Chapter 220 - The Carrow Siblings' Conversation

Tap-tap.

Praeris knocked on the door of this disloyal office, seven years, seven different professors.

"Come in, heh heh!" Amycus Carrow's voice filtered through from the other side.

Praeris pushed the door open. Amycus wasn't alone. His sister Alecto was there, and so was Professor Snape.

She decided then and there to sort them by first name in her head. The two Carrows were going to be difficult to tell apart otherwise.

The moment she spotted Professor Snape, Praeris relaxed. She wasn't going to come out the worse for this.

She smiled pleasantly and greeted them. "Professor Snape. Professor Carrow. Professor Carrow."

Looking closer, Praeris blinked. Judging by the expression on Alecto's face, she was fairly certain Alecto had been among the Death Eaters she'd set on fire in Diagon Alley.

Neither sibling looked particularly friendly, but Alecto's body language carried something extra, a faint, almost involuntary, physical fear.

"It's been a while, Praeris," Snape said, unhurried. "Find a seat."

Praeris turned and looked for a chair, paying no attention whatsoever to the office's actual owner.

"If I'm not mistaken," Amycus said, somewhat stiffly, "this is my office?"

Praeris looked up, glanced at Amycus, then looked toward Snape.

She appeared, for all the world, to be a student who simply deferred to her Head of House in all things.

"Is that so?" The faintest cold sneer touched the corner of Snape's mouth. "Well then, Amycus — do you have any particular instruction for Miss Prince before she sits down?"

The corner of Amycus's mouth twitched. "Sit."

Praeris sat without a moment's hesitation, hands resting on her knees, looking every inch the model student.

Model student, my eye. Alecto seethed internally. What a performance.

Amycus was a short, bloated wizard, even puffier than a lump like Crabbe, as if someone had beaten him swollen all over. His features were lopsided, his mouth slightly crooked, and when he laughed he looked like a man struggling for air.

In a Shakespeare play, he could have walked straight into a role like Richard III on looks alone. The kind of villain whose physical misfortune had curdled into something much worse inside.

"You still call Headmaster Snape 'Professor'?"

The moment Praeris was seated, Amycus started in on her.

She reacted as though the point had only just registered, and smiled with slightly stiff delight. "My apologies, Professor Carrow — I haven't quite adjusted to the good news yet! I should be saying Headmaster now, shouldn't I? Congratulations on your promotion, Professor Snape!"

"Why, Praeris." Snape seemed unable to fully suppress a smile. "All credit belongs to the Ministry's confidence in me."

"The Ministry's confidence alone isn't enough." Praeris delivered it as smooth, practiced flattery. "It's your reputation and your ability. Everyone agrees you should have had this position long ago."

This witch was Snape's prized student, yet she had never been drawn into the Death Eater cause. Her potion had indirectly weakened the Death Eaters' grip on the werewolves, their coercion and bribery had both lost traction. And despite her obvious power, she had not appeared at the Astronomy Tower.

And yet Snape had still passed muster with the Dark Lord.

The Carrow siblings didn't understand it. But they themselves were among those who had not sought out the Dark Lord after his fall, and their contributions were even less than Snape's, who had killed Dumbledore. It wasn't their place to question him.

Among the Death Eaters who had been in Diagon Alley that day, the prevailing theory was that Prince simply wasn't a Death Eater and therefore hadn't been eligible for the Astronomy Tower operation. Receiving the Dark Mark required the Dark Lord himself to bestow it.

According to Umbridge, Prince was the kind of witch who traded emotional intelligence and social awareness for raw power. Looking at her now, that seemed partially true, just not to any remarkable degree.

Teacher and student, one performing humility, the other laying on the flattery, quite the lively little performance.

Ahem. Amycus had to resort to a cough to cut them off. Enough of this.

"All right, Praeris." Snape's tone was even. "It seems Professor Carrow has something to say to you."

Why else, indeed.

Why else would they have summoned her to his office.

Amycus smiled, a crooked, unpleasant thing.

"Prince," he said, his voice carrying a dark undercurrent, "during the summer holiday — did something unpleasant happen to you in Diagon Alley?"

"You know about that?" Praeris looked genuinely surprised. "Yes, it happened. A friend and I were shopping in Diagon Alley and ended up being followed."

"I have no idea who those people were, but things haven't exactly been safe lately..." She let a thread of anxiety work into her expression. "That kind of stalking and robbery used to be a Knockturn Alley problem. I never expected it in Diagon Alley."

At the words stalking and robbery, Alecto's face went tight.

Praeris "didn't notice" and pressed on. "So I taught them a lesson and got out of there. Lucky I didn't slack off in class — my dueling held up well enough."

Well enough. Four people, Bulstrode, Nott, Alecto, and one other Death Eater, beaten black and blue, burned, and poisoned by a girl barely past her coming-of-age. Snape had even reproached them afterward for failing to state their purpose first. As if they'd been given any chance to open their mouths.

None of the four dared say so out loud. Admitting the truth would mean admitting they had been too weak to get a single word out in front of this girl.

Praeris sat perfectly straight, her expression open with undisguised curiosity. She seemed genuinely puzzled as to how the new Professor Carrow could possibly know she'd been mugged.

From the side, Snape let out a short, contemptuous snort. The Carrow siblings' expressions darkened another shade.

Snape threw them a lifeline, his tone perfectly flat. "Professor Carrow is concerned for your safety. Be careful when you go out."

"I will be." Praeris took it immediately, and just as immediately "forgot" to ask any more questions.

That particular hurdle was cleared, and the Carrow siblings actually breathed a sigh of relief. The moment they realized what they were doing, both their expressions soured further. Anyone who didn't know them would have thought they were constipated.

Alecto finally spoke, her smile cold. "Prince. I trust you support blood purity."

Praeris didn't answer directly. She simply said, in a tone that treated it as obvious: "Professor Carrow, we are all Slytherins."

"Good!" Alecto stood and began circling her, looking down at her with hooded eyes. "We all know that Muggles have degraded the conditions in which we wizards live. And Mudbloods are nothing but Muggles stealing what rightfully belongs to us."

"Now that we true wizards have reclaimed power, a proper order is finally being restored." Alecto leaned in close and spoke quietly, unhurried. "We need certain eyes among the students — to help identify the traitors in our midst. What are your thoughts?"

The Carrows would have loved to hear Praeris say she'd be delighted. But ordering Snape's student around to his face was another matter entirely. They disliked Snape. They weren't stupid enough to be that brazen about it.

"I understand." Praeris nodded. "Deputy Minister Umbridge once established an Inquisitorial Squad at Hogwarts, students tasked with watching other students. That might be worth using as a reference."

"That sounds promising." Alecto clapped her hands, satisfied. "Thank you for the suggestion."

Alecto had no idea that Praeris had, in fact, been counted among Umbridge's Inquisitorial Squad, and had spent that entire time doing absolutely nothing useful, then actively made things worse by hiding the DA's list.

"I hear your Potions work is quite impressive," Alecto continued. "And that you're developing new potions as well?"

Here it comes.

Praeris tilted her chin up slightly. "I've learned reasonably well, I think. That's entirely down to Professor Snape's teaching. Since third year I've put out several published papers and a few innovative potions."

Published papers. Right, the Cheap Wolfsbane Potion was publicly available. Any wizard who wanted to legally produce and sell it on the market had to pay Praeris a licensing fee. Brewing it for personal use was a different matter.

"How did you come to research the Cheap Wolfsbane Potion specifically?" Alecto didn't leave it there. She pressed, methodical, looking for a crack.

Snape watched from the side and said nothing. Not only because the matter touched on him, but because he trusted Praeris.

Praeris scratched her head with the air of someone digging through old memories. "No one's ever asked me that, actually. It was third-year Defence Against the Dark Arts, we covered werewolves."

"After class, while I was doing homework, I looked up some related reading. I came across Damocles's Wolfsbane Potion in a book, and I thought I'd try it myself." She shrugged lightly. "The Cheap Wolfsbane Potion was a happy accident after that."

Praeris was exactly the kind of genius that made people want to grind their teeth. Brilliance and hard work in equal measure, every result she had was bought at real cost. But in front of the Carrow siblings, she flattened years of effort into a breezy and then. As though the potion that had caused the Dark Lord serious headaches had simply materialized when she was thirteen, half by accident.

Among Hogwarts students, this was the precise variety of insufferable person who would casually mention they had sat their O.W.L.s without revising and picked up twelve certificates while they were at it.

"Is that so." Amycus cut in. "Who was your third-year Defence Against the Dark Arts professor?"

"Remus Lupin," Praeris said.

And just like that, everything made sense.

Why would a Slytherin help creatures as lowly as werewolves? It had to have been those Order of the Phoenix types, using Praeris's talent against her, steering her toward the Wolfsbane research. That was how the current situation had come about.

The Carrow siblings knew the Wolfsbane Potion was no simple brew, but they had no precise measure of Praeris's ability or how hard it actually was to develop new potions.

Her research turned up intermittently on the market, and what hadn't been disclosed was like the mass of an iceberg below the surface, no way to gauge it.

And the way she spoke about the Cheap Wolfsbane Potion, as casually as someone describing a glass of water, blurred the siblings' sense of scale even further.

Which meant they couldn't very well hold Snape accountable for failing to stop her.

According to Snape, the potion was Praeris's earliest work and not a complete innovation, merely an improvement. So Snape hadn't even known she was capable of building on Damocles's research. And the utter indifference in her voice made the Carrow siblings feel she hadn't put in much effort at all.

Given that, it was hardly strange that Snape hadn't noticed.

Think about it. Your student goes quiet for a few days. Would you assume she was reading and doing homework and chatting with her friends, or that she was improving upon the signature work of one of history's foremost potion-makers?

The only thing to blame was that this Prince was simply too talented.

The Carrows had covered everything they'd wanted to ask and come up empty. With Praeris's former Head of House and mentor sitting right there watching them, there was nothing further they could reasonably do to her. They let her go.

Praeris rose and bowed. "Headmaster Snape. Professor Carrow, Professor Carrow. Good night."

"Go back early," Snape said. "Don't linger in the corridors."

Amycus laughed twice, the sound coming in short bursts like a man winded, and made a crude attempt to ingratiate himself. "Prince, as fellow Slytherins, Alecto and I both think very highly of you."

Praeris lowered her head with an appropriately modest smile. "I'll do my best to live up to that."

She turned and walked out of the office.

Out in the second-floor corridor, she let out a quiet breath.

Voldemort had clearly developed some suspicions about her. Her identity as a Slytherin had helped. Professor Snape had helped shield her from the rest.

She and Dumbledore had already taken care of a number of Horcruxes, which was part of why Voldemort hadn't had the bandwidth to focus on her.

She could only hope that Dumbledore and Harry were out there making enough of a mess to keep him occupied.

By the time Praeris got back to the dormitory, it was late.

Astoria, doing her rounds as prefect, was coming in from the other end of the hall. She spotted Praeris and blinked. "Selwyn said Professor Carrow called you in, just now?"

"Just now," Praeris confirmed. "Coming back from the younger years' wing?"

"Yes." Astoria hesitated, then asked, voice dropping. "Did they do anything to you?"

What had happened to Grease had driven Astoria's opinion of the Death Eater regime straight into the ground. Her first instinct, seeing Praeris at this hour, was worry.

Praeris smiled, the expression easy and unhurried. "Professor Snape was there. What could happen? Go get some sleep, and don't let that kind of thing show on your face so easily."

Astoria knew she was right. She nodded quickly and let it go.

Praeris went back to her room, settled onto her bed, and picked up her class schedule.

Daphne was brushing her hair. She glanced over and said, idly, "Defence Against the Dark Arts tomorrow. Wonder what this new professor's style is going to be like."

They'd been through the whole range over the years, useless and competent, pure theory and pure practice, everything in between. Where did Amycus Carrow fall on that spectrum?

➤ Next: Don't Know — The Conversation