Chapter 2

In the following hours, Harlowe took Clara on what she called a 'quest of great administrative importance'. Their quest began in a gungy little office at the bottom of the castle. Teetering piles of paper and files, held together by thin strings of magic, surrounded a stringy haired woman who looked like she could crumble at any minute. A little plaque, half buried on her desk, read, "Maureen Price. Administrations and Compensation for Near-Lethal School Incidents".

"Yeeees?" Maureen rasped. Her teeth were yellow, her gums a sickly green. She adjusted her glasses, which should be a perfectly normal thing to do except that her hands moved like vending machine claws. It took her an age to lift them up and put them back down again.

"This is our new student, Clara," Harlowe said.

"Claraaaa?" The decayed old woman's rasp trailed off into a question.

"Kettleborn," Clara said.

Harlowe blinked at her. A puzzled look flittered her face.

"Aaah, yes. K, Clara…" The weathered old lady stood up and began to leaf through stacks of pages with her wand. "K's, K's are always troublemakers… Kettleborns, Kadikoys and Kapers… Hate troublemakers… Now C's, C's make excellent students…"

"Does she know we can hear her?" Clara hissed under her breath.

"I don't think she knows her own bloody name right now," Harlowe muttered back.

One of Mrs Price's leaflets was guided to the desk by the tip of her wand. Clara's name had been stamped out across the top in large letters.

Eligibility for Hogwarts Financial Assistance Program for Muggle-Borns and Orphans Application

Please circle the answer that best applies to you.

Someone had filled out the form before her, so that Clara only had to sign and agree to the terms. Muggle-born? No. Orphan? Yes. A note had been penned in underneath in cramped purple writing: Special circumstances witnessed and confirmed by Professor Michael Dendron.

Harlowe could not hide her wandering eyes. Clara said nothing, and promptly signed. "What is the financial assistance for?"

"Your books. Your uniform. Your tuition. Your food. An entertainment stipend, payments supervised by Hogwarts administrations staff or Head of House. Your care in case of near-lethal injury." Maureen smiled her gummy green smile. "I look forward to seeing you again." She pushed an old leather purse forward on the table. "A student support pack is available." She pointed her trembling hand at a dusty, cobwebbed pile of cloth sacks. Each was a horrible faded plum, except for one that was stained a mysterious green.

Clara picked up the least dusty, cobwebbed and stained, and they darted out down the hall.

Both curious about the contents, they dumped the sack open on a seat in the hallway. Much more came out than could possibly fit in such a small sack. It contained several introductory magic books, gloves, quills, parchment, a small pewter cauldron, telescope, scales, tied bundles of herbs and small pickling jars of odd ingredients.

"Agh, these are all first year books," Harlowe sighed, picking up The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1. "They'll be good for your own reference, but they won't work for class. You can borrow someone's until we get to Hogsmeade to buy you all your fourth year stuff, I guess. Not that you'll be able to practice magic without your wand, anyway."

Clara didn't answer that. Instead, she leafed listlessly through A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration. "I'm screwed," she said, "Done for."

"Toast," Harlowe agreed.

"How am I going to catch up on three missed years of education? I haven't even been to Muggle school in a year," Clara huffed.

"Let's go talk to Professor Roselia. I'm sure she has a plan." Harlowe helped Clara scoop everything into the bag.

"Wait."

"What?"

"Why are you so happy to help?" Clara wondered, searching Harlowe's big brown eyes for explanation.

Harlowe smiled a thin smile. She fingered the tassled drawstring of the old purple sack. "I still have my one of these. The Extension charm on them is really good. Don't throw it out." She stood up and took Clara's hand to help her up. "Orphans have got to stick together."

After that, Harlowe guided her around the enormous castle to what she called the Charms classroom, where Professor Roselia was unpacking a large crate of seemingly unrelated items: Feathers and soft toys; compasses and jewellery boxes; dirty old buckets and rusted nails.

"Ooh!" Harlowe walked right on over to the boxes and began poking around the contents. "What are we charming this year?" She pulled out a tap handle with black mould blooming all over it, unimpressed.

As Harlowe was holding it aloft, Professor Roselia wandered past, rapping it smartly. "Scourgify," she said. The mould disappeared.

"Ahhh, wonderful," Harlowe said, placing the shining new tap handle aside.

"Clara, you look well rested," Professor Roselia said, turning now to peer over her new student. She huffed a bit, eyes resting on Clara's wrinkly, slightly smelly shirt. Her wand hand twitched, as though another 'scourgify' was waiting behind her lips, unsaid.

Clara nodded shortly. She felt unwilling to show too much gratitude. Her experiences here still felt raw and unreal, like they could be ripped from her at any moment. The beds were plush, and too comfortable. The views from stone windows were ethereal: A rolling mountain landscape, underlined by the beautiful dark lake. Reflected in that lake, Hogwarts' immense visage against whisps of fragile cloud. Then, the people: Bubbling Harlowe and kind Professor Roselia. Ah, but people usually ruined otherwise lovely things, and there were many more people left to meet.

"You said that I would go to school here," Clara said, "What sort of things would I learn?"

"Hm," the professor's face was thoughtful. She leaned back against a desk, crossing her legs at the ankles. "Harlowe, what do you think? Perhaps a student perspective would be more useful, for Clara's purposes."

Harlowe looked up from a dirty kettle, that had funny shiny patches on it, as though someone had made a bad attempt at polishing it with a rag. Evidently, she had been trying to get in some early education. The professor raised a brow at her. "Ahem, well. How to magically clean things, for one." She grinned. "How to turn one thing into another thing. Charms that make something happen – Like making something very heavy float way above your head, like a feather."

"Levioso!" the professor said with a twitch of her wand. A desk rose and spun in lazy circles around the room.

Clara watched it with wide eyes.

"Potions, too. How to care for magical plants, and great magical beasts! Oh, and how to battle dark wizards of course."

The professor inclined her head to Clara. "Battle might be an exaggeration. I should hope that Professor Mackavoy has more on his curriculum than that. Many a powerful wizard is expert less in battle, and more in the delicate art of making a run for it."

Harlowe grinned. "That's not really Professor Mackavoy's style, ma'am."

The professor rolled her eyes and turned to Clara. "Does this answer your question?"

"Yeah, a bit. I've no idea how good I'll be at any of it."

"The issue of your late entry to Hogwarts does pose an interesting problem. You've missed out on years of magical education, as well as exposure to our culture." Professor Roselia's fingers beat a tune against the desk. She stood thinking, mulling over the problem. "Harlowe, take Clara on a tour of your common room. You two are not the only early arrivals this year."

Clara gave her a strange look – She had been told that the school year began on September first. "It has been a very strange beginning to the year indeed, and some students are safer within our walls at this time," the teacher explained. "It will be good for you to meet some other students."

Harlowe and Clara shared a look.

"Well, uhm, she hasn't been sorted yet. How do you know she'll be a Hufflepuff?"

"Oh, I don't expect she will be – But friends are found in many places." The professor waved them out, turning back toward her boxes.

"How do you expect me to catch up, then?" Clara wondered, feeling like she missed something.

"Wasn't I clear?" Professor Roselia smiled. "Go on." She turned back to her boxes.

Out in the hall, Harlowe was laughing a little. "Come on then."

"Friends?" Clara spluttered, "Years of magical practice, and she expects friends to help?"

Harlowe grabbed her hand and began dragging her down the steps. "Yep!" She took the stairs one, then two at a time, jerking Clara down with her.

"Where are we going?"

"My common room! You'll get one too – I reckon you'll be a Hufflepuff like me!"

"What's a Hufflepuff?" Clara spluttered.

Harlowe dragged her out into the landing of a towering room full of staircases. On every inch of wall, paintings were squeezed alongside yet more paintings, of every subject matter. They moved. A girl on a grassy knoll with a flower crown in her hair waved hello. A zebra plodded by over the girl's head. To her left, a daisies were tossed about by a silent wind. "There are four houses," Harlowe explained while they waited on an empty platform, awaiting a staircase that was lazily sliding over to them. "Hufflepuffs are hard working. Loyal. Good people, kind people – Perhaps the best people. Gryffindors are brave. Ravenclaws are all smarty pantses, though sometimes they've the stupidest people you've ever met, believe me – Esther Turpington went into the Forbidden Forest once, following a will o' the wisp! Her boyfriend's in Slytherin, see, and they were meant to meet outside the forest. She thought it was his lantern. Idiot. Why would he have gone in? Anyway, the centaurs found her at the bottom of a ravine two days later, absolutely addled. Thought she was a goat. No idea what happened to her out there. But she's fine now."

By the time Harlowe has finished her winding story (with all its detours), the staircase had arrived and they were on the move, down hundreds of steps.

"What are Slytherins?"

"What?" Harlowe seemed distracted by her own imagination.

"If Gryffindors are brave, and Hufflepuffs are hard-working, and Ravenclaws are clever… What are Slytherins?"

"Well, jerks, mostly," Harlowe replied, shrugging. "Perhaps that's unfair… You'd be better off asking someone else about them. But I suppose, they've meant to be cunning. And ambitious. Has that ever been a recipe for good?"

Clara didn't answer. She felt that recipes for good and evil, traditional or otherwise, tended to be unreliable.

Harlowe started taking the stairs in leaps again, hopping down them. Her pale cloak fluttered as she ran. Clara began to hop down the stairs too – First in twos, then, feeling braver, threes. She laughed. "Why are there so many stairs?"

"The Hufflepuff common room is in the ground, next to the kitchens. And it's a big-Woah!" She exclaimed, impressed, when Clara hopped four stairs down to the next landing. Gazing over the second one, she said, "Race you?"

Together they raced down dozens of stairs, speeding up until they were running down a long stone hallway. Clara grinned despite herself and pumped her legs harder, feeling pain in her lungs and exhilaration in her chest.

"Why are we running?" Clara yelled.

"Because no one can yell at us yet!"

They pelted down the halls and staircases, past grand windows and paintings of wonderful things, until they reached darker halls, lit by flaming pedestals. Down and deeper they went, into cosy golden halls. Down from the kitchens, beyond a darling greenhouse, there lay a pile of huge, round oak barrels. A smell of cloves, cinnamon and berry, like Christmas cake with a rich underlying hint of alcohol, hung low in the air of this shadowed but pleasant corner.

Harlowe stopped running. Clara jogged to a halt beside her. Both of them clutched their knees, panting and giggling, elated with their own silliness. "That was fun," Clara panted, "I haven't had this much fun since my old school."

Harlowe tried to speak and faltered, so she just grinned instead and straightened up. Then she rapped her knuckles against an enormous barrel in a little tune that Clara didn't recognise. With a fsshh! the barrel opened wide like a round door. A low-ceilinged tunnel curved up and away into the stone walls of Hogwarts castle. "Come on," Harlowe whispered conspiratorially, "You're going to love it."

They bowed their heads to enter. The inside was stained red with wine and smelled like overripe fruit, as though it had been poured only yesterday.

Claire followed Harlowe up the curving tunnel of stone, into a golden halo. The tunnel opened out into a beautiful place that smelled of sweet, floral perfume.

If a small animal was to make its home in Hogwarts, surely it would make its home in the snug golden hole-in-the-ground that was the Hufflepuff common room. A low hanging tendril of curling, living ivy touched her hair as she entered, as though to pet her a fond hello, before curling back up into a relaxed loop. All manner of ivies, ferns, vines and philodendrons draped from terracotta pots with copper rims, some so low you had to walk around their curling, explorative fronds. A violet wisteria rustled in a wind Clara couldn't feel. Pom-poms of orange and yellow puffball flowers in pots around the room seemed to inflate and deflate, pumping in the air, like they were breathing. Green cacti guarded windowsills with their spines, some three inches in length with enormous pink flowers popping out of their tops, while still others were covered in a delicate, deadly layer of short white needles and bright blue bulbs.

On the wall hung a giant portrait of a smiling woman holding a two handled jug, toasting. Underneath that portrait, in a large, gilded bird cage, lived a tall, beautiful plant with silky heart-shaped leaves and a single violet, bell-shaped flower. Enchanted, Clara edged closer to read the silver plaque on the base of the cage. The room's sweet smell grew stronger.

BEWARE OF REGINALD

R.I.P. Whiskers

"Reginald?" Clara wondered aloud, "Whiskers?"

"Don't touch the flower!" Harlowe tugged her back, away from the cage. The beautiful flower twisted and sagged, flapping its leaves, as though disappointed. "He really will bite you." As though to prove it, the curling silky lid on the flower's violet cup opened to reveal needle-like teeth. The sweet smell grew yet stronger.

"You really ruin the fun when you tell people." A boy was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace with a book in his hands. Clara hadn't noticed him because the high-backed chair obscured him from the doorway. He had mischievous eyes in a tan, round cheeked face under dark hair. Like most teenage boys, the ghost of the man he might grow into was hinted at by his features: A strong jaw, pointed ski-slope nose, long fingers. He was skinny, but muscle was wired to his upper arms. "Professor Salt already put a warning on him. It's their fault if they choose to ignore it."

"It lures you in!" Harlowe argued with the boy, her face blotchy with outrage already. Clara suspected this wasn't the first time this argument had come about. "It's evil. You're lucky no one's set it on fire."

"Oh come on, it's a flower! He's just doing what comes naturally to him. You don't say that about Maisy's stupid barn owl."

"Maisy doesn't keep her owl in the common room!"

"No, he just swoops people at breakfast. What an improvement!" The boy stood up and went to the cage. He lifted up the little bird door on the side and reached in, stroking the agitated flower with the back of his finger. It trilled, dancing, and settled down into its pot. "You're a good boy, aren't you, Reginald?"

Harlowe opened her mouth to argue once more, but Clara decided it was time to introduce herself, lest the argument grow in scope or venom. She held out her hand to shake. "I'm Clara. New. Nice you meet you, and uhm, Reginald." Clara tried not to let her mind wander to the fate of poor, unfortunate Whiskers.

"Thomas," he replied, shaking her hand in return. His hand was calloused to touch. "Don't take Harlowe too seriously, there's plenty worse things in the ground around Hogwarts than Reginald. You'd have a much worse time just walking around the lake."

Clara swallowed, hard. "I'll take that under advisement." Her eyes slid to the book he'd been reading, which was planted, open and pages down, over the arm of the chair. CRITICAL ADVANCEMENTS IN DIVINATION. A brief by-line offered further detail: New issue each century, for the up-to-date witch or wizard!

Before she could ask, Thomas waved a dismissive hand. "I just wanted to hold something in front of my nose while waiting for company. Turns out, divination doesn't change much every hundred years. Tea leaves, crystals, visions. Magic mushrooms." He shrugged.

Harlowe sniffed delicately, making her glasses bob up and down on her nose. "Why are you here this early, anyway?"

"I could say the same to her," he said. He gestured for them to be seated.

Clara flopped down into a plush brown armchair. The cushion was so soft that she sank several inches before the chair stopped giving way. In the haze of Reginald's overpowering scent, she felt comfort settling into her bones, and began to relax a bit.

"You said you were expecting more students," Clara said, "But the Professor was telling me yesterday that students don't normally arrive until the first of September. What are you two doing here? Why are students coming early?"

"Well, I live on the grounds," Harlowe said, "I'm always here. But this year, students from certain families have been arriving whenever they can."

Thomas looked uncomfortable. "Some wizarding families have been receiving threats… Threats to take their kids."

Clara's mouth formed into a soft 'o'. "Someone threatened to kidnap you?"

"Sort of. It's a bit weird." He and Harlowe met each other's gaze. Something passed between them, a common decision to play something close to the chest. Clara felt like she'd been splashed with cold, locked on the outside of their friendship, but quelled the feeling. She wasn't entitled to their confidence.

"Fair enough," she said, "So, what do you do when you're not in class?"

"Gardening, of the dangerous variety," Thomas said.

"Caring for creatures of magical origin!" Harlowe replied, with delight in her voice.

"And Gobstones," Thomas said.

"Oh yes! Can't forget Gobstones."

"What on earth are Gobstones?"

As it turned out, Thomas had his own set, and was more than happy to explain how to play. The three of them matched each other until evening, by which time, Clara was delighted for the prospect of a bath. Both Harlowe and Thomas had neglected to warn her that the stones spewed a foul-spelling tonic all over the loser. Their laughter, rather than bullying, quickly felt like an initiation of sorts – especially when they shared a tale about Thomas's first loss in second year, just before he had to sit through a hot, smelly double Potions period.

They cackled their way through the afternoon, until the evening. Professor Roselia came to collect them, warning them that curfews were still to be observed prior to the beginning of term. "I'll take Clara back up to her room," she said, effectively ending the chorus of complaints that the trio started in on.

Clara grabbed her ugly purple sack and stood up, hugging it to her stomach. "Thanks, guys," she said. "It was a good first day." She waved an awkward little wave. Thomas smiled. Harlowe looked sad to see her go. Even Reginald gave a little wiggle goodbye, snapping his toothy flower.

This time, Clara got to see the path up the tower. It was hard not to stop at every window, from which she could see stars reflecting off the black lake. Professor Roselia explained that they kept visitor quarters alongside the Ravenclaw common room, and showed Clara where the bathrooms were. "Enjoy the privacy, while you have it. Soon, you will cohabit with students in your year and house. Hundreds of students will arrive to study here. More opportunities for good friendships will arise. Isn't it very exciting?"

"It is," Clara agreed, in a small voice. "Thank you for sending Harlowe to fetch me. Thanks for giving us time to get to know each other, in the common room." She got the feeling that students rarely, if ever, got to see a house common that they hadn't been assigned to.

"Hm, yes, well, magic is a funny thing. The books are important, the incantations and theory and such, however… You would be surprised at how much magical skill is derived from companionship. Magic continues to surprise even the most learned of us." The professor seemed thoughtful as she spoke, dwelling on each word before it left her mouth. "You'll see. Anyway. We're here now." She smiled.

"Thanks, Professor." Clara turned to enter and hesitated. "Uhm… I actually… I already have a wand."

"Ahh, I did wonder if any magical items came with you to Hogwarts. Is it yours?"

"It wasn't," Clara said, "But I think it might be now."

"Good. If it favours you, if the wand really has selected you as it's wielder, use it. A wand truly won can be fiercely loyal, protective even, of the one who took it. Goodnight, Clara."

Okay whoops, there was no Sorting this chapter – I had to get some stuff out of the way first. It's coming in chapter three, I promise!

Please review if you enjoyed it! Keeps me motivated :D