Harry Potter: The Slytherin Heiress

Dark Arts grow stronger fast. The barrier to entry is low.

Think about it, how many years does a white wizard have to grind before becoming powerful? And not everyone can become Dumbledore. But a dark wizard, with enough malice, won't find it hard to learn the Avada Kedavra curse.

It's simply an easier road.

In just one night, Praeris understood this.

She sighed, thinking of Robert Frost's poem about two roads diverging in a wood.

Two roads lay before her now. One broad and bright, at least not rejected by the masses. The other overgrown and uncertain, its end invisible.

But did the Dark Arts equal evil? At least, the current Praeris didn't think so.

Power was like a Muggle's gun. The wizard was the master of the gun. Whether that gun launched a terror attack or protected its owner was entirely the master's choice.

Owning the gun was itself a kind of confidence. A deterrent. Only by owning it could you have the power to choose, at the critical moment, whether to fire at all.

.

"You still haven't made up with Millicent? Liking Lockhart is perfectly normal, isn't it? Plenty of witches like Lockhart."

Stella had passed her OWLs last year and was already deep into NEWT preparations.

Praeris wasn't at that level yet, but with professors giving her private tutoring, she could already sit with Stella and work through NEWT-level Potions material.

"No wonder Professor Snape chose you," Stella said, with feeling. "If I were a teacher, I'd want very smart students too."

"Some teachers aren't like that. Take Lockhart — I'd say he likes the famous ones and whoever kisses up to him most."

After a week or two, everyone had a pretty clear picture of Lockhart. Vain. Spotlight-hungry. No sense of limits whatsoever.

Professor Snape and Professor Sprout had recently lost a reliable helper, because Praeris now darted in and out of their offices at light speed, never once lingering.

If you noticed that staying too long in an office meant running into Lockhart, you'd learn to move fast too. Praeris said so herself.

The man had actually become unhinged enough to start instructing Professor Snape on how to brew potions better.

Instructing. Professor Snape. On Potions.

It was practically showing off magic in front of Merlin. Dancing on Satan's head.

His classes were no better.

Later, Lockhart found a window to make up the lesson he'd missed. The moment class started, he handed the Slytherins a quiz.

Praeris looked down at it. Every question was bizarre. "What is Lockhart's favorite color." "What day is Lockhart's birthday."

She felt deeply puzzled, but her memory supplied the answers anyway, and she filled the whole thing in.

And the result.

Praeris refused to revisit that day. She had even begun to resent her own excellent memory.

Sometimes forgetting was its own kind of mercy.

No. She couldn't forget at all.

That daddy's boy Malfoy laughed at her for days.

"Prince~ I had no idea you admired Lockhart so much!"

"Prince~ your idol is here!"

After enough repetitions, Praeris lost patience. She turned his pomade-slicked blond head rainbow-colored.

Malfoy didn't dare leave the dormitory for the entire afternoon.

Not until dinnertime, when he showed up wearing a hat to bluster: "How dare you! I'm telling my father!"

"Listen, Malfoy. If I ever hear you put my name and Lockhart's together again, I'll turn every hair on your body rainbow-colored. Let your father have a dazzling, colorful son."

In the end, Praeris let him off, before Professor Snape got a look at him.

Malfoy avoided her for several days after that.

Once he apparently decided she'd calmed down enough, he crept back out to cause trouble again.

When Praeris mentioned Lockhart, Stella thought of Millicent. She'd heard they'd fallen out during Herbology, some argument that came down to Lockhart.

She didn't actually think Praeris admired Lockhart. The look in Praeris's eyes whenever Lockhart came up was exactly the same look Professor Snape wore when he saw Longbottom.

Both eyes spelling out: idiot.

"He does have a nice face," Stella said, leisurely. "And he knows how to groom himself. All those honors, and now he's a professor on top of it. The rich experiences, the apparent competence. As for whether any of it is real — we don't need to investigate that. The fact that he can pull it off at all is a kind of skill in itself, isn't it?"

"False ability and false status are castles in the air," Praeris said, lifting her gaze. "Celebrated for a moment. Then they shatter."

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Stella shook her head. "Prince, you have real ability. The professors recognize it. Of course you'd think that way. But plenty of important people have no real ability at all. Take the current Minister for Magic — is he a powerful wizard? Does he have any exceptional talent?"

Praeris didn't say yes. She didn't say no. She just shook her head.

"There you go. As long as you can use him to reach your goals, who cares whether he has any real ability? Whether he eventually shatters, what does that have to do with us?" Stella propped her chin in her hand and smiled. "Honestly, I quite admire Potter. He clearly loathes Lockhart, yet he always manages to play along perfectly. Even posed for photos with him, several times."

"You're actually praising a Gryffindor?" Praeris raised an eyebrow.

Stella shifted her posture, expression unchanged. "At school, they're Gryffindor and we're Slytherin. Outside, we're all Hogwarts. When it matters, house and school stop being relevant. We're just friends."

"There are no permanent friends. Only permanent interests."

Praeris went still for a moment.

Stella seemed to think of something and smiled. "Of course, for someone with your talent, Prae, I expect us to share interests for a very long time. So, you're Hogwarts. You're Slytherin. And you're my friend. We're on the same team."

Praeris didn't dislike that framing at all. Vague emotional bonds that could be withdrawn at any moment had always unsettled her. Stella's interest theory, shallow as it was, offered something more solid to stand on.

So she nodded.

"As for Millicent Bulstrode," Stella said, rolling her eyes, "you don't have to be so rigid about it. Friends find common ground and make room for differences. She might be waiting for you to make the first move."

"Stewart, it's not like that," Praeris said, eyes down. "My relationship with Millicent depends on her. I've sent her signals more than once. She just won't accept them."

"I genuinely didn't expect that." Stella looked surprised. She found it a little hard to picture Praeris lowering her head to make amends, even once, let alone repeatedly.

"Lockhart is only one of the reasons. I don't even think she actually likes Lockhart," Praeris said. "She has her own reasons."

"Anyway. Forget it." Stella moved on. "You haven't been paying much attention to house news lately, have you? Draco joined the Quidditch team."

Praeris frowned. "Him? The professor approved that?"

"His father donated a set of new brooms." Stella's voice went sour. "I'm so jealous that Marcus gets to ride a new one. I was just born two years too early."

When Praeris made her way back to the common room carrying Stella's gift of snacks, she walked straight into the returning Quidditch players.

The rest of them were built. Malfoy among them made a visible dip.

"They're bound to get punished for that, oh. Prince." Malfoy had been talking loudly. The moment he spotted Praeris, he shut right up.

Praeris lifted the bag. "Marcus, you're all in luck. This is from Miss Stewart."

Marcus laughed and waved everyone over for a late-night spread. "Stella and Prae are treating us! You won't believe it, we ran into Gryffindor this morning. That pauper Weasley tried to curse Draco and ended up making himself sick. Slugs everywhere!"

"Probably a wand core issue," Praeris said.

"Who knows! The thing's held together with Spellotape." Marcus and the rest of them roared.

Praeris turned to look at Malfoy. "You really don't get along with Weasley. He was the one who hit you last year too."

"Last year was because Longbottom went crazy!" Malfoy snorted. "He gets provoked so easily. I only said a couple of things about that Mudblood. Was I wrong?"

The Slytherin players laughed again.

"Who are you talking about?" Praeris asked, genuinely puzzled. What was a Mudblood?

Malfoy looked at her like the answer was obvious. "Granger. Both her parents are Muggles."

Someone whose parents were both Muggles, that was a Mudblood.

Praeris's instincts told her it wasn't a kind word.

She'd long known that Slytherins harbored blood prejudice. But her understanding of it was thin, mostly limited to the pure-blood supremacist books she'd skimmed before.

She made a bit more small talk, then headed to the dormitory.

Millicent and Daphne were both out. Only Pansy was there, painting her nails.

"Pansy." Praeris took a moment to choose her words. "Malfoy almost got cursed by Weasley today."

"What!" Pansy put everything down immediately. "What happened!"

"I ran into our Quidditch players just now," Praeris said. "Marcus told me Malfoy insulted Granger, and Weasley lost it."

"Is Draco alright?" Pansy said, worried.

"Not a scratch. Weasley's wand was broken — the curse turned back on him."

"Hahaha, good."

"I'd say," Praeris added, smiling, "Weasley is pretty protective of Granger."

"Maybe Weasley likes her!" Pansy picked her nail brush back up. "So what did Draco even say to make Weasley that angry?"

"Mudblood."

Pansy switched fingers. "It's a bit harsh, but pretty normal~ Daphne calls Muggle-born wizards that all the time."

"Honestly, when Daphne says it, it doesn't feel especially insulting," Praeris said, easing the conversation forward. "She always sounds so matter-of-fact about it."

"That's how pure-blood supremacists are," Pansy said. "Muggle blood is dirty, wizard blood is clean, so Muggle-borns carry dirty blood. But honestly, whose blood isn't red?"

Praeris hadn't expected that Pansy wasn't a pure-blood supremacist.

Right. She was just a pure love-brain. Pure-blood or not, it didn't matter to her one bit.

"You don't seem like one either!" Praeris said. "You don't talk that way when you're cursing Gryffindors."

"Whatever Draco likes," Pansy muttered. "I'm not a pure-blood supremacist, I'm a pragmatist. Look at my nails, aren't they pretty? Do you think Draco will notice?"

"They're pretty. But I think he probably won't notice," Praeris said honestly.

"Your honesty breaks my heart." Pansy held her hands up and studied them from every angle.

Praeris smiled. "So much for pragmatism."

"Beautiful nails put me in a good mood — that's very practical!" Pansy giggled.

Praeris kept the turbulence inside her very still.

Before tonight, she hadn't felt much of the real weight of blood ideology in Slytherin.

She was the most outstanding young witch in the house. The student Professor Snape valued. She moved through the wizarding world without friction.

And she had never let anything slip about the Muggle world. No one had ever questioned her identity.

But she knew what she was.

A half-blood.

No surprises in the facts of it. Her mother was a witch. Her father was a Muggle. Her witch mother killed her Muggle father, placed her in a Muggle convent, and she grew up in the Muggle world for seven or eight years.

If not for that one word, Mudblood, Praeris might have gone on nearly forgetting any of it.

But what did it matter? Voldemort had been blasted to dust by baby Potter a decade ago.

Wizards still clinging to the pure-blood distinction nowadays were like old fossils insisting on the divine right of kings. They should have been buried long ago.

The way Praeris saw it, even if Voldemort came back, he wouldn't manage to stir much of anything.

Grindelwald at least lost to the greatest white wizard of the age, and he was still rotting in Nurmengard. Voldemort? He died at the hands of a tiny baby. Not even as impressive as Grindelwald.

Blood purism, Praeris thought, was nothing but a political bond. A reason for certain people to draw close to one another. A banner to raise when you wanted a war.

Think about it. Potter's mother was a Muggle-born witch. And the most fervent champion of blood purism was destroyed by her son.

If blood actually determined power, Malfoy should be smarter than her.

Salazar Slytherin excluded half-bloods and Muggle-borns out of fear that wizards' secrets would leak out. What he hated was betrayal. The leaking of secrets. Not some belief that pure blood made a person stronger.

That made pure-blood supremacy seem even more laughable.

.

October settled over the Scottish Highlands. Rain came down in a steady, quiet drizzle. The Forbidden Forest in the distance was soaked deep green.

Rain was not good weather for Slytherin. The dungeons were always damp, requiring drying charms and lit fireplaces as a matter of routine.

When it rained, students coming and going tracked water in from outside, until the chill soaked straight through to the bone.

The Quidditch players came back from practice, clothes soaked, brooms soaked, shaking their heads and spraying rainwater in every direction.

Miss Farley exploded.

"Are you shaggy dogs?! All of you, OUT! Shake yourselves dry before you set one foot back in here!"

➤ Next: Reconciliation