Evelyn

The dungeons were colder than the rest of the castle at any hour. At one in the morning they were colder than the Forest had been. I went down the long stair with my wand lit low and my footsteps sounding twice, once on the stone and once off the dripping walls, until I came to the stretch of bare wall that was not a wall.

I had thought about it on every stair. Every landing had given me a chance to turn round, and I had not taken one. It would have been easy to tell myself I had no choice. I had a choice. I could go back up to the hospital wing and sit by his bed until Nan woke and told them everything, and then I could stand beside him while it all came down, and that would be the honest thing. I knew it was the honest thing. I kept walking anyway, because the honest thing ended with him in a locked room for the rest of his life, and I had already decided, somewhere in the clearing with my forehead against his, that I would not let it.

The Heads were given every password in the castle on the first of September. I had never used this one. I said it now, quietly. The stone slid back.

The Slytherin common room lay under the lake. By day the light came through the great windows green and shifting, full of weed and the shadows of things that swam. At night it was almost black, only the faintest glimmer where the moon found its way down through the water. A few low lamps hung on chains. The fire had burned to embers. The leather chairs stood about in the dimness like sleeping cattle.

One of them was not empty.

He was sitting in the deep window seat with his knees drawn up and his back against the glass, as he used to sit in fifth year when he could not sleep. He was still dressed. He had a book open on his knee that he had not been reading. When the wall slid shut behind me he looked up without any surprise at all.

“Evelyn,” said Sebastian Sallow. “I wondered when you’d need me again.”

I had not seen him properly since the summer. A nod in corridors. A glance across the Great Hall. He looked older than he had in June, thinner in the face. Something in him had gone still that used to be always moving. Anne had come home to Feldcroft. He had told me that much in a letter in August, four lines long. She has forgiven me. I don’t know how.

“I need you,” I said. “Not here.”

He looked at me a moment longer. He looked at my face, at my hair pinned back so hard it hurt, at my hands, which I had scrubbed until the knuckles were raw and which still, in that green dark, did not look clean.

Then he closed his book and got up.

We went out through the wall and along the dungeon passage without speaking, round two corners and down a short stair, to the place where the old stones had been pushed aside long ago and a gap opened into the dark. The Undercroft smelled as it always had: damp, old smoke, the cold mineral breath of the earth under the castle. Sebastian lit the brazier with a flick of his wand. The light went up the walls and showed the same scorched flagstones, the same chalk marks on the far wall where we had once set up targets.

He had taught me the Unforgivable Curses in this room. I had learned them as I learned everything, because I could not bear not to know a thing. I had never cast one outside it.

“So,” he said. He leaned against the wall with his arms folded. “Someone was mauled in the Forest tonight. The whole of Slytherin knew within the hour. The Head Boy, they’re saying. And a first year. And you.” He tilted his head. “You look as if you’ve been in a slaughterhouse.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Is he dead?”

“No.”

“Is the first year?”

“No.”

“Then why,” said Sebastian, “are you here?”

I had thought, too, about how much to tell him. I had thought I might give him half. A child who had seen something she should not have seen; a memory that needed a little smoothing; nothing more. He would do it. He owed me enough to do it without asking.

And then he would do it badly, because he would not know what he was looking for. Some piece of the truth would be left lying in Nan’s head like a splinter. It would work its way out. They always did.

So I told him everything.

I told him about the clearing and the mooncalves and the wolf with a man’s eyes. I told him about Leander’s arm going up. I told him the sound the bones made. I told him what I had done with the power I was supposed to be keeping under lock and key: how I had nearly killed the thing, and had not. I told him about the silver and the dittany and the forehead pressed to forehead in the grass. It clawed you. Say it. I told him what I had said to Weasley and to Blainey, and how easily it had gone.

I told him that it had been a bite.

He did not interrupt. When I had finished he was silent for a long moment. The brazier ticked and settled.

“A bite,” he said at last. “At the full moon. From a transformed werewolf.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve told no one.”

“I’m telling you.”

“So you are.” He unfolded his arms and looked down at his own hands, turning them over as if they belonged to someone else. “You know what it means.”

“It may come to nothing.” I heard my own voice say it, perfectly steady. “Not every bite takes. We won’t know until the next full moon. Until then there is nothing to tell anybody. No reason for anybody to look.”

Sebastian lifted his eyes to mine.

He had known me for two years. He had watched me read my way through half the restricted section and most of what was left of Rookwood’s papers. He knew perfectly well that I had read Forfang, whose monograph on the bitten had come out the summer before I came to Hogwarts and sat in the hospital wing library with my name in the borrowing book four times. He knew that I knew what Forfang had found: that Muggles mostly died of it, and witches and wizards mostly did not, and that the ones who did not die did not stay what they had been.

He did not say any of that. He just looked at me until I looked away.

“You’re in love with him,” he said.

It was not a question. It did not sound like an accusation either. It sounded like a diagnosis, delivered by a physician who had seen the symptoms in the doorway and was only now troubling to name them.

I did not answer. I could not have answered and kept my voice.

“What is he to you?” said Sebastian. “Prewett. Say it plainly, for once.”

“My colleague.”

“Your colleague.” He laughed. “You came down to the dungeons at one in the morning, with his blood still under your fingernails, to ask me to commit a crime for your colleague.”

“He saved a child’s life tonight. He would have died for her. He nearly did.”

“And does he know you’re here?”

I did not answer that either. He nodded slowly, as though I had.

“Merlin,” said Sebastian softly. “Evelyn White. Head Girl.” He smiled, and it was not entirely kind. “What would you have me do?”

“She’ll wake by morning,” I said. “Or a little after. Blainey says so.”

“And when she does?”

“She’ll remember a bite.” I made myself say it plainly. “She’ll remember him saying It bit me. She heard him; she was right there. And she’ll remember light coming out of my hands like smoke.”

“Three things.”

“Three things. They have to be gone before she opens her eyes.”

“And the rest?”

“The rest stays. The Forest. The wolf. Being frightened. The claws across his shoulder; those were real, she saw them. The two of us standing between her and the dark with our wands up.” My voice caught. I steadied it. “Let her keep that. Let it be a story about two people who were brave and an animal that was terrible. Nothing more.”

Sebastian was quiet for a moment. “You’ve thought about this.”

“On every stair.”

“You want me to alter the memory of an eleven-year-old girl,” said Sebastian, “while she lies unconscious in the hospital wing, under Madam Blainey’s nose.”

“Yes.”

“I could be expelled for it.”

“You could be sent to Azkaban for a great deal more than that,” I said, “if anyone ever found out what happened in the catacombs under Feldcroft. Nobody has. Nobody will. I made sure of that.”

It was a cruel thing to say. I had known it would be when I came down the stairs. I had brought it anyway, folded small in my pocket with the dittany. I watched it land. I watched him remember his uncle on the floor of that cave, and the green light, and me standing between him and the Ministry for a year afterwards with my mouth shut.

He went white. Then the colour came back into his face, slowly.

“That’s the debt,” he said. “Is that all?”

“No.” I took a breath. “There’s Anne.”

Something moved behind his eyes.

“I don’t have it yet,” I said. “I won’t lie to you about that, of all things. But I’ve been working on Rookwood’s notes since sixth year. There’s a pattern in the binding he used, a way the curse is anchored, that I think can be loosened from the other end. I’m close. Closer than anyone has ever been. When I have it, it’s hers. Whatever it takes. You have my word.”

Sebastian was silent for a long time.

“Blainey tried, you know,” he said at last. “Years ago, when it was new. Uncle Solomon took Anne to the hospital wing. Blainey was kind and she was hopeless. She sent us home with a sleeping draught.” He laughed under his breath. It was not a laugh. “Everyone was kind. Nobody could do anything.”

“I can.”

“You think you can.” He pushed himself off the wall. “All right. The debt gets me to listen. Anne gets me to do it. But understand something, Evelyn. After tonight I’m not the only one who owes.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” He looked at me for a moment longer. There was something in it I did not want to see. Then he drew his wand and touched it to the top of his own head.

The cold went down him like water. I watched it go: the dark hair first, then the face, then the shoulders, the colour leaching out of him as though someone were rubbing out a drawing. In a moment there was no Sebastian. There was only a faint warp in the firelight where he stood, the chalk marks on the wall behind him wavering as if seen through rain.

“Walk in front,” said the warp. “And talk, if anyone stops us. You’re better at it than you used to be.”

I went up the stairs ahead of him with Forfang in my head. Three hundred cases, collected over twenty years. A chapter of tables. I had read them twice. I knew how few of the bitten had ever woken on the morning after the next full moon still themselves, and the number was not a number anyone could hope on.

I would let Leander hope on it anyway. He would wake and ask me, and I would tell him that not every bite takes, which was true as a lie is true when it is built out of the right words. It was the only medicine I had left for him. I would give him a month of it.

The castle had not changed in the hour I had been gone. The same armour. The same sleeping portraits. On the stairs I heard him behind me, a soft step that stopped when mine stopped and went on when I went on. Twice I glanced back and saw nothing but the stairwell and, for an instant, a ripple across the face of a tapestry as something passed in front of it.

The hospital wing was dim. Every lamp was turned down but one, at the far end, by Leander’s bed. In its light Madam Blainey sat in the hard chair where I had sat, slumped sideways against the bedframe with her cap askew and one hand still resting on his blanket. She was asleep.

I walked down the ward with my heart going so hard I could hear it.

She woke when I was three beds away. She sat up with a jerk, blinking, reaching for her wand on the bedside table before she saw who it was.

“Miss White.” Her voice was thick. “I told you to go to bed.”

“I tried.” That was nearly true. I had looked at the bed. “I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing it.” That was not a lie at all. “Let me sit with him, Madam Blainey. Please. I won’t sleep anyway, and you’re falling off the chair.”

She looked at me. She looked at Leander, at the white bandages and the slow rise and fall of his chest. She looked across at Nan, curled small in the next bed. Then she rubbed her face with both hands and stood up. The relief in her was so plain that I felt it like a slap.

“Pulse every quarter hour,” she said. “If anything changes, anything at all, you wake me.”

“I will.”

“I’ll be in the office.” She went, pulling her wrapper round her. At the door of her little office she stopped, looked back down the ward, and left the door standing open a hand’s width. Lamplight from inside fell across the floorboards in a thin bright line.

I sat down in the chair. I put my fingers on Leander’s wrist and counted. Sixty-four. Slower. Better. I did not look round.

Somewhere behind me, the air moved.

He crossed the ward slowly. I knew he did, because I listened to every step he did not make. A board gave, halfway down, with a sound like a knuckle cracking. I stopped breathing. In the office, a chair creaked; then nothing. After a long moment the air moved again, closer. Something brushed past the back of my chair. The curtain at the foot of Nan’s bed swayed a little on its rail as though a draught had found it.

Then nothing at all for a long while.

“Tell me again,” whispered the air, by Nan’s pillow. “Exactly.”

I told him. Not the bite. Not the words. Not the light. Leave the claws, leave the fear, leave the two of us standing in front of her. Leave her the mooncalves. I don’t know why I said that last. It seemed important that she keep them.

I could see him now, a little, if I did not look straight at him: a shape against the white of the pillow where the linen did not line up. His wand hand was a smudge of shadow by her temple. He murmured something too low for me to catch. Then he murmured it again, and again, slowly, patiently, like a man picking a lock with all the time in the world.

Nan’s face twitched in her sleep. A small frown came and went between her brows, the frown of a child who has dropped something and cannot remember what. Her lips moved. Then her face smoothed out. Her breathing went on as before, long and slow.

He did it four times. Once for each thing, and once more, I think, to make sure. Each time I watched her face change and change back. Each time it was easier for him than the time before.

He had done this before. I did not know on whom. I did not ask.

I sat with my fingers on Leander’s pulse and my eyes on a sleeping child, and let it be done. I had stood in a clearing five hours ago with a wolf in my hand and refused to break its neck because there was a man inside it. I had told myself that was what a healer was. And now I sat in a hospital ward and watched someone reach into a little girl’s head and take things out of it, and I did not stop him, because I had asked him to.

First, do no harm. I had thought it was a rule. It was only a direction to face in. Tonight I had walked a long way in the other direction, one reasonable step at a time.

The windows at the end of the ward were turning grey.

The air by Nan’s bed straightened. I felt more than heard him come round behind me, close enough that I could have reached out and touched his sleeve if I had wanted to.

“Done,” he breathed. “She’ll remember claws. She’ll remember you were brave. She won’t remember why her head aches.” A pause. “She’s a sweet little thing. She called you Evie in her sleep.”

I could not speak.

“We’re even now, Evelyn,” said Sebastian, so quietly I barely heard him. “Or we will be. When Anne is well.”

Then he was gone. I felt the draught of him go, down the long ward and out through the door. I heard the door ease shut behind him with the softest click in the world.

In her office Madam Blainey snored, once, and was quiet.

I sat between the two beds in the grey light with my fingers on Leander’s wrist. His pulse went on under them, steady and slow. Sixty. Fifty-eight. I counted it and counted it, because counting was a thing I knew how to do.

In the next bed, Nan stirred.

She turned over onto her back and flung one arm out across the blanket. Her eyelids fluttered. The light from the windows was on her face now, pale and clean. She made a small sound, half a word, and was still again.

Then, slowly, she opened her eyes.

And screamed.