Evelyn

The fire took slowly. Deek had banked the brazier before dawn, and I fed the cauldron fire from it with the tongs a coal at a time until the flames came up blue under the copper. Leander slept through all of it, where I had left him by the brazier, one arm across his chest in its reddening dressing. Every so often his breath caught and his fingers twitched. Each time I stopped what I was doing and watched until it evened out again.

I brewed the Wiggenweld first, by the book, because there was no sense being clever with a base I had not made properly. Horklump juice, measured twice. Dittany leaves from the shelf, shredded fine. I had brewed it so often in fifth year that my hands knew the counts before I did: seven stirs anticlockwise, a pause, one clockwise to settle it. It came up green and clear, smelling of cut grass, as it ought to. It would have closed an ordinary wound by supper.

Then I opened my box and took out the twist of silver.

It was the powder the apothecary in Hogsmeade sold to keep a bite from festering, grey and gritty in its paper. I had carried it since the year of the goblin troubles and never once opened it. I tipped half of it into the cauldron at the boil and stirred.

The potion seized. The silver neither sank nor dissolved. It drew together on the surface in grey clots, like fat on cooling broth, and the green underneath went the colour of ditchwater. A smell came up off it, hot and metallic. I stirred harder. The clots broke into smaller clots and the colour went darker still, until the whole cauldron was the dull grey of an old spoon and the stuff ran off the ladle in strings.

I took it off the heat. I knew before I had it on the bench that it was useless. I would not have put it on a dog.

Behind me Leander stirred. “Evie?” he said thickly, without opening his eyes. “Something’s burning.”

“Nothing’s burning. Go back to sleep.”

“Smells like sickles.” He was asleep again before I could answer.

I sat down on the stool with the ladle across my knees. Half my silver was in that cauldron, wasted. The other half lay in its paper on the bench. If the second half went the same way I had nothing else to try, a wound that would not close, and a boy asleep on the floor who had thanked me for lying to him.

And you let me hope. He had said it without any anger at all, and I could not get past it. I had known what Forfang said: every bite from a transformed wolf, three hundred cases, and not one that failed to take. I had known it, and I had let him lie in the hospital wing and talk about Auror training. I had told myself it was mercy. Some of it had been. Some of it had been that I could not bear to be the one who said it. I had grown good this autumn at not being the one who said things.

I looked at the grey ruin in the cauldron and made myself think about it as Blainey would: as a failure with a cause. The silver had not failed because it was silver. It had failed because it was grit, not powder, and too much of it at once, thrown into a potion at a rolling boil. Wiggenweld was a healing draught. It wanted to take things in, not have them flung at it. Fed slowly enough and fine enough, it might carry the silver instead of choking on it.

I asked the Room for a mortar. It gave me one of grey marble, heavy and cold, with a pestle worn smooth by hands long before mine. I scoured the cauldron, set a fresh batch of Wiggenweld going and sat down at the bench with the rest of my silver.

The silver would not dissolve.

I had known it would not. Silver does not dissolve in anything a schoolgirl keeps in a cupboard. But I had ground it as fine as flour in the Room’s mortar, finer than the apothecary in Hogsmeade had ever ground it. I fed it into the Wiggenweld a pinch at a time as the potion came off the boil, stirring it under before it could settle. By eleven o’clock on Saturday morning I had a cauldron of something that was neither one thing nor the other: the green of Wiggenweld, with a slow pale shimmer turning through it whenever the spoon moved, as if there were weather in it.

I did not know what it would do. I wrote down every step in the back of my case book, with the time beside each, in case it did something I would need to undo.

Leander woke while I was decanting it. He lay on the blanket by the brazier with his head on his folded robe and watched me pour.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“You said that last time.” I knelt down beside him with the bowl and a clean cloth. “Give me your arm.”

He gave it to me. I pushed the sleeve of his clean shirt up past the elbow and peeled back the dressing. The wound under it was as bad as it had been at dawn: the long trench torn open and ragged, the flesh at the edges grey where the iron had crushed it, still seeping. I soaked the cloth and laid it along the whole length.

He hissed through his teeth. Then he went quiet.

“It’s cold,” he said. “It’s—Evie, it’s cold all the way down. Like snow.”

I watched. I did not breathe. Under the cloth, slowly, the seeping stopped. When I lifted a corner the grey at the edges had gone pink. I soaked the cloth again and laid it back and sat on my heels and watched the clock on the workroom wall. Every quarter of an hour I lifted the corner and looked.

By three in the afternoon it was closed.

Not neat. It would never be neat. It ran from below his elbow almost to the wrist, a long ridged seam where the trench had been, puckered at the edges. But it was whole. And in the light from the high window it shone. It had a sheen to it like moonlight on wet stone, a faint cold silver that came and went as he turned his arm.

He turned it now, slowly, to look.

“It’s pretty,” he said, in a voice of great surprise.

“It’s silver. Some of it must have stayed in.” I touched it with one finger. It was cool, a shade cooler than the skin either side. “I don’t know if it will fade.”

“I don’t mind if it doesn’t.” He was still looking at it. “Nobody’s ever done that before. Have they?”

“Not that I could find.”

He looked up at me then. He had a split lip and a graze down his cheek and he had been a wolf twelve hours ago. He was looking at me as if I had hung the moon.

“You’re going to have to write that down,” he said.

“I already have.”

I did not say what else I was thinking: that Penhallow would want to see the arm again, and that I had no idea how I would explain a scar that shone. I put that away for another day.

At four I walked him to Gryffindor Tower. He was steady on his feet by then and hungry. We went the long way so that nobody would see where we had come from. The Fat Lady looked at the graze on his face and said, “Good heavens,” and swung open before he could give the password. Garreth was on the other side of it.

“There you are,” he said. “There you are. Where’ve you been? They said the hospital wing and I went up and you weren’t—” He stopped. He looked at Leander’s face. “What happened to your face?”

“Fell out of bed,” said Leander. “Fever.”

Garreth looked at me. I looked back. He did not believe a word of it. He did not say so. After a moment he put his arm round Leander’s shoulders and steered him in through the portrait hole.

“Come on,” he said. “I saved you a pie from lunch. It’s gone cold. You’ll eat it anyway.”

The portrait swung shut. I stood on the landing and listened to their voices go away up the Gryffindor stair. Then I went down to the hospital wing.

Blainey was off duty on Saturday evenings. The ward was empty except for a third year with a sprained wrist, asleep. I let myself into the stores with my own key, as I did every week to check the stock against the ledger. I stood in front of the second cupboard on the left.

It was on the top shelf, where it always was, behind the Pepperup. A dozen small brown phials in a rack, corked and labelled in Blainey’s round hand. There was always a dozen. She kept it stocked without comment and without being asked, for the same reason she kept the burn salve and the Skele-Gro stocked: because the castle was full of young people with too little supervision and a great many dark corridors. Somebody had to be sensible about it.

I had restocked that rack myself. I had never once thought I might take from it.

I did not want to now. I stood with my hand halfway to the shelf and could not make it go the rest of the way. Good girls did not do this. My mother had told me so in a hundred ways without once saying it outright: in the set of her mouth when a housemaid left in a hurry, in the novels she would not have in the house. A good girl went to her husband as she had come out of the schoolroom, and anything else was ruin. My father expected that of me. Somewhere in London a surgeon was waiting for the measure of my finger, and he expected it too.

But I had been against a wall on Thursday night with Leander’s hand under my skirt. I had stopped him because I could see he was not himself. I was not at all sure I would have stopped him otherwise. I was not sure I would have wanted to.

Better to be prepared. Far better to be prepared than to sit my NEWTs in June with a babe in my belly. I could see my father’s face. My mother’s. Dr Hale’s. The end of everything.

I took one phial. I wrote it in the ledger in my own hand with the date, as I would have for anything else, and put it in my pocket.

I did not let myself think about what it meant that I had taken it. I knew what it meant.

I did not go down to supper. On my way up from the hospital wing I passed the doors of the Great Hall and heard the noise of it, four long tables of it, and kept walking. In my room I took off my shoes and sat on the bed with my sewing box, because my hands wanted something to do and there was a loose hem on my petticoat that had wanted doing since Wednesday.

Halfway along the hem I stopped. I snapped off a length of the thread and wound it once round the third finger of my left hand, snug, as a jeweller would want it. I pinched the place where the ends crossed and tied a knot there to mark it. Then I sat holding a white thread with a knot in it, which was all Dr Hale had asked of me, and could not think what I had meant to do with it.

I could have folded it into a letter. Three lines would have done: Dear Dr Hale, I enclose the measure you asked for. I trust you are well. I had written him a dozen letters as dull as that. I took a sheet of paper, dipped my pen and wrote Dear Dr Hale, and the pen stopped there. A drop of ink gathered on the nib and fell on the H.

I laid the thread on his letter, with the blotted sheet beside it, and wrote no more.

At a quarter to midnight I was still at my desk, in my uniform and stockinged feet. I had meant to go on with Rookwood’s notes and had read the same line four times. In the end I sat with my chin on my hand and looked at Dr Hale’s letter, which I had taken out of my pocket on Monday night and put on the desk and not answered. The measure of your third finger also, so that the jeweller need not guess.