“You know,” said Walden, “most of my colleagues do call me Saffy. So where, exactly, were you thinking of sending the students?”

“What?”

“Chetwood School is closed on the recommendation of the Marshals,” Walden said. “We have just over six hundred pupils and all of them know some magic. Where are they going to go?”

“A normal school,” said Kenning. “With normal people in it. It’d be good for most of them.”

Walden inclined her head. “Good luck persuading their parents.”

“Fine. A different boarding school. One without, again, the giant demon.”

“And where do you think the giant demon will go,” said Walden, “when it’s not getting anything to eat?”

Kenning stopped walking. They had just reached the oak tree on the far side of the quad. The grounds team came most days and swept up the leaves and acorns that it dropped at this time of year, but they didn’t work on Saturdays. The gnarled ground and the wooden bench underneath the tree were heaped with curling dry leaves, and a low breeze stirred them, making faint rustling sounds. Kenning said, “So are you actually saying that it’s fine to keep feeding an occasional kid to the big demon, if that keeps it happy enough to leave the rest of them alone?”

Walden just looked at her. She looked until Kenning glanced away, embarrassed. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t appreciate that accusation, Marshal Kenning, and I am very sure you don’t actually believe it.”

Kenning tucked her hands in her pockets. “It’s just crazy,” she said. “That thing is here and no one has done anything about it. It’s crazy.”

“I think the problem with this conversation is that you have cause and effect reversed,” Walden said. They kept walking; the tense moment was over. And Walden did need to work with this woman, and she was good, and it was not unreasonable to be upset about the presence of a giant demon on the school site. Walden also found it upsetting. “You’re acting as if the demon was here first and some complete idiot decided to build a school on top of it. But it’s the other way round. The school was here first; the demon is here because of the school. If the school was somewhere else, or if the students were somewhere else, that’s where the demon would go too. That’s exactly what happened when they tried to move the school site in the sixties. Powerful demons become powerful by going where the power is and digging in. Old Faithful became what it is by moving into Chetwood’s shadow in the demonic plane and staying there.”

“I don’t have to like it.”

“I don’t think anyone likes Old Faithful, no. But the work we do keeps our students safe from it.”

“No big incursions in twenty years,” said Kenning. “And thirty years before that.”