Magical oaths sworn between human beings are old magic, messy and vague and unsatisfying magic, a few sentences in the A-level syllabus. But there is a power in them which even a higher demon cannot resist. It is the power of the promise. The contract. Because no matter how carefully the forces of magic have been meticulously pinned down to scientific principles by the European academic tradition, magic is not science. Little as magicians like it, it can be divorced from logic, skill, and expertise. It can find its way through whatever tools come to hand, through coincidence and potential, through human perception and human connection.

Most serious academic magicians ignore this sort of thing—partly because it is hard to exploit, and partly because it makes them uncomfortable.

By this oath I lay my fate in her hands. If the Phoenix wakes, she shall know of it, and she shall be granted all power to act.

There is no how. There is no when. But there is a binding, full of force. You have slipped all other jesses. You cannot slip from this one.

It is the middle of the night. A demon is loose on the world.

The Marshals are coming.

Here is the knight in shining armour. (Only the Head of the Order gets the knighthood, actually, she might say, wry, adjusting her rune-engraved vambraces.) Here she rides on her noble steed. (She’s a Kawasaki Ninja H2, I picked her up second-hand—which does not refute ‘noble steed’; Laura Kenning really likes her bike.) She has come alone. You wouldn’t have expected that. It doesn’t make sense to come alone.

You know she is there the moment the motorbike turns off the road onto the old lime avenue. You are vibrating with wakefulness and worry. Your first feeling is relief, tremendous relief, born—you do not think of this—from the host. Feeling comes from the body and stakes insidious claims on the will. Feeling still confuses you a little. You—you! A demon of the tenth order! The prince of air and fire!—you don’t think She has come to kill me. You think Maybe she knows where the Upper Sixth have gone.

Marshal Kenning does not come straight for you. She goes to the Keymaster first. Old Todd Cartwright, up late at night watching the sinking ashes of the fire in the ancient groundskeeper’s cottage that he has made a snug little home. The polished Great Key of Chetwood is hanging from its chain on a peg beside the fireplace. He answers the knock and looks, for a moment, baffled. “Chief Marshal Kenning?” he says.