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Chapter Text

When one must fight, one had better do it without hesitation, according to his own nature.

Fausto Cercignani

Chapter Text

Filius preferred that their practice duels take place on the roof. With the proper charms in place, there was nothing untoward for his Muggle neighbours to see, nor any risk of splattering on the ground when one inevitably fell or was pushed off the edge. The impact would be painful, certainly, but take place midair and after only ten or twenty feet of free-fall (Filius found that brief moment of uncertainty to be more hurtful than any subsequent collision with an invisible floor).

The slope of the roof put Tom forever on the back foot and, save for some easily-Scoured pigeon droppings and other refuse, there was precious little that lent itself to his use up here. That did not mean that there was nothing available, however: to the practitioner of transfiguration, everything was a weapon, and that was a philosophy which found a most willing student Tom Riddle. Filius had busted Tom’s shields just a moment prior and was on the verge of pushing him off the roof for the third time that hour when he was legitimately caught off guard by a blow to his back.

Barely staying on his feet, Filius launched into the air with a Rocket Charm, then let loose a blast of air to gain some distance from Tom and give him space enough to evaluate the changed situation. Something small and bluish-white whizzed past him, narrowly missing his face, and Filius was able to spiral out his fall enough to avoid its next pass as well. Below him, however, Tom was firing off additional spells, though Filius couldn’t make out what they were and, falling as fast as he was, they were unlikely to hit him.

Filius smacked the roof hard enough for the impact to nearly hurt, even through the Softening Charm that he cast on himself, then bounced into the air again. He cast a Shielding Charm against another of Tom’s spells, without even knowing what it was, but he needn’t have done so: Filius was moving quickly and was scrunched up, arms and legs close to his body, to present a small profile. Being small had its irritating moments, but times like this more than made up for them.

Between two Body-freezing Spells, Filius cast an Amplifying Charm on himself to make sure Tom could hear him. “What is it that sets one wizard apart from another?” Filius questioned. “What makes one wizard better than another, Tom?”

“Magical power and magical knowledge!” Tom answered before he returned fire with a Bone-mending spell. That was curious, Filius thought, but then he realized its use. Performed improperly, the spell would not mend bones but Vanish them entirely.

“Close enough, but not quite,” Filius replied, still dodging and bouncing as the situation required. “There are three things that determine your power as a wizard, Tom: innate capability, wand potency, and mental aptitude – or capacité, puissance, and sagesse. The first does not matter as much as some, especially Pure-bloods, would think. There are certainly outliers, like Squibs, but most wizards fall closely enough together that you’ll only see a small range of capability among your classmates. It is far more common to find a Squib than to find someone who is nearly a Squib, and those who boast of their native strength usually have nothing else to pride themselves on.”

Filius considered his next words. “Through all seven of my years at Hogwarts, I was the weakest of any student in the whole school. My grandfather was a goblin – he was called Guthrack the Grumpy – and goblins have a more even distribution. There are as many Squibs among them as there are goblins with the capacité of the average wizard.”

“Folderol!” he muttered under his breath, a goblin expletive slipping out as Tom’s mystery weapon hurtled past him in another near-miss. It was a bird, a goldfinch or something, which Tom must have transfigured as it flew past and then enchanted with that object-animating jinx which the boy liked so much. Well, there was a solution to that, at least. Filius might have been as bad at transfiguration as Tom was talented at it, but something like this didn’t give him much trouble at all. This time, Filius terminated the Softening Charm and instead cushioned his fall with a quickly-uttered Slowing Charm.

As soon as his feet made contact with the roof, Filius heard the leaden once-bird whirr through the air as it made a beeline for him. Now that it was on a straight path, though, aiming was something that he could handle with his eyes closed. Behind him, the makeshift Bludger became a bird once more – seconds before it smashed into Filius’s Shield Charm and became utterly unusable for further hijinks and especially for jinxes.

Riddle sighed as soon as Filius’s wand centred on him, but Filius wasn’t about to end the duel just yet, not while he was just about to get to a pertinent topic. “A magical focus, like our wands, is considerably more important,” he said. “Unaided, there are stark limits to what I can accomplish with magic, but the combination of wand-wood and core in my focus allow me to overcome this, so long as I properly take advantage of its strengths. The elm in my wand lends itself toward elegant advanced spellwork, while the dragon heartstring of its core bolsters my innate capabilities tremendously. Together, they allow me to perform spells of a complex and advanced nature so long as I pair the elegance of the elm with equally intricate visualization or wandwork. Indeed, they actually come more easily to me than simple spells do.”

To disarm Tom, though, it took only a jab of his wand. It was a casting to which he was well-accustomed, and if his wand truly did have an opinion on his dueling style, as was Ollivander’s wont to suggest, then it never seemed to mind the plainness of that charm. Filius had never encountered any resistance in using that spell, where some others of its calibre were harder to master than their school-year level might suggest.

Tom received the loss of his wand with a surprising amount of geniality. Previous disarmings had already established that Tom needn’t to worry about his wand getting lost in the gutters below or being stolen by some passing Muggle tramp, but there was still something about his smile… Perhaps it was the lesson. He was always eager to learn.

“Your yew, on the other hand,” Filius continued. “I’m not sure what Ollivander might have said in his usual game of scaring and impressing young customers, but the simple truth is that, as you might have seen, a yew-carved wand is adept at casting spells of a combative nature, as well as curses of all types. Healing magic, which you might have noticed with your disposition for turning such spells toward an unorthodox—”

“Depulso,” Tom incanted in the middle of his lecture, and Filius felt a throbbing pain in his right hand. Tom grinned, and Filius looked down, part of him confused even while another part of him was already putting the pieces together, and saw that his wand was gone.

Tom raised his left hand, which Filius was quite sure had never held a wand in any of their duels, and then even Filius’s dumber half understood what had happened and snapped to attention. “You never told me that you could cast magic wandlessly,” Filius said, and he started to laugh, too hard to say anything, and signaled with his off-hand that the duel was yielded to Tom. After a moment he was able to control his laughter and sat down. Tom remained where he was and did not sit, so the two of them were at eye level. It was a rare occurrence, and Filius rather liked it. “The famous Tamil duelist E. A. Vishal Pillai was a vociferous opponent of wand-use, you know: ‘They will cease to exercise the birthright which is theirs, calling magic forward no longer from within themselves but by means of external objects, and in some distant generation our children will find themselves unable to produce magic except by such a means.’ I suppose that you are living proof of that: the surprising thing isn’t your skill without a wand, but that you obtained it in Britain rather than, say, Uagadou. This is as good a time as any to lead into a wizard’s third, and greatest, source of power.”

While Tom’s eyes were centered on his, attentive as any student ought to be, Filius rubbed the ring on his right pointer finger and gestured to nonverbally Summon his wand back into his hand. A bit of misdirection, that, but it wouldn’t do to give away all of his secrets so soon. At the same time, he canceled his Amplifying Charm. “Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum: a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing. Who should we call the superior animal?”

A beat, then Tom realized that the question was not rhetorical. “The fox,” he answered. “To reply to one proverb with another, when all you have is a hammer, everything around you will look like a nail.”

It took a second to remember what a hammer was, but Filius nodded appreciatively. “I was going to say that it depends on something more, but I like your answer. The hedgehog may, however, prevail if it is better able to parlay what it knows, and familiarity with its one skill may win out the fox’s various tricks. The determining factor is not just what you know but how well you use it, see? Not just scholarly knowledge, but mental agility. Your most powerful asset, therefore, will not be your magical essence, or your wand, or the facts stored in your brain, but your creativity.”

The lesson thus ended, Filius headed downstairs and Tom followed after. In the uppermost floor of Filius’s home was a room which he liked to think of as The Observatory, whose ceiling was spelled to portray a perfect night-time sky, without the obstructions of atmosphere or light pollution. The chairs were comfortable, and it was a good deal warmer than the open night air, so the experience of stargazing from within it was altogether superior to the alternative of doing so from the roof.

“And there, beside Aries, is Dak-Vuk, the Wasp. Muggles and wizards don’t care for it much, so I only know it by the name which Kuku Guthrack gave to me.”

“I didn’t know that goblins named the constellations,” Tom said slowly. “I didn’t know that they cared about the stars at all.”

“Oh, we must have been seafarers once. The Pukwudgies might have gone to the New World by way of Siberia and the land bridge, some ten or twenty millennia ago, and the goblins here in Britain came over with the Saxons in the Fifth Century, but there were goblins in Japan before there were humans. And, of course, there are the stars and the names which we gave them. I wonder why we stopped.”

“Do you remember very many goblin constellations?” Tom asked, and Filius nodded.

“Probably more than wizarding ones, to be honest. I forgot most of the Greco-Latin ones because that was only Astronomy class, but I remember the goblin names because those are from my grandfather. He called Aries by the name ‘Zazabonck,’ the sphinx, but that’s clearly derived from the Old Egyptian name – ’sphinx’ is a Greek word, you know, so all that tells us is that goblins have known of Egypt for a very long time, long enough for us to forget what we originally called it. But that over there, the Big Dipper, we call that Navodeld, or the mine-cart.”

They continued in this way for some time, until, sensing that the boy had something to say, Filius put an end to the impromptu Goblin Studies lesson and allowed Tom the space to mull over how, or even whether, to change the subject. “Wandless magic isn’t the only talent of mine,” Tom said at last.

“I suspect that you aren’t referring to dueling, or anything else which you have already demonstrated.”

Filius couldn’t see it, not in the late evening’s darkness, but he could hear, almost feel, Tom shake his head. “I can... I can speak to snakes,” he said, and silence fell over him again.

Well, that was interesting, wasn’t it? Filius’s first thought was concerned with whether it would be possible to cast magic in Parseltongue and how that might affect the spell, but then he remembered that he was speaking with a fifteen-year-old who had just lowered his walls and told him something of a highly personal nature, which was most unusual for a teenager. “If you are looking for scorn, then you will not find it in the four-foot tall mixed-breed grandson of a goblin and a witch.” Three and a half feet, really, but who was counting? 

This seemed to be enough for Tom. “Most people think that I’m a Muggle-born, but being a Parselmouth puts the axe to that theory. It’s always possible that I spontaneously acquired the ability, of course, since that had to have occurred at least once in history, but it’s unlikely, isn’t it? Which makes me a half-blood, presumably. My father, I’d expect, since I can’t imagine what a witch would be doing near a Muggle orphanage or why she would die as she did, practically on its doorstep. Even if she were a Squib, which makes as much sense as the matron’s theory that she was a circus performer, I would have expected her to have died at St. Mungo’s at the very least. But the records at Hogwarts have nothing to say on wizarding families named Riddle, with or without sons of the name Marvolo.”

Ah, misgivings of a familial nature. Now here was something that Filius knew something about! “And this troubles you,” he said gently.

“Yes. I suppose it does,” Tom replied from the darkness. “It raises many questions, at least. We both know what Slytherin was famous for: did my father share that same prejudice, and did he make a stitch with my mother and then abandon her as an ancient lord might have done with his maidservant? Did she even have a choice in the matter? It isn’t an attractive idea, that I’m the product of rape. For all I know, his name wasn’t even Tom, and that was just some pseudonym he fed to my mother in order to cover his trail. But if it was, and if he were still alive…” As he spoke, Tom’s voice developed a kind of flatness which was uncharacteristic of the boy, obviously doing too good a job of suppressing his feelings about what he was saying.

“You’d want to kill him.” It’s the obvious response, especially in consideration of the boy’s natural aggression. Even Filius might consider it, a bit of that goblin hot-bloodedness. Debts could be owed in more currencies than gold, but accounts had to be settled all the same.

“I think that I would,” Tom agrees readily.

Filius let that sit and Tom, thankfully, seemed to understand the need for a thinking break and as far as Filius could tell did not take offense. “I won’t tell you not to do it. I think that I might do the same, in your place,” he said, not entirely sure what words would come next but knowing, or maybe just hoping, that they would be the right ones. “I’ve killed before, by accident. I did nothing wrong, and the judges did not censure me for it, but there are nights when it still gnaws at me.”

“I see,” is that all Tom said, and Filius got the sense that he knew, even more than Filius himself did, where this conversation was headed.

“Murder is a serious thing. I would caution you to not take the matter too lightly, and I would counsel you to not dwell too much on who your father might have been, or what his present state may be. But if you do happen to come across him, and things are as you have feared, then tell me,” Filius said slowly, “and I will kill him for you.”

“Master Filius?”

“You are young,” explained Filius. “More to the point, you are inexperienced. There are many mistakes which one could commit in this, and I would not see you make them, not when an older wizard might avoid them. Besides, I make this offer to you in order that justice, and not you, might be satisfied.”

“But for my mother, you would do it?”

“For you, I would do it, but I would not ask you to examine your own heart and know whether it was justice or vengeance that was lifting your hand,” Filius said. That was how it was done among goblins, at least, for it was important to ensure that business remained business, and the collecting of debts was not done for passion’s sake. Translators of Gobbledegook usually explained that the word “ukod advarr” could refer to two things, a representative appointed to oversee and carry out the terms of a contract, and an executioner. In truth there was no difference between them: death was simply the penalty for some violations. “I do not make this offer lightly. I would prefer to keep my hands unstained. Nevertheless, I will do it.”

“Some things are worth the price of killing,” Tom said, his voice still mostly flat, but lilting slightly at the end, as if it were a question.

“There must be justice,” Filius said, and in the false twilight of the room he saw Tom's smile in relief.

Chapter Text

Filius’s lessons with Tom continued to proceed smoothly, and it wasn’t that long before he began to wonder how he might possibly fill the time when Tom’s apprenticeship came to an end. Few tournaments ever ran in the summer, and Filius was long past the age when he might be able to get away with making impromptu challenges. At least this problem was one which he wouldn’t have to face for months to come. 

Today, there was cause for celebration. On the Continent, Grindelwald’s forces were being pushed back on most fronts, and it was rumored that a group of students calling themselves the Durmstrang Army had recently killed Rector Schimmelpfennig and other faculty members whom Grindelwald had installed. If true, it was a victory almost as grand as the landings at Normandy a few weeks earlier. Closer to home, Tom’s O.W.L. results had come in and he had gotten top marks in every subject, as expected, though Tom was not sure he would be continuing all of his subjects into their N.E.W.T. levels.

“I won’t say that Herbology is useless,” he said as they sat for dinner, “but I have only so many hours in the day – they still won’t give me a Time-turner, did I mention that? – and there are extracurriculars which I’d like to pursue as well.”

“Dueling Club, of course, but that can’t be taking up all your time. What else do you have?” Besides midnight conversations with some delightful-sounding lady friend named Horila, anyway. Tom had clammed up on the matter as soon as he realized how often he had been speaking of her, but it was sufficient for Filius to know that his young apprentice could be interested in more than just dueling and magic. Oh, Tom had tried to say they were merely studying, but then why exert so much effort to meet her alone?

Filius hadn’t been born yesterday.

“You could call it Hogwarts Studies, perhaps,” Tom answered with a smile, and Filius wondered, given Horila’s mental hoard of trivia on the Founders, whether that might be a sly euphemism for something more. “I might be able to return someday as a professor, but I can only count on having two more years to explore as much of the castle as I can. I’m still finding new surprises: secret passages, a tower that goes on forever, even a room that isn’t always there when you look for it.”

“Interesting. You may want to be careful when you explore the tower. There was a rumor in my day that a group of students had gotten lost in the Restricted Section a very long time ago and gone feral, but perhaps it was that endless tower which they were really talking about,” Filius said, smiling.

Riddle nodded. “I need to keep on with Study of Ancient Runes, at least, and probably Charms. Transfiguration, too, perhaps…” he said, and Filius got the sense that Tom was thinking about the needs of a single project in particular.

“Planning something, are you? I expect that it will be exciting.”

“One can only hope. I don’t know nearly as much about enchantment as I’d like, and magical objects can be so difficult to work with sometimes. It would be nice to be able to go to Hogwarts whenever you liked, wouldn’t it?” Tom said, his tone wistful at the end.

“You won’t find any disagreement with me,” Filius replied. “It would be difficult to land a position soon after your graduation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this project of yours were able to convince Headmaster Dippet to hire you on. I would be willing to recommend you as a Defense professor, if that’s what you have your eye on, but I think it would be a major loss to the art if you were to drop dueling before your career has properly begun. You have your whole life ahead of you anyway, so why not give dueling a go for two or three decades?”

“Thank you, Master Filius. You needn’t worry. Even if nothing becomes of me on the dueling circuits, I would still like to gain some worldly experience before I hang up my traveling robes. Teaching at Hogwarts seems to be the sort of thing which traps people till old age, regardless of when they start.”

“Speaking of dueling, I’d like to start you on some alternative styles of dueling this summer,” Filius said. “My experience in this regard is limited, but I’ve been studying what I could this year in order to prepare, and even a little bit of practice might serve you well.”

“If you think it could bear fruit then I could hardly deny you. What do you have in mind?”

“It isn’t something that they teach at Hogwarts, but there’s nothing to keep you from wielding more than one wand at a time,” Filius said.

“How many, exactly?”

“Well, two would be the practical limit. Without three hands there just wouldn’t be much of a purpose to triple-wielding. I did once hear of a wizard who held three in one hand, but that’s the stuff of urban legends, you know, and I never met anyone who’d seen it done personally. So, two wands. Perhaps if Demiguises had any use for wands, they might use three…” Filius shrugged. “The uses for a second wand are limited, anyway, because of the principle of visualization. It’s nearly impossible for a wizard to form an intent for two separate spells at the same time. Nevertheless, it might be profitable for you to study the techniques of the Kovachev School, from Bulgaria,” Filius said, and he levitated a child’s toy wand over to Tom.

The toy wand dipped a bit in the air when Tom grasped it with his own spell. He looked at it with disbelief for a moment, then took hold of it with his hand and gave it a small jerk. A flurry of red sparks shot out of the end. “Am I to blind you with particles of light, then?”

“You’ll lose the toy wand eventually, but I want you to think more easily of your off-hand as a channel for your magic. I’ve been watching, and you tend to use wandless magic only when you’re forced to. You’ve grown reliant on your wand, Tom, and I want to break you of these bad habits which British education has forced on you.”

“Reasonable,” Tom said in a satisfied tone.

“Now, some of these forms that I’m going to walk you after dinner through may seem strange, but that’s because everything has its antecedent. During the Early Middle Ages, one of the dueling styles of the time was what they called ‘Horntailing,’ after the Hungarian Horntail: In one hand you’d hold a wand, which was the dragon’s fiery breath, while in the other you would wield a sword, which was the dragon’s eponymous – and dangerous – tail. Nothing that was not once alive is suitable for focusing one’s magic, but the Bulgarian warlord Mladen Kovachev found that some elements of Horntailing were useful and adopted them for his two-wanded style, just as I suspect that you might be able to develop your own distinct approach, though you would probably have to travel beyond Europe for it to get any kind of a following. We Europeans are too attached to our wands,” Filius said with a note of remorse. 

“Could one combine both approaches?” Tom asked. “It’s difficult for me to conceive of how one could design a sword that was suitable as a magical focus, unless one used parts from a dragon, but a bone knife should certainly be possible.”

“Should be, and is,” Filius replied. “In Hawaii there’s a school that still teaches the art of using a shark-tooth sword, which is unorthodox and, in my opinion, produces results strictly inferior to what one finds with a wand, but I suppose that it is suitable for their practices. I’ve also seen bone daggers of various kinds and knives made from Re’em horn, and heard legends of a witch who used a giant’s thigh bone for a good staff or even a short sword, though it would be the first time I’ve heard of a Wizarding giant.”

“There’s a half-giant of that sort at Hogwarts,” Tom said. “He’s a couple of years below me, but he hasn’t suffered for a lack of talent on his mother’s side. I should hope that nobody harvests his femur anytime soon, though.” Tom paused, his eyes directed to the side in that way that told Filius he was thinking of something, but wasn’t sure whether it should be asked.

“Come on, Tom, what is it?”

“I was only wondering, what with this talk of multiple foci, and Grindelwald being, well, Grindelwald, and his sign being his sign...” Tom trailed off.

“That’s a great interest to you,” Filius said, taking pains to ensure that his tone was merely observational, and not the least bit condemnatory.

“He has been in the news for as long as I have known of the magical world,” Tom said. “How could I not be interested in him, or his banner, or what it represented?”

“Fair enough, though you needn’t pretend that you only have an academic interest in the matter. We’re both duelists here,” Filius said. “So, the Hallows, then. You were thinking that the Deathstick might not be the only magical focus among them, I guess?”

“Exactly. I was wondering if that might be what it means to be the Master of Death. The Cloak of Invisibility is probably made of some organic material. Invisibility cloaks usually are. Oh, but the Resurrection Stone…” Tom frowned. “Stones are stones.”

“Perhaps. Just perhaps,” Filius replied slowly, his own mind chewing on the idea now. “Of course, I’ve heard rumors that petrified wood and limestone are suitable elements for making a magical focus. I honestly don’t know for sure, but limestone does have some interesting magical properties, though you would be better off speaking with a potions master about them, because I know very little on the matter.” Filius nodded to himself. “That’s your theory then?”

“Yes, but there are holes. I doubt that the Resurrection Stone is limestone, even if that’s a workable substance – which I wouldn’t be too sure of, since I don’t think all limestone was once living, so there would probably be impurities scattered throughout. Really, the legends would probably have mentioned something about that, if the Deathly Hallows were meant to be used in such a way, and they certainly wouldn’t have taken such odd forms. What are you supposed to do with a stone?”

“Scry,” Filius said.

“I suppose, but I still think my idea was stupid,” Tom said. “I wonder who made them, really, and for what purpose.”

“I don’t know much about the Cloak or Stone. Most of what I’ve learned has come to me by way of my profession as a duelist,” Filius admitted. “It’s hard to not trade rumors about an unbeatable wand, after all.”

“But if it really were unbeatable, why not make more? I don’t remember any story that said the Peverells were wandmakers.”

“Do you think it was actually Death who made the Hallows, then?” asked Filius. 

“No. And we know so little about them. All we have are legends, really. Perhaps they were wandmakers after all.”

Filius nodded. “I’ve heard it said that Ignotus Peverell incorporated goblin lore into the Deathstick. The implication, I think, was that goblins are too dangerous to be given wands, if they could make such a thing. Or that one must see death – or Death, the figure – in order to use the wand, because of the Thestral hair that is its core.” He sighed. “As you say, legends,” Filius concluded, and when Tom turned the conversation to other matters, to runes and the repairing of magical objects, he thought that the boy’s curiosity had been sated.

It would not take long for him to learn that he had judged incorrectly.

Chapter Text

There were precious few tournaments held during those summer months when Tom was in Filius’s charge, and honestly none of them were particularly high-profile, but it was already clear to Filius that the boy might not stay with him for long after graduating from Hogwarts and Filius wanted to see him when he got his first taste of action on the international circuits.

With the state of the Global Wizarding War as it was, there could be no hope of travelling to the Continent, which was a great disappointment to Filius. It would be physically easy to travel there, of course, but local politics made it a different matter to do so in practice. At any rate, Tom seemed well-suited to the style of duelling that was in vogue among the Eastern Europeans and, given its popularity among Grindelwald’s supporters, that style was becoming more unpopular than ever before among everyone else. American duelling was a fair substitute, perhaps, and the New World didn’t care one whit for the fashions of Western Europe, but Filius still would have liked to see Tom square off against a spirited Magyar before his apprenticeship had come to an end.

Things were as they were, however, so Filius found himself preparing for a trip to the New World that summer. “At this time of year there will still be some exhibitions, mostly to serve our very purpose, which is to show you off and let you begin the process of building a name for yourself,” Filius explained when he first proposed the idea to Tom. “As a duellist of no small renown, my status as your master is enough to guarantee you a place in at least a couple of exhibitions, and if you perform as well as you have in our sessions together, then, Merlin willing, when you are on your own then you will be able to use that to negotiate entry into some tournaments that would otherwise be closed to a neophyte duellist.”

Most wizards could Apparate from London to Edinburgh in one pop. From there it was a couple of shorter jaunts from Edinburgh to Thurso, in the north, and then to the Faroe Islands. The only tricky jump was to Iceland, but Tom had spent a few days practicing longer jumps across Britain, and Filius was confident that the boy wouldn’t Splinch himself across the Atlantic. From Iceland they got to Greenland by way of Scoresbysund, and after that it was clear sailing (or rather, clear Apparating) through communities all down the east coast and up the west. Then they jumped across the strait to Baffin Island, and they were nearly in Belleterre, or what the Muggles called Quebec.

All told, the journey took them just short of two weeks, having spaced the jumps out by a day each and taken a few extra to rest in Iceland. A ship from London to New York City wouldn’t have taken even half that time, and the journey wouldn’t have been half as cold, but all that was worthwhile for the practice that Tom had gotten. Too many wizards could travel the length and breadth of Great Britain, then Splinch themselves twelve ways trying to Apparate across the Channel.

The New World was a place of many magical nations, far more were present in Europe. In some ways there were large swathes of the continent which were without any unitary law at all, an anarchistic melange of peoples who would neither rule nor be ruled by others. In such places one could not even be assured of finding wizards who believed that what they did was magic: some claimed a psychic talent, others miracle-working. If there was one good thing about this then it was the diversity of approaches that they brought to magic. All in all, though, Filius was glad that he and Tom would be remaining in the Atlantic Commonwealth, a little strip of land along the East Coast which held all that one could find of a Wizarding British tradition in the New World.

Everything seemed to be new and delightful to Tom, however, who took to the place with such a passion that Filus wished he could have been there when the boy had first seen Diagon Alley. Oh, he tried to act reserved about it all, of course, and that seemed to be something of a habit whenever he was in unfamiliar territory, even figuratively, but Filius knew the boy’s body language by now and Tom’s eyes were focused. There was the enigmatic “ghost in a box” at Junk Deluxe and Augury & Alchemy’s Panprosoponic Mask, which could adopt anyone’s features. “Take care that you don’t overuse it, though, because the damned thing doesn’t always come off,” the proprietor told them before he tapped the side of his own face and drew attention to a place where the coloration of his skin changed sharply along a line. “I should know.” They lost all interest in the mask after that and moved on to Jealous Monkey Candies, where there were exploding chocolate taffies, cinnamon berries, and Dynamicremes that changed flavor as they were chewed. In one bookstore, Tom’s hand lingered over The Peacetime Applications of the Dark Arts, but ultimately drew away.

Three days after they’d settled in at the Quiet Thicket Hotel, an unkempt wizard with a stubby beard and yellow gloves arrived to escort them to the exhibition, which had been willing to admit them but not to trust them with its location. He took them deep into the North End and down a sad and crumbling alleyway, talking animatedly to them all the time and occasionally making reference to some kind of animal that had been common around these parts. “The age and the reputation of these streets are as good as any enchantment for keeping out the No-Maj sort, though of course that doesn’t mean we skimp on the necessities.” And then, as he led them through a creaking, sunken flat that smelt of mildew and rotted worms, and deep into its cellar: “These tunnels weren’t always safe for habitation, no. The whole place was infested, donchaknow, whole packs of the things running around beneath your feet.”

“Packs of what?” Tom asked. The man hadn’t actually specified, now that Filius thought of it, just gone on and on about them, ever since they’d crossed over into Battery Street.

“Ghouls, kid. And mind your heads now,” the man said as he lifted a hatch in the floor and ushered them through. “You couldn’t lay a corpse down and turn your back for five minutes before they’d come over and steal it out from under you, but the Aurors, well, they went and did a job of it and cleared out all these tunnels. That would’ve been before you were born, maybe twenty years ago or so.”

“Using Aurors seems extreme,” Tom said as they followed him into the cellar. “Aren’t ghouls just beasts?”

“British ghouls are rather tamer than what I suspect Boston had to deal with,” Filius said. “A dog is one thing, a feral one quite another, and, like many things on this continent, the New World’s ghouls have gone very feral indeed.”

Mr. Barlow gave Filius a quick look, as if wondering whether Filius had meant anything untoward about his countrymen with that comment, but any further discussion was nipped in the bud when the three of them turned a corner and the exhibition came into view. The passageway widened into an underground plaza, teeming with people and illuminated by balloons that glowed in ever-changing colors. Above the crowd, in a gigantic, cursive script that flowed from the torches all around them, was the proclamation that they were Welcome to the 28th Annual Atlantic Apprentices’ Tournament. The area smelled strongly, though not unpleasantly, of stale beer and damp mushrooms, and Filius was reminded of his grandfather’s summer hut.

Unexpectedly, Filius felt rather like he was at a Hogwarts event. He couldn’t see them all, but he knew from previous reports that there wouldn’t be more than seven hundred people in attendance, and slightly less than half of those would be underage. The tournament was for duellists no younger than fourteen, and no older than eighteen, and organized into age-based brackets, so there were quite a few older teenagers, but there were also a number of master duellists accompanied by much younger children. These couldn’t compete, but they could still observe and glean what lessons they could, and a few probably had older fellow-apprentices to (very quietly) cheer on.

“Watch yourself in these matches. You may be an accomplished duellist for Hogwarts, but you are not the only skilled youth in the world,” Filius warned Tom. “Duelling is a formal part of the curriculum in many of the schools on this continent, and there are places where the rest of one’s academics may come second to the art of duelling.”

Tom took his counsel with a nod, and Filius wandered away in search of familiar faces. He eventually found Samphias Cobblefrost, an Atlantic native as tall as Filius was short, with lemon drop eyes and a black Stetson hat with the words Boss of the Plains lettered on one side in bright silver. Samphias had no interest in taking on an apprentice and was here to scope out the future competition (and maybe just fiddle around), but she was more than happy to give Filius the word on this year’s competitors: “And then Malachi Rankin, from the GLC, well, he might have only won a bronze in the Great Lakes tourney this year, but it was a near-miss and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him perform better here.”

“How does he fight?”

Samphias popped another crab dumpling into her mouth. “Light on his feet,” she said, speaking out the side of her mouth as she fished through her bag with spindly fingers. “Looks timid, but doesn’t ever act intimidated. Maybe his face is just stuck like that. Mm, you want a dumpling? Two Dragots for a baker’s dozen, just down the way over there, by the hag with the lazy eye,” Samphias said after Filius tried the one she had offered and found that it agreed with him.

The first matches started pretty soon after that, and while they wouldn’t get around to Tom’s bracket for an hour it was still good form to be in attendance in the stands. Eventually, however, his name came up and Tom walked down onto the duelling strip, and as the day progressed and he advanced through the match-ups, the break between each of his duels became increasingly shorter.

“Bright kid you’ve got there, and vicious, too,” commented Samphias. She’d come to sit next to Filius after the first series of matches had finished, bearing fried anole on a stick – or rather two fried anoles, one for herself and the second for Filius, which Filius had accepted gratefully. British food could be so dull, and the diversity of American cuisine was a breath of fresh air that reminded him of his family’s mixed recipes.

“Tom doesn’t hold back,” said Filius, though that was somewhat of an understatement. His apprentice’s last duel just now, against a gangly wizard named Miguel Legrande, had been finished in under a minute. Legrande, the poor boy, had gotten cocky after his last three victories and cast his Shield Charm more sloppily than was wise, and Tom, never one to hold back, promptly cracked that charm wide open and then snapped Legrande’s kneecaps.

Beside the duelling strip, the announcer called out the next set of names. “For the final match of the round of sixteen: Tom Marvolo Riddle, of Filius Flitwick and Hogwarts, and Rosetta Isabella Le Roi, of Guillermo Rasmussen and Long River.” Each held out their focus for the referee to examine, Tom with his wand and Rosetta with her gloves – or gauntlets, properly speaking, since they were made of hardened leather – and then they took position at opposite ends of the duelling strip. The environment put him at a disadvantage, with precious little in the way of terrain and clutter to turn against Le Roi, but that just meant that he would have to stretch a little. “The duel will proceed under the Buchanan Rules,” the announcer stated, meaning that there would be no points taken and the duel would end only with the incapacitation or explicit submission of one of the duellists.

It wasn’t immediately obvious, but the longer the Filius looked at Le Roi, the more he thought he could pick up a kind of ashy grayness in her complexion. Was that a hint of vampire that he saw in her, or was it merely the heat of the moment? Her eyes were not quite sunken, their color perhaps rusty but not red, and if her jaws had just snapped, well, it was anyone’s guess whether that could be ascribed to mind games or some predatory twitch inherited from five generations back.

“The duellists may prepare themselves!” called the referee.

Le Roi punched her left palm, then switched hands and drove a fist into her right hand while Tom, on the opposite end of the strip, angled his chest away from her and lifted his wand-arm nearly parallel to the ground. That would require him to reach around in order to use his left hand, but it was a classic stance and might entice her into drawing the wrong conclusion.

The referee snapped his fingers, and a sound like thunder let out from an iron bell over the duelling strip. There was maybe half a moment of stillness, and then an onslaught. Le Roi cast from her gauntlets, and as soon as one hand completed the movements of a spell, the other was in position to sign out the next. Filius leaned forward in his seat. It wasn’t every day that one saw a truly ambidextrous caster, but she didn’t appear to favor either hand.

Tom’s defensive reply was elementary, delivered as flatly as if he were remarking on the weather. It was nothing serious, though, and Le Roi continued to set the tempo of the duel. What she cast were relatively simple spells but the shortness of their incantations let her deliver them in a flurry so she could keep up the pressure. 

“Looks like your boy’s on the defensive,” Samphias observed. “Course, Rosetta’s nasty enough to be his match.”

“Tom’s only being careful. So long as he gets the room to breathe and evaluate, he should be fine,” replied Filius. “Her style lends itself well to an all-out assault, but can she defend as well as he?”

While he cast another Shield Charm to bolster the first, Tom pressed one foot against the heel of the other and slipped out of his shoes. His off-hand twitched. He advanced, and the shoes slid forward with him. Another twitch, and they disappeared.

“Semaforo!” Another three streaks of light, each a different color. With as much of an opportunity as Filius had to examine that spell, he wasn’t sure that those lights were supposed to do anything but look flashy. It would explain the ease of casting, and amid the casting of other, legitimately dangerous spells they would have forced even Filius to fight a little more cautiously than he would have liked.

Tom, however, was preparing for something. He had been pushed back a little, or let himself get pushed, so Filius was no longer sure where Tom’s shoes were. Had they moved with him, gone forward in his stead, or remained where they were? Not for the first time, Tom’s off-hand briefly disappeared inside his robes, but when it reappeared this time it was followed by a streak of red.

A human of Tom’s size could easily lose most of a pint of blood without notable ill effect. Make that, say, five hundred cubic centimeters, and one would have five hundred thousand cubic millimeters. Spread that out, as though along a flat surface, and, well...

With a few hand movements, what Le Roi was presented with was a solid sheet, half a millimeter thick and one meter squared, of Tom’s own blood. And what was that in her eyes – deep-rooted thirst, or a stab of fear?

It didn’t matter. Tom jabbed his wand and went on the offensive. The sheet floating between them crashed against her and her shields like a red-stained tidal wave upon the rocks. “Leviosa, depulso!” Tom cast, his off-hand mirroring the movements of his wand. Something – an invisible shoe – hit her in the stomach. “ Accio !” Another shoe hit her in the nape, and Tom lunged forward in a relentless assault to match Le Roi’s, unleashing spells with his right hand and, where necessary, guiding or refining them with his left.

“Definitely a match,” whispered Samphias. “I’d like to see them have it out again in twenty years when they’re matured.”

With an impression of nonchalance, Tom deflected one spell and set up a shield for the next, then made a few gestures with his off-hand. The blood on Le Roi’s gloves immediately coagulated, then hardened like a tough shell. While she scraped her gloves against each other to remove the obstruction, one of Tom’s shoes hit her in the back of the knee like a slung stone and Le Roi fell straight back. The back of her head smacked the ground and then she was still.

Tom stood equally motionless for a moment and then, when the referee didn’t call the match, slowly advanced forward. Le Roi wasn’t moving much, from what Filius could see, but her eyes were open. Tom stood near her feet, his posture relaxed and triumphant, and slowly leveled his wand on her. Filius noticed Le Roi’s feet twitch besides Tom’s, and something seemed to stick in his throat. This was nothing but an exhibition, a mere duel between peers, but for the first time in his life Filius experienced the dread of seeing someone in the act of making a terrible mistake while he was unable to do anything about it. Even if the rules allowed outside interference, a number of charms had been laid down to prevent the duellists from seeing or hearing the spectators.

Tom smiled and leveled his wand on her. “Do you yield?” Le Roi said nothing, and Tom persisted. “You aren’t getting out of this. My wand is ready to cast and your hands are out of position. Just tell me—” Le Roi swung a foot up into Tom’s groin, swept his legs out from under him, and then, in one fluid motion, kicked back and flipped herself into a standing position before Tom could get to his knees. “Cutis estlapis,” she incanted. Her gauntlets flared green, and Filius wondered briefly at the point of her spell before Le Roi punched Tom square in the face and Filius heard a sickening crack. Tom crumpled and fell back again, and Le Roi dropped to her knees over him in order to keep him in range.

“Do you yield?” Swing. Hit. “Do you yield?” Swing. Hit. “Do. You. Yield?” Even as Le Roi demanded his reply, she continued her assault, alternating fists with the steady precision of two pistons as her gloves began to come up streaked with a fresh shade of red. Despite himself, Filius began to feel more than a little uncomfortable. Physical contact between the duellists’ bodies was a faux pas even in Hungary, and resorting to fisticuffs, clad in magical foci or not, would have surely disqualified her in most matches that Filius had participated in.

Tom said something in response to Le Roi but Filius couldn’t make out what it was, only that his words, whatever they were, seemed slurred – and, judging by that the duel was still going, that he had not given in. As the duel wore on, the seconds seemed to drag. Though it took only two minutes or so from the time that Tom hit the floor to when he lost consciousness and the duel was called, to Filius it seemed as though years had passed. He left his seat immediately, nearly launching himself out of it, and reached the strip before the referee was finished with her diagnostic spells.

“He’s mostly fine,” she said, while an automatic quill wrote furiously on a length of parchment floating at her left shoulder. Finally, she stopped casting and the parchment drifted into Filius’s hands. It was a list of potions and instructions for their use. “Take that to the Medi-wizard down in Shaft 4-B, and you’ll get set up with what you need. Just go down that tunnel,” she said, pointing, “then take the second branch to your left. Then go talk with the director before you leave.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your ‘prentice made it to the finals. Second place. That’s four hundred Dragots that he’s earned,” she said, and Filius crunched the exchange rate before he could pause and scold himself for it. Without factoring in the money changer’s fees, that would come out to sixty-one galleons and change. Not much, by Filius’s standards, but a respectable sum for a young duellist’s first exhibition. “We good?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she cast a Reviving Charm and walked away.

At Filius’s feet, Tom groaned. A hand rose half-heartedly in the air, but Tom didn’t seem able to lift it higher than his chest before it went back down. Tom groaned again, but it was more coherent this time and almost sounded like real words.

“Did I never teach you how to lose, Tom? That dogged obstinacy of yours is going to get you killed someday.”

“If it had really been dangerous, the referee would have halted it.”

“There are accidents,” Filius said, and Tom shrugged, at least to the extent that he could do so while lying on the ground. “As you wish. There is a kind of beast in the New World that they call an opossum. When threatened, it will act as though it has died. The behavior is well known in these parts, and they call it ‘playing possum.’ This is what Le Roi did to you,” Filius explained. “Nonetheless, she did not win by that stratagem alone. Do you understand the contribution that you made to her victory?”

“I was careless,” Tom said as he pulled himself into a sitting position, and Filius nodded.

“You could have thrown a stunner from across the room, but instead you approached and left yourself vulnerable. You were gloating, Tom. In action, if not in word. If there is one lesson that you take from this, then learn that you must not be too cavalier in handling your opponents. The wounded tiger must be regarded as being twice as dangerous.”

“Yes, sir.” There was a hint of something strange in Tom’s voice, but Filius couldn’t tell whether it was frustration or reflective of some bodily pain that was yet unaddressed. Tom focused his eyes on Filius, and smiled. “I bet they’ll remember, though. Everyone who was here. I didn’t yield.”

“Or they’ll remember that Rosetta Le Roi pounded your face into the ground,” Filius snapped.

“Maybe. They don’t matter, anyway,” Tom continued after a moment’s pause. “Who cares what they remember? My pride doesn’t live or die on them. You’ll remember that I didn’t break. I’ll remember it. No matter what,” he said, more slowly, more thoughtfully, “I know what I can bear.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed with that attitude,” commented Samphias, who must have followed after Filius. “But I can’t say it won’t be fun to watch you go out. Oh, that’ll be a sight to see for sure.” She grinned and, a second later, so did Tom.

Chapter Text

The summer that followed Tom’s graduation from Hogwarts was marked by both sorrow and exultant joy on Filius’s part. Tom had performed well academically and as a duellist, and had more than fulfilled the expectations which Filius had first held for him years ago, but he intended to travel abroad and it was not clear when the two of them might meet again. It was even possible, given his plans, that Tom might fall into trouble that he would be unable to extricate himself from.

“Germany first, then Poland, then down to the Balkans,” Tom said as he explained his plans in detail. He had remained with Filius for another summer in order to continue his apprenticeship a little longer, but it had come time for him to depart at last. “Now that the war is over and even the Muggles are just mopping up, it seems like a good time for travelling. Europe will not be in such disarray again for decades, if ever.”

The purpose behind his itinerary was clearer than crystal. “You are searching for the Deathstick,” Filius said. Tom had told him last year of a rumour that the wandmaker Mykew Gregorovitch had once claimed ownership of the Deathstick, but whereas Filius had forgotten the conversation till now, it appeared that Tom had not.

Indeed, he had done more than just remember the tale. “I am quite convinced that Gregorovitch did have the Deathstick at one point in time,” Tom said. “I spent most of my time between Halloween and Christmas last year poring over everything that I could find on Gregorovitch. It cost me a fair amount, between purchasing whatever books I couldn’t find at Hogwarts, owling Gregorovitch’s clientele, and so forth. I don’t know whether there was a duel that I couldn’t find out about or he was the victim of theft, but he had the wand at one point.”

“You’re sure of that?”

Tom nodded. “Sure enough that I’m willing to spend the foreseeable future pursuing this lead, at least. Regardless of how many hands it passed through in the meantime, the sort of wizard who would be interested in wielding the Deathstick would likely have participated in the war, on one side or the other. I could be wrong about that, and it might have gone as far afield as Vietnam or Peru and never returned to Europe, but if I start thinking like that then I won’t look anywhere at all.”

It was sound thinking, and if one was going to pursue the Deathstick at all then Tom’s plan was definitely reasonable. There was one glaring problem, or at least point of worry, which Filius saw, however. “Much of your planned route will be taking you behind the Iron Curtain,” he said. “The Russians may resent your presence and consider you as an agitator. You may not be allowed entry at all.”

“Let them resent me,” Tom replied. “I do not fear Muggle Communists, nor the Committee for Magical Security.”

Filius had come to expect that kind confidence from Tom, but he did not appreciate the forcible reminder that the boy was, after everything, a Gryffindor. “Very well. I expect that you will be searching for more than the Deathstick when you head to the Balkans,” he said. That region was once home to an empire of dark wizards, centuries ago, and the mountains were littered with ancient sites and the remains of libraries which would be of interest to a scholarly duellist such as Tom had proven to be. “Where shall you go after that?”

The question seemed to stump Tom, at least for a moment. “Perhaps further east, deep into the Russian interior. There is always the Winter Order, if, that is, one believes in such fairy tales. Or I might spend a season in Hispanapule, then turn south, make entreaties to the elders of Uagadou, and learn the finer points of wandless casting from those who know nothing else.”

“You will have to be reserved among such people, and keep a tight rein on your temper,” Filius advised him. “They will consider you a child until you are forty years old, which will make them unlikely to take you seriously. You may be better off waiting until the end of your travels, wherever else they bring you, so that you can prove your earnestness.”

“East, then, through St. Petersburg, to Siberia, down through Japan, and from there to the New World, though in truth I can’t predict my journey so far in advance. I will go wherever the trail leads me, and detour when and where I must in order to pay my expenses. You can expect to hear well in advance whenever I plan to make myself known at a tournament, should you wish to attend – or compete and make me truly earn my winnings.”

Filius worried that the Russians might give Tom trouble when he went into the Soviets’ domain, but there was one thing alone which truly gave Filius pause. “How long do you expect it will take for you to find the Deathstick?”

“Years,” Tom said, and then “Decades. But I don’t intend to find it all in one go,” he continued, and Filius’s worries of madness and obsession were abated, at least in part. “It’s probably been decades since Gregorovitch lost it, though, and I want to find out what I can before the political climate settles into something else. I won’t have another opportunity like this for a long time.”

“Reasonable. You will be sure to write, I hope,” said Filius.

“At least once a month, and more often if I have anything interesting to report. You will have to wait until my return to hear for news that pertains to my search, though. I wouldn’t want a letter like that to be intercepted, especially while I’m anywhere close to Russia.”

“Very good, Tom. Only, don’t be writing just to me. I know how you like to be on your own, but don’t leave your, ah, lady acquaintance out in the dark, either.”

“Who?” Tom asked, and Filius was not sure whether he was genuinely puzzled or just putting on a good show.

“Oh, you know, Horiho, Horiyo, it was something like that.”

Tom laughed, and the sound of it made Filius realize how rarely he had ever heard Tom express his more positive emotions so openly. “I believe that you mean Horila. She’s still at Hogwarts, I’m afraid, and correspondence between us may be difficult to achieve. Even while I was there, we couldn’t be seen in public, you know?”

“She’s a Slytherin, then,” Filius said, realisation blooming in him like a warm flower.

“Quite so,” Tom said, and he laughed again. “At any rate, there’s nothing of a romantic nature going on between us. It’s strictly platonic.”

“Of course,” said Filius, not believing a single word of it. Filius hadn’t been born yesterday, and he still remembered how fondly Tom had spoken of her. “And do you have plans for your return, if you do not intend to seek out the Deathstick till the end of your days?”

“Oh, this and that,” Tom said, and his mouth parted in a toothy grin. “Perhaps shake things up a little,” he added. “Things could do with a bit of shaking up, I wager.”

“That they could,” Filius said. “That they could, indeed.” He paused and, not quite able to reach the boy’s shoulder, settled for laying a hand on his elbow. “I am not the sort of teacher who will hand you a laundry list. My expectations of you are not many in number. I ask only this of you: that your accomplishments, whatever they may be in detail, be magnificent. You may be a champion duellist, get elected Minister for Magic, or even find the Deathly Hallows. I do not care, so long as you do great things.”

Tom nodded solemnly, shook Filius’s other hand, and gave a deep bow. “Your teachings, and your friendship, have been indispensable to me. Thank you, Master Filius, for all your guidance and all that you have done for me,” he said, and he Disapparated on the spot.

It was the last time that Tom Riddle would call anyone “Master” again.