Chapter 3: First Term Struggles

The dungeon air had a taste like old coins and damp stone. Torches burned with a low, oily flame that sent shadows crawling over the blackened arches. Tom stood very straight beside a cauldron that still smelled faintly of someone else’s last attempt, a thin curl of something metallic rising from its rim. He had arrived five minutes early and arranged the lent beakers, and the stirring rod, and the scales with their tiny brass weights, so that everything lined up with the chalked measurements on the slate. He had read the chapter twice before breakfast and once again in the corridor outside until the last second, lips moving just enough to shape the words silently. The list of ingredients made a little path in his mind: nettles, snake fangs, horned slugs. There was comfort in the path. There were rules.

Professor Slughorn’s voice rolled from the doorway before his bulk appeared, genial and deep, like a contented cat that had just eaten someone else’s canary. “Good morning, good morning! Gryffindor and Slytherin together—yes, a very promising combination, don’t you think? Everything ready? Excellent.”

Tom did not look up at the laughter that followed that last remark. He watched the surface of his cauldron reflect a smudge of torchlight and told himself it would begin here. Potions had appealed to him even before he had understood what they were: the exactness, the way it allowed no sentiment. Either you had measured correctly, or you hadn’t. Either the potion turned the right colour, or you had to scrape the mess out and try again. There was nothing to argue with in a rule written in a clear hand.

“First-years,” Slughorn said, pausing near the front bench and placing a hand on Tom’s cauldron rim as if it were a familiar pet, “we begin with something simple and quite useful, if you don’t mind boils on your nose or not. Cure for Boils. Page One-Hundred and Eleven.”

Tom’s eyes flicked to the page where his finger already lay. Crush the snake fangs to a fine powder. Four measures of the standard scoop. Add to the cauldron and stir twice clockwise, then once anti-clockwise. Heat gently until the potion turns from transparent to light teal.

He ground the fangs with the pestle, the gritty sound steady under his hand. The fine dust clung to the mortar and tickled at the back of his mouth. Four level measures, each shaken flat with the edge of the scoop, tipped neatly into the cauldron. The water took the powder without a sulk. He stirred two to the right, one to the left, counting the turns with the exactness of someone who had counted ceiling cracks to fall asleep for years.

Slughorn’s soft-soled shoes sounded behind him as he moved on. “Mr Nott—no, not that way, clockwise—that’s the other way for you, yes. Miss Bletchley, careful—horned slugs do prefer not to be smashed like that.”

Tom read ahead. After the slugs: porcupine quills. Add when removed from the heat. He watched his neighbour, a Gryffindor boy with hair the colour of wet straw, slice the slugs with exaggerated care, tongue out. The boy’s hands were clean but clumsy. Tom’s were clean, too. He had scrubbed them with the little square of soap until his knuckles dried and whitened, the way he did when he wanted to look as if he had always been meant to be here.

The potion was doing precisely as it should until it wasn’t. The teal refused to appear. It stayed a sulky grey, with a faint shimmer, like cold blued steel. He glanced up. Several other cauldrons were turning. Steam carried a nettle bitter to his nose. He flicked a trace more heat at the flame and glanced ahead again. After teal, allow to simmer five minutes, then—

A thought came swifter than caution: perhaps if the fangs were finer. Finer meant quicker brew, meant clarity, meant that Slughorn’s eyes—friendly, too friendly—would linger and nod, and he would move on. He picked up the pestle again, tipped the remaining fragments into his mortar, and crushed until the dust turned almost soft between his fingers. He knew how pressure made a thing cooperate.

He measured a shade more than four scoops, just a shade, and shook it in. The potion hissed, a sound like a cat warning, and then it went a colour that was not in the book at all. A flush of bile-green spread in a ring and collapsed inwards. A smell rose like scorched hair. For a heartbeat no one moved. Then his potion belched, and a number of gelatinous blisters throbbed up the sides of the cauldron and burst, spattering his sleeve with something that stung.

“Stop—oh dear—”

Slughorn’s hand was suddenly there, a thick wand pinched between two fleshy fingers. He flicked without fuss. The potion subsided with a unhappy gurgle, the blisters collapsing back into a sullen puddle. He murmured a little charm and the sting at Tom’s wrist cooled; the red patch faded to a faintly shining patch of clean skin as if the burn had gone backwards. “See how it sulks when it thinks you aren’t paying attention to its nature? Nothing to be alarmed about.” Slughorn smiled down at Tom. It was not mocking. It was worse. It was kind. “The text means fine, m’boy, but not dust. And four measures means four. Not a lick more. It’s particular, like some of our wizened Heads of House. This potion has a very simple little pride.”

There were sniggers from the back, someone’s whisper darting like a fish in water. Tom felt his jaw tighten. He had not made errors like this. He did not make them. He swallowed and looked at the smear on his sleeve and then at Slughorn’s genial face.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Good. Wash your utensils; begin again. That’s where most go wrong with this one—they fancy themselves cleverer than the page. And perhaps they are,” Slughorn said, eyebrows lifting, confiding, “but the page has seen off a good many fancy notions in its time. We’ll get you there. I expect we’ll get you further, Mr Riddle.”

There it was, that warm chuckle that hoarded boys and girls as if they were sugared fruits in jars, labelled and ready to be offered around at tea. The hand patted the bench top. It would have been better if he had barked and told Tom to pay attention, if he had allowed the failure to stand like a chair left askew for everyone to glare at. Kindness blurred edges that ought to be sharp.

He picked up the mortar and carried it to the back where the wash barrel stood. The water had cooled. His sleeve had dried. It caught at the red patch and pulled. He sluiced the mortar clean and set it to drip on the rack, then returned and began again, each movement measured, his mouth a flat line. He did not look at anyone else. His second attempt behaved itself like a pupil who had been made to stand in the corner and decided that the corner could be useful after all. The teal arrived at its proper moment. The blisters did not return. Slughorn drifted the room like a heavy bee and paused once more.

“Ah,” he said softly, and did not pat his arm this time. “There.”

Tom nodded without looking up. He kept his eyes on the potion, which was now a comfortable pool of the right colour, and wrote his name at the top of the page more slowly than it needed.

When they were dismissed, he took a place at the end of the stream of Slytherins that poured back into the lower corridors like ink. The dungeon corridor smelled of damp wool and something green, the lake perhaps. The Slytherin common room lay behind a stretch of blank, sweating stone. The prefect, a girl with a silver-green badge and hair like the gloss on a raven’s wing, stood with her hands in her sleeves and spoke the word that slid the wall aside.

The room beyond was not warm, exactly. The fire made an amber light at one end that never seemed to conquer the corners. The rest of the room wore a light like water seen through glass, green and uncertain, shifting according to the moods of the lake outside. Chairs with high backs looked like calculations. The lamps wore shades shaped like lilies. He stood beside the hearth and dried his sleeve and watched the older boys and girls drift into their favourite eddies and whirlpools of conversations.

Names gathered and stuck to faces. Lestrange, with the cleft chin and lazy eyelids that did not quite hide how quickly he noticed a thing. Dulac, laughing too loudly and too often. A younger Nott, thin and pale, hopping from foot to foot to be closer to those deemed important. A snub-nosed girl, their prefect, who moved through the room with a sort of absent-minded authority that made people clear a path without knowing they had done it. He saw who had chairs pulled nearer when they joined a group and who had to fetch their own. He watched a card-game that looked like more than cards. He did not sit. He leaned against the wall with his back to the stone, one shoulder gathering the chill, and listened.

He learned the rhythm. In this room, one did not blurt. One did not merely take. There were favours shaved into smaller favours until they could be exchanged invisibly. Lestrange said very little and made people eager to fill in his silences. The snub-nosed prefect’s gaze flicked to the fireplace when the subject had gone far enough, and the subject changed by itself. And there, on the thick rug before the fire, a tall boy with hair so fair it looked white, propped on one elbow and watched the room as if it belonged to him. Malfoy. He did not speak; other people filled his cup for him.

Tom marked the names and their uses as if sorting screws in a box by size. He knew he did not belong anywhere yet. Belonging was a possession to be won. He would have preferred to be invisible until then. But invisibility was not a thing easily managed when one’s school robe sleeves shrank back from the wrists as they warmed near the fire, showing the frayed cuff of a charity hand-me-down. The fray looked worse in the green light, like torn moss.

“Riddle,” someone said.

He turned. It did not sound unfriendly. A thin boy with sandy hair and an open face stood a pace off. “Are you going to try out for Quidditch practice? First-years sometimes do, when we’re short. I’m Edgar Bletchley.”

“I prefer to observe before leaping,” Tom said. His voice came out level. He had practised that. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Suit yourself,” Bletchley said, and wandered to the rug, where he collapsed into a sprawl with the others. The fair-haired boy murmured something that made them turn their heads as one. Tom heard only the soft rise of laughter.

It was in the Great Hall the next day at supper that public attention decided to turn on its hinge and find him properly. He had chosen his place at the Slytherin table carefully—not too near the Head of House, not at the very end, where the tables sometimes creaked disapprovingly when the kitchens forgot someone. He set his knife and fork parallel, sharper side in, and pulled his sleeve down subtly. From where he sat, he could watch the four tables, the bit of the staff table where Slughorn’s belly did not quite touch the edge, and the doors through which owls occasionally came late with letters.

A second-year boy to his right—Cole, who chewed with his mouth shut, an improvement—was building a fort out of roast potatoes that leaned. Tom shifted very slightly so that an older boy approaching from further up the table would pass behind him and not between him and his plate.

The older boy changed his angle. He came to a stop not opposite but just to the left so that Tom had to turn his head. His prefect’s badge shone. His hair had that same pale, expensive colour as the fair-haired boy by the fire. There may have been a family resemblance. His smile had teeth.

“So,” the boy said, and his voice slipped out easily, like a hand through water. “This is the famous Riddle. I have heard all about you.”

Tom looked at the boy’s tie, which was correctly knotted, and at his hands, which were manicured to a shine. It was the level tone that made the laughter ripple along the bench before the words had done their work. “I am surprised,” Tom said. “I do not tend to announce myself.” He did not blink.

“Of course you don’t,” the boy said. “With a name like that, one hardly needs to. What is it—Tom? Tommy? Please tell me someone told you what your mother gave you to live by before she died? Riddle. It’s not even clever. Nomen est omen, however. You do look a puzzle someone forgot to finish.” His gaze dropped, deliberate. “And that cuff—oh dear. Did no one explain to you that we have standards? If you need a rag to wipe the stones with, ask the elves, m’boy, do. Don’t wear it to supper.”

A spray of laughter ran up and down the table in a fizz. It felt like a hand being run lightly down the spine and every vertebra reacting. Heads turned from other tables. Someone at the Gryffindor table craned to see. The Great Hall stretched high and indifferent overhead, its ceiling a low lid of cloudy sky.

Tom’s fingers tightened on his knife, then eased. He made himself put the knife down with care. There was a delicate difference between saying nothing because one was speechless and saying nothing because one chose not to give. He let his gaze pass slowly over the boy’s face in the way he might consider a mark on a page that someone had inked carelessly. The boy’s eyes had that pale gleam that came with being accustomed to a certain result.

“Standards change depending on who is watching,” Tom said. “I will differentiate accordingly, Mr—?”

"Tiberius," the boy said, surprise flickering very faintly at the way he had been refused without any push having been detected. "Tiberius Malfoy. Remember it. And pull your sleeve down. If you cannot afford a tailor, perhaps Slughorn can find one among his darlings."

Tom did not look at Slughorn. He looked at the roast beef on his plate, exactly at the line where the gravy ended, then he lifted his hand and pulled the cuff down. The fabric obeyed. It would creep again. He knew that. He inclined his head the smallest degree that could not be doubted and watched Tiberius take his bow from the applause and melt back into his seat further up. His body had been bent and straightened like a wire. He put meat into his mouth and chewed until it could be swallowed, each movement noiseless.

The cuff crept back before pudding. He tucked it in and used the napkin to hide what the wool would not. When he stood, he stood carefully, and when he walked the length of the table to the doors, he did not hurry.

The first Charms lesson came a week later, and this too had seemed designed for him when he had read it. Words had always done what they were told in his head. He liked them even when they belonged to someone else. The charm on the page had a shape like a ramp up and a ramp down: Wingardium Leviosa. A little handful of feathers trembled in a jar on each desk. The Charms master, a compact man with a precise moustache and the quick, crisp movements of someone who had been a duellist in his youth, watched the room as if it owed him something and he meant to collect.

“Swish and flick,” he said, demonstrating with a wand that had seen a lifetime of grips wear it smooth, “and note the placement of the emphasis. Wingardium Levi-O-sa. The object rises gracefully. The object does not shoot to the ceiling like a ball. The object certainly does not catch fire.”

There was a laugh at that. The room smelled of chalk and feathers and the faint sweetness of polish.

Tom lifted his wand. It still felt new, this thing, as if it were tasting his hand every time he picked it up to decide if it would consent. He had felt the thrill of it in Ollivander’s and again on the train, but this felt different. This time the wand asked for control more than it offered power. He set the feather on the desk exactly square with the grain of the wood and narrowed his eyes at it.

“Repeat after me,” the Charms master said. He sang it almost, the rise and fall like the edge of a blade slicing air. “Wingardium Levi-O-sa.”

The room echoed the syllables. Tom shaped them with his mouth. The v caught on his lower lip, light as a bite. The o wanted to lengthen. He felt heat prickle at the back of his neck at the ridiculousness of his own tongue turning traitor. He tried again. Wingardium. It came out clean. Levi-O-sa. His o came heavy, a fraction late.

“Again,” the Charms master said. “Mr Riddle—” He paused by Tom’s desk and cocked his head. “You’re swallowing your i. Lift it. Do not let the o sit like a cow. More lift.”

Tom touched the edge of his teeth with his tongue, minute adjustments. He had seen children in the Home teach themselves to speak without accents, to sand down the edges of their vowels until no one could hear the place where they came from. He did it now with will instead of shame. He lifted his wand and swished and flicked, and his emphasis behaved itself better. The feather, however, twitched and struck at the table twice as if trying to get free and then ran out of breath.

A Gryffindor girl across the aisle, the sort whose hair made a halo of light even underground, breathed the syllables and her feather rose a clean foot, hovered, and drifted sideways like a tired thing going to sleep. She looked at it with joy and did not try to hide it. No one had told her to yet. A Ravenclaw boy next to her had his mouth screwed tight, his lips white, and managed only to blow his feather off the desk entirely, which earned him a look of pure loathing from his own work.

Tom blew out his breath once, sent his annoyance somewhere it could be put to work later, and tried again. The wand warmed. The air around the feather altered. He could feel it, a pressure change as if the room took a small breath in the wrong place. The feather lifted a fraction, a tremor under its own weight, and dropped. His jaw worked, and then stilled. He did not glance to see who was watching him.

“Better,” the Charms master said in a low tone, not unkind. “You have the intent. Your mouth hasn’t caught up. It will. If you practise.”

Practice was a word that in other mouths had always meant that perhaps one day you could be allowed to share what others had without needing to be asked if you had earned it. In this room, practice meant victory in front of people who would think they had given it.

The library admitted him as if it were expecting him. The light there was not green. It had a lamplight simplicity that made the dust motes visible on the air like tiny planets in a slow orbit. The librarian, a thin woman in a cardigan with cuffs that covered half her hands, watched him not at all. Shelves rose like trees in that forest. He could smell glue and leather and the faintest aroma of something medicinal that came, he discovered, from a small pot on the desk marked For Paper Cuts. He ran a finger over the spines of beginning Charms, then to the shelf for theory, then to the more practical volumes that had diagrams of wand movements with arrows like scythes.

He did not attempt to skulk. Skulking drew the eye down to the act instead of to the intention. He took three books and carried them to a table and opened them. The first gave him what he already knew. The second had a footnote that corrected the placement of a tongue in a rune-inspired charm to avoid a common mistake. He mouthed the Latin slowly, lips precise, then wrote it in a hand no one else would have recognised as belonging to him because he had left off the flourish and the point that sometimes betrayed him. The third book—older, foxed along the edges—had notes in the margin that seemed to disagree with the text mildly and with experience. The writer had adjusted the swish of a particular charm by the angle of a wrist and had underlined the word again twice.

He held his wand under the table. He did not dare break a rule loudly yet, not here, but there was no rule against holding. The wood felt calmer in his hand now, as if the chaos of the classroom had been the thing it disliked. He formed the syllables without speaking and then breathed them silently, giving them no audience. The tip of his wand warmed in response when he got the emphasis exactly where the book suggested. He practised until a shadow moved at the edge of his vision—only a first-year from another table fetching a second volume—and gathered the books into a neat stack, squared them, and replaced them in exactly their spaces.

The days unfurled. They were not all like the first Potions lesson. Some simply happened. In Transfiguration, the chalk squeaked and the line of the chalk told him a truth he wanted. In Herbology, the smell of damp earth clung to his nails and he loathed it—dirt under his nails felt like being small. He began to know which stair disliked him and would move if he set foot upon it too carelessly. He learned that the whispering tapestries whispered to those who whispered back. He discovered that the giant squid in the lake would rise if someone threw it a bit of bread at dusk and that it, too, liked being watched.

In the common room, he continued to stand where the lamplight fell and to listen. He discovered that Abraxas Malfoy liked his jokes reflected back to him as if they were pearls found by other people. He discovered that the prefect, Selwyn, had a brother who had left a year before and whose name made her glance at the window. He discovered that Dulac cheated at cards only when the pot was small because it annoyed him to be suspected for small stakes. He made no alliances. Boys spoke to him without thinking and without quite deciding to become friends. He returned those words with interest and no promises.

He opened his trunk every night and took out the school tie and placed it on the chair-back the way the other boys did, even though it made little sense to take off something and then have to put it back on again in the morning. He brushed his teeth and set the brush with the bristles facing a certain way in the glass, and if the boy in the bed nearest the door made a noise when he slept, Tom learned the pattern of the noise and arranged himself to be awake for the gaps between. In the evenings he took the feather from his Charms kit and tried the levitation in the empty stretch of corridor between the second and third statues where the torches burned the least brightly, just far enough from the common room for a small sound to be unheard and a larger one to be deniable. The feather rose a finger’s width and hovered like a breath in cold air. He kept it there as long as he could. He did not count. Counting made one aware of the clock. He wanted to forget the clock existed.

At Sunday breakfast a week before the mid-term, the owls came in late. It was raining outside, a thinness of rain that did nothing and made everything unhappy about it. Their feathers looked darker than usual. They dropped parcels and letters and a few shrivelled leaves in their haste to be off. The Hall brightened. The sound of delighted surprise and the soft rustle of paper made a layer of noise under the clink of cutlery. Tom ate oat porridge with a seriousness that offended the idea of porridge. He had learned not to look up when a flock bore down on a table unless he wanted his face in an owl’s foot.

A small package landed near his hand. The nearest boys glanced. A few heads turned, interested. He put his spoon down and saw, under his name written carefully in the school secretary’s hand, a simple printed line: From the Hogwarts Charity Committee for Residents. His fingers lay still on the table a moment. Then he pulled the brown paper neat, without tearing. Inside lay a pair of woollen gloves, thick and ugly in that earnest way that did not care whether anyone saw, their green a fraction off from his tie, as if whoever chose the wool had held it up to the light and decided that close enough would do. A small card fluttered to the table. A list of items for distribution. Gloves. Socks. Sweets. He did not look at the last. He slid the gloves into his bag without trying them, folded the paper, slid the string inside it, and set all at the foot of the bench for later.

There was laughter at someone else’s table over a bright tin of toffees. A girl got up and ran the length of Gryffindor to throw her arms around a small boy with the same nose as her. Someone at the Ravenclaw end unwrapped a book tied with ribbon and leaned down to smell it. The Slytherin table’s end nearest the windows had a pile of parcels like a minor mountain, and Abraxas’s chair stood temporarily empty as he had gone to collect something grand looking that refused to balance on his plate. Tom took up his spoon again. The porridge had cooled. It clung to the spoon with an unhelpful tenacity. He swallowed it anyway and felt it slide. He heard, without lifting his head, Slughorn’s laugh at the staff table and the distant warmth of it.

Snow came at the end of the month. It came in silence, a snowfall that did not notice it was being watched. The castle altered the way a person’s face altered when they slept; its edges softened, its sharpness went inward. The Slytherin windows looked out on the green lake light and the occasional slow drift of something large just beyond sight. The Great Hall exchanged its draughts for ones that smelled of winter greens and orange peel. A fat pudding appeared on the dessert trolley that steamed at the right places and wafted a cloud of something spiked with brandy.

“Home for Christmas, those who are,” Professor Dippet said at the end of the table one evening, his voice drifting like dust motes. “And those who are not—we shall make a day of it.”

Tom did not add his name to any list. One did not add one’s name until one had something someone might object to. The thought of London in winter had little to recommend it: damp that crawled into the beds and lay down with you; Mrs Cole’s tight mouth; the sound of the door at the top of the boys’ room, which always stuck and always made a certain noise as it opened, a signal that would bring small bodies back into their own beds like a tide going out.

On Christmas morning the Great Hall did its best to be everything to everyone. Evergreen boughs hung from the rafters. Twelve enormous trees stood like soldiers dreamt by a child. Candles burned themselves out without falling; when a draught ran along the table to lick at the nearest flames, they shivered and then stood again. The fire in the hearth at the end of the room roared its approval of the day. At each plate lay a cracker that had ideas about what constituted a proper bang. There were fewer students. Their voices echoed. Those who had stayed had their reasons. Some were obvious: a pale boy from Ravenclaw whose parents had travelled abroad; a pair of Hufflepuff girls who clung to each other and then pretended they were not clinging. A few Slytherins who looked as if they had stayed because leaving would have been a sort of concession. Abraxas was not among them.

Slughorn’s smile had grown, if it were possible. He wore a hat that seemed to be trying to ruin his dignity and failing. Dumbledore at the far end nodded at something, his eyes thoughtful. Tom took the seat he had taken on the first day and had a Christmas cracker explode in his face with such zeal that he blinked confetti out of his eyelashes and stifled a cough. The paper crown it yielded was gold. He set it beside his plate. He did not want to wear something someone else had snapped into being for him. The roast goose was crisp. He took a slice and laid it on his plate and at once the smell of spice rose and stuck to him, orange and clove and something else like the sharpness of pine. When the plum pudding came, it flamed, and the Hall made a small, collective sound of appreciation.

The owls did not make a show of it that morning. Those with parcels had long since been delivered. There was a school parcel at his place instead, heavy, square. The neat hand again. He opened it in the same way, folded the paper neatly, collected the string. Inside lay a scarf, thick, practical, the green more accurate this time. It had been knitted by reined-in hands. There was a note with no signature.

For warmth.

His fingers hovered above it. He could feel the old cold in his arms as real as the stone behind him now. He slid the scarf back into the box and pushed it under the bench where it would not be under anyone else’s eyes. If he wore it later, it would be when there were fewer people who would notice and decide that kindness had happened to him and that gratitude—a form of obedience—was due.

After dinner, when the light had gone earlier than his bones thought right and the castle had put its party faces away, he went to the library because it smelled less like new happiness there. The lamps were lit low; the desk was empty. The cardigan with cuffs lay over the back of the librarian’s chair like an abandoned skin. He went to a table and set out the book on beginning defensive charms, and his wand, and a sheet of parchment, and wrote, in a hand that made no demands on anyone to think well of it, the words: Practice makes precise.

There were steps. A small sound, like someone trying not to make a small sound. He did not look up. The chair opposite him shifted as someone sat so slowly that it did not quite qualify as sitting. When Tom raised his eyes, he saw the youngest-looking boy in Slytherin—perhaps actually smaller in a way that had not much to do with height and more to do with the way he hunched into his jumper. His hair stuck up at the back as if someone had tried to smooth it and it had laughed in that person’s face.

“Riddle,” the boy said. His voice had the flatness of someone who had been told not to use it. “I mean—Tom.” The boy swallowed. “Professor said we could ask older students if we couldn’t ask him. Because of Christmas, I mean. I’m Reggie. Reginald Cole.” His eyes flicked to the book, and back to Tom’s face. “I can’t get the—” He made a small helpless motion with his wrist. “My wand won’t listen to me.”

Tom saw the boy’s parchment, crumpled at one corner. The handwriting was a child’s, it would be for a few years yet. He could see the name Cole written at the top with unnecessary care. The letters were clinging to one another. A smudge ran where a hand had dragged through ink while still wet. He had a memory—a brief one, hardly worth the process of summoning—of a boy’s hand clutching at his sleeve in a corridor at the Home, the two of them the only ones in that particular part of the building that smelled of bleach and cabbage, the noise from the street coming in like something that wanted to be let in. He had shaken the hand off then; he did not plan to be touched. He did not plan to be used. But this was not that. This was a chance to see if a thing would do what he told it when it belonged to someone else’s hand.

“What is the charm,” Tom said. He did not ask as if he did not know. He kept it even.

“Levitating,” Reggie said. “Wingardium—” He stumbled. “I know it. Only when I—” He brandished the wand and seemed to apologise. “It falls. Or it bumps.”

“Your mouth lies to your wand,” Tom said. “Say it. Slowly. As if you were teaching it to someone you did not like, but whose respect you required.”

Reggie stared as if the instruction had come from somewhere unexpected. He stared down at his feather. He pointed his wand in a line that was almost straight. “Wingardium Levi-O-sa,” he said, the emphasis wandering.

“Again,” Tom said. He raised a hand before Reggie could correct him. “No, say it wrong, then say it less wrong, then say it as if it will cost you something if you fail. Do not hurry. Do not look at me.”

Reggie swallowed and did as he was told. The second attempt had more lift to it, the o a little less confident. The third time he found the place where the syllable seemed to become the idea itself. His wrist made the swish and the flick; his hand remembered at the right moment what the book had told it; the feather lifted in a smooth, resigned dawdle and hung the height of a book above the desk. Reggie’s mouth fell open. He closed it again very quickly and glanced around as if someone would come and remove this small miracle from him.

“There,” Tom said. He kept his voice flat. Inside, something uncoiled and stretched like a cat in the sun. The boy had done as he had asked. The world had that much more order in it. “Again. Do it five times. Then stop.”

Reggie obeyed. He did not laugh. He smiled once, quickly, when he thought Tom was not looking. When his feather drooped, he did not look wounded. He lifted it again. After the fifth rise he set his wand down neatly and did not fidget with it. He looked up.

"Thank you," Reggie said. He said it simply. He did not try to attach to it a promise of friendship, or a claim. He gathered his parchment with both hands and made no move to get out of his chair. He bit his lower lip, let it go, then said, in a rush, "Tiberius shouldn't have said that. About your—your clothes. He thinks he can. He thinks—" The boy stopped and looked as though he wished he had never had a mouth.

Tom let the boy stutter in the silence for a breath. He felt the familiar slide of contempt for the weak being asked to forgive the strong for being stronger. He also saw the usefulness of gratitude untangled from fear. He shifted his hand so that the candlelight caught it and the light made the old burn patch from Potions shine faintly.

“He says what his audience wishes someone would say,” Tom said. “It satisfies them. He enjoys satisfying others at a cost to someone else because it costs him nothing. He will misjudge one day. You will be careful not to be nearby when he does.”

Reggie nodded as if that had been a test and he had passed it by agreeing. He stood up, his chair grating the tiniest bit. He made to say something more, found that he could not make the words be on his side, and raised a hand in a little stiff wave instead. He went away without looking back.

Tom remained at the table for a while after, the book open, his wand under his hand. A small line had eased between his brows. The lamps hummed faintly to themselves. Somewhere in the stacks a draught turned a page with a papery little sound. He lifted his wand and traced a charm in the air without speaking, and in the space above the table the motion repeated itself soundlessly, precisely, as if he had already, in the practice of it, changed the shape of the world’s patience in his favour.

The days after Christmas narrowed into the quiet that comes after a large thing has happened and everyone has agreed not to notice it is over. Snow turned to slush and the slush to a grey that tracked into the corridors on shoes and into the common room on robes and then was charmed away by those who minded such things. Classes began again with a note of irritation, like a throat in need of clearing. Slughorn praised and chided and collected. The Charms master stood with his arms folded and said less; he watched more. Tom’s feather went up and hovered, went down, went up again, without a flinch. He began, when no one looked directly at him, to move from feathers to pebbles, then to books.

One evening, he sat at the edge of the common room, where the green light from the lake was thickest and the fire did not quite reach and the older students, in their coteries, were loud enough not to hear him. Reggie sat on the rug with a sheet of parchment he could not get to behave. Every two minutes he looked up to see if Tom was aware of him. Tom signed his name to his Charms homework and placed a dot on the i with a calmness that had not been there at term’s beginning. He picked up his quill, tapped it once against the edge of the desk, and felt his mouth form a shape, slow and deliberate in his head.

There were rules. Some he would have to obey for a while. Not forever. He set the piece of writing aside and went to the bookshelf by the window. He reached for a book on simple hexes and examined the thickness of it between his hands; it had the feel of a thing that had stood too near to heat and had tightened. The lake outside showed its slow back. He went back to his chair. He did not join any particular group. He sat, and he watched, and he learned what pleased people and what made them silent together. When someone he did not much like brushed his chair with a careless shin, Tom moved the chair back by an inch and spoke his next phrase a fraction louder so that the person noticed and altered his path.

Devotion to mastery had a taste like the metal in the dungeon air. It was unsavoury until one learned to make it sweet.

Mrs Cole had once put a penny on the table and made the boys count the marks on it, and had said that patience was nothing but stubborn pride in a different hat. He had not understood then that there were hats one wore to cross a room so that one might reach another hat. Now, when he folded his scarf at night—not the green one, not yet, though he had tried it on once in the corridor when no one had been there—he laid each end against the other and smoothed the line with the side of his hand and thought of the boy’s feather rising.

It would be time enough. The castle would give him its secrets slowly. He could be slow. He could be quicker when it was required. The cuff would be replaced soon enough by a piece of cloth that no one would laugh at. The name—he would make the name his, the way a person made a room pay for the use it had had out of them. He went to his bed and lay down and put his face to the stone and his back to the room as if, at any moment, he might be called to get up and go, and he would be ready. He did not sleep at once. He did not need to. He had time, and he had a hand on the few cogs that had begun to turn. He allowed them to turn at the pace they wanted while he watched how they meshed.

Even the green light from the lake learned to do as it was asked, for it did not fall across his face that night as it had done the first, when he had not yet thought to put his pillow at an angle to deny it him. A thin smile found its way to his mouth and sat there until it was not a smile any longer but concentration. Patience pressed its hands into his shoulders and held him down. He did not struggle. It was a weight he could use. He slept as if he had decided to, and morning came whether it wished to or not.