Saturday was cold and clear, which was the best Hogsmeade weather — the kind that made the village look like itself rather than a grey approximation of itself.
He met her at the entrance to the grounds and they walked into the village with the slightly adjusted quality of two people who had been walking side by side for months and were now doing it as something other than simply friends. The adjustment was small. It was also perceptible, the way small true things were perceptible.
Their first stop was Tomes and Scrolls, because starting with a bookshop was the correct opening move — it gave her something to focus on that was not the new register of the occasion, which was the specific mercy of a good plan. She moved through the shelves with the quality she always had in bookshops, which was total absorption, and he moved with her and occasionally picked things up and occasionally put them back and once found something on the upper shelf that she had been looking for since October and handed it to her without comment.
She looked at the book. Then at him.
'How did you know I was looking for this?' she said.
'You mentioned it in November,' he said. 'And again in December. Third time was in January when you couldn't find it in the library.'
She held the book with the careful quality she used for things she intended to keep.
They spent forty minutes in Tomes and Scrolls. She bought three books. He bought one — the water-damaged journal's subject had sent him down a specific warding theory thread that had arrived, eventually, at a text he had not been able to find anywhere else.
From the bookshop they walked the long way to Honeydukes, which took them past the post office and the side street with the view toward the hills, which was the view he had wanted her to see in the specific winter light. She noticed it. She stopped walking.
'That's —' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
They stood for a moment. She had her books under her arm and her breath was visible in the cold air and she was looking at the hills with the quality she had when she found something genuinely beautiful, which was quiet and unhurried and not performed.
He did not take a photograph. He had the camera. He chose not to use it.
At Honeydukes he collected the order he had placed — a selection of things he had identified over the autumn as the specific ones she actually liked, as opposed to the ones she ate without comment. She looked at the bag and then at him with the expression she had when something accurate had been delivered and she was deciding what to do with it.
'You noticed,' she said.
'You always leave the sugar quills,' he said. 'And you take the chocolate cauldrons last, which means you're saving them.'
'That's very observant,' she said.
'You do the same thing with books,' he said. 'Save the best one for last.'
She looked at him for a moment with an expression he did not quite have a name for yet. It was new. He filed it for later.
Lunch at the Three Broomsticks was the easy part — two people who were already comfortable talking to each other, now talking at a table by a window with butterbeer and the Three Broomsticks' particular quality of ambient warmth. The conversation went in the directions it always went: a Runes problem she had been thinking about, something Babbling had said that week about pre-medieval variant systems, his thoughts on the warding theory he had been reading. Then sideways into things they had not talked about before — her parents' dental practice, the specific strangeness of growing up knowing magic existed and not being able to use it at home, the way she had felt in her first week at Hogwarts before she had understood that being very good at something did not automatically produce friendship.
He listened with the full attention he gave things that mattered. She talked with the ease of someone who had decided she was being heard.
At some point during the second butterbeer she said, 'I should tell you something.'
'Alright,' he said.
'I'd been thinking about this too,' she said. 'Since the dinner. The invitation card.' A pause, the quality of someone delivering accurate information and wanting it received accurately. 'I put it in my bookshelf.'
'I know,' he said.
She looked at him. 'Harry told you.'
'Harry mentioned it,' he said. 'I'd already guessed.'
She absorbed this. Then she said, 'I'm not very good at — this. At the beginning of things. I'm better when I know what the shape is.'
'The shape is,' he said, 'that we're having lunch and it's going well and we'll figure out the rest as it comes. There's no requirement to have it mapped out immediately.'
She looked at him with the expression he did not have a name for, a little more of it this time.
'You're very calm about this,' she said.
'One of us should be,' he said.
She laughed — the real one. It had warmth in it and relief in it and something that was simply glad, and he received all three and did not comment on any of them.
They walked back to the castle in the late afternoon with the bags of books between them, shoulders occasionally touching in the particular way of people who were negotiating new proximity and had not yet established its natural distance. Near the gates she stopped and turned to him.
'This was good,' she said. 'The whole thing. It was very you.'
'Specific,' he said.
'Yes,' she said. 'Specific.' The not-yet-named expression again, settled now, less new. 'I'd like to do it again.'
'Next Hogsmeade weekend,' he said.
'Yes,' she said.
They went through the gates. He thought: good. He thought: this is what the year has been building toward, among other things. He thought about the invitation card on her shelf between books and found the image carried something he could not fully articulate and did not try to.