Chapter 47 - Moon

Praeris disagreed. She put it plainly: "Muggle sports also emphasize spectator appeal, which means Muggles can see every player just by looking at the ground. But when I watch Quidditch, madam — forgive me — I'm often holding up binoculars and sweeping the sky for ages without finding half the players."

An exaggeration, yes. Plenty of spectators genuinely couldn't find them. But she could see exactly where they were. She just wasn't willing to swivel her head around like a confused goose with a pair of binoculars. That was undignified.

After her first Muggle Studies class, she added the subject to the list she planned to hand Professor Snape, without a second's hesitation.

As for the OWL, it was a purely theoretical course. She figured she could sit the exam on memory alone and recall every wizard's viewpoint just fine.

She dropped the class, but she and Professor Burbage established a research connection. Both of them hoped to keep discussing the similarities and differences between the Muggle world and the wizarding world when the opportunity arose.

Praeris had also envisioned setting up a live broadcast screen for Hogwarts Quidditch matches, with dedicated wizards zooming in and replaying the key moments in real time.

She was still thinking about it as she hurried down the stairs toward Defence Against the Dark Arts, quietly praying that this worn-looking professor, Remus Lupin, actually had something worth showing for himself.

That was what she'd thought, at least a minute ago. The thought didn't last. It dissolved into anger.

She walked slower. Then slower still. She came to a full stop beside the staircase, staring darkly at the Gryffindors coming down.

Nobody held up well under that stare. Her irises were very dark, and when she fixed them on you like that, you thought of the bottom of the Black Lake, lightless, cold, no depth you could measure.

The Gryffindors parted around her. Praeris pulled her gaze back, expression flat.

As mentioned before, Praeris sometimes absorbed information without meaning to. She didn't need to seek it out. She could just be passing by, not deliberately listening, not deliberately looking, and it came to her anyway.

The Gryffindors were laughing, trading stories about the class they'd just had.

Apparently the new professor had some skill. For once he'd given them a real practical lesson, had them face a Boggart in the wardrobe, using laughter to defeat what they feared most.

That sounded fine enough. Except that someone's Boggart had taken the shape of Professor Snape, and his Riddikulus had dressed the professor in his grandmother's clothes.

Oh, it was understandable. Wasn't it?

Professor Snape had criticized Neville Longbottom recently. Had used his pet toad as a test subject. Neville Longbottom was frightened of him, of course. And then there was the grandmother, Praeris knew he and his grandmother depended on each other. She'd worked that out during the Remembrall incident in first year.

And Neville Longbottom was a Gryffindor.

Slytherin, Draco, specifically, had offended Hagrid in Care of Magical Creatures. So now the Gryffindors were here to offend Professor Snape. Fair exchange. Perfectly logical.

Everything was perfectly logical. What couldn't be helped was that Praeris could not stamp down the anger rising inside her.

She genuinely respected her professors. Even Lockhart, the flashy, insufferable showman, she could manage to humor him, to brush off his presumptuousness with a smile. Even the eccentric Hagrid, she could look past without comment.

Professor Snape was different. Among every professor at this school, he was different to her. He had given her things she hadn't asked for and hadn't expected: guidance when she was starting out, teaching that cost him nothing to withhold, and the quietly extraordinary decision to allow her to spend the summer in Diagon Alley.

His tongue was sharp. No one was going to argue otherwise. But no one could argue away his knowledge, either, or deny what he'd actually given his students. Half the school had learned Expelliarmus from Professor Snape at the Duelling Club.

What he had given Praeris was harder to name. And harder to erase.

She was standing in the classroom now, both sleeves rolled up to the elbow, arms crossed over her chest, watching the new professor move.

"What's so interesting about this pauper?" Draco rested a hand on her shoulder, his head tracking along with hers.

Praeris shrugged his hand off. "Stop it. I'm busy."

She wasn't going to do anything to Neville Longbottom. His fear wasn't something he could control. But Lupin, Praeris felt, could have at the very least respected his colleague. He shouldn't have guided Neville Longbottom into making a fool of a professor in front of the class.

If he couldn't manage to respect others, he wasn't going to earn Praeris's respect either.

This was the first time she brought her full attention to bear on a single subject. All those loose, scattered fragments about Remus Lupin that had drifted into her memory over the weeks, she gathered them up now. She took the man standing in front of her and pulled every detail apart, ground it down, turned it over piece by piece.

Lupin paused mid-sentence and rubbed his arms like he'd caught a chill.

Praeris's mouth curved. Not warmly.

Her expression was cold and completely certain.

No man is an island. Nobody exists in isolation.

Remus Lupin's body was in poor condition. He carried chocolate on him constantly. Some illness, or a long-term condition he'd been living alongside for years.

The castle provided professors with both silver plates and copper plates at mealtimes. He pressed the silver one underneath and used the copper one on top.

Most people, if they weren't using one of the plates, would simply move it aside. You wouldn't press it beneath the other one, an extra plate underneath makes the top one slide, and that makes it awkward to use a knife and fork.

Silver. He avoided silver.

The start-of-term decorations in the Great Hall featured stars and a moon. His gaze had touched the moon multiple times that evening, and each time it had skipped away. Even when it was only a crescent.

When she'd gone to hand in homework early in the term, there were new materials on his desk and shelves. Research on werewolves. Research on the Wolfsbane Potion. Don't doubt it, no one understood the layout of the Potions office better than Praeris. She could notice a change in the professor's door lock.

Most things were no secret to her. It only depended on whether she was interested. Whether she was willing to spend the thought.

The way Professor Snape had looked at Remus Lupin, she hadn't studied it closely at the time, but revisiting it now, there was more than hatred in it. There was a pity so faint it was nearly invisible.

Werewolf. XXXXX-class magical creature. Extremely dangerous.

Wolfsbane Potion. Inventor: Damocles.

The potion was extraordinarily expensive. Expensive enough to keep a man scraping along the edge of poverty, which matched what she saw in front of her. And a werewolf's identity alone was enough to get him turned away from any job that paid well, pushed out of normal wizarding society entirely.

A werewolf during transformation had no control over what it did. But when it woke, it remembered everything.

That was what this man lived with. Not the transformation. The memory of it.

A creature like that, in a school full of children, if it couldn't be controlled, the consequences didn't bear thinking about. So the professor was studying Wolfsbane himself. To make sure the werewolf didn't lose itself on the full moon?

Then, forgive her. She was just a petty, grudge-keeping little girl.

Lupin guided the students to the far end of the room. There was a battered wardrobe there. As they drew close, something inside it banged and shuddered.

Lupin introduced it: a Boggart. He asked the class what a Boggart was, explained the incantation for dealing with one, and then had the students form a line and face their fears one at a time.

Praeris poked Draco. "I want to go last. That's fine, right?"

Under normal circumstances, convincing Draco meant convincing the vast majority of Slytherin.

"Well, well —" Draco drew it out, "so there are things you're scared of after all. I'm genuinely curious what it is."

"Just say yes or no!"

Draco reached up and rubbed the spot she'd hit. "Do I even have a choice? And keep away from Bulstrode — your hitting is getting stronger."

While students were shuffling around, he grabbed Praeris and maneuvered her to the very back of the line, beside a low cabinet.

The Slytherin girl already standing there looked like she was searching for a crack in the floor to disappear into. But when she saw who was walking over, she swallowed whatever she'd been about to say.

The first to demonstrate was Daphne. The Boggart became a long-haired Tibetan Yeti.

Praeris watched, genuinely baffled, as Daphne turned it into a cheerful, stationary, non-person-eating Christmas snowman. She thought: she'd told them already. There are no snowmen in Scotland.

Daphne's demonstration was fine. The line moved forward.

Praeris stopped watching. She closed her eyes and began to imagine.

Most people didn't understand their own minds very well. Praeris would be the first to admit her understanding wasn't complete, either. But her brain was her most loyal companion, and the most trustworthy thing she had.

She let go of every other thought. Only imagined. Imagined her fear, imagined herself afraid. A full moon. It was hard to do. But Praeris could do it. Her brain never failed her.

When she stepped in front of the Boggart, it shifted into a cratered, uneven sphere of silver-white.

Professor Lupin's expression went very still. He looked at the sphere. He looked at Praeris. He looked like someone who had just seen something that didn't make sense.

Praeris raised her wand with an expression of pure arrogance. "Riddikulus," she said, unhurried.

The moon fell. It hit the ground and shattered into a pile of white sugar.

Praeris felt very pleased with herself. What was wrong with white sugar? White sugar was wonderful. Getting sweets at the convent had been a genuine occasion for happiness.

"What was that?" Millicent was, as always, relentlessly curious. "Can I ask?"

Praeris pulled Millicent close and turned back toward the room with a bright expression. "No. It's a secret, darling."

Her objective was accomplished. She had, at minimum, genuinely unsettled this man.

She understood Draco's feeling about going after Potter a little better now. Watching the shock on Mr. Lupin's face, the kind he couldn't quite hide, she had to admit, it felt good.

When she rejoined the group, Draco shoved through the crowd to reach her. "I am absolutely certain you just did something, but you didn't even tell me!"

Normally she would have looked at him in mild confusion and said: why would I tell you?

But he had helped her. So Praeris smiled at him, brilliant and unguarded, the kind of smile she rarely gave. "Oh, thank you for your help, Draco! I'm really so glad!"

Draco went still. His eyes moved around the room, not landing anywhere. After a long moment, he muttered under his breath: "So you can actually talk like a normal person..."

"What?"

Praeris had already turned back to Millicent and was murmuring something to her. She turned when she heard his voice.

"I said it's time for Herbology!"

"Why are you shouting? Do I have a hearing problem?!"

That evening, Praeris checked her schedule in the Slytherin common room. Friday had Divination, Herbology, History of Magic, and Charms.

Right, the major subjects, Herbology, Potions, Charms, Transfiguration, Defence Against the Dark Arts, usually ran more than one session a week.

She had already attended one Divination class. She was genuinely interested in the esoteric arts. Humanity seemed perennially drawn to the intangible, always searching for something fixed inside all the uncertainty.

Divination covered a wide range: crystal balls, tea leaves, palmistry, tarot, astrology, and more. A rich, sprawling system. Beyond the methods currently in use, Trelawney had also traced their origins.

Tea-leaf reading, for instance, descended from ceromancy. Wax divination. A wizard would drip melted wax into water and read the shapes it formed as it cooled, interpreting them as messages about fate.

Trelawney was their Divination professor. The first time Praeris saw her, she thought: firefly.

A Divination professor who looked like a firefly. It was fitting, actually. Diviners were like fireflies, they lit up something in the dark to show you the way forward, weren't they?

The esoteric arts were interesting. But in that very first class, Trelawney had looked at Praeris with an expression full of sorrow and said: "I am so sorry, my dear... I have looked into your mind. How cruel — it has not opened a single door for the Mysteries."

The Slytherins in the room were visibly surprised. They had never once seen any teacher say, with such complete certainty, that there was something Praeris would be bad at.

Praeris's best guess was that Trelawney meant this: Praeris's mind was interested in the Mysteries. It could understand them, work with them. But her spirit couldn't open itself to them. Couldn't let them in.

The esoteric arts required something called spirituality. It wasn't something you could pursue. It either found you or it didn't.

But in the wizarding system of divination, spirituality alone wasn't enough. The Mysteries were a two-way exchange. They could extend an invitation. You were equally free to decline.

Praeris had submitted one assignment, working through it carefully according to the textbook's instructions and what had been taught in class.

Trelawney had accepted the parchment with all her usual mystical muttering, and a long cascade of lamentation followed. Praeris had assumed she was about to receive a P.

Instead, this vague, rambling, half-unmoored witch gave her an O.

"I regret it so deeply, so deeply... my dear, you have wasted your gift. You did not believe a single word you wrote, and yet you wrote them anyway. How cruel you are to your own words!"

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