Evelyn

The carriages were waiting where they always waited, in a long dark line beyond the end of the platform, their lamps swinging gently on their hooks. And in front of each one, between the shafts, stood a thestral.

I saw them before I meant to. I always did. Two years ago I had not known they existed; I had come up to the castle for the first time in a carriage with Professor Fig, and something had come down out of the sky and torn it open, and the driver had died with his hands still on the reins. Since that night, the beasts that pulled the school carriages had been there for me every September, as plain as the lamps: black and skeletal, with blank white eyes and great leathery wings folded tight along their sides, waiting with a patience that looked a great deal like sorrow.

Most of the school saw only carriages that drew themselves.

“Are they there?” Poppy asked, low, as we came up to ours.

“They’re there.”

She put her hand out, palm flat, into the empty air in front of the nearest shaft. I watched the thestral lower its long head and breathe on her fingers. Poppy shivered, delighted.

“I felt that,” she said.

“He likes you.”

“Everything likes Poppy,” said Natsai, climbing in. “It’s exhausting. Come on, both of you, before Garreth takes the last seat and talks about cauldron temperatures all the way up the hill.”

The carriage smelled of damp straw and old leather. The three of us squeezed onto one bench with our skirts crushed together. The door swung shut on its own; the thestral leaned into the traces. Through the little window the lake went by on our left, black and enormous, with the lights of the first-years’ boats strung across it like a necklace somebody had dropped. Somewhere out there was a small girl with a dented cauldron. I hoped she was not being sick over the side.

Then the castle rose up out of the dark ahead of us, all its windows lit, and I stopped thinking about anything at all.

I had been at Hogwarts two years. I had seen it in snow and in summer, in the first light and at midnight from the top of the Astronomy Tower. It still did this to me every time: stopped my breath and set it going again, harder. Natsai, who had first seen it the same autumn I had, glanced at my face and smiled and said nothing.

The Great Hall was full of candles and noise. A thousand of them, perhaps, floating in the air under a ceiling that showed the sky outside, cloud and a few early stars. The four long tables were already filling. I peeled away from Natsai at the Gryffindor table and Poppy at the Hufflepuff, and went to the far end of the Ravenclaw table, by the doors, where the seventh years sat, on the bench that looked across at the Gryffindors.

Amit Thakkar shifted along the bench to make room, a pamphlet of star charts sticking out of his pocket.

“Head Girl,” he said, as though announcing a conjunction. “Jupiter’s in your house this month. That’s very promising.”

“Is it?”

“Expansion,” said Amit. “Responsibility. Possibly indigestion. The almanac isn’t clear.”

Everett Clopton, on my other side, leaned across to shake my hand with grave formality, as if I had been appointed to a Ministry post. Then he went back to arguing with a sixth year about whether the Hippogriff paddock ought to be moved further from the greenhouses. The rest of the Ravenclaw seventh years were boys. Every other girl in my year had gone home after her OWLs: to marry, to keep house, to be finished somewhere less peculiar. I had stopped noticing, most days. Tonight, at the end of the table, with the badge on my robe, I noticed.

I looked up the length of the Hall to the staff table instead.

Professor Weasley sat at Headmaster Black’s right hand, upright in her chair, watching the doors for the first years. Beside her, Professor Hecat was already bored. Professor Sharp sat as he always sat, like a man waiting for an explosion he has been told about in advance. Professor Ronen had his chin in his hand and was smiling at nothing. Further along, Garlick and Howin had their heads together over something in Howin’s lap that moved.

And at the far end, in the chair that had been Professor Fig’s, sat an old man I had never seen before.

Even from the far end of the Hall I could see that he was small and upright, with a close white beard and a pair of half-moon spectacles that caught the candlelight whenever he pushed them up his nose. His robes were plain grey.

Last year, Magical Theory had gone to whoever the Headmaster could find. A tired young wizard from the Ministry had lasted until Christmas; Professor Ronen had covered it until Easter, in between his own classes, with the air of a man reading a eulogy for someone he had liked. Nobody had sat in Fig’s chair. The staff had simply left it empty, by unspoken agreement, at the end of the table.

Now somebody had sat in it.

I had told myself, all summer, that I had finished grieving for him. That I had done it properly, the summer he died and the long year after, and could put it away like a dress I had outgrown. I had found it a comfortable thing to believe. It did not survive the sight of a stranger’s elbow on the arm of his chair.

I found that I had my hand around my goblet and had not drunk from it. I let go.

The doors opened. The first years came in.

They came in a ragged double line behind Professor Weasley, who had slipped down from the staff table to meet them. The Hall quietened to watch them come. They were so small. I always forgot. Small and wet-haired from the lake, the boys in their Eton collars and the girls in calf-length dresses and pinafores, their plaits coming loose, their faces turned up to the ceiling and the candles with exactly the expression I must have worn two years before, coming in alone at fifteen behind a professor who was now dead.

The girl with the dented cauldron was near the back. She had left the cauldron in the boat, and without it she seemed not to know what to do with her arms. She folded them. She unfolded them. Her coat had gone; she was in a brown wool dress a size too big, and she was looking for someone.

I watched her find him. Leander was at the far end of the Gryffindor table, across the aisle from me, between Garreth and Natsai, with Marigold further up among the third years, craning her neck over her friends. He wasn’t looking at the first years. He was listening to Garreth. But the girl found him anyway. Her shoulders came down a little; she stopped fiddling with her arms.

The Sorting Hat sang. It always sang; I always meant to listen properly and never did. Something about four founders and the ties that bound them, and a warning, as there usually was, about the dangers of division. The Hall applauded politely, as it always did. Then Professor Weasley unrolled her list.

The names went past. Abbott, Hufflepuff. Bainbridge, Slytherin. A pair of twins called Brock who went to different houses and stared at each other across the Hall in outrage. Then:

“Coldwell, Ann.”

She went up the steps as though they were much taller than they were. Professor Weasley lowered the Hat onto her head and it came down over her eyes. She sat still on the stool with her hands knotted in her lap.

The Hat took its time.

It took long enough that the Hall began to murmur. Long enough that I saw Professor Weasley glance at the Headmaster, and the Headmaster raise one eyebrow towards the ceiling as though appealing to it for patience. The girl’s face was hidden, but I could see her chin. It came up, and went down, and came up again. She was arguing with it.

Then she turned her head, under the Hat, just a little. Towards the Gryffindor table. Towards him.

“HUFFLEPUFF!”

The Hufflepuff table erupted, as it erupted for everyone. The girl slid off the stool. Professor Weasley lifted the Hat away, and for a moment the girl stood on the step blinking in the candlelight. She did not look pleased. She looked like someone who had lost an argument she had been fairly sure of winning.

She went down the steps towards the cheering Hufflepuffs with her head lowered. And from the far end of the Gryffindor table, one person clapped for her.

Only one. The rest of the Gryffindors had already turned back to their plates, waiting for the next name. Leander clapped steadily, without hurry, until she looked up and saw him. Then he nodded to her, once, and turned back to whatever Garreth was telling him.

I had not clapped. I had been too busy watching to think of it. I sat with my hands in my lap and felt, absurdly, that I had failed a test nobody had set, and that the boy who had blamed the Slytherins for everything had passed it without noticing there was one.

She sat down at the top of the Hufflepuff table, beyond the Slytherins, with her face pink to the ears. I saw Agnes Pye lean over to her at once, and the small shoulders come down. I looked back at the stool.

The Sorting ran its course. Amit muttered predictions under his breath for every name and got perhaps a third of them right, which he declared a remarkable showing. The last first year, a red-faced boy named Yaxley, was dispatched to Slytherin with something like relief on all sides. Professor Weasley rolled up her list. The Hat was carried out. Then the Headmaster rose.

Phineas Nigellus Black did not enjoy standing up in front of children. He made no secret of it. He stood at the centre of the staff table with his fingertips resting on the cloth, and looked down the length of the Hall as though it had been delivered to him by mistake.

“Welcome,” he said, “or welcome back, according to your misfortune.”

Somebody at the Slytherin table laughed. The Headmaster ignored it.

“The Forbidden Forest remains forbidden. That is, as the name implies, the point of it. Mr Leander Prewett and Miss Evelyn White are this year’s Head Boy and Head Girl, and you will do as they tell you, as I can hardly be expected to tell you myself.” He did not look at either of us. “And after a year in which Magical Theory was taught by whichever of my staff could be prevailed upon to teach it, I am pleased to inform you that the post has been filled. Professor Penhallow comes to us from St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, where he served as a Healer for forty years. I am assured he is very good. You will find out.”

The old man at the end of the table stood and inclined his head, and sat down again. There was a scatter of applause. I didn’t join it. I was watching him settle back into Fig’s chair as though he had sat in it for years.

Forty years at St Mungo’s.

“That,” said the Headmaster, “is all. Eat.”

And the dishes filled.

I ate. I must have. Amit explained that a Healer on the staff in the same year as Jupiter in Ravenclaw was a sign of tremendous significance, the nature of which he was not yet able to divine. Everett asked whether I thought the new professor would teach the healing applications of Magical Theory, which nobody had taught in years. I said I didn’t know. There was treacle tart. There was always treacle tart.

Mostly I watched the old man at the end of the staff table, eating with small, precise movements, and once, near the end of the meal, looking up. His eyes went down the Hall the way my father’s used to go down a ward first thing in the morning, unhurried, taking an inventory of every bed. They passed over me without stopping. I felt it anyway.

When the feast was over, the prefects stood up and called for their first years, and the Hall broke apart into noise and scraping benches. I saw Leander on his feet at the Gryffindor table, already herding. I saw Agnes Pye gathering the new Hufflepuffs by the doors. “Nan,” she was calling, “Nan Coldwell, this way.” The girl went to her, looking back over her shoulder at the Gryffindors as she went. Nan, I thought.

Professor Weasley caught us both at the doors before we could go after them. She did it without seeming to, a hand on my sleeve and a glance at Leander that brought him across the flow of students as surely as a summoning charm.

“The patrol book,” she said, and put it into my hands: a fat ledger bound in green, its spine cracked by a century of Heads before us. “Rounds begin tomorrow night. You will each take two evenings a week and share the Saturdays. Anything you cannot manage, you bring to me. I do not expect there to be much.” She looked from one of us to the other over her spectacles. “I chose you both, you know. Not the Headmaster. Do try not to prove me wrong in the first week.”

She was gone into the crowd before either of us could answer.

The new professor came past us a moment later on his way out, small and unhurried among the jostling students. He gave the badges on our robes a glance and the two of us a nod. As he went by I saw his hands, folded at his waist: the cleanest hands I had ever seen, the nails pared short, the skin scrubbed almost pink.

I knew those hands. Not his, but their kind. My father had hands like that. So did every surgeon I had ever watched at the Prince Alfred, and every Healer I had ever followed down a ward at St Mungo’s on the Saturday visits I talked my way into last summer. Hands that had been washed too often and for too long, for reasons that mattered.

I wanted hands like that. I wanted it so badly it frightened me. I knew what it would cost, and I knew who would never forgive me for paying.

Leander looked at the ledger in my hands. “She’s given it to you.”

“She knows who’ll write in it.”

“Fair.” He glanced along the crush at the doors to the knot of Hufflepuffs, where Agnes was still counting heads. “Ann Coldwell. She argued with the Hat.”

“I saw. You clapped.”

“Somebody had to.” He said it simply, as he might have said that somebody had to lock the doors. Then he tilted his head after the old man, who was making his slow way out into the Entrance Hall. “A Healer, White. You’ll be knocking on his door by Friday.”

“I’ll be knocking on it on Monday,” I said.

He laughed and went to find his Gryffindors.

I took the Ravenclaw first years myself. There were nine of them this year, all of them shaking with nerves. I led them up the marble staircase and the long spiral of the west tower to the door with no handle and the bronze eagle knocker. The eagle asked them what can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, and a bed but never sleeps. Nine small faces turned to me in despair.

“A river,” said a boy at the back at last, quietly, as though he expected to be struck.

The door swung open. I let them go ahead of me into the common room, wide and airy even by candlelight, to see it for the first time: the domed ceiling painted with stars, the midnight-blue carpet strewn with more of them, the blue and bronze hangings, the bookshelves running up and up into the dark, and Rowena herself in white marble beside the dormitory stair, looking down at them as if she had expected better. Nine mouths fell open together. I left the sixth-year prefects to show them their dormitories, and went on up.

The seventh years’ rooms were on the top level of the tower, up a last narrow stair that most of the school didn’t know existed. They opened off a little common room of our own, round as a coin, set in the heart of the tower: a hearth, a ring of worn armchairs, a table scarred by generations of NEWT revision, and in the middle an iron staircase spiralling up through the ceiling to the roof. There were no separate staircases for boys and girls up here, no charmed steps to tip anyone out. Once students reached their last year, the school had decided, they were old enough to be trusted with a corridor. Or perhaps there had simply been too few of us, for too long, for anybody to bother. My door was on the far side of the hearth. Everett’s was beside it, and the other boys’ beyond.

Mine was the only door up here with a girl behind it.

Somebody, a house-elf I supposed, had already brought up my trunk and lit the fire. The room was small and round, a slice of the tower, with a desk and a washstand and a window that faced east. Last year it had held four beds for the girls of the year above me. Tonight there was one. The castle had counted us, as it always did, and made exactly what was needed.

Everett put his head round my door on his way past, already in his shirtsleeves with his collar in his hand.

“Goodnight, Head Girl,” he said. “If you hear something on the stairs at two in the morning, it’s Amit. He goes up to the roof of the Astronomy Tower and comes back down muttering about Saturn.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Nobody else ever does,” said Everett, and shut my door for me.

I emptied my reticule onto the desk beside the patrol ledger: hairpins, a handkerchief, my father’s watch-key that I had forgotten to give back. The torn corner of Leander’s letter was at the bottom, folded once, with his pencil line across it. I looked at it for a moment. Then I put it in the desk drawer, at the back, and shut the drawer.

I didn’t go to bed. I went back out to the little common room, where the fire had burned down to embers, and climbed the spiral stair.

The door at the top let me out into the night air, cold and clean and smelling of the lake. The roof terrace lay open around me: a paved garden walled in by a waist-high parapet, with a stone monument at its centre and four stone eagles keeping watch around it, wings half spread. Benches stood along the parapet between potted conifers, black shapes in the dark. Nobody else was out here. Anyone with the nerve could land on this roof on a broom; only a Ravenclaw could open the door back in.

Beyond the parapet the grounds fell away into the dark: the black of the lake, the blacker line of the Forbidden Forest along its edge. Somewhere down there, in a dormitory in the Hufflepuff basement, a small girl who had lost an argument with a hat was going to sleep. Somewhere in Gryffindor Tower, across the castle, the Head Boy was counting his first years a fourth time. And at the end of the staff table, an old man with scrubbed hands had come to teach Magical Theory, after forty years of healing.

And far to the south, a night and a day away by train, my father would be reading by the lamp in Islington with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. Not thinking of me at all, perhaps. Or thinking of me and Dr Hale in the same breath, as one thinks of a patient and a cure. I could not decide which I minded more.

I leaned my elbows on the parapet and watched the stars come out over the Highlands, one by one.