After the blood had been washed from the streets and the bystanders obliviated, as the sky crisscrossed with owls, while the castle strained to whisper and to hear whispers, before the private cabinets' of witnesses could be keyed open and emergency liquors uncorked and the story aired to intimate audiences, after the revels but before the headaches, and during that pregnant quantum state of not-yet-ramifying ramifications, the three principals were summoned before a kind of tribunal in Hogwarts.

The Headmaster was a piece of superannuated human gristle in a black velvet robe that was heavier than he could comfortably move within. Eyes glaucous with the milk of encroaching blindness. Stringy bits of beard meshed in the gum of his mouth. He was Fytherley Undercliffe III, (referred to as simply III—or, "the third"—in the halls). He was a placeholder between real Headmasters, knew it, and spent most of the proceedings napping.

Professor Warwick Warwind, Master of Slytherin, resident local authority over two of the principals, in the more or less absence of the Headmaster, presided. Warwind might have been riven from oak. Odes had been penned to the mightiness of his beard. He smelled very good. Animals tended to curl at his feet.

Delilah Squilch, Mistress of Brindlestick, was in attendance as the ward of the girl—Elizabeth. Famously the victim of a dragon-mauling (at the talons of a Ukranian Ironbelly that hadn't taken to the tenets of Merlinism), Squilch was stiff in her movements. Like most of her house she was covered but for her face, which showed an expressive mouth and eyes that tricked you into thinking them phosphorescent. Orange, in some lights.

The girl, Elizabeth, was almost cried out, but not quite. At least she had ceased shaking. Under the bright steady flame of her mind the trauma changed, became something new, something else, something more.

The smaller and younger boy's eyes betrayed the pitched boil of his interior. He seemed calm outwardly—indeed he somehow called calm to him, like a fire dousing itself—but the pale green eyes started at every noise, blinked not at all, and vibrated some even when focused, like a shaken cymbal. And what did they see?

The Headmaster's sanctuary wasn't yet familiar to this one, though in time he would possess it in a way III never could. In his prime to come, it would be the nucleus of Hogwarts and thus of British wizardry, a laboratory, a place of careful disassembling and testing of anatomies, a mine of rarest scrollwork and objects of fell power, a chamber in which secrets were forged: secret books, secret pacts, secret legacies that, could they take human form, would roam the centuries, cross eras and oceans, alter the shapes and destinies of nations.

At least the current one kept a good fire—or his help did. A line of house elves, the anti-bucket-brigade, struggled under logs their own size they fed into the snapping maw of a blistering burn in the hearth. The heat went out in waves. A night's sky worth of candles lit the place besides, hissing personally, alive to changes missed by even the most sensitive.

The third boy knew the Headmaster's lair very well. He'd been there a lot.

Ry hadn't taken the events the same as everyone else. He'd been delighted by them. What could possibly be more wonderful than fresh calamity—particularly when dead Muggles were involved? He couldn't think of a single being in Britain he wouldn't like to immediately regale with the story. So when the old man sputtered: 'What is the meaning of this?' he plunged in without delay:

'The Freak killed a Muggle! Then Brindlestick Betty nearly killed him in turn! Then she burned a Muggle village to the ground!'

III might not have made any sense of this, but he recoiled into himself like a startled turtle, which at least indicated he'd taken receipt of a youth's talking at him.

Warwind muted deMille with a snap.

Ry'd seen others subjected to this treatment go on for a bit, soundlessly speaking, but he was too attuned to his voice, its delicious vowels and musicality, to miss its absence for a moment. He scowled. The sensation was not that of a pinch in the throat, as he would have suspected, but of a field of sorts between his lips into which all his sound went flying. Almost got in the way of his closing his mouth.

Warwind said, 'Pickle, you were present, were you not?'

According to one school of thought, Pickle was the seventh person in the room. But he was also a ghost, so, according to another, he was neither a person nor in the room at all, but the shade of a soul whose carcass had decades prior coughed it up and merged with a boneyard and been redistributed into worms and wormfood and grasses.

Ghosts like Pickle—who were, through some baffling whim of mortality, not bound to a single location—were uniquely valuable to the living, because they could stand guard along the portkey networks that tied wizardry together without Muggles catching wind of them. If Muggles strayed too near or happened upon a portkey at an inopportune moment they could alert the connecting links in the chain of the problem.

The 'alert' was another matter: owls weren't fast enough, and ghosts couldn't apparate or use Floo powder. It had been the inspiration of a 13th century Ravenclaw called Estrid the Shorter to enchant a set of paintings such that their subjects were granted freedom of visitation: thus enchanted, painted beings (or anything 'rendered framebound') were free to flit from one canvas to the next. Over time both the enchantment and the act it entailed came to be known as a stride or strider, after Estrid, who, while not as tall as some other Estrid, had otherwise completely won out.

Anyone with access to a few trustworthy ghosts and a reliable stride-chain could therefore fling themselves about Britannia with reasonable confidence that they'd not materialize within a pitchfork mob or at the bottom of a well or amidst a raging bonfire. Still, things happened.

Muggles were tedious reorganizers, always shuffling things about, changing furniture from room to room, tossing framed works into closets and selling portkeys in a pinch and the like.

The 'rendered framebound' were notoriously unreliable. The esoteric magic that imbued them with such longlasting and unevolving animation (a state that could not, in fairness, be called 'life') also made them truculent, given to hermetical naps, doggedly indistractable.

And not all Pickles were trustworthy.

Pickle, for instance. No one trusted him in the slightest.

'I was as present as is possible for one in my condition to be,' he replied.

'Kindly bring us up to speed, Pickle,' said Warwind. 'From the beginning.'

'The absolute beginning?'

'The beginning of the day.'

'Confounding matter, my Lord, to the dead: the delineation of days; for even the sun's rise makes no impression on the mantle of night eternal that cloaks him.'

'The beginning of the events in question, then. The events that have brought us here.'

'Ah, I understand. Though permit me to marvel, my Lord, for a moment, on the vexing nature of sequence and causality—ever an idée fixe of mine, since I was pink. How it prickles the mind, my Lord: that we are summoned hither and thither by events we summoned, ourselves, into the world. At once actor and acted upon. Quite prickles the mind.'

'Where was you stationed today, Pickle?' asked Squilch.

'Cozy church in Manchester, my Lady. Anglican, methinks. Bang up next to the organ.'

'Is this…what did…do you mean to say…?' sputtered III.

Warwind sniffed. 'I believe the Headmaster is expressing alarm that we would arrange a portkey dedicated to the safe transport of Wizardry's next generation in a temple dedicated to the wholesale slaughter of our kind.'

'Nowhere else to put them, Headmaster,' Squilch explained. 'Most Muggle towns the church's the only building with good walls. Some baron might keep a castle up, sure, and we use 'em if we must, but there's like as not dozens of Muggles inside awake all hours. Churches at least have a quiet part at night, if you're careful.'

'And were you careful, Pickle?' asked Warwind.

'Extraordinarily, my Lord. I am, one might say, the very soul of caution.'

As if this meant the disaster hadn't happened, III breathed a sigh of relief.

Warwind said, 'You were minding the portkey in the church when the stride from the Leaky Cauldron came through?'

'When what, sir?'

'When the stride from the Cauldron inquired as to whether it was safe to proceed.'

'Ah. No, and yes. No: the stride from the Cauldron did not inquire; and yes: I was minding the portkey in the church. The priest and I were engaged in vigorous debate at the time.'

Squilch dropped her face into her hands.

Warwind cleared his throat. 'You were engaged in…?'

'Vigorous debate, my Lord. With the parish priest. He's a very thinking sort of person, my Lord.'

'What was you debating, Pickle?' asked Squilch, smiling with the parts of her mouth that moved.

'The question of transubstantiation, my Lady. Dead tricky bit of desert magic, so far as I am given to understand: transfiguring one deceased fellow into bits of bread and cups of wine all over the world forever. We've been up many nights this past while talking it over.'

Warwind was aghast. 'When did your relationship with the parish priest begin?'

'Difficult to say, my Lord. Often we-the-no-longer-pink conceive of these things in terms of whiles. The past while. The next while. As I have mentioned, the everpresent darkness through which the dead encounter the world—'

'But tonight was not the first of your debates.'

'Nowhere near it, my Lord. We've actually come quite a ways since the beginning, I should think. Harry especially. He's settled down a lot.'

'Harry?'

'The parish priest, my Lord—Harold Moore, though only his mother calls him Harold. At first he was quite put out by my presence. Deranged might not be too strong a word. Convinced God had sent a demon to afflict him! Can you even imagine a sane person believing such nonsense? But I persevered, I made it plain: not demon, only man.'

'Dead man!' III coughed.

'Really, Headmaster,' said Pickle, bruised.

Within the stiff unmoving carapace of his robe, III, issuing a creaking sigh, fell asleep.

Warwind sunk fractionally into his own broad shoulders and, after a moment, pointed at an extravagantly feathered quill suspended over a scroll in front of the snoozing Headmaster. 'Let the record reflect that no stride warned the minding ghost of Manchester of impending transit,' the quill got to scribbling, 'and that the minding ghost of Manchester was entertaining a Muggle priest at the time.'

Even muted, deMille's laugh somehow dominated the room.

Squilch said, 'What happened when the first students portkeyed over?'

'Harry practically fell out of his seat! There we are, kindred souls, in the privacy of evening, establishing a dialectic, and suddenly three sweating hogs warts drop into the room. He was entirely put out. Thankfully they continued directly on to the next portkey and left us, and I explained things to Harry.'

'What on earth did you explain to him?' asked Warwind.

'That he was a ghost. No one had told him yet. And that so was I. And that those were witch- and wizard-children headed back to school from holiday break. I explained everything, my Lord.'

'Was he a ghost, though?' asked Squilch.

'No, my Lady. I was laboring—at that time!—under a misapprehension. At that time.'

'And how did Harry take to your explanation?'

'He was unconvinced, my Lady. He raised his voice, as if to arouse a force of Muggles. I, in turn, raised mine, and told him, in no uncertain terms, that his soul was with my soul—which is to say, it was shucked of its mortal envelope. Else how could he and I have been enjoying such a vigorous debate? I made this point emphatically, and presently another gaggle of hogs warts fell into the room.'

Squilch flashed her phosphorescent eyes to the table of principals. 'Is this where you come in, Liz?'

'No,' said the girl. 'It's where the stride goes out.'

'That's true,' Pickle interjected. 'The stride we keep in the church is of a stag party having supper. One of the hogs warts who'd just arrived, he got into an altercation with Harry. Harry had gone for the spittoon in the corner, you see—that's the portkey to Hogsmeade, of course, which he'd seen the first party take. Anyhow, Harry went for it, the hogs wart shoved him away, and that's when I knew Harry was pink. The shoveability, you see, gave him away.'

'The stride,' nudged Warwind.

'Right. So, this hogs wart, having shoved Harry down, shouted, to the stride, something along the lines of, "Tell them what you've seen here!" And the chap in the middle of supper got up and wandered off frame, leaving me with poor Harry.'

Warwind, to Elizabeth: 'Meanwhile, in the basement of the Cauldron?'

Elizabeth: 'The stride walked into the frame, said something to the one on the cross, and that one said we'd meet him in paradise.'

'Like what you was telling Harry!' Squilch crowed to Pickle, delighted. 'That he was dead, like you!'

'It is possible that I muddied the waters, somewhat,' Pickle allowed.

'Let the record reflect,' Warwind told the quill, 'that the ghost Pickle misconstrued the priest Harry to be a ghost himself; that the first party of students shocked them both, that the second triggered a confrontation, and that said confrontation resulted in a stride signaling ambiguously to the Leaky Cauldron. Now, Elizabeth...Susurro, isn't it? What happened then?'

'It was obvious we were supposed to wait. I was in the next group to go and said as much. But as soon as I did, Nightless said otherwise. He always says otherwise.'

Squilch did a gesture then: a swish of breathed sound and twitch of the hand so fast and simultaneous it was one thing. The girl—stung, frowning—shushed.

'Is this true?' she asked the Slytherin boy with vibrating green eyes.

'No. I don't always do anything.'

Squilch scoffed. 'Let the troublemaker speak, Warwick. These two are too clouded with enmity to be useful.'

Ry was suddenly able to swallow the blip in his mouth. 'Finally!'

III's eyes glimmed open.

Ry said, 'I could have died sitting here listening to you all prattle on!'

III, with a whistle through his nose and a shake of his head, willfully closed his eyes.

Ry said, 'We, all three of us, put our hands on the bloody portkey, and midway through the bloody portkey this one,' he pointed, without looking, at Nightless, 'this one took his hand off the fucking thing!'

Pickle gasped. Squilch gasped. Warwind's eyes widened. The house elf left to mind the fire squeaked, ran out of the room, and curled one of its floppy ears around the doorframe so as to miss nothing.

୫

He'd imagined what it would be like. They'd all imagined. Told again and again not to do something, you imagined what it'd be like. You couldn't help it. Living meant considering the other way. But he couldn't imagine trying himself. Not even Ry. Releasing a portkey was tantamount to suicide, but worse, because you didn't end up found, like a proper suicide—you ended up no one knew where. Zigged between the zags of the sky. Particulate, caught on a cloud, shifting forever. In the ground, maybe, having skipped the terminal stages, long in the soil, confused, sinking, lost.

Hang on to the portkey, was the main thing.

So suddenly they were up and going, hooked into the big vault, divorced from the basement of the Leaky Cauldron and Diagon Alley and London and Britain and the nap of the Earth entire—three cheeky magicians sailing the hidden highway. Ry couldn't help laughing—he loved too much not to laugh. Why didn't everyone understand this about him? How suffused he was with love? For himself most of all, yes, and the situations he found himself in, but still?

Betty and the Freak certainly didn't see the humor. Humor would be fatal to their mutual undertaking. Hate couldn't tolerate humor, nor humor hate. Glorious—glorious!—it was to be erupted like the spew of a volcano into the slipstream of magical travel like that, free of parents and silliness and endless rules...and yet all those two wanted to do was grouse at each other, even clinging to a wench's slipper in the blend of coordinates.

Until he wasn't. The Freak opened his hand. Was floating away. And giving as he did this look to Betty, a searing gaze, half puzzled, half ecstatic, half again determined. Ry'd have a hard time explaining this, but the Freak in that moment, stretching off into the in-between and beaming at Brindlestick Betty, definitely and one-hundred percent contained at least three entire halves of a human being in him.

Ry, anyway, reaffirmed that he didn't have to associate with the Freak.

And for an instant it seemed possible that no one would ever again—that little 13-year-old-or-whatever-he-was Nightless Day was excusing himself from life. Clearly it was in their power to let that happen—his and Betty's. And he was in no mood to extend a hand. He was watching the play. The only one in attendance, in fact.

The one who got to see Betty reach out and seize Day's hand.

The one who got to see the Freak's eyes constrict to two pale, watery green coins, vibrating with certainty.

They were almost human.

But then they, the three of them, fell into the church.

He said three—Ry did, to the tribunal—but really it wasn't quite. There was Ry, and there was a two-headed creature with four arms and three hands, for where Betty's right met Nightless's left, there was one hand only. A fused and writhing bomb of fingers sprouted from an intersection of smoothed wrists.

Then things got bad.

୫

'The Muggle screamed,' said Ry. 'He saw how these two were stuck together and started screaming his head off. Can you blame him? I think I was screaming.'

'Omit the extraneous, deMille,' sighed Warwind.

'All right: the Freak exed him. I don't know how—he didn't say anything—just moved his hand. The Muggle fell away from his own soul. Strangest thing I've ever seen. Thud the body collapsed—yet stood, still, but transparent.'

'A ghost.' Pickle lectured. 'Again and for the first time. Sequence. Harry was amazed.'

Ry continued: 'Then Betty-'

'Liz,' Squilch corrected.

'Liz-' Ry started.

'Ann,' the girl decided.

'Ann,' said Ry. 'Ann?'

'My middle name.'

Ry shrugged. 'Ann here untangled them somehow and sprayed fire all over the Freak.'

Warwind lifted a finger. 'Um…'

'deMille can call me what he likes,' said Day.

'Real fire. Not the magic stuff. I don't know how she did it. I've never seen it before. Right from the long wand. The—her wand. The most famous wand in Britain. You know what I mean. Everything going up. The smell in your nose. And the Freak here wiping it off, like it was wet. All it did was burn down the church.'

But not all. Ry'd gotten out—he'd seen it leap, seen it feed on the town, the ground itself going up like dry paper, sprinting people trailing flames from their arms and backs, too preoccupied to make a sound. All of this was rushing up in him, coming back. It wasn't that he'd forgotten it, exactly—it had only just happened—but possibly he hadn't experienced it correctly the first time, and now he was.

As if the experience had been like a difficult sentence he could only get the sense of after a few hard reads.

He realized at some point he'd stopped talking, and no one had filled the void.

III emitted a tiny snore.

'Well,' Ry admitted, 'more than the church. Actually a bunch of Muggles. Loads of them.' He tried laughing. The cooking smells came back to him. He felt the crunch under his foot, heard it snap. 'I was stumbling and I, I stepped on something…'

Ashes floating up, spinning, the heat like coming off a furnace to the naked face, the awful chords of Muggle's wailing, the moist snap of the thing underfoot, charred and smoking, Ry's boot staving in what—he realized now—had been a man's mouth. Those creamy white pebbles: teeth.

'That's enough,' said Warwind. 'Let the record reflect: following the accidental killing of a Muggle, students engaged in hostilities, and said hostilities resulted in widespread devastation of Manchester.'

The girl's eyes narrowed. 'Liz didn't see any accidental killing. Liz saw murder.'

Ry reeled himself back in from the smoldering margin. 'I thought you were Ann, now.'

'I am,' she said.

Girls.

He tried laughing again. But nothing came. And this time he couldn't blame it on Warwind.