"Lumos!"
"This is supposed to be a wand, yeah?" Ginny smirked, pretending to examine Luna's new wand, which remained stubbornly unlit. She was chewing on a few rowan berries, which Luna had forfeited as penance for not including Ginny in her expedition to Devon and her first foray into wandmaking.
"Oi, don't be rude. Lumos!" The craggy rowan wand was rough to the touch but felt light and almost flimsy in Luna's hand. Nothing happened.
"Lumos! Lumos!" Luna tried flicking it one way, then stabbing it another, then holding it still and upright like a torch.
"I think it actually got darker! Is that possible?"
"And you wonder why I didn't want to let you in on what I was planning," Luna scoffed, though clearly not taking any real offense at Ginny's teasing.
"Lumos!" Ginny waved her yew wand once and a large orb of clear white light emanated from it, "You know how I used to carry on about having a secondhand wand, and you tried to comfort me by saying I could just make my own? And I sort of brushed you off? But here I am feeling like the Queen of Sheba because I have a functioning wand! I think I'll stick with my crummy used wand, thanks," she crowed.
"Yes, well, congratulations. You can come down from your high hippogriff now. Lumos!" Luna tried again, and this time a dim spark of light sputtered to life at the tip of her wand.
"See, it works sometimes," Luna whispered with satisfaction, more to herself than to Ginny.
"Well done! But a wand that works less than half of the time isn't much of a wand, is it? I know Ron's seriously threatening to leave Charlie's busted old wand at home when he goes to Hogwarts this year if Mum and Dad don't buy him a new one. Stupid git."
"I've never used a wand before, so maybe it just takes some getting used to," Luna said. Emboldened with her small success, she pivoted on her feet and assumed a fencing stance, swishing her wand through the air several times like a sword.
"Oh, you fancy a duel, do you? Bring it on," Ginny grinned, taking the same stance and giving her opponent a low bow with a flourish. Luna inclined her head slightly. Her wand suddenly felt like a mere splinter of wood, light as a feather and fragile as glass as she tightened her grip.
"Well, you're younger and your wand's a bit shit, so why don't you go first?" Ginny said, putting one foot forward and crouching into a defensive position.
"Rictumsempra!" Luna's wand made a strange buzzing sound and she felt a jolt of static electricity travel down the wood, through her hand, and up her arm with a flash of light and a frightening crackling sound.
"Ow!" Luna dropped the wand and flexed her fingers.
"You alright?" Ginny called. She had run forward several paces, but Luna waved her back and stooped to retrieve her wand.
"Yeah, it's alright, I'm fine. So, we know my wand doesn't like that charm, apparently. It's your turn, so let's see how my new friend and I do with shield charms," Luna rubbed her sore arm in an attempt to massage away the phantom shockwaves still trembling through her nerves. She hoped she was imagining them.
"Good shout. Rowan wands are supposed to be really good for defensive magic, which is why so many people are desperate for them. Bill and Charlie fought for ages over which one of them would get Uncle Gideon's old rowan wand. Anyway, are you ready?"
Luna wanted to ask why Ginny knew so much about rowan wands, but stopped herself. She knew she needed to focus so she didn't electrocute herself to death with her own wretched wand.
"Hit me."
"Rictumsempra!" Ginny cried. Luna was sure Ginny must be taking pity on her by sending such a simple spell at her. In fact, Luna was almost offended. With an entire year's more experience with her wand and her knack for hexes, Ginny could have done much worse, she knew. But as the tickling charm careened towards her with an audible zipping sound, Luna was thankful Ginny had chosen to go easy on her.
"Protego!" she cried, willing the unicorn tail hair burrowed deep within the rowan wood to surge to life with all her might. Come on, wand. Let's cast our first shield charm together, she thought.
But nothing happened.
The charm hit Luna square in the chest, and she was brought to her knees with forceful convulsions of laughter.
"What in Morgana's name…" Luna stopped to catch her breath, still trembling with hysterical laughter, "is wrong with this damn thing?" She shook the wand in frustration, as if she could jolt loose the magical flow that had somehow become clogged inside the wood.
Ginny came to sit beside Luna as she attempted to recover from her state of involuntary mirth, dropping her own wand on the ground between them.
"Well don't bash it about or you'll break it," she wrested the new wand from Luna's hand.
"Doesn't matter, does it? Like you said, it's shit," Luna paused to vent a violent outburst of chuckles.
"Why am I even bothering? It's not like I even need a wand to do magic. Maybe wands are just not as effective. Useless stupid twigs!" Luna was trying and failing to sound angry in between her spurts of laughter, and tears of frustration rolled down her face.
"No offense, but I think you're just used to being good at everything on the first go," Ginny said as gently as she could manage.
"What?! That's not true!" Luna's tear-stained cheeks were stretched into a grotesque grin, but there was genuine anguish and hurt on her face beneath the involuntary laughter.
"I mean, I don't blame you! You're only eleven and look at all the amazing stuff you've done! You're a Seer, and you sensed the magic in that cave and basically rediscovered a whole branch of magic, and you knew what to do with that evil diary. But you're not a professional wandmaker, are you? Maybe this isn't something you can just guess at."
"But that's exactly it! I'm not exactly a professional dark artifact destroyer, am I? I usually just follow my intuition and after a few tries, that's enough. I guess I just thought making a wand was just another thing like that."
"Well, maybe your intuition isn't right all the time, is all I'm saying. Wandlore is so complicated! First of all, I'm pretty sure our rowan tree doesn't even have wand-quality wood in the first place, since bowtruckles don't guard it. That's like, wandlore 101. So you were probably doomed from the beginning."
"But, it's our rowan. I wanted my wand to have…personal significance," Luna trailed off. She was thinking of when she made the eggshell charm for Ginny in their tree, and Ginny kissed her like it was nothing. Could memories be engrained in wood? Her laughter was beginning to quieten.
"Personal significance is nothing compared to bowtruckles when it comes to sniffing out quality wand wood, sorry to say," Ginny shrugged, not looking remotely sorry.
"How do you know so much about wands anyway?"
"Well…I didn't want to tell you, but I did a lot of research after I got my wand. I felt like I sort of got robbed of the experience, y'know? I'm pretty sure that girl in the shop couldn't tell a wand from a broomstick handle."
"Huh," Luna considered this, examining her flimsy, rough-hewn wand and comparing it to Ginny's wand lying next to it on the ground. She held one wand in each hand and weighed them like her mother comparing the heft of the squash in the garden. Ginny's wand was smoother and sleeker in shape, but it also felt more substantial, more deeply infused with magic. In comparison, Luna's wand felt like it had once been in the same forest as a unicorn. She gripped Ginny's wand and waved it once. It felt natural in her hand.
"Lumos!" The yew obediently began emanating light almost before she had finished saying the incantation.
"Do you think you could recommend some books on wandlore for me?" Luna asked Ginny.
"The Luna Lovegood, reading a book? Of her own free will?" Ginny feigned awe and Luna giggled, her first genuine laugh for several minutes.
"Well, I still want to make my own wand. And maybe you're right, and intuition isn't enough. If I keep fumbling around, I'm just going to keep wasting time and materials. Maybe I need to do a little good old-fashioned learning."
"Capital idea!" Ginny clapped her on the back and Luna winced. Her sides still ached from her paroxysms of laughter.
"Well done. Your tickling charm was…potent. I think I'm going to be feeling the urge to laugh for weeks," Luna chortled.
"I've been practicing, but I can't wait 'til Mrs. Brown lets me try the really good stuff. Like the impediment jinx. Or the knee-reversing hex! I'd like to see Sirius Black kidnap me with his knees reversed! Hi-ya! Aha!" Ginny whirled around several times, kicking and punching the air as if she were fighting the escaped convict.
"If the man can escape Azkaban, I'm sure he can do much worse than a knee-reversing hex," Luna reasoned, but Ginny only stuck her tongue out at her friend and duck and rolled into a somersault.
"Do you think he's really escaped, then?" Luna asked to Ginny's tumbling form.
"I don't see why the Ministry would lie about him escaping. It doesn't exactly look good for them, does it?" Ginny panted.
"I suppose, yeah."
"I expect your dad must think it's all a cover up because the Ministry's evil experiments in Azkaban have turned him into a flobberworm or something?"
"I don't know," Luna shrugged, "We haven't really talked about it."
"Really? Xeno Lovegood silent about a potential conspiracy? Is he sick or something?"
Luna smiled appreciatively but said nothing, rubbing her sore ribs.
"My dad says he keeps waiting for The Quibbler to do a big exposé on it, but your dad hasn't written about it at all."
"I expect he's busy with the series on merpeople fin farms he's been doing. Plus, we've been doing a lot of Hallows research. You know how obsessive he gets."
"Ah, maybe in the next issue then."
"Yeah. Maybe."
Most children in the wizarding world spend their entire lives looking forward to the day they will receive their Hogwarts letter. Most of them know the precise week in July when the letters are usually dispatched. Many of them wear their best dress robes for several days in a row, sitting ramrod straight next to the nearest window or door in eager anticipation of the first flutter of the owl's wings. Their parents bake their favorite cakes and write formal, indulgent announcements in advance. The family owl flies on the heels of the departing Hogwarts owl, carrying the good news and inviting all manner of friends, family, and hangers-on to a joyous party commemorating the special occasion.
Luna Lovegood wasn't like most children. If you had asked her if there was anything particularly significant about the July after her eleventh birthday, she would have likely shrugged and said she thought Neptune and Uranus were in quite a significant conjunction, one that heralded great change and revelation. The day her Hogwarts letter arrived, Luna was up to her elbows in soil, digging for earthworms.
"Hello, lovely," she cooed, scooping up a pale, fleshy worm from its damp home in the loam and holding it up to the light with great tenderness. The worm struggled, writhing about blindly in the glaring light, its world utterly upended.
"It's alright, poor little one. I won't hurt you. You'd like to help me with my experiment, wouldn't you? You'll get some lovely compost out of the bargain, as much as you can eat," Luna soothed the squirming worm before slowly scraping it from her garden glove and dropping it into her bucket. She wanted to compare the quality of magical and mundane ingredients grown in different qualities of soil, and needed the worms to strengthen one of her compost heaps. Would cowbane grown in robust, healthy compost with worms be more potent than if the plant were grown in normal compost, or regular, unenhanced soil?
The still summer air was disturbed by the unmistakable flapping of a large bird's wings. Surely an owl for her mother, or for Professor McGonagall. Luna ignored it and readjusted her sun bonnet, smearing dirt onto her cheek.
The owl landed nearby and looked distastefully at the uneven mounds of upturned soil as if unsure where to tread. When Luna continued to ignore it, it squawked at her.
"If you're looking for Cressida Lovegood, she'll be in the chapter house, I expect. If she's not there, you ought to check the women's dormitories. Over that way," Luna pointed.
The owl clicked its beak impatiently.
"If the letter is for my father, Xenophilius, I'm afraid you've just missed him. He'll be back home in Devon by now," Luna said, turning away from the owl and extracting another wriggling worm from the soil.
The owl made a distinctly impatient huffing noise and began picking its way towards Luna, trying to keep its talons and wings away from the worst of the mud.
"Oh, is it for me? You can just drop it there if you'd rather not get closer. I've never seen a prissier owl!" Luna exclaimed with equal degrees exasperation and curiosity. She didn't receive many letters, not after her disastrous letter-writing campaign had resulted in rather more hate mail than she had bargained for. It didn't occur to her that she was eleven years old and due to start Hogwarts in the fall. Luna wondered idly whether it was yet another advertisement for Madam Mulberry's Marvelous Murtlap Menagerie.
But the owl was apparently under strict instructions to deliver the letter directly into the hands of its recipient, because it clicked its beak irritably, took flight with a disgruntled flap of its wings, and dropped the letter directly onto Luna's head.
"Oh, alright, fine," Luna muttered, taking the letter and setting it aside on top of a mound of earth without looking at it, "Are you happy now?"
The owl cocked its head at her, puzzled by the underwhelming reception of its delivery. The owl thought rather highly of itself and its cargo, accustomed as it was to being greeted with open arms, tears of joy, and more than its fair share of yummy treats. This one was odd indeed. But its mission had been accomplished, so it took to the air again, dipping back down for a moment to stick its head into the girl's bucket and coming away with its mouth full of the refreshments she had so rudely neglected to offer. It cuffed the girl about the head with its wings for good measure as it flew away.
"Hey, not the earthworms! I promised I'd keep them safe!" Luna cried, but the owl was already a small speck in the distance.
"Silly, rude bird," Luna grumbled, peering into her bucket to check on the rest of her earthworms, who were wriggling madly. To safeguard her charges from any other meddling birds, she took off her hat and covered the lid of the bucket before setting it aside.
"Well, let's see what all that fuss was about," Luna shrugged. She picked up the letter and, not bothering to remove her garden gloves, smeared the parchment with mud.
Luna Lovegood wasn't like most wizarding children, but even she could recognize the Hogwarts seal.
"Heh," she chuckled, "It figures! Only a Hogwarts owl could be so self-important." She broke the seal without ceremony and began ripping the tidily folded letter from its envelope. Then she had another thought. Mum is going to just love this.
Luna smiled to herself as she retrieved her hat and threw her Hogwarts letter in the bucket with the worms. She bolted through the fields, already giggling in anticipation of her mother's reaction. Her mum would be so amused, and they'd mock the sanctimonious letter together, cackling over the formality of it all. Lists of rules and supplies being included in an admissions letter, what a welcome! Cressida would laugh. And then they would have the ceremonial burning of Luna's Hogwarts letter they'd always joked about. Finally, they'd have a grand time composing Luna's letter of refusal. Maybe they would even hand deliver it to Professor McGonagall at dinner, plop it on her plate and have her read it aloud to the whole Circle. They would all have a good laugh. And neither Luna nor Ginny would ever step foot in Hogwarts again.
Luna ran first to the chapter house, then to the women's dormitories, then to the laboratory without finding any trace of her mother. She eventually found Rania eating a punnet of raspberries in the shade of a tree and asked her if she had seen Cressida.
"I can do you one better! I saw your mum and your dad going into the chapel a few minutes ago. Berry?" Rania said, offering the berries to Luna.
"What?" Luna waved away the proffered raspberries, "That can't be right. My dad said he was leaving after lunch."
"Apparently not," Rania shrugged, "I thought it was odd, too. Your family aren't exactly the praying type, are you?" She strode towards the church, "If you give me a boost, I bet I could see through the windows. Maybe they're doing a weird occult ritual or something!"
"No, no. I…I just remembered, they told me to meet them in there. Thanks anyway," Luna lied. Rania looked unconvinced and eager to spy on the church being defiled with naked heathen dancing, or whatever nonsense she had gotten into her head. It wasn't as if Luna's parents needed a church to dance naked and do weird occult rituals in the first place. Eventually Luna convinced Rania to leave, and Rania went off to the laboratory to finish her berries over her latest alchemy experiment.
Luna waited until Rania was safely out of sight before approaching the heavy oaken door to the chapel and opening it a crack. She listened for several moments and heard nothing. She opened the door a bit wider, then a bit wider until there was a crack just large enough for her to slip through. Luna shut the door as quietly as she could. A gust of fresh air mingled with the stale air of the chapel, and Luna worried that the breeze was just as likely to give away her presence as the sound of the door or her footsteps.
She hurried behind a column and stood still for several moments, but heard only birdsong through the holes in the stained glass windows and the quiet murmuring of her parents' whispered conversation. They apparently had not heard her or felt the change in air.
Xenophilius and Cressida were standing in front of the altar. Beneath their feet, unbeknownst to them, lay the bones of Eva de Braose and the diary that had possessed Ginny Weasley. Luna edged closer, dashing from column to column until her parents' voices slowly became audible.
"…comes here," Cressida was saying.
"Have you Seen this, my love?" Xenophilius ask, stepping closer and gripping her arm. His eyes darted towards the chapel door, but he did not see his daughter crouched behind the column.
"Well, not exactly," Cressida admitted. Luna barely recognized her mother's voice. It seemed to have dropped a full octave, and was husky and pinched with anxiety.
"Then we have no reason to believe it will come to pass, my sweet," Xenophilius relaxed, releasing his wife's arm and reaching up to caress her face.
"But I do have to wonder, because we are family…"
"In name only!" Xenophilius interrupted her with great feeling, "You made it entirely clear when you severed ties with them that you wanted nothing to do with any of them! There are much more fitting places in your so-called family for…for one such as that." Luna had never heard her father speak with such disdain about anyone, not even Cornelius Fudge. He usually had such a gentle amiability about him that even his enemies viewed him as a harmless nuisance.
Luna reeled back, startled by seeing her parents so unlike themselves - her mother timid, her father angry. She was suddenly aware that she was still holding her stupid bucket with her stupid earthworms and her stupid Hogwarts letter, and nearly dropped it in her rush to get out of the chapel. Her heart was racing and her head was spinning. She wished she had never entered the chapel in the first place. Not because she had eavesdropped on a private conversation, but because she had caught a glimpse of her parents acting like other people, Cressida and Xenophilius instead of simply Mum and Dad. And she wasn't sure she liked her parents' other selves.
Luna and her mother did eventually have the ceremonial burning of her Hogwarts letter they had always talked about, and they did present her rejection letter to Professor McGonagall on a platter at dinner, to the great amusement of nearly the entire Circle. But Luna took no pleasure in it. She couldn't stop thinking about what Ginny had said, that every family had a Squib, and anyone who claimed otherwise must be lying or hiding something. How Mrs. Figg was the only Squib Luna had ever met. How odd Ginny found it that Luna did not know anyone in her mother's family apart from her aunt and cousin. How her father had spoken so derisively of his wife's family, as if they were dragon dung on the bottom of his boot.
As the summer stretched on, Cressida grew more and more agitated. Nightmares plagued her most nights, and her eyes became permanently puffy and rimmed with dark circles that looked like bruises. She startled easily and jumped at small sounds. Her wand was nearly always in her hand, and she could no longer be prevailed upon to even glance into her beloved crystal ball.
Luna could not bring herself to confront her mother about what she had overheard, or her growing suspicions about her mother's family. She carried on as usual, pretending to have small, harmless prophecies for her mother's sake and continuing her Deathly Hallows research with her father. One afternoon in Xenophilius's study, they were discussing the legend that the brothers depicted in The Tale of the Three Brothers were Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus Peverell.
"If the Hallows did indeed exist as actual, physical objects, it stands to reason that they would have been passed down through the Peverell family line, so some would say," Xenophilius said, obtaining a book from one of the stacks littering the room and flipping through it to show Luna portraits of the three thirteenth-century brothers.
"There must be living descendants, yeah? We could trace the Peverell genealogy and see if we can track any of them down! Maybe some of them might even have the Hallows, or know where they are," Luna said, prodding Cadmus Peverell's nose with the tip of her quill.
"There may indeed be living descendants, but the Peverells were one of the first pureblood wizarding names to go extinct, so to speak. That makes researching the family genealogy much more difficult. Very thorny, indeed. We would not be the first to attempt such an endeavor. But that's not to say…" Xenophilius mused.
"What do you mean, gone extinct? Didn't you say there are probably living descendants?"
"I mean that the name has gone extinct in the patriarchal sense of the word, my love. The name Peverell has died out. So if there were living descendants, they would no longer bear the name Peverell."
"That's silly. It's not like the boys would be any more Pevrells than the girls! If there are still living descendants, the line hasn't really died out at all, has it?"
"Functionally, it has not. But unfortunately, although indeed unsurprisingly, the wizards who see themselves as the guardians of such rules are not particularly liberal-minded. Indeed, the Peverells and several other historically significant families were excluded from the list of the Sacred Twenty-Eight for a variety of foolish reasons. Among them were names deemed too foreign, names too associated with Muggles, and indeed, families that had no or very few male descendants."
"But the Sacred Twenty-Eight is bung, isn't it? You always say it was just made up to make rich people feel more important."
"Oh, most certainly, my love. I merely meant to illustrate that the Peverells have not been considered a prominent family with a traceable line for quite some time. That is not to say that we could not attempt to reconstruct a genealogy and track down the living descendants, of course."
"Yeah, we could do," Luna considered this. She saw an opportunity to question her father about the conversation she had overheard in the chapel. Luna had always felt more comfortable talking to her father. He could be relied upon to take her seriously and treat her like a grown-up, while her mother was more likely to flutter about, refuse to answer the question, or take offense.
"Were families left off the list of the Sacred Twenty-Eight for having Squibs?"
"Oh, certainly. Squibs, Muggleborns, or indeed anyone known to be within a few generations of Muggles or Muggleborns."
"Dad, are there any Squibs in our family?"
"Squibs? Not that I know of, my dear, although I'm sure there must have been at some point. My own grandmother was a Muggleborn, you know." Luna in fact had not known this, given how little attention she paid to her mother's endless sermonizing about the Lovegood family tree.
"What about in Mum's family?" Xenophilius went silent and turned away to flip intently through the book, despite the fact that it was upside down.
"I'm not intimately acquainted with your mother's family tree," his voice sounded tight and rather high, "but I'm sure there have been at least a few Squibs, as well. What makes you ask?"
"Well, she won't talk about her family. Almost like she's... ashamed of them," Luna ventured.
"And why do you think your mother would be ashamed to have Squibs in her family?" He finally put the book down and turned to face his daughter.
"It's not just that. She barely has anyone from her side on that dumb family tree tapestry she keeps making me weave, and I just figured…"
"Do not speak of your mother's project that way, Luna. She makes it for you, so that you might know about your heritage."
"But only the Lovegood side! Does she think I wouldn't want to know about her side of the family, just because there might be Squibs or Muggleborns? She's always been a bit snobby and puts on airs, but that's just silly! You've always taught me not to judge people based on their blood, but she's just a hypocrite!" The words were coming out of Luna faster than she could contain them, years of suppressed resentment and annoyance bubbling to the surface.
"Luna, that is enough! You have no idea what your mother has sacrificed for this family, for me and especially for you. I can assure you that you have quite the wrong end of the wand. Your mother is not a hypocrite, and she believes passionately in the equality of all people, Muggle and wizard alike. That is why her family is excluded from the family tree."
"I'm…I'm sorry, Daddy," Luna's lip trembled. Her father had never raised his voice at her, but hearing his disappointment hurt more than his anger. She still did not understand what he was saying about her mother's family, but being chastised instantly took the wind out of the sails of her curiosity.
"Yes, well," Xenophilius patted her hand awkwardly, "Don't mention it to Mummy, she doesn't like to talk about it."
"I won't, I promise," Luna hung her head.
"Let's go back to these runes, shall we?" Xenophilius picked up his quill and straightened the book, but tears dripped from Luna's nose onto the page, blurring the runes.
AN: Thanks so much for reading! I can't promise a regular update schedule, but I've been able to write much more consistently due to being quarantined, so I should hopefully be able to promise more frequent updates. There's a twist coming next chapter, so I hope you keep reading. :)
As always, any reviews, favorite lines, concrit, etc. are very much appreciated!