The reply from Madam Pomfrey arrived four days later, carried by a small efficient owl he didn't recognise.
The letter read: Mr Weasley — Professor McGonagall has forwarded your letter and the relevant context. I will still test you personally to confirm your theoretical standard remains at the level described. Come to the hospital wing at appointed date. Do not be late. — P. Pomfrey
He went back to his Transfiguration practice.
He had taken his father's workbench in the garden shed, which his father had offered without question. Ginny had immediately used his workload as leverage for use of his Nimbus 2001 on Tuesday and Thursday evenings — though it had quickly become apparent that she was not flying alone. Harry joined her on the first Tuesday, ostensibly to practise Seeker drills, and thereafter by what became a quiet arrangement that required no announcement. Ron had watched them from the shed door once, the two of them cutting low across the garden in the early evening, and had gone back to his workbench without comment. He considered the Nimbus a fair trade for what it was producing.
He spent two hours every morning in the shed with a set of objects borrowed from around the house — a brass candlestick, a pair of kitchen shears, a doorstop shaped like a hedgehog that Ginny had won at a Muggle fair — working transformations until they stopped feeling like individual acts of will and started feeling closer to something he didn't have to decide about.
He had also purchased, in the second week, a set of duelling dummies from a specialist supplier in Hogsmeade. They arrived in six flat-packed crates and required an afternoon with his father to assemble properly — articulated figures that could be calibrated from Hogwarts-fifth-year level through to Hit Wizard standard, each level updating automatically at the end of a practice session based on the caster's output. He set them up along the far end of the garden where the target posts had been, so he could move between point-shooting drills on the static posts and live-response work against the dummies in the same session. The fifth-year setting gave him no trouble. The Auror-standard setting, which was what the dummies defaulted to after the first week, was not interested in making it easy.
Non-verbal casting had come to him earlier than most — the Black library, Occlumency discipline, a year of deliberate practice. The mechanics of suppressing the spoken word were no longer the difficulty. What he was working on now was point casting: the difference between directing a spell and placing it, the precision of someone who could put a Stunner not just at a target but through a gap the width of two fingers at twenty feet while a dummy's return fire was already in the air. He worked it slow, then fast, then slow again. He kept notes on the misses.
He also brewed. He had set up a station in the corner of the shed with a portable brazier and a set of second-hand copper cauldrons, and spent the other hours of the morning on potions that weren't in his textbooks — combinations from a monograph he'd found in the Black library on experimental potion work that required reading the colour and the smell and the viscosity and making a judgment rather than following a sequence. He got it wrong more often than he got it right. He took notes on both.
His mother had offered to help, which he had accepted without hesitation. She ran a potions business from the Burrow — a quiet, long-standing thing, private clients and a standing order to St Mungo's for three standard remedial compounds — and what she understood about potion-reading was not theoretical. She came to the shed on two mornings that first week, looked at what he was attempting, and said, without preamble: 'Your heat's wrong. You're managing it like a standard brewing, keeping it even. This wants variation. Watch the colour at the edge of the surface rather than the centre — that's where it tells you.'
He watched the edge. She had been right.
After that she came on Wednesdays, which became a working arrangement: he brewed, she observed, she said exactly what was wrong and nothing else, and he adjusted. Biscuit, the older of the two elves, had developed the habit of appearing at the shed door around eleven with tea and something to eat, which Ron accepted without comment and which his mother received with the expression of someone who was still occasionally surprised that this was how things were now.
The afternoons were for duelling. Harry joined him most afternoons after the first week, which had not been planned but was not unwelcome. Harry was a natural duellist in a way that reminded him of the assessment's note about intuition — less methodical than Ron, faster to improvise, better in the moments that required feeling rather than calculation. They pushed each other in the specific way of two people who had complementary strengths and no reason to pretend otherwise.
Ron joined Harry and Ginny in the garden at the hour-and-a-half mark on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when they came down off the brooms. The three of them would run through a short passing drill or a Seeker scenario, nothing formal, Ginny having clearly decided that Ron's presence was not an imposition provided he kept up. She was a better flier than Harry, technically, on most days. Harry was more dangerous. The difference was interesting.
He still took photographs.
His mother at the kitchen table with her mending, the amber catching the late afternoon light through the window. Ginny asleep on the sitting room sofa with a book open on her chest, in the particular boneless quality of someone who had run herself into the ground and was finally resting. Harry and his father in the shed on a Tuesday evening, Arthur explaining the mechanical principle of the Jaguar's gearbox with the focused joy of someone describing a miracle, Harry listening with the expression he had when he was genuinely interested and not performing it.
He developed them in his room at night, the developing tray on the windowsill, watching the images appear.
He put the good ones aside for the album.