Chapter 8 Lignis incantatum
It was a soaking rain all right but not necessarily one best indulged. A whisking afternoon wind lent caprice to the downpour, a plunge in temperature gave it malice. Even so, squinting into the weather from the Stalwarts House front door (or what remained of it after the cart-pusher had smashed through), Lovegood resolved to walk across town. He needed time to think. He was in the thick of the strangest, most eventful day of his life. He tapped his wand in time against his knee and said: 'Double double toil and trouble, seal this poor sod in a bubble!'
On bubble he unlatched what he thought of as the Gate of Any Dimension—a protean obstruction erratically located somewhere between his wrist and heart, whose willing acquiescence was required for any magic whatsoever. The G.A.D. could be anywhere in his body and was a snob. In order to loose the magic on the world, Lovegood had to locate the gate and summon the precise sequence of words to coax it open. As with most things in life, this became easier with experience. Bubble charms and their ilk tended to make similar demands on the spellcaster—as did most magics grouped into their sundry phylum. He wouldn't testify to the universality of his system, but Lovegood ordered spells into high, low and middle varieties, based on where the effort tugged on him inside. This one was nice and high: the gate lay behind his right eye; he opened it with a cerebral maneuver akin to hurtling down a chute (the rhyme and meter helped) and felt the watersoft stream of magic sluice down through his wandwrist and manifest in the world.
The immediate result was that everything went a bit warpy, the top part of the storm's music hushed, and raindrops popped and streaked in their millions down and around him, as if upon a transparent aura. He turned to say one last goodbye but the Stalwarts were occupied completely by the cart-pusher.
Rooney Tuttle, he'd learned. Legend of amateur Quidditch. You mean you haven't heard of him? Don't judge him like this, they said. He used to really be something. But come back and meet poor Rooney on a better day, won't you, dear—why you'll have to finish sitting for the portrait anyhow. He walked out briskly, the dry bit the tempest couldn't touch.
Antimouse's Dry Country: wherein ghosts struggled to tell between the sleeping and the woke. For a moment Lovegood entertained the fancy that he was asleep, actually—that everything since he'd 'come to' in the Ministry of Magic had been an elaborate charade conducted by his mind. Certainly elements of dreams were sewn throughout the day: the way he accommodated himself so quickly to his new surroundings despite their oddity; their tenuous hold on reality (Toucher's triple-snap reveal); the public nudity of his innermost life broadcast to people who mattered to him; the dark passage into something like home (a sure metaphor for waking, though he'd often 'waked up' in his dreams, too); the tumbling of useful coincidences among the tenants of Stalwart House (Binns, did you say? But he's right here!); the dreamy chaos of a lunatic barging down the door…
Yet the day was real. The things happened.
Still, that didn't mean nothing funny was afoot.
For starters, Rupert Brood appeared to have satisfied himself concerning Lovegood's quirky memory with the matter of the letters he'd been automatically writing over the years, but Toucher had continued trying to unpeel him with her eyes, to touch something off of his face with her finger-flapping hands. She'd seen something else in there…a third complication next to the obliviation and the letters, and he'd felt it too. He couldn't shake the sensation that something more had happened in Darby's classroom than he could remember.
His memory was a jigsaw puzzle with lots of white in it being reassembled on a white surface. What if it was missing a white piece on the white surface? He could be holding just the piece and still not know where to place it, or he could not be missing anything at all, or he could be missing loads.
But he didn't feel like he was missing loads. He sensed there'd been a theft of discrete material. Someone had it. The truth of his day was held in the minds of other people—people he may or may not have known. Again and again, walking through storm-emptied Hogsmeade, his thoughts returned to the pillaging of his room by Britain's most famous wizard.
Why would Rupert Brood break into my room to steal my letters?
Lovegood's native inclination was to accept the explanations of people whose sincerity he had no reason to doubt, and he certainly didn't have any reason to doubt Brood's. In the room, in the moment, Brood's actions made sense: Naturally, Lovegood assured himself, you'd have done the same thing… But he was perhaps congenitally overeager to assign reasonableness to men. It was perhaps a flaw to hunt for reasonableness in a category so reliably short of the stuff. And, in fact, had Lovegood been in Brood's position—and the boy not on his deathbed, as indeed he hadn't been—Lovegood now thought he'd have waited for the victim to surface from the spell's effects, whereupon he'd have engaged in the normal course of casework. If ultimately he'd deemed the boy's private correspondence worth a look, he'd have asked for consent and found a way to get it. In the most extreme circumstance, he'd not have paraded the memories so hastily before a room full of strangers.
In hindsight it was clear: wanting to see them as fast as possible, Brood grasped at the first opportunity to do so.
Probably he'd not have so mildly conceded to Robards had he felt sincerely justified, as an Auror, in his actions. Particularly there, on the second floor, with Uther Underata right down the hall.
He's hiding something, Lovegood thought. He's hiding something and he's afraid I've found him out.
It was the room, of course. This clicked in place inside him like a simple turn of arithmetic. Seven twice was fourteen, and Rupert Brood was nervous because the room he was staying in had been meant for Linus Lovegood. What if one of Lovegood's clever chums had charmed or jinxed it in some way? What if there were spectral ears in there or magical zoomy eyes trained on it? Some prank set for the new boy they were too ashamed to confess. What if nothing he did in Shambhala could be private? For all Lovegood knew, Brood had been prying into the lives of the other Secret Chiefs, too.
He queasily felt the next revelation's approach and queasily made room for it: Darby obliviated me because Brood wanted him to. They're in league for some reason: two famous wizards guarding their reputations…
He let the full repellant slithering send of the thought coil through him, then willed it return to hiding. He effected a little laugh at himself. Inspector Lector Darby, and Rupert Brood, afraid of Linus Lovegood? Hah!
He shuffled mentally for a change of subject.
He didn't understand how to feel about the actual attack.
This was perhaps a unique symptom of a memory-erasing charm: experientially speaking, what was the difference between not remembering something and not having endured it? He'd been attacked, therefore he recalled no attack. He was sure he should have felt afraid, and would have done, walking about town unprotected but for a magical bubble, if he could remember that he'd been hurt, stunned, vanished. As it was, the back of his head was a trifle tender. His left shoulder felt a mite numb. He had an ache in his left side. That was it. He might've fallen out of bed.
And Robards was certainly right: whoever'd attacked him had deemed his continued existence a risk worth taking. Someone skilled enough at the obliviation charm that wiped him clean wouldn't have had any trouble summoning an A.K. spell in a trice: wizards were lethal. He was alive because he posed no threat. To wit, the Headmistress's response. Buried under controversy and deadlines or no, she'd have been there to personally oversee the crisis had it reached a particular severity. Ergo: it wasn't so severe a crisis. 'Overzealous' traditionals. Or someone clever enough and powerful enough to make it appear so.
Brood: I just need him out of the way for a moment.
Darby: I'll see what I can do.
Was it possible to enclose obliviations within obliviations? Was that why he couldn't remember how he'd gotten into the argument with Darby to begin with, but remembered traces after? He'd ask Phineas. Phineas was there.
But the Inspector could've hypnotized the entire class, so he couldn't take Phineas's word for anything.
He wanted to laugh again, at himself, to really do it, really laugh hard—what a preposterous thought, Lovegood! This is why there's no bottom to paranoid imaginings! This is why that way leads to madness…!—but he couldn't find the laugh in him. The problem with magic was that most things were possible, and the problem with men was that most weren't reasonable.
When he arrived at Shambhala no one was there. Not a soul. The hearths sat fallow while timepieces of every variety ticked seconds from the evening. Just after six. Supper, but who would guess it. I will invent a clock, he thought, that will show me the exact location of everyone I love.
Portia!
He sped upstairs; his door was ajar, resting on the jamb. A gout of anger and despair exploded in him—but there she lay, too crusty with age to explore, on the sheetless bed by his pitiful pillow, folded and grooming, pausing to take him in. What?
He stroked her bony head and considered the situation. Except for the door's being open and the letters in his pocket there wasn't any evidence of looting, though any halfway decent wizard knew how to cover his tracks.
The letters. He clutched them in his robe's interior pocket. They'd been carelessly tossed under the cot. Brood could've just accio'd correspondence.
But he still hadn't seen the most recent one. Robards had kept him from it. If Lovegood's suspicions had any part of the truth, Brood wouldn't let that go. He'd have played it straight by starting with the earliest ones (you mean you never collected an enemy?) but that would have been to conceal his true intent. He'd only been really interested in the ones that came after his arrival, and he'd only gotten to see the one—which ended up coming from a night well before his entrée to the house.
A wild hair of an idea occurred to Lovegood, a serious and potentially very bad one, and, for the first time in his life, he bet everything on it.
He kissed Portia's raspily purring head, closed the door behind him, and bounded down to the fifth-floor landing. He aimed his wand and clocked the door with the creepy S on it and said 'Alohomora!' It clicked open. Rupert Brood wouldn't let his door be opened so easily lest other security measures were in place. He depended on this. He hoped the Auror got tickled and apparated over. With a little luck he'd be gone already.
After the attic the room seemed a palace: a vast octagonal space with very nearly nothing in it. What you'd expect from a temporary quarters. A desk in a corner under a storm swept window. A single bed neatly made—pair of slippers peeking out from underneath. Walls of bare old plaster, imperfectly healed of their centuries of nontrad-inflicted abuse. He inhaled a Broody waft: spice with a tang of musk underlying. He wasted no more time.
A pad of writing parchment was on the desk near a quill and inkwell. He took the quill and scribbled: Return when finished, then ripped the sheet from the pad, took the last memory letter from his pocket and set the one over the other. But something covered by the pad had become uncovered: a single page much marked up in a way dearly familiar to him.
Lovegood imagined he could hear the bells of alarm chiming around Brood and all through the Auror bureau on the 2nd floor of the Ministry, but he couldn't resist. The man broke into his room!
It was an examination in Dark Arts, of all things. The name on the top was Lavinia Diggory's, beautifully written in Lavinia's lush hand. According to the marks—which Lovegood instantly recognized as the Headmistress's, replete as they were with her adventuresome spellings—she'd eked out an Exceeds Expectations. Why here? Just the one test? Why hidden?
Thoughts for him to ponder en route to the Forbidden Forest.
He scooched it back where he'd found it, closed Brood's door behind him and noticed the S wobble. It was a numeral 5, of course, upside down.
On second thought, he left the door wide open.
୫
Lovegood had a fairly good idea of what Brood would find in the letter: a young man stumbling briefly into his arms. If the Auror had imagination and feeling equal to his mechanical skill as a wizard he would decode the moment's significance; he might recognize Gerry Ollivander, and might not; but barring an anatomical knowledge and recall of the Forbidden Forest itself he wouldn't know whither the memory originated. Which meant that, if he intended to pursue, it would take awhile.
Which meant Lovegood would have the drop on him.
On the fifth floor landing he centered Uncle Quercus in his thoughts, kicked a heel down and twisted into the longspace between points. He went fluid. He fritzed. When he cracked into one vertical shape of air-displacing mass again his stomach was the last to stabilize, and the cup of nausea swashed about within him. But when his seeing snapped back into place, there it was: the monarch of the wood, a Medusan colossus of time, light and water metamorphosed into timber, bark and leaf. Beneath it Lovegood was a tick contemplating a mastiff. He'd apparated next to the great trunk—just where Gerry'd tumbled into him, in fact—and from his perspective the crown ran out indefinitely in every direction. He reckoned the day had an hour more of light in it at most. The storm either never reached the forest or had moved on already.
He paced off a circle round Quercus, trailing a toe in the ground, dragging it through the cold stream, incanting cave inimicum to hide from prying eyes. This would augment his surprise or his privacy or both. He didn't really think anyone would come after him, but he had violated the sanctity of an Auror's private chambers. It wasn't impossible. And if Brood did come, it would almost certainly confirm his worst suspicions. In which case you'll what? he asked himself now. Kill him?
He halted. It was the strangest thing: an entire nest of baby plovers lay on the ground in his path. Their slick reptilian bodies squirmed and called as if neither action could be accomplished without the other. How many…five, six? The tiny hinges of their beaks opened and closed in a bubbling matrix of need.
He counted five. A pair of adults in low-slung boughs above hopped about, squawking. A person's touch, Lovegood knew, could prove fatal to the litter. He levitated the nest up to a likely nexus of branches, taking his time. Only gradually did a semblance of calm return to the family.
He finished marking off the concealment charm, flagging a bit.
It hadn't been a small glass of wine, and he'd drained it fast.
He crossed his ankles, dropped to his bum and let his knees settle to either side.
Obviously he wasn't going to kill anyone.
He fell backwards onto leaf strewn Scotland. Oak canopy monopolized his vision.
He was essentially invisible in the middle of the Forbidden Forest on a Thursday at suppertime. He would crack the Susurro enigma or die trying.
Or maybe he'd just embarrass himself trying. Give himself a glancing wound of some kind. Put himself off other goals.
He laughed at the sky: he'd already embarrassed himself. This whole delusion of grandeur.
He came up swiftly, aimed his wand at the oak and said, 'Interrogatis!'
Magic swifted through him. It flexed the crimp of his wrist on the way out—it trembled his vine wand and bulbed its tip and flashed visibly—
—but nothing happened. The mighty oak gave nothing up. It was completely unaltered, unalterable: a monument to itself; a wild, sprawling bank of years.
Interrogatis wasn't a subtle spell. Darby had shown them how to wring the ghosts of tactile sensation with it—from shoe cavities, sleeves, old, sweat-marbled hatbands. It expressed the wielder's dominance over the subject, and if Lovegood thought it ridiculous to suppose he could threaten a Darby or Brood, it was simply the most hilarious joke ever conceived to pretend dominion over a tree a millennium old. What multiple of Lovegoods would it take to match the oak in age? In mass?
He considered the tree. The forest air was cool, laced with a bouquet of lignin and vine on a spectrum of budding to decay. He could just make out the burbling of the wandering brook. He did interrogatis on a continent of moss consuming a small damp log: an ethereal skein of insects-it-had-known appeared and floated off as if exhaled before puffing out in the air.
This confirmed that the spell worked on living flora. It was just muted by the oak's Brobdingnagian proportions.
Even had it worked, what would he see? Ten centuries' of remembered birds? He wanted to tap a tree, to get at the inside stuff; he wouldn't be able to do anything with the sloughed-off sense memory of an eternal flock rising from the dirt into the sky and back again. He knew that story and could write it already. He needed to invent something.
One of its great laterals sunk down near him: thick as a cannon and dipping almost to the ground before arching up again. He placed his palm on it, felt the sere, unyielding scalemail of its outer bark. He craned his neck to chart its progress behind him and saw that it was one of those that twined round and actually seemed to splinch into a bough from a different tree entirely. Shame on you, Lovegood! Gerry had said. Respect their privacy!
That's the thing to do: kiss the oak! Approach it as an intimate!
He stood, brushed off his hams, took a deep breath. 'Uncle Quercus,' he said, 'allow me to introduce myself. I'm Linus Lovegood. Mostly people call me Lovegood.' He took a darting look around: it would be an awkward time for Brood to show. 'Like you,' he said, 'I'm made of earth and water. Like you, I've magic in me, and memory. I put down roots—metaphorically, at least. Or at least I will… Um, I don't leaf exactly but I do, sort of, er…sprout.' He sighed. 'Like you, I'm alone among many.' His wand palm was clammy. He showed the tree his wand.
'This is my wand. It's made of vine and has a dragon heartstring inside. The vine came from the Black Forest in Germany. Mr Ollivander told me it'd been harvested from an essentially immortal plant that'd grown round the wooden gate of an abandoned castle. The gate eroded completely, but the vine grew up around it and so replaced it. Supplanted it—is that funny?' No sign from the tree. 'The dragon was an Hebridean Black called Myrmwyrm.' He cleared his throat. 'Well, Professor Muldoon always says it's a good idea to clock things you mean to practice magic upon—or with. So, I'm going to attempt to do that now, as a way of our getting to know one another better.'
He extended his wand and focused on the trunk, spavined with fungal conks like stepping stools for fairies. A column of condensed life that had continuously grown for half a million days. Brother, he thought, giving his wand a miniscule twitch…
୫
…it dawned on him that he'd been thrown. He was some distance from the trunk and his chest hurt. Actually everything hurt. Lovegood's various precincts took their time reporting but soon enough the vote was in: Pain, unanimous. He realized he was panting because his wind had been knocked out—one—and also because it hurt to fully inflate his lungs. He'd been on his back, then curled half up at the waist, and now set himself gingerly down again. Groundwet soaked in. He scooped up his head to regard Uncle Quercus, then plopped it back.
Quercus seemed fine.
An adult plover regurgitated provender down the throats of its jockeying get. The light appeared no different—greygreen, suffused with mist and sporefog that lifted and floated and mixed. He'd been out for a moment, no more.
He cast anchora terminum at a point in midair and tugged himself up by his wand. 'Right,' he said aloud, 'sorry about that.' He collected himself and walked slowly to the trunk. 'That was pretentious of me. I apologize. I feel a fool. It won't happen again.' He got down to one knee and examined the heaving of the soil at the swollen old ribs of exposed roots: thumping big mountainous terrain for bugs. Though, to be fair, he was a bug, too.
He closed his eyes and waited for the dulling aches to shift through him.
A forest shared sonic qualities with a library: the papery hush that muffled everything. The face of Nehemiah Tombs crystallized in his vision. He'd once told Lovegood that the only tenable posture of librarian to library was that of servant to sovereign. The oak is a compendium of sticks, an index of them, an archive. He imagined Tombs bowing to the library, effacing himself.
Not a superior. Not an equal.
He got on both knees and prostrated himself.
He opened his hands over the craggy plate of roots, let his wand roll out.
He thought a spell that was the complete submission of his mind to the tree. Lignis omnium incantatum, he thought, clarifying the words with the beam of his mind, seeing and hearing them, lignis mnemosynorum, lignis incantatum omnium submissum. Flood me. I beg you to flood me. Tasting the earth, his lips mouthed the airless words.
The Gate of Any Dimension yawned open from the pith of his brain with a screaming and terrible light.
୫
He sees a seed crack awake, the husk riven by living quick, tendrils sniffing water, suspended in loam.
He establishes. He drinks from the sky. Sunlight courses down into him like sugar and he towers into it, heaving with pain and exhilaration into the cistern of the sky.
His mind splats against the flying of seasons.
The winds rinse him, push, bow him down, eat at his womb of dirt, test him without pause forever but he claps to the earth at the points of a thousand marriages. He claps deep, sucking the earth up into him and the sunlit watersky down. He composes himself from elements.
He is exposed.
He spans in every dimension, his shadow clocking round a field of cousins.
Green blooms from his tips and is painted by the lowering sun and falls in a heap all at the same time. He is gravid with berries, then lost of them. He comes over time to know his fellows. Together they read the wind and mark the spinning of the great orb their home.
He has no awareness of other beings, but the horizon changes.
Then an alien declares him a god and locks onto him in praise.
In an instant he sifts its mind and takes the measure of its wants.
୫
Lovegood stood a stone's throw from the Black Lake. He saw the distant, many-turreted silhouette of Hogwarts up on its ridge. Gloaming bent the sky's blues into silvers and oranges. Something was off about the line of hills and trees and the castle. Something was off about everything except the lake: the lake was a field of undulant shattered glass beneath the sky, returning its light in trillions.
A man approached on foot.
He had on a funny hat with lots of what looked like metal tags in it and a ruffled black doublet slashed over a white linen shirt that tied by drawstring at the neck. Black hose, soft boots that climbed to midcalf and flashed emerald green in certain lights. He wore an actual codpiece. A Shakespearian in search of a tragedy? He was trim and not very tall—a Lovegoodian body, actually. Slight, with indifferent posture. He couldn't quite make out his face.
Lovegood tried a hello but nothing came out. He tried to move but that didn't go either. It was suddenly clear to him that his feet were myriad and planted inextricably in the ground.
The man glanced at him how people do at furniture, then looked again more closely—a curiosity in his posture—then pivoted to face the lake and the castle above it. Lovegood still couldn't make out anything of his features. The fellow squatted, his hands flat upon the ground, turned to peer at Lovegood again, as if to catch him out, then shook his head clear of the distraction.
His hands worked into the ground, head down and intent. Language issued from him, hushed and continuous. Lovegood couldn't make out the words, but it was clearly some very heavy, very serious spellcasting. At length he arose, hands dripping earth. They stiffened down in front of his knees—fingers walled, thumbs touching, then started climbing almost imperceptibly in an arc up and away from his body, his arms straight. Lovegood was trembling—why he couldn't say. Fear followed the shaking instead of the other way around. From far away a noise arrived on the breeze like nothing he'd ever heard: a minute whine that gained every moment in volume and urgency.
The wizard's hands were spread in front of him now, sculpting the air, holding it; they vibrated like sand in a tremor, livid with blood, fine bones rigid.
A dark dot appeared on the sky south of Hogwarts. It grew as it rose.
The air around Lovegood seemed to compress as the object neared, its call heightened to a roaring and then shrieking string section. In the last moment it blotted out the sky, then thudded to the ground. A dust cloud fountained up. Lovegood stood exposed: couldn't run, shut his eyes, cover himself. Earth rained over him, fine in parts and bunchy in others.
As the dust thinned Shambhala was revealed. Probably a seven-storeyed building with a cellar could not have made it better through the journey: it did tilt a bit, though, in the direction of the wizard who'd moved it—a consequence of gravity and force. In one way the scene now made sense to Lovegood: he knew where he was. In another it made less sense than ever. Where had the house been moved from?
Something funny about the real estate, Brood had said. That was why it was functionally part of Hogwarts. Why it was ½ High Street instead of a whole number. Shambhala hadn't originally been conceived in Hogsmeade—it had been relocated by the bloke in the hat.
As to who that bloke was, Lovegood had little doubt. He'd never known a wizard capable of the feat he'd just witnessed, but he had heard of a wizard obliviating every Muggle in London—one who'd outgrown wands by eleven.
A black shape on the ground moved, then so did another, and Lovegood saw that a mess of people had tumbled out of the house like pepper from a toppled mill. As they stirred Nightless Day walked among them, hands clasped peaceably behind his back. Clearly they couldn't have survived the transit without his intending they did.
'Oliverus,' he said to one in a clear, high voice, 'I welcome thee to Hogsmeade.' A lanky boy gathered himself shakily to his feet. This one seemed no older than Lovegood himself, though again he couldn't quite make out the face. Like those of his compatriots, his garments were more rags than proper robes, threadbare and dark. 'Jane,' said the wizard. 'Miles Moriona. Jon, son of Jon. Dear Bryn. I bid ye welcome.'
Lovegood recognized the names from the archive—the Secret Chiefs of the mid-16th century, the last ones recorded in scanty detail. Uncle Quercus had taken him to the time of the flood that had ruined the original archives and necessitated their replacement. Or maybe this was, somehow, the flood itself.
Day came to a stop over a small form, a crumple of brown and jet fabrics powdered with dust.
'Ann,' said Nightless Day, 'arise.' He waited a moment. 'Arise and confess that thou hast killed poor Rybel, and tell us why.'
The crumple moved, but it didn't speak. The crumple shuddered.
It was crying.
Ann, Rybel. As if sipping from something too cold to take at once, Lovegood accommodated himself to the truth of what he was witnessing: the Headmaster claiming that Rybel deMille's death was not a suicide at all, but murder—done by someone soon to burn, no less.
Day sniffed. He looked up, reacquainted himself with the twilit sky, glanced again at Lovegood. 'Oliverus,' he said in a new tone, 'thy mistress has committed murder.' He pronounced it morder. 'The murder of an old classmate of ours. She don't deny it. What say ye?'
The boy backed fractionally away from the wizard, his body tense. 'Milord, is not My Lady Susurro a councilor to Lord Castlemore?'
'Murder is murder, Oliverus. Or is it thy position 'tis a perk of the office?'
'Milord, if she don't deny it,' the young wizard's voice ruffled Lovegood's memories, 'if she don't then I—then I say she must answer for it!'
Day addressed the form gently weeping on the ground. 'What thinkest thou, Ann: will all Brindlestick come so swift? What thinkest thou, Jane Wyck?'
Neither woman responded.
Day approached the other young man. 'Jon, son of Jon, what say thee? Or does thy House cat claim also thine tongue?'
'Headmaster,' this one dropped to his knees, 'ask us again, Headmaster?'
'Suspicion mounts me, Jon, that thy noble House will object to the justice soon to fall upon its bravest champion. Methinks Brindlestick schemes to rebel.'
'Rebel, Headmaster?' the one called Jon didn't seem to understand.
A ghostly silver muskrat entered the scene from stage left, a chubby, dawdling, pointy-nosed thing aimlessly threading its way among the actors, by all appearances oblivious to them.
At the same time a young woman with a shock of long red hair aimed a quivering wand at the wizard with his hands behind his back. 'Ain't any justice absent our lord,' she said, her voice tremulous. 'Not even thee can stand in for him, Headmaster.'
The crumple called Ann got to its feet. 'Bryn,' she warned, hand outstretched.
Seeing Day's attention split between the witches, one of the young men—Miles—lifted his wand, a hot spell articulating. But the Headmaster made a quick, short thrust of his left palm and the assailant froze in midmotion, as if arrested in a creeping current of time. His body concussed around an invisible impact to his chest and he was cast into the air. Floating away, his tattered robes in their degrees of black flowed round his person as if in aqueous solution. Lovegood felt a shudder: he got no clues as to the boy's condition from his face. Faces were indistinct to him—they were thumbs. But the reaction explained itself.
A choked note of grief and shock escaped Bryn, her wand dipping. Then it had flown into the Headmaster's hands and he'd snapped it in twain. This happened in one gasping moment. Only afterward did Lovegood appreciate that an identical rush of dread had filled him as had done when Gerry'd broken Coyne's fraudwand. An instant's panic, gone almost before it began.
'No more!' Ann limpingly placed herself between the Headmaster and the students. This was the first time Lovegood had a vantage of her, but he couldn't make out her features either. People were mostly just fast: they blurred from place to place. 'Thou hast slain thy beloved Miles!' she cried.
'Thou saw!' Nightless Day answered, his voice thick. 'He killed his self!'
'Bastard!' shouted Bryn, making to advance—
—but Ann blocked her and threw her down, where she wept on her knees, moaning and swearing and broken.
'Do not for a moment think he died well!' Day insisted. 'The witch Ann Susurro hast murdered Rybel deMille in cold blood! The student was killed trying to save her from justice! Jane, who is the villain here? Isn't that what Brindlesticks believe in: villains and heroes? Evil and good? Is that not what ye fill your heads with in Shambhala?'
The witch Jane Wyck bore herself up. 'Villains or no I see victims aplenty. I wish Merlin's grace on us all,' she said, like a challenge. 'On every one of us, I say!'
Day absorbed this. 'I hope thou are not the only one who sees it thus, Jane. In any case, the new Hogsmeade Shambhala must improve on the Isle of Man version. We shall abide no gods on High Street. We shall burn them from Britain if that's what keeps us safe. Say it was for a different reason thou murdered Rybel, Ann. Swear it was a mistake, or for love, or treasure, and not that he'd found you out for a fanatic. Persuade me thou art common, after all—or does not thy religion forgive lying to thy persecutors?'
She wasn't a tall woman, Lovegood saw now, the gap between herself and Day having shrunk somehow—and not by one party's aggression but as if the two drew each other, like magnets. He wasn't very tall and she was still shorter. Her head had the aspect of looking up.
She said, 'I'll not give thee the satisfaction of my spit, Nightless, nor the license of my spleen. I'll go quiet.'
She turned to Bryn, collected her from the ground, and—it was just a twitch of seeing Lovegood experienced, not documentable, but like something that occurred to him as if from the plain habit of vision, the way he'd known the horizon was wrong—she slipped something into the girl's robe: her wand.
'Let the Secret Chiefs go,' she told Day, 'and show mercy on my brethren. Thou mayst hurl Shambhala o'er leagues of sea, but fool not thyself into supposing thou canst sink the house of Bridgit Brindlestick.'
Day shook his head. 'Such prideful words from a woman going to her last room.'
'Ah but, Nightless,' Susurro tocked her finger at him, 'I know where they hide the door.'
Then in bits the world disappeared. The people went—one at a time, the first Miles, by then a dot over the water, the last Day—next the house, finally the castle on the ridge. Each plucked away in turn, as if wiped from a lens.
For a moment Lovegood occupied a primordial Hogsmeade—trackless, ancient. A lake under the sky. An island just for trees.
The moment felt no different from eternity.
୫
He awoke at night still bent at the oak's feet, dug a bit into the ground. When he moved leaves slid away off of him. The spell had petrified him—that's what it felt like. His legs craaaacked as he unkinked them, his arms craaaacked, his back craaaacked. He yawned and rubbed his eyes and dug nibs of sleep from them. His skin was chilled leather, numb and tight. He stood for a moment, gaze burrowing into the middle distance between himself and the trunk of the great oak, mind and spirit wandering the Unland between sleep and waking. He held his arms, blew his lips, sniffed, started shivering.
The shivering rattled him into consciousness.
The dream returned to him fully—every word, every feeling.
Quercus Robur loomed before him, over him.
He wasn't sure how to act.
He fell to his hands and knees and crawled backwards, averting his eyes.
Confusion swept through him: how could see anything at all? It was true night, deep night in the heart of the forest… But then he remembered from his evening with Gerry that this particular area had an innate, sourceless light to it. This he'd taken as just another novelty of life in the neighborhood of Hogwarts, where it was foolish not to expect the unexpected. But now he thought that version of himself deeply naive. The oak's light was a symptom of something like divinity, or, if not exactly that, at least of a magic so old, pervasive and unusual as to be indistinguishable from divinity.
He a chanced a peek at the tree and real fear broke through him.
It wasn't Uncle Quercus that scared him, not exactly.
He'd crossed some interior Rubicon, but into what new territory he didn't yet know.
Everything that wasn't strange before was strange now, and he didn't know how to adapt.
He needed to talk to his friends.
After a deep, fortifying breath, Lovegood stood and approached the 'tree.'
(In his mind it had become the 'tree.' He'd have to investigate the etymology of the word, which was all of a sudden glaringly insufficient. People planted 'trees' for shade. They chopped down 'trees' to make houses and fires and frigates.)
Without taking his eyes off it completely he bent to retrieve his wand. It didn't come up easily, but pulled back, and Lovegood saw with surprise that sprigs of knotgrass had curled round it.
He gentled it free.
The plover nest, he marked, was empty.
A soft thump sounded behind him.
Not thirty feet distant stood a black and white roan, majestic in a shaft of silverblue moonlight. Her body strong, sleek. The great, rippling column of her trunk tapered into a trim waist before flaring slightly out into a pair of small, muscled breasts. An otherworldly length and grace characterized her slender neck and lank, lissome arms, above which her long, equine face gazed back towards him from eyes that were pools of stars. They shimmered with a palpable sadness that gripped Lovegood by the heart.
A centauress. He'd read of them in Pokeby, but never seen one. For all he knew he was the first human to ever see one. He stepped forward but didn't rate her attention: she looked up, skyward, poised in soft light that held her like amber.
She moved—she held a lengthy, awful knife. She brought the point to her breast.
'Don't!' Lovegood rustled through a weird caking of leaves, kicking them up, making a ruckus, arms extended.
Several things happened at once. The centauress reared up with a whinnying cry, her forehooves scratching wildly at the air. Lovegood's concealment charms collapsed, negated by his willful disruption. Suddenly he was conscious of a perimeter border that had been hidden before—a flaw in the dark, a stifling of sound, a corral of stagnant air—all these magics evaporated with a brief but bonefelt sigh. In the same instant, Lovegood hit the ground like a man who'd been shot. It was as if, somehow, the enchantments had been holding him up.
Hooves stamped perilously in his vicinity, kicking up leaves in angry fans. Any moment now, he thought, she'll break me open like a melon.
'Wizard. Who are you? Where did you come from?'
'Terribly sorry,' Lovegood tried, speaking into the earth, 'I'm Lovegood.'
'Get up! If you would intervene, stand! If you would spy—'
'I wasn't spying! I just woke up and there you were!'
'Liar!' she yelled. Her hooves tromped around some. She scoffed. 'Asleep in the forest under an Aquarian moon? In your puny human flesh? What do you take me for?'
'Well, I don't understand it either, but it is true, and that's all I can say.'
'Get up.'
Lovegood managed, after considerable negotiation, to roll over. Over him towered she; over she, Quercus.
The centauress was haughty and magnificent up there: her face radiant atop a bewildering arrangement of body. The knife was gone but she now stared down at him along the length of a fledged arrow nocked in a taut, flexed bowstring. Come down from the horse and let's talk, he imagined saying, silly with exhaustion.
'I worked a spell involving the oak and it put me under. When I came to, there you were.'
'Why don't you stand? How did you get here?'
'Apparated. As to why I'm so tired, I've no idea. I suppose the spell took it out of me.'
Her eyes were a mélange of greens—a wedge rather than a point of the color chart. What magical oak- and moonlight there was refracted from the various shades in them at different intensities, causing the illusion of starryness. Her hair, he saw, had been brutally chopped down to the roots. But of course she wasn't well.
'Could I prevail on you,' Lovegood tried, 'to lower that thing?'
' "Apparate," ' she said, 'this is the wizard trick of sudden presence, is it not? Unusual for your kind to practice this trick within the Wood…'
Lovegood drew himself up onto his elbows. She was right, of course. Apparating into the Forbidden Forest was chancy for a number of reasons, not least of which was that one must keep very centrally in mind a particular location, and forests didn't have those in ways people could reliably visualize. But at the moment he was primarily preoccupied with the question of getting out of it. And just then he didn't have juice enough to float a twig, much less project his living body into the longspace between coordinates.
'Well, let's talk about that,' he said. 'But what about you? I thought you always traveled in packs. What are you doing out here alone?'
Never before had he made such an impact with a question. The bow slackened, her eyes brimmed, a sob quaked somewhere deep inside her before catching in her throat. She blinked the tears back, then shakingly retrained the arrow.
But then she cried openly, sobbing, plumped to the ground, having forgotten her weapon, hands thrust into and pulling at and working her stubbly hair. 'My Cyrus is DEAD!' she moaned, rocking amid a shower of tears. 'He's DEAD…!' Her features distorted with grief. While in the midst of this explosion she looked at him—or, to him, actually—with a confusing and arresting continuity. It seemed she only required him as a witness. Certainly he wasn't capable of anything more.
At length her fit passed. She rubbed her perplexing eyes. 'Without him I have no meaning,' she explained. It was a matter-of-fact declaration.
'Is that what you saw in the stars? That it was time to…end everything?'
She shrugged. 'The stars…' a kind of laugh entered her: the way a body relaxes around humor, the way it craves to laugh after tears. 'Pluto in Taurus. The moon in the eighth house. The night full of phantoms. And my husband is no more. That is what I saw. The sky and I, our conversation is over.'
Lovegood waited. The restlessness of the forest gathered round them.
'It's Linus, actually—my first name.'
'Hylanome,' she gave him a wet little smile.
It was all he could do to work himself up into a proper sitting position. How fitting: a Centauress whose name rhymed with astronomy. 'Will you tell me about him?' he asked.
For a moment she considered it—he could tell. She perked. Something flashed in her eyes. She imagined wreathing the forest with her husband's story.
Lovegood was aware it had nothing to do with him. He could've been an animate stone. But, finally, owing to his irrelevance, she let the fantasy part from her. As a stranger, he would only demean the story. It wasn't for him.
Hylanome issued a curt shake of her head, then thwopped her tail to the ground. 'You won't survive the night,' she said, then stood, maneuvered, gracefully dipped herself again and collected him onto her back.
They didn't speak, and the voyage out was brief. Hylanome didn't hurry so much as fall through the Forbidden Forest, as though it'd been tipped onto its side. Starting off slung athwart her, like a saddlebag, Lovegood in short order was bumped into a traditional posture, hands clasped round her waist and eyes mashed shut, room in his mind for nothing at all of his life that was or would be. He became an aspect of transit, a kind of human verb. Lovegood went.
Icy night air froze his ears and colonized the interior of his nose and throat. He bumped and bumped and tried to keep his head from thrashing against her strong back, against its downy muscled softness. Centauress warmth radiated into him along with her heady aroma of sap and horse lather. He lurched, they lurched; branches swiped at him. Hylanome's living chassis rippled and flexed and churns between his legs. He slid and banged from her back to her bucking hind over and over. When she came to a stop and kneeled, he shuffled down light as a balloon, weak kneed to an extreme, giddy with the passage. But then he saw her looking at him and remembered himself.
'It's that way, wizard boy,' she said, signaling with a nod. Then, before he could thank her, she turned tail and galloped off into the inky dark of the forest.
୫
Lovegood was miserable. He was too weak to perform any magic, which felt akin to castration. The freakish cold front oppressed and discomfited him. It compelled his legs to work faster than his exhaustion would permit, resulting in a jarring, arhythmic half-jog that jangled a brain already jangled quite enough. The revelations of lignis incantatum were too large and oddly shaped to fit inside him. He saw a snake once in the garden at Catchpole, the area just behind its head distended exactly into the silhouette of a mouse. He needed time to digest what he'd seen; needed other minds to help him eat it and comprehend. There was nowhere better to go than Shambhala, yet he didn't know what awaited him there.
He imagined the place crawling with Aurors. The boy broke into my room to leave me proof he's a deviant. We must bring him in at once. He's a threat to himself at least, and quite possibly to others…
Nevertheless he straggled forth. The revealed fact of animal sadness in the world, its incalculable weight, made flight or dishonesty equal absurdities. Having met Hylanome and witnessed the purity of her despair, Lovegood could no longer see sense in attempting to squirm away from the various truths of his life and their repercussions. He needn't invite discomfort, needn't call down powers against him, but neither did he see any merit in wriggling off the hook. Let them condemn him to his face. Let him stand up a man.
Besides, he was tired. It'd been a long day. He'd awoken at five.
He made his way through the bitter night, hands clenched to the lapels of his robe and shivering, teeth chattering, robe crusty with forest, ankles and feet going numb, keeping as much of his chin and mouth tucked under cloth as possible, relying on his own hot breath splashing onto the top of his chest, narrowing as best he could his physical awareness of himself to the cavern of his mouth and the warm slug of his tongue there, mysteries and emotions cycling Ouroboros-style through his exhausted mind, eyes fixed so intently to the ground meagerly in his future that he could have missed entire wizard duels unfolding on either side.
When he finally did arrive at ½ High Street he paused to recalibrate and spent a moment frowning at the English oak a stone's throw from the Black Lake, looming over slouching Shambhala, its immense leafless canopy written against the night like the plan of a city, or of a brain.
The house was bizarrely lit, as though in a state of emergency. Just as he'd feared. Strangers would be inside, allies of Brood and Darby at the helm of the operation seeking to rope him in…
…but who knew really what he'd find in there, or in the people. We're not all alike, Gwen McKinnon said. That's what makes society colorful. If there was any profit to be had in assuming men were scoundrels, he didn't want to make it.
Finally, it was the promise of warmth that sped him to bravery. He straightened his back, cleared his throat, and bustled through the door.
Low voices sounded from the dining room. Something weird about them. He stood for a moment breathing, rubbing his arms. Already, even after just a few nights, the smell of the house was a comfort. The voices were strange but not unfamiliar—perhaps he wasn't going to be summarily arrested. He girded his loins and entered the dining room…
…where he at once encountered the source of the strange lighting. The air was sewn with floating candles—an audience of hissing stars, the tips of their flames standing straight to the ceiling. Huddled among them at three sides of the table, their hands held and suspended just above it, were Magda, Eve, and—of all people—Phineas Black. Their eyes were closed as they chanted. In the air over the table's center a greenish cloud of magic was coalescing into something he knew not what.
He'd walked in on a seance.
He sniffed quietly and debated interrupting.
In hoarse whispers that lapped each other and braided, like the ends of waves mingling up a beach, they said: 'Oh veil 'tween lives and air, throw back your nightmade hood, and if you deem it fair, reveal our friend Lovegood!'
He shivered, held his robe tight under his chin and commiserated with himself. He ought to've gone directly to the kitchen where there'd be fire and tea. Now he was loathe to move lest he disrupt the object. Sniffing some more, but trying to be quiet, he slunk over to the dining room's hearth, which at least put off a bleeding heat. He walked a path through the floating candles that closed behind him with his every hushed step. He rubbed his eyes and yawned and smacked his dry lips. The greenish blur, which seemed before his eyes to fold and refold itself into something, each iteration approaching closer a final intended shape, reminded him of a demonstration he'd seen over the summer of a Japanese art form involving paper. Even being able to perceive clearly what it was becoming (a tree, naturally) he found the magic entrancing.
'Oh ghost assigned to me, I must be understood, I only wish to see my lost old friend—'
'Lovegood!' barked a white-faced Phineas Black, staring hard at him.
'Oh dear,' he said. 'I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to—' but a tremendous yawn routed the word interrupt.
Magda gasped sharply and stood so fast her chair toppled over backwards.
'It worked?' Eve breathed.
'No, that's…' Magda took a step towards him. He grinned sleepily. She extended her wand and poked it against the meat of his shoulder.
'No, Eve,' Magda blinked many, many times in a row, 'it's—he's real.'
Then he was engulfed in her sudden, tearful embrace. 'Where have you been?' she asked. 'It's been months!'