So the desk might look chaotic, but she knew what was in all the piles of paperwork. The bookshelves were not dusted often, but everything on them was valuable reference material. The filing cabinets had decades of useful stuff in them: old exam papers, worksheets with customised exercises—so hard to find secondary-appropriate magic exercises, none of the big academic publishers had come up with a financially viable textbook yet. Even the contents of the filing cabinets were GDPR compliant, since Walden had finally got around to shredding her predecessor’s decades of handwritten notes on every student he’d ever taught, along with his opinion of their parents. A bit of a shame, because some of that stuff had probably had historical value—if nothing else, as a record of how wildly unprofessional teaching had once been.

When Nikki came in, with the slight shuffling pause on the threshold of a child who really wasn’t sure if this was allowed, Walden saw the office for a moment through her eyes. Wood and leather, books and antiques, a modern desk chair with back support like a throne for Walden, and a battered repurposed Edwardian antique from the staff dining hall for whoever was unlucky enough to be sitting opposite her. No art on the walls, no photographs, no personal touches anywhere. It was not a friendly room. It had never been meant as one.

So Walden had to be the friendly one. She had to channel everything she’d ever been taught about Connecting Effectively with Young People, without shame or hesitation. She had to be welcoming and accepting and respectful and predictable and safe. She had to toss away her fairly reasonable aversion to coming off as embarrassing, try-hard, awkward, or just fundamentally uncool. If you were someone’s authority figure you were definitionally uncool. It was time to lean in to it.

It was just unfortunate that the most effective way Walden had of connecting with young people, by a long way, was to tell them about something fascinating that she was an expert on, and then show them how to do it themselves. She had good relationships with her students because she was a good teacher, not because she was a naturally warm and empathetic person. She would have been absolutely delighted to have a short academic chat with Nikki about literally any branch of magic at all. They could have gone through the bookshelves pulling out old journals and reference texts together. Walden would have sent her away energised and excited, with something new to learn. She’d even thought of trying to do it that way—leading into the topic of Oxford sideways, via a neat little stretch-and-challenge magic lesson, And this of course is the sort of thing you’d be doing in your first year. But there was a hesitation in her. She’d given Nikki her old copy of Nielle’s Arrays in just that spirit, and look what had happened.