilities. If you were lucky—as Walden, this time, had been lucky—your remarkable student’s chief interest was in your discipline: and then you could have the extraordinary, humbling experience of teaching a child whom you knew would one day totally surpass you.