Chapter 4 'Rèvèler Nargle!'

The kitchen was a crime scene, and the culprit already singing.

'Honestly,' Duck complained, 'I've been watching people make breakfast my whole life. Who would have guessed they were all geniuses?'

The center of the eight-sided room was commanded by a huge butcher-block table. In the northeast corner sat a squat-bodied cast iron stove, clockwise next to that a smoke-blackened hearth framed by cookery depending from nails, next to that a washtub, then an enormous ice box, next to the ice box a chest loaded with linens, then another for cutlery, then a dry-goods cupboard that went all the way to the ceiling, and finally the cellar door and a corral for quaint Muggleish kitcheny things like coal shovels and brooms designed without the faintest anticipation of flight.

Walking in, Lovegood found the tabletop entombed within a humus of flour, fruit rind and vegetal scrap, the icebox flung open venting steam, the cutlery chest and cupboard raided by Viking berserkers, the washtub concealed within an ominously inflating carapace of soap bubbles, and a pot on the stove overflowing with water so hot it resembled milk. This he addressed first, surprised by what else he discovered bobbing within the panicking pot. 'Duck?'

'Lovegood?'

'Why is there a teakettle inside the pot?'

'Naturally, because I ran out of room.'

'It's boiling too.'

'Excellent. Shall I be mother?'

Lovegood directed his gaze up in amused disbelief. 'Is that jam on the ceiling?'

'Most of it.'

He gave Duck a look. Duck said: 'Right, you be mother.'

'Out!' Lovegood commanded.

Five minutes later he'd put the kitchen to order, and twenty minutes after that he'd assembled elevenses of sliced apples and pears, hardboiled eggs, toasted crusty white bread, torn garden greens spritzed with vinegar and oil, a rainbow of soft cheeses, and a pot of hot chocolate to complement the tea. This he served in the dining room.

Lit by three sections of windowed wall overlooking the Black Lake, the dining room had nested within it a heavy octagonal cherrywood table beneath an immense wrought-iron chandelier. An elbow-crooked buffet under two of the windows permitted one to serve one's breakfast while admiring the view. Built-in elvishly rustic wood shelves enchanted to glow with buttery light housed scores of random magical odds and ends marooned at Shambhala over the years, while the non-windowed walls were all buff shingles, each a different size and shape, most graffito'd by former residents. These etchings took the form of constellations and occult geometrics, esoteric acronyms, vestiges of dying languages, arithmantic equations…the usual dross that collects around the magical table.

Poppy raised a chipped mug to Lovegood. 'I believe we've found our new Marta.'

'Indeed,' Eve cracked an egg with a teaspoon. 'Where did you learn cooking magic?'

'I didn't. It's all manual, actually.'

Eve attempted to politely swallow her amazement. 'Do you mean you…used your hands?'

'Not to worry, Evie,' Duck spread marmalade on toast. 'I supervised and can attest to his hygiene.'

'There's really no substitute, in my experience,' said Lovegood. 'Spellcast usually tastes off to me. But honestly, this was hardly cooking. I only threw some things together. Tomorrow I'll make a proper breakfast.'

Eve sliced off a wafer of egg and nibbled experimentally. Once assured she wouldn't drop dead, she asked, 'Did a house-elf instruct you?'

'My father, actually. Chocolate, anyone?' He filled Magda's proffered cup. 'We didn't have "help" in Catchpole.'

'On purpose?'

Poppy, chewing, laughed behind her hand. 'Go on, Eve. You're relentless!'

'Am I being indelicate? It's just so interesting.'

'No, it's fine,' said Lovegood. 'We certainly couldn't afford one, but even had we been able to…it isn't really the Lovegood style.'

Eve said: 'For political reasons?' then whisperingly deferred to Poppy: 'May I ask that?'

After some reflection, he said, 'Rather more aesthetic reasons, I think. Lovegoods tend to keep to themselves, and ask the same courtesy in return.'

Eve blushed and retracted, as if stung. 'Oh, I see. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to give offense.'

'You didn't! Forgive me, I worded that awkwardly. I only meant they wouldn't want a stranger living under their roof.'

Duck cleared his throat loudly. 'So what's all this about a fifth house?'

'Yes, please!' piped Magda. 'And why have I got it tattooed to my neck?'

Poppy studied Magda's neck. 'It could be a translation error. Mightn't that account for its lingering after the rest of the text returned to the page—because it didn't belong there in the first place?'

'I don't believe the Translotamus makes mistakes,' said Magda.

'No, but the mistake may have been original—something Ujiaki confused from the English. He was a 90-year-old man remembering a trip he took 70 years before, after all.'

'Was he only 20 at the time of the visit?' Lovegood asked.

'18, actually. I was rounding off.'

'Mathematical laziness, Lovegood,' Duck observed. 'A vice often noted in the common Hufflepuff.'

'He came,' Poppy said, aiming and then flinging a shred of lettuce at Duck, 'for the international potions tournament we host every seven years.'

Eve averted her eyes from the hijinks.

'It sounds like a Durmstrang house to me: Brindlestick,' Duck decided, saying it with a German accent, lingering on the schhhh before collecting the lettuce missile from his hair and dropping it into his mouth. 'Say Ann Susurro was a Durmstrang witch here for the potions tourney and our Japanese chap got confused, supposed her British. Then Magda does her vanishing act into the text and hooks a piece that won't go back because it didn't belong to begin with.'

'Susurro not being British would explain a lot,' said Lovegood. 'If she was really so powerful and a confidante of Castlemore, it's doubtful the five of us could have gone through Hogwarts without ever hearing her name.'

'Except you said you had heard of her,' Poppy reminded him.

He opened his mouth to say Yes, but... but Duck was faster: 'Not possible. Lovegood knows nothing I don't. Hexed him soon as I saw him coming, I did. Pipsqueak thought he had so much on the ball. More sugar, please, mother. I've never heard of her, so he hasn't either.'

Lovegood spooned a lump into Duck's tea. 'I'll see if I can't ambush Professor Bagshot and ask her about this Brindlestick business when I go in. I should see her in the library.'

Eve perked. 'Are you off to Hogwarts presently?'

He opened his mouth to answer but Duck was faster: 'Lovegood becomes thin and weak the longer he goes without visiting the library. It's frankly a miracle he's waited this long. Actually we're lucky he came to the Three Broomsticks at all. Come to think of it, it's hard to believe any of us have ever met him.'

'Are you truly already studying?' Magda asked.

Lovegood straightened his back. 'I have to start immediately if I'm ever to start at all. I don't even have a project!'

Poppy held up a freshly pealed and peppered egg, said to it, ' "Thanks for nothing, Poppy!" ' and took a vicious bite.

'No!' Lovegood laughed. 'Thanks masses, Poppy, honestly! I'm going to look into the whole thing. Have you come across any more details, by the by, about this murder Vandal was suspected of?'

She wiped her mouth, nodding. 'This chap Rybel deMille—he was allegedly something of a scorcher as far as bachelors go—anyhow, they found him hanging from a tree in Epping Forest, his horse, to whom it was said he had a great attachment, dead on the ground beneath him.'

'What did for the horse?' Duck asked.

'Slashed throat—and a bloody blade located on the dead man's person.'

'No,' said Eve with quiet horror, generally pausing.

'Sorry, Eve,' Poppy a bit impish. 'Not your typical elevenses fair, conversationally, is it?'

'How was your man Vandal implicated in the murder?' asked Lovegood.

'Love triangle. He and deMille were rumored to've shared a mistress. Or something to that effect. Mibu isn't always easy to understand. Fifteen-hundreds British society through the eyes of a young Oriental visitor—wouldn't you know it, not exactly clear as crystal. But apparently all Wizardry was gripped by the scandal. Vandal was suspected, your Susurro was—'

'Why her?' Lovegood interrupted.

Poppy shrugged her ignorance. She speared a wedge of pear with her fork and slid into Cockney: 'I ain't gotten to the end yet, mate, so I dunno whodunit, but I gather you're just the mutton-shunter for the case.'

'A mutton-shunter,' applauded Duck, 'I say!'

The breakfast adjourned not much later. Duck and Poppy volunteered to clean up while Magda tended to the sedated Translotamus. Lovegood collected his things, slipped into his robe and was on his way out when Eve called to him.

'May I walk with you, Lovegood?'

Eve floated within a vanilla-scented aura of whiteness. As she was paying a visit to Aedion Muldoon—Charms Prof, head of Gryffindor, and Eve's graduate tutor—she'd donned the scarlet and gold, but even that bold palette paled in the alabaster glow of her skin and the soft blur of her long, wavy hair. To be Eve, Lovegood gathered, was to look out from a nice-smelling cloud and see squinting people pay obeisance to you. Next to her, one couldn't help but feel a bit run down—even one as conscientious of grooming as himself.

En route they trawled for chit-chat and fell into the subject of the feud—currently entering its second decade—between Muldoon and the head of Ravenclaw, Potions professor Dermot Nicklefoot, over which of them exactly was more deserving of Professor Smila Perch. The Magical Creatures professor had resolved the issue to her own satisfaction years prior by asking someone else to be her husband, but Muldoon and Nicklefoot had never let this inconvenient fact interrupt their mutual loathing. Lovegood avoided besmirching the Gryffindor head directly and Eve skirted outright hostilities, but it was hard going and hadn't been a wise topic if they both wished to bury any unpleasantness left over from breakfast.

At one point, rounding a curve on the cobblestone path adorned with a bench under an alder tree, Eve became exasperated and the veneer of politesse cracked. 'You're a history man, aren't you, Lovegood?'

'That certainly seems to be my reputation.'

'Have Gryffindors and Ravenclaws always had a hard time getting along? Or did Muldoon and O'Nicklefoot start it?'

Lovegood's hands were folded behind his back. The mild September sun stood around noon. The day was cool and moist. The gargantuan edifice of Hogwarts Castle grew in their future. He said: 'If you just judge us on our merits, I think it makes sense we've had a hard time. We might be the two houses least disposed to abide each other, really.'

'Why?'

'Ravenclaw puts a premium on patience and wisdom…not restraint exactly—we are eagles, after all—but decisive action, if not carefully considered, isn't preferable to inaction. Whereas Gryffindors—'

They said it at the same time, but from very different motivations: 'Rush in.'

'Sometimes, yes,' Lovegood appended.

'But it's too simplistic: only fools rush in. Heroes rush in! Warriors! What rushes in if good people don't? Be assured something will…' She changed tack: 'Why can't you just hate Slytherins like a reasonable person?'

Lovegood laughed. 'I don't hate anyone. And Slytherins I find more reliable than—'

'Than Gryffindors? More reliable?' Her tone was clear, even if she wouldn't come out and say Are you mad?

'More predictable, then. A Slytherin isn't going to run off half-cocked at the first suggestion of wrong-doing and embroil everyone in events they've no control over.'

'No, of course they won't. They're calculating and you're clever. Nothing much would get done without Gryffindor and Hufflepuff—certainly no one would stand in the way of the next menace to emerge from the dungeon—but everything would unfold predictably, and afterwards you could light one and other's pipes and drink a toast to Caution.'

They walked in mutually frustrated silence for awhile.

Luckily, Hogwarts teemed with activity. A clumsy line of students trailed Professor Perch on course towards the Forbidden Forest. Beaters and chasers flited soundlessly about the distant Quidditch Pitch in early trials. Picking through her extensive garden and the class of fifth-years decorating it, Herbology Professor Flora Verdue held court in her subtle, demonstrating way.

Along the path the odd student acknowledged Lovegood with a nod or a cheerio, but Eve was too long graduated to spark any recognition. In a throb of empathy he appreciated how lonely it must be in her cloud now that Pringle and Prym had moved on: house full of strangers, unknown to all at Hogwarts but the faculty.

Finally they reached the main entrance and came to a stop at the foot of the big staircase. 'I'm to the library,' he said.

'Ta ta,' she said distractedly, and went her own way.

୫

Duck's diagnosis of Lovegood was generally accurate but not precisely so: he liked libraries; he worshipped books. The former made excellent rooms because of the company they kept, but the magical thing about a book was that it made a room of itself wherever it went. The bench, for instance, on the path next to the alder tree—Lovegood had spent a Saturday afternoon of his third year there immersed in Gulliver Pokeby's Why I Didn't Die When the Augurey Cried. And had he ever had an idea better than reading Most Macabre Monstrosities within a lumos'd glow, his bare feet in the sloshing opaque water of the dock beneath the castle? Already he had designs on various Shambhala House locales, including the soft green slope down to the lake and a promising nexus of low branches on the big oak. (Reading in a tree was seldom comfortable, but what wizard bookworm could resist the romance?)

He had his favorite spots in the Hogwarts Library, of course, and these, like everything else, had evolved over the years—much as had his relationship with Mr Nehemiah Tombs. The willowy, bald, ageless librarian with a face like a yellow gourd, baggy eyes and carefully trimmed pewter whiskers had at first refused to acknowledge him in any way, then had evinced jealous petulance over Lovegood's perhaps-too-chummy comportment with the inventory, then came at length and grudgingly to accept him, as a landlord might a tiresome but responsible tenant. Next thing he knew, Mr Tombs was calling him 'Mr Lovegood,' setting aside books he thought would be of interest, initiating sly, meaningful eye contact regarding the gaffes of the less library-fluent, and finally smiling with real warmth at the sight of him after a long break.

'Good day, Mr Lovegood,' he said now, pausing on his way to the Restricted Section with a stack of books. 'I see you're well. I do hope you profited by your summer.'

Second in size only to the Great Hall, the library was a labyrinthine, rug-bestrewn honeycomb of snug cells bursting with books and spanned by catwalks. In the taller sections tilting ladders slid along greased rails. Burgundy wallpaper framed high windows that siphoned daylight from above the Black Lake. Floating lamps were charmed to gravitate towards the readers most in need of them. Entire walls were adorned with colossal paintings (The Goblin Rebellion; The History of Hogwarts). Vast mahogany tables sat full classes while modest, irregular teak ones had been carved to fit into their nooks. Even blind, any bibliophile would know where she stood based on the soft near-silence and papersmell into which the business of learning was mufflingly absorbed.

'Thanks, Mr Tombs, I did. I trust you were sad to see it end?'

He sighed. 'Every year the hiatus between invasions grows shorter. What is to be the subject of your graduate study, sir?'

'It's unsettled, sir, but just at the moment I've an interest in a kerfuffle involving acquaintances of Lord Castlemore.'

'Do you refer to the deMille episode, perchance?'

'I do, sir.'

'I should think the incident more brouhaha than kerfuffle, Mr Lovegood, as, in the end, if memory serves, they found no murder done.'

'No murder, sir? Is that so?'

'I would point sir towards the vertex of History of the Wizards' Council and,' he lowered his voice theatrically, 'Famous Magical Suicides,' then nodded politely to his young friend and swept off to his duties.

Lovegood couldn't help but be disappointed. First, Inspector Darby pooh-poohed his choices, now a promising lead seemed squelched. Dramatically speaking, the antonym of unsolved murder was established suicide. If deMille indeed took his own life, Lovegood would have nowhere to go, nothing to seek. Still, having nothing better to do, he resolved to engage in at least cursory research—it was preferable to taking the dictation of the Inspector's remarkable career, and something could yet come from the strange Brindlestick mention or the alleged obliviation of all London following Vandal's False Dawn.

Something was bothering him about the Ujiaki text, anyway… Why had one stubborn piece of work remained for the Translotamus to translate? Why could Poppy and he tell that they weren't seeing everything in the passage concerning Susurro? Why had the kanji for "fifth house" clung to Magda Coyne's neck? These questions indicated that something might have been, not lost in the translation, but concealed in it, something only the extraordinary Translotamus could unearth.

There was as yet no 'vertex' of the sections Tombs mentioned. HISTORY OF THE WIZARDS' COUNCIL was a good twenty yards from FAMOUS MAGICAL SUICIDES, but the Library was known to form vertices of its own volition—especially if Lovegood or someone like him (for the Library was promiscuous and cherished all its creatures) had been spending lots of time reading from stacks far apart. These ghostly reorganizations were hard on Mr Tombs, but, as he'd told Lovegood, the Library would madden anyone who felt it belonged to them or was their pet; the only tenable posture to take was that of servant to sovereign.

He collected selections from both areas and claimed a halfmoon desk with three padded wooden chairs. Around him traditionals toiled quietly as solos or clustered, all linked by motive and place to the strangers next to them. Duck hadn't been precisely right, but he knew his Lovegood, who surrounded now a variety of happiness most familiar to him: the sensation of being solitary but unalone that was the peculiar bequest of the Library, where even a single present person wanders cities of the dead yet speaking.

The Council Chiefs & Their Times was a doorstopper of a tome by a witch named Sophronia Dixon. It was published near the end of her tenure as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot in the 1830s—which must have been a quiet decade for the Wizengamot, as she appeared to've had all the time she needed to work on her book. He took a moment to refresh himself on the context.

Before the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy made the governance of witches and wizards professionally complicated, the Wizards' Council held the reins of British Wizardry (but loosely) for 500 someodd years. For a multitude of reasons (among them nonoptimal owl breeding techniques, unregulatable portkey markets, an abundance of dodgy floo powder, and the alarmingly routine occurrence of homicidally paranoid mobs of torch-bearing Muggles) infrastructural capacity was not, pre-Statute, what it would become by Lovegood's day. That a central body might attempt to assert control over Wizardry at large was, for most of history, neither practicable nor advisable. The Wizards' Councils therefore reserved the bulk of its energy for promoting Quidditch, and racism.

The composition of 'the Council' itself was nebulous. Dixon shared the consensus opinion that once on it, few ever bothered to leave, perhaps because the etiquette about coming and going was ill-understood. Some were certainly voted into their positions by the Wizengamot—the High Court of the land—, others were appointed directly by the Chief Warlock—who lorded (and even sometimes ladied) over that body—or the Council Chief (who was sometimes the same person, and sometimes not), while still others evidently nominated and elected themselves. It was a different time: even journeying to London was a dangerous proposition, and to serve meant, at the very least, periodically joining, at real risk of exposure, a nontrivial quantity of witches and wizards meeting in the midst of highly suspicious communities bent on seeking-out and eliminating just such conferences. Unsurprisingly, the Council drew from Wizarding Britannia its most hardheaded, anarchic, and intemperate—or plain batty—souls.

At the helm of this peculiar and disputatious body a Council Chief sat enthroned. According to Dixon, it was tempting to ascribe to the men and women who filled this post more scope, impact, or poetry than reality justified. The truth was much less scintillating.

One of them accidentally invented the snitch just before the 1300s came round to change things not one whit.

Another got his hat levitated from his head by a spell-inventor and fought a duel with the poor bloke because his wig had been attached.

Another—an ancestor of Aedion Muldoon, in fact—stirred up a debate over what constituted a being with the absurd declaration that standing on two legs was a requirement. The ensuing controversy was resolved four centuries later by then Minister for Magic Grogan Stump—who was not only still alive in Lovegood's day but was probably at that very moment waiting on a refill at the Leaky Cauldron while talking someone's ears off about the Tutshill Tornados.

Pre-Statute histories easily alienated the contemporary reader. That the recent hiring of Leopoldina Smethwyck (gadzooks, a woman!) by the British Association of Quidditch Referees had raised hackles all across the isles was proof of the steady focus paid by Wizards' Councils and their sundry Chiefs throughout the decades to their primary focuses of Quidditch and British pureblooded chauvinism. Dixon believed there'd been 86 (maybe 87) chiefs before the final one—Ullick Gamp—became, with the ratification of the Statute, the first Minister for Magic in 1707. Luckily for Lovegood, Castlemore fell into the minority: his term was interesting.

In a field overflowing with paradoxical personalities, Lord Castlemore continues to stand out. His enduring fame is all the more surprising given the brevity of his term as Council Chief (1553-1556), but then his had been an unlikely story from its outset. The sickly runt of perhaps a dozen illiterate urchins delivered of an east London Muggle prostitute, Lord Castlemore's eventual elevation to the highest office in Wizardry could have been foreseen by only the bravest of seers.

While many of his fellow Council Chiefs were the inheritors of old names and the wealth that so frequently attends them, and consequently gushed into the historians' sphere as though in tide pools of data concerning their lineages and the stuff of their early days, little of the self-styled Lord Castlemore's origin story can be factually established. The earliest verifiable evidence of his existence arrives, in the year 1510, with a knock on the door of the witch Cecily Doddle, who found at the entrance of her cramped south London hovel a ragged, barefoot, muddy lad approximately as old as the new century.

According to family legend, the child, whilst begging, had witnessed Cecily's son Miles at some furtive prestidigitation among friends and followed him home. 'I can do them things, too,' he'd claimed, immediately sneezing, as if to prove his point, a blast of light in D minor.

When the most recent flood of dragonpox had receded from London, Cecily Doddle had looked round to discover her husband and their other children gone. (The records are not in accord, but her lost brood most probably numbered five or six.) She asked the child his name, he responded with one word ('Oswyn'), and she took him in.

When, two years later, Hogwarts wrote, the invitation was addressed to Oswyn Doddle.

Here Lovegood's train of concentration was derailed by the unceremonious arrival at his table of another boy: a paunchy, tube-shaped chap in Slytherin green, pallor of a cave-dweller, big soft face and the big soft mouth and eyes there permanently grouchy beneath sprigs of curly black hair. Collapsed into the chair as if escaping a dire threat, did the lad, thereupon nodding at Lovegood scowlingly before disappearing behind one half of a folded Daily Prophet.

BUSES FOR USSES? McPHAIL MULLS TRANSPORTATION FIX FOR THE ELDERLY, and MACUSA STUNNED BY TITANIC MUGGLE CLASH IN PENSYLVANIA, and GRINGOTTS HEAD TO MoM (IN PLAIN GOBBLEDEGOOK): 'LEAVE BANKING TO THE EXPERTS!', and, LONGBOTTOM & McKINNON AT LOGGERHEADS OVER HOGWARTS APPOINTMENTS.

Over the broad yellow sheet of newsprint he saw Mattie Bagshot enter, right on time, at the head of a straggling row of miniature Ravenclaws and Gryffindors: the duck matron guiding her chicks to sustenance, just as she did on the first day of classes every year.

He returned to his book and learned virtually nothing about Oswyn Doddle's years as a student in Hogwarts, where he'd been a Ravenclaw and unspectacular. In 1523 he'd earned his hat and gone to work for a committee the Council had established in London to explore ways of improving Muggle-Wizard relations. This hadn't been a competitive posting, but Doddle'd made the most of it. Sophronia Dixon herself was at a loss to explain it (at one point attributing his rising popularity to a peculiar sort of explosively negative charisma), but he began to attain, against all odds, celebrity. He dressed wildly, maintained amorous public relationships with much older women, and was famously baptised by a Muggle chaplain and 'reborn' as Lord Castlemore. He made proud, frequent and transparently false claims of illiteracy, referred to himself as one of the 'devil's poor', was usually sick, and had an uncanny knack for being discovered near the center of minor scandals. Concurrent to the careful grooming of his grotesque reputation, Oswyn Doddle (Lord Castlemore) quietly maintained close relations with his adoptive mother (the financial support he gave Cecily was 'unstinting') and, if his colleagues on the committee could be believed, turned in excellent work.

'Is it true you're Rupert Brood's roommate?'

The look on Phineas Black's face was as close as it ever got to genuine interest. The top half of his lowered newspaper had collapsed backwards, revealing upside-down the enormous headline of the front-page article he'd been reading: RUPERT BROOD'S RETURN.

'What's it say?'

Phineas scrutinized him grumpily, found the relevant passage, issued a raucous phlegm-clearing, and read: ' "A working man with inside knowledge disclosed that the private quarters of retired Professor Senilius Fludd, which Brood was scheduled to invest, had become" ' he flashed a glance across the desk and said: 'quote: " 'lost, your honor, most likely under protest, like, as it seems your man Fludd had lived in 'em quite some time.' " ' Black scowled at Lovegood. 'End quote.'

After a moment, Lovegood said: 'But I don't see—'

' "The working man—" ' Black continued without warning, ' "—went on to explain that Brood had been redirected to graduate housing in Hogsmeade." So come on, Lovegood, out with it: is Rupert Brood at Shambhala?'

Lovegood made him wait a beat. 'In my very own room, matter of fact.'

Phineas Black honked a disbelieving snort-guffaw that triggered a salvo of shushes from their neighbors. 'Broody and Lovegood: best friends!' he said, happily malevolent.

The shushes gained in volume and asperity. Taking note, Black retreated meanly into himself, shoulders hunched, scoured his assailants with turtling scorn, and finally slotted Lovegood again into the center of his chopping block. 'Actually you can't be besties, you and Brood, as he's already got one. Just going by what transpired today in Dark Arts, that is…'

Perhaps half a minute passed before Lovegood, holding his place on the page with a finger, indulged Black with a beckoning stare.

'Only he and Lady Lavvy Diggory are right bosom chums already, it seems.'

'Lavinia Diggory? They're familiar?'

' "Oh, Professor, how dearly you were missed in Catchpole this summer." "My dear Lavinia, you know if I don't make the visit it means the very world's on fire." They were in each other's laps, Lovegood. She persisted in nearly calling him "Rupert". Nauseating, I tell you.' He shuddered. 'I detest sixth-years.'

'What year are you in now, Phineas?'

'Don't remind me. Every year I tell myself, "That's it, P.B. You've taken all you can take." Yet every year when September rolls around, punctual as ice storms, I find myself immured again within this bog of hormonal inanity.'

'Hang in there, P.B.' Lovegood said, picking up the second book.

'Don't call me that.'

'Won't happen again.'

Black disappeared behind his newspaper…

…but not for long. 'I cannot conceive, Lovegood,' he said, Prophet retracting, 'of a more effective program of torture and social control than that which enrolls children into daily incarceration under the heels of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats, mind you, whose livelihood depends on indoctrinating their charges into the same silly system they claim—self-fulfillingly—it is folly to resist.' He considered this sentiment for a while and then his face squinched around the agony of a new thought. 'Aren't you from Catchpole?'

'I and every other Lovegood since the dawn of time.'

'Were you not keen to the Brood-Diggory connection?'

'It's not uncommon, as I understand it, for an Auror to cover his footprints.'

'Pish. Because they make so many enemies? Hah. What a glamorous view of the world you have, Lovegood. Why can't you be more critical?'

'Oh, I'm trying.'

'Yes, I see that in you.' Phineas had a special, highly refined way of sniffing he employed from time to time. It was a versatile, articulate sniff that he used to say things he didn't want to put into words. 'You know, Lovegood,' he said, glaring around the library, 'I used to think I hated people. But then I got older, and realized I just hated children.'

Lovegood stifled a laugh.

'Problem is, I have the same revelation every year. When will it end?'

'If there's any justice, Phineas, they'll make you Headmaster someday.'

Black did his snorting-guffaw again. 'Can you imagine a more ingenious punishment? All Britain's kiddies my wards… I should rather A.K. myself and be done with it.'

'Unlikely to work,' said Lovegood, perusing A Spell to End All Spells. 'Scarce few magical suicides accomplished by spellcraft, it says here.'

'Well that isn't bloody fair.'

'Magic won't naturally work against itself, you know, Phineas. Mysteries of this world, and so on.'

'How's it bloody done, then?'

Lovegood flipped through some pages. 'The noose is recommended.'

'Makes sense,' Black grasped it at once. 'Can't talk to cast. Can easily set one's wand out of reach…' He floated contentedly off for a while, contemplating suicide by hanging, then resurrected a previous strand. 'Actually, Lovegood, I rather think I should be the most popular Headmaster in history, and forever, for my first act should be to disband Hogwarts forthwith. Let all the tedious self-absorbed strivers go back from whence they came. What say you, Bagshot, have I your vote?'

All five foot nothing of Mathilde Bagshot had appeared over Phineas Black's shoulder in the middle of his speech. Untended butterscotch hair, lengthy avian neck, long nose, glimmering coal-dark eyes recruiting Lovegood into her skepticism. 'And put myself out of work? I think not, Mr Black.'

'Perhaps you'd be susceptible to a bribe.'

'It can't hurt to try. I saw you noting me before, Mr Lovegood. Are you well?'

'Quite well, Professor, thanks.'

'How are you finding Shambhala?'

'Spiffing, Professor.'

'Is it? I attended Camelot House, as you know, and we thought the Shambhalans the worst sort of conceited monsters. Actually I think we all thought that—those of us in the four other graduate houses, I mean. But if Linus Lovegood's one of them, then they probably weren't what we thought. And that's history improving, which is a nice way to start the year.'

Lovegood sputtered at what he supposed was a compliment before recovering. 'Um, Professor, I do have some questions I'd very much appreciate putting to you, if I may.'

'Of a historical nature, sir?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'I have less than twenty seconds.'

'Brindlestick?'

'Gesundheit.'

'A fifth house of Hogwarts?'

'Unless you're referring awkwardly to Shambhala—being the fifth of five graduate houses and the only one situated so close by—I can't help you. There have never been more or fewer than four houses of Hogwarts.'

'Ann Susurro?'

'Alas, Lovegood, I fear I'm no help to you at all.'

'Did you translate the Ujiaki text yourself—the one you gave Poppy Bardot to read?'

'No, sir. I read it in the original Japanese.'

'And in there you found no mention of Brindlestick or a Fifth House of Hogwarts or a person named Susurro?'

'Running out of time, Mr Lovegood.'

'The Rybel deMille brouhaha?'

She thought about it. 'Rather more an imbroglio, I'd say, Mr Lovegood.'

Lovegood sighed. 'I'll make an appointment.'

'I can be found most Friday afternoons at the Three Broomsticks, behind a vat of wine. Oh and, Phineas, I almost forgot, Professor Warwind wishes to see you in his office.'

'Do you know, Lovegood,' said Phineas as the professor departed, 'I rather pity you and your duller colleagues in Camelot. The idea of accepting my pointy hat and walking straight into another Scottish school makes me want to hang myself.'

Its Hogsmeade address was the primary perquisite of being accepted to Shambhala—the most elite of non-trad houses, which culled the best students from every graduating class irrespective of their sorting. Camelot, the Ravenclaw house, was near Glencoe in the west of Scotland. Avalon, which collected nontrad Hufflepuffs, wasn't far from Cardiff in Wales, while Gryffindors nested in the Penzance-area house of Lyonesse.

'Will you gun for Murias, Phineas?' Lovegood asked.

Black arched an eyebrow. 'I'll gun for an inheritance. The hell with school.'

Lovegood smiled, but he had long entertained fantasies himself of visiting Murias, which, according to legend, had been designed by none other than Merlin himself. Non-trad Slytherins convening there could ride across the far coast of Ireland into Galway for a pint of stout without their horses breaking a sweat.

୫

At an impasse in his research, Lovegood spent some time among archived copies of the Daily Prophet. He was thinking about Rupert Brood's unexpected visit last night—this business of apparation on Hogwarts grounds. If Rybel deMille did himself in, Mibu Ujiaki was just confused, and he maintained his resistance to stand for his CATs in Lector Darby's reflected glory, perhaps he could get to the bottom of the mystery of Brood's disapparation from Hogwarts at graduation.

The accounts were unvarying: witness after witness reported the same thing, almost verbatim. His name was called; he walked so far as the middle of the stage, said: 'Everything born deserves mercy;' disapparated. It wasn't the most unusual thing in the world, but it bugged Lovegood that he couldn't find any pictures of the event.

Phineas said, 'Just ask Lavvy Diggory how he pulled it off. I'm sure Uncle Rupert would be only too happy to oblige her.'

Later, advancing on the Forbidden Forest, Lovegood was jarred from a reverie by the voice of Gerry Ollivander, coming to meet him.

'Tally-ho!'

'Oh dear. Am I your quarry?'

Gerry's interesting blue-grey eyes clouded over. 'My what?'

'That's what hunters cry out when they spot their prey. Tally-ho!'

'Ah. No, of course no. Forgive me, Lovegood. England is still extra strange to me. Come, let's to the forest.'

The sun was a white coin in the north. The subtle tinge of chill in the air was a premonition of the fall to come. Gerry wore navy trousers, finely creased brown leather boots and a buttoned shirt of creamy broadcloth. Lovegood could've followed him by his smell alone—and would've. He cleared his throat. 'The Headmistress mentioned you were going to be opening up an Ollivanders in Paris.'

'So I am.'

'When, exactly?'

Gerry laughed, cuffed him on the shoulder. 'We hardly know each other, and already you are Get away, Gerry! Go back to France! So smart is Lovegood, he reaches in two days the conclusion that takes most people two weeks!'

'On the contrary,' Lovegood blushed. 'I like your company.'

'Well,' Gerry deposited a sidelong glance in Lovegood, 'it remains to be seen. A year? Six months? My father is off collecting cores, which, this can take some time, mon amie. Have you ever seen a grown man try and get an eyelash off a sphinx? It's absurd that we have any competition at all in this business—how many other lunatics have the funding? All day scouting forests, sniffing trees, negotiating with the children of dying unicorns… But what can you do when it's your inheritance? So yes, he will return and at some point decide when I am experienced enough in…retail? This is the word, no? Then whoosh, Gerry returns to France.'

'You'll be here a while yet, then.'

The taller boy flashed him a private smile. 'Oui.'

The air cooled markedly as they plunged into the Forbidden Forest, and in no time wilderness canceled the sky. Root systems arrested the undulant ground. Windthrow piled underfoot. Moss of brilliant Irish green fringed stones and stumps. Trunks in a range from grandparent to adolescent—felled by winds, fire, ice and time—crisscrossed the forest at every stage of decay. Light pierced the overstory in arrays teeming with inconsequentia. Flitting between the trees were ravens, bee-eaters, bullfinches in their smart suits of peach and blue. Hairy networks of vine crawled with ants. Diaphanous fans of spiderwebs glinted in waves of light. The air thickened with moisture, and, save their own footsteps, the noises of civilization subsided into the critterscurry, wingbeat, twigcrunch, oakgroan and branchsway of the wood.

There were yet hours of light in the day, but 'day' in the Forbidden Forest's interior was a grey limbo, plainly enchanted by ageless factions. Each time Lovegood trekked in beyond the outskirts, a moment arrived in which—from one step to the next—the birds were too large and attentive, the rodents uncowed, the trees aware. At such points the edges of one's senses became the playpen of monsters: all shadows held evil, and every rustle was a Centaur's hoof.

Gerry led Lovegood purposefully, untroubled by such truths.

'What are we looking for?'

'I'll let you know once we've found it. How is our friend Magda, by the way? What a thing this morning!'

'She was a bit shaken, honestly. But I suspect her of toughness.'

'Ha. Me too, Lovegood. You'd never guess it from looking at her—where she came from, you know.'

'How do you mean?'

'It's a bit of a cruel joke that her name is "Coyne," as their family's never had any. There's a reason she went to that huckster Cephalopos, you know.'

Lovegood was blindsided. 'She spells it different, actually.' He spelled Coyne for Gerry.

'Ah. This is better.'

'Then, the silver lime…'

'Oui. Take a pauper from the gutter and hand her a golden baton. Voi-lah, Madamoiselle, you were meant for each other! …But that is Arturo. In a business of crooks, the crooks know their business.'

'How did you know about her family?'

Gerry laughed. 'Earlier you made a pun and said of yourself—by way of explaining, as if you couldn't help it—"Ravenclaw." You ask me, how do I know this about the Coynes? I say, "Ollivander." Understand?'

He did. He walked a few paces. 'What did Briar mean by asking if Magda and I were inside?'

'Do not be ashamed to ask. It was an awkward moment. You may have noticed: Briar, very much time in solitude. Very much a solitary. Our longest-tenured employee, you know. I'd wager my own leg that some aspect of your wand—may I see it?'

Lovegood didn't ordinarily part with his wand, but Gerry—there was no sense denying it—changed him around. It was miraculously light in his hand: a single length of vine probably a foot if flat, but two parts had constricted and squiggled up on themselves with age. (It was impossible not to read portends into the gradual shrinking of his wand, but Lovegood made the attempt.) Even containing a piece of a Hebridean Black's heart it weighed almost nothing. He loved it unconditionally and handed it over without a thought.

'Splendid vine piece, eight inches almost exactly…for now.'

'That's right.'

'Core of…?'

'Dragon heartstring.'

Gerry nodded. 'I'd wager she gleaned the wood, the core, or both. Same goes for most every wand at Hogwarts. May I ask, when you came in to be matched—'

'It erupted from the box, shot off a cascade of sparks and flew directly to my hand. Your father said, "That's you sorted," and I was out the door within the minute.'

Gerry smiled. 'The vine match is what you wish for if last night you spent too many paydays at the tavern. It's no work at all. Just wrap the thing and give the child his receipt. Everyone's happy.'

'So, when she asked…'

'Yes, yes, forgive me. Here, have back your handsome wand. Briar's helping me put up the Paris shop. You wouldn't believe how complicated are laws regulating magical business in France—especially if a "foreigner" is putting it up. And perhaps there are some aspects of these negotiations that a witch of her specialized background is better able to conduct than a mere boy—or than by Gerbold, the public face. Aspects, you know, not all of which,' Lovegood was a second late in realizing Gerry's voice had deliberately taken on a poncy English lilt, 'would necessarily be considered, in the strictest sense, cricket, my good man.'

'I see.'

'Of course you do. And here we are.'

Where they'd stopped did not at first seem markedly different from any other claustrophobic thicket of the Forbidden Forest. It was perhaps slightly clearer, with an empty ring circling an absurd, sky-smiting, godlike oak. He started to speak, but Gerry, grinning, put a finger to Lovegood's lips.

The contact stoked a tempest of dizziness in him. Parts of his belly fell into his shoes.

After a moment he detected the soft burbling of a brook. A nearby runnel of clear and sourceless water trickled through the carpet of stone, root, nettle and leaf. It came from upstage and zig-zagged down and off vaguely to his right, looping round as it did the oak and a huddle of mismatched trees (the oak's deputies) that Lovegood belatedly realized were better lit than those in the surrounding and anonymous ranks, as if some private moon floated tethered to the sheriff.

The light made no sense.

The back of Lovegood's neck prickled.

'Where are we?' he whispered.

'Heart of the forest,' Gerry answered, not with sacred hush exactly but in the same register of reverence Lovegood had heard when that morning he'd eyed Magda's fraud wand and intoned Tilia tomentosa. He indicated the colossus. 'This is my uncle, Quercus Robur. That means English Oak, Lovegood.'

'I knew that, actually.' He craned his neck and stepped back to try and behold the oak in its entirety.

It was more than shade, more than a tree, more than some future span of heated winters. It was too large and too old to be completely sane. Had it been painted on the air, a sober viewer would've condemned the painter's hyperbole. Its bole of black scalemail bark was six or seven Lovegoods in diameter at least, its crown a vast, irresponsible Medusa's spray of crookeding limbs—a ludicrous fountain of nature's cursive. Many behemoth leaders dipped down to the ground like the elbows of an exhausted man, others weaved themselves into long marriages, others pioneered heights the rest of the forest shrank from; all spoke with the inflection of a culture of leaves.

In his mind Lovegood held the word Teacher. Aloud: 'How came you to be its nephew?'

'My great-great-many-times-great Uncle Geraint planted it a thousand years ago. When it finally dies, it goes to the oldest Ollivander son. Some lucky devil's birthright, Lovegood. Looking at it,' he looked, 'no, I think not mine.'

'Can you still get magic from dead wood?'

'But of course. It is the easiest way. The magic parts are the last to rot.'

'The magic parts, you say… Do you mean the tree isn't completely suffused?'

Gerry didn't try hiding the fact that he enjoyed having an enthralled student. 'Magic pools here and there. It even slides around—very slowly—over the life of the tree. But lop off the magical limb? The whole being will perish and you'll have nothing…firewood. Wait for nature to take its course? A bough dissolves into a rack of wands. Go ahead, come closer. Forget Uncle Quercus. Look at this one.'

Rubbing his neck, he looked down to see that Gerry now leaned against the ivy-strangled trunk of a modest yew whose crown had become over the years all but extinguished by the oak's. He approached. The ground around them was cleaved and roped by roots. 'You've a very impressive uncle,' he said.

Gerry winked at him. 'This one's older.'

'No! Do you mean it? This yew?'

Gerry laughed. 'Not much topside, all right, that's true, but underneath? You'll never believe what next I tell you.'

'Try me.'

'You've heard I'm sure that the wand of yew, when buried with its dead owner, sprouts another yew tree?'

'I'm sure I hadn't heard that.'

'Good, I teach you something. This?' Gerry pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the ivy-caked trunk. 'This is Merlin's grave.'

Lovegood reeled. 'That's not true!' he said, a smile in his voice though he couldn't close his mouth. Gerry, he noted, suddenly had wand in hand.

His guide flicked his wandwrist generally above him. 'Révéler Nargle!'

It took Lovegood several seconds to realize that anything had changed. For a moment they stood in the forest's deep heart, attending the alleged grave of Merlin, while around them scores of night-hidden wildlife counted off the hour, air colder by the minute. Then he blinked. And blinked again. And mashed his closed eyes with the heels of his hands—but no, those clots of light in the trees weren't going anywhere. Faintly throbbing constellations, leisurely pulsing tapiocas of the green closest to white, clinging to the joints of oak and the open gashes of the yew and visible—now that he looked—even deeper into the reaches of the forest, as though some hooligan had careened drunkenly through, splashing magic paint on trees.

'The nargles, you see, they congregate on the magic parts…what, like moth to flame? Except in a good, friendly, reciprocal way. One of the mysteries of our world, this relationship of nargles to woodmagic. Does one create the other? And if so, which? We can't know. We know only: where nargles are, this is wandwood.' Evidently pleased by the effect he'd had on Lovegood, Gerry straightened up, took a step, stumbled on a root and lurched.

Lovegood lunged forward and caught him by the upper arms. For a spell their faces were so close they breathed each others air. Eyes and senses swimming, Lovegood said, 'Listen, Gerry, teach me everything you know about woodmagic, all right?'

And Gerry, still smiling, pushed away, shaking his head…