Disclaimer: Everything is JK Rowling's, except Maeve Moondaughter, Chris "Hex" Holmstrom, Peter Brandegoris and Maggie McGonagall, who belong to me; and Tansy the house-elf, who belongs to the Malfoys…for now! MWAHAHAHAHA!
Technical Notes: Maeve's owl, Aurora, is named after the Roman goddess of the dawn. The mythological Aurora flew across the sky each morning to herald the coming of Helios, charioteer of the sun.
Author's Notes: This is for everyone clamoring for a sequel to Sounds Like A Breakfast Cereal. Thanks to you guys, Hex and his friends keep popping up in my head! I'm still working on setting up a new adventure for them, but for now I thought I'd give you an idea of what happened to Maeve the summer after fifth year. Enjoy! ~ Ara Kane
PARTING SHOTS"You are slouching," Narcissa Malfoy said in a cold, clipped voice.
Maeve Moondaughter sat up a little straighter and dipped a spoon into her soup. It was cream of mushroom, her favorite, but she might as well have been spooning up water.
All around her, ornate tableware clinked discreetly against fine golden plates. Seated at the head of the heavily carved table, Lucius Malfoy was ignoring Maeve completely. Narcissa, seated opposite her husband, generally did the same, except for the occasional criticism of her appearance or behavior. Their son, Draco, slightly older than Maeve, watched her from across the table, smiling smugly whenever she happened to look up.
Lucius had not said a single word to her since she and Draco had returned from their fifth year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Thanks to his son, Lucius was aware of Maeve's doings at Hogwarts, especially about her budding relationship with Hex Holmstrom, a fellow fifth year Hufflepuff. The Malfoys considered Hex a "Mudblood," a wizard with no bloodline to speak of and thus not worth their time. It definitely did not help that Hex had been responsible for the death of Selenius Lestrange, a Death Eater and close friend of the Malfoys who had turned out to be Maeve's father.
"Stop making that ghastly face," Narcissa snapped.
Maeve realized she had been scowling and smoothed her features back into the demure mask that passed muster at the Malfoys' table. One was not supposed to frown at table. Then again, one was not supposed to show any expression whatsoever at table. It just wasn't done in noble wizarding families. However, at Hogwarts, she smiled and talked and even shrieked with laughter at table.
She'd had to learn that it was perfectly all right to do that, of course. When she first came to Hogwarts, Peter Brandegoris had asked her how she could chew her food without moving her jaw.
Peter. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from laughing at the memory of the question that had brought about her first ever friendship. A letter and birthday present — Maeve's sixteenth birthday had passed unnoticed by the Malfoys just two days before — had arrived from him that afternoon, and she was hoarding the treat for after dinner.
She missed him and all of her other school friends. It was tiresome being stuck in Malfoy Manor for two months with only Draco for company.
Of course, she missed Hex most of all.
Draco looked as if he knew what she was thinking and his pale gray eyes narrowed. Last year, he had actually threatened Maeve that she would be cast out of Malfoy Manor if she carried on with Hex. She supposed Draco saw her as his property, just because they had grown up together and he thought she was beholden to his family for the roof over her head and clothes on her back — which was a crock of shit, as Hex liked to say. Maeve, though bastard-born, was the sole heiress of her wealthy mother's estate and she knew from the regular Gringott's reports that Lucius drew from her inheritance in payment for her room, board and education. To his credit, he never took too much from her.
Perhaps the money was the only reason preventing Lucius from throwing her out on her ear. With Selenius Lestrange gone, there certainly could not be any other reason for the Malfoys to put up with her.
"Might I be excused?" Maeve asked, pushing back her chair.
"One asks that question before they rise from the table," Narcissa told her crisply.
Dutifully, she plopped right back in her chair and repeated the question.
Draco's mother nodded frostily. "You are confined to your room tonight. We have guests. However," she added, raking Maeve with an uncomfortably appraising glance, "if you are good, we may send for you and you may help with the entertaining."
"Yes, ma'am," she said in an appropriately meek voice. A house-elf came forward to take away her dirty dishes as she rose.
Guests, my ass. Maeve stifled a giggle at this unexpectedly rebellious thought as she left the dining room. She knew who the Malfoys' "guests" were and what was their business at Malfoy Manor. This was the first time, however, that she had been asked to help with the "entertaining" ever since she was a very small child.
Back then, Lucius would call upon her to recite a clever rhyme or sing a song for his "guests," and they would applaud, pat her head and give her sweets. Maeve supposed he paraded her before his friends to show them that he was taking excellent care of her while her poor dear father, his very best friend, was rotting in Azkaban. She highly doubted that she would be asked to sing or recite tonight — and she was certain that the Malfoys' guests weren't going to just applaud. She'd heard rumors about Death Eater activities while at Hogwarts, and shuddered to think that such atrocities had gone on in this very house, while she slumbered innocently just two floors above.
"I wouldn't change into my nightgown just yet if I were you."
Maeve spun around. Draco was standing behind her. The thick Persian carpeting must have muffled his footsteps. "I didn't know you wore a nightgown, Draco," she replied.
He smiled coolly. "Interested in my choice of sleepwear, are you?"
"Certainly." She smiled. "Do you prefer flannel or a negligée?"
"You've picked up very poor manners from the riffraff you consort with."
"My friends are not riffraff. Yours, on the other hand, are different animals altogether." Draco's henchmen, two burly Slytherins named Crabbe and Goyle, could not between them put a single coherent thought together. Goyle had actually tried to kiss her the previous summer. Thanks to a blow from a handy brass candlestick, he had failed and learned to never come near her again.
"They have their uses."
"Spoken like a true Slytherin."
"Ah, what sharp wit. I never knew you had it in you." Draco drew closer. "What else has Holmstrom taught you, Maeve?" he asked in an unctuous voice that made her skin crawl.
"Oh, ever so many things," she retorted bravely, "but you wouldn't be interested." Maeve lifted her chin with a small, triumphant smile. "At least, you wouldn't care to do such things with a bastard-born Muggle-lover like me, would you?"
He looked both revolted and irate. "You mean you've—"
She arched a delicate eyebrow the way she imagined Narcissa's experienced friends would. "What do you think?" Maeve asked with a trace of amusement, hoping she sounded like a "woman of experience."
"You—you whore!" he spat. "You filthy sl—"
Her arm came up just in time to prevent Draco from smacking her across the face. The contact jarred her very bones, but she did not waver. "I got the idea after 'whore,' Draco," she told him crisply, "and I suggest you think twice before using your other hand. Lucius' friends will not admire a bruised cheek."
Draco's face was flushed pink with anger. "You'll have more than just a bruised cheek once Father finds out what you've done."
"The Ministry of Magic will be very interested if that ever happened, don't you think?" Maeve asked coolly, brushing his hand away.
He glared at her. "You little ingrate. Is this the thanks you give us after all we've done for you?"
"You haven't done anything for me, Draco, except raise my blood pressure. Everything I have, I paid for. Now get out of my face — or I'll show you a little something I learned from Hex and kick you in a very special place."
There was blazing fury in his gray eyes, but Maeve stared him down. Finally, Draco snorted, turned away from her, and stalked away.
* * *
Maeve tried to keep her knees from buckling as she ran for her room. What she had insinuated about Hex and herself was true, in a way, she told herself. Hex was teaching her more about Muggle music and this sport called baseball, things Draco certainly wouldn't be interested in. She hadn't out-and-out said that they were…doing things they weren't supposed to be doing…but she had certainly let Draco go on thinking so. Maeve saw how it enraged him and there was no way that she was going to lose that argument.
Hex would understand — she blushed just thinking about the way he would probably grin when she explained it to him. On the other hand, she had more immediate and pressing concerns.
She burst into her bedchamber where Tansy, her personal house-elf, had been readying her bath. "Missy's bath is all ready," Tansy chirped, twitching her pillowcase dress in some semblance of a curtsy.
"I'm sorry, Tansy, but I shan't be taking that bath," Maeve told the house-elf. "Take down my school trunk, would you please?"
Tansy's already big green eyes widened even more. "Your trunk, miss? Y-you mean—tonight?"
Her heart began to pound as the reality hit her. Yes, she was finally leaving, after ages of idly planning it. "Yes, Tansy, tonight."
Since the house-elf was obliged to obey her mistress's orders, the trunk appeared at the foot of the bed with a pop and Maeve began tossing things pell-mell into it. In went her cauldron, wand, spellbooks and the rolls of parchment containing her summer assignments. In went her robes, underwear, shoes, combs and brushes. In went her few books and journals, her Gringott's file, and what little other personal items she had.
Leaving Tansy to finish her packing, Maeve sat down at her now-bare desk to write a short note to Albus Dumbledore, the Hogwarts Headmaster.
Dear Professor Dumbledore,
You may be interested to know that Lucius Malfoy will be having guests over tonight. I have
been asked to help with the "entertaining"…
Dumbledore was Voldemort's worst enemy, and out of her own initiative, Maeve had been sending him owls about the comings and goings at Malfoy Manor all summer. So far, he had not sent any Aurors to raid the Malfoys — he had never even acknowledged receipt of her letters — but it comforted Maeve to think that she making a contribution, however small, to the fight against the Dark side.
She signed the note as "A Friend," then rolled it up. "Come here, Aurora."
The small tawny owl hopped off her perch (which Tansy promptly whisked away and stowed into Maeve's trunk) and lit on her owner's arm. "Take this to Professor Dumbledore," Maeve whispered as she tied the note to Aurora's leg, "and when you're done, don't come back here. We will be at Maggie McGonagall's in Hereford."
Aurora hooted in understanding before spreading her wings and soaring away.
Maeve watched her owl disappear into the night, then turned to Tansy. "Packing all done, miss," the house-elf reported with another twitchy curtsy.
"Thank you," she replied as she threw on her black school cloak and shouldered her broomstick. She scanned the room quickly to see if she had left anything behind. Nothing. "Alright, then; let's go."
* * *
With Tansy levitating the trunk in front of her, Maeve and the house-elf slipped into the network of secret passages that riddled the manor house. The tunnels were dark and narrow, but Maeve moved quickly through them. She had spent as much time in them as she had in the house proper — the hidden passageways had sheltered and provided her escape from Draco's cruel games when they were children; and again more recently, when he had begun to look at her in an oddly disturbing way.
They surfaced in a garden shed built into the high stone wall defining the Malfoy estate.
Maeve tucked her hair into her hood and mounted her broomstick. She took one last look at the only home she had ever known, but did not feel even the slightest need to say goodbye. It was never much of a home, anyway.
There was a full moon and she was flying through an empty plain, but Maeve was not afraid that Muggles might see her. Malfoy Manor stood far from the seldom-used highway cutting through the area, and any Muggle who looked upon it would see an ominous-looking ruin and suddenly "remember" all sorts of fearsome ghost stories about the place. The Malfoys did like to keep the riffraff away.
She landed on the roadside and Tansy and the trunk appeared with a pop beside her. "Here you is, Missy," the house-elf squeaked softly. Her big green eyes glistened wetly in the moonlight.
"Thank you, Tansy," Maeve said in an equally soft voice. She then bent down and offered something to the faithful creature that had cared for and played with her since childhood.
A mitten.
"Ohhh…Missy!" The glitter in Tansy's eyes wavered as tears formed and streamed down her small face. She took the mitten with trembling fingers and looked worshipfully up at her former mistress. "Missy has s-set T-Tansy free!"
"Of course." Maeve's own eyes were starting to mist as well. Tansy wasn't the only one getting her freedom that night. "I couldn't just up and leave you behind. Now you can do what you like."
The house-elf threw herself at Maeve and hugged her tight. "Tansy wants to go with Missy! Tansy will work for Maggie McGonagall, or at Missy's school…Tansy will work for free, so long as she is with Missy!"
Maeve sniffled and hugged the house-elf back. "We'll talk to Maggie when we get there; but first, we have to get there." She released Tansy and stuck out her right hand.
There was a loud BANG and she jumped as the giant purple Knight Bus pulled to a stop in front of her. She looked furtively over her shoulder, afraid that the sound roused the Malfoy household even from so far away, then brushed right past the conductor, house-elf and trunk behind her.
Maeve breathed deeply when the doors hissed shut without any of the Malfoys appearing. "Take me to Hereford," she said, dropping thirteen silver Sickles in the conductor's hand.
"We'll be there in a flash, miss," the well-dressed young woman said with a smile. There was another loud BANG and the bus began to move.
Maeve moved down the aisle and settled into a bed near the back of the Knight Bus. The Malfoys' guests would be arriving soon.