“Yes, ma’am?” Zane said.
“Two sharp flicks and the word ‘nurglammonias’. Emphasis on the first and third syllables.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Zane replied again, grinning.
The school year descended through autumn, approaching the winter holidays. The football field became carpeted with leaves, crunching and kicking up under the feet of Professor Curry’s Muggle Studies teams. The unofficial football tournament ended with James’ team winning. James himself scored the winning goal, his third of the day, against goalie Horace Birch, the Ravenclaw Gremlin. His team collected around him, jumping and hollering as if they’d just won the House Cup. In fact, the winning team’s house was rewarded one hundred points by Professor Curry, that being the best prize she could offer. The team circled James, heaving him onto their shoulders and carrying him into the courtyard as if he had just returned from slaying a dragon. He grinned hugely, his cheeks beet red in the chilly autumn wind, and his spirits were higher than they’d been all year.
The routine of classes and homework, which had been daunting during the first weeks, became dull and predictable. Professor Jackson assigned endless dreaded essays and sprung unsuspecting ‘pop quizzes’ on his class every couple of weeks. Zane told James and Ralph amusing tales of confrontations between Professor Trelawney and Madame Delacroix during his Tuesday night Constellations Club, which, like Divination class, both professors managed to share. On the Quidditch pitch, James continued to advance his broom skills with the help of both Ted and Zane until he began to feel cautiously confident that he might, indeed, make the Gryffindor team next year. He began to imagine how rich it might be to show up at tryouts next spring and wildly surpass everyone’s memories of his first year attempts. Zane, for his part, continued to fly remarkably well for the Ravenclaws. Calling on his rather unique Muggle background, he invented a move he called ‘buzzing the tower’, in which he’d hit a Bludger around the press box, letting it gather speed as it circled back, then meet it on the other side, striking it again to add even more speed and a bit of direction. Using that trick, he had managed to knock two players completely off their brooms, leading to a few apologetic visits to the hospital wing.
Life for Ralph in the Slytherin house had been rough for a while. Tabitha had never actually spoken to him about his desertion of the debate stage or his abandoning of the Progressive Element meetings. James and Zane figured she’d ceased having any use for him when he’d returned to being James’ friend. Eventually, the older Slytherins simply forgot about Ralph, apart from a few cool stares or snide remarks in the Slytherin common room. Then, surprisingly, Ralph began to befriend some other first- and second-year Slytherins. Unlike the blue badge wearers, none of them seemed all that interested in the broader world of politics and causes. To be sure, there was a sort of shifty guile to even the first-year Slytherins, but a couple of them seemed to genuinely like Ralph, and even James had to admit they were funny, in a double-edged sort of way.
Defense Against the Dark Arts became a favorite class of James, Zane, and Ralph. Professor Franklyn taught a very practical class, with many exciting stories and real-life examples from his own long and wildly various adventures. James, to no one’s surprise, was a very good dueler. He admitted, with a sheepish grin, that he’d been taught quite a lot of defensive technique by his dad. Nobody, however, including James, was willing to go up against Ralph in a duel. Ralph’s wand skills seemed remarkably haphazard when it came to defensive spell-casting. The first time he’d dueled, Ralph had attempted a simple Expelliarmus spell on Victoire. He struck out with his wand, a bit wildly, and a bolt of blue lightning had erupted from the end, singeing Victoire’s hair so that a ragged bald stripe ran straight across the top of her head. She patted at it with her hand, then her eyes nearly boggled out of her head. She screamed in rage and had to be restrained by three other students from tackling Ralph, who was three times her size. Ralph backed away, apologizing profusely, his wand still smoking.
Only once, during an evening in the Ravenclaw common room, did anyone have the temerity to mention anything to James, Zane, and Ralph about the debate. They were just finishing their homework when a large fourth year named Gregory Templeton sat down at the table across from them.
“Hey, you were both in that debate, weren’t you?” he said, pointing back and forth between Zane and Ralph.
“Yeah, Gregory,” Zane said, shoving his books into his backpack, his voice betraying his general dislike of the older boy.
“You were the one at the table with Corsica, right?” Gregory said, turning to Ralph.
“Er. Yeah,” Ralph said, “but…”
“You tell her from me she’s right on the mark, eh? I been reading a book that tells all about the whole thing. It’s called The Dumbledore Plot, and it’s all about how the old man and that Harry Potter cooked the whole thing up, start to finish. Did you know they made up the whole story about Riddle and the Horcruxes on the night the old man died? Some even say it was Harry Potter himself killed him, once they’d worked it all out.”
James struggled to control his temper. He looked levelly at Gregory. “Do you even know who I am?”
Zane stared hard at the bottle in Gregory’s hand. “Hey,” he asked with forced casualness, surreptitiously pulling out his wand, “what’s that you’re drinking?”
Ninety seconds later, James, Zane, and Ralph scrambled as Gregory spat nurgle water all over the common room table.
“Practicing!” Zane called, ducking under Gregory’s grasping arms. “I swear! I was supposed to practice that transfiguration! Your drink just got in the way! Ask McGonagall!”
The three boys successfully ducked from the room, laughing uproariously at the ensuing chaos.
By Christmas holiday, James was ready for a break. After lunch on his last day of class, James went up to the Gryffindor sleeping chamber to pack his things. The sky outside the tower window had grown chilly and grey, making him wish for the grand fireplace back at number twelve Grimmauld Place and one of Kreacher’s very complicated hot chocolates, which consisted, at last count, of fourteen unnamed ingredients, including, he had been assured, at least a pinch of actual chocolate.
“Hey, James,” Ralph’s voice called up the stairs, “you up there?”
“Yeah. Come on up, Ralph.”
“Thanks,” Ralph panted, climbing the steps. “I came up after lunch with Petra. She said you’d be here packing. All raring to go, I expect.”
“Yeah! We’re having everyone over to the old headquarters for the holidays this year. Uncles George and Ron, Aunts Hermione and Fleur, Ted and his grandmum, Victoire, even Luna Lovegood, who you don’t know, but you’d be keen on. She’s the weirdest grownup I’ve ever met, but in a good way. Mostly. Grandmum and Granddad won’t be there, though. They’re visiting Charlie and everybody in Prague this year. Still, I think even Neville will be there. Professor Longbottom, I mean.”
Ralph nodded glumly, staring into James’ trunk. “Sounds swell. Yeah, well, I hope you have a happy Christmas and all that, then.”
James stopped packing, remembering that Ralph’s dad was traveling for business over the holidays. “Oh, yeah. So what will you be doing, Ralph? Will you be spending Christmas with your grandparents or something?”
“Hmm?” Ralph said, glancing up. “Oh. Nah. Looks like I’ll just be hanging around here for the holidays. Zane’s not leaving until next week, so at least I’ll have him to hang around with over the weekend. After that… well, I’ll figure out something to do with myself.” He sighed hugely.
“Ralph,” James said, tossing a pair of mismatched socks into his trunk, “do you want to come and have Christmas with my family and me?”
Ralph tried to look surprised. “What? No, no, I’d never want to impose on your big family gathering, what with all the, you know… I couldn’t. No…”
James frowned. “Ralph, you prat, if you don’t come home with me for the holidays, I will personally perform a random transfi
guration on you with your own wand. How about that, then?” “Well, you don’t have to get pushy about it!” Ralph exclaimed, then his face broke into a grin. “Your mum and dad won’t mind?”
“No. To tell you the truth, with all the people that’ll be in and out of the place, I’m not sure they’ll even notice.”
Ralph rolled his eyes. “I meant about me being on the… you know, the wrong side of the debate and everything.”
“They listened to it on the wireless, Ralph.”
“I know!”
“And you never said a word.”
Ralph opened his mouth, then closed it. He thought for a moment. Finally, he grinned and plopped onto Ted’s bed. “I see your point. So you say Victoire will be there?”
“Don’t get any ideas. She’s part Veela you know. She puts the whammy on any guy that gets within ten feet of her.”
“I just wanted to try to make it up to her somehow. You know, about that whole incident in D.A.D.A.”
James slammed his trunk. “Ralph, mate, the less you say about that, the better.”
The next morning, breakfast in the Great Hall was thinly attended. A heavy frost had fallen in the early hours, etching silver fern shapes in the corners of the windows and giving the view beyond a hoary ghostliness. James and Ralph arrived at the same time and found Zane at the Ravenclaw table.
“You’re a lucky stiff, Ralph,” Zane said grumpily, huddling around his coffee cup. “I’m dying to see what a magical Christmas is like.”
“To tell you the truth,” James said, pouring himself a pumpkin juice, “I doubt it’d live up to your imagination.”
“Maybe you’re right. Even at the best of times, I gotta admit, it feels a little like Halloween around here.”
“Hey, Ralph,” James said, nudging the bigger boy, “wait until you see our traditional Christmas parade of ghouls! We’ll have candy cane-stuffed bats to eat and drink hot chocolate out of elf skulls!”
Ralph blinked. Zane looked sour and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a laugh riot. Not.”
“Come on,” Ralph said, finally getting the joke. “You’ll have a great Christmas with your family. At least you get to see your mum and dad.”
“Yeah, sure. An eight-hour flight back to the States with my sister, Greer, bugging me the whole way about life at that crazy magical school. She’ll be disappointed that, so far, the only way I can affect things with my wand is to hit them with it.”
“We’re not allowed to practice magic out of Hogwarts, anyway,” Ralph said instructively.
Zane ignored him. “And then Christmas with the grandparents and all my cousins in Ohio. You have no idea what kind of craziness that always is.”
James couldn’t help asking. “How do you mean?”
“Imagine the traditional all-American Norman Rockwell Christmas scene, right?” Zane said, holding up his hands as if framing a picture. “Opening presents, and carving turkey, and carols by the Christmas tree. Got it?” Ralph and James nodded, trying not to smile at Zane’s grave expression.
“All right,” Zane went on. “Now imagine hinkypunks instead of people. You’ll get the idea.”
James burst out laughing. Ralph, as usual, just blinked and looked back and forth between the two other boys.
“That’s fantastic!” James hooted.
Zane smiled reluctantly. “Yeah, well, it is pretty funny, I guess. The screeches and the clawing, all those tiny shreds of wrapping paper flying all over the place, landing in the fireplace and nearly burning the place to the ground.”
“What’s a hinkypunk?” Ralph asked, trying to keep up.
“Ask Hagrid next Care of Magical Creatures,” James said, still chuckling. “It’ll all make sense.”
Late that morning, Ralph and James said goodbye to Zane, then hauled their trunks out to the courtyard. Ted and Victoire were already there, sitting on their trunks on the top step, framed against the strangely silent, frost-laden grounds. Victoire’s hair had been regrown as well as possible by Madam Curio in the hospital wing, but the new hair was just different enough in texture and color to be noticeable. As a result, Victoire had taken to wearing a rather amazing variety of hats. The hats, if anything, enhanced her appearance, but she complained about them at every opportunity. Today, she had donned a small ermine pillbox cap, cocked rakishly over her left eyebrow. She glared coolly at Ralph as he dragged his trunk out onto the step. A few minutes later, Hagrid drove up at the head of a carriage. Ralph’s mouth dropped open when he saw that nothing, apparently, was pulling the carriage.
“You lot aren’t s’posed to see these until next year, mind,” Hagrid said to James and Ralph. He yanked the brake lever, climbed down, and began heaving their trunks easily onto the back of the carriage. “So be sure to act surprised when yeh sees ‘em next spring, right?”
“Oh, Hagrid,” Victoire said haughtily, “if zese awful things are as ugly as mummy tells me, I’m glad I can’t see zem, anyway.” She held out a hand and Ted took it, helping her rather unnecessarily into the carriage.
There were a few other students crammed into the carriage, all similarly late departures for the holidays. Hagrid drove them to Hogsmeade station, where they boarded the Hogwarts Express again. The train was far emptier than it had been on their arriving journey. The four of them found a compartment near the end, then settled in for the long trip.
“So Hogsmeade is a wizard village?” Ralph asked Ted.
“Sure is. Home to The Three Broomsticks and Honeydukes Sweetshop. Best Cockroach Clusters in the world. Lots of other shops, too. You’ll get to go on Hogsmeade weekends starting your third year.”
Ralph looked thoughtful, which meant his brow pinched down while his lower lip pooched up, squeezing his entire face toward his nose. “So how do wizards keep Muggles out of a magical village? I mean, aren’t there any roads or anything?”
“Tricky question, mate,” Ted said, slouching on his seat and kicking off his shoes.
Victoire wrinkled her nose. “You will keep zose dirt-kickers away from me, Mr. Lupin.”
Ted ignored her, stretching his legs across the compartment and resting his feet on the opposite seat. “I’m in old Stonewall’s Applied Advanced Technomancy class this semester, and all I can tell you is that places like Hogsmeade aren’t just hidden because Muggles can’t find a road in. It’s all quantum. If Petra was here, she could explain it better.”
James was curious. “What’s ‘quantum’ mean?”
Ted shrugged. “It’s a joke in A.A.T. When in doubt, just say ‘quantum’.” He sighed resignedly, gathering his thoughts. “All right, imagine that there are places on the earth that are like a hole in space patched with rubber, see? You can’t tell anything’s different from the top, but it’s maybe a little bouncy or something. Then, say, some wizard comes along who really knows his quantum. He says, ‘Gor, here’s a place where we can put up a smashing wizard village.” So what he does is he conjures something sort of like a huge magical weight, but it’s really, really tiny, right? And the weight drops into the bit of rubbery reality and pulls it down, down, down. OK. So the weight punches that rubber reality right out into another dimension, making a funnel in the shape of space-time.”
“Wait,” Ralph said, frowning in concentration. “What’s space-time?”
“Never mind,” Ted said, waving dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. It’s all quantum. Nobody gets it except for crusty old parchment-heads like Professor Jackson. So anyway, there’s this funnel in space-time where the weight pushes down on the rubber reality. Muggles, see, can only operate on the surface of reality. They don’t see where the funnel dips down into this new dimensional space. To them, it just isn’t even there. Magic folk, though, we can follow the funnel down off main-space, if we know what to look for and share the secret. So we build places like Hogsmeade there.”
“So Hogsmeade is down in some sort of funnel-shaped valley,” Ralph said experimentally.
“No,” Ted said, sitting up again
. “It’s just, you know, a metaphor. The landscape looks just the same, but dimensionally, it goes out through the other side of space-time, where Muggles can’t go. Lots of wizard places have been built that way. We breed magical creatures in quantum preserves. Whole mountain ranges where the giants live, all buried in quantum, off the Muggle maps. That’s pretty much how unplottability works. Simple as that.”
“Simple as what?” Ralph said, frustrated.
Ted sighed. “Look, mate, it’s like the Cockroach Clusters in Honeydukes. You don’t need to understand how they make them. You just need to eat ‘em.”
Ralph slumped. “I’m not sure I can do either.”
“This bloke’s a real barrel o’ laughs, isn’t he?” Ted asked James.
“So if Muggles can’t get in,” James replied, “how’d that Muggle get onto the school grounds?”
“Oh yeah,” Ted said, leaning back again. “The mysterious Quidditch intruder. Is that what people are saying now? That he was a Muggle?”
James had forgotten that not everything he knew about the intruder was common knowledge. He recalled now what Neville Longbottom had said about the wild rumors surrounding the mysterious man on the Quidditch pitch. “Yeah,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant, “I heard he may have been a Muggle. I was just wondering how a Muggle could get in, what with all this stuff about, you know, quantum.”
“Actually,” Ted said, squinting out the window at the brightening day, “I guess even a Muggle could get in if they were accompanied by a wizard or led in somehow. It’s not that they can’t get in, exactly. It’s just that, as far as their senses are concerned, the spaces don’t even exist. If a magical person led them in, though, and the Muggle pushed through what their senses were telling them… sure, it’d be possible, I guess. But who’d be stupid enough to do such a thing?”
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