Francis, the first Viscount St Alban, once said: "Knowledge is power."
Back at Maria Orphanage, Praeris had been punished by Sister Mayne with laundry duty. The orphanage uniform was a white tunic and black skirt, and worse, the children did chores every day — grease stains were inevitable.
Unfortunately for anyone hoping to see her struggle, Praeris used toothpaste and dish soap as cleaning agents and got rid of the stains without breaking a sweat.
Praeris had known from a very young age that if she wanted to change her circumstances, she couldn't rely on tears or brute force. All she needed was knowledge. A great deal of knowledge.
She opened The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 and studied its contents with complete seriousness, every word of it utterly new to her.
By the time her attention finally lifted from the page, it was dusk. Tom had come up specially to knock on her door and call her to dinner.
Praeris had tried to use her power before, but without a wand, casting magic as an unstable, underage witch was still a difficult thing to manage.
Now, though, conditions were perfect: her temporary guardian was gone, her wand was sitting in her trunk, she was alone in her room, and right in front of her was a copy of The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1.
The right time, the right place, and the right person.
By the time Tom knocked, Praeris had already attempted several spells on her own initiative and had even learned to use the Levitation Charm to lift the candlestick across the room.
She had no idea that underage witches and wizards were not permitted to use magic outside of school.
Fortunately, on one hand, she hadn't started school yet. On the other, the Ministry of Magic could only detect where an underage wizard used magic, and Praeris happened to be in the place with the highest concentration of young witches and wizards in the days before term: Diagon Alley.
"Miss Praeris, time for dinner. Do you eat buttered bread?" Tom led her downstairs as he spoke.
"Just call me Prae." She gave a small wave. "May I call you Tom?"
"Of course."
Tom couldn't quite put his finger on it, but this girl Professor Snape had brought over gave him an odd sense of pressure.
After some thought, he decided it was probably the expression. That stiff, unreadable face of hers had a certain quality to it, Snape's quality, or rather, the quality of professors in general.
In short, she looked like a teacher who was about to scold someone.
Praeris had no idea Tom had already mentally filed her alongside the Hogwarts faculty. She collected her complimentary buttered bread and glass of milk and sat down.
Snape had paid for her room and board from today through the start of term, the money was said to come from the school, and had given her a little extra on top of that.
Praeris decided then and there that she was going to fall in love with Hogwarts. An excessively humane school, this one. It even gave out financial aid.
While Praeris ate, Tom observed the girl Severus Snape had brought in.
The wizarding war ten years ago had left some children without parents, true enough. But even so, Hogwarts had almost no orphans enrolling. Relatives, distant relatives, even family friends, someone always stepped in to take responsibility for raising the child.
So it never would have occurred to Tom that the girl sitting there was actually an orphan about to start her first year.
All he knew was this: Professor Snape had arrived with a little girl of about eight or nine, paid for her room and board for a stretch of time, told Tom to keep an eye on her, and left without looking back once.
Extremely odd, Tom thought.
And stranger things were yet to come.
This girl called Praeris had spent the entire afternoon upstairs without setting a single foot outside her room. Anyone who didn't know better would have thought the room was empty.
Tom polished a glass and watched her from the corner of his eye.
She was thin. Black hair pinned up. Her features were striking, but her complexion was pale, and her eyes kept drifting to some fixed point in the middle distance, as if she were working through a problem.
She was. And she wasn't just thinking — she was eavesdropping.
The Leaky Cauldron was a gathering place for wizards of all kinds, and their idle chatter was, for her, a source of real intelligence. From what she could observe, there were only wizards here, no ordinary people, no Muggles. She suspected the place was under some kind of enchantment that made Muggles unable to see it, or at least inclined to ignore it entirely.
Stolen story; please report.
The child at the table nearby was clearly a Muggle-born student about to start school. Some wizard with nothing better to do had given them a rundown of the four houses and recommended Hogwarts: A History.
That sounded like a book worth having. Far more useful for understanding the wizarding world than a History of Magic textbook that started from Merlin and worked its way forward.
She made a mental note to visit Flourish and Blotts again.
Spending her financial aid there was perfectly reasonable. Wasn't it?
"But how does Hogwarts actually decide which house you go to?" the new student pressed, anxious. "Is it based on grades? Is there an exam?"
A wrinkled wizard in shabby robes grinned and showed a set of yellow teeth. "My dear, I'm not going to tell you. It is, presumably, an extremely difficult trial!"
The new student went pale.
The wizard hadn't even finished speaking before the whole Leaky Cauldron erupted in laughter.
Praeris nearly rolled her eyes.
She had already worked it out. The so-called trial almost certainly wasn't that hard. What she was watching was pure psychological projection, these people had once been fooled by exactly the same kind of talk, so they assumed this new student would be fooled by it too. Teasing the child gave them a sense of control. And seeing someone else fall for the same trick they once had made them feel a little better about their own past.
What nasty-minded adults. Praeris took a bite of her bread.
"So what am I supposed to do?" the boy asked, flustered. "Do I need to prepare anything? I can't do magic at all."
"Oh, yes, child," a wizard with an enormous beard said gravely. "You should probably read through all your preparation books. Fail the exam and you'll be expelled!"
Another wave of laughter rolled through the pub.
So these books were for after term started. It didn't matter if she couldn't get through them all beforehand, Praeris noted.
Not that she had any intention of slowing down. Her life had always been a fight against something. You didn't stop running; you kept moving forward. The moment you stopped, whatever was chasing you caught up.
She finally turned to look at Tom. The man's stare had been boring into the back of her head long enough to leave a mark.
She tipped the last of her milk down her throat, walked to the counter, and set the glass down in front of him. "Let me guess — you're curious about me. Specifically about my relationship with Professor Snape?"
Tom's pupils contracted slightly.
She'd guessed right.
"You can relax," Praeris said. "It's nothing beyond teacher and student. You've been watching me for a while now, and you haven't found anything — because there's nothing to find. People like me are a dime a dozen. If you want someone worth observing, watch Professor Snape. He's far more interesting than I am."
She gave him a polite smile, turned, and walked slowly back upstairs.
Legilimency? Tom stared after her. No, a child that young couldn't possibly know Legilimency. But then again, natural-born Legilimens were said to exist.
His thoughts kept spiraling. He found it harder than ever to simply ignore her.
Praeris retrieved the small purse of subsidy money from her trunk, tucked it and her wand into the crossbody bag she had sewn herself, and headed back out to Flourish and Blotts.
In Britain, books were a luxury, development goods and leisure goods both, and priced accordingly, whatever the subject.
Which was why Flourish and Blotts didn't only carry new books. It carried secondhand ones as well.
Calling them secondhand was being generous, by Praeris's assessment. Most of what sat on those shelves had passed through 3 or 4 pairs of hands already.
And they were still expensive.
She walked out with a single battered copy of Hogwarts: A History.
Just that one broken-down book had cost her a noticeable chunk of her money.
Once again, she silently thanked Hogwarts for covering her school supply list.
She returned to the Leaky Cauldron radiating quiet resentment and settled in to read everything she'd bought until she knew it cold, conceptually speaking. Not physically.
A History of Magic, Magical Theory, One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them were all pure memorization. Praeris got through them by reading each one straight through.
Spells weren't difficult. She could practice those herself, same as she'd done with the Levitation Charm.
The harder subjects were Transfiguration, Potions, and Defence Against the Dark Arts.
Transfiguration required an understanding of Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration as a foundation, the textbook said as much, right there in a warning about the dangers of the subject.
Praeris was no longer the girl she'd been a few days ago, the one who hadn't known enough to be afraid of anything.
Hogwarts: A History documented cases of magical accidents that had resulted in serious injury. Some had resulted in death. That was enough to make her slow down, and she started with the theory before attempting anything practical.
Potions was a problem of materials. She had the equipment but nothing to put in it, so the textbook was all she could do for now.
Defence Against the Dark Arts had a similar issue, just from the other side: nothing was attacking her. No Dark Arts, no magical creatures. You couldn't practice defense in a vacuum.
Even with those 3 set aside, there was still far too much to learn.
She barely left her room except for meals. Sometimes she forgot about meals entirely, and what should have been dinner became a late-night snack.
"What exactly has she been doing this whole time?" Snape finally said, remembering the student he had left at the Leaky Cauldron.
Tom scratched his head. He thought back to the glimpse he'd caught while cleaning the guest room. "Reading, I think?"
"And?"
"Eating?"
The corner of Snape's mouth moved. He swept his cloak back and went upstairs.
This student was special. Very special.
An orphan. Reasonably good-looking. Not stupid, she could fairly be called intelligent. And on top of all that: a genuine appetite for knowledge, and quiet, polite manners to go with it.
The last person who had ticked every one of those boxes during their school years had left a mark on his arm.
Dumbledore, evidently, had also found her impossible to overlook, which was precisely why he had handed the child off to Snape.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Praeris narrowed her eyes.
Tom always called her name after knocking. This wasn't Tom.
Which meant the person outside could only be —
She crossed the room at a jog and pulled the door open. Snape's dark, unreadable eyes met hers.
"Professor. Please come in." She stepped back. "Is it time for the term to start?"
A perfectly reasonable question, given that this irresponsible professor had never actually told her the start date. She had already found that out on her own, but there was no reason to lead with that.
"I would imagine," Snape said, "that you have not spent this entire time sleeping, to the point of being completely ignorant of the outside world."
He hadn't told her. She was the one who'd figured it out. And yet, somehow, with a few well-placed words, Snape had already made it sound like the oversight was hers.
He had a gift for that.
➤ Next: A Story on the Train