Chapter 62 - Praeris's Boggart

The Boggart was the learning objective for their first Defence Against the Dark Arts class.

Out of dissatisfaction with what Lupin had done, Praeris had willfully faked her inner fear during that lesson, making the Boggart transform into the moon of its own accord.

Everything that should happen will happen, sooner or later. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then sometime further down the line. Now, at last, the time had come for Praeris to face her fear for real.

She passed the first three stages without much effort and stood before Lupin. Professor Lupin cast her a worried glance, then pulled open the chest that held the Boggart.

Praeris climbed inside as the exam required. The moment she appeared, the Boggart shifted, stirring up a gust of wind.

It transformed into a person. A woman Praeris had never seen in real life. This woman had long, straight black hair and black eyes. She wore a pale apricot coat with a subtle woven pattern, her abdomen slightly rounded, her face sallow and deeply haggard.

The woman the Boggart had become raised her wand at Praeris and wept without a sound.

It was as though a bolt of lightning struck through Praeris's mind, illuminating her bewilderment. She had seen this person before. In the newspaper.

She was Sylvia Prince.

Unlike the Boggart's version, the Sylvia in the newspaper had been even thinner. And far more unhinged.

Praeris finally remembered she was in the middle of an exam. She pushed down the chaos rising inside her and turned the Boggart into a lopsided, misshapen doll.

She had stayed inside the chest a little too long. By the time she climbed back out, Professor Lupin was already standing at the chest, his face tight with worry. "Prince, are you all right?"

Praeris managed a strained smile. "I think I'm fine."

Professor Lupin hesitated for a moment, then gave her a high mark all the same.

Snape had not explained the full circumstances to him, but he had made one thing explicitly clear: the moon was not Prince's true Boggart. He warned Professor Lupin not to take any unnecessary interest in his student.

By that measure, this was Praeris's first time truly facing her own Boggart.

She had been slower than usual when confronting it, but that was only relative to her own standard. Compared to everyone else, she had still spent far less time on the exam overall.

But Praeris did not look happy about the high mark. She was distracted, her mind fixed entirely on Sylvia Prince.

Earlier, she had silently sworn to herself that she would not think about anything to do with Sylvia Prince. Sylvia Prince had abandoned her, left her at the convent. That was the same as deciding to kill her own daughter.

Whether Sylvia Prince lived or died, from that moment on, her daughter had ceased to exist. Only the orphan Praeris remained.

Before the exam, Praeris had tried to guess what the Boggart might become. She had once feared days of starvation and bitter cold, but as she grew older and learned to take care of herself, that fear had long since dissolved into time.

What caught her off guard was that the Boggart had turned into Sylvia Prince. Which meant Praeris feared her. Yet she had never once seen a Sylvia Prince who looked like that. So why would she fear her?

No.

Praeris overturned her own question.

Somewhere in that lost stretch of memory, the Praeris who existed before the age of five had very likely seen a young Sylvia Prince.

In the beginning, her understanding of magic had still been shallow, and she had still been in the habit of approaching problems from a Muggle's perspective.

Back then, she had suspected she'd suffered some kind of severe shock, and that her mind's protective mechanism had caused her to forget that portion of her memory. She had also wondered whether she had simply been too young at the time, her mind not yet fully formed, and so the memories had never taken hold.

Once she learned the Memory Charm, a new theory took shape unbidden: could such a complete erasure have been caused by a powerful spell? Someone had cast it on her at 5 years old, wiping away her earliest memories.

None of these theories could be verified. She had buried them all deep inside herself. She did not want to think about these things. Clinging to the investigation of her own past felt too much like still carrying some expectation of an irresponsible mother.

That would make her seem far too pitiable.

The Boggart's appearance was like a stone dropped into a still lake, sending ripples across the surface.

She had never, in the years after turning five, seen the Sylvia Prince the Boggart had conjured. That meant this was a fear the version of her before age five had never overcome.

Praeris almost wanted to laugh at herself. The thing her younger self had feared most, before the age of five, was her own birth mother pointing a wand at her. Her childhood tragedy had not begun with the convent at all. The wheel of fate had already been set in motion long before that.

All those days spent wondering whether her birth parents might have regretted it, whether they might have come back for her — it was like a circus clown. Laughable.

Praeris wandered aimlessly through the castle, her mind blank, emptying herself out, drifting through the school like a ghost.

Years ago, she had read a line somewhere: once you start thinking, you start falling apart. The more you contemplate the meaning of your own existence, the more you probe your own origins, the more you tug at the loose threads you spot sticking out from other people, the deeper you sink into the mud of the past, until you can no longer pull yourself free.

And those, of all things, had once been what Praeris loved most. Uncovering the secrets hidden within herself and others.

Hogwarts had changed her. The family she had found in Slytherin had changed her. She was no longer drawn to such pursuits, and had chosen instead to act, to obtain. To build a Praeris who belonged only to the present and the future, using the love others gave her and the knowledge she had earned.

Praeris stopped walking.

Before her stood the ugly, hunchbacked one-eyed witch statue.

The statue had only one eye, yet it stood here year after year, not ceasing to exist because of its imperfection. Praeris had a past of being abandoned, yet there were still many people who loved her and wished for her to grow up healthy and happy.

Thinking about why Sylvia Prince had abandoned her was an extremely foolish thing to do. She had done it, it had happened, and that was the fact. There was nothing worth dwelling on.

Miss Winnie had once said: "My greatest strength is that at any moment, I have the courage and the ability to let go of everything from my past and dare to start again from nothing."

That everything was sometimes not limited to one's achievements. Being able to set down self-pity over one's own misfortune also required firm resolve.

"Huff — huff — huff, Praeris?!"

Granger's voice suddenly rang out from behind her.

Praeris turned around and looked at her with puzzlement. "Miss Granger, are you running a marathon?"

Granger was startled. "What? A marathon? How do you know what a marathon is?"

Praeris said calmly, "Is that so unusual?"

"I don't know — that's not important." Granger was still catching her breath. "Step aside, I need to get something. You won't tell anyone, will you? Like before."

"Probably not," Praeris said, on guard. "Have you run into the forces of You-Know-Who again?"

"No! Move, left and right!" Granger had the look of someone with her eyebrows on fire. "It's not You-Know-Who, but you wouldn't want to know what I'm planning anyway — goodbye!"

"Oh. Goodbye."

Praeris pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose. She had just told herself not to go prying into other people's business, and Granger's frantic appearance had already interrupted that resolution.

Well. It was just a tiny bit of curiosity, wasn't it?

She couldn't very well stand by and watch them snatch away Slytherin's hard-won lead.

Let her think. Granger had retrieved an Invisibility Cloak from the secret passage behind the witch statue, and that Invisibility Cloak was one of Potter's props. At the start of term, Dumbledore had warned him not to use the Invisibility Cloak to challenge a Dementor's area of expertise.

Come to think of it, she held quite a bit of credibility with Granger. Perhaps because Granger knew that no matter what she did, she couldn't fool Praeris. So she had simply stopped bothering to conceal the fact that she was taking the Cloak at all.

Crabbe and Goyle had once told her they had seen "Potter's head" floating around Hogsmeade. Potter had left the Invisibility Cloak here, which meant he had used it to leave school grounds and visit Hogsmeade at some point. But the trip had been cut short, so he had been forced to hide the Cloak in the passage for the time being.

The person who had cut that trip short was Professor Snape, fetched there by Draco and the others.

Before the exam today, Draco had been boasting everywhere that Buckbeak was as good as dead. Granger had even considered asking her for help on Buckbeak's behalf, despite Praeris being a Slytherin, though that request had been refused. That was also the reason Granger thought she wouldn't want to know what she was planning.

In short, Granger intended to use the Invisibility Cloak to rescue Buckbeak.

From the perspective of Draco's family: they doted on Draco and had every means to take revenge on Buckbeak for hurting him. Why wouldn't they? From Granger's perspective: rescuing a friend's animal companion was something she would throw herself into completely. And from Praeris's perspective: Buckbeak had been in the wrong, but not wrong enough to deserve death. The one who truly needed a lesson was Rubeus Hagrid, who had no sense of limits.

Praeris sighed. Since this was not some matter of confronting You-Know-Who or earning a hundred-odd house points, there was no reason for her to stick her nose in.

She moved to the corridor window. Within her field of vision: Hogwarts's kitchen garden, Professor Sprout's greenhouses, the Whomping Willow, and the Forbidden Forest.

The setting sun spread across the sky like heated iron gone red. Running beneath that dying light were Granger and her companion, Potter.

You took the Invisibility Cloak and you're not using it, Granger?

Praeris blinked and fell into thought.

Dusk settled over the castle. Praeris changed into her sleeping robes and sat on the windowsill reading Stella's textbook.

After finishing her NEWTs, Stella had worn the expression of someone marching to their own execution and packed up every single one of her upper-year textbooks to hand over to Praeris in one go.

"Have you considered what happens if, by some chance..." Praeris said hesitantly.

"No! Don't even say it!" Stella cut her off. "No 'by some chance'! All these books are yours now — don't you dare give them back!"

Praeris was so amused by her dramatics that she dissolved into laughter.

Now, sitting on the windowsill with the book open in her lap, Praeris could see the Giant Squid through the window, lazily paddling its way back and forth through the water.

She couldn't help turning to watch it. Honestly, being a Giant Squid beat being a person. Food and leisure in the Black Lake, no need to think about what tomorrow would bring.

Millicent seemed to think Praeris was worrying about the exam. She sat down at Praeris's feet, clenched her fist, and declared with great conviction: "Prayle, stop overthinking it! I'm positive you're still the top scorer."

"No, it's not about that." Praeris frowned. "I just feel like something isn't right."

She was absolutely not fretting over Sylvia Prince. That afternoon, standing before the one-eyed witch statue, she had already sorted through all of it.

She simply had a persistent bad feeling. A sense of being at a loss, like a Centaur catching sight of a bright shooting star, a Muggle seeing a black cat, a wizard catching sight of a black dog.

"Why don't you go to bed early tonight," Millicent said with a grin. "There's no worry a good night's sleep can't fix."

Praeris smiled and shook her head. "In this world, there are far too many worries that a good night's sleep can't fix."

But Millicent had a point. Perhaps she really was too exhausted, and that was why she had been feeling so unsettled.

Praeris dug out the calming pillow Professor Sprout had gifted her, rested her head on it, and fell asleep quickly.

Praeris was someone who almost never dreamed. Sleep, for her, was a highly functional thing. If not for the sake of staying sharp the next day, she could go without it entirely. She slept clean and decisive: lie down, lights out, and the next thing she knew it was morning.

But this time was different.

She had a dream, rare for her, and the images within it were vivid and clear. First she saw a person, a Gryffindor student who looked a great deal like Potter, in the middle of a furious argument with another boy.

This boy who resembled Potter flew into a tremendous rage, then sprinted toward the Whomping Willow at extraordinary speed. What was astonishing was that, whatever he had done, the Whomping Willow showed not the slightest reaction to his approach. Instead, it revealed a passage.

Praeris's gaze followed Potter the Second into the passage.

Inside it was a young Professor Snape.

And a werewolf in the grip of a frenzy.

Praeris jolted upright, stiff as a board. The back of her sleeping robes was soaked completely through with sweat. Her hair was drenched, plastered into separate strands.

"Milly! Milly!" she called in a low voice into the darkness.

Millicent poked her head out from under her covers, drowsy and bleary-eyed. "What is it, Prayle?"

"Where do you keep your moon phase chart?" The urgency in Praeris's voice was unmistakable.

Millicent blinked, bewildered. "In my Astronomy textbook. Why?"

"I need to check what day it is." Praeris was already climbing out of bed.

Pansy sat up too. "Hmm, it's almost a full moon, isn't it? I saw the moon when I came down earlier." She paused. "How is it that you can't work that out yourself?"

Praeris felt a dull ache building behind her eyes. She breathed hard. "Which dormitory is Selwyn in?!"

Katherine Selwyn was woken by a knock at her door.

Being a prefect was no easy job. Being a Slytherin prefect was a particularly troublesome one, especially when every single student below you had very strong ideas of their own.

➤ Next: End of Term