Taylor sipped her tea while eyeing the spread Luna had prepared. Pretty porcelain dishes surrounded a cauldron cake, complete with knife and forks. Beside it sat a small pot filled with colourful beans. Beans that she remembered very well: Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans.
Nneka attacked the cake like someone who had skipped dinner. Considering the tea party was happening at the same time as dinner, she probably had. Luna plucked a bean from the pot, a vivid almost glowing green and threw it into her mouth. Her lips curled into a small smile and she let out a happy little sigh.
Taylor shuddered. She didn’t want to know what flavour that bean was.
On the other side of the table, the redhead was distracted with Nap. Ginny had listened to Taylor’s blurted advice and brought lots of treats. So much so that Nap had perched on her shoulders and was behaving like a queen being fed by her subjects. The happy hoots and flapping wing were obvious, but more than that, Ginny’s familiarity with how to handle an owl was a big tell.
“She likes you,” Taylor said, trying to break the awkward silence.
Ginny snorted, rolling her eyes. For a brief moment, she didn’t look so tired anymore. “She likes the food, you mean.”
Nneka guffawed between bites, bits of cake flying everywhere, and Luna covered her smile with a hand. Nap hooted, wings spread like she was ordering: Feed me more, mortals!
Taylor still had trouble wrapping her mind around things like this. For her, a magic owl, because Nap clearly wasn’t a normal barn owl — normal owls didn’t know how to find anyone in Britain or deliver letters halfway across the country — was something she’d find in a storybook. For Ginny, it was just another normal day in her life.
That got her thinking about how their life was before school. Of the four present, Taylor was the only one that grew among non-magicals (never muggles!) and it showed.
Nneka, it seemed, didn’t like the silence either. “Who do you think is the heir?”
Taylor was about to speculate, when she noticed something strange. Ginny’s face paled, and any semblance of a smile fled from her face faster than the spiders fleeing from the horror.
“I’m tired of hearing that,” she said instead, still observing Ginny from her many eyes hidden in the room. “Heir this, chamber that. Hey buy this anti-heir-protect-from-curse charm, only ten galleons!” she said in a high pitched, annoying voice.
Ginny rolled her eyes, and Nneka’s face changed to a scowl.
“A secret chamber with some monster hidden inside a magic castle is something I can understand. What I really don’t get is how Lockhart’s is our Defense Against the Dark Arts professor when all he does is tell us about his books and make us write poems. He’s more like a literature professor than a defense professor.”
“Litera-what?” “But he’s so handsome!”
It was Taylor’s turn to roll her eyes.
“It’s... studying stories and books, really. Why do people write them, what they mean, that sort of thing.”
Nneka shoved more cake into her mouth before asking her question.
“Muggles do that?”
Taylor nodded. “Non-magicals do.”
“Non-magicals? Why not call them muggles like everyone else?”
Ginny nodded with Nneka’s question.
Luna smiled like she knew a secret others didn’t.
“I don’t want to be targeted by the curse,” Taylor deflected.
“Why would the curse target you for saying muggle?” Ginny asked, running her fingers through Nap’s feathers.
“Because muggle is an insult,” Taylor said, remembering the books she’d read with her pixies in the library. The old dusty tomes had been fascinating, and after reading them she’d understood why her mum always insisted on saying non-magicals. “But no one remembers that.”
“No!” “It’s just what everyone says.”
Ginny, Taylor noticed, was looking a lot better now that the subject had changed.
“What did you guys think about the Quidditch match?” she asked, still struggling to find a topic she was comfortable with and wouldn’t be related to the heir.
As it turned out, Ginny was a massive Quidditch nerd. Nneka, not so much.
The tea-party ended up split into two pairs. Luna and Nneka kept near the table chatting and nibbling at the cake and beans, while Ginny got to her feet and decided to give Taylor an impromptu flying lesson.
“You hold the broom like this,” she said mimicking the position with her hands. “Brooms are fickle. You gotta get to know yours before she'll behave.”
Taylor scrunched her nose, remembering wrestling with the school broom.
“It doesn’t help,” Taylor whined. “The broom’s so stiff! It won’t listen to me. I want to do loops and swishes and twirls.”
Ginny snorted. “We can practice together if you want. Even the best witches had to start somewhere.”
Taylor bounced over and grabbed Ginny by both shoulders. “Yes! Please!”
The rest of the hour slipped by with plans for flying practice and stories about Ginny playing Quidditch with her brothers. It sounded all so chaotic and interesting that Taylor now wanted to see “The Burrow“, as the red-hair had called it.
Near the door Ginny said, “Thanks for inviting us, I had fun.”
It might have been Taylor’s impression, but the bags under her eyes seemed less pronounced.
Nneka nodded. “The cake was good.”
“Thank you for coming,” Luna said, waving. “And Nneka, we can practice together. I’m sure Taylor won’t mind.”
Nneka pretend-glared at Luna, theatrically placing her hands on her hips. “You’re supposed to tell me her secret training method, not give me more homework!”
Taylor watched both girls leave, unsure if they’d done anything to help at all. Ginny looked more relaxed than at the start of the tea-party, but they hadn’t even tried to talk about what was making her feel like that.
“Do you think it will help?”
Luna walked closer. “She’s happier. I think she needed a friend.”
Taylor almost scoffed. A Weasley needing a friend? That sounded ridiculous. All Weasleys were so outgoing and popular that thinking one needed a friend was like thinking that Malfoy was a nice person, just impossible. The only thing preventing Ginny from joining the red-hair hall of fame was her obsession with Harry Potter. Once she got over that, Taylor expected Ginny would be too busy with the Gryffindor crowd to pay them much attention.
“Maybe,” she said after a while.
Then Taylor closed the door and turned to face her dreamy friend. She pulled out her wand, smiling.
“If you want to meet the big spider, you need to be able to protect yourself.” With a careful swish of her wand, Taylor created a shield charm. “I’ll only take you there when you’ve managed to use a shield charm.”
Instead of answering, Luna pulled out her wand.
Taylor smiled wider.
Things got even more hectic with the addition of even more practice time with Luna and Ginny. Not to mention there was another Quidditch match next weekend: Ravenclaw versus Hufflepuff.
Ginny had explained how the game worked when they were geeking about it during the tea-party.
The Quidditch cup consisted of six games over the school year. The cup winner wasn’t the team with the most victories, but the team with the most points. Getting the Quaffle through a loop awarded the team ten points, while catching the Snitch gave a hundred and fifty. The game only ended when a seeker caught the golden ball.
Ginny told her about games that lasted for days. How that even worked Taylor had no idea. It boggled the mind.
On top of all the new things happening in that week, Taylor had to increase the surveillance in the days prior to the game. There was a lot of rivalry between the houses, and some taunting she ignored, but there were a few stand outs that had to take things too far.
Like a Ravenclaw boy who trashed a Hufflepuff Quidditch card collection because the Hufflepuff boy mocked Ravenclaw for losing the cup in the previous year. As much as Taylor liked the game, the rivalry was daunting.
Her flying lessons with Ginny went about the same as with Madam Hooch: The broom refused to cooperate, but Ginny didn’t make fun of her, or even got impatient, which was a plus.
On Friday, Taylor had to endure double potions and double bullying from Snape.
“Instead of curing boils, you’ll kill someone,” the man hissed, disappearing their potion without even looking inside their cauldron. His gaze flicked toward Luna. “Though perhaps expecting Miss Lovegood to follow a simple set of instructions was my first mistake.”
When class ended, Taylor had to storm off to an out-of-the-way, empty classroom and do her best to hold back the bugs. Enduring Snape hadn’t been an issue until now, but the man had the gall to bully Luna of all people? Their potion had been perfect, exactly as described in the book. Luna had done an excellent job with the brewing. She had done everything right. What the hell was wrong with him?
Taylor yanked out her wand and pointed it at the nearest table, but nothing came out.
In the walls and in our of the way corners, bugs attacked each other in a frenzy.
Luna found her hours later, still holding her wand and glaring at the table.
“It would be so easy, you know,” Taylor said without turning. “Wait until he isn’t looking and add a few more bits to his precious potions.”
“But you won’t.”
Taylor wouldn’t. But she really wanted to.
“Dinner is almost over,” Luna said from the doorway.
Taylor put her wand away and left the room, suddenly feeling very tired.