Chapter 71 - Occlumency — Tears Unshed

Praeris's powers of observation were extraordinary, and she had spent enough time with Professor Snape to read him well.

Most of the time, Professor Snape was a deeply reserved man. He rarely showed his emotions. Positive feelings went without saying, but even negative ones he kept buried.

So when his demeanor shifted in small, unusual ways, Praeris could tell immediately. The professor was angry. Angry at her recklessness, at her arrogance, at her failure to take her own life seriously.

She was full of self-reproach. Moody already held a strong prejudice against Death Eaters, and now he was probably even more eager to find fault with the professor. Her actions had brought trouble down on him, made his already precarious position harder to hold. And the professor had said not a single word about it. Only that he hoped she would improve. Only that she needed to recognize her own faults.

That was the other reason she'd lost her temper at Draco. Would it have killed him to think before acting, just once?

All right. That was also what she needed to say to herself.

She truly didn't know what madness had possessed her. Maybe if she had paused a moment, there would have been a better solution. But she'd raised her wand anyway, without thinking.

The unpleasant conversation finally drew to a close. Professor Snape said quietly, "Does anything still hurt?"

"No," Praeris said.

Snape scrutinized her from head to toe. "It had better stay that way. Call in the one outside."

Praeris didn't ask how he knew Draco was there. She and Professor Snape always had that kind of understanding between them.

CREAK!

Draco, who had been leaning against the wall in a daze, snapped his head around to look at her. He opened his mouth, wanting to say something.

Praeris glared at him. "Get in."

Draco, knowing he was in the wrong, went in without a word.

She didn't wait long. Draco came back out again, the recipient of two weeks of detention.

Detention, it sounded serious. In practice it meant you couldn't return to the dormitory after class and had to stay in the office completing whatever punishment task the professor assigned.

Hogwarts punishments had a great deal of room for maneuvering. If Moody had set the terms, Draco would undoubtedly have suffered. If Professor McGonagall had set them, he wouldn't have escaped easily either.

But Praeris's maneuvering had ruled out both possibilities.

As a student who hadn't technically committed any offense, Praeris had used treatment as a pretext to pull Draco away, cutting off the other professors before they could finalize a punishment. On the surface, she had merely objected that Professor Moody's actions violated school regulations. Strictly speaking, that wasn't a fault on her part at all. If anything, Moody was the one who deserved criticism for laying hands on a student.

Now she had delivered Draco directly to Professor Snape, neatly transferring the punishing authority into their own Head of House's hands.

Two weeks of detention?

At worst, it meant chopping herbs in the office, lighter work than what Praeris normally did. And if things went well, a big issue would become a small one, a small one would become nothing, and ending up with nothing to do at all was not out of the question.

Praeris's battle in the Entrance Hall had shaken her Slytherin classmates deeply. They had assumed her strength was in potions. Now they knew she had quietly moved on to something else entirely.

That was what the ordinary ones thought. The clever ones thought further.

After fighting Moody, she had still had the presence of mind to fabricate an excuse and pull Draco out from under the other professors. What kind of reaction speed was that? What kind of willpower?

Praeris was unaware of their speculation. She always had things to do, and this year they were harder to manage than the last.

Because Professor Snape had decided to teach her Occlumency.

"Miss, you know a great many things. A very great many." Snape's expression was deadly serious. "And your mind is still exercising its talents, consciously or not, unearthing every secret in the world that you might possibly encounter. For you, for us, and for many others — this is a danger."

Praeris reacted immediately. "Legilimency?"

"Without question," Snape said. "Should anyone ever use Legilimency on you, or cast the Imperius Curse on you — then, Miss, a world without secrets would open before their eyes."

"Er, Professor. I'm not always like that. I've gotten much better at suppressing my mental wandering."

Praeris defended herself. As a child she had been genuinely uncontrolled, but she had improved greatly since entering Hogwarts.

Snape let out a cold laugh. "That is precisely your danger. If you exercised no control at all, the flood of information from Legilimency would burst some people's minds. But you have learned a preliminary level of control — and that is exactly what gives certain people a safe opening into your thoughts."

"How will you judge when you are being subjected to Legilimency, and when the things in your head are what someone else is after? By analyzing everyone around you? Then your mind will begin to race again, and you'll leak exactly what should never be discovered."

Praeris saw it instantly. A perfect dead loop.

There was only one way to break it: learn Occlumency.

The simplest, most basic method was to empty the mind completely. Think nothing. Ponder nothing. Remember nothing. Feel nothing.

This was similar to the training she had already done on herself, curbing her excessive thinking, releasing the restraint on her mind at critical moments. Both were, in their own way, forms of mental control. Controlling emotions and memories was manageable. But controlling active, racing thoughts was a different problem. She was accustomed to thinking. Accustomed to whipping up storms in the ocean of her own consciousness. Being asked to empty her mind completely felt like having her spinal cord pulled from her body.

Professor Snape said, "I will enter your mind and assess your ability to resist."

The entire process was chaos. Neither of them wanted to speak about what had happened.

Praeris swore she had genuinely tried. But perhaps things break when pushed too far, her severely suppressed thoughts burst open like an overstuffed suitcase, and Professor Snape was forced out almost immediately.

Another deathly silence, Praeris thought. These had been happening far too often lately.

She also thought: what had the professor seen? Hopefully nothing worth extra detention. She still had so many spells to master. Her time was worth more than that.

Honestly, she didn't know what she had just revealed. What memories. What thoughts. What feelings.

Even a book collector with a vast private library can't recite the contents of every volume. At most, they remember which person they bought each book from. And Praeris had memories that were passively locked away, an unsorted compressed archive of Winnie's Complete Spells, and the full collection of convent secrets she had excavated from her childhood.

Praeris stammered, "Professor, I — I didn't do it on purpose. Truly."

Professor Snape said nothing. He turned around, his back to her, silent.

She sat on the stool, both hands braced against its edges, holding her breath, staring at Professor Snape's back. Like a child who had done something wrong.

The human brain is complex and precise and easily hurt. No one knew this better than Praeris. Revealing her own secrets was one thing. Causing the professor injury through her own incompetence was something else entirely, and the guilt of it pressed down on her.

A long while passed. Truly, agonizingly long. Then Snape said, very slowly, word by word: "Rest. Miss, we will need to adjust the teaching plan."

What had rushed at Snape was not Praeris's vast, analytical intellect. It was memory, branded with the deepest feelings she carried.

Face after face, young and twisted, voices jeering: "You didn't really think we were all the same, did you? Everyone here is a Joseph. Only you are a Prince!"

Face after face, wearing expressions of kindness and pity, unable to hide the schadenfreude underneath: "Lord! How could anyone abandon their own child at Christmas? How much must her parents hate her?"

Sister Mayne's face appeared. "Father! We must expel her from the convent! Someone with such wicked thoughts cannot remain here. She will defile the glory of the Lord!"

And then came the shift in "Little Praeris's" attention, and Snape experienced Praeris's omniscient perspective for the first time.

The love bite one-third visible above Sister Mayne's collar. Her chignon, pressed slightly flat. The dust along the back of her habit. The soil at the edges of her shoe soles, the kind found only near the storeroom. Her makeup slightly more refined than usual, with freshly reapplied light lipstick. A scent similar to Mr. Matthew's. An abnormally increased frequency of baths.

Detail after detail after detail. Nearly imperceptible to anyone else. In her eyes, each one was as clear as if a magnifying glass had been pressed directly against it.

A chubby-cheeked face loomed large in "Little Praeris's" memory. "You are a demon! A demon's child! You deceived the Father! I will expose you, sooner or later!"

The scene shifted rapidly. A dim little kitchen.

"Only one pound?" The old matron's contempt was written plainly across her face. "If you're going to steal, at least steal more! Take it!"

"Little Praeris" said nothing. She hastily picked the piece of black bread up from the floor, tucked it carefully inside her clothes, and ran without looking back toward the storage room.

She stood on tiptoe, peering through the hole in the broken lock, checking and checking again with great care. Only then did she slip inside, to the corner of the room.

"Little Praeris" lifted a floorboard. Beneath it was an envelope wrapped in cloth. She peeled back the cloth with careful hands and opened the envelope. Inside were a few banknotes, and a greeting card.

Snape's eyes narrowed.

He had never written Christmas cards to anyone. Well, Lily, of course, was not counted among ordinary people.

In any case, writing letters to children of six or seven was absolutely not something he had ever done. So he had dug out the greeting card the prefect had given him during his student days, changed the name, and copied the whole thing over wholesale.

In Slytherin, Lucius's prefect greeting cards had been like Christmas shop flyers, everyone who passed by received one, no one was missed. Every first-year in Snape's cohort had gotten one. Only the recipient's name was different.

In Praeris's memory, this copy of a mass-produced card was something she treasured.

He watched "Little Praeris" bow her head over the envelope in prayer. Praying that if a Lord truly existed, He would let the kind Half-Blood Prince live a happy life.

Live a happy life. Ha.

Snape couldn't help the cold laugh that rose inside him. This absolute fool. One pound for a piece of black bread harder than a rock. Believing in an illusory Lord. And hoping that this so-called Lord would grant him happiness.

In reality, Praeris was watching Professor Snape with anxious, restless eyes.

He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. "Miss, it seems this method does not suit you."

"I can try again." Praeris blinked. "I can do it. I just need some time."

"That won't be necessary." Snape paused, then added, "Advanced Occlumency is better suited to you."

Advanced Occlumency, simply put, meant closing off only specific areas of the mind while leaving a false surface exposed, something for a Legilimens to see without finding what mattered.

Before learning Occlumency, one first had to understand its counterpart: Legilimency. Legilimency allowed direct access to a target's thoughts and memories.

What Praeris needed to achieve, in a short time, was a customized, adaptively modified version of advanced Occlumency, tailored for her specifically by Snape, a master of the discipline.

By leveraging her own strengths, she only needed to lock away her key memories. Then, when meeting someone's eyes, she could drown them in a flood of chaotic, cascading thought. That alone would produce the effect of Occlumency.

It was a shortcut that only she could take.

As for true, traditional advanced Occlumency, that would have to wait until she learned to govern her overflowing mind.

"Did the professor punish you?" Millicent couldn't help asking. "It wasn't your fault!"

Praeris was childishly fighting over a piece of corn with Nina, making the little cat yowl in frustration. "He didn't even punish Draco. Why would he punish me?"

Millicent snorted. "That Moody — can't catch real Death Eaters, so he takes it out on students!"

"Shh." Pansy covered Millicent's mouth. "Less talk about sensitive topics."

"Pansy, you're such a coward." Millicent couldn't resist.

Daphne came to Pansy's defense. Her smile stayed gentle. Her words did not. "Millicent, dead people don't talk. Words are for the living. The brave die fast, and the microphone passes to whoever knows how to survive. If you're not a coward, go join Gryffindor. We promise, we'll write you up as the great hero Bulstrode."

"If you put it that way, then I really will go!" Millicent wasn't the least bit cowed. "I'll be waiting for you to write that book!"

The two glared at each other. Then they both burst out laughing.

Pansy and Praeris laughed too, clamoring to throw Millicent the "traitor" out.

Laughing aside, Praeris had too many debts to keep playing around. Most recently: she still owed Professor Viktor a makeup lesson.

Viktor was a lenient teacher. He rarely assigned homework, only telling Praeris to cover that lesson's content on her own. It was, at least, one thing that didn't weigh on her too heavily.

➤ Next: Press-ganging — Words Unspoken