Chapter 12 'Accio Brindlestick.'

In a smart new red brick building on Fisherton Street in Salisbury, Gerry Ollivander made another purchase of tickets for one-way travel. The destination was the country town of Blackwine, four stops Londonward, where lurked in a future so close as to be almost touchable a confrontation with a piece of 300-year-old furniture. The nearer Lovegood got, the more uneasy. Did he look as uneasy as he felt, standing in the darkest available corner of the lobby, a man of perhaps 60 and boy of 19, gaze glued to his accomplice?

How do you know so much about the Executioner's Tree cupboard, he was thinking, and why didn't you tell me before? How did you make your approach to Barnes? Why are you willing to spend so much money on this expedition?

Gerry completed the transaction with his customary bonhomie and swaggered over. Lovegood said, 'Do you always have Muggle cash on hand?' and was interested to hear the frosty edge of mistrust in his own voice.

Gerry heard it too. He floated back on his heels; reassembled his smile. 'Never touch the stuff. You get farther with a knut and a confundus charm. Come,' he wrapped an arm round Lovegood and moved them towards the exit, 'let's wait outside.' He glanced towards the cashier and added in a sotto voce ripe with tavern porter, 'It's best not to linger in sight of the confounded.'

She was puzzling over where in her register to set the worthless bronze coin.

Outside, their breath gushed from them in clouds illuminated by kerosene lanterns. It was nearly six, and night total, but the West of England Line maintained regular service for a few hours yet. Muggles had gone mad for rail. Nevertheless they had privacy.

Lovegood blew on his hands. 'That can't possibly be legal.'

'What? A minor confundus?'

'On an unsuspecting Muggle. And paying with wizarding currency. What will her supervisor say when he counts her take?'

Mystified, Gerry shook his head. 'What business is it of mine what he says? What would you have me do, keep pounds and farthings?'

'Why not? It's you insisting we take their train, isn't it?'

Gerry laughed. 'By all means apparate and wait for me, then. Or go by yourself. I care not.'

'Really? Only it seemed you had an agenda of your own back there in the tavern. How did you make your introduction to Barnes, by the way? And how do you know so much about the cupboard?'

Gerry glared at him and thrust a finger into his own chest. 'Ollivander, Lovegood!' he said. 'Ollivander! The Executioner's Tree is as notorious a tree of magical wood as has ever grown in England! Three generations of the giant-slaying Ollertons used wands of its wood! Tales of its properties chase Ollivander tots into sleep! Did you not know that the cretin Cephalopos got his start hawking counterfeit wands of the Executioner's Tree in Diagon Alley?'

Lovegood realized he was supposed to answer. He managed a shake of the head.

'Perhaps there's even more you're not aware of, eh?' Gerry slid into imitation: ' "A cupboard they say a man hanged from long ago." And because it's new to you you assume it's new to the world! That's the problem with people who think they're so smart: they never see how smart the other person in the room is until it's too late.'

Lovegood felt himself flush. 'You aim to steal it.'

'What difference does it make to you? So long as you work your magic, what difference does it make?'

'I didn't plan on being embroiled in a felony.'

'But you needed help, didn't you? Someone without your scruples, someone who had a few coins to rub together, someone to grease the wheels while you held your nose. Mon dieu, I simply told the bartender to point out the Malfoy's man when he arrived. An extra sickle for the trouble. It is nothing. How glad you must have been to gain leverage over Gervaise. I wonder if it even crossed your mind to ask for help before discovering you could blackmail me for it.'

'I told you all that was forgotten. I did ask.'

'All right, then, Ravenclaw. What was your plan for getting to the cupboard? You didn't even know how to approach Barnes. What's your plan now? Do you suppose Bracknel's servants are going to simply usher us in? You don't share my condition. You could've apparated all the way here and handled things yourself. You needed me—'

'I want you,' said Lovegood.

Pause stole into Gerry, arrested him completely—every part but his searching eyes.

'I mean,' Lovegood stammered, 'I wanted you. To help. You're right. That's the truth. I don't have your abilities. Your knowledge of the world. Your—'

But he had to stop talking because he was being kissed.

Lips had touched his lips, had smooshed against them, and everything around their soft pressure dissolved into meaninglessness. The kiss closed his eyes, stilled the breath in him, stoked a throb in the center of his chest that blossomed into a moan.

His knees were balloons.

The system of his brain melted.

Never mind the hint of sour ale on Gervaise Ollivander's breath, never mind the rising bubble of exquisite fear in his gut, desire filled Lovegood like a hand filled a glove.

Then he was standing alone against the wall of the train station. Ollivander was several paces off, stalking, his back to Lovegood.

Whatever foundational logic stuck moments together had crumbled around the plummeting weight of the kiss, the wild revolution of human touch. It wasn't a loss of time á la lignis incantatum, but animal magic, and too old to fit within the framework of sentience.

A shuddering lifted from the subliminal into the soles of his feet. He was insubstantial, smearable, like sound or light itself, something dispersed by winds. He laughed.

It was the train, and the train was singing.

୫

The car was only half redcoats in full regalia, but they were so drunk and boisterous it seemed packed full of them. Lovegood was in awe of their high-waisted plaid pants and wobbling plumed hats and stupendous mustaches, their vigorous voices barreling through a chorus. He and Gerry tucked into a two-seater bench amid a smattering of shy civilians towards the front: country lasses who breathed in when a soldier clamored past, country lads whose eyes dripped envy at the cutlass on his hip.

It was a relief: the noise, the atmosphere. Their awkwardness had no stage in the train car—it hardly even competed for the spotlight. They took care arranging themselves but the occasional contact was unavoidable: a broadside of thighs, a brush of shoulders. Sensation radiated through Lovegood from the epicenters of these minor quakes. They were both of them hot in the face. He half thought Gerry was mad at him, still or newly, but somehow it didn't matter. Such worries were the province of a previous Lovegood—the one who'd never been kissed.

He said, 'I'm sorry, Gerry,' and now he was surprised by the breeziness in his voice.

Gerry nodded, his eyes directed forward. 'Me too.'

The train thrummed and hissed and clanged and chugged. A quantity of redcoats staggered into another quantity. Hilarity ensued.

'That's never happened to me before,' he said over the commotion. 'I've never done that, I mean.'

Again Gerry nodded.

Lovegood was surprised by pity. A kiss only appeared simple from the outside, he realized. People were weather, a kiss a storm, the world never returned to just how it was before, and where one might be liberated by the winds, the other might be marooned and besieged.

He pitied the older boy—his mate, his chum. Gerry's fist was balled up by his knee. He imagined patting it, saying There there.

'Well,' finally Gerry glanced at him—just for a moment and from the corner of his eye—'anyway…'

'How do you intend to get the cupboard out of there?'

The question had the desired effect: Ollivander relaxed, marginally. 'Floo powder,' he said, indicating an inner pocket of his coat. 'Safer than enchanting an unauthorized portkey, I think.'

Lovegood agreed. 'We'll have to do it together.'

'Why? What are you saying?'

'I'll have to steal it with you and work my spell from whatever destination you had in mind. Otherwise, it's entirely possible I'll be passed out, and you won't be able to get both me and the cupboard out through a fireplace.'

Gerry looked at him. 'I see,' he said. 'Only, there's a chance you are detected—as the missing boy, I mean. They have ways of tracking these networks, you know, and your disguise may not bedevil them.'

'If I am, I am. Think nothing of it. You were right, what you said: I couldn't have gotten here without you. Why shouldn't you profit? Besides, the cupboard is our history. Wizards. It belongs on our side.'

A glister of feeling saddened Gerry's eyes. 'I cut memories from your head.'

'I can make more.' Lovegood let his leg rest against Gerry's. 'I can make better ones.'

But his friend pulled away. 'I don't know if I could be so forgiving, in your place.'

What strange peace had seeped into Lovegood? He realized he'd never been happier in his life.

'Have you ever thought about God, Gerry?'

'You mean…?' he pointed up. 'Not really. Why would I?'

It was an absurd dialogue to have at volume over a platoon of rowdy soldiers, but perhaps it would've been in any context.

He said, 'There's a man in Ireland, a Muggle astronomer, who's built the largest telescope in the world. I was just reading about him back home. He's discovered a spiral structure in a nebula. As I understand it, this is earthshaking. Like if you were to learn that a cloud proceeded from a deliberate plan. Religious Muggles, they look at the universe and see grand design. Someone put the stars there; someone put us here so we would see them.'

Gerry dismissed Muggle religion with a wave of his hand. 'Poppycock. I see only what has happened. How can things be other than what they are? You know Darwin?'

'We were just getting acquainted the other day, in fact.'

'Darwin shows us, every creature you see has adapted to its environment. The ones that did not are kaput. But do you not think, in the unfathomable age of the world, that the kaput far outnumber us? If we did not adapt how we did, we too are kaput, and no one is present to behold the stars—or someone else is, something else. But the stars are still there! That we did adapt means we find ourselves in this glittering palace, crazy and thoughtful and with lots of ideas, including: This must all be here for us! Childishness. Things are the only way they can be, not because of an all-powerful maker in the sky but because when you kick a ball it goes where it must and ends up where it does, every single time.'

'But who kicked the ball?'

'Isn't that obvious?'

Lovegood giggled. 'Is it obvious to you?'

Gerry stage-whispered: 'Magic!'

'But where did magic come from? Who made it?'

'This question is impossible, Lovegood. It's like saying, where did time come from? Who put time there? There is no who, because if there were, we' d have to figure out who put him there, and so on forever. Therefore, it makes just as much sense to say: time is God, or magic is God. Without these elements the universe simply does not exist. Things can only be exactly what they are! If they were otherwise, they would not exist, and neither would we.'

He nudged Gerry, said: 'Sadler.'

'Yes, yes, Longdog, I forgot. Forgive me. You and your incroyable disguises. I meant to ask, by the way, how did you do the eyes? They're the most convincing part.'

୫

Blackwine was a cozy village, unusually well lit. Lanterns whose light elsewhere in Britain could reliably be counted on to fade within a couple yards of the post burned with a steady, buzzing, unflickering brightness, their glows mingling at the limits. The two young men walked along the river Test, through a part of town a proud sign dubbed CHEMISTRY, past an acid manufactory rank with oak tannins, to an imposing cathedral of red sandstone arranged round five monumental windows of plate glass. This they approached, bewitched by the presence in the glass of their reflections—so infrequently encountered at night.

The light confused Lovegood. Most towns made for horrifying walks after dark, especially when one had to hesitate to deploy a wand. If lanterns were even in place and lamplighters diligent, darkness congealed in the air between them, oozing with potential knavery. But there was something so off about the light in Chemistry, a dreamy unreality. 'Is this—is this electricity?' he asked.

Gerry didn't know.

'Would a sleepy village in Shropshire have electric lamps?'

Gerry shrugged. 'One with a wealthy enough patron might.'

He couldn't have asked for a simpler crystallization of the primal forces behind the Muggle project: faith, power, invention—all on display here of a January evening in Blackwine. The people shuffle into a great temple of stone and glass and make offerings to a remote deity; a benefactor not remote in the least, ennobled by some monarch or other, corrals and arranges them in the light of a future imagined by science.

Their reflections moved in the cathedral's glass. Lovegood was unrecognizable to himself.

'Do you suppose it's possible that hundreds of years ago Wizardry was Christian?'

'My friend, wherefore the sudden fixation on theology?'

Turning back to the road, for an instant Lovegood thought he saw a phantom in the glass behind them: a flash, a shape in the darkness, the memory of a sound he instantly doubted, but looking over his shoulder he saw nothing. Dreamy light, spectral shadows.

They walked on south, towards what a map in the train station indicated was Bracknel Manor.

'Wasn't Jesus something of a wizard?'

'Do you know, we studied this at Beauxbatons. The seven signs, and all that. There is a very convincing case to be made that he was, but most everyone agrees he didn't work alone.'

Lovegood thought: In another world, I'd take his hand in mine. 'Why? Tell me.'

'You know the story of the loaves and fishes? Where Christ feeds five thousand people with a few baguettes and sardines? The first of the principle exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration tells us you cannot create so much food from nothing. A doubling here or there, yes all right, perhaps two doublings, but the duplicates would not have sated. They'd have had no nutritional value. The story would have gone: Angry Hebrews Can't Get Full on Carpenter's Lousy Cooking. In truth, this was the title of a paper of mine.

'I am told it is the same at Hogwarts as it is at Beauxbatons: miraculously, supper multiplies upon the buffet, when in fact house elves are sweating in the cellar. Always there are house elves sweating in a cellar.'

'You suppose he had one? A house elf partner?'

'Or perhaps a human one. Who could this Lazarus have been, but a convincing co-conspirator? Death can be cheated—if you're lucky—sometimes—while you're still alive…but once it's had you, you're finished. A speck of death's as good as a hole in the ground. No magic penetrates the grave.'

'Unless it wasn't magic…'

Gerry chuckled. 'You know he died again, this Lazarus, thirty years on? If the all-powerful creator redeemed me from death, I'd have hoped for a full reprieve. But no, him they only borrowed.'

'And the rest of the signs?'

'With the exception of the walking on water, it's all healing and transfiguration. A blind man sees, a lame man walks, water becomes wine…nothing beyond the grasp of an expert wizard with an arsenal of potions. You understand I describe a prodigy, a genius—who still would have required a secret collaborator. On the other hand, there are those who think him merely a gifted huckster: a practitioner of entrancements, memory modifications, a Legilimens, perhaps, whose métier was the production, in witnesses, of the belief they'd seen something they hadn't. To wit: his jaunt upon the water.'

Lovegood gasped. 'That's how Rupert Brood did it!' He'd seized his friend's arm.

His friend disengaged, but his touch was soft and his voice easy. 'Did what?'

'No one's ever explained how he apparated from Hogwarts on his graduation day. The answer is, he didn't! He just convinced everyone he did! That's why there weren't any pictures of it!'

They walked on in silence for a moment. It was cold but tolerably. Strolling through the south of town, following a road that downgraded into a path, they left the lanterns behind and entered the domain of the moon, which was bright in the ringing winter night and close. Walls of shrubbery loomed, tree limbs swayed out of the darkness, night critters sounded off, but Lovegood felt no fear next to Gervaise.

He decided his thought experiment had run its course. Whatever the Brindlesticks went in for, it wasn't Christianity. What Nightless Day burned out of Britain he'd burned for good; he'd not have left a cathedral in every town for the Sadlers of Longdog Lane to find their way to. Not if he really deemed it a threat. They believed in something else, the Brindlesticks: some other god, some different system.

At a fork in the path Gerry went left, and then on the other side of a stand of quercus robur they were confronted by the immensity of a Georgian estate. It was a grand edifice: a spectacular if architecturally unimaginative box, hulking in the night. Minimal torch light splashed onto brick walls crawling with ivy. But for those few lights, the place appeared dormant. Lovegood hadn't known what to expect, but it wasn't walking up to a place and knocking on the door. Nonetheless…

They went past the carriage house, past a trio of inert fountains, up a few broad white steps to a colonnaded portico and a gigantic set of hardwood double doors. They looked at each other.

Part of the joy of being Gerry's sidekick, Lovegood saw, was not having to worry about what to do next. The older boy met every moment perfectly provisioned and towed the likes of Linus Lovegood in his wake without a care. But Lovegood didn't want to rush the next act.

'Are we ready?' he asked.

Gerry was thoughtful, or feigned it. 'It's like the man said: there should be a few servants here. Perhaps a houseguest. That's all. We'll see. Some confundusing, some muffliato…'

Lovegood thought: You don't need to prepare anything; you've worked it all out already. 'What's our story?'

Gerry was the sort of person who looked up when thinking. 'We are…representatives of the Malfoy estate.'

'Are we really?'

'Who says no?'

Lovegood ran with it. 'It's come to our attention that in fact the cupboard might have been a counterfeit item to begin with.'

'Oui. Magnifique. A fraud.'

Lovegood, who couldn't imitate anyone so never tried, attempted a Muni Barnes: 'This is intolerable to my Lord Squamous, who takes his gift-giving very seriously, don't you know.'

'Oh yes, oh yes,' Gerry concurred, 'he considers it his obligation to establish the veracity of the, uh, the cupboard, or what have you.'

'I am the esteemed appraiser of antiquities, Longdog Sadler, and you—'

'I am the son: Shortdog.' Gerry shook his fist at the portico. 'Always I am the son!'

Lovegood smiled; his friend smiled back. He didn't even feel nervous. He felt rooted to the day and safe in it, clean like he'd never once been dirty. He felt new.

He said, 'Gerry, can we again?'

But he knew the answer already. Gerry's happy eyes faltered from his, his face dropped, his hands retreated to each other behind his waist.

Lovegood said, 'We can't ever. Isn't that so.'

A grunt escaped his special friend, midway between a laugh and a bolt of pain. When he looked up his eyes were wet. 'They don't really write happy endings for our type, do they, Linus?'

Lovegood sighed.

From the house came unmistakably the high staccato popping of gunfire.

Before his eyes, Gerry went white.

'Oh no,' he said, digging his wand from his pocket.

'What is it?'

But Gerry was in a rush now. 'Alohomora!' The double doors unlocked with a heavy click, and suddenly Lovegood had invaded the house in his friend's train. He fumbled for his own wand.

Tiled entrance hall in a low-lit gloom. Taxidermied megafauna from around the world haunted the corners, lions and bears and wolves with permanently bared fangs. Lushly maintained houseplants perfumed the air. A servant was approaching with greater alacrity than etiquette would sanction, waving his arms. More gunfire in the near distance, puncturing the background whine of a wild, veering voice. Drunk Muggle, Lovegood thought, on full alert. Drunk, rich, armed.

As the servant skidded to a halt he was overtaken by a woman coming from the same direction who ran through the inadvertent blockade the three of them had established. Gerry and Lovegood made way. Her dress was upset; she did her best to keep it in her arms as she ran, chintz and velvet and hoops shifting and sliding. Before disappearing into the night she stopped to scream back into the house. 'You're a very demon, Hugo Jones, and all Shropshire shall hear of your perfidy!'

The servant didn't appear to be a demon—probably wasn't Hugo Jones. Footman roused by commotion, more likely. He was frazzled, unbuttoned, elderly. 'Excuse me, please, gentlemen, but who—'

'Confundo!' Gerry's wand cracked a brief red c into the air between them.

The footman recoiled a step. His Adam's apple logged a swallow. 'Hadn't you better go see about the lady?' Gerry suggested.

The footman absorbed the idea and after a moment's pause was vanquished by the sense in it. He bowed at the waist. 'How right you are, sir.' The old fellow went out the door.

'Gerry, what about the plan?'

'This is the plan now. Come on!'

They went deeper into the house. The voice ostensibly belonging to Hugo Jones was a siren caroming from walls, droning along the ceiling.

Bracknel was an expensively appointed country estate, but there was no mistaking its Muggleness. Portraiture adorned the walls with characters frozen in canvas, their gazes fixed and lifeless. If a stallion was pictured its tail didn't swish at flies, it would never whinny. Most of the furnishings were carefully under wraps for the season. A grand, central and inert staircase went predictably up and down. Everything existed to be operated and looked at, nothing looked back or had a sense of humor or agency. Each room's utility was apparent at once: parlor; library; sitting room; gun room…nothing surprised, nothing jumped out. To Muggle was to control, to make reliable. Which made it all the scarier when one of them popped a gear.

Gerry was in heroic command. Coming up on two housekeepers whispering in a dark pantry he issued muffliato to mask their passing. They advanced on the voice and the gunfire like soldiers. The voice sung at times, at others laughed or bellowed or scolded, but was never still. Gerry walked up the stairs with his back to the rail and his wand raised. Lovegood mimicked him.

At the top of the flight a landing connected to a gallery whose doors hung open.

A gunshot's report tapped the interior of Lovegood's ear—a rain of splinters burst from one of the gallery doors. The voice cut out.

He was deaf and stunned. The shot must have been terribly close.

Gerry put a finger to his lips and sneaked across the landing. Lovegood followed him. From the soft void of his cancelled hearing a ringing emerged. He took this for a good sign but was slow to act when his friend wheeled into action, pivoting on his heel and spinning into the room, wand leveled. He hesitated before shadowing him.

Seen from the outside the whole house was eleven windows wide, and this grand room contained six of them, huge, mullioned things. Suits of armor, tapestries the weight of oxcarts, Oriental screens, the biggest fireplace Lovegood had ever seen, a billiards table, a long, polished bar, crystal chandeliers, fleets of things under sheets—and one chap sitting on his knees, facing them with a look of bemusement. A decanter had tipped over next to him, emptying itself. Tears tracked his cheeks. His chestnut hair was surfed through with cowlicks. His white silk shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, was tucked frowzily into dark trousers. The black revolver in his left hand was the very form of malice. It was partially supported by a huge rug of deep pile. A whisper of smoke trickled from its barrel.

He said—and Lovegood could just make out, as if through a yard of cotton—'More friends of father's?'

Gerry incanted confundo, crossed to him, kicked the revolver away and sat on Hugo's chest.

'The cupboard,' he said to Lovegood.

'How do you know it's here?'

'Quit yelling, please. Remove the sheets over things. This is a likely place.'

Lovegood hadn't realized he'd yelled. His hearing rebounded but slowly.

The man he presumed was Hugo Jones discovered the ceiling with childlike delight.

'But it could be anywhere. Did you see all the sheets downstairs? All the rooms filled with furniture under sheets?' Now he knew he was yelling—he couldn't help it. 'Accio Executioner's Tree!' he said wildly.

But he hadn't ever seen the thing. The spell wouldn't work.

'Do you mean that nasty little cupboard?' said Hugo to the ceiling. 'Is that what you're after?'

'Yes,' Gerry snapped. 'Where is it?'

Giggling, Hugo unfurled a long wobbly arm and pointed into a dark corner of the gallery. Lovegood hurried there, seeing as he did some of the damage the man had wrought with his weapon. Glass glittered the rug, a chandelier still rocking from impact. A suit of armor with a ragged hole in its snout, its chest plate knocked off true as if twisted in pain. The corner was a pool of shadow. The sheet he ripped up into the air was heavier than expected and sent aloft an atmosphere of dust, but he saw it at once: wedged into the very corner of the great room next to a humble wooden chair.

'We have it!' he exulted.

Gerry said something but was too far away. The ringing in his ears hadn't abated. He raced back to his friend, who remained if not patiently atop the young man at least steadily so. 'What's that, Gerry?'

'I said bring it here.'

Lovegood raced back to the corner, laughing.

It was as meek a piece as advertised, and only stood out in the gallery for its rusticity. Nothing about the cupboard appeared flimsy, though. Indeed, it was the sort of furniture—blocky, simple, squat—that gave off a whiff of immortality. Of course it could have been filled with priceless baubles or vintage wine. He stooped to open its lone door, and on that door encountered the evidence of its sordid history.

The narrative was gruesome. Five carved images stacked totemically in the center of the cupboard revealed from the bottom up:

A man on horseback beneath a great tree's horizontal bough;

climbing onto the bough;

sitting on it, tying a noose;

his neck in the noose, his fist on the horse's throat in a gout of blood;

a man dangling from the tree, the horse a pile on the ground.

It was empty. Lovegood hefted the cupboard from the floor: it pulled harder on his back and arms than it ought to have done. Setting it down in front of Gerry was a relief.

Hugo was gratified. 'That's the one!'

Gerry centered himself, breathed deeply, extended his wand. 'Révéler Nargle!'

And nothing happened. Lovegood peered in at the wedge of ancient wood, scouring it for that faint green luminosity—but nothing answered.

Gerry frowned. 'I was afraid of this. The Nargles, over time they sink in, very deep inside the grain, you understand. They become essentially one with the wood.'

'So it's still magical,' Lovegood said.

'Either explosively so or not in the least. A piece this old…there is no middle ground.'

'So we take it and look more closely at your shop—we keep it in your cellar,' with your other stolen tree, he didn't add.

'No. It's too dangerous now anyway. The woman who left the house before—she saw us and was not confunded.'

'Confunded?' Hugo was orienting. 'The bitch didn't let me confund her either!'

Lovegood incanted the confundus charm at the same time Gerry did obliviate. The effect was: Hugo Jones whistled in one long wet warbling tune his conscious awareness of the moment out through his bleary, benumbed lips. Then he was as placid as a hole in the ground filled with rain. Placidly his hands dropped to either side and he was cruciform on the rug; placidly his absent gaze fell on the fireplace. The fire was shamed by the cavernous hearth but the reflection of its flames inhabited completely the vacant orbs of Hugo Jones's eyes.

'Sacré bleu,' Gerry stood. 'What a specimen.'

Lovegood was exhilarated. 'What now? Will he be all right?'

'Yes. Probably? I don't know. Never mind him. Do your spell. I will rescue us through the floo.'

'Are you sure? And no cupboard?'

'Yes—do it quickly. We have no time.'

Tears sprung to Lovegood's eyes. He thought: Only so much of a scoundrel—that's what you want. Someone who fancies himself a scoundrel until the chips are down and a glint of gallantry shines through. 'I'll pay you back, Gerry. For everything.'

'With what? The Lovegood fortune? Work your magic already. Let this not all be for naught.'

'It could never be that.'

He thought: This is the best day of my life.

Gerry glared and signaled him get on with it. He extracted a pouch of floo powder from his pocket as Lovegood got himself under control.

He took the reins of his breathing, shut his eyes, pressed the ringing in his ears down into the velvet at the pit of him. He arranged himself before the cupboard and imagined himself in a forest glade. Gloaming lingered in the canopy. Glow-worms clung to the peaks of grass stems, iridescent. Air younger than his own exhalation was cool on his face. Love held him in its hand and crushed him to powder. He fell to his knees.

Lignis incantatum. Lignis omnium incantatum, lignis mnemosynorum, omnium submissum…

Magic awakened inside him: a hissing leak; a rupture; its volume doubled in the time a blink took and doubled again at every interval; he'd never felt this before, never anything like it; he was succumbing to a cataract of blue magic before the Gate of Any Dimension even applied. When it did it was the crown of his head, its entire throbbing circumference. For an instant he contained an ocean. His eyes flew open, streaming with fear.

Lector Darby was in the room, standing nearby, looking down at him and frowning, puzzled.

The meatchop in the tavern, the phantom in the glass.

His wand rolled out of his open hand.

Lovegood was out.

୫

And this is what he did not witness:

He didn't see Gerry dye the fire jade with floo powder and thrust his head in.

He didn't hear what was said or see the strain in his friend's hands clenched to the rug.

He didn't see him bowled from the fire as the witch Briar stepped out into the room.

He didn't see her assess the situation, find the revolver, pick it up.

He was lying close as brothers to Hugo Jones when she put the barrel to Hugo's temple, but he didn't hear the evening's final gunshot.

He didn't feel the cupboard lifted away from his limp hands, or the scalding pistol placed there in its stead.

He saw neither the guttering of the green fire as the room emptied nor the flames' reversion to the spectrum of incinerating reds.

He didn't smell the shot's acrid cough, didn't see the smoking hole rimmed with brainy pulp it left or the mess it made of the other side of Hugo's skull.

He felt neither the great rug dampening beneath him nor at last the blood collecting around his own face.

He was in Epping Forest. A cool spring day.

A man approached on horseback.

୫