Paper Confines

iv. Magpie Impulse

PAPER CONFINES.
04. / Magpie Impulse

✶

There was a clock somewhere.

"Out of my way... you can't seriously think... Amoret Banks... Head Girl!"

It ticked and sounded like the first beat in her father's tapping feet, his shanties, his songs from the sea. Tales of caught fish and sailors, siren songs and fair ladies who waited at the shore. Songs for all the places she'd never get to see.

"Belahue... petrified before..."

Young Amoret tapped her feet on the kitchen table and sang. The window was open and night sighed through the curtains, warm bread cooking in the oven, candles flickering on the mantelpiece. This was home. Mum was laughing about something rude the Van Deusen's had said about their front garden. She said if you were going to be nasty you might as well be creative. Her hair had started to streak with grey, and she didn't know yet that she was dying, and she had almost no wrinkles between her brow; only crow's feet and creases in her smile.

"And I'm telling... you know her... no, I'm not drunk!"

Back then she was Bitsy. Not Banks. Rarely Etta. She had skinny little legs, just like her sisters before they grew into them too.

"Just needs time... sort herself..."

Light peered in the mirage. There were figures encircling her.

Let me stay, Amoret pleaded, let me go home.

"Look!... she's—Banks?... son of a..."

Her father's hand cupped her cheek. He was alive then. She swore it. But the light drank any image of him away.

"Banks!"

Nadya's eyes were basins of undercurrent when Amoret woke; pockets of living moonrise.

Amoret couldn't manage more than a grunt before Nadya was pushed away by a prodding hand. She didn't look to care much that it was Headmaster Dippet's hand, or that standing behind him—

"...Minister?"

Minister of Magic, Sir Leonard Spencer-Moon, stood in a grey, silken robe, wearing rectangular spectacles down the bridge of his nose and a long black overcoat. Amoret blinked dubiously at the sight of him. He smiled like there was a canker-sore pressing inside his cheek.

"Amoret Banks." Her name sounded regal in the inflection of his voice.

Amoret wanted to say all of the things she'd planned to say to any single Minister of Magic, but she'd never felt so far from the words. Everything was spinning and her head was pounding. The Minister—why would the Minister be here?

But there were plenty more where he'd come from. Colette stood taller than most in the throng of professors and investigators standing beside him, probably still in her heels, worrying on fingernails that were red with the fixation of her teeth.

Red. The colour of drowning teeth and a broken skull and a liquid halo. Amoret remembered it like a terrible dream. She'd fainted. Hard on the stone floor. No wonder her head hurt; if she had it in her to reach for it she wondered if she'd be stitched and wrapped in gauze or if the fall hadn't been so bad. It felt bad, but that could have been a million other things.