Isabella was quiet for a long time after Eddie's admission.
Not the comfortable quiet of someone who had accepted a thing and moved on. The other kind - the working quiet of a mind that had received information it wasn't built to process and was now methodically trying anyway. She sat with her hands around her teacup, not drinking, staring at a point somewhere between the fire and the middle distance, and Eddie could almost hear the machinery of it.
He let her think. He was in no particular hurry. Outside, Sheffield continued its grey and indifferent morning, and the fire burned, and the vials on the table caught the light and held it.
"Time travel," Isabella said finally, as if testing the phrase in the air.
"That's one way to put it," Eddie said.
"There are established theories." She spoke carefully, the way someone speaks when they are building an argument and checking each plank before they stand on it. "The Department of Mysteries has studied temporal mechanics for centuries. Time-Turners - devices that fold minutes back on themselves, allow a person to revisit hours already lived. They are heavily regulated, rarely sanctioned, and their effects are well documented." She paused. "But a Time-Turner has never, to my knowledge, moved anyone across decades. Certainly not across half a century, not without any serious repercussions."
"Doesn't sound like a Time-Turner situation," Eddie agreed.
"No," Isabella said, still staring at the middle distance. "No, it doesn't." She turned the cup in her hands. "There are rituals. Ancient ones, poorly understood - the kind that predate modern magical theory by a thousand years or more. Some of them deal with temporal displacement. Blood magic, mostly. Celestial alignments, sacrificial components." Her eyes flicked briefly to him and away again. "The kind of magic that is studied in the Department of Mysteries precisely because it is too unstable and too dangerous for any sane practitioner to attempt."
"You think someone performed a ritual on me?"
"I think -" Isabella stopped. Started again. "I think that what happened to you does not fit neatly into any category I know. Which is not a comfortable thing for me to admit." She set the cup down with a small, precise click. "What I know is this: you are here. You are real. You are demonstrably not from 1978, and the only frameworks I have for how that could be true all have holes in them large enough to sail through." She exhaled through her nose.
"So. For now, I am going to do something I am generally very bad at."
"What's that?" Eddie asked.
"Leave it unanswered," Isabella said, with the tone of someone making a significant personal concession. "There are questions I cannot resolve today. Perhaps cannot resolve at all. I have lived long enough to know that forcing an explanation onto something you don't understand rarely produces the truth - it just produces a story that fits, which is considerably more dangerous."
Eddie looked at her with something approaching respect. "That's - yeah. That's a good way to think about it."
"I generally think in good ways about things," Isabella said, with a dryness that surprised a short laugh out of him, which surprised both of them.
She reached for the teapot.
The morning settled around them, a degree or two warmer than it had been.
Eddie waited until she had refilled both cups before asking. It wasn't calculation, exactly - more that the question had been sitting at the back of his mind since he heard her answer and the moment finally felt right.
"Can I ask you something? About magic."
Isabella looked up. "Of course."
"What actually is it?" He framed it carefully. "Not - I've seen what it does. The wand, the light, the soup that made itself. I mean what is it. What's actually happening when you do that."
Isabella considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "That," she said, "depends on who you ask. There are theorists who will tell you magic is a fundamental force, like gravity - a property of the universe itself, no more mysterious than light. There are philosophers who will tell you it is something closer to consciousness given form, that it responds to will and intent because it is, in some essential way, made of the same material as thought." She paused. "And then there are the people who have simply lived with it their whole lives and will tell you that it is a gift, and that understanding a gift is considerably less important than using it well."
"Which one are you?"
"I am all three on different days," Isabella said. "Depending on how much sleep I have had."
Eddie smiled slightly. "And the wand. You mentioned wood and core when you were - when I was still half out of it. I remember that. What does that mean?"
Isabella reached beside her and lifted her wand. She held it between her fingers, and in the morning light Eddie could see it properly for the first time - pale, slightly curved, worn smooth at the grip from years of use.
"Every wand is made of two things," she said. "The wood, which is the body of it - each wood has its own character, its own affinities. Willow, like mine, tends toward healing. Toward emotional intuition. Toward those who have known loss and grown around it rather than being broken by it." She turned it slightly. "And the core, which is the heart. The magical substance at the center – a dragon heartstring, unicorn hair, phoenix feather, and others more obscure. The core is what channels the magic. The wood is what gives it shape and character. Together they make something that is - not quite alive, but not entirely inanimate either. A wand chooses its wizard as much as a wizard chooses their wand."
"It chooses?" Eddie asked.
"It chooses," Isabella confirmed. "You will know when you hold the right one. Everything else feels like holding someone else's hand."
Eddie turned that over. "And you - how did you learn? Was there a school, a teacher, did you just - figure it out?"
"There is a school, actually there are few around the world." Isabella said. "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in Scotland. Most British witches and wizards of my generation attended. Seven years of formal study - theory, practical application, the history and ethics of magic. Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts." A brief, complicated expression crossed her face at the last one. "I attended, and I learned what was taught, and then I spent the following years learning considerably more than that on my own terms."
"So, it's like university."
"It is nothing like a Muggle university," Isabella said, with mild affront. "But I take your meaning."
"Muggle?" Eddie asked, confused.
"It is a term used by wizards to describe people without magic, or those without an active magical core, for that matter," Isabella replied, sighing softly.
"Leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, that word," Eddie said.
"It does," Isabella replied, a complicated expression crossing her face. "...Sometimes."
"You said magic is a gift," Eddie said, after a moment. "That it's something people are born with."
"Yes." Isabella set the wand down. "A magical core - that is what we call it. It exists within the body, distinct from but connected to the mind and soul. Most Muggle-born witches and wizards - those born to non-magical parents - carry it without any knowledge of it until the first accidental magical release. Usually in childhood. Emotional distress, or joy, or fear - something strong enough to move the core before the conscious mind can intervene. A glass breaks across the room. Hair changes color overnight. Something flies, or shatters, or grows."
"That's how you know?" Eddie asked more confused.
"That is often how you know. The core wakes itself. It announces its presence through accident." She folded her hands. "After that, it grows. Slowly, in most cases. Training develops it - systematic study, deliberate practice. A good teacher accelerates the process considerably. Bloodline matters too, in ways the Pure-blood families have spent centuries loudly overstating - having magical parents does tend to produce a stronger initial core, but it is far from the determining factor. I have known Pure-bloods with barely a spark and Muggle-borns of extraordinary power." She paused. "And then there are rarer cases. Trauma, certain rituals, or circumstances we don't fully understand - things that force the core to grow in ways that normal development never would."
Eddie was quiet for a moment. Then - "So if someone had none of that. If someone just - didn't have this core thing. They can't do magic."
Isabella looked at him. "Correct. A person without an active magical core cannot perform magic regardless of training or desire. It simply isn't there to work with."
"Right." Eddie nodded slowly. "So that's me, then. No core. Not a wizard."
The words came out more flatly than he intended. Not quite resignation - more like stating the obvious before someone else felt the need to.
Isabella stared at him.
Not the polite, considering stare she deployed when processing new information. Something sharper. Something that had gone very still in a way that was different from her usual stillness.
"I beg your pardon?" she said.
Eddie blinked. "I'm not a wizard. I don't have magic. I've never had an accidental - whatever you called it. I didn't go to your school. I grew up in New York and I was a journalist, and the closest I ever came to magic before landing in your park was-" he stopped, rerouted, "- something else entirely. Not this."
Isabella was looking at him with an expression Eddie couldn't immediately read.
"Eddie," she said, very carefully. "What makes you believe you don't have a magical core?"
"Because I just described not having one," Eddie said, slightly confused now.
Isabella stood up. She crossed to the table with the vials, opened a small wooden box beside it, and withdrew something - a short crystal rod, clear, no longer than her finger. She came back to the bedside and held it out toward him, not touching, just proximity.
The crystal glowed.
Not faintly. Not as a flicker.
Steadily, warmly, with a clarity that filled the dim room and cast small moving shadows on the wall behind him.
Isabella withdrew it. The glow faded.
She looked at him with an expression that was now identifiable - it was the look of a person recalibrating something fundamental.
"That," she said quietly, "is a magical resonance indicator. It responds to the presence of a magical core. The stronger the core, the stronger the response." She paused. "In my ninety-one years of practice, I have used that instrument on thousands of people." Another pause. "I have never seen it respond like that."
Eddie stared at her.
"You have a core, Eddie," Isabella said. "Not a developing one. Not a modest one." She set the crystal down on the tray with a small, careful click, as if she needed to put something down in order to say the next part. "One of the most developed I have ever encountered. And-" She stopped, looked at him steadily. "It has grown. Since you arrived. Since the Cruciatus. Whatever that curse did to your body, it did not damage your core." Her voice was precise and quiet. "It expanded it."
The fire burned.
The vials on the table caught the light.
Eddie stared at her in a silence that had no words in it yet, because the words hadn't caught up.