A job and a flat at eighteen. No safety net. No time to spare for anything but survival. No friends or family, no A-levels, nothing to fall back on but a set of perfect GCSE grades that would never come to anything more. Of course, people did it every day. The vision of grinding, isolated, dead-end poverty that Nikki Conway had quietly planned for herself was a life that millions of people had to live. It was a life a long way removed from Chetwood School, and yet its ghost haunted the ancient halls that shone in the sunshine among the green fields. Fifty thousand pounds a year per child, less whatever scholarships and bursaries a family could argue out of the endowment. People paid it. Some of them were rich—well, all of them were rich, really. Most of them did not feel that way. They knew about the future that Nikki had imagined for herself. They felt its chilly spectre breathing on the backs of their necks.

Almost no one was paying for magical boarding school because of the magic. The magic was an interesting quirk, a historical curiosity, in a few cases a genuine passion being indulged by a loving parent—but you didn’t pay fifty thousand pounds a year for magic tricks, any more than you paid it for Shakespeare or the respiratory system or the ability to solve quadratic equations. No: Chetwood’s school fees were insurance money, a policy taken out against the future. Let my child be safe. Let my child be happy. Let my child have every single possible chance at freedom, joy, hope, power.

Because an elite education was an investment in power. Magic was the least of what you gained at Chetwood. What mattered was the power to walk the walk and talk the talk, to have your résumé picked out of the pile and the interviewer already speaking your language. It was the power to know the people you ought to know, to befriend them easily over a you too? or to laugh together about how ridiculous the whole theme park experience of childhood had been. A few could afford that power. Most could not. Plenty of parents who loved their children worked appalling hours and then remortgaged their homes to pay for it. They did it for love, and for terror. You could never completely future-proof your children. But power would keep them safe from the bitter grind of survival in a way that nothing else could.

“Nikki,” Walden said, trying to sound neutral, and not viscerally horrified, at how much power, freedom and possibility this child wanted to throw away.

“I could have killed someone,” Nikki said.

Walden paused.