The Wandmaker

Warm

CHAPTER              t h i r t e e n

The next sensation that Symbida was aware of experiencing was perfect warmness – akin to that lovely feeling of a late morning sleep in, where the sheets and blankets of the bed perfectly balance the temperature of the room; where it feels as though you could lie there in a perfect dozy state, neither asleep nor awake, for eternity. Where the light in the room is not too bright as to rouse you, and not too dark to send you back into deep sleep; where your stomach is not yearning for food nor actively digesting anything; where it feels as though the entire world is in a perfect balance.

This is the beautiful sensation that Symbida felt, rising from sleep. And as such, she can be forgiven for forgetting the events of the last twenty-four hours, and the pain that had throbbed in her arm. For a little while, she did not even ponder on where she was, or how she got there, or even if she was safe at all. Suspended in a dream state, she just lay there and existed.

A slight itch on her leg eventually caught her attention, and as she moved to scratch it the enormous pain in her arm became suddenly clearly apparent again. Hot tendrils of pain began throbbing up her arm and shoulder, instantly starting a heavy headache.

Symbida yelped at the sudden pain, involuntarily, and the spell in the room was broken.

Within ten seconds, the door swung open, and in shuffled a middle aged man, oddly familiar. Seeing her awake, he immediately hurried to the bedside. Symbida tried to rise, feeling awfully rude to be lying down, but crashing waves of pain from her side sent her onto her back again with a cry.

"Gentle, gentle, my dear!" cried the man, and his voice seemed to trigger a memory in her brain. Of course! She felt silly for not realising sooner who the man now inspecting her bandages (that she hadn't even noticed earlier, in her content) was.

"Ollivander?" she said, surprise tinting her voice.

He smiled warmly. "Yes, yes, it's me," he said. It was obvious to Symbida now - the slightly greying hair, kindly face, shuffling walk. I must have been very drowsy to have taken so long to realise. The bookish smell of the place was explained, too – the wand boxes tended to have a very bookish odour, and it was no surprise that a wandmaker would smell of wand boxes.

Having inspected her arm thoroughly but gently, without much complaint from the twelve year old, he asked how it was feeling.

How did it feel? Symbida bit her lip and tried to put into words the kind of sharp spikes and crashing waves of pain and heat that seemed to emit from her arm at every movement, but no words seemed the right match. Sore or painful didn't accurately reflect the intensity of the pain, while excruciating felt overdramatic. "Not good," she settled for.

Ollivander hmmed and ahhhed as he further inspected her mobility of the arm, and grew more and more sombre as every tiny movement caused a hiss of pain to slip from the young girl's lips. Satisfied but not relieved with the inspection, Ollivander took a step back and gave Symbida a sad smile – the type adults give to children when they are trying to be sympathetic and encouraging, but things are too bad to hide from their eyes. Symbida saw straight through it.

"That bad, huh?"

All Ollivander could do was nod sadly, forming in his head the right way to explain things, while Symbida slumped down against the bed head and lowered her eyes to her toes, processing.

"I..." Ollivander begun, and then stopped. "Your arm..." he tried again, but faltered. "Look, when I was younger, I wanted to be a healer. Went through three years of magical training, before my father fell ill and I came back to the shop to help him. Then I fell in love with wand making, and never continued my training. But in those years... I have never encountered an injury that looked so deceivingly mild and yet caused so much pain. Your arm," he gestured to it confusedly, "looks like a simple fracture, and yet, even with the medical balms and healing scents and spells I have tried over the last day," Day? Symbida wondered, realising how long and deep she had slept, "it remains resolutely unhealed."

"And not just that," he continued, "but you seem to be experiencing an extreme amount of pain for severeness of the injury." He frowned, unsure what to make of the situation. "I'm afraid, my dear... if all I have done for you has not made any difference... then there is no more that I or any medical witch or wizard can do, except basic pain-reducing herbs to help you deal with the pain. I'm sorry."

Symbida looked into Ollivander's eyes, and in them read the deep sincerity of his apology, as if being sorry enough would make everything okay. She nodded, then suddenly realised she had lots of unanswered questions burning in her mind that had been hidden until now.

The first one tumbled out, "How did you find me?"

If Ollivander was disturbed by the abruptness of the topic change, he did not show it. "I happened to be out that night, luckily, in search of prickletac stems, for my experiments." Symbida frowned as if to say why at night? "They only appear at night, my dear - they shrivel below the surface during the day and grow from the sun's heat in the soil, and catch bugs by night."

And so, in between brewing of a pain-relieving tea and manoeuvring through accidental wand-making tangents, Symbida learned that Ollivander had taken her carefully to his second, smaller store in Hogsmead that he was currently readying to use as an experimental duelling club, where students flowing from Hogwarts on their allocated afternoons could try Ollivander's experimental wands in challenges and duels. 'A money-making exercise, of course, but mostly for my own experimental gain', he had explained. She learnt that she had been slept for twenty-six hours, and had barely roused when he had applied the healing balms to her arms. Ollivander, in turn, also learnt the reason of Symbida's predicament, and the chain of events that had led her to that point. She also learnt more than she needed, or indeed wanted, about wand cores, and the experimental harvesting of wand cores, and the significance of the wand core in the performance of the wand, among a staggering amount of other wandmaking facts that Symbida sincerely doubted she would ever need to know. By the time Ollivander had wound down, Symbida was very sleepy and was trying to discreetly yawn behind her hand.

He eventually caught onto her fatigue, and had hurried quickly from the room muttering about his bad manners before she remembered to ask her last question – was her wand, or perhaps 'the vine wand' was a better way to refer to it, still with him?

By the time Ollivander had returned with hot stew and warm, buttered bread, she had convinced herself that it was not so important, and could wait. Besides, she did not want to seem selfish and schemy, and ruin any chance she had of negotiating the wand back.

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