Liz had been to the Three Broomsticks a number of times before, but she hardly ever spent any time in the main room. Being a favourite place to visit for students on free weekends, the place was always terribly crowded, packed wall to wall with loudly chattering customers — between the audible noise and the psychic noise, Liz could barely hear herself think, much less actually listen to whoever she was with talk. Liz had tried to suffer through it a couple times, visiting the village with friends last year, but it just wasn't worth the miserable fucking headache it gave her, they normally had lunch at a smaller sandwich shop down the way instead.

Her friends did occasionally go to the Three Broomsticks, but only when they were in Hogsmeade without her, which she guessed worked out well enough for everyone.

But Liz had been in the building a fair number of times, just not lingering for long in the public room — she met her Latin tutor in one of the private rooms, an afternoon every couple weeks (exactly how often depending on their respective schedules). Meeting private tutors on Hogwarts grounds was... Well, it wasn't that it never happened, but arranging it could be difficult, it was much easier for Liz to go to Severus's office and floo to the Three Broomsticks, meet Mg.a Madeline upstairs. In addition to a brewery and a restaurant, the Three Broomsticks was also an inn, but besides bedrooms there was a private dining room and a few salons, comfortable armchairs and sofas. Liz assumed they were intended for private parties or to hold trade meetings and the like — they did have to be reserved ahead of time, but the schedule wasn't particularly tight, it wasn't too difficult to get a slot. Whatever business was normally done here, Hogsmeade was sleepy enough of a village that there wasn't much competition for the space.

The private rooms were much nicer than the big open one downstairs. The furnishings were more comfortable, sure, padded sofas instead of the plain wood stools and chairs, but the thing that Liz cared most about was that they were quiet — they were shielded with privacy wards that completely blocked off the noise of the main room. They also had access to the whole menu up here, though getting the attention of staff if you needed it was somewhat more difficult, since you weren't being watched the whole time. The butterbeer everyone blathered on about was fine, she guessed, though Liz preferred the mulled mead. She hadn't tried much of the food, since her meetings with Mg.a Madeline were usually in the afternoon between meal times, but the chips were pretty good...

(Magical-made chips were relatively rare, and different. The ones at the Three Broomsticks were irregularly-cut wedges with skins left on and dusted with flour and herbs, and she was pretty sure they were actually pan-fried in butter instead of deep-fried, sometimes mixed with carrots or onions or whatever else — a funny mix of the muggle dish and the supplies and techniques mages already had to hand, probably brought in by a muggleborn at some point and telephoned into its current form — which were kind of a different thing from the more familiar kind, but they were still good, so really who gave a shite.)

It wasn't her favourite place in the world to go, but for a neutral but private place to meet people, it wasn't bad. Which was exactly why she was going there today — she'd gotten a note from Severus at breakfast that the volunteer Saoirse had found had agreed to meet them there. It was on very short notice, Liz had had things she'd been planning on doing, but she guessed she could learn Gaelic today instead.

Liz had been vaguely aware of the process of finding someone for her to copy Gaelic from, as well as a time and place to do it, but only from Severus making an occasional comment about it, she didn't really know any details. It was a somewhat complicated problem, she understood. Saoirse Ghaelach was arranging it for them, as a favour in exchange for Severus lending them a hand at the World Cup, which meant it should be one of their people. But, mind mages fiddling around your head could also be somewhat dangerous — the proper way Severus had told her how to do it now was actually perfectly safe, but it had a reputation for being risky, at least — so they would want it to be a volunteer. The problem with that was that they couldn't openly publicise what they were doing in order to find a volunteer, for complicated political reasons Liz didn't really get, but she wouldn't want her Girl Who Lived horseshite to make things more difficult for Saoirse (being neighbourly and all that), so, fine, they had to be careful who they told about it. Also, the feel of languages changed according to gender and generation, so they would need a girl as close to her age as possible, which further complicated matters. Also also, there were multiple different dialects of Gaelic, some of them quite different from each other, and it'd be best to find someone who primarily spoke the formal, academic register used by the Academy, the guilds, and the major priesthoods, which narrowed their options even further.

And then there was figuring out the time and place, that had been a complicated negotiation too. They could theoretically just do it at Hogwarts, but that would require explaining to at least Gamp what was going on, which might be awkward. And their volunteer might feel more safe on neutral ground, that was worth considering — Liz or Severus's house weren't options for the same reason. Fully private areas held by one family or another — she understood Síomha's family's lands had been suggested by someone at some point — were less than ideal, due to Liz and the volunteer perhaps not feeling fully welcome there, but fully public areas also weren't great, since being interrupted could end very very badly. (More for Liz than the volunteer, granted.) When they did find their volunteer, her ability to travel was somewhat limited, since she could only get to places accessible by floo and didn't speak English at all, but they could get around that by having a Saoirse escort apparate her if necessary...

Eventually, after far too much discussion, they'd settled on a private room at the Three Broomsticks — neutral ground, but reasonably private, and only a short floo trip for the both of them. Seemed like it'd taken way too much effort to come to such a simple answer, but what did she know. Pretty sure most of the delay had been just finding a volunteer in the first place, so.

Since the meeting was in Hogsmeade, and wasn't until one thirty in the afternoon, Liz was able to get done at least some of what she'd planned on doing today. Her notes and practice problems and the like for Competencies had taken up more paper than she'd expected, she needed to restock on writing stuff, as well as some potions ingredients — the potions in the Competency didn't perfectly overlap with the OWL, she'd been practising — and she also needed a refill of some basic alchemy supplies. Hermione, Sally-Anne, and Padma could also use some things, so they made a whole trip of it, Susan and Sophie tagging along just for the hell of it. Luckily she had the excuse of the club Severus had started up this year to explain why she wanted the alchemy stuff, but she was pretty sure Hermione and Padma didn't entirely believe her.

(Hermione, at least, was aware she was studying for the Transfiguration Competency, but Liz still hadn't told anyone else about her plans to transfer overseas.)

They stopped at a sandwich shop for lunch, somewhere well off the main street of the village — there were a few locals around, and a couple of older students here on a date, but it was much less crowded than the big destinations like the Three Broomsticks. Talking about their plans for after lunch, after a brief hesitation, Liz actually admitted what she was doing. Picking up a language with mind magic subsumption was perfectly legal (so long as it was done with a volunteer), and they already knew she'd done it with French, so there was no real reason not to admit it...except the fact that she was immediately drowning in so many questions. It didn't help that she didn't know how mind magic worked that well, honestly, she didn't need to fully understand it to do it. Kind of like how she had no fucking clue how parseltongue worked, Liz's very first conversation ever with Hermione had been about exactly that...

Liz suspected it might be possible to enchant something that could press a language (or any other information) into a person's mind, gradually just from contact, but a small mistake could make that sort of thing extremely dangerous. Like, slowly breaking people's minds and driving them insane just from being in the same room kind of dangerous, you really didn't want to fuck with that kind of thing. She would ask Severus about it, but if Hermione wanted to learn Gaelic, she'd probably have to do it the slow way.

Actually, a simpler, much safer version of such a device might work as a training tool to help teach people occlumency — Liz quick pulled out her freshly-bought writing supplies to take a couple notes before she forgot.

Hermione and Padma would be lingering in the village after they were done here, since they both had dates starting later in the afternoon. Padma was just meeting Michael here in the village, but Hermione and Neville would actually be taking the floo all the way to Edinburgh — there were significant magical districts in Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Dunfermline, which were all geographically closer, but Edinburgh was the nearest city where they primarily spoke Cambrian, so Hermione and Neville wouldn't have too much difficulty getting around. Apparently, they were catching a show or something? Hermione didn't know the details, just that there'd be a stage of some kind involved. Neville was aware Hermione was muggleborn, obviously, so he was using the opportunity to expose her to more magical cultural things, hence the plan for the date.

Sophie's immediate reaction to the idea wasn't super positive, accusing Neville of being just another pureblood trying to enlighten they poor deprived mudbloods — she didn't say it nearly that harshly, but that was basically what she meant — but Hermione actually really appreciated it. It wasn't like they were exposed to much cultural stuff like theatre and the like at Hogwarts, and she wouldn't know where to start on her own, she thought it was a good idea. The other girls were slightly taken aback, which Liz thought was silly — Hermione was a massive nerd, obviously she would love the idea of going to the bloody theatre on a date, this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

(Neville was trying, but Liz still felt pretty confident that Hermione and Neville was going to be a very temporary thing. She had no clear feeling on how temporary, but she'd be surprised if they were still together by Easter.)

After lingering in the sandwich shop sipping at tea and coffee and chatting for like an hour or so, their group finally split up, heading off to whatever they had on next. Liz checked the time quick — she was going to be slightly early, but there was no reason she couldn't head up to their room first. She did like the mulled mead...

The Three Broomsticks was, of course, horribly crowded. Trying to pull herself in as much as she could, pummelled by a constant hail of thoughts and feelings from dozens and dozens of minds, Liz grit her teeth and elbowed her way through the mass of people, making her way toward the bar. It took a few minutes for Liz to get the manager's attention, as busy as the place was at the moment. Rosmerta was the current owner of the Three Broomsticks, having inherited it from her grandfather when he retired, and could more often than not be found manning the bar herself. (For establishments not owned by some noble bastard who hardly ever set foot in the place, the owner also doing a share of the work themselves was pretty typical.) The name was a mos maiorum thing, a reference to some agricultural goddess or something, but Rosmerta was a commoner, and rather obviously looked like it — pretty, smiling round-cheeked face with bright green eyes and long curly blonde hair, but her clothes were super cheap, brown canvas trousers (old and worn enough they looked a little ratty at the hem), and a plain greyish wool jumper, topped with a vest of ancient-looking soft leather, the colour faded and cracking in places. Of course, the jumper and the trousers were worn close enough to make her hips and chest very obvious, which, well, she didn't need fancy clothes to honestly be kind of distracting. Liz was aware there were a fair number of boys who not-so-secretly lusted after Rosmerta every time they stepped foot in this place, and she got why.

Liz generally thought of mos maiorum as a filthy-rich noble thing, but occasionally she was reminded that wasn't quite accurate — Rosmerta's family were hardly destitute, of course, but they weren't exactly rolling in it either. Middle-class, she thought, but actually a step under the qualified professional types, like the people in the guilds and the Ministry, not normally the sort of people Liz thought of as being involved in the purebloods' weird pseudo-Roman religion. She still didn't think she had a very good impression of what religion was actually like in the magical world...

Anyway, Liz was early, but nobody was using the room just now, so Rosmerta temporarily handed the bar off to one of her employees so she could lead Liz upstairs. With how bloody short Liz was and how steep the stairs were, Rosmerta's hips ended up at about eye-level — Liz tried very hard not to stare, and honestly didn't do a very good job of it. The room she was led to was familiar, she was pretty sure she'd been in this one with Mg.a Madeline at least a couple times, warm and cosy and quiet. Rosmerta quick asked if she needed anything — some of that mulled mead sounded great actually, thanks — and then Liz was left alone. She shucked off her jumper, it was warm in here, and pulled out her Transfiguration Competency notes to pass the time — she'd brought them along, just to make sure she didn't forget anything on her shopping list.

Liz still struggled with transfiguration, in the practicals hardly keeping up with the rest of the class, but she actually found alchemy much simpler. Even the supposedly hard stuff, like permanent transfiguration — the alchemic charm to, say, transform a thimbleful of sand into quartz was actually easier for her than the equivalent transfiguration, despite it technically being much more complex magic. (The mental exercise was easier, anyway, alchemic charms had a much higher raw power requirement than the equivalent transfiguration, so as long as she kept the mass she was transforming low the alchemy was easier.) And combinatory alchemy, using devices to alter the physical or even chemical structure of substances, was basically just enchanting, and super easy — the physical stuff was mostly just basic geometry, awkward to express in runes but not complicated, and chemistry was way simpler than the logic that went into potions. True, they weren't doing much chemical combinatorics, mostly just physical stuff, but in principle...

(As long as Liz could get her hands on pure graphite, she was pretty sure she could enchant a device she could use to manufacture literal diamonds. Figuring out the structure was the only hard part, but it did require pure graphite, filtering out the carbon of an impure substance would be a much more complicated problem...)

In fact, she found alchemy approachable and interesting enough that she was actually considering taking the Transfiguration Proficiency class. She'd hated Transfiguration from the off, she'd been looking forward to finishing the OWL so she didn't have to deal with the shite anymore — though she had been told that the difficulty mind mages had with transfiguration didn't necessarily apply to conjuration, so more recently she'd started having some doubts about that. But, she was definitely interested in taking the Proficiency course in Alchemy, and while the subjects were split up at the Proficiency level, some schools required students in the Alchemy course to also take Transfiguration, for background. (And also Potions, but she planned on taking that anyway.) Durmstrang was one of the ones that did, she'd checked.

Which, her Proficiency schedule was going to end up pretty fucking full at this rate, if she was adding in Alchemy and Transfiguration, but that was fine. At Hogwarts, people were supposed to finish in two years, but Proficiencies were expected to take three, and if it took four or even five to fit in all the courses she wanted to take, that was also fine. Proficiency study lasted however long it took until the student was done. She might end up taking her exams in multiple batches a year or two apart, so she didn't overload herself preparing for too many at once — especially since most Proficiencies required a project prepared ahead of time in addition to the exam itself, which might each take months of work — but that was fine, you were allowed to do that.

So, there were Potions and Alchemy and Transfiguration, and of course she'd want to take Charms, and Enchanting and Ritual Arts — the course on basic ritual magic required the Proficiency-level Runes course, which she would have taken anyway — Arithmancy was a maybe, and 'defence' was split into courses on battlemagic, cursebreaking, and something Durmstrang called a Survey of Popular Witchcraft — Liz's use of "popular" was translating in her head from the French vulgaire, here meaning "low" arts, the sort of witchcraft traditionally used by uneducated hedge mages and the like, the same category they called "Dark Arts" in English — all of which had their own Proficiency exam, Liz was definitely taking the first and the third, and would like to squeeze in the second if she had the time, and there were history and literature seminars, probably a good idea, and Durmstrang even had art classes, which, Liz was maybe curious...

Yeah, her Proficiency schedule was going to be super full.

Liz was idly checking through a few practice problems (from the ICW's suggested final exams for third-years) she'd done last week, when Severus turned up. She suspected he hadn't been back to the school yet — he was still in his more casual, I-don't-have-to-pretend-to-be-a-villain-in-a-muggle-childrens'-cartoon-today clothes, plain black trousers and a dark blue jumper, long hair tied back out of his face. He'd definitely gotten stares on his way up from the Hogwarts students down there, some people still weren't used to Severus not needing to keep up the act anymore. "Hey, Severus."

"Elizabeth. I see you've arrived early."

She shrugged. "I had some shopping I needed to do, got some lunch with Hermione and Susan, but then I didn't have anything better to do. I half-expected you to show up with Síomha."

A flicker of some kind of feeling in his head, too mild and gone too quick for Liz to decipher, Severus arced up an eyebrow at her. "I expect she's collecting our volunteer presently." Right, that made sense. Drifting deeper into the room with his usual quiet grace, he leaned a little over her chair, his eyes on her mug of mead — checking how full it was, she thought. "I hope that is your first."

"Yep. I know not to subsume a language while drunk, Severus — I'm an idiot sometimes, but I'm not that stupid."

There was a mild flutter of amusement pittering against her, like tiny specks of snow on the wind. They'd discussed her absolutely idiotic strategy with the dragon already, he caught that was what she was referring to...though Severus had actually been more charitable about that than she'd expected. He'd immediately compared it to Liz's tendency to immediately jump to overwhelming force when threatened, throwing everything she had into a mind magic attack without thinking about it, which, um, yeah, there was probably something to the thought that that might be behind any alternative approaches failing to occur to her — getting better with duelling was supposed to help her get over that sort of thing, but apparently it was a work in progress. Suggesting it was abused kid brain stuff wasn't really better, and she still felt like an idiot, so.

He had said a simple good or something at her confirmation that she wasn't drinking too much, but she wasn't really listening, folded her scroll up to her work. Holding it up over her shoulder, "Since I got you here, my script is turning out different from the answer in the book, but I can't figure out where I got it wrong."

Severus looked over the scroll for a moment, before reaching forward, tapping the paper with a finger — there was a very faint crackle of magic, some kind of wandless charm. Looking over the scroll, one passage had been highlighted in red, apparently where the problem was. But, that didn't make any sense, it wasn't in the part she'd been looking at, this bit was translating the crystal structure into a form that could be expressed in runes, she didn't—

"Oh!" It hadn't been a magic theory problem, she'd fucked up the maths. "Ugh. I know basic trigonometry, I swear..."

She could feel Severus laughing at her on the inside, but outside all he said was, "It happens to the best of us. I once used a square root in the definition of an active formant that should properly have been a cubed root."

Active formant, he was talking about spectral alchemy, she hadn't done hardly any of that — it was primarily a Proficiency topic, which was a fair part of the reason why she wanted to take the Alchemy Proficiency in the first place. "What happened?"

"I set the Malfoys' potions lab on fire. It burned for hours."

Liz completely failed to stop herself from bursting into giggles. At least Severus just seemed vaguely amused with himself, so...

After a little bit, one of the staff people — not Rosmerta, a younger woman — appeared with a pot of coffee and a plate of chips for Severus. (Not having any alcohol, just in case something went wrong and he needed to intervene.) Unsurprisingly, Severus ate the chips with a fork, because he could be fussy like that. Liz might have stolen a few, summoning them to herself with flicks of wandless fingers — they smelled really good, okay.

(Severus could stop her if he gave a damn, but he didn't even comment, so she assumed this was fine.)

The chips were mostly gone by the time the door opened again — before anyone even walked through, Liz immediately recognised Síomha's mind, smooth and cool and quiet, surrounded with a cloud of sizzling dark magic, fluttering bigger and smaller with her breath. Síomha wasn't the only sorcerer-powerful mage she'd ever met, most of the others just made more of a point of hiding it, it seemed like Síomha just didn't give a damn. Liz had expected just Síomha and whoever their volunteer was, but she actually felt four minds. They streamed into the room, three of them (including Síomha) in the brown leather and green and white cloth of Saoirse Ghaelach's militia, the fourth in a plain red and blue dress, a hood over her head. Liz tucked her alchemy work back in her bag, stood up to meet them.

They went right into introductions, starting with Síomha. Liz and Síomha had technically met before, but only briefly, and Liz had been a little out of it at the time anyway. Síomha was relatively tall for a woman, with long full curly black hair held back by a narrow headband, green eyes — like, a normal person green, muddy with little flecks of amber-brown in it, not the weird solid unnatural too-vibrant green Liz had — her face sharp and vaguely severe-looking. Liz noticed she didn't pluck her eyebrows, like most pureblood women Liz was used to did. Though, she was normally able to tell if someone had cosmetic charms going (Seer thing), and she was positive Síomha didn't — she was basically a soldier, and even in uniform and everything at the moment, maybe she made more of an effort to pretty up when she wasn't on duty or whatever the proper term was, who knows.

Of course, her magic was kind of intense, crackling and hissing on the air around her, coiling over Liz's skin like a warn summer breeze. But it wasn't unpleasant, exactly...maybe just a little intimidating — she wasn't normally quite so tactilely aware of how easily someone could crush her without hardly trying if they wanted to. She was still pretty sure Severus and Síomha were going to end up getting married eventually, so Síomha's magic filling the room didn't feel like nearly as much of a threat as it might have otherwise. Still curious, though, she wondered why other sorcerers tried so much harder to hide it...

The two blokes with Síomha in mostly identical Saoirse uniform were Fionn Ingham and Ciarán Ó Báinfhéigh. The names sounded familiar, and not just because Ingham was one of the Seventeen Founders and one of Britain's judges for the Triwizard Tournament happened to be a Báinfhéigh — after the World Cup, Liz had gone back and looked up articles from back when Saoirse had successfully tracked down and killed the Glasgow Seven, she thought both men had been on Síomha's team for that. Fionn was shorter and stockier, with short messy black hair and a seemingly permanent smile, Ciarán taller and slighter, with bright orange-red hair and a face dotted with freckles (looking very Irish to Liz). Ciarán's mind was shut up as tight as Síomha's, smooth and solid and warm to the touch, like stepping on the floor tiles just next to a hearth, but Fionn was completely open, his mind soft and pleasantly warm and almost fluffy, undercut with a steady pulse of sharp frigid light magic, a little crackle of interference on the air where it mixed with Síomha's. The instant Liz touched him, she could tell Fionn knew she was there, but he made no effort at all to keep her out, mind kept relaxed and unguarded.

(She didn't intrude, though, didn't want to be rude to Severus's girlfriend's friend and make things awkward.)

The Saoirse men were all reserved being introduced to Liz, standing well back and not moving to do the hand-clasping thing she knew a lot of the more culturally Celtic mages did — since Fionn's mind was completely open, she knew at least one of them was consciously keeping back because he didn't want to crowd the Seer. They were a bit less polite and formal being introduced to Severus, doing the not-handshake thing, yes, but also smirking and joking, a teasing comment from Fionn that made Síomha huff and roll her eyes.

Liz quickly picked up that Síomha and Fionn had been friends for ages, since they'd been going to Caoimhe's Academy together. Feeling her listening, Fionn sent a quick smirk at her. Síomha is so stiff and standoffish, needling her about her love life is always entertaining.

For a second, Liz just blinked at him like an idiot — she could count the people who'd ever thought to think back at her on her fingers. Once she'd collected herself, she gently pressed into his mind, I do the same thing on my end, it's fun.

She knew it was kind of a bloody weird experience, having a mind mage push a thought into— Oh, um, turned out Fionn was a priest of Bríd, and one of his teachers when he'd still been in training was a mind mage, so he was used to it. Okay, then... Grinning back at her, seemingly ignoring the conversation still going on around him, he thought, I see I have an ally in my endeavour to get my dear friend to loosen up for five bloody seconds.

I'm positive for Seer reasons that they're getting married eventually, if that helps.

Fionn burst into delighted laughter, Severus and Síomha and Ciarán's conversation abruptly went silent, all turning to give him a mix of bemused looks.

The girl she'd be copying Gaelic from today was introduced last — that she didn't speak English at all and had no idea what anyone was saying probably had something to do with that. She was older than Liz, but not by very much, maybe eighteen or nineteen at most. She'd hung up her hooded cloak while they were talking, revealing long dirty blonde hair, showing maybe a slight hint of auburn red in the darker patches, held in a long plait run through with a green and blue ribbon stitched with a curling Celtic knot -looking design in white. Features soft and round and delicate, make-up accentuating her green-brown eyes and darkened lips — not cosmetic charms, done by hand with actual physical make-up — when her turn for introductions came she gave Severus a shy little wave, and Liz a proper formal curtsey (because Lady of the Wizengamot), the dip smooth and graceful, practised.

Ciarán did the introductions, a hand at her elbow Liz couldn't help interpreting as protective, she was called Muirgheal Chroíúil ó Ghlaschú. Before Liz could stop herself, she said, "Wait, I thought the Ó was for boys."

A mix of confusion and amusement flicking through the three Saoirse people, Fionn answered with a slightly crooked smile. "You are thinking of the wrong word, though they do sound the same to the unpractised ear. Glaschú is a place name, not a family name — it's how you say Glasgow in an Gaeilge. Muirgheal ó Ghlaschú simply means 'Muirgheal from Glasgow'. Croíúil is a nickname, in case there is more than one Muirgheal from Glasgow around."

"It's an adjective, not a nickname," Síomha said. "You don't use it by itself."

Fionn rolled his eyes. "Yes, she's going to realise that in a few minutes."

"She'll understand the rest of it in a few minutes too. We might as well get on with it."

"I don't know about you, Síomha, but I was taught it's only appropriate to be properly introduced before one goes rooting about in another's mind."

A flash of exasperation leaked through Síomha's occlumency, but she didn't comment. Personally, Liz also thought Fionn was being rather silly, but it wasn't worth arguing about — which she guessed was probably why Síomha hadn't bothered.

...Though, from Fionn's explanation, Liz had kind of gotten the feeling that Muirgheal...didn't have a family name? With the way magical law worked, you had to be attached to a House, the situations in which someone might not be were few and generally not very pleasant. She was starting to get a creeping feeling something fucked up was going on here.

Now that they'd gotten through the introductions, a small square table was conjured with a flick of Severus's wand, a pair of the armchairs floated over to settle at opposite sides. Severus pulled a little round device out of a pocket, a ceramic disc lined with runes around the rim, the most prominent feature an overlarge reservoir stone nearly the size of Liz's fist in the middle. He set it down in the middle of the table, turned to Liz. "You know what to do." It wasn't really a question.

She nodded. "Yep, thanks." The trick was to bridge Muirgheal's mind to the reservoir, and dump her linguistic knowledge into it. Using the reservoir, it was perfectly safe for Muirgheal, since Liz wouldn't be in contact with her mind at all when the subsumption was happening, and also safer for Liz, since she wouldn't have to try to subsume the entire language all at once.

When Severus had explained what she'd done wrong, she'd felt extremely stupid about that too. She'd used a reservoir as an intermediary most of the time when they'd been practising, she just...hadn't thought of it. Because, you know, the only way she could be sure if she was getting all of the language she wanted was if she could hold the whole thing at once, it hadn't occurred to her that she didn't have to keep holding it, could include a reservoir that would...

She didn't know, she just felt fucking stupid, that was all. Severus had maybe been less than perfectly clear about what the plan would be when she did actually subsume French, but that wasn't really his fault, he hadn't expected her to go off and do it on her own either. She was a reckless idiot like that, sometimes.

(At the time, she hadn't really felt guilty about Valérie — it was a mistake, and by the time she'd realised she'd fucked up it'd been too late to do anything about it — but now that she realised it'd been completely fucking unnecessary from the off, she'd been doing it wrong in the first place, now she thought she kind of did, a little bit...)

Muirgheal was helped into her seat by Ciarán, pulling it out and floating it back up to the table for her — Liz just climbed over the arm and slipped into place without moving it, which was maybe slightly indecent while in a skirt, but she didn't really care. By the time she settled in and looked up again, Muirgheal was smiling at her, a funny warm squishy flutter of amusement coming off her head. Right, well. So they just had to do the thing, then.

...Except, Liz wasn't sure how well the Saoirse people had explained how this would work to Muirgheal, so Liz should probably take care of that first. She didn't speak any English, but thoughts didn't have language, so.

Reaching forward with a delicate tendril of mind magic, Liz gently pressed the single word into her mind: Hello.

Muirgheal twitched, rearing back in her seat blinking at Liz, her mind shivering around her with surprise. But after a second she relaxed, a smile flickering at her lips. She didn't know how to talk back.

You don't have to, I can hear you thinking. Did anyone explain to you how this is going to work?

Not really, no. She'd been told it would be perfectly safe, and that people from Saoirse would be in the room with her. She hadn't known it would be Síomha Raghnaill Ní Ailbhe, honestly, she'd been approached by Ciarán. She was trying not to be embarrassing about meeting Síomha — she was rather famous in Glasgow, Liz gathered. Though, she was also trying not to be weird about Liz, but that wasn't—

...

Muirgheal had friends who worshipped Liz.

Well, no, that wasn't quite right — they thought one of their gods had something to do with what had happened that Samhain (Hallowe'en, obviously, Muirgheal thought of it as Samhain Night), that Liz had (or had had) divine protection, not that she was divine herself. So, like, tangential religious importance, if that made sense. That her survival was proof that sometimes shite did happen, you know. Though some people kind of blurred the line a little, since some claimed the goddess who'd intervened on Lily's behalf to save Liz — she didn't recognise the name Muirgheal knew, but then she didn't expect to, there were a lot of gods out there, religion in magical Britain was bloody complicated — had done so because Lily was Hers, and it was a pretty easy leap from there to claim that Liz was, like, whatever the fuck the proper term was, that this goddess of theirs was kind of sort of Liz's biological parent. Not, like, literally biological, since people didn't necessarily believe that their gods had physical bodies, so they didn't have biology as such, but magic could do some really fucking weird things sometimes. A couple of Muirgheal's friends believed that variation of the story — she didn't herself, but she'd heard the way they talked about Liz plenty of times, so actually meeting her in person was kind of odd.

Yeah, that was...uncomfortable. Liz was aware that there were people out there who had a religious interpretation of what had happened that night, but mostly it was just that, you know, Lily had invoked some god or another, sacrificed her life in exchange for Liz's. (Which, there might actually be something to that, considering Liz knew for a fact that Lily dying for her had been a premeditated ritual.) Nobody Liz had talked to thought that that made Liz special. Well, when she thought about it, the people who believed the story that Liz had somehow blown up the Dark Lord on her own obviously thought something like that, it was just in a really fucking weird way that made basically no sense — the divine intervention and ritual sacrifice versions of the story at least had some explanation for what the fuck happened. Though most of the people who believed the blatantly nonsensical official story were all Light kids who hated her now anyway.

I'm pretty sure I'm just a normal human person — it was just a vengeance ritual, all Lily, no divine intervention required. Or, the ritual might have invoked one god or another, it was hard to say, since Liz hadn't really tried to interpret Lily's notes. They were a fucking incomprehensible scattered mess, because apparently Lily had been the mad genius type.

Oh, Muirgheal knew that! It was just a little— She was sorry, she hadn't meant to make Liz uncomfortable.

...Right. Well, Liz was just going to not think about any of that.

(She'd rather pretend strangers didn't think about her that much, especially shite like that.)

Anyway. How it would work, Liz would reach deeper into Muirgheal's head, and use a couple compulsions to draw out her linguistic knowledge. Liz would, kind of, stretch Muirgheal's mind out, carried along her own, so she was in contact with the reservoir — Liz would pull her language stuff over in that direction, where it would settle. It was going to feel very very weird. Muirgheal wasn't going to be properly in control of her own thoughts while it was going on, and normally she couldn't be consciously aware of every word she knew simultaneously, her mind simply wasn't big enough for that, so she was going to kind of be using some of Liz's, amplified much bigger than she could normally be with Liz's magic. Liz hadn't felt this sort of thing from Muirgheal's end before, but she could guess it was going to be extremely disorienting, and probably rather creepy. It was perfectly safe, though — honestly, doing it this way, Liz was going to be in more danger than Muirgheal. Liz wasn't touching the actual structure of her brain at all, so, once she was done moving her language knowledge to the reservoir — during which Muirgheal may or may not forget how language worked, Liz wasn't sure — once she let go it would all come back, and Muirgheal would be back to normal. Should only take a couple minutes.

It did sound rather intimidating, but Muirgheal seemed more preemptively embarrassed than anything. Liz had said deeper into her mind, that meant...?

Yes, Liz might see some of her memories. She didn't plan to go looking, but sometimes shite happened.

Muirgheal grimaced a little — that part she was uncomfortable with. She'd experienced things she didn't want Liz to see.

Don't worry, I'll keep whatever I see to myself. Not that they even knew any of the same people, Liz wasn't sure why it would matter at all.

That wasn't what Muirgheal meant. Sure, she did have some secrets kicking around in here, but it wasn't that, she just didn't want Liz to see...

Muirgheal was a prostitute. That was what she didn't want Liz to see.

For a couple seconds, Liz just gaped at her. She was aware prostitution was perfectly legal in magical Britain, there were even brothels and shite around in some of the cities, she just hadn't... Well, she didn't know what to do with that information. She quick glanced up at Ciarán, still standing over Muirgheal's shoulder, she— Are they paying you?

No, Muirgheal nearly protested in Gaelic, twitching to move before stopping herself, no no no, nothing like that, they didn't— She'd volunteered. The word had gone out that Saoirse needed a fluent Gaelic-speaker comfortable with being a focus in a ritual to repay a favour — Glasgow was a mixed city, with their own peculiar dialect, not everyone there actually spoke perfect Gaelic — and Muirgheal had volunteered. It wasn't like that.

Liz was confused by Muirgheal being so very firm about having volunteered, didn't know what that was about — honestly, it was probably better if Muirgheal was being paid? Like, that seemed appropriate somehow. But, with Muirgheal being very insistent as she was, what she'd thought Liz had assumed was just under the surface, clearly visible, Liz caught sight of it after a second.

Muirgheal was indentured. Most of the time, she didn't get to choose who she saw — well, she sort of did sometimes, it was complicated — and the money didn't go to her. It went to her curator — proper Latin term, the holder of her indenture contract. She wanted to be very clear that she'd volunteered because, in ordinary circumstances, if someone had paid her curator for her time, she didn't have a say in the matter.

Because, Muirgheal wasn't free — she wasn't a prostitute, she was a sex slave.

Saoirse had needed to find someone suitable Liz could copy Gaelic from, and they'd ended up going with a literal sex slave.

...

Liz had absolutely no fucking clue how she was supposed to feel about this. She didn't like it, she knew that much.

Her creeping feeling before that something fucked up was going on here turned out to be completely accurate. She rather wished it hadn't, just... She didn't know what to do with this, that was all. Of course, she was aware that corporal indenture existed, intellectually — as far as she knew, she'd never met any bondsmen (i.e. slaves) before — and she knew from her talks with Rita around the super super illegal child brothel they were trying to take down that the sex trade in magical Britain could be extremely fucked up, she already knew that a fair fraction of prostitutes in this country were indentured, she...

She didn't know. She felt kind of gross, that was all, couldn't even put her finger on why. This just felt wrong, somehow.

It was always hard to tell how much the other person picked up when she was talking to them in their head, but she was positive that Muirgheal at least knew that Liz had figured out the indenture part, and that Liz was extremely uncomfortable with it. Oddly, her reaction was... Well, Liz wasn't sure what to call that feeling. She was kind of...maybe embarrassed, but, Muirgheal had guessed that Liz's discomfort was with the concept of indenture itself — she wasn't, like, grossed out because Muirgheal was a prostitute or whatever, she—

I don't care about that. I think it's kind of weird, and the way it's done in magical Britain is fucked up, but it's not my business, you know. Liz hesitated for a second, before adding, I've just never met any bondsmen before. You're right about me not liking it, indenture is some horseshite.

Well, Muirgheal couldn't really disagree with that. There was nothing fucked up going on here, though, Muirgheal had volunteered — her curator didn't know she was here, and honestly she'd probably get in trouble for associating with Saoirse if he did. She did think it reflected well on Liz that she was, well... If it would help, she could explain.

...Basically give Liz her life story, she meant — which she realised would be Liz just trawling through her head, nudging Liz in the right direction now and then to keep things going. Um.

So, Muirgheal didn't remember her family very well at all. She'd been sold into indenture when she'd been...five or six, maybe? Something like that. She actually didn't know how old she was, exactly — magical Britain didn't register everyone born in the country like the UK did, there'd been no official record of her existence before her indenture contract was signed.

Okay, that was fucked up. Is that something that happens a lot, parents selling their kids into indenture?

...Muirgheal didn't know if it was a lot — she knew others, but she really had no sense of how common it was. She assumed her parents must have been very poor, and it made a kind of sense, especially since you knew the child you were giving away would be well cared-for, even if you'd never see them again. Being indentured was better than starving. So, it did definitely happen, but it was hard to say whether it happened a lot.

Anyway, most of Muirgheal's childhood that she could remember had been spent at what Liz guessed was kind of a dormitory? for the whores under contract with the Noble House of Farley. (Sometimes Muirgheal's thoughts translated it to prostitute in her head, and sometimes it was whore, Liz was sure there was an underlying distinction in what Muirgheal meant but she wasn't sure what it was.) Muirgheal had tried to keep away from Liz the family that held her contract, worried it might lead to political complications, but it didn't take very long before Liz caught it anyway — not like it mattered, the Farleys were one of the worse families in the new bigger Ars Brittania, and the Farleys were already on her list for voting against her custody stuff, so whatever. Muirgheal hadn't been the only kid there, there were several others who'd been indentured the same as her, and the whores sometimes had children too — they did their best to avoid it, but sometimes shite happened — they kind of all took care of each other there, like a big extended family. She vaguely remembered feeling like it was actually an improvement on her previous living conditions, warmer and better fed and actually seeing a healer now and then — though it'd been crowded, and it'd taken her a while to stop missing her family.

As fucked up as magical Britain could be, they did have laws against actually prostituting little kids — there were reasons why the place Rita and Liz were gathering intelligence on was so thoroughly underground — so none of them had to do that kind of work. All of the kids had chores and stuff, helping to keep the dorms and the brothel itself clean and fixed up and everything, some of the older kids helping with the cooking and the like — mostly for the people living there, brothels were also restaurants, but that was a grown-up job. When they weren't doing that stuff, they were mostly in lessons. Magical Britain didn't have a public education system (yet), so they didn't go to a proper primary school, just random adults teaching the local children things in their spare time, someone from one of the priesthoods occasionally coming by. Muirgheal was literate, which wasn't actually common in the underclass — she was pretty sure her parents couldn't read.

That was also when she learned Gaelic. Muirgheal's first language was actually the funny mixed Cambrian-Gaelic(-Anglic) speech particular to the mages of the southwest of Scotland, most especially the city of Glasgow itself, but she'd been speaking proper Gaelic since she was a child, most native speakers couldn't tell the difference. She had been taught the proper formal dialect — to native speakers, the Gaelic Liz was going to copy from Muirgheal would likely sound rather formal and educated, and also especially feminine, but not foreign, which was more than good enough. She also spoke some Cambrian — probably only a little better than Liz already did, and with a very obvious Gaelic accent — so, Liz would end up with Gaelic, the Glasgow dialect, and slightly better Cambrian, which she guessed was neat.

At the end of what Liz thought of as primary school lessons, around nine or ten, Muirgheal and the other kids were transitioned into more specific lessons. The indentured kids, like Muirgheal, had been indentured for a specific purpose, but the other kids were more mixed. Indenture only applied to the person whose name was on the contract, so the prostitutes' kids weren't also indentured (most of the time)...but they also weren't members of a house, meaning their legal situation was kind of precarious — so long as they were a minor, they were fine, but they had to figure something out by the time they were thirteen. Some got jobs in the kitchens, a few were lucky enough to land an apprenticeship in some trade or a scholarship for OWL study at the Academy in Ireland, some ultimately ended up signing indenture contracts themselves, for the Farleys or sometimes some other family or guild or something.

Muirgheal's future, though, had already been determined when she'd been a small child. But, the Farleys actually owned a couple brothels, and Muirgheal doing well in her lessons had her put on the track to work in the higher-class one — some of her friends she'd grown up with had gone to the lower-class one instead, they were just gone one day and she hadn't seen them again for years. This one was meant to cater to, like, noblemen and wealthy commoners, high-ranking guild types, so was a rather different setting, and took different training. Muirgheal's academic education actually continued, taught some potions and enchanting, but also literature and theatre and music — Liz was shocked that Muirgheal could sing and play the bloody piano — and also started getting lessons in formal etiquette and stuff. This was also when she started learning Cambrian, since that was the dominant language of most of their patrons, though it wasn't a priority — apparently it was desirable for her Cambrian to be somewhat deficient, though Liz didn't quite follow why.

There were also lessons on, um, the job. Muirgheal mostly skipped over that stuff, not wanting to make Liz too uncomfortable. Just making sure Liz understood that she had been prepared, they hadn't thrown her into the deep end...

Her first job had been within a couple weeks after when they'd decided for legal reasons was her thirteenth birthday — because that's where the age of consent was in magical Britain, because this country was seriously fucked up. That hadn't actually been at the brothel, she'd been brought to a little private cottage somewhere, she'd spent a few days there with a man, it was a whole thing. Muirgheal didn't spell out that her virginity had been sold to some bastard, independently from her attachment to the brothel thing, which, just, Jesus Christ, that was fucked up, she'd been thirteen and trapped in a house with a man for days, who the fuck did—

No no, that one hadn't been so bad, actually! Well, no, okay, Muirgheal admitted it was fucked up, but the whole situation was fucked up — on a scale off fucked up, she was honestly kind of ambivalent about her first job. They'd taken their time, and he'd been rather sweet about it, honestly. Trying to recapture some lost romance of his youth, you know how it goes. (Liz categorically did not know how it went.) Still fucked up, yes, but it could have been a lot worse, she'd heard stories... She'd had much worse experiences with clients since then, that one wasn't really worth freaking out about that much.

(Liz honestly couldn't tell whether Muirgheal was trying to defend the bastard — she did admit it was fucked up, so probably not — or if she was just trying to reassure Liz that she hadn't been violently raped for days. Given the edge to her mind, probably the latter, but she was just so blasé about this stuff, it was hard to tell for sure...)

But after that she was, er, on duty, at the brothel. Muirgheal would be skipping along, of course, she didn't think Liz really needed to see any of that, Liz tried to brush aside memories flicking by at the edge of Muirgheal's attention summoned by thinking about it. A couple years into it, when she was sixteen or so (about the same time Liz started at Hogwarts), she started passing information to Saoirse.

The politics of the Gaelic independence movement were actually way more complicated than most people Liz talked to made it seem — mostly they just talked about Saoirse Ghaelach, as though Saoirse and the nationalist cause in general were interchangeable. Granted, most separatist groups were allies and working together at this point — that was what made the present situation different than, say, twenty years ago — but there were still multiple different factions. Given the diverse ethnic composition of Strathclyde, especially in Glasgow itself mixing into a culture that wasn't properly Gaelic or British but a unique blend of its own, Saoirse tended to have a relatively light presence on the ground. The separatist sentiment was still significant there, but their ethnic and economic circumstances led to it coming in a very different flavour: Glasgow was a strongly communalist city.

Now that Muirgheal pointed it out, Liz had already sort of known that? Like, after the last of the first generation Gaelic communalist leaders died in Azkaban — Dáire Ó Broin, Liz had forgotten the name but Muirgheal knew who she meant off the top of her head — there'd been a really bad riot in Glasgow, Hit Wizards sent in force to put it down. There'd been fighting in the streets between locals and Ministry people for days. Muirgheal remembered that, she'd been around Liz's age at the time, she and the rest of the young people had mostly hid down in the kitchens, the grown-ups upstairs watching the entrances. (Whores wielding dangerous potions for grenades and hurling sticks for weapons, ready to fight off intruders to protect the kids, which was simultaneously a funny image and also weirdly tragic.) There were Gaelic and British nationalist groups active in Strathclyde, but Saoirse mostly took a light touch, deferring to the (communalist) local councils on the ground, occasionally backing them up when fighting broke out with the British nationalists...

Anyway, Saoirse wasn't super active in Glasgow, but they did have a good reputation, thanks to their friendly dealings with the local communalists and taking out that infamous gang of vampires. And they had the connections to actually make use of it when Muirgheal heard things. Men liked to feel all big and important and impressive, especially when with a pretty young thing who'd been taught from childhood to stroke his ego (among other things). Sometimes clients bragged, told her things they probably wouldn't tell anyone else — after all, she was just an indentured whore, she wasn't anyone important, it's not like showing off a little would come back to bite him in the arse. Except, sometimes, if she thought something she'd been told might be useful to someone, the next day she'd go down to the modest little Saoirse office in Glasgow, and they would pass it along.

She had no idea if much of it was very helpful, but they must get some use out of some of it. One day, last year, Ciarán had shown up at the brothel with a thank you gift for Muirgheal from Lady Ingham of all people — Lady Ingham was known to be probably the firmest advocate for Gaelic independence in the Wizengamot and one of the biggest financial backers of Saoirse Ghaelach, so getting a thank you from her was kind of a big fucking deal. Muirgheal hadn't been told the details, but something she'd passed along had ended up being important leverage in some political negotiation or whatever, to the point that Lady Ingham knew her name, which was just bloody absurd to her...

Of course, that the Girl Who Lived was sitting at the same table right across from her was also absurd, surreal — people like her didn't tend to meet important people. She was trying not to be weird about that, though.

I appreciate that.

Muirgheal smiled, warm amusement fluttering in her head. So, she did help Saoirse, now and then, primarily by passing information along — but she wasn't actually with them. Muirgheal's loyalty was primarily with her friends in Glasgow, the local councils. She didn't even think of herself as Gaelic, necessarily, she was Glaswegian first. But Saoirse were good neighbours to her people, reliable allies — there was the back-up dealing with local British nationalists and criminal gangs, yes, but they were also responsible for sending some of the priests that helped educate or heal the locals, and sometimes just sent them supplies they needed for free too — and, while their motivations might not be quite the same, they did have the same goals. Strathclyde wouldn't be able to break away from the Wizengamot on their own, if they were going to pull that of it'd be with the Gaelic nationalists, led by Saoirse Ghaelach.

So, helping Saoirse was helping her people — and Muirgheal wanted to help, in whatever small way she could. They hadn't really told her much, they hadn't even told her who this was about — she hadn't known Liz would be here until she'd walked through the door and recognised her from photos in the papers — but she had heard rumours. Liz was with them, right?

...Liz wasn't entirely sure how to answer that question. After a couple seconds thinking about it, she 'said', I live in Caoimhe's Refuge now, and I like living there. I don't want to be a shite neighbour, so, if independence is what the Gaels want, then yes, I'm on their side.

(She didn't mention that she was pretty sure she'd be actually fighting on the Gaels' side in their revolution — she didn't know how far away that was, and a lot could change between now and then. And, Seer shite was weird, it'd take too much explaining...)

Smiling at her some more, Muirgheal thought it was only appropriate that Liz learn their language if she was going to live with them. And things were moving quickly these days, the sooner the better. There were the politics of the matter too, of course, that was all over her head, but...

Muirgheal paused for a second, then leaned forward a little, reaching her hand out to settle palm-up, halfway across the table. It was obvious what she was going for here, Liz stared at her hand, hesitating. Eh, fuck it — she reached forward and took Muirgheal's hand, mind slamming loud against hers. Smooth and warm, but prickling a little with pins and needles Liz didn't know how to read, the complex interlocking web of thought and memory stretching out around her, brushing against her fingers with every twitch, dark feelings burning away at the edge of her attention, but unexpected sympathy and affection swirling nearby, backed with a hard edge of determination, pressing tight against Liz's chest, intense and sharp...

She wanted to help. She wasn't here because she was obligated to be, or because she was getting something out of it. She just wanted to help — if this was how she could help, she was glad to.

...It was kind of hard to doubt that, with Muirgheal's mind pressed right against hers, bright and sincere. The realisation that Saoirse had brought her a literal sex slave to copy Gaelic out of had made her extremely uncomfortable at first, but, well, she guessed this was fine, at the storm of Muirgheal's thoughts and feelings battering at her she felt a little bit of the tension dribble away. Fine, this was fine.

But she did wonder, Why are you so serious about this? You're not even Gaelic, not really, you said so yourself. Well, she thought so herself, Liz meant, whatever.

Her mind firming up a little against Liz, Muirgheal's smile thinned into more of a smirk, her eyes sharp. That should be bloody obvious — Saoirse had promised that one of the very first things a free Gaelic republic would do was abolish indenture. That was a cause she would die for, if it came to it.

...Oh. Right, I'm definitely on your side for that one, indenture is fucked. Liz shifted in her chair a little, settled her free hand over the reservoir. Let's go then. Ready?

Grinning brightly back at Liz, rather delighted by the news that the Girl Who Lived was so firmly against the practice of indenture — some of the feeling must have gotten through the mental contact, and Liz did realise that her opinion was kind of a big deal for some people, as silly as it was — Muirgheal just nodded.

The trick she was doing now was similar to what she'd done the first time she'd copied a language, but not quite the same thing. Easier in some ways, harder in others. For one thing, Muirgheal hadn't been potioned into passivity, which meant she was capable of resisting what Liz was trying to do...though she mostly didn't. There was a sharp flare of unease as Liz sank toward Muirgheal's mind even while pulling it up toward herself — similar to preparing a quick-step, or directly taking control of someone's body (which she'd only done a couple times ever thus far), a far more efficient means to direct Muirgheal's thoughts than completely overwhelming her mind, by matching their resonance creating a funny continuity Liz could exploit to basically use Muirgheal's mind as an extension of her own. (Liz had practised this with Severus, but only briefly, it made him extremely uncomfortable.) Her control wasn't complete, though, as Muirgheal felt her own thoughts pulled away from her there was a shiver of panic, their joined mind jerking, almost slipping out of alignment...

But then, with a deep breath, she relaxed, the unease evaporating away. Liz hadn't even done anything, Muirgheal had just decided to trust Liz all on her own.

(Some kind of feeling was clawing at Liz's chest, hot and thick, but she ignored it.)

Mind magic could be super trippy sometimes, so it was kind of difficult to put into English words what she did next. Liz and Muirgheal's minds were running at close to the same frequency now, close enough that Liz could manipulate them both the same, but they weren't quite identical, there was still a part of the intermixing soup that was Liz and a part that was Muirgheal. The Muirgheal part was bound to her own aura, since she wasn't the mind mage in here — but it didn't have to be. With one hand, Liz reached toward the back of Muirgheal's mind, deep deep deep down, and pushed a little bit of magic into it, flaring brighter with a crackle of energy, her aura expanding; with the other hand, Liz tweaked the character of the bridge connecting them, making it more Muirgheal than Liz, the change continuing on along the edge of Liz's mind and back out through her aura, reaching out, looking for the empty black lifeless cold of the reservoir...

...There. Got it.

At this point, with the change made, their mixed-up mind was actually more Muirgheal than it was Liz, but that was fine — Liz was still in control of the part that was Muirgheal anyway, so it hardly mattered. Liz formed the compulsion not out of her own mind and magic, but out of Muirgheal's, tweaking the shape of her own thoughts to draw out her linguistic knowledge. Tangled webs of memory and raw information, it took a couple minutes of adjustments to get exactly what she wanted — just the knowledge, stripped from experiences it was associated with — and shortly it was all streaming out of Muirgheal and through Liz-coloured-like-Muirgheal and straight into the reservoir, the empty space glowing brighter and brighter as the flow of information coalesced inside.

Once she got the funny delicate balancing act of bringing their minds into alignment, designing the compulsions, and connecting Muirgheal to the reservoir, this part was actually way easier than the first time. She needed to build the whole pool of knowledge, but if she broke contact she would get repeats or miss things — she needed to be able to hold all of it, all at once. The problem with that was that languages were big, and the human mind simply wasn't capable of holding all of it at once, even between the two of them they didn't have enough stuff. (Especially since Muirgheal actually spoke multiple languages...though two languages took significantly less space than double of what a single language took, Liz wasn't entirely sure why.) The first time, Liz had come up with the idea of amplifying Valérie's mind to get a bit of extra stuff to work with — which she was still curious about, she'd hinted around the idea with Severus (in case what she was doing here was actually super freaky), but he'd just said it was impossible — but even pushing both their minds as far as she could without dangerously overchannelling, she'd barely come up with enough material to hold the information she wanted.

The trick this time was that the reservoir would hold the information they put into it, on its own. Last time, Liz had to continue channelling the power to contain the information she was pulling, but here she could just put it in the reservoir, and it was suspended there, the power Liz had been using now free to hold another bit. She kept a slow trickle of power flowing into the back of Muirgheal's mind — making a sort of closed circuit, magic channelled through Liz into Muirgheal's mind, where it picked up a bit of information, flowed across the bridge between them, and through the Muirgheal-coloured part of Liz, into the reservoir, where it was caught, that fraction of Liz's channelling capacity freed up again, which she put straight back into Muirgheal, and around and around...

She had no sense of how long it took — time could be funny when focussed on this stuff — but eventually the well ran dry, the compulsions locked into Muirgheal's mind failing to dredge up any more. Liz kept pushing along the stream, pulling it up across the bridge and through to the reservoir, making sure all of it was locked in there. Right, that was it, they were done. Liz let the Muirgheal-coloured parts of herself lapse back into their natural resonance, quick slashed apart the compulsions anchored into Muirgheal's mind proper, and then let go.

Muirgheal wavered in her seat for a second, one hand coming up to her forehead with a low "ooo" sound, slumping into the backrest. Ciarán was saying something to her in Gaelic, Muirgheal said something back — Liz was still close enough to her mind to pick up that she was telling Ciarán she was fine, just a bit dizzy and nauseous.

"That should wear off in a couple minutes," Liz said, drawing eyes to herself — Ciarán's, Muirgheal's, and Síomha's, Fionn was bothering Severus over by the hearth, the two of them distracted. (At least, Liz assumed Fionn was teasing Severus, by the shivering feeling of exasperation leaking from his head.) Tapping at the reservoir with a fingernail, the crystal now visibly glowing a pleasant orange-blue, "I'm going to go ahead and get started on this. If you want to order some food or drinks or something, I'm buying."

There was some discussion about that, in a mix of English and Gaelic, but Liz tuned it out, focussed on the reservoir. Actually, after a couple seconds she quick cast a privacy paling to block out their voices instead — mind magic subsumption was very sensitive, it was best she wasn't distracted. Though the way she was doing it this time was much less risky than the first time. Liz reached for the large bright bundle of knowledge held by the reservoir, encircled a bite-sized chunk of it and drew it away from the rest, into her own mind. She pumped magic into the bubble in her grasp, her own magic tracing over the pattern of Muirgheal's knowledge, until it was thoroughly saturated, the excess energy venting back out again. A quick calming breath, firming herself, she forced intent into the waiting magic, hard and sharp and jealous...

Mine.

The information was burned into Liz, like hot metal pressed against skin — she grimaced, grit her teeth against the pain, but it only lasted a couple seconds. She took a few calming breaths, rolling her shoulders to try to work out the tension, and reached for the reservoir again.

Grab, trace, mine, ow.

Grab, trace, mine, ow.

Grab, trace, mine, ow.

Over and over and over, only pausing for maybe five to ten seconds between each bit before reaching for the next. She was taking small pieces, to reduce the risk of hurting herself, which drew out the process considerably — it took much more time to do however many smaller subsumptions than one enormous one. She had no idea how many times she'd have to do this — she did have a vague impression of relative size with mind magic stuff, but it wasn't nearly accurate enough to guess at exact ratios — which was somewhat tedious, but, well, she had overchannelled rather badly in the Third Task just last week. She'd been reminded that that was very bad for you, as much of a pain as this was it was better than risking serious brain damage.

Eventually, after seemingly endless repetitions of the process, she finally scooped up the last bit of it, the reservoir once again left completely blank. She quick traced over it, subsumed it — and then let out a heavy sigh, leaning against the table on her elbows, rubbing at her forehead with both hands. She'd ended up with a pretty serious headache, hot tight pounding in her temples, but there wasn't any tingly numbness or burning at the base of her skull. This wasn't an overchannelling headache, this was an I've been sitting in one place studying for too fucking long and need a break headache. She might not be fully conscious of it, but her brain did need to properly process and sort the information she was shoving into it when she subsumed things, so, that was exactly what kind of headache this was, she guessed.

Liz dismissed the paling with a flick of her fingers, and pushed herself to her feet — she felt a little stiff and shaky, which was understandable, she had been sitting tense in one place for a while, so. She felt eyes flick her way, her skin crawling, tried not to flinch. (It was always a surprise the first time someone looked at her after being ignored for a while, very irritating.) The first person to speak to her was Severus. She didn't miss the low edge of concern in his mind, wondering if it'd turned out well this time, but what he said out loud was, "I expect you could use something to eat," nodding at the low table in the middle of the circle of armchairs.

What did he— Oh, there was another plate of chips there, a pitcher of water and a mug that Liz was pretty sure was more of the mulled mead. She hadn't even noticed anyone come back in, too busy. Now that Severus pointed it out, she was a bit hungry — subsuming multiple languages' worth of information in the space of however long could do that to you. "Oh, thanks." Not sure what Liz was thanking him for, she was covering the tab...

There were glasses and mugs around, an empty soup bowl on the table in front of Muirgheal, apparently they'd taken her up on her offer to pay for stuff. Liz bonelessly flopped down in an armchair near the plate of chips and the mug of mead, poured herself a cup of water and gulped it down before glancing over the chips. It wasn't the exact same thing Severus had gotten, more carrots and onions, little bits of bacon sprinkled through it. She quickly tried one of the bits of bacon — mm, not excellent, Seer-stuff-wise, but it was fine — and there was also a tiny little pitcher of gravy, she tasted that first too. Mushrooms and herbs, mostly, there was some cream in it, but that was actually somewhat better than the bacon — not quite as great as the special stuff she got at home, but still good. Right, then, she emptied the gravy over the chips and mixed it around.

There was some conversation going on around her — in English, and perfectly innocuous, discussing some point or another about the trade in alchemical products that Liz didn't give a damn about — nobody spoke to Liz until after she'd taken a couple bits of her chips. (Using the fork herself this time, since they had gravy all over them now.) Muirgheal asked, "So, do you speak Gaelic now?"

She asked the question in Gaelic, of course, but Liz understood it just fine. It felt kind of weird, a delay between hearing the words and the meaning clicking, but it'd take a bit for the knowledge to sink in all the way, that was normal. "Yes, I speak Gaelic now." Talking also felt slightly weird, the words feeling stiff and clumsy in her mouth, but that would get better with practice too.

Muirgheal smiled back at her, a shivering crackle of enthusiasm around her. "Oh, that is interesting. I didn't know mind mages could do this."

"It's not very common," Liz said, shrugging. She opened her mouth to continue, but realised after a second she didn't know how to say subsumption in Gaelic — Muirgheal did have some education in magic, but not advanced enough in the right areas to know that kind of thing. "Some parts of the magic are a little risky for the user if you don't know what you're doing, so it's pretty rare to do it with something as big as a whole language. But I think languages are neat, and it's really inconvenient not being able to talk to people sometimes." The magical world, inconveniently, was a lot less globalised than the muggle one was getting these days — if she wanted to go practically anywhere outside of Britain, even just to visit, she'd need to know more languages. Not that she minded, languages were neat, she was just saying.

"We managed just fine a moment ago."

"Yes, well, most people are uncomfortable with having a stranger poke around their minds, so."

Once they'd confirmed it'd worked, and Liz spoke Gaelic just fine now — meaning the favour Saoirse had owed Severus for his help at the World Cup was well and truly paid now — it didn't take very long for them to start wrapping up. Most of them had other places to be, after all — they didn't say it aloud, but Liz caught that Muirgheal needed to get back to the brothel before it opened for the evening. They didn't want to get her in trouble with her curator, if people in charge got suspicious that could get very bad for her very quickly. Everyone but Liz was standing, now, Muirgheal and Ciarán talking about something while Muirgheal retrieved her cloak, she didn't catch it because Fionn was talking at her, teasingly asking her to keep him informed about any developments. About Severus and Síomha, he meant, he was still extremely amused by her cheating Seer knowledge that they'd end up getting married eventually.

Oh shite, there were rituals and stuff around the big Gaelic holiday in February — the proper name was the Feast of the Mother (meaning Bríd), "Imbolc" had a Gaelic etymology but was only ever actually used in English, for some reason — Fionn was suggesting Liz might want to do some stuff at her house, for protection and for her garden, he could pass along word to make sure some priests came over? (He was a priest of Bríd, so that was super easy for him to arrange.) Um, Liz would probably have to be there for that, which should be doable. There was a Task at the beginning of the month but it wasn't until the weekend, and what did they even do for Bríd's day anyway...

Liz was only half paying attention to the conversation, her eyes drawn again and again to Severus and Síomha. They were off by themselves, standing rather close, their heads together — Síomha was tall enough he didn't have to lean over that uncomfortably far — having some kind of whispered conversation. Private, definitely, they had gone off alone, and were keeping quiet, enough to not be overheard. It was sort of odd to watch, honestly. They weren't being terribly obvious about it, from Fionn's comments earlier Liz gathered Síomha was also a very private sort of person, but it was still weird to see Severus being so physically close with someone. Something about the way they were talking seemed very intimate, somehow. Enough that Liz felt a little embarrassed watching, like it was too private — but she was a nosey little shite, so she couldn't help herself.

...

Two years. Maybe three, '97 or '98. Their first child was coming a couple years after that, around the millennium, 2000 or 2001. Liz felt very certain about that.

It hadn't stopped being a weird thought, honestly, but being a Seer was like that sometimes.

(Liz would be in the wedding party — she would wear green — and she'd end up babysitting the kids on occasion. Severus better get used to the idea of being a normal person who had shite like a wife and children, because she was very certain it was happening.)

After finishing up whatever they were talking about, Síomha tipped up to drop a quick kiss on Severus's lips (woah, that was fucking weird to watch), and she turned around, her boots sharply clunking on the rug-shrouded wood. "We should be leaving," she called, in Gaelic. "We're to have Muirgheal home in less than an hour, and I'm meant to report back at the Hill before the session meets."

Fionn snapped off a sarcastic salute. "Yes, ma'am. I believe you said you're covering the tab?" he asked Liz.

"I am. Get out of here, before Muirgheal's late."

They quickly sorted themselves out, goodbyes going around. Muirgheal again gave Severus a shy wave, saying goodbye in Cambrian — she was extremely tempted to be very nosey about the famous Síomha Ní Ailbhe's boyfriend, but she was trying to behave. (It was very funny that Severus was just Síomha Ní Ailbhe's boyfriend in Muirgheal's head, it took effort to stop herself from bursting into laughter.) She again went with the 'appropriate' curtsey to Liz, who couldn't help rolling her eyes at the formal gesture — Muirgheal grinning back, her mind crackling with amusement and affection. She was definitely telling her friends stories about meeting the Girl Who Lived later (editing out exactly why), but she was mostly going to be telling people how nice and normal and not all stuck-up noble-ish she'd turned out to be, so Liz guessed that was fine...

Fionn was already out the door, Muirgheal nearly at the threshold, when Liz blurted out, "Wait." She turned back, looking at Liz over her shoulder, curious. Liz hesitated, glanced at Síomha and Ciarán — and switched to Glasgow dialect. "I guess it wouldn't be appropriate for me to give you the money to buy out your contract."

Muirgheal smiled, an odd hot-cold shuffling going through her head Liz didn't know how to read. "It doesn't work like that, I don't have a debt to pay off. You would need to negotiate with the Farleys to buy my contract from them, and no, that wouldn't be appropriate. It would be trouble, you being who you are, for me and for you."

"Right." She'd thought that would be the case. If she could just give Muirgheal the money to buy herself out, that would be one thing, but if she needed to get the contract off the Farleys that would become a whole big public scandal, it would be a mess. Especially since everyone would probably assume Liz was only doing it because they were sleeping together...

"Don't worry about me, I'll get by until the revolution comes." Like practically everyone Liz had spoken to, Muirgheal didn't think that was very far away, probably only a couple years. "But it is sweet of you to ask."

Liz hated just letting her go back there — way more than she would have expected, honestly, but she guessed spending like a half hour deep in someone's head could do that — but she guessed there was nothing she could do about it. And Muirgheal had been getting on for years, she was sure it would be fine. Or, Muirgheal was sure it would be fine, Liz just had to trust she knew her situation better than Liz did. "Okay. Bye."

"Goodbye." Muirgheal quick glanced at Ciarán over her shoulder, nodded at Severus again, and then disappeared through the door. Ciarán followed her, and finally Síomha, closing the door behind her. Leaving Liz and Severus alone in the room once again.

Liz still had some chips and mead left, so they'd probably be in here for a little bit yet. Severus was making for one of the armchairs by the fire, acting super casual — though there was a slight shade of awkwardness, he knew Liz had noticed the kiss. For a second, Liz considered teasing him about that, but instead she asked, "Did you know they were bringing a sex slave?"

A sharp cold shock through his head, Severus froze, staring at her. It took him a couple seconds to find his voice. "I did not. What do you mean by that, precisely?"

"Muirgheal is indentured, she works at a high-class brothel in Glasgow, has for as long as it's been legal for her to, you know. Her parents sold her off as a little kid."

Finally sinking into his chair, Severus visibly grimaced, something twisted and sharp and furious and horribly cold burning away at the back of his mind. "Síomha did not mention that, no — I imagine she considered it to be none of my business. I regret you had to see that."

She was temporarily confused, before putting together that he thought she must have seen some of Muirgheal's memories. And that, given her issues around her abuse and sex and stuff, that that probably hadn't been very pleasant for her. "No, no, I'm fine, it wasn't— Muirgheal's nice, she tried to keep anything sensitive away from me. I just... I fucking hate this country sometimes, that's all."

"I understand the sentiment entirely."

Yeah, Liz just bet he did — she hadn't missed the cold rage when she'd mentioned that Muirgheal had been sold into slavery as a small child, had been working in a brothel since she was thirteen. Not the hot kind of anger, but the patient, murderous kind he got sometimes when he was truly furious, reminding Liz of that time he'd found out Tracey's grandfather fully intended for her to die before she was old enough to marry off (and he'd implied he would engineer the bastard's death if necessary to prevent it). Except there was no target for it this time, leaving the feeling directionless and bitter, fruitlessly simmering away.

Liz knew, intellectually, that Severus had just as many issues with magical Britain as she did, but sometimes she was reminded that he also took it very, very personally. Given the shite he'd seen, she guessed that wasn't surprising, it just wasn't something she thought about very often.

The thought occurred to her when she was partway through a mouthful of chips, she had to wait a few seconds before she could actually say it. "We're both going to be fighting on the Gaels' side when the war comes, aren't we?" Severus's only personal connection to their side was Síomha, as far as she knew — he was friends with a whole hell of a lot more people who'd be on the British side, loyal to the official government. But Severus despised the official government, so Liz wasn't certain how much that mattered. She had a feeling.

Severus watched her for a long moment, the riotous hot-cold storm in his head not showing on his face at all. Whatever was going on in there was way too complicated and conflicted for Liz to get much without intruding, so she just focussed on her food instead. It was maybe a full minute later before Severus finally said, "If we are very fortunate, it will not come to that."

"You don't honestly think we're going to get that lucky."

"No. I don't. Should you transfer overseas, you will be safely out of the country for nine months out of the year, at the very least. But, given the present climate, I am certain it will get worse before it gets better."

Fair enough. Honestly, Liz might get a flat in whatever country she was going to school in and just not come back until things settle down. Or, that's what she thought, but she'd gotten Seer flashes, she knew that wasn't actually going to happen...

Maybe she'd be in it just to be neighbourly, to make sure the Gaels still wanted her around? That would make a kind of sense.

"Oh hey, um, before I forget, Fionn is going to send a couple junior priests over to my house for stuff to do with an Fhéile Mháthar, and I don't know how all that works, but I think it'll be pretty involved? I think I'll need to go home after lunch on the Thirty-First, and I might not be back until the Second..."

፠

A couple days later, Liz got her first letter from Muirgheal — she couldn't even say she was all that surprised. She hadn't expected that copying Gaelic from someone would end with getting them as her second regular penpal (Rita didn't count), but she guessed that was fine.

While they did talk about normal stuff, they ended up talking about politics kind of a lot, since Muirgheal knew what things were actually like for ordinary people way better than Liz did. Which was probably only radicalising Liz even more thoroughly than Tamsyn and Hermione had managed already, but she didn't give a damn — at this point, magical Britain could burn for all she cared.

Oh hey, a totally innocuous chapter, Liz just magically learning a language and absolutely nothing else going on. Weee!

The next chapter should be relatively short, hopefully, but I may or may not write some for First Contact before starting. We'll see how I feel about it. There are an estimated 27 scenes left in my outline for year four, but it's possible I may need to add or remove things as we go along, hard to say.

Bye, then.