Chapter 4: The Scholarship System

The notice appeared overnight, pinned to the Great Hall board between a Hufflepuff’s lost glove and a warning about exploding teapots. Tom had a plate in his hands and a plain piece of bread on it that he did not yet intend to eat. His eyes moved before his feet did. The parchment was heavier than the others, a dignified cream that pretended not to show off, the handwriting the neat, officious sort that made decisions from behind a desk. School Governors’ Scholarship for Advanced Studies, it said at the top. A modest stipend. Summer access to the restricted sections of participant libraries. Tutorials with a Master of the applicant’s field of interest. Open to exceptional students of any year. Recommendations preferred.

He stood with his back straight, the hem of his robe falling properly because he had mended it, and read every sentence as if the ink might rearrange itself when no one watched. He knew about scholarships; the word was a key without the wards, a promise of a door somewhere ahead. Advanced studies suggested a corridor afterwards, and a choice of rooms.

A boy at his elbow nudged the glove above the notice and giggled at the shape the fingers made. Tom did not look round. He watched a trickling stream of older students stop, take it in, and move on. Several Slytherins glanced at one another as if they were already sharing it between them. He lifted the corner to check the fine print and his thumb felt the weight of the parchment, the press of the seal.

His plate clinked as his hand lowered it to the table. He sat with the Slytherins but not among them, the corner where he preferred to fit, where he could hear the edges of conversations and be unnoticed by the centre. The morning was bright enough that the enchanted ceiling pretended to be cheerful. He took a bite of bread so his mouth would be occupied while his mind arranged the facts. Exceptional students of any year. Recommendations preferred. Summer access. Tutorials.

He did not think of summer as a season. He thought of a building with thin walls and beds that creaked and a matron who rationed hot water with the benevolence of a queen granting a favour twice a year. He thought of days when the clock hands lagged as if reluctant to admit they had moved at all. Summer meant Elphinstone’s charity committee in brown coats and a church hall with trestle tables and the kind of smiles that expected a grateful performance. He saw the notice, and the word summer shifted in his head like a coin flipping to land with a different face up.

A fork scraped across a plate nearby. Abraxas Malfoy leaned in to say something with buttery ease. Tom heard the words “Father knows the Governors” and the soft, finishing laugh. He swallowed carefully, breathed very quietly, and contained the sudden, almost amusing urge to ask certain names for certain signatures.

He had neat handwriting. He had sharpened his own quills when the school’s were blunted and had practised letters on the reverse of old prospectuses until his curves were even, his lines uninterrupted. He knew what to say and what to leave unsaid. He would not ask for charity. He would request a proper exchange. He could make it sound entirely reasonable. He had a way with words, he had discovered, if the words were written and he had time to weigh them in his palm first.

The library had a smell that never changed with the weather. It smelled like dust that belonged to books, a respectable dust, and leather and ink and something faintly medicinal that came from Madam Pince’s polish. She watched his hands when he approached the desk, and he let her. He placed a slip of parchment upon the blotter and asked if there were materials that explained the Governors’ scholarship criteria in more detail.

She peered over the top of her spectacles with the hauteur of one who could have been a dragon in another life but had chosen to guard shelves instead of vaults. “Criteria,” she said, and her voice could have pressed flowers flat. “Applicants list their achievements to date, their intended course of study, and their proposed summer reading. Recommendations should be attached, and all must be submitted to the Headmaster’s office by the last day of April.”

“What are achievements to date for a first-year,” Tom asked, as if the question were merely practical, as if he had not already arranged the answer.

“Marks. Professor references. Any… special commendations,” Madam Pince said. Her mouth softened. She liked the word commendation. “You will find previous years’ announcements in the Governors’ records.” She produced a thin volume that had the look of having passed through too many careful hands. “Return it before luncheon.”

“Thank you,” Tom said.

He read as if someone might snatch the book away and he would be required to quote it by heart. Recipients: a Macmillan, a Carrow, a Wilkes, a Rowle, names that were small old kingdoms in their own right, names that required no introductions. There were two Muggle-born recipients listed in the last ten years, their names out of place and silenced by the page. Scholarships granted for Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, Potions, and Transfiguration predominantly. Additional note: extra consideration given to students who have shown leadership potential.

He closed the book very carefully and left it a little straighter than he had found it. He had already decided upon Potions as his declared field. Slughorn had a way of taking notice when his subject was flattered. Tom would suggest an independent study of ingredient interactions beyond the first-year syllabus. He could frame it as curiosity and discipline both. Leadership potential would require a story. He thought of the time he had kept two boys from hexing each other in the corridor by remarking, mildly, that they were both about to be seen by Professor Merrythought if they continued to shout. He had received a nod for it, which he had folded away like a banknote. It was not enough on paper. He needed the right sentence that would make the right person imagine him in a prefect’s badge before he had the right to wear one.

His quill moved before he had fully ruled his lines. The application asked for an outline of intended summer study and the ways in which it would contribute to the school. His hand did not hesitate. He wrote in that clean hand of his, without flourish, as if every stroke were necessary and any decoration would be waste. He explained that the standard texts introduced potions as recipes, but that he intended to examine cause as well as effect, to develop an understanding of the properties that made ingredients what they were. He would propose a small project about substitutions under constraints, a practical adaptation when supply lines failed, a phrase he knew would remind a Governor of something outside the castle without requiring him to be overt.

He did not write about being an orphan. He did not write about summers that crawled. He did not write the words please or help anywhere on the page. He kept to fact and to intent, because those were respectable companions. The achievement section he filled with the precise ranks he had earned to date. He knew them; he counted them when the dormitory breathed hot and slow around him. He wrote that he had maintained perfect attendance and had contributed to class by assisting in quiet ways—steadying an unstable cauldron, bringing down a shattered jar with a nonverbal recoil when a careless boy knocked it. In a space where a brash child might have written boasts, Tom placed small observations about order and attention that looked like responsibility.

Recommendations preferred. He would require Slughorn. The second he could not ask of Dumbledore. The man watched him with those eyes as if he were a puzzle and the solution might not be pleasing when it emerged. Another teacher then. He thought of Flitwick, who had a high voice and a higher regard for tidy charms, but Tom had not allowed himself to be seen by Flitwick except at the level of neat accomplishment. He thought of Professor Merrythought, who had smiled when he answered a question on defensive positioning with more clarity than a first-year had any business claiming. Slughorn would be enough perhaps, if the application were very good. He would secure the one he required and see if the rest could be managed by the manner in which he delivered it.

Slughorn kept an office that was a sort of fat, friendly cave with his spoils glittering on the walls. There were photographs of boys and girls caught with their mouths open in laughter and their hands holding trophies, and old Quidditch pennants, and a clock that always seemed to think it was time for a drink. The man himself had the kind of smile that came in puffs, as if blown between moustaches. When Tom knocked, the smile appeared even before the door fully opened.

“Mr Riddle,” Slughorn said, the name rich in his mouth. “Come in, do, come in. Ah—what is that, an application? I can always smell them. Have a seat. I keep sugared pineapple, you know.”

“Thank you, sir,” Tom said. He did not look at the pineapple. He sat, straight-backed and well-behaved. He placed his parchment on the desk as if it were not nervous paper with its fibres beating. “I wondered whether you might consider writing a recommendation. For the Governors’ scholarship.”

Slughorn rumbled. There were armchairs in his voice; there always were. “The Governors’ scholarship. Ambitious. Good. Very good. Yes, I saw the announcement. It’s about time they allowed first-years to put in, what? Yes, more competition, but it does sort the wheat.” He took up his quill as if he were already signing. “Now then, what are you proposing, exactly?”

Tom summarised his intended study in restrained sentences that suggested there was a great deal more that would be indecorous to say without being asked. Slughorn’s face brightened on cue.

“Oh, splendid,” he said, thoughts of pineapple forgotten for the moment. “Individual initiative, that’s what they like, and a boy who can see past the page. Very proud of you, my boy. Not many of your year have… yes, yes, I shall be delighted. Leave it with me. And you have kept the highest marks in my class, haven’t you?”

“I have, sir,” Tom said.

“And you’ve a good head for the practicalities, not just the pretty theory. I noticed the other day—you kept Crabbe’s potion from turning to stone.”

“It was going to, sir,” Tom said, as if it had been obvious.

Slughorn chuckled. “It was indeed. Well. The Governors like a narrative, Riddle. Do remember that. They are old men, most of them, and they like to think they are encouraging the future. Write as if they had good taste.”

Tom inclined his head. “Thank you.”

“Of course, of course,” Slughorn said, his voice expansive. “Now, I wonder… have you given thought to joining my little gatherings? Just a few pupils now and then. Bright prospects. Friendships made at school have a way of becoming… useful.”

“I would be honoured,” Tom said, and meant something by it the professor would not detect. He did not intend to sit too long in anyone else’s parlour; he would observe the room while he was in it and map the exit.

He left the office with the smell of sugared fruit in his robe and a folded note that was Slughorn’s recommendation. The ink shone. A generous hand had been poured over the page, thick and flattering and the exact thing old men might enjoy reading over sherry. Tom slid it into place with his application, still thinking about the phrase leadership potential and how best to arrange it so it would not look like reaching.

The Headmaster’s office had a taste of old, polished wood even in the corridor approaching it. Faces in the paintings the pupils were not supposed to study looked out of the corner of their frames and affected not to watch. Tom did not allow himself to gaze up at the gargoyles. He would not be a boy craning his neck. He approached the brass post-box outside the outer door and examined the slit with a consideration that made an ordinary action an intentional ritual. The envelope slid in with a soft scrape. He stood a fraction longer than necessary, hand still where it had been, eyes on the place where it had disappeared.

The outer door was ajar. Voices moved in and out of the opening as if caught in a draught. Tom did not press himself against the wall. He stepped to one side and paid attention with his body arranged as if he were merely thinking about nothing at all. He had learnt long before he knew he had learnt that people did not notice a boy who did not intend to be seen.

“…understand why you might wish to apply, Miss Gray,” a voice said, the consonants precise enough to be arranged on a shelf. Dumbledore. Tom’s cheek tightened. He had avoided being alone with the man when he could help it since September. “You have excelled in your Charms work, and Professor Flitwick speaks very highly of your practise. There are, however, limits upon my discretion.”

The girl’s reply came low. He knew the kind of low it was—the kind that cost. “Sir, you told me there was no harm in trying. You said—” She stopped.

“I said that assuming anything is your right has its dangers,” Dumbledore said gently. “It has also its uses. But in this case the Governors have made clear that, given the… financial constraints, they prefer to invest in—”

“Names,” the girl said, and the word fell like a dropped plate.

The pause was deliberate. Tom knew a deliberate pause when he heard one. “In students whose families have already indicated they will support corresponding expenditures,” Dumbledore said at last. “It is not a decision I command.”

There was a tiny, exhausted laugh. “They cannot be bothered pressing their own coin into their own children’s hands, and so they require the school to do it for them,” Miss Gray said. It did not sound as if she expected to be corrected. “Will you write to them again, sir? Will you tell them I can pay them back with my work?”

Tom did not move. He imagined the colour in the girl’s face, the damp in her eyes, and made himself feel nothing at all.

“I have written,” Dumbledore said. “And I believe in your promise. For what that is worth.”

“It is worth nothing,” she said, not unkindly. She had a slant in her voice, perhaps a Midlands town, perhaps a soot-smudged seaside where the gulls fought. “May I go, sir?”

“You may,” Dumbledore said softly. “Miss Gray—”

The footsteps that followed did not slow. They came closer, and Tom turned slightly as if he were just then remembering an errand. The girl’s head was high, which was interesting. She had a raw face of the sort that freckles never settle on. He could have forgotten her and then remembered her as someone who had always been there. She did not look at him. He allowed the door to pass the edge of his robe without brushing.

Dumbledore remained inside, and the air seemed to hold him and his gentle voice and the way his words made soft shapes around sharp objects. Tom stood very still. He had placed his application in the box like a coin in an honest machine. He was not certain now that a machine sat behind the panel. He thought of Slughorn’s advice. Write as if they had good taste. He thought of old names in books that had been left on tables in Slytherin common room for boys to pretend they had not read. He thought of Miss Gray’s chin when she walked. He did not feel sorry for her. He recorded that she had not begged. He recorded that Dumbledore had arranged his helplessness in polite fabric.

His hand adjusted the cuff of his robe very precisely. He did not want to stand in that corridor any longer. He did not like the taste of the air.

He did not go back to the dungeon corridor where the Slytherin portraits watched with pleased heaviness. He walked instead without consulting his feet and allowed them to carry him into a part of the castle that had fewer footsteps for company, where spare desks waited and chalk dust lay along the edge of a board like snow that had been pushed aside and forgotten. The light came thinner here, as if the windows were embarrassed to admit they had less to offer.

He opened a door because it looked like a door that was used only when someone had mislaid a key to something else. The room beyond was large in a quiet way. It held old chairs with one leg repaired by someone with more determination than skill, and a piano with its back to the room as if it were sulking, and against the far wall a mirror so tall it might have been a doorway if it had been a shade less reflective. It had an ornate frame that had been carved by someone who wanted to prove a point about time and hands and patience. The top arched like an eyebrow. The floorboards in front of it had the dull sheen of wood that had been watched, often and for long minutes.

He knew at once that he was walking towards it, but he did not speed up. His steps were perfectly ordinary. He had a good memory for the way his face looked at twelve; he had spent a great part of a childhood watching it appear and alter in a glass so he would have something to talk to. He did not expect to be surprised by himself. He stepped into the reflective place and watched the boy who stepped in from the other side.

At first, he saw only himself. A thin boy in a school robe with the hem mended too many times. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A face that had learned not to ask for things.

Then the mirror changed.

A woman stood behind him in the glass—tall, with dark hair that fell past her shoulders and a face that he knew, somehow, the way you know the shape of a room you have dreamed about but never entered. Her eyes were his eyes. Her chin was his chin. She wore robes of deep green velvet, and around her throat hung a locket that gleamed with a cold, familiar light.

Mother, he thought, and the word felt like a stone in his throat.

She was looking at him. Not past him, not through him, not with the vacant kindness of strangers who patted orphans' heads and then went home to their own children. She was looking at him, and her eyes were proud. Her hand rested on his shoulder in the glass, and he could almost feel the weight of it, the warmth.

But as he watched, the image shifted again. His mother's face remained proud—but now she was not standing behind him. She was kneeling. Her head was bowed. The pride in her eyes had become something else: submission. Reverence. Fear.

Tom's breath caught.

The boy in the glass was taller than he was. That was the first wrong thing. The second wrong thing was the cut of his robes; they fit as if they had been made to size and by someone who had remembered his shoulders. A prefect's badge shone briefly at the throat, and then it was gone and a Head Boy badge glinted and went, and then the gleam became something else entirely—a brooch of a serpent coiled around a skull, an emblem that did not belong to school uniform. The boy's face was not much changed from his own; the bones would always be delicate, the chin exact, the mouth neat. But the eyes—the eyes were different. They were darker, somehow. Emptier. As if something had been scooped out of them and replaced with cold fire.

His mother knelt at his feet in the glass, her head bowed. And she was not alone. Behind her, arranged in rows like the pews of a church, knelt others—faces he half-recognized from the common room, from the corridors, from the Great Hall. Abraxas Malfoy. The seventh-years who had sneered at his mended robes. The Governors whose names he had memorized from the scholarship records. Dumbledore, his silver beard trailing on the floor, his half-moon spectacles cracked.

All of them kneeling. All of them bowing to the boy who had once been Tom Riddle and was now something else entirely.

His reflection's mouth moved. It was not a smile. His own mouth was very still.

Tom's right hand had its own thoughts; it lifted, as if to test the glass. The other hand did the same. The boy in the mirror did not look as if he were trying to open anything. He looked as if he had finished opening everything already and was about to close what he did not require.

He took a breath. There were objects on a table within the glass, behind the older boy—a ring with a black stone, a diary with no writing on the spine, the locket that had hung at his mother's throat. Behind that, faint as things are when they are further than a gaze can travel, towers and a castle stood as if they were listening. He had never been to anyone's house; his house had been a communal room and a corridor where doors slammed like mouths. The notion of a place that belonged to him rather than to a person who would evict him if he breathed too loudly unfolded behind his ribs as if a hand had flattened it out.

His palm met the cool surface. The boy inside did not soften. Tom had expected he might, perhaps; that he might fail himself and yearn for the kneeling woman to stand up and embrace him, that he might wish the proud mother back instead of the bowing one. But he did not. He looked at what the mirror showed him—the submission, the power, the cold and solitary throne—and he felt something settle in his chest like a key finding its lock.

This was what he wanted. Not love. Not family. Not the mother who had died rather than live for him.

He wanted them kneeling.

"I can make things happen," he said. His voice did not carry in the room as others' voices did. The space between the boards swallowed it discreetly. He examined his own expression and disliked that the line of his mouth had shifted even that much. The boy in reflection had not spoken. He had no need to announce his capacity. He sat at the centre of a circle of effects, and no one in that circle was standing.

He let his hand drop. It did not feel like surrender. It felt like a vow that did not require witnesses. He did not think of magic as love would have been thought of; he thought of it as a lever. The mirror gave him this: reassurance that the lever existed. It offered nothing else. He accepted the terms.

On his way out of the room he did not look back. He took one more breath of that thin air and left it for others to waste.

The library had the quality of an answer when he returned to it, which was convenient because he had a question he could not at present articulate. He found the shelf with the early edition of Advanced Potion-Making and stood on his toes to remove it, because it was placed as if to remind young minds that knowledge should sometimes be reached for. The old book weighed properly. He turned and nearly brushed the sleeve of another student who had stepped into the same space.

Her hair put him in mind of the underside of ravens’ wings, not because it was glossy but because it absorbed light in that complete, uncompromising way. She had a long, pale face with a mouth that seemed to have been fixed into an expression that warned others not to ask. She had the posture of someone who had decided not to be hit even if it hurt. He had seen her before; he knew her name because he counted names like coin in a pocket. Prince. Eileen Prince. The whisper attached to it made it sound like a joke someone had told badly.

She moved to let him pass. He did not. He tilted the book so she could see its spine.

“Do you need this one,” he said, because it was true and because offering has power when it is done very neatly.

“I’ve already taken notes,” she said. Her voice had the shape of Yorkshire, if Yorkshire were careful. “You can have it.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You took notes from Borage without the book in your hand?”

“I took notes from Borage with the book in my hand earlier,” she said. “I return things.”

Tom considered that. She looked at him without invitation. She had the sort of eyes that looked as if they ought to be grey in a storm and were instead a stubborn brown that would not indulge anyone by changing. Her robe had been mended invisibly by someone who knew how to mend. He looked down at her sleeves and the ordinary nature of the cloth and the way she kept her fingers folded as if she were keeping them from reaching for something.

“Prince,” he said. He said it as if it was a word he was pronouncing for himself, not calling her by it. “I’m Tom Riddle.”

“I know,” she said.

“Do you,” he said. It was not a question.

“You sit where the table legs wobble and you put a folded scrap under them,” she said. “You don’t like noise. You make your quills last longer than they should. You look as if you know where the secret passages are even if you don’t.”

He allowed the corner of his mouth to move, very slightly. “What else do I do.”

“You read introductions properly,” she said. “You don’t ask questions if you can get the answer on your own. You’ve not learnt when to pretend to be stupider to make other people happier.”

“That sounds like a useful lesson,” Tom said, and his tone made it into a kind of joke without adding a smile. “Would you advise it.”

“No,” she said, quick and flat. “I’d advise not needing other people to be happy.”

He inclined his head. The book was still between them. He extended it to her.

“You should not have to pretend either,” he said.

She looked at the book and then at him. Her mouth tightened. “You assume I’m pretending to something,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Only that you know the shape of it.”

She took the book as if it were a test with a trick and she had to mark carefully where the trick was. He watched her hands. Her nails had a rim of ink where she had failed to keep it off despite best intention. She did not look like a Prince; she looked like someone who had been made to joke about the name and had not found it funny.

“You’re Slytherin,” she said, as if remarking on the weather.

“As are you,” he said.

She made a face that could have been a laugh if it had trusted him. “Am I,” she said. “They tell me I shouldn’t be.”

“Why,” Tom said. He knew why. He wanted to hear the version she would give him with her chin like that.

She tipped the book so the gilt letters caught a bit of the light and then set it flat on the shelf as if demonstrating order appealed to her. “Because my father’s a Muggle and because the name on my mother’s side makes them think it ought to be enough to wash me clean,” she said with dispassion so careful it sounded like precise hatred had been polished out of it. “Because I don’t smile when Mulciber says something clever. Because I corrected a seventh-year’s Latin and she didn’t like that I was right.”

Tom had corrected older children’s Latin before he knew it was Latin. He let his hand rest on the spine of the book without touching her fingers. “If your name were not attached to you like a nail,” he said, “would you keep it.”

“I would keep it and make it mean me,” she said, coolly. “Not whoever married whoever.”

He listened to the way she said married and thought that there were rooms in her house he would recognise. “What do you want,” he said, without ceremony. “It seems an obvious question.”

She did not flinch. “A laboratory where no one else is allowed to touch anything. Enough glass. A proper thermometer that isn’t cracked. A cupboard of ingredients sorted by solvent. Books that aren’t kept behind a chain as if reading were theft.”

It was a better answer than the ones he had expected. He considered telling her about the notice in the Hall and decided that if she had not seen it, then she ought to discover it herself rather than have it presented as a favour, so that she would owe him obligation rather than gratitude. “And what do you do to get those things,” he asked.

“I work,” she said. “I don’t beg. Does it work. The begging.”

“I haven’t tried it,” Tom said.

“Good,” she said, and there was an approval in the word that he found more agreeable than Slughorn’s expansive warmth. “What do you want, Riddle.”

He could have made a list to rival hers. He considered the mirror. He considered, very briefly, the place where it had lived. He considered his envelope in the box and the air in the corridor by Dumbledore, which had smelled faintly of old lemons. He put all those away and said, “Books. Access.”

“You do not say family,” she said.

“You do not say friends,” he said.

She glanced at him sharply, as if a bird had flown past a window at speed and she had almost missed it. “Friends make demands,” she said, with an honesty that sounded as if she had cut it out of herself and shaped it carefully. “They want one to be particular shapes. I’m occupied.”

“I am too,” he said. “Perhaps we can be unoccupied near each other.”

She looked at him for longer than was comfortable, and he let the discomfort live. He would not be the first to drop his gaze. Then she nodded, small, as if the motion cost her and she decided to pay anyway.

“You can use my notes,” she said. “If you do not tell anyone you have them.”

“I would not,” he said. “And I can—” He considered what he could give that would not cost him the posture he required. “I can show you an angle Quirrell’s book does not include.”

“Quirrell’s a fool,” she said.

“Even fools write sentences that can be used,” Tom said.

“Not him,” she said, but there was humour in it, and the set of her mouth eased. “All right. We will exchange.”

She turned to lead the way to the far table, the one that hosted students who were not invited to speak loudly at other tables. She sat opposite him and opened her book, and the scent of paper loosed itself into the air between them. He did not have to tell her to keep her voice low. He did not have to tell her anything that seemed covered by It’s obvious. He found the place in Borage that he wished to mark and traced a line with the edge of his nail. She drew a neat line under her notes in a penmanship that was long and narrow and precise. He looked at what she had done and adjusted his own notation. He found the pleasure in the work that had nothing to do with future sherry conversations.

They spoke when they needed to. She did not pretend to be less clever than she was. He did not flatter except where it would achieve something; he discovered, privately, that praise would not achieve anything here and was therefore unnecessary. She did not mention the Board of Governors. He did not mention Dumbledore. But when Madam Pince circled like a hawk around the stacks, Eileen’s eyes flickered to the side, very briefly, towards the far corner of the floor, where a disused card index held a drawer that did not quite close.

Tom knew that place, and knew what was kept below it: old editions and books that were due to be repaired and had simply not yet demanded more attention than other injured things. He said, in the tone of one who is moving a piece on a board with no unnecessary noise, “You find what you want.”

“I don’t ask,” she said.

“You will apply for the scholarship,” he said, not as order, not as kindness.

“I cannot win it,” she said, as if stating that a potion left un-turned would burn.

“That is not what I asked,” he said.

She held his gaze as if she wanted to see whether he would blink. He did not. Something like a decision passed over her face, the faintest shadow. “Perhaps,” she said.

“If you apply,” Tom said, turning a page where the paper rasped the way paper always did, reliable and unfussy, “we can compare what we propose and not write the same sentence twice. The Governors will prefer to think they have found two di…fferent kinds of promising child.”

“What would they write under yours,” she said, her voice sardonic but not unkind. “Ambition without funds. Good posture. Quiet.”

“Under yours,” he said, inclining his head, “Talent without patience for flattery. Knuckles stained with ink. Won’t put up with Mulciber.”

“Mulciber is boring,” she said. “I don’t put up with boring.”

“We shall get on,” he said.

He showed her the Quirrell angle then, marking the section where the author pretended that the order of adding root to liquor did not matter if one was steady-handed. He demonstrated with the tip of his quill how an error compounded if one refused to understand cause. She listened with the keen silence of someone watching a trick and wanting to know where the false bottom was. When she smiled, it was small and not performed for anyone.

“You dislike being taught nonsense,” she said.

“It offends me,” he said.

She reached into her satchel and pulled out a thin notebook. “These are my substitutions,” she said. “I have a farm catalogue. Quantity matters. Names matter if one wishes to be phrased properly, but if the dock root is too stringy that week a boy should know whether he can cut it or leave it, and whether he can sweeten one thing to brace a bitter thing and not kill his classmate.”

He accepted the notebook and read quickly, his eyes running along the edges as if measuring the room. She had labelled by solvent and by temper and by aggressiveness. She had a rating for volatility that would make a professor sigh in pleased surprise if properly explained.

“This is very good,” he said, and he did not make the words large. He allowed them to be exactly the size of the truth.

“Don’t say that in front of anyone,” she said, and there was no false modesty in it. “They’ll want to copy and then pretend it was theirs.”

“They will,” he said. “Perhaps better that they remain bored.”

Her laugh—small, involuntary, irritated with itself—was a quick spill of water on a dry surface.

They worked. He arranged his application sentences so that leadership potential occurred in the shape of solutions, not speeches. She set her proposed study in terms of economy and safety and the benefit to the school, and she wrote Sylvia Prince in the recommendation space and then scratched it out, frowned, and left it blank. Tom wrote Slughorn and left the second line elegantly unfilled.

“Flitwick would say yes if I asked him,” she said to her ink, not to him.

“Do you want him to,” Tom said, equally to his ink.

“He would think he was doing me a kindness,” she said. “He would put a little note in it somewhere that would make it easy for them to say no.”

Tom moved his hand a fraction and kept writing. He did not say miss Gray into the line of his quill. They were not discussing other people, not here, not loudly. Eileen found the right word for her intent and placed it, neat.

When the bell sounded, low and far off, a flock of students rose and scuffed and scraped and the long tables breathed out. Eileen closed her notebook with care and slid it back into the satchel. She lifted the early Borage and placed it precisely where it had been, as if she believed in some sort of bargain with objects.

“After supper,” she said, without looking up.

He nodded once. “After supper.”

“Don’t be late,” she said, then ruined the command by glancing at him with something that, if it were in a different person, would have been hope. With her, it was an insurance policy against disappointment.

He was not late.

Supper in Slytherin was a practise in colours and toasts and looks that landed softly and stayed. Tom ate as if he were fueling a body that had to live through the evening. He left without making any boy believe he had been rude. He knew where to find Eileen; she had the posture of someone who returns to the same chair.

They took the far corner again. The library’s lamps made small islands of gold on the wood. Outside the windows, the last of the day drew itself up as if it were shy. They compared sentences. They removed phrases that sounded like begging even if they did not intend to beg. She wrote “resources allocated equitably” in a line, then crossed equitably out as if it made her mouth feel dirty.

“They’ll think I’m being political,” she said.

“You are,” he said.

“I’m twelve,” she said.

“So am I,” he said.

He considered the mirror again, a steady shape behind his eyes. He folded his parchment and made sure the crease lined up with the previous one. Eileen’s hair fell forward when she bent; she pushed it back with the same impatient movement each time. He looked at the way her hand moved, saw there the same refusal as in her voice: not to be softened, not to be touched simply because someone reached.

“What do you see when you close your eyes,” she said suddenly, as if she had been saving the question in a difficult pocket.

He did not allow silence to be a question. “Letters,” he said.

She looked as if she had expected a lie and was not sure whether he had given her one. Then she nodded once. “Ingredients,” she said. “Arranged in rows.”

“Useful,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He thought of telling her about the room with the mirror and what it had shown him. He did not. There were words one did not put on the table in the library where Madam Pince stood motionless and watched dust settle. He also did not wish to see what her face would do if he spoke aloud what he had seen. It had been his face. He preferred to keep it.

“You will post the application tomorrow,” he said.

“I will,” she said. She traced the corner of her parchment with a nail and then made herself stop. “Riddle.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you think,” she said, and then exhaled and changed it, “They will give it to us.”

“They will give it to someone,” he said.

She made a sound that he might have named a curse if he had been a different boy. “I hate them,” she said, very calmly.

“You will have to learn how to persuade them,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“I did not say you would like it,” he said. “Only that you will have to.”

She made a thoughtful shape with her mouth and then, after a long moment, sighed. “Teach me that then,” she said.

He looked at her; she did not look away. It occurred to him, very precisely, that this was the first offer of its kind he had received at school, that had not been dressed as a favour or a trap. It was not friendship; it was not something softer. It was an agreement between two people who had looked at the same shape and named it. He did not feel warmed, particularly. He felt that something had clicked into place that had been waiting quietly to be pressed.

“I will,” he said. “And you will teach me when Quirrell is wrong and Borage is right.”

She nodded once. “I will.”

When they parted, it was with a civil “Good night” each and the knowledge that neither of them would call it anything else. He watched her go with her shoulders set and her name a nail she held and not one driven into her. He thought of the envelope in the box and the polite helplessness in the office beyond it, and of the Mirror’s older boy with his solitude like a cloak he had chosen rather than a blanket he had been thrown.

He understood that a system existed. He did not yet know all the places where a hand could be inserted to make it stutter and stop. He intended to learn. For the first time since September, he did not imagine himself entirely alone in the task.

He climbed down to the dungeons with his step measured and his breath even. In the common room, a group sat close to the hearth, trading names and family stories as if they were banknotes. Tom passed them without interrupting the count.

He wrote one more sentence that night at his desk in the dormitory, his quill moving without the scratch of anxiety behind it, and then he placed both applications, both sets of careful words—his and a copy of Eileen’s that he had held briefly in his eye—to memory. He slept the way one sleeps when one has built something and left it to dry, knowing that in the morning he will test it with a fingertip and it will either hold or crack. He did not dream of mothers. He did not dream of fathers. When the dormitory breathed, he listened and did not imagine it was for him.

In the morning, he would pass the brass box again. He would not stand there any longer than necessary. He would keep his hand steady. He held in his head the shape of a mirror where only he stood, and behind him the suggestion of a school that had not yet decided it was his. He imagined, briefly and with satisfaction, that it would.