Chapter 6: The Writings of Willard the Reformed
They crept along, single-file, trying their best to make no noise. George occasionally whispered "Right up here," or "Watch your heads along this one," as they made their way down three levels of passages and behind the brick wall that made up the back of the kitchen. Within five minutes the six friends were aligned behind minute cracks and crevices, peering out at the three girls and the dusty man. He gazed turtlishly at the cousins, the too-large but well-starched jacket lending a shell-like quality to his back.
"Sir," said Elizabeth, smiling prettily, "I'm afraid that I don't understand your logic."
"Well," said the man, pushing his lank brown hair behind his ears, "Rowena Ravenclaw is a witch, so therefore you all must be witches."
"But she—" Elizabeth pointed at Pallas, distaste evident on her features, "is most definitely not a witch. She's the child of Squibs, good heavens man." She laughed like an Empress confronted with an embarrassingly biological manner far too low for her to take seriously.
The man peered at Pallas, whose profile was visible to Harry through the crack in the wall. One of her pale blue eyes was visible as she sent a jagged look at Elizabeth's prim face. "Well, she's got to be," said the man practically. "Because out of the six great-granddaughters, the one too old is Athena, the Squib is Helen, Luna's sister, and the girl who died is—"
"I never knew Luna had a sister," Ginny whispered to Harry. "Did she say anything about it to you?"
"No, shhh," Harry shushed her.
"We know, Master Troy," Elizabeth said with obvious patience. "You've said it many times."
"Well," the man—Master Troy—said, rather taken aback. "Then you should understand." He turned around when the girl opened her pink mouth to protest then closed it, her chin poking out in defiance. Luna and Pallas exchanged bland glances as Troy flipped through his many rolls of parchment, coming up with a dusty half-sheet that looked as though someone had spilled a cup of tea on it. He cleared his throat noisily and began to read.
"From the records of Brother Willard the Reformed, recorder of the Abbey of St. James the Lesser, year of our Lord 989.
"Today was a marvelous day for we simple monks of St. James, for today we were visited by the most lovely woman in Christendom. Well, actually it was quite dreadful, reminded me of all the bloody sex I had to give up when I took my vows. She was very beautiful, but traveled alone but for a man whom I must assume is her keeper or husband. Nay, not husband, for she wore not a ring, but still there to keep her away from rogues. And monks. In fact, that boy was damned irritating. Wouldn't even let me help the lady with her cloak, only stalked about and demanded to know where Godric Gryffindor was."
The man scanned ahead a bit, raised his eyebrows appreciatively, and continued.
"—The most remarkable feature of this girl was her hair, long hair so fair as to be near white, as shiny as water on a clear day. It fell in a most comely fashion to her hips—and those made every Brother regret his vows to God, but this fine hair also hid her face from us, as though she were ashamed of it. Since I remained in the gatehouse after being rebuked by that lout of a man, I saw what the others did not, including her bare ankle as she sat and stood." Troy paused and skipped past what came next, two spots of pink appearing under his gray skin. "But I did see that she was not marked by pox nor made less beautiful by age. The Abbot did dare to ask the lady her name, and though she looked away in her maidenly shyness, her varlet answered fearlessly: "Her name is Rowena, and she is long betrothed." After this they took their leave north, presumably to find this Godric, who I must assume hold the ring for the lady."
Pallas went white, her pupils flaring to their most indignant size. "Wait just a bloody moment," she commanded. "Do you mean to say that if any of us are Rowena, we've got to go back in time and marry some bloke twice our age?" She shook her head violently, disgusted by the thought. Harry watched in horror as he saw Pallas's thick blonde ponytail swish on her back, at least waist length though it was very tangled. It was a fine head of hair, bleached almost white at the tips by the sun. Luna blinked blandly up at Troy, who was watching Elizabeth nervously. The third girl was white with anger, her teeth were grinding audibly, and it was suddenly very apparent that her hair was barely shoulder length.
"Boy, she's really eager to do this, isn't she?" Harry murmured under his breath to George, who was at the hole next to him.
George made a muted, but still very rude noise. "She's welcome to it. I don't want Pallas to get whisked off someplace where she'll get felled by the plague in a week."
"Rowena Ravenclaw didn't die of the plague," Hermione whispered from Harry's other side. "It's in Hogwarts, A History."
Harry leaned back as George climbed over and past him in the narrow passageway to stand next to Hermione. "How does she die?" George demanded. In the faint light shining through the peepholes, Harry could see that Hermione was taken aback. "How does Rowena die?"
"I—I don't know," Hermione stuttered. "I just know that she doesn't die of the plague." George harrumphed and fell silent once more, his freckled face indignant in the twilight of the passageway. She raised her eyebrows at Ginny, who stifled a giggle.
"He's not very deft at hiding his feelings when it comes to girls," Ginny said quietly from his far left. "It's pretty funny, actually."
Harry blinked at her, taking a moment to consider what she'd said. "What? You mean—George and Pallas—she's a little kid!" he sputtered. "She's only twelve!"
"Thirteen," Ginny corrected him. "Her birthday was yesterday."
"But still—" Harry protested, then Ginny clapped a hand over his mouth and pointed out into the room where Luna was trying to engage Troy in a discussion about Ramoras, the powerful silver fish that could anchor ships and whether or not Fudge had used a pair of them to create a pair of unique leather boots. For a moment Harry didn't understand why Ginny wanted him to pay attention, then he saw Elizabeth leaning over to Pallas, her fingers bunched up tightly in her wand pocket. Pallas was busy with the laces on her ratty trainers and didn't see it coming.
"Oh, shit," George said in a normal tone that echoed in the narrow passageway.
Pallas looked up curiously, and Elizabeth's wand hit her directly in the eye. "Ow!" she cried, striking out automatically and knocking Elizabeth out of her chair and into the smoking coals of the fire. Pallas jumped to her feet, one hand clasped over her eye, and in the confusion Harry saw her cousin hit her with a curse, the words muffled by Eponine's shriek as a flaming coal abruptly shortened her hem, and then a firm hand grabbed his shoulder.
"You think that servants don't know about servant's passages?" Rory asked grimly. She seized Harry by the ear (something that he hadn't had done since he was seven and had tried to run away from school) and marched him upstairs with Ginny in her other hand. Fred and George had run for it down the other end of the passageway, and Harry suspected Ron was with them. He felt Hermione's breath of the back of his neck as he was dragged up the passageway.
"Now listen, all of you," Rory said, releasing them and looking each in the eyes in turn. "If I ever—and I mean ever catch any of you down in those passages spying on any Order business again, I'll modify your memories myself." Her face didn't inspire the kind of fear that Dumbledore's or McGonagall's did when one was in trouble, but the desperation in her voice gave Harry some momentary feelings of guilt. "I'm charged by Dumbledore to keep the Order Meetings secret and I've never failed in a job."
"Don't worry," said Ginny with a reassuring smile and a hand on Rory's shoulder. "We'll do as you say."
Rory made a disbelieving noise, but then smiled tightly and pointed up the stairs. "You all need to go upstairs, and don't think I won't be making sure that you're all there."
"But Pallas! That evil cousin of hers just hexed her," Harry exclaimed. "Shouldn't we check and see if she's all right?"
"Elizabeth? She doesn't have a wand. How on earth would she hex someone?"
"Hex who? She just poked me in the bloody eye with it," Pallas snapped around a hefty chunk of ice. "I didn't think that wands had many practical uses, but trust Elizabeth to find a good one." She was in a high bad temper and stormed upstairs despite Rory's soft protests. Ginny watched her go with a slightly amused expression, Hermione with concern, and Harry wondered why on earth Pallas hadn't thrown a punch at Elizabeth (or anyone, really). It was a display of self-control that surpassed his expectations of her.
"Oh," Rory gasped suddenly. "I forgot. Will you take these things upstairs? They're Miss Leander's—her father thought that she'd want them." She pulled out a shopping bag that was half-full of various things—a few pairs of jeans, a smelly pair of spikes, a field hockey stick, several hockey balls, and a soccer ball.
Harry took the handles of the bag as Ginny reached inside and took out the soccer ball. "What's this? It's weird." She twirled it absentmindedly as they continued up the stairs to the room Pallas was sharing with Hermione and herself. The door was closed. Harry knocked hesitantly.
"Piss off!"
He really hadn't expected her to welcome them with tea and biscuits, so in reply he opened the door all the way, ducking a pillow as he entered. Harry paused in horror at the scene that greeted them. Pallas was perched on a chair so that she could see herself in the gold-rimmed mirror over the fireplace, a pocketknife in one hair, her long hair caught up in the other. For a moment he was transfixed with the fear that she had already taken a chunk out of her hair or perhaps her neck, but when Hermione rushed over and relieved her of the knife, it was clear she hadn't yet.
"Give that back!" Pallas yelled, overturning the chair as she jumped down. "What're you playing at?"
"Where did you get that?" Ginny asked, taking the knife from Hermione and examining it. "This is George's—did you steal it?"
"Borrowed," Pallas corrected, fingering her swollen eye. She seemed to have shrunken with the loss of her weapon of choice. "I just wanted to make sure that I would get home in one piece."
"You can't expect Elizabeth to leave you alone if you cut off your hair," Hermione said practically. "She's just angry that she's not good enough."
"I bet she works some witchery tonight and comes up with blonde hair to her knees tomorrow." Pallas fingered one of her tangles wistfully. "If only I could do that—cut it all off until Elizabeth or Luna gets zapped back to god-knows-when, and then do a little magic and have it all back." Her hippogriff's eyes settled on Harry. "What's all that?"
"Your dad sent it," Harry said, plunking it down on the faded carpet. "Its mostly sports stuff, but there's some clothes in here."
Pallas walked over and ran her hands over the spikes and jeans, then stopped, suddenly very cold and very angry. "Why has he sent it?"
"I think he thinks you've been accepted into some sort of summer camp," Harry said blithely despite Hermione's meaningful look in his direction and Ginny's meaningful foot stomping on his.
"And...if I'm sent back to whenever...he'll just forget about me?" Pallas flushed and her eyes snapped to each of them in turn, reading the guilty looks like banners. "Well isn't that just lovely," she said in a voice of forced calm, and then picked up the soccer ball and threw it at the mirror so hard that it shattered into a thousand glittering pieces. Harry ducked behind the door and avoided most of the flying splinters, but didn't quite manage to avoid the lamp that smashed against the doorframe.
Hermione, who bore a small cut across the bridge of her nose, cried out "Pallas, get a hold on yourself!"
"Tell those bastards that run your government to get a hold on their ears so that their heads don't get stuck in their asses!" she shrieked. "They've got it all worked out so that I just stop existing, I don't have a choice, and they've told my father that I'm at a summer camp when I'm stuck in this stupid house with a bunch of stupid wizards and a bunch of stupid wands and pictures and bloody homicidal cousins..."
"I'll try and calm her down," Ginny said, and pushed Harry and Hermione out of the room.
It was no surprise to either of them that Ginny stomped out of the room less than a minute later, mussed and looking hassled. "There's no reasoning with a maniac," she said, her voice high and thin with frustration.
"None at all," Hermione reassured her with a pat on the shoulder. "Come on, lets go upstairs and wait for her to calm down."
Harry thought that this might be a long time coming, considering Pallas's stunted history of forgiveness and grace. It was more likely that she would either show up bald at breakfast or punch Elizabeth's lights out. It was clear that she was capable of either, and Harry knew which one he preferred. He allowed himself to get sucked into the girl's conversation as they went upstairs to wait out the storm.
Waldo's office was quite a sight to behold. Stacks of papers and files stood as high as the ceiling, cabinets with their doors half-off stuffed with thick books and albums. A huge easel in the corner farthest from the door held the genealogies of every significant family from before the fall of Rome to the present day. A large box of scrolls teetered on top of a stack of portraits and photographs. Waldo's desk was a magnificent antique oaken thing, which would have taken at least five men to move. It was buried under folders and notebooks and hundreds of loose pages of his notes on his viewings of the past.
Troy flipped through Waldo's notes for what seemed the hundredth time. "How did the old man know which girl?" he mumbled to himself as his pick- like fingers riffled through the yellowing parchment. "Even Waldo's past- sight was hairy at best. The only way he'd be able to tell is if he had actually talked to the real Rowena in the past, and none of that is in here." In frustration he crumpled up a piece of parchment that documented Waldo's unsuccessful attempt to prove that Wyoming was really just a giant hole in the middle of North America and pushed the rest of the papers onto the floor.
Which, in retrospect, was a really dumb idea. Not only did it not suddenly reveal the true Rowena Ravenclaw, but it also put the already unorganized papers into a higher level of disarray. In fact, the only things revealed were several long scratched in the top of the desk that looked unnervingly like claw-marks. Troy heaved his slouching frame wearily out of Waldo's chair and crawled about on the floor, trying to round the papers up.
"Er—is this a bad time?"
Troy was forced to look around his hind end from his position on the floor to see a dusty mirror the size of about half a sheet of parchment. It had been cracked more than once, and the spider's web of shiny silver made the face of the young boy in the mirror look like a cubist painting. The boy raised his eyebrows politely. He was wearing a tall, white, powdered wig with several layers of curls framing a face only slightly less round than Troy's. With carefully concealed dismay, he bowed from the waist.
The hapless Ministry official scrambled to his feet and bowed in return, aware that he looked like a fool. "Excuse me, but—who are you?"
"Viscount Albert the fifth. Who are you? I wasn't aware that Mousier Waldo's mirror had been relocated. What year is it in your time?" the boy demand. His voice faded in and out as if it were coming from a badly tuned radio. One moment it was rather too loud, the next it was a bare whisper. Troy suddenly felt a little bad about how often he had laughed behind Waldo's back at his odd manner of speaking. The poor old man had probably considered it quite normal after all his conversations with people through his magic mirror.
"It's 1996," Troy said, completely nonplussed. "What's your year?"
"1713. Has Waldo died then?"
"No, but he's gone mad."
"What?" Albert scoffed. "What on earth do you mean by mad? Insubordinate cheek!" His fragmented face faded for a moment, then sharpened. "Who are you? I need to warn the others not to use this mirror if you're on the other end now."
"Wait!" Troy shouted, scrambling over Waldo's desk. "Wait, don't go! I'm just one of the—the servant-ish things around here. I didn't mean to offend you."
"Yes, I suspected that," said Albert condescendingly. "You seem far too simple to operate the mirror." He rested his boyish face on his cupped hands. "What do you want?"
"I'd like to tap into your expansive wisdom, good sir," Troy replied, very relieved that he had not driven the pompous viscount away. He realized that talking to this young noble was going to be a lot like talking to Fudge: shameless flattering. "How do all these mirrors work, enlightened one?"
"Well, actually there's only about seven of them," Albert replied. "But since different people possessed them at different times there's an awful lot of people you can reach through them. You just breathe on the mirror and speak the name of the person you want to talk to. Then you wait a few moments while the mirror looks for them and voila."
The Ministry official wrinkled his forehead and tried to look as dumb as Albert was making him feel. "Can I use it to call my grandmother?"
The viscount laughed heartily. "No, my dear simpleton, you can only talk to someone who has another mirror. I think that by 1996 there's only one mirror left, so it's highly unlike your grandmother is hiding one in her petticoats."
Troy bowed deeply from the waist. "Does this prince of wisdom know of one called Rowena Ravenclaw?"
Albert snorted. "Just turn over the mirror, stupid." His face faded from view.
With trembling hands Troy lifted the mirror off it's hook on the wall and looked on the back. It was covered in plate glass, beneath which symbols written in mercury twisted and turned fitfully. Etched into the plate glass, worn almost smooth with age, was the symbol of an eagle. Beneath it, in small, precise handwriting, was the name of the maker.
"Rowena Ravenclaw!"
Author's Note: Gah! I love this, but it's so distracting, especially when I've got finals to cram for. However, judging by the newborn and yet unpublished chapter, I do my best when I'm not supposed to be writing. Review, por favor.