James sighed and gave up, stuffing a slice of toast into his mouth before anything he regretted could come out of it.
Blake went out a minute later, leaving the servant’s door to swing in and out on its hinge. His voice echoed back dully, impatiently, and as the door swung, showing regressively smaller slices of the hall beyond, James caught a glimpse of a female house elf standing just inside, observing him with her large, strangely somber eyes. She was probably the one from the kitchen, checking to assure that James found his toast acceptable. The expression on her face, however, showed less servile efficiency and more watchful intent. As the door swung one last time, showing only a few inches of dark hall and one large elven eye, James saw her face tilt back in the direction of Blake, her expression sharpening, her brow lowering with undisguised contempt.
James chewed his second slice of toast and thought about his conversation with the Gryffindor house elf, Piggen. Things seemed to be coming true just as he and his fellow elves feared. Humans were taking over house elf duties, all in the name of equality and progress.
Aunt Hermione would heartily approve. And yet the house elves themselves were obviously painfully unhappy with this new reality.
James wondered briefly what had happened to the former upstairs house elves that had been replaced by Blake and Topham and the rest. Where did house elves go when they were dismissed? Did they all still live in the downstairs warren of rooms, only without any purpose or duties to occupy them? If so, it seemed like an arrangement destined to end badly.
Impulsively, James jumped up, tossed the last bite of his toast onto the plate, and strode to the servant’s door. He pushed it open with one hand, certain that he would be too late to speak to the female house elf, to ask her his questions, and he was right. The hallway was empty, dark except for the glaring light from one window at the far end, reflecting on the polished wooden floor, turning it into a blind, imperfect mirror.
James exhaled, slumped, and allowed the door to swing shut again.
He spent the next hour and a half haunting the house by himself, never fully alone (the servants could be sensed just out of sight at most times, slipping furtively from rooms as he entered them, leaving a feeling of half-finished dusting or half-fluffed pillows behind them, so that James felt underfoot at every turn) but surrounded by the somehow watchful emptiness of the house. The portraits observed him sleepily but James couldn’t bring himself to talk to any of them. They were all just a bit too old and imperious for his comfort. In the ticking silence, his thoughts returned repeatedly to last night’s confrontation with Judith, probing the memory like a tongue probing a loose tooth.
His first question was the most obvious one of all: had it really happened? Was it possible that he had imagined it somehow? Or, more likely, that it had been a sort of magical vision projected directly into his mind by Judith? Neither Millie nor Blake seemed to have seen her. But then again, they’d been chatting secretly in the shadows beneath the boathouse. The wind and blowing snow would have been enough to conceal Judith’s form and drown her voice. The memory of her certainly didn’t feel like a dream or a vision. He remembered the wasted, blue-black shrivel of her hands and arms. With a hard shiver, he recalled the way the deadness had crept up her neck and over her face, spreading in blossoming veins just beneath her skin.
He decided that it didn’t matter whether Judith had physically appeared or merely projected a vision into his mind. By venturing out onto the frozen bay he had stepped into her domain—she was the Lady of the Lake, after all—and she had taken the opportunity to send him a simple, emphatic message: stay away from Petra.
But she had sent another message as well, perhaps unwittingly: over the past few years, Judith had clearly begun to lose her grip on this plane of existence. When Petra broke the connection between herself, Izzy, and Judith during the night of the Morrigan Web, she had apparently revoked Judith’s right to occupy human reality. Without Petra’s sponsorship, Judith was slowly being reclaimed by the void beyond life and death. It was sapping her, perhaps weakening her, but also making her mad, and desperate, and (James suspected) far more dangerous than ever.
This, he decided, was a good thing. Soon, Judith’s grasp on human existence would collapse entirely. She would sift away back into the nothingness from which she had been summoned those several years before, when she had apparently arisen from the small woodland lake on the fringes of Morganstern farm, paid for by the murder of Petra’s stepmother, Phyllis.
But in the meantime, Judith was restless. What had she said before vanishing into the wind and snow? Sometimes we have to sever the relationships that formed us… sometimes that’s the only way to forge new and better relationships…
Was Judith seeking a new host? A different sponsor that could renew her right to occupy the human world, allowing her to continue her quest for chaos, death, and destruction?
James sat in the cold sunlight of the empty library and shook his head firmly. No one, he told himself, could be so foolish as to accept Judith’s poison bargain.
But he knew better, of course. The world was depressingly full of people who would trade chaos for power, if the opportunity arose.
His best hope, he determined, was that Judith would dissolve into the creeping black before she could find any new human sponsor, whoever such a person might be. And surely Petra was watching, guarding against just such a thing, assuring that the process she began when she broke from Judith continued to its final, inevitable end.
The thought of Petra was the one thing that finally took his mind away from the shivery chill of the Lady of the Lake. Despite Judith’s intent, her words had had exactly the opposite effect on James.
By comparing Millie to Petra, she had shown him just how different his feelings for the two young women really were.
The thought of Millie inspired desire, certainly, but that was a shallow affection, a thin sheen over a puddle of more conflicted feelings and emotions.
By comparison, thinking of Petra was like walking a tightrope across a chasm of unimaginable, dizzying height. He might fall off the tightrope on one side and drop to the most horrible loss imaginable—a loss so heartbreaking and soul-crushing that he could barely conceive it.
But he might jump off the tightrope on the other side and soar into a bliss of fulfillment so deep and wide that it was an ocean of joy.