Almost

Chapter 7: Questions for a Hat

It was dark when Katherine was trying to force herself out of bed the next morning. She was far better at staying up late than getting up early. In a haze, she took the ring off, jolting upright in bed within seconds.

"Right," she muttered to herself. "Here we go."

Her hair still wet from her shower, she opened her closet and scanned her options. She wasn't going for anything important, but she had only ever seen McGonagall in robes, which felt formal. But Care of Magical Creatures seemed to lend itself to pants. And something about the castle screamed cold, even in May. She settled on a pair of black jeans. She wanted to wear green just to give her father a hard time, but she landed instead on a grey long sleeve shirt and threw her green cardigan in her backpack just in case.

With her hair in soft curls, she wandered down to the kitchen. She laughed when she saw Crawley at the table hunched over two books and a notebook. His left fingers were trailing over the lines of text and holding his spot as his eyes darted between the pages. True to his wizarding education, his right hand was twirling a quill.

"Ezra," she said softly, causing him to nearly jump out of his chair. "Being up this late is my thing. You should be asleep."

"What time is it?" he said, rolling his shoulders back.

"Just past two in the morning. I'm getting ready to go to the Burrow to meet Charlie and George."

"Did you manage to get any sleep, or have you just been working away up there?"

"No, you're the only one burning the midnight oil. I crashed around 9:30."

"That's unlike you," he said, turning back to the books. "Hey, does the word 'screen' mean anything to you?"

"No, why?"

"This poem we were looking at, it talks about her giving in 'to the tempting veil.' That's the tempering, right?"

She leaned her forearms on his shoulders and peered over to read, though she could recall the verse well. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure."

"I've been looking to see if veil comes up anywhere else. I can't imagine this is the only story about this woman."

"Lee made it sound like they were one-off stories, like campfire tales."

"They are, but look here," Crawley started flipping through the larger book to pages where he had stuck little pieces of paper as bookmarks. "This is the rune for 'veil.' And this," he said, flipping many pages ahead, "is the rune for 'screen.' They're really similar, would get easy to get mixed up. Could have been transcribed wrong and no one would catch it. But, here," he pointed to the leather book, "this story talks about a screen that was worn by the only survivor of a siege, but you wouldn't wear a screen. And in the next line are the runes for 'roar' and 'vessel,' which can't be a coincidence—"

"What are you saying?" she said, trying to get him to slow down.

"This screen story, see how this line comes around," he explained, pointing at what just looked like scribbles to Katherine, "that means it's a name, not the normal rune. But the rune the name is attached to," he riffled through the pages of the bigger book again, "is this. Bury. And the name variation of that rune crops up all over this book. I have to keep translating, but listen to this one so far. 'She hid herself with fear. The men came and went, cutting magic off at the neck save this one frozen observer. She something something something horrified by the scene before her, considered abandoning her strength for good. But it lurked and observed and waited for something something something.'"

"And you think her hiding was with a tempering?"

"Maybe," he said, rubbing his temples. "I have to keep digging. If she is someone who reoccurs in the stories, we might be able to find some history about her or tie her to a real person."