Paper Confines

xii. I Do

PAPER CONFINES.
12. / I Do

✶

Amoret cried over the grey light trickling through the windows of the Great Hall. It had been raining for five days, and all that was left was a damp fog across the courtyards, ants flooded out of their burrows, mosquitoes whizzing for blood. She'd carved X's in the swollen bites on her legs, and then A's, B's, and awkward stars. She'd rummaged every dormitory for fresh clothes and found them finally in a Slytherin boy's mahogany credence. Strange, dull uniforms, in a strange place. The trousers were fitted for men, and fell slanted on her hips. The stiff collar itched at her throat. Amoret went to Nadya's dormitory and stretched across her empty bed, though they were all empty, and cried again. The same meals sat unattended on the House tables when she left in the morning: porridge, milk, breadrolls, black pudding and cawl. Pauper's fare. She took modest spoonfuls of the last, and spat out a bleeding tooth, and fell asleep on fine china. The silence when she woke felt like something once-full that had been gouged empty.

After seven days, she went looking for answers.

Her pewter chair yawned as she sat at her desk in the library, but it showed no trace of her ghost—the outline Nadya had laughed at her for leaving behind. Amoret read until the horizon was black, but the clocks were odd and time was uncertain. She traced the lines of her stack of books, murmuring the words under her breath. Immortality, mutilation, rudimentary body. Horcrux. They formed milky clouds in the cold. Sleep blanketed her shivering body.

She shook awake from a nightmare. She read again. She left notes in the margins.

The body bound by a horcrux could not be destroyed. It would, instead, linger in spirit and soul. Amoret dipped her quill in the ink.

Linger how? she wrote. What form would it take? What would happen to someone trapped in one?

It had never been done. Her cursive sagged.

She dug through the restricted section again, but as she knew, details on horcruxes were almost impossible to come by. Even the darkest witches and wizards were wary of toeing the line between life and death. Branches of necromancy were the most unpredictable sort of magic. They stole what death was not ready to give, and death was an unforgiving power to usurp.

The mechanisms of sacrifice had too many faults: love interrupted, magic barricaded, survival instinct drove death backward. Those who wanted to live weren't defeated easily.

Amoret only had it in her to laugh under her breath and wince at her sore lungs—precisely why he picked you, you sorry girl. She was chosen to live for the same reason he'd chosen Ruby and Myrtle to die.

Amoret left her books scattered on the desk.

The Room of Requirement hadn't changed since she left it. In nearby corridors, the serpentine voices still murmured her name, still drawled out the syllables and then slithered into the cracks. The rose-and-thorn door loomed in passing. Amoret waited for it to transform. She called on the familiar black panels and the golden flower handle. It remained the same. It asked to be fed. She wanted to be pricked by it, and bleed, and watch the rose vines fill red like intravenous tubes.

The want frightened her. She walked away, and the voices didn't follow.

Amoret filled a bag in the afternoon. From the kitchens: a canteen, a steak knife, two dishrags, and a paper roll of saltines and meat. From the dormitories: a thick woollen coat, a lantern, and a change of socks. From the hospital wing: bandages, Skele-gro, and a blood replenishing potion she'd left on the nightstand during her first night. Her coat pockets were already full of little vials of dittany and dragon's blood and rue from the top of Slughorn's cabinet, and admittedly, she might have been going overboard. It was only a night trip. As far as she could go past the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest until she reached... what? An invisible border? A door back home? An endless replica of the world with no one else in it?