Uagadou was an hour from Kampala by enchanted transport — a vehicle that moved through the traffic of the city and then through the green of the countryside beyond with the quality of something that had its own logic.
The school revealed itself gradually: first as a presence in the air, a thickening of ambient magic that his perceptual work over the past months let him feel more clearly than he might have otherwise. Then as shapes in the mist that covered the mountainside — towers, not the Gothic spires of Hogwarts but something lower and wider, built into the rock rather than rising from it, the architecture of a place that had decided to be part of the mountain rather than imposed upon it.
Professor Nalwanga met him at the gate.
She was a small woman, perhaps sixty, with the quality of someone who had been paying attention to the world for a long time and had found the habit useful. She had read his letter — the one he had sent in Luganda in February — and her reception had the warmth of someone who had been pleasantly surprised and had not forgotten it.
'You wrote to us in Luganda,' she said, in Luganda, looking at him with the assessing quality of someone confirming a hypothesis.
'It seemed polite,' he said, in Luganda.
Her expression shifted slightly — an educator who had just realised a student was going to be interesting.
'Come,' she said. 'I'll show you the school.'
Uagadou was not Hogwarts. This was the first and most important thing to understand. Where Hogwarts had accumulated — centuries of additions and the specific character of a building that had been many things to many people — Uagadou had a singular quality, the coherence of a place that had known what it was from the beginning. The corridors were wide and lit by something that was not quite torches, the classrooms opened onto the mountainside in a way that meant the boundary between inside and outside was more negotiable than at Hogwarts.
The magic was different too. Not better or worse — different. Less pointed than the concentrated European style, more ambient, the way weather was different from a tap. It moved through the building the way light moved through water, present everywhere and sourceless.
He would be attending three classes: Magical Creatures, Herbology, and the advanced practical sessions covering what Uagadou called integrated spellwork — the wand-free techniques that were the school's particular tradition. Outside of these he would have access to the school's library and the two practitioners who had agreed to work with him on the animagus transformation and the broader ritual question.
'The transformation practitioners,' Nalwanga said, stopping at a door that had the quality of somewhere important. 'They have reviewed your letters and your preliminary meditation notes, which you sent in February.'
'I sent those as context,' he said. 'Not to impress.'
'I know,' she said. 'They know. That is why they agreed to take you.' She knocked and opened the door.
The room inside had two people in it.
The first was a man of approximately seventy — tall even sitting, with the specific stillness of someone for whom stillness was a practice rather than a default. He was introduced as Ssemakula, and he had the quality of the best teachers Ron had encountered: present without performing presence, interested without performing interest.
The second was a woman perhaps ten years younger, with the quick assessing attention of someone who had spent a career reading people. Her name was Adaeze, and she was Nigerian — here as a visiting practitioner. She had the manner of someone who had come because the work was interesting and for no other reason.
Ron sat down across from them.
'The wolf,' Ssemakula said. In English, which surprised him. 'You've seen it clearly?'
'Since March,' Ron said. 'Large. Grey. Patient.'
'Patient,' Adaeze said. She had a way of isolating words that made them carry more weight. 'Wolves in the tradition are many things. Patient is not always what they present.'
'It looked back at me,' Ron said. 'Without urgency. It was waiting rather than hunting.'
Ssemakula and Adaeze exchanged a look.
'We begin tomorrow,' Ssemakula said. 'You understand what the first stage requires?'
'To go deep enough that the animal becomes real rather than imagined,' Ron said.
'Deeper than that,' Adaeze said. 'The image you already have. The first stage is not finding the image. It is finding what the image costs.' She looked at him. 'The animal is a part of you. Not a pleasant part, necessarily. A true part. The meditation goes until you have sat with the truth of it long enough that you have stopped flinching.'
'How long does it take, typically?' he said.
'For most students, four to six days,' Ssemakula said. 'For students who have been practising Occlumency for a sustained period —' he paused, 'sometimes shorter. The Occlumency gives you the stillness. Whether it gives you the honesty is a different question.'
'I'll find out,' Ron said.