Sebastian was waiting in the Undercroft on Wednesday evening when Rowan came down the stairs. He was sitting on the trunk in the corner with his wand across his knees and his legs stretched out in front of him. Ominis was in his chair. Anne wasn't there.
"You look like you fought something," Sebastian said.
Rowan's arm was still tender under the sleeve and he'd been favouring it without realizing. "Beasts project. One of the Kneazles bit me."
"Kneazles don't leave swelling like that. My aunt kept them." Sebastian didn't push it. "Sit down. I want to talk about the championship before we spar."
Rowan sat on the edge of the duelling platform. The Undercroft was warm and dry and the light from the sconces threw long shadows that shifted when the flames moved.
"I won the first round," Sebastian said. "Boy from Beauxbatons. He was good but he telegraphed his Stunners and I read his patterns inside the first minute. Caught him with a Disarmer through a feint, same combination we practiced."
"How did the nonverbal casting hold up?"
"It didn't. Not reliably. I threw two silent spells in the first match and one of them fizzled. The other connected but the Beauxbatons boy didn't even react to it, which tells me it wasn't strong enough to register." He turned his wand over in his hands. "The second round was a fourth-year from Durmstrang. She was faster than anyone I've ever fought except you and Hecat. She had this thing where she feinted left with her body and cast right, and I kept falling for it even after I'd spotted the pattern because the timing was so tight I couldn't override the instinct."
"How long did it last?"
"About four minutes. She put me down with a chain I didn't see building. Body-Bind into a Disarmer into something that felt like getting hit with a wall." Sebastian's jaw worked. "Clean loss. I didn't have an answer for her and she knew it from the second exchange."
Ominis spoke from his chair. "He's been insufferable about it since August. I told him losing a round at an international championship is a respectable result for a third-year and he looked at me like I'd suggested he take up knitting."
"It is a respectable result," Rowan said.
"I know it is." Sebastian stood up and stepped onto the platform. "But the Durmstrang girl was using techniques I've never seen and I couldn't adapt fast enough, and that's the part I keep going over. I want to be faster at reading new patterns. That's what I want to work on tonight."
Rowan stood up too. He could work with that. They'd spent enough time sparring that Sebastian's combat instincts were sharp, but the tournament had shown him the limits of drilling against the same opponent. He needed unfamiliar sequences. New angles.
"Throw things at me I haven't seen before," Sebastian said. "Don't be predictable. Don't be nice about it."
"When have I been nice about it?"
Sebastian grinned. It was the old grin, the competitive one, and for a moment the weight of the championship loss wasn't sitting on his shoulders. "Fair point. Your go."
They duelled for an hour. Rowan threw combinations he hadn't used before in the Undercroft, spell sequences built from what he'd watched the attackers do in the shop. Overlapping angles, pressure from unexpected directions, chains designed to force the opponent into responding to the wrong threat. He softened them for sparring but kept the underlying logic. Sebastian struggled with the first few exchanges and then started adapting, and by the end of the hour he was reading Rowan's feints two out of three times.
Ominis called out adjustments from his chair. "Your left side is open every time you throw the curved Flipendo. Sebastian, you're leaning into your dodges. Stay centred."
They finished drenched in sweat and breathing hard. Sebastian sat on the platform edge and drank from a water flask and didn't say anything for a while.
"The Durmstrang girl," he said eventually. "Her name was Katrin. After the match she shook my hand and told me I was the best third-year she'd faced. I wanted to hate her for it but she meant it, and that made it worse somehow."
"It made it worse because you wanted her to dismiss you," Ominis said. "That would have been easier to be angry about."
Sebastian looked at Ominis with something between annoyance and recognition. "I really wish you'd stop doing that."
"Doing what?"
"Being right about things I haven't figured out yet."
Ominis's expression didn't change but something around his mouth suggested he was pleased.
Rowan packed up his things. At the base of the stairs he turned back. "Sebastian. The shop attack over the summer. The people who came after me."
Sebastian's face changed. He'd heard about it, everyone had heard about it, but they hadn't discussed it directly.
"The magic they used was old. Dark." Rowan looked at Ominis. "One of the attackers used a word to collapse the anti-Apparation ward. Every body in the room, conscious or not, Apparated simultaneously."
Ominis was very still.
"I need to know if you've ever heard of anything like that."
The Undercroft was quiet except for the sconces. Ominis turned his wand between his fingers, a slow rotation, and Rowan could see him choosing what to say.
"There are old families who pass down certain invocations. They predate modern spellwork by centuries, maybe longer. They're tied to blood and lineage, and they work through the caster's connection to their family line." His voice was careful but he wasn't evading. He was describing something he knew about from the inside. "The Gaunts had them. My father used one once in front of me when I was young. A single word that sealed every door in the manor at once. I remember the feel of it. Something pulling in the air, as though the magic wasn't coming from his wand but from the stone of the house itself."
"Could you identify which families would have that kind of magic?"
"Not from a description. The invocations are specific to each bloodline. But one word moving multiple bodies over distance through an active anti-Apparation ward?" Ominis turned his head slightly, an unconscious gesture that oriented his hearing. "That's ancestral magic. Pureblood, almost certainly, and one of the older lineages at that. The Blacks, the Lestranges, the Selwyns, the Gaunts. Possibly others."
"Not the Gaunts," Rowan said. "You'd have heard something."
"No. Not the Gaunts." Ominis's voice was quiet. "But I can listen. My family may be estranged from me but they talk, and they talk loudly, and they assume a blind boy in the corner isn't paying attention."
Sebastian had been watching this exchange with an expression Rowan couldn't read. He spoke now, and his voice had lost its competitive edge entirely. "This is about the people who tried to kill you."
"Yes."
"Then I'll help however I can." Sebastian met his eyes. "You taught me nonverbal casting when you didn't have to. You gave me the championship spot. Whatever you need, ask."
Rowan nodded. He went up the stairs.