Chapter 221 - Don't Know — The Conversation

After the Owls and the screening of the Muggle-Born Registration Commission, the number of upper-year students taking any given course had shrunk considerably. Classes ran in a mixed-house format now.

Take sixth-year Potions the previous year, all four houses together.

The Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom seemed, in some way, to capture exactly where Hogwarts students stood.

It had been arranged to feel dark and threatening. Every curtain drawn, only a few torches lit. The sole splash of color was something vivid hanging in the corner of the wall.

Pansy Parkinson craned her neck, rising onto her tiptoes to get a look, but Praeris caught her arm and pulled her back.

"What's wrong?" Pansy asked, puzzled.

Praeris shook her head. "Don't look."

"Why?" Pansy asked.

"Is that Pansy's mum?" Crabbe muttered to Goyle. "Worried Pansy might get scared!"

Then he stepped forward and announced to Pansy, "Pansy, it's a strangled Fwooper!"

Pansy whipped around. Now that she knew, she couldn't unsee it, the strangled Fwooper hanging on the wall, its tiny head with bulging eyes drooping limply between folds of brilliant lime-green feathers.

"Crabbe, are you trying to get yourself killed?!"

She startled so hard her feet left the floor, and she scrambled behind Praeris as if launched by springs.

Even Pansy was frightened. Students from other houses were worse, pointing at the Fwooper, a few covering their faces and peering through their fingers, their expressions sick with it.

"It seems —" Amycus's flat, sinister voice drifted in from the doorway, "the class is quite intrigued by my new decoration!"

His bloated frame squeezed through the door. He let out a wheezing laugh. "I got this Fwooper in Knockturn Alley. Beautiful, isn't it?"

"A pity, though," He swept his gaze across the room. The corner of his mouth twitched twice, dragging into a cruel smile. "Its cry was unbearable. I grew tired of endlessly casting Silencing Charms, so I had to shut it up for good."

The students might as well have had Silencing Charms cast on them. Every mouth closed. Not one person made a sound.

Amycus savored their fear, thoroughly satisfied, and strode toward the center of the room.

The students scrambled to clear a path. In seconds the classroom had parted like the Red Sea.

He clearly enjoyed this. His mouth twisted into a smirk.

Once he reached the middle of the crowd, he rattled through attendance without interest, then began to speak.

His tone was ice. The moment he opened his mouth, he dismantled Hogwarts without hesitation. "Over the past six years, you have received a cowardly education. Your spirits have grown weak and feeble."

"Starting today, you will cast aside those ridiculous notions of the past. You will raise your wands and deal with Muggles, Mudbloods, and every other blood-traitor piece of filth."

Some students couldn't hold back their expressions, brows creasing, faces tight, mouths pressing shut against words that never came.

Many clearly did not agree. But in the end, not one of them raised a hand in objection the way Hermione had once done.

Amycus watched every expression settle. He gave a cold laugh. "Wait here."

Then he left them and strode out of the classroom.

The moment he was gone, the room erupted, like water hitting hot oil, crackling and spitting in every direction.

Lavender clutched her chest. "Merlin, he's terrifying. When he looked at me, I forgot how to breathe."

"Professor Carrow actually used that word — that word — at Hogwarts..." Terry kept his head down, nervous. "What did he go out to do?"

That was the other houses. The Slytherins were different.

Draco's gaze flickered. He stayed silent. Theodore had his arms crossed, leaning against the pillar by the wall, wearing the expression of someone who'd heard all this before. Pansy was still furious at Crabbe for scaring her and was carving him apart with her eyes.

She didn't seem to care about Amycus's rhetoric at all. Crabbe's offense was the more pressing matter.

Crabbe rubbed his nose, dodging Pansy's glare, and said to Goyle, "I'd say this class is finally looking like something, isn't it?"

A few seconds later, someone pressed a mute button on the room. Every mouth shut. Some students' faces went white. Several stepped backward.

Amycus Carrow walked back through the door, dragging someone behind him, his face lit with a smile that had crossed from excited into something closer to manic.

The person being dragged was barely recognizable. Tattered rags. Purple-red hair tangled into a wild, matted wreck, like seaweed hauled up from the ocean floor. Head hanging limp.

"Thank the Ministry for its generous support!" Amycus gloated, drinking in the students' faces, and flung the person onto the open floor. "This is a Mudblood caught by the Snatchers. Head Yaxley — knowing we lacked suitable teaching aids — generously gifted him to us."

What followed was something many students would never have the courage to revisit. Amycus used that Muggle-born wizard to demonstrate to the class how to cast the Cruciatus Curse.

The man convulsed off the floor like a fish beached on dry land, then slammed back down.

After one demonstration, Amycus asked the class if they had learned it.

"I've learned it," Praeris said, without hesitation.

Every student outside Slytherin turned to stare at her. Like she was something wrong.

Pansy spoke up quickly. "I've learned it too!"

A few other Slytherins followed, slow and scattered.

"And the rest of you?" Amycus's grin widened. "It seems many students still haven't learned. I suppose I'll have to demonstrate again."

Seamus nearly broke out of the crowd. Macmillan grabbed him. He shouted, "We've got it! We already know it!"

It didn't matter. Amycus cast the Cruciatus Curse again, and only then asked whether the class had learned.

This time, he got his answer. Enthusiastic. Unanimous.

For most of the students, the class was pure torment. Praeris kept her face arranged into something that looked like indifference.

She understood she couldn't stop Amycus Carrow. Before Voldemort fell, if not this Carrow, there would be another Death Eater. Any carelessness on her part would bring consequences she wouldn't bear alone.

Pansy's anger had faded. What replaced it was a quieter, creeping fear of Amycus.

Outside the classroom, she asked in a rattled voice, "Prae, Professor Carrow's lessons, they won't get worse than this, like Moody's did, right?"

"No," Draco said, coming up from behind. Quiet. "Pansy, let's find somewhere else to talk."

Something that had happened had made Draco grow up. He understood now that an open, empty lawn, nowhere to hide, nothing to muffle sound, was actually harder to eavesdrop on than a secluded corner.

"Draco." Pansy's voice came out small and wretched. "Is it true? You've already..."

Draco didn't deny it.

"This isn't what you actually wanted for yourself, is it?" Pansy asked.

"No," Draco said. "It's what I wanted back then."

To deny a person's past is to deny part of what makes them who they are. To disavow your own thoughts, your own choices, your own actions, that's just rejecting your actual self.

Draco would not deny that he had once hoped becoming a Death Eater would free his father and restore his family's standing.

"But you don't look happy." Pansy's eyes glistened. Her mouth pulled down at the corners. "If this is what you wanted, why isn't there any joy in you at all?"

Draco went quiet. He looked at Pansy. Then at Praeris. Then back to the shine of tears in Pansy's eyes.

"What I wanted," he said, "and what I got, they're not quite the same thing."

Draco rarely admitted things like this. Admitting a mistake. Admitting regret.

Pansy burst into loud sobs and threw herself into Draco's arms. "Draco! I don't know, I don't know what you've been through! I don't know anything!"

After Praeris had told her Draco had become a Death Eater, Pansy had known he must have endured far more than she'd ever seen. More than she knew. Worse than she could imagine.

Not all Slytherins took pride in becoming Death Eaters. Pansy's parents hadn't.

A choice with options, with a way out, that's a real choice. Having no choice at all is the worst kind of decision.

Draco lifted both hands, helpless, and looked at Praeris. Praeris calmly shook her head at him, then reached out and stroked Pansy's hair.

The old Pansy and the old Draco had actually been a lot alike, both arrogant, both the type to bully the weak and back down from the strong, neither of them as bold as they pretended to be.

The Draco in front of her now was different. Pansy had changed too.

After a long while, Pansy finally pulled herself upright, still sniffling, and asked, "What was that person's name? In class. What's going to happen to him?"

It had hit her near the end of the lesson: if Praeris couldn't prove her identity, she could end up like that too.

The thought wouldn't leave her alone. Her chest was tight with it.

Draco and Praeris exchanged a look. Draco was the one who spoke. He turned his head to the side and said to Pansy, "I don't know. Don't ask."

"Why?" Pansy pressed. "Why not?"

Draco started to say something, stopped, swallowed, and said slowly, "Don't learn their names. Don't be curious about how they end."

"If you know his name, you'll feel something. More or less, it doesn't matter, you'll feel something. You'll lie awake being uneasy about it. Afraid. Sad. Heartbroken. Turning it over and over in the dark."

Draco looked past Pansy, to Praeris. Her gaze was steady and quiet. It settled something in him.

Under that gaze, he said what he actually meant. "Pansy, don't be curious. It won't do you any good. The only way not to get hurt is to not know."

Pansy understood him, dimly. If she hadn't known that Praeris was a half-blood with no legal proof of her blood status, she wouldn't have felt sympathy for that Muggle-born wizard in the classroom. Wouldn't have felt anything at all.

A stranger dying brings, at most, a moment of fear. But if the person who dies has a name, a face, if it's someone you know, then it doesn't leave you so easily.

This was only Amycus Carrow's first class. Already he had stopped treating people as people, using a living wizard as a teaching aid to demonstrate an Unforgivable Curse.

It was said that casting an Unforgivable on a human being would land you in Azkaban. But Amycus faced no consequences. The wizard he'd used had been provided by the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement himself.

Every student at Hogwarts understood: whatever was happening out there hadn't been stopped by Hogwarts' stone walls.

Back in the castle, Praeris made a point of going to Myrtle's lavatory to warn her to stay inside.

"Those people are ruthless toward Muggle-born wizards," Praeris said, watching Myrtle drift slowly down toward her. "I don't know whether they might go after you."

The others, if she warned them, they might not listen. Everyone had their own mind about things. But Myrtle was a ghost friend who genuinely trusted her.

Myrtle studied Praeris's face with careful attention. She reached out a hand, and it passed straight through Praeris's head.

She tilted her head. "Praeris, what does growing up feel like?"

Praeris shook her head. "Growing up makes you stronger. But it doesn't make you happy."

Barron was a fifth-year now. The gap between his age and Myrtle's, frozen at the moment of her death, kept widening. They couldn't really be called peers anymore.

Barron hadn't shown the slightest sign of wanting to leave. But sensitive Myrtle felt it regardless, a quiet ache that wouldn't go away.

Every year, every day as a ghost made her more aware of it. She couldn't grow up. She was completely, permanently stopped at the moment she had died.

Barron was alive. He would grow up.

"Praeris, I know you mean well." Myrtle's voice came out in a sob. "But I can't stay here. I have to go find Barron."

"But Barron can come here to see you," Praeris said, without thinking.

Myrtle shook her head through her tears. "He can't always come! Barron has his own dreams. He wants to be a Healer, he doesn't want to be trapped by a ghost like me, stuck in this tiny patch of a lavatory for the rest of his life!"

Barron had to study, do homework, put in time at the Hospital Wing, and still find time to come to Myrtle's lavatory to be with his girlfriend. His schedule rivaled Praeris's back when she had been researching the Limb-Regrowing Potion.

Praeris had nothing left to say. This was a relationship where both sides were giving everything they had. Barron was squeezing out every spare hour he could. Myrtle didn't want him wasting what little time he had just getting there.

She put on a light smile. "Maybe they don't know your blood status. Who would bother going after a ghost? Don't you think, Ginny?"

"I'm glad you still care about a ghost from a Muggle family." Ginny's voice came from behind Praeris. "Hermione says we can trust you completely. We're planning to steal the Sword of Gryffindor. Any suggestions?"

"I suggest you don't steal it," Praeris said.

➤ Next: DA Rebuilt — Face to Face