The Blue Birds

Harry and the two Dumbledores entered the room, and Mrs. Cole closed the door on them.

The room was bare: the iron bedstead, the wooden chair, the old wardrobe in the corner, a window giving onto a flat grey London afternoon. Nothing in it looked as though it belonged to anyone. Even the book the boy on the bed was holding had a library spine, the cloth rubbed pale at the corners where many hands had carried it before his.

Tom Riddle was sitting with his legs stretched out. There was no trace of the Gaunts in his face. Merope had got her dying wish: he was his handsome father in miniature, tall for eleven years old, dark-haired, and pale. His eyes had narrowed the moment Dumbledore came in, moving over the plum velvet suit, the auburn hair, the long beard, the eccentricness of him.

"How do you do, Tom," said the younger Dumbledore, holding out his hand.

Riddle looked at the hand a beat too long before he took it. The handshake was short. He let go first, and wiped his palm on the blanket.

"I'm doing well," Riddle said, slowly, wary. "Who are you?"

"I am Professor Dumbledore."

"Professor," repeated Riddle. His eyes went to the door that Mrs. Cole had shut just a moment before. "Is that like a doctor?"

"No," said Dumbledore, and sat down on the wooden chair. He folded his hands over one knee and settled in.

Riddle stared at him. "She sent for you, didn't she," he said.

"No. She didn't send me. I asked her to let me come, and she did."

Something shifted on Riddle's face. He had asked the question to catch the lie in it, and there had been no lie, and so he had to look again, had to think, to ask another question.

"What do you want?" Riddle asked.

"I would like to talk to you. It's about a school."

"What school?"

"A school called Hogwarts."

Something flickered in Riddle's face. For a moment he looked like he was about to jump backwards, to react, to move. Instead, he took a deep breath and said, "I've never heard of it."

"No," said Dumbledore, a smile playing on his lips. "I should have been very surprised if you had."

Riddle stared at him. Then he shook his head. "No. You're lying," he said, hard and flat, like a hand laid against a door to prevent anyone coming in. The window did not rattle, but Harry half-expected it to with the way Riddle said those words. Beside him, the older Dumbledore had gone still as a held breath.

The younger Dumbledore did not look offended. "I'm not lying," he said.

"Then tell the truth!"

And now there was no mistaking it. The three words came down like a fist on a table, and Harry felt the whole room tilt toward the boy. A voice that had been used before, many times, on people who did as they were told.

Dumbledore let it land. He let the anger come, and crest, and the wave of it break against him and slide back, and he did not move at all.

"I am telling the truth," he said, quite gently, then. "And I think we should settle one thing first, before anything else. You may ask me whatever you like, Tom. You may doubt every word I say. You may tell me to leave, and I will leave. But you may not order me. Not ever."

For a moment the boy only stared at him. The fist had hit the table and the table had not moved, and he did not seem to know what to do with a thing like that.

"You're not... from the asylum," he said at last.

"No."

"Right," he said, slowly. "But Mrs. Cole thinks I belong in one."

"I don't."

"You don't know me."

"That's true."

"Then how could you say that you don't think I belong in an asylum." He had drawn his knees up now. The book slid down the blanket, slowly, forgotten. "How could you... say anything at all about me, then?"

"Because I know what you are," said Dumbledore.

The change in Riddle's expression was immediate. He sat up straighter, looking at Dumbledore intensely.

"What am I?" he asked.

"You are a wizard, Tom."

The cart passed in the street below. A child shouted somewhere, and another laughed, and a tap began to drip in the corridor, and Riddle heard none of it. He was looking at Dumbledore with a hunger Harry found hard to watch.

"A wizard," he said. The word came out of him quietly.

"Yes."

His hands had closed on the edges of the book. "So it's magic. The things I can do."

"Yes."

The colour came up in his face then, not much, a faint warmth high in the cheeks, and it made him look, for one second, like an ordinary boy who had been given a good piece of news. "I knew it. I knew it!" He was speaking fast now, almost to himself. "I always knew. I can make things move. I can make things happen when I want them to. I can make animals come to me. And I can make people sorry, when they bother me. Properly sorry. It's all magic!"

Harry looked at the younger Dumbledore's face and found nothing there he could put a name to. No disappointment, no horror, none of the admiration Harry had half-expected. There was only a close, careful attention, the kind Harry's aunt used to wear at the kitchen window when the sky over Privet Drive turned the colour of a coming storm.

"So you have had some control over it," Dumbledore said.

"More than some."

"I see."

Riddle looked at him. "You're not surprised by that."

"I have met children before who could do strange things without understanding them."

The warmth in Riddle's face cooled at once. "Other children."

"Yes."

"How many?"

"A great many, over the years."

"They can do what I do."

"Some of them can do many of the things you've described. Some can do things you can't. And there will be things you can do that they cannot." Dumbledore said it plainly, as though he were reading a boy the news about something happening just a street over, and Riddle listened. He listened hard.

The grey light moved a little on the wall. Riddle turned the information in his head for a while. "So I'm not," he started, "I'm not the only one," he finished.

"No."

The boy looked down at his hands, and back up, and his jaw had set. Dumbledore did not fill the silence for him. He let it sit there until Riddle had to pick it up himself.

"But," he started again, "I'm different from the rest of them."

"You may be."

"I am." He said it low, and there was the danger in it again, quiet and patient, like something coiled under a stone.

"Then Hogwarts is where you'll find out what kind of difference it is," said Dumbledore, and his voice did not change at all. "That is, if you would like to come."

Riddle looked as though he might argue. Instead, his eyes went, again, to Dumbledore, taking in his appearance. "Are you a wizard too?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Prove it, then."

"No," said Dumbledore.

The boy went very still. His expression fell into something that Harry could almost register as surprised.

"...No?"

"I will not do magic because you've ordered me to do magic. I have told you. That door doesn't open."

The pale face emptied of everything, but Harry had the sense of a great deal moving behind it, fast, the way water moves under ice.

"I only asked," Riddle said.

"You told."

A pause. Somewhere below, the laughing child went quiet.

Then, in a voice gone suddenly low and quiet, Riddle said, "Would you show me, Professor. Please."

"Certainly," said Dumbledore.

He drew his wand, and Riddle's eyes fastened on it with a greed so naked that Harry felt his own face heat in second-hand embarrassment. But Dumbledore did not take that in mind; he turned his wand toward the cracked white jug on the washstand.

A second passed. Slowly, the jug lifted off the stand, tilted, and poured a thin rope of water into the air and the water did not fall. It hung there, twisting and bright, and then it broke apart into a dozen droplets that arranged themselves in a circle, and each droplet became, for the space of a breath, a small, transparent blue bird with beating wings.

They flew once around the little room, silent as falling snow. One passed close enough to Harry that he ducked. Then they came back together over the washstand, ran into one stream again, and poured themselves neatly home. The jug settled where it had stood.

Riddle's mouth had come open. He shut it quickly.

"Where do I get one of those," he said, looking at the wand.

"I will tell you. In good time."

"I want one now."

"I had rather gathered that."

"You said I'm a wizard." His eyes flicked up. "Wizards have wands."

"They do. And a wand is a tool, Tom. It tells people a great deal about the person holding it." Dumbledore turned the wand once in his fingers, almost idly, and put it away. "More than they usually mean to say."

Riddle watched the wand disappear with the look of a boy watching a meal carried back into the kitchen. "With one of those," he said, "I could do anything I wanted."

"You could do a great deal."

"I could make them stop."

"Who?"

The shutters came down. Riddle's face closed over, smooth and blank, and he looked at the wall.

Dumbledore did not chase it. "At Hogwarts, you'll be taught to use magic well."

"I already use it well."

"Do you? What do you use it for?"

Riddle frowned. "For doing things."

"What things?"

"Whatever I want."

"Then you don't yet know what it's for," said Dumbledore, "which is no shame at eleven. Most people don't. Some never learn."

The flush climbed Riddle's neck. "You said I was special."

"I said you are a wizard. It's not the same as being special, and I think you already know it is not, or it wouldn't make you so angry that I said it."

Harry glanced sideways. The old Dumbledore's face gave away nothing at all.

When he looked back, Riddle's gaze had slipped to the wardrobe, fast, and away. It was so quick that Harry didn't quite understand the air had changed.

"There's something else," said Dumbledore.

"What is it."

"The things in your wardrobe."

For a single second the boy looked frightened, truly frightened, a child's fear, here and gone. Then it was suspicion again, cold and watchful. But Harry had seen it, and so had Dumbledore.

"What things," Riddle said.

"Things that aren't yours."

"You can't know that."

"I do, though."

"You looked." A beat. "Or you did magic. You read it off the walls or something."

"I did neither. I won't fetch them out by magic either, before you ask."

That stopped him. Whatever he had braced himself for, it wasn't this. "Why not?" he asked.

"Because I would like you to fetch them out yourself."

Riddle stared. Harry watched the anger in him reach for somewhere to go and find no purchase, no hand grabbing his collar, no fist, no spell, no shout, nothing to hate. Only a man on a wooden chair, waiting, with his hands folded on his knee.

"I don't know what you mean," Riddle tried.

"Yes, you do."

"You can't prove they're not mine."

"Perhaps not to anyone else."

"Then you can't make me."

"No." Dumbledore tilted his head, the smallest amount. "But I can ask. And I can tell you that the first thing you learn from me had better not be that magic is only a strong person making a weak one do as he's told. You've had enough of that lesson already, I think. From people without wands."

The silence stretched until it hurt.

Riddle got off the bed and crossed to the wardrobe. He moved slowly, deliberately. He reached up to the top shelf, brought down a small cardboard box, and carried it back. He set it on the blanket between them and stood over it.

"Open it, please," said Dumbledore.

Riddle's fingers tightened on the lid. "If I do, what happens."

"That depends on what's inside."

"You already know what's inside."

"I'd still rather hear it from you. There's a difference between being caught and telling the truth, and the difference is the whole of the thing."

For a long moment the boy looked at him, and Harry thought again how old his eyes were in that young face. Then he took the lid off. He lifted it slowly and set it down, and looked at what was inside as though he were checking it too for the first time.

Inside lay a yo-yo, a tarnished mouth organ, a silver thimble, a brass button, a little enamel badge with the colour chipped off, and a scatter of other small things. Ordinary, the lot of it. After the way they had been hidden, Harry felt almost let down, until he looked at the boy's face, which was not let down at all.

"Are these yours?" asked Dumbledore.

Riddle said nothing.

"Tom."

"No," he said.

"Do you know who they belong to?"

"Yes."

"Good. Then you'll give them back."

Riddle's head came up. "With an apology?" His lip curled.

Dumbledore considered him for a moment. "Not yet."

The sneer faltered. Whatever he had braced for, it wasn't that either. "Not... yet?"

"An apology is a coin most children learn to hand an adult so he'll stop looking at them. It buys quiet. It doesn't buy anything else, and you already own a great deal of quiet. You'll return what you took, and you'll stop taking from those children," Dumbledore said. "When you understand why an apology is owed, you can give one, and it will mean something. Until then it would only be another lie, and you tell quite enough of those."

A glint came into Dumbledore's eye, though his voice stayed level. "I'd rather you not add more of it to the collection."

Riddle looked down at the box. "They don't even need them."

"That isn't why you took them."

His head snapped up. "Then why."

"I think you know."

"I do. I wanted them. They're better off with me. The people they belong to are stupid!"

"Some of them may be." Dumbledore leaned forward, just slightly. "But a stupid person's belongings are still theirs. Stupidity doesn't sign anything over to the clever."

"They're only things."

"Then you'll find them easy to give back."

The boy's mouth went tight. He put the lid on the box. Harry let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

"At Hogwarts," Dumbledore went on, "we don't allow stealing. We also don't allow magic used to frighten other children, or hurt them, or make them do as they're told."

Riddle's face was smooth again. "I didn't know there were rules."

"You know now."

"Nobody taught me."

"That is a good deal of why I'm here."

Riddle's face moved again. "I can't help what happens around me," he said.

"You told me a moment ago that you could. You said you could make things happen when you wanted them to." Dumbledore's voice did not rise, but it filled the small room all the same. "You aren't to blame for being magical, Tom. You're to blame the day you choose to be cruel and tell yourself you couldn't help it."

The flush went all the way up Riddle's neck. "I'm not cruel."

"Then you'll have no trouble leaving the other children alone."

Riddle gave him a long, freezing look. Dumbledore met it the way the grey wall met the light, and said nothing, and let it pass.

"Can the school throw people out?" Riddle asked.

"Yes."

"And outside the school? If somebody breaks the rules there?"

"There is a Ministry. A kind of government, with its own laws."

"And prisons."

"And prisons." Dumbledore nodded.

Riddle took that in, and something moved at the corner of his mouth.

"You needn't look so pleased about it," said Dumbledore.

"I'm not."

"No?"

"No. Sir." The word arrived late and light, tossed out to see whether Dumbledore would notice it had been thrown.

Dumbledore noticed. He only nodded. "You'll learn our laws in time. But understand this now, before you come: walking into our world is not the same as walking into a place where you may do as you please. It only looks that way from outside."

Riddle's glance went to the wand pocket. "It looks that way for some people."

Dumbledore's eyebrows rose a fraction. "That's a sharp thing to notice," he said. "And a dangerous one, if it teaches you to admire the wrong people."

Riddle didn't answer that. He looked at the box instead.

"I haven't any money," he said abruptly.

"That's easily mended." Dumbledore drew an envelope from inside his coat and laid it on the bed, near the box but not touching it. "There's a fund at the school for students who need help. It will cover your books, your robes, everything on the list."

Riddle opened the envelope and went through it with quick, exact fingers, the way Harry had once seen Mr. Weasley count Muggle change, except there was no wonder in it, only inventory. He drew out a gold coin and held it to the grey light.

"This is... wizard money."

"Yes. A Galleon."

He turned it over, watching the light run on it. "What's it worth?"

"That depends what you want to buy."

"Where do I buy things?"

"Diagon Alley, in London. The directions are in the envelope, and the list of what you'll need. I can come with you, if you'd like."

"I don't need you to."

It came out instantly, flat, before Dumbledore had finished the sentence. Harry waited for him to insist. He didn't.

"Very well."

Riddle looked at him sideways, suspicious, like someone who had put his shoulder to a door braced for it to be locked and gone straight through into empty air. "What, you'll let me go on my own?"

"If you follow the directions carefully."

"I always go on my own. I don't get lost. I don't ask anyone for help."

"The first two will serve you well," said Dumbledore. "The third, less often than you think." He nodded at the envelope. "You'll go in through a pub called the Leaky Cauldron. The Muggles around it won't see it. Non-magical people, that is. You should ask for the barman. His name is Tom, as it happens, which should make it easy to remember."

A muscle moved in Riddle's jaw.

"You don't care for the name," said Dumbledore.

"There are a lot of Toms."

"Yes."

"I don't like being a lot of anything."

Harry felt the older Dumbledore stir beside him, the smallest movement, like a man recognising a memory in a crowd.

The younger Dumbledore looked at the boy a beat longer than he had looked at anything. "No," he said quietly. "I don't suppose you do."

Riddle seemed to hear, too late, how much he had given away. He turned his eyes back to the parchment. "My father was called Tom Riddle too," he said, after a moment, as if the list had told him to. "They said."

"Yes?"

"Was he a wizard?"

"I don't know."

"You must know." The boy's voice tightened. "You know about me."

"I do not know everything about you. I know that you are a wizard. Who you came from is another matter, and a closed one to me."

That answer displeased him; Harry could see it land. The idea that this man could hold one fact about him and not the rest, that there were locked rooms even here, even with magic in the world. Riddle looked back down at the coin in his hand.

"My mother can't have been magic," he said, more to the Galleon than to Dumbledore. "She died. If she'd had magic she wouldn't have died."

Dumbledore was quiet a moment. Outside, the grey light had begun, very slowly, to thin toward evening. "She might have died all the same," he said.

Riddle looked up sharply. "No."

"Wizards and witches die, Tom. We are not exempt from it."

"Not if they're powerful enough."

"Even then," said Dumbledore.

There was something in the boy's face now that Harry did not like. Something like a kind of affront, as though he had just been told a rule he intended to break.

"Then what's the use of it," Riddle said. The words came out cold. "The magic. If it can't even do that. If it can't save my mother."

Dumbledore did not answer at once. The dripping tap in the corridor filled the gap.

"To mend what can be mended," he said at last. "Standing between people and the worst of what's coming for them, on the days we manage it. Learning a little more than we knew. And now and again, if we're lucky, putting a flock of blue birds into a grey room that's gone too long without any." He nodded toward the jug. "It is not nothing, that last one. Though I'll grant you it sounds like nothing to a boy who's only ever been shown the other use."

Riddle looked at the jug. Then he looked down at the box. He was quiet for a moment, and when he looked up his face had closed again.

"You talk a great deal," he said.

"So I'm very often told."

Riddle watched him, not sure whether he was being laughed at, deciding he wasn't, not liking it any better.

Dumbledore stood. "So. You'll return the things in the box. You'll buy your supplies. And you'll take the train from King's Cross on the first of September. It's all written down."

Riddle stood too, the envelope gripped in one hand. "What happens when I get there."

"You'll be sorted into one of four houses, and start your lessons, and learn to live among other magical children."

"I don't want to live among them."

"You may change your mind."

"I won't."

"Then you'll learn something about putting up with things, which is also useful." Dumbledore almost smiled. "Hogwarts teaches that too, though it isn't on the timetable."

Riddle's mouth tightened, and then, as though it got out before he could stop it: "Will they know."

"Who?"

"The others."

"Know what?"

Riddle hesitated. He was holding something back, Harry could feel it, saving it. When it came, he said it with unmistakable pride.

"I can talk to snakes."

Dumbledore looked at him, eyebrows raised, interest showing on his face.

"Can you, now."

"Yes. They find me," Riddle said, a little bit quicker. "When we go to the country on the outings. They come to me and they talk and I understand them." He waited. "Is that normal? For a wizard?"

"It's unusual," Dumbledore said, after the smallest pause. "But not unheard of."

The pride on Riddle's face dimmed a fraction. "Unusual?"

"Yes."

"Is it powerful?"

"No gift is, on its own. A gift only tells you what you've been handed. What sort of person you are while you carry it, that part stays open." He held the boy's gaze. "It's the one part that ever really does."

The boy's face hardened, but he didn't push. He had learned already, Harry saw, exactly which doors would not move no matter how hard he leaned, and he was not a child who wasted his weight.

Dumbledore held out his hand. Riddle looked at it, and took it, and for a moment they stood there, the man and the boy, hands clasped, while the orphanage went about its evening on the far side of the door: a kettle, a voice, feet on a stair.

"One last thing, Tom."

The boy waited.

"You're coming to Hogwarts to learn magic. But you'll have to learn the other thing too, the thing everyone strong has to learn or turn dangerous. There's no spell for it. We teach it anyway."

"What is it."

"That having power over a person is not the same as being worth more than him. From the inside the two feel exactly alike. That's the whole danger of it."

The boy's face gave back nothing. "I don't see the difference."

"No," said Dumbledore. "But I'd like you to, one day. I've staked a little on it."

He let go of the hand and went to the door.

"Good-bye, Tom. I'll see you at Hogwarts."

Riddle didn't answer at once. He stood by the bed with the envelope in one hand and the box at his hip and the wardrobe door standing open behind him.

"Professor," he called.

Dumbledore turned. "Yes?"

"If I give them back." A small nod at the box. "Will you know."

"Yes."

"How."

Dumbledore's mouth curved. "That would be telling."

Riddle looked annoyed, and not entirely annoyed.

"And if I don't give them back?"

"Then I'll know that too."

Riddle's face crumpled. "That isn't fair."

"No," Dumbledore agreed. "Very little of this is. You'll find that out as well."

Riddle stared at him. Dumbledore opened the door, and the noise of the building came in a little louder.

"Good-bye, Tom," said Dumbledore.

This time Riddle inclined his head, the way he must have seen done somewhere, by someone he had decided to copy. "Good-bye, Professor."

The door closed.

For a little while the memory went on. Riddle stood very still in the middle of the room. Then he sat, and opened the envelope again, and ran his eyes down the supply list, quick and exact. After a while he set it aside and lifted the lid off the box.

He took out the yo-yo and turned it over. The mouth organ. The thimble. His face stayed flat through all of it. Then he came to the little enamel badge with the chipped colour, and at that one he stopped.

He turned it over in his fingers. He pressed his thumb to the worn place where the colour had rubbed through to the metal. For a moment he was only a boy holding a small thing he wanted to keep, in a place that had let him keep nothing, and Harry felt something in his chest go tight and strange at the sight of it.

The boy slipped the badge into his pocket.

He stood there a while with his hand over it.

Then his face closed, the way a hand closes, and he took the badge out and dropped it in the box with the others, and did not look at it again. He fitted the lid back on. He picked the box up, carried it to the door, and went out into the corridor without a backward glance, the box held against his side.

"I think that will do," said the old Dumbledore beside Harry.

The room came apart. The bed and the open wardrobe and the grey window all drew up into long silver threads, and Harry felt himself rising through the dark, and then his feet struck the floor of the office and he staggered and caught himself on the edge of the desk.

---

The Pensieve sat where it had been, its surface smooth and bright again, throwing pale light up across the ceiling. The portraits on the walls were all apparently asleep. Harry was fairly sure at least three of them were not.

For a moment he didn't say anything. His head was still in that room, with the stolen things and the open wardrobe and the boy's face when he'd been told the magic could not keep his mother alive.

"He wasn't like me," Harry said. "When I found out. About being a wizard."

"No," said Dumbledore, settling into his chair. "He was not."

"He just... believed it. Straight away."

"He had been waiting a long time for someone to put a name to it." Dumbledore looked into the silver. "You wanted Hagrid to be wrong, that first night. Tom had wanted, his whole short life, to be told he was right."

Harry turned that over. "When he used that voice on you," he said. "The 'tell the truth' one. It made the room feel... wrong. Like the floor went sideways. I don't know how you sat there."

"He had a great deal of practice in that voice," said Dumbledore. "It works, you understand, more often than not. Adults had been answering it his whole life, shouting back at it, or flinching from it, and either way teaching him the same lesson: that the loudest person in the room is the one who walks out of it the winner." He turned the empty bottle of memory between his fingers. "He already understood fear, you see. He understood it better than any child should. I had no wish to be one more grown man teaching him that magic was only a faster way to frighten people. He had teachers enough in that subject."

Harry thought of the handsome face, the cold eyes, the box of small stolen things.

"It didn't matter in the end, though," he said. "He still became... him."

"No," Dumbledore said. "It did not change what he became."

The office was very quiet. Somewhere in the castle a clock was ticking that Harry had never noticed before.

"I have asked myself a great many times whether anything could have," Dumbledore went on, not quite to Harry. "I no longer think the question is a useful one. A door can be held open. A boy can be shown the room beyond it, and told he is welcome in it. He still has to walk through. That part was never mine to do, and it was never yours, and I would ask you to remember it, in the months to come, when you are tempted to think a kind word in the right moment might have turned it."

Harry looked back at the Pensieve. Somewhere down in that pale light a boy was walking out of a bare grey room with a box of other people's belongings held against his side, off to give them back, the badge he had wanted to keep lying in there with the rest.

He had taken it out of his pocket. Harry had watched him do it.

Dumbledore set the stopper back in the bottle.

"And now," he said, very softly, "it really is rather late."