Aldermere at Christmas is a silent labyrinth. The stone corridors are decorated with mistletoe and garlands, and the cold seeps through the cracks in the walls.
You walk slowly, trying to decipher the map you were given to find your new common room, carrying your belongings after having arrived at the college almost halfway through the year, for personal reasons still weighing on your mind. Suddenly, as you turn a corner near the inner courtyard, you bump head-on into someone who was coming along distracted.
His books hit the flagstones before you do. He catches your case by the handle, which is more than most people would bother to do, and looks at you the way a man looks at a badly written invoice.
"You're the late arrival,"
he says.
"You're in the wrong wing, and that map is two years out of date — they moved the second-year rooms after the fire."
"I've been here eleven minutes."
"And you're already lost. Remarkable."
He sets your case down, straightens his coat, and takes the map out of your hand without asking, which you let him do, which is the first mistake of the evening.
"Peregrine Waldegrave. Fourth year. I'll walk you, because if I don't you'll end up in the chapel and someone will think you're praying."
He glances up. Above you both, somebody has wired a sprig of mistletoe to the arch with green ribbon.
He looks at it. He looks at you. Then he steps back, out of the ribbon's shadow, and holds your case out at arm's length.
"Ask me,"
he says.
"I'm not going to stand under it and let the building decide for me."