Where is the heart of a school? Every child will give you a different answer; every adult a different answer again. Is it in the warren of classrooms, the underground maze of wire lockers, the all-encompassing social world of the quad and lunch hall and tuckshop? Is it in the staffroom, the departmental offices, the Victorian school hall with its rows of battered benches? Is it on the rugby pitches and netball courts, or lurking amidst the ancient glamour of the mediaeval colonnade, or buried in the concrete-and-scaffolding dormitories? Perhaps there is no physical heart at all, no centre, nothing so solid; just a weight on the imagination, a dream-picture of green and gold and innocence, the lofty goals of scholarship and humanity mixed together with the sound of children’s laughter, a place of power made safe from the wicked world—

Perhaps it’s a memory. Perhaps it’s a hope. Perhaps it’s an adult’s blind fantasy. Perhaps it never existed at all.

But to you, Chetwood radiates out from a single fixed point. It is the place where all realms cross: magical and mundane, child and adult, eternal and devastatingly mortal. It is the place you began to learn life’s hardest lesson, the one you have not yet finished understanding. It is the place where consequences came for you.

Twenty years ago they planted a birch tree in memory of Charles Green. It grows here still. It will grow here, most likely, for longer than Charlie himself would ever have lived. Is the tree a reasonable replacement for the boy? He was not a particularly special boy. Few mourned him; few remember him. Others like him have lived and died largely unremarked. Realistically, the two of you would have broken up by the end of your first year at Oxford—probably, honestly, by the end of Michelmas term. As romances of early adulthood go, the master-magician Rosalind Chan was far more significant to the person you eventually became.

And yet. And yet.

You get there before Laura does. This is your school. You wait at the end of the pathway past the birch tree, standing half in the demonic realm and half in mundanity—the two blur, for you, and will increasingly start to do the same for anyone else who gets too close to you, which is a fascinating magical development and also a safeguarding issue. Have you thought, Phoenix, of what you will do if you ever become a danger to the children despite yourself? Have you realised, Phoenix, that this is already happening?