James Potter And The Morrigan Web (23 page)

Later that night, Rose and Scorpius were sceptical enough to be dismissive.

“He didn’t just
look
a little bit like him,” James insisted, gathered with the others at their regular table in the corner of the Gryffindor common room. “But it wasn’t like it was Dumbledore’s identical twin, either. It
was
Dumbledore, but… changed somehow. Different…”

“So it was an old professor that looked a lot like another old professor,” Scorpius clarified sardonically, “except where he was completely different, came from another country, and has a totally different Muggle-hating pureblood attitude. Somebody get the Ministry on the Floo. This mystery is obviously out of our league.”

“It wasn’t just that they looked alike,” James muttered, plopping his chin onto his crossed arms. “Look at their names! Albus Dumbledore, Avior Dorchascathan. Same initials! He even talked and moved and worked magic the same way. I’ve been hearing my dad talk about Dumbledore the headmaster since I was a kid. I feel like I know him almost as well as he did. Maybe I should ask him about it.”

“Absolutely not!” Rose suddenly interjected, looking up sharply from her Arithmancy textbook. “Not unless you want to dig up all the worst kind of memories from his past. Headmaster Dumbledore was the closest thing Uncle Harry ever had to a father-- and he watched him get killed right before his eyes. You go telling him that there’s some half-evil Doppelganger of Dumbledore running around, there’s a part of him that will
want
to believe it, trained Auror or not. That wouldn’t be fair to him, James.”

James opened his mouth to argue, but then closed it. His cousin was right. For now, it would be best to investigate this particular mystery without his father’s involvement. After all, if James was right, the existence of a sort of bizarre twin of one of his father’s most revered heroes would indeed be quite unsettling. What if they ever had to fight or something? Would his father even be able to do it?

But that was silly. He shook his head, dispelling the very idea.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” he said firmly. “It isn’t just that this Avior wizard looks and acts like Dumbledore. He’s powerful like him, too. Way more so than some cranky old Prophecy teacher should be.”

“Do you want to know what I think, Potter?” Scorpius asked, adopting his loftiest tone of voice.

James shook his head firmly and leaned over his homework. “Not in the least.”

“I think you
need
this sort of drama,” the blonde boy went on, undaunted. “I think you’ve gotten so used to being in the centre of huge, dramatic conspiracies that you’re beginning to see them everywhere.”

James flipped some pages in his textbook. “That’s just stupid. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t
want
to notice that Avior and Dumbledore are basically the same person.”

Rose looked up sheepishly. “Just the other night you were sitting in that exact same spot telling us about how Zane’s new girlfriend is some sort of secret vampire animagus spy or something. It does seem a bit much, James.”

James felt a mixture of embarrassment and anger redden his cheeks. Suddenly he was very glad he had not mentioned the mysterious disembodied voice he had heard in the corridor on first night. “You’re both daft,” he said in a low voice, angrily staring down at his books. “You’d have to be blind not to see that Nastasia is trouble.”

“Perhaps,” Scorpius admitted airily, taking off his glasses and closing his books. “Or perhaps your sister is right and you’re just jealous. Nastasia
is
sort of intriguing. If, that is, you fancy somewhat odd girls with sketchy, troubled backgrounds.”

James glanced up at Scorpius, his brow furrowed. Was he comparing Nastasia to Petra? Scorpius merely looked back, his eyebrows lifted, a small smile on the corners of his mouth.

After a moment James shook his head and looked back down at his homework. He didn’t want to admit it, but Scorpius had struck a nerve. It wasn’t that Nastasia and Petra were anything alike. In fact, it was hard to imagine two girls who were more different. And yet…

Later that night, James did something he hadn’t done in months. Before changing into his pyjamas, he took something out of his back pocket and laid it on his bed. It was a small packet of parchment, folded into a seamless envelope. He sat down next to it with a deep sigh, produced his wand, and tapped it.

“
Revelierus,
” he whispered.

The packet blossomed like a paper flower, revealing a small sheaf of pages. The pages had once contained a story-- a retelling of a dream-- written in Petra Morganstern’s neat cursive handwriting. She had given it to him the previous year, during their voyage to America. On that same voyage, something strange-- and powerfully magical-- had occurred between the two of them. At the height of a freak storm, Petra had gotten swept overboard, avoiding being tossed into the heaving waves by a mere length of broken rigging. James had eventually saved her, but in a way that neither of them fully understood. Something had connected them that night, a sort of unbreakable silvery cord, running from his hand to hers, saving her from the doom she seemed to wish for. For in fact, some part of Petra had
wanted
to die that night. James had stopped her, saved her by tapping into her own seemingly limitless magic, using the key of his unspoken love for her.

And that magic was still there. The silvery cord, now invisible, still somehow connected them. He could feel it sometimes, especially when Petra was close by. Mostly, however, there was the erstwhile dream story. The packet of parchments had become a sort of portal into her thoughts, one that only the two of them knew about. Petra had communicated through it once before. Perhaps she would do so again.

He leaned over the parchment, studying it by the dim moonlight of the nearby window.

It wasn’t a note this time. It was still covered in Petra’s handwriting, but scribbled now, with lines overlapping other lines, some scrawled in large, looping slashes, others crammed into tight, indecipherable paragraphs and clusters. James could only make out a few words, although very little of it made sense:
Judith… Izzy… fates… Marshall Parris… trans-mundane… talisman… the Collector…

And in larger print, scribbled so haphazardly that it was almost unreadable:
The Morrigan Web.

It was all disconnected, random, as if all of Petra’s most fevered thoughts had been scrawled at once, blindly, and with no relationship to one another. James wasn’t sure what, exactly, he had been looking for, but one thing was certain: there were no answers to be found here. He shivered, shook his head, and then tapped the parchment once again, sealing it shut. He hid the dream story away in his trunk, closed and locked it carefully, then got ready for bed.

Had it really been Petra that had whispered to him in the halls on first night? It certainly hadn’t sounded like her. The voice had been feminine, but
mad
somehow. The memory of it sent a shudder down his spine.

He remembered his father’s voice from the common room grate
: it was Petra, son… she flickered on and off, fluctuating all over the corridor. And then, she was just gone again
.

James shivered again as he climbed into his bed.

Petra was powerful. So powerful that even the great Merlinus Ambrosius had failed to stop her. Perhaps the power was simply more than she could contain. Perhaps (though it pained him greatly to consider it) the Petra he had known-- and secretly fallen in love with-- truly was no more.

It was, to be sure, a deeply sad and tragic thought.

He rolled over.

Eventually, he slept.

As the first week of school wound down, James and Ralph attended their first class at Beauxbatons, Advanced Arithmatics, and finally understood what Rose had warned them about.

The class was held in a high tower room of the Beauxbatons palace, which was (to James’ eye) much newer, brighter, and gilded with wall frescoes, bevelled crystal windows and glittering gold chandeliers than Hogwarts. The Arithmatics classroom was high and airy, with open windows along one side and a wall of mirrors on the other, reflecting the light and seemingly doubling the room’s size. The parquet floor was filled with a collection of strange frames, each as tall as James himself and divided by rows of metal rods strung with heavy glass beads. Beauxbatons students gathered before the frames in their immaculate powder blue silk robes, studiously sliding the beads and producing an oddly insectile clicking noise that filled the otherwise silent room.

James and Ralph stopped in the doorway, baffled.

“What are we supposed to do?” Ralph muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

Another boy pushed between them, his eyes lighting up behind his glasses. “Oh! I’ve seen these before,” he proclaimed. “Abacus! Or abaci, plural, to be precise. But look at the size of them!”

James frowned at the boy and saw that it was Morton Comstock, the Muggle from Yorke Academy. He was followed into the room by two other boys and a pigtailed girl with braces. She glanced at James furtively then looked quickly away. James recognized her from some of his other classes, including Wizlit. She had been part of the throng that had waylaid Professor Revalvier-- and himself-- in the library, enamoured with the idea that their beloved Harry Potter stories were actually real. Outside of that mob, however, the girl (whose name, James recalled, was Lucia) was apparently much less bold. She quickly ducked behind an unmanned abacus and peeked back through its rods and beads.

James glanced around for a teacher but there didn’t seem to be any present. “So, what’s an abacus?”

Comstock scoffed loudly. “An ancient calculator, precursor to the modern computer. Finally, a tool that makes sense in this crazy backwards magical universe of yours.” He adjusted his glasses and glanced toward a large chalkboard at the head of the room. It was crammed with dense sequences of numbers, geometric diagrams, and formulae. “Oh, I see,” he said smugly. “We’re resolving a series of programmatic coordinates based on a predefined time-space wavelength. Time travel, perhaps. Or maybe…”

“Space travel?” a crew-cut Muggle boy suggested hopefully.

“That’s ridiculous,” Ralph scowled, installing himself uncertainly behind one of the huge abaci. He glanced at James. “Er, right?”

James shrugged. Tentatively, he reached forward and touched one of the glass beads. “So… how’s it work, then?”

“‘Ave all you worked wiz applied Arithmatics before?” asked an older Beauxbatons girl without a trace of a smile, addressing the newcomers.

Comstock pushed his glasses up his nose with one stubby finger. “I’ve plotted hyperspace coordinates for faster-than-light travel in every space game since Galaxy Quest Ninety-Nine. This looks like a standard event-aversion matrix, but it isn’t collision based, as far as I can tell.” He frowned at the beads in front of him for a moment, then, seemingly at random, shucked four green ones to the right, two red ones to the left, and counted off seven blue beads, moving only one with a sharp, decisive click.

“Very good,” the Beauxbatons girl admitted grudgingly. “Carry on, zen. But please be extremely careful. Professor Moreau ‘as entrusted ‘is return to us. If you do not know exactly what you are doing, zen please,
do… nothing
.”

“That’s my favourite thing of all to do,” Graham quipped, dropping his book bag to the floor and promptly sitting on it. James glanced at him, and then at Ralph, who merely shrugged.

Comstock shuffled a few more beads and shook his head. “Honestly, the gaps in your schooling are big enough to drive a lorry through,” he muttered. “No wonder you people can’t find any work in the real world.”

“Just keep pushing beads, spod,” Graham replied breezily.

James narrowed his eyes slightly. Keeping his voice low, he asked, “What do you mean, ‘in the real world?’”

“You know what I mean,” Comstock answered. “Where the rest of us all live. Where we have light bulbs and rockets and where history isn’t stuck somewhere in the middle ages. We’re here to learn about you lot, but it seems to me that it’s going to be a lot harder for you magical types to adjust to
us
now that our worlds are about to come together.”

“Who says our worlds are about to come together?” Graham asked pointedly, lowering his own voice beneath the constant shuffling click of the classroom.

“Duh,” Comstock said with a roll of his eyes. “The Night of the Unveiling? Your vow of secrecy was broken when that crazy witch revealed everything last year. People are still trying to cover it all up, at least for a while, but the secret’s out. Pretty soon, our world and your world are going to collide. That’s why we’re here. We’re sort of like the front line, preparing the way. That’s what Miss Corsica tells us.”

James had been preparing an angry response to Comstock’s little tirade, but suddenly he glanced at the boy, wide-eyed.

“Miss who?” he asked in a harsh whisper.

“Miss Corsica,” Comstock repeated. “She’s our mediator between your schools and ours, and she’s totally got your number. She says she’s been studying the magical world her whole life and knows you lot like the back of her hand. She says that most of you are totally unprepared for how to deal with the ‘Muggle’ world. Apparently there are a few ‘enlightened’ witches and wizards, but I sure haven’t met any yet.”