Chapter 3
It hadn’t taken Vinda long to floo call the home of the healer Dumont and request their immediate assistance on behalf of the leader. A mere ten minutes later she was leading the impeccably dressed frenchwoman through the halls of Nurmengard, towards the private chambers of their commander.
When the healer had asked what she should expect Vinda really hadn’t known what to tell the woman. She had no clue where the boy had even come from. Grindelwald had locked them out of a room that he was in, alone, with a strange black magical fire that had somehow spontaneously combusted in the middle of the castle, and he walked out with a teenage boy in his arms and an expression on his face that she had never seen before. Vinda wasn’t quite sure what to think about any of it.
The two women found their commander in his inner chambers. He stood beside a large bed with deep blue hangings and was gazing down at the figure laid upon it intently. At the sound of their entrance Grindelwald’s attention was momentarily drawn to them before returning to the boy. The women approached the bed and Vinda heard Healer Dumont let out a tiny gasp of surprise before hurrying to the boy's side and beginning to run scans on him.
Vinda hadn’t gotten a good look at the boy before, it had been difficult with the way he’d been bundled in Grindelwald’s arms. Now he was laid out on top of the dark fur throw, wearing a set of loose fitting silken pajamas that she was sure belonged to Grindelwald if the ‘GG’ stitched into the shirt pocket was a sign. She was shocked at the state of the boy and all she could really see was his face and his hands.
His face… It looked like the boy had taken a curse directly to the right brow and it had split the skin in a lightning strike down his face. She’d never seen anything like it. Vinda wondered what the curse had been and if the boy was affected by it. She looked over the rest of him. He looked cleaner than he had before but she could tell that he had been cleaned by magic and was still in need of an actual bath. He was quite cute, it was a shame the attacker had gone for the boy’s face. He was also quite small, Vinda couldn’t tell exactly how old he was, but he was much too skinny for any age and she was sure he’d have been taller if it weren’t for the lack of nutrition he had evidently received.
The top few buttons of the shirt had been left undone, revealing a raised welt in the middle of the boy's chest, and the sleeves had been rolled several times. Though, with how oversized the shirt was on the boy the sleeves still hung to maybe an inch above his wrist bone. It gave Vinda plenty of space to see the way the boy’s fingers bent at slightly wrong angles, as though they had been broken in the past and not healed properly after. Fixing something like a broken finger was simple for even a healer in training, for the boy to have so many broken bones had implications that Vinda didn’t want to ruminate on. His wrists were littered with cuts and older scars and the skin on the back of one of his hands looked slightly mangled.
She heard Grindlewald explaining to Dumont that the boy had been in the middle of the black flames, that he had opened his eyes when Gellert first touched him and that he’d had a magical outburst before falling back into unconsciousness. His current injuries seemed to be his face, the burns from the necklace he’d evidently been wearing, and the hundreds of small cuts that had just closed on his arms. Though there were apparently other scars that were currently covered that Grindelwald seemed to be equally concerned about.
It was interesting that he seemed concerned at all, because he really did. Who was this boy? The leader said he didn’t know, so why was he so concerned? She had felt the outburst of magic that had come from the boy, it was dark and powerful and could explain Grindelwalds interest, but Vinda didn’t think so. She studied Grindelwald’s face and the way he was looking at the boys and then she glanced back to the boy, eyebrows shooting up.
Ah, the boy really was cute. Vinda wasn’t into their sort, the male sort. But the boy was adorable behind the unfortunate curse mark that currently ruled his face. He was soft looking, despite the lack of body fat. He was also too young for Vinda’s tastes, she didn’t know how young but knew it to be too young for her. She looked at Grindelwald once again; she wasn’t sure what his tastes were if she was being honest. She knew that he liked men, obviously, knew that he had had one epic romance in his youth that ended in tragedy, but she didn’t know much past that.
Grindelwald himself was a pretty man, Vinda could recognize. His features were delicate and harsh simultaneously; his golden blonde hair and mismatched blue eyes seemed to make him glow from an inner light, the man looked like magic. There had been plenty of times, mainly before the international wizard hunt, when the two of them had been out and he had been approached by all sorts of wizards and witches alike. She had never seen him show much interest past the typical charismatic pandering he was prone to do.
The healer’s scan seemed to come to an end. Vinda didn’t know much about healing but the paper that suddenly appeared in front of the other woman seemed too long, even to her. She watched Dumont scan the sheet, eyes growing slightly wider at certain sections, but retaining her mask of professionalism all the while.
”Well?” Grindelwald finally snapped after the healer had been reading for several minutes. She glanced up from her report.
“His name is Hardwin Peverell, Sunday will be the start of his 215th moon cycle, so around 17 and a half years old.”
If Vinda hadn’t been watching the leader she may have missed the way his eyes seemed to light up with recognition and something else at the name ‘Peverell’. Vinda herself wasn’t familiar with the name, though it felt as if she had heard it before. Maybe in one of the books on old french wizarding families she’d been made to read in her youth, the name Peverell was surely from France.
“It’s the oddest medical scan I’ve ever seen,” Dumont continued, “I cast a Plena Anatomia Nito, it's one of the most in depth scans that can be performed without some level of invasiveness. Starting from the top, the entire section on his identity is blank except for the name and age via moon cycle, no birthday, no parents… I’ve never seen it before…
Then again throughout the scan. Plena Anatomia Nito tends to be very precise when listing the date that injuries and illnesses happened but again the dates are marked by terms of moon cycles and occasionally other markers such as solstices or equinoxes.
“His current injuries seem to be caused from the backlash caused by destroying cursed objects. My guess would be that he was wearing a cursed necklace when he somehow came to be in the middle of a cleansing fire, and the necklace didn’t react well.”
”What about his face?”
“The magic residue on his face also seems to read as backlash from the destruction of a curse. It’s hard to know exactly how it happened without running more in depth tests, but it’s possible that he had just received a curse to the face before the fire took him, ultimately ripping the curse out of the still open wound. The scan shows that he had been recently hit with two curses other than the cutting curse that hit his arms, though the names of the curses are blacked out.” The healer sounded annoyed as she squinted down at the paper.
”Either way, neither of those curses is currently affecting his mind, body, or magic. The cutting curse was a nasty one, I don’t believe I’ve seen it before.”. She picked up the boys arm and pulled the sleeve back slightly, so they could see the tan skin covered in tiny cuts.
”Instead of a slicing curse, this curse makes hundreds of papercut like incisions in the victims flesh, each one getting slightly deeper” Vinda shuttered, she’d rather be stabbed. “It’s lucky the fire stopped the bleeding or he would have bled out without care. As is, the bleeding has stopped and he seems to be doing fairly well given what he’s recently been through. I have a paste with me that can be slathered on his arms and should have those cuts healed up and faded by the time he awakes. Same with the welting around his neck as the damage seemed to come more from the cursed item burning him than the actual curse itself doing damage. His face is another matter.”
Grindelwald looked at her sharply and the woman hastened to continue.
“It will heal, of course. There is only a small amount of curse residue still in the wound and that can be drawn out overnight. I do not have the required salve at the moment, though it may be something that you have stocked here. If not, it should be easy enough for one of your followers to find at an apothecary in Vienna or Zagreb this evening.
”While the residue can be easily enough removed, there was still curse damage done, and that stands a much larger challenge in completely healing and fading. The wound will close, but I do not know that it will ever disappear in the way that it could without the curse damage. It’s a shame.” She looked down at the boy sadly.
“Past the most recent issues I have… other concerns” the healer continued hesitantly, seeming to notice the tension in the air.
”His medical history is much too long for a seventeen year old with any decent quality of life. The first harm done to him seems to be at around 15 months old when he was first cursed and since then hasn’t gone more than a moon or two without injury. His early childhood seems to full of frequent physical injuries, not caused by magic. A little later into childhood the non-magical physical injuries get less frequently, mainly contained to around 2 or 3 months, and the rest of the year he begins taking more magical damage. These injuries were less frequent but still highly concerning.
“His right arm in particular…” the healer put down her scroll to free up her hands and walked closer to the boy, booting Grindelwald to the side. She gingerly lifted the boys hand, drawing their attention to the mangled
skin on the back of his hand that Vinda had noticed earlier.
“It seems that during two week-long sessions a little over two years ago, Mr. Peverell was forced to use a Black Quill to write the line ‘I must not tell lies’ between five to ten thousand times, leaving permanent scarring. I’m not sure there's much I can do, if anything to fade these scars. There is remnant curse residue still in the wound, that was never properly drawn out, as well as nerve damage that can be healed. Though, I am sure you are both aware of the negative side effects that Blood Quills can have…”
Vinda wasn’t quite sure she’d ever seen Grindelwald look so angry. She was sure that if he had been holding something, it would be broken. She was horrified herself. Who would even think to torture a magical child in such a vile way. It was unthinkable.
”On top of that,” Dumont continued, and Vinda wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what else there could be wrong with the boy. She watched the healer gently roll the boys right sleeve up slightly higher and gasped at the scar on his forearm. It was large and round, the circumference distorted in a way that looked as if the skin had been bubbling at one point.
”He was bitten by a basilisk when he was twelve, then immediately cried on by a phoenix. Both venom and tears are still in his system, constantly fighting each other in a battle to break down and regenerate his body. It’s not healthy.”
”What the fuck?” Grindelwald growled, seeming to lose the composure he had been holding tightly to since the healer entered. The glass lantern on his bedside table fracturing under the sudden spike in his magic.
“The two of you can handle acquiring the proper potions and healing him.” It wasn’t a question and Vinda nodded her ascent while Dumont immediately sprung into action, healing the injuries she could at the moment.
Vinda watched as the leader walked out of his chambers into the greater castle. Both women flinched as his booming voice echoed through the halls just as clear as if he was still standing beside them.
”Zabini! Find out how many basilisks are currently alive and who they belong to, immediately! And bring me a Brit, I need someone to take a little trip for me.”
Poor Sacha…