III
Easter comes down on them like a sudden rainstorm of silver-grey, so quickly that he doesn't even have time to think about how Isolde's letters are sparser, shorter, few and far between. He assumes she's busy, revising for her exams and doing her art. The second task goes by, and he's on a par with Harry Potter now, both of them tying for first place, and he knows that if one of them wins, then the first victory in over two hundred years will go to Hogwarts.
It's something that he wants so badly, to bring honour on their school.
The second day of the Easter holidays, he walks over to the village, spring caressing his face and the wind tangling itself gently through his hair. The bookshop waits like it always does, sign creaking, door screeching, the books falling over each other from the shelves and stacks. There is no-one behind the counter, so he rings the little bell, waiting with pent up breath. Finally, for the first time in months that have stretched themselves out longer than centuries, he'll see her.
There is a clatter of footsteps on the stairs, and then she appears, older, somehow, thick eyeliner smudged around her eyes like a defence. She stops dead, stares at him.
"Oh, it's you."
"How are you?" he asks, stung by her greeting, and she shrugs.
"Alive, as you can see. Not sure about much else."
"Do you want to come for a walk?"
"I'm busy."
"Come on, Isolde. I haven't seen you in ages."
She looks at him, a burning look that pierces him like a sword, cuts away his breath in the way only she can. "Okay," she says, grudgingly. "Only to the field and back."
"Okay," he replies.
She is silent, all the way there, a mutinous silence that curdles the air around them. They finally reach the brook that chatters happily, he turns to face her. "What's wrong?" he asks, reaching out to touch her hand.
She jerks it away, sharply. "Nothing."
"Isolde."
She looks up at him from under her fringe, anger simmering behind the icy-blueness of her eyes. "How's your girlfriend?"
And in that moment, he knows. He looks away. "She's not my girlfriend."
"That's not the way it sounded in your letters."
"I broke up with her. A few weeks ago."
She steps closer. He can feel the warmth radiating off her skin. "I'm sorry."
"I know you're not."
They stand in the quiet for a time, a quiet that washes them clean like rain. "Why?" she asks, eventually.
He takes a breath of air that sears his lungs. She's so close, Isolde, with her thin wrists, her too-much make-up, her tattered old dungarees, her soul reaching out its hands into his chest and squeezing his heart until it feels like bursting.
"Because she wasn't you," he says, all in a rush.
She stares at him, incredulity flickering for a second, then the air melts away between them and she's in his arms, her smell of soap and skin and lavender making his head spin so wildly that he can barely think as he leans down to press his lips to hers.
The mellow light cascades around them as they kiss for long, endless seconds, her arms winding around his neck and her taste slipping under his tongue until he feels drunk on her, on her bitterness and sweetness, on the way her soft hair feels knotted in his fingers.
When they finally pull apart, it's as though nothing has ever come between them, as if nine months and a dark-haired Ravenclaw have dissolved into nothingness like dreams at the break of day.
"Come on," she says, winding her fingers through his. "I've got something to show you."
At the bookshop, she leads him up the back staircase behind the counter, the steps protesting loudly and the beams brushing his head, and into her room at the very top of the house. It's small, with piles of books everywhere, painted cream and yellow, with blue checked curtains.
"Here," she says, putting a notebook into his hands and sitting down beside him on the bed. "I didn't tell you about it, before, but…"
He opens the front cover, slowly. Castles Falling it reads.
"What is it?"
She turns her head towards him, the sunlight picking out the gold in her chestnut hair. "It's a book that I'm writing. It started off as an assignment for English Lit, but I got so stuck in that I couldn't stop."
"Wow," he says, flicking through the pages that are almost all covered in Isolde's distinctive handwriting, notes scribbled in margins, lines upon lines of faded blue words rolling across the paper like waves at the seashore.
She turns it back to the second page. "Look."
Verdun, January 1916.
"It's about the war?"
"Yes." She pauses. "I'd like you to read it. It isn't done, yet, but nevertheless…"
"I'd be honoured." He turns to her, kisses her. "Thank you."
Their holiday turns over too quickly in hours spent flopped in her garden, he with her psychology and history textbooks open on his chest idly testing her from them, and she making daisy chains that she hangs about her neck, or sitting in her bedroom with his head in her lap, reading her book as though it is something holy.
How is it that endings come too quickly?
Too soon, they are standing in the doorway the night before his train leaves, her arms wound around his waist like vines and her head on his chest. "I feel like I'm saying goodbye to a soldier off to the Front," she remarks suddenly.
"Why's that?"
"I don't know."
"I'll be back in June."
"I know. Keep safe for me, in the third task, won't you?"
"I promise." He kisses her, slowly, softly, feeling her touch weave around him like a magic spell. "Isolde…"
"Yes?"
"I love you."
"I love you too."
She kisses him again, salty tears mixing on their lips and heat burning through their veins like a beautiful poison. When they break apart, he looks at her, small, pale-faced, a shadow in the silver light raining down from heaven.
"See you soon," he says.
"See you," she whispers.
June comes and goes, and still there is no sign of him. No word, no letters, no nothing. It claws into her, this absence of him from her life, makes her heart weep angry, bloody tears because he said that he'd come back.
Eventually, with August comes a letter, hastily stuffed into an envelope and addressed to her in an unfamiliar, blocky handwriting. She snatches it from her mother's hands and bolts down the hall into her room, slamming the door and tearing it open. There are two pieces of paper inside.
Dear Miss Isolde Martin,
My name is Harry Potter. You don't know who I am, and I don't know you. How can I write this? I don't even know how much you know.
I go…went to the same school as Cedric Diggory, and his friends told me that you were his girlfriend. The second letter is something they found, and didn't know what to do with, and it's addressed to you, so I've enclosed it with this…
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. There was an accident in the third task of the tournament the two of us were champions in, and he…he's dead. I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry. It was only chance that he was the one killed and not me, and I feel so incredibly guilty for it – I know I always will.
I hope his letter to you is some solace, and I can tell you that when we took the cup together, right before the accident, his eyes lit up like he was thinking of someone – I guess that someone was you.
It was an honour to know him. He was such a good person, and I know I'll always remember him.
I'm sorry.
H. Potter.
As she reads the letter, the air turns to metal, she can't breathe. Cedric? Dead? No, no, no, no, no, no…this has to be some horrible joke, he has to walk into the bookshop in the tinkling of the bell – how can he be dead? How can his school run a competition where people can die?
Oh God, no, no! She stares blankly at the letter. How can he be dead? How can it be that she will never see his easy smile, never feel his arms around her, his strength, his life ever again?
Slowly, ever so slowly, she begins to cry, then to sob, and before she knows it she's screaming into her pillow, and her mother is running up the stairs, pulling her into an embrace, and all Isolde can think about is that Cedric's gone, and dead, and no, how can this be happening?
Weeks later, when September is colouring in the leaves on the trees in shades of brown and gold and red, she finally picks up the second letter, the paper crinkling between her fingers and a heavy numbness in her chest where her heart used to be.
24th June 1995
Dear Isolde,
How are you?
It's the day of the third task here, and everyone is buzzing – you can literally feel it in the air. It's a maze, as I'm sure I've already told you, with the Cup at the centre – first person to get there wins, though I'm not sure what obstacles we'll be facing. It'll be good. Harry and I are in joint first position, and I know that everyone's hoping for a Hogwarts victory.
How's your writing going, and all of your exams? Won't they have finished by now? I love your final piece for art – it's such a clever idea, taking harmony and discord – before the war and after. I can't wait to see it in real life, and I'm sure it will get you full marks.
I'm enjoying 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' greatly – poor Quasimodo. It's not his fault that he was born the way he is. It does pose an interesting question about prejudice, though, doesn't it – and how peoples' minds always jump to conclusions before they have the full picture.
My friends have just come into the dormitory – we're going to dinner now, and then I've got the last task. Wish me luck!
I'll see you very, very soon. I love you.
Cedric.
Fresh sobs choke in her throat, and tears dribble down her cheeks like pearls as she reads the letter over and over, pain spiking between her ribs. He wrote this only hours before his death, so convinced that they would see each other again…oh Cedric…
She turns her face into the pillow. Make it stop. Make it stop.
Years later, when she's in her twenties and at university, still carrying the weight of her loss like a mantle across her shoulders, she approaches an agent with Castles Falling, hands over her precious book to their greedy eyes and eager fingers.
Eventually, when it is published, and her copy arrives in the post, she sits in the lounge of her student flat with it on her lap, wishing that he were here to see this moment, wishing that he were there to rip away the brown envelope with her, to turn the first page together, to discuss the cover and the blurb that someone has put together, and to laugh when they see it in a bookshop.
She's alone as she opens it up for the first time, as she knows she'll always be alone. Being a writer is a solitary life, but then, since he died, she hasn't wanted anyone else.
She leaves the book lying on the table, and when her flatmate comes in, picks it up to look, it falls open at the dedications page, thin black writing looping in a line.
For Cedric, my soldier who never came home.