Evelyn

The fortnight after my birthday went by as the castle measured time: in bells and rounds and the hours between them.

We duelled on both Fridays, coats on, first to three. I won the first. He won the second, with a Shield Charm he held a breath longer than I believed anyone could, so that my own Stunner came back off it and sat me down on the boards for the second time that month. I went to the hospital wing on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and rolled bandages and made beds and did not touch my wand. On Thursdays at four I climbed the three steps in the Astronomy Wing with my case notes. The Ravenclaw third year with the sprained wrist, it turned out, had fallen off her broom because she had been crying and could not see. Penhallow read that and nodded once and said, “Better,” and I walked back to the tower lighter than I had any right to be.

My father’s letter stayed at the bottom of my trunk under my winter stockings with the gloves on top of it. I did not answer it. Every night I thought about answering it. Every night I found something else to do: a page of Transfiguration, a case note to copy fair, the rota for the week after next. I knew perfectly well what I was doing. I had watched patients do it on the wards at the Prince Alfred, pretending not to feel a lump because once they had felt it they would have to do something about it. I was eighteen and Head Girl and I had faced worse than a letter. I did it anyway.

On Sunday afternoon, in the library, Marigold Prewett sat down opposite me without being asked.

She was thirteen, all knees and elbows, with her brother’s freckles and a great deal more of his red hair, which she wore in a plait as thick as my wrist. She put her books on the table in a pile, folded her arms on top of them and looked at me with a frankness that I suspected ran in the family.

“It’s his birthday tomorrow,” she said.

“I know.”

That surprised her. “How?”

“It’s in the prefects’ records.” I turned a page I had not read. “He read mine. I read his.”

Marigold considered this. “That’s either very romantic or very boring,” she said. “I can’t tell which.”

“Boring,” I said. “What do you want, Marigold?”

“We’re giving him a surprise,” she said. “Tomorrow night, in the common room. Garreth’s making a cake.”

“Garreth is making a cake.”

“I know.” She had the grace to look worried. “Natsai’s sworn half the house to secrecy. Do you know how hard that is, in Gryffindor? Somebody always tells somebody.” She lowered her voice. “The trouble is Leander. He’s in the library every Monday after supper. You can’t get him out of there for anything, and if any of us tries, he’ll know at once that something’s up.”

“He’d know if it was me,” she went on. “Or Garreth. Garreth can’t lie. His ears go red.”

“And Natsai?”

“He’d know if it was Natsai because Natsai never asks him for anything.” She leaned across the table. “But you could. You’re Head Girl. You could say there was trouble in the tower and you needed him. He’d come. He wouldn’t even ask what.”

I looked at her. “Why wouldn’t he ask?”

Marigold gave me a long, pitying look, of the kind that only a thirteen-year-old can give an eighteen-year-old.

“Because it’s you,” she said. She picked up her books and went.

I sat in the library for a long time after she had gone, not reading. Because it’s you. She had said it as though it were obvious, a thing everybody knew, like the date of the Goblin Rebellion or the password to the kitchens. I turned it over and over and could not make it lie flat. I did not know what she thought she had seen. I did not know what I wanted her to have seen. I knew only that I had a letter at the bottom of my trunk that said my mother was speaking of April, and that none of it, not one word, had any business making my heart go as it did between the library shelves on a wet Sunday afternoon.

I bought nothing that week. I did not need to. The present was already in my desk drawer, wrapped in brown paper, where it had been since the afternoon of my birthday. I had bought it in Hogsmeade while Natsai was paying for her own sweets, at the stationer’s on the corner, without letting myself think about why: a silver propelling pencil, slim and plain, with a ring at the top for a chain. I had told myself it was because he would never stop lending me pencils. I had told myself a good many things.

On Monday evening I went to find him in the library.

He was at his usual table under the window in the Charms section, with three books open and a pencil behind his ear, so deep in the middle one that he did not hear me come between the shelves. I came up behind his chair and took the pencil from behind his ear.

He turned so fast that the chair nearly went over. Then he saw who it was, and the look on his face caught my breath before I could stop it.

“White,” he said. He held out his hand. “Thief. It’s not your night for the library. It’s your night for rounds.”

I tucked the pencil back behind his ear instead. My fingers brushed his hair doing it. I had not meant them to.

“There’s trouble in your tower,” I said. “I need you.”

He was on his feet before I had finished. He did not ask what. He left the books lying open where they were and came round the table. We went out together and up the stairs at a pace that was nearly a run, for him. He was a head taller than me, with nothing round his ankles but trousers. I had my skirts bunched in one fist and took the steps as fast as my boots allowed, and still I fell behind. I felt guilty all the way up. He was so ready to be needed. I had not known, until I watched him leave three books open on a table without a glance, how ready.

By the fourth landing the guilt and the stairs had both got the better of me. He was three steps ahead, taking them two at a time with one hand already at his wand. I lunged, caught his sleeve and began to laugh, out of breath, and could not stop.

“Slow down,” I said. “There’s no need to run. Nobody’s dying.”

He stopped on the step above me and looked down at me for a long moment. Then he took his hand away from his wand and went on up at a walk, with his hands in his pockets.

On the seventh floor he said, “What kind of trouble?”

“You’ll see.”

He looked at me sideways. I kept my eyes on the stairs.

The Fat Lady was in her frame, in a dress of pink silk, with a glass of something in her hand that she had not been holding the last time I passed. She opened her mouth to ask for the password. Then she saw my badge and his. She closed it again and swung open without a word. That was one of the privileges nobody had told me about until Professor Weasley had mentioned it in passing on the first night: the Heads could go anywhere the staff could go. Every common room. Every dormitory corridor. I had not used it yet. I had not expected to use it first for this.

He went in ahead of me. I heard the noise before I saw anything: a great ragged roar of voices, forty Gryffindors at least, all shouting at once. Then I came through the portrait hole behind him and saw the common room.

I had never been inside Gryffindor Tower. It was smaller than ours, warmer and a great deal untidier, all crimson hangings and sagging armchairs and a fire built up so high that the room was like the inside of an oven. Somebody had hung a banner across the mantelpiece that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY LEANDER in letters that changed colour every few seconds and did not run in a straight line. Natsai stood beside it with her arms folded, looking as pleased with herself as I had ever seen her. Marigold was on the arm of a sofa. Garreth was in the middle of the room holding a cake.

It was a large cake. It was iced in red and gold. It was also, unmistakably, smoking.

“Don’t worry,” said Garreth, over the cheering. “It’s supposed to do that. Mostly.”

Leander stood in the middle of it all. For a moment he didn’t do anything. He just looked at them. At Garreth with his smoking cake and Marigold on the sofa and Natsai by the fire and forty Gryffindors he had herded off trains and out of trouble for seven years. Then he laughed: the laugh I had heard on the platform, open and surprised out of him, the one that made people turn their heads.

He turned and looked at me.

“Trouble,” he said.

“Enormous trouble,” I said. “The worst I’ve seen.”

Then Garreth was thrusting the cake at him and they were all singing. I stepped back against the wall beside the portrait hole, where I would be out of the way.

He cut the cake, which went on smoking quietly as he did it, Garreth explaining at length that this was intentional, Marigold stealing the first slice. Natsai handed him a parcel that turned out to be a book on Auror training from a shop in Diagon Alley, and he turned it over in his hands as though it were made of glass. A Gryffindor first year I did not know presented him with a drawing of a dragon. He thanked her as gravely as if it had been a medal. I watched all of it from my place by the door.

I was glad I had come. I was glad of every minute of it. And under the gladness, quiet and stubborn, was something I did not want to look at. This was his. All of it: the warmth and the noise and the red hangings, the people who had known him since he was eleven, the sister on the arm of the sofa. I had come to Hogwarts at fifteen with nobody and made a place for myself out of nothing. I was proud of the place I had made. But I had never had this. I stood against the wall by the door, a Ravenclaw in blue in the middle of all that crimson, and felt cold, in a room as hot as an oven.

He found me there, eventually, with a slice of cake on a plate.

“It’s safe,” he said. “I think. Garreth swears.”

I took it. It tasted of cinnamon and, faintly, of gunpowder.

“You knew,” I said. “On the stairs. You knew there wasn’t any trouble.”

“I knew there was something.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall beside me. “You lied to me in the library. Then you laughed on the stairs.” He considered me. “You’re a good liar, White. I’ve seen it. Just not with me, it seems.”

I looked down at my cake.

“So,” he said. “What did you get me?”

I thought of the pencil in my pocket, in its brown paper. I opened my mouth and found I could not give it to him here, in front of forty Gryffindors and his sister.

“Nothing yet,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“Then I’ll choose,” he said. “A duel. Tonight. Before your rounds. That’s what I want.”

The Clock Tower courtyard was empty when we came down into it at half past eight, the lamps lit, the platform standing dark and damp from the afternoon’s rain. I took off my cloak and laid it on the steps. When I turned round, he was taking off his coat.

He laid it on the steps beside my cloak. Then he unbuttoned his waistcoat and laid that on top. He unfastened his collar and put it in his pocket. He stood there on the boards in his shirtsleeves in the lamplight, rolling his cuffs back to the elbow with quick, practised turns, one and then the other, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

I had seen men in their shirtsleeves before. I had grown up in a hospital. I had seen my father in his shirtsleeves every evening of my childhood, and orderlies, and students, and once, memorably, the Governor of New South Wales with a broken collarbone. It had never once mattered.

It mattered now. I stood at my end of the platform with my wand in my hand and could not have said what any of the first three spells I meant to use were.

“You don’t mind,” he said. “It’s easier to move.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“First to three?”

“First to three.”

We bowed. He moved first.

I lost the first point in under a minute, because I was watching his arms and not his wand. That was the plain truth of it. I was not proud of it. His forearms were long and lean and freckled, the muscles moving under the skin with every turn of his wrist. I was so busy watching them that I did not see the Disarming Charm until my wand was already leaving my hand. It clattered on the flagstones. I went and picked it up with my face burning.

“Distracted?” he said.

“Cold,” I said, which was a lie, and he knew it, and did not say so.

I took the second point properly, because I was angry with myself and anger made me careful. I took it with a Knockback Jinx off the back of a feint, low and to the left. It lifted him off his feet and set him down on his back on the boards. He lay there for a moment, looking up at the clock.

“That’s better,” he said to it.

The third went on longer. It always did. We went round and round the platform in the lamplight. I made myself watch his wand and only his wand. I nearly managed it. In the end I cast a Stinging Hex a fraction too wide. He turned into it rather than away, and it caught him across the inside of his left forearm with a sound like a whip.

He hissed and dropped his guard. I could have taken the point. I didn’t. I was across the platform before I had decided to be, my wand in my pocket, his wrist in my hand.

“Let me see.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Let me see.”

He let me. I turned his arm to the lamplight. There was a red welt across the inside of the forearm, a hand’s breadth below the elbow, already rising, the skin unbroken. A Stinging Hex. Nothing. I had treated a hundred of them. I could have told him to put cold water on it and gone back to my mark.

I didn’t. I stood with his wrist in my hand and my thumb on the place where his pulse was. I counted it, because I could not help counting it. It was fast. So was mine. The skin of his arm was warm and freckled and smooth. Apart from my welt there was not a mark on it anywhere. I noticed that. I did not know why I noticed it. I only knew that I looked at the clean, whole inside of his forearm under the lamplight for a moment longer than any healer needed to.

“It’ll be gone by morning,” I said. My voice did not sound like my own. “Cold water. Or dittany, if you want to waste it.”

“I don’t want to waste it.”

I looked up. He was looking at me, not at his arm. He was close. His hair had come out of its parting again and fallen into his eyes. He didn’t push it back.

“You know what it is,” he said. “Duelling with you. It’s the only time you look at me without deciding something first.”

I didn’t let go of his wrist. I should have. I knew I should have. I stood there with his pulse going under my thumb and his eyes on my face, and every sensible thing I had ever told myself went quietly out of my head.

My father has found me a husband. I had said it to him on the stair a month ago. He knew. He had known for a month, and he was standing here anyway, looking at me like that, and I was letting him.

I let go of his wrist.

“Cold water,” I said again. “I’m on rounds at nine. You’ll make me late.”

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. Then he fetched his coat from the steps and put it on over his shirtsleeves, without the waistcoat or the collar. He rolled his cuffs down over the welt.

“The third point’s yours,” he said. “You stopped.”

“I didn’t take it.”

“I know. That’s why it’s yours.”

He walked my rounds with me. It was not his night. I did not ask him to, and he did not ask whether he might. He simply fell into step beside me at the foot of the Grand Staircase as the clock struck nine, with his collar in his pocket and his coat buttoned over his shirtsleeves, and we went up through the castle together without much talking.

I did not mind the silence. I was too busy with the inside of my own head.

I had been telling myself for a month that this was nothing. That it was the badge, and the rota, and the long evenings walking the same corridors. That anyone thrown together with anyone for that many hours would come to notice the colour of their hair. I had been telling myself that what I felt at the foot of the stairs, and on the road up from Hogsmeade, and now on a wet platform with his pulse under my thumb, was the kind of thing a sensible girl could fold up and put away at the bottom of a trunk, under her winter stockings, with the gloves.

I was not a fool. I knew that I was lying. I had been lying to everybody all month, to Professor Weasley and to my father by my silence and to Leander by my silence, and now, it seemed, to myself. Penhallow had said that was the one I was not allowed.

On the Viaduct the clouds had cleared. The moon stood over the lake, swollen and lopsided, a few nights short of full. I looked at it for a moment without thinking anything in particular and then walked on.

At midnight we stood at the newel post with the ledger open between us. I wrote the entry. Monday 3rd October. Rounds 9 o’clock to midnight. E. White; L. Prewett, off duty. Castle quiet. Then I took the brown-paper parcel out of my pocket and put it down on the page beside the pen.

“You said nothing yet,” he said.

“I meant nothing in front of your entire house.”

He unwrapped it slowly. The silver pencil lay in the brown paper under the lamp, slim and plain, with its little ring at the top. He picked it up and turned it over. He twisted the end so that the lead came out, and twisted it back. He didn’t say anything for a long moment.

Then he looked at me.

“And the other one?” he said. “My third-best. The stub.”

I put my hand in my pocket, where it had been for a month. I did not take it out.

“I’m keeping that,” I said. “For my records.”

Something happened to his face that I had not seen happen to it before. It was not a smile. It was the thing that comes before one, when a person is not yet sure they are allowed one.

He initialled the entry with the silver pencil. L.P. Then he put it in his breast pocket, over his heart, and buttoned it.

“Thursday?” he said. “After your appointment with Penhallow. Late. The courtyard.”

It was the prefects’ night. Neither of us would be on duty. There was no reason for it at all, except the reason neither of us was saying.

“Thursday,” I said.