Chapter 83 - Plagued by Doubts and Fears

Except for school, Praeris had never left London.

The orphanage, Diagon Alley, and Black Rose Lane were all in London.

Miles was different. He grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. The village he came from was a small wizarding settlement, and Ernie Macmillan from Hufflepuff was the Bletchleys' next-door neighbor.

Living together like that was a form of protection wizards had developed for their own kind. Young wizards had poor control over their magic, and sudden outbursts could happen without warning.

"When I was little, I met a Muggle kid. We were playing house together, and I made the clay bowl she'd shaped go flying," Miles said, still a little shaken by the memory. "Luckily, her family didn't believe her. They thought she was talking nonsense."

Praeris kept waving her wand. "Were you scared?"

"Not really." Miles smiled. "My older cousin works at St. Mungo's. He tricked those Muggles into thinking he was a pediatrician. Then, with this perfectly professional air, he told them..."

Miles lowered his voice and slipped into his cousin's tone: "Ahem. I'd recommend you both bring your child in for an evaluation. Children at immature stages of development can easily confuse imagination with reality. If symptoms like this come up regularly, early intervention is advisable."

"I genuinely feel sorry for that little Muggle girl. She must have felt so wronged." Miles took a hit from one of Praeris's attacks and grimaced. "You're really something..."

Praeris put away her wand and walked with Miles toward where they'd left their bags.

Students chattered all around them about the champions, about what the first task might be, about Potter. Praeris and Miles slipped away from all of it together.

She had imagined what children raised in ordinary wizarding families were like, but all her friends were exceptions. Mrs. Bulstrode was mentally unstable. Pansy Parkinson didn't like talking about family. Daphne Greengrass had grown up bickering with her little sister. Draco Malfoy was unconditionally spoiled.

Miles was the first to satisfy her curiosity about what normal looked like. He'd also accidentally revealed himself in front of Muggles once, but his cousin had calmly cleaned up the mess for him. No lingering trauma, no dark memories. He could tell the story like it was nothing more than an amusing anecdote.

Miles pulled a box of jam biscuits from his bag and held it out to Praeris.

She took one and said offhandedly, "You seem to really like finding things for me to eat."

"You're too thin." Miles instinctively squeezed her arm. "Besides, bringing prey back to the family is only natural. My dad does the same thing when he comes home from work."

He pulled a handkerchief from his bag next and handed it over for her to wipe her hands. As Praeris ate, he watched her with quiet attention.

"What are you looking at?" she asked, puzzled. "Do you want one too?"

Miles nodded. "You're nice to look at."

Praeris gave a helpless laugh.

Miss Winnie had once written a sweet, syrupy short love story: a reclusive witch in the forest, a hunter, and how they met, grew close, and fell in love.

It was written during a stretch when Winnie was holed up at home and too lazy to go out. So the willful author had the hunter deliver his "goods" right to her door, letting the witch reap sweet love without ever leaving the house.

Winnie called it "a home-invasion-robbery kind of romance."

Miles's arrival was exactly that. He came without preamble, rushing in all at once, freely pouring out his passion, never stingy with words of praise for her.

Lately, Praeris had almost been letting herself go, freely enjoying the feeling of loving and being loved. That thoughtless, simple happiness brought her joy, but it also made her inexplicably uneasy.

She was like an Inuit person grown used to harsh winters, suddenly dropped onto a warm, sun-bright stretch of Mediterranean coast. This was exactly the kind of weather she had always envied. And yet it made her uncomfortable. It gave her sunburn.

Miles said her acceptance of him felt like a dream. But Praeris thought it was the other way around. Miles was the one who felt like an unexpected dream.

She knew it was a pleasant dream. Her reason could find no holes in him. Yet the alarm in the back of her head kept ringing, turning over the question of Miles, who had offered up a sincere heart.

Miles poked her. She made a questioning sound.

He stumbled a little over the words. "Can I... can I hold your hand?"

Praeris blinked, hesitant.

Miles quickly added, "Never mind. I was just saying."

"No, I meant — both my hands are full." Praeris showed him: one hand held the biscuit box, the other held a biscuit.

Miles suspected smoke was rising from the top of his head. Love had lit a fire under his brain and boiled it into soup, and now he couldn't seem to think before he spoke.

He reached for a topic, and once again said something without thinking: "I'm not very calm right now. I feel... I feel like I'm falling in love for the first time."

Praeris crunched her biscuit and asked in the tone of someone conducting a study, "Is that so? What does that feel like?"

"Ah — I didn't mean it that way. I'm not trying to compare you to anyone!" Miles caught himself.

Praeris nodded. "I know what you meant."

Miles leaned gently against her and asked carefully, "You're not upset? About what I just said?"

Praeris shook her head. "You were telling the truth."

Miles felt his boiling blood go cold all at once.

A question surfaced without warning: when Praeris said she'd try, did she mean it as an experiment, or as permission for him to go further? All his pursuit these past weeks, had any of it actually stirred even a single ripple on the lake of her heart?

Jealousy and love are born together. When a person begins to love, possessiveness follows, and they can no longer tolerate the thought that the person beside them might feel differently.

Miles didn't want to compare Praeris to anyone. But he couldn't stop himself. Unlike the people he'd dated before, Praeris was good to him, even unconsciously romantic, and yet she seemed to feel no possessiveness toward him at all.

Love truly was a sweet torment. It made even the most confident, most thick-skinned person start second-guessing everything.

Meanwhile, in a corner of the Slytherin common room.

Pansy rolled her eyes so hard it looked painful. "I genuinely look down on you," she muttered.

Draco gave a cold snort, but kept his voice low. "You'd better not be sitting there wondering whether to take back that dead-log ex-boyfriend of yours. Because if you are, you've got no right to judge me."

Pansy went quiet for a moment. Then, a little sourly: "Let's change the subject, Draco. Do we really have to expose each other's weaknesses?"

"Oh." Draco picked up the bottle and poured a little for each of them. "So you do know this counts as exposing weaknesses."

"I'm trying to help you!" Pansy drew herself up into her best strategic-advisor pose. "Since you like her, you should charge straight in, kick that big oaf out of the way, and confess to Praeris all in one go. Then Praeris accepts your confession, and you two live happily ever after. Done! Oh, and remember to make me godmother to your children."

"Is this plan written for some kind of large magical creature?" Draco said. "Because it sounds like it requires inhuman physical conditioning and a brain that's perfectly smooth, no wrinkles whatsoever."

Pansy considered that honestly. It was a bit crude. It looked more like something Millicent Bulstrode would design.

She puffed out her chest. "But my plan has actual feasibility, because Praeris doesn't like Bletchley that much."

Draco's eyes sharpened on her. "She told you that?"

Pansy shook her head. "No. I sensed it."

Draco gave a contemptuous smile. "Oh, sensed —"

"You're underestimating a girl's intuition and what she knows about her closest friend!" Pansy said, indignant. "Why won't you just admit to her that you love her?"

"Who says I love her?" Draco muttered. "I just like her a tiny bit."

Pansy sighed. Getting Draco to admit to "liking" someone was already difficult enough. According to Theodore, if Bletchley hadn't come charging in out of nowhere, Draco's mouth would have been harder than diamond.

Today, Pansy had come looking for Draco, but Crabbe and Goyle, who were practically glued to his side, had no idea where he'd gone. That had startled her, knowing what she knew about Draco's situation.

Theodore had tipped her off: "That guy walked out with his violin."

So Pansy had followed the sound to the clock tower, where she found the music and its owner. The piece was melancholy and heavy, as if working through something its player couldn't say out loud.

After a stretch of one-sided lecturing from Pansy, Draco had to concede that he was miserable about Praeris and Miles.

Pansy showed him no mercy. "Go ahead, keep being stubborn! Be stubborn right up until Praeris becomes Bletchley's girlfriend, and then you can pour all that utterly useless pride of yours into a tragic violin piece!"

Once, as a secret admirer, Pansy had defended Draco without question. As a Slytherin, she always would: mocking Gryffindors together, starting trouble together, that was a given.

But right now, watching him sulk like this, she just wanted to grab him by the shoulders and make him look at what was actually going on inside his own head.

"Draco, fair or not — you're way more handsome than Bletchley, and you've known her far longer. How are you letting a latecomer get ahead of you? What kind of Slytherin does that?" Pansy crossed her arms. "Praeris isn't his girlfriend yet. Are you going in or not? Because if you don't, I'll still look down on you."

Draco propped his chin on one hand and said coldly, "She likes Bletchley. She gave him flowers."

"One flower. Haven't you gotten more gifts from Praeris than that?" Pansy raised her glass and softened her tone. "Draco. I've been in love. I've truly liked someone. I know exactly what a stirred heart looks like."

"In my eyes, both you and Bletchley go a little sideways when it comes to feelings. His way is headlong, all-in passion. Your way is denial and avoidance. But Praeris — the way Praeris looks at Bletchley is more like the way she looks at that broken singing conch shell of yours."

"That's a conch shell that plays back the sounds you want to hear!" Draco corrected her.

Pansy waved him off. "Does that really matter? Who cares what kind of conch shell it is! Compared to being in love, she looks more like she's humoring him, more like she's trying out a new experience, more like she's puzzling over an unsolved riddle. A piece of advice from a real friend, Draco: pursuing someone you like takes the same drive as chasing the Golden Snitch."

The one caught in the middle never sees clearly. The one standing outside does.

Pansy was torn. She knew Praeris didn't want to accept Draco's feelings, but it wasn't because Praeris didn't like him. It was because she could see, clearly, that it was a journey with no destination.

By Praeris's own logic, if she didn't like Draco, she would never have thought as far ahead as whether they could actually end up together. The fact that she had already considered the future of that relationship was precisely what told Pansy that Praeris's heart had been stirred by Draco, or at least had been, at some point.

Pansy also knew that Draco liked Praeris.

It was just that, all his life, his loves and his hates had never been intense. He was like a handcrafted metal quill: gorgeous, but light. Drop it once and it shatters.

So people had no choice but to keep it in a glass case.

So everything it looked at had a layer of glass between them.

The most alive Draco had ever seemed was probably the time he caught the Golden Snitch. And even that, in some way, had been connected to Praeris.

Because things had always come easily to him, Potter got under his skin: Potter, who made him lose face. But even then, even caring about Potter as much as he did, he almost never sat down and seriously plotted against him. It was always impulse, always spur-of-the-moment, which meant Potter turned the tables on him more often than not.

Except for that time with the magic ball. Pansy knew Praeris had given him a proper lesson over that one.

There it was. Every real change in him traced back to Praeris. How could he possibly not like her? It was just that, behind his layer of protective glass, he didn't know how to reach through and stop what was happening on the other side.

On the other side of the grounds, Miles suddenly stood up, eyes on the Forbidden Forest. "What's that?"

5 young men were pulling up to the forest's edge. Behind each of their vehicles was an enormous cage, each one covered in black cloth, sealed tight without a single gap.

Praeris blinked. "It's the first task of the Triwizard Tournament."

"I didn't think we'd be this lucky, getting a look at the first task before the competition even starts. Well." Miles grinned. "At the cages, anyway."

"It's dragons."

Praeris said it the way someone might say they'd had bread for breakfast.

"How can you tell?" Miles asked, astonished.

Praeris pointed at the men. "Dragon handlers. They have healed burn scars from dragon fire on them. The size of those cages matches the rough build of a dragon. And most importantly, the red-haired man over there is Charlie Weasley. I saw a photo of his family winning a prize in the newspaper. Charlie Weasley is a dragon handler."

"You're incredible!" Miles said, his eyes going wide. "What do dragon fire burn scars even look like? You can work out the whole hidden truth just from spotting something like that?"

➤ Next: The Mistletoe's Answer