PAPER CONFINES.
04. / Magpie Impulse

✶

There was a clock somewhere.

"Out of my way... you can't seriously think... Amoret Banks... Head Girl!"

It ticked and sounded like the first beat in her father's tapping feet, his shanties, his songs from the sea. Tales of caught fish and sailors, siren songs and fair ladies who waited at the shore. Songs for all the places she'd never get to see.

"Belahue... petrified before..."

Young Amoret tapped her feet on the kitchen table and sang. The window was open and night sighed through the curtains, warm bread cooking in the oven, candles flickering on the mantelpiece. This was home. Mum was laughing about something rude the Van Deusen's had said about their front garden. She said if you were going to be nasty you might as well be creative. Her hair had started to streak with grey, and she didn't know yet that she was dying, and she had almost no wrinkles between her brow; only crow's feet and creases in her smile.

"And I'm telling... you know her... no, I'm not drunk!"

Back then she was Bitsy. Not Banks. Rarely Etta. She had skinny little legs, just like her sisters before they grew into them too.

"Just needs time... sort herself..."

Light peered in the mirage. There were figures encircling her.

Let me stay, Amoret pleaded, let me go home.

"Look!... she's—Banks?... son of a..."

Her father's hand cupped her cheek. He was alive then. She swore it. But the light drank any image of him away.

"Banks!"

Nadya's eyes were basins of undercurrent when Amoret woke; pockets of living moonrise.

Amoret couldn't manage more than a grunt before Nadya was pushed away by a prodding hand. She didn't look to care much that it was Headmaster Dippet's hand, or that standing behind him—

"...Minister?"

Minister of Magic, Sir Leonard Spencer-Moon, stood in a grey, silken robe, wearing rectangular spectacles down the bridge of his nose and a long black overcoat. Amoret blinked dubiously at the sight of him. He smiled like there was a canker-sore pressing inside his cheek.

"Amoret Banks." Her name sounded regal in the inflection of his voice.

Amoret wanted to say all of the things she'd planned to say to any single Minister of Magic, but she'd never felt so far from the words. Everything was spinning and her head was pounding. The Minister—why would the Minister be here?

But there were plenty more where he'd come from. Colette stood taller than most in the throng of professors and investigators standing beside him, probably still in her heels, worrying on fingernails that were red with the fixation of her teeth.

Red. The colour of drowning teeth and a broken skull and a liquid halo. Amoret remembered it like a terrible dream. She'd fainted. Hard on the stone floor. No wonder her head hurt; if she had it in her to reach for it she wondered if she'd be stitched and wrapped in gauze or if the fall hadn't been so bad. It felt bad, but that could have been a million other things.

"Minister," she said again. It was all she could manage.

The sky was light outside the hospital wing despite the roiling clouds; the same light that had peered into her unconsciousness and pulled her here, surely. She resented it.

Nadya whirled around the other side of Amoret's bed despite Dippet and the Minister watching warily. Dumbledore was here too. Dumbledore and Colette and Professor Slughorn and an array of old pale men with their heads down in scrolls of parchment, waiting, and—

Tom.

Tom Riddle was sitting on the footboard of the bed across from her with his arms crossed, looking uncharacteristically small. His feet tapped in a subtle ding against the brass bars. Nervous. She'd never seen him so nervous. But he was looking at her with a wrinkle in his brow and a dullness to his face that didn't suit someone so clean-cut. His tie was loose, his hair disheveled, his clothes slumped. That green head boy badge had no shine in the grey light. But he was looking. His eyes were on hers alone.

Nadya hurried beside her on the bed, brushing the curls from her eyes. "You okay?"

Amoret nodded faintly.

"Miss Banks," the Minister started again, "I must begin with my sincerest apologies for what you bore witness to last night. As your Minister, such crimes fall, in part, on my shoulders."

"Mr Riddle has already been questioned by Mr Prewett, and our aurors will interview him shortly. We had hoped, of course, that a more private audience might be found here—but we suspected you would be soothed to see some friendly faces upon waking." He smiled, less sorely this time. "The questioning is far from an abrasive process, Miss Banks. Sensitivity is a constituent of the Ministry's due process. We'll give you a moment alone before Mr Prewett returns."

Her skull felt like it was pounding. "Why did you question Tom?"

The Minister frowned. "Well, Miss Banks, I... suppose it's only natural you don't remember. Mr Riddle was the only other witness."

Amoret frowned. "But I was..." Alone. Completely alone. Would she be in trouble for saying it aloud? Would he?

Headmaster Dippet cleared his throat. "Tom is the one who found you, dear. On the floor, just next to—well, you were unconscious when he arrived."

She looked at Tom. His answering gaze was sympathetic, but still wrought with an anxiety that made her turn away.

"Oh."

"We're deeply sorry, Amoret," Dippet said.

"Bloody likely," Nadya grumbled under her breath.

The Minister clapped his hands together. "How about a moment for Miss Banks and her friends, hm? Everyone out."

The surrounding congregation of Ministry detectives and Prophet vultures dispersed with a slowness that assured Amoret they wanted nothing more than to devour her strained memory for all that it was worth.

Nadya glared at Tom. "You can walk, can't you?"

Amoret didn't have it in her to protest. She winced to a sitting position and Colette rushed to her bedside to prop up her pillow. Nadya's hand was clasped over Amoret's with overprotective tightness. Tom glanced between the three of them and left.

Nadya's smothered Amoret with a hug the moment he was gone. "Oh, Banks, you have no idea—Slughorn found me on the couch at half-past-five looking like he was going to cry. Kept blabbering on about a girl on the seventh floor, and then he said your name and I thought—God, I was barely sober. I thought—"

"It's okay. I'm fine, I'm sorry."

"You're sorry? I'm fucking—I'm sorry."

"It's fine, Nadya." Amoret coughed, itching the bandage wrapped around her head. "Who else knows what happened? What actually happened?"

"That's sort of what everyone's here to figure it out. Rumours about the Chamber of Secrets have been going for ages, but the way Ruby died doesn't line up with the petrifications. That's what's got the Ministry so fussed." And then she whispered, like they might have had charms magnifying the sound in the room, "I've been watching them, Banks. I think what happened tonight makes them think there's more than one person behind all of this."

Colette cleared her throat. "Nadya... she, ehm, asked Tom some questions earlier. Or, we both did, really."

Amoret whipped her head back to Nadya. "You asked Tom questions?"

"Banks, I'm sorry, but I get told a girl's been killed, you're unconscious, and by some miraculous coincidence, Tom Riddle is ready at the scene to save the day. I was kind, all things considered. I really did just ask him questions."

"With your wand out."

"Colette—"

Amoret squeezed Nadya's hand. "What did he say?"

"Not much. He said he was clearing out the RRI meeting from the Room of Requirement and he was on his way to leave when he heard someone... fall."

Amoret's eyes shifted to his empty hospital bed. "Right."

"Banks," Colette murmured with a hand on her shoulder, "Whatever you need, we are here."

The doors opened and the Minister strode in like he had never left. His dark, reddish hair billowed with his robes and that political smile gleamed over an undeniably wary face.

"Thank you, Miss Sidhu, Miss Chapdelaine. You will be allowed to visit Miss Banks shortly, as the healers have informed me her head injury is minor, but for now—" He stepped forward and Nadya gripped Amoret's hand like she was worried to let go.

"I'd like you to speak with some aurors now, if that's all right, Miss Banks."

The aurors peered up from their scrolls, quills at the ready. They looked at her like a puzzle to be solved. A few stood behind them with their arms crossed, hardened expressions like fortress walls. They looked at her like an impending threat.

Something felt suddenly tight in Amoret's lungs. She wasn't a witness. She was a suspect.

"I... Yes. Of course."

The Minister smiled again. Amoret imagined his teeth swimming in a puddle on the floor.

Dippet stepped in through the wreath of men, a head shorter than the lot of them. "Professor Slughorn, would you kindly escort Miss Sidhu back to her house? And Colette, of course. This is now a private matter."

The Minister patted Dippet's shoulder as if the two were old friends, and Dippet did not look like he felt the same. "I should ask the same of you, Armando. A little space for our aurors, if you don't mind?"

"I—Certainly, Minister. Yes."

"You have my gratitude. Well then, residents of Hogwarts, students and professors alike, if you could kindly return to your duties."

Nadya went to protest but Amoret closed a trembling hand around her wrist to steady the both of them. The sinews of Nadya's skin clenched and softened like moving gears.

"Don't," Amoret said.

"But—"

"I'll find you when it's over. Don't get involved."

Nadya looked unconvinced. She looked scared.

"Please, Nadya."

Nadya shook her head resignedly. "Fine. But I'll be right outside until these fossils leave you alone."

Amoret almost mustered a smile. "Go on."

Nadya ran a thumb over Amoret's palm as she got up, swallowed in the crowd of robed men and a towering Colette, before she disappeared too. The aurors blanketed her line of vision.

The Minister pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. Amoret didn't think she'd be able to cry if she wanted to.

"Ready when you are," he said.

Amoret glanced around. The light was still heavy through the blinds, and a clock ticked, and her father was waiting somewhere, watching.

"Ready."

━━━━━

The kernel click and release of a camera shuttered.

Four petrified, one dead. The first was only a week into the school year: a second year boy found in the courtyard one morning, wet grass licking his ankles.

Colette brushed over the wrinkles in Amoret's sweater.

The second was on September 20th: a fourth year girl, hand frozen in an approaching knock outside Professor Merrythought's classroom.

Amoret looked at herself in the mirror, her skin the muted brown it had been before magic made her whole, her eyes glassy, dull, ringed with violet fatigue.

The third: Ruby Belahue, dead in blood and teeth, spilling brain matter on the stone, collecting rove beetles and flesh flies.

Amoret felt the thick, cold blanket that swallowed her grief each time it tried to rise. Whatever her mind was trying to do to protect itself, she didn't think it was working.

The fourth came only a few days later, when Emeric Prott was found petrified in the dungeons after being kept overnight for a drunken misdemeanour. On a Wednesday, no less. His palms were glued by frost to his knees where he'd rocked himself to sleep in the cold, eyes wide open, peering into a sheet of ice on the floor. Breath left his mouth in stiff bursts of air, lungs brittle but fighting still. He was lucky to be alive. The caretaker, Mrs Thompson, was fired and charged with child neglect by the Ministry that evening.

Appearances were important. Amoret just couldn't seem to get this one right.

Mum had written—or Sybil had for her—two letters from home. They were the first Amoret had received since she left for the school year. Her question of who had written them was answered by the handwriting, which read in spotty iron gall, as if the quill had just barely traced the parchment.

My Etta, her mother wrote,

I'm sorry I haven't been writing, my love. Keeping the house together has been a great deal harder with you and Reid gone, but there is no excuse for my absence in your life.

I'm horrified to hear the news of Ruby Belahue's death. Etta, I'm so terribly sorry... words cannot encapsulate it. My love, should you wish to pack your things this very minute and come home, I will effectuate it. I will have you warm in bed with a plate of food before the week's end. You needn't explain. I'll wait for your letter at the door. Know there is nothing I wouldn't do to keep you safe, and I would not be angry at you for what you choose. Admittedly, I wish with all my heart to see you again, and selfishly I pray for it against my better judgment. It pains me to think of you handling this alone.

If it should brighten your days at all, the sun still shines in Lower Slaughter. It hasn't snowed yet, and the soil is strong. When I can manage, I weed the clovers in the yard and tend to Bibi's greenhouse. The cattle are healthy. There's a second car in the village for the preacher. Mrs Ford had her first boy in September and named him Oliver, and she's doing exceedingly well caring for him after Francis' passing. Sybil has started to paint. Children play on the banks of the River Eye. What I mean to remind you is that there is still good here, and there is still good waiting for you. Don't forget it.

I know this October has been no less cruel to you than your last. I was there for you as we grieved your father and your Bibi, and you for me. If companionship, care, refuge, and love are what you need, I have them to offer. I have too much to keep here without you. I love you, Etta. I'll wait. Come home.

Yours, Mum

The second letter—handed to her at six-thirty breakfast yesterday morning—Amoret hadn't yet dared to open. If it was anything like the first, she didn't think she could manage reading it without tearing the hand-sewn stitches in that gaping wound of her heart. She was certain she'd crumble, go running home across the mountains on bare feet if she had to. She wanted to break properly. As if her mother wasn't the one dying, and Amoret wasn't the one who had seen it a thousand times before.

No, she wasn't all right, but it felt unfair to be so torn as the witness and not the victim.

"Well, Miss Banks, I'd say we're just about done here." Elisabeth Hopkirk blew a ring of smoke from her pipe and sat on the edge of Circe's empty bed, encircled with precautionary tape for reasons unknown to Amoret.

Hopkirk was wearing a thick wool suit and a white collared blouse that looked like it was choking her. She rapped the end of her quill on her scotch mint teeth, watching Amoret with twinkling, leonine eyes. Amoret wondered if she'd been a Gryffindor. Her gaze was ravening. Like she could and wanted to leap at any moment, protract fangs and sink them into the nearest body of flesh. The image of hot, spilled blood was startlingly easy for Amoret to picture.

She focused back on Hopkirk. Her aging hands gleamed with diamond-encrusted rings, not so many as Nadya wore, and not nearly as bulky, but enough to declare plenitude the moment her fingers touched the light. She unbuttoned the highest link of her suit jacket and reclined against the bedpost. Then another puff of her pipe. Another chime of the camera.

"Knight," she said to the photographer, voice dark and raspy, "you've got your piece of the article, haven't you?"

Knight, a strangely long man—tall didn't feel quite like the right word—he looked like he'd been stretched and slimmed like a soft dough—glanced up and opened his mouth, but Hopkirk's lioness eyes found him and he seemed to think better of it.

Elisabeth Hopkirk was a renowned investigative journalist, top of her pay grade at the Daily Prophet, but she beat Knight by means of status alone. She'd been the catalyst to solving infamous cases of theft, murder, and treason across eight of the eleven great wizarding schools. Her name was commonplace among any magical family who'd checked the news in the last decade. Fame, eminence, prestige: those were only additions to her already impressive resume. Hopkirk was nasty, but no one could deny she was good at her job.

So Knight corrected himself, tucking his camera back into his bag and sulking across the room to the dormitory exit.

"Now then." She glanced at Colette as the door creaked shut. "Just the... three of us, hm?"

Amoret looked up at Colette from her stool at the vanity. She was leaning awkwardly against the wall, drawing circles on the floor with the scuffed end of her cane.

Hopkirk smiled. "Not an issue, of course, Miss Chapdelaine. I've been waiting for a chance to speak with you since I heard about your affairs in France."

Colette looked so affronted by the mention that it took her a moment to answer. "It is a matter of the past. My family does not take interviews."

"Such a pity... I'd have loved to make that hardship even the slightest bit easier for you," Hopkirk said with a pitiful look. "But that's for another time, dear. I'm sure your support today is much appreciated by Miss Banks."

Colette would have probably burned holes in Hopkirk's suit if she could have.

"Now," Hopkirk turned to Amoret, "a few more questions, shall we?"

Amoret nodded, ready to be done with her week of interrogation.

"You mentioned you grew up in the Cotswolds District," Hopkirk glanced up from a leather-bound notepad, her quill at the ready.

Amoret's gaze wandered, daring another glance in the mirror. She was grateful Knight had only come to capture the details of her bedchamber. If it was evidence they were looking for, it wasn't tucked in her wardrobe or her pillowcases or the jewelry box on her nightstand. It was written all over her face, guilty or not. She hadn't slept all week and her clothes weren't ironed and the room felt cold and muggy after being closed off since the night of Ruby's death.

"Yes," she answered quietly.

"Lower Slaughter, to be exact?"

"Yes."

"Quaint little town, as I've heard it." Hopkirk wrote something down and Amoret stiffened. Had she said something noteworthy already? "Most purebloods own their own estates. Why is it your family settled there?"

"I—" Amoret understood the implication well enough. She rubbed over her sleeve to hide a growing tear. "It's a long story."

"We have time enough, dear."

"I'm very grateful for what I have, Mrs Hopkirk. My mother raised me not to dwell on what I don't."

"Hm," Hopkirk frowned. "Your sister, Reid, she works for the Ministry, does she not?"

Amoret didn't see what any of this had to do with Ruby Belahue's death. "Yes, she does. Um, foreign affairs—defense—in Russia. Mostly she works at Koldovstoretz."

"And do you ever feel resentful of her?"

That didn't seem like a relevant question. "Reid is my sister. I don't..."

"Oh, dear, I'm not trying to drive a wedge between you two!" Hopkirk laughed, coughing up smoke. "It's important I understand you, Miss Banks. Your feelings, your motivations, your history. I'm no auror; this is an interview beyond the events of last Saturday. Nothing like the one you had with Mr Prewett and his assembly, as I'm sure you can tell."

As if Amoret could forget. Her wrists itched under the cuffs of her wool sweater, knitted by her grandmother for Reid years ago.

"I've never thought of her that way," she said, only to dismiss the question from the place it waited between them. Liar.

"Well, I'm sincerely glad to hear it. I wish I could say the same for my sister and I; envious little thing, she is. Though she is only twelve, so I suppose it isn't quite the same." Hopkirk paused. "Anywho, I'm going to read some notes from your file, if you don't mind, and I want you to share with me whatever you're able."

Colette placed a hand on Amoret's shoulder and rubbed softly, but instead of feeling soothed, Amoret only tensed more. She didn't want to be placated. She didn't want to be here at all.

But she nodded, biting her cheek and holding her tongue.

"You're the third child of three sisters, both of which have graduated Hogwarts in the last five years... your mother was especially gifted in Herbology... her mother—" Hopkirk made a face like she'd been waiting for this— "Tumaini Salahe. Well, Miss Banks, how glad we at the Prophet are to see that name again. She was quite the accomplished witch."

"Um, yes, she was."

"No need to be taciturn, darling, they're large shoes to fill, no doubt about that."

Amoret stared blankly. "I'm not afraid of living up to any legacy, Mrs Hopkirk."

"Of course not." Hopkirk lent her a tight smile and returned to her files. "Ah, your father left school at sixteen, correct? A Scotsman... born and raised in... Glasgow? Golspie?"

"Greenock. And he was—"

"Suffering a drinking problem?"

Colette stood impossibly taller, opening her mouth in protest.

Hopkirk continued to read. "He spent much of his life after Hogwarts around privateers, gamblers, and drunkards. Off to go... sailing. Such a muggle calling for a pureblooded man. I can't help but wonder, Miss Banks, and forgive me for the intrusion, if you remember at all: is that where your grandmother's finances went?"

Of course Amoret remembered. Her father spent more time on the water than he did at home, and when he returned he stumbled around on teetering legs, adjusted to the sway of the sea and the mead in his cup. But Amoret never thought of his pastimes as anything more than a dream she one day wanted a part of. The places she could go—Iceland, Spain, Tanganyika—so long as she remembered her sailor's knots and merrow tales and all the other tricks he'd taught her.

Amoret loved that part of him. In death, still, she loved him. So she would not think of him as a privateer or a gambler or a drunk. Not even now.

She searched for an answer, but Hopkirk's dull teeth were tucked away, and the fangs were out in their place.

"It's odd for a family of such success to marry into poverty; blood purity or not," she said. "It must have been true love, then. I'm not too heartless to admire that. A poor choice in husband on your mother's part, but it isn't really a choice when it happens, is it?"

"I beg your pardon but—"

"Oh, I don't mean to be crude, Miss Banks. I so feel sorry for any child suffering under such circumstances. But it all makes sense now, you see? It isn't only Ruby Belahue who haunts you. You're ashamed, and shame is a sticky, relentless thing."

"Ashamed?"

"Of such a dreadful upbringing." Despite Hopkirk's expression, her voice oozed false sympathy.

"I—"

"A father like that..."

Colette gripped Amoret's shoulder.

"I understand why your mother kept her husband's name. What, after liberating the name of her mother only to stain it again—"

Amoret couldn't help it. The words tumbled out and wouldn't stop. "I'm not hiding my family! I'm not hiding anything! I found Ruby, alone; she was dead before I'd even got there. I was looking for the Room of Requirement. I had no part in what happened to her and I had no part in what happened to my father, so if everyone could stop looking at me like I've gone mad maybe I could go back to pretending my life's been anything less than hell for the last two years!"

Hopkirk leaned in, palming her chin with an elbow to her knee. "Thank you, Miss Banks."

Whatever she was looking for, she'd found it, gifted by Amoret's own hands, wrapped in fine paper and tied with a bow.

Amoret tore her gaze away. Her eyes were hot with oncoming tears. Colette shuffled before her, a great pink shield. In her blurring vision, Amoret found herself staring at a tear in Colette's favourite pea coat, wondering when she'd ever seen her looking less than perfect. Her ears felt full of cotton as the world dulled. She was deflated. And most of all, she was wrong. Grief hadn't blanketed her—she was an empty warren grief had burrowed itself in.

"This has been most enlightening,," Hopkirk said, taking a final breath of her pipe. She packed her things quickly, buttoning her loose suit jacket closed again. "I do wish you all the best."

Amoret was silent, reeling. In the back of her mind she heard Reid's scolding voice meld with her own. Stupid—how could she be so stupid?

Hopkirk's heels clapped as she walked to the door. "Oh, and Colette," she said, turning back, "do feel free to write me if you'd ever like to answer the questions your friends in France have been wondering for so long. I can assure you, I'd drop whatever case I had to hear the end of that tantalizing story."

Colette didn't meet her eyes, but her fist was white-knuckled around the quartz end of her cane. "Tu veux q'je t'écrive, Madame?"

Hopkirk, for the first time since she'd entered Amoret's dormitory, looked surprised. "Bien sûr, Colette."

"Et je vous conseille de n'attendre pas pour une lettre, sauf si vous voulez être maudit en l'ouvrant."

Maudit... something about a curse. Amoret was barely scrambling the foreign words together, but by the look that crossed Hopkirk, Colette had not been kind.

"Au revoir, Madame."

Hopkirk took Amoret's arm as she left and leaned in. "Best of luck with this investigation, Miss Banks. You're going to need it."

Translations:

"You want me to write to you, Madam?"

"Of course, Colette.

"And I advise you not to wait for a letter, unless you'd like to be cursed upon opening it."

"Goodbye, Madam."

[ . . . ] lazily written rita skeeter's 1940's incarnation + me not knowing how to conjugate french even though i was in french immersion for twelve years. / word count. 4446

© Crierayla ✶ 2020