James glanced down. A chunk of rotten railing lay on the deck, transported aboard along with himself by Zane’s levitation spell. But as James watched, the broken wooden chunk melted away like an ice sculpture, losing all colour and draining into a loose puddle.
Behind him, a hunk of roof did the same. In a moment, all the gazebo debris had vanished into nothing but melted seawater.
“Oh no,” Rose said, her voice high and faint. She ran to the railing and peered out over the waves.
Beyond her, the fog was drifting away, fading from view.
Revealing…
Nothing. There was no encircling shoreline or fringe of woodland. Only dark waves marching off into further and further leagues, eventually stretching all the way to the horizon.
James reached the railing alongside Rose and looked out, speechless.
Faintly, Zane asked, “We’re not in any country lake… are we?”
“They got rid of us,” Scorpius mused aloud, almost as if he was impressed. “Odin-Vann and The Lady of the Lake. They got rid of us because we were the only ones who know enough to stop them.”
“But, where are we?” James asked, banging his fist down onto the railing.
“I think where we are matters less,” Zane said, nudging James and pointing upward, “than that does.”
James looked up. Revealed by the retreating fog, a low, hulking boil of clouds bore down on the Gertrude, driven before a rising, whipping wind. It was a storm front, dark as a bruise and flickering with gouts of lightning, rumbling with distant thunder.
“Am I crazy,” Rose breathed, eyes wide, “or does that storm seem to be aiming directly for us?”
“Into the wheelhouse,” James cried, finally engaging to action.
He turned, grabbing Zane and pulling him along. “We need to get back into the tunnels below, and as soon as possible! The storm won’t be able to reach us there, and we can get back.”
Fat drops of rain began to pepper the ship, striking with stinging force, pinging off the metal wheelhouse and pattering in the sails.
Together, the foursome poured through the door of the wheelhouse.
Scorpius tugged it shut with a heavy clang.
James moved behind the wheel, which was turning loosely back and forth with the increasing rock of the ship.
Wind suddenly tore over the deck outside, whumping in the sails and singing a high, whipping note in the rigging.
Scorpius scanned the instruments ranged below the window.
Spying a large brass dial with an attached lever, he gripped it and tugged.
The lever ratcheted, turning the dial past several notches. When it stopped, the readout showed a single word, white letters printed on black: HOGWARTS.
The wheel began to turn in James’ hand, spinning ponderously and bringing the Gertrude about. With a lurch, it rocked forward. A spray of mist began to plow up beneath the bow. Then, heavily, the bow began to rise and fall on the waves, striking with sickening force and sending up gouts of spray.
The Gertrude drove onward, faster, but it did not submerge.
This was all part of Judith’s design, James realized. To maroon them far from any hope of escape, to set a murderous storm upon them, preventing their return, and hopefully killing them all. It was just as Scorpius had said: this was the final act, and the stage was set. It was the Triumvirate brought to horrifying life: a ruse of an ocean journey, a magical storm racing them back, and the villain Donovan, along with his ally, the Lady of the Lake this time instead of the Marsh Hag, forging ahead, ready and prepared to freely execute their final, fatal plan.
And yet their intent was no mere wedding conspiracy in pursuit of a seat of power. Their plan was to somehow kill Petra, leaving Odin-Vann to take over as Judith’s host, harnessing her chaotic power instead of thwarting it.
As James finally grasped this horrible change of events, a surge of undiluted anger welled up in his chest. Odin-Vann had lied to Petra all along about helping her to fulfill her destiny as the Crimson Thread.
He had never intended to help her save the world. He had tricked her, sabotaged her, fed her guilt and the madness of her scheme, only to betray her in the end in the worst way possible.
“But,” Rose asked James, not taking her eyes from the rushing waves and the advancing, terrible storm, “How can Odin-Vann and Judith kill Petra? They know she made a Horcrux.”
“Potter here knows better than anyone else,” Scorpius answered darkly. “Horcruxes can be created, and they can also be destroyed.
They needed Petra alive for some reason, until this moment. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
James knew that Scorpius was right. But he had a deep suspicion that Judith’s answer would be a lot simpler, and more final, than even Scorpius suggested.
23. – Chaos Descends
The Gertrude could not outpace the storm. Even as it plowed forward through the rising waves, the arms of the tempest encroached on both sides, surrounding the blockade runner in a smothering embrace.
Wind tore across the deck in capricious gusts, shrieking in the rigging and whumping the furled sails hard enough to shudder the entire boat.
In the wheelhouse, the windows rattled in their frames. Raindrops fell hard enough to ring on the roof like coins.
“It’s slowing us down,” Zane observed, raising his voice over the gale. “The storm is coming around against it, forcing us backwards!”
Scorpius leaned toward the window and peered up. “It’s the sails and masts,” he said. “Too much wind resistance.”
James understood. “We need to lighten our load and get more streamlined. Come on!” He reached for the door.
“What are you going to do?” Rose asked, her eyes wide. And yet James saw that she already had an inkling of his plan. She drew out her wand in preparation.
He nodded, one hand on the door. “We need to strip away the masts, the sails, the rigging, everything that’s slowing us down.”
He shoved open the door against a sudden, shocking force of wind. Rain sprayed in, immediately spattering his face and hair. He squinted against it and pressed out into the gale. Rose followed, with Scorpius and Zane right behind.
The driving rain was like icy pebbles pelting their heads and shoulders. Indeed, the deck was scattered with tiny knots of hail. They rolled with the increasing sway of the ship, pushed by ever harder gusts of wind.
“Hagrid will likely kill us!” Rose cried over the storm as James raised his wand, aiming at the foremast.
James hoped they lived long enough to find out. He sighted down his wand, squinting one eye shut, and shouted, “Convulsis!”
The bolt struck the mast just below a junction of pulleys and netting. With a deafening crack and flash of purple, the base exploded, spraying splinters in every direction. The mast crunched down, still momentarily suspended in its web of rigging, but then the force of the storm caught it, pushed it, and the mast keeled over ponderously, dragging whips of rope and torn netting with it. The boat rolled and the mast fell into the waves, where it was tugged away from the ship completely.
From the rear of the ship, another flash and crack marked the aft mast. Zane and Scorpius backed away quickly, peering up as the mast creaked, snapped, and tottered backwards, spearing into the waves beyond the stern.
Suddenly, sickeningly, time seemed to double back on itself in James’ mind. As he watched the aft mast break and tear away, the Gertrude became the Gwyndemere. He heard Petra’s surprised scream as the falling boom swept her overboard, felt the weight of her hanging from the back of the ship over hungry, mountainous waves. He brooch fell away, and her eyes pleaded with him. Let me go, James, she said with terrible calm…
He was shaken back to the present as Rose tugged him by the arm. “The lifeboats,” she cried, pointing. There were only two, one on either side of the bow, lying upside down and battened down with canvas straps.
Together, they broke the straps with their wands and blasted the boats
over the side, taking some of the railing with them.
James paused and looked back over the ship, shielding his eyes with one hand. The Gertrude was no longer a high, noble craft but a streamlined, if ragged, bullet shape, stripped down to a low profile that noticeably cut the waves much faster, driven by its magic-powered paddle wheels.
“That’s the best we can do,” Zane called, returning from the stern, his hair plastered to his forehead by rain. “We blasted away everything that wasn’t bolted down, and plenty that was!”
“Let’s go back inside,” James shouted and pointed to the wheelhouse, which was now the highest point on the ship.
The storm boomed thunder and spat lightning, illuminating miles of waves like a flashbulb image. The four students clambered back into the relative warmth of the wheelhouse and James resumed the wheel, catching it as it spun sluggishly.
“What now?” Rose asked, wiping her wet hair out of her face.
James considered this, and shrugged a little helplessly. “We see if we can outrun it.”
Amazingly, this did now seem possible. Relieved of its excess weight and drag, the Gertrude plowed ahead like a torpedo. The storm still strained on both sides, trying to close in on the little ship, but it could only keep pace. Slowly, it began to fall behind.
Within a few minutes, the waves ahead shrank from sharp-peaked hills for the Gertrude to climb to streaming whitecaps for the ship to cut through. The blasting wind gradually diminished, replaced by warmer currents. Thunder still boomed, sounding like an enraged beast cheated of its prey, but from greater distance.
And then, so suddenly that James gasped and flailed with one hand, grabbing for the steadying bar behind him, the Gertrude angled down like a whale. Its bow plunged into the ocean, buried itself in the waves, and the entire ship followed. Water rushed up over the diminished shape of the boat, overtook the windows, and swallowed the Gertrude with a deep, gurgling roar. Dimness filled the wheelhouse as the bow dropped first into rushing green pressure, and then into swift and total darkness. The lantern was gone, of course, having been blasted away along with the foremast.
James could see nothing. The ship creaked ominously all around, adjusting to the pressures of the deep.
“I hate this part,” Rose said in a strained voice.
The external pressure changed somehow. James felt it in his stomach and the very sockets of his eyes. With a shudder and a blast of bubbles, the Gertrude sucked into some smaller, tighter space, accelerating at an even more alarming rate than before. Stripped of its external structures, the ship was an underwater arrow, careening into blind darkness.
The ship suddenly dropped, fell through a burst of loose water, and landed with a shuddering thud in the sluice of the returning tunnel.
Freed of the surrounding depths, it sped onward, rocking with the angle of the walls.
The storm was behind them now, and they were utterly beyond its angry reach. It may be a magical storm, as James suspected, but they would outpace it easily, at least until they reached their destination.
All that was left was to return to Hogwarts and hope that they weren’t too late to stop whatever Judith and Odin-Vann intended to do.
With this in mind, James leaned forward into the rushing dark, peering uselessly through the black window. He groped and put his hands on the wheel again, doing whatever he could to keep the ship pointing straight ahead, willing the boat to go even faster.
“We can’t confront them, you know,” Scorpius said, sensing James’ thoughts. “Judith and Odin-Vann. She’s too powerful. And he countered my stunning spell before it so much as left my wand. He can deflect any spell we might cast. There’s no way to battle either of them.”
“I don’t care about battling them,” James said grimly. “We just need to get to Petra. We have to tell her what we know.”
After a worried moment, Zane asked, “And then what?”
James narrowed his eyes in the blind dark. With conviction, he answered, “Then she can battle them.”
The return journey seemed to take far longer than James thought possible. The Gertrude barreled onward through endless curves and pitches. Rose and Scorpius braved the rushing wind and sloping decks to leave the wheelhouse and climb down to the hold, hoping that the motion would somehow be less pronounced below. Only Zane stayed with James. Neither spoke, but James was glad of his old friend’s presence. After what felt like hours, James loosened his grip on the wheel. His fingers ached from strain, and his eyes bulged for light.
Zane sensed James’ respite. “This isn’t the same without the Ralphinator, is it?” he said for the second time.
James sighed deeply and nodded in the dark. He knew Zane couldn’t see him, but didn’t think it mattered.
Zane spoke again. “I wonder what our parents are up to right now?” He seemed to consider this in the rushing darkness, and then said, “Actually, I know what my parents are probably doing. They’re home in St. Louis starting to think about dinner. Greer is probably at the table doing her homework and being really grumpy about it, while my dad teases her, thinking it will put her in a better mood, although it never does. They’re Muggles, so they don’t know anything about halted destinies, and rogue sorceresses, and magical snafus threatening to end the whole universe. I think, for the first time in my life… I’m a little jealous of them.”
“My dad is probably home in his office,” James mused quietly.
“Probably looking over the latest reports and emergency procedures, but not really reading any of it. Just moving pages around while his brain spins on like a machine, trying out ideas, testing plans, figuring out what he’s going to do next. I’ve seen him like that a thousand times.”
“We should call him somehow when we get to Hoggies,” Zane said with resolve. “He’s Harry Potter. He’ll know what to do.”
James shook his head slowly. “Do you remember what the dryad said, back during our first year?”
Zane blew out a breath, as if he’d been secretly thinking the same thing. “Yeah. She said your father’s battle was over. She said this one would be all yours.”
“Well, fortunately, it’s not all mine. I’ve got you, and Rose, and Scorpius.”
Zane seemed to accept this. Then, uncomfortably, he added, “But no Ralph.”
“Ralph is his own problem now,” James said, half angry, half sad.
Gradually, light began to blossom far ahead. James at first wondered if his senses were teasing him, but the glow quickly resolved into a solid blur, deep blue, reflecting on the rushing river and the walls of its tunnel, growing with increasing speed.
James tensed to alertness and gripped the ship’s wheel again.
“Looks like we’re almost back,” Zane said, approaching the windows and peering out.
James suddenly didn’t feel ready. He realized now that he had drifted into a sort of stunned stupor, lulled by the motion of the ship and the timelessness of the dark. Now, adrenaline surged through his body like electricity, bringing with it a sick dread. He felt the weight of his wand in his pocket, and wondered how soon he might need to draw it, to use it to defend either his own life or someone else’s.
The blue light grew to fill the tunnel, but remained dim and murky, rushing forward to illuminate the ship.
“Something’s wrong,” James said, almost to himself.
Instead of angling out into the open air of the moonpool, the tunnel river rose suddenly, washing up the tunnel walls and closing over the bow of the Gertrude. The ship bobbed upward with it, rising on the sudden tide until the wheelhouse roof crunched against the ceiling, screeching and scraping with deafening force until the roof began to cave in over James’ and Zane’s heads. They ducked instinctively, eyes wide with fear.
Then, with a rushing whump, the river blasted over the ship completely, submerging it in dim blue depth. The Gertrude sank away from the tunnel ceiling, fortunately, but began to turn, rolling into a sluggish corkscrew. James held onto the ship’s wheel whi
le Zane grappled with the railing behind, struggling to stay on his feet as the wall and floor began to switch places.
The view ahead changed. The ship shot out of the confines of the tunnel into some larger space full of murky, shifting depths. James couldn’t recognize it at first, if only because he was looking at it sideways, from the odd capsizing perspective of the ship. Then, with a cold shock, he recognized the huge circular space, the row of tunnel mouths, the terraces leading up to the closed and locked door. It was the cavern beneath the lake, only completely submerged now, dense with shifting beams of what could only be moon glow sifting down from the lake far above.
Something disastrous had happened, flooding the erstwhile moonpool.
Shapes swam through the dimness, darting between shadows, glinting like metal in the dim moonlight. James couldn’t tell for certain, but he had a cold suspicion that the shapes were not fish.
The Gertrude slowed as it propelled out into the airless abyss, still turning, turning upside down. James and Zane clambered over each other, banging from the wheelhouse’s walls and tumbling to its ceiling.
Noises boomed up from the ship as its contents shifted, rolled, crashed through corners and angles. James hoped, fleetingly, that Rose and Scorpius were hanging on tight somewhere, safe from the loose cargo.
The Gertrude was angling upwards now, even as it continued to corkscrew, tumbling slowly upright again. Through the windows, the beams of moonlight broke into tatters, resolved into rolling facets— waves seen eerily from below. They rushed closer, grew larger, and James tightened his grip on the wheel.
With a thunderous roar, the ship exploded to the surface, crashing down and bobbing crookedly on oily waves, where it listed precipitously, streaming water from its decks.
James was bruised and sore from his tumble around the interior of the wheelhouse, but he forgot his own pains entirely as water ran from the windows, revealing the view beyond.
Hogwarts castle was lit against the blue night sky by a seething yellow glare from below. James could not see its source beyond the trees, but the flicker of fire was unmistakable. Shadows moved past the trees, forming a mass of silhouettes, some flitting in furtive groups, others worryingly large and lumbering. And then, as the crash and trickle of water fell away, James heard voices as well. Echoing over the lake came shouting and bellows of rage or pain, the distinct roar of a large and angry crowd.
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 56
