"Carwyn said something interesting," Edmund said.
Edmund, Robert and Helena were walking back through the forest to the castle. Edmund had made sure to linger in the clearing, and had managed to shake Carwyn off so that he could talk with Robert – and it had seemed like they had barely been on the path a moment when Helena had flitted out of the shadows, full of excitement for the successful trick they had played. Edmund found himself surprised by how easily the three of them fit together. All the same, he wished he could be having this conversation with just Robert.
"Interesting how?" Helena asked. She seemed just as animated in excitement as she had been in distress, and was nearly bounding along the path. "Was it about the wands?"
"No," Edmund said. "Well, not exactly. He told me a little of how they're made, but…" Helena had a dozen questions on everything from the tools used to cut the wood to what Carwyn would use as a core, all coming rapid-fire, one after another, and Edmund did his best to wave them off. "I thought you didn't need to learn to make a wand anymore?" He asked.
"Sorry," she said with a smile. "Force of habit. After years of trying to finally make one good enough…"
Edmund squinted at her. Was all of this part of some scheme? She had as much as said that her mother had instructed her to learn the Ollivanders' secrets in making a wand. Carwyn had trusted him with some of the secrets of his trade, and he did not know if he should share them, not with Helena.
"What was it?" Robert asked. "That Carwyn said?" Edmund suddenly realised that he had stayed silent a moment too long, and Helena was looking at him strangely.
"Well..." Even aside from any family secrets in wandcrafting, there was much that Carwyn had said that he was not ready to share, even with Robert. But he had had an idea when he was talking with Carwyn, and that idea had had time to put down roots and begin to grow. "When we first met, Robert, we talked about…" He tried to pick his words carefully, unsure what it was safe to reveal, "keeping an eye on… certain things."
"Like Salazar?" Helena said. Edmund looked over, surprised, but her face didn't have any malice in it. "Or the Baron?"
Robert laughed. "Both, really," he said. "She knows, Ed."
Edmund's stomach did a complicated flip. On the one hand, he was uncomfortable with just how easy Robert was to trust Helena. But on the other hand, Robert had called him Ed. Not even Alfric called him Ed anymore. It was the name of his childhood, but more than that – it was the name that Hilda and Osbert had used to call him, back in Northumbria. It was something he was called by friends.
"She does?" He turned to Helena. "You do? Great." He tried to mean it. "Well… I was thinking that we might be able to keep an eye on Salazar – on both of them, really, him and the Baron – by calling up the spirits of the castle."
"The spirits of the castle?" Robert frowned. "The castle has spirits?" He paused. "You mean like… ghosts?"
Helena laughed. "Of course not," she said. "Everyone knows there's no such thing. " She turned to Edmund. "Do you mean like the green man?" Edmund and Robert both looked at her blankly. "The green men!" She said. "The woodland spirits we saw today, the ones in the grove."
"That's what those were?" said Robert. Edmund stared at him, but the boy shrugged. "I don't speak Latin, I didn't know – I thought perhaps Carwyn had cast a spell on the trees to bring them to life."
"No," Edmund said, "he told me that everything around us has spirits. That's what he said – a spirit of some kind lives in every stone, every tree and every brook."
Helena considered this for a moment, kicking a stone along the path. "That's true," she said, "in a fashion. Mother tells enough stories about the old country. The way the mist clings to the hills…" She gave the stone another long kick and it tumbled, end over end, down the path. Her face had a strange expression, one Edmund could barely understand at first – but then he recognised it. He was sure he felt much the same sometimes, when he remembered the river banks of Northumbria and the way the trees there had turned to gold in the autumn. In her heart, Helena was in very different woods to these. Edmund felt a pang of sympathy for her. Helena had, in all the years he had been there, never left Hogwarts. Had she ever set foot in the lands she talked of so fondly? Was it worse, he thought, to miss dearly a land you had had to leave? Or never to have known the land that you loved at all?
"The land's full of spirits there," Helena continued. "The green man in the wood, the Ceffyl Dŵr in the well… I always thought it was just the land, that specific land, but what if it's everywhere?" She paused, lost in thought and nearly stopping on the track. "But then, apart from today… I hate to say this, but I've lived in Hogwarts my whole life, Edmund, and I've never seen any spirits. Not in the castle."
"They're not just…" Edmund trailed off, trying to remember exactly what Carwyn had said. "You need to be able to draw them out," he said. "He said there's magic for it, to… bring them forth. To awaken them. Though I don't know what it is."
"But everything you listed is natural," Robert said, aiming a kick of his own at Helena's pebble and sending it skittering into the undergrowth. "I'm sure that stone might have a spirit – and I apologise to it – but I don't think castles would have spirits, not in the same way that a forest or a rock would."
"That's just it, though," said Edmund. "He said every stone."
"And?"
"And what's a castle but hundreds and thousands of stones, all pieced together?"
Helena considered, slowing down so much for a moment that she almost came to a stop. "So you're saying that we can summon the spirits of the stones that make up Hogwarts?"
"Yes! Well, I'm not sure. But I think it's worth a go. Not just the stones, either: the wood and the trees used to build it too," said Edmund, "the water of the moat, too – anything like that."
"It shouldn't work…" Helena said slowly. "After all, when Mother and the others built it… well, they're not real stones."
"They feel real enough to me," said Robert.
"They're real now," Helena continued, "but they weren't quarried. The wood here isn't from grown trees, it was created. Summoned from nothing, like the stone and everything else. The magic is incredible, but they're not…" Suddenly, another thought seemed to strike her, and she was a lightningbolt of movement again, striding ahead so far that Edmund and Robert had to struggle to keep up. "But then again," she said, "if we're talking about a spirit of magic, and we're talking about materials that were born of magic, perhaps it would be even easier to summon them. Perhaps more spirits would live there." She turned around to the two of them, face flushed. "I think we could do it," she said. "Maybe."
Robert looked thoughtful. "That's a big maybe."
"We'd have to do a lot of research. Read through the library, and maybe also things that weren't written down." Helena sighed. "We might able to make some enquiries, I mean. If only I could ask Mother, but…"
"Absolutely not," Edmund said, so quickly he hardly had time to think before the words left his mouth. Immediately after he said it, a silence fell between them, and he could feel that it had been a mistake.
Helena looked at him coolly. "Of course I wouldn't," she said. "I can't tell my mother I'm getting a wand for myself: do you really think I'd trust her with secrets about another of the founders?" Edmund looked away, because Helena's eyes were blazing now, burning with a fire that had certainly come from her mother, and he could not meet them. "Yes, my mother is close with Salazar," she said. "Is that what you wanted to hear? I don't know a thing about where in the castle he goes when no one sees him for months, but she certainly seems to. There. That's what you've been thinking, isn't it? You've been wondering why I, Rowena's daughter, would want to help you spy on another of the founders?"
Edmund still couldn't meet her eye. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean…" He paused, unsure exactly what he had meant. He had been wondering what, exactly, she would get out of this, but this hardly seemed the time to mention that. The silence hang heavy between them, and he was aware of Robert standing, watching them both, saying nothing. "I just didn't know if I could trust you," Edmund said finally.
Helena shook her head slowly. "You didn't know if you could trust me?"
"Well…"
"What, you think I'm going to go from here and run to Mother? Tell her all about how you're planning on enchanting the castle to spy on Slytherin?" Edmund said nothing, but risked a nod. He didn't know if Helena had even seen it or not – she continued regardless. Some of the energy seemed to have sapped from her, and she seemed a little deflated – more sad than angry, now. "My mother might know where Salazar is in the castle and how he spends his days, but I see no more of him than anyone else at Hogwarts. And as for letting a word of this slip to Slytherin, I've never liked him. The man brings out the worst kinds of magic in Mother." She shivered, and seemed to shrink back into the cloak she had wrapped around herself. "You weren't the only one in the chapel when Godric and Salazar duelled, Edmund. I remember. And then with everything that Robert told me, too?" She shook her head. "There's no fear I'm breathing a word of this, and you'll just have to believe me on that."
Edmund considered. "I'll try," he said – and immediately, Helena's reaction made it clear that it had been the wrong thing to say.
"You'll try?" She said. "This is the first time I've met you, Edmund, and I've trusted you to know that I am going behind my mother's back to have a wand made for me against her express instructions. And I'm trusting you because Robert does, but Robert's only met you once before today. And both of us are doing a good deal more than just trying!" She turned to Robert. "Edmund seems able to trust you just fine," she said.
Robert threw his hands up. "Don't say that like it's a bad thing," he said.
"I'm sorry," Edmund began, but Helena continued and cut across him.
"I'm not saying it's bad," she said. "But the point is that you've chosen to trust each other. Robert, you've trusted both of us with the fact that you're wary of the Baron, and with your suspicions about Slytherin. Edmund, you've trusted him with the same. I've chosen to trust both of you with the fact that I'm going behind my mother's back for…" she waved her hands vaguely at the woods around her, "all of this. So maybe, Edmund, you can choose to trust me not to immediately go running to Mother and to Salazar with this."
There was a long silence, only broken by three sets of feet trudging through forest paths. "You're right," Edmund said finally. "Helena, I'm sorry." He thought back to his conversation with Carwyn. "It's been… I've not been used to making friends at Hogwarts."
Helena nodded. "I haven't either," she said, with a sigh. "Mother's kept me busy enough to see to that. So I can understand."
Robert shrugged. "I don't know what the two of you are talking about," he said. "I've barely been here a month, and I've already made two friends. Where's the difficulty?"
Everyone laughed, and some of the tension hanging over the forest path seemed to have broken. "Well," said Helena, and her face had softened, and she seemed to be back to her habit of nervously twisting the ring on one finger, "I'll say no more about it." Edmund nodded. "But I think that between the three of us, and with a lot of work, we can do this. And I'm in," Helena said, "if you're in."
Edmund nodded. "I'm in," he said.
"Always have been," said Robert.
By the time the three of them arrived at the castle, it was clear to Edmund that Carwyn was not right anymore: now, he had two firm friends at Hogwarts. Once he was able to get past his unease about Helena's family ties, he had to admit that there were definite advantages to having Rowena Ravenclaw's daughter owing you a favour. After Edmund had first met Robert, it had taken weeks to be able to see him again and continue on in their quest. But now, he was suddenly furnished with the perfect excuse to see him every day. The day after the wand ceremony, the scriptorium master had pulled Edmund away from copying a particularly dull treatise on the magic of the sorcerors of Augustus Caesar – instead, he was lead to a small anteroom off of the scriptorium where Helena and Robert were waiting with a stack of books nearly half his height, fresh parchment to take notes, and near boundless time to discuss the finer points of different summoning spells.
Ever since Edmund had been able to set quill to parchment, the scriptorium had taken up the bulk of the daylight hours he spent at Hogwarts. Oh, there were times when older witches and masters would teach spells to him and other youths, but it felt as though the majority of the magic he was able to cast had been learned entirely by accident, scraps of magical knowledge and instruction that he picked up copying page after page of text for the ever growing library of Hogwarts. But this was the first time that he had ever taken those books out of the library, had ever purposefully looked for information rather than devouring whatever scraps got thrown his way like a hound hovering around the table at a feast. Every day, Helena would bring a stack of books, and she and Edmund would pore over any mention they could possibly find of spirits of wood and stone, their origins, and of how to bring them forth. Robert, who could still not read well enough to be of much use searching in books, would sit copying some Latin text and working on his hand, and would occasionally chime in when Edmund and Helena shared what they had learned.
"This isn't going anywhere," Edmund groaned, closing On the Magic of the Black Forest. "Plenty on kobolds and hill trolls, which I suppose might be some kind of very big spirit, but I think the author's a lot more interested in how to fight them and or trick them than how to summon them."
Robert looked up from a sheet of parchment, a quill gripped inexpertly between his fingers. Edmund tried to remember back to his own days of learning to write. Was the speed Robert's writing was progressing at normal, or had something slowed down his acquisition of letters, of Latin? In his afternoons in the anteroom, he hadn't spotted anything particularly untoward between the two of them. Nothing bad. But sometimes he would see a glance linger, and he had an uneasy feeling of intruding on something, however unwise that something might be. "If we summoned a troll from the stones of Hogwarts," Robert said, "I think Salazar might have an idea that it was following him." Edmund laughed. "Some things you don't need book learning for."
Helena had hardly reacted: she was frowning at a scroll in an alphabet Edmund did not recognise, unrolled across a table before them. "Boggarts," she said, frowning.
"I'm sorry?" Robert said, looking curious at her. For a moment, Edmund wondered the same thing –and then a memory came crashing over him, and he felt himself dragged back a decade.
"Boggarts are… they're a little devil. A bad creature," he said. He could see Granny's hut, with her warming her old bones by the fire as she told the story of the farmer who'd had a boggart in his field in the next village. "They sour the milk, and take the crops, and scare the children." It had only been a few months ago that Alfric had first come to the village, and before he and Godwin had found out that Alfric used to be a soldier, the strange, battleworn old man had scared them so much that they had wondered in hushed tones if he was a boggart himself. "I thought they were just a story," he said to Helena, frowning. "Something to stop me from running off where my Granny couldn't see me."
"My mother used to tell me that the elves would take me away if I didn't finish my porridge," Robert said with a smile, "but I'm not sure we need to spend too much time on that."
"Well, Kentigern wrote about the boggarts here," Helena said, ignoring Robert's comment. "And listen to this." As she read, Edmund could not help but notice the way that Robert's eyes were fixed on her face, hanging on her every word, despite his disinterest in the conversation moments ago. "I came then to the village of Mumby, in the country of Mercia, where the godly people had been much troubled by a bogle, which they did call a boggart. A peculiar spirit, it will form from the stones of a ruined house that has known not love nor care, and without the proper care to banish it will cause all manners of fear and tribulations to good Christian folk." She skimmed through the text. "There's a lot here about the problems the boggart was causing, making the sheepdogs of the village go lame, stealing away a child, driving an old woman mad with fright…" she turned a page. "But look, it says again that it is a creature born of an abandoned cottage, where the tumbled stones will give it shape and it will haunt and create havoc…" She shut the book, looking around at the two of them. After neither of them said anything, she asked, "Don't you see?"
Edmund shook his head. "I suppose a boggart is a spirit, but I can't say this makes me want to summon one."
But something seemed to be slowly dawning in Robert's eyes. "No," he said, "not the boggart specifically, but that it's born of the house…"
"Exactly!" said Helena. "Buildings can have spirits! Not just that, but the shape of the stones themselves, the way they are assembled, give them life – it's exactly the information we needed."
Edmund exhaled. "And if a place that's ruined gives a bad spirit, perhaps Hogwarts will give us something less malevolent," he said. He shuddered. He'd had plenty of nightmares about boggarts that one winter, and it felt strange to know that something he'd long dismissed as a childhood story was real.
"There's something else…" Robert said. His quill was set down now, any pretence at attempting to study long abandoned. "Something…" He squinted, trying to concentrate. "If the shape of the stones themselves has magical properties, isn't that like the adder stone?"
Edmund sat bolt upright. "The adder stone? Is Slytherin…" Helena and Robert explained together what Robert had learned in the same room back when he first started his reading lessons: that it was nothing to do with Slytherin, but that adder stones were their own particular class of stone, and that they had some of their own magic to them, and that a Grand Adder Stone stood beneath London, a passage between life and death itself.
Edmund nodded slowly. He couldn't deny that he was disappointed – all of this felt like they were barely any closer to finding out what Slythering was up to, and he was hoping that this adder stone, however interesting it was, might hold the key. Instead, he was left to consider the terrible possibilities of what Guillame the Bastard might want with a magical power like that.
"The shape of those stones gives them their magical powers, too," Robert said. "That's what you were saying when we first talked about it."
"I suppose so," Helena said.
"Well," said Robert. "It seems to me – and I, of course, haven't been able to read all of these books, so I might be wrong – that the shape of things is what's important. The shape of the stones, and wood, and clay, and everything else that makes a building is enough to make a new spirit from them, not just a spirit of the rock. The shape of an adder stone gives it some magic, even a grand adder stone."
"And?" Edmund asked. He dug his heel along a groove between flagstones in the floor, wondering what magic the shape of this room might be making.
"We can't be the first people to realise this," Robert said. "Whether it's in the library here or not, I'm sure that other witches have made a study of the magical properties of shaping stone." He paused, and something in the look in his eye helped Edmund realise where he was going. "If Salazar is shaping all of Hogwarts…" Robert said, trailing off and letting the horrible possibilities hang in the air.
No one said anything. Edmund stared into the heart of a candle flame, watching the flicker of white heat and hoping it might provide some sort of answer. "So the new chapel…" He said.
"Maybe," Robert said with a shrug. "I don't know. How would we?" He turned to Helena. "Do you think your mother would know anything?"
"I don't know," said Helena. "Even if she did, I don't know what…" She paused for a long time. "Well," she said finally, "we're not going to find out by wondering." There was a cold iron in her voice now, and Edmund wondered if he imagined that she was gripping the edge of the volume in front of her a little tighter. Had that whiteness in her knuckles been there before? "We'd best get to work," said Helena.
The three of them set to their task with a quiet, determined new vigour. But however dusty the tomes Helena brought from the library, however fragile the scrolls they pored over, there was nothing they could find about the architectural magic they were wondering about, and almost as little about the conjuring of spirits.
Somehow, the books and the mission began to slowly take over the rest of Edmund's life, creeping in like weeds, setting down root, and flourishing. He grew steadily more and more distracted in mass, unable to properly devote himself to prayer – instead, he would try to take in as much of the room as he could without moving his head, wondering what spells could be laced into the stone. Salazar had wanted to seize the throne of Britain at the head of an army of the dead. Was anything really beyond him? Sometimes, as Edmund walked the corridors of Hogwarts, he imagined that the whole castle was an arcane sigil, some part of the strange rune magic that Helena and Robert would argue about as he pored over books in the little anteroom off the scriptorium. All of Hogwarts was one enormous rune, and with each footfall he and every other witch were activating and channeling its magical power - if he could just view it from the right angle, he would see it glow and understand its power.
When Edmund lay on his straw mattress at night, pages of inscrutable magical text danced behind his eyes, taunting him as he tried to fall asleep. Alfric began to ask pointed, concerned questions about whether Edmund had got enough sleep, and the new project that Rowena Ravenclaw and her daughter had apparently recruited Edmund for. He tried to shrug him off with as noncommittal an answer as he could – everything was going well, he was honoured to be helping with such important transcription, he just hadn't slept as well. There would be a time to go to others with what they knew – to Alfric, to Carwyn, all the way to Godric himself. But what good was it coming to them with a vague suspicion? He had to find something – something more tangible than theories and the speculation that ran through his head as he tried to find something, anything useful.
Days blurred together: sleepless night turned into sleepless night. One afternoon in the scriptorium seemed much like another. He was only able to measure the passing of the days by Robert – by the growing sureness of Robert's hand, by the slow, faltering creep of the spoken Latin conversations between him and Helena while Edmund buried his nose in a book. Other time had become so meaningless that when on the way back from chapel one morning, Carwyn met Edmund and told him that the wands would be ready to distribute soon, and Edmund was surprised. Hadn't he said it would take many weeks to work through all of those? But the calendar had rolled on and those weeks must have passed – they were passed Whitsun now, the calendar of feast days and saints days starting to turn its long arc towards the start of summer.
Then, as he shifted on the hard wooden bench and tried to stretch out the crick in his neck, his eyes caught on a few words on the page – and he saw it. He was reading in English today – a chronicle of Saxon missionary, bringing the church to England in the dark days when the land was still pagan. But there, tucked between stories of the conversion of a heathen king and the Lord's miracle to save a harvest, was a plain set of instructions: A spell by which to summon the spirits of rock, stone and earth.
He took a breath. Helena was frowning at a scroll before her in Greek, and Robert was making halting attempts at writing more letters after some gentle instruction from Helena earlier. At this moment, he was the only one who knew. The moment he spoke, everything was going to change.
He swallowed. "I have something," he said – and both heads whipped around within a moment. "Not just an idea, something with detail," he said. "A spell to summon the spirits of stone. Any spirits, he's very specific."
"In buildings?" Helena asked, frowning.
"I'm not sure," Edmund said, peering at the text closer. "It doesn't look like any spell I know, but it's something."
Helena rushed over, pulling her hair back from her face as she peered at the text. Her lips moved silently for a moment, her eyes darting across the page, and Edmund and Robert shared a look of excitement.
"Will it work?" asked Robert, standing up from his chair and peering over.
Helena nodded. "I think so," she said. "It's better than anything else we've…" she sighed, her hands reaching up to twist a ring off of one finger and pass it from hand to hand. "Yes, it should work," she said finally. "Though it won't be easy." She smiled at them brightly. "I think it's time we summoned the spirit of Hogwarts."
