Sébastienne Moreau stepped out of the floo, as the green flames faded took a quick look around the room. And froze.

It was a pub. It was really a pub. When she'd been looking up public floo grates at Castle White, she'd noticed the only one in Hogsmeade was at a place called the Three Broomsticks. Now, it was sort of absurd for a magical settlement as important as Hogsmeade to only have one public hook-up, especially during a public spectacle like the Triwizard Tournament — she'd think they'd at least set up a temporary one around the big events. She'd assumed this Three Broomsticks was a public meeting hall of some kind, but she'd asked the attendant, who'd informed her it was a pub. A pub with rooms for rent, the only hotel of any appreciable scale in the village, but still. Tienne had assumed he was just messing with her, for some inexplicable reason.

But no. It was really a pub. A rather nice pub, rustic and old-fashioned, all plain woods and furs, real casks stacked up behind the bar, that pleasant combination of hardness and softness these sorts of places could get — though, Tienne thought the stuffed heads hung on the walls here and there were horrid, no accounting for taste. But it was still a pub.

Tienne just shook her head to herself, dumbfounded. British mages sometimes, honestly...

The floo flared behind her, green-tinted shadows thrown out, Tienne stepped to the side in time for a family of five to stumble through the grate. Right, she had things to do today. First on the list was getting herself a room here.

Which turned out to be impossible. She managed to get through the conversation with Rosmerta, the woman apparently running the place, without too much difficulty — she had studied it in elementary, what felt like forever ago now, but she'd actually picked up most of her English through American films and British television, which, yes, somewhat embarrassing. (Once at a club in Paris she'd been informed by an American man, breathless from laughter, that most people from his country didn't really say "fuck" that much.) So it wasn't a difficulty of making herself understood, Rosmerta apparently just didn't have any available rooms, fully booked by people (mostly foreigners) coming in for the First Task tomorrow. There were sizeable magical enclaves in Inverness and Edinburgh, but they'd likely be full up too, her best bet would be going all the way to Charing in London. Or just find a muggle hotel in Inverness, if she was comfortable with that.

Tienne rolled her eyes at that last bit — of course she'd be comfortable in a muggle hotel, but she kind of doubted they accepted French or elvish currency (the standard in magical Britain), so that wouldn't exactly work very well, would it? Her best bet would probably be to floo to London, find a bank or something that would be willing to exchange francs or sickles for pounds...but not actually stay there, because hotels in London were probably stupidly expensive. Pop back up to Inverness, maybe, she'd figure it out.

Sighing off her irritation and Rosmerta's apologies, Tienne stepped out onto the village street. And immediately hugged her coat tighter around herself — holy fuck, it's cold. It was only November, it should not be this cold. Squinting against the wind whipping at her hair, Tienne looked around the little village — smaller than she'd expected, and seemingly frozen in time centuries ago, the buildings mostly peak-roofed wooden cottages — finally spotted the asymmetrical mess of Hogwarts rising in the distance. Right, that way. Ducking her head against the wind, she turned down the dirt street that seemed to be going in that general direction, and started off.

Eventually, just beyond the edge of the little village, was what was obviously a train platform of some kind, though completely empty at the moment. Just beyond that was the end loop of a dirt track, a few old-fashioned carriages sitting out there. But, just the carriages, no horses or whatever to pull them. So how the hell were they supposed to get to the castle? It had to be a few kilometres away, did she have to walk there? That just seemed horribly inconvenient...

But even as she watched, a few people in an eclectic mix of archaic British robes and ordinary muggle clothes hopped into one of the carriages, shut the door, and the thing just...started off, by itself. Hmm. Must be enchanted or something. Alright, then.

Tienne was still a few metres away from the closest when a familiar voice called, "Moreau? What are you doing here?"

She looked that way and, sure enough, there was Doriane Delacour, standing out in the middle of the horrid British autumn, the wind making even more of a mess of her perpetually messy hair than usual. Tienne had met Doriane a few times, but they didn't exactly know each other very well. Her mother was one of the instructors in the healing programme at Beauxbatons, Doriane was around now and again, assisted sometimes.

Honestly, Tienne thought she knew of Doriane better than she knew her — she was the very first human–veela hybrid in the history of ever, she'd come up in blood magic textbooks and newspapers or magazines from time to time. And that wasn't really a basis for any kind of familiarity, was it.

"Miss Delacour, hello. Ah..." She didn't want to talk about why she was here, really. "I didn't expect to see you here."

Doriane raised an eyebrow at her, the one with the bar through it. "My mother is from Britain, you know, she decided to take the opportunity of her nephew ending up in the Tournament to introduce herself." Not Master Delacour, obviously, she was talking about Lise Delacour — Tienne had attended a talk she'd given once, but she'd never actually met Doriane's more famous parent. "Laïa and Izzie are staying up at the castle with our people, Maëlie wanted to visit them."

For a second, Tienne had no idea who she was talking about, before she belatedly spotted the little girl with her. She was maybe seven or eight, and half-hiding behind Doriane, peering out around her hip up at Tienne. Somehow, her hair was even worse than Doriane's, a huge puffy tangled monstrosity. "Oh, hello there, I didn't see you. Your sister?" she asked Doriane.

"Yep. I'd introduce you, but she's very shy." Yes, she had noticed that. "Anyway, what brings you here? The First Task isn't until tomorrow, you know."

Right, back to the thing she didn't want to talk about. Oh well, it wasn't that big of a deal. "Ah, dropping in on my niece, actually."

Doriane frowned. "I thought you were muggleborn."

"I am, sort of — my mother's a squib, you know, but she didn't tell any of us until I started getting magic outbursts as a toddler. My mum had me really late, my eldest brother had already moved away to Britain before I was born, so, Statute of Secrecy, we weren't allowed to tell him, or his wife and little Maïa."

Doriane was frowning a little, clearly thinking about something. "Wait, why not? If he's your brother, he'd be immediate family."

"Apparently, for the purposes of the Statute, 'immediate family' is defined as people in the household, which he wasn't anymore." The only reason Anne, Tienne's twenty-year-older sister (who was really more like an aunt, for all intents and purposes), had been allowed to know about magic was because she'd dropped out of school to come back and help out when Mum had been pregnant with Tienne, she'd been around for those first few years. Mum had had to deal with her husband dying (Tienne had been born after her father had died, actually), going through a difficult birth (they'd both nearly died), raising a four-year-old girl being a toddler and a rebellious pre-teen boy being a little shit (Rémy hadn't handled their father's unexpected death so well himself), all within the space of a few months, so she'd really needed the help. In fact, Anne was still annoyed with Daniel for staying in Britain during that time, though Mum herself had never really held it against him.

(It probably helped that the four-year-old girl being a toddler had been Anne's problem in the first place — Mailys, the eldest of Tienne's nieces and nephews, the only one older than Tienne herself. Anne had gotten knocked up during lycée and left the kid with her mother and stepfather so she could finish her education, so when it came to making things more difficult for Mum than they had to be, Anne was a slut in a glass house.)

But anyway, she was talking to one of her professor's kids here. "Mum wanted to tell him, but she'd had multiple little kids to take care of at the time, she didn't want to risk getting in trouble. Actually," Tienne winced guiltily, "Adjustment came in and messed with their memories multiple times, when magic happened while they were visiting for the holidays. That's going to be fun to explain..."

With a disdainful-yet-sympathetic grimace, Doriane drawled, "If it makes you feel better, in this country they wipe the memories of muggleborns and their families until they're old enough to go to school. I'm certain your niece's family have been obliviated any number of times."

...That was the stupidest fucking thing she'd ever heard. "No, that does not make me feel better. What the fuck, Britain?"

"Yeah, I know." That thoughtful frown still on her face, Doriane's head tilted, hesitating for a second or two. "You said your niece's name is Maïa. You don't mean Hermione Granger."

Tienne was faintly jealous Doriane had nailed the English pronunciation of Maïa's first name — she'd known the girl for literally her entire life, and she'd never gotten it quite right. (Thankfully, Daniel hadn't left France so far behind he hadn't raised his daughter bilingual, because that would just be embarrassing.) "Oh, yeah, in fact, that's our Maïa. You've met her?"

"Briefly, she's one of Harry's best friends. I don't envy you that conversation — Hermione can be a bit..." Doriane trailed off, clearly not certain how to end that sentence tactfully.

Tienne smirked. "Yeah, that's our Maïa. At least I have an excuse to bail out if I have to — I've got to find somewhere to spend the night, and there aren't any rooms available in Hogsmeade."

"Dorrie," the little girl (whose name Tienne had forgotten at some point) whined, drawing the word out long and plaintively, tugging on the hem of Doriane's jacket. "Can we go home now? I'm cold..."

Looking down at her, Doriane muttered, "I'm sorry, Princess, one more minute." At least, Tienne was pretty sure that's what they said, it wasn't French — one of the magical Aquitanian dialects, presumably, but Tienne's Occitan still wasn't very good. (All the classes at Beauxbatons were in French, or at least the ones she'd taken, she'd never really needed to learn.) Turning back to Tienne, she offered, "I can ask our host to put you up too, if you like."

"Well, I wouldn't want to impose..." More like, she wouldn't want to spend a night or two in the home of a complete stranger. Especially since Doriane was probably talking about someone from one of the old noble families, if they had the space to host the Delacours and still have a room leftover for Tienne.

"I'm sure he wouldn't mind. We're staying with the Blacks, your niece's girlfriend's family — and they've claimed the Grangers as vassals, which means, by the traditional British sense of kinship the Blacks still keep to, you also count as family."

"Oh." She had been aware Maïa was dating Lyra Black, one of only two remaining members of the Noble and Most Ancient House of. (Even as young as she'd been expelled from her family and the magical world at large, Mum had still heard of the Blacks, it'd come up during the scandal over Sirius's escape and then exoneration.) Of course she'd known that, the thing that had finally clued Tienne in to Maïa being magical had been a profile of the Champions in the paper, Maïa had only been mentioned at all because of her relationship with Lyra.

Though, the article had spent rather more time on Maïa than might have been expected. They'd mentioned that Emma was apparently speaking for the Blacks in their ridiculous unelected parliament, with some speculation that her controversial entry represented a nascent néocommunaliste faction in the body, and also that the enormous scandal that had gotten Dumbledore removed from his position in the CIS and in the local British government had been partially sparked by an open letter written by Maïa herself. Tienne had followed the scandal around Dumbledore, of course, in which his legilimising students at Hogwarts had played a minor part, though French and Aquitanian newspapers hadn't published any of the children's names. They had these weird ideas about child protection, see, they preferred not to put minors' names in print if they could help it, especially connected to something so controversial — British newspapers, apparently, hadn't the same compunction.

The Grangers' part in Lyra's profile had raised quite a few things to talk about. For one, Maïa was apparently dating girls now? Not that Tienne had a problem with that or anything, she was just saying, she hadn't seen that coming at all. Mum did sort of have a problem with it, but Tienne suspected that had more to do with Lyra's family than her being a girl. Mum did not like the old aristocratic families in the magical world, even the fact of their existence — she hadn't found out until Tienne started taking history classes at Beauxbatons, fifty years later, that her birth family had been practically exterminated in the communaliste revolution in France, and she'd honestly seemed more satisfied by the idea than anything (they had exiled her and stuck her in a non-magical orphanage when she'd been a tiny kid, but still, what the fuck, Mum) — so she hadn't reacted particularly well to the news that her son and granddaughter had apparently submitted themselves to one of the oldest, wealthiest families in Britain.

But then Mum had read up a little more on what Emma was doing in their parliament, a few statements that Sirius had made, and some of the shenanigans pulled off by Lyra herself that had made it into the papers (like that World Cup fiasco, for example), and grudgingly admitted that maybe these ones were okay. She still wasn't happy about it, but it could be worse.

Tienne was less than certain about that...but at the same time, she did have to admit that Maïa actually took after Mum quite a bit, when it came to her views on society and how it should function. (Though, by what she could tell, Mum was far more willing to accept violent revolution as justifiable, but still.) And Emma did kind of remind Tienne of her mother sort of a lot sometimes — she was told her other siblings had teased Daniel for that relentlessly around the time of the wedding. (Tienne herself literally hadn't been born yet at the time, but she had no doubt she would have gotten in on it too.) Daniel was a big damn softie, but if Emma (and Maïa) had thought this whole vassalage thing with the Blacks was a good idea, it was probably fine.

But, she realised, she was being handed an opportunity to meet her brother's family's lord for herself, in a relatively low-pressure, conflict-free setting, where she could make her own judgements about him. At the very least, she'd be able to bring her impression back to Mum, so they'd have more to go on wondering if this was really something they needed to worry about.

So she told Doriane that would be great, please do ask him if she could stay. They quickly arranged to meet back at the Three Broomsticks later with his answer, and went on their respective ways.

The carriage ride up to the castle was very smooth, and surprisingly brief — it moved at a very good clip, but also without the occasional jerks and starts she'd normally expect from such a thing. But then, she'd only expect that if it were actually being pulled by a living animal, which this wasn't...or maybe it was? Sitting closer to it now, she definitely felt something there. (A consequences of the sensing exercises they were taught in the healing programme, she could sort of feel living things now, which was rather neat while also slightly creepy sometimes.) But she couldn't at all guess what it was. It wasn't sapient, certainly, and she supposed there might be magical animals that could pull a carriage this consistently...but how many of those were invisible?

Weird, but the magical world was weird sometimes, Tienne decided to not overthink it.

Before too long, the carriage jerked to a sudden halt, and Tienne plopped back down to the dirt. Hogwarts towered up above her, a staggering mass of stone and metal, halls set at weird angles and towers placed seemingly at random...and much larger than she'd expected it to be. The various magical nations could be very private sometimes, but basic information about all the major magical schools was made available to foreigners — with how small the student population was these days, Tienne couldn't possibly imagine they needed all of this space. Or even most of it, really. That just seemed...impractical.

And also made it almost bloody impossible she'd be able to find Maïa on her own. It was a weekday, but the first task of the Tournament was tomorrow, she somehow doubted classes were proceeding as scheduled. (Teenagers could be quite unruly at the best of times, expecting them to behave themselves today was probably unrealistic.) She'd expected it would be relatively easy to track her down, given how small the student population was there could only be so many places she would be expected to be, but with how bloody huge the castle was... Even if she found someone who knew who she was — and, given how small the student population was, she was pretty much guaranteed to — chances were whoever she found would have no bloody clue where Maïa was.

Well. This was why tracking spells existed, wasn't it?

Tienne stepped through the huge double doors, a tingle of magic on the air as she crossed through some kind of environmental ward — it was much warmer inside, if slightly chillier than she might prefer. The room she stepped into was bloody huge, a wide hall with an arched ceiling stretching high above her head, glimmering with polished granite and gold, the few people walking around tiny and dull by comparison. Shaking her head to herself, she stepped to the side a little, pulled out her wand, and cast a basic locator charm.

Nothing happened. She blinked to herself, then shrugged — the wards probably interfered with that sort of charm, basic security feature. (Especially in a school for the nobility, she supposed that rivals might try to kidnap children now and again to use as leverage had probably been a very real concern in the past.) So she tried a few more advanced charms, each fizzling out, even divination-based tracking spells weren't working. Which, holy shit, paranoid much?

Hmm... She could probably cast a messenger charm, and follow that to Maïa...or she could just cheat. The wards might interfere with basic charms and divinations, but she seriously doubted they could stop blood tracking. Maïa should be the only person in the building she was closely related to, it shouldn't be difficult to identify her.

Taking a few more steps away from the main corridor of foot traffic — not that anyone had gone in or out of the main door since she'd arrived, still — Tienne cast a few basic attention-diverting palings, then an illusion, twisting light into an ephemeral mirror floating in front of her. Tienne sliced into her wrist, wincing only slightly (she couldn't cast a numbing charm first, they tended to interfere with these sort of magics), carefully painted a few glyphs on her forehead, her cheeks — like searching for like, representing that familiarity in a form she could see, sketch a path she could follow.

Tienne closed her eyes, threw magic into the glyphs cast in her own blood, the spell snapping into action. For a second she just felt faintly dizzy, but soon, a flush passing over her skin and her heart thumping in her ears, points of warmth and light started to rise out of the darkness, subtly throbbing with their own internal rhythm, all out of sync of each other and her own. Somewhat to her surprise, there were actually a few dozen of them — though she probably shouldn't be surprised, her mother had been born into one of the old families, presumably she had distant relatives in the British magical nobility. And they were distant, mostly, one signal was far clearer than the others, the light brighter and its draw more insistent, enough it almost completely overwhelmed a few rather weaker signals nearby. Focusing on this one, on her desire to find it, Tienne sketched one last glyph on the back of her hand — the others abruptly vanished, a tether fading into existence connecting Tienne and Maïa, transient but present enough to follow.

She opened her eyes again, healed her wrist and cleaned the blood off her face, dismissed her illusion...and frowned. Where was the trail? The spell was working — she blindly grasped at her surroundings with her mind, and yes, she could definitely feel it there, the wards hadn't foiled it — there should be a trail of faint red-purple light only she could see leading right to Maïa, wherever she was. Tienne knew what it looked like, she'd used this same spell to track down Aimée once, when she'd managed to get herself separated from the family in Barcelona two summers ago — unlike many other tracking spells, it was subtle enough she could use it in the middle of the city with no one the wiser. (It was subtle to maintain, she meant, she'd slipped out of sight to cast it, obviously.) She'd expected there to be a trail leading her across the room, but she didn't see—

Oh, because it was behind her, leading through the main doors out onto the grounds. Because of course Maïa couldn't be inside, where it was warm. Obviously. Grumbling to herself, Tienne cast a warming charm before stepping back outside again.

Her tracking charm led her to the left, toward a row of greenhouses, and then around them and back toward the forest. No, not toward the forest, into the forest, the ephemeral little wisps of light slipping between a couple trees and twisting into shadows. Tienne frowned, hesitated for a moment halfway across the clearing. For a moment, she wondered if Maïa wasn't in the valley at all, had left to go somewhere else, but that couldn't be — this spell should only have a range of a few miles. Theoretically, if Maïa had been in range and then left after she'd cast it, it would still be showing Tienne the way to her, but it worked by divination (mediated through their shared blood, insulating it from the effects of the castle's anti-scrying wards), revealing the most efficient path to reach her destination. Theoretically, if Maïa had left for somewhere any significant distance away, it should be leading her to the nearest floo grate or something. (Which would be a dead-end, since the spell couldn't tell her where she should take the floo to.) So Maïa couldn't be too far away, she must be in the forest somewhere.

Which was bloody weird. Tienne had met less outdoorsy people than Maïa, but not very many — they'd taken a vacation to Greece, once, would have been five years or so ago now, and literally every time Tienne and the others had gone out to the beach Maïa had stayed in the room with a book by herself. (And she'd been tiny then, Maïa was such a nerd.) That Maïa was out in the forest was the only reasonable explanation, but that was such an out-of-character thing for her to be doing, there must be some reason she was out here. She wasn't exactly the type to go take walks out in the trees for fun.

Because divination was neat sometimes, her little road of light did lead her on the most efficient path, avoiding the thickest brush, taking detours around bunches of trees or bits of mossy stone for no obvious reason, but Tienne assumed there must be one. Of course, that it was the most efficient path didn't stop Tienne from occasionally tripping on a root, or getting her coat caught on a branch now and then. She was certain she was making quite a bit of noise, Maïa would probably hear her coming long before she spotted her.

Or, somebody else would find her first. Among the tapestry of life around her, warm but relatively featureless, there was something hotter, brighter, more active — something intelligent, following her. Tienne hadn't noticed it at first, too focused on the path leading toward Maïa and not falling on her face like a clumsy idiot, but as it got closer she finally picked it out, suddenly hitched to a stop. She didn't know what might be in this forest — she'd heard there were centaurs, and apparently there were bloody acromantulae in here somewhere (presumably nowhere near the school, or someone would have noticed before) — but chances were it wasn't anything too threatening. Despite what a lot of people claimed, wild magical beings, elves or dryads or whatever, tended to be relatively harmless.

Looking around, it took Tienne a moment to spot it — far enough away the mostly leafless brush almost concealed it, but not quite. A figure maybe about waist-high, hints of fur white and gold. A wolf? Probably an animagus. Speaking in her most careful English, she said, "Hello, over there. I'm looking for Maïa Granger. Is she out here?"

The wolf had frozen when Tienne had halted, presumably in an effort to be less noticeable, but it twitched as she spoke directly to it, tensing somewhat. After a short moment of hesitation, it moved, bounding around the brush separating them, trotting along the path Tienne had taken to approach closer — yep, that was definitely a wolf. She'd never seen one in person before, she hadn't realised how large the things were. (She stopped herself from reaching for her wand, it wasn't snarling at her or doing anything particularly threatening, she was fine. Probably.) Once the wolf had come within a few metres, a more appropriate conversational distance, there was a flare of magic, its form shifting, and—

Her eyes going wide, Tienne choked out an awkward guh of surprise. The woman standing before her was a little taller than Tienne, probably right around her age (or perhaps a little younger), blonde hair wild and wind-swept, she was lean and very fit, subtle lines from muscle visible here and there, mud streaked in bands up to her knees. She was also completely naked.

...She must be wilderfolk, then. Animagi generally took everything on them with them when they changed — though they didn't actually need to, it usually took an extra effort of concentration to leave something behind — but the same wasn't true of wilderfolk, they always left everything behind. Sort of like how veela and lilin would, if whatever it was wasn't specifically enchanted to come with them, except there supposedly wasn't an equivalent enchantment for wilderfolk — probably because few wilderfolk bothered with clothing at all ever, so nobody had put in the effort to figure one out. So, unless this woman was an animagus who'd decided to leave human society behind entirely, she must be wilderfolk.

Which, she wasn't saying that was a bad thing, she didn't care. Tienne had just literally never met one before. (At least, not as far as she knew.) At least she was managing to not stare like a jackass, she guessed...after the first couple seconds, anyway — she couldn't help it, okay, a naked person had just appeared out of nowhere...

"Why do you look for Maïa?" The wilderfolk girl's speech sounded slightly stilted, her English nearly as bad as Tienne's, but it was understandable enough.

"Eh, I'm her aunt. I'm here for the Tournament, tomorrow, I was coming to say hello."

The girl tilted her head, her hair shifting over her shoulders with the motion, eyes narrowing a little in obvious suspicion. But, after a couple seconds of unnervingly-intense staring, she said, "Come, follow." And then she was a wolf again, slipping past Tienne and setting off in the direction of her spell-lit path — the red-purple glow shifted as the wolf went, as though pulled over and pinned to the ground by her paws, implying following the wilderfolk was now the most efficient way to get to Maïa.

...Okay, then. Tienne washed the blood off her hand with a quick charm, killing her tracking spell, the illusion instantly vanished. And she followed.

After only a few more difficult minutes — she got the feeling the wolf-girl was irritated with how slow and clumsy she was, kept pausing ahead to wait for her to catch up, silently watching her — Tienne finally stepped into a clearing, a patch where the stone of the mountains came up too close to the surface for trees to take root. Despite having heard them before she got close enough to see them, Tienne was rather surprised just how many people there were here. Most of them were scattered around practising defence spells — mostly various stunning charms, a few shields — but someone had conjured a couple chairs and a desk, a few people leaning over some papers there, clearly discussing some project.

Maïa, Tienne noticed, was in this latter group. Wearing a thick jumper against the cold, her impossible hair loosely held back with a scrunchie, she looked pretty much the same as always — save for the fact that she was in the middle of an argument with three older kids in obviously magical dress, the two boys (identical twins, obviously) only with cloaks but the girl with full-on boots and tunic and cloak and everything.

It was slightly surreal, honestly. Tienne had known Maïa was magical, yes, but it was still just...weird, seeing her on the grounds of a magical school, surrounded by people in magical-made clothes, spells shooting back and forth not far away. She froze at the edge of the clearing for a moment before finally shaking the odd moment off.

The wolf-girl had run off toward the kids practising spells, Tienne left her to it, headed straight for Maïa. She was a couple metres away when one of the boys noticed her. "Heads up, girls," "we've got company." Oh hell, bonded twins, she never got used to that...

Maïa didn't look up, scribbling something on one of the pages, her brow furrowed in concentration, but the other girl did. She was definitely a Proficiency student, a couple years older than Maïa, black-haired with narrow, dramatic features — currently turned on Tienne with an impressively sharp glare. "You're not supposed to be here. Who are you?"

"Well, that's rude — I just wanted to see my favourite niece, is that a crime now?"

Maïa froze, writing hitched in the middle of a glyph (Northern runes, Tienne couldn't read it), so still she hardly seemed to be breathing.

"Do mine ears deceive me, Gred, or is that a French accent?"

"No, Forge, I think you're right."

"I would say we got us a Beauxbatons spy on her hands, but..."

"...you'd think a spy would come up with a better lie than that."

"Ah, but maybe that's the trick! Clearly she couldn't possibly be a spy because she's so bad at spying! It's brilliant!"

"Yes, yes, I think you have something there, Gred." Wait, Tienne had thought this one was Gred...not that 'Gred' was even a real name... "Cleary we've underestimated our competitors."

"We must step up our game!"

"Yeah, nobody out—"

"Shut up." That was Maïa, said hard and flat. The twins cut off immediately, all three of the older kids blinking down at Maïa — apparently they thought that cold bluntness was just as out of character as Tienne did. Maïa stared down at their work for another couple seconds before finally glancing up. "Tienne?"

She tried to smile, but it felt like it came out a bit more shaky and uncertain than she wanted. "Hey, Maïa."

"What are you—" Maïa cut herself off, rubbing at her face with both hands. "No, you know what, I don't have time for this right now. Mallory, how does this look?" she asked, turning one of the papers around toward the other girl.

"Er..." The older girl, Mallory, glanced between the two of them, her discomfort almost tangible. "I thought you were muggleborn."

Maïa glared at her. "So did I."

"You are, technically," Tienne said, with an awkward shrug. "We both are. See, my mother's a squib, and—"

"What?! How could— No, I have too much to do, I'm not getting distracted by this right now. Mallory?"

With a somewhat concerned frown — probably at the desperate pleading on Maïa's voice saying her name, that was a bit...much — the girl reluctantly turned down to the page. "Ah... This looks good, yeah. Are you certain you can handle the strain? I haven't practised this sort of thing at all myself, and we don't really have time for me to learn. Even with the blood magic, you'll still have to..."

"I think so. I'll scale the outputs down testing it, just in case." Maïa poured over their papers again for a moment, eyes flicking around seemingly at random, lips twitching. "Right, come on," she said, abruptly pushing herself to her feet. "Let's try it out." She stomped off toward the middle of the clearing and the rest of the kids practising their spells, Mallory and the twins starting after her, shooting Tienne uncertain glances.

"I'll just wait here then, shall I."

Maïa hitched to a stop, one hand coming up to rub at her forehead. Not turning to face her, but still switching to French for her benefit, she said, "I'm sorry, Tienne, I just— I don't have the energy to deal with this right now. With the game coming up tomorrow, we have to get this right, I can't get distracted by Dad's side of the family apparently being magic, and nobody fucking telling me..."

Tienne blinked — she didn't think she'd ever heard Maïa swear before. In English, maybe, but not in French, at least. "Mum wanted to tell you all when I started showing magic, but, the Statute..."

"Dad's your brother, though."

"It's not immediate family that are exceptions to the Statute, it's people in the household. I wasn't even alive yet when Daniel moved to England, so."

Her head bowing a bit, her shoulders squaring, Maïa growled something that was probably a curse, Tienne didn't catch it.

"I am sorry, I just, but with— Well, we had no idea you were magical until we saw you with your girlfriend in the paper a couple days ago, and—"

"Oh, of course!" Maïa yelled, in English again. "Of course I was outed to my family in a bloody newspaper article! I should have known something like that would happen eventually, because the magical press is the fucking magical press..."

Tienne winced — that did sound kind of bad when she thought about it that way, didn't it? "You know none of us care if you're gay or whatever." She nearly said something about how making a fuss about that would be a bit hypocritical of her, but the only women she'd ever been legitimately attracted to had been lilin (and veela, and this one river nymph), and she was pretty sure that didn't count...or maybe Trixie did, actually, river nymphs didn't have anything like the empathic sex magic thing lilin and veela did, but she still wasn't a human woman, so...

Maïa let out a long, tense sigh, and then, finally, turned around to actually look at Tienne. She was obviously very annoyed, her face pulled into a strained glare, but. "I know, Tienne. I'm not angry with... Well, no, I am angry with you, and Grandmother, obviously, but I'll get over it. But right now, I have work to do. I'll talk to you later, okay?"

"Sure. I'll be here," she said, flopping into one of the now-empty chairs.

"Right." Shooting her a last uncomfortable look — probably at the realisation that Tienne would be watching them at it, stage fright like — Maïa turned back around and continued on toward the rest of their group, shaking her head to herself.

After a bit of chatter and disorganised scrambling, the whole group had reformed, packed together with Maïa and Mallory at the middle. Someone cast a noise charm, which was apparently their signal to start, because the people around the edges started casting a panoply of charms — palings mostly, also trap hexes seemingly at random across the ground some metres away, but one of the twins (the other was standing at a fair distance, just watching) and Mallory were doing a bit of transfiguration, narrow fingers of dirt rising out of the ground, creating a dense forest of the things starting about twelve metres out from the centre, the dirt then transfigured into bronze, then flaring, the surface going wavy and spiky, frost limming along the surface...

While all this happened, Maïa stood still in the centre, her eyes closed, unmoving. After some seconds, she raised a hand, a single finger, and...started drawing glyphs in the air, lines faintly glowing green and blue left floating in her finger's wake.

Tienne stared, dumbfounded. That was... Was that free graphic spell-shaping? But... But Maïa was barely fifteen! Where the hell had she even learned that?

With some effort, Tienne managed to stop herself from jumping up and stunning her. The graphic arts could be very dangerous when not performed on a static medium — like, accidentally incinerate several city blocks dangerous. But Maïa certainly knew that. She just had to trust that, if Maïa was even attempting it, she must know what she was doing.

Besides, it was probably already too late to do anything about it.

Maïa drew out a small handful of glyphs — Tienne couldn't read it from here, too many people and pillars of transfigured bronze in the way — the spell taking with a sharp pulse of magic. Her chair shivered under her, the ground was shaking — not a lot, it was barely noticeable, just a little vibration that quickly faded away. Whatever Maïa had done must involve fucking about with geomancy somehow. (As though fucking about with free graphic spell-shaping hadn't been bad enough to begin with, God...) In a ring around the group of kids, the ground between them and the little transfigured pillars started shifting around, moving slowly enough Tienne couldn't tell what was happening quite yet.

In the middle of the circle, one hand pressed against the floating glyphs of her first spell, Maïa drew another couple glyphs, the motion a little more shaky this time, then drew a line between these and her first spell. There was another little shiver running through the ground, though less noticeable this time, and cutting off much quicker. Whatever she'd done, there was no obvious external effect, but it'd clearly taken more out of Maïa — her head was a bit lower, partially bent over. For a moment she just breathed, rather heavily, her hands on her knees. Mallory — who'd conjured a knife at some point, cutting at her own palm — stepped closer, looked slightly concerned, but Maïa waved her off, straightened again.

Maïa cast a few more series of glyphs, these blinking out as soon as she was done drawing them — more palings, she spoke to the others after each one, presumably telling them they didn't need to hold up the charm versions anymore. While she did that with one hand, Mallory cut at the palm of her other hand, presumably carving a few glyphs into her skin. She'd heard Mallory saying something about blood magic, but what the hell were they doing?

This was some pretty serious magic they were throwing around, it was a bit overwhelming, though Tienne really shouldn't be surprised. Maïa always had been advanced for her age, when it came to academic things — she should have expected the most bookish of her nieces would be just as proficient with magic as she was with everything else.

(Though, seriously, where had Maïa learned this stuff? With how tightly Britain regulated the Dark Arts, Tienne wouldn't have thought Maïa would have even heard of this sort of graphic magic...)

Maïa's first spell, the one messing with the ground, was finally starting to take shape now: a ring of earth was rising around them, a depression sinking down just beyond it. Making themselves a little hill fort, apparently. As the outline of the depression started to become clear, the others started casting spells there too — a layer of ice appeared, then a layer of a liquid of some kind, then various conjured detritus (marbles particularly, bouncing all over the place), and then more trap hexes...

Once Mallory's carving was done, they conferred very briefly with the others, and then...held hands, bloody palm to bloody palm. Some kind of quick-and-dirty power-sharing thing, maybe? Then Maïa was drawing glyphs again, quickly and methodically. And then more glyphs, and then more, and then more...

Holy shit, what the fuck was she doing...

"Maïa is getting pretty good at this." At some point, a girl had dropped into one of the other chairs around the little table, Tienne hadn't noticed. She was tiny, with dramatic, not-quite-too-pretty features, making her age pretty much impossible to guess (her first guess was maybe twelve, but she had the feeling that was too young), her hair very black, thick and curly, wearing rather expensive-looking dueling clothes in black and red — taken all together, Tienne was all but certain this girl was from a wealthy, old pureblood family. "Not as good as me, of course, but she's catching up pretty damn fast. Maïa's dead clever like that, you know."

"Yeah, I know." According to Daniel, Maïa had started reading when she'd still been three — when she thought about it, it wasn't really a surprise that she might take to the graphic arts like a fish to water. Didn't mean it wasn't stupid reckless, but...

"So. You told Sylvie you're Maïa's aunt."

Tienne turned back to the girl — not that there was anything to watch anymore, the wall of rising earth had gotten high enough she couldn't see Maïa at all anymore. "Sylvie?"

"The wolf."

"Oh. Ah, yes, I am. Daniel, her father, he's my eldest brother."

The girl gave her an odd, crooked look. "Dan's got to be like thirty years older than you." She'd abruptly switched to French, probably realising Tienne's English wasn't particularly great.

"Twenty-four, actually."

"That's quite an age difference between siblings, for muggles."

"Yeah, well, my family's weird." That was kind of an understatement, really. "Not really your business, is it?"

The girl smirked. "I guess not. Lyra Black."

Oh. Maïa's girlfriend. Tienne probably should have been able to guess that. "Sébastienne Moreau."

One of Lyra's eyebrow's ticked up. "Tienne? Maïa's mentioned you. I assume those wards over her muggle grandmother's house are your work."

"When have you been to my mother's house?"

"Back in July — I came by quick to drop off the House Law for Emma, went out with Maïa as long as I was in town."

...That must have been when the rest of them had been visiting Tienne's aunts and cousins, she couldn't think of any other time Emma and Maïa would have been alone long enough for Lyra to not be noticed. Damn good timing, that. "Yes, I set the wards there. Nothing much, my options were limited by—" Tienne cut off as a sharp, tingling crackle of magic shot through the air around her.

It was coming from the direction of their little hill fort — Maïa must finally be done with this big spell of hers. There weren't any visible effects, not at first, just the static of too much magic on the air. Though, gradually, something started fading into existence. It was a dome, formed of blue-yellow light, so faint it was almost entirely invisible, dozens and dozens of geometric faces arranged to create a single, smooth surface. It gradually darkened as Tienne watched, starting to look almost solid. The twin outside the dome shot a stunning charm at the dome, the spell splashing apart against the surface; someone on the inside fired back, he barely danced out of the way of a bludgeoning hex, loudly cursing.

That... How did...

"Are those mobile wards? Like Grindelwald's?"

"Yep!" Lyra chirped, grinning with childlike enthusiasm. "Maïa and Mallory's design isn't nearly as complex as the ones distributed to the communalistes militias, but it doesn't have to be — I doubt anyone Beauxbatons or Durmstrang is going to field can pull off a proper Hostile Takeover, they'll have to approach on foot. They even adapted the basic framework from an historical communaliste design. Which, someone on the judge's panel is definitely going to recognise that, it'll be hilarious."

...Okay, apparently the people speculating about the Blacks maybe being néocommunalistes now hadn't just been talking out of their asses. Weren't they one of the most important British noble families?

Huh. Looked like maybe things here in Britain were about to get...interesting.

(Of course, Mother was herself a néocommunaliste sympathiser, so this wasn't a bad thing exactly, just...interesting.)

"So, how did this happen, anyway? The odds of two people so closely related both being muggleborn is astronomical, it can't be random. Was your father a squib?"

Oh, right. Talking to a little British noble girl...who happened to be a bioalchemic clone of Bellatrix Black, and was also dating her niece. Pay attention, Tienne. "Ah, my mother, actually."

"Right," Lyra said, nodding, "wasn't her name some fancy Greek-sounding thing? I'd thought that was weird at the time, but hey, maybe some muggles use some really old-fashioned names, I don't actually know."

"It's Athénaïs."

The girl snorted. "Yep, that's definitely a pureblood name. Would I know her family?"

"Oh, I can guarantee you you do." Tienne glanced in the direction of the ridiculously well-defended hill fort, but Maïa was obviously still busy. Eh, why not. It wasn't like she had any damn clue what else they could talk about. "My mum was born into House d'Angeus."

For a long moment, Lyra just stared at her. "Wait, are you serious? The House d'Angeus?"

Tienne couldn't help a smirk. "Is there more than one?"

"Well, not since, like, the Fifteenth Century or something, but... You know, your mother is probably the only one left, House d'Angeus was completely wiped out by the communalistes."

"Yes, I know. Though, I didn't know until we learned about the Revolution in history class, Mum was kicked out early enough she had no idea."

"That must have been fun to read about."

"Mostly, she said good riddance to bad rubbish — she was slightly bitter about being sent off to an orphanage, you can imagine."

Lyra giggled. "Yeah, I guess. Who are you grandparents? I mean, what are their names, I might have heard of them. My mother — or grandmother, whatever, you know what I mean — she was a Rosier, her grandmother was a d'Angeus, I had to learn some of their names when I was little."

Oh, apparently the British nobility did that memorise your whole damn family tree back seven generations thing too, Mum had mentioned having to start doing that when she'd been literally three years old. Smirking again, a dark note of amusement on her voice, Tienne drawled, "Nicodème and Mélisande."

Lyra's eyes widened, her mouth dropping open a little. "You're joking."

"Nope."

"No, really, you've got to be fucking with me, because I thought you just said Maïa's great-grandfather is Nicodème d'Angeus."

"I'm not fucking with you, Nicodème d'Angeus really was my grandfather. I took a lineage test to prove it and everything." When she'd started telling people what her mother had told her about her parents, nobody had believed her at first — there hadn't been any record of Mum's birth at all, as had sometimes happened with squibs born to old noble families. It wasn't entirely unusual for a muggleborn to claim they were related to one famous mage or another, though Nicodème d'Angeus would be a very strange choice.

Because, Tienne's grandfather was actually somewhat famous — or infamous, depending on who you asked. Nicodème had essentially been in charge of all of House d'Angeus — though, these things were actually very complicated, it wasn't quite so simple as him being able to just order them all around — and by the time of the Revolution had been influential in the Parliament of Paris for decades. As the Revolution started becoming a serious threat, Nicodème had been made Lieutenant-General of the la Maréchaussée, the highest-ranking law enforcement (and military) figure in all of magical France.

After the communalistes successfully took over the country, abolishing the Parliaments and the Chancellery, Nicodème refused to surrender, continued prosecuting a vicious campaign against the provisional government and their supporters. The loyalistes coalesced around him, the only serious organised resistance left by then. His capture, trial, and execution in 1943 was generally considered to be the final nail in the coffin of pre-Revolutionary France.

(When French mages referred to the Revolution, they didn't mean the French Revolution, it was very confusing sometimes. Though, it did make sense, when she thought about it — in a sense, L'Ancien Régime had continued to exist on the magical side until the early 1940s, the Revolution back in the 18th Century had had very little effect on them.)

The worst violence of the Revolution actually came after the communalistes took control of the country — various loyalistes, Nicodème's group the largest and most "legitimate" by far, continued to strike at the communalistes, and sometimes people only tangentially related to them. If loyalistes couldn't get their hands on any actual communalistes, they settled for killing their families, sympathisers, their families...or just people they thought might be sympathisers, it was nuts. The various factions in the Revolutionary government, of which the communalistes were the largest but not the only, then retaliated with equally horrible tactics. There had already been tribunals ongoing against members of the old Parliaments and la Maréchaussée, owners of lands and manors and workshops and tenements, but in the wake of violence at the hands of loyalistes, the tribunals started issuing death sentences — not only against people who had provably done real harm, and might arguably deserve to be punished, but sometimes against people whose only real crime had been being of noble birth, or supporting the old aristocracy then or loyalistes now.

And it just deteriorated from there. The communalistes would execute someone, and the loyalistes would hit someone's home, and then sympathisers on the ground (dirt-poor purebloods, mostly) would raid the estate of some noble family or another and cart them off to face a tribunal, looting the place and often burning it to the bedrock — and, increasingly, killing all the residents who weren't a name of any importance the tribunals would care about, including the children. And then the loyalistes would do something insane, like show up in a market in the middle of the day and indiscriminately murder people. And then the sympathisers would retaliate, and then the loyalistes would retaliate back, and so on and so on and so on.

To this day, there were some people who claimed the communalistes were responsible for the worst of the violence — or, usually actually the faceless masses of the underclasses of French society, most of whom hadn't been directly associated with the communalistes — and other people who insisted the loyalistes had instigated the cycle, and had often been the ones to escalate first. Basically, people who had sympathies for opposite sides of the civil war were still arguing about who started it, fifty years later.

But, generally speaking, most people agreed Nicodème d'Angeus had been a complete monster. Which was especially remarkable, because unlike a number of others in his social class he hadn't stuck out as being particularly objectionable before the Revolution — though, proceedings of the Parliament of Paris had made it clear he'd had a shocking degree of disdain for ordinary people, that had been the norm among the nobility at the time. But even in the early days of the Revolution, long before the communalistes had taken power, he'd advocated for executing anyone involved, and even those too closely associated with them — he'd referred to communalisme as a disease that would destroy civilisation if allowed to spread, to preserve their nation and their way of life everybody contaminated with it must be purged — and after...

Nicodème had kept a diary during his war against the Revolutionary government, detailing the people he dealt with and his planning of and participation in various actions and just his personal thoughts. Passages had been included in this or that book Tienne had read over the years, and it was horrifying. Not just the things he'd done, but how he'd decided they should be done... Nicodème wrote about the simple, uneducated rabble, how they were a base and violent people, that the reason people like him and his peers existed was because they needed to be controlled, lest civilisation itself fall into ignorance and barbarity. The common man was a beast, that could and should be brought to heel as one — he considered slaughtering random people to be just as good as killing actual communalistes, because the goal was to frighten the rabble into returning to their proper place, to once again accept the enlightened, necessary rule of they wise few.

After rioters killed his own family, well, there came a point where Tienne wasn't convinced Nicodème really even cared about the politics of it anymore. Toward the end, he was only interested in making those who had wronged him suffer — those who had wronged him here being the French people at large. Nicodème had hardly been the only monster to crop up over the course of the war, but he was certainly the single most prominent, and arguably one of those most extreme in his rhetoric. It was just disturbing to read, honestly.

It had been even more disturbing knowing that this man, this psychotic war criminal she was reading about, was her grandfather. In any history class that touched on the Revolution, Tienne often ended up feeling very uncomfortable.

So, definitely not the kind of person a muggleborn should want to claim as an ancestor, was the point.

Lyra had gone silent, clearly thinking this revelation over, watching her team continue building up the defences of their hill fort. The ring wall had been transfigured, the top of the ridge pushed out so the incline actually curved inward, like a wave about to break. It was hard to tell from here, but it looked like most of the wall, or at least the outside surface of it, had been transfigured into iron, bits at the top stretched out into crenellations, barriers the defenders now standing on the ridge could hide behind while still tossing spells out through the gaps. Which kind of seemed like overkill, since Maïa's mobile wards prevented people from attacking at range anyway.

The whole thing taken together — the spires of bronze layered with trap hexes, the moat, the ring wall — was a very impressive defensive fortification, especially since they'd put the whole thing together in ten minutes or so using only what they had on them and the dirt around them...and that they were schoolchildren. Honestly, Tienne wondered if even gendarmes could get through that. If the wards held to assault, which they very well might, they'd have to approach on foot, which honestly looked pretty much impossible.

At least, it'd be pretty much impossible to take them alive — they could always just blow the whole thing up, of course. Modern French magical security forces were known to bring in muggle explosives to take out wards and such if they felt the situation called for it. Just this summer, an assault against a trafficking ring had opened with a coordinated barrage of RPGs, it was a whole thing.

Finally, the girl said, "I would say that's a hell of a coincidence, but I'd bet it's not. The gods do have a sense of humour — whatever they're going for here, someone is amusing themselves."

...Okay, then?

"So," Lyra said, turning to smirk at her, "do you want to tell Maïa about her great-grandfather, or should I?"

Tienne felt her lips twitch. "I think the so your great-grandfather was a war criminal conversation is the sort of thing you save until after you've gotten through the awkward stuff."

The girl seemed less than entirely pleased about that, but she shrugged, presumably deciding to leave it up to Tienne. (Old purebloods had a whole thing about internal family business, she'd probably keep her nose out of it.) "You know, I never really understood the idea of a war crime. The whole point of war is to kill the other side, and I kind of thought normal people considered killing people to be sort of inherently criminal in the first place? Like, I just don't get how people decide when killing someone is okay and when it's not, it can be very confusing. And, I've been paying more attention to muggle stuff recently — Maïa talks about things sometimes, you know, I have to know enough about it to keep up at least — and it...kind of seems like it's applied really inconsistently? I don't get it."

"Oh, there are muggles who've pointed out the same thing, it's a mess." Though, granted, the thing most often focused on is the hypocrisy often shown in prosecutions for war crimes — people did generally agree on the targeting of noncombatants being unacceptable, Western nations just rarely got in trouble for it. (She meant, obviously, they were the ones in control of the international courts, they weren't going to try too hard to prosecute their own people.) But she had the feeling she wouldn't get very far trying to explain that, the distinction between applying the law inconsistently and applying it hypocritically was only aesthetic anyway.

Of course, bloody war crimes tribunals weren't really what she wanted to talk to Lyra Black about. How the hell had that happened?

Forcing a cheery smirk on her face, Tienne said, "So! I hear you're shagging my niece. Having fun with that, are you?"

Unfortunately, Lyra didn't show a hint of embarrassment, just smiling somewhat blankly back at her. "We're not shagging, in point of fact. Maïa's all twitchy and shy about it, it's kind of adorable, honestly. I can't say I really get why, but, well, normal people." She shrugged.

...Tienne hoped Lyra realised calling Maïa a normal person was sort of hilarious. "And here I had all this teasing planned out. Damn."

"Sorry to disappoint. I can start trying to get in her pants for you if you like."

"You probably shouldn't tell Maïa that you're seducing her so I can tease her about it," she said, barely choking back completely inappropriate giggles.

"Well, obviously I wouldn't tell her until afterward. That would just be gauche."

"Oh, I can tell you're going to be fun already. Nice to meet you, Lyra."

The girl gave her a toothy grin.

[néocommunaliste] — As a reminder, Grindelwald's movement called themselves Gemeenschoppisten (or the cognate Gemeinschaftisten in standard German), literally translated "communitarians" or "collectivists". The term was translated into French as communalistes. The ideology has seen a resurgence in various European countries since the 60s, post-Grindelwald adherents referred to as neo-Gemeenschoppisten, or néocommunalistes in French.

Yeesh, sorry about that delay. Rather longer than we originally intended.

We both got distracted with other projects for a little bit there — I legit wrote like 100k words for my Dragon Age fic in the span of two weeks, what the fuck — but we're starting to poke at this fic again. Next is the First Task, which involves two parts: the events before the start of the task, mostly involving the Order of Merlin induction, and the task itself. The first part will probably be a couple chapters, we'll start publishing once we finish the whole thing. The task will probably be a single monster chapter, and then a smaller aftermath chapter.

I can make no promises on when we'll have those since, again, both distracted by other things. They'll happen when they happen.

Oh, and, yeah, Hermione's grandmother is a squib from an old pureblood family. This was pulled from my headcanon, all stuff I already had set up. For people who read The Long Game, the wards over her grandmother's house and the names Tienne and Aimée should have been red flags. Because this fic is becoming a huge confused mash-up of both our headcanons, apparently?

—Lysandra