Chapter Text

The Owl Over Djemaa el-Fnaa

Marrakech. June 1991.

It was the end of June, and the afternoon heat lay heavy on the city.

A girl squatted on a roof above the Djemaa el-Fnaa and watched the marketplace below. Pyramids of oranges and lemons on the stalls beneath her, the voices of traders praising their wares, the endless haggling, and through it all the slow, regular lines of police patrols working their way along the stalls. The blue-and-black djellaba she wore was worn but clean. The hood covered her hair and most of her face. Only her eyes were visible. She tracked a handful of kids pretending to wander aimlessly through the crowd below. Bread went missing here, some apples there. Nuts, dates, and fruit vanished, briefly unobserved.

A second group trailed the obvious tourists, who kept discovering that their watches, cameras, or wallets had gone. She watched them all, and she watched the officers watching the square.

The name of the girl was Hermione Granger.

Karim's group was working the northern edge of the stalls again, which was ambitious given that a pair of officers had been loitering near the spice stalls since noon. She noted it and moved on. She would mention it when she returned.

Youssef could slide between bodies as though he were made of smoke, but at the moment he was closer to the snake charmers than she liked: tourists clustered there, which meant cameras, which meant risk. Still, Youssef was careful, and the afternoon wind was moving people northward towards the food stalls, which would thin the crowd around him in another few minutes. She would give it until then.

Amina smiled sweetly at tourists and could lift a purse with two fingers while apologising for bumping into them. Little Rachid, thin as a reed and barely eight, carried baskets for old women, a few coins earned the honest way. They ran errands, took small jobs where jobs were offered, and stole the rest. But not from the poor. Hermione's rules were not written down anywhere. They didn't need to be.

Five years of rooftops. Five years of this market. She knew the city's pulse, its crowds, its restless motion, perfectly. She had forgotten most of her life before, a life that had gone quiet one afternoon when she was six years old and had never resumed. She did not think about it often; there was too much else that needed watching.

The sun moved. The crowd below shifted and breathed as one. A tourist near the carpet stalls had just checked his back pocket for the third time in as many minutes, which meant he knew he was a target and would probably leave soon, which meant Driss's group would need to redirect. She was already mapping the alternative when something landed beside her.

She did not flinch. She rarely did.

A dishevelled owl had settled on the crumbling parapet two feet to her right. It was a large brown bird, with dark rings beneath eyes that looked as though they had not closed properly in several days. One wing sat at a fractionally odd angle, not broken, but strained. It had come a very long way.

The moment its talons touched the stone, two things happened simultaneously and without any instruction from Hermione: a narrow head the colour of deep water emerged from her left cuff, and a second head rose from her collar, chin resting on her collarbone. Lapis and Lazuli watched the owl with an attention that was neither aggression nor welcome.

The owl looked at them. Then it looked at Hermione. Its expression, insofar as owls had expressions, suggested that it had encountered stranger things, though perhaps not recently.

Hermione tilted her head and examined the owl.

"Bonjour," she said, because it was always safest to start politely. "You are not from here."

Obviously not, hooted the owl, lifting one leg and extending it towards her with the resigned dignity of a courier who had endured a great deal and wished to be acknowledged for it.

Hermione untied the letter from the owl's leg with careful fingers. It was heavier than ordinary paper and sealed with a red wax emblem she did not recognise. She tucked it into her vest, which she wore beneath the djellaba.

"You look hungry and tired," she said. "Come with me. There you can rest, and I will find some food for you."

Water first, said the owl.

"Water first," Hermione agreed.

She gave a sign to Tiziri, on another rooftop not too far away, that she had to leave. Tiziri would notify the others.

They would all meet at the usual time and place.

＊＊＊

The building she led the owl to was a ten-minute walk from the square, down a series of narrowing streets that tourists did not follow and locals had mostly forgotten. It took them longer than ten minutes: the owl flew in short, tired stretches, ledge to ledge, resting between them. The building was large, probably once a merchant's house, its outer walls the colour of old sand and its windows shuttered against the afternoon glare. The street entrance had been boarded up long ago. Hermione pulled a rope, and a ladder slid down from the roof, wood knocking softly against the wall. When she reached the top, she hauled it up again through the pulley and vanished inside the abandoned house.

Inside, the heat dropped several degrees. The building had good bones: thick walls, high ceilings, a central courtyard open to the sky where a lemon tree grew, not tall but dense, its branches heavy with fruit that was still some weeks from ripening. The courtyard flagstones were clean. The shadows were deep and cool.

Tiziri and Tifawt, the thirteen-year-old twins who shared her refuge in the abandoned house, had arrived before her and were sitting in the shade of the lemon tree in the courtyard. They occupied the same patch of shade they did every afternoon. Tiziri was mending a sandal strap. Tifawt appeared to be asleep.

Neither of them looked up when Hermione entered. This was normal.

Hermione crossed the courtyard to her own room. It was the largest, because she was the one who had found the building and secured it. Some months later, the twins had moved in. She filled a clay bowl from the jug she kept there. She set it on the windowsill.

Against the far wall of her room stood an old mirror that had been left behind with the house, its dark wooden frame worn smooth by time. She rarely looked at it.

The owl drank for a long time.

The owl was exhausted. More than exhausted: it had been pushed, or had pushed itself. The strain in its wing suggested distance and speed rather than injury. It had been sent with urgency, or it had decided that urgency was warranted. She could not yet tell which.

When the owl had finished drinking, it looked at her, too tired for anything but plain assessment.

"Where did you come from?" Hermione asked.

Scotland. Then England. Then here.

She weighed this. The owl would need at least a day before it could fly again, perhaps two. It was not her bird, and she had no real reason to house it, but the calculus was simple: the letter in her vest was from Scotland. The owl was the only living connection she had, at this moment, to whoever had written it. The owl was information.

"Stay as long as you need to," she said. "I'll find mice."

Preferred, said the owl, and tucked its beak towards its chest with the air of something that intended to sleep for a significant period of time.

Hermione left it to it.

She sat beneath the lemon tree and took the letter from her vest.

The envelope was thick, cream-coloured, the kind of paper that cost money. The ink on the front was green, not black, and it was handwritten: not printed, not stamped. The address read:

Ms H. Granger, The Roof of the Building Above the Orange Stalls, Djemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakech, Morocco

She considered that, the specificity of it, the mild impossibility of it, and then turned it over. The wax seal showed a crest divided into four sections: a lion, a serpent, a badger, and an eagle. Beneath the crest, a motto in Latin that she sounded out quietly: Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus. The back of her mind was already saying never tickle a sleeping dragon, which seemed less like a school motto and more like practical advice.

She broke the seal.

HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY

Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore (Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock, Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)

Dear Ms Granger,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.

Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by 31 July at the latest.

Yours sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress

Hermione read it twice, at the same even pace.

Then she read the enclosed list.

UNIFORM. First-year students will require: Three sets of plain work robes (black). One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar). One winter cloak (black, with silver fastenings). Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry name tags.

She noted that everything was black.

COURSE BOOKS: The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1) by Miranda Goshawk. A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot. Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling. A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration by Emeric Switch. And four more.

Eight books for a first year. She noted what the list contained: history, theory, transfiguration, herbs, potions, and defensive practice. Transfiguration implied that the physical nature of things could be altered. And she noted what it did not contain. No book for mathematics, none for literature, none for languages. Dragon-hide gloves, but nothing anywhere on the list for physical training.

She read the rest. A cauldron. Phials, a telescope, a set of scales. And a wand.

Then: Students may also bring an owl OR a cat OR a toad.

She looked at the doorway to her room, where the owl was presumably asleep.

And beneath it, in the same neat print: Students should arrive at King's Cross Station, London, no later than eleven o'clock on the morning of 1 September. The Hogwarts Express departs from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

London. King's Cross. A platform with a fraction in its name.

She had no money for a journey across Europe, and two water crossings stood between her and London: the strait at the top of Africa, the channel at the bottom of England. And above all: no papers that any border would accept. The letter assumed she would be there. It might as well have named the moon.

The letter had found her in Marrakech. She had never attended school, had no address that anyone official knew about. Yet the letter carried her name, and an odd, precise description of where to find her.

She turned that over carefully.

Witchcraft and Wizardry. The name of the school. The phrase on the page sat plainly between descriptions of cauldron sizes and cloak fastenings. Magic. She did not reach for the word with enthusiasm, nor did she dismiss it. She treated it as she treated all new information: as a thing that had not yet been proven, but which was also, as yet, undisproved.

The evidence available to her was: an owl that had carried a letter across what appeared to be thousands of miles and found her on a rooftop it had never seen; a letter handwritten in green ink, on paper heavier than any she had handled, addressed to that rooftop.

She read the letter a third time, this time looking for what was absent. No parents' signature was required. No confirmation of address. No previous school record requested. No address to write back to: only we await your owl by no later than 31 July, and the owl itself, asleep on her windowsill. July was still five days away.

She had time. Not a great deal of it, but time. Tomorrow she would start finding answers rather than waiting for them to arrive.

She folded the letter back into the envelope and tucked it into the inner pocket of her vest, against her ribs.

Tifawt was awake by the time Hermione had finished with the letter. She was sitting upright and cross-legged, eating a fig, watching Hermione with the direct gaze that Hermione had always found more useful than tact.

"A letter," Tifawt said. It was not a question.

"Yes."

"Important?"

Hermione sat down across from her on the flagstones, in the longest stripe of shade cast by the lemon tree, and thought about the question properly.

Tifawt took a second fig from the fold of her djellaba and set it on the flagstone beside Hermione. She did not look at her while she did it.

"Potentially," Hermione said.

She ate the fig.

Tiziri had gone still, which meant she was listening. The twins had never needed to ask the same question twice.

"There is an owl in my room," Hermione said. "Do not disturb it. It needs water, fresh and small prey when it wakes. I will deal with the prey."

Tifawt nodded. Tiziri mirrored her exactly.

＊＊＊

Hermione went back to her room, sat on her sleeping mat with her back against the wall, and did not sleep, though the afternoon moved towards evening around her. She was thinking about the letter. Not the contents. Those she had already read through. But the fact of it.

She thought about the owl, and how it had found her.

Hermione could hear the animals when they chose to speak to her: chatter and fear and gossip. When she was smaller, she'd thought everyone could do it. When she was six, and her parents' hands had slipped from hers in a crowd and never returned, the animals had been the first to answer her when she screamed their names into the streets. No one else had. Later, the stray cats in the streets had told her which alleys were dangerous, the pigeons on the rooftops had carried information about police movements without being asked. Lapis and Lazuli, her beautiful pit vipers, had spoken to her in the market square three years ago and asked for her help; she had freed them from a menagerie stall, and they had never left her since.

The letter used the word "witchcraft".

The call to prayer rose over Marrakech just as the last light began to fade from the rooftops.

It came first from the nearest minaret, long and clear, then from another further away, and another beyond that, until the sound rolled across the whole city like a slow tide.

Hermione paused.

She had almost forgotten the time.

She crossed the courtyard. Tiziri and Tifawt were already on their feet under the lemon tree.

"We should go," she said.

The twins nodded. They both knew what the call meant. The market would thin now. Stalls would close, lamps would be lit, and the night crowd would take its place.

Their meeting place was three alleys away, behind a shuttered spice shop that always smelled of cumin. By the time they arrived, the others were already there, sitting on overturned crates and a broken cart wheel.

"Late," Karim said, though he was grinning.

"Not late," Hermione replied calmly. "Just careful."

They emptied their pockets onto a scrap of cloth. Coins and paper money, mostly francs, dollars and dirhams. Two small knives. Jewellery: a pair of silver bracelets, a ring, a watch. Dates and figs and bread. The division was quick and quiet. No one argued. Hermione watched the piles and adjusted two of them by a single coin.

Then she spoke again.

"I won't be here tomorrow."

That made them look up.

"Where are you going?" someone asked.

Hermione ignored that.

"Tiziri and Tifawt will handle things tomorrow," she said. "Same rules. Same routes."

Karim looked at the twins, then back at Hermione, and shrugged.

"Fine by me."

Hermione nodded once.

They went home. On the walk back, Tiziri kept closer to Hermione's side than she usually did. Nobody said anything about it.

＊＊＊

Hermione went to her room.

There was enough courtyard light to see the room clearly. The water bowl on the windowsill was empty; the owl had drunk again. It was watching her now from the corner of the windowsill, both entirely still and entirely alert at the same moment, like compressed readiness.

"Better?" Hermione asked.

Better, the owl said. Water helped.

"Rest. You'll need at least one day before you fly again."

I know, it said, with the patience of something that had been doing this job for a long time. Then, after a moment, You are not what I expected.

Hermione looked at it. "What did you expect?"

Most children, the owl said, shifting its weight to the other foot, react differently to the letter.

"Differently how?"

Loudly.

Hermione took this in without comment. Eleven was not particularly young, not in any life she was familiar with. Perhaps it was, in lives with roofs and regular meals.

"Who sent you?" she asked.

The school sends the letters. I carry them.

"You chose to come here specifically?"

The owl tipped its head at her, a calculating look in a face that was mostly feathers and severity.

Letters find their people, it said. I find the letters.

This was either a tautology or the beginning of a more complicated answer. Hermione decided not to press it.

She rose and went to the courtyard to wash her face. She thought again about the letter against her ribs.

There was a question she had not yet permitted herself to ask. Asking it would mean she had begun to believe it.

But the evidence was accumulating.

She went back to her room and sat on her sleeping mat.

Lapis emerged from the upper shadows near the ceiling beam and looped herself around Hermione's left forearm: I have been thinking.

Smell of elsewhere, Lapis said.

"The letter?"

The bird. The letter too. Green and old.

Hermione turned this over. "Old how?"

Old like stone-smell. Old like the well outside the south wall.

The well outside the south wall was the oldest structure on the street: older than the building, older than the neighbourhood. Lapis was not given to imprecision.

Lazuli arrived from the direction of the doorframe, moving fast and then stopping abruptly, as though she had made a decision midway and not bothered announcing it. She took up her usual position, coiling loosely around the back of Hermione's neck and settling her chin on Hermione's collarbone.

The bird is large and stupid, Lazuli said.

The bird is not stupid, Lapis said.

The bird flew for days with a strained wing. That is not intelligent behaviour.

That is loyal behaviour.

Lazuli said nothing further.

What will you do? Lapis asked.

Hermione looked at the letter in her hand.

"Think," she said.

You are already thinking.

"Think more, then."

Lapis was silent.

＊＊＊

Hermione looked at the wall opposite her sleeping mat.

The mirror stood where it always stood, leaning against the far wall, its surface dim in the slanting candlelight.

She could see herself in it, faintly, at the edges of perception rather than clearly.

She was about to look away.

Then she did not.

The surface of the mirror moved.

Not like a reflection moved when you moved. Something within the glass shifted, slowly, as though the mirror contained a depth that had not been visible a moment before. The surface trembled once, faintly, like the waver of air above hot stone.

Hermione did not move.

Lapis, around her forearm, made no sound.

Lazuli, at her neck, went very still: attention, not alarm.

The dimness inside the mirror gathered itself. At first it was only a thickening, no shape to it yet, just more shadow than a moment before. Then the shape resolved by degrees: the outline of shoulders, the tilt of a head, the fall of long dark hair.

A face emerged slowly from the dimness.

It was and was not familiar. Dark eyes. Dark hair loose around a face that demanded attention, that would not let itself be glanced at and forgotten.

A woman.

The figure in the mirror looked directly at Hermione.

Hermione's spine straightened before she understood why.

The woman's lips moved.

No sound came through. But Hermione was good at reading lips, a skill the market had taught her, and she watched the shape of the words carefully as they formed.

Two words.

The first was unmistakable.

Hermione.

The second took longer. Three syllables, spoken slowly.

Hermione watched the movement of the lips again in her mind before trusting what she had read.

Granddaughter.

The mirror's surface stilled. The figure withdrew rather than vanished, slow and complete, leaving the glass dim and quiet and slightly different than it had been before.

She looked at the mirror, but it said nothing further.

She left it there: unfinished. It could wait until morning. She had waited for worse.