The note arrived at breakfast on Monday morning.
An owl dropped it in front of Felix without ceremony, and he unfolded the parchment to find four lines written in McGonagall’s narrow handwriting.
Mr.
Falker —
Your first private lesson will be held tonight at seven o’clock in the Transfiguration classroom.
Do not be late.
— M.
McGonagall
He read it twice and folded it back up.
Fred leaned over to see what it said, and Felix tucked the parchment into his robes before he could.
“Private lesson?” Fred asked, sitting back with the interested expression of someone who had already decided this was worth paying attention to.
“Tonight,” Felix said.
“With McGonagall.”
Fred considered that for a moment, then shrugged and went back to his breakfast.
“Just McGonagall?”
“Why wouldn’t it be just McGonagall?”
“No reason.” Fred reached for another piece of toast.
“Just a question.”
Felix let it go.
He ate the rest of his breakfast and went to his lessons and did not think about the note again until dinner.
But the note sat at the back of his mind all day, the way things did when Felix knew they mattered and did not yet know why.
He arrived at the Transfiguration classroom at six fifty-five.
The door was already open.
Warm light spilled out into the corridor, and Felix stood in the doorway for a moment before he stepped inside — and when he did, he stopped.
Professor McGonagall was at her desk.
Professor Flitwick was on a stool beside her, his feet dangling above the floor.
Professor Snape was standing near the window with his arms crossed.
And Albus Dumbledore was sitting in one of the student chairs at the front of the room, his hands folded in his lap, watching Felix with the patient, half-lidded expression he always wore when he was paying more attention than he appeared to be.
Felix stared.
For a long moment, nobody said anything.
Then Dumbledore smiled, and it was a small smile, and it disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared.
“Come in, Mr. Falker,” he said.
“Sit down.”
Felix walked to the chair Dumbledore had indicated — the one directly in front of the four of them, set apart from the rest of the room — and sat down.
He looked at each of them in turn.
McGonagall was watching him with that focused, scholar’s expression she had worn after the first lesson.
Flitwick was watching him with something like curiosity.
Snape was watching him with the same unreadable look he had worn since the first Potions lesson.
And Dumbledore was watching him with the calm, patient attention of someone who had already decided how the evening was going to go.
“I imagine you have questions,” Dumbledore said.
“A few, sir.”
“Then let me begin by answering the most obvious one.” Dumbledore leaned back in his chair.
“You are wondering why all four of us are here.”
Felix said nothing.
“Professor McGonagall came to me on Friday evening,” Dumbledore said.
“She told me what you did in her lesson. She told me you produced a perfect Transformation on your first attempt, without instruction, and she told me what you said when she asked you to explain it. That you did not feel as though you were learning the magic. That you felt as though you were remembering it.”
Felix glanced at McGonagall.
She did not look away.
“I found that interesting,” Dumbledore continued.
“And I do not say that lightly, Mr. Falker. I have been Headmaster of this school for a long time, and I have met a great many students, and very few of them have ever made me say that word in earnest. So I spoke to Professor Flitwick, because he taught you Charms, and I spoke to Professor Snape, because he taught you Potions, and I asked them both the same question I am about to ask you.”
“What question?” Felix said.
“Whether what Professor McGonagall saw in your Transfiguration lesson is the only place you have shown it.”
Felix was quiet.
“It is not,” Dumbledore said.
“Professor Snape tells me you transfigured a spray of scalding potion into feathers in his classroom before you had ever had a Transfiguration lesson. Professor Flitwick tells me you levitated a feather on your first attempt, with a precision he would expect from a third-year. Neither of these things is impossible on its own. Together, they suggest something I have not seen in a very long time.”
He paused.
“You have a gift, Mr. Falker. And I am not speaking of talent. Talent is common. Talent is something every student in this school has in some measure. What you have is not talent. It is something closer to instinct.”
Felix did not answer.
He was not sure he was supposed to.
“Professor McGonagall has agreed to take you on for private instruction,” Dumbledore said.
“She will teach you twice a week, as she told you. Professor Flitwick has also agreed to take an interest in your Charms work, and Professor Snape has offered to oversee your Potions education outside of your regular lessons.”
Felix looked at Snape.
Snape did not look back.
“I — ” Felix started, and then stopped.
He was not sure what he had been about to say.
He was not sure he knew how to say it.
“You are surprised,” Dumbledore said.
“Yes, sir.”
“That is understandable.” Dumbledore smiled again, and this time it lasted a little longer.
“It is not often that four teachers agree to take an interest in a single first-year student. But you are not a single first-year student, Mr. Falker. You are a Falker. And I suspect — as your father suspects, as Professor McGonagall suspects, and as I think you suspect as well — that there is more to you than any of us has yet seen.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Dumbledore did not answer.
He simply looked at Felix for a long moment, the way he had looked at him in the Great Hall on the night of the Sorting, and then he stood up.
“Professor McGonagall will begin with you tonight,” he said.
“I will remain for the first lesson, if you do not object. I would like to see what you can do.”
He walked to a chair at the side of the room and sat down, and McGonagall stood and gestured to the front of the classroom.
“Come here, Mr. Falker.”
Felix stood and walked to the front of the room.
McGonagall set a small, smooth stone on the desk in front of him.
“Before we begin,” she said, “I want you to understand something. What you did in my classroom on Friday was not a spell. It was not a technique. It was an act of will. You looked at a matchstick and you decided what it would become, and the magic obeyed you. That is not how transfiguration is taught. That is not how it is learned. That is how it is practiced by those who have spent decades mastering it, and even then, most of them never reach the point where the magic simply does what they intend without effort.”
She looked at him.
“You did it on your first attempt, with no instruction, in less than thirty seconds. So before I teach you anything, I want to see what you can do without being taught. This stone — turn it into water.”
Felix looked at the stone.
“Water,” he said.
“Water,” McGonagall repeated.
“Transformation of state is one of the more difficult branches of the discipline. Most students do not attempt it until their fourth year. But you are not most students. You told me you do not learn transfiguration — you remember it. So I would like to see what you remember.”
Felix looked at the stone and thought about what it could become.
He thought about the water inside it — the water that was not there, that had never been there, that existed only as a possibility in the mind of someone who could reach the magic that made the stone a stone and rewrite it into something else.
He thought about the way Andros had written that matter and intent could be rewritten, that a duelist did not counter his opponent but rewrote him.
He raised his wand.
He did not think about the spell.
He did not think about the movement.
He simply thought about the water.
The stone shimmered.
It went soft.
It went clear.
It spread across the desk in a thin, even sheet, and then it settled into a small pool of water that gleamed in the light of the classroom lamps.
Felix looked at it.
McGonagall was silent.
Flitwick made a small sound — something between surprise and delight.
Snape did not move.
And Dumbledore, sitting in his chair at the side of the room, leaned forward just slightly, and his expression had changed.
It was still calm, still patient, still half-lidded.
But underneath it, something had shifted.
“Interesting,” McGonagall said quietly.
“You did not cast. You did not focus. You did not even appear to try. You simply decided, and the magic obeyed.”
She picked up the pool of water with her wand — it floated, still liquid, suspended in the air in front of her — and studied it for a long moment.
“Now turn it back.”
Felix looked at the water and thought about the stone.
And the water shimmered, and it went hard, and it went grey, and then the stone was sitting on the desk again, exactly the way it had been before.
McGonagall set the stone down and looked at Dumbledore.
Dumbledore nodded.
“You have a gift,” McGonagall said, turning back to Felix.
“I have known that since Friday. But a gift is not enough. A gift without discipline is a wildfire — dangerous to everyone around it, including the one who holds it. So before you learn anything else, you will learn why transfiguration works. Not the spell. Not the movement. The principle beneath it.”
She picked up the stone and set it in front of him again.
“Transfiguration is not a change of shape,” she said.
“It is a change of nature. A matchstick becomes a needle not because the wood becomes metal, but because the idea of the matchstick is replaced by the idea of the needle. You are not moving matter. You are rewriting it. Do you understand the difference?”
Felix thought about Andros’s words.
A duelist who masters it does not fight with spells.
He fights with reality itself.
He does not counter his opponent.
He rewrites him.
“I think so,” he said.
“Then tell me. What is the difference between a transformation that lasts and one that does not?”
Felix considered the question carefully.
It was not a question he had been asked before, and it was not a question he had an answer to that came from reading.
“Intent,” he said slowly.
“A transformation that lasts is one where the caster’s intent holds. If the caster’s intent wavers, the transformation wavers.”
McGonagall’s expression did not change, but something behind her eyes did.
“Correct,” she said.
“That is a first-year answer, but it is a correct one. Most students take years to reach that conclusion. Some never do.” She set the stone back on the desk.
“Now, turn it into a feather.”
Felix looked at the stone.
A feather.
Not water.
Not a needle.
A feather.
He thought about the lightness of it, the softness, the way it would float if he dropped it.
He thought about the idea of a feather, and he let the idea become the stone.
The stone shimmered.
It went light.
It went soft.
It went brown and white and grey, and then it was a feather — a single feather, lying on the desk in front of him, so soft and light that when Felix breathed, it drifted a fraction of an inch to one side.
McGonagall looked at the feather.
Then she looked at Dumbledore, and Dumbledore looked at her, and something passed between them that Felix could not read.
“That is enough for tonight,” McGonagall said.
“You have done more in one hour than most students do in a year, and you have done it without instruction, which tells me that instruction is exactly what you need. We will begin properly on Wednesday. You will learn the theory first. You will learn why a stone can become water and why it cannot become a lion until you understand what a lion is, in terms of magic. You will not attempt anything beyond what I have taught you. Is that understood?”
“Yes, professor.”
“Good.” She set the stone back on the desk.
“You may go.”
Felix turned to leave — and then Flitwick hopped off his stool and hurried over to look at the feather.
“Remarkable,” he said.
“Truly remarkable. Minerva, do you see what he did?”
“I see it, Filius.”
“He did not cast. He did not incant. He did not even pause. He decided, and the magic obeyed.” Flitwick turned to Felix with a delighted expression.
“Do you know how rare that is?”
Felix looked at the feather.
“No, sir.”
“It is very rare. I have taught Charms at this school for decades, and I have seen students who were talented and students who were brilliant, and none of them — none of them — have ever done what you just did in their first lesson. Not once. Not in forty years.”
He turned back to the feather and studied it, and then he looked at Felix again with an expression that had shifted from delight to something more focused.
“May I ask you a question, Mr. Falker?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When you turned that stone into water, and then into a feather — did you think about the shape of the thing? The size? The weight?”
Felix shook his head.
“No, sir. I thought about what it should be.”
Flitwick’s eyes widened.
“You thought about what it should be,” he repeated.
“You did not think about how to make it that way. You simply decided.”
“Yes, sir.”
Flitwick turned to McGonagall.
“Minerva. The boy is a natural duelist.”
McGonagall raised an eyebrow.
“Dueling and transfiguration are not the same discipline, Filius.”
“No, but they are more closely related than most people think.” Flitwick turned back to Felix.
“Mr. Falker, I was a dueling champion in my youth. I have not spoken of it in years, but I was — I won the European Junior Championship three times, and I still hold a seat on the International Dueling Commission. I know dueling when I see it, and I know what makes a duelist great.”
He pointed at the feather on the desk.
“That. What you just did. That is the instinct of a duelist. A duel is not won by knowing more spells than your opponent. It is won by deciding — deciding what the fight will be, deciding where your opponent will be, deciding what will happen before it happens. You decided the stone would become water, and the stone became water. You did not ask. You did not negotiate. You decided, and the magic obeyed.”
He paused.
“Do you understand what I am telling you?”
Felix looked at him.
“I think so, sir.”
“Then understand this as well.” Flitwick’s voice had grown quiet.
“There are three things a duelist must master. Power, speed, and will. Power is the strength of the magic. Speed is how quickly you can bring it to bear. Will is the ability to decide what will happen and make it happen, regardless of what your opponent wants. You have will already. That is the rarest of the three, and you have it.”
He looked at McGonagall.
“We should teach him to duel,” he said.
“Not as a game. As a discipline. If he has the will, we can teach him the power and the speed. But the will has to be there first, and it is there.”
McGonagall was silent for a moment.
Then she looked at Dumbledore.
Dumbledore had not moved from his chair.
He had watched the entire lesson without saying a word, and now he looked at Felix with the same patient, half-lidded expression he had worn all evening.
“We will discuss it,” he said.
“For now, Mr. Falker, you may go.”
Felix stood up.
He felt strange — lightheaded, almost, the way he always felt after spending too long inside his own magic.
He gathered his things and walked to the door.
“Mr. Falker.”
He turned.
It was Snape.
He had not moved from his position by the window, and he had not spoken all evening.
But now he was looking at Felix with the same expression he had worn when Felix had transfigured the potion in his classroom — flat, unreadable, and entirely too interested in what he was seeing.
“Do not neglect your Potions work,” Snape said.
“You will need it.”
Felix looked at him for a moment.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
He walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.