Chapter 187: The Woman Who Vanished

⟦The library was almost empty when they reached it, and the frustration came off them the moment the eggs were on the table.⟧ The anger came off their faces and left a sort of tired frustration sitting in its place.

"Don't ask," Harry said, pulling a face. "We had it open half the night in the Gryffindor common room, and there is nothing inside it but screaming. It goes straight through your ears and there is not one usable sound anywhere in it."

Cedric turned his own egg over in his hands. "Mine is the same. I slowed it with a freezing charm and then amplified it, and when neither worked I carried it down to the lake in case being near water made any difference to it. It screams in exactly the same way every time, with no pattern in it that I could find from any angle."

 

"We tried it in the dark, sealed inside a box, and under simulated pressure and temperature," Hermione added. "Translation charms, decoding charms, nothing. It does not match any language or any known magical signal, and as far as I can tell it is simply noise, which is the part that bothers me."

Edward considered the pair of them sitting there side by side, giving nothing away to anybody.

"Both eggs behave identically," he said slowly, "so whatever the answer turns out to be, it is not hidden in the difference between them. It is a method, and it is the same method for every champion, which means somebody has written it down. Let us go up to the library and look for a task that needed a condition rather than a spell."

Nobody argued with him. They left the paper where it lay and went up together.

They took a corner table beside the window and set the two eggs in the middle of it. The sunlight came across the shells and lit the patterns from the side, so that where the lines crossed there was the faint suggestion of markings underneath, far too worn to read.

Hermione went off between the shelves at once, while Harry and Cedric opened both eggs together out of stubbornness rather than hope. The two screams laid over one another made something considerably worse than either had managed alone, and they shut them again in a hurry.

Edward's gaze drifted across the table and settled on Adeline.

She was a Shacklebolt, and so had his mother been, and the whole quiet weight of that sat on his chest every time the two of them spoke. There was a great deal he wanted to ask and no safe way of asking any of it. His parents had never allowed their story to be known, and he had inherited the silence along with everything else they left him.

He turned it over for a long moment. Then, with the library hushed around them and the others buried in their pages, he spoke lightly, in the manner of a man raising a small academic curiosity.

"Adeline, the Shacklebolts are supposed to be very strong on Runes. Is that something you work at yourself?"

She looked up from the books she had been sorting and smiled at him.

She looked pleased to have been asked. "We are, yes, it is one of the family disciplines. My father started teaching me when I was small and I never really stopped. What brings that on?"

Edward kept his eyes down and made his voice as ordinary as he could manage.

"I came across an old notebook a while ago, and whoever kept it went very deep into rune interpretation. There is a great deal in it on constructing runic workings, four-element theory worked out from first principles, and even notes on where Egyptian magic and Runes touch one another."

He paused, swallowed, and looked up with just enough puzzlement arranged on his face.

"Whoever wrote it understood the theory better than anything I have read since, and the practical side is unlike anybody else's work. I know your family has produced serious theorists, particularly where runes meet circles and the four elements, so I wondered whether you had heard anything of the sort at home."

He had been careful with every word of it. Each detail he offered pointed at the work, and not one of them pointed at the woman who had done it.

Adeline's expression turned inward, and she tapped one fingertip slowly on the table while she went looking for it.

Her fingertip stopped moving. "You know, there was somebody. My father mentioned her once, an elder of the family who cared about almost nothing in the world except Runes and theory." She found more of it as she went along. "She was said to be extraordinary at interpretation, and could read scripts supposed to have been lost. She wanted to take theory that abstract and build working circles out of it, and she went into the Egyptian material as well, looking for the places where it joined ours. That was a daring thing to be doing at the time."

Edward's heart went hard against his ribs.

"She must have been remarkable," he said, and he kept his voice steady almost the whole way to the end of it.

Adeline's admiration was entirely unhidden. "By every account she was. My father said her mind was simply beyond the people standing around her, and that half her ideas had arrived a generation before anyone knew what to do with them." Something more complicated came into her tone then. "He also said there was a rumour in the family that she had become involved with somebody outside it. Nobody ever learned who it was, or what came of it in the end."

Her eyes went to the window.

"What she left behind was valuable enough that the family has kept every page of it. The sad part is the ending, because she disappeared, and there was never any word of her afterwards. With a mind like that, if she had been given the years for it, I think she would have changed the subject entirely."

Edward's gaze dropped, and something took hold underneath his breastbone and pinched, small and very sharp.

Disappeared. That was the entry, then. That was the whole of his mother as the Shacklebolt records had her: a talented woman who went out one day and did not come back again.

And still something in him came unclenched, because this was the first time in his life that another person had described her to him. Brilliant, and stubborn, and buried in her own work, and unafraid of the rules about where that work was permitted to go.

He breathed out and got his voice down to something manageable, though it came out rougher than he had intended.

"Was that direction unusual inside the family?"

"Very." Adeline nodded. "We are good at Runes, but we use them, mostly for practical interpretation and support work. It is a conservative tradition. Somebody going that far into pure theory, and reaching across into the elements and Egyptian magic on top of it, was very nearly unheard of." Her mouth twisted slightly. "My father said several of the elders called the work impractical while she was alive to hear it. Then they read her notes afterwards and understood exactly how wrong they had been, and by that time there was nobody left to tell."

She glanced up, curious now.

"Could your notebook be hers? Everything you have described lines up almost too neatly for coincidence."

"I doubt it." Edward let a measured quantity of regret into it. "There is no name anywhere in the thing, and the paper has gone brown enough that I would not begin to know how to date it." He looked away. "But hearing this from you helps a great deal, because it tells me the person who wrote it came out of a real tradition, and that is reason enough to keep working through it."

He could not say it, not here and not yet. The secret had far too much attached to it, and he was afraid of what saying it aloud would break: the quiet they had between them now, and whatever lay underneath those years that nobody had thought to disturb.

Adeline thought nothing more of it and smiled.

"If you get stuck on the runes, or on the circle work, come and find me. I cannot promise you answers, but I can usually offer an angle."

"I will, and thank you."

He meant it. He had learned very little, and yet he had learned the one thing that mattered, which was that his mother's mind had not gone into the ground along with her. It was kept in a vault somewhere by people who had understood at last what they were holding, and it was still spoken of with respect by a girl who had never met her.

Hermione arrived at the table then with an armful of books and her hair stuck to her forehead.

She dropped the stack on the table, out of breath. "History of the tournament, and several volumes on breaking enchanted objects. There are past tasks in here where the clue only opened under a particular condition, or with something else present in the room. If we go through them together we might at least find the shape of it."

They took a book each. Edward set his longing down carefully somewhere behind his ribs and picked up a volume along with the rest of them.

The sun came through the high windows and lay flat across the open pages, and the air smelled of old ink and of that faint dry charge which hangs about any room with enough magical books in it. Somebody murmured a question and somebody else murmured an answer back.

The two golden eggs sat between them and kept quiet for once. Outside the window the light went from gold to amber and began to lean westward, drawing everybody's shadow out long across the floor, and the library emptied around them by degrees while they stayed exactly where they were.