Chapter 4 — An Owl Makes It Official

Emma’s ban lasted three days. My obedience lasted until the following morning, when I heard her go out into the garden and opened Dad’s box again. I left the ordinary ink downstairs. Whatever I tried next, I had no intention of discovering how a second collapse compared with the first.

Ken had kept sealed preparations alongside his notes, and one of his early trials used a cinnabar-based mixture. That gave me something better than a film to work from. I checked the label against his instructions, chose a fresh strip of Runebark and copied the levitation incantation in red.

The writing sank into the fibres. I braced myself, waiting for the cold pull beneath my ribs, but the only change I noticed was warmth in the paper. Several seconds passed, during which I remained seated by choice. It was a considerable improvement.

The apple I tested it on later would probably have disagreed. A change of fruit and ink had failed to persuade Wingardium Leviosa to behave like a Levitation Charm. Other attempts produced nothing, or brief flashes of magic that sent me back to the notebook with more questions. Once a slip jumped off the table and hit me in the forehead. I resisted entering that under successful flight.

Repeating the words more neatly didn’t help. Eventually I turned to a tiny repair exercise explained in Ken’s school notes, where the instructions gave me something to think about beyond pronunciation. Even that took several attempts before I began to understand what I was trying to ask of the magic.

I set a cup with its handle broken off on the desk, positioned the loose piece beside the break and prepared a strip with Reparo. Then I flicked the charged paper against the cracked edge. On impact, the porcelain drew together, closing the join until I couldn’t find it with a fingernail.

For a full minute I held the cup up to the light. I had watched the handle break off, watched it lie separate from the cup, and now it was firmly attached again. The obvious next step was to break it a second time. Unfortunately, Emma arrived as I was carrying out this important scientific procedure.

‘Have you decided we own too much crockery?’ she asked. The handle had landed between us, which made concealing the experiment difficult. ‘I can assure you we don’t.’

‘I repaired it first,’ I said. I showed her where the join had been and explained the test, hoping that fixing a cup would count in my favour against deliberately breaking it. ‘It worked properly. Not like the banana.’

‘Then use your own mug next time.’ She left me to collect the pieces, considerably less impressed than I felt the occasion deserved. Still, permission to endanger my own tea supply was progress.

Simple sparks also began to work. They weren’t impressive, but I could prepare a strip and get the small burst I expected instead of waiting to find out what might explode. Levitation remained stubbornly beyond me, and the difference finally forced me to reconsider the whole experiment.

With the repair charm, I could follow the explanation in Dad’s notes. After several successful preparations, I began recognising the particular pull in my magic as I worked; the sparks had their own familiar feel. With levitation I had an incantation and a hopeful picture of floating fruit. The paper wasn’t supplying the understanding I lacked.

I had been treating it as though writing the name of a spell ought to order the result. A thousand copies of Wingardium Leviosa would only give me a thousand labelled failures if I couldn’t shape what went into the fibres. That discovery spoiled several ambitious plans. It also explained why my father, who had known considerably more magic than I did, hadn’t solved every problem merely by owning a brush.

I went back to his pages about magical tools. Wands helped a wizard shape and direct magic; older methods, according to Ken, had relied more heavily on preparation, gesture, voice or ritual. His historical arguments soon became too complicated for me to judge, but the practical point kept me reading. I needed to learn the spells, whatever I used to cast them.

For the next few weeks, learning involved a great deal of paper. I numbered the experimental slips and kept a ledger of the ink, the intended effect, the preparation and what actually happened. Failed pieces went into an envelope instead of the bin. Recording a useless flash was less exciting than producing it, but a page of similar failures sometimes stopped me sacrificing another strip to the same bad idea.

The cinnabar preparation hadn’t simply made the ink a more suitable colour. In my trials it changed the way the paper accepted my magic, avoiding the brutal immediate drain of the first attempt. Other preparations changed the resulting effect. I began comparing them carefully, trying to separate what I had learnt about a spell from what the medium itself was doing.

One of Ken’s bottles held a bitter-smelling black liquid. Its label was too damaged for me to identify the ingredient, so I kept it away from my skin and worked from the notes that accompanied it. A previous death ought to earn a person something, even if it was only a healthy reluctance to improvise with mysterious substances.

The clearest result came from a basic combat spell Ken called the Force Pulse. Its incantation was Impello, and the intended effect was a blunt burst of force, more shove than cutting blow. The explanation was simple enough for me to begin following, though my first efforts gave no reason for anybody to fear for their safety beyond the usual risks of standing near my desk.

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With the black preparation, the release seemed quicker and the impact narrower. A wooden target toppled in the first useful test. Next I managed to crack a thin glass jar, and then a pulse went through one jar and broke the one behind it. I was still admiring the result when Emma’s footsteps approached the doorway.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. She stopped at the edge of the scattered glass, preventing me from pretending the damage was smaller than it looked. ‘Research?’

‘It did exactly what I expected this time. Just a little farther.’ I put the remaining paper down and went for the dustpan before she had to ask. Whatever my future held, it was likely to involve a great deal of sweeping.

Thicker wood provided a useful correction to my enthusiasm. The effect weakened against larger, sturdier targets, and I couldn’t reproduce my best results merely by choosing the same bottle. How well I prepared the strip mattered, as did how much of the spell I understood. Dad had left me a promising material, not a way of turning a beginner’s shove into artillery.

Impact remained the only release I could make reliable. I prepared the paper, let it settle and struck the target with it; a poor throw could spoil the attempt or send the magic in an unhelpful direction. The skill I remembered from throwing cards was useful here, but being able to aim didn’t mean I controlled everything that happened at the other end.

Ken’s notes hinted at more deliberate ways to release stored magic. I marked those pages for later, when I might understand the explanations around them. For now, I had enough unfinished problems without ruining more sheets in pursuit of a method I couldn’t yet follow.

There was also no saving a spent talisman. The paper which came out of a successful test was no more available for the next one than the blackened remains beside the banana had been. By the time I properly appreciated that, roughly a third of the treated stock was gone.

I counted what remained twice. Alongside the clean sheets sat the notes I had made and an envelope of failures; it was harder to admire my progress with all three spread across the same desk. Ken couldn’t prepare more paper for me, and I couldn’t yet reproduce his work. Some of the ingredients were unfamiliar, several stages made no sense, and I didn’t even know which supplies I could buy.

Whenever I tried to read further, I ran into references to books I didn’t own. Dad would dismiss a difficult step in half a sentence because, presumably, anyone reading a research notebook ought to know the relevant potion theory. My old life had supplied military training and a police education. Neither course had covered what to do when a plant fibre disagreed with a spell.

I searched the house for my parents’ schoolbooks. After the cupboards and shelves failed me, I asked Emma, and her silence took the excitement out of the question before she answered.

‘Most were lost in the old house,’ she said. ‘There was a fire. We haven’t got them tucked away somewhere, if that’s what you’re hoping.’

I knew there had been a fire, but what I remembered and what I had been told wouldn’t arrange themselves into a clear account. Dates were particularly unhelpful. I had learnt enough about my parents from the box to want more than the careful fragments adults offered a child.

‘Was it connected to Mum and Dad?’ I asked. ‘To what happened to them?’

Emma took time over her answer. ‘I don’t know enough to tell you that,’ she said. ‘And I won’t pretend I do, Oswald.’

I let the question rest. She hadn’t said no, but making her repeat what she didn’t know wouldn’t give me evidence. Ken and Mary had fought Voldemort and belonged to the Order of the Phoenix. They were dead, their old home had burned, and I was trying to assemble a magical education out of what had survived. I wanted those facts to explain one another, which wasn’t the same as knowing they did.

The anger was mine, as surely as the hands resting on Dad’s notebook. There wasn’t a separate, sensible adult who could dismiss the loss as something that had happened to another boy. I wanted my parents back, and, failing that, I wanted to know whether somebody had taken them from me.

Wanting an answer didn’t make me capable of getting it. I had already died once through bad luck; there was no reason to improve on the experience by volunteering. If a trail led to Voldemort, I would need considerably more than a few experiments and memories of a story whose details kept escaping me.

I did remember that he had lost his body after attacking Harry Potter. He hadn’t yet returned to full strength, which left an interesting possibility if anyone could find him. I didn’t know where to start, how weak he was or what it would take to kill something that had already survived losing its body. Those questions could wait on the same list as several other things I was presently unqualified to attempt.

First I needed schoolbooks. By late July I was still working through Dad’s notes when an owl arrived to assist with that problem by hitting the sitting-room window.

Emma looked up from her tea. I lowered Ken’s notebook as the owl tapped the glass again, harder this time, and fixed me with the sort of stare usually reserved for people standing in a doorway. There was an envelope attached to its leg.

‘Does that normally happen?’ I asked. I was already getting up, unwilling to let the bird damage whatever it had brought in a dispute with the window.

‘It did with your parents,’ Emma said. She moved her cup out of the way while I opened the catch. ‘Let it in before it decides we aren’t home.’

The owl hopped inside and extended its leg. It tolerated my attempt to untie the envelope with the impatience of a professional who had been assigned an apprentice, then drew its foot back as soon as I freed the last loop. The parchment was thick, the writing green and the address unsettlingly precise.

My name was on the front. I turned the envelope over, broke the seal and unfolded a letter offering me a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that September. An equipment list lay behind it, with textbooks, robes, a cauldron and all the other things apparently necessary to educate a wizard.

I read the list more slowly than the letter. The books had titles which promised answers to questions I had been collecting for weeks. The cauldron meant I would finally learn something about the potions Dad kept assuming his reader understood. And there was a wand, an entire method of making magic which I had barely begun to understand from notes.

None of it was a guess in a margin. A school expected me to arrive with these things and intended to teach me how to use them. I went back to the first page to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood, then read my name again because I could.

‘Well?’ Emma asked. ‘Are you going to tell me, or must I wait for a letter of my own?’

‘I need a cauldron,’ I said, passing both sheets to her. ‘And robes. There are books, Emma. Actual books for people who don’t know everything already.’

She laughed, and I realised how broadly I was smiling. Since my birthday, I had been working from Dad’s unfinished questions, trying to make each of his remaining sheets count. Upstairs, the diminished stack of Runebark would still be waiting after I finished staring at the letter. Now I had a place to take the questions I couldn’t answer, and a reason to go out and buy a wand.