Chapter 48 - Tender Love

Although her presence was a torment to Trelawney, Praeris had no intention of dropping Divination. She made Care of Magical Creatures the second course on her list instead.

Divination was interesting enough to keep. Hagrid, on the other hand, had veered to the opposite extreme, his students spent day after day raising Flobberworms, arguably the most mind-numbing creature in existence.

Good grief. If she remembered correctly, there were classifications between X and XXX, weren't there? Like XX? Bowtruckles, do you have anything to say for yourselves?

"Prince, good evening. Are you doing homework? Do you have a moment?" It was Terence Higgs, the new prefect.

The fellow was genuinely a stickler for courtesy, greeting her before he'd even made his request.

Faced with that, Praeris felt too awkward to stay seated. She stood up quickly. "Higgs, is there something you need from me?"

"Professor Snape. He's waiting for you in his office." Higgs smiled with impeccable politeness.

The words Marcus had once said surfaced unbidden in Praeris's mind: I absolutely cannot understand it! How could Professor Snape choose Terence as prefect?!

I can't understand it either, honestly. Praeris thought, with full sympathy. And this was a Slytherin prefect.

Normally, Professor Snape wouldn't summon her through a third party, except for that talk in first year. But this year was different. Since term began, she'd handed in her summer homework once and that was it. She hadn't set foot in his office since.

Could it be because of Remus Lupin?

But Snape's expression at the time hadn't looked like fear. Startled at most.

He'd already gone and told on her? That seemed a bit much.

Praeris made her way to the Potions office with practiced ease and knocked on the oak door. When she pushed it open, Professor Snape was just pressing a stopper into the mouth of a potion vial.

He set the vial slowly on the shelf. "Miss Prince," he said, "I have a small point of curiosity. I trust you won't refuse to satisfy it."

"It would be my honor, Professor." No hesitation.

Professor Snape's pace of speech quickened suddenly. "I've heard certain rumors about a Boggart. Not the ones concerning me, naturally. You know what I want to ask, don't you?"

Praeris didn't. She shook her head, earnest.

"What was your Boggart? Tell me, Miss." His tone was ice.

Praeris paused. She hadn't expected Remus Lupin to actually report her. She moved her lips and let out a slow breath. "I'm very sorry, Professor. I admit my mistake."

"Admit your mistake?" Something shifted in Professor Snape's rigid expression, just for a second.

"Oh, yes," Praeris said, with complete self-possession. "I admit my mistake. I don't want to deceive you with lies. I shouldn't have frightened Professor Lupin, but he went too far — he showed you no respect. I think he got exactly what he deserved. If you wish to punish me, anything will do."

Professor Snape went silent. His expression did something complicated. After a long moment: "So, Miss. Your Boggart was not the moon, was it?"

"Of course not. Well — I mean, it probably wasn't. Though I've never actually seen my own Boggart," Praeris said.

He composed himself. "How did you figure it out?"

"The Wolfsbane Potion, Professor. Speaking of which — may I learn it?"

There wasn't a trace of fear on her face. Only hunger for knowledge. She knew then: no punishment was coming.

When Praeris was expelled from the office a second time, she was carrying an enormous stack of reference materials on Damocles's Wolfsbane Potion.

This year's Professor was especially irritable, she reflected. Since the end of last term, this was the second time she'd been thrown out.

"Miss, you cannot forever expect me to tell you what to do and what not to do. Do you imagine I'll be your mentor for the rest of your life? Give over. You cannot spend your entire life stepping in my footprints. Sooner or later you must have your own thinking, dependent on no one."

Then he'd yanked these materials from his desk, shoved them at her, and told her to get out at her earliest possible convenience.

Praeris had only skimmed the first few pages, and already her head itched like a brain was about to sprout. No wonder Wolfsbane Potion was so expensive. You get what you pay for.

The meaning behind Snape tossing her these materials was obvious enough: no desire to teach it, no time to teach it, certainly no time to mentor a student. Here are the materials. Figure it out yourself.

At her current level, Praeris stood almost no chance of independently brewing Wolfsbane Potion. But in every other sense, the materials were exceptional study aids. They would show her how a Potions master, Snape himself, selected his sources, how he dissected the research methodology of another Potions master, Damocles, and so on and so forth.

Oh, and there was one other function: helping Professor Snape dispatch his troublesome student out of his sight, so she would stop hovering around him, stop creating extra chaos when there was already chaos enough.

On the other side of the castle, Lupin asked with quiet concern, "That child..."

Snape gave a cold laugh. "Perfectly fine, Lupin. She is my student. Did you think she'd come to harm right under my nose? Here's a piece of advice: sort out your own life before you go overflowing with pity."

Snape could barely recall the exact moment it happened, when Lupin told him that Praeris's Boggart was the moon.

Lupin had been agitated. That was rare.

"I was startled at first. I thought she'd discovered my secret. If she said anything, it would create trouble for Dumbledore. None of us want that."

"Then I realized: the Boggart is a mirror. It reflects what a person fears most. I'm very worried about that child. Perhaps you don't know — my own Boggart is the moon. Because of, well. You know why. Though she appears perfectly healthy..."

Snape knew, of course. Lupin was a werewolf. Every full moon brought the torment of transformation.

He had disliked Praeris from the beginning. Believed her birth was a mistake, another episode of madness from her immeasurably foolish mother. Events had proven him right, that woman's naivety had ruined herself and her child both.

What made it truly laughable was that the woman had completed her revenge and successfully gotten herself thrown into prison. And then? She left a witch's child to a convent.

When Snape learned of this, he nearly laughed aloud. A witch's child, left to a convent. What did that woman have in her head, water? If you shook her, would it slosh?

In the Middle Ages, she might as well have thrown her own child into the fire. Literal fire.

But sometimes matters were simply beyond his control. One day, as if someone had cast an Imperius Curse on him, he found himself walking to that convent. He saw a gaunt, bony little figure in a black smock, distributing alms.

The old nun called her "Prince."

She is not your responsibility, Snape had warned himself.

Everyone with Prince blood in their veins has something wrong with their heads, he had also warned himself.

None of it did any good. He still wrote that first letter, that Christmas, signed: the Half-Blood Prince.

Why had he written it? Snape actually, genuinely, paused to consider the question. In the end, he reached a conclusion: probably because everyone with Prince blood running in their veins was, indeed, unwell in the head.

His shoulders already bore countless burdens, countless things that could not be spoken aloud. And now, he knew, he had unconsciously placed yet another life upon them.

Many Death Eaters had their eyes on him, watching him as a potential traitor, ready at any moment to kill him in vengeance for Voldemort. He could not draw near to her without reason, that would only put her in danger. All he could do was watch from a distance, watch her struggle to survive, the way he himself had once struggled in Spinner's End.

Children are always raised by the people who can't bear to look away. Without realizing it, Snape had become both practitioner and proof of that truth.

He had watched her grow up, guided her into Hogwarts, and watched her become a Slytherin, just like him. And today, he had heard she might be a werewolf. A werewolf. The thing that had nearly killed him once.

In a daze, he remembered how she had pleaded in first year, desperate not to be sent back to the convent. He had raised her into himself. Raised her worse.

He knew she couldn't possibly be a werewolf. During the school year, he watched over her himself. During the summers, Dumbledore had Brown keep watch. The coverage was seamless.

Yet he couldn't stop turning it over. Suspecting that the madwoman had planted something even before Praeris was born. The child of a werewolf and a human was normal enough, though such pairings were rare.

But who knew why she had killed her own husband? Who could guarantee he hadn't been bitten? In the end, Snape had called Praeris in.

After hearing what she had to say, he regretted it. He was always regretting things. A lifetime of it, the same regrets looping back on themselves, over and over. This was merely one more entry, too small to matter.

Before she left, Praeris submitted the courses she intended to drop: Care of Magical Creatures and Muggle Studies.

Two fewer classes, but she wasn't much lighter for it. She still carried one more elective than the other students, and she had no intention of abandoning the material from the courses she'd dropped.

Praeris stretched, stuffing books one by one into her satchel. She owed Stella for this, the Portuguese cork bag she'd gifted her could expand its space freely, swallowing every textbook Praeris owned without complaint.

Though it would be better if it were a backpack. She was beginning to suspect she was developing uneven shoulders.

She walked out of the library yawning and nearly collided with someone.

She yelped. Then recognized the face. "Oh — Granger, it's you. Watch where you're going."

"Prince! Sorry, I'm rushing to class!" And Granger was gone, running like the wind.

Praeris nodded thoughtfully. Professor Snape's advice really did have some merit. Dropping a few courses was necessary. Otherwise she'd be exactly that frantic right now.

She turned, slightly unsteady, and started walking.

Two steps in, she realized Granger's interruption had sent her the wrong way. She turned back.

And then she saw Granger come up from the floor below again.

Huh?

Because of those extra two steps, Granger didn't notice her this time, dashing up the stairs in a hurry.

Praeris rubbed her eyes. She pressed one hand to the side of her head and drew a sharp breath.

She recalled something Draco had said at the start of term: Used your brain too much, now it's not working properly, is it?!

The staircases at Hogwarts moved, but they moved according to fixed rules. If her brain was functioning normally, it was absolutely impossible for Granger to go up those stairs and then, within a single minute, reappear at the exact same position on the exact same staircase coming up again.

An ordinary person standing here would probably just doubt their own eyes. But the person standing here was Praeris Prince, a witch who had lived her entire life on the strength of her mind.

Accepting that her brain had broken down would be the equivalent of Daphne accepting she was a Squib. Absolutely impossible. The problem was not her brain. The problem was Granger.

She convinced herself of this quickly, and decided it was very likely the reason Granger could manage her impossible class schedule.

She had heard that Japanese wizards possessed a magic of self-duplication. But Praeris reasoned that while a person might be duplicated, a duplicate could not replicate a wand. Based on the wand alone, she concluded swiftly: the first Granger and the second Granger were the same person.

No question about it.

So what method allowed the same person to appear in two places at the same time?

Praeris had not, in fact, failed to consider the fugitive Sirius Black. He had escaped Azkaban, guarded as it was by Dementors. Was it possible he could transform into other people and walk out?

An interesting line of thought. But Dementors had no eyes. They monitored prisoners by sensing emotions and mental states.

Even if Sirius Black could take on the appearance of a Ministry official, after so many years in Azkaban he'd have no way to counterfeit the body and mental state of a healthy person. Unless he had someone on the outside, someone in the same physical condition, who swapped places with him.

And since every person's wand was unique, that possibility collapsed quickly.

In this world, everything existed within a fabric woven from time and space. If it was confirmed that both Grangers were truly the same Granger, then what she had witnessed could only be explained by a change in one of those two things.

Either Granger had teleported, a shift in space. Or she had turned the axis of time itself, allowing her present self to step into a timeline that had already passed.

Praeris blinked. Then she turned around and walked back into the library.

It cost her several more hours. She sat surrounded by books, reading, cross-referencing, feeding that damnable curiosity of hers.

She was supposed to be resting. Or doing something else sensible. All her homework was already finished, yes, but she still had her stalled research on Wolfsbane Potion, and there was always Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a book that revealed something new every single time she opened it.

➤ Next: A Little Disappointment