“Marshal Kenning’s report was interesting reading,” the senior Marshal said. “That was the most sensible thing you could have done. I hope you know that.”

“I do know that,” Walden said. “I’m not stupid.”

He snorted. “Define stupid. Magicians.”

The most sensible thing you could have done; the words stayed with Walden. They were somehow a lot more comforting than anyone else’s kind, awkward sympathy. The next time a nurse came in, she asked for pen and paper. If she was going to be left-handed for the rest of her life, it was time to start practising. No one ever learned anything by sitting around feeling sorry for themselves.

She was stuck in the hospital for another week. She had to be costing the NHS a fortune just in wasted space. During visiting hours on Friday, someone knocked on the frosted glass door and Walden called, “Come in!” without looking up. She’d managed to get hold of a ream of lined paper which she had propped carefully on her knees, and her attention was on writing with a cheap biro: R r R r R r, until the letter came out looking right every time. Her left hand was clumsy, and her bandaged left arm twinged. The Phoenix had been making ample use of those spell-siphons, especially once it started panicking at the very end. Apparently the burns had been quite bad. Walden didn’t yet know how much was left of her tattoos. She would have been happy to discover that the spells she had spent so long designing were gone forever, but it did seem a shame to lose the flowers.

A memory: the tattoo artist, that handsome bearded man in San Francisco, about five foot two—even shorter than Walden—and as serious about his art as she was about hers. He’d done such lovely work. Irreplaceable.

Lots of things were irreplaceable.

Walden was trying not to think too hard about what she’d really lost: more than twenty years of practise at freehand spellwriting. Speed and confidence and precision so deeply ingrained that in the lessons where she taught new summoning arrays, it always took her longer to demonstrate something that was intentionally wrong. Now she was stuck with childlike wobbles and inaccuracies just writing the alphabet. She did not trust herself to safely summon even a first-order imp. Effectively, she was not a magician anymore.

Well. Her left hand might not have the skill, but the knowledge was still in her head. She would get it back.

Writing on a whiteboard, as well. She was going to have to stand the other way around. Assuming, of course, that she ever got to go back to the classroom at all.

The final R went off into a useless scrawl and the biro fell out of Walden’s fingers. She made a frustrated sound.

“Should I go?” said Laura.

“Oh!” said Walden, finally looking up. “Sorry, I—”