Passing Through Nature To Eternity

Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?
Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air.
--Job 28:20-21

Rowena rarely sleeps well, but tonight it isn't rain that disturbs her, nor the owls brooding under the eaves, nor the poker she left stirring the fire. Human voices wake her, straining like wind through the walls of her room. She holds her breath and lets her mind out to listen.

"Blood," Salazar says, "is thicker than water."

Godric's laugh puffs up like pipe-smoke. "You ought to write that one down."

"I am not making a joke."

"That's what worries me."

"They drive us out of their villages," Salazar says, a little more loudly, each word edged and distinct. "They call us infidels, demons; they have stoned us in their streets. Most of them are illiterate and many are murderers. And you'd invite their offspring into our world. Board them with our own children. Teach them our secrets."

They have been having this argument since before Rowena knew them by anything but reputation. It flares between them now and again, never finished. Rowena stands and walks to her door. She presses her eye to the crack and can see them, at the end of the hall, shadow shapes in the thin streak of light.

"...shouldn't be any secrets," Godric is saying. "Secrets are what hold us back. If they knew us, they wouldn't be afraid of us. It's fear that I'm against, old friend: ordinary, ugly, animal fear."

"I have no fear of them."

"Don't you? Aren't you still a bit of an animal?"

She touches her wand when she hears this, without quite knowing why. From sleep she has moved to alertness, alarm, the muscles tensing underneath her thin gown.

After a long pause Salazar laughs his own dry falling leaf of a laugh. "You bait me terribly."

"Oh, yes, I do."

"Perhaps I am too fearful. And perhaps you're too confident." Salazar's arm moves darkly, swiftly across Rowena's line of sight. A handshake, perhaps. Certainly not a blow. "I say you cannot house hens with foxes, unless you want bloodshed. Sometimes I think you want bloodshed."

"Sometimes I think you want..."

But if Godric finishes the sentence, he does it under his breath. Rowena crosses her arms over her chest. It's never cold in his house, but she's cold, and she knows no charm, Heating or Cheering, to cure this chill.

With her cheek against the door, she listens to their murmurs, and finally to their footsteps receding in opposite directions. When she concentrates, she can almost hear the crackle of the fire, the footsteps of spiders, and Helga asleep in the room across the hall, behind her own closed door.

They never do turn to Helga, or Rowena, when they're fighting this fight. Maybe they don't want a mediator, a level head, a third or fourth point of view. Maybe they don't want a woman. Whatever the reason, it's this and not the noise that disturbs Rowena's rest.

"Lumos," she whispers, and follows the flimsy light of her wand to her writing-desk. The surface is buried in rippled parchments, and the ink shines as though it is still wet.

She reaches for her quill and begins to draw, for the hundredth time, the outlines of the castle.

*

Decades later, she will think: But we were so young. There will be a number of children before her, twiddling their new wands to send eagle feathers flying in circles around the classroom.

She'll look out the window, down to the courtyard, mentally counting the pointed arches and cataloguing the chipped stones. We were so young and we made this happen. This place that's already beginning to change the world.

She'll take comfort in that, and pride, and maybe it will ameliorate a little of her sorrow at how much she didn't know.

*

It takes a year and a day, with each of them searching on their own, to find the place. A year of long walks and Portkeys, of splintering broomsticks and punishing winds and disappointed letters. A year of coastline, hillside, rainfall, and a day on which Helga sends each of them an owl with a three-word message. I've found it.

When they Apparate to the location--all of them, in unison, in haste--Helga is already beginning the long work of pruning back the brush, marking their territory. They walk around the shore of the lake, not speaking, branching off one by one from the path Helga's made. They converge, as do the ley-lines, upon the hill.

It is the source of all Rowena's visions, the site of the castle she's seen in dreams. More importantly, it's the place they've been discussing for so long, created whole out of their conversations. A colonnade of elm trees whispers where the Great Hall will be, and a low cloud marks the spot of the tallest tower. She can see their school here, from flags to flagstones. She can see it so completely that it hurts her, its perfection a physical ache in her chest. Her fingers itch for a quill, to set this down before it flees her.

"Yes." Salazar says it first, gravely, but his eyes are shining.

"Yes," Rowena echoes.

Godric hesitates for a moment, a long moment, and then he sinks to one knee and plants a noisy kiss on Helga's hand. The smile breaks on all of their faces at once as he says, "Yes!"

It is the happiest day they ever spend together.

The year is young, and the sun tires quickly of their talking, rolling away to sleep behind a bank of colorless cloud. Helga lights a fire that doesn't consume the grass beneath it. Godric conjures wormwood wine and passes it around in overlarge goblets that were tiger lilies a moment before.

Below them, the lake is a black mirror. Rowena studies it on the slant and almost glimpses something, a flash that makes her slightly dizzy. She sits down near the fire. Soon they're all sitting down, except for Salazar, who stands bone-straight and says, "How will we protect this place?"

They follow the flight of his gaze. Wooded hills roll out as far as the horizon, light forest and dark, the pattern broken here and there by river and mountain. It creates a very convincing illusion of peace.

"There isn't a settlement within two days' journey," Helga tells them, and then sighs. "That doesn't mean anything, does it? We'll have so much here to hide."

"There's..." Rowena blinks, sifting half-crumbled, half-forgotten antique text through her mind.

"There is the Dunichtus," Salazar offers. "What they did to safeguard Stonehenge."

"I've seen it done." A frown shadows Godric's brow and darkens his eyes. Out of habit, his fingers graze the hilt of his sword. "It takes an innocent life," he says. "Could we truly build on that? A school, founded on such a thing?"

The fire crackles, flames slanting in the breeze. They think about this, and watch each other thinking about this.

Salazar says, "If it's for the greater good--"

The idea bolts across the blue of Rowena's mind, so complete and concentrated that she scarcely realizes she's speaking it aloud: "It relies on the free and willing nature of the sacrifice, not the life itself. With a few modifications--once we mark out the perimeter--" She stands, paces. It isn't just one idea, it's a ladder of them. Her castle in the air. She turns back to them, their waiting eyes. "We would all die for this," she says.

Assent runs a circle around the fire. Not one of them has to consider the question. They would give their hands, their tongues. They would open their ribs and offer up lungs and hearts.

Rowena trembles as she steps into the circle. "That's the essence of the spell," she says. "All the magic that matters."

*

The rest of her life will pass on that hill, by that lake, within the walls they built, Dunichti ringing around her like great invisible bells. She will remain inside the boundaries they draw in their mingled blood.

Her skin will turn to paper, her hair to silver, her vision to a blur, and she'll survive to grieve each of the others, in their turn. Foreknowledge won't be entirely comforting and neither will the students, growing younger every year, piled high with hopes and terrors that Rowena, at her age, will recognize but not feel. Yet every afternoon she'll plan a lecture, and every morning she'll walk down the stairs--unaided, under her own power--to her classroom.

Every night she'll lie still, wakeful and grateful for the reason to rise in the morning. The past will lap around her like the waters of the lake, the way the future used to seep in at the edges of her mind. There will be very little distinction between present and past, past and future, and she'll wonder why their differences ever mattered at all.

*

At times it seems the school is not being constructed, but summoned from elsewhere: vision made flesh. The castle grows, arching and beaming on the hilltop, stretching into the earth and sky. At other times it's miserable, exacting, exhausting work, but even so, not one of them ever wants to stop for the night, to leave it even for a few hours. Not one of them ever wants to leave.

Rowena and Helga watch the sun rise from the foundations, down in the maze of loose earth and entrenched stone. Later it's going to rain, a rough-handed summer storm, but now the column of air above them is full of rosy light, and the ground underfoot is already warm.

"It seems impossible," Helga says. Her face is flushed from the work, almost as red as her hair. "That we could live long enough to finish what we've undertaken here."

"We can," Rowena says. It is much too dangerous to imagine otherwise. If they think of how much there is yet to do, how long it will take, it seems impossible indeed, and foolish even to try.

Helga nods. "I know. I wouldn't have begun something I couldn't finish. In truth we're moving faster than I would have imagined." She points her wand at a long black root, hits it with a steady stream of light, and as it shrivels she smiles her relentless smile. "Once we've finished one story, for instance, the second one will be done with a flick."

"The building is the least of it," Rowena reminds her, gently. "Walls and windows. What we build around our pupils is not half as important as what we'll build within them."

"One thing at a time." She shatters a boulder with one blast, reaches up to brush a flyaway lock of hair out of her eyes. "You look too far ahead, my dear, and talk too much. You and Salazar and even Godric. I hear you scheming about the library you want to put together, and I wonder if you realize how much rain is going to fall on your parchments--and on your heads."

"If we don't argue these questions--"

"Heavens, we do nothing but argue these questions."

Rowena stoops to touch the ground. She can feel the running of the underground stream that feeds the lake. Helga is the one who intuits the deepest workings of such things, who's gathered all her skill and power bare-handed, pulled it up from the dirt. And Rowena has always felt most herself with words, with a roof overhead and parchment between her fingers. "You're right," she says. "The castle itself will have to stand much longer than any of us lives. We have to learn from the building itself, every stone of it, if it's to keep all the knowledge we would pass on."

"Then these will be the most addled stones in history." Helga's laughter is clear as a bell ringing matins, a bell that will hang from a rafter somewhere right above her head. "If there's knowledge the four of us can't find, I doubt it's anywhere on this island. Or anywhere that the sun shines."

"Even some places where it doesn't." Rowena squints up at Helga and her halo of daylight and can't help but smile. "But every question we leave unsettled weakens those walls."

Helga tosses her hands up, stray sparks still dancing at the end of her wand. "It's hopeless. You will be a philosopher, whatever I say. I'll just have to work around you."

The river curves away to some deeper place, some secret. Rowena stands, clasping her hands together, the dirt clinging to her skin. "And Godric and Salazar?" she asks, not quite meeting Helga's eye.

"As if they listen to anybody," she says. She says it with a grin, but nevertheless her voice has something inside it that makes Rowena's grip tighten on her wand. They have a lot of earth yet to move, and they do not have an eternity.

*

Someday the students won't recognize her on sight, won't realize that she's the Ravenclaw whose banner flies with the others in the Great Hall. Stooped, slight, all but blind: nobody's idea of a living legend. She'll speak to them from the front of the room, her hands white and withered on the lectern. Her voice will still be steady. They will still hush and listen.

She'll have the annual luxury of new blood, of the wonder that walks into the room with each class. There will be students who stay with her, become teachers, become almost friends. And the ones who leave forever, walking away with whatever little learning she's been able to impart, working their own spells, raising their own children, creating worlds which Rowena will never see. She'll never be able to settle for herself which course is better, which ones she loves the best.

*

"Look." Godric opens his arms to the air. "Look--"

They've followed him to the top of the skeletal tower where the owlery will be, perched on the bare timbers. The wind roars around them with such rage that it's hard to hear, and harder to balance. This is as high as they can go. Rowena feels like a bird when she gazes straight down at the castle, spiraling and twisting away beneath her, taking on a shape that both resembles and doesn't resemble all her drawings and dreams. She looks to the others, her head spinning.

"--Changed so much," Godric is saying. "And we will have to transfigure it ten times over before we're done."

"But when we're done, it will be finished for the ages," Salazar replies, smiling the smile that illuminates and eases the angles of his face. "And for our children."

"For all our children, Salazar."

Their eyes meet, and it's like a cloud has covered the sun. Rowena could almost curse Godric for saying that, for starting this. But he wants to keep fighting the fight, hoping that it will end differently this time.

"We have decided this," Helga says in her firm, final tone. She looks at her feet on the beam, visibly battling the urge to crouch and hold on.

"You have decided, not I. I concede nothing. Until you see reason--"

"Reason?" Godric snorts out a laugh. "Madness. Our ways would have died out long ago if everyone lived by your standard of proper breeding."

"Perhaps you've been doing some improper breeding of your own." Venom pours into Salazar's soft voice, and his smile warps on his lips; he is almost wincing at his own words. "Is that the sort of animal you are?"

"Salazar!" Helga catches him by the wrist. He doesn't try to shake her off, doesn't seem to notice her at all.

Godric turns his wand in his fingers. He holds it down and away, beside his thigh, but the small motion somehow draws their attention to his size, his strength, his skill, to the massive force that he holds at bay with every gesture. "Say it again!" he calls. "You will not like my answer."

"I like nothing about this. I despair of it. But for the survival of our kind I will risk what I must..." He touches his sleeve where it covers the Dunichtus scar and turns, sudden and sure-footed, to Rowena. "You have the sight," he says. "Use it for us now. Can you swear to me that Godric's way will bring any peace?"

She shivers. "You rely too much on prophecy."

Godric's hand clasps her shoulder. His eyes are as cold and blue as the sky wrapped around them, and she isn't merely shivering, she's shaking. "Tell the fool," he says, "if he must know."

The wind in her ears is a shriek of laughter, a howl of agony; it thunders with every story that will be told here, every secret, every lie. They are so alike, these men, and they demand such different answers. She hates them both for doing this. Her throat closes up like a lock.

"We're not in this for peace," she says, all but choking on it. "I believe it is the wisest way, and the fairest."

Helga folds her arms in close against her chest. "If we can't make peace among ourselves, it will not matter who follows us," she says. It is the most doubt she's ever allowed herself to express. Rowena wishes she could reach her hand.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!'" Salazar shouts, his face contorted into a stranger's with the effort of making himself heard. "Their holy books denounce us. Their holy men have us drowned, or hung, or burned. Make no mistake: the outsiders will always be afraid of us, always hate us. It will come to war, and when it does, these children you speak of so fondly will revert to the filthy ways of their fathers. We have built so much good, and now you would deliver it into evil hands!"

"There is no good or evil," Godric says. "There is only power."

The words resound like a clash of swords. Salazar's face is grey, but his eyes burn. He looks at each of them, asking, pleading, and if nobody answers, nobody dares to look away, either.

"Very well," he says, at last. "It is decided."

And he steps off the beam, into the bright thin air.

He falls for a year and a day, and they are too stunned to do anything, too stunned not to watch. Rowena tastes her heart in her mouth. At the last possible instant, his broom rises to meet him and whisks him easily to the ground. He lands unharmed. But it is too late.

*

What all the children will ask Rowena, the only part of the story they'll really want to hear: Whose idea was it?

She will shut her eyes as if the answer might be inscribed there, in the private dark. The design itself was hers. The ambition, Salazar's. It was Godric's passion. It was Helga's mission.

We were so young.

Whose idea was it? she'll say. It was nobody's idea. It was our lives.

*

The snows fall. The rains dissolve the snow. The sun scourges the clouds out of the sky. Fruit on the trees blooms and ripens and falls and rots. The snows fall again. The world doesn't end.

It amazes Rowena how little things change. Never, not for the space of even one heartbeat, do any of them consider halting the construction. Even Salazar does not slow his pace; if it were possible they'd work harder, give more. They continue to build together, plan together, break their fast together each day. Together, she observes, side by side, but no longer as a one.

Salazar spends much of his time toiling in the passages that they've agreed must be best concealed, tunnels and cellars and cells. His smile never quite comes untwisted. He is not always found where he's meant to be, but all of them have their secrets, need their spaces, and he's never missing for long. He speaks to them with flawless courtesy. Everybody is more polite than they once were; nobody raises their voice in argument.

So there is a kind of peace among them.

On the seventh anniversary of the day that Helga led them here, at the precise instant of sunset, they are gathered at the doorstep of the fortress. The walls shine above and around them, almost breathing in the torchlight and the twilight, as scaly and secretive and splendid as a dragon coiled around her eggs to sleep.

It is finished. Nobody needs to say so. The feeling that spreads its wings within Rowena's chest is too wild and too harsh to be called joy.

Godric holds his hat in his hands. It seemed a joke when he suggested this, but somehow all their jokes turn deathly serious these days. He sings the incantation, gives a flat chuckle when the hat wiggles in his grip.

"Courage," he says. "I would claim all those who dare to attempt the impossible. Who make the jump. Take the risk, and win the battle. The brave..." He lifts his gaze to the castle, his wide shoulders tensed. "And the honorable."

With his wand pointed at his temple, he draws out a silver strand of thought and lets it fall into the hat. It winks away to nothing beyond the brim. Godric keeps his eyes fixed on the ramparts, extending his hand, giving Salazar the hat without ever looking down at him.

Salazar speaks. At first Rowena doesn't understand why she doesn't understand, and then of course she identifies it: Parseltongue. She shouldn't be surprised. The liquid hiss of the syllables makes her angry, makes her stomach turn, but the spell is already in place. If she clawed his eyes out it wouldn't change anything now.

He adds his silver strand, and thrusts the hat too abruptly into Rowena's hands. It weighs rather more than she expected.

Of course she has considered what to say, has spent several sleepless nights pondering the question, but now her prepared speech seems worthless. She'd like to ask for all that the others fail to recognize in themselves: their untamed imaginations, their small kindnesses, the innumerable hours they have lost in conversation. Their old undying hope.

After too long a pause, she says, "Intelligence." It's what the others chose her for, the one virtue she's ever had to offer.

She draws the wish from her mind and lets the hat take it. There is a small pang of something lost, something missed, but it fades as Helga's hands brush hers.

Helga regards the hat as though she's been passed a cup of poison. "I told you that we ought to stand together. I tell you again now, this is the worst idea any of you have ever had. I want no part of this division." She trails off, swallowing, her round face taking on a look of iron. "I claim the lot of them. Every student who comes into our care--they will all be mine, and I will treat them all the same."

If only each of them had known enough to say exactly this. Rowena tries to smile at Helga; Helga doesn't smile back. She flicks her strand into Godric's hat and returns it to him, closing the circle. He repeats the incantation.

His spell coalesces around them, holds them for a moment in its fist, and this, too, is finished.

Salazar moves from his place first. He sketches a bow to Rowena and Helga, one eyebrow raised, his expression frozen somewhere between a sneer and a grimace. Helga shakes her head, rejecting the gesture. Rowena checks an impulse to reach out to him, to each of them. She lowers her head slightly, holding his gaze, saying nothing because it is the right thing to say.

He takes one step away from them, one step back. When he looks at Godric, the sneer fades and raw pain surfaces, and naked loss. Rowena recognizes the pain, its talons in her heart. Godric folds the hat under the crook of his arm and offers a stiff, half-closed hand.

Salazar moves swiftly in and seizes him by the arms, throwing his whole body into it as if he'd tackle a man who outweighs him by many stone, and Godric's hands rise to throw him away, or pull him closer, the women and the wands forgotten--she knows she is forgotten--and they grip each other, shake each other, with the fury of enemies and the fondness of brothers, their faces made ugly with tears.

Impossible to say which of them lets go first. Only that it ends, and Salazar is walking away, around the curve of the castle, gone into the gathering night.

It is the quietest this place will ever be.

Some immeasurable time passes before a hollowed version of Godric's voice asks, "Will it stand?"

He asks it of no one, of the air, but it hangs there and waits for an answer. Rowena turns half away from him and from Helga, listening to the thrumming stillness of the castle behind her. She blinks her own tears away and stares at the lake, at the flash of flame in its depths. Whatever she thinks she sees, she knows the answer to give. The future isn't fated; they have conceived it by their desire and labored it into the world. All futures come to be in this way. Every woman knows that. It is almost all the magic that matters.

She lets out a breath so long and slow it could be the last one in her body. "Yes," she says. "It will stand."