I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Apprentice of The Red Witch
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- Willowmere Hollow -
Harry woke slowly.
The first thing he registered was the ceiling. Wooden beams. His own ceiling, his own room. The second thing was his left hand, which was a separate country of pain located approximately at the end of his arm and which announced itself the moment he tried to move his fingers.
He did not move his fingers.
He lifted his head off the pillow and looked down. The hand was wrapped in a thick cream-coloured bandage that ran from the base of his fingers up past his wrist, and the cloth itself looked alive in a way bandages were not supposed to look. A faint pulse moved through it, slow, regular, the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He could see the shape of his knuckles underneath. They were the wrong shape. Less wrong than last night. Still wrong.
The door opened. Natasha came in with two mugs.
"You're awake."
"I think so."
"Sit up. Slowly. Don't use the left."
He pushed himself up against the headboard with his right hand. Natasha set one of the mugs on the bedside table and stayed standing. She did not sit on the edge of the bed. She had never sat on the edge of his bed. The closest she ever came was the chair by the desk, and even then, only when there was something to say that wouldn't say itself standing.
She was standing now.
"How does the hand feel."
"Not bad, but with a little pain on it."
"Good." She took a sip from her own mug. "Means the bones are knitting where they should. If it felt like nothing, that would be worse. If it felt like fire, that would also be worse."
"What does it feel like in a week?"
"Like a hand. You'll get it back."
He picked up the mug with his right hand. The tea was the strong black kind she made when she wanted him awake, with one and a half spoons of honey, which was the amount she had decided on for him in September after watching him drink it three different ways. He took a sip and watched her over the rim and waited.
She was watching the hand. Not him. The hand.
"Her name was Ileana," she said, after a moment.
He swallowed. "Ileana."
"Ileana Ardelean. Romanian father, Hungarian mother. Fourteen years old, eight months on the circuit, won her opening bracket last summer in Sofia and her second in Kraków. Her guardian is her uncle on the father's side. He was on the second balcony last night. He watched the whole match."
"Did he see your face."
"He saw a woman who is not in any of the books he keeps. He'll ask. He won't find me. But he saw you." She set her mug down on the desk. "He'll remember Andrei. And one day, somewhere, you may see Ileana again, and she may be carrying things her uncle has put into her since last night. Keep the name. Don't write it down."
"Ileana Ardelean."
"Mm."
He held the name in his mouth for a second and then let it go. He had been about to ask her tonight. She had given it to him before he had to.
She crossed to the desk, pulled the chair out, and sat. Harry understood that this was the part of the conversation she had been planning since she put him to bed.
"Three things."
"Okay."
"First. You stepped wrong on her third opening spell. You knew the first two were openings. You treated the third like it would also be an opening. It wasn't. It was the real one. She gave you two free hits to see how you'd move and the third was aimed at where she'd already learned you'd be. That's a thing trained people do. You should have known by the second spell that the third would be her measuring shot. You didn't. You ate it under the ribs."
He nodded. He could feel the bruise on his right side, low, a dull purpling weight that he had not noticed yesterday because of the hand.
"Second. When she broke your hand, you misread her wand by half a degree. Half. Which doesn't sound like much. But she was at full power and she had been watching you for ninety seconds and the half-degree was the difference between her aiming at your wand and her aiming at your hand. She wanted the hand. She didn't want to disarm you. She wanted to hurt you so you'd panic, and the next exchange was going to be the end of you. You didn't panic. That was good. But the read was bad."
"Yes."
"Third. You took too long to figure out that her concentration was where she was weakest. Sixty seconds. You should have known in twenty. You were watching her wand. You should have been watching her face. People tell you what's breaking in them before their hands do."
He drank his tea. The list sat neatly in his head, each item finding the place it belonged. He had felt all three of them happening last night without having the language for any of them. Now they had names. He would not make any of them again.
"Okay."
"Okay." She looked at him. "I'm proud of you."
He waited for the rest of it. With her there was always a rest of it.
"That's the whole sentence," she said.
"Oh."
"Drink your tea."
He drank his tea.
She got up from the chair, came over to the bed, and held her hand out. "Give me the wrap."
He extended his left arm. She unwound the heavy bandage carefully, her fingers working from the wrist down, and as the layers came off, he saw his own hand for the first time since the pit. The skin was the color of an old bruise across the back of the knuckles. The fingers were straight. They were the right length. They looked like his hand, all the lines in roughly the right places.
"I could have given you Skele-Gro," she said, not looking up, winding the heavy bandage into a coil. "Slept you for the night. You'd have a working hand by breakfast and no memory of it past the smell."
"Why didn't you."
"Because you broke it doing something you chose. A week of remembering you broke it is part of what you earned. Skele-Gro takes the lesson out and leaves only the win." She set the coil aside and unrolled a thinner bandage, pale and almost translucent, threaded with something that caught the light. "This one's for school. Lighter. Holds the bones. Lets you write. Doesn't show under a sleeve unless someone is looking."
She wrapped his hand. The new bandage settled against his skin and went warm and then went neutral and then went almost weightless.
"Pomfrey will see it if you go anywhere near her," she said. "Don't go anywhere near her."
"I won't."
"Trunk's by the door. Pack your books. Train's at eleven."
She stood up, took both mugs, and left. The door clicked shut behind her.
Harry sat in bed for another half-minute and looked at his hand.
Ileana Ardelean, he thought.
He got up and started packing.
- Hogsmeade Station -
The carriage smelled of wet wool and old leather and the faint iron tang of snow that came through the gap at the top of the door. He sat with his right side against the window and his bandaged hand resting on his thigh under his cloak, and he watched the road climb.
Across from him a third-year girl whose name he did not know was complaining about the cold to a friend whose name he also did not know. Both of them looked at him twice in the first minute and then made a point of not looking at him at all, which was the new pattern since the troll. Harry had learned to find it restful.
The lake came into view through the trees, and he turned his head to see it properly.
It was half-iced. The far shore was a white line, and the near shore was open black water that steamed faintly in the cold, and the line between them moved as he watched, the ice extending and retreating in small, slow tongues. The castle rose behind it on the hill, and Harry understood, looking at it now, that the castle he had left in December had been an autumn castle, and the castle he was looking at was a different building. Snow on the roofs. Frost on the stone. The windows were the same warm gold they had been in September, but the light coming through them changed by the cold air it had to cross.
He had been gone eighteen days. The castle had not noticed.
The carriages stopped at the gates. Harry got down using his right hand on the doorframe and kept the left tucked against his body, and he was halfway across the path toward the entrance when he heard footsteps catch up to him on his right.
"Harry."
He turned his head. Daphne. She was in a dark green winter cloak with the hood down and snow in her hair, and her eyes went to his face for half a second and then to his left arm, which was not visible under the cloak. She could not have seen the bandage. She had seen something else, which was the way he was holding the arm.
"What are you hiding in that arm, Harry," she said.
"Tonight i will tell."
She accepted this with no change of expression and fell into step beside him.
Theo came up on the other side a few paces later, materialising the way Theo always materialised, having taken some route Harry had not noticed him take. He looked at Harry and at Daphne and at Harry's left arm and then at Harry's face, and Harry watched Theo do the same arithmetic Daphne had done thirty seconds earlier.
"Tonight," Harry said.
"Okey, lets wait a bit to hear your adventures with ur aunt."
That was the entire conversation. They walked the rest of the path to the entrance hall together in silence, and the silence was companionable in the way that mattered, the kind that meant two people had asked a question and accepted an answer and would wait.
The dungeons were the same as they had been in December. The same green lamps. The same cold under the flagstones. Harry's dormitory had the smell of unaired stone that always settled in over a long break, and his trunk was already at the foot of his bed, set there by the elves while he was still in the carriage. He unpacked one-handed. Daphne found him near the stairs to the common room ten minutes later and pressed a small pot of something into his pocket without breaking stride.
"Bruise paste," she said. "From my mother's case. For the ribs. I assumed."
"How did you know about the ribs."
"You walked off the carriage favouring the right side."
"I was favouring the left."
"You were favouring both. Apply it tonight."
She was gone before he could thank her.
The first Potions class of the term was after lunch.
Harry took his usual bench at the back left, set his cauldron, and laid his book open with his right hand. His left sat on the wooden surface where his left always sat, and the cuff of his robe rode up perhaps an inch above the wrist, which was something he had not corrected when he dressed that morning and which he did not correct now.
Snape entered without speaking and went directly to the board. He wrote Strengthening Solution in his small, precise hand and turned and began the class. The brewing today was a fourth-week revision of work they had begun before Christmas, and the room settled into the rhythm of weighing and chopping and stirring.
Snape walked.
He walked the rows, slowly, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the cauldrons and on the cutting boards. He paused at Crabbe's bench to correct the angle of a knife. He paused at Hermione's bench across the aisle in the Gryffindor half of the room to tell her, in a flat voice that was not quite a reprimand, that the recipe asked for a clockwise stir and three was not the same number as seven. He moved on.
He arrived at Harry's bench.
Harry did not look up from his cauldron. He was crushing dried nettles with the pestle in his right hand, which was the natural position for the work, and his left was on the bench where it had been for the whole class, where it would have looked deliberate to move. He felt Snape stop. He felt Snape's eyes go to the bandage at his wrist. He counted internally because Natasha had drilled him in counting internally when he was being watched and could not show that he knew. One. Two. Th-
Snape moved on.
The eyes had been on the hand for the count of a slow two and a half, which was perhaps a second longer than the eyes had been on anyone else's bench that lesson. There had been no comment. There had been no slowed step. There had been no break in the rhythm of the class.
Harry did not tug his sleeve down. He kept crushing his nettles. He counted his own breathing back down from where it had spiked, and by the time Snape was at the front of the room again, Harry's pulse was where it had been before he had come into the dungeon.
The class ended on the bell. Snape dismissed them without looking at anyone in particular. Harry packed his book away with his right hand and tugged the sleeve down only as he was standing up, as if absently, as if the cold of the corridor had reminded him. He felt that Snape was not looking. He left.
That evening, after dinner, the three of them found the sofa nearest the fire in the Slytherin common room. It was the one with the green velvet that had gone bald at the arms, and it was their sofa now in the way that sofas became people's sofas, by repetition.
Daphne sat at one end with a book open on her knees. Theo sat at the other end with a roll of parchment on a board across his lap and a Charms essay half-written on it. Harry sat in the middle with his bandaged hand turned palm-up on his thigh, close enough to the fire that he could feel the heat moving in the bones, far enough that the wool of his trousers did not start to smell.
The common room was loud around them. Pucey was holding court near the windows. A third-year girl was crying about something in the corner. Two first-years he did not know were playing exploding snap badly.
None of the three of them said anything.
Daphne turned a page.
Theo's quill scratched.
Harry watched the fire and did not look at his friends, and his friends did not look at him, and the warmth in his hand spread up his wrist into his arm. Somewhere above them a door slammed in the boys' staircase. Nobody flinched. Harry felt, for the first time since the Portkey had set him down in a Carpathian forest, that he was indoors.
He stayed in the warmth and waited for the room to empty. Which didn't happen, and he decided to go and sleep.
- The Long Courtyard -
The snow in the long courtyard had been trampled into a brown slurry along the main path, but the open ground on either side was still clean, and the second-years and below had been out in it since breakfast. By the time Harry crossed on his way to Defense, the snow fight in the south corner had reached the stage where there was no longer anything that resembled sides.
He walked the path with his books in his right arm. He was not looking at the snow fight. He was looking at the colonnade ahead, where Professor Quirrell was crossing in the other direction, alone.
The snowball came from the south corner.
Harry caught the motion of it out of the corner of his eye, an underhand throw, low and wide. He watched it travel without turning his head.
The snowball hit the back of Quirrell's turban with a wet, flat smack.
Quirrell stopped walking.
The boy who had thrown it, a small Hufflepuff Harry did not know, perhaps ten or eleven, froze in the snow with his arm still half-raised. The friend he had been aiming at stopped laughing. The fight in the south corner went quiet in a slow ripple that spread out from the point of impact, as the other children noticed first the snowball and then where it had landed and then who had been wearing the thing it had landed on.
Quirrell did not turn around.
"You idiot."
The voice was not Quirrell's voice. Harry heard it from twelve paces away, low and exact, the kind of voice that did not need to be raised to carry, and the boy in the snow took one step back before the next words landed.
"I will make you pay for what you did."
Harry kept walking.
He did not slow, did not look up, did not turn his head, and his pace did not change by a fraction. He kept his eyes on the far end of the colonnade and he let the scene happen in his peripheral vision because that was the rule, the rule from the kitchen at four in the morning, the rule from the coach with the smoked glass windows, visibly watching is how you tell a target you're watching them, and the target was Quirrell, and Quirrell was not aware yet that he had become one.
Then Quirrell moved his head, he understand that he made a mistake with his words.
He turned it, not all the way, only enough to scan the colonnade in both directions, a sharp short sweep with his chin barely lifting. He was checking for teachers. Harry watched the sweep finish. There were no teachers in the colonnade. There was only Harry and three Ravenclaw girls about ten paces behind him, and the children in the snow.
Quirrell turned the rest of the way around.
"Mind where you throw next time."
It wasn't the same voice that had said I will make you pay. Now it was the usual Quirill voice. The Hufflepuff boy was staring at him with his mouth open. Quirrell looked at him for one second more and then his shoulders changed.
He pressed his right hand to the back of the turban. He held it there.
Then he turned, not toward the staff wing, not toward the Defense corridor, but down the short flight of stone steps at the east end of the colonnade that led to the lower passages, and he was gone around the corner before the Hufflepuff boy had finished swallowing.
Harry kept walking.
He reached the far end of the colonnade and turned the corner toward Defense, and only then he decided to remeber and file in his head what happened.
The voice was not Quirrell's voice.
The hand on the back of the turban.
The east stairs.
Three things. He would tell Daphne and Theo tonight.
He shifted his books to his good arm and walked on.
- The Slytherin common room -
The fire had burned down to its red bones by the time the last of the third-years went up to bed.
Harry waited another full minute after the door to the boys' staircase clicked shut. He counted it on the clock above the mantel. The minute passed. The common room was empty except for the three of them and the small clicking of the cooling stones in the grate.
"All right," he said.
Daphne closed her book on her thumb and set it on the arm of the sofa. She did not mark her page. She had not been reading for the last half hour, which Harry had noticed and not commented on.
Theo rolled his half-finished essay up neatly and slid it inside the cover of his Charms book and laid the book on the floor at his feet.
"All right," he said.
Harry slid down off the sofa onto the rug in front of the fire, and they came with him, Daphne curling her legs underneath her at one end of the hearth rug and Theo settling cross-legged at the other. Harry put his bandaged hand on his knee, where they could both see it, because the hand was part of the story and there was no point pretending otherwise.
He told them about Romania.
He told them about the kitchen at four in the morning and the brandy in the warming draught and the Soviet coin from a contact he was not going to name. He told them about the Portkey landing him in a forest east of Brașov in air that smelled wrong and about walking with Natasha through a village without a name on most maps. He did not tell them about Volkova. He did not tell them about Sanda or about Bunicu, and he did not tell them that Natasha had a working name at all, because that piece of information was not his to give away even to these two.
He told them about the citadel.
He told them about the gallery above the pit and the witchfire in the iron baskets and the runic line cut into the stone. He told them about the announcer who spoke three languages and the rule about killing curses and the rule about the face. He told them about the first duel, which had ended in four seconds, and about the second duel, the long one, with the Romanian who smiled at his entrance and the shorter man in the dark coat.
He paused.
Daphne did not move. Her eyes had not left his face since he had started talking. Theo had gone still in the way Theo went still when his mind was building something, his shoulders dropping a half-inch and his fingers flat on his knees.
"The shorter man cast a spell I don't have a name for," Harry said. "I'm not going to describe it. It was bad."
"How bad," Theo said.
"The kind of bad you don't say out loud at midnight in a stone room."
Theo nodded once and did not push. Daphne also did not push.
He told them that Natasha had told him it was his turn. About walking through the crowd and stepping over the runic line into the pit. About the girl on the other side of the pit. He told them her name was Ileana Ardelean, fourteen, Romanian father, Hungarian mother. He told them her uncle had been watching from the second balcony.
He told them about the duel. The opening that he had read wrong on the third spell. The bruising hex under his ribs that he had not noticed at the time. The ninety seconds in the middle, where he had figured out that she had been trained for combat but not for noise. The trick with paired casting. The cutter that had taken her across the thigh.
He told them about the hand.
Daphne's eyes went to the bandage when he said it and then back to his face.
He told them about the disarming charm at point-blank that had thrown her across the pit and about the announcer saying the name Andrei, and he told them about the girl on the stone lifting her chin at him in a nod, and he told them about walking back across the pit and over the runic line and seeing Natasha's face. He did not tell them, in detail, what Natasha's face had looked like. He said only that she had been pleased. The rest of that was his.
He did not tell them about the scar being gone. He did not tell them that he had been called Andrei because there were people in that room who could not be allowed to know his real name. Those things were also not his to give.
He told them about the blackout and about waking up at Willowmere with the hand in the bandage and Natasha bringing him tea and giving him the girl's name. He told them about the three things she had said he had done wrong.
He stopped.
The fire moved in the grate. Daphne's hands were folded in her lap. Theo opened his mouth.
"Wait," Harry said. "There's something else."
Theo closed his mouth.
"Yesterday," Harry said. "At the long courtyard. Quirrell."
He told them about the snowball. About the boy from Hufflepuff who had thrown wide. About the voice that had said, "You idiot, I will make you pay for what you did", which was not Quirrell's voice. He told them about Quirrell's head turning in the small, sharp sweep that had been checking for teachers. He told them about the rewritten sentence afterward, mind where you throw next time, delivered flat. He told them about the stammer coming back and the hand going to the back of the turban and Quirrell taking the east stairs.
When he was done Daphne was looking at the fire. Theo was looking at nothing at all, which was how Theo looked when he was assembling.
"The hand," Theo said. "On the back."
"Yes."
"Not on the side. Not on the front. Not where the snowball hit, exactly, but specifically the back."
"Yes."
"And he checked for teachers before he corrected himself."
"Yes."
Theo was quiet for several seconds.
"He has been stammering at us since September," Theo said. "Every class. Every meal. Every corridor encounter. He stammers when he asks for the salt. He stammers when he wishes us a good morning. I have heard him stammer at his own footsteps in an empty room."
"Yes."
"And yesterday, for the length of one sentence, he didn't."
Theo absorbed this.
"The thing he was protecting with his hand," Theo said slowly. "Was the back of the turban."
"Yes."
"Which is not where you put a hand to check if a snowball is melting into your hat."
"No."
"You put a hand there to check on something underneath."
"That was also my thought."
Theo looked at Harry. Harry looked back. The thing they were both looking at sat in the air between them, unnamed, and Harry knew that Theo was not going to name it tonight because Theo did not name things until he had two more pieces of evidence than he needed, and Harry was not going to name it tonight either because Natasha had told him, in her last letter, to watch and not act.
"We watch," Harry said.
"We watch."
"We don't follow him. We don't approach him. We watch where he is and where he isn't, and we watch what his hands do, and we keep watching the third floor."
"Agreed."
"And if Natasha's contacts find anything, I'll tell you."
"Agreed."
Daphne had still not spoken.
Harry turned to look at her. She was still looking at the fire. Her hands were still folded in her lap. The line of her jaw had not changed, which with Daphne was how he had learned to recognise the difference between her being calm and her being absorbed. She was absorbed.
"Daph."
"Mm."
"You haven't said anything."
"No."
"Are you going to."
"Not tonight."
She did not look at him when she said it. She said it to the fire. Theo glanced at Harry. Harry did not glance back.
"All right," Harry said.
They sat for a while longer. Nobody added a log. Nobody got up. The clock above the mantel moved through quarter past midnight and then through twenty past, and somewhere above them in the boys' dormitory, a door slammed, and none of the three of them flinched.
Daphne finally moved. She reached out, slowly, and her fingers touched the edge of the bandage on Harry's left hand where it lay on his knee. She did not lift the bandage. She did not say anything about the hand. Her fingers stayed on the cloth for perhaps two seconds, and then she withdrew them and folded her hands back in her lap.
"Good night, Harry," she said.
"Good night."
She got up and crossed to the girls' staircase and was gone.
The dormitory was dark. Daphne climbed into bed without lighting her wand and stared at the canopy above her.
Eighteen months of training Harry had received before he ever set foot in Hogwarts. Breathing patterns, core sensing, visualization under distraction, physical conditioning, spellwork beyond the standard curriculum. Eighteen months Daphne could not recover by reading ahead in Charms or practicing Transfiguration after hours, because Harry was doing those things too.
And he had duelled. A real duel, in a pit, against a trained opponent three years older. He had won. The broken hand proved the stakes had been real.
Daphne had managed a clean Lumos in October and been pleased with herself. The comparison was humiliating.
The gap would not close because she wanted it to close. Wanting was not a strategy. She needed resources. A tutor who understood what Natasha was teaching him. Access to her family's restricted library. Time, which she did not have in quantity but could use with precision.
Her father would understand. The Greengrasses did not fall behind.
She turned on her side and made herself stop calculating. Morning would be soon enough to write the letter. She closed her eyes.
The decision was already made. She would match his strength, whatever it cost.
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