Albion was waiting outside the office door.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was the expression — the particular arrangement of golden scales and half-lidded eyes that Cael had learned, over seven years of shared existence, meant I have done something and I am not going to apologise for it.
"What did you do," Cael said. It was not a question.
Albion looked at the corridor ceiling with great interest.
"Albion."
The dragon glanced back at him, then in the direction of Gryffindor tower, then back at Cael, with the air of someone who had made sensible arrangements on behalf of a busy person and expected gratitude rather than interrogation.
Cael considered this. "Did you invite Fawkes to the room."
Albion blinked once, slowly, which meant yes and also obviously and also, you're welcome.
"He's Dumbledore's phoenix."
Albion's expression suggested this was an administrative detail of no particular relevance.
Cael looked at him for a long moment. Then he exhaled. "Fine. Go on then."
Albion turned and flew away in a flash.
The library was quieter than the corridors at this hour, which Madam Pince enforced less as a preference and more as a moral position. The lamps were low and gold. The smell was old parchment and wood polish and the particular dusty weight of a great many books that had been waiting a long time to be useful.
He found them at a table near the window.
Tonks had a chair pushed back at an angle that suggested she had already nearly fallen off it once and had not adjusted her posture in response. Alex had a book open, a notebook beside it, and the focused expression of someone who had been here long enough to have opinions about the shelf organisation. Opposite to them, occupying rather more than her fair share of the table, was Hermione — surrounded by a tower of books – about Pendragon history.
He stopped. Looked at the tower. Looked at Hermione.
She had not noticed him yet. She was reading with the intensity of someone defusing something.
"Ahem," Cael said.
Hermione looked up. Her expression cycled through: surprise, composure, the look of someone who had been caught doing something entirely reasonable and was aware it might not appear that way. "I was curious," she said, with dignity.
He pulled out the chair across from her, between Alex and Tonks and sat. "How many is that."
"Fourteen."
"Hermione."
"Some of them are cross-references."
Tonks leaned forward with her elbows on the table. "She was here before us," she said, in the tone of someone providing witness testimony. "We arrived and she already had eight."
"I had six when you arrived," Hermione said. "The other two were already on the table."
"That you had reserved."
"That is not — I simply asked Madam Pince if they were in use —"
"Shh," said Madam Pince, from somewhere between the shelves.
All four of them went quiet. The four of them arranged themselves in the particular careful way of people in a library who have just been shushed and were being watched.
Cael looked at Hermione. Hermione looked at her books. Then at him. Then back at her books.
"Go on then," he said, quietly.
She folded her hands on the table in a way that was entirely composed and also slightly betrayed the fact that she had been waiting to ask this since approximately the moment she opened the first book. "Was Godric Gryffindor actually the younger brother of William Pendragon."
Cael considered her for a moment. She held his gaze without flinching, which was, he had noticed, a consistent feature of Hermione Granger — she asked things directly and she waited for direct answers and she did not look away while doing either.
"Yes," he said.
Hermione's composure held for approximately two seconds. Then something in it wavered, very slightly, in the way of someone who had found something they expected to find and had not entirely prepared for the reality of finding it. "The flags," she said.
"The flags," he confirmed. " Godric chose the path of a teacher. King William chose to establish the kingdom. They designed their sigils together Godric chose lions and King William chose dragons — the family bond is in the similarity. It's not tribute. It's just —" he paused. "Brothers."
Hermione was quiet for a moment. "That's why every Pendragon goes to Gryffindor."
"Every Pendragon in the school, yes. I mean it is our house so it's the obvious choice." He picked up one of her books, glanced at the cover, set it down. "Though Merlin was Slytherin — but he only married into the family later. He was already sorted before the connection existed."
Hermione stared at him. "Merlin married into the Pendragon family."
"Technically the lineage intertwined rather than —" He watched her face. "Yes. Essentially yes."
She looked at the table. Then at her books. Then at him.
"You," she said, with great precision, "are an enormous cheat."
"Hereditary, I'm afraid."
"You have access to —" she gestured at the books, at him, at the general situation — "all of this. Firsthand. And I'm here with fourteen —"
"Cross-references."
"— books, trying to —"
"Shh," said Madam Pince.
Hermione closed her mouth. The expression remained. Cael held her gaze with the specific pleasantly innocent look that had served him well in approximately this situation for most of his eleven years, and after a moment the corner of her mouth moved, very slightly, against her will, in a direction that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one.
"Fine," she said quietly. "Fine."
"I'll answer questions," he offered. "It's more efficient than books."
She reached for her notebook. Cael took that as the agreement it was.
He introduced them properly then — Hermione to Tonks and Alex, Tonks and Alex to Hermione.
"Seventh year," Hermione said, looking at Tonks with the expression she reserved for things she found genuinely interesting. "And you're here voluntarily? In the library? Studying?"
"Metamorphmagus theory," Tonks said, with the gravity of someone who had recently been given a word for something that had been troubling them for five years. "Somatic language. It's — there's a whole framework, apparently." She glanced at Cael. "He's going to help."
"She's going to help herself," Cael said. "I'm going to point at the door."
Tonks considered this. "That's a very princely way of describing tutoring."
"I prefer facilitation."
Alex had already opened her notebook again. She and Hermione had exchanged approximately forty words since the introduction, which Cael had observed was enough for each of them to identify the other as someone worth taking seriously. They were now at the stage of careful, mutual intellectual circling.
"The cascade model," Alex said, not quite looking up from her notes. "You said one anchor — the others hang from it. Is the anchor the first target acquired or the most stable target?"
"Most stable," Cael said.
"So heaviest, for Accio?"
"Densest, technically. Mass is a factor but composition affects magical friction. Stone anchors better than wood even at lower mass."
Alex wrote this without looking at him. Hermione, who had been watching the exchange, reached over and wrote something in the margin of her own notebook. Alex glanced at it, considered, added a star.
Tonks watched both of them. "I genuinely only understood about half of that."
"It's Charms theory," Hermione said. "The friction model is from Vindictus Viridian's third volume —" She stopped. Looked at Alex. "Do you have the third volume?"
"I have annotations on the third volume."
Hermione looked at the annotations. Her eyes did something that could not quite be called reverent but occupied the same neighbourhood. "Those are — you've cross-referenced the friction model with the Summoning modification table."
"The table has an error in the fourth column."
"REALLY?!" Hermione said, with the passion of someone who was astonished at this error. "No one ever —"
"Shh," said Madam Pince.
Both of them went silent immediately. Then they looked at each other, and a negotiation occurred that lasted approximately three seconds and resulted in Alex sliding her notebook across the table and Hermione pulling it toward her with careful hands.
Tonks looked at Cael. Cael looked at Tonks.
He leaned slightly toward her. Very slightly. The kind of slight that was designed to be invisible to people who were currently having a passionate silent disagreement about a fourth column error.
"The twins have a plan," he said, barely sound at all. "Filch's office. The filing cabinet with the confiscated items. They need a seventh year who can do a decent confundus and isn't on Filch's existing list of suspects."
Tonks's eyes went very slightly wider. "I'm Head Girl adjacent," she whispered back. "I'm supposed to be responsible."
"You're also a metamorphmagus who can change her hair colour and has spent five years wanting to do a full transformation. You'll need practice with the somatic shift in low-stakes environments." He paused. "This is practically therapeutic."
Tonks stared at him.
"Also," he added, "they've been planning this since second year and the twins deserve better than an confundus done by someone who'll fumble it."
A pause.
"I don't fumble confundus," Tonks said, with quiet dignity.
"I hope so."
Another pause.
"When?" she said.
Cael smiled. It was the smile that Caedmon Pendragon had worn for five centuries and that Seraphine had, on multiple occasions, described as a diplomatic incident waiting to happen. "I'll send a note."
Tonks settled back in her chair with the expression of someone who had just made a decision they intended to examine later and had decided later was soon enough.
Across the table, Hermione looked up from Alex's notebook. Her eyes swept the pair of them. Her gaze stopped on Cael. He held it with perfect serenity.
"What," she said quietly.
"Nothing," he said.
She looked at him for three more seconds. Then she looked back at the notebook, with the expression of someone filing this under investigate later.
"Shh," said Madam Pince.
They left when the lamps dimmed — Madam Pince's version of a polite request, which was the closest to polite she got. Alex departed for Ravenclaw tower with her notebook tucked under her arm and three new pages of annotations. Tonks headed in a vaguely kitchen's direction while composing her own internal monologue about somatic language. Hermione put the books back.
Cael walked with her.
The corridors were quiet — not empty, just settled. Their footsteps were even and unhurried.
"Godric Gryffindor," Hermione said, after a while. Not a question. Just placing it.
"Mm."
"Younger brother."
"By three years."
She was quiet for another corridor. "Does your family talk about him?"
"Dad has stories. Grandpa hates his approach to interior decoration." He paused. "The sword recognises a true Griffindor. That's — it's not ceremonial. It's actual recognition. I am the crossest to Godric than anyone alive."
Hermione processed this. "That's why you could pull it in the Great Hall."
"That's why it felt like picking up something that had been waiting."
She absorbed this quietly, filing it somewhere that would produce questions later. They turned the corner toward the portrait of the Fat Lady, who was dozing lightly and opened one eye at their approach.
"Password?"
"Caput Draconis," Hermione said.
The portrait swung open. They entered, and the common room received them with the warm low light of a fire that had been burning all evening.
Cael stopped in front of the fireplace.
Hermione, three steps ahead, noticed he'd stopped and turned back. "Are you —"
He said one word. It wasn't English, and it wasn't Latin, and it wasn't any of the languages she knew. It was something older than all of them — something that sat in the chest rather than the ear, the way a low note on an instrument sits differently than the sound itself.
The fireplace moved.
Not the fire — the fireplace. The stone around it shifted and separated, smooth and silent as something that had always been designed to do exactly this, and where the hearth had been there was now a door that had the quality of having always been there and having simply been waiting to be addressed correctly.
Hermione's mouth opened.
"It's a private room," Cael said, pleasantly. "Every Pendragon heir gets one. The castle provides."
"The — the castle —"
"Hogwarts was founded partly by a Pendragon branch. We also get privileges as royalty." He gestured through the door with the ease of someone gesturing at a perfectly normal thing. "Come on."
Hermione walked through the door with the expression of someone who had stopped arguing with reality and was now simply attempting to catalogue it.
It was large.
That was the first thing. It was considerably larger than it had any right to be given where it was, and it was furnished with the particular assurance of a space that had never needed to justify its own existence. The floor was stone and warm underfoot. The ceiling was high enough that the upper shelves of the library — and there was a library, taking up an entire wall and then, through some architectural generosity, continuing around a corner and apparently not stopping — were in slight shadow.
There was a worktable with alchemical apparatus that Hermione identified as extremely advanced and then identified again as actively running, several processes turning and heating and condensing without any visible intervention. There was a kitchen area where utensils moved of their own purpose — a ladle stirring something that smelled extraordinary, a set of scales adjusting themselves with the satisfaction of scales that had never once been wrong.
Astrape was on a perch by the window — silver-white, crackling faintly at the edges, currently sharing the perch with Fawkes in the specific arrangement of two creatures who had reached a territorial agreement neither intended to acknowledge publicly. Albion was on the floor beneath them, examining the base of the perch with the proprietary interest of someone confirming their own excellent taste in room design.
Hermione turned a slow circle.
"You," she said, "have a library."
"Mm."
"Inside your room."
"Obviously." He dropped into one of the chairs by the worktable with the ease of someone very comfortable in his own space. "The infinity shelf is Mum's work. I told her not to send it. She sent it anyway. It's currently about three kilometres deep."
"Three kilometres —"
"Theoretically. I haven't tested the far end."
Hermione looked at the shelves. Her expression was the expression of someone standing outside a place they had been trying to find for their entire life and not yet fully believing they'd arrived.
"Come in," Cael said. "You're allowed to look."
She stepped toward the shelves with the reverence of someone approaching something that deserved it.
Behind her, the wall rippled. Ron, Harry and Neville peeped in a slightly apologetic way.
They were looking at the fireplace that was parted into an entrance. They looked at the wall behind them. They looked at Hermione, who was standing in front of a library that did not, by any reasonable geometry, exist inside a Hogwarts dormitory.
Ron observed the room in astonishment. "Is that —" He looked at the wall, at Cael, at the wall again. "Can we — are we — is that yours?"
"It is," Cael said.
"How?"
"I'm the prince. I own the castle."
Ron stared at him. "You own —"
"Technically the state owns the castle. But I own the state." He stood, with the particular ease of someone who had timed this correctly and was aware of it. "Come in then. All of you."
Ron did not need to be told twice. He was through the wall before the sentence was finished, head swivelling between the library and the alchemy and the self-operating kitchen with the expression of someone whose understanding of the possible had just been substantially revised. Harry followed, quieter, taking it in with wide eyes and the particular stillness of someone who had learned not to react too fast because reaction had historically been complicated. Neville came last, stepped through the wall, looked at the ceiling, and said nothing for a moment.
"It's very warm," Neville said finally.
"The castle keeps it," Cael said. "Come sit. The kitchen makes better hot chocolate than the house elves and I will not apologise for saying so."
The wall — or rather, the opening in the fireplace— transformed behind them.
On that wall, where before there had been only stone, a portrait had appeared.
It covered most of the wall.
The Flamel-Pendragon family, painted in the style of someone who had understood that grandeur was only half the point and the other half was warmth — Nicolas with his arm around Perenelle and the expression of a man who cried at most things and was currently choosing not to cry but clearly thinking about it. Caedmon in full Pendragon regalia with the look of someone who had sat for a formal portrait under protest and had made this formally known. Seraphine with her hands folded and her back straight and the precise controlled expression that softened, if you looked at the lower left corner where Edouard had clearly said something, into something that was almost a smile. Edouard, who had the look of a man who had indeed said something and was delighted by the results.
In the centre, painted exactly as he was in the room — golden-eyed, unhurried, with Albion at his side — was Cael.
The portrait Caedmon caught Ron looking at it and winked.
Ron blinked.