Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

By breakfast the next morning, I had learnt that my father considered margins a personal insult. His handwriting climbed the sides of the page, ducked under diagrams and occasionally continued upside down, as though turning the notebook had been easier than finding a clean sheet. I turned it with him, trying to follow an argument about making paper remember magic.

Six notebooks lay open around me on the bedroom floor. They contained years of work, but almost none of it had been written for someone who needed the difficult words explained. Ken Mercer had known exactly what he meant. His eleven-year-old son would apparently have to catch up.

At least I wasn’t the only person he argued with. Somebody called Dead Face appeared throughout the notes, usually beside a correction that my father resented having to make. In one margin Ken had admitted that Dead Face was right about an ingredient ratio, then instructed himself never to let the man see that page.

I spent longer over that sentence than the calculation beneath it. The diaries I had found six months earlier had told me things about Dad that Emma hadn’t, but these notes brought him closer in a different way. Here he was complaining about a friend, losing an argument and planning to conceal the evidence. I could almost hear him doing it.

Whoever Dead Face was, he knew a great deal about potions. My father trusted his judgement enough to redo weeks of work on his advice, which made the insults look rather affectionate. Together, they had been investigating something called Runebark.

I fetched one of the brown slips from the box and held it beside a drawing. Fine, uneven fibres ran through the paper; the darker strands matched the ones Ken had labelled in his sketch. Under the smell of old potion ingredients, it still had a faint woody scent.

The name belonged to a magical tree. Its bark could absorb magic, but untreated fibres released it again within seconds, making them poor storage and, according to Dad, an excellent way of having an accident. Dark wizards had used the stuff in crude traps. I supposed that counted as solving the storage problem, provided you didn’t mind the solution happening to your fingers.

Getting hold of the bark was another difficulty. Ken’s lists mentioned private collectors and black-market sellers, with occasional angry notes about the quality of their stock. The trees grew in places he didn’t make sound inviting, and bad material could spoil the treatment before the interesting part even began.

I set the slip down more carefully. Whatever I did with these sheets, I couldn’t replace them by asking Emma for a trip to the stationer’s. I didn’t know where to find the tree, let alone how to turn its bark into the paper on my floor.

Dad and Dead Face had tried grinding, soaking and pressing the fibres, using treatment baths with more than ten ingredients. There were pages of failures: brittle sheets, magic leaking out too quickly, samples that had become what Ken tactfully called unstable. Beside one result he had drawn a cauldron with its bottom missing. Even without a caption, I understood the objection.

Their ambition had gone beyond storing a useful spell. One entry asked whether a defence prepared beforehand might give its user a chance against a curse that an ordinary shield couldn’t stop. Dad had added Killing Curse in the margin, and I turned the page hoping for an answer.

The next experiment had failed. So had the one after it, and there was nothing later to suggest they had solved that question. I went back to the more modest success underlined three times: a batch of treated paper that held magic for longer. That was what they had left me, along with all the work they still hadn’t finished.

The remaining slips filled more than half the box. I sorted them by condition, kept the cleanest sheets together and entered the counts at the back of a notebook. Rough edges and visible faults could go into the first experiments. It wasn’t an exciting precaution, but I remembered enough of my old life to prefer counting supplies before discovering that I had run out.

While examining one of the rougher pieces, I settled it between two fingers. My wrist moved almost before I decided what I was doing, and the slip crossed the bedroom to lodge its corner between two books on the shelf. For a moment I simply stared at it. Apparently death had taken plenty of useful memories and left me that.

Someone in my old army unit had once claimed that throwing playing cards was a film trick. Naturally, several of us had spent weeks proving him wrong. A card couldn’t replace a knife, but with practice it would fly straight and strike considerably harder than the person volunteering to be a target expected.

Runebark paper was thicker. I retrieved the slip, checked its corner and imagined it carrying something more interesting than a paper cut. A prepared spell could wait in a pocket or between my fingers until I needed it. Someone watching for a wand might miss the movement altogether.

That was a promising advantage for a weapon which, so far, had successfully attacked a bookshelf. I had never cast a proper spell, and Dad’s notes stopped short of a reliable way to prepare one. Before I planned any magnificent victories, I would have to get some magic into the paper.

I sat down again and reread the pages about retaining a spell’s structure. The fibres could hold magic; the treatment delayed its escape. Neither fact told a beginner how to make the result do what he wanted. Dad had left me a laboratory problem, and my qualifications consisted of patience, stubbornness and memories of watching very silly films after training.

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One of those memories caught. In an old ghost film, a priest had painted a paper charm with red ink before slapping it on a corpse that refused to stay dead. The scene hadn’t struck me as an educational resource at the time, but the picture was clear: paper, ink, a written instruction.

I didn’t need to believe the film. I only needed to find out whether writing a spell on Runebark could help give the stored magic a shape. With that extremely thin justification, I went downstairs for a calligraphy brush and ordinary ink.

Emma intercepted me on the way back. She looked from the jar to the brush, then towards my bedroom, where the open notebooks were visible through the door. ‘That had better be for drawing. What are you planning?’

‘An experiment with Dad’s paper,’ I said. ‘A small one. I’ve found the words for a charm that makes things float.’

‘And can you do this charm?’ she asked. She followed me into the room before I could decide how much confidence the answer required.

‘That’s one of the things I’m hoping to establish.’ I cleared a place on the desk, away from the notebooks, and laid out a single slip. Emma stayed beside me, which ought to have reminded me that hope was doing quite a lot of work in my explanation.

The Levitation Charm seemed a sensible choice. Making something float had to be less hazardous than trying a spell intended to hurt people, and Ken had written the incantation clearly enough for even me to read it. I dipped the brush and copied Wingardium Leviosa down the centre of the paper.

The ink vanished before I had properly lifted the bristles. A cold pull ran up my arm and opened beneath my ribs, taking my strength with it. I dropped the brush, reached for the desk and missed as my knees gave way.

‘Oswald!’ Emma caught my shoulder and lowered me the rest of the way. By then the edges of the room were disappearing behind black spots, and answering her seemed less urgent than remembering how to breathe.

The pull stopped. I was on the floor with my back against the bed, hearing Emma say my name again, closer this time. My legs felt hollow, as if somebody had removed all the useful parts and left the skin to keep up appearances.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she said. Her hand stayed on my shoulder when I tried to sit forward. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘I don’t think so. It took something out of me.’ I could see the slip on the edge of the desk, the writing gone. ‘The paper. Can you pass it down?’

‘You nearly fainted, and you’re asking for the paper?’ Emma reached for it anyway, perhaps because I was already trying to get up. ‘If you can’t stand in a minute, I’m calling a doctor.’

‘I’m not sure a Muggle doctor has a box to tick for magical stationery,’ I said. It would have been a better joke if my voice hadn’t sounded so weak. I took the slip from her and rested it across my palm.

It felt warm. There was something else, a pressure that hadn’t been there when I sorted the stack, although I couldn’t have explained what I was sensing. The words had disappeared, but the paper hadn’t returned to being an ordinary uncharged sheet.

‘Something stayed in it,’ I whispered. I looked up at Emma, suddenly grinning despite the floor incident. ‘I think I put magic in the paper.’

‘And I think that’s enough for today.’ She took the slip back before my excitement could improve into another attempt. ‘You’re not making any more of these. Tomorrow either, until we know you’re all right.’

I wanted to argue about tomorrow. Then I shifted my foot, discovered that my knee still had very little interest in supporting me and let the objection go. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘No more preparations.’

It took nearly half an hour before I could walk without the floor seeming to tilt. Once the first excitement wore off, the experience frightened me more than I wanted to admit. I remembered exhausting myself in training, but this had happened in seconds, without warning. I couldn’t measure what the paper had taken or know whether doing it again would merely knock me down.

I left the brush alone. By evening I felt steady, and the prepared slip still seemed different from the unused ones. Whatever I had stored had lasted for hours; finding out what it did would not require charging another sheet. Emma listened to that distinction with an expression that suggested a future career in law would disappoint her, then insisted on supervising.

I chose the garden. The lawn gave me distance, and the stone wall beyond it offered a better prospect than the sitting-room windows if my aim went wrong. A banana stood on an overturned flowerpot about ten metres away. Emma waited behind me while I checked that the route to it was clear.

‘Why a banana?’ she asked. ‘And please remember that I bought those for eating.’

‘If it floats, you can still eat it.’ I held up the prepared slip, keeping its edge pointed down the garden. ‘It might even save you reaching for the fruit bowl.’

That was the intended result, at least. I pictured the banana rising gently, settled the paper between my fingers and threw. It flew straight and struck the flowerpot beside the fruit.

A white flash swallowed the banana. The bang made me duck, and something soft hit my sleeve while the wall acquired a large yellow decoration. When I looked back, Emma hadn’t moved. She was examining the aftermath with the expression of a woman mentally extending a ban.

‘That was not levitation,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ll be eating it, either.’

I had to agree with both points. The banana had moved, but asking it to return to the fruit bowl now would require a brush and bucket. My pulse was still racing as I crossed the lawn, partly from the bang and partly because the spell had been a failure in such an extraordinary way.

I had prepared the paper hours earlier. It had held something until the strike, then released enough magic to do that. I couldn’t call it a Levitation Charm, or even claim I understood what I had made, but there was banana on the wall which had previously been elsewhere because of me.

The spent slip lay beside the flowerpot, blackened and split through the fibres. I picked it up by an intact corner. Whatever the treatment had allowed it to hold, the release had ruined the paper; that piece of Dad’s work was gone for good. I would keep the remains with my notes, where they might at least explain something later.

Even so, I couldn’t stop smiling. For nearly two years I had been discovering impossible things that had happened to me: another childhood, another family, a world with magic in it. This was the first one I had managed to make happen myself.

‘Emma, if we—’

‘No,’ she said. She pointed at the wall before I could finish. ‘You can start by putting the garden back into a state where I don’t have to explain it to the neighbours.’

I tucked the ruined slip into my pocket and went to fetch a bucket. There would be no more tests tonight, and repeating the same method would only risk another collapse. While I scrubbed banana off the stone, I kept returning to the red ink in that remembered film. Tomorrow, when I was allowed near the notebooks, I would see whether Dad had left anything about that.