The train station was impossibly quiet, knowing glances traded between every student on Platform Nine and Three Quarters. Even many of my fellow Slytherins looked grim as we boarded the train. As I searched for a seat, other students’ whispers of words like Heir and Muggleborn reached my ears and reminded me of the potential dangers that awaited us back at the school.
I once again sat with Josie and Artemis, but this time I was pleasantly surprised when Grant appeared in the door to our cabin and asked if it was full.
“Sit down, you!” I motioned towards the empty seat next to Arty.
“I thought you were afraid to spend seven hours in a
cabin full of girls,” Josie said, flashing her smile.
Grant gave her a smug grin, an unusual expression for him. “Estrogen exposure
has been known to cause me all sorts of nasty rashes, but as long as we don’t
make contact, I should be fine.”
Josie held up both hands. “Don’t worry, I’m wearing mittens.”
Grant sat down and then shot me a glance. “Was your Holiday productive Michelle?”
“Uh-huh.” I looked to see if Artemis was paying attention, but she was already curling up and starting to nod off. “I produced quite a few things, in fact. How did your, uh, research go?”
“Swimmingly.”
“Keep talking in your secret code,” Josie said. “I love trying to decipher it.”
I laughed in spite of myself and sat back with a blush. Grant and I tried to avoid saying anything else regarding our Heir of Slytherin-catching plans, and instead turned the conversation to professional Quidditch. This mostly consisted of Grant rattling off South African teams that nobody else knew about, Josie singing the praises of the Hollyhead Harpies, and Artemis chiming in every now and then with an insult to the chances of the Chudley Cannons, who she apparently only knew by their sterling reputation for failure.
After the lunch trolley came through, Josie excused herself to go to the lou and Artemis leaned forward.
“Now that She-Who-Hates-Gossip is gone… spill it, Danesti,” she said.
“Spill what?” He arched an eyebrow.
“I heard you and the Golden Boy fighting on the platform. That’s why you’re sitting with us instead of him.”
“Wait, fighting? Why didn’t I hear about this?” I asked, suddenly interested.
“You were already
on the train.”
“Look, I don’t know why Jacinto threatened me”” Grant began.
“He threatened you!?”
“Sypha Aulin was bawling in the door to the train and I told her to move. I may have used a few unkind words.” Grant muttered something I couldn’t understand and put his fist over his mouth to cover his scowl.
“Bawling?” I said.
“I don’t know what it was over, but Jacinto jumped to her
defense and said that he would hex me.”
Artemis’ eyes narrowed. “Did he call you… you know, the N-Word?”
I winced inwardly because the phrase made me think of a rather different slur than the one Artemis meant.
“You can say ‘the Nasty’, McFly,” Grant sighed. “And he didn’t call me anything. He just told me to let her alone. I told him it wasn’t his business and he threatened me.”
“Still, it isn’t like Jacinto to take up for people into Blood Purity,” I said. “You’ve told me that yourself, Grant.”
“Well I might have been wrong about him.” Grant looked out the window and took a sip of pumpkin juice, staying silent for a good minute. He finally looked like he was about to say more on the topic, when the door opened and Josie slipped back in. In silent consensus, we let the conversation stay dropped.
0000
After the return dinner that night, I sat with Grant in the Common Room under a green lamp; he was playing chess with Terrance Austin, and seemed to have finally met his match. The two boys kept making moves without killing anything; not because the kills weren’t there, but because the kills were deemed an unequal sacrifice compared to what the other would lose. I thought there might be a metaphor in that, but I didn’t say anything.
“Knight to…” Grant hesitated. “Queen’s pawn.”
“King’s pawn to knight,” Terrance responded.
The piece did not move.
“What, did the enchantment wear off in the last two seconds?” Grant muttered.
“He’d be moving into check from your Queen,” I said.
Terrance grimaced. “Damn, I should have castled.”
“Want to just call it a draw?” Grant said. He leaned back in his chair. “My head’s not in this game.”
I leaned forward in my seat. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Grant said. “I just don’t feel like
playing.”
“You always feel like playing,” Terrance said. “You’ve been off your game
tonight, though.”
“Well, you would be too if literally the only person in your dorm who doesn’t seem to hate you suddenly, well, seemed to hate you.”
“Never was a problem for me,” Terrance said. “Everyone in my dorm hated me from day one.”
I raised a fist and bumped it against Terrance’s. “Mudblood pride, yo.”
Grant slammed his hand palm-down onto the table by the chess board, rattling the pieces from their positions. “Do you have to joke about everything? This isn’t funny for me.”
“It’s really not funny for us, either,” Terrance said. “But if you let it eat you up, you’re the one who gets eaten.”
“Profound words,” I said with a sage nod.
0000
Minutes after the chess game ended, Grant and I slipped into the boys’ dorm and used our wands to lift a bed from the side of the room to block the door; then he tossed his bag on the floor and knelt by it. Out from it he pulled a massive roll of parchment, which he spread out on the floor of the dorm. On it were dozens, maybe hundreds of names with lines connecting between them, a family tree, or at least one huge branch of one. He slid his finger along it until he came to one of the lowest branches. Below the names Boudicca Ramirez Neithercut and Basarab Neithercut was the name of a single child: Jacinto N. (19 August 1981- )
“This is incredible, Grant.” I traced the lines up through a maze of names, my eyes crossing from the strain. The names were printed very small. “How hard was it to get this?”
“Immensely,” he said, his voice still full of annoyance.
“The Walkers Midst Carrion archive is directly by Cape Town harbour. When I
first tried to sneak in I found there was an Apparition trap set on the door
that popped me directly into the water. And that was the least difficult thing
to avoid.”
“That’s horrible!” I skimmed the list of names a bit further, but none of them
meant a thing to me. Then, something occurred to me and I looked up at Grant
dryly. “Wait, so earlier when you said that your holiday went ‘swimmingly’ you
were””
“Making a pun, yes.”
I blinked. “Thanks for clearing that up. I’m going to hex you now.”
“Please, I’ve been hexed enough this winter.”
“It’s only been winter for fourteen days.”
“My point exactly.” He paused for a moment, and took a deep breath. “I need to show you this, though.”
He traced his finger up from Jacinto to his father.
“Basarab Neithercut, is as far as I can tell, a nobody in
terms of blood status. He barely qualifies as pureblood and has enough Muggle
ancestors that he’d likely be kicked out of the Death Eaters or the WMC. His
wife Boudicca, on the other hand, is as pure as they come.”
He traced his finger up to a line that read Samara Ferdinand, who lived in the
1700s. “Samara is the first member of her family to live in America. She’s
important, because as best we can tell, she’s the direct descendent of this
person.”
He moved his finger over a gap filled in with dotted lines instead of solid
ones. His finger came to a rest on the name Salazar Fernando.
“They changed the family name when they moved, but the
line goes back further in Spain, all the way to a dreadfully powerful witch
named Galatea Slytherin.”
“A descendant of Salazar Slytherin,” I said.
“Not exactly.” Grant sighed. “The truth is, Salazar Slytherin’s line stayed in England and died out early in the twentieth century. Galatea Slytherin is the direct descendant of Salazar Slytherin’s brother. Jacinto is not a descendent of Slytherin, but he’s definitely related.”
“But wouldn’t that make Boudicca Neithercut the current Heir?” I said.
“Well legally, yes,” Grant said. “But what if Jacinto is taking orders from her? You told me he was using his mother’s spell books.”
I nodded. I couldn’t deny that was possible; even though
he spoke like he and his mother didn’t get along too well, it might have all
been part of the act. “We should tell someone. The Headmaster.”
“We can’t just tell anyone. It would start a panic and Jacinto could be the
victim of attacks. You see how people have been treating Harry Potter since he
spoke in Parseltongue and he’s a national hero. If
people thought Jacinto was the Heir”and if he’s not”we could screw him over.”
“And if people were suspicious, he might start attacking
more students.”
“Yeah.” Grant looked away. “And I still want to trust him. I know it looks
horrible, but what if things aren’t like they seem?”
Just then, there was a pounding on the door and Arianna Davis’ voice. “Oi, what’s the deal? Why is the door blocked?”
I slapped my hand over my mouth in embarrassment, suddenly realizing what it would look like if they found a girl and a boy locked alone together in the dorm. My concerns were unwarranted, though, because a moment and a jinx from Arianna later, the bed we’d moved against the door flew across the room and slammed into me, knocking me to the ground and sliding over top of me.
When Arianna barged in and demanded to know what Grant was doing, he quickly rolled up the parchment and muttered something about interrupting his alone time.
I felt my face flush so red that the glow might have given me away had Arianna been looking at the floor.
0000
I slid easily enough back into my studies, including continuing at the dueling club. Thankfully there was not a repeat of my disastrous first match with Luna Lovegood, and I became adept at disarming other first years with a bit of reliability. Older students, not so much. I wanted Grant to join me, but he remained bitter and it became difficult to be around him, every thought seemingly devoted to figuring out Jacinto”not whether he was up to no good, but whether Jacinto liked him personally. I told him he was being selfish; he told me I couldn’t understand.
It was a week before Arianna Davis announced that Slytherin needed to select a captain for the Slytherin team in the Dueling Club. We’d vote on 1 March, so I threw my faux-campaign into high gear. I fixed ten of my pins to the notice board in the common room and handed others out at random. Josie and Artemis knew something was up, but took my pins anyway. I suspected it was out of pity.
The original, with Copi inside it, stayed pinned to
the lapel of my robes, and every time I was free I looked for an opportunity to
pin it to Jacinto. (Not literally.) Jacinto, however thwarted my attempts by
sticking close to students whose company I wished to avoid. More than once I
saw him chatting animatedly with Othello Harper, laughing even. And since her
bout of crying on the train, he clung close to Sypha Aulin. I came across the
two of them in a corridor shortly before Valentine’s Day, and slipped behind a
suit of armour, wishing I knew some of Grant’s Chameleomancy talents.
“Can you believe they’re making us go to class on Sunday?” Jacinto was saying. “And a holiday on top of that.”
“We did miss all those days when the teachers all mysteriously came down with Dragon Pox,” Sypha said.
“True.” Jacinto’s voice didn’t betray any emotion. “I bet it was Snape’s fault. He doesn’t seem big on hygiene.”
“You’re horrible,” Sypha said, but her voice was smiling. “You should respect Snape. He’s a teacher.”
“The way you respect McGonagall? What was it you called her? A ‘pus-filled hag’?”
“That’s different,” Sypha said sternly. “My dad says McGonagall’s under Dumbledore’s thumb, says she’s a troublemaker.”
The two of them passed in front of the armour in front of
me and I held my breath, squeezed my eyes shut. I was about to mutter an
apology for eavesdropping when I heard Jacinto’s
voice more distantly.
“Some trouble is worth making, Sypha. Bah, listen to me, I sound like a
Gryffindor.”
I opened my eyes and saw the backs of them, walking down
the corridor with arms full of books.
“You think they’re hot for each other?” Copi
whispered from my lapel.
“Sssh, you,” I said. Though, since it was Copi, I knew the same thought must have been flitting
around in my brain somewhere.
0000
“They’re bonding,” I said. “If he likes Sypha then he must hate me.”
Professor Binns droned on in the background; he rarely seemed to hear, let alone take note, of whispering in class. Maybe he knew that nobody but the Ravenclaws really listened to him anyway.
“Because Sypha hated ya?” Artemis said. “Is that what ya think?”
“Sypha hated me from the start. She still hates me.”
“Nae, she didn’t, and she doesn’t.” Artemis leaned forward. “I don’t know if you noticed, but when the two of ya first met, she thought she was bein’ friendly.”
“She said I was stupid and lost.”
“Aye,” Artemis said. “But that’s how a lot of us see Muggles. Me dad was always right impressed”and afraid”of what they
could do without magic, but a lot of dads, dads like Sypha’s got their heads
stuffed so far up their bums that they can’t see past their lack of robes and
their dog ugly hats. Comes with old money.”
“Your dad’s pretty rich too, isn’t he?” I said. “Even with the market at the bottom.”
“Sure, we got some gold leftover, but he’s New Money. Leprechaun Gold Speculation’s a newish thing, inspired by Muggle economics, in fact. It starts with taking a few pots of it and””
“Artemis,” I hissed, too loudly. I drew glares from
Ravenclaws in the front row and Binns paused his drone for a moment, as he did
whenever he was interrupted. If he stopped talking, you had two seconds to stop
talking yourself or he’d continue on in a ghostly wail that managed to sedate
even the most boredom-resistant students.
After a moment, Binns went back to talking. “I don’t need a lesson,” I said, more
quietly. The bell rang a few moments
later and the class began spilling out.
Artemis joined me, throwing her red hair behind her and tying it into a ponytail so it wouldn’t blow about: we had flying next, a fact I was grateful for. Even in the cool of February I’d rather be whirling through the air than stuck in a class room. I figured that if something was going to attack, the attack would happen in the halls of the school. The monster in the Chamber of Secrets couldn’t find me in the sky.
Could it?
Arty interrupted my thoughts. “What I was saying earlier was, Sypha got mad at ya because ya called her dad an
idiot. Not saying he’s not an idiot, but an insult’s an insult. And then she
got caught up with Pansy and Millicent and they twisted her in knots trying to
convince her that y’re just a daft Mud”well, you
know.”
“Well it worked. She’s convinced.”
We trudged down the first floor steps, dodged a corridor when we saw Peeves down it, and then headed to the grounds where Madam Hooch awaited us, looking a bit pale. There were still a number of Dragon Pox scars on her face and I was amazed she’d lived as long as she had without getting it before. Or maybe it wasn’t like chicken pox”you could get it more than once. I honestly didn’t know.
We were the only two Slytherins who’d arrived yet, so we were in no hurry
Artemis sighed. “But ever since they kicked her out of their little gaggle, Sypha doesn’t know what ta think. All I’m saying is, she had a reason to be mad at ya, and now you can give her a reason to forgive ya.”
“Wait,” I said, stopping dead in my tracks. “What do you mean they kicked her out? Who kicked her out of what?”
“Ya didn’t hear about it?”
I blinked. In fact, I hadn’t, but that’s because I’d been doing my best to
avoid Sypha and the second year cliques she clung to. I knew that Sypha had been studying harder
than ever, going to bed early, and generally appearing down, but I never
thought about asking her. The idea of intentionally initiating a conversation
with her seemed counterproductive.
“What happened?”
“Well, I only heard second hand from Emma, and she’s just guessing at some of
it. But over Christmas the girls who stayed here got it in their heads that
Sypha isn’t really a Pureblood. They said her parents couldn’t have a girl of
their own, so her mum killed a Muggle family and took ‘er
away.”
“And that baby just happened to be a Muggleborn?” I said skeptically.
“Aye, it’s mad. And have ya seen her dad? She’s looks just like ‘im.” Artemis shrugged. “But that’s what I heard. After that, Parkinson told her off and that’s why she’s been a weepy wall-flower this whole term.”
Madam Hooch called class into session and the twenty-or-so students, Gryffindors and Slytherins, gathered around our brooms. We’d long since covered the basics, so Hooch began explaining how to pull off more advanced flying techniques, such as barrel rolls and quick reversals; the latter of which involved applying the braking charm while simultaneously willing the broom towards the left or right. The best brooms, she said, could pull it off in two seconds flat, like what one might see in professional Quidditch matches. The school brooms, however, were rubbish, and it could take up to five seconds to perform the maneuver at top speed.
Hooch lined us up in two rows facing each other.
“Of course this is beneficial for our insurance policies because slow brooms are less dangerous than fast brooms,” she commented. “And God knows Professor Snape costs the school enough there.”
Several Gryffindors burst into giggles, Ginny Weasley particularly amused. She still looked peaked and pale, but there was a small flush to her cheeks when she laughed that had been entirely absent the night I’d met her in the corridor. I caught a glimpse of Sypha too, trying to fight off a smile herself.
Moments later we kicked off, assuming various positions
over the school’s courtyard and practicing the techniques. Madame Hooch flew
among us, giving us pointers and demonstrating the techniques for those of us
who just weren’t getting it. I drifted upward as I practiced, inching ever
closer to a figure I saw out of the corner of my eye. Only when I was within
comfortable speaking distance did I fully realize that it was Sypha, and that
I’d been getting closer to her to talk to her.
Her face was red and splotched and her technique on the barrel roll was even
worse than mine. She didn’t seem to notice me at first, so I nudged my broom
gently, drifting closer to her and hoping Hooch didn’t shout at me for not
practicing, or for disrupting the practice of others.
“Is there a reason you’re in my personal space?” Sypha said after a moment. She hovered to a stop beside me, her eyes boring into me. My urge was to leave, and forget I’d even gone up there. But I needed a way to get close to Jacinto, and close in a way that didn’t immediately look suspicious. I didn’t see any other options; this was, to borrow a Muggle expression that my Uncle Eustace was fond of, one bullet that I’d have to bite.
“I just wanted to say that I was sorry,” I told her. “For
calling your dad an idiot.”
“You came to apologize for something you said to me months ago? I barely even
remembered that.”
I could tell she was lying. I didn’t say
anything because I sort of was too.
“Well not just that,” I said. “I heard about what happened between you and Pansy and I was wondering if maybe we could start over. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind when we met.”
“Why would you want to get friendly with me now?” her eyes narrowed. “You know how we feel about people of your birth.”
“Yeah, because the people who convinced you I’m a filthy Mudblood proved so reliable in the end, right?”
She stared at me for a minute, not crying but with her eyes wide and damp. I thought she was going to say something else, but instead she turned and backed away, flying off for more practice. I grimaced and whirled after her.
“I have to work on my technique,” she said, spinning into
another awkward barrel roll. I backed away myself and began dropping in height.
I didn’t know whether or not I’d gotten through to her or she even accepted my
apology as sincere. That was an uphill battle on its own because I still wasn’t
sorry, not really. Her dad was an idiot and there was nothing that could change
my mind about that. But that didn’t necessarily mean Sypha and I had to hate
each other. I thought my own parents were, if not idiots, being incredibly
cruel, and Grant’s parents were by the sounds of things unspeakably awful.
There was no reason for animosity between us except this: she accepted her
dad’s ideas about Muggleborns, even in part, and as long as she did I could not
accept her as a friend.
Not a friend, maybe, but a useful chess piece to throw against Jacinto.
0000
Hours later I slumped against the headboard of the bed in my dorm, ignoring the conversations around me. I thumbed through my Bible, looking at chapter headings, skimming passages. Nothing seemed to click, to reach out and grab me, though. I was afraid, terrified, of what I’d find if I dug deeper than some of the famous versus of comfort. For every Psalm 23 it seemed like I stumbled across a ‘clobber’ verse about the fate of the wicked and what, ultimately, would befall them. I noticed the translation here, that Amanda had given me, was different than the one my father often read from. Where his Bible might say that the wicked dead would go down into hell, this Bible wrote the grave there, with a footnote. I followed the footnote to the bottom of the page, where it was printed in italics, sheol.
Sheol? I didn’t know what that meant. A Hebrew word, obviously, but why have a note there and not on any other random word?
After a moment I put the Bible down on the nightstand between my bed and Josie’s and picked up the copy of The Young Defenders. I still hadn’t opened it to read it. Pastor Wilkins had often preached against things like Dungeons and Dragons, saying it promoted witchcraft. Ironic, then, that that fear stuck with me now that I was actually practicing witchcraft. I forced my fears aside and read the prologue.
In the beginning there was only darkness until the Great Wizard raised his wand and willed light into existence. But the darkness resented the light, and seeded the world with men and women who could bend the darkness to their wills and cast spells”the origin of wizards. Then, one of those wizards stood up and cast the darkness out of herself, inspiring others to do the same, so that wizards were no longer beholden to the evil in their hearts but had choices. The problem was, all that darkness had to go somewhere, and it gathered together and corrupted the birth of a child; the child, in time, came to be known as Grendlemort, the Mountain King, who would live for all eternity.
I turned the page. There was a brief summary, just a few panels each, of various wars and schemes that Grendlemort caused, each ending when someone rose to challenge him; some of the schemes I recognized as events in wizarding history, others as actual Muggle wars that Grendlemort supposedly caused, behind the scenes. Then the book fast forwarded to 1986; a small white house in Surrey where a fourteen year old girl named Tandy Devers prepared to go to Hogwarts for fall term. I was just about to read where to where she reached the Hogwarts Express, when I felt a presence standing over me.
I looked up to see Sypha, clutching her wand, fiddling with it nervously.
“I was thinking about what you said.”
I blinked. “Sypha””
“I guess what I’m saying is, if you want to try and start
again and forget what’s happened between us, then I’m willing to give it a go.
Because right now I have only one friend in the world and he’s not allowed in
this dorm.”
She sat at the foot of my bed. “Actually, I was wondering if you could explain Flitwick’s charm theory lecture,” she said.
So now I’d be helping her with her homework. I silently closed my book, gritted
my teeth, and nodded, putting on the least strained smile I could muster. If I
were going to have a relationship with her, even one as… utilitarian… as this,
then I’d have to have something to talk about, some pretense to get us
together, to let us at least pretend we were bonding. And I didn’t have much
longer to go before March 1, before the vote, so it would have to be fast.
“I think the problem is,” I said with forced
cheerfulness, “that Flitwick sort of glossed over that transitive-theory of
thaumaturgy thing from last week and you pretty much have to have that down
before you’ll understand what we talked about today.”
And in my head I said, Knight to King’s
Pawn.