Evelyn

The post came at breakfast, as it always did, in a storm of wings under the enchanted ceiling. I had stopped looking up for it in my first term. Nobody wrote to me at Hogwarts except Samantha Dale, who never wrote in the first week, and my mother, who never wrote before the second Sunday because she liked to give me time to settle.

So I buttered my toast and let the owls go over. Amit got a parcel from his uncle and tore it open at once: almanacs. Everett got the Daily Prophet and read the Ministry appointments aloud to whoever would listen.

Across the aisle, at the far end of the Gryffindor table, Garreth was drawing something on the tablecloth with a spoon for Leander’s benefit, and Leander was frowning at it as though it might be on the examination.

Further up the Hufflepuff table, near the staff, a small girl in a brown dress a size too big was eating porridge with great concentration while Agnes Pye talked at her. She looked down the Hall once, towards the Gryffindors, and went back to her porridge.

The bell rang for the first lesson. I picked up an armful of books and went to Herbology.

Greenhouse Three was warm and green and smelled of wet earth, as it had every Friday morning since my fifth year. Professor Garlick met us at the door with soil to her elbows and a Snargaluff pod under one arm, delighted to see us, delighted with the weather, delighted with everything. There were eleven of us in the NEWT class. She set us to dividing the dittany.

“Before it gets ideas,” she said. “It’s had all summer to itself. Pairs, please. Gloves are on the bench.”

I had not decided to pair with Leander. The bench had two places left at the end. He was standing at one of them, already pulling on his gloves.

We had met at this bench, two years ago, when I came to Hogwarts late and behind, with four years to catch up in one. He had called me Colonial for a month, until I pushed his face into a tray of Fluxweed. In the same fortnight he had been sent out twice for making the Mandrakes scream on purpose, so I had not expected him to know anything about soil. He knew more than Professor Garlick. We had spent the rest of that year arguing about whether the textbook or the soil was right. I still thought it was usually the textbook.

“The book says to divide at the crown,” I said now, as he lifted the first plant out of its pot.

“The book’s right.” He turned the root ball over in his gloved hands, considering it. “The book’s never had to do it in September. Look.”

The roots had bound themselves tight around the inside of the pot over the summer, a pale, dense knot. He worked his thumbs into it, slowly, until the knot gave. He didn’t tear anything. He waited until each root let go of the next before he eased it out. In a minute he had three clean pieces lying on the bench, each with its own crown and its own leaves.

His mother kept the gardens on the farm. He had told me that in fifth year, the first time I asked how he did it. He had said it as though it explained everything, and I had thought it explained nothing. Watching him now, I thought perhaps it did.

“Your turn,” he said.

My first plant came apart in two pieces and a mess. My second came apart in three. By the fourth, he had stopped watching me and started potting up the divisions. We worked down the row together without much talking. The greenhouse glass streamed with condensation. Somebody along the bench dropped a pot. The dittany gave off its sharp clean scent every time a leaf was bruised, the scent of every wound I had ever dressed.

At the end of the lesson Professor Garlick came down the row with a basket and let the seventh years take cuttings from the trimmings for their own use, provided we were sensible. Leander cut a handful of the best sprigs without being asked and laid them on my side of the bench.

“For Potions,” he said.

“How do you know I’m making it?”

He shrugged and went to wash his hands. I put the sprigs in my apron pocket.

Professor Sharp did not believe in easing anyone into anything. He stood at the front of the dungeon on Friday afternoon with his arms folded and informed the NEWT class that he wished to see what we had kept up over the summer and what we had allowed to rot. We were each to brew one potion of our own choosing, competently, in two hours.

“Competently,” he said again, and looked at Garreth.

“I heard you the first time, sir.”

“I am aware that you heard me, Mr Weasley. I am less certain that you were listening.”

Garreth set up at the bench in front of mine, as he had since fifth year, so that I could see over his shoulder when his cauldron began to do something it shouldn’t. He had chosen Draught of Peace, which he could brew in his sleep and nearly had, the year he invented a version that sent half the class to sleep at their desks. Leander was two benches along, setting up a Wiggenweld, as steady and unshowy as he did everything.

I chose essence of dittany.

It looked like a simple brew. Fresh dittany, chopped fine, steeped in water drawn at a precise temperature, then reduced, strained, and reduced again until a pint of liquid had become a thimbleful of something green and fierce that would close a wound in seconds. Sharp would think it unambitious. I didn’t mind. My own supply had run low over the summer. Islington did not sell it.

I chopped Leander’s sprigs. I measured the water. I watched the temperature as my father watched a fever chart, without blinking. Ahead of me, Garreth’s Draught of Peace turned the right shade of silver and then, alarmingly, a shade beyond it. He fixed it with a pinch of something from his own pocket that was certainly not on the syllabus.

Sharp came round at the end. He looked at Garreth’s cauldron for a long moment and moved on without a word, which from Sharp was a sonnet. He looked at Leander’s and said, “Adequate.” He stopped at mine, bent and breathed in.

“Essence of dittany,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“A first-year potion.”

“A third-year potion, sir. And not, I think, a simple one.”

He straightened and looked at me down his nose. For a moment I thought I had been impertinent. Then he said, “No. Not when it’s done properly,” and moved on.

I bottled it in four small phials, stoppered them and wrapped them in a handkerchief to carry upstairs. Garreth leaned back over his bench to look.

“You’re going to cure the whole castle,” he said.

“Only the parts that need it.”

After supper I went up to my room and knelt to take the box out of my trunk at the foot of the bed. It was a japanned tin box with a hinged lid, scuffed at the corners, and I had kept it since the year of the goblin troubles. Bandages and lint. A phial of Wiggenweld. A twist of powdered silver, bought dear in Hogsmeade. One phial of dittany, nearly empty. I had carried that box into places I preferred not to think about. I set the four new phials in a row beside the old one, closed the lid and put the box back in the trunk.

My father had a bag like it, black leather gone soft at the corners, that went with him everywhere. I had learned what went into it, and in what order, before I could read. He had never once let me carry it. I knelt by the trunk a moment longer with my hand on the lid of my own, and could not tell whether what I felt was pride or the oldest kind of hurt.

At a quarter to nine I took the patrol ledger from my desk and went down to begin my rounds.

The patrol ledger said that the Heads were to begin their rounds at nine o’clock at the foot of the Grand Staircase and continue until midnight or until the castle was quiet, whichever came later. It said that the Head Boy and Head Girl would each take two evenings of the week and share the Saturdays. It did not say whose evening Friday was.

I had not written Friday into the rota. I had meant to. I had meant to decide it last night. Then I had gone up onto the roof instead, and today there had been the dittany and Sharp. So I had told myself that I would take the first night, because somebody ought to walk it properly before it was handed out in pieces, and that I would tell Leander so in the morning.

He was sitting on the bottom step of the Grand Staircase when I came down, with his elbows on his knees and his wand turning slowly between his fingers.

He stood up when he saw me. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“I thought you’d want it done properly,” he said.

“I thought you would.”

“I did.” He put his wand in his pocket. “That’s why I came.”

Above us, the staircases groaned and shifted in the dark, swinging from landing to landing on some errand of their own. A portrait on the first-floor landing woke up long enough to tell us to keep the noise down and went back to sleep. Neither of us suggested that the other go to bed.

“We’ll split it,” I said. “Next week. Properly. Two evenings each.”

“And the Saturdays shared.”

“And the Saturdays shared.” I opened the ledger on the newel post, where the lamp could reach it. “The book has a route. It’s the same route the Heads have walked since about 1810, as far as I can tell. Nobody’s changed it.”

He looked over my shoulder. “It doesn’t go near the Viaduct.”

“Nobody went near the Viaduct in 1810.”

“Then it’s time somebody did.” He took a pencil from his pocket, his third, worn down to a stub, and held it out. “Your book, White.”

I looked at the pencil. Then I took it, and drew a line on the plan from the Entrance Hall out to the Viaduct Courtyard and back, and put the pencil in my pocket. He didn’t ask for it back.

We went up first. The castle at night was another castle, one I had come to know better than the daytime one in the year when I had been out after curfew more often than not, though not always for reasons I could have written in a ledger. The corridors were long and grey with moonlight, the suits of armour standing in the alcoves like sentries who had forgotten what they were guarding. Our footsteps went ahead of us and came back off the stone. On the fourth floor, outside the library, a pair of sixth years were discovered in a window seat discussing, with great seriousness, the Goblin Rebellion of 1612. They had a textbook open between them, upside down. Leander looked at the textbook and then at them. He said he imagined they would want to finish their revision in their own common room. They went, scarlet to the ears.

“Points?” I said, when they had gone.

“It’s the first night.” He looked after them. “And they were nearly revising.”

We went on. He walked on the outside of every staircase, as he had on every round we had walked as prefects, and slowed at the turns so that I could keep up without lifting my skirts. He had done both all last year as well, and I had spent all last year pretending not to notice. We talked about the prefects: which of them would patrol and which would sit in window seats; whether the Slytherin fifth years could be trusted to patrol at all. We talked about the rota. I told him I had been right about the luggage van. He told me I had not.

At the foot of the Astronomy Tower stair we found Amit, coming down it with a brass telescope under one arm and his almanac under the other. He did not look in the least guilty. He looked delighted to see us.

“Saturn,” he said, before either of us could speak. “Low in the south-west, just after ten. You can’t see it from the Ravenclaw windows.”

“Everett told me you’d be on the stairs at two in the morning.”

“Then I’m early.” Amit looked from me to Leander and back, and brightened further. “Shall I tell you what it says about the two of you?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” said Leander.

Amit consulted the almanac, which he did not need to open. “Saturn in the eighth house,” he said gravely. “Long nights. A great deal of being out late.” He tucked the telescope more firmly under his arm. “Goodnight, Head Girl. Goodnight, Head Boy. I’m going to bed now, as you’re about to tell me to.”

He went, humming. Leander watched him down the corridor.

“Is he ever right?”

“About a third of the time,” I said. “He calls it a remarkable showing.”

“And the old man,” he said, somewhere on the sixth floor. “Penhallow. You’ve not said a word about him all day.”

“I haven’t spoken to him yet.”

“That’s never stopped you having an opinion.”

I thought about it. About the clean, scrubbed hands, and the old man’s eyes going down the Hall at supper, missing nobody.

“I think he’s a real Healer,” I said at last. “Not a wizard who knows some healing charms. A Healer. I think he’s spent forty years with his hands in other people’s blood.”

Leander was quiet for a few steps.

“And you want to be that,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“Then you’d better be at his door on Monday,” he said. “Before anyone else gets there.”

I walked on beside him with that in my chest like a coal. Nobody had ever said it to me like that, as though it were simply a fact about me, to be planned around. My father had said a great many things about my future. None of them had been that.

We came down through the Clock Tower, out across the courtyard where the fountain was still running in the dark, and in through the Viaduct entrance to the Entrance Hall. It was a little after eleven. The great doors were barred. The house-point hourglasses stood glimmering on their plinths, their gems sunk level in all four, as they were on every first night of term, before anyone had won or lost anything.

Sebastian Sallow came in through the side door from the grounds.

He stopped when he saw us. He was in his cloak with the hood down and a broom over his shoulder, his hair flattened by the wind and his face raw with cold. He smelled of the night air, of heather and high places. He had been out of the castle. He had been gone for hours.

“White,” he said.

“Sallow.”

“Prewett.” He nodded to Leander, who nodded back. Nobody said anything about the time.

I knew where he had been. I knew it as surely as if he had told me. There was only one place in the Highlands that Sebastian Sallow would fly to and back again on a Friday night in September, in the dark, on the first night of term: a cottage in Feldcroft, miles off across the moors. His sister had gone away when their uncle died, and stayed away a year. This summer, I had heard, she had come home. I supposed she had forgiven him. I could not imagine what that had cost her.

I did not ask him. I did not want to hear him lie to me, and I did not want to hear him tell me the truth.

I was angry with him still. I was angry with myself for being glad she had come home to him. And under both, where I did not look if I could help it, I was afraid: that if I asked him one question tonight, everything I knew about Feldcroft would come up with the answer, here, in front of Leander, at eleven o’clock in the Entrance Hall.

“Go to bed, Sebastian,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment longer than he needed to. Then he went past us and down the stairs towards the dungeons, the broom on his shoulder. His footsteps went down with him.

Leander watched him go. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at me. He stood beside me at the foot of the stairs until the footsteps had gone, then a moment longer.

“No points?” he said.

“It’s the first night.”

He nodded, as though that were an answer. Perhaps it was, as far as it went. He didn’t ask how far that was.

We did the dungeon corridors after that, a little way behind Sebastian, then the kitchen passage, and finished at the foot of the Grand Staircase, where we had begun, a few minutes before midnight. The castle was quiet. The staircases had stopped moving; the portraits were asleep or pretending. I opened the ledger on the newel post again, uncapped my pen and wrote the first entry of the year, in my best hand, under a hundred years of other people’s:

Friday 2nd September 1892. Rounds 9 o’clock to midnight. E. White, L. Prewett. Two sixth years out of their common room on the fourth floor; sent back. Route amended to include the Viaduct. Castle quiet.

I blotted it and held out the pen to him for his initials.

He took the pen. He read what I had written, all of it, slowly. Then, under my entry, he wrote a line of his own in his square, unhurried hand:

One seventh year in from the grounds after curfew, 11 o’clock. Sent to bed. L.P.

He blotted it, closed the ledger and gave it back to me without a word. It was written down now, between us, in a book that Professor Weasley would read.

I held the ledger against my chest. I had thought I would be angry. I wasn’t. He had not taken the points. He had only refused to pretend, in writing, that it hadn’t happened.

“Fair,” I said.

“Fair.”

Above us the Ravenclaw stair went up into the dark to the west, and the Gryffindor stair to the east. We stood at the foot of them both. Neither of us moved towards either. He had his hands in his pockets, and he was looking at the ledger in my arms rather than at me.

“Yesterday, on the platform,” he said at last. “Something had happened before you came through. I didn’t ask. I thought it wasn’t my business.” He looked up. “I still think that. I’m asking anyway.”

I looked at him. He didn’t look away.

“My father has found me a husband,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Have you said yes?”

“I haven’t been asked.” It came out sharper than I meant. “I don’t believe anyone thinks it necessary.”

He took his hands out of his pockets. I thought he was going to say something, and found I did not know what I wanted it to be.

“Goodnight, Prewett,” I said.

He let out a breath. “Goodnight, White.”

I went up the west stair with the ledger held against me and his pencil still in my pocket. Halfway up, I heard him go at last, towards the east.