The Vault of Destinies (James Potter #3) (45 page)

"Yeah, I did notice that," James agreed, walking along with the grey breeze in his face. "I've been playing every part in every practice. But so has everyone else. Even Mukthatch gets pulled out of Keeper every now and then, which I don't understand at all since those Bigfoot arms of his are about as long as broomsticks and as strong as tree trunks. What's the point?"

"The point
is
, on Bigfoot team, everybody is trained to play every position," Wood nodded, looking aside at James. "That way we don't have any weak links. With the other teams, if their star Clipper gets sidelined by an injury or a well-placed hex, the whole team suffers the loss. A team is only as strong as its strongest player, you know. In Bigfoot House, every player is as strong as the others."

James frowned as he thought back on the skills of his teammates. "Which is how strong, exactly?"

"Well," Wood replied, taken aback, "strong enough, at least. Quite solid, if you ask me. The point is, if we lose one member of the team, any other member of the team is prepared to take their place. Even Mukthatch on goal. Harold Gobbins has nearly as good a reach and Jazmine Jade has the strength of any two boys her size, although she'd hate it if anyone knew it. Frankly, though, I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone as solid on the skrim as you are, my boy. You do your old dad proud. Why, I wager you might even beat him, skrim to broom!"

Wood clapped James heartily on the shoulder as they walked and James grinned even as his face flushed. The two walked in silence for a while, passing knots of students as they made their way across campus. Finally, James glanced up at the professor.

"So you knew my dad when he was a kid, then?"

Wood laughed. "That I did. Taught him to play Quidditch, just like I'm teaching
you
to play
Clutch
. Wheels within wheels is what it's like, eh? Fate has a sense of humor."

James was thoughtful. "What was he like as a kid?"

Wood looked down at James. "A lot like you, I suppose. He looked a lot more like your brother, though."

"That's what everybody says," James replied, shaking his head.

"And I imagine you get right tired of hearing it too," Wood agreed seriously. "But to tell you the truth, I see a lot more of him in you, as far as the kind of man you're growing up to be. He was rather intense, but you couldn't really blame him, not after all he'd been through, and what with his family situation."

"The Dursleys," James sighed. "I've heard about them. A little, at least."

"You never see them?"

James shook his head. "Never once. Dad's Uncle Vernon died a few years back, and Dad and Mum went to the funeral. I heard that Petunia Dursley barely said a word to either of them, although his cousin, Dudley, was decent enough. Invited Mum and Dad both to his house for tea after the graveside service. Dudley's all grown up with kids of his own these days. Mum said that it'd be poetic justice like if one of Dudley's kids was a witch or wizard, but nothing of the sort, apparently. His wife was nice, although she didn't know anything about Mum and Dad being magical. She thinks they're insurance salespeople or something. That's what Dudley told her."

"One shouldn't be too hard on them," Wood said stoically. "It's rather a hard thing for many Muggles to deal with us magical folk. It puts their world a bit on its ear, if you know what I mean."

James shrugged. As they neared Apollo Mansion, he spoke up again. "So what brought you here, Professor?" he asked. "To the States, I mean. If you don't mind me asking."

Wood drew a deep breath and looked up at the grey sky. "My parents, actually," he answered on the exhale.

James was curious. "What for?"

Wood looked down at him then, as if weighing how he should answer. After a moment, he sighed again and looked away. "It's a bit complicated, I suppose. On the surface of it, they thought that if they brought me here, I could get a good advanced degree from the graduate school, further my learning, and become a teacher, like they'd always hoped. But that wasn't the real reason for the journey, really."

James waited, but Wood didn't seem to have anything else to say on the matter. Together, they approached Apollo Mansion where it sat like a giant brick beneath the low sky. Wind soughed noisily beneath the eaves and carried dead leaves up into the air. After a moment, James realized that Professor Wood had stopped walking. Curiously, he looked back to see the man standing in the middle of the narrow path, smiling very slightly.

"My parents were afraid," Wood said quietly, lowering his eyes to meet James'. "I guess it's really as simple as that. You probably wouldn't understand it, but it was a frightening time to be a witch and wizard, or even a Muggle, although very few of them knew it."

Wood stopped again and looked away, out over the campus. He chewed on his words for a moment, and then went on. "It was the time of Voldemort's return, after all. No one knew what was going to happen. The Ministry was being taken over by the Death Eaters, and even Hogwarts had come under the thumb of Voldemort's minions. No one felt safe. As time went by, the battle lines grew bolder and more defined.

"My parents… they weren't fighters. They knew that what was happening was evil, but they were afraid. They didn't know what to do. As things got worse, they planned to do the one thing they thought was best. They planned to leave, to escape. I didn't want to go with them though. I wanted to stay and fight. They begged me to join them, but I refused. I was playing reserve for Puddlemere United at that time despite everything, but even more important than that, I was committed to being a part of the resistance along with your dad and the rest of my old schoolmates. When the Battle happened, I was there. I saw Remus cut down by Antonin Dolohov. I remember seeing Fred Weasley fighting like a wild man, even though I didn't see the blow that killed him.

"When it was all over, I was glad to have been there and to have done my part, but I missed my parents. I began to feel I had abandoned them by staying. As soon as I could, I followed them here, meaning to do what they had originally planned for me, to attend university and become a teacher. I found them here, but they seemed… older. Used up, like. They'd read about the Battle of Hogwarts in the American wizarding press, but none of their new friends here quite understood any of it. Very few of their neighbors celebrated the end of the Death Eaters. None of them had been there, after all. They didn't know what had really happened…"

Wood stopped as his voice drifted off, lost in the increasingly chilly breeze.

James took a step closer to the professor. "But… why did you stay here, then?"

Wood glanced back at him thoughtfully. He shook his head. "I don't really know. I did go to university, of course, right here, good old Alma Aleron. But when it was done, I just couldn't go back to England. My parents were afraid to lose me again. And what's more, strange as it is, I think they were ashamed of what I'd done. They never talked about it, but there was an attitude here in the States, a sort of confusion about who really had been right and wrong during the Battle. My parents had begun to think the same sorts of things. They'd forgotten how it had really been. They never talked about my part in the fight, and if I ever brought it up, they'd avert their eyes, like I'd said something taboo. I stayed because… I wanted them to know the truth."

James didn't quite understand Wood's words or what had really happened with his parents. He asked, "What
was
the truth?"

Wood blinked at him. "Why, that what I did was right. That it was a fight worth fighting. That I'd done the right thing."

James nodded slowly. "Do they know that now?"

Wood looked away again. "My parents both died years ago," he said blandly. "Whatever truth there is to know, they know it now, I suppose."

James wanted to ask why Wood still chose to stay now that his parents were dead, but the professor seemed to be done talking. He smiled rather stiffly at James and clapped him on the shoulder, less enthusiastically this time. "Come along, James. Good practice. I should let you get down to the cafeteria while there's still some dinner to be had."

James nodded and followed Wood into the shadow of Apollo Mansion. Deep down, he thought he did understand why the professor had chosen to stay in the States even though his parents had died. James couldn't have put it in words (at least not very easily) and yet the shape of it was clear enough in his head. Wood's parents may have died, but Wood's mission had not. Somehow, James understood that the question wasn't whether Wood's parents believed he had done the right thing by staying to fight the Battle. The question was whether he, Oliver Wood, believed it himself.

On the day of the season's first Clutchcudgel match, James, Ralph, and Zane had an early Potion-Making class. It had been arranged to begin right after lunch, rather than its normal time one hour later, for reasons that had not yet been explained. The Alma Aleron Potions Master was a very tall, very dark-skinned man with an omnipresent grin that tended to have a somewhat unsettling effect on the students who sat beneath it. His name was Fenyang Baruti and he was apparently from the island of Haiti. He had a very deep voice and a vaguely hypnotic French accent. What sounded haughty and arrogant in Aunt Fleur, however, sounded smoky and deeply mysterious in Professor Baruti. James liked the professor, even though it was rather difficult to know if the man was technically
good
, exactly.

"That's just what you
do
like about him," Rose had sniffed from the Shard a few afternoons earlier, sitting on the sofa in front of the Gryffindor fireplace thousands of miles away. "Sounds to me like one of those people who purposely keep their allegiances secret, so to avoid getting pigeonholed into any of the obvious compartments of life. People like that aren't the sort that one can trust when things come to the sticking point."

"Maybe," Zane had agreed from the American side of the Shard. "But they're a lot cooler than the straight up good guys. And they do tend to get all the girls too." He grinned knowledgeably into the Shard.

"That's true," Ralph agreed with a serious nod. "Baruti's got Petra. She's his teacher's assistant."

Rose narrowed her eyes. "I don't think that's quite what he meant," she said, glancing furtively from Zane to Scorpius, who sat in a chair nearby on the Hogwarts side of the Shard.

Unlike Potions class at Hogwarts, Alma Aleron's version was held in a bright airy room halfway up the Tower of Art. The room was bounded by windows which looked out over an ornate but precariously crooked balcony. On nice days, Professor Baruti was known to take his class out onto the balcony, cauldrons, mortars, and pestles in hand, to do their assignments while seated crosslegged in the sun. This, he claimed, reminded him of his childhood in Haiti, when his father and mother taught him the art of mixing potions on the roof of their small house surrounded by the hiss of the wind and the chatter of the birds. The balcony leaned enough that a dropped pestle was prone to roll all the way across the cracked floor and fall the hundred feet to the ground below, which gave the afternoons in the sunshine a certain nervous edge. James was quite sure that when the breeze blew, he could feel the balcony tremble slightly beneath him.

Today, however, a stiff autumn wind and spritzing rain prevented the class from adjourning to the balcony, and James was rather glad. As he, Ralph, and Zane approached the shelves to gather their supplies, Professor Baruti entered from his office door in the corner of the room. Petra followed him, carrying a stack of parchments and wearing a large leather satchel slung over her shoulder.

"You will not need your cauldrons today, students," Baruti called in his smoky accent, smiling even more indulgently than usual. "Today, we will be going on a small journey to view potion-making in one of its purest and most essential forms. You may leave your packs here and collect them upon your return, but do take a seat while Ms. Morganstern hands out your writing assignments. On the whole, I find your works passable, if uninspired. This is not your fault, however, but rather that of your former Potions Masters, whose lack of passion for the subject has, of course, left you equally dull. This will surely change now that you are in
my
class."

"He's probably right about that," Zane whispered. "Last year, I was in Professor Fugue's Intro to Potions. It wasn't just that he was boring. He made us wear safety goggles if we so much as sliced a lemon! It's pretty hard to take the fun out of dissecting an Acromantula for its venom sac, but he managed to do it."

Petra passed in front of their table and settled James' essay before him. The grade at the top of the parchment was printed in red ink: H+. "Slightly better than Humdrum," she explained quietly. "Not bad, considering the class average is Mediocre Minus. Izzy says hi, by the way."

James smiled up at her, but couldn't think of anything to say. She passed him by, continuing to distribute the writing assignments. When she was done, Baruti instructed the class to follow him out into the hallway. Mumbling curiously, the students began to descend the spiral staircase through the Tower of Art's many levels. Along the way, they passed music lessons, magical art classes, and even a wizarding dance class mostly populated by Pixie students in yellow and pink tights. The teacher at the piano stopped playing and glared impatiently as the Potions students clumped noisily down the stairs in the corner of her studio. A strikingly handsome Pixie boy trembled on his toes, levitating his partner over his head in mid-pirouette, during the pause in the music.