Liz stepped out of the floo, with only a little bit of stumbling — she was getting better at that, taking multiple little trips instead of one big one helped. She wasn't entirely surprised to find Severus's library empty. Shrugging that off, she moved into the kitchen, flicking the lights on, fished the sack she'd transfigured from a sheet of paper out of her bag, set it on the table before heading to her bedroom. Well, it wasn't really her bedroom anymore, since she had her own huge bloody house now, but— Whatever. She set her bag down on the bed — she wondered if it was always made up, or if he'd just put the sheets and things back on because she was coming over — before leaving again.
The bathroom door was open, as well as Severus's bedroom — she peeked in quick to make sure he wasn't in there, and nope, nothing. She only had to get halfway down the stairs to check the potions lab, and he wasn't down there either. It didn't look quite the same, two sizeable pieces of parchment hung up over the side table, a drip tray underneath, presumably for the heritage test thing. (Since it did use blood, Severus wanted to test it with himself first, because he was a paranoid bastard like that.) And that was really it, the house wasn't very big. He could be in the back garden practising spells, but— Nope, he wasn't out there either, must not be home.
That was...weird. The duelling tournament was finally coming up, they were leaving for Romania tomorrow. They had to be at the keyport pretty early in the morning, so Severus had suggested she just stay at his house tonight, since she would otherwise floo over here first anyway. Which, since Severus was one of the chaperones and everything, he actually had to be at the keyport earlier than Liz would need to on her own, but it wasn't that much of a difference, it was fine. As long as she was here, they were going to do that heritage test thing Tamsyn had sent her, and Liz was going to cook, and— Point was, Severus knew when she was going to be here, she'd kind of expected he would be home.
Not like it really made a difference, of course, just unexpected. Liz skimmed over the bookshelf for a moment, found one on blood alchemy — she had maybe a half hour before she needed to start dinner, might as well spend it reading neat Dark Arts shite. A half hour assuming Severus would be home at a reasonable time, anyway. Oh well, she could always draw out the simmering stage as long as necessary by adding more liquid in, it wasn't a big deal.
She didn't hear the floo go off until maybe an hour later — she was well into making dinner by that point, the air in the kitchen thick with herby savoury steam. When Severus stepped in, he was wearing healers' robes, trousers and close-sleeved tunic in his usual black and blue, his cloak folded over her arm. "Elizabeth."
"Hey, Severus. Did something happen? I thought you'd be home when I got here."
"I planned to be — there was an emergency at Saint Mungo's. Some foolish amateurs were playing around with ritual soul magic, the hospital called in several cursebreakers to disentangle them."
Idly stirring the simmering beef, Liz frowned. "Wait, disentangle? They were doing soul magic with multiple people in the circle?"
There was a shiver of exasperation from Severus's direction. "As I said, foolish amateurs. How much time do I have?"
"Um, half an hour, probably. Plenty of time to have a shower if you need to." He'd apparently just been through a pretty intense healing session, Liz wouldn't be surprised if he was all sweaty or whatever.
"If I have that long, I'll also test the potion — the catalyst only takes ten minutes or so to prepare." The potion Tamsyn had sent was sort of complicated, required brewing a very sensitive potion which you then had to soak parchment in — as in real parchment, the stuff made out of animal skins (it called for undyed calfskin, specifically) — for a day and a night, before hanging it up to dry. The second part, which you mixed your blood in and poured over the top of the prepared parchment, had a much simpler formula, a pretty small part of the page, Liz wasn't surprised Severus thought it'd only take ten minutes. "May I use the table?"
"Oh, sure, just, um..." Liz knocked off her spoon and set it aside, picked up the bowl of vegetables — actually, she thought it was about time for these anyway — the bottle of wine, the bundle of herbs and things still in the transfigured sack, set them all down on the counter instead. Her hands were full, Severus actually moved the cutting board and bread knife to the counter, as well as the pan with the blobs of bread dough on it, giving them a curious look. "What?"
"I didn't know you could bake."
"I can't, really, Nilanse prepared those for me. Actually, I think it's about time to put them in the oven, gimme that..."
When Severus returned to the kitchen, nearly a half hour later, the beef stuff was almost done, and it was smelling like bread in here along with everything else. She felt his mind coming, but jumped at an unexpected crackling noise — the parchment, moving to lay it over the table. It sounded oddly...crispy, must be the potion in it. Once he had it in place, centred on the table, he straightened again, swirling a purplish potion in a little wide-bottomed bottle. "Do you have a minute?"
"Um..." Liz glanced at her timer, bread still had like five minutes, right. "Sure, we're good." Turning the burner off — this stuff was pretty much done anyway, might as well let it cool off a little — she padded over to the table. "How does this work anyway?"
"I'm not certain — divinatory potions are not my area of expertise. The active elements, both those that query magic for the required information and those that sketch it out in a comprehensible form, are contained within the parchment. I suspect this," holding up the purple potion, "primarily acts as a targeting mechanism, and also as a catalyst to activate the elements in the parchment. If I want to be more specific I'd need to conduct a much more through analysis — and as I haven't much experience with divinatory potions, it would also take a fair bit of research. A proper analysis would take me months, I suspect."
...Liz was kind of used to Severus already knowing everything, that he only had a vague idea of how the potion worked was honestly very weird. "Right, well. Let's see it then?"
"Let's." Severus up-ended the bottle — the potion was thin enough to run right out, very little of it sticking to the inside of the bottle, must repel glass. (Some potions were like that, it was always very neat.) As soon as the liquid made contact with the parchment, more or less in the centre, there was a snap-hiss-crackle of magic, more felt than heard. She definitely felt something going on around Severus, a twisting shimmer she didn't know how to read, a rustling of leaves in the wind, the potion sparkling in the light as it spread across the parchment, and then began to sink into it, faintly glowing pink...
By the time the light faded, the ambient magic in the kitchen going back to normal, Severus's family tree was already drawn out on the parchment. It was kind of rough, no boxes or anything, just words stitched together with colourful lines, and not in neat rows, spreading out like a snowflake. Leaning over, Liz saw right there in the middle, Severus Snape— "Hey, that's your handwriting."
"So it is. And this is my mother's as well," he said, pointing. There were lines leading off from Severus's name, a plain black one straight up, and straight down one a solid deep blue, another one a lighter blue with little purple flecks, a light pinkish-purple one, and another reddish-orange one, all squished together leading to a single name. The name on top was Tobias Snape, the one on bottom with all the lines Eileen Prince — as in the Noble House, Severus never mentioned that, she hadn't even known about it until someone brought it up during her first time at the Wizengamot. He must be related to fourth-year Ravenclaw Brendan Prince, on Liz's duelling team, and the sixth-year Ravenclaw prefect Mallory Prince, but she wasn't sure how exactly, never asked. "I suspect everyone's names will be rendered in their own handwriting, when feasible. You'll notice the more neutral text toward the edges, back when common people were far less likely to be able to read."
Liz noticed a lot of those names toward the top of the page also went blank of blank, the second one obviously a parent's name (since their parents were also on the page for a lot of them, kind of gave it away), so these ones hadn't even had surnames. Apparently ordinary people having surnames was something that hadn't become common in some parts of the country until the government had started keeping official records of everyone, only in like the last century — Tamsyn had mentioned something about that talking about her own test. "I think this blue line here is mind magic, and the other— Hang on a second." She quick ran off to her bag in her bedroom, fished out the notes on the potion she'd copied out of Tamsyn's letter, ran back. (Maybe unnecessary, but she didn't want to miss the bread going off.) After quick checking the beef, she returned to Severus's test. "Right, the dark blue one is mind magic, and the lighter blue and purple is magesight — do you have magesight?"
"Perhaps — depending on how the talent manifests, it can be difficult to say for certain."
"Right." She remembered Severus had said something about that, that everyone could feel magic, magesight just mapped that sense onto the normal five ones, kind of a synesthesia thing. If the effects were subtle enough, it could be kind of hard to tell if it was actually magesight or not. "And the pink one is psychometry."
"I certainly don't have psychometry. It must not have activated."
Liz nodded, that was also a thing that could happen, magical traits laying dormant. "And the reddish-orange one is...ooh, parseltongue. Guess it didn't activate, though."
"My great-grandmother is a parselmouth," he said, pointing at the name Eileen Selwyn — apparently his mother had been named after her grandmother. And this meant Severus was probably related to Ceinwen somehow, the bitch. "It isn't public knowledge, but it was widely known among the Death Eaters that Eileen Lestrange has the talent."
Liz was confused for a second before realising her married name was obviously Lestrange, right, stupid. "Was she a Death Eater?"
"A supporter, not a member — though she did have children and grandchildren who joined, including Rodulphus and Rabastan." So, the people who'd tortured Neville's parents into insanity were Severus's second cousins? Bellatrix was also Liz's second cousin, she was just saying, purebloods, everybody related to everybody... "We met once, at a holiday gathering. I had no knowledge of our relation until just now, though during our one brief meeting she made a point of subtly insulting my mother, so I assume she must have known."
...Awkward. Before Liz could decide what, if anything, she should say about that, she was rescued by her alarm going off. It took a little bit of running around to get everything put together, but before too long they were sitting at the table with soup (sort of) and bread and wine — Severus hadn't bothered moving the parchment, Liz's eyes idly perused over it while splitting her bread further apart (carefully with a fork, it was still hot). His mother's side happened to be most visible from here, a lot of noble family names she recognised scattered all over. At the very edge, she eventually noticed a couple Blacks, a Bellatrix Black (not that one) leading to a Scorpius Black, where it cut off. Liz didn't think there were that many Blacks anymore, so that meant she and Severus must be related, distantly. Actually, there was a second Scorpius Black over here, which was either a different Scorpius Black (which was possible), or a couple cousins had gotten married at some point in the tree here (which, knowing the purebloods, was way more likely). Actually, yeah, she found it right here, these parts of the leaf were duplicated, coming down to, um...
"I see you made it to the Greenwood."
Liz twitched at the unexpected comment, blinking up at Severus. "Huh? Oh, the piercings? Yeah, I did that like a week ago." For a second, she was distracted remembering what she'd done after the piercings, forced herself to focus — her mind was stupid loud, Severus probably didn't want to get bombarded with flashes of Daphne and kissing. "Um, I kind of thought it would hurt, since it is basically being stabbed, but it wasn't that bad."
He let out a little hum, but didn't say anything else — she got the feeling he did intend to say something, he was just temporarily distracted by dinner. It had turned out pretty good, she thought. She'd kind of copied the stew she'd had in France, or at least something that was sort of the same idea? Hers was thicker, almost more gravy-like, and more intensely herby. The bread was pretty good too, Nilanse had put in little pieces of the garlic butter stuff, and— It'd turned out pretty well, was the point Liz was pretty good at this cooking thing, if she did say so herself. "I hope you know well enough to be cautious where the potential of infection is concerned."
"The person actually healed them right away. Apparently, the jewellery have enchantments in them to speed up healing, but they're light magic, so it was uncomfortable. So, they were sealed up from the off, infection isn't really a problem." But even if they weren't, no, she wasn't stupid enough to make herself ill for no reason. Though maybe she could admit he had reason not to think so, because apparently her nutrition was still shite most of the time, and she did get in a lot of accidents and stuff, but it wasn't like she went out trying to hurt herself on purpose...
"You realise there will be a reaction, of course. It's hardly the sort of thing people will fail to notice, and such practices, while perhaps more common in certain circles, are less than fully tolerated among those you encounter most frequently."
The nobility thought of it as a weird cultish and/or poor people thing, he meant. "Yeah, Daphne mentioned that. I like it, though, so they can all go to hell."
A subtle glint of dark amusement in his head, Severus nodded. "Fair enough." He took a sip of wine, the light crinkle-clunk of the glass being set down seeming to put a close to the conversation.
Which was good, she guessed. Liz honestly hadn't considered the possibility that he might disapprove — they had talked about it, just theoretically, and she hadn't told him she was doing it beforehand. She wouldn't take them out if he did turn out to be annoyed about it, or whatever — like she'd said, she did like them, and the inspiration for doing it in the first place was their conversation about doing something about hating her body (though he probably hadn't realised at the time the way she'd taken it), so it was kind of his fault to begin with — it would just be awkward. Actually giving a damn what Severus thought about her was a bloody pain sometimes, was all.
Honestly, she still got a little bit of a thrill sometimes, when she had a reason to think about it, fiddling with the ring in her lip or feeling the ones in her ears bobbing as she moved, the one in her eyebrow pulling just slightly against an expression, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She couldn't say what kind of thrill, just, she liked it — not just the look of it, but the having done it, there were little flashes when she felt inexplicably giddy about it, she really had very little idea why. Well, probably that revelation she'd had months ago now about all the shitty things about her body she had no control over, and at least this was one thing she had had control of, but if that was it she wasn't really conscious of it, just. She didn't know. She liked it, she couldn't articulate the feeling beyond that.
She was definitely getting more, at some point, once she was used to these. Piercings were neat.
"This is a curious bit of magic," Severus said eventually, nodding down at the parchment. "I imagine the nobility must use something similar to manage their pedigree — I know from various conversations over the years that many of them are aware of what unexpressed talents they may be carrying, though that information is rarely bandied about in public." Liz wouldn't be surprised if they were all doing blood tests on each other before arranging marriages, no matter how bloody weird using the word "pedigree" for people was. "The handwriting in particular is fascinating, I wonder how that was managed. It apparently isn't capable of translation, but given that, that it is capable of rendering the names of illiterate individuals is curious. I'm having difficulty imagining an element that would produce one effect but not the other."
"What isn't translated?"
"Here." Severus shifted his plate a little bit, pointing at a spot on the page that...um...
It looked like cursive, Liz's eyes had kind of just glazed over it at first — she'd never really learned cursive, and she couldn't read it very well — had only noted that there was a purple line (the Sight) that cut off a couple generations above Severus's father. (Not really a surprise that there was magic somewhere on his father's side, theoretically all muggleborns came from squib lines, there were supposedly all kinds of heritable magical traits floating around unexpressed in the muggle population.) But now that she was looking at it more closely she had absolutely no idea what that said. "What is that? My cursive is shite, but that doesn't even look like Latin letters."
"It's not. These ones," tracing along a string of names in the funny-looking cursive with a finger, "are in Russian. I was already aware that my grandmother's family was from Russia. There are regions of eastern Europe where it was particularly dangerous to be openly Jewish during the Nineteenth Century, I was told by one of my aunts that they fled the country after a pogrom — they intended to leave for America, but in the end lingered in France for one reason or another. My great-grandparents moved to Britain later on.
"I was not aware that my great-great-great-grandfather who fled Russia with his wife and children was a squib — and of course I wouldn't have been, my father's family knew nothing of magic. This surname here," he said, tapping one of the names nearer the edge, "is one of the old noble families of Muscovy." The magical country that was basically Russia, he meant. "I'm only familiar with the name from the history of Grindelwald's War — a member of the family was one of the commanders of the invasion of Lithuania. He was killed during Grindelwald's counter-attack, in an infamous last stand at Smolensk. The family was effectively obliterated during the riots in Moscow late in the war."
...Huh. Fun facts, she guessed?
Before Liz could decide what to say — the magic was neat, but since neither of them understood how it worked she wasn't sure where to go with that — there was a sudden flicker in Severus's head. He stiffened in his chair, eyes narrowing, staring unfocused at nothing — and then there was a roar of fire, the floo. "Good evening, Severus. Do you have a moment?"
Severus bit out a hissed curse, his spoon clunking down against the table a bit harder than necessary — he hadn't fully licked it off, he was getting broth on one of his great-great-great-grandparents. "One moment," he muttered at her, before getting up and stalking off toward the library, moving in that smooth, sharp, dangerous way he had. (By this point, Liz had seen enough to realise it was a duellist thing, most people who moved like that had been trained to fight.) "What is it, Albus?"
Oh, Dumbledore, she'd thought the voice sounded familiar. Had he just randomly decided to come through the floo, and— No, no, if he was physically here, Liz would be able to feel his mind through the doorway — Severus had fully gone into the other room, and she could still feel him, thoughts sizzling with frustration. Liz could still hear the fire of the floo, it hadn't gone out, hadn't she heard something about a floo call? She'd never seen one, but supposedly that was a thing, like a magical telephone. Alright, then.
"Minerva informed me that Master Gamp called a staff meeting yesterday."
"With all due respect, Albus, Hogwarts staff meetings are no longer any of your concern."
"Now, my boy, there's no cause to be so confrontational. I merely hoped to discuss your first impressions."
"It takes a special kind of cruelty to demand that we all return to the castle so soon after we'd departed for the summer. Clearly, Gamp's investment as Headmaster is the culmination of a Death Eater plot to take over the school." Liz bit her lip to keep herself from laughing — she'd rather not get drawn into the conversation, thanks.
"Severus..."
"What do you expect me to say, Albus? The Board and the Ministry are instituting a long list of reforms, all of which you are already aware of — we were called in early for introductions and to discuss the implementation process, suggestions we may have for new hires. It was hardly anything nefarious."
"Perhaps not. But surely you can understand how developments at the school may be of interest to me. I have been living and working at Hogwarts for so long, I suspect simply leaving it all behind and moving on is beyond me."
She heard Severus sigh, a flutter of something in his head. "Perhaps so. But, surely, you realise that my continuing obligations to the school prohibit me from sharing possibly privileged information with people outside of the institution. There are limits to what I may share, and I am under no obligation to exceed those limits on your behalf."
"You've demonstrated the flexibility of such rules more than enough in the past."
"In the proper context — you know the terms of our arrangement. Unless you suspect Gamp is smuggling the Dark Lord's shade into the castle under his robes."
"Well, then I would still like to discuss what you may share with me without exceeding those limits. May I come through?"
"No. We are not friends, Albus, who might gossip about our personal lives over tea. Unless you have news concerning the Dark Lord, or heard rumour of some threat to Elizabeth, we have nothing to discuss. If you wish to gossip about how the school is faring in your absence, speak to Minerva."
There was a brief pause, silent save for the crackling of the fire. Then, a little lower, "If I'm being honest, I don't trust the...objectivity of what Minerva might tell me. I fear she may tell me what she believes I wish to hear, to spare my feelings."
"...So you've sought me out for callous honesty. I'm uncertain whether I should be offended."
"We've had our disagreements over the years, Severus, and no small number of them. But I've always appreciated your perspective — I'm well aware that I can get...lost in my own head, sometimes. All too often, you see things I cannot."
"I would never have imagined you thought so, given how frequently you ignore my advice."
"And to my detriment, it seems — I wonder, sometimes, whether any of this would have happened if I had taken your advice a little more often. Particularly where Elizabeth and Hogwarts are concerned."
"You already know the answer to that, Albus." Severus let out another sigh. "Even if I did wish to discuss the bloody staff meeting with you — there is truly little to say, it was quite tedious all told — now is not the time. Elizabeth and I were just sitting down to dinner when you called."
"Ah! My apologies, of course, I didn't mean to interrupt." There was something off about his voice, a little higher and breathier — if Liz had to guess (and she did), Dumbledore had just realised that she'd been listening in the whole time, and was now a little embarrassed about that. Which, this conversation had gotten kind of private for a bit, so, fair. "Good evening, Elizabeth," he called, his voice raising just a little.
Liz leaned back, getting a better angle on the door. "Hello, Headmaster! Wait, shite, I mean..."
His normal low chortle was a bit diminished by being carried through the floo, lacking something. "That's alright, my dear — I daresay that will take even more getting used to for myself than it will for you."
Apparently Dumbledore was assuming that had been an honest slip, but judging by the flutter in Severus's head he, at least, was aware she'd done it on purpose. "I'm uncertain whether you recall, but we're leaving for the I.C.W. tournament tomorrow morning. We'll be in Romania for the next week. I'll call you after we return. Though I can't imagine what you expect to get out of it — as I said, the meeting was perfectly ordinary, and I haven't any pressing concerns to discuss."
The call wrapped up pretty quickly from there — some pleasantries, another apology from Dumbledore for interrupting dinner, blah blah. There was a brief exchange Liz didn't catch, their voices lowered enough they didn't carry into the kitchen, but then they were saying goodbye, and the steady crackling of the fire finally went out. A moment later, Severus was walking back through the doorway, rather less quick and smooth than he'd left, his initial frustration burned out. Sinking back into his chair, an odd shifting flutter in his head she didn't quite know how to read (awkward?), Severus said, "Sorry about that. Albus isn't known for observing working hours when he wishes to speak with someone."
Severus left out the part where Dumbledore seemed to think they were friends who might gossip about their personal lives over tea — which Severus had said with maximal scorn, of course — and only bothering people during the workday didn't apply to friends, nor that Severus was really terribly busy, so outside of working hours was the best time to get in contact with him. It didn't apply to the situation, was her point, but Dumbledore was an inconsiderate arse sometimes, which was Severus's point, so it didn't really matter. "It's fine. We have a new headmaster?"
He paused with a bit of bread lifted halfway to his mouth, one of his eyebrows curling up in one of those unimpressed expressions he was so good at. "Of course. Haven't you been reading the news?"
"No, I don't get the Prophet," she admitted, shrugging a little self-consciously. "I'll glance at it sometimes at Hogwarts, or at coffeeshops or whatever over the summer, but I don't bother paying for a subscription for myself. Too many irritating articles about me, I don't want to give them my money. If someone hasn't told me something, I don't know about it."
"The Northern Herald is targeted more toward commoners, and spends far less page space on asinine society gossip — you might find the competition more amenable to your tastes." Yeah, she was vaguely aware the Herald existed, she even owned a fraction of it, she just didn't care to follow the news that much. But being completely ignorant of what was going on was probably a bad idea, maybe she should do that... "The Board of Governors voted to remove Dumbledore months ago, while the scandal surrounding your trusteeship was ongoing, but the vote was made in conclave."
"In conclave?"
"Secretly — they didn't publicise the vote until the end of term. There are various reasons the Board may wish to wait until the end of the term to announce such changes, involving politics and contracts with staff and suppliers, it's complicated and not particularly relevant. And they didn't only replace the Headmaster, there were a long list of other decisions they made in conclave, one by one, all of them released together as a single package of reforms. As you're aware, the student population is increasing, to the point student safety is becoming a concern — these reforms were overdue, and for the most part very welcome."
Right, that had come up, the Board of Governors had been in talks with people in the Ministry and in guilds and stuff about how to design changes to the school for at least a year now, and probably longer. Liz was vaguely aware of all that stuff — some of her friends had close relatives who were involved in one way or another, so it'd come up — but she didn't know the details. "Who's our new Headmaster?"
"Hector Gamp. I doubt you would have heard the name before — he has long been among the leadership of the tutors' guild, but isn't well-known outside of academia."
Liz blinked. "There's a tutors' guild?"
"Of course. Any trade requiring any degree of skill or training is represented by a guild. Do you know much about the guilds?"
"Um, no, not really. I know they exist, and that a lot of the more stuck-up nobles don't like them, but that's pretty much it."
Severus felt a bit exasperated, sizzling in the air around her, but it didn't show on his face and he didn't directly say anything about her ignorance. (There were a lot of things she really should know about magical Britain that she didn't, she was aware of that, but a lot of it didn't turn up in books much.) "To oversimplify matters somewhat, there are two kinds of guilds in Britain: academic guilds, and trade guilds. The muggle institution academic guilds are most similar to are university departments — they determine the requirements to achieve a Mastery in their field, cooperate on research projects and help educate each other's students, and publish journals respecting current developments in the field. I myself am I member of the potioneers', alchemists', and healers' guilds.
"While the comparison isn't perfectly accurate, trade guilds can be thought of as the equivalent of labour unions — they advocate for the legal and financial interests of their membership. If a client attempts to violate a contract, or if a new law concerning their trade is being discussed, or if the nobility attempt to undermine their market with unlicensed or foreign professionals, the guild uses their collective leverage to press their interests however they feel necessary. Unlike labour unions, they also have a degree of regulatory power — many of the safety and professional standards concerning various products and services in this country aren't set by the Ministry, but by the guilds, independently. While these regulations do not have force of law, guild members are obliged to follow them or else risk their membership, thereby endangering their career and livelihood. Rising up through the ranks of the guilds is perhaps the sole legitimate method by which a commoner can come to have significant influence in magical Britain by their own merit, and the guilds often act as a check on noble privilege, so yes, the nobility do often dislike them.
"The tutors' guild is primarily focused on private tutors — setting a standard of competency for their members, monitoring contracts for abuses, advocating on their members' behalf in the event of a legal complaint, and so forth — though they are also influential in official schools, particularly primary and craft school programmes. Professors at academies, such as Hogwarts, are almost always members, but as we are also all members of academic guilds which may be better equipped to advocate on our behalf, we are considered a lesser priority."
"Right." All of that more or less made sense, just sounded...really complicated. Which wasn't really a surprise, when she thought about it — she didn't know much about how economics worked, but she did understand that it was complicated. "So, they picked as the new Headmaster someone whose previous job was basically helping a bunch of teachers all over the country do their job? That actually makes a lot of sense."
"That it does. Gamp is also well-connected in various academic guilds and noble families — the Gamps themselves are nobility, though a relatively poor, unremarkable example — so he is well-equipped to handle the politicking that comes along with the position. His history in the guild is, well, perhaps not as radical as you and I might prefer, but he is decent enough of an advocate. It's still early to say much for certain, but I suspect the Board chose well."
Well, good. That was good. Hogwarts was honestly managed quite terribly sometimes — which was something she was aware of, even if it didn't effect her a lot of the time, since Severus did a pretty good job with Slytherin. Hufflepuff was managed pretty well too, but it was common knowledge that Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, yeah, not so much, it was a mess up there. With only one professor for each of the houses, that wasn't nearly enough adult supervision to keep everything running smoothly — Severus and Sprout had basically deputised the prefects to help them out, and had what were sort of tiny internal governments to handle disputes and stuff, but that did require them to pay some attention to set the system up in the first place and make sure the rules were followed. Flitwick and McGonagall hadn't bothered, essentially just expected their prefects to handle it without actually giving them any way to do that.
(Hermione had complained more than once that the Gryffindor dormitory was practically Lord of the Flies, which was supposedly a reference to a book, but Liz hadn't read it. From the stories she'd heard about bullying, and things like older students offering help on homework in exchange for sexual favours, she could make a guess what Hermione meant.)
And that wasn't even getting into the staff, and the grounds. Most of the professors were at least qualified in their field, and competent at their jobs (if not necessarily excellent), but they were all overworked, teaching far too many classes to have much time for anything else. Which might have something to do with why Gryffindor and Ravenclaw were such a mess, since McGonagall and Flitwick both taught primary required classes — Severus did too, but he'd done a pretty good job delegating, and Liz still wasn't convinced he ever slept. Binns was useless, most people just skipped History, and the Defence Professor was often worse than useless, presenting an active danger to the students. (Despite being a scary evil dark creature, Lupin was widely considered to be the best they'd had in as long as anyone could remember.) Hagrid got special mention for actually not being qualified in his field — in the sense of not having any official qualifications or training as a teacher, she meant — and actually managing to get some of his students injured while in class. Nobody seriously, sure, but it was an uptick relative to the year before.
Hogwarts might seem unsafe at first glance, with all the moving staircases and shite, but injuries gotten just getting around were actually very rare — Liz assumed the wards had something to do with that, and maybe the elves kept an eye out too — but that safety didn't extend to the grounds. Students went swimming all the time, unsupervised, sometimes people just fell right off the cliff into the water. The number one cause of death at Hogwarts was potions accidents — which was almost always the case at magic schools, potions could be dangerous, though there hadn't been any since Severus had taken over (he was a strict bastard, but when he got angry in class it was normally for a very good reason, since fooling around could literally kill them all) — but the number two cause of death was drownings. Which was kind of shockingly mundane, when Liz thought about it, with all the potentially dangerous magic shite around, but it did make obvious sense. They couldn't really stop students from wandering around the grounds and jumping in the lake if they felt like it, but neither did the professors have the time to keep an eye on them, even to make sure they didn't accidentally kill themselves.
The forest, as creepy as it could be sometimes, was actually safer than the lake. Centaurs didn't harm children, they'd just turn them around and lead them back out — the "Forbidden" part was called that because it'd been guaranteed to the centaurs by treaty, so humans weren't supposed to go there — and supposedly they along with the wilderfolk kept dangerous magical predators to a minimum. Or it had been safe, before Hagrid had set up a bloody acromantula colony in there. As far as they knew, the giant man-eating spiders hadn't actually killed any humans yet (though they had killed plenty of centaurs and wilderfolk), but obviously the Wizengamot wasn't willing to take that risk — last Liz had heard, the DLE was preparing a force to go exterminate them all, which was definitely the correct response to an infestation of giant man-eating spiders outside of a school.
The professors were already too busy to deal with the problems at Hogwarts as they were — and the class sizes were getting bigger so it was only going to get worse. Liz didn't know how Hogwarts was run, so she had no idea how much of all this was Dumbledore's fault, but she didn't think bringing in new people could hurt. And she had caught that, "You said something about new hires, are there going to be more professors next year?"
"Yes, finally — we've been warning the Board about increasing class sizes for years, they've decided to solve the problem at the last possible moment. The Headmaster has been authorised to hire professors as necessary to ensure class sizes do not exceed twenty students for required courses, and thirty students for electives. That may not seem like a high number by muggle standards, but with magic involved any more than that begins to become unsafe."
Yeah, no, that made plenty of sense — Transfiguration and Charms classes could get messy, with everyone throwing spells around, and Liz honestly thought twenty cauldrons was too many for one professor to keep an eye on. (Come to think of it, that was probably why Severus had them brew in pairs more often than not.) Defence and Herbology probably weren't great with too many people either, so. It wouldn't effect Liz's year — they had forty-one students, she assumed they weren't going to mix everything up for just one student — but the lower years were much bigger, splitting them up more was a great idea. "So, what, two more for each subject?"
"One or two. Two professors are enough to split all the necessary classes at the moment, though they will need a third and a fourth in the near future. But our new Headmaster has chosen to enforce elements of the Hogwarts bylaws that have lapsed in recent generations — particularly the prohibition against staff members holding multiple positions at once. One consequence is that we will have a new Deputy Headmaster. The purpose of the role is to manage inter-house disputes and oversee discipline, and to act as a more approachable representative of the Headmaster for students to bring concerns to. Obviously, it is inappropriate for one of the heads of house to also act as Deputy Headmaster — it presents a conflict of interest — so Minerva was forced to choose one. It is also preferable that they not have teaching responsibilities to distract them from their duties, so Gamp will be bringing in someone new — I expect he'll pick a colleague from his time in the guild, but it hasn't been decided yet.
"Also, a head of house may not be a full-time instructor — we aren't barred from teaching, and we will be responsible for supervising the new professors in our subjects, but there are now a maximum number of classes we're allowed to take ourselves. Minerva, Filius, and myself have all elected to keep only fifth years and above, to ensure they are prepared for their exams; Pomona will continue to manage the greenhouses, and will likely jump in to observe one class or another at random, but she's decided to not teach any classes at all, instead focusing on her Hufflepuffs going forward."
Right, that all made sense. So far it all seemed very reasonable, Liz didn't know what this Gamp bloke was— "Wait, fifth year and above? So you won't be teaching my Potions class this year?"
"No, I won't. You hardly require much instruction in any case, I'm certain you'll do fine with whoever we end up hiring."
...Liz had no idea how she felt about that.
By that point, they were both mostly done eating already — Liz didn't know how Severus managed to talk so much and eat at the same time, but he did get dragged to a lot of fancy dinner parties and shite, presumably he'd gotten practice. Severus recommended she have a shower while he cleaned up in the kitchen, since they wouldn't have time for it in the morning, which was a good idea, she detoured by her room to grab her things quick. By the time she got out, Severus was long done in the kitchen — it didn't take that long to wash up, with magic and everything — and he wasn't in the library either. Must be downstairs already. Might as well handle that other thing when they had a moment, she backtracked to grab the contract out of her bag.
Severus was, unsurprisingly, in his basement potions lab. The hanging parchment had been taken down, the drip tray removed, making room to lay the parchment out on the table — actually, Liz was pretty sure the table wasn't naturally that square, Severus must have transfigured it. When she came in, he was tending a little silvery cauldron over one of the burners, idly turning it every once in a while with a glass stirring rod. Hmm, silver was purifying and glass was inert, the second part must be pretty reactive. Which was no surprise at all when she thought about it — Severus did call it a catalyst, after all.
Liz walked over to the table, set the contract down next to where Severus was working — the side opposite where he had ingredients sitting waiting, so it wouldn't get in the way — plucked a pen out of the bundle of note-taking stuff on a shelf nearby. "Before I forget, I found a proxy person, you know, but since the trusteeship is still on I can't sign for myself." Which was slightly irritating, but the things it was a problem for were limited, and the minor inconvenience was worth the potential benefits. Honestly, not being the target of letters attempting to open negotiations to arrange a marriage with her was by itself probably more than enough to keep things the way they were for now — he could just deal with that, thank you very much, she didn't want to think about it.
Severus glanced over at the contract, quickly skimming through it — it was a standard thing, they'd literally just gotten a prepared copy from WAS at the Ministry — after a moment his mind giving an odd lurch. "Silviana Slughorn."
"Yeah. Do you know her?" They'd definitely met, Sylvia had been a third year when Severus started teaching back in 1980. But he might not remember her, and she doubted they'd interacted much outside of classes — Sylvia had been a Ravenclaw, so.
"I vaguely recall she attended Hogwarts back in the Eighties." There it was. "I have extremely negative history with a particular Slughorn, I can't help remembering him whenever I see the name." Whatever his problem with this Slughorn was, it must not be big enough of a deal to object to Sylvia — or he just thought Liz's proxy wasn't his business — because he twisted around to scrawl his signature along the line without any further hesitation. "One advantage of the reforms at Hogwarts putting us in charge of our departments is that I must be consulted before any new Potions Professor is hired — Albus had suggested Slughorn might return to pick up the slack, but that will never happen so long as I have a say in the matter."
Ah, the Slughorn he didn't like had been the Potions Professor before Severus, got it. (Wait, was that the same Slughorn she was belatedly remembering Tamsyn had mentioned a few times? There were like forty years between them, but it seemed likely...) Since Potions had been Severus's favourite subject — or she was assuming, anyway, he did do it professionally now — she might have guessed he'd liked his professor in school, but apparently not. "Shite teacher?"
"He was decent — prone to becoming distracted with one matter or another, and thereby failing to notice accidents before they erupt, but he is a brilliant potioneer and an engaging lecturer. Slytherin under his leadership, however, was a nightmare. Imagine Gryffindor as it is now, but with the addition of a head of house who openly favours certain students over others, and incipient Death Eaters openly recruiting their fellows and harassing those they felt undeserving of a proper education."
"Okay, that sounds absolutely fucking miserable."
"Children died. Suicide, mostly."
Jesus Christ, yeah, fuck him, Liz guessed...
"And that was another concern brought on by the increased student population — a single head of house and four prefects can manage a dormitory of seventy students with some careful planning, but Slytherin will likely be twice that size next year." Woah, Liz hadn't realised it was that many.
Each house had averaged around ten to a year when Liz started, some slightly more and some slightly less — that was where Severus got the number, ten students times seven years — and the baby boom hit proper starting in first year. Or, second year now, she meant. So, to have double the kids, five times ten subtracted from one-forty, that was ninety, which meant first and second year would have to average, um, one-sixty to two hundred overall. That was too much — Liz thought they were actually around a hundred each, which was huge relative to Liz's year but not that big — Severus must be being hyperbolic. Supposedly the class sizes were going to continue increasing, and of course the smaller ones were going to graduate out, so it'd probably get that high pretty soon, but not this year. Still worth it to prepare, so.
"Each of the dorms will have a pair of supervisors, one male and one female, living alongside the students, to more directly manage whatever issues might arise. Or, the current plan is to have only a pair of them, the Board discussed perhaps bringing on more in future, depending on how it works out. The preference will be for younger adults — recent graduates of the respective houses, perhaps part-time Mastery students — who might be more approachable to homesick children and the like than authority figures proper. I need your blood now."
Liz twitched at the unexpected change of subject, wordlessly held out her hand. Lightly gripping her wrist, Severus sliced open a small cut in the pad of her middle finger, the dark material of the knife glinting a little in the light — glass, she didn't have one of those, but she knew from reading that glass tools were common when working with blood and stuff. Glass knives also tended to be absurdly sharp, shaped with alchemy to an unnaturally fine edge, Liz hardly even felt it. Severus carefully teased out three drops, the blood striking the surface of the potion with odd little sizzling noises, closed the wound with a quick healing charm, the dark magic cool and tingly on her skin, and released her without comment.
"I can't say for certain how they'll approach the matter," Severus said, moving on as though there hadn't been any interruption, "but I imagine they'll focus on the first- and second-years, while leaving the older students to continue on as before with little interruption. Any candidates for the position will be familiar with the way Slytherin operates, and likely wouldn't wish to disrupt the system as it exists — but it isn't equipped to serve so many students, and was always rather...impersonal. I imagine the supervisors will make themselves available at all hours for whatever may come up, and conduct meetings to help the new students get to know each other, and study halls and tea parties and whatever else. I'm certain they'll have ideas to occupy themselves and their charges."
Well, that sounded tedious — people being aggressively friendly and trying to get kids to socialise or whatever always made her uncomfortable. As much as having more adults in the dorms to help out was probably a good idea, Liz thought she was relieved that she'd missed it by a couple years. "Do you know who you're getting?" Depend on how recent "recent graduates" was supposed to be, Liz was probably at least vaguely aware of their existence.
"Not yet. I've already sent the first round of letters to sound out possible candidates, but it's too early to say anything definitive."
"Right. Anything else going on at Hogwarts I should know about?"
"The operation in the forest to exterminate the acromantulae will likely proceed through the New Year, at the earliest. The team will consist primarily of Hit Wizards and cursebreakers with the Department of Public Works, though they will also be taking volunteers from the general population. They have only begun to mobilise recently — the negotiations with the centaurs to allow a military presence on their treaty lands were tedious, but Amelia conducted the gifting ceremony with their elders just last week."
"Gifting ceremony?"
"Centaur culture, it's not relevant." Fair enough. If Liz had to guess, it was sort of like the Ministry buying their way in, or maybe an exchange of gifts kind of making them officially friends or whatever, but the details weren't really that important. "As you may have heard, Hagrid has been convicted of a suite of offences and sentenced to fifteen years in Azkaban — he will likely be let out early, due to extenuating circumstances and his friends outside advocating on his behalf, but he will be imprisoned for some years at the least. So there will be a new Care Professor, and a new groundskeeper. Going forward, Gamp is attempting a scheme with the Defence Professorship: we know from previous decades that the curse only targets the head of the department, so he plans to hire 'junior' professors on a permanent basis. The head of the department will be a cursebreaker provided by the Ministry on a one-year contract — they will need to take some classes, to ensure the curse doesn't target one of their 'subordinates', but their primary role will be to attempt to determine the source of the curse and eliminate it. A course of action that is terribly overdue, in my opinion, but Albus has a terrible habit of ignoring advice as it suits him.
"And there's the Triwizard Tournament this year, of course."
"Wait, seriously? They're bringing the Triwizard back?" Liz knew about the thing, from history books. She'd done a little bit of research on it at some point, because the idea was just interesting. It'd started ages ago, between what had been pretty much the only schools of magic north of Rome at the time — most mages had learned directly from people, one on one, schools with classrooms and proper curricula hadn't really been the done thing yet. (In some of the big, ancient cities, yes, enough people in small enough of a space for it to be practical, but not really anywhere else.) It'd been a pretty big deal once upon a time, a bit of friendly competition, trading books and the occasional student or professor back and forth, a lot of diplomacy and shite went on during the events, it was a whole thing. All three schools had needed to call off a Tournament now and then during the 17th and 18th Centuries, for one reason or another — wars, political instability in the early decades of Secrecy, that sort of thing — until they'd put it on hold during a particularly difficult time toward the end of the 18th Century, she thought almost exactly two hundred years ago, and just never picked it up again. On a number of occasions since, Britain, Aquitania, or Daneland would make noises about starting the Tournament up again, but it never ended up happening — the most recent had been in the late 30s, and they'd actually gotten pretty far in the planning, but Britain had baulked at Durmstrang picking people with connections to Grindelwald and the Revolution for the judges' panel and backed out.
(Liz had looked up stuff about it in the archive at Hogwarts, curious, and Beauxbatons's Headmaster then had been a communalist, when the time came gave big passionate speeches in their parliament advocating for joining the war on the 'wrong' side, but for some reason the story as told in Britain left that part out. And Aquitania had fought with the Revolution in the end, same as Daneland, but for some reason they didn't have the same bad reputation in Britain. It was weird.)
"Yes, negotiations for the revival have been ongoing for some time — as part of Britain's effort to clean up our reputation in the wake of the war, I expect. It was agreed two years ago now that Hogwarts would host the first of the new Tournament, Durmstrang would host the second, and Beauxbatons would host the third, to continue through that sequence every four to five years, depending on the local political climate. Which is a new development from the original Tournament, the schools used to compete for the right to host each time it came around. The timing is atrocious — hosting the Triwizard while acclimating to the necessary changes Hogwarts is undergoing will be a trial — but by the time the circumstances we now find ourselves in began to resolve it was too late to postpone."
"But that's so cool, though! I had no idea they were bringing the Triwizard back, this is going to be great." Not only did the Tournament itself sound like it would be entertaining — much more fun to watch than quidditch — but it would also act as a good distraction from Liz, people given more interesting things to pay attention to than the Girl Who Lived. Ooh, and the next one was going to be at Durmstrang, the top of the list of schools Liz was thinking of transferring to. The Proficiencies were expected to last for three years instead of the two in Britain (and it wasn't unusual for people studying several subjects to take four or five to finish), so she would even still be there — and she'd be old enough for that one that competing would be a reasonable thing to try to do, she could definitely give it a shot. So yeah, this was excellent news, she was actually looking forward to the school year starting now.
Probably feeling her eagerness, Severus cut her a narrow-eyed look, his head simmering with an odd mix of frustration, dread, and reluctant amusement. "Perhaps it seems exciting to you, but all it will mean for me is extra work and several months of unnecessary headaches. This is finished now," he said, nodding at the potion.
"Right, let's do it then." No point waiting, not like she had anything better to do...and she was pretty sure the catalyst wouldn't keep, anyway.
Severus didn't bother transferring the catalyst to a bottle, like he had for his, instead simply gripping the rim of the cauldron with a clamp and carrying it over to the prepared parchment. Liz hadn't really doubted that the part of the magic that actually determined who the subject was was in the catalyst — it did have her blood in it — but she could also feel it happening, an odd warmth shooting through her head to foot with a lurching thump, like her heart missing a beat. But then the magic reached deeper into her, an energetic sizzling that was making her a little antsy, all but shivering, and then down and through her, glittering gossamer threads reaching out far into the distance...
Though it didn't really have a direction that Liz could make sense of — she meant, it did have a direction, she could feel it stretching away, wavering as it went like leaves rustling in the wind, but it wasn't one she could follow with her eyes. Less travelling through space as into it, she guessed, penetrating through the physical world into...well, presumably the same source all her Seer intuition nonsense came from. It was supposedly a divination potion, though she really had no idea how that was supposed to work, but she didn't know how the Sight worked in the first place, so.
(Like mind magic or snake-speak or just channelling magic to put into any kind of spell, she didn't need to know how it worked, she just did it. Magic could be funny like that.)
Anyway, the weird magical sensations only lasted for a few seconds before it was over, words beginning to blossom on the page, first in the middle and then quickly spreading out. There were lines in several different colours converging on Liz, she leaned over to— "Oh shite, I left the thing upstairs. One second." Obviously it didn't do any good if she didn't know what the colours meant, honestly...
After running back upstairs to get the damn thing, she was back at the table a moment later, glancing between the legend Tamsyn had written up and the parchment. Around her name — Elizabeth Potter in the familiar untidy scrawl, as though done with a pen, her handwriting was even worse with a quill — there were a bunch of coloured lines all mixed up. Because, apparently, despite how bloody short she was and her stupid fucking hair, Liz had won the magical genetic lottery, which was strange, but okay then. Coming down from James Potter above her were a pair of blue lines, one with little purple flecks in it and the other silver, and then a pair of green lines, one with orange flecks and the other purple — let's see, those were magesight, omniglottalism (oh neat!), the self-transfigurative capacity necessary to become an animagus, and the last one was metamorphy. She'd suspected she probably had magesight already, and she wasn't surprised she carried the metamorphy gene (or whatever it was called) — her grandmother's sister was one, so it wasn't out of the question she'd gotten it, though obviously it hadn't activated — and she was shitty enough with transfiguration that she wouldn't be able to become an animagus anyway...though that she apparently carried the trait implied that must not have expressed either. It might be worth seeing if it could be activated with blood alchemy somehow, maybe her transfiguration would get better then. The omniglottalism was a complete surprise to her, though, she'd had no idea about that.
Out of curiosity, she quick traced the animagus line back — Sirius was a pretty close relative, it was likely he'd gotten it from the same person. Her finger passed over James Potter, and Dorea Black, and then Violetta Bulstrode, and then something that didn't look to be letters at all, a curly design of some kind. The branch extending from the mystery person, everyone in there had the same green and orange lines through them...but there was something off about their names. Some of them actually had names, some drawings like the first mystery person, but a few just looked like placeholders, smudges where a person would be but— Oh! These must be wilderfolk, the mystery person was the swan-woman she'd been told about. Obviously they would also have the animagus trait, since they were by definition descended from animagi, kind of like animagi in reverse. Got it, that made sense.
(No wonder Sirius liked wilderfolk so much, he was only a few generations off of being one.)
Anyway, right, back the other way. Leading down to Lily Evans were some more coloured lines — a repeat of the blue and purple of magesight (apparently got that from both sides), and then a familiar-looking reddish-orange, a red with silver flecks, a dark blue, and then a light pinkish-purple one. Right, so, the reddish-orange was parseltongue, the dark blue was legilimency (no surprise there). The red with silver flecks was something she'd labelled simply "spirit magic", which Liz didn't entirely understand what it was — Tamsyn's explanation had been confusing, things to do with an intuitive ability to manipulate magic in the environment, but also to manipulate magic in people, which, depending on how it was applied, could mean weird esoteric healing magic or soul magic. She didn't entirely understand what Tamsyn meant by that, what the talent was supposed to do, and maybe she should ask more in depth, since apparently she might have it. Whatever, the pinkish-purple one, she remembered purple was the Sight, the lighter colour was...psychometry, apparently, which was bloody weird. That was the only purplish colour coming to her name — a deeper purple, for oracles, reached as far as Lily but didn't continue up to Liz — so that must be the kind of Sight she had, but her thing didn't really seem like what she'd heard of how psychometry worked. But she wasn't an expert with weird esoteric witchcraft nobody really studied anymore, and wasn't taught at Hogwarts at all (Divination class didn't count), so she was just going to assume the potion hadn't fucked it up and she really did have psychometry.
"Right," she said, folding up the paper again, "that's neat. I should ask the blood alchemist person if she can switch on the omniglottalism, and maybe the self-transfigurability...thing. Or hell, I got the metamorphy one too, I could get them to switch that one on instead."
With an uncomfortable flinch in his head, his voice going a little sharp, Severus said, "I would strongly recommend against the latter. Metamorphs possess an intuitive awareness of their own body and the operation of their talent, one that develops as they age. I'm sceptical whether that awareness would carry through should the potential be awakened later in life. And even with this awareness, it's not unheard of for metamorphs to transfigure themselves into a shape incompatible with the normal functioning of the human body and accidentally kill themselves — I suspect gaining the ability but not the intuition would be extremely dangerous."
...Well, fine, she guessed that made sense — being a metamorph would be cool, but she'd rather not die, thanks. Disappointing, but fine. "I can still see if I can get the omniglottalism, at least. That one isn't going to fuck me up on accident, right?"
"No. My understanding is that the trait is inborn — by which I mean it is already present upon the beginning of primary language acquisition — and I know for certain that it is mediated through mind magic. I can feel it working whenever Ashe speaks to anyone, though it is very subtle. As you are already a mind mage, you may be aware of it happening, but I doubt it will affect you much. Have you noticed these names?" he said, pointing somewhere toward the bottom half of the page.
"Not really? I mean, I only wanted to do this to see if I had anything I could get the blood alchemist to switch on for me, I don't really care about this sort of thing." That and it was kind of a lot of names to look at — each name would split into two, and it went back six generations, so that was, um, two plus four plus sixteen plus thirty-two plus sixty-four plus one twenty-four, was...well, a big number, anyway. There was a reason the sheets of parchment they'd needed were so bloody huge. Severus was pointing at something in particular, though, it looked like he'd followed the parseltongue line back — he'd probably been curious where Lily had gotten it from since they were children — which at that point was still only paired up with the spirit magic one, the lines splitting up as they went deeper into Lily's ancestry. Which was interesting, there must be multiple squibs back here somewhere, but that wasn't so much of a surprise, really. Though it was kind of odd how much more colourful Liz's chart was than Severus's, on both sides of the family, didn't know what was up with that. Besides the observation that she'd apparently won the magical genetic lottery, anyway.
Distracted with thinking about that, it took Liz unreasonably long to identify the name Severus was pointing at: Diana Gaunt. "Wait, Gaunt like the Gaunts?" Liz counted up the generations, one two three...her great-great-grandmother? There were two generations after that on the chart, and even in such a small chunk there were repeats — Diana's father was also her grandfather, ugh...
While half of her attention was on that, Severus was saying, "I suspect so. The Gaunts were known to have been Parselmouths, it is not particularly surprising you and Lily might have gotten the trait through them. I suspect her child was a squib," he added, pointing at the one just above her, Hunter Britnell. "It is curious that the given name is in English, but 'Britnell' is a Mistwalker name — used among the Hartwrights, I believe. Most of these all down this branch are Hartwright names." Liz noticed both the psychometry and the spirit magic lines originated somewhere in that section of the chart, which made sense, Mistwalkers had all kinds of neat magic stuff going on. "Mistwalkers don't expel squibs from their communities, but many of them do attend muggle schooling, so it's not impossible some might decide to pursue lives out in the muggle world instead."
"So...someone ran away from one of the Seventeen Founders that had gone crazy and insular and suicidally inbred—" Severus snorted a little at that characterisation. "—and married into the Mistwalkers, of all people — that's a hell of a jump right there — and their son was a squib, who married a muggle, and then that couple—" Daniel and Caroline Britnell, apparently. "— had Lily, magic coming back after skipping two generations, and then something happened to them and she was adopted by the Evanses."
"So it seems," Severus said, amused for some inscrutable, Snape-ish reason.
"...Okay. It's kind of neat that my great-grandfather was apparently a Mistwalker, but I'm going to go ahead and just not tell people I'm related to the Gaunts. That's kind of embarrassing, honestly, they were so fucked up."
Severus felt even more amused, the air around her warm and practically shivering with it, but it didn't show on his face or his voice at all, still as cool and smooth as normal. "I assure you, the purebloods are very much familiar with embarrassment over one segment of their family or another — some of the Dark families are themselves related to the Gaunts, only a few generations further back than this. But I don't imagine it's likely to come up in conversation."
Well, she might mention it to Tamsyn, since it turned out they were distant cousins — as inbred as the Gaunts had supposedly been, Liz didn't doubt Diana's parents and grandparents (and parent/grandparent, ugh) would also be on Tamsyn's chart — but no, she didn't imagine it would come up for any other reason. But he didn't have to make fun of her over it, honestly, Severus.
"Oh wait, speaking of purebloods being inbred and everyone being related to everyone..." Liz jumped back up to her own name and followed it up, James Potter, Dorea Black, Cygnus Black, Phineas Black — the same Phineas who'd been Headmaster of Hogwarts two before Dumbledore? probably — and then Scorpius Black. "Ha! I thought so, this same Scorpius Black is on your chart, I think." It was kind of odd that Liz was a generation younger than Severus, but her Black names actually went back further — she had a Nigel Black above that, but Severus's had ended at Scorpius — but James's parents had been older than average when they had him, and his mother had been born very late (like a dozen years after her next-youngest sibling), and that was about the space of a generation just right there, so.
"He is. I can't say I'm surprised — the Blacks are one of those families who are seemingly related to everyone in one way or another. Though with this many generations separating us, we're not likely to be any more genetically similar than two strangers picked off the street at random."
...Well, Liz thought it was neat, anyway.
There was a flicker in Severus's head, he gave her a glance. "Perhaps my issues with my own family are prejudicing me somewhat, but I don't attach much importance to blood relation, especially one so distant as this. Our relationship in the present and my history with Lily are far more meaningful to me than the coincidence of my four-times great-grandfather and your three-times great-grandfather being the same person."
Oh.
Good point.
And now Liz had absolutely no idea what to say, blankly staring back up at him for a moment as she scrambled to... She was inexplicably uncomfortable all of a sudden, Severus's attention on her warm and stifling, her chest tingling and— Ugh. She definitely wanted to say something, the tension of words stopped up in her throat a physical pressure, but she had no idea what. (Honestly, Liz had to be the most un-self-aware mind mage in all of history, it was extremely frustrating.) Awkwardly clearing her throat, Liz forced out, "Right, um. Thanks for helping me with this, I don't know if I could have gotten it right on my own. I would say remind me to ask the blood alchemist when we get to that about the omniglottalism, but I don't really think I'll forget — I've always thought languages were neat. Well, once I started having Cambrian classes, anyway, I never really thought about it before then..."
Severus definitely realised something was going on with her — with as loud as her mind was, she was basically shouting in his face all the time — but at least he was tactful enough not to say anything about it. "It was no trouble at all, Elizabeth, I found it an interesting project. And I'm certain you could have managed it, though it might have taken a handful of attempts — given how expensive some of the components are, those attempts might have been quite costly, I suppose."
Not like Liz really had to worry about affording potions supplies, but sure. "Yeah. Anyway, I'm going to go read for a while. I was poking through a blood alchemy book before starting dinner — I'm not going to play around with it, I know that would be dangerous, just curious, you know."
"Do you have enough nutrient potions to last through the week in Romania?"
"Oh, um, I haven't counted them, but I think so? I made a bunch of them like a week ago."
"Very well. Do remember to bring along a few calming potions — of course they would be counterproductive to use during the competition itself, but you might find them helpful when navigating the crowd and for press events."
Ugh, yes, she was aware there would be pictures every once in a while, where people could shout questions or whatever at the contestants — just off the cuff, not a proper interview, but still — it all sounded very tedious. She would probably need a little if she wanted to get through those without looking obviously uncomfortable for the cameras. "Yeah, I'll remember. I'm gonna go, then," she said, starting to roll up the big piece of parchment to put away...her trunk wasn't here, but somewhere, anyway. It was very noisy, the potion absorbed into the material making it all crackly, which, with Severus standing there watching her, was making her feel oddly jumpy and embarrassed for some inexplicable reason.
When she did managed to leave the little potions lab, his eyes crawling on the back of her neck despite Liz being fully aware he wasn't even looking her direction at the moment (setting about brewing something, to bring along to Romania just in case, she assumed), it felt annoyingly like she was fleeing. Her brain was so fucking annoying sometimes, she didn't know what the hell was wrong with her.
(She didn't know why Severus saying that had made her so uncomfortable — it wasn't like him giving a damn was a bad thing, obviously. Feelings were hard, and confusing, and stupid.)
On second thought, she wouldn't be going back to that book. She did have a form to send off, and she was feeling a bit antsy (she was leaving for Romania tomorrow, the tournament was only two days away), wearing herself out a little practising spells out back sounded like a good idea. It was maybe the only way she'd get much sleep tonight, so. Oh, and as long as she was sending the proxy thing, she could write a letter quick...
Tamsyn
I realise there's probably already a response from you on the way, but I'm going to be in Romania when it arrives and won't have time to write back right away. And I wanted to get this down before I forget.
Me and Severus both did the heritage test thing you sent me — it uses blood, so he wanted to do it with himself first, because Severus is a paranoid bastard like that. (Also, he's an enormous potions nerd, and thinks the magic is neat.) Apparently I managed to win the magical genetic lottery, because I got, like, over half of the things the potion tests for, even if some of them obviously didn't activate properly. I'm definitely going to see if the blood alchemist I'm going to see for stuff can switch on the omniglottalism as long as they're at it, because that sounds neat.
Anyway, my mother was muggleborn, you know, and she was also adopted, so nobody knew anything at all about her birth family. It turns out, her grandfather was a squib — from a Mistwalker family, random coincidence — and his mother was a Gaunt. I assume the same Gaunts? My great-great-grandmother was Diana — which is funny, my wilderfolk however-many-great-grandmother was also named Diana, but it's probably just a common name on the magical side — and her parents were Corvin and Mared. And then there's another row, look, I'll just copy off that part of the chart, check the back of this page.
Apparently Corvin was Diana's father and also her grandfather, so I'm guessing they are the same Gaunts. Also, ew.
Right, that's all I wanted to get out of the way. I would say I'll tell you how the duelling tournament goes, but there are newsletters and things, I'm sure you can read about it yourself.
Elizabeth
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Elizabeth
Forgive me for the briefness of this note, I was in transit when the owl caught up with me.
I don't have my chart in front of me, but if I recall correctly, Corvin and Mared Gaunt are my great-grandparents — we are second/fourth cousins twice removed. I guess this makes me Aunt Tamsyn to you.
I've decided to travel over the summer, and I had the time to make a brief detour to Romania, so I will be personally watching the tournament. I did promise I would stay away from you, I won't be trying to meet up with you. I'm in Europe at the moment anyway, and it is quite an event — and something we didn't have when I was your age, what with the war going on — so I thought I might as well check it out.
Good luck in the tournament, not that I expect you'll need it.
Tamsyn
Woo, fun? Yeah, fun. Yay.
Anyway, I don't have a lot to say about this one — it doesn't help that my brain is fuzzy at the moment — so I'm just not gonna bother. If you've got pressing questions go ahead and ask them in comments I guess. Other than, yes, I really did have Hagrid sent to Azkaban completely off-screen, because I amuse myself.
And it's on to Romania we go, wooooo...