September 2, Slytherin Common Room
The Prophet is saddened to report that this afternoon Harold Heralder (36) died after ingesting a vial of Boil Cure potion mixed with a mug of the Knight Bus’s iconic hot chocolate. Heralder was a muggleborn graduate of Hogwarts’s Hufflepuff House and a former Keeper for the Chudley Cannons, who had the excellent record of only fifteen crashes during his seven years as driver of the Knight Bus.
Aurors concluded the death to be accidental, telling The Prophet that Heralder, who had achieved a P on his Potions OWL and sustained several concussions during his Quidditch career, must have forgotten the erratic effect that sugar has on many healing potions.
—W.R. Mordant, The Daily Prophet Evening Edition
When the Slytherins trailed in from supper, there was a certain amount of crowding around the door and groaning.
The Dread Adult Contaminating Their Sacred Space (Cleo thought everyone was overreacting; he was only using black ink) looked up from the enormous heap of papers and folders spread out in front of him on a go table he must have enlarged. He informed them coolly, “You were twice warned. Prefects’ meeting in an hour; seventh years who don’t know where to start with your homework have until then to ask me. The rest of you, ask someone from the year above. I didn’t take Divination or Muggle Studies, so don’t bother.”
Then he turned back to his papers.
Someone behind Cleo sniffed, “Who would take Muggle Studies?”
“Anyone who wanted a career in the Ministry,” the Naj said, this time without looking up. “Or wanted to travel. Or loved the arts. Serious questions only, if you please.”
“How did you get back from the Great Hall before we did?” Anthony asked aggrievedly.
“Please tell me that was a first-year,” the Naj said flatly to the room at large, still without looking up, pointedly ignoring the fact that the boy’s voice had not only broken but settled. Cleo flushed in contact embarrassment, and tried to pretend she hadn’t before Anthony could notice.
She had a moment of intensely missing the days when he and the Black cousins would take over the hearth-most sofa and all her year would sit around on the floor to read and play. She curled in the corner nearest him of that selfsame sofa, to keep Yaxley from thinking of it first. On a sigh, she announced, “I’ve got more than an hour’s worth of homework already, and it’s only Tuesday,” and opened Apothecarial Astronomy: An Herbal.
Catching a corner of his mouth curling up over her book cover as the other kids grumblingly settled in to work, she glowed with pride for nearly two minutes before she could make her eyes fix on the page.
Probably fifteen minutes in, a group of third-years started complaining, increasingly loudly, about how were they expected to memorize all of Ogham.
“Twenty-five runes!” someone moaned.
“Stop whinging,” snapped Chisterleigh. “You’ve only got to memorize the strokes and names your first week, it’s not as if she’s going to make you reel off everything they do.”
“But she wants us to be able to read in them by Thursday!”
“I’ll bet you a galleon she didn’t say ‘fast,’ you little whingers.”
“Come here, the five of you,” the Naj said quietly, straightening up from the parchment he’d been covering with a spiderweb of connected notes, not half so neat as an array. He always worked bent over his paper, and read with the book right near his face, but apart from that he didn’t act like someone who needed glasses.
The third-years looked at each other in apprehension, but then dragged reluctant feet over to him.
“Hands,” he instructed, holding out a demanding one of his own.
Clearly afraid the scary man was about to chop him off at the wrist, one of the boys hesitantly held out his hand.
“Is that your wand hand?” With unerring speed, the Naj’s crow-feather quill darted over the backs of his fingers. Cleo wasn’t surprised he used one of those; she’d had his ink death-of-a-thousand-cuts her essays before, and you needed a really precise quill to write like he did without getting all the letters bleeding into each other.
“Now the other.” The quill darted again, and he said, “Next.”
When he was done, the third-years had the Ogham lines slashed down the correct joints of their wand hands, and the corresponding Futhark runes on the joints of the other. The Naj told them, “You will discuss the rest of your homework in silence for the remainder of the hour. Look at the Futhark as seldom as possible, unless you haven’t had a subscription to The Prophet and need the practice. If I catch anyone hand-speaking in Potions, except with your own brewing partners about your potion, it will go hard for you.”
Still intimidated by the paltry bulk of their third-year homework (okay, they all had at least two classes more than they had the last year, but their work was still easy, especially in the first week), the five of them murmured Thanks-Sna-er-Thank-You-Apoth-er-uh-Merlin-Snape-that’s-so-weird.
“He’s the Naja, in here,” Cleo noted, turning a page.
There was a pause, with a lot of people holding their breath for the explosion. After a sigh, though, the Naj capitulated, “I suppose I am.” He added sharply, “In here.”
“Of course, sir,” Cleo agreed, turning the page back to frown at a footnote.
“At least that’s less of a mouthful,” Glenda muttered at her, making a face. “Still be weird, though.”
Cleo blinked at her. “He’s always been the Naja,” she pointed out, but Glenda just patted her hand condescendingly and dipped back into The Dream Oracle.
After a little while, the firsties started squabbling over which of them was doing their Potions homework completely wrong.
“The numbers are on the weights in your scales,” Shafiq bit out, eyeing them coldly.
“Only for one scruple and things,” a girl objected piteously. Scowling at the Naj, she said, “Nobody told us to bring an abacus to school.”
“You shouldn’t need one,” he replied, buried in papers again. “And if you do, you shouldn’t have had to be told what you’d need.”
This started off a howling.
“Did you think you were being taught maths simply to drive your tutors mad with your resentful recalcitrance?” the Naj drolly inquired. “Obviously you were going to need to be able to do simple calculations at school. How are you to manage Charms, Arithmancy, or Astronomy without geometry? Did you imagine you could get through Potions, Transfiguration, or Herbology without algebra? Even the most unformed of proto-Slytherins should be capable of rudimentary planning ahead.”
Cleo hadn’t been aware she knew anyone who used maths for anything besides Arithmancy, unless you counted measuring distances between stars. Now she had to stop herself making a gleeful noise at the mental image of a tiny Naj filling the margins of his Herbology homework with… with calculations about how much watering to do in especially dry spells, or soil balance, or something. Also at the mental image of Professor Sprout reading them and her big, kind face going all sideways: Professor Sprout generally did her measuring in handfuls.
“We didn’t know we were going to be Slytherins, did we?” asked the girl, aggrieved. “My family—”
“What sort of excuse is that? Hufflepuffs know that the first step of any job is to ready one’s tools, Ravenclaws should be clever enough to stock a cupboard, and Gryffindors who don’t prepare for their quests die, ” he snapped[1], and strode over to sit down with them.
A drop of black ink dripped from his quill onto the carpet, and a metal snake stretched from the leg of a nearby unoccupied chair to lap it up. It didn’t greatly reinforce the chair’s varnish, but Cleo supposed every little bit spared the elves something in the end.
Thoroughly annoyed, the Naj grabbed the little Liverpool boy’s notebook and demanded of all the firsties, “Who told you to need a calculating machine in any case? You can add, can’t you? You have hands? You can manipulate a quill? Then there is no earthly reason… Any of you other drakelets who have unaccountably arrived at school unable to do bloody multiplication without bulky machinery, why are you not over here already?”
More than half the baby snakes, including a lot of the second-years and a few carefully nonchalant third-years pretending amused curiosity. scrambled into an apprehensive clump around His Grouchiness and his ill-tempered air-stabbing fingers. A few older students gathered around with an air of wanting to watch the fun, but about half of them had been struggling with Potions and Herbology measurements and nearly everything in Transfiguration for years.
Cleo wasn’t the only older Slytherin who took the opportunity to peek at his work. Afterwards, she and her roommate Glenda glanced at each other in bafflement.
She didn’t think he was writing in code or using warding spells. It was just that between his handwriting and the crazed spider-web slapdash way his notes did not seem to care about which part of the page was the top, all she could figure out was that he thought alliums were a stupid idea he had to deal with because of stupid people and he wanted to rule them out at once.
After about ten kids had casually wandered over past his table to ‘see if there was anything on the notice board yet,’ the Naj said in a loud eye-rolling voice, “If you want to understand my homework, I advise you to first excel in your NEWTs.”
“But what are you studying, Naj?” Glenda asked, taking this as permission to stare at the scroll openly.
“Unbreakable curses,” the Naj told her with a sardonic little tilt to his eyes that made everybody think he was perfectly capable of casting one.
“The unforgiveables?” Yaxley asked, with his first evidence of interest so far.
“The unforgiveable ‘curses,’” the Naj sat back thoughtfully on his hands, “might more properly be considered overpowered, out-of-control jinxes. One does all its work in the first instant, the others require that the spellcaster maintains intention for as long as they want the spell to continue.
“A curse—most curses,” he continued, with a very slightly concerned frown at all the fourth and fifth years suddenly frantically scribbling, “are set, and the caster need do no more. That is why they’re crimes, where hexes and jinxes are merely discouraged and impolite, or misdemeanors at the worst. Hexes and jinxes are easy to cast, hard to maintain; it’s the reverse with curses. They may need sacrifice, but it’s a one-time sacrifice, and so in some ways easier. The spells we call curses cling to their victims until they’re broken or the victim dies.”
“Or the spellcaster does,” Glenda suggested, looking less sure than she sounded.
“In some cases,” the Naj agreed, “although only a complete nitwit with a brain of rancid chalk powder and an overpowering death wish would cast one of those. When I say ‘unbreakable curses,’ I’m referring to magic that leaves its victims alive, and will never leave them whatever anyone does afterwards, including the spellcaster. What the devil are you all taking notes for?”
“My brother said this kind of thing is on the OWLs,” Cleo explained.
“Because it is,” Anthony said like the most superior big brother on the planet, which he thought he was.
“Then I should think Professor Robards will be covering it.”
“I hope so,” Cleo agreed, “but we were supposed to get Dark Spell Theory last year and Professor Muldoon, um.”
“Mostly got excited about why if something is bad, it’s bad, we are bad people for thinking hypothetical situations could ever make bad things in any way not bad,” Glenda finished for her.
“I see,” the Naj said sourly. “I believe Professor Muldoon had an unfortunate encounter with an acromantula?”
“Lots of them,” Maeve nodded helpfully. “And Professor Imago.”
“That is most unfortunate,” the Naj said gravely. “I understand that Professor Imago was a well-informed and conscientious teacher, however specious his subject matter.”
A few people (including Anthony, and also Will Quartstave, which was not responsible of Will) snorted a little at the careful exclusion of Daphne Muldoon from his regrets.
Ignoring them, the Naj told Cleo and Glenda, “In that case, I suggest you bring your concerns about Professor Muldoon’s legacy to Professor Robards’ attention, and ask him how to fill in the gaps.”
“Yes, sir,” they said, Glenda giving it a throaty note that made the Naj look at her in annoyance even though it was… mostly respectful.
“Are you inventing one?” Yaxley burst out excitedly, as if he’d been waiting far too long to get the question in. “An unbreakable curse?”
The Naj gave him an are you mental look, not in an especially unfriendly way even though Cleo knew he knew Yaxley was hoping for something to get him in trouble with. “Unbreakable curses have very limited utility. If the spellcaster can’t erase or even mitigate his own work once the curse is cast, where is his leverage? Only over those he hasn’t yet cursed: the irretrievable can’t bargain with him, can make him no offers. All they and their families can hope for is revenge. To cast an unbreakable curse is to sign one’s own death warrant. The power would come from curing one.”
“Will you?” Shafiq asked, coolly curious.
The Naj shrugged. “No one yet knows why they take hold in muggles and wizards and in no other species. Once that’s discovered, it may be possible to take a further step. Since it seems all homework has ground to a stop, perhaps we’d best start the meeting. Perhaps the rest of you little sods will be less distracted working in your rooms.”
There was another pause, this one full of dropped jaws. Some of her Housemates, Cleo knew, had never heard language like that in their lives—or, at least, not from a grown-up.
The Naja smiled at them all, a wide gash of a smile full of crooked teeth and dark, glittering promise. “Go.”
The room was empty of non-prefects in about thirty seconds. Some of them had forgotten their books.
“Will Sluggy know we’ve started?” asked Alan Bellchant, Cleo’s co-prefect, frowning.
They all drifted over to join the Naj cross-legged on the floor, since he didn’t seem to intend to pull up a chair at a table. Some came more reluctantly than others.
“Professor Slughorn,” the Naj said with light emphasis, “is having an early night.”
“Because you two were at each other’s throats all day,” posited Alan with a grin.
Naj pursed his lips. “I’m sorry you should think so,” he said meaninglessly. “We are both most concerned you should all take as much from classes as you can. That is not the subject of this meeting.”
“Okay, Naj,” Cleo said patiently, privately a bit amused at his attempted diplomacy. “You wanted to talk about whether the Houses are at each others’ throats, right?”
“In part,” the Naj agreed judiciously. His face warming a bit, he said, “I will say I was pleasantly surprised today. No one appeared to think that plotting the downfall of another was their first priority on their first day of class.”
“Nice change for you?” asked a droll Merry Quartstave.
“Very,” the Naj agreed, not joking. “In some matters of self-discipline, the House has forgotten itself, and that will have to be addressed. You were right in that tensions do seem to have eased a bit since my year graduated. We can’t take that for granted, however. That exhibition at the Sorting was precisely the sort of thing that will sink our reputation and leave the drakelets vulnerable again.”
“That was just Travers, he’s an idiot,” objected Will. Cleo secretly thought he’d been made a prefect mostly because he would have murdered any other boy who spent that much time around his twin and Sluggy didn’t like making big distinctions between siblings.
“I don’t care who it was just, and neither will anyone else,” Naj told him—not coldly, but his voice was hard. “A Slytherin took it upon himself to target a Hufflepuff first-year, the closest thing we have at Hogwarts to an infant or a puppy, and make her feel ashamed and worthless, in public. For no apparent reason, although declaring one could not have improved the situation. As he quickly made an equally public restitution, I think we may close the incident, except to remember it. But that our House gave birth to that impulse, and the notion that it was acceptable to exercise it, will be remembered.”
He looked around at them all, meeting all their eyes slowly. “I hope it’s clear to everyone how vitally important it is that Slytherin not be seen as the cause of any trouble,” he said somberly. “I don’t even say blamed—I say seen.”
“Not really, to be honest,” said Merry. “Even the Huffies get in trouble sometimes, Naj, it happens.”
“Of course Professor Slughorn and I do officially expect and demand uninterruptedly angelic behavior,” the Naj said dryly, and even Yaxley smiled grudgingly. In dead earnest again, he leaned forward a little. “I mean that, whenever there’s trouble, the first question in everyone’s mind mustn’t be Which Slytherin is behind this? All of you were present for the Fenshaw-Rosier meeting—”
“Yeah,” growled Yaxley, suddenly openly belligerent. “And after it we had to walk on eggshells for two years because you couldn’t handle four stupid Gryffs.”
Cleo thought that if Yaxley were smarter, he would have realized that the cool, idle look the Naj was sweeping over him meant I know where all your internal organs are and how to make you wish each one was dead.
“Not quite, Mr. Yaxley,” the Naj said calmly, “but I shan’t trouble you with the subtleties for the moment.”
Will winced, and Cleo thought she even saw Shafiq’s eyelid flicker.
Cleo did not wince, because in her opinion Yaxley would have had it coming even if he’d noticed. Gathering herself, she said, “I heard they turned flying toffee-apples at a Halloween feast into rubies one year and four firsties broke their teeth.”
“If it was Those Four, it was probably only a duro charm,” the Naj said in his being-unnecessarily-accurate voice. “It was our year’s third Halloween at Hogwarts. They were clever and dramatic, but I think rubies would have been beyond them at that point. But who did what isn’t the important part of that story. The important part is who didn’t do what.” He looked at them expectantly.
With an air of humoring him, Merry suggested, “You didn’t kill them, which is good and we should not-do that?”
“In fact, Professor McGonagall insists I set their table on fire,” the Naj said dryly. “Although I’m sure I recall doing no such thing.” A few smiles ran around the room. “I said ‘if it was those four’ because I don’t know. I am convinced, but only because I have no reason to think anything else: I don’t know it as a certainty. And the reason I don’t know is that the teachers never bothered to find out.”
The prefects looked at each other. The head prefects looked at each other. Shafiq started to say something, Then she started to say something else.
Finally, she looked straight at the Naj and said, in a pained voice that was less dignified and frigid than anything Cleo had heard out of her before, “I expect they were more concerned with the three feet of flames all over the Gryffie table that looked a bit like Fiendfyre and the three inches of solid ice covering our supper and our hands, Snape.”
The Naj rewarded this unbending by looking a bit sheepish himself. “I honestly don’t remember anything between hearing your teeth crack and realizing Lockhart was going to cast a spell in public if I didn’t stab him with a fork,” he told her.
She scowled at him, which was the first time Cleo could remember her looking like a kid at all. Cleo wasn’t sure whether he’d meant that he’d specifically heard Shafiq’s teeth crack, but Shafiq looked angry enough to be feeling personally embarrassed. “I expect you don’t remember breaking the common room door with green lightning, either!”
“Let’s not stray too far from the topic,” he said loftily, a little smirk playing around the corner of his mouth. “Lockhart-induced difficulties are, thankfully, behind us.”
“You mean tantrums.”
“He didn’t go after girls, he just flirted with you lot,” Yaxley reminded her. Cleo supposed this wasn’t so much defending the Naj as fighting with his classmate. “I would have had a tantrum if he’d tried to snog me a week after I’d hexed all his hair off, too.”
“Ooh, ooh,” Will bounced, “I wasn’t there for that one. Was he doing that thing where he insists that nothing can come of it because he has a boyfriend but he understands you just can’t help yourself so he’ll take pity on you, and then he throws himself on you while you try to run away?”
“Yes,” Shafiq hissed, exasperated with everyone, “and then Snape threw lightning at the door and it cracked in half and started smoking and we couldn’t get any spells to work in the common room for a week besides the serpents and the portraits. Nobody could make the fire light, even the muggle way, because the smoke-siphon wasn’t working so the snakes in the grill kept eating all the sparks even when we brought in flint and matches. And it was January and the window iced over and we kept being afraid it would crack and it was freezing.”
“Professor Flitwick charmed it from outside,” the Naj reminded her, trying to be mild but actually looking defensive.
“I was there,” Merry reminded her, charitably ignoring him, “and Gildy didn’t just say Snape couldn’t help it, he said he’d knew Snape had been suffering the pangs of longing for him for years and years and making do with a pale substitute and Gildy was sure his boyfriend would understand Gildy taking pity on Snape on his birthday.”
There was a pause.
“Which boyfriend?” Alan asked.
The Naj scowled. “I beg your—”
“I think he meant his own? He didn’t say exactly, he said any loving boyfriend, or something like that. I was busy hiding behind the log pile.”
“Erk,” Alan sympathized.
“A week after Snape hexed all his hair off?” Will asked, in an I-just-want-this-bit-clarified voice.
“Technically it was the next week, but not really,” the Naj clarified in a slightly muffled voice. His eyes were probably closed, but Cleo couldn’t see them buried in his hands with his hair hanging in front of him like that. “Friday after supper, Sunday after breakfast.”
“Ohhh,” everyone chorused, instantly understanding that during what the Naj considered to be breakfast-time on a Sunday the fer-de-lance (who, as everyone had known perfectly well, was the Naj’s boyfriend, although no one had ever heard them say that) could not possibly have been in the Common Room.
Rosier might have been still in bed. Or he might have been perched on a tower somewhere in six layers of warming charms, painting the sunrise on the snow in a ‘frumpy working morning’ outfit Gilderoy would have killed to have for dress robes, in boots Gilderoy might have cut off his own toes for, grumping about why one couldn’t get sunrise-light at a civilized hour, like teatime. There was zero chance of him having been present at that hour to blink sleepily and tell Snape that the common room was getting too noisy, come back upstairs, what sort of time did Snape call this to wear boots on a Sunday?
“As I understand it,” Merry told her twin, “and, mind you, this is fifth-hand but Barty Crouch told Reggie Black told Narcissa Black told Lucy Wilkes told everybody—Gildy immediately told Snape it was sweet of him to want to prove how beautiful Gildy’s head was unadorned and take his hair to stuff a teddy-bear with and Gildy didn’t mind in the least but he’d have to make sure his boyfriend didn’t mind either because frankly it was a little bit obsessive and might worry his boyfriend a little bit even though Gildy understood it was pure-hearted admiration. Which is why Crouch knew. Poor, poor Crouch.”
There was another pause, although this one was more of a moment of silence. Deeply, deeply commiserating silence.
“And that was the Friday,” Will said in the same let’s-just-be-clear voice, once they’d given Crouch his moment. “And then he said the taking-pity and the pale-imitation thing on Sunday.”
Something disgusted emerged from behind Snape’s hair. It might possibly have been muddy for ox-eyed ponds, but probably wasn’t.
“I heard,” Yaxley put in with an overly sympathetic smirk, “it was the first Hogsmeade weekend Potter had a date.”
Yet another pause. This one was filled with held breath and jagged eggshells.
Alan summed up, “So you’re saying it’s a miracle Naj just killed the door.”
“That’s good of you to say,” the Naj said, just a little too gravely with eyes just a little too helplessly wide. “And I don’t believe it was their first date, as it happens. But we are straying from the point.
“Which, Shafiq,” he went on, more grimly, “is that the teachers, that Halloween, cared about what might have been an overreaction but was a reaction and didn’t hurt anyone. Not about what had set it off by hurting your form—both physically and by showing first-years that even the public treats offered by this new home their parents had sent them to were treacherous and dangerous.”
“…Er, I don’t think anyone thought about it like that,” Yaxley said, eyeing him.
“I did,” the Naj assured him flatly. “You may not have formed the thoughts, but you learned the lesson all the same. I watched your scales harden, and your spines stiffen. That night there was a wizard at the end of the table who had friends in every House and every teacher smiling at him, and by the end of the year he only cared about DADA and Quidditch and he even suspected the Hufflepuffs were out to get him. That night, a witch sat across from me who was eager about everything new and met magic with joy, but it was a hard-eyed young lady who went home to her parents that Christmas.”
He watched the seventh-year prefects be uncomfortable for what felt like far too long, and then asked softly, “Do you remember what happened the day after, on All Souls’ morning?”
Shafiq’s lips went tight. Yaxley turned purple.
“Why did you think it never happened again?” the Naj asked quietly. “Did your Gryffindor yearmates complain of detention? Did their points fall? Did the professors give any indication of having known about it, that they’d stopped it themselves?”
They glanced at each other, and then stared at him in suspicious surmise.
He inclined his head, hard-eyed. “A gentle warning not to let themselves be… entangled.”
“Gentle,” repeated Yaxley, looking as if he could still taste the so-called cobwebs from last night.
They didn’t taste nice. Cleo had never earned them by herself—almost nobody did—but the Naj had turned them once on her whole class over Glenda’s bright idea that since Slughorn had already tottered beerily off to bed they could stay up celebrating a Quidditch win as late as all the older kids. He’d very sweetly offered them pillows and a bedtime story to keep them company up there if they were determined to stay all night in the common room.
They really didn’t taste nice. Not horrible, but it got to you after a while. A bit like mothballs smelled. Or maybe like when you realized someone hadn’t cleaned their teeth and it was you.
“The very softest of kid gloves,” the Naj inclined his head with a very cold pretending-to-be-a-smile, “I do assure you. But let us ask ourselves, why were the teachers so disinterested? They certainly never thought they were. They thought they were quite fair. Whenever they happened upon an incident in process, they considered themselves even-handed. But where there was doubt, it was never evenly distributed. And we ask ourselves, why?”
He waited, but they just kept looking at him as if he might explode.
“We ask ourselves,” he resumed, “why one side gets the benefit of all doubt. And I must think it comes back to what was said in the moment those boys decided I was their antagonist and they would be my enemies. Shall I tell you what happened?”
Since the seventh-years seemed as if they really, actually, did not want to know, Cleo nodded. The Naj kept speaking to Shafiq, though, not to her.
He said, “We were on the train, on the way to our first year, in September. I was telling my friend that she ought to be in Slytherin—she needed those lessons, I felt. I don’t think I’ll ever forget what they said.” His eyes narrowed, and his voice changed. They all recognized the offhand West Country self-confidence, which was eerie.
Mostly what was eerie was the Naj very-nearly managing a tenor, his voice lightening with his eyes full of something laughingly dismissive that didn’t suit his face at all as he parroted, “’Who wants to be in Slytherin? I think I’d leave, wouldn’t you?’”
“Potter’s a blood-traitor,” Yaxley pointed out. He didn’t look unnerved. Cleo supposed it came of having no imagination.
“Which means he’s a pureblood,” the Naj pointed out in return, quite himself again. “My own pureblood grandfather completely lost interest in my family once I sorted Slytherin. He cared very much about traditional values, I assure you,” he added, a flash of hate passing through his eyes before he came back to them. “He followed old wizarding ways, he cared about bloodlines. And he despised Slytherin. That’s normal. In the general population, our House’s name is mud.”
Although Cleo was sure he’d chosen the word deliberately, he didn’t seem to like the taste of it any better than the rest of them. It hung heavily in the air.
Then the cobra swiveled its head and asked, very softly, “Eggshells for two years, Corban? That was ’76.”
Yaxley looked as if he didn’t understand the question—so did the sixth year prefects. Shafiq’s expression was more along the lines of I’d-pity-your-naiveté-if-I-cared.
The Naj scrubbed at his eyes, looked tired to death and a bit disgusted. “Right. What did Regulus Black keep from Narcissa and me about the year he and Selwyn were lead prefects because he couldn’t bear for us to know he was in over his head?”
“Oh, sweet Salazar, Reggie,” Merry burst out in disgust. “I don’t know what Sluggy was thinking—”
“Completely hopeless,” Will chimed in after his twin, scowling, “I mean, he’s nice enough, Naj, but he just spent the year skulking around like a scared little bunny—”
“And bloody Selwyn,” Yaxley snarled resentfully, “throwing her weight around—”
“But it’s not as if either of them was doing anything with it,” Shafiq agreed venomously, eyes flashing, so vehemently that Cleo jumped. “The prefecture isn’t a defensive game, it’s not there just to sit there and keep everyone else out of power—”
“I swear, Snape,” Yaxley agreed, scowling, “it’s as if they thought their whole job was to sit on Bast Lestrange.”
“Wasn’t it?” muttered Alan, who’d had a few unfortunate run-ins.
Even though she knew Black was the Naj’s friend and she wouldn’t have wanted to be in his shoes for worlds, Cleo had to tell her classmate, very firmly, “Not their whole job.”
“Ah ha,” the Naj uttered, not in a laughing sort of way. He’d moved on to rubbing down the sides of his nose, now, as if he had a cold and couldn’t find any Pepper-Up. “Let me guess. While Lestrange was occupying a great deal of everyone’s attention by being visibly, worryingly, and charmingly psychotic and Lockhart ran around like a loose niffler being distractingly vain and annoying, Thor Rowle set a sterling example of doing whatever the hell he wanted to whomsoever he liked so long as no teacher was actually staring in his direction, the Carrow twins started selling nasty ‘study aides’ to Hufflepuffs and muggle-borns, Cressida Thicknesse stole student pets and Kettleburn’s creatures so Lestrange could give her vivisection and chimera-making lessons in between their noisy semi-public shagfests, and Vivienne Twintrees perverted my art and got baby Ravenclaws to be her guinea pigs in the name of Experimentation. Meanwhile Lucinda Davis tried to invisibly sleep, eat, and if possible, shower in the library while Reggie tried to murder her with his eyes out of pure jealousy for her position as a private person without responsibilities, thereby making her vomit three times a week because she thought she’d somehow really made an enemy of the House of Black.”
“Wow, Naj,” Merry said sardonically after a minute. “It’s almost as if somebody who’d spent five seconds with their year could have predicted that.”
“They weren’t that bad,” Will was wrong out loud. “Well,” he amended when he’d seen everyone looking at him in disbelief, “Rowle was. And obviously Lockhart’s a mental case.”
“Nobody expects fifth-year prefects to take points from seventh-years,” Shafiq told him coldly while everyone else simultaneously weighed the hypothesis that Will had agreed to be one of Vivienne Twintree’s guinea pigs in the name of getting to tumble her. Cleo could tell it wasn’t just her thinking it: Merry looked revolted and her fingernails were sharpening.
“I do,” the Naj said, sounding casual but spearing Cleo and Alan with his eyes. It sent something fizzy and proud and alarmed down Cleo’s spine.
“What she means,” translated Yaxley, “is: Dumbledore expected us to clean up after them, Quartstave, not you. So shut up.”
“Psychos,” Alan muttered. Cleo, who’d been the one to find him after he’d got away from Lestrange and Thicknesse after the time with the pumpkin seeds, gave him a quick side-hug. “Why’d all the psychos end up in one class, to give us a bad name?”
“Bad apple principle, encouraging each other, I expect,” the Naj sighed. “Law of averages—that is, there has to be an especially difficult form sometimes, Merlin knows there was one in my year. The worst of them having at least power as much as the best, internally… I hate to think what my form would have been like if Mulciber had held the power.”
Yaxley and Shafiq exchanged a quietly appalled look.
The Naj made about a fifth of a face at Merry. “I had hoped someone would catch the more compulsive grotesques, at least, once no one was stopping them,” he admitted. “Salazar knows Narcissa dropped enough hints. I suppose we just taught them to sneak better. But what happened to Goldstein?” he demanded. “I was counting on her to keep Black and Selwyn reminded of their broader duties.”
“Er, she’s from a Ravenclaw family,” Cleo reminded him. “Her brother was Ravenclaw’s lead prefect when she signed up for her NEWT classes. I literally saw her look over and see him grinning at her really proudly when Professor Slughorn came around with the sign-up sheet at breakfast that year. So she took nine of them.”
The Naj threw up his hands. “Oh, for pity’s sake.”
“Didn’t you take ten?” Cleo asked him, grinning.
“That was a completely different situation,” he said crossly.
“How was that, Naj?” asked Merry, also starting to grin.
“We had Narcissa.”
“That,” Shafiq allowed (a little dreamily, Cleo thought), “is a point.”
“And we only had two to keep in check, both well within a standard deviation of sanity.”
Yaxley gave him a look that visibly disagreed with the number two.
The Naj addressed it only obliquely, continuing firmly, “Most of our year’s problems were external. And I gave up Quidditch, so I did have more time than in previous—”
“I heard Rosier hid all your books until you—”
“I could have managed.”
“How?”
“Wilkes liked it when I bumped Avery out of games,” the Naj said promptly. “She would have lent me hers. And Goldstein’s Ravenclaw brother in my year didn’t care about Quidditch. We studied together for half our classes anyway. It was just less trouble and more useful to let Rosier think he’d won.”
Shafiq’s head pulled back an inch and her throat spasmed, although her face didn’t change. Will’s jaw dropped for a second before he recovered himself, and Merry looked amused.
Not everybody was in Slytherin because they were twisty-minded. Yaxley just seemed confused, although he was smart enough to be suspicious. He asked, “What do you mean, useful?”
Pleased someone was making him spell it out, the Naj said, very distinctly, “The leader I supported believed that he was strong enough to make me act against my wishes. Because he believed it, without doubt, so did you all.”
“…Did it just get colder in here?” asked Alan, a little sardonically.
Personally, Cleo didn’t believe the Naj on this one. Or, at least, she thought he’d spun what happened so hard it had got dizzy and fallen on its face. She didn’t think for a minute he’d played a weak and useless Evan Rosier for a fool to make him into an intimidating figurehead whose strings the Naj could pull as he liked.
She was a hundred percent sure that in reality it had gone like this:
- Lance had annoyed the Naj to get his attention, quite possibly by stealing his books.
- They’d talked about it.
- Lance had made him see sense.
- The Naj had gotten all the concessions he felt were really important, such as Lance also not getting in the way of bludgers anymore if the Naj wasn’t there to be a more tempting target, but continuing to look after the players as captain instead of somebody who would let Reggie Black get avoidably clobbered by his troll of a brother.
- The Naj had made a big show of crabbily giving in against his will and better judgment
a. Because that always made Lance crow and grin and go all sunshiny-smug.)
b. Which invariably made the Naj look like someone had whacked him in the face with a Beater’s bat and then get a hilarious helpless look like a sugar lump disintegrating as it dropped into hot tea.) - They had both mysteriously vanished for several hours and come back looking like anyone who walked between them would spontaneously fry but, weirdly, both knowing their History homework cold.
“Black and Rosier held the House without challenge, without having to squeeze,” the Naj reminded Alan with one of his levelly challenging more-impatient-than-really-annoyed looks. “We have never had a year with less trouble in all my time here, or had the teachers or other Houses look at us with less wariness or less contempt, or come closer to the Cup. Name one Slytherin who did not benefit,” the Naj challenged Alan levelly.
“…Lestrange?”
“Lestrange made it through his seven years without being expelled because the House was under control. Try again.”
“Well, some of us think this whole ‘under control’ idea of yours is stupid, Snape,” Yaxley flared up again, which he’d clearly been looking for an excuse to do since the Naj had talked about spines stiffening. “My family is one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. So is Najwa’s. Blakeney’s has been a Slytherin family for two hundred years, and the Quartstaves can trace their family back farther than the Gaunts!”
“Not reliably,” they protested, almost in unison. Since everyone had heard Will very confidently claim very legendary ancestors after one too many on Hogsmeade weekends and heard Merry recite what had to have been all of de Worde’s Lytell Geste by now at parties, Cleo supposed they just didn’t want to be dragged into Yaxley’s argument.
“This is our school,” Yaxley snarled. “It was made for us. We let the younger blood come in, but that was a decision we made, and we keep having to talk about it and see if we think it’s still the right decision. Because welet them come, or we don’t. Because it’s ours. The wizarding world is ours. They proved they were unfit to live with, that their filthy little minds have an infectious disease that can turn lethal any minute, like crickets and locusts, that religion of theirs. They tried to burn us out like roaches, and now we live our places, our way.”
The Naj weathered his hot, panting glare with a tilted head and frowning interest. Finally he asked, “What’s your point?”
“You come in and say we’ve got to, to—who do you think you are, anyway, to—”
“To you,” the Naj cut in cleanly, still giving him that look of mild, frowning interest, “since it matters to you, I’m Severus Prince-Snape.”
Yaxley blinked.
The Naj gave a thin little curl of a smile. “Not ‘farther than the Gaunts,’” he said judiciously. “Exactly as far. While the House of Prince is maintained by others I won’t live under its name, but legal is legal and blood is blood. Now: you had something to say, I think, beyond expressing opinions about my mother’s admittedly regrettable life choices. Which are rarely relevant and in any case, if I may speak plainly, none of your concern. What was it?”
“We shouldn’t have to keep our bloody heads down!” Yaxley yelled, throwing his hands out, his derailed train of thwarted indignation yanked right back on track.
The Naj sat back with a sigh, looking at him. There was a trace of exasperation there, but Cleo could see he was taking Yaxley seriously. “Corban, I think you misunderstand me.”
Yaxley crossed his arms and stared mutinously at the Naj, but he didn’t actually say oh yeah? He was still a Slytherin, after all.
“Yes,” the Naj answered him as if he had, “And I think you misunderstood Fenshaw, too. This isn’t about making muggleborn wizards comfortable. It has nothing whatever to do with that. To be frank, I’m not at all sure why you think it does.”
“I didn’t misunderstand Fenshaw,” Yaxley accused, his eyes hot but in control. “He just took over to look good. It was Rosier’s game. He made Slytherin act scared for years and defer to absolutely everybody, just because a half-blood couldn’t hack it at Hogwarts without everyone changing for him.”
Severus was usually pretty good at sneering insults off, but they all saw that strike sink right into his throat, and the venom pump in. He could contain his face, but no one could keep from going pale.
One slow, controlled breath. Two. Cleo almost flew out of her skin, wanting to go to him, just to put her hands on his back, it looked so bony suddenly, so small compared to Yaxley, unguarded. She’d known he wouldn’t let her when she was eleven and he was falling, choking, rising helplessly under Gryffindor wands. She knew he wouldn’t let her now.
[1] In later years, Severus would develop dark, lustful, detailed dreams of beating Albus Dumbledore to death with a first-edition Peter Pan.
(Or maybe a paperback. It would take longer, and not ruin the first edition.)