He went into the garden that night.
Not for any particular reason — he had been sleeping well, the Burrow had that effect, of a house that knew how to hold people — but because the night garden in July was its own kind of room and he had been meaning to sit in it since he arrived.
He took the wolf carving Ginny had given him in March and sat on the back step.
It was a good carving. He had looked at it often enough to know all its angles — the posture patient and low, the wood worked to show the grain running along the line of the spine, the animal mid-rest rather than mid-motion. It was better than he had said when he received it. He had said thank you and she had said don't and that had been all, which was the correct exchange for the occasion, but the carving itself was extraordinary for someone who had taught themselves.
He had not asked how she had learned woodwork. He would have to ask.
'You're out here late.'
Ginny was in the doorway in her dressing gown, with the expression of someone who had woken up and come downstairs for water and found the garden door open. She looked at him on the step and at the carving in his hand.
'So are you,' he said.
She came and sat on the step beside him without asking, which was Ginny. She looked at the carving.
'I didn't know if you'd like it,' she said.
'You knew,' he said.
She looked sideways at him with the quality she had — the quick-assessing look that was very like their mother's but sharper at the edges, the look of someone who had spent years surrounded by people who underestimated her and had developed a specific attitude toward the experience.
'I thought the posture was right,' she said. 'Patient. Like it's watching something but it's not in a hurry.'
'It is right,' he said.
She seemed pleased to hear it, and seemed slightly annoyed at being pleased, which was also Ginny.
They sat for a moment in the garden dark. The Burrow made its nighttime sounds — the creak of the house, the distant hoot from the direction of the pond. The garden was silver and grey in the moonlight, the herb rows his mother kept in strict order looking almost architectural in the low light.
'Uganda,' Ginny said.
'Three weeks,' he said.
'What for?' she said. It was a direct question, asked with the quality of someone who had been thinking about it and had decided to ask rather than continue thinking about it.
'A school,' he said. 'Uagadou. Magical creatures, some Herbology. And practitioners I can learn things from that aren't available here.'
'What things?'
He thought about how to answer this. 'Ways of working with magic that the British tradition doesn't have,' he said. 'The animagus work, partially. And ritual practice that requires a different background than what the library at Hogwarts holds.'
Ginny was quiet for a moment. She was good at absorbing things — had learned it young, he suspected, from being the only girl in a house full of brothers, from finding that the way to get what she wanted was to understand the room she was in before she moved in it.
'You've been planning this for a while,' she said.
'Since last summer,' he said.
'Not since the Chamber,' she said.
'Also since the Chamber,' he said.
She looked at him. 'What happened to you in the tunnel?'
He had been asked this before, by Hermione, by his parents in their own oblique ways. He had answered with the partial truth and left space around it and that had been enough, for them, for now. Ginny was asking it differently — not as a question about what had changed but as a question she already had part of the answer to and wanted the rest.
'Something changed,' he said. 'The Lockhart spell hit differently than it should have. The effect was — not what he intended. I've been working with it since.'
'And it's why you're different,' she said. Not as accusation. As completion.
'Yes,' he said.
She sat with this for a moment. The garden was very quiet. In the pond the frogs were doing their nighttime thing, a low rhythmic sound that had always been part of what the Burrow smelled like in July.
'I'm going to ask you something,' Ginny said, 'and I want you to answer it honestly.'
'Alright,' he said.
'Are you going to be okay?' she said. 'Not this year. Not next year. Are you — the whole of it. Are you going to be okay.'
He looked at the carving in his hand. At the patient low shape of the wolf, the grain of the Mvule wood running along the spine.
He thought about the honest answer. Not the reassuring one — Ginny was asking for the honest one, had made that clear, and giving her a reassurance when she had asked for honesty would be a kind of dismissal.
'I think so,' he said. 'The work I've been doing is good work and it's going well and the people I have around me are the right ones. But I can't tell you there's no cost. There will be cost. There already is.'
She looked at him.
'Okay,' she said. It was said with the quality of someone filing the information and deciding what to do with it, which was not acceptance exactly but was something more useful. 'Then I'll be here,' she said. 'When the cost part happens. That's all.'
He looked at her.
'Thank you,' he said.
She stood, dusted off her dressing gown, and looked at the garden in the way she had of looking at things before she went back inside — taking a quick thorough inventory, as though checking that it was still itself.
'Bring something back from Uganda,' she said. 'Not for me. Just — bring something back.'
'I will,' he said.
She went back in. He sat on the step for a while longer in the July dark, with the wolf carving and the garden and the weight of a house full of people he was not going to let down,
and found that the weight of that, which could have been burden, was instead simply there — present and structural, the kind of thing that held you up if you let it.
He went in at midnight and slept without difficulty.
In the morning he began the meditation work.