Chapter Text

Chapter One — Where They Are

Daphne did not manage every flavour before Friday, and Harry maintained that this was not a failure of commitment. It was mathematics. The board behind the counter listed nearly thirty flavours, not counting whatever the tired boy at the till insisted was seasonal, and even Daphne had eventually conceded that seven ice creams in one afternoon would undermine the principle she was supposedly defending.

She managed two. Harry paid for the second after she spent nearly three minutes insisting she was only reading the board.

They stepped back onto the pavement with their books and gloves. The snow had thickened while they were inside: not enough to settle, but plenty to catch in Harry’s hair and melt down the shoulders of her coat. Boston carried on around them without a glance. Tyres hissed on the wet road, a horn went off twice somewhere down the block, and a woman hurried past with a paper cup tucked under her chin, explaining quarterly projections to the man beside her with the urgency normally reserved for attacking trolls.

Harry watched her go, then watched everyone else. Nobody watched him back.

Daphne bumped his shoulder. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Inspecting people. You’ve looked at that man twice.”

Harry glanced at a man waiting at the crossing with a folded newspaper under one arm. “I thought I knew him.”

“From where?”

“No idea.”

“That rather weakens your case.”

He pulled a face at her. She smiled and hooked two fingers through his sleeve.

It was happening less, which was the odd part. Harry still noticed doors. Daphne still picked chairs with a view of the entrance without ever appearing to pick, and both of them knew which pocket held their wands before they sat down, though neither had needed one since they arrived. But a week ago every unfamiliar face had demanded an answer. Auror? Someone from school? Someone following them? Now sometimes a man with a newspaper was only a man with a newspaper, and it was taking Harry embarrassingly long to get used to that.

“What now?” he asked.

Daphne stopped walking. Harry went another step before he noticed and turned back.

“You’re asking me?”

“Yes.” Harry shrugged.

“You don’t have somewhere in mind?”

“No. Do you?”

“I assumed food.”

“I’ve just eaten enough ice cream to offend you.”

“It would take considerably more than that. A museum, then.”

“Do you know one?”

“No.”

They stared at each other while people parted around them like a river around a rock. Then Daphne started to laugh.

“What?” Harry’s mouth was twitching.

“We have no plan.”

“We could make one.”

“No.” It came out so fast he blinked. Daphne looked down the street, still smiling. “No, I don’t think we should.”

Harry considered this. “All right.”

They turned left, because the light changed first.

* * *

The magical shops were not grouped together, and this irritated Daphne enormously. Harry found out after the third one.

The first hid behind a stationery shop and sold books, and so many enchanted inks that Daphne spent twenty minutes testing samples while Harry found a shelf of Muggle machines that wizards had tried to copy and mostly ruined. The second occupied half a basement under a bakery and smelled of warm bread and, less pleasantly, whatever was in the cauldron aisle. The third looked like an ordinary tailor until the elderly woman at the counter asked whether Daphne would like her winter coat charmed against “all sensible forms of American weather,” which apparently included spilled coffee.

Daphne asked where the magical district was.

The woman looked at her over half-moon spectacles. “The what?”

“The magical shopping district.”

“You mean here?”

Daphne gestured at the window. A laundrette sat on the opposite corner.

“No,” said the woman. “There’s shops around.”

“Where?”

“Around.”

Daphne came out of the tailor’s wearing the expression Harry associated with badly argued Arithmancy papers. “They’re scattered.”

“I noticed.”

“Why?”

“Big country?”

“That is not an organising principle.”

Harry shifted the paper bag under his arm. “You should write to America.”

“I may.”

He was still laughing when they reached the fourth shop, which was where they called Dobby. Not because they needed him. Harry noticed the difference before he’d finished saying the name, and he looked over at Daphne. “Think Dobby would like this?”

She glanced up at shelves that climbed to the ceiling and held everything from powdered horn to a jar labelled, helpfully, DO NOT SHAKE. “Yes.”

“Dobby?” Harry called. Dobby appeared beside a stand of self-stirring cauldrons with a quiet crack. A woman comparing bundles of dried root glanced over, saw a house-elf, and went back to her roots.

Dobby froze. His enormous eyes went from the woman to Harry to the rest of the shop.

“Harry Potter called Dobby.”

“Thought you might want to come shopping.”

“Shopping?” His ears lifted.

“We found some magical shops. Three,” said Daphne, “none of them sensibly located.”

“Four.”

“The tailor barely counts.”

“She sold wand holsters.”

“That doesn’t make a commercial district.”

Dobby looked between them. Then his face split into a grin so wide that Harry laughed. “Dobby would like shopping.”

For the rest of the afternoon Dobby discovered Boston, or more exactly discovered a Boston full of magical people who reacted to him in ways he couldn’t make sense of. A wizard asked him to move because he was standing in front of the tea. A witch apologised for nearly treading on his foot. Dobby kept waiting for someone to mind him, and nobody did, which seemed to bother him more than being minded would have.

Then, outside an apothecary, another elf walked past carrying two bags of groceries and wearing a knitted red cap.

Dobby stopped dead. So did the other elf. For about three seconds neither of them said anything, and then the stranger nodded. “Afternoon.”

Dobby’s mouth opened. The elf kept walking.

“Dobby?” said Harry.

“Elf had a hat.”

Harry looked at Daphne. Daphne looked at the red cap bobbing away into the crowd.

“You have clothes,” she pointed out.

“Dobby knows Dobby has clothes.”

“Then—”

“Elf had a hat.”

There was clearly more to this than either of them understood. Dobby hurried after the stranger for ten steps, stopped himself, turned around, took three steps back the other way, and returned.

“Dobby should not bother strange elf.”

“You can talk to him if you want,” Harry said.

“He might be busy,” Daphne added.

Dobby weighed both possibilities with enormous gravity while the red cap turned a corner and vanished. “Next time,” he decided.

“Next time,” Harry agreed.

Since he could not walk freely through Muggle Boston, Dobby spent the rest of the afternoon scanning every head in the stores where he was summoned.

* * *

Their hotel room was exactly as they’d left it: one bed, a wardrobe, a bathroom the size of a broom cupboard, and a window overlooking the backs of three brick buildings. Between the wardrobe and the wall, in a gap no ordinary object of its size had any right to fit, stood the entrance to the tent. The hotel staff did not enter thanks to a sign on the door, half because of the tent and half because Dobby felt insulted if he was not the one cleaning and organising the room.

Harry opened the flap and stepped through, and warm air met him, along with the smell of cocoa. He stopped. Daphne walked into his back.

“What—”

She leaned around him. A tray waited on the table with three mugs and a plate of biscuits.

Harry turned slowly. “You’ve been with us all afternoon.”

Dobby clasped his hands behind his back. “Yes.”

“When did you make cocoa?”

“Dobby came home twelve minutes ago. Harry Potter and Miss Daphne were arguing about whether seven Sickles was too much for an enchanted pencil.”

“It was twelve dollars,” Daphne said automatically.

“You Apparated back here,” said Harry, “made cocoa, and came back.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Dobby’s forehead creased, as if the question had been phrased in another language. “For cocoa.”

There was no answer to that. Harry sat down. Daphne took off her coat, draped it over a chair, reconsidered, and hung it up properly by the entrance. Dobby climbed into his own chair, and Harry’s chest did the odd quiet thing it did whenever he noticed. Months ago Dobby would have stood beside the table until someone ordered him to sit. Now he sat because there were three mugs.

Daphne wrapped both hands around hers. “So.”

Harry drank. Dobby drank. Somewhere in the walls the tent’s heating charm ticked.

“What are we doing tomorrow?” Daphne asked.

Harry almost answered by reflex. There should have been something: the Tournament, Dumbledore, a route, a deadline, a list with half of it crossed out. Instead there was cocoa, snow collecting on the hotel window, a stack of books by his chair, and Daphne across from him with one foot tucked beneath her.

He frowned. “I don’t know.”

She waited.

“That feels wrong,” he admitted.

Her face softened. “I know.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know either.”

Dobby raised one hand, like a student in class. “Dobby would like to find the elf with the hat.”

Harry laughed into his cocoa. “All right.”

“A single objective,” Daphne said solemnly.

“Find the hat.”

“Find the elf wearing the hat. It’s probably safer.”

Dobby beamed.

They never found him.

* * *

The next morning they woke late. Not dangerously late, and not late enough for McGonagall to take points. Just late. Harry opened his eyes, saw nine forty-three on the little alarm clock by the bed, and spent several confused seconds trying to remember what disaster this was supposed to cause.

There was none. The ceiling remained stubbornly free of consequences.

Beside him, Daphne made a small furious noise and dragged the blanket over her head. The tent had more than one bedroom, and they had somehow stopped using the others without ever discussing it. Some nights they simply fell asleep halfway through a sentence. Nobody had told them whether this was proper, which turned out to be a great help.

Harry looked at the clock again. Nine forty-four. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them next it was ten twenty-seven.

This, he decided, was excellent.

* * *

They found museums, and Daphne approached them the way she approached libraries: establish the building’s purpose, identify the useful sections, plot an efficient route. Harry ruined this almost at once.

“You’re skipping the dinosaurs.”

“They aren’t relevant.”

“They’re dinosaurs.”

“We have three hours.”

“Exactly.”

“I want to see the development of magical—”

“Dinosaurs.”

Daphne looked at him. Harry looked pointedly at the skeleton. She sighed. “Ten minutes.”

It became forty.

Two days later they visited a magical museum whose centrepiece was the history of wandmaking in the colonies. The day after that it was a Muggle one again, then a magical one, and then nowhere at all, which Harry found the strangest part. One morning they left after breakfast and walked for nearly four hours without reaching anything they’d meant to see, because there was nothing they’d meant to see. They crossed streets because something looked interesting on the other side. Daphne bought a pastry because it smelled good. Harry stood for twenty-five minutes outside a bicycle shop watching a man fix a wheel, until Daphne pushed him through the door and told him to ask questions instead of fogging the glass.

The mechanic seemed baffled that a fourteen-year-old English boy was so desperate to understand a derailleur. Harry came out with grease on two fingers and a booklet.

Daphne took one look at him. “You’re happy.”

“It’s clever.”

“It’s a bicycle.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t contradict what I said.”

He kissed her cheek. She rolled her eyes and took his hand.

* * *

Harvard's Botanical Museum was what finally defeated Daphne Greengrass, and Harry knew the exact moment it happened.

She had been behaving perfectly until then. She’d spent ten minutes among the mineral specimens muttering that it was absurd for Muggles to catalogue rocks more rigorously than some magical apothecaries catalogued ingredients, and she had been interested and critical in the correct proportions. Then they reached the flowers, and she stopped so abruptly that Harry got three paces ahead before he noticed.

She was staring into a glass case. Inside it sat a spray of blossoms so delicate that Harry assumed they’d been preserved somehow. Her nose was inches from the glass.

“Harry. What charm is this?”

He checked the label. “No charm.”

She straightened a little. “They’re glass.”

“Yeah.”

“That is a flower. Made of glass. By Muggles.”

“Yes.”

“Stop smiling.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re thinking very loudly.”

Harry stepped up beside her. The flowers really were absurd: thin petals, tiny stems, leaves with veins, colours layered so carefully that even a foot away it was hard to believe they weren’t alive. Daphne read the placard, then read it again, then tapped it.

“It says they were made.”

“That’s usually what made means.”

“With tools? No Transfiguration, no preservation spell?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

She narrowed her eyes at the nearest petal. “How?”

Harry lost the fight and laughed.

“This is not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“They turned glass into petals.”

“They shaped it. It’s not the same as transfiguring it.”

“It achieves the same result.”

“You know Muggles can make things, right?”

“I am aware Muggles can make things.”

“Are you?”

She looked at him, then back at the flowers, and froze. “That one has pollen.”

Harry leaned in. It did. Tiny yellow structures sat dead centre, each one a speck of glass.

Daphne’s expression turned personally wounded. “They made pollen. Out of glass. Why?”

Harry read the next part of the display. “Teaching, apparently. Dried specimens weren’t good enough.”

“So they built thousands of individual models.”

“That seems to be the idea.”

She turned slowly back to the case, and for once no cool Greengrass verdict arrived. There was only curiosity, bare and a bit stunned. She moved to the next case, and Harry followed. Twenty minutes went by, then thirty. She bent to examine the underside of a leaf. She spent a full five minutes comparing two models of the same plant at different stages of growth.

“You know,” Harry said eventually, “for someone who said the dinosaurs weren’t relevant—”

“Be quiet.”

“You’ve been here forty-five minutes.”

“They are glass flowers, Harry. That’s different.”

He was still laughing when she took his sleeve and towed him to the next case. “Look at this one.”

He went willingly.

* * *

By the end of the week something had shifted, though not dramatically. Harry did not wake up on Saturday having forgotten Hogwarts. Daphne still kept her important papers under layered protections, Harry still checked the hotel corridor before opening the tent, and Dobby still insisted on knowing roughly when they’d be back.

But they’d stopped treating every day as a problem to be solved. On Monday Harry had asked what they were doing on Tuesday. By Wednesday Daphne had quit making lists unless a list was actually needed. On Thursday they left after breakfast with no destination, and on Friday they spent an hour by the river because Harry wanted to watch the boats. Daphne read. Harry eventually lay back with his folded coat under his head.

Dobby had disappeared before lunch. Not vanished; gone somewhere. The difference was becoming important too.

He’d met another elf the previous afternoon at one of the shops, and he’d talked to him near the back while Harry examined enchanted measuring tools and Daphne argued politely with a bookseller over whether an American Arithmancy journal had printed a formula wrong. That morning Dobby had appeared at breakfast in his blue jumper and an expression Harry immediately distrusted.

“Dobby is going out.”

Harry paused with toast halfway to his mouth. “Out where?”

Dobby’s ears dropped a little.

Harry heard himself and put the toast down. “Sorry. I meant, do you know when you’ll be back?”

“Before dinner.”

“All right.”

Dobby kept looking at him.

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “You don’t have to tell us where you’re going.”

Dobby’s ears rose again. “Harry Potter worries.”

“Harry Potter is working on it.”

Daphne hid a smile behind her teacup.

Dobby had left at ten. It was nearly four now, and Harry had checked the time seven times. Daphne had noticed all seven and mentioned none, turning a page instead.

A boat slid down the river. “Do you think he’s all right?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

Harry turned his head. Daphne kept reading. “That isn’t helpful.”

“It’s accurate.”

“He’s been gone six hours.”

“He said before dinner.”

“He usually comes back every couple of hours.”

“He usually believes we need feeding every couple of hours.”

“We do.”

“You had lunch.”

“A pretzel.”

“You chose the pretzel.”

“It was a very good pretzel.” Harry remembered fondly.

Daphne finally lowered the book. “Harry. He’s making friends.”

A gull landed on the railing. “He had friends before.”

“Did he?”

Harry opened his mouth, then shut it. Dobby had known elves at Hogwarts, the kitchen ones, and perhaps some of the Malfoys’ old household. People he spoke to while working. Harry wasn’t sure that counted.

Daphne followed his gaze to the water. “He came with us because he wanted to. Maybe now he wants to see things we can’t show him. That’s good.”

“I know.”

“You’re allowed to be a bit nervous, but it’s good.”

Harry sighed. “I don’t like how reasonable you get when I’m being an idiot.”

“I treasure these opportunities.”

He bumped her knee with his. She smiled, and a moment later he let his head fall against her shoulder. Daphne reopened her book. Nothing happened. No messenger arrived, no alarm sounded, nobody found them.

Dobby came home at six twenty-three with mud on his shoes, a paper packet under one arm, and more words than either of them had ever heard him attempt in a row. He had met three elves. One worked for wages. One worked for a family but wasn’t bound to them. One did not work for any wizard at all and apparently repaired magical kitchens for money. Dobby didn’t understand any of it, and it thrilled him.

He talked straight through dinner. Daphne asked questions. Harry listened, and somewhere between Dobby explaining that there were whole places where free elves lived together and Harry trying to work out why Dobby had bought six cinnamon buns, he realised he hadn’t glanced at the door once.

A week ago he would have.

That night, when Daphne asked what they were doing tomorrow, Harry was halfway through brushing his teeth. He looked at her in the mirror. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, reading one of the museum catalogues.

He spat into the sink. “No idea.”

Daphne turned a page. “All right.”

Harry rinsed his toothbrush, and for the first time the answer didn’t feel wrong.

* * *

Dobby was with a friend.

Harry had to repeat the sentence in his head twice before it stopped sounding peculiar. Not helping another elf. A friend, the ordinary kind, who had offered to show him somewhere and then been met with Dobby’s sudden, suspicious vagueness about where.

Harry had decided not to ask twice. Daphne had looked unbearably pleased with him for it.

They were now sitting across from each other in a magical coffee shop hidden behind what appeared, from the street, to be an entirely ordinary tobacconist. Getting in had meant walking through a door marked STAFF ONLY, ignoring the narrow storage corridor behind it, and then pushing through what Harry had been fairly sure was a brick wall. Daphne had objected to the arrangement, and not on grounds of secrecy.

“There isn’t even a sign. How is anyone supposed to know it’s here?”

“Magic?”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s technically an answer.”

“It’s a poor one.”

Over the past week Harry had come to understand that America was failing Daphne Greengrass in a number of organisational categories, and that tea was the worst of them. She was presently holding a cup of coffee in both hands and glaring at the tea menu chalked on the wall behind his shoulder with open hostility.

Harry turned to look. “What did it do this time?”

“Oh it knows what it did.”

“The menu?”

“The tea.”

“You’re not drinking tea.”

“Precisely.”

She took a sip of coffee. Harry had discovered by now that she didn’t much like the stuff; she simply liked it better than what half the cafés in Boston had tried to pass off as tea, and somewhere along the way this had become a matter of principle.

“You could order one,” he suggested. “Find out if it’s good.”

“I’ve done that six times.”

“Five.”

“Six.”

“The museum café doesn’t count.”

“The museum café most certainly counts. It claimed to serve English breakfast tea.”

“It did serve English breakfast tea.”

“It served hot water into which a bag had been introduced. At some point in its history that bag may have met a tea leaf.”

Harry bit the inside of his cheek.

“Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re doing the thing with your mouth, where you try not to laugh because you know I’m right.”

“I don’t know you’re right.”

She set her cup down with great care. “They gave me water that had stopped boiling several geological periods before the bag arrived.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“You put milk in yours before you’d even tasted it.”

“I always put milk in tea.”

“You were protecting yourself.”

Harry gave up and laughed. Daphne sat back, the picture of a woman whose case had been decisively proven.

“I’m very grateful for Dobby, you know.”

“You were grateful for him before.”

“I’m more grateful. He understands that water should still have some acquaintance with boiling when it meets the leaves.”

Over by the counter a witch in a green apron was charming a row of cups to stir themselves while she argued with a customer about whether cinnamon belonged in coffee. Harry nodded toward her. “If you keep insulting American tea, someone’s going to hear you.”

“Good.”

“They might throw us out.”

“They should improve their tea.”

“Maybe it’s revenge. You insulted it first.”

“I did not insult it first. The tea insulted me.”

“When?”

“The first café.”

Harry stared at her. Daphne lifted her coffee with enormous dignity. “It started it.”

He laughed loudly enough that the wizard at the next table glanced over. Daphne ignored them both until Harry reached across and stole the little biscuit that had come with her cup, at which point her hand shot out like a snake.

“Excuse me.”

“You weren’t eating it.”

“That is irrelevant.”

“It’s been sitting there for fifteen minutes.”

“I was saving it.”

“For what?”

“I hadn’t decided.”

Harry snapped it in half and handed one piece back. Daphne looked at it.

“You stole my biscuit and returned half.”

“Yes.”

“That isn’t restitution.”

“It’s exactly half restitution.”

“You’ve grown very bold in America.”

“Nobody’s stopped me.”

“That is becoming a problem.” She ate her half before he could take that too.

For a while they didn’t say much. The shop was warm enough that both coats had been abandoned over the backs of their chairs. A fire burned under a stone mantel on the far wall, though Harry suspected it was decorative, since the heat seemed to come from somewhere else. Little brass lamps floated over each table and drifted a few inches whenever someone opened a newspaper or scraped a chair. A man in jeans and a heavy work coat was reading a Muggle paper with his wand lying openly across his saucer. Near the window two witches were discussing potion ingredients and, as far as Harry could tell, a university application. At another table a young man scribbled in a notebook until his pencil lifted itself out of his hand and corrected his spelling.

It was only strange by Hogwarts standards. Nobody here seemed to feel they had to belong wholly to one world or the other, and Harry liked that more than he’d expected to.

Daphne was watching the room too.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

“I’m observing.”

“It’s staring when you do it. You told me last week that I was inspecting people.”

“You were.”

“And you’re not?”

“No.”

Harry waited. Daphne lasted about six seconds.

“I like it here.”

“Boston?”

“This place.”

“The coffee?”

“No.”

“The tea?”

Her face went flat. “Careful.”

He grinned, and she looked around the room again. “It’s just... normal.”

Harry understood at once. A witch walked past with a tray, and nothing happened. Someone laughed behind them, and nothing happened. No portraits reported their conversations. Nobody cared that Daphne was a Greengrass or that Harry was Harry Potter. He ran a finger around the rim of his cup. “Yeah.”

“I thought it would feel more foreign.”

“It does sometimes.”

“Of course it does. Just not in the ways I expected.” She shrugged. “I thought it would be more organised.”

Harry snorted. “I knew it.”

“I don’t only mean the shops.”

“You absolutely mean the shops.”

“The shops are scattered across an entire city.”

“Still bothering you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Daphne chose not to acknowledge that. “I suppose I expected another Britain. Different laws, different accents, but recognisable underneath. It isn’t.”

“Do you hate that?”

She took a long time to answer, long enough that Harry looked back at her, and found that she was smiling a little. “No. I don’t think I do.”

“That’s lucky. I doubt America’s going to reorganise itself for you.”

“It could make an effort.”

“I’ll mention it to the President.”

“Who?”

Harry blinked. Daphne blinked back. Then Harry started laughing and couldn’t stop.

“Harry. Who is the President?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“You are intolerable.”

“You thought America had a king.”

“I did not.”

“You hesitated.”

“I was working out whether you meant the magical government.”

“You definitely thought—”

“I know perfectly well America does not have a king.”

“Now you do.”

She kicked him under the table.

“Ow.”

“Tragic.”

He was rubbing his shin with exaggerated suffering when she said, almost casually, “I want to go to Salem.”

Harry stopped rubbing. “The witch-trial Salem?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Tomorrow?”

The ease of it startled them both. Daphne smiled first and Harry followed. “Tomorrow,” he said.

“It isn’t far, and we’ve nothing else to do.”

“No.”

She leaned in, warming up. “Hogwarts teaches almost nothing useful about magical America. Binns mentioned the colonies perhaps twice, and one of those times he spent half the lesson on taxation law.”

“That sounds like Binns.”

“But if Salem became famous in Muggle history because of accusations of witchcraft, then there must have been something there. Real witches among the settlers, a community, records.”

“Or there weren’t any.”

“Then we find out there weren’t. Either way I want to know.” She frowned. “They burned people, didn’t they?”

“I know I did an essay on that, but I don’t really remember.”

“Neither do I. That’s rather the point.”

Harry smiled. There had been a time when choosing a destination meant weighing Ministry detection and Apparition limits and ports and identification and whether Dumbledore might guess the route. Now Daphne wanted to see Salem because of something she’d half heard in a history lesson, and that was reason enough.

“What do you think it’ll be like?”

She glanced at the ceiling. “Old.”

“Strong start.”

“With libraries, if we’re lucky. Archives.”

“Tea?”

Her face lit with hope, and Harry laughed. “There it is.”

“I’m only saying a settlement with centuries of magical history may have kept some standards.”

“It might all be coffee.”

“Then Salem has fallen.”

She finished her coffee, grimaced, and set the cup down. “We could stay a few days. Not rush.”

“Keep this hotel and come back?”

Daphne shook her head. “If we’re going, I’d rather go.”

Harry understood. They didn’t need Boston as a base. Their clothes were in the tent, their books were in the tent, and their home, increasingly, was in the tent, so Boston could simply become somewhere they had been. It was still a strange idea, and he turned it over once more before he said, “All right. Salem tomorrow.”

Her eyes sharpened. “You don’t want to research first?”

A week ago he would have wanted maps, magical entrances, lists, and a plan with at least one backup. He looked around the little shop, at the floating lamps and the pencil that corrected spelling, and then back at her. “No.”

Daphne smiled slowly. “Neither do I.”

“We’ll find a hotel.”

“When we arrive?”

“That’s how hotels usually work.”

“Without booking one?”

“We have money.”

“That isn’t the same as competence.”

“We’ve survived worse than hotels.”

“That isn’t reassuring.”

Harry reached across the table and took her hand. “We’ll figure it out.”

She looked down at their fingers, and something in her face went soft. “All right.”

And that was how Salem entered their plans: without a map, without a timetable, and without even a decent cup of tea.

* * *

Dobby didn’t come home until after eight. By then Harry and Daphne had packed everything that wasn’t already inside the tent, confirmed with the hotel desk that they’d be leaving in the morning, and established that Salem had several hotels and therefore no immediate danger of anyone sleeping on a bench. They were in the tent when the familiar crack sounded in the room outside.

“Harry Potter?”

“In here.”

Dobby pushed through the flap in his blue jumper, shoes damp, with a narrow green ribbon tied around one wrist. Harry noticed it at once, and so did Daphne, and neither of them said a word. Dobby looked so pleased that his ears were nearly horizontal.

“Dobby had a very good day.”

“With your friend?”

Dobby hesitated, only for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yes.”

Friend. Still odd, though a little less than yesterday.

Daphne closed her book. “Good.”

Dobby looked between them. “Miss Daphne and Harry Potter have packed.”

“Mostly,” said Harry. “We’re moving tomorrow. To Salem.”

“Not permanently,” Daphne added.

Dobby glanced at the room, then at the tent flap. “Dobby packs the tent?”

“That’s what we wanted to talk to you about. We were thinking you might go and see your friend again tomorrow morning.”

His ears dipped. “Miss Daphne does not want Dobby to help?”

“The opposite,” she said quickly.

“We have to collapse the tent to move it,” Harry explained. “And we know you’re fine inside when it’s packed. You came across the Atlantic that way.”

Dobby nodded.

“What we don’t know,” Daphne said, “is what happens if you try to Apparate into it while it’s collapsed.”

Dobby blinked.

Harry gestured vaguely around the impossible interior. “If we’re carrying it through a station, or it’s in a bag, or we’re halfway between hotels and you hear me call—”

Dobby’s eyes widened.

“Exactly,” Daphne said.

“Dobby does not know where Dobby would go.”

“Neither do we.”

There was a short silence.

Dobby frowned thoughtfully. “Dobby could test.”

“No,” said Harry and Daphne together.

Dobby looked between them.

“Dobby could wait until tent is folded and try from very close.”

“No.”

“Dobby could try only a little.”

Harry clapped a hand over his mouth.

Daphne rounded on him. “This is not funny.”

“It is a little funny.”

“It is not.” She turned back to Dobby. “You are not deliberately Apparating toward a collapsed enchanted space to see whether it accepts you.”

Dobby considered this.

“Dobby is very good at Apparating.”

“That is not the concern.”

Harry managed to get himself under control. “She’s right. I’d rather not discover that you appear inside whatever pocket the tent is in.”

Dobby’s face went blank.

Then horrified.

“Dobby does not want to Apparate into Harry Potter’s pocket.”

Harry lost the fight again.

Daphne pressed her lips together.

“Then we’re agreed.”

“Yes,” Dobby said firmly. “No pocket.”

Daphne settled back. “So tomorrow you go wherever you went today. We’ll pack, collapse the tent, travel to Salem, find a room and set everything up again, and then Harry calls you.”

“When the house is ready.”

“Yes.”

“Then Dobby can stay with friend until then.” His fingers found the green ribbon.

“If you want to,” Harry said.

“Yes,” said Dobby, quietly.

He didn’t say Dobby can, or if Harry Potter permits.

He just said yes.

Daphne’s eyes flicked to Harry, and Harry knew she’d caught it too.

“Good.”

Dobby’s ears rose again. Then he frowned.

“Salem has elves?”

“We don’t know.”

“Salem has hats?”

Harry laughed. “We don’t know that either.”

Dobby nodded slowly, as if accepting that Salem was a place of deep mystery. Daphne rose from her chair. “We know it has history.”

“Magic history?”

“Hopefully.”

“Good tea?” Dobby asked.

Harry folded over. Daphne stared at the elf, whose face was a masterpiece of innocence. Harry was fairly sure it was a fraud.

“Dobby.”

“Yes, Miss Daphne?”

“Go and make tea.”

“Good tea?”

“The best tea.”

“With boiling water?”

Harry had to sit down on the floor. Daphne pointed at the kitchen like a general. “Now.”

Dobby vanished with a crack, giggling, and Daphne turned very slowly toward Harry. “You’ve corrupted him.”

Harry wiped his eyes. “I didn’t say anything.”

“He wasn’t like this in Britain.”

“Neither were you.”

That stopped her. His laughter faded into a smile. In the kitchen Dobby was humming, off-key and happy, over the sound of a kettle he was apparently threatening. The tent was half-packed. Tomorrow they would fold it up and leave Boston and go somewhere simply because they wanted to see it. Nobody had ordered them to, nobody was chasing them there, and they didn’t even have a decent plan.

Daphne looked at him for a long moment.

“No,” she said softly. “I suppose I wasn’t.”

Then Dobby shouted from the kitchen to ask whether American biscuits were allowed with proper British tea, and the moment dissolved in Harry’s laughter.

* * *

Salem disappointed Daphne almost immediately, and Harry tried very hard not to enjoy it.

He failed.

On the first morning she had stepped out of the hotel with the look of a woman about to uncover several centuries of neglected magical history. By lunchtime she had bought nothing, learned very little, and developed strong opinions about pointed hats.

“There are too many of them.”

Harry looked through the shop window beside them. There were, admittedly, a great many: black ones, purple ones, one covered in silver stars, and another with a plastic spider sewn to the brim.

“I thought witches wore pointed hats.”

“At ceremonies.”

“You own one.”

“I own several.”

Harry turned slowly. Daphne narrowed her eyes.

“That is different.”

“How?”

“They are proper hats.”

Harry looked back at the window, where a mannequin wore an enormous purple hat with a bent tip, orange feathers, and a buckle nearly as large as its face. “Fair.”

Daphne folded her arms. “This is insulting.”

“To hats?”

“To witches.”

“You’re a witch. Are you offended?”

“Deeply.”

He smiled, and she noticed. “Do not encourage them.”

“I haven’t bought anything.”

“You were considering the mug.”

“It said World’s Second-Best Wizard.”

“That is exactly the sort of thing I mean.”

“It was honest.”

Daphne walked away. Harry followed, grinning.

* * *

They gave Salem three days, partly because Daphne refused to accept the first as representative. The second was required for fair comparison, and the third was necessary because surely they had missed something.

They had not. There was magic in Salem, just not very much of it. A narrow apothecary hid behind a shop that sold crystals and incense to tourists, reached through a door that appeared to lead to a broom cupboard. There was a bookseller above a café, though half its stock was imported from New York, and a wand-repair workshop operating out of the back of a jeweller’s. Two magical households admitted, with some reluctance, that there had once been more families in the area. That was more or less it. There was no sprawling hidden district, no ancient council hall under the town, and no archive of colonial witchcraft kept safe behind wards.

Daphne questioned three shopkeepers about this. The first shrugged. The second said most magical families had drifted toward larger towns generations ago. The third asked whether she was writing a school essay, which offended her nearly as much as the hats, and which Harry thought was the best thing that had happened all week.

They spent the rest of their time in Muggle museums, some interesting, some grim, and a few so heavily decorated with theatrical gloom that Daphne stood in front of them trying to decide whether to laugh or complain. She also learned, with visible annoyance, that no one had been burned; the executions had been by hanging. Harry promised not to mention her earlier certainty more than absolutely necessary. Everything in town that could be sold with a witch on it had been: wax witches, plastic cauldrons, snow globes, key rings, candles, and small wooden signs informing visitors that a witch lived here. Harry bought one of the signs. Daphne made him put it back.

Dobby bought something much worse.

It happened on the afternoon of the second day, when they left him alone for perhaps seven minutes. This was a mistake. When he reappeared beside them he was carrying a plastic witch nearly as tall as his forearm, with violent purple hair, a hooked nose of heroic proportions, a black dress covered in silver moons, and a broom that bent alarmingly in the middle.

Daphne stopped walking. “No.”

Dobby hugged it to his chest. “Dobby bought witch.”

“I can see that.”

“Dobby likes her.”

Harry looked at the witch, and then at Daphne, and understood at once that this was going to matter. “She’s got character.”

“Do not support this.”

Dobby looked wounded. “Miss Daphne does not like witch?”

Daphne visibly wrestled with several possible answers. “She is very... purple.”

Dobby beamed.

“And the nose is perhaps a little excessive.”

Dobby examined it with care. “Dobby likes nose.”

Harry lost the fight and laughed. Daphne glared at him through the whole thing.

Dobby carried the witch back to the hotel, and through the tent flap. It went in. It did not come out. This would later prove significant.

* * *

By the third evening Daphne had stopped pretending Salem might improve.

Rain tapped on the hotel window beyond the tent, but inside the sitting room it was warm. The fire had burned down more red than gold, and the lamps were turned low enough that most of the room lay in soft shadow. Dobby had spent dinner describing his day. He’d found another elf, this one employed by a family with three restaurants, and he had spent almost an hour trying to understand why she was paid separately for each building. Harry had tried to explain wages. Daphne had corrected him. Dobby had asked why anyone would accept payment by the hour when hours changed depending on how busy the day was, and Harry had given up. Daphne lasted another ten minutes before doing the same, which seemed to please Dobby very much.

By nine he’d announced he was tired.

“Already?” said Harry.

“Dobby walked much today.”

“That happens when you keep disappearing across cities.”

Dobby smiled. “Dobby had good day.”

At the doorway he paused. “Are Harry Potter and Miss Daphne staying in Salem tomorrow?”

Daphne glanced at Harry. Harry glanced at Daphne. Dobby looked suspicious.

“We haven’t decided,” Harry said.

“Dobby thinks Salem has many bad witches.”

Daphne sat up. “Exactly.”

Harry groaned. Dobby pointed down the corridor. “Dobby’s witch is good.”

“She is purple.”

“Yes.”

“And the nose is offensive.”

Dobby’s ears lifted. “Dobby likes nose.”

“I know you do. Good night.”

“Night, Dobby,” said Harry.

He vanished down the corridor, and a moment later a door clicked shut.

Harry stretched his legs toward the fire. Daphne sat beside him on the sofa with a book open on her lap that she hadn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes. He knew, because he’d been watching. Eventually she closed it.

“Well. Salem is terrible.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“I was being charitable yesterday.”

“You accused a gift shop of historical vandalism.”

“It was selling broom-shaped bottle openers.”

“That sounds useful.”

“They had glitter.”

“That doesn’t make them less useful.”

“It makes them worse.”

Harry laughed quietly. For a while they listened to the fire, and the clock ticking somewhere in the little kitchen, and the rain. Then Daphne shifted closer until her shoulder touched his, and a moment later her head came to rest against his chest. Harry lifted an arm without thinking and put it around her. She tucked herself in. It was easier than it used to be, and neither of them stopped to notice.

“You’re very quiet,” he said.

“I’m thinking.”

“Very dangerous thing.”

She pinched his side without moving, and he flinched. “Cruel.”

“You were warned.”

The fire popped. Daphne watched it a minute longer. “Harry.”

“Mm?”

“Would you mind very much if we went to New York?”

“Not at all.”

She lifted her head slightly. “That’s it? No questions?”

“I’ve got questions. Why New York?”

She settled back against him. “There’s an academic there. Doctor Tamarack.”

The name meant nothing to him.

“She’s one of the few serious Arithmancy researchers in the world, and as far as I know the only woman publishing regularly in the field. She writes about structural relationships rather than just predictive work. Layered equations, stability in magical systems.” Daphne’s voice warmed in a way he’d learned to recognise. “The things that actually interest me.”

“You’ve read all of it?”

“Most of it.”

“That sounds more believable.”

She ignored him. “I’d like to meet her.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not asking your permission.”

“Good.”

“I’m asking whether you’d mind going.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re suspiciously agreeable.”

“I’m not busy.”

She stared at him for perhaps two seconds.

Then she moved.

Her hand caught the front of his shirt.

Harry had just enough time to raise his eyebrows before Daphne kissed him.

Not the quick sort.

Not the small, casual kisses they had fallen into over the past weeks.

This one lasted.

Her fingers tightened in his shirt and pulled him closer, and Harry’s hand slid from her shoulder to her waist.

Daphne shifted until she was almost half across him.

Harry forgot New York.

He forgot Salem.

For a little while, he forgot most things.

When she finally pulled back, his glasses were crooked.

His hair was worse than usual.

Daphne looked extremely pleased with herself.

Harry blinked. “What was that for?”

“Good behaviour must be rewarded.”

“That sounds suspicious.”

“It’s meant to encourage repetition.”

He pushed his glasses straight. “I’m suddenly willing to leave tonight.”

Daphne laughed.

“Actually, I’d like some clarification. What exactly counted as good behaviour?”

“Agreeing with me quickly.”

“That’s a terrible precedent.”

“For you, perhaps.”

“What if I disagree?”

“Then there are no rewards.”

“This relationship is becoming corrupt.”

“You’re free to file a complaint.”

“With whom?”

“Me.”

“Who reviews it?”

“Also me.”

“Completely corrupt,” said Harry, and kissed her cheek, which made her smile into his shoulder. He gave it a moment. “Hotel when we arrive?”

“Yes.”

“And then Doctor Tamarack.”

Daphne’s smile slipped. “I don’t know if she’ll meet me.”

“She might.”

“She might not. She’s respected, Harry.”

“So are you.”

“I’m fourteen.”

“So?”

“So respected researchers don’t rearrange their lives because a fourteen-year-old has questions.”

Harry thought about it. “Then she says no.”

“That is your advice?”

“Ask. If she says no, she says no.”

Daphne stared into the fire. “I dislike how obvious that sounds.”

“I learned from you.”

“That is absolutely not true.”

“It sounded good, though.”

She smiled, and Harry thought that was the end of the conversation. It was not. Daphne’s eyes drifted toward the corridor and narrowed.

“Do you think I could throw away that plastic witch without Dobby noticing?”

“No.”

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“I didn’t need to.”

“It’s hideous. It has purple hair.”

“Some people have purple hair.”

“Not naturally.”

“In our world?”

“That isn’t the point.” She sat up. “It has a nose, Harry.”

“You’ve already insulted the nose.”

“It insulted me first.”

“I think you have a problem with objects.”

“The tea started it.”

“And the witch started it.”

“Yes,” Daphne said, giving him her most shamelessly pleading look. 

“Is anything else currently attacking you?”

“The lamp in the hotel room is questionable.”

“Of course it is.”

He pulled her back against him. “We can’t throw it away. He bought it with his own money, and it’s in his room.”

Daphne opened her mouth. Harry watched her understand where this was going.

“That,” he said gravely, “is sovereign territory.”

“Sovereign territory.”

“His bedroom. We have to consider the diplomatic implications.”

“There are no diplomatic implications.”

“There’s retaliation.”

“From Dobby?”

“Yes.”

“What sort?”

Harry considered. “No tea.”

Her face went still. “That is unacceptable.”

“Exactly.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“Would you risk it?”

Daphne looked toward the corridor, then toward the kitchen, and then back at Harry. Her shoulders sagged. “No.”

“Wise.”

“I hate that thing. It watches me when the door’s open.”

“Maybe she likes you. Maybe she’s lonely.”

“She is plastic.”

“That’s very judgemental.”

Daphne hit him with a cushion. Harry caught it and refused to let go, and the resulting struggle displayed very little dignity on either side. It ended with Daphne tangled up against his arm, the cushion trapped between them, both of them laughing too hard to say anything.

When it faded she smiled, more quietly. “New York.”

“New York.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

She rested her head against him again. Harry tucked the cushion behind them both. The fire sank lower, the rain kept falling, and somewhere down the corridor, inside what Harry had now formally declared sovereign territory, a plastic witch stood on a shelf with purple hair, an enormous nose, and the first stirrings of what would eventually become an extraordinary collection.

Daphne did not know this yet.

For now, New York was enough.

* * *

New York had existed in Harry’s life for forty-three minutes before Daphne attempted to leave Dr Vivian Rose Tamarack’s institute.

They had not found a hotel, and they had not eaten lunch. The tent was collapsed inside Harry’s bag, Dobby was still happily somewhere with a friend, and the only thing they had accomplished since getting off the train was walking several blocks in the wrong direction because Harry had misread a street number. None of this concerned Daphne nearly as much as the brass plaque on the building in front of them.

INSTITUTE FOR MAGICAL MATHEMATICS

She had been staring at it for nearly a minute. Harry shifted the strap of his bag higher onto his shoulder. “Well?”

“I am thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking since we crossed the street. You said she works here, so we go in.”

Daphne finally looked at him. “That is an appalling summary of the situation.”

“It has a handle,” Harry offered, nodding at the door.

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“I know.”

She turned back to the plaque, and Harry watched the sequence happen. Her shoulders straightened, her chin rose, and for one hopeful second he thought she had decided. Then she took half a step backward, and he caught her sleeve.

“No.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re leaving.”

“I am repositioning.”

“Toward the train station?”

“I was considering whether this is the best time. We have luggage, we haven’t found a hotel, and we should eat.”

“It’s one bag, we can find a hotel afterward, and you weren’t hungry five minutes ago.”

“That can change.”

Harry smiled, and Daphne narrowed her eyes at him. “This is amusing to you.”

“A little.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

“It really is.” She tried to free her sleeve, and he kept hold of it. “You dragged me through months of practical training. You made me ask professors questions, and you made me talk to Sirius when I was avoiding him.”

“Those were necessary.”

“And this isn’t?” Daphne went still, and Harry softened his grip without letting go. “You want to meet her. You’ve wanted to for years.”

She exhaled through her nose. “Yes.”

“Then let’s meet her.”

“It doesn’t work like that. You do not simply arrive at the workplace of one of the most important researchers in modern Arithmancy and ask to see her.”

“Why not?”

She stared at him, appearing genuinely offended by the inadequacy of the question. “Harry, she wrote The Remainder Problem.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know.”

“You’ve explained it to me seven times.”

“That does not mean you understand it.”

“No, but I understand she wrote it.” Daphne pressed two fingers to her forehead.

“She took the residue everyone else treated as mathematical noise and showed that the same relationships recur across entirely different spell families.”

“That’s the bit with the numbers that shouldn’t be there.”

Her eyes snapped to him. “They are not numbers that shouldn’t be there.”

Harry smiled. “There she is.”

Daphne realised what he had done, and her expression darkened. “That was manipulative.”

“It worked.”

She looked at the door again, and Harry waited. “I wrote to her,” she said at last, more quietly. His smile faded. “Twice. The first time was in second year.”

“You wrote to an academic in America when you were twelve?”

“I had questions.”

“Of course you did. What about the second?”

“Last year. Neither was answered.”

“So she probably doesn’t answer student letters. Or never got them.”

“Or she read them and decided that a child from Britain asking poorly formulated questions did not warrant her time.”

“That’s a lot to get out of no answer.”

“It is the most probable explanation.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“That is precisely why we shouldn’t arrive without an appointment.”

Harry released her sleeve, and for a second Daphne looked almost relieved. Then he took her hand instead. “Come on. Worst case, the receptionist tells us no.”

“She will.”

“Then you were right. You like being right.”

“I like being right when the consequences are not humiliating.”

He opened the door, and Daphne stayed on the pavement, their linked hands stretched between them. “Harry, you are being extraordinarily annoying.”

“Seems to be working.”

“I regret teaching you anything.”

“You like me.”

“Currently under review.”

He tugged gently, and Daphne came through the door.

* * *

The institute lobby was smaller than Daphne had expected. Harry knew because she stopped just inside and looked around with visible confusion. There was no marble, no enormous magical seal, no intimidating security wizard and no portraits of dead mathematicians. There were polished wooden floors, a row of comfortable chairs, several framed diagrams that meant absolutely nothing to Harry, and a broad reception desk beneath a clock running three minutes fast.

A woman with silver-streaked dark hair sat behind it, reading something Harry suspected was considerably more interesting than visitor paperwork. She looked up. “Afternoon.”

Daphne’s fingers tightened around his. “Hi,” Harry said.

“Can I help you?”

He looked at Daphne, who looked back with unmistakable warning, and then at the receptionist. “We were hoping to see Dr Tamarack.”

The woman nodded as though this were not an absurd request. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

Daphne inhaled. “We completely understand if she is unavailable,” she said at once. “In fact I’m certain she is. We should probably have written first, and we can leave a note if that would be less disruptive, or simply contact the institute formally at another—” Harry squeezed her hand, and she stopped.

The receptionist’s mouth twitched. “What’s your name?”

“Harry.” Daphne turned her head sharply, and the receptionist waited. He sighed. “Harry Potter.”

Nothing happened. There were no widened eyes and no flicker of recognition, only a pen moving across a pad. “And your friend?”

Daphne opened her mouth, and nothing came out. Harry stared at her, and she stared back. It was extraordinary. He had seen Daphne argue with Snape, calmly tell Dumbledore that he was lying, and negotiate with goblins, and apparently the true terror of her life was a pleasant woman behind a reception desk.

“Daphne Greengrass,” he supplied, and Daphne closed her eyes for half a second.

“And what should I tell Dr Tamarack this is regarding?”

Daphne recovered a little. “Spellform Analysis.”

The receptionist looked up, and that seemed to interest her. “Student?”

“Independent.” Harry heard how much work went into making that one word sound normal.

“All right. Let me call upstairs.”

“You’re going to call her?”

“Well, yes.” She had already picked up the telephone. Harry steered Daphne toward the chairs.

“Sit.”

“I am perfectly capable of standing.”

“You look like you’re about to duel the furniture.”

They sat. The receptionist spoke too quietly to be overheard, and Daphne placed both hands on her knees. Harry watched her right foot bounce once, stop, and bounce again. He smiled, and she caught him. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You are thinking very loudly.”

The receptionist hung up, and Daphne straightened so quickly that Harry nearly laughed. “She’ll be about five minutes.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Dr Tamarack. She said to give her five minutes.”

“Oh.” Daphne sat back, and Harry leaned toward her.

“She said yes. You thought she wouldn’t see you.”

“We have not seen her yet,” Daphne said, looking straight ahead. “She could still change her mind.”

The next five minutes were the longest Harry had spent anywhere since leaving Britain, though not because they were actually long. It was because Daphne checked the clock eleven times. At one point she stood, and Harry caught the back of her coat.

“I was going to look at the diagram.”

“You were going toward the door.”

“The diagram is near the door.”

“Sit.”

She sat. The receptionist was openly smiling by now, and Daphne noticed. “I apologise.”

“Don’t,” the woman said. “You’re doing fine.” That somehow made Daphne more nervous, and Harry thought it was magnificent.

At last a side door opened, and a small woman stepped through with three folders held against her chest. She was not wearing academic robes. She wore brown corduroys, a soft green cardigan and shoes comfortable enough to have survived years of neglect, and her light brown hair was pinned in a knot with a pencil, several strands escaping around her face. There was ink on one thumb. Daphne stopped breathing, and Harry was fairly sure of it.

“These the mysterious visitors?” the woman asked.

“Daphne Greengrass and Harry Potter,” said the receptionist.

Dr Tamarack’s warm brown eyes moved to them with no flash of recognition at Harry’s name and no calculation, only curiosity. “Hi.”

Daphne stood, and Harry stood because she did. “Dr Tamarack,” Daphne said, a little too formally.

Viv’s smile widened. “That would be me.”

“It is an honour to meet you.”

Viv shifted the folders into one arm and shook her hand. “That’s awfully kind.” Daphne looked as though she had rehearsed several more sentences and lost all of them, and Viv waited kindly, and Daphne said nothing. Harry decided mercy had its limits.

“She’s usually better at talking.”

Daphne turned on him, and Viv laughed. Harry offered a hand. “Harry.”

“Viv.”

“The suddenly very shy girl next to me is my girlfriend. She admires you a lot.”

“Harry.”

Daphne’s face was turning steadily pink. Viv looked from one to the other. “I gathered.”

“We came from Britain to meet you.”

Daphne closed her eyes. Viv blinked. “Britain?”

Harry considered. “That sounded more dramatic than it was.”

“It was dramatic enough,” Daphne muttered.

Viv looked amused rather than alarmed. “Well, you’d better come upstairs, then. It would be terrible customer service to make you cross an ocean and leave you in reception.” She glanced at the receptionist. “I’m stealing the small conference room.”

“You already stole it this morning.”

“Then nobody will be surprised.”

* * *

The small conference room held a round table, six mismatched chairs and a blackboard that had clearly lost an argument with mathematics. Harry understood perhaps three symbols on it. Daphne understood considerably more, and he knew because she stopped halfway through pulling out her chair, her eyes moving over the board.

“Sorry about that,” Viv said. “We were working through a decomposition problem.”

Daphne stepped closer. “That’s a fifth-order collapse term.”

Viv paused, and Harry watched something change in her, not dramatically, but as attention sharpening. “Yes.”

“You’ve separated the intent weighting.”

“Trying to.”

“But if you separate it there, wouldn’t the third relation become dependent on pronunciation?”

Viv put the folders down. “Only if the phonetic term remains local.”

“It has to. Otherwise—” Daphne stopped, and Viv waited. “Unless you’re treating the incantation as a boundary condition.”

Viv smiled. “There it is.”

Harry sat down, and neither woman noticed. Daphne forgot to be nervous so completely that he almost laughed. Within two minutes she was standing beside Dr Vivian Tamarack, discussing whether a spell’s vocal structure should remain mathematically separable from intent, and within five Viv had picked up a piece of chalk. Within seven Daphne had taken another. Harry understood the words individually, mostly, but the sentences were another matter.

“That’s the problem,” Viv was saying. “If the ratio were merely phonetic, we’d expect the transformation to drift across languages.”

“But it doesn’t, not even with translated incantations.”

“Some movement. Not enough.”

“What about nonverbal casting?”

Viv’s face lit. “Oh, now you’re being troublesome.”

Daphne smiled, actually smiled, and Harry leaned back in his chair. Viv drew something and Daphne erased part of it, and Viv objected, and Daphne explained, and Viv stopped objecting and then objected differently. Ten minutes vanished. Harry began counting, because it gave him something to do.

At some point Viv turned from the blackboard. “What do you think, Harry?”

Both of them were looking at him. “I’m counting.”

“Counting?”

“So far I’ve understood seven sentences. Including the introductions.”

Daphne covered her mouth. Viv laughed, not politely, but leaning against the table until Daphne joined her. “I understood the bit where language shouldn’t change the numbers,” Harry added.

“Eight,” Daphne said.

“No, that was one of the original seven.”

“Then you’re falling behind.”

“Very rapidly.”

Viv pulled out the chair beside him and sat. “I’m sorry, honey. We left you completely behind.”

Harry paused very slightly at the word. Viv did not seem to notice, and neither did Daphne. “I’m used to it,” he said. “I always am when you start on Arithmancy.”

“Spellform Analysis,” Viv corrected mildly.

Daphne looked mortified. “I’m so sorry. In Britain most advanced mathematical magic gets grouped under Arithmancy, even when—”

“Kiddo, breathe.” Daphne stopped, and Viv smiled. “I have spent thirty years correcting people who call it Arithmancy. Harry is not going to offend me by doing it once.”

Daphne looked down, and Harry nudged her foot beneath the table. Viv looked between them. “So. You’ve clearly read considerably more than most students your age. How old are you?” Daphne hesitated, and Viv tilted her head. “I’d have said sixteen.”

“Fourteen.”

Viv’s eyebrows rose, and she glanced at Harry. “Also fourteen.”

“Huh.”

“Good huh or bad huh?” Harry asked.

“Interesting huh.” Daphne looked nervous again, and Viv’s expression softened. “Interesting is good around here. Are you at school in New York?”

“No.”

“Visiting family?”

“No.”

Viv waited, and Harry waited for the next question. It did not come. Viv simply nodded. “All right.”

That was all. Harry looked at her a little more carefully, and she noticed. “Something wrong?”

“No.”

“You made a face.”

“He does,” Daphne said, smiling faintly, and Harry betrayed her with a look.

Viv leaned back. “Well, whatever brings you here, I’m glad you came.”

Daphne glanced toward the blackboard. “I didn’t think you’d see me. I wrote to you twice, once about two years ago and once last year. The first was a question about the recurrence terms in your early paper on spoken charms, and the second was about the same pattern appearing in shield structures.”

Viv stared at her. “Oh.” Harry recognised hope in Daphne’s face, trying very hard not to become hope. Viv grimaced. “I owe you an apology.”

“You remember them?”

“No.” Hope vanished, and Viv raised a hand. “Not because I ignored them. I am terrible at correspondence. Not charmingly terrible, actually terrible. There’s a box in my office that has been labelled ANSWER THESE since 1982.” Daphne stared, and Viv leaned toward her conspiratorially. “I keep changing the label.”

“To what?”

“ANSWER THESE SOON.”

Harry laughed. “Did it help?”

“Not even slightly. If your letters reached me, there’s a very real chance they’re in that box.”

Daphne stared at her another second, and then she laughed, quietly at first, and the last of the stiffness left her shoulders. Good, Harry thought.

Viv stood. “Now, I have another meeting in—” She checked the clock and winced. “Eight minutes, which means I’m already morally late.”

Daphne rose at once. “Of course. We’ve taken enough of your time. We arrived without an appointment.”

“You did,” Viv said, smiling. “And I let you in.” That stopped her. Viv gathered her folders. “Come back tomorrow, if you want.”

“Yes.” The answer came so quickly that Harry laughed, and Daphne ignored him.

“There’s a café about two blocks from here, quiet in the mornings. We could sit down properly. Ten?”

“Yes.”

Harry raised a hand. “Does it have tea?”

Daphne turned toward him. Viv looked delighted. “Proper tea.”

Daphne’s whole expression changed. “Proper?”

“Absolutely.”

Harry narrowed his eyes, and Viv’s smile became suspicious, but Daphne did not notice. “Thank you,” she said, and for once she managed to sound like herself, mostly.

* * *

Outside, New York hit them all at once, with its cars and voices and cold air between tall buildings. Harry adjusted the bag on his shoulder. Daphne stood staring at the institute door.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“You met Dr Tamarack.”

Daphne’s mouth opened and closed, and then she hit him lightly in the chest. “You told her I was shy.”

“You were.”

“You told her I admired her, and that we crossed the Atlantic to meet her. That was not the primary reason.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

“That makes it worse.”

Harry grinned, and Daphne tried to remain offended and lasted perhaps four seconds. Then she smiled. “I met Dr Tamarack. She asked me to come back.”

“She did.”

She looked down the street, and he could practically see her replaying the blackboard. “She treats intent as a boundary condition.”

“I understood that sentence.”

“Nine.”

“Eight.”

“You said seven.”

“I’ve been learning.”

She laughed, and Harry took her hand. “Hotel?”

Daphne started walking. “Yes.”

“Food?”

“Yes.”

“And then tomorrow, apparently, proper tea.”

She brightened. Harry looked back once at the institute. Something about Viv’s smile when she had said it bothered him, but he decided not to ruin Daphne’s evening.

The next morning would do that perfectly well.

* * *

The tea was terrible.

Daphne knew it before she swallowed, Harry knew it from her face, and Viv did not know it at all. She sat across from them with both hands wrapped around her own cup, looking entirely content, while Daphne lowered hers very slowly to the saucer.

“Well?” Viv asked.

Daphne looked at the tea, then at Viv, then at the tea again. Harry turned toward the window, because he was already losing control of his face.

“It is...” Daphne began, and tried again. “Warm.”

Harry made a strangled noise, and Daphne kicked him under the table. Viv looked between them. “Warm? That bad?”

Daphne’s composure fractured. “I am trying very hard to be polite.”

Viv blinked, picked up her own cup and took another sip. “I like it.”

Daphne stared at her, and Harry gave up and laughed, and Viv looked mildly offended. “What?”

“You told me this café had proper tea.”

“It does. It says English Breakfast.”

“The label is not evidence. It is floating in water.”

“That is generally how tea begins.”

“The water was not boiling.”

“It was hot.”

“That is not the same thing.”

Harry rested his forehead against one hand, and Viv was smiling now. “I didn’t realise I had invited a tea inspector.”

“I am not a tea inspector. I simply have standards.”

“She’s spent two weeks insulting tea across Massachusetts,” Harry said.

“The tea insulted me first.”

Viv laughed, and that made Daphne pause, not because Viv was laughing at her, but because she was laughing with the complete ease of someone who had forgotten that Daphne had spent most of the previous afternoon treating her like royalty. It was difficult to stay intimidated by one of the most important magical mathematicians alive while she defended badly steeped tea. It was difficult, but not impossible, and Daphne straightened slightly.

“Dr Tamarack—”

“Viv.”

“Viv. I should probably apologise for yesterday, for arriving without an appointment.”

“You already did, and I told you it was fine. Why are we doing it again?”

Daphne opened her mouth, and Harry smiled into his coffee. Viv looked at him. “Does she do this often?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Daphne said, at the same moment.

Viv laughed again, and Daphne sighed. “I simply do not want to take advantage of your time. You have work.”

“Not today.” Daphne blinked. “I mean, I have things I could do, but everything is something I could do if I tried hard enough.” Harry liked that immediately, and Daphne looked unconvinced. “I cleared today, actually, mostly because I wanted to continue the argument you started about phonetic dependency.”

“I did not start an argument.”

“You erased part of my board.”

“It was wrong.”

“There she is,” Viv said, smiling, and Harry laughed. Daphne looked briefly offended before she failed to hide her own smile. Viv reached for the notebook beside her cup. “So. Show me why.”

That was how forty minutes disappeared.

* * *

Harry understood the beginning, which gave him false confidence. Viv drew a simple charm structure on the page, reducing the incantation, wand motion and intent to three sets of relationships, and he could follow that. Then Daphne asked why she had isolated one term, and Viv answered, and Daphne disagreed. Viv agreed with half the disagreement, which somehow created another problem, and then small marks began appearing above the numbers and ratios multiplied. Something was divided by something that Harry was fairly sure had not existed five minutes earlier. He drank his coffee.

Daphne forgot the tea entirely. “This still assumes intent is stable.”

“It doesn’t. Only if you’re treating intent as input.”

“What else could it be?”

“A constraint.” Daphne stopped, and Harry recognised the expression, the one she wore when somebody had said something deeply irritating and possibly brilliant.

“That wouldn’t work for transfiguration, because the target state matters.”

“So include it.”

“Then you’re adding another term, and the whole model becomes uglier.”

“Nature has never shown much respect for elegant notation.”

Daphne stared at the page, and Harry watched her finger trace the expression without touching it. Then she looked up. “That would explain why nonverbal casting doesn’t collapse the same way.”

Viv’s eyes lit. “Exactly.”

Harry understood none of it and kept drinking. At some point a server came by, and Viv ordered another coffee, and Harry ordered food. Daphne said she was fine, so he ordered food for her too, and she did not notice.

* * *

It took Viv perhaps an hour to realise Daphne’s education did not fit neatly anywhere.

“What did your professor use for second-order transformation work?”

“We didn’t cover it formally.”

“You know it, though.”

“I read it.” Daphne named two books, and Viv’s eyebrows rose slightly. Harry knew enough by now to understand that this was probably significant.

“And recursive systems?”

“Independent.”

“Spell stability?”

“Mostly independent.”

Viv tapped the end of her pen against the table. “How much Arithmancy did your school teach you?”

“Enough.”

Harry snorted. “That means not enough. She always says enough when she means she fixed it herself.”

Daphne sighed. “We were taught the foundations well enough. I wanted more.”

“So you found more,” Viv said, “and wrote to strangers in other countries.”

Daphne went slightly pink. “That happened twice.”

Viv smiled and wrote something in the margin, and Daphne leaned forward at once. “What are you writing?”

“Nothing sinister.”

“You wrote my name.”

“Because I want to remember which books you’ve read.”

Harry and Daphne both looked at her, and Viv glanced up. “What?”

“Nothing,” Daphne said. Viv returned to the page, and Harry watched the tension in Daphne’s shoulders ease again.

* * *

Viv did not let Harry disappear.

He noticed it somewhere around noon. It would have been easy, because Daphne and Viv could have gone on for hours without needing him for anything but the occasional coffee, but every so often Viv turned. “What do you think?”

The first time he answered honestly. “I think both of you started speaking another language twenty minutes ago.”

The second time she asked differently. “What would you do if a charm stopped working?”

“I don’t know what the numbers mean.”

“Forget the numbers. Say a charm heats a metal plate evenly. It works for three hours, and then one side starts running hotter. What do you check?”

Harry thought. “The plate first. It could be warped.”

“And if it’s fine?”

“The mounting. And if that’s fine, the spell anchor, I suppose. If the thing is physically fine, something in the charm must have moved.”

Viv smiled. “There.”

“There what?”

“You work backward. Daphne starts with the structure and asks what it produces. You start with what went wrong and ask what structure could have caused it.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not at all.” Daphne looked interested now, and Viv turned the notebook toward him. “You don’t need to understand these yet.”

“Yet?”

Viv smiled, and Harry narrowed his eyes while Daphne looked delighted. “That sounded threatening.”

“It was educational.”

“Same thing, sometimes.”

Daphne took a bite of the sandwich Harry had ordered her without acknowledging that he had been right, and Viv noticed and said nothing.

* * *

Lunch happened without anyone deciding it. The café grew busy, then quiet, and the server replaced empty plates with fresh cups. Daphne checked the time once and looked horrified. “It is one-thirty. We have been here three and a half hours.”

Viv glanced at the clock, genuinely surprised. “So we have.”

Daphne began gathering her notes. “We’ve taken your entire morning.” Viv laid one hand lightly over the corner of Daphne’s notebook, and Daphne stopped.

“If I wanted to leave, I would leave.”

“You don’t have to stay because you invited us, or because we came yesterday, or because—”

“Daphne. I am having fun.”

The simplicity of it silenced her. Harry watched her expression change. Adults in Daphne’s world, he had learned, rarely did anything without some reason beyond wanting to: duty, family, reputation, expectation. Viv apparently did. Daphne slowly put her notebook back down.

“All right.”

“Good.” Viv pushed a page toward her. “Now tell me why this is wrong.”

Daphne looked. “It isn’t.”

“Excellent.”

“That was a test?”

“No, I made a mistake. Those happen.”

Daphne stared at her, and Harry laughed at the expression on her face.

* * *

By three, the conversation had stopped having clear subjects. They spoke a little about Hogwarts, and Viv asked which school they attended after Daphne compared an American text with one Professor Vector used.

“Hogwarts.”

“Never visited.”

“You aren’t missing the weather,” Harry said.

“You liked the weather,” Daphne said. “You liked snow.”

“I can like something and complain about it.”

Viv pointed at him. “That is a very useful life skill.”

A few minutes later, while they were discussing wandless casting, she asked whether either of them had encountered much of it.

“Dobby,” Harry said.

“Who’s Dobby?”

“Our friend,” Harry said.

“He’s a house-elf,” Daphne added.

Viv’s pen stopped. “Your friend is a house-elf. Does he cast around you?”

“All the time, without a wand.”

“And incantations?”

“No.”

Viv leaned back. “Huh.”

Daphne recognised the expression immediately. “You’re interested.”

“Very.”

Harry pointed at her. “That’s the same face Daphne makes, the one where somebody stops being a person and becomes a research problem.”

“I do not do that,” Daphne said.

“You absolutely do.”

Viv laughed. “For the record, I would ask before turning your friend into mathematics.”

Harry relaxed. He had not realised he had tensed until he didn’t anymore. “Good.” Viv noticed that, and again she said nothing.

* * *

Harry’s name came back almost an hour later, and nobody had asked about it. Viv was looking through one of Daphne’s copied references when she said absently, “And Harry Potter was working from the same textbook?”

“Yes.”

She turned a page and stopped, and her eyes returned to him. “Potter.”

Harry felt the old reaction before he could prevent it, and his shoulders tightened. Viv looked at him more carefully. “Harry Potter. I’ve heard the name.”

“Depends what you’ve heard.”

Daphne went quiet. Viv’s brow furrowed. “The British child. Voldemort.”

There it was. Harry’s fingers tightened around his cup, and Viv saw it and set the paper down. “That is about the extent of my knowledge.”

He blinked. “Really?”

“Really.”

“You don’t read British news?”

“Not unless somebody sends me an article.”

Daphne asked, carefully, “You haven’t heard about the Tournament?”

“The Triwizard? I know it restarted.” Harry waited. Viv shrugged. “I don’t follow sport.”

“It isn’t really a sport.”

“Shows what I know.”

He smiled despite himself. Viv did not ask why his expression had changed, or why he was in America, or why two fourteen-year-olds from Hogwarts were sitting in a New York café on a weekday. She simply picked up her coffee. “You’re taller than I imagined.”

Harry stared, and Daphne laughed. “What?”

“Famous children are always frozen at whatever age you first hear about them.”

“A lot of people expect a baby.”

“I was trying not to say that.” Daphne covered her smile with one hand, and Harry looked at her.

“You’re enjoying this.”

“You could at least pretend to be on my side.” 

“I'm pretending. Can't you tell?”

Viv returned to the notes, and that was all. Harry liked her considerably more after that.

* * *

By late afternoon, Viv had stopped pretending the notebook belonged solely to her. Daphne had half of it and Harry had three loose pages, and there were coffee stains near one corner and a smear of jam across a calculation that neither woman seemed to mind.

Viv slid a sheet of paper across the table. “What happens here?”

“That’s incomplete. You removed the stabilising term.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To see what you’d do.”

Daphne frowned and began writing. Harry watched for a while and then stopped, having learned that Daphne solving something difficult looked remarkably similar to Daphne being angry at paper. Five minutes passed, and she crossed something out, and Viv watched without helping. Another five, and Daphne tried something else and stopped. “This doesn’t close.”

“No.”

“You’ve made it impossible.”

“No.”

Daphne looked irritated. Harry smiled, and Viv did not, but she looked delighted, and that was interesting. Most teachers Harry knew grew pleased when a student got the right answer. Viv seemed happiest when Daphne found something wrong.

Daphne stared at the page again, and then she said slowly, “The missing term isn’t a stabiliser.”

“It can behave like one.”

“But that’s not what it is. It’s compensating for something outside the model.” She looked up. “The Remainder.”

Viv leaned back. “There you are.”

For several seconds Daphne did not speak, and Harry could almost see the idea rearranging itself behind her eyes. Then she started asking questions, many of them. Viv answered half and said “I don’t know” to the other half, and every time she said it she sounded pleased. Daphne seemed fascinated by that too.

* * *

Harry checked the clock because he was hungry, and then he checked it again. “Um.” Neither woman heard him. “Daphne. Viv.”

Viv looked up. He pointed. It was six forty-eight, and Daphne looked at the clock and then at the window, where the light had changed completely, and went pale.

“No.”

“Huh,” Viv said, checking her watch.

“We have been here almost nine hours.” Daphne began stacking papers with frantic efficiency. “I am so sorry. This was supposed to be coffee.”

“It was coffee.”

“And then lunch, and more coffee, and we have occupied this table for an entire working day.”

Viv looked around. “They don’t seem angry.”

“That is not the point.”

“What’s the point?”

Daphne stopped, and Viv waited, and Daphne seemed unable to find one that Viv would accept. Harry smiled. “She thinks she kidnapped you.”

“I do not.”

“I came willingly,” Viv said.

“Thank you,” said Harry, and Daphne glared at them both.

Viv gathered the loose papers, and something in her tone changed, not formal, only quieter. “So. What are you two doing next?”

Harry looked at Daphne, and Daphne looked at Harry. Viv noticed. “Tomorrow? This week?”

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “We don’t really know.”

“Where are you headed after New York?”

Daphne looked down at the notebook. “We haven’t decided. We have no shortlist.”

“Places you need to be?”

“No.”

“New York was Daphne’s idea,” Harry said, and Daphne gave him a look. “It was. And the plan was...” He counted on his fingers. “Find Dr Tamarack, meet Dr Tamarack, and then—”

She sighed. “Figure it out.”

Viv laughed, and Daphne looked embarrassed. “It sounded more sensible before he said it aloud.”

“It sounded exactly like that,” Harry said.

“We had been moving for weeks.”

“We still are.”

“Yes, thank you.”

Viv looked between them, and there were questions in her face, and Harry could see them now. They were not accusations, not even suspicion, only questions. Fourteen. Britain. No school, no adults, no destination. A tent, a house-elf friend and money enough to keep moving. She asked none of them. Instead she looked at Daphne.

“If you’re not in a hurry to leave New York, would you like to work with me for a while?”

Daphne stared, and Harry said, “What?”

“Not formally.” Daphne still had not moved. “No apprenticeship, no institute programme, no paperwork. This.” Viv gestured toward the pile of papers between them. “A few days a week. We work through foundations where you need them, and then whatever catches fire after that. Months, perhaps, if it works. If it doesn’t, we stop. You read, I give you problems, and you argue with me about my own papers.”

Daphne opened her mouth, and nothing came out. Harry waited one second, then two, then three, and Viv was starting to smile. He decided this was going nowhere. “Yes.”

Daphne’s head turned slowly. “Harry. You cannot accept academic arrangements on my behalf.”

“You were going to say yes.”

“That is not the point.”

“Were you?”

She stared at him, and her expression collapsed from outrage into something much less manageable. “Yes,” she said, very quietly.

“Then I saved time.”

“You did not save time.”

“At least thirty seconds.”

“You are impossible.”

“Seriously,” Harry said, and his voice changed. He reached across and touched her hand. “Only if you want to.”

The joke had gone out of it. Daphne looked down at their hands, and then at Viv, who was waiting with no expectation and no pressure, only the offer. Daphne swallowed. “I want to.”

“Good.”

“I very much want to.”

“Even better.”

Daphne’s eyes were suspiciously bright, and she blinked quickly and looked at the papers instead. Viv, mercifully, did not acknowledge it. “Then that’s settled enough for today.”

“That’s it? I expected forms, an agreement, some sort of—”

“Daphne. You are making this harder than it is.”

“She does that,” Harry said, and she ignored him.

Viv gathered her bag. “We’ll work out a schedule tomorrow or the day after. I have lectures, institute work, students, and a research meeting I have successfully forgotten twice this month.”

“Twice?”

“They keep inviting me back.”

Harry smiled and stood. “I’m beginning to like America.”

“You’ve been here two weeks,” Daphne said.

“Strong start.”

* * *

Viv put on her coat and paused. “Do you two have dinner plans?”

They looked at each other, and Viv’s eyebrows rose. “We were going to look for somewhere to stay,” Daphne said. “Properly, I mean, not just for a night.”

Viv went still for a fraction of a second. “Where are you staying now?”

“A small motel,” Harry said. “We’ve only booked it a night at a time, and we haven’t found anywhere longer-term yet.”

She looked toward the dark windows, and then back at them. “It’s fine,” Harry said. “We have the tent.”

Viv clearly had questions about that too, and again she did not ask them. “Come have dinner at my place.”

Daphne shook her head at once. “We couldn’t.”

“We’d love to,” Harry said.

“Harry.”

Viv covered a smile. Daphne stared at him. “You are developing a terrible habit of accepting things for me.”

“Seems to be working.”

“I feel like I’m missing context,” Viv said.

“You are,” Daphne said.

“It was excellent context.”

“It was not.”

Viv laughed. “Dinner?”

“You’re sure? We have already taken your entire day.”

“You spent the entire day telling me interesting things. I didn’t ask for payment, and I was going to eat anyway.”

“Very efficient,” Harry said, and Daphne closed her eyes briefly.

“You two are going to be terrible together.”

“Probably,” Viv said.

Daphne looked at Harry, and then Viv, and then at the mountain of notes they had somehow produced from what was meant to be coffee. “All right.”

Viv opened the café door, and cold evening air pushed inside. Harry picked up their bag, and Daphne gathered the papers Viv had told her to keep, and the three of them stepped out into New York.

That morning, Harry and Daphne had walked into a café with a motel room, no long-term plan and exactly one hope, which was to talk to Dr Tamarack for an hour. By evening they still had nowhere permanent, but apparently they were staying in New York for several months. Daphne walked beside one of the women whose papers she had been reading since she was twelve, clutching a notebook full of corrections and new problems to her chest.

Harry watched her smile when she thought neither of them was looking, and decided the plan had gone rather well.

* * *

The building did not look like it contained one of the most respected magical mathematicians in America.

Daphne stopped on the pavement and looked up, then farther up, then back at Viv. “This is where you live?”

Viv followed her gaze as though checking whether the building had changed since morning. “Last I looked.”

Harry tilted his head. It was five storeys of old red brick squeezed between two slightly taller buildings, with narrow windows, a battered awning over the entrance and a front door that had been painted dark green so often that its edges had grown thick and rounded. It was not dirty, only old, the sort of old that had been repaired repeatedly rather than replaced. One of the upper windows had a crooked blind, and another held a plant that had clearly won a long war against its owner.

“I imagined something else,” Daphne said, unconvinced.

“Bigger?”

“Possibly.”

“More expensive?”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“You were thinking it.”

“So was I,” Harry said.

Viv pushed open the door. “Come on.”

The hallway was narrow enough that Harry had to turn sideways to let a woman with groceries pass. The walls were painted cream and the floorboards creaked, and everything was clean but none of it was new. A row of small brass mailboxes lined one wall, and someone on the second floor was cooking something with garlic.

“This is very...” Daphne began.

“Affordable?”

Daphne winced. “I was going to say modest.”

“That’s the polite version,” Viv said, and Harry laughed.

There was no lift. By the third floor Harry had decided the bag containing the collapsed tent had grown heavier out of spite, and by the fourth Daphne was looking at Viv with suspicion. “You do this every day?”

“Usually. Stairs are cheaper than lifts.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“I know,” Viv said, reaching the next landing.

The fifth floor had no corridor, only a short landing with a single window and a single door. Daphne stopped, and Harry nearly walked into her. “This is the entire floor.”

“Mm-hm.” Viv pulled out a key.

Daphne looked at the door, then at the width of the building, then at the door again. “That apartment cannot be large.”

“No. It is very cheap, too. It pays to be good at mathematics.” Daphne’s attention snapped toward her, and Viv smiled. “And spatial spells.”

She opened the door, and Harry stopped. Daphne stopped harder.

From the outside, the flat should have been perhaps two rooms. Inside it was enormous. The entry opened into a wide space of exposed brick, black iron beams and concrete floors softened by rugs and furniture that looked collected rather than matched. Glass panels rose toward a ceiling that should not physically have existed, and a black iron spiral staircase climbed to a mezzanine lined with books. Beyond it, floor-to-ceiling windows showed Manhattan caught in permanent golden light.

Harry looked back through the open door. The landing remained narrow. He looked inside again. “No.”

Viv laughed. Daphne stepped through slowly. “How?”

“Very carefully.”

“No, really.”

“Mathematics. Spatial mathematics.”

“That is not enough of an answer,” Daphne said, though she had already forgotten to be tired.

Viv set down her bag. “The original flat is tiny. One bedroom, one bath, barely enough kitchen to insult a cook. I started expanding it when I was twenty-eight.”

“You did this yourself?” Harry asked.

“Most of it. My first attempt made the pantry six feet deep on the outside and two inches deep on the inside.”

“That seems inconvenient.”

“I lost a saucepan for three weeks,” Viv said, while Daphne stared. “I got better.”

Harry stepped farther in, and now he could see the rest: a huge slate wall covered in equations, hundreds of numbers and lines shifting slowly as though reconsidering their positions, and beside it a corkboard of cards joined by red thread. A rooftop greenhouse glowed beyond a glass partition. In the centre of a handmade quilt on the sofa lay a grey cat, which lifted its head, looked at them, and put it back down.

“Noether,” Viv said, “those are guests.” Noether did not care.

“I like him,” Harry said.

“Her.”

“Sorry.”

Noether continued not caring. Daphne had already reached the Wall, and Viv pointed toward the kitchen. “Do not let her start.”

Harry looked at Daphne. It was too late. Her eyes were moving across the equations. “What is that relation?”

“Dinner.”

“Viv.”

“Tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Tomorrow.” Daphne looked offended, and Viv went on toward the kitchen. Harry followed.

“You’re good at this.”

“At what?”

“Handling her.”

“I teach.”

“That explains a lot.”

“I can hear you,” Daphne said behind them.

“Good,” Viv called back.

* * *

The kitchen was large enough for three people if two of them agreed not to move quickly. It had steel counters, old wooden cabinets and a battered copper kettle that looked completely out of place among the cleaner lines. Viv opened the refrigerator. “Pasta?” Harry sat on a stool by the counter and said it sounded good, and Viv leaned sideways. “Daphne? Pasta?”

“Yes?” came a distracted voice from the other room, and then, after a pause, “Yes.”

Viv looked at Harry. “She has no idea what she agreed to.”

“No.”

“That’ll teach her.”

She began pulling out tomatoes, garlic, herbs and cheese, moving comfortably, though not elegantly. At one point she reached for a knife, changed her mind and summoned it instead, and it hit the wall beside her hand. Harry stared, and Viv stared at the knife. “I am better at mathematics.”

Harry laughed. “Do not tell Daphne.”

“She’ll find out.”

“Yes, but perhaps after she agrees to study with me.”

Daphne appeared in the doorway looking slightly dazed. “Your Wall is extraordinary. There are partial decompositions from at least six different spell families.”

“Seven,” Viv said, and Daphne’s face brightened.

Harry pointed at her. “No. You were gone for ten minutes.”

“He’s right,” Viv said solemnly, and Daphne looked betrayed.

Then she shifted, and her face went faintly pink. “Actually... could I use your bathroom?”

“Of course. Down the hall, second door.”

Daphne disappeared almost at once, and Harry watched her go. “She hasn’t been all day. She finished that tea out of politeness.”

Viv winced. “That was a lot of bad tea.”

“She was committed.”

“To suffering?”

“To being polite.”

“That sounds worse.” Viv returned to chopping, and Harry watched her for a few seconds before he spoke.

“May I ask you something?”

“Sure, honey.”

It was still strange to hear that from an adult without anything attached to it. He rested his forearms on the counter. “Why are you being so nice to us?”

The knife stayed on the board for a moment, and then Viv looked at him. Harry went on. “We’re two fourteen-year-olds with no adult. We turned up at your office without an appointment, and our story is...” He searched for the word. “Sketchy.”

Viv’s mouth twitched. “A little.”

“You’ve noticed things.”

“Yes.”

“You know we’re not in school, and we’re travelling alone, and we haven’t told you why.”

“No, you haven’t.” She leaned one hip against the counter. “You want to know why I haven’t asked, and why I’m inviting you to dinner.”

“And why you’re offering to teach Daphne.”

“And you,” Viv said, and Harry blinked. “We’ll get to that. Harry, I have noticed all of it. You’re fourteen, both of you, and in another country without parents or teachers. You left Hogwarts at some point in the school year. You have enough money that hotels don’t concern you much, you’re travelling with a house-elf you call your friend, and you carry your home in a bag.” Harry’s fingers tightened slightly, and Viv saw it, though her voice stayed the same. “And every time I get close to something that might explain any of that, one of you steps around it. So yes, I’m fairly sure there’s a story.”

“A bad one?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have an idea.”

“I have several.” She smiled faintly. “And none of them are my business.”

Harry stared. “That simple?”

“That simple.”

“You’re not worried?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I don’t need your story.” She put the knife down. “I’ve spent most of today watching you two, and I like what I see. Daphne knows enough mathematics to frighten people twice her age, and she gets excited when something proves her wrong, which is rare. She has a very good mind, better than good, and she works hard enough that I suspect nobody has ever managed to convince her to stop.”

Harry laughed softly. “No.”

“And you have holes everywhere in your foundations. That’s not an insult. You’ve learned in fragments, but every time something becomes practical you wake up. You don’t care about a formula because it’s elegant, the way Daphne does. You care when it tells you why a charm fails, or why something heats unevenly, or what happens if you change the structure but keep the effect.” Harry thought about it and found it was true. “You’re curious. A lot of people want answers. You seem to like questions.”

That made him quiet. “So that’s it? You like what you see?”

“You’ve known us for one day.”

“Two,” Viv said. “Which is worse, I know.” She scraped the tomatoes into a pan. “But I don’t need a grand reason to help someone. If you turn out to be wanted criminals, I reserve the right to revise my opinion.”

“That seems fair.”

“And if you’re secretly here to steal my research, I’ll be very disappointed.”

“Daphne might.”

“I heard that,” Daphne called from the hallway, and Harry laughed.

Viv stirred the sauce. “If one day you want to tell me why you’re here, you can.”

“And if we don’t?”

“Then don’t.”

There was no pause after it, no but and no condition. Harry felt something in his shoulders loosen, and Viv saw it and did not comment. Instead she pointed at the cupboard above him. “Plates. If you’re going to interrogate me in my own kitchen, you can set the table.”

Harry smiled. “All right.”

* * *

Daphne returned looking much happier, and she stopped when she saw Harry carrying plates. “What happened?”

“Viv has conscripted me.”

“He asked intrusive questions while I cooked,” Viv said.

Daphne looked at Harry, who shrugged. “She passed.” Daphne’s gaze lingered on him for half a second, and he gave her a small nod. She understood enough, and she did not ask. She took the cutlery from him instead.

Dinner became remarkably ordinary after that. There was no mathematics, which Viv enforced by threatening to take away the notebook if Daphne mentioned spell decomposition before dessert, and Daphne looked genuinely scandalised. So they talked about Salem, and Viv laughed so hard at the story of the plastic witch that Daphne grew defensive on principle.

“You haven’t seen it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“It has purple hair, and a nose larger than its broom.”

“It’s Dobby’s,” Harry said, pointing his fork at her. “Property rights.”

Viv looked confused, and Daphne sighed. “Harry has declared Dobby’s bedroom sovereign territory. He believes I am planning an illegal cross-border operation.”

“You are. I suggested removing one plastic object.”

“Without permission,” Viv said gravely. “That sounds like an international incident.”

“Thank you,” Harry said, and Daphne stared at both of them.

“This is becoming unbearable.”

Noether jumped onto the empty chair beside Harry, and he scratched behind her ears while she accepted it as her due. “She doesn’t normally like strangers,” Viv said.

“She ignored me,” said Daphne.

“You made eye contact. Noether considers eye contact a declaration of intent.”

Harry looked down at the cat. “She came to me.”

“Because you didn’t care whether she did.” Noether began purring, and Daphne looked offended.

“I am being rejected by a cat. First the tea.”

“The tea insulted you,” Harry said, and Viv shook her head.

They talked about New York. Viv told them which neighbourhoods were worth walking through and which magical shops were useful and which overpriced, where Harry could find second-hand technical books and where Daphne could buy tea that Viv claimed was better. Daphne no longer trusted her opinion on this. They talked about Dobby too, and Viv asked about him carefully. She did not ask what he could do, but who he was, how long Harry had known him and what he liked and thought of America. Harry found himself talking more than he had expected, and Daphne told the story of Dobby’s first elf friend while Harry described the hat.

“He sounds happy,” Viv said.

“He is,” Harry said, and then, after a moment, “I think.”

“Sometimes that’s enough.”

* * *

Dinner lasted longer than the food. By the time Viv brought out something she claimed counted as dessert, a slightly overbaked apple tart, it was late. Daphne checked the clock. “Harry.”

Nine twenty-three. “Oh.”

“We should go,” Daphne said. “The motel is only booked through tonight, and we still haven’t found anywhere longer-term.”

Viv stopped cutting the tart. “So tonight is covered.”

“Tonight is. Tomorrow is the problem.” Harry smiled. “It really isn’t a big one. We have the tent, and we only need a room to put it in.”

Viv looked at them for a long moment, and then she put down the knife. “No.”

Daphne blinked. “No?”

“No more motel rooms. Put the tent there,” Viv said, pointing toward the living room.

Daphne recovered first. “We couldn’t.”

“Yes, you could.”

“That is extraordinarily generous.”

“It is floor.”

“It is your home.”

“Also true.”

Harry shook his head. “We can find somewhere. Money isn’t a problem.”

“I believe you.”

“We’ve managed so far.”

“I believe that too. But a long-term place is a different matter. Landlords in this city want references and a grown-up’s signature, and you have neither, and two fourteen-year-olds with no adult will get a great many polite questions and a great many closed doors. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying it’s a lot of motel in the meantime, and you’d be carrying your house the whole way.” Harry opened his mouth.

“We’ll manage.”

“Probably.”

Harry paused, and Daphne narrowed her eyes. “Probably.”

“Exactly,” Viv said, and Daphne folded her hands.

“Viv, truly, we don’t want to impose. You barely know us, and you’ve already given us dinner and offered to teach us—”

“And I still possess unused floor.”

“That is not the point.”

“What is the point?”

Daphne stopped. Harry smiled faintly, because that question had defeated her twice today. Viv softened. “Listen. You can stay tonight.” Daphne began to speak, and Viv raised a hand. “Stay tonight, and leave tomorrow if you want. Stay a week. Stay while you’re studying with me, or leave next month. Leave in three days because Noether steals your socks and you decide I’m intolerable.” Noether looked up from the sofa, and Viv pointed at her. “She will.”

Harry smiled, and Viv looked between them. “You don’t owe me anything for staying here.”

“No rent?” Daphne asked.

“If it becomes six months, we’ll discuss groceries.” Harry laughed. “No explanations.” He went still. “No promises. And no obligation to stay because you said yes once. If you want to go tomorrow, you go tomorrow.”

Daphne looked at Harry, and he looked back. It was not really a conversation, but they had become better at those. Daphne’s eyes moved briefly toward the living room, to the Wall and the sleeping cat, and back to Harry. He raised one eyebrow, and she gave the smallest nod.

“Dobby will have opinions,” Harry told Viv.

“I would expect nothing less.”

Daphne exhaled. “All right.”

Viv did not celebrate or make it important. She simply nodded, and then pointed at the tart. “Finish that first. I overcooked it, and I refuse to suffer alone.”

* * *

The tent went beside the far wall of the living room. Harry unpacked it from the bag while Daphne moved a small table out of the way, and Viv watched with interest but did not interfere. The folded bundle looked ridiculous compared with the amount of space Harry knew existed inside it. He spread it out, and a few minutes later the entrance stood open. Viv stared. “That is very good work.”

“Not ours,” Harry said.

“Still.”

Daphne looked at the placement. “It won’t be in your way?”

Viv glanced around the enormous room. “No.”

“You can tell us if—”

“Daphne.” She stopped, and Viv smiled. “It is fine.”

Harry stepped inside, and the familiar warmth met him: their books, their furniture, the kitchen. Home. Daphne followed, and he turned. “Dobby?”

A crack sounded almost at once in the sitting room beyond, and Dobby appeared beside the sofa. He looked around and froze, because this was not the motel. “Harry Potter? Where is house?”

“New York,” Harry said, and Dobby stared.

Daphne sat on the arm of the sofa. “A great deal happened.”

Dobby’s ears lifted. “We met Dr Tamarack,” Harry said, and Dobby nodded seriously, though Harry was fairly sure he had no idea who that was. “She offered to teach Daphne, and me a bit, and then she fed us.”

“And now we’re staying in her apartment,” Daphne added.

“That was roughly my reaction,” Harry said.

Dobby turned toward the entrance. “Harry Potter and Miss Daphne lives here?”

“For now.”

“How long?”

Harry looked at Daphne, and Daphne looked back, and neither had an answer. “A while.”

Dobby considered this, then smiled. “Good.” It was that simple for him.

Daphne stood. “We may be in New York for several months.”

His ears rose farther. “Months?”

“Possibly.”

Dobby looked toward the door, and back at them. “Dobby can tell friend?”

“Of course,” Harry said, and Dobby beamed and vanished with a crack. Harry stared at the empty space. “He didn’t even ask where in New York.”

“He has priorities,” Daphne said.

Harry sat down, and Daphne joined him, and for a moment neither of them said anything. Outside the tent they could hear Viv moving around her kitchen. A cupboard closed, Noether made a small complaining sound, and someone hummed badly. Daphne rested her head against Harry’s shoulder.

“We came to New York yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“We were going to meet one academic.”

“Yes.”

“We now live with her.”

“Temporarily.”

“Of course. And apparently we’re staying for months.”

“Possibly,” Daphne said, and Harry smiled.

“Good plan.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then she smiled too. “It could have gone worse.”

Harry rested his cheek against her hair. Outside their tent was New York, and inside was everything they owned. Somewhere between Salem, terrible tea and a blackboard full of mathematics, they had accidentally found somewhere to stop, for a while at least.

That was enough.

* * *

Viv woke at seven because she always woke at seven.

It was one of the many habits she had acquired over the years without ever making a conscious decision about it. Seven meant kettle, kettle meant tea, and tea meant whatever problem had survived the night, usually in that order. She pulled on a cardigan, twisted her hair into something that would technically remain above her shoulders, and stepped into the hallway expecting silence.

Instead she found two teenagers standing outside her kitchen, both dressed, both awake, and both staring through the doorway. Viv stopped. “Morning, sweethearts.”

Harry glanced back. “Morning.”

“Good morning,” said Daphne, turning more slowly. Neither of them moved, and Viv looked from one to the other and then toward the kitchen.

“What happened?”

Harry’s mouth twitched. “Do you remember Dobby?”

“Yes.”

“He’s expanded his sovereignty.”

Daphne closed her eyes. “Ignore him.”

“I can’t. It’s a developing political situation.” Harry pointed toward the kitchen. “You may have lost this room.”

That got her attention. She stepped closer, Daphne moved aside, and Viv looked in.

The kitchen was immaculate. It was not merely tidy but immaculate, the counters gleaming, the copper kettle polished, every pan rearranged by size, the windows cleaned so thoroughly that the morning light seemed sharper. The floor looked new. In the middle of it all stood Dobby, wearing a small apron Viv had never seen before, while a pan floated beside him, something stirred itself on the stove and toast rotated slowly through the air. Four plates waited on the table.

Dobby looked up. “Good morning, Miss Professor!”

Viv blinked. “Good morning. Dobby, it’s Viv. Just Viv.”

“Yes, Miss Professor.”

“That isn’t—”

“He chose it yesterday,” Harry murmured. “He picks names, and then he keeps them.”

“I’m not even sure what I’m a professor of in that sentence.”

“Neither is he,” Harry said. “It’s a title. Daphne’s been Miss Daphne for months.”

Dobby, who had not stopped working, pointed at the table. “Breakfast will be ready in four minutes. Miss Professor must sit.”

“He timed it,” Harry whispered, and Viv looked at Dobby, then at Harry, and then at Daphne.

Daphne gave her a small shrug. “This started about twenty minutes ago.”

“You didn’t stop him?”

Harry looked wounded. “We value our lives.”

“And our breakfast,” Daphne added.

Viv stepped into the kitchen. “Dobby. You’ve cleaned my entire kitchen. You did not have to do that.”

Dobby stopped moving, and Harry’s face changed at once. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“Too late.”

Dobby lowered the spoon in his hand. “Dobby knows.”

“I only mean you’re a guest.”

Dobby stared at her. Harry covered his mouth, and Daphne looked toward the ceiling. Viv’s confusion deepened. “What did I say?”

“I think you may have insulted him,” Harry said carefully. “Probably him and several ancestors.”

Dobby drew himself up. “Dobby is not tired.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Dobby likes to work. Dobby likes to cook and likes to clean, and Dobby is very good at cleaning.”

“This is going badly,” Harry murmured, and Viv shot him a look.

Dobby went on. “Dobby is not working because Miss Professor tells Dobby. Dobby is not servant. Dobby is helping.”

Viv finally understood, and her expression softened. “All right. Then let me try again.” Dobby’s ears shifted. “You can help as much as you want.”

“Good recovery,” Harry said, and she ignored him.

“But you don’t have to do anything just because you’re staying here. You can cook because you like cooking and clean because you like cleaning. You can reorganise my kitchen because apparently you’ve already decided my cupboards are badly governed.”

Dobby looked toward the cabinets. “They was.”

Harry made a choking sound, Daphne looked away to hide a smile, and Viv laughed. “Fine. But if you’re tired, you stop, and if you don’t want to do something, you don’t. Nobody here gets to order you to work.” Dobby looked almost offended again, and she raised both hands. “Not because you can’t. Because you don’t have to.”

Dobby thought for several seconds. “Dobby understands.”

“He doesn’t,” Harry whispered.

“I know,” Viv whispered back.

Dobby pointed at the table. “Sit.”

Viv sat.

* * *

Breakfast was better than anything she had planned to make, which annoyed her slightly, though not enough to matter. There were eggs and toast, fried potatoes and fruit, and something with mushrooms that Harry immediately ate half of. Dobby sat with them, and Viv noticed that. He was not standing or hovering or waiting to be told, but sitting. Harry passed him the jam without thinking, and Daphne asked whether he had slept well. Dobby complained that Miss Professor’s cleaning supplies were badly organised, and Viv objected, and Dobby explained why she was wrong. Harry and Daphne sided with Dobby, and Viv decided that betrayal came early in this household.

By the time breakfast ended, she was laughing. Dobby stood, and she pointed at him. “You are not required to clean.”

Dobby looked offended, and Harry sighed. “Viv.”

“I know, I know.” She lowered her hand. “Do whatever makes you happy.”

Dobby’s ears lifted. “Yes.” He gathered the plates and disappeared into the kitchen, and a moment later water began to run.

“That went better than expected,” Harry said.

“You said I insulted his ancestors.”

“You recovered.”

“Barely,” Daphne said, sipping her tea.

Viv narrowed her eyes. “You’re both very comfortable criticising your host.”

“You said no obligations.”

“I regret that already.”

* * *

After breakfast, Viv carried a stack of blank paper into the living room. Daphne noticed first. “Are we starting?”

“Something very basic. I want to see where both of you actually are.” Harry groaned theatrically, and Daphne sat straighter, and Viv noticed. “No performance.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were about to.” Daphne opened her mouth and closed it again, and Viv smiled. “Basic exercises, nothing clever. I want mistakes.”

Harry looked relieved. Daphne did not. They went into the tent to collect their things, and a minute later they emerged, each carrying parchment and a quill. Viv stared. Neither noticed at first. Daphne sat, and Harry uncorked a bottle of ink, and Viv went on staring until Daphne looked up. “What?”

“What is that?”

Daphne looked at the quill. “A quill.”

“I know what it is. Why are you using them?”

Harry and Daphne looked at each other. “Because we write?”

“You’ve been in America for weeks, and nobody fixed this.”

“Fixed what?”

Viv stood. “Coats.”

“What?”

“Get your coats.”

“But the exercises—” Daphne said, looking at the paper.

“Later.”

“Where are we going?”

“Out,” Viv said, already heading for the hall.

Harry looked at Daphne. “Is she angry?”

“No,” Viv called back.

Harry stood. “That somehow sounds worse.”

* * *

Viv did not explain herself, which grew irritating by the third block. Harry walked beside her, and Daphne followed half a step behind, still carrying one quill because she had apparently refused to surrender it on principle.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“You said that five minutes ago.”

“And continues to be true.”

“Are we buying books?”

“No.”

Daphne brightened slightly. “Academic materials?”

“Possibly,” Viv said, smiling, and Harry saw the expression and sighed.

“Oh no. I recognise that face. It’s the one adults make before spending our money.”

“I am not spending your money.”

“She will,” Harry said, pointing at Daphne, who ignored him.

They turned down a narrower street. The magical part of Manhattan did not announce itself with a single gate or dramatic archway, and Harry was beginning to understand that America preferred hiding things in ordinary places. There was a bookshop and a tailor, and then a narrow passage between two buildings that widened impossibly once they passed through it. The street beyond was busy, not crowded but alive, with witches and wizards in robes mixing with people in ordinary coats. A broom-repair shop stood beside a bakery, and an enchanted instrument in one window played itself. Harry slowed, and Daphne nearly walked into him.

Then Viv stopped. The shop in front of them had three broad windows. Paper filled the first, pens filled the second, and the third held drafting tools, rulers, ink bottles and enough coloured stationery to make Daphne go completely still. Harry looked at her, then at Viv, then back at Daphne. “Oh.”

Viv smiled, and Daphne stepped toward the window. “Is that vellum? And cotton paper? Handmade? Is that colour-changing ink?”

“Yes, to all of it.”

Harry sighed. “You have no idea what you’ve done.” Daphne did not hear him, because she was reading the display card. “This is it,” he said solemnly. “We’re doomed.”

“Are we?”

“Our money.”

Daphne had already entered the shop, and Harry watched her go. “Gone.” Viv laughed. “We had a good run,” he said, and followed.

* * *

The first thing Harry noticed was how few quills there were. A decorative rack near the back held several expensive ones, one with silver feathers and another that wrote in two colours, but they were clearly not the centre of the shop. Pens were. There were hundreds of fountain pens, some simple and some ornate, some magical and some not. Daphne had disappeared into a wall of paper, and Harry found her two aisles later holding three different notebooks, with Viv standing nearby.

“I’ve made a mistake,” Viv said.

“I warned you.”

“This one dries ink instantly,” Daphne said. “This one corrects smudging, and this paper preserves diagrams when folded.”

Harry glanced at Viv. “She is gone.”

“I think so.”

Daphne moved toward another display, and Harry followed more slowly, but Viv stopped beside a glass case. “For you.”

Inside were several fountain pens. “I can use normal ones.”

“I know. That one.” The clerk unlocked the case, and Viv took out a dark pen with a small brass ring near the grip and handed it to Harry. It was heavier than a quill and balanced differently, and he liked that at once. “What does it do?”

“Writes. And refills itself.”

“No reservoir?”

“There is one. It draws from a paired bottle.”

Harry looked interested. “How far?”

“Depends on the model,” said the clerk from behind the counter. “This one, about fifty miles.”

Harry stared, and Viv smiled. “There. That face. It’s the one where you forgot you were pretending not to care.” He ignored her.

“How does it know which bottle?”

“Binding mark,” the clerk said, pointing at the brass ring.

“And if I change bottles?”

“Rebind it.” The clerk showed him, and Harry immediately asked another question, and Viv smiled.

Daphne reappeared carrying far too much paper, and her eyes went to the pen. “What does that do?”

“Refills itself.”

“Oh,” she said, her eyes sharpening, and Harry pointed at the paper. “No. You already have your problem.”

“This is not a problem.”

“It is physically becoming a pile.”

“Come here,” Viv said, and led them to another section.

Some of the pens had small rotating dials built into the barrels, and Harry picked one up and turned the dial. Black, blue, red, green. “That is brilliant.”

Daphne had already taken one. There were pens that never needed refilling and others that simply lasted, a cream-coloured one that promised twelve thousand feet of line, and Harry wondered aloud how anyone measured that. “You’re asking the right questions,” Viv said. They moved on to paper that resisted water and paper that accepted erased ink without leaving marks, drafting sheets with faint grids that vanished when the work was finished, and notebooks that corrected spelling after the writer finished a sentence. Daphne tested one, and it changed one of her words. She frowned. “It is wrong.”

“It is,” Viv agreed.

Daphne corrected the correction, and the notebook changed it back. Daphne stared, and Harry began to laugh. “This is personal now.”

“It is incorrect.”

“Fight it.”

“I intend to.”

Viv removed the notebook from her hands. “No wars with stationery.”

They reached the drafting tools last, and Harry slowed. There were metal rulers and compasses and mechanical pencils, and pens designed to draw perfectly even lines. One ruler projected measurements directly onto whatever surface it touched, and another divided a length into equal sections without calculation. Harry picked up the second one. “What is this?”

“Proportion ruler.” Viv leaned beside him. He moved the small dial, and the markings shifted. “For diagrams, construction, rune layouts, charm arrays.”

Beside it was a ruler that locked angles, and another that repeated the same curve precisely. A mechanical pencil had a tiny rune etched near the clip, and Harry tried it on a scrap of paper. The line stayed perfectly even no matter how hard he pressed. His eyebrows rose.

“There are people who build things with magic, Harry,” Viv said. He looked at her, and she gestured around the drafting section. “Not academics, exactly. People who design enchanted objects, structures, tools, wards, machines.”

Harry looked back at the ruler, and something in his expression changed. It was not a revelation, only interest. Viv left it there. She did not explain, or tell him what he should become. She simply picked up another mechanical pencil. “This one changes hardness.”

“How?”

“Turn the ring.”

He did, and Harry forgot about time.

* * *

Daphne eventually appeared beside them carrying a basket. Harry stared. “No.”

“What?”

“You found a basket.”

“It was provided.”

“That does not help.”

“I need paper.”

“You have paper.”

“Not this paper,” Daphne said, and Viv covered a smile. Harry looked inside the basket. There were three notebooks, two packs of loose sheets, ink, a fountain pen, another fountain pen and something that looked suspiciously like sealing wax. “Daphne. We need food.”

“We have money.”

“That is exactly what rich people say right before becoming poor.” She narrowed her eyes, and Harry held up the enchanted ruler he was still carrying. She looked at it, then at him, and the silence stretched. He lowered it slightly. “That is different.”

Daphne smiled, and Viv laughed, and Harry looked betrayed. “You planned this.”

“No.”

“You knew.”

“I suspected.”

“That is worse,” Harry said.

The clerk approached. “Ready?” Daphne said yes and Harry said no, and the clerk wisely listened to Daphne.

* * *

They left nearly an hour later. Daphne carried a paper bag against her chest, and Harry had a smaller one, much smaller, which he considered morally important. Viv walked between them. Daphne looked happier than she had any right to after buying stationery, and Harry pulled the new fountain pen from his coat pocket and turned it once between his fingers, then again.

“Better than a quill?” Viv asked.

“Yes.”

“Traitor,” Daphne said.

“You bought two.”

“That is irrelevant.”

“You abandoned the quill very quickly.”

“I am capable of appreciating superior tools.”

“That’s exactly what I did.”

“That is different.”

Viv laughed. At the end of the magical street, Harry glanced back. “Can we come here again?” Daphne looked at him, and he realised what he had said. She smiled slowly, and he pointed at her. “No.”

“You asked.”

“For tools. Useful ones, not twelve kinds of paper.”

Daphne looked down at her bag. “There are only five.”

Harry stared, and Viv laughed so hard she had to stop walking. Daphne looked offended, and then Harry started laughing too. By the time they reached the apartment, the exercises still had not happened. Viv decided they could wait until the afternoon, since there were worse ways to lose a morning.

And for the first time since Harry and Daphne had arrived in New York, neither of them seemed to be thinking about where they might go next.