When we returned home for dinner - middag - the four of us dined on boiled potatoes and fish. I had the constant thought of Nerida Vulchanova in the back of my mind as I thought about what Sergius’ muggle parents might think if they found out she had died in 1332.
I listened attentively to the Moonbloods’ foreign conversation while I ate, even though I couldn’t understand a word of it.
“Jeg våknet veldig tidlig i morgen for å begynne baking og matlaging for julaften. Vil du hjelpe meg? Hva er du og Candie kommer til å gjøre hele dagen?” His mother was speaking so fast I couldn’t believe there were intelligible words in there.
Sergius was answering sparsely between bites of veg and shaking his head.
“Jeg ønsker å vise henne mer muggle ting. Hun forstår ikke TV eller kameraer eller noe. Og jeg tror ikke hun vet hvordan å lage mat. Vi kan hjelpe deg med å forberede seg på julaften i morgen kveld, men det er alt. Få ham til å hjelpe deg.”
Sergius motioned to his father at the end of the sentence, who looked up as if he’d been called upon.
He simply gave an unimpressed expression, muttered, “Lat ass kom hjem for hva,” and went back to picking apart fish bones with his fingers.
I tried to look alert and aware of the conversation but my thoughts were starting to drift back to that spot between the lakes; to the Vampires in the film from Sergius’ bedroom. A gargled meow broke out as the poof ball that was Tisha came padding silently into the room.
She wound her way under my chair, across the table, and then stopped next to the unlit hearth where a tiny green plate had been set upon the floor with scraps of milk and fish skins. I stared at her in restraint as I tried not to leave my seat to pet her. She was fluffier than Binky, with large amber eyes bigger than Kaia’s and an innocent expression like Professor Burbage always says - a deer in the headlights.
Sergius’ father bent in his chair to pick her up gently and hold her to him, both hands wrapped around either set of paws. She seemed frozen completely, and the tip of her pink tongue was poking out of her squished up face.
“Candie er besatt av katter” Sergius said, and his father looked up at me, stroking Tisha’s mass of fluff between her ears.
“Tisha is nice, but do not like to be bothered,” he said to me from our respective places across the table.
“Gi henne til meg.” Sergius took Tisha from his dad and turned towards me.
I raised a hand tentatively, but she hissed and stuck her tongue further out of her mouth.
“Tisha,” Sergius scolded back. “It’s okay, you can touch her.”
I raised my hand again and placed my forefinger on the flat little bridge of her nose to rub up and down. Unlike most cats I’d encountered, she didn’t seem to enjoy it or even close her eyes, instead those golden orbs were locked on mine menacingly.
Don’t look her in the eyes,” Sergius added, and I couldn’t help stifling a laugh.
“Wait a minute, does she have powers?” Sergius laughed and set her free, shrieking, on the ground as she scuttled away, then shook his head.
“What, what she say?” his mother asked as he continued to chuckle.
“Hun spurte om Tisha har noen magiske krefter fordi jeg fortalte henne ikke å se i øynene hennes.”
Sergius’ mom smiled at this and turned to me.
“We have Tisha for very long time, before we even hear Sergie is wizard,” she explained.
This only heightened my belief that Tisha was a familiar; a magical companion. What muggle creature could live that long? What power was held in those enormous eyes? If they hadn’t bought her at a Magical Menagerie knowingly, then she probably came from the Centaur’s forest.
Sergius’ mother abruptly changed the subject.
“Candie, your mother, she must miss you because you are not home for Christmas,” she said in a voice of concern.
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this, so I smiled, shrugged, and shook my head all at the same time.
“I usually stay at Hogwarts for Christmas anyways. I don’t go home. So this is nice.” I trailed off.
She turned to Sergius and murmured something in his ear.
“Vi har ikke en magisk jul her, kanskje hun ikke vil like det.”
Sergius immediately shook his head and spoke to me as he picked miniscule bones out of his mouth.
“She thinks you won’t like it here because we have a muggle Christmas.”
I was aghast, and did my best to display that I was apologetic.
“No! No, I can’t wait. I really like it here. There isn’t really a difference, is there? At school we just have a feast Christmas Eve, and the owl post brings us presents to our dorms instead of the Great Hall. It’s nothing special there. I really want to be here.”
Sergius nodded to his mom and she smiled, then we all went back to finishing our food.

I was too excited to sleep that night after tea as the day after tomorrow was Christmas Eve. I kept digging through my suitcase, analyzing its contents, wondering if I had the nerve to wear the Yule Ball dress I'd brought; what pajamas would be suitable for Christmas morning.
By the time I'd finally settled down Sergius had fallen asleep watching the Vampire movie again and as it ended, I retired to cuddle into his chest and drift off to the sound of his snores. We slept in the next morning and didn't leave his room until well into the afternoon.
He took to using my Muggle Studies textbook and his various technologies to explain to me the way his possessions worked. He refused to watch the vampire film yet again, but I was determined to master the television, so he put in an identical tape, this one inscribed with ‘Home Alone’, and we sat laughing through the entirety of it.
The young protagonist was forgotten by his family when they went on Christmas vacation, and he had to protect his house from villains intent on stealing his family’s possessions. The cleverness and the amount of effort he had to put into fooling and defeating the culprits - called ‘burglars’ - left me bewildered. Without magic nothing could be settled by a wizard’s duel; muggles had to be extraordinarily resourceful, like scavengers. I was convinced the various objects he had strewn about the house - called ‘boobytraps’ - were in fact portkeys, and the thieves would be whisked away unawares. There was something inherently special about the child, Kevin, and I kept waiting expectantly for the end of the film when it would be revealed he was of wizarding ancestry. When this didn’t happen I asked Sergius if the ‘actor’ was perhaps, a muggle-born wizard.
“No,” he sighed. When I picked up the annoyance in his voice I realized I was perhaps being prejudiced again.
“More!” I shouted excitedly, bent on getting into the Christmas spirit in the usual muggle fashion. I especially loved this film because it appeared to be in present day, and was in full colour, unlike the vampire film.
“No,” he repeated more forcefully. “This next.”
He held up a small black contraption with a headband connected to it. I raised an eyebrow at him. He motioned me over and we sat down on the plush white rug.
The object popped open in his hands and he revealed the contents to me. It was like a videotape but smaller and translucently black. He snapped it closed again then looked up at me.
“Okay, don’t be afraid,” he said as he raised the headband over my ears. I went wide eyed with fear anyway but sat perfectly still. He took my finger and pushed it over one of the buttons on the machine. It bent in and then sound began pouring from the headband directly into my ears. It was a song I recognized, one of my brother Roman’s holiday favourites. I looked up at Sergius and smiled, then tried to speak so he could hear me.
“I KNOW THIS ONE!” I shouted over the jingling bells and crooning tones. He laughed and reached up over my head, pulling it off of me, trailing curls of my hair with it until they slipped through his fingers. The music drifted away and then ceased as Sergius placed it over his own ears. Only one person could listen at a time.
I crawled over beside him and stretched the headband until it snapped over my ear. One on his, one on mine.
Have a holly, jolly Christmas;
It's the best time of the year
I don't know if there'll be snow
but have a cup of cheer
Have a holly, jolly Christmas;
And when you walk down the street
Say Hello to friends you know
and everyone you meet


Oh ho
the mistletoe
hung where you can see;
Somebody waits for you;
Kiss her once for me
Have a holly jolly Christmas
and in case you didn't hear
Oh by golly
have a holly
jolly Christmas this year
When the song ended he took the headband off - which I later learned was called ‘headphones’ (for reasons I am still not sure) - and turned to wiggle his nose against mine. I giggled and grinned, and was just reaching for the headphones again as his kiss landed on my neck and there was a knock at the door.
“Hello? Can I come in?” Sergius’ mother pushed the door open and stepped in, wearing a pair of fuzzy blue slippers and an oversized t-shirt dress.
“ Kom lage varm sjokolade for deg og Candie, så gå utenfor. Du må forlate dette rommet,” she spoke down to Sergius.
“Ja mor,” he replied. She scuttled away and he rose to his feet, pulling me up with him.
He took my hand and we left the room, padding down the hallway and following her into the kitchen.
“Sit, Candie, sit,” she beckoned, and I took the seat that had been allotted to me at every meal since I’d come here. Tisha was perched on Sergius’ father’s chair, looking up at me wide eyed and wary. I decided to pretend I hadn’t seen her in order to perhaps enjoy her presence a bit longer. She jumped down and ran out into the living room anyways.
I watched while Sergius helped her about the stove and then ladled me a mug of hot chocolate. Rather than sitting down beside me he pulled me by the hand into the living room (where Tisha’s tail could be seen immediately disappearing around the corner) and we plopped down on the sofa to relish our rich treat.
Suddenly the front door to the cottage opened and a gust of cold wind swept into the room. Sergius’ father entered, turned to me and smiled. Then he motioned to Sergius.
“Kom hjelpe meg å bære treet ut av garasjen,” he said, then walked back out the door. Sergius followed him and I knelt from my position on the sofa to gaze out the lacey window curtains at them as they trudged together through the snow to the other side of the house.
I strained to see after them but surrendered to finish sipping the creamy hot chocolate until they rounded the corner again. Sergius was walking backwards toward the house, and they were carrying something between the two of them.
I jumped up to open the door for them and stepped aside as the blast of cold air hit my bare legs. It was probably time to change out of my pajamas now.
Sergius backed through the door, muttering back and forth to his father as they craned and leaned this way and that, trying to fit their enormous package through the little cottage entryway.
“Løft høyere og da vil vi gå til venstre.”
He was motioning to the left towards me and I realized I was probably standing right in their way. I shuffled aside; scampering back toward the kitchen as what they carried came into view.
It was an evergreen tree, almost black it was so dense and dark, and much too tall to fit in the cozy space we occupied.
I gasped and pushed against the wall next to the little mirror and half moon table, watching uncomfortably as they hauled it all the way through the doorway on its side, arguing about where to put it up.
“I hjørnet vil det passe,” his dad kept repeating, but Sergius shook his head.
“Sett det i sentrum, foran vinduet, og jeg vil gjøre det passer,” he said imploringly.
I watched on in amazement. How could they be arguing about this now? They most plainly could have seen from outside that this tree couldn’t possibly fit within the house. Suddenly Sergius’ mom appeared next to me in the doorway to the kitchen and settled the matter for them.
“Sett det i midten og Sergie vil gjøre det passer uten å gjøre treet mindre. Ja?”
She nodded and smiled happily at me, then returned to her preparations in the kitchen.
Sergius’ father seemed to have accepted this solemnly and they were now laying the tree on its side on the floor. It stretched across the whole living room, shedding coarse pine needles everywhere.
They stepped back and his father walked away to stand next to me gruffly. I tried to manage a weak smile at him as communication but he was focused solemnly on Sergius and the tree.
Stepping around the tree, Sergius walked over to the corner where I assumed his father actually believed it would fit, and took his staff out from the shadows. I felt a spark of excitement go through me. Of course, he was going to use magic! But why hadn’t they just gotten a smaller tree? If he had to shrink it now, what was the point of chopping down such a magnificently large one?
Without looking back at his father, who now had his arms crossed in defeat over his broad chest, he stood directly in front of us and banged the staff once on the ground.
“Rekonstruere,” he enunciated clearly, and all at once the cottage roof became tented, allowing just enough space for the tree’s top needles to brush it.
Then he murmured, “Oppreist!” and tilted his staff slightly toward the horizontal tree. Transparent blue ribbons swirled around its thick branches and soon the enormous tree was hoisted into standing position under the reconstructed ceiling.
His mother was clapping from her view in the kitchen.
I wanted to help too and so pulled out my wand and waved it over the floor, calling, “Mundum.” The pine needles that had gotten lost in the carpet resituated themselves back on the tree.
Sergius’ father nodded and scoffed, then walked away past the living room.
“It is so beautiful,” Mrs Moonblood cried, coming back in from the kitchen. “Father think he does not need magic to do this but he know tree is too big. And I like big tree,” she laughed.
“Where did that even come from?” I asked as Sergius placed his staff back in the corner, now hidden more thoroughly among the dark pine.
“My dad chopped it down with some friends about a week ago. It was lying in the garage.”
Garage? I thought to myself incredulously. I hadn’t seen a garage. Sergius’ mother spoke up before collecting our mugs and hurrying away.
“Du bør forlate huset. Ta henne ut i bilen, viser hennes ting. Hun kom ikke hit bare for å sitte hele dagen,” she said, disappearing to stoke the fire. Sergius turned to me.
“She said we should go out instead of staying inside all day.”
I looked down at my little pajama shorts, fuzzy blue sweater.
“Where else is there to walk?” He shook his head.
“We’ll take the car.”

After we’d dressed and said goodbye I followed Sergius around the right corner of the house, the opposite direction we had always walked (the left being toward the village and his room and straight ahead leading to the Centaur’s forest) where a sheltered structure stood attached to the right wall of the cottage. A large shape I knew to be a car was covered in a beige coloured tarp.
We learned about the car in first year Muggle Studies, as it is the most obvious and populous of muggle inventions. Since non-magical folk cannot power a broomstick or apparate or even use the Floo Network, they often get around by ‘vehicles’ called cars. There are many variations, such as buses, trucks, trains, subways, and vans, which Professor Burbage quizzed us on extensively. Muggles can fly, actually, but they use technology rather than magic to power yet another vehicle called ‘airplanes’.
Sergius went around the left side of the car and slipped the covering off to reveal a dark green Lada with enormous black tires. The back read ‘Grønn’.
“I’m going to assume you don’t know how to drive?” he asked, prying open the door and looking over at me with his eyebrows raised. I stared back at him blankly without saying a word and he came around to open the passenger side door for me.
I crouched down and sat in the car, wincing when he shut the door after me. He climbed in and began running his hands over the seats, returning clutching a ring of jangling keys. I felt a jolt of fear go through me - I’d only ever seen or heard a set of keys like that when Filch was around.
“What is its name?” I asked as he pushed the keys into a slot by the large round wheel in front of him. The car began to shake and hum and I grabbed onto his arm, digging in my nails.
“What name?” he asked back, peeling my hand off his arm and holding it in his lap.
“Grønn,” I replied. “Isn’t that the car’s name?”
He looked at me confusedly and shrugged.
“Sure. You can call it that.”
I smiled and wiggled in my seat as he reached across from me and fastened a strap over my chest. I knew this was a muggle safety precaution and did, as a matter of fact, actually feel safer. Then he pulled his door closed with a bang and clicked his own safety strap into place.
The car had begun to slowly warm up and I took off my mittens, placed them in my lap.
“So where are we going?” I asked. Sergius didn’t reply to me at first but seemed to be concentrating on working the car; fiddling with the assorted mirrors around the vehicle and pulling and pushing buttons, until we finally started to roll backwards out of the little shelter.
“You’ll see,” he answered as the car carried us through the thick fields of snow onto a dirt road leading out of the village.
We drove down a long slope and I got my first glimpse of Svalbard for what it really was: glaciers. Great cliffs of ice began to rise up on either side of us as we carried on down the road, eventually passing a sign that read ‘Longyearbyen’.
Soon a colourful menagerie of homes and buildings came into view amid the mountainous backdrop as we entered the settlement.
“This is where my dad used to live - he’d commute to Sveagruva on the mainland to work in the mines before he met my mum at the University. After I was born we moved out to Ny Ålesund and we haven’t left Svalbard ever since.”
I nodded and imagined Sergius as an infant; his mother young and unbeknownst to just how special he was. Then I thought about the Durmstrang ruins again.
“Your parents live so close to school, why could you never visit or go home for the holidays?”
He made a face that alighted that the matter was more complicated.
“The castle may be physically on Svalbard, but the school isn’t, really.”
I raised an eyebrow and looked at him, although his eyes were still focussed on the road.
“To get into Durmstrang, you have to use the Floo Network. It takes you to the fireplace in the dining hall,” he continued, and I got the mischievous feeling he wasn’t supposed to be telling anyone any of this.
“On the first day of term, the network is closed. No one comes in or out. It is opened again for the summer. Even if I wanted to go home, I couldn’t. You can’t see anything of Svalbard or Ny Ålesund within the confines of the castle grounds. It’s so well unplotted it kind of exists within its own dimension. Everything’s foggy, and all we’ve got to look at is lake. Durmstrang is a world apart from muggles and wizards alike.”
He paused to let all of this mull over in my mind. So many secrets, I thought. How could Karkaroff let him leave? No wonder there was no formal exchange program, nobody could be allowed in and out of the school from the outside wizarding world without spilling all of its secrets.
“Why did they let you leave?” I asked quietly as the car slowed to a stop on the edge of town. He turned to me, one hand still on the wheel.
“I told you, to show off. There’s no point being ‘the best wizarding school in the world’,” he said in a mock accent, “if you can’t brag about it every once in a while. They opened up the Floo Network for a group of us to travel to the mainland where we boarded the Durmstrang ship and flew - yes, the viking ship flies - to the Black Lake. To Hogwarts.”
“Yes, but … how were you allowed to stay?” I pressed on.
“Oh,” he answered offhandedly, “I think Karkaroff didn’t realize his mistake until it was too late. I’d already left. How could he force me to return? Dumbledore accepted me as a student and that’s all I needed.”
He took the key out and the car stopped humming; became silent, then Sergius turned to me. “I don’t regret leaving,” he said, looking me in the eyes, his arm around the back of my seat.
I smiled and nodded meekly. “I know.”
He leaned over and kissed me; swirled a tendril of my hair around his thick finger. I looked at his eyes and saw the same icy blue reflected past his head in the glacial waters outside, and suddenly got an idea.
“Is there somewhere we can put the car where no one can see it?” I asked.
“Maybe, why?” he returned, a devilish grin spreading across his face. I shook my head and giggled.
“No, not like that. Just somewhere nobody will notice the car … disappearing?” His brow furrowed as he thought hard for a moment, then he turned the car back on and we crawled up the zig zag road through the homes by the water; the shops up the hill; all the way to the University nestled between the dip in the mountains.
The car rounded a corner and hid behind a small building marked ‘Forskningssenter’. He took the keys again and looked at me.
“Alright, now what?”
I took out my wand and first, before all else, conjured the waterproof bluebell flames that would keep us warm while the car lied dormant. Then, focussing my attention on the panel of buttons and dials that were laid in front of us I pointed my wand and concentrated on commanding the vehicle by its name.
“Grønn,” I called, “Fugite Invisibilia!” The vehicle groaned but nothing happened. I frowned and repeated the incantation three more times before trying the same but instead calling it ‘Lada’. It did not work.
“Try using, ‘Fly Usynlig’,” he whispered, and I did my best to repeat the pronunciation, this time calling on Grønn again. The car vibrated slightly, even becoming somewhat transparent, before groaning and returning to an ordinary muggle object.
I stamped my foot in frustration and gripped my wand tightly, pointing it menacingly at the front window.
Sergius smacked a palm to his forehead and looked at me.
“Wait, I got it. Say, ‘Letat Nevidimym’.”
I stared at him blankly. The foreign words had gone right over my head, just like the thestral’s name, and we had to repeat them over and over to each other until I sounded right.
“Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym, Letat Nevidimym!”
This time, without my meaning to, the car lurched upward, and began flickering in and out of visibility.
I gasped and beamed back at Sergius, who was still clutching the wheel tightly in his hands, his knuckles turning white as he tried to regain control. I repeated it one last time for stability.
“Grønn, Letat Nevidimym.”
The car stopped shaking and became completely transparent to the outside world; we could see nothing but the back of the University building and grey sky in the little mirrors outside our respective doors.
Then we slowly rose straight up off the ground, soaring higher until we were comfortably three times as tall as any building in Longyearbyen. Sergius took control of the wheel again and began steering us out over the town, toward the freezing waters, over the tips of the glaciers, pulling up to rise higher. The bluebell flames in the backseat cast a glow throughout the car that made me feel like a ghost floating over the sea.
I turned to Sergius as we levelled out over the pure white of a glacier.
“Why didn’t the spell work with a latin incantation, or even a Norwegian one?” I asked him quizzically. He shrugged.
“It’s a Russian-made car. I guess even with a Scandinavian name - which you gave it - it still speaks Russian.”
He pointed out a polar bear as we flew over and I admired it fearfully. Its fur glared yellow against the stark white snow.
“So, what do you want to see?” he asked after we’d been flying the length of the glacier for a while in silence.
“I don’t know, is there anything I should see?” I returned. His full lips disappeared as he chewed them; coarse hairs from his beard sticking up as he thought about this.
“We could fly over Nordaustlandet,” he answered, already turning Grønn’s wheel to the right as we changed course and dipped past the mountains. “We’ll have to go higher.”
I was confident of my magic, and of Grønn’s capabilities, but I also found myself wishing Sergius had brought his staff with him - even if miniaturized in wand form. He could command Grønn much better, as I’d seen the kind of advanced magic he could do (construction spells?!) and he also knew how to speak to the car in its native tongue. I could barely pronounce Russian. If something were to go wrong, we would spend our last moments plummeting to earth with Sergius frantically trying to teach me the right words to say. Still, Grønn rose higher and we were soon engulfed by a flurry of clouds.
When we emerged over a land mass there were no roads or towns visible, only ice. It was beautiful to see it glinting off the surrounding waters, but I wondered why Sergius had wanted to show me this deserted area of Svalbard. He warned me to hold on as we took a quick nosedive, rather broom-like, toward the ground, landing softly and sliding smoothly until I commanded Grønn to stop.
“Ostanovit,” Sergius told me calmly, even though we were still sliding along the icy surface toward the water. I repeated it with as much authority as I could muster and Grønn grunted, then locked his wheels and came to a halt. We jerked forward in our seats then each breathed an even sigh of relief. Sergius unfastened his safety strap and opened the door, looking over at me.
“Are you coming?” he asked. I stared back at him, the strap still tight on my chest, hands gripping the seat.
He got out and walked around to the other side of the car and opened my door carefully.
“It’s alright,” he said. “No polar bears here right now.”
I narrowed my eyes at the way he’d said ‘right now’ and he laughed. “They’ll listen to your latin, don’t worry.” He pressed down on the button next to my safety strap and it popped off of me. Then he took my hand and guided me out of the car. My little black boots slid over the ice and I had to pull on his jacket to steady myself.
“Have you been here before?”
He shook his head. “I would’ve flown over earlier had I thought to use the car. Actually, my dad would kill me, so maybe not. If I’d had a broom I’d have been over here already.”
“What about the thestral? Val….” I trailed off after mistakenly trying to pronounce the name. Sergius laughed.
“He’s not exactly tame. I’d never try that.”
He looked expectantly back at me, used to my casual volleying of questions. I wondered if he had Ravenclaw types at his school that often did the same. Maybe the traits that made me part of a group at Hogwarts were what made me unique to him. I continued my line of questioning anyway.
“When do you learn to apparate?” I asked, skating forward to find a patch of fluffy snow.
“Final year. So technically I’ll learn it at Hogwarts two years earlier than I would have at Durmstrang, but because you’re not allowed to practice magic outside Hogwarts, I won’t be able to use it,” he laughed. “Except for Christmas; maybe Easter. But I might as well just use the Floo Network. Less possibility of getting splinched.”
I winced at this comment, as the idea of half-apparating somewhere and leaving a part of yourself behind had haunted my nightmares ever since my cousin Melatrick had left a chunk of her knee in Dublin one summer.
Feeling a chill after leaving the bluebell flames in the backseat of the car, I pulled out my wand, waved it up and down over my body and chanted, “Calidos,” until the freezing breeze was blocked out of my clothes.
“Do my gloves,” he said, holding his enormous hands out to me.
“You’re cold?!” I exclaimed in playful surprise. I’d had to sleep in shorts and a tank top every night since we’d left Hogwarts because his body heat was so intense, else I’d wake in the middle of the night sweating.
He thrust his mitts out to me again and I waved my wand over them lavishly.
“Thanks,” he replied, throwing his arm around my shoulders as I placed my wand back safely in my coat pocket.
As we traveled further into the snowbanks and away from the car, I looked back at it. It looked like a fat little shrubbery with its dark green paint standing out against the grey sky, white ground underfoot, and the blue sea surrounding us.
When my boots finally found traction on the snowy ground I tried to carve a shape into the snow with my boot, but it was too light and soft, not packing snow at all, so I only managed to throw up gusts of snowflakes into the wind. I felt slightly annoyed by this, then grinned.
“It’s perfect!” I exclaimed, collapsing down into the snow, spreading my arms and legs wide around me.
Sergius looked down at me in an amused confusion. I moved my limbs back and forth in their star shape, creating a snow angel, then carefully stood up, hopping as far out of the way as possible. I gazed down at my creation and twisted my mouth to one side. It was missing something crucial.
Pulling out my wand and pointing it delicately just above where the hood of my coat had laid I shouted, “Lumen Vultus!” and a glowing yellow halo lighted over the snow angel’s head. Sergius gave me a kiss on the cheek and then sat in the snow beside my imprint.
I carefully laid down back inside the angel, careful not to ruin it or touch the magically conjured halo, and turned to squint at him through the snow.
“How do you say ‘snow angel’ in Norwegian?” I asked.
“Snø engel,” he replied.
“Oh.”
He took my mitten in his hand and pulled it off to reveal my bare fingers. They instantly felt the freeze of a winter on Svalbard and I grimaced.
“One second,” he said, using both hands to slip mine inside his mitten, his fingers interlocking with mine. I smiled and looked up at him, the question I’d been wanting to ask since we met finally forming on my lips.
“Why did you talk to me that night you sat with Ravenclaw?”
“What do you mean?” he asked back, eyebrows raised expectantly; lips pursed.
“I just...I don’t get it.”
I looked into his eyes searchingly and he pressed his forehead to mine; rubbed my cheek with his other glove.
“Because,” he said before planting his lips tenderly on mine. He looked back into my eyes. “You’re my snow angel.”
I smiled but still felt confused. “But-”
“Shh,” he murmured, bringing his lips back to mine again. “You shush.”
I nodded and we laid quietly in the snow until Grønn began to honk its horn in great blaring blasts. We sat up and squinted in the direction of the dark mass.
“That can’t be good.”
A polar bear had reared up out of the icy waters to stand in the foreground. We struggled to our feet, but the bear was already charging; too fast. I stumbled backwards and hit the wall of the snow drift with a thud, knocking the wind out of my lungs as I tried to free my wand from my parka pocket. Grønn was flashing the lights at the front of the car on and off as the bear tore past it, leaping and bounding on all four of its mighty paws directly to us.
With my wand finally in hand fear clouded my mind and remembering the boggart Acromantula from Halloween I loudly called out, “Ridikulus!”
The polar bear kept charging, gaining speed and I shook my head, pointed my wand again and screamed, “Expelliarmus!”
The bear faltered in its steps and seemed confused; began stumbling; but still carrying on forward. Sergius grabbed me by the shoulders and shouted.
“It’s not a boggart or a wizard, Candie!”
But I couldn’t help it, Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons were racing through my mind; wizarding duels and deathly spells. As the bear continued to stumble the hex ‘Sectumsempra’ alighted in my mind but I shook it off.
Then I found the right spell in the archives of my brain, a sweet and simple charm from Professor Flitwick’s class second year.
“Se Somnum,” I stated calmly, and the bear immediately quit fumbling toward us and laid, yawning, down in the snow. It was soon fast asleep. Grønn was wheeling carefully toward us, slipping slowly on the ice before hitting the traction of the snow and coming to a halt at our feet, flinging its doors open.
We didn’t have to be told twice as I climbed over the driver’s seat to the passenger side and Sergius buckled his strap and used the key to take control of Grønn again. We rose slowly, then zoomed out away from Nordaustlandet.
I didn’t look back at the bear but knew it would be waking shortly. My somnum charm was only ever good enough for naps. As Grønn steadied out to fly scenically over the colourful settlement from which we had departed, Longyearbyen, I turned to Sergius, still breathing hard.
“I thought you were joking about the bears.”
“I didn’t really expect one to show up. There’s thousands in the sea but, I don’t know. I thought we’d be in and out of there pretty quick,” he replied, glancing over at me solemnly.
“I can’t wait to tell Professor Flitwick his charm worked on an angry bear. Lupin would be unimpressed, though…” I laughed, trailing off. Sergius shook his head.
“No, you saved us.”
“Yeah well, I don’t think I’m going to be leaving your room for a while after this,” I retorted. He chuckled and Grønn groaned. “Unless we’re safe inside Grønn, here,” I added, and something within the car clanked with approval.
We began to lose altitude as we approached the Moonbloods’ little village of Ny Ålesund, and it was only from above I realized how dense and dark the snow capped forest of the Centaurs was. Grønn landed softly in the fluffy snow and Sergius steered us safely back under the shelter.
We unfastened our straps and pried open the doors, letting them slam shut after us.
“Uh, I don’t think my dad’s going to be too happy if the car takes off without him in it,” he said, pausing as we exited the shelter. I looked back at Grønn sadly, then raised my wand to return it to an ordinary muggle object but then remembered it doesn’t take commands in latin.
Faltering, I looked to Sergius.
“Obychnyy Obyekt,” he repeated slowly and clearly. I nodded and expelled a deep breath.
“Sorry, Grønn.” The car beeped lightly and I raised my wand. “Obychnyy Obyekt.”
We strolled back through the snow and Sergius held the door open for me, helped me up the snow drift that had risen outside. Tisha was perched on the armchair backing and I froze when I saw her. The yellow orbs she had for eyes stared back at me and as Sergius stepped in behind me, closing the door I turned my nose up at her.
“I put a polar bear to sleep today,” I said matter-of-factly, and I kicked off my boots and stomped off in the direction of Sergius’ room, followed by his laughter.