Everything was the same as it has always been inside Hogwarts. Same candles floating overhead in the Dining Hall. Same professors lined up at the high table; same neurotic, newbie Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher who'd be gone by next year (this one was called Carleton Swift); same tired, endless Sorting ceremony. God, was it dull. Muggles who thought that wizardry must always be interesting would only have to sit through one or two typical Sorting ceremonies and soon they'd think it was on par with accounting or golf for tedium.
Did anyone really care to see which House each and every short, scrawny eleven-year-old was going to plague with his or her presence? They were all so awkward-looking. Big ears, big noses, odd haircuts. One boy, John Earnshaw, had long, floppy brown hair that reached to mid-back and before he sat down on the Sorting stool he turned around three times and clapped. (And he was in Eglantine's House, gods be praised.) Claire's little sister Julie got Sorted into Ravenclaw, too (she didn't look half as dim as her sister) as did Jacqueline Abbott and the blond acne-cream first year from the train, who bore the awkward name of Gilderoy.
Some of the students—Gryffindors, mainly, it seemed—were waiting eagerly for Dumbledore to speak, though Eglantine hardly cared about what. He never said anything terribly interesting. James and Sirius, and Peter by default, seemed to worship Dumbledore's very toes, though ironically they never seemed to respect his rules; but Eglantine had never liked him. It was one of few opinions she had shared with her aunt and uncle, though her reasons had certainly been different. It wasn't his principles she disliked, it was his personality: his calm eccentricity seemed, to her, to be cowardly. If he had the power to defeat Voldemort the same way he had done Grindelwald, which one might assume he did, why hadn't he already done so? Bertie had done more for that cause than Dumbledore had. He was a figurehead. Hadn't always been, but he was now. She had tried, but she couldn't respect him for whatever conclusions he had come to that enticed him to a life of what seemed like idleness.
He did speak, about how Voldemort's influence was growing, blah blah, and how some of the seventh years might be called to be Aurors, blah blah. Eglantine yawned. It was exactly what might be expected. Unoriginal and, to her, uninspiring. Can't they see through him? she wondered, as the Great Hall erupted into applause. Remus wasn't clapping: he looked preoccupied. Neither were Severus and his cronies.
As the students tucked in to dinner, Eglantine's table was buzzing with news about Voldemort—or, as everybody referred to him, "He Who Must Not Be Named," or "You Know Who." It seemed rather infantile to Eglantine to refer to anybody as "You Know Who." It was how third-year girls referred to boys they fancied. And yet what inspired it was not strictly infantile itself, though it seemed to do nothing but inspire babyish reactions: there was a very real fear underneath it all, an unspoken dread that Voldemort's power would continue to grow, that one day they would perhaps all have only two choices. Serve him or die.
Eglantine didn't believe that. She believed in the third option—always the third option. Life was not black and white; people seemed to gravitate towards thinking that way, towards separating things that couldn't be quantified into categories and pairs, little pockets of control. These were lies, these categories. All this "Dark Arts" business, implying that everybody else practiced "light arts," or whatever on earth the equivalent of supposed goodness was. There were no Dark witches and wizards. There were no good witches and wizards. There were many thousands of normal witches and wizards, those who occupied neither of the uninhabitable poles of Dark and Light, but who dwelt in all the space in between. To go around thinking that some were only evil, and others only good, and some destined for greatness, and some destined for dullness—that seemed to be the only real destiny of these people. They were destined to believe in destiny. The only polarization was between those who believed in the poles and those who didn't.
She thought about this as she ate her pot roast. It was dry; Dumbledore had yammered on too long. To everybody else, his words were the nourishment. They scarcely seemed to notice the food as they talked away, urgent and self-important. She preferred silence and non-desiccated beef, preferably in solitude. She would even happily sacrifice all the food, if only everybody would just shut up.
She had scarcely settled into the girls' dormitory near the Astronomy tower when she began to wonder if perhaps the library was already open. She had never really wondered about it before—the first day had always seemed to offer other options. All those were tired out now, she supposed. She would try to make it to the library.
Sure enough, Madam Pince was there. Eglantine wondered if she ever actually went anywhere else.
"What are you doing here?" croaked Madam Pince. "There aren't any assignments yet." She was regarding Eglantine with extreme suspicion. Eglantine tried to remember if she had ever been especially obnoxious in front of Madam Pince before.
"Er—independent study?"
"You're supposed to be in the dormitories."
"Aren't I at school to learn, Madam Pince?" said Eglantine, with what she hoped would appear to be wide eyes of sparkling innocence.
"You're at school to follow the rules."
"What eloquent training for real life. Fine, I'll go. Might I borrow just one book?"
Madam Pince sighed. "If you must. But make it quick."
Eglantine wasn't exactly familiar with the library—she hadn't tried to make coming here a habit—but she poked through the tall rows of brown until she found a fairly suitable dim, dank corner. Here there was a row of oversized gray books, their bindings crumbling and dangling over the edges of the shelves, with faded gilt writing spelling out the words she was looking for: Legilimency.
"These?" whined Madam Pince, incredulously peering over the stack of ancient books. "I thought just one. You can't have all these."
"Well, which would you recommend? To a person wishing to learn Legilimency."
Madam Pince shook her head. "I don't know that you can learn Legilimency. You either have it, as they say, or you don't."
"Which one will help me figure out if I have it?"
Madam Pince pursed her lips. She pointed to a slightly newer, slightly less crumbly book in the middle of the stack. It was grayish blue, instead of grayish gray. "Legilimency for Beginners. You can borrow it for a week."
"Is a week really enough time—"
"It is if you try, now get out! I'm late to feed Rodney as it is."
"Rodney?"
"Bassett Hound. Are you quite done, Miss Bertrand?"
"Oh, so suddenly you know who I am?"
"I recognize you as the girl who conspired with Lily Evans to plant Dungbombs in James Potter's satchel three years ago. It took me a week to clean up the Arithmancy section."
"Aah." She'd known there was something.
"And even if there hadn't been that, you're a carbon copy of Bertie. Just a little more…" Madam Pince sniffed. "Wild."
"Er, thanks, maybe. I'll see you, Madam Pince."