The Founders

Chapter 8

"The statue of Remus Lupin," Kyra muttered as she made her way along the fourth-floor corridor. Outside the windows, she could see some fifth years playing quidditch in the blustery autumn sunlight, yelling and laughing. The afternoon light had a rich quality and warmed the stone in squares beneath the windows, the corridor stretching out empty and bright ahead of her.

Just before she reached the statue, she came across a narrow stone arch doorway set into the wall with a large window and ledge behind it. Entering this shallow arch, she saw that directly to her left was a wooden door, with the print of the deathly hallows burned blackly into it. She ran a finger over the rough grain of the black line and, feeling foolish, said "confringo" to the door.

The door clicked and swung open. Kyra thought idly that it was lucky that she couldn't properly do wandless magic. Otherwise, she would have set the door on fire. Maybe that's how my parents set themselves on fire. Kyra felt morbidly amused at her intrusive thought. She closed the door behind her and let out a quick breath of surprise, leaning her back against the door.

The library consisted of one small room, with bookshelves reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Shelves had even been fitted to surround the one large gothic window so that no part of the walls was uncovered. It was small and womblike, carpeted in Persian rugs which were layered untidily over the floor.

A small vase of roses, almost completely dried out, was placed below the closed window and the old, sleepy smell of rotting roses pervaded the air, mingled with the smell of dust. The room was breathless and still, as though a rug had been thrown over it.

She pulled off her jumper and dropped it to the ground, her shirtsleeves rolled up to her forearms. Unlatching the window, Kyra pushed open the pane and leaned her shoulders out, her elbows propped on the windowsill.

The day felt exactly how it looked; breezy and fresh. Kyra could still see the quidditch pitch in the distance, beyond the greenhouses, players floating and diving above it like wasps.

Though it was only midmorning, the sun was already at its peak and she closed her eyes for a moment, arms and cheeks prickling in the warmth of the sunlight. With a sigh, she left the window swung open and turned back to the room. Walking around the perimeter, she ran her hand along the spines, and pulled out a few books that might be useful, cradling them on her hip. When she circled back around to the wall adjacent to the window, she found that what she had taken to be a rolling library ladder was in fact an actual ladder, leading up through a hole in the ceiling.

She dropped the books and her bag to the ground and placed her hands on a lower rung of the ladder, her wand gripped against the wood. Levitating her belongings up beside her, she climbed up the rungs until her head poked through a trapdoor to the second floor, and pulled herself up.

This room was exactly like the lower level, except that it had two windows side by side, and the roof was vaulted, rather than flat, with rafters crisscrossing it. Sunlight flooded in through the windows and lit up floating dust motes to embers. The floor was a light, uncarpeted wood and there was a faint smell of cedar oil. It was as though the library had once been one tall, well-esque room which someone had spliced in two, creating two smaller box rooms on top of one another.

Settling herself on the ground, Kyra knelt below one of the windows, which she had opened as well, and pulled out the entire collection of Gilderoy Lockhart. They were all large books bound in beautiful silks of various bright colours.

She transfigured Voyages with Vampires into a purple rug to cover the bare wooden floor and, for good measure, turned the rest of the collection into fat cushions that she arranged below the windows. Admiring her handiwork, which looked like some sort of luxurious divan, Kyra was pleased to find that Lockhart's books were useful for one thing at least.

She went to work compiling a stack of books, and pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment on which to write a list of the particular spells that she wanted to master. Her idea was that Alexander's schooling had evidently gotten him further through the syllabus than they were, and she wanted to catch up.

She didn't truly believe that he was dangerous, but it was still a matter of pride, and being able to fend him off her greenhouse.

Scribbling in her illegible, rounded letters, she recalled again how Natalie had once commented how similar her writing was to her father, peering over her shoulder at the kitchen table one school afternoon. Ever since, Kyra had tried to find old letters written by her father, searching their attic and even ransacking Natalie's old trunks.

The problem was that most of Kyra's parents' belongings were still in their ancestral home in Wales, in which they had died. Kyra had never yet been able to bring herself to go back. Besides, she had always hidden her attempts to recover scraps of her parents, since she never wanted Natalie and Carson to think that they weren't enough for her.

At the sound of the bell ringing out suddenly, she jumped. Throwing her belongings haphazardly back into her bag, she left the books strewn across the floor, the pillows a mess of colour. She hurled herself down the ladder, scraping a thumb painfully against the wood, and jumped the final few rungs, pulling the library door shut behind her.

Outside the window, the quidditch pitch was empty and sun was in the tops of the trees. The grass looked mottled in the low sunlight, clumps of grass casting their own shadow. She slapped the wall with one hand and raced along the corridor, takings the stairs down two at a time, her bag hitting against her thigh. Skidding around the corner to the Charms corridor, she hurried past a few portraits of old Charms teachers, and tried to steady her breathing.

Usually, Professor Lingard, the Charms teacher, was fairly laid back; as one of the youngest professors, he liked to be considered cool by his students. He wore gold eye liner around his eyes, and dyed his cropped curly black hair white, in contrast with his bronze skin.

However, he also hated any infringement of his authority and hated to seem undermined. Considering this was the first lesson back from the summer, Kyra doubted that he would be particularly forgiving.

She clicked the door quietly open, sliding her body surreptitiously in. "Ah, Kyra, my favourite student," Professor Lingard intoned, welcoming her sardonically and she stopped short. "So kind of you to join us. Perhaps you would like to aid in a demonstration today?"

"You're joking," she returned thoughtlessly, her eyes scanning the room. Ravenclaws, again. In the far corner, Kyra caught sight of Alexander sitting alone, his legs stretched out, trying to supress his laughter. Well, he seemed to have recovered his mood enough to laugh at her. She narrowed her eyes at him, before returning her gaze to Lingard.

Professor Lingard looked mildly offended. "Take a seat before I give you detention for lateness and insolence."

Kyra moved in relief to where Grace had saved her a seat.

"But, yes," the Professor continued, turning back to the board. "I was joking," he finished with a smirk.

Kyra sat down heavily beside Grace and dropped her face into her hands. "I can't believe I'm being bullied by teachers," she muttered.

The rest of the lesson didn't improve. Lingard had them working on the impossibly difficult Protean charm; they had to charm the pattern on one coin to be mirrored by other coins. Kyra was generally hopeless at Charms, since, like Transfiguration, it required a ridiculous amount of precision and pretty spell work.

Her mood soured further when she saw Alexander, having already completed the assignment, leaning backwards in his chair and creating coloured images of vibrant sparks. Green sparks of different hues danced together to coalesce into the outline of mountains, individual pine trees visible on the slopes before merging with cobalt blue sparks to form the blurry reflections of trees in a lake.

The sparks kept shifting like pixels as Alexander moved his wand through the air and restlessly became new images. It was certainly pretty spell work, she had to admit.

She turned back to her own piece of metal, prodding it with her wand. There was a little spark of blue light, and the acrid smell of burning. Smoke wreathed from the coin, clearing to reveal a cigarette hole of melted metal.