Four Ways Home

      ‘A school.’       ‘Yes.’       ‘Like one of those monastery Muggle things?’       ‘Not a monastery school. Just a school. We don’t need a monastery itself. I mean, you could have one, personally, for you, if you want to. But praying isn’t a strong condition for learning, you know.’       ‘Wait, wait, slow down. I’m still trying to figure it out. A school for the Mudbloods?’       ‘Muggle-bloods.’       ‘That’s what I said.’       ‘So... what?’       ‘You’re mad.’       ‘Thanks.’       ‘That’s not a compliment.’       ‘From you? Yes, it is.’       ‘Don’t even think I’ll take part in it.’       ‘Got you!’       ‘Salazar, no.’       ‘Your mouth says “no”, but your eyes say “yes”. Godric, oh, come off it! You like the idea, and I’ve got you.’       Worst of all, the little snake was, by and large, right.       The problem with Mudbloods had been brewing for a long time. Wizards born into wizarding families learned the basics at home—sometimes rather more than the basics, depending on what sort of family it was—then became apprentices to someone, took pupils of their own, brought up children alongside all that, and so the whole wheel kept turning. But those born to Muggles… Never mind the fact that, without books, and without mentors, they simply couldn’t master anything worth calling magic (though, to be fair, that wasn’t necessarily true in every case—there was the odd prodigy). No, village wise-women, and half-literate travelling tricksters, were the least of it. The real threat, let’s not pretend otherwise, was the Muggle parents themselves.       And other accidental witnesses, or even victims, of a child’s first magic. A magical outburst is called an outburst precisely because you can’t control it. And… at best, peasants, half frightened to death, hurried to fetch the priest. Worse, when they tried to drive the ‘demon’ out by their own means—and the demon, stubborn thing, refused to be driven out… Another popular notion among the common folk was an ‘elf changeling’, and there the child was in genuine danger. Because everyone knows what you’re supposed to do in such a case: torment it a little—then the elves will pity their own child, and quickly return the true little one to its family.       And if the ‘elves’—house-elves, what nonsense—had never thought of stealing, or swapping, anyone, and there was, accordingly, no one to return? Then—what?       ‘We didn’t torment it enough,’ the villagers decided, when they failed to get the result they wanted. And they tried to do more. Most often, the children didn’t survive. In fairness, it wasn’t always a child. Some managed to hide their abilities for quite a long time. But the truth, as they say, will out sooner or later.       Only a month ago, word reached them of a woman whom her own husband had called an elfin changeling. Godric snatched up the first monk he could find—poor Anselm, it seemed, not only couldn’t ride, but had perhaps never even seen a horse up close before—and they hurried as fast as they could, travelling with hardly any rest. And still they were too late.       For a week they dosed her with herbal draughts ‘against witches’. When that didn’t help, they beat her with a log, and shoved her, still alive, headfirst into the hearth. They threw the corpse into the forest, barely covered with branches, beyond consecrated ground—though she had been a baptised Christian woman.       As were the other participants in that vile business. ‘We are so few, so few, and yet we… rot the harvest at its root,’ Salazar kept repeating, bitter as poison. So many wasted lives, so many blossoms cut down before their time, all that potential, gone without return. If they had all of them, all those witches, and wizards, been able to receive a proper education, if they had at least survived—what might they have become?       A second Merlin, perhaps, a second Circe. Or perhaps no one remarkable at all. The tragedy was that now there was no way to know, because they were no longer in this world, and they—precisely those people—would never be again.       But there would be others, and it was for their sake—so that they too would not rot in boggy soil like seeds under a negligent farmer—that all this was being set in motion. Godric found himself reminded once more: under no circumstances should you listen to Salazar, or you’d scarcely have time to blink before you began to believe him. And that regardless of whether he was saying something sensible, or not—that was the sad part.       But this particular proposal felt… right. Just. A worthy deed. Entirely in the spirit of their king, so earnest in his support of learning. A school for Mudbloods, for all of them, without regard to class, and free of charge.       Godric’s first question for his restless companion was how in God’s name they were meant to find them. It turned out Salazar had a plan. Of course he did—how could it be otherwise?       ‘I’ve thought about it a great deal. And here’s what I’ve come up with: we need to create an artefact. Something to track magical outbursts…’       ‘All of them?!’ Godric blanched.       Salazar didn’t so much as flinch.       ‘At first, we’ll have to track everything. Then we’ll work out how the accidental ones differ from the deliberate ones. And we’ll make a second artefact, something more precise. But for now…’ Here he toyed with that thin excuse for a beard. ‘For now, my friend, find a way to meet Wulfhere and Æthelred.’       ‘Æthelred is ill,’ Godric informed him. ‘Any day now, he’ll pass.’       Salazar sighed, scratched his ear.       ‘I see. And who’ll take charge of Canterbury in his place?’       Godric shrugged.       ‘Not clear yet. Plegmund, perhaps?’       ‘Oh, Ælfraed’s secretary?’ Salazar brightened, rubbing his hands unconsciously. ‘Splendid, splendid...’       ‘In any case, don’t imagine I’m on such familiar terms with the primates of the Church that I can kick the door open on my way in. And what do you want from them, pray tell?’       Salazar raised his brows, wearing an infuriatingly superior expression.       ‘What do you think? Information. The Church is our only ally right now. And the only properly managed structure, incidentally—even the army falls short of it. At least here you can hope that an order from above will make its way down the chain in reasonable time, without distortion—from the archbishop down to the parish priest. Arrange it so that anything... strange, and out of the ordinary, comes under our jurisdiction. It’s a nuisance to them as well; they’ll agree.’       Godric didn’t like that line of reasoning. On several counts. He hooked his thumbs under his belt, rocked from heel to toe, paced the room. He tried to shape his objections as well as he could—rhetoric had always been where he struggled to compete with Salazar.       ‘The Church is no ally of ours,’ he said at last. ‘And note that you’re hearing that from me. Which means the danger is plain even to someone whose view is bound to be biased. We’re balancing on a knife’s edge. And what separates us from a fall may be one plague, one lean year, one failed harvest. It’s easy enough, for instance, to have me anathematised. But the bishops have a weapon stronger still: an interdict. Imagine a whole kingdom—Mercia, Wessex, any of them—placed under a ban on the sacraments. No Communion, no confession, no baptising children, no burying the dead. After that, every wizard will be hunted, and hounded, like a hare across fields and forests, and there’ll be no hole left for us to hide in. Past merits, feats in battle... all of it will vanish like morning mist. I wake every day thinking: is it today? And every evening I ask the Lord to let us all hold on until tomorrow.’       Godric’s carefully composed speech did not move Salazar in the slightest. He merely stared back with that perfectly maddening, unreadable look of his.       ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said coldly. ‘The Church isn’t our ally, it’s a tool. A temporary one, until we find something better. Sometimes you have to take risks.’       Godric drew a breath, and went in again.       ‘Suppose so. But this business about the “strange”. Do you have any idea how much of it there’ll be?! And how many of us there are? What, have you invented a way to Apparate to places you’ve never even laid eyes on? Or are you an angel of the Lord, a swift-winged messenger—wishing yourself somewhere, and arriving there that very instant? There are two of us, wake up, the distances are enormous, and how many places can you Apparate to do you remember? And are you certain you can bring a horse along? A horse is a hefty beast, it’s like Apparating three men at once. Forget it—we can’t be everywhere, we simply can’t split ourselves to cover everything.’       There Godric, of course, went too far. Telling the little snake to his face, ‘you can’t’, was only a shade wiser than taunting an untethered bull. But Salazar merely began, once again, to tug at his newly sprouted little beard between finger and thumb.       ‘Leave that to me. It’s mine, not yours,’ he said, far more calmly than Godric had feared. ‘For a start, go on, arrange that meeting with Wulfhere. And then I’ll find a way to... split myself. It can’t be worse than it is now, can it?’       Godric couldn’t stand it—he batted his hands away at last, and grumbled: ‘Holy Christ’s blood, Salazar, shave off that abomination already! It makes me feel sick, looking at it.’       Salazar, of course, put on a show of being deeply offended.       ‘Yours probably wouldn’t grow even that much!’ he snapped, hastily stepping back. ‘I need to look respectable. When people say “wizard”, don’t they picture a wise old man at once? Merlin, for instance. Well? I think I look like him.’       And he smoothed those pathetic three hairs again, fondly—curl and all, for added splendour. Godric sighed. He had to listen to something of the sort far too often.       ‘All your Satanic pride, unbridled,’ he reproached him sternly. ‘Honestly? You look like a billy goat spoiling for a fight. You turned twenty-seven the other day—what sort of elder are you, for God’s sake?!’

* * *

      ‘In the Year of Our Lord eight hundred and eighty-nine, four lords and ladies of magic met in council. And they resolved to establish a school…’—that is what the chronicles will one day record—not at once, of course, but a generation or two later, when the scale and weight of what happened become clear enough to grasp. That is what chroniclers are for: to pick out what is significant and essential, while neglecting what is secondary. And to embellish, if need be, for in reality it was nothing like that at all.       First of all, of the four of them only Godric was a hereditary royal thegn; the others were of no particular noble stock. Unless, perhaps, Helga, judging by her manners—and Rowena, whose past resembled a gaping shadow, like a grave, and what lay hidden in that shadow—who could say?       She simply appeared one day, in the furious brilliance of a fine summer afternoon, on the clayey, crumbling edge of a half-dug foundation pit—sudden as snow at that time of year, small, serene, and frightening. Her face was child-smooth, her eyes burned with the light of suns not of this world, and even shapeless rags could not conceal the outlines of her body—maimed, twisted, as though she were a saint stepped down from an especially striking fresco.       ‘I remembered I was meant to be here,’ she said, by way of greeting. ‘Salazar, let me see the calculations for the west tower. You’ve made a mistake there, you’re right to doubt yourself. I know Arabic numerals, I can calculate very quickly. If you like, I’ll teach you, too.’       And yes, she knew his name—including the one given at birth, as emerged a little later—and Godric’s name as well, though they most certainly had never met before. And Salazar was caught at once by the odd turn of phrase. ‘I remembered,’ Rowena began all her predictions exactly like that thereafter.       ‘No, I’m not a völva,’ for some reason he had the distinct impression that Rowena grimaced, even though her face was animated only by the dance of restless shadows. The fire crackled in the hearth, sending up smoke; bluish haze hung in the room, a candle threw light across the table, and the remnants of a rough supper, while the corners of his temporary hut lay in darkness. In time with the wavering of the tiny tongue of flame, Rowena’s pupils shimmered mysteriously beneath her half-lowered lids.       ‘And I’m certainly not a prophetess. Salazar, I beg you! Curb your imagination. The Lord, and the angels, have nothing to do with it, and the old gods don’t either. Truth be told, it would be better for none of them to meet me.’       Salazar was so dazzled that he was struck dumb, which had not happened to him in a very long time. It was a pity Godric didn’t hear—righteous indignation would have torn him in two. And he—Salazar—was the one they never tired of reproaching for ‘Satanic pride’! Compared with the new arrival, he was a humble, downtrodden little monk.       Rowena, paying no heed to her interlocutor’s reaction, went on in an even, thoughtful voice: ‘I just remember everything that happened afterwards. Some things very clearly. Sometimes I suddenly remember something important. The rest… in broad terms.’       That evening, they crossed the lake in an enchanted boat—Salazar had worn himself out so thoroughly during the day that he had not the strength left for Apparition. Not just Apparition, either; he barely had the strength to carry a spoonful of stew to his mouth. Still, wizards are human beings, and they must eat at least once a day. The question is whether they truly need to sleep every night.       It was no accident that he was the best of all the potion-makers under King Ælfraed’s hand. He had dealt with worse than this. All he needed was to invent some kind of invigorating draught. The task certainly would not be too difficult.       Perhaps he could start with those hard, bitter beans, the kernel of carmine-red berries, that the Sufis gathered in the vicinity of feral, half-abandoned villages left behind by what was once the mighty Kingdom of Aksum? What were they called, in al-Rāzī’s writings?.. Buncham? No, bunn, or qahwa, a word that meant, at once, ‘wine’, ‘love’, and ‘that which fully satisfies’. Buncham was the aqueous extract. And could the effect be strengthened, if one added…       Salazar pulled his scattered thoughts together, and opened his eyes.       He was curious, as ever. If not for that trait of character, Salazar would scarcely have been where he now was, nor doing what he now did.       ‘What, exactly, do you remember?’ he asked, turning over the incredible claim she had made.       Rowena gave him a look that said, ‘Don’t be an idiot.’       ‘I told you. Everything,’ she repeated, with emphasis.       Oh, Morrígan, no wonder Rowena seemed mad, if that was the case. But for any gift received, the gods—old, new, or those who would come after—always demanded payment. Especially if the gift was unasked for, and unwanted.       ‘But how do you tell…’ Salazar rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to shake himself awake, and scrubbed his face with his hands. Alas, it never helped—and it did not help now, of course. ‘How do you manage to separate the past from the future?’ he finally managed to shape his words into something that resembled a coherent question at all. He was rewarded for it with yet another disappointed look.       ‘Ah,’ a soundless realisation rolled across his tongue, even before she parted her lips. ‘Aha. That’s it.’       ‘There’s no need to tell them apart.’       ‘Because your memory doesn’t keep the past. There’s only the future in it,’ Salazar finished to himself when she fell silent.       Something went hollow inside him, and a little sad: the riddle had been solved too frighteningly, and too easily. A curse and—what? a blessing? Was it truly that?—all at once, in one. In its own way, elegant. And yet one did want to believe—the Crucified Saviour was not so cruel. But it was not in the manner of this land’s former gods, either. Then again… who could vouch for anything here, in the wild North, beyond Hadrian’s Wall?       They said that those who dabbled in such things had left Dál Riata centuries ago. It seemed Salazar had not doubted for nothing.       ‘It’s all right,’ he said, closing his hand for a moment around her fragile wrist, twined with an old, ugly scar. And, obeying an impulse from nowhere, he added with a firmness that astonished, and frightened, him himself: ‘From now on, we’ll be your memory.’       ‘Yes, I know,’ she said lightly. ‘You’ll be far more than that. Go on, ask. I’m sleepy, I’m tired. I think I rarely walk this much.’       He snorted.       ‘So Apparition is—what—against your principles, is it? Or can’t you do it?’       She paused to think—surely she really can’t?—but the next moment she laughed brightly. The sound was surprisingly pleasant. And besides, it became clear that her face was not expressionless at all. It only seemed so at first.       ‘How stupid I am!’ she said, glancing at Salazar with a sly look. ‘The stones aren’t in place yet! I’d quite forgotten.’       ‘Stones?’ Salazar scratched his chin.       Rowena nodded, still keeping the ghost of a smile on her lips: ‘Menhirs. We put them up—let me think—yes, next year. In spring.’       A cromlech. A barrier that dampened Apparition? He had thought about that already, to be honest. In principle, why stop at just one barrier, eh? If one calculated the placement, and the rune-chains, correctly, might it be possible to cover the whole castle with the charms of a magical shield? The stones would be at the structure’s supporting nodes—true, it did not usually work like that, but…       ‘Salazar.’       ‘Hm?..’ Irritated, he came back to himself from his thoughts, and, finding the tabletop an inch, or two, from the tip of his nose, realised he had practically fallen asleep.       ‘Ask,’ she prompted again, insistently.       He clenched his jaw. ‘Contrariness,’ Godric called it (usually with a mournful, heavy sigh). Salazar truly wanted to ask. But now—now that he was being forced—now, out of cursed pride, he couldn’t.       ‘Do you remember when you’ll die?’—and yet he asked it anyway, though, as usual, it was nothing like what he had meant to ask.       ‘Not for a very long time. We’ll build the castle—it’ll be so hard!—they’ll begin bringing pupils to us. I’ll teach them how to use a stylus, Godric will teach them the sword, and Helga…’       ‘Plants and little beasts,’ he cut in impatiently. ‘Right. And me?’       Rowena smiled mysteriously.       ‘And you will devise excellent ways to protect all of us.’       For a prophetess, she was still maddeningly obtuse.       ‘Me—when do I die?’ he ground out through his teeth.       There, he had wrung the main question out at last. And he held his breath, waiting. She lowered her eyes, like a child caught misbehaving.       ‘Much sooner. The first of us. And also… We couldn’t give you a Christian burial. We truly, truly tried!’ She threw up her hands, plainly trying to make him believe her, though for some reason it never even occurred to him to doubt the sincerity of her words. ‘The body… we never found it.’       He felt… something strange. He would have liked to work out for himself—what.       ‘So you didn’t see me dead in the end, did you?’ He laced his fingers, stretched, cracking his joints (that gesture invariably filled Godric with squeamish admiration: ‘All-merciful Lord, people’s hands don’t bend that way! What are you, a snake?’). ‘Why, then, do you say—dead?’       She bit the tip of her thin, long braid. Truly, like a little girl. How old was she, one wondered? With peculiarities like hers, there was no knowing…       ‘You left me a letter,’ she said, raising eyes that glinted with moisture to Salazar. ‘After reading it… I no longer doubted.’       Salazar leaned back in his travelling chair, hiding a smirk in the corners of his mouth.       ‘Even völvas don’t know everything,’ he declared with grim satisfaction. ‘So I didn’t die, I went missing. That’s how I prefer to think of it. What was I trying to do?’       Rowena sighed, drew a clay cup towards herself, and took a generous sip of wine diluted with water (in that heat, ale went sour faster than they could brew it). Salazar could see clearly that Rowena had pushed him into that wretched conversation on the very first evening because the subject was deeply unpleasant to her, and she longed to be done with it in one go.       ‘As usual,’ she said, rocking the cup in her hands. ‘Protect all of us.’       ‘Did I manage it?’ He had the sense he knew the answer, though foresight had always gone worse than nowhere for him; assume the worst of people—that was the only method of prediction that had never failed him.       She smiled at him through tears, like a little girl.       ‘Yes.’

* * *

      At first, they had nothing—literally.       No cups, no spoons, no bowls, no blankets, no shoes, no socks, not even a scrap of yarn; and soap—well, that went without saying, they managed with lye from wood ash, like the very poorest of the poor.       Well—that is… nothing? They had a goat.       They’d had to get a goat for the littlest ones—better a cow, of course, but a cow needs proper grazing. And they had dense forest on one side, whilst on the other the marshy shores of the lake were thick with reeds. To the north, sheer crags mottled with lichen came almost right up to the unfinished building site. From the point of view of defence, should the Muggles come raiding, you couldn’t ask for better—Salazar was right about that.       One day, as Rowena declared, their blessed little simpleton, there would be a village on the far side of the lake. With cows, sheep, a baker, and a blacksmith, all as it ought to be. But that was still several years away, and the children needed feeding on something better than bread soaked in water, right now.       A week hadn’t even passed before the mermaids made off with the goat.       Helga had never met merfolk face to face before, but she’d heard plenty about them from her father. Man-eaters. They start with a goat, and if you don’t give them a proper hiding straight away, they’ll carry on.       On some things she and Godric saw eye to eye: you mustn’t fear anything in the world, least of all the things that are truly frightening.       So she Transfigured a suitable driftwood log into a goat—pity that a conjured one wouldn’t give milk—tethered it in precisely the same place as the missing one, and hid nearby herself.       The waiting was unbearably dull; Helga regretted a hundred times over that she hadn’t brought at least some knitting with her. But at last, as if a fish had splashed at its prey—and then again, and again. Something gurgled; something plopped, pebbles rustled along the shore. A mermaid hauled herself out of the water.       Unexpectedly, it was an undine, not a merrow. Helga scratched at the base of her sweat-slick braid—what heat!—and changed her plan there and then. Something was going on here, and it needed looking into.       The undine flopped about on the grass, waiting for her gills to dry, endured the moment of transformation, and then sat down, wiped the water from her face. She picked up a little spear with a jagged bone point, stood, swaying. No wonder—anyone would feel wretched enough when all the lightness water gives you disappears. And her legs were even more tender than a baby’s; look how she curled her toes under.       Helga shot a Stupefy at the naked girl, conjured binding ropes, emerged from the bushes, and came closer. She checked every knot carefully, and only then lifted the stunning charm.       ‘Why are you stealing what isn’t yours?’ she demanded in a stern voice. ‘Aren’t you ashamed! Have the fish in the lake run out, then?’       The undine glared sullenly from under her tangled mane, hissed, gurgled, clicked her tongue, chattered her teeth. Helga was dismayed: she hadn’t accounted for that.       ‘Can’t you speak properly—our way?’       The undine croaked.       For a time Helga conscientiously tried to remember anything at all of merfolk knot-writing. Then she spat it out, and reached into the pouch at her belt for gillyweed.       ‘All right. If that’s how it is, we’ll try a different way…’       Underwater the mermaid, predictably, tried to bolt. Helga promptly stuck her tail to the stones.       ‘Where do you think you’re going?! We’ll talk first.’       The undine’s aquatic form resembled a human one only faintly, if at all. Instead of hair—something like cat whiskers stuck all over; hands—like a frog’s feet. Some sort of lump had grown between her wide-set eyes. Nostrils—four of them, not a nose but a whole flute. And a tail, like a seal’s, only bald—because what is a mermaid without a tail?       ‘You lot are thieves, lawless creatures’—that part had to be repeated. ‘You saw the goat wasn’t anyone’s, it was tethered there. And we’re all witches, and wizards, here, and if we fancy it, we’ll slaughter the lot of you, however many there are of you.’       The mermaid suddenly stopped trying to swim away. Her flute-nose twitched, the valves fluttered.       ‘For hunger, it is not theft,’ the undine sang. ‘Kill me, if I am worth less in your eyes than a goat. We will all die anyway, when winter comes.’       That is the nature of merfolk speech—underwater, anyone can understand it. And what, on land, sounds like stew bubbling at the bottom of a pot becomes at once a song, tender, and painfully sad.       Helga frowned, clasped her hands over her stomach. She felt utterly ridiculous: naked, but with a wand. Then again, try swimming about in wet wool, and linen, whether bleached, or dyed, was something only Godric had got used to wearing. And even then, truth be told, only on feast days.       And yet the clothes left on the shore seemed to introduce some new rules between her and the mermaid—rules not yet clear. Besides, Helga was easily taken in by pity. She knew it, of course, and still she could do nothing about it.       ‘I’ll ask ransom for the goat all the same; don’t think you’ll wriggle out of it,’ she warned gloomily. ‘But go on, tell me. Why are you starving, and why have you decided you’re going to die? I might even help you with something…’ Here Helga caught herself in time: ‘But not for free!’       ‘A giant… who, sorry? Say it again,’ Salazar said, seizing his chin and tapping his lips with his forefinger.       ‘A squid,’ Helga sighed. ‘It’s a thing with… er… I ought to draw it.’       ‘That’s an octopus,’ Rowena pronounced with authority, peering at the resulting sketch.       ‘No,’ Godric disagreed, ‘I’ve seen octopuses, their heads are quite different. And they’ve only got eight grabbers, and they’re all the same length.’       ‘They live in the sea, for one thing, and this one’s in a lake, which is what should really surprise you,’ Helga said, propping her cheek on her hand.       ‘That is all madly interesting,’ Salazar cut off the budding scientific discussion, ‘but what has the squid got to do with their thieving? How does it come into it?’       ‘They brought a small one with them when they migrated here, but squids grow all their lives, and this one has grown simply enormous. So it needs food accordingly, and the lake, unlike it, isn’t enormous,’ Helga replied. ‘It’s eaten nearly all the fish; they’re starving. That’s why they’ve started looking for food on land.’       ‘Then they should’ve killed it,’ Godric protested.       ‘They can’t, it’s also… sacred, as I understood it.’       ‘A gluttonous god. Are they not all like that?’ Salazar immediately supplied a philosophical aside.       Godric rewarded him with a hefty thump in the ribs, but Salazar caught the blow, and at once, without changing his tone, corrected himself: ‘The old gods, I mean. Of course, only the old ones.’       ‘Fine, if they can’t, we’ll kill the monster ourselves,’ Godric did manage to jab Salazar with his fist on the sly.       Helga drew herself up.       ‘You wolf-tribe—always eager to kill someone!’ she wagged her finger at them. ‘I’ve already thought of everything, and I’ve even done half of it…’       ‘We will compose a great song,’ promised the undine, whose true name was quite impossible for a human to pronounce, and which translated roughly as ‘She Who Lies on the Shoal Among Warm Rocks’. ‘My children will sing it, and the children of my sisters, and their children, through every generation, until the fire of heaven dries the world dead.’       Helga smiled with restraint, taking in the seaweed garden spread out before them, and the magical lamps that picked out every unevenness on the bottom. Along the far edge of the field, fish were already feeding, and the fronds of ‘sea cabbage’ swayed invitingly.       ‘Well, there you are… it’s not as though we’re heathens,’ she muttered in a satisfied tone, feeling the weariness of long spellwork in every bone. ‘Just don’t forget the bargain, that’s the main thing, and as for songs—well… We didn’t do it for songs. But thank you. I should like to hear it sometime.’       The merfolk village, too, stopped looking like a cluster of sunken beaver huts, and shone with lights in earnest. The bargain with the undines, in all honesty, was far more favourable to the mermaids than to Hogwarts, but only Salazar was displeased by it (and Salazar was displeased by roughly everything). In addition to safe bathing, and washing, Helga demanded that they make saving drowning people obligatory, and also a regular tribute of certain seaweeds, and waterside herbs.       As for the squid…       ‘I must admit, time and again, I have underestimated your potential,’ Salazar said, worrying his lower lip, and folding his arms over his chest. His gaze grew dreamy, then clouded over. ‘It would never have occurred to me to train a creature quite so mindless.’       ‘It isn’t training,’ Helga thought it appropriate to interject. Salazar glanced at her with displeasure.       ‘Yes, I know. And the other alterations its flesh has undergone…’ The predatory thoughtfulness returned to his eyes.       ‘They won’t harm it,’ Helga said; she was certain of it, and yet she still felt the urge to justify herself.       Salazar pulled an irritated face: ‘Would you mind not interrupting?! I’m trying to praise you, actually.’       ‘Oh, sorry,’ Helga lowered her eyes, hiding a grin in the corners of her mouth.       ‘You’ve given me a staggering idea…’       Helga, partly alarmed, hurried to add—and only half in jest, alas: ‘Whatever you do, don’t you dare say afterwards that it’s my fault!’       ‘Helga!’       ‘Yes, yes, sorry,’ she fluttered her hands.       Salazar pinned her to the spot with his gaze, and cleared his throat meaningfully.       ‘So,’ he went on, with emphasis. ‘It’s fair to say the Giant Squid is, from now on, the guardian of this lake, yes?’       ‘Well…’ Helga drew it out cautiously. ‘I suppose so.’       ‘A monstrous guardian,’ Salazar narrowed his eyes blissfully at the setting sun. ‘And I was thinking Hogwarts wouldn’t mind having a similar immortal protector.’

* * *

      ‘Why aren’t you writing it down,’ Salazar asked, when they both, without a word, decided to take a breather, and sat in the shade of the slowly rising stonework. Rowena, vigorously chewing a strip of dried meat (she was properly hungry), shot him a surprised look from the corner of her eye.       ‘Writing what down? My? They’re with me all the time anyway. I’m not so old yet that my memory’s failing.’       Salazar bit into an apple with a crunch, worked his jaws at his leisure, watching her with an attentive, sly look. Today he was clean-shaven, Roman-style, yet Rowena remembered perfectly well what his beard would look like (not at all venerable, despite all his hopes). And how in the end, the statue Salazar would solemnly set up in his hidden underground hall would acquire a beard almost down to its knees—and all three of them would be doubled over with laughter, because the enchanted idol would turn out so comically unattractive, and yet, for all that, would embody the life ambitions of its model, and maker, in full.       But only Helga, and Godric, would laugh with their whole hearts, whilst Rowena, laughing aloud, would be trying, just as audibly, not to break into sobs. And she would manage it, but only just. For she would never, never, in all her life, tell anyone about it.       There was no way to explain it, to convey it to someone who had not felt it for themselves, to cram it into words. Grief sometimes spilled out of her like a cup filled right up to the brim. Every joy melted in her hands like a snowflake, every sweet taste was poisoned, a funeral keen wove its way into every festive melody. For she already missed Salazar. They still had many, many long years to spend together—relatively hard years, but peaceful ones—and she already missed him.       And she missed Godric, and Helga. And Ninon, Cuthbert, Thornstein, Cynewise—every one of her future pupils. The curious, and the calm, the restless, and the mischievous, the bold, yet tender inside, the closed-off ones, hiding secrets soaked through with pain.       The first ten years were the most… difficult. Later, thank goodness, Salazar did finally get the seeking artefact properly working, and they began to find, and take, children without that agonising delay, at once. But the first pupils, who didn’t have the benefit of that, had suffered terribly at the hands of Muggles for their accidental abilities, for their ‘strangeness’.       Rowena remembered burn marks from firebrands, knobbles of mended fractures, traces left by ropes, whips, slave collars, a string of missing teeth, torn ears, and eyes put out. Sometimes, looking at someone else’s healed wounds, she would understand how she had come by one of her own. More often, she could not.       In a sense, she had been lucky—she didn’t remember, truly didn’t. Fear, pain, helplessness, humiliation—nothing at all. But they, gathered like a late, ill-matched harvest from every corner of that long-suffering land—they might have wanted to forget the past, but it did not much want to let them go. And no infusion of medicinal herbs, no ointment, no healing poultice could erase certain other, invisible scars, with which almost every—no, every—young soul was mottled.       On her very first evening at Hogwarts—not in the castle, but still in the tented camp pitched on the shore by the book, so that, from time to time, one of the little ones would start asking, ‘Where’s your longship, then? You’ve hidden it, have you? It’s invisible?’—on that very first evening, having been deloused, scrubbed clean until she squeaked, fed on milk porridge, and shod for the first time in her life, Ninon worked something out in her little ginger head—rightly, that you must pay for everything good in life; and best pay at once, before the interest starts running. Having reasoned thus, Ninon, in Godric’s words, ‘stripped beyond all decency’, approached Salazar, and Godric, and offered herself to them.       Salazar, poor man, was horrified. Godric was deeply insulted and, as a result, flew into a rage. Helga collapsed on to a stool as though her legs had simply stopped holding her up, and bit her fist. Untangling the resulting mess, in the end, fell to Rowena. She took Ninon by the hand, and with her other hand, bending awkwardly, snatched up from the bench the shirt the girl had flung off.       ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ll have a talk.’       The conversation took about as long as a candle burns. Ninon, with a mixture of delight and disbelief on her face, ran off along the row of tents glowing from within. Rowena slipped back into the main one (functionally, if not visually, distinct from the others), pulled the flap tightly behind her to keep the mosquitoes out—there was standing water nearby, and by night they were especially vicious.       Inside the tent, Helga, and Salazar, were trading quiet remarks, and Godric sat hunched over the table laid out for the evening meal—dark as a thundercloud, though it was clear the storm had already passed, skirting only the edge.       ‘What a nightmare,’ Helga sighed, patting Godric’s forearm in consolation.       ‘Well, not exactly…’ Salazar muttered gloomily, turning a clay cup glazed on the outside only between his fingers, and then, out of habit, arguing with himself: ‘Though, all in all—yes. A-animals.’       ‘How old is she, at least?’       ‘They said eight,’ Godric sighed, gloomily examining a bitten barley cake (yes, stale). ‘But if you ask me, they lied through their teeth, just to sell her. I’d give her six at most, and even then she’s small for it.’       ‘If you don’t feed a child, it doesn’t grow—what marvellous miracles,’ Salazar sneered at once. His voice was like honey gathered by bees from poisonous flowers: in principle, you can taste it, but only once in your life.       And then Helga, suddenly scowling, thwacked Godric on the nape with the towel she’d taken off her shoulder.       ‘You lump-headed great oaf! Godric, sometimes you astonish me. Was it too much to ask that you warn us straight away where, exactly, you got her?’       ‘Ninon’s trying to express gratitude to you, and repay you,’ Rowena told them. ‘In the only way she knows at all.’ She pressed her lips together and tapped her knuckles on the fresh, still almost white, wood of the tabletop. ‘This is how we’re to behave in a situation like that, so remember it: don’t scold, don’t recoil in horror, don’t fuss over them. And above all, don’t shame them. I think I got across what we expect in return here in exchange for food and shelter, but relapses are possible. Habits don’t break overnight, you know.’       ‘Learn. Learn as though your life depends on it. Incidentally, it does.’—that was the payment Rowena demanded of Ninon, and Ninon understood perfectly.       Ninon later became an extraordinary healer, Helga’s pride and joy. She died, hurrying to help a woman in labour: it was deep winter, the Apparition point, as so often happens in mixed Muggle-and-magical settlements, lay far beyond the village boundary, Ninon stepped straight into a blizzard, couldn’t make out the lights, lost her way… They found her bones, and buried them, in spring—that very spring when she would have turned twenty-five.       What did she regret, freezing in the cold, what did she remember?       And what was that to Rowena, why torment herself without end?       Ninon was not at Hogwarts yet. Godric would bring her in a couple of months, when the plum trees’ branches in the orchards sagged with fruit, and the harvest in the fields was done.       And now—sky pale as cloth washed too many times, the well-coolness of shade, the blazing sun at its zenith, and a bee that had taken an interest in the apple core in Salazar’s hand…       Ghosts, ghosts of memory, surrounded Rowena everywhere. Before she had truly had time to make friends, and pupils, she had already lost them all, buried them, mourned them. She had parted from each of them before every meeting. She had lost in advance everything she would ever gain. The future stretched before her like a descent into a vast shining valley, full of rich green, and yet cut through with deep, dreadful shadows.       And behind her—behind her, an all-devouring emptiness churned forever. All she had to do was lie down on a bed, close her eyes, and yield to sleep, and everything she’d lived through since waking vanished. It fell to dust, turned to grey mist, scattered to the wind. Forever. As though in a fairy tale: go on, and on, and mind you never look back.       A particular source of irritation were the moments when Rowena, for instance, buried in some difficult computations, managed to drift off right there at a table covered in sand. The devil himself could not have made sense of the notes she’d scratched during the work, and she had to begin everything from the start.       Those calculations were of no use to her now, and if only she could put them off for another two hundred years. But she could not, however she might have wished to delay the inevitable: she would not give Salazar the slightest hint, and he would work it out anyway.       ‘No, you’ve misunderstood me,’ his voice cut into Rowena’s joyless thoughts. ‘Why not keep a… m-mm, a private journal? Not like the monastery annals, but about yourself. Daily, naturally. Just write down everything that happens, and then you can look back over it.’       Rowena flinched. That happened to her often: a word tossed off in passing, a glance sliding by, a scent that brushed her nostrils and suddenly seemed familiar.       ‘Remembered?’ Salazar was alert, and by now he’d grown quite skilled at reading her like an open book by her expression. ‘Aha, I can see you have. A splendid idea, isn’t it?’       Yes, she remembered: a heavy table, a cupboard half crammed with thick notebooks, a candle flame throwing reflections on to fresh smooth parchment, the smell of dust and leather, a faint waxen note, the moon bitten on one side, caught like something in a net in the lattice of the window, heat from the fireplace, and cold creeping from stone.       ‘Reflection is almost a door,’ an aged hand, corded with swollen veins, wrote—her own hand—‘and many doors lead back. We return by our own footprints.’ And in her head, meanwhile, a heavy pulse hammered: ‘I’ve almost no time left.’       The memory dulled, settled among the others—mottled autumn leaves hiding the black, cold sheet of the lake beneath. Rowena sighed.       ‘Thank you,’ she said, and smiled, turning her peeling nose into the sun that had crept closer. ‘You really are a genius, Salazar. It’s simply a splendid idea.’