That great hereditary mark of all Heirs of Slytherin, the power of understanding the speech of snakes.

This sentence repeated itself again and again in Mary's head as she, slanted in tense uprightness like a quill on its holder, leaned against the door of Torquil Travers' office with her ear pressed against one of its many cool, dark panels. Wearing nothing but a pair of Florence's violet robe-trouser pyjama sets, she shivered in the ample foyer of Tarquin's Court, for Mr. Travers had returned earlier that night—and wherever he went (he, in his dark, layered, ominous outfit)—stiff cooling charms followed like a sort of arctic perfume.

"There is something you should know, Father."

"I am busy, Florence," came Mr. Travers' authoritative voice. "Well, what is it?"

"Osborne has been harassing Mary."

Mr. Travers deemed such a trifling complaint unworthy of a response, but Florence persisted.

"Father," she implored, her voice taking on the plaintive quality that girls often resorted to when faced with unfeeling brothers, fathers, and lovers. "He forced her to kiss him."

Another interminable moment passed in silence before Mr. Travers emerged unfazed. "Ms. Riddle ought to appreciate the attention of a boy so far above her station."

"Father!" Florence cried out, before suddenly lowering her voice. "What if it were me in Mary's place?"

"But you are not in her place. You belong to the superlative station of our kind. You are my daughter."

"What of pureblood hospitality, father—is Mary not our guest? Send Osborne back to Aunt Agrippina, father, please!"

Mr. Travers yawned. "I am busy, Florence. Leave me."

Mary realised that, far from being malicious, Florence's father not only believed in his cruel and absurd words, but genuinely considered the entire matter a trifle. She marvelled at his callousness, which was not founded on indifference, but rather a particularly masculine sort of stupidity—he would not have been able to understand even a fraction of the terror she felt in the presence of his nephew.

"Mother would have understood," Florence said in a choked voice.

Before Torquil Travers could respond to his daughter's caustic remark, she angrily stomped out of the room. Mary's ear, still pressed against the cool, dark panel, heard the sound of Florence's tears before the door opened, and she was met with a weeping Florence who fell into her arms. Despite all her loquaciousness, there was nothing Florence could have said that would have accurately articulated the extent of her sorrow to her father. But to cry was to give meaning liquid form.


The week that followed Florence's failed plea to her father saw Mary feeling more sick than she had ever been in her life. Tarquin's Court, far from being the sanctuary from the world's torments she had hoped for, became a chrysalis in which sheer suffering impelled her to nothing short of metamorphosis. Between nightmares, fits of crying in her bed, promenades with her kind but distant friend, and obscene quantities of butterbeer, Mary read The Sacred Twenty-Eight every evening, for two hours—the amount of time it took to read the entire section on the House of Gaunt. It did not take her long to memorise the names of all the incestuous mediaeval witches and wizards whose dark saturnine eyes glowed on parchment like droplets of enchanted ink. They were, after all, her family.

Indeed, her relation to the Gaunts and ultimately to Salazar Slytherin himself was a revelation that came to Mary in droplets of understanding—by the weekend that she perceived she was overflowing with realisation. Deep down, she had always known her parseltongue was of some significance, and it was not lost on her that Slytherin house took its emblematic animal more seriously than the other houses took theirs—but she could never have guessed that the meaning was so simple and perfect. It took nothing less than a figure as debased as Saturnius Gaunt, a man of the Wizengamot become professional clown—a 'snake-charmer', in the courts of petty muggle lords—for the mysterious authors of The Sacred Twenty-Eight to consider parseltongue worthy of mention for their readers. That it took a description of his sordid life, which transpired six hundred years after the romance of Ermesinda Slytherin and the Knight of Jaunet, for an allusion to the family's strange congenital gift to be finally made, had given Mary for a couple of days the impression that said gift was perhaps a mundane thing. Perhaps parseltongue, like blonde hair, spread intermittently through all magical families—here was a golden Lucretia, there was a dark Walburga—indeed, perhaps snake-speech adorned the Gaunts in the way freckles adorned the Weasleys.

Her notion of the commonality of parseltongue lasted only until Tuesday morning. Mary decided to partake in Florence's potions lesson that day—it was the second last one she would have. The cramped little potions laboratory that jutted like a wilting branch from the trunk of the house suited Mary just fine; it reminded her of Ezekiel Tansley's Hospital Wing study. For all his faults, Mary knew Ezekiel Tansley would never hurt her.

"Good morning, Florence," came the merry voice of Fleamont Potter, whistling as he swung his leather suitcase over his shoulder, "and to you as well, Mary. I suppose you'd like to join us?"

"Good morning, Mr. Potter. I would indeed."

"Marvellous! The more the merrier!"

Potter set his briefcase on the small table already occupied by a cauldron, a burner, several textbooks, and a pair of enchanted mittens. The briefcase unlatched and opened itself, enabling Potter to bend and dip an arm into its enchanted depths, from where he drew a large, cubic jar that appeared to enclose nothing less than an entire colony of little black beetles, complete with dirt, sand, grimy little rocks, leaves in various states of decay, and a self-replenishing dish of water.

"Yuck!" Florence exclaimed.

"Authentic Egyptian scarabs," introduced Potter. "Fed on sphinx dung and wild soulmoss. Each one of these little critters is as potent as a shot of firewhisky."

The young potioneer snapped his fingers to disappear the lid of the enclosure. Gently lifting his left hand, he levitated a dozen of the little black creatures into the palm of his right.

"We'll need to grind them up while they're still alive," Potter explained nonchalantly. "It can be a messy task, but that's the only way to ensure the quality of the Wit-Sharpening potion we'll be brewing today."

Torquil Travers, for all his defects, had evidently appointed an excellent potions tutor for his daughter. Albeit not as knowledgeable as Professor Slughorn in his specialty, Fleamont Potter abounded with the happy vitality proper to well-formed young men. That, coupled with his deep passion and more than adequate knowledge of the art, made potions a most riveting thing for the Slytherin girls. An hour into the brewing, Florence excused herself to the bathroom. Mary took the opportunity to make conversation with Potter.

"So, how old are you, Mr. Potter?" Mary asked curiously. "Florence never told me."

"Twenty, as of July," replied Potter.

"May I call you Fleamont, then?"

"Of course! Mr. Potter is my father," chuckled Potter.

"Your son will say that too one day," Mary remarked with a smile.

"Well, luckily for me, I don't plan on having one anytime soon," Potter quipped.

Mary couldn't help but feel a strange tinge of disappointment. The son of Fleamont Potter would undoubtedly inherit his father's dazzling black hair.

"Say, what do you know of Sextus Prince?"

"A brilliant potioneer, but a terribly dour man," replied Potter casually. "I assume you like the things he makes that make you beautiful?"

"Indeed. I've been to his store many times. He has a great big snake that circles around the poisons section—I wonder if he talks to it."

"Sextus Prince a parselmouth? Less probable than Spencer-Moon secretly being a squib."

"Why so?"

"Ah," Fleamont murmured sympathetically; Mary saw that she reminded him she was, at least in spirit, quite muggleborn, "you should know that parseltongue is a very rare thing, even in the magical world. There are few parselmouth families, and none of them are in Britain anymore. Salazar Slytherin was a parselmouth, and the Gaunts—his snakeling descendants—inherited this capacity of it. But they are no more than the scarabs we just crushed."

"Then Sextus Prince cannot be a parselmouth."

"Not unless he's secretly a descendant of old Slytherin himself. But he's certainly got the looks for it," Potter grinned mischievously.


"Friday terrifies me."

"Why?" asked the snake Mary had conjured.

"That's when Urquart comes back. I don't know what he will do."

"You are a dessscendant of SSalazzar Sslytherin."

"Yes, snake, that is the case." Mary, in a light blue sundress the hue of a cloudless sky as it was reflected in a still midday lake, sighed and rolled over on the violet chaise. "Tom will be thrilled to find out."

"And you, Mary Riddle?" the snake hissed. "Will you not rejoice in the glory of your name?"

"I wish I could," Mary lamented, her voice a mere whisper. "But as of late I don't think I've been capable of rejoicing in anything."

"You musst not let the darknessss conssume you," the snake admonished. "Your name can sssshine brighter than the ssun if you let it."

"But what if it attracts more Urquarts?" Mary fretted. "Would he still abuse me if he knew of my lineage? Hold—of course he would."

The snake's eyes glimmered with a knowing light. "You have alwayss yearned for your name to sssshine, Mary Riddle. Do not let fear hold you back."

Mary sighed, her thoughts troubled. "You understand me so well, snake. I missed conversing with your kind."

"I am born of your imagination. Of courssse I know you well."

"I suppose so. Yet it doesn't quite feel like I'm talking to myself."

Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Mary hurriedly drew her wand and banished the snake. The door opened, admitting Florence, who carried in her arms a bundle of books tied together by a pair of brown laces.

"Were you saying something?" Florence propped herself onto a chaise adjacent to Mary's. She said wingardium leviosa and made her bundle of books hover between them.

"Was practising the banishing charm," said Mary. "What's this?"

"A letter for you, apparently."

This took Mary by surprise. She only had three correspondents; Abraxas, Ezekiel Tansley, and Professor Lovegood. All of their owls came on weekends. She had not noticed the envelope that lay atop Florence's bundle of books. Untying the laces that bound it to the package, Mary took the envelope, unsealed it with the tip of her finger with a tiny flame, and withdrew the parchment within.

The first thing she noticed was the signature at the very bottom; the letter came from Lydia Cotterill, a to-be second year girl of their house who was rather obsessed with Tom. Although Lydia's handwriting was cultivated for her age, Mary, who was used to the overrefined styles of her older male correspondents, squirmed at the uncertain script of the younger girl.

Dear Mary,

We have not talked much but please don't throw away this letter. I meant to send the books to your brother Tom but I don't know where he is. I sent a letter to Wools Orphanage and they said he and you aren't there. So I sent a letter to your friend Walburga Black and she said your with Florence Travers. You must not be with Tom then. It sounds like you had a fight with him and I hope you two get on well again soon. He asked me for some books, so I have sent them to you, will you please give—

Mary had read enough. She explained the situation to Florence and got a laugh. The books that Lydia sought to give to her brother, however, were less of an amusing subject.

"Legilimency?" Mary asked curiously, handling a captivating blue tome on the subject that had come from Cotterill's library. "Does Tom really intend on learning legilimency?"

"If anyone would at our age, it would be him." Florence's voice was tinged with admiration.

Mary sharply glared at her friend and threw the book aside. The next in the bundle, a large, white tome whose pearlescent cover was delineated with moving flowers so intricately drawn that they seemed real, was picked up.

"How To Paint In Magic," Mary read its title in elegant purplish font. "A rather pretentious name, don't you think?"

"It looks jolly expensive. Wonder how the Cotterills afforded it."

Looking at the lifelike flowers on the book's cover being blown by a nonexistent wind, Mary's memory was propelled Gauntward. She had an ancestor called Maia the Painter, a childless daughter of one of the great Wizengamot Gaunts, whose life occupied no more than two interstitial pages between a wizard who commanded aurors against France, and a witch who reconciled a recusant goblin lord to Henry VIII. Her picture was, albeit quite diminutive and undetailed compared with many of the other portraits in The Sacred Twenty-Eight, easily one of the most memorable ones of her family by virtue of its strangeness—for she, plain-faced and dressed in a great bland grey towel of a robe, stood in the middle of two other girls; both were replicates of herself.

"Let's go to the beach," suggested Florence. "The day's too beautiful to waste."

Mary supposed her friend must have been right; from the bedroom window she gleaned a blue sky and heard the chirping of warblers. Neither of these things brought her much joy. But thinking of Maia Gaunt delighting in conjuring illusions of herself, a smile nonetheless emerged on Mary's face.

Thus with How To Paint In Magic in one hand, Mary snapped her fingers with the other to summon Ellie the House Elf for a tall glass of iced chocolate. Obtaining her beverage, she and Florence skipped out of the house, down the sloping lawn of Tarquin's Court, to the shore where the virginal sand reflected the afternoon sun. Florence brought a small bag that contained a great many things: a large violet towel for Mary and her to lay upon; a huge violet umbrella to sport above this towel; a pair of smaller white towels to dry themselves should they go swimming; a pair of sunglasses that could be transfigured into diving goggles; a pair of broomsticks; and a quaffle.

Reposing in their shady violet encampment, Florence dictated a letter to some aunt of hers while Mary read Cotterill's pretty book. Her iced chocolate depleting at a steady pace, sentences of the book embedded themselves in Mary's mind like bundles of budding wildflowers;

Aristophanes thought the world was a painting of the Gods. In divine drunkenness they carved out man, matter, and magic from reminiscence, animation, and obfuscation.

Reminiscence is the foundation of all. One can only draw what they remember. All paintings are but memories animated, distorted, and obfuscated.

The greatest artists of the obfuscatory school have always been skilled occlumens, whether they knew it or not.

To paint a masterpiece, one must have a mutilated soul.

A novice ought to paint on water before they paint on canvas.

"Care for a fly, Mary?"

"I've had half a gallon of iced chocolate; I'd rather not retch it all up."

"Ah, well." Florence sighed. "I'll go for a lap myself."

With an instinctual, "Up!" Florence took her broomstick in one hand, and summoned her quaffle with the other, expertly spinning it atop a finger as she left the heiress of Slytherin to herself. Savouring the feeble murmurs of the tide and the distant squawking of seagulls, Mary closed her book and rolled from her stomach onto her back. She had mistakenly believed that being at the beach on such a beautiful afternoon would inoculate her from the dark thoughts that had stalked her the past few nights. Admiring her hands underneath the shade of the umbrella—her fingers, like her figure altogether, had become so long and graciously slender in the past few months—she wondered whether boys saw them in the light that she did. Tom rather liked them; he had always held them more tightly than necessary—albeit it was her face that he touched the most.

Mary could not decide whether she missed or resented the infinite caresses Tom gave her face; although it was a ritual he actively indulged in since they were scarcely children, Hogwarts had made him enact it much more forcefully than before, as though he required the whole magical world to recognise that it was he who possessed her. But true possession was never possible; indeed, Mary found great consolation in the fact that while a man could very much hurt a woman—a domineering father may spoil his adolescent daughter's happiness, and a ravisher would wrack his victim with nightmares for the rest of her life—he would never be able to have her for eternity, or even for longer than a moment. For despite Florence's docility towards her father, her obedience was clearly finite—all it took for Torquil Travers to realise that his infinite desire would never attain its object was for his daughter to say a single defiant word to him.

Nonetheless Mary felt a profound sadness at the fact the relations between the sexes was one of perpetual warfare and intermittent appeasement. While men inflicted most of the casualties and often won the wars, the distinctions of conqueror and conquered effaced in peacetime; being stupid, violent, and complacent, man naturally despised his antithesis in his victim-lover, woman—Urquart had called Mary disgusting before he ran his hands all over her body. Perhaps she was disgusting; and perhaps this was simply another way of expressing that which Ilaria indicted her—and by extension, all women—of being; smarmy. Smarmy and disgusting. Yet while she found great consolation in relating her personal miseries to those of her entire sex, Mary did not want to consider herself partial to muggle women or even mediocre witches. While womankind might never be happy or dignified, individual women might be; and it was to this clique, whose noble initiates rarely knew each other, that Mary wanted to belong.

She stood up and gazed about the sky for Florence. Failing to get any sight of her friend, Mary made a small sigh and went towards the water. Already shoeless, she slowly walked into the tide, trembling as the liquid coolness engulfed her feet and licked at her ankles. Though it made her tremble, the coldness of the sea was very agreeable; it liberated her from gravity. She went further and further into the sea, until the bottom half of her dress had sunken underwater and swelled like the pouch of a jellyfish. Conscious that her wand was holstered at her submerged waist, Mary drew it so that it would not float away. The moment her hand rose from the water, she became conscious that her wand pulsated with magic. But what did it tell her? Able to speak to snakes but not to wands, Mary merely looked down at her reflection in the water.

Urquart had been wrong to say she was disgusting. She looked at her image in the sea, oscillating in superposition to the gelatinous motions of her buoyant dress, and the conviction that there were few creatures in the world as beautiful as her returned to Mary. Her wand seemed to agree, so she bent over, tapped it on the water to meet it precisely with the tip of its reflection, and said, "Similitudo animata."

Mary straightened herself and waved at her reflection. It waved back.


Mary had awaited Friday with stomach-wrenching dread all week. When it came, she was presented with a bouquet of flowers.

"Take it," Osborne Urquart demanded, shoving the bouquet into her chest. "Take it as a token of my love, or as an apology, it doesn't matter. Just take it, please."

Florence shoved the bouquet back to Urquart as though it was a cornucopia full of dead insects. "Do you really think a few flowers can make up for what you've done? You have no respect, no decency, and you're completely mad. Get lost!"

"I am mad," he said hoarsely, shoving the flowers forward again, "mad with love—Mary—and you know that in love one can't help themselves!"

"You don't love me."

"I do, I do!" he yelled, causing Mary to shrink in fear, "oh take them will you, take them! You've got to take them, or else—or else—"

Out of pure fear, Mary accepted her violator's offering. This quelled his rage enough for Mary to say, "Excuse me," and flee up the stairs into Florence's violet room.

Upon entering the room, Mary transfigured the small clock on Florence's bedside table into a wooden vase; she put as many of the flowers of Urquart's bouquet as she could into it, and even arranged them a little; those that remained were incinerated.

"I suppose it's not a completely rotten idea to appease him a little bit," murmured Florence, gazing at the vase.

The word appease made Mary queasy. The idea of compromising even a little bit with Urquart infuriated Mary. She suddenly stomped to turn her body lengthwise in a duelling stance, and pointed her wand at the flowers she had just so delicately arranged. Tom had taught her a curse called Dementor's Breath, which required one to raise their wand just beneath their lower lip, and blow out cold air from the area of the mouth between the gums and the cheek. It was precisely the sort of magic Professor Dumbledore had warned them about, two years ago—it drew on the dark underbelly of their souls. Indeed, Mary closed her eyes and imagined that each of the flowers of the bouquet had been ironical gifts given by a thousand muggle soldier-ravishers to the thousand horrified little girls they defiled and mutilated—they had to be destroyed.

"Osiris mihi spiritum."

She opened her mouth and her eyes at the same time. Her open lips emitted a cloud of thick purplish gas that smelled like sewage and made the air cold. It took only a few moments to dissipate; once it did, the flowers that remained in the vase looked like they had been left in a cellar for a hundred years.

The following morning Mary started up in terror upon beholding the frightful aspect her decomposed flowers had taken. Their wrinkly grey stems and sagging, colourless petals presented hundreds of conspicuous little holes, like a bundle of giant moth-eaten grasshopper carcasses covered encrusted in dust. Provoked both by this horrific sight and the awareness that Urquart would be angered if he saw it, Mary jolted out of Florence's bed, briefly gazed at the ovular mirror on the other side of the room—though her figure shone beautifully in Florence's violet silk pyjamas, her face and hands were too pale, and her hair was a frightful mess—to examine more closely the vase of dead flowers. At the bottom of it was a thick layer of grey dust; it appeared that substantial portions of the cursed flowers had decayed into colourless atomic dust. It would not do.

Maia the Painter's biography was a brief one; she had been sent by her father as a sorceress-in-waiting to many foreign noble courts, and at some point she and a handful of her disciples sought to collaboratively paint 'the greatest painting wizard-kind had ever seen'—obviously they had fallen very short, for Maia's biography was only two pages long. But Mary venerated Maia all the same. As a courtier, Maia must have often employed painting beyond the canvas; it would have been a magnificently useful tool for both diverting her guests, and perhaps saving her in dangerous situations.

Mary pointed her wand at the vase and said, "Expecto memoriam."

As soon as she turned her wrist to commence the complex wand movement of the 'charm of reminiscence,' Mary knew that her spell had failed. She felt not the slightest drop of magic trickle through her arm. "Expecto memoriam!" she yelled, furiously scrambling to reimagine how the flowers looked before she corrupted them. All this did was disintegrate more of their expired flesh into dust.

Mary recalled some maxims from How To Paint In Magic; there was nothing more antithetical to remembrance than 'forced feelings', and it was recommended that novice painters ought to play with the 'free flow of their imagination' rather than try to conceive of 'specific images'. Thus, instead of trying to rejuvenate the flowers as she might have with a rejuicing potion (and she considered brewing a rejuicing potion, in the makeshift laboratory by the dining room, before remembering Tarquin Court's dearth of herbological ingredients), Mary let herself contemplate the general notion of a 'flower'. What she was to paint had to be meaningful to her; Urquart's flowers would not do—so her mind plumbed the depths of her memory, bundling in a blurry rotating kaleidoscopic bouquet the dried carnations she and Tom collected in a straw basket along the orphanage's avenue during the autumns of their earliest childhood, with the singing saffrons that serenaded her first blissful, fateful kiss with Arcanius Fawley. She closed her eyes.

"Expecto memoriam."

Magic gushed down Mary's arm. She felt she had mobilised enough power to kill a dragon. She opened her eyes to find the flowers she had murdered and uglified had changed into the proud, purple saffrons that adorned a particularly meaningful bower in the grand garden of the Fawley estate. Although they produced no music, they were as ripe and as desirable as her maidenhood was to Osborne Urquart.

A yawn sounded. Florence had woken; she, in her violet pyjama robe, sat up in her violet bed, and squinted quizzically at Mary's empurpled flowers.

"Good morning Mary."

"Morning, Flo."

"Merlin's beard! How did you do that?"

"I painted them."

Florence paused for a moment before remarking in a strained voice, "Wouldn't—Osborne—find that disagreeable?"

"Precisely," said Mary, a hint of pride in her tone, "remember the singing saffrons I stole from Arcanius's place?"

Florence got out of bed, put on her velvet slippers, and went to stand behind Mary to admire her work. "But don't you think you're playing with fire?" she asked quietly.

Mary responded to her friend's question with one of her own. "Aren't you on my side, Florence?" Her tone was more sharp than she intended it to be.

"Always!"

"I'm standing up for myself," said Mary, imagining she said what Ermesinda Slytherin would have liked to say to her father, when the Knight of Jaunet liberated her of her father's cursed necklace. "I'm playing with fire, indeed—but I'd prefer to burn myself with it than to renounce my dignity as a witch."

"I just want you to be like yourself again," Florence said, placing a hand on Mary's shoulder. "You want to hurt Osborne, I understand. I want to hurt him too. But if you let him consume your thoughts you'll just be letting him hurt you more."

"He'll never consume more of my thoughts than Arcanius." Aware that this was a non-sequitur, Mary reinforced it by sensually running her hand through her painted saffrons. "I'm already as I was before."

"You're not as you were before. Don't hide it from me, darling; I've never seen you read so much as you have for the past week. Mary Riddle is not a reader."

Mary had not told Florence of her discovery. She knew she inevitably would, but she wanted to go on a secret honeymoon with her new knowledge before disclosing it to anyone. Moreover, she felt it would be wrong to tell it to anyone before she told it to Tom.

"Plus, The Sacred Twenty-Eight? Mary Riddle is not a genealogist, either."

"Perhaps it might give me some clue of who my parents were." The lie floated out of Mary's mouth like a placid cloud of perfume.


In a charming little park in Cardiff, an elderly muggle couple took a leisurely stroll under the shade of the lush summer beeches. The warbling melody of a bird could be heard in the distance, and the leaves rustled in the wind like a conch shell echoes the sea.

However, the couple's peace was shattered when a kaleidoscope of colours suddenly appeared on the pavement—a black cloud tinged with bursts of yellow and red, which transformed into a man like a shape-shifting messenger from Greek mythology. It was none other than Fleamont Potter.

Dusting off his dark dress-robes trimmed with golden lacework and drawing his wand, Fleamont approached the terrified couple and said, "Don't be afraid, I'm just a wizard. Please stand still, this won't hurt—obliviate." And just like that, he erased himself from the memories of the muggle couple.

Adjusting his cherry-red cravat and picking up his leather briefcase, Fleamont strolled out of the park. He had been invited to dinner by Torquil Travers, and he hadn't dressed up this fancily since his father's diamond jubilee. Checking his reflection in a muggle fountain, Fleamont saw that his hair had already begun to rebel against the enchanted pomade he had applied only an hour ago. Oh well, Torquil Travers would just have to deal with it.

Fleamont arrived at the west side of Cardiff bridge and drew out his antiquated racing broom, which had been shortened at one end to fit under his invisibility cloak. The flight to Tarquin's Court along the Welsh coast was peaceful, taking only fifteen minutes to reach the courtyard of the imposing estate. After landing and dismounting, Fleamont returned his broom and cloak to his briefcase, straightened his robes, adjusted his cravat, and knocked on the door.

He was met with a pair of adorable little Slytherin girls.

"Why good afternoon there Fleamont," came the first Slytherin girl, the tempestuous, easily-laughing heiress of Travers, "here on a Sunday, and so splendidly dressed. What's the occasion?"

"Your father invited me for dinner," Fleamont replied with a sheepish grin. "And when Torquil Travers invites someone for dinner, they better dress like they've been summoned before the Wizengamot."

"But isn't it rather early?" came the second Slytherin girl, a pale, black-haired muggleborn beauty whose acumen for potions far exceeded that of her friend's. "Dinner's not until eight."

Fleamont looked at the sky to redundantly examine the position of the sun. "Ah," he said with a sigh followed by a laugh. "I suppose it is. Well, I had nothing else to do—and I've a bag full of ingredients for a potion ordered by one of my most prosperous clients. I don't suppose you girls would like to learn how to brew the Draught of Peace?"

"Sure we would!" Florence Travers and Mary Riddle chanted synchronously. "Who's your client?"

It was none other than Madam Hepzibah Smith, the pitiful and absurd heiress of Hufflepuff. Fleamont believed her nervous problems were more physiological than "spiritual," but he was not one to challenge the delusions of monstrously affluent witches who took an interest in his services.

"I would be a poor apothecary if I forewent potioneer-patient confidentiality so easily."

As they went down the hallway and turned into the dining room, they were met with Torquil Travers' nephew—an Urquart called Oscar or Obscurus or something of the sort—who, in his velvet black pyjamas, was in the process of unceremoniously having tea upon the kitchen worktop.

"Hello," Fleamont called jovially. "You must be Mister Urquart. How do you do?"

Urquart, with his mouth full of jammy scones, managed to mumble out a reply, "Doing fine, thanks. And you're Mr. Potter?"

"Mr. Potter indeed!" Fleamont exclaimed proudly. "Although do call me Fleamont. The girls and I intend on brewing two cauldrons of Draught of Peace. Care to join us?"

Fleamont felt both the girls tug at his sleeves; they did not seem to want Urquart to join them. A cousinly quarrel—he had seen such happen in his own family many times—and as an adult he felt responsible to not succumb to the girls' petulance. Urquart, being older than the girls and thus more sensible than them, gave Fleamont an appreciative smile before yelling, "Sure."

As they went into the makeshift laboratory, Fleamont heard Urquart grunt multiple times—the girls had taken to hexing him. Deciding he was after all too young to play the substitute parent, Fleamont pretended not to notice.

"Fleamont," came Mary Riddle's melodious voice, "I'm feeling sick. May I excuse myself?"

This caught the potioneer by surprise. Although she hadn't attended most of Florence's lessons, Mary Riddle, whenever she was present in the laboratory, always proved to be at once a much more inquisitive, competent, and proactive student than her friend, who was already in her own right (and despite her father's estimation) quite capable. Moreover the colouration of Mary's comely face betrayed no illness.

"Of course you may—but sick in what regard? We can brew you a pepper-up potion concocted with honey."

"It's alright, quite alright," Mary Riddle said quickly, stepping backwards towards the door. "I'll see you at dinner."

"Mr. Potter," said Urquart. "Might I excuse myself too? I'll take care of—"

"That won't be necessary," Mary blurted acerbically. "I will see you at dinner."

The Urquart boy looked like he wanted to protest, but Mary Riddle slammed the door in his face. Fleamont watched this altercation quizzically; it was normal for animosity to foment between cousins—but between a boy and his cousin's brilliant best friend? Most curious. But while it was a pity to lose the company of Mary, Fleamont was sure that the Urquart boy—a sixth or seventh year by appearance—would be more than adequate compensation from a technical point of view.

The potioneer was proved wrong. The moonstone Urquart grinded was not sufficiently granular, and he grunted indignantly when Fleamont took up the mortar and pestle to complete the task. Fleamont had often prided himself on his ability to criticise others without offending them; he never raised his voice, and it was a maxim of his that demonstration was always a better way to teach than remonstration. Oscar/Obscurus/Osman Urquart was a living counter-proof to Fleamont's pedagogical principles; every gentle nudge Fleamont made was taken by the boy as a hex to the crotch.

The Draught of Peace was supposed to be a beautiful, bluish-white potion that emitted a silvery vapour. The tincture that the heiress of Travers and the Urquart boy brewed under the supervision of Fleamont was too blue, and its vapours were smoky. Nonetheless it still resembled what it was supposed to be, and whoever imbibed it would certainly feel some sense of peace, albeit not the thirty-galleons-a-gulp tranquillity that Hepzibah Smith sought.


Osborne Urquart tried not to glare at Fleamont Potter, but he had never met a man who embodied everything he disliked so comprehensively like the black-haired potioneer did. Like many former Gryffindors, Potter's pride took the form of a sheepish smugness that considered itself above arrogance. Potter comported himself like those vile muggle men of religion—missionfairies, or some pompous appellation of the sort—who went to the most impoverished corners of their sad world to tell the most downtrodden muggles that they were equal to their kings. That Potter's specialty was potions outraged Osborne all the more; yes, potions were certainly necessary for the flourishing of any wizard—but that Uncle Torquil should invite an apprentice apothecary to dine under the arched ceiling of Tarquin's Court was obscene. The Potters were beneath the Travers; Uncle Torquil of all men ought to have known that.

"All of these are for you!" Potter patted Florence's back with one hand as he gestured with the other at the four vials of Draught of Peace that he, Florence, and Osborne just extracted from two still-boiling cauldrons. "I don't mean to insinuate that anyone in your household has a need for them, but you never know. Perhaps take them with you to Hogwarts. Third year's a big step up from second year, and not just academically. Hogsmeade Trips can be great fun, but you'll find that all the romance and intrigue involved in them might give you something worse than a headache—a heartache."

"What about your client?" Florence asked with consternation.

"I'll brew another batch tonight," Potter said easily. "Why don't you and your cousin run along now? Today's Sunday, not strictly a lesson for you. I'll clean up the lab."

"Splendid. Thank you for these," said Florence, awkwardly holding two draughts in each hand, "I will see you at dinner then."

With that, Florence left the laboratory; Osborne, refusing to say farewell to the upstart potions-man, simply followed his cousin and closed the laboratory door. At last liberated from that cramped space, the first thought that came to him was find Mary Riddle. He needed her; he had felt, for the past two weeks, that life was not worth living if not in her presence, and that happiness could only be felt in intimacy with her; the greater the intimacy, the greater the happiness. The second was to complain to his cousin about her potions tutor.

"You know Potter gave you those potions because they aren't good enough for his 'client', right?" he asked Florence.

"Obviously," Florence huffed, starting to climb the stairs with the four Draughts clutched tightly in her grubby hands.

"You should throw them out. If they aren't fit for his client, they aren't fit for a Travers. They'll make you sick."

Florence snorted. "You've got the mind of a doorknob covered in mold. Yes, these Draughts aren't the best there are—but they'll still work, and they were given to us for free."

Osborne glared at her. Mother had once suggested he might one day marry Florence; Osborne resolved that if this were to ever happen, he would utterly ruin their wedding day. She was a stupid, stupid little girl who held potions like a muggle butcher might have held the dismembered feet of pigs. The potions storage of Tarquin's Court was on its second floor; realising that his cousin already held all of Potter's treacherous draughts, Osborne found there was no point for him to continue following her. He would resume his courting of Mary. Before she had slipped between his fingers in the laboratory, he had sniffed her hair and pressed himself against her backside and felt her electrical magic make every fibre of his flesh quiver.

Indeed, Osborne's appreciation of Mary Riddle was something he prided himself on. He had a unique understanding of her worthiness (other boys merely liked her because she was physically beautiful; this, too, made Osborne yearn, but it was not the only thing that aroused his wizardly animus)—being the best Slytherin in the class of 1942 at Ancient Runes, he had developed his sensitivity to magic potentiality to a degree far higher than most wizards his age (though this would not aid his NEWTs for the subject, sensitivity to magic potentiality was indispensable to any cursebreaker worth a damn, and Osborne intended on being the best cursebreaker in Britain) and thus felt keenly the great, luminous store of magic that coursed through the veins of the exquisite, tantalising mudblood that his cousin had made her best friend.

Mary's twin brother, too, radiated magical potentiality—but Tom Riddle's being was inhospitable and frightening to Osborne. It all interested Osborne very much, the interrelation of magic, sex, and power—Mary seemed the encapsulation of all three; and there fate presented her before him, with no ominous brother or meddlesome professors to protect her. He would have preferred to have her in love; but the notion of having her by force agreed with him just as much. She was more than an infatuation; she was an opportunity that he could not afford to squander. Osborne felt as though having her would increase the power of his own magic; perhaps it would.

But Mary was nowhere to be found. She was as elusive as a young unicorn that sensed danger. Osborne thought to interrogate Florence, but his cousin, clever little bint that she was, spent the early evening in the room with Uncle Torquil. He searched everywhere in the house and even went down to the beach. Mary was nowhere to be seen. Osborne only had two more weeks to have her; after that they would both return to Hogwarts, where she would create a distance from him that he would be unable to close for the rest of his life. But he had no choice other than to wait for dinner, and take her afterwards.

When dinner came, Osborne's heart pounded against his sternum like a wild boar beating against the bars of a magizoologist's cage. Mary Riddle wore a light blue sundress, the hue of a cloudless spring morning, which somehow accentuated the fragility of her pure, pristine skin. A small laurel of bluebells crowned her head, and her eyelashes were decorated as such that every time she blinked, Osborne felt heat rush to his loins.

"What do you make of the incident in Cambridge, sir?" Potter asked Uncle Torquil, as he hastily partitioned the duck breast on his plate into large, uneven chunks.

Torquil Travers, with an upright demeanour befitting a man of his surname (if only Florence knew the value of her heritage), took a delicate sip of his champagne before responding. "It was an attack, Mr. Potter, carried out by the Freimagier vanguard."

"But why would they bother with somewhere like Cambridge?" Potter asked impertinently. "If they'd wanted to kill a dozen muggles they could've done so in London. Would've sent more of a message, don't you think?"

Uncle Torquil faintly shook his head as though to reproach a curious but presumptuous first year. "These weren't common muggles, Mr. Potter—the DMAC lists among their casualties eleven members of the Royal Air Force, including a captain, three senior officers, two engineers, and one of the muggle British state's foremost aeroplane designers."

Potter suggested a tit-for-tat approach. "So it's eleven of theirs for eleven of ours, then?"

Osborne snorted.

The conversation continued in this vein for some time, with Potter and Uncle Torquil discussing the war while Osborne could do nothing but watch in agony as Mary Riddle laughed and chatted with his dim-witted cousin. He tried his best to appear engaged in the conversation, but his mind was elsewhere, consumed by thoughts of Mary and the unbearable throbbing in his loins.

"Father, Mary and I must use the bathroom," said Florence. Taking Mary's hand, Florence fled upstairs with her. Osborne considered following, but he realised doing so would arouse the suspicion of his uncle and Fleamont Potter. Mary would come back anyhow, and after dinner he would have her.

But the girls did not come back. Over fifteen minutes passed; Uncle Torquil and Potter continued to chatter on about the damned war; and Osborne realised that his cousin and Mary had outmanoeuvred him.

"Uncle, may I be excused?" he asked.

"Yes, go on now," Uncle Torquil murmured impatiently, evidently glad that the dinner table was at last rid of teenagers. "You were saying, Mr. Potter?"

Osborne cast the silencing charm on the soles of his shoes and climbed up the stairs. He opened the door of his cousin's ridiculous purple bedroom, only to find it vacant—his attention was drawn to the vase on the bedside, containing a bouquet of what was undoubtedly singing saffrons; Arcanius' flower—provoking from him an anguished grunt. Finally, he found on Florence's bed two empty draughts—it appeared that the girls had ingested the liquid opiate—and at once Osborne's mind cleared of its envy of his best friend; instead it bloomed with damp, vivid fantasies of what he would do with a delirious or unconscious Mary Riddle.

Leaving Tarquin's Court, Osborne marvelled at how it was always warmer outside of Uncle Torquil's home than it was within. This suited him; he prided himself on enduring rather than accommodating his uncle's proclivity for the cooling charm. The clear night sky and cool nocturnal summer air was suggestive of Mary Riddle's luscious black hair and benevolent lips. Running down the sloping lawn of the mansion, Osborne found her.

She lay, with Osborne's insolent little cousin, on a great violet blanket spread out against the sand that glittered under the permissive half-moon. Lest she run, Osborne tiptoed all the way towards her, seeing Florence soundly tranquillised by the draught when he was but a few yards from the blanket. Mary, however, like a Greek statue brought to life by the goddess of love to assuage its lovelorn sculptor, lay serenely on the blanket with her both hands folded beneath her head, engrossed in the contemplation of stars that were less beautiful than her.

"Mary." Osborne's lips trembled as he said her name.

"Osborne," said she, with neither a smile nor a frown. "Are you going to hurt me?"

"No," he said without hesitation. "Of course not. Is Florence asleep?"

Mary sat up and looked over at Florence. "Yes, the draught's effects were rather pronounced on her."

And they're rather pronounced on you, you silly, silly little witch, Osborne wanted to say, for the tenor of Mary's sweet voice and slowness of her movements betrayed nothing short of total inebriation. He came closer to her. She shrank.

"You want to have me, don't you?" she asked numbly. "You can, but be gentle."

This startled Osborne. He was a terribly proud boy indeed, but he knew what he was and was not capable of—he had not expected Mary to concede to him so easily. He had already prepared himself to take her by force.

"You can have me many times," she continued, although there was no warmth in her voice. "But you must be gentle each time, or I will flee you forever."

"Of course I will be," he said at once, going towards her with twitching, outstretched hands, "gentle, each time, for you, love."

She stood up. "Not here, not by Florence."

"Back inside then?"

"No, your uncle's there. I know somewhere nice, follow me."

Waddling in intoxication, the beautiful girl went towards the shore. Osborne, giddy with anticipation, rushed towards her to touch her arm.

"Off," she murmured, placing her own gentle, drunken hand on his intentful one. "You'll get to touch me all you want later."

"Of course."

The promise of future bliss made Osborne easily acquiesce. They had reached a small headland surrounded with rocks that Mary, despite her insobriety, impressively scaled. Turning a rounded corner, Osborne saw her slyly enter a cavern etched in the stony cliff, quickly disappearing into its opaque depths. He followed, undeterred. Being no more than a few yards higher than the present tide, the cave must have been frequently flooded during storms; besides the pungent scent of the sea that permeated the cave, all it took was for Osborne to draw his wand and say "lumos," to see that the cave's floor was covered in little puddles, dead clams, and bundles of dried seaweed. Lifting his eyes, he found that the cavern was considerably larger than he had thought—and that Mary was nowhere to be seen.

Yet her footsteps could be heard, and the cave only went in one direction. Following the capricious passage that nonsensically went up, then down, then left, then right, Osborne quickly found where sweet swift-footed Mary must have been; a smaller tunnel, jutting from the unidirectional passage like a cave within a cave, was basked in a strange blue light—perhaps Mary's wand's rendition of lumos.

"Mary?" he asked meekly.

"Come in," she said, "but unlight your wand, it's so garish."

Her words were sultry and sober; the draught's poor quality was showing—no more than an hour could have passed, and its effects were already waning.

"Nox." Now there remained but the strange fluorescent light coming from the tunnel, towards which Osborne went with the fervour of a chaser towards a goalpost, but the actual motions of a sixteen-year-old boy stumbling about in a cave.

When he got to the entrance of the tunnel, he beheld Aphrodite herself.

Like a young shamaness atop her sacrificial altar, Mary Riddle sat completely naked on a large, weathered stone, across a large pool of shimmering silvery water from where Osborne stood in amazement. Her portions weren't quite what his lurid imagination had imagined for her—she was infinitely more a girl than a woman—but the way in which she sat there, as bare as the day she was born, her porcelain maiden skin glowing against the strange argent water, surpassed everything that Osborne could have hoped for. Her body was manifold; it combined the curvaceous lineaments of a young woman with the slender fragility of a virgin girl with the fragile purity of an infant. She was evidently younger than him; though he had oddly never contemplated this fact, it now engorged his satyric appetite all the more. He thought that taking her innocence might make him regain some of his own.

But though he was utterly enthralled by Mary's nude figure, it did not elude Osborne that she had cast some strange beautifying charms on herself. For instance, she seemed indistinctly watery—she swayed ever so lightly on the rock in the way that her reflection ought to have swayed in the water, were the water not opaque and silvery. Furthermore her skin was, quite literally, radiant—it was the second source of light in that narrow, sensual tunnel, besides the incomprehensible blue fluorescence of the water.

"Well?" came her voice, which, eerily resonant and disembodied, came from all around Urquart, reminiscent of the voices of Quidditch commentators enhanced by sonorus. "Disrobe yourself."

Osborne thought Mary's words did not align with her mouth, but let go of this thought as soon as he unlaced his robes. He would have taken off his undergarments quicker, were it not for the magnetic attraction his eyes had to this mirage of a girl before him. As soon as he was done, her celestial voice pronounced, "Come, step in the water."

He obeyed her. His foot stepped on something at once soft yet sharp; but the sharpness quickly dispelled while the softness remained. Perhaps he was growing delirious from lust, but it seemed to Osborne that Mary's radiance had, in the span of a few seconds, increased twofold—she looked as though she were made of converging beams of light.

"Don't you want me?" Her voice echoed. "Stop looking, and come."

He took a confident step forward, only to find himself quavering madly to correct himself as the floor of the pool depressed. He stepped onto another soft-sharp thing. Soft-sharp things swarmed his ankles and stung him; he winced and flinched and muttered more than one expletive under his breath. Mary, whose sheen had augmented in brightness so much that it was beginning to hurt to look at her, appeared indifferent to Osborne's suffering.

"Why are you so bright?" he asked awkwardly, moving about his legs in an effort to evade the omnipresent soft-sharp things.

"Come," repeated the mass of light in the shape of a nymph.

Osborne took another step forward and found that the silvery water swallowed his knees. The stinging things did not abate in their attacks on him. The instinct that had been eminent in him for the past four hours—that of a boy looking to slake himself on a girl who was close and unprotected—was still his driving urge, albeit he became aware of another emotion that swelled by the side of it; fear. But he refused to acknowledge the terror that grew within him; he was so close to attaining that which he most wanted—he would not give up right before his goalpost—before Mary, goddess of beauty and caprice, suddenly vanished in a blaze of colour.

As though she had been the intersection of several beams of light in a greenhouse and a dozen invisible curtains were just drawn, the girl on the rock dematerialised into a moving shadow, and then nothing into at all. The cave was suddenly very dark; Osborne had not realised at what point it was Mary, rather than the ugly fluorescence of the pool, that had illuminated the tunnel all along.

"Mary!" he called horrifically. "Mary!"

There remained nothing but the stinging creatures and the sound of trickling water in the distance. The worry that remained obstinately dormant in his heart for the past few minutes suddenly roused into waking terror, eclipsing and killing his libido in one decisive motion. He had never heard the beating of his heart so clearly.

"Mary! Please!"

Then, something hard hit him in the back. It felt like a fist or a foot, and just as Osborne fell into the pond of a hundred starved jellyfish, he thought he heard a girl say, you disgust me.