The Hogwarts Express pulled into Hogsmeade as the sun dropped behind the mountains. Rowan carried his trunk in his right hand. His left still wouldn't grip properly in the cold.
He told them on the train. Edmund and Poppy hadn't heard the details, only the Prophet article and what Lawrence had written over the summer, and it was Lawrence who finally said "Just tell them" somewhere north of York. So Rowan did. He told it the way you tell something you've already told three times to people with clipboards. When he finished, Poppy was wiping her face with her sleeve and Edmund was looking at the floor like it owed him money. Iris had turned toward the window at some point during the telling and hadn't turned back.
Lawrence sat through all of it without moving.
Later, while Iris slept against the glass, Edmund told Rowan that her parents had nearly pulled her from Hogwarts. Her father still wouldn't talk about the attack. Her mother had spent weeks convincing him to let Iris return.
"I heard from Poppy," Edmund said. "On the platform. Iris told her things she didn't put in letters." He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve. "Her dad wouldn't even come to King's Cross. Her mum brought her."
The thestrals pulled their carriage up the hill. Edmund talked about his summer, his mother taking him to Cork to see relatives, how he'd accidentally set his cousin's curtains on fire trying to demonstrate the Lumos charm. Rowan let the words wash over him.
Weasley was waiting in the entrance hall. She got him into an alcove and cast a privacy charm, and the brisk efficiency of it told Rowan she'd been planning this interception since his name appeared on the Express manifest.
"The Healers' report came by owl. I want to hear it from you."
He gave her the short version. Two more weeks on the potion. Left hand still unreliable.
She handed him a folded parchment. "The Headmistress has offered accommodations if you need time."
"No."
She looked at him for a moment. Whatever she saw, she let it go. "Feast in ten minutes."
Rowan and Lawrence unpacked in the third-year dormitory while Hector Fawley tried to convince Lawrence to try out for the Ravenclaw Quidditch team.
"Tell him he's wrong," Hector said to Rowan. He'd arrived carrying a stack of tryout fliers and an expression of deep personal conviction.
"He's not wrong. I've seen him on a broom."
Lawrence threw a sock at his head. Hector looked personally betrayed and spent the next five minutes talking about how Poppy Sweeting was trying out for Beater despite being, in his words, built like a fence post, and how Imelda Reyes had told him she was going to flatten whoever Ravenclaw put up as Seeker.
Hector continued in this vein while they finished unpacking, covering the tryout schedule, his predictions for each house team, and his ongoing campaign to get Amit Thakkar to attend a match without bringing a book. Lawrence folded his robes and stacked his textbooks and let Hector talk, and Rowan noticed that he was checking his book bag for the third time, the same way he used to check it before exams. His hands were steady. His face was somewhere else.
Rowan sat beside Iris at the feast. She presssed her shoulder against his for a second and then reached for the water jug.
"Ricketts predicted the end of the world four times last year," Hector announced from down the table, to nobody in particular. "The seventh years are running a book on which month she picks next."
"Who's Ricketts?" Iris asked.
"Divination," Hector said, as though this explained everything.
After the feast, Rowan lay in bed with the ritual manual under his pillow. Hector was snoring already. Lawrence was still reading, pages turning at regular intervals, and the sound of it was familiar enough that it should have been comforting. The moonstone was the only piece he couldn't get. He went over the preparation sequence again anyway, the way you'd keep checking a locked door even though you know it's locked.
He stared at the ceiling until Lawrence put his book down and blew out the candle. Neither of them said goodnight. They hadn't since August.
The first week of classes settled into a pattern. The core curriculum confirmed what Rowan already suspected about the third-year level, and he spent most of those lessons on nonverbal practice or reading the ritual manual behind a textbook cover. The new electives were where the work was.
But Defence Against the Dark Arts came first, and it came with a Boggart.
Hecat had them line up and face it one at a time. A Gryffindor girl got a spider and put it on roller skates. A Ravenclaw boy got a banshee and took its voice away. Edmund got an exam paper marked Troll and turned it into a paper dart that sailed into the wall.
Iris went up.
The trunk opened and Rowan was lying dead on a stone floor. Blood pooling under him. Eyes open and empty. The Boggart had gotten the details right, the angle of his arms, the colour of his robes. It looked like a body. It looked like him.
The class went quiet.
Iris raised her wand. Her hand was steady but her voice wasn't, quite. "Riddikulus." The dead Rowan sat up and sneezed so hard a pair of glasses flew off his face. He didn't wear glasses. The absurdity caught and the class laughed and the Boggart retreated back into the trunk.
She stepped back into line and didn't look at him. Her hands were shaking. She put them in her pockets.
When Rowan's turn came he walked up with his Occlumency locked tight. He was curious what the Boggart would find. His worst fear had shifted over the summer, rearranged by violence and everything that came after, and he didn't know what shape it had settled into.
The Boggart shifted. What stepped out of the trunk was Rowan.
Older. Maybe twenty. Same face, but the expression was wrong. The eyes were flat and empty and they looked at the real Rowan the way you'd look at something stuck to your shoe. He held a wand in one hand. The other was stained dark. His posture said he'd been standing like this for a long time and nothing had bothered him in years.
Someone in the back row inhaled.
Rowan cast Riddikulus without speaking. The older version tripped over an untied shoelace, landed face-first in a puddle that hadn't been there a moment ago, and came up sputtering with a frog on his head. The class laughed. The Boggart collapsed into smoke.
He walked back to the line. Hecat watched him from the front of the room.
After class Iris fell into step beside him in the corridor. They walked for a while. She was chewing the inside of her cheek.
"Don't become that," she said at the junction where their paths split.
She turned left toward the library. Rowan turned right toward Ancient Runes.
Fenwick opened his first lesson by drawing two runes on the board, Ansuz and Isa, and asking what would happen if you carved them side by side. Three students offered answers. Fenwick listened to each one and then said "No."
"Two valid runes," he said. "No magical effect. Why?" He waited. Nobody had an answer. "Because runes are not spells. You cannot line them up like words in a sentence and expect meaning. Different system entirely. By June you'll understand how the system actually works. For now, copy both runes and list every association from chapter one. We'll spend the next three lessons discovering why all of those associations are inadequate."
He put the chalk down and sat on the edge of his desk and waited while they wrote.
Rowan had been using runes for two years. Luminaires, ward arrays, a summer of advanced work with Nicholas Flamel. He'd built functional products and sold them and they worked and he'd assumed that meant he understood the underlying principles. Over the following weeks, Fenwick took apart even basic pairings in ways that showed him otherwise. The Isa-Thurisaz interaction he'd been using in his window wards had a calibration problem he'd been compensating for by trial and error all summer. Fenwick identified the resonance pattern in the third lesson and solved it on the board in four lines of chalk.
Beasts was Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff, which meant Edmund and Poppy were in the section. Howan had set up at a table near the paddock at the edge of the Forest. On the table were three wicker crates, and from inside them came sounds: a low purring from one, a series of sharp clicks from another, and from the third, a noise that sounded like a very small person grumbling about the weather.
"Right," Howan said. "Who can tell me the difference between a Kneazle and a housecat?"
Poppy's hand went up so fast she nearly hit the boy standing next to her. "Kneazles have a lion-like tail, spotted or speckled coat, and large ears. They're exceptionally intelligent, rated XXX by the Ministry, and they can detect untrustworthy individuals. Crossbreeding with domestic cats produces half-Kneazles, which is where most of the magical cat population actually comes from, because purebred Kneazles require a licence under the —"
"Thank you, Miss Sweeting." Howan opened the first crate. A tawny, speckle-coated creature the size of a large cat stepped out onto the table, surveyed the class with an expression of withering appraisal, and sat down. Its tail, lion-tufted at the tip, flicked once. "This is Mab. She doesn't like most of you. Don't take it personally."
Mab looked at the class. Her gaze stopped on one Ravenclaw boy, lingered, and moved on. The boy went red.
"Kneazles can tell when someone's lying to them," Howan said. "They can tell when someone's hiding something. They can tell when someone's afraid, and they can smell an Animagus at fifty yards. They're also extremely particular about who handles them and they bite when they're unhappy. Miss Sweeting, feed her."
Poppy approached with a piece of dried fish from the supply table. Mab sniffed her hand, considered the offering, and accepted it with dignity. Then she butted her head against Poppy's wrist.
"That means she likes you," Howan said. "It won't happen for most of you. Mr. Ashcroft, you're next."
Rowan held out his hand. Mab sniffed it. The sniffing went on for longer than it had with Poppy, the Kneazle's whiskers brushing his knuckles, her ears flattened forward in concentration. Then she sneezed directly onto his fingers and turned her back on him.
"That's not bad," Howan said. "That's neutral. She'll come around. Or she won't. Mr. Haggarty."
Edmund approached with a piece of fish and the enthusiasm of a person who had no idea what was about to happen. Mab looked at him, looked at the fish, stood up, walked across the table, and climbed into his lap.
"She never does that," Howan said, and looked genuinely surprised.
Edmund froze with both hands in the air, the fish dangling from his fingers, and a Kneazle purring in his lap. "What do I do?"
"Feed her the fish and don't move."
Poppy spent the rest of the lesson moving between the three crates, asking Howan questions that went so far beyond the curriculum he eventually told her to come back after class and they'd talk properly. She came back looking like she might burst.
"He asked if I'd be interested in helping with the breeding programme," she told Edmund on the way back to the castle. "He said most third-years can't tell a Kneazle from a cat and he needs someone who actually knows what they're doing."
"That's brilliant," Edmund said.
Poppy grabbed his arm and squeezed it.
Rowan spent most of History of Magic reading the ritual manual behind a Potions textbook cover while Binns drifted through the Statute of Secrecy. Half the class was asleep. Iris was taking notes with the focused determination of someone who refused to let a ghost bore her into submission.
Binns caught him not paying attention.
"Mr. Ashcroft. The primary goblin objection to the 1692 Statute."
Rowan closed the manual under the textbook. "They weren't consulted. The Statute was negotiated entirely by wizards and the goblin clans only learned about it after ratification. They argued they'd been bound by terms they hadn't agreed to."
"Correct. Five points to Ravenclaw." Binns turned back to the blackboard without waiting to see if there was more.
Iris kicked Rowan's ankle under the desk. He went back to the manual.