The Black Forest or the Secret Diary of Prof. S. Quirrell

* * *

August 8

“This decision you make, Quirrell, is the most important one. You must want this -- to travel on with me and to where I am taking you. You bring evil with you into an evil place and you must want that.”

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“They told you I was to be watched. They warned you.”

“They didn't tell me why.”

“It was a test. When a sang 'solut is given me, it's always a test.”

I remembered the old man. “Send this one to Levin.” Of course. “A test many others have failed?”

Levin sought my eyes and held them with her own. “Though the flesh of the sang 'solut is the sweetest on this earth, not all of them perished under me. Some met other fates.”

“You've --”

“Yes. You should know.” She was not ashamed, but merely recounting for my benefit. “It is the best this wolf has ever had, the meat of the sang 'solut.”

You are damned, I wanted to shout at her then. You are damned for eternity and after your short nici 'magie life span is lived, you will suffer.

But I said, “I'll go with you.”

“Alright. Return to the first camp. I'll meet you there and then we can travel on.”

I aparatted back to our belongings as she would travel faster without me. I desired the time alone and Levin needed as much as I did.

There is much to think about.

What I know: Levin is a werewolf. In animal state, she has killed -- and eaten -- my people and her own. She is not ashamed of it. It is her nature to kill, she says. Nature made the werecreature and she is obeying nature. It isn't a situation of right and wrong to her, but merely what is.

Yet she has suffered. No wonder she hates her people and my own. But that's not enough to do what she had done. And she knows that. She calls it evil, but also her nature.

If I could see some good in her, some undeniable good, I would know what I believe it to be true is true, that evil can become good.

As she sees the man inside my weakness, I sense the fight inside her. If she could embrace it, could she not learn to fight her own nature?

But she doesn't want that. She is damned.

But she doesn't want that. She is damned and she accepts it. She is damned and the strange woman's voice returns "Cine se baga intre lupi, trebuie sa urle."

If evil can become good, can't good become evil?

Q

August 9

Again at dawn, Levin arrived but this time I was not asleep. I had been unable to for more than a few hours, my head full of the worst dreams. I saw myself torn apart by a wolf. I saw her devour my heart. I felt her muzzle deep inside my chest, lapping at my blood with her great wet tongue. Then I woke and when I closed my eyes, it happened again and again.

“You look terrible, Quirrell.”

She did not. She looked rested and well, despite the fact that she had been hiking most of the night.

“I didn't get much sleep.”

“Neither did I.” She sat down at the fire on which I was warming a kettle of water. “After coffee, will we travel on?”

“We will.”

“What will be then, will be.”

We drank our coffee silently. I confess I'm beginning to like it. Not prefer it to tea, but, at least, to find it drinkable. Jones would be proud.

“The worst is ahead of us. More mountains, more forests. Places the nici ' magie have never been nor even imagine in their worst nightmares. You can still die.”

“I'll risk that.”

“Another thing you should know. Someone is following us.”

“What?”

“I don't know who, but I smell them on the wind, behind us, watching us.”

“Do you think they're dangerous?”

She shrugged. “They aren't friendly or they would introduce themselves. Just be careful.”

“You as well.”

“Don't worry for me, Quirrell.”

We traveled only a few miles and I noticed Levin's limp had returned. She traveled on, seemingly refreshed, but each step was begun with a hump. Hump-step. Hump-step.

“You should let me look at that.”

“Why? It will heal.”

“But not well. Not the way you're treating it.”

“How I treat it is my business.”

“I know that spell I used against you. I know the counterspell.”

“Leave the mark as it is. It is a reminder that I am what I am and you are what you are.”

“At least let me take the pain away.”

She stopped, the hump-step ceasing as she turned. “There is no pain, Quirrell. There is only pain in your mind.”

“You're very hard, Levin.”

“I have to be. For both of us.”

I could protest that. I don't. I don't have the heart for it.

Q

August 13

“It is half moon tonight,” Levin announced, halfway through our daily climb.

"Half moon, yes." I figured out the full moons until the end of the year - there are two in December! - but the other phases didn't strike me as important.

"It is something sacred for my kind - waning, waxing. Tonight should be a celebration. We'll stop soon and I'll find game. We'll feast as the nici' magie do."

"Sick of my conjured cooking already?"

She didn't answer. Half an hour later, she found a wooded outcropping and declared it acceptable for the night. Then within minutes, she disappeared.

As if it had been taught to wait - and perhaps it had been - a tiny elf owl fluttered into our camp as soon as she was gone. It hooted warily and I held out my arm for it. The bird landed comfortably on my hand, its claws slipping gently around my fingers.

Even if Levin had spotted the poor thing, I doubt she would have wasted a shot on him. There was hardly meat there for a cat, let alone a wolf.

I calmed the nervous little thing down, whispering small encouragments that seemed to please him. He rubbed his head against my left hand.

"What have you brought me then?" There was a slip of paper rolled and tied to his leg.

I saw the familiar CW at the end of the note and my heart leapt.

"Trained this one to your scent and sight. Tiny, but tough. Call him Snitch. If you're alive, he'll find you."

As he wrote, Charles perhaps wondered if that last statement would proved true, if the owl would find me alive. Had I survived another month in the country with Levin? Another full moon?

If he knew.

I was still pondering my reply when Levin reappeared, three brown hares laid over her shoulder. I looked up to acknowledge her, but she immediately focused on my new companion.

"What is that?" She dropped the still bleeding hares on the ground beside the fire pit.

"An owl."

"So I see. What is it doing on you?"

"Waiting. It's from Charles Weasley. At the dragon reservation."

She softened at the mention of my school fellow. "Charlie, yes. A rare one among your kind. He loves the beasts as his children. But he has no love for me."

"He mentioned you."

"To say no good." Levin knelt beside the rabbits and took out a long wicked-looking knife. "Has he taken any meat?"

I couldn't remember him partaking of any type of flesh while I was with him. "I don't think so."

"I ate dragon once. It was too tough and too hard to get at."

"As a wolf - ?"

"As a woman. Which wolf would have the patience when there is easy killing? Only the human is so stupid and stubborn." As she said it, she slit the biggest of the hares from chin to anus and its innards tumbled out. I suddenly felt less anxious for our meal. "Your Charlie could smell it on me - that dragon meat. He hated that."

"Isn't it against the law to kill a dragon?" After I'd said it, I realized how ridiculous the question sounded, considering of whom I asked it.

"Unless the dragon is rogue, yes. This one killed and ate two nici' magie girls. One was seven, the other three. They sent me out to hunt it down."

"So you killed it. And then you ate it."

"More or less. So is the cycle. The worm eats the king, the fish eats the worm, the beggar eats the fish."

"Hamlet."

"Nature. This is a good skin." Levin held the rabbit's skin up for me, red and black gore dripping from it.

I turned away, pretending to be occupied with the conditions of the camp. "Very nice."

"I'll keep it."

Levin quieted down then, concentrating on butchering the hares. I quickly wrote out a note to Charles. "She hasn't killed me yet. Love Snitch. American? Thank Jones. Send him back. Levin won't eat him. Q"

I tied the slip to Snitch with a bit of string and looked the little owl in the eye. “Take this to Charles with the dragons.”

He hotted happily at me and flew off. Happy to be away from Levin, no doubt. If only he knew.

When the meat was spitted and cooking over the fire, Levin felt friendly again. “I celebrate the waning, my brother, always the waxing. It meant prey was coming. I say the time for prey is going, so we celebrate.”

“Here, here!” I raised my cup of tea.

She immediately produced a tin flask from her pack and poured a clear liquid into it.

“From now until we part ways, we will do this.”

“To the waning!” I toasted, ignoring the odor eminating from my cup.

“To the waning!” Levin drank, then dipped a finger into the hare's blood and put it in her mouth. “Still warm. You'll eat well tonight.”

She was right, although I wouldn't have believed it as she licked her finger clean.

“I have not felt this in a long time.” Levin almost looked fat in the firelight, as if one good meal was all she needed to plumpen her up. “I will tell you the last time I felt as good as this. I was sitting at my brother's feet and he was playing clarinet, as my father's father taught him before he died. My brother knew the folk songs of the Enr'u as if he were a son of Abraham himself.”

“Kandel's Hora?” It was out before I could stop myself.

“Yes!” Her eyes lit with recognition and surprise. “'Di Mahke' and 'Ki Tinam' were his favorites.”

I sang the first lines of the second as if I were taught it yesterday, not years ago. She joined in and I was surprised that her voice was quite pretty.

“Do you know 'Miserilou'? That was my favorite,” she interrupted halfway through the first verse.

I sang -- poorly from a distant, happy memory. "Shtil, ovent kil,/Un ikh fil az ikh vil mayn gefil/Far ir oysgisn un zi zol visn nor,/ Az nor zi lib ikh,/Mayn lebn gikh ir, yo. "*

"Her, s'iz mir shver, /Mit a trer zog ikh dir un ikh shver. /Mayn printsesn, kh'ken nit fargesn dikh /Kum heyl mayn benkshaft, /nor di kenst heyln mikh. " ** Levin stopped singing, laughing and shaking her head. "How can you know this? Are there many Enr'u among the English sangs?"

The joy, the light was so great in me, I blurted out. “No, no. Not among the sang. I knew a nici' magie who sang them to me.”

“A printsesn? Was she beautiful, your printsesn?”

Beautiful? Did I tell how she was when I first stumbled upon her in the woods beyond our summer home, when her hair was chestnut silk and her eyes brightest blue? Or when we parted and that soft treasure was gone and her eyes went dull with pain and nici' magie cures?

“Is this a fairy tale then?”

“I see not.” Levin was embarrassed as she read everything in my face. “But when are they ever? Even when we sang our father's father's songs together, my brother was turning. Another year and he would close his mind and his door as his new friends played their game with me. There is never happiness where there is not sadness crouching nearby.”

“She was only 17. It wasn't right.”

“No, it wasn't.” Levin put her hand out and laid it on top of mine. It was the first time we'd touched in peace since she transformed. Her hand was warm and cold at the same time. “Get some rest. With a full belly and a full heart.”

“Kum heyl mayn benkshaft, /nor di kenst heyln mikh.”

I can sing myself to sleep.

Q

* Translation of Q's verse:

It's quiet, the evening cools,
And I want to pour out my feelings
So that she knows I love her only.
If only she would love me,
I would give my life to her.

** Translation of Levin's verse:

Oh alas, it is hard for me,
Oh, how can I say it, tearfully I swear to you:
My princess, I can't forget you,
Come heal my longing,
Only you can heal me.