Praeris shook her head inwardly. She had a feeling Malfoy wouldn't succeed this time either.
Had that guy ever succeeded even once? Praeris found herself genuinely pondering that, starting to doubt her own memory.
Unlike Praeris's skepticism, Malfoy looked utterly confident, as if he could kick Harry Potter out of Hogwarts the very next second.
"Then I can only wish you good luck," Praeris said, shaking her head. "I should go find Professor Snape."
As it turned out, Professor Snape was not in his office. He had left a note, arranging what Praeris was supposed to do.
"Oh, Professor Snape, are you in?"
Praeris looked up from the ginger she'd been simmering over a low flame, confused.
During the winter-to-spring transition, young witches and wizards caught colds easily. The method was laborious: wrap ginger in herbs, roast it over fire until the surface chars black, slice it, then brew it into a potion called the "Sniffle-Snort Cold Draught."
The downside was that after drinking it, your nose would puff steam like the Hogwarts Express. Once the puffing stopped, the nose cleared and the cold healed faster. The bigger downside was that simmering ginger was genuinely tedious. Praeris had already been at it for several hours.
Fortunately, Professor Snape's office held more than potions. There were also books, books he read himself.
Interestingly, they weren't Potions textbooks like One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. They were books Muggles read. Shakespeare's Hamlet, for instance.
"There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now."
Professor Snape had drawn a line under that passage. He didn't seem like someone who believed in fate, Praeris thought, yet he'd been moved enough to mark the words.
She closed Hamlet and slipped it back into place.
The books a person reads reflect their inner world. But Professor Snape's books sat at odds with everything about him. He was head of the house most hostile to Muggles, yet he read Muggle playwrights. He seemed to disbelieve in fate entirely, yet he underlined that line.
Praeris was still staring blankly at the ginger chunks when the office door knocked. A timid voice came through: "Professor Snape, are you in?"
Well. That was a good question. Professor Snape was definitely not in, but should she be?
She hesitated a moment, then stood up and opened the door anyway.
"Professor Quirrell?" Praeris held a measure of respect for teachers, something she owed to Sprout and Snape. "Professor Snape is out. Is there something you need him for?"
"He's not in? Ah, how embarrassing. If he's not here, I'll just be going," Quirrell said, flustered.
Praeris blinked. "You could leave him a note. What did you need him for? Hey — Professor Quirrell!"
She watched Professor Quirrell hurry away, as if some ferocious Three-headed Dog from hell were chasing at his heels.
Right. As it happened, Praeris's photographic memory and her absurdly fast reading speed had come into play here.
She had found information on Three-headed Dogs without much effort: they were easily lulled by music, drifting to sleep in its sound. The magizoologist she'd read also believed Three-headed Dogs might be descendants of Cerberus, since Charon, the death-god of the River Styx, had fallen asleep under Orpheus's music.
That wasn't the point, though. Praeris watched Professor Quirrell's retreating figure until it disappeared, then silently stepped back and shut the door. She opened a drawer, pulled out a sheet of paper, and wrote down what had happened and how Professor Quirrell had reacted.
Her intuition told her it wasn't normal. She couldn't pin down the reason yet, but she believed Professor Snape would find the information useful.
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Professor Snape returned after nightfall. Under Hogwarts's warm amber lamplight, he looked like a bat with its wings spread wide.
He took Praeris's note, scanned it, and twitched the corner of his mouth. "Miss, you spend far too much of your mind on superfluous matters. This is the common failing of people like you — always convinced you can do everything, and so wanting to do everything."
Praeris had thought it might help him. She'd thought so, and so she'd done it. She hadn't expected praise, but she hadn't expected criticism either.
She couldn't help lowering her head. Her ears burned.
"You are a student, Miss Praeris. Perhaps you very much want the approval of others — or some other form of glory. That is easy enough to understand." Snape spoke like a serpent releasing venom, even to Slytherin's most outstanding student. "But I do not wish to see you become reckless and vainglorious like Potter or Granger. You ought to know — from the very beginning, you and they are entirely different."
Praeris walked back to the Slytherin common room alone, replaying his words in her head.
He wasn't wrong. Not about a single thing.
More than half a year of smooth sailing had quietly muddled her. She had drifted into self-satisfaction without noticing.
Was there any other student who never forgot anything they read?
Any other student whose knowledge ran as deep?
Any other student who could read a stranger's past from the faintest traces?
No. There wasn't.
But by the same measure, who else like her had no family, no kin?
Who else like her was suspected of having a murderer for a mother?
Who else like her was a half-blood sitting in Slytherin?
No one. Not one person.
Filth and poverty were her past. Extraordinary talent was her present. If she forgot the first and lost herself in the second, arrogance would swallow her whole. It was only a matter of time.
The next day, Praeris arrived at Snape's office as if nothing had happened, only this time, her entire attention was fixed on the items in her hands, as though they were rare treasures.
.
Malfoy dropped into the seat beside Praeris, turned sideways to face her, and lowered his voice. "Where did you run off to again?"
Praeris glanced at him sideways. "It sounds like I should be reporting my whereabouts to you, so I'm available to advise you at any moment. Is that it?"
"Seems you do have your sharp moments. That's about right," Malfoy said, completely missing her point. "I imagine you know something about Norwegian Ridgebacks?"
"So in your eyes I'm basically a library. The auto-search kind." Praeris rolled her eyes. "Is this about Potter?"
"I knew that wouldn't be hard to figure out." Malfoy snapped his fingers.
Praeris stared at him. "They're playing with fire. Literally. This thing can learn to breathe fire in a week. At three months old, one blast can burn a person to charcoal."
She gestured with her hands. "It grows this fast in a week. And they're venomous. One bite and your hand swells up like black pudding."
Black pudding was a British blood sausage, pitch-black, as the name suggested, with a faintly iron tang.
Malfoy sneered. "I think this time I can really make them regret it. I bet I can get Potter sent back to his filthy Muggle family."
Praeris looked away. "Fine. I'll look forward to it. Now go carry out your plan and leave me in peace."
Perhaps the incident with the note had led Professor Snape to conclude she had too much spare energy. He left Praeris a pile of assignments, some of them taken straight from upper-year coursework. Along with a stack of books, each one requiring a full essay after she finished reading it.
The truly terrifying part: if Praeris failed to reach an "E" or above in even a single subject, Snape had said, "Miss, you do not want to know what the consequences will be."
Praeris was going to lose her mind. She had originally planned to let Flying class go, she was pulling "E" or even "O" in everything else.
But now she had no choice but to find Marcus for broomstick lessons, and in exchange she had to tutor him in his other subjects.
Someone might reasonably wonder: how was a first-year tutoring Marcus?
The answer was simple. Marcus had strong practical skills and a solid build, but academically, he was a complete dunce.
Marcus buried his face in his hands. "I hope I won't become the first prefect who can't graduate."
Praeris's expression was flat. "I hope Professor Snape won't obliterate me."
Two unlucky souls, bound together by circumstance, dark clouds hanging over both their heads. They tucked their chins down and got to work.
Flying class alone was enough to make Praeris irritable. Back at the start of term, she had been able to coach Malfoy's takeoff technique using textbook knowledge. Now she was just trying not to fall off. She had never been on an airplane in her life, and broomsticks were genuinely awful to sit on, she always felt like she was about to slide off.
"You fly too conservatively," Marcus said, choosing his words carefully.
Praeris shrugged. "But it's safe. I've never fallen."
"There isn't a single Quidditch player worth anything who hasn't fallen off their broom at least once," Marcus said, trying to reform her thinking.
Praeris exhaled. "Fine. What am I supposed to do, ride the broom like I'm ready to die?"
"Er, you do need that charge-forward-and-don't-look-back feeling. But not quite ready-to-die." Marcus sighed. "Falling off a broom won't kill you."
Praeris looked at him steadily. "Marcus. You know I've read a lot of books..."
Marcus waved her off. "Alright, alright. I'll watch you, just like Madam Hooch. If you fall, I'll personally drag Madam Pomfrey here on the spot. Guaranteed you'll still be in one piece tomorrow. Deal?"
"That would be wonderful!" Praeris thumped his shoulder. "I trust you completely!"
That was what she said. After an entire afternoon on the broom, though, Praeris barely earned a single nod from Marcus.
"Given our relationship," he said, "I'll allow you to pass with an A."
Praeris let out a slow breath. "I should start figuring out how to keep Professor Snape from obliterating me."
➤ Next: Mutual Torment — The Conversation