Chapter 145 — A Bird of His Own

For the next test we changed the layout. The new tray had no raised stone edge in the line of the effect, loose material was moved away and the protection reached the floor. I practised the position with an uncharged scrap against my hand, then changed and rehearsed it slowly against a forepaw on the mat.

I returned before adding a charge. Once McGonagall had checked the position, I placed one fresh, small Incendio piece in the pendant and changed again, taking time to balance before calling it out.

The paper touched the outer edge of my forepaw with its working face already pointing towards the tray. I held that angle instead of turning the paw after it, reached for the brief connection and felt the prepared charge answer.

A compact flare bloomed beyond the paw. The shavings curled black, heat brushed my whiskers and I drew back rather than trying to prolong it. The flame died with the paper, leaving the soft tick of cooling material in the quiet room.

‘Oh, that’s useful,’ Ron said. Harry laughed, and a pleased rumble began in my chest before I remembered how much louder a lion could be than a boy.

I returned, sat on the mat’s edge and looked at the tray. Two charged pieces had now worked in animal form: pulse and fire, each prepared beforehand and released through contact. The pendant had fetched them for me; the ash and the emptied space inside it showed exactly what that assistance cost.

‘What changed when you kept the paw still?’ Hermione asked. She drew a chair nearer while I explained, then gave me the pen when a sketch began to seem more useful than another attempt with words.

Harry pointed at the mark for the paper. ‘It disappears so quickly,’ he said. ‘I thought that was what I’d seen before.’

‘It still has to be there.’ I added the blank edge to the drawing and showed where it had touched me.

‘What if you need another spell?’ Ron asked. He stayed behind Hermione’s chair, watching the small arrows spread across the page.

‘Then I return and use my hands, until I learn something else properly.’ McGonagall inspected the pendant and its empty interior before allowing me to replace the original chain. She approved more supervised practice of what we had demonstrated; carrying a store of charged pieces through repeated changes remained a different test.

Luna waited until I finished writing before offering her hand. I took it with my good arm and stood, finding the shoulder recovered enough for the work but the rest of me tired in the way a long physical effort could leave it.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked. I looked at the ash, the blackened shavings and the notebook crowded with arrows.

‘Hungry. And very pleased.’ She laughed and let me lean against her briefly before we collected our things.

Harry returned to his question about the transformation while we put away the equipment. Ron came to stand beside him as I packed the loose cord, interested enough this time to wait while I fetched the earlier notebook.

‘You said you’d show me the work,’ Harry reminded me. I opened it on the table, and Hermione brought her organised references to set beside it. Mine had more crossings-out and several stretches where the handwriting had become distinctly unfriendly.

Ron turned a page, then another. ‘This is just the preparation?’ he asked, looking at the remaining thickness beneath his fingers.

‘Some of it.’ I showed them the month with the leaf, the conditions I had needed and the points where a spoiled preparation meant beginning again. Harry stopped over the first return to human form.

‘Three attempts?’ He looked up at me, and I nodded before he could move to the next page.

‘I shouldn’t have made the first change when I did. You speak to McGonagall before starting anything.’ Ron asked whether you could know the animal beforehand, and I told him I had not chosen mine.

‘So I could do all this and end up unable to reach a table.’ He considered that with more seriousness than the number of pages had received.

‘You already complain enough about what’s on the tables you can reach,’ Hermione said. Ron agreed that giving up such an advantage required thought, and Harry laughed without closing the notebook.

‘I’ll read it,’ Harry said. When I told him to include the failures, he pointed at a particularly untidy paragraph. ‘Those are the pages with the bad handwriting?’

‘That doesn’t narrow it down enough.’ He borrowed the reading list, while Ron decided to wait before asking to begin. We put the notebooks away after they had finished asking questions, leaving the practical work for a conversation with McGonagall.

The following weeks had fewer moments I could point to afterwards as the instant something changed. Lessons, corrected essays and short practice sessions filled the days, making the small results less unreliable. I kept experimental pieces apart from talismans I trusted for ordinary use; homework remained due even when I could give an impressive explanation for being late.

The author's published chapter is on the page they use for publication, while this copy was taken without permission.

Luna and I kept the afternoon we had chosen, spending it on the covered walk with her books and no catalogues. Before we said goodbye, we chose the next one. It was easier to leave room in the week when I knew who would be waiting in it.

Harry completed both detentions. After the first he rewrote part of his account for McGonagall; after the second he returned tired of checking and sorting classroom equipment, but less inclined to repeat the broken bottle to himself as an explanation for everything that had gone wrong. He still watched for post from Sirius.

I gave Dumbledore copies of the further reports Xenophilius had sent, with their names and dates attached. He accepted them for the material he was gathering. They produced no notice in the Prophet declaring Sirius innocent, and Pettigrew remained somewhere we could not point to on the map.

The map itself was back with me. Harry asked when he wanted to borrow it and returned it afterwards, and I could clear its names and fold it away. That did not stop me thinking about the one we wanted, who might be far beyond the ground the parchment could show.

Spring made it easier to leave the library before the lamps were lit. On the fourth of April I turned fourteen, and Emma sent a letter long enough to fill the breakfast space between my plate and Harry’s. The parcel accompanying it had been packed so thoroughly that Ron offered to fetch a saw.

Her questions about my shoulder had finally grown less frequent after my letters and the school’s account of my recovery. Luna met me at the time we had chosen that afternoon and refused to name our destination until we reached the sunny end of the covered walk. There she produced a box containing a small cake.

‘It leaned the other way when I put it in,’ she said. I inspected the slope and decided we had arrived just in time.

We ate it before it could complete its journey sideways. Luna brushed a crumb from my mouth with her thumb and let me kiss her, then laughed when I rescued the pendant from the icing with more care than I had shown my sleeve.

‘It can carry a book, Oswald. It will probably survive birthday cake.’ She held the box steady while I wiped my cuff.

‘I’m not putting that in the test notes.’ For an hour we did very little worth recording. I remembered it better than several days that occupied whole pages.

Gryffindor won the remaining matches against Ravenclaw and Slytherin. I watched Harry climb above the pitch on one of the team’s Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones, the other players building the scores Wood wanted, and learnt to recognise the point when Ron stopped breathing normally in the stands.

Harry caught the Snitch in both matches. Afterwards, against Ravenclaw, he discussed part of the game with Cho almost as fluently as he had flown it; then she smiled and asked something unrelated to the catch, and he forgot what his hands were for. I looked away before he could catch me noticing.

Two wins and the loss to Hufflepuff left Gryffindor ahead on the final table. Wood inspected the figures as though another House might change them by looking in his direction, then fell silent for several seconds when they were confirmed. That alone would have been worth attending.

Harry told me Cedric had asked Madam Hooch about the storm match. Its recorded result stood, and I remembered him in wet robes on the stairs, trying to explain that he had not seen Harry fall.

‘He didn’t have to ask,’ Harry said. He watched the Hufflepuff players leave the pitch while I agreed. ‘He’s decent.’

Winning the Quidditch competition mattered to the race for the House Cup without turning every classroom point into part of the same score. The hourglasses gave us plenty to argue about as examinations approached. Hermione shortened those arguments by putting books in front of us, and Ron complained while opening his.

By the end of the examinations he had predicted disaster in three subjects and catastrophe in another. The results gave him rather less to discuss: he passed what he needed, with weaknesses he could name and none of the failures he had spent the week rehearsing.

‘I told you it wasn’t as bad as you thought,’ Hermione said. Ron reminded her that she had actually told him to revise another chapter.

‘You did revise it,’ she replied. He considered this, then decided to be pleased with both himself and her advice.

There was another reason he had been checking for post. After Scabbers I had offered to pay for a new pet when he wanted one, and he had finally decided he did. He wanted an owl, and he wanted to choose it himself.

Before examination week we visited a seller in Hogsmeade during a permitted outing. Ron spent longer watching the birds than discussing prices, returning twice to a tiny owl that regarded every movement in the shop as a personal invitation. I asked whether that was the one he wanted as it turned almost completely round on a perch too narrow for so much ambition.

‘Look at him,’ Ron said. I was looking, but let him finish the inspection before he asked the seller about food, letters and the right cage.

Once he chose, I paid for the owl and a proper travelling cage. We arranged delivery after the examinations, and it arrived at breakfast protesting the need to remain behind bars while Ron read the accompanying note.

‘Pigwidgeon,’ Ron announced at last. Hermione paused with her toast halfway to her mouth, so he looked up and repeated it. ‘Pig for short. Look at him.’

The owl gave a shrill call. Harry observed that he had an opinion, while Ron offered a finger through the bars and received a quick investigatory nip.

‘He’s excited,’ Ron explained. He kept the finger where the owl could inspect it again, smiling down at the cage.

‘So are you. Try not to bite anyone.’ Ron laughed without looking away, and we moved the breakfast things far enough back to keep them beyond the owl’s reach.

Later we shut the dormitory windows and secured the door before Ron opened the cage. Pig made a circuit of the room, landed on the wrong bed and reconsidered. When he came to Ron’s outstretched arm, Ron held perfectly still until the little bird settled its feathers.

I remembered Scabbers travelling in his pocket like a familiar piece of home. This was a creature Ron had chosen, learning the shape of his hand while Ron learnt how much space it needed.

‘Thanks,’ he said quietly. I told him he was welcome, and he looked up at me. ‘It doesn’t make what you did to Scabbers all right.’

‘I know.’ I kept still while Pig inspected the edge of Ron’s sleeve, giving him time to finish.

‘But thanks for this.’ I nodded, glad he had said both, and helped move the cage nearer his bed.

Pig soon made his ambitions clear. He could carry a small letter and believed he should also assist with parchment rolls, shoelaces and whatever Ron was eating. Leo watched his first visit to the Owlery with the grave expression of a larger owl whose working conditions had deteriorated.

Harry said Hedwig would teach him manners. Ron replied that Pig already had manners; they were simply enthusiastic, and the owl punctuated the explanation with another piercing call.