FicWad

The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.

Author's note: Yes, I have been changing the age of Oren's little sister over and over. Just assume I can't make up my mind, go with my most recent assertion, and remember that Rowling herself was awful about dates.


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Chapter 38: Christmas, Oren, Part 1


Thursday, December 20th, 1990


Sarepta Wayland was thrilled to have her brother back home. The house was considerably more boring when he wasn't around for her to pester.

This was his first full day home, and after breakfast he had disappeared into the library. She had followed along behind, trying her best to sneak up behind him. Her sneaking technique was so far reliable for catching insects in jars and getting her mother to scream at her. It was not reliable for sneaking up on rabbits, post owls, her father, or her brother. This morning's effort was not an exception.

"Hi Sarepta." He turned around, grinning, and she came and stood next to him, where she could best interfere with whatever he was doing.

"No fair! You never let me sneak up on you!"

"You're just going to jump on me and shriek."

"But it's fun!"

"Sure, but it's like me tickling you—you giggle, but you still try to get away." She looked briefly put out by this. "Look, when you learn to actually stay quiet, you'll be able to jump on me and shriek all you like without me noticing you first. I'm not going to fake it for you!"

"But you and father are really good! As soon as I get my wand I am going to learn a spell to make my shoes stop making noise."

"You don't need a wand for that. You can do it with a single rune on the bottom of your shoes."

"I can?"

"Well, not without learning to inscribe the rune. It's not the easiest one to start with. And ideally you'd want to do something to keep it from wearing off, and really wand magic is best for that."

"Oh. Could you do it for me?"

"I'm not going to just give you the ability to sneak up on me. Learn to do it yourself."

"But I'm only nine! And seven months! So you should do it for me."

"Nope. Tell you what—I'll try to teach you. But only if you agree to do all the exercises I give you. I don't want you giving up halfway after I've put in a lot of effort. How does that sound?"

"What kind of homework are you going to give me?"

"Smart girl. Only stuff I think you need in order to get good enough to do the silencing rune. I promise never to give you busy work. I mean, I might sometimes do it to keep you busy, but busy actually getting better, not busy wasting time."

"How long will it take?"

"To get to the silencing rune? Let me think . . . Actually, tell you what. Let's start you on a very basic rune first, just to see how long it takes you to learn that. Then we can guess at how long it will take to do the rest, and you can decide if you're still interested. Okay?"

Sarepta couldn't come up with any potential pitfalls. "Okay!"

"Great. Let's go down to the basement and find some things for you."


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The Waylands did not have a house elf. This was not due to lack of ability to pay for one. Mostly they just wouldn't have enough work they would be willing to let it do, and the poor thing would go insane. Sure, their mother would be happy to let it do the cooking, but would insist on supervising everything, and would never let it do as much as rearrange the pots and pans.

Here in the basement, an enthusiastic house elf could find years of interesting and satisfying things to do, most of which would result in no one in the family being able to find anything down here ever again.

Right now Oren and Sarepta were staring into a cabinet full of quills, quill holders, ink bottles, dried up and empty ink bottles, the components of ink, some unlabeled jars that might also be related to ink, and a lot of dust. This cabinet had two shelves, each about the right size to hide Sarepta in if they were cleared. It was at about eye-level for an adult. It rested on a similar cabinet below it, and had some unknown, unreachable, and probably dusty stuff in boxes balanced on the top.

The entire length of the wall of this workroom—about sixty feet—was lined with cabinets and drawers of varying ages, designs, and accessibility. Some of them could only be reached after moving large piles of boxes, other furniture, or in one case an upright piano and a taxidermied goat. The other walls were similar, except that there was a lot of open shelving on them. Five or six tables and two old dressers had been lined up down the middle of the room. The family called it the "workroom" but very little work ever got done in it, because there was no space left on the tables to do anything. Effectively, it had been storage for the past fifty years.

It would be wrong to say that it was storing junk. The vast majority of things in the room were very useful, if you knew what they were, how they worked, and happened to remember them when the circumstances arose for which they were designed. Oren actually knew where most things were, although he hadn't at this age the first time around. That didn't mean, necessarily, that if a book were falling apart he would go use his great-great-grandmother's bookbinding equipment, his great uncle's collection of mysterious leather samples, or his great aunt's library paste. He had at one point made sure he knew how to use those things. It's just that by the time he remembered them, he usually would have solved his problem some other way.

For all that most of what was down here got overlooked or forgotten most of the time, the Waylands did use it regularly enough, as Oren and his sister were now doing.

"What I want," explained Oren, as he stared more or less blankly into a box of quills, "is one quill that's magically neutral, and one that's designed for magical inscriptions. I'm pretty sure there are lots of different types of quills here." He rooted around, eventually deciding he'd have to take the whole box upstairs. "It would be nice if any of them were labeled."

Sarepta did, in fact, already have a desk in her room, complete with her own ink, quills, paper, and blotter. What Oren wanted, though, was for her to practice using a quill that magic could not flow through, and to actually inscribe runes using one optimised for that; everything in her room was sort of middle-of-the-road, magically speaking. Most wizards couldn't be bothered with worrying about stuff like this; Oren was grateful to whichever ancestors had shared his sensibilities, and had cared enough to buy or make the various quills in the basement.

About 45 minutes, eight cabinets, six drawers, and three rooms later, Oren had gathered an acceptable type of ink, a pair of quills, a carving stylus, and a pile of paper. Sarepta could use these until she found something better, or, more likely, until she received three sets of duplicates the first Christmas after their relatives noticed her showing any interest in the subject.

"Still interested after all that?" They were back in her room, with everything set up on her desk. She nodded. "Okay—have a seat. I want you to start with the neutral pen—this one—and copy this rune. You need to make the strokes in the same order I did—one, two, three . . ." He traced it with his finger, then wrote it out a second time. "Let's see how you do."

"What does it do?"

"Well, if you do it right, with the other quill, it will just glow. That all it does. It's a good one to start with because you can tell if you get it right."

"Can you show me?"

"Nope! It will be more exciting if you do it yourself. But don't worry about the magic quite yet. Um, you need that downstroke to be longer, and that bit there is supposed to be a circle. Make it rounder. Good!"

After a few attempts, she had copied it to his satisfaction. Back in the original timeline, Sarepta's penmanship had been excellent, and was far better than his up until his first year of design school. She was quite good now, which was a relief to Oren, since he was using her handwriting as a sort of neatness threshold beyond which he would not venture for fear of blowing his cover.

"Alright. So that rune is itself a magical symbol. It's like casting a charm, although the underage magic detectors won't pick it up even outside of our wards. You are sending your magic through the quill or stylus just like you would a wand or staff or other focus. In this case you want to do it while intending for the rune to glow—that's the best I can describe it. If you do it right, you'll be able to feel your magic moving, and the rune will start to glow a few seconds after you finish with it. Okay, now. Try it."

Sarepta switched to the other quill, and with enormous determination, very, very slowly copied out the strokes of the rune, willing it to glow. She had some idea what magic felt like, having waved her mother's wand around once and caused a window to explode outwards. She thought she could feel something more controlled than that flowing through her hand, but she was so excited that it was nearly impossible to tell.

She lifted her quill and held her breath. One second. Two.

There was a faint lightening, as if the still-wet ink were shining a little more, and then suddenly it glowed like a candle. Gradually it brightened, until it rivaled the ceiling lamp.

Sarepta stared at it with wide eyes, then had to look away. "Wow."

"Nice job. Seriously, nice job." Oren leaned in and gave his sister a hug. He hadn't been all that physically affectionate the first time around. He was going to try to change that. He had also not tried to teach his sister anything; that was going to change too.

"Is it supposed to be that bright? Was that good?"

"No, and yes. You put a lot of magic into it. You looked like you were concentrating really hard, so whatever it was you did, remember that." He grinned. "Try it again with your regular quill, so you can see what the difference is."

This turned out to be possible, but annoying. The resulting rune glowed, but only like a candle. "I like the other quill better."

"Never underestimate the basement. More importantly, don't underestimate yourself. You know, I'm really sorry I never thought to try to teach you anything earlier. I apologize for that."

"That's okay. You'll just have to make it up to me!"

"You have absolutely no shame, do you." He shook his head, laughing. "I'll certainly try. Ready to try something else?"

"Okay!"

"Great. This next thing I want you to work on is a lot more complicated, but I want to jump ahead to something more difficult to get a sense of what you can do. Okay?" Using the neutral quill, Oren drew what looked like a square grid with leaves around it. "That center bit has to be precise—notice how some of those lines are shorter than the others, and three of them actually have gaps in them? This one is tricky. I'm going to break this down into several groups of strokes, and have you master it up to that point."

"What does this one do?"

"I'm not going to tell you, because I'm curious to see what happens if I don't."

"Okayyyyy."

It was almost an hour later when Oren let her try the other quill again. Some of that hour included two trips to the kitchen to steal Christmas cookies, but it felt like a long time.

Oren handed her a blank sheet of paper, and she started in, carefully doing all thirty-two strokes, pushing her magic into it without any specific purpose. When she was done, nothing happened.

"Oh. Maybe you should tell me what it does, and I'll try again?"

"Not yet. Most runes don't do anything flashy—the glowing one is unusual, which is why I started with it. Could you feel your magic going into it?"

"Yeah."

"Interesting." He picked up the piece of paper and shook it, then grinned, broadly. "Notice that?"

"What?"

"Here, let's try another sheet of paper." He picked up one of her practice sheets, shaking it. It rustled. He switched back and shook the other, which didn't. "Here—try it yourself!"

"Is this the silencing one?"

"It is. My end of the bargain is done. You did it. Once again, very nice job. I suggest starting with slippers."

She ran around the room, finally pulling an old pair out from under her bed. "Will these do?"

"So long as you can write on their soles with that pen, yes. If you get it to work, I'll cast the spells to make it last longer."

In another fifteen minutes, Sarepta had two pairs of completely silent slippers, with no visible signs of enchantment. Oren had cast a long sequence of spells on them; somewhere in the middle, the ink had vanished.

"There you go! Your second and third magical items. Well, second through fifth, I guess, since they're in pairs."

"Can I wear these outside?"

"I wouldn't do anything with them that you wouldn't do with non-magical ones. Not because the enchantment will wear off, but because they're still just slippers. If you step in a puddle, your feet get wet. Stuff like that. It's not like you don't have other shoes."

"Will it work on the others?"

"Not the ones with rubber soles, no, since the ink won't stick. I'd use the stylus for those. You should practice on something else first, though."

That 'something else' turned out to be lunch. So far as Oren knew, it was safe to use the glowing rune on food, and he watched in fascination as his sister made glowing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and glowing cookies.

It was, in fact, possible to etch a rune into even a very crumbly cookie if you were careful enough.

It stopped glowing once you bit into it, but Sarepta rapidly mastered the art of casting really bright runes, then putting the entire cookie into her mouth so that it glowed through her cheeks. Oren had to admit this was an application of the rune that he hadn't seen before.

After the creation of an entirely silent bock of cheese (they had great difficulty explaining this to their mother later), Sarepta found a relatively flat-soled pair of sneakers and successfully carved the silencing rune into each.

"Nice. How about if I go back to the library, and you wait a few minutes and try to sneak up on me again?"

"Okay!"

This led to a fairly nerve-wracking two minutes, during which Oren wasn't able to concentrate on anything.

"Now I can hear you breathing."

"Orennnn!"

"Well, I can. But if I weren't listening for it, maybe I wouldn't have noticed."

"You weren't supposed to be paying attention!"

"I can't exactly not think about it—you only took two minutes to try again."

"Hmph. What are you reading?"

"You mean, what was I trying to read, but couldn't because you keep pestering me?"

"Yeah." He made a mental note of his place and handed her the book.

"Manual of Mind Magics, Third Edition, Revised, Volume One. Why are you reading this?"

"A whole bunch of reasons. Mostly to see if there are good ways to help someone resist the stuff the book talks about."

"This is lots of potions. Ooh! Love potions—is there some girl who's trying to get you?"

"I don't think so. At least, not me. But a lot of the girls in Slytherin have been talking about them lately. Really, this is just the first volume, and I'm not sure it's any use to me." He pointed at the two other books from the set.

"So what are you really trying to do?"

"Like I said, a bunch of things, some of which are easier to explain than others. You have so far permitted me a whole four minutes with this book, half of which was spent listening for you creeping up on me, so I don't know what's in it yet. Let's see . . . This one seems to be truth serums, love and hate potions, various other potions and antidotes, mood-affecting charms . . . let's see what the others have . . . the imperius curse, compulsion, confusion, repelling, notice-me-not, geases, oaths, and contracts—interesting but not what I wanted, come back to that later . . . here we go! Legilimency and occlumency, memory charms, pensieves, magical dissociation? Some other stuff I don't recognize.

So, legilimency is the use of a spell to read minds. Very intrusive. Headmaster Dumbledore does it all the time, and I wish he wouldn't. Occlumency is the opposite—techniques for resisting it. There are a half dozen books on each of these things in here, by the way—mostly over there, where that gap is now. I wanted to look at the overview to see if there was anything I was missing."

"Was there?"

"I don't know yet! Probably. I've never heard of anything in the last half of this book."

"Can I see?"

"Oh, sure, why not. Tell you what. Want to help?"

"Okay!" The alternative was being bored, and if Oren thought it was interesting, it probably was. At least, bugging him had paid off really well so far today.

"Great. Thanks, actually. Go through there and see if there's anything that looks like a way to block legilimency without spending a year learning to do it the hard way."

"Are you sure it would take a whole year?"

"That's the average, I think. Father will probably make you take a course on it eventually, if you don't pick it up on your own. Um, picking it up on your own is really, really hard. I've done a lot of the exercises, but I'm scared to ask for a tutor because I don't like the idea of someone reading my mind."

She laughed. "So you're looking for something like a magic hat, right?"

"More or less."

"Could you make magic earrings?"

Oren stopped and thought for a moment. "Maybe! That might be a pretty good idea. If I ever understand what I'm doing here, I might try that, if you have some we can experiment with."

"I have lots of earrings!"

"The problem is getting either a charm or runes on them. We'd have to write really small with runes. You can do it, but it's tricky. Anyway, go look through that book and tell me if you find anything interesting."

The legilimency and occlumency sections looked interesting, but they were all about the same things. Sarepta was able to skim a book effectively. You couldn't grow up in this family otherwise.

The chapter on magical dissociation was pretty unpleasant. "Ewwww!"

"What is it?"

"There's a way to split someone's mind in half—magically, I mean, not with a knife—but you have to do gross things to them."

"What kind of things?"

"Go see for yourself."

Apparently wizards knew how to take advantage of the mind's natural ability to dissociate in response to traumatic situations. If you used the right rituals, and provided the right kinds of trauma, you could control the process fairly precisely. Doing it without the trauma was much harder—human minds don't like to split apart if they don't have to.

It was mostly useful for hiding things from the victim, and not really something you would want done to yourself if you could help it. The Manual of Mind Magics wasn't exactly the Dark Arts, but it was certainly grey enough to teach you both sides of every process. In any event, there were rituals for undoing the dissociation ritual. Difficult ones, definitely, but presumably effective.

"The rest of this is about possession by spirits. Do you care about that stuff?"

"Sure. It might work like occlumency. The fact that it's even in there is a good sign."

The possession section was broken into three chapters. The first was a short review of stories from mythology. At least in the classical mythology most wizards read in primary school, messing around with gods tended to get you raped by swans or turned into a tree or something, and was regarded as, overall, a Very Bad Idea. A "god", to a wizard, simply meant anything immensely more powerful than wizards; complicated theology was nowhere to be found.

As to possession by them, most cultures seemed to believe that if a god wanted to take over your mind or body, there wasn't anything you could do about it. Although western wizards considered this idea distinctly unappealing, the manual dutifully reported that a variety of foreign wizards claimed to contact gods directly, actually seeking out divine possession on purpose. The manual took this to be on the religious end of things, and fell back onto the common wizarding approach to religion—amiable, respectful skepticism coupled with spectacularly lousy fact-checking.

The second section on possession covered spirits of the dead (ghosts), or of the living doing some sort of projection. It included a sizable digression on the making of magical portraits, but the primary content on ghosts was intriguing, if sparse on details. There were quite a few leads here for Oren to research elsewhere.

The third involved more generic "spirits". The most powerful and complex of these sounded a lot more like Peeves than something out of stories, like Shakespeare's Ariel. The book was not so concerned with making them come and go as it was with getting them into your head and out again, and what they could do while they were there. Generally speaking, possession didn't leave the host body with any magical powers it didn't have before, so the experience wasn't one sensible wizards were expected to seek out. The book politely overlooked the fact that sensibility was not exactly a common trait among wizards.

In fact, most respectable pureblood libraries contained several books on the summoning of spirits. Never mind that this was normally useless, or that the only spirit most of them had any experience with was Peeves. Purebloods just liked thinking of themselves as the sort of people who would summon spirits, just as something to do on a slow Sunday afternoon when they were bored. And so occasionally they would pick up books on the subject, which would make a nice conversation piece until somebody decided to go on a de-cluttering spree and relegate them to gathering dust in the library.

The Wayland family was not an exception to this tendency among purebloods, nor were they exceptions to the tendency to have very few children to divide inheritances between, or the tendency to never, ever throw anything out if it seemed like it might be useful someday. So Oren and Sarepta found a solid thirty books on spirits right off the bat, and those were just the ones that had been shelved correctly in the library. These ranged from genuine medieval tomes with crumbling bindings, beautifully illustrated but useless coffee-table books, various books and pamphlets in languages no Wayland had ever bothered to learn, comprehensive and boring manuals for the genuine "enthusiast", reproductions of genuine medieval tomes, modern forgeries passed off as reproductions of genuine medieval tomes, books bound in expensive leather and sold to people who were not expected to ever open them, four identical copies of a former Hogwarts textbook, and two quasi-autobiographical novels by Gilderoy Lockhart.

Those, it bears repeating, were just the ones shelved correctly in the library, where "correctly" meant "somewhere more or less all near each other". There was no shortage of other bookcases around the house, all of which were full, and no one ever felt the need to reorganize everything further so certain topics were all in the same room. That would be silly, because the way things were shelved now was the product of how generations of real people had used real books and bookcases. Real people using real books also tended to create little piles "to be read later", "to be shelved later", or "to be left out so that the relative who gave it to us can see it when they come over"; those piles were easily abandoned and forgotten, which was the primary way for books to wind up "lost".

"Lost" was actually a pretty useful category, because it meant you remembered a book existed and knew it was worth bothering to look for. Of course, in absolute numbers, "lost books" just didn't compare to the much larger category of "books Oren and Sarepta didn't know about", which in turn overlapped with their parents' own gaps in knowledge to form the category of "books no one in the Wayland family actually knew they had." It was pretty easy for books—or anything, really—to wind up in that category, even in the main parts of the house. All it took was for a room, or part of one, to get heavily used by one family member for a few decades until all sorts of things had been dragged in there and put into their own idiosyncratic order; once that person died, no one would bother moving anything unless they knew it existed and had a use for it, or they actually needed the space for some reason. Certainly there were differences in scale, but the same principle that applied to the specialized potions references in their great-grandfather's basement laboratory applied equally well to their grandmother's cookbooks tucked into the corner of the pantry.

And all of that ignored the books that were stored in boxes, crates, chests, and trunks. When you had an attic with six rooms and an extension charm, and two more basement floors of the same size, you could just put stuff there. When great aunt Nerodia had died without children, Oren's grandfather had just had the movers put everything in crates and stick it in the attic. Oren's father had lived abroad for several years, and upon returning had never really unpacked—if he needed something he acquired during that time, which he never did, he could just go to the attic, root around, and find it. And in the first timeline, when Oren had graduated from Hogwarts, he had never fully unpacked his trunk; it had joined seven others in the attic.

In this filing and storage system, pulling everything off the shelf and calling it a day was usually good enough—either you knew where something was and could find it relatively quickly, either in the library or one of a few dozen other likely hiding places, or else you didn't know it existed in the first place and were unlikely to discover it on purpose. By the time their father came home at 5, they had bookmarked a handful of potentially useful things and carefully put the books back on the shelf where they would not arouse suspicion.

"Come on. You should go show father the runes."


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


"Father! Father! Come into the kitchen and let me show you something!"

"Okay, okay. Let me get my cloak off."

Malaxis followed his daughter into the kitchen, and watched in puzzlement as she took a cookie from the tin. "You know, you two, I can tell there's only about half the cookies left since the last time I looked, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't me or your mother eating them. Leave some for the rest of us, okay?" Wizards weren't really solid on the idea of a healthy diet, but mostly they agreed that there was such a thing as too many cookies.

"But watch! Watch!" Sarepta put the cookie right on the counter, pulled her stylus out of her pocket, and started drawing on it with an intense look of concentration. A few seconds after she finished, it glowed very brightly. Malaxis had learned to wait a little bit before showing surprise to his children. This was the correct move on his part, because she didn't turn her attention back to him with her triumphant "look at me!" expression until after carefully closing her mouth with the entire cookie inside, making her cheeks glow red.

"I see."

"She was pestering me, so I showed her how to write runes, since she wouldn't need a wand for it. I didn't know if she could do it, so I started with the glowing rune, since it's simple and you can tell right away if you got it right. She's really good at it! Um, the thing with the cookies was not my idea."

Malaxis just stood there, smiling, not sure what to say. Something was weird about the situation beyond his daughter's precociousness.

He realized after a moment that the weird thing was that Sarepta was not actually talking, because her mouth was full.

"You know, I think you were really small the last time you tried to get my attention by putting something odd in your mouth. At least now you're doing it with actual food, and I don't have to leap at you in a panic to stop you from swallowing. Good show!"

Oren had gotten the rune-inscribed cheese out of the icebox.

"So I only taught her two. This is the other one." He pointed to the rune, then pointedly dropped the cheese onto the counter from a foot and a half up.

"A silencing rune?"

"Yeah. It's on her shoes, too, so you have to listen for her rustling or breathing when she sneaks up on you now."

"Thanks a lot."

"Well, she kept pestering me, and I wanted to see if she could do it."

"Oren . . . that's not really the best reason to teach her something, you know. It could apply equally well to . . . all sorts of things."

"Oh. Yeah. I guess so."

Malaxis watched his son put the cheese back. His wife would no doubt find it distinctly unsettling and demand an explanation; he knew better than to ask why the cheese needed to be silenced.

"Sarepta, I'm very impressed. Are you going to eat that cookie?"

"Mmrph mrph."


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Malaxis had come to sit by the fire with his wife, Alya. "I just spent the past two hours talking to Oren and Sarepta."

"I'm sure they appreciated that. I heard you in there testing Oren on what he learned at Hogwarts. How's he doing?"

"You know, we really ought to pay more attention to Sarepta, too."

Alya looked thoughtful. "I think we give her plenty, really. She's just so exhausting sometimes. Oren was so much less demanding."

"I worry that we aren't really giving her a chance. Or at least, the right ones. Oren was able to teach her those runes in just a few hours, and he said she got them on the first try once she mastered the calligraphy. I don't think I could have done that."

"Did you ever try?"

"No—Oren's confident we all could have done it at her age, although he says it helps that she has good handwriting. He says he was able to do it then, too, although I honestly don't remember when he started playing with runes."

"Well, maybe it will keep her out of trouble."

Malaxis snorted. "If only. I asked Oren why he taught her, and he said, I quote, 'because she was bugging me and I wanted to see if she could do it.'"

"That sounds reasonable enough."

"This is a girl who thinks the natural use for a rune that glows is to put it on food and eat it."

"Right. I wish she hadn't done that, even if it is safe. It's not a good habit."

"What, eating your experiments? I think so long as they remember decent safety practices, they'll be okay."

"You mean so long as Oren does."

"I think you're being too hard on Sarepta. 'Creative' isn't always dangerous. I think it will only get dangerous if we don't pay attention to her, and the next thing Oren teaches her 'to see if she can do it' is the reductor curse or something. She only gets in trouble if she feels ignored or bored."

"Really? I hadn't noticed. I hope that doesn't mean I'm ignoring or boring her."

"We probably both are, some of the time. It's not really avoidable, although honestly it would help if you would spend more time at home." This was a sore point, but by mutual agreement it was only ever mentioned in passing.

"I suppose."

"So should we get her a wand for Christmas, like she asked? I'm sure Ollivander's will be open this weekend . . ."

"Would that work? I mean, wouldn't she just blow things up or get frustrated, at her age?"

"Within two hours of learning her first magic, she created more functional magic items than I did my whole first three years at Hogwarts." He paused, realizing something. "Even if you don't count the ones she ate. I think Oren has the right idea, when he says he has no idea what she can do."

"Well, let's take her in and see what Ollivander has to say. How is Oren doing?"

"Like his sister, impressive. He doesn't have all that much power—I asked him to transfigure a five-inch wide paperweight, and he could only get it to something about twice that diameter. But he didn't have any trouble when I asked him to turn it into a hedgehog, which was the most complicated thing I could think of off the top of my head.

Same with charms—as long as it requires finesse but not power, he's fine. I started pushing him on charms, you know, going up a few years in the curriculum, and the only reason I stopped was that he looked so embarrassed. I think he wants us to be proud of him, but not overly impressed, which I suppose is fair. Of course that just means we have to be sneaky to avoid embarrassing him."

"Oh? How?"

"Maybe you could see how he does with some cleaning charms? Some of those can get trickier than people realize, but that can get overlooked because they are 'household charms'."

"Well, I won't let him at anything breakable. I'll try to come up with something."

"I'm pretty sure Oren wouldn't try a charm if he thought he'd break something. He's far too conservative. Sarepta, now, we'll have to be careful with."

"I suppose. Did you try anything else?"

"I gave him some puzzles and let him solve them with runes if he liked, since he's apparently been practicing them for longer. If you give him a problem he has to think about, he'll get distracted and stop worrying about whether you'll think he's showing off."

"Puzzles?"

"I put a ward on the paperweight and asked if he could break it. He used some inscriptions to store power until he could overload the ward, then grabbed the paperweight. It looked surprisingly simple when he did it, but I have no idea where he got it from.

Then I had him try to make it so I couldn't get at it. Okay, he says. So he takes a pad of paper from the shelf and started scribbling things, then asks met to leave the room when I tried to look over his shoulder. Fine, fine. He calls me back in, twenty minutes later, and the paperweight is nowhere to be seen, he's grinning, and Sarepta is giggling at me.

I ask him where it is, and he says he hid it, which made it so I couldn't get at it until I found it. It took me almost an hour before I simply gave up—I was stubborn! Turns out, he spent over half the time teaching Sarepta a notice-me-not rune, handed her a piece of chalk, and told her to put it everywhere she could think of."

"I hope she didn't put it on anything too hard to clean . . ."

"Chalk's easy to clean up, although I had to ask Sarepta to point out the runes she put on anything I might need to find later. I'm impressed he had the chalk in his pocket in the first place. So I try a general detection charm, which fails, as I expected. I start on my desk, and find the fields from three of the runes there, and manage to clean them all up, but no paperweight. I try a shelf, same thing.

I have to hand it to her, she's creative and fast. Afterwards Oren said he did it so she wouldn't give away the location by looking at it, which is just brilliant. So it turns out he spent almost all of his remaining time putting bigger notice-me-not runes on the ceiling so that I would detect the magic there and get distracted. It took me ten minutes to get through each of two corners, at which point I conceded defeat. So where do you think it was?"

"In his pocket?"

"No."

"Not in the room at all?"

"No, it was in the room. It wasn't transfigured, or put inside of anything."

"Let me guess, it was just an ordinary job of hiding it?"

"Except for the bit to foil my detection charm, yes. He stuck it to the underside of my desk, drew an anti-detection inscription around it, and left it there. No wards, no invisibility, none of Sarepta's notice-me-not runes. If I had thought to look there, I would have seen it, no problem. So the whole thing required two different runes and a sticking charm, and Sarepta did most of the work. Cleverness and attitude beats power and experience, apparently."

"Sounds like you better be more specific in your puzzles from now on."

"Definitely. I sent them to bed after that."