The school had acquired other boarding houses in haphazard fashion over the centuries, naming them after benefactors or patron saints: Kings, St Edmund’s, St Jude’s, Lady Margaret, Brewers, and New House—so called because it only dated from 1904. The house buildings, mostly erected before the advent of modern plumbing and on the assumption that every student would be male, had become ever more inconvenient and impractical. In the 1960s a forward-thinking Headmaster had sold them all off except Brewers and New House and used the profits to buy the school a secondary campus, an expanse of former farmland on the other side of the main road into Chetwood village. There he erected a new boarding house, heavy on the concrete, to house the whole student body. He named it, grandly, Universal House.

The students called it Wormwood Scrubs.

This had been abbreviated to just Scrubs by Walden’s own time at the school, and Scrubs it remained to this day. Walden felt very fond of it despite how ugly it was. After all, she had lived there for most of her adolescence. She knew that the Bursar also felt very fond of it, because it was one of the few school buildings that didn’t require an expensive specialist in historical construction techniques every time something needed repairs.

With the exception of the seven young sorcerers being fostered in School House—where they had their own bedrooms—all the college’s boarding students lived in single-sex accommodation in Scrubs during term time. The younger ones slept in dormitories of eight, graduating to smaller groups of four further up the school and double rooms by sixth form. There was also a substantial minority of day pupils, who lived in the village and in the surrounding countryside. The names of the old boarding houses had been retained as organisational and pastoral units; every student, day or boarding, was assigned to one. The younger ones took house sports and the annual house point competition very seriously, though most of them lost interest, or at least felt they were too cool to admit they cared, by Year Ten or so.

Walden’s meeting with Todd ended just after half past four. He’d had nothing of substance to report except that morning’s excitement in the arcane labs, which of course Walden knew about already. “Key picked it up,” he said—Todd always attributed his remarkable awareness of Chetwood’s magical fluctuations to the Key, though as far as Walden could tell it had no earthly way to detect anything of the kind—“but I knew you were teaching in there, and I’d already seen Marshal Kenning heading over.”

Walden otherwise got on with Todd very well, but she wished he didn’t have quite so much respect for the Marshals.

“Old Faithful rolling over in his sleep?” Todd said.

“Something like that,” said Walden.