Twenty-One
Sharing a surprised glance, they turned to look. Far back in the room along the wall on entryway's other side a long wooden table, its dusty surface pocked and scarred, was covered with archaic tools . . . scrolls . . . and three fully-set candelabra, the wicks of which had, quiet apparently, flamed to life at her outburst.
Her brow furrowed as she asked, "Did I . . . ?"
Lucius nodded slow. "Yes, I believe you did." In delayed reaction to this new source of illumination, he murmured, "Nox," extinguishing his wand.
They stared at one another, more than a little skeptical at the notion while they whispered in the same breath, "Wandless magic?"
She shook her head, looking down at her own hands and the returning her gaze to his. "But how? Magic requires direction. I wasn't even thinking about light or . . . or fire, or . . . anything."
"No, but you were angry," he pointed out, nodding. "And there is no better metaphor for anger than fire, Miss Granger."
Realization struck hard, leaving an uncomfortable curling sensation in the pit of her stomach that reflected in her tone as she whispered, dumbfounded, "I'm a child."
Lucius eyebrows pinched upward as he very obviously waited for her to clarify. The young woman was many things, but a child was nowhere among them. He was ignoring that her observation made him uncomfortable because of how close they'd gotten—physically, at least—in the space of just under twenty-four hours.
Something of his internal response to her statement flashed in his expression and her shoulders slumped as she noted it. Neither of them wanted to address the elephant in the room, in fact, they each seemed perfectly content to go right on acting as though said elephant was nothing more than an average piece of furniture that . . . simply so happened to be source of tension and take up quite a bit of mental and emotional space.
"What I mean is it's like when you're a child and you can't control when your magic bursts out of you, because you don't realize it's happening."
He frowned in thought. "Perhaps you are, then." Holding up a hand, he tacked on. "Newly come into magic, I mean. After a fashion, at least. Whoever did this to you, if they suspected you'd turn, they might have taken your wand deliberately because they knew it would no longer work properly for you."
"But we just saw that I can still do magic." Initially she'd tried not to think about the loss of her wand, because she had thought for certain with her 'death' she'd lost her magic.
"It's probably not the same." Lucius shrugged. "Certainly, our emotions can get the better of us and make bizarre things happen around us from time to time, but this?" he asked, gesturing to the candles. Those were a lot of wicks. "Is something more wild, yet more refined. I suspect your old wand would no longer function for you, were it still in your possession. Well, not as a wand that's truly your own should, anyway."
Completely taken away from the situation—from the horrid torture room with its blood and its apparent research table and its very literal skeletons—she blinked at the floor in a daze. "I'm going to have to learn to control my magic all over again."
He nodded, his lips pursed. "We'll simply toss it on the to-do list, right beneath finding out who murdered you, keeping you from getting murdered again if that was their intent, and sussing out how you're supposed to live like this."
"Don't make this all sound so flippant!"
"Miss Granger," he said, drawing a deep breath in through his nostrils—and instantly regretting it in the musty air. "You have to prioritize. What is more important? Your life or your magic?"
Her brow furrowed. She hadn't considered it in that way, however . . . . "Mr. Malfoy, if I'm going to end up setting things ablaze with my temper, we should consider that my magic might be a threat to my life. Or yours."
"Fair point."
