Spells in Silence

Chapter 37: More Meetings

The sun shone cheerfully overhead, buoying Hazel's spirits even as she grew more and more frustrated.

She had been walking around the periphery of the grounds for close to an hour, searching fruitlessly for a route of escape.

Professor Sprout had told her the previous day in Diagon Alley that the anti-teleportation magic covering the castle was tied to the walls, and that meant that if she ever wanted to leave the castle and grounds for any reason at all, she needed to find away around that.

Unfortunately for her, she was already on the short side for her age, and the stone walls had clearly been built with defense of the school as the highest priority.

The individual stones were each the size of her torso, and they were stacked ten feet high along the length of the wall.

A massive wrought iron gate twice that height was the obvious route in and out, but despite her best efforts Hazel had been unable to even start climbing it.

Every single one of the bars was slicker than anything else she had encountered throughout her travels, for which magic was the only obvious explanation.

On the opposite side of the campus was the train station where they had all arrived on the first night, but when she checked that possible exit, the stairs up to the platform had vanished to who-knew-where and all the arches had been blocked off with solid wooden doors that she could not recall seeing the night she first stepped off the train.

The gate was out. The train station was out. So far, the wall was out. Hazel would not deny that she already felt a sense of wanderlust luring her back to the neverending roads, but she was thankful that it was still only a low-level itch in the back of her mind for now. If she remained stuck here in this one little patch of land for months and months, though, trapped in a stone box like an animal in a cage…

She shook her head, focusing on the here and now instead of possibilities she would not let become real. There was a way out; she just needed to find it. As far as she could tell from looking across the campus, she had examined three of the four 'sides' of the school grounds. The gate, the train station, and the wall in between. That just left one more.

The Forbidden Forest that no one was supposed to enter.

The edge of the trees started not fifteen feet from her, a small hillock hiding the junction of woods and wall from the sight of the castle. Yes, it was supposed to be 'forbidden', but she still had yet to hear a good reason why that was. The most reasonable answer had been that it contained trolls and werewolves, but in all honesty she was not concerned about the latter. The moon was in its first quarter stage based on what she saw in the sky the previous night, which meant she had about a week before any hypothetical werewolves would lose control of their own actions. If anything, she was hoping she did find another commune of werewolves. It would be nice to find people as kind as Jean Luc and the others, and they might appreciate being able to communicate with more of their own people in a place as far removed as Compiègne.

What do you think, she asked Morgan as she looked at the inviting trees. You up for an adventure that has a chance to send us running for our lives again?

The blue tit tilted his head at the sight before them and chirped nonchalantly.

That's what I was thinking, too. Rolling her neck around on her shoulders, she walked into the tree line.