On the last day of the month, Beth, Melissa, Mervin, and Bruce took Gina to the edge of the Forbidden Forest to release her back to her new master.
Mervin was disconsolate. He had been dreading the event for a week, Beth knew; she was impressed that he was willing to go through with it at all. What had finally convinced him was the repeated insistence of his friends that Gina could fend for herself.
"Look at her, Mervin," Melissa had said, gesturing at the snake coiled at his feet. "She's enormous. She survived two years with the Dark Lord and a whole year with you not to mention this attack, and she found her way back to you. If she needs you she can find you again. Mervin, she tried to beat up Marcus Flint once. If she can deal with him, she can deal with anything."
Reluctantly, Mervin agreed that she was a significant force. So here they stood on the snowy grounds, Gina slithering restlessly at their feet.
She didn't look happy to be out in the snow. Mervin got down on his haunches and stroked her snout gently. After long moments, he stood up. Taking a bit of wrapped steak from his pocket, he unwrapped it, waved it in front of Gina's snout, and hurled it as far as he could into the forest.
Gina took off after it like an arrow. She found it behind a shrub, several yards into the brush. She poked her head around, seeking the others; Mervin gestured her away. She twisted around confusedly for a moment. Finally, she flickered her tongue, picked up the meat in her jaws, and set off deeper into the forest.
Mervin's jaw was set as Gina slithered away. He drew a deep breath.
"D'you think we'll ever see her again?"
Melissa smiled and put a comforting hand on his arm. Bruce chuckled to himself, as he watched the tip of Gina's tail slither round a tree trunk and disappear. Beth put her hands in her pockets. It was a relief to have finished with Nott's request, but she felt surprisingly content with their compliance. She thought that Gina really would be all right.
"I wouldn't rule it out," she said, turning back to Mervin with a smile. Mervin nodded back, unsteadily, and the four of them returned to the castle to owl Nott that the deed was done. They had paid their dues to the Dark Lord this time; hopefully he would lose interest in them again for a while. Every Slytherin seeks fame, but in this case it was far better to be forgotten.
February turned to March with a welcome calm. The days were starting to lengthen now, hesitantly, and the sky seemed less gray. There were days when the sun even shone; on those days, it was not uncommon to see teachers staring out of windows with longing faces, as well as their students.
Beth had been dreading her first run-in with Professor Snape after the Death Eater meeting, but his attitude toward Beth remained exactly the same. He continued to treat her as a professor treats a student, which made it impossible to judge exactly how much he knew about her. She decided to believe that they were both ignorant of each other's involvement with the Dark Lord. It was a stupid assumption, she knew, but there was no other way to carry on day-to-day life. There can be freedom in denial.
N.E.W.T.s practices continued on Wednesdays, though Beth's attendance was spotty, to Melissa's horror and disdain. Sometimes she just didn't feel like taking another class after dinner; and then there was her job with Snape, which took up more and more of her time as the potions became more complex. Beth was sure that sitting there, day after day, applying principles from Potions, Alchemy, Arithmancy and occasionally Herbology, more than made up for the formal practices that she missed.
Melissa was not convinced.
"All right, yes, it's practical," she said, at dinner one Wednesday not long into March. "But you can't be sure it will appear on the N.E.W.T.s. That's what these practices do, you know - they focus our studying so we don't waste time on things that won't show up!"
"There is life beyond the N.E.W.T.s, you know," said Beth crossly.
"We have to make it there first," said Melissa darkly.
Bruce, who had heard the entire argument before, spoke up from beside them. "The Head Table's almost empty," he noted idly, twirling a spoon in his pudding. "I wonder where all the professors are tonight."
Aaron regarded the Head Table casually. "Orgy," he decided.
Groans and moans of disgust.
"Pucey, you idiot," gasped Bruce, with his arm pressed over his eyes, "I have to live with that image for the rest of my life."
"How could you?" begged Melissa.
Groaning, Beth pushed away the rest of her apple pie. "On that note..." She got up and slung her knapsack onto her shoulder.
Melissa glanced up at her. "Going somewhere?"
"Off to waste more time working for Snape," she said, with a grin. "Snag a tart or something for me, will you?"
"Enjoy the orgy," Aaron said.
She made sure to smack him upside the head on her way past.
Melissa has a point, she admitted, trudging down to the dungeons. Why was she still taking the time to worry about such an insignificant thing as her job for Snape, when there were so many other, larger things to worry about?
Because it's easy, she thought. The worst I can do is fail. But something urged up another thought, part grudging but part proud: Because I like it.
Potions was her "thing". It always had been. If one of those jobs she had applied for came through, it might be forever. The prospect was overwhelming, but she found a sudden and surprising ease at the thought. She really could work on potions every day, and be happy.
She skipped down the stairs and turned the corner into the dungeons.
"Legilimens!"
Without a moment's hesitation, and without realizing what she was doing, Beth put her hands over her head and hit the dirt.
She raised her head from the floor a moment later. Nothing had happened; the hallway was empty, and the air was silent. Beth scrambled to her feet, blushing furiously. Had she imagined it?
Faint, as if muffled through walls or doors, came the garbled sound of a boy yelling.
Beth started towards the noise and almost immediately stopped herself. Every fiber in her being was screaming at her to get out of the dungeons and pretend she had never heard something so ominous. It could only bear ill and she had entirely too much to worry about already... She noticed that while her brain was pulling her backwards, her feet were moving her stealthily forward.
It surely wouldn't hurt just to peek around a little. She could always just say she was coming down to do some work for Snape - which she was. Perfect excuse. If she saw something she wished she hadn't, Mervin could Obliviate her. And if she happened to prevent a murder or something, well, good for her, fifty points to Slytherin.
I'm almost as stupid as Rich, she thought, half despairing, when she heard a voice that made her scalp crawl.
"Get up, Potter."
The voice was indubitably Snape's; the origin, unquestionably his office. Beth stopped in her tracks. It could not, must not be what she thought it was.
Snape spoke again, before Potter had a chance to reply. "That last memory. What was it?"
Potter spoke then. Beth was now pressed against the wall outside of the office; the words were not clear, but they were mostly audible. "I don't ... cousin ... stand in the toilet?"
"No..." Snape's voice dropped and took the conversation with it. Beth strained to catch his words, but she could only pick up hints:
"...inside your head, Potter?"
"...dream I had."
"A dream." Snape's voice rose back into clarity, and Beth held her breath. "You do know why we are here, don't you, Potter? You do know why I am giving up my evenings to this tedious job?"
Potter muttered something in reply.
"Remind me why we are here, Potter."
"So I can learn Occlumency."
"Correct, Potter. And dim though you may be..." He slipped back to mutterings. "...make you feel special - important?"
"No, they don't."
"That is just as well, Potter," came Snape's voice, and Beth had to strain to hear it. "because you are neither special nor important, and it is not up to you to find out what the Dark Lord is saying to his Death Eaters."
"No," came Potter's voice, challenging, "that's your job, isn't it?"
Beth's heart seemed to stop. Mouth open, eyes wide, completely unable to believe what she had just heard, she stood frozen with her head pressed to the doorframe. Could it possibly mean what she thought it meant-?
Her thoughts were so loud and tumultuous that she almost didn't hear Snape's next words. They were as stunning as Potter's.
"Yes, Potter. That is my job. Now, if you are ready, we will start again... One - two - three - Legilimens!"
Blue light flickered under the door. It struck Beth suddenly what a horribly precarious position she was in. Perhaps she wasn't going to do any potions work that night. Slowly, she began to back away from the door to Snape's office.
"Protego!"
Beth turned and fled from the dungeons.
She reached the Entrance Hall in time to hear a piercing scream.
A trunk came rocketing down from the staircase and crashed at Beth's feet. She leapt back in time to save herself from a second trunk which bounced gleefully and stopped defiantly upside-down. This was followed by Professor Trelawney, half-stumbling and half-falling down the stairs. She tripped over the last few steps and went sprawling.
Her hair was wild, her glasses askew. She picked herself up unsteadily, staring at Beth with kohl-streaked eyes through one lens of her absurd glasses.
"This is not happening," she whispered.
An unmistakable voice carried down the staircase.
"Come now, Sibyll," said Professor Umbridge, patting her hands together as she descended the stairs. "We must all know when to go gracefully."
Her voice was chilling.
People were starting to come out of the Great Hall to see what was the matter; a few of them disappeared and reappeared with their friends. Leaving Professor Trelawney screaming, "No! NO!", Beth fought back inside. She met her classmates on the way out.
"What's going on?" said Bruce, his face urgent.
"Trelawney just got chucked out of her tower!" Beth blurted, unable to describe things more clearly.
Professor McGonagall forced through the crowd, her face worried but determined.
"Not by Umbridge!" Melissa gasped.
"She almost landed on me!"
"Come on, we're going it miss it!" urged Aaron Pucey, and the Slytherins joined the exodus.
When it came to getting through crowds, there was no topping Warrington; he had them in the front lines within a minute. The professors made an impressive tableau: Trelawney, sitting on her upended trunk, sobbing into the handkerchief that McGonagall had pressed to her face, while Umbridge looked on with pride and contempt. McGonagall was speaking words of comfort.
"... not as bad as you think, now... You are not going to have to leave Hogwarts..."
"Oh really, Professor McGonagall?"
Professor Umbridge advanced. Her stocky figure and maiden-aunt trappings only made her all the more menacing.
"And your authority for that statement is...?"
The front doors burst open.
"That would be mine."
The crowd cleared to reveal the figure of Headmaster Dumbledore, straight and calm, his outline framed strangely against the clamor within, the cool dark without. He strode through the crowd, which parted before him; there was an air of great authority and timeless vigor about him, as if all his accumulated acclaim over the years had come to settle on his shoulders in one brilliant moment. Even Professor Umbridge stood awed for a moment. Then she let out a short laugh.
"Yours, Professor Dumbledore? I'm afraid you do not understand the position. I have here an Order of Dismissal signed by myself and the Minister of Magic." She had pulled out a scroll with a large purple seal and was now brandishing it like a Beater's club. "Under the terms of Educational Decree Number Twenty-Three, the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts has the power to inspect, place upon probation, and sack any teacher she - that is to say, I, - feel is not performing up to the standard required by the Ministry of Magic. I have decided that Professor Trelawney is not up to scratch. I have dismissed her."
"Pay up," muttered Mervin. Aaron ruefully handed over ten Sickles.
Smiling, Dumbledore gave a pleasant little bow towards Umbridge. "You are quite right, of course, Professor Umbridge. As High Inquisitor you have every right to dismiss my teachers. You do not, however, have the authority to send them away from the castle. I am afraid that the power to do that still resides with the headmaster, and it is my wish that Professor Trelawney continue to live at Hogwarts."
"No - no," Trelawney choked, "I'll g-go, Dumbledore!" She gestured wildly with her empty bottle. "I sh-shall leave Hogwarts and s-seek my fortune elsewhere-"
"No." Dumbledore's voice was stern. "It is my wish that you remain, Sybill. Might I ask that you escort Sibyll back upstairs, Professor McGonagall?"
McGonagall obliged, muttering presumably comforting things. Professor Sprout came out to assist her; Professor Flitwick, levitating the trunks deftly, followed them upstairs. Everyone turned their attention back to the remaining teachers: Umbridge and Dumbledore.
Professor Umbridge looked like she was going to spit. "And what are you going to do with her once I appoint a new Divination teacher who needs her lodgings?"
"Oh, that won't be a problem," said Dumbledore, as if he had done her a great favor. "You see, I have already found us a new Divination teacher, and he will prefer lodgings on the ground floor."
A new teacher! Murmurs rippled through the student body. So far their luck with new teachers had been about seventy/thirty in favor of the evil and incompetent types. How much better could this one be, who had been found on virtually no notice, from goodness-knew-where?
"You've found-?" Umbridge was all flabbergasted fury. "You've found? Might I remind you, Dumbledore, that under Educational Decree Twenty-Two-"
"-the Ministry has the right to appoint a suitable candidate if - and only if - the headmaster is unable to find one," Dumbledore finished politely. "And I am happy to say that on this occasion I have succeeded. May I introduce you?"
From the foggy night came the sound of hoofbeats.
A dark shape moved into the doorway of the Entrance Hall - and then it came into the light, and was no longer dark, but glowing golden from long pale hair and shining white flanks. This fusion of man and horse trotted into the Hall and gazed around at the students, calm on his face and in his bare shoulders. It wasn't the same centaur that had helped them find the Precious Tree three years ago; this one was much lighter, with a more casual (and Beth thought, younger) carriage.
"This is Firenze," said Dumbledore cheerfully. "I think you'll find him suitable."
Professor Umbridge had no words.
Student opinion on their new, unusually-shaped Divination professor was varied.
Some of the younger Divination students came back raving that he was a genius; others declared loudly that they believed otherwise. Draco's class was not impressed, but then, they never really were. Beth regretted having dropped the class for the first time in her Hogwarts career.
"He doesn't actually expect us to ever See anything," Melissa frowned, at lunch after her first class with the centaur. "Which will net us all top marks, anyhow. But his brand of Divination is so ... it's quite feral, and ... well, I'm not certain that the Ministry embraces it as an approved method..."
"She means it won't be worth a box of doxies on the N.E.W.T.s," Bruce interrupted, pausing between bites of a chicken-salad sandwich.
"Then why would he ever have gotten the job?" Beth pressed. "I mean, what made Dumbledore think, 'You know what we could really use on the teaching staff? A centaur.'"
"That's easy," said Melissa, taking up her own sandwich. "He did it just for spite. Everyone knows what Umbridge thinks of half-breeds."
In truth, hardly a day had passed since Firenze's appointment which failed to produce a dark warning about trusting "unnatural species" in D.A.D.A.
Beth wanted to know what Audra thought of him - the little Seer had called Trelawney's class "a waste of time" - but the white-haired girl remained close-lipped. As a logical next step, she went to Oren.
"The classroom's set up like a forest," he told her (an interesting detail that Melissa had forgotten to mention), "and he was waiting for us. Audra came in with the rest of us - Firenze spotted her, and they just looked at each other for like a minute."
Beth thought that spoke well for Firenze's abilities in that department.
"So did she See anything in class? In the smoke, or whatever?"
"She says not," Oren said, shaking his head. "But," he added, pushing up his rimless glasses with one hand, "she looked a little vague for part of the class. She says she didn't see anything," he repeated, shrugging, "but I tend to doubt that."
But whatever Audra may have seen, the tiny white-haired girl kept it to herself. Beth stopped her in the halls every once in a while to ask if there was anything they ought to know, or if anything was coming up, or (once, snidely) whether there were any other Death Eaters in the school that no one had pointed out yet. All she ever received was a brief shake of the head, and once the soft but pointed admonition: "I do sometimes think of the present, you know."
There was so much clamor over the great public event, in fact, that it was the next day before Beth remembered the private one she had witnessed: the strange exchange between Professor Snape and Harry Potter. In other times she would have gone immediately to Richard or Melissa with the news; but this had been a year, it seemed, for unusual alliances. She left off studying for an afternoon and sought out Evan Wilkes.
He seemed unsurprised, but then getting a strong reaction out of Evan was nearly impossible. He listened to the entire story without interrupting with a sarcastic comment or caustic observation. When she had finished he sat back in his seat. His eyes were faraway in thought.
"I don't know what to think anymore," said Beth. "I thought he was trying to kill Potter."
"And you didn't intervene," said Evan, with a hint of a grin.
"Well, no, seeing as it was Potter," said Beth, grinning back. She frowned again, remembering. "Then that whole thing about, it's Snape's job to find out what the Dark Lord's up to. But he was using the Legilimens Curse ... and if Potter had wanted him to stop, he had plenty of time to do something about it..."
"Potter wouldn't dare to ask for lessons on his own," said Evan. His dark eyes were fixed on the ground. "And Snape wouldn't give them willingly. The only one to whom they share loyalty is Dumbledore."
Beth, too, stared at the ground; there was no use trying to meet his eyes. "You're saying that Snape is working for Dumbledore."
"It's the only answer."
"We know he's a Death Eater," said Beth, working it out aloud. "We think he's working for Dumbledore. It sounds like Dumbledore knows he's a Death Eater. Do you think the Dark Lord knows he's working for Dumbledore?"
"Who knows?" said Evan. He finally raised his head. "Which one is he loyal to, and which one is he betraying?"
It was an unanswerable question.
"He can't hurt us."
Beth stared at him. "He could be our enemy for two different reasons and you don't think he can hurt us?"
Evan shook his head. "No." He bent to gather his things. "Because if he does too much for either of them, the other will know it."
He collected his books and walked off.
Beth stayed where she was, still thinking. Evan was intelligent; he had an unusual ability to gauge peoples' motives and actions. If he believed that Snape was neutralized by his dual loyalty, he could very well be right. But then, he could be wrong ... and the stakes in this game were too high to risk that.
But Professor Snape continued to hide his secrets well; and if he knew more about Beth than he should, he never let on. The two Death Eaters carried on a careful professional relationship; she graded his potions, he taught her classes, and neither spoke a word about their shared bond. Both feigned ignorance; both played their roles flawlessly.
When it came to playing roles, of course, no one could do it like Antigone von Dervish. She had dumped Roger Davies the day after the Hogsmeade trip and had been making a big deal of her singlehood, eyeing every boy that crossed her path and spreading rumors about her own intentions. Whenever she happened to pass Warrington, her eyes simply flicked past him as if he were no more notable than a post. She was an expert ignorer.
"He's really taking it hard," Melissa told her at lunch one day.
Antigone glanced at her loftily. "Whoever do you mean?"
"Warrington. I think he's-"
"Who?"
"Warrington. Your-"
"Who?"
Melissa rolled her eyes. "Never mind."
"Oy, ladies." Aaron Pucey appeared and vaulted into a seat beside them, grinning round. "Want in on the Hagrid poll?"
"Beg pardon?" Melissa raised her eyebrows.
"To see when Umbridge gives Hagrid the sack." He winked at Beth. "Now she's done Trelawney, it's just a matter of time before Hagrid's out the door. We've got a poll running, want in?"
He pulled out a calendar peppered with students' initials.
"Just put your initials to claim a date, two Sickles per guess, winner takes the pot," he explained. "Minus," he added modestly, "ten percent commission to the broker."
Beth picked the fourth of May.
