Ezekiel’s update was the last serious point on the agenda. Walden asked for Any Other Business—there was none, of course, and most people’s expressions just said Let me out of here I need to finish my marking—and then said, “Thank you very much, everyone, we’d better stop there,” a precise two minutes before the bell. “I’ll email the minutes round later. That was our last faculty meeting this half term—it’ll be back to departments in this slot for the next few weeks. And remember—do your risk assessments, check your wards!”

There were still a few chewy, unconvincing school croissants left, so she snagged an extra before heading back to her office across the road in Brewers. Her schedule for the day was rattling through her thoughts. She didn’t see Upper Sixth on a Tuesday, but she did have an arcane safety lesson with 10T before lunch. Write up and circulate those minutes, spend Period One doing emails and an incident report about Old Faithful’s little feint yesterday, and then observe Ezekiel’s Year Eleven. Break, lesson planning, Year Ten early lunch. And then she’d blocked out the afternoon, weeks ago, for a long session working on the thaumic engines. Everything planned and prepared. Everything under control. Nothing could go wrong.

Ezekiel, like most teaching staff at Chetwood, had a classroom that was his. It was one of the things Walden missed most from frontline teaching. Lab Three was her regular lab, but you could hardly personalise an arcane laboratory. Ezekiel’s teaching room felt like his own, with his fountain pens and notebooks on the desk, his laptop jammed into a corner, and a framed photograph balanced precariously on the stationery cupboard: Ezekiel and Ebele outside the chapel with the school choir last Christmas. He was a form tutor in the Lower Sixth, and his tutees had decorated their form noticeboard with a circus theme, featuring their own school-photo headshots stuck onto the bodies of cartoon clowns: all very good-humoured and really only lightly disturbing. They’d stuck a photo of Ezekiel in the middle as ringmaster.

The other noticeboards around the room were looking smart too: middle school posters about philosophy and religious studies, Year Ten Invocation work featuring colourful annotated diagrams of first-order summoning arrays. Walden, arriving before the bell for Period Two, went and peered at that display and discovered it was a few years old. One of the diagrams had Aneeta’s name on it. She wouldn’t point it out. Technically, displays of student work were supposed to be refreshed every academic year, but it was one of the things that always fell by the wayside. Who had the time?