Paper Confines

xii. I Do

She had no idea, but she needed to find out.

In an hour, she was trekking along the wall of the woods downing her second swig of Skele-gro that day. Her bones were still aching where they'd been cracked and bent stumbling down the hill of Tom's meadow, and now she crept sorely up another. The liquid burned her throat and sizzled in the pit of her stomach. She kept on, and by dusk, arrived at a long, colourless pasture. Hogwarts was a vague cluster of ramparts and towers against the purple sky, and Amoret sunk to the grass to watch night fall.

She wondered in the dark about Scotland, and Greenock, and redcapped faeries who could smell wars before they came. Sometimes Amoret still smelled war too. She wondered about all the blood fields, about how they dried, how deep the red ran, how many unnamed carcasses scattered the soil. She imagined ants weaving through orifices in lungs and skulls and blood-brothers joined at skeleton fingers, buried together. She imagined they built castles. She imagined Morrìgan, washing the dead, pink foam bubbling and wheezing under her cloth. It all belonged to creation—as in larva and corpse, as in river and rain, as in moon, Mother, Maiden, Crone; as in death fertilizing life. Amoret wondered about birds, but there were none here.

She ate the meat and the saltines and stretched to stand.

Her lantern guided her in the dark. She trailed sleepily beside the Forbidden Forest with her free hand around her wand, and for a while, there was only grass and sky and a disconcerting quiet that seemed absent of all life, until the leftover fog thickened to white mist. Amoret squinted at the light, but light didn't feel like the right word. There was no glow. No golden sheen of sun warming her hands. No moonlight kissing her blue or fire flickering in the dark. It was just white, growing, swallowing, hungry. It felt light under her feet, and her shoes scratched it like pen on parchment. The quiet was different here. Flat and long, instead of round and hollow. Wax dripped from her lantern and stained the whiteness gold like a letter seal.

This was the end, and it was never-ending.

Amoret took careful, breathless steps backward, and had never been so relieved to feel the dark embracing her again.

She couldn't sleep the next morning. Nadya's blankets curled around her but wouldn't warm, and Amoret couldn't stop thinking about the blank pages surrounding the castle. She rolled in bed. Back and forth, outstretched and fetal, until she tossed the quilt to the ground and groaned into her palms. She didn't have it in her to cry anymore. She drew A's and B's into Nadya's pillowcase and laughed at the trinkets in her drawers. Butterknives, wishbones, earrings bent to slash, a bottle of firewhiskey, and about fifteen sugar quill sticks tucked back into their wrappers. If she could, she'd tell Nadya she was going to get bugs if she didn't clean up her mess.

Amoret swelled with guilt, and then longing. She missed her.

The Black Lake glimmered like dozens of emeralds through the window. No fish swam in its waters. Nothing seemed to live here that was bigger than what could be put under a microscope. She'd thought about it—dwelled on the possibilities every time she noted a new insect. Little white moths, mosquitoes, ants, and more damselflies than she'd ever seen at Hogwarts before. Nymphs, larvae, hatchlings. They waded the lake, and lived where they were usually swallowed by fish or frogs. Amoret had a few bold theories on why they were here, only she wasn't bold enough to trust her intuition, so she let the ideas slip away.

She was coming to realize there were too many questions she couldn't answer. Not on her own.

Her fingers found the firewhisky and rapped on the glass in consideration. If she could hear her father now, he'd be using all the words that sailors often did. If he were corporeal, tangible, he'd put his ivory hand to the bottle and pull it away. But she couldn't hear him, and she knew she'd never feel him.