The Opposite of Secrets

The Opposite of Secrets

They are old women, even for witches, and they work slowly, removing stone after stone from the tower wall. Now and again they rest, looking out over the green fields and grey little towns of Muggle Britain.

It is a land that has seen many changes in their day. Slim-turretted castles and grand cathedrals grace the horizon and soar heavenward. They are built in the new style, for beauty as much as for defense. The lords within their walls drink wine instead of mead now, and season their food with exotic spices. The scops with their elegies for lost heroes have been replaced by troubadours, singing light love songs in the language of some distant southern country.

But Rowena remembers the old poetry now: the laments for ruined halls and fallen warriors, and the consolation of ancient Saxon wisdom. As a nun, she approves of the notion that all earthly glory is transient; as a woman who has sweated and bled and wept for a school now torn apart by factions and quarrels, she likes to think that noble failures will be remembered.

In the days of their youth, they built this place to be a candle in the dark. Now it seems as though it must be the source of a new darkness.

Helga turns to her and wipes sweat from her brow. “I have not the strength to go on,” she says. She is a midwife and Healer, born of peasant stock. Her arms have pulled children into the world and carried injured men to safety in her day; but they are wasted and wrinkled now, and she is feeling her years.

“Then we shall try the spell,” says Rowena. She passes her hand over two of the rings and whispers the words that are written in the book, and when she and Helga have slipped the rings onto their fingers both women set to work again. This time they carry stones and chip away at mortar with the strength of two.

At last they reach the dark dead space between the inner and outer walls of the tower; the air inside is chilly and stale. Rowena lays the book inside, and the rings on top of the book, passes her hand over them one last time, and whispers a prayer.

Helga, meanwhile, is mixing the mortar; slowly, it thickens, and they gather the stones together one more time. Sealing the wall once more takes longer than excavating it, because they have left the magic rings behind and each must rely on her own feeble and divided strength.

They walk down the steps in silence and part company at the bottom of the tower. In a few years’ time they may be too old to teach, or Hogwarts itself may stand empty, but for now, they still have work to do. Helga returns to the classroom where she has taught Herbology and Potions for so many years, but Rowena goes to the glassworks, for she has one more task to complete.

For more than eight centuries the dust falls in the silence of the chamber. And the rings and the book sleep together, even as the sword and the basilisk sleep apart.

The basilisk and sword wake, and five more years pass.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The window stood over the stairway that led from the Hufflepuff common room to the girls’ dormitories. Susan must have passed it at least twice a day during each of her seven years at Hogwarts, but she had never noticed it particularly. It was dim with years of accumulated dust, and unlike most stained-glass windows in the wizarding world, it was not enchanted. The leaden bars and bits of colored glass formed a picture that never moved, and that was, on the whole, remarkable only for its awkwardness and lack of proportion.

Susan paid attention to the window now because a girl was hovering upside-down in front of it, her blonde hair streaming toward the floor and her face very red.

“What are you doing in here, Luna?” asked Susan.

“Looking at your window.”

“I can see that,” said Susan somewhat irritably, “but – why...”

“It’s a bit different when you’re upside-down,” Luna explained, “but the blood does rush to your head after a while, and maintaining the Hover Charm is exhausting.” She turned a half-somersault and landed with her feet on the floor.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” said Susan. “How did you get into the Hufflepuff common room?”

“Oh – Houses and all that,” said Luna vaguely. “Worrying about that sort of thing seems rather trivial just now, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s a war on.”

“Well – yes,” Susan admitted, “but I don’t think our prefects would see it that way, so you’d better come away before Ernie or Hannah catches you here.”

“Can you draw?” asked Luna, seemingly apropos of nothing.

“Yes, a bit. Why?”

“Then do you think you could make me a copy of the window on parchment? That way I won’t have to sneak back in.”

“Er – All right,” said Susan, and then wondered exactly what she had agreed to. “Um, I don’t have to hang upside down the whole time I’m copying it, do I?

“No,” said Luna. “That would be silly. It would be much simpler to turn the parchment upside down when you’re finished, don’t you think?”

Of course Susan thought so; but based on her previous encounters with Luna Lovegood, she had been far from sure that something that made sense to the rest of the world would make sense to the girl who stood in front of her. “Do I get to know why I’m doing this?”

“Take a look at the picture in the window. What do you see?”

Susan looked. It depicted a woman grown rather stout in her old age, standing in a garden of herbs useful for Healing. She wore robes in a medieval style and several prominent rings upon one finger.

“Helga Hufflepuff,” she said.

“Well, yes,” Luna persisted, “but don’t you think there’s something a bit odd about the picture?”

Susan looked again. The hand that bore the rings jutted out at a clumsy angle, as if the artisan had not been a master of his or her craft. There were numerous other oddities of perspective and proportion, such as an oversized, and overly straight, vine that seemed to be growing out of the Founder’s shoulder.

“Well, it’s not enchanted to move, and – it’s not particularly well done, is it?”

“On the contrary,” said Luna, “I think it’s very well done. For a work of its kind, that is. We’ve one of Rowena Ravenclaw in our common room that’s quite as good, but other than that, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Susan stared at her.

“It helps if you look at it upside down. So if you don’t want to Hover, I think you ought to start copying and see what you see.” Luna wandered off, humming one of the Sorting Hat’s songs under her breath.

Susan felt utterly at sea, but a promise was a promise and Luna was – well, if not exactly a friend, at least likeable in her vague, quirky way. She fetched her colored pencils from the dormitory and began to copy the heavy lead lines and panes of colored glass.

It was after midnight when she finished, and she realized she had forgotten all about her Charms homework. Feeling distinctly irritated with Luna, she shoved the picture into one of her textbooks and slammed it shut; but then curiosity got the better of her, and she took the piece of parchment out again and looked at it upside down.

And then Susan saw it. The picture was awkward because it wasn’t meant to be decorative at all. It was a plan of sorts, an architectural drawing.

She still didn’t understand what she was looking at, but she had a feeling “Loony” Lovegood might not be so loony after all.

 

                                                            *          *          *

She met Luna in the library the next day and passed the parchment on to her. “Do you know what it means?”

“I’m not entirely positive,” Luna admitted. “It does seem as if it ought to be somewhere in the castle, but I’ve been looking at ours – Ravenclaw’s window – for ages, and I can’t work out which part of Hogwarts it shows.” She took out a drawing that was clearly the counterpart of Susan’s; this one showed an elderly witch in a nun’s habit, with a book in one hand and the same awkward, heavy lines separating the panes of stained glass.

Luna turned both pieces of parchment upside down and frowned at them. “They’re different, you see. Only the rings and the book are in the same position in both windows. I wonder if...” She placed one parchment on top of the other, tapped the topmost one with her wand, and murmured, “Translucentio.”

Now that both sets of lines were visible, superimposed over each other, Susan began to see what the plan depicted. “Why, it’s a slice of the uppermost part of the castle. There are the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Towers, and the Owlery and the bat-house and the Astronomy Tower...” Her voice trailed off as she remembered that terrible June day, almost a year ago now.

“And there’s the Divination classroom,” said Luna evenly, “and it looks like the rings and book are walled up inside the fifth tower, the one that hardly anybody uses. There’s an old chapel here, and behind on the other side of it are two walls, see, and in between them there’s a sort of chamber.”

 

“A chamber?” Susan asked warily. “Like the Chamber of Secrets?” She thought of their second year, of Justin’s blank eyes and the blood frozen in his veins, and shivered.

“Almost the opposite, I think,” said Luna. “What is the opposite of secrets?”

Susan shrugged. The question sounded like a riddle, and she had never been good at those.

“It’s quite clever, really. Because you can only find it if people from two of the Houses work together. Not like the Chamber of Secrets, which only the heir of Slytherin can open. It reminds me of the legend of the Pillar of Storgé, now that I think of it...”

Susan listened to the legend of the Pillar of Storgé with considerable patience for the next half-hour, and then decided it was time to bring Luna back to the main point. “So we’ve found a secret chamber. What are we going to do about it?”

“I imagine we ought to excavate it. I expect that’s why they left a map.”

“But –” Susan’s mind was full of monsters that lurked in chambers, and cursed books, and rings that could wither away men’s hands...

“Do you trust our Founders?”

Susan sighed. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Then meet me at the chapel tomorrow night at nine. Bring a couple of pickaxes if you can find one, and take care that the Ecclesiastical Blisterbugs don’t bite you.”

“Pickaxes? Can’t we use a Vanishing Spell?”

“No, because the Founders made the walls of this castle impervious to magic. Only force can bring them down.” Luna smiled vaguely. “Haven’t you ever read Hogwarts, a History?”

Susan had to admit that she had not.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Luna, Susan decided, might have made a good Hufflepuff if she had the slightest concept of method. She swung her pickaxe and scraped away at the mortar with enthusiasm, but every so often she stopped work and went into a reverie for several minutes at a time. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she announced as she came to her senses after one unusually prolonged bout of reflection. “I brought sandwiches.”

Susan grabbed the topmost sandwich and crammed half of it into her mouth with more enthusiasm than manners. After three hours of chipping away at the tower wall, she was famished.

“Mmmph. Whudkinna...” She swallowed. “Luna, what kind of sandwiches are these meant to be?”

“Rhyming,” said Luna, taking a delicate bite out of her own sandwich.

“Rhyming?”

“They’ve got ham, lamb, and jam. I wanted to put clams on as well, but the house-elves said there were none to be found in the kitchens.”

Well, thank goodness for small mercies, Susan thought. “Luna, would you mind awfully if I had mine without the jam?”

“Oh no, that would be perfectly all right. It’s an experimental sort of sandwich, really. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Evanesco jam!” said Susan, and took another bite of her sandwich. It tasted much better this way. “Do you make ... er’m ... experimental sandwiches often, then?”

“Yes. I made one with rice, spice, and Ice Mice that was quite lovely, a bit like very cold rice pudding, but the mustard and custard one didn’t turn out very well.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Susan.

Luna, as usual, was oblivious to sarcasm. “I have a hypothesis that mustard doesn’t go well with puddings, as a general rule, but I haven’t tested it enough to be certain.”

Remind me not to come to dinner at your house until you have, Susan thought. She suppressed the urge to say this out loud, finished her sandwich, and picked up the axe again.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Susan’s arms were aching when they broke into the chamber, and the sweat was running into her eyes. Luna, who had tied her hair back with her butterbeer-cork necklace, was looking equally frazzled, but she gave Susan a serene smile and asked, “Would you like to enter, or shall I?”

In answer, Susan dropped to her knees and crawled into the rubble-strewn space between the walls. She did not particularly want to, but she had an innate sense of justice that told her it would be unfair to ask Luna to do something she felt reluctant to do herself.

Her hand touched a little velvet pouch filled with something that jingled, and underneath the place where the pouch had been, she felt the square, solid shape of a book.

Luna poked her head through the hole in the wall. “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah.” Susan crawled out of the hole and spilled the contents of the pouch out onto the floor of the tower. It proved to contain a small heap of rings, two dozen or more, made of silver set with amber. Though they were badly tarnished, Susan could see that the craftmanship was excellent: intricate Celtic knots blossomed around the stones.

Luna was examining the book. It, too, was a thing of beauty; some medieval illuminator had decorated the pages with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. The lettering, however, looked utterly foreign to Susan.

“What language is that?”

“It’s mostly Latin,” said Luna, “but there’s some very early Middle English mixed in. We’ve studied Latin in Magical Theory, so I think I can read it, but it will take a while.”

Magical Theory was offered only at the N.E.W.T. level, and only a handful of students at Hogwarts bothered with it. The famously eccentric professor would only allow people into the class if they had received an E or higher in Ancient Runes, Arithmancy, History of Magic, and Divination – three of which were optional subjects, and none of which was easy. Susan felt a growing respect for the girl beside her.

Luna yawned. “It’s quite late, so I mean to start work on the translation tomorrow. I think you had better take charge of the rings, as my roommates are always taking my possessions and hiding them. I don’t ordinarily mind, but these might be rather valuable.”

“Er ... all right. Yes. That makes sense.” Actually, none of it made any sense at all, but Susan felt too tired to argue.

 

                                                            *          *          *

A week later, Susan was walking to classes with Justin and Hannah when Luna wandered up to them in the corridor. “I’ve worked out what the rings do,” she announced without bothering to greet any of them. “If you say the spells in the book, and then you put on one of the rings and give the rest of them to your friends and allies, you can all draw upon each other’s strength and magical powers. It lets you pull a tiny bit of somebody else’s soul into yours, only without actually splitting the souls. A sort of anti-Horcrux, if you see what I mean.”

Susan had heard that word before. At the beginning of the year, Harry Potter and his closest friends had often disappeared from her classes for days at a time. People whispered that they were roaming the country in search of something mysterious called a Horcrux, but they always came back; they seemed to have worked out a flexible arrangement with the Headmistress. Now there were rumors that all the Horcruxes had been found and destroyed; at any rate, Harry seemed to have returned for good. His Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff classmates watched him with curious eyes and felt a certain solidarity with him, though he held himself aloof from them most of the time. He was waiting, as they were all waiting, for the final encounter with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

“Harry could use something like that, couldn’t he?” said Susan slowly. “If you could persuade him to take it...” The trouble, she realized at once, was that Harry was the sort of person who would be expecting, perhaps even hoping, to face his destiny alone. He had been adamant about wanting to keep his classmates well out of it.

“I think you should gather everybody together and talk to him,” said Luna.

“Me?” said Susan. “But you know him better than I do, and this whole thing was your idea...”

Luna smiled sadly. “I’m a bit hopeless at persuading people. You should hear what they still say about the Umgubular Slashkilter. And the Crumple-Horned Snorkack.”

Susan looked from Luna to Justin and Hannah, who had been staring at the Ravenclaw girl all this time as if she had been speaking gibberish. “Fair point, Luna. I’ll try my best.” She turned to her two Housemates. “Could you do me a favor and help me round up all the old members of the DA who are still at school? Get Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger to join us if you can, but don’t talk to Harry just yet. I have a feeling this might be important.”

Justin and Hannah still looked deeply skeptical, but part of the ethic of Hufflepuff House was that you came through when your friends asked something of you, no matter how nutty it seemed. They went.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The remaining members of the old DA, plus a handful of newcomers, had met in the Room of Requirements. They had enchanted the rings with the spells from the book and made some preliminary tests of their new powers, and found that they held true. Now the only task that remained was presenting the last ring to Harry. Susan had expected Ron and Hermione to take over at this point, but somehow they remained in the background as if by common consent, and she and Luna found themselves at the head of a small delegation.

She held her right hand, on which she wore the ring, in front of her a little awkwardly. It felt different, almost as if it were vibrating with some unseen force – a force that connected them all, from little Dennis Creevey to the tall, stolid Head Boy, Ernie Macmillan, in a strong and unbreakable chain. And yet she felt as if one link was still missing, the one that would bring the chain full circle and transform it into an endless and unbreakable knot.

“Harry,” she said, and her voice trembled only a little. “We have something for you. It’s a gift from all of us.

“Thank you,” he said, accepting the last of the rings, which happened to be one of the more tarnished ones. “Er, I don’t mean to be rude, but what is it, exactly?”

“It’s something that will help you defeat – Him.” Susan did her best to explain about the rings’ powers, with frequent interruptions from Luna, who seemed to have come up with a long and very weird explanation about why they worked.

He looked at them all, frowning a little; the scar on his forehead wrinkled. “It’s all right, Luna and Susan. I do appreciate it, but I don’t need help, really. Er – assuming that it does work, I wouldn’t ask all of you to risk your souls.”

“It works,” said Hermione confidently. “We’ve tested it. You should have seen the Reductor Curse Dennis threw half an hour ago.”

Ron nodded. “It’s amazing, mate. You can feel it as soon as you put the ring on your finger. Give it a try.”

Harry toyed with the ring, which was now lying in the palm of his hand, but did not put it on. “And what happens if I’m killed while I’m wearing it? Would pieces of all of you die with me?”

“Well –” Hermione looked uncomfortable. “We don’t actually know what would happen, but...”

“I think,” said Neville Longbottom quietly, “that would happen anyway, whether you’re wearing the ring or not.”

The entire room fell silent for a moment, and one by one, the other students nodded their agreement.

Harry slid the ring onto his finger without another word and Susan felt the chain close at last, locking each of them into the others and linking them together with a power that no Dark magic could sunder.