So Laura Kenning and her squad had plenty of tools at their disposal for managing the minor demons that cropped up every day in the natural course of putting six hundred teenagers in one place and letting them learn magic. The thing that set an enchanted sword apart was not that it hurt demons, but that it could also, very easily, hurt people. That felt wrong to Walden. Her students should not feel themselves perpetually on edge around Laura Kenning’s squadron of paranoid paramilitary brutes.

Walden would never put it quite like that out loud. The Marshals were of course ‘a valued traditional element of the rich fabric of Chetwood life, here above all to ensure the safety of our students and staff.’ Walden visualised the relevant page of the school prospectus—with a large photograph of Kenning on it; the woman photographed well—and gave the Chief Marshal a bland and professional smile. “What can I do for you, Laura?”

“I’d like to discuss Nicola Conway,” said Kenning.

Nikki Conway: seventeen years old, originally from South London, the most talented teenage magician that Walden had come across in nearly twenty years, and for more than a decade now a ward of the school. There was absolutely nothing to discuss, or at least nothing that the Marshals hadn’t made clear already in their repeated, annual formal protests, which they had been making ever since Nikki started studying magic in Year Seven—like every single child in the school—years before Kenning even took this job. On top of that, Kenning seemed to take Walden’s polite stonewalling about the whole thing personally. Over the last three years, they had had this conversation so many times that Walden could probably have done it in her sleep. It had been bad enough during Nikki’s GCSEs, and even worse since she had started her Invocation A-level.

The Marshals’ problem with Nikki was not based on her grades (outstanding) or her character (remarkably level-headed, for a teenager). It was simply that when she was seven years old, Nikki had been responsible for the demonic incursion that had killed her mother, her father, and her younger brother. Marshals did not believe in extenuating circumstances. They were not interested in second chances.

And this was the real core of why Walden found herself having a conversation like this one with Kenning every couple of weeks. Both of them—Walden as Director of Magic, Kenning as Chief Marshal—were responsible for the magical security of the school. Walden, at deputy head level, technically outranked Kenning within the school hierarchy. But the school’s squadron of Marshals reported not to her—which they should, in Walden’s opinion—but to Chetwood’s Board of Governors on the one hand, and the Knightly Council of the Reverend Order of Marshals (District of Buckinghamshire) on the other.