Emily headed back to the compartment nearly ten minutes later, after having waited on the seemingly endless line for the changing cabins. The robes that she put on felt baggy, the bell sleeves cascading past her wrist. She was careful not to trip over its lengthy hem as she returned to the compartment where she had, she only just realized, left two troublemaking boys alone with her things.
When she got back, Fred and George were sitting across from a black boy with short, dark dreadlocks., and for a moment, Emily thought she was in the wrong compartment.
"Hey," the boy said with a grin. He looked at Emily only briefly and then turned back to the boys.
She was hesitant as she sat down between him and Wheezy, who was asleep in his cage, nonplussed by the addition of a stranger in their compartment. "Um… hi?"
"Em, this is Lee. He's a first year too," one of the twins said. Emily hadn't considered that upon her return they'd be so difficult to tell apart again. "Lee, this is Emily."
"Princey," the other twin corrected, and she was nearly certain that it was Fred. "Her Royal Highness Miss Princey." Lee chuckled in response.
"My last name's Prince," Emily explained, rolling her eyes at Fred. "It's really not that funny."
"Mine's Jordan," Lee replied. "Not funny at all 'cept it sounds like they got my name backwards."
Fred let out a snort of laughter, slapping Lee's knee with his palm. "Oh, I like him. You're cool, Jordan; you can stay."
"Left all my stuff in the other compartment though," he said, and Emily couldn't tell if it was a joke or not. "With a bunch'a lousy Slytherin third-years." He made a sneer and crinkled his nose at the thought of going back.
"We'll be there soon anyhow."
Lee slumped back in his seat, relieved.
It was already dark outside the windows, with a chill breeze lingering through the open crack. Emily couldn't see the countryside anymore, its outline fading into shadow. Where were they?
"What's a Slytherin?" Emily asked, almost out of nowhere. She had been thinking the question since the twins first mentioned their dungbomb. "I mean, you two pranked them before —" She pointed at the matching redheads before turning her finger to Lee. "— and you look like it's a fate worse than death to be around them. So what are they, and what makes them so bad?"
"Buncha lousy blood purist prats," Lee grumbled, shifting awkwardly in his seat. "Kept talking about how many…" He paused for a moment as if struggling for the words. He whispered, his voice barely audible over the roar of the train, "… how many mudbloods are on the train this year."
Emily almost asked what a mudblood was, but once she saw Lee's paled face, she changed her mind. She wasn't sure she really wanted to know.
"They're bloody bad news, the lot of them."
"Evil."
"Slytherin's the worst. They try and sort me there, I'll leave."
"Sort you?" Emily asked.
"Yeah, there's a whole big Sorting ceremony," Lee said, perking up slightly. "It's how they pick what house you get in 'cause there are four."
Emily considered the quarter-cut crest that adorned the school's stationery, and it suddenly made more sense.
George pointed to each color on the crest as he described it. "Gryffindor's the best house — all our brothers are there. Slytherin's where the worst ones go. Ravenclaw's for nerds, and Hufflepuff's whatever."
"So which d'you think I'll be?" she asked. Their bias was evident, but she didn't feel much like she fit any of those.
"Oh, no, it's not that easy. I have it on pretty solid authority that you'll have to fight a troll," Fred said. Emily waited for a smirk to crack through his pursed lips, but it didn't.
"What?"
"And if you make it," George began.
Fred injected, "Many don't."
"— you'll get yourself sorted into one of the houses."
Emily was hesitant to ask her next question, fingers trembling as the sweat built up on her skin. "And, um, what happens if you don't make it?"
"Then it'll eat you, of course."
"What d'you think would happen?"
"And they let children come to this school?" Her voice was shrill with panic. "To fight a troll and die?"
"Children are its favourite food." Fred quirked a brow at her.
"Gets its fill the first day, and it's good 'til the end of term."
"And then it's finals," Lee finished with a smile.
"That's absolutely barbaric!" she shrieked.
"True," Fred said with a slight nod as George looked sympathetically at her, "but we've had three brothers beat it already, so we know all the tricks." The twins both grinned.
She turned, horror-struck, to Lee, who shrugged.
Emily's reflection in the window stared back at her with pleading eyes, which she turned on the boys. "Well, can you teach me? Please?"
The train lurched to a stop as it arrived at a small station made of blackish brick. The cobblestone streets outside were dimly lit by tall lamps, just enough to navigate. There was a sign that indicated where they were: Hogsmeade Station.
"Sorry, Princey," Fred said as he pulled down her trunk and handed it to her. "But we're all out of time."
The air around them was brisk as they exited the train, and she tried to snuggle under her robes to stay warm, now grateful for the extra fabric. The wind burned against her cheeks as it whipped them red and raw.
The older students, dressed in robes with coloured accents, moved in the straight line, at the edge of a forest clearing where carriages waited, pulled by nothing. It was amazing to her that so many people managed to defeat the troll.
"Firs' years!" At the edge of the dock at the opposite end of the station stood a burly man with a thick black beard and long black hair. He was easily, by at least a foot, the tallest man Emily had ever seen, with waving hands larger than her head. "Firs' years o'er here!"
Where he waited were dozens of small rowboats floating in the water of a gigantic black lake. As the students approached, the giant man set aside their trunks and pets, and Emily bid Wheezy farewell with a sad smile.
"Four to a boat, please! And keep yer hands and feet and other 'ppendages inside 'til we reach the castle!"
Emily was confused what he meant by castle until she looked up and saw it out in the distance: Hogwarts. It was a magnificent stone palace like something straight out of a fairytale, towering over the lake. She wondered how nobody had ever seen it before when it was so big and beautiful.
As instructed, she and the other first year students made their way toward the boats, which were larger than they originally appeared to be. The burly man was bigger up close too, as he took her hand to help her into a boat with Fred, George, and Lee.
With one swift motion, all of the boats began to move at once, across the black lake and in the direction of the Hogwarts castle. The water in the lake was murky, almost opaque in its darkness, but when she looked down into it, Emily saw a giant eye staring up at her before it disappeared into the depths below, and she felt her body trembling. Giant lake creatures, a troll — her old school had done nothing to prepare her for this.
"You okay?" She turned around to see Lee shooting her a comforting glace. Fred and George were awestruck, fighting each other for the prime view at the boat's front; at one point, Fred threatened to chuck George overboard for it. "You look a bit… green."
"Boat sick," she replied. It wasn't a total lie. Her stomach had started tumbling before they got to the boats, sure, but the rippling of the water, no doubt from whatever horrific beasts lurked below the surface, certainly did not help. At this point, she was likely equal parts motion sick and homesick and ready to vomit out of sheer panic, her intestines twisting into knots as the boat inched closer and closer to the castle.
He moved to set his hand on Emily's shoulder, hovering over her for a moment until he clapped his hand down. "Don't worry; we'll be there before you know it."
They pulled into the docks at the stone castle, and Emily could barely make out the train's scarlet silhouette in the distance. The castle was even larger up close, perched atop the plateau of a cliff, all elegant stone and candle-lit windows.
"Welcome," the giant man said, helping students out of the boats, "ta Hogwarts."
The students continued to follow him as he led them up a flight of stairs that led to the castle's iron doors, which swung open as soon as he lifted a hand to knock. A woman stood in the doorway, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a tight bun and buried beneath a tall pointed witch's hat. Her emerald green robes reached to the floor, and Emily wondered how they didn't trip her when she walked.
"Thank you, Hagrid," she said, nodding politely to the man who dwarfed her. She turned to the rest of the students, her face stern with thin-framed glasses set halfway down her nose. "And welcome, first years."
She ushered them all into the castle, each of them hesitant to follow behind her, the sound of her heels echoing through the empty corridor of the entrance hall.
"Wait here," she said with one hand against the door to the Great Hall. "I will come for you when we are ready to begin the Sorting Ceremony, at which time you will be accepted into a house, your own Hogwarts family. Until then, be patient and remain ready."
She left the chamber, and Emily felt her stomach drop. Surely, she was getting the troll. And what chance did Emily have of making it through that? She couldn't even do magic; could she? And by the time the woman returned, Emily's palms were soaked with sweat, and her heart beat a deafening pulse within her chest.
"Form a line, please." The students all moved from their haphazard, disorderly crowd into a single-file queue on command. "We will enter the Great Hall all together, and I will call you up one by one to be sorted." The woman paused for a moment, her beady eyes glancing over the lot of them from behind her thin-framed glasses before she opened the door and let them all in.
There were five large tables filling the expanse of the hall — students in color-coded robes sat at the four in the room's centre, while the larger table at the fore seemed reserved for faculty. Emily spotted Severus at the end of that table and waved to him, but her smile was met with a stern glare and apathy.
In front of the staff table was a stool with a pointed burlap hat set on top of it, dirty and frayed at its edges.
"Hey," she nudged the twins and Lee who were all in front of her in the line. "Where's the troll?"
"The troll?" Lee parroted, confused for a moment before he caught on to the question.
"Blimey, you muggleborns can be thick," Fred replied, staring at her with one raised brow.
George smiled in a way that seemed almost sympathetic. "C'mon, Em, we were just taking the mickey."
"Yeah," Fred agreed. With a mischievous smirk, he continued, "Besides, everybody knows they save the troll for the end of term."
Lee snorted, stifling his laughter behind his hands.
"That's your idea of a joke?" Emily hissed, indignantly. "My heart nearly stopped!"
From just behind the stool, the woman in the green robes — no doubt a teacher — let out a small cough to catch the students' attention. Everyone in the hall was staring at the hat, which just sat on the stool, unmoving.
Until it twitched. Emily swore she had imagined it until its brim opened into a wide mouth, like a smile, and it began to sing a rhyming song.
"Oh, you may not think I'm pretty, but don't judge on what you see," it said, its voice booming through the quiet in the hall. "I'll eat myself if you can find a smarter hat than me."
The song continued and on. For what felt like forever, the hat sang about the history of the school and its founders, each of whom crafted a house in their image and took students in according to preference for desired personality traits: bravery, cunning, intelligence, kindness. Emily hung on its every word, amazed at how much she had still yet to learn about this place.
"Briggs, Violet."
The first name was called out, and the short-haired blond from Kings Cross walked tentatively to the stool, setting the hat gently upon her head. Everyone waited with baited breath to see what would happen, and the hat shouted out, "Ravenclaw!"
She let out a relieved sigh before dropping the hat back on the stool and rushing over to the blue-coloured table, the students there all beaming with pride at their house's new addition.
The names went quickly after that, the process almost expedited by the hat's speedy decision-making. Corvey to Slytherin, Davies to Ravenclaw, Diggory to Hufflepuff, Everdeen to Gryffindor, Grimsby to Slytherin, Johnson to Gryffindor… When Lee's turn came, the hat went quiet briefly, muttering a "hm…" before announcing loudly "Gryffindor!" The twins clapped for him as he went to sit with the other red-clad students, and the names continued, flying by so quickly Emily could barely keep up. Several more to Hufflepuff and Slytherin, a few more each to Ravenclaw and Gryffindor.
"Prince, Emily."
Fred heard it before she did and jutted an elbow into Emily's side to get her attention.
"Oi!" she spat. "What's that for?"
He nodded his head toward the stool, and her face went pale.
She approached it slowly, each step calculated, measured, before placing the matted cloth atop her head. The hat, though made of a thin burlap fabric, weighed down against her.
"Been quite some time since I've had one of you here, a Prince." It wasn't speaking aloud, but its voice resonated in her head, booming within her skull. She clenched her teeth against the sound as it continued, "Long history of Slytherins in your line. You could fit there too. I see ambition. Plenty of cunning. And clever — oh so clever. Yes, you'd make a fine Slytherin, indeed." Emily's breath hitched, and all the awful things Fred and George and Lee had said about Slytherins flooded back to her. Bloody bad news, the lot of them... evil… where the worst ones go... "And yet, there's more to you."
Emily crossed her fingers in her lap.
"Tricky..." the hat continued. "Very tricky indeed..."
The silence of the of the Great Hall was deafening, blaring against her ears as she wondered if the hat's deliberation could possibly be as long as it felt.
"Wit, creativity, neither a flaw; you'll do well in Ravenclaw!"
Until the applause erupted from the hush of the room, she hadn't even realized the hat had spoken out loud. She was ushered over to the table decked out in blue and bronze, sitting in an empty seat next to the blond girl, Violet.
"Welcome to Ravenclaw!" an older boy said, grinning at Emily. At the front of the room, a boy named Pucey was sorted into Slytherin. "Name's Robbie Hilliard. Prefect."
Emily smiled at him and introduced herself as well, though it felt a bit unnecessary after having her name announced to the whole room just a minute before.
"Weasley, Fred."
Emily turned in her seat to see Fred stroll ever so casually to the stool and set the hat lopsided on his head. "Always another Weasley," it said out loud, and she wondered if it had intended to or not. "Off to Gryffindor with you!"
He headed to the red table, proudly welcomed by one of the older brothers she had seen at Kings Cross. And then it was George's turn.
"How many more of you are there?" the hat asked with a groan as George put it on, the fabric barely skimming his hair. "Gryffindor for you as well!"
The end of the sorting neared, the last few names called out and divvied amongst the houses. And in the silence that remained, before speeches and feasts, Emily saw Severus seated at the faculty table, shaking his head in disappointment, watching where she sat.
Long history of Slytherins in your line, the hat had said.
Until now.