I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Wandless Archmage
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Harry woke happier than he had ever been at Hogwarts.
He lay still a moment in the blue dark of the dormitory, working out why. The happiness had been there since the day Flitwick knocked on the Dursleys' door, since the cupboard became a castle and the word freak became wizard. But there had always been a hole in it, cut the day he learned he couldn't have a wand. Every classroom where the others raised wands and he raised an empty hand. Every whisper. Every time Ollivander's voice came back to him in the dark, saying he had no wand for him.
That hole was gone now.
He turned his head. On the table beside his bed, wrapped in pale cloth, lay the phoenix wand. His. Made from a tree that had turned its leaves to look at him. He had a wand, finally, like everyone else, and the thought of it pulled him upright before the sun was properly up.
Terry was a shape under his blankets, dead to the world. Michael had his pillow over his head. Harry didn't wake them. This was his, and he wanted it to himself.
He dressed fast, pulled the wrapped wand from the table, and held it through the cloth the whole way down the spiral stairs. The common room was empty, the fire banked low. He found an unused classroom on the second floor, a clear floor and a high window letting in the first grey light, and shut the door behind him.
Then he unwrapped it.
The wand sat in his palm, silver-grey, light as nothing. He could feel that distant point of heat at the very edge of his senses, far off and patient, exactly as it had been on Vrek's hill. He told himself it would be different now. He was alone, he could concentrate, he had time. He thought of every spell he'd watched the others cast, every wand movement he'd memorised from books he couldn't use.
He set a quill on the floor three feet away. He raised the wand and swished and flicked the way the diagram showed.
"Wingardium Leviosa."
Nothing happened. The quill lay there.
Harry frowned. He'd done this wandless months ago, lifted his whole Charms textbook three inches. A quill should be easy. He squared his feet, took a breath, and tried again, more behind it this time, more want, picturing the quill rising.
"Wingardium Leviosa."
The wand stayed cold in his hand. The distant heat did not come closer. The quill did not so much as tremble.
His jaw tightened. He switched targets, pointed the wand at the window, reached for the simplest thing he knew, the thing that had answered him in the cupboard when he had nothing and no one.
"Lumos."
His palm could do this. His palm had thrown light across a classroom and made the whole room cheer. The wand did nothing. Not a spark. It sat in his grip like an ordinary stick of wood.
The door opened.
Harry turned, wand still raised at the dead window, and found Flitwick coming in. The little professor did not look surprised to find him there at first light, which meant he'd known where to look.
"Ah," Flitwick said. "I rather thought you might start early."
"You knew I'd be here?"
"The Headmaster asked me to be present while you practise with it." Flitwick climbed onto a stack of two cushions he conjured by the wall, settling himself nearer Harry's height. "A wand like yours is not a thing to learn alone, especially at the start. He thought you might want a second pair of eyes. Or simply someone in the room." He folded his small hands. "How is it going?"
Harry's voice came out harder than he meant, shaking at the edges. "I can't do anything with this wand either."
The words hung in the cold morning air. He hadn't planned the either. It had come out on its own, and it was the worst thing he could think of. Either. The way no wand on a shelf had wanted him. The way the bone wand was the only thing that had ever answered, and he'd refused it.
Flitwick did not flinch at the tone.
"Show me," he said gently. "From the beginning. Pretend I am not here."
Harry turned back to the quill. He hated how badly he wanted it to work now, with Flitwick watching. He raised the wand, did the movement, said the words. The quill lay still. He did it again, and again, until his arm ached and his face was hot, and the quill sat on the floor exactly as it had the first time.
"I can do this without a wand," Harry said, and to his horror his voice cracked. "I did it months ago. With nothing. And now I've got an actual wand and it's worse than nothing."
"It is not worse than nothing," Flitwick said. "Set it down a moment. Sit."
Harry sat on the cold floor, the wand across his knees. Flitwick looked at him a long moment, and when he spoke his voice had lost its brightness and gone quiet and serious.
"Tell me what you feel when you hold it. Not what it does. What you feel."
Harry thought about it. "There's something. Far away. Like heat, but at the very edge, like a star you can only see if you don't look straight at it. It doesn't come closer. It just... sits there. Waiting."
Flitwick nodded slowly, as if Harry had confirmed something. "That is the wand. That is your wand, being exactly what it is. Most students never feel their wand at all, you know. They wave it, the spell happens, they never think about it again their whole lives. You are feeling yours from the first day. That is not failure. That is the opposite. You are simply feeling a thing that has decided to take its time."
"How long is it going to take its time?"
"Master Vrek told you, I think."
"Years." Harry looked down at the wand. "He said years."
"Then it will take years." Flitwick said it without apology, the same plain way Vrek had. "I will not pretend otherwise to make you feel better this morning. You learned magic the wrong way round, Harry, before anyone gave you the tools, in the dark, from nothing. Your magic does not know what a wand is for, because it has never needed one. Now you are asking it to learn, and it is a stubborn pupil, because it has done very well so far on its own." He almost smiled. "Rather like its owner."
Harry let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something else. "So what do I do?"
"Ten minutes a day. No more. Vrek's instruction, and a wise one. You do not master a phoenix wand by hammering at it until you both hate each other. You sit with it. You let it learn you, a little at a time, the way the tree did." Flitwick hopped down from his cushions. "And you do not do it in a panic at dawn on the morning of a duel."
Harry winced. "The quarterfinal's today."
"It is. And we are going to talk about that, because I do not think this wand will be ready to fight for you, and I think you already know it." Flitwick's eyes were kind but they did not look away. "The question is not whether the wand will save you. The question is what you are going to do instead."
Harry looked at the wand across his knees, silver-grey and patient and useless, and then at his own right hand, the empty one, the one that had never once let him down.
He thought he already knew the answer. He just didn't want to say it out loud yet.
"Ten minutes," Flitwick said, more gently. "Then breakfast. The wand will still be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the year after that. It is not going anywhere, Harry. It chose you. It is only making you come and meet it." He moved toward the door, then paused with a hand on the frame. "That is worth something. A thing that makes you earn it. You will trust it more, in the end, than the ones that come easy."
He left Harry alone in the grey light with ten minutes on the clock and a wand that would not wake.
Harry picked it up. The far-off star sat where it always sat. He breathed, and did not hammer at it, and tried to do the hardest thing anyone had asked of him since the cupboard, which was to be patient with something he wanted badly and could not have yet.
The quill did not move. But he sat with it the whole ten minutes, and did not throw it across the room, which felt, in its own small way, like the only thing he'd got right all morning.
By the time he got to breakfast, he'd decided.
Cho was already there, halfway through her toast, and she took one look at his face and put it down. "That bad?"
"It didn't do anything." Harry dropped onto the bench. "Not one spark. I held it for ten minutes and a quill just sat there laughing at me."
Terry leaned across, instantly alight. "Did you try the swish properly? Because the angle on the Leviosa is forty-five degrees, not thirty, people always get that wrong, the book says—"
"Terry," Michael said. "He learned to light a room with his bare hand. I think he knows what a swish is."
"I'm just saying."
"You're always just saying."
Harry almost smiled. He reached for the teapot, poured himself a cup, and said the thing he'd worked out on the cold classroom floor. "I'm not using it for the duels. I'm fighting wandless, same as always."
The table went quiet for a second.
"Are you sure?" Cho asked. Not doubting him. Checking. "You've worked for that wand."
"That's the thing." Harry turned the cup in his hands. "I kept thinking the wand was the part I was missing. Like once I had one I'd finally be a proper wizard, like everyone else. But the wand's the thing that doesn't work. The hand's the thing that's never let me down. Not in the cupboard, not in any duel I've had." He looked up. "Flitwick basically said it. The wand'll come in years. I don't have years."
Michael nodded slowly, buttering toast. "Then go in with what got you here. You can win wandless. You have already, more than once."
"That's the most supportive thing you've ever said," Terry told him.
"I have range."
Cho was watching Harry with that steady look, the one that saw past what he was saying to whatever was underneath. "It's not a defeat," she said quietly. "Choosing the hand over the wand. You know that, right?"
"I'm starting to."
"Good." She picked her toast back up. "Because you don't fight like anyone else in this castle. Whoever you get, they've never duelled someone with empty hands, because there's never been anyone to practise against." A small smile. "You're not the one missing something. You're the thing they didn't prepare for."
Harry felt the last of the morning's frustration go out of him.
"Right," he said, and drank his tea. "Let's win a quarterfinal."
The Great Hall had filled again for the quarterfinals, the benches packed, the platform waiting under the high blue of the enchanted ceiling. Eight competitors left in the first-year bracket. Four matches. By lunch there would be four.
Harry sat with the wrapped phoenix wand at the bottom of his bag, where it had sat all morning, his empty hand resting on his knee. He'd made his peace with both. The wand could wait. The hand was ready.
"Justin Finch-Fletchley," Terry said, reading off the bracket he'd copied onto the back of his hand. "Hufflepuff. He's good. Beat a Slytherin in the last round, clean Disarm, didn't even look rushed."
"He's steady," Cho said. She'd been watching the earlier rounds. "Doesn't panic. Doesn't show off. He'll duel you properly, by the book, and the book is good. That's the danger. He won't make a mistake for you. You'll have to make one happen."
Harry nodded. He'd seen Justin around, a sandy-haired boy with an honest face, the sort who said please and thank you to the house-elves' food. He didn't dislike him at all. That was almost the problem. It was easier to fight someone you wanted to knock down.
"First match," Flitwick called from the platform's edge. "Harry Potter versus Justin Finch-Fletchley."
The whispers started the moment Harry stood, the way they always did, the empty-hand whispers, the he's the one whispers. He'd stopped hearing them, and climbed the steps.
Justin was already up, wand in hand, and he did something none of Harry's other opponents had done. He held out his free hand to shake.
"Good luck," Justin said, and meant it.
Harry shook it. "You too."
It threw him a little, the decency of it, and he was still thinking about it when he stepped to his mark and raised his open hand and realised it had thrown him exactly the way Cho warned a steady opponent could. He breathed it out. The crowd is not in the duel. The handshake is not in the duel. Only Justin is in the duel.
"Ready?" Flitwick looked between them. "Begin."
Justin opened with a fast Disarming Charm, testing, the way you'd open against anyone. There was nothing to disarm. The spell broke against Harry's empty palm and died, and Harry saw him register it, saw him adjust without flustering. No wand to take. Two ways left to win, then. Off the platform, or the wandtip to the neck. Justin's face settled into something more careful.
Harry moved first this time. That was new. With the phoenix wand abandoned and nothing splitting his focus, the magic felt closer to hand than it ever had, cleaner, like he'd been trying to play two instruments at once for weeks and had finally put one down. He flicked a low band of force at Justin's lead foot, not enough to knock him over, just enough to make him shift, and the instant he shifted Harry sent a sharp flash of light at the air in front of his eyes.
Justin flinched and turned his head, and Harry was already moving, out of the line Justin had been holding. When his eyes cleared, Harry wasn't where he'd been.
"He's herding him," Michael said somewhere below, to Terry, not quietly enough. "He did this to Susan. Watch."
He was, a bit. But Justin was better than Susan at refusing to be herded. He didn't chase the light or panic at the flash. He planted himself, squared up, and came back with a tight combination, Stinging Hex then Knockback Jinx, the second aimed at the floor in front of Harry to catch him with the spread. Clean. Textbook. Flat-footed, it would have rocked him off the edge.
Harry lifted. The small inward version, taking the weight off his heels, letting himself drift back out of reach, and he came down clean three feet clear. The hall murmured. He didn't let it touch him.
They circled. Justin was breathing harder now, but his face hadn't cracked, and Harry understood Cho had been exactly right. Justin would not hand him the duel. There was no rage in him to provoke, no smugness to puncture, no chair to tip over the way he'd wanted to tip Draco's. Justin would just keep doing the correct thing. Harry would have to build the opening himself, piece by piece.
So he did.
He stopped trying to end it and started shaping it. Light to the left, and Justin turned from it. Heat low to the right, not enough to burn, and Justin stepped off it. Each small thing moved him a half-step, and Harry kept the half-steps going the same direction, patient in a way the old flood-and-nothing Harry had never managed. Cho's voice in his head, from a hundred years ago on a different platform. Open the door a crack. A dozen small clean pushes instead of one explosion, and Justin, defending each one correctly, gave ground to stay safe, and the ground he gave was always backward.
He realised it a beat too late. Harry watched the understanding cross his honest face, watched him glance once at the edge of the platform suddenly too close behind him, watched him plant his back foot to stop the retreat and make a stand.
That was the opening.
Harry didn't take the easy push. He could have shoved Justin off the edge then, clean and fair, but something in him wanted the harder thing, the controlled thing, the thing that proved the morning hadn't broken him. So instead of a wall of force he did something small and precise. He lifted, sharp and sudden, just Justin's wand hand, a flick of focus on the wrist alone, and the arm jerked up and wide, the wand pointing at the ceiling for half a second.
In that half-second Harry crossed the distance.
He didn't have a wand to put to Justin's neck. He had a hand. He brought it up flat and stopped it an inch from Justin's throat, fingers open, and held it there, and the whole hall understood at once. If Harry's hand had been a wandtip, the duel was over. By the rules they'd written for him, it was.
Justin froze. Then he lowered his wand arm, and a grin spread across his honest face, rueful and real.
Flitwick's voice rang out. "Winner: Harry Potter."
The Ravenclaw benches went up, and a good part of the Hufflepuff ones too, because nobody could be too sour about losing to that, to a boy with an open hand an inch from your neck and no wand. Harry stepped back and let his hand drop. His heart was going but his legs were steady, his head was clear, and there was none of the scraped-out emptiness that had nearly put him on the floor after Bletchley. He'd used a fraction of the power and ten times the control, and won cleaner for it.
He'd done it all with the hand. The wand was at the bottom of his bag, useless.
Justin shook his hand again at the bottom of the steps. "I genuinely could not work out what to do," he said, cheerful about it. "There was nothing to take off you. It's like duelling a brick wall that's also clever. Horrible. Well done."
"You nearly had me off the edge twice," Harry said, and meant it.
"Nearly." Justin shrugged, smiling. "My gran says nearly butters no parsnips." He went back to the Hufflepuff benches to a warm round of applause, and Harry liked him even more for losing the way he'd won, with grace.
Cho was waiting at the bottom of the steps. She didn't say anything clever. She just looked at him, and there was something settled in her face.
"It worked," Harry said.
"It worked because you stopped reaching for the wand in the back of your head." She tilted her head. "You've been half-somewhere-else for two weeks. Today you were all here. I could see it."
Harry hadn't known it showed. But she was right. With the phoenix wand given up for now, there was nothing pulling at the edge of his concentration, and everything he had went into the one hand. He felt, oddly, more himself than he had since the morning Vrek put two wands on a bench.
The other matches ran through the rest of the morning, and the bracket emptied toward four.
Hermione took Padma Patil apart with the brisk efficiency Harry was coming to expect, a Shield Charm that caught everything Padma threw and a Disarm so fast Padma's wand was in Hermione's hand before the crowd finished gasping. She walked off the platform with her chin up and her face pink and did not look at anyone, which Harry had learned meant she was pleased and trying not to show it.
Terry, to his own evident astonishment, beat Anthony Goldstein. It was not pretty. A Shield Charm that held for almost a full second, a Trip Jinx that mostly worked, and a Disarm he got off more out of panic than plan, but it counted, and Terry came off the platform looking like a man struck by lightning in the best possible way. "I won," he kept saying. "Michael. I actually won. Did you see it?" "I saw it," Michael said. "I'm as surprised as you are." But he was grinning.
In the other half of the bracket, Draco beat a Slytherin boy without breaking a sweat, that cold toothless smile in place the whole way through, and when it was done he found Harry in the crowd, the way he always seemed to, and held the look a moment before turning away.
By lunch it was settled.
Four left. Harry, Draco, Hermione, Terry.
"Semifinals tomorrow," Flitwick announced to the emptying hall. "Two matches. Then, the day after, the final." His eyes moved over the four of them where they sat, and there was something in his face Harry couldn't quite read, something almost like a warning. "Rest well, all of you."
Harry caught Hermione's eye across the hall, and Terry's beside him, and felt the strangeness of it settle in. Two of his friends were in the last four with him. Tomorrow he'd have to duel one of them for real. The thought sat oddly, half exciting and half something he didn't have a name for.
He didn't know yet that the duel he was dreading would be the smallest thing that happened in the days to come. He only knew the bracket was down to four, his hand had carried him through, and the wand at the bottom of his bag could wait as long as it needed to.
He picked up his bag, felt the silent weight shift inside it, and went to lunch with his friends.
They took the long way back, the five of them, because Hermione had something to show them and didn't want to show it in the Great Hall.
She led them to a quiet alcove off the second-floor corridor, a dead-end nook with a window seat where nobody went, and pulled a folded sheet of parchment from inside her robes. It was covered in her small handwriting, lines and arrows connecting one thing to another.
"I've been writing it all down," she said. "Everything we know. And when you put it on one page, it stops looking like nothing."
Harry leaned in. Michael read over his shoulder. Terry, still glowing faintly from his win, went quiet for once.
"The unicorn," Hermione said, tapping the top of the page. "Drained, not torn. Deliberate. The blood keeps you alive when you should be dying, but only someone desperate takes it." Her finger moved down. "Quirrell, found at the forest edge by Hagrid, lying about valerian root that doesn't grow there. Quirrell, who terrifies a class one day and can barely speak the next. Quirrell, who I'd bet anything wasn't at the duels when he should have been."
"He wasn't," Cho said. "I told you. I saw him at the start of the first round and then I didn't, and nobody could say when he left or came back."
"Right." Hermione tapped another line. "So. A unicorn dies in the forest. Quirrell is in the forest, lying about why. And he goes missing at exactly the times nobody's watching, when the whole school's looking at a duel instead." She sat back. "I can't prove a single piece of it. But it's the same person, in the same forest, at the same times, around the same dead creature. That's not nothing. That's a pattern."
"It's a pattern with a hole in it," Michael said. He wasn't arguing, just being Michael. "You've got Quirrell being shifty and a dead unicorn. You haven't got why. What's a professor doing draining unicorns in the dark? What's he after?"
Nobody answered, because nobody knew.
"The third floor," Harry said slowly.
They looked at him.
"He talked about the third floor. The night I heard him." Harry had told them this part weeks ago, but it landed differently now, sitting on top of Hermione's page. "Whoever he was talking to, the voice that didn't stutter, he said the third floor. And Dumbledore told the whole school on the first night that the third floor would kill us if we went there." He looked round at them. "There's something up there. Something Dumbledore's hidden behind a death warning. And Quirrell wants it badly enough to do whatever he's doing in that forest to keep himself going."
The alcove went quiet. Outside the window the afternoon had gone grey, clouds dragging across the towers.
"So that's the why," Terry said quietly. "Or part of it. He wants the thing on the third floor."
"We still don't know what it is," Hermione said. "Or what the unicorn's for, exactly, or how close he is." She folded the parchment carefully, as if it might tear. "But you're right. It all points the same direction. The forest, the unicorn, the missing hours, the third floor. One person, pulling at one thing."
"Quirrell," Cho said.
"Quirrell," Harry agreed.
There was one more piece, and Harry could feel it sitting just out of reach, the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue. Something that connected all of it tighter than even Hermione's page could show, something he hadn't found yet because he hadn't been close enough to find it.
He didn't know the last piece was already inside his own head, waiting.
"Semifinals tomorrow," Michael said into the quiet. "And we're chasing a teacher who drinks unicorn blood. Brilliant. No notes."
Nobody laughed, but the corner of Harry's mouth moved, and that was something.
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