Paper Confines

xxv. A Sort of Murder

PAPER CONFINES.
25. / A Sort of Murder

✶

Two hundred and fifty days of Tom Riddle's soul sunk cold and acrid onto Amoret's shoulders. The time bit down and ate, and for all her own hunger, as the kitchen supply dwindled to the worst scraps of Tom's childhood—watery peas and porridge—she could not recompense what his soul consumed of her. Not at a matching rate. Her stomach would growl and she'd pick at her food like she did as a child, then meander to the Astronomy Tower and watch the sky change.

Hail, on this day, started at dusk. It battered the asphalt and the court clovers until morning. Amoret didn't sleep. She watched it turn from black ice to amethyst to gold, in the night and the dawn and the verge of an afternoon washed green from staring at the sun. Whatever decrepit thing she lived in had, at last, turned to summer.

It was Sybil's birthday.

She would be twenty-one today, wherever she was. Whenever she was. And if when was the question, then maybe she wouldn't be, but Amoret had no room to hold onto a thought like that. It was something she caught herself doing more often, and she had grown quite proficient with a metaphorical shovel. She'd bury this with all the other graves she'd dug in advance.

Sybil and her ribbons and her cheek and her aliveness, every bit their mother, and there sat Amoret in the treetops of a beautiful bloodline, feeling full of death.

She went to the Hufflepuff dormitories that morning for some meagre recognition of the day, and tied the tight curls of her hair with a single yellow strip she tore from one of the linens. It was a ribbon by approximation, anyway. She flitted between calling it celebratory and memorial and landed somewhere in the middle, as she did with most things now.

It had become routine that Amoret's lessons took place in the meadow, and Tom's in his library. An arm of puckered red dots did not dissuade her from the Room of Requirement. She'd arrive every other morning to sit at the stirring lakeside and watch for her eagle to strike. Very rarely did it, and instead she'd fall asleep against the oak tree and wake to Tom sneaking his way into her dreams, sat too staring at the water, tracing a ring on his finger that he never took off and she never asked about.

This day, she fell dizzy against the tree, and woke to the eagle perched on the toe of her shoe.

Amoret screamed, clambering for her wand. The eagle leapt from her kicking feet but didn't seem afraid. It cocked its head, great wingspan tucked behind its torso, beak slavering with blood and light.

Amoret stood and panted, her wand arm out and fizzing instinctually in her palm. She stared in some sort of contest with the eagle. When it finally looked away, it didn't feel like Amoret had won. It felt more like the eagle just had better things to do, and propelled upward and left into the forest, the shadow of its wings eclipsing the sunlight so Amoret could watch after it.

For a moment she stared like she was watching a dream disappear. Then sense, perhaps, kicked in, and she followed it; into the forgotten depth of the forest.

It was different from the Forbidden Forest, to be sure. The danger in those trees was that they were so full of life. Good or bad, the wild contained all manner of beasts and beings. Here, the worry was the lack of them. The last time Amoret had been further than the first few trees, there wasn't so much as a rustle to be heard in the winding branches to signify any life beyond her own. There were no flies, or spiders, or starlings—only the firm sense that she was being led somewhere important.