‘Tis cozy here by the fire, Malkin purring at my feet, the flames no more red than his fur. A few apprentices move quietly around the room; they are a willing audience for an old witch’s tales of her life, or so I flatter myself. It is a mix of joy and foolishness and sorrow, but at the end there is something left behind that is more than the sum of all our lives, young Godric, Master Slytherin, poor Lady Ravenclaw and me. We changed the world, so we did, so we did.
A bit lonely at the end, you might think, for I am the last of the four. If lonely you could call it, being that the castle is full of apprentices and journeymen wizards and those that teach them.
I cannot remember who first spoke aloud the idea of a school. P’raps Master Slytherin, for he was forever looking for ways to part the magical and non-magical worlds. He didn’t have faith in the goodness of people, and if I had walked in his footsteps mayhap I would have felt just the same. Always more comfortable around his fey beasties, he was, especially after his wife was gone. That now, that was a terrible time for us all.
From the moment I stepped into it the school was my home, the resting place at the end of all my travels and a place to share with all that wanted to learn. Lady Ravenclaw saw it differently; she collected her books and learnings and scrambled them up together, the way a house-elf makes a cake. A little of this and a little of that all combined in a toothsome morsel to make you smile. Why, the way she bespelled the staircases to move about was a wonder and a delight, but held no earthly practical use! Unless to bewilder the apprentices.
It makes me sad still that those early times passed us by. You might ask what happened, and if you did I would tell you, for it saddens me that the tale is so little known. What ill will folk think of Master Slytherin if the truth were left behind to moulder through the years?
Now some will argue, and I will not say them nay, that Master Slytherin was a distrustful man, grim and distant seeming. You would not think that he was one to love with all his heart. Ah, but there you would be wrong, for he gave his heart to my little apprentice, Lind, to keep for all time. And she in her turn loved him with all her soul. It would warm me clear through to see the two of them together. Quiet-like they were “ but the happiness between them could fill a room. I think that when she bore him their first child, a sweet girl, his joy sang up to the heavens that he said he no longer believed in. Young Godric stood up to be Rhiamon’s godfather, for he and Master Slytherin were as close as that in those early years. As close as that.
Well, well, if I could have saved the memories in a bowl and look back on them that is one that I would keep.
Of course, we were all close in those days; the four of us bound snugly by ties of family and affection. Lady Ravenclaw and Godric were brother and sister by marriage, and I could not have loved them more had I bourn them myself. Master Slytherin earned my affection as well as my respect for I saw how gently he treated my Lind, and how tender he was with Rhiamon, and Arvel, his son, born two years later. Godric now . . . .Godric looked to Master Slytherin with such esteem and admiration that you might think them brothers “ or lovers, if you did not know how little Salazar would think of such a notion.
Those were the best of days, so they were. The best of days.
It was a new thing, Hogwarts. Oh, I had seen the Lyceum in Greece, and the Academies in Rome, broken down as the northern hordes had left them. I had even visited the University of Al-Qarawiyyin, in Mauritania, and saw with my own eyes its great library. Hogwarts was like, and yet not quite “ for we take our apprentices in as children and ask for nothing in return.
I can see them still, the first few classes. Awkward apprentices, young and shy, like little birds, apt to start and twitter at the least thing. Some had never known that the things they could do were magic. Some came from families with a history as long as my own, and as humble. Others came from a noble wizarding blood as ancient as Lady Ravenclaw’s and young Godric’s, and thought they knew it all.
That now, that makes me chuckle, for none of us know it all. Not even Lady Ravenclaw with all her books, or Master Slytherin with his wanderings on the edges of Faerie.
I said “Faerie,” yes that I did, for it is real, though you smile at an old witch’s ramblings. And Hogwarts is one of the places where it borders easily on. Why, all you have to do is wander the woods that edge the castle to watch the unicorns come down to drink the stream, or see the piskies and thestrals at twilight. As for the Fair Folk themselves, there were times I thought I saw them passing the time of day with this or that apprentice “ a worrisome thing, for you never know when they might be minded to make a changeling.
My, how the telling takes me back! We see little of the Fair Folk these days.
When Lind died. . . . Ah, when Lind died. Master Slytherin was heartbroken. No, that does not do it justice. I worried that he would do himself harm, no matter that it would leave his wee ones orphaned. But young Godric stayed by his side; plied him with strong drink and soft words and sweet reason until the worst was over. Master Slytherin drifted among us like a ghost for months after that “ speaking little. That was when he started spending so much time away from the castle, we knew not where. He all but abandoned his poor bairns, and they suffered for the loss. That was a sorrow that needn’t have been, that was.
Rhiamon, now there was a child to break a parent’s heart. So headstrong and cunning she was and as quick and supple as the adder that lived in the wall. She wished to see the world, and had I yet been travelling, I would have taken her. Perhaps. They named her for the witch she became, but in the end, she left and married that man from the Highlands. A brother of one of Godric’s apprentices, he had not a magical hair on his head. But he could enchant with his harp and enspell with his voice and so he wooed her away. Master Slytherin never forgave Godric for not putting a stop to it. Hah! As if Godric could have! I have to shake my head and laugh for the folly of men, for any woman would have known that lass would wiggle out of any plan to keep her from her desire.
She left, let me see, yes, it was just a year before King Ethelred burned Strathclyde. After that Master Slytherin drew away from us all, trusting the world less and less. It led to quarrels. Over this, over that . . . but mostly over apprentices who came from non-magical families. He thought, you see, that they would betray him, as the King had betrayed his duty to his subjects.
More and more he drew his apprentices from families with long magical histories. Oh, he took his turn at teaching all the apprentices about the magical beasties that he loved so much, looking for those as had his own gift of cunning and foresight. It was thanks to him that we were so often forewarned “ for he had the gift of Second Sight. And as often as we escaped attack because of it, that was how often he told us we were fools to trust any who were not like us.
He never knew that I guessed at the basilisk. He thought that he could hide his mind from all of us, just as he hid the type of egg he had set a cockerel to brood. A powerful bit of magic, that, to make so unnatural a thing. When it hatched, it gave me the shivers to think of it “ so cruel and fell, its gaze chilling. And as it got older its gaze became as poisonous as the venom of the adder whose egg hatched it.
Poison enough to sicken his son.
That was when he told me of the beast. When he brought Arvel to me, stricken and limp. If the lad had not been a strapping youth of fifteen summers, I fear he would not have lived. As it was, it took all my skill to bring him through unharmed. Unharmed but not unaltered, for the poison left a mark on him ever after. When the danger was past, I sat his father down and gave him the sharp side of my tongue, for the beast was a danger to us all, loose in the woods. Mayhap Salazar could control it “ but only when he was there! And he could not always be there. The beast, I told him, had to be destroyed or locked away. Ah, I was fierce; I was as fierce as a badger defending her cubs, and it shocked him to silence for an entire hand span of minutes, so it did.
He promised me, most humbly, that he would lock the creature away. I would have wished that he had destroyed it, but it seemed safe enough, far down below the castle, at the very roots of the hill.
For a time I hoped that things would mend. That Master Slytherin would see where his road was taking him and allow our friendship into his heart again. That he would see how much his actions had hurt his son. But it was not to be. The distance grew greater. Especially with Godric; the regard between them had gone as sour as week-old milk.
I misremember the last quarrel; it was not of great note, just one of too many. I came into the Great Hall to find the apprentices sent away and Master Slytherin hissing in anger. Lady Ravenclaw was perched at the edge of her chair, her hands clutching the table, her face pale and drawn; Godric stood beside her red faced and fierce, golden hair reflecting the fire. I remember that Godric flung his hat down and proclaimed that it would choose what Houses apprentices should go to when we were gone.
In the silence that followed Master Slytherin looked at us each in our turn and then walked out into the morning sun. We saw him no more.
For these three score years I have kept watch on the basilisk that lurks in its hidden chamber. As I watched Salazar’s children and grandchildren make their way in the world. Arvel is head of his father’s House, making it into a place where those of old blood flourish. He has darkness in him unlike his father’s, and at times I think that he sees the world through eyes tainted by the basilisk’s venomous gaze.
Rhiamon’s granddaughter, Fenella, apprenticed at Hogwarts and wed one of Harold’s many grandsons. I was godmother to her daughter, a girl the very image of Lind, the same raven-dark hair and milk pale skin. Fenella told me many a time that her daughter would come to Hogwarts one day, and nothing I could say ever convinced her that the lass was gone forever, for she was lost when a band of brigands swept over their croft and destroyed all they had. After that Fenella settled her family in Hogsmeade, for these days it is dangerous for magical folk to live scattered about
The fire is burning down into flickering caves of embers, and Malkin winds about my old legs, reminding me that my bed waits.
I wonder what paths Master Slytherin has walked since I saw him last, and what company his ambition has found him. When he left the home we had made at Hogwarts he was afraid to love again, afraid to let someone near. For what had love done but betray him over and over again? His Church had betrayed his devotion by allowing evil to flourish, his wife had betrayed his love by dying, and his daughter had betrayed his trust by leaving. Even his son, the last to bear his name, betrayed him by growing into a man whose ways were foreign to him. He must have felt so alone when he walked away from the Great Hall that last time.
Aye, I wept for him then, and I could weep for him now, poor lonely soul, with all his secrets. He had eyes that could see the wind and a soul that cried for love. I hope that he has found it, for he has my friendship still, and always will.