Note: It's Hallowe'en, and in honour of the occasion, have another chapter of C&I. But be warned: herein, everything begins to be revealed. Herein, everything starts to pander to the complete whimsy of Kimmeth's imagination...
Chapter Fifty-Four
The Best Kept Secrets
The knock at the door sounded urgent, harried, and Minerva was immediately set on edge. She had been in a state of permanent nervous tension since four in the morning and was still expecting to hear that Severus had vanished to meet his doom at any moment, although nothing as yet had come to pass of Harry's nocturnal revelations. It was still early days yet, thought Minerva grimly, but this latest visitor might be a harbinger of doom.
"Come in," she called, head still bent over the paper to which she was giving her signature.
"MINERVA! WE KNOW WHAT THE KNITTING PATTERN IS!"
Minerva looked up in alarm to find Bathsheba standing in the doorway panting, her knitting needles gripped tightly in one hand and the parchment from which she had been working for almost a year in the other, the huge bag containing her project floating behind her. Her eyes were glistening with excitement and rejuvenation behind her spectacles, and Minerva was certain that she had never seen her older colleague look so ecstatic. Behind her, following at a more sedate pace but seeming no less enthusiastic, was Irma, clutching a sheaf of papers to her chest. Caught off guard, the headmistress could not think of how to reply to this sudden statement.
"What is it?" she asked faintly.
"You'll never believe it," said Bathsheba. "It's officially the most complicated piece of magic I've ever seen. The cable stitches alone were something else."
"Yes, but what is it?" Minerva pushed, her composure partly regained.
"It's part of Hogwarts," cut in Irma before Bathsheba could get carried away. "It's knitted into the magic of the building."
Of all the answers that Minerva might possibly have foreseen, including a pullover of doom, this was not one of them. She shook her head.
"I beg your pardon?"
"The… whatever it is," explained Irma impatiently, pointing to the bag full of knotted wool, "is woven into the magic of the school." She paused. "We were spending so much time trying to work out what it was that Bathsheba was making that we overlooked something very important – the identity of the author."
"Ethelburga's Eighth Untitled," murmured Minerva.
"Exactly," said Bathsheba. She seemed so excited that Minerva half-expected the ancient runes teacher to start bouncing up and down. "But who was the mysterious Ethelburga? Her name was Ethelburga Hogwart. She and her family built the castle."
"But the founders…" protested Minerva faintly, but Irma shook her head, rifling through her papers and sending a shower of parchment onto the floor. The headmistress looked around at her predecessors, all of whom were shaking their heads in as much dumbfounded wonderment as she was. She twisted to glance at Albus, whose expression was perfectly neutral and as such far too innocent. "Did you know about this?" she asked him plainly.
"I suspected that Ethelburga's Eighth Untitled might have something interesting to do with the school that could prove useful, but I swear that I was not aware of her identity, and I could not read enough of the runes to glean anything from them. I merely had to leave it to Bathsheba and hope she could find more than I could" said the former headmaster. Minerva was not entirely convinced, but at this point Irma found the sheet she was looking for and began explaining.
"The founders designed the castle and added in their own elements where they wanted them – we all know Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, and Ravenclaw was responsible for the ever-changing layout, but the majority of the building work itself, and the magic that was imbued during that process, was done by the Hogwart family. Have you never wondered why the school is called Hogwarts and not named after the founders?"
Pieces began to fall into place in Minerva's mind.
"You did always say that it was the greatest mystery not covered in Hogwarts: A History," she said. "A history of everything except Hogwarts, in a manner. I'd always assumed it was a partial anagram." Minerva paused. "That's very interesting Bathsheba, Irma, but what exactly does your woollen masterpiece do?"
Bathsheba opened her mouth to explain, thought better of it, closed it again and stared pointedly at her workbag before finally speaking again.
"I think there's something you need to see first," she said. "There's only one part of this grand theory that we haven't managed to prove yet," she continued, "because we need the incumbent headteacher and we weren't about to try and hoodwink the castle." She paused, waiting for Minerva to make the next move.
"Well ladies," said the headmistress, "I place myself in your capable hands. Lead on."
Nothing was said as they left the office, but Irma could not hold her silence long in her excitement and soon began explaining how her research had been undertaken.
"The problem is that all the literature on the subject is completely scattered," she said eventually. "There are no solid accounts, and the majority of them are old unreliable witness reports of the knowledge itself being split up and hidden in its various component parts. The concept of divide and remain hidden is in theory a strong one, but if the knowledge is not passed on then it is possible for it to be too well hidden, and lost throughout the generations. I still don't know if I've found everything." She shuffled her papers absently as she walked. "The thing is, the information is there in the books that we stumble across every day, but because it's piecemeal and we're not looking for it, we tend to ignore it. The meaning doesn't register when we find the next piece of the puzzle however many months later in a different book."
Irma stopped in her tracks, causing the other two witches to do the same. They had reached the painting of the dancing trolls.
"We're here," said Bathsheba.
"The Room of Requirement?" asked Minerva incredulously.
"Yes and no," said Irma. "Yes, we will be entering what has come to be known as the Room of Requirement, but that wasn't its original intended function. When the room was first built and enchanted, there was a completely different purpose in mind. The enchantments of the Room of Requirement were put in place to hide this original room." She paused and indicated for Minerva to place her hand on the bare wall. "It will only respond to the inherent magic of the head of the school," she explained.
As Minerva placed her hand on the stone, as unusually warm to the touch as it was, things became clear, things that had been worrying at the back of her mind all year. She understood why Albus had left Bathsheba the knitting pattern, in case it was something to do with the school's magic. She understood why he had been so desperate for her to keep hold of her headship, and she was beginning to understand why the Ministry under Voldemort's rule was so determined to destroy the students' knowledge of history. Not only did Voldemort wish to protect his horcruxes; if he had found out about whatever mystery hid itself within Bathsheba's knitting then he would want to make sure that no-one else knew about it. Irma, however, had prevailed against the odds, and she was about to uncover Hogwarts' best-kept secret, a secret so indescribably powerful that whatever it was, it had remained hidden for over a thousand years.
She looked down at her hand on the wall to see the outline of a door handle slowly forming around it, the texture and colour of the stone changing until they were standing in front of a foreboding arched door. Minerva looked to Bathsheba, who gave her an encouraging nod, and she turned the handle, allowing the door to creep open in eerie silence.
The room that was revealed was unlike anything that Minerva had ever seen before, a cavernous chamber made of exquisitely carved marble that reflected like a mirror. One the four walls hung four enormous portraits framed in gilded wood and bedecked with rubies, sapphires, topaz, emeralds…
The four founders, whose portraits did not exist anywhere else within the castle, and whose likenesses Minerva had never seen in such startlingly large relief, looked down at the three women as they entered. Godric Gryffindor leaned on his sword, a hat barely recognisable as their sorter perched rakishly on his head. Rowena Ravenclaw wore no hat, but her ebony locks were crowned instead with the now infamous diadem. Helga Hufflepuff smiled down at them benevolently, fingers curled around an elegant goblet, the splinters of which Minerva had seen. Finally, round the neck of Salazar Slytherin hung the dread locket that had nearly claimed the life of her colleague.
"Good evening, Minerva," said Gryffindor, his voice from the frame booming around the chamber. "We've been expecting you for a while now."
Minerva was speechless.
"I never doubted you, Bathsheba." Hufflepuff addressed the alumna of her house. Bathsheba, as dumbstruck as Minerva, gave an awkward curtsey.
"Ethelburga was a truly extraordinary witch," Ravenclaw added. "We all hoped that it would never come to this; that this magic would never need to be awakened, but you have proven yourselves admirably and even in these desperate times, this should be acknowledged."
Finally, Minerva found her voice.
"Thank you," she managed. "This is a truly extraordinary room, but I don't know what we are supposed to be doing in it." She turned to Bathsheba. "How exactly does the knitting fit into this?" She could not believe that Bathsheba had spent since the end of July knitting in order to find this strange chamber and nothing else. The older witch nodded and took hold of her hovering workbag, emptying the contents out onto the glittering floor.
The finished product did not look all that different to the mess that it had appeared to be whilst it was being knitted, but as Bathsheba began to unwind it and lay it out around the room, Minerva saw the way in which the many coloured threads wove around each other, stopping, starting and making loops and knots, so interwoven and undulating that they were almost alive.
"The wool represents the school," she said eventually once the entire thing was unfolded in a circle around the three women. "Each colour corresponds to a different staff member or someone else important within the network; the ways they knot together represent the ways in which we interact." She ran her fingers over the runic pattern that she had been attached to for so long, and pointed out the gold thread that ran solidly through the centre of the work. "That represents the castle itself; a constant that can never be changed." Bathsheba indicated a dark maroon colour that ran up the edges, keeping it in shape and occasionally dipping in and out of the main work. "That's me, shaping the knitting."
It was so intricate and so detailed that there was little wonder that it had taken her so long. Now that she knew the secret behind it, Minerva could appreciate its beauty and delicacy, and she stared at the wool for a long time, gradually picking out her own and her colleagues' threads.
"What does it do?" she asked eventually, unsure of how much time she had spent mesmerised by the pattern and suddenly becoming acutely aware of the others in the room, both living and long-dead.
"Protection," said Slytherin, speaking for the first time since the three witches had entered the chamber. "The magic of the founders, the staff and the castle itself all combined into one."
"It's a very simple principle," said Ravenclaw. "United we stand, divided we fall. With all the magic here united, then the school will stand against allcomers."
"But…" Minerva looked up at Slytherin. Surely, since he had deserted, such a magic could not function.
"Yes, I know," snapped the portrait, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. "Believe me, there have been many occasions upon which I have considered deserting this position and letting my kinsman transform this school into the one I had envisaged, but times are ever-changing and so must our opinions change too. These protections were set in place before I parted ways with my colleagues and do function still. I had accepted…"
"Grudgingly," interrupted Gryffindor. Slytherin glared at him.
"I had accepted," he began again, "that the time might come when a great foe might strike the castle and we must unite against it, regardless of blood purity. Alas, it is against my kinsman that I must now unite, for the threat he poses to the wizarding world and the school is, admittedly, far greater than my original intentions."
Gryffindor opened his mouth to say something but Hufflepuff stopped him.
"And we're not getting into that argument again for the umpteenth time in however many hundred years," she said sternly, her eyes darting between Slytherin and Gryffindor. "Certainly not when we have company." She turned to the three witches in the centre of the room. "We must all unite against Voldemort."
Minerva felt a sudden need to sit down in order to digest the wave of information that had just been imparted to her, and Irma drew her up a misshapen chintz armchair that the headmistress sank into gratefully.
"Is that it?" she asked. "This simple train of wool will keep us safe from the evil forces on the outside?"
She turned to Bathsheba, who shrugged her shoulders.
"That's the only thing that Irma and I couldn't find out," she said. "The magic is there, but we don't know fully how it works."
Minerva looked around at the founders for help.
"It is not so simple," said Gryffindor. "Nothing in Hogwarts ever is. Not only must the pattern be complete, all those it represents must be present as well. We are here, and always will be." He indicated himself and his colleagues. "The castle will naturally be here, represented by the room in which we stand. "In order for this base protection to be set into motion, the rest of the staff must be present. Once the magic is in place, the castle will sustain it for as long as necessary."
"But be warned," added Ravenclaw. "The magic does not distinguish between good and evil intentions. It will defend the castle. No-one will be able to get in, be they friend or foe."
"It is for this reason that we advise you to only begin at the last possible moment," Hufflepuff continued. "This protection was only ever intended as a last resort. It is a mark of how dire the circumstances are that it has come to pass at this moment in time."
Minerva could only nod, still dumbfounded, still unable to believe that something so immense and so powerful could have been hidden in plain sight for so long. This incredible power had been placed in her hands, and it was her judgement that would see it used, for better or for worse. The responsibility weighed heavy on her shoulders; she could almost feel it physically. There could now be no denying it. The process that had begun with the lockdown of the school was reaching its completion. Hogwarts, the last bastion standing against Voldemort, was becoming the new front line…
Note2: Before I am met with a chorus of 'deus ex machina!' I would like to say a few words. Namely, keep reading! It isn't all rainbows and roses yet; after all, only three people know about this terrific knitted protection at the moment… Hopefully the reasoning behind this new development was explained in the chapter itself. I have always thought that more should have been made of the castle's inherent magic and of the legacy that the founders left behind, so there it is. And I am really intrigued as to why the building was called Hogwarts, of all things. I've never been able to find anything concrete on that score.
Note3: And if you're that interested, feel free to go back through the chapters involving Bathsheba and her knitting and match the threads and the actions performed with them to the staff members. Honest to goodness, none of it was random. This little beauty's been in the planning for a long while now.
