The boy stared at her, and there was a heavy silence. He opened his mouth and seemed about to say something, but left it hanging open and silent. Far away, a great cheer went out: perhaps one of the hunters' arrows had found its mark. Just when Matilde thought that her new companion would never speak, he swallowed and said, "Are you a Norman?"

Charming, thought Matilde. Any hopes of gaining an ally here are clearly long gone if he can't even manage basic introductions. For one wild moment, she was tempted to lie, to say she was a Saxon, that she was half Saxon. "I am," she said after a moment's pause, reluctantly resigned to the truth. "Is that going to be a problem?"

She stared this boy down. He was older than her maybe, fair haired, broader across the shoulders. Everything about him – the way he sat in the saddle, his grip on the reins, his uneasy expression – betrayed him as uncomfortable on horseback. But to his credit, he met her gaze head on. He seemed conflicted, but finally, at some great cost to himself, he said. "No. Well… I don't know. It doesn't have to be."

"Good," Robert said, and the boy looked away first. Matilde felt she'd won. Is this what being a boy is always like? Matilde thought. All of this posturing? "I'm Robert," she said, still wondering at the strangeness of it on her tongue.

"Edmund." He looked at Robert as if to size him up, and Matilde hoped that her own nervousness was at least a little harder to read on her face than Edmund's was. "Why aren't you at the hunt?" Edmund asked her.

She shrugged, trying to buy time while she wondered how much of the truth to tell. "I don't care for hunting," she said – it was true enough. But there was something in Edmund's face, something in how he'd looked waiting in the courtyard on the edge of the men preparing for the hunt, that made her keep talking. "And I'm none too sure I fit in with the hunters," she said. Edmund nodded at that, and she decided to turn the question back on him. "How about you?"

"Me neither," said Edmund, before adding hurriedly "Hunting. I'm not sure I'm any good at it." He flushed at saying it, and Matilde looked at him with pity: she hadn't realised another human being could be so obviously uncomfortable.

"Do you not ride well?" She asked, unsure if she was throwing him a lifeline or digging the knife in further.

He shrugged, looking away, before abruptly changing the subject. "If you're a Norman," Edmund said, frowning, "why did you swear the oath in English?"

Matilde rolled her eyes. "What does it matter?"

"I'm just curious," he said. "All of the other men did."

"Well," said Matilde, uncomfortable, "the other men spoke Latin. I don't. And Salazar doesn't speak Norman." She detected something in Edmund, some shimmer of disgust, but whether it was at Salazar or at the entire idea of being Norman, she was not sure. A silence settled in, a tense waiting broken only by the gentle grunt of Edmund's horse. She seemed fidgety: Matilde tried to resist the urge to smile when she saw how uncomfortable her rider was at every tiny movement. She decided to make a peace offering: gently, she reached out with her mind, finding the horse's mind and soothing it. Within moments, the creature stopped fretting and Edmund seemed a little more relaxed. He was still silent though, and the silence was stretching out further than Matilde could bear. Finally, she found herself saying, "I hate him. I wish I didn't have to be his apprentice."

Edmund stared at her, open mouthed. "Salazar?" He asked.

Matilde nodded, eagerly, feeling like she was beginning to lose control over her own tongue. "The way he looks at you..." She was unable to finish, unable to choose the next set of words that would not give her away. Robert should have no secrets to be worried about.

She looked up at Edmund, worried that she would have lost him, but he was nodding along carefully. For weeks, Matilde had been building a dam slowly across her heart, trying to hold back rivers of anger, of secrets, and of discomfort. But talking to Edmund, having one single sympathetic ear and a few nods of encouragement, was making cracks grow across the dam.

"He can talk to snakes," she said, trying to divert the conversation. She would have to do her best not to unleash the full flood of all that had happened in one great torrent: she didn't want to let either of them drown.

"He can what?" said Edmund.

She told him what had happened when she swore the oath yesterday, leaving out that pressure against her mind. "It looked up at him like it was listening to him," she said, "and slithered back into his sleeve. I know a little magic, but I've never seen anything like it."

"It's ungodly magic," Edmund said firmly. Matilde was less sure: Giselbert had had more than enough opinions on what counted as against God, and calling something ungodly was not a tool she took any pleasure in wielding.

"The Baron's no better," she said, deciding to change topics again and divert the conversation before it could travel that road too long. "Everyone seems to think he's so grand, everyone here and all his men, but I've seen-"

Edmund interrupted, eyeing her curiously. "Are you not one of his men?"

She was glad he had cut in then, had saved her from trying to articulate everything she had seen of him. "Hardly," she said: she repressed a smile at how she was hardly the Baron's man in more ways than one. "I travelled here with him, but we didn't meet until we were on the road."

He nodded. "I'm sorry, you were saying that you'd seen…"

"I've seen a different side of him, that's all," she said lamely. It was hard to know exactly how to say what she had seen, because it was Matilde who had seen it. Robert, she was sure, would not have understood what was happening quite as well.

"I don't understand why everyone is so keen to welcome him," the boy across from her was saying, and she breathed a sigh of relief to be on safer ground. He seemed more than happy to distrust the Baron even without her going into any specifics. "He's not truly a noble, not really."

"What do you mean?"

"He came yesterday with his list of long titles, but they aren't his," said Edmund: Matilde sensed that his own dams may have begun to break, that his frustrations were the ones pouring out now. "That seat he holds is on English land. It's an English title; he stole it." Matilde shifted uncomfortably, and as if he picked up exactly what she was thinking, he looked directly at her. "You're a Norman," he said. He may as well have spat a curse at her.

"I am," she said. "But I promise, I didn't…" he was staring at her uncomfortably. "Look, I'm only here because the Lord I served insisted on bringing his whole household over, after the conquest. I wish I'd stayed in Normandy too."

He seemed to consider this for a moment, and must have decided this was good enough for him. "If you're a Norman," he said, "why do you speak English so well? I can barely tell from your voice. No one else in the Baron's party sounds like you."

"After I came here," said Matilde, speaking slowly, trying to work out the exact details of Robert's story as she'd already begun telling it, "I was raised by a Saxon." That intrigued Edmund – he was looking at her eagerly, impatient to hear more. But how could she best describe Edyth? She was sure a Norman boy would have had considerably less to do with the midwife. "She was a witch also," said Matilde, "and taught me as much of her magic as she could. She cared for me, since my parents passed a long time ago."

"Mine too," Edmund said, and the boy seemed to thaw suddenly. The two of them shared a look of understanding, unspoken.

"Perhaps we should ride on a little further," Matilde said. "Just so that if anyone from the hunt sees us, we're not too far off."

"Should we?" said Edmund, and a strange fear came over his face. Matilde looked at him, worried he was hiding something terrible. She wished for a second she could be like Salazar, to see into his mind, to understand. But while she could touch the brain of a horse and could ease the pain and maybe even the panic from a human consciousness, it would be something else entirely to peer unbidden into his mind.

But then she had seen the way he sat on the horse, remembered his grip on the reins. She understood exactly what he was thinking, without the need for any magic at all. "You don't ride well, do you? You can't really control the horse, right?"

He looked away from her, frowning. For a long moment, he didn't say anything, until he suddenly said sullenly, "You won't tell anyone, will you?"

"Of course not," said Matilde. She paused, and, trying to keep a smile from her face, asked the question that had been plaguing her. "How were you planning on getting back?"

Edmund shrugged. "I hadn't exactly planned it. I was told she-" he indicated the horse with one hand, "would be easy and that I wouldn't have any trouble." He sighed heavily. "To be honest, I was enjoying the chance to just get away from the castle for a little while. I know I'll have to go back eventually."

"I know how that feels," said Matilde without thinking.

"To want to get out of Hogwarts?" Said Edmund, eyeing her carefully.

It was Matilde's turn to shrug. "Not really," she said. "Well, maybe. I've only been there for a day, but I don't know if I much like it yet. No, I'm thinking of a long time ago, back when I first knew I had magic." Her tongue was moving almost of its own accord now, with no thought for Robert, and she fought to check her own words before they left her lips. "I was in the hall, and I was waiting at table," she said, hurriedly checking with herself. Boys served at table too, did they not? Well, if they didn't, she could always say that Norman boys did- "and everyone had drunk rather too much. It was loud, and there was no air – the fire was burning hot, and the smoke was thick, and someone had aimed a kick at me as I passed for no real reason, and I just wanted to be anywhere else. Anywhere at all. And then…" she drew a breath, and Edmund was looking at her with wonder. Telling this story hurt, and she found herself unexpectedly dealing with the pain of two wounds. There was the pain of that night, the shame, the terror, but there was another layer, too. She was remembering Edyth, asking about her disappearances that very first morning in the old woman's hut. She missed her terribly.

"Then?" He echoed, bringing her back to the saddle and the lake.

"I was up a tree," said Matilde. "Half a mile away. I thought I'd gone mad." She shook her head. "I got back an hour later, and no one even knew I was gone. I kept disappearing after that, kept disappearing until someone noticed I had magic."

He nodded. "I disappeared too. Not quite like that, but... I wonder sometimes…" His hand strayed to his belt, to the tiny leather scabbard that so many of the witches here seem to carry. "The magic we do then, before we can control it," he said, "Do you think we'll ever be able to do that again? To turn invisible? To just disappear from one place, and reappear in another?"

She tried, and failed, to suppress a smile. Could the witches of Hogwarts really not make themselves invisible? She decided not to tell him about that particular trick, just in case she still needed to use it sometime soon. "Even if you could disappear and make your way back to the castle that way," she said, "the horse would still be here."

"That's not what I meant!" He said, indignant.

"I know-"

"Even the four founders couldn't-"

"Edmund-"

"I know," he said, still a little touchily. "I'm just saying. The thought that we could do such complicated magic, so young, and without even having a wand…"

"Why would I need a wand?" Said Matilde. She'd seen the witches of Hogwarts carrying them, of course, and casting spells with them, but she'd thought they were purely decorative – an affectation, like their pretence of being a monastery. "I can do magic just fine without one."

Edmund stopped and stared at her, and Matilde decided to demonstrate. Closing her eyes for a second, she reached out with her mind to find Edmund's horse's, and set it moving towards her.

"How.. are you doing that?" Edmund clutched onto the reins, his face in exaggerated mask of terror that made it hard for her not to laugh at him again.

"Oh yes," she said. "It's quite easy, really." She was enjoying the look on his face, and, deciding to show off, reached out to her own horse as well, setting them both trotting along the side of the lake in the general direction the hunt had gone. She let her hands sit by her side, away from the reins. "I just find the horse's mind, and I tell it what it wants to do."

"And it listens?" Said Edmund, staring at her. "So Salazar can talk to snakes, and you can talk to horses-"

"Well, not exactly," said Matilde. "I don't talk to it, it's not that sort of spell. I just sort of… let the horse know what it wants to do. And it believes you." She patted her mount affectionately on the mane. "You just have to let it think that this is what it wants to do by itself, you don't tell it. If you tell the horse, it might decide it disagrees."

Edmund stared at her. "I still don't see the difference," he said.

Matilde sighed. She was struggling to articulate it herself, to explain the sheer wrongness of what she'd seen. "Think of it this way," she said. "I know a spell – a complicated spell – to let me command a horse, or a dog." Edmund nodded. "But Salazar…" she reached for the words. "Salazar knows a language of snakes. That's not a spell you cast, that's something else, something stranger…" Did the creatures of the earth really have their own tongues, she wondered. Could you really learn to talk to a snake like you would learn English, like you'd learn Norman?

Edmund nodded slowly. "I think I understand," he said. "That's something else entirely." She felt guilty for a moment that she had not said about Salazar looking into her mind, but how could she explain that? Edmund paused, lost in thought. "Why would he even have a snake?" He said. "Even if he can speak to snakes, why does he have one there at the sorting? Do you think there was someone he was trying to poison? Perhaps Godric-"

Matilde shook her head. "No," she said, "I don't think so. He wasn't worried that I'd seen it, and, besides, I think that if Salazar wanted to kill someone, he'd have far easier ways of doing it than that." As she talked to Edmund, an idea was dawning on her, an idea she didn't quite understand until she found herself saying the words aloud. "I think…" she said, "I think he wanted me to see it."

"What do you mean?" asked Edmund. "He was showing you the snake?"

"He was pretending not to," said Matilde, "but the way he looked at me… it was like he was making sure I'd seen."

"That he could speak to the snake?"

"That he could command it," said Matilde. She shuddered. If her other suspicion about Salazar was true, he'd have been able to tell that she'd seen. "I bet if I just asked any of the other Slytherins, they'd have seen the same thing. He wants us to know what he can do. That it's special."

"I wish I knew what he was planning," said Edmund, his weight awkwardly shifting in the saddle. "Wait…" He paused, face screwed up in thought. "A moment ago, when you were talking about…" he held up the useless reigns with one vague gesture, "You called it a spell. How can you cast a spell without a wand? You didn't even say anything."

"Some spells need words," Matilde shrugged, "and some don't. That's what I learned." She looked at the scabbard on Edmund's belt with interest. "Before I came here, I'd never even seen a wand." She shrugged, guiding the two horses around either side of a spindly tree that had chosen right by the lake side, of all places, to grow.

"That's not how it works!" Said Edmund, inflamed. "You can't just-"

"I think you'll find I can, actually," Matilde shrugged. "I'm sure you did some magic long before you first came to Hogwarts and got a wand."

"That was different," Edmund frowned, and they rode in silence for a few minutes – she seemed to have lost him to another brooding spell. She couldn't tell where the hunt was by now, but they were bound to be turning around and heading back to the castle soon, and from here she should be able to see them when they were. She supposed she should ride to meet them when they did, but the thought made her wince a little. She looked over at her travelling companion. Edmund was sat bumping in the saddle. Like a sack of flour, Matilde thought – he should be moving with his steed's motion, but instead the let each bump jar him as though he had no muscle tone of his own at all. Even with her doing the hard work of moving and directing his horse, he quite simply had no idea how to ride.

He looked over at her, clearly noticing her watching him. It was so strongly reminiscent of the courtyard that for a moment, she was almost there again. He looked at her, frowning. "Could you do that to me?" He asked.

"Do what?" Asked Matilde, and then she understood. "Reach into your mind?" He nodded, and for a fleeting moment she felt bad about her decision not to tell him about Salazar's other power. "God, no," she said. For a moment, she thought about what you could do with a power like that over another man. Even if Slytherin could reach into her mind and see what was inside, could he really change her wants? What would a man like that do with – she bit her cheek so hard it hurt. No point in thinking of that here. No point in spooking the horses. She hoped Edmund wouldn't notice her hesitance, and the way the two creatures had started to strain at her control. "Animal minds are easy," she said, pushing her mind towards the two mounts and calming them again, "especially animals that have been bred to do what they're told. Horses, dogs are easy, but then goats…." She shrugged. He looked at her as if she'd confessed that draining the lake was a little hard, but she was able to dry up small streams. "Animals just want things," she said. "It's not hard to make them want something else. They never stop and think about why. But people… I don't know. The most I can do with people is find pain, and take it away. I can help, but I can't just make them do something with magic, not like that. And even if I could…" She let the possibility hang in the air, not wanting to think about it any further.

Edmund nodded slowly. "I suppose that makes sense," he said. "It's just so strange to me. I've never heard magic spoken of like that."

She shrugged. "Well, there's plenty I don't know," she said. "I can't even use a wand. All your spells are in Latin, and mine aren't, they're in English-" Edmund peered at her, fascinated but unable to interrupt, "some of them, anyway. There's some words I don't recognise, maybe from something else even older. But maybe…" she hesitated momentarily. "Maybe there's more to magic than your masters at Hogwarts know," she said with a smile.

Edmund thought for a moment. "I suppose there must be," he said. "Although maybe…" He shuddered. "Maybe some know more than others. Or more than they say. Maybe being able to understand minds is…"

"What do you mean?" Matilde asked – but she knew what was coming, slowly but surely, and it felt as though ice-water was trickling down the back of her neck.

"Sometimes," he said, in a conspiratorial tone, "I think that Salazar knows what I'm thinking." Matilde blinked, and did her best to look interested, surprised. "I don't know why I think that but maybe… maybe there's more to that school of magic. That type. Maybe that's something he knows."

"Maybe," said Matilde. Even now, it was better to say nothing, she decided. Robert should be an open book, should have no secrets he was worried that Salazar was looking into his head to bring out.

"Maybe he'll teach you," said Edmund, a slight note of bitterness in his voice now, "all of you. All of his strange magic." He sighed.

"Not likely," Matilde said. "After the feast he disappeared. I don't know where he's even gone." Silence fell between them for a moment. "If he does," said Matilde suddenly, with a conviction that surprised even her, "I'll teach you. All of it." She gave him a hard look. "Maybe even about telling that horse of yours what to do, and how to ride it. Although not all of that's magic."

"Please do," he said. "Perhaps I can help with your Latin, and with using a wand..." And with those words, Matilde knew that the alliance between them was sealed. She smiled. It had taken years for her to gain a friend in the village, when she had met Edyth. Now she had managed to find one at Hogwarts in days. Perhaps things were looking up.

For a moment, she enjoyed a moment of optimism – but a thought came racing soon to chase it away. "I don't know if Salazar will teach much that I can tell you about," she said. "Not to me, at any rate."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you remember the way Salazar asked about the Baron's parents?" Asked Matilde. "Like the only real way to get magic is to inherit it like some family crest?"

She shook her head, breathing in for more, but Edmund cut across her. "As if it matters! My parents had no magic at all, and it made no difference to me. What about yours, were they…?"

He left the question hanging, and Matilde shrugged. "My mother probably wasn't," she said, "but I don't really remember her. Maybe she just hid it all her life. But I'm sure if he feels like that, he won't want to teach me."

"And your father?" Edmund asked, following his quarry like one of Godric's wolfhounds.

"I don't know," said Matilde carefully. "I've never met him. I'm not sure if my mother…" she coloured, realising too late that that was Matilde's answer. There was no reason Robert could not have known his father well, been raised on his knee before the man reached an untimely death in war. Well, she thought, looking across at Edmund, maybe not at war. This one has no fondness for Norman soldiers, and for good reason.

Edmund nodded sympathetically, and Matilde squinted at him, trying to gauge if that was pity. But all that he said was, "it's so unfair that you're all under Slytherin now."

"I wish I wasn't," said Matilde. "I don't know if Godric would take me, because…" she vaguely gestured around herself, Edmund, the hunt, trying to encapsulate the whole dynamic between Gryffindor and the Baron. "But surely one of the others, the two women…" She shrugged. "I didn't understand much of what was happening, to be honest. It was all in Latin, and one of the men near me would translate, but he didn't get everything-"

"Something bad happened," said Edmund. "I don't know what, not really. But the four founders used to discuss it all between the four of them, used to divide up who everyone would serve under. That got hard after…" he trailed off, looking out over the lake, "well, you know," he said, clearly forgetting that Matilde didn't. She sighed – one more mystery to uncover later. "But it's how they've done it for years. This hat…" He grimaced, adjusting himself in the saddle, "I don't know. None of us knew until it happened that whoever got the Baron would get to have all of his retinue, but I keep thinking that Slytherin must have known. And then I think about the hat, and, I wonder… what if Slytherin enchanted it somehow? Changed it so that he got all of the new arrivals? The founders said they all put their magics into it, but…" He trailed off helplessly.

"I bet he did," she said slowly. Of course, she had no idea what was possible, not really. Not where Slytherin was concerned. Oh, she knew a little magic, but that was Edyth's magic – magic of blood and bone, of pain and calm, magic of the land and the people and the earth. But this Hogwarts magic, this strange land of enchanted buildings and hats that spoke, of Latin and quill and parchment… Even before talking to snakes, and looking into her mind, there was still so much she could not begin to understand. But there were some things she did know. "He's planning something," she said, and as she spoke it, she believed that it was true. There was simply too much mystery around Slytherin for her to disregard. "And I'm going to find out what I can."

Edmund nodded. "Me too." He looked over at her. "I never would have thought I'd be working with a Norman," he said, sounding strained.

"I've worked with a Saxon before," said Matilde, trying not to roll her eyes. "I think she managed not to die of shame." She still missed Edyth fiercely, but she wondered if that sting might lessen a little now she had someone else to work with, to conspire with. Ahead of them, horsemen broke from the treeline of the dark forest further North. The hunt was returning, and in high spirits. Norman and Saxon had clearly managed to work together long enough to catch the two bucks who were levitating lazily six feet above the ground, dead. "Ready to rejoin the hunt?" She asked to Edmund.

"I think so," he said. "Are you able to help me with…" he glanced back down at the horse, ashamed.

"I won't let up until we're in the courtyard, don't worry," said Matilde. In truth, holding focus on the two horses at once was just beginning to wear on her. It was a great deal of magic to be doing, complicated magic, and once she was able to stop, she was sure she would do as little else for the day as she could get away with. Perhaps the pious witches of Hogwarts would believe it if she said she wished to spend the rest of the day in silent prayer and meditation. But for a friend – for her first true friend here – it was more than worth it.

Matilde looked over at Edmund, leaning in his saddle at entirely the wrong angle. "You know, you're not just working with a Norman," she said teasingly, deciding to try on this friendship for size and see how she liked it, "but a Slytherin too. Do you think you'll die of shock?"

Edmund seemed to consider her for a moment. She was not sure he had quite got that she was joking. "Not a true Slytherin, though,"" he said with some thought. "You're helping me find out what he's doing. You're not loyal to him, not like I am to Gryffindor."

"I'm not doing this for Gryffindor either," said Matilde, a little more sharply than she'd intended. She had no love for Godric and his knot of men with their brooding and posturing. Then who are you doing it for? A voice in her head asked. Easy, said another voice. I'm doing this for Edyth. She'd be so proud that I was delving into the secrets of Hogwarts and its founders. Aloud, she said, "I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do."

"I know," said Edmund, taken aback. The figures of the hunters were growing ever closer, and Matilde was a little surprised to see Godric and the Baron locked in some kind of conversation. Edmund looked up and seemed to see it too. "I'm in this with you," he said with a shrug.

"For Godric?"

He shook his head. "I don't even know anymore."