She’d seen Ezekiel teach before, and always enjoyed it. His style was stricter on the surface than Walden’s—Will Daubery would never have risked attempting his brand of schoolboy bullshit on Reverend Ezekiel—but that strict structure gave him room for a relaxed, conversational approach. Year Eleven obviously liked and trusted him. He opened with a quick-fire question-and-answer session, recapping their last lesson: When and how can you use magic on another human being? Hands went up every time he asked a question, but Ezekiel ignored the volunteers and called out names: “Anastasia, what do you think? The principle of consent, good, we discussed it last time. Connie, do you agree with Anastasia? Why? Yes, excellent. Zachariah—” A pause; Ezekiel raised his eyebrows and glanced at the bin in the corner. The luckless Zachariah obediently got up, walked over to it, and spat out his chewing gum. “You’re not off the hook yet,” Ezekiel said, when the boy got back to his seat. “Better make it good. Anastasia and Connie made good points. How would you disagree with them?”

“Uh, I wouldn’t?” said Zachariah, attempting a charming smile.

“Try,” said Ezekiel, good-humoured and patently uncharmed. “Pause, think about it. Everyone else, I want you to think about it as well. Make notes if you need to. I’ll be picking someone else to speak once Zack’s had his turn.”

Walden was busily adding to her observation notes: Use of names, strong questioning technique, praise and encouragement, behaviour management, THINKING TIME, contribution is strongly expected / not a punishment, no one gets to hide. All normal parts of a good classroom discussion, and she did all of it herself, but doing it with twenty fifteen-year-olds of mixed magical and academic ability was a lot more impressive than doing it with four talented Year Thirteens. Ezekiel clearly knew his students extremely well—picking out a confident speaker to start the discussion, getting a quiet one to expand on an established point, identifying minor misbehaviour and immediately correcting and refocusing. Zack took his thinking time and then said, “What about if someone’s unconscious and you’re trying to help them?”

“Go on,” said Ezekiel. “Why would that change anything?”

“Well—”

The discussion kept going for rather longer than Walden would have allowed if she’d been teaching this topic. The class covered the basic exemptions to the principle of magical consent and from there dove deeper: What about medicine? Does a doctor need your consent to save your life? If a person is unconscious, can you assume they probably would consent to being helped? What if you don’t speak the same language? What if someone has a developmental disability and doesn’t understand what you’re asking? What about age, does that matter? Can a child consent to having a spell cast on them? Can you?