"Sir! If you lived on Tulip Street, you would know that Praeris is by no means the best choice!"
The woman speaking wore a black-and-white nun's habit. Her face was gaunt, barely any flesh on it. Her eyes were narrow inverted triangles. Her lips were thin and pressed tight. When she spoke, the corners of her mouth pulled down, and her tone brought to mind a hen in full combat mode, ready to peck someone at any moment.
"Little Fiona, little Sophia — take a look! These are hardworking, capable girls from the orphanage. They'll save you a great deal of trouble!"
The middle-aged nun gestured toward the girls beside her. The girls, who had been straightening their clothes, immediately puffed out their chests like two proud little hens.
Not a trace of tact in her words. She talked about the girls the way you'd talk about useful equipment, those who could work had value, those who couldn't didn't. And the girls seemed to take genuine pride in that.
Snape's gaze didn't linger on either of them for a single second. He let out one slow sentence: "Perhaps I am here to collect my student, not to hire two housekeepers."
The nun looked as though someone had reached across the room and pinched her by the throat. She choked for a few seconds. The little hens deflated beside her, glancing uneasily at her face.
The embarrassed nun scraped together what remained of her confidence, shooed the two girls away, and led the dark-clad man toward the end of the corridor.
No knock. She pushed open the door directly — the room had no lock.
It was more storage closet than bedroom. Wooden shelves lined both walls, loaded with boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling. Mops and brooms in the corner. Wooden buckets. Jars in every size. There was a lot of it, but surprisingly, everything was in order. Nothing filthy, nothing chaotic.
Tucked against the wall in the corner of this "storage room" was a small wooden bed. On it sat a girl in a worn-out black dress.
She had the look common to all the orphanage girls, thin and pale, like someone who had never quite eaten their fill. But what set her apart from Fiona and the rest was the sharpness in her eyes. A wary, watchful look. Like a stray cat by the side of the road.
"Praeris! This is Mr. Snape!" the nun said, voice pitched high. "He has come to select a student and offer a free schooling opportunity. I trust you know what you ought to say!"
She gave Snape a brief nod. "You may test her however you like. But I still strongly recommend Fiona and the others. You understand — I would much rather give a truly deserving girl a way forward."
Snape paid no attention to any of it. He only looked at Praeris, clasped his hands behind his back, and half-closed the door.
"I imagine you sometimes have certain... special talents?" His face showed not a flicker of expression. "Such as accidentally making things fly into the air?"
Praeris's eyes drifted upward for a moment, as if turning something over in her mind. Then she countered: "Do you mean tossing beanbags? The orphanage holds that sort of activity in the spring."
Snape let out a short "hmph." A wand slipped from his sleeve. He pointed it at a jar on the shelf. The jar lifted smoothly from its place and sailed toward Praeris.
Praeris lunged to catch it, she knew exactly what happened when jars broke. Sister Main would make sure she understood what several days without meals felt like.
Snape delivered his next words in the flattest tone imaginable, which made them all the more insufferable: "If you would only engage that peanut-sized brain of yours, you might realize just how clumsy that lie was."
"As you can see, unlike those mediocre, ignorant Muggles, we are wizards with abilities they could never imagine..."
The man in black, Professor Snape, she supposed she should call him now, laid out for Praeris a world of wizards and magic.
All of it felt like a dream.
Even after Professor Snape left, Praeris was still half-sleepwalking, staring blankly at the letter in her hands.
"I will come for you in 3 days and take you to Diagon Alley to purchase your school supplies," he had said before he walked out.
Finding a new child at any hour, any day, this was routine at Maria Orphanage.
Some people had children they couldn't afford to raise. Some people had children at an age when they had no business having them at all. Drop the child at the orphanage door or the church steps, shed the burden dragging you down, walk away lighter. What a bargain.
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Praeris was different. She had been five or six years old when she was left at the orphanage doorstep. The orphanage didn't take children that old.
But the police couldn't find her parents either. The orphanage had no choice.
Sister Main had harbored a grudge against Praeris from the very first day. She had insisted, from the start: "She will lead the Lord's children astray!"
Father Dowling thought Sister Main was worrying over nothing. Praeris simply had an unusual temperament.
But Sister Main's "prophecy" came true all the same. Strange things started happening around Praeris. Plates that shattered on their own. Fiona tumbling over for no reason. One thing after another.
What pained Sister Main even more was discovering that Praeris had learned to lie.
"I didn't throw a plate at Fiona," Praeris said, face blank. "If I wanted to deal with her, I have a thousand ways to do it."
"Lord! Listen to what this child is saying?! You have a thousand ways to harm Fiona!" The vein at Sister Main's temple pulsed. "So you're telling me the plate flew up on its own and hurled itself at her? Is that what you're saying?"
"I know you don't believe me. But that is exactly what happened." Praeris had no framework to explain it. No knowledge she possessed could account for what she kept seeing.
"Oh, Lord, forgive me! I have failed in my duty to this girl, that she would speak such words! Everyone! No laundry today — Praeris will do it alone! Perhaps labor will lead you to reflect on your conduct and earn the Lord's forgiveness!"
Sister Main was incandescent.
Praeris refused. "This isn't something I did. I committed no wrong, so I will not be punished for it."
"Fine!" Sister Main snapped. "Then you don't need to eat, either!"
Circumstances were stronger than principles. Praeris couldn't prove her innocence. She couldn't go without food indefinitely.
In the end, on a freezing winter day, she washed every last piece of the girls' laundry alone.
The nightmare was far from over. For a long time after that, inexplicable things kept happening around her, just like that plate sailing through the air. It was as if a devil had taken up residence at her side, a Mephistopheles to her Faust. As if they had made a wager with God: would Praeris break under pressure, or wouldn't she?
She was pushed from the crowd into the corners. Driven from the girls' dormitory into the storage room. Her parents had abandoned her. Now Maria Orphanage was abandoning her too, one small degree at a time.
Praeris didn't need warmth. She could manage perfectly well on her own. But she had one fixed obsession: she wanted to catch the "devil" lurking beside her. She would not bow to it.
If Snape had never appeared, she would have sat the entrance exam for a nearby public secondary school the following year. She had already been learning to live with the power inside her, slowly bringing it under control. She didn't need him.
But Professor Snape's appearance was a beautiful accident. She had always had a plan to leave the orphanage. He simply let her reach that goal sooner, and aim for something higher: not just to survive what lived inside her, but to dance with it.
Praeris stood up, crossed to the storage shelves, and pulled a book from one of the baskets.
3 days later, Professor Snape arrived exactly as promised, and pushed open the door to an entirely new world.
The Leaky Cauldron. Diagon Alley. Owls and wands. All of it exceeded anything Praeris had imagined. She was like a snake with an appetite for elephants, she wanted to swallow every piece of knowledge in sight.
"You use snowy owls to deliver letters? There are no postmen? No postal vans?" she asked.
"They are owls," Professor Snape said. "Unless you imagine Hogwarts is some sort of residential neighborhood that anyone can wander into."
Professor Snape was not a patient, encouraging teacher. He had no interest in wasting breath.
Praeris read him quickly. High standards. Strict. Short-tempered. No tolerance for stupidity.
She didn't see a problem with any of that. She was the same way.
In fact, she thought both she and Professor Snape were straightforward people to deal with. Follow instructions, don't cause trouble, don't ask the same idiotic question twice, and they became a library. A very well-stocked one.
Their last stop circled back to the Leaky Cauldron. Snape had arranged for a child without a family to stay in a second-floor guest room until school began.
That was what he'd said. She didn't see any other orphans.
Tom, the owner of the Leaky Cauldron, was a warm sort. He wouldn't call Praeris a bastard, or unclean, or any of the other names she'd grown used to hearing.
He called her: "Miss Praeris!"
A remarkably pleasant form of address. Praeris admitted she didn't dislike it, she could even overlook a certain amount of old Tom's rambling for its sake.
"Professor Snape has placed you in my care. You'll be in Room 11 on the second floor — does that suit you? Anything you need, please don't hesitate to ask." Old Tom grinned as he said it.
Praeris swept a quick look around the room. Plain. But every necessary piece of furniture was there. It was more of a room than her "room" back at the orphanage had ever been.
"That's perfectly fine. Thank you," Praeris said, dipping her head.
She saw Tom out. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and let her gaze travel slowly from the door to the window.
She stood, walked over, and pushed it open. Below, Diagon Alley stretched out in both directions, full of noise and movement, people coming and going. Plenty of children her age among them, only every one of those children had someone beside them who looked like family.
So she was the only orphan in this year's intake. Good. She wouldn't need to explain herself to anyone.
Professor Snape had given her a trunk for her school things. Inside: a stack of books, some laboratory equipment, a set of wizarding robes (the school uniform, she assumed), and a wand, essentially a slightly more elegant tree branch.
As she had already known, the most important thing she had done to escape the orphanage was study. She had accumulated enough to pass a public secondary school entrance exam without difficulty. But she had also known that a public secondary school was not a real way out.
She had been learning to control her magic, yes. But in the ordinary world, there was no one to teach her, no body of knowledge she could draw from. Everything had to be worked out alone. That made the magic inside her like a landmine, one wrong step, one moment of loss of control, and it would detonate.
If it went off at secondary school, she would lose everything she had built. Just like at Maria Orphanage.
So she had never stopped exploring, never stopped looking for answers.
Until Snape came.
Praeris picked up her copy of The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1.
Hogwarts, she thought. Surely it would have something worth surprising her with.
➤ Next: Extremely Odd