Evelyn

On the morning of the thirty-first the Great Hall had been hung with black and silver for Sir Nicholas.

Four hundred years ago to the day, a clumsy executioner had taken forty-five strokes with a blunt axe to fail to separate him from his head. The castle had decided this was worth a party. Banners hung from the enchanted ceiling, lettered in silver: 1492 – 1892. FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. There were pumpkins along every table, carved by the first years and lit from inside. Live bats hung in the rafters, waiting for the feast. Nearly Headless Nick himself drifted the length of the Gryffindor table bowing to everyone, his ruff carefully arranged, accepting congratulations.

I ate porridge and watched the owls come in.

Leander came down late. He crossed to the Ravenclaw table with the prefects’ rota for the night in his good hand, because the Heads always doubled the patrols at Halloween and he had drawn up the list. He put it beside my bowl and stood over me while I read it.

He looked ill. The freckles stood out on skin gone the colour of candle wax. There were bruise-dark shadows under his eyes. He was rubbing the inside of his left forearm through his sleeve with his thumb, back and forth along the line of the scar, as if it itched.

“You haven’t slept,” I said.

“Not much.” He did not sit. “It’s fine. Read the list.”

The family owl landed on the table between us before I could. I knew her: the brown barn owl from home, with the white feather in her wing. She held out her leg to me and the letter on it was not in my father’s hand. It was a tall, sloping, confident script I had seen once before, on a card at a garden party in June. Leander reached past me and untied it for her, since my hands had stopped, then turned it over to give it to me. On the back, in the same hand: E. Hale, St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

He held it a moment too long.

“Who is E. Hale?”

There was no point lying. I had told him in September that my father had found me a husband. I had not told him the name.

“Dr Edmund Hale,” I said. “The husband.”

He gave me the letter. His face did not change at all, which was how I knew. He stood still beside me while I broke the seal. I read it with him there because I could not think how to make him go.

Dear Miss White, Your father tells me that you take a six and a quarter in gloves. I wonder whether you would be so kind as to send me the measure of your third finger also, so that the jeweller need not guess. I hope your studies go well. I look forward to Christmas. Yours very sincerely, E. Hale.

I folded it in half, and in half again.

Across the table Amit Thakkar leaned over his toast. “Evelyn, did you finish the star charts for Astronomy? I can’t make Jupiter come out where—”

“She’s busy,” said Leander.

He did not say it loudly. He said it in a voice I had never heard him use, low and flat, with an edge on it like a knife laid down on a table. Amit stopped with his mouth open. Two seats along, Poppy looked up from her plate.

“Lee,” I said.

He looked down at me. For a moment there was nothing in his eyes I knew. Then he blinked. It was him again. He looked at Amit and went red to the ears.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Thakkar. I didn’t— Sorry.” He touched the rota by my bowl. “Read the list,” he said again, quietly, to me, and went away to his own table.

Amit stared after him. “What’s the matter with him?”

“His arm,” I said. “It’s been bad at night. He isn’t sleeping.”

That much was true. I put Dr Hale’s letter in my pocket under the Puffskein, who stopped humming.

He was worse by Defence.

Professor Hecat was setting pairs for shield work. She put me with Sebastian because we had been partners in sixth year and she liked a known quantity. Leander was across the room with Garreth. I felt him watching from the moment Sebastian came to stand opposite me. I did not look round. I did not have to.

“He’s looking at me,” said Sebastian pleasantly, raising his wand, “as if I’m something he’d like to eat.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m standing here.” He cast, a light Stinging Hex, and I turned it on my shield. “Protego. Good. You know what day it is on Friday, I suppose. I can count, Evie. I can read an almanac.” He cast again. “Four days. And he’s already like this.”

“Leave him alone.”

“Gladly. Tell him to leave me alone.” His eyes went past my shoulder. “He’s coming over.”

He was. He had left Garreth mid-cast and was crossing the classroom with his wand in his good hand. He was not looking at me. He was looking at Sebastian, steadily, with his shoulders gone square.

I stepped into his way. I took his wrist, the good one, and held it down at his side with the wand pointed at the floor, as if we were adjusting his grip.

“Not here,” I said, low. “Lee. Look at me. Not here.”

He looked at me. His skin was hot under my fingers, fever-hot, through the cuff. I felt his pulse going hard and fast against my thumb. Then I felt it begin, slowly, to come down.

“He was standing too close to you,” he said.

“He’s my partner. That’s what partners do.”

“I know.” He shut his eyes. “I know. Evie, I know.”

“Mr Prewett,” called Professor Hecat. “Is there some reason you are not with Mr Weasley?”

“No, Professor.” He took his wrist out of my hand. He went back across the room without looking at Sebastian once. Garreth said something to him, puzzled. He did not answer.

Sebastian lowered his wand.

“Keep him on a short lead, Evie,” he said, too quietly for anyone else. “For his sake. Not mine.”

All day it went on like that. He was short with Garreth in Charms. He was short with Professor Ronen, which nobody had ever been. In the corridor before lunch a Hufflepuff sixth year held a door for me and Leander said, “She can open a door,” in that same flat voice. The boy flushed and let it swing. To everyone else he was a stranger with a temper.

To me he was as gentle as he had ever been. Gentler. When we met on the stairs after lunch he stopped two steps below me, so that our eyes were level. He asked if I had eaten, if my head ached, whether I was cold. He did not ask about the letter. He followed me to the library without saying he was going to. He sat at the next table with a book he did not read. Afterwards he walked me back to the tower as far as the eagle knocker. He stood closer than he had stood all month. Not touching. A good deal nearer than a lamp’s width.

“You’re not angry with me,” I said at the foot of the stair.

“No.” He looked surprised I could think it. “Not with you. I’m never angry with you.” He rubbed the scar again, hard. “I don’t think I could be. I’ve tried.”

The feast was at seven.

The candles had been charmed to burn silver for the night. The bats were out of the rafters and wheeling under the ceiling, and every ghost in the castle had come. The Grey Lady stood beside the Ravenclaw table looking down her long nose at the pumpkins. The Fat Friar had a seat of honour beside the Headmaster that nobody else could sit in. Sir Nicholas floated above the staff table in his best ruff, so overcome that his head kept slipping sideways on its flap of neck. Every time it did, the whole Hall cheered.

Before the first course the Heads were to give him the school’s present. We had arranged it a fortnight ago, before any of this. I met Leander at the foot of the dais. He had a scroll under his good arm, tied with black ribbon, and he did not look at me as we went up the steps together. He stood at my shoulder. He stood so near that the whole High Table must have seen it, and I could feel the heat coming off him through my sleeve.

“Sir Nicholas,” I said, as loud as I could make it carry. “On behalf of the students of Hogwarts.”

Leander untied the ribbon and let the scroll fall open. It went down the steps of the dais and a good way across the floor. Every student in the school had signed it, in four colours of ink, and some of the first years had drawn pictures.

“It’s a petition, sir,” Leander said. His voice was rough, but it held. “To the Headless Hunt. For your admission.”

Nick put both hands to his face. His head, unbalanced, tipped forward into them. The Hall roared.

We went back to our tables in the noise. Leander sat down between Garreth and Marigold. Once, during the soup, I looked up. He was watching me. He looked away.

It happened during the pudding.

Garreth had been in high spirits all evening. He stood up on the bench to toast Nick with a goblet of pumpkin juice. Then, still standing, he swung round to toast the Heads. When nobody laughed enough he climbed down and came round to the Ravenclaw table to do it properly. He threw an arm round my shoulders, hugging me into his side as he would have hugged Poppy. He raised his goblet.

“To the Lioness of the Forest,” he said. “Who has made an honest man of my—”

“Take your hand off her.”

The Ravenclaw table went silent. Then the Slytherin table nearest us. Leander was on his feet behind Garreth. I had not heard him come. His voice had not been raised at all. He was white to the lips. His eyes were on Garreth’s arm round my shoulders. The look in them was not his.

Garreth took his arm away. He did it slowly. He looked at Leander as if he had never seen him before.

“Lee,” he said. “It’s me.”

Leander blinked. I watched it reach him, what he had said and who he had said it to. He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.

At the staff table the Headmaster rose and tapped his goblet with a spoon. The lights went down.

Every candle in the Hall dimmed to a glow. A horn sounded from somewhere above us, long and silver and dreadful, and through the far wall, at a gallop, came the Headless Hunt.

Twenty horsemen, every one of them holding his head under his arm or by the hair, rode down the middle of the Hall between the tables and round the staff table and up into the air. The whole school screamed and cheered. Sir Patrick Delaney-Podmore threw his head in the air and caught it. Nick, above the High Table, looked torn between delight and despair. Every face in the room turned up to watch.

I stood up, in the dark, and took Leander by the sleeve.

Garreth had turned to watch the Hunt with everyone else. He did not see us go. I drew Leander back down the aisle to the wall by the doors, into the deep shadow there where the candlelight did not reach. Nobody looked round. Over our heads the horses wheeled and the school roared.

He was shaking. I could feel it through his sleeve.

“I said that to Garreth,” he said.

“I know.”

“To Garreth.” He stood with his back to the wall and his head down. I stood in front of him, between him and the room. “Evie. It’s started, hasn’t it.”

I did not answer him.

I had answered him for three weeks. Not every bite takes. We won’t know until the moon. I had said it in the hospital wing and on the stairs and in the orchard. I had told him a hundred true things about wounds and fevers to keep him from asking the only question. He had let me. Now he had asked it. I stood in the dark by the doors with his sleeve in my hand and could not make my mouth say the lie one more time.

He heard the silence. I felt him hear it. He let his breath out slowly and leaned his head back against the stone.

Then his good hand found mine in the dark and held it.

We stood like that while the Hunt rode and the ghosts danced, his fingers locked through mine where nobody could see, his shoulder against my shoulder. Once he bent his head and rested his forehead on my hair. He breathed in. I felt him do it, long and slow, as if he were breathing in the smell of me to keep it.

When the lights came up we were standing a lamp’s width apart. The school was on its feet cheering Sir Nicholas. Garreth was looking for Leander at the Gryffindor table with a face like a kicked dog.

Monday was my night for rounds.

I took the lamp from the foot of the Grand Staircase at half past nine and did not look to see whether he was there. I knew he would be. I walked the second floor and the third. I heard him behind me on every stair, keeping his distance, stopping when I stopped. On the fifth floor I turned round.

“You aren’t on the rota,” I said.

He was at the end of the corridor, in the dark beyond the lamp. “I know.”

“You should be in bed.”

“I can’t.” He came forward into the light. “I can’t be where you aren’t tonight. I tried. I got as far as the common room door.” He stopped in front of me. “Let me walk with you. I won’t touch you.”

I held the lamp a little higher, to see him properly. His eyes were too bright. There was a fine sweat at his hairline.

“Tell me what it’s like,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“It isn’t new,” he said at last. “That’s the worst of it. I thought it would be something new. Something that wasn’t me.” He looked down the corridor and back. “It’s everything I already think about you. All the worst of it. The parts I keep shut away. When a man stands near you I want to stand between. I want to know where you are every minute. I want to—” He stopped. “I’ve always wanted it. Since sixth year. I used to be able to put it down. Now it’s all turned up loud. It won’t be put down, and I can’t tell any more which bit is me.”

“All of it’s you,” I said.

“That’s what frightens me.”

We walked on. He did not touch me. He walked at my shoulder, much nearer than a lamp’s width, close enough that his sleeve brushed mine on the turns. On the sixth floor where the corridor narrowed by the old tapestry of the unicorn hunt he stopped walking.

There was an alcove behind the tapestry. Every prefect knew it. We had caught a dozen couples in it between us.

I set the lamp down on the windowsill.

I could not have said which of us moved first. I was in the alcove with my back to the cold stone and he was in front of me, filling it, one hand braced on the wall beside my head and the other in its sling held carefully away from me between us. He did not kiss me. He put his face to the side of my neck, just under my jaw, and breathed in. The sound he made was low and helpless and went through me like a hot wire.

My hand was in his hair. I did not remember putting it there. My other hand had found his waist under his robe and taken a fistful of his shirt and was holding him to me. He pressed in closer. His knee pressed between my thighs, through all my skirts, and pinned me to the wall. I let my head fall back against the stone and held on.

His mouth was at my throat. Not kissing. Breathing. His breath was hot and uneven and his whole body was trembling against mine.

“Evie,” he said into my skin.

I pulled him closer by the hair.

He tore himself away.

He did it all at once, as if it hurt him. He stepped back out of the alcove into the corridor and stood with his back against the opposite wall and his good hand over his eyes. I stayed where I was, against the stone, and could not get my breath.

“Not like this,” he said. His voice cracked in the middle. “Not with it in me. I won’t have the first time be— I won’t have you not know which of us you were with.”

I put my hand to my throat where his mouth had been. My pulse was racing under my fingers.

“Four days,” I said.

“Four days.” He took his hand from his eyes. “Then you’ll know what I am. Then you can choose.”

He picked up the lamp from the windowsill and held it out to me at arm’s length, the whole width of it between us. I took it. He walked behind me all round the castle, a lamp’s width back. At the foot of the Ravenclaw stair he stopped and waited until I was through the door.