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The last staff member Minerva hired before retiring was the new librarian. It had taken some time, and a great deal of diplomacy, to persuade Madame Pince to retire, and they’d had to cast a wide net to find a successor, advertising in wizarding periodicals all over the world. She’d ended up hiring a young witch from New Zealand, which was about as far away from Hogwarts as you could get.
She’d had to fight the Ministry over it, since it wasn’t that there were no qualified candidates in Britain. But they’d all been too much shaken by the war, and when they spoke about their plans for the library in their interviews, the questions they circled back to were always How do we stop it all from happening again? What else should have been in the Restricted Section? What should go there now?
Madame Powers had said, simply, “It’s beautiful.”
“It is,” said Minerva. “But it is a fortress. Irma saw her mission in life as defending the books against the barbarian hordes, by which she meant students.”
“I would like to do something about that,” said Madame Powers.
Some of her ideas were uncontroversial enough, like keeping the library open late and storing more of the books at an eleven-year-old’s eye level. Some raised a few eyebrows among the other Hogwarts staff: events with food? Removing all of the jinxes meant to keep students from defacing books? But Minerva was prepared to back her up, and by the end of her first year, Madame Powers seemed to be settling in nicely, well-liked by students and staff.
Minerva began to clean out her office, and invited Madame Powers to look over her books and pick out any that seemed suitable for the library.
She hadn’t been expecting Madame Powers to have such a wildly different definition of suitable.
“Those aren’t mine –”
“Oh. Whose are they, then?” Madame Powers surveyed the portraits of previous Headmasters in some puzzlement. Her eyes rested for a moment on Severus Snape, who shook his head vigorously, and then on Phineas Nigellus.
“They’re – Well, they’re the library’s, actually. But they were removed decades ago. By Albus.”
“Did it work?” asked Madame Powers.
“No – I mean, obviously not – but if it had happened in time...” Minerva fell silent, knowing perfectly well that it had not happened in time. And that the only person in the last fifty years to borrow Secrets of the Darkest Arts (though not through official channels) had been Hermione Granger.
“Take them,” she said at last, trying not to look in the direction of Albus’s portrait. “But – Restricted Section, please. They’re not appropriate for children –” (Minerva wondered who she was fooling. Herself, probably. Since the war, all children except Muggle-borns knew what a Horcrux was.) “I mean, they’ve got instructions.”
“Instructions that can be followed by an eleven-year-old?” asked Madame Powers. And then, after Minerva had stared at her for a long time, “All right, Restricted Section.”
Minerva wondered if that would be the end of it. Lately, books that had been safely confined to the Restricted Section for years had tended to go wandering...
* * *
The last of the books had been packed up; the shelves were empty, inviting Minerva’s successor to fill them again. The file cabinets had been emptied of years of paperwork. Even the tin of Ginger Newts had been thrown away.
Minerva took one last look around the Headmistress’s office and said, softly, Nox.
She picked up the crate of books and began to carry them down the corridor to the library, where Madame Powers would be working late. Lumos, she said, to light the way.