She found it neatly concealed inside the rotten bole of the largest tree. The experience of reaching in among the damp moss and slimy fungus was skin-crawlingly unpleasant: not just the usual eurgh of rather too much Nature without gardening gloves, but an additional frisson of You’re not interested. You don’t like this. You don’t want to look at it.

Oh, but I’m very interested, Walden told the feeling, and steeled herself. It was still very difficult. She forced her hands to grip hard around something spiked and broken and unpleasantly plastic-slick.

The school umbrella was a tattered inside-out skeleton. Its red-and-white canopy was ripped in half a dozen places. Walden turned it over. The slimy, repellent, ugh-not-my-business ward was pressed into the handle, the size of a thumbprint. She’d handed this school umbrella to Mark, and it had definitely not been a fantastically accursed object when she’d done so. He must have enchanted it as they were walking around the school site. Ambling across the marshy Games fields in the pouring November rain, making idle conversation, umbrella in hand. The thumbprint size of the ward might be a record of how he’d actually pulled it off: with just his thumb, pressing into the plastic handle like wax.

It got me in the arm! he’d said. But that injury had ceased to be a concern remarkably quickly after that day, hadn’t it? When had he punched his neat little portal back to the mundane world to drop off a cursework somewhere safe? She’d asked about the umbrella at some point, she was sure, and Mark had dismissed it. Months ago; she couldn’t be certain of anything now.

Quite impressive, really. Very impressive, even. How galling it was, to think you had the measure of a nasty man exactly, and then discover that you’d been allowed to take the measure he saw fit to share. How deeply embarrassing, to fall for the pose even as you laughed at it. Mark was a much, much better magician than Walden had given him credit for. He was at least as good as she was. He was better than she was, in some specific ways. She was an invocation specialist, which was, intellectually speaking, the show-off field. The go-big-or-go-home field. Invocation teachers teach contract law. She’d just assumed she had to be cleverer than he was. Probably she was. Probably, decades ago, she’d got better grades in all her exams.