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.
Closer to Harriet, a few of the new first years had out their Transfiguration texts and seemed to be making headway on their homework. On the table between them laid a bunch of matches.
"You're doing it wrong," said the boy, his hair curly and brown, matched by an extensive pattern of freckles over his pudgy cheeks. "It's acusfors!"
His match twitched and turned pointy. The material didn't change.
Harriet observed that he had the right of it, but he mucked up the motion, too tentative on the final tick, and hadn't emphasized the right syllable.
"That's—that's not right either," one of the girls with him, blonde with murky green eyes, stated.
"It is!" the boy argued. "I'm just...messing something up...."
The third member of their group turned to glance in Harriet's direction—who immediately ducked her head and fiddled with the pages of Trimble's book, pretending she hadn't been listening.
"Maybe we can ask her."
"Err, isn't that a third year?"
"A fourth year, I think. I don't know her name. Come along."
"Wait, Izumi—!"
Harriet heard the patter of approaching footsteps and let her chair fall back on all four legs, raising her gaze to watch the three first years. The boy hesitated, hanging back with the blonde girl, but the second girl—dark-haired and dark-eyed with blue crystals dangling from her earrings—strode right up to Harriet without reserve.
"Hello," she said, sticking her hand out. "Izumi Takagi. And this is Adaline Overcliff and Graham Pritchard."
"'Lo," Harriet replied. She shook the girl's hand. "I'm Harriet Potter."
"Potter?" Takagi lifted her nose in the air, eyes sharpening. "Pure-blood?"
Harriet resisted the urge to groan, well used to the different kinds of people who joined Slytherin House. A large portion of them only cared about family names or placed too much curiosity on a person's lineage. Like a handshake, it became a social tick in the House more often than not.
Harriet didn't answer her, smiling. "D'you need something?"
Takagi paused, then nodded. "Yes. Do you know the Match to Needle spell?"
"Of course. Do you lot need help with it?"
The three first years bobbled their heads, and Harriet gestured for Pritchard to set down his match. He did so, and she asked him to perform the spell. It had a similar result as before, sharpening the match's top.
"You have the wrong emphasis," she told him as she hit the match with a muttered spell, changing it back into its proper form. "Can I have your textbook for a moment? Brilliant, thanks. Now, you see how the incantation is made of two parts? 'Acus' and 'fors.' You'll see 'fors' a lot in Transfiguration, and that's usually the bit you wanna stress. It's from 'forma,' meaning shape, and the main point of the magic is to change the match, the form being secondary to that. Professor McGonagall would call 'acus' the guiding word giving the main part of the spell direction."
Harriet did the spell herself, the match turning into a proper needle, the eyelet slender and proportioned with delicate edging around the side. She turned it back with another flick.
Pritchard tried again, and this time the match turned into a needle, but the material didn't follow.
"Now, what you need is to regulate the power in your spell. I had a lot of difficulty with that when I was a first year—ended up with needles the size of javelins." Chagrined, Harriet scratched her cheek. "Typically, power translates into how you move and the force applied in your wrist."
"I don't understand."
"Like when you flick your wand. You have to be more confident; be firmer, but not hasty. Take your time while you're learning. With practice, you'll be faster."
Pritchard blinked, then mustered his resolve and tried the spell again. "Acusfors!"
The match wobbled and changed, Pritchard grinning as Harriet picked it up. "Almost," she told him, bending the needle between two fingers. The outside had a flimsy metal covering, but the inside was still wood. She repaired the needle, then reverted it again. "A few more tries, and you'll have it."
Sitting, Pritchard moved himself and his needle out of the way for Overcliff to step closer, the girl fidgety and nervous as she met Harriet's eyes and immediately looked away.
"Do—do you remember what the e-essay is meant to be about?" she stuttered.
"For acusfors?" Harriet scratched her head and frowned, trying to recall. Takagi took it upon herself to practice the incantation, and as far as Harriet could tell, she had the opposite problem from Pritchard, wherein she put too much power into her magic casting. Her needle turned into lead and thickened to the size of a pencil.
Harriet idly pinched the girl's elbow between her thumb and forefinger so she'd stop flailing quite so much. "Oi, you're going to put someone's eye out."
"Sorry, Potter."
Harriet turned to Overcliff again. "I think McGonagall probably wants an etymology break down. That's what we usually did in our first year."
"Wh-what's that?"
"Oh. The professor always tells us to take the bits that make up the spell and explain their meaning in the essays and how they impact the magic and stuff." She cleared her throat. "So, like how I told you 'fors' comes from 'forma.' She'll start teaching you Latin next year, I think, and you start learning how spell-chains are formed, how they're altered, and having the language etymology makes it easier."
Overcliff made a quick dash back to their table and returned with her parchment and quill. She started making notes on what Harriet had told her—which was how, ten minutes later, Harriet found herself standing over three first years with her old, battered writing primer in hand, teaching them how to use a quill.
"Trust me, all it takes is one failed essay from Snape for you to start practicing your penmanship. Of course, McGonagall fusses too—and Slytherin tosses anything he can't immediately read."
"Professor Sl-Slytherin is our Head of House, right?"
"Mmm," Harriet replied—because it was true, but in the same way it was true that the Dursleys were Harriet's guardians, which was to say meant it wasn't really true at all. He had all the authority and none of the responsibilities. "Yeah, he is."
"We haven't had him in class yet," Takagi commented, gently flicking her eagle-feather quill back and forth. She had the best handwriting of the group, but English was her second language and not the one she wrote at home. She needed to practice the characters of the Latin alphabet. "Is he always like...that?"
She made a gesture toward the common room, recalling their first night here, and Harriet grimaced. The first years looked at her, waiting for an answer, and she sighed. "He's, ah...particular," Harriet hedged. "Not the kind of bloke you want to go bothering with schoolwork questions, though. You understand?"
"Can we come to you with questions?"
Harriet blinked. "Oh, err—sure. Why not?"
They grinned and went back to scribbling, the steady scratch of quills on parchment oddly soothing against the slow, heavy slosh of the tide. Harriet stared out the window at the distant, inscrutable shadows moving in the water, the shape of things both big and small among the waving kelp towers.
"Hey, Potter!"
She turned her head as two more underclassmen approached. The first Harriet recognized straight-off as Gabriel Flourish, red-haired and grinning, and the second she had to think about for a moment. Then, she remembered the skinny, dark-haired boy was Gabriel's friend Walt Murton—a Muggle-born she'd fished out of a closet a time or two when the older boys acted like prats.
"'Lo, Flourish, Murton."
Flourish blushed to the roots of his hair at the greeting, not that Harriet had any idea why. "We noticed you're giving Transfiguration tutoring?"
Harriet stared at the two boys, then at the table with the curious first years—the table holding three copies of Miranda Goshawk's Standard Book of Spells, Grade One, and a tidy stack of glinting needles. "Is that what I'm doing?"
"Could you help us review the Transfiguration alphabet? Walt and I are both hopeless at it."
"I—guess so?" Bewildered, Harriet nonetheless tugged two more chairs to the already overburdened table, and the second years joined them.
Having so many eyes on her made Harriet uncomfortable—and really, Transfiguration wasn't her best subject. She considered telling them to find someone more capable, to wait for a prefect or to ask Professor McGonagall for more assistance, but Harriet realized she was the only one here and willing to listen right now. They didn't have other options.
So she sighed, adjusted her glasses, and flipped the nearest textbook to the glyph legend in the back. The bloody Transfiguration alphabet was the bane of her existence.
"All right, this is what you want to do...."
xXx
The bell rang, ending class and signaling the start of lunch. Hawkworth folded up his star charts, and the chess game came to an end. Those students still in the common room bundled up their belongings and went on their way.
"Thanks for all your help, Potter!" Takagi said, the sentiment mirrored by the others as they stuffed Transfiguration books in their satchels.
"Yeah, of course," Harriet said, feeling quite odd as the underclassmen departed with the other Slytherins. They left behind ink-splattered scraps of parchment, broken quills, Transfigured needles, and a hair-clip that belonged to Overcliff. Harriet picked it up and turned it over in her hand. The shiny covering glittered in the dull green light filtering through the lake.
"Rikkety?"
With a pop, the house-elf appeared, dusting her hands off on her toga as she hopped to attention. "Miss Harriet Potter! What can Rikkety be helping you with?"
"Could you return this to Adaline Overcliff's dorm?"
"Yes, miss!"
The house-elf and clip disappeared, leaving Harriet to tidy the rest of the table. She reverted the needles to matches and tossed them and the spoiled parchments into the hearth, pausing to watch them burn. She spelled the ink stains off the table, then picked up her copy of The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection. She tucked it into the wide pocket of her cloak.
It had been a very...odd afternoon. Harriet didn't know what to make of it. She didn't consider herself very smart and had never thought she'd be the kind of person someone would come to with homework questions. Strangely, she hadn't had difficulty reviewing the material or explaining it.
"'So teach us things worth knowing,'" she hummed under her breath as she tucked in the chairs and cast a final look out the window. "'Bring back what we've forgot. Just do your best, we'll do the rest. And learn until our brains all rot.'"
Harriet departed the common room, her head full of thoughts and wonderings she pushed aside in favor of her stomach, considering instead the spread waiting for her in the Great Hall.
The wall had only just sealed shut behind her, the dark of the corridor pressing close, cold air breathing on her bare face. She couldn't say why she stopped, or why she suddenly knew someone was there, only that it was true. Awareness prickled against Harriet's spine, and she stood still, hand inching toward her concealed wand.
A thump echoed against the stones. Harriet stepped back, closer to the hidden dorms, unease twisting her middle—.
She shrieked when a person suddenly eased into the torchlight, revealing a horridly scarred face and a wide, oscillating eye.
"Wh—what in the bloody hell are you doing here?" Harriet demanded on a weak breath as she recognized the bloke as the Auror, Moody. She'd seen him before as one of the wizards in charge of Sirius' incarceration, but nothing could have prepared her to see him again skulking about the dungeons.
Why is he down here? Why is he even at Hogwarts?
"Never you mind, girl," he growled, wooden leg thumping as he stepped nearer. Harriet froze. "Get going. Now."
She didn't need to be told twice. Harriet darted by him and ran.
A/N:
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