Iphany squared her wand and scowled at Madame.
"I want to do it," she said. Her small study, flush with cloud-muted morning light, was strewn with the organized dross of her lessons. A pile of parchment threatened collapse from the center of the red elm desk, and a charred-bottom cauldron by the window coughed up cloud after cloud of pungent-smelling vapor. Madame Adienne shook her head and moved to retrieve the cage.
"Want and can are not the same thing," Madame said. "I'll not subject another creature to your mistakes, it isn't fair, and it's cruel."
"So?" Iphany asked, rolling her shoulders in a shrug. "It's just a sparrow, there are thousands more where it came from. It doesn't matter."
Madame Avery gaped, horrified. "It matters to this one." She walked over to the window and opened it, then unlatched the birdcage and held it halfway out.
"Madame," Iphany said, coming around from behind the work table towards the older woman. She stuck her hand in her pocket and traced the outline of her wand. "Don't let it go."
"Iphany, if you want to give it a go with an earthworm or a whelk I won't stop you, but I'm not going to watch you disembowel this innocent thing." She shook the cage, trying to urge the bird out. It fluttered about the cage but couldn't seem to find the opening.
"Madame," Iphany said again, her tone more forceful. "Close that window and bring me that bird."
Madame narrowed her eyes and rattled the cage again.
"I am not a House Elf, Miss Novara, and if you don't watch yourself I'll be telling your father about this," she said. "Go on, you foolish thing, go!"
"Bother my father," Iphany said, then she snatched her wand from her pocket and pointed it at the cage. "Ornithicandere!"
The bird did not turn inside out, but it gave a a terrified screech before breaking apart into several hundred tiny feathered pieces. Madame screamed and dropped the cage.
"Why did you do that?" She shouted. Her face and hands were spattered with scarlet. Iphany put her wand back and backed away a few paces. She'd never seen Madame so angry before.
"If you wouldn't have been shaking it -"
"You will not," Madame interrupted, "Blame this on me. I told you not to do it. What is wrong with you, girl?" She drew out her own wand and passed it over her face and hands to dispel the blood.
"Poor little chap," she said softly as she performed another charm to gather up the feathers and bones and squishy red bits off the floor. Iphany sat down behind the table with a huff and kicked the slats of her wooden stool with her heels.
Bloody bird, she thought darkly, and then let out a quick burst of laughter at her own joke. Madame regarded her as though she'd sprouted tentacles and began gathering up her things and throwing them into her bag.
"Oh come on now, Madame, don't leave," she said. She hopped off the stool and snatched Madame's bag to prevent her from putting anything else inside. "I'm sorry, I just really wanted to get it right."
"The moment we put desire above suffering is the moment we start down a path with no discernible end," Madame said. She swished her wand at the bag and it dislodged himself from Iphany's arms. "If that is the path you wish to take, I am not equipped to teach you."
"I swear, I didn't mean it, I just really thought it would work this time," Iphany said. "Don't go, please." Don't leave me all alone again.
Madame paused, her books hovering above the large brocaded knapsack. She did not meet Iphany's eyes.
"When I was small, my father's owl disappeared. We waited for weeks for it to come back, and I even got the idea of putting up an add in the Prophet for a reward. My mum helped me with my spelling and wouldn't let me use my own pocket money to pay for it. He loved that owl, you see, and the owl loved him back. It wasn't something you'd see every day, that thing slept perched on the headboard of his bed and sat on his shoulder pretty as you please. The only one who wouldn't help was my little sister. She was just a baby then, probably five or six, so we didn't expect much from her. After a while Mum and I gave up thinking we'd find the owl, but my father did not. He kept searching. We moved houses a year later, and he left strict instructions with the next owners to contact him should they happen to see a large horned owl hanging about the house."
Iphany's mind was starting to drift towards other things, like whether or not she might take her swim early. She hadn't seen her father all day and his cloak was not on its customary hook in the marble tiled foyer, which usually indicated he'd be gone for a while. She wondered if -
"And when we went back to look, we saw it. It was alive, all right, but in this case it wasn't a cause for celebration. She did something to it, my sister. Kept it alive, but tortured it. Feathers all plucked out, beak clipped, naked wings nailed up to the wall behind the secret compartment in her closet. Told us she was just playing, just trying to learn, didn't think she was really hurting it, just wanted to see what would happen. It should not surprise you to learn that she was in Azkaban before she finished her sixth year at Hogwarts. Murdered a little boy, a first year."
Iphany stopped wondering about swimming and looked at Madame. Her eyes were dry, but she was trembling.
"Forgive me, then, if I am intolerant of just," she finished. Iphany could not quite find the words to respond.
"I'll need a day, Miss Novara. If you can give me your word that you will not harm another living thing again, I will continue to teach you." She zipped up her bag and Disapparated.
When she was gone Iphany retrieved the cage and sat it on the table in front of her. She counted each of the narrow silver bars, knocked the perch with a knuckle so it swung back and forth, opened and closed the door. A minuscule droplet of blood, missed by Madame's spell, stuck to one of the bars. When she looked closer she saw a tiny wisp of brown feather stuck to the spot.
She knew she was supposed to feel bad, and not in the objective sense of comparing her reaction to the someone normal. She knew that she, personally, was not the type to be indifferent to suffering. This kernel of truth, badly in need of sunlight and rain, lay buried in the soil of her mind, refusing to germinate past a few half-hearted sprouts. Everything she experienced was something that happened to her, a story played out in vivid dimensions, but not something she participated in. That was why it had felt so good to get angry at her father the night before; it nudged the seedling and lifted the veil for a moment or two, chasing after her heart til it beat a fast unruly rhythm on a white skin drum.
As much as she tried, she could not bring herself to care about the bird or the mouse or the fish that wound up scaled, yet still alive, when she'd tried to turn it into a crystal paperweight. Nor could she muster any concern for the fact that she didn't care. She didn't even care that she didn't care. This was no hidden urge to do harm because she could, it was an apathy beyond the capacity for reason.
After a bit she tucked a Potions book under her arm, planning to go up to her room and read until the sun slipped a few degrees lower in the afternoon sky. But when she opened the door and made to march into the hallway, she ran directly into her father with a surprised oof!
"Oh," she said, rubbing her shoulder where she'd banged into him. "It's you."
"I suppose it is," he replied. His lips twisted up in the hideous approximation of a smile. "Will you take tea with me?"
"I don't know," she said. "Are you going to try and murder me again?"
Icarus' mouth opened and closed for a few moments before he shook his head.
"No. I'm...no. I'm not going to try to murder you. I just want to talk."
She eyed him like someone who suspects their opponent is cheating at cards. Finally she nodded.
"Yeah, all right," she replied. "Let's talk."
. . .
A House Elf brought tea and petit fours to his study. Iphany was still marveling at the fact that he'd actually let her in. Even when he did not have guests it was locked. A grand old writing desk stood in an alcove flanked by windows at least four meters high, though the curtains were tightly drawn to avoid even the suggestion of outside light. The walls were deep, burnished red, pocked with strong-armed candelabras and portraits of her progenitors, stern features softened by the artist's folly. She'd once asked father why he had no portraits of her mother, and he'd told her that the painter they'd commissioned went mad after a week, obsessed with his inability to capture her face and his failure to achieve the right shade of blue to limn the starlit waves of hair. Last he heard, the man was still at St. Mungos and spent his days crying to himself and drawing blue-green eyes and long, slender fingers.
She sat in a low-backed chair by the hearth as her father circled the tea tray a few times, aimlessly adding milk and an ungodly amount of sugar to his tea. He sent Iphany's over with an absent wand-flick.
"You wanted to talk?" She asked when the silence began to pluck at her nerves. Her father cleared his throat and finally stopped violating his tea long enough to join her in the opposite chair.
"It has come to my attention that you do not sing when you swim," he said. "Please start this evening."
"Um...no," she replied. Of all the things she'd expected to hear from him, this one hadn't even made the imaginary list. "The last time you caught me doing that was deeply unpleasant. I would rather not repeat that encounter."
"I'm..." He took several long gulps of his tea, wincing as it went down. No wonder, it might as well have been pudding for everything he put in it. "I will not be here when you do. Just tell me the hours you plan to be in the cove and I will attend to business elsewhere until you are finished."
"Well it's different every night," she said, put out by the prospect of having to schedule the one thing that she did without restraint.
"If I am away, I will set up a Protean charm to allow you to alert me that you are...indisposed. You can use it to tell me when you begin and when you stop."
"But why?" Iphany asked. "What do you care if I sing or not?"
"I, ah...I did some reading recently. It's not good for your kind to deny that part of yourselves. Can weaken you to the point of death, or so I've read."
"Like you'd care," Iphany muttered. Her father stopped fussing with the pleats in his trousers and fixed her with a withering glare.
"You are my daughter, Iphany. I am the only person who cares if you live or die," he said. She swallowed her tea glared back.
"Fine," she replied. "Anything else?"
"Yes," he said. "I'll be sending you to Hogwarts next year."
. . .
She went to the cove at six, after tapping on her father's door (locked, again, but what else could she expect) to let him know she'd be starting soon. He did not reply, but she heard the pop of Disapparation and assumed he'd heard her.
For a while she swam silently as usual, alternating between diving down to the shallow bottom of the pond and floating on her back with her face to the moonless and starless sky. Heavy clouds reluctant to relieve themselves of rain moved along with a wind still chilled by the last gasp of winter. Summer in the Hebrides was summer in name alone; it was simply a time when it was slightly less wet and dreary.
The fuzziness at the back of her throat was there again, too, like it always was. She'd learned to ignore it over the last couple of years, though there were times it grew so irritating that it bordered on painful, especially when she swam. Tonight she would not ignore, she would indulge. A quick throb of fear struck the inside of her chest.
When she began it was very soft, just a reluctant hum buzzing out of her nose. As she continued the fear began to ebb, swallowed in incremental gulps by the hungry melody. It seemed a living thing, her song, a being not entirely tethered to the physical world, somehow managing to weave itself between the dark secret places that do not love the dawn.
She opened her mouth and let the creature free, pitching her voice up until it was snatched away by the breeze and carried off, presumably to give some unsuspecting soul a nightmare of grief and loss on the other side of the world. The song was thick with melancholy, but it needed something more, something to balance the headiness and lift the heart rather than drop-kick it repeatedly down a flight of stairs. Iphany closed her eyes and concentrated on the minute rumblings of her vocal chords, finding that suddenly her voice produced a second sound, weaving beneath the first in rich and elegant harmony. A listener would perceive two singers, puzzled by the fact that only one could be seen, and that all sound seemed to spring from her alone.
Well that is something, she thought. As she sang she continued to explore, finding that adding a third harmony was either not possible or beyond the current scope of her ability. Oddly the second voice seemed to behave of its own volition, hitting notes that she did not believe a human could hear, let alone reproduce.
In time she began to realize that the second voice did not belong to her at all. It came from her throat, yes, used the breath from her lungs for support, but it was not her own. She was the vessel through which the song met the world and nothing more.
And so she began to listen.