Chapter 1 'Immersus totalus!'

Never better than at night under rain, Hogsmeade.

He hadn't sensed it upon apparating, not right away, but then apparating had a way of fritzing the brains. One blots oneself between the folds of space and time, becomes a smear on creation, and cracks with an audible pop the miles between Catchpole and Hogsmeade. So marvelously strange, apparition. Lovegood was still getting used to it. Also, it was his first time visiting Hogsmeade outside the daylight hours prescribed traditional Hogwarts students—one of whom he'd been only months before—and also, the house they called Shambhala wasn't where it was supposed to be, unless the house they called Shambhala was actually a worn, scrimshawed canoe lashed to an oak tree in the little lawn framed by Dervish & Banges, the Black Lake, and Hogsmeade Station. Naturally he was a bit dazed.

He stood a moment getting rained on, sniffing the wet world in, acclimating himself. He regarded the canoe. Of course that would be Shambhala. Another damned test. He'd have to find just the spell to make it show true. Probably all the others were in there already—Duck and them, even Coyne, watching him, making bets, giggling into their hot chocolates. Well, let 'em laugh. Linus Lovegood was nothing if not his parents' child: they'd reared him up to esteem rain and rainy nights especially. Amble! See the world no one's looking at—see it how it wasn't designed to be seen… Thus, with an arched eyebrow, he acknowledged the-canoe-that-was-probably-his-new-house and turned to make his way up High Street, not bothering to shield himself from the downpour, since rain was for soaking and best indulged.

It applauded on landing, smothered other smells, delineated the radiance of lantern light. It scattered all but the most indigent: here were streets and alleys swept clear, bouncing with rain's percussion. It splashed from shingled roofs and sluiced burbling to his feet. It branched in its thousands down Scrivenshaft's dusty windows and made a fuzz of the air above the cobblestone walk spanning Gladrags.

Lovegood moved to the center of the road and craned his face up into the rain, happy in his private manner. He knew where he was going.

Curled against the Three Broomsticks' exterior wall a pauper came coughingly awake, flicked a wand from his sodden vest and growled 'Umbrellus.' As the rain redirected itself around his magical shelter, a cheerful susurrus from within the tavern reached laughing crescendo, a flying coach galloped into town and an ethereal muskrat nibbled its way down the street in the other direction. The pauper's sneer had maybe a dozen hazel teeth in it. 'Sickel for your health, guv,' he said. Lovegood flipped him one and opened the door to honeyed light and crackling hearths.

He thought: Hogsmeade was born on a rainy night.

A shadowy booth to his left erupted with dejection—mostly dejection.

'Nine minutes and forty seconds past the hour,' cried Edwin Duck, tucking away his watch and grinning at his mates. 'Pay me what you owe me, you beautiful squibs!'

Lovegood charmed himself dry and gravitated over. A party of four sandwiched a table busy with squat glasses of firewhisky. 'Am I lucky for you, Duck?'

The older boy stood to greet him. 'Are you ever not?' Tawny forelock jaunty beneath a mortarboard that didn't fit well, narrow jade eyes mirthful, mouth big and pink and freighted with humor. Lovegood hadn't seen him since graduation day, and was grateful now to be able to convincingly pretend not to remember where that day had gone. Duck clasped Lovegood's hand and—slightly shorter—leaned up. 'Though I'll admit,' he whispered, moist breath hot on Lovegood's ear, 'twenty more seconds and I'm bankrupt. You had me worried! But sit, old boy,' he said, voice raised, 'as you can see, you're expected! Make room, Poppy!'

The girl next to Duck scooted nearer the booth's wall. Duck gently pushed Lovegood into the middle, where his thigh docked along hers in a startling access of warmth.

Poppy wore her magnificent red hair in a tall, leaky construction that wobbled as she spoke.

'Poppy Bardot, isn't it?' said Lovegood.

'Isn't it always? I can't escape the fiend!'

Could've been Duck's fraternal twin, Poppy, with her slender green eyes and prolific lips, though where he was wry and incorrigible she was subtle and feline. Lovegood had nearly forgotten about the notch of space between her front teeth.

'Everyone knows Poppy,' Duck explained. 'And of course you know our Coyne—'

Magda Coyne across the table, Lovegood's year but Slytherin, plump from certain angles, long wheat locks protectively deployed, a whiteness to her skin that, even slumped in a dim corner, bothered the eye like lightning. They nodded to each other.

'But you've never met Eve. I have it on good authority. "Linus Lovegood?" she said, just about ten minutes ago, "Who's that?" So here he is and there you are, Eve Alysser-Wren. Greenest Chief meet Senior Chief. Get it over with.'

In fact he wasn't unfamiliar with the name, both sides of the hyphen among the oldest in Wizardry. Thin, severe, gold-blonde, fine-boned, immaculate…so delicate that she was, though young and in bloom, nearly a ghost already.

'I'm Lovegood,' said Lovegood.

'O.K.,' she breathed, big round sky-blue eyes a little alarmed by the introduction.

'The bet was ten minutes?'

Duck was giddy. 'We were just about to go back to meet you at the appointed hour when the rain started. But it was such a deluge. I said "Let's stay." Coyne said "He ain't gonna find us here!" '

'That is not at all how I talk,' said Magda Coyne, coloring.

'And I said to her, "A galleon says my mate comes through that door no more than ten minutes past the hour."'

Poppy decanted half her firewhisky into a glass she handed to Lovegood. 'The rest of us thought Shambhala would hold your attention for at least a little while.'

'I assumed you were all in that canoe, somehow, laughing at me.'

'Was it a canoe for you?' said Coyne, with interest.

'Yes. What did you see?'

'My grandmum's figgy pudding.'

'Lashed to the…?'

'To the tree, yes. I mean, I think I've said before someone ought to take it out and, you know,' she giggled, 'tie it to a tree or something, but,' she caught up with herself, cleared her throat, 'I am, in this life, as a rule, ignored.'

Duck glanced over his shoulder towards the bar, then, wand covert and nonverbally, refilled their glasses of red smoking firewhisky. 'I must say, Coyne did give the pudding quite a whacking. Old Warwind himself would've been proud.'

'She did whack it about,' Poppy agreed, inclining her glass to Coyne. 'Did you rate an O in Transfigurations? Your revealing spell took my breath away.'

'Not all it took away, alas,' Duck smiled. 'Besides unvanishing the communal house, Coyne revealed the spirt of every animal that's ever lived in it! Intensely crowded there for a bit.'

Coyne shifted uncomfortably. 'Been having trouble with my wand, actually.'

'Really?' Eve perked. 'With the silver lime, even so?'

Magda frowned. 'To tell the truth, we've never exactly seen eye to eye.'

This was news to Lovegood. Throughout his time there, all Hogwarts had persisted in a state of whispering delirium regarding those select few students who'd been 'chosen' by wands of silver lime—which, aside from its native beauty, was said to possess a singular felicity for the legilimancer's arts. This went a long way in explaining how an otherwise anonymous half-blood like Magda Coyne could have achieved status of any kind in Professor Vito Warwind's House of Slytherin—or so at any rate claimed her (no doubt envious) detractors. Lovegood had heard the whispers but maintained neutrality, so it was interesting to discover now, after he and Magda had earned their hats together three scant months before, that the wand perhaps hadn't been the thing at all.

He said, 'Was there a muskrat?'

After a brief silence Poppy replied, 'Owls, mostly, and cats. Why do you ask?'

He polished off his glass in one draught and wiped his mouth dry. 'I saw one, walking the street.'

'That's my Lovegood,' said Duck, laughing, topping him off and raising his glass. 'Or should I say our Lovegood, and our Coyne, the newest Secret Chiefs of Shambhala. May we all someday—'

'Avast, Edwin,' said Eve. 'You're jumping ahead!'

'That's true,' Poppy said, 'but you mustn't blame Eddy. He only pretends to know things so the rest of us don't have to. Just a second year Chief himself, isn't he? Eddy's never had to say goodbye to anyone.'

Lovegood wasn't completely oblivious to the rituals. He raised his glass. 'To Peter Pringle and Marta Prym.'

'Right,' Magda followed, 'Secret Chiefs no more.'

'Oh dear,' said Eve. 'Who's going to feed us now that Marta's gone?'

Duck was bold: 'Why not me? What could be so bloody hard about poaching a few eggs? To Peter and Marta, may they make proud the shabby house of Shambhala. And may we all one day stand for our CATs and get on becoming grown-ups, but let that day—'

And here Poppy and Eve, rousing herself, joined in: '—take its sweet time coming!'

Five glasses collided wetly over the table's middle.

୫

A sporadic traffic of Hogsmeaders entered and left the Three Broomsticks over the next hour as the newly established Secret Chiefs got to know each other. Outside, rain fell unflagging, a muted background glurgle that framed the chit-chat and crackling fires within.

For Lovegood, Duck alone constituted a known quantity: like him a Ravenclaw, but one year ahead. He was the worst sort of charismatic: innovative at mischief, good at roping friends in, luckless at escaping justice. (Among other stunts Lovegood could recall, he'd enchanted a bench to fly off with a napping Professor Smila Perch before an exam in Magical Creatures, hermetically sealed the Gryffindor training room moments prior to their Quidditch final against Ravenclaw, and turned himself into a red squirrel for a fortnight to avoid going home for Christmas.) Duck's was a fairly distinguished name in Wizardry—an advantage he leveraged whenever in trouble at Hogwarts: nothing like a nice shiny patrimony in your back pocket when staring down the wand of discipline.

Lovegood believed Duck squandered much of his talent. Matchless at transfiguration, he'd applied himself less strenuously to his other subjects and had only attained a seat in Shambhala on the strength of his remarkably durable animagus (the aforementioned squirrel). If he could pull off his graduate project, all British Wizardry would remember his name forever: he planned to transform into two red squirrels simultaneously. But, Lovegood privately suspected, if anyone were ever to achieve such a coup, it wouldn't be Edwin Duck.

Duck had littered his seven years as a Traditional with fast-blooming, high-color relationships that wilted in his wake like mushrooms allergic to light. Lovegood wasn't the only victim of his special gravity: over the six years they'd overlapped in Ravenclaw he'd seen scores tugged in. People wanted Duck to think them useful, which was a dangerous power to have, really, and one most would have trouble handling responsibly—or so Lovegood thinks now, athwart him in a booth getting toasty on ill-gotten spirits.

Opposite Duck both positionally and metaphorically was Eve Alysser-Wren, scion of one of the richest houses in Wizardry and the most mature and mysterious of the Secret Chiefs. Lovegood had the impression of a witch long accustomed to privilege—that remote station inaccessible to the less auspiciously sired. Probably she'd not deny it nor likely ever considered it at all shameful. In Lovegood's experience, privilege was a secret third parent, spoiling and influential, a shadow planet that swayed the tides of an infant's make-up.

She was polite but not at all forthcoming. Ceremony got her attention—as when the proper order of acknowledgements for Shambhala House graduates and newcomers was nearly reversed—but what Lovegood could muster in terms of direct sallies were absorbed harmlessly into her distracted whitegold aura. And Lovegood was distinctly uncomfortable with direct sallies. He accepted that she was a superlative Gryffindor witch perhaps unusually keen to status, that her blood was old as Merlin's, that she was five years his senior, a fastidious drinker, and that her course of study lay in curses. The rest would come, or wouldn't, with time.

Next to her: Coyne. He had no memories of Magda Coyne from the very beginning, those wild first hours in the Hogwarts Express all but floating with excitement and apprehension; the chilly Black Lake supporting the creaking boats commanded by Professor Perch, Hogwarts Castle a forbidding citadel of secrets looming ever larger as saltless breezes took them up; the smash of fellow first-years through the tremendous door; Warwind's inimitable baritone in greeting; the sheer dizziness of Sorting… Sometimes it seemed that whole first year was a fire in his memory. But the peculiar visage of Magda Coyne began cropping up in Lovegood's recollections very early indeed: a doughy little alabaster face he'd realize suddenly was looking at him from some shaded hollow, some dark nook. She was a creature of dark nooks, filled with looking, always pushing her wheated hair over her ears. They had History of Magic together right off with Professor Binns—this well before the field took hold of him. He wasn't an indifferent student—his parents overlooked everything but intellectual laziness—but Magda buried him beneath the pitch in that class. Smart girl, Miss Coyne—ten points to Slytherin. Yes, Miss Coyne. Miss Coyne again? Ten points to Slytherin. Another ten to Slytherin. Anyone else care to have a go?

The pattern repeated in other classes he shared with her over the next two years, and then, as a third-year, overhearing gossip at Ravenclaw's table in the Great Hall, he'd pieced together that those performances were exceptions—that in fact her customary scholastic pose was one of strict silence and grudging participation. After adding to this fact certain aspects of her behavior towards him he summed it all up awkwardly: she wanted to impress the Ravenclaw lad with the intelligent air. She fancied him.

Baffled by girls in the blandest circumstances, Linus was completely foxed. He went to great pains to avoid her. When at the end of term last June he'd arrived at the Headmistress's office to receive his graduate assignment he'd been taken aback to find Coyne coming out. Now here they were, entering at the same time the most exclusive of Hogwarts' five graduate houses, where the next however many years would find them studying side-by-side, sleeping under the same roof. Of course he'd wondered if she'd done it on purpose…but that was preposterous. Still, even after seven years of his polite non-engagement, she seemed at times to falter in his presence.

Ask anyone about Magda Coyne and the first thing you'd hear was silver lime wand. Lovegood wasn't immune to the appeal. The wood itself was lovely: blonde and delicately textured with swooping arterial age-rings. Magda's was eight and three-quarter inches, bendy and knobbled, a beautiful stick from an enchanted forest with one luminous strand of kelpy hair slotted into its core. The larger share of the wood's celebrity however came from its supposed attunement with Legilimens and Seers—brands of magic enjoying a moment all across Britannia. Even Muggledom swooned at the slippered feet of mediums: society-types in London linking frail bejeweled hands round candlelit tables commanded by dilettantes with exotic scarves intoning mumbo jumbo; salad days for crystal balls, incense, palmistry, beads. Lovegood had seen actual legilimency only once: a visitor to old Senilius Fludd's Dark Arts class in fifth year, albino bloke named Rake Something, or Something Rake, could've been a recent graduate just going from looks but then it was hard to judge given the absence of pigment. Ended up being one of the most memorable experiences he'd ever had at Hogwarts—though not pleasantly.

But Magda, though the daughter of one, was not herself a seer. She'd flourished finally among animals, and had taken for her initial graduate project the rather difficult task of proving that a certain mythical bird never existed. The oozlum.

'Don't you mean the weejy weejy bird?' winked Duck.

'It's complicated. The weejy weejy's a one-winged variation of the oozlum. It might actually have existed. But the oozlum didn't. I'm almost sure of it.'

Poppy covered a burp. 'I've never heard of either.'

Magda took a deep breath, magiced a sheet of parchment from her wand and started drawing on it with same. 'According to the Australian Aborigine, if one were to startle an oozlum, he would leap high up into the air and fly backwards in smaller and smaller circles…until disappearing…'

Lovegood noted the pinking of her face, only imperfectly concealed by her hair as she hunched, drawing. 'Disappearing how?'

'Disappearing,' she said, rotating the page to reveal the product: a charming, puffy orange bird standing on one leg and smiling crookedly, 'into his own bum.'

'Top you off, Lovegood?' said Duck.

'Um, please, yes. Into his own…?'

Blush stormed Magda. 'His fundament.'

Duck cleared his throat. 'The bunghole, old boy!'

'Poor creatures,' Poppy sympathized. 'Rather startling in own right, I'd wager.'

Lovegood's mind was thoroughly bent. 'But where does he go, exactly?'

'According to the Aborigine he enters the Dreamtime: the great eternal uncreated alltime on the other side, the realm of giants and the like.'

'Pish,' Duck scoffed. 'There's giants in the Shetlands.'

Magda shrugged.

Lovegood was intrigued. 'Is a motive suggested for his flying backwards?'

'Two. One is that he is entranced by his own tail feathers. The other is that, having no idea where he's going, he likes to at least see where he's been.'

'It's a poem!' Eve breathed.

'Evidently,' Magda continued, 'in the Dreamtime, looking backwards is more useful than looking forwards.'

'But the weejy weejy…' Lovegood prompted.

Magda's pale brown eyes narrowed suspiciously. 'There's a witch in Wagga Wagga who claims to've made a time-travel potion using the lone wing of a weejy weejy bird.'

'Surely,' Duck's laughter was falling out of him, 'you couldn't mean the Wagga Wagga One-Winged Weejy Weejy Time-Travel Potion?'

'Australia's bats,' Poppy concluded.

'How do you prove that something never existed?' Eve wondered.

'That's what I'm going to find out.'

'Wait, is this funny?' Lovegood was experiencing a wave of warmth and buoyancy. 'The oozlum's sort of an exercise in a negative proving itself, isn't it?'

'Rather a proof negating itself, don't you think?' Duck countered.

'Oh, God,' Poppy clapped her forehead theatrically, 'Ravenclaws…'

'What about you then, Poppy?' Duck said. 'Tell Lovegood about yourself.'

She eyed Lovegood and emitted a sustained note of dubious appraisal. 'Eh...not 'til Lovegood's shared a little something of himself, I think.'

Thus cornered, and ballasted with Ogden's Old, Lovegood cracked open his gates.

What do you want to know? The only son of older parents who never thought they'd conceive; another of the Catchpole Lovegoods…eccentrics mostly and freethinkers, pamphleteers, agitators, experimenters, loners. He'd spend days among cousins before returning home to his peculiar folks, Carl Linnaeus and Nedda, who dealt with him always as a bemusing surprise, ward more than son, left largely to raise himself.

In return Poppy described the Bardots as relatively new to the shores of Albion. Her grandparents still spoke thickly French-accented English—and spoke it in their shared, overpopulated London flat. Poppy was the middle of seven sisters. A notable quirk attached to the family was that the Sorting Hat kept dispatching them willy-nilly into the four Houses. While her mother and father met in Gryffindor, she'd been sorted Hufflepuff, while Bardots had represented or currently adorned the common rooms of Ravenclaw and Slytherin.

Lovegood confessed to having been consumed by studies during his time at Hogwarts—a disclosure that did not rise to the level of news. Prior to third year he'd had no idea what to do with his life, had assumed he'd end up a solitary Lovegoodian oddball in the family mold—but hadn't realized that they'd all had jobs, actually. Then he signed up for visiting lecturer Antonia Antiquarius's special lecture called, simply, '1689': an entire semester devoted to the fateful year. He'd filed in an aimless 13-year-old and walked out an hour later vibrant with intention. He'd found his calling.

The Bardots were artists, which might have accounted for the Sorting Hat's difficulties. Not to take shine off Helga, Godric, Rowena or Salazar, but did even one of them lay any store by art? Papa sculpts, mama does oils, the sisters have dancers and singers and poetasters among them…Poppy dabbles.

'Just wait 'til you see her room,' said Duck. 'It's an absolute disaster.'

'It's wonderful,' Coyne sighed, blue with envy.

'It's definitely something,' Eve allowed.

Poppy's talents were legendarily diverse: she welcomed all creative endeavor indiscriminately. Lovegood already knew—one couldn't have attended Hogwarts at the same time as Poppy Bardot without picking up on it. She'd cut a striking figure as a traditional, finding new and inventive things to do with black and yellow robes (magically frilling their hems, girding them with spectacular magical hoops, charming the colors to mesmerically swim about on the cotton and so on), and her hair was unanimously agreed upon as the single best physical attribute in the school at any given time. (Walking past her during class, Professor Perch used to start braiding it automatically, while the Fat Friar had at least twice scorned his vow of celibacy to propose marriage.) Around her boys congregated like clouds of smitten flies, she flitting among them—at least by appearances indifferent. When Lovegood was in fourth year and Poppy sixth, her romance with the dashing Gryffindor prefect, head boy and keeper Charles Pepper galvanized the entire school. Would they? Wouldn't they? When at last they did—the consummation a famously triumphal snogging following that year's decisive match (tall, sweaty, handsome Pepper: Quidditch Cup in one hand, other arm round Poppy)—happiness fell upon Hogwarts like manna. Until the end of term everyone grinned at each other and exchanged compliments. When he never returned for his final year and Poppy arrived cloaked in grief, unable to account for him, confusion ran deep. Had it been only a dream? A summertime charm that took them all in?

Lovegood's graduate thrust hadn't taken shape yet. It would fall into his chosen field of forensic magical history, but to date his appointed don, Inspector Darby, had failed to respond to any of his overtures.

Eve perked. 'Do you mean to say that Lector Darby is on faculty this year?'

'Visiting, yes. He's teaching Magical Crimes to sixth years, too.'

Duck winked, 'But you he's got composing symphonies?'

Lovegood frowned. 'I was to assemble a list of unsolved historical mysteries that intrigued me. Sent it last month. Haven't heard back. We meet tomorrow.'

'Before or after sorting?' Duck asked.

'First thing, actually. I gather the Inspector's an early riser.'

'Ditto Warwind. Let's go in together, shall we? Before the riff-raff on the damned train.'

Lovegood ignored his friend's sarcasm. 'What about you, Poppy?'

'Thank you, I won't be going in tomorrow. My Mattie is allergic to work until they've all sung "Hoggy Warty Hogwarts".'

'I meant about your graduate studies.'

'Oh! Linus Lovegood, I'm so glad you asked!' Poppy burrowed into a large handbag and withdrew an aged book she rested on the table. 'What do you make of this?'

As invariably happened in the presence of historical artifacts, a change came over Lovegood. It was as though someone had snapped next to his ears. The book dominated his attention, and no one objected when he took it in hand.

Its outer sleeve was soft, thick brown leather embellished with nothing but the patient hand of time, whose slow rings, scuffs, nicks, stains and sundry impressions had combined over the years to lend a somewhat waterlogged appearance. It might have spent centuries entombed in mud on the bottom of the sea.

Lovegood's forearms tested its weight. 'A quarto volume, very old.' He sniffed it. 'Animal vellum. Bovine, maybe.' He opened it and—ignoring the page—studied the binding. 'It's fine work, as you'd expect from something so ancient. Muggle-made. See how the pages are folded on the edge you turn and sewn on the spine-side? No glue to spoil or crude staples to let in light and humidity. Careful work, made to last.' He turned to Poppy. 'Good show, Poppy. What is it?'

'Have you tried reading it?'

'Oh!' Lovegood's most common laugh was on the quiet side, a tight bundle of self-conscious yips. He set it down, propping up the left side with a few fingers to avoid stressing the spine. All five peered in at the first page: blank. He hummed, turned it, and revealed a confusion of black hieroglyphs in columns that seemed to begin at arbitrary heights near the middle of the page.

'Ah-hah,' Lovegood declared, 'note the kanjis. It's upside down.'

Across the table, Magda whispered to Eve, 'Should it make sense to us, then?'

Lovegood shifted the book 180-degrees clockwise and opened it in exactly the way contraindicated by English norms. 'Comme ça,' he said. 'This is the recto, the first page of the first leaf of the many gatherings or quires of leaves that make up the manuscript. The last page—which we were just mistakenly assessing—is of course the verso. In the Far East, you see, they do things opposite—'

'Lovegood?'

'Er, yes, Duck?'

'What's it say?'

'Oh!' Lovegood examined the page: three more or less centered and evenly-lengthed columns of glyphs. 'Haven't the foggiest. Do you read Japanese, Poppy?'

Poppy tapped her lips. 'Now listen, Linus, this might come as something of a shock, but actually, no…'

'Then, your project…?'

'It's in there!' Abandoning her previous reserve. Poppy thumped the book. 'An eyewitness account of Andrew Vandal creating his most famous work of art.'

Coyne said, 'Sorry, Poppy, but who's—'

'Who's Andrew Vandal? Only the most famous artist in wizarding history!'

'Right,' Duck followed up, 'and what's he famous for, then?'

'Philistines!' Poppy erupted. 'Have none of you ever heard of the False Dawn of 1552?'

'It's almost as hard to believe,' Duck sniffed, 'as your ignorance of Japanese.'

'It's worse, Edwin, because it's your history.' Sighing with disappointment, Poppy transitioned into storyteller mode. 'In 1552, Andrew Vandal painted the midnight sky over London to resemble a cloudy morning at sunrise. He did it behind a magical veil that was like a roof over the whole city. Then, with a snap—' she snapped '—the veil vanished and it was morning. Birds went bonkers. Roosters crowed. All the livestock went mad. The criminal element was completely exposed… Imagine it!'

'How long did it last?' asked Magda.

'That's the most brilliant part. Not twenty minutes later great big peals of thunder rolled through the sunny sky. It was totally incongruous.'

'Was the sun rising and the clouds moving and that?' Eve wondered.

'Of course they were! It was Andrew Vandal—he was a famous perfectionist! Then, when the rain started, the whole thing just melted. The rain rained through it. The blue sky dissolved in tatters and behind it was stormy night.'

'I say,' Lovegood clucked, 'what must the Muggles have made of that?'

'There must be some record,' Magda said.

'But there isn't!' Poppy blurted. 'You see, back then the most powerful wizard in Britain was a fellow called Nightless Day—'

'The old Headmaster?' Duck interjected. 'I didn't think he was any great shakes.'

'He was famous!' Poppy insisted.

'Rupert Brood famous?' Duck needled.

'Famouser. Notorious, even. Quit interrupting. The point is: the Muggles were in an uproar. Princess Bloody Mary—or whatever her name was—thought it was her father—don't ask me who, one of the Eighths—sending a signal from the afterlife. Everyone was up in arms. No one knew what to do. Naturally we on our side were nervous, since when Muggles get stirred up it's only a matter of time. So the Council sent Day to do the impossible: obliviate the entire city.' Poppy, an animated storyteller, sat back. 'And that's exactly what he did.'

'Gosh,' Eve gushed. 'That's quite a spot of magic!'

'Impossible,' Duck said. 'That's Merlin level. There'd be portraits of him all over Hogwarts.'

'Oh,' Coyne offered, 'there's a portrait in the Slytherin common room. It's one of the spooky kind that don't move at all.'

Eve pressed a sisterly hand to Magda's arm. 'I can't take the ones that don't move.'

'There, you see? I'm not just making it up, Edwin. And I've got all the proof—' she thumped the book again, '—right there!'

Magda mulled it over. 'Eyewitness account, you say?'

'That's what Mattie told me. And she's read the bloody thing.'

Lovegood digested this. The Chair of History, Mathilde Bagshot was not one to send her students on diversionary errands. He exchanged a significant look with Duck.

Duck stood, turned, and addressed the denizens of the Three Broomsticks: 'Does anyone here speak Japanese?'

Conversation throughout the pub was snuffed dead as blown candles. A dozen or so pairs of bleary eyes regarded him impassively. Logs popped in the hearths like cracking knuckles.

Lovegood stood, whispered to his friend, sat down again.

'Sorry,' Duck's shy, self-deprecating laugh was his most winning. 'Does anyone read Japanese?'

He sat back down, cleared his throat, refilled the decanter, and, without asking, topped up their glasses.

Lovegood asked Poppy, 'What all have you tried?'

'Nothing yet. I didn't know where to start. I'm afraid of damaging it.'

Lovegood spent a moment searching the ceiling for answers, then, with a certain flame-eyed intensity, snatched his wand, tapped the book and said, 'Lingua franconum!'

A charge numbed his left wrist and his wand grew intolerably hot. He dropped it with a 'Yeow!'

'Step aside, brother.' Duck aimed his own wand and tried the same spell—

—with precisely the same result.

'Is it still in Japanese?' Eve asked.

Poppy elevated a chunk of pages and brizzled through them. 'Book: two,' she said, 'Chiefs: nil.'

'I don't understand,' Lovegood said.

'Me neither,' Duck concurred. 'Should've worked.'

'It's as if it's resisting translation.'

Poppy said, 'Anyone else have any ideas?'

With a gleam in her eye, Eve pointed her wand, licked her lips, and said, 'Lingua ignotia anglaisiora!' The book hissed and coughed up a puff of smoke, but didn't change.

'Translatus omnium,' went Coyne. The book bounced as though goosed and skittered about the table a bit.

Getting into the spirit of things, Poppy pointed her wand at herself and asked the group, 'What's a spell for Turn me Japanese?'

'Nipponia transformus?' Duck suggested, shrugging.

'Careful, Poppy,' Lovegood cautioned. 'Duck's a loon.'

Duck rolled his eyes.

Magda rose to a standing position on the bench, glass of firewhisky in left hand, wand in right. She drained the one and aimed the other.

'I say, Coyne—' Lovegood started.

But too late. 'Immersus totalus!' said the alabaster Slytherin just before jumping into the book. She leapt up and out over the table and the book seemed to grab her and suck her down… In the time it took Lovegood and Duck to come to their feet she'd been consumed entirely.

The remaining four stared at each other, agog.

'All right, all right,' arrived a new voice sauntering up to their booth. 'Japanese, who-do-ya-please, touch-yer-knees...what're yiz up to over here?'

The voice belonged to Madame Euphemia 'Effie' Styx, proprietor of the establishment: a rotund and illiterate witch who it was rumored bought the oldest tavern in Hogsmeade thinking that it and she shared a surname. Robed in billowing purple, sporting a violet headscarf, black leather boots and a walleye, Madame Styx treated the table to a much-practiced glare of suspicion.

'Nothing, Effie,' Duck ventured, sitting. 'Just breakin' in the new blood.' He yanked Lovegood down.

Madame Styx crossed her arms over her ponderous bust. 'There five a yiz a minute ago, I swears it on Merlin's beard.'

'There still are, actually,' said Eve, glancing at the book, 'I hope…'

But Madame Styx saw something else at that end of the table. 'And when was the last time we saw any a yiz at the bar? Will yiz tell me that's me own Ogden's Old, and that ye're not a pack a teeves I oughta be chargin' rent?'

'Of course it is, Effie!' Duck protested. 'We've been nursing it, is all!'

'Right,' she chuckled, 'for two hours nursin'. And yiz Shambhala House, what're known from here to Diagon Alley as the thirstiest sots. Anyhow,' she sniffed in their vicinity, 'yiz don't smell like ye've been nursin'.' With a deft whisk she unsheathed a wand hidden deep in her décolletage. The decanter zoomed to her lips. Lovegood sensed Duck physically cringe next to him as she sipped, smacked, swallowed—and stormed. 'LIARS! I'd never stock such swill as this! Ye've been at magicin' up yiz own brew and holdin' down me booth with yer larcenous farts!'

Eve blanched.

'Really, Effie,' Duck stuttered, 'I mean it isn't as if they've been pounding down the doors—'

But just then the book began shaking, its pages flapping and tenting up, and before anything could be explained to Madame Styx there emerged a human form decked in Japanese kanjis that stretched over her like fishing net.

'What in the name of…' said the proprietor, taking a step back and aiming a shaky wand.

Lovegood froze with indecision.

'No no no,' Duck insinuated himself between Styx and Magda and cycled through his various smiles.

For their parts, Eve and Poppy were mesmerized. The Magda that came out of the book wasn't the same as the one that went in. The shape of her eyes had been tweaked and her skin imbued with an olive tint several ticks south and east of her native hue. Only the golden chaff of her hair remained distinctly Magda Coyne, but even that she now wore up in a neat bun architecturally tweezed together with a pair of what appeared to be chopsticks. She seemed cognizant of the situation—her eyes enlarged with fear and hands spread defensively—but when she spoke it was in a language neither spoken nor read by anyone in the Three Broomsticks.

'Kono sekai no soto de!' she yelled. 'Kono sekai no soto de!' Elaborate kanji streamed down her skin, slurped back into the book. She stepped down from the table, unleashed a torrent of frantic Japanese, and collapsed, wailing, into Eve's arms.

'Out! Out with all a yiz!' screamed Euphemia Styx, bodily bullying them towards the door. 'And if I sees yiz back this year it'll be too soon!'

୫

The rain tapered. An eyelash moon backlit a brook of clouds flowing out to the Atlantic. But High Street had shut down already and wasn't keen on waking. Down it the Secret Chiefs of Shambhala advanced, arm over shoulder, drunker than they'd realized, singing (one of them in Japanese) 'Never Let a House-Elf Do Your Laundry.'

When they came to where the canoe ought to have been, Lovegood was surprised to discover a looming structure of dark slimy stone tilting over the road—not unlike his relatives' ancestral home in Catchpole, actually, except bigger and comprised of four octagons that shrunk in size as they ascended. Small, slatted windows glowed like misaligned eyes. The tilt frightened the animal in Lovegood. He felt a lift of fear in the back of his thighs and an airiness in his stomach. To think, this was what he'd actually been facing when he'd seen a canoe lashed to a tree: a precariously antique pile of stones directly overhead, inevitably one day to tumble—perchance to squish the unsuspecting initiate.

By unspoken accord they stopped in the front lawn. The enormous oak tree shivered in night breeze, scattering drops. The veteran Chiefs laughed and talked amongst themselves while Magda scrutinized Lovegood. He observed fresh hoof marks stamped into the mud.

'Well, Lovegood,' said Duck, 'it's your go.'

'Are we still at it?' he asked.

'Rules of the game, old boy.'

Lovegood said, 'Where's the book?'

'You mean this?' Poppy held it out at arm's length—enough that he felt safe zapping it with another spell. A transfiguration charm this time, to try and turn it into a parrot. (For some reason he thought they might have better luck with a parrot.)

This spurred another round of attempts.

Poppy surrounded the book (which had refused parrotness) with a flame of translation (ignus comprehensium), to no avail. Duck attempted to convert the narrative into pictures (texto iconia). Magda incanted something in Japanese and then waited (they all waited), searching the nearby grounds for something they knew not what (they all searched). And, most impressively, Eve conjured a second but blank book and tried to coax it into transcribing the original into English. While she was thus involved, the rest undertook multiple sundry attempts of varying subtlety. For a solid quarter hour five wands poured magic onto the relic—a luminous crux of action in the wet, still, quiet night.

Finally exhausted, Duck considered Lovegood. 'Don't know about you, old boy, but I for one could do with a success. What say you give your canoe a go?'

'My…canoe?'

Duck signaled to approximately the looming house's front stoop.

Lovegood looked up, looked back at Duck, looked up again, looked back at the others. He understood in a flash that they believed him to still be bamboozled by the challenge. They didn't realize that something had come along after he'd found them in the tavern to undo the spell.

He pointed his wand, cried, 'Revealio Shambhala!' and undertook a bit of acting. 'Oh!' he said, staggering back and shielding his eyes from, perhaps, the light of discovery. 'I say,' he remarked, 'a building!'

Poppy returned her buzzing, aggrieved, slightly smoking but indomitably Japanese book to her handbag. Approaching the house, she eyed Lovegood. He wasn't an experienced actor.

Eve entered it still negotiating with her ingenious translation experiment.

Walking past, Magda shook her head at him and said something something 'figgy pudding' something something.

'All right, come on then,' Duck didn't quite buy his performance either. 'I'll show you to your room.'

'Someone's already here,' Lovegood said, worrying. Why, when he and he alone knew that the illusion on the house had already been smashed, had he let anyone walk in unawares?

'What do you mean?' Duck asked after the suddenly rushing Lovegood. 'Come on, Lovegood, what now?'

Nothing amiss announced itself right away. The vestibule was a cozy room with coat closets off, faded paintings of erstwhile Secret Chiefs and a wee bench beneath a mirrored hat rack for handling one's wellies. Beyond that lay a claustrophobia of rooms, halls and steep staircases magically lit by floating candles. Lovegood rushed in to the smells and sounds of a happy house. Fires sizzled from myriad hearths. Somewhere string music played. Pots and pans clattered.

'Everyone all right?' Lovegood called, racing upstairs. 'Poppy? Eve? Coyne?'

Phantom syllables in the female register came to him. Rooms ballooned almost as if by happenstance from the winding staircase. The house was crammed with itself. 'Is anyone there?'

'Calm down,' said Duck, rounding a corner behind him. 'Hello—you found your room.'

The door was of heavy black wood shiny with wear. Hanging in its middle top was a strange letter S, golden and chunky. For Shambhala? Slytherin? He turned the knob.

A very tall wizard came forward, bald as a fly rink, eyes a smoky brown, sienna beard to his waist, soily robes wafting about bare feet. 'L. Lovegood?' he asked, the deep timbre of his voice strumming some heretofore undiscovered cord in Lovegood's breast.

'Yes?'

The wizard handed over an envelope. 'I'm Rupert Brood. Do forgive my intrusion. My quarters at Hogwarts have been, well, lost. The Headmistress commanded I lodge temporarily in Shambhala House, and this room appeared unoccupied. Have I erred?'

'No!' Duck laughed, clapped his dumfounded friend on the chest and backed them both away. ' "Erred?" Don't be silly! Hah hah! I'll show Lovegood to the spare room!'

୫

What they called the spare room was in fact the attic. For bedding he had a cot. For furnishings a bunch of crates filled with whatever the graduated Chief Peter Pringle had seen fit to leave behind. Lovegood's things were scheduled to arrive by magical coach the following day, along with Portia.

Alone at last, Duck's imitation firewhisky percolating to his surface and the heat from untold fireplaces floating up to bake him, Lovegood stripped to his knickers and evaluated his position.

He was fond of his housemates. Magda's condition would almost surely subside. That she'd managed to say 'figgy pudding' at him was not nothing. Poppy was enchanting, Eve deeply intriguing, Magda Magda—maybe more. Duck he could handle.

Some bygone Chief had sketched bygone Quidditch stars into the attic walls. They moved in slow colorless pulses. He butterflied his arms from the locus under his head and stared at the ceiling and thought.

The first seven years of magical education were for kids. He felt that now. It wasn't his fault he'd been a kid. Every day you weren't the person you'd been the day before, yet still it took so very long to grow up. Every dram of it, every page, counted.

Hogwarts clarified beyond the attic's lone window. Lovegood raised his eyebrows at the fleeing clouds.

Tomorrow would mark the eighth consecutive year he'd arrive there on the precise calendar day. September 1st had become as regular an event for Lovegood as May Day. But, tomorrow, for the first time, he'd ring it in as a non-trad: a graduate student.

The eyelash moon fell palely on the envelope Rupert Brood had given him.

L. Lovegood

the attic

Shambhala House

½ High Street

Hogsmeade

And on the reverse:

L. Lovegood

Outside the Windy Wicket

Hogsmeade

He frowned, tossed it onto the floor, and spent a minute revolving on his beckoning meeting with Lector Darby.

Then he saw what he was looking at on the ceiling above: just discernible, a line scrawled on dusty wooden planks. Lovegood collected his wand and whispered 'Lumos.' Golden light cracked out of him, up and out and away—he could have been an egg.

Light licked the writing legible:

I've in mind a land that's washed away - N.D.

When the charm snuffed out the darkness was total. The hot attic smelled of dust—millennia of dust. Breathing it in, Lovegood decided he'd be lucky to survive the night.

But then, with a sound that wasn't only a sound, but an evocation of smells and atmospheres and culture, a pacing, a way to slide away from time, a creature endlessly falling in love, rain started again.