Chapter 9 '…something very interesting is wrong with me.'

' "Months"?' He teetered away from Magda, feather-light with confusion. 'I made Easterhedge pudding this morning!'

'You…what?' Magda's expression fluttered wildly.

Eve appeared at her side, studying Lovegood. 'That was the day he disappeared.'

'Something's wrong,' Phineas Black sidled up on Magda's other flank. 'He doesn't look like himself.'

'It's the eyes,' Eve confirmed. 'Didn't they used to be…something else?'

'Merlin's pants,' Magda studied him, 'you're right!'

Phineas lifted his hand and there was a bottle in it. He drank a bit and partially stifled a belch. 'Impostor?'

'Lovegood,' said Eve, 'catch this.' She flipped a coin high into the air. As Lovegood watched it thread through the candles she aimed her wand at him: 'Fibmorphius!'

The knut landed in his palm with a gentle pat.

'It's him,' she declared.

'Thank heavens,' said Lovegood.

Black hiccoughed. 'Why're your eyes different?'

'Where have you been?' Magda scolded.

'Is there anything to eat?' Lovegood's legs were failing. 'May I go to sleep now?'

୫

They set him in an armchair in the den by a noisy, ripping fire. They ensconced him in quilts and bade him thaw his hands on a mug of steamy wassail. They cut a slab of prime roast into pieces for him and ladled lumpy brown gravy over it and spooned hot potatoes alongside and an oily mound of something green and set the plate in his lap. Someone thought to give him a fork. Someone thought to try and feed him. He looked terrible. They'd been so worried. There was so much he'd missed.

They crowded cheek by jowl onto the sofa. Lovegood babbled answers to their questions as best he could, but his brain hadn't caught up to his mouth yet, nor his soul to his brain, and of all the information crossing in the air little connected to receptive ears. He ate steadily. Scent tickled his appetite awake and warmth hauled it open. Every bite restored a measure of the vitality that went missing the instant he'd stopped Hylanome killing herself.

He relived the surreal scene in the woods and a calm settled over him like the darkness of a closing coffin. His audience appeared to note the change; silence emerged—the tense, augmented kind that succeeds the clattering of a dropped pan.

'What day is it?' he asked at the tension's thickest part.

'Christmas Eve,' Magda volunteered. 'Thursday, as it happens.'

Lovegood closed his eyes and eased into a hot bath of self-recrimination. Some professor had at some point or another forcefully cautioned against experimenting with new spells by one's self. If he couldn't think of a particular one—he knew this to be the case—it was because they all had, in each class, every single year.

'What's happened?' he asked. 'Does Brood still room here?'

'Oh you missed a right scandal, didn't you, Lovey?' Phineas Black was drunk. 'No sir, he collected to himself quite the promotion. You see right after you went missing, it turned out the Headmistress had falsified a test to fail Lid'l Lady Lavvy Digg'ry out of a Dark Arts she'd need to be an Auror.'

'It didn't make sense,' Eve said, still litigating the case. 'Why would she go out of her way to alienate the family of one of her supporters on the Board? And with Morris Longbottom calling for her hide?'

'Lavinia Diggory's father is on the Board?' asked Lovegood.

'Her mother,' Magda said, scrutinizing his eyes like a suspicious jeweler.

Phineas drained his bottle and cast it shattering into the fire. 'Celia Diggory's was the decisive vote,' he said. 'Brood's appointment wasn't so closely contested.'

'You don't mean he's the new Headmaster?'

Three heads nodded at him.

Lovegood was yet too depleted and disoriented to feel any of the shock he knew would come. Instead, in the instant, he had just room enough for a flicker of self-protection. 'If you would, please, humor me, and let's keep my reappearance under wraps, at least for now.'

'What about Poppy and Duck?' Magda asked. 'I must tell them, Lovegood.'

'They're home for the holidays? I'm not sure it's safe. Owls can always be—'

'Won't use owls,' Coyne rolled up the left sleeve of her dress. 'We came up with something faster. A kind of code word, really, that just means get back to Shambhala.' There and rawly on the pink plump of her upper arm sat a tattoo. Umber on a field of peach skin, it was of a house shaped a bit like a witches hat, slouching at the top. 'It's just them, Lovegood, honest.'

He shrugged his consent. She pressed the tip of her new wand to the tattoo, closed her eyes…and next to her on the sofa Eve bounced and grasped her arm in pain.

Coyne tugged her sleeve back down and Lovegood saw that the original Japanese kanji on her neck had been replaced by another tattoo modeled after it. She noticed his noticing and her hand flew to it self-consciously. 'It finally disappeared, and, honestly, I just missed it.' She tucked her hair behind her ears, looking away from him. 'At any rate, they'll be on their way now.'

Lovegood said, 'Where's my cat?'

୫

He felt better—more real, more present—once the plate of holiday dinner had been swept from his lap and the spindly old cat placed there instead: a curled band of warm, breathing fur, the purring more felt than heard, while the dinner itself wended its way through the needy stations of his interior. The wassail wasn't bad either. It came in like hot honey and put a soft tilt in his blood right away.

'So what's the word on the street? Am I news?'

'You went missing September 3rd, the night of,' Phineas said, 'same day you'd been attacked at Hogwarts. Who'd have guessed you had such drama in you, Lovey!'

'Brood and the Inspector,' said Magda, addressing Eve, 'they'd taken us in that night, hadn't they? To the castle.'

'Yes. They asked all manner of probing questions.'

Lovegood remembered how abandoned the house had seemed then. An hour ago.

'Did Lovegood have enemies, who'd attack Lovegood, how well do you know him, what's he up to, that kind of thing,' said Magda. 'Then, when we came back home…'

Eve picked up the thread: 'The Headmaster—eh, Professor Brood—he came with us and found his door wide open.'

'Oh, you didn't see,' Magda chided.

'Poppy did! She spied from the steps! She said he went to his desk, picked something up—and the door banged shut behind him. He came out a moment later, calm as can be, then went up and slid something under your door.'

'I know what it is,' he said, thinking of the memory that Brood would've seen right away he had nothing to fear from. 'When did they raise the alarm I was missing?'

After a bit Phineas nominated himself to raid the awkward silence. 'Gosh, not right away, Lovey. But you must admit you are a very private sort of wizard.'

'We dispatched owls,' Magda said.

'They all came back shaking their funny little heads,' said Phineas.

'We sent to your parents!' said Eve.

'They shook their funny heads too.'

Coyne glared sidewise at her younger Slytherin compatriot. 'Honestly, Black…'

'Rupert Brood sat on it 'til it was useful,' Black exploded. 'The Diggory thing and the Lovegood thing one-two. Look: the old bird who makes her kiddies flunk can't even keep track of 'em! Why, he's been missing weeks already—the one who'd been attacked—and where's McKinnon? What's she up to? Writing angry letters to Morris Longbottom.'

Eve was cool: 'Brood and Darby thought you were most likely in the Forbidden Forest. We don't know why.'

Lovegood squirmed. 'They've been in charge of the case, have they?'

He saw himself bowing to the tree, in a stupor, digging his own grave, the calendar whirring past, leaves piling up on his back, Brood consolidating control, he and Darby laughing in Gwynevere McKinnon's office, clinking glasses.

Coyne nodded. 'They sent search parties.'

'Quite unsettling to the Forest, truth be told,' Black noted. 'The Centaur population in particular.'

Lovegood retreated from the implication. 'Is the search still on?' he asked, feeling sick.

'Oh yes,' said Eve. 'Your picture's in every issue of the Prophet. Or was…'

'They had groups out scouring all over, Lovey, every day, every town. Your mother organized them. Not quite so concerted an effort now, but—'

'Eh, if I may,' Coyne interjected, 'where have you been?'

'Well I,' Lovegood started and stopped. He laughed. 'Well,' he halted again. He didn't have the first clue what to say, how to start, ifto trust. He was scaffolded in consequences.

He swallowed. 'They were right. I've been in the forest.'

Coyne gasped. 'The whole time?'

'Yes, I—I didn't want to be found. I did concealment charms and, and I, well, I made something of a discovery…' They hung on his every word, even the serially unimpressed Phineas couldn't cover his fascination. 'A piece of magic… I mean, of course I didn't mean to stay out so long…'

Magda's face fell.

'...I know I'm a fool—I wasn't thinking straight. It's been a taxing day. Or, it was. But, Gervaise Ollivander introduced me to a tree, and—well honestly it's tangled in my head just now—but I decided to practice on it, because if I could learn how to tap into its memory I'd be able to do the same with the deMille cupboard they made from the Executioner's Tree.'

'deMille…' Coyne put it together. 'You mean the dead man from Poppy's Japanese?'

Clearly, Lovegood saw, the scandal of his disappearance had overtaken the scandal in ancient history that had set him on his disappearing way. He watched as Coyne brought Eve and Black up to speed, as much it seemed for her own benefit as theirs. 'There's a surviving cupboard, you see,' he said once she'd finished, 'bought at auction by the Malfoys.'

'Oh, that's lovely,' Black cooed. 'Can I come? I'd very much like to see the look on Squamous Malfoy's face when you ask to interview his cupboard.'

'Did the magic work?' Eve asked.

'Too well. I think I may have stumbled into something, um, stupendous.'

Pops and sizzles issued from the hearth, deep tocks from a shadow-cloaked grandfather clock. Portia squiggled into a new position and her purring momentarily heightened, like a spout of flame from a sundered log.

'What'd you see, Lovegood?' asked Coyne.

He stroked his cat's long, withered back.

୫

The revelations fell into three general categories.

First was the matter that spurred events to their present state: that is, the mysterious death (ruled a suicide) of the wizard Rybel deMille, in 1553.

Next was the notion that Hogwarts once sported, alongside Ravenclaw, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Gryffindor, a co-equal house called Brindlestick. That no one else in Britain knew the first thing about it, Lovegood was beginning to see, didn't necessarily make him insane; it might actually mean he'd wandered into a historic discovery.

Finally was the matter of Rupert Brood. The fact that Lovegood found (that very day, or, nearly four months ago) Lavinia Diggory's passing test hidden in Brood's room indicated that the reclusive Auror had orchestrated a campaign of chicanery dedicated to McKinnon's ouster. As Lovegood came to reconstruct it, the highlights of the campaign unfolded thus:

Prior to the beginning of term, McKinnon was reported to have publicly besmirched the name of Morris Longbottom, a distinguished and powerful member of the Hogwarts Board of Governors, who, she seemed to believe, was spending too much time hunting for reasons to disparage her personally—time the Headmistress suggested might be more profitably spent 'alone in a room ironing his hat.'

In a copy of the Prophet dated from mid-August Lovegood encountered the image of Morris Longbottom for the first time: above a caption reading 'How wrinkly is it really?' was a broad, lightly freckled, fractionally bucktoothed and ever-so-slightly cross-eyed middle-aged face wearing a dopey smile. Roundsman didn't spare any ink in attempting to illuminate the origins of the Longbottom/McKinnon antipathy, which supposedly took root in their student days at Hogwarts. Various parties spoke anonymously of Quidditch disappointments, academic rivalries, even bungled love affairs that, nursed with time and resentment, had at length blossomed into unconcealed scorn. (None of these sources—Lovegood read with incredulity—divulged to which House McKinnon had belonged, depriving him of the solution to what was surely the most elementary of mysteries in his orbit.) But plainly the intrepid journalist had no particular interest in getting to the bottom of their alleged hatred—his commitment rather appeared to be making sure it had no bottom.

For a good while the back-and-forth was just that: a tennis match of insinuation and indignation that Roundsman did everything to amplify, like a gardener of poisonous plants. At base, Lovegood came to believe, Longbottom really did think the Headmistress favored her longtime friends and cohort and used her powers of appointment to reward them to the detriment of the school's academic rigor. While for McKinnon's part, she believed that in resisting a Board of Governors' effort to impinge on her authority, she was protecting not just her own prerogatives, but those of all subsequent headmistresses and -masters, who must feel secure to conduct the school free of undue influence from a body that was unavoidably political. (Members of the Board were appointed by, and therefore subject to the whims of, whichever administration currently controlled the Ministry.) But legitimate differences of opinion were boring, so Roundsman instead discovered (or invented, Lovegood suspected) a chorus of anonymous sources to lob rude conjectures and improbable conspiracies across the field of play.

That field was the expensive real estate of his weekly Daily Prophet column, "The Rounds," page one, above the fold, every Monday.

Lovegood had encountered the fellow himself only hours (months) before: there was something scurrilous about him. A gardener of poisonous plants. One just got a feeling off certain people. That it wasn't fair didn't automatically make it false.

One question of the hour was if Roundsman was in on the campaign to kick Gwen McKinnon to the curb, or if the forces interested in doing so simply took advantage of him. And did it matter? For shortly after Lovegood's actual (but not yet reported) disappearance, the soil Roundsman had so diligently cultivated delivered up a sprout. His column of September 9th reported that the daughter of a very popular governor had been flunked out of her lifelong passion thanks to a piece of fraud worked by McKinnon herself.

Lavinia Diggory had earned an Acceptable in Senilius Fludd's Dark Arts OWL the previous year, which cleared his bar to continue in the field, but Rupert Brood insisted on an Exceeds Expectations. McKinnon approved Brood's plan to extend another go at the class in the form of a revised version of the test given specially to those students, like Lavinia, whose grades were found retroactively wanting. According to Roundsman, McKinnon insisted on grading them herself, a development Brood reportedly found 'vexing', but, being new to the faculty, he'd refrained from objecting. (The Daily Prophet piece featured a less than flattering sketch of Brood, exaggeratedly tall, bald, bearded and shrugging, above the caption: 'Say, I just GOT here!') His story was that he'd handed McKinnon the tests, she'd returned them—graded—the next day, he'd posted the scores privately, and then—owing to a family connection with the Diggorys—had consented to a private session with the devastated Lavinia to go over hers in detail, during which session it came to pass that she noticed something amiss with one of her wrong answers.

The challenge had been to identify a specific magical creature notorious for bathing in the blood of her young female victims, but, Diggory told Roundsman, 'I didn't write "Erszebet Bathory." I've never even heard of Erszebet Bathory. I know now that she was a Hungarian countess who bathed in the blood of young women she'd murdered, but I didn't write that then. I couldn't have. I'm not smart enough to have gotten it wrong that way. I wrote Carmilla Sanguina, who as everyone knows was an Austrian vampire who bathed in the blood of young women she'd murdered. I did the boring right thing, not the clever wrong thing!'

Uncovering the fraud from that point was nothing to a wizard of Brood's abilities. A disenchantment spell reverted Erszebet to Carmilla, Bathory to Sanguina: with one stroke of his lie-demolishing wand, Lavinia exceeded expectations. Brood went directly to the Board of Governors with the evidence, and after a prolonged and heated session, Gwynevere McKinnon, just starting her eighth year as Headmistress, was placed on probation. While a special task force was assembled to investigate the case, the 'Hebdomadal Rule' was decreed, putting the heads of the four houses temporarily in charge of Hogwarts affairs.

At this point in the feud, McKinnon went silent, and her silence was deafening. Lovegood didn't understand what kept her from rising to her own defense, but it was clearly not that Roundsman quit soliciting her quotations. Indeed, 'the Headmistress's silence' became a trope the journalist returned to repeatedly, concluding questions that led off with phrases like 'What on Earth could possibly account for' and introducing statements that ended with phrases like 'continues to befuddle.'

For a time, event lapped report. Where before was clamor, institutional muffling fell. McKinnon was exiled from power and—for whatever reason—muted, as Longbottom and the rest of the Board of Governors submerged into the work of probationary discovery.

Magda told him that, at Hogwarts, Brood and Darby, designated to lead the investigation into Lovegood's disappearance by the Headmistress herself, were instructed by the Hebdomadal Council to stay at it.

She handed him the Prophet, Sunday edition, 15th September.

At first he didn't recognize the young man drawn in such eye-catching scale on the front page: the narrow face, longish nose and short, tumbly, sandginger hair, the proud straight mouth and far-off eyes. But what a Lovegood! What other bloodline mixed so consistently the proud set of the jaw with the dreamy cast of the greygreen eyes? Aloof yet forthright, said the combination; McKinnon's favorite? said the caption; while the headline said:

DISAPPEARANCE OF McKINNON'S MENTEE RELATED TO DIGGORY FRAUD?

'Timeline suggests connection or incompetence,' Says Faculty Source.

'My name didn't even make the headline,' Lovegood observed.

'Try having a more illustrious one next time,' said Black.

And on the cover of the next day's Prophet:

B.O.G. VOTES 6 - 5 TO DEPOSE HEADMISTRESS IN HER 8TH YEAR; 11 - 0 TO ELEVATE BROOD

Governor Felix Frisby: 'This probably isn't a coup.'

The fire went green and there was Duck with Poppy tailing, both agog, relieved, curious. All the Secret Chiefs now assembled, dialogue erupted generally.

'What do you mean, the Forbidden bloody Forest?' Duck laughed.

'Eddy climbed every last tree!' added Poppy.

'Hang on, were your eyes always that color?'

They sat down next to each other on the big rug, greedy for story. Eve fetched more wassail. For his part, Lovegood let his thoughtful stare settle on Duck and stay there a minute.

He was experiencing a not altogether unpleasant confusion. No one had the gall or meanness to name what they'd seen in Toucher's office, but in a very real way Lovegood had lost control of his secret—a secret he'd largely kept even from himself.

Getting his most private soul unraveled before strangers had changed him. Humiliation and anger took their customary seats of honor in the symposium of his inner life, but as their glare lessened something else was visible, something about the architecture of the very room. Heavy curtains had been removed, a central darkness succumbed to a tentative light. A falsity he'd believed was unmovable bedrock had been only smoke, and just as easily dispersed.

The confusion lay in the discovery of this new interior space that felt so oddly like home, and in which, it seemed for the first time, he'd met himself.

Duck after a moment crooked his head and squinted back at Lovegood, expectant smile faltering.

Lovegood's eyes brimmed with meaning.

The room fell quiet.

His friend pinked and examined his right hand as its fingers drummed the steaming flagon. Lovegood just noticed in time Duck's left drawing away from Poppy's right.

But of course.

He let a yawn overwhelm the moment, then displayed the Prophet. 'Can you believe they didn't even mention my name?'

Magda said, 'We were just getting to the part where Rupert Brood became Headmaster.'

Lovegood considered the furry pink confines of Portia's right ear. 'He's the one who tampered with Lavinia's test to begin with, not McKinnon. That's the critical point. That's why he'd hidden it in his room. McKinnon had given her a double-e to begin with.'

Poppy reeled. 'Brood altered Lavinia's answer and McKinnon's grade?'

'And it worked like a charm,' said Magda. 'It tricked her best supporter on the Board into turning against her.'

'Yes—' something occurred to him, 'and I was there when Brood and Roundsman met.'

'Where?' asked Magda.

'At the Ministry! He was trying to get a quote from someone when my group came out of the High Obliviator's office. Brood and Darby and Robards and Toucher and me. That could've been the very moment Brood first decided to make use of Roundsman. Even then he had Lavinia's true exam concealed on his desk upstairs…'

Duck blinked. 'Did you say Toucher?'

Lovegood explained. He started with he and McKinnon's tête-à-tête en route to the 7th floor, learning that she'd never heard of Brindlestick, that Robards could help him find the Executioner's Tree cupboard, firing off by owl a missive to Gervaise Ollivander (Do trees have memory?) and then finding himself in the boiling middle of an argument with Lector Darby he had no recollection of starting.

'I recollect well enough,' Black chuckled. 'You knocked a hole wide as a quaffle in his proof. He'd based his solution on a boot, said Here's evidence the chap died in the explosion, only you showed that the poor devil didn't even have a leg on that side, or an eye neither! Really impressive, actually, privileged to've witnessed it, Lovey. You were polite of course and even professional but,' he whistled, 'the Inspector was not well pleased.'

'I still don't remember it,' Lovegood marveled.

He told them the next thing he did remember was waking up in the Ministry of Magic with a house elf touching his face. Vaguely as he spoke he recalled the strange dream he'd had before coming to in the office: a seed cracking into life…but it felt like simultaneously too much and too little to recount.

He arrived at the secret correspondence. 'I accidentally invented an enchantment, when I was just a boy,' he said. 'In moments of, um, emotional resonance,' he blushed fiercely, 'well, magical letters get written to myself. It used to be years would pass between the incident and the echo, but it's happening much faster now. Brood was immediately suspicious of them, living here—because the room he was staying in was supposed to be mine, and he was up to no good in it. He needed to see them.'

Eve said, 'Are you suggesting Rupert Brood was behind the attack on you at Hogwarts?'

'Either he was or he exploited the opportunity to read my letters. Someone very good obliviated me. Robards himself said it wasn't a student's work.'

'Did he find anything in the letters?' asked Coyne. 'Not that it's any of my business…'

'Not what he was looking for, but Robards interrupted before he got to the last one. It seemed likely he wouldn't leave me alone until he had, so I left it for him in his room when I got back from Stalwart House.'

'That's what I saw him find that night,' Poppy realized. 'He appeared quite at peace afterward, I thought.'

'Well,' Lovegood smiled blandly, 'there was nothing in it.'

Duck was lost. 'Stalwart House, old boy?'

'The letters weren't a complete waste. Poppy, you remember I thought I'd heard the name Ann Susurro? The one from the old Japanese book? Turns out I had. Professor Binns wrote it on the board in one of his classes.'

On the sofa, Black nudged Coyne. ' "Moments of emotional resonance," like.'

'The Headmistress told me that a bunch of retired professors live together in a house just down the way on Goblin Cove. I'd wanted to ask Professor Antiquarius whether or not she'd heard of Brindlestick or Susurro, and it turns out Binns was there.' He related the story: the portraitist, her dog, a paused game of draughts, the insanity of Nightless Day, the Mystery of the Corpse on the Subcontinent, the retired Quidditcher Rooney Tuttle bursting through the door in the rain, apparating from Shambhala to the Forbidden Forest…

Which brought them, roundaboutly, to deeply uncurrent events.

Lovegood's narration lead them into the wood. He skated over his motivations for setting concealment charms. He trimmed fat from the story of discovering the spell. He kept as simple as possible what exactly he'd seen.

He became that oak tree out there in the front lawn. (He pointed.) He didn't know how else to say it. He was that oak tree in its infancy. Must have been a cutting from Uncle Quercus to begin with, or else magical trees shared some secret communion, some link. He'd ask Gerry. But he was that tree, and as that tree he saw Nightless Day physically relocate Shambhala House to Hogsmeade. He saw Day confront and dominate a gaggle of 16th century Secret Chiefs led by the mysterious Ann Susurro; saw him kill one that raised his wand, watched the body float out over the Black Lake. He heard Day accuse Susurro of murdering Rybel deMille and speechify on the subject of the so-called House of Bridgit Brindlestick, their oddness, their suspected fealty to Susurro.

He heard Susurro threaten to escape death.

It was all news to Phineas Black. 'So there used to be five magical houses, and no one in Britain remembers that, and the only evidence you have is a 300-year old book a daffy Siamese wrote and a tale a bloody tree told to Rip Van Winkle?'

Poppy bobbed. 'A daffy Japanese, thank you very much.'

'There's also the Indian connection,' Lovegood added. 'Susurro was a Brindlestick—from the way Day treated her, an extremely important one—and Professor Binns only mentioned her in class because another foreigner, an Indian, knew her name. Both evidences come from overseas.' Partitions were showing weakness in his mind, rays of light smoldering through. 'We'll burn the gods from Britain if that's what keeps us safe… Nightless Day said that. In the lawn, just there, about three centuries ago.'

Coyne darkened speculatively. 'And we already know he obliviated all of London… Could he have done all Britain, but missed some foreigners? Did you hear the names of the other people?'

'The nontrads? Oh yes. All of them. Actually I should write them down, shouldn't I? Before I forget. In case any weren't in the archive. Capital thinking, Coyne. Has anyone any paper?' But the Daily Prophet was directly to hand. Lovegood importuned Portia extracting his wand and then cast the names onto the page over his own image, speaking them as he did and working his memory like a man struggling under weights. 'Miles something, Moriona? Is Moriona a magical name? He's the one Day killed. Um, Joan Wick. Maybe Wyck. Maybe Jane. Not sure. Then the one with the red hair...Brin! She ended up with the wand…'

'Which wand?' Poppy asked, lost.

'Susurro's. Odd Day didn't get it off her—but then he wouldn't think much of wands, would he?' He thought, thought. 'Jon Johnson, or Jon's son. Son of Jon. Something to that effect.' The magical letters had a warm, unguent quality on the page, drooping down onto the parchment like slow-setting bubbles of ink. Like a potion of sleep. His fatigue was so thoroughly soaked in it had come nearly all the way round again: his mind teemed, the borders of things bled and quivered. He felt as vulnerable and vital as an exposed nerve. He snapped. 'Oliverus Ollivander!' and wrote it down. There was a shift in the room.

Everyone had become still and begun staring at a point above and behind him.

'Ahoy, Finbar,' Poppy said, carefully. 'What brings you to the first floor?'

The ghost leaned over Lovegood, staring at the paper. 'Those words,' it said, extending a pale, flickering finger to the last name Lovegood had written. 'Read 'em to me, would ya'?'

Portia swiped at the finger; her paw wafted through it.

Revelation swept through Lovegood. Eyes opened all over and inside him. Milord, if she don't deny it… He said, 'That's you, isn't it?'

The ghost didn't move, but remained fixed to the appearance, in Lovegood's graceful cursive, of his long-forgotten name.

'You were a Shambhala student. You knew Ann Susurro. You were there when Nightless Day caught her; when he killed your friend. You were there when this house was moved.'

Still bent at his ethereal waist, Oliverus Ollivander raised an eyebrow and dealt Lovegood, above his fabulous nose, a skeptical sidelong glare.

'If you say so,' he said, 'whoever you are.' And, with an audible pop, he vanished.

Tick-tocking of clocks and fires spread into the answering silence. Secret Chiefs digested the ghost's appearance with expressions significant and quizzical. Eve opened her mouth, then closed it. Coyne's face queried Poppy's, Poppy's Duck's. Portia put the ghostfinger incident out of her head and readjusted into sleep. Lovegood had been flicked by a power. He was ringing.

'Privileged to've witnessed that too!' Black said at last. 'I gather it's not for me to know, who that was and all, being a lowly traditional…' Black waited hopefully but no takers offered to fill him on the mystery of the house ghost. Everyone was too involved in their own projects of intrigue and revelation. 'Where was Shambhala before, at any rate?'

'The Isle of Man,' Lovegood replied at once. Knowledge was indexed everywhere in him now, his cross-referencing grid surfacing from the murk, bright systems and constellations of intelligence slashing through a dissipating fog. 'Day said the Hogsmeade version would have to do better than the Isle of Man one…'

'Ah-hah,' Black nodded. 'One graduate house for Ireland, one Scottish, one Welsh, one Cornish…'

Lovegood joined him for the finale: 'And one Manx.' He thought of the quirky Hogwarts sign on the door of the Stalwarts house, with a manx cat in the middle where the H usually was. Has thy cat got thy tongue as well? Day asked one of the nontrads.

Coyne said, 'What year did the archives start including each student's house?'

Lovegood's eyes clicked on hers. '1555. Benedict Pennebrygg, Slytherin.'

Poppy looked from face to face, 'So before that…'

His last swallow of wassail hadn't any heat left. 'We can assume every Shambhalan was a Brindlestick.'

Eve's inscrutable expression inflected slightly: it favored the room. She did a hmm. 'Our thesis then is that a bygone Hogwarts Headmaster burned his arch nemesis at the stake, wiped her house from the record of history, and lost his mind after seeing her decades later and continents away.'

Lovegood was comforted by the Gryffindor's choice of leading pronoun. He nodded.

Duck said, 'But why?'

He looked into the fire a moment. 'It'll be to do with the death of Rybel deMille. And the Malfoys have a piece of furniture that could take me to the scene of the crime. Anyone ever been to the Stoned Henge?'

୫

In the morning Lovegood came awake like a man spat from the pit of a maelstrom. The sentence on the attic ceiling walked into his mind, ushering out every vestige of the dreamscape he'd just left. I've in mind a land that's washed away. The washed-away land is a dream, he thought. Scattered by the flood of reality, unrecoverable, but in the mind still. Where else can it go?

Portia nuzzled his jaw, seagreen ovals set back in the crystal orbs of her eyes. Her whiskers grazed his cheek. The small damp sponge of her nose. He got up.

The attic room showed signs of having been thoughtfully ransacked. Nothing was quite in its right place. His last letter to himself was nowhere to be seen. The obsessively ordered contents of his dressing case had been unsettled. The portmanteau that doubled as his bedside table lay on its side; he nudged it easily with his foot and deduced that someone had extracted the previous tenant's crates. It was disorienting, but he felt well-rested and sharp and as limber as any of the Puddlemere United Quidditchers scratched into his walls. He slipped into a bathrobe and descended to the water closet he shared with Magda on the 6th floor.

When, a moment later, she came in, having grown accustomed over the past months to its exclusive enjoyment, she found him standing locked to his own reflection in the glass, as if he'd seen a ghost.

She emitted a gasp of alarm in front of a train of apologies, but Lovegood hardly noticed. Water from the tap trickled over his motionless hands. He turned to her, harrowed and frail. Coyne had never seen a paler person.

He said, 'They're brown as oak bark…'

To which she could only think to reply, 'Happy Christmas, Lovegood!'

୫

No one wore a toque and apron with more flare than Poppy. As Lovegood gingerly set himself into a chair at the dining room table she entered from the kitchen brandishing a vast bowl of pumpkin pudding. 'Monsieur,' she said, pouring hot black coffee into his cup and heaping onto a plate for him a jiggling pile of the orange substance. He didn't know how the tall white hat stayed balanced atop her abundant red coiffure, if not by magic.

He smiled feebly. 'Looks excellent, Poppy, thank you.'

'After every morning for a month,' Duck said, tucking a napkin into his shirt, 'she ought to have it down.'

Poppy pinched his ear. 'Oh pretend you don't love it.'

Coyne hovered restlessly, starting tasks and giving them up in favor of dealing Lovegood lingering looks of concern. Eve wasn't out of bed yet. The house was strewn with decoration he'd failed to observe in the previous evening's delirium. It appeared as though a copse of evergreens had been dismantled and decked on the available space of Shambhala's busy walls. A scrubby, undernourished Christmas pine occupied a corner of the parlor amid a floating hive of enchanted candles, apples and chestnuts.

He added a sugar cube to his coffee and spooned a crater from the hemisphere of pudding. 'What was Phineas doing here last night? I'd have thought the House of Black would insist on him at Christmas.'

Coyne colored like a pail of white paint with a drop of scarlet swirled in.

Duck said, 'Ah, well, he got to be quite the regular at Shambhala after your disappearance, Lovegood. Rather ingratiated himself to us, and to, uh—' he cleared his throat.

'To me in particular,' Coyne blurted, standing in a kind of no man's land and wringing her hands. 'It turns out we've a great deal in common, actually.'

Lovegood beamed. 'That's wonderful, Coyne. Do you really?'

'I mean, his family is rich and mine is poor and we want completely different things from life, but…'

Poppy winked at him. 'But they're both short.'

'In the end,' Duck said, 'it's mostly about complementary heights, wouldn't you say, Lovegood?'

Coyne slumped into a chair, exhausted by the attention.

'Honestly, Magda,' he said, 'I couldn't be happier for you.'

She gave him a weak but grateful smile and sat up straighter. Lovegood took in Duck and Poppy peripherally while stirring his coffee. 'Indeed, it seems I've missed rather a lot over the past four months…' He glanced up and saw that they were happy smitten fools, drunk on each other.

This Edwin Duck he knew only too well. Some part of his body would be touching some part of Poppy's more or less constantly. It could be as innocuous as a foot brought alongside hers, as light and tender as his palm laid over the back of her hand, as confiding as a cheek-brushed cheek and a quick, needful inhale of her scent. Duck's affection was bodily first, physical and playful and touching; he was a puppy. Lovegood had seen it often over the years. He wondered how long it took him to wear down Poppy's resistance. And even though these dalliances seldom ended painlessly, he couldn't help but take comfort; one does not begrudge spring the autumn in store.

He took another crater out of the pudding, a bigger one this time. 'For instance, this exceptional pudding. Do I taste brandy?'

She didn't bother concealing her pride. 'And nutmeg and milk and ginger and lots more—all handmade because I wanted to be like you.'

'You amaze me, Poppy.'

'Don't be modest, brother,' said Duck. 'When everyone finds out about you, about where you've been and what you've seen, there will be Linus Lovegood Appreciation Societies opening all over Britain, just wait.'

He wiped his mouth. 'We shall have to wait, brother, as for the time being I intend to use my absence to my advantage.'

As it landed this comment splashed discomfort among his friends. He felt compelled to explain.

'Brindlestick was real, but no one's ever heard of it. Gwen McKinnon didn't do what Rupert Brood said she did, but now he's in charge of Hogwarts. Grand conspiracies are afoot, I'm on both of them, and nobody knows I've surfaced. Neat, isn't it?'

Duck, after an oddly quiet moment, said to Poppy, apropos of nothing, 'Do you suppose he bumped his head?'

Poppy was squinting at him.

Lovegood ignored their confusing tableaux. 'I'm leaving after breakfast and I'm going alone. I know what you're going to say,' he cautioned Coyne, whose eyes had grown wide, 'but I absolutely insist. We must keep up the appearance of my disappearance. As for me, I'll disguise myself as why the devil are you three gazing at me like that?'

Duck emitted a startled laugh. 'Well, it's like you said last night, mate—'

'No,' Coyne interjected, 'it's precisely like he said last night.'

'Verbatim from "Brindlestick", wasn't it?' said Poppy.

Lovegood went cold. 'I don't recall discussing it.'

' "Grand conspiracies",' Magda said in a half-hearted impression, 'and "neat, isn't it"...'

'And "I know what you're going to say but I absolutely insist",' Duck added.

' "The appearance of my disappearance…" ' Poppy contributed.

'It was like a—what are they called?' Coyne tried to snap her memory to the point. 'Au-to-ma-tons? Fake people done up for wealthy muggles who only repeat something over and over?'

'Same cadence,' Duck laughed, 'same looking from person to person in the same order.'

Poppy leaned forward. 'You honestly don't remember?'

Lovegood swallowed. 'I don't even recall going up.'

Was he doomed to be on the receiving end of mystified expressions from now on? He watched their puzzlement morph into a common desire to be useful. They piped up with details he heard without listening: about how the night wound up; how he'd delivered the identical speech and tromped up the stairs half asleep, nuzzling Portia; how they'd stayed up after talking things through. Their voices were encouraging, willfully so, but, Lovegood knew, the reality of his present situation was better depicted by their baffled concern.

He reached out and grabbed Duck's shoulder. 'Eddy, what was I about to say? Because I swear on my life I only just now thought of it. So if you know...if you tell me I said it last night...then something very interesting is wrong with me.'

His best friend's eyes were hard and serious, his lips tense with worry. They hardly moved when he spoke. 'An old bloke, you said. You said you'd disguise yourself as a codger.'

A sickness had gotten into him, into his memory. He acted sometimes as if in a sieve of forgetfulness. Lignis incantatum had wakened something in him, something—it beggared belief but he knew it to be true—that had radiated from the spell both forwards and backwards in his life, as a tree's roots screw deeper into the firmament even as its crown expands into the sky, growing in all directions at once.

Tree magic.

He remembered where he'd first seen that look of singular, probing, unswerving attention, and finally knew where to start looking for answers.