"A summer poorly used is a winter poorly survived."— Your mom
The last of the carriages cleared the main gate on a Saturday morning, just before the noon meal. I stood at the window of the third-floor corridor and watched the column of them thread down the road toward Hogsmeade, the horses moving at an easy walk in the early summer warmth, trunks and cases roped to the backs of the rear two vehicles. Within the hour, the noise that had occupied the castle since September had gone with them.
I stood there for another minute after the last carriage disappeared around the slope, listening. The castle did not become fully silent, within the place you could hear the creak of a timber settling somewhere above, water through a pipe, a distant door. But the particular sound of a school in operation, hundreds of voices and footsteps and the constant low-level collision of one person's day against another's, that was gone. What replaced it was a quieter register of sound that I had not heard since the winter break, and even then only partially.
I turned away from the window and went down to find Owen Thatcher, who had the summer assignments.
He had posted the roster on the board outside the groundskeeper's building the previous Thursday, and I had read it twice already. Twelve students remained at Hogwarts for the summer, most of them muggleborns or those with no household to return to. The summer workforce also included two older students completing outstanding obligations from the school year, a pair of third-years who had been assigned extended work terms and were visibly unenthused about it.
My assignments ran Monday through Friday: animal care from dawn until the morning meal, then a rotation through field work, wall repair, and general maintenance through the afternoon. Saturday mornings were reserved for whatever task Owen judged most urgent that week. Sundays were free, provided nothing on the grounds had broken badly enough to require all hands.
Margaret's roster was similar, though she drew kitchen garden and herb drying where I drew field work on the alternating days.
Owen himself said very little when I confirmed my schedule with him. He looked at my hands, looked at my build, and assigned me to the cattle without comment. Whether that was a vote of confidence in my fitness for heavy work or simply a function of his having one slot remaining, I could not determine and did not ask. Though I'm sure it was because I'm such a stud, right? The magical workouts have been going amazing, I am probably the most fit thirteen year old in the world. Mind you, I haven't skipped a single day without a 'workout', though the lazy man's workout. The only thing I've had to do is endurance training, because while the muscles may be greater, my lungs haven't been enhanced or whatever else is needed, not that I really know how it all works.
The first morning set the pattern for the ones that followed.
I woke before the dawn bell, as usual. The dawn bell rang early enough in June that waking before it required only a moderate degree of early rising, and I had been waking at that hour since first year. The dormitory held no one else, as Thomas wasn't here and everyone was still in their dorms from the school year. I guess because the house elves do the cleaning, there was no reason to have to assign summer housing. I dressed in the dark, gathered my things, and went down to pray in the common room before the light was fully up.
The fire had been set the previous evening and burned steadily when I fed it. I knelt on the hearthrug and kept the prayer brief, as I usually did on mornings when there was work to start. Gratitude, and a clear request for the day ahead, and then I rose and went to find my boots.
The path down to the byre, a new word I learned which was just a cowshed, ran along the inner courtyard's east wall and through a low gate in the outer ward. By the time I reached it the sky had gone pale blue above the treeline, the sun still behind the hills to the east but the light already full and clear. The dew on the grass left a dark line along the toe of each boot by the time I crossed the outer ward. The byre was a long stone building, lower-roofed than the main outbuildings, set against the curtain wall where it caught some shelter from the north wind. Eight cattle, which wasn't a lot but perhaps I had the smallest herd.
Hugh, the third-year Hufflepuff I had worked beside in January on the courtyard ice, was already there. He had the first of the cows tied to the ring post and was wiping down her flank with a cloth.
"Nicholas," he said, without looking up.
"Morning."
He handed me a wooden pail without further discussion and nodded toward the end of the line.
I had not milked a cow before coming to Hogwarts. I had learned the first week of May, which was the last time the summer students had stayed on to help with spring maintenance. The learning curve was, in my private assessment, steeper than most things I had attempted in this life, and that was including runic circuit work and partial Transfiguration. The cow did not cooperate, the bucket moved, and the result of the first three sessions had been a waste of good milk and a quantity of bruising on my shins from the hoof. By the end of the second week I had it well enough that Hugh stopped wincing when I sat down.
That first June morning I got through two of my four cows before the light had risen far enough to see clearly without the lantern. The third gave me trouble at the start, shifting her weight in a way that suggested she had opinions about the morning schedule, but settled after I spoke to her in a low voice for a minute, which was a technique Hugh had suggested and which I had been skeptical of and been wrong to be skeptical of. The fourth milked clean, praise the Lord, though my skill left much to be desired as too much milk was wasted onto the ground. This was in fact the time to cry over spilled milk. Anyone who uses that saying has never had to squeeze cow nipples for a living.
We carried the pails to the dairy and poured them into the broad shallow settling pans, then went back to muck out the stalls. This was the less pleasant portion of the morning, and I mean that without qualification. Hugh worked from one end and I from the other, and we met in the middle sometime around the point when the distant smell of the kitchen told me that breakfast was being prepared and I was hungry enough to find that information immediately relevant.
The muck went on the garden heap, the stalls got fresh straw, and the cattle went out through the gate to the east pasture. All of this took until midway through the morning on a good day and longer when something went wrong, and something went wrong with some frequency. A cow that had found her way to a section of pasture she should not have been in. A calf that had managed to separate itself from the herd through a gap in the dry stone wall that no calf should have been small enough to fit through. The gap in the dry stone wall that then required patching before anything else.
On the third day I patched the wall myself, carrying field stones from the pile beside the gate and resetting them in the original course without being asked to do so, which Hugh acknowledged with a short nod that did nothing for me, but what am I, chopped liver? No, I am a child laborer, oh the tragedy! Actually, it wasn't all that bad, you kind of just get used to the work, same as any other job really. Plus, it wasn't really hot out, nothing compared to a hundred plus degrees that Texas had on the daily.
Meals in the summer were a smaller affair than during term, taken in the side hall rather than the Great Hall, the long tables replaced by two short ones where the remaining students sat together regardless of house. The food was not reduced in quality, only in variety, which I found acceptable. The bread was still good. The porridge remained salted by some miracle of continued negotiation I had managed with the house-elves. The tea was strong, served in heavy ceramic cups that held the heat well.
Margaret sat across from me most mornings, her hair pinned and her sleeves already rolled, which told me she had been in the herb garden before breakfast on the days I had been with the cattle. She ate with the direct efficiency she always had, not rushing, but not lingering either, and the conversation at that end of the table tended to be sparse and practical.
"The fennel on the south beds is going rank," she said one morning, not looking up from her cup. "It hath bolted early from the heat."
"Did you cut it?"
"I did. What I could. The lower growth may recover." She tore a piece of bread. "The beds along the wall will need watering by Thursday if the rain doth not come."
"I can do that Thursday afternoon."
She looked at me then, briefly, confirming I meant it. "I shall leave the watering can by the gate."
That was generally how our mornings went. A short exchange of whatever was current on the grounds, then both of us finishing the meal and going to our respective assignments. There was nothing uncomfortable in the quiet between sentences, and there had not been since some point in the first year when we had both apparently decided that conversation for the purpose of filling silence was not something either of us had energy for.
The field work that occupied my afternoons in the first two weeks of June was principally haymaking.
I had known, in the abstract way of someone who has read about it, that haymaking was a significant undertaking. I had baled hay with my dad before, the smaller square kinds but he had a tractor and trailer whereas I now had a scythe and barn, a bit of a difference.
The meadow ground south of the outer ward had been left uncut since spring to grow tall, and the grass there stood past my knee in long, soft waves that smelled of grass sprinkled with dew, almost rich enough to smell like the aftermath of a lawnmower early in the morning. The scythes came out of the equipment store at the beginning of the first week, long-handled and wide-bladed, and Owen walked us through the stroke before he left us to it.
The stroke was not difficult to understand. It was difficult to execute without catching the blade in the ground, pulling through improperly, or tiring the wrong muscles. The third-year Ravenclaw, whose name I had finally caught as Edmund, had done this before and moved with a clean rhythm that I watched for most of the first morning before I had the pattern in my own hands well enough to maintain it for more than ten minutes together. The work was hot. June in Scotland was not the killing heat of a Texas summer, but it was warm enough, and the motion of the scythe was sustained enough, that I was sweating through my shirt by midmorning and glad of it in the way that physical work makes you glad of its own exertion.
Why we weren't taught some charm was beyond me, but would I let that stop me? Well, yes I would… but I did have an alternative: a levitation charm. And so, levitating the scythe, I would swing my hand back and forth, the scythe following along; a grim reaper mixed with a conductor if you will. It didn't take long for the other guys to follow suit, having already worked up a sweat. And so there we were, a group of guys waving our arms and a set of floating scythes swinging out in wide arcs several feet long.
There was, I will note, a version of this that magic could have done in an afternoon. A competent wizard with the right charms could have laid the whole meadow flat and raked it into windrows before the morning meal. Owen Thatcher knew this and did not use those charms and did not explain why he did not use them, which meant the reason was either one he considered self-evident or one he had no particular interest in discussing. I just think it was a jerk move, we are children for crying out loud, but sure, chalk it up to character building.
The would-be hay, once cut, had to dry in the rows for two or three days depending on the weather, then be turned with long wooden rakes to dry on the other side, then be gathered into cocks (not that kind, get your mind out of the gutter, though I do laugh to myself every time I hear the term), the small dome-shaped piles that shed rain and allow the hay to continue curing without losing what had already dried. All of this happened in stages across a week, and the weather cooperated imperfectly, as Scottish weather did. When a shower came through on the third day, we spent the afternoon covering the nearest cocks with canvas weighted at the edges by stones, which was its own kind of labor and not the pleasant outdoor kind.
By the end of the second week I had muscles sore in places I had not previously known contained muscles. I did find my butt rather sore, though have I skipped glute day for a year? Do I want to grind my glutes as well… first world problems I guess.
The evenings were mine.
This was the part I had been looking forward to since the moment Owen posted the work roster, though I had kept that anticipation to myself as a matter of general practice. After supper, which the kitchen produced reliably and with more variety than I had expected for a reduced household, I had three or four hours before the light failed entirely. In June in Scotland, that meant working until half past nine or later, the sky outside still holding a faint luminous blue long after the horizon should have gone dark.
I divided the evenings between the Codex and the ring.
The Codex work was the more urgent of the two. My restricted section pass expired at the end of the school year. I think I got all of them, with the second to last day of term, the codex had stopped writing in itself, the gemino charm that had been enchanted to activate when on no longer copying into the codex. So now I have started perusing through the book looking for interesting sections and leaving a placeholder on ones I wanted to look into later. I may or may not have been reading this in the general library area, and totally coincidentally, the end of the codex has been getting farther away from my reading. I'm sure it's nothing.
What I did have was more than enough to keep me reading for the foreseeable future.
Most evenings I spent an hour with the Codex open on the desk in the corner room I had taken over as a working space, reading whatever section seemed most relevant to whatever I was currently building or trying to understand. The ward geometry texts I had copied in February were useful for the ring work. A text on material conductivity, which I had found on the last day of term and copied in the final minutes of my last allowed session, was immediately applicable to the question of what metal to use.
The ring itself was a simpler project than the Codex, which was why I had taken it on simultaneously. After the weeks of managing the Codex's complexity, the ring's demands felt workable, a single series of contained problems rather than the cascading system I had spent most of the year debugging. The concept was the same as the extended bags I had made for Thomas and the others: a small object with a spatial extension charm anchored by runic overlay. The difference was scale and material.
Metal was a harder substrate than wood for rune work. The text on material conductivity had confirmed what I had suspected from my earliest experiments: metals resisted runic inscription in ways that wood and leather did not, their internal structure too regular and too dense for the channels to seat cleanly. The exception was metals with what the text called natural magical affinity, which it defined only vaguely as those materials whose lattice structure permitted the passage of magical force without significant resistance. The named examples were goblin silver and the alloys used in certain wand cores. Neither of these was available to me.
Copper, however, was partially listed in a later section as having moderate magical conductivity under certain conditions. The blacksmith in Hogsmeade, whose name was Edmund Rawlings and whose opinion of unsolicited visitors to his forge was not warm, had a quantity of copper scraps from a repair job on the castle's kitchen drainage fittings. I had asked him about the scraps on a Wednesday evening during a supply run, and he had looked at me for a long moment before naming a price that I considered reasonable and he considered modest, and we had concluded the transaction without either of us finding much else to say.
The work on the ring proceeded slowly, as metal work always did. The knife was inadequate for this material, mostly because my transfiguration wasn't quite up to snuff for metal just yet. I had eventually obtained a small chisel from the carpentry supply, ground its edge finer with the whetstone from the Charms preparation room, and used it with deliberate care to cut channels into the copper band that were clean enough to work with. The levitation carving frame I had built in the Room of Requirement served well here, holding the band steady at the angle I needed while I directed the chisel with careful pressure of thought.
The first version cracked along the fourth rune. The second held its inscriptions but failed to seat the extension charm properly, the spatial lattice drifting after two days into a configuration that was stable but wrong, the interior space contracting rather than holding. The third version, which I began on a Thursday evening and completed on the following Saturday, held on the first charm application and was still holding a week later. The interior expanded to accommodate a small notebook when I concentrated magic into the Fehu rune, and returned to ordinary band proportions when I released it.
It was not large. It was not impressive to look at, a plain copper band, slightly irregular, worn on the middle finger of my right hand where it sat without catching on anything. But it worked.
Margaret noticed it on a Tuesday morning at breakfast and said nothing for a full minute, which with her was the equivalent of a long examination.
"Thou hast made a ring," she said at last.
"I have."
"Is it doing something?"
"Yes. Interior extension. Smaller than the bags, but it holds."
She turned her hand over her cup, thinking. "Copper."
"It has enough conductivity for the purpose. Not ideal, but workable."
She nodded once, the small firm nod she used when she had received information and classified it as accurate.
So yes, I may have made a storage ring, but I mean, who wouldn't? Enchanting the ring with extremis capacious expands it according to the magic and all the lattices used for the codex. In order to get anything into the object which wouldn't usually fit, a shrinking charm or rune work had to be used. For example, a hole in a ring won't fit a book, while a trunk would. So the trunk doesn't need a shrinking charm and the ring does. I plan on casting the extension charm every evening until it can handle the room of hidden things, which means I'll be at this for quite a while. I may try to have a runic scheme to constantly add magic to the enchantment, if it'll improve the space.
The Sunday I decided to go further came at the end of the second week.
The third Sunday I woke early, as usual, said my prayers, and decided that the ring was stable, the Codex was in order, and the field work would still be there on Monday regardless of what I did with the day. I went to find Margaret.
She was in the kitchen garden when I got there, deadheading the borage along the south wall with a pair of small iron scissors. I could see a pile of flowers that had faded and been cut laid to the side. This method was used to prevent self-seeding and to allow for new flowers to bloom. She looked up when I came through the gate.
"I am going up into the hills," I said. "The ones south of the village, east of the road. I want to map the ground properly. Wilt thou come?"
She set down the scissors and looked at the sky, which was clear in the east and holding only a few thin clouds to the west. Then she looked at the borage, which was not urgently in need of her further attention.
"How far?" she asked.
"As far as the ridge above the eastern slope if the weather holds. I may camp."
She considered this with the directness she brought to most things. "I shall need to fetch my cloak."
"Meet me at the outer gate in half an hour."
We left the castle at full mid-morning, the sun already well up, the air warm enough that the cloaks were tied across the top of our packs rather than worn. I had put together what I needed the previous evening: a small canvas bag with food from the kitchen, two blankets, a firesteel and char cloth, my notebook and a piece of charcoal for sketching, and the small compass I had carved from a scrap of softwood in the spring, its needle a sliver of iron I had magnetized by repeated stroking against the lodestone in the Charms equipment room. It pointed north reliably enough for my purposes, which was all I needed.
Margaret had her own pack, compact and squared, put together with the same efficiency she brought to everything.
The road through Hogsmeade ran south from the castle gate and forked at the edge of the village, one branch continuing south toward the lowlands and the other bending east along the foot of the hills. We took the eastern branch and followed it until the houses of Hogsmeade were behind us and the track narrowed to a footpath between dry stone walls.
The hills to the east of the valley rose in a series of long, gradual shelves, each one ending in a steeper face before the ground leveled again above. From the castle, looking across the valley, they appeared uniform, a single slope covered in grass and heather. Walking up them, the internal structure became clear. The first shelf was farmland at its lower edge, the fields of two or three small holdings running up to a line of gorse where the improved pasture gave way to rough grazing. Above the gorse the grass changed character, shorter and drier, with the first patches of heather coming in among the bent grass, and above that the ground grew stonier, the shelves more pronounced.
I sketched as I went, not stopping for each observation but pausing at the top of each shelf to mark the relative elevation, the angle of the slope above and below, the drainage patterns where streams had cut shallow channels through the peat. Scotland's hills drained in ways that were particular to their structure, the water moving not simply downhill but following the underlying rock through channels that were not always visible on the surface. The sketch was rough, done in charcoal on the notebook page, but the proportions held well enough that I could read it back without difficulty.
"What art thou marking there?" Margaret asked, coming up beside me at the second shelf while I finished a line.
"The ridge direction relative to the valley." I turned the notebook to show her. "And the drainage, here, where the stream cuts east instead of south. The ground below that line is probably wetter than it looks."
She looked at the sketch and then at the ground indicated, and then back. "The grass is different, yes," she said. "Greener. And the rushes are beginning at the edge."
She was right. A line of soft rush had established itself at the margin of the cut, just visible among the bent grass. I added a notation and we moved on.
The third shelf was the longest, a broad band of moorland perhaps half a mile across before the ground rose sharply to the ridge. The heather here was in early bud, not yet flowering, the plants dense enough to make walking slow where we left the narrow sheep path that crossed the moor in a line worn to bare peat by generations of use. Skylarks were up in numbers, their songs dropping from somewhere above and ahead, the birds invisible against the pale blue overhead. One hovered almost directly above us for a long moment before lifting higher and drifting east.
I stopped at the foot of the steep rise to the ridge and looked back.
The view from here took in the whole valley. Hogsmeade was visible as a cluster of rooftops and smoke, the Three Broomsticks distinguishable by the size of its chimney stack. The road north from the village ran straight until it curved around the shoulder of the hill below the castle, and the castle itself rose from its promontory exactly as it looked from a distance, complete and impossible and seemingly larger than its actual footprint should have justified. The lake caught the morning light and held it, dark blue at its center and lighter toward the shore we could see from this angle.
Margaret stood beside me without speaking. She had her cloak over her arm and her hair was coming loose at one side from the exertion of the climb, which she had not noticed or had noticed and not addressed yet. She was looking at the castle.
"I had not seen it from this direction before," she said after a time.
"The south face is the best of it. The towers are evener on this side."
"Aye." She was quiet for another moment. "It doth look smaller from here."
"It is the distance." I turned back to the notebook and marked the position relative to the valley. "The proportions are the same."
She made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disagreement, and we started up the steep face.
The ridge was a long, narrow crest of exposed rock running roughly north to south, the highest point perhaps six hundred feet above the valley floor. The last twenty feet of the ascent was scrambling more than walking, both hands on the rock, the packs shifting awkwardly with each move. I went first and reached the crest well before Margaret, who was climbing carefully but steadily below me, and I sat on the nearest flat stone and waited.
She came up without asking for a hand, which I did offer as a proper gentleman, yet was rejected, partly because the ledge was too narrow for two to stand comfortably side by side. She sat on the rock beside me and put her pack down and looked out at the view, which was no longer just the valley but the country beyond it in all directions.
To the north, the castle. To the west and south, rolling hill country with a wider valley further on, the road threading through it as a pale line. To the east, the hills continued, a series of ridges stepping back toward higher ground, each one slightly darker and more distant, the furthest ones blue-gray against the horizon. A river was visible in the lower ground to the east, catching the sun in brief flashes between bends.
I sat for a while and then opened the notebook and began the ridge survey, marking the compass bearings of each notable feature: the direction and approximate distance to Hogsmeade, the castle, the lake, the eastern river. The work was rough navigation, the kind of basic mapping that did not require instruments beyond what I had, but done consistently it built a picture of the ground that I could read back later with reasonable accuracy. Slowly mapping out the trail we had been taking and the general elevation or notable markers to recognise, we spent some time on that ledge.
Margaret ate an apple and watched me work without comment.
When I finished the ridge notations I looked at the sky to the west, where a bank of cloud had been building since midmorning. It was not yet threatening, still white at its upper edge, but it had grown thicker since we left the valley floor.
"We should eat before the clouds come in," I said.
"Agreed."
We found a section of the ridge where the rock formed a natural windbreak on the north side, a small concavity between two outcrops just large enough to sit in with our backs to the stone. The food from the kitchen was bread, a wedge of hard cheese, dried salt pork in a cloth, and two small pastries wrapped in paper that I had obtained from the kitchen that morning by the simple method of asking Binky before anyone else was up. We divided everything without discussion, the pastries last because they were clearly the better item and both of us were aware of this.
"Thou didst bring pastries," Margaret said, when she unwrapped hers.
"I did."
She looked at it for a moment. "At what hour didst thou go to the kitchen?"
"Before the dawn bell."
She looked at the pastry again and then at me. "That is," she said, and then stopped.
"A dedication to proper provisioning?"
"I was going to say excessive, but thy word will serve."
She ate the pastry. I ate mine. The wind moved over the ridge above us and left the windbreak quiet.
We descended to the third shelf before the cloud reached us, which was not faster than I had hoped but fast enough. The plan to camp on the ridge had become, on closer inspection, a plan to camp on the third shelf, where the moorland offered reasonable shelter and the peat was dry enough to burn. I had marked the position of the old sheep fank, a low-walled stone enclosure the shepherds used for gathering the flock, which would cut the wind and give us a back wall to reflect heat.
We reached it before the first rain came, a brief shower that passed in under ten minutes and left the heather smelling of wet earth and something harder to name. The fank was unoccupied, its walls sound on three sides and partly fallen on the fourth, the interior floor packed earth and dry.
I built the fire against the sound back wall using the method that worked reliably in wet conditions: a base of dry moss gathered from under a rock overhang, then the smallest pieces of heather stalk I could break off cleanly, then larger pieces, the whole thing built into a shape that drew air upward through its center rather than smothering itself. It caught on the second strike of the firesteel and I built it up in careful stages until it was large enough to hold through the evening without constant attention. I hadn't been an outdoorsman in my past life, almost a hybrid between a country kid and a suburban one. But this was amazing: the scenery was beautiful and you could hear all kinds of nature around you. I was reminded of a hymn How Great Thou Art, where the second verse went something like this:
When through the woods and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees
As I look down from lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze
Then sings my soul, my saviour God to thee
How great Thou art…
The hike was something I would never have been able to see in my old world. Sure you had some country sights or places to visit but it wasn't near as vibrant or magical as what we were seeing here.
Margaret sat on her blanket against the wall opposite the fire and opened the small volume she had brought. I had not asked what it was. She read with the fire on her face and the last of the daylight from the open fourth side, not speaking for a long time.
I worked on the notebook. The ridge sketch needed details added while the memory was clear: the angle of the rock strata on the upper face, which ran at a consistent tilt that suggested the original uplift direction. The drainage pattern I had marked at the second shelf needed a connecting line to the eastern river I had spotted from the ridge. Small things, but the kind that made the map useful rather than merely decorative.
The light from the west faded slowly, which was the particular quality of a June evening in Scotland. It did not go quickly or in stages but diminished in a gradual, patient way, the blue deepening while the hills remained visible, so that for a long time you could see the shapes of things without being able to make out their details, and then eventually you could not see the shapes either and you had been aware enough of the transition to place it at no particular moment.
I fed the fire and opened the Codex.
The text I had been working through was the ward geometry volume I had copied in the spring, a dense and often frustrating treatment of spatial enclosures and their interaction with ambient magical fields. I had read the first three chapters twice and understood them well enough. The fourth chapter, which dealt with anchor points and how a ward maintained its position without active maintenance, was harder, the author's explanations relying on concepts he appeared to assume the reader had already encountered elsewhere.
Margaret looked over from her own book. "The ward text again?"
"Chapter four."
"What doth it say?"
I turned the Codex toward the firelight and found the passage. "The author argues that a ward's anchor cannot be the ward-caster's own magical signature, because the ward would collapse if the caster died. He says it must be fixed to a material object or a fixed point in the landscape." I looked up. "The problem is he does not explain how the fixing is done. He only says it is done."
She considered this. "Perhaps there is a following chapter."
"There is. I have not reached it."
She returned to her own reading. The fire popped once and settled. Outside the flank walls the moorland was dark, the nearest hills still barely visible as dark shapes against a sky that was not yet fully black, the last of the western light holding on in a thin pale line along the horizon.
An owl called from somewhere down the slope toward the treeline, a long resonant sound that carried well in the still air. Then silence, and then the owl again, nearer.
I read until the Codex's text became difficult to follow by firelight alone, which was later than I expected. The chapter on anchor points ended inconclusively, as I had suspected it would. The following chapter began with a different subject. I closed the Codex and put it in the pack with the ring, which I had been running a test activation on and off throughout the evening as a quiet parallel activity, measuring how the copper band handled repeated charging without a rest interval. The results were stable, which was what I wanted to know.
Margaret had fallen asleep against the wall with her book across her knee, which I noticed when I looked up from packing. I set a larger piece of peat on the fire to see it through the night and settled my own blanket around me and sat with my back against the stone.
The sky above the fourth open wall of the fank was clear now, the shower having passed entirely. Stars had come fully out, the band of them most visible in the south and east where the sky had gone darkest first. The Milky Way was present as a diffuse thickening of the light, not spectacular but real and steady, the way things in the actual sky are always more modest and more consistent than paintings of them.
Transfiguring a couple logs into pillows and leaves into blankets, I lay my own bedding out before gently taking her head to a pillow I set for her and covering her in a blanket. I walked to the edge of the site, casting Protego Totalum and Cave Inimicum, to protect against anything into the stie and to alert us if any hostile enters the area.
Watching the milky way above, with the campfire crackling lightly and Margaret's soft breathing, I gradually fell asleep.
We came down the hill the following morning in the early light, before breakfast.
The descent was faster than the climb had been, the path known now, the footing familiar. My legs were stiff from the night on the ground but workable, and the morning was clear and cold enough that the walking warmed me within the first ten minutes. Margaret moved ahead on the steeper sections where the narrow path made single file the only option, and we did not talk much on the way down, both of us working through our own thoughts at the pace that physical movement allowed.
Hogsmeade was waking as we came through it. A woman shaking a rug from an upstairs window. A man leading a horse from the stable behind the inn, the horse's breath visible in the morning air. The smell of woodsmoke and something baking from the direction of the baker's shop, which opened early and closed when the bread was sold.
I bought two small rolls from the baker's boy, who was arranging the morning's output in the window with the focused attention of someone who had been told exactly how it should be done and intended to get it right. He took the coin and handed over the rolls without comment. I gave one to Margaret.
"The eastern ridge," she said, when we were past the village and on the road back up to the castle. "Is that the furthest you mean to go?"
"Not necessarily. The country east of the ridge is worth looking at, and there is higher ground beyond the second line of hills. But that would take two days at least."
She looked at the ground ahead for a moment. "When?"
"End of the month, if the work permits."
She nodded. "I shall want to see the river from close range. The one we saw from the ridge."
"There is probably a ford somewhere on the eastern approach. I marked a possible crossing on the sketch."
"Good." She finished the roll and brushed the crumbs from her sleeve. "I shall tell Owen we are going at the end of the month."
She said it as though it were settled, which it was.
The third and fourth weeks of June ran in the same shape as the first two.
The haymaking moved from cutting to turning to cocking, and then the hay that was dry enough was moved into the barn in stages, loaded onto the flat-backed cart and unloaded again by hand into the mow. This was the heaviest work, pitching the dry hay up onto the growing pile, which required a particular technique with the long-handled fork that I was still developing on the days when the pile was at its highest and the angle was steepest. Edmund, who had been making hay in some form since before he could remember, worked with an ease I watched and tried to imitate and did not fully achieve by the time the last load went in.
The cattle continued their daily routine regardless of what else was happening, which was the characteristic quality of cattle as workers. Their requirements were constant, their opinions on the quality of service offered were expressed through small acts of non-cooperation, and they were not interested in any explanation of extenuating circumstances. Hugh found this reliable. I found it character-building and left it at that.
In the evenings I read from the Codex and continued the ring testing. The copper band was holding well, but the interior dimensions were not quite what I wanted. A ring that could hold a notebook was useful. A ring that could hold more than a notebook would be more useful. The limiting factor was the anchor stability: at higher extension ratios the spatial lattice began to drift the same way the second version's had, not collapsing but shifting, the interior dimensions slowly contracting toward a smaller configuration that was stable but wrong.
I spent three evenings working through the relevant sections of the ward geometry text, looking for the mechanism the author referenced in his treatment of anchor points. On the fourth evening I found it, buried in the fifth chapter under a discussion of fixed-point enchantment in architectural wards, a technique the author described as material resonance anchoring. The principle was that a ward or spatial enchantment could be stabilized against drift by fixing its internal anchor to a material with high natural magical conductivity, the conductor serving as a reference point that the enchantment returned to rather than drifting from.
I read that paragraph three times and then sat with the Codex closed on my knee for a while.
The problem with the ring was not the extension charm or the rune sequence. The problem was that copper, with its moderate conductivity, was not a stable enough reference for the spatial lattice to return to. The lattice drifted because the anchor drifted with it.
What I needed was the same thing I had needed for better ring work from the beginning: a more conductive metal. The text named examples but did not describe how to obtain them. I added the question to the ongoing list in my notebook, under a heading I had begun in first year and continued to extend: Things I do not have the resources for yet.
Margaret, when I explained this on a Friday evening over the remains of supper, listened without interruption and then said, "The ring works for smaller things."
"It does."
"Then use it for smaller things until thou canst make it better."
Word came from Eleanor on a Saturday, carried by a small tawny owl that landed on the windowsill of the side hall during breakfast and sat there until someone noticed it. The letter was folded tight and sealed with plain wax, Eleanor's handwriting on the outside neat and close.
She and Thomas were coming to Hogwarts at the end of the following week on what the letter described as family business of her guardian's, which would bring both of them to Hogsmeade for two days. She did not explain further, since the explanation was apparently secondary to the notification that they would be there.
I showed the letter to Margaret, who read it and handed it back without comment, then looked at the ceiling in the way she did when she was working through an implication.
"Two days," she said.
"Yes."
"And they will have seen only the town and wherever the family business takes them." She looked back at me. "We should take them out."
"A picnic," I said. "The hillside above the lake. They have not seen that view."
She turned the idea over briefly. "Aye. Saturday is free after noon. If we ask the kitchen Thursday evening, Binky will have time to prepare something."
"What should we ask for?"
She thought. "Bread. The good kind, with the seeds. Some cheese. Whatever preserved fruit they have. Something warm if Binky will send it in a pot." She paused. "And the cider currant tarts, if she will make them."
"She will if I ask."
"Then ask." Margaret rose from the table and set her cup aside. "I shall find a cloth large enough for four to sit on. There is one in the linen store that is not claimed for any specific use."
She went out toward the south passage, already in motion toward the next task. I folded Eleanor's letter and put it in my coat pocket and finished my tea, looking at the window where the tawny owl had been and was no longer. The morning outside was clear, the hills to the east visible in full detail, the sky above them exactly the shade of blue it had been when we reached the ridge three weeks earlier.
The cloth, the bread, the tarts, the hillside above the lake, all of it could be arranged by Thursday if the week went without incident.
I picked up my cup and went to find Binky before the cattle needed their morning attention.