Chapter Seventeen
"Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, an' a pair is six. Have some more shortcake, Effie?"
"Please, Sarah. With lots of cream on top."
"Comin' right up, Effie. Watch her so she doesn't move my pegs, John," Sarah Norton said as she got up from her chair.
Effie blew her a raspberry.
Agent Euphemia Kramarczuk, of the U.S. Department of Magic, was a very busy woman. But she also was fond of good homemade food, good people, and a good game of cribbage. And it was her part of her job to check in on rural underage magic-users, especially those in Muggle households. Her occasional visits to the Norton household allowed her to drop off some extra potions supplies for Severus (he was going through ginkgo and periwinkle and club moss like it was going out of style, the poor kid!), and to mix business with pleasure to the satisfaction of all concerned.
She normally wouldn't have been back more than once that summer to visit Severus and his Muggle guardians, but this was a special situation.
It seemed that Severus' presence had managed to trigger a tiny bit of latent magic in a young Muggle girl living with her grandmother next door. The girl would never be able to cast a spell on her own, but she could mentally commune with the young British wizard, which was remarkable in and of itself.
And, Effie smiled to herself, where she got her magic from was even more remarkable...
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It had happened on the afternoon after the trip to Winona.
Severus and Julie, fresh from helping Mr. Norton with the truck patch, were over at Mrs. Halvorson's place, learning to make lefse, a traditional Norwegian flatbread made from cooked and mashed potatoes that had come from her small garden behind the house. Hjordis was in the habit of making up huge batches of the stuff and giving it out as gifts to her friends, family, neighbors and anyone else she could catch. Severus had been given a sample of the finished product, rolled up and filled with lingonberries; he had to admit that it was one of the better things one could do with potatoes.
Mrs. Halvorson could no longer stand for any length of time, but Severus now could see where she got her strong arms. During the mashing, he watched with amazement as Mrs. Halvorson sat on her high stool and popped the large peeled spuds into the potato ricer, squeezing them faster than an eyeblink into long thin strands with no more trouble than if they had been lumps of warm butter. Severus had tried it himself, and found himself stopping to massage his hands after the fifth potato. Julie could only manage three before giving up and settling for mashing the potatoes that had been riced yesterday and then stored in the fridge.
"They roll out better if you give 'em a day to cool after they're riced," Julie explained as she set the large covered bowl on the kitchen table. "And mashing them now removes any lumps that might be left, and you wanna get out all the lumps before you add the flour."
Severus soon found that rolling out stiff lefse dough to the desired thickness – or rather, thinness – was somewhat challenging in itself. If the dough got close to room temperature, it became very difficult to handle.
Oh, well. Time for a little Cooling Charm, he decided.
"Mrs. Halvorson," he said.
The stout old woman turned towards him, and looked at him with those sharp eyes of hers. "Yes, Severus?"
"May I... try a bit of magic?"
Mrs. Halvorson smiled. "Go right ahead, dear," she said.
He thought he could hear Julie gasp next to him. Or maybe it was the mental gasp from her that he'd registered. Yes, Julie had told her gran that he was a wizard. But this would be the first time that he'd actually, well, demonstrated it in front of the lady.
With both Julie and Mrs. Halvorson watching his every move, the boy wizard unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. He then pulled his wand out from inside his shirt, from the chamois-leather-and-elastic wand holster Mrs. Norton had made for him.
"Frigidio minimus!" he called out, pointing his wand at the bowl of dough. A thin blue beam shot out from the wand and encircled the bowl for the briefest of moments. It then dissipated, leaving a slight coating of condensation on the outside of the bowl.
"Oh, my," said Mrs. Halvorson. She leaned over from her perch on the stool and touched the side of the mixing bowl for a second. She nodded knowingly as she pulled away her fingertips, now slightly damp from the condensation.
"That's a very good ability to have, Severus," she said, twisting herself on the stool so she could face him. "Did you learn it, or could you always do it?"
"Both, actually," he said, putting his wand away back inside his shirt. "What I mean is, I've always had the ability to use the spell, once it was taught to me."
"Hmmm. And you can talk with Julie?" Her face suddenly scrunched up as if she were in pain.
...talk like this?...
It was a whisper compared to Julie's near-shout, but it was there.
Erm, yes I can, Ma'am, he replied in kind, and with considerably less effort than she'd exerted.
Mrs. Halvorson clapped her hands together and laughed. "Good for you, dear! I thought that Julie and I were the only ones alive who could do that trick." She looked over at her smiling granddaughter. Severus thought he caught the faintest suggestion of a message being exchanged, but couldn't quite make it out. Whatever it was, it suddenly caused Julie's smile to get even wider.
"Severus," Julie said, "Gran'd like to show you something else she can do, if you wouldn't mind." You'll just love this, she whispered to him mentally.
"Erm... all right." What?
"Super!" Don't worry. Just watch and don't interrupt Gran, okay?
Okay...
Julie turned to her grandmother. After a moment, her grandmother nodded.
Julie walked over to the large wooden block where her grandmother stored all her knives. She pulled out a small paring knife.
Severus had a sick feeling about what was to come next. Julie, no!
"Don't worry, Severus – it'll be all right. Watch."
With the knife in her right hand, Julie turned over the forearm on her left, so it was facing upwards. Then, ever so carefully, she cut herself an inch-long gash right on the inside of her forearm, two inches or so below the elbow.
JULIE!
Julie's eyes pinned and held Severus in place. "Severus, watch. It's OK, you'll see." She turned to her grandmother, holding the cut and bleeding arm out for her to inspect. Severus felt as if he were watching some ancient blood ritual, and he suddenly had a vision of Hjordis as an old Norse wise-woman, preparing a thrall for sacrifice.
But sacrifice was not what happened.
Mrs. Halvorson calmly put her hand over the wound and closed her eyes. Her face contorted in a grimace, and her hand trembled slightly. Even standing where he was, Severus could feel a power of some sort flowing from her into her granddaughter.
And when she pulled her hand away, the cut was gone. Not just sealed up, but gone.
Julie looked up smugly at an astonished Severus. "See, I told you it would be OK."
Severus looked at the spot where the cut was, then at Mrs. Halvorson. Then he looked back at the spot, and then again at Mrs. Halvorson.
"You're a bloodstopper, aren't you?" was the first coherent thing he could think of saying.
Mrs. Halvorson smiled. "You betcha, sonny. Been one since I was a little girl." She looked over at Julie, who smiled back at her. "I was hoping Julie would be one, too, but she hasn't showed the signs yet. But she and I – and you – can mind-talk. And that's close enough for Government work."
"And no American wizarding people ever came for you?"
"Nope. Well, actually," Mrs. Halvorson said, correcting herself, "one did. But when I held the wand he gave me to hold, I couldn't so much as shoot off a spark. So they wrote me as just a bloodstopper and left it at that."
Now it was Julie's turn to be astonished. "Gran," she said, half outraged, "you never told me about that!"
"Didn't think you'd believe me. And it was so long ago. But I've told you now, both of you."
Light was dawning for Severus, on many things. "That was why you became a nurse, wasn't it, Ma'am?"
"Ah-hum. It was wartime, I wasn't really trained, but they had programs and they needed bodies. They put me in a nurse's uniform almost before I knew how to swab an arm for a tetanus shot." Her eyes got a faraway look to them. "It was okay then, it was wartime, the guys at the front wouldn't say anything. Nobody was going to get the heebie-jeebies over somebody who was just a little bit better at healing things than the next gal. Besides, they were all local boys, I knew most of them back home. But then I got caught in a red-tape snafu."
"Snafu?"
Hjordis snorted. "The fancy term is 'bureaucratic error'. I was transferred, for no particular reason, to a Stateside hospital, barely three months after I went overseas. Couldn't get un-transferred. Didn't do as well there. Too many doctors were wondering why too many people with knife and gun wounds suddenly were turning up without a scratch on them the next day."
She stopped for a long moment, a moment in which Severus could hear the hum of the machine he now knew was an air-conditioner, coming from the parlor. "So I came back to the farm. Got married, helped my late husband Oscar – that's him on the mantel in the parlor, in the big leather frame; we were just starting to go out when that picture was taken – well, I helped him run the farm, raise a bunch of kids, watched them grow up and have kids of their own; they weren't much older than you and Julie when they did, but they're all doing fine." She smiled at Severus then, and if he wasn't already sure that she would give them her blessing, he knew now. "Later on, I volunteered at some of the local nursing homes, the ones that had the vets from the war in them. I knew they'd never talk. But that stopped when I got the gout and my memory went kerflooey."
Severus looked at Mrs. Halvorson. Here was a woman who wanted nothing more than to be useful, who was put on this earth to work, to heal, to make things better. And yet for most of her life, she wasn't allowed to use her most potent gift. But her magic wasn't the kind that could be channeled into other uses.
It could, however, be passed on. And if what he'd suspected was the case, then any moment now –
CRRAAAACK!
Three heads whipped around to look out of Mrs. Halvorson's kitchen window. A woman in a smartly-tailored three-piece suit and a straw boater on her head was standing just outside, peering at them through dark-rimmed cat-eye glasses. She looked down at a piece of parchment in her hand, then back up at Mrs. Halvorson, who was motioning at her to come inside the house.
CRRACCCK!
The woman was now in the kitchen, standing next to the refrigerator, looking somewhat perplexed. Then she saw Severus, and laughed.
"Never a dull moment with you around, kiddo," she said.
"Which one of us set off the alarm?" asked Severus,
"You all did," she replied, setting her briefcase out in front of her on an imaginary invisible shelf.
"We all did?"
"Ah-humm. By the way," she said, lifting up head, "I should probably introduce myself to your friends. Mrs. Halvorson, I'm Euphemia Kramarczuk of the United States Department of Magic..."