1540

So many things happen in a year. Try four of them!

Somehow Ry matriculated, was forced with the rest of his class to ascend into 7th year and beyond, out into the real world, like smoke up a chimney shredded by breeze. Ask him how he managed his OWLs—no idea. It wasn't as if he tried. Or that's what he'd say. And by the end he still walked with a certain bold insouciance, if not as bold, as cavalier as once he had. He'd filled out, gotten tall, acquired a range to his shoulders.

He'd diddled the 6th-year Delores LeMahieu in a broom closet in his 5th year, and had cultivated a reputation ever since for carrying on with members of Hogwarts staff. When a youngish and scarlet-haired Herbology professor took a leave of absence for a year to tend to an ailing relative, it was common knowledge that the real reason for her absence was Ry'd bounced a baby into her she needed to deliver on the sly.

In his last year he spent a lot of time every morning on his mustache and goatee. He bought a wand-sheath of Spanish leather and took to wearing it on his hip like a sword. He ditched the standard-issue House robe (you were allowed to as a 7th year) and began spending money on clothes. They said the ladies he bedded kept him in coin—an income he supplemented with profits reaped from even shadier ventures. They said he'd found an Irish connection in the hunting and harvesting of dragons, various unspeakable parts of whom were then very much in vogue among the nastier houses of Wizardry. Weekends Ry was nowhere licit activity could locate—this being when his Irish sailed in on drums swashing with dragon lymph.

'Whatever would they say if they knew the truth,' asked Mary Potter, snickering at him, stroking the mane of her mare.

Ry tsked. The two of them were riding out at a canter to check the bridges around the Potter farmstead. There were several, it was the first dry day in a week, and Mary's father, who'd become paralyzed from the waist down in a hunting accident, paid Ry good money for the work. In fact all the money he had in the world came from Charles Potter.

Mary's friendship had surprised Ry most of all, but there was a logic to it, to the unforeseeable, the channels life wore into the earth.

Ry came back to school from the Manchester fiasco of Yuletide, '36, different. Something nervous about him. A jangly quality to his laughter. His bullying strained and false, not at all the natural cruelty with which he'd terrorized so freely before.

After a particularly bad dream that had waked up half the Dungeon he'd wandered the halls of Hogwarts in the small hours, crying as if he were someone else entirely. Was doing just that in a bit of a heap in the middle of a corridor when Mary Potter found him.

Strange how good it felt to be found—he wasn't ashamed at all. She, precisely the person he'd hated most, for reasons he could never articulate, was exactly the person he most needed to be seen by in his state. It was a collision of true surfaces thrusting themselves clear of falsity, like rock exposed from glaciers, and it could only be pulled off by himself and his worst enemy—no other meeting would occasion the necessary voltage. Why had he even despised her so? He instantly couldn't remember. Possibly something in her had reminded something in him of the future: of how sorry a state he'd be in upon needing her. In the hall, she'd brushed back his hair and held his hands while he quaked.

If there was one thing about Gryffindors that infuriated Slytherins it was that you never knew what you were going to get. They absolutely couldn't be counted upon. With a Hufflepuff, of course you'd find warmth. A Ravenclaw might sagely advise, from a distance. A Brindlestick would exploit the moment to pitch the sad sack on the redeeming benefits of Merlinism. While a Slytherin…obviously there was no benefit whatsoever in being discovered abjectly weeping by a Slytherin. But anything could happen with a Gryffindor. Mary helped him up, finally, but didn't rush it. Then she walked him back down to the Dungeon without a word.

He'd said, sniffing, 'Do I love you, actually? Instead of hate?'

She'd rolled her eyes. 'No. You just have to do some more crying.'

He'd flecked away a tear. 'Are you busy tomorrow?'

Mary was busy—devoted student, potions prodigy, intrepid seeker—and spectacularly popular, so when she started making time for him in public it was more or less universally assumed that there was something slantwise and erotic about their relationship. How else to explain it? When he'd always been simply the worst person at Hogwarts?

Only her closest friends weren't deceived. 'That's Mary,' they said—they who knew her best—'if a life needs saving and she's there…' and they'd gesture at the inevitability of her intervention. 'It's the quickest way to slow her down.'

And try though he did—once, and without much heat, almost obligatorily, but because you had to, what with the lovely hair and fair green eyes and so on, the lissome body and cinnamon scent and freckles—there wasn't anything physical between them. She rebuffed him with a sort of amiable ruthlessness, as though she'd seen it coming (which, who wouldn't?) but knew also that there was something in Ry worth following through on, that he was only acting on some unignorable masculine instinct and would be harmless again presently, and maybe in fact a swift, resolute, friendly No was just the thing to blast him finally clean, truly clean, of his heretofore shenaniganized self.

In truth he was relieved by the rejection. It meant she could go on helping him without the other stuff getting in the way. Maybe at some point she'd expect something from him, too, but in those early days at least she never suggested it, and Ry wasn't in any condition to offer. He'd found himself marooned at the end of a very long and stupid trail he'd spent his public life energetically blazing, and there he'd been discovered by a nice person, a good person, who felt obligated to help bring him back to a point where he could begin again, with authenticity.

Not that beginning again for Ry meant starting over, exactly. The thing that controlled him was not absorbed into the glare of Mary Potter's caring. He remained bad—he just showed more discrimination in choosing his victims. She helped.

One night—they'd snuck off to the Quidditch pitch, and, after a series of very competitive broomstick sprints, were catching their breath with a leisurely ellipse anchored on the goal posts—he'd found himself regaling Mary with the story of Otis, Nightless Day's spooky companion owl.

'You see,' he said, 'it'd been Dusendrad's owl to begin with. Runny Richie's. Tiny fledgling, like. Only I got upset about something and gave it a toss around the Dungeon, and the next thing you know: splat on the ground goes Otis. Any deader he'd be reincarnated already. Runny Richie was ragged with tears. Well, who but the Dungeon Freak slithers out from his dark corner, puts his hand in the fire, and resurrects the owl bastard like you wouldn't believe.' He didn't tell her—had never told anyone—about the mind-reading incident. He half didn't believe it himself, anymore. 'Otis's been on his shoulder ever since. And who can blame him?'

'He's more your size, isn't he? Nightless Day?'

Ry laughed. 'Than Richard Dusendrad, you mean?'

'Richie's so helpless—even with all his money. You could take it from him just by asking. There's no glory in it, is there?'

'What have you got against Nightless?'

'Me? Nothing. I have nothing against anyone. I'm only thinking of your next friends.'

Ry realized with suspicion that there was something about being manipulated by Mary Potter that he liked. 'What do you mean, my next friends?'

'Your victims, then, if you prefer. The people you molest in order to arouse human feeling and attract attention.'

'I couldn't care less about the attention of Runny Richie!'

'Exactly. Why would you? He's so easy. Nightless Day, on the other hand…'

He chuckled. 'Even were there human feeling in that one, I'd not arouse it.'

'Why?'

Just the week before, in Astrology, Day had, ostensibly on accident, with a snap of his fingers, shot Professor Locksley into the sky. He'd come down a hour or so later dizzy and hiccoughing with a feather in his mouth and hadn't left the Infirmary since. 'Because I'm no fool,' he said.

'All right, but stronger people. Worthier. Gig Belby, say. Alex Brood.'

'Ooh, Alex. I do sort of hate Alex.'

'Why not? Who doesn't? He's a bully!'

'Gig's all right, I suppose, for a Ravenclaw.'

'If you say so.'

'Did you know his father gambled away all their money at Quidditch? On one game?'

'That's gutsy, isn't it, coming back to school and still being an intolerable prig.'

'Now they've nothing to their names but their smarts… I did enjoy watching him run roughshod over the competition in Potions last year. Rare you see someone so contemptuous of his own house.'

'They're certainly contemptuous of him…'

'You're trying to set me up.'

'Is that what I'm doing?'

'Look at the witch stirring her pot! You want me to lay off the lesser lights and take on the tournament of bullies.'

'I just want to see you test your mettle against your equals, that's all.'

The thing that controlled Ry melted in flattery. Was it true? Did people put him on a par with Gigliomo Belby, the hot-tempered and mercilessly intelligent scold of Ravenclaw? With Alexander Brood, the iciest, most arrogant Brindlestick of their age? Did they say, There goes Rybel deMille, and a crueler Slytherin you never saw…

'I do hate the guts out of Alex Brood…' he said.

He started right away by picking a fight with him at luncheon ('I hear you're always rubbing your own wand, Alex. Ask Susurro to give you a hand, why don't you—she knows how to make it spit fire.') and that same day deflected Gig Belby's skewering of none other than 'Runny' Richie in Transfigurations with a glancing blow ('Don't get too close to Dusendrad, Gig: you might see a coin or something, and everyone knows there's no faster way to disgrace a Belby than to flash him a galleon.'). Brood and Belby responded with alacrity and force, and soon enough none of them had time or energy to pester anyone but each other. Mary was a genius.

Of course it wasn't lost on Ry that the more time he spent with her and, separately, conniving against his new rivals, the less he saw of the mesmerizing Caty Jax, and the more she saw of his nominal best friend, Andrew Vandal. She and Van were connected by an invisible thread that'd been shrinking for years, reeling them nearer together, inch by inch. Van was a close one, never let on or uttered an unnecessary syllable, had something of the stalking cat about him, you didn't hear his footfall and had to guess at his mood, but Ry knew him. Some people you simply had insight into: a chance gift, derived from how your personalities combined. He loved Caty, had never told Van, yet knew that Van knew it. He knew that Van loved Caty too, and that Van didn't know he knew. Van thought he was all secrets, that no one could read him, and—Ry knew—he was dogged by doubt. Sometimes he thought Caty loved him, sometimes he thought she loved Ry. Because Ry was forward. Because where Van staked himself out a position on the sidelines, looking while trying to appear not to, studying from the corner of his eye, framing, Ry took her by the waist and planted kisses on her neck. How could she prefer me? Van thought, Ry knew.

The situation came to a head in their 5th year. Ry had observed a widening gulf between Van and himself. The Mary Potter thing had caught him more off guard than anyone. To think that his hectoring, belittling, dangerous friend was a man of parts, after all, who could attract anyone's loyalty—much less that of such a paragon of virtue! It made Ry more likely a threat—which Ry knew Van conceived of him as: a threat—to Van's sweet secret. If he could conquer a Mary Potter, what was a Catydid Jax? This invidious truth had seeped in slowly, and slowly poisoned the well.

There had always been a pusillanimous and self-serving quality to Vandal's friendship, anyway. In his early years at Hogwarts, no one offered themselves up to be Ry's mate except to escape something—some anticipated abuse, from Ry himself or from someone against whom Ry could offer protection. He'd long believed—or, at any rate, he swiftly decided one night at age 16 that he'd long believed—that Van had no native care for him, no inbuilt affection. That he'd only ever been in it for reflected glory and safe passage. Easier to tag along in the shadow than risk the glare, etc. Which calculus had held true for so long as Ry was regularly torturing just anyone. But now, if he was only occupied bullying bullies, what was the risk in Van's stepping out a bit? And how much to gain, with Caty Jax in the offing? And how pressing the case, with his likeliest rival proving himself ever more worthy?

Their friendship waned. Like a moon, it tucked itself piece by piece back behind the black cloth from whence it came.

As a cat, Vandal's mode of rupture was slinking withdrawal. As a snake, Ry's wasn't.

The Winter Ball. Their first one. It was only 5th-years and up. Attendance mandatory. Not that Ry would have missed it.

He strutted in alone in a stupendous get-up of blinding yellow and set about right away outdoing himself. On a ballroom floor swimming with formal black he was a kind of shimmering explosion—a crisis of pigment the eye could not tear itself from. (For the effect, he'd lunged—with the enthusiastic aid of some enterprising Diagon Alley tail0rs, Messrs. Smythe & Hammerstein—into a precipitous quicksand of debt.) He was actually the best male dancer at Hogwarts—better even than any of the faculty—knew this, and made sure no one attending could ever pretend otherwise. He spiked the butterbeer, decked Alex Brood clean to the floor, dipped Warwick Warwind, smooched the new Headmistress, and borrowed the string quartet.

Above all he danced. He danced enamored of bodies. Girls of all Houses, their particular livelinesses, their delicate smells. Girls he'd never called by name and girls he'd pined for and girls he'd actively disliked for years. Girls who up until the moment he entrained them in his inertia had never imagined dancing with Rybel deMille. It didn't matter, really. He molded his body to them as if they were notes of music marching across a staff. He danced out of himself the most toxic things weighing him down—his family's silly poverty, his cruddy prospects, the unyielding bleakness not of tomorrow, necessarily, but of the day after, the impossible weight of the day after tomorrow… They'd come back, they always did—but in the moment, in a dance of light through a dark field, for a second, he could drop them and float far away. Bodies were like balloons if you treated them right, and movement the wind that kissed them off the ground.

He saved Caty for the last. Rolled up on her standing in a gaggle of Slytherins, mopped his brow with a handkerchief, went down to a knee, clasped her hand to his mouth, his hot cheek.

'Dance with me, Caty, or I'll kill myself.'

Stumblebunny Catydid, fingertips of her free hand grazing her lips, giggling. He yanked her onto the floor.

It wasn't as if they were the only two people in the Great Hall. By the entrance, Ann Susurro tended to Alex Brood's swollen-shut eye. Warwick Warwind gallantly undertook a waltz with the discombobulated Headmistress. Mary Potter—who, to Ry's perverse pleasure, had gracefully spurned his offer of a dance earlier in the evening—was in the arms of the Gryffindor keeper, having her own splendid night. Even the Dungeon Freak was present (attendance mandatory), and Ry was distantly aware of him (everyone was always aware of him) sitting by the librarian and a vat of wine, stroking his chin and staring at the ceiling. And Van, of course. Van was there, somewhere, watching his life, imagining it on a canvas.

But for all intents and purposes the Hall belonged to he and Caty. The dance floor was largely clear. The bulk of the flower of British wizardry had congealed along the edges of the room, content to watch the show, nudging each other, fantasizing, coveting, enjoying, regretting. They were treated to a dumbshow of remarkable deftness. Caty was every bit as fluid and natural a dancer as Ry. People got out of their way and no one couldn't look. They took ownership of the whole thing and moved too swiftly for their lips to be read.

He said, 'Marry me.'

She rolled her eyes.

He said, 'He doesn't love you, you know.'

She said, 'Who?'

'He only thinks he does, because I do, and I'm bigger than he is.'

'Than who is?'

'Van!'

'Van?' she said, laughing. But the quality of the laugh. The blush it ushered in.

'He told me to take your flower,' said Ry. 'As much as challenged me. To show you for a strumpet. He thinks it's all a game.'

He watched the impact, the hit in the eyes, the mouth, felt the instant's drag of her body. She looked away from him—first just to look away, then to find something else, her hands not slackening from his shoulders. She fixed him with a doubting glare. 'No he didn't.'

'He did! I think he'd have made a bet, to be honest. I think he'd have put money on your being a whore. But I didn't want to do it. I love you too much. I want to protect you from men like him. Would you, though, for money?'

'Rybel…'

'No, I mean it! Listen, has he danced with you? All night, has he even tried? He said, he told me: "Go in there and be larger than life and slip Catydid your yard if you can, I dare you!" If he loved you, wouldn't he have asked you for a single dance?'

She became stiff against him and volitionless, a log. He put his nose into the crux of her shoulder and inhaled, threaded his fingers into the dry persimmon water of her hair, squeezed her close, looked up to exhale—and saw Van staring back, all art and guile drained from his face. Van how he must have thought he'd never appear to anyone. Ruined. Right next to his ruiners. Self Portrait in Despair.

The quartet brushed their final notes.

Ry spun a half turn to finish. Watched Catydid find, finally, what she'd been looking for: that face now over Ry's shoulder. He felt quickness return to her body. It was suddenly and in one immense gulp of knowing clear that a new element had established itself between them. She took a deep breath. Softness came over her. She cleared her throat, separated from Ry, and curtsied to him. 'My thanks, milord, for the dance.'

He turned. 'Well, Van? I gave it my best. She's all yours.'

There was applause as Ry made his exit. He indulged himself imagining it was for him, and not for the newly inaugurated couple extravagantly kissing after a close shave. He decided to hold that indulgence in his mind and resolved not to look back and was assisted on that score by the sudden materialization in front of him of one of those girls he'd danced with earlier. A year older, he thought. Hadn't really known her name before. Sort of a hungry, slightly unhinged look about her. Delores something?

୫

The first and second bridges were intact, just wanted some sweeping. The east bank under the third had suffered a collapse and required a good deal of shoring up. Ry and Mary could only do so much with magic, with the result that they were neither of them remotely clean trotting back to the homestead. 'Thanks for the hand,' said Ry.

Mary shrugged. The intimation was: at the farmstead of Charles and Anella Potter, one neither expected thanks for work nor offered it. Work was a given.

White sheep on the hills nibbled grass. Clouds scudded about a ruby blue sky.

Mary said, after a moment, 'Did you hear Van and Caty are marrying?'

Ry had learned to love the feel of a horse under him. 'Of course. Who's this, again?' he asked, meaning the stallion.

'Pasha, you idgit! Don't you ride him every time? He's my da's favorite!'

'All right, I just like the way you say his name.'

'He's a papa himself soon. Edwina's set to foal at any time.'

'Well, isn't everyone up to big stuff?'

'What about you?'

'The herbology teacher? One of my finest works, that rumor. But alas, no, it really is a dying relative.'

'I meant, what have you got planned for after.'

'Do I need something?'

'Like it or not, yours is one of the important names of the class of Fifteen Hundred and Forty! Susurro's off to find God in India. Day's murdering Him in Ireland. What has Rybel deMille on the agenda?'

'Nothing holy, I'll warrant.'

The truth was he had no idea, had been actively deferring consideration of the topic for...ever. The deMilles had never had a regular line—in work or even, for that matter, in blood. They entirely lacked prestige, were neither old and distinguished nor new and monied, but had muddled through the centuries trying to stay out of the poorhouse while sewing their seed as widely as they could.

Rybel was the rare deMille only child. Three younger siblings hadn't endured infancy. To that fact he owed the very humble inheritance coming his way: title to the 'estate' in London on his majority, including his father's owl-breeding 'operation,' which had never risen above the level of desperately aspirational…

Muck is what it was. Muck!

'Sorry I asked,' said Mary, off the look on his face. but then she heard something and spurred hyahing toward home. A moment later he detected, disentangling from the drumming of hooves, the small plaintive cries of Charles Potter: 'Come quick! It's happening!'

'What's bloody happening?' Ry said. Pasha mumbled and skittered around a bit. 'Oh. Oh my. Are you ready, old man? Have you names picked out?'

A minute later he'd tied the expectant father to a post and walked into the stable, where Mary and her parents kept a pensive vigil by the mare.

Ed, as they called her, lay on her side in a mess of hay, munching absently. She was shoeleather brown, her tremendous flank sheeny with sweat. Except for the object extending from what certainly appeared to be her bum, it seemed a normal sort of Saturday afternoon.

The object was a length of foal leg, straight as a rod, contained in a stretching bulb of translucent blue. 'It's sticking right out of her!' Ry exclaimed.

'Hush!' said Charles Potter. Since the accident he'd spent most every day in a cushion-lined stool he'd rigged a back onto. This he had ample magic to move about, floating through his world. He sat in it now, clutching the hands of his wife and daughter, witnessing together the dawn of a new life.

Ry motioned toward the exterior, where Pasha thoughtfully selected among grasses. 'The sire doesn't seem to care.'

Anella, who was so short that, standing, she was only arguably taller than her paralyzed and stool-bound husband, spat. She was a sweaty, hunched little witch with squinty brown eyes and curly, ash-colored hair.

'The foal chooses the day,' Charles recited, 'the mare the hour; the sire elects where to stand and cower.'

Ry shrugged. 'Pasha's having a bite.'

'Well, he's a smart one, isn't he? Now watch, lad. You'll want to remember this.'

Ed over the next several minutes stood and nosed among the hay and re-established on her side many times. It was amazingly calm in the stable: the other livestock present glanced occasionally with no more than polite interest and Ed gave zero evidence of distress. The bulb expanded in increments and more of the foal extruded as it did. A dark mass appeared above the increasing length of leg. Ry was at a loss until he saw its eye open: a chestnut stoked into life, staring madly up out into the bright, vast world.

'Fuck me,' he breathed.

Ed got down onto her side again, issued a broad stream of umber fluid over the sac, and concentrated. Ry made himself breathe again and measured the remaining process in his own exhales. Two more and the hoof had pierced the sac and extended into air—almost half of it, almost dry. Three more and the sac pulsed—the first flexes of animal muscle, first twitchings into its first day.

What is that? Ry wondered. How do we command our tissues?

The word initial bounced into him and rebounded. Initial. Initial.

Another exhale and the thing, amid a sudden discharge of brine, was out: out of the mother and most of the way out of the sac: a budging, scrabbling form of black. It molted from the blue-white bag, scrabbled over toward Ed's broad belly and nosed against it. Ed nudged its head with her lips. Kissing. No doubt kissing.

Two creatures confronted the event's essential oddness: I was just in that!

That's me. You were the thing in me!

Shall I go back in?

No, stay. I was wondering what you'd look like!

Ry laughed and looked to the Potters.

The Potters were crying. The knuckles of their grasping hands were white.

He sniffed and shut up.

Ed licked the foal and nudged it until it stood: a silly contraption, weak and unbalanced, slick hooves skating for purchase. Then it worked, it all worked. Initial this, initial everything. The foal fumbled its way into the deep, giving shadow of its mother, latched on and began drinking.

Ry covered his mouth, voiceless. He looked out: Pasha staring in the wrong direction entirely. He laughed. Charles looked at him.

'What'll you call her, son?' said the Potter paterfamilias, red of eye, soft of smile, surrounded of woman.

Ry turned to Mary for guidance. She nodded, did a weeping laugh into her hands and wiped her eyes.

'The mare chooses her hour,' said Charles. 'This was no mistake. It weren't gonna be an easy time after my accident, so… Happy graduation, my boy.'

Even suckling, from the dark beneath her mother's carriage, Ry felt trained on him the newborn's steady chestnut eye.

He fell in love.