September 1993
It didn't take long for Liz to decide being stuck in hospital was kind of miserable. She'd had worse, but still, not great.
By the time Severus's visit was over, it was already well into the dinner hour — Liz didn't feel particularly hungry, honestly, but since before lunch a bit earlier she apparently hadn't eaten for two days, she ate what she was given anyway (except the pudding, obviously). She tried to get back to her book, but it didn't go very well. She kept losing track of where she was in a paragraph, reading the same sentence over and over, the words not quite making sense, echoing meaninglessly in her head. The only thing she was accomplishing was giving herself a headache, so she gave up, settling in to try to go to sleep.
When she woke up, the Hospital Wing was dark and still, the quiet almost a physical weight settling around her. Groping for her wand quick, she checked the time, finding it was barely after midnight, she couldn't have slept for more than a few hours...which did make sense, since she'd been unconscious for two days already. At least after her nap she was able to read again, the words coming easier and more clearly than they had even after the first time she'd woken up — no matter that reading by a light charm in the darkness was kind of hurting her eyes a little.
She'd been awake maybe a half hour when Pomfrey showed up, asked her if she wanted a potion to help her get to sleep. Honestly, she realised she was probably screwing her sleep schedule for when she was let out, but she'd already slept for two days, she thought she was fine missing a few hours tonight...
One of the more annoying things about being stuck in the Hospital Wing was the clothes she'd been put in. At first, she'd assumed her dislike of the underclothes the mages wore was just because it wasn't what she was used to, but after trying different styles of robes she was starting to think that wasn't it. She had a feeling she just liked clothing that clung tighter to her skin — around her legs it didn't matter, since she was used to wearing dresses and stuff, but from hip to shoulder, definitely. And the mages' knickers were always made out of this smooth silky stuff, and just kind of loosely tied in place, hanging there, too baggy and... She didn't like it, she just didn't. The top wasn't as bad as the pants, but still wasn't great, she'd much rather be in her own clothes now.
And it only made her more uncomfortable when she was trying to talk to people. Dorea and Hermione that first night hadn't been so bad — Liz had been rather uncomfortable, but that might just be because her friends' concern and...various squishy feelings had been clinging at her, which had just drawn attention to how distractingly half-naked she felt like this — but people she didn't know just made it worse. She would have preferred to put off her little meetings with new professors until she could get back into her own clothes, but apparently that wasn't on the table...
Vector, the Arithmancy Professor, came in to meet with her Wednesday morning, before classes started. (Liz hadn't even quite finished breakfast yet.) Since Vector was considered one of the Slytherin professors, Liz was familiar with her by sight, though they'd never spoken before. She was the youngest of the professors on staff at the moment, in her early twenties — magical aging being what it was, she looked like she could be a NEWT student — pale-faced and dark-eyed, with long curly black hair. Weirdly, she wore muggle-style clothes most of the time — usually dark-coloured knee-length dresses, plain enough by muggle standards but showing even that much leg was almost scandalous by magical standards. (Liz was aware there were boys who liked her classes for very shallow reasons.) She had a rather high, soft voice, and tended to speak in an excitable babble, with a faint hint of a foreign accent of some kind, maybe German.
Vector hadn't attended Hogwarts as a kid, Liz knew — she hadn't even lived in the country at the time. She, Babbling, Hooch, and Pomfrey were the only people on staff who hadn't. (Well, Filch too, obviously.) There were people who actually cared about that, Liz had overheard kids saying they — especially Vector, a foreigner, and Babbling, a Mistwalker — didn't belong here, didn't deserve to be here, which Liz had always thought was very silly.
Apparently, Vector gave every incoming third-year class a little maths quiz, just to get a sense of where people were on the background stuff that was necessary to do arithmancy really at all. Liz didn't have to do the quiz in hospital with Vector sitting right there, instead just talking through stuff — which was awkward for reasons besides Liz not feeling like she was properly dressed right now. She hadn't paid proper attention in maths class since...well, a long time, anyway, for the obvious reason. They had done some basic magic theory stuff in Charms and Transfiguration, which had required Liz refresh her atrophied maths skills, but still, she was well aware she was behind with this stuff.
Talking to Vector about it was weirdly humiliating. She couldn't put her finger on exactly why, but it was, she didn't like it.
She guessed it could have been worse — most magic-raised kids were homeschooled before Hogwarts, Vector said it wasn't unheard of for some of them to have practically no background in maths at all. (She had the feeling Vector was trying to make her feel better, but it didn't really work.) For that reason, the first couple months were always spent catching people up on basic maths. Vector gave her the title of a book she could find in the library, told her to look up the sections on fractions, geometry (especially trigonometry), basic algebra, and something called arrays, but not to worry about it, they would have a couple months of review first, she wasn't really behind.
Liz still kind of hated it anyway. She wasn't really regretting taking Arithmancy, because the more advanced stuff did sound kind of neat. Being told that she had to review how fractions worked just made her feel really stupid.
By the time Vector left, she was starting to feel tired again, so she took another nap. It took a while to fall asleep, too uncomfortable from these annoying clothes, and ugh, she hated feeling stupid...
(She wasn't sure why. The Dursleys had told her she was worthless for half her life, she should be used to it.)
She was woken up a few hours later, when Severus came barging in during the lunch hour to give her another of his mental function evaluation things. (Being startled awake by the curtains being wrenched aside and finding Severus looming nearby hadn't been pleasant, it took her a moment to get her heartbeat back down to normal.) This time she did somewhat better, but Severus said he still wasn't happy with it — he'd be back first thing in the morning on Thursday to check again, and if she was recovered by then she'd finally be let out.
Liz didn't like being in hospital, but she wasn't entirely certain having to go to classes and deal with all the other kids was really that much of an improvement.
After Severus was gone, Pomfrey bustled over and asked if she'd like to have a bath — not a shower, they didn't have showers in here. Which was a really weird thought, honestly, though she couldn't explain to Pomfrey why it made her so uncomfortable.
Liz couldn't remember the last time she'd had a bath. She would have been very small, she thought, back before Petunia had decided she could be trusted to wash herself properly on her own; after that, they hadn't wanted her wasting time sitting in the water not doing her chores, she'd only been allowed showers. (On a timer, she'd been dragged out more than once for taking too long.) And honestly, the thought was not appealing. She wasn't comfortable being naked longer than was absolutely necessary, and sitting out in the open in a tub like that would only make it worse, especially in a room she'd never been in before...especially because there wasn't a lock on the door — Pomfrey presumably wanted to be able to get inside in case a more severely injured patient was having trouble. And she wasn't supposed to leave the Hospital Wing, so Pomfrey wouldn't let her pop down to the showers in the dorms either.
It'd been a few days since her last shower, she realised that...but she kind of didn't want to. And she might have put it off for another day if it hadn't occurred to her to she could negotiate with Pomfrey — sure, she'd have a bath, if she could change into her own clothes afterward. Pomfrey had seemed a mix of amused and exasperated, but she'd agreed, so. Good.
Except maybe not so good, because then she'd actually had to do the bath part. She did not like sitting around naked, okay, she just didn't. It didn't help that Pomfrey could walk in at any time — she'd said she wouldn't, but that didn't make much of a difference — and also that Nilanse might be hanging around. Pomfrey had asked if she wanted to wait for one of her friends to come by to ask them to get some of her things (which wouldn't do any good anyway, they couldn't get into her room), but Liz had just called Nilanse. She hadn't been entirely sure Nilanse would show up, since she was in Hogwarts right now, but with a pop the little elf was right there, so, good.
Except maybe not so good, because it hadn't occurred to Liz until she was undressing in the sparkling clean bathroom that she had no idea how aware of what was going on around her Nilanse was. She could clearly hear her when Liz called for her, but did she hear everything? like some kind of scrying that was just always going on in the back of her mind? Was it just Liz's voice, or did she see things too? Was the excitable little elf watching her right now?
Yeah, her bath hadn't been a restful experience, to put it mildly.
Normally, each subject had two sections for each of the seven years, theoretically working out to fourteen classes each of the professors were teaching in total, but it didn't always actually work out that way. Whether a student continued on into sixth and seventh year in a class was entirely up to them — or whether they continued on at all, actually, some students dropped out after OWLs — so the class size of the sixth- and seventh-years was always smaller than Liz's year. In most subjects, the professors could get away with only having a single session for each year, so it was actually twelve classes total.
But that was only the classes taught to all seven years. There weren't NEWT classes in History and Astronomy, so those cut off then. Also, obviously, the electives they started in third year didn't have to deal with the first two years, and Divination didn't have a NEWT level. (There was a NEWT exam in both Divination and History, but Hogwarts students who meant to take them studied on their own, there weren't enough people interested to be worth having a class.) At the most, say in Care of Magical Creatures, a professor teaching an elective might have somewhere between eight and ten classes to teach, two each for third through fifth and one or two for sixth and seventh, depending on demand — in fact, it was pretty normal for Care and Muggle Studies to have the full eight to ten.
Liz had no idea why people would take Muggle Studies — the kids with a muggle background already knew it, and most of the purebloods and the like planned on never leaving the magical world anyway — but apparently it was one of the more popular OWL choices, alongside Care and Divination. Weird, but okay.
Sometimes, even in the OWL years electives didn't have enough to fill two classrooms, so only had one session a year. This was pretty common for Arithmancy and Ancient Runes — sometimes Runes would get enough in a year to have two sessions, but mostly it was only one. Liz thought this was pretty damn weird too, since from what she could tell both were pretty much necessary to get into any higher education or career in magic at all. After talking to Daphne, she realised the answer to that was actually pretty obvious: a large proportion of the kids at Hogwarts were from the Noble Houses, so didn't really need to worry about supporting themselves, for the most part. Arithmancy and Runes tended to be filled with muggleborns or half-bloods or poorer purebloods, or the occasional noble kid who happened to have a purely academic interest in the subjects. Kids from Noble Houses did take them, of course, just the practical considerations that were a concern for most other people weren't on their radar.
Of course, Liz was mostly taking Arithmancy so she could better understand some of the Dart Arts books Severus had lent her, and Runes because being able to put her own enchantments on her things sounded neat, but she realised her interests were hardly typical.
The point being, the Runes Professor probably only had five classes to teach, so it wasn't really a surprise she had a free period Wednesday afternoon to come visit Liz in hospital and catch her up. Ashe Babbling — Liz knew what Severus called her was a nickname, but she forgot what her full first name was — was a witch with long, curly, dirty blonde hair, who looked to be maybe thirty, which meant she was probably closer to fifty, because magical aging was ridiculous. Like Sinistra, Vector, and Burbage (Muggle Studies), Babbling usually wore muggle-style clothes, but unlike Sinistra and Burbage they were definitely muggle-made — Liz had yet to see denims or tie-dye tee shirts in a magical clothing store. Which seemed kind of weird, but according to Daphne Mistwalkers tended to go to muggle schools (those who went to school at all), so maybe it wasn't that weird, she guessed. When taking meals in the Great Hall, Babbling would usually throw on a cloak in a nod to mages' silly decency standards, but Liz didn't think she'd ever seen Babbling in the robes everybody else wore all the time.
(Daphne would later tell her this was very much normal for Mistwalkers in general and Babblings in particular, so.)
Babbling introduced herself quick, and explained that Liz hadn't really missed much of anything, just a little presentation on the origin of the graphic arts and an overview of the material the course would cover — the first real class was on Saturday, so long as Liz was recovered by then she hadn't really missed anything. Babbling went ahead and explained it all anyway. Apparently, she'd talked about the development of the graphic arts (Liz quickly learned Babbling hated the name "Ancient Runes") all the way back in prehistoric Egypt, almost single-handedly by a woman referred to in English as the Green Lady — Liz had heard of her, an ancient metamorph and parselmouth (who'd been advisor and bodyguard to the kings of Egypt for literally millenia) credited as the earliest known person to make a systematic study of how magic worked — down through the centuries to the enchanting and warding of today. Which was all vaguely interesting, Liz guessed, but she really didn't care that much. And then she talked about what they'd be doing this year, with a quick overview of fourth and fifth year.
At least that actually answered a question Liz had been wondering about. People said enchanting was done in "runes", but Liz had been under the impression runes were just an alphabet, and alphabets were terrible for doing enchanting in (for some reason Liz didn't know yet). Apparently, the "runes" used to do magic had developed out of the old runic alphabet over the years, so they were related, but they weren't really the same thing. Instead of a symbol representing a sound, most symbols had a meaning — a full word, usually, but some encoded weird grammatical things that it would take Babbling too long to get into. Many of the symbols looked like a couple letters smashed together, and you could kind of guess what they might mean if you knew the alphabet and also spoke Old Norse, but the script used in enchanting and the old runic alphabet weren't the same thing.
Babbling gave five points to Slytherin for knowing alphabets were bad for enchanting and asking an intelligent question about it, which seemed slightly silly, considering how obvious of a question it was, but Liz guessed she'd take it.
They wouldn't actually have to learn Old Norse to use the pseudo-Norse to enchant things though. It wasn't necessary to know how the words the symbols stood for had originally been pronounced to use them, just what they meant and their use in an enchantment, and the grammar of a script had more to do with the theory on how enchantments were put together than any underlying spoken language. They would have to learn a bit of Egyptian and Sumerian through the rest of the course, because sometimes symbols in hieroglyphs and cuneiform were used for their sounds instead of their meanings, but they didn't have to worry about the Norse. Which was good, Liz didn't really have any interest in learning the language the bloody vikings had spoken.
Since Babbling seemed to be kind of an expert on language-related stuff, Liz asked if there was a Latin elective she'd missed somehow. (She owned far too many books in Latin now to not be able to read any of them.) Apparently there wasn't, but there was a language club run by Babbling and Smethwyck (the Cambrian professor), and they usually had groups for French, Irish, something called Eyjamál (a Scandinavian language spoken in magical Britain), Egyptian (the one the modern mages spoke), and, yes, Latin. It wasn't really a class, but Babbling and Smethwyck and a few older students were willing to help newcomers learn, the first meeting would be in a couple weeks, keep an eye on the notice board.
Liz really had no idea whether she'd have enough time for another club on top of quidditch and dueling, but she'd keep it in mind.
Before mentioning the club, Babbling had admitted a private tutor would be her best bet, and Liz instinctively rejected that idea...before belatedly realising she could totally do that, couldn't she? She could definitely afford it, and there was no reason she couldn't go out to Hogsmeade on Sundays to meet with them somewhere. She'd have to talk to Severus about that — she had no idea how to arrange that sort of thing, and she technically needed his permission to leave the castle.
Once Babbling had left, the rest of the evening passed more or less quietly. She got a brief visit after dinner had already passed downstairs from Dorea and Hermione, Daphne, and Susan — Susan was a surprise, they weren't that close and she hadn't even been in the compartment with them (but at least she hadn't brought Hannah with her this time). Dorea and Hermione confirmed they'd been copying notes and assignments for her, though there was never really much in the first few days anyway, and Dorea came to talk about their timetable, not knowing whether Severus had gotten Liz's to her yet
They had double potions Thursday mornings — good, going down to the dorms to change into her school robes (assuming she was let out tomorrow morning) wouldn't be too far out of the way.
They didn't stay around very long, they had turned up sort of late, the only real significant thing that came up the confirmation that Dorea had some kind of health problem, she'd nearly had a fit on the train at the same time Liz had. Dorea seemed slightly surprised that Severus had told her that, but he hadn't given her any details — and neither did Dorea, she promised she'd tell them later (Hermione didn't know either). Liz got the very clear impression Dorea just didn't want to think about that right now, which was fair, she let it drop.
Her sleep schedule still a little off from her head being fucked up by soul-sucking monsters and her subsequent forty-hour coma, Liz woke up on Thursday at an unpleasant hour in the early morning. It wasn't even five o'clock yet. Grumbling to herself, she reached for her scrying book and resolved to be bored for the next couple hours. Or, relatively bored, anyway — now she was reading a section about how to actually do scrying, which was at least interesting. Even it did seem like it would be difficult, since apparently scrying was almost always done wandlessly. It involved a sort of meditation, which didn't sound too difficult, she should see if she could set aside a little time to try it later...
To her surprise, Severus showed up not that long afterward — she guessed he'd asked an elf to tell him when she woke up. This evaluation went much better, and after a brief conversation with Pomfrey, they agreed she was ready to be released, she was free to go.
Finally. If she had to be stuck in here any longer she suspected she might have started to go mad. Or more mad than she already was, anyway.
Liz was handed a little slip of paper from Severus saying she was allowed to be out in the corridors — it was early enough curfew still hadn't been lifted — she quickly packed up her pockets, and walked out the Hospital Wing doors into the castle. The halls were still and quiet, only the faintest whispering of portraits or a muffled clank from a suit of armor at the edge of hearing, and much darker than usual, the lights still out for the night, half-illuminated with the vague blue glow of pre-dawn, and that only near the windows, the rest still in shadow. Liz didn't see another soul until the couple older students lounging around in the common room — Severus had forgotten to tell her the password, but she'd figured out last year the door would open if she told it to in Parseltongue, so.
There must be something in the air in the Hospital Wing, she didn't know what, but she suspected there was an odd, sharp smell hanging around her, her skin feeling oddly tacky, so she had a shower quick. The little placard with the red and white Potter shield on it was still hanging next to one of the doors, so Liz plucked it off before stepping inside. Her trunk was in here, as she'd expected, but her things had been put away — her clothes hanging in the closet, her broom hung from a hook on the wall, books and potions and enchanting equipment on the shelves, parchment and ink set up on the desk — which she had not expected. Had someone been in her room? For fuck's sake, she'd thought nobody was supposed to get in here but now it'd happened twice, Severus's wards apparently weren't nearly as good as he thought, she'd have to go through all her shite to make sure nothing—
Wait a second. "Nilanse?"
With a familiar light popping noise, the excitable little elf appeared by the foot of her bed. "Yes, Liz! You are being better now? Are you needing anything?"
"I'm fine now, yeah, but I hate being stuck in hospital nearly as much as I hate dementors." Nilanse scowled a little, her head bobbing in a nod — Liz guessed the Potter elves were probably just as irritated with dementors being let on the train as she was. "I was just wondering, did you unpack my trunk?"
"Oh! Yes, that was me. You were being in hospital and sleeping on unpacking day, and I was thinking you didn't want to be behind when you got out, so I took care of it. Is that okay?" Nilanse asked, a little bit of the energy draining out of her voice, looking almost sheepish.
"Yes, that's fine, I was just worried someone had been in my room for a second." She started across the room toward her desk, was nearly there when she added a belated, "Thank you." Liz vaguely remembered, from when she'd been very young — early enough she still hadn't quite accepted her place in the household yet — wishing the Dursleys would appreciate the things she was made to do around the house, even just a little bit. She remembered putting extra effort into things sometimes, even taking care of cleaning she hadn't been told to do, hoping for... She didn't know, exactly. Nilanse had gone out of her way to be helpful, and Liz realised she didn't really have a choice in the matter, for weird magic reasons, but she didn't have to do things like this if she wasn't explicitly told to, and...
Well, Liz realised she wasn't really in danger of this happening, at least not any time soon, but she didn't want to wake up one day and discover she'd somehow become Petunia. The very least she could do was thank Nilanse when she did things for her.
Nilanse broke into a grin, almost seeming to bounce on her toes a little. "It is no problem! Are you needing anything else?"
"No, that's all, you can go home now." Had Liz woken her up? Nilanse didn't seem tired, but maybe tiredness looked different on elves. She had absolutely no idea what a normal elf sleep schedule was like...or if they even slept at all, for that matter. As Nilanse raised one hand to snap herself out, Liz twitched, a thought suddenly occurring to her. "No, wait. How do you do magic without a wand?" After all, if she wanted to do any scrying at all she had to learn how to apply magic wandlessly, and she really didn't know how to do that. She could figure it out on her own, but she sort of had an expert right here, didn't she? "Or can elves even use wands? I guess I never thought of that..."
Her overlarge eyes slowly blinking up at her, Nilanse's head tilted thoughtfully. "Elves can use wands, I think, but we don't need to. Wands are to focus the magic, make it tighter—" Nilanse pushed her hands out, fingertips first, for a little bit before curving her hands in, her palms coming closer together. "—but elf magic is different, we don't need to. Also, humans aren't wanting us to have them."
Well, yes, she might have guessed that. Legally, only humans were allowed to carry wands, though other beings could get special permission from the Ministry under various circumstances. That was something they'd been taught in History class — the goblins had rebelled citing that very policy among their grievances on more than one occasion, which was strange because she didn't think goblins even could use wands, their magic was too different — though Liz couldn't say why it was the law existed. Probably more stupid magic racism. "Right. Well, I was looking into scrying," she said, nodding at the book, "but it's done without a wand, and I don't really know how to do wandless magic..."
Nilanse gave her a lopsided sort of look, one eye narrowing a little, shifty tingles slipping out into the air — confusion, maybe? "But, you are doing magic without a wand all the time."
"What do you mean?"
"You're a mind mage."
Liz's mouth opened to respond, then fell closed a second later. She blinked.
...Huh. It was, wasn't it? She'd never thought of it that way before. The bits of her mind she pushed out to interact with other people's minds weren't really the same thing as the magic she pushed through her wand to do a spell, but they weren't really that different. If she just paid attention casting spells for a little bit, she could probably figure out how it felt, and just try to repli—
Oh! Severus had said a couple days ago that mind magic worked by pushing magic into her mind — the extra power was set to resonate with her mind, or whatever minds she was touching, but it was already magic she'd pushed out of her body! She just had to get the bit of stuff she pushed out to resonate in the form of the spell she wanted, and that should work just fine!
Liz grinned. "Thank you, Nilanse, that was exactly what I needed to know. Now you can go home."
Nilanse still seemed slightly confused, but she grinned back up at her anyway. "Okay! Bye, Liz." A sharp snap of her fingers, and the little elf was gone.
As long as she had the problem on her mind, there was no reason she couldn't try it out right now. Liz set an alarm for seven — nearly an hour from now, she'd woken up stupid early — and sat down at her desk. Now, it seemed like all she would have to do to get wandless magic to work would be to cast a levitation charm on this quill right here, try to get a sense for what the magic felt like, and push her magic into the (dispelled) quill, like she would if she were interacting with someone's mind, but try to get her magic to feel like the levitation charm. Spells felt different than living minds, but she could still feel them no problem. She didn't think this would be particularly difficult to figure out. Assuming she could aim her magic properly without another mind to focus on, it might take a little fumbling, still.
But, doing it that way didn't actually solve her problem. The whole point was to prepare for scrying, and for that there was no spell she could cast and get a feel for, she'd have to do it totally blind. No spell form to imitate, just raw intent shaping the spell. Which she was pretty sure was a completely different sort of thing, and more difficult.
...Or maybe not more difficult? Normal spells could sometimes be pretty intricate, she honestly wasn't certain she had the precision with this stuff to imitate them on purpose — she didn't have to think about "resonating" with people's minds or whatever, she just did it. She could maybe imitate the simpler ones, like a levitation charm, but not more complicated ones. It wasn't like she thought of the particular magical characteristics of a compulsion or whatever when she was doing one, she just imagined what she wanted and shoved power at it. She guessed, more like accidental magic than the wand magic she'd studied at Hogwarts so far. Since trying to imitate the particular spell form wouldn't help with the scrying, and since it would be much more difficult with more complex spells, maybe she shouldn't even bother trying to figure this out that way to begin with.
Right. Liz set the quill in the middle of the desk — she wouldn't have put it out here to begin with, she only used quills for exams, but Nilanse didn't know that — and tried to reach out with her mind. After a second, she felt the tingle of an enchantment, very rigid and symmetrical in a way a mind simply wasn't, and no, that was the desk under the quill, so she tried to pull back a little, and... Well, obviously she wasn't going to feel anything, was she? Walls, as long as they were normal enchantment-less walls, had no effect on her senses at all, she could only feel magic and minds and stuff, and this quill was completely magicless — unenchanted quills were required for exams to prevent cheating, it was the only reason she had this thing in the first place. (She hated writing with quills.) The quill was an entirely mundane physical object, it was invisible to her magical senses.
This might be more difficult than she'd thought.
By the time the alarm went off, Liz hadn't actually managed to get her feather to levitate. But, leaning forward on her arms and pushing her magic out and glaring at the feather and willing it to float, she was pretty sure she did feel something — a tingle of magic moving, not in her hand as though casting with her wand, but an electric tingle deep in her neck, at the base of her skull, the faintest coppery taste on her tongue. That wasn't an entirely unfamiliar feeling, it was similar to how she felt when she pushed her mind magic really hard (if not as intense), which did make sense, considering she wasn't channeling her magic through her hand. She hadn't actually gotten the feather to float, but she figured she was close, so that was still progress.
Liz leaned back into her seat, and as soon as her arms lifted off the surface of the desk the entire thing started to, slowly, rise up into the air, inch by inch. She slammed her hands onto the top, pushing it back to the ground, books shifting a little and her inkwell rattling. For a couple seconds, she just sat there, her eyes wide.
...Oops? Apparently she just needed to work on her aim...
A quick dispel from her wand stopped her desk from floating. Liz pulled on her new robes — the cloth hugging close around her as she ran her wand up the laces bringing an unconscious smile to her face — and made sure her bag was packed for the day. They had double Potions this morning (with the Gryffindors again, ugh), Defence just after lunch, then a free period, then another free period (actually History, but she didn't plan on going), and then Cambrian...during sixth period?
Dinner was available in the Great Hall for a long time, from five to nine (except on holidays, when the schedule in the afternoon and evening was often altered), and Liz had noticed before that sixth period ran from five thirty to six forty-five, and seventh period started at seven — supposedly, there was a rule that someone could have a class in sixth or seventh period on the same day, but not both. (Unless the seventh period class started at eight instead, as she'd heard some of the upper years' did, whatever.) In both first and second year, Liz had had Cambrian in seventh period, but she'd never had a class in sixth period before. Now she had Cambrian on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday...oh, and also Herbology on Monday. Huh.
Shrugging it off — she guessed she was having dinner late this year — Liz made sure she had her Potions and Defence stuff, then left her room. Dorea was certainly awake by now, but her door was closed, meaning she probably wasn't in there. (The wards cut off her mind magic, so she couldn't tell for sure.) She ducked her head into the bathroom, crossing the wardline, to confirm Dorea wasn't in here either. Just Daphne in the bath, and Millie in the shower — she could feel both of them, but also Daphne's hair things were on the counter by the sinks, and she was pretty sure that robe hanging from a hook was Millie's, it was too long to be anyone else's. Must already be out, then.
Liz was halfway across the common room when she paused at the call of her name — that was Adrian, she was pretty sure. After a moment of looking around, Liz spotted him in a clump of chairs nearby, along with a few older students, mostly sixth-years. She recognised Miles, who was also on the quidditch team, and Alastríona ("Alex") Ingham, now the sixth-year girl prefect, but there were a few others she didn't know. As she walked closer, Adrian asked, "Have a good summer?" with a crooked sort of smile.
She shrugged. "Good enough. What's up?" She felt herself tense a little, anticipating being asked about her hospitalisation, which she really didn't want to talk about.
Somewhat to her surprise, that wasn't what Adrian wanted to talk about either. "Our first practice is at ten on Sunday. I thought I'd catch you as long as you're here."
"Oh." Despite herself, she felt a smirk pulling at her lips. "What, no six in the morning practices anymore? Mark going soft or something?"
Adrian mirrored her smirk. "No, Wood got there first this time."
"Wood is a bloody madman," Miles said, grumbling a little.
Shrugging, Adrian said, "Not arguing with you there." Mark could get on their arses about practising sometimes, but from what she could tell (both overheard and picked up through mind magic) Wood, the Gryffindor Captain and keeper, was even worse. Honestly hard for Liz to imagine, she thought she would quit rather than deal with him. Turning back to Liz, Adrian asked, "What's your schedule like this year?"
"Um, I think I'm booked solid through sixth period every day, even Saturday." Counting History class, that was, but she didn't plan on going to that one.
Miles turned around in his chair to raise an eyebrow at her. "Shite, how many electives you taking?"
"Three — Runes, Arithmancy, and Divination. And I'm still taking Cambrian, too." It was actually optional starting this year, but she'd decided to keep taking it anyway — it wasn't a particularly difficult class (for her, anyway), and languages were kind of neat. Also, she apparently owned a bunch of books in Cambrian too, so...
Several of the older students winced. One of the girls Liz didn't know said, incredulous, "Both Runes and Arithmancy, and quidditch?"
As casual as she could, Liz shrugged. "I'm also thinking of trying for the dueling team."
"Fucking hell, Potter, you trying to drive yourself mad?"
"I've been told I already am, so, what difference does it make? Anyway," she said to Adrian, over a few huffs and chuckles, "I have seventh period free the whole week."
He nodded. "You and Draco both. We're probably going to have evening practices this year, then — I think Mondays and Thursday through Saturday are best. Mark will probably be able to say for sure by the time we meet up Sunday."
"Right, see you then." A few goodbyes back and forth, and Liz continued on her way.
The Great Hall was still less than half full, which wasn't really a surprise. Virtually everyone did have breakfast, of course, but it wasn't unusual for people to eat just before their first class in the morning, which was still over an hour and a half away. There were still plenty of people around, though disproportionately — weighted to the middle years, both the younger years and the NEWT students underrepresented, and short on Ravenclaws and Gryffindors, whose dormitories were the furthest away. It was still noisy, the air thick with a crackling soup of feeling and thought, heavy enough Liz could nearly feel it as a pressure against her skin.
Even so, it wasn't difficult to find Dorea. She was at the Ravenclaw table, sitting next to Hermione, Nevile, Padma, Lisa, and...shite, was that one Terry or Michael? Liz didn't pay that much attention to the Ravenclaw boys, to be honest. It definitely wasn't Tony, that would be him sitting with Susan and the Hufflepuffs, but beyond that she wasn't sure.
Yes, she'd known the blokes for nearly two years now, she knew she was ridiculous. She could tell which was Terry and which was Michael when they were sitting next to each other no problem, but when there was only one of them...
Shaking off her own irritation with herself, Liz sat down next to Dorea, letting her bag slump down to the floor. "Liz, you're out!" That was Hermione, sitting across from Dorea, nearly spilling her tea in her surprise.
Liz started scooping herself beans and eggs — she wasn't particularly hungry again, but she should eat anyway. "Yes, finally. Pomfrey let me out early this morning."
"So you're doing better, then?" Dorea's voice sounded perfectly easy and casual, reflecting none of the storm of emotions flickering past in her head. She was withholding the urge to hug her, with Liz appreciated.
"I'm fine. What have I missed?"
Over breakfast, Liz was filled in on the events of the last couple days. Dorea, Padma, and Michael (Padma said his name at some point) mostly stuck to gossip and the like, which Liz could not give a flying fuck about, but it was better than anxiously fussing over her due to her recent hospitalisation, so she didn't complain. Apparently, something weird was going on with Pansy and Millie, though nobody had any idea what — the pair had been inseparable for the first two years, but there was an obvious rift now, growing wider the last couple days. Liz honestly couldn't imagine why anyone would want to be friends with Pansy in the first place, so good on Millie, she guessed? There was a rumour going around about McGonagall and Sinistra shagging, which they were, Liz had figured that out ages ago, but she didn't bother saying anything — they clearly wished to keep it private, and honestly Liz didn't give a damn about who was shagging who, so she didn't see why she should tell anyone about that sort of thing when she picked it up with her ridiculous mind control superpowers. Apparently, Padma's Gryffindor sister and her friend Lavender were already plotting how they were going to get cute boys to ask them on Hogsmeade dates, which was only hilarious because they meant to target popular older students, primarily Cedric Diggory (Hufflepuff quidditch Captain and now fifth-year prefect) and Roger Davies (sixth-year Ravenclaw prefect and dueling team member), and there was no fucking way that was going to happen.
There was a disproportionate amount of gossip about the Weasleys. Things hadn't quite settled after the death of the littlest Weasley before the end of term — they'd all been in shock, and hadn't been in the castle for much of those months anyway — but it was clear now they'd all been changed. Percival, the eldest, was Head Boy this year, which a lot of people hadn't been looking forward to, the annoying strutting pompous git, but he seemed much less...well, Percy Weasley now. His self-righteous, patronising behaviour had vanished completely over the summer, leaving him quieter, more serious and more intense — according to Hermione, he'd given the first- and second-years a big lecture the first night back about sticking together and never leaving anyone out, and if there was anything that was bothering them, for the love of everything sacred, tell someone, himself or a prefect or a professor or a friend, someone.
Hermione conjectured Percival blamed himself for his sister's death, at least partially, for not keeping close enough of an eye on her, for not realising anything was wrong. Apparently, Ginevra had been behaving oddly for months beforehand — the common assumption was that her murderer (Tamsyn) had already been doing something to her over that time (which Liz guessed was possible, but she hadn't thought Tamsyn had been in the school all that time), that someone should have noticed something was wrong. It sounded like the realisation had made their new Head Boy far less annoying, at least, so Liz didn't really care that much.
(Of course, Liz didn't really care at all that Ginevra had been killed to begin with, but she'd managed to make it this far without admitting that to anyone besides Tamsyn. Severus's behaviour that day had forewarned her that that would probably be a bad idea.)
The twins, on the other hand — the same pair of red-heads sharing a single mind who had annoyed Liz on the train before first year, seemingly forever ago — just seemed to be depressed. There was always a large-scale prank of some kind from them on the first day back (though usually targeting other Gryffindors or Ravenclaws, so Liz hardly noticed), but there hadn't been one this year. Apparently, they hardly spoke to anyone, uncharacteristically quiet and downcast, and were often off on their own somewhere, nobody knew where they went or what they were doing. A lot of people suspected they were planning something nefarious — which was fair, given who they were talking about — but nothing had come up yet.
The one in their year, Ronald, just seemed angry. He'd blow up at the drop of a hat these days, bad enough most of the other Gryffindors had taken to walking on egg-shells around him after less than a week. That didn't seem like a new thing to Liz, he'd always been kind of...shouty, but apparently it was worse than before, which, ugh, at least they only had Potions with the Gryffindors this year. (And History, but Liz didn't intend to go.) Which was already bad enough — Liz suspected there'd be more melted or exploded cauldrons than usual this year.
Neville, somewhat cautiously, warned her to keep an eye on him. On the first night back, when they'd been in their dorm room, Ronald had laid into Neville about his continuing friendship with Liz — which was sort of hilarious, she and Neville might share friends but they weren't really friends themselves, they hardly talked to each other. Because Liz was a Parselmouth, Ronald had decided she must be the Heir of Slytherin (which wasn't even a thing), and since his sister had been found in the Chamber of Secrets (which also wasn't a thing) that Liz must have killed her. It didn't help that the rumour had spread that the Aurors had talked to Liz, though those rumours did include that they'd just needed a Parselmouth to get where Ginevra was, and they clearly hadn't thought she was a suspect, so...she didn't know how that fit into his claims, exactly? Neville said he seemed to think someone was protecting her, Scrimgeour or the Malfoys or, hell, maybe even Dumbledore — obviously the Girl Who Lived was more important to his interests than a poor family like the Weasleys, which was true, but Liz hadn't expected someone like Ronald to be that cynical — so Ronald felt he either had to expose her somehow, or else find some way to get revenge himself.
That was so supremely stupid Liz found herself wanting to hit something. Was Ronald honestly stupid enough to think that if Liz had murdered another student Dumbledore would protect her? He didn't even like her to begin with, if she did something so extreme he'd probably chuck her right into Azkaban himself! Also, she was pretty sure Lucius Malfoy was one of those idiots who wanted her dead for their precious Dark Lord blowing himself up like a fucking moron, and... She didn't know, it was just so stupid. And frustrating, that she'd inevitably have to deal with this nonsense at some point. She wasn't worried, Ronald Weasley wasn't any kind of threat to her, but it was just stupid, and she hated the whole fucking thing, it was making her angry.
Hermione just wanted to talk about the classes Liz had missed, speculating what they'd be studying going forward. Sorry, Dorea, Hermione was her favourite now.
Babbling off on all that nonsense took up about half the time remaining before classes started, until Hermione suggested they go up to the library — partially just because Hermione lived up there, but also so they could give Liz the homework assignments she'd missed, make sure she was caught up. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable use of their time, so their group split up, the Ravenclaws wandering up to their dorms and the Slytherins and Gryffindors heading to the library.
Liz had missed two days of classes already — on Tuesday the Slytherins had had Transfiguration, Divination, Runes, History (which Liz would have skipped anyway), and Cambrian; on Wednesday there'd been Transfiguration again, Arithmancy, Charms, and then Divination again. (Divination was one of the weird classes on her timetable, jumping around to fit into open spots on the schedule, second period on Tuesday but fifth on Wednesday and Saturday.) There hadn't been any assignments in Divination, History, Arithmancy, or Runes...sort of. There was reading for History, but Liz had read the whole book already (and also it wasn't like Binns kept marks anyway), in Arithmancy they were just doing the basic maths review Vector had already told her about, and in Runes they'd just been told to look over their books and familiarise themselves with what the runes looked like.
It sounded like Hermione had hated her first Divination class, thought the professor was a crank, which was kind of a disappointment — Liz had been looking forward to that one a little.
Anyway, there was a reading for Charms, and Flitwick often had little surprise quizzes on the reading so Liz should actually look at it just in case (even though she'd already read the third Standard Book of Spells back in spring first year and then again during second). Smethwyck had given them a worksheet to fill out, just to see how much they remembered, which was supposed to be handed in this afternoon. Since Liz hadn't been there, she probably wasn't expected to have it done, but she actually liked Cambrian, so she had Hermione make a clean copy (without her answers) on a fresh sheet of paper for her — it would be something to do between periods, or if she got bored in Defence.
And of course McGonagall had already set an essay for Transfiguration, they had to do one for her practically every week. Liz copied down the assignment, trying not to grumble out loud. She hated Transfiguration — she was still inexplicably terrible at it, and McGonagall being a stern, demanding bitch all the time did not redeem the subject to her at all. McGonagall had started being a little less cold and harsh to Liz since Severus had gotten her to try bringing her marks up last year, but still, terrible.
By the time they'd gotten through all that, Liz had barely enough time to speed through the reading for Charms before it was already time to go down for Potions.
As was usual, the door to the Potions classroom was closed and locked when they got there — there was all kinds of sensitive equipment and supplies in there, she assumed Severus didn't want students poking about unsupervised. Most of the Slytherins were already there — they were only missing Millie, by the look of it — but the only Gryffindors so far were Lily (one of Hermione's friends) and Fay Dunbar (who Liz only knew from the pick-up quidditch games people put on some weekends). Which wasn't unusual, the Gryffindors were often just barely on time for Potions.
They hadn't even stopped moving yet when Draco started swaggering over, shadowed by Greg and Vinnie and Pansy. Liz bit down on the inside of her lip to keep herself from groaning aloud — she was not in the mood to deal with Draco right now. And apparently nobody else was either, the other three continued past her, Dorea and Hermione toward Daphne and Tracey, and Neville toward Lily and Fay. (Traitors.) Forcing her own impatience off her voice — Draco wasn't really that bad, not since they'd both joined the quidditch team — Liz said, "Good morning, Draco. Pansy, boys."
Pansy tensed slightly when Liz glanced her way, the smallest, barely-noticeable flash of stale fear crossing the air — she never had entirely gotten back to normal after Liz had put a snake in her bed nearly two years ago now. Liz tried not to smirk.
The two larger boys hulking over Draco's shoulders hardly reacted, though Greg did smile and nod at her. Liz wasn't sure either of them had ever so much as spoken to her (nor did she really want them to), but Greg seemed nice enough, despite being so big and intimidating-looking. As usual, Draco spoke for them. "Liz. Good summer?"
"Fine enough," Liz said with a shrug. It'd definitely been an eventful summer, but she wasn't supposed to tell anybody about it — and if she were going to, it'd be one of her friends, not Draco bloody Malfoy.
Draco quickly went off on a ramble about what he'd done over the summer, which thankfully didn't require Liz's participation at all. Apparently his family had gone on holiday to France to visit relatives — Draco suspected part of his mother's motivation was to have an excuse to get some time away from Draco's grandmother, her mother-in-law, they didn't get on. And since there was a French branch of the Malfoys — technically it had been the other way around, but the French Malfoys weren't nobility in their home country any longer, so the British Malfoys were more important (yes, Draco literally thought that as he spoke of them) — and his mother's mother had been born in France, there were a lot of relatives.
Honestly, Draco's French holiday sounded much worse than Hermione's. All visiting relatives, forced into polite teas and shite with stodgy old aunts and uncles, and into the almost constant company of cousins he barely knew, Liz thought she would have been miserable in Draco's place. But he seemed pleased enough about the whole thing, and she didn't want to start a pointless fight, so she kept her mouth shut.
While Draco was rambling, most of the rest of the class filled out — now they were only missing Dean and Seamus, the Gryffindor muggleborn boys Hermione never had gotten to join her study group, and also Ronald. (Those three were friends, they'd probably turn up together.) Cutting himself off from a tangent about something to do with one of his distant cousins Liz did not care about, Draco said, "I'm sorry, am I babbling?"
He'd turned to Pansy as he asked, she gave him a crooked sort of smile. "Maybe a little bit."
"Right. I'm sorry about that," he said a little sheepishly, turning back to Liz, "Mother says I have a tendency to do that, I've been trying to work on it."
...Honestly, Liz was a little surprised Draco had even that much self-awareness, but she probably shouldn't say that.
"How about you, what did you do this summer?" Liz very clearly caught the thought from his head that reciprocating in conversations like this was what he was supposed to do, it's what his mother would expect, which was literally the only reason he'd done it. But at least he was trying, she guessed?
Of course, the only reason Liz had caught on to that sort of thing was due to mind magic, noticing people's thoughts when she didn't do something they expected. And that only worked sometimes. So, she really had no right to judge at all.
But anyway, not only did she not want to talk to Draco bloody Malfoy about her holiday, she also couldn't. She wasn't supposed to tell people she'd spent it with Severus — or not yet, anyway, it'd inevitably be in the fucking newspapers before too long, because people were ridiculous. And, the more she thought about it, it'd probably be fine if Draco knew? She'd gotten the impression Severus and Draco's mother were close, which meant Draco had probably known him growing up, so he probably wouldn't care? And also Draco didn't want to rock the boat with her for the same reason she was playing nice with him, they'd been standing right next to each other when Mark had lectured at them about putting their stupid feud to bed, so. But Liz couldn't say the same about Pansy, and there were other people within earshot, so even if Draco would be fine they couldn't talk about it now anyway.
Besides, Liz also just didn't want to tell Draco. Kind of petty, she knew, but she didn't like him, so if she was going to talk about it she'd rather it be Dorea or Hermione.
"Oh! Um..." That would be fine to say, she thought — and she'd even told her friends this already, so it was theoretically something Draco could get from someone else anyway. "Nothing much, really, but I did visit Clyde Rock for the first time, so there's that. The Potter manor," she clarified, when she noticed their confusion.
The confusion was instantly replaced with surprise, and then a warm, slimy, creepy, clingy feeling Liz had learned to recognise as pity. Belatedly, Liz realised that purebloods would consider the only remaining member of one of their old magical families never even having been to the family home before to be a big fucking deal — they probably all lived in theirs. (Well, Draco and Pansy, anyway, the Goyles and Crabbes weren't nobility.) Maybe that had been a stupid thing to say...
It was showing on their faces — Greg's the most, but only the slightest frown on Pansy's — but thankfully nobody said anything about that. "I see," Draco said, slowly and delicately. "And how was that? I admit I don't know anything about...Clyde Rock, did you say it was called? Nobody has been there since—" —your grandparents died in the Seventies — Draco cut off again, kicking himself for almost saying something quite that blunt. Not something his mother would have approved of, Liz gathered.
She didn't actually care, but it was better he hadn't actually said it, she would have had to figure out how the hell to respond to that. Since he'd only said it in his head, she could pretend she hadn't heard it. "It was...neat, I guess. Kind of lot — these family manor places are really big, you know? Dorea says Ancient House is huge, it sounds absurd."
Draco was smiling a little, but only barely, as though he were trying not to. "Yes, Ancient House is one of the largest estates in the country — Mother used to stay there sometimes, she loved the gardens."
By "the gardens" Draco meant the couple ponds and streams and the bloody forest they had on their land, it was ridiculous. There were a lot of little buildings scattered about, going back over a thousand years and some little more than crumbling ruins, Dorea didn't even know what all they had out there. The Potters', as huge and fancy as it'd seemed at the time, was actually modest by comparison. "Well, apparently there are a lot of greenhouses and workshops and stuff, the Potters being big into potions, you know? The library was the best part, though, that place is amazing."
"It would be, wouldn't it — didn't the Potters get the Peverell library?"
"Oh, well, maybe." Liz didn't know much about the family history, but she did know the first Potter had married one of the last Peverells. The Peverells had actually turned up in History readings — they were one of the Seventeen Founders of the Wizengamot, the so-called "Noble and Most Ancient" families (the Blacks, the Boneses, the Longbottoms, the Inghams, and the Monroes were the only ones left) — but she knew practically nothing about them besides their name and that they didn't exist anymore. She guessed it was possible the Potters had inherited their books, but they'd be super old so they're probably among those Latin and Cambrian ones way up at the top. "But there was also a pensieve in there, and pensieves are so cool. I've only used it a couple times so far, but it's amazing. There are even racks of bottled memories sitting there, dozens and dozens and dozens of the things."
Draco's eyes had gone wide, his mouth dropping open a second or two before he actually found his voice. "Oh, that's incredible! Do you know how far they go back?" He was thinking the Potters had probably used it as a way to permanently memorialise important events in the history of the family, magics or wisdom of their masters, all kinds of secrets of the family outsiders didn't get to know about — apparently, that wasn't an unusual thing to do, for a family that had the expertise to maintain a pensieve and the memories themselves over centuries. (Enchanted objects could get damaged, and the memories would dissipate if not carefully preserved.) Even if there weren't any Potters left to teach Liz these things, she could still learn of the family's traditions on her own through their vault of memories.
Liz didn't care so much about that last bit, which Draco seemed to think was really important for silly magical culture reasons, but she did have to admit the idea was pretty cool. "I don't know, I haven't really looked into those yet. I've been trying to figure out how to use the pensieve first — the charms to copy and manipulate memories are really hard, you know." She'd managed to extract Tamsyn's memory from the pensieve without ruining it, but it'd been a close thing, and she still hadn't successfully copied any of her own yet.
"Of course they are, memory charms are NEWT material."
"Yes, but I'm good at charms." Also, they were NEWT-level because they were sort of half- mind magic, so Liz expected they should be easier for her than they were for most people. "I've gotten it to work a little bit, but it always falls apart before I can—"
And that was when Ronald Weasley turned up.
Liz felt his mind approaching from down the corridor from behind her, along with Dean and Seamus, long before she saw or heard him. As soon as he noticed her, bright sparks shot through his head, then quickly settled into a hot, frothing anger. Nobody had needed to warn Liz that he blamed her for his sister's death — she would have figured that out within seconds of bumping into him.
In the last seconds she had, Liz let out a sigh. She did not want to deal with this.
Draco gave her a confused look, wondering why she'd suddenly stopped talking in mid-sentence, but before he could ask Ronald shouted down the hall, "Finally decided to come to classes with the rest of us, Potter?" Ronald had heard she'd had a bad reaction to a dementor, of course, but he didn't really belive that was why she'd been gone for a few days. After all, they hadn't affected anyone else that badly, that had to have been just an excuse. An excuse for what, Liz wasn't sure, and neither was Ronald.
Before Liz could decide how the hell she was supposed to respond to that, Draco said, "Is that how your mother taught you to greet people who'd just been in hospital?"
"Don't talk about my mother, Malfoy," Ronald snarled, his face reddening with anger.
"I don't see why I shouldn't — you speak of mine all the time."
"My mother isn't a frigid, high-and-mighty bitch who spends more time on her hair than her own family!"
"And mine isn't a boorish, self-righteous shrew who still has more children than sense."
Ouch, low blow, Draco, even Liz knew that was too much. But it made Ronald very, very angry at him, enough that when Liz slipped away, ducking between Pansy and Greg, Ronald didn't even seem to notice, still furiously trading insults with Draco. Draco did notice, but he didn't stop and ask her where she was going — in fact, Liz suspected he'd made an opportunity for her to escape on purpose. She wasn't going to give him too much credit for that — Draco and Ronald had hated each other from their first day at Hogwarts, they got into petty verbal sparring matches on the regular — but still, she guessed that was nice of him.
It was probably less than a minute later when Severus showed up, sweeping out of the shadowy corridors of the below-ground levels, so abruptly he might as well have appeared out of the walls. He had, sort of — Liz had felt his mind approaching from overhead and in that direction, there must be a secret passage over there. At that point, Draco had already managed to anger Ronald enough that he'd drawn has wand, holding it shaking pointed right at Draco's face. Draco hadn't drawn his own, just kept standing there taunting him, which might seem like a stupid thing to do, but he had to have known Severus would be showing up soon.
"Fifteen points from Gryffindor—" Most of the other kids jumped at the smooth, drawling voice slipping through the hallway. Apparently they hadn't noticed Severus showing up. "—Weasley, for threatening another student."
Whirling around, Ronald practically yelled, "The slimy git stated it, and—" He abruptly cut off, staring up to meet Severus's frozen, pitiless eyes, the red starting to run out of his face. A lot of the students were unreasonably afraid of Severus, Ronald probably wouldn't have shouted at him if he'd been thinking.
One of Severus's eyebrows twitched upward, with a flicker of amusement Liz barely felt from here. "And another five for insulting your classmates." Severus flicked his fingers at the door, a tingle of magic on the air, the lock clicked and the door slowly swung open. "Everyone get inside — unless you would like to continue this, Weasley? I find myself curious whether a house has ever gone into the negative in the first week of classes."
Ronald, wisely, turned right around and stalked off toward the door, his shoulders hunched and his fists clenched at his sides.
A moment later, they were all seated at their tables, Liz as usual with Dorea in the second row on the Slytherin side — Slytherin–Gryffindor classes tended to be very clearly split down the middle. Severus was quiet a moment, seemingly poking about a few papers on his desk, but Liz could feel the vague presence of his mind clawing over the room. Counting the students, maybe? When Severus straightened, gazing out over the room, all the little whispered conversations immediately went silent. That way he had of quieting a roomful of noisy children, Liz wondered sometimes if that was some kind of mind magic too subtle for her to notice, it didn't seem natural.
"Welcome," Severus said, low and soft yet still carrying easily through the room (Liz suspected that was also magic), "to the third year in our study of potion-brewing. Over the last two years, you all should," with a delicate, skeptical emphasis, "have developed a familiarity with the elementary fundamentals of the craft — common components both mundane and magical, simple methods of preparation and reduction, the basic schema of interval and coalescence. Those who approached their efforts with a minimum of the proper attentiveness," said with a tone suggesting he expected very few had, "should have observed certain patterns in the interaction of various components, effects predictable and reproducible. I don't expect any should understand the mechanics behind these interactions at this point, but I do expect these patterns should have been noted.
"Now, in your third year, we will begin to construct a coherent, comprehensive system out of these disparate elements." Severus's wand appeared in his hand, he tapped it against his desk; a sheaf of papers lifted off the surface, started drifting across the air, the pile smoothly splitting apart into individual sheets, each floating over to simultaneously rest before each of them.
Liz slid the paper a little closer to herself. It was...really weird-looking. In the middle was a big five-pointed star, at the centre of each of the five segments one big bold word — fire, earth, blood, water, air — and other words and symbols which seemed completely random. Some were potions ingredients, but others were, just, random adjectives — colours, or physical or personality traits — with no explanation at all. Around the star was a circle, and in the round arcs between the points there were more random words, around another five bold words — spring, summer, autumn, birth, death — and some of them were even repeats, which seemed very confusing. Then there was another ring around that, divided into sixteen segments with more nonsense symbols, names of metals (plus salt and sulphur and phosphorus) and planets and constellations and bodily organs, some of them appearing in multiple places around the circle. It looked like random nonsense, Liz couldn't guess what any of this shite was supposed to mean.
"It is the opinion of some," Severus was saying, "that since a potion cannot be reduced to a set of formulaic expressions and translations that can be arithmantically analysed, its function cannot be systematised at all. That the craft of potions," he disdain on his voice so thick it was almost tactile, "is not a form of magic with any true science behind it, in the manner of charms or transfiguration, but a more...primitive art. This is, as you should come to understand over the course of this year, absolute nonsense.
"The diagram before you is a depiction of the primary affinities and their first-level associations with each other. Over the course of the next couple months, you will be assigned readings aiming to explain the underlying concepts involved. As complex as these ideas are, I expect few of you will understand them at first glance — you will have ample opportunities to ameliorate any...deficiencies in your comprehension through your written work over the course of the year, which you will find to be more theoretical in its approach than that which you've been assigned thus far.
"By the beginning of your fifth year, you should be able to verbally describe, without prompting, all the affinities and associations depicted in this diagram. If you cannot manage even that, I sincerely doubt you will perform well enough on your OWL exams to progress to NEWT Potions — the few of you who are capable of achieving even so basic an understanding, it is then that we will truly begin to delve into the deeper mysteries of the craft.
"But that is not a matter for today. Were any of you so foolish as to fail to acquire a copy of Affinity and Interaction? no? My my, not a one of you chose to bumble into my classroom unprepared, will wonders never cease. By the end of the month, you should have read through the entirety of the first section — it is the first seven chapters, I believe — and familiarised yourself with the tables in the appendices. I will not be assigning sections of it piecemeal or quizzing you on the particulars — whether or not you have done the reading and understood the concepts therein will be immediately apparent in the quality of your brewing and your written work, so I will not waste any of our limited time, yours or mine, holding your hands through it.
"In the meantime, we shall be spending our first couple weeks here ensuring your skulls have not too thoroughly emptied themselves over the summer of what little you have managed to absorb in your education thus far." Severus flicked his fingers at the blackboard on an overlarge rolling easel sitting next to his desk — there was a flash of chalk dust, and a dozen plus lines in Severus's scrawling hand appeared written on the surface. "This is a standard shrinking solution. As formulated, it does not directly shrink the target, but instead forces it to regress to a previous stage of development, which typically involves the target becoming smaller as a natural consequence. You shouldn't need any more explication than that to brew it correctly. The observant may note this is a different formulation than the one you will find in Magical Drafts and Potions. This one is the superior formulation — if I catch you brewing Jigger's instead, I will vanish the contents of your cauldron and you will receive a zero for the day.
"That is all. Begin."
Leaning a little closer, Dorea whispered, "I can copy down the formula if you want to collect the supplies."
Liz nodded — normally they wouldn't bother copying the formula down, since it could be found in their textbook later, but apparently Severus didn't like Jigger's. (That did happen sometimes, especially if Severus was trying to teach them a procedural thing that wasn't in the standard recipe.) And Dorea's handwriting was much better than Liz's, so. "Right, er..." Red hairy caterpillars, shrivelfigs, rat spleens, daisies, leech juice — the leech juice was on the shelf right there, they'd just run over and borrow a bottle when they needed it, but all the rest would be in the storeroom. "Okay, be right back."
A couple minutes later, while Liz was plucking a few rat spleens out of the jar into a vial with a little pair of tweezers, something peculiar occurred to her. Liz did pay enough attention to start picking up some of the patterns Severus had referred to in his opening lecture, and something about this potion didn't make a whole lot of sense. The magic in any potion had to come from somewhere, but none of the ingredients were magical — Liz guessed the shrivelfigs were, and the caterpillars if they were raised by mages (which they certainly were), but neither of those were powerful enough in these amounts to do much, she didn't think. Certainly not enough to do what the potion was supposed to. She'd read somewhere that the point of using spleens in a potion was to focus the magic better, to make the potion act more efficiently (and also counteract unwanted negative emotional effects of other ingredients), but Liz didn't think there was nearly enough power even with that.
But there was one ingredient Liz didn't need to collect: in the middle of the brewing process, they were supposed to cast a strong shrinking charm on the potion. That was...peculiar. Not that they would cast a charm on a potion at all, no, they'd done that before — it was very rare in older potions, from back when far fewer people used to own wands, but it was a pretty common shortcut in newer potions. (And also might be the point of the spleens and the leeches, to better focus the spell and filter out any interference.) The weird thing was that there was nothing in the potion to catch and hold the energy of the spell. That was what the moonstone in the pensieve base was for, to contain the energy of the memory-stuff, and also hold the magic in the proper "shape" so it didn't decohere. Tincture of Moonstone was actually really good for that, it was part of why they'd made it in class so many times. But this potion didn't use Tincture of Moonstone, and there wasn't anything hard and crystalline like the moonstone that could do the same thing.
When Liz was finished gathering their components, instead of immediately setting to preparing them, she raised her hand. Severus had already started pacing around the room, silently looming over the students and watching them work — though nobody had gotten beyond setting up their cauldrons and gathering components yet. He noticed her right away, but he waited a moment before acknowledging her, giving the room one last glance one end to the other. Sweeping closer, stopping just a couple metres away, his voice lowered somewhat, he said, "Yes, Miss Potter."
She blinked — it was still slightly weird, going back to Miss Potter after nearly two months of Elizabeth. Shaking the thought off, "I just wondered, Professor, why we're not using Tincture of Moonstone in this one. The charm has to be caught by something, right?"
One of his eyebrows ticked up, a feeling Liz couldn't quite put words to tingling in the air. (Considering something, she thought, but she wasn't sure.) After a second or two staring at her, he nodded, then abruptly turned around, started strolling back up toward his desk, his overdramatic robes overdramatically fluttering behind him as always. His voice again carrying through the room in that way he had (definitely magic), "Hold a moment. Miss Potter asked an interesting question."
This wasn't entirely out of the ordinary. While Severus didn't like people gossiping about stupid shite while brewing, or shouting out distracting interruptions, he didn't mind people (quietly) asking him intelligent questions while they were supposed to be working; sometimes, he would decide it was important enough everyone should listen. Everyone stopped what they were doing, turning to look back up at the front of the room — a few heads even poked out of the storeroom.
Once everyone was still and quiet, Severus looked back to Liz. "Would you mind repeating your question, Miss Potter."
Er, okay. "I was wondering why we're not using Tincture of Moonstone in this one."
"Why do you expect it to be included?"
"Well, every time we're casting a spell on a potion, and it's supposed to be kind of absorbed into it and used as a component — like in this one, I assume we're not actually shrinking the potion itself — it always has Tincture of Moonstone in it. Or maybe something else that can act as a reservoir, like crushed quartz or some other gemstone." Liz did actually know what a reservoir was now, thanks to her divination-related reading. "But there doesn't seem to be anything like that in this one."
Severus nodded. "Can anybody answer Miss Potter's question?" Liz felt herself wince — normally, when Severus asked the class to answer a student's question, it was because they'd just asked something very stupid all of them should already know. But, somewhat to her relief, nobody raised their hand right away. After a moment of silence, Severus asked, "Nobody?" Finally, with a brief glance at Liz and a hint of hesitation, Daphne raised her hand. "Yes, Miss Greengrass."
"The magic of the charm is integrated through the ritual element."
Liz blinked, turned to frown at the formula on the blackboard. She knew potions were, technically, a form of ritual magic — that was why Severus had to explain specifically what the potion was supposed to do before they started, it wouldn't work right otherwise — but she didn't really know much about how the particulars worked. This potion did seem weirdly...symmetrical. The shrinking charm was about in the middle, and the ingredients and stir patterns were sort of mirrored, after the charm was done repeating the process up to that point backward — not exactly, but pretty close. And there did seem to be more stirring in this one than normal, done in more specific patterns (Severus had even included little diagrams next to those lines, in case they'd forgotten what the highly technical terms meant), but Liz really knew fucking nothing about what the stirring even did, on a magical level. So, while she suspected Daphne was right, that didn't actually mean very much to her.
Severus said a single word: "How?"
Daphne floundered for a second, before she admitted, "...I don't know, sir."
Rather than call them both idiots, which Liz honestly half-expected, Severus just nodded. "By the end of this spring," he said, a suggestive lilt on his voice, "you should all be able to tell me the answer to that question. That is all, you may continue." While everyone got back to work, the room filling with low mutters and the clanking and clinking of cauldrons being set up and vials being passed around, Severus muttered, "Three points to Slytherin each, for the question and the answer."
...Okay, then.
Brewing the potion wasn't particularly difficult. As peculiar as it was that there seemingly wasn't any way to get the shrinking charm into the potion, they'd brewed far more complicated potions over the last couple years, this one wasn't a big deal. After maybe a half hour, she and Dorea had finished. The potion filling their cauldron was an intense, acid green, so bright it almost seemed to glow — Liz pulled out her copy of Magical Drafts and Potions, just to check the description quick, and it sounded about right. She thought their potion might be a little thicker than Jigger described, but other than that. Liz carefully bottled it, Dorea wrote their names on a label and stuck it on, and that was that.
Once they'd handed over their sample, Severus said they were free to go, don't forget to do the reading. They cleaned up their shite, and left. They'd only been in there for a little over an hour — and this was supposed to be a double period, there was still another hour until they started serving lunch, and three hours until their next class.
Really, she'd rather have stayed in Potions for the full class period. As intense as Severus could be, she actually liked Potions, and it was better than having to sit around waiting for her next class to start for three hours.
She spent most of the extra time in the library, working on her Transfiguration essay. She hated Transfiguration, but she'd rather have it finished and out of the way as soon as possible than have it lingering over her head for the rest of the week. In that time, she didn't actually manage to finish it — she'd needed to go over Dorea's notes from the lecture, and also do the reading — but she was maybe a third of the way done with the actual writing, which she guessed was as good as she could hope for.
(She'd be allowed to drop Transfiguration after fifth year, and she was already looking forward to not having to deal with this frustrating shite anymore.)
They ended up having lunch at the Hufflepuff table. Liz really didn't know how Dorea decided when they were going to sit where — they usually had breakfast and lunch with the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs, since they weren't welcome in Gryffindor and Hermione wasn't welcome in Slytherin — even with the cheating of being a bloody mind-reader and standing right next to Dorea as she made the decision. She thought it was probably more feeling than reason, it could be hard to interpret that sort of thing.
She kind of wished Dorea hadn't chosen the Hufflepuffs, though. They could be a bit...squishy. Liz had just been hospitalised for a couple days, and the Hufflepuffs she was at least minimally friendly with — Susan, Hannah, Megan — or were acquaintances — Justin, Wayne, Sophie, Sally-Anne — had apparently been worried about her, because they were rather insistent about asking what happened and whether she was okay, and being...well, squishy. It was annoying, and honestly kind of exhausting to deal with. It didn't help that Liz didn't actually like most of them very much, they were just Dorea and Hermione's friends, so she tried not to be a complete and total bitch all the time. She was being a little snappish, she could tell the Hufflepuffs thought she was being rude and off-putting, but she was trying, dammit. They should feel lucky she hadn't just told them all to shut the fuck up and leave her alone.
At least Hannah hadn't out and hugged her this time — she'd tried, but Susan had seen it coming and snagged her by the collar of her robes. Susan was quickly shaping up to be Liz's favourite Hufflepuff.
They'd been sitting for some minutes when they were interrupted. Liz felt the mind coming before she saw the person, of course, though what she saw wasn't at all what she expected. With absolutely no warning at all, an unfamiliar-looking woman sauntered up behind Dorea (sitting straight across the table from Liz), and draped herself over her, arms wrapping loose over Dorea's shoulders and chin settling on the top of her head.
Dorea tensed with surprise and confusion and a creeping discomfort — not nearly as bad of a reaction as Liz would have had, but still not happy about it. She tried to turn around to get a glimpse of the woman, but there wasn't much to see from her angle. "Um, can I help you?"
"You already did, sweet girl." Her hands rubbing idly at Dorea's shoulders, the woman rubbed her cheek against the top of Dorea's head — which might seem like a weird thing to do, but it actually made perfect sense, given who this was. The woman was long-limbed and scrawny, enough that her wrists were noticeably boney, with a shaggy head of scattered grey-ish hair — not the grey of old age, and not a uniform colour, mixed flecks from charcoal-black to an ashy grey — and her eyes were an unnatural orange-yellow, bright and vibrant. She was dressed somewhat awkwardly, old robes in a mix of browns and faded reds, sewn with patches here and there and far too large for her frame, awkwardly hanging off her, the neck revealing her clavicles and hints of a bony shoulder on one side.
Liz had been aware wilderfolk could choose to look human if they wished to, but she'd never actually seen Mrs Norris like this before. The mind was the same, though, flittering sparks struck with erratic flashes of colour, complex and intense enough to be a person but obviously not human.
"I heard it was you what tells everyone about me." Norris's English was slightly awkward-sounding, her voice a little rasping. Liz guessed she probably didn't use it much. "I came to thank you for what you did, as Argus won't."
"Um...?"
Dorea was so horribly confused, and Norris didn't seem to realise that hadn't actually explained anything, Liz decided to come to the rescue. "She's Missus Norris."
There were twitches and gasps of surprise from all around them, everyone staring in surprise up at Norris. The word had spread around that Norris was wilderfolk back when she'd been petrified — Dorea had chosen to tell the professors almost immediately after Liz had told them Filch's cat was a person, so they'd treat her with the same dignity they would anyone else — but nobody had seen her human-shaped any more than Liz had. In fact, Liz was aware a lot of people didn't believe it. Partially just because they didn't want to — wilderfolk were one of those magical beings most people were inexplicably racist about, a lot of the other kids were happier thinking she was just a normal cat.
While everyone was dazed, trying to figure out what the fuck to say or do now, Susan broke out into a grin, an oddly twisted sort of glee flaring in her head. "Hello Missus Norris, it's nice to finally meet you. Your eyes are very pretty." Liz guessed they were, if very obviously inhuman.
Smiling back, Norris said, "You're sweet, girl. And your hair, it's like fire." Reaching across the table — leaning even further over Dorea, to her reluctantly-amused exasperation — Norris ruffled Susan's hair, setting the much-shortened strands randomly fluttering. She let out a low chuckle, hissing through her teeth.
Susan laughed with her, futily trying to straighten her mussed-up hair with one hand. Hermione nearby asked, "Are you doing well? I wondered, you were petrified the longest..." And she also hadn't been certain whether potions intended for humans would work as well for wilderfolk, but she didn't say that part, worried it wouldn't be polite.
"Yes yes, I'm fine. Sev was always good with his potions, all well now." A few of the kids went bug-eyed at the woman calling their professor widely considered to be the most intimidating of the lot...Sev. Norris didn't seem to notice. One hand coming up to stroke Dorea's hair, she said, "I want to thank you, for telling. I'm secret so long, Argus didn't want to tell without asking first, but it is not good for him, keeping me at home like that. You spared him this, so thank you, truly."
"Oh, er..." Awkwardly, Dorea reached up to pat Norris on the arm. "I didn't really do it for that reason. It didn't sit well with me, the way they were treating you," just because you're not human — Dorea thought the very idea of wilderfolk was kind of unnerving, but she didn't approve of other mages being weirdly racist about them either. She suspected at least some of the staff must know what Norris was, that they'd still treated her like any dumb animal had kind of winded Dorea up. "You're welcome? But, I didn't know what you are until Liz told me, I wouldn't have been able to do anything without her."
Dammit, why did she say that...
Norris glanced around the table, and then focused on Liz when a couple kids pointed at her. "Oh, this one, you make the air tingle, I thought you might know." She was pretty sure Norris was suggesting that she knew Liz was a mind mage, but it didn't seem like anybody else had caught that. She started leaning across the table, probably intending to ruffle Liz's hair like she had Susan.
Liz sharply leaned away from the table before she could. As a mix of confusion and amusement flickered from the heads around her, she said, "Don't do that. Oh, no offence, I just don't like being touched." She hadn't realised at first that could have been interpreted like she was being weirdly racist against wilderfolk. The thought of offending Norris didn't really bother her, but she didn't want to give everyone else at the table the wrong impression — a lot of people in the school already came up with wild ideas about her, she didn't need to give them ammunition for stupid racist shite.
Of course, the Light kids wouldn't like that she wasn't weirdly racist against wilderfolk, but they already didn't like her for other stupid reasons, so they could just go to hell.
"Oh, okay, is good. Thank you, Liz. Potter?" A little warily, Liz nodded — she half-expected Norris to freak out about oh my god Girl Who Lived, but instead she just nodded back. "Yes, thank you. And you again, sweet girl," Norris said, ruffling Dorea's hair a bit.
Dorea was a little annoyed by that — her hair was longer and less easily-fixable than Susan's — but she didn't say anything about it. "You're welcome..." Wilderfolk probably don't give a damn about formality, do they... "I'm sorry, do you have a given name?"
"Mm, all names are given, yes? My father was Taylor Norris, so the children in the village called me Miss Norris. It's the only name I have."
Liz picked up on the pulses of disgust coming from the minds around her. Apparently, Norris was first-generation wilderfolk — instead of being born from other wilderfolk, her mother had been an ordinary cat and her father an animagus. (Or maybe her mother had also been wilderfolk, Liz wasn't certain how it worked.) But that didn't really deserve such a strong reaction, they'd all obviously already known where wilderfolk ultimately came from. Personally, Liz thought the weird thing was that her human father had apparently raised her (at least partially) but hadn't even bothered to give her a proper name. This had been a bloke who'd gone around screwing cats, though, so maybe she shouldn't be surprised he'd been...peculiar.
Dorea recovered quickly though. "Right. You're welcome, Norris."
"Yes." Norris gave Dorea a last weird, draping hug, rubbing her face in her hair again, before she straightened again. Waving at the rest of them, "Bye, children," she sauntered off, making for the staff table with an odd, mincing-yet-swaggering gait. (Very cat-like, Liz guessed, graceful but casual at the same time.)
"Well," Megan said once she was out of weirdshot, "that was weird."
Susan shrugged. "I think she seems nice."
"You would think so, bloody misters..."
While Susan argued that the Boneses weren't Mistwalkers — they had been, originally, but unlike the Greengrasses they'd since fully integrated into the culture of the nobility — Liz kept watching Norris. She'd walked up to where Filch was eating at the end of the table, they talked for a little bit. And then Norris climbed up into Filch's lap, completely ignoring his spluttering protests and Sinistra, Flitwick, and Hagrid's laughter. Once she was settled in she reached over to a nearby platter, plucked up a slice of ham with her bare fingers, and started munching away.
Liz felt herself smiling — apparently Norris really didn't spend much time human-shaped.
Within a couple minutes, her part of the table had returned to their previous conversation. And it didn't take long for Liz to start feeling exhausted. Not physically — though she was starting to drag a little, her fucked up sleep schedule the last few days hadn't done her any favours there — but mentally. She'd been in a good mood earlier today, from finally being released from the hospital and her little revelation earlier with Nilanse, but that had been completely worn away by now. Unsettled and strung out, the more the feelings and thoughts of the people around her beat her over the head the more she retreated, trying to pull herself in. But she didn't have much experience with not picking up shite from people's minds (she was annoyingly terrible at keeping herself to herself), and being tired wasn't making it any easier.
So she slipped away as soon as she couldn't take it anymore, escaped up to the library.
Some time later, it was time to go to Defence class. Dorea actually walked over to remind her — she'd been in here for about a half hour, Liz thought, but had tactfully left her alone to recover from lunch. (She was forgiven for spending too long on stupid gossip this morning.) Liz had her nose buried in Reflections of the Unseen again, so, probably good Dorea had reminded her. It was a relatively short walk to the Defence classroom from the library, two flights up the Grand Staircase and along a corridor to the edge of the tower over the courtyard. When they got there most of the Ravenclaws were already inside and seated (they were Ravenclaws), still missing maybe half of the Slytherins.
They had all arrived by the time the new professor showed up. Liz knew he'd been the one to run the dementors on the train off with some kind of light magic, and had apparated her up to the school afterward, but of course she didn't remember any of that. She had vague memories of inexplicably six-year-old Ellie thinking she and these other kids were being kidnapped by this shabby-looking man, but that wasn't very clear either. He did look a bit...run-down. His professional-style robes — the kind people who needed to use their hands wore, with trousers baggy enough the legs were barely defined but sleeves that narrowed to tightly wrap around the arms elbow to wrist — were in quiet earthy dark browns and tans, plain and unornamented. Also somewhat old, the cloth looking a little faded and worn — given magical clothing was always enchanted, they must be very old to look it. He looked tired, his face drawn and pale (crossed with a set of long-faded scars), a hint of bags under his eyes, and he walked somewhat delicately, as though hiding pain. His short (for a mage) tawny-brown hair was frosted with grey at the temples, clashing with his youthful (if scarred) face.
He was the first werewolf Liz had ever seen in real life (as far as she knew). Though she wasn't supposed to know that — it hadn't been announced, but of course it hadn't, it was technically against the law for a werewolf to work with children in any capacity. She'd picked it up from Dorea's head, but she'd realised at the same time it was supposed to be a secret, so she hadn't said anything. She'd heard and read terrible things about werewolves, but she also thought a lot of the mages' prejudices were fucking stupid — which she knew from personal experience, with the whole you can talk to snakes?! thing — so she'd decided to reserve her judgement.
There was something kind of peculiar about Lupin's magic, though she couldn't say what it was. It was pretty damn subtle. She might not have noticed anything at all if she hadn't already known he was werewolf.
Lupin didn't walk all the way to his desk, instead stopping only a few metres into the room, sharply clapped his hands to gather the class's attention. "Good afternoon, everyone. You can pack your books away — today's will be a practical lesson. Make sure you all have your wands and follow me."
There was a brief moment where everyone glanced between each other, a few low mutters crawling across the room — they literally hadn't had a practical lesson in Defence since first year...unless the debacle with the pixies the first week of second year counted. (It was kind of absurd that the former Muggle Studies Professor possessed by the not-quite-dead Dark Lord had been the superior Defence instructor, even with the awful stammering.) But after a few seconds people started moving, the air filled with the shuffling of books being shoved into bags and chairs scraping as people stood.
"Um, sir?" called Lisa, holding up her hand. "Should we bring our bags?"
"No, leave them here, I'll lock the door behind us. Everybody ready? Right, let's get moving."
After they'd all filed out of the room, Lupin locking the door and then following that up with a sealing charm (overkill, but okay), he led them down the hall, the tromping of shoes and the chattering and laughing ringing in Liz's head. They came around to the Grand Staircase but didn't actually step onto them, instead turning into a side hall — she knew the professors' flats were this way, or at least some of them, Liz had never been over here. They didn't go very far, though, Lupin opened one of the doors almost right away and shuffled them inside.
Liz had never been in here before, but it only took her a couple seconds to decide this must be a staff meeting room of some kind. The space was rectangular, the walls covered in wooden panels, dark and polished to a shine, the floor smooth little stone tiles in black and blue. The central feature of the room was a long wooden table, surrounded by ancient-looking, mismatched chairs. Liz counted them quick — sixteen, one for every member of the staff, including Pomfrey, Hooch, and Filch. There were a few bookshelves here and there against the walls, filled with loosely-bound sheafs of paper — not properly-published books, probably school records of some kind — and a large, scuffed wardrobe Liz assumed was for the professors to stick their cloaks and hats during meetings, and that was really it.
The wardrobe shook, the door vibrating on its hinges, the base rattling against the floor, half the class let out shouts and squeaks of surprise, backing away. Alright, then...
"Let's see, one moment..." Lupin gave his wand a harsh flick, an intense flare of magic prickling at Liz's skin — the table and chairs abruptly shrunk down to dollhouse-size, another wave of his wand sending them all flying off to sit in a corner. "There we go, that's more comfortable. Okay, then," he chirped, punctuating it with another clap of his hands. "As the Headmaster informed you all earlier this week, my name is Remus Lupin. I graduated from Hogwarts in Nineteen Seventy-Eight, Gryffindor; after the war I moved to France, where I achieved Masteries in enchanting and cursebreaking. The latter is considered a Mastery of Defence — in the Continental system, the NEWT equivalent and the Masteries are divided into battlemagic, cursebreaking, and studies of the Dark Arts themselves."
There was a little bit of whispering going on, people's minds sparking with surprise and curiosity. Liz didn't know when was the last time Hogwarts had had a Professor of Defence actually qualified in the subject. Also, a few people had noticed the same thing Liz had — Lupin had graduated in '78, but said he'd moved to France after the war, meaning he'd probably been involved somehow. Liz was guessing he'd been in Dumbledore's vigilante group, like her parents and Dorea's father.
Huh, Lupin should have been in the same Gryffindor class as the three of them, and he happened to show up the same year Sirius escaped from Azkaban. Random coincidence...
(She wondered if that was why Severus had told her to be careful around him, and it actually had nothing to do with him being a werewolf.)
"Before we get started, I'd like to go down the rolls quick — I don't promise I'll remember all of your names and faces right away, I do have many students to keep straight, but I will at least try." He pulled a roll of parchment out from his robes somewhere, started unrolling it. "Terrence Boot." Terry raised his hand, Lupin stared at him for a second. "Good. Amanda Brocklehurst...good. Michael Corner..."
So Lupin went down the whole list, the Ravenclaws first, alphabetically, and then the Slytherins. It could have been Liz's imagination, but when he finally got to her name — she was second to last, only Blaise with his Z-name was after her — she thought Lupin might have hesitated, just slightly. He'd done the same thing on Dorea's name, Liz assumed her guess that he'd known their fathers was correct. His mind was relatively self-contained to begin with, but when he glanced up, meeting her eyes, his thoughts seemed to abruptly ice over, turning solid and cold and impenetrable, so quickly Liz twitched with surprise.
That wasn't her imagination. (If she'd been actively reading his mind at the time, that might have been very unpleasant.) She assumed the staff must all know she was a mind mage — it wasn't so surprising the Defence Professor would have really good occlumency, and would be careful about protecting himself. Still slightly weird, she thought. She hadn't even been intruding, she left the professors alone, on the assumption that they'd notice...
"Now, is there anyone whose name I didn't call?" Lupin paused for a second, but only a second. "I didn't think so. Then welcome to Defence the Dark Arts, everyone. The third-year curriculum largely deals with the dangerous magical creatures native to Britain — red caps, will-o'-the-wisps, grindylows. We will also briefly discuss pests — pixies, doxies, boggarts — which were supposed to be part of the second-year curriculum, but I've been given the impression that your previous instructor didn't cover them properly." There was a little bit of tittering from the students at that. "We will also discuss more dangerous threats, including kelpies, werewolves, and vampires — however, unlike the creatures I listed before, you will not be made to encounter any of those in class."
Liz snorted before she could stop herself. Technically, they would be encountering a werewolf in class, just she and Dorea were the only ones who knew about it.
"We'll also take a couple weeks in the winter term to review basic self-defence principles, which should—" Lupin was cut off by the wardrobe shaking again, the clatter of the base against the floor loud enough it wasn't worth trying to speak over. Most of the class jumped, letting out a few involuntary noises of surprise, but Lupin hardly even seemed to react, just blandly smiling to himself. "And that would be our lesson for today. Can anybody tell me what a boggart is? Yes, Mister...Cornfoot?"
"Yes, sir," Stephen confirmed, letting his hand fall again. "A boggart is a fear demon, sustaining itself by feeding off the fear of humans and other beings. They utilise a form of divination to determine a person's greatest fear, and then a combination of shape-shifting and illusion to simulate it."
"Excellent answer, Mister Cornfoot, have three points for Ravenclaw. And what is a 'demon', precisely? Mister Zabini."
"Any denizen of the Shadowlands."
One of Lupin's eyebrows twitched. "That is technically correct, but perhaps you could be more specific for your classmates less familiar with such things."
Blaise smirked smugly at him, but answered easily enough. "The Shadowlands are another plane of reality parallel to ours, much like the homeland of the fae. However, theirs is more easily accessible — any sufficiently deep shadow can be used as a gateway to the Shadowlands. The term 'demon' refers to any creature or being who lives in their realm, or can be generated from accumulated magic at the points where our realms intersect. Normally, most demons are amortal, incorporeal entities with innate talent with illusions, divinations, and mind magics. As non-physical beings, they tend not to have physical needs, but instead sustain themselves through the absorption of magical energy. These encounters can range anywhere from a stressful but harmless nuisance, as in the case of boggarts, to a lethal danger, as in the case of lethifolds."
Through Blaise's lengthy explanation, Lupin's eyebrows gradually migrated up his forehead, a faint tingle of amusement leaking through his occlumency. "Rather more thorough than I was expecting, Mister Zabini, but nowhere inaccurate. Take three points for Slytherin.
"As Mister Zabini mentioned, while demons are native to the Shadowlands, they can also come into being here. If enough magical energy gathers in a place with shadows deep enough to act as a gateway to the Shadowlands — like an enclosed space," waving at the wardrobe, "under wards as powerful as those here — this energy will sometimes coalesce into a demon. You will never get one of the more powerful, dangerous demons in this manner, only the relatively harmless ones, such as boggarts.
"Now, as much as a boggart is incapable of seriously harming you, encountering one outside of a controlled setting can still be extremely upsetting. Hidden in darkness as it is now, it has no form at all, but once it comes into contact with one of us it will divine what might frighten you most — as you might imagine, that can make boggarts rather unpleasant to stumble upon unexpectedly. However, there is a simple method one can use to protect oneself from boggarts, and in fact many other shape-shifting demons: the Forced Image Charm."
While Lupin explained how the charm worked — describing the visualisation component, demonstrating the wand movement and incantation, drilling them on both until they were all passable — Liz started to get a very bad feeling, crawling like ants across her skin. He wasn't really going to make them all face the boggart in front of the whole class, was he?
"Let's have a demonstration. Does anyone wish to volunteer?" Lupin was met with dead silence, the air heavy with wariness and disbelief. Enough coherent thoughts shook loose out of people's heads that Liz knew at least some of her classmates were having the same thought she was: Lupin couldn't possibly expect them to display their greatest fear before the whole class. "No one?"
The silence lingered another uncomfortable moment, nobody willing to volunteer themselves for humiliation, and possible mockery from their peers later. (Really, this was a terrible idea, what the fuck was wrong with Lupin?) Worried Lupin would pick someone out of the crowd — Liz suspected, she wasn't actually in his head at the moment — Draco surreptitiously gave Greg a hard shove. Greg was so much larger than Draco it didn't work very well, but the couple steps forward still drew Lupin's attention.
"Ah, Mister Goyle, good. Come on up here." Greg glanced over his shoulder at Draco, fear and anger sparking in his head, but he obeyed, awkwardly lumbering up to stand with Lupin in front of the wardrobe. "Right. If we are to figure out how we are to best disarm the boggart, we must first know what form it's likely to take. So tell me, Mister Goyle: what would you say frightens you most in all the world?"
Goyle didn't respond. Instead he just silently stared forward at the wardrobe, his fists clenched at his sides — Liz couldn't see his face from this angle, but by the simmering of his mind she felt certain he'd be glaring.
"Mister Goyle?"
In a low, grinding mutter, hardly audible at this distance, Goyle muttered, "Father."
The room went quiet, even quieter than it'd been when Lupin had asked for a volunteer. Nobody even seemed to breathe.
Liz knew Greg's father had been a Death Eater. She supposed it was quite possible the man was even worse than Vernon — that he would frighten Greg more than anything else seemed perfectly reasonable.
She was suddenly very glad someone had been volunteered — if Lupin had been forced to pick out of the crowd, he might have picked Liz. She felt quite certain a boggart would show her Vernon, and she really didn't want any of her classmates to know about that. The people who didn't like her would find her being afraid of a muggle hilarious.
Lupin froze, blinking down at the top of Greg's head (but not very far down). Liz wondered if he'd finally realised just how fucked up asking them to do this was, especially in public. His surprise caused his occlumency to lapse a little, and since Liz happened to be wondering what he was thinking she managed to accidentally catch a few snippets. Pity for Greg, wondering how he could turn this around, Greg's encounter with the boggart would have to go very smoothly if the others were to have any confidence at all when their turn came...
He expected them all to do it. Right here, in front of the whole class.
Horror dribbled down her spine like icy water, Liz could barely even process the idea.
"Mister Goyle, I understand your father works with magical creatures. Pegasi."
"Yes," Greg grumbled. There was a short pause, and then, "He manages the stables." The Malfoys' stables, Liz knew — the Goyles and the Crabbes were among the Malfoys' vassals.
(The only reason Greg and Vinnie had been allowed to come to Hogwarts was because Lucius Malfoy had sponsored them for admittance, which was kind of a nice thing for him to do, she guessed? Hogwarts was considered the best school in the country...)
Lupin suggested Greg have the boggart in the shape of his father trip and fall in a pile of pegasus dung, which Liz guessed was amusing enough. But she was barely even listening. Her head was bouncing back and forth between inane stuff, like maybe Lucius Malfoy not being a complete shite if he did things like getting his vassals' kids into good schools, and maybe when she got her scrying figured out she could look back on her first meeting with Dumbledore and figure out what the fuck he'd been thinking (he'd read the Dursleys' minds, but he wasn't a proper mind mage, maybe he'd fucked it up?), to wondering what the students who didn't like her would think to say or do about the Girl Who Lived being frightened of some fat stupid muggle...
No.
No, Liz wasn't doing this. If Lupin didn't like it, he could give her a detention or something, she didn't give a damn.
Liz turned and stalked off toward the door. People were calling to her, Lupin and a few of the students she thought, sparks of surprise and concern echoing through the air, but Liz wasn't listening, she didn't slow down. She stepped out into the hall, slamming the door closed behind her.
They'd gotten a qualified Defence Professor this time, but apparently that didn't stop him from being a total fucking idiot.
It only took a moment to get back to the classroom, but Liz couldn't get inside — she didn't know the counter for whatever sealing charm Lupin had put on the door, and she wasn't magically powerful enough to overwhelm it with a dispel. Frustrated curses hissed through her teeth, Liz stomped over to the side to sit against the wall, and she settled in to wait.
This was going to be terribly boring. She didn't even think they were halfway through the hour, and she didn't have a book to distract herself with.
And she would still be here when Lupin got back, he'd probably yell at her before she could escape.
(Waiting for the punishment to come, lingering in the air like a bad smell, like sitting on the sofa while Vernon—)
Gritting her teeth, Liz did her best to focus, trying to not let herself be dragged away on bad tangents. She didn't have a calming potion on her, it was in her bag — freaking out right now would be...bad, it would be bad. But she'd never been great at doing that without something to distract herself, she couldn't will herself out of it. Practising wandless magic, that would do, took enough concentration her stupid fucked-up brain would hardly have room for anything else. There wasn't anything conveniently nearby for Liz to try levitating — besides her wand, she guessed — but that wasn't the only option.
It only took a few moments of focus, shoving her magic down her arm and imagining what she wanted to happen, before faint white light blossomed out of her fingertips. It started really dim, but it working even a little just made her more confident, relaxing into the magic — the flow of energy increased, the harsh, artificial light growing brighter by the second. Liz had never liked the plain white glare of the wand-lighting charm, so she tinted it a bit warmer, much more yellowish. It worked instantly, hardly difficult at all, the magic reacting to her intent even as she visualised it. Now, the next thing to do would be to separate the light from her hand, so it was actually useful — she imagined trying to illuminate anything with light coming straight out of her fingertips would be kind of awkward, especially if she actually needed to use her hands.
Liz couldn't help a little, semi-delirious giggle — her fingers were glowing, that was so weird...
"Oh..."
When the soft, surprised sound came, it had been at least a few minutes. Liz had hardly noticed the passing of the time, focused instead on playing around with the magical light. Getting it to shift to different colours had been easy; getting the light to separate from her fingers had been much more difficult. After a hard, straining minute, her neck tingling and the taste of copper on her tongue, she managed it — by the time Daphne showed up, there were a few little balls of light floating around Liz, sunny yellow and Slytherin green and Potter red. They were still connected to her by little invisible tethers, energy and intent sustaining the spells, she'd set them to bobbing in little circles, the pale shadows around her shifting.
And it was Daphne — that little oh was soft enough her voice might not have been identifiable, but Liz had felt her mind nearing before she'd turned the corner. Weirdly, she was alone, Liz would have expected the rest of the class. Or, if only one person had come to find Liz, that should be Dorea.
...Unless Dorea had stayed to chastise their professor for doing something so stupid as demanding they display their greatest fears to the whole class. That was also possible.
Daphne had paused just past the corner, when she'd noticed the lights Liz was wandlessly casting. Her mind was writhing with shock, and an odd, deep, shivering feeling Liz couldn't put a word to. It felt kind of similar to fear, but it wasn't that, something much less unpleasant...and not the same at all, really, that was just the closest thing Liz had a name for. Whatever it was, Daphne shook it off after a couple seconds staring, drifted down the hall rather less gracefully than usual, gingerly sat down within an arm's reach of Liz. Whether the caution was because Daphne Greengrass rarely did something so undignified as sit on the floor or if it were that nameless shivering feeling, Liz couldn't tell.
Daphne was quiet a moment, watching the lights bob through the air. When Liz cast another, glowing the same bright blue as Daphne's eyes, she twitched, her mind bubbling with an odd, twisting glee. "Those are very pretty. How are you doing that?"
With a stiff shrug, she said, "It's not difficult." It really wasn't. It'd taken a little bit for her to figure it out, but once she had it was only a little more difficult than casting lights with her wand — she assumed it'd get easier as she practised.
"Mm. How long have you been doing wandless magic?"
...Daphne didn't know she was a mind mage. "Since I was...seven or eight, I think." It'd been right around then that her mind-control superpowers had first kicked in, but she didn't remember exactly anymore.
"That's quite impressive, Liz."
"They're just lights."
Daphne didn't say anything, but she really didn't need to, and not just because Liz was a cheating mind-reader. Very few people ever learned to cast magic without any kind of focus at all. Not because they couldn't, they just never needed to — casting something with a wand or whatever was much easier, most didn't consider it worth the effort once they had one. It wasn't unusual for children to figure out a few little tricks they could do whenever they wished, which was still called "accidental" magic despite not being accidental at all, but for Liz to have retained the talent to this age was unusual.
Of course, she hadn't retained the talent, she'd figured this shite out literally two minutes ago. But she had the feeling that was a much more unusual thing to do than just remembering it from before she'd even had a wand, it would make Daphne suspicious something else was going on.
"In case you were wondering, Lupin isn't going through with it. Tracey pointed out the obvious to him — in part to explain why you left, and in part in defence of Greg — and the others backed her up." There was a pulse of something warm and bright shining out of Daphne's head as she spoke, affection and relief and pride all mixed up. (Tracey had hardly ever spoken up in public before.) "He's giving a lecture about the sort of demons that are likely to turn up in a magical household instead."
He should have done that to start with, but Liz guessed he at least wasn't so much of an idiot that he couldn't recognise the problem once it'd been pointed out to him. That wasn't much, but it was something. "Should you be missing it?" Because coming out and saying leave me alone would be rude.
Daphne did catch the unspoken message, Liz could tell, but she just ignored it. She couldn't tell if that was more annoying than not picking up on it or less. "No, one of my aunts taught Tori and me how to protect ourselves from the lesser demons years ago. They're hardly common in the Greenwood, due to protections our ancestors laid over the land centuries ago, but they do turn up now and again."
Oh, that was a sort of interesting thought. Something that altered a location as deeply as Daphne was suggesting, lingering for so long afterward, could only be a ritual — and a powerful ritual, certainly requiring a sacrifice of some kind. Perhaps even human sacrifice, that hadn't been nearly so fiercely forbidden once upon a time. (Many of the Black properties had been fortified through ritual human sacrifice, which made Dorea uncomfortable but Liz very curious, she'd barely restrained the urge to ask questions.) Liz wondered what kind of magics they'd "laid over the land", but knew she wouldn't get any answers if she asked — Daphne wouldn't admit to her ancestors having done anything illegal, and purebloods tended to be very silly about their family secrets.
"Honestly, I suspect my family know far more about demons than Lupin — the Mistwalkers have had more contact with the residents of other planes than most mages in recent centuries."
"Is your family still in contact with the fairies?" Liz still wasn't over the revelation that the myths about ridiculously powerful elves and fairies and shite were actually real, she still had so many questions. Fairy shite was one of the topics she meant to research in her free time this month, after she figured out scrying and copying her memories.
Daphne's mind sparked with amusement. "A little bit. The Greenwood sits over a Gate."
"You mean like Glastonbury Tor?"
"Yes, exactly like Glastonbury Tor — our Gate also leads to Avalon, though I understand the exits are separated by a couple hundred miles. There are a few dozen different fairy kingdoms, I think, but the Gates in the Isles mostly all lead to Avalon."
That did kind of make sense, she guessed, that nearby locations on earth would still be nearby on the other side. Liz had so many questions, after a moment of thought she asked, "What's it like?"
"The Gate?" asked Daphne, but she didn't wait before continuing. "Perfectly normal, I suppose. There's a courtyard, very old, a free-standing arch marking the precise location, a fountain supposedly gifted to the family by a fairy whose true name I can't pronounce. But nothing about the place sticks out as...especially other-worldly. Perhaps it might have seemed so in the past, when the Gate was actively used, but they rarely cross over anymore. The last time we had a visitor from the other side I was three or four, I don't really remember it."
Oh, that was kind of disappointing. Still neat, but.
"I can show you, if you like."
Liz twitched, surprised enough she lost focus on the magic — two of her little lights winked out, the yellow and the green flickering but she grabbed hold again before they could die. "Er, what?"
Giving Liz a somewhat sheepish smile — or maybe Liz only noticed the sheepish part because she was in her head right now — Daphne said, "I intended to invite you to stay at the Greenwood over winter break at some point. I was going to do it properly, with a written invitation and everything, but I suppose this works just as well."
...Liz had no idea how to respond to that. "Why?"
"I'm not planning anything nefarious, Liz, I just want to. Tracey and her mother will be there, they come every year, and also Susan — her aunt is often too busy to observe the Solstice with her properly, and her mother's family's traditions are very different." Well of course, Liz assumed her mother's family weren't Mistwalkers. "I was also considering inviting Millie and Lisa, maybe Lily, and Dorea, Hermione, and Sophie, Sally-Anne, and Justin. Our muggleborn friends will likely wish to celebrate Christmas with their families, but that's not until a few days after the Solstice, there's no reason they can't do both."
Wow, that was...quite a guest list. She remembered Daphne brushing off the suggestion her parents might not be happy with her inviting people over for the holiday with a blithe the more the merrier, but this seemed like a bit much. "Why?"
"The more the merrier." Yep, there it was. "Besides, most of our classmates don't know much of anything about my people, the muggleborns just as much as the nobility — mainline magical British culture considers Mistwalkers to be rather backward and superstitious, only a few steps removed from complete barbarians. I thought... I thought it would be nice." Daphne wasn't meeting her eyes, and actually sounded a little awkward. Which was fucking weird, because Daphne Greengrass hardly ever sounded awkward — Liz might catch the uncertainty in her head, the occasional hesitation in a gesture, but it was always very subtle.
Of course, since Liz was a cheating mind-reader, she knew that was because Daphne wasn't sure this was really a good idea. She wanted to share these things with her friends, but she was also worried they would think she was, well, a backward, superstitious barbarian, and wouldn't like her anymore afterward. She didn't think it was a huge risk, but she was maybe a little paranoid about it.
Liz was pretty sure that was very silly. She didn't think anyone on the guestlist would judge Daphne for any kind of weird old-timey spiritual shite she and her family were into...with the possible exceptions of Justin and Sally-Anne, but they were too nice to say anything about it, and probably wouldn't treat her any differently afterward. Muggles had this whole freedom of religion concept they would have grown up with, and Liz was pretty sure that was what the weird Mistwalker stuff would come down to? So it shouldn't be a problem, really.
But that wasn't what Liz had been asking about in the first place. "Why ask me?" Because she and Daphne weren't exactly close. Maybe friends, she guessed, but she didn't think they were invite each other home for holidays close. The only friend she'd visited over holidays so far was Dorea, and that had just been during the summer, not something special like Christmas (or the Solstice, whatever).
"I thought you would like it."
...That wasn't a lie, but it wasn't really an answer either. Liz considered just slipping deeper into Daphne's head and figuring it out herself, if she was going to be so evasive, but decided against it — supposedly some of the noble families taught their kids some basic occlumency, there was no telling if Daphne would notice if she were that intrusive. "That's not really an answer."
"I thought..." Daphne trailed off, letting out a soft, delicate sigh. (Even while sighing she had to be pretty and delicate, because the magical nobility were fucking ridiculous sometimes.) For a couple seconds, she just watched Liz's magical lights bob and turn in the air, thoughts and feelings sparking in her head. "Forgive me if I'm stepping out of line a little here, Liz, but you always strike me as very...intense. Withdrawn. I'm uncertain whether I've ever seen you happy before — with the exception of the hours immediately following a quidditch match, I suppose.
"And the Greenwood over the Solstice is...infectious? There's a magic to our festivals, one we've been cultivating for centuries. I thought you would enjoy it. That's all."
Liz suddenly felt very certain Daphne had only invited so many people so Liz wouldn't feel suspicious or put on the spot over being singled out — that was both thoughtful and also slightly...she didn't know, something, that Daphne would go through that kind of effort over it. "Why do you care?"
That actually seemed to throw Daphne off a little, her head reeling, she even twitched a little. "Well. We're friends, aren't we? Should I not care?" There was a faint wiggle of disharmony on the air — Daphne wasn't lying, but that wasn't the whole truth, either.
...But Liz didn't think she'd get a straight answer if she asked, and it didn't seem worth digging through Daphne's head over it (and possibly being discovered). It'd only felt like a small deception, probably wasn't anything important.
She probably just reminded Daphne of Tracey. Liz had recognised enough of her old, pre-mind-reading-superpowers behaviour in Tracey to guess what was going on with her grandfather — and, perhaps more important, why she hadn't told anyone — and she knew Daphne had somehow gotten a glimpse of the scars on her back — not as bad as Tracey's but more numerous, and similar enough to Tracey's that Daphne should be able to make the obvious guess. (And no, Liz still had no idea when or how Daphne had seen them, she tried to just be relieved it didn't seem like Daphne had told anyone.) She and Tracey even looked somewhat alike. The Blacks and the Davises, along with a couple other closely-related families, had intermarried several times in recent generations, and supposedly Liz looked more like a Black than a Potter — except for her stupid hair, that was apparently a Potter thing. (And her eyes, she was told she had her mother's eyes, but obviously she'd been muggleborn so didn't look like anyone.) It didn't seem entirely unreasonable to assume Daphne might have kind of linked Liz and Tracey in her head, and at least part of her inclination to be nice to Liz was for that reason.
Liz might be more annoyed about that if she felt any pity at all coming from Daphne's head right now, but she really didn't. But then, Daphne had known Tracey forever — she probably already understood that her pity wouldn't do Liz any good, and was also very much unwanted.
Which...kind of made this invitation way more comfortable than Dorea's had been, last year. Dorea knew Liz didn't want to be pitied, enough that she tried not to show it in the way she talked or acted, but she also knew Liz could feel what she was feeling, and she was fucking terrible at hiding that. Even Hermione was getting better about it than Dorea was now...if largely because she'd realised Liz had probably terrified her relatives into leaving her alone by now, and if she did want something she could just take it — she had effortlessly forced a bloody troll to sleep as a first-year, after all. Hermione still felt badly about it all, of course, but she accepted that there was nothing to be done about it, that Liz didn't want anything to be done about it, getting there much faster than Dorea was.
Liz didn't care if it might be too much, she was definitely doing that here's-a-catalogue-buy-a-galleon-worth-of-books idea she'd had before. She did enjoy Hermione's company most of the time, and she was doing better than anybody else (except perhaps Severus) at accommodating Liz's...quirks, and Liz was filthy rich, so why the fuck not.
But anyway, yes, this invitation didn't bother her as much as Dorea's last year had, but she still wasn't certain she wanted to go. Some of this old magical stuff, like Mistwalkers and Gates and such, sounded neat, but... The Greenwood sounded kind of...big. A lot of people, she meant. The impression she'd gotten from Daphne and Tracey over the winter holiday was that it was a big damn party, and there'd be a lot of people crowding around, and it'd be noisy, and... She wasn't sure she'd be comfortable, there.
But then, she was also certain they had a lot of land — apparently the Greengrasses had been the priesthood of an agricultural cult of some kind before being reorganised into a normal House around the time of the Statute, supposedly they still had a bunch of farms and orchards and shite hidden from muggles under wards — so it probably wouldn't be difficult for Liz to sneak off if she needed some time alone. Just grab a book and hide up a tree, she'd gotten really good at that back at Privet Drive. And now she even had privacy spells to make sure she wasn't bothered. So. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem.
And, Daphne had never been silly about the Girl Who Lived nonsense, so maybe the rest of the Greenwood people wouldn't freak out about it either. Or at least not as much as most mages did. Like, she knew Morag and Megan's families were also fucking huge (though maybe not as big as the Greenwood?), but she thought it was much less likely she'd be left alone for even five seconds if she went to stay with them — Megan was better now, but she'd been just embarrassing for the first few months first year.
It would probably be fine. She thought. Maybe. And there would be neat magic stuff she didn't know about yet, so. Might be worth going. Poking around the Greenwood would be something to do with her time for a couple weeks, at least.
...Assuming Severus would let her go, but she thought he probably would? They were a big magical family on land they'd held forever, they probably had crazy powerful wards on the place — like the Blacks', if not quite as viciously deadly. (They were a dark family, but they weren't the Blacks.) She suspected Sirius would have to be suicidal to try to track Liz down while she was there. And Severus had seemed vaguely familiar with Daphne's mum (Ailbhe, Lady Greengrass, or whatever) when they'd been talking about the trip to Charing on her birthday, he'd clearly thought she was trustworthy, so.
"I'll ask Se– my guardian if I can go." Whoops, Liz had nearly slipped and said Severus — this conversation had thrown her off a little, okay...
"Oh?" Daphne turned to blink at her, mixed confusion and surprise buffeting against Liz. "I thought... I'm sorry, but I thought you were living on your own now. Tracey said on the train you don't live with your muggle relatives anymore — during your episode you mentioned your uncle, it tipped Tracey off something was seriously wrong—" Liz guessed Daphne was defending Tracey for letting one of Liz's secrets slip, but she didn't really care that much, as this was the first time anyone had even mentioned it so far. So long as none of them bothered her about it, she didn't actually care that much if her friends knew some of these things. "—so I assumed you were living independently at a Potter property somewhere. You are thirteen now, after all."
Liz felt her lips twitch — Daphne was assuming she'd actually lived alone longer than that, whether she'd been legally allowed to or not, she was just trying to be tactful in not saying it. Dorea could take some lessons from that. "Ah. No, I'm actually..." She was rather tempted to tell Daphne the truth, a lot more than she would have expected. It was probably safe for her to, since Daphne knew shite she hadn't told anyone about, like her scars, but she wasn't supposed to. And, again, Severus would almost certainly find out if she did. Oh well, stick to the cover story, then. "I've had a new guardian since last summer, but I'm not supposed to tell anyone who. It's a secret, you know, for safety reasons."
"I see, that makes sense." Daphne's fingers tapped on her knees for a moment, an odd warm feeling setting the magic around her to glowing, unvoiced thoughts sizzling deep inside. "I suppose this is an improvement upon your previous circumstances." It wasn't really a question.
Again, Liz found herself wondering just how much Daphne knew. She knew about the scars, somehow, and she'd probably guessed some from that, but... "Yes, by a lot. We're hardly, um, normal, but that's really better. If I were stuck in a normal home with normal adults watching me I'd probably end up feeling suffocated." Whether they were the Walker kind of normal or the Dursley kind of normal — visiting Dorea's family for a few days had been fine but she wouldn't want to stay there, and if she were saddled with adults who tried to treat her like Petunia and Vernon had she'd murder them in their sleep before letting herself be—
Well, it wouldn't work out, be they kind or cruel. Weird, dorky, distant, awkward Severus was the way she liked it, honestly.
(Enough some small part of her was disappointed she almost certainly wouldn't be going back there next summer, but she tried not to think about that.)
Now that that conversation was done with, until Liz could ask Severus if she could go, they ended up talking about fairies. Daphne knew a fair bit, but it was also just something she'd grown up with, she hardly knew where to start. That did make the conversation a little bit frustrating, sure, but it wasn't like Liz really needed Daphne to know where to start, since she already had so many questions. She got so involved in the discussion, occasionally pausing for a second to cast another floating ball of light (she wondered how many she could keep going all at once...), that she completely lost track of time.
So she failed to feel the minds of Lupin and the rest of the class approaching until after she heard them turn the corner...and after the ones in the front saw the dozen little magical lights bobbing in the air around Liz and Daphne. All four of their hands were clearly visible, and there wasn't a wand in sight — by the shock echoing down the hall, Liz knew some of them had realised what was going on here.
Oh fuck, this was just going to encourage those rumours about her being a crazy powerful evil dark witch, wasn't it? This was going to be such a pain...
(Liz suddenly felt very tired, and the term had barely even started yet.)
[the Forced Image Spell] — I've changed what's really going on with anti-boggart stuff a bit. Instead of a charm specifically intended to force the boggart into an amusing form, the spell changes any shapeshifter into any form the caster imagines. This is mostly useful against demons, but can also be used on other non-corporeal entities, like ghosts or poltergeists or dementors (the last of which are technically also demons). Theoretically, it can even be used on physical shapeshifters, like metamorphs, but that would require much more power. A boggart could be forced into any shape with this spell, but boggarts are vulnerable to amusement in particular — another form may make them harmless, but a humorous one has a chance of actually banishing them.
omg why is this chapter so long...
Right, so, none of The Plan ended up happening, but I did write a bunch for By Gods Forsaken, and even started up an entirely new side fic, because that was completely necessary. I completely hate my inability to focus sometimes.
I'm not certain how the next few chapters are going to go, so there might be another delay as I do some planning. Or I'll spit out 50k words over the next two weeks like I just did for BGF, really I can't predict these things at this point.
—Lysandra