Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

Our dormitory waited at the top of another staircase, which seemed an unnecessary demand after the climb to the common room. Four beds stood beneath red hangings, with a desk for each of us and a fireplace to make the room comfortable. Through the large window, I could see moonlight on the lake. I claimed the bed beside it before anyone else had finished looking round.

‘Why do you get that one?’ Ron asked. He dropped his case beside the nearest mattress, apparently willing to dispute my choice without actually wanting to move.

‘Because I asked first,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome to have the view when I’m asleep. There should be enough darkness for everybody.’

Harry took the next bed and tested the mattress with both hands before sitting down. He emptied the bag I had given him into a spare school trunk beside his bed. Neville’s things and the rest of Ron’s luggage had already been brought up. The place at the foot of my bed was empty, since most of what I had brought remained in the pouch. Unpacking could wait until I had established whether Hogwarts beds justified Hogwarts stairs.

Harry lay back beneath the canopy. ‘This is better than the cupboard,’ he said, smiling at the red cloth overhead. Then he noticed that Ron had stopped opening his case.

‘What cupboard?’ Ron asked. Harry sat up again, looking as though he hadn’t meant the comparison to reach the rest of us.

He explained about sleeping under the stairs at his aunt and uncle’s house. Neville stood with a folded robe in his hands throughout the explanation, while Ron’s expression grew steadily angrier. I knew the story already, but the proper bed beneath Harry made it harder to listen to. All the things he had missed were here, ordinary enough that we had begun arguing about which window to sleep beside.

‘Well, this one’s yours,’ Ron said. He indicated the bed with enough force to make it sound like a decision we could enforce. ‘If anyone tries putting you back in a cupboard, they’ll have to get past us.’

Neville nodded before looking at the rest of us, as though checking whether he was allowed to join the promise. Harry thanked them, and the awkwardness began to ease. We couldn’t do much about the house he had left, but we could make room for his belongings without treating them as something in the way.

I unpacked my clothes while Ron discovered Percy’s initials inside one of his robes. He tried picking out the stitches until Neville suggested that nobody would see them when he was wearing it. That sensible observation failed to improve his mood.

‘He could at least have taken his name out,’ Ron said. He held the robe up as if Percy might have left some other claim to ownership in the pockets.

‘You’ll still know whose it was,’ I pointed out. ‘Two missing letters won’t make it new.’

Ron threw a sock at me, which I caught and held up by the toe. Harry suggested it might have belonged to Percy too. I dropped it before considering whether that made any sense, and Ron laughed so hard he lost his grip on the robe. After that, removing the initials seemed less urgent.

Neville settled on the edge of his bed while we put our things away. At first he watched each new conversation without joining, but Ron’s complaints about growing up with Fred and George eventually drew out a story about his own family. They had worried that he wouldn’t show enough magic to come here. He tried to make it sound funny, though his relief at having a Hogwarts letter was much easier to hear.

‘Uncle Algie gave me Trevor,’ he added. The toad sat in his palms, making no apparent effort to appreciate being part of the story.

‘Then he’s had quite an exciting first day as a present,’ I said. ‘Perhaps tomorrow he could try staying somewhere you’ve put him.’

Neville said he hoped so. Ron produced Scabbers, who promptly burrowed into a fold of his blanket and settled down. When Neville admired having a pet that stayed nearby, Ron explained that the rat usually remained wherever the food was. He said it with an affection which made the complaint unconvincing.

Harry looked towards the window. Hedwig hadn’t arrived yet, and he reminded us that the pets were being brought up separately. I told him she had managed to find my house without my help. Between the school staff and the owl herself, there was probably less chance of her getting lost than any of us.

We talked about home as the beds disappeared beneath the things we meant to tidy. Ron described the Burrow, then had to explain the name when Harry asked about it. There always seemed to be someone in his stories, calling from another room or borrowing something or getting in trouble. Neville’s grandmother’s house sounded quieter. Harry listened to both accounts with his schoolbooks still in his lap.

Eventually he asked what we wanted to do at Hogwarts. Ron hoped to play Quidditch, although several of his brothers had already complicated that ambition by being good at it first. Neville wanted to manage his lessons well enough that his family would stop worrying. Harry struggled to choose anything when he had only just discovered how much there was to learn.

‘Answers,’ I said when my turn came. Ron asked whether I meant the sort that would help with homework, and I admitted those would be useful too.

What I really wanted filled notebooks. There was the brush-wand, the paper, the gap between something working once and understanding why. There were Ken and Mary’s records, with questions I couldn’t yet ask a teacher without first finding out whom to trust. I wanted practical skill as well. A target in my room stayed obligingly still; anything worth worrying about was unlikely to be so considerate.

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‘That sounds like Ravenclaw,’ Neville said. He had grown comfortable enough to tease me, which was progress worth leaving unchallenged.

‘The Hat had plenty of time to reconsider,’ I told him. Harry suggested it might have sent me here to supervise the others, and Ron immediately objected to the qualifications required for that job.

They asked about my home, so I told them about Emma. My previous life belonged well outside a first-night conversation, as did the private parts of my parents’ research. Emma gave me enough to talk about without either. She had raised my father before raising me, could still carry me when sufficiently annoyed and had developed firm opinions about experiments which damaged furniture.

‘Have you blown anything up?’ Ron asked. I began with a denial, then saw Harry watching me and added that I hadn’t intended to.

Neville thought that was worse. I told him he had taken remarkably little time to join their side, and he smiled down at the robe he was folding. By the time we changed for bed, he no longer looked surprised when someone addressed him. There was a place for Trevor and space for Neville’s voice in the room.

I had slept in shared quarters before, in another life and with far less comfortable furniture. Good company had made some of those places bearable. Hogwarts had supplied a soft mattress, warmth and a view; the three boys around me were making it easier to believe I might enjoy being here after the excitement wore off.

Ron fell asleep almost before we finished saying good night. Neville drew his curtains, and Harry’s bed creaked as he settled under the covers. I put the wand within reach, secured the pouch beside me and lay watching the last strip of lake through the gap in my hangings. At last, there was nothing more I needed to do that day.

Several hours later, my bladder disagreed. I woke in the dark and spent a useless moment hoping the need would go away, then pushed the curtains aside. Someone was sitting at the window. Harry had drawn his knees up, and Hedwig perched beside him, white against the black glass.

‘Did I wake you?’ he whispered when I got up. ‘She tapped to be let in. I tried to be quiet.’

‘You didn’t,’ I told him. I started to explain my less dignified reason for being awake, then caught the look on his face and stopped beside the bed. ‘Is something wrong?’

He said it was nothing. I had used that answer often enough to recognise when it meant he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk, so I sat at the other end of the ledge without asking again. Hedwig shifted towards him and watched me with her usual air of assessing whether I would be useful.

For a while we looked out at the lake. Then Harry said he kept thinking about his parents, and the change from the cheerful boy testing his new mattress became much easier to understand. Everything good about this place had brought them closer without giving him any way to reach them.

‘They were here,’ he said. ‘Hagrid knew them. So did Ollivander. People keep telling me things, but I don’t remember any of it myself.’

His fingers tightened on the edge of the sill. He thought he should be happy to have arrived, then found himself imagining his parents taking him to the station. I looked towards our trunks, remembering Emma standing on the platform and the care she had taken over saying goodbye. Harry should have had someone he could worry about leaving behind.

‘You can be glad you’re here and still wish they’d brought you,’ I said. ‘One doesn’t cancel the other.’

Harry didn’t answer straight away. Hedwig bent her head towards his hand, and he stroked the feathers along her neck while I tried to find something honest to offer him. Telling him to be strong would be easy. It would also leave him doing exactly what he had been doing before I woke up, only with an extra instruction about how to look while he did it.

I told him that missing Ken and Mary could catch me when I thought I was getting on perfectly well. Emma would mention something Dad liked, or I would find a note in his handwriting, and suddenly whatever I had planned for the afternoon didn’t matter. There had been nights when I cried under the blankets because I didn’t want Emma to hear. Having someone who loved me hadn’t made it impossible to miss the people who were gone.

‘You don’t remember much either?’ Harry asked. I shook my head, keeping my answer to the part I could explain.

‘Bits,’ I said. ‘Most of what I know comes from Emma and the things they left. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to find it out that way.’

He understood that well enough without hearing about the confusion inside my head. I could remember grief more clearly than the people at its centre, and having another life’s memories had never put those missing pieces back. Beside me, Harry ran one finger over a worn patch in the stone.

‘Does it stop hurting?’ he asked. I took long enough over the answer that he glanced up to see whether I had heard.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It doesn’t hurt all the time. I have good days with Emma. Today was a good day with you lot, even after the ghost tried to put us off dinner.’

Harry smiled a little at that. Ron gave a snore from behind his curtains, providing an unhelpful example of the company I was recommending. We listened until he settled again, and Harry’s shoulders began to lower. The room had other people in it, even when they were asleep and doing nothing to deserve our gratitude.

‘You seem to know what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘Most of the time, anyway.’

‘You’ve seen what happened when I tried to buy a wand,’ I reminded him. ‘I spent the afternoon getting nowhere while Ollivander ran out of boxes. You’re giving me far too much credit.’

He said I always had a joke ready. I admitted that was easier than having an answer, particularly when I could prepare the joke while someone else discovered the problem. This time his laugh sounded less careful. We stayed on the ledge for a while, watching the moonlight shift on water too distant to hear.

Eventually Harry asked what I wanted to do after school. We had arrived only hours earlier, and already he had found a question for which seven years might not be enough preparation. I thought about the unfinished notes waiting among my things, the people who had written them and all the magic this place could teach me.

I wanted to understand what had happened to my parents. I wanted the strength to do something with that knowledge when I found it. Those ambitions were tangled together with a simpler delight in discovering that magic existed, and for once the simplest part supplied the answer I could say aloud.

‘I want to be the strongest wizard alive,’ I told him. Harry turned away from the lake with the beginnings of a grin.

‘You’ll have to get past Dumbledore,’ he said. ‘He looks as though he’s had quite a lot of practice.’

I told him that gave me something to aim for and slid off the ledge. The movement immediately reminded me why I had got out of bed. Harry’s grin became a puzzled frown as I stopped halfway through straightening up.

‘I’ve spent all this time talking to you when I was supposed to be finding the toilet,’ I whispered. He covered his mouth, which did very little to conceal what was happening behind his hand.

I left before he could make it worse. Behind me, Harry struggled to keep his laughter quiet enough for the sleeping room. It wouldn’t carry him through every night he missed his parents, but I was glad to hear it through the door as I hurried down the corridor.