He woke to the dull ache of wind pressing against the windows, a low sound that seemed to seep into the walls.
The dormitory air was thick and heavy with the warmth of bodies that had slept too long under wool blankets. Harris was on his stomach, one arm bent under the pillow. Thomas had tangled himself halfway out of his bedding, his foot bare in the cool air.
He sat up slowly, feeling the weight of the blanket slide into his lap, then swung his legs over the side. The boards were cold under his feet, smooth where they had been worn down by years of the same motion.
The shirt on the chair was stiff from drying too close to the fire the night before. He pulled it over his head, the fabric rough at the collar. The trousers followed, one knee patched darker than the rest.
From somewhere below came the faint knock of wood on wood — someone moving about in the kitchen, likely Mrs. Whittaker.
The washroom smelled of soap and damp stone. The only light came from a narrow window high in the wall, letting in a thin blade of pale grey.
He took his place at one of the empty basins. The water from the tap was sharp against his skin. He cupped it into his hands, splashing it over his face until his cheeks stung. The towel on the hook was coarse, its edges curling where the stitching had frayed.
In the mirror, his reflection was fractured by black blooms in the worn silvering. He looked at it just long enough to confirm his collar was straight, then turned away.
Lenton passed behind him without a word, heading for the door.
The dining room was still lit by lamps, their light soft and pooled close to the tables. The benches scraped as boys sat, the sound uneven, some abrupt, others slow.
He took his seat near the end. The porridge came into his bowl in a slow, heavy drop from the ladle. A thin curl of steam rose and vanished before he could see where it went.
Harris was seated further down, speaking with Lenton and another boy, their voices low, leaning in. The words didn't carry.
Thomas sat opposite, tearing his bread into neat halves before eating each piece in three bites.
He ate without looking up, the taste of the porridge exactly as it had been yesterday and the day before — a weight in the mouth, a metallic tang at the edges.
After breakfast came the broom. The handle was worn smooth, the bristles bent at odd angles from years of use.
The east hallway was cold at one end where the window didn't close fully. The boards there were darker from the damp, their polish gone. The broom rasped along the floor, gathering dust into small, deliberate piles.
Miss Aldridge passed him once, carrying a stack of folded linen. She didn't stop. The faint scent of starch hung in the air after she'd gone.
In the kitchen, bread sat cooling on the counter, its crust cracking softly in the heat. Mrs. Whittaker moved between the stove and the table with her usual steady rhythm, the wooden spoon in her hand tapping against the side of a pot as she stirred.
He lifted the bucket of scraps from beside the counter. She glanced once in his direction. "Straight to the barrel," she said, then turned back to the pot.
The yard was empty except for the broken crate still leaning against the fence. The grass at its base was pressed flat where the wind had worked it.
He tipped the scraps into the barrel. The sound was dull, wet. A crow landed on the fence, feathers shifting in the breeze, one bright eye fixed on him.
He watched it for a few breaths before turning away. When he looked back, the bird was gone.
Lessons began with arithmetic. The ink in his bottle had thickened overnight; he shook the quill gently until it ran again.
Mr. Bowyer's voice filled the room in a steady, unbroken line. Chairs creaked when someone shifted. The pendulum in the clock kept its soft, precise tick.
Harris kept his head down over his work. Thomas's hand moved quickly, his page filling with numbers and cramped writing.
The branches outside rattled faintly against the window in a wind they could not hear.
By midmorning the light through the windows was stronger, cutting thin bars across the desks. The air smelled faintly of bread baking again.
A younger boy ran down the corridor between lessons, nearly losing his footing on the polished boards.
The kitchen door stood open, letting out a wave of warm air.
The second bell came at noon, the sound long and steady. He was in the hallway outside the dining room when the far door opened.
The woman who stepped through carried the cold in with her. Her robes shifted with each step, the fabric heavy and deliberate. Silver threaded her dark hair, catching in the light from the high windows.
She stopped in front of him, eyes sharp behind her square spectacles.
"You," she said. "We have business."
They crossed into an empty room off the hall. The door shut behind them with a sound that settled into the still air.
"I am Professor McGonagall," she said. "I teach at a school for those with certain abilities."
He stood where he was.
"You received a letter," she went on. "You threw it away. I have come because you must understand what it meant."
She stepped closer to the table between them, resting her fingertips lightly on its surface.
"Magic exists," she said. "You have it. My school — Hogwarts — is where you will be taught to use it properly."
The word hung in the air. He didn't move.
"You've done things," she said. "Things you couldn't explain. Haven't you?"
He gave the smallest nod.
"This is why you must come with me in September. We can teach you control. Without it, you risk harm — to yourself or others."
He lowered his gaze to the grain of the wood. "I see things."
Her head tilted. "What things?"
"Threads."
The pause was sharp. "Threads?"
"They're there. Between things. People. Not all the time. But when they are, I can see them."
She drew in a breath through her nose, her eyes narrowing slightly. "Describe them."
He spoke in fragments — lines that shimmered faintly, changing with speech, sometimes snapping as if cut. She stayed silent, listening.
When he stopped, she was still. "There are spells that show connections," she said at last. "But they are cast deliberately. What you're describing sounds… different."
She looked at him as if the shape of his face might give her the answer. "It could be a gift. Or something older. Something we don't name because we don't see it anymore."
"You don't know," he said.
Her lips pressed thin. "No. Not yet."
She straightened, her gaze steady. "You'll come to Hogwarts. We'll find out what it is. Together."
Neither of them moved for a long moment. The clock down the hall ticked into the silence.
She let the silence lift itself off the room before she spoke again, as if it had weight and might bruise if handled roughly.
"Would you like some tea?" she asked, like it was an ordinary question in an ordinary house.
He shrugged a little. "If you're having one."
Her mouth tipped at that. She drew her wand—not quick, not theatrical—and tapped a ring that had left a pale circle on the tabletop where a cup had once sat. Porcelain rose out of the wood grain itself, the lip of it thinning to a fine, clean edge, the bowl hollowing with a sound like breath. Steam curled up, not from nowhere but from a warmth that seemed to gather out of the air and sit patiently above the liquid until it found the right shape of heat.
She made another without looking at her wand at all.
"It's stronger than Mrs. Whittaker makes," she said, almost apologetic.
He tasted it. It was bitter and good. He put the cup down with care, as if he were afraid the table might unmake it again when he wasn't looking.
"I am curious why you threw the letter away," she said. There was no scolding in it. Only curiosity, clean as chalk on a slate. "But we needn't start there." She glanced at the window. "We can start with this."
A gust had found the frame; the top pane rattled the way it always did in wind. Without moving closer, she touched the sill with her wand. The rattle stopped. The draft softened to nothing. The air smelled briefly of rain that hadn't made it inside.
His eyes went to her hand. "You fixed it."
"For now." She ran a thumb gently along the wand's length. "You'll learn to do that your first year. Small domestic charms. They keep houses livable." She set the wand down, as deliberately as one sets down a pencil so it won't roll. "But magic isn't only mending. It's also making, nudging, coaxing. It is, when taught properly, a conversation with the world where the world is allowed to speak back."
He thought of the cup rising up out of wood as if it had always been there and only needed someone to remember it. "Does it always listen?"
"If you ask it rudely, it pretends not to." Her eyes creased; it was almost a smile. "May I?" She nodded at a small stack of stray chalks by the slate on the wall.
He nodded.
She swept them into her palm, set one on the table between them. "Old standby," she said, and flicked her wand once. The chalk shivered, softened, and shook itself into a neat white mouse with a chalky sheen to its fur. It blinked, whiskers twitching, sniffed his knuckle, and scampered into his open hand with the cheap boldness of anything new. When it ran, it left the barest dust of white footprints on his skin.
"It's alive," he said.
"For now," she echoed, softer this time. "Charmwork, not permanent transfiguration. You'll learn the difference. The ethics, too." She looked steadily at the small creature, then touched its back. It sighed into chalk again, nothing broken, only returned to what it had been a minute before.
He brushed a thumb across his palm where the footprints had been and left a faint streak.
"Why did you throw the letter away?" she asked again, not pressing it; just offering the question up like bread and letting him decide if he wanted to take it.
He looked at the bin by the door as if the paper might climb back out and explain himself for him. "It had my name on it," he said. "Too clean. Everything here is… not that. I thought someone was playing a trick. Or it would require something I didn't have."
"We ask nothing you cannot give," she said. "And most things we help you find." She considered him. "There are bursaries. Supplies can be purchased on your behalf and reimbursed by the school where necessary. The cost is not meant to be a barrier." She saw the flicker in his face at that, the small loosening at the jaw that wasn't relief and wasn't distrust either; only a ledger being updated. "We would never invite a child and then tell him he cannot afford the invitation."
He nodded. "It's far."
"Scotland." Something warmer came into her voice when she said it, like a fire remembered. "Trains and boats and clocks that run late and sometimes owls that don't. But we make it work."
He watched her hands as she spoke. She wore no ring. Her nails had a pale moon of chalk on one, the kind you pick up in classrooms and forget until you wash your hands and remember you are a teacher again.
"What happens there?" he asked.
"We study," she said. "Charms, Transfiguration, Potions, Herbology. You learn to call light when you need it and put it away when you don't. You learn how to ask a chair to be a cat and why you probably shouldn't. You learn to write precisely, because words are beams and beams hold houses up. You learn to care for things you didn't know you cared about until they trusted you not to break them." She paused. "And you make friends. Some that hold. Some that do not. We try to teach you to tell the difference."
He reached for his tea again. "Show me something else."
Her mouth made a shape halfway to a smile. "Of course." She looked around the modest, tired room as if it were a larder where one must be inventive. On the wall, a picture hung slightly askew—a print of a ship in weather, sails overfull and the horizon tilted toward bad luck. She raised her wand, and the horizon steadied, the ship found itself upright, and then, very gently, the painted sea moved. Not a storm. Just motion, the soft lift and fall that makes you widen your stance if you are there. A gull crossed the square of painted sky and vanished at the very edge.
He took one unconsciously balancing step with it. She saw and pretended she hadn't, which is the best sort of kindness.
"There," she said. "Anchors belong in their places."
"How much of that is… words?" he asked.
"More than you think, fewer than you fear," she said. "There are incantations—Latin mostly because Latin sits obediently in the mouth and doesn't slither away—but intention and motion matter. There's a grammar to magic the same way there's a grammar to walking across a room without bumping into a chair. You do it without naming it. We help you name it so you can do it when the chair is invisible."
He let that settle. "Can I try something?"
This time the smile came without hesitation. "Yes. Something safe. Light, perhaps?"
He nodded.
"Hold your wand—" She stopped, noting his empty hands. "Ah. We'll fetch one properly, and it will be yours. For now." She set her own wand on the table between them as if putting down cutlery to allow a child to try a spoon. "Two hands. One to hold, one to steady. No flourishes." She placed the wand in his grip the way one shows a new swimmer to breathe: simple, unhurried. "Say 'Lumos.' The 'u' like in 'lune.' Think of the space in front of you asking to be seen."
He drew breath the way he did for cold water and said it once, straight, no drama. "Lumos."
Nothing. He didn't look at her. He looked at the end of the wand like the answer might be hiding there. He adjusted his hand, not guessing, just setting things square. "Lumos," he said again.
The light came, so soft you could have missed it if you hadn't been watching for that particular color—the almost-white of butter left in a pantry with the window open. It grew, not all at once but like a candle catching properly after sputtering. It lit his knuckles and the fine cracks in the tabletop varnish and the faint steam still rising off her tea.
He did not smile. Something in him went stiller instead, the way a lake goes still when a wind stops. She watched that stillness with a look she had for bright first essays and shy first meows and every other first that proved a child had been listening to the world and the world had answered.
"Good," she said, and took care that the word was adequate and not extravagant. "Now 'Nox.' Off like a door closed gently."
"Nox," he said, and it went.
He placed the wand down immediately, as if it were someone else's tool he was grateful to have used without breaking.
"A feather?" she offered. "The classic test. It's not about strength; it's about listening."
He glanced at the room, perhaps looking for a feather in a place that had none to spare. She solved the matter by taking a scrap of paper from her pocket and tapping it once. It became a feather without fuss—drab, ordinary, the kind of feather that lives on the underside of things.
"Hover, not fling," she said. "A light touch. Wingardium Leviosa. The 'gar' is quieter than you want to make it. Decide where the feather ought to go before you ask it."
He said the words once in his head, once under his breath, then aloud. The feather rose half an inch, fell, rose again, and hung there like something thinking.
She did not clap. She did not speak. She let him watch the feather learn the room's gravity. He lowered it, not by dropping but like a person setting a book back on a shelf—aware there were other books beside it.
He exhaled, only then. She watched the exhale like it was also the spell.
"Why do you want me to love it?" he asked suddenly, not belligerent; curious.
She folded her hands. "Because fear makes you careless, and disdain makes you cruel," she said. "Love—by which I do not mean gushing fondness but respect, attention, and the willingness to be changed—makes you careful. I would rather you be careful."
He nodded as if he'd expected that answer and was relieved to have been right.
She leaned back a fraction, considering him from another angle. "Will you try one more?"
He nodded again, smaller.
She touched the wall with her wand, and a hairline crack that had wandered in the plaster like a dried riverbed since before either of them had stepped into the room glowed faintly, like chalk dampened to show its lines. "Mending," she said. "Reparo. It is easy to break things. It is necessary to learn how to put them back."
He traced the crack not with his finger but with his eyes, which was better. Then he spoke the word as if it belonged to the wall already. The line drew itself closed, not snapping, not smug—just closing, the way a mouth closes after it has said all that was needed.
"Enough," she said gently, when she saw the small fatigue that comes with asking a new part of yourself to be born. "Sit."
He sat.
They let the quiet return and settle. The ship in the picture found its rhythm and kept it. Outside, a cart went by, iron wheels complaining on stone. Somewhere below, Mrs. Whittaker lifted a lid and put it down again and lifted it a second time because that is how cooks check stew.
"Threads," McGonagall said after a time, as if she had let the word grow room around it before she touched it again. "Tell me when you first saw them."
He looked not at her but slightly past her, like the thing he wanted to describe might be standing in the corner. "Not first. They're not there most of the time. Then they are. Between people. Sometimes things. I noticed because they hum. Not sound exactly. When someone means something very much and says something else, they go tight. Or thin. When someone wants something from someone else, they get brighter."
"And when someone is honest?" she asked.
"Steadier. Not showy. If the two are… aligned—" He searched, not for the thought but for the right weight of it. "It feels like the air has one less knot in it."
She nodded once, slow, the way one nods to a musician who has played a note you didn't know you were listening for. "Color?"
"Sometimes," he said. "Not like a rainbow. Mostly… more or less." He left it there because that was as far as language would go.
"Do they connect to everyone?" she said.
"No. Sometimes a person is all edges," he said. "No lines. Sometimes the room is full of them and you can't move without feeling them in your shirt."
She was quiet. She had the look now of someone sitting with a theorem that might have three proofs and also might be a riddle. "There are fields of study that might grace this," she said after a moment. "Arithmancy attempts to describe the structure of magic with numbers, but it rarely admits it's describing people, too. Some wards respond to intent; they thicken when malice approaches. That's a kind of… non-visual awareness. Divination claims to see through veils, but its best use is often as a mirror held at an angle." She frowned, but not unhappily. "There were older ways. Work with leys and lattices—power that runs under things the way water does. I do not know that we've had a student who claims to see connections between minds and objects themselves as if they were—" She lifted a hand, searching. "—string on pegs."
"They're not always between people," he said. "Sometimes between a person and a place. The hall outside the dormitory, if you stand still there, there's a… pull at the corner where the floor dips."
"Old sorrow sits there," she said, almost absent-mindedly. "A fall, I think, long before your time. People step around it without knowing they are doing it." She filed that away. "And you can see it."
"Not see like sight." He waggled his fingers, as if that were the word he wanted and not something truer. "But yes."
She tapped a fingertip against her cup, once. "I will not pretend certainty. There is something here that is neither mere empathic sensitivity nor common magical perception. We will ask Professor Vector to listen to you with Arithmancy's ear and see whether the structures you sense can be caught in numbers. Professor Babbling will have thoughts about ancient runic frameworks and whether what you feel maps to older grids. I will ask Professor Flitwick to sit with you for Charms and listen if your spells 'lean' in a particular direction. And Professor Dumbledore…" She considered, then smiled, an amused softness at her mouth for a man not in the room. "He has a tolerant mind for unusual ways of knowing. He may simply pour you tea and ask you to talk until he hears what the rest of us missed."
He watched her list her colleagues with the care of someone setting stations for a meal that must feed a very specific appetite.
"What if it stops?" he asked, voicing the sort of thought children have alone and rarely share.
"Then we will trust that the world is being merciful and noisy in some other way," she said without hesitation. "And if it does not stop, we will teach you how not to be crushed under it." She leaned forward a fraction. "It is not your job to be a weather vane for every wind. It is your job to learn your craft and choose your uses."
He looked at the picture again. The ship continued its steady motion. "Do you see them?" he asked, and meant threads.
"I see other things," she said. "I have a nose for disorder that is trying to pretend it is order, and a knack for making tables stand up under badly cut legs. I hear when a class wants a joke and when it wants rules." She tilted her head, considering. "As for your threads—no. But if you say they're there, I don't require proof on the first day. We can live with not knowing for a bit."
He thought about the how of living with not knowing. He knew a lot about it already.
"You'll have a letter again," she said, with the air of solving a practical problem. "Not one that expects you to believe it on faith. One that arrives while I am still here to answer it. You will not throw this one away."
He flushed, not embarrassed but seen. "I won't."
"Good." She stood and the room shifted in that barely perceptible way rooms do when a person with purpose stands; furniture knows when someone is going somewhere. "Would you like to see one more thing before I return you to stew and porridge and the good order of Mrs. Whittaker's day?"
He nodded.
She went to the window. Without breaking the pane's perfect new silence, she hooked a nail under the latch and opened it an inch. Cold air came in with a clean smell. She raised her wand and drew a shape in that air—no word, only a gesture with corners you could almost diagram. The cold gathered and made itself visible. A small square of snow formed in the space between them. It hung there for a breath, then became a slow, articulate flurry that dusted the sill and his sleeve and melted at once into the fine damp you get when something has chosen not to last too long in an old house.
He reached out as if to touch it and didn't, deciding to let it be what it had been instead of making it be something else.
"Another grammar," she said. "Conjuration is expensive work. We do not teach you to do it until you've learned to clean up after it."
"Do you ever…" He stopped, then went on because she had left space in which to go on. "Do you ever make things that stay?"
"Yes," she said, and the word had weight. "But only after long practice and longer thought. We are not gods, Mr.—" She hesitated.
He gave her his name. It surprised him less than he expected to hear it sound right in her mouth on the first try.
"We are not gods," she repeated, "and we do not behave as if we were. That way lies a great deal of sorrow and very few cups of tea."
He held on to the tea line as if it were the rope thrown from a boat to a person not in distress but not entirely certain of the swim.
"Will you let me speak to your matron?" she asked. "I will tell her the shape of things. The letter. September. I will answer her questions with as much truth as a woman can who lives most of the year in a castle that moves its own staircases."
"She will ask if it is safe," he said.
"It is and isn't," McGonagall answered. "Like any place with children and weather in it. We make it as safe as we can. We train you to not break yourselves on the parts that aren't. We write rules. We break them when higher rules require it. We apologize when we are wrong." She took a breath. "I will tell her we want you there."
He nodded. "I'll come."
"I'm glad." It was simple gratitude, and he believed it. She stepped to the door, then paused. "If the threads become too much—if they tangle so you cannot breathe—will you promise to tell someone? Me, when I am there. Or the Head of House we place you with. Or the friend you will make who thinks to sit by you when everyone else sits somewhere else. Anyone."
He opened his mouth to say he did not promise things, not even to himself. Then he shut it and nodded once, which was better.
"Good," she said again. She opened the door. "Shall we go and meet the keeper of stew?"
They found Mrs. Whittaker in the kitchen as expected, her spoon already poised, her eyes flinty with the protective suspicion of a woman who sees strangers only when they bring change. McGonagall rolled the truth out for her like cloth, straightening the selvedges, trimming nothing. There was talk of September and trains and lists of books and a trunk that would be supplied if one could not be had honestly. Mrs. Whittaker asked twice about discipline and only once—quickly—about safety. McGonagall answered the first with a firm line about rules and the second with the honesty you give grown women who do not want to be petted like cats. By the end of it, Mrs. Whittaker's mouth had softened a fraction, which is how matrons say yes.
At the edge of the room, he stood quiet and watched the lines between them—the older woman's initial wire-thin tension slackening, the new bright strand running from McGonagall's steady gaze to Mrs. Whittaker's spoon-hand. He did not think it was affection. It was something like respect, which is sturdier.
When there was nothing left to decide that could be decided today, McGonagall turned back to him. "You'll have your letter by evening," she said. "Keep this one. You may tear it once you've memorized the train time if it comforts you to do so, but not before."
He almost smiled at that and did not. "I'll keep it."
"Good. And—" She reached into her sleeve and produced something small, wrapped in brown paper with string. "A foolish present. The school does not allow students to have pocket knives, and this isn't one. It's a pencil sharpener. I've decided you seem like someone who prefers a clean point to work with." She set it in his palm. "There's a satisfaction in turning a messy end into a neat one. It's not magic, but it feels like it on bad days."
He turned it over once. It was even, a little dull at the corners from having lived among chalk and pens. "Thank you."
"You're welcome." She hesitated, then put a hand on his shoulder the way someone might check whether a loaf is done: lightly, with experience. "We'll see you soon."
She went to the door. He watched her walk down the hall toward the light and the draught she had made behave earlier. At the far end, she glanced back, as if to be sure he was still in the place she had left him, and tipped her head once.
The door closed. The kitchen remembered it had stew. Mrs. Whittaker's spoon remembered it had a job. He slipped the brown-paper package into his pocket and felt the small weight of it settle there like proof.
Later, in the upstairs corridor where the window had grown still, an owl tapped again at the glass. He was there to meet it this time. The letter slid into his hand like something that had decided, after making a point, to be polite. He read it under the lamplight with the same care he used to fix a crooked picture frame.
He did not tear this one.
He put it in the small wooden box where he kept the only things that had chosen him back, and shut the lid softly so the threads in the room did not jump at the noise. He felt them slacken a fraction anyway, as if the day had exhaled.
In the bed across, Harris shifted and muttered. Down the row, Thomas sighed. The night was the same night it always was in that house, and also it wasn't. He lay on his back and watched the dark work itself into softer shapes.
The world had spoken to him. He was surprised to find that he wanted to learn its grammar—not to own it, not to shout it, but to understand how to answer when it asked him a question.
Somewhere far to the north, in a place he had not seen, a castle turned one of its staircases for practice, because even stones rehearse when a new student is coming. And in a small, ordinary room, a boy closed his eyes and let his breath find the length of itself, long and even, as if he had finally remembered the right pace to walk at.