Evelyn

Blainey let him go on Monday morning after breakfast, with a sling and a list.

“No duelling,” she said, counting on her fingers. “No Quidditch. Nothing heavier than a quill in that hand. Dressings morning and evening, and Miss White does them, not you. If I see you lifting a cauldron I’ll have you back in that bed so fast you’ll leave your boots behind.” She folded the list and tucked it into his good hand. “And eat.”

“Yes, Madam Blainey.”

“Don’t you ‘yes, Madam Blainey’ me. You’ve said it to every rule I’ve given you and broken half of them.” But she was smiling. She looked at me over his head. “Take him away, Miss White. I want my bed back.”

We walked down to Charms together. It was the first time we had walked anywhere together since the forest, and I found I did not know where to put myself. On the stairs I kept to his left, on the side of the sling, so that nobody would jostle it. He noticed. On the landing he stepped round me so that I was on his right instead.

“I’m not made of glass,” he said, and kept walking.

Garreth was already in Charms, spread across both seats. He looked up as we came in and his whole face opened. Then he made a great show of gathering his books and moving back a row, bowing as he went.

“Your seat, Head Boy. Kept warm.”

The room laughed. Somebody at the back began to hum the song and somebody else shushed them. Leander sat down in his place two benches ahead of me, carefully, settling the sling, and Professor Ronen said, “Welcome back, Mr Prewett,” and began the lesson.

The back of his neck was where it belonged. I looked at it for most of an hour and wrote down almost nothing.

That night, after rounds, for the first time in eleven days, I had nowhere I needed to be.

I went up to the seventh floor and walked past the bare stretch of wall three times with what I needed held clear in my head. The door came.

The Room had been mine since fifth year. It knew me. Tonight it gave me what it always gave me when I came to work: the long table under the high window, the lamp already lit, and the drawer at the end of the table that opened for nobody else. Rookwood’s notes were in the drawer where I had left them in June. I spread them on the table and sat looking at them for a long time before I touched anything.

I had promised Sebastian a cure. I had promised it in the Undercroft at one in the morning with Nan’s memory as the price. I had meant it. I had not opened these pages since.

Rookwood wrote in a cramped, slanting hand, much of it in a cipher of his own that had cost me most of sixth year. Most of it was about the repositories. Some of it was about what could be done to a person with the magic in them. In the margin of one page, beside a passage I had read forty times, he had drawn a curse’s binding as a knot: three loops through one another, closed at both ends. Beside it was a single line. Every knot is tied from one end. Look for the other.

Anne’s curse was bound. Everyone who had ever tried to break it had pulled at it from where it sat in her, Blainey among them, and it had only drawn tighter. In the spring I had begun to think it had been tied from somewhere else. Somewhere outside her. If I could find where, I might be able to loosen it without touching her at all.

I took out my wand and laid it on the table beside the notes. I did not pick it up. The magic I carried did not like small questions. When I reached for it carelessly it came up too fast and too much, as it had for the field kit in the forest. A binding was not a thing to be hit with a hammer. I would have to work at it a thread at a time.

I worked until the lamp burned low. Then I stood up and asked the Room for something else.

The far wall drew back. Beyond it lay the largest of my vivariums, empty, its weather stilled, its sky a flat grey nothing waiting to be told what to be.

Eighteen days. Eighteen days to make it somewhere a wolf could not get out of, and somewhere a man would not mind waking up.

On Tuesday at nine he was waiting at the foot of the Grand Staircase with the ledger under his good arm.

“These are my nights,” he said, before I could speak. “You’ve had them a week. I want them back.”

“You’ve one arm.”

“I’ve one arm and a wand. That’s one more of each than the castle needs.”

“You can’t hold a lamp and a wand at once.”

He considered this. “No,” he agreed. “Then you’ll have to come and hold the lamp.”

So I went.

We had walked this castle at night for more than a year, first as prefects and then as Heads, and I had never once had to think about where to walk. Now I could think of nothing else. There was a space between us that neither of us had named and both of us kept: the width of the lamp, held out at the end of my arm. Where the corridor narrowed at the top of the Astronomy stair he went ahead. The light went up the wall in front of him and did not touch him.

On the fourth-floor landing he stopped by the window seat.

“Out of bounds,” I said.

“It isn’t. We settled this.”

“You settled it by sitting in it. That isn’t winning.”

“It’s exactly winning.” But he did not sit. He looked at the seat, then at me with the lamp, then went on down the stair. I heard him laughing at himself under his breath.

We argued about whether the suit of armour outside the Trophy Room had moved since September. We argued about whether Peeves counted as an incident. We did not argue about anything that mattered. At midnight he wrote Castle quiet in the ledger with the silver pencil I had given him for his birthday and held the book out for me to sign under it. Our fingers did not touch. We were both careful that they should not.

The school had decided we were a story, and was writing it without us.

“Garreth’s taking bets,” Natsai told me at breakfast on Wednesday, low, with her eyes on her porridge. “A Sickle on Christmas. Three on the Easter holidays. Somebody in Hufflepuff has a whole Galleon on never.”

“Who has never?”

“I’m not telling you. You’d give them detention.” She glanced at me. “Garreth’s put a Sickle on it himself. He won’t say which.”

I looked at my toast. I had promised myself I would not look at the Gryffindor table at meals, and I kept the promise until Thursday lunch. Then I looked up and saw Nan Coldwell sitting beside Leander with his plate in front of her, cutting his meat into small careful squares.

He was letting her. He sat with his good hand flat on the table and watched her do it. He said something that made her laugh. When she had finished she pushed the plate back to him with the air of someone who has done a great thing. She did not look like a child who had been in a forest. She looked eleven.

She did not know what had been taken out of her head, or who had asked for it to be taken. After that she sat beside him every lunch. Every lunch I meant to look away, and every lunch I did not manage it.

At four o’clock on Thursday I climbed the three steps in the Astronomy Wing with Leander behind me.

Penhallow had pushed his papers to one end of the desk and spread a clean cloth at the other. He did not get up.

“Sit down, Mr Prewett. Take your arm out of that thing.”

Leander sat. I unwound the dressing myself, since Penhallow did not offer to, and laid the arm on the cloth, palm up.

The wound ran from two fingers below the elbow almost to the wrist. Where I had cut away the dead flesh there was a long, shallow trench, the bottom of it filling with new flesh as red and granular as a strawberry. The skin round it was dragged in and puckered where the dittany had pulled it as far as it would go. Old bruising still yellowed the whole of the forearm. It was the ugliest thing I had ever made. There were no crescents anywhere in it. There was nothing there that anyone could read.

Penhallow put on his spectacles. He bent over the arm and looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then he touched it, one fingertip barely resting, along the whole length of it.

“Does it ache?”

“At night, sir,” said Leander. “A bit.”

“Hm.” Penhallow turned the arm a little to the window. “Tell me what happened in the forest, Mr Prewett. In your own words. Miss White has given me hers.”

My hands went still in my lap.

“It came out of the trees at us, sir,” Leander said. His voice was level. “Nan was behind Evie. I got in front of them both. I put my arm up and it caught me with its claws, across here, and knocked me flat. It came down on top of me. After that I don’t remember much until Evie was there.”

“Its claws,” said Penhallow.

“Yes, sir.”

Penhallow looked at him. Leander looked back, steady and pleasant, the Head Boy at a prefects’ meeting. I could not breathe.

“Thank you, Mr Prewett,” Penhallow said at last. “You may put your arm away. Wait outside, would you? I want a word with Miss White about her notes.”

Leander glanced at me. I nodded. He took up his sling and went out, and the door closed behind him.

Penhallow took off his spectacles and folded them.

“It will make an ugly scar,” he said. “But a clean one. It’s healing from the bottom, as it should. In a year he’ll show it to girls at dances and tell them it was a dragon.” He tapped the folded spectacles on the blotter, once. “I was wrong to doubt the method. I should like you to write it out for me properly, with your sources. Lister, you said.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He was quiet a moment. “Miss White. You are carrying a great deal for eighteen. Head Girl. The ward. A patient. Your NEWTs.” He did not look at me while he said it. He looked at the cloth, where the arm had lain. “If this patient ever needs more than you can give him, my door is open. At any hour. I should like you to remember that.”

I heard it as a warning. I heard every word of it as a warning. I know what you are doing, and I am watching you do it. My mouth had gone dry.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I’ll remember.”

On Friday afternoon I went to the library for a book about knots.

There was such a book. I had seen it in sixth year and not needed it then: A Treatise upon Bindings, Ligatures and Tyings-Off, two volumes in brown calf, on the top shelf of the Charms theory stacks where nobody ever went. I could reach the shelf below it. On my toes I could touch the spine of the first volume with two fingers and get no purchase on it at all. I was considering whether a Summoning Charm in the library counted as abusing the privileges of a Head Girl when a hand came past my shoulder and closed round the book.

I knew the hand. I knew the cuff and the freckles across the back of it.

He was behind me. Not touching. Not by an inch. With his left arm in a sling he could not reach round me, so he had reached over, and to reach over he had to stand close: closer than he had stood since the hospital wing, close enough that I felt the warmth of him all down my back and his breath stir the hair at my temple.

He did not take the book down. He stopped with his hand on it.

Neither of us moved.

The stacks were quiet. Somewhere far off a page turned. I could have stepped aside. I could have said his name, or thank you, or anything. I stood with my hands flat on the shelf below and did nothing at all, and behind me I felt him draw one slow breath and hold it.

“Bindings, Ligatures and Tyings-Off,” he read, low, over my head. “That’s not for your NEWTs.”

“It’s for the ward,” I said. “Some of the old splinting charms. Madam Blainey wanted to know if there was anything better.”

“Is there?”

“I won’t know until I’ve read it.”

He took the book down. He did it slowly, and stepped back with it, and the cold came in between us at once. I turned round. He was holding the book out to me in his good hand, and he had put his face carefully in order.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be.”

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he nodded once and went away down the stacks without looking back. I stood with the book against my chest and my heart going like a hare’s and did not open it for a quarter of an hour.

I read it in the Room that night, and the night after. It did not have the answer. It had a diagram on page three hundred and twelve of a ligature tied off against a second, hidden point, and I sat with that diagram and Rookwood’s knot side by side until the candles guttered.

In Defence on Monday, while Professor Hecat had her back to us, Sebastian leaned across the gap between our desks.

“Any closer?”

“Closer.”

“Good.” He did not look at me. He was copying the board in his neat, small hand. “Anne asked after you in her last letter. I told her you were working on something.” He blotted the line. “She’s never been told that before. That anyone was working on something. I thought you ought to know.”

I wrote the next three lines of the lesson twice over without noticing.

The rest of my evenings that week went to the vivarium.

I did it a piece at a time, as I worked at the binding, asking the Room for one thing and then the next. A wall first, of dry stone, higher than a man and too smooth to climb. A gate of iron with no handle on the inside.

On Wednesday night I came back from rounds and found the straw already in. It was heaped deep under the far wall, fresh and sweet, and beside it a channel had been cut with water running through it from nowhere I could see. Deek was standing in the middle of it all with a pitchfork twice his height.

“Miss is making a place for a big beast,” he said. He did not ask what kind. He looked at the wall, and the gate, and the bare iron where a handle should have been. “A beast that must not get out.”

“Yes.”

He leaned the pitchfork against the wall and folded his long hands. “When Tobbs did not come home, nobody went to look for him. Only Miss. Miss went into the spiders’ cave and brought Deek his last notes.” His ears had gone down. “Deek has not forgotten. Whatever comes into this room, Deek did not see it. Whatever happens in it, Deek will not tell. Not the Headmaster. Not anybody.”

I could not speak for a moment. I nodded.

“Then Deek will do the water properly,” he said, “so it does not freeze,” and went back to work.

The sky I did myself, so that Leander would not wake under a ceiling and think himself shut in a cupboard. Everything else I left to the Room. I did not look at the whole of it until it was finished.

On Sunday night, the night before Halloween, I took him up to the seventh floor.

He had not asked again where the safe place was. He had trusted me with it, as he had trusted me with the lancet, and I still could not tell whether that made it easier or harder.

I walked past the wall three times. He watched the stone. When the door came he made a small sound, too short to be a word.

The Room gave us the workroom first. I had asked it to keep the table and the drawer out of sight, and it had. Then the far wall drew back.

I had asked for somewhere a wolf could not get out of. I had asked for somewhere a man would not mind waking up. I had not known, until I saw it, what the Room would make of the two together.

It was an orchard.

Old apple trees stood in long rows on a slope of rough grass, gnarled and leaning, their heavy branches propped on forked sticks. The stars were out over it, thick and cold. My wall ran round the whole of it, grey in the starlight. At the bottom of the slope a stream ran fast over stones. Deek’s straw was heaped deep under the biggest tree.

I had never been to Monmouthshire. I had his mother’s letter, apples half in and rain coming. I had the barley that smelt of dust the week before it was cut. The Room had taken them from me anyway.

Leander walked out onto the grass. He put his good hand flat on the trunk of the nearest tree and stood with his head bowed. After a while he reached up and pulled an apple from the branch and held it to his face.

“It doesn’t smell of anything,” he said.

“The Room can’t make food. Nobody can. It can only make the look of it.”

“It’s the top orchard.” He turned the apple over in his hand. “Above the house. The wall’s wrong, it’s far too high, and the apples are wrong. But it’s the top orchard. You can see the river from the gate.” His voice cracked on river. “Evie. How did you—”

“I didn’t. I asked it for somewhere you’d be safe. It did the rest.” I made myself go on, while I still could. “The wall will hold. I tested it with a Blasting Curse and the curse came off it like rain. The gate only opens from outside. The water won’t stop.”

“And you?”

“I’ll be where I’m needed.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he came back across the grass.

He stopped a good deal closer than the width of a lamp. He stood looking down at me with the apple in his hand, and I knew what he wanted to do and what I wanted him to do, and between us stood the four weeks, a wall higher than the one round the orchard.

He did not do it. He put the apple into my hand instead and closed my fingers round it with his own.

“Five more days,” he said.

“Five more days.”