Stepping into the Great Hall, I was surprised to see that everyone became quiet as I entered the room. Heads snapped around to stare at me, and conversations petered off until you could hear a pin drop.

I could smell the bacon, and so I ignored the staring eyes to sit in my accustomed place. I'd debated trying to change seats so that I'd be less likely to be the victim of an attack, but everyone else tended to have their favorite spots, and I was already making enough waves by just being there.

As I sat, I began filling my plate.

Millie and Tracey were staring at me. "Did you really kill a troll last night?"

I shrugged; my mouth was full.

Apparently recovering a large amount of blood took its toll on the body's reserve; according to Pomprey, I was going to have to eat more for the next few days to make up for it. I didn't mind, really.

"Draco says that all of them helped," Tracey said.

I was surprised that he hadn't claimed credit for himself. However, he hadn't screamed and run away like most children his age would have done, so he deserved whatever credit he could accrue.

Nodding slightly, I reached for a piece of toast.

"Apparently it was a rogue male," I said, "The rest of the pack is on the other side of the forest. It was just one of those freak accidents."

"I heard that the Dark Lord himself sent it to kill you," Pansy said. "Because he thinks you plan to be the Muggle Dark Lord. That's so stupid though."

"Oh?"

"Like a mudblood could ever be a Dark Lord... who would follow them?" she asked. "And it's crazy to think that the Dark Lord would even know you existed... like you're that important."

"How many times have the Goblins rebelled?" I asked.

"I don't know... a lot?"

"And according to you, Wizards are better than goblins?"

"Of course."

"Even mudbloods?"

"...yes...barely."

"Then if goblins can rebel, why not muggleborns?" I asked.

"Because mudbloods don't have any power," she said, as though I was stupid to even suggest it. "They aren't even all that good at magic."

I used my wand to levitate a piece of ham and two pieces of toast from in front of her simultaneously. She didn't seem to notice.

"So why were you in the Infirmary?" Tracey asked. "I'd have thought that you'd have been either dead, or not harmed at all."

"The troll fell on me when I killed it," I said. I took another piece of bacon.

"What?"

Everyone was staring at me.

I shrugged.

"How did you let it get that close to you?"

"I killed it with a knife," I said. "And that requires close up work."

"With...a knife," Pansy said. "Not a spell... you didn't even use magic to drop something heavy on it. You killed it with a knife. Is that even possible? Trolls are huge?"

"The skin of their scrotum and the back of their knees is thinner," I said. "I probably should have transfigured a bigger knife, though. It would have died faster."

Some of the first years around me looked puzzled, as though they didn't know what I was talking about. The older students nearby looked a little green.

"So you used magic to make something to kill with non-magically?" Pansy was staring at me incredulously, as though I'd grown a second head.

"It seemed like it was resistant to spells," I said. "What else could I do?"

"Run away?" Pansy asked. "Scream for help?"

"Die you mean?" I asked. I shook my head. "I try not to do that any more than I absolutely have to."

"How did you know how to kill a troll with a knife?" Tracey asked, as though she was afraid of what the answer would be.

"I grew up in a tough neighborhood," I said.

"That's a muggle thing, isn't it?" Mildred asked.

I nodded.

That seemed to end their interest in the conversation, which suited me just fine. I'd said all I meant to say, and the last thing I needed was to seem as though I had secrets, even though I did.

I still caught several of my classmates staring at me when they thought I wasn't looking, and through my insect's vision, I could tell that other students where whispering all over the Great Hall behind my back.

At the end of the meal, Dumbledore stood up.

"Last night, you may have heard that there was an incident in the Forbidden Forest. Courage is what is usually attributed to Gryffindor, but last night several students in Slytherin showed great courage under a situation which would have cowed some adult wizards."

"For courage under fire, Terence Higgs, Miles Bletchley and Draco Malfoy will each be awarded twenty five points. For courage beyond that expected of any child of her age, and for risking her life to defend her classmates, Taylor Hebert will be awarded seventy five points, for a total of one hundred and fifty points for Slytherin."

There was a collective gasp from the entire room.

There were politics behind the decision, I suspected. Giving points to Malfoy would help ingratiate the school to his father, although truthfully he hadn't run, which actually was worth some kind of an award. I doubted that I would have been as brave at his age.

Giving me the largest proportion of points wasn't simply because I'd done most of the work. It was a way to emphasize my value to Slytherin, to make me more valuable to the group and to help push whatever agenda Dumbledore and the Sorting Hat had in subtly backing me.

I'd been thinking about Dumbledore lately, and it occurred to me that any overt support he gave me would be counterproductive with my House, because of his own unpopularity.

For a moment I wondered why they hadn't had Snape deliver the points, but it occurred to me that having Dumbledore do it prevented accusation that Snape was being biased and attempting to push his House to win the House Cup.

Personally, I didn't care about points at all; it seemed rather arbitrary and meaningless when the reward was a little bit of bragging rights at the end of the year. It seemed to work to keep the peace, though, and so I was willing to work within the system.

I glanced over at Draco, whose chest was swelled with pride. He glanced at me, and I gave him the slightest of smiles. He paled a little and seemed to deflate a bit, but that didn't keep those around him from clapping him on the back and congratulating him.

I didn't get any of that, but several of the older students did nod at me approvingly.

Dumbledore had done me a service, and I would remember that. What he expected from me wasn't clear; most likely his interests aligned with those of the Hat; turn Slytherin from a terrorist breeding ground into something that produced reasonable human beings.

The fact that this aligned with my own goals didn't mean that our goals would always be in synch. I suspected that he'd been delighted to have me in the House despite the fact that it was objectively the worst place for me.

He hadn't gotten where he was without being a master manipulator. He knew how to play the political game. Being a powerful wizard wasn't enough; there had been plenty of powerful Capes in the protectorate who had never risen to the top of their respective divisions. Usually it had been because of personality conflicts or an inability or lack of interest in playing the political game.

As the meal ended and the plates vanished, I stood up and I headed toward the exit. I felt three other people making a beeline for me.

"What do you want?" I asked.

Marcus Flint was standing behind me, flanked by Terence Higgs and Miles Bletchly.

"You saved the team, Hebert," Flint said. "The boys told us what you did, and we'd have been a Keeper and a Seeker short."

"Anybody can be replaced," I said.

"You've obviously never played Quidditch," Flint said. "I don't like your kind. I don't even particularly like you. But I respect you, and I never thought I'd say that about a first year. Most of you are snot nosed little nothings."

Was he saying I was worthless as a mudblood, or as an annoying kid?

"But not you. You're mean as a snake, and dangerous as one too. If you have any problems with anybody on the team, let one of us know and we'll take care of it... preferably before you do. Hopefully nobody on the team will be that stupid. I have a feeling that someone might be able to hurt you, but you'd make them pay later."

"The best way to get her is to drop a troll on her," Terence said. He was smiling slightly as he said it though.

"Nobody would ever be able to get a troll in the school," Flint said absently.

"I think if she drank a cheering charm, it would be like deadly poison to her," Miles said. He was smiling slightly as he said it, though.

This... didn't feel like the jokes that Emma had made. Was this what friendly teasing actually felt like?

Miles and Terence had seen what I had done last night, but instead of making them afraid of me, it seemed to make them... admire me? A little?

I couldn't tell, and that bothered me more than I wanted to admit. The strange warm feeling in my chest was probably a side effect from the potions I'd been drinking.

"You should try out for beater next year," Terence said.

"She probably weighs less than a bludger," Flint said. "Beaters have to be strong."

"She killed a troll with a knife the size of my forearm," Terence said. "Which means she can probably beat the Weasley Twins half to death without too much trouble."

Apparently my alliance with the twins was still a secret.

Good.

"She weighs half as much as a bludger," Flint argued. "I don't care how vicious she is, there's laws of nature. You try to hit something that weighs more than you, you're the one who goes flying."

"I think she could do it, and without cheating," Miles said, glancing at me.

They hadn't even asked if I wanted to try out.

"It's too bad that first years can't try out," Flint said, looking at me as though I would obviously want to try out for a sport I knew nothing about except that it sounded ridiculously dangerous.

I already thought that flying class needed more safety protocols; having kids flying around, beating each other with bats while a hundred a fifty pound ball of iron tried to slam into them sounded like a perfect receipt for a bunch of dead kids.

Yet somehow they made it work, which meant that there were aspects to it that I wasn't seeing.

I'd never been into sports, and I wasn't now. But letting them think I might try out next year was harmless, and if it kept the team's goodwill toward me for a few months while I grew stronger, I didn't have a problem with lying.

Terence and Flint argued, and I stiffened as I felt Miles hand on my shoulder.

In a low voice, he said, "Me and Terence... we know what you did for us last night. You could have gotten away easy and left us to die, and nobody would have thought anything about it. But you put yourself at risk when you didn't have to, and we'll remember that."

"You helped," I said.

He chuckled bitterly. "Using a first year spell against a class XXXX creature? We'd have been dead sooner than later. The Defense teachers over the past few years haven't been good."

"The one we have now isn't bad," I said.

"He's the best one I've had," Miles said. "Most of them aren't worth a crap. You'd think Dumbledore would at least try to put somebody in the most important class, but they say the Dark Lord put a curse on the position."

"Oh?" I asked casually. "Is that something that can be done."

He stared at me for a moment, then paled a little. He removed his hand.

"That's seventh year or maybe further stuff. Don't go trying to curse the whole class if you stub your toe or something."

I smiled at him sweetly, then grinned as he paled some more.

"I remember my friends," I said quietly. "Even if they can't be my friends publicly."

He nodded and took a step back. Terence and Flint were still arguing about my potential skills as a beater, which Flint thinking that the physics of the task would defeat me, even if he didn't seem to know the word physics.

"I'll think about it," I said more loudly, and then I stepped away from them.

As I headed for class, I saw people staring at me and whispering everywhere I went. I listened in as I could, but there were too many conversations all happening at the same time for me to get more than a few fragments of each of them.

"-she's not really a witch. She's a creature pretending to be a witch. How else could she have killed a troll like that without magic?"

That was actually close to the truth; if it became a common rumor I'd have to figure out a way to direct people's attention elsewhere.

"She's a vampire."

That... didn't even make sense. It was already daylight, and I was clearly walking around in the sunlight right now, as they were staring at me.

"She obliviated them and made them think she killed it. Somebody else did it."

"Doesn't that make her even more scary?" A second voice asked. "If she can already obliviate people?"

"...yeah."

That was a rumor that I wasn't going to fight. Keeping people uncertain about what you could and could not do was basic Caping 101. Most Capes always held a little back, just in case. Having people uncertain might make them hesitate in attacking me.

It was going to make them less likely to overestimate me, though, which I did not like.

"I think she's kind of cute," I heard a boyish voice say. It wasn't a voice I recognized, so it wasn't one of the Slytherins.

"She'll stab you, mate. Just let it go."

I fought to keep myself from wincing. That was the kind of complication that I did not need. Just thinking about it made me a little nauseous. Kids that age shouldn't even be thinking about pairing up, and it was hard for me not to think about even seventh years as anything other than children, even though chronologically they weren't that far from my actual age.

Sometimes experience aged you.

Vista had always been a lot older than her age would suggest. She'd been through a lot of vicious, nasty fights, and it had made her into someone older than her age.

These kids were still kids. Their concerns were the concerns of children. They hadn't had to fight and die, and had to watch people they loved die in front of their eyes.

That was a good thing, although I doubted that all of them would stay that innocent by the time they graduated.

War was looming on the horizon, even if I was somewhat insulated from it here with the children. There were indications in the Wizarding Newspaper that some of the purebloods left lying around, if you were able to read between the lines.

Wizards were dying of accidents, and it was almost always a muggleborn wizard who had done well for himself. There weren't a lot, maybe one or two a week, but it was a pattern, especially as I'd been told that wizards tended to live twice as long as muggles on average, both due to wizard medicine and their own, innate magic.

It didn't make sense that there were this many accidents in this small of a population. The overall death rate per year in the United States (not counting Endbringer deaths or Golden Morning) had been less than one percent a year. That had included deaths from a lot of illnesses that Wizards could cure with a wave of a wand and car accidents, and most Wizards did not drive.

Old age should have been the main cause of Wizard deaths, and even if Wizards had simply died at half the rate of muggle deaths, there should have been less than fifty wizard deaths a year from all causes. Accidents simply should not happen as often to wizards.

You wouldn't climb on a ladder to get something and fall to your death. You'd just use your wand.

Poisoning?

Wizards didn't use caustic cleaning products like muggles did. Again, a simple swish of a wand meant there was no need.

There were spells to protect from being trapped in fires.

Of course, even Wizards could choke on a piece of food; I was surprised that some of the Gryffindor boys hadn't already died, given the speed with which they ate. Anyone could slip in the shower.

But when those things kept happening over and over to one class of people, it moved from being suspicious to being attempted genocide.

They were keeping it low key from now. I had nop doubt that aurors were investigating the deaths, and that sympathetic pureblooded politicians were obstructing those investigations. There was a battle being waged in the shadows, and for the moment at least, I was out of it.

Unfortunately, I knew that was a situation that wasn't going to last. Sooner or later I was going to be drawn into a war that was not my own, and then all this pettiness at school would seem like a distant memory.