16th July 1995, the Prison de Sombrelac, southern France, early morning
The cell had no window, but Rachelle de Frautois had learned, over three long years, to feel the morning come anyway — a thinning of the dark, a softening of the chill in the old stone, the distant stirring of the wards as the day shift took the watch. This morning it meant something it had never meant before.
Today she was free.
She stood before the small clouded mirror bolted to the wall and traded her grey prisoner's robe, for the last time, for the plain travelling clothes they had returned to her in a paper parcel. The woman who looked back was not the one who had been brought here. She was thinner, harder; there was grey now threaded through the dark of her hair that had no business being there at her age, and the years had cut lines around her mouth and worn hollows beneath her eyes.
But the eyes themselves —
The eyes held something the haggard face did not. A flash of it, surfacing as she met her own gaze: relief, clean and deep, and beneath the relief, against every expectation, a small fierce happiness. 'It was worth it.' She had brought down the man and the organisation that had destroyed her father and made a weapon of her, and she had paid for the things she had done in their service with five years of her life, and she did not regret a single hour of either the doing or the paying. The ledger was square. She could begin again.
The Warden came for her himself.
He was an old man, grizzled and unhurried, and he walked her up the long spiralling stair toward the daylight with the air of a man who had walked a great many prisoners up it and seen most of them again. "You've a visitor at the gate, you know," he remarked, keys jingling. "This early. A gentleman, no less — and a very fine-looking one. Years I've worked this gate, mademoiselle, and not once has anyone been waited on so handsomely on their way out. You're a lucky woman."
Rachelle frowned, puzzled — and then a thought crossed her mind, unbidden, and her step faltered for half a heartbeat.
'The Magician.'
She had never known his name. She had only ever called him that — the Magician, or, privately, for the deep midnight blue he wore and the strange starlit light in his spellwork, the Blue Magician. They had worked together for the space of a single desperate season in China, in secret, each for their own reasons, to bring down Asmus Drazkan and the Altxorra Braconier — and when it was done she had gone to her cell and he had gone wherever men like that go, and she had not expected, ever, to see him again.
The great door stood at the top of the stair.
"Well." The Warden unlocked it, and the morning light fell in, thin and pale and almost painfully bright after five years of torchlit stone. "A good life to you, mademoiselle de Frautois." He gave her a long, not-unkind look. "And I'll be very content if I never have the pleasure of seeing you back here."
"You won't," said Rachelle, and meant it, and stepped out into the sun.
It took her eyes a moment to clear. When they did, she saw him.
He was walking slowly up the gravel toward her — unhurried, easy, his hands loose at his sides — dressed in that same deep midnight-blue coat she remembered so well, the long lines of it catching the early light, the only thing missing the Moretta mask that had hidden his face the whole of that season in China. Without it he was simply a man: composed, kind-eyed, amber-eyed, with a face that did not match the terror she had once watched him visit upon a poachers' compound.
"Magician," she breathed.
"Mademoiselle de Frautois." He stopped before her and inclined his head, a small courtly bow. "Or — I think we may dispense with the working titles now. The war's long over for both of us. My name is Ethan." His mouth curved. "Welcome back to the world. I thought it ought to have a friendly face waiting in it."
They walked.
Paris was just waking around them as they came down out of the prison district into the ordinary streets — shutters going up, the smell of bread and coffee threading the cool morning air, the wizarding quarter blurring quietly into the Muggle one the way it did in the old cities. They spoke a little, at first, of the past — carefully, the way two people do who have shared something too heavy to handle roughly — and Ethan, with the grave courtesy that she remembered as being entirely his own, congratulated her on her freedom, and gave her a gift.
It was a hat. A wide-brimmed thing of pale organza, trimmed with silk flowers and a single curling feather — absurdly, gloriously elegant, the sort of thing a free woman might wear to a garden in summer.
Rachelle looked at it, and a small self-deprecating laugh escaped her — 'five years in a cell and the man brings me a tea-party hat' — but she put it on, and it shaded the sun from her unaccustomed eyes, and she found she was oddly, foolishly glad of it.
Ethan handed her, next, a folded newspaper.
The front of it carried the same story the front of every paper had carried for weeks: a fresh atrocity laid at the door of Lord Voldemort, and the now-familiar still of a bone-white face. "You'll have heard the broad shape of it inside, I expect," he said. "Britain's risen Dark Lord. The Boy Who Lived. All that. Keeping up?"
"The famous story," Rachelle said, glancing at it. "Not the whole of it. Walls are thin in Sombrelac, and gossip travels even where light doesn't." She handed it back. "He sounds like Asmus, only larger. They are all the same animal, in the end. They want, and they take, and they call the taking a philosophy."
"They do rather." Ethan folded the paper away. "But it's a poor topic for a fine morning, and you've only just got one back. Let's leave him to his headlines."
She smiled — and that, too, felt strange and good.
They turned along a quiet street where the plane trees threw dappled shade, and after a while Ethan said, lightly, "You told me once — in China, the night before the compound... that you wanted Asmus Drazkan dead. That nothing short of it would do." He glanced sidelong at her. "We didn't manage that, in the end. The Americans took him; MACUSA has had him these five years and means to keep him. Not the ending you swore you wanted."
A pause. "Are you at peace with it?"
For the first time, Rachelle smiled a smile that reached all the way up into her tired eyes — a real one, bright and unguarded, the first in longer than she could remember.
"His organisation is ash," she said. "Altxorra Braconier doesn't exist any more. A handful slipped the net — they'll spend their lives in holes, looking over their shoulders, which is its own small justice. And Asmus himself—" she breathed it out, savouring it, "—Asmus will rot. In an American cell, year on year, until there's nothing left of him but the rotting. I had wanted Azkaban for him, once. But MACUSA's hold is no gentler, and he is caged, and the man who made a beast of me is going nowhere, ever again." She lifted her face to the sun. "Yes. I find I am very much at peace with it."
"Good," said Ethan, and meant it.
They walked a little further before he asked, gently, "And the future? Have you thought what you'll do with it, now you've it back?"
Rachelle gave a low, rueful breath. "A prison gives you a great deal of quiet in which to think. I have thought of almost nothing else." She was silent a moment. "And the honest answer is — I don't know. I spent so long pointed at one thing. Now the thing is done, and I'm — " she searched for the word, "—hollow, a little. The way a bow must feel, perhaps, when the arrow's finally loosed."
Ethan nodded, as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world.
"Your father was a magizoologist," he said. "You told me that, too. That before the Braconier took him, he kept beasts — cared for them, studied them, loved them."
And at that, something moved across Rachelle's face — a flash of memory, warm and sudden: a small girl's hands buried in thick fur, her father's laugh, a creature's great gentle eye regarding her, sunlight in a paddock long ago. The memories came, as they always came to her now, faintly blue about the edges, the colour of a thing kept safe and far away.
"He did," she said softly. And nothing more.
"Well." Ethan's mouth curved. "If you've not yet decided — and there's no hurry on a morning like this ... I find I have a proposal for you."
He told her, as they walked, about Atid Stella.
Her eyes widened slowly as he spoke — for she knew the name, even five years buried; everyone in the trade had come to know it, the strange ambitious British company that built impossible things and meant to drag the whole sleepy wizarding world forward by the collar whether it liked it or not. "You're offering me a place," she said, half-disbelieving. "A woman three hours out of prison. Why—"
"Because I've seen you work," Ethan said simply. "Under pressure that broke better people. I don't much care where someone's been, mademoiselle. I care what they'll build." He smiled. "There's a position. Assisting my manager, Verrona — who is the finest woman I know and who has been threatening to resign from overwork for six years running. You'd suit each other. And in time, if the magizoology calls you back — well. We keep a great many creatures, and we treat them rather better than the trade does."
Rachelle de Frautois stopped walking.
She looked at this strange kind man in his midnight-blue coat, who had crossed a continent to wait at a prison gate at dawn for a woman the world had written off, and who was now, gravely and matter-of-factly, handing her a future along with a ridiculous summer hat — and a small, helpless, astonished laugh broke out of her, and her eyes filled, just slightly, with something she had not let herself feel in years. Hope.
"Yes," she said. "Yes. All right. Thank you — I— yes."
"Splendid." Ethan turned them down a side street toward where, Rachelle would shortly learn, a Paris branch of the company kept a discreet door. "Come along, then. There's a great deal to tell you, and Verrona will want to know precisely how soon she can offload her filing."
And he talked, easily and warmly, the whole way there.
16th July 1995, the basement of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, mid-morning
The basement beneath the kitchen of Grimmauld Place was a long, low, stone-vaulted room that Sirius had cleared of three centuries of Black-family junk and enchanted, at the children's eager request, into something halfway between a duelling hall and a gymnasium. Practice dummies stood in a ragged row along one wall — Atid Stella surplus, salvaged by Ethan, sturdier than they looked. The light came warm and steady from floating lamps. And eight young people had gathered in it for a purpose none of them had quite said aloud at dinner.
It had begun, as these things did, with Hermione.
If they could not join the Order — and they could not, then they would at least make themselves ready. For Voldemort. For the war that every adult in this house was quietly preparing for behind sealed doors. And there was, among them, exactly one person who had stood in a graveyard against the Dark Lord himself and walked out of it; one person trained for four years by the most formidable wizard any of them had met.
Harry had not wanted to do it.
The thought of teaching — of standing up in front of even his closest friends and being looked at, expected at — had made his old shyness rise up in his throat like a swallowed stone. But Ron had deployed his particular gift, that oddly clever, oddly persuasive patter that could talk a Niffler out of gold, and Luna had simply looked at him with those wide shining grey eyes and said she thought he'd be wonderful, and between the two of them Harry's defences had fallen with an ease that made Hermione's and Draco's mouths twitch in perfect unison. 'Gullible,' their two expressions said, identically. 'Hopelessly, specifically gullible.'
Persuading Sirius had taken about four seconds. Persuading Molly had required pushing Sirius out in front as a shield and letting him take the fire — which, to his eternal credit, he had done with relish.
And so, here they were.
Harry stood at the head of the room, facing them, and breathed out, and clung hard to the memory of his father's composure as though it were a wand he could hold.
Ron, who knew exactly how this went, already had a packet of crisps open in his lap — long experience having taught him that the only way to survive the theory portion before the good part was to be eating throughout it. He'd brought enough to share; the twins each took a handful, and Neville too, and — to Ron's open astonishment — Hermione, after a withering look at the lot of them, reached over and took some herself. Ron's delighted snicker died very quickly when he saw how close her other hand was to a fist. Everyone else had a small notebook out and a quill ready. Everyone except Ron and the twins, naturally.
Harry cleared his throat.
"Right. So. Before anyone waves a wand at anything—" he found, to his faint surprise, that the words came "—we start with what magic actually is. Because if you don't understand that, the rest is just memorising noises."
He paused, gathering it.
"Magic is versatile," he said, "and it's sentimental — it answers to what you mean, not just what you say. But don't mistake that for magic having no rules. It has rules. Deep ones, fundamental ones. They're what keep magic from collapsing into chaos every time someone gets it wrong. You break the small rules, you fail a spell. The fundamental ones are there so the world doesn't come apart."
Hermione's quill was already flying. Draco had gone very still and attentive.
And then Harry reached back — five years back, to a sunlit afternoon when he was ten and a man with amber eyes had explained the whole of it to a small bewildered boy — and recited it, word for word, exactly as it had been given to him:
"The most important thing is the intent. Focus on what you want — and speak the incantation as you pour that intent into every word, and leave the rest to magic. But it is you who must be the anchor. You are what the magic answers to."
He drew a breath, and gave them the rest of it.
"If you find it too difficult to feel — imagine your own innate magic as a coiled thread. When you cast, the coil begins to spin; the threads of you reach out and catch the threads of magic in the world around you; and through the incantation, those threads do what you ask of them."
The effect on the room was immediate and unequal.
Hermione and Draco looked as though someone had lit a lamp behind their eyes — enlightenment and a hundred questions at once, both of them visibly biting down on the urge to interrupt, both of them knowing better than to break a teacher mid-thought. The twins and Ginny were a half-step behind, fascinated. Ron and Neville wore the matching faintly-glazed look of people for whom this was going to require the demonstration before it landed. And Luna only smiled — serene, untroubled, already long past all of it — and her quiet confidence in him steadied Harry more than anything else in the room could have. She was Ethan's disciple too, after all. She had learned this years ago, at the same knee.
Harry raised his holly wand.
"Watch." And — nonverbally, his voice gone steadier and surer the deeper into his father's teaching he went — he cast.
"Lumos."
A clean white light bloomed at the wand's tip.
"This is where it starts. The simplest light-charm there is. Now—" he held them with it, "—when it comes to Charms, Jinxes, Hexes, even Curses, the basic requirements to cast successfully are always three: the correct sensation, the correct movement, and the correct intent. Get those three right and the spell answers. And if you strip away years of theory and a thousand tests other people ran before you, what they built on top of those three things are the advanced forms — Lumos Maxima. Lumos Solem. Lumos Duo."
He cast each as he named it — the blazing flare, the burning sun-white pulse, the twin lights leaping apart — under the wide watching eyes of the children, and then let them all die, and held up the single ordinary glow again.
"But at its core," he said, "it's still Lumos. The only difference is what they added to those three basic things." He let that sit. "And what they added — what turns Lumos into Lumos Solem — is two things."
The light in his palm began, slowly, to swell.
"Knowledge. And imagination."
It popped free of his wand and floated out into the room, a small soft orb hanging in the air before them.
"Knowledge gets you from point A to point B." Harry moved his wand, and the orb drifted obediently after it, circling the room, his wand a conductor's baton. "It's the foundation. The base. Everything that's already known, everything in the books Hermione's read twice—" a small laugh from someone "—that's your fuel."
Then he raised his free hand, empty, and moved both hands together — and his voice dropped, warm with the wonder of the thing.
"And with knowledge as the fuel — imagination gets you everywhere."
The orb burst.
It bloomed into brilliance, splitting and splitting again, scattering into a slow drifting constellation of tiny coloured lights — gold and rose and deep blue and silver — that wheeled gently through the vaulted dark above their heads like a sky turned loose indoors, and then, one by one, winked softly out into nothing.
The basement was silent. Then Luna clapped her hands, delighted, and the others followed, and even Draco was grinning.
Harry lowered his wand, and the last of his shyness with it, and found he was smiling too.
"That's the whole of it, really," he said. "Sensation, movement, intent — then knowledge, then imagination. That's all magic is, underneath. And once you've got that in your bones—" his eyes moved round his friends, steady now, sure, "—then we take exactly that, and we point it at something that's trying to hurt us. That's what martial magic is. That's where we're going."
He squared his shoulders.
"So. Wands up. Let's begin."