"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,
and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth."
— The Gospel According to John, i. 14
I woke before anyone else, which had become such a reliable habit since September that I no longer gave it particular thought. The dormitory was dark in the way Hufflepuff was always dark underground, that total and complete absence of light that I had stopped noticing sometime in October, and Thomas was asleep on the other side of the room, his breathing slow and steady under the drawn curtains of his bed. I dressed without a candle, which I could now do at the same time as with one, and went out into the passage.
The common room was empty. The fire had been banked to coals overnight, sitting low and red in the hearth, and a split log had been set across them, probably by a house elf sometime before dawn, the bark beginning to char at the edges where it touched the coals. I pulled a chair close and knelt.
I had been considering, since the night before, how to open the prayer. Christmas morning was not a morning for the usual brief accounting of thanks and petition, and then on with the day. It required more than that. I spent a moment thinking about what more than that actually meant, and then I stopped trying to plan it and simply began.
I thanked God for Christmas and what it meant, before I said anything else. Then I worked outward from there. I thanked Him for the autumn just past, for the work that had gone into it, for the classroom on the third floor with its north-facing window and the pile of carved pine boards that was slowly becoming something I understood. I thanked Him for the runes text, the library, the three people who had been sorted into the same house and chosen, in their different ways, to remain in proximity to me despite all evidence that I was more strange than I had any right to be. I thanked Him for Thomas, who was genuinely funny and who had no idea how rare that was. For Eleanor, who attended to things others passed over. For Margaret, who counted the strands.
Then I stayed kneeling for a little while in the kind of quiet that follows when you have finished speaking and are simply present. The fire took hold of the log at some point and began to burn with a steadier sound. The room was cold still, the warmth not yet built, my breath faint in the air in front of me. Outside, beyond the walls of the castle, snow was probably falling, or had fallen, or was about to fall. It was always doing one of those three things in December.
I rose from my knees after a while longer, set a second log on the fire, and sat in the chair nearest the hearth to wait for the others. It was times like these when I was alone that the walls seemed to close in on me. Here I was, in a foreign world, one completely different than the one I had been born and grew up in. I had so many aspirations and thoughts for the future: what my job would have been, getting married and having children, spending years growing older and celebrating holidays with my parents and brothers. Only to wind up in a foreign world, just a pilgrim or traveler that didn't really belong. There's been a huge culture shift for me: the propriety expected of men and women, though I preferred it to the post-modern America where even girls as young as eight were out dressed as little as a 20th century whore. I mean, really, who has a little daughter and puts them in public in spandex shorts or bikinis? I never really could understand it, especially with the rising amount of pedos and their normalization. It got even worse with young women and men, the way the spoke and dressed in public was a social experiment more than anything else and I would blame feminism for it among other things.
But here in the 1600s, it was the total opposite. Even among the wizarding world, the upper year guys have to properly court the girls, meeting parents, sitting down with fathers, or so I've heard. There wasn't any hand holding until it got serious, like a japanese anime. The dress was three to four layers on a summer day and more for the winter days. The manner of living and entertainment was much more simplistic and felt far more formal to me.
During times like this, I missed my family and home, the little cousins who would run around the room causing mayhem, all of it and I'll never be able to see them again, lost in a world I knew nothing about.
Combine this with the spiritual dilema, there are only a couple of theories I have. In my modest understanding of scripture, I could only see something like the multiverse as a plausible explanation. Another is just as the world was created in the beginning and is to be destroyed and a new heaven & earth is to be made after the judgement day, perhaps the one I am in can before or after that creation, though I doubt this explanation simply because the Harry Potter book was created during my previous life and would not make since to have it be a new creation. Unless you combined the two theories together as a sort of mesh conspiracy theory, but on the largest scale conspiracy possible. Another thought I had was this was in a separate dimension, and I was transported here by a spiritual being. Alex Jones had thought the aliens and UFOs were actually demons and angels from the light & dark dimension, appearing in the physical plane, so perhaps I was taken to a dimension similar to that of a dimension created by thought. Another possibility is the matrix, whether implemented through technology or spiritual forces, I could not tell. What needs confirmed for me ultimately is: did Christ walk this earth, die, and rise again? If so, then I can believe and chalk it up to the mysteries of God, but if not then it would be pointless to cling to this false hope. Like Paul, or maybe it was Peter, had said that if Christ did not rise from the dead, then we Christians are the most pitiable, yet if he truly did rise, then we have the greatest gain.
Stewing in my thoughts and reminiscing, I continue to sit in the quiet room, looking into the fire, and time slowly passes by.
Eleanor appeared first, which was not what I had expected, though I guess I don't know who I expected first, which might make me a little retarded.
She came down from the girls' dormitory carrying her cloak over one arm, wearing the plain wool dress she wore most days with the cream collar that she kept clean with more care than the material strictly warranted. Her hair was pinned neatly at the back. She stopped when she saw me sitting by the fire, as though she had assumed the common room would be empty at this hour, and then, after a brief pause, she crossed to the chair beside me and sat down without saying anything.
We watched the fire together while the second log caught and the flames built. The room was still quiet around us. Somewhere above us, the castle was doing what old buildings do at this hour, the slow settling of stone and the distant draw of wind through passages, sounds that had no urgency in them.
"Happy Christmas," I said.
"Happy Christmas to thee as well," she said. After a short pause, she added, without looking away from the fire: "I did not know if thou wouldst observe it.
"I always observe it."
She seemed to find that answer satisfactory. She settled back in the chair and opened the small psalter she had carried down with her, its spine worn from regular use, the cover held to the binding by a thread she had resewn at some point herself, the new thread a slightly different color from the old. She found her page without needing to check which one it was and began reading.
After a few minutes, she said, without looking up: "I could not sleep past four o'clock. I tried but once I had awoken, I could not fall back asleep."
"I usually can't either."
"Thou art always up before us. I have noticed."
"I woke up early. I've always woken early, a habit I've picked up, I guess." I paused. "Did you have Christmas with your family?"
"Yes, though my uncle, being of the wizarding lineage, did not partake nor take kindly to the festivities, though he never did prevent them. My aunt, who had taken me in, observed the day like my parents had. She was a muggleborn as well."
"That's nice, to celebrate it with your family."
She closed her mouth on whatever she had been about to say by way of apology and returned to her reading and we sat together in the warming common room while she read and I watched the fire, and that was a fine way to spend the first part of a Christmas morning.
Thomas came down just ahead of Margaret, arriving with the particular forward energy of someone who had been awake for some time and was only now releasing it. He was fully dressed, cloak already on, which meant he had been lying in bed for a while before coming down rather than waking late. He dropped into the chair across from me, stretched his legs toward the hearth, and addressed the fire with deep satisfaction.
"Happy Christmas," he said, to both of us or neither of us, in the way he sometimes spoke to a room.
"Happy Christmas, Thomas."
He was quiet for a moment, which was not his natural state. Then: "Dost thou think they shall give us the bread with the seeds in it today? For the morning meal?"
"Probably."
"The bread with the seeds is the good bread," he said, in case there was any disagreement on the point. He pulled up his legs and sat with his feet on the edge of the chair, arms resting on his knees, watching the fire with the look he wore when something pleased him, and he was not yet going to say so out loud.
Eleanor set aside her psalter. "How dost thou think they do it?" she asked him. "The seeds. They get them into the bread so evenly."
Thomas considered this with the seriousness the question deserved. "The elves."
"They mix them in before baking, surely," I added in, giving my two-cents.
"Aye, but the mixing. Thou hast seen me mix dough once. It is nothing like the evenly-mixed seeds Hogwarts has."
"Thou mixed that dough with thy elbow," Eleanor said, "It isn't a wonder why thy bread was more like a troll's head than a loaf of bread."
"I'm eleven and the dough in the kitchens is much too hard to knead," Thomas said, without apparent regret.
Margaret appeared at the foot of the stairs during this exchange. She came into the common room with her usual efficiency, dressed straight, cloak already on, hair already pinned. She took in the three of us assembled at the hearth, and the corner of her mouth shifted briefly.
"Well," she said. "Here we are."
"Indeed, here we are," Thomas agreed. Not that that needed saying, though I wouldn't voice that aloud on such a cheery morning
She sat down in the remaining chair and folded her hands in her lap, and that was the four of us. The fire was burning well by then, the second log caught fully, and the room was noticeably warmer than it had been an hour before.
Outside the round windows set near the ceiling of the common room, a narrow band of gray-white light was building, the early morning pressing in at ground level, filtered through several inches of snow on the outer sill. Christmas morning was arriving on schedule, slow and overcast and white.
I had not expected the gifts, which was a failure of observation on my part. I had spent the better part of three weeks in the third-floor classroom making things for each of them, and it had simply not occurred to me to consider whether they had been doing the same, which was an oversight I could not entirely explain. I had made the items because not making them had felt wrong. Christmas without a gift for the people around you was something I did not know how to do.
They were small objects, made from materials I already had or could come by without trouble. For Margaret, I had made a comb, worked down from a piece of close-grained oak I had taken from the scraps of the September carpentry assignment, sanded smooth with the flat of a whetstone until the teeth moved through cleanly without catching. A simple pattern ran along the spine, angular and regular, cut with the same knife I used for runes, but with no runic intent in it. Purely decorative. For Thomas, I had carved a knight, a standing figure with a rounded shield, simple in form, the proportions not perfect but recognizably what it was supposed to be, the figure about the length of two fingers and solid enough to hold without feeling fragile. For Eleanor, I had made a small cross, flat and evenly proportioned, the length of her thumb from top to foot, smooth on all surfaces, with a notch cut at the top for a cord.
I had wrapped each in a square of cloth cut from a worn shirt I had outgrown and set them on the arms of the chairs while we were talking about the bread with seeds, which was as good a moment as any, since no one was expecting it and therefore no ceremony would attach to it.
Thomas unwrapped his knight and turned it over in his fingers. He examined it from each side with the focused attention he brought to things he intended to take seriously, not rushing the inspection.
"Thou madest this?"
"I had a good deal of time in that classroom."
"I had thought thou wert practicing runes."
"I was. Among other things."
He held it up to show Eleanor, who leaned across to look at it. She studied it for a moment with her head tilted slightly, the way she examined anything she found genuinely interesting. After that, Thomas set it on the arm of his chair and looked at it from where he sat, not putting it away. He kept it there throughout the morning, occasionally picking it up to turn it in one hand while listening to the conversation, which was the best possible outcome for a carved figure. Objects were for handling.
Eleanor held her cross in both palms, in the posture of someone accustomed to holding that particular shape of thing. She did not say much about it, but her expression was the one she wore when something landed in the right place. She said thank you in the careful way she had for things that mattered to her, without adding anything to the words to make them seem larger, and then she put it in her coat pocket. I did not see her put it away during the day after that, which meant she had moved it to somewhere more permanent.
Margaret unwrapped her comb and examined it with the systematic attention of a person who intends to actually use the thing she has been given. She tested the teeth with her thumb, checked the gaps between them, and ran it lightly through the end of her braid to test the tracking. She turned it and looked at the pattern along the spine.
"The teeth are well-cut," she said. "Evener than the one I have now." She examined the spine pattern once more. "This is not runic."
"No. Just a pattern. I was practicing my knife work."
She turned the comb once more and then tucked it into her sleeve. "Thank thee, Nicholas. It is well made."
"You're mighty welcome."
Thomas raised the knight briefly in a small gesture from across the fire, the way you raise a cup to someone, and went back to examining it.
Thomas, it turned out, had been to the kitchens the previous evening. He produced from the inner pocket of his coat two small tarts wrapped in cloth, currants, still carrying a faint residual warmth from wherever he had been keeping them, and placed them on the arm of my chair with the air of a man completing an arrangement he had made well in advance.
"For thee," he said. "I had an elf make it last night." He settled back in the chair with the mild virtue of a man who had done a thing for the right reasons and found that the right reasons produced good results. "He said they were the better ones, made with the cider currants, not the plain ones."
I ate one. He was not wrong. The crust was thin, and the filling was sharp and sweet from the cider and did not have the gummy quality that the standard pudding currants sometimes had.
"This is very good," I said.
"I know," said Thomas, smiling, "'Twas even better fresh out of the oven, it melted in my mouth at the slightest bite.
Eleanor had brought her gift out of her psalter, where it had been pressed flat between the pages. It was a small card of thick parchment, the kind cut from the margin of a spoiled writing exercise, bearing a drawing done in ink with care and some evident revision. The drawing was of the four of us standing together, rendered in the flat style that portraits used in this period, the figures stiff but identifiable by their proportions and the details she had included: Thomas's round face and the particular tilt he stood with, Margaret's straight posture and the braid over one shoulder, Nicholas taller and standing slightly apart in the way she had apparently observed him standing. Underneath, in small neat letters: "In the year of Our Lord 1609. First Year. Hufflepuff."
I looked at it for a moment. "You drew this?"
"I draw tolerably," she said, in the way she always qualified things she was good at. "I used the mapping pen from the Charms supply room. I asked Professor Ashford if I might borrow it for an hour, and she said yes."
Thomas had leaned over to look at the drawing while we talked. He examined his rendered figure with the specific interest of a person evaluating their own likeness. "I do not stand like that," he said.
"Thou dost," Margaret said, without looking up. They bickered back and forth about whether Thomas did in fact like to pose as a knight, but never could quite get the posture right, making him look like a rooster puffing its chest and stretching its neck out before cawing.
I took the parchment carefully, on account of the pen line being set but still liable to smear at the edges if handled roughly, and folded it into my coat pocket where it would sit flat.
"Thank you, Eleanor."
Margaret waited until Thomas and Eleanor had gone ahead of us up toward the hall for the morning meal. She reached into her cloak and produced a length of cord roughly the span of a wrist, braided in a pattern that repeated over itself and closed into a flat structure at the end.
"It is a warding knot," she said. "From the charms section in Foundations of Spellwork. The chapter on household protection." She held it out across her palm. "I cannot say with certainty that it works. The text describes only the correct form and notes that it is traditional among certain wizarding households. I tied it correctly, by the diagram in the book."
"And if it doesn't work?"
"Then it is a cord," she said. "But the form is correct, and the intent is correct, and those are the conditions the book gives for the charm to function. So I believe it works." She said this with the direct confidence she had about things she had checked. "The braid is seven strands. The text specifies seven."
I turned it over in my hands. The braiding was tight and even, the strands crossing in a sequence that repeated exactly every third crossing. Better than anything I would have produced, and I had been carving wood for months. "You made this."
"I have braided since I was four. Goodwife Fletcher taught all the girls. It was not difficult work." She said this the way she said most things about her own abilities, as though they were simply facts about the material world, requiring no embellishment.
"The color?"
"Madder dye. I had a small quantity from a third-year in Herbology who works in the gardens, and had some left from a dyeing experiment. She was willing to part with it." Margaret paused. "The text does not specify color. I chose red because it is traditional for warding work in the sources I found, though the foundation text does not require it." She said this in the tone she used when she had researched something beyond the minimum requirement and was noting that fact without calling attention to it.
I understood, from knowing Margaret, that "the sources I found" meant she had been to the library on this specific question and had not stopped at the first answer. I also understood that she would not say this directly because saying it directly would make it a display of effort rather than simply the way you did things correctly.
"Thank you." I turned the cord once more and tied it at my left wrist, under the cuff of my coat. It sat flat against the skin without pulling. "It's well made. I'll be sure to wear it wherever I go."
She gave one short nod. Then she turned and went up the passage after Thomas and Eleanor, and I followed, the cord settling against my wrist as I walked.
The castle on Christmas morning was a different thing from the castle on an ordinary morning.
The corridors we passed through on the way to the Great Hall held their usual torches and the usual grey stone, but the students who moved through them were fewer in number and moved at a different pace than the term-time crowd, no urgency of lessons in it, the particular quality of a morning when nothing is required by a set hour. The decorations that had been appearing all week were fully in place now: the evergreen branches along the rail of the main stair, the small bundles of holly above each doorframe tied with red cloth, the pine scent spreading through the cold air of the passages in a way that had not been true even two days before.
The portraits were awake and alert this morning in a way they sometimes were not on ordinary days, the painted figures in their frames sitting upright or standing at their windows, watching the few students pass with more interest than usual. An elderly wizard in a gray robe on the second-floor landing called out a merry Christmas as we went by, to no one in particular, his voice carrying down the corridor. A woman in an older style of dress, the portrait I had always assumed was a former teacher or possibly a founder's contemporary, had arranged herself to face the entrance of the hall rather than her usual posture, turned toward the opposite wall.
"Why do they do that?" Eleanor asked, meaning the portraits.
"Christmas is a feast day," Margaret said. "They observe it." She said this as though the observance of a feast day by a painted figure required no more explanation than the observance by a living one. Margaret's relationship with things she found in books was a settled one: if the text established that something was so, it was so.
"I suppose they have had long enough to get used to it," Thomas said. "If I had been in a painting for two hundred years, I should think I would have formed opinions about most holidays."
"Makes sense, I guess."
The Christmas feast was the largest meal I had eaten since the start of term.
The Great Hall held perhaps a third of its usual number, the students who had remained through the holiday ranged along the long tables in the informal way that smaller gatherings produced, the strict house-by-house seating that governed meals during term having loosened into something more general. The staff table had its professors, fewer of them than usual, and arranged differently than they sat on ordinary days; the positions they occupied when the hall was full were not necessary when the hall was half empty. The ceiling showed the winter sky, overcast and white, the flat cold light of a cloud-covered December morning arriving evenly from no particular direction. I suppose they just wanted an excuse to have a feast and it was as good of a day as any, especially with most of the purebloods and halfbloods gone home, doing whatever it is wizards do instead of Christmas over the winter break. No slytherins were here, a single Ravenclaw, two upper year Gryfindors, and the four of us and a seventh year Hufflepuff girl I didn't recognise were all that was left of the students here. We must've been the only ones working on the grounds to pay tuition or something of the sort.
Professor Blackwood sat at one end of the staff table. She had been at Hogwarts, and specifically in the role of Head of Hufflepuff House, since before any of us were born, and she had the quality of someone permanently present in the place, part of its furniture in the way that very old portraits were part of the furniture, as familiar and as fixed. She was not a warm person in the manner Thomas was warm, but she was consistent in a way that I had come to understand was its own form of reliability. She had noticed something about each of the four of us during the first weeks of term and had adjusted her manner toward each accordingly, which was a fine thing to observe even if it was not always comfortable to be on the receiving end of it. She raised her chin slightly in the direction of our table as we sat down, which was as much greeting as she generally offered.
The food came in platters set along the center of the tables. Roasted meats, dark bread baked that morning with the warmth still in it, vegetables prepared with dried herbs, a dish of spiced apples that had come from somewhere on the staff end and was making its way down toward us, pushed along by a series of students passing it when they had served themselves. Pastries near the end of the meal, in small quantities, the kind that required more effort than the daily meals, and were made with that in mind. We passed the dishes between ourselves in the easy way that had developed over the course of a term of eating together at the same end of the same table, no formality in it.
Thomas got his bread with seeds in it. He held up a piece, examined it briefly, and put it down with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose prediction has been confirmed. He did not say I told you so, which took restraint on his part, and I noted the restraint without commenting on it.
The seventh year, Holly as she introduced herself, had carried some spiced apples over to us from the professors' table. I assume the spices are luxuries, which is why they didn't appear at each table. They had these sitting at the far end and someone ought to eat them before they go cold," she said, setting the bowl down and returning to his own seat without waiting for any response.
Thomas served himself immediately. I took some and passed the bowl to Eleanor, who took a small portion and passed it to Margaret, who served herself , placing the bowl in the middle of our group.
I had been noticing this particular Hufflepuff quality for most of the term, the way generosity moved through the house without ceremony. It happened in small transactions: a note passed, a spot at a study table offered, a bowl of spiced apples relocated to where it would do more good. It was done as though it were simply the practical thing, and treated as unremarkable by the person doing it. I had grown up in a time when generosity was occasionally performed for its own audience, and the contrast had taken me some months to fully understand. The Hufflepuff version did not perform.
I had a second helping of the roasted meat, which I did not do on ordinary days, because it was Christmas and the cook had done something to it with herbs that the daily meals did not usually receive.
Near the end of the meal, Professor Blackwood made her way along the Hufflepuff table, stopping briefly at each cluster of students to exchange a few words. It was methodical in the way she did most things, moving with purpose and no waste of motion, speaking to each group for roughly the same duration before moving on.
When she reached the end of the table, she stopped and looked at the four of us with the assessing expression I had come to recognize, the one that was not severe but was not warm either and had very little to do with how she actually regarded the person she was looking at.
"I trust the term has treated thee well enough," she said. It was not a question.
"Aye, Professor," Thomas said.
She looked at me specifically. "I am told Professor Ashford has noted thy progress in Charms as satisfactory. I have not heard the same reported from Professor Thorne."
"No, Professor." Thorne's assessment of my Potions work was somewhere between tolerating my presence in his classroom and being deeply uncertain about the wisdom of that tolerance. The cauldron incident in October had not helped.
She did not pursue it. "And the rune work."
I kept my expression level. What the rune work meant to Professor Blackwood was my progress in the formal course content. What it meant to me was the pile of experimental boards in the third-floor classroom, sorted into working results and structural failures. The two categories overlapped enough that I could answer honestly. "I've been reading ahead of the course. The principles hold up to some testing."
"Testing?"
"Small-scale. Nothing outside the approved uses."
Whether this satisfied her was difficult to determine from her expression, which was not designed to be easy to read. She gave a short nod and moved along the table.
"She knows about the classroom," Margaret said quietly, after Professor Blackwood had moved out of immediate hearing range.
"Probably."
Margaret looked at her plate. "She has not said anything about it."
"Nope, not that it is against the rules, so I doubt she could do anything about it without causing a bigger problem. It isn't like I'm capable of much anyways."
The afternoon was free of obligation, no lessons and no work assignments, and I asked a question many children did after a certain Disney movie: "Do you want to build a snowman?"
And of course, they had no idea what I was talking about. So after some moving of snow and explanation, we began a competition for the largest snowman.
The courtyard snow was good, the overnight fall having added several inches to what was already there, compacted enough to pack but not frozen solid.
Thomas had found a branch beneath the oak near the east wall and was working it into the arm socket of the largest figure with the focus of a man doing something that mattered. He stepped back twice to check the angle, adjusted it, then stepped back again.
"Is that level?" he asked, to the general air.
I looked at the branch. "Close enough."
He accepted this without argument, which meant the branch was probably actually level and he had simply wanted confirmation.
Eleanor had been working on a smaller figure to one side of the main construction, a shape that had begun as a simple sphere and was gradually acquiring details: two flat stones for eyes, a third for a mouth, a circle of smaller stones along the base in a pattern that I could not immediately identify.
"What is the pattern?" I asked her.
She looked up. "Christmas roses. The stones are standing in for them. They are said to have bloomed at the Nativity." She set one of the stones more carefully. "I know they are only stones. But it seemed right for the day."
It did seem right for the day. I left her to it.
Margaret had been working alongside Holly, who had come from the castle at some point, on the igloo structure that had been begun earlier in the week. She was packing snow into the gaps in the dome walls with both hands, pressing it in at an angle that she had clearly worked out was most effective, moving along the circumference of the structure with systematic efficiency. Holly was placing blocks at the top, the two of them having arrived at a working arrangement without, as far as I could tell, having discussed it.
"It will hold another night if the temperature stays," she said, examining the dome from outside.
"The gap above the entrance needs filling," Margaret replied. "If snow falls heavy it will collapse that section first."
Holly looked where she was indicating. "Aye. Good eye."
Margaret did not respond to this, which was how she received praise for observations she considered obvious. She went back to packing the gap.
I worked on the main figure for a while alongside Thomas, who had found a second branch and was determining the best angle for the other arm. The air was cold and clear, the kind of winter cold that is simply cold without being particularly bitter, the overcast sky holding everything at a flat, even temperature that was easy to work in. My hands were numb by the second hour, but not unpleasantly so. There was something about standing in a courtyard in the middle of December, building a snow figure in a castle that had been standing since the eleventh century, that I found I was not in a hurry to leave.
Thomas set the second branch and stepped back to look at the completed figure. It stood perhaps five feet tall, taller than any of us, the arms extended, a crown of packed snow at the top with two small stones for eyes and a curve of pebbles for a mouth, the overall impression of a figure either welcoming something or in the middle of saying something at some volume.
"I think it looks like Professor Deverell," Thomas said.
I considered the figure. The extended arms. The general sense of addressing someone. "I won't tell him you said that."
"Do not," Thomas agreed.
We came back inside as the light was failing, the sky outside having moved from flat white to a pale grey-blue that indicated the afternoon was ending. Cloaks were hung, boots left near the passage entrance, and numb hands held toward the fire in the common room until feeling returned to the fingers. One of the many house elves had made spiced cider from the kitchen supplies, or possibly persuaded the house elves to make it, and had simply transported it up, and it was being passed around in wooden cups near the fire. Thomas received his cup with both hands and held it close to his face for the steam before drinking any of it.
"This is the best day," he said, to no one in particular.
No one contradicted him.
After supper, the common room filled in the unhurried way it did when there was nowhere else to be. The fire was built high for the evening, the pine branches along the walls giving off their resinous scent in the heat, the small charms set in the garlands producing their slow drifting sparks that moved up toward the ceiling and dissolved before reaching it.
Holly took one of the chairs near the center of the fire, which was where she sat, sipping a mug of cider. She told a story about a wizard named Orin Crabbe, no relation to the Crabbes of the present school, he was careful to note, who had lived in the valley below the castle sometime in the middle of the last century and who had been, by all accounts, a man of significant eccentricity. Crabbe had spent the better part of twenty years attempting to develop a charm that would allow him to speak to birds. Do not control them, do not receive messages from them, simply carry on a conversation. His reasoning had been that birds flew everywhere and saw everything and must therefore possess information of considerable interest, and it seemed unreasonable to him that this information was not more readily available.
The charm had never worked as he intended. What it produced instead was a partial and highly unreliable translation effect that rendered bird sounds as what Holly described as the kind of speech you might hear from a man who had been asleep for a week and was not yet fully awake. Incoherent, mostly. Occasionally, single words: "there," "warm," "down." Once, famously, "no thank you."
Thomas had been listening with the particular quality of attention he brought to things he found genuinely funny, which was full-body attention, leaning forward, elbows on knees. He laughed at the no thank you and then covered his mouth because the laugh had come out louder than he intended, which made two of the third-years on the bench behind him laugh as well.
Holly continued without acknowledging this, which was definitely the correct way to handle it.
Crabbe had eventually abandoned the bird project and turned his efforts to fish, on the theory that fish spent most of their time still and might therefore be easier to converse with at sufficient length to make any exchange useful. The fish had proven uninterested in conversation of any kind. His notes on this period of the work, which she had apparently read in the restricted section in a moment of curiosity, had consisted largely of descriptions of the fish's expression, which he had characterized in various entries as "inscrutable," "vague," and on one particularly discouraged afternoon, "profoundly unhelpful.
The light thinned gradually as the evening moved on. Thomas had fallen asleep in his chair, the knight on the arm of it where he had been turning it before sleep overtook him. He was still holding his empty cider cup at an angle that suggested he had been about to set it down when he lost consciousness, and had never quite completed the action. Eleanor was still reading, or had gone back to it, the psalter open to a page near the end that she had reached over the course of the day. Margaret had her runes text out on her knee but was not reading it with any focus, her eyes on the fire instead, which for Margaret was a reliable indication that she was thinking through something she had not yet resolved.
I sat in my chair and watched the room for a while.
I had come to know these three people the way you come to know a room you spend most of your time in, not from examining it deliberately but from being present in it until the shape of it is simply part of what you know. Thomas, who was funny in the way that good humor is funny, precisely calibrated without seeming calibrated, deployed selectively enough that it kept landing. Eleanor, who attended to things others passed over, small details and small kindnesses, because she took people seriously enough to notice what they actually needed rather than what was easiest to offer. Margaret, who had braided a cord in seven strands because the text specified seven, who had consulted additional sources on the color, who would not have made it in any way other than correctly, because making it incorrectly would have made it into something other than what it was intended to be.
None of them knew where I had come from or what it had cost to end up here, kneeling in a pestilence pit outside York in January. None of them knew what I had left behind. They knew what I was now: a first-year Hufflepuff with a strange manner of speaking who spent his free afternoons in an empty classroom and kept notebooks he did not show people and prayed every morning before the rest of the dormitory woke. They had seen all of that and stayed anyway, in the Hufflepuff way, without making a point of it.
I pulled back my left cuff far enough to see the cord at my wrist. The braiding was even and tight, the seven strands crossing in their regular sequence, the knot sitting flat against the wrist bone in the traditional position.
The fire crackled. A log settled in the hearth and sent a small shower of sparks up the chimney. Margaret turned a page in her runes text, which meant she had begun actually reading it. Eleanor finished her page and paused at the end of it with the stillness of someone who has arrived somewhere. Thomas made a small sound in his sleep and the knight slipped from the arm of his chair and landed on the floor without waking him, and Pemberton picked it up from the floor as she passed on her way to bed and set it on the arm of the chair without comment, the ordinary small competence of someone who sees what is in front of her and handles it.
I had no reason to expect, when I opened my eyes in a plague pit in the dead of winter two years ago, that I would be sitting in a warm underground room on Christmas night with three people who had given me a cord and a drawing and two currant tarts. I had not planned any of it. I had simply been present for it, and it had accumulated around me the way most things worth having accumulated, without announcement.
I stayed until the fire burned well past its peak and the room was nearly empty, and then I said a final prayer in the chair, because I was tired enough that kneeling would have simply meant kneeling on the floor for a few minutes and then falling asleep there. I thought God would forgive the informality. He had forgiven me more.
Then I woke Thomas by setting the knight carefully in his hand, which brought him awake with the start of someone returning from a significant distance, and he looked around the room and then at the knight and then at me with the expression of a man reconstructing recent events.
"I was not asleep," he said.
"Of course not."
He stood, tucked the knight into his coat, and we went to bed.
It had been a merry Christmas indeed.