“Good. That’s all I expect of you.”
The three straightened out of their conspiring huddle. Harry tucked the Petra poster back into his inner pocket, and then patted his robes, looking for something and muttering. “Where did I put that, then? Ah.” He produced a tiny black velvet bag that James recognized.
It was weighed down from the inside by a single dense object—a pewter chess king of the non-magical variety, from a set once owned by James’ grandfather, Arthur Weasley. The piece normally decorated the corner of Harry Potter’s desk in the Auror department at the Ministry of Magic, except for moments like this.
“One benefit of the diminished boundaries around Hogwarts,”
Harry said, bouncing the small bag on the palm of his hand. “Portkeys work much closer to the school than they used to. There was a time I’d have to walk halfway to Hogsmeade before this would have functioned.”
He looked up at the three gathered students again. “I assume I’ll be seeing you lot soon enough, now that you’re all officially junior Aurors in training?”
Rose nodded. “Until any of the teachers catch wise on my part, at least.”
“But hopefully only during class-times, from here on out,” Ralph added.
James only nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak.
“I’ll give your love to everyone else,” Harry said, his smile fading slightly. “And they send theirs to you. Until next I see you, then, remember: you know how to contact me, both personally and officially.
I trust that you will, should anything… come up.”
The three nodded as Harry watched. Apparently satisfied, he bounced the black velvet bag on his palm again, caught it, and then turned and walked several paces, as if he meant to stroll into the evening shadows of the Forbidden Forest beyond the old courtyard. Wind blew and switched through the tall grass at his feet. As James watched, his father upended the bag onto his open right hand, catching the pewter chess king as it fell out. With an eye-bending whoosh and a whip-crack of collapsing air, he was gone, leaving only the impression of his footsteps in the field grass below.
“We’ve crossed the Rubicon now,” Ralph breathed fretfully, running a hand back through his hair and collapsing against the stone wall. “We’re withholding valuable information from official Ministry investigation. Your dad’s right, James. We could go to prison for this.
Seriously.”
Rose shook her head, more uncertain than denying. “We don’t know any valuable information. Not yet. At least not so far as the Ministry’s concerned. James just had a dream, that’s all. Uncle Harry might understand the significance of such a thing. But his bosses would think he was daft if he brought it to them. James probably did him a favour, not telling him about it.”
Thinking about it that way, James felt slightly better. Not a lot, but a little. Wordlessly, for lack of anything better to do with the remaining hours before dinnertime, the three clambered over the stone wall and meandered down toward the lake, watching the stiff breeze as it skated over the treetops and rippled the mirror of the lake, listening to the companionable, if somewhat tense silence between them.
It wasn’t that James had never lied to his dad before. He’d lied to him on loads of occasions, regarding everything from windows broken while playing Winkles and Augers to who had left the Quidditch rulebook lying outside in the rain after an argument about blatant blatching.
But he had never lied about anything as serious as this, about anything that might get both he, and perhaps even his father, into serious trouble with people who could imprison all of them.
A pit of unease lay in his stomach, nagging at him, growing even as the evening rolled over the edge of the world and pulled the night behind it, cloudy and cool and wet with fog, like a portent, a damning shroud that chased James silently, even as he finally climbed the steps to his dormitory and fell into bed, restless and worried.
He hoped he would dream of Petra again, perhaps even go to her, as he had the previous week. He wanted to talk to her, to gain some assurance that she really did mean to set everything right, and that he, James, had done the right thing by guarding her secret even from the man whom he loved and respected most in the whole wide world.
When he finally slept, however, he did not dream of Petra. She had closed the conduit once more, even though it cost her much energy, and she could not maintain it forever. James knew this, even in his sleeping mind. The unplugged thread of her sorceress powers glowed between them, shifting from grey, to white, to deepest red. It pulsed.
Even as she closed her end, James felt the strength of the thread banking inside him, storing up in him like a battery.
He had absorbed her powers before, even called on them from time to time, usually without even intending to. Her powers were foreign to him, and completely uncontrollable. And yet he comforted in feeling the connection, the slowly intensifying energy that pooled inside him like a cycling dynamo.
Even in his dreaming mind, he mused: perhaps someday he would be able to use that banked strength to protect Petra again, just as he had on the back of the Gwyndemere those several years earlier. Only better, and more confidently, because he had absorbed so much of that weird energy in the time since. Petra was a sorceress, but unlike Merlin, her element wasn’t the vast expanses of nature. She was a new kind of sorceress, and her element was the humming hive of the city.
James’ dreaming, untethering mind mused with some tentative comfort: since he had first connected to Petra on that fateful ocean voyage, he had visited many, many cities. All of that absorbed sourcery strength was inside him, banked away, just waiting for the proper moment to be unleashed. When it came, perhaps—just perhaps—James could use it for good.
If, of course, it didn’t kill him first.
6. – Ordinance Thirteen
Despite Zane’s advice, James had deliberately left out any reference to Professor Odin-Vann when he told the others about his dream visit to Petra. This was because, deep down, he was still half certain that the appearance of the professor was the vision’s only truly imaginary element, culled by his dreaming mind from thoughts earlier that day.
And yet, as the next week began, James became suspicious that the professor was giving him furtive, sharp-eyed looks at unexpected moments. He noticed it for first time during Monday’s breakfast, a decidedly gloomy affair beneath an iron-grey caul of autumn clouds.