Rose's favorite place on the grounds would have to be the clock tower. She had discovered it the previous winter, and even though it would sometimes be too cold or too hot, it was a good place to work. It was closer to Gryffindor Tower than the library was, so if she needed a quiet place to study, she would carry her books there and read, with only the ticking of the giant second hand to keep her company. No one else ever came up there, but she didn't mind. It was a place she could go to be alone without ever feeling lonely.

The absolute best part had to be the view. From the tower, she could see everything: the forest, the lake, the grounds, the Quidditch pitch… the whole school was stretched out beneath her. If there had been dragons, as Hagrid no doubt wished there were, she could pretend to be a princess in a tower. Actually, she would probably have Ruby pretend to be the princess so she could be a knight. Rose didn't think she could sit around looking pretty all day while someone else had all the fun of saving her. If she had to be a princess, she wanted to be a princess who could use a sword, or at the very least knew her way around a bow and arrow.

Ruby could be a princess, though. She looked the part, and would until she started getting pale from the clouds, and as long as her palace had a library, she would likely be perfectly happy as a princess. Rose could be her knight-errant, running off on quests and returning to receive her payment, but denying everything except a soft, small kiss on the forehead.

Rose shook her head to clear her thoughts, glad no one else was around to see her blush. It had been days since the kiss, and Ruby hadn't given her another, but she still couldn't get it out of her mind. Whenever she saw Ruby, she felt the butterflies again, and no matter how she tried to push them aside, they wouldn't go. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted them to go, either. She rather liked how she felt around Ruby, unfamiliar as it was. The only thing that kept her from doing something about it was the conversation she'd had with James the first night after classes. It wasn't that what James had said had convinced her of anything – falling in love with a vampire was possibly the most foolish thing she could do – but what she had said to him. She was too young for romance, and that was that. This was just a little crush, and in a month or so, she would be over it and she and Ruby could have their old friendship back.

Or perhaps she wouldn't be over it. Maybe it would just stay tucked inside her somewhere, and she would even start pining, or writing bad poetry. That thought made her laugh, and more than anything else, it brought her out of her thoughts and back to her homework. She had been trying to memorize the differences between two very similar kinds of mushrooms, and she couldn't do that if she was busy mooning over her best friend.

"I'm not going to fall in love," she said to no one, looking down at the pages of her textbook and trying to make the words connect in her mind. "I wouldn't have time to beat Scorpius if I did."

Only the steady ticking of the clock answered her.

But maybe it would be good for her to have an interest outside of trying to beat Scorpius. After all, it wouldn't be healthy if it turned into an obsession, especially if he suddenly started getting better than her in classes – not that that would happen. She didn't need to stop trying to be the best, or even change it from her top priority, but it might be nice to have something else to do, something that didn't revolve around him. After all, if her life became nothing but Scorpius, then he would have won in a different way.

Rose groaned and leaned her head back against the wall. This was all so much more complicated than she had thought, and rather exhausting besides.

After a few more minutes of looking at pictures of mushrooms and reading (and rereading) the descriptions below, Rose closed her copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi and got to her feet. She hadn't given up on getting any work done today, but she did need a bit of a break, something to clear her mind. With a sigh, she got to her feet and began pacing the tower. Maybe she could figure out how the clock worked and whether there was anything special about it or if it was just a giant clock. Her Grandpa Arthur had filled his retirement with a study of Muggle things, and maybe he would be interested in hearing about whether the clock at Hogwarts was anything like Muggle clocks.

For a few minutes, she looked up at the gears, memorizing their positions and tracing the pattern of movement from one to the next. She thought she understood, but she would have to look at other clocks to compare it. Maybe there was a museum somewhere, or she could wait until Christmas and beg her parents to get her a pocket watch. It would have to be an old pocket watch, though, since the clock tower of Hogwarts likely hadn't been changed in decades or even centuries.

She was about to return to her work when movement out of the window caught her eye. When she looked again, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but then she spotted it: the lake was rippling.

They weren't the sort of ripples that would come from a windy day or from rain, and the day was still aside from the motion of the water. They were the sort of ripples she might see if she were down by the surface, watching someone come up from beneath. To be able to see them this high, though, meant that whatever was coming up had to be very large indeed. For a moment she was frozen with fear, but then curiosity struck, and she ran to the stairs. She might be able to see whatever was surfacing from inside the clock tower, but if possible, she wanted to be down by the lake to get a good look at it.

September had been a gray month, and no one was outside aside from people preparing for the Quidditch season. She wasn't sure when the tryouts would be, but she had already decided not to bother. She was a skilled enough flier, but there were already so many people in Gryffindor interested in being on the team that she had decided to focus on her schoolwork. She didn't need to be both a brilliant student and an excellent Quidditch player. That could be Albus's glory. He'd already told her that he was going to the Slytherin tryouts, and she'd wished him the best. She'd even wished Scorpius well, hoping that maybe all his time in practice would give her an edge.

Rose took the stairs down the castle two at a time, one hand skimming over the railing, ready to catch herself if she missed a step or the staircase happened to move at just the wrong time. She didn't want to tumble down and break a bone, even if Madam Longbottom could fix it in just a few seconds. The time it would take her to get to the Hospital Wing would be less time for her to see whatever was rising out of the lake, and she didn't want to miss a moment.

She was breathless when she burst out of the school, but that didn't stop her from sprinting down to the lake and skidding to a stop just before she splashed into the water. The surface was roiling now, and she was amazed that no one else had come out to look. As she stood on the muddy bank and caught her breath, Rose spotted the first sign of what was rising out of the water. It wasn't the squid, as she'd thought it might be, though now there was far too much motion for it to be the squid, no matter how large it was supposed to be.

It was a mast.

The mast was exactly like one out of the children's books her grandparents would get her for Christmas when she was very little. As soon as she saw it, she was reminded of pirates sailing the seven seas in search of buried treasure, and as the rest of the ship came up, she realized that she was right. The mast did belong to a pirate ship, and one that should have been beautiful if it hadn't been covered in cannon holes and scorch marks.

It might have been a galleon, or a frigate, or one of those other Muggle ships that her Grandpa Arthur liked to make models of to give to various members of the Weasley family. Rose had never bothered to learn the difference, but even she could tell that this ship was made for speed. Once it was up and all the lake water had fallen off of it, it edged around the lake, finally settling several yards from shore but close to the castle. By now, a few other people had ventured out, though they stood further from the lake than Rose did.

A longboat hung off the back of the ship, and peering close, Rose could see men climbing into it and lowering it to the water. They rowed it across the lake, whose waters had begun to settle but still rocked both the ship and the longboat in a way that would have made Rose seasick if she'd ever had the misfortune of being seasick. As it was, it just looked exciting, although there was one moment where she thought that one of the men might topple off the boat and into the water.

The sailors made straight for Rose, and she hurried along the shore to find a place where they might bring their boat out of the water a bit. She stopped by a flatter stretch that had more sand than grass and waved her arms, and the sailors changed their course. A few of the students who had come out were edging closer to the lake, and Rose wondered why none of the professors were there. It was possible they just hadn't noticed what was happening to the lake, but she would have thought that someone would at least glance out their window. Of course, considering how drab the day had looked until then, maybe they were more interested in reading or grading papers, or whatever it was that professors did.

When the sailors dragged the boat ashore, Rose got a better look at them. Most were men, but there were a few women among their number, and they all looked soaked and bedraggled. Their clothes were torn, and several had cuts and bruises on their faces, some of which were wrapped in wet bandages. As they settled the boat onto the land, one of them, a man with long dark hair and a rough beard, approached Rose and asked, "Young lady, could you tell us where we are?"

"This is Hogwarts," she said. "You're in the British Isles."

"The British Isles," he murmured, as though he had never heard the name before and belonged to some exotic new land. "Tell me, how far is that from Essemeulia? We have a vital message for Her Grace, Queen Avina, long may she reign."

"Long may she reign," the other sailors echoed, and all of them looked at Rose expectantly.

For one of the first times, she was speechless.