I woke up in a much better situation than the last time I'd come to. It took me a minute to remember why I was in a small castle hospital that would have looked obsolete by 1900. I guessed cleaning magic could account for a lot of problems, but if this was a muggle hospital people would be getting infections constantly. The view was nice, at least, sunlight reflecting off the large lake below indicating that I'd been out for most of the morning, and at it least smelled clean, if not antiseptic.
Dumbledore had calmly put off most of my questions the night before, other than affirming, "Wait, is that a phoenix!?" when the bird in question burst into flame and apparated us from the prison to wherever I was now. I assumed Hogwarts, but so far I'd only seen this hospital room. An elderly matron who seemed to regard herself queen of this domain had briefly conferred with the headmaster, showed me a bed, and made me drink a potion. By the taste and effects, I was guessing a dreamless sleep draught.
"Well good morning, Mr. Dresden," the lady in question called, moving about the room in a manner that the verb bustling had been coined to describe. She'd been across the room, bottles and boxes piled on several chairs outside a large closet, likely in the middle of summer inventory. She wandered over to me and started doing diagnostic spells with her wand while I looked on in bemusement at the school nurse stereotype come to life. "You seem to be recovering, though I insist you take it easy for a few days. I'm afraid to say that you'll likely retain some faint scarring from your improperly treated splinching wounds, but it looks like you've already bounced back from the dementor exposure. How do you feel?"
I checked my forearms and agreed that it was a significant improvement, with the angry scabs I'd had replaced with fading lines. Justin had never been interested in healing charms, not to mention some early problems at the orphanage, so they wouldn't be my first scars. I no longer felt the haze of depression and fear that lingered throughout the prison, so I guessed whatever those creatures had done to me was passing, as well. "Much better, thank you ma'am."
"Excellent. I'll inform the headmaster that you're up and around. Please stay in bed until someone comes to collect you." With that, she went back to what she was doing and left me to reflect on the chaos of the last few days while looking out over the lake.
I was now wearing a cotton hospital gown instead of prison robes, though I could faintly feel magic running through them as if they'd been transfigured from what I was wearing when I walked in. Curious and with nothing better to do, I gathered my magic for a few minutes and then muttered, "Finite." The surge of cancellation snapped through my clothing and in a moment I was back in the t-shirt and shorts I'd managed to salvage from the fire and collected before leaving the prison. The transfiguration had at least worked out most of the smoke smell, but the shirt was still emblazoned with a now-completely-inappropriate logo for Baderbräu. Well, maybe not completely: Dumbledore had been amused that the beer's logo looked like a phoenix.
Of course, I was never that precise without a focus, and the counter-spell also caught the bed I was laying in. I noticed too late that the rest of the beds in the ward would only be roomy for small children as my legs were suddenly sticking off the end of the cot. I grumbled and pulled them Indian-style so I could barely fit on the bed that had clearly been lengthened to fit me.
"Five points to… well, we don't know what house you are yet," said the woman that had just walked in. Or, that was what I thought she'd said, through her thick Scottish accent. I glanced over and was impressed. This lady could rule the Chicago goth scene by just walking into a club. Given how long witches and wizards lived, the combination of barely-graying dark hair and fine wrinkles could put her at anywhere from 50 to 100. Severely dressed in all black with a witch's hat, perhaps her lack of wrinkles was due to never smiling. Though I thought I spotted a number of emotions flickering around her eyes as she looked at me.
"Five points?" I asked, confused.
"Our scoring system for student achievements," she explained. "Once one gets into the habit, it becomes a reflex. That's the first wandless counter-spell I've seen from a student in some time."
I shrugged, "I was never very good with a wand as a focus. I'm much better with the right tool than a Swiss Army knife. Since you can't always get the right focus, I learned to do most charms without one if I need to."
Her mouth puckered a bit, and I wasn't sure if she was upset or impressed. "Well, that may make it harder to teach you, here. We haven't taught anything but wand magic for decades. I wasn't sure there were any serious practitioners of other styles still in the Western world. This certainly makes your placement tests much more important."
I felt like I needed to throw the brakes on this whole educational train before it got too much momentum. "Ma'am, I really appreciate the headmaster sticking his neck out for me to keep me from being railroaded by the aurors. But I'd barely heard of Hogwarts before last night, and I certainly can't pay for a fancy Scottish boarding school for purebloods. I was honestly hoping that the US embassy would ship me back home to Chicago so I could get a job and try to pick up my GED."
She cocked her head like a confused animal, then admitted, "I'm not exactly sure what a GED is, Mr. Dresden, but there are difficulties with your plan. Mainly, that it won't be permitted for you to leave the country until we can convince the Ministry to lift the Doom of Damocles. While using muggle means might succeed, the aurors do keep an eye on flight and ship manifests, so it's far from guaranteed. However, I can assure you that this is not simply a school for the pureblooded elite, no matter how much they'd like others to think so. We have many students here on scholarship, including quite a few muggleborn. The headmaster has assured me that arranging your tuition will be a priority, as long as you're willing to put in the work."
I made a guess. "My mother went here?"
A flicker of pain, quickly concealed. None of the adults here seemed to want to be completely honest with me. "She did. Several of her own ancestors did so as well. Margaret was… a willful girl, and left here early and not on the best of terms. Like her son, she was eager to make her own way, perhaps to her own detriment. I simply ask that you give me an opportunity to prove to you that it's worth your time. Her life might have gone much differently, had she stayed at Hogwarts."
I wasn't even trying to be horrible, it just slipped out. "She wouldn't have married a muggle, died in childbirth, and lost her son in the American orphanage system, you mean?" I apparently wasn't ready to hear my mother, who my father had always told me was the most wonderful woman in the world, described as basically a delinquent high school dropout.
The woman's face went even more still than before, as if it was taking all of her skill at being a taciturn school marm from reacting. But I thought I saw a glimmer of tears in the corner of her eyes. Finally, after a long moment, she answered, "Something like that. Will you come with me to my office so we can discuss your placement exams, Mr. Dresden?"
As I followed her out, I caught a look of concern from the school nurse at the both of us, and a whispered, "Oh, Minerva…"
