A/N: Woot! Mr. Darcy and I are writing chapters at the same time. Hopefully, the result is more chapters in less time. I won't ask which chapter you liked most. ;)
Enjoy. :)
Lady Beatrice
Dear Albus, September 28th, 1991
I hope you and Abe are both doing well. I imagine the new first years must be settling in now and starting to learn more about their respective houses. I do hope you decide to abolish that system someday, though. The rivalries it produces are quite dreadful.
Last week my two charges got their first wands; a very interesting process here in Australia that requires a visit to the Australian Ministry in Uluru. As always, a child's first few days with a wand can be very interesting, depending on how stable the child's magic has become and how cooperative their wands are, but they both seem to be adjusting with surprising ease. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised since they've been 'secretly' practicing magic for quite some time now.
As we both know, my strengths in teaching lie in History and Magical Theory, and with my magic dwindling as I age, precious little else. While I feel confident that I can teach my two charges the basics in all of the major branches of magic, I fear that once they are ready to learn more, I will be unable to demonstrate it, or even teach it properly, particularly given my speech difficulties. While you have suggested the possibility of bringing the children back to England and Hogwarts, I remain as fundamentally opposed as I was 10 years ago, especially considering your ongoing suspicions about a certain dark wizard who I would very much rather the children not encounter.
Let me suggest a compromise. In your last letter, you hinted at a plan to either confirm your fears or finally allay them. If nothing comes to pass, as I dearly hope is the case, then I will talk to the family next door about returning to England. However, if your intuition is correct and our mutual adversary has still not passed on, then let us put together a list of trusted acquaintances with the necessary skills who could be persuaded to take an extended vacation to visit me and teach the children what I cannot.
Good luck with all your assorted meddling,
BB
P.S. - I fed Fawkes beetle berries before I sent him back, so don't let him guilt you into giving him any more.
~~~~~~~~~~ November 1991 ~~~~~~~~~~
Mia sighed as she carefully stripped the stamen out of the asphodel flowers. She'd really been looking forward to trying out her new wand, but Mrs. Wilkins had told them they needed to take advantage of the spring months to study magical plants while they were still blooming. Most of October had been spent wandering local magical parks looking for different plants. It had taken her a while to get the hang of it, but with a little bit of help from her brother, she had learned how to find several magical plants like croakoa, nux myristica, and starthistle.
They were currently learning how to store the plants they had collected in magical containers and mix them with other ingredients like antimony to help preserve their magical qualities. Most of the tutoring sessions were spent learning the various magical properties of the many plants of the Australian wilderness, which Mia dutifully wrote down, followed by a short practical session in which they learned how to prepare the plant for use in potions. Today's plant was asphodel. Each of the six stamen needed to be stripped from the flower and the pollen carefully deposited in a glass jar containing air precisely saturated with 30% water; otherwise, the pollen would lose its magic. The remainder of the plant would be left to dry out, at which point they would crush the roots into a powder using a copper mortar and pestle. Mrs. Wilkins made them prepare things with various tools so they could develop a better sense for the effects those tools would have on the outcome. Tomorrow, she would have them using a pewter set instead.
It was terribly boring to endlessly re-pot, cut, strip, and grind various parts of the native magical flora, but Mrs. Wilkins was right - a wizard or witch couldn't always count on having an apothecary down the road to buy ingredients from. And the advantage of preparing everything from scratch was that they were learning about the properties of each plant firsthand. Hopefully, that would help whenever Mrs. Wilkins decided to teach them more about potions.
However, the part that Mia and Jamie enjoyed most was that every week Mrs. Wilkins would take the ingredients they had prepared out to the nearest apothecary, sell them, and split the money with the children. They both got an allowance from their parents, but they had quickly learned that top-notch potion ingredients could be worth galleons, allowing them to purchase the magical sweets their dentist parents would never buy them. It was great motivation to get it right since the Darwin apothecary was very persnickety about his ingredients and wouldn't accept any that hadn't been carefully prepared and stored.
~~~~~~~~~~ January 1992 ~~~~~~~~~~
Mia and Jamie rushed across the lawn to Mrs. Wilkins' house. It was the last weekend before school started again in February, but they'd spent the last month in France with their parents, and they had missed their magical tutor while they had been gone. Since today was a Saturday, they knew they were in no danger of being quizzed on the magical theory she had given them to read up on over their vacation. Saturdays, no matter what, were always reserved for Magical History, and in the case of Mrs. Wilkins, that meant awesome story time.
*Ding dong*
The children fidgeted back and forth as they attempted to wait patiently for Mrs. Wilkins to answer her door. Suddenly, both children were bowled over by a big flying fuzz ball.
"Bedlam!" They both screeched with delight as they tumbled about on the grass. After a few moments of roughhousing, which resulted in Jamie getting pinned underneath the bobcat, the boy asked Bedlam, "Do you know where Mrs. Wilkins is, Bedlam? She hasn't answered the door yet."
At this, Bedlam released Jamie and started walking towards the back of the house. The children followed the bounding bobcat to where Mrs. Wilkins was sitting on her tiny porch and drinking lemonade while reading a book. When she noticed the children, Mrs. Wilkins stood up, and both kids gave her a big hug.
"It being good to see you again." After the hug, the children hurriedly settled down into the other two chairs and poured themselves glasses of lemonade, with Bedlam curling up at their feet. Seeing their expectant faces, Mrs. Wilkins said, "I supposed you two trouble makers being here for a story?"
Mia saw the twinkle in her teacher's eyes and said very seriously: "Of course not, Mrs. Wilkins. We're here for a history lesson."
The old lady chuckled. "Well, today I thought we would start the story of Arthur Pendragon, who became the King of England at the same time as Merlin was the Chief Warlock of the English Wizengamot..."
~~~~~~~~~~ February 1992 ~~~~~~~~~~
Mrs. Wilkins smiled at her two pupils. It was the first Friday night in February, and as such, she'd gotten permission from Bertram and Valaria to keep the children up late for the 'exciting new subject' she wanted to teach while the nights were still long.
"As you both knowing, magic be highly variable. Today, we controlling magic with wands, words, and gestures. But the earliest magic practitioners did not having that luxury; they use magic by trial and error. The first method discovering for guided magic was actually learned from the centaurs, and it involve a detailed knowledge of the movement of the stars, planets, and their moons. While this knowledge had becoming mostly irrelevant today, knowledge of it can help you better understanding the ancient magical places of the world. As bright young children, I is hope you will pick up much theory of astronomy from me over the next few months as it be quite likely that I will not be teaching it again.
"Now, look through your telescopes and center the western horizon across your view. From there, use the guide to tilt up four degrees and scan to the left 25 marks…" Jamie yawned before putting his eye to the lens. As he was panning across the sky, he happened upon a shooting star, and though he was pretty sure that it wouldn't do anything, he wished for the end of the class anyway, dearly hoping he could get to his bed. Alas, he would be there for two more hours looking at various pinpricks of light in the sky before Mrs. Wilkins finally released them to bed.
~~~~~~~~~~ May 1992 ~~~~~~~~~~
"You're saying it wrong. It's Wing-gar-dium Levi-...atchoo!"
Jamie stuck out his tongue at his older sister. She had been able to make her make her feather levitate on the first try, but that didn't mean he couldn't lift his feather with his hands. Mia glared at her younger brother for daring to tickle her nose but soon gave up. They both knew she was being overbearing. After all, who learned a spell after only attempting it once? Mia, apparently, but that wasn't the point.
"Mrs. Wilkins, you said casting the levitation charm was more difficult on heavier objects. Can I try a pencil?"
Satisfied that his sister's energy would no longer be focused on him, Jamie laid his feather back down on the table. Swish and flick, Mrs. Wilkins has said. He concentrated, and to his delight, the feather lifted off the table to hover for a couple seconds before settling back down. His first bit of magic with a real wand! Mia hadn't noticed, but Mrs. Wilkins smiled at him from across the table where she was knitting as she watched them both. With another few tries, maybe Mrs. Wilkins would let him try to levitate a pencil, too.
~~~~~~~~~~ July 1992 ~~~~~~~~~~
"Transfiguration be not charms. Transfiguration is a charm that taking years of practice and experience to fully master the nuances of. Since both of you is just begin to learned this charm, you finding that it takes immense concentration and effort to turned even the toothpicks you seen in front of you into fairly similar needles. However, as you gaining more experience, you will discovered that slight variations in tone, enunciation, or wand movements easing the transfiguration process along. That level of magic be far beyond what is achievable over the next few months. These months are for you to learning the incantation and to practiced, practiced, practiced."
Mia looked down at the toothpick in front of her, then across the table at Jamie. He had a better imagination than she did, but she was better at remembering and visualizing what she had already seen. It was going to be fun to see who was better at this. She looked back down at the toothpick again, pointed her wand at it, and started muttering the incantation Mrs. Wilkins had taught them yesterday, all while intensely visualizing a needle: silver, sharp at one end, blunt at the other, with the tiniest of holes...
~~~~~~~~~~ October 1992 ~~~~~~~~~~
Mia sat cross-legged on the ground across from her brother with a little notebook on her lap and surrounded by snakes happily warming themselves in the sun. hey were sitting by the banks of the Melacca Creek, which was right on the edge of the unsurprisingly named Melacca Swamp. Mrs. Wilkins had apparated them out here hours ago as part of their lessons on magical creatures. She would pick them up again this evening, but until then, they were supposed to meet and talk to as many snakes, magical or otherwise, as possible.
To this end, Jamie had been teaching his sister Parseltongue, something they'd accidentally discovered when their parents had taken them to the zoo for Jamie's fifth birthday. She'd picked up a smattering of phases in the intervening years, but Mrs. Wilkins had decided that it would help Jamie understand his natural talent better if he taught someone else the language. The siblings had eagerly agreed at the thought of having a secret language between them.
"Mia, try sssssss s sssss snake sssss."
"Alright, I got 'Mia try, snake' that time. Can you give me the words individually?"
"Calling, calling, grass, grass, again, again."
Mia carefully jotted down the sounds as her brother spoke them. Originally, she thought she'd need to develop her own alphabet for it, but Mrs. Wilkins had found a copy of one of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks which detailed the sounds his friend Paracelsus made when talking to snakes. Like any good student, she had read the entire thing, but only a small portion of it had proved useful: namely, an alphabet for Parseltongue, and the fact that she had to focus her magic on her tongue and ears if she wanted any success. Parseltongue was much more than just making the sounds.
"Okay, let me try to say that back to you. Mia, try kaling an gras snake again."
Some of the closest snakes woke up slightly and started to bob their heads in what was obviously snakish laughter. Mia stuck out her tongue at them but was secretly pleased. They'd initially ignored her as nothing more than an accessory, but it seemed that her parseltongue was improving to the point where they would at least recognize her attempts.
"Who is sssssssssss my ssssssss?!"
Jamie and Mia both jumped up as a very large serpent reared out of the water. It was a brilliant shade of purple with large white dots down the back and a deep burgundy stripe along its spine. It stared menacingly at them with its large, unblinking eyes.
"Hello, kind sir! This is my ssssss, Mia. I've ssss a sssss sssssss from sssss. We're not trying to be sssssssssssss of the sssss ssssss; ssssss I'm trying to ssssss her."
"You ssssss the sssss sssss sssss well, sssssssss. It has been many sssss since one of your ssss sssss like one of us."
Mia watched as the snake continued to talk to her brother, jotting down words as she caught them, but it was frustrating to miss so many details. A snake that big and old had to have all sorts of interesting things to say, but alas, most of it was complete gibberish to her. At least the snake's tone had become remarkably more friendly since it first spoke to them. After a few minutes of conversation, the snake swam away, and Jamie turned back to his sister.
"That was so cool, Mia! Did you know he's a wagyl? They're usually solitary creatures, but every year, he says he meets up with the other wagyls in Lake Eyre to exchange tales, lay eggs, and have a big party! He was pretty upset because he thought some of the land snakes were making fun of his vocabulary again. Apparently, the more magical the snake, the better their Parseltongue. Anyway, he says you need more practice, but once you get a little better, he wants to try and give you lessons; he says if you're interested enough to learn the noble tongue, then you should learn it properly."
Mia squirmed a little at the thought of those big, black eyes watching her as she stumbled over Parseltongue, but then again, she'd never had a snake offer to teach her anything before. She would think about it and decide another day. It didn't look like the wagyl would be returning anytime soon.
~~~~~~~~~~ Y ~~~~~~~~~~
A/N: Mr. Darcy and I had a long debate about how we would render parseltongue. Ideally, we would have found a written English-to-Parseltongue translator based on one of the rule sets so nicely developed on FraithWiki, but it was not to be. Thus, we've decided to go with the more boring, but perhaps more canonically accurate, English.
Thanks for reading! Please leave a review if you've enjoyed it. :)
Lady Beatrice