PART ONE

The wind lifted my hair and stirred the leaves of the rowan tree, so it almost sounded like whispering. I stood listening, hands on the trunk. Around me, light crept into the woodland, and a single blackbird started to call.

I sighed and stood back, glancing behind me as I pulled the wand out of my sleeve. This early in the morning, this deep in the woods, there were unlikely to be many Muggle dog-walkers, but I wasn't looking for trouble. I pointed the wand silently at the tree, and with a sharp crack, the branch I'd been looking at fell to the ground, leaving a clean severed stump. I touched the rowan lightly on the trunk again as I passed, a gesture of thanks. The branch she'd given me was a small one, so, stowing my wand away safely, I pulled it upright, like a staff. I turned sharply on the spot and vanished, as the dawn reached the tree and the birds began to sing in earnest.

This is where every wand starts – a woodland, a willing tree, a gift given and received. I'd been visiting my rowan for years now, in the little wood just below the moors – watched her grow and weather storms, watched children hide round her trunk and swing from her branches and pick up sticks as swords. The birds came for her berries in the autumn, like the wind came for her yellowing leaves. And in the early dawn, when her sap was low, I came for her wood.

I apparated back into the small yard behind my house, just in time for the delivery owl to drop the morning's post on my head. Cursing, I bent round to fish the letter out of the back of my jacket, and then cursed again when I saw the writing. Shifting the rowan branch to the crook of my arm, I slit open the letter and read,

Dear Ms Mortimer,

Further to our letter of 26th June, we are pleased to offer you *new stock* of dragon heartstring, all guaranteed caught within the past six months, and all offered at fabulous *reduced prices* (see enclosed order form for details)…

I didn't bother to read further, but swore yet again and crumpled the letter into a ball just as a voice called, "Kerry! And how come you're about and swearing so very early in the morning?"

"Hester." I turned to see my neighbour, a stocky witch dressed – as I was – in Muggle country clothes, heading back down our shared drive. Hester and her husband Michael bred Puffskeins for the Wizarding market, and, as Muggle-cover, guinea pigs and dachshunds. "I might ask you the same thing."

Hester shrugged, and gestured to the tatty plastic bag she was holding. "Potion ingredients. I've got one or two of my lot down with scale-skin, and I can't risk it spreading. You know what the Ministry's like." She nodded at the branch I was still holding. "I see you've been out gathering too."

"Mm." I hefted the branch so as to better show her. "Rowan."

"It'll make someone a nice wand, that," Hester said appreciatively.

"Two or three people, I'd hope." I carried it over to the lean-to at one side of the yard, and stacked it on top of the pile of branches that were already there. "In a couple of years' time." I squinted up at the angle of the sun, and said, "I'd best get on and light the fire – Martin said he'd drop by this morning for a word, and I don't want to keep him waiting."

Waving at Hester, I turned and let myself into my house through the back door. A small meow announced that Blaize had realised I was back and now might provide breakfast. I shrugged off my waterproof and hung it up, and leant down to scratch her behind the ears as she rubbed furrily round my legs. In my other hand, I realised, I was still holding the crumpled letter, and – freeing my hand awkwardly from Blaize – I smoothed it back out again, frowning as I re-read it. "Can you give me a sec?" I asked Blaize, and – ignoring her reproachful look – I shut the door on her and walked quickly back across my yard to the workshop.

There's an old rumour that wands should not be exposed to magic in their making, other than that which is used to create them. Too much background magic, from ordinary spells such as conjuring flames or summoning objects, will create weaker wands and affect the process of coring, leaving the wandmaker with a higher rate of rejects. Whether it's true or not I've never tested, but every wandmaker, for preference, does most of their work in a workshop like mine, specially isolated from the rooms where we do most of our everyday magic. I'm also one of the minority who insist on making our wood blanks by hand, with Muggle tools and time-honoured carpentry skills. Half-absently, I released the catches on the vice and picked up the blank I'd finished shaping yesterday, carrying it over to my desk. The wood was hazel – from a Sussex coppice I'd been helping nurture for a number of years – and as I'd worked yesterday, the feel of it had suggested to me a core of dragon heartstring – too young and unpredictable, this wood, for kelpie hair, too intrinsically loyal for unicorn hair to be anything other than a risk, and who among us these days knew where the phoenixes were, to be able to get a phoenix-feather…

I pulled a box out of my desk drawer, and tapped it once with my wand, to break the magical seal. Inside, coiled, lay my entire stock of dragon heartstring. Sinewy and unremarkable, they nevertheless seemed to pulse, slightly, under my gaze. It was a strange quirk of legislation which meant the Ministry of Magic had never made dragon heartstring into a controlled substance, despite its considerable magical properties… and therein, I thought heavily, lay the root of my problem.

The populations of dragons across most of the wizarding world were both limited and carefully monitored by the authorities. The culling of dragons was tightly controlled by the Ministry, with only a certain number of licences granted per year, and only to wizards and witches who had the necessary experience and qualifications. As part of it, the hunters signed an agreement that all parts of the resulting carcass would be used, sold, or otherwise disposed of responsibly; and that no immature dragons or breeding females would be included in the cull. What this all meant for me, though, was that dragon heartstring obtained from Ministry-sanctioned culls was almost prohibitively expensive. I'd taken to sourcing most of my dragon heartstring from Eastern Europe, where I had good contacts and the populations were more buoyant than our poor old Welsh Green. And those contacts had also told me a lot about illegal dragon culling.

"Fantastically dangerous business," I remembered Igor saying, one night over the campfire, with the mountains rearing up all around us in the dark. "Their tools are very limited, and they're not just hunted by the dragons, they're hunted by us. But, these are poor places, and these hunters, all they know is the dragons." He'd shaken his head, admiringly. "I wish they'd work for me! What they don't know isn't worth knowing. But they have to move fast, and disappear quickly, after the kill – they know we'll have seen it, and we'll be searching. So too often, we find the carcass – claws gone, heart gone, blood drained from the jugular, rest of it left for the wolves. The breeding female I was watching for months – that's how she went. I got to the eggs in time, but…" He'd shrugged, and I'd known what he meant. The orphaned young of any animal had a low chance of survival. Igor and his team had managed to bring one to the age it could be released back into the wild – one solitary male, out of a clutch of five eggs. My time in Lithuania had taught me exactly what dragon heartstring cost.

I snapped the lid shut on the box – my precious, legally-sourced ingredients for wand cores. I didn't really have enough of it to risk making a wand where the affinity might not be perfect. This hazel wasn't my best wand tree, but it would perform fine with a Thestral-hair core. Then I turned back to the letter. Words jumped out at me again, like they always did, like they'd done in all the past letters I'd been sent. "Fresh Stock!" "Guaranteed Caught within the past Six Months!" "Species including Welsh Green…"

There was no sender, no return address. They didn't need one. I drummed my fingers on the desk for a minute, then said curtly to the parchment: "I don't buy from poachers." And, as I knew it would, it burst into flames.

Every wand starts with a worked wooden blank and a carefully-sourced core. Ollivander, famously, uses a wide range of woods and only three, high-quality, cores – unicorn hair, phoenix feather and dragon heartstring. I, however, do not have two thousand-odd years of family history behind my business, nor a shop in Diagon Alley – just a former farm cottage on the edge of the North York Moors, a healthy dislike for company, a handful of amenable wand-trees and good results from kelpie- and Thestral-hair cores. After a rambling negotiation over unicorn hair with Martin, I left Blaize to mind the shopfront and went back to my workshop, to start on the next stage of the process.

The process of coring a wand is the wandmaker's greatest secret. It is also, very probably, the longest sustained piece of magic which anyone is called to perform. Some wands core easily, while other combinations take time to get to the point where wood and core unite into something which can be called a wand. That day, I achieved affinity on the hazel and Thestral-hair wand towards the middle of the afternoon, just as the sunlight over the moors beyond the window started to dim. It was with a feeling of satisfaction that I racked it with the others awaiting testing, before I could add them to the shop stock. One of those wands, I was sure, would turn out to have some problems – out of a batch of five or six, one of them always would – but it was rarely anything beyond my capability or experience to fix.

I got up and stretched out my shoulders, and – on a whim – picked up the cherry and unicorn hair wand I'd made a few weeks before. I pointed it at the bookshelf on the other side of the room, and winced as the large tome I'd wanted to summon instead belly-flopped off the shelf and landed on the floor with a thud. "I knew I'd not got you right yet," I muttered to the wand, and went to pick up the book myself. I set it down on my desk and opened it, and then paused, my skin prickling.

I'm not Ollivander. I don't remember every wand I've ever made. But wands are something the Ministry likes to keep a check on, and so instead I have the ledgers. The records I keep are meticulous and exhaustive – different combinations, different tests, the sources and suppliers, all the way back to the first wand I made as a qualified wandmaker. In my memory, only certain wands stand out, but in the ledgers, every single one is still there.

Except now, there was a page missing.

"And you're sure it was taken?" Hester said. "I mean, it couldn't have been an accident, or something?"

"No, I had an intruder." My hands were still shaking, I noted, and forced myself to take a sip of the tea Hester had made for me. "He used magic to sever the page, I could smell it. No-one uses magic in my workshop, it's a magically-null zone, the only magic that should be in there is mine."

"Alright, I believe you," Hester said, in a tone of voice which suggested rather the opposite. "But why would anyone break in just to steal a page of your notes? I mean, you've got some valuable things in the workshop, haven't you?"

"He was looking for something." I tried to force my thoughts to steady. I'd run over to Hester's almost immediately, but being away from my own turf was making me feel worse. "I think… there were records of about ten wands on that page. It must be something to do with them." My thoughts skittered briefly over my experiments with cherry wood… but no, it was too early for that… or, God forbid, had that been when I was trying out cores…? I tried for another sip of tea, the liquid sloshing in the mug.

"And you've no idea what was on the page specifically?" Hester said.

"No! That's just it! If I knew…" I took a deep breath, let it out, and then said, "It was a page from spring five years ago. The year after You-Know-Who was defeated at the battle of Hogwarts. I was up here by then, but only just. It was a horribly busy time, I remember that – so many people whose wands had been destroyed in the violence, all the Muggle-borns who'd had theirs snapped… we couldn't make wands fast enough. And of course Ollivander was still struggling with his health after his imprisonment, and his heir was still learning, so they asked… me…"

I trailed off. Hester gave me a moment, and then said, "Have you remembered?"

"Not exactly." My hands were steadier now. "I was sending wands down to London, to Ollivanders', though, to help them cope with the shortfall in stock. They'll have records of everything I sent them. Not as detailed as mine, but still." It was in London, I thought with relief, it started in London, that's why I didn't see it coming.

Hester's expression cleared. "There we go," she said. "That's one problem sorted, at least. It's easy enough to go down to London and ask them. Who runs Ollivanders' nowadays, is it still the same chap as five years ago?"

"It's still an Ollivander," I said absently, and then I focused on her question and my stomach lurched. "Oh. No. Well, yes. Garrick Ollivander – the one who was in charge during the war – he retired. Passed the business on to his… second cousin once removed, I think? Some sort of relative, anyway. He was handling the sales back then, so he'll remember." I paused, and then said, "Thomas Ollivander."

Three days later, I still hadn't gone.

Instead I ignored one problem by burying myself in another. The cherry and unicorn wand was still struggling to reach affinity, and I spent my time alternately trying every trick I knew, and staring glumly out of the window at the spindly cherry tree just beyond my garden wall, its leaves still bright with late summer green. By lunchtime on the third day I'd accomplished nothing except to work myself into a solidly bad mood, when Blaize came into the workshop, fixed me with a yellow gaze and meowed loudly to tell me that someone was in the shop.

I followed her waving tail back across the courtyard and through the house, uncertain whether I was more relieved or annoyed at the interruption. I did most of my business by mail order or appointment, but when I'd first moved here I'd converted one of the front rooms into a small shop, and put a sign on the gate. To Muggle eyes, I just sold woodcarvings – ducks, toadstools, chess sets, little wooden mice that you might want to take home as a souvenir - and did a reasonable trade in them too, over the summer.

The woman waiting in my shop was a Muggle, I thought, as I clumped through the door followed by Blaize, who jumped onto the table which held the till. Her daughter, however, was a different matter.

"Hi," I said. "Can I help?"

The mother looked at me with a worried expression. "I, er… I don't know," she said. "Are you Kerry Mortimer?"

"I am indeed." She wasn't that much older than me, I realised, looking at her more closely, but her face was etched with tired lines. Her daughter had her hair, wheat-blond, and bright brown eyes which were at the moment fixed on Blaize, who was haughtily pretending not to notice.

"I was told… Rissa… that is, Mrs Openshaw… do you sell magic wands?," she asked, deflating hopelessly. "Only we're looking for one. For my daughter."

I had to smile. "Hogwarts new starter?"

She looked terribly relieved. "Oh thank goodness," she said. "We've sent off for most things, but Clarissa Openshaw said it was best not to do that with wands, and she said that you were local and we should come to you, but…" She smiled, and said, "I'm Cathy, Cathy Muir. And this is Holly."

"Is it, now? Hello, Holly." From my desk drawer, I pulled out a tape measure and the folder which contained my latest stock list, shooing Blaize off the table in order to put them down. "Now," I said to her, "I don't think you'll suit a holly wood wand, but we probably ought to give one a go, shouldn't we?"

The wand chooses the wizard, but I prefer not to let mine make bad choices. I put the kettle on for Cathy, and sat down with Holly and the stocklist and played a game of word association until I had a fair idea of four or five wands which might suit. Then, while Cathy drank her tea and Holly studied my wooden mice, I laid a dark cloth over the table and fetched out the boxes. My first wand had come from Ollivanders, but I'd never liked the snatch-and-grab method of selling, even then; and my tutor, when I'd told him about it, had merely shaken his head in disgust. I called Holly over once I'd laid them out, and was delighted to see her face light up at the one I'd placed right on the far end. "I like that one," she said, unnecessarily.

I handed it to her. "Let's see if it likes you."

The sparks that flew from the end were enough, but to me, even better was the bell-like sound I could hear it make. "Willow and dragon-heartstring," I said, checking the box. "Gosh, that was a long time ago that I made that one." Just after the war, my brain added, just about the time described in a missing page from a ledger… I shook the uneasy feeling off, and reached for a calculator to work out what the right price would be in Muggle money.

"What wand does Dad have now, Mum?" Holly said. "He broke his last one, didn't he, because he fell down the mountainside?"

"That sounds adventurous," I commented.

Cathy gave me an embarrassed grin, and Holly continued, "He's helping look after a mountain in Wales. He writes me letters and tells me about the dragons, and there's a ghost of an old Welsh prince who died fighting the English, and Dad tells me all of his stories that he tells him. He says I'm half Welsh, so I ought to know them."

I glanced up at Cathy. "Ah. Hence the surname?"

"Not a very Leeds name, is it, Muir?" she said. "She doesn't get to see her Dad that often now. But he does write good letters."

"And Bluetit delivers them," Holly said.

I paused in wrapping the wand-box. "Sorry… Bluetit?"

"He lives in a commune somewhere right out in the sticks, with some very interesting people," Cathy said dryly, "one of whom decided to call the delivery owl Bluetit."

And that would be why Holly doesn't visit him, I added to myself. I took a mouse off the shelf, and showed it to Holly before dropping it into a paper bag and twisting it closed. "Now when you get to Hogwarts," I told her, "after a Charms class, you take this to Professor Flitwick and tell him that it's one of Kerry Mortimer's mice."

I offered her the bag and she took it, a little uncertainly. "Ok," she said.

"Don't worry," I told her. "There'll be a couple of others in your year who have one too. But if you tell him it's one of mine, he can teach you a charm to make it move."

Her face lit up again, and I wondered just how long it had been since she saw her father. After I'd seen them out I walked back to my workshop and opened the ledgers. Her wand was there, two pages after the missing page, but I stared at the entry for longer than usual before I noted down the buyer's details: Holly Muir, eleven years old, New Pudsey, Leeds. I couldn't shake the feeling that something was eluding me. And I couldn't ignore it any longer.

Less than an hour later I was stepping out of the fireplace at the Leaky Cauldron, shaking the soot out of my robes and trying not to sneeze. At four o'clock on a sunny afternoon, the bar was filling up, and I made my way hastily out of the room and into the back yard before I could be spotted by anyone who might know me. I hadn't been daft enough to stay in Muggle clothes, but, I thought resentfully as Diagon Alley appeared on the other side of the archway, I almost wished I had.

It had been years since I'd last been in Ollivanders, and I was perversely pleased to see that the shopfront hadn't altered – the new management had left it as dusty and mysterious as ever. The bell had tinkled as I'd walked in, but there was another on the counter which I rang, loudly. From the back, a voice shouted, "In a minute!"

I tried to peer round the corner. "Ollie?"

There was a pause. And then he came striding into the shop, five foot eleven and built like a rugby player, the most unlikely wandmaker you could imagine. "Good God," he said, his Inverness accent still rich after years in the south. "Kerry Mortimer! And what brings you down from your mountain fastness?"

We knew each other from Hogwarts: awkward first years in the same carriage on the train north, both of us embarrassed to be sorted into the same house. He'd been Thomas Buchanan, from very old wizarding stock, eager to be a Gryffindor but ended up in Hufflepuff, Quidditch-mad, Chaser for the house team. I'd been practically a Muggle-born, missing home like fury, clumsy in my lessons and asking my step-dad to record all the episodes of Buffy for me to watch when I got home. In the first week of term he was asked by the staff a dozen times over, "You're one of the Ollivanders, though, aren't you?", and by the end of the second week he was Ollie. To everyone. For good.

With an effort, I shook the memories off. "It's the North York Moors, it's scarcely mountains."

"Fair," Ollie said with a grin. "You'd need something a bit pointier for a proper hermitage."

"And more remote. I'm scarcely thirty miles out of Leeds."

He came round to my side of the counter, and leant back against the desk. "So how are you? You know, it's funny you should turn up. I was talking to someone about you only the other day."

I frowned. "Really?"

"Not by name. I was telling him about that gramophone you enchanted at school," Ollie said. "Do you remember it?"

"Oh God, Ollie," I said. There'd been no way to use my Muggle Walkman at Hogwarts, and wizarding equivalents were far too pricey to afford. I'd been stuck until my step-father had found a wind-up gramophone in a flea market and sent it to me. All I'd added really was a charm to improve the amplification, and one to keep the turntable turning. "It wasn't someone from the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, I hope?"

"Oh no, nothing like that. Foreigner." He shot me a look. "What, you don't still have it, do you?"

"'Course not. It broke down years ago." I had, however, enchanted a new one. Also a television, SkyBox, and fan heater, because I liked the BBC and because no-one had yet designed a spell which replicated the feeling of hot air blowing around your feet. "Why on earth did it come up, anyway?"

"Oh, I dunno. We were just chatting." He stretched, and said, "So how come you are down here, anyway? Must be something major to bring you to London."

"Mm," I said. "I need a favour."

Briefly, I outlined the details of the situation: the break-in, the loss of the page from my ledger, aware of Ollie's frown deepening as he listened. "And you're sure it was a break-in?" he asked.

I gave him a look. "I'm not in the habit of ripping out pages of my own ledgers and putting them away somewhere," I said. "Plus, it wasn't my magic, and it was in my workshop. You know."

He nodded, slowly. "Did you tell the Ministry?"

"No." I hesitated, unable to explain my reluctance, and then said, "I'd rather have something more definite. I mean, if it was supplies, of course, but a page of records? I'd get laughed at." I shrugged, and said, "Anyway, I just want to get the records off you, if you've got the details of the wands I was sending down, so I'm in the clear for my next inspection. The rest of it's probably nothing."

"Perhaps." He was still frowning, though, and he said, "You know, a few months back, I had a chap come into the shop and ask me to check over his wand. Welsh. Strong accent. Can't remember his name. Anyway, I asked him if there'd been any problems, and oh no, no, he says, just that he's not anywhere he can get it repaired easily and he relies on it. Bit over-cautious, but fair enough. Anyway, we chatted a bit - he was interested in where I got some of my materials – but, and I can't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure it was one of your wands." Ollie shrugged, and said, "Now, that is probably nothing."

"You think he could have been digging for information?" I said. "About his wand?"

"Perhaps. But why would you want to?"

I spread my hands, bewildered. "You don't remember what wand it was?"

"Walnut and dragon heartstring. About 12 inches." I blinked at him, and Ollie added, "If it's the one I'm thinking of, that is. I remember it, because you have an odd technique when it comes to binding dragon heartstring."

"It's not odd, Ollie, it's just…" I bit my sentence off before I could finish it. Ollie had always been curious as to where I'd trained, and, for reasons of my own, I preferred not to tell him. "But you think it's one you sold?" I asked him.

"Oh yeah, I'm sure we'd have sold it. But I'd have told him it was your workmanship, of course." He met my eyes. "I can find out his name," he said, and I could tell by his tone he was trying to reassure me. "But it might take me a few days, and, like I said, it might be nothing."

I shook my head, ignoring the cold prickling at the nape of my neck. "The whole thing's probably nothing, Ollie. Just a storm in a teacup."

"Right? You know they've got them for sale now, at Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes, down the road."

I laughed, as he'd intended – Ollie, damn him, had always been able to make me laugh. But I'd known him for fifteen years, and I knew that he was as uneasy as I was.

Late that night – after I'd returned home, after I'd cooked dinner and fed Blaize and spent a determined hour on the monthly stock-take; after I'd read a couple of chapters of my novel and gone to bed - long past the time I would usually have been asleep, I still lay awake, the thoughts tumbling over in my head. What was going on here? Was it dangerous? Outside, a fox coughed, and there was a creak as Blaize nudged open the bedroom door and jumped up onto the bed. I guessed it must be about 3am, and, suddenly irritated, I got out of bed. Downstairs, I settled myself into my armchair and pulled a blanket around me, waiting for the kettle to boil, going over and over the things I knew. Holly Muir. A wand with a dragon heartstring core. A Welshman who'd come to Ollivander's in London. A missing page of notes. A wand that wouldn't core and a letter from the poachers.

Thoughtfully, I crossed the room and pulled out from a drawer a well-used bunch of yarrow sticks. I sat down at the table and shuffled them in my hands like cards, then started to cast. It was a method of divination, the only one I'd ever been good at, and that was because it didn't tell the future but only served to make the present clearer; taking disparate objects and events and showing me the patterns that lay behind them. I kept in practice by stopping episodes of Midsomer Murders and working out the ending in advance. The man who taught me would have hated that.

I continued to cast, patiently, as the daylight gathered and things became clearer in my mind. Then I got up, went out of the back door and checked first the woodpile, then the supplies in my workshop, for what I knew I was now short of. By the time I heard Hester clattering out to the yard to feed the Puffskeins and went to accost her, my rucksack was packed and everything was arranged.

"I'm off for a day or so," I told her, leaning over the fence. "Can Blaize come over to you for her meals?"

"Oh? Sure." She finished shaking out the pail and stepped over the low fence of the Puffskeins' enclosure. "Where are you off to?"

"Wales. I'm out of kelpie hair. Although technically it's Ceffyl Dwr, not kelpies, over there. They're only kelpies in Scotland."

"I'll take your word for it." Hester put the pail down and ambled over to where I was leaning. "Did you find out anything more about your break-in?" she asked. "I was thinking, maybe you should report it to the Ministry. I mean, it's very odd."

"Oh, I think I've an idea what that was about," I said. "And Ollie… Thomas Ollivander… he's finding out some notes for me, so I shouldn't get in trouble with the inspectors."

"Ah." Hester smiled, looking relieved. "Nothing too sinister, then?"

I thought of the way the yarrow stalks had fallen, the lack of menace in any of the readings, and of Holly Muir's brown eyes. "No," I said. "I don't think it is."