I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Apprentice of The Red Witch
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The morning Harry woke up tired, praying he had woken up early so he could rest a little more, he got another nap and woke up 40 minutes later, surprised.
No voice from the hallway. No instructions. No "Get up, get dressed, come downstairs." Just birdsong through the open window and the slow creep of sunlight across the floorboards.
When he finally came downstairs, Natasha was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and The Daily Prophet spread in front of her. She glanced up when he appeared, and her expression was strange. Not cold. Not sharp. Just... elsewhere.
"Morning," she said.
"Morning." Harry hovered in the archway, waiting for the schedule. The exercises.
Natasha turned a page of the Prophet. "No training today."
Harry blinked. "What?"
"You heard me. No training. Do whatever you like."
He stood there, unsure what to do with that information. In three weeks at Willowmere Hollow, every day had followed the same shape: breakfast, training, lunch, more training, dinner, reading, bed. The routine had become familiar, and familiar was something Harry had learned not to take for granted.
"Is everything okay?" he asked.
"Everything's fine." She didn't look up from the paper. "There's toast on the counter. Go eat. Then go outside. Read a book. Fly if you want. Explore. You've earned a day off."
Harry ate his toast standing at the counter, watching Natasha read. She turned pages slowly, sipping her coffee, and said nothing else. There was something deliberate about the silence, but Harry couldn't figure out what it was, and after a few minutes of standing there, he decided that standing wasn't going to give him any answers.
He went outside.
The morning air was warm, and still, he took a deep breath and started walking. Grasshoppers clicked in the long grass near the stone wall. Butterflies drifted between the wildflowers in patterns that looked random but probably weren't. The willows along the stream hung low and heavy with summer, their branches trailing in the water.
Harry walked. No direction, no destination. Just walking, the way he'd never been allowed to walk at Privet Drive, where every step outside the house had been monitored and every minute accounted for.
He followed the stream south, past the willows, past the flat rock where he'd sat yesterday after training. The property stretched wide around him, and he could feel the wards at the edges, a faint pressure against his skin when he got close, the boundary between the world Natasha had built for him and the world outside it.
He thought about Hogwarts.
It's not long before he will have to leave this place. He would board a train. He wondered if they would like him. He wondered if he would know how to talk to them. At his old school, he had been invisible. The weird kid in Dudley's clothes who didn't have friends because Dudley made sure of it. He didn't know how to be anything else. The thought of walking into a room full of strangers who already knew his name, who had grown up hearing the story of the Boy Who Lived, made his stomach clench.
Natasha had warned him about that. "They'll stare," she'd said. "They'll want to use your fame; someone may try to manipulate you. Very few of them will treat you like a boy."
He picked up a stone from the bank and skipped it across the stream. It bounced twice and sank.
He thought about his parents. About Lily, who had walked into the magical world at eleven with no preparation and became extraordinary. About James, who had grown up in it and still fell in love with someone from the outside. He tried to imagine them young, his age, sitting in a classroom at Hogwarts, not knowing yet that they would find each other, not knowing what was coming.
He tried to imagine what they would think of him now. Whether they would recognize the boy with the scar and the practice wand and the two-minute-fourteen-second sphere. Whether they would be proud.
He didn't have an answer. He never did. But the question hurt less here than it had in the cupboard, and that was something.
Harry walked the full perimeter of the property, tracing the ward line, and by the time he came back around to the front of the house, the sun was high and his legs were tired and he felt, for the first time in weeks, quiet inside. Not the trained quiet of the breathing exercises, but a natural stillness. The kind that came from walking a long time and thinking honest thoughts and not being afraid of any of them.
He pushed open the front door, kicked off his shoes, and stopped.
There was a door in the hallway that had not been there this morning.
It was on the left wall, between the coat rack and the entrance to the sitting room. A wooden door, like the rest of the house. It looked as though it had always been there, as though Harry had simply failed to notice it every day for three weeks, except that he hadn't.
He touched the handle. It was warm.
"Go ahead," Natasha's voice said from behind him.
Harry turned. She was leaning against the kitchen doorframe with her arms crossed. Her expression had changed since this morning. The distance was gone. In its place was something careful and watchful.
Harry turned the handle and pushed the door open.
The room beyond was small. Not cramped, but contained, with a low ceiling crossed by the same dark beams as the rest of the house. The walls were lined with bookshelves, floor to ceiling, and the shelves were full. Not the general magical textbooks from his bedroom. These were specific.
Advanced Charm Theory. The Invisible Book of Invisibility. Practical Defensive Magic and Its Use Against the Dark Arts. A leather-bound copy of Quidditch Through the Ages. Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches.
In the corner by the window stood a telescope. Not the small brass one from his bedroom, the one that fit in his palm. This was proper, mounted on a dark wooden tripod, its lens angled toward the sky through a window that had been positioned, Harry realized, to face north, where the stars would be clearest.
On the desk beneath the window sat a quill, an inkpot, a stack of fresh parchment, and a leather-bound journal with nothing written inside.
And on the wall above the desk, in a dark wooden frame, was a photograph.
Harry stopped breathing.
Two people stood in the photograph, close together, laughing. The woman had dark red hair that fell past her shoulders and green eyes, bright green, the same green Harry saw every time he looked in a mirror. She was young, maybe twenty, and she was beautiful, and she was laughing at something the man beside her had just said. The man had messy black hair, glasses, and a grin so wide it looked like it might crack his face open. He had his arm around her waist, and as Harry watched, the man turned and pressed a kiss to the woman's temple, and she swatted his shoulder, and they both laughed again, and the loop started over.
His parents. Moving, alive, laughing. A photograph.
Harry's hands were shaking. His vision blurred. He reached up and touched the frame, and the glass was cool under his fingertips, and his mother laughed again, and his father kissed her again, and Harry realized he was crying and he didn't care.
"Where did you get this?" His voice came out rough.
Natasha had followed him in. She stood just inside the doorway, and her expression was the most open he had ever seen it.
"Old contacts," she said. "People who knew your parents. People who fought alongside them."
"Fought alongside them," Harry repeated. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and turned to face her. "You mean in the war. Against Voldemort."
"Yes." Natasha leaned against the doorframe. "There was an organization. A group of witches and wizards who came together to resist Voldemort and his followers. They called themselves the Order of the Phoenix."
"The Order of the Phoenix," Harry said. The name settled into his mind with a weight that felt right.
"Voldemort had his Death Eaters," Natasha continued. "Fanatics who believed in pure-blood supremacy and were willing to kill for it. They wore masks. They tortured. They murdered Muggle-borns and anyone who stood against them. The Ministry was too slow, too corrupt, too afraid to act. So a group of people decided that if the government wouldn't fight, they would."
"Who started it?"
"A wizard named Albus Dumbledore. The headmaster of Hogwarts. He gathered people he trusted: your parents, their friends, Aurors who were willing to risk their careers, ordinary witches and wizards who had simply had enough. They fought the Death Eaters in secret, protected families who were targeted, gathered information, ran safe houses." She paused. "Your mother and father were some of the youngest members. They joined straight out of school."
Harry looked back at the photograph. His father's arm around his mother's waist. The grin. The laughter.
"They were brave," he said quietly.
"They were children," Natasha said. "Barely older than teenagers. Brave, yes. But also young. Younger than they should have been, doing things no one that age should have to do." Something shifted in her voice. "Lily used to write to me. Long letters. She told me about the meetings, the missions, the people they lost. She never complained. But I could read between the lines. She was scared, Harry. They all were. They just didn't let the fear stop them."
Harry's throat ached. "Were you in the Order too?"
"I helped where I could. From the outside, mostly. Natasha Evans was useful in certain circles." "The point is, the people who knew your parents remembered them. When I reached out, when I told them Lily's son needed something of hers, they gave what they had. That photograph was taken at a wedding. One of the few happy days they all got."
Harry traced the edge of the frame with his finger. His mother laughed. His father kissed her temple.
"I never had a picture of them," he said. "Aunt Petunia didn't keep any. I didn't know what they looked like."
"I know." Natasha's voice was quiet now, and there was something tight in it, something she was holding back. "I should have come sooner, Harry."
She stopped herself. Closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the tightness was still there, but she had packed it away, folded it into whatever place inside herself where she kept the things that hurt.
"Today isn't for that," she said. "Today is for you."
She reached into her jacket and pulled out a flat rectangular package wrapped in brown paper. She held it out to him.
Harry took it, confused. He tore the paper carefully. Inside was a leather case, worn and well-made, with a brass clasp. He opened it.
A broom maintenance kit. A small jar of handle polish. A set of twig-trimming scissors. A tail-twig grooming brush with soft bristles. A compass-like instrument that Natasha later told him was a drag calibrator, used to test broomstick alignment. Everything was compact, fitted into its own slot in the case, practical and precise.
It wasn't expensive. It wasn't flashy. It was a kit for someone who loved flying, chosen by someone who had noticed that he did.
Harry was still holding the broom kit against his chest when the thought arrived, sudden and obvious, and he couldn't believe he'd missed it.
"Wait," he said. "What day is it?"
Natasha tilted her head. "The thirty-first of July."
Harry stared at her. "It's my birthday."
"Yes, Harry. It's your birthday."
"I'm ten."
"You are ten."
He looked at the room. The books. The telescope. The photograph of his parents laughing on the wall. The leather case in his hands. All of it, every piece, chosen and arranged and hidden behind a door that hadn't existed until today.
"This is a birthday present," he said slowly.
"You're a quick one." The corner of Natasha's mouth lifted.
"Nobody's ever given me a birthday present before."
The words came out plain and factual, because they were. The Dursleys hadn't forgotten his birthday. They had simply never acknowledged it. Dudley got thirty-seven presents one year. Harry got told to cook the breakfast.
Natasha's smile faded into something fiercer.
"Then we have nine years to make up for," she said. "Happy birthday, Harry."
Harry looked at the photograph on the wall. His mother waved. His father grinned.
"You built me a room," he said quietly.
"I built you a study."
"You built me a room full of books you picked because you knew I'd want to read them, and a telescope because you saw me looking at the stars last week, and you found a photograph of my parents because I told you I didn't know what they looked like. And now you're giving me a broom kit because I said I could fly forever."
Natasha said nothing.
"Nobody's ever done anything like this for me," Harry said.
"I pay attention," Natasha said simply. "That's my job."
"It's not a job."
Natasha looked at him. Something in her expression cracked, just for a moment, and underneath it Harry saw something raw.
"No," she agreed quietly. "It's not."
Harry looked at the books on the shelves and the telescope angled at the sky and the blank journal waiting on the desk. Someone had built this room for him. Not for the Boy Who Lived. Not for a symbol or a story. For Harry. The boy who liked flying and stars and books and had once named the spiders in his cupboard because they were the only company he had.
He was ten years old, and for the first time, it mattered.
"Thank you," he said.
And he meant it more than he had ever meant anything.
The morning after his birthday, Harry came downstairs expecting the same rutine. Instead, Natasha was standing by the back door in a black vest and running shoes, her red hair pulled into a tight ponytail.
"Get changed," she said. "Something you can move in. We're going outside."
Harry looked at her shoes, then at her face. "Are we flying?"
"No."
"Spell practice in the clearing?"
"No."
"Then what are we doing?"
"Running," she said.
Harry stared at her. "Running."
"Yes."
Harry went upstairs and changed into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt Natasha had bought him, and when he came back down, she was already outside, stretching her calves against the porch railing. He stood in the doorway and watched her, trying to figure out what running had to do with magic.
"Most witches and wizards don't do this," Natasha said, as if reading his thoughts. She switched legs. "Physical training isn't part of the magical curriculum. Not at Hogwarts, not at any of the other schools. Most magical people rely entirely on their wands and consider their bodies an afterthought."
"And you think that's wrong."
"I think that's stupid." She straightened and turned to face him. "A wand is a tool. It can be taken from you. It can break. It can be knocked out of your hand in the first three seconds of a fight. And if you've spent your entire life standing still and pointing a stick at things, what do you do when the stick is gone?"
Harry didn't have an answer.
"You run," Natasha said. "Or you dodge. Or you move fast enough that the spell aimed at your head hits the wall behind you instead. Physical fitness isn't a replacement for magic. It's a complement. Your body is the one thing you always have, and if you train it properly, it becomes a weapon no one can disarm."
"Okay," Harry said. "So we're running."
"We're running." Natasha pointed at the hill behind the property. It wasn't enormous, but it was steep, and the grass at the top was still hidden in mist. "Up there. And back down. Three times."
Harry looked at the hill. Then at Natasha. Then at the hill again.
"Three times?"
"Would you like to make it four?"
"Three is fine."
"Then let's go."
They ran.
Or rather, Natasha ran, and Harry discovered within the first thirty seconds that he could not run. Not properly. Not the way she did. His legs burned before he was a quarter of the way up. His lungs seized. The hill, which had looked manageable from the porch, seems to be the more he runs, the farther it gets.
He made it to the top of the first lap and bent double, hands on his knees.
Natasha jogged back down to him. She wasn't even breathing hard.
"Two more," she said.
"I'm going to die," Harry wheezed.
"You're not going to die. Keep moving."
Harry kept moving. The second lap was worse than the first. The third was an experience he would later describe to himself as proof that he was not, in fact, already dead, because nothing in the afterlife could possibly hurt this much.
When he finished, he collapsed on the grass at the bottom of the hill, chest heaving, legs shaking, the sky spinning slowly above him.
Natasha stood over him, blocking the sun.
"That was terrible," she said.
"I know," Harry gasped.
"Your form is awful. You run flat-footed, you swing your arms too wide, and you hold your breath on the incline instead of regulating it."
"I know."
"We'll work on all of it." She extended a hand. "Get up. We're not done."
Harry took her hand and let her pull him to his feet. His legs felt like someone else is the owner of them.
"There's more?" he asked.
"There's always more."
Natasha led him to the clearing behind the house, the same flat patch of ground where they did wand drills. But today there was no wand. Instead, she pointed at the grass and told him to lie face down.
"Plank position," she said. "Forearms on the ground, body straight, core tight. Hold it."
Harry got into position. It felt easy for about ten seconds. Then his abdominal muscles began to shake. Then they began to burn.
"How long?" he managed through gritted teeth.
"Until I tell you to stop."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting. Keep your back straight. You're sagging."
Harry held the plank for what felt like an eternity, and it was probably about forty-five seconds before his arms gave out, and he face-planted into the grass.
Natasha crouched beside him. "That's your baseline. Forty-two seconds. We'll build from there."
"Forty-two seconds is awful, isn't it."
"Forty-two seconds is where you start. It's not where you'll finish." She stood. "Rest for one minute, then we go again."
They went again. And again. And by the end of the morning, Harry had done more planks than he thought physically possible, run the hill three times, and been introduced to something Natasha called hanging leg raises, which involved gripping a horizontal branch on the oak tree behind the house and lifting his legs to a ninety-degree angle while his arms burned and his grip screamed and his stomach muscles did things he hadn't known stomach muscles could do.
He managed four before he dropped off the branch.
"Your upper body is weak," Natasha observed, watching him massage his forearms. "We'll fix that."
"You keep saying that. 'We'll fix that.' 'We'll build from there.' 'We'll work on it.' When does the fixing actually happen?"
"Over time. This isn't magic, Harry. There's no spell that builds muscle. No potion that gives you endurance. You earn it, the same way you earned the breathing and the visualization."
Harry sat in the grass, sore in places he didn't know he had, and thought about the two weeks he'd spent sitting on the floor learning to breathe. He'd hated that too, in the beginning. He'd wanted to skip to the good parts. And then the good parts had arrived, and he'd understood why the boring parts mattered.
Maybe this was the same thing.
"Tomorrow?" he asked.
"Tomorrow," Natasha confirmed. "Same time. Same hill. We'll add push-ups."
Harry groaned.
Natasha almost smiled.
The weeks turned into months.
Autumn settled over Willowmere Hollow. The leaves changed color, and some of them began to fall. The mornings grew cold enough that Harry's breath hung in the air when he ran the hill at dawn.
He ran up the hill every morning. Three laps became four. Four became five. Five became six with a weighted pack that Natasha strapped to his back, and when Harry complained that the pack was too heavy, Natasha added another stone to it.
"If it were easy, it wouldn't be training," she said, and Harry was beginning to think she had that sentence tattooed somewhere he couldn't see.
The planks got longer. Forty-two seconds became one minute. One minute became two. Two became three, and then Natasha started making him hold the position while she placed a small wooden block on his lower back, and if it fell, he started over.
The hanging leg raises improved. Four became eight, and then Natasha added a twist at the top of each rep, working the sides of his core until he couldn't laugh without wincing.
She added push-ups, burpees, squat jumps, sprint intervals between the willows, balance exercises on the flat rock by the stream, and a particularly awful drill where Harry had to dodge small objects Natasha threw at him while he recited spell incantations.
"Why do I have to dodge and talk at the same time?" Harry asked one afternoon, picking a tennis ball out of his hair.
"Because in a real fight, you won't be standing still," Natasha said, tossing another ball from hand to hand. "You'll be moving, casting, thinking, and reacting simultaneously. If you can only do one of those things at a time, you're dead."
"Cheerful."
"Accurate." She threw the ball. Harry ducked. "Better. Again."
One evening, after a particularly brutal session involving hill sprints in the rain, Harry asked the question that had been sitting in the back of his mind since the first day.
"You said most wizards don't train like this. So why do you?"
Natasha was towelling off her hair in the kitchen. She paused, the towel around her shoulders, and looked at him.
"Because I've seen what happens to the ones who don't," she said. "During the war, good witches and wizards died because they couldn't move fast enough. They could cast brilliantly, their spell work was flawless, but they stood in one place and duelled as if the ground beneath them was glued to their shoes. The Death Eaters learned to exploit that. Flanking, ambush, overwhelming numbers. It didn't matter how powerful your shield charm was if someone walked up behind you while you were busy holding it."
Harry absorbed that. "And Voldemort? Was he fast?"
"Voldemort was fast, powerful, and ruthless. But his Death Eaters were the real danger in numbers. A hundred average wizards who can move and coordinate will overwhelm ten brilliant ones who stand still." She hung the towel on the back of a chair. "I'm not training you to duel like a textbook, Harry. I'm training you to survive."
"You mentioned a spell once," Harry said. "Avada Kedavra. You said it kills instantly."
Natasha's expression hardened. "The Killing Curse. Yes. Unblockable by any known shield charm. If it hits you, you die. No exceptions."
"Except me."
"Except you. Once. Under circumstances no one understands." She sat down across from him. "I wouldn't count on that happening twice. The point is, the Killing Curse can't be blocked. But it can be dodged. It can be avoided. If you're fast enough to get behind cover, if your reflexes are sharp enough to see it coming and move before it arrives, you survive. That's why I'm making you run hills and dodge tennis balls. Not because it's fun. Because one day, the thing coming at you won't be a tennis ball, and the difference between living and dying will be whether your legs are fast enough and your instincts are sharp enough to get you out of the way."
"Okay," he said. "Add more hills."
Winter came and went. The stream froze at the edges. Harry ran in the cold, his breath a white cloud around his face, his shoes crunching on frozen grass. Natasha ran beside him, never ahead, never behind, matching his pace stride for stride. On the worst mornings, when the wind came off the fields hard enough to make his eyes water, she was there, and that was enough to keep him moving.
Spring arrived. The meadow bloomed again. The willows put out new leaves, pale green and delicate, and the stream ran fast with snowmelt.
Harry turned eleven.
His shirts fit differently. The shoulders filled out first, then the chest, then the arms. His legs, which had been thin and knobby when Natasha found him at Privet Drive, had developed actual shape: calves that were hard when he flexed them, thighs that powered him up the hill without the burning agony of those first weeks. His core was flat and defined in a way that would have been impossible to imagine a year ago, when he'd been a skinny boy in an oversized shirt who couldn't hold a plank for forty-two seconds.
He caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror one morning after a shower and stopped. The boy staring back at him was not the boy from Privet Drive. That boy had been small, pale, underfed, with ribs you could count through his skin and arms that hung thin at his sides. The boy in the mirror was lean, with shoulders that had broadened, a chest that had filled, and a posture that was straight and sure because Natasha had spent a year telling him to straighten his spine until his body did it on its own.
He looked healthy. He looked strong.
Harry didn't say anything about it to Natasha, but she noticed, because Natasha noticed everything. One morning, after he finished his hill sprints in a time that would have been impossible six months ago, she looked at him and said, "You're not the same boy I picked up from Privet Drive."
"I know," Harry said, catching his breath. It came easier now.
"Good." She handed him a water bottle. "Don't forget it."
By mid-summer, the magical training and the physical training had merged into something seamless. Harry ran in the mornings and practiced spells in the afternoons. He could hold his Lumos for twenty minutes without strain. He'd moved on to other charms: Nox, Wingardium Leviosa, Reparo, Alohomora. Natasha had started teaching him the theory of defensive magic, shield charms and counter-jinxes that he wouldn't attempt for months but that she wanted him to understand on paper before he ever tried them in practice.
He could sense his core in under five seconds now, a far cry from the thirty minutes it had taken the first time. The coloured sphere was second nature. He could hold it indefinitely, through noise, through movement.
He was ready. He could feel it.
And then, one morning in late July, the letter arrived.
Harry was in the clearing behind the house, halfway through a set of burpees, when a sound made him look up. Something was moving in the sky, small and dark against the blue, growing larger as it approached. A bird. Not a sparrow or a crow. Something bigger, with wide wings and a purposeful flight path, heading directly for Willowmere Hollow.
An owl.
It was tawny, with enormous amber eyes and a severe expression that made it look like a very small, very disapproving professor. It circled the clearing once, twice, then dropped toward Harry and landed on the fence post beside him with a precise little hop. In its beak was a letter.
Harry wiped the sweat from his face and took the letter carefully.
The envelope was thick, made of yellowish parchment, and it was heavy. Harry turned it over. On the front, in emerald green ink, was an address:
Mr. H. Potter The Bedroom at the End of the Hall Willowmere Hollow
There was no stamp. The seal on the back was purple wax, pressed with a coat of arms: a lion, an eagle, a badger, and a snake surrounding a large letter H.
Harry's heart was beating very fast.
He broke the seal and pulled out the letter.
HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY
Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore
Dear Mr. Potter,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.
Yours sincerely, Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress
He had known it was coming. Natasha had told him months ago that the letter would arrive the summer he turned eleven. She had described everything about the school. He had read about Hogwarts in a dozen books from his study. He had imagined walking through the doors a hundred times.
But holding the letter in his hands was different. Holding the letter made it real.
He ran.
Not toward the hill. Not away from anything. Toward the house, the letter gripped in his fist, his feet pounding the grass, his breath coming fast and easy because his lungs were strong now and his legs were strong now and he could run across an entire property without stopping because a year of hills and sprints and Natasha's relentless, stubborn belief that his body mattered as much as his magic had made him into someone who could.
He burst through the back door and found Natasha in the kitchen, coffee in hand, The Daily Prophet open on the table.
"It came!" Harry held up the letter, and he was grinning so wide it hurt, and he didn't care that he was sweaty and breathless and probably tracking grass across the clean floor. "It came, Natasha! I got in! I'm going to Hogwarts!"
Natasha set her coffee down. She looked at the letter in his hand, at the broken purple seal, at the green ink on the parchment. Then she looked at Harry: flushed, happy, standing in her kitchen with a Hogwarts acceptance letter and a year of training behind him and a lifetime of possibility ahead.
"I know," she said, and her smile was the real kind, the kind that reached her eyes and changed her whole face. "I've been waiting for that owl all morning."
"You knew it was coming today?"
"I knew it was coming today."
"And you didn't tell me?"
"And ruin the surprise?" She raised an eyebrow. "Never."
Harry laughed. He couldn't help it. He stood in the kitchen, holding the letter, and laughed, because a year ago he had been a thin, scared boy in a cupboard who didn't know magic was real, and now he was standing in a hidden house in the countryside with calluses on his palms and a wand in his room and a letter from a school that wanted to teach him, and the woman who had made all of it possible was sitting at the table smiling at him like she had known this moment was coming since the day she drove to Privet Drive with shepherd's pie in the oven and hope in her chest.
"We have a lot to do," Natasha said, standing. "School supplies. Books. A proper wand." She paused. "A wand that chooses you, Harry. Not a practice stick. The real thing."
"A real wand," Harry said, and the words tasted like the beginning of something enormous.
"But first," Natasha said, and her smile faded into something more serious. She set her coffee down. "Before you go to Hogwarts, there's one more thing I need to teach you.
Harry looked at her. "What?"
"A spell."
"What spell?"
"Not today." Natasha held up a hand before he could press further. "You'll know when you're ready. For now, just know that you won't be boarding that train until you've learned it."
Something in her voice told Harry this wasn't a suggestion. It wasn't a drill or an exercise or another breathing pattern. Whatever this spell was, it mattered to her in a way that the others hadn't. He could see it in the set of her jaw and the way her eyes held his without blinking.
"Is it dangerous?" he asked.
"Everything worth learning is." She picked up her coffee again. "Enjoy your letter, Harry. We start tomorrow."
Harry looked at the letter in his hand. Then at Natasha.
He tucked it carefully into his pocket, against his chest, where he could feel the parchment against his skin.
Hogwarts was waiting. But Natasha wasn't finished with him yet.
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