August 1069
"So!" Helga said, clapping her hands together. "Before we get started, does anyone have something they want to discuss?"
We were back in Rowena's tower, a week after I'd dropped the bombshell on Eadric and Hilda and Eva. We weren't at the top top of Rowena's tower, but we were fairly high up, in the usual meeting room. That is to say, a single large square table, four relatively nice chairs, a thick carpet, and some glasses filled with watered wine, the whole setup right next to an open window.
Cuthbert wasn't magical, by the way. All the handshake had produced was extreme confusion on his end. Just thought I should mention that.
"Yeah," I said, sliding the chair back even further to make sure I had ample leg space. "I picked up an apprentice recently, so I'm going to need some elementary magic texts. And maybe some introductory books in general; I'm pretty sure she's illiterate."
After a few days, Eadric had come by to say that Eva wanted to apprentice under me, something he clearly hadn't been that pleased about, and then we hashed out a rough schedule regarding her training. So far, the lessons had been pretty basic, meditation and such, just getting her to the point where she could actually feel magic and some very general philosophy and theory.
"You did?" Helga asked, blinking. "When? Is it that woman from Berkhamsted?"
I shook my head. "No, it's my landlord's daughter. She's got a lot of potential; full wizard, definitely."
"Witch," Helga and Rowena corrected simultaneously.
"Terminology is important, Harry," Helga added chidingly.
I rolled my eyes. "Fine, witch. The point stands."
"Are we sure that's a good idea?" Salazar asked, looking at Helga.
"If you've got a problem with me, say it to my face," I said to his face, before looking around at everyone. "And for the record, how many of you have trained an apprentice, or even taught?"
Salazar's lips thinned so much he looked like a snake, while Helga and Rowena both shook their heads.
"Well I have, so I'd say I have experience. Hell, considering what we're trying to make here, a school for all kinds of magic practitioners, I'd say I have the most relevant experience," I said.
"You never mentioned you had an apprentice," Helga said.
"It was never relevant before. My request?" I reiterated.
"I should have some appropriate texts," Rowena said. "I'm willing to let you borrow them, assuming you're careful with them."
"Of course," I said with solemnity.
"Then what are you looking for in particular?" she asked.
"Any kind of elementary, introductory magic text, and then low-level texts dealing with disciplines that aren't evocation or thaumaturgy. Those I know rather well, but the others are… outside of my wheelhouse, so to speak. I either don't use them much or at all, so I could use refreshers myself."
"I'll see what I have, then," she said.
"Thank you." I turned to Helga. "That's it, I think. Unless you think we need to cover what happened in Berkhamsted."
"I do," she said. "Now, two weeks ago, Harry here encountered a vampire enmeshed with the Norman nobility."
"A Raith, specifically," I interjected. "The kind that feed on lust."
Helga nodded. "Things didn't end in violence."
"Truly?" Salazar asked with thick sarcasm.
"I resent the implications," I muttered.
"Boys," she said warningly. "In any case, from what Harry told me, the vampire then arranged for Harry to be called to the local lord's castle at Berkhamsted, one Earl Robert, or Count of Mortain."
"Who's that?" Rowena asked.
"The king's half-brother," I said.
"Oh," she said. "Well."
"Yeah," I said. "Along the way, I was attacked by the Red Cap, and some redcaps. Dealt with them all, but people saw me."
"Are you telling the story or am I?" Helga asked archly.
"It's my story," I said.
She opened her mouth to respond, then closed it.
"Anyway, after I arrived, I identified myself as a member of a monastic order, which is… highly debatable as to its veracity, there was some back and forth, my knowledge and possession of magic was established, though I underplayed it a lot, and I got roped into doing a job for the earl, which involved negotiating with a local tribe of centaurs that felt aggrieved at the actions of the people of Berkhamsted. So far, it's looking like a bloodless peace and agreement will be reached." I stretched and cracked my knuckles. "Now, the actual relevant bit is that I have the beginnings of a working relationship with a high-ranked Norman lord, and knowing my luck I'm going to be called in again for help."
"In a broader sense, Harry raised a good point when we talked that the project will go much smoother and be easier to accomplish if we have an understanding with the local lords. Getting permission to move people across shire and national lines, getting any practitioners that manifest in the nobility," she nodded at me for that part, "building a castle or place of residence if we can't secure the Hidden Halls, additional protection from any mobs or attacks, and so on. Now, a related problem is that if we want to cover the isles in full, we're going to have to deal with a number of peoples and a number of regional languages. And I don't think any of us speak any form of Gaelic."
Salazar shook his head, while Rowena hesitated before doing the same. "Not well or adeptly," she added.
"Which is a problem we'll have to fix, along with the relations side. Now, thoughts?" Helga asked, looking primarily at Salazar.
Salazar settled into a gloomy thinking pose, shooting me a quick dark glance, before sighing. "As much as I… dislike the notion, I think it is necessary. Particularly when taken together with some emerging facts."
"Oh?" Helga asked, and I grudgingly turned in my seat to look at Salazar.
"I have heard that King William has a hidden court wizard in his employ, one Armaund Malfoy. According to some of my acquaintances, he is not the most… scrupulous sort. Or one likely to be very interested in helping us out of the goodness of his heart." Salazar snorted for emphasis. "While I question whether Dresden is the best representative to put forward, the simple fact of the matter is that dealing with the Norman nobility is now a necessity, lest the Malfoy complicate things for us."
"Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence," I said. "Really feeling the love here."
Salazar shot me an irritated look.
"Well, that's not good," Helga said. "Can you find out more about this new wizard and work with Harry on that front?"
Salazar and I both gave each other some very… hesitant looks, and after a brief, and maybe objectively hilarious not-staring contest, he gave an aggrieved sigh. "I will see what I can manage," he said, as if he was about to perform some great labor and we should be thankful for it.
"Fine," I said.
"Great!" Helga said. "Now, the project. Location's still undecided, and lordly permission is a new factor, so let's set aside the issues of where and how to establish ourselves and the matter of students and focus more on how we're going to find said students. Ideas?"
"If our goal is to target every individual with burgeoning magical potential, we will need a very wide net," Salazar said. "And we would need to retain sole control of it lest others abuse it. Involving faeries, other supernatural beings, or God forbid demons is a recipe for disaster. And subordinating the task of searching to individual local talents risks those individuals adopting and hiding those with potential, which will simply propagate the current state of affairs."
"Do you have a solution?" Helga asked.
"A theoretical one, a possibility," he said. "There are ward structures that can detect the presence and use of magic, and furthermore identify the location magic was used and inform the wizard who laid them down of their activation. My personal abode is protected in such a fashion. In theory, a similar model could be applied thaumaturgically on a mass scale, which would serve a variety of purposes, not just in recruitment but also in enforcement of the Laws. The difficulty, of course, is in expanding this structure."
"It's not impossible," I said, letting my distaste for Salazar settled as we moved onto problems of magical theory and practice. "I once made a roughly scale model of a city that I could use for thaumaturgical purposes. Sensing magical residue, tracking people, scrying, so on, all from the safety of my own home, that kind of thing. It was very complex to build and maintain though; I had to properly model all the ley lines, get bits and pieces of every major landmark in order to connect the model to the city, and the first time I used it I almost blew myself up. And maintaining it was a continual chore. And that was just for one city; if we tried to scale it up to a whole island…" I shook my head. "It would require a lot of work."
"There needs to be a reduction in complexity or detail somewhere, if we're to use that model," Rowena said. "It might be simpler to create a general map model, tie it to a detection spell, and then somehow propagate that detection spell through leylines. The isles are riddled with them, after all. Then we would only need to accurately replicate the ley lines on the thaumaturgical model; the island itself would just be a rough guide, a general indicator of location."
"Which is still a stupendously difficult task, getting them all lined up properly and making sure the energy never goes wild," I said. "Especially since there's a bajillion of them around here. And the difficulty of tying a spell to a leyline and getting it to actually propagate and not get instantly washed away."
"Bajillion?" Helga asked.
"It's a word," I said. "And if we were going to do something like that, our best bet would be to anchor the spell around a nexus of leylines so it spread out over a wider area, like-"
"The Hidden Halls, which we don't have access to," Helga finished. "I'm working on that. What about Stonehenge? That's a major nexus."
"Impractical," Salazar said, shaking his head. "We would spend an entire century feuding with local druidic, fae, and other magical groups with interests in Stonehenge, and that's ignoring any mundanes that would take offense. Not to mention that the very act of fortifying or reconstructing the area might damage its suitability as an origin point."
"I can work on the anchoring problem," Rowena said. "And see how practical it is. My tower is built on a ley line."
We all looked at her in slight surprise. "Really?" I asked. "Doesn't feel like it."
"It's not an especially strong one, and part of its power is contained and diffused through the wards on this tower, so you can't feel it from inside or around the tower," Rowena said. "But it's here, and I can experiment with it."
"Safely?" Helga asked.
"Yes," Rowena said.
Helga nodded. "Then, for now, let's go with the ley line idea. Requirements, obstacles, resources, let's start working on those."
Rowena brought out some parchment and started taking notes, and over the course of the next four hours we hashed out a preliminary plan for turning the ley lines of the British Isles into a magical Big Brother. As part of a project with the goal of bringing together entire generations of practitioners and technically indoctrinating them.
Man, on second thought, the Hogwarts project is a real big supervillain scheme. Guess all my detractors were right about me being a budding dark lord.
At the tail end of the meeting, Rowena spent about five minutes trying to find a suitably Frenchy last name for me to adopt that was also, entirely coincidentally, alliterative.
I considered Hamill for a few seconds just because of the connection to Luke Skywalker's actor, but ultimately turned it down.
Salazar left soon after we were done, departing to talk to his 'contacts' or whatever, while Rowena went down a floor into her library to start looking through her collection. I'd planned to join her, but Helga asked me to stay behind a bit, so we ended up alone in Rowena's sitting-slash-meeting room, sat across a table from one another.
"Harry," she began slowly. "How long were you trapped in the Nevernever?"
I gave her a sharp look. "What?"
"There's things about you and your story that don't really fit," she said. "You speak like you've got a wealth of experience, and I believe that, but I also haven't heard of you, at all, before recently. You use phrases and words and references that none of us understand, and apparently you made a deal with the previous Winter Queen. There's other stuff too, but... to me, it looks like… like you're a man out of time. So, how long were you trapped?"
I looked at Helga, surprise working its way through my system, and then chuckled. It figured she'd take all the pieces and come to the most reasonable conclusion under the circumstances, even if it was wrong. That said, her misinterpretation was a good one, and one I decided to stick with then and there.
"Too long," I said quietly.
She shuffled in close to the table and stretched painfully, patting me on my gloved hand. "I'm… sorry. I can't imagine that it's easy, being thrust out of circumstances familiar to you into… something completely different. Do you… I mean… have anyone?"
"No. They're all… dead or gone." I took a deep breath. "I don't want to talk about it."
Helga smiled wanly. "Of course. I'm sorry, I was just… too curious."
"It's fine," I said. "We're wizards- wizard and witch. Curiosity and concern's natural."
"Still," she said, worrying at her lip, before brightening. "Well, we'll just have to fix that. Now come on." She got up, walked around the table, and started tugging me out of my chair. I gave her a bemused look as her five-foot-nothing, barely muscled frame tried to shift me before acquiescing and getting up. She led me downstairs into Rowena's library, which was actually fairly impressive by period standards. A few hundred books by my guess in a variety of topics, from mundane practicalities and theories, to magical texts, and there even seemed to be a shelf devoted to various fictions, plays, and novels. Rowena was going through one of the shelves with her wand, eleven inches, tapering, and I think made of holly, sometimes taking out books and adding them to a pile that floated right next to her.
"You know, Harry," Helga said conversationally as we moved to the center of the library room, "you never elaborated on that story with the vampire. You kissed her and then…?"
Rowena jerked and turned around sharply, the floating stack of books wobbling slightly. She gave me a quick, wide-eyed look, then narrowed her eyes to stare at Helga, who just looked at me, smirking.
I got the feeling I missed a lot of subtext there. I'm just not sure what.
"And then we rocketed out on the blast wave of an explosion, buffered only by a shield spell," I said. "Then I threatened to kill her and her family if she didn't stop playing games. There's really not a lot more to the story."
Helga pouted. "Really? That's as far as it went?"
"I also asked her for some mouthwash to get the funny taste out of my mouth," I added.
Helga's eyes boggled. "Wow. What? You said that? Really?"
"Stick around me long enough, and you'll realize I snark about everyone and everything." I looked her up and down. "Shortstack."
Her eyes narrowed.
Author's Note: It's not going to happen, I don't think the years line up or that she's that old, but just imagine Harry's face if he ran into a younger Lara. The sheer "of all the fucking people..." reaction.