The Founders

Chapter 5

Early the next morning, Kyra woke up to the grey dawn shifting the dust motes in her room. She lay still for a moment, watching the dust dance aimlessly, fingering the charm on her necklace. Suddenly, she started and pulled the covers off her legs. Silently padding across the green pile carpet to Grace's bed, she shook her awake.

It was tradition for them to wake up early on the first day and sit on their bench by the lake, talking.

The sun was just starting to stretch across the grounds as they came down the front steps, veiling the ground in bars of milky light, the long shadows of the dark forest reaching between them. Icing-powder-frost had gathered over the grounds during the night. Where the sunlight fell, green was already beginning to show, like the colours in a picture developing.

Deciduous trees billowed out among the pines, the reddish gold leaves crisped and striking against the green, and drifting down in jewel tones to scatter on the lake's surface. In a semicircle around the lake, where it backed onto the forest, was a line of tall sentinel pines, looking down at watery reflections of themselves and watching the sunlight spread from their peak downwards.

It was in this direction that Kyra and Grace walked, cutting through a corner of the forest to reach the narrow border of pebbles between the lake and the trees. From this position, one was completed roofed in from the castle, hidden by trees.

The pebbles ran from the lake, where they were wet and shiny, right up a gentle slope to the foot of the pine-trees, where they lay scattered intermittently in the dirt and roots.

In their third year, they had with a fair amount of difficulty accioed a bench there, after they had discovered that this square foot of pebbles was the only place on the entire Hogwarts grounds where mobile phones worked. For whatever reason, there was some kind of blip in the protective Hogwarts magic there, which allowed the privileged few to access phone service.

Collapsing onto the bench, Grace watched Kyra unfold the blankets she had brought with. "Did I tell you that I met Michael's grandma?"

Michael was the boy who had spent most of the previous term leading Grace on, although she had always insisted that she was the one keeping things casual. Kyra knew that Grace felt things much more deeply than she would let most people realise, and she also knew that Michael was one of the few boys that Grace had actually introduced Kyra to her. Grace usually kept her family and her relationships separate, since, she said, family was for emotional support and she didn't need relationships to fulfil that role.

Huddling under the blankets with Grace, Kyra paused and looked over. "No," she said, pulling the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fingers. "Was it weird?"

Grace was gazing at where the water met the shore, lifting up the grit and depositing it again in swells, the sun glistening on wet sand and scattered pebbles. She half smiled and shrugged a shoulder. "We bumped into her outside his house. She invited me in for tea."

She fiddled with a loose thread on the blanket, one of those cheap ones which they brought from home, bright blue and very soft. "It was just weirdly intimate, I guess, drinking tea with his grandma and him around the kitchen table, and eating sesame snaps. Did you know that's his favourite food? Sesame seeds? I just thought, what a weird favourite food to have. Like, it's not even a food, it's an ingredient. Embarrassing."

Kyra flicked her eyes over Grace's face and took hold of one of her hands, facing the lake again. Grace shook her head in frustration, her short blond hair messy and bright in the early sunlight. The sun had completely risen above the mountains, the sky white with brightness where it framed the range, and Grace squinted, the sunlight illuminating her dark eyes to glass-brown. "Distract me, please," Grace asked, pulling her hair out from her collar.

Kyra leaned back against the bench, tipping her head back to look at the sky. It was already a fierce blue, stark against the brilliant orange and reds of the forest, and two blue finches swooped and dove in the distance. A heron picked its way along the far shore.

"Did you know that linguists can't pin down the etymological development of the word 'sesame'?" she asked the sky, her voice falling into a familiar cadence, like a story. "It's what's called a wanderwort, a wandering word, because different languages developed words for it simultaneously.

"That's because it was one of the most traded and valuable goods of the ancient world. It was the only kind of oil that the Babylonians used; Greeks and Persians used it for flour; Romans made it into a kind of sweet paste to put on bread. It has about a 60% oil content, you know? That's why it's so valuable. The word for it in Hindi is ingingi; linguists think that the word might mimic the sound that the seeds make, rattling in their pods.

"They don't really know, though. They have no idea where most of the words for sesame come from, and how they're connected." Kyra smiled in slight self-deprecation, looking at Grace. "It's one of the great mysteries of the world," she said with raised eyebrows.

Grace was smiling now. "Geez, I asked you to distract me, not bore the life out of me." Still, the familiar story-time rhythm of Kyra's voice had relaxed her enough that she settled back against the bench, Kyra's arm warm and pressed against hers.

"I have something to tell you," Kyra remembered, turning to face Grace.

"Drama or not drama?" Grace asked cheerfully, sitting up again.

"The latter." Kyra huffed, pulling her legs crossed underneath her, and holding her freezing toes. "You know my praesidio plant?"

"The illegal one?" Grace responded dryly.

Kyra ignored this. "Well, I found someone in my greenhouse, hacking it to pieces. They were wearing a cloak and ran off when I came in, but I'm pretty sure it's some new guy who's just joined. I saw him come into the entry way right after."

Grace frowned, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers. "New guy? I heard that there's a sixth year who just joined Ravenclaw." She dropped her hair. "I don't know about this, Kyra, this could be kind of dangerous. I mean, those plants are pretty valuable, right? You should probably watch out for this guy, if you really think it was him."

Kyra looked in surprise at Grace, who wasn't usually so serious. She shrugged. "Yeah, of course I'll be careful. But I'm more pissed off than anything. I think we've got DADA with the Ravenclaws later- maybe I'll ask him about it then. Either that, or I'll make him cry until he tells me." She gave Grace a little wink.

Kyra was by far the best DADA student in their year. She loved it because it was one of the few lessons where precision wasn't really necessary. Instead, you just had to be quick-thinking and aggressive and creative. Sometimes aggressively creative. It was satisfying to completely throw people off guard by using lesser-known spells, some of which weren't even classed as defensive spells.

Grace looked at her in exasperation, and threw up her hands. "All right, do what you like; you usually do. Now come on, Oscar's probably already having breakfast."

She dragged Kyra up with both hands and they made their way back to the castle, the turret windows gleaming back sunlight and squares of blue sky.