Unwritten Magic

The owl came at breakfast, which was inconvenient, because I was in the middle of an argument with Ron about whether the Chudley Cannons' new Keeper was worth the transfer fee, and I had just reached the part where I was winning.

"I'm not saying he's *bad*," Ron said, jabbing his fork at me across the toast. "I'm saying he's not forty thousand Galleons good. Nobody's forty thousand Galleons good."

"His save percentage last season was the highest in the league."

"Against rubbish teams."

"Against *everyone*. I looked it up."

Ron groaned and dropped his forehead to the table. Harry, who had been eating his eggs in the peaceful silence of a man who had learned years ago not to intervene in these debates, looked up when the barn owl landed in the butter dish. It stuck out its leg with the air of a creature that had been flying since dawn and expected gratitude.

"That's a Ministry bird," Harry said.

I knew. I'd seen enough of them in the past two years, ever since I'd taken the job in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. The brown tag on its leg, the official seal on the envelope. I untied the letter, and the owl helped itself to Ron's sausage, and Ron didn't even complain, because he was watching my face.

The letter was short. That's how you know it's bad. The short ones never waste words on pleasantries.

*Ms. Granger, your presence is requested at the Ministry at your earliest convenience. Ask for the Department of Mysteries. Come alone.*

I read it twice. The second time, I noticed that it wasn't signed.

"Everything all right?" Harry asked.

"Fine," I said, and folded the letter into my pocket, and finished my tea.

---

The thing about the Department of Mysteries is that it doesn't exist. Not officially. You can't find it on any directory in the Atrium, and if you ask a security wizard where it is, he'll tell you he's never heard of it, and he'll mean it. I'd been working in the Ministry for two years and I'd walked past the unmarked door on Level Nine exactly once, and I'd felt it watching me the way a sleeping animal watches you, and I'd kept walking.

Now I stood in front of it with my hand raised to knock, and before my knuckles touched the wood, the door opened.

A woman I didn't recognize stood in the doorway. She was old in the way that trees are old, weathered down to something hard and essential, and she looked at me with the flat patience of someone who had stopped being impressed by anything a long time ago.

"Ms. Granger. You're early."

"You said at my earliest convenience."

"I did." She stepped aside. "That's not the same as early."

I followed her down a corridor that shouldn't have existed. I know the Ministry's floor plan. I'd memorized it my first week, the way I memorize everything, because I've never trusted a building I couldn't draw from memory. But this corridor went on longer than the building was wide. The walls were smooth gray stone, no portraits, no torches. The light came from nowhere and cast no shadows, which I noticed because I have a habit of noticing the things that shouldn't be possible, and I've learned that the things that shouldn't be possible are usually the things that matter most.

"Where are we going?"

"To see something."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

We stopped at a door. It was plain, iron-banded, the kind of door you'd find on a cellar. The woman put her hand flat against it and closed her eyes, and I felt the magic move through her the way you feel a train pass underground, a low rumble in the bones.

"You'll want to prepare yourself," she said.

"For what?"

"For the fact that you're going to want to fix it. And you can't."

She opened the door.

---

The room was round and dark and cold, and in the center of it, on a stone table, lay a body.

I knew it was a body before I knew anything else. The stillness of it. The particular way a thing lies when it has stopped being a person and become an object. I made myself walk closer, because I've never been able to look away from the hard things, and I've always thought that was a virtue, though I'm no longer sure.

It was a girl. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Black hair fanned out on the stone, and her face was turned slightly to the side, as if she'd fallen asleep mid-sentence. Her robes were Hogwarts robes. Gryffindor colors. And on her left hand, curled loosely against her chest, was a ring I knew.

I knew that ring because I had given it to her.

Not the same one, obviously. The one I'd given her was in a box in my flat, a silver ring with a small moonstone, a birthday present three years ago. But it was the same ring. The same exact ring, down to the tiny scratch on the band where she'd caught it on a cauldron in her fourth year.

"That's impossible," I said.

"Yes," the woman said.

"That's my ring. That's my ring on a girl I've never met."

"Yes."

"Who is she?"

"We don't know. She appeared here three days ago. No records. No family. No one in the castle remembers her, and the castle remembers everyone." The woman paused. "The ring is the only thing that's real. And the ring, as you say, is yours."

I looked at the girl's face again. The shape of her jaw. The way her eyebrows angled up at the inner corners, like she was asking a question even in death. I thought of a thousand things I could say, and none of them were useful, and I am a person who is only comfortable when I am being useful.

"Have you tested the ring?"

"Extensively."

"And?"

"And it's yours. It was made for you. It has your magical signature, your name in the maker's mark, and a residue of a spell that was cast on it six days ago, in this building, by someone we can't identify."

"Six days ago I was in Wales, arguing with a goblin about cauldron-bottom tariffs."

"I know. We checked."

I sat down on the cold stone floor, because my legs had stopped being reliable, and I looked at the dead girl wearing my ring, and I did the thing I always do when the world stops making sense. I started making a list.

One: the ring exists. Two: it was made for me. Three: someone cast a spell on it in this building six days ago. Four: the girl wearing it is dead and no one knows her. Five: I am standing in a room that shouldn't exist, being asked to fix something I can't fix, by a woman who won't tell me her name.

Six: I am going to fix it anyway.

"Who else knows about this?" I asked.

"You. Me. Two others in this department."

"Not the Minister?"

"The Minister is not to be told."

"Why?"

The woman looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, "Because six days ago, someone in this building cast a spell that shouldn't exist, using your name, and the last time a spell like this was cast, it killed forty-three people. And whoever cast it is still here."