On a hill in Provins just outside of Paris sat a looming castle, the last of its kind, unseen by the non-magical residents of the medieval village and only made clear to the wizard approaching when he stepped past its wards, a feat he would not be able to do unbidden.
The wizard, tall and decked in black robes, moved swiftly through the night. Only when he made it to the front step and knocked on the massive door did he look down at the child in his arms.
Unlike other newborn infants, she didn't cry. Instead, she shook, pale as the moon and as fragile as the flower she would soon be named after.
When a young maid opened the door, the man rearranged the child in his arms, tucking her deeper into his robes to ease her shaking, and followed the maid into the sitting room where an old man and an even older husband and wife huddled in the corner, speaking quietly amongst themselves.
The wizard kept his face carefully impassive as he approached with the child.
"Have they agreed?" he asked one of the men bluntly. The man he asked wore half-moon glasses, which glinted in annoyance at the young man's question, but the young wizard did not care; he knew the older wizard had wanted to approach the matter tactfully, but his patience for tact had grown thin—he was running on three hours of sleep after the most traumatic day of his life and if he stayed up much longer, he feared he would snap. He felt as though the weight of the child in his arms was the only thing tethering him to his sanity, and only by a thread at that.
"Nicolas and Perenelle have some very valid concerns about taking on a life so young and vibrant at this late age," the bespeckled man replied. "Though I gently remind them that this wouldn't be their first."
Pained expressions broke out on the faces of the wizened couple.
"Ever since her passing, we've tried for another for so long, but we fear now we may not have enough energy to give this baby the happy life she deserves," the old husband agreed, his voice surprisingly strong for a wizard approaching on his 650th birthday. That had been what brought the ancient wizard to the bespeckled man's mind after all; with his birthday approaching, the bespeckled man remembered his old friend in this time of crisis and decided no one would be more fit to take care of the girl in her ailing state.
"Mr. Flamel," the young man gritted, barely keeping his patience. "With all due respect, the child may not live at all if you do not take her under your care. Who cares if you cannot ride brooms with her or chase her through the house? The baby is on the brink of death and she will be for quite some time. Who better to raise her than the man who has escaped his own mortality for over half a century?"
"Do not be fooled. No one ever truly escapes," the old wizard replied quietly. "Our time will come one day."
"But hers has not," the young man said forcefully, taking a step forward as he removed the baby from the warmth of his chest, ignoring her violent shakes, so that they could see her.
The baby opened her eyes to reveal a striking green.
Immediately the man's wife, Perenelle, broke out into a tiny sob and rushed forward with surprising speed for the oldest woman alive. She looked down at the child, stroking the baby's pale cheek, before looking up at her husband with an elated smile.
"Nicolas, it's her. The eyes."
"We will raise her as our own," Nicolas agreed suddenly, his attitude changing entirely. The young man surveyed him in surprise, but was not about to complain about the sudden change of heart. When Perenelle lifted the child out of his arms, the old woman smiled down at the young girl with such adoration that the young man assured himself the baby would be just fine.
As he and the bespeckled wizard began to leave, the young wizard turned back at the door, as if he had forgotten something crucial.
"One more thing." The now glowing couple looked up. "Name her after a flower, please, to honor her mother. It's a family tradition."
He rushed out without waiting for a response, knowing that if he heard the name, he would get too attached and the events of the night would become all too real. However, as the bespeckled man met his eyes with a soft smile, they heard Perenelle Flamel whisper softly:
"You will be named Marguerite. For the daisies that spring from the soil of death."
At that, the young man finally snapped, his grief breaking free from the dam he had carefully constructed as he worked on reviving the child from her dead mother's womb. Perhaps the bespeckled man saw it in his eyes, because he apparated them both out of there in an instant and held the crumpled youth as sobbed long into the night for all those who had died in the past night, and most of all, for the child who had just been borne.
"Marguerite!"
A tiny figure flew at me, knocking me down to the dewy forest floor. I cringed at the mud now caking my back, liking England less and less by the second. Father had always refused to take me here, so when Madame Maxime had offered to take me and a couple other girls staying at the school over the summer to the Quidditch World Cup, it would be my first time being in the country, and I must say I was not impressed. Not only was it muddy and the male population rendered stupid by our veela mascots, but the whole camp was now running around like chickens with their heads chopped off.
Leave it to England to mess up something as simple as security spells.
"Lucie, mon dieu, get off of her. We need her over 'ere," called the deep voice of Brigette. Lucie's large brown eyes looked down at me desperately, rounded and tearing, her curly blonde hair a wild mess. I frowned, hating to see the younger girl in such disarray.
"It's going to be okay, petit lapine," I comforted, lifting her off of me as I rose. I called her rabbit because she was jumpy and nervous most of the time, full of either anxious or excited energy, but always fidgeting all the same. Like a rabbit, she could work herself up so much that she often passed out. Ever since my parents died, I drew closer to little Lucie, since she reminded me of a version of my younger self. Before my father's medication fully kicked in.
The rest of the girls, eleven of us in all, stood around in a circle, tensely discussing what to do.
"Où est Madame Maxime? Nous l'avons perdue —" one of the younger girls, Camille, asked a passerby with red hair.
"Er, what?" the boy looked a bit dumbfounded as his two friends turned around with equally blank faces, and I rolled my eyes.
"Oh…'Ogwarts," Camille realized, turning back to us and blushing.
"Ces ont les Britanniques qui nous ont mis dans ce pétrin," I called out, announcing my presence. All the girls in the circle turned to me, their faces drawn. "What makes you think they can get us out of it?"
A tense, quiet laughter broke some of the tension of the moment as we heard more people scream from the campsite. Nothing like a good jab at foreigners, especially when they had failed so miserably to host us.
"Marguerite." Fluer, the oldest girl there, stepped forward. An overachiever and part veela, the older girl often clashed with me. It made sense since I would be the first to admit that I got extra attention and instant status at Beauxbatons not only for being a Flamel but for being Madame Maxime's ward. My dominant personality certainly didn't help the situation.
"Oú est Madame?" she asked urgently.
"Calmer. Wherever she is, she is fine," I said, taking a seat on a tree branch, looking down at them. "These idiots britanniques parading around in hoods are no match for her, should they decide to stop playing and actually fight."
"What is zis folie?" Fluer said angrily, taking a step closer. "Zese imebéciles zink it is amusant to scare people out of zeir beds and make zem scream? I'm guessing you investigated?"
How right she was. It was why I had been so late to find my classmates.
"They wear the Mangemorts' cloaks." The girls gasped at the mention of Voldemort's followers. I had not heard that name since my parents' deaths, and it filled me with a burning rage. "I heard a young boy talking about it before I came here, claims his papa is one of them. My guess is they were old veterans invited as guests who grew bored and stirred up trouble to have some fun. From what I saw, they are firing only in jeu agressif, not to kill."
"Sauvages," Fluer cursed, stomping away indignantly to sit down now that she knew the threat was nothing but the pathetic attempt of middle aged men to relive their glory days. The rest of the girls relaxed too, irritation overtaking their fear as they began to parler de merde the British.
I sighed and leaned back into the branch, laying against the trunk of the tree in exhaustion, both physically and emotionally. In order to get a good look at the death eaters, I had had to transform into my animagus form so I could fly close by, which always took a lot out of me since I was still inexperienced. Combined with the emotional wormhole of grief and anger that the name Voldemort opened, I found myself losing more and more energy by the second. After centuries of protecting the stone from thieves, he was the one they felt they could not evade. He was the reason they chose to die 'for the greater good.' He was the reason they left me.
Just then, a hideous mark of a skull and snake that I only recognized from books took form in the sky, the other girls falling quiet under its dark green light. My left hand burned slightly and it took me a moment to realize the heat was emanating from my ring. I squinted, looking back and forth from the mark in the sky to the bulky onyx ring my father had given me just before he passed so I wouldn't be quite so alone.
Was it possible that the souls of the dead sensed the mark that had killed so many and were somehow projecting their anger through the stone? My father had told me not much was known about the resurrection stone since it never fell into an alchemist's hands for proper studying. It could have a host of unknown properties, but there was only one way to find out more.
Hopping down from the branch, I checked to make sure the girls were all distracted before placing my bag down and turning into animagus form. I fluttered high above the tree, surpassing the forest entirely, until I was level with the mark. I felt a dull burn in my left wing, assuring me that the ring, like always had transformed with me, represented by a black dot on my orange wing.
As I flew closer to Voldemort's mark, it burned harder.
A shout caught my attention, and I looked down to see a group of wizards pointing their wands threateningly at two boys and a girl around my age, maybe a little bit older.
I swooped down, landing on the closest boy's shoulder, not wanting to reveal my animagus form, which I had kept a secret so far, but ready to get involved if things escalated. The boy looked to me, surprised, but didn't shake me off. Instead, he just dodged a spell cast his way by one of the men.
"STUPEFY!" several voices called out as the teenagers ducked again.
I threw up a nonverbal, shield but it was weak since I was still relatively new to nonverbal, wandless magic.
Just as I decided it might be time to change forms, a redheaded man ran forward. "Stop! STOP! That's my son!"
A few wizards lowered their wands, but the teens were far from safe, judging by the look of the oldest man in the front.
"Ron — Harry — Hermione — are you all right?" The man asked in a shaky voice, running to them.
"Out of the way, Arthur," said the man in the front with a cold, curt voice. "Which of you did it? Which of you conjured the Dark Mark?"
I rolled my eyes. The British were such a mess. In France, we played cards or went out to the pub if we got bored, but for some reason, apparently the British's idea of a good time seemed to be invoking a deranged, dead psychopath.
"We didn't do that!" said the boy who I sat perched on top of, his shoulder reverberating with each word.
"We didn't do anything!" seconded a redheaded boy next to him. With a start, I realized the redhead was the same boy from the woods, in which case it was unlikely he had cast the mark; he had seemed just as scared as Camille.
"What did you want to attack us for?" the redhead asked indignantly.
"Do not lie, sir!" shouted the man in the front. His wand was still pointing directly at the redhead, and his eyes were popping — he looked slightly mad, and he seemed to be in charge, unfortunately. "You have been discovered at the scene of the crime!"
"Barty," whispered a witch in a long woolen dressing gown, "they're kids, Barty, they'd never have been able to —"
"Where did the Mark come from, you three?" said the redhead's father quickly.
"Over there," said Hermione shakily, pointing at the place where they had heard the voice. "There was someone behind the trees . . . they shouted words — an incantation —"
Immediately, I left the boy's shoulder and flew over to the spot behind the tree, surveying it as the man continued to investigate the bewildered teens. The burning got more intense as I moved closer to the spot. Their story checked out.
"Yes! We got them! There's someone here! Unconscious! It's — but — blimey . . ." A man passed me as he came across a fallen figure. I flew up next to him, and laughed—in the near silent way a butterfly does—when I looked down.
"You've got someone?" shouted Mr. Crouch, sounding highly disbelieving. "Who? Who is it?"
They all gaped as the man brought the house elf to the center, then proceeded to argue about whether or not it could have been the elf. The incompetence of the British never failed to surprise me.
The plot thickened when the boy with the glasses, the one who I had landed on, claimed the wand in the elf's hand was his.
"Excuse me?" the wizard interrogating the elf asked incredulously.
"That's my wand!" said the boy. "I dropped it!"
"You dropped it?" repeated the man in disbelief. "Is this a confession? You threw it aside after you conjured the Mark?"
"Amos, think who you're talking to!" said the redhead's father, very angrily. "Is Harry Potter likely to conjure the Dark Mark?"
I nearly dropped out of the sky. Harry Potter?
Of all the people I could meet in this forest, the random boy who's shoulder I had landed was Harry Potter? The very boy I'd been curious about since I had been ten.
As an ambitious witch, not only did I wonder about the boy's power, curious how he was able to defeat Voldemort as just a baby, but even more so I wanted to know how he had been able to keep Voldemort from taking the stone when my parents could not. When I had been told he played a part in defending it, my curiosity about him doubled.
Questions ran through my mind like; was he somehow connected to Voldemort that he knew what he was plotting? Why did he go after the stone in the first place? Why did the teachers let it get to that? And, most importantly, did he possess some power that the rest of us did not have?
All former mockery of the British aside, I fluttered forward, landing lightly on the accusational man's head so I could get a closer look at Harry Potter. He was an average height, probably not quite done growing yet, but not short. His hair was a jet black and his eyes were an emerald green, much like my own but a tad darker. He was very skinny and overall a lot more normal-looking than I expected. Except his facial expressions—there was something a lot more mature about them than there should be for a boy his age. It was almost as if there was an old man inhabiting a teenager's body. He held a hint of the same weariness for the world that I had seen in my parents.
"Er — of course not," mumbled the man beneath me. "Sorry . . . carried away . . ."
"I didn't drop it there, anyway," said Harry, jerking his thumb toward the trees beneath the skull. "I missed it right after we got into the wood."
"So," said the man, looking back at the elf cowering at his feet. "You found this wand, eh, elf ?
And you picked it up and thought you'd have some fun with it, did you?"
"I is not doing magic with it, sir!" it squealed, tears streaming down her face. "I is . . . I is . . . I is just picking it up, sir! I is not making the Dark Mark, sir, I is not knowing how!"
"It wasn't her!" said the girl behind Harry, speaking for the first time. She looked very nervous, perhaps because these were all law enforcement officers, but I wanted to advise her to calm down, lest she look guilty. "Winky's got a squeaky little voice, and the voice we heard
doing the incantation was much deeper!" She looked around at the two boys, appealing for their support. "It didn't sound anything like Winky, did it?"
"No," said Harry, shaking his head. "It definitely didn't sound like an elf."
"Yeah, it was a human voice," said the redhead boy.
"Well, we'll soon see," growled the man beneath me, sounding unimpressed. "There's a simple way of discovering the last spell a wand performed, elf, did you know that? Prior Incantato!"
The mark floated out and the elf immediately squealed in protest. The man jumped on the evidence, seeing it as proof enough for conviction but I remained unconvinced. This was clearly a set up, and a sloppy one at that.
Thankfully, the redhead's father put it all together, convincing the rest of those British dunderheads what plausibly happened. As drama with the elf and her master, the high-ranking official named Mr. Crouch, began to ensue, I grew bored and flew back to the girls, content that I got all the answers I needed.
When I got back, I saw that Madame Maxime had finally joined them, and demanded to know where I was, infuriated by the girls' vague answers.
"Here I am," I said, steeping from being the tree as I picked up my bag. Everyone looked over, mostly relieved but a few annoyed probably for looking incompetent for losing me, Fluer the most irritated among them.
"Marguerite," Madame barked, her tone as imposing as her full height. Though she was kind, no one could ever accuse Madame Maxine of being a pushover. "Where were you?"
"Went for a walk," I answered nonchalantly, glancing towards the sky. Understanding dawned on Madame's face.
"Fall into line, girls," the headmistress said as she led them back to the campsite. "Marguerite—by me."
I obeyed, and no sooner than we were out of earshot from the girls did the giant woman whisper, "What did you learn?"
"The stunt was nothing more than the bored actions of guests who were former death eaters. They made no lethal or even particularly harmful shots."
The headmistress nodded, as if she had suspected that. "And ze mark?"
"A man conjured it above Harry Potter's head, using his wand and placing it in an elf's possession to frame both Potter and someone named Barty Crouch. It took awhile, but they finally saw it for what it was; a set up."
" 'Arry Potter," Madame Maxime mused softly. "Very interesting."
"Madame." She looked down at me and I looked up, craning my neck due to her giant frame. The woman was large and proud of it, one of the things I most admired about her. She showcased a side of femininity rarely acknowledged: strength.
"These British wizards are not very impressive. I think we have little to fear with the competition," I said bluntly, not even trying to be rude, just honest.
Madame laughed softly.
"You just may be right, mon petit papillon. At least if it is you zey are up against, I am sure we will win."