Sherlock is there, unpacking some books out of his bag.

"Hi, Sherlock! How was the rest of your summer?"

"Largely unremarkable. And the same with you?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Did you get your schedule, do we have anything together this year?" She digs hers out and hands it over for inspection: Charms, Herbology, Potions, Magical Defense, lunch, Social Studies, Transfiguration, Magic Theory. (Brooms as a class is for sixth graders; flying will be on their own time, or as part of an organized sport or the JROC drills.)

"You'll have to tell me if Divination is any good. It doesn't sound terribly teachable but maybe I'm wrong."

"I intend to find out."

"Maybe I'll take it next year if it's cool and I don't love Herbology. Or maybe I'll take magizoology, that was my second choice for this year."

"What put Herbology in the lead? Its applicability to Potions?"

"Yeah. Magizoology is applicable too, I'll take it eventually, but it would mostly be - conversationally helpful, not academically, you know? I could stop asking people things like 'wait, are nundus really that big or are you exaggerating for effect'."

"And what was the quoted size of the nundu in question?"

"Quote, 'the size of Lake Erie', end quote."

"Exaggerated. But by less than if it had been, for example, any of the more common species of dragon."

"Yeah. Dragons are cool. Magizoology would probably be more fun. I just think Herbology with the Potions applicability will be more useful, so that's a reason to do it earlier."

He nods.

"Come on, let's go to the welcome feast." And off she skips.

He follows.

Tony is at the welcome feast too! And she is already sitting with Feral, which means they have plenty of space.

That is depressingly convenient! Down sits Bella. "Hi, Tony, hi, Feral! How're you?"

"I am awesome," says Tony.

"Me too," says Feral. "The elves let me help with the feast."

"Cool, which stuff did you cook?"

"Desserts!" he beams. "Cupcakes and brownies. They're really good."

"I will save room for dessert, then."

"Good plan," says Feral.

"But the rest of it is good too," says Tony. "Man, decisions are hard."

"I bet if you go to the kitchens later and say 'those tea-infused pork medallions looked scrumptious but I didn't have room for any', the elves will make you some."

"Ooh."

"They totally will," says Feral. "I better go with you, though, or they'll be sending you back to your room with a cart. They get kind of enthusiastic."

"It's a deal," giggles Tony.

"Do they have carts?" laughs Bella.

"Yup," says Feral. "For moving stuff around, not specifically food."

"I guess that makes sense, they're pretty little and they have to make a lot of food, an elf would probably have trouble with a fifty pound sack of flour."

"Yeah - they can lift it no trouble, but only with magic, and it gets pretty hectic if everybody's levitating ten things at once. Carts are easier," he explains.

"I bet," laughs Bella. "Oh, and you couldn't even levitate the flour, doesn't flour explode or something, not just plain burn, if it catches?"

"Yep," says Feral. "Kaboom. Under the right circumstances, anyway. But these days I can just pick them up, they're hard to lift but not tricky or anything."

Bella nods. "So none of the cupcakes will have previously exploded flour in them."

Feral giggles. "One hundred percent explosion-free!"

"Just how I like 'em," says Tony.

"It is undoubtedly the best way to have cupcakes."

"Because otherwise they might explode."

Feral snorts.

"And that wouldn't be at all fun. Feral, what does your schedule look like this year?"

"Dunno," he says. "Haven't looked."

"Well, you should look, we can find out if we have anything together this year. What elective did you pick, at least?"

"Herbology," he says. "What about you guys?"

"Divination."

"Arithmancy."

"I'm in Herbology too," says Bella. "I think it'll be useful for potions. I thought about magizoology though."

"Yeah, magizoology looked fun," he says. "But so did a lot of things, so I just picked one."

"I'm waiting for Sherlock to tell me whether Divination's any good. It looks cool if it can really be taught but the books I've seen are divided on that."

"I'm pretty sure it's mostly crap," says Feral. "But who knows."

"Not me. Yet."

"I guess you have a while to swap out if it's obvious crap from day one, what would you take instead if it was?"

"Quite possibly Herbology."

Bella giggles.

Sherlock smiles.

Feral is determined not to set anything on fire!

But will he succeed?

Yes. On the other hand, he Scourgifies a teapot so hard it rockets off his desk and slams into the wall in a blast of soapsuds. Luckily it is a metal teapot, and the teacher fixes the enormous dent with a flick of her wand and vanishes the excess soap with another. She doesn't even bother asking him what went wrong; this teacher has taught Feral before and knows that is not the worst thing that could have happened.

Avoiding worst-case scenarios is pretty good. Bella likes the cleaning spells they are starting the year with - certainly it is more fun than scrubbing things and tidier than stubbornly waiting while dust gently heaps itself on everything - but she would like them more if she were allowed to use them at home.

The remainder of class is uneventful. Afterward, Feral follows Bella to Herbology - held in a building where neither of them has had class before - and Sherlock and Tony head off to Potions in the same room where they had it last year.

...Feral looks suspiciously at Mr. Sutherland. He can't help thinking that there is an obvious reason for a teacher's ghost to be giving safety lectures.

"Did you die of a mandrake?" asks Feral.

"Cool," say Feral.

"How is that cool? I didn't think this class was going to be dangerous," Bella murmurs under her breath.

"It's cool to me," he murmurs back, grinning.

"I might switch," Bella whispers.

"Suit yourself," shrugs Feral.

"Why?" says Feral.

"To see if he is any good at being a person."

"...Huh?" says Feral.

"If ghosts are people, then dying isn't so bad, as long as you can be one - it's still inconvenient and if you can't be a ghost it's still really bad. But maybe ghosts are more like portraits, which don't seem to be people properly as far as I can tell - there's one in Tony and Sherlock's house but she only speaks French, she doesn't seem able to learn a language, people can pick up at least some of new languages if they're around them a lot."

"Oh," says Feral. "I don't think anybody's figured out how to make a ghost, though, so where's that leave you?"

"Still trying not to die," says Bella. "But maybe with different research interests."

"So are you going to drop Herbology?"

"Yeah, I mean, you've seen me walk, you think I can keep earmuffs on even if my life depends on it? I'll take magizoology. There aren't any interactions with live animals until the second year of it, it's not like Magical Animal Husbandry."

Feral laughs. "Okay. I'll tell you if we learn anything interesting."

"Thanks."

He shrugs. "No problem."

Next is Potions. Bella and Feral have this at the same time, but he's at grade level there since it requires no wandwork; they go to adjacent classrooms with separate classes. Bella learns to make "wizard coffee" of the sort that woke Sherlock up last year when he was dead on his feet (apparently its proper name is "Perking Potion"). She then proceeds to Magical Defense.

Everyone has Magical Defense together!

"How was Herbology?"

"I'm switching out. I didn't realize my life was going to depend on my nonexistent ability to reliably keep earmuffs on, or not spill substances up my sleeves, or trip facefirst into flesh-eating thorns," says Bella. "Magizoology it is."

"I knew about mandrakes; I didn't know about flesh-eating thorns," says Sherlock.

"We weren't technically going to be working with the flesh-eating thorn thing this year but it was awfully nearby. You've watched me, you know, walk."

"Yes I have. Have fun in magizoology."

He's just fine with being practiced on, however.

Bella collects his wand many times after she gets the hang of the spell.

Feral giggles the whole time. Also he has a habit of hugging his wand every time he gets it back.

"Why are you hugging your wand?"

"Because I missed it," he says, snuggling it some more.

"Expelliarmus," Bella snorts.

"Hey! I was hugging that!" exclaims Feral, chasing after his fleeing wand.

Bella catches it and hands it over, giggling.

Feral hugs it some more.

Bella steps back to appropriate distance, and swipes it once more.

Feral lunges after it again, and this time manages to catch it on its way to Bella.

"They probably will," says Feral, shrugging. "Not like I can do much about it."

"Have you noticed any patterns about when it happens and when it doesn't?" Bella asks, finding them a table.

"Kinda," he says. "It happens more when I'm distracted, and it happens a lot when I'm angry."

"So maybe when they say you'll grow out of it what they mean is you'll learn to concentrate and calm down?"

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm just weird," he says. "I'm already starting to get the sense that nobody expected me to still be doing it after two years."

"I've heard of kids having problems with spontaneous magic and spells backfiring and stuff," says Tony. "It's not that rare. But I don't think it usually works the way it's going with you."

"I wonder if Healer Song knows anything about it, have you asked him?" Bella inquires.

He shrugs. "Nah."

"It is not always obvious to me if you really want the fire thing to go away," muses Bella.

"...What do you mean?" says Feral, cocking his head quizzically.

"Well - you don't seem to like it, I bet if I could wave my wand and make it go away you'd let me, but you don't seem to spend much time trying to work on it. Maybe you do it when I'm not looking or something."

"Depends," he says. "I like being able to set things on fire. I don't like doing it when I don't want to. So if it's all part of the same thing, then I don't want it to go away. I'd lose just the lighting things up by accident part in a second, though."

"Any witch or wizard - why is there not a collective term for that? Besides 'magic folk' which is clumsy? - can set things on fire."

"'W'," he suggests whimsically. "No, I mean set things on fire like I set things on fire. Anybody can cast spells; most people can't do what I can do."

"You mean like what you accidentally-on-purpose did to that guy's sleeve last year?"

"Exactly," he says. "And when I cast a spell to light something on fire, and I really want to, it goes up like flashpaper. I'd miss that if I lost it."

"It did come in handy that one time," acknowledges Bella. "I wouldn't make the tradeoff, though."

He shrugs. "I am getting better at the accidental part."

"How fast?"

"Not that fast."

"Like, how many times per hundred spells do you set a thing on fire?"

"...I don't really keep count?" he says. "And it matters how hard I'm trying not to?"

"Yeah, but is it more like fifty or like five?"

Bella settles for this description. She nibbles her sandwich. (She found enough information about animal intelligence last year to be comfortable eating non-magical meat again; her sandwich is turkey.)

Feral munches lunch.

"...Seriously?" says Feral.

Tony pats him on the back. And goes and sits somewhere far away.

"This is a simple exercise, and a year behind your grade level," the teacher tells him. "There is sympathy between the firecracker and the firefly according to Corbetti's Third Principle. Carry on."

The teacher was near enough to get a faceful of smoke. She stares at Feral as though he's an intrusive snail in her garden, clearing away the smoke with a wave of her wand. "You are still having your pyrotechnic incontinence issue?" she says. "At this age? This is ridiculous. Go see Healer Song. Don't bother coming back to my class until he's cleared you."

Healer Song is in the infirmary, of course.

"Hmm," says Healer Song. "Can you tell me more about the problem? I know you have that nearby room with the fire detector, but since you've never actually put anyone in the infirmary with fire - as opposed to with your teeth -" he raises an appraising, but not instantly condemning, eyebrow - "I don't have a lot of detail."

"Yes, speaking of which, please tell me how that goes. How often? Is it more with particular spells or at particular times than others?"

"I dunno how often. Less than I used to," he says. "More when I'm distracted or in a hurry, a lot more when I'm pissed off. And that's casting spells - if I get upset enough, sometimes something goes up without me even touching my wand."

Feral gives him a slightly suspicious look. "I don't remember exactly. Sometime when I was little."

"When your wand isn't involved to pick out a target, what things tend to go up?"

"Just stuff. Whatever's nearby. Things I'm looking at or touching. Not people." He hesitates, then amends, "Not most people."

Healer Song waits invitingly.

Feral raises his eyebrows.

"Has someone caught on fire before?"

"Depends," says Feral. "What are you gonna do about it if they have?"

"Diagnose you," says Healer Song dryly.

Feral rolls his eyes.

"I'm obligated to inform if you are a danger to yourself or others. That's are, in the present tense."

"Then yeah," says Feral. "Somebody's caught on fire before. Way before - before I ever got here, before I knew anything about magic except 'stuff catches fire sometimes'."

"And I surmise you were upset at the time."

"Extremely," Feral agrees, with a not particularly nice little smile.

"Now - the puzzle pieces aren't aiming this way so far, but I have to ask - you were not upset at this person for anything along the lines of copying off you in class, throwing a hex in the corridors, or name-calling."

"Nope," says Feral.

"All right. What I think the other faculty have been assuming this is is just particularly neotenous, thematic accidental magic - that means it's the same thing as when children levitate their toys or turn their hair pink, only continuing longer than usual and themed around a specific thing - but I think it may be something else; am I right that if you deliberately cast a fire spell you get dramatic, intense results?"

"Sometimes," says Healer Song, gently, "if a wizard whose magic is still forming spends a lot of time in a state of panic, his magic will try to find an outlet to do something about that situation, early. But the reason magical education starts at ten or eleven is because magic used before that age isn't reliably controllable, and if too much of it is forced out, it leaves a sort of - wound, in the magical core. It's called a premature spillway."

"So... what?" says Feral. "Am I just gonna keep lighting things on fire?"

"Not necessarily, but controlling it will never be effortless, and if you let up on the effort even a little, it will mean you'll need to redo some of the work to assert control. This happened because fire was the only thing your immature magic could come up with to do. Continuing to use uncontrolled fire - the spells are fine and you'll always have the extra affinity; this is just the uncontrolled, especially wandless, kind - sort of tells your magic that it still needs to do this, that you are still in situations where the only thing is to react instantly by igniting something and there isn't other recourse."

"But I can figure out how to cast spells without burning anything I don't wanna burn," he says. "Can I stop lighting up the bed, too? Or would I have to give up wandless fire? Is it just wandless fire I don't mean to use that's the problem?"

"Any wandless fire, whether you mean it or not, runs the risk of keeping the wound open, and as the wound closes all of it should be easier to avoid, sleeping and waking alike - but - I haven't actually heard of other cases where there was much voluntary, deliberate use of the spillway to speak of; how much control do you have?"

"That's - uncommon. It's otherwise very much a textbook premature spillway, but there might be a complicating factor somewhere I'm not seeing," muses Song. "At any rate, I have no way to directly observe the spillway, so I can't definitively say if wandlessly setting things on fire deliberately will prop it open as much as accidental cases will, but my best guess is that you shouldn't use any wandless fire you can possibly avoid."

"Damn," snorts Feral. "So what do I have to do to get back into Transfiguration?"

"Well," snorts Healer Song. "How do you get along with your classmates and your teacher in that section? Considering the nature of the problem I can authorize some shuffling to put you with people who won't rub you the wrong way as badly, at least for this year while you start getting your spillway more firmly in hand."

"I don't have that much trouble with the teacher, but we were doing firecrackers to fireflies today and she didn't seem to get that that might be a bad idea for me, which did tick me off a little," he says. "Would somebody else be any better about that, though?"

"She expected you to have grown out of it; I can give you a signed note you can show to anyone who continues to expect that."

"That'll help," says Feral agreeably.

"And of course anything that would be a disaster to set alight shouldn't have your wand aimed at it. Have you checked how you stack up against fire suppression spells?"

"Nnnno," he says slowly. "Should I? And - I got to swap out bugs for mice last year, but someday I might need to cast a spell on a person I don't want to kill."

"Your spillway should close up as you go longer and longer without using accidental and/or wandless fire," Healer Song says. "And then it will be safer and safer to cast spells on people and nondisposable objects. But for the short term, while you're still working on it, maybe a fire suppressant will work. Are you capable of relatively gentle deliberate wanded fire - about the same strength as your accidents? We can test it here without making anything worse if so, I just don't think I have a good way to test an overpowered Incendiary Charm."

He shrugs. "Yeah, I think so."

"How much do you think so?" Healer Song asks, glancing around at various things he would rather not see go up in smoke.

"Well, maybe we shouldn't do it near any stuff you don't want on fire? But I don't actually think I'm going to light anything extra on fire. And I'm really, really fast with Extinguishers."

"Perhaps we should go outdoors and put a leaf on a boulder for you."

He laughs. "Sure."

And out they go, and Healer Song puts a leaf on a large rock, and casts a fire suppression on the leaf.

"All right. So that should help as long as the target in question is a relatively replaceable object and not, for instance, a human. You can ask your teachers to perform it for you; I'll put it in your note. I cannot imagine why no one did this before even if they thought it was neotenous accidental magic."

"Search me," snorts Feral. "People just don't think of stuff sometimes. Anyway, two years back I probably still wouldn't have gone near the mice."

"Yes, that's fair. But this should protect your next firecreacker or equivalent."

"Sure, okay," says Feral. "Thanks. You're less useless than I was expecting."

"My career ambition is to be less useless than anyone expects," remarks Healer Song, and he heads back into the infirmary to write the note.

Giggling, Feral follows him.

Write-write-write. The note explains the spillway (without reference to the suspected trauma-related cause) and what should be done about it. Healer Song signs the note and hands it to Feral. "Here you are, then." He coughs slightly. "You can always make an appointment if you would find it helpful to have me be surprisingly useful on any other matter."

"Well, as you like," shrugs Song. "Too late for today's Transfiguration, but you can probably make your next class if you go now."

During the middle afternoon period, Bella and Sherlock have transfiguration together. They are also doing the firecracker exercise.

Sherlock successfully transforms his firecracker into a firefly and back.

So does Bella! Her firefly is not very energetic and can't seem to turn its butt off, but it is totally a firefly, and then it is a firecracker again.

Firefly. Firecracker. Firefly. Firecracker. It's almost meditative.

Bella is not as quick as her friend, but she earns a good grade for the day anyway, and then they're off to Magical Theory, the last class of the day.

"Someone had Feral point his wand at a firecracker. Wow."

"And then she got mad and kicked him out of the class," says Tony.

"Of course she did, realizing that she'd made a mistake would just be silly. I wonder what's going to happen with him and his fire thing."

"Who knows? She sent him to the healer. Maybe it's, like, medical."

"Maybe. I hope the healer can fix it."

Tony shrugs. "The healer's pretty good."

"He's always nice when I go in with a split lip or a nasty bruise from tumbling down the stairs, but I've never gone to him about anything more serious except when I brought Sherlock about the sleeping. He seemed good then though."

"He was."

"Maybe he can help Feral. I wonder why nobody sent him there before if that's at all likely, though?"

"Perhaps they didn't know."

"I guess. There are a lot of things to know, and most people seem to miss some."

"It would be hard not to."

"I guess that's what specialization is for and it took a long time for anyone to notice that Healer Song's specialization might be useful."

Sherlock shrugs.

"Have fun," says Sherlock.

Sherlock answers the door.

Bella is sober-faced. "Hi."

"You did not have fun," Sherlock observes.

"Well, the library is as nice as always and the elves in it are too, but I don't think the ghost is a person really."

"How do you know?"

"I don't know for sure, but - I don't think so. I think he's like a - a really good record of a person that you can voice-operate. He doesn't know about things that have happened since he died - he could remember my name for the length of our conversation but he couldn't tell me the name of the current Herbology teacher. And if I waited quietly for five minutes after asking him a question and then repeated it the exact same way I got the exact same answer, and when I asked him if he'd give me the Herbology safety lecture he didn't even wonder why I wanted it or whether I hadn't heard it well enough this morning or about how didn't I say I was going to drop it, he just recited it all the same. And I asked him what he did with his time and he just said he was an herbology teacher - and if I asked him point blank if he was dead he'd say yes and explain what killed him but on every other subject he talked about his lifetime like it was nowish."

"Well. That makes me question how current the Herbology safety lecture can possibly be," he says after a moment.

"I suppose the idea is that the plants don't change very much," shrugs Bella.

"But procedures do. Or they should, considering who they have failed to protect."

"Yeah. Feral probably doesn't even care, but I'll tell him anyway," snorts Bella.

"It won't do him any harm to hear it."

"Yeah. Tomorrow in Charms." She writes this down, after the notes on her conversation with the ghost. "It's a pity about Mr. Sutherland. I was hoping ghosts would be good enough and then the problem would be figuring out how to leave one and coming up with ways to go on interacting with stuff, but it's not good enough at all."

"Has it occurred to you that the problem you intend to solve might not be solvable?"

"Yes, but I think it would be premature to decide that while I am eleven."

"Of course."

Bella puts her things where they belong, and then she gets ready for bed and flops thereinto.

And Sherlock, as usual, doesn't sleep.

At Charms the next morning, Bella finds Feral and tells him about the results of her conversation with the ghost. "So I don't think he's really a person," she concludes sadly. "Also Sherlock pointed out that the safety lecture can't be very up to date."

"I changed classes. I bet you're going to stay anyway, though."

He grins. "It's like you've met me or something."

"I have totally met you," giggles Bella.

"Anyway. Did you hear I got kicked out of Transfiguration?"

"Yeah. Someone wanted you to point a wand at a firecracker, I'm not surprised it was a disaster. What happened after?"

"I went to Healer Song," he says. "He told me I've got something called a premature spillway. Like using all that fire as a kid burned a hole in my magic. He wrote me a note to get the teachers to quit giving me crap about it."

"Oh. I hope that works. What are you supposed to do about it, just wait? Does it go away?"

He shrugs. "The affinity for fire doesn't. The lighting things up by accident might. If I'm a good boy and don't use wandless fire. Like that's going to happen. Well, he said he didn't know if deliberate wandless fire would hurt anything or not, because he's never heard of it working like that in the first place."

"Well, as long as you've got your wand on you, why do you need to do it wandless, if it might make it worse?"

"Because it's more fun?" he suggests.

"You're creative, I bet you can come up with other ways to have fun that don't mean you can't aim your wand at anybody you like or anything you can't replace."

"Skip it," he says. "We're missing Charms here."

Charms ensues. They're doing Cheering Charms. Bella tentatively agrees to allow one to be tried on her after frowning at the description in the textbook for several minutes, but it doesn't work.

No one tries a Cheering Charm on Feral. Feral does not try a Cheering Charm on anyone.

"Do these stack?" muses Bella, peering at the book. "Maybe you better hit him again, Tony."

Tony giggles and casts another one.

"Ha. Ha, ha, ha," says Sherlock.

Bella sticks out her tongue at him. "Tony, can I try on you?"

"Sure."

Bella points, waves her vine wand, and speaks the incantation.

Tony is cheered!

The Charms teacher has read Feral's note from Healer Song, and says that he can get a passing grade for the day's assignment if he submits a one-page essay on Cheering Charms that is not "conspicuously plagiarized from the textbook".

The other three continue their practices. Bella tries both wands; it's easier to get the spell off correctly with the vine, but the hazel has more oomph. The charm continues not to work on her, but she seems to be having a good time anyway.

By the end of the class, Feral is the only student who has not successfully cast the charm, but he does have his essay written.

Bella peers over his shoulder.

His handwriting is terrible.

Bella giggles. "Is there a handwriting-fixing spell the teachers know?"

Feral shrugs.

Feral cheerfully heads off to Herbology.

"Take notes for me?" Bella calls after him. "...Neatly?"

He laughs.

She takes that as a "maybe" and goes to Magizoology.

"Did you take me Herbology notes?" Bella asks.

"Kind of," he says. "We didn't learn much. I wrote down some stuff."

"What not-much did you learn? Magizoology was about Kneazles today."

"Dittany," he says. "It's not dangerous or anything. Has a bunch of uses in healing potions and stuff. The teacher was vague about some of them. But we learned which parts are called what, and how to tell if they're okay, and some stuff about how to take care of the plant properly."

"I like dittany. It's easy to shred for potions."

Feral shrugs. "So, that."

"Do you think you're going to keep wandlessly firing things on purpose even though it might make your thing worse?"

"Of course I am," he says. "I like wandlessly firing things, and I'd sure be fucked if I couldn't do it anymore and I lost my wand and got into trouble."

"Maybe you should get another wand, like I have? Or maybe there's other wandless magic you could learn that would be just as useful."

"I like my wand," he says. "I don't want another one. Anyway, same difference, having two wands just means you have two things somebody can take away. Wandless fire isn't something anybody can take away from me."

"But what about my second idea?"

He shrugs. "Wandless magic like what? Where am I going to find it, what's it going to do, how am I going to learn it, can I kill somebody with it?"

"I don't know, I'd have to look it up. I just want to know if I should even bother."

"Sure," he says. "But I might not bother learning it unless you find something good."

"I would already not bother bringing you anything if you couldn't learn it, but does it have to be able to kill someone?"

He considers. "Nah. I'd rather have something that could, but I won't not learn something useful just 'cause it's not deadly."

"The idea is to find something that will make you okay with not wandlessly firing things."

"Sure," he says, "and the more other useful fun wandless magic I have, the less I'll need to use fire."

"Okay. I'll see what I can turn up. I'm worried you're going to fail things and then we won't have classes with you anymore."

He snorts.

"What?"

"Nothing," he says. "It's just weird that somebody wants to have classes with me."

"We're friends," Bella says.

"Guess so," laughs Feral.

"Did you not notice till just now?"

"Well, sure," he says. "You read my mind, remember?"

"I remember. You've had a while to get used to it, why is it weird?"

He starts a sentence, stops before the first syllable, does that a few more times, then settles on: "I didn't know being friends came with wanting to be in my classes."

"Oh. Why wouldn't it?"

"Why does it?"

"I like having you around," explains Bella.

Feral laughs. "Okay."

"So I'll look up wandless magic, this afternoon when I'm letting Sherlock nap."

"Awesome," says Feral.

The rest of the day of classes goes by, and Bella goes to the library, and then she knocks on Feral's door with a stack of books.

"Maybe. There's Apparition, but we're not old enough to learn it yet. And Legilimency can be wandless and some people can learn to move things or change their colors without wands, but not everyone seems to be able to pick it up and you can't move the stuff very fast or from very far away. The thing I think you will like best is this." And she takes from the top of the stack a book entitled "Animagical: Unlocking Your Animalian Self" and hands it over.

"Animagi can turn into animals - particular ones per Animagus, and you don't get to pick it, but you get something that suits, and then apparently you can get a really good guess what yours will be by checking your Patronus except I don't know what that is so I'll have to look it up later. They don't need their wands to do it and they can do it at will. It does take a long time and you have to be good at Transfiguration."

Hugs!

Bookhugs.

"What do you think you'll be?"

"Well, I'm going to go look up what a Patronus is. You could sit with me in the library if you want."

"Sure!" says Feral. He tags along, hugging his book.

In the library, Bella plops the other books from her stack of wandless magic information on a little table between two armchairs, gets help from Mith, and finds a book on Patronuses, which she proceeds to read in one of said chairs.

Feral flops into the other chair and reads about Animagi.

"Whatcha doin'?" says Feral.

"Trying to make a Patronus. They're a sort of guardian spirit thing made out of happy memories, that take the shape of an animal - it's usually the same as your animagus form if you can do both, that's what that thing meant - and they're useful for fighting off some dark creatures. It's supposed to be advanced but the spell isn't actually very complicated and it's not dangerous to get wrong." She shows him the page.

"Maybe I just didn't pick a happy enough memory, or something." Bella carries on trying.

Bella copies the spell into her notebook and flicks the Patronus book away onto its shelf with her wand. "Do you want to check out the Animagus book and then go practice outside? I think Kay is giving me dirty looks from behind the history section."

He laughs. "Sure."

"What memory are you using?"

"Different stuff every time," he says. "Cooking, stuff I did before I came here, you reading my mind..."

Feral practices some more. His mist is rapidly gaining form and definition. It's still not a recognizable creature, but it moves around as a coherent blob.

"You are so much better at this than me. I wonder if it's just because you're older, the book did say people don't usually learn it early. Maybe I'll go find Tony and see if she wants to come try." Sherlock, of course, is asleep, but she can show him between when she gets back to their room and when she goes to sleep if he's curious.

"Go right ahead," says Feral. He tries it again. This time the short-lived mist-blob has something that could definitely be limbs.

"Ooh," comments Bella, and in she goes to Tony's room, at which she knocks the perfunctory knock of someone who during the school year crashes there at least once weekly.

"Me and Feral are trying a spell I found in a book called the Patronus, do you want to try?"

"Sure! What's it do?"

"It's supposed to make a spirit guardian animal thingy that's good against some Dark creatures. The book says it's really advanced and I haven't gotten anything better than mist but when I left Feral his kind of had limbs."

"Cool," says Tony. "Sign me up."

"C'mon." Bella shows her out to where Feral is, and shows her the copied spell description from her notes on the way.

"Hey, good going!" says Feral.

"Yeah, I didn't even get that on the first try." Bella concentrates as hard as she can. "Expecto patronum!"

"Your blob is bigger and shinier than my blob," says Tony.

"He has a head start," Bella says, shaking her wand as though to dislodge a blockage and trying again. Mist, nothing but mist.

"What kind of something?"

"Some kind of something. I'm gonna sit and watch you guys for a bit," he declares, and sits down on the ground.

Bella continues trying. She varies between getting mist and nothing at all, depending on whether she tries the mysteriously correct birthday present or anything else.

Tony improves slowly but steadily with practice.

"Hello," says Sherlock.

"Hi. We've been practicing Patronuses but I can't get anything more than mist and I only get that much if I specifically concentrate on the book you got me when I turned eleven, nothing else does it. Feral and Tony are both way better at it. Do you want to see the spell?"

"Yes," says Sherlock.

Bella shows it to him from where she copied it into her notebook. "It's supposed to make a spirit animal guardian. Feral's definitely had, like, limbs, before I gave up. They're good against Dark creatures and also you can send them with unfakeable messages, when they're all formed up. I don't know why mine won't work."

"I see," he says. "Do you mind if I practice this tonight?"

"As long as you don't start till I'm asleep saying random words, it shouldn't wake me up. You aren't shouty with your incantations," shrugs Bella.

"All right."

Bella goes to bed shortly after, and doesn't take long to drop off and start saying things like "gray spire suet box".

Bella peers at him to see if he's gotten a shape to his yet.

"Good morning," he says.

"Morning. Were you patronusing all night?"

"Did you get a shape?"

He shakes his head.

"Is that why you won't let me see?"

He nods.

"Well, tell me what it is when you know, I guess." She hops out of bed and sets about getting ready for the day.

"I will."

"I dunno what I'm doing wrong," she mutters. She tries the spell again before heading out to breakfast. Only mist.

Bella startles, briefly, then laughs. "Tell Feral his patronus is weird-looking and I want to know what it is," she instructs it. (This one is way too big to be Tony's and it doesn't look Sherlocky at all; it is definitely Feral's.)

It dips its head and vanishes, returning a few seconds later to relay in Feral's voice, "It's a Thestral, duh! Isn't she pretty?"