I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Wandless Archmage
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The second Apparition went easier than the first, in the way getting hit a second time goes easier than the first. Harry had stopped expecting his ears to remain in their usual locations, and stopped being surprised when the world reassembled itself around him in an order it had not been in before. His knees still wobbled. His stomach still made an editorial comment. But he did not stumble, and he counted that as progress.
Dumbledore released his arm at the school gates and looked at him.
"Better," Dumbledore said.
"Yes, Thank you, sir."
They began walking up the long drive toward the castle. The wind had thinned to nothing while they were on the hill, and the lake had gone glassy.
"Harry."
"Sir."
"What we did this morning belongs, for the moment, to the two of us."
Harry thought about that. He had already decided, on the path coming down, to keep most of it to himself, but it was different to be told. It made the silence official.
"Even my friends?" he asked.
"You can give them a short summary but keep the details especially those that may worry them. You will know which parts those are."
Harry nodded.
"Excellent, now have a good night Harry."
"Good night, sir."
The eagle knocker considered him without enthusiasm. What does a man take more of as he gives more away?
Harry was tired and his answer came out before he could second-guess it. "Knowledge."
The eagle made a sound that might have been a sigh.
Inside the common room the fire was low and the chairs were mostly empty. Terry and Michael were sitting at the round table closest to the door with the postures of two people who had been waiting long enough to forget they were waiting.
"Where did you go?" Terry said, before Harry had crossed the threshold.
"What did you bring me?" Michael said.
"Nothing. I told you that before I left."
"I was hopeful."
Harry sat down between them. He thought about Dumbledore's instruction, found it the right size and shape for what he had to say.
"I went to see a wandmaker."
Terry's face did the thing it did when he had a question stacked behind every word in the sentence he had just heard. "Who?"
"Not Ollivander."
"I gathered. Where."
"Up a hill."
"Harry."
"I don't actually know where. We Apparated. There was a stream and some sheep."
"That narrows it to half of Britain," Michael said.
"He picked a tree for me. Or it picked me. He wasn't clear."
Terry sat forward so far his elbows came off the table. "What kind of tree?"
"Rowan."
Terry made a noise. He went quiet, and then he made the noise again, and then he said, very seriously, "Rowan is interesting."
"That's all you're going to say?"
"It is the most I have ever said about a tree."
Michael had taken out a piece of toast from his pocket, which Harry suspected he had been saving for emergencies, and was eating it as if Harry's news required commentary in the form of mastication. "Was there tea," he said, around the toast.
"Yes."
"Good tea?"
"I don't know what good tea tastes like."
"Then I cannot help you."
Terry was still on the tree. "You'll bring me notes?"
"I haven't taken any notes."
"You will, though. Won't you."
"Probably."
Harry stood up, and his legs felt heavier than legs ought to feel after a day spent mostly standing on a hill and sitting on a chair. He told them he was going to bed. They let him go, which was generous of Terry, who looked like he had a list of follow-up questions long enough to staple.
The duelling session began the next evening, in a long room on the third floor that Flitwick used for Charms practical examinations. He had pushed the desks against the walls and laid down a line of chalk across the floor, and he stood at one end of the line with his hands behind his back and a small, alert smile that suggested he had been looking forward to this.
"Wands away."
Eight first-year Ravenclaws looked at him with eight matching expressions of betrayal. Terry, who had come early to choose his spot, made a small sound.
"Sir," said a girl Harry thought was Lisa, "isn't dueling with wands?"
"Eventually." Flitwick rocked once on the balls of his feet. "First, with this." He indicated himself, generally. "The body. Tonight we begin with the body, because in two weeks I do not want any of you to lose a duel for the reason most first-years lose duels."
"Which is?"
"They freeze."
He let that sit. He had a way of letting sentences sit that made them feel heavier than the words.
"Fear travels through the spine before it travels through the wand. If you do not own your spine, you cannot own your spell. Now. Watch."
He stepped sideways into the duelling stance and Harry, who had not known what a duelling stance was supposed to look like, suddenly understood several things at once. Flitwick's feet were not parallel; the lead foot was angled forward, the back foot turned out about thirty degrees. His weight sat low and slightly forward, somewhere alive between his heels and his toes. His wand arm extended without locking. His other arm folded across his chest, hand open, ready to do something Harry could not yet name. His chin was down. His eyes were up.
He looked, Harry thought, like a very small clock spring in the half second before it released.
"Feet. Weight. Wand arm. Eye line. Four things. Most duels are won and lost in these four things before any spell is cast. A first-year who plants their feet correctly and looks their opponent in the eye is harder to beat than a fifth-year who doesn't. I have seen it. I have refereed it. I have written it on student reports."
He had them try. He went down the line and adjusted ankles and elbows and chins. When he came to Harry he paused for the smallest moment and then said, "Wand arm or open hand?"
"Open hand, sir."
"Then we will angle it forward, not across. You are not protecting your chest. You are pointing."
Harry adjusted. The new shape felt strange in his shoulder, then not strange at all, the way a lock turns when the key fits.
The session ran for an hour. Flitwick did not let any of them cast a spell. By the end, Harry's calves were complaining, and his back had joined them. When the others packed up and filed out, Terry mouthed notes at him from the door, and Harry rolled his eyes, and Flitwick, who had eyes in places eyes usually weren't, said, "Mr. Potter. A moment."
The door closed. The room felt larger.
"Sit, Harry."
Harry sat on a desk. Flitwick remained standing because standing put him at roughly Harry's eye level.
"List for me what you can do, spells without wand."
"Light. I can hold a Lumos. Five minutes, almost."
"Good. What else."
"Warmth. Without the light. Just heat in my palm."
"Useful."
Harry was not sure how, but he kept that to himself. "A small flame. I haven't done it inside. Only outside, in the garden at Privet Drive."
"Wise."
"A push. That's what I've been calling it. It's like a hand, but invisible, and angry."
Flitwick's eyebrows lifted. "Range?"
"Across a corridor. Maybe further. I haven't tried."
"And."
"Levitation. Three inches. The book dropped."
Flitwick was quiet for a moment, thinking, and Harry watched him think. There was something orderly about the way Flitwick thought, as if he were sorting a small drawer in his head.
"Five things. Light, heat, flame, force, levitation. Most of your year-mates have one spell they can do reliably and three that they cannot. You have five tools, none of them refined, all of them yours. We are not going to teach you Expelliarmus, Harry, and I will tell you why."
"Why, sir?"
"Because it is not a question of whether you could learn it. It is a question of what it would cost you to learn it badly when you already have things you do well. We are going to take what you have and sharpen it. Light bright enough to take an opponent's eyes for two seconds. Heat directed, not held. Flame on a leash. Force you can aim instead of throw. Levitation that lifts a boy off his feet and over a line."
Harry looked at his own hands, the bitten nails, the small pale scar on his thumb. They did not look like an arsenal.
"What about warmth?" he said.
Flitwick smiled. "We will find out what warmth is for. Magic is honest, Harry. If you have it, it is for something. That's everything for today, you can go now."
Harry walked back along a corridor he thought he knew and found, after a turn, that he didn't. He was still looking for the right one when he heard a whipcrack. Then another. Then a third, with a grunt of effort behind it that did not quite belong to the spell.
He pushed the door open.
Tonks's hair was the colour of an electrical fire, and her wand was already in motion when she registered him. She fired a Stinging Hex past Cedric's left ear to buy herself a half second, and used the half second to wave.
"Harry!"
"Tonks," said Cedric, very calmly, with his Shield Charm flickering off the air in front of him and the Stinging Hex dispersing in violet sparks. He turned his head a quarter inch. "Hello, Harry. You can come in. She is being rude."
"I'm being efficient."
"You hexed me to wave."
"I hexed you to wave at a friend. There is a difference."
"There isn't."
"Come watch," Tonks said to Harry, before Cedric had finished speaking. "Stand by the wall. He's about to lose."
"I'm about to do nothing of the kind."
Harry stood by the wall.
He stayed for twenty minutes and learned more about duelling than he had learned in the hour of stance work, which was a thing he would not say out loud to Flitwick.
Tonks did not duel like the older students he had glimpsed in the practice corridors. She duelled like someone playing a game whose rules she had written herself and not fully shared. Every time Cedric thought he knew what was coming, what came was the other thing. She would begin a wand motion that ended in a different spell. She would shift her weight to her left foot, commit the shoulder, and step right. Once her hair flushed a sudden pink, and Cedric flinched, as if he expected a shape change, and the spell came from her offhand at his knees while he was still watching her face.
"You're cheating," Cedric said, on his back on the stone floor for the second time in a row. He sounded admiring.
"With what."
"Your face."
"My face is mine. The rules say so. I checked twice."
She offered him a hand up. He took it. He limped a half step on his way back to his line and did not pretend he wasn't.
"What is she doing?" Harry asked.
Cedric considered the question with the slight crookedness of a boy who had been hit somewhere expensive. "She makes me think I know what's coming. Then she does the other thing."
"That's it?"
"That's all of it. The trick is she's the only person I know who can do it for ten minutes without ever doing the same other thing twice."
"You're flattering me," called Tonks.
"I'm complaining about you," called Cedric.
"Sounds the same in your voice."
They went again, and a third time. By the end Cedric had landed a Disarming Charm clean enough that Tonks's wand left her hand and clattered against the wall behind Harry, and by the end Tonks had landed three things in a row that had nothing to do with what her face had said, and they were both filthy and grinning, and Harry was leaning against the wall with his arms folded and the smallest, most surprising feeling sitting under his ribs.
"I won enough, im leaving now." Tonks said.
Tonks waved Harry goodnight from halfway down the corridor, and Cedric clapped him on the shoulder on the way past, lightly enough not to shake anything important loose. Then they were gone in different directions, and Flitwick's office was already dark when Harry passed it on the way back to the right corridor.
The eagle knocker had a riddle for him that he had heard before. He answered it without slowing down.
In the dormitory, Terry was a long shape under his blue covers, still clutching a book; Michael had kicked his blanket onto the floor again and was making a sound that, charitably, could be called sleeping.
Harry undressed in the dark. He held his hand up in front of him and looked at it for a moment, the way Tobias had looked at it that morning, the way he had not yet looked at it himself.
Five tools. None of them refined.
He woke up and saw that he was the last one in the dormitory. He put on his clothes and went to eat breakfast.
The argument had already begun.
"A Stinging Hex," Terry said, "is a hex. It says so in the name."
"It's also a spell that you cast at someone in a duel," Michael said, "and which lands and removes some of their attention from what they were doing. What more do you want from a duelling spell."
"Pedigree."
"Pedigree."
"Yes."
"Terry. Listen. A spell that works is a spell that works. A hex that lands is a hex that has, in fact, landed."
"By that logic, you could throw your shoe at someone."
"You could."
"That isn't duelling."
"It is if my shoe lands."
Harry, who was somewhere in the middle of this, took the position of having seen a Stinging Hex used to free up a hand for waving, and offered the case in evidence.
"That's exactly my point," said Terry. "Tonks doesn't even consider it a real spell. She uses it as punctuation."
"Tonks," Michael said, "won the only point in your argument by putting one in Cedric's left ear in front of a witness in an actual duel. Harry, would you like to take Terry's side, or would you like me to keep being right by myself."
"You're not being right," Terry said.
"I am. Harry, tell him."
Harry was about to say something diplomatic about both of them being a little bit right, which was the sort of thing he had recently learned could buy him five seconds of peace at any given table, when the doors of the Great Hall opened.
He was on his feet before he had decided to be.
Terry looked up, registered, and rose half a second later, the way you rise when you have decided you are going to rise and your legs are catching up to the news.
Michael did not stand. Michael, however, paused his fork halfway between plate and mouth and did not move it again, which from Michael was roughly equivalent to a brass band and a row of bowing courtiers.
Cho was wearing her school robes and her hair was tied back the usual way, and the bandage was gone. She looked thinner than Harry remembered. She walked the length of the Ravenclaw table at a normal pace, which Harry suspected took some doing, because most of the table was watching her and pretending not to.
She stopped at their bench. She said hello to Terry first, which was kind. She said hello to Michael, who said hello back in the voice he used when he was not going to make a joke for at least one minute. She said hello to Harry last, and then she went up on the balls of her feet and kissed him on the cheek.
It was not a long kiss. It was not a real one in any sense, Harry could have explained later if anyone had asked, which he hoped no one would. It was small and warm and over before he had registered that it was happening.
His face went hot in a way he could feel from his collar to his hairline. He thought he had probably gone purple. He suspected that everyone in the hall was watching. He looked up to check and found he was right. Everyone was watching him and Cho.
"Sit," Cho said.
Harry sat.
Michael resumed eating without comment, which Harry was grateful for in a deep and lasting way.
"I'm not duelling," Cho said, before any of them could ask. "Pomfrey says no impact magic for a fortnight, and she said it the way she says things when she means them."
"That's it then," Michael said.
"I'm not out. I'm just not in. I'm going to coach."
Terry put down the piece of toast he had picked up specifically to gesture with. "Coach."
"Strategy. Watching. Telling the three of you what you are doing wrong and then telling you what to do about it."
"That sounds suspiciously like being our boss."
"It sounds like that because it is that, if you will accept, of course."
Harry, who was still trying to get his face back to its usual colour, said, "Yes, it will be our pleasure."
"Show me what you've got so far," Cho said. "All three of you. We've got a free hour before lunch and there's a room on the fourth floor that no one uses."
Harry was already standing, in part because he had not properly sat down. He told her he needed the bathroom for two minutes and would meet them there. He said it without thinking about it. He did need the bathroom. He also needed two minutes alone with his face.
The corridor outside the hall was emptier than usual for a Sunday, and the light through the high windows was the soft grey kind that made the stone look kinder. Harry took the bathroom break briskly and the long way back, partly to clear his head and partly because the long way back went past Flitwick's classroom and he liked passing Flitwick's classroom.
It also went past Quirrell's.
Quirrell's classroom door was ajar by perhaps two fingers. Harry registered this in the unbothered way one registers a door, and was already past it when the voices reached him.
The first was Quirrell's. He would have known it anywhere, the small shape of it, a syllable falling and then catching itself like a step missed on a stair.
"M-master, I am d-doing what I can. It is n-not so simple, the th-third floor is..."
The second voice answered.
It was a low voice, level in the way a good blade is level. It did not stutter. It did not catch on anything. It moved through the words the way something moves through water it knows the depth of.
"Then do what you can faster."
That was all. Harry caught two sentences, one and a half if he was being strict about it, and his feet had carried him three steps further down the corridor before he had thought about whether to stop.
He did not stop. He had told Cho two minutes. The voice had not been raised. Teachers spoke to one another in classrooms when classrooms were empty, which they were on a Sunday morning. He had no idea who the second teacher was, and no business listening at a half-open door in a castle watched by a thousand portraits.
He filed the moment away the way he had been filing other things lately, in the small, growing folder in his head he had labelled for later, and walked on.
The fourth-floor room had been a classroom once, long enough ago that the desks had been removed and the chalkboard had been taken down and the only thing left was a long open space and a tall window with the lake in it. Cho was sitting on the windowsill with her legs folded under her. Terry was already standing in something that was almost the duelling stance Flitwick had drilled them in, and Michael was flicking his wand at a chip of stone on the floor as though he were thinking about levitating it and could not be bothered to commit.
"Took your time," Cho said.
"Two minutes."
"Six."
"Two of mine. Four of yours."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been her ribs reminding her not to laugh, and she settled them down to it. Terry first. She watched him through a Lumos, a Wingardium attempt, and a stance reset, and then she gave him three corrections so precise he wrote them down on the back of his hand with a quill he had produced from nowhere.
She had moved on to Michael when she stopped mid-sentence and put a hand to her ribs, and Harry was on his feet before she finished the sentence she had stopped.
"What."
"Pomfrey gave me a vial. To take at eleven. I forgot it on my bedside table."
"I'll get it."
"You won't. It's my bedside table. In a tower with girls in it, Harry."
"Right."
She slid down off the windowsill with care, and Terry, who knew the look, was already gathering her bag.
"We'll go again tomorrow," Cho said. "I want to see you, Harry. I haven't seen you yet."
"Tomorrow."
She caught his eye and held it for a second longer than necessary. "Tomorrow."
Then she was on her way out, supported on Terry's elbow on her left and Michael's, surprisingly, on her right. Harry stayed in the empty room a moment, looking at the chip of stone Michael had been pretending not to lift, and at the long grey window with the lake in it, and he could not tell, when he tried to put it into words later, whether what he was feeling was disappointment or relief.
He had been a little of both. He thought that was probably honest.
The week that followed had the shape of a week being counted down. Cho returned to the fourth-floor room on Monday with her vial taken on time and a notebook under her arm, and she sat on the windowsill while Harry showed her, in order, the five things he could do. She corrected one of them in a way that made it work better immediately.
Flitwick's evening sessions ran long. Terry developed a Shield Charm that held for almost a second. Michael developed a complaint about it. Harry walked back to the tower most nights with his calves burning and his head full of the small useful things Cho had said from the windowsill. He went to bed on Friday with the bracket already half-drawn in his head, and woke on Saturday before any of the others.
It was the Great Hall, but it wasn't, the way a room is not itself when the furniture has been moved. The four long tables were gone. In their place, a raised wooden platform had been laid down lengthwise. Banners in the four house colours hung from the rafters. The enchanted ceiling was doing a sky Harry had not seen before, a clear, high blue that did not match the weather outside.
The first-years stood in a loose crowd at the foot of the platform. The older students filled the benches set up on either side of the room, far enough back to feel like an audience and close enough to remind everyone they were one.
Dumbledore stood at the centre of the platform with his hands folded.
"Welcome." He smiled. "I will be brief."
Harry thought this was unlikely, and then Dumbledore was brief.
Sportsmanship, he said, is the practice of remembering, even when it is inconvenient, that the person across from you is also a person. Dignity, he said, is not about how one wins. It is about how one loses. Disqualification, he said, with the same gentle smile, will be immediate, public, and final. He said all of this in something close to thirty seconds, and then he stepped back and gestured to Flitwick, who climbed onto the platform on a small set of folding steps that had been put there specifically for him and which fooled nobody.
"Right." Flitwick rocked once on his heels. "Thirty-two first-years. Sixteen first-round matches. The bracket has been drawn by lot and witnessed by your Heads of House, so any complaints about your opponent should be directed to whichever Head of House you find least frightening."
A laugh ran around the hall. Harry caught Cho's eye in the crowd and she smiled back, the small private one, and then they both faced front again.
"Victory conditions. You win when your opponent is forced from the platform, or when you take their wand in your hand. Disarming is not enough. You must hold the wand. No dark magic. No spells above third-year curriculum without my prior written approval, which you have not asked for, so the answer is no. Mr. Potter."
Harry's stomach contracted.
"Yes, sir."
"Your conditions are different. Your opponents may also win by touching the tip of their wand to your neck. You may only win by the standard methods. You understood this when you signed."
"Yes, sir."
"Good." Flitwick produced a long parchment from a sleeve that should not have held it. "The brackets."
He read them in the order they had been drawn, and Harry stopped hearing names after his own.
"Match three. Harry Potter, Ravenclaw. Roger Bletchley, Slytherin."
The name did not arrive with anything attached to it. Harry had never heard it. He turned in the crowd, searched the hall the way one does when one is looking for someone one does not know, and located him only because the boy stood up.
Roger Bletchley was half a head taller than Harry. He had sandy hair cut in a way that suggested someone else had paid for the cut. He stood with his weight on one hip and his arms folded, and his face wore the small indifferent smugness Harry had only ever seen on people who had never lost anything.
The smugness did not seem particularly sharpened in Harry's direction. It was simply on, the way a lamp is on. The boy looked at him as if Harry were a chair he was deciding whether to sit in.
Harry filed him away.
Flitwick read on. Harry stopped listening to the names and started listening to the structure. He had a stub of parchment out of his pocket and Cho's pencil in his hand because Cho had pressed it into his palm before they walked in, and he sketched the tree as Flitwick called it.
Sixteen first-round matches. The winners would meet in the eight, those eight in the four, those four in two, those two in one. Five rounds, four wins to the final, five wins to be the boy or girl with the cup.
He put a circle around his own match. He drew a line up.
Match four was Michael Corner, Ravenclaw, against a Hufflepuff girl named Susan Bones. The winner of match three would meet the winner of match four. So if Harry beat Bletchley, and Michael beat Bones, his second round was Michael, which Harry had a number of feelings about and would not be able to sort into a useful order until later.
He drew the next line up.
Across the tree, Draco Malfoy's name was called against a small Hufflepuff boy. His name sat in the far half of the bracket.
Harry looked up across the platform.
Draco was looking back.
If both of them kept winning every match, there was exactly one place their lines could meet: the final.
In Potions, Draco had smiled with all his teeth, the kind of smile that came with words attached. This smile had no teeth in it at all. His mouth went up at one corner and the rest of his face stayed exactly where it was, and it was a worse smile in every way Harry could measure. It said something close to good. It said it without saying anything.
Hermione was in Harry's half of the tree. If they both kept winning, the lines crossed in the semifinal, and one of them ended the other's tournament a match short of the final. Terry was in the far half, Draco's half, where Harry could not reach him, and he could not reach Harry.
The dormitory was already dark when they got back, except for the small blue glow Terry kept on his bedside table because Terry was not above admitting that he did not love the dark.
They lay in their beds in a row and pretended for a few minutes that they were going to go to sleep.
"Easiest first round," Michael said, after a while. "Go."
"Mine," Terry said. "Boy I have never seen before. Hufflepuff. He had a quill in his ear during the bracket reading and didn't notice. I'm calling that early reconnaissance."
"That's not reconnaissance. That's a quill."
"You don't know what it might mean."
"I know what a quill means."
"Mine isn't easy," Harry said, "but I don't know if it's hard. He's taller than me. That's all I have."
"Tall is not a duelling spell," Michael said.
"It's a duelling fact."
"He could trip."
"On what."
"Anything. Robes are long. Platforms are wood. Confidence is slippery."
Terry laughed into his pillow. "Confidence is slippery."
"I stand by it."
The blue glow on Terry's table flickered and steadied. Somewhere in the tower, a door closed quietly. Harry lay on his back and looked up at the canopy of his bed and traced the bracket again in his head, and on the third pass, with his eyes already closing, he found himself stopping at the line that ran up from his own name, and following it, and stopping again at the place where it crossed Draco's.
He stayed there for a moment.
Then he turned over and slept.
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