I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Apprentice of The Red Witch
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The name had kept Harry up for a while, which annoyed him, because it told him nothing and still wouldn't let him sleep. Nicolas Flamel. He had turned it over in the dark until the words stopped being words. By morning, he had got exactly as far as he had the night before, which was nowhere. Over a fast breakfast, he, Daphne, and Theo agreed that the library after lessons was the only move they had. Until then, there was nothing to do but carry the name and go to class.
Transfiguration was the day McGonagall had set for the grain.
The needle had been easy for weeks. Matchstick to needle, the basic change, Harry could do that in his sleep and probably had. The hard part, the part she had given only to him, was the grain. A transfigured needle came out looking like a needle but holding the memory of the wood it used to be, a faint pattern running down the metal if you turned it to the light, the object not quite believing in what it had become. McGonagall wanted that gone. She wanted a needle that had forgotten it was ever a match.
Harry set the matchstick on the desk and looked at it, wondering what it was going to be before asking it to be anything. Not a needle made of wood. A needle. Steel all the way through, cold, with no history in it. He held the picture until it was the only thing in his head, touched his wand to the match, and let it go.
The needle that lay on the desk was clean. He turned it under the window and there was nothing in it, no grain, no ghost of the match, only a thin line of grey metal that had never been anything else.
McGonagall came down the row and stopped. She picked it up, which she did not often do, and held it to the light herself, turning it once between two fingers.
"You have lost the grain," she said.
"Yes, Professor."
"A week early." She set it down with a care that was its own kind of comment. "Do it again. I want to see it was not luck."
He did it again. It was not luck.
She moved on without saying anything else, which from her was a great deal, and Harry was left with two clean needles and ten minutes of nothing, the way he always was before everyone else. He turned one of them back into a matchstick, and then into a needle, and then into a matchstick again, slowly, just to have something for his hands. Match. Needle. Match. He did not have to picture it anymore. The thing went where he sent it.
He was still doing it, half-attending, when he noticed Daphne had stopped working.
She was beside him with her own needle in front of her, and it was a good needle, clean lines, properly pointed. She had got the change itself weeks ago, the same as everyone. But hers had the grain in it. He could see it from where he sat, the faint wood pattern down the side, the exact thing he had been told to lose and had just lost, the place he had been standing himself seven days ago.
She was not looking at her needle. She was looking at his hands.
She watched the matchstick become a needle, and the needle become a matchstick, back and forth, easy, while her own clean, grained needle lay in front of her, done as far as she could take it. Her face was doing the thing he had no word for, the still flat look it got when she was somewhere private and working, except there was nothing here for her to work on. There was only the gap, lying on the desk between them in two small pieces of changed wood, and Daphne looking at it.
He stopped turning the needle.
For a moment, he thought about sliding it across to her, or saying something, the way you do. It is just intent. You decide first, and then you cast. The line Natasha had given him a hundred times. He had the words ready. He almost used them.
Then he looked at Daphne's face again and put the words away, because there are things you do not say to someone like her, and one of them is here, let me show you the thing you have been failing at all week. She had not asked. If she wanted it, she would come and take it on her own terms. Offering it now, across a desk while she watched his hands go easy through a change she could not finish, would not be a kindness. It would be the opposite of one.
So he did the only thing that was actually kind, which was to stop. He turned the matchstick back into a needle one last time, set it down, and looked at the front of the room as though the lesson were the most interesting thing in it. He gave her the quiet to look as long as she wanted, without watching her do it.
She looked a while longer. He felt it more than saw it. Then there was the small click of her wand against the desk, and the scrape of her starting over, and she went back to her needle and the grain in it without a word.
McGonagall set the next week's work. Harry wrote it down with a hand that no longer shook when it wrote, and did not look sideways again. The library could not come soon enough. At least Flamel was a problem all three of them were behind on together.
The library after lessons was Theo's idea of a good time and Harry's idea of a very large room he did not know how to use.
That was the part nobody warned you about. Natasha had given Harry a shelf, one shelf, and he had read every book on it twice and could have told you what was on page forty of any of them. The library was not a shelf. The library was thousands of books that no one had chosen for him, going up into the dark past the point where the lamps bothered, and standing in front of it Harry understood for the first time that knowing a great deal about a small thing and knowing your way around a large thing were not the same skill at all.
They took a table at the back, well away from Madam Pince, who sat at her desk like a hawk that had been told books were small animals. Theo vanished into the reference section and came back bowed under an armful of fat spines, which he dealt across the table like a hand of cards.
"Right," he said. "Notable Magical Names of Our Time. Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century. A Who's Who in Magic, two volumes, F is in the first. Study of Recent Developments in Wizardry, which has an index the length of my arm. If a man called Flamel is anybody at all, he's in one of these."
He was not in any of them.
Harry took the Who's Who. He found Flack, then Finch-Fletchley, then a whole dynasty of Fawcetts, and then Fletcher, with nothing in the place a Flamel should have sat, as though the book had gone to print with the name already lifted out of it. He checked twice. He checked the second volume in case the alphabet had turned on him. Nothing.
Daphne worked the Recent Developments index with one finger, top to bottom, turned the page, and did it again. Harry watched her clear three columns without a wasted movement and arrive at the same nothing he had.
"He didn't discover anything recent," she said quietly. "Or if he did, they didn't print his name next to it."
Theo had Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century open at the contents and was reading it with the look of a man whose theory was not surviving contact with the evidence. "He is not a great wizard of the twentieth century."
"He's not a notable name of our time either," Harry said, and shut the Who's Who. "He's not anywhere people put the names you're meant to know."
Theo's eyes went to the desk. "We could just ask her. She's read all of it. She keeps it like it's hers."
"No." Harry said it fast enough that Theo looked around. "You won't ask her. We start wanting a name nobody our age should want, and by tomorrow she's said to a teacher that three Slytherins were after it, and then someone who knows what it means knows we're looking. We find it ourselves, or we find someone safe who can."
Theo sat back, laced his fingers, and looked at the failed stack. "Then look at what we do have. It isn't nothing." He tapped the nearest cover. "These books have everybody. Anyone who invented a charm, took an Order of Merlin, ran the Ministry, played a decent game of Quidditch, they are all in here. Flamel isn't. And a man whose name guards a thing in a deep vault, under a trapdoor, behind a dog with three heads, is not a man who is nobody. So he is somebody who is not in the recent books." He set his hand flat on Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century. "Which means he isn't recent. He's old, or he's been put out of sight on purpose, and either way he is not on these shelves, because these shelves are for now."
It was annoyingly good. Harry turned it over and could not find the hole in it. They had not failed to find Flamel. They had learned something true about him, which was that he did not belong to the part of the library you could walk up to and read. The trouble was that knowing he was old, or hidden, told them nothing at all about which of the thousands of books going up into the dark he might be folded into.
"So we need someone," Harry said, working it as he spoke, "who actually knows this room. Not us. Someone who reads the way we train. Someone who'd already have looked in places we don't know are there."
There was a short silence while all three of them arrived at the same name, because there was only one it could be.
"Granger," Theo said.
"Granger," Harry agreed.
Daphne said nothing for a moment. Her hands were flat on the table and her eyes were on the stack.
"She's a Gryffindor," she said at last. "Bring her in and a Gryffindor knows we're chasing something we shouldn't be. And we have looked everywhere we know how to look, and we are out of cards. So. Yes. We ask her."
Harry got up and began squaring the failed books into a pile, the name still meaning nothing, and now meaning nothing in a more exact way than before. Tomorrow, they would ask Hermione Granger to find a man who had been kept out of every book you were allowed to find easily. He had a feeling she would say yes.
They found Hermione the next afternoon in the east courtyard, on a stone bench in a patch of sun, alone with a book the size of a paving slab. She was the only person in Harry's year who looked relaxed reading something nobody had set her.
She saw them coming. Three Slytherins crossing a courtyard toward one Gryffindor was the sort of thing people noticed, and by the time they reached her, she had closed the book on one finger and arranged her face into something polite and entirely unconvinced.
"Harry," she said. The other two she gave a small nod each, the careful kind. "Did you need something?"
"We do," Harry said. "I'd like to ask you for help. Properly, before I say any more about it."
That earned him a look. She had expected, he thought, the usual approach, whatever the usual approach from a Slytherin was in her experience, and getting a plain sentence instead had knocked her half a step off her footing.
"Help with what?"
"Finding something in the library. A name. It isn't in any of the books we'd know to look in, and we've looked." He kept it level and unhurried. "You'd know to look in more than we would. That's the whole of it."
Hermione's eyes moved over the three of them, weighing it. "Why me," she said. It was not quite a question. "There are other clever people."
"Because you're the best reader in our year and everyone knows it," Harry said. "And because you can keep a thing to yourself. I'm betting on that part. I'm not going to tell you all of why we want it. I'm also not going to lie to you about that. You'll know exactly as much as I think is safe to give you, and no less. That's the offer, and I'd rather make it honestly than dress it up."
She was quiet for a moment. Harry watched her decide something about him, and he had a fair idea what it was.
"You don't talk like a first-year," Hermione said. It came out almost accusing.
"Is it a bad thing?" Harry said.
"No," she said slowly. "The opposite, if anything."
"The troll," she said. "You're not going to bring up the troll."
"It's got nothing to do with this," Harry said. "You don't owe me a library because I cast a spell once. If you help us it'll be because you want to know the answer as much as we do, not because you think there's a debt. There isn't one."
Theo, who had been silent until then, murmured, "He really won't, you know. It's almost annoying."
Daphne said nothing at all, but Harry felt her watching Hermione the way she watched everything she meant to understand later.
"What's the name," Hermione said.
Harry told her. "Flamel. Nicolas Flamel."
He saw her turn it over and find the same blank in it that he had, and then, underneath the blank, the small bright thing that lived in Hermione and lit up only for a question she could not immediately answer. She had never heard it either. He had counted on that. There was no faster way to recruit Hermione Granger than to set a thing in front of her that she did not already know.
"I've never come across it," she said, and she sounded almost offended by the fact. "Which is strange. I've read most of the reference section."
"That's why we came to you and not the reference section," Harry said.
She closed the book the rest of the way and stood, tucking it under one arm, and that was the yes, before she said it. "I'll look. I'm not promising anything. And if any of this turns out to be against the rules, I'll stop."
"That's fair," Harry said, and meant it.
They had gone perhaps three steps together toward the cloister when it came from the bench along the wall, where a knot of Gryffindor girls had been pretending to share a textbook.
"Didn't take her long," one of them said, pitched to carry. "Sits with the snakes now."
A second, lazier. "She'll sit with anyone who tells her she's clever."
A small laugh, passed between them, meant to be heard and built so it couldn't be answered.
Harry watched it land. Hermione's step did not break, but the colour came up the back of her neck, and her jaw set, and for half a stride she was somewhere else, somewhere that cost her.
She lifted her chin and kept walking.
"Ignore them," Harry said quietly.
"I'd worked that out," Hermione said, and there was a thread of steel in it that Harry had heard once before, behind a troll, and he thought, not for the first time, that the Hat had got at least one thing right and very possibly the wrong house entirely.
She set off for the library before any of them suggested it, which told Harry she was already more interested in the name than in the girls on the bench.
Hermione did not search the way they had searched.
The three of them had spent a whole afternoon looking the name up, which Hermione told them, not unkindly, was the single thing guaranteed to fail. "If it were in a book you can simply look it up in, you would already have it. A name kept out of the ordinary books does not come when you call it. You have to come at it from the side."
She showed them what she meant, and it was, Harry had to admit, a different order of thing from what the three of them had done. They had hunted Flamel. Hermione hunted for the shape of the hole he had left. She did not start at the letter F in anything. She started at the long drawer of cross-reference cards by Pince's desk and worked through it with the speed of someone who had done it a hundred times for pleasure, pulling a card, reading it, sliding it back, pulling the next.
"A name that's been taken out of the general books still gets cited in the specialist ones," she said, half to herself. "Somebody, somewhere, footnotes him. You don't find the man. You find the footnote that needed him, and you follow it back."
She set them to fetching. Theo got the advanced histories, Daphne the older catalogues, and Harry a stack of bound periodicals with spines that flaked when he lifted them. Hermione read faster than any of them, running a finger down indexes and small print and discarding most of it in seconds, and within an hour she had got further into the dark than the three of them had managed in a day, which was useful and a little humbling at once.
It was while she was deep in the third history that the doors banged and Draco came in.
He came in loud, the way he came into most rooms, with Crabbe and Goyle a half step behind and a remark already half out of his mouth about somebody's marks. The library was the wrong room for it. Pince's head came up. But it was not Pince that stopped him.
Draco had stopped a few feet inside, looking at the table, at the four of them, at Hermione Granger sitting in the middle of three Slytherins with a book open in front of her, and whatever the remark had been, it died unsaid.
This was, Harry knew, the easiest target Draco would be handed all year. A muggle-born. A Gryffindor. Sitting with Slytherins, in public, with no teacher in the room. Draco had gone after people for a tenth of it. He could have opened his mouth and made her afternoon a misery, and nobody would have stopped him.
He didn't. He looked a second longer, then turned and steered Crabbe and Goyle to a table on the far side and sat with his back half to them and said nothing at all.
Harry thought, hm, and went back to the periodicals, because Flamel was the problem in front of him, and Malfoy keeping his mouth shut was, if anything, a small mercy.
But Daphne had gone still. She was not looking at her catalogue. She was watching Draco's back with the flat, unhurried attention she gave to things she meant to take out and examine later, and where Harry had seen a boy decline to be cruel and felt mildly grateful for it, Daphne had plainly seen something else. She caught Harry looking, said nothing, and went back to her cards.
Hermione found it twenty minutes later.
She did not announce it. She just stopped, with one finger pinning a place near the bottom of a page, and went very quiet, and Harry knew that quiet now, because it was the same one she'd had in the courtyard when he first said the name.
"There," she said.
It was a footnote. Small type, the kind nobody reads, at the foot of a chapter in a heavy old history. One line. Harry leaned in and read it twice, and it gave him almost nothing and exactly one thing. The name was there, Flamel, cited as the authority for some claim the chapter had made and then waved off, and after the name came a reference to another book, a title none of them knew, and Hermione's finger was already sliding from the footnote to a thought she plainly did not like.
"I know that title," she said slowly. "It isn't out here." She looked up and past them, toward the far corner where the shelves stopped, and a rope hung across an opening, a sign hung from the rope, and beyond it the books sat in a dimmer light behind a low iron grille. "It's in the Restricted Section. You can't take anything from there without a signed note from a teacher saying why you want it."
The four of them looked at the rope.
"So he's real," Theo said. "And whatever he is, the part worth reading is behind that."
"And we can't get behind that," Daphne said, "without telling a teacher we want to."
Which was the whole shape of it, in the end. They had not found Flamel. They had found the door he was behind, and the door was locked, and the only key was an adult asking the one question they could least afford to ask out loud. Harry looked at the rope and the dim grille and felt the afternoon settle into the same place the name had settled the night they walked back from Hagrid's, close enough to touch and no closer.
Hermione was still frowning at the footnote, not at the Restricted Section but at the name itself, turning it over.
"The strange thing," she said, almost to herself, "is that I've seen it before. Not in a reference book. Somewhere ordinary, recently, and I can't think where." She shook her head. "It'll come to me. It always does."
Harry did not doubt it. He gathered the flaking periodicals into a pile and thought that they had spent two days and brought in a fourth person to learn that a man named Nicolas Flamel was real, was old, was worth guarding and worth hiding, and was sitting behind a rope they could not cross. It was more than they'd had that morning. It did not feel like much. And over Hermione's shoulder Draco sat with his back to them and did not once turn round, and Daphne, packing her cards away, glanced at him one last time and said nothing.
Daphne's point of view
They broke apart outside the library. Granger went up toward her tower alone, to pay whatever her house had decided she owed, and the boys went down toward the dungeons, and Daphne went her own way and let them think she was tired.
The grey screech was at the dormitory window when she got there, hunched and affronted in the cold, looking exactly as it had when she sent it off two days before. Her father had answered fast. That, before she had read a word, told her she had judged the last line of her own letter correctly. He did not hurry for much.
She untied the parchment and unrolled it by the window's grey light.
Daphne,
You will have the tutor in June. The lower shelves are open to you when you are home; I have instructed the household to grant access. I know who you have been sitting next to. That is why this is granted without debate, and why you must proceed with caution. A Greengrass does not fall behind. A Greengrass also does not bind herself to a famous boy. Be careful.
Your father.
She read the lines once.
The request had been straightforward: a private instructor and the key to the family's restricted collection, intended solely to close a disparity in training that was hers to resolve. Her father had granted both, while simultaneously making it clear he had deduced her circumstances. The instruction was secured, but her association with Harry was no longer an unobserved detail.
She had anticipated his deduction. What remained was the quiet weight of his closing warning—a reminder of family expectations she could neither dispute nor ignore. She stood by the glass, the owl shifting against the stone, holding the letter steady in the fading light.
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