"The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD." Proverbs 21:31
The bracket for the main rounds was posted on the board outside the Great Hall before the breakfast bell finished its last note, and thirty students crowded around it in the cold corridor with enough collective nervous energy to heat the whole north wing. I found my name at the bottom of the lower bracket, which meant I read upward through the draw, following the line until I saw who I was fighting first, and then I read the rest of the bracket slowly, tracing each potential path with my finger and saying nothing aloud.
Thirty-one names total. Seven from the lower years who had come through the prelims undefeated. Twenty-four upper years in their own parallel draw, the two brackets set to converge at the quarterfinal stage if the lower years held that long. Prentiss had drawn a bye in the first round, which meant he would stand at the ropes and watch two of us fight before he had to move a muscle.
Thomas read the bracket over my shoulder and made a sound that was half-impressed and half-concerned. "The seventh-year specialist, Denholm," he said, tapping a name in the upper bracket. "He doth appear at the quarterfinal stage from the upper bracket side. If thou dost advance that far-"
"I know," I said.
"That is the match where-"
"Thomas, it'll be alright. You're more worried about my rounds than I am. Relax and enjoy the day for what it is," I said, trying to calm down the jittery boy.
He fell quiet. He had a nervous energy to him and probably had been up since before first bell again, running footwork sequences in the outer ward frost until his boot prints went from clear marks to worn channels in the thin rime. The energy needed somewhere to go and it was, at present, going into reading my bracket for me as though I could not read it myself.
We joined the girls who were waiting on us by the door. Entering into the hall, we sat in our usual spots, with plates and cups appearing before us. I only took a couple fruits and nuts to chew on,a s I didn't want to have a full stomach when dueling. Oddly enough, if you don't have breakfast, you won't feel hungry later on in the day until you drink or eat something. I think it has to do with the metabolic cycle being in a different stage. A better way to understand it is if you want to lose weight, you need to fast for a couple days straight to see a great change, only taking necessary water and minerals, no carbs or food in general. After some time, your body switches from consuming the carbohydrates and proteins from the food you eat to consuming the fats that are stored on your body. In the same way, I believe it's because of not eating that I don't feel hungry because my body is consuming the stored, excess fats and what not. But I never did look deeply into these things, I was blessed enough to have an extremely high metabolism to not worry about such things.
That being said, heavy foods before a competition can mess with your body and sugars could mess with your concentration. And if the unfortunate need to vomit comes about, I'd rather not have a couple pounds of breakfast ready to throw up.
After a relatively quiet breakfast with my friends, too nervous to make much conversation, we headed out of the hall towards the courtyard for the tournament.
The main round field was a sight to behold. The ropes were heavier gauge (a unit of girth or thickness), the posts were transfigured to be a part of the ground, and a shimmering dome could be seen reflecting light. I imagine it's either a ward or a sustained shield charm. The ring was surrounded by wooden stands, and its dimensions were triple the size of the preliminary fields, spanning a couple dozen yards in diameter. Three professors occupied judge's chairs, with Crane in the center chair and two staff members I recognized from the meals table on either side of her. Their seats were on an elevated platform that split the stands apart where they sat. Behind the boundary ropes on all four sides, students sat in the stands, mostly by house, and it really put into perspective how many students there really are.
If you took just the upper years who participated in the tournament thus far, you had 24 break out of prelims, with five prelims for the upper years. Two to the power of five is thirty-two, multiplied by twenty-four would be 768. Split between the three grades would be two hundred and fifty-six. It was truly mind-blowing how many wizards and witches there were, and I guess I hadn't really thought about it but everything must have gone down hill with Grindelwald and Riddle, killing off the magical population better than any witch burnings did. If you consider the ones in the first through fourth years and those who didn't enter the tournament, you'd have 2000 students, which is also the reason for such a greater number of professors and staff.
It kind of makes sense why we haven't been ostracized for being muggleborn. Who would care about a percent of the population? It's only when the minority starts to become the majority population that you see fear mongering, or at least that's my speculation. If there's this many at Hogwarts, what about the great noble houses and those who don't attend school, or all the parents and relatives? There's got to be more than ten thousand wizards in just Britain and Scotland. Anyways, it's a lot more than I assumed at first, but I also haven't cared or thought about it long, not like it'll affect me anyways.
As we settled into our seats awaiting the start, the cold pressed in from the north, and the frost that had settled on the rope sections overnight was still white and stiff on the upper surface where the morning sun had not reached. My breath showed clearly when I breathed out standing at the ring edge, and the chalk lines on the turf held the sharp definition of marks drawn in cold dry air.
Calloway came to the opposite side of the ring at three minutes before nine. He was broader across the shoulders than I had expected from Tuesday's distance, and he carried himself forward in the slightly overbalanced lean of someone who had built his whole approach around pressure, momentum, and the willingness to take a hit in exchange for a better position. He bounced twice on the balls of his feet. He rolled his neck. He looked at me the way upper years sometimes looked at lower years in competitive settings, assessing, with one brow slightly higher than the other, filing an expectation.
And of course I was the opponent because why wouldn't I not get a later round. Man, my luck is abysmal.
Crane read the terms in her dry, unhurried voice, the same words she used in every session and the same tone she used for everything that mattered. "Step outside the boundary and the match is awarded to thine opponent. Casting at a student who hath clearly yielded will result in immediate disqualification. Questions?"
Shaking our heads, neither of us had questions.
She dropped the stone.
Calloway moved the instant the stone touched the ground- forward, fast, committing his weight to a charge that would close distance before I could finish a full incantation. He was right that the charge disrupted standard response timing. He had probably done this exact move in every match since he was a first-year and it had almost always worked.
I had already begun the Silencio and the charm worked beautifully, catching him mid-stride. His mouth kept moving with the shape of the incantation he had been building a sharp, percussive word that I recognized from the starting syllables as a force charm but the sound that came out was nothing. His lips moved. His throat moved. No magic came from the wand, because no incantation completed. Success!
While he had slowed, blinking in confusion, I chained into transfiguration: You have activated my trap card! A big hole! Creating a ridge in front of his feet, I trip Calloway into a pit which hadn't been there before.
Reacting on instinct, he throws himself to the side, his knee catching the inside of the hole with a dull thud. Not giving him a breather, I follow up with an expelliarmus to which he rolls over to avoid. Finally, I cast an accio on the wand, yanking his arm and dragging him towards the pit, causing him to roll successively into my pit, which was just a three foot depression.
Dropping the charm, I transform the earth into shackles around his limbs and cast one more disarming charm, ending the duel. I guess not everyone is silent casting, though maybe he was just taken by surprise, not that I'm complaining.
The wand came to my hand and I caught it on my left.
"Match," Crane said, from the center chair.
The whole thing had taken less than ninety seconds. Calloway stood with his weight back and the expression of someone adding information to a file he was going to look at later. He was not angry. He gave me a single nod across the ring, the acknowledgement of a competitive person who has been beaten cleanly , now that's sportsmanship. Not everyone can get beat by someone five years their junior and accept it with grace.
Thomas erupted from the rope line with an enthusiasm that earned looks from a professor and two sixth-years standing nearby. "That were the most unsportsmanlike display I have ever enjoyed watching!" he announced, to no one and everyone simultaneously, clapping once with both hands. He was grinning like he had won the match himself, which was entirely Thomas.
Well, he didn't have to say it like that. "No Thomas, that was my respect for him. Giving it my all and not holding back is as sportsman one can get," I say, trying to bs my way through. There ain't a chance I'm gonna admit to the rather scummy play I just went through, though it did feel a little like I was playing with him.
Eleanor handed me a strip of linen from the assistant station without comment.
"Thank you," I said, wiping a bit of sweat and dust from my face.
"Thou art welcome," she said.
I tucked the rag in my pocket. "When is the next match?"
"Eleven," Margaret said. "Round of sixteen. Thy opponent advances at half past nine."
The ring was reset with a couple waves of the wand and the next match began immediately. At half past nine the match was between a fifth-year Ravenclaw named Ashby and a sixth-year Slytherin whose name I caught from the bracket as Prentiss's older cousin.
The sixth-year won it in seven exchanges. He moved with the unhurried precision I had been watching in the upper-year matches all week, low and economical, never overextending, managing the distance between himself and Ashby. When he cast, the spells had almost no visible flourish, something most students haven't yet gotten out of their habit. Ashby hit the boundary rope in the sixth exchange when a force application caught him mid-press and sent him one full step backward and out.
His name on the bracket was Hector Vane. He was seventeen, built like a tank, as if he were on some magical steroid, and he came for our eleven o'clock match with a folder of notes under his arm that he handed to the Slytherin prefect standing at the boundary rope before crossing in.
Notes. He had brought notes to a dueling match.
I want to say I found this ridiculous. I had an entire notebook at the dormitory desk with analysis of every opponent I had watched across three days. The only difference between me and Hector Vane was that he was apparently comfortable enough with his preparation to walk it all the way to the field and hand it off at the rope rather than leaving it in his dormitory. So instead of ridiculous, I found it slightly concerning. Gulp, I might be screwed.
Crane dropped the stone.
Vane did not rush forward. He did not move at all for a full two seconds after the stone hit the turf, which was not hesitation but deliberate management. He was letting me commit to an opening before he had shown me anything at all about his approach. It was technically correct. The person who moves first shows information. I was aware of this principle, which was why I also did not move for two seconds.
We stood at mid-range, looking at each other across twenty feet of cold turf, for long enough that someone at the boundary ropes said something that produced a small burst of laughter. I do not know what they said, nor did it matter to me at this moment.
He cast first. The charm came from a wrist movement so small it looked like an involuntary flex, and the result was not a colored flash or a bolt but a sudden pressure on my left side that pushed me two inches off my footing before I recognized what was happening. I stepped into it rather than with it, which kept my position, but the step told him my balance response and he was already casting again before the first charm's effect had fully resolved.
The second cast I blocked with a Protego, the shield charm springing up bright and transparent and the blue-white impact against it sent a jolt back through the wand and into my hand. His charms hit harder than any fourth-year's, and the shield absorbed it but the absorption cost me a half-second of recovery while he moved to close the mid-range gap to close-mid.
I transfigured the turf. The grade went up ahead of his advance, same as the Calloway match, angled to redirect his forward weight backward. He planted his back foot and stopped moving before the grade finished forming, which meant he had been reading the ground ahead of his step rather than watching my wand. He had expected a terrain change.
Too bad for him, for behold ye frog at the bottom of a well, ye ignorant fool! Silencio!
I let the grade reverse and tried a Silencio in the gap before he resumed advancing. He had a shield up before the charm arrived, Protego but smaller and more directed than mine had been, the focused application Ashford had demonstrated in the second week of term. The Silencio deflected off it in a faint shimmer with no sound and no effect.
He resumed advancing. Crap
He could cast silently. The Silencio had worked on Calloway because Calloway needed to speak his spells, and it had worked on Monday and Tuesday because most students in the lower and middle years had not fully developed non-verbal casting. Vane was a sixth-year who had apparently decided to spend his two years between O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s becoming very good at dueling, and silent casting was part of that.
I abandoned mid-range and performed a move that had never been seen before… RUN! And for whatever reason, I mimicked Jack Sparrow, my upper body swaying all around trying to avoid spells flying past my ears, and my legs moving independently, with the pedal to the metal.
And they're off!
-no, wait; he's running?! Nicholas has abandoned the entire concept of dueling! No spells, no stance, just raw, panicked sprinting! Ladies and gentlemen, we may be witnessing a complete tactical collapse or a breakthrough in magical theory!
Hector pauses, he has to pause - this is not in the syllabus! And now he's chasing! Of course he's chasing, what else can he do?!
Around the corner, Nicholas taking it like a man fleeing his responsibilities, he takes a tight turn, no hesitation! Hector follows, wider, faster -oh, he's gaining! He is absolutely gaining on a man who has, I must stress, decided to solve wizard combat with cardio!
And what's this -debris! Nicholas throwing up chunks of stone, dirt, possibly parts of the building -hard to tell at this speed! This is less a duel and more a home renovation project gone violently wrong!
Hector pushing through, visibility near zero; dignity also questionable at this point!
Nicholas, still running, is showing no signs of stopping! This is now a chase, a marathon, a philosophical argument about what constitutes a duel!
If he wins like this, we may have to rewrite the rules; if he loses, we may have to pretend this never happened!
Flinging up rocks with a quick confringo and transfiguring marsh land behind me, I sprint away like the times we broke something of mother's and could already foresee the whoopings in store. Seeing a rather large orange spell pierce through the dust cloud, I toss out another confringo, meeting it halfway.
The casts hit each other at half-distance between us, almost anime-like in effect, with a flash at the point of contact, broad and white, and a pressure wave that pushed us both back a step. My ears rang briefly. His collar was disturbed from the concussive air, the shockwave pushing the dust cloud out.
Both of us were panting, though he was noticeably worse for the wear, and glaring at me as if I had done something offensive.
His next cast was a sequence, and one of malice I might add: two charms in fast succession, the second arriving before the first's effect completed, designed to split the defender's response across two simultaneous problems. The first charm was a binding attempt, thin golden thread from the wand, aimed at my wand arm. The second came from a slightly different angle, a force application directed at my feet.
I Banished the binding thread sideways with a Depulso, a red-white impact at the deflection point and stepped over the force application while it was still low, using the step to close the remaining distance between us to arm's length.
As he was gaining ground throwing yet another barrage, I duck, "DEPULSO!"
"Fwoom! He launched six feet, rolled once, and landed on his feet like some protagonist. "Oh come on, that's not even fair. Who invited the karate kid to Hogwarts?" I complain under my breath, of which I had little of.
Now I could see veins snaking across his forehead and neck, some berserk mode about to happen. Oh good, I thought. We've moved from "duel" to "poor life decisions."
He came in hard; no probing cast this time, just raw output, something wide and violent.
I ran.
Again.
"OH, HE'S RUNNING AGAIN!" I could practically hear the commentary in my own skull as I pivoted, boots skidding in the churned mud I'd made earlier.
Behind me - exactly where I wanted him.
I flicked my wand once, sharply.
The marsh I'd transfigured a heartbeat ago lost cohesion all at once.
Solid ground remembered it was supposed to be mud.
Hector hit it at speed.
There's a particular sound a man makes when forward momentum meets Newton's Second Law of Motion: half impact, half betrayal. He went down hard, spell going wild, blasting harmlessly into the air, hitting the ring's dome.
Before he could recover-
"Expelliarmus."
Clean. Close. Final.
His wand snapped out of his hand and landed somewhere in the muck behind me.
I stopped, bent over slightly, hands on my knees, lungs burning.
"…and that," I muttered between breaths, "is GG."
"Match," said Crane, from the center chair.
The two professors beside her made notes on their parchments without looking up. Crane herself looked at the earthen barrier still standing in the ring, then at the depression near the left stake, then at the area near the center where the two opposing casts had met and left a faint scorch on the turf. Her expression was somewhere between not knowing what to say and resigned in her role as a judge.
Vane came forward and I extended the wand to him handle-first. He took it, having calmed down, lips bleeding and covered in dirt and mud.
"Good… pants.. Match."
"Thou art annoying," And with that, Hector walked away not wanting to be near me for another second. Wore out, I also exited the ring, meeting my friends who had come to greet me.
Thomas had both fists in the air at the boundary rope and was saying something to Eleanor beside him that I could not hear from the ring. Margaret was writing at speed, pencil scraping across notation paper, and she did not look up from the page.
I came off the ring and Eleanor handed me a water cup from the assistant station without waiting for me to ask for it. My hands were damp inside the gloves and were clammy from the sweat that had started somewhere around the close-range sequence and had not stopped.
"That was harder than it looked," I said.
"It looked quite hard," Eleanor said.
"Good," I said. "I would hate to have suffered through that and had it look effortless."
She almost smiled. "When is the octofinal?"
"Two o'clock," Margaret said, from behind her notation page. She had not looked up yet. "The opponent depends on the match at half twelve. Either a fifth-year Hufflepuff named Price or a sixth-year Ravenclaw named Cott." She turned the page. "Price doth prefer distance casting. Cott hath a tell in the left shoulder that precedes lateral movement." She finally looked up. "I will tell thee which one it is as soon as it finishes."
Thomas came through the rope opening and grabbed my arm. "The terrain works in the corner," he said, at a volume three students nearby turned to look at. "Vane went right without seeing the stake slope and thou hadst already placed the depression on the left side before the barrier went up. He had no route except the one thou wanted him to take."
"Yes," I said.
"Thou built the trap in three separate stages before he recognized any of them individually," Thomas said. He was not just excited, he was working through it analytically in the Thomas way, which involved saying the analysis aloud at a volume suited to outdoor announcements. "Each piece looked like a normal exchange choice. None of them looked like a sequence until the sequence had already happened."
"That is the theory," I said, 100% not bluffing. Truly what a great wingman, knowing exactly what to say.
We were watching the round my next opponent would come from.
The winner was a guy named Price. He was a fifth-year, which meant nothing about his capability except that he had survived four years of Hogwarts and had been training for at least three of them. He was tall, with the reach of someone who had grown quickly and not yet fully adjusted to the new geometry of his own body, and he moved with the slight overreach in his casting arm that tall students often carried before they learned to compensate. Margaret's notation said he preferred distance.
At two o'clock.
The afternoon light was flat and gray, the sun fully blocked by the cloud cover that had settled over the castle after noon. The cold was sharper and my breath showed in clear clouds and the turf had the slightly frozen quality of ground that had thawed during the day and was beginning to refreeze. Price bounced on his feet once and settled his guard. He had a focused, inward expression, the expression of someone running a pre-match mental sequence.
Crane dropped the stone.
Price opened at distance immediately, stepping back two full steps to establish his preferred range before I could close the gap, and cast a force application from the new position with full incantation "Depulso!", the purple-white burst bright and directed from a well-extended arm. The reach gave it power. The overreach in the final extension gave it a fractional angle away from the intended line, and it passed left of center rather than dead center, which meant I moved right to let it pass rather than having to block it. Having had a bit more experience and the opponent not being near as hard as Hector the seventh year from my previous round, I could take time to actually notice these details.
I matched his range, kept mid-range spacing, and let him establish the exchange at the distance he wanted. People who preferred distance assumed they were safe there. They built their entire defensive strategy around the comfort of that assumption and I was waiting to blow it up, metaphorically speaking of course.
He cast again. Another Depulso, same arm extension, same overreach, the angle slightly different from the first because his feet were in a slightly different position. The second cast went marginally further right than the first, which told me the overreach was consistent and the angle variation was a function of foot position rather than wand position. If I could read his foot position, I could predict the angle before the cast.
He was not reading the ground, rather he was watching my wand.
I transfigured the ground under my own feet, raising the surface an inch and a half in a very specific configuration that would shift my shoulder line slightly left without changing anything about my wand position or my face, which were the two things he was watching. The shift in my shoulder line was not visible at this range to anyone watching my face and wand. My foot position, from his angle, was also unchanged in appearance.
I cast from the new position. My Depulso went right of where he expected it based on the previous two exchanges. He had already started his block to the wrong side.
The charm caught the edge of his guard rather than the center, deflecting off at an angle that pushed his wand arm out and away from his body. The arm went wide. His grip shifted.
I closed the distance in two strides while his arm was still recovering, which put me inside the range he had built his whole strategy around, and from inside that range I did not transfigure the ground, I did not set up terrain, I simply put a Silencio on him at arm's length and followed it immediately with an Accio aimed at the wand in the overextended hand.
The wand left his grip and came to me.
Crane said: "Match."
Price stood with his empty hand and a dumbfounded look. Can you blame him? The way I dismantled this son of a gun was downright stylish.
He shook hands without prompting, which I appreciated, and said: " "Twas a good match. I shall look forward to our next bout." And with that, I just made it to quarterfinals, a surprise to me. Maybe my luck isn't so bad, with only one hard duel out of three. Did I just jinx myself?
The semifinal was at four, which gave me ninety minutes.
I ate cold bread and apple sitting on the boundary wall with the others, watching the other quarterfinals. The seventh-year Denholm was in the first upper quarterfinal, and he won it in a sequence of three exchanges that took four minutes total. The three exchanges were unhurried. He simply waited until each specific moment arrived, used it with complete precision, and waited for the next one.
The quarterfinal was nothing to write home about. I started with my usual silencio only for the seventh year I was up against to not be bothered in the slightest. With a flick of his wand, my arm was yanked awry, dislocating from my shoulder. Pain lanced through me and my vision immediately became spotty.
Casting a protego, and quickly tried to transfigure a wall only for it to be turned into a multitude of hawks which swarmed me from all sides. Casting confringo twice in a row, I hadn't noticed that my opponent had already gotten to my blind spot. A shout rang to my left and I duck only to be sent sprawling outwards, landing on my dislocated arm. I look up only to see a wand in my face.
"Match!" was called. Getting up, I shook his hand with my left arm (the good one) and hobbled my way out. If this were a chinese drama, I'd be shouting something like "A thousand miles to the east, a thousand to the west, don't bully a poor boy!" or something along those lines. However, I'm no psychopath and do have morals, so I take it like a man and try not to let the tears of pain out.
Eleanor was through the rope opening before Thomas. She did not say anything. She looked at the numb arm, looked at my face, and looked at the arm again.
"Infirmary," she said.
"Yes," I said. I did not argue this time. The arm was numb from the elbow and had been for three minutes, which was long enough that the argument for waiting had left.
Thomas came through behind her and took the satchel from my good shoulder without being asked. He did not say anything about the match. He was processing, I could see him processing, but he had enough control to hold it until later.
We walked to the infirmary. The castle was lit with evening torches, the corridors empty of tournament traffic now that the matches had concluded. The warmth of the interior was immediate after the hours on the cold field, and the arm that was numb began to produce the prickling return of sensation that always accompanied the end of numbness, which was its own variety of discomfort.
The healer on duty was Mistress Crowley, who had been on rotation since November and who moved with the brisk efficiency of someone who had been receiving tournament casualties all week and had a particular way of looking at injuries that communicated both accuracy of diagnosis and a mild professional irritation that the injury existed at all.
She looked at the arm. She looked at the forearm mark from Ashby's morning hit, which had progressed to a proper bruise through the afternoon. She looked at my face.
"Sit," she said.
I sat.
She applied a healing charm to the elbow, which reduced the numb prickling to a warm ache, and a separate application to the forearm bruise, which faded from dark to pale over about ninety seconds. She said nothing while she worked. She handed me a small vial of something dark and thick and said: "One measure tonight, one at breakfast. This will complete the repair to the nerve tissue at the elbow."
"Thank thee," I said.
"Do not attend tomorrow morning's physical work assignment," she said. "Thou mayest resume in the afternoon."
"There is restricted section access in the morning," I said.
She looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who has worked in a school long enough to have heard everything but still manages to find specific things tiresome. "That is acceptable," she said. "The arm needs to be used minimally for twelve hours. Reading is of minimal use."
Thomas made a small sound in the corridor that was either a suppressed laugh or a suppressed comment. Either was possible.
Eleanor was standing in the infirmary doorway. She had her observation notebook open but she was not writing in it she was watching the healer's work with the analytical focus she brought to anything medical, her pencil held but still.
"Is the nerve damage from the force application or from the forearm restriction charm that preceded it?" she asked.
Mistress Crowley looked at Eleanor, looked at the vial she had given me, and said: "The restriction charm reduced blood flow to the area and increased susceptibility. The force application then caused the nerve impact at a lower threshold than it would have otherwise." She paused. "A well-sequenced combination."
We went to the Great Hall for supper, arriving late enough that the main serving had mostly concluded and the house-elves were already beginning their clearing work, moving between the tables with the same unhurried efficiency they brought to everything else in the castle. There was still food, though bread that had been freshly replenished, cold mutton from dinner, and a wide bowl of something hot and root-vegetable-heavy that one of the older Hufflepuffs had apparently persuaded the kitchens to leave out a little longer than usual. The smell of it lingered warmly in the air, grounding the hall in a quieter, post-peak sort of comfort.
As I entered, I was congratulated by a few of my housemates. The attention was brief, not loud, but it carried a certain weight, being the first second year to make it this far in a long time. I acknowledged it as best I could and moved with them to the near end of the Hufflepuff table, where the noise of the hall thinned slightly and conversation tended to settle into smaller, more practical clusters.
Thomas ate with a kind of urgent focus, as though the day had quietly forgotten to include sufficient food and he was now correcting the oversight with determination. He did not speak much at first, only occasionally pausing to glance at the table as if making sure it would continue to exist while he worked through it.
Margaret, by contrast, had already shifted into her post-event mode. She sat angled slightly toward the candlelight, her notebook open, pencil moving with steady precision. Every so often she paused, tapped the tip lightly against the page, and then resumed, adjusting earlier notation, inserting small corrections, tightening phrasing.
Eleanor and I were slower to leave the experience behind. She ate her bread in measured bites, but her attention was not on the food so much as on the notebook she had opened again beside her plate. At times she would stop, linger on a single line, and then shift slightly in her seat as though testing whether what she had written was still aligned with what she had seen.
Eventually, the meal thinned out around us. Thomas and Margaret left together at some point, Margaret closing her notebook with careful finality, Thomas finishing his last bite, murmuring something about homework or obligations in the common room or elsewhere in the castle. Their departure left a quieter space at the table, the kind that feels more deliberate than empty.
Eleanor remained.
We eventually drifted from the hall ourselves and ended up in the common room, settling into one of the worn couches near the edge where the firelight didn't quite reach as strongly. The room had that late-evening hush: scattered conversations, the occasional rustle of parchment, the soft shifting of students who were already half-convinced they should be asleep.
We were both simply sitting with the end of the day now that it had finally arrived properly.
Eleanor had her notebook out but not open, resting it on her lap. She looked down at it for a moment, then set it beside her rather than using it.
I took another bite of bread without much attention to it.
The common room had quieted into its evening rhythmlow voices near the fire, someone turning pages somewhere behind us, the occasional movement of chairs or cushions as people settled into studying or waiting out the last stretch before bed. Nothing pressed.
After a moment, Eleanor spoke again.
"You did not eat much."
"I ate enough," I said.
A short pause.
"That is not the same thing," she said.
I did not respond to that directly.
Eleanor opened her notebook, then stopped before writing. She rested the pencil against the page and looked at it for a moment as if deciding whether anything needed to be recorded at all. Then she made a small note anywaybrief, functional, not elaborated.
We stayed like that for a while, neither of us speaking much. The day had already been spent; what was left did not require effort to manage.
At some point she turned a page, then left it blank and closed the notebook partway, keeping it open but unused.
The fire in the common room shifted and settled, and the space between us remained quiet in the way it naturally did when nothing more needed to be said.
Eventually I closed my own notebook and set it aside