"It is maintained by the Masters that Geometry commandeth the unseen Current. I answer: they mistake instrument for cause.
For before there was Form, there was Word.
The Sacred Tongue, spoken at the world's foundation, imprinted upon Creation its hidden Grammar. The lines men carve into Silver are but shadows of that first utterance.
The Rune therefore worketh not because of angle or proportion, but because its Shape echoeth a syllable once spoken by Divine Authority.
Remove Meaning, and the Rune is but scratchings.
Thus the true Art is not engineering, but remembrance."
-De Verbo Primordiali By Father Ignatius Valmaris
The second Sunday of the term was the first day that felt like a gift.
There were no lessons. No work assignment. Professor Malyn had announced at breakfast the previous Friday that Sundays were free days, meaning students could occupy themselves as they chose within the castle grounds and the outer ward, provided they stayed inside the walls and returned before supper.
We were breaking our fast in the common room, having gotten our meal from the kitchen. I ate my porridge, listened to the older Hufflepuffs talk about nothing in particular, and waited to see who would mention going outside first. Now I know the English, and even part of America, are stereotyped for being tasteless, or more accurately, spiceless. But, not even salt? Its just grain, mainly oats, and water. That's it. At least add some berries, nuts, or pepper! I'll have to talk with the house elves, otherwise my tastebuds may never know the word 'yum'.
Thomas mentioned it before I had finished my second cup of water.
"We ought to go out," he called across the table, looking at each of us in turn. "Explore. We have only ever walked the path between the tower and the castle and back. There is a great deal more to see."
"Aye, and the walls. Canst thou see the top of them from the windows? There be guards up there. Real guards, with arms. I want to see closer."
We let Beatrice, who was reading near the fire, know where we were going to be. She waved us off without looking up. "Stay within the outer wall. Do not go near the Forbidden Forest. Come back before the supper bell."
We collected our cloaks, distinctly different from our robes, from the dormitories and headed up.
The morning was overcast in the way Scottish mornings often were at this time of year, the sky a uniform gray that held the light in without releasing it. The air had a bite to it. My breath made small clouds as we crossed the inner courtyard and passed through the second gatehouse into the outer ward.
The outer ward was larger than it looked from the castle windows. It stretched between the inner walls of the castle proper and the outer curtain wall, a broad irregular space serving a dozen purposes at once. The ward line was only seen by a slight shimmer in the air and a line of stone in the ground. Closest to the castle on the northern side were the kitchen gardens, long raised beds of dark earth where the remains of the summer's herbs and root vegetables were still showing. Some had been harvested already, the beds turned over and left in ridged furrows. A house-elf I had not seen before moved along one of the beds with a small trowel, tamping down the earth around something, paying us no attention, a bevy of tools and seeds moving through the air as it worked.
Further along the northern side stood a low stone building with a slate roof. I recognised the smell before I saw what it was — a woodstore, stacked floor to ceiling with cut timber. I had spent enough months hauling firewood to know the scent of cut pine and oak before I needed to see it.
"That be enough wood to last half a winter," Thomas said, peering through the open doorway.
"More than half, I should think," I answered. "They'll cut more before the cold comes in."
On the south side of the outer ward was the practice yard. I stopped when I saw it.
It was not large, perhaps forty feet square, but clearly well used. The ground within it was packed hard and bare of grass, and along one edge several wooden posts had been driven into the earth at angles, each of them marked and scored from long use. A weapons rack stood against the far wall holding several long practice staves and two wooden shields with iron rims. Two men were there, both in rough wool clothing over padded gambesons, working slowly through a drill with the staves. They were not fighting. They were stepping through movements, the same sequence repeated, one calling corrections quietly to the other.
I watched for a moment, a bit disappointed there wasn't any magic at play. The older of the two noticed us and gave a short nod before returning to his work.
We continued along the outer ward and reached the base of the curtain wall. Up close it was more substantial than it appeared from the castle windows. The stone was old and deeply mortared. The wall stood perhaps twenty feet high, and at intervals of roughly a hundred feet there were round mural towers projecting slightly outward from the face of the wall. From where I stood I could see two of them clearly, and at the top of each there was a figure walking a slow circuit.
At the base of the nearest tower there was a door, plain and heavy, standing slightly open.
"Can we go up?" Thomas asked. He was already moving toward it.
"We ought to ask," Eleanor said.
There was no one immediately visible to ask. Thomas had already put his head through the door. "There is a stair," he reported.
I looked at the door again and thought about what Beatrice had told us. Stay within the outer wall. She hadn't said to stay on the ground.
"Quickly, then," I said.
The stair inside the tower was a tight spiral, the treads worn smooth and uneven. It was dark except for two narrow slit windows letting in thin lines of gray light. We climbed single file, Thomas first and me last, and came out through a wooden hatch onto the wall walk at the top.
The wind hit us immediately, stronger up here than in the ward below, and colder. I pulled my cloak tighter. Eleanor made a small sound beside me.
The view was worth it.
To the north and west the forest ran as far as I could see. Not the managed edges of a coppiced wood but real forest, ancient and dense, the treetops moving in the wind. From up here I could see how the outer wall curved with the natural contours of the land and how the castle rose behind us, its towers and battlements layered against the gray sky. The lake was visible to the south, a wide dark sheet that absorbed the light rather than reflected it. At this distance the surface looked perfectly still.
"I can see Hogsmeade," Margaret called out. She was standing at the outer parapet, her hands on the stone, looking south-west. "There, past the slope. The smoke from the chimneys."
I found it. The village was a cluster of dark rooftops and pale chimney smoke, small and distant against the surrounding landscape.
We stood for another few minutes, long enough to fix the view properly in memory, and then went back down the stairs.
We crossed toward the southern end of the outer ward, where the ground sloped down slightly and the outer wall followed the hillside. Here the space between the inner castle wall and the outer curtain was narrower, and a series of storage buildings ran along the inner wall. A granary from the smell of it, and another building that Thomas identified as a smithy when we heard the ring of metal from inside.
Near the south-east corner of the outer ward, where the curtain wall turned, there was a postern gate, much smaller than the main gatehouse we had arrived through on our first day. It was closed and barred. Through the gap at the top I could see the slope of the hill falling away toward the lake path below.
"The boathouse is through there," a voice said.
We turned, a little startled. A boy I didn't recognize was sitting on the low wall beside the postern gate, whittling something with a small knife. He was perhaps a year older than me, with reddish-brown hair and ink stains on his right hand. A silver-trimmed blue badge on his robe marked him as Ravenclaw.
"Second year," he said, still not looking up from his work. "Aldous Fenn. The postern leads down to the boathouse path. They keep it barred save when the lake is being used for instruction. Thou canst not go that way today."
"Dost thou know the grounds well?" I asked.
"Better than most." He examined what he was carving and shaved off another thin curl of wood. "Last year I did find a door in the north-east tower that openeth into a passage running inside the outer wall itself. Not the stair to the wall walk. Inside the wall. It doth lead to a chamber above the main gatehouse where the portcullis mechanism is housed. Nobody did tell me I could not go in, so I went." He paused. "Professor Malyn did tell me afterward that I should have exercised better judgment. But he gave me no detention, so I believe he was not entirely displeased."
"How many guards are there?" I asked. "On the walls, at a given time."
Aldous answered without pause. "Six upon the walls at any given hour. Two at the main gatehouse, one always. Two more who patrol the outer ward upon the ground. And there be two senior men who walk no regular patrol but oversee the others and respond to whatsoever needs responding to. Of course that only pertains to a single shift and doesn't include those who go out of the ward. Wilfred Hawkins doth command them all, though the day-to-day running of it falleth to a man called Sergeant Pryce. The broad fellow with the grey beard thou mayest have seen near the practice yard."
"That is more than I expected for a school," Eleanor remarked quietly.
"It is not only a school," Aldous said. I had been thinking the same thing not twenty minutes earlier. "It is the largest gathering of wizards in Britain. If thou wert an enemy of wizardkind, here is where thou wouldst look."
None of us said anything to that. The wind moved through the ward and the smithy door rang once and was quiet again.
"What art thou carving?" Thomas asked.
Aldous held it up. A small bird, roughed out but recognisable. "A wren. Practice, mostly. The grain of this wood is difficult."
We left him to it and continued the circuit back toward the main gatehouse along the western side. Here the inner castle wall showed a series of buttressed arches, and through the arches I could see the base of one of the larger towers of the castle proper, its stones green-dark with moss near the ground. A spiral stair was visible through a low window. I made a mental note of its location.
The gatehouse was the most imposing structure in the outer ward. It projected inward from the outer wall and rose three full stories, with the gate passage running through its base. The portcullis was up, its iron teeth hanging overhead as we walked beneath. The passage itself was perhaps thirty feet deep and wide enough for two carts to pass abreast. Above us, set into the ceiling, was a series of holes I recognised as murder holes, where defenders could drop things or pour liquids onto attackers caught in the passage below.
"Do not look up while walking through," Margaret told us. She had already looked, and that had been enough.
Wilfred Hawkins was in the guardroom to the right of the passage, visible through an open door, talking to one of the guards over a piece of parchment. He noticed us as we passed and gave a short look that made clear he had filed us away precisely.
We did not trouble him. We passed through and stood for a moment in the open space before the path down to Hogsmeade, looking back at the wall from outside. From this angle the full height and thickness of it was plain. It had been built by people who understood what stone needed to accomplish and had done the work to accomplish it. It was so much larger and imposing than the Hogwarts in the movies, seemingly stretching into the sky like the tower of Babel.
"We are not supposed to be out here," Eleanor said.
"We are on the threshold," I said. "Technically we have not left the grounds."
"That is the sort of thing that sounds reasonable and turns out not to be," Margaret replied. She was already turning back.
We followed her back through the gate.
On the way back across the outer ward, Thomas stopped to watch the guards in the practice yard again. They had moved on from drills to something more vigorous, working in pairs now with padded blunt staves. The sound of it was flat and hard against the stone.
"I should like to learn that," Thomas said.
"We learn Curses and Countercurses on Wednesdays," I answered.
"That is magic. I mean this." He gestured at the men in the yard. "The way of it. With your hands and a weapon. My father was a farrier. Before he died he said a man who could only do one thing was half a man."
I thought about that for a moment and had no argument against it. It'd be pretty cool to sling spells and swing swords at the same time. Maybe a sword which shoots spells as you swing it? Something to think on…
We made it back to the inner courtyard in time for the midday meal, cold in our fingers and with mud on our boots that the house-elf near the entrance hall regarded with the particular silence of someone who would be cleaning it up later.
The weeks after that settled into a shape. The days had a routine and the routine had small variations, and the small variations were where the interesting things happened.
On a Thursday in the third week of September we found the owlery.
It wasn't hidden or anything, just a bit out of the way. The castle simply had a great many towers and not all of them were obvious from inside, and the one housing the owls happened to be accessible only through a door in a corridor we had not yet had reason to use. Eleanor found it first, following a smell she described as pungent, which turned out to be true given the accumulated evidence of several dozen owls living in an enclosed space.
The stair up to the owlery was the longest and narrowest we had yet found, a tight spiral in stone so worn it had developed a slight lean toward the outer wall. The smell intensified as we climbed. Thomas made sounds of protest at each landing. By the time we reached the top those sounds had resolved into a resigned silence.
The owlery itself was circular and open to the sky through arched windows without glass. Every surface that was not floor or stair was given over to roosting bars and nesting shelves, most of them occupied. The owls were of every size: small brown creatures tucked into the higher shelves with their eyes shut, large tawny birds on the lower bars watching us with the complete indifference only owls managed, and several of the large white ones I had only ever seen in films before coming here. There were also three or four I could not assign to any species I recognised, one with a faint luminescence about its wing edges watching me with eyes too pale to be natural.
"They are magnificent," Eleanor breathed. She was standing near the largest of the tawny owls, which had lowered its head and was watching her. She raised her hand toward it slowly. It turned its head sideways to look at her hand, then back at her face.
"It will bite thee," Thomas warned, from a position slightly behind me.
"It might," Eleanor replied. She did not move her hand away. The owl turned its head again, a full rotation to the right, then reached forward and pressed the top of its beak very lightly against her knuckles.
We stayed enjoying the view and playing with the owls until the cold coming through the open windows drove us out, then went back down the narrow stair with Thomas leading the way considerably faster than he had come up.
The lake we did not reach until the fourth week of September, on a Saturday afternoon after the work assignment was finished.
Owen Thatcher was willing to take groups of students to the lake shore provided they stayed above the waterline and did not touch the water. He said the second part with a particular emphasis.
"Stay ye above the waterline," he told us. "Dinna touch the water. That rule existeth for sound reason and I'll hear no argument against it."
The path down from the postern gate ran along the hillside to the boathouse, a timber-framed structure built out over the water on stone foundations. Inside it were the boats used for the beginning-of-term crossing, pulled up on their keels and resting on wooden cradles, smelling of cold water and tar and old wood. Owen locked the door behind him and we continued along the shore.
The lake was larger than it appeared from the wall walk. Standing at the edge of it I revised my estimate of its size considerably. The far shore was not visible in any useful detail, only a dark line of trees and rock against the gray sky. The water was dark, almost black, and very still at the edge where it lapped against the pebbled shore.
I crouched down and looked at the surface. Below it the water was clear for perhaps two feet and then deepened into a darkness that gave no indication of how far it went. A slow movement passed underneath about ten yards out. Whatever had caused it did not come up.
"What liveth in there?" Thomas asked Owen.
"That which the school hath agreed to share the water with," Owen answered. "And that which hath always been there and taketh no particular notice of the school. Both sorts are best observed from exactly where ye stand."
"Merpeople?" Margaret asked.
"Among other things. Dinna whistle near the water. They dinna care for it and they hold a long memory for a slight."
We walked along the shore for perhaps half a mile before Owen turned us back. The pebbles were large and rounded, iron-gray and dark red, and along the upper shore where the water did not reach there were clusters of a low plant with small white flowers that Owen identified as bog stitchwort. Eleanor knelt to examine it for long enough that the rest of us had to wait.
On the way back Thomas found a flat stone and threw it at the water. It bounced twice and then something below the surface came up and took it.
September left quietly like a lamb and October arrived in Scotland roaring like a lion. The mornings were cold enough that breath clouded from the first step outside, and the afternoons only warmed slightly before the light began to go. The trees on the hillside above the castle showed yellow and dark red against the gray rock, and the forest beyond the walls went from a wall of green to something more varied as the leaves thinned.
Classes had developed their own texture by this point. Herbology was moving from identification and basic care toward preparation: how to dry, store, and process plants without losing the properties that made them useful. Professor Graves demonstrated a thing once, correctly and in full, then expected it had been learned. She corrected errors when they appeared without explaining why the correction was necessary, on the apparent assumption that the error itself would make the reason plain.
It reminded me of an Arab professor I had who had been teaching Sophomores for the first time and had only ever taught graduate students. Everyone failed the test but after we had taken it, he asked us how it went and when we talked about the questions we struggled with, he would say "Oh, that's simple. You just have to do this, this, and that." Like it was our fault for being too stupid to understand the content and not his fault as a teacher. But I digress.
Potions continued to reward attention and punish inattention with the impartiality of a process that could not be argued with. I focused on measuring correctly, timing precisely, and not speaking unless I had something worth saying. This might as well have been a chemistry experiment, just less fancy tools. This approach had thus far yielded no detentions and two brief nods from Thorne.
Charms was the class I found most interesting to think about outside of it. Professor Ashford's approach was patient and thorough, and the underlying questions it raised about intent and precision occupied me for a good deal of time. The work I had begun on my own with runes, reading through my book in the evenings, connected to this in ways I was still working out. Runes were fixed intent — intent written down and held in material form. Whether the same principles governed both was a question I had not yet resolved, and I was content to leave it open until I had enough to reason from.
Thomas had absolutely no interest in the theoretical side of anything. He was good at Charms because he was quick with his hands and not prone to overthinking his movements. He was poor at Potions because he was easily distracted by the process and had twice let something cook past the point it should have been removed from heat. He brought to Curses and Countercurses the straightforward attention of someone who had grown up knowing that the ability to defend yourself had a clear and immediate value, which was probably the most honest relationship anyone in the class had with the subject.
On a Wednesday morning in the second week of October we came out of the Curses and Countercurses classroom to find the outer corridor filled with a wind that should not have been able to get in from anywhere. It moved papers on the windowsills and made the torches gutter and lean. The portraits on the walls were animated in the particular way they got when something had happened, the painted figures turned toward each other talking in hushed tones, two of them moving between their frames at speed.
A seventh-year Gryffindor passing in the opposite direction told us without stopping that a section of the west battlement had dropped three stones into the outer ward overnight, and that two guards had been sent to investigate the forest edge because something had been heard in the trees before dawn. He said it and kept walking.
I thought about the west battlement for the rest of the day. If a section of wall had failed, the question was whether it had failed from age or from something acting on it. I did not know enough about how the castle's protections worked to guess usefully, and guessing without information was a reliable path to wrong conclusions.
I came across Aldous Fenn in the outer ward the following afternoon, sitting on the same low wall near the postern gate where we had first spoken, and raised it with him.
Aldous said the west wall had been showing cracks since summer, and that structural fatigue was the most probable cause. The castle was old and certain sections of the outer wall had been repaired piecemeal over centuries. As for the forest, he noted that movement at the forest edge was common on most nights, from creatures that lived there and occasionally came closer than they meant to, and the guards were noting it as a matter of record.
"Thou dost know a great deal about the guards," I observed.
"I talk to them," Aldous replied. "They are not interesting to most students, so they will speak to someone who asketh questions without wanting anything in return. Sergeant Pryce hath been here two-and-twenty years. He knoweth the castle better than most of the professors."
The repairs to the west battlement began the next morning.
We watched from the inner courtyard as two of the senior guards and three men from the ward crew hauled up a small hoist rig along the inside of the wall. The dropped stones had been cleared from the outer ward, but the gap was visible from below: a darker interruption in the line of gray where three blocks had sheared free and fallen. From the ground it did not look like much. From the wall walk, I suspected, it would look like a missing tooth.
By midday a section of the western yard had been roped off. Students were told to keep clear, which ensured that no one did. We passed by at a distance that was technically compliant and watched as mortar was chipped out and replaced, as new stone was levered into place and tapped until it seated flush with its neighbors.
Sergeant Pryce stood below with his hands clasped behind his back, looking up more often than he spoke. When he did speak, it was brief and precise. Once he glanced toward the line of watching students and held our gaze for half a second longer than necessary. You'd think we did something wrong with that kind of look.
"It doth look like age," Margaret said quietly.
"It does, though I suppose anything is possible with magic," I agreed.
The wind did not return, at least not in any unnatural way. The days proceeded. The battlement was mended. The ropes came down. The ward resumed its usual traffic of students crossing between lessons and guards pacing their routes with the same steady rhythm as before.
If there was anything else, it did not announce itself.
Mid-October brought the first frost.
It lay thin and white across the kitchen gardens one morning, silvering the turned earth and tracing the edges of the remaining leaves with a brittle outline. The house-elf we had seen weeks earlier moved more quickly than before, covering certain beds with cloth and lifting others entirely. The air had the clean, sharp quality that made each breath feel narrower in the chest.
Thomas and I stood by the practice yard before breakfast, watching the guards work through a new drill with short swords and bucklers. The sound was different from the staves: metal on metal, the ring bright and quick.
Sergeant Pryce noticed us and, after a moment, beckoned Thomas forward with two fingers.
Thomas glanced at me and walked over. They spoke for a bit and then he stood to one side while Pryce demonstrated something with the sword — a turn of the wrist, a shift of the shield — and then handed Thomas the buckler. Thomas mimicked the motion, once, twice, three times. On the third attempt Pryce nodded and took the shield back.
Thomas returned with a look that was not quite a smile but close enough.
"What did he say?" I asked.
"He said a man who learneth where to place his feet will seldom need to place his blade," Thomas replied. "And that if I stand to watch, I may as well watch with purpose."
"Well, hopefully that means more than shuffling a bit with a sword & shield. Let me know how it goes," I say before taking a seat on a log.
The owlery grew much colder as the month went on, wind blowing sharp through the tower bringing frost on the wind.
The open arches admitted more wind than light now, and the owls had drawn themselves tighter into their feathers. Eleanor continued to visit them regardless, bringing small parcels of meat from the kitchens when she could manage it. The large tawny owl she favored had taken to hopping down one bar when she entered, as if acknowledging her presence without committing to enthusiasm.
One afternoon as we stood among the shifting feathers and the dry rustle of wings, Margaret pointed upward.
There, on one of the higher beams near the open arch, perched a bird I had not seen before. It was larger than the others, with mottled gray plumage and eyes the color of tarnished silver. It did not blink as we watched it.
"Is that one of the school's?" Thomas asked.
"I have not seen it before," Eleanor said.
The bird opened its wings once, slowly, as if testing the air, then settled again. Plop
"Eeeee!" Margaret scream with a big load of owl dropping sat right in the middle of her forehead.
"Hahaha," I burst out laughing, bent over clutching my stomach as I double over laughing. She smacks me and grabs my coat and proceeds to rub it off on my clothes. Giving an indignant squawk, I start rubbing it over her face and we spend the next two minutes rough housing until Eleanor's laughing broke us up. Meeting each other's eyes, we smiled and cornered Eleanor, our shadows blacking the light from the window. Her laughing stops as she realizes what's going down.
"Uh, what art thou doing? Stop, no! Stop this nonsense at once!"
Needless to say, the three of us ended with feathers and droppings in our hair and stuck to our faces. So we made our way to the house dorms to shower and clean up, poking fun and laughing along the way. When the supper bell rang faintly from the grounds, our group merged into the mass of Hufflepuff students, ready for some fine dining.