Then he came back and again paced to and fro beside the house of his friend.
He knocked at the door with a hundred fears and reverences, lest any disrespectful word might escape from his lips.
A young man Apparated a couple of yards away from the large rusty gate. The lane beyond was pleasantly lightened by two rows of candles floating in the twilight.
He made directly for the labs on his left and crossed the elegant lobby. A young secretary was rummaging for something in a lower drawer beyond a large brass counter.
‘Excuse me, Sir.’
‘Ouch! Sorry. Sir, how can I help you?’
‘George Weasley, I have an appointment with Miss Philius.’
‘The director is on her way. Take a seat,’ the secretary invited.
George sat and noticed that the week-old Prophet was there on the coffee table, the one which, on page six, announced Neville’s appointment as a Hogwarts professor and the Magian Philius’ takeover of the prestigious foundation. He made to reread the article Magian Welcomed Back to Wizarding Community After Four Year Absence, but Cybele was coming down.
‘George!’
‘Cybele! How do you do? Hope I’m not coming at a wrong time?’
‘Not at all! Well, I am busy at the lab, but I’m so happy to see you. How are Angelina and the baby? Come, we’ll talk in the lab, if you don’t mind; the juniors are doing experiments and I’d rather not be far.’
‘Angie wanted me to come and show you some pictures. We know you won’t be able to leave the lab before the weekend.’
Cybele and George’s first meeting had been quite dramatic. She and Neville had come back on the First of September. Neville had made his professorship official and had immediately flown to Hogwarts, and she, Cybele, had gone over to Diagon Alley, filed with a mixture of guilt and happiness.
George was closing the shop when she arrived, and Lee was with him.
She stood at the door, the girl who had cast herself away, who had abandoned them after Fred’s death, left without saying goodbye… The girl they had let go, whom they had not convinced to stay, whose convictions they had judged and dismayed; the friend they had let Neville fly after.
There had been no need for words as all the guilt and the regrets passed through their eyes, leaving only, in a warm hug, the happiness to be reunited in peace.
They had all gone to George’s apartment, where Cybele had hugged a very pregnant Angelina while Lee was cooking a simple dinner. Adding to the night drama, Angelina had started delivery. A charming young Muggle woman named Amanda had Flooed over at Lee’s call for assistance, Lee and George had Apparated Angelina to St Mungo’s and Cybele had been left to contact the Burrow and announce to the Weasleys that they were just about to become grandparents for the third time.
Cybele had started work the following day and had just received a short note by owl from George saying, ‘It’s a boy. We’ve named him Fred.’
‘Oh, George, he’s gorgeous, look at him!’ Cybele exclaimed as she saw the pictures.
‘Well, no, actually, he’s red and itchy right now, just like old Uncle Fred! But he will be, if he has his mother’s good looks.’
‘Don’t! He’s the most beautiful little creature…’
‘Honestly, Cybele, you’ve been around too many baby mandrakes… I’m joking, I’m joking, don’t!’
Cybele had taken a twig off a nearby plant and was jokingly pointing it as a wand; they laughed. It felt good.
‘Don’t tell me you can use that, now. Seriously, if you get any more powers, I think even I will freak out!’ George said with a wink.
But Cybele was looking down at the twig, feeling a bit like she did ten years earlier in Ravenclaw Tower. Except, she knew how it felt, now. She had felt the flowing of magic, like a foreign humour in her body, the violence of her spells as she expelled the magic from her limbs through the wand. She had never felt it again, since the day in the dungeons, when she had wanted to smash Draco down, for making bad choices, for being a coward, for being a prejudiced git, for following his parents, for giving in to torture – but who could ever judge anyone for the last?
George was looking at her, taking in her saddened expression.
‘Where have you been, Cybele?’ he asked almost in a whisper.
But at that moment a gigantic red flower had risen from a glass tube and was over towering one of the lab’s juniors, opening its petals to revel sharp teeth.
‘Merlin! George, I’d better go. See you on Sunday! Seriously, Dennis, when did we ever mention an Engorgio charm?’
Where had she been? Cybele was replaying George’s question in her head later the same night, when after a satisfyingly exhausting day in the lab, she sat down once again at her desk, where blank papers where waiting for Severus Snape’s last co-authored book to be written.
The perfectly white parchment seemed to be staring at Cybele with reproach.
‘Where have you been, Cybele?’ Lee was echoing in George’s leaving room on Sunday, in the same careful whisper. Lee and his wife Amanda had made most of the conversation going on at lunch, as Angelina and George tended to yawn more than they talked, lately.
Angelina, helped by an Amanda quite gaga over the baby, had eventually left with Fred when he had fallen asleep, and she never came back, no doubt having fallen asleep with him.
‘The first year, we found nothing. It was hard out there; the wizards had flown abroad, most of them. I was about to abandon everything, to convince Caroline to give up – maybe I never really tried hard in the first place… I wanted to escape Hogwarts more than anything after Professor Snape… and all the confrontations, with you, with Draco. Anyway, that’s what we were doing when Fred called.’
‘Then why going back, Cybele? Why not staying after the battle?’
‘I didn’t know what to do with myself, honestly. When I saw Fred, Caroline, and all these mourning families, it may sound awfully selfish but I felt excluded, if anything.’
George just shocked his head softly.
‘So you wanted to escape again?’
‘We didn’t see it coming, Cybele, we thought you were back for good,’ Lee added.
‘I know, I thought that too, when Fred summoned me for the battle, but… It was as I tried to explain to you before; I was surrounded by a magic I had no grip on and which had no grip on me. I needed to understand. My own power of destruction frightened me. This time around I was determined to come back knowing everything there was to know about wizards and magi, and my own story.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what have you been up to, these last three years?’
‘I found them. The magi, the lost tribe, or whatever is left of them. It was pitiful. They have lost the knowledge of their own history, just as I would have if I had not come across the path of Dumbledore and Snape. They still see their magic as some religious rite and they hide it. They have come out with rules and they prevent themselves from performing most of what they can. Over the ages, they have lost most of their knowledge. They speak of how they will be punished if they use their powers, they really believe it. The truth is, they have been punished most cruelly for their magic over the last centuries.’
‘Cybele,’ Lee was lost for words.
‘Cybele, are they anything like… your family?’ George dared.
‘Yes and no. There are an ancient magic tribe, which I think might truly means they are the descendents of the mythological Magi. The Magi were the first magical humans ever and it seems that wizards were Muggles with magical abilities that the ancient Magi had identified and trained to perform magic, much like Hogwarts does. For some unknown reason, over time Magi have disappeared and wizards have survived and transmitted and developed their craft. Maybe because Magi were only a legend and really were just ancient wizards, maybe because they had to stop using their powers for an unknown reason and unlike wizards, their powers don’t build up if restrained but fad away and this is most likely what happened to the tribe I met…
‘But the fact is, neither myself or Rowena Ravenclaw were born Magian. That’s what Severus discovered before he left; a Magian, as we can agree that I am, has to be made. I am the product of a complex and most cruel enchantment. What magi tribes have is the power to perform this enchantment. You see, it has to be our blood. A power-hungry wizard must have, following an ancient spell, made them perform the ritual to make a Magian, not understanding what it really meant… thinking they were calling for some sort of prophet…,’ she added with a shudder.
‘Why did you ever stay there? Cybele, we should have gone for you, we thought-’
‘It took me time, to figure all this out and then, I… oh, it was so presumptuous of me, I wanted to help, I wanted them to understand. At the beginning they were happy because I was this Magian they had created, they believed I was a prophet. But when I started to tell them all the truth, the history, the magic; their chief Akhun classed me as a heretic. I spent the last year hidden, close to them, trying to help a group of dissidents who had believed me. That’s why it took so long to Neville to find me… and to let me see the light, too. These who had followed me had done it with the same obtuse faith with which the others had rejected me. That is what is left of my people,’ she concluded in a heavy silence.
‘Cybele, what do you mean they created you?’ George was asking with a strange look over his face.
Cybele sized up her two friends. She could not say they had never judged her for what she said or did, but she could not recall they had ever judged her for what she was. She knew she would have to try them.
‘When a Magian is created, a new life comes out of an old one. A vicious, violent, power-hungry and immortality-seeking man had convinced his tribe to perform the magic on him to become a true Magian. I was this man,’ she said simply, eluding the human sacrifice part of the enchantment, the part which had broken something in her forever.
A horrified silence stretched as Cybele looked at her feet. She eventually resumed.
‘But there are many things they didn’t know. The Magian nature controls itself in a simple yet efficient way. As only the violent and the power-hungry could seek for such depthless magic, the Magian who is created out of them is the very opposite of what the seeker had been, hence preventing the powers from being used to do harm.
‘The new Magian appears among Muggles, in the body of a ten or eleven year old of the opposite gender from the seeker, and generally instinctually travels back to the magi tribe, their memory perfectly wiped. This is how magi, before their virtual destruction, were kept a peaceful and good-doing breed. That also explains our powerful bonds of love: the magic of our creation holds a curse. So this is what I am. Neville reckons I should publish a book under my and Snape’s name about all this. I’ll probably do it.’
The two boys were silent. A soft, tiny baby cry came from the bedroom. Lee looked up at Cybele.
‘His- my name was Astor Sabzeh. That, Sabzeh, would be Greengrass in English, that’s why McGonagall registered it as my real name…’ Cybele explained sadly. Strangely enough, even though nobody would ever call her Astoria, feminine for Astor, Cybele resented it strongly. It denied her the illusion of not being that man at all anymore. A part of her thought she just deserved to be Cybele Philius, now.
And Lee answered her prayer.
‘He must have been a seriously vicious one, this man, Cybele, if you truly are his opposite.’
He hugged Cybele who smiled weakly, as Amanda came back and sat on an armchair with a fretting Fred in her arms. She took in the sight of the tears in her husband and George’s eyes but didn’t question.
‘Angelina has fallen asleep,’ she informed George. ‘Have you visited your friend Draco yet?’ she asked Cybele unexpectedly.
Even Lee looked up at his wife with surprise.
‘I met the man at this defence against the dark art introduction for Muggles, remember, at the PAMI?’ she said to him.
‘The what?’ asked Cybele
‘About the same time that Malfoy started his Auror training,’ started Lee, and Cybele’s heart missed a bit; Draco had fought in the final battle; That’s the only way he could have escaped Azkaban. She felt elated and frightened at the same time.
‘He created this association for Muggle spouses, like Amanda,’ Lee continued. ‘Volunteers offer a series of classes where they teach Muggles defensive strategies in case of wizarding attacks, a bit of history, those kinds of things. Neville had offered a seminar last year about how to take care of magical plants and creatures without magic.’
‘Mum goes regularly, too. She tries to help the spouses fitting into Wizarding households, you know, and she sells some of her magical products over there, too. She’s making a lot of money off her clocks,’ George added.
Cybele opened her mouth but no sound came out of it just yet.
‘It’s quite nice, really,’ Amanda resumed, ‘especially because you get to meet other Muggle spouses and it really helps to talk with people in your same position! I made a lot of friends there. But back to your friend, Mr Malfoy, he gives, himself, the defence sessions. He does that as a volunteer work in the weekend, see, on the top of managing the association and coordinating all the other volunteers. A most charming man, really. When he knew I was Lee’s wife, he mentioned you were his best friend.’
Cybele’s heart was beating so hard that she stupidly wondered how she could still hear what Amanda was going on about.
‘He has a knack for making Muggles feel at ease, you know,’ Lee’s wife was elaborating. ‘With personal anecdotes on how wizards can be awkward and clumsy in a Muggle environment. It makes us feel better about our own awkwardness, he’s so sweet.’
‘Is he?’ Cybele’s jaw was hanging very near the floor by then.
‘Yeah, you would know better, wouldn’t you? Lee told me you had always doted on him,’ she added, missing her husband shaking anxiously his head. ‘Anyway, how is he?’
‘Err… I haven’t got to see him yet, actually, I…’
‘Well, you should,’ George spoke. ‘It’s going to be just, you know, as easy as with us! You are friends; you are meant to be.’
‘He changed a lot, you know, after the war,’ provided Lee.
‘He really seems to have become a decent fellow,’ George added.
‘Yeah, you both have beaten the bad guy in you,’ Lee chuckled.
‘Yes,’ Cybele admitted weakly, ‘we had sort of an agreement, though; I kind of said that I would be back after five years,’ she defended poorly. The truth was, if she had been afraid that Draco might be just the same person she had left in a cupboard three years ago, she was now scared to death that the wonderful man he had apparently become would not want anything to do with such an imperfect being as herself.
‘Well, you’re a bit early, that’s all,’ George commented. ‘Seriously, go put the man out of his misery. He’s-’
‘But I am surprised Neville- I mean we had-’ Lee gave a quick glance at George, ‘assumed that Neville had told you all that back there. What did he say to make you come back, then?’
‘Nothing about Draco, he didn’t. I… Neville- he understood why I was there. I went hoping that I would belong, and when it became clear that I did not, I still did not dare to come back because I thought that, as a Magian, I had to put my extraordinary powers into extraordinary actions for the people I would live among, wizards or Muggles or else, and as far as helping the magi I was failing miserably.
He said that whatever I dis, if I did it well, would be extraordinary. He said he had thought he owed it to his family’s memory to be an Auror, but it had taken him more guts than anything else to dare to only become a Herbologist and now look at him! He said if I could enable him to go to Hogwarts by taking directorship of the foundation, he would be grateful, but that if I chose to just check the knight bus’ tickets with a smile, I’d still be his hero!’
The boys smiled.
‘That’s Neville,’ Lee summed up fondly.
Amanda was following the exchange with interest, guessing that the kind Auror in training she had met about a year ago when she had married Lee had somehow redeemed himself of some past misconduct, which explained why her husband obviously disliked him. And now the girl he had called his best friend, the girl George and Lee too, had called their best friend, this girl whose shadow had been around these past years, she had come back at last with stories to make them cry. Well, she may not know much about past wars and whatever magi was and magic herself, but she could tell that Mr. Malfoy’s kindness, however recent a development it might have been, was something genuine.
‘You should go now,’ she said a bit coolly.
Cybele looked up at her, unsure but not hostile. Amanda did not smile but locked the dark eyes with her piercing blue ones. She had Dumbledore’s eyes, Cybele realized.
‘It’s Sunday, he’s giving his session at the Ministry until four; you’ll catch him. Actually, could you come back with him one of these days? Angelina mentioned she would like to introduce Fred and I’ll be happy to see him again.’
‘Yeah, that sounds brilliant,’ George soon added, ‘anyway you need to speak to him soon, you are both invited to my sister’s engagement party next week: Harry insisted that he’s be present, as a symbol of peace and forgiveness. You don’t want to bump into him then, right?’
‘Makes sense,’ Lee insisted, ‘I mean, it’s all very good to wait a whole years just because you said so, but we are a small community, it’s going to be a headache to make table plans with you two around!’
‘Right, I’m gone,’ Cybele said, suddenly standing up, looking pale but determined.
The boys and Amanda beamed.
‘It was about time you obeyed us for once!’ George called after her as she ran to the door.