Quite a bit of explanations in this chapter, but then, Meg has to learn this kind of stuff from somewhere. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I own Meg and her family, Pyra owns Alys and her family, JK Rowling owns everything else.
ALYS
Both Meghan and I lived in Scotland, and we both had lots of Muggle friends. This was a big problem- more so for Meg than for me. We were so used to hanging around with our non-magic pals that when they went back to school on the 21st of August we had nearly two weeks of boredom to live through.
Our dads found a solution to that. Seeing as how we were both bored out of our skulls, they reasoned that it would be better if we were bored out of our skulls together- at least then we'd both have company (we're both the only children in our families).
We both knew it was just an excuse for them to go to Pride of Portree Quidditch matches together…
I smiled at Meg who was looking around my bedroom in amazement. She stared at the picture of my Quidditch team, The Sirens. The players waved merrily at her but she seemed to think this was wrong.
"Do people always move in your photos?" she asked with slightly wide eyes.
"Yeah, you just have to dip it into this potion. You could try it with some of your photos when we get to Hogwarts."
At the mention of the word Hogwarts we both looked at my calendar. Ten days left to go before we'd be training to become proper witches. It's a pity all our classmates were back at school. We still had ages of time to wait.
"So," said Meg in a voice that told me she'd been waiting for ages to ask me this, "have you got a broomstick?"
"Of course! I've got the latest Comet. Come on I'll show you how to fly, you can use my dad's broom." I grabbed her arm and pulled her out the room, shouting to my mum as I went. "I'm just going to teach Meg how to fly, we'll be back for lunch."
Meg followed me as we went out into the garden and up the rocky path towards the forest behind my house. I should explain- I live in this really remote area of the Scottish Highlands because, as Mum put it, there isn't really much point in living where there are loads of Muggles and it's really easy to be spotted flying. And Mum and Dad get to work via Floo powder anyway.
"Is this all yours?" Meg asked as we entered the fringes of the woods, awe plain on her face.
I nodded proudly. "I grew up in this forest. I think Mum inherited it from a great-aunt or something. Bit of a shock for her as she was disowned by her father."
"There are so many strange plants here! What's that?"
I pulled her quickly away from the large tree she was pointing towards. "That's a Whomping Willow. They're really rare. You don't want to go near one, trust me." To demonstrate my point I threw a stone at the tree and it lashed out at it sending the stone back towards us. We ducked and I grabbed a twig. "As long as you know the right spot then you can disarm it." I whacked a bit of rotten wood onto its trunk and the tree stopped fighting.
We walked onwards until we came to a small clearing with mini Quidditch goals on either side. "What are they?" asked Meg curiously.
"They're goalposts," I explained making my way over to the storage cupboard. I tossed her a broom and took own Comet 260. "Right. You're going to have to be able to fly before we can play Quidditch. First step is getting your broom to accept you as its rider. Just lay the broom on the ground and say 'Up!', ok?"
Meg nodded and laid the broom on the ground. "Up," she said tentatively. The broom twitched a bit, but didn't go up. She looked at me, confused.
"Be a bit more confident," I encouraged. She nodded and said in a more assertive voice, "Up!" This time the broom shot straight into her open hand. She gripped it, pleased.
"Ok now we have to mount the brooms." I showed her how and corrected her grip.
"You ready to fly?" I grinned at her.
She nodded, her face looking both eager and a bit apprehensive at the same time.
"Ok, kick off!" I launched myself into the sky and looked back at her. She was staring at me, open-mouthed. "Come on!" I said, impatiently. She nodded and kicked off from the ground, rising from the air in a smooth motion.
"Well done!" I said, pleased. "You're a natural flyer!"
She smiled and did a slow circle around me, getting the feel of the broom.
We spent the next hour just mucking around on the brooms. I showed her all of the many tricks I'd learned while playing Quidditch with my friends Lee and Angelina, and she experimented with some of her own, basic corkscrews and that sort of thing. I looked at my watch as I came smoothly into land.
"Lunch time!" I said, slightly hyper after the flight. "Hey, after lunch Lee and Angelina are coming over. Maybe we can do a little Quidditch with them. What do you say?"
Meg smiled. "If you teach me how to play," she said.
MEG
The rest of the day passed as only fun days can- very quickly. I met Lee and Angelina and they were both really, really nice. We also played Quidditch. I was a bit confused by the game at first, but then Alys explained it to me properly and I realised that it was really just a dangerous version of basketball, which I'd always been good at. Alys was impressed by my aim- she said I was a natural Chaser. She herself was also best in the Chaser position, although she was also a good Seeker. Angelina was another excellent Chaser, but Lee wasn't as good as any of us and was resigned to being a substandard Keeper.
Well, when I say 'resigned'…
"I hate being a Keeper!" Lee moaned. "Why can't we play with Bludgers? That's always more exciting!"
"Because," Angelina explained patiently, "it's Meg's first time and she's not good at dodging yet."
"And I don't know what my parents would say if I brought her back as a pulverised mess," Alys added. She caught my expression. "I'm exaggerating," she said hastily. "Bludgers don't pulverise people."
"At least, not usually," said Lee, smirking. When he said this Alys and Angelina zoomed over and hit him over the back of the head and he almost slipped off his broom.
After the Quidditch game, I came back to Alys' house to find a big plate of larger-than-normal cookies that shouted out your fortune when you bit into them.
"Fortune cookies, Velvet-style," explained Alys. "Mum doesn't like the Chinese ones, she prefers good-old chocolate chip. Although she likes the idea of ones that tell fortunes."
I bit into my own. It squawked, "You will meet a tall, red, handsome stranger!"
"Red?" I asked, bemused.
Alys took a chunk out of her own, and it gave her the exact same message. She shrugged. "I think mum makes up the fortunes herself..."
"Or maybe… you're going to cheat on me!" I mock-accused her.
"ME!"
Her mum came back in and smiled at us both. "Enjoying yourself, Meghan?"
I smiled and nodded. "Yes, very much. Thank you for the cookies, Mrs Velvet."
"Oh, just call me Caline. I hate getting all formal with people. My patients never address me by my end name."
"Well, apart from grandfather, but he always was a pain in the-"
"Alys!" warned her mother.
"Well, it's true…" Alys tried to protest. Her mother just sighed and grabbed the last cookie on the plate before taking the empty plate away.
I didn't want to seem nosy but I was curious. "You get on well with your grandfather I see."
Alys had a sheepish grin on her face. "Well I never actually met him. He disowned mum after she committed the ultimate crime and married someone without his consent. And the someone was a muggle-born wizard no less. Oh the shame!" Alys threw an arm over her face in apparent shock.
I laughed, then asked, "But what's so bad about muggle-borns?"
"Nothing, but you see some pure-blood families, like the Lestranges- mum's lot -got it into their heads that they're better than all the rest because all their descendants had been wizards. They thought that it would be awful to have Muggle blood mix with their own. The result is they usually end up marrying cousins. Mum was supposed to marry this Black guy called Regulus but then eloped to marry Dad. She was disowned, but her aunt died before she could change her will and Mum got this estate. We still got a howler from Mrs Black once a week asking what was wrong with her darling little boy, until the old bat eventually died."
I gaped at her, then shut my mouth quick. "So wizards and witches are into arranged marriages?" I asked.
"Not all… just the batty ones," Alys said with a wide grin on her mouth. "Quite a few of the pure-bloods practise it. Mostly Slytherin families."
"Slytherin?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot you don't know about the houses! There are four of them- Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. Your house is meant to meant to say something about yourself, although Mum and Dad won't tell me how it's decided. They say I've got to wait and see for myself."
"So, what do they mean?"
"Well," said Alys' mum, bringing over some more cookies. "Ravenclaw was my house, and they're all supposed to have keen minds and be really intelligent. Gryffindor was what Alys' father was in- they're brave and honourable. Or so they say," she said with a slight smile.
"Slytherins are ambitious, and place great importance on heritage. Hufflepuffs are loyal," continued Alys.
"Your dad was in Gryffindor," Caline informed me. "That's how he and Alan met. I think your grandmother was in Ravenclaw, though, and your grandfather in Hufflepuff… so you see, heritage is no guarantee of house."
"Good thing too or else I'd be in Slytherin and you'd probably have a dark mark on your arm," Alys rolled her eyes at her mother who made to swat her hand away from the plate of cookies.
"Now, be fair, not all Slytherins were bad," she admonished. "My old teacher, Horace Slughorn, he was good at heart… I think..."
"What's a dark mark?" I asked.
Alys and her mother gave each other long looks.
"It was something that happened before you were born," Caline said reluctantly. "A wizard turned bad- really bad. His name was…" -she braced herself as if about to plunge into ice-cold water- "Voldemort. Except everyone calls him You-Know-Who, unless you're one of his servants of course…"
"What happened?" I asked, feeling a twinge of fear. "He was defeated, wasn't he?"
"Well, yes and no. You see he started killing muggles, muggle-borns and blood traitors. It was a time of terror. It was also the reason I ran away. I had made it clear to my family I had no interest in joining the Dark Lord, as is followers called him, and decided to run before he could come after me and force me into service." Oddly, her eyes became misty. "Alys' father helped me run away- and yours, incidentally," she added. "We fell in love, and got married. Your mum and dad also married when he saved her from one of Voldemort's killing sprees and was so smitten with her that he couldn't bring himself to wipe her memory. It was like that at the time- everyone got married really quickly because they were afraid that one of them might suddenly die.
"Anyway, you two were three years old when Voldemort found our friends, the Potters." She stopped and scrubbed an eye vigorously as if to scratch some annoying itch, but I noticed her hand came away wet. "He… he killed Lily and James and then turned on their son, Harry, but the curse rebounded and Voldemort vanished."
I sat in silence for a moment, then picked up on something Caline hadn't said properly. A knack that I have. "Vanished? Not killed?"
"Nobody knows what really happened to him. Harry was only one at the time so he can hardly explain what he did. All we know is that Voldemort has vanished and he may return, but then again," she smiled ironically, "he may not."
I absent-mindedly bit into the cookie.
"You will face great trials!"
"Oh, shut up."