Certain Dark Things || Book Four

xx. things worth knowing

For the whole week, the Triwizard Tournament remained the only topic of conversation anyone cared to talk about.

Frankly, Harriet found it a bit dull. The prospect of the competition sounded interesting and fun, but in the same breath, it seemed an awful lot of attention to spare something that would, theoretically, only concern three days for the vast majority of the student body.

Chatter in the Slytherin common room showed several upper-years still grumbled about their Head of House's decision to exclude them from the Tournament. Harriet considered the obsessive need to participate in every challenge or chance to prove themselves a failing Slytherins shared with Gryffindors. They were a bit like Dudley, petulant and angry whenever someone else had a game he didn't.

The Slytherins kept their discontent quiet for the most part. One seething glance from their Professor kept their heads bowed and conversation to a minimum. Terrance Higgs dared to question aloud just what would happen if someone went behind Slytherin's back and entered the Tournament anyway, and Lucian Bole hexed his mouth shut.

No one wanted to test Slytherin's conviction.

The professors had difficulty getting their students to concentrate that first week back to class. Even Snape and McGonagall broke out their most severe voices when people kept turning in their seats to murmur to their neighbors about the competition. Snape handed out detentions with every other breath, though Harriet managed to escape unscathed.

He still ignored her the best he could. She, in turn, did the same.

This term, Harriet found herself with more free time, much to Elara and Hermione's disgust. After mulling it over for much of the summer, Harriet finally wrote Professor Slytherin—cringing the whole while—and asked to withdraw from Divinations. His response had come on the back of her letter, and in his pedantic and pompous prose, the wizard had told Harriet to do as she wished and not to bother him about the specifics—or else.

She counted herself lucky the letter hadn't been cursed.

Elara was peeved over her decision, now having to sit through Trelawney's class alone.

"I'm not getting anything out of it," Harriet tried to explain after Snape distributed schedules over breakfast and they noticed the change. "I don't want to waste my time with it."

That led to a disagreement over Divinations' usefulness, and Hermione and Elara spent much of their first day back snapping at one another.

Meanwhile, Hermione thought Harriet should use the excuse of dropping Divinations to enroll in Arithmancy and didn't understand her reluctance. Truly, Harriet just wanted the few extra hours the week to herself and didn't have much interest in Arithmancy. Hermione and Elara both found the intricate matrices and relays incredibly fascinating, but they mostly gave her a headache.

Because of her surplus of time, Harriet found herself sitting in the common room on the first Wednesday afternoon on her own, the rest of her year mates off in their classes.

Quentin Trimble's The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection laid open in her lap, and Harriet propped her feet on the table's edge and leaned her chair back in a way that would have set Hermione off in a huff.

She'd studied part of the book over the summer already and had read the first-year edition from cover to cover years ago. Really, she didn't think Trimble had added much in the Grade Four edition, but she wouldn't put it past Slytherin to find one obscure spell in a footnote and give her a detention for not knowing it.

Letting her chair teeter farther backward, Harriet exhaled through her nose, her attention wandering over the rest of the room.

One upper-year student sat by the main hearth—Hawkworth, she thought—and he had star charts open in front of him, studying a fold on the pamphlet. Third years gathered around the chess table, Aidan Shafiq playing Reinhold Burke while Theodric Barrow leaned on the back of Burke's chair, muttering advice.