En passant.

The house was quiet. Apart from Anticles' occasional whine, and the flap of his ears listening to Tiggy working silently about the kitchen. Wood shavings down mouse holes was proving a very enduring entertainment, and the mice fortunately cleared them before Cles had filled any one hole. There was time – time, and quiet. Time to wash the dishes and sweep the floor and cook the never changing round of soup and porridge – by wand light. Time, by wand light, passed slowly – each distinct, ticking second in these two quiet rooms under siege. There was nothing to say. Except what Rax had said when Tiggy had told him about Aldred:

"Zugzwang."

Every move disadvantageous. Every move down into darkness – sixty-nine steps into pressing, stalking, ever-encroaching Darkness...

~:~

One repair job came in. The same flicker of fear with an eagle owl tapping at the window. "A. Sutch & Co., Wizarding Chess Makers," in a quavery old hand. One Galleon repair in mahogany. Somebody had stepped on the white knight. Payment enclosed. Tiggy peered over Rax's shoulder at the letter's signature. "Tib. Ogden?"

A. Sutch and A. Sutch looked at each other.

Rax nodded. There was no need to say any more. Grandfather had often spoken of Tiberius Ogden as a 'crony' of Albus Dumbledore. He was – probably – unlikely to be hunting for the Dark.

But everything still led down into darkness. The mahogany white knight still needed packing paper to go home in, or he'd be coming straight back for more repairs. Tiggy took down her cloak, pulled her hat very low. The mists were still lingering into the autumn.

"And it's terrible," said Benait. " 'Cause nobody wants to buy rugs – or anything else. I don't know why. You'd think a nice warm red wool rug would cheer you up against all these bloody mists... D'you want one, Miss Sutch?" She grinned without a pause. "All I've had in a fortnight was two boys. They thought they were smart, but all they really wanted to know was whether I'd stolen their rug, for pete's sake. I've got a shop full of rugs!" Benait waved both arms around dramatically. "What would I want somebody else's old rug for? It's like the Ministry Enforcers – in their artistically old robes and shiny desk-white hands – they think they can get anything out of a girl just for smiling at her. Beats me."

Two boys? Tiggy tensed. The shadows were deeper in the corners of the rug shop. Two boys... two men in the Dragon and Warlock... "I'll just have paper today, please, Benait."

"You can't cover your floor with that," Benait retorted, with a grin that meant apology for her juvenile cheek. She dragged out an unusually small bale. "It's not much, 'cause we're not getting any more imports until we get some business. And Ali's using it on the fire as well, with these temperatures." She shivered. "Two knuts, then, Miss Sutch – and I don't know when there'll be any more. We'll have to import a nice live dragon to warm the place up, hey? He'd come with lots of packing..."

Tiggy closed the door on Benait's cheerful banter. Thought they were smart, but all they really wanted to know... Darkness...and fear...

~:~

The only way not to fear was to do. And there was so little to do. Plenty of time. Time to sweep the floor and wash the dishes - all three mugs, two chipped where Anticles had smashed them so often; three sets of cutlery; three bowls; four plates because Anticles hadn't smashed the one that had been Grandfather's yet; the knife, the chopping board. She couldn't scour the cauldron because that would take the Restorative Blacking paste off, so that had a quick pass with a cleaning charm. They had no more everyday dishes – mostly due to Anticles. Like newspaper, china only repairs so many hundred times. There were the few bits of Grandmother's wedding china left, arranged on the mantelpiece. The damaged bits, because they weren't worth selling. One platter – glaze perished. Three teacups – unbroken but all pattern washed off. Two bone china dinner plates – both chipped. And the old milk jug, that had lost its handle to become the charm-protected pot where they kept their wands out of Anticles' range. When you had washed all that lot, fear was still waiting.

She couldn't go and watch Rax working. It made him cross. Long ago, very long ago, before the People had come or they had met Dolohov on Diagon Alley, Tiggy could remember watching Father carve. A bigger workbench, a bright room, and golden, sweet-smelling curls of wood shavings– Rax wouldn't want to know. Do-you-remember-? was a game they never played. All that was worth remembering was long ago. And between them and long ago was a doorstep with Anticles on, and a smashed-up study, and the People...

That was simply how life was.

Books passed time, but they were so dull. 'Charms for the dinner party' out of 1001 Household Charms were pointless when you were waiting for the inevitable soup to cook; the Young Witches of the World did not strive vainly against encroaching darkness – even the one with the werewolves in Australia.

Even rationed, every book they owned apart from one only staved off the dark for six crawling weeks into November. November long ago had been the time of Father's birthday. November had been the time they had been sent upstairs to the playroom when Somebody had come. It hadn't really bothered Anticles, two years old and chuckling happily over a set of blocks. Rax had curled up on the hearth rug, one hand holding a book open without turning the pages, the other absently returning the blocks Cles rolled at him. Tiggy had mounted the rocking-hippogriff, with his great wings of carved wooden feathers that wafted slowly up and down as you rocked. Creak, whoosh... creak, whoosh... a noise comforting but dull; a comfort and a dullness which could not shut out the dread of the Somebody downstairs.

~:~

November now meant Rax had work – a slightly smaller than usual order from the Christmas cracker makers. And the same dread lingered in the corners of the Post Office, where Tiggy must go, like it or not, to post the completed order. The rows of owls on their ranked perches were the same as ever, rows of glittering, jewel-bright eyes like the decorations that nobody was bothering to put up along Diagon Alley this year, but they stood out of darkness. Tiggy chose the queue for the post-office wizard, not Aldred's sister-in-law.

"What's the return address?"

He spoke so loudly. The line of anxious, middle-aged witches in the other queue all seemed to look round. She hadn't put it on. If the Christmas cracker makers didn't know a parcel from A. Sutch & Co, Wizarding Chess Makers, after all these years, they weren't going to know it for a return address.

The post-wizard leaned forward. "Return address, darling?" he repeated condescendingly. Now the whole place was listening. Tiggy seized the quill, wrote 'A. Sutch' on the package herself, and shoved it back across the counter.

"We can spell, you know..."

Tiggy thrust twelve precious Sickles across the counter, and walked out.

"And season's greetings to you too, darling..." followed loudly after her.

Season's greetings. Season of Goodwill. No goodwill dogged the shuffling footsteps of the street vendors on Diagon Alley; nor encroached upon the front page headlines in the windows of the Daily Prophet offices, with their reports of attacks and deaths and the Dark; nor lingered in the sludge-filled shadows of Knockturn Alley. Snow in the Alley never lasted: its sparkling whiteness trodden down to slushy darkness.

~:~

Snow did not last. Slush lingered, melted, froze in pools of dark ice by January as Tiggy picked her way along Knockturn to Bitter & Pitt the greengrocers. It was good it was January again. It was always a relief when Christmas was over. Christmas, like birthdays, was something they could not afford. And even more than birthdays, there were too many Christmases from Long Ago – the Last Christmas which had been very slightly odd, because Father had gone out on Christmas Eve instead of holding Rax or Tiggy's hand as they lit the candles on the tree with his wand and Mother had had to light them instead – the earlier one when Anticles had been brand new and they had got the rocking-hippogriff – and longer and longer Ago, back into when the darkness at Christmas had only been the pleasurable, delightfully mysterious darkness of opening one's stocking very, very early in the morning, only to fall asleep again with a silver Sickle clasped tightly in one hand...

She had a Sickle clasped equally tightly today – the entire allowance for their food shopping for a fortnight. Even with Rax having the time to perform increasing charms on the parsnips, while Tiggy took Cles into the front room and shut the door lest he be upset, they still had to buy food – and the money had to last. Rax had no more work. Nobody this new year seemed to want to buy a new chess set with five Galleons a doting bachelor uncle had sent them. There was no dependable order likely until the summer order from Scrivenshafts. But everything had gone up so.

It was – easier – anyway, to get a whole batch of shopping in a single trip. It cut down on expeditions in this cold weather. Not that there was any risk of Bitter & Pitt ever giving anything away in light-hearted gossip. Old Eleanor Pitt hated all customers in general, and those under the age of eighty in particular. She was almost stone deaf, and carried a large brass ear trumpet, but this was used for her to yell down at the customers, rather than for them to speak to her.

Tiggy squeezed herself and her basket through the door. Bitter & Pitt's was a large shop, but for some unknown reason they kept the big Ali-Baba basket for potatoes right behind the door. The other fruit and vegetables were ranged in baskets all round the walls, strings of mangy onions and shrivelled peppers and greenish-tinged garlic cast lumpy shadows from the window, and the centre of the shop was kept Clear. Perhaps for crowds of customers, thought you never met anybody else in there. Perhaps just to be Kept Clean. Eleanor Pitt sat in a big chair in the Back Corner of the shop, a cat to one side, a mop to the other. The slightest speck or blot or footprint on the floor, and that mop whizzed out under Eleanor's angry wand flick to obliterate the desecration – with no regard for customers' ankles.

The bell jangled dully as the door swung shut. Tiggy strove vainly to wipe the slush off her feet on the six inch square doormat that always seemed to have a water-repelling charm on it. The two pairs of eyes fixed on her from the corner of the shop.

"Good Morning." No answer. Politeness was generally futile in here. She lifted the lid on the potato basket. Three potatoes. Nothing else for it: Tiggy put the lid back, and approached The Corner. "Have you any more potatoes?"

Eleanor Pitt glared back, and lifted her ear trumpet. "Speak up!" she bellowed.

"Any More Potatoes?"

It was always the same answer, what ever you asked: "Nothing Wrong With Them!"

"Are There Any More?!" Nothing like being discrete over one's shopping.

"Nothing Wrong With Them!"

Tiggy stepped back. "Parsnips, then!"

Eleanor raised her wand, and a small flurry of limp-topped, yellowish parsnips soared out of one of the baskets, and into the pan of the hanging scales next to her chair. "Eight Knuts!"

"And the three potatoes!"

The same wand flick, three clangs into the scales. "Eleven Knuts!"

"A cabbage!" The whole place would smell, but a cabbage made at least three meals without resort to magic.

Eleanor glared at her: "Pick It Yourself!"

The least miserable cabbage, from the very bottom of the basket. Eleanor seized it from Tiggy and banged it on top of everything else. "Fifteen Knuts!"

"And an onion?"

The scale pan promptly levitated and tipped its contents pell-mell into Tiggy's basket: "Nothing Wrong With Them!"

As in, that was the last string in the window, and Eleanor Pitt liked them there.

She gave Tiggy another furious glare over the ear trumpet. "Fifteen Knuts!"

Tiggy handed over the now rather warm Sickle. And waited. And waited. And waited. "What About The Change?"

Eleanor Pitt rose in a fierce surge of shawls. "What about this? What about that?" she shouted, apparently under the impression she was muttering. "I know your sort, poking around and asking questions! Who what ? Who where? Looking for trouble, and coming back after dark! Protection and blood-purity – it's all young folk's trouble!" From somewhere under the shawls she produced the twelve knuts change, and slammed it with a final glare into Tiggy's hand. "You'll meet a sticky end like your fathers!"

They had a very silent soup for dinner. Remarks about Death Eaters weren't rare in Bitter & Pitt's – Eleanor Pitt had lost her son to the Dark side via an uncertain incident with his son and Imperius, and, like Ali Bashir, had known perfectly well whose granddaughter Tiggy was for the last fifteen years, and whose daughter that made her. Tiggy had been subjected to Eleanor's angry, almost-frightened muttering relating to the Dark side in there for years.

But- Asking questions? Looking for trouble and coming back after dark? Made Eleanor Pitt knowing who she was – into Darkness?

Eleanor Pitt did not gossip or sell 'baccy. After fifteen years Tiggy could have listed exactly everybody who shopped regularly with Aldred, half of those who just used it as an apothecaries, and a fair smattering of the one-off visitors. In the same timespan she had only ever met two customers in Bitter & Pitt's: one an elderly witch twelve years ago, and the other Madam Choppe from the Knockturn Alley butchers two years ago, who had been bartering meat of unknown origin for half a sack of carrots.

But the Dark side did not stop at gleaning gossip. And Eleanor Pitt did, very occasionally, deliver.

Had, once, delivered to the darkness at the foot of the sixty-nine stairs.

~:~

Even food shopping, then, could be too good. Even though going out or not made no difference to the problem with Eleanor Pitt. She knew – one isolated old witch with a shop on Knockturn Alley that no Ministry Auror or Enforcer would ever defend, even if they heard in time, knew something the Dark side had been prepared to stake a hundred Galleons on. And every day must go on regardless – carrying on playing when your king is in check.

Tiggy went out after a fortnight, down the sixty-nine stairs into darkness, and the bitter cold of frost and fear tearing at her chest with every step. To Burntwells for bread – being on Diagon Alley they had enough customers to never know who she was, even if they knew her by sight as the shabby witch who bought the day-old bread; and into Choppe & Sons the butchers. They didn't know her, because meat in there was permanently too expensive, even the "Selections" box they kept at the end of the counter, full of odd ends of meat of dubious hygiene and origin – but they sold onions. Eleven knuts for a whole string of only slightly questionable French onions – probably cheap due to smuggling in with a cargo of Abraxan horse meat.

It did have to be one of the '& sons' serving. He peered suspiciously at Tiggy. "And why would you be wanting a whole string, then...?"

Onion soup as a change from parsnip was one of the few things that could be counted as purely good. Cooking, washing the dishes, the daily struggle to extract Cles from behind the wing chair, brush the wood-shavings off him and make him go to sleep – all the time the fear and darkness was pressing. Eleanor Pitt knew. And so the Dark side could know. And so these shabby rooms under siege might be too good. Even lying awake at night, in its own way, was too good. Because there was the Dream.

The same Dream, over and over again. In the Dream, she had gone out. And from somewhere, someone – Somebody – was behind her... And in a slow, pointless game, like a pawn that flees vainly across the board from the opposing queen, she and the Somebody dodged through Knockturn Alley... in and out, in and out, through Choppe & Sons the butchers, and Benait's shop that was always empty no matter how much the dream-Tiggy hoped she might hide there, and Bitter and Pitt, and Borgin & Burke's, or sometimes Aldred's, or the post office, or even Whitburn & Thom's... the shops varied but the Dream never did – relentless pursuing Darkness that always came back with her up the sixty nine steps, and ended– always, always ended– ended in Rax dead upon the floor...

It was never Anticles. Tiggy figured that out when she would wake up, and lie in the probably too good darkness, staring at the pitch black wall. She could always remember the Dream – and it was never Anticles. Always Rax – always Rax. Sometimes she was not sure who had held the wand.

Lying awake was a relief after that. Even if your woken mind tossed over the same phrases... seen a Basilisk … your sincere patron, Lucius Malfoy … active again … return address … be glad to see you … I know your sort … two men … meet a sticky end like your fathers! …

Was that fathers plural or singular?Tiggy wished Eleanor had not said that, because there had been this haunting dread out and waiting quiet in long ago - in the week when life had become too good – in the week when Father had stopped going out. But he had not come upstairs to play with Tiggy or Rax or Cles. He had stayed in his study and the sound of pacing footsteps had drifted with the reek of burning parchment beneath the locked door.

You could not pace, here. There was no room, quite disregarding the risk of tripping over Cles in the dark, as he crawled across the floor searching for new mouse holes to poke wood shavings down. Keeping him supplied with shavings was becoming a problem in itself. There was no work – maybe naturally, maybe the Dark side had cut it off to starve them out. There was no way of telling. But there were no waste shavings, nor could they waste any of the unused wood in the big store chest. There was no way to get more. Wood came from many, many places – from Trewing & Duerrs, who were wizarding woodsmen, as offcuts from two different cabinet makers, and as small, smuggled-in parcels from the network of backstreet tradesmen who "knew people" abroad. But all of them – all of them you met by owl-appointment in the Dragon & Warlock.

Rax took the two pawns Tiggy had ruined in the summer and carved them into long, curling shavings for Anticles. They could not be repaired: a chess piece keeps its secrets and its power only as long as the heartwood is not hit. And then there was nothing else to do. Rax still sat at the workbench – just sitting, running his fingers occasionally along the lid of the store chest. They had a small fortune in wood in there – mostly in sizes only of use to chess makers. There was no need to say it; they both knew it. They could not sell it – and what good would money do them? The wood could only wait. Wait, and wait, in the darkness – for an owl... for an order... for the Dark side to find out where it was...

Waiting... waiting... Tiggy retreated back into the kitchen and curled up in the wing chair in the dark. Lumos was one of the many spells her temperamental, half-inherited wand was not much good at – certainly not for a prolonged span of time. There was a little light from the meagre flames in the fireplace while the soup was slowly simmering – simmering because to cook it slowly over a very low heat used far less fuel, and to think about waiting for the soup was easier than to not think.

To not think about the Dark outside. To not think about Father. To not think that they had never known how he had died – the Daily Prophet had not troubled with details for another Death Eater perished – but that they did now know how he had lived... lived that last week besieged behind the door... and that there was every chance they would come to know in the same way how he had died … every chance that the Darkness would come back up the sixty-nine stairs, as it did in the Dream.

Why had it not? Why ever the Dark side wanted them, why had they not found them? The house was not Unplottable – they knew that because the people from Hogwarts had come for each of them. It could, perhaps, be under a very weakened and far-spread Fidelius charm, with hundreds of Secret Keepers – yet not one of them had told the Dark side? Aldred – had talked. But she did not know where they lived. Eleanor Pitt did – the rest of Knockturn Alley must – it knew them as a Death Eater's children after all. Mother Hubbard – Mother Hubbard knew where half the rats and mice lived on Knockturn Alley, let alone the people. So why...?

There was only one unspoken question more unanswerable. What if...?

Perhaps that was how Eleanor Pitt lived, behind her ear trumpet and deafness – not thinking, just waiting, waiting. Perhaps the ever-whizzing mop had nothing particular against the customers' ankles – perhaps Keeping The Floor Clean was just something to do. Tiggy pondered this idea all through March and April – and finally took the brush and the bucket and the risk with Anticles' temper – and scrubbed the floor.

Perhaps the upheaval involved in getting at all of their two tiny floors – the moving of chairs and chests and Rax's blanket collection by the hearth - inspired Anticles to change his sitting spot. He did that sometimes. Behind the old wing chair had been his hiding place for years, But when Grandfather had been alive, it had been the drawer beneath the box bed. Grandfather had used to get very cross about 'the brat' sitting there. Tiggy could see now it had not been the blankets he had been worried about.

But it was fabric she was worried about now. Because Cles had decided, in his own mad way, to sit under the cloak hooks on the back of the front door. When he was just sitting, he sat outside the cloaks. When he wanted to hide, he pulled them in front of him. And when he wanted to stand up, he seized two large handfuls of cloak and pulled. He had given up on wood shavings. The regular Grrr...rrr...rrr...rrr of the marble rolling back and forth sounded all day long through the kitchen and workroom again. Tiggy just wasn't sure how many heaves the worn fabric of their only cloaks would take.

~:~

It happened the same as ever – as every outburst of Cles' had always done: a sudden bump that made Tiggy look round from the cauldron - and then the screams of mad anguish and the Crack! Crack! Crack!

Tiggy ducked – it was always safest to duck – and then dived round the kitchen table to catch up the stiff, screaming figure. "Cles... Cles... there now, there now..." Never scream - never shout for help – that only made Cles worse – Rax had come anyway – there was smoke – scorching smells – "There now, there now..." – and Anticles still screaming – don't explode, don't explode – "Ssss... ssss... ssss..." – Rax saying "Hold still, he's burnt" – "Ssss... ssss... sss..." – and very slowly the screams fading down to the sobbing of a mad, elephant-eared three year old with both hands red and flame-scorched.

Only a minute or two – Anticles' magic only ever lasted a minute or two by the clock. If an hour in the instance.

Tiggy carried him into the better light of the front room, and held each hand out in turn for Rax's first aid charms. They were not badly burned, but even so – it wasn't often Anticles set fire to things instead of exploding them. Grandfather had used to be furious when Tiggy picked Cles up out of a burst of magic: "He'll blow you up, the brat!" But this was Cles – he couldn't help it. This was Cles who had answered the door – and somehow you got to be not afraid. A pent up flood of magic might break out at any moment – you could not be afraid of that each and every moment.

Right now, Cles was nothing but a crying baby – a heavy weight in her arms who would cry himself sick and then doze and sob and be feverish for a week or so, and need spoon feeding. That never varied; that wasn't a problem. Tiggy met Rax's eye. "What damage has he done this time?"

"The cloaks."

The cloaks.

It shouldn't matter, when they were hardly going outside at all. But – but... well, but.

Rax's cloak had only the rent where the back hem had torn under Cles' grasp to drop him back on the floor. The matching damage on Tiggy's had vanished – obliterated in the two-foot diameter bite the magical flames had taken out of the fabric.

"He couldn't explode it," said Rax flatly.

Tiggy nodded. The door beneath was scorched. They had to open it, she had to go out onto the precarious top step, and shut the door into darkness, and try if it opened again. It was nice to know the silver plate seemed to have a stronger charm than Anticles could break. That was all right. The other problem now – was bread. Cles was asleep – when he woke up tomorrow he would be fretful and need her for days. And the late afternoons were when Burntwells tended to put out the previous day's bread.

"I'll go," said Rax suddenly, into Tiggy's silent consideration of the hole one of Benait's dragons would have been proud of.

"No you won't!" Tiggy snapped back. "Not after–"

"You can't go out without a cloak! Or in that!"

Tiggy glared at him. "Of course I can't! – but you can't go at all; you haven't even got a hat to pull down. We have one cloak left – I'll wear that."

"We have one cloak left?" Rax repeated sceptically. "Where 'left'?"

"This," said Tiggy, flapping it. "Yours. I can wear it, it's only threadbare." Black hat, grey cloak – it was only one further step in mismatched shabbiness.

Rax looked at it for a long time. Then he fetched his wand down from the charm-protected pot. "You'll need the hem repaired."

The stitches were somewhat uneven, but nobody would be looking at the hem of what would be a floor-length cloak. "Don't trip," said Rax, with the slightest corner of a grin. Tiggy's first display of accidental magic had been 'borrowing' Mother's cloak for dressing up – and bouncing instead of falling down the playroom stairs.

Tiggy smiled back at him. "Keep an eye on Cles."

"He's asleep..." Rax protested.

"Then you'll just have to sit there and suffer from boredom," Tiggy retorted, and pulled the grey cloak about her. Rax came over and set the wrinkles from it being too wide evenly across her shoulders, as Father had used to do for smart new cloaks if they were going out with him. That was Long Ago – Tiggy shrugged it away, and pulled her hat down low. "I won't be long. Take care of Cles."

Rax opened the door. "You too, little sister. Take care."

~:~

They seemed to be suffering from boredom in Burntwells, too, for the serving witch was chattering on and on to a witch with red-gold hair in front of Tiggy about something or somewhere the serving witch knew her at or in or from. Something to do with a theatre. Tiggy didn't listen closely, but it didn't seem to be a very close acquaintance, for the young woman had folded her hands behind her back and was saying "yes... yes... yes... no... yes..." in a polite but disinterested tone. "Yes... no..." When the serving witch finally bent down to get the two sickles worth of sticky buns, the other witch whisked her head round and yawned and rolled her eyes and grinned at Tiggy, before whisking back to take her bag with a perfectly straight face.

A strange face... Tiggy paid four knuts for her loaf of yesterday's bread in silence, and walked out musing. It had been a face somehow like Benait's – not the milky white colouring, or the red-gold hair, but – the flashing of laughter – a face with neither fear nor malice. They were rare, these days... and completely non-existent among those who must slip past Mother Hubbard and live in the dark evening shadows of Knockturn Alley.

This bread buying had taken a long time, with that gossiping witch. Long, light May days did not penetrate between the close-packed, madly angled roof tops. Tiggy blinked as she reached the corner to let her eyes adjust to the coming darkness – and then hesitated. Nobody on Knockturn ever hesitated – it would be as much an indication that you were not minding your own business as looking round before opening your door – but two dark cloaked figures turned with rapid paces past the 'Dragon & Warlock' and into Knockturn – then another two – and another two.

They walked too fast to live here. Ministry enforcers?

Mother Hubbard was nowhere to be seen.

Tiggy heaved her mind back from musing, pushed her hat up just enough to keep watch and stepped softly into Knockturn. One house-witch with her basket was not important; in the shadows they would not see her. The first pair had reached a door and let a flash of light across the Alley, with the familiar sickly whine and tinkle of Borgin & Burke's door closing.

The door whined and tinkled again – and again. Tiggy hurried into their now clear wake – and an odd shaft of dazzling sun angled into street level, to catch her opposite Borgin and Burke's. She reached up and adjusted her hat slightly. A door slammed. Tiggy stepped forwards into the shadow.

"Stupefy!"

~:~:~:~

A/N: 'En passant': a chess move in which a pawn that has apparently safely passed the attacking piece may still be captured...

I am reminded that I have not yet put any disclaimers to this fic. So, before certain Canon characters make an appearance, the usual: anything you recognise is borrowed, with all due respect and copyright infringement, from JKR; for the witch in Burntwells, see 'The Dream Shop'; while the two boys in Benait's shop belong to my beta-reader and his unfinished epic.

Next chapter, Tuesday: 'The Dark Queen.'

Three guesses and the first two don't count!