It was an unfortunate truth that in the Venn diagram of ‘qualified to teach magic’ and ‘still alive,’ the overlap consisted almost entirely of people who had always been much too sensible to accidentally get eaten by a demon…
“School of Magicians” is one of my favorite story tropes, right up there with “Let Me Tell You How Our Family’s Scandal Began”, and “Goblin Market”. Everyone has their own version of what magic looks like in a school setting, and Emily Tesh’s has to be one of the most entertainingly grounded ones I’ve seen. Everything is the normal bureaucratic chaos of a UK boarding school. Normal, except that magic is a viable education path, wealthy families can help their children turn a magical aptitude into a career, and one of the biggest sources of magic is a demon dimension that is always trying to break through into ours. Chetwood School, with its population of not-always-careful children, is a particularly tasty target for horrifyingly powerful demons, but so is technology of any kind. In this version of the UK you have to be prepared to negotiate with the possessed photocopier to get any work done, and even cuckoo clocks can have an opinionated imp in residence.
The wall clock, in an unusual burst of activity, gave out thirteen very fast chimes and then manifested a cuckoo which emerged with glowing red eyes, opened its beak, and screamed.
“Yes, yes, I don’t like her either,” Walden said, and picked up her pen for the next bullet point…
Sapphire Walden (“Saffy” to her friends, and “Doctor” if you know what’s good for you) is a particularly powerful magician whose specialty is Invocation. That is, the magical discipline of summoning demons. Her duties as Director of Magic mean she doesn’t get to do as much teaching as she would like, but she’s still in charge of the Upper Sixth Invocation students. You might think that having children – teenagers and younger – bring terrifying creatures over from a nightmare world into a school sounds fantastically dangerous. And it is. But Doctor Walden is responsible for every element of the Faculty of Magic, every teacher, every student, every class curriculum, and above all keeping everyone safe. And Walden is very good at her job.
Walden is so good, in fact, that she resents having to have the Marshals around. It’s a constant source of irritation, official demon-hungers carrying magical swords around children in the off chance that they have to do physical battle with a rogue demon. She particularly resents Laura Kenning, who at thirty-two, (a whole six years younger than Walden and one of the youngest to become Chief Marshal) has no interest in pretending Walden outranks her, at least as far as security is concerned. It’s annoying, and so unnecessary, Walden has it handled.
Everything under control, nothing could go wrong.
Obviously this wouldn’t be much of a story if something didn’t go wrong. The scenes of Walden filling out threat assessment forms, grading papers at eleven at night, scraping together at least five minutes for yet another meeting, Tesh writes all of these with dry humor and a surprising amount of interest. But things kick into high gear when a demon – either through accident or inexperience or taking advantage of a childhood trauma – breaks through and tries to eat the entire school, occasionally while wearing the bodies of people they killed a long time ago. The magic in this book is one of intricate chalk-drawn runes and meticulous formulas, but it’s also one with combat blasts of energy and knives, glowing enspelled tattoos, and at least one fantastic kick-ass entrance by a Chief Marshal who is also very good at her job. And a fight with death on the line is the absolutely best/worst time for Walden and Kenning to realize the undeniable spark of attraction between them…
…which totally doesn’t go the way you think it will. And it’s not even halfway through the book so don’t expect an epic whirlwind romance that ends in tears. This is a fantasy set in a real world where relationships are messy, and people are tentative, and when a disaster happens the bureaucracy always needs someone to take the fall, and Walden can’t even find the time to have a real dinner most days, which means a long-distance relationship just couldn’t work, so let’s not pretend, shall we? Walden has her life figured out, with no real time for companionship, so it’s all fine. Really.
Walden loved her job. Chetwood was hers and she belonged here, in this place where she did good and meaningful and interesting work every day of her life. What had she spent the last two decades working for, if not this?
One of the interesting things that Tesh does in telling this story is that huge swathes of the book go by without an actual bad guy. Or rather, the bad guy is something intangible, like the basic unfairness of children growing up with fewer opportunities simply because they weren’t lucky enough to be born in a family of generational wealth. Or having to keep a school going without the money to fix old buildings, or upgrade the thaumatic engines that have been struggling to keep demons out for, oh, a century or more. We don’t even have to put a face to any bullies, which is pretty remarkable in a book about a UK boarding school. Walden spends a lot of time thinking about the importance of dealing with bullies, the methods for diagnosing the problem and shutting it the hell down before anyone gets hurt, but the reader never has to watch any of it happening.
It’s like that for a good portion of the book; what we get are the fascinating logistics of things. The logistics of magic and demons, obviously. The element of demons being attracted to technology is something I haven’t seen before. It makes for a lot of fun developments in a school with teenagers who can figure out how to use minor demons to get away with whatever they’re not supposed to be doing, and in a current-day reality where it practically takes an act of Parliament to get people to put down their phones. But also the logistics of running a school where there’s never enough money or time to replace things, but just enough money to keep them limping along another few months. The logistics of teaching children, inspiring children, and seeing the entire person well enough to recognize when something has changed abruptly, and what that might mean. Then there’s the logistics of civil infrastructure in cities where demons are a worse potential hazard than drunk drivers or earthquakes. And last but certainly not least, the logistics of relationships with people who have ulterior motives, and an inflated idea about what they need, and what they can handle, and whether or not they can justify making terrible decisions about who to sleep with, Walden.
And then partway through the book something…happens. I didn’t quite realize what was going on at first; Tesh plays with the way books are formatted to tell you that something has gone spectacularly wrong. And now we’ve got a much bigger problem, and the setup for another apocalyptic battle with real peril, and quite a few people have cause to regret all their terrible decisions. Which comes back around to the most important element of all: the logistics of learning. What everyone needs to realize is that is a huge part of learning anything is to be bad at it. To get an awful result, to make the worst decisions, to have an absolute disaster of whatever it is you’re trying to do. And then to grit your teeth and keep learning anyway.