Christmas in London Town, Fifteen-something. Ask Ry deMille what year it is, how old he is, what year he was born…he knows none of it. If it can't be spun on the parquetry of a ballroom or coerced in a shadowy corner or set afire or consumed it has no use to him. He's in his teens. At Hogwarts he is an emperor of the middle forms. In Slytherin he is a Someone. At home for Christmas he is bored into a state of catatonia.

The family castle: the family room; familiar cluttering; familiar gloom. Ignored, Rybel, aiming his wand, tracks the passage of a snake along the hearth-warmed flagstone floor. It goes and stops, stops and goes, like a whip aping a river. Busy in her rocking chair his grandmother says, 'Is that so?'

''Tis,' says his father, busy in his.

The snake pauses at the sleeping cheek of Uncle Gris.

'Hear tell Scorpia Malfoy has the dragon pox!' says his grandmother.

His father says, 'Don't know about that, mom, but rumor is they've newly welcomed a son, have the Malfoys.'

His grandmother perks. 'Is that so?'

The snake's flickering tongue plays on the sleeping man's cheek.

With a whisper and a twitch of the wrist Ry launches the beastie into the fireplace. For an instant the smoke, scream and smell combines into one blast of horror.

The uncle scratches his nose; eyes open.

The grandmother says, 'Oh…!' and rocks back slowly.

The mother looks up from her knitting. 'Was that Cedric?'

The father says, 'Rybel Tiberius, damn you boy, what are you about?'

'It wasn't real!' says Ry.

His father can't help it—he laughs. 'Cedric wasn't real? He was older than you are!'

Ry laughs too. 'He was about to bite Uncle Gris!' he explains.

'Gris?' says his mother, confused. Then she, too, bursts into laughter.

Now his father can hardly speak for laughing. He slaps his knees. He stands up and walks around, beating his thighs, red as a tomato.

Ry smiles at his gran. 'What'd I say?'

She points an arthritic, knobbily jointed finger at his uncle. 'That's not Gris. That's Harold, Gris's twin. Gris died.'

'My Uncle Gris was a twin?'

'He was,' his father manages. 'Harold too!'

'But what happened to him?'

His gran starts chuckling, her rheumy eyes squinting round something funny. 'Snakebite,' she says.

'But Cedric wasn't venomous,' his mother says, then starts up laughing again. 'Merlin's beard, Ry, you used to curl up with him to sleep!'

Ry gazes into the hearth, where a coil of frying leather had exsanguinated a smoking black stream onto a sizzling ashy grate. The brackets of the joke formed in his belly.

He starts laughing hard.

Uncle Harold smiles dimly, scratches his nose, closes his eyes and yawns.

That was Christmas.

୫

But there are moments, even in the life of a Rybel deMille, that score the heart and nudge a soul along its trackless path to maturity. Here is one.

Every year it was the same: grind through Christmas, make it to the bash, then portkey in threes to the midpoint and thence to Hogsmeade. Every year he noted how his parents were never cheerier than at the party; how they pinched his cheek; how their spittle found its way in clouds of winesweet breath to his face; how glad they were to show him off while shunting him over to the portkey closet—where every year the same line formed of unwanted sons and daughters as eager to be abandoned as their drunk abandoning parents were to abandon them. Or at any rate that's how Ry tallied it. Possibly he was jaded.

The Count and Countess Bon Von Steuffelkamp were well-connected exiles from one of those European countries you couldn't find on a map—all fog-shrouded mountain passes and intractable feuds, maybe even a language of their very own. The Muggle King Henry found the Von Steuffelkamps amazingly fashionable and had no suspicion they were magic to the gills. The Von Steuffelkamps loved Oswyn Doddle, who'd helped them off the Continent and in return arranged the portkey in their closet to make life neater and posher for the better wizarding families of London, on whose good side he angled tirelessly to stay.

None of this was privileged information or hard to discover. In Slytherin circles it was the air they breathed: who owed what to whom for why, who was coming, who was out, who need never be spoken of again. Doddle was pretty good as far as Ravenclaws went—at least he had ambition. Henry they couldn't talk about enough: how he prized his nice long legs; how he declaimed poetry; how well he sat a horse. Many witches and wizards attended the King's court—not openly, not since what they did to Mimsy-Porpington, but disguised as Muggles—and it was these who were accorded the biggest and most respectful audiences in gatherings such as the Von Steuffelkamp's annual bash. Everyone wanted to get the brats out of the way then get tight and gossip.

But this year went different.

Ry was slinking about the dance floor of the palatial ballroom, sniffing witches and stealing drinks, when he found himself behind a maid carrying a tray. He pinched her arse. When she turned in pink shock he did it to her front, too, then claimed the hors d'ouvres and stalked away, grinning. Within five paces he couldn't recall one aspect of her face; five more and he couldn't tell you where he'd come by the bloody tray.

Raised voices offstage, a kennel of them, disrupted the waltz. Ry found himself at some architectural threshold of the ballroom standing next to the Von Steuffelkamp's butler, just arrived, a wiry chap with his face all in the middle and a random fountain of colorless hair who held a wand to his throat in amplification. 'Lay'ees and ge'el'men,' he said, his cockney cascading all out of scale through the enormous room, 'we've 'ad a portkey malfunction. The remaining stu'ents are directed to use the alternate site in—' he coughed, its report cacophonic, people held their ears, he recovered, '—Diagon Alley.'

The ballroom erupted. Speechless wizards fanned the faces of fainted witches. Fizz exploded from dropped flagons of sugared ale and spinning bottles of inkwine. A chandelier burst into a cloud of glass some cool mind thoughtfully transfigured into rain on the way down—not, unfortunately, before some less cool one ran screaming and seriously on fire into the night.

Ry tested one of the pastries he'd nicked, spat it out disgustedly onto the butler, and let the tray drop to the floor. 'Shite,' he told him.

But at least things were finally getting interesting…

୫

Given the circumstances (yuletide in Londontown was already rife with loonies—more of us than them—kill 'em if we have to) the party at length settled on travelling en masse. If we must slum, they said, let us do so as a conquering army.

And while typically loathe to exposing themselves in numbers, where their peculiarities of speech and dress and custom were paradoxically more likely to attract attention, once the hubbub had died down and the options plainly reduced to one, the die was cast. It was clear to Ry, at any rate, that they'd do anything—risk any extremity—to be rid of their children.

So the lot of them filtered out of the Von Steuffelkamps' into Muggle-driven stagecoaches rented for the occasion. (The details were left to Doddle—always Doddle was left with the details.) A ripping pace was set through London. Ry, because he could get away with it, rode alongside the driver of the first coach (bloke named Simpson). He liked feeling the wind on his eyes and eating the odd bug. When Simpson wasn't looking, he zapped passersby with tickling charms or sneezing fits or leg cramps or bloody noses or fits of gas. One chap he made invisible, just for a kick. When Simpson was looking, Ry took lusty swigs from a flask that Simpson suspected, correctly, was his own.

They made an unholy ruckus, this train of mostly inebriated wizards and witches, careering over the crowded rutted muddy streets of Muggledom's densest city. Furtive repairo spells made short work of axle issues that otherwise might have held them up—baffled drivers scratching their heads, being handed the reins and encouraged to resume by their curiously dressed charges. Those inclined to misbehave (and there weren't a few, lubricated with spirits and given an extra zip of mischief thanks to the rarity of the occasion and the company) did what they could. So the path they took became a bright line through the dark city—bursting with fireworks and specters and phantasmagoria. They told themselves the Muggles would remember this Christmas Eve for years and years; they'd sit fireside and dip their noses into their ales and sing songs about the Wizard Convoy of Yule Tide Fifteen Hundred and Thirty-Six.

Finally the mob streamed into Diagon Alley, high on their daring, laughing uproariously—quite a few frankly cackling. Behind them the drivers, perfunctorily obliviated, found themselves in a dingy and eccentric part of town with no recollection of how they'd gotten there. Simpson, for one, found his flask empty, which at least seemed to explain it.

The sought-after portkey being in the cellar of the Leaky Cauldron, the families shuffled thence, and finally Ry received his hateful portion of icky-breathed cheek-squeezing. 'Goodbye, darling,' said his mother, 'don't forget to write.' 'Goodbye, boy,' said his father. 'Be sure and write your mother.'

He shrugged away from their grasping hands—a kind of gestural grimace, this dodge—and retreated into the Cauldron.

Or tried to. It was jammed with people and animals. Like a smell or a virus Ry insinuated himself into the room. He noted the clamor at the bar and maneuvered himself toward the jakes in the back, where the trap door opened into the cellar via a set of rickety steps that currently held aloft, swaying and groaning, several Quidditch teams worth of queued students. He swam down upon their protesting shoulders and did a flip onto his feet on the thrush floor.

'Ta-da!' he said, amazed. But everyone was looking elsewhere. He belched uproariously—a ghastly and complicated bubble of mostly Muggle whisky that nearly made him wretch—and still no one noticed.

Betty Brindlestick and the Dungeon Freak were having a spat over by the portkey.

Ry rolled his eyes. Yawned.

Betty and the Freak were due a big fight—that wasn't news. There'd been something between them, some animus, since they'd first filed into Hogwarts. Most reckoned it was because they were the best at magic. Natural rivalry, like. She with the ancestry and the wand and the religious devotion, he with the Muggle-made fortune and the frightful skill and the void inside. They were perfect for each other.

Ry hated them.

The cellar was packed with bodies taut with attention. He looked up and saw dust springing down from the planks and beams that constituted the ground floor of the tavern, heard the thuds of feet up there, bad dancers, blitzed wizards falling uncaught.

'What a stupid place,' he said to no one, to everyone.

'Shhhhh!' a girl hissed, turning.

It was Mary Potter—Mary Potter of the ravishing sorrel hair—and Caty Jax was right next to her, and next to Caty Jax, Andy Vandal. The latter two couldn't have been closer if they'd been packed into a womb.

At least some witches behind Ry were whispering about him—at least that. Except the words, the only ones, that arrived intact to his ears were: 'He only acts rich. The deMilles have nothing.'

The thing that controlled Ry coiled into a fist of glowing and pulverizing heat and began beating him from the inside. He stamped into the front of the room. 'All right, all right, everyone calm down, Rybel's here! What goes, and how may I be of assistance?'

He knew the groan so well it was like an old friend. Or, it was like what he thought it must be like: having old friends. The groan was a single event, a single being, but it borrowed however many throats were present to exist. It could come through one alone but was happiest in a chorus. The chorus pushed shivers of more-than-delight through Ry's person, as if directly into his chest and through his back and out again. A pulse of more-than-delight like a quenching change in his own temperature. He could almost have gone to sleep, right there and then, after such a pleasant mauling.

But as long as he had everyone's attention…

'What's the hold-up? Where's the minding ghost? This is the portkey, isn't it? Shall I?' He extended his hand to within a fingernail of it—a poor girl's unmatched slipper placed atop an empty keg, from opposite sides of which the Freak and Betty faced off, him short and dark and creepy, her middle-sized and plainish, him in a robe of Slytherin green, her in a robe of brindle, him wandless as always—which was insane—her the inheritor of the most famous wand in Britain, the eponymous wand of the House Brindlestick, the pair of them putting off (Ry had to admit, though not out loud) a field of sorts, a kind of crackling that manifested in gooseflesh and prickled down all over his person.

In plain truth, he felt his berries retract.

'Stop it!' Betty told him.

He stopped.

'You don't understand!' She pointed to the cheaply framed oil painting crookedly dangling from a nail on the wall above the slipper, depicting a multiply-pierced and mostly nude Muggle hanging suspended from a crucifix. 'The minding ghost isn't here and the strider said it isn't safe!'

'No it didn't,' said the Freak. 'It said nothing of the sort.'

'It absolutely said something of the sort. It said what it can say.'

'What say you, strider?' Ry asked the subject.

Its painted head, bearded and grimed with sweat, tears and blood, swiveled left and right, as if addressing others off the span of the canvas. It said, in a weak and curiously accented voice, 'Today, you will be with me in paradise.'

'If that's not a warning, what is it?' said Betty.

'Has anyone gone over yet?' Ry asked.

Many voices answered—the gist being, yes, two groups, or six students, had already made the portkey jump to the midpoint.

'But then the strider came,' Betty explained.

'Except that isn't the code,' said the Freak.

Ry couldn't look at the Freak. Not since the mind-reading incident over the resurrected owl. The Freak, he'd decided, was something he was going to have to live with, like he had to live in landscapes with weather next to oceans under the sky, but not something he had to associate with. 'What's the code?' he asked Betty.

'He's to say "They know not what they do" if the way isn't safe,' said the Freak.

'And the all-clear message?' Ry asked Betty. 'What's that?'

' "Into your hands I commit my spirit," ' she said.

'I will go,' said the Freak. 'Alone. To see. And then return.'

'Not alone!' Betty snapped. 'Nobody goes alone. We have no idea what's waiting!'

Ry couldn't help being predictable. He loved too much, too strenuously, not to be himself. He looked at Catydid Jax, held her in his eyes and said, 'That's easy. I don't mind heroics.'

He reached out to the slipper like the Russian prince of story—

—and felt two other hands arrive at the same time.

୫