Chapter 37
The Importance of Magic
A Response to Miss Granger by Toma Grozdanov
For the last year or so, I have been intrigued by Miss Granger’s articles running periodically in the Daily Prophet. As a half-blood wizard, newly settled in England with Pureblood cousins, I related to the struggle of a girl who straddles two worlds. My mother - a witch - kept her heritage a secret from my father - a Muggle - and as a result, I was raised for years without any Magical understanding. Even when I grew into my gifts, I was estranged from my peers at school and at home. I never understood the war because I never learned about it. I never understood the fight for Blood Purity nor for total integration of our worlds because I never knew they were struggles.
I thought all witches married men and hid themselves away in their own homes.
Miss Granger’s articles, paired with the socio-political climate of my new home, have opened my eyes to the reality of this place. The Statute of Secrecy was first enacted in 1692 in response to the nearly two-hundred years of witch trials that preceded that bit of new policy. It was an understandable attempt to curb violent interactions between Muggles and Wizards, and the 1692 language enacted as standing policy never intended to include Muggleborn Witches and Wizards in our world. Early scholars at the time argued that magic persists without honing of skill, and those children born with magic to Muggle parents would, in time, learn to control and understand themselves with no need for our governmental involvement.
That particular clause within the Statute was removed in 1709, when enrollment to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry hit an all-time low.
The answer is neither to exclude the Muggleborns from our world, nor to force them to somehow be both Witch and Muggle. Miss Granger’s own writings are delicate, complex, and detailed explorations of our society. What we have lost, what we have driven away, and our shortfalls in clear and unashamed detail. What we can do, our beauty, and our gifts in genuine and honest form. What Miss Granger had been able to do is finally show why Wizarding Britain cannot let go of the First War, and why we are still trapped in the same arguments from 20 years ago. Where the Death Eaters rose to power in a frenzied attempt to save our unique culture, the Order rose to power in a reactionary bid to protect Muggle-influence in our world by way of ‘modernizing’.
As Miss Granger has said, neither of these are the right pathway forward.
Continued on page 34…
~~~
Hermione was already laying on the couch when Toma got there. Draco was still at home recovering and Theodore was furiously catching up on letters from his father - never a good sign when Thoros got it in his head to write to his son - which once again left Hermione to her own devices. No one in the common room had seen her, and the Library was empty, so the Room of Requirement it was.
Toma collapsed onto the couch, just out of her way. Hermione responded by wiggling down the couch a bit and propping her legs up on Toma’s knee. It wasn’t the way she would have put her feet in Draco’s lap, rubbing her heel down on the most sensitive parts of him, or how she would have dug her toes into Theo’s thigh until he laughed. No, instead she crossed her legs at the ankle and balanced them precariously on Toma’s knee.
“Good afternoon,” he greeted, hand coming to rest on Hermione’s shin.
“I read your article,” Hermione said. “Is this how we are going to introduce our combined articles?”
“Of course,” Toma said smoothly. “Didn’t you read the continuation from the front page?”
“Not yet.” Hermione shook her head. “I assumed the ending and skipped ahead to the part where we fight over parchment to send to the Daily Prophet.”
Toma snorted, but let it go. Instead, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He was tired - he’d just been helping Snape with a lesson and was feeling a bit drained. His magic was strong, but it wasn’t unlimited. Toma was still recovering from the drain he’d felt when Draco was attacked.
“Take off your necklace,” Toma ordered suddenly.
Hermione didn’t think about it, just reached up and pulled her necklace from around her neck and unclipped the chain. The Dark Mark pendant fell into her palm. “Why?”
“Can you feel this?”
Hermione felt an explosion of shivers down her back. Her skin was prickling, her hair standing up, and her hair faded in a split-second into dark smoke before the feeling was gone and she felt the couch firmly underneath her.
“What was that?”
“That,” Toma said, waving his hand in the air but not opening his eyes. “Was me calling you without a Dark Mark.” The silence between them hung thick, but not uncomfortable.
“Am I a Riddle now?” Hermione asked, never even looking up from her book. Toma startled and finally opened his eyes. “Or are you a Granger? Or are we both Grozdanovs?”
Toma huffed out a laugh through his nose, and smiled, and Hermione smiled back. Toma had explained it all hours ago during one of their middle-of-the-night conversations that seemed to be more fond, more fun now that neither one of them were keeping so many secrets.
Her magic had been given up willingly - his core healed by hers. In any other circumstance, they might have likened the bond forged on accident as a life debt. It would have been strong, but certainly not reciprocal. Toma would have been bound to Hermione in service and while he wouldn’t be able to hurt her, she would have been able to walk right over him and curse his bones if she so chose. No, their bond wasn’t a life debt or servitude.
It had been cultivated and grown, slowly and over more than a year. Through physical fights, mental games, literal and metaphorical games of chess. Toma had been Hermione’s foil and her encouragement. He’d engaged in their arguments, engaged in her policy ideas and ideals.
They’d built something that mattered just as much as Hermione’s bonds with Draco and Theodore. They’d built trust and rapport, honesty, the kind of ingrained understanding that only came from family.
Hermione could read him. She forgave him for those bouts of violence in the early days, and she teased him, and she came to him for advice. She felt weirdly safe - safe in the way she used to feel with Harry years ago.
Hermione rocked her feet on Toma’s knee, and Toma rolled his eyes at her.
Toma knew what Hermione was thinking without her having to voice it. He trusted her council, believed in her causes, and supported her policy endeavors. He was her editor, and she was his sounding board, and he felt a foreign kind of affection for her. She was the closest thing to family he had, even closer than Theodore got.
Where Theodore had been an entertaining host, and a phenomenal actor for the role of cousin, Hermione had wholly embodied family. With hair far more tame than Bella’s, and a mind sharper than Antonin’s or Thorfinn’s, and a loyalty that rivaled any other, Toma saw Hermione as his. His.
“I think,” Toma said, pushing Hermione’s feet off his knee with an exaggerated huff. “You are about to be a Malfoy so it doesn’t really matter.”
“Speaking of,” Hermione said, setting her book aside. “We need to talk.”
“What of?”
“Draco’s claimed Narcissa to walk him down the aisle at our wedding,” Hermione said. “And I’m not going to come between Theo and Lucius. But I do need a family member to walk me down the aisle and to complete the familiar part of the ritual. My parents can’t do it, for obvious reasons-”
“Oh, yes, they are dead.”
Hermione ignored him. “-and there’s no one else to ask. I’d really like my brother to walk me down the aisle.”
Toma regarded her carefully. “What, so I’m the last choice? Chopped liver?”
Hermione laughed, and Toma broke into a smile. She pushed at his shoulder, and he rolled with it. “You’re not chopped liver. You’re my family now.”
“I never agreed to that.”
“You literally told me we were magical siblings.”
“That doesn’t mean I like it,” Toma teased. Something about his tone must have been lost in translation, though. Or maybe Hermione was just feeling uncertain about their relationship now that she knew how deeply they were connected. In any case, Hermione’s face went a little slack and she paused, frozen at Toma’s side. She recovered smoothly, but Toma knew her. He knew her.
“Hermione,” he said. She looked at him, brown eyes meeting his, and he smiled. “I will not lie to you, I have never wanted family. But today, in this new life that you gave me, there is no one I would rather have as my sister.”
“I have had surrogate brothers before,” Hermione confessed. “But you’re my favorite of them all, and the only one I want standing with me when I get married.”
Toma nodded contentedly. “Then I will be there. You can help pick out the right dress robes.”
Hermione picked her own book up again before she paused and looked over the pages at Toma. She hummed a bit. “Have you and Draco had any success with the cabinet?”
“We’re almost done,” Toma admitted. “He’s kept up the ruse with false attempts, mostly to keep attention off his activities in the Room. How is Mister Weasley?”
Hermione rolled her eyes. It had been all over the castle by the time Hermione got up in the morning - Ron Weasley had been rushed to Professor Slughorn’s office to reverse a bad love potion, only to be accidentally poisoned with a bottle of mead intended for the headmaster. Draco had not intended for the mead to hurt anyone, expect perhaps Professor Slughorn himself who would have grabbed an antidote quickly for himself if he had sampled the mead, but it was accident that Weasley grabbed it while high off the dreamy, imagined kisses of Romilda Vane. By the time Hermione heard about it, he was already recovered enough to dramatically call out Hermione’s name in a bid to get rid of Lavender.
Ron’s little act in the Hospital Wing had been funny, but Hermione didn’t feel comfortable holding his hand there endlessly and had left him in bed just a few minutes after Lavender’s sobbing exit.
“Fine,” Hermione said. “At this point, he’s just acting to avoid Lavender.”
Toma nodded. “Draco and I are going to allow for the Death Eaters to enter the castle this upcoming month. You’ll be in your dormitory.”
“Of course. Theodore, too. I don’t want him anywhere near his father.”
“No,” Toma said. “I’ve already sent a note to Antonin, praising his spunk in my absence. He’s not bringing Thoros on the raid, it will be a select few of the old guard from the first war.”
“Still. I want Theodore away from it. Draco won’t want us to see what he has to do that night, anyways.”
“Speaking of unspeakables,” Toma said. “You need to step up your performance with the Order. I’ve heard through the channels there’s scepticism about your dedication. People are noticing the strain between you and the boys, and you’re not a formal member of the Order yet.”
Hermione shook her head with rolled eyes. “I’ll do better. Forgive a bride-to-be her indulgence in fiances as fit as Draco and Theo.”
“You’ll have an excuse made up for the summer to enjoy your wedding and honeymoon,” Toma assured her. “I’ll work with Cissa and Lucius on it. But you will be expected to spend the majority of the summer with the Order.”
“That’s fine,” Hermione waved her hand. She wasn’t happy about it, but they were all making sacrifices. “We need to talk about pulling some of the stronger Death Eater’s away.”
“No, actually,” Toma corrected. “We need to talk about pulling all of the strong Death Eater’s away.”
“What?”
“I have plans for that,” Toma said. “Over the summer, you will be called to join me a few times. There are people I wish for you to meet, and people who need to meet Theodore. Heed the call, Hermione.”
“Please,” Hermione said, returning to her book. “Call me something less formal. Now that we are family and all.”
Toma cocked a single eyebrow. “As you wish. Hermy.”
~~~
Continued from the front page…
Children of Muggle parents are ostracized, and oftentimes, never have a full-bodied and reliable relationship with their parents. They are estranged from the first signs of magic. The child loses a parent in that instant, and the parent loses a child desperately loved.
Even in my case, with a magical parent in the home with me, there was still ostracization. My mother feared for her life in that home, and she was in no position to save me. To teach me who I was.
My Muggle father had no interest in the woman he continuously beat into submission, nor the child he never wanted in the first place, least of all when I started to scare him with my unexplainable bouts of magic.
The Statute of Secrecy did not save me - for a long time, I thought it was the nature of the very thing it sought to do. There is no way to make a secret of this magnitude safe. There is no way to save Witches from the ire of their Muggle husbands, nor any way to save magical children from ignorant parents. Growing up where I did, in the home I did, I believed there was no need for a Statute of Secrecy if there’s no permitted marriage between Muggle and Magic.
Coming here, I realized how wrong I was. The issue is not with those adult Witches and Wizards who desire to straddle worlds themselves, nor for those who prefer the company of Muggles. No, the government has no place in the affairs of adults who can make decisions for themselves. The Statute of Secrecy stands to protect wizarding society as a whole, not the individual. Laws around marriage between Muggle and Magic folk is iron-clad, imbued with memory triggers should a marriage fall apart and Goblin-wrought contracts to protect magical assets. No, adults are not the issue.
It is the children. Miss Granger has yet to touch the sticky subject of Muggleborn children who are not allowed through the tightly guarded doors into our world until they are eleven years old. Muggleborns shouldn’t be taken for granted. Without Muggleborn and Half-blooded children, we’d have abysmally low populations and our world would die out within three generations. Without great minds like Miss Granger, open to learning our complicated history and heritage and taking up our old traditions, there would be no hope for the next generation of Ministers and Professors to safeguard our way of life. It is Muggleborn children who, ultimately, hold our world in their hands. I can count on one hand the number of Pureblooded students I have met at Hogwarts - the vast majority are Muggleborns and Half-bloods, with some influence from the Muggle world coursing through them.
I’d be curious to know what Miss Granger proposes, then. How can we protect ourselves and save those children born to unknowing Muggle parents? How can we better the next generation? How can we increase their magical and cultural literacy when we do not allow these children through our gates until eleven?