Noah bowed curtly at the waist, grinning.
“Our treasurer,” Ted continued, “if we ever manage to come across any coin, Sabrina Hildegard.”
A pleasant faced girl with a spray of freckles and a quill stuck in her thick reddish hair nodded to James.
“Our scapegoat, should such services ever be required, young Damien Damascus.”
Ted gripped the shoulder of a stout boy with heavy glasses and a pumpkin-like face who grimaced at him and growled.
“And finally, my alibi, my perfect foil, everyone’s favorite teacher’s favorite, Ms. Petra Morganstern.”
Ted gestured affectionately to the girl who was just returning from the portrait hole, her long dark hair framing a face that James immediately memorized, recognizing straight away that she was soon to become the solar centre of his universe, although he barely knew how or why. She met his gaze and smiled, her eyes twinkling but deep with hidden secrets.
She was so young, so seemingly carefree. James had no idea what lay beneath that easy, pretty smile.
Except that he did.
Both of her parents were dead, her father at the hands of vengeful Azkaban guards, killed for dark secrets they insisted that he was keeping, her mother in childbirth, dying even as Petra’s first cries met the world. Now, Petra lived with her grandfather and his hateful, vicious, Muggle wife, Phyllis, whose bullying even extended to her own mentally handicapped daughter, young Izzy Morganstern, whom Petra loved like a sister and protected as best she could.
“How is this happening?” James asked Petra as she moved to join the rest of the Gremlins.
Only they were alone now. The other Gremlins walked on into the past, their voices fading. The portrait of the Fat Lady drifted into shadow and the corridor vanished away into darkness, becoming a damp cavern, hot with pressure. A pool flickered nearby, illuminated from within by eerie green light. Petra was wearing a yellow dress now, almost impossibly frilly and stiff with layers. Her makeup was streaked and running with tears, although her eyes were clear, unhaunted.
“You followed me,” she stated with a sort of weary, disapproving affection. “James, I really just don’t know what to do with you.”
He shrugged and moved next to her, looking around. “Where are we? Do you know?”
She glanced about, used the back of her hand to wipe a streak of mascara from her cheek. Only, as she did so, the Chamber of Secrets blurred, dimmed, and grew huge. The floor became the wooden planks of a dock. A woodland lake spread away toward a misty forested shore.
The gazebo wasn’t there. Or, it was, only long since fallen away, sunken to the dark depths.
“It’s not a where,” Petra said, turning alongside James and taking his hand, walking to the end of the dock with him. Together, they looked down toward the hidden, phantom shape below the waves. Petra wore a plain calico dress now, warmed by a pale blue hooded jumper. “I thought I was opening a portal to another dimension. But I see now that I was lied to. I understood it in the space between entering the portal and your joining me here. People say that hindsight is always clearer. Here, hindsight and foresight are the whole fabric of reality. It’s pretty much impossible to be deceived here.”
He sensed that she was right, and began to understand.
“We’ve both been to the World Between the Worlds,” he said, squeezing her hand and looking aside at her. “This is like that, isn’t it?
It’s the Time Between the Times.”
She nodded. The wound on her forehead was healed now, James saw, or perhaps had never yet happened. She looked both younger and older than he knew her. Probably, he appeared the same to her.
The lake faded away. In its place was a vast open space. There were neat benches arranged at intervals, and the suggestion of platforms, a sense of patient waiting, even though the space stood entirely empty.
It was, James realized, a train station.
“King’s Cross,” Petra smiled, and stepped away from him. She was dressed differently again, but not in any way that James had ever seen her before. She wore a simple dress, form-fitting on top, loose and flowing at the bottom, the same powder blue as her former hooded jumper, but made of some soft, dully shimmering fabric, at once dense and light as it swished about her legs. Ivory pearls hung in a single strand around her neck. To James’ surprise, she had a diamond ring on her left hand. It was not huge or ostentatious, but neither was it cheap.
It was inscribed on the inside with a phrase: Amis et amoureux pour toujours. James knew this as if he himself had caused the inscription— and the ring itself—to be there.
Petra had learned French at Alma Aleron, after all, and continued to love the language, even if she was not precisely fluent at it…
James looked down at himself. He was dressed differently as well—a white button-down shirt and a dark blazer, navy blue, Bigfoot house colour, yet somehow matching Petra’s dress, tone for tone. He was a little taller, a little older, as was she.
He moved to her with confidence, took her into his arms, and she came to him easily, laid her head on his shoulder. They stood that way for some time, resting together, holding each other as if it was the most natural thing in the world, saying nothing.
Finally, Petra drew a long sigh against him, stirred, and shuddered as she exhaled.
“We can’t stay here forever,” she said regretfully.
“I know,” James replied quietly, not yet letting her go. That moment would come soon enough.
She raised her head and looked up at him, reading his eyes.
“What is this, do you think?”
He shrugged a little. “A glimpse of what might have been…”
She nodded and looked around, then rested her cheek against his chest. He touched the top of her head with his chin, breathed in the scent of her hair. Muffled faintly, she said, “There’s not much sadder in the world than ‘what might have been’.”
It was James’ turn to sigh then.
The strangely empty world of King’s Cross Station was darker now. It had the effect of theatre lights dimming, quieting the crowd, subtly hinting that the final act was about to begin.
Still James did not let Petra go. She lowered her arms, found his hands, and laced her fingers into his. When she took a small step back and looked up at him, he wondered if they would kiss again. It was purely a wistful thought, however. They had already had their first and last kiss, the one to stand for all. He knew this. She, he could tell, was thinking the same thing. Her eyes dipped.
She let go of his hands and moved back another step.
The Station darkened from twilight to grey dusk, then dipped into patient midnight, drifting away all around them.
“It’s happening,” Petra said, still nearby but fading into shadow.
James nodded. There was a sound, dull and boundless, deep and low. It grew, rose up around them, bringing with it a sense of cold anticipation, of mist, and wind.
With quiet conviction, Petra said, “You won’t like how this ends.”
James shook his head in the lowering dark. “Nobody knows the end yet.”
“Perhaps not. But promise me one thing.”
“I will if I can,” he said, straining to see her one last time in this place that only they would remember. She was there, but just barely, merely a dark Petra-shape against a darker infinity.
“Accept the ending, James. Even if the play is a tragedy.”
Neither spoke again. Time was reasserting itself. They were coming out of the other side of the Time Between the Times. Voices blended with the rising drone now, indistinct, some shouting busily, others speaking with low, animated worry. They echoed dully, strangely familiar, like people heard from the other side of a wall. He strained his ears, tensed his body, as the gears of time caught up to him again, meshed minute to minute, and began to carry them forward again.
Petra was no longer in front of him, although he still sensed her nearby, herself realigning with wherever and whenever they were coming to rest.
This kind of time travel unwound along his own lifeline, de-aging him, returning him to the very person that he had been then, younger, and ultimately oblivious to whatever future he had just come from. He would only remember that future if he forced himself to concentrate on it, to cling to it like a dream upon waking.
There was motion around him, as if the whole world was rolling, rocking, creaking faintly, banging with footsteps and distant, urgent voices. The drone of noise finally resolved itself, and James recognized it.
He knew where he was.
He knew when he was.
There was a bliss of relief, even in the midst of the worrying motion, the creaking and rocking, the ominous groan of approaching thunder and howling wind.
Because none of it had happened yet. Somewhere, far away, the Vault of Destinies was still intact. The Loom was still spinning its mysterious, unbroken tale of earthly destiny. The Vow of Secrecy was yet intact, absolutely inviolate.
And amazingly, wonderfully nearby—James sensed this almost as if he could hear and feel her very beating heart—was his cousin Lucy.
She was still alive.
This won’t be any magical storm, Barstow, the first mate of the Gwyndemere, had said to James. Not like what nearly overtook the fabled Treus and his crew…
How wrong he had been about that.
As James clambered up the stairs to the swaying, rocking mid-ship deck, he recognized the storm that bore down on the ship, chilling the wind, whistling through the rigging and sails, growling with deliberate intent. It was Judith’s cursed tempest, unrelenting, still seeking payment in death. It had pursued James first to Hogwarts, and then to the cemetery, and now, incredibly, it had followed him back through the years, into his own past, to the ocean voyage of the Gwyndemere, during James’ third school year.
He remembered the smell of it, the sudden roaring violence of it, only unlike the first time he had encountered it, now he understood it.
It had always been Judith’s cursed storm, seeking payment in blood. It had been cheated once, but only for a time. The clock had turned back.
James had a sinking certainty that, this time, there would be no escaping payment.
The sky moved overhead with sickening speed, as dark and heavy as a tombstone. The ocean all around was a mountainscape of leaden waves, carrying the ship over looming peaks and down into guttural valleys.
Ensconced in the elevated pilot’s chair atop the bow, Barstow himself clapped his hat tight to his head with one hand, hung on to the guiding pole with the other. James marveled at it all, remembering every detail in a giddy rush—the sea monster, Henrietta, that powered the ship, corkscrewing the waves with her lithe, scaly body; his parents and relatives in the captain’s quarters beneath the stern, waiting out the storm while Merlin observed keenly, knowing that something portentous was afoot; and Petra standing on the deck above them, her dress and hair whipping in the gale winds, her eyes calm but eerily haunted, tormented by dreams of her stepsister, Izzy, drowning to death, murdered for a bargain of lost love and hopelessness.
The Petra of that time did not understand that she was, in fact, infected by the dreams of her dimensional twin, Morgan, soon to be unleashed onto a world that was not her own.
But this version of Petra did understand.
James turned and tried to run up the mid-ship steps to the stern.
The rocking ship pitched him, made him stumble. He flailed for the bannister and groped his way to the top.
Petra was there, just as before, her back to him, her hands resting calmly on the railing that arced around the stern. He hair whipped and flicked in loose ribbons. Her drab dress fluttered about her legs like a flag.
“Petra,” James called, raising his voice over the storm.
She turned to look back at him, and he stopped in place, his heart thudding up into his throat. She was so much younger than he remembered. And yet her blank face, her haunted eyes, made her seem much older than even the Petra in the Time Between the Times. She looked at him only briefly, a mere sidelong glance over her shoulder, and then, without a word, turned back to the raging storm and the mountainous waves. The ship rocked in slow, precipitous rhythm, like an enormous pendulum dividing time into dwindling moments.
James braved the canting deck and joined her at the stern, grabbing onto the railing himself. It was cold and wet. In mere moments, if things weren’t changed, Petra would be thrown over it, swept by the falling mast and its swinging booms.
“We should go below decks,” he said, raising his voice over the wind and looking aside at her. She was the same height as him in this timeframe. Her hair flitted and swirled around her face, hiding her eyes.
Just like last time, she made no sign of consent or agreement. But she did place her hand on his, covering it. Whether giving or taking comfort, there was no way to tell.
“Petra…” he called again, trying to get her to look at him.
“She’s out there,” Petra replied, not taking her gaze from the marching waves. Each was of nearly alpine height, dwarfing the ship, topped with white crests that tattered in the gale winds.
James looked out and up at the constantly shifting ocean topography. He nodded. “She always was, wasn’t she? Water is her medium, after all. She was the waves and the rain. She followed us the whole way, biding her time, watching, waiting for her moment. We can’t give it to her. We need to go below, Petra. Right now.”
“Lucy is still alive here,” Petra nodded to herself, ignoring him.
“If we do it right, she won’t have to die again. None of it will have to happen.”
A shiver coursed down James’ back, chilling him. He reached to touch her elbow. “Odin-Vann let slip with his plan,” he said. The wind batted his words, tried to steal them away. “He said that the only way to change the past was to find something that almost happened differently, and to make sure that it does. I think… they mean to see you fall from the back of the ship, to die, like you almost did the first time. Then, Odin-Vann will take over as Judith’s host in this world.”
Petra nodded again, slowly, her eyes still hauntingly clear as she looked out over the tempest, measuring it. “She will be weaker with him as her host than she was when Izzy and I were her sister fates. She knows this. She is a creature from outside of time. Her future, dying self has informed her past, vibrant self. Donofrio won’t multiply her power as we did. But neither will he oppose her. Where Izzy and I defied and broke her, he will submit and bow to her. That’s all that matters to Judith now.”
“Petra,” James said, using her name as a talisman, trying to rouse her to action. “Don’t you understand? We can’t let them win. They will stop me from saving you somehow.”
Petra shook her head. “I don’t think they will. I don’t think they will have to.” Finally, she turned to him. Her eyes were eerily dead. “You were so wonderful, James. So sweet and gallant. You fused your love to my power, connected us. We’re still connected even now. I can feel it. The thread between us has been there ever since. You saved me that time.”
“That time…?” James asked, although he had a sinking feeling that he knew exactly what she meant.
“She will be less powerful with Donofrio as her host,” Petra nodded, her eyes unfocussing, drifting back out over the waves. “Merlin will be able to defeat her. Or your father. Or even you, perhaps. None of it will need to happen as it did. The broken Loom. Lucy’s death.
The Night of the Unveiling. The Morrigan web…”
James was shaking his head firmly, growing deeply alarmed.
“But Odin-Vann didn’t even follow you back in time!” he insisted, reaching to
take Petra’s hand, to shake her out of her fatalistic fugue.
“Nor did Judith! You and I were the only ones that went through the portal!”
She blinked aside at him, as if surprised that he didn’t yet get it.
“I was the only one that needed to come back, James. Don’t you see?
Judith’s origins are outside of time. In some vague way, she is always in both the past and the present. It’s her unfair advantage. And Donofrio already exists here. She has surely already found him in this timeline, prepared him, poisoned his already broken mind with delusions of power and revenge. The version of him that you knew will never be. A new Donofrio Odin-Vann will spawn from this changed moment.”
She looked at James once more, assuring that he saw the conviction in her eyes, albeit tainted with regret. “They only needed me to come back in time, James, because I am the one who will make the change. I should have gone over to my death the first time we went through this cursed storm. You saved me. But you should have let me go. You have to let me go. I can’t let you interfere this time.”
“That’s crazy!” James exclaimed, nearly shouting in the face of the blaring, rainy wind. “You can’t give them what they want! You can’t just give up!”
“I’m not giving up,” Petra said, her voice going firm, her eyes hardening. “This is the cruelest thing of all for me, don’t you see? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave Izzy! It’s even worse than when I thought I was just returning to Morgan’s dimension! But this is what should have happened. Just look at the terrible things that occurred as a result! This time, without me to amplify her power, Judith will be defeated! Merlin will destroy her, assisted by you and all the others who will join him. You know the truth of all this, James. You must tell them. You must make them believe, and act! This is your duty.”
“No!” James cried firmly, taking Petra by the shoulders, turning her to him. “Come down below decks with me! It can’t be like this!”
“You’ve always wondered,” Petra mused thoughtfully, studying his face, “when you invoked the same Deep Magic that your grandmother did to save your father, how it was that you didn’t have to die, like she did. The love covenant is a force of sacrifice, after all. But now we know the answer, don’t we? The bargain wasn’t over. The Deep Magic didn’t require your death because it knew we would be back here again. The bargain was only a reprieve. And now, the circle will complete itself.”
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 61