Felix did not go back to Gryffindor Tower after the private lesson.
He walked out of the Transfiguration classroom and stood in the corridor for a moment, listening to the castle settle around him.
It was late — later than curfew, later than he should have been out of bed — but he was not tired.
He was the opposite of tired.
He was awake in a way he had not been since the night he first opened Andros’s notebook in the High Library, and the feeling had not faded since.
He had the dagger in his pocket.
He had the stone-to-water, water-to-feather lesson still turning over in his mind.
And he had a question he had not been able to answer since he sat down in that chair.
What happens if I ask for something no one else has thought to ask for?
He knew about the Room of Requirement.
He had known about it since he was six years old, since the first time he read the books in his previous life and realized that Hogwarts was not just a school but a place — a place with secrets layered so deep that even the people who lived in it for seven years never found them all.
The Room was one of those secrets.
Dobby had told Harry about it.
Neville had used it.
The DA had trained in it.
And Felix had filed it away the way he filed everything else, waiting for the moment when it would be useful.
That moment was now.
He walked.
He did not go to the seventh floor immediately.
He went to Gryffindor Tower first, climbed through the portrait hole, and made his way up to the dormitory.
Fred, George, Lee, and Jonah were all asleep, and Felix did not turn on any lights.
He found his trunk by touch, opened it, and pulled out the notebook he had been reading — the same one he had taken from the High Library before leaving Falker Manor.
He tucked it under his arm and left the dormitory as quietly as he had entered it.
Then he went up to the seventh floor.
The corridor was empty.
Felix stood in front of the blank stretch of wall opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy and looked at it for a long moment.
He had read about this.
He had read about it a dozen times.
The wall would open only if you walked past it three times while thinking about what you needed.
The Room would give you whatever you asked for — a place to hide, a place to train, a place to sleep, a place to learn.
Felix did not want a place to hide.
He did not want a place to sleep.
He wanted something specific, and he wanted the Room to understand exactly what he meant.
He closed his eyes and walked.
I need a place where I can get the most value out of these notes.
He walked past the wall once.
I need a place where Andros’s teachings can be studied and practiced and understood.
He walked past the wall twice.
I need a place where I can become what he became.
He walked past the wall a third time.
When he opened his eyes, there was a door.
It was not a large door.
It was not an ornate door.
It was a simple wooden door, dark and unmarked, set into the stone wall where there had been nothing a moment before.
Felix looked at it for a long moment, and then he reached out and turned the handle.
The door opened.
The room beyond was not what he had expected.
He had expected a library — shelves of books, a desk, a lamp, perhaps a comfortable chair.
What he found instead was a wide, circular chamber with a high ceiling and a floor of smooth grey stone.
The walls were lined with shelves, but the shelves did not hold books.
They held objects.
Small wooden blocks.
Glass spheres.
Coils of rope.
Folded paper.
A bowl of water that never spilled.
A candle that burned without consuming itself.
In the center of the room was a table, and on the table was a single book — not one of Andros’s notebooks, but a plain bound volume with no title on the cover.
Felix walked over and opened it.
The first page read:
Practice what you have read.
When you have mastered it, the room will give you more.
Felix looked at the shelves.
He understood.
The Room had not given him a library.
The Room had given him a workshop.
It had taken what he had asked for — a place to get the most value out of Andros’s notes — and it had decided that the most value did not come from reading.
It came from doing.
He set Andros’s notebook on the table and opened it to the first page.
Footwork comes first.
Before a duelist learns to cast, he learns to stand.
Before he learns to stand, he learns to move.
The feet are the foundation of everything that follows.
Felix read the passage twice.
Then he closed the notebook, stepped away from the table, and walked to the center of the room.
He began to practice.
He did not know how long he was there.
The room did not have windows.
The light came from somewhere above him, steady and even, and it did not change.
There was no clock on the wall and no sound from the castle beyond the door.
Felix moved through the footwork sequences Andros had written out — step, pivot, step, settle — and then he moved through them again, and then again, until his calves ached and his shoulders were loose and the movements had stopped feeling like movements and started feeling like breathing.
The shelves on the walls changed while he worked.
He did not notice at first.
He was too focused on the footwork, on the pivot, on the weight shifting from one foot to the other.
But when he stopped to rest, he saw that the shelves nearest him had rearranged themselves.
The stones had been replaced by small wooden figures — crude, faceless, no larger than his hand.
They stood in a line on the shelf, and each one held a tiny wooden wand.
Felix looked at them for a long moment.
Then he picked one up.
The figure was warm in his hand.
It did not move, but it seemed to be waiting.
Felix set it down on the floor in front of him and stepped back, and the figure raised its wand.
He barely got his own up in time.
The spell that came at him was not a real spell.
It was a spark, a flash of light, nothing that would have hurt him if it had connected.
But it was fast, and it was aimed, and it was the first time anything had ever cast at him.
He dodged to the side without thinking, and the figure’s wand tracked him, and a second spark flew past his ear.
He laughed.
He did not know why he laughed.
It was not funny.
It was just — the room had given him a partner.
The room had given him something to practice against.
He had spent three weeks drilling footwork in his father’s dueling hall with no one to test it on, and now there was a figure on the floor casting sparks at him and tracking his movements and forcing him to move the way Andros had written about.
He stepped forward and knocked the figure over with his foot.
It fell, and it did not get up.
Felix stared at it for a moment.
Then he picked it up, set it back on its feet, and stepped back.
It raised its wand again, and he spent the next hour learning how to avoid a spell.
When he finally stopped, his arms were shaking and his shirt was damp with sweat and he had lost count of how many times he had been hit.
The figure had not hurt him — the sparks were nothing, less than nothing, the magical equivalent of being tapped on the shoulder — but it had tagged him, over and over, and each time it did, he had learned something.
He had learned that it aimed for the center of his chest.
He had learned that it tracked his movement with a slight delay.
He had learned more in one hour in this room than he had learned in three weeks in his father’s dueling hall.
He sat down on the floor with his back against the table and looked at the shelves.
The figures were still there — a dozen of them, maybe more, all facing the center of the room and waiting.
Felix picked up Andros’s notebook and opened it to the next section.
When the feet have learned to move, the body learns to cast.
A duelist does not cast from stillness.
He casts from motion.
The spell is not the goal.
The spell is the continuation of the movement.
He read the passage twice.
Then he stood up, set the figure back on its feet, and stepped back.
It raised its wand.
Felix raised his.
He left the Room of Requirement at four in the morning.
He did not know it was four in the morning until he stepped out into the corridor and saw the pale grey light coming through the windows at the far end.
He had been in the Room for hours.
He had not noticed.
The Room had given him exactly what he needed, and he had used it until his body refused to continue.
He made his way back to Gryffindor Tower, climbed through the portrait hole, and went up to the dormitory.
Fred, George, Lee, and Jonah were still asleep.
Felix put Andros’s notebook back in his trunk and lay down on his bed without changing out of his clothes.
He was asleep in less than a minute.
The next morning, Fred noticed.
“You look terrible,” he said at breakfast.
Felix looked up from his porridge.
“Thank you.”
“Where were you last night?”
“Out.” Felix went back to digging into his porridge.
Working yourself to the bone in a room you didn’t even know existed until four in the morning really did give a person an appetite.
He had already finished one bowl and was most of the way through a second, and he had not said a word to anyone since he sat down.
Fred and George exchanged a look.
George leaned forward, elbows on the table, the way he did when he had decided something was worth his attention.
“Out where?”
“Just out.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s an answer,” Felix said, between bites.
“It’s just not a good one.”
Fred sat back with the expression of someone who had just decided to make this his problem.
“All right. We’re going to figure out what you’re up to.”
“Good luck.”
“We don’t need luck. We have each other.”
Felix looked up at that.
“That’s worse.”
George put a hand on Fred’s arm before he could respond.
“Let it go,” he said.
“He’ll tell us when he wants to.”
“He’ll never tell us.”
“Then we’ll find out ourselves.”
Felix did not look up from his porridge.
But he was smiling, just a little, and he was thinking about the wooden figures and the sparks and the way the Room had given him exactly what he asked for without him having to explain what he meant.
He had a place to train now.
He had a place to practice.
He had a place where Andros’s notes could become something more than words on a page.
And he had not even begun to ask the Room for what he really wanted.