You are not paying attention when four eighteen-year-olds catch the London train. They are honestly surprised by how easy it is. They assumed they would be in trouble; they assumed they would be stopped. But the station—a quiet country station, not on a main line—is not staffed. They have all dutifully purchased the correct tickets from the machine, and when the guard comes past, further down the line, he will hesitate a moment over how shifty Mathias looks but ultimately decide that it’s not his problem as long as the kids have paid.

Your webs of perception do not extend as far as London. You have seen London, and it does not appeal to you: too big, too ill-defined, too difficult to control and call your own. You have found your place, and you intend to stay here for a long, long time. So you do not have even an inkling of how much danger you are in until evening registration, when it finally becomes obvious that four sixth formers have slipped the net and no one noticed.

This is a very, very, very big problem when your institution has legal and professional responsibility for the safety of those sixth formers. Now Upper Sixth Invocation are in trouble—big trouble. Now there are frantic phone calls going out to parents and to authorities, and friends and classmates are being interrogated to no avail, and ordered to place their own calls and send their own messages. In the big house in Kensington where no one else is home—Aneeta’s parents are hardly ever home, and the cleaners only come on Tuesdays—she takes out her phone in its warded blue case and grimaces at the screen of notifications.

You are frantic. Not because you are in danger (you are powerful, you are confident, why would your first assumption be danger?) but because they might be. The self you have become cannot bear it. It is a shocking downside to your new existence. You have never found anything unbearable before. You have never worried. You have never cared.

No, you don’t expect danger, even now.

You don’t sleep. The body, worried about missing children, refuses to obey your will. You did not know bodies could do that.

You have forgotten all about the oath sworn between magician and Marshal, months ago: If I fail, I submit myself at once to the judgement of the Order of Marshals and especially to the Chief Marshal Laura Kenning.