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Except, perhaps, at the group that had called Silas over. They were staring disappointed at their own empty beaker.

Silas walked over. “And what happened here?”

The first student, Imogen, was an older girl with long hair and an expression that said plainly she did not suffer fools. She was currently glaring at the other student, Wyatt, a boy who looked extraordinarily guilty.

“This child vanished our experiment,” she said. “We had it perfect and he vanished it!”

“I wasn’t trying to vanish it on purpose,” Wyatt said. “She just assumed I did! It was an accident.”

The pair immediately dissolved into arguments about who was responsible. Perhaps in their other classes, the professor might’ve been able to recover the vanished experiment, but Silas had no such abilities. As it was, he simply blinked at their beaker, hoping it might reappear.

“I don’t even see the point,” Wyatt said. “I can make something glow with my wand. Why do I need to do it with benzyl-whatever-the-hell?”

“Language,” Silas said. “And—”

“Maybe because you actually can’t make anything glow with your wand,” Imogen snapped. “If you can’t even get the hang of a vanishing charm.”

Wyatt turned bright red at this, while Imogen huffed.

“We’ll just do it again, Professor,” she said. “But I wanted you to know that we’re behind because of him.”

Silas blinked and nodded. “Of course, Imogen. Carry on. But I want to see both of you working. Right, Wyatt?”

Wyatt grumbled something and nodded.

Truthfully, Silas had been about to tell her not to worry about it. But then again, he supposed any extra practice would do the kids good. Especially if Wyatt was, as Imogen seemed to be insinuating, in need of additional support.

Thankfully, the rest of his students seemed to be doing quite well with the lab. They’d mostly finished and were writing up their labs, chatting a bit as they did. Silas had found that this kind of easy buzz of energy after a successful lab was what he chased most as a teacher: Everyone in the room had that sense of freshly seized knowledge, and they were all leaving the room feeling triumphant.

Except, perhaps, Wyatt.

Silas took a closer look at the boy. He had the sort of face that was caught between the roundness of youth and the sharp angles of adolescence, with a messy shock of hair that looked dark brown in some lights and black in others. He was gangly in the way Silas had been as a child. He’d grow into his height, Silas imagined, but for now, he was stringy. More than anything, there was an awkwardness to him, something that made Silas doubt that he was being obtuse on purpose.

Silas kept an eye on him for the rest of the class. As promised, Imogen made sure they finished the lab, but any trust she might’ve had for Wyatt had firmly evaporated. They wrote their lab reports in tense silence. When the class was dismissed, they were still working. Imogen finished first, leaving her lab materials and paper on Silas’s desk with a “hmph!” and then turning around and disappearing out of the door without a word.

This left Silas and Wyatt as the only two people still in the room. Silas fidgeted with the stack of reports that had been turned in, straightening them several times, glancing over at Wyatt. Silas was learning that one of the most important tricks in a teacher’s repertoire was the ability to determine if a student was going to ask for help or if help needed to be offered. And if help was offered, this had to be done so carefully, so as not to a) insult or b) offend or c) scare off the student in question. In many ways, it was like approaching a feral creature. If you wanted to escape with all of your limbs—and ego—intact, caution was of the utmost importance.

At the thought, Margaret Nettle sprang into his mind. He thought of her with the kurlop, how she’d made its capture and relocation look so effortless. The memory made him smile. That was, until he remembered her with the dragon, chasing it around as it wrecked her beloved pub. That hadn’t looked so easy. But then again, the error there wasn’t anything to do with Margaret; the fault there was entirely his.

“Professor?”

Silas glanced over, finding Wyatt standing before him, goggles making his eyes look even smaller than usual, holding out the report so that Silas could add it to the stack in his hands.

“Oh, thank you, Wyatt,” he said, taking the paper. He ran his eyes over it briefly, seeing enough of the right words that made him certain that Wyatt’s report would be more than sufficient.

“I . . . I just want you to know that it really was an accident,” Wyatt said, running his hand through his mop of teenage-boy hair as he avoided eye contact. “I was just trying to levitate it a little bit.”

Silas nodded. “I understand. Though, if I may ask . . . why were we trying to levitate the fairly dangerous chemical compound?”

He made sure he said this cheekily, so the boy knew that no real harm had actually been done. And this made Wyatt laugh a little and even flash the briefest of eye contact in Silas’s direction.

“Well, I thought she’d think it was cool,” Wyatt said. “But, well . . . you saw how that went over.”

Ah. Of course. The poor boy had been trying to flirt. An abysmal attempt by any measure, but Silas wouldn’t be saying that.

“She’s just so smart,” Wyatt said, pulling off his goggles. “And I’m . . . I’m not dumb. But it feels like it comes so easily to her. To everyone, honestly.” He sighed. “My dad’s always telling me that magic’s in my blood and I just need to trust it and let it happen. But the spells just . . . are never that easy for me. And it should be easy, shouldn’t it?”

At once, Elliott’s words floated back to Silas.