Edinburgh’s a weird city; castles and ancient buildings and modern shops all piled together down the length of sloped streets, with that giant grass-and-stone hill looking down over the rooftops. In the summer it’s crammed with tourists, but this was February, generally accepted to be the most miserable month in the British year, and not too many visitors were braving the cold winds and drizzle.

In magical society, Edinburgh’s famous for a different reason: it’s the location of the second and smaller of the Council’s two apprentice programs. Sometime back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, there was a treaty signed giving the Edinburgh mages the right to run their own teaching establishment separate from the ones in the south. Over the centuries most of the mage schools were assimilated into the association that would eventually become the London apprentice program, but the Edinburgh faction resisted it for long enough that having a second apprentice program became a tradition. There’s still the odd attempt to merge the two, but the proposals have always fallen through, partly due to Scottish nationalism but mostly because a number of British mages find it useful to have a secondary power centre in the British Isles that’s not quite so closely connected to the Council.

We wound our way through the streets, away from the tourist centres and to a stone house down a side alley. We rang the bell and the door opened to reveal Variam. “Hey, Vari,” I said.

“Hey,” Variam said. He looked more subdued than usual.

“Landis in?” Caldera asked.

“He’s up there,” Variam said, pointing his thumb at the rickety staircase behind him. “Good luck, you’ll need it.”

Up until a year and a half ago, Anne and Variam were living with me. Anne moved out in the summer to a flat in Honor Oak, but Variam came here to Edinburgh, taking up the role of apprentice to a mage named Landis, a Council Keeper from the Order of the Shield.

The Keepers of the Flame have three orders. The largest and most well known is Caldera’s order, the Order of the Star. The Order of the Star police magical society; if a crime is committed that breaks the peace of the Concord or the national laws of the Council, they’re the ones who are supposed to deal with it. Next is the Order of the Cloak, the ones responsible for preserving the secrecy of the magical world. They work with (and on) the mundane authorities, dealing with normals and sensitives, and they’re much less high-profile. They rarely deal with other mages, to the point that a lot of mages forget that the Order of the Cloak even exists.

And then there’s the Order of the Shield. Once the biggest of the orders, their name’s a hint at their original function: they were battle-mages, meant to protect the population from magical predators. But as magical creatures declined, so did they, and nowadays they’re the Council’s military reserve, called in when a situation is violent or expected to get that way. Ninety-nine percent of their time is spent sitting around doing nothing or guarding against threats that never show up. The last one percent involves getting sent into the most horrendously dangerous situations imaginable. Let’s put it this way—the Order of the Shield are the ones who get sent in when the Council thinks that mages like Caldera aren’t enough.