Feeling somewhat mollified by Franklyn’s assurance, James stopped listening. Some time later, he, Ralph, and Zane finished their Butterbeers and excused themselves from the gathering. Only Harry and Oliver Wood noticed, waving goodbye to the boys as they made their way to the tavern’s tiny doorway.
Outside, the moon had risen high into the sky, shining brightly now that the clouds had blown away. Moonlight lit the campus eerily, making the glow of the scattered lampposts seem rather unnecessary. The boys spoke in low voices as they made their way across the campus, stopping at the entry to the common dorm to retrieve James’ and Ralph’s trunks and bags. In the near distance, the Administration Hall’s clock tower rang out, announcing nine o’clock.
As the boys returned to Apollo Mansion, lugging and levitating their various trunks, they discovered a group of witches sitting on the low portico, speaking in hushed voices. Lucy was among them, as was Aunt Audrey and James’ mum. Ginny stood as the boys approached, her eyes bright in the moonlight.
“Is everybody all right?” Lucy asked. James saw that she was still wearing her Vampire House tie and blazer, buttoned against the slight chill of the evening.
“Everybody’s fine,” Zane sighed. “It’s the world that’s in sorry shape. According to everybody who knows anything about anything, it’s high time we packed up and started looking for a new dimension.”
Ginny shook her head dismissively. “I’m sure it isn’t as bad as that,” she said. “It rarely ever is.”
“I’m going to walk Lucy back to her dormitory,” Aunt Audrey sighed, getting to her feet from the front steps. “I’ll meet you back at the guest house in a little while, Ginevra, to see Neville and the Headmaster off. That’s assuming that they still plan to leave tonight.”
“I suspect so,” Ginny agreed. “Goodnight Lucy. Lily says congratulations on getting into Vampire House. She’s started reading those books by your new Head of House, and she’s totally jealous of you.”
James rolled his eyes as he pulled his trunk up onto the portico. “Where is Lil anyway?”
“She’s back at our new flat with your Uncle Percy and Molly. Percy will probably blow a cauldron when he hears what happened here tonight, and him not here to get all worked up about it.” She sighed and settled to a seat on James’ trunk. “Wait with me, won’t you, son? Your father promised he’d be back before nine thirty. Keep your mum company until then.” She patted the trunk next to her, where there was just enough room for James to sit as well. He did and she put her arm around him. Ralph and Zane plopped onto another trunk at the base of the steps, resting their chins on their hands, as if too tired to go on. The moon shone on them all with its bony glow and James couldn’t help worrying. It had been a strange, foreboding evening, and the worst of it still seemed to be happening, what with the stopped Loom and the missing thread and the twin mysteries of Petra’s involvement and the enigmatic woman that had been with her. He sighed deeply, feeling greatly unsettled.
“I almost forgot,” Ginny said, sitting up suddenly. “You left this in the galley of the Gwyndemere. Captain Farragut gave it to me before we disembarked.” She retrieved her shoulder bag and rummaged in it. A moment later, she produced a thick grey sweater from the depths of the small bag. “Your grandmother made this for you,” she said reproachfully, handing the sweater to her son. “If she learned you’d lost it during the voyage…”
“She’d probably make me a new one out of Devil’s Snare,” James sighed. He knew the mantra of their family quite well.
“That’s right,” Ginny smiled. “Now put it on before you catch cold out here. You two should bundle up as well. It’s getting chilly and late.”
“Yes ma’am,” Zane said hollowly, not making any effort to get up.
Ginny looked from face to face, her brow lowered slightly. Finally she took James’ chin in her hand and turned his face to hers. “Cut it out!” she said sternly, surprising him.
“What?” he exclaimed, pulling away. “I’m not doing anything!”
“Yes you are,” she insisted seriously. “All three of you are. I recognize it as plain as day. You’re getting all wrapped up in what happened tonight. Pretty soon you’ll start feeling like you all need to go out and do something huge and daring to set it to rights. I see it on your faces as plain as day. So cut it out!”
“We’re not, Mum!” James protested, his face reddening. “We’re just sitting here, for Merlin’s sake!”
Ginny softened very slightly. “I know the look,” she said, shaking her head. “You can’t grow up around the likes of your father, Uncle Ron, and Aunt Hermione and not recognize when the wheels of some half-brained adventure start turning.”
“Well,” Ralph said, sitting up on his trunk, “we were there when the Archive was attacked, after all. We saw what happened. And we know even more about it than Chancellor Franklyn does, thanks to Merlin. We have something to do with it already, don’t we? It’s not our fault fate keeps doing stuff like this to us.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Ginny said firmly. “Look, you won’t hear me say this very often, so pay attention. Fate is a nasty, sneaky prankster. You don’t have to do what she tells you, no matter what the storybooks say. You do have to do what I tell you. Zane Walker, I’ve met your mother and if she was here, she’d tell you the same thing I am. And Ralph, I’m the closest thing you’ve got to a mum, so you heed me as well. You three already have a job to do, but it isn’t saving the world. It’s learning Arithmancy, and playing Quidditch and whatever that strange American sport is with all the rings and Cudgels, and… well, meeting girls. If the world needs saving, then it’s a job best left to your father and Merlin and the rest of them. They’ve all done it before, after all. It’s rather old hat for them. You don’t need to worry about it.”
James sighed and rolled his eyes. “We’re not, Mum. Lay off us, all right?”
Ginny met her son’s eyes and searched them. After a long moment, she seemed to grudgingly accept what she saw there. She nodded slowly.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said, turning to address the three of them. “Are you hearing me? You lot don’t need to worry about it. It’s going to be fine. It always is, isn’t it?”
James nodded as his mother put her arm around him again. It did always seem to end up being all right, no matter how bad things looked at any given moment. And yet he couldn’t help thinking of Merlin’s words when they’d all seen the Loom with its broken crimson thread: this changes everything.
And on the heels of that, echoing in his memory like a tickling feather, he recalled Scorpius Malfoy’s comment on the morning their journey had begun. Fate seems to enjoy placing you Potters right onto the bull’s-eyes of history, he’d said, as if anticipating James’ mother’s words. It might be a good idea to try not to be too… distracted if that should happen again.
In the moonlight, James shuddered slightly under his mother’s arm.
As with all initially unfamiliar things, James found life at Alma Aleron dizzyingly foreign at first, and then merely odd, and finally, nearing the end of his first week, only occasionally eccentric but otherwise fairly manageable.
Unlike the sleeping quarters he had been used to at Hogwarts, the Bigfoot dormitory was divided into a warren of small bedrooms on the third floor, extending up into the attic. Some of the rooms housed as many as six students, but Ralph and James found themselves in a very small twoperson room at the end of the main hall. Upon inspection, James determined that until fairly recently, the room had probably served as a maintenance closet. This suspicion was cemented late during their first night when the janitor came in and shone a torch around the room, claiming to be in search of a spare mop. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to find James and Ralph blinking blearily at him from the darkness, however, and spent some time rummaging under their beds in search of the missing mop, which he eventually found.
Over the course of the first few days of school, James and Ralph enlisted
Zane’s help in decorating their room, filling it with Quidditch posters, a makeshift Gryffindor banner (hung tactfully next to a Bigfoot House crest), an old carpet they’d rescued from the trash cans behind the common dorm, and a small bust of Sir Percival Pepperpock, which was enchanted to say amusingly crass phrases whenever the dorm room door opened.
The upshot of life in Apollo Mansion, however, was that the rest of Bigfoot House seemed to accept James and Ralph with a fairly universal degree of equanimity, nearly approaching boredom. They seemed to be a good and loyal bunch, surprisingly diverse, with members from all over the world and even representing a variety of humanoid species. There was a sophomore goblin named Nicklebrigg and an overweight junior Veela named Jazmine Jade, upon whom Ralph seemed to have a rather hopeless crush despite her obvious, and perplexing, lack of self-esteem. There was even an actual Bigfoot with long ape-like arms, feet the size of frying pans, and an inexplicable predilection for polka music, which he played for hours at a time on the house’s ancient record player.
Oliver Wood was quick to introduce James and Ralph to all of their housemates during evenings spent in the basement game room, under the twin gazes of the stuffed deer and moose heads, affectionately known as Heckle and Jeckle. Both boys found themselves becoming increasingly familiar with the names and faces of their fellow Bigfoots as they passed them on their way to the common bathroom each morning. There were no bullies or obnoxious gits in Bigfoot House, but neither were there any apparently shining stars, either academically or athletically.
“We’re a team,” Wood proclaimed happily, nodding at the Bigfoots as they congregated around the game room of an evening. “No standouts on either end, but that just makes us stronger in the middle. No other house can boast that.”
Secretly, James wondered if that was such a particularly good thing. When he asked Zane about it, the boy nodded enthusiastically.
“I know exactly what you mean!” he exclaimed. “Apart from you and the Ralphinator, Bigfoot House is like a magnet for the mediocre. It’s like living on the Island of Misfit Toys!”
James didn’t understand the reference and stopped Zane with a sigh and a roll of his eyes when the blonde boy attempted to explain it.
Getting the hang of all the new classes was by far the hardest part of adjusting to life at Alma Aleron. Finding the classrooms, which were scattered all over the sprawling autumn campus, was made far easier by the fact that Zane seemed to be in almost all of the same classes as James and Ralph, and he knew his way around the campus very well.
The class names, however, often seemed unnecessarily obtuse and confusing. Many of the classes James was accustomed to at Hogwarts didn’t seem to have any American equivalent whatsoever. On the other hand, the American wizarding curriculum included courses on such things as Muggle Occupation Studies (or Mug-Occ, as it was known among the students) and Clockwork Mechanics, which were not at all a part of James’ previous Hogwarts studies.
Some of the classes he liked quite a lot, such as Magi-American History, which was taught by a full-fledged American giant named Paul Bunyan, and Advanced Elemental Transmutation, which was the American version of Transfiguration. Others he dreaded exquisitely, such as Precognitive Engineering and Mageography, with the stultifyingly dull Professor Wimrinkle. His most hated class, however, was the American equivalent of Defense Against the Dark Arts, known locally as Forbidden Practices and Cursology. Taught by the insufferable Persephone Remora, the only students that seemed to enjoy the class were the members of her own Vampire House, who adored and revered the professor with something like fanatical devotion.
As it turned out, Remora had made quite a reputation for herself by writing a series of wizarding romance novels about fictional American vampires with amazingly cool names and darkly dashing personalities. In class, she made thinly veiled references to the ongoing progress of her latest book, claiming that her stories were not fictional at all, but merely novelized accounts of her own life experiences.
“Much like another series of books based loosely on the exploits of a certain famous wizard,” she said in class, sniffing disdainfully and glancing furtively at James. “Although mine,” she went on breezily, “are not biased in favor of the main characters. I write my tales exactly as they happened, with an eye toward intellectual honesty.”
“And adjective-heavy run-on sentences,” Zane mumbled under his breath, his face low over his parchment as he doodled.
The Shard of the Amsera Certh had proven to be exactly as refreshing to James and Ralph as Merlin had implied. Most afternoons, James would return to his and Ralph’s dormitory room on the third floor of Apollo Mansion and uncover the Shard. He’d tap it with his wand and say the phrase that Merlin had taught him and watch as the Gryffindor common room swam into view, usually filled with late evening activity. The first time he had done it, both Ralph and Zane had been with him, and they had succeeded in startling Cameron Creevey quite badly, calling his name from the enchanted mirror over the Gryffindor fireplace.
“Cam!” James had called, cupping his hands to his mouth and leaning close to the Shard where it hung on the back of his dormitory room door. “Cam! Can you hear me? It’s me and Ralph and Zane! Where’s Rose and everybody?”
Cameron had lowered the Potions book he’d been studying and glanced around uncertainly. When James called his name again, the boy looked up, saw the three boys’ faces in the mirror over the hearth, and leapt neatly over the back of the hearth sofa, throwing his book into the air. A second later, he peered over the back of the sofa, his eyes wild.
“Somebody killed James!” he cried out shrilly. “And Ralph Deedle! And that third bloke, the blonde one that they hung out with their first year! They’re haunting us in the mirror! Look!” He pointed frantically as James, Ralph, and Zane dissolved into laughter. It was nearly a minute before they could recover enough to explain to the gathered students on the other side of the Shard that they weren’t ghosts at all, but were simply communicating from the States via Merlin’s magical Mirror.
As they finished, James heard Rose’s voice as she pushed through the crowd of Gryffindors. “James? Is that you? Move aside, Paulson, you great ape!” She elbowed her way to the front and leaned close to the mirror on her side. “James,” she asked gravely, “what are the three of you doing in the mirror?”
James drew a breath to answer, but Rose shook her head impatiently. “Never mind. Tell me this first: is it true that the American students get to take weekly field trips to some giant unplottable prairie where Native American Indians still sleep in teepees and live like they did three hundred years ago? Because if it is, I don’t even want to talk to you again out of sheer dead jealousy.”
“No, Rose,” James laughed. “Nothing like that’s happened. So far, classes here are almost just like classes back home. Some are good, some are bad, but it’s just school. Different country, same routine.”
Rose sighed skeptically. “All right then,” she said, plopping onto the sofa. Cameron Creevey was still peering over it, his eyes wide. Rose planted a hand on the side of his head and shoved him away. “So how is it there, then? How are you two and Lucy and everyone else settling in? Tell me everything, spare nothing.”
James shook his head helplessly, not knowing where to begin. Zane, however, skipped right to the bit that most interested him. “Petra’s turned all evil schizo on us!” he exclaimed, his eyes going wide. “She attacked the Hall of Archives and destroyed life as we know it!”
“Shut up!” James said, pushing his friend aside. “We’re not supposed to talk about that! And besides, she says that it wasn’t her!”
“She says that she was asleep when it happened, along with Izzy in her rooms on campus,” Ralph clarified, raising a finger. “And Merlin only told us to keep it a secret around the school. He didn’t say anything about our friends back home.”
“Wait a minute,” a different voice said from the other side of the Shard. James looked up and saw Scorpius Malfoy s
eating himself on the sofa next to Rose as the rest of the students drifted back to their homework and various conversations. “What’s this about Morganstern? Are you telling us that she’s already gotten into trouble with the Americans?”
“No!” James said immediately, glancing warningly at Ralph and Zane. “There was some confusion, but nobody really knows what happened. It’s… complicated.”
Together, the three boys explained the events that surrounded the attack on the Vault of Destinies, ending with the details of their interview with Chancellor Franklyn, Merlin, and James’ father in the Chancellor’s office, which had occurred later that night.
“So Merlin didn’t let you tell the Americans that it was Petra you saw leaving the Archive?” Rose asked, frowning.
“He didn’t really stop us from saying so,” Ralph answered. “He just sort of… explained it to Franklyn on our behalf, leaving that bit out, and we didn’t contradict him. It helped that those crazy loons at the W.U.L.F. released an announcement the next day claiming that they had been the ones responsible for the attack. They said that if Harry Potter and his people didn’t return home, there soon wouldn’t be any home for them to return to.”
Rose frowned. “Do you think it really was the W.U.L.F. that was responsible for the attack?”
“It would make sense,” Zane nodded. “They already went after James’ dad and the rest of us once, on the Zephyr ride here.”
At that point, the conversation turned to an excited recitation of the travelers’ adventure on the train and the warning issued by the W.U.L.F. leader immediately before he flew away. Finally, Rose shook her head thoughtfully.
“And yet it wasn’t the W.U.L.F leader you saw coming out of the Archive after the attack,” she mused. “It was Petra and some other woman, right?”
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