Chapter 24: The Founders

They read the letters in the kitchen of the house on Ashgrove Lane, because it was the only room that nobody had a claim on.

Harry lit the stove.

It took him four tries, and Draconia stood by the sink with her arms folded and told him that his ancestors would have been ashamed.

"Yours would have had a servant," he said.

"Mine would have had the sense to buy matches."

She had taken her cloak off.

She sat down at the scrubbed deal table, opposite him, and put the tin box between them.

The thread had crumbled when Georgina touched it.

Inside lay a packet of folded sheets, brown at the edges, tied with a strip of green cloth.

There were eleven letters, all in two hands.

One was upright and small and hurried, with a loop on the tail of every y.

Harry had seen the loop on every note Draconia had ever written him.

The other was square and slow, with the pen pressed hard, and it had the habit of crossing a word out and writing it again.

He knew that one too, because it was his own.

"They wrote like us," said Draconia.

"They wrote exactly like us."

"That is a hideous coincidence."

"It isn't," said Harry. He picked up the first sheet. "It's a family."

He read it aloud, because she asked him to.

It began without a greeting.

They call it a truce. I will let them.

We both know what it is, and I will not be the one to put it in the minutes.

The wards held tonight with your wand across mine. Four hours.

I did not think I could stand it, and I did not want it to end.

The lamp went gold when I said your name. The clerk wrote down steady.

He stopped.

Draconia had her hands pressed together on the table.

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