clxxxiii. fibbing
Not a word was exchanged between the three witches as they sat through a very long and very complicated lecture in Potions that morning. Elara took dedicated notes—she had to, as her essays were the only component floating her dismal marks in the class—but her mind wandered as she watched Snape's slow, methodical pacing in front of the blackboard.
Of course something as dated as the Triwizard Tournament would have a ball. It seemed the want of wizarding society to mark events with balls and dances and festivals—be it Yule or Imbolc or Ostara. It brought together witches and wizards, high in spirit and energy, a perfect time for communal casting—at least, in the old days.
Now, it was simply a ball, a chance for everyone to dress up and ask their crushes to dance.
Elara felt sick to her stomach.
Snape ended his lecture with his usual biting remark on their dearth of talent, but it mostly went unheard as stools scraped the stone floor and bodies slumped toward the ingredient cupboard. Elara didn't move, allowing Harriet and Hermione to retrieve the items. With her luck, she'd cause a catastrophe if she touched anything.
"Bloody tournament," Harried hissed as she slapped a slip of Erumpent skin on the table. Though much less volatile than the creature's horn, sparks still spat from it and earned a sharp "Potter!" out of Snape from across the room. Harriet flung herself onto her seat. "Who decided we had to get dress robes?!"
"Lucinda Thomsonicle-Pocus," Hermione said, balancing several bottles of different oils. One bottle took the chance to escape and began floating toward the ceiling, but Hermione jumped to catch it before it got too far.
"Gesundheit," Harriet snarked.
"Don't be that way. Madam Thomsonicle-Pocus is a member of the Board of Governors and is responsible for generating and ratifying the student lists every year." Hermione lined the bottles by their cauldron. "I guess we can write Mrs. Malfoy and see if she can assist us in finding something on a Hogsmeade weekend. Gladrags is a tad pricey, but the sooner we look, the better selection we'll have…."
Elara noted Hermione had neatly glossed over the fact that none of them had dates, nor did she clarify if they wanted to attend this travesty. Their less than middling social clout probably demanded they go whether or not they desired to, lest they become true House pariahs. They were already considered odd; Elara didn't want their standing to devolve into freakish anytime soon.
She closed her eyes and kneaded her brow.
"I can't go to Hogsmeade," Harriet said.
"What?"
"I didn't magically gain a guardian over the summer to sign the permission slip."
Hermione sputtered and shoved her hair aside. The curls had begun to swell already as cauldrons were set over open flames. "But what about Sirius? He'd signed mine for this year—and he's your godfather!"
"But not my guardian. He can't be my legal guardian without filing paperwork at the Ministry. Dumbledore says that particular office is being watched. Closely."
"And? What does it matter; once he's your guardian, he's your guardian!"
"You'd think that, right?" Harriet looked around and, noticing Finnigan and Thomas at the table behind them were trying to listen in on their conversation, lowered her voice. The floating oil slipped from Finnigan's hand and rose to the ceiling. "But apparently, Gaunt's been waiting for that."
"How do you know? Or, well, how does the Headmaster?"
"I think he knows someone in the department. I asked about it, and he said this, err, clause? There's this clause in family law about former Azkaban prisoners, where the Ministry can contend their suitability as a parent or guardian."
"But he's my guardian. That doesn't make sense."
The unspoken sentiment that the MPA had very little concern for a guardian's suitability passed between them, and Elara heard Hermione grinding her teeth.
"If the Ministry decided Sirius wasn't suitable, which would most likely happen, then I'd have to go back to my prior guardians." Harriet sighed as she fished through her potions kit and pulled out her goggles and dragonhide gloves. "And I can't go back to my guardians because they're—y'know." Muggles. And rubbish human beings. "So I'd become a ward of the Ministry."
Elara and Hermione could not mask their shivers. "I still cannot fathom why he is expending such effort on your part, Harriet." Hermione's gaze flicked across the classroom toward Snape, who had come down from his desk to answer a question for Nott. "Yes, he wishes to know what happened in front of the Mirror of Erised, but to what end? Surely he understands you don't know what happened any more than Selwyn or Professors Slytherin or Dumbledore. So why expend Ministry resources and—and act like a creep?"
"Intuition," Elara muttered, and when Hermione raised a brow, she rolled her eyes and explained. "While you might disparage Divinations, others do not. Intuition and instinct are powerful factors for witches and wizards." She flicked one gloved hand toward the potion they'd barely started. "Like this mess. I would say if Gaunt and the Dark Lord are connected in some manner, we should assume something in the Minister—however minuscule—recognizes Harriet."
"That's absurd," Hermione said, though her face paled and her voice lacked conviction.
"Is it? He doesn't strike me as a particularly rational man. If he were to follow an inkling that told him Harriet was important, or that the secrecy around her residency and background elicited more inspection, would he not behave as he has been? Like a dodgy conman trying to pull her under his thumb so he can finally get a good look?"
Neither Harriet nor Hermione replied, both lost in the thought as they considered Elara's words. Harriet started pulling on the goggles and gloves, grumbling.
"Still doesn't change the fact that I can't go to Hogsmeade and buy my weight in Honeyduke's fudge." Then, she smirked. "Well…not legally, at any rate."
For want of something to do, Elara picked up their cauldron and brought it to the sink, filling it with water from the spigot shaped like a gargoyle's mouth. As the cold liquid sloshed, Snape swept by and hissed, "Do something besides stand there like an idiot, or I'm failing you for the day."
Elara turned her head to meet his dark eyes—a surprisingly easy task, given they were nearly the same height now. It was their unspoken agreement that Snape would allow her to skate by as Harriet and Hermione's partner so long as she appeared busy and refrained from blowing up his classroom.
"Yes, sir." She cut off the water, and Snape slid away, snapping at Longbottom to mind his ingredients. Elara returned to the table and placed the cauldron on its rack before Hermione, retreating to her seat.
Harriet started in on the Erumpent skin, slicing it into slivers, goggles and gloves in place to protect herself from the stray sparks. Others in the room did the same, and soon the air smelled heavily of sulfur and pepper. The odor gave Elara a headache.
"Regardless of Hogsmeade, are you going to write Narcissa?" Hermione asked as she measured lungfish oil and dripped it into the warming water. "She'll be able to find you something without you there."
"That's what scares me," Harriet snorted, handing her knife to Elara so she could wipe it clean. It was about all she could do in Potions most days. "No, I think I'll write Mr. Flamel and Perenelle and ask."
"Why not Narcissa?"
"If I have to go to this stupid ball, I don't want to be dressed up like a pure-blood twit."
Elara took exception at that—after all, she intended to let Mrs. Malfoy help her pick out her clothes, and she was a pure-blood. Her temples pounded. "Can we stop talking about the wretched dance?" she demanded. The venom in her tone earned a startled look from Hermione and Harriet. They both nodded and concentrated instead on the potion.
The remainder of class passed in a similar manner, the trio of witches silent aside from the occasional remark about their project, Hermione enthralled by how the different oils layered atop one another and the boiling water beneath. A rounded metal sieve went over the cauldron's top when they came close to being done, the finished product floating upward like strange, amorphous helium bubbles. It was caught in the sieve and carefully funneled into their sample vial.
Predictably, Seamus and Dean managed to explode their own brew, which meant Elara, Harriet, and Hermione ended up with gunk splattered against the back of their robes.
Snape's snarling did little for Elara's headache.
"I'm going to change," she said as soon as the bell rang for lunch. "And get some fresh air."
"All right. Want me to save you anything?"
"No. I'll ask Mably if I need something."
She left before Harriet or Hermione could say anything else, or before Snape had a chance to dismiss them, given he was busy trying to heal the burns on Seamus' face. She returned to the dorm, shed her ruined robes, and yanked a spare pair from her wardrobe. Her throat felt tight, the collar and tie seeming to cut into her skin, but Elara refused to undue the buttons.
The Yule Ball. It's traditional for the Triwizard Tournament to include a seasonal ball that you have to attend with a date.
Elara hadn't even heard of the stupid ball until this morning, and now it lurked in her head like a loathsome rat the size of York.
You have to attend with a date.
The air bit against her cheeks as she stepped out the front doors and went down the steps. Elara deliberated whether to head toward the lake or around the castle, but decided the wind coming off the water would probably wreak havoc on her asthma. She instead turned along the path toward the greenhouses.
She walked in silence, hands shoved into the pockets of her robes, passing a group of fifth-year Ravenclaws rushing toward lunch. Exhaling, Elara hurried a few more paces and stepped off the path into the planter cloister to avoid the Slytherins trailing after the Ravenclaws. She didn't particularly care about seeing them, but she didn't want Verpia and Barlow starting any gossip about her wandering on her own.
Standing in the arch's shadow, watching the older students pass, Elara waited. From behind her, she heard a voice.
It spoke quietly, and not in English, so at first, Elara didn't realize someone else was in the cloister with her. When she did, she froze, then slowly turned to see who she'd interrupted.
Elara would recognize that silver hair anywhere. Even in the dim glow, it glimmered like starlight, and when Fleur Delacour flipped it back behind her shoulder, she saw Elara and paused in her reading. There was a book—a textbook by the looks of it—open in her lap, and next to her sat a girl of no more than seven or eight with the same silvery hair. They sat on one of the overturned stone planters like a bench. A yellow magelight hovered at her shoulder.
Heat crawled up Elara's neck, and the tight, choking feeling in her throat returned. "Ah, hello," she said, voice breaking. She coughed into her hand once. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize anyone was over here."
Delacour gave a small, entirely too poised sniff. The younger girl said something in French, something nervous, and Delacour gave her hand a small, reassuring pat.
Elara wondered if Delacour remembered her from their brief meeting at Beauxbatons. No, probably not; Elara had experienced a growth spurt over the summer, and why would Delacour remember one of two strange foreign students who visited her school for one evening? That was foolish.
It couldn't be comfortable in the cloister. A persistent damp lingered and clung to the stone walls, and because the space mainly found use as a storage area for the containers Sprout didn't use, it didn't have any proper places to sit.
She shouldn't care. It wasn't any of Elara's business where Beauxbaton's champion chose to spend her time.
"Why are you here?" she blurted, cursing herself. "As in here, in the cloister? There's plenty of space in the library if you need a place to study or read."
"Hmm. It iz too noisy there. It iz too noisy everywhere. You Hogwarts students are too boisterous and intrusive. It iz impossible to find a place where we will not be bothered."
Her brusque reply helped abate the blush on Elara's face, and she returned Delacour's cool look with one of her own. Still, that didn't stop her from spewing more words before she could stop herself. "There's a better place near the greenhouses. More comfortable, instead of what is essentially a garden shed."
A delicate pink flush touched Delacour's cheeks, then vanished just as quickly. She snapped the book shut. "Very well. Come, Gabrielle. Nous irons avec elle."
The little witch, Gabrielle, nodded and hopped to her feet, followed by Delacour, who held her hand. Delacour glanced at Elara, then away, fussing with her hair.
"This would not be a problem if the accommodations at Hogwarts were not so…primitive."
"Yes, unfortunately, we can't seem to afford gilding every torch bracket or featuring marble fountains in every classroom." The corner of Elara's mouth hitched as she remembered the brief tour of Beauxbatons and the obscene wealth displayed therein. She felt less uncertain of herself, at least for the moment. "It's just this way."
She stepped out of the cloister onto the path again, heading toward the greenhouses. Delacour and the girl followed.
"Which are you, then?"
"I beg your pardon?" Elara asked, glancing over her shoulder.
"Which of ze…Houses?"
"Oh. Slytherin."
"I do not understand zis custom."
"Do they not have Houses in Beauxbatons."
"Non. It is a silly thing. We are taught by age group, and then…par garçon ou fille."
That sounded bloody awful to Elara, but she kept her opinion to herself. Delacour may not believe in the House system, but she surely was as prissy as any Slytherin.
"I didn't know Beauxbatons accepted students so young," Elara commented. Delacour's blue eyes flashed, and her lips compressed into a fine line. When she spoke, her voice was frostier still, an impressive feat, and her accent thickened.
"Zey do not. Not zat it is any of your business, but Gabrielle iz my little sister, and our maman cannot watch her during the year. Madame Maxime is generous enough to make an exception for her."
Elara didn't reply as they came to the gate leading into the greenhouses. She led the way along the stone wall, walking farther in until they reached a point almost halfway between the glass enclosures. She stepped into the area between greenhouses eight and nine.
"Oh," Delacour said, blinking as she saw the stone courtyard with its benches and tables, surrounded by blooming bushes of vibrant flowers. The area smelled much too fragrant for Elara's allergies—already she could feel her nose tickling from pollen—but she could admit it was lovely. "It is…it is acceptable," Delacour sniffed.
Elara glanced at her from the corner of her eye. "Quite."
Gabrielle muttered a shy "Merci!" and took her book—a book of basic Charms for children—from her sister, and skipped to a table. Delacour turned to Elara.
"Yes, merci. It is adequate, your help is appreciated." She tucked her hair behind her ears. "I did not catch your name."
"It's Elara." Elara cleared her throat again as her stomach tightened, and the air in her chest felt thin, paltry. The uncertainty returned again, and her palms felt sticky with sweat.
It's because she's part-Veela, she told herself. She has to be. It's Veela magic.
Veela magic isn't supposed to work on women.
Guilt swelled hot and miserable in her gut, and Elara hated it. She hated the echoing voices of the sisters at St. Giles' talking about sin and aberrant behavior and how they dug into her skin like burrs.
She lowered her eyes to the ground and took a sharp step back from Delacour, refusing to think of how her shampoo smelled like jasmine, or how she seemed to glow in the sunshine. In doing so, Elara brushed her arm against a dark-leafed plant. It shivered and started to shriek.
"She thinks you're pretty!" it chorused, sending Elara's heart plummeting to her knees. "She thinks you're pretty!"
The bush next to it howled, "She thinks you're ugly! She thinks you're ugly!"
Elara yanked her wand out and started throwing vicious Silencing Charms over the foliage, shredding a few flowers in the process. By the time she turned, red-faced, to Delacour, the French witch looked very smug indeed. Elara flinched.
"Do mind the Fibbing Mums and Wholesome Holly," she managed to say. She almost dropped her wand as she tried to tuck it away.
"Oui. One tells lies, and one tells the truth, yes?" Delacour tipped her head and tapped one finger against her lips as if in thought. She smiled, her teeth bright and straight, her eyes glittering with mirth she hadn't displayed earlier. "Oh, but which plant is which, I wonder?"
Elara gathered what courage she had and quickly hurried away.
A/N:
Later, Sprout finds Elara in the Chrysanthemum Courtyard, strangling the flowers. Sprout backs away without a word.