James Potter and the Morrigan Web

by G. Norman Lippert

  James felt a mixture of embarrassment and anger redden his cheeks. Suddenly he was very glad he had not mentioned the mysterious disembodied voice he had heard in the corridor on first night. "You're both daft," he said in a low voice, angrily staring down at his books. "You'd have to be blind not to see that Nastasia is trouble."

  "Perhaps," Scorpius admitted airily, taking off his glasses and closing his books. "Or perhaps your sister is right and you're just jealous. Nastasia is sort of intriguing. If, that is, you fancy somewhat odd girls with sketchy, troubled backgrounds."

  James glanced up at Scorpius, his brow furrowed. Was he comparing Nastasia to Petra? Scorpius merely looked back, his eyebrows lifted, a small smile on the corners of his mouth.

  After a moment James shook his head and looked back down at his homework. He didn't want to admit it, but Scorpius had struck a nerve. It wasn't that Nastasia and Petra were anything alike. In fact, it was hard to imagine two girls who were more different. And yet…

  Later that night, James did something he hadn't done in months. Before changing into his pyjamas, he took something out of his back pocket and laid it on his bed. It was a small packet of parchment, folded into a seamless envelope. He sat down next to it with a deep sigh, produced his wand, and tapped it.

  "Revelierus," he whispered.

  The packet blossomed like a paper flower, revealing a small sheaf of pages. The pages had once contained a story-- a retelling of a dream-- written in Petra Morganstern's neat cursive handwriting. She had given it to him the previous year, during their voyage to America. On that same voyage, something strange-- and powerfully magical-- had occurred between the two of them. At the height of a freak storm, Petra had gotten swept overboard, avoiding being tossed into the heaving waves by a mere length of broken rigging. James had eventually saved her, but in a way that neither of them fully understood. Something had connected them that night, a sort of unbreakable silvery cord, running from his hand to hers, saving her from the doom she seemed to wish for. For in fact, some part of Petra had wanted to die that night. James had stopped her, saved her by tapping into her own seemingly limitless magic, using the key of his unspoken love for her.

  And that magic was still there. The silvery cord, now invisible, still somehow connected them. He could feel it sometimes, especially when Petra was close by. Mostly, however, there was the erstwhile dream story. The packet of parchments had become a sort of portal into her thoughts, one that only the two of them knew about. Petra had communicated through it once before. Perhaps she would do so again.

  He leaned over the parchment, studying it by the dim moonlight of the nearby window.

  It wasn't a note this time. It was still covered in Petra's handwriting, but scribbled now, with lines overlapping other lines, some scrawled in large, looping slashes, others crammed into tight, indecipherable paragraphs and clusters. James could only make out a few words, although very little of it made sense: Judith… Izzy… fates… Marshall Parris… trans-mundane… talisman… the Collector…

  And in larger print, scribbled so haphazardly that it was almost unreadable: The Morrigan Web.

  It was all disconnected, random, as if all of Petra's most fevered thoughts had been scrawled at once, blindly, and with no relationship to one another. James wasn't sure what, exactly, he had been looking for, but one thing was certain: there were no answers to be found here. He shivered, shook his head, and then tapped the parchment once again, sealing it shut. He hid the dream story away in his trunk, closed and locked it carefully, then got ready for bed.

  Had it really been Petra that had whispered to him in the halls on first night? It certainly hadn't sounded like her. The voice had been feminine, but mad somehow. The memory of it sent a shudder down his spine.

  He remembered his father's voice from the common room grate: it was Petra, son… she flickered on and off, fluctuating all over the corridor. And then, she was just gone again.

  James shivered again as he climbed into his bed.

  Petra was powerful. So powerful that even the great Merlinus Ambrosius had failed to stop her. Perhaps the power was simply more than she could contain. Perhaps (though it pained him greatly to consider it) the Petra he had known-- and secretly fallen in love with-- truly was no more.

  It was, to be sure, a deeply sad and tragic thought.

  He rolled over.

  Eventually, he slept.

  As the first week of school wound down, James and Ralph attended their first class at Beauxbatons, Advanced Arithmatics, and finally understood what Rose had warned them about.

  The class was held in a high tower room of the Beauxbatons palace, which was (to James' eye) much newer, brighter, and gilded with wall frescoes, bevelled crystal windows and glittering gold chandeliers than Hogwarts. The Arithmatics classroom was high and airy, with open windows along one side and a wall of mirrors on the other, reflecting the light and seemingly doubling the room's size. The parquet floor was filled with a collection of strange frames, each as tall as James himself and divided by rows of metal rods strung with heavy glass beads. Beauxbatons students gathered before the frames in their immaculate powder blue silk robes, studiously sliding the beads and producing an oddly insectile clicking noise that filled the otherwise silent room.

  James and Ralph stopped in the doorway, baffled.

  "What are we supposed to do?" Ralph muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

  Another boy pushed between them, his eyes lighting up behind his glasses. "Oh! I've seen these before," he proclaimed. "Abacus! Or abaci, plural, to be precise. But look at the size of them!"

  James frowned at the boy and saw that it was Morton Comstock, the Muggle from Yorke Academy. He was followed into the room by two other boys and a pig-tailed girl with braces. She glanced at James furtively then looked quickly away. James recognized her from some of his other classes, including Wizlit. She had been part of the throng that had waylaid Professor Revalvier-- and himself-- in the library, enamoured with the idea that their beloved Harry Potter stories were actually real. Outside of that mob, however, the girl (whose name, James recalled, was Lucia) was apparently much less bold. She quickly ducked behind an unmanned abacus and peeked back through its rods and beads.

  James glanced around for a teacher but there didn't seem to be any present. "So, what's an abacus?"

  Comstock scoffed loudly. "An ancient calculator, precursor to the modern computer. Finally, a tool that makes sense in this crazy backwards magical universe of yours." He adjusted his glasses and glanced toward a large chalkboard at the head of the room. It was crammed with dense sequences of numbers, geometric diagrams, and formulae. "Oh, I see," he said smugly. "We're resolving a series of programmatic coordinates based on a predefined time-space wavelength. Time travel, perhaps. Or maybe…"

  "Space travel?" a crew-cut Muggle boy suggested hopefully.

  "That's ridiculous," Ralph scowled, installing himself uncertainly behind one of the huge abaci. He glanced at James. "Er, right?"

  James shrugged. Tentatively, he reached forward and touched one of the glass beads. "So… how's it work, then?"

  "'Ave all you worked wiz applied Arithmatics before?" asked an older Beauxbatons girl without a trace of a smile, addressing the newcomers.

  Comstock pushed his glasses up his nose with one stubby finger. "I've plotted hyperspace coordinates for faster-than-light travel in every space game since Galaxy Quest Ninety-Nine. This looks like a standard event-aversion matrix, but it isn't collision based, as far as I can tell." He frowned at the beads in front of him for a moment, then, seemingly at random, shucked four green ones to the right, two red ones to the left, and counted off seven blue beads, moving only one with a sharp, decisive click.

  "Very good," the Beauxbatons girl admitted grudgingly. "Carry on, zen. But please be extremely careful. Professor Moreau 'as entrusted 'is return to us. If you do not know exactly what you are doing, zen please, do… nothing."

  "That's my favourite thing of all to
do," Graham quipped, dropping his book bag to the floor and promptly sitting on it. James glanced at him, and then at Ralph, who merely shrugged.

  Comstock shuffled a few more beads and shook his head. "Honestly, the gaps in your schooling are big enough to drive a lorry through," he muttered. "No wonder you people can't find any work in the real world."

  "Just keep pushing beads, spod," Graham replied breezily.

  James narrowed his eyes slightly. Keeping his voice low, he asked, "What do you mean, 'in the real world?'"

  "You know what I mean," Comstock answered. "Where the rest of us all live. Where we have light bulbs and rockets and where history isn't stuck somewhere in the middle ages. We're here to learn about you lot, but it seems to me that it's going to be a lot harder for you magical types to adjust to us now that our worlds are about to come together."

  "Who says our worlds are about to come together?" Graham asked pointedly, lowering his own voice beneath the constant shuffling click of the classroom.

  "Duh," Comstock said with a roll of his eyes. "The Night of the Unveiling? Your vow of secrecy was broken when that crazy witch revealed everything last year. People are still trying to cover it all up, at least for a while, but the secret's out. Pretty soon, our world and your world are going to collide. That's why we're here. We're sort of like the front line, preparing the way. That's what Miss Corsica tells us."

  James had been preparing an angry response to Comstock's little tirade, but suddenly he glanced at the boy, wide-eyed.

  "Miss who?" he asked in a harsh whisper.

  "Miss Corsica," Comstock repeated. "She's our mediator between your schools and ours, and she's totally got your number. She says she's been studying the magical world her whole life and knows you lot like the back of her hand. She says that most of you are totally unprepared for how to deal with the 'Muggle' world. Apparently there are a few 'enlightened' witches and wizards, but I sure haven't met any yet."

  "Morton!" Lucia, the pigtailed girl, hissed from her own abacus. "Shut it, you big berk!"

  Comstock shrugged. "Who cares if they know? They'll find out soon enough, anyway."

  James shifted his stunned gaze to Ralph. "Corsica?" he whispered. "Could it be?"

  Ralph merely shook his head and frowned. "Can't be Tabitha Corsica."

  Lucia peeked through her abacus again. "You know her?"

  James glanced at her. "I don't know. If it's who we're thinking of… that would be…"

  "Hilarious," Graham nodded with a grin.

  "We'll find out tomorrow, maybe," Ralph said. "We've got our first class there at Yorke. If she's their mediator, then she'll probably be there."

  James nodded uncertain agreement. Was it possible that Tabitha Corsica had been sent to the Muggle school to manage the exchange program? Wouldn't his dad have known about that? And if it was true, what did it mean?

  Later that evening, as dinner concluded in the great hall and the enchanted ceiling began to twinkle with early stars, James and Ralph watched the enormous Clock over the head table. When it gonged the quarter hour before seven, they made their way to the tall cabinet with the double eagle carvings.

  Rose met them there dressed in her uniform, a smart pink cardigan slung over her shoulders.

  "You're not really going like that, are you?" she asked sharply, looking them up and down.

  "What do you mean?" James blinked, glancing down at his jeans and tee shirt. "It's an extracurricular club. No uniforms required. Besides, what do you know about how Americans dress?"

  "Enough to know I don't want to look like them," Rose sniffed.

  Ralph cocked his head. "What, you're not coming, too, are you?"

  "I certainly am," she replied primly. "You two aren't going to have all the fun this year. We're dying to take a look at Alma Aleron, and since this is the end of our school day, it's the perfect time for it. Besides, Zane promised he'd sneak us all around the campus."

  Ralph nodded speculatively. "Sounds like Zane."

  "Hold up," James said, "Who's 'we'?"

  "Scorpius and me," Rose answered lightly, glancing back over the hall. "Here he comes now. But you two can probably come along if you wish. We won't mind."

  James nodded sarcastically. "Oh, thanks loads."

  Scorpius joined them in front of the Alma Aleron cabinet, dressed in a natty pair of khakis and a white button-down shirt. "I see the gang is all here," he announced wryly, looking askance at James and Ralph and obviously refraining from commenting about their clothing. "Shall we, then?"

  James rolled his eyes. "Let's go already."

  The four crammed together into the cabinet, which just contained them. Scorpius pulled the door shut.

  The cabinet interior fell dark, and then flashed bright, electric blue. As one, all four students jumped. When all eight feet plunked back to the floor, the cabinet doors popped open again, now revealing a bright afternoon sky studded with clouds. Chestnut trees shushed in the near distance, overshadowing colourful gardens, fountains and statuary. Paths looped across a pristine lawn, connecting the blocky brick buildings that lined either side.

  "Smell that!" Rose declared, stepping out into the sunlight. "Honeysuckle!"

  Ralph looked up at the sun, then down at his watch. "It's just after lunchtime here," he announced. "All I smell is goulash from the cafeteria in admin hall."

  "Oh, quit showing off, Deedle," Scorpius groused, following the troop out onto the footpath. "Everyone knows you spent last year here."

  James glanced back as the cabinet doors clunked shut. Here, the cabinet was decorated with a colourfully painted woodcut of the Hogwarts crest, nearly as big as the doors themselves. The cabinet itself rested in the shadow of a large awning, situated in the centre of Alma Aleron's long, grassy mall. Three other cabinets sat beneath the awning, each facing a different direction.

  "Greetings mates!" Zane called, approaching from the direction of the gigantic brick building at the head of the mall. "Right on time. Everyone ready to have fun and do some wild and crazy stuff?"

  "Just lead on, Walker," Scorpius instructed. "Save the American uber-enthusiasm for the tourists."

  Zane cocked his head and tapped his chin with one finger. "Oh, that's funny," he said brightly, "I thought that's what you were."

  "Patches!" James cried suddenly, grinning. "Look, Ralph!"

  A short-haired calico cat came trotting lightly along the path, stopping in a dapple of bright sunlight. It sat down on its haunches and preened itself, waiting to be petted.

  "Aww!" Rose proclaimed shrilly, striding forward and dropping to one knee next to the cat. "This is Patches? I remember you talking about him last year! What a pretty, smart little kitty you are…"

  James glanced back at Scorpius, waiting for a sarcastic comment. Scorpius, who seemed to be in a particularly foul mood for some reason, merely looked away, distaste etched all over his face.

  "Welcome to the Aleron," Zane announced, unperturbed. "This here is the mall. Back that way is Zombie house, universally agreed to be the best house on campus. And over there is Administration Hall, our destination. That concludes the tour for now. Let's roll or we're gonna be all kinds of late."

  The group began to make their way along the sun-dappled path, followed casually by Patches the cat, who seemed to take every opportunity to rub up against Rose's leg as she walked.

  "See?" she said adoringly, "He likes me! What a smart kitty."

  As they approached the bulky shape of Admin Hall, James took a moment to look around at the campus and the knots of students heading to class or lounging in the sun. It was all very familiar to him, and rather comforting to come back to. On his right was the theatre where Professor Longbottom had given his lecture on Herbology. Beyond this was Faculty Row, where Petra and Izzy had lived briefly, before the debacle that had led to Petra's arrest. And just peeking over the tops of the distant trees was Pepperpock Down, the Clutchcudgel stadium, its banners waving cheerfully against the deep blue of the sky.

>   Zane led the gathering up the Admin Hall steps two at a time. As they passed into the shadow of the high clock tower, the clock itself began to gong the hour.

  "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," Zane called back. "It tolls for us. Chancellor Franklyn won't wait around."

  "Wait around?" Ralph huffed, straggling behind. "Is he going somewhere?"

  "Just you wait, Ralphinator," Zane answered with a backwards glance. "X-Comm's gotten totally quantum since Professor Jackson got involved. Who'd have thought that crusty old Stonewall would have any cool ideas about how to use technomancy for actual fun?"

  Scorpius frowned. "Fun?"

  "Yeah," James admitted, "That doesn't sound like Stonewall at all."

  Zane passed through the propped open double doors of Admin Hall and angled toward a wide staircase. "Well, I wouldn't say the word 'fun' in front of him," he admitted, lowering his voice in the echoing main hall. "But a lark's a lark, and what he and Franklyn have come up with has definite possibilities. We're hoping to try it out for the first time today."

  Before James could ask if Professor Jackson was going to be there, Zane reached the top of the staircase and turned left into a narrow doorway. Rose followed and James heard her proclamation of amazement as she stepping into the comparatively dark room.

  It was stuffy on the second floor, but much more so in the confines of the cramped room, which was cluttered with all manner of gizmos, devices and machinery. Most of it, James noticed as he looked around, seemed to be broken or disassembled, stacked and labelled on shelves and against the far wall, blocking the windows and their pulled, drab shades. A huge work table stood in the furthest reaches of the room, its surface crowded with tools, monstrous mouldy books, and what looked like a half-built clockwork giant.

  "Just imagine the nightmare of a Gauntlet that Professor Debellows would build out of all this," Ralph muttered, squinting in the dusty dimness.

  Movement behind the work table caught James' eye. He glanced up to see a strange, shambling figure emerge. Its eyes glowed green on the ends of telescopic brass stalks and its hands were complicated metal claws, snickering and ratcheting alarmingly. James stumbled back from it, bumping into Ralph, who bumped into Scorpius, nearly knocking the blond boy to the floor.