James Potter and the Crimson Thread

by G. Norman Lippert

  It was a voice that only he, unfortunately, seemed doomed to hear.

  13. – The triumvirate revisited

  James slept in late the next morning, missing breakfast, so that by the time he came blearily to the table in search of tea everyone else was already gone for the morning, apparently on a final Christmas Eve shopping trip to Sartori Alley. The glare outside the broad windows was so bright with new snow that it was painful to look at. Cold light filled the dining room and reflected from the glossy wood of the table so that James had to squint as he plopped to a seat. To his embarrassment, he was waited on by Blake, who was once more dressed in his formal tails and white shirt, his hair combed severely and gleaming black.

  “I trust Sir had a restful night,” he commented perfunctorily as he poured hot water into James’ cup.

  James couldn’t bring himself to answer or even to make eye contact. Blake, for his part, seemed to enjoy James’ discomfiture.

  “Toast, Sir?” he asked brightly.

  “Sure,” James answered dully, watching the steam rise from his steeping cup.

  “Jam, Sir?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Honey, Sir?”

  “No.”

  “Butter, Sir?”

  “No. Wait. Yes.”

  “Straight or diagonal sliced, Sir?”

  James finally turned and looked up at Blake where he stood nearby. “Tell the house elf who makes it that she can draw and quarter it for all I care. And while you’re at it, feel free to take it down a notch, why don’t you.”

  It was like kicking a statue. Blake didn’t blink, merely smiled his small, insincere smile. “Very good, Sir. I shall have that for you in just a jiffy.”

  When the toast came, it was diagonally sliced, perfectly buttered, sitting on a China plate without a single crumb visible, and decorated with a twist of orange and a sprig of parsley.

  “I hope this is to Sir’s satisfaction,” Blake said, with just a trace of courteous doubt.

  James sighed and gave up, stuffing a slice of toast into his mouth before anything he regretted could come out of it.

  Blake went out a minute later, leaving the servant’s door to swing in and out on its hinge. His voice echoed back dully, impatiently, and as the door swung, showing regressively smaller slices of the hall beyond, James caught a glimpse of a female house elf standing just inside, observing him with her large, strangely somber eyes. She was probably the one from the kitchen, checking to assure that James found his toast acceptable. The expression on her face, however, showed less servile efficiency and more watchful intent. As the door swung one last time, showing only a few inches of dark hall and one large elven eye, James saw her face tilt back in the direction of Blake, her expression sharpening, her brow lowering with undisguised contempt.

  James chewed his second slice of toast and thought about his conversation with the Gryffindor house elf, Piggen. Things seemed to be coming true just as he and his fellow elves feared. Humans were taking over house elf duties, all in the name of equality and progress.

  Aunt Hermione would heartily approve. And yet the house elves themselves were obviously painfully unhappy with this new reality.

  James wondered briefly what had happened to the former upstairs house elves that had been replaced by Blake and Topham and the rest. Where did house elves go when they were dismissed? Did they all still live in the downstairs warren of rooms, only without any purpose or duties to occupy them? If so, it seemed like an arrangement destined to end badly.

  Impulsively, James jumped up, tossed the last bite of his toast onto the plate, and strode to the servant’s door. He pushed it open with one hand, certain that he would be too late to speak to the female house elf, to ask her his questions, and he was right. The hallway was empty, dark except for the glaring light from one window at the far end, reflecting on the polished wooden floor, turning it into a blind, imperfect mirror.

  James exhaled, slumped, and allowed the door to swing shut again.

  He spent the next hour and a half haunting the house by himself, never fully alone (the servants could be sensed just out of sight at most times, slipping furtively from rooms as he entered them, leaving a feeling of half-finished dusting or half-fluffed pillows behind them, so that James felt underfoot at every turn) but surrounded by the somehow watchful emptiness of the house. The portraits observed him sleepily but James couldn’t bring himself to talk to any of them. They were all just a bit too old and imperious for his comfort. In the ticking silence, his thoughts returned repeatedly to last night’s confrontation with Judith, probing the memory like a tongue probing a loose tooth.

  His first question was the most obvious one of all: had it really happened? Was it possible that he had imagined it somehow? Or, more likely, that it had been a sort of magical vision projected directly into his mind by Judith? Neither Millie nor Blake seemed to have seen her. But then again, they’d been chatting secretly in the shadows beneath the boathouse. The wind and blowing snow would have been enough to conceal Judith’s form and drown her voice. The memory of her certainly didn’t feel like a dream or a vision. He remembered the wasted, blue-black shrivel of her hands and arms. With a hard shiver, he recalled the way the deadness had crept up her neck and over her face, spreading in blossoming veins just beneath her skin.

  He decided that it didn’t matter whether Judith had physically appeared or merely projected a vision into his mind. By venturing out onto the frozen bay he had stepped into her domain—she was the Lady of the Lake, after all—and she had taken the opportunity to send him a simple, emphatic message: stay away from Petra.

  But she had sent another message as well, perhaps unwittingly: over the past few years, Judith had clearly begun to lose her grip on this plane of existence. When Petra broke the connection between herself, Izzy, and Judith during the night of the Morrigan Web, she had apparently revoked Judith’s right to occupy human reality. Without Petra’s sponsorship, Judith was slowly being reclaimed by the void beyond life and death. It was sapping her, perhaps weakening her, but also making her mad, and desperate, and (James suspected) far more dangerous than ever.

  This, he decided, was a good thing. Soon, Judith’s grasp on human existence would collapse entirely. She would sift away back into the nothingness from which she had been summoned those several years before, when she had apparently arisen from the small woodland lake on the fringes of Morganstern farm, paid for by the murder of Petra’s stepmother, Phyllis.

  But in the meantime, Judith was restless. What had she said before vanishing into the wind and snow? Sometimes we have to sever the relationships that formed us… sometimes that’s the only way to forge new and better relationships…

  Was Judith seeking a new host? A different sponsor that could renew her right to occupy the human world, allowing her to continue her quest for chaos, death, and destruction?

  James sat in the cold sunlight of the empty library and shook his head firmly. No one, he told himself, could be so foolish as to accept Judith’s poison bargain.

  But he knew better, of course. The world was depressingly full of people who would trade chaos for power, if the opportunity arose.

  His best hope, he determined, was that Judith would dissolve into the creeping black before she could find any new human sponsor, whoever such a person might be. And surely Petra was watching, guarding against just such a thing, assuring that the process she began when she broke from Judith continued to its final, inevitable end.

  The thought of Petra was the one thing that finally took his mind away from the shivery chill of the Lady of the Lake. Despite Judith’s intent, her words had had exactly the opposite effect on James.

  By comparing Millie to Petra, she had shown him just how different his feelings for the two young women really were.

  The thought of Millie inspired desire, certainly, but that was a shallow affection, a thin sheen over a puddle of more conflicted feelings and emotions.

  By comparison, thinking
of Petra was like walking a tightrope across a chasm of unimaginable, dizzying height. He might fall off the tightrope on one side and drop to the most horrible loss imaginable—a loss so heartbreaking and soul-crushing that he could barely conceive it.

  But he might jump off the tightrope on the other side and soar into a bliss of fulfillment so deep and wide that it was an ocean of joy.

  He knew, on some level, that he was young, and idealistic, and hopelessly love-struck. But knowing that didn’t make the feelings go away. He couldn’t make himself believe, no matter how hard he tried, that his love for Petra was childish. Or silly. Or merely a passing fancy.

  He suspected—he knew—that even if she vanished away into Morgan’s dimension, leaving his world forever, he would still live his entire life thinking of her daily, missing her, pining for her silently and affectionately through the years.

  The tragedy, he began to understand, was not in missing her every day for the rest of his life once she was gone. The tragedy was in denying his love for her while she was still, if briefly, walking the same world as him.

  He was not, as Judith had assumed, “over” Petra.

  He never would be.

  He drew a deep, aching sigh, filling his lungs in the frozen stillness of the manor house, and let it out slowly. He knew once again what he had to do. He’d told himself it would be easier at some later date. But of course that later date was likely never to come.

  He’d done extremely difficult things in his life. He had faced demons and horrors, confronted monstrous forces and villainous powers.

  But now he felt that he would gladly face them all over again if only he could avoid the one task that now lay before him: breaking up with Millicent Vandergriff.

  “After the holiday,” he said to himself with a firm nod, his voice small in the tall, empty library. “No excuses, Potter. Make it happen.”

  He nodded again, resolved, and fisted his right hand on his knee.

  Shortly, fortunately, he heard the sweep of the opening front door, felt a push of cold air that swayed the curtains slightly, as if they were sighing with relief at the family’s return. Boots knocked on the hall floor, voices echoed loudly, cheerfully, and James jumped up to join them, sheepish at having missed the shopping trip, but grateful to no longer be alone with his troubled, worrying thoughts.

  He and Millie whiled away the midday practicing parts with the younger children, Ariadne, Nigel, and Edmund, for their presentation of the Triumvirate the following evening. As it turned out, Nigel was to play Donovan the villain, Edmund took the role of Treus the hero, and Ariadne, after some argument, filled the parts of the Marsh Hag, the Page Boy (“Page Girl,” she amended gravely) and various other roles, mostly to avoid having to play a romantic lead alongside her own brother—a conundrum that James, having a sister himself, could well understand. Millie accepted the role of Princess Astra, calling upon every ounce of her Hufflepuppet Pals histrionics to give the part the melodramatics it deserved. And James took on whatever parts were left as each scene demanded, sometimes acting as the King, other times as various soldiers, villagers, sailors, a ship’s captain, and even the raging sea monsters of the dreaded Dagger Peninsula.

  “You’re not doing it properly,” Edmund complained, breaking character as James hulked over him, his hands raised into hooked claws.

  “You’re not scary in the least. You have to be scary or else Treus won’t overcome his fatal flaw.”

  James frowned, still hunched in monster form over Treus’ boat (an upholstered ottoman on a huge blue rug). “What’s Treus’ fatal flaw?”

  Edmund rolled his eyes, but it was Nigel who spoke up, observing from the backstage of a nearby sofa. “Everyone in a tragedy has a fatal flaw. Treus’ flaw is his naiveté. You should know all this, shouldn’t you?”

  James slouched and looked helplessly at Millie, who sat forward on a nearby chair attempting to rework one of her old dresses into a Marsh Hag costume for Ariadne. She glanced aside at him and shrugged. “I don’t know how you missed that, either. It was on our Wiz Lit final last year.”

  Ariadne gave James an indulgently patient look and crossed her arms. “Treus has the fatal flaw of being naïve. He knows that Donovan, the King’s advisor, has plans to marry Princess Astra so that he can become viceroy when the king dies. Treus also knows that Donovan has already used dark magic to trick the king into decreeing their marriage, against Astra’s wishes. And yet, when Donovan sends Treus, his only rival, off on some trumped up sea voyage, it never occurs to him that, hmm, this is probably a ruse to get me alone on the ocean so that Donovan and the Marsh Hag can send a magical storm to sink my ship and kill me.” She cocked her head at him and raised her eyebrows.

  “Naïve.”

  “I know all that,” James said, glaring up at the ceiling and raising both hands, palms up.

  “Then you know that, by sailing through the horrors of the Dagger Peninsula to cut around the Marsh Hag’s magical storm, he is also sailing through his own journey of growth into true manhood,”

  Nigel prompted in his squeaky voice, as if reading from a cue card.

  “Of course,” James said, trying to give the words a patiently weary lilt. “Can we just get on with this? We have to get changed for the actual play soon.”

  “And that’s why the Marsh Hag’s storm follows Treus all the way back to the castle of Seventide,” Ariadne finished, eyeing James critically. “It’s a representation of Treus’ noble foolishness, a lesson learned too late to save him. Or his love, the Princess Astra.”

  Without looking up from her costume project, Millie said, “So what’s Princess Astra’s fatal flaw?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Edmund said smugly, still looking at James from his perch on the ottoman. “Princess Astra’s flaw is that she’s impulsive. She falls in love with Treus, who’s just some random soldier.

  Not a bad thing, but an impulsive thing. Then she tries to attack Donovan with her own letter opener when she learns he’s arranged to have Treus killed out on the high seas. Donovan nearly cuts her with her own knife as a result. Then, after Treus gets back to the castle and kills Donovan to save her, and the Hag’s storm unleashes itself on the castle to kill Treus, she stays with him instead of escaping! Totally impulsive.”

  “But that’s what makes it so romantic!” Ariadne interjected, sighing solemnly.

  “Your off your onion. Getting crushed under falling walls during your first kiss isn’t romantic,” Nigel shook his head dismissively.

  “It’s daft as a drunken doxy. Escape and find yourself a new soldier, if you ask me. One without any stupid ‘fatal flaws’.”

  “How did you three learn all this?” James asked, plopping to the ottoman next to Edmund.

  “Old Mrs. Birtwistle, our tutor,” Ariadne sniffed. “Three hours of lessons every day. Who was your tutor?”

  James blinked. “Um. My mum, I guess?”

  “I’d sack her, if I was you,” Ariadne shrugged dismissively.

  “James is right,” Millie announced, standing and draping the dress in her hands against Ariadne, testing the fit. “This will do until tomorrow. For now, we should all get ready for the real play. We leave in less than an hour.”

  The rest of the evening was occupied entirely with the trip to the famed and ancient Theatre D’Extraordinaire in central London, and the play itself, which was nearly three hours long, including a half-hour intermission. James had seen wizarding plays on occasion, though never a fully magical production of the Triumvirate, and never in a theatre of the sheer size and grandeur as the one he now entered. Decked with gilded scrollwork, arched pillars, and flying buttresses that lined both side aisles, the theatre appeared capable of seating approximately half the population of London itself. The many balconies overlaid each other like drawers in a baroque dresser, opened into terraces. None were fixed in place, but floated, rising and lowering from the main floor like parade balloons, studded with purple velvet seats and crowded with richly dress
ed patrons. James watched as they drifted overhead, swapping places for loading and unloading, their undersides decorated with massive frescoes of ancient fictional scenes.

  The one thing that detracted from James’ experience was the woefully old-fashioned and hopelessly wrinkled dress robes he wore.

  Putting them on in his upstairs bedroom, he had briefly mourned their bedraggled state. Now, sidling into his seat in the grandest of the lower balconies with the Vandergriff family, he understood just how exquisitely ridiculous he looked amongst the coiffed finery that surrounded him. As James passed, a fat man with a monocle flinched back from him, blinking rapidly, as if James had flicked water into his face. The woman next to him, resplendent in a stiff jeweled dress, her grey-pink hair piled into a knotty beehive large enough for storks to nest in, frowned elaborately at him, looking him unabashedly up and down.

  James sighed and shook his head to himself, feeling the too-short sleeves slap at his wrists, the moth-eaten fringe of lace flopping limply, embarrassingly ratty. The high burgundy collar and broad lapels had likely last been in fashion when Grandmother Weasley had been in school. Even worse than this, however, was the sadly wrinkled state of the entire garment, the result of spending the last several months crushed and damp in the bottom of James’ trunk. He emitted an odor of old bananas and mould as he walked, trying as hard as he could to shrink, to become as small as possible, to blend right into the crushed purple velvet of the seat as he sank into it.

  “I could have let you borrow one of Bent’s old dress robes,”

  Millie whispered aside at him as the huge chandeliers dimmed. “Or at least used an ironing charm to smooth that travesty out a bit.”

  “A little late for that, now, isn’t it,” James whispered back, trying to make it sound as if he was merely bemused, rather than completely mortified. He thought back to the look on Countess Blackbrier’s face when he’d first come clumping down the stairs, his hair still damp from a severe, desperate combing, without a minute to spare before loading into the vehicles gathered along the front of the house. She hadn’t said a thing—she was far too diplomatic for that—but her wrinkled eyes had widened slightly, her brow raised, and her chin dipped a tick. James understood that he had lost several points with her, and regretted it more than he might have expected. The children, however, had been far less discreet, collapsing into nearly hysterical laughter at the sight of James’ trailing lace frill and the gown that stopped a full five inches short, showing his trainers and incongruous argyle socks.