Throughout the rest of November, the weather turned steadily colder. Sarah marveled at how the students scarcely seemed to notice it. Were they too young to feel the chill crawling into their bones and sitting there, like ice in a deep well? Sarah went everywhere wrapped in scarves and a cloak.

Her Potions and Transfiguration lessons continued on. Sarah learned to Vanish what she'd Conjured. Snape was unfriendly and insulting, bordering on verbally abusive, but she hadn't really expected otherwise. Not after she'd exposed his childish behavior to Minerva (and indirectly to Dumbledore) and threatened to blackmail him.

The essays piled up — and not just hers. In the third week of November, Sarah found herself dragging essays back to her room, with the attendant books. She spent Tuesdays and Thursdays reading and responding to journals, grading the essays for Snape and Minerva.


"If you have all the basic skills," McGonagall said, one evening, "then all you need now is practice with the more complicated transfigurations."

"Is it going to be time for those wizarding tests soon?" Sarah asked. She tried to surreptitiously move closer to the fire that snapped and cracked cheerily in the hearth. But there really was no way to subtly move an armchair.

"Hm," Minerva replied. "Perhaps. Although another year to familiarize yourself with the material could only do you good. And you can hardly take the OWLS for only one subject."

"I"m not taking those with the ordinary students, am I?"

Minerva gave her a shocked look at that, before saying, "Gracious no."


Two days later, she had her third lesson with Snape since the morning of Harry's first Quidditch game. She dressed in jeans and a thick sweater and thick socks, and wrapped her LMH scarf around her head, tucking her hair into it.

She found Snape bent over a cauldron bubbling with something that looked almost like molten turquoise. The potion's top even had a pearly shine. He ladled the turquoise liquid into a few vials, which he corked and labelled.

After a moment, he looked up. "Williams."

"Professor," she said. She tugged her scarf back slightly, as if drawing back a hood, but didn't unwrap it.

His mouth thinned into a straight line. 'Today, you will work on potions identification."

Here, brew this unidentified potion. If you've brewed it correctly, it should taste like licorice—

His gaze met hers, and either he was reading her mind again or he was observant enough about people to see the frisson of caution that had carved an icy trail down her spine. His eyes glinted with a sense of humor she didn't share.

After a moment, he added, "First, you must brew three potions to test for components. The instructions are in your book. You have three hours; I do not expect you to successfully name what I've brewed, but you should at least identify the key ingredients to test for."

Wonderful. She was pretty sure this was NEWT level work, if not even more advanced than that.


Sarah dragged herself back to her chambers after the potions lesson. She tried not to think about the smug look on Snape's face when she'd handed in her work. Sh'ed identified three key ingredients to test for, but her third had been incorrect.

"You should have been testing for powdered moonstone," he'd said. "That is the primary cause of a pearlescent sheen in a potion."

"Not mercury?"

"Obviously not mercury," he'd snapped. "That's what you tested for, and not one of the potions assigned had even a drop."

Snide, hateful, insufferable man. She swept up the stairs to her little neighborhood, too angry to feel the cold in the hallway.

"Valentine evenings," Sarah snapped at her door, which swung open.

She shrugged out of her cloak and tossed it into her armchair, ripping the scarf from her head in one harsh gesture.

She was left standing, without scarf or cloak, in her front room. It took her a moment to realize just how wildly her heart was beating, just how hard she was breathing. She unclenched her fists; Snape was Snape, and she'd obviously taken those three a little too much to heart. A hot bath might calm her down, or would at least soothe some of the chill away.

Later, ensconced in a hot bath — complete with a rainbow of bubbles; she wasn't sure when magical bubble solutions had been stocked, but if it had been Gurdie, the little house elf was a genius — Sarah looked up and had to smile. In the copper mirror across from the claw-footed tub, some of the steam appeared to be curling out of her ears.


Sarah spent Thanksgiving Day alone in her room, affixing photographs in a small volume, grading essays and, in the afternoon, responding to journals. She woke before dawn, lit her lamps, and got to work. The clock chimed both breakfast and lunch without her really noticing.

She stopped to rest her tired hand about an hour after lunch had stopped service. Her wrist was once again covered in ink and her hand had started to cramp. But at least she only had a few essays left. Then she could start on all the journals — for which she was sure her hand wouldn't thank her.

Once she got into the journals, though, she found herself completely engrossed.

Persephone Greengrass had written: Was L Frank Baum the non-magical relative of a wizard? This book seems really consistent with what a non-magical person might see of magic as performed by a family member.

Ryan Carrick wanted to know: Is it possible that Matilda was a witch? The things that happen around her read like accidental magic.

Erick Witwicky, on the other hand, had been more interested in J. R. R. Tolkien: Would it be possible to read a biography of JRRT? The commentary on The Hobbit implies that one of his primary purposes in writing the stories of Middle Earth was a chance to develop languages. Is it common for non-magical scholars to study the spread and creation of language?

Sarah made a mental note to pick up a biography of Tolkien — and maybe a very basic linguistics text, while she was at it — when she was home again.

She was so engrossed that she never heard her clock chime for dinner. The next time she looked up from her work, the sky had long darkened and her clock informed her it was an hour past dinner.

So she wrapped her head and throat in her LMH scarf, then donned her two thickest cloaks. She had just barely made it off the Hogwarts grounds before she pulled the hood of one of her cloaks up over her head.

She spent most of the walk shivering, her breath leaving clouds of fog in the air. The fog seemed to glitter under the inconstant light of the stars and the rare lamps that lit the path. Older snow crunched underfoot, but every so often she kicked around powdery clouds of it; when she did, it almost looked to her as if the fog had begun to reach the ground.

By the time she reached the Three Broomsticks, the cold had crawled into her belly, she was ravenous, and the stars burned bright in the sky above the little town. With the snow that had settled on the rooftops and walks, she might well have walked to the Santa's little village at the North Pole.

The Three Broomsticks was a blast of surreal warmth and brightness. She could feel sweat bead on her forehead, and the light hurt her eyes. The wooden tables and hardwood floor gleamed. Even the bar seemed to glisten in the rosy light of the contented, quietly snapping fire.

Candles on the walls and tables lit each corner of the room, made parties of people she didn't recognize seem to glow as if lit from within.

Sarah smiled at Rosmerta — who smiled back — and slid a coin across the counter to her. She locked herself in the cubicle with the phone.

Toby answered. His voice was young and bright and yet slightly uncertain: "Hello? This is Toby Williams."

The cold that had crept inside her seemed to warm a little. "Hey, Toby. Happy Thanksgiving!"

"Sarah!" He made one of those little kid noises of glee, and then she heard, "Mom! It's Sarah!"

"Hey, now. I want a chance to talk to you. I really miss you, you know."

"I miss you too. Thanks for the Ice Mice," he said. "Is teaching school really boring?"

"Actually, no. One of my classes baked a cake," she said. "And on Halloween, we had the scariest party ever."

"Did everybody wear scary costumes?"

"At least one guy did," Sarah said.

"Cool," Toby said. There was a murmuring Sarah couldn't decipher, and then Toby said, "Mooooo~ooooom!" After more murmuring, Toby added, "Mom wants to talk to you."

Plasticky noises, and then Irene said, "Sarah! Happy Thanksgiving!"

"Happy Thanksgiving to you, too. How have things been?"

"Well, Toby is just getting more and more excited for Christmas," Irene said, her voice warm and happy. "Your father has a thing in Kansas somewhere tomorrow and again two days after Christmas, but Stockton's let me keep him here in town for the past few months."

"Is Stockton okay? Did he hit his head, you think?"

Irene laughed. "There's no telling. Oh, my parents are in town for the weekend. Do you want to talk to them?"

"I would, but I don't have much time left. Is Dad around?"

"Sorry, honey, he's making a last minute run to the store for cranberries and yams."

Sarah snorted a laugh. "Did Grandpa Sorkin get into the cranberry sauce?"

She could practically hear Irene roll her eyes. "Worse. Aunt Irma thought she could 'improve' it."

"Please tell me she didn't pour apple jack in?"

"Some cranberry liqueur, apparently, but I'm not taking my chances with cooking that nonsense."

"The alcohol will cook out."

"Or set my stove on fire," Irene said, tartly. "Toby, Toby don't — I'm sorry, Sarah, I've got to go. Love you."

"Love you, too." She hung up the phone.

Then she headed to the bar. She pulled one of the barstools out, leaning her elbows on the shiny, polished wood. "Rosmerta, it's a family holiday back home and I haven't had a thing to eat. Any chance of a meat pie?"

"I've got a shepherd's pie," Rosmerta said. "And how about a cup of tea to warm you up? You look chilled down to your bones, girl."


The end of term crept nearer. Sometimes she imagined it looming like a huge open mouth. Sometimes it skittered toward her on eight dark legs.

It wasn't that she wasn't looking forward to the end of the term. She was certainly looking forward to going home for the first time in four years, to seeing Toby and her parents again.

She just wasn't looking forward to administering or grading exams.

Sarah had already written her exam for her class as part of her curriculum, but she found herself reading and re-reading it as the end of term drew nearer. Was it too hard? Had she given them the resources they'd need not to be stumped by these questions?

What if it was too easy? It needed to be a challenge; they needed to have accomplished something.


One night, when Hoggle was visiting, her eyes strayed once too often to her desk.

Hoggle, who had always been strangely sensitive to her moods, furrowed his brow at her. "I know you wouldn't actually rather be working right now, Sarah."

"No," she admitted.

He crossed his arms..

"I'm just... a little nervous."

"What's there to be nervous about?"

"What if the exam's too hard, or not hard enough? Have I done a good enough job?" Sarah sighed and retreated to one of her armchairs. She adjusted it so she couldn't look at her desk.

"That's not all."

She sighed. "It's the end of the very first term I ever taught, Hoggle. I just... I just hope they liked it."

"Course they liked it," Hoggle said.

She didn't ask him how he knew.


On December Sixth, just two weeks before she was set to give her final exam, Sarah headed into Minerva's office for reasons not related to her students or her own lessons. She knocked at the door to discover Minerva calmly pouring cream into a cup of tea.

"Sarah," Minerva said, half rising from her seat. "Is something the matter?"

"I'd hoped to go home over Christmas vacation," Sarah said. "Thing is, I'm not sure what's the best way to get there. Should I just buy a plane ticket —" at Minerva's puzzled look, Sarah clarified, "an aeroplane ticket?"

Minerva set her cup down and indicated for Sarah to sit. Sarah obeyed, and Minerva lifted an empty cup and saucer in a silent offer.

"No thanks," Sarah said.

Minerva nodded, then lifted her own cup, apparently deep in thought. After a moment she said, "At some point you'll have to learn to Apparate. That much is clear to me now. You could Floo into Diagon Alley and purchase a ticket in London."

"Is that the easiest way?"

Minerva laughed. Her voice was dry, a little raspy. "Good heavens, no. The easiest way would be to Portkey straight from Hogwarts to... Well, somewhere in America."

"Like an airport?"

The other woman's eyes narrowed. She was both thinking and measuring Sarah. "You're very set on aeroplanes."

"It's what my family will expect." Sarah shrugged.

"They don't already know?"

She didn't reply.

"Very well. I understand Albus has been to a number of airports. Quite possibly he has visited one in America." With that, Minerva stood from behind her desk and crossed to her fireplace.

She opened up a can of something on her mantelpiece, then tossed glittering powder into the fire. "Albus Dumbledore."

After a moment, Professor Dumbledore's face appeared in the fire. He arched an eyebrow and asked, "Yes, Minerva?"

"Lecturer Williams has encountered a problem in her plans to return home during the Christmas holiday."

"Ah, has she now? And in what way do you think I can assist?" There was a glint in his eye, as though he already knew what Minerva was about to say.

"Could you charm a Portkey to an American airport?'

"I could create a Portkey to any of three American airports," Dumbledore replied. He looked faintly surprised. "Which would best suit her purposes?"

When had Albus Dumbledore — Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot and Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards — ever visited an American airport? Didn't wizards mostly fly on broomsticks and Apparate when they needed to go places?

Minerva turned to look to her.

Sarah stood and made her way to the fire. "Have you ever been to JFK?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. Come find me when you're ready to depart and I will be quite happy to create a Portkey for you."

Perfect. She'd Portkey into JFK, and then grab a flight from JFK to Woodrum Field.


Jareth kept his distance throughout the rest of December. He left no message through Hoggle, nor any gifts in her mirror. He seemed to recognize and respect that she was stressed.

Sarah wasn't sure if she was grateful, or if she missed him.

No, she realized the morning she paused on the main stair, looking for him, she definitely missed him. The question was only whether she missed him more than she was grateful, or vice versa.

That evening, she placed her palm against the silver mirror in her room. The mirror rippled, but Jareth's face didn't appear. Her brows furrowed.

Had he been staying away for reasons of his own? Was he sick, or hurt, or busy with wish-aways?

The mirror was still rippling. So Sarah drew in a breath, gathered her thoughts, and said, "I just... I just wanted to thank you, if you've been keeping away on purpose. I'm really stressed right now, and I appreciate that you've respected that. If that's not what's going on — well, anything I can do to help, just ask. Maybe I'm nuts for this, but I miss you."

She jerked her hand back from the mirror and turned away. Her hand felt fine, but her face was burning.

God, he was going to misinterpret that. Of course, was the conclusion he was bound to draw actually a misinterpretation?.


December Twentieth dawned snowy and cold. Sarah wore a sweater and jeans and thick socks under her robes. She left her hair long again as she headed down to breakfast.

A letter waited for her at her place. It had been written on something that was both papery and not. She ran her thumb along it, noting that the parchment had an almost leathery quality. So it was actual vellum, then. Did wizards use vellum?

She unrolled the letter and stared. In an elegant, spidery hand, someone had written:

Such a Pleasure to know my Efforts have not gone to Waste! I wish You all Good Fortune in administering your Exam and ending your Term. May your Winter Celebration be a Joyous one.

J Rex

Sarah read the letter twice. Then she folded it up and tucked it into her sleeve.

After that, she surveyed the breakfast table. Today was a day for bacon and caffeine.


At least judging as an observer, the exam was a success. Nobody cried. Nobody had a breakdown and ripped the exam into tiny shreds. Nobody stood from the long desk, knocked their chair over, and fled the classroom.

When the students had all handed in their papers, she did a quick shuffle to make sure nobody had given up and drawn gruesome cartoons or something. But nobody had; on a cursory inspection, all the answers looked earnest.

Maybe she'd taught well, then, she thought. She certainly hoped so.

Evans smiled at her as she handed in her paper and left the room. Greengrass and Nott had both smiled as well. Sarah suspected she knew her top three scorers.

She smiled back, waited until the classroom was empty, and then closed the door. She took the quickest — although admittedly coldest — route to her chambers, where she stripped the robes and stuffed them in her wardrobe.

She packed the exams away in her bag — along with Christmas presents — and grabbed the winter coat she'd been wearing for the last two years. The coat was long, reaching nearly to her knees, and looked like tight-knit gray wool on the outside. Drab and second-hand, but warm: a normal, non-magical Sarah's normal, non-magical coat. She hefted her bag and inspected herself in the mirror. After a moment, she dug a gray woolen hat out of her bag and pulled it down over her hair and ears.

There. The woman staring back at her from the mirror was regular, non-magical, freshly-away-from-teaching-in-the-wilderness Sarah Williams. Nothing special about her, except pretty green eyes and an ability to find weird candy.

Best to break the news slowly, after all.


The flight from JFK to Woodrum Field was mercifully brief. Sarah pushed her way past the Liverpudlian fellow who'd so thoughtfully regaled her with his excitement to see the historical lost colony.

Sarah had smiled, nodded, and not mentioned she was from a suburb of the town they were flying into. Nor had she mentioned that the "lost colony" was actually further south — in North Carolina, in fact, not Virginia.

It'd have been a real shame to crush his enthusiasm, especially since he was already in the States.

She grabbed her bag from the carousel, hurriedly opening it to check and see that her wand had gone through safely. She felt the smooth sycamore whole and intact under her fingertips and closed her eyes in relief.

After that, she made her way to the row of pay phones.

Her father picked up on the first ring. "Williams residence, this is Robert speaking."

"Hey, Dad. Guess who's in the States again?"

"Why, it couldn't be my daughter," her father said, tone dry. "She got married in England."

Sarah laughed. "Nope. It's definitely not me."

"Are you at JFK?"

"No, I'm in Woodrum Field."

"What? When could your flight have left? How did you get through customs so quickly?"

Sarah forced a laugh. "I guess it must be magic."

"Or a lot of luck," her father said. His tone was dry again, and Sarah felt a stab in her gut at how much she'd missed his humor. "Alright, sweetheart, we can be there in half an hour to pick you up."

"I'll be sitting on the curb," she replied.


There was a lot of hugging and a lot of laughing when her family arrived. Irene's face was positively glowing, and Toby latched his arms around her waist and didn't let go. Her father's joy was a quieter thing, but his eyes glinted and he wore a small smile. He clapped his hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently.

"It's good to have you home," her father said.

Sarah smiled up at him. "It's good to be home."

It was.

She hauled her bag out to the car and shoved it in the trunk. After that, she scrambled into the back seat. Toby crawled in next to her, asking questions about how different England and Scotland were from America.

Sarah tapped her finger against her lip, pretending to think. "Well, for one, I haven't had a good cup of coffee since I graduated."

Tony wrinkled his nose, while Irene scoffed. "If what we had at your graduation lunch was the best coffee you've had in England, then you haven't had good coffee since you left America."

"But what about how they talk?"

"Lord knows I don't understand most of the village people. And one of the students — not one of mine, he's two years too young — has the thickest Irish accent I've ever heard in my life. Cannot understand a word out of him."

Her father laughed. "Let me guess, you have to get one of the older students to translate?"

"Thankfully, we don't speak much," she admitted. "I deal mostly with the third year students. Right now I've got them reading and journaling."

Her father looked at her in the rearview. "What is it you teach, anyway?"

Sarah's stomach sank low enough to play poker with her toes. She swallowed, and said, "I — well — my subject is kind of weird."

"Do tell, Sarah," Irene said as they passed an old farmhouse with a roof covered in snow.

"It's sort of a cross between history and literature. We do a lot of reading, and then do we a lot of reading about our authors."

"Didn't your classes bake a cake?" Toby tugged her sleeve.

Oh shit, oh shit. Irene raised an eyebrow.

"A cake in a reading class," her father said, tone mild. "That's a little odd."

"Somebody had a birthday," Sarah said, "and with Halloween coming up... Kind of a holiday treat."

Irene laughed. "Sounds like someone's determined to be the cool teacher."

"Are you kidding? I'm the coolest teacher in that whole school."


The entire trip only usually took half an hour — forty-five minutes today, just in case of invisible ice — but it seemed to go in stages. Sarah stared at snow-covered and icicle-bedecked telephone lines and asked questions about Irene's work in the library and Toby's part in the Christmas play. After slightly longer than usual, the car passed into the old downtown of the tiny Virginia town her parents had settled in. Its buildings were old but clean and well-tended. She caught glimpses of white wood, welcoming red brick, and snow on every roof and tree-top. The roads and sidewalks, at least, were mostly clean of the snow.

Eventually, they made it to another cluster of old buildings and older houses. It looked almost as if it could have been the main street of an entirely separate town, but it was just Old Woodrum, the original town center. Sarah knew from elementary school projects that Old Woodrum had been abandoned in the 1860's thanks to Civil War shenanigans, then re-claimed and gentrified in the 1940's.

The car pulled up to the driveway of a two-story Victorian monstrosity. Sarah watched it roll closer as they traversed the long drive. There was the oak tree with branches right outside her window. There the trellis she'd used to climb up to the roof (or down to meet her drama club hooligan friends) during high school.

Her father pulled into the garage. Sarah crawled out of the car and grabbed her bag.

"You're in your old room," Irene said as they got out of the car.

Sarah sidled her way away from the car, easing gently past a group of bicycles, a tangled garden hose, and cardboard boxes labelled in her father's illegible scrawl.

Sarah made it from the garage to the laundry room, and from there to the kitchen. It had been left in a riot of disorder: flour on the counter, the crock pot simmering, mixing bowls in the sink.

Thankfully, the overn wasn't on, so Sarah assumed whoever had been baking had put the batter in the refrigerator. Though judging from the state of the kitchen, it had probably been Irene. Her father tended to clean up in stages as he cooked — he'd always called it, with a wry smile, the 'clean up mess a before making mess b' prinicple.

She grinned a little and headed out from the kitchen into the main hall. To her left was the door into the dining room, while in front of her was an open sitting hall — her mother had insisted on the walls being knocked out when she was very young — at the far end of which was an open entrance area. The entrance hall had an arched ceiling, with shelves built in to hold the various knicknacks, none of which she could see from her present position thanks to Irene's enormous tree. The sitting hall also led straight to the main stair; Sarah adjusted her bag on her shoulder and pounded up the main stairs.

The second floor had been built around the top of the ground floor, with much of its square hallway open to the ground floor. Sarah turned left once she'd made the top step. The second door was hers.

Inside, she found a room so bleak she knew she would have pitched a fit six years ago. She'd hated people touching her things; now, almost every personal effect and item of clothing appeared to have been removed. Most likely Irene had boxed it all away and dragged it up the rickety back stair — all that was left of the old servants stairways — to the attic.

It was a little unnerving to see her presence erased so thoroughly from her old room. For a moment, Sarah wondered if she was even in the right house. Had she slept here? Lived here? Really?

But no. The old, sturdy oak branch was still just outside her window, in easy climbing distance. The furniture — dresser, desk, bed — were just as she'd left them in the summer of 1987. It was her room. It just wasn't hers anymore.

Sarah took in a deep breath and let it out. This wasn't her home anymore, and that was okay. She had a new home, for now. And once she and Hogwarts parted ways, she'd find another home in Wizarding Britain or maybe even Wizarding America.

She tossed her bag on the floor by her bed and dug out both her wand, which she tucked in to her sweater's thick sleeves. It rested surprisingly comfortably against her forearm, held in place by a pair of bracelets of knotted fabric. Next, she grabbed the presents she'd bought. Three for each of them, all neatly wrapped in shiny paper she'd bought in Edinburgh.

Those, she carried back downstairs. This year, and probably for the last few years if some of the scratches on the round ornaments were any indication, her father and Irene had apparently thought if the tree is huge, go for understated elegance rather than throw all the shiny, brightly colored things on the big tree until you have a thirteen-foot eyesore. They had hung gold, silver, and clear glass ornaments, a few fake glass icicles, and a smidge of silvery tinsel. They hadn't gone for colored lights, either — just plain, unblinking white.

Sarah tucked her presents at the bottom, then looked around. The wallpaper was the same, but the knicknacks in the entry room had changed. She drifted toward the front door. Gone were the urns, figurines, and antiques. Instead, her father and Irene had put up photographs: wedding photographs, candids of Toby, a few of her school portraits, candid shots of her with her friends. She saw one of her father and Irene evidently coming home from a fundraiser; Irene wore a champagne-colored evening gown and small earrings. It wasn't a look Sarah would have expected of her stepmother. Her father had placed his hand at the small of Irene's back, looking both familiar and protective, and Sarah wondered if Irene had suffered another seizure shortly before that fundraiser. Her father wasn't really prone to touch.

She couldn't help but grin when her eye caught another photo: her, most likely in her later high school years, climbing down the trellis in broad daylight. Her hair had just begun to really grow out, and she'd left it long and straight. The photo, though black and white, looked incredibly detailed — her hair seemed to swing with her movement, its glint almost seeming to shift in the captive afternoon sunlight.

Sarah blinked, and the motion was gone.

"You know how many times I had to nail that trellis back to the house?" Her father said from somewhere behind her.

"I'll bet you never even nailed it once," Sarah said, turning around. "Isn't it your friend Dave who fixes this house up?"

"Usually. But that trellis would always come loose right after you'd used it. I don't know how you managed never to fall."

"The fall would only have broken a few bones," she said. Her stomach clenched in a sharp, longing pang as she realized that if she'd fallen, her magic might have manifested earlier.

"One of which," her father replied, tone grim, "might have been your spine. Or your neck."

Sarah put up her hands. "Okay, you got me. I'll be more careful And I definitely won't go climbing it while it's slick from snow."

Her father rolled his eyes and sighed. After a moment, he looked back to her, a smile curling on his lips.


While her father baked and Irene opened Christmas cards, Toby wanted to hear all about Oxford as well as her remote Scottish school. Sarah tried her best, but he was seven years old. There was a limit to how well he could understand something so completely outside his reference pool.

"So it's like the highschool and the middle school and the elementary school are all one big —"

Sarah shook her head and took a sip of her cider. "No, no, no. It's more like... you know how you have Miss Pennington, and Jacob has Miss Davis, and Jacob's older brother has Mr. Morris? And sometimes your classes all compete against each other to guess the marbles in the pickle jar, or who can be quietest coming in from recess?"

Toby nodded. From what Irene had told her a month or so ago, Toby had been very upset about Miss Pennington's class losing the pickle jar challenge. Sarah was pretty sure it was the first time she'd heard of Toby being unlucky in the last six years, so no wonder he'd reacted so strongly.

"Well, imagine that all the classrooms in your school were…houses of their own, okay? And the students in those houses basically lived in little rooms tucked away in the houses, and then went to school in the houses's big rooms. That's what it's like."

Toby wrinkled his nose. Living at school was evidently the wors tthing he could think of.

Sarah laughed.


They ate simply for her first night home. Sarah grabbed a pizza crust, slathered it in olive oil, and then she and Toby added toppings. Irene watched over them, laughing as Toby tried to add grapes rather than olives, and ketchup rather than tomato sauce.

"Stop trying to ruin my first dinner back home," Sarah said. She ruffled his hair.

"I'm not! It'll be good, I promise!"

He gave her a really good innocent face, looking up with very wide, very blue, very guileless eyes.

Sarah scoffed. Irene rescued their dinner by scooping away grapes and ketchup, stowing them away safely. She set olives and tomato sauce down by Toby's hands.

"Try these, Toby."


They managed not to ruin the pizza. And during dinner, Sarah found herself dodging more in-depth questions from her parents regarding Hogwarts. She was so busy weaving something close enough to the truth that she didn't feel guilty, and wouldn't feel too bad about when she finally told them the truth, that her father managed to blindside her.

"So who was that man who showed up at your graduation lunch? Irene says you've never really talked about him."

"Jareth?" Sarah tried to hide a wince. "I met him in spring a few years ago. It's complicated."

Her father raised an eyebrow. "Have you heard from him since you went to Scotland?"

"He's come by for a few visits." At her father's expression, she hastily added, "It's not like he's ever stayed the night! Dad, it's a kids school. I'm not about to get fired over — "

Irene looked between them, then asked, quickly, "So what do you and the other teachers do, cooped up in that school with the children?"

Her father's thunderous look subsided, though she suspected the Jareth conversation wasn't actually over. Sarah reached for another slice of pizza, thinking.

"Well, it's an old-style castle, so we've got basically an entire wing to ourselves. We're pretty busy with the coursework and monitoring the kids — it's basically grades six through twelve — so we're never too bored. We walk down to the village, if we have time, I guess."

"Isn't that a bit far to go for fun?" Irene shuddered. "Imagining you trapped by snow and fog in some windy castle with a bunch of stuffy British teachers and a pack of children..."

Sarah threw back her head and laughed. "Irene, you sound like me when I was fifteen. I promise, it's really not that dramatic. The village is only a few miles — it's a pretty easy walk and all downhill."

"Walking any number of miles in ice and snow sounds just awful to me," Irene replied. "But I've spent so long in the south, I guess I'm biased."

"It could be worse," Sarah pointed out, gesturing with her glass. "It could be the Overlook."

That drew a laugh from her father.

Toby stared at them all. "What's the Overlook?"

Sarah leaned down and muttered, "It's a hotel from a movie where a family got snowed in all winter and the dad went crazy."

"Cool! Can I see that movie?"

"Absolutely not," Irene said, tone suddenly brittle.

"Not until you're much older, son," her father said.

After a few moments of Toby's pleading look, Irene turned to Sarah and asked, with just a faint note of forced cheer, "So, you are staying for most of your break, right? It's been much too long for just a short visit to satisfy us."

Sarah leaned back in her chair and thought. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see an old black-and-white photograph of Grandma Williams. "Well," she said, slowly, "I don't have to be back at Hogwarts until January Fourth."

Her father dropped his glass. It hit the floor and shattered with a tinkling sound. She heard shards rebound and click across the wooden floor.

"Robert!"

They all jerked away from the dining room table, rising or, in Toby's case, sliding sideways from their chairs. Irene braced her hands against the grain of wood for a moment, before backing away a step.

"I'll… I'll just go get the broom. Toby, stay right where you are; I don't want you stepping on glass."

But her father ignored her. His grass-green eyes were trained firmly on Sarah.

Very quietly, and without even a tremor in his tone, her father asked, "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?"

Sarah stared back at him. Her already pounding heart pounded faster, hammering hard in her chest like it wanted to escape as badly as she did. She drew in a quick breath, let it out, drew in another. Shallow.

Her, "yes," was quiet and dull, pushed out of a dry mouth.

Her father leaned away. His expression crumpled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling as his mouth curved down. He shook his head as if that would change her answer, and then asked, "But Sarah, why? Why would you bring magic back into our lives like this?"

Irene returned from the kitchen with a broom and dustpan.

"Back? Back into our lives?" Sarah asked. Her voice seemed to echo in her ears, or maybe off the dining room walls, and she was startled at how shrill it was.

"Sarah —"

"You mean you knew? You knew all about Mom, and why she left. Everybody knew except for me, right?" She rounded on Irene. "Did you know? Did Dad just happen to tell you, 'So, my ex-wife is an actual, honest-to-god, flies-on-broomsticks witch and her family is full of evil baby murderers who still buy into eugenics'?"

Irene stared at her like she'd gone crazy. Sarah wondered if she actually had gone crazy.

Quietly, her father said, "No, Sarah. I never told Irene any of Linda's secrets."

"Right, and you kept this from me because they were her secrets, right? But the fact that she was sleeping with Jeremy, that wasn't one of her secrets even before the tabloids got hold of it? The fact that she didn't fight you at all for custody — that wasn't a secret worth keeping?"

Her breath was coming faster and faster, turning even shallower. Clammy sweat began to bead on the back of her neck, on her hands. She was pretty sure her voice was up in teakettle range, but she was too angry and hurt to care.

Her father snapped, "I thought you were like me. It would only have hurt you to know that your mother was disappointed with you for something you couldn't change. You'd only have blamed yourself, you'd only have thought it was the only reason, when the divorce was so much more complicated than that."

"Really? So she left right after my eleventh birthday came and went, and no Hogwarts letter came, for some much more complicated reason?"

"Our relationship was already over." Her father's tone was flat, but he was speaking loudly enough to echo of the dining room now, too. "Between her ambitions and Jeremy, we were through. That had nothing to do with you."

"And the reason she didn't bother taking me with her," Sarah said, "didn't bother calling more than twice a year, didn't bother with cards or letters, was that I wasn't like her."

Her father looked away. "I thought you were like me," he said again, softer this time. "If you couldn't have changed it, would knowing why really have helped?"

Slowly, Sarah pulled her wand from inside her sleeve. And just as slowly, she walked around the dining room table. When she could see the shards of her father's glass, she pointed the wand in a sharp motion, pictured the glass as it had been before he'd dropped it, and murmured, "Reparo."

It was a simple enough transfiguration. All the component parts were there, remembered what they had been. They just needed a little push.

The glass re-assembled itself quickly, and Sarah bent to pick it up.

She looked away from the table, away from her father, across the rest of their smallish dining room. Irene's face had gone pale, mouth wide open. Toby was shaking, but his expression wasn't one of fear.

Silence reigned. It dragged, and stretched, and seemed to keep going and going.

At length — it couldn't have been too long, could it? But it felt like forever — she turned back to her father.

He was looking at the glass with undisguised resentment.

Sarah looked down at her wand, then tucked it back into her sleeve. She sucked in another couple of noisy, shallow breaths. She waited for her fingers and heart to steady out even a little.

"I wish," she said, and had to stop and moisten her lips. Her mouth had gone dry at those words, "I wish that the mirror in my room was a door into and out of the Underground so I could leave right now."

And then she turned and headed out of the dining room, pushing the door open. She picked up speed as she crossed the main hall, thudding up the stairs almost as quick as her heart in her ribcage. A sharp corner left, two doors, and then her old wooden door swung open and Sarah, by now half-running, reached for the floor-length mirror.

It rippled.

Her hand went through.

The rest of her followed quickly after.


Personal notes: Dear sweet surfer-chomping Leviathan have I been waiting for this one. As always, a thousand thanks to Leviathanmirror for being my pre-reader and general touchstone to sanity, and a big hearty thank you to Cheloya for her help as well.

Technical notes: Fixed a continuity error in Chapter 3, so if you think you've found an inconsistency... ha ha, you haven't. Or at least not in this chapter! Also, for those who've read other things by me, I'm using roughly the same background details for Sarah and her family that I used in Xanatos Crash. Obviously a few changes to make the fusion work, but roughly the same shapes.