Chapter 11

"What is this, Stevens?"

Professor McGonagall had only skimmed the first few paragraphs of the essay I handed her before putting it down to look at me, her gaze sharp. Intimidating, but expected.

"It's the research I've done on the process of becoming an Animagus, Professor," I said fingers curling and relaxing at my side. "I know that it's far more complex than what I'm capable of at the moment, but I was curious and did some reading in the Library."

"I see," McGonagall said, relaxing slightly. "I thought for a moment that you were entertaining delusions of attempting the transformation by yourself. Given that even the theory of the Animagus transformation is not looked at until your third-year classes, I'm sure I don't have to emphasise how completely out of the question that is." She paused and turned back to examine my work, her eyes skipping rapidly down the roll of parchment. "Though I must say that this does seem quite comprehensive. Yes, you have the dangers and pitfalls of the process outlined well enough..." She trailed off again as she went back to the top and seemed to read through it in more detail.

I'd approached the Transfiguration teacher after class, as I occasionally did. Such discussions had somewhat declined in frequency once I finished working through the list of questions her book had raised, but I wanted her opinion on this particular bit of research.

Becoming an animagus had never been a major goal for me. While there were distinct advantages to possessing the ability, it was highly risky and very advanced. In the preceding weeks, however, the urge to make some visible progress on something had driven me to investigate the process. Which had led to making notes on the transformation, which had lead to writing those notes up into a more coherent form, which I'd decided to ask Professor McGonagall to take a look at. She had agreed to consider mentoring me if I chose to attempt the transformation, after all. Though I had my doubts about whether she remembered it.

"Well, you can consider me moderately impressed, Poe. I may end up honouring my promise sooner than I'd anticipated, if you are still interested." Professor McGonagall handed the scroll back to me and smiled—a discreet, measured grin—at me. "Certainly not yet, not even any time this year, but at some point... Yes, if you can keep your current level of progress through the next two years than I'll consider letting you make an attempt. However, I will only even consider it if you stay out of trouble, understand?"

"Yes, Professor. Thank you so much," I said and made my way out of the classroom. My ears may have been deceiving me, but I thought I heard her humming in the room behind me.

—tN—tN—tN—

Confidence swings were annoying. In the weeks following my near-breakdown and talk with Albus in the Room of Requirement, I'd calmed down considerably. Albus assured me that he hadn't actually done anything yet, but the classes that had been bothering me before had seemed to fall back and become more manageable. I was mostly sure I recognised the experience and was resigned to the other shoe falling after a week or so. While it lasted though, I made good progress on both my assigned coursework and my extracurricular projects.

I had technically completed the practical aspects of my second-year Charms and Defence classes, though I was less sure on my Defence work. Professor Flitwick had been delighted to observe a demonstration of my charmwork and had given some useful criticism on things I was doing wrong. He also directed me to a good book of duelling tips in the Library, which I'd since read from cover-to-cover.

Even Snape had bestowed a rare 'Outstanding' grade on my Girding potion, vindicating my three previous attempts at it with the Weasleys' help.

In my bogey subjects, I had yet to rise to the same level of accomplishment. I was still the slowest in the class on a broomstick, the last person to pack up my telescope in Astronomy and overly skittish in Herbology. History of Magic didn't bear mentioning. I thought that the quality of my work may have been improving slightly, which was the best I could hope for.

—tN—tN—tN—

There was a downside to meeting with the Weasley brothers regularly. Namely, Percy's rat. Scabbers aka Peter Pettigrew. Percy didn't carry him everywhere, but the rat was a frequent enough guest at our meet-ups that it put me on edge.

I consulted with Dumbledore and we elected to leave the traitor be for the moment. To the best of my knowledge, Pettigrew had remained completely docile until Sirius escaped Azkaban. As such, there was little danger in leaving him where he could be watched.

The one point that I had raised was that Peter's capture would aid considerably in securing the release of Sirius. The prospect of getting Black out quicker had a strong appeal to it, but Dumbledore had eventually come to the conclusion that it would not address the larger problem. Put simply, Pettigrew's survival would indeed get Sirius out of Azkaban, but it would not be enough to exact the reforms Dumbledore was looking to have enacted. By working at it from a different angle and taking a slower route, the hope was to reform the system.

I could only hope that Sirius would forgive us. To leave him even one day longer than necessary in the presence of the Dementors... 'For the Greater Good' rang hollow.

But I acquiesced to Dumbledore's judgement, for the moment. He wasn't happy with it either, but he said he would rather bear Sirius's hatred for the rest of his life and have such an incident never happen again than to have him free on the morrow and doom uncountable others to the same fate. It was a cold logic. I didn't like it.

But I was able to put Sirius's situation out of my head most of the time around the Weasley's. I had to, really. I didn't want to worry them or risk raising Peter's suspicions. So instead, whenever the worries surfaced, I threw myself into hearing Bill or Charlie's plans for the future. Percy had plans as well, but was still a bit too young to conceive of any but the broadest of strokes.

Bill was aiming to become a Curse-Breaker, I knew. It was the adventure of the job—moreso than the gold—that attracted him and he would talk for hours about famous tombs and the people who explored them. When he discovered that I was studying concealment spells, he begged me to help him practice uncovering hidden objects and traps. It was good for my own learning as well, so I agreed readily.

Charlie was fixated on dragons, of course. He dragged me out to Hagrid's hut on multiple occasions to sympathise with the caretaker about the lack of any on grounds. I personally had to agree with them on that point. Hogwarts could only be improved by the addition of a dragon. They made everything cooler. Hotter, technically, but those were just details.

I enjoyed sitting back and listening to the eldest Weasley brothers arguing good-naturedly about whether dragons or tombs were better. I was just happy that they'd found things to be passionate about. Say what you would about the Weasleys, that was one thing about them that I envied. Even in poverty, Arthur and Molly loved what they did.

—tN—tN—tN—

Bill had apparently claimed the need to properly study for his new and challenging NEWT subjects. I strongly suspected that Charlie had deliberately flunked a few subjects just to also use the excuse of study—I knew for a fact that he was actually planning to sneak out and help Hagrid to care for the magical creatures who needed extra care and attention in the winter. Percy had argued to be allowed to stay as well, but Mrs Weasley had prevailed in having at least one of her sons home for Christmas. I actually missed having Percy around, even if his absence gave the rest of us an excuse to step up some of our 'study sessions'.

On the first day of the winter holidays, however, we wrapped up and trudged outside into the knee-deep snow on the first morning of the holidays, half-dragged there by Bill. The sky was half-clear, a plain of blue smothered by large swathes of grey. It was bright though, which was a relief. The grounds were covered in snow, an untamed wilderness of white. Bill lead us to an area beside where I estimated the lake to be. Once there, he turned around to face Charlie and me.

I couldn't see his face under his scarf—wrapped many times around his lower face and neck—but I just knew he was grinning like a loon.

"So, you plan on telling us what you have in mind before or after we freeze to death, Bill?" Charlie said, stamping his boots to clear some more legroom for himself in the snowdrift.

"Hold your Horntails for just a minute, will you?" Bill said, his rolling eyes entirely unobscured. "So, I was thinking about how we could make our little duelling sessions more fun and came up with the idea of a change of scenery."

"So we're practicing outside now?" I asked, eyeing the grounds again with a duel in mind. "The snow would make footing more difficult and the glare would mess with our aim, I think. Not to mention the more variable terrain. Sounds like it could be good, though we'd have to ease off on the Full-Body Binds. Don't want anyone catching hypothermia from being left in the snow."

"That's... Those are good points, but that wasn't exactly what I had in mind," Bill admitted. I liked that about Bill. He was proud of his skills and knowledge, but he was always willing to admit when someone thought of something he hadn't. It was a trait that would serve him well in the tombs Gringotts would send him into, I suspected. "What I was actually thinking of was... well, do you both know what a snow fort is?"

I looked at Bill. I looked at the snow. I imagined a magically constructed and defended structure made of ice, the three of us dodging around it to try and get an advantage on each other.

"I'm in," I said, already drawing my wand.

"Bill, please tell me you know why Poe's do eager all of a sudden," Charlie said in a pseudo-whisper. "I've never seen them like this before and it's kind of unnerving."

"No need to worry," I said, an unseen grin to match Bill's forming. "I just have so many ideas I want to use. Hey, Bill, I have an idea for the first round. How about you let us two work together to build something up for... let's say half an hour. Then you have to try and attack our 'fort'."

"I actually had a different thing again in mind where each of us would build forts and then try to steal stuff from each other and..." Bill trailed off as he found the bait I'd hidden in my proposal. "Wait, that'd be like a practice run at breaking into a tomb, wouldn't it?"

"Yep."

"I agree with Poe's idea," Bill said, looking at Charlie, who was shaking his head.

"What, you think I'm going to miss a chance to try and outwit you like this? Let's get building, Poe. Bill, you're not allowed to look."

Bill wandered back into the castle while we went to work. Neither of us knew a whole pile about building things out of snow, with or without magic, but we managed to kludge some stuff together.

After a few tries, we were able to levitate chunks of snow and roughly shape them. Then one of us would use Glacius to freeze them into that shape and glue them to each other with a Sticking Charm. I cast Glacius on them again after that, just to be sure.

What we made wasn't a very advanced structure. It was basically a ten-metre wide mound—created with judicious combination of Ventus and Glacius to blow snowdrifts into position—that we built a corridor through, then put a platform on top of with a hole in the middle. After that, we froze some wall-shaped chunks of snow on the ground, levitated them up and stuck them into position to create a fortlike shape. At my suggestion, we stuffed more snow into the space between the platform and the mound until it looked like a rectangular structure rather than just a box on a mound. The end result was instead a ten-by-ten metre box on the ground. We cut the shape of some battlements into the top, just for the look of the thing.

That took about twenty minutes. Then we had to trap it and prepare some kind of defenses.

I ran around the outside casting Imperturbable Charms around the outside. Hopefully, that would stop him from getting a grip if he tried to cling up.

Inside, Charlie hollowed out a few openings along the corridor. Then we both filled them with snowballs that would—I'd copied the Bludgers I spent so much time fighting against in the Room of Requirement—pelt Bill as he went past. Charlie cast a Glacius on them as well, so they freeze solid if they hit something. Then I concealed the opening so they would just appear to be blank patches of wall until Bill went past. Then we reached the center.

In the middle of our fort was a hole roughly double the width of Bill's armspan. The walls were slick, though not quite completely smooth and would present Bill with a vertical climb of about five metres.

Charlie and I levitated each other up and finagled a weather charm Charlie had read—I made sure to get the name of the book of him—to create a constant drizzle down into the hole below. Then our time was up.

"Rady or not, here I come you two!" Bill hollered from below. Charlie went to the makeshift ramparts and waved down at him.

"How do you think he'll do?" he asked me.

"Dunno, let's watch," I said and joined him at the ramparts. I broke a few pieces of ice off a nearby wall and made them into mirrors so we could see what happened once Bill entered the corridor.

Bill was cautious. Instead of charging right in, he walked around the fort first, prodding the walls with his wand at several points before coming back to the entrance. Then he cast a floating fireball in front of him and walked in.

The heat from the conjured fire wasn't enough to seriously endanger the fort's integrity and I knew Bill wasn't stupid enough to risk collapsing the place around him. It was enough to confuse the hidden snowballs though, which burst out and tried to pelt the flames to little avail. Most just passed through harmlessly and melted away in the process, a few flew at Bill and were blasted away easily. He was forced to conjure several more fireballs after the sustained cold assault wore out the first. This had the pleasantly—for us, not Bill—unexpected side-effect of creating enough heat to trigger then next few traps.

Bill got through the corridor mostly unscathed, with a few patches of ice across his body that he had to direct his wand at for a few minutes to melt. He looked around the hole, keeping the rain off him with an invisible umbrella—another spell I made a note to get ahold of—and laughed. We could actually see him directly now instead of through the reflections of a series of floating ice-mirrors.

"Not bad, you two! Not bad at all! With how cold it is, all this drizzle would be at serious risk of freezing me solid on top of making it hard to see. I think you may have overlooked something though. Meteolojinx Recanto!"

The drizzle stopped instantly. I glared at Charlie, who just looked sheepish.

"I forgot that the counterspell was in the book as well. And that Bill borrowed it after me. I can just recast it though, right?"

"No, I don't think that's really in the spirit of the exercise," I admitted reluctantly. "In future, if we can't protect the enchantment somehow, perhaps rig it so the water freezes solid once the rain stops falling? Or make the falling water keep something else from activating?"

"Those could work," Charlie conceded. "Certainly help keep Bill on his toes. Guess I'm studying over break after all."

While we were making notes for our next attempt at building a fort, Bill was making his way towards us. Instead of levitating himself up—which was a rather precarious thing to attempt, compared to having someone else levitate you—he was conjuring a spiral set of stairs leading up to the platform. A staircase made of ice, to be exact.

"He used the water left on the ground from our rain to do that, didn't he?" I said, resisting the urge to smack my face into my gloved palm.

"I think so," Charlie said. "Git."

Bill sauntered out of the hole a few moments later. As before, he was evidently grinning beneath his wrappings.

"That was fun. Not as difficult as I'd hoped though, which is a bit disappointin—"

"Descendo," I said, cutting him off and aiming my wand skywards.

The pile of snow I'd concealed and levitated overhead during construction fell, burying us with a thump. Almost all. I managed to get a Shield Charm up in time to avoid to avoid any landing on me, even if it collapsed a moment later.

"The tomb collapsed due to one last booby trap as soon as you reached the final chamber," I said.

Bill sighed while Charlie frowned at me.

"Hey, that's a bit harsh, Poe. This is just a game, you know?"

Bill shook his head at his brother's words.

"No, Poe's right. I should have expected one last trick. This is my loss. Well played, you two."

It felt bitter. The brief internal swooping feeling that came with winning—I tried to tell myself that I didn't like it, I really did—was smothered by shame. I had planned to drop the snow once Bill made it to the top, but the way I'd done it... I just came across as a sore loser and that was no fun at all.

"I messed up."

I hadn't meant to say that out loud, but when the Weasley brothers turned from where they were getting the snow off each other I kept talking.

"Sorry, sorry, I had planned to drop the snow, but not like that. I shouldn't have made it a jab at you, Bill. Sorry, I was being stupid and—"

"Hey, hey, we get it," Bill said, frowning. "I accept your apology. And honestly, even if you think you did something wrong, I feel I probably still owe you thanks. I made a dumb mistake and if your rubbing it in makes the lesson stick, then so be it."

"Don't beat yourself up over it, Poe," Charlie said, voice gentle—like he was talking to one of Hagrid's frightened animals. "We all do stupid things sometimes, say dumb things that we want to take back. We won't hold it against you."

He trudged over to me through the snow and patted me on the head. It was a touch condescending and the contact was slightly uncomfortable, but I was still relieved. I'd been worried I'd wrecked my friendship with Bill and Charlie. I guess the really stupid part was in underestimating their ability to forgive me.

"Well, won't hold it against you much," Bill said. He had another invisible smile on his face, I could just tell. And somehow, this one just made me nervous. "Next round is you versus the both of us. And we're taking forty-five minutes to build. I'm not going to send you into a sloppy piece of work like this."

—tN—tN—tN—

I was generous and gave the two brothers a full hour to work. And by 'generous', I meant 'stupid and guilt-ridden'. Bill and Charlie had built what looked like four subforts arranged around a much larger one that reminded me of a stepped pyramid.

Each of the smaller ones was about the same size as the one I'd built with Charlie, except made of proper bricks of snow instead of just blank ice. The central one was twice as tall and divided into three different levels, each with their own set of ramparts. Each of the smaller forts fed into the central one via a closed corridor. I was simultaneously nervous and intrigued at what the future-dragonkeeper and future-cursebreaker had come up with.

There was no sign of either Weasley as I approached. I was debating how to go about exploring the fort when the paranoia I'd been trying to beat into myself kicked in.

Stopping a dozen metres away from the structure, I fished the glass Dumbledore had given me the previous year out of my pocket. Raising it to my eye, I walked a perimeter around the fort. As I did so, I raised my wand in the other hand and muttered Specialis Revelio every few steps.

The glass revealed ranks of disillusioned snowmen standing on the second level of the larger fort as well as a number of concealed entrances cut into the otherwise featureless walls. The snowmen were enchanted somehow, probably animated to attack me if I got too close. There were spells in the walls too, more than just the freezing and sticking spells myself and Charlie had used. And, most importantly, there were spells set around each subfort's entrance. I considered my options.

I wasn't about to try and break through the walls. Even if that weren't against the spirit of the game, it was both dangerous and likely untenable. Tightly-packed snow was pretty strong even without being bewitched. To get through I'd have to follow the doorways and passageways my opponents had created for me. What I could do was deal with the snowmen.

I held my wand up and measured the distance. The second level of the central fort was about forty metres away and ten metres above my level. It was quite a distance to aim a spell. Then again, at least my targets were stationary. And it was good practice.

After a few moments of consideration, I decided to use a charm from the third-year curriculum that created a magical rope to pull in the target. If I wasn't careful I'd be pulled towards it, but I considered it worth it. It had the benefit of not being too destructive if—or when—I missed and performed reasonably well at a distance. I was able to hook targets over a dozen metres away while practicing in the Room of Requirement.

"Carpe Retractum!"

The orangey-gold rope shot out before rebounding back after covering only half the distance. I gritted my teeth and cast again and again.

In the past, I'd managed to achieve unusual results from charms by using them in unorthodox ways. Now, however, I was lacking pure power. Power in spells came from practice, from confidence and from determination, or so I'd found. I was not a particularly forceful person. I was more likely to yield than to bull ahead until I got my own way. But my wand was not. Alder was a contrary wood and sought out wielders whose nature opposed its own. I'd held my wand daily, even during my holidays. I'd let my fingers find comfort in running along its length. I'd considered it a part of me, as irreplaceable as an arm or a leg. Maybe even moreso.

And as I cast again and again to no avail, my wand dug its heels in and refused to yield to an opponent as meagre as distance.

On my fiftieth—or maybe higher, I'd lost count—attempt, the gleaming rope finally lashed over the edge of the second level. More through luck than my own aim, I took hold of one of the snowmen.

Immediately the tension ran up my arm and pulled in, towards the fort. The snow beneath my feet, usually so slippery and treacherous, bunched up and compacted, catching my feet and holding me in place. The snowman teetered before sliding towards the edge and—finally—giving way and tumbling to the ground. It shattered into powder.

I took a moment to catch my breath and repeated the process with the next snowman. All told, it took me about twenty minutes to clear them all. In the limited time Bill and Charlie had, they only made ten of them. And they'd still taken me longer to deal with than it had taken Bill to get all the way through our fort.

The sentries were down now though and I could proceed with pride at dealing with an obstacle before I even entered. Speaking of entrances, I smirked beneath my scarf as I undid the spells laid on the doorway to the nearest fort. I may have had less experience than either of the other two, but I'd put a significant enough amount of time into studying magical locks and alarms to defuse their efforts with ease.

Not that that was all I had to contend with. Remembering how Bill had sent a fire ahead of him, I moulded a humanoid shape out of nearby snow and hollowed out a hole in its centre. Then I cast a spell I'd found the previous evening, a charm that created warm flames that would neither burn nor melt anything. Given their bluebell colour, I had my suspicions that it was the same one that Hermione had found in her first year. Then I levitated the dummy ahead of me into the corridor.

As expected, there were traps. The corridor was initially similar to the one Bill had conquered so easily, but that impression faded quickly. A few metres in, the snow underfoot shifted and fell away beneath me. I brought the dummy back towards me as fast as I could and grabbed hold of it, grateful that I'd thought to reinforce it with a quick 'glacius'.

The dummy hit the ground and tilted under my weight, but it was enough to stop my fall. Enough to let me swing my legs up and clamber out. The pitfall that I'd fallen prey to revealed that this particular fort was built over the lake and taken advantage of that to nearly drop me into the waters. The floor had been thin ice covered in a dusting of snow. A cunning trap that made no use of magic and went completely undetected by my floating dummy.

I froze the water and maintained the spell until the ice was thick enough to hold my weight. Then I cast a 'ventus' along the corridor, disturbing the snow and uncovering three more similar traps. The wind also triggered some other snare further along and caused a wheel of compacted snow to fall from the ceiling and roll away from me. I was duly impressed by the unintentional Indiana Jones reference.

I dodged, disabled or faked-out the rest of the traps until I reached the end of the corridor. There, I found a stairway leading upwards and a huge wheel lying at an angle against the wall. Checking for spells and traps every few steps, I made it up the stairs and through the second floor. There were pitfalls there as well, chutes that would have dumped me in the lake or outside. All except for one, which went downwards but didn't seem to descend far enough to enter the lake. Curious, I conjured another ice-mirror periscope—that was the word!—like I'd used to watch Bill earlier. At the bottom of the chute was a closed room with a stone on a pedestal. Guessing it was important, I sent another 'Carpe Retractum' down the chute and grabbed it.

The stone was about the size of my palm and had a rune carved on the side of it that was probably Bill's work. There were no actual spells on it, so I pocketed it and kept going.

The corridor on the first floor of the fort was, unlike the ground floor, built around the perimeter of the structure. Starting from the staircase, I eventually came back around almost to the same point. This time though, I found the corridor leading to the larger fort. Taking the same precautions as before, I made my way across to the central fort.

The interior of the building was a maze of sorts. This time, however, I was not over the lake and didn't have to worry quite as much about pitfall traps. There were a number of snowmen like I'd dealt with outside, though these ones weren't disillusioned. I took pleasure in blasting them away with different spells. The first one got a Knockback Jinx, another got hit with Ventus. The third was beheaded with a Severing Charm and the fourth was pulled over a pitfall leading outside.

It was fun, kind of like a video game. Just colder.

The maze took a little while to navigate. Bill and Charlie had complicated things by charming some of the doorways to look like parts of walls, and some of the walls to open and close whenever I wasn't looking. Casting 'specialis revelio' revealed the tricks pretty quickly though. Eventually, I made my way to the center of the second level. There I found a chamber with a thick column going through the middle. It probably led from the top level to the ground floor, so I left it be. Once more, blasting through the walls was missing the point of the game. Besides, the puzzles were fun.

The central column had four sides. In the middle of each one was an indent with a rune carved in the ice. Examining them all, I compared them to the stone I had in my pocket. As I'd hoped, one of them matched. Taking a few steps back—just in case—I levitated the stone into the matching indent. Once it made contact, that wall of the column light up for a moment.

When the light cleared, the stone was gone and replaced with a message. As I was reading, an icy ladder grew out of the wall next to the message to an exit that appeared in the ceiling.

"Keystone accepted. Proceed to entrance above," I read. "Well, that seems straightforward."

And it was. Or at least, it was since I'd gotten rid of the snowman sentries first. The ladder had led to the second level I'd seen earlier, which confused me. The geometries didn't quite seem to add up. I turned it over for a moment before remembering that Bill was a NEWT student. I doubted it would last long, but playing around with the height of a building made of snow was probably within his reach.

Outside, it was now dark. The sun was sinking and the blue was losing to the grey. I thought I could make out a few falling flakes as well. I put that aside and considered the center of the fort. This was, I suspected the equivalent of the climb in the middle of our fort from earlier. An obstacle that demanded the explorer create their own path. I didn't have any water around to create an ice staircase out of though. And even if I did, it'd feel derivative. This called for creativity.

I still had my dummy beside me. Now I floated it a bit higher in the air and cast a sticking charm on it. Then I levitated it up higher until it was hovering over the ramparts of the fort's highest level. Grinning, I dropped it down just behind the crenelations. I took some steps back until I was almost at the edge before raising my wand and aiming.

"Carpe Retractum!"

My aim had improved that afternoon and I snared the dummy on my first try. The rope tensed and pulled. This time I went with it, running across the level and jumping at the wall. I'd never tried anything like this before and my knees banged against the ice painfully. I persevered and hauled myself upwards by my wand. Unlike the Weasleys' snowmen, my dummy was frozen solid and securely anchored. It gave me the foothold I needed to pull myself over the top. Where I collapsed, rubbing my doubtlessly-bruised legs through my insulating layers.

Once I felt I could stand, I examined the rooftop. It was featureless, save for a hole in the centre that mirrored the one in the roof of the first fort we'd built. Except that this one went deeper. They'd done something to it as well, filled it with a fog that stopped me from seeing what lay below, even when shining a light down it from my wand.

I considered lowering myself down bit by bit using my dummy as an anchor again but decided against it. Even if I wasn't already tired, it was a long way down and I wasn't sure I could maintain the spell that long. Besides, it would leave me defenceless against any traps that lay in wait on the way down.

"Ventus," I muttered and the fog dispersed for a moment before returning. "Finite incantatem. Meteolojinx recanto. Ventus." Even with the counterspells, the fog reformed before I could see anything.

I paced the rooftop and thought. The Weasleys had used various tricks in the fort. They used hidden traps and tricks, even come up with a clever mechanism to require me to pass through one of the smaller forts first. I was almost tempted to go back and see what was in the other forts, to see if they had the same traps as the one I'd used. It was an impressive amount of effort and had always been just-about solvable with what I knew.

There was nothing around for me to levitate myself down the shaft. Nothing I could transfigure into a rope or ladder. Besides, those were solutions that were a bit beyond my abilities. And the Weasleys were fairly familiar with what I was capable of by now. I stopped and stared into the hole.

Maybe I should just jump. It was a very Gryffindor type of solution. Take a jump into the unknown, a leap of faith. Except it didn't have to be a leap of faith.

I pulled off my outermost layer of clothing and shivered in the resulting chill. Working quickly, I spread it out in front of me and cast a Cushioning Charm on it. I picked it back up and wrapped it around me. I made sure my wand was tucked away safely so it wasn't sticking out—but could still be drawn quickly.

Then I jumped into the hole.

I tumbled through the air, twisting to try and keep the cloak I'd just charmed between me and whatever lay below. Fog wrapped around me, stealing away the light. But I thought I could see the shadows, hear the whispers of projectiles shooting out of the walls. They were no Bludgers though and I passed by too quickly for them to have a prayer of striking home.

Then I hit the bottom.

It was like landing on a pile of cushions. I felt the impact, but it was as gentle as if I'd fallen only a few inches. I rolled over and opened my eyes—I closed them at some point during the few seconds of freefall and not noticed. The room I was in was brightly lit by several floating icy braziers filled with the same bluebell flames I'd put in my dummy. And standing a few feet from me was the two Weasley brothers, Charlie in the middle of checking his watch.

"One hour and about twenty minutes, I think," he announced. "That's judging by when we started hearing traps go off since the spells we put on the entrances didn't work."

"Not bad, Poe," Bill said, grinning and coming over to offer me a hand. "We weren't entirely sure you'd make it all the way to the end. And don't worry, we didn't put in any last-minute tricks."

"To be fair, it was more like we couldn't think of any," Charlie cut in, his tone wry. "We'd used up all our ideas by the time we got to the end."

"They were good ideas," I said, letting Bill pull me to my feet. I was grinning as much as he was. "I thought they were lots of fun. You've got to tell me how you did some of that though."

"We will," Bill said, raising his wand towards one of the walls. "Tomorrow though. Or maybe after dinner. It's late enough as it is."

The section of wall he was pointing at began to come apart, the bricks twisting and sliding apart to reveal an opening. It took a while, the wall was very thick.

"That's the same thing they have on Diagon Alley, isn't it?" I said, looking to Charlie, who nodded. "Why do they have that wall in place anyway though? Muggles can't get through the Leaky Cauldron without a witch or wizard to escort them anyway. It seems kinda redundant to have another barrier that you need magic to get through."

"No idea," Bill said, leading the way out of the fort. "You'd have to ask Dad. Or maybe Percy, he likes bits of trivia like that. You mind getting those fires, Charlie? We don't need and ashwinders popping up while our backs are turned."

"Yeah, I got them," Charlie said, dousing each brazier in turn and extinguishing the light and heat in the room. I created a bubble of flames from the tip of my wand and let it rest in my palm. The others did the same.

"Let's get something to eat, I'm starving," Bill said, leading the way back to the castle.