Paper Confines

xxi. The Martyr's Knot

PAPER CONFINES.
21. / The Martyr's Knot

✶

Amoret laid buried in her covers wondering how she was going to get out of the mess she'd made. It was two days after a second lesson with Tom and her skull thrummed with the headache that came every time she thought of it. Had she needed legilimency? Enough to gamble the bridge between healing magic and transfiguration by placing it Tom's hands? It was a gamble reliant on that information never leaving this place, and that would never happen while he could build castles from rubble and she still felt sick after a trip from Ravenclaw Tower to the dungeons. Yes, she answered every time. To escape his soul, she needed his mind.

Yes, and she wanted it too.

She climbed out of bed with haste and dressed in her usual trousers and button-down, which she had cinched with a quick charm to fit her better. She still found them awkward on her, and disliked how the men's fit of the shirt broadened her shoulders, but imagined Nadya dusting them off and saying with a grin, "if they're made for men, why do they suit us so well?" And that was the end of that.

She found the Room of Requirement and it spited her with its familiar black lacquer. After all these weeks, it no longer hid in the camouflage of the wall, but it was as sentient as an animal and equally as untamed. To all but its domesticator, to whom its loyalty remained unchanging.

"Can we be done with it?" Amoret asked. "Or is this a game you never bore of?"

The door changed with a flash, thorns whipping forth like an angry mouth to catch her wrist. Amoret shrieked as the teeth sunk down more viciously then they ever had before.

An animal indeed.

No games, hissed the roses as they filled with blood. No quips from your forked tongue. No games, none.

Amoret stared, breaths laborious as she struggled to fend the shock off her face and compose herself. Even then, the urge to press was an easy one. Her forked tongue? she would have said, when the Lord of serpents crossed their foothold every morning and every night? Priceless. And annoying.

She instead walked into the meadow without another word.

It was as cold as it had always looked now, like it knew December was almost upon them, even though it was an invention of the Room, even though it needed not abide any laws but its own. Wet earth had turned white around the big oak tree just to the shore of the lake. The water whipped against the slowly spreading ice like the rim of a glass, and made a sound like a mark tree on each percussive strike. It was as if winter had started to grow from the oak's roots into the veins of the meadow.

Amoret made her way down the hill and sat at the frozen trunk of the tree, contented by what was all but music splashing under the silence. It almost filled her disappointment as the thorn-wound on her arm stopped bleeding and she felt nothing about her awareness change.

She hadn't seen a vision of Tom's childhood since the first, and with his easy dismissal of every shove she made for the bed of his mind during their lessons, she was antsy to see the things he was hiding. A prick of the thorn-and-rose door was worth his memories, but they wouldn't come, and Amoret was beaten. It could have come only from pure goodness. It could have come only from self-preservation. But Amoret was patterned for loss as of late, and she was beyond pretending this particular aspiration wasn't stained with another sort of wanting.

She glanced up as the shadow of a bird cast over the first fall of snow. Her gasp caught one of the snowflakes. If she'd thought the glowing starlings looked like angels, then the wide, white wingspan of her House's symbol was Mary's own. An eagle.