Blistering heat and blinding dark suffocated Pyrrha. Something hauled at her robes and she resisted until the urgent voice with it grew familiar. Daisy hollered over the drumming seethe of the cauldron.
"C'mon, right here, up this way—I've got you—"
Up torrid stone Pyrrha scrabbled and found her feet with Daisy's help. The heat didn't leave her, it was radiating from her own blood, her frantic heart—she tried to stride away into her dark, heedless where her steps might lead. Daisy caught her in a hug and she barely restrained herself from thrashing away.
"Please say it worked, it must've—sorry? What's futile?"
Everything.
All of it.
Useless since the instant Pyrrha had undertaken the resurrection of her parents. The response of Fionn's summoned soul resonated clear in her memory as if spoken into her ear, deciphered by the cauldron.
"Our line must end."
The only way to lift Morrigan's curse—Fionn's curse—was to die.
Die and resign her family to the same.
They were whispering to Pyrrha over both shoulders, Daisy and Ashlin, soft and incessant sounds that couldn't make sense in her disturbed mind. Her lungs wouldn't fill, she was choking, cloaked in heat, smothered in embraces she should savor but hated instead for the pain they engraved on her heart.
Pyrrha shook herself free and gasped, the nails of her hand puncturing her palm. The agonizing desire not to think, not to feel, not to be, nearly hurt her enough to drive her over the edge and into the boiling fires below. But there was just enough spirit left in her not to traumatize Daisy that way.
"Leave me be!" Again Pyrrha threw off Daisy's hands. "Leave me, leave me, let me think! Go—go and partake of the cauldron. Take your turn. Please," she said over Daisy's alarmed questions. "A moment, just a moment. Please."
Pyrrha's head swam in boiling blood. She held herself upright by the side of a searing stalagmite while Daisy scurried away. Febrile blackness embroiled her mind, a devilish backdrop to the memories of Morrigan, the scream, the cursed blood that enwreathed her even as she breathed it . . .
Her curse was Pyrrha. Since the beginning she had sought death, while Pyrrha fought against it.
All the life spent clawing a way out from under dismal fate only to find herself ruined and empty at the one inevitable end. The Clays were always meant to perish. Pyrrha had always been destined to fail, and fail, and fail. To lay down, accept what had been dealt, and die.
Ashlin would never laugh at her again, no good-natured tease snapped over her shoulder as she left the house. She would never let out that obnoxious snicker when Pyrrha startled at a prod in the back and lost her spot on the page. No more silly notes would slip their way inside Pyrrha's belongings or along the margins of her books, written lovingly in tangled script.
No one would ever hug Pyrrha the way Ashlin did, sudden and unprompted and warm, too tight to think of escape. Pyrrha hurt to return it just as tightly.
But Ashlin was dead and she was never coming back.
Why, then, wouldn't she stop whispering?
A bone-jarring crack split the air like a shot from a cannon and crumbled into countless more, the sound cascading down deep underfoot. The stone beneath Pyrrha shifted with a deafening grind. She clung one-handed to a crop of rock, caught between maintaining balance, drawing her wand, or simply letting go. Her black enclosure shuddered and roared with the boil of the cauldron turned volatile, as if she'd been swallowed whole by something still ravenous.
The air rushed at what must have been dislodged hunks of rock plummeting down all around to crash and shatter, splash scalding slag up from the flows. Daisy seized Pyrrha by the arm, heaved and shouted. Pyrrha stumbled after her and fumbled for her wand. A pounding heat through her veins came with one pure focused thought; Daisy would not die in this cave even if Pyrrha had to break the planet in half to see her safely out.
Before Pyrrha could brandish her wand Daisy's arm wrapped her securely, and she yelled again, a spell Pyrrha didn't make out. Nothing happened—the cavern kept collapsing, devouring itself, and their footing began to give way—
Dry and wiry tendrils roped them up and hoisted them off the ground—Pyrrha's stomach knotted tighter—and Daisy repelled errant rockfall with a shrill Protego. Rocks and boulders hammered down like deadly hail, while hissing sprays of soil rained endless grains over the smooth planes of the charm. By the thick rich smell of turned earth Pyrrha knew they'd been taken by roots.
No sooner did it come to her than a familiar senseless vaccuum pressed her in from all sides, suppressed her breath, drew her ever upward through perfect nothing. A passage without time, a journey without distance. It felt like the empty interstice between the end of a long vivid dream and the slow wake that followed.
Then the wind stroked her face, cool and light. It toyed with the leaves spanning overhead and made them softly rasp; Ashlin's murmurs rose to overmatch them. Pyrrha's body was free, but her world was still the same flawless void.
"What happened?" Pyrrha said distantly, lightheaded. "Was it your great desire for us to be buried together?"
"Wha—of course not! I—I only wanted the damned cauldron to stop working, dry up or something, but—oh, but we can talk after—"
Daisy's arm hadn't uncurled from around her. The hold clung closer, and then they folded inward and pressed through liminal space. With a whiplike crack the pressure at last abated.
"I don't know where we are, exactly," Daisy said after they parted, when they could breathe again. "Had to get moving before the witch could lock us down, right? My first thought was to bring you home. But . . ."
Soft soil and springy grass supported Pyrrha. Pine needles and sap cast their scents on the sighing breeze, coasting gently over the loam beneath. She tilted her face into the wind. Its blew with an acrid sting, an unsettling stench of ash and arid decay. The remnant of cursed fire.
Ashlin's hand was in Pyrrha's, tugging her away, cajoling in whispers, nearly the way she used to. Now she embodied a subdued peace that Pyrrha felt mirrored inside as the words gifted to her found gradual meaning. Pyrrha withheld herself long enough to wrap Daisy in a starved embrace, and they stood like that a long time while she scrounged for words.
"Thank you for who you've been to me," Pyrrha said eventually, struggling to stay coherent. The scar throbbed, and her heart throbbed stronger. "Who you are. I love you."
"I love you too. Always." Daisy said the words like an incantation to mend Pyrrha.
Pyrrha stayed there and let herself feel that happiness was finally more than an abstract condition meant for others. One moment before the end was more than she could've hoped for, more than she deserved.
"So . . . it's over?" Daisy breathed against Pyrrha's neck, tucked in like they were built of two halves. "You got what you needed?"
"Finished." Pyrrha drew back and found her wand, flourished it aside; a pleasantly warm bonfire flared into being. She swallowed, a painful dry click in her throat. "I know exactly what to do."
"Oh! Is that really a Floo flame? But we haven't got any . . ."
Pyrrha produced the powder from her bag and cast it out. The flames ate it with a hoarse cough, roared higher. The anxious slide of palms and fingers had already begun.
"Of course, you're going straight back after her . . . and I suppose I can't come with you." The emotions bleeding from Daisy gave off a turbulent dread, an optimistic relief. Overwhelming love. "Aren't you going to tell me what her weakness is? What did we miss? Is it really going to work, y'know, for certain? You'll come home to me all right?"
"I'll see to everything. Try not to worry," Pyrrha said. With Ashlin's help she wove between truth and elusion. "Return to our quarters in the Lodge, but don't wait for me. Prepare yourself for the transition back to Hogwarts professor." An abiding calm had at last fully settled over her like a cloak drawn snug. "I'll find you when it's time."
Then, after pure laughter and swift stolen passion, Daisy left in a burst of fire and took all warmth with her.
Pyrrha tracked through fathomless black after her sister, steered by the hand, neither hurried nor hesitant, holding the memory of Daisy's parting as a pulsing talisman in her chest.
From somewhere far off a stream faintly ran through the sprawling forest that surrounded what had been her home. The foul burn of latent dark magic strengthened at every step, thick as tar down her body's fragile passages. There were none of the lively sounds she remembered, no birdsong or skittering rodents, nor even the faint chirps and buzzes of insects. Only the receding stream and the slumbering wind drifting in.
The barren tranquility matched her well.
To truly comprehend Morrigan after so long spent nurturing pent up hatred and grief came as a strange relief, though those thoughts still burned in Pyrrha. From the beginning it had been Fionn to start their cycle of loss. She hadn't imagined she could loathe any more of herself.
Drifts of ash replaced shoots and grass soon enough. Pyrrha paced from shade into sun, its vibrant eye staring down upon bare scorched earth. The silence was near absolute. Already she had laid eyes on her land ravaged by cursed fire; she could still picture starkly the photo in the newspaper, the curls of black smoke hanging low over chalky dirt and ash, an impenetrable grey pall veneering the sky with pale shadows shaped like bestial claws and teeth.
No life, no light, no presence. It felt like walking beyond the end of the world. Ashlin coaxed her onward, telling her what she already knew.
"It's better this way," she said. "Don't worry . . . I'll be right here with you."
As Pyrrha neared the plot where their home had stood her heart started to work itself harder, as if it could change her mind, remind her it still had a purpose. The burn shivered down the length of every winding scar marring her head. Her blood flooded hot in her veins, made her feel every last inch of her living flesh with endless heightened nerves.
With Ashlin's guidance she'd arrived at the right conclusion, but she was uncertain what came after. Standing in the wasteland she'd made of her life Pyrrha knew fear. It was a blindness of the mind, staring into black unknown and awaiting what came for her.
She stood in the ashes and waited.
The sun beamed heat from one side, soon to set, soon to leave the world to share a more shallow taste of her lightless hell. Here and there a gust of air tried to fly but trailed off in stirrings of sour cinders. Deathly quiet.
A hiss broke the silence, the sound like sizzling embers. When Pyrrha didn't react a dragging slither drew nearer from behind her and the creature hissed again, insistent, steaming breath buffeting her robes. An ashwinder defending its clutch of eggs.
Pyrrha took her wand and pressed it against her throat; there came an unpleasant writhing inside, then she spoke.
"Heed me if you wish to be safe; burrow down deep. Don't return until morning." The serpent paused in its track, and Pyrrha could imagine it swaying side to side with skeptical regard. She added, "Your eggs will stay just as you left them."
Another hiss, one long sibilant sentiment Pyrrha couldn't understand. Then the turning of earth, burning against hot scales, giving thick gouts of smoke as the snake wormed its way far below. Pyrrha felt lighter somehow when the delving sounds faded; perhaps she had at last managed to protect what needed it.
It was with that fleeting sense of peace Pyrrha lingered, her sightless eyes on the empty sky. She could feel by the phantom beat in her heart pounding, more and more closely matching the strain of her own, that she didn't have long to wait. Looming sickness grew thicker in her blood as the hour crept by.
They were desperate for the end.
Sweeping her gaze across the far black space Pyrrha languished in, she swiped away sweat from her head, winced at the sting of the scar, the burn flaring sensitive as the day it had marked her. Breaths fought to escape her. She forced them down. Her hand was numb and empty; Ashlin took it and squeezed.
If she looked up she was drowning. Down, she was falling. She couldn't close her eyes against it, couldn't block it out. Instead she pierced it and carved slow courses along the dimensionless stretch where a horizon might be, intent on any hint of motion, any glint of light.
Pyrrha finally found it. Two shining gold sparks in the dark like holes in the fabric between worlds. They bloomed larger and flew farther down, eerie and soundless, and she felt as if she stood in the path of an oncoming train with her arms held open. Ancient rot mingled with ash in the air.
Two beaming yellow stars, floating in the dusk just out of arm's reach. Morrigan shuddered, her putrid flesh squelching, and she circled as a pair of pale lights streaking by and by. A dry clatter marked the staff cast aside.
Pyrrha shut her eyes tight and focused on the warm pressure of Ashlin's hand.
"Do it."
Blinding yellow yawning inches away. Pyrrha startled back but a spread of fetid fingers snatched her by the throat, the other hand caressing her scar, streaking gore. Ashlin's grip turned crushing, wrenched Pyrrha's arm down and behind.
AT LAST
One or all of them screamed and everything was conflagrant gold. Pyrrha felt her heart stop.
" . . . no less than fourteen inches of parchment on the applications of dragon's blood with respect to the four base mixtures we discussed today. Extra credit for, hmm, let's see . . ." Daisy paused with her wand in the air before the chalkboard. She gave a flick and the floating chalk wrote the rest in a quick scribble as the bell tolled. "Six inches on the most common prep mistakes, again regarding the base four—their cues and how best to avoid them, rectify them safely, et cetera. Thank you all, have a fine evening, goodbye, goodbye. Gilbert, don't forget your chalcedony."
Her fifth years filed out in one jostling, chattering stream, poor Darian's hair still sticking up everywhere as if she'd been charged with strong static. The girl glared daggers at her twin brother, who hung back to study something of great interest in the wood grain of the doors to ingredient storage. Daisy swept over to the corner desk and gathered her materials into a bottomless bag with one neat wave.
When she spun around and strode between the hazy brewing stations she nearly clubbed Dorian with her bag. He was perched on the edge of a flat iron coil, smiling the way of someone who'd gotten away with too much.
"Get your butt off that burner, Mr. Hawkins. Five points from Slytherin."
Dorian slid off and brushed down his robes, still smiling. "Students of a certain age start worrying about more pressing things than which house gets to hold the big shiny cup, professor."
"Things like livid sisters?" Daisy gave a brief smile when Dorian laughed and nodded. "Good luck. If you'd paid more careful attention, you wouldn't need it . . . Is there something else, or—?"
"In fact there is! How fortunate you asked." With a flourish Dorian produced a familiar rack of vials from a robe pocket, rattling when he planted them on a nearby counter. One vial was missing. "You forgot this on your desk after yesterday's lesson. I tried to return them right away, but see here, someone else had already found them—a right pilfering fiend, had his hood up and all, so I couldn't say who—but I managed to chase the blighter away before he made off with any more of it."
"Well, thank you very much. Twenty points from Slytherin for stealing." Dorian reeled back as if she'd punched him in the heart. She stuck the rack in her bag. "I hope you carried out all the appropriate identification and evaluation procedures before having a sip, at the very least."
"Naturally, naturally. Best brewed Draught of Peace I ever had. A half hour of ranting sailed by before I even noticed Darian had sat beside me in the library." Dorian scratched at the bridge of his aquiline nose, eyebrows slightly uplifted. "You know, at first you always sent us off on a 'wonderful day' or a 'lovely evening.' Though this past week it's been only 'fine' or 'good.' I feel as if something has you preoccupied, professor." He gave a goofy, significant expression as he quoted one of her favored potioneering adages. "'Distraction spells disaster.'"
Discomfort and surprise shook Daisy, but she managed not to show it. "Oh. I'm sorry you picked up on that . . ."
"Is there something I can do?" Dorian said, a chipper gleam in his eye.
"Absolutely." Daisy beckoned, and they both left the classroom and started down the dungeon corridor, guttering torches lighting the way. Dorian rolled his eyes before she could finish the thought.
"Behave in class," he droned. "Follow directions. Keep your trousers on, even when it gets terribly humid."
"Well said. Good night, Mr. Hawkins."
While Dorian took a turn toward the Slytherin common room, muttering about leeches falling from the folds of his bed's canopy, Daisy climbed a few flights of stairs and hurried down several corridors. She offered quick waves to all who acknowledged her, teachers and students, ghosts and portraits. Sunset bronze painted the halls in patches through each high arched window.
Daisy wrung her hands raw the whole way to her quarters.
Try though she did to hide any distress among company, it had nonetheless caught her students' attention. The circumstances surrounding the attack on Hogwarts already had her walking a thin line with regard to the faculty's suspicion, let alone that of the Ministry. If her students began disseminating word of odd behavior on her part, it could mean more trouble, more trying questions.
But for the whole of September, her tenuous position had been the least of her concerns. A full month had come and gone without any development. Daisy's worry for Pyrrha had formed a persistent pit of illness in her stomach. Daisy hated to have left her like that, frail and alone and so deathly pale . . .
Through the door to her room Daisy passed into peppery warmth and wan firelight. The gramophone's brass horn extended like an elephant's trunk and plucked up an unsleeved record for its turntable, laid it deftly down. The music tiptoed in, a solitary wandering piano piece. Perfect balm for troubled sleep.
"No rest for the wicked," Daisy said quietly, moving for the fireplace.
"Judging by the bags beneath your eyes," came the vanity mirror's snooty voice, "you must be utterly depraved."
"Stow it." Daisy threw in a fistful of Floo powder and said, "The Lodge. Pyrrha's chamber."
Low red lamplight skirted the edges of the room over burdened shelves and precariously stacked books. The strange ebbing blue of the nebula illuminated the rest, sparks of static arcing in long patterns, flashing cold white. Against the back wall, the lectern somehow still hadn't bowed bearing the fleshbound book of blood magic. Daisy's bile stirred every time she had to pass it, a disgust in small part for herself, for a morbid clinging curiosity.
Feeling leaden weight in her chest, and in the pocket of her robes where the draughts rode, Daisy trudged through the lab and down the narrow hallway with the portrait at the end. A glance at Nona's door came with another lance of sadness. Silent, like Pyrrha's. She waited a minute and hoped to hear Vinci drop by to keep the shell company as he tended to, but the only sound was Daphne's snoozing.
Stalling was useless. Daisy would have to open the lefthand door and face the lifeless room the same way she had every night for a month.
She had gone and sobbed to her father a sanitized version of what they had done and been through. He'd held her tight and said with utmost confidence that Pyrrha would return to her, even though they both knew he had little idea how true that was. It had heartened her to hear. But it was only groundless hope.
How long would it be for her hope to die, for her to accept what she'd lost? Could she do such a thing without dropping dead herself?
Daisy swiped away tears and shoved the door open, banging it off the wall. The floating candles were twinkling brighter.
Beneath them, Pyrrha sat upright on her bed.
Not comatose. Not thrashing in thrall of nightmares, sweating and groaning. Not barely lifting the sheets with weak breaths.
Alive and awake.
Daisy reined herself in just short of tackling Pyrrha at a run, instead dropping to her knees by the bedside, flinging her arms around that bony frame. None of what she stammered formed a coherent thought; she committed herself to crying into Pyrrha's lap, letting out everything that had built in her for a terrible while. Relief flooded in to fill the void.
Pyrrha stroked Daisy's hair until the outpour ran dry. Her voice was different somehow, still low and soft and sure, though with a new distance that instantly brought a pang of anxiety.
"I'm sorry I worried you. In truth, I awoke more than a day ago, I think. I needed time to understand."
Daisy drew back, stung, but pushed the reaction down. She clasped Pyrrha's hand in both of hers, kissed it. "What's to understand? You're alive," she said, kissing again. "And Morrigan's dead, isn't she?"
"She is." Pyrrha stared straight ahead, black eyes half lidded.
"Pyrrha, what's wrong?"
She smiled, brief and joyless, then began a recounting of the things Dagda's cauldron had shown her. Daisy listened, enthralled, heedless of her knees protesting the wood floor until the story came to an end in blood and suffering. Stunned, Daisy pushed herself up and sat with Pyrrha on the bed.
"The curse came from Fionn McCoul? From his blood? How horrible . . . beyond awful . . ." Daisy wrung her hands at the images in her head. Hundreds of years that poor woman had suffered. "And what he said at the end—your bloodline—did that mean . . . ?"
"The curse would only end with my life."
Dripping wax pattered over the heaviest silence to ever weigh on Daisy. She didn't know if she was more terrified of remaining ignorant, or understanding just what had happened.
"Then . . . ?"
"Morrigan spent a thousand years imprisoned and cursed. The pain drove her mad, of course, but she held onto one thought through it all: revenge." Pyrrha sank back onto her pillows and aimed her listless eyes at the ceiling. "I let her take it."
"No . . ." Daisy's heart dropped like a stone. "No, Pyrrha, no, don't tell me this! God, this is why she kept trying to take you alive—she passed that curse on to you?"
"Yes."
Daisy shook, an agonizing ache in her core that tried to force more tears, but she'd been wrung dry. She whispered, "This isn't happening . . . It was supposed to be all over . . ."
Pyrrha felt around until Daisy slid her hand over to meet, and she squeezed it, tender and trembling. It was so ridiculous, so like Pyrrha to try to comfort Daisy when she needed it more, that Daisy almost laughed around spasms of grief.
"I'll never join my family, in this life or the next." Pyrrha looked as hollow as the doll across the hall, staring far off. "Ash—Morrigan deceived me, led me to believe my work could continue. But the curse stills my blood . . . I can't wield it. I can't bring them back. And I can't return to them, Daisy." A tear trailed down her cheek over winding pink scars. Her grip crushed with the desperation of a child, lost and terrified. "I can't."
Pyrrha didn't eat, didn't speak, didn't bathe, didn't rise from bed at all. Her reasons were gone. The next draught was the only want to cross her mind.
Every evening without fail it found its way to her lips and left behind a soothing numbness to temper Daisy's lingering presence, her coaxing touches, her tenacious attempts to talk. She didn't yet understand Pyrrha's life was over. Empty as the darkness that never left her alone.
Through days, weeks or months unmarked Pyrrha laid still and tried only to embody the dead, tried to will Daisy to leave a cursed corpse well behind and live for herself. But with every night came a visit held with soft insistence, an undaunted sort of assurance that she could lead Pyrrha back to life. It wouldn't stop unless Pyrrha made it.
"You know," Daisy said quietly, breaking a thousandth silence, "I read in the news a few weeks ago how MacLeod managed to save a lot of people from Caerialto. His team broke the elves free of Morrigan's curse, then coordinated hundreds of side-along disapparitions, right up until the castle landed."
It meant nothing to Pyrrha, no matter how her next breath rose a touch more freely. She traced the winding lines of her scar and stayed silent.
Daisy had noticed some reaction; she shifted forward in her seat and spoke more urgently. "There's something else I need you to hear, something that's been bothering me . . . I've been using the Resurrection Stone to try to make contact with Wasila's soul, but it won't work. D'you think it's because of the alias, or . . . might she still be alive?"
"Mmm." Pyrrha gave a gritty cough and refused water yet again, grasping at the vain delusion she might finally die from the lack. "You told me she stepped through a tree as if it weren't there."
"Yeah. I'd assumed some sort of tricky charm . . ."
"As we were meant to, I'm sure. But the charm was on her, if I had to guess. Rather, it was her. She lost you in the battle and sent back an illusion to 'die.'"
"What? Why? So she could follow us to the cauldron? We were bringing her along already!"
"So she could take what she wanted and then flee our fight, our company, and use that power thereafter without inquiries or interference . . . whatever she desires may not be something the Cabal would have stood for."
"You really think she did that?"
Pyrrha sighed and settled deeper into the blankets, closed her eyes, back into aspiring death. She murmured, "I do . . . I felt her pass us by when we discovered the cauldron, though I didn't know it then. Whatever her plans are, they're well underway."
Weeks went by and it was enough, Daisy decided, anxiety forming a blockage in her chest. That evening after classes she retired early as was her habit, and traveled by Floo to the Lodge again. She chose the common hall as her destination; for the first time there sat no rack of vials weighing in her robe pocket, and she wanted a little more time to rally herself and gather what she intended to say.
The round table was barely visible beneath tall sheafs of parchment and assorted tomes parted open, pages yellowed in the golden light of the fungi sprouts above. The light was too dreadfully familiar; it set Daisy's already nervous heart racing proper. She skirted the pile of writings and found Eilith and Byron with their heads together over a desk at the back beside the ornate silver mirror.
"Could one of you do something about the color of those mushrooms?"
They turned and looked at her in unison, shared a glance, then back to her, openly incredulous the whole time. Eventually Eilith spoke up.
"You're here again?" She said it as if Daisy were indulging in a disgusting, pathetic habit.
"Get used to it. You already know Pyrrha invited me to join. And I'm serious about the lights; she won't like them either." They didn't yet know about her condition.
Eilith had already turned her back, and Byron moved to do the same, though he huffed a discontented breath at the mention of Pyrrha and pointed vaguely aside. "Burn a good measure of deepcrawler chalk at my station there. Make lots of smoke. Should find some in the third cabinet from the right, behind the jellyfish squeezings."
"Sounds like you've got that in hand." Daisy spoke for their de facto leader, and she intended to act like it. While she was here she could feel out whether they intended to move against Pyrrha while she was vulnerable. "What are you two working on? Can I be of any help?"
Without turning around Eilith said dryly, "Any experience guiding a lost soul into an unfamiliar body?"
Astonished, Daisy bit her tongue for a moment before she realized. "Oh. You're trying to bring back Aradia, aren't you? Well then, yes, I can help with the first bit. A suitable body will be your problem to solve."
They looked at her with incredulity again, Byron adding a "Really?"
An older woman's voice answered, faint and lilting, seeming to issue from something on the desk behind them. "I sense that she means it honestly . . . This will expedite things, if we are clever enough . . ."
After stiff parting sentiments Daisy left them to it and made her way into Pyrrha's room. The near ten minute walk brought her no perfect phrasing nor impenetrable logic. She was sick of watching Pyrrha stew in depression, sick of enabling it, and she would have to simply say so. Something had to change.
This curse was just one more impossible challenge. They would figure it out.
Regret and despair cleaved Daisy like lightning the following morning.
With the swarm of owl post came dozens of issues of the Daily Prophet landing everywhere, and like always Daisy had averted her eyes, unwilling to glimpse any more unkind speculation about her (never named outright, thank God) or Pyrrha. She'd spent most of the meal watching the Gryffindors again, wondering which empty seat had been Ashlin's, which subdued conversations brought her name back to the hall, which crestfallen expressions had memories of her behind them.
"Daisy, dear, have you seen today's headline? Incredible! It must come as a tremendous relief—that's how I take it, to be sure!" Professor Woodward exclaimed from a couple chairs down the faculty table.
"What? No, I haven't."
Professor Longbottom passed her an issue, his normally cheerful boyish face set with concern. "It's regarding what happened before term. I'd find somewhere private to read it, I were you."
Daisy bustled off to take his advice, worry boiling in her belly, and she took a bare few turns and stopped at the first abandoned hallway. She shook open the paper with numb hands and could not fathom what she read.
HOGWARTS ATTACKER TURNS HERSELF IN TO IRELAND'S TRIBUNAL COURT
Late last night, Irish magical authorities were astonished to receive a house call from none other than their number one fugitive, Pyrrha Clay of Leitrim. Clay, a pureblood witch of twenty-nine, is wanted across the United Kingdom for the recent attack on the staff at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, amid suspicions of involvement in other remarkable disasters that have befallen Ireland of late (see the article on page four for details).
Clay is said to have arrived peacefully and said nothing, claims one anonymous insider, with a stunning exception. "Confessed to everything, she did. I reckon she couldn't handle the pressure, what with the DMLE searching high and low for her sorry skin. Goodbye and good riddance."
Ireland's DMLE Head Auror MacLeod advised this reporter via priority firecall that Clay no longer represents any danger to the public, as the Tribunal has elected to bypass standard incarceration proceedings pending trial and ship her directly to the maximum security pit of the Agon Ergastulum. The Ergastulum is Ireland's premier prison fortress, containing all of their most nefarious dark wizards. Built many miles underground, the dungeon complex is run jointly by the Ministry and a strange, cave-dwelling society of elves . . .
Across the world a witch finished reading the same article, toothy grin settled comfortably on her newest face. She folded the paper primly into the rudimentary shape of a dragon and blew; it fluttered up over the sea of black hair spilling out across the stands beneath her, caught fire, and crumbled to ash in the wind. Amplified voices boomed in breathless Mandarin.
"Isn't it marvelous when a problem simply solves itself? Poof! Like magic!"
The wizard beside her offered half a bewildered glance. Wasila appeared native, but spoke English for the amusement of it, not that she would lack for such much longer.
Shockwaves of smoky air slapped the crowds as the pair of sinuous dragons whipped back around, soaring an arm's length overhead and erupting fire across the slate blue sky. They met over the center of the stone stage and coiled upward in a breathtaking helix. The wizards beneath, conducting their beasts' motions with a series of light and sound cues, cast with sharp grace.
A flash of red sent the pair twisting away and over the roaring square, the packed stands rearing in their seats, craning around. The dragons sailed between the flares and arches of the tiered temples towering over the outskirts of the arena. Over, around, beneath, above like desperate snakes slithering for a burrow they raked the sloping roofs with their scales, wound up and down the lofty tiers of the pagodas, past amazed spectators high in their terrace seats, then streaked back for the stage's airspace after an urgent burst of blue sparks.
Soft whistling rose from the clamor, and the crowds applauded wildly when the dragons slowed to a swirling drift in the shape of yin and yang, scales scintillating like gems in the sun.
Wasila watched the crowd for signs. Every one made her heart leap with elation as she counted: one there struggling to conjure a parasol; another pair failing to summon refreshments from the floating trays; a gaggle of witches taking it in turns to try to mend a tear in one's robe. Each of them ineffectual, all of them increasingly distressed, eyeing their wands with betrayal.
The six dragon handlers in their vibrant silk robes moved in perfect harmony, but only five of their wands produced a white flash, a shrill whine. Guttural roars ripped the air on cue. The man who hadn't cast was sweating through his headband, more and more pale with each failure. His fellows sent furious glances without falling out of step.
Five casters fell to four. One of the beasts swung wide and nearly aimed a breath of fire over the western stands; the officials standing ready shouted their shield charms and less than half of their wands lit up. Murmurs and cries of concern developed throughout the audience.
In a long restless spiral the dragons writhed, sensing the unease unfolding, wide gleaming eyes rolling about in search of the cues they were trained for, instead met with halfhearted shards of light. They rippled with anxious energy; they were trained well, tenaciously, and they knew dreadful punishment followed failure to obey instruction.
The handlers were clustered together, whispering frantic, the charmed lights dimmed for all but one of them; as Wasila watched delightedly his wand produced one short beam of gold and guttered out.
A smattering of questions and demands over horrified silence, all eyes turned upward. For a few breaths came uneasy hissing, snapping, waiting. Then like a pair of fireworks the dragons streaked off with trajectories chaotic, panicked, shrieking fire in the air, plumes twenty feet long sweeping the plaza. Alarmed outcries turned to screams.
Desperation took hold in moments, all flailing wands and wailing heads producing nothing of substance. The handlers beckoned down, desperate, useless, brandishing blades and hunks of meat in turn, hammering small gongs. The dragons responded by diving at their handlers in a deluge of fire; they arced up and away from a clutch of smoking corpses and then sought to clamp fangs round each other's throat. Claws raked scales and steaming blood rained on the fleeing crowds.
Nothing more gorgeous had Wasila ever seen. She laughed and laughed.