Chapter 3 '…the so-called Fifth House of Hogwarts.'

Wand in hand, champagne on floor, Lovegood assessed the situation from about five feet.

The toy piano he'd found in the attic closet had been just light enough for him to maneuver manually without too much strain ('Never miss an opportunity to annoy an Accionite,' Carl Linnaeus always said, referring to the bygone cult of pureblood supremacists who'd refuse to lift a finger if they could wave a wand instead). Unidentified pages of sheet music he'd unearthed from the kinderklavier's bench were arrayed on the stand. Neither a grafting charm with a twist nor a more general chores-in-concert charm had enchanted the sheet music into playing itself on the keyboard. The former had clogged in his wrist like a blob of grainy mustard—much too yellow a magic—while the latter had articulated well enough but merely caused both objects to look around shyly for something to do and someone to do it with, like a pair of lonelyhearts tragically so close and yet so far… He was coming at it wrong.

The voice of an instrument was of a piecewith the instrument—it wasn't grafted on or into it. Likewise, when a person lost his voice it didn't fall out of him and wander elsewhere—one did not literally search for one's lostvoice. Ergo: they weren't separate objects to be coaxed into working together. Could he teachthe toy piano and the sheet music that they belonged together? But here entered the vexing third element of the dilemma: he wasn't working with instrument and voice...he was working with instrument and sheet music, which was to voice what written language was to random babble.

And yet the relationship between sheet music and musical sound didn't preciselycorrespond to written language and voice either, because though music was akin to language, was maybe even a species of it, it was not at bottom a bank of codes designed to relay information. (Indeed, one frequently submitted to music to escape information.) The toy piano didn't need the sheet music in order to be a perfectly serviceable toy piano, not anymore than the sheet music needed the toy piano in order to avoid incoherence. But they complemented each other, they worked towards better fulfilling each other's potential, and in harmony they exceeded the sum of their parts…

It came to him in a chiming of thought.

Professor Aedion Muldoon (Charms, second-year) had early on impressed young Lovegood with the helpfulness of clocking any object involved in a piece of spellcasting. Like much in the magical arts, the technique was harder to explain than to get the knack of: in essence, to clock a thing was to incite mutual acknowledgement. When done properly, not only did the witch or wizard (and, sometimes more importantly, his or her wand) gain a valuable sense of the object, but the object was left with a sense of the fun it was about to have—or at least the futility of its resistance.

A seriousness of mind settled his eyes, he leveled his wand, clocked—with conductory baton ticks—both the toy piano and the sheaf of sheet music, then said: 'Matrimonium!'

Good magic was a cool blue, usually: a slender whipfast watersoft cord or cordbundle that slipped from the thumping kiln of his heart and flowed through his wrist, wand-channeled, impossibly hot but never searing. Feeling this and success were the same thing. He closed his eyes in anticipation and heard an instant later the odd metallic notes of the miniature piano confidently embarking on actually a rather strident minuet in G.

The sheet music now appeared to be conforming as gloves to the expert hands of an invisible pianist, bouncing over the keyboard, while a luster that hadn't been there before the wedding animated the little piano—as if it'd become pleasantly toasted on wine, or pregnant.

Finally accompanied, Lovegood turned his attention to the attic at large.

He emptied his portmanteau of its white three-piece suit, white walking-around vest, white high-stand collared shirt and trousers, pair of pinstriped workaday shirts (navy and rose) and white French cuff shirt with a three-inch collar. These laid carefully on the cot—there being no dowel rod in the so-called 'spare room's' so-called 'closet'—but Portia was coiled there studying him, kind of panting, and even though she, like his clothes, was mostly white, he was still as terrorized by Portia-fur clinging to his threads as she was devoted to nesting on them, so he floated the lot up to the ceiling. (Which itself would've been a dangerous procedure were she still a kitty; now she only primed a bit and gogged as his garments' hems ascended up and out of reach.) The rest of the contents (some underthings and hose socks and breeches) he dunked onto the cot to keep her occupied.

Next, Lovegood clocked the empty portmanteau and tried out 'Capacious extremis!' It felt right but he'd never done the charm before. He only knew it at all because once (fourth year), when an inadvertently disturbed herd of garden gnomes had stampeded an herbology class, Senilius Fludd—a chance passerby—had charmed the interior of his top hat with capacious extremis, accio'd the entire swarm into it, reset the stove pipe, said: 'Tiny green friends!' to a relieved if conflicted Professor Flora Verdue, and carried on.

The left-behind boxes of graduated chief Peter Pringle were uniformly not of a shape that the portmanteau would accommodate if normal physical laws held sway, so he'd know quickly whether or not the spell had taken. The nearest stack was comprised of mean, splintery crates lushly adorned with the initials P.P. and variations on 'Hands off!'. He hefted the top one, manhandled it into the portmanteau…and fifteen minutes (and three minuets) later had compressed his predecessor's sprawling residue into his own tidy piece of luggage.

Lovegood located his champagne flute, sadly discovered it empty, and that instant watched it refill from the bottom: a burbling bubbling up-gush of hissing liquid diamonds. 'Well done, Eve!' he said. A moment later, smacking his lips, he regarded the newly barren attic.

A room in want of furnishing was a bleak thing.

The obvious first move was to empty his trunk, flip it on end and set the dressing case thereupon…but empty it into what? Lovegood knuckled the beast open; its contents were one-eighth correspondence, three-eighths clothes, and half books, all meshed like the intestines of a Muggle's timepiece. Employing a shelving charm (that was among the first ever taught him) he fixed the books to the wall in nice even ranks above his pillow. The clothes he floated up alongside the others, while the correspondence he set out on the floor to await assignment. Now he had free use of the trunk, but his plans for its immediate future, he realized, were snagged on a complication.

Fully bloomed, the dressing case was a formidable decoration: multiple compartments unfurled as petals from the central bud: one for a set of grooming scissors of diverse applications; one for a set of hand-held mirrors of many sizes; one for combs and brushes; one for powders and salts. In the center, under a mirror that shifted up, lay a nest of vials, pipettes, spoons and syringes—a potioneer's workshop in miniature. All of it set in blue silk fastened to the case by brass pegs dulled and ennobled by time.

The complication was that the trunk—a blunt, iron-framed, oxblood leather cube—did not deserve the dressing case.

Inspired, Lovegood removed the plain white bottom sheet from his cot, magically dyed it ivory ('Colovaria!') and draped it over the trunk beneath the dressing case he then proceeded to elaborate entirely. The placement wasn't exactly right, so he magiced the ensemble to the dark corner of the attic right of the cot's head and left the lone window. From about three feet, then five, then seven, he sipped champagne, and deemed it would do in a pinch.

The portmanteau he tipped (carefully!) onto its end to the left of the cot's head. The freight of crates within adjusted under gravity. He stepped back and considered his new bedside table.

The minuets were driving him mad.

Obviously he needed a lamp there and a sequence of mirrors and chandeliers arrayed to magnify the lone window's natural light and ideally a sitting corner for a parlor chair and maybe a slipper chair and plainly the walls needed work—he didn't want to go any longer than he had to surrounded by yesteryear's Quidditchers. But just now he'd drained the last of his glass and, though he fixed his eyes on it intently, it didn't refill. Lovegood went to his door, opened it, and saw there a tangle of blue-gray smoke writing itself onto the air with a noise he felt more than heard in his eardrums. For a moment the image reminded him of the single kanji still clinging to Magda's neck. But then it consolidated into the form of Rupert Brood.

'I say,' said Lovegood, 'wrong floor?'

'Not likely.' Brood's eyes were remarkable brown lights, more large and luminous than seemed quite natural, spaced under thick—threatening bushy—brows just a tick too wide apart. The beams of them now glanced over Lovegood and probed into his room. 'Forgive me, but, do you mind? I was tickled, you see.'

Lovegood didn't see, but he stepped aside to let the famous Auror past. He noted Brood's bare feet and caught a hearty natural odor from the man. Not ripe exactly, but…

'Eh, the music…'

'Sorry about that.'

'Then it's all right if I…?'

'By all means.'

Brood's right hand flexed, he said: 'Diminuendo,' and the sheet music shrank in mid plunge. Quiet flooded the room around the piano's suddenly tolerable volume. The Auror examined the muffled instrument. 'You performed this magic,' he remarked, half a question.

'I did, yes.'

'What did you use?'

'I married them.'

Brood thought on this, nodded his approval, then engaged a wandering examination of the attic.

Lovegood maintained a deferent distance. Portia's lambent blue eyes were trained on the invader, her body tensing in preparation for rapid action. He could see the Daily Prophet headline already: Brood Shredded by Ravenclaw Siamese. He discreetly collected her. 'Is the sorting over, sir?'

'Yes,' Brood said, leaning in towards the wall. 'Fan of Puddlemere United, are you?'

'Oh, I didn't do those, sir. Found it like this. Can I help you find something?'

Brood straightened up. 'Puddlemere is cheats,' he announced.

'Are they?'

His smile revealed a storm-tossed thicket of khaki teeth. 'I've no idea,' he said. 'Chudley booster told me so. Hardly shut up about it, actually, all the way to Azkaban.' Brood's voluminous eyebrows tilted at the still unopened letter half-concealed beneath Lovegood's pillow. 'Suppose he was laboring under the false impression that I gave a fig…' He sniffed at the sight of Portia in Lovegood's arms, clasped his hands behind his back and continued his perusal. 'I see you've not yet opened your peculiar letter.'

Lovegood frowned. He didn't know how to respond. He pet the cat.

'I couldn't help but notice the return addressee. Prescient sort, this L. Lovegood, writing to you in the attic before you could've known you'd be rooming there. Close relative, I gather?'

'It's a long story, sir.'

'Well, it appears we'll have some time to get to know each other. Do you care for Quidditch, Mr Lovegood?'

Lovegood shrugged; Portia squirmed.

'That's me too. Seemed there was always something more pressing to do.'

'Sorry sir, but, you were called away from the Great Hall to…to come here?'

'Indeed I was. But you needn't worry, Mr Lovegood: I don't like crowded rooms. Which,' he signaled his surroundings, 'appears to be another thing we have in common.'

Lovegood emitted an embarrassed laugh. 'You should've seen it a minute ago, sir.'

'Indeed!' Brood bent to inspect the dressing case. 'Remarkable spell: capacious extremis.'

'That's true!' Lovegood said appreciatively. Then things clicked together. 'Oh. Does it happen to be a regulated spell, sir?'

Brood's smile didn't quite climb to his eyes. 'It is at that.'

'I'm sorry, sir, I didn't know—'

'So I'd assumed,' Brood said, fingering through the contents of the dressing case.

'Only there were stacks of crates and things in here—'

'Have you any Hespatia's Halitonic laid by?'

'Sir?'

'For unsavory breath.'

'Oh, no. Um, I charmed the—'

'The portmanteau. Yes, I saw it right off. And I see no reason to make a bother. I am merely performing my due diligence—making sure everything else is above board. You're sure about the Halitonic?'

Lovegood was now regretting the second—or had it been third?—glass of champagne.

Brood took pity on him. 'When a regulated spell is cast on Hogwarts property, the Auror nearest the violation gets tickled. Er, a "tickle", it's—'

'It's how they contact you from the Auror's office, sir?'

Brood nodded.

'Even here, in Hogsmeade?'

'Shambhala is technically Hogwarts property. That's why it's only ½High Street, you know, instead of a nice whole number. Some funny business with the real estate back when. Are you familiar with the history of your house, Mr Lovegood?'

Lovegood grimaced. 'Haven't had much of a chance to acquaint myself as of yet.'

'Of course not. Too busy dealing with the sudden change of venue, no doubt. I'm grateful to you for accommodating me, by the way. I shall retroactively approve the use of the spell. Good day, sir.' With that, he started to leave.

'Wait, sir,' wrestling Portia, Lovegood followed. 'You apparated here.'

'So I did.'

'Which means you disapparated from the Great Hall?'

Brood stared at him blankly.

'But you can't do either on Hogwarts grounds.'

'Ah-hah. I grasp your confusion. No, Mr Lovegood, the average witch or wizard may not do so. Aurors, on the other hand, find that by necessity a great many restrictions do not obtain.'

Brood began walking down the steps. 'And yet—' Lovegood, after a moment's indecision, flung his yowling cat back into the attic and closed the door behind him, '—and yet that wasn't the case thirty years ago, was it?'

The great Auror stopped on the stairs and looked up at him, perhaps now finding Lovegood a dash tedious. 'I'm not sure I see…'

'On your graduation day, sir. When you disapparated from the ceremony. You weren't an Auror then.'

Brood's smile this time wasn't big enough to expose any teeth—only a corner of his mouth twitched, but a sly humor glimmered in his eyes, one of whose furry hats arched up. 'I think I'll be taking a more conventional route back to the Great Hall, Mr Lovegood. I'm not in a terrible rush, after all. And one is wise to avoid rousing unnecessary suspicion, when one can.'

'Right you are, sir.'

He watched Rupert Brood disappear down the stairs and around the corner.

୫

In the morning Lovegood found light smoldering through the cracks round the heavy black door in the otherwise dim landing outside Brood's room. Downstairs in the den Poppy lay on her belly on the immense Persian rug, its russets, indigos and greys softened with time but a magnificent piece still, hemmed with heavy golden tassels.

Shambhala House's first floor comprised four equally large octagonal rooms. If it were a compass rose, the north one (nearest the Black Lake) would be the den, east (nearest Hogsmeade) the kitchen, south (nearest High Street) the vestibule and west (nearest Hogsmeade Station) the dining room. In the rectangular middle sat the first of the magically expanded bathrooms; the narrow, creaky staircase poured down into the joint between anteroom and kitchen. Above the first floor the octagons converged incrementally into the cramped peak of the attic, each floor smaller than the one below it. For students, altitude and seniority shared an inverse relationship: the newer one was, the farther one had to fall (or, depending on one's perspective, the greater the buffer between one's station and the beginning of adult life). With the departure of Pringle and Marta Prym, Eve had slotted into the palatial second floor, Poppy the third, Duck the fourth, and Lovegood and Magda (by their N.E.W.T. scores) the fifth and six, respectively. (Or that, at any rate, had been Lovegood's original assignment—he'd of course ended up on Shambhala's seventh floor, which became the eighth if considering the cellar, eight being an important number in the house's construction.) One of the results of this arrangement was that newer entrants were encouraged by their constrained environs to get out. At home they tended to gravitate to the den and dining rooms. Oftentimes these habits endured even as they advanced earthward into more commodious spaces, so that the house's four-part bottom floor tended to be the sight of all the action.

The den was the rug, the immense hearth, a gallery of old mismatched squashy armchairs, great big sunrise/sunset landscapes in oil and ornate gilt frames that aged daily into moonrise/moonset landscapes, and a large warpy plate glass window that pointed easterly. Through it Lovegood now saw, slightly refracted, a drowsy, climbing sun cherished by fat grey clouds. A fine diaphanous mist sat on the Black Lake. Next door in the kitchen Duck was magicing a breakfast together amid attendant clatter and the odd stage-whispered oath.

'How's the Japanese, Poppy?' he asked.

'I may never read a book left-to-right again,' she said, investigating the text with actually a spot of aggravation, as if at something she couldn't quite make out. Then, squinting up at him, 'Say, Lovegood, you're a history boy: ever heard of an Ann Susurro?'

He'd opened his mouth to offer a negative when an answering echo gave him pause. 'Have I?' he said. 'You know I think I have, but I can't place the memory. Give us a hint?'

'Don't have much to go on. 16 C. Filed under Great Witches, British. Susurro comma Ann.' She opened her palms in a shrug.

'Hogwarts house?'

A long frolicsome tongue of Poppy hair fell into her face and she blew it away. 'Unknown. There's a sentence here that seems to be about her background but for some reason I can't read it. Like the translation's not quite done yet, or something.' She squinted and read: ' "Susurro was known to be the most powerful witch ever to emerge from the something house of Hogwarts, something something something…" '

Lovegood went to look over her shoulder. There was definitely something off about the passage. One could almost read it as the most powerful witch to ever emerge from Hogwarts…but the eye tripped rather than flowed over the passage, as though the sentence had potholes hidden in it, or traps. Clearly it was magic at work—particularly unsettling magic. Lovegood wasn't accustomed to anything unnatural coming between himself and the mechanical act of reading English on a page.

'What about the bookends?' he asked.

'Bookends?'

'Birth date, death date, any of those?'

'Not as yet. But I've got this: she was close to Lord Castlemore.'

'Castlemore led the Wizards' Council back in—well, back when your man Mibu arrived in Londontown, didn't he? The 1550s.'

'Ten points to Ravenclaw,' Poppy said, returning to Beyond This World.

Duck appeared from the kitchen holding a mallet and wearing an apron that was a tad on fire. 'Listen, is poaching an egg just stealing it? Does anyoneeven know?'

'You're on fire, Edwin,' Magda observed, arriving at the bottom of the stairs.

'How typical,' Duck spat, returning to the kitchen.

'Morning, everyone,' said Magda. 'Ready, Linus?'

Poppy hooked him midway out the door with a shouted: 'Oh, Lovegood!'

'Yes?'

'Have you settled on a graduate project yet?'

'No. Do you think you've found me one?'

She tapped her lip thoughtfully with the point of her wand and then did a big donnish voice: 'Come find me later, young man!'

'You mean you're not staying for—?' but Duck's lament was interrupted by a tremendous cascade of rioting cutlery.

୫

It was Lovegood's first visit to the Hogsmeade Ollivanders. He found it much the same as the location in Diagon Alley: Makers of Fine Wands Since 382 B.C., alleged the engraved plaque above the front door. Next to it, the throbbing pink frills and cleanliness of Madam Puddifoot's could not offer more contrast. When he opened the door a bell tinkled against it. The space was much deeper than it was broad, poorly lit, undusted, as utilitarian a retail location as could be imagined. A rich olfactory brew of curated wood intoxicated him. An Ollivanders, he thought, is a library of trees.

Then he corrected himself: A library is a library of trees, but an Ollivanders is a library of trees no one's yet pulped and written all over; trees de- and not re-constructed. A proto-library, older than the written word. A library of sticks.

Gerry emerged wrapped in a wrinkled green robe. His hair appeared only brown in the low light, and rather unruly. Were his eyes blue at all or merely grey? Lovegood couldn't say.

'Did we wake you?' Magda couldn't believe it. (Slytherins were notorious early-risers.)

'Oui, a little,' said Gerry—then, recognizing Lovegood: 'Ah-hah! The headmistress's office, no?'

Suddenly an officer of the Prussian cavalry, Lovegood clicked his heels together and bowed. 'Linus Lovegood,' he managed, through a fire of humiliation. 'I came with her.'

Magda held out her wand. 'It isn't good anymore.'

Light flared in Gerry's eyes and Lovegood saw that shreds of silvery blue were indeed mixed in. The hold silver lime had on a descendant of the oldest wand-making family in Britain was to be expected. 'Gervaise,' he said from his distraction, carefully accepting the blonde knobbled offering from Magda. 'Tilia tomentosa,' he intoned. Then something caught him short. 'Or…?'

'Magda Coyne,' Magda said helpfully, as if correcting him.

But he'd been identifying the wand, not its owner. 'Mademoiselle Magda, did you do this work, or did you buy it this way?'

The accent was English, Lovegood realized, a fairly posh one too, only with some of the native softnesses sanded even further down by years on the Continent.

'I don't understand…what work? It's in precisely the same condition as when I took it home my first year.'

'Surely not from Ollivanders?'

'No,' her eye contact faltered, 'from the other one.'

Gerry for an instant flashed fully and dramatically French: he withdrew protectively from the offending idea, scorn and repugnance swept across him, he said: 'Not Cephalopos?' and, witnessing Magda's abject confession, hissed as if burnt and let fly a staccato torrent of nck nck nck nck ncks.

Magda looked to Lovegood for aid, but he had none to give.

'What have I done?' she asked.

'Let me guess,' said Gerry, 'you went unaccompanied?'

Her whole visage flickered like a shivered cymbal. With a gust of revelation Lovegood realized he knew next to nothing about the Coynes at home. 'I suppose I did, at that,' she said.

'He waited until the shop was completely empty to help you.'

Magda shook her head of cobwebs. 'It was a long time ago. Who remembers shopping for a wand eight years later?'

Lovegood did, only too well. 'All right, Ollivander,' he said, 'let's have it.'

Gerry handed the wand back to Magda. 'It's a fake.'

She crumpled, and Lovegood saw she'd had her suspicions.

'I don't suppose you have insurance…?' Gerry says.

'Do they sells policies on wands?' asked Lovegood.

'No one reputable,' said the taller boy, 'but…'

Magda avoided the wand-seller's gaze, focusing on the lie in her palm. 'So what is it really?' She offered it to him again.

Gerry plucked it away and they followed him to a cozy tea table and chairs set amid pendulous towers of boxes. Lovegood noticed a cot with disheveled blankets tucked in a corner. Gerry magically ignited a rickety old chandelier overhead and watery, shadow-spliced light splashed down upon them, bringing out the subtle lavender from the wand cases, the powderdust on everything, and the hints of burgundy hiding in Gerry's short, unkempt coiffure. This was what Lovegood mostly concentrated on as the subject of his attention brought to bear on Magda's heretofore famous wand what appeared to be Muggle implements and solutions. He took turns bathing it in a little tub of bubbling mundane fluids and scouring it with a wire brush.

'Can you not use magic instead?' asked Lovegood.

'Using magic on wands…' Gerry waffled. 'It's not optimal. Like thinking about thought, the tool cannot comprehend itself… Strange things, you know. Mysteries of the world.'

Lovegood was aware that Magda looked on the destruction of the one and only wand of her life to that point as more shameful disaster than learning opportunity, but he couldn't help it; he leaned in. 'And yet Muggle stuff works?'

'Ever used the soap? Miraculous stuff, the soap. Put an end to all that plague business by itself. You know in Paris—what, some time last year?—they exhumed the graves of a few old churchmen buried during the last plague. Who can say why. Nutty Muggles! But they found some of them with their fingernails grown into the wood. Think about that. You come to from disease only to find yourself in a box underground, and no apparating your way out of that one! Think about all the witches and wizards who don't get scapegoated for the Black Death anymore. All thanks to the soap. Look, see this?' The artfully scored age-lines in the blonde wood had smeared and faded under Gerry's ministrations. He grinned. 'Admixture of soap and essence of elbow grease.'

Magda was so low she forgot about their new first name accord. 'What will I do, Lovegood?'

'Get another wand?'

'That's next on our agenda,' Gerry said, the slight wire brush a blur in his hands. 'Have you any money?'

'No.'

'Magic works on wands in other contexts,' Lovegood quibbled. 'Dispelling charms dispell charms, don't they? Expelliarmus is directed against a wand, isn't it?'

'When I dispell a charm I'm attacking someone's magic, not his wand. Expelliarmus disarms the opponent, regardless of what weapon he's holding. See?' Beneath a bubbling white-gray froth the wand was beginning to show much darker. 'And this particular fraud is not technically magical in nature. Arturo Cephalopos is a crétin and imbécile, but,' Gerry gave the exposed wood several strong sniffs, 'even he knows better than to disguise his spruce as silver lime with magic. The first spell would shuck it clean as husked corn.'

'Spruce!' Magda exclaimed. 'Why? Is it cheap?'

Gerry weighed his response. Lovegood inferred that Ollivanders were as a rule disinclined to declare any magical wood cheap. 'Ehhhh...hard to match, let's say. Tends to have a mind of its own.'

'A whole personality is more like it,' Magda appended, her hand flying to the nape of her robe. 'A whole bloody skill-set…'

'Perhaps he prefers it,' said Lovegood, 'because it's easiest to…spruce up?'

Magda struck him on the meat of his upper arm. 'What's wrong with you? Can't you see I'm devastated?'

'Apologies, Coyne.' He shrugged helplessly: 'Ravenclaw.'

'And now we're back to last names. Perfect. I hate today.'

Gerry held the wand out horizontally, fists bundled over each end. 'May I?'

Magda briefly consulted her feelings. 'What's eight years? Go ahead.'

'Should we say something?' Lovegood interjected, sitting up straight. They both stared at him, Gerry from a place of undisguised curiosity and Magda from somewhere darker, a dank festering unlit Slytherin hole.

'It means nothing to me,' she said.

'Adieu, Fraud Wand,' said Gerry.

'See you in the Dreamtime,' Lovegood added.

Gerry's fists whitened and the wand bent into a blonde arch.

Lovegood felt a breath on the back of his neck. A cold, liquid fear poured into him. His eyes watered. Then, snap, it was done; he was himself again. 'Did you feel that?' he asked the table.

But evidently they didn't.

Gerry held the two pieces. 'What did he tell you the core was?'

'I don't remember,' Magda lied.

'Hair of the kelpy,' Lovegood answered.

Magda hit him again.

'Oh, come now,' Lovegood rubbed his arm, 'everyone knew.'

Gerry tapped onto the table from one end of the wand a sharp-ended, shriveled inch or so of filament. He held it to the light. 'Try whisker of troll.'

The sound was Magda's face falling into her hands.

'Forest or...or mountain troll, perhaps, I can't tell which.' He brought it down and, clearing his throat, addressed his grieving client. 'May I keep this?'

She moaned her indifference into her hands. Gerry secreted the offending whisker into the vest pocket of his green robe. 'Merci. We'll put it towards your new wand.'

Magda came up with a start. 'New wand!' she said. 'Is there a chance… I mean I don't care one way or the other, of course, but… Could an actual silver lime wand work for me?'

'Perhaps one, oh, say,' Gerry pieced the two ends back together again, 'about nine inches? Supple? A bumpy blonde job?'

Magda spread her hands above the table: 'Why not?'

Gerry got to his feet. 'Would that I had any in stock, mademoiselle.'

'Sorry,' Lovegood cleared his throat, 'was that "wood" you had any?'

Gerry winked at him, then turned his attention to the nearest tower of unsold wands. 'Alas, tilia tomentosa is harder to source these days than ambergris.'

' "Ambergris," what's that?' asked Lovegood.

Magda was glaring at him. 'Whale wax. Hah. Something that I knew and you didn't.'

Lovegood patted her hand. 'Hey, this is a good day. You came in here with a rotten old wand that didn't work well and you're going to leave with a nice new one from Ollivanders. And you were already so strong!'

'Don't patronize me, Lovegood.'

'Is it important to you, competing with smart people?' Gerry offered Magda a wand to try.

'Just with him,' she said. 'What do I do?'

'Anything. Take it.'

'Now what?'

He snagged it back and returned to the stacks. 'Describe yourself in three words.'

Magda crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. 'Invisible, invisible, invisible.'

'Three different words, s'il vous plaît!'

'Knowledgeable,' Lovegood proffered. 'And, unexpected. And…'

Magda pinked. 'Unexpected?'

'…plucky,' he concluded.

'Try this one.'

'What's so unexpected about Magda?' she challenged, waving the new wand at Lovegood.

Gerry lifted it from her hand. 'Say the first color that comes to mind.'

She gave him a withering look. 'Is lonely a color?'

Gerry disguised a shocked laugh with a fake cough.

'All right then,' Magda leaned back in her chair and used her arms theatrically. 'Black. We all knew she'd say "black", didn't we? Plucky old Coyne. Not so unexpected after all. We steered her into it and then we bloody well waited.'

'This one,' said Gerry—but, almost in the same breath—'No. What's your number?'

'She's number one.'

'Damn you, Lovegood.'

'Try this.'

And on they went for the better part of twenty minutes: Gerry peppering Magda with questions the answers of which he seems barely to absorb before providing her with prospective matches he nixes almost simultaneously. Soon enough he was ranging around the shop looking for likely wands, spelunking into dark recesses, a rosiness of excitement rising in him that was the reverse of Magda's own mood. Lovegood was fascinated by the variety. His only previous Ollivanders experience lasted maybe all of sixty seconds, and he considered his wand as inseparable as one of his own limbs.

Finally Gerry returned from a prolonged absence with a new wand and attitude both. He extended it to her—thought better and pulled it back—extended it again—again reconsidered—and finally relinquished it with a smothered French obscenity and a big step back.

Lovegood had grown expert in quick appraisals. Nearly ten inches, lustrous ebon, a bit swerving, regularly stippled. When Magda grasped it a palpable bass note thrummed from the contact. Three sets of eyes opened wide and sought each other out.

'Oh my,' Magda exhaled. 'What. Am. I. Holding?'

'Uhhhhhhhh,' Gerry breathed in through his teeth and chuckled unconvincingly. 'Well…'

'It's lovely,' said Lovegood, 'whatever it is.'

'It's intense,' said Magda. 'Merlin's pants!' she gasped. The wand had taken command of her arm. 'I think it's probing me?'

'Mademoiselle, I believe you said you had no money?'

'Does it matter?' Magda sounded frankly unhinged. 'Is this something one pays for?'

'For you, today, I give this beautiful wand, absolutely free!'

'I don't under—OH!' she whooped, the wand had slipped out of sight under the table '—don't understand! OH MY GOOD GRACIOUS.'

'What is it, Gerry?' Lovegood urged.

'Blackthorn. Nine and a half inches. Terribly, just terribly brittle. Extremely loyal wood but takes some doing getting there. Our agent, she brought it in last week. It's a novelty, you know, we'd never sell it. I should have known when Mademoiselle is saying "invisible" and "black!" This sort of thing, ha ha, believe me, even a place as established as…we'd be in pretty serious trouble. Honestly, every night it's here is a horror. But, let us be frank, we're all witnesses: Ollivanders isn't, uh, isn't pressing this…problematic wand on Mademoiselle. She and it belong to each other. Voilah!'

The wand was curling Magda's hair.

Lovegood's eyes narrowed. 'What's the core, Gerry?'

'Should you ask that?' Magda laughed nervously. 'Is it really so important to know?'

Gerry's face dropped. He was an undertaker, a reaper, a surgeon in a surgeon's worst moment. He lowered his voice. 'Tendon.'

'How's that?' asked Lovegood.

Gerry cleared his throat. 'Tendon of…house-elf.'

Lovegood's first reaction was to slide away from the table and get to his feet—to put distance between himself and the wand and the no doubt still moist, still maggot-white length of tissue unspun from the arthritic elbow or ankle of some tiny big-eyed lapsing servant the moment their Master Malfoy or Master Black or Master Pureblooded-Tyrant-Whomever found a final usefulness for them.

His second reaction, off Gerry's twisting hands and sweating grin and the expression on Magda's face impossibly mingling faint hope, total dread and complete lack of surprise, was a rare session of uncontrollable laughter.

'Look,' Gerry implored Magda once Lovegood had gotten himself in order, 'the deed's already done. What were we to do? Find the rest of the old guy and reunite them? He's gone. The people who treat house-elves this way…they don't stick them in the family plot. That,' he indicated the wand, 'is what remains of the chap it came from. The blackthorn is his grave.'

Magda considered it. The wand sort of sniffed her ears. 'Any fingernails growing into this one, do you think?'

'I think it's up to you what kind of life it has, now it's buried.'

'What were you going to do with it?' Lovegood asked.

Gerry's answer was interrupted by the dinging of the shop's bell. A shift in the air pressure. A door closed.

He blinked and a short, scrawny witch was in the room with them. Her sunbrowned leathery skin was extensively wrinkled in strange opposition to her eyes, which were hot, buggy blue sapphires. Lovegood was struck by the notion that the face had exhausted itself over the years straining to expel the eyes, then that the eyes had leached the life from the face. She appeared to have outfitted herself for a safari in the '30s and never changed, and she radiated odors of an uncivilized outdoors. Beneath her pointy hat, so old it was actually mossy, grey-brown hair occurred in odd braids and clumps. So anomalous were the lively eyes in the wrinkled bed of her face it took Lovegood a moment to realize they were focused on him with a degree of suspicion that catalyzed a brief sensation of freefall in his chest.

'Briar!' said Gerry. 'Speak of the devil. How are you, dear. Briar's worked for Ollivanders longer than I myself have been alive. A Barker—or tree witch. The greatest alive, I'd wager. Meet Magda and Lovegood—my new friends. Poor Magda—defrauded by Cephalopos. But we've taken care of that now.'

Magda swiftly stuck the blackthorn wand into her robe pocket. Briar's sparkling eye detached from Lovegood to track it and stayed there a moment. Then Gerry said, 'Oh! I have something for you.' He extracted the troll whisker from his pocket and handed it to the witch. 'Cephalopos peddled it as kelpy hair, an obvious fiction. Clearly it's troll. I couldn't decide—'

She mouthed it directly from his hand.

'—well, whether mountain troll or forest, actually.'

She spit it into her palm and cackled. 'River troll, ya ponce!' Lovegood counted three teeth. 'We need to talk, Gervaise.' She lamped on him again and something in her stare sheathed Lovegood's neck in ice. 'Are yer shiny new lovelies inside?'

'Them? Ha-ha-ha!' Gerry manufactured easiness and started shuffling them physically to the door. 'Goodbye, Lovegood, Goodbye Magda. Lots of fun, no? Very fine start to the day, I think. A problem solved for everyone.' He lowered his voice. 'Sorry about this but Briar's, uh, well…' he ran out of words.

'Listen, Gerry,' said Lovegood, 'I did need to ask you something.'

'What's that.'

'Only a rather large wych elm disappeared from Hogwarts yesterday.'

He had Gerry's undivided attention. 'Did it?'

'It did, and for personal reasons I'm rather invested in its whereabouts.'

'What could those be, I wonder,' said Gerry.

'Can we go, Lovegood?' Magda sulked.

'I'd lashed my levitating bicycle to it.'

'Your levitating bicycle,' said Gerry. 'And you wanted to talk to me about it?'

'You see I thought the Headmistress had spoken of it to you— she did mention "boosted elm", did she not?—and I was hoping you could keep me apprised of the details…in the event that I might recover my levitating bicycle.'

Gerry stared at Lovegood for a while with nothing at all written on his face, then snapped his fingers several times. 'Do you know something,' he was by all appearances experiencing a happy wind of memory, 'I'm scheduled to take a walk later in the Forbidden Forest. Dowsing for magical wood, you know. Would you accompany me? We'd have plenty of time to talk about…whatever you wanted to talk about. Your bicycle, for instance. This elm.'

'What time?'

Gerry touched his right palm to Lovegood's sternum. 'Meet me at the Quidditch pitch two hours before twilight.'

Lovegood stared down at the hand. 'I'll be there,' he said.

୫

About halfway back to Shambhala he realized he had for a traveling companion a young witch who within an hour had been divorced from a seven-year's-going fraud and remarried to a scandalous blackmarket collector's item. Taken one at a time, either trauma would be enough to flatten most self-respecting witches. And Magda, Lovegood realized, hadn't said a word since the dusty door of Ollivanders slammed shut behind them. He put his arm round her shoulders.

'Come on, then, Coyne.'

'Be nice to me, Lovegood.'

'Doesn't this feel nice?'

'It feels like the very best I can hope for.'

They walked for a while in generally unstressful silence. Most of the town was behind them and doing steady commerce. Ahead, Shambhala House leaned roadwards against a baby blue sky. Fluffy clouds loitered. The day smelled of trees and lake. Gravel crunched underfoot.

'I'm not a first name sort of witch, am I, Lovegood?'

'Oh, I don't know about that. We're all still young. Still figuring things out.'

She went hmph. 'Seems you've got things figured well enough…'

'Does it?'

'…Seven years and all I've managed is to fly up my own bum. Maybe in the Dreamtime I'll find the one for me.'

'Come now, Coyne. It's only wands. I won't tell anyone about the core. I'll keep your secret!'

'Oh,' her laugh had no humor in it, 'is it only wands?'

'Isn't it?'

The look she gave him then was born in innocence, reared in poverty, branded by hardship and put to sad pasture in less than five ticks of the second hand. 'Listen to me, Lovegood, not everyone gets to win. Some of us work and work and save and wait only to find out that the thing they wanted could never have been theirs to begin with.'

It felt to Lovegood like a vast and involved house had been constructed all round him. He didn't know how to move within it or react without destroying the architecture and devastating the architect.

'Did I not spell it out precisely enough?' Magda went on. 'My pitiful life was collapsing, and all you could do was make moony puns at him.' She sighed expansively. 'But that's all right, Lovegood. I'll keep your secret too. At least that way I'll be useful.'

He didn't know what to say.

୫

When they got back to Shambhala, Eve in the front lawn furtively peeked round a corner, laying in wait. 'Did you see it?' she asked.

'See what?'

'I don't know!' she whispered. 'I didn't see it either!'

Lovegood and Magda exchanged a look. Walking in, they were confronted by Poppy. 'Did you see it?' she demanded of them.

'No!' said Lovegood.

'Didn't see what, exactly?' asked Poppy.

'Hold on—you just asked!' Magda objected.

Poppy was somewhat crazed. 'But when I saw it I saw right through it! So what was it?'

Lovegood watched this declaration impact on Magda and slowly sink in. 'Hang on…' she said, thinking.

'I've got her!' Duck appeared in the nexus of anteroom, den and kitchen still wearing a singed apron, holding in his arms—

—but Lovegood couldn't tell exactly what: a light-fuzz in a shape; a writhing container of bundled light; a sort of peripheral, raccoonish blur.

'I am challenged,' Duck said. 'She doesn't like being held!'

'When I was Japanese,' said Magda, 'and we were standing out there trying to translate the book…'

'Eve, come in here!' Poppy called through the front door. 'Eddy's got it!'

'…I did a spell to summon a Translotamus. There's only supposed to be—goodnight, did I do this?' She laughed and Lovegood felt his back relax. 'There's only supposed to be six on Earth at any given time. Here, give her to me. Of course she took a time arriving. Lovegood, can you believe it? Can you believe I summoned a Translotamus?'

Transferring an essentially invisible animal of unknown dimensions was a thoroughly awkward exercise, but Duck and Magda succeeded. At one point, the Translotamus seemed to climb Magda—a large writhing blob of water defying gravity. Doing so, it tugged upon her robe and something funny happened to the kanji on her neck.

'Do you even require her services, Poppy?' asked Duck, happy to be rid of it. 'Is not your book translated enough already?'

'Yes and no,' said Poppy. 'There's a part I can't make out. It's a bit queer, really.'

'How does a Translotamus work?' asked Eve.

'According to Pokeby,' Magda was evidently getting her chin licked, 'one just reads through her. Place her between yourself and the text and, presto. Lovegood, what are you doing?'

'I am placing myself opposite her and the text.'

'What—oh! My kanji?'

'Can you hold it still?' Lovegood continuously reoriented as the Translotamus fluxed about in Magda's arms. It seemed to recognize her as its summoner and was positively canine with fond exuberance. But Lovegood saw a flash of something through its shifting, watery bulk, a throbbing-forth of bold, black quill strokes. Now, Magda slowed her breathing and shoooooshed the Translotamus and pet its long aquiline back. Lovegood, Poppy, Eve and Duck all orbited the pair, squatting, standing on tip-toes, angling left and right: a ridiculous band circling a witch shushing a generous and unseeable mythical raccoon, until at last Eve gasped and reached out her hands to still them. ' "Fifth House," ' she said. 'What's that mean?'

'No idea,' said Poppy. 'Let's set this monkey on my book.'

'This monkey does not seem easily set,' Duck suggested.

Magda mulled it over. 'Is there any opium in the house?'

A few minutes later, on the big rug in the den, Edwin Duck lowered an inert, purring Translotamus over a particular page of Mibu Ujiaki's Beyond This World. Following it, Poppy lowered her keen jade eye, holding back her hair.

'Young Master Lovegood,' she said, finally.

'Madam.'

'You asked what house our girl Susurro came from.'

'So I did.'

'I think we've found your project.'

'Because it's still a mystery?'

'Because listen to this,' she said, reading: ' "She was said to be the strongest witch ever to come from Brindlestick, the so-called Fifth House of Hogwarts." '