Even Legilimency couldn't preserve her consciousness through History of Magic, and Defense Against the Dark Arts hobbled along excruciatingly, Carleton Swift babbling and stammering on unconvincingly about his credentials as a vampire hunter. Her cousin Victor's wife Anastasia had once killed a vampire, and she was five-foot nothing, spoke in a little-girl lisp, and was as bony as a baby bird. She was more believable as a vanquisher of the undead than Carleton Swift.
She returned to the library after class. Its vaulted ceilings were still loomingly silent, almost deafeningly echoing with white noise. Boyden Clearwater was there, his nose almost literally in his book, his dark curls tumbling over the text. He was very serious, Boyden. He wanted to be Minister of Magic one day, but most people secretly thought he would end up fetching the Minister's robes from the tailor's.
She sat in a more-than-usually quiet corner, one out of the way, almost so as to be wholly forgotten, and opened the book. It smelled sweet, like fresh-cut hay in a field.
To become an adept Legilimens is not to learn to read another's mind, the book began. "Well, fuck that," Eglantine muttered. Somewhere, Madam Pince shushed her.
To become an adept Legilimens is not to learn to read another's mind. The mind is not a book: it is never flat, two-dimensional, or unchangeable. To navigate the avenues of another person's mind—especially as so few of us are intimately acquainted with our own—is the most subtle magic of all, according to many. To navigate the mind of another human being is to be suddenly catapulted into a strange, languageless land, with no map and no guidebook. To become a successful Legilimens is to learn the compass of this land, the ways to sift through the information thrown at you in order to find what is relevant. To become a successful Legilimens, you will be able to pull individual thoughts and memories for your own perusal not like books from a shelf, but like pulling one individual minnow from a sea of thousands.
"That sounds amazingly fucking tedious," thought Eglantine. Sifting? Thousands of godforsaken minnows? Who had written this stupid textbook, anyway?
She flipped through the table of contents, and the chapters. There were several diagrams that she couldn't begin to understand. Then something caught her eye—Misconceptions concerning Dark Magic.
She read on.
Due to the unfortunate circumstance of many Dark wizards being Legilimens, many people erroneously believe Legilimency to be among the Dark Arts. This is far from the case. Legilimency has many practical and legal uses, as well as—perhaps more pertinently—the use of Legilimency to combat the Dark Arts. Occlumency is not enough, the authors of this book feel, to successfully evade a Dark Legilimens. One must understand the science, almost be a practitioner oneself, to truly evade the machinations of a skilled Legilimens who approaches one with malicious intent.
She yawned, and flipped back to the Table of Contents to find the bloody instructions. Was this all a load of theory? No, there it was, right in the back, in an appendix. "Application of Legilimency."
To apply what you have learned, simply point your wand levelly at your target, and say, "Legilimens." The navigation of the target's mind is entirely yours. No mind is alike. With luck, what you have learnt in this book will allow you to glean useful information.
Be forewarned, this is not a spell likely to make you popular with friends and neighbors. Use only when necessary.
That's it? Point my wand and say Legilimens? They need a whole book to tell me that? thought Eglantine. She needed someone to practice on. The only other person here was Boyden, and damned if the first mind she ever read – not that Legilimency was "reading minds," oh no – was Boyden Clearwater's.
Then, life handed her a perfect gift, the type of which an individual does not receive more than one or two in his or her lifetime. The exact thing she needed appeared at the moment in which she needed it.
"Hullo, Peter. Getting an early start on studying, eh?"
"Er—yes, I suppose. Are—er—you haven't seen Remus and James, have you? I—er—I've been looking for them—"
"No. But come here, Peter. There's a spell I need to practice. It won't hurt, I promise."
His eyes narrowed. Even the stupid could be suspicious, she supposed. "What is it?"
"Legilimency. I'm learning how to read—how to see into other people's minds."
"You—" he squeaked.
"But it's going to be the first thing I've ever tried it. I probably won't see anything I don't already know. Please, Peter? I'll help you with one of your Transfiguration lessons." Peter was the worst at Transfiguration. Once he'd turned a French press coffee-maker into a rather tacky glass unicorn. It was supposed to be a scone.
"Erm. All right. But you—you c-can't tell anybody if you see anything embarrassing."
She rolled her eyes. "Of course." She glanced over at Madam Pince. "Maybe we'd best go into the hallway. Won't take a moment."
Peter followed her out, chewing on his lip. The hallway was deserted: students were either in class or somewhere outdoors, enjoying their freedom before homework kicked in. She didn't have time for Peter's uncertainty. She wanted to know whether she was even capable of it or not.
"Stand over there. Please."
"Look, Eggs, I really don't—"
"Legilimens!"
The book was right. It was strange, unnavigable. There was a kind of purple haze, and she felt like she was walking on butter, as if any moment she might fall and slip backwards. She reached out her wand and pulled.
Peter was in footed pajamas, about six years old, seated cross-legged beside a tall Christmas tree decked with multicolored fairy lights. His father was wearing Buddy Holly glasses and red flannel pajamas, sitting on a plaid-patterned couch, smoking; his mother, whom he resembled remarkably, was in a ruffled pink nightgown, her fluffy brown hair tied with a pink bow.
"Peter, darling, do you like it?" She saw more than heard the words. It was as in dreams, when one knows that a person is talking but doesn't necessarily hear it.
"Of course I do." Peter looked just as uncertain and troubled as he had when Eglantine had asked him to let her do this.
"Then what's the problem?" snapped his father. "You certainly don't look as if you liked it."
"I—er—" Peter removed from a large cardboard box an immense gray cat, both fat and fluffy. The cat hissed and scratched at Peter's arm, and Peter dropped him. The cat went running beneath the tree, knocking off one of the ornaments.
"I don't like cats. They scare me."
His father rolled his eyes. "Really, Peter. It's just a cat. It won't hurt you."
This was boring. She held her wand out again.
Peter was opening the front door. He placed the cat on the front stoop and closed the door, then sat down on the stairs. Hours later, his parents arrived home. Peter informed them that the cat had escaped and that he'd searched for him and been unable to find him.
She was dimly aware now that Peter was trying to push her out. The environment was humming with random memories, with apprehension and pointless details, trying to crowd out the original pictures of what happened to the cat.
Fuck you, Peter, she thought. I'm staying.
The cat was lying in one of Peter's father's shoeboxes. Dead. It looked far smaller in death, less soft. Like a stuffed toy with all the filling pulled out.
"Poor Figgins," said Peter's mother. She was crying lightly – merely sentimental, not distraught. Peter tried to push her out again.
Instead she wound up merely moving forward in the memory (or was it backward?) to Peter and his father sitting in Peter's bedroom. It was a small room, cozy, with old-fashioned mustard wallpaper and a series of posters of Quidditch teams. A leatherbound copy of The Borrowers sat beneath a glass of milk at Peter's bedside.
"Be honest with me, now, Peter," his father was saying, his voice cross. "Did you let the cat out on purpose?"
"No. Of course not. Why would I?"
Mr. Pettigrew scoffed. "Well, it's not really any secret that you didn't like him, Peter."
"I did like him, I was just afraid," Peter pouted. "And anyway, I wouldn't have just let him out. I never would've wanted him to get hit by a car."
"And this is the absolute truth, Peter?"
"Yes. I swear."
Mr. Pettigrew gave a curt nod. "All right. I—"
Something else pulled her out, not Peter. It was like waking up – all of a sudden your dream is gone. She could remember this far better than most dreams, though. Dreams had a tendency to evaporate back into the unconscious, but this was as if she had Apparated somewhere and back: it was disconcerting, but real.
"What the hell is going on here?" It was Remus. Great. Of all people… His Prefect's badge glimmered smugly on his robe, making Eglantine feel like a career criminal.
"Practicing Legilimency. Hello, to you too."
"Legilimency? Why?" He looked somewhat suspicious.
"Do you want the honest answer, or the normal one?"
"Are they suddenly two different things for you, honest and normal?"
She rolled her eyes. "I meant the sarcastic one, cleverclogs. The honest answer, for your information, is that I am practicing it as a matter of self-defense. And also because I'm really curious to find out who murdered my uncle, and it may prove to be a useful skill as far as that sort of hobby goes."
Remus narrowed his eyes. "Right. Why are you practicing on Peter, again?"
"He was there," she said with a shrug. "I didn't even know if I'd be successful. Mainly I wanted to see if the incantation worked."
"You could have left!" spat Peter. "You wouldn't—wouldn't leave!"
"Come off it, Peter. It was practice. I don't give a shit about your stupid cat." This wasn't strictly true. She hadn't expected that sort of thing from Peter, somehow.
"Still. You could've left."
"Oh, goodness, sorry, Peter. Next time I get the urge to invade your boring memories, I'll bring an egg timer."
"A what?"
"Merlin's beard, you might be the biggest imbecile—"
"What the hell, Eglantine?" Remus snapped. "If I catch you practicing Legilimency on Peter again—" (The Peter in question was wide-eyed and incredulous, overjoyed that for once somebody who had wronged him was actually getting talked to about it.)
"Don't worry, I won't. It was a shit time. Anyway, I thought we were friends, you and me. More so than with that berk over there."
Remus's expression softened. "We are." She couldn't help but notice that there seemed to be something unsaid. She couldn't practice Legilimency, apparently, so she wasn't allowed to know what it was. "But more than who I'm friends with, I'm—well, I'm a Prefect. If I saw what I did and failed to react, I could be…I dunno, put on warning or something?"
"Don't you trust me not to be doing anything shady? Especially in a fairly public hallway?"
"Trust has nothing to do with the way things are now, I'm afraid. Not between me and you," he added, seeing her become instantly enraged. "In general. With the way the world is. You never know about people."
Eglantine snorted. "Horseshit. Legilimency or not, intuition is pretty much infallible. What does your intuition say about me?" He hesitated. "Come on. Spit it out."
He seemed to be struggling with framing what he wanted to say. "You aren't…bad. You're very—er—passionate, perhaps a bit—er—selfish, but not bad."
"Why does everybody always describe me as selfish?"
"Because you're selfish."
"Why do people get the urge to tell me?"
"Because you know that there are more important qualities than being or not being selfish." Remus cleared his throat. "Now—er—ahem, it's nearly dinnertime. We all ought to go down to the Great Hall."
"Yeah. I've just got to run back and get my books. You two go on."
Eglantine didn't quite run back and get her books. She returned to the library and sat there in front of her books and thought.
She had mentioned intuition because, while the front part of her brain, the public part, was engaged in conversation with Remus, the private part was subtly slogging along, partially distracted, occasionally shouting at her with flashes of realization. Her intuition was telling her that what had happened with Peter's cat wasn't just a childhood caper, that it was somehow significant. It told her something about his character.
Everybody lies, the private part of her brain had said, but not everybody's lie results in something dying. And then the private part of her brain had shouted at her, serial killers! Although serial killers usually were directly involved in animals' demise, indirectly causing one wasn't all that far removed. So maybe Peter wouldn't be a serial killer, but maybe he would be a serial accident-encourager. She had visions of him casually hip-checking her so she fell down flights of stairs.
The memory hadn't pointed to any culpability on the cat's part. It hadn't shown him doing anything but being a cat—something of a pain-in-the-ass cat, maybe, but not Lucifer with claws and a fluffy tail. All she had seen was Peter's fear of something he couldn't control. And he had subjected it to a force it could not control. That didn't exactly speak well for his character.
Maybe you're judging him too harshly, she said to herself. He was just a kid. Kind of a stupid, repressed sort of kid. Maybe what he did wasn't that bad.
Her stomach gurgled, both in protest of this revisionist outlook, and also because she was just sitting there in the library when she ought to have been eating. She sighed and picked up the books, finally—late—joining the Ravenclaws at their table in the Great Hall.