Chapter 4: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Outdoors, in brilliant sunshine, on the rolling green lawns of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Neville and Susan are married with a degree of pomp and circumstance appropriate to Balkan royalty. In lieu of flower girls, the wedding procession includes a specially imported sphinx, which runs amok and claws the dress robes off a cowering Cornelius Fudge. Charlie pulls his wand and rushes forward, with a score of other scarred and sunburnt guests; it's easy to pick out the ones who've made a career of working with magical beasts. Shouting and brandishing their wands, the motley assortment of wedding guests at last coordinate Stunners and wrestle the animal to the ground. An athletic young witch in a slinky dress, now torn at the hem, covers the sphinx's heavy talon with her wand, hand quivering slightly, as Cornelius Fudge crawls out from beneath the outsized claw.
At the lavish outdoor reception Charlie is seated next to his old schoolfriend Nymphadora Tonks. She is negotiating a high chair between two dinner chairs as her bookish werewolf husband spins their shrieking thirteen-month-old daughter on the grass. Charlie looks at her and realizes how long it's been.
How little he has to show for the last nine years.
Under the influence of a couple of glasses of dark, dry, elf-brewed wine from the Longbottom cellar, Tonks becomes expansive, and she asks about his love life. As usual, she gets right to the point.
"So what are you waiting for?" she says.
"I'm waiting to meet the right woman." Charlie grimaces. "Or even a not obviously wrong one. That would do."
She laughs. She says, "I think you could find a not obviously wrong one anywhere, mate. Even in Romania."
He shakes his head. "Tonks, you don't know what it's like. No one who hasn't lived there can imagine what it's like. Some weeks I literally do not see a woman to speak to, except for Antonja and Marina."
Antonja she apparently remembers from his occasional chatty letters. He wrote more frequently when he first went out, when he still felt like life was happening to him. When he still had things to say. She asks, "Who's Marina?"
"Slovadan's sister." She raises her eyebrows. "A friend," he says firmly. "A friend."
"That's a good start," says Tonks.
Charlie shakes his head. "I've known her almost as long as I've known Slovadan. I've known her since she was sixteen. If there was anything there, I think, by now, we'd know. Besides," he says, "she doesn't speak much English and I don't really speak Romanian, so there's not much we can say to each other."
"That didn't stop Bill and Fleur."
Charlie chuckles. "That was pure animal magnetism, that was."
"And that's not what you're looking for?"
Charlie sighs. He says, a little sadly, "I'm looking for a girl who likes dragons and Quidditch. Who wouldn't mind raising a large family on a modest income. Who can put up with my parents and my siblings and my in-laws." He says, a little wistfully, "I'm looking for a girl who can fly."
"And you want to live in Transylvania?" she says.
He hesitates. Not for long. He says sadly, wistfully, honestly, "Yes. Yes, I do."
The dragons that Mrs. Longbottom at last obtained, after much dispatching of owls and pulling of strings, are as well-suited to residence in a petting zoo as any dragons can be to such a bizarre endeavor. One is so elderly and arthritic that Charlie merely hopes it won't keel over and die before the reception ends. The other one is far too young to leave its mother, and Charlie briefly contemplates penning an indignant missive to the Swedish Shortsnout Reservation. That's one place where he won't be applying for a job.
As the dragons are few, there is also a hippogriff, and a familiar one: Buckbeak, a.k.a. Witherwings, lent specially by the Order of the Phoenix. Buckbeak is plainly rather bored with the proceedings. He curls up in a patch of shade and goes to sleep, ignoring the stream of visitors eager to stroke his feathers. The elderly dragon follows Buckbeak's example, and the baby dragon noses happily in a patch of mud, splattering it on the lace-trimmed, pin-tucked, and dress-suited children who happen by.
Charlie is surprised to discover how easy his ridiculous assignment has turned out to be, and he is still more surprised when the young witch who helped stun the sphinx strolls up and asks him if he needs help with the dragons.
"Does it look like I need help?" he asks, half indignant, half amused.
She shrugs. "No, but you never know. I didn't think anyone was daft enough to want a dragon petting zoo at a wedding. I told Mrs. Longbottom she was asking for trouble—particularly if she went with Horntails. I couldn't talk her out of it, but at least she accepted my suggestion about the Shortsnouts. I work with hippogriffs," she adds, by way of explanation. "Psst—Beaky!" She bows.
Buckbeak lifts his sleepy head and nuzzles her affectionately.
Charlie takes a second look.
She is short and sturdily built, just as he is, with a muscular, outdoorsy look. Dark blonde hair is piled on top of her head, and a Muggle evening dress of violet chiffon sits uneasily on her shoulders. She has the bearing of a tomboy, an athlete, not a society girl. A thick raised scar runs down the right side of her face from her temple to the dimple in her chin. Scar tissue buckles over the corner of her right eye, and he knows without asking, without knowing how he knows, that she has no vision in that eye.
Part of him finds the scar repulsive, and part of him finds it fascinating. Erotic. It forms the oddest contrast to the blonde Hebe knot and the violet chiffon.
"It wasn't a hippogriff," she says, reading his thoughts.
"I'm sorry," says Charlie, humiliated. "I didn't mean to stare."
"I don't care," says the girl, "but it wasn't a hippogriff. I fell on the blade of a sword." She pauses. "I'm Katie," she says as an afterthought.
"I'm Charlie."
"I know."
He feels taken aback. Was he supposed to know her?
"I remember watching the Quidditch matches, my first year at Hogwarts," she says. "You were brilliant."
"Thanks," says Charlie, who still can't place her. "Which house were you in?"
"Gryffindor."
Oh.
"I was a Chaser," continues Katie.
Oh, oh, oh.
"Starting my second year."
Oh, lord.
She was on the team with Fred and George, then. With Fred and George and Ron and Ginny. And Harry. They must all have known her well. And if she made the team second year—which Charlie did, of course, but not many others—if she made the team second year, that she must have been pretty damn good.
She must think he's an idiot, a self-absorbed idiot, not even to know her name, when she spent six years playing Quidditch for Gryffindor with his four youngest siblings.
He finds himself staring wordlessly at this girl he ought to have known. Four hours later, distracted and chilly as the rising night wind whips through the thin fabric of his dress robes, he is still staring, over the Swedish Shortsnout crates and the shoulders of the departing guests, at the blonde Hebe knot, at the violet chiffon, at the scar.