Evelyn

It began in his back.

He was standing under the apple tree with his face turned towards me. I saw his shoulders draw up as if somebody had laid a cold hand between them. Then his spine bowed. It bent forward and down, slowly at first, as a green branch bends before it breaks. He went down on his hands in the straw.

I had my own hands on the gate before I knew I had moved. The iron was cold. I held it.

I had read every word in the castle about this. I had read Forfang four times. None of it had said what it would sound like.

The bones went first. I heard them before I saw them: a deep, wet, grinding crack from inside his body, like ice going on a pond. His back lengthened. I watched the ridge of his spine come up under the old shirt, every knuckle of it. The shirt split down the middle and fell away. His shoulder blades shifted under the skin and drew in towards each other. Scapulae, said some cold part of my mind that would not stop working. Rotating forward. The clavicles are going. His arms were shortening and thickening at once, the elbows turning back on themselves. His hands spread flat on the straw and the fingers drew up and in. The nails went dark and long.

He screamed.

It was his voice. That was the worst of it, for the first minute. It was Leander screaming, high and cracked, a boy’s scream. I stood at the gate with my hands locked on the bars and did nothing, because there was nothing to do. I had splints and dittany and a curved needle. None of it was for this.

Then his jaw went.

I saw it push forward, the whole lower face stretching, the teeth crowding and lengthening in the gums. The scream broke in the middle and came out the other side as something else. Lower. Longer. It rose up through the branches of the orchard into the Room’s violet sky. It was not a boy’s voice any more.

Hair came up over him like a shadow over a field. Rust-dark along the spine, greying at the flanks. The last of the shirt hung from one shoulder and slid off into the straw. His trousers had gone at the seams.

Then it was done. The whole of it had taken perhaps four minutes. It had felt like a night.

The wolf stood up under the apple tree.

He was bigger than the one in the forest. Long-legged and gaunt, deep in the chest, with a narrow head carried low. Not wholly a wolf. The muzzle was too short and the tail ended in a tuft, as the books said it would. He stood with his head down and his flanks heaving. He did not look at me. He did not seem to look at anything.

Then he moved.

He went through the orchard like a storm going through a wheat field. He tore the bark off the nearest tree in long pale strips. He took a branch in his jaws as thick as my arm and wrenched it off the trunk and flung it. He went down the slope to the stream and across it in one bound and up at the far wall. He hit it, fell back, hit it again. Deek’s straw went up in a cloud. The bucket went over and rolled away down the grass. He ran the whole length of the wall, round and round, testing it, throwing his weight against the stones at every few strides. The wall held. I had tested it with a Blasting Curse. It held.

I stood back from the gate as he had asked me to. I stood by the brazier with the blanket round my shoulders and made myself watch.

He had been round the orchard three times when he stopped.

He stood in the middle of the slope with his head up. His nose went up into the air. I saw his nostrils work. Then, slowly, his head came round.

He looked at the gate.

He looked at me.

His eyes were amber in the dark, pale and lit from behind. There was no Leander in them at all. But he knew where I was. He came down the slope towards the gate at a slow, stiff walk, his head low. He stopped a yard from the bars and breathed in, long and deep. The hair stood up along his spine.

Then he threw himself at the gate.

The iron rang like a bell. The whole frame shook in its stones. He fell back and came again, again, his jaws closing on the bars, his claws scrabbling at the iron and the stone either side of it. I backed away. It made no difference. He could smell me. He knew I was there and he could not get to me and he would not stop trying.

“Lee,” I said. “Lee, stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”

My voice made it worse. He went at the gate as if he would tear it out of the wall with his teeth. I heard one of them crack on the iron. There was blood on the bars now, black in the firelight, dripping from his mouth.

I went right back to the door of the workroom, out of sight. I stood against the wall with my hands over my mouth.

He howled. It went on and on. Then I heard him hit the gate again. Then something new: a dragging, tearing sound and a whine, high and hurt.

I looked round the door.

He had his left foreleg through the bars. He had forced it through up to the shoulder, reaching for the place where I had stood. The iron had caught the long red trench along the inside of it and torn it open. I could see it from where I stood. My work. The wound I had cut clean and closed with dittany and watched over for three weeks was open from end to end. He did not seem to feel it. He was wrenching at the bars with his leg still through them. Every wrench opened it wider.

He would not stop. He would not stop while I was here. And I could not leave, because if I left he would still be here, alone, doing this to himself all night.

You don’t go in to it, he had said. Promise me.

I had not promised.

I put the blanket down on the chair. I stepped back into the shadow by the workroom door, where the firelight did not reach. I closed my eyes and let myself go small.

It never hurt. It was like letting out a breath that went on and on. The world grew larger round me and went grey at the edges and then came back in other colours, fewer of them, sharper. The smells came in all at once, as they always did, like a door thrown open. Iron. Smoke. Blood, his blood, hot and coppery. The torn bark, green and bitter. Under all of it, everywhere, the smell of him: Leander, the soap and the wool and the warm skin. Over that, something rank and wild and new.

I was low to the floor, on four feet, with my tail out behind me. I was still myself. I had always been still myself.

I went along the wall in the dark, round the edge of the firelight, to the far end of the gate where the bars came down to the stone. He was still at the middle, his leg through, his jaws on the iron. He did not turn. I put my head between the two end bars, then my shoulders, and pushed. I was through.

The grass was wet under my feet. The orchard rose up round me, huge, the trees like towers.

He went still.

He pulled his leg back through the bars slowly and stood. His head came round. He looked at me, a red fox at the bottom of his orchard. His nose went up and worked at the air.

I stood my ground. Every hair on my body was standing up. Every part of me that was a fox wanted to run. Every part of me that was not knew that if I ran wrong he would follow wrong.

He sniffed. He took a step towards me, then another. He put his head down until his nose was almost touching mine. He breathed me in. His breath was hot and stank of blood.

Then he lost interest.

I felt it go out of him. He lifted his head and looked past me, at the gate, at the place where I had been. He had smelled a fox. He had not smelled me. A fox was nothing to him. He turned back to the gate and began to whine again, low in his throat. He put his nose to the bars where my human hands had been.

He was going to start again.

I ran at him. I went straight under his chin and nipped him on the foreleg, the good one, hard enough to sting. I was away down the slope before he had turned his head.

He came after me.

Not fast, at first. Not hunting. More as a dog will go after a thing that moves because it moves. I went under the low branches of the nearest tree and out the other side and doubled back. He crashed through after me and stopped, puzzled, because I was behind him. I yipped. He spun round. I was off again, down the row towards the stream.

I lost count of how long we ran.

I led him up and down the long rows under the trees. I went over the stream and back. He went through it in a great splash and shook himself and came on. I went under the fallen branch he had torn down and he went over it. When he lost me I let him find me. When he found me I was gone again. Once he caught up with me by the far wall and pinned me under one great paw, with care. He put his nose down to me and sniffed and let me go. Once he put his front end down on the grass with his hindquarters in the air, as a puppy does. He stood like that looking at me with his tufted tail swinging. I nearly laughed, as far as a fox can.

Somewhere in it he stopped looking at the gate.

The Room’s moon went over. It climbed out of the violet over the wall, high and white, and slid across the sky. The light moved across the orchard as it went. His leg was bleeding. I could smell it. I could not do anything about it except keep him from opening it further. So I kept him running. I kept him away from the gate. I kept him tired.

He began to slow when the moon was past the middle of the sky. He ran with his head lower. He stopped more often, to stand with his sides heaving. At last he came up the slope to the great tree where Deek’s straw had been. He turned round twice in what was left of it and lay down.

I lay down too, a little way off, on the wet grass, with my nose on my paws.

He looked at me for a long time. Then he put his own head down on his good foreleg and sighed, a long rough sigh that went all through him. He closed his eyes.

I did not sleep. I watched him breathe. I watched the moon go down the sky towards the far wall and the light go silver, then grey. I listened to the stream, and to the blood still dripping slowly from his leg into the straw.

I thought about next month. The moon would come again on the fourth of December, and again in January, and again, every month, for the rest of his life. Twelve times a year. Thirteen, some years. I thought about the gate, and how many nights a man could throw himself at iron before something in him broke that dittany could not mend. I had eight months of Hogwarts left. After that I did not know where either of us would be.

He changed back a little after seven.

It was quicker going back. It seemed to cost him less, or perhaps it was only that he was asleep for the start of it. The hair went first, thinning and sinking as if it were being drawn back in. Then the bones. I made myself watch, because I would need to know, next month and every month. When it was over there was a young man lying curled on his side in the trampled straw under the apple tree, naked and filthy and shivering, with his left arm torn open from elbow to wrist.

I went out through the bars and changed on the far side of the gate. I unlocked it and went back in with the blanket off the chair and the clean shirt from his bundle. I brought my healer’s box from under the chair where I had left it and knelt down beside him in the straw.

I put the blanket over him first. Then I took his wrist and found his pulse. It was fast and thready, but it was there. His skin was cold.

“Lee,” I said. “Lee. It’s morning.”

His eyes opened. Brown. His.

He looked at me for a long moment without seeming to know where he was. Then he looked past me, at the torn trees, the scattered straw, the gate with its bars smeared dark. He looked at his own arm.

“Oh,” he said. His voice was a ruin. “Oh, Evie.”

“It’s all right. It looks worse than it is.”

That was not true. It looked exactly as bad as it was. But he let it go.

He lay still while I cleaned his face. There was a split in his lip and a broken tooth at the side of his mouth. There was a long graze down one cheek. His hands were scraped raw across the knuckles. I washed it all with water from the stream and dittany from my box. I did not touch the arm yet. I would need more light for the arm, and steadier hands than I had.

“There was a fox,” he said.

I went on washing his knuckles.

“There was a fox,” he said again. “In the orchard. Red. I wanted to—I don’t know. I wanted to follow it.” He turned his head on the straw and looked at me. “It was you.”

“Yes.”

“You came in.” He shut his eyes. “I told you not to. I made you promise.”

“I promised I’d be here,” I said. “I was here. You were tearing your arm open on the gate trying to get to me. I wasn’t going to stand outside and watch you do that all night.”

He was quiet for a while.

“What did I do?” he said at last. “To you. In there. Did I—”

“Nothing. You couldn’t. You didn’t want to.” I put down the cloth. “It doesn’t care for animals, Lee. Only people. To it I was only a fox. You sniffed me and lost interest. Then I bit you on the leg and you chased me round the orchard until you fell asleep.”

He opened his eyes. Something moved at the corner of his ruined mouth.

“You bit me.”

“Not hard.”

“You bit a werewolf.” He began to laugh. It hurt him, I could see it hurt him. He laughed anyway, weakly, with his eyes wet. Then the laughing stopped and it was only his eyes. He put his good hand over them.

“So that’s it, then,” he said behind his hand. “That’s what I am.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing true I could say that would help.

“You knew,” he said. “Didn’t you. All along. Since the hospital wing.”

I could have lied to him. It would have been the easiest lie yet.

“Forfang,” I said. “He studied three hundred cases over twenty years. Every bite from a werewolf in its wolf form took. Every one. I’ve read it four times.”

He took his hand from his eyes and looked at me.

“And you let me hope.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me for a long time, lying in the straw with the blanket over him and his arm torn open and his face scraped raw. I waited for him to be angry. I would have understood it.

“Thank you,” he said.

I had to look away.

“Why?” I said, when I could.

“Because I had four weeks.” His voice cracked on it. “Four weeks of thinking it might not happen. I got to have the orchard, and the library, and Thursday night.” His ruined mouth twisted. “If you’d told me in the hospital wing, I’d have spent every one of them waiting for this.”

He fell asleep again with his head in my lap, by the brazier, after I had got him into the clean shirt and out through the gate. Deek had come in the night and built up the fire. There was tea in the kettle and bread and butter under a cloth. There was nobody to say who had put them there.

I sat with his head heavy on my knee and looked down at his arm, laid across his chest in a clean dressing that was already showing red. The dittany would not close it. Not this time. It was too wide and too ragged. The edges had been torn, not cut.

I would need something stronger than dittany.

Behind me in the workroom was the cauldron I had brewed in since fifth year, and the shelf the Room kept stocked with whatever I asked of it. Horklump juice. Dittany leaves. Wiggenweld brewed by the book would knit an ordinary wound in a day. But nothing in him was ordinary now. Silver held a cursed wound shut; it did not heal it. Wiggenweld healed; it did not know what to do with a curse. Nobody had ever put the two together in one cauldron. Nobody, as far as I knew, had ever had a reason to. I had a twist of powdered silver in my box, and the whole of a Saturday.

I eased his head off my knee onto his folded robe, and went to light the fire under the cauldron.