Chapter 25 — An Empty Seat

On Halloween morning, I sent a short throw across the desk and said, ‘Wingardium Leviosa!’ The talisman released its stored charm, and the feather rose. For once it stayed where I wanted instead of twitching, lurching or returning to the wood while I pretended to be examining the result.

I held my hand steady. A charred scrap of Runebark settled beside my elbow, but the feather remained a foot above the table. The difference was small enough to miss from across the room and large enough to make several weeks of unsuccessful practice feel worthwhile.

‘Very good, Mr Mercer,’ Flitwick said beside me. I hadn’t noticed him approaching through the noise of the class practising the movement he had demonstrated. ‘Keep your attention on it. Let us see what happens when you ask it to move.’

I eased my fingers left. The feather followed, trembling a little before settling into the new position. I brought it back and lowered it until the tip brushed the desk, then allowed it to rest as he instructed. Nothing exploded or fell off the table. By the standards of my early work, this was an extremely respectable achievement.

Flitwick examined the spent scrap without touching it. The stored charm had established the effect, he said, and I had continued directing it afterwards. He asked what I had done differently. I told him I had stopped trying to correct every small movement before the feather had time to respond to the first instruction.

He smiled at that. Hermione leaned around the edge of her desk, looking from the paper to the feather. She wanted to be certain it had still responded after the talisman burned away. I confirmed that it had, remembering Wood’s question about changing direction after a throw.

The throw itself remained fixed. I hadn’t made the paper turn a corner or pursue anything; I had guided the effect after it reached the target. That distinction opened a possibility none of my brief pulses or bursts of fire had offered. It also explained why treating Levitation like one of those effects had produced so many disappointing results.

Flitwick asked to see another attempt. I took the second prepared piece, checked it and aimed over the desk. ‘Wingardium Leviosa!’ The paper flashed as I threw, leaving me to catch the light pressure of the charm without pulling at it too hard.

The feather rose more smoothly. I moved it across the desk, then lowered it at the different speeds Flitwick requested. The last descent wobbled, but I corrected it before the tip struck the wood. He was more interested in that recovery than in making the object rise quickly, and told me to practise the control I had just used.

A bang from the next row interrupted him. Smoke rose from Seamus’s desk, where the feather had become a blackened stalk. He looked at the tip of his wand with the injured surprise of someone who believed he had followed the instructions. I passed him a clean cloth and suggested that his target had probably finished floating for the day.

‘I used the right words,’ he said. He wiped soot off his nose while Flitwick hurried over to inspect the desk, which seemed likely to offer a more useful explanation than I could.

Hermione turned towards Ron. His feather remained where it had started, although the wand above it had received plenty of exercise. She told him his movement was too sharp and repeated the pronunciation, emphasising the syllable he kept rushing. He lowered the wand and challenged her to demonstrate instead of explaining what he had done wrong.

She did. Her feather rose above the desk and hung steadily in the air, bringing Flitwick back with praise for the precision of her casting. Hermione lowered it and looked at Ron. There was enough satisfaction in the look to make him sink farther into his chair, and I returned to my own work before their argument acquired another participant.

By the end of the lesson, I could make the feather pause during its descent. I wrote down the correction which helped and the ways I could still lose control. Repeating the result mattered more than another round of congratulations, especially after standing on the flying lawn with no reliable answer to a person falling.

Ron was still muttering when we left the classroom. He pointed out that I had succeeded first without spending the rest of the lesson making certain everybody knew. I told him Hermione had been trying to help. He replied that she could do so without making him feel as though failure was something he had chosen deliberately.

He lifted his chin and copied her pronunciation. Harry glanced down the corridor while I prepared to tell Ron to leave it alone. Then Ron added that it was no wonder people didn’t want to sit with her, since nobody could do anything without being told they were wrong. Hermione came between us before I could answer.

Her books struck his elbow. He turned to object, saw her face and stopped speaking. I called her name, but she quickened her pace and disappeared around the corner. The noise of other students leaving their lessons filled the space she had left, making Ron’s explanation sound particularly weak when he said he hadn’t known she was there.

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I reminded him she had attended the same class. Harry told him to apologise, and Ron took a step towards the corner before hesitating. A group passed between us and the route she had taken. By the time we followed, she was gone, and promising to find her later became easier than deciding where to begin.

She wasn’t at lunch. I expected her to have gone to the library, where she often withdrew when we annoyed her, and left Ron to repair the argument he had started. That afternoon I returned to the levitation work. It was more comfortable to improve a spell than to check whether my explanation for an empty place at the table was correct.

With permission to use the practice room, I tried heavier targets. A fresh talisman, thrown with the Levitation formula, lifted a book. Another prepared piece went into the attempt with a low wooden stool. That required more care: it tilted when I hurried, scraping a leg over the stone before I steadied it.

I kept the stool close to the floor, guided it over a marked patch and set it down. Both pieces had been spent, and the difference between their targets belonged in the notes. I could move more than a feather, but the heavier object demanded corrections the feather had allowed me to handle clumsily. It was progress worth keeping within the limits I had actually tested.

Before dinner, I prepared two fresh Levitation talismans. One went into the useful-work section of the pouch; the other stayed with my lesson supplies. I had no immediate task for either, but after the flying lesson I liked having another option available. The time and material spent preparing them would at least give me a choice if I needed it.

By evening, pumpkins hung over the Great Hall with candles shining through their carved faces. The enchanted sky had darkened to purple, and thunder moved somewhere above the tables. Ron chose a seat facing the doors. Harry sat beside him while I reached for sweets and tried to relax fingers which had spent too much of the day holding a brush or quill.

Hermione’s place remained empty. Harry asked whether anyone had seen her, and Neville said Parvati had heard she was in a bathroom. Ron put his fork down. We asked Parvati, farther along the bench, and she explained that Lavender had tried speaking to Hermione that afternoon. She had been crying and hadn’t wanted company.

I asked which bathroom. Parvati indicated the girls’ one on the first floor, looking towards Ron as she answered. He pushed his plate away and said he would go to apologise. The doors opened with a crash before he could get up.

Quirrell stumbled between the tables. Conversations stopped around him as he tried to reach the staff, one hand clutching his robes. He gasped out a warning about a troll in the dungeons, turned towards Dumbledore and collapsed onto the flagstones. A crack of thunder from the ceiling made several students cry out before anyone had decided what to do about the words.

Benches scraped. A boy near the entrance began running, and others moved after him. Dumbledore rose and called for silence with a voice which carried across the room. Ron stopped beside me as the noise fell away enough to hear the instructions which followed.

The prefects were to gather their Houses and take us back to the common rooms. Teachers moved towards Quirrell and the doors while Percy began calling first-years into line. I secured the pouch and followed Harry between the benches, looking towards the entrance as though the size of it might explain how a troll had got into the castle.

Ron thought someone must have let it in. They weren’t clever enough to get past everything by themselves, he said. That was a disturbing possibility, but we hadn’t seen where it had entered or how. Before I could ask anything more useful, Harry caught my arm and reminded me who hadn’t heard the warning.

‘Hermione,’ he said. ‘She’s still in the bathroom. She won’t know.’

I looked back at her empty seat, then towards the staff table, which had almost cleared. We needed to get her, I said, and Ron moved with us despite looking as frightened as anyone else in the queue. We caught Lavender as the line reached the entrance hall and confirmed the bathroom before separating from the group.

I asked her to tell Percy that Hermione was missing. Then we used a gap beside the passing Hufflepuffs to get to the stairs, leaving his calls behind us as we climbed towards the first floor. We had a location and a short route. At the time, that seemed enough to justify continuing without waiting for someone in charge.

Movement in the next corridor made me pull Harry and Ron behind a statue. Black robes crossed the opening: Snape, taking a route away from the dungeons. Harry leaned forward to ask why he wasn’t with the other teachers. I drew breath to call to him, but he turned onto another staircase and disappeared before I did.

Following would take us away from the bathroom. I motioned the others forward, keeping the question for later. Every doorway seemed larger now that I was imagining what might fit inside it, and our shoes sounded much too loud on the stone. I kept a hand against the pouch until we reached the room Lavender had described.

Hermione stood near the basins with her books held to her chest. Her eyes were red. She stepped back when I pushed the door inward and all three of us appeared, then began objecting to finding us in the girls’ bathroom. Ron crossed into the opening before she could finish.

‘I’m sorry about what I said,’ he told her. ‘I shouldn’t have said it. But there’s a troll in the castle, and you need to come with us.’

She stared at him, trying to follow the change from the morning’s argument to a danger she hadn’t heard about. I held the door and explained that the prefects were taking everyone upstairs. She started towards us, still looking from Ron to me as though we might supply a different account of the situation if she waited long enough.

Then her attention passed beyond my shoulder. A foul, wet smell reached me, followed by something dragging against stone. Her books slipped from her hands and struck the floor. I had barely begun to turn when she shouted for us to get down.