uly 3rd 1968
Several months after Ruth's funeral, David existed in a constant war with himself—flipping between soul-crushing sadness that made his chest feel hollow and all-encompassing fury that left his hands shaking. The grief came in waves, unpredictable and violent. He'd be walking to school and suddenly remember Ruth's laugh, high and bright like bells, and have to duck into an alley until he could breathe again. Other times, rage would slam into him so hard he'd bite the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, just to have something else to focus on.
He went through the motions of his usual days because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant drowning. School. Home. Sleep. Repeat. He sat in the back of his classroom at Sheffield Lane Primary, close enough to the radiator to stop shivering, far enough from the teacher to avoid being called on. He paid just enough attention not to fail—copied maths problems from the board, mumbled through reading exercises—but he couldn't make himself care. The words slid off him like rain off glass. What did long division matter when his sister was dead? What was the point of memorising kings and queens when eight-year-olds bled to death in council flats?
Instead of listening to Mrs Patterson drone about the Norman Conquest, David watched the other children. Really watched them. Tommy Briggs in his crisp new school jumper, packed lunch from home in a proper tin. Sarah Chen with her neat plaits and shoes that actually fit. They had no idea how lucky they were. No idea that the world could reach down and rip away everything that mattered while they sat safe and stupid and fine.
After school, he tried to find more work. He knocked on every shop door along Ecclesall Road, offered to sweep, haul, scrub, anything. But the answer was always the same—a pitying look, sometimes a tuppence for his trouble, nothing more. "Sorry, lad. Can't afford help right now." "Come back when you're older." "We're cutting back, not hiring."
His mother's hands were cracking open from the lye soap she used on other people's floors. She'd taken on a fourth job—laundry for the boarding house on West Street—and came home so exhausted she sometimes fell asleep at the kitchen table, her Bible open in front of her, her cracked lips still moving in silent prayer.
David couldn't watch it anymore.
So he turned to something else. Stealing. Pickpocketing, to be exact.
It started almost by accident. He'd been walking through the market on Castle Street, weaving between the Saturday crowds, when he brushed past a man in a nice wool coat counting change at the fruit stall. David's fingers moved before his brain caught up—a quick dip, a gentle lift, and suddenly he had half a crown in his palm. His heart hammered so hard he thought everyone must hear it, but the man just pocketed his apples and walked away, oblivious.
David stared at the coin in his hand, warm from the man's pocket. Half a crown. More than he'd made in a week of hauling boxes.
He should have felt guilty. He waited for it—the shame, the wrongness. But all he felt was a cold, hard satisfaction. That man had money to spare. Had enough to buy fresh fruit without counting every penny, enough to wear a coat with all its buttons. He'd never miss it. And David's mother could buy meat this week instead of stretching the same pot of watery soup across four days.
The math was simple.
He got better at it. Careful, methodical, watching people the way he'd learned to watch everything else. And that's when he noticed something strange—he could tell who would be easy marks. It was like seeing patterns in static, the way some people moved through the world loose and careless, while others clutched their bags tight. He'd see a flash—almost like a shimmer—around someone's pocket, and he'd know there was money there. He'd feel a pull toward certain people in the crowd, a certainty that they wouldn't notice, wouldn't feel his quick fingers.
It felt like magic.
Where once he could barely scrape up a few shillings working himself raw, now he was making as much as his mother brought home from all four of her jobs. More, some weeks. His fingers grew quick and sure. His instincts sharper.
He knew he couldn't just give his mother his earnings; she'd ask questions he couldn't answer, and even if he was still bitter about her acceptance of Ruthie's death—God's will, she'd said, as if that made it better—she still worked herself to bone and blood. He didn't want her breaking her back any more than she already was.
So every few days, he started leaving small pouches of coins in the kitchen drawer, tucked right next to her worn leather Bible with its cracked spine and dog-eared pages. A few shillings here, a crown there. Never too much at once—nothing that would raise alarm. Just enough that when she opened the drawer for her morning prayers, she'd find a small miracle.
She never said anything about it. But he noticed she stopped taking the laundry job. Noticed she bought proper cuts of meat instead of bones for soup. Noticed the new bar of gentle soap by the sink, the kind that didn't make her hands bleed.
And if she suspected where the money came from, if she added extra prayers for his soul alongside her usual litany for Ruth's, she kept it to herself.
Everything changed when the letter came.
It was a Saturday in late July, one of those rare Sheffield days where the sun actually managed to burn through the industrial haze. The heat made the flat's dampness steam, turning the air thick and close. David had been sitting on his bed—just his bed now, Ruth's stripped bare across from him, the yellow-flowered nightgown gone—eating strips of dried meat he'd bought from the butcher on Ecclesall Road. Cheap stuff, the cuts no one else wanted, but it was protein and it was his. He'd bought it with money he'd lifted from a businessman's coat pocket outside the department store, and he didn't feel even a flicker of guilt about it.
He was staring at Ruth's empty bed, trying to decide if he should ask his mother to move it out or if that would hurt her more, when he heard the tapping at the window.
At first, he thought it was just the window frame coming loose again. The whole building was falling apart—cracked plaster, loose fixtures, gaps in the walls where the cold crept through in winter. The landlord didn't care. Council housing for council tenants, you got what you got and you were grateful for it. The tapping could have been anything: the frame rattling, the pipes knocking, the building settling into its own slow collapse.
But then it came again. Sharper. More insistent. Deliberate.
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
David set down his meat and crossed to the window, his sock feet silent on the worn linoleum. The window overlooked the narrow gap between their building and the next—barely six feet of space filled with rubbish bins and weeds forcing their way through broken concrete. Not much of a view, but Ruth used to press her nose to the glass and narrate stories about the sparrows that nested in the drainpipe.
He pulled back the thin curtain—one of the few things his mother had managed to keep nice, faded blue cotton she'd sewn herself—and froze.
An owl sat on the narrow outer sill.
A brown owl, sleek and compact, with enormous amber eyes that fixed on him with what could only be described as impatience. A sealed letter was tied to its leg with string, the parchment yellowed and official-looking.
David blinked. The owl didn't disappear.
He'd seen owls before—dead ones, stuffed and mounted in the museum on Weston Park, their glass eyes dull and lifeless. Maybe once or twice at a distance, dark shapes hunting over the moors outside the city. But never like this. Never here, three stories up in a council estate, staring at him through glass like it had an appointment to keep.
The owl tapped its beak against the window again, somehow conveying annoyance in the gesture. Which was absurd. Owls didn't do annoyance. They were birds. Predators, maybe, hunters certainly, but not—
It tilted its head and fixed him with an unmistakably superior look. As if David was the strange one in this situation. As if he was the one who should feel foolish.
His hand moved to the window latch before his brain caught up. The hinges protested—they always did, swollen from damp—but he forced it open. The smell of the alley wafted in: rotting bin bags, motor oil, the ghost of coal smoke that never quite left Sheffield's air.
The owl hopped onto the inner sill with surprising delicacy, its talons clicking against the peeling paint. It held out its leg—the one with the letter—and stared at him expectantly.
David hesitated. This was mad. Birds didn't deliver letters. This was some kind of joke, or a mistake, or he'd finally cracked from grief and was hallucinating in his dead sister's bedroom.
But the owl was undeniably real. He could smell it—a wild, feathery scent, tinged with something ancient. Could hear its breathing, see the tiny movements of its feathers.
Slowly, carefully, he reached out and untied the string. His fingers fumbled with the knot—it was tight, waxed cord that didn't want to give—but finally it came loose. The letter dropped into his palm, heavy and official. Expensive parchment, not the thin paper from school.
The owl, its duty apparently discharged, gave him one final look of disdain and launched itself back out the window. He watched it wing away over to the windowsill on the building across from him. Still watching him. Waiting,
David closed the window with shaking hands.
He turned the letter over.
His breath caught.
The address was written in emerald green ink, in precise, slanted handwriting that looked like it belonged in a museum:
Mr. D. Price
The Smaller Bedroom
Flat 7, Park Hill Estate
Sheffield
South Yorkshire
The smaller bedroom. They knew which bedroom. They knew Ruth's was empty, knew he was in the smaller one now, alone.
His hands started shaking harder.
On the back, pressed into deep red wax, was a seal. A coat of arms he didn't recognize: a lion, an eagle, a badger, and a snake surrounding a large letter H.
David sat down hard on his bed, the springs creaking under his weight. The dried meat lay forgotten on the thin blanket beside him. His heart was hammering in his chest, that same wild rhythm from when he'd first stolen from the market, but faster. Louder.
This wasn't a joke. This wasn't a mistake.
Someone knew him. Someone had sent an owl—an owl—with a letter addressed specifically to him, to this exact room in this exact falling-apart building in this exact city.
He took a breath—deep, steadying, the kind his mother took before praying—and broke the wax seal. It cracked cleanly under his thumb, the pieces falling onto his lap like drops of blood. The parchment unfolded stiffly, crackling with age, revealing dense lines of that same emerald ink.
He read:
HOGWARTS SCHOOL
of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY
Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore
(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,
Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)
Dear Mr. Price,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.
Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.
Yours sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall
Minerva McGonagall
Deputy Headmistress
The words blurred. David blinked hard, forced them back into focus, read them again.
Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Magic.
His chest went tight. The room tilted. For a moment he couldn't breathe—couldn't make his lungs work, couldn't make sense of the letters on the page even though they were right there, clear as anything, spelling out the impossible.
Magic was real.
Magic. Was. Real.
And not just real—organised. Formalised. There was a school for it. Had been for long enough to have a headmaster with a string of titles David didn't understand, long enough to have deputy headmistresses and term dates and required equipment lists.
His hands were shaking so badly the parchment rattled. He set it down on the bed, smoothed it flat with trembling fingers, and kept reading. There was more—a second sheet, itemised and precise:
HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
UNIFORM
First-year students will require:
Three sets of plain work robes (black)One plain pointed hat (black) for day wearOne pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings)Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry name tags.
COURSE BOOKS
All students should have a copy of each of the following:
The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1) by Miranda Goshawk
A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot
Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling
A Beginners' Guide to Transfiguration by Emeric Switch
One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by Phyllida Spore
Magical Drafts and Potions by Arsenius Jigger
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Newt Scamander
The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection by Quentin Trimble
OTHER EQUIPMENT
1 wand
1 cauldron (pewter, standard size 2)
1 set glass or crystal phials
1 telescope
1 set brass scales
Students may also bring an owl OR a cat OR a toad.
PARENTS ARE REMINDED THAT FIRST YEARS
ARE NOT ALLOWED THEIR OWN BROOMSTICKS
David read it three times. Then a fourth.
Dragon hide gloves. Cauldrons. Wands. Students could bring owls—that's why the owl, then. That's how they'd sent the letter. Because in this world, this magical world that had apparently existed his entire life without him knowing, owls delivered post.
His breath came faster. Shallower.
The room seemed to contract and expand around him, the walls pressing in and then retreating. Ruth's empty bed swam in and out of focus—the bare mattress with its faded striped ticking, the pillow folded at the foot because his mother couldn't bring herself to throw it away.
Magic was real.
There were people—wizards and witches—who could do magic. Who learned it in schools. Who had entire systems for it, entire societies built around it. Who had equipment lists and textbooks and deputy headmistresses. They'd been here, been real, the whole time. Walking the same streets, maybe. Living in the same cities. Existing parallel to everything David knew, invisible and untouchable.
The whole time Ruth was dying.
The thought hit him like a fist to the stomach—sharp, brutal, stealing his air.
Magic was real. Magic existed. There was a whole school dedicated to teaching children how to use it, how to brew potions and cast spells and do things that defied everything David had been taught about how the world worked. Fantastic Beasts. The Dark Forces. Magical Drafts and Potions.
And Ruth had died anyway.
Ruth had died in this flat, in that bed across from him, drowning in her own blood while their mother prayed to a God who didn't answer. Ruth had died because the doctors at the Royal Infirmary said there was nothing more they could do, because the experimental treatments cost too much, because eight-year-old girls from council estates didn't get miracles. She'd died choking on her own breath, her hand going limp in his, her eyes going dull.
But magic was real.
Which meant—
The thought crystallised slowly, terribly, like ice forming over his heart.
He could have saved her.
He could have saved her.
If he'd known sooner. If someone had told him. If he'd discovered this world three months earlier, six months earlier, whenever the magic had started showing itself in those strange moments of knowing, of seeing, of feeling like the world bent around him in ways he couldn't name.
Maybe he could have willed her wounds away. Maybe that's all it would have taken—just wanting it badly enough, needing it desperately enough. God knew he'd wanted it. God knew he'd begged and pleaded and bargained with any power that might be listening. But he hadn't known. Hadn't known to reach for something real instead of prayers that echoed into nothing.
Maybe magic responded to need. To desperation. Maybe if he'd understood what he was, what he could do, he could have placed his hands on her burning forehead and made the leukemia stop. Made her blood clean itself. Made her body whole.
Instead, she'd died and left him.
Left him alone in this smaller bedroom with her empty bed, her fairy tale book and a letter that came three months too late.
His hands started shaking again, harder this time. The parchment rattled like dry leaves.
No. No, that wasn't right. That wasn't—
He forced himself to breathe. To think past the first terrible spike of realization.
He was ten. He didn't know anything about magic, not really. Whatever strange sense he had—the knowing, the seeing—it was barely there, barely controlled. Untrained. Wild. He couldn't have saved her with that. Even if he'd known, even if he'd tried, he probably couldn't have—
But someone could have.
The thought rearranged itself, settled into a shape that made more sense. A shape that burned hotter, cleaner.
Someone could have saved her. Someone who went to this school, who learned from these books, who knew how to brew healing potions and cast mending spells and do whatever magic did to fix broken bodies.
This school had existed for—how long? The letter didn't say, but the titles after the headmaster's name suggested centuries. Order of Merlin. Supreme Mugwump. These weren't new positions. They were old.
Which meant there had been trained witches and wizards in Britain for generations. Decades. Centuries, maybe. People with the power to heal, to cure, to save lives.
And they'd let Ruth die.
They'd let thousands of Ruths die, probably. Hundreds of thousands. However many sick children there were in the world who didn't know magic existed, who couldn't pay for experimental treatments, who lay in council flats and council hospitals and council graves because the people with power had decided that power wasn't for them.
David's grip on the parchment tightened until his knuckles went white.
They'd hidden. That's what this was—a hidden world, a secret society. They had to be secret, or everyone would know about magic. Or everyone would want it. Or everyone would demand help from people who could give it.
So they'd hidden instead. Chosen secrecy over service. Chosen their own comfort, their own safety, their own separate little world, overusing their power to help.
And children died because of it.
Ruth died because of it.
The fury was back, no longer the wild, uncontrolled thing that made him want to scream in graveyards. This was colder. Sharper. More dangerous because it had a shape now, a target, a reason.
Now he knew there was magic, he couldn't let something like this happen again.
The thought settled into his bones with absolute certainty.
He couldn't bring Ruth back. That was done, finished, permanent as stone. But he could make sure no other David Price sat in a bedroom watching his sister die while people with the power to save her chose not to. He could learn their magic, understand their world, and then—
And then what?
He didn't know yet. He was a small boy with a stolen coin purse, a dead sister and a letter that promised him admission to a world that had failed her.
But he'd figure it out.
David Price carefully folded the letter—both sheets, the acceptance and the equipment list—and placed it on his nightstand. Right next to Ruth's fairy tale book, the one with the cracked spine and her name in crayon on the inside cover. Ruth Price, Age 6, This Book Belongs to Me.
The book of stories about magic that turned out to be real.
The book she'd never get to finish.
He sat on his bed in the smaller bedroom of Flat 7, Park Hill Estate, his stolen coins heavy in his pocket, and made a promise to his dead sister and to every child like her.
I'll learn their magic. I'll understand their world. And I'll make sure that no one dies like that again.
His mother's prayers drifted through the thin walls. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb...
David didn't pray. Prayer hadn't saved Ruth. Prayer wouldn't save anyone else.
But magic might.
o-o-o-o