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“You mean I’ll have to fight a cobra, or a mamba, or some other kind of viper before I can be considered a full-fledged practitioner by the Folly?” I said.
Nightingale was aghast at my lack of ophidian knowledge.
“Neither cobras nor mambas are vipers, Peter,” he said. “They belong to the family Elapidae and lack the Viperidae hinged fangs, as well as employing a different type of toxin in their venom.” Abigail, who happened to be enjoying an experimental Molly lunch with us at the Folly when I learned about the magical snake combat requirement, sagely nodded along. “And, I assure you, mambas were very rarely used in Casterbrook.”
“But I’d still have to fight some kind of snake,” I said. “Because that’s how it was done in Casterbrook eighty years ago. No offense, sir, but that’s idiotic.”
“It’s traditional, Peter,” Nightingale sighed. “The serpents on Hermes’s caduceus are a very old symbol of transformation and transcendence, and so mastery of Newtonian magic is – perhaps a bit literally – represented by demonstrating mastery over a snake.”
“A literal, very poisonous snake.”
“Venomous,” Abigail said helpfully. “Unless you’re planning on biting it. Also Aunty Rose is going to kill you deader than any snake if you even think about going through with this.”
She was definitely right about Mum – I could hear the lecture about boomslangs and green mambas already – but Bev was probably going to want to kill me first.
“The snake fights were really not as dangerous as you all seem to imagine,” Nightingale said. “They were conducted in a highly controlled environment, senior practitioners standing by with eighth-order healing spells at the ready. Permanent injuries were quite rare. And I did explain that the perilousness of the individual snake was inversely proportional to the quality of the work submitted by the aspiring practitioner during the earlier phases of the examination.” (Abigail snickered in my direction in a way I found pretty insulting.)
“Why,” Nightingale continued with a fond smile that I’d learned to recognize, “Mellenby got a grass snake for his, and the poor thing was so timid, it took him longer to find it than to defeat it, which only required putting it in a box and taking it outside. Although there was the lad who had significantly irritated the masters and had to contend with a tiger snake for his – that was touch and go, though he got there in the end.”
“What kind of snake did you get, sir?” I couldn’t resist asking.
Nightingale’s smile turned wry. “The work I turned in for the examination had been described as ‘unexpectedly shoddy’ by my masters, so I was assigned a specimen of Ophiophagus hannah.”
(I looked it up afterwards, and apparently that means he fought a king cobra, which it turns out isn’t a real cobra at all, although I never did fully figure out what the difference is.)
“I may have been thinking of the snake fight as a sort of audition for one of the more adventurous lines of work,” he added, still smiling ruefully.
In the end I didn’t have to fight any snakes. Seawoll and Stephanopoulos explained the amount of paperwork that would be pre-emptively required, in case I did get bitten, and how much faff requisitioning antivenoms would involve, and I think that scared Nightingale off the idea.
“Besides, it’s Peter,” Stephanopoulos had said. “He’d probably just set the poor snake on fire and then we’d have to deal with the RSPCA.”