Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

I woke before the others and lay still long enough to establish that this time I didn’t need the toilet. Running had brought some order to mornings when the two sets of memories in my head were much harder to live with. Now that I had arrived at Hogwarts, I saw no reason to abandon a useful habit simply because the route had become more interesting.

Getting outside required more attention than the exercise. I followed the passages Percy had shown us, checked the stairs before trusting them and kept the castle in sight once I reached the grounds. By the time I turned back, my breathing had settled into a familiar rhythm. Magic might eventually make a great many things easier, but I still intended to have a body capable of carrying me somewhere.

Hermione was in the common room when I returned. She looked from her open book to my damp hair, then asked where I had been. I told her I had gone running, which briefly seemed to surprise her more than any of the things we had seen the previous evening.

‘Before breakfast?’ she asked. ‘I suppose that’s a good way to make time for it. I was going to read until the others came down.’

She showed me several sheets of parchment covered in a study timetable. Every subject had its place, with work divided among the days and smaller notes squeezed beside the main headings. I had seen less planning devoted to getting an entire unit out of barracks. Hermione had managed it for one girl and a schoolbag.

‘Have you left room to eat?’ I asked. I followed a particularly dense section with my finger without touching the parchment.

‘Yes,’ she said, drawing it back. ‘I used a timetable at my old school. It helped me come top of the year.’

I suggested she leave a little space for getting lost between subjects. She tried to maintain an offended expression, then glanced at the tightly packed page and admitted Hogwarts might require an adjustment. Preparing for everything was going to be difficult in a building whose stairs moved. At least she had allowed more time for finding the first classroom than Harry and Ron appeared likely to need for waking up.

‘Go and wash,’ she told me as she gathered her books. ‘We’ve got Professor McGonagall first. You should make sure the others are getting ready.’

Neville sat up after I called his name twice. Harry and Ron proved less cooperative, despite repeated shaking and the removal of the curtains protecting them from daylight. Each promised to be up in a minute. After hearing that promise often enough to recognise it without the actual words, I went to breakfast with Neville.

Their seats were still empty when Transfiguration began. Professor McGonagall looked towards the door before addressing the class, and I hoped the two of them had found a convincing explanation somewhere between their beds and the Great Hall. She made it clear from the start that attention mattered here. Changing an object incompletely could create problems a careless attempt might not prepare us to put right.

I opened my notebook and listened. School in my previous life had struggled to hold my interest; this lesson offered the possibility of changing what something was. When McGonagall mentioned transformations involving the caster’s own body, I put up my hand before she could move on to anything less interesting.

‘Could you show us, Professor?’ I asked when she called on me. Around the room, people who had been looking at their books lifted their heads.

‘An Animagus transformation is far beyond your present work, Mr Mercer,’ she said. ‘Watching a demonstration does not qualify any of you to attempt it.’

I promised to watch carefully. She told us to record what we observed, then became a tabby cat before I had quite decided what my first observation should be. The change was too quick to separate into useful stages. There was simply a much smaller creature on the desk where our teacher had been, with markings around its eyes which made it particularly unwise to think of petting it.

I had wanted stronger spells and a better understanding of my paper. Now I was staring at an entirely different way a person could use magic, and every question I could think of seemed to depend on the answer to three others. Where did the extra weight go? What happened to the clothes? Could she hear us differently with those ears?

Hermione noticed that I wasn’t writing. ‘Are you all right?’ she whispered, keeping her eyes on the desk as though the cat might object to being discussed.

‘I’m deciding how many pages this is going to take,’ I told her. I began with the things I had actually seen, leaving space for questions underneath. Understanding it could take rather longer than the rest of the lesson.

The door opened behind us while I was trying to describe the transformation. Harry’s whisper made me turn. He and Ron stood just inside the room, robes crooked and faces bright with the relief of finding an apparently empty place behind the teacher’s desk. Harry asked where McGonagall was, and I pointed urgently at the cat.

He looked past her. Before I could make the warning clearer, the two of them came farther in, and Ron said something about being lucky that the professor hadn’t arrived yet. Hermione put down her quill. I had the uncomfortable feeling of watching a dropped plate in the instant before it reached the floor.

The cat sprang from the desk and became McGonagall on the way down. Harry stopped so suddenly that Ron nearly walked into him. Their teacher regarded them over her spectacles, allowing plenty of time for whatever excuse they had prepared to lose its appeal.

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‘We got lost,’ Harry said at last. His voice sounded considerably less relieved than it had at the door.

‘Then learning your way around must become a priority,’ McGonagall replied. ‘Five points from Gryffindor. Take your seats.’

They sat down without further discussion. Harry gave me a look which suggested I ought to have found a less ambiguous way of pointing at a transformed teacher, but the lesson soon gave me something more immediate to worry about. When we began working on matchsticks, mine refused to change at all.

I followed the instructions again. Around me, people compared small alterations and complete failures, while McGonagall moved between the desks correcting hands and explaining what each attempt needed. She watched mine, adjusted what I was doing and had me repeat it. The match remained exactly as it had been before she arrived.

By the end of the lesson I had a page of useful notes and no visible result. Harry and Ron caught me while I was packing away, still indignant about their arrival. Ron said I should have woken them properly, which brought Neville to a halt beside his chair.

‘He did try,’ Neville said. ‘I was there. You both kept saying you were coming.’

Harry accepted that part but insisted I could have told them about the cat. I reminded him that I had pointed straight at her. He said it hadn’t occurred to him that the animal was our professor, and I admitted that our warning system might need improving if Hogwarts intended to make that a recurring problem.

Ron muttered that he hoped not to see McGonagall’s face again for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, he had chosen to say this while still in her classroom. Her voice came from behind him before I could offer any advice about checking one’s surroundings.

‘I am afraid that may prove difficult, Mr Weasley,’ she said. Ron closed his eyes, then turned to explain that he had meant he wouldn’t be late again.

McGonagall allowed the others to leave and asked me to follow her. The familiar sensation of being summoned to an office straightened my back before I could stop it. I had spent enough of my old schooldays explaining myself to know the route, even if the corridors had never contained this many portraits.

Her office was quieter than the classroom. She offered me a chair and waited until I sat before mentioning the practical exercise. I had been paying attention, she said, which was why she wanted to understand what had happened when I tried to apply the instructions.

‘Was there something you couldn’t follow?’ she asked. ‘Or something interfering with your concentration?’

I told her I understood what she had explained. That didn’t mean I could do it yet, but the failure had felt uncomfortably like the other times I had tried to cast directly with a wand. The brush-wand lay inside my pouch, capable of helping me inscribe magic and apparently uninterested in releasing it the ordinary way.

‘Could I have some time to work it out?’ I asked. ‘I don’t think trying harder at the same movement is going to tell me much more.’

McGonagall studied me for a moment before agreeing. She told me not to hide a difficulty because I was embarrassed by it, and I assured her that irritation was a much larger part of the problem. Her eyebrow rose slightly. I couldn’t tell whether that improved her opinion of my chances, but she let me return to the others.

Over the next few days, the distinction became harder to ignore. In Charms I could produce no direct result either, even when a professor corrected the movement and had me begin again. Other people made mistakes which gave them something to adjust. My attempts left the objects unchanged, offering no hint of whether I had come closer.

I kept notes on the instructions and on each correction. Beside them I set what I already knew about the fire and repair talismans, the force effect and the failures I had recorded at home. Understanding those workings had helped me prepare magic in Runebark. It had never made the brush behave like everybody else’s wand.

The paper wasn’t an answer to every exercise, either. My failed Levitation notes made that plain. I could read a description, copy the movements and still lack whatever understanding was needed to make a useful inscription. Before Hogwarts, I had hoped lessons would close that gap. They might yet do so, but they weren’t curing the separate problem with direct casting.

Harry and Ron began to worry aloud. Ron explained what a Squib was, then looked unhappy with the word now that it had entered the conversation. Hermione pointed out that I had already produced magical effects with paper. None of us knew what that made me, but at least it gave us a reason to doubt the most discouraging answer.

On Thursday, after Charms, McGonagall called me to her office again. This time I brought the notes where I could find them easily. I still couldn’t name the problem, but I could show her the difference I had been trying to describe.

‘Have you made any progress, Mr Mercer?’ she asked. I put my pouch on the desk and opened it, glad to have something more useful than another apology for an unchanged matchstick.

‘I think I can explain what’s happening,’ I said. ‘I haven’t worked out why.’

I took out a yellow-brown piece of treated Runebark to show her the material. Dad had researched the magical tree with another wizard, I explained. Untreated Runebark absorbed magic and released it again after a delay; they had been trying to make that storage stable enough to use. The paper and the notes they left were what I had inherited of the experiment.

McGonagall’s attention sharpened when I mentioned Ken, but she let me continue. I described the brush, the trouble with ordinary ink and the different results I had obtained from prepared liquids. Making the paper hold a working spell had been my contribution. Calling it a completed system would have ignored too many failures, including the first attempt which had left me exhausted on the floor.

‘You continued after that?’ she asked. Her gaze moved from my notes to the paper, as though reconsidering how innocuous it looked on her desk.

‘With different materials,’ I said. ‘I stopped repeating the attempt that hurt me. The later tests were smaller.’

She removed her spectacles and polished them while I considered how little comfort that explanation had offered. Curiosity did not protect a child from an experiment, she told me. I agreed, although I suspected we had rather different ideas about which risks followed from that fact. Having the results written down at least allowed us to discuss what I had done instead of what either of us feared I might try next.

I opened the notebook at the repair work and put the failed Levitation attempts beside it. Both used the same kind of paper and the same brush. One had produced a useful result, while the other had given me more questions and nothing I could safely rely on in class.

‘The material helps when I understand enough to prepare the spell,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t supply the part I haven’t learnt. And knowing how to prepare it still doesn’t let me cast it straight from the wand.’

McGonagall examined the two sets of notes. When she looked up, she described the distinction back to me, carefully enough that I knew she was considering it. My difficulty might be with the method of expressing magic, rather than with learning magic at all.

‘That’s the best explanation I’ve got,’ I said. I returned the sample to my pouch and selected a prepared talisman, keeping it in my hand while she looked from the inscription to the brush.

‘Then we need to see what the evidence supports,’ she said. Her attention settled on the piece I was holding. ‘Show me, Mr Mercer.’