The door flew open, revealing Principal Cyrus Ember, wand in hand, academic robes blown back by the force of the blow. His face was a mask of silent fury above his beard, far more furious than Isis had ever seen him.

“What,” Ember barked, “is the meaning of this?”

“I-I can explain, Principal Ember,” said Sparks, rising to his feet. “We caught Ms. Wright in the very act of-“

“And already strapped her down in the Disciplinary Suite, I see,” Ember said, striding over to Sparks. “In mid-application of a Greater Bullet Ant enchantment, as well. Extraordinarily painful.”

“Yes, Principal Ember, but-“

“I am doing the talking now, Sparks,” Ember barked. With a flick of his wand, he tossed the Magical Resource Officer aside like a rag doll. He then grasped a chair, turned it around, and sat down on it, resting both hands on the chair back.

With Sparks’s concentration broken, the incendiary pain from the Greater Bullet Ant enchantment quickly faded, but the ashes of the pain still left Isis gasping.

“T-thank you, Principal Ember…” she gasped.

“Pick yourself up, Sparks,” said Ember, his gaze resting, unbroken, on Isis. “Has she said anything?”

“She…she has been extraordinarily resistant to the pain, Principal,” said Sparks.

“He has been questioning me, accusing me of all sorts of lies,” Isis cried. “He-“

Ember curtly waved his wand at her, briefly silencing her with Maxine’s favorite classroom control spell. “This is why you don’t start interrogations without me, Sparks,” he said. “I’m surprised your wand doesn’t go off in its holster, you miserable incompetent.”

Sparks seemed to crumble a bit. “I’m sorry, Principal Ember.”

“Spare me your sniveling.” Ember said. He dispelled the silence enchantment, leaving Isis’s labored breathing and gasps audible. “I will do this myself.”

“It’s a lie,” Isis cried. “It’s all lies! Sparks made everything up!”

“Oh?” Ember said. His eyebrows arched. “Are you telling me that my Magical Resource Officer has been chasing at paranoid shadows, letting his imagination run away with him, and accusing an innocent little girl, one of our star pupils, of all sorts of fantasy?”

“Yes,” said Isis. “He’s been against me from the start.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. The man hasn’t an imaginative bone in his body,” said Ember, cooly. “If anything he’s been blundering from the beginning. I’ve told him time and again to leave you be, that if you go to ground we will learn nothing. But now, I fear, the time has come for our little non-magical infiltrator to tell all.”

“You…you know?” A sensation of dread, blazing and more painful than even the Bullet Ant enchantment, welled up inside Isis.

A flash of something flitted across Ember’s face. Isis thought it might have been pity, before she realized it was contempt.

“My dear girl,” the principal said. “I’ve known from the very start.”