"Are you sure we have not made a mistake, dear?" The voice of the woman was cultured and aristocratic; the type one person rarely had the occasion to hear today.
"Concerning what my dear?" asked her companion with an amused tone.
"Trusting Albus Dumbledore? Bribing the Goblins? Conspiring against the King?" The woman's smirk could not have been more evident.
"It is not like we had a lot of choices, my dear. I know it took me a long time to guess the plans of this madman, but..."
"But we can't let his projects come to fruition? Even if we contributed to funding them in the first place?"
"Exactly. I have no love for the Goblins or the Muggles, but what the King has prepared for our world is too horrible to become reality. And as much as I hate it, letting one of our Stones fall into Albus' hands was perhaps one of the easiest way to hamper His plans."
"I don't like it," said the beautiful blonde woman. "There are a lot of things which could go terribly wrong."
"I don't like it either," admitted the man with a roll of his shoulders. "But Albus is one of the rare wizards the eleven other Knights won't dare to attack openly. They remember what happened to Grindelwald and they know it won't be easy to defeat him."
"Unless the King decides to deal with him personally."
"Yes," sighed the man many knew as Nicholas Flamel. "But I don't think he's ready to come out of the shadows. Yet."
15 September 1991, Hogwarts, Scotland
If Alexandra had thought she had known to how further the Slytherin-Gryffindor mutual loathing could go at Hogwarts, her second week at the magical school made clear she hadn't known anything at all. As Professor Flitwick had predicted with the wisdom of a former Ravenclaw student, everyone from the headmaster to the caretaker's cat knew what had happened on Friday evening between Longbottom and Malfoy's groups by the next day at breakfast. Okay, maybe not the caretaker's cat. Though this pitiful and angry animal, called Mrs Norris by his dirty and gloomy owner, looked extremely well-informed on everything which happened in the rooms of the castle. As teachers were on their guard Saturday and Sunday to avoid further incidents, the week-end was relatively devoid of any magical incident. The issue was that all the Gryffindors and the Slytherins had known this, and had passed these two days planning and stockpiling for the coming week.
When Alexandra entered the Great Hall for breakfast on Monday morning, the Slytherin table was full of people wearing red robes and having gold hair, while the Gryffindors sprouted green beards and song salacious hymns. Far from stopping the pranks, this event just unleashed a circle of pranks and magical ambushes between the Lions and the Snakes, with the Ravens and the Badgers in the crossfire. Alexandra followed the advice of her Head of House: as soon as there was a prank or a fight, she ran away from it the most discreetly possible. She was already a paria in Ravenclaw House and detested among the rest of the student population; she didn't need to encourage the older teenagers to see her as Enemy Public Number One. The issue was that the chaos was spreading into the school, and it became increasingly difficult thorough the week to avoid all the disturbances.
The teachers assigned detentions by the dozens, the House points for the two belligerent Houses dropped in the negative numbers but it didn't change anything: by Thursday, Hogwarts was a "prank zone": going to the classes exposed every student to funny and humiliating traps, spells, jokes, which saw a boy or a girl present himself to the professor with a far different look than the one he had left the common room. A normal conversation between two students was now consisting of:
"Rictusempra!"
"Tarentellagra!"
"Furnunculus!"
"Everte Statum!'
In a non-magical school, reflected Alexandra on Friday, half of the students guilty of these "pranks" would have been expelled instantly for what they'd done. Their venerable Headmaster, the Gandalf-like Albus Dumbledore, thought it was all in good fun. But the old wizard had thought the same thing when Alexandra was almost murdered, so she supposed the man was simply senile. Maybe his notion of fun was way off the radar? Anyway the Headmaster himself had not been seen since dinner on last Friday.
On the scholarly side, the only novelty in the first-year classes of the second week at Hogwarts was the Flying lesson, which for the Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff revealed themselves singularly boring. At two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, Alexandra and the other Ravenclaws, followed by the herd of Hufflepuffs, hurried down the front steps into the grounds for their first flying lesson. It was a clear, sunny day and the grass rippled under their feet as they marched down the sloping lawns towards a smooth lawn on the opposite side of the grounds to the Forbidden Forest, whose trees were swaying darkly in the distance.
Professor Hooch, teaching the Flying courses, was already there, and so were twenty broomsticks lying in neat lines on the ground. Alexandra had heard a prefect saying they had replaced the old-models of brooms at Hogwarts two years ago after one broke in half with a student on it, but the students addicted to flying had emitted deep reserves with the replacements, telling everyone these were training brooms for five years old. Their teacher for this class, Professor Hooch, had short, grey hair and yellow eyes, features which made her comparison with a hawk appropriate. Unfortunately, the witch had also the temper associated with this bird of prey.
"Well, what are you all waiting for?" the woman barked. "Everyone stand by a broomstick. Come on, hurry up."
Alexandra glanced down at her broom. She knew appearances could be deceptive, but this broom did not seem to be saturated with magic. The wood was ugly and dark, and the best one could say about it was that its conceiver had passed a little varnish over the broom to make it more presentable. Not the idea she had of a competition broomstick.
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