Evelyn

Blainey took the sling off on Tuesday morning.

“You can have your arm back,” she told him, “on condition you don’t do anything with it.” She bent the elbow for him, slowly, and watched his face. “Does that pull?”

“A bit.”

“It’ll pull for a month. Let it.” She frowned at him over the dressing. “You’re hot, Mr Prewett.”

“It’s warm in here.”

It was not warm in there. It was the first of November and the hospital wing had a fire at one end and a draught at the other. Blainey put the back of her hand to his forehead and then looked at me.

“Is he eating?”

“Well enough,” I said. “I think the wound’s given him a low fever. It comes and goes. I’m watching it.”

“Watch it closer.” She let him go. “And you, eat.”

He was waiting at the foot of the Ravenclaw stair at seven the next morning, and the morning after that.

I did not ask him to. I came down the spiral with my books and there he was in the half-dark of the landing, leaning on the wall with his arms folded, as if he had been there an hour. Perhaps he had. He did not say good morning. He looked at me from my shoes to my hair and let out his breath. Then he fell in beside me and walked me down to breakfast.

He walked me to every lesson that week. He walked me from every lesson to the next. When I went to the library he went to the library. When I went to the hospital wing for my ward afternoon he sat on the bench outside the door for three hours with a book he did not open. On Tuesday night he walked his own rounds with me beside him and never once let me get more than an arm’s length ahead. On Wednesday night he walked mine.

He could smell where I had been. That was the first thing I noticed that frightened me.

“You’ve been in the greenhouses,” he said on Tuesday, before I had said a word. I had. I had gone down at lunch for dittany. “And the owlery. And you’ve had the Puffskein out.” He frowned, as if listening to something. “Something with lavender in it.”

“Poppy’s soap,” I said. “I borrowed it.”

He nodded. He did not seem to find it strange that he knew. That was worse.

He ate at every meal that week like a starving man. Meat, always, as much as the house-elves sent up. At supper on Wednesday, when the beef came round a second time, he took the reddest slices from the middle of the plate and ate those too. Then he looked down at his empty plate as if somebody else had cleared it.

Natsai caught me on Wednesday afternoon outside Transfiguration.

He had gone in ahead of me to save our seats. It was the only time all day I had been out of his sight. Natsai must have been waiting for it. She took my arm and drew me two steps along the wall.

“Evie,” she said quietly. “I have to ask you this. Don’t be cross.”

“Ask.”

“Is he frightening you?”

I looked at her. She was serious. She had seen him at the foot of the Ravenclaw stair, then. She had seen him on the bench outside the hospital wing, in the library with his unread book, on the stairs a step behind me wherever I went. I thought about how it must look to someone who did not know.

“No,” I said. “He’s courting me.”

Natsai’s eyebrows went up. Then the corner of her mouth twitched. “Courting. Is that what he calls it?”

“Apparently,” I said. She looked at me a while longer, as if she was not sure that was all. Then she let go of my arm.

“All right,” she said. “But if that changes, you tell me. Whatever it is. You tell me.”

Garreth was harder.

He found me in the Potions classroom after the lesson on Wednesday, scrubbing out my cauldron because I had sent Leander on ahead to fetch my Arithmancy book and wanted two minutes to myself. Garreth closed the door behind him. He stood with his back against it and his hands in his pockets, which he only did when he was trying not to fidget.

“What’s wrong with him, Evie?”

I kept scrubbing.

“He hasn’t said ten words to me since the feast,” Garreth said. “He won’t play cards. He won’t come down to the pitch. He sits on his bed with the curtains shut and when I try to talk to him he looks at me like—” He stopped. “Like the feast. He doesn’t sleep. I hear him. He walks up and down the dormitory half the night.” His voice went up at the end. “Is it the arm? Is it gone bad again? You’d tell me if it had gone bad.”

I made myself look at him. I made myself put the brush down.

“It’s the arm,” I said. “There’s a fever in it. It’s not the wound itself, it’s healing well, but there’s an inflammation deeper in, near the bone. It comes up at night. It makes him—” I chose the word carefully. “Short. He isn’t himself. He knows he isn’t. That’s half of why he won’t talk to you. He’s ashamed of the feast.”

“He doesn’t have to be ashamed with me.”

“I know. Tell him so. Next week. Give him till next week. The fever should break by then.”

Garreth looked at me for a long moment. He had his family’s red hair and his family’s freckles, and none of his family’s cleverness for hiding what he felt.

“Is he going to be all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded slowly. He took his hands out of his pockets.

“Thanks, Evie,” he said. He went out and left the door open behind him.

I picked up the brush again. My hands were shaking. I scrubbed the cauldron until there was nothing left in it to scrub. Then I went on scrubbing, because I did not want to go out into the corridor until I could trust my face.

At four o’clock on Thursday I climbed the three steps in the Astronomy Wing for the last time before the moon.

I had my case notes. They were short this week. Wound granulating well. Margins healthy. Low evening fever, intermittent, cause uncertain; possibly deep inflammation. Patient fatigued and irritable. Every word of it was true. I had stopped knowing how to write anything else.

Penhallow read them once and laid them down.

“Fever,” he said.

“Yes, sir. It’s worse each evening. I’d like him kept in bed tomorrow afternoon, and Saturday. I’ll watch him myself.” I had rehearsed this. I put the paper on the desk in front of him. “He’ll need excusing from his lessons. I wondered if you would sign it.”

He looked at the paper. It was a plain note in my hand: Mr L. Prewett is excused attendance from noon on Friday 4th November until Monday, on medical grounds. There was a space at the bottom for a name.

He did not ask a single question.

He picked up his pen, dipped it, and signed. Then he paused with the nib above the paper. He drew a line under his name and wrote something else beneath it in his small, upright hand. He blotted it and turned the page round for me to read.

Miss E. White to attend her patient.

“You can hardly watch him from Charms,” he said.

I could not speak. I folded the note and put it in my pocket with an unsteady hand.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Keep him warm,” said Penhallow. He had already turned back to the papers on his desk. He did not look up. “Fevers are always worst at night, Miss White. Whatever the cause.”

Leander was not at supper.

Marigold said he had gone up straight after the last lesson. I went up to Gryffindor Tower and gave the Fat Lady the password and found the seventh-year dormitory empty, his bed curtains drawn back and the blankets kicked to the floor. I tried the library. I tried the Astronomy Tower. In the end I did not find him at all. He found me, on the fourth floor, coming up behind me so quietly I did not hear him until he spoke.

“You were looking for me.”

I turned. He was standing at the end of the corridor in the dark. When the lamp caught his eyes they gave back a flat gold shine. Then he stepped into the light and they were brown again.

“You weren’t at supper.”

“I couldn’t sit in the Hall. All those people.” He came closer. “Everything’s too loud. I can hear the house-elves in the kitchens, Evie. I can hear you breathing from here.”

There was an empty classroom behind me. It had been empty since before my time, with a cracked blackboard and the desks pushed against the walls. I opened the door and took him by the wrist, the good one, and drew him in after me. I shut the door.

The moon came in at the high window. Not yet full. A day short of it, white and swollen over the mountains.

“It’s Thursday,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Four weeks ago tonight, in the courtyard,” I said. “And the next morning you told me to ask you again in four weeks.”

“Evie.” His voice was rough. “The moon’s tomorrow. You know it is. You know what tomorrow’s going to be.”

“I know.”

“Then you know I can’t—”

I kissed him.

I had meant it to be gentle. I had meant to give him one thing to carry into tomorrow that was not fear. For a moment it was. His mouth was hot and dry and still under mine, startled, and I felt him go rigid with the effort of not moving.

Then he moved.

He kissed me back as if he were drowning. His hands came up, both of them, the bad arm too. They took my face, then my waist. Then he lifted me clean off the floor. I heard him gasp at the pull in the healing arm and he did not stop. He carried me two steps and put my back against the wall and held me there with the whole length of his body. My feet were off the ground. I wound my arms round his neck and held on.

He kissed my mouth and my jaw and the place under my ear he had breathed against on Monday. He said my name into my throat. His hand was at my knee. Then it was under my skirt, on my stocking, sliding higher. I wanted it. I wanted all of it. I felt him shift his weight to free his other hand and shrug one of his braces off his shoulder.

He was shaking. Not the trembling of Monday. His whole body was shuddering against mine, fever-hot, and his breath was coming in short rough pulls that did not sound like his breath at all.

I opened my eyes.

The moonlight was on his face. His eyes were shut. There was a look on him I had never seen before, intent and blind and far away, as if he had gone somewhere I could not follow and might not come back from it.

“Lee,” I said.

He did not hear me.

I put my hands on either side of his face, as I had in the clearing, and held it still.

“Lee. Look at me.”

His eyes opened. For a heartbeat they were gold. Then they were his.

“Stop,” I said. “Love, stop. Just for a moment. Stop.”

He stopped. He went still all at once, with my weight still held against the wall, his hand still on my leg under my skirt. I watched him come back into himself. I watched him see where his hand was, where his brace hung, how hard he was holding me. His face went grey.

“Oh God,” he said. “Evie. Oh God, I’m—”

“Shh. Put me down. Gently. It’s all right.”

He set me down as if I might break. He let go of me and stepped back so fast he hit a desk. I caught his wrist before he could get any further.

“No,” I said. “Don’t go. Look at me.”

He looked at me. He was shaking so hard I could see it.

“I want this,” I said. “Do you hear me? I want it. I want you. I’ve wanted you since sixth year on the fourth-floor landing, when you sat in that window seat to win an argument. None of this is because I don’t.” I held on to his wrist. “But not like this. Not tonight, with it this close. You’d wake up tomorrow and not know how much of it was you. You’d hate yourself for it. I won’t have you hate yourself for me.”

He shut his eyes. His throat worked.

“I didn’t hear you,” he said. “The first time. You said my name and I didn’t hear you.”

“You heard me the second time.”

“And if I hadn’t?”

“You did,” I said. “You stopped. You stopped the moment you heard me, Lee. That’s you. Not the moon. You.”

He bent his head until his forehead rested against mine, as it had in the clearing with his blood all over both of us. We stood like that in the moonlight while his breathing slowed. I put his brace back up over his shoulder myself.

“After,” he said at last, into the space between us. “When it’s done. When I know what I am. Ask me again.”

“I will.”

“I’ll say yes.”

“I know,” I said. “I know you will.”

On Friday morning I went to Charms and Herbology and took notes on neither. At noon I gave Penhallow’s note to Professor Weasley outside the staff room. She read it, then read the line at the bottom. She looked at me for a long moment before she folded it into her pocket.

“See that he rests, Miss White,” was all she said.

Leander was waiting at the foot of the Grand Staircase at four, after an afternoon on his bed with the curtains drawn, as the note said. He had dressed in his oldest clothes, a shirt worn soft at the collar and a pair of trousers out at one knee, with his school robe over the top so that nobody would wonder. He carried a bundle under his arm: a clean shirt, his good trousers, his boots. For afterwards.

Marigold caught us on the bottom step. She had come running from the Hall with her napkin still in her hand.

“Lee! Are you going to the hospital wing? You look awful.”

“Evie’s taking me,” he said. “It’s only the fever. Go and have your tea.”

She threw her arms round his middle and squeezed, hard, as she must have done all her life. He held on to her a moment longer than she expected. I saw her notice it. Then he let her go and turned her round by the shoulders and sent her back to the Hall, and stood watching until the doors had closed behind her.

We went up the seven flights side by side and did not speak.

He had stopped shaking in the night. He was quiet now, almost calm, with a grey stillness on him like the light before snow. He walked closer to me than he ever had in public, close enough that his arm brushed mine at every step, and I let it.

On the seventh floor I walked past the bare wall three times. The door came. Inside, the Room gave us the workroom, with the table cleared. Then the far wall drew back on the orchard.

Deek had been in. There was a fire lit in an iron brazier outside the gate, on my side of the wall, with a chair beside it and a blanket folded on the chair. There was a kettle. On the straw under the great tree inside the gate there was a second blanket, and beside it a bucket of clean water and a cloth.

Leander stood at the gate and looked at it all.

“He knew,” he said.

“He knows there’s something that mustn’t get out. That’s all he knows.”

He put his bundle down on the chair by the brazier. He took off his school robe and folded it on top. Then he stood in his old shirt with his hands at his sides and looked through the bars at the trees, the stream, the high grey wall all round, the enchanted sky over it beginning to go violet at the edges.

“What time is it?” he said.

I looked at my watch. “Twenty past four.”

“How long?”

“About a quarter of an hour. Perhaps less.”

He nodded. He swung the gate open and walked through it onto the grass, and turned round to face me through the bars.

“Shut it,” he said.

I shut it. The lock turned over with a sound like a stone dropped in a well.

He stood on the other side of the iron and looked at me. I looked back. There was nothing between us now but the bars, a quarter of an hour, and the rest of his life.

“Evie,” he said. “Whatever comes out of me tonight. You don’t go in to it. Promise me.”

I put my hand through the bars. He took it.

“I promise I’ll be here,” I said.

He heard what I had not promised. I saw him hear it. He opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he lifted my hand to his face and kissed the inside of my wrist, where he had kissed it in the hospital wing four weeks ago.

“Stand back from the gate,” he said. “Please.”

I stood back.

He walked away from me up the slope under the apple trees and stopped under the biggest of them, by Deek’s straw. He turned round to look at me once. Over the wall, in the Room’s violet sky, the edge of the moon came up white and full.

Then he began to change.