"A line ill-cut mars the whole design; for in small errors do great failures take root, and no spell exceedeth the craft of its making."
Liber Runarum Minor, anonymous, c. 1500
The students came back on a Tuesday, which meant Monday had been spent in a quiet so complete that I could hear the house-elves moving in the corridor below the dormitory before dawn. It was a bit weird thinking about how the house elves try to not be seen working, a bit reminiscent of a haunted house where invisible forces open doors and take care of the house. After all, you never really see scenes of a haunted house full of dust and moths, do you?
I had been at the castle for three weeks, give or take, with nothing but the field records and the temporal notation texts and the Room on the seventh floor for company which was good company, if you happened to enjoy silence and the smell of old stone. I did, well mostly but it gets eerie and unnerving when you think about it, so I guess just don't think about it. The specific thing about a nearly empty building, though, is that the quiet it holds is a different kind from the quiet of late night. A building full of people has a warm quality even in silence, just knowing someone is in this house gives you a kind of subconscious comfort of not being alone. For example, when your parents leave you at home for the first time for a day, I remember being rather unnerved, like someone would break and enter at any moment, all because of the knowledge I was alone.
As was my habit, I said my morning prayer by the common room fire, then sat reading until the oats appeared at the kitchen table. The house-elves who managed the castle over the break had settled into delivering meals with efficient minimalism. Breakfast turned up on the common room tables and only did so when you asked for it. There was probably some invisible elf or a charm doing that work but you get used to it after a while. The one thing was there wasn't anyone talking in the room, like a guy's first apartment, coming home from work only to be met with a lonely quietness that makes him feel just how lonesome his life is. Okay, maybe that hit a little too close to home, but you get the idea.
So I was not especially surprised when, at half past ten on Tuesday morning, the first voices came through the entrance hall and the quality of the castle's silence shifted the way a room shifts when someone opens the door from outside and all the outdoor air comes in at once.
I closed my notebook, tucked it under my arm, and went to the inner courtyard.
The cold had not eased, instead it was as if an old man in the sky who embodied winter itself was blowing out cold winds that blew vegetation sideways and froze the grounds with sleet, hail, and snow depending on just how cold it was. And Scotland in the first days of January was rather typical, which is to say gray and wet and running somewhere between cold enough to see your breath and cold enough to actively regret going outside. The path from the outer gate to the castle entrance was clear, the house-elves having managed the ice overnight, but the courtyard grass had gone the specific shade of brown that grass reaches when it has spent three weeks frozen and is now merely very cold. My boots, which Margaret had identified in September as a problem waiting to happen and which I had treated over the break with oil from the tool shed, held the wet out rather well, something I was grateful for.
Thomas appeared around the corner from the outer gate pulling his cart (why he had a cart with him, I could not guess), his coat sitting higher on his shoulders than it had in September. He had grown over the break enough that the coat looked borrowed from someone his own height from six months ago. He had bought it at the Hogsmeade market in August and planned for a size he had not yet grown into. By January he had apparently caught up to it and kept going.
He was also eating bread, which meant the road from wherever his cousin lived had been long enough to justify bringing breakfast on the road. That was another thing I did not realize, people of these times didn't eat three meals a day. Instead many had one large meal at the start of the day or one at dawn and one at dusk, of medium size I suppose. However, Hogwarts had abundant magic, workers, and land that there was enough food for three meals a day.
"Good morning, Nicholas," he said, by way of greeting.
"Thomas, its good to see you. What's with the cart?," I said.
We looked at each other for a moment. Then he lifted one side of the cart and I took the other and we got it over the iced edge of the inner step, where the wheel always stuck. "Mine uncle allowed me to bring 'tis cart for the return journey. I've many a thing to carry back and I am to purchase items for the family abode when the traveling merchants do come by."
"Ah, that makes sense. How was the winter break?" I asked.
"Cold and 'twas not much of a break." He repositioned his grip on the cart handle. "My cousin's holding is on higher ground than here. I did not know that was possible."
"Higher elevation is colder."
"Aye, I know that now." He pulled the cart across the courtyard. "His father keeps cattle. Three weeks of cattle in the height of winter is a very particular kind of experience, Nicholas."
"What does that mean, exactly?"
"It means," Thomas said, with a solemn gravity, as though he had come through a great tribulation, or resigned to his fate, "that cattle do not care what the weather is doing. Cattle have things they need doing at six in the morning regardless of the frost and regardless of whether you are a twelve-year-old child who would very much prefer to be inside."
"That seems like a reasonable way for cattle to operate. It's worse when they get stuck in mud during the rainy season, for if you cannot get them out, they're better off killed and butchered for meat."
"Aye, tis true," he said. "Though, the cattle are consistent and I shant fault them for that."
He pulled the cart over a second uneven stone without breaking stride. "Did you train?" I asked, which I knew brought out the pure boyish happiness out of him more than anything else.
Thomas brightened immediately, the cattle apparently displaced by a better subject. "Every morning. Pryce sent a letter to the village in early December asking whether the blacksmith there knew the footwork patterns he had been teaching me. The blacksmith was no help, but his eldest son had trained with a garrison in his youth and did know them, so we worked together most mornings before the milking."
I did not ask about the milking. His expression had made it clear that there was a category of experience he had filed under learning opportunities and preferred not to revisit verbally, and I had learned to respect that, after all, I had once worked for pigs and there were some experiences you'd rather others not know. One particularly bad experience was having to clean 880 pound boars. You'd put their feed out only for them to tip the bowl over into their own urine and feces and proceed to eat without reservation.
Ugh, makes me gag remembering those pigs. It makes sense they were categorized as unclean in the Old Testament, though bacon is good. Thankfully, the modern day pig farming regulated their diets, otherwise it'd be rather risky to eat pork. Pigs eat their own kind, corpses, and literally anything remotely edible, including fecal matter, should it be in their food. And that reminds me, I should avoid pork until I can manage the source farm and feed. Sobs, no more bacon for me.
Eleanor arrived two hours later, coming through the outer gate in a group of students I half-recognized from passing them in corridors during term. She had a new bag, she had also received one the previous January as well, which appeared to be a pattern and her aunt had sent her back with a small clay pot of preserved medicinal herbs tied in a cloth and tucked under her arm, which she was carrying with the careful attention one gives to things that will be annoying to replace if dropped.
"Eleanor, I'm glad you made it safely here. It's good to see you again," I said, giving her a light hug.
"Nicholas," she greeted, returning the hug. "Thou art well?"
"Well enough. Though it is still cold, an unpleasant feeling and one which is starting to become my least favorite the more the winter goes on."
She looked at the courtyard, then at the castle, then at me. "The tower," she said. "I want to see the children before supper. Wilt thou come?"
"After we get Thomas's trunk up the stairs. He has added considerably more weight to it than he departed with."
Thomas, from ten feet away: "It is tools. I told thee in the letter."
"Thou didst say 'some things,'" I said, "not 'enough tools to outfit a small garrison.'"
"A small garrison would need considerably more than this," Thomas replied cheerfully, either not noticing or dismissing the sarcasm dripping from my voice.
Eleanor looked at the cart, looked at Thomas, and said nothing with the practiced expression of someone who had decided this particular dispute did not require her participation, in layman's terms she couldn't care less. "I shall go ahead to the dormitory," she said, and proceeded to follow Thomas to the dorms.
Margaret arrived last out of the three. She arrived in the middle of the afternoon, her dark wool cloak closed against the cold and a look on her face that said she had been traveling since before dawn and was not in a good mood, if the frown and disgruntled look told me anything. She saw me waiting by the inner gate and walked over without altering her pace.
"Thou art standing in the cold on purpose," she said.
"Good to see you, too. I was waiting for you, though it its not like I enjoy standing in the cold for no reason."
She looked at me for a moment, noticing the gift Eleanor left with me. "The parcel is for the children in the tower? "
"Yes, we'll head over together when they settle in. We will have to be quick about it so it isn't dark by the time we return."
After making a journey to the Muggleborn tower and back to Hogwarts, we barely made it back before the sun went down, taking the same path as always, on the outskirts of the forest, winding around the long way and over a bridge to enter Hogsmeade.
Supper that evening was the first full Great Hall meal since before Christmas, and the sound of it was considerable. Two hundred students eating together in a stone hall produce a specific kind of noise that is difficult to describe to anyone who has not been in one something between a market square and a very organized argument about everything simultaneously. After three weeks of near-silence, I found it overwhelming for approximately the first ten minutes, then perfectly normal after that.
The food was better than anything the break's reduced kitchen service had provided. There was roasted mutton, which Thomas addressed with a seriousness of purpose that suggested the break's diet had leaned heavily toward things he had personally helped produce and was tired of. There were parsnips, which I recognized from the summer field. There was dark bread, still warm from the ovens, and a hard cheese that was sharper than the usual variety.
Eleanor ate three pieces of the cheese before appearing to notice, at which point the plate was almost empty.
"That was mine," Thomas said, pointing at the plate.
"Thou didst not claim it," Eleanor said, with a light pout.
"It was in front of me."
"It was in the middle of the table."
"It was considerably closer to me than to thee."
Margaret, without looking up from her bowl: "There is more on the serving plate behind Thomas's left shoulder."
Thomas turned, located the plate, and served himself three pieces with the efficient speed of someone who had learned from experience not to let opportunities sit. Eleanor, watching this, reached across and took one more piece from the near-empty plate before him. Thomas noticed and chose not to comment, which was either maturity or the recognition that the cheese situation had moved into a territory where escalation would not produce more cheese.
"How was the break?" Thomas asked Eleanor, having resolved the immediate question of the cheese.
"Quiet," Eleanor said. "My aunt's farm is small. We dried herbs and put up preserves, and there was a great deal of snow in the second week that came over the fences." She paused. "The chickens did not care for the snow."
"Chickens rarely do," I said.
"One of them had an opinion about it specifically," Eleanor continued. "She stood at the gap in the fence for the entirety of a Tuesday morning."
Thomas looked at her. "Stood at the fence."
"Aye. Not crossing through it. Simply standing at it and considering the snow with what I can only describe as sustained displeasure."
We sat with this for a moment.
"I respect that chicken," Thomas said.
"I thought thou mightst," Eleanor said. Was that a burn? Why is it so difficult to tell if a child was being genuine or making a dig at someone?
Margaret had been eating quietly through this exchange, the expression on her face suggesting she was listening while also thinking about something else entirely. "The parcel was well received," she said, at a pause in the chicken discussion. "Goodwife Fletcher has three new children in the tower. One is very small and wept the entire time we were there."
"Infants tend to do that," I said.
"This one wept while eating, which requires a particular kind of commitment," Margaret said. "I found it impressive."
Thomas looked up from his mutton. "How does a child weep while eating?"
"Continuously," Margaret said. "It did not stop. It had opinions about everything and expressed them all simultaneously."
Thomas considered all of this. "I was never like that," he said.
The three of us looked at him.
"Probably," he added.
The morning of the first full day of classes arrived with frost on the interior side of the third-floor windows, a sign that January intended to be thorough about its work. I had been up since before light, said my prayer by the common room fire while Thomas slept, and reviewed the Charms reading that Ashford had flagged before the break as the subject of the first session.
Thomas came downstairs while I was finishing the last section, rubbing his eyes with the expression of someone who had been asleep and would like to continue being asleep.
"Is it cold?" he asked.
"Yes."
He looked at the window. Frost on the inside, as established. He looked at the fire, then at his coat hanging by the door, and then at me resigned. "I will apply the warming charm before we go," he said.
"The notes from the summer on wool substrates were correct," I said. "Two passes before you go out, one once you're in the corridor."
He blinked at me. "I know. I said that."
"I know, I know. You were right."
He stared for a moment longer, then went to put on his coat. "Two passes," he muttered to himself.
We went to get Eleanor, who was already dressed and reading in the common room. She looked up when we came in, looked at Thomas's coat, and said, "Did thou apply the warming charm?"
"Twice," Thomas said, with the air of a child thinking they had done something great on their own.
"Good," Eleanor said, and followed us out.
The Charms classroom was warmer than the corridor leading to it, which was the first encouraging thing about the morning. Ashford had the usual semicircle of desks arranged and was at the room's center when we arrived, which was his standard position for the opening of any session.
"Levitatio Sustenta," he said, when the room had settled. "The sustained levitation variant. Before I explain what it is, I would like to know whether anyone present can tell me what distinguishes a sustained spell from a standard one."
Silence for a moment. A girl from Ravenclaw put up her hand. "The sustained spell doth not end when the wand is lowered," she said.
"Closer. Thou hast identified a symptom rather than a cause." He looked around the room. "The cause?"
I answered, "It requires continuous input from the caster. The spell does not convert the initial energy and release it. It uses the initial energy to begin the effect, and the caster maintains the effect by continuing to supply intent."
Ashford looked at me for a moment. "Correct," he said, and turned to the class. "The process your classmate described is the essential distinction. A standard levitation charm converts the initial energy and releases; the object floats briefly, or falls, depending on whether the initial energy was sufficient. A sustained levitation maintains the object through continuous intent. The effort required of the caster is ongoing."
He demonstrated the spell for the class, using a small wooden disc whic began to rise from the stand before him, held at chest height, and stayed there while Ashford turned to write on the board and then faced the class again. The disc had not moved. He lowered his wand arm to his side. The disc remained.
Thomas, beside me, said very quietly, "He has stopped pointing at it."
"The wand is not the mechanism once the spell is established," I said, equally quietly. "It is the initial channel."
"Can I let go of the wand entirely?" he said.
"Do not let go of the wand in class," I said.
He looked deeply interested in a way that suggested he was going to try this later and I was not going to be able to stop him. Meaning, he was going to do exactly that, like when you tell a child not to do something yet the moment you look away, they do exactly what you tell them.
The exercise was working in pairs: one student cast and maintained the object while the other asked questions to divide the caster's attention. The object was a piece of chalk, light enough that the initial levitation presented no difficulty. The challenge was keeping it up during the questioning.
Thomas was paired with me. I asked him about his summer, specifically about the cattle-related incidents he had declined to describe in detail, which turned out to be a very effective method of dividing his attention. His chalk dropped three times in the first five minutes while he attempted to reconstruct the timeline of a particular incident involving a gate that had not been properly latched.
"Stop asking about the cattle," he said, on the third drop.
"You were doing better while you were talking," I said. "The problem is the chalk, not the cattle. Try again."
He picked up the chalk, cast again, and I asked him a question about the Charms reading instead. The chalk held. He maintained it for forty-five seconds before Ashford moved on to the next segment, at which point Thomas set the chalk down with the expression of someone who had narrowly won something and knew it.
"The cattle questions were unsportsmanlike," he said.
"They were effective, though who thinks on why cows have four stomachs or no top teeth in the front? Plus, having a cow paddie fight is a lot more fun than you would think. Personally, I think cows are one of the easier animals to take care of," I said to which Thomas's face scrunched up in nausea.
He thought about this. "Aye," he said, after a moment. "I need to learn to not care about the cattle questions."
"That is actually good advice for dueling," I said. "The opponent will ask cattle questions at you. Metaphorically."
Thomas looked at me, looked at the chalk, and looked at me again. "I feel as though thou hast made something both more useful and more confusing," he said.
"That is frequently the case," I agreed.
Margaret was paired with a Ravenclaw girl named Ashmore, and she was maintaining the chalk at a steady height while Ashmore asked a rapid sequence of questions about the Charms reading. I watched her for a moment between my own attempts. She had gone very still, all her attention directed inward to the spell, giving enough to the questions to answer them but no more than enough. The tone of her answers had gone slightly flat, which was what happened when she was running two things at once and speech was the one she was giving less to.
Ashmore at one point reached out and physically pushed the chalk sideways while asking a question, which was creative and slightly outside the spirit of the exercise. Margaret's chalk returned to its original height within three seconds without any visible change in her expression.
Ashmore looked at the chalk, then at Margaret. "That was not supposed to happen," she said.
"The chalk is where it is supposed to be," Margaret said, helpfully.
After the session, in the corridor, Eleanor fell into step beside me. She had managed the sustained levitation adequately and had spent the final portion of the session working on something the exercise had not required, which was reducing the amount of visible concentration required. She had gotten it to the point where she was looking out the window while maintaining the chalk, which produced in observers the impression that she had simply forgotten to care about the chalk.
"The sensing circuit helped," she told me, when I asked about the window-looking. "I am more accustomed to attending to things without looking at them. It made the spell feel like the same kind of attention."
"That is a useful connection," I said.
"It was thy circuit," she said, which was Eleanor's way of crediting the source.
"The connection is yours," I said. "I only made the tool."
She looked as though she was going to disagree and then decided not to, which was about as much argument as she usually brought to statements about her own abilities.
The second Charms session of the week introduced Impulsus Moderatus, and this one Thomas immediately identified as dueling-relevant, which Ashford had expected.
"The distinction," Ashford said, holding a wooden block on the demonstration stand, "is in the character of the force. A force-displacement moves a target from one point to another in a single application. Impulsus Moderatus applies a continuous, graduated force. The caster controls the magnitude throughout the application."
He demonstrated: the block slid smoothly along the table surface without jerking, moving at a consistent pace that he varied partway through, slowing it and then stopping it precisely before the edge.
Thomas said, very quietly, in my direction: "One could keep someone moving at a particular speed and direction."
"One could also move objects along a path without picking them up," I said.
He considered both options. "Aye, the second one has value," he said. "I am thinking about the first one more, though."
"I know."
"Dost thou think Wardlaw has used it in the tournament before?"
"I think you should ask Wardlaw," I said.
"I think I shall," he said.
He did, after the session. Wardlaw's answer, relayed to me at supper, was that yes, the application Thomas was describing existed, it had a name in the dueling tradition, and it was currently beyond second-year curriculum but Thomas could come to the Friday consultation and observe how it was done. Thomas reported this with the expression of someone who had received exactly what they had been hoping for and had not expected it to work quite so smoothly.
The Herbology session that week was in the first greenhouse, which in January meant the heated one, the one with the warming charms on the glass panels and the thick smell of earth and something alive, which after three weeks of outdoor cold was genuinely welcome. Professor Graves had three new varieties on the demonstration bench when we arrived, each in its own clay pot, each with a small label that I could read from the second row.
She held up the first plant, a low, dense thing with dark green leaves and a slight silver edge and looked at the class. "What is this?" she said.
Nobody answered immediately. Thomas was looking at it with the expression of someone trying to match it to a description he had read but could not place.
"It doth smell strange," he said, after a moment.
"It does," Graves said. "What kind of strange?"
He leaned forward and then leaned back. "Like... metal? Almost. And something herbal underneath."
"Good," she said, which from Graves was approximately equivalent to a standing ovation from anyone else. "Silver-edge bloodwort. The metallic quality in the scent is from iron compounds absorbed through the root system in high-iron soils. 'Tis a potions ingredient with a moderate magical affinity. The roots are the useful portion; the leaves are inert." She put it down and picked up the second pot. "What about this one?"
The second plant was taller, with narrow leaves and small clustered buds at the top that had not yet opened. Thomas was still looking at the first one.
"Thomas," Margaret said, quietly.
He looked up. "Right," he said.
Eleanor was examining the second plant with her head tilted at the specific angle she used when she was genuinely curious about something. "It is related to the wound-herb," she said. "The leaf structure is similar."
Graves looked at her. "Why dost thou say that?"
"The way the leaves grow from the stem," Eleanor said. "Pairs of leaves opposite each other, not alternating. My aunt grows wound-herb for drying. The pattern is the same."
"The wound-herb," Graves said, "is an informal name for Stachys sylvatica, common in this region. This is Stachys magicalis, which is not common. The leaf arrangement is similar because they are related species. The wound-herb has healing properties in the leaf oils. This species has healing properties in the root sap, which is considerably stronger and considerably harder to extract without destroying the active component." She set it down. "The third plant," she said, and held up the third pot.
The third plant was unremarkable to look at: a medium-sized pot with what appeared to be ordinary green leaves, nothing distinctive about the color or the edge or the arrangement.
"Nobody?" Graves said.
Silence.
"Good," she said, and almost looked pleased. "This is Puffapod sprout, second week of growth. It will look like this for another three weeks, at which point it will look considerably more distinctive. The reason I am showing it to you in this stage is that students who encounter it later, when the pods are developing, tend to be overly cautious about it based on reputation. In this stage, it is completely harmless." She set it on the bench. "It is also completely boring. The lesson is that you cannot always identify a thing by what it will become."
Thomas raised his hand. "When does it become interesting?"
"Week five," she said. "At which point thou shalt wear gloves and pay attention."
He lowered his hand. Week five was some time away. He returned to examining the silver-edge bloodwort, which apparently continued to interest him for reasons I did not fully follow.
After Herbology we had a gap before the afternoon session, and we ended up in the outer ward because Thomas wanted to run footwork drills and Eleanor wanted to look at the kitchen garden, and the outer ward contained both of these things simultaneously. The cold was still present but the frost had lifted enough that the ground was merely frozen rather than actively slippery, and the morning sun such as it was, in January had made some impression on the east-facing wall.
Margaret and I sat on the boundary wall while Eleanor examined the covered herb beds and Thomas ran his footwork patterns in the open space by the woodstore. He had been doing this since the beginning of the break, according to his letters, and it showed. The patterns were cleaner than before Christmas, the transitions between them smoother, the positioning more certain.
"He has improved," Margaret said, watching.
"He has been practicing for three weeks with someone who actually knows what they are doing," I said.
"He was already good."
"That's relative. Good for a student, perhaps, but not for a soldier," I replied. The guy could swing the sword but in a clash with a grown man, the muscle mass alone would send him to the ground, much less when combined with height differences.
She watched for a moment. Thomas had moved into the lateral pattern, which was the hardest of the three because it required keeping the weight even through a sideways movement that naturally wanted to shift to the leading foot. He was managing it cleanly. "The tournament is in April," she said.
"Yes."
"What dost thou expect from it? For thyself, I mean."
I thought about this. "I expect to get further than the first round," I said. "Whether further than that depends on who else enters."
"The upper years will be in a separate bracket for the preliminary rounds."
"I know and that helps, but the other second-years include at least three who have been training seriously since the year started." I had been paying attention in the dueling class. "Birch has better sequence timing than I do. Ashmore has cleaner casting than almost anyone in the class. And there is a boy from Gryffindor whose name I do not know but whose footwork has been improving at about the same rate as Thomas's. We'll see"
Margaret nodded. She had been doing the same assessment from her own observations, I was fairly sure. "The sensing circuit," she said. "In a competition context."
"It gives me more information about what is coming," I said. "If I can tell the difference between a spell being prepared and a spell being cast, I can begin the counter earlier."
"How much earlier?"
"A fraction of a second, maybe. Enough to make the transition smaller." I looked at Thomas, who had moved into the combined advance-and-lateral pattern, which Pryce had introduced in October and which Thomas had described in a letter as the one that made him feel like he was going to fall over until the day it stopped feeling that way. "The question is whether I can maintain the sensing awareness under competition pressure. In a calm session, yes. Under pressure, I do not know yet."
"Friday," she said.
"Wardlaw's consultation," I said. "I intend to ask him to run the session at competition pace and see what survives."
She looked at the kitchen garden, where Eleanor had knelt beside one of the covered beds and was lifting the edge of the cover to check the soil beneath. "I want to work on the sequencing before April," she said. "The spell-while-another-is-active work. I have been drilling the individual spells. The combination is still rough."
"The common room in the evenings?" I said.
"Aye," she said. "And in the practice room if it is free."
The practice room on the ground floor was available most evenings after supper if you got there before the third and fourth years who used it for their own study sessions. We had been using it since October for exactly this kind of work. Margaret went there with a list and drilled through it until she was satisfied, which was usually about forty-five minutes, and then she went back to whatever reading she had not finished, and the list was shorter the next time.
"Tuesday and Thursday evenings," she said, "and whatever Saturday afternoons are not taken by the work assignment."
"Agreed," I said.
The Potions session in the second week of January covered the theory behind Ligatura Solutio, which Thorne introduced on a Friday with the particular directness he brought to everything.
He set three small vials on the demonstration bench. One held a dark liquid. One held a pale liquid. One held what appeared to be nothing, or possibly very dilute water.
"Ligatura Solutio," he said. "A binding medium. I will describe what it does and then I will describe what it does not do, because the errors students make with this preparation arise from confusing the two." He looked at the class. "What it does: it creates a medium in which magical components can form stable bonds with a substrate. Applied to a surface, it allows those components to adhere, to maintain their properties, and to be later removed cleanly if necessary. What it does not do: it does not create the bonds itself. It does not enhance the properties of what is bound to it. It does not work on non-magical substances." He picked up the dark vial. "This is an unprepared version. The medium has been made but not primed. Applied to a surface, it will sit there and do nothing useful." He picked up the pale vial. "This is primed. The difference in preparation is a single step. In practice, that step takes most students three attempts to get right, because it requires sustaining a specific magical state for twenty minutes without interruption."
Thorne continued. "The applications are specific. Stabilization of volatile components in a compound potion. Preservation of prepared materials during storage. Certain ward construction applications that I will not cover this term." He set the vials down. "The preparation itself is third-year curriculum. You are learning the theory now so that when you reach the preparation, you have already thought about why each step exists."
I copied the notes and thought, underneath the note-taking, about the part he had said regarding ward construction applications. The ward construction text I had bought in Hogsmeade mentioned binding mediums in passing, in the section on materials for temporary rune channels. If the Ligatura Solutio was one of the mediums used in that application, then the theory I was learning today was directly relevant to the variable-layer concept I had been developing since January.
I noted this in the margin of the Potions notes, in the smaller handwriting I used for things I wanted to return to later, and kept listening to Thorne.
The announcement came on the Wednesday of the third week of January, in the Defence session.
We had been working through the spell sequencing exercise for about forty minutes when Professor Crane stopped the class by moving to the center of the room and standing still, which was her signal.
"In April," she said, "the school will hold a dueling competition. Students of all years are eligible. The format is single elimination, with year groups separated in the preliminary rounds. The final round is open to all years." She looked at the class without particular expression. "The entry list opens Monday and closes the following Friday. Those who enter should be aware that preparation between now and April is their own responsibility. I am available for consultation on Fridays after the session, by appointment."
The room produced a low immediate noise, the sound of twenty students beginning to process information simultaneously.
Thomas turned to me. He had the expression I had seen on him in the outer ward when Sergeant Pryce showed him a new drill, and on the wall walk the first time we saw the castle from above, and on the first day of dueling class. "We are entering," he said.
"I am considering it," I said.
"We are entering," he said again, at the same volume and with exactly the same certainty, as if my consideration was merely a formality.
"I need to think about the time it requires."
"It is April. We have three months."
"I am aware of when April falls, Thomas."
"Then thou art considering for long enough," he said. "We are entering."
On my other side, Eleanor was looking at her hands in her lap in the way she looked at things when she was deciding whether to say something. I had learned to notice this.
"Eleanor," I said.
She looked up. "I am thinking about it," she said.
"That is nearly a yes."
"It is not a no," she said, which for Eleanor was in fact approximately a yes.
Margaret, across from us, had already pulled a small piece of paper from her coat pocket and was writing on it. The paper turned out, when I glanced across later, to be a practice timetable the weeks between now and April divided into a grid with sessions marked in the gaps that were not already occupied by classes or work assignments. She had two columns: Dueling and Runic Support.
"You've had two columns since before Crane finished speaking," I said.
"I have been thinking about it since October," she said, without looking up. "Crane said in the first session that the course would advance into competitive contexts. It seemed the natural conclusion."
Thomas looked at the timetable over her shoulder. "That is a very organized amount of thinking about hitting someone with a spell," he said.
Margaret looked at him. "I prefer not to think of it as hitting someone," she said. "I prefer to think of it as placing a spell where it is required."
"That is a very Margaret way to describe dueling," Thomas said.
"Thank thee, Thomas," she said.
He looked uncertain about whether that was a compliment or something else entirely. Given that it was Margaret, the answer was probably both.
After the session I walked alongside Wardlaw as he headed to the equipment room. He did not look at me, but he had not moved away either, which I had learned was his way of indicating he was available.
"The tournament," I said. "Are the year groups fully separated in the preliminary rounds?"
"First and second years together," he said. "Third through fifth together. Sixth and seventh have a separate bracket."
"And the final round is open."
"The top performers from each bracket compete in the final." He paused. "This has not produced a first-year finalist in the tournament's recorded history. The gap in experience is considerable."
"But it is possible," I said.
He stopped walking and looked at me directly, which was unusual. "Thou art asking whether winning the lower bracket is the goal or whether thou art planning beyond it," he said.
"I am gathering information," I said.
He studied me for a moment. "Come to the Friday session next week," he said. "I want to see something in thy casting."
He went to the equipment room. I stood in the corridor for a moment, then turned toward the common room, running through in my mind what he might want to look at and what I knew about my own current state.
The Room of Requirement in the second week of January held the workbench configuration I had been using since October. I arrived on Tuesday evening, Disillusionment Charm cast in the corridor from the fifth-floor stairwell, the seventh-floor corridor empty as usual.
I sat at the workbench and opened the notebook to the section I had been building since the conversation with Margaret in December about wax tablets and permanent inscription. The structure of the idea was this:
A permanent layer: carved rune circuit on a substrate, defining the underlying logic flow direction, containment, the basic operational rules. Fixed, reliable, the thing that does not change.
A variable layer: a secondary medium carrying runic inscriptions that can be altered or replaced without touching the permanent layer. The permanent layer defines what operations are available. The variable layer defines which are active and in what configuration.
To better visualize, think of a 3d printer where the permanent runes act like the hardware of the machine and the secondary layer acts as the variables and such which you alter to create something new.
The problem was that I had no analog for the variable layer in anything I had access to. The temporal notation volumes addressed a different problem entirely. The ward construction text mentioned modular rune arrays but described physical modularity different carved sections assembled in different configurations which was a manufacturing approach and solved a different problem from what I was imagining. What I needed was something that could carry runic inscription and be re-inscribed without degrading the substrate.
Potentially a liquid that dried to a conducting state. Potentially a surface that accepted magical impression directly. The Potions connection was obvious Ligatura Solutio, or something like it, modified to carry inscription rather than bind potion components but that was years away in terms of what I was capable of preparing.
I wrote: Long-term project. Three years minimum. Keep the structure in the notebook. Begin the permanent layer work now and develop the capability for the variable layer as the Potions and alchemy knowledge improves.
Then I turned to the shorter-term problem: the carving itself, and how to make it faster and more precise.
The idea for the carving tool had been developing since November, arriving in pieces. The core was simple: if manual carving with a knife was slow and imprecise, build something that was not. A levitated cutting element, controlled by intent rather than by hand steadiness, driven by the Impulsus Moderatus to maintain consistent depth and force.
I had three problems: drift in the levitation, force magnitude calibration, and the control system how the tool knew where to cut.
The control system, when I thought about it from the right angle, was the answer to its own question. In engineering terms, it was asking who provides the path guidance. The answer was the caster. The caster already provided path guidance in every wand movement they made, in every dueling footwork drill, in every sustained levitation exercise. The tool was not an autonomous machine. The tool was an extension of the caster's existing precision, the same way a good straight-edge extends what a carpenter can draw. The caster's intent governed direction. The tool maintained depth and force. Between them, the channel was cleaner than either could produce alone.
For future purposes, there are two main objectives I have pondered on. One is this printer which can carve runes for me and it was born of another idea. If I could create a standard coding language in runes, the possibilities would be endless.
You see, I need a way to standardize runes, to make sure nobody can copy my creations, and how to best do this? If I did have a code for runes (magic in writing essentially), then the precision necessary for advanced applications would be far harder as the resolution of runes, and their sizes would greatly increase and decrease respectively. For example, say I want to create a device which can fly autonomously. It must be able to fly (which is fairly simple with brooms as an existing creation) but also needs to be able to respond to air pressure, height, coordinates, etc. The more information needed to process, the more compact runes are, especially on smaller devices which don't have much space to carve.
Another thing is how to inscribe runes autonomously? Well, if I put in a template and set the machine to work, I think a laser carver would be the best bet long term. That's not even mentioning the amount of enchanting, alchemy, spellwork, and so much more I may need to learn.
So, I set out to make a rudimentary rune carving tool that could help me out for the time being, something easier to use than a knife.
The first practical test was in early February, after days of preliminary work that felt more like debugging a stubborn machine than practicing magic. Once I had the pen‑nib tool assembled and the boxwood set on the table, the Room seemed to hold its breath with me. I lifted the tool, steadied the levitation field, and began.
On the first attempt, the force was too high; the nib shot across the surface in a wild, skidding arc that looked like a signature forged by someone fleeing the scene. I winced, reset, and tried again. The second attempt barely scratched the wood, the nib whispering across the grain like it was afraid to commit. The third attempt started well, good depth & clean entry, until my attention drifted a fraction of a second too early and the cut faded into nothing halfway through, as if the tool had simply lost interest. I muttered at it, knowing full well the problem was me.
Time blurred into a sequence of failures, each one distinct enough to be memorable. One cut curved left when my focus flickered; another bounced in a dotted line when the levitation and force spells tangled like crossed wires. Once, the nib dug deeper and deeper as I overcorrected, carving a trench that would have embarrassed a first‑year woodcarver. Another time, the corner turn hesitated, leaving a tiny, mocking divot that seemed to say, really? that's your best? I kept adjusting the force magnitude, mental pacing, the angle of intention, each attempt a tiny patch on the last bug.
Somewhere around the thirtieth try, I realized the same mistake kept haunting me: I was ending the spell where I wanted the cut to end, which meant the magic stopped early. So I wrote it down, extend the mental path past the endpoint, aim beyond the target, don't let the spell die before the tool does. It felt ridiculous, but magic often rewards the ridiculous.
When I tried again, something finally aligned. The levitation held steady, the force pressed true, and the mental path stretched cleanly through the wood. The nib glided forward in a smooth, confident line, turned the corner without complaint, and finished with a depth so consistent it looked machined. I lifted the boxwood to the room's steady light and checked the channel. Less than half a millimeter of variation. A corner sharper than anything I'd ever cut by hand.
After all the failures, all the drift and wobble and overthinking, the tool worked. And for the first time, it felt like it wasn't fighting me, a miracle!
Thomas found me in the common room that evening when I came back. He was at the table with Eleanor, working through what appeared to be a Charms problem set, though from the diagram Thomas had drawn on his practice parchment it had turned into a diagram of something else entirely, involving arrows and a set of concentric circles that bore no obvious relationship to Charms.
"How was it?" he said, when I sat down.
"The tool works," I said. "First version."
He looked up from the diagram. "The rune carving tool."
"Yes."
"And it is better than the knife?"
"Considerably. The channels are cleaner. The corners are far more accurate, though there's still much more room for improvement."
Thomas looked at this information and appeared to file it under things he did not fully understand but was prepared to believe. "Good," he said. He went back to the diagram.
Margaret set down her quill and looked at the four of us. "It is the twenty-second of January," she said. "There are eight weeks and two days before the tournament. We have decided on a practice schedule. We have the courtyard on Tuesday evenings, the practice room on Thursdays, and Wardlaw's consultation on Fridays." She looked at the timetable she had pulled from her coat pocket. "On weekends we have the work assignments, which do not end until April, and the preparation reading for each class, which also does not end until April. I want us to be clear about what the available time actually is, because agreeing to something we cannot sustain is worse than agreeing to something smaller."
"And on Sunday mornings before chapel," Eleanor said, which surprised me a little. She looked at the three of us. "There is usually two hours before the midday meal when there is nothing scheduled. I should like to use it for individual practice rather than letting it go to nothing."
"Chapel?" Thomas said.
"I attend chapel on Sunday mornings," Eleanor said, with the straightforward simplicity of someone explaining a fact about themselves rather than making a declaration. "My aunt taught me. Before that, my parents. I do not intend to stop."
Thomas absorbed this. "I did not know that."
"There are many things people do not know about each other," Eleanor said, mildly. "It seemed worth mentioning since it sets a time constraint on Sunday."
I said my prayer in the mornings and sometimes the evenings, and had since before arriving here. Eleanor and I had never discussed it directly, but the fact of it had been visible in small ways, and she had apparently noticed. She gave me a brief look and went back to her problem set.
Thomas looked at me. "Thou dost too?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
He looked at Eleanor and me and then at Margaret. "Margaret?" he said.
"My mother kept the faith," she said. "I keep it in my own way." She looked at the timetable. "The schedule," she said, which ended the inquiry for the moment, though Thomas was clearly filing information and would return to it later.
February settled into the pattern that February in Scotland generally chose: cold, gray, and occasionally blowing something horizontally that was technically precipitation but needed a more specific word than rain. The outer ward managed an inch of wet snow on three separate occasions, melting each time before accumulating to anything interesting. Thomas ran footwork drills in all three snowfalls, which the rest of us watched from the covered walkway with varying degrees of appreciation.
The academic pace had found its term rhythm by the second week of February. The Charms work had moved from sustained levitation into Impulsus Continuum, the sustained-force variant of the controlled push. I had been applying the continuous-force principle to the carving tool for three weeks already, and managing it in class presented no particular difficulty as a result. I said nothing about this, on the grounds that explaining it would have required explaining the tool, which would have required explaining the rune work, and the rune work in its current state was not something I was prepared to discuss in a classroom that included several Slytherin students who would have questions I was not ready to answer.
The Transfiguration session in the second week introduced Forma Lignum, the structural wood-shaping spell. Professor Blackwood demonstrated on a piece of rough timber from the supply box, setting it on the stand and looking at it for a moment before casting a complete moment, the way she always looked at things before transforming them, as though she was making a decision rather than going through a preparation.
The timber's surface smoothed at one end into a flat plane and rounded at the other into a curved edge. She showed the joint fit: the spell trimmed the end to a specific angle, and she pressed it against another piece of timber to show the fit was clean. It was.
"Practical Transfiguration," she said. "The wood remains wood and only the form is restructured. The applications in construction and repair are evident. This term, you will develop precision sufficient to produce joints, flat surfaces, and curved elements. By April, the standard is repeatability. If I ask for the same shape twice, I expect the same shape twice."
Thomas had his hand up before she finished.
"Yes," she said.
"Can it be applied to stone?" he said.
Blackwood regarded him for a moment. "Forma Lignum is specific to organic cellulose structures," she said. "Stone requires a different spell family. Thy question contains a more general inquiry about structural Transfiguration and martial applications, which is a legitimate academic subject." She paused. "The answer is yes, and we will not be covering it this term."
Thomas looked briefly disappointed. Then he settled, which meant he had understood what she was actually telling him, which was that the subject existed and the library had texts on it and there was nothing stopping him from investigating outside of class.
After the session, in the corridor: "The library," he said to me.
"Third shelf on the left of the restricted alcove entrance," I said. "The section on applied Transfiguration. There is a volume on structural modification in conflict contexts."
He stared at me. "Thou hast already read it."
"I had a quiet three weeks over Christmas," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. "Nicholas," he said. "What do you do when thou art not doing the things the rest of us know about?"
"Read, mostly," I said.
He seemed to find this both completely believable and slightly worrying. "Right," he said, and went to supper. My persuasion skill just leveled up!
The exercise for Forma Lignum that day was a basic joint: produce a flat board from rough timber, produce a rounded dowel from a different piece, trim the dowel to fit a hole cut in the board. Two pieces held together by the dowel.
I managed the board and the dowel cleanly. The trimming was harder than it looked, requiring small incremental applications while keeping the target shape in mind across repeated passes. By the third attempt at the trim I had the dowel to within a fraction of the right dimensions.
Blackwood came by my station, looked at the joint, and pressed two fingers against the dowel to test the resistance. "A gap," she said. "Small. The trim went short on the final pass. Check the geometry before the final application." She moved on.
I looked at the gap. She was right. The final pass had trimmed from the wrong starting point because I had not checked where I was before cutting. An engineering mistake: confirm the tool position before you move, not after. The same thing had happened in the second attempt with the carving tool.
The next attempt had no gap. The trimming was cleaner and the joint fit without play. Blackwood did not stop at my station on her second circuit.
Sitting next to me, Thomas had produced a joint that was slightly off-angle the dowel fitted but the board and the opposing timber were not quite parallel, which meant the joint would have a lean if built into anything real.
"The angle is wrong," I said.
He looked at it. "I know." He ran his thumb along the gap at the top of the joint. "Two degrees, maybe."
"More like four," I said.
He looked at it again. "Three," he said.
"Are you measuring or estimating?"
He looked at the joint. Then at me. "Estimating," he said.
"Four," I said.
He cast Forma Lignum again and adjusted. The joint came out straight. He pressed the two pieces together and checked the fit. "Three and a half," he said.
"You adjusted for four and got three and a half," I said. "That is close enough."
He looked satisfied. Close enough was an acceptable result for Thomas when the alternative was spending another five minutes arguing about half a degree.
March came in from the north with the specific intention of demonstrating that February's brief easing had been just that. The first week brought heavy snow that closed the outer ward to student access for two days and filled the kitchen gardens' cover with enough weight to require the house-elves' intervention. The castle's heating system, strained by the cold, produced an intermittent clicking in the east dormitory staircase pipe that the maintenance crew spent three days investigating and declared "resolved" without elaborating on what had been wrong, which the portraits in the east corridor found deeply interesting and discussed among themselves for a week.
The academic pace in March reflected the calendar. The tournament was in April. The term examinations followed two weeks after. The material being covered in every class was reaching the stage where new things were introduced regardless of difficulty, because the second-year curriculum required them and the curriculum did not negotiate.
Transfiguration had moved from structural wood shaping into the first work on stone modification, which Blackwood had described as a different order of difficulty and had not been understating. The stone resisted the spell in a way wood did not, requiring sustained intent at a level that was noticeably more demanding, and the results were slower and less precise. I managed the first exercise by softening a small piece of limestone's surface to accept a carved mark on the fourth attempt. Thomas managed it on the third, which he did not mention but which I noticed.
Charms had reached Structura Revelare, which the class was treating as new material. For me, it was simply the formal version of something I had been piecing together on my own since the previous autumn, and the structured instruction filled in several gaps I hadn't realized were missing, especially Ashford's explanation of the underlying surface‑mapping principle. He laid it out more clearly than anything I had read, and the moment he connected it to Transfiguration theory, I could see exactly how it applied to the channel‑precision problem in the carving tool.
In the third week of March, a week before the tournament, I ran the first complete test sequence on the boxwood piece.
I had spent four weeks of Tuesday and Thursday evenings carving a full three-rune sequence of Fehu, Kenaz, Thurisaz using the tool rather than the knife. The channels were cleaner than anything I had produced by hand. The corners were accurate to within what I estimated as a quarter millimeter. The containment ring was a continuous arc without the slight wobble that the knife's grain-catch had produced in every previous version on pine. The hybrid containment geometry was the most demanding of the cuts and had taken the most attempts: the continuous arc required holding the force application level through a full curve, which was different from holding it through a straight line in the same way that walking in a circle differs from walking in a straight line even at the same pace.
I activated the Fehu rune.
Kenaz warmed in four seconds. Even distribution across the disc, the pattern I recognized from two years of similar tests. Thurisaz produced a faint warmth at ten seconds, consistent with the best results from the hand-carved hybrid containment on pine.
Duration at Kenaz: twenty-one seconds. Three seconds longer than any previous result from this circuit type.
I held the disc in my palm until the warmth faded, then set it on the workbench.
The cleaner channel geometry was producing better results. The tool was the reason the channel geometry was cleaner. The tool worked well enough to improve the output of the rune system in a measurable way. The causal chain was closed.
I wrote in the notebook: March, third week. First complete rune circuit produced by tool-assisted method. Fehu-Kenaz-Thurisaz, hybrid containment geometry. Kenaz duration: 21 seconds. Previous best from hand-carved hybrid on pine: 18 seconds. Thurisaz terminal response: faint warmth at 10 seconds. Consistent with best hand-carved results. The tool is the correct direction.
I closed the notebook and cleaned the workbench. Outside, the Scottish March was doing what March did, which was not much different from what January and February had done, though the light through the Room's high window lasted a little longer in the evenings now, the days stretching out by a few minutes each week, not enough to feel like much but enough to notice when you were looking.
Margaret had told me at supper that she wanted to review the sequencing exercises on Sunday. Thomas had said, over breakfast, "I am going to ask Pryce for a final footwork session and he will say yes," which was either confidence or the result of knowing Pryce well enough to predict his answers. Eleanor had been quiet on the tournament for the past two weeks, in the way she was quiet when she was preparing for something internally differently from Thomas's outward and energetic preparation, and differently from Margaret's documented and scheduled preparation, in the way that Eleanor specifically prepared, which was thorough and invisible and would be fully present when the day came.
The tournament was in seven days. The term before it had produced more than any single term was supposed to reasonably produce. The tool on the shelf in the room was cleaner than anything I had made with a knife.
I said the evening prayer in the chair, specific and full, thanking God for the twenty-one seconds and the clean corner on the Fehu mark and the four of us sitting at the Hufflepuff table having an argument about cheese that was not really about cheese at all.
Then I went downstairs to find Thomas awake and reading by the dormitory window, which was unusual enough that I looked at him twice.
"What are you reading?" I said.
He held up the volume. It was the section on structural Transfiguration in conflict contexts from the library. "Thy recommendation," he said. "From two months ago."
"You waited until the week before the tournament to read it," I said.
"I have been busy," he said.
"It will not help you in seven days," I said.
He lowered the book. "It might not be meant to help in seven days," he said. "It might just be interesting."
I looked at him for a moment. That was, in fact, a reasonable position. Reading something because it was interesting rather than because it was immediately useful was something Thomas had not done when I first knew him. A year and a half of being around books and people who treated reading as something other than a task had done something to him.
"Fair enough," I said.
He went back to his book. I changed into my night clothes in the dark and lay down and looked at the ceiling, where the beams of the Hufflepuff dormitory ran in the same pattern they had run since September of the year before.
The tournament was a week away. The term had been long and useful and was not done yet. The tool on the shelf in the Room was the first version of something that would, eventually, do what I needed it to do. The variable layer was still a future problem. The automated carving machine was a further future problem.
Sorry future me, but it ain't my problem..