Evelyn

The howl went on longer than any animal’s should. It rose and broke and dropped away into the trees, and when it was gone the whole Forest seemed to be listening for it to come again.

Leander’s wandlight had shrunk to a glow between his fingers. He had shielded it with his hand without noticing.

“That wasn’t a wolf,” he said.

“No.”

We both knew what night it was. We had both looked up at the moon from the platform an hour ago and talked about Garreth’s potions. I felt it now as a stupidity, a thing I should have seen at lunch in the Entrance Hall when Nan said Tonight? and looked at the sky.

“Give me the scarf,” I said.

He held it out without asking why. I pressed the wool to my face and breathed in. Soap, the cheap yellow kind they gave out in the Hufflepuff dormitories. Ink. Something sweet, a sherbet lemon perhaps, saved in a pocket. Under all of it, the warm, particular smell of one small person and nobody else.

“Keep your light low,” I said, “and keep up.”

Then I let go of myself again. The Forest came rushing in.

I was still entirely myself. I knew who I was and where I was and what the moon meant. I knew I had kissed him against a wall a quarter of an hour ago and that I would have to decide what to do about it. But the world came to me differently on four feet. The dark was not dark any longer. It was grey and silver, full of edges. Every leaf had a smell. Under the smell of the leaves there were a hundred other things: badger, owl, the cold green breath of the stream, the musk of something with hooves that had passed a day ago. And through all of it, like a thread pulled through cloth, ran soap and ink and sherbet lemon.

I followed the thread.

Behind me, Leander came on through the bracken with his light cupped in his hand. He was quiet, for a boy his size, but to my ears he crashed like a cart. I could hear his breath. I could hear his heart, or thought I could. I went a little way ahead and waited. He saw the white tip of my tail in the wandlight and came on. I went ahead again.

There was something else in the Forest besides Nan.

I had smelled it at the treeline and not let myself know it. Now it came stronger, crossing the thread and crossing back: rank and wet and wrong. It was dog and not dog. It was blood that was not fresh. Under the animal stink there was something I did not want to put a name to, something sour and close, like the inside of a sickroom where the windows have not been opened. A man’s smell, worn on the wrong body.

It was moving. It was not moving towards us. It was moving the same way we were.

I went faster.

Leander kept up. I don’t know how. The ground went down into a gully and up the other side, through holly that tore at him and let me through. He did not once call out to me or ask me to wait. Once he slipped. I heard his knee go down on stone, heard him swallow whatever he had been going to say and get up again. I was ashamed of how glad I was that he was there. I was a fox and he was a boy. The thing in the trees did not want foxes.

I knew that much from my reading. A werewolf will pass an animal by. It wants people. In this shape I was the safest creature in the Forest. He was walking behind me in his shirtsleeves with nothing but a wand and the wrong sort of courage.

I could have turned and sent him back. He would not have gone.

The trees opened.

It was a clearing, perhaps thirty yards across, in a hollow where an old oak had come down years ago and taken its neighbours with it. The moon stood straight overhead, so that the grass was white as frost, every blade throwing its own small shadow. At the near edge, half behind the fallen trunk, a small figure in a pale pinafore knelt with her hands clasped under her chin.

And in the middle of the clearing, the mooncalves were dancing.

There were perhaps a dozen of them. They had come up out of the ground to stand on their hind legs, those long thin impossible legs, with their great pale eyes turned up to the moon. They moved together in a ring, slowly, solemnly, stepping and turning. The grass bent behind them in a pattern like a lace doily. They made no sound at all. I had seen them once before, from a long way off, and had thought them comical. I did not think so now. There was something in it that caught in my chest: those plain shy creatures dancing because the moon was full and they could not help it, in a place where nobody was meant to see.

Nan was not afraid. Her face, turned up in the moonlight, was the happiest thing I had seen in a month.

Leander came up beside me at the edge of the trees and stopped. I heard him breathe out. For one moment neither of us moved. We had found her. She was safe. She was looking at the thing she had come for, and I could not bring myself to take it from her.

Then the mooncalves stopped.

All at once, in the middle of a step, they stopped dead with their heads up. Then they dropped to four legs and were gone, back into the ground, down holes I had not seen, in the time it takes to blink. The clearing was empty. The pattern lay in the grass where they had been, silver and perfect, and nothing moved.

Nan made a small disappointed sound and got up on her knees to look.

On the far side of the clearing, something came out of the trees.

It came slowly. That was the worst of it. It came as a dog comes into a kitchen where it knows there is meat, head low, unhurried, sure. It was bigger than a wolf and wrong in the shape of it: too long in the leg, too narrow in the flank, the ribs showing through the grey coat like the staves of a cask. Its muzzle was short. Its tail was tufted. When it lifted its head and the moonlight caught its face, the eyes in it were the eyes of a man.

It looked straight across the clearing at Nan.

I was moving before I had decided to. I crossed the grass in six bounds and changed on the last of them, so that I came down on my own two feet at the end of the fallen trunk with my wand already in my hand and my skirts round my ankles. I took Nan by the shoulder and swung her behind me. She made a small, surprised sound, no more than a breath, as her feet left the ground. Her hands found the back of my waistcoat, then my waist, and locked there.

“Don’t let go,” I said, without turning round. “Whatever happens. Stay behind me.”

She didn’t answer. I felt her nod against my back.

The wolf stopped in the middle of the clearing, in the ruin of the mooncalves’ pattern, and looked at us.

Then Leander walked out of the trees.

He did not run. He walked, steadily, with his wand up, out across the white grass until he was standing between us and it. He did it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I suppose, to him, it was.

I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to drag him back into the trees by the collar of his shirt. A quarter of an hour ago I had held that shirt in my fist and pulled him down to me, and now he was standing in the open in front of a werewolf with his back to me. There was nothing in all my reading, nothing in a month of Penhallow’s questions or Blainey’s ward, that had told me what to do with the two of those things at once. So I did nothing with them. I put them away, somewhere behind my ribs, where I could feel them pressing, and I raised my wand.

“Evelyn,” he said, low. He did not take his eyes off the wolf. “Take her and go.”

“No.”

“Evie—”

“It’s faster than me with a child on my back, and you know it.” My voice was level. I had no idea where it came from. “We do this together or not at all.”

He didn’t argue. He moved a half step to his left, out of my line. I understood him at once. It was how we stood on the duelling platform. It was how we had stood every Friday for a month.

The wolf came.

It came without any warning at all, from standing to full stride in a single heave of its back, and Leander’s Stunner took it full in the chest. The red light broke on it like water on a rock. It staggered and shook its great head and came on.

I cast. So did he. Stupefy, Impedimenta, Petrificus Totalus: everything we had ever thrown at each other across the boards, and some things we never had. His Full Body-Bind locked its hind legs for a heartbeat and it fell, rolled, broke free of it and was up again before the spell had finished glowing. My Leg-Locker caught a foreleg and it went down on its chin in the grass. It came up snarling and the sound of it went right through me.

It came at my side next, the side where Nan was. I could not dodge it, not with her wrapped round me. A duellist’s whole art is in her feet, and mine were planted in the grass like fence posts. So I fought from where I stood. Glacius turned the ground under its forepaws to ice, and it skidded, scrabbling, so close that I smelled its breath, hot and foul. Diffindo took a branch as thick as my arm off the dead oak above it and brought it down across its back. Leander’s Depulso hit it while it was still tangled in the leaves and sent it rolling.

“Good!” he shouted.

For one wild second it was Friday. It was the platform and the lamps and his grin across the boards, and I nearly laughed.

The wolf came up out of the branches shaking itself like a dog out of a pond.

“It’s not stopping,” I said.

“I know.”

“Leander, it’s not stopping.”

“I know.” He was breathing hard. He sidestepped to keep himself between it and us. “Then we keep it busy until Weasley comes.”

Weasley was ten minutes away. Fifteen, if Poppy had to find her. We both knew it.

None of it was enough. The thing had a werewolf’s hide and the moon in its blood, and our spells were slowing it, not stopping it.

I knew what would stop it.

I could feel it at the ends of my fingers, as you feel the sea in a shell. It had been there every day for a year, under everything I did, under every spell I cast in class and every charm I put on a bandage. I had learned to hold it so carefully that most days I forgot I was holding it at all. Now it rose in me like a tide that has heard the moon, and I wanted to let it go so badly that my hand shook.

I did not let it go. I could not. Nan was wrapped round my waist with her face pressed into my spine, and I did not know, I truly did not know, what that power would do to a child standing that close to it. I had seen what it did to stone. So I cast small and careful and hard, with my wand arm only, while my other hand went back to hold her against me. I hated it. I hated every careful spell.

“Left!” Leander shouted.

I threw a Shield Charm left. The wolf hit it. The impact went up my arm into my shoulder; Nan cried out, and I felt her nearly lose her grip. The wolf rebounded and came round, and this time it did not come at me. It went for the one who was standing in its way.

Leander saw it coming. He got a Shield Charm up. It was a good one, the one he could hold a breath longer than anyone, and the wolf went through the edge of it as if it were paper.

Its claws took him across the shoulder.

I heard the shirt tear. I heard him make a sound I had never heard him make, short and astonished. I saw him spin half round with the force of it and go down on one knee. The wolf was past him. It turned, so fast, and he was up again, somehow, with dark coming through the linen at his shoulder and down his chest, and his wand still in his hand.

He threw something at it. I don’t know what. It barely noticed. It came round in a long curve with its head low and its eyes on me and on the child behind me.

Leander was between us again. I don’t know how he got there. He was simply there.

“Leander!”

It leapt. He threw up his left arm across his face, as a boy does when something is flung at him, without thinking. The wolf’s jaws closed on his forearm.

I heard the bones of his arm.

It shook him. It shook him as a terrier shakes a rat, a man nearly six feet tall lifted and flung about like something stuffed with straw. Then it let go of his arm and he fell on his back in the grass and did not get up.

The wolf stood over him. It lowered its head to his throat.

I let go.

I saw the light come out of my hands, pale and moving like smoke. From inside, it was simple. All year I had been holding a door shut against the sea. Now I opened it. It came through me, enormous and old and bright. For one moment I was not afraid of anything at all.

I took hold of the wolf with it.

I did not cast a spell at it. I reached out across the grass with something that was not my hand and closed it round that grey starved body, and lifted. It came off the ground. It hung in the air above Leander with its legs scrabbling at nothing, yelping, and I held it there.

I could have broken it. It would have been as easy as closing my fist. I could feel the whole length of its spine in my grip, every vertebra, the great heart going like a drum under the ribs. If I closed my hand it would die there, in the air, over the boy it had torn open. Every part of me that was not a healer wanted to.

The eyes in its face were a man’s eyes.

Somewhere there was a man in this. Somewhere there was a person who would wake tomorrow in the cold leaves, naked and bruised and sick, not knowing what he had done. He was somebody’s son. Perhaps he was somebody’s father. He had not chosen this, any more than the boy on the grass had chosen it. If I killed the wolf, I killed him.

First, do no harm.

I didn’t think the words. I didn’t need to. They had been under everything else for a year, as the power had.

I brought it down.

Not to kill. Hard enough to teach it. I slammed it into the ground so that the earth jumped under my boots and the breath went out of it in a whine. I lifted it again and slammed it down a second time. Werewolves are hard to hurt; anyone who has read a page about them knows that. It would mend by morning, and the man inside it would wake bruised to the bone and never know why. Then I flung it back across the clearing, out over the white grass and into the bracken at the far edge. It went down in a crash of leaves. It came up again slowly, shaking, and stood a moment on the edge of the trees with its head turned towards me.

I lifted my hands. The light was still in them. I let it see.

It ran.

I heard it go, a long way, crashing and then not crashing, and then nothing. The Forest closed over the sound of it as if it had never been there.

The light went out of my hands. My knees went with it. I caught myself on the fallen trunk, standing with my palm on the cold wet bark, shaking from head to foot, and for a moment I could not remember how to breathe in.

Behind me, a child began to scream.

She had barely made a sound all through it. Now that it was over she screamed, high and thin and terrible. She would not stop. Her hands were still locked at my waist. I could feel her whole body shaking through them.

And in front of me, in the trampled ruin of the mooncalves’ ring, Leander lay on his back in the moonlight and did not move. The grass around his left arm was black. It was spreading.

I took hold of Nan’s hands at my waist. She held on harder. I said her name, then said it again, and her fingers loosened one at a time under mine. Then I went to him.