The two girls could not hold out against the late hour, and they knew the other three had things to say to one another, so once the birthday celebration was over they went off to bed of their own accord.
Kate waved her wand, sweeping up the charred remains of the spent fireworks, then turned to look at the two elders, who kept starting to speak and thinking better of it.
Honestly. She was not half as tense as they were - what did they have to be nervous about?
The night had grown deep. A yawn caught her, and she said with deliberate lightness, "If there's nothing else, I'll head up."
"You wait right there!"
Katherine hauled her back without ceremony and pressed her down in front of the chair, then planted a hand on the table and loomed over her. "How much have you worked out?"
"Worked out what?" Kate played the innocent, glancing blankly at the old butler, whose face was every bit as grave. "What exactly are you two talking about-"
The old butler cleared his throat, rose, and stepped between them. "Miss Kate. The secret I promised two years ago to tell you - I shall let Katherine tell it to you now."
Only then did Kate's expression sober, her body leaning forward without her meaning it to. "Wasn't it supposed to be a secret? How does Auntie know about it as well?"
"Because yours truly is the one who lived through it." Katherine narrowed her eyes and folded her arms, every inch of her daring an argument.
"I hear that in Defence Against the Dark Arts class, a Boggart showed you your own fear?"
Kate's eyes flickered, but she nodded honestly. "Yes. Every student in the room saw it, and Professor Lupin too."
"And do you remember that memory?" Katherine pressed.
She shook her head. "Not the faintest impression of it."
"Hmph." Katherine gave a cold snort. "So the Memory Charm on you is still holding fast."
She drew out a small vial holding a memory light as mist, and the old butler produced a Pensieve.
"This is one of the pieces from the collection room. It allows one to view memories," he explained, tipping the wisp of memory into the basin.
Kate studied the pair of them for a moment longer, then bent down and lowered her head into it. Her consciousness fell through something cold and black, as though a dark whirlpool had swallowed her whole.
When she opened her eyes again, she found herself standing somewhere faintly familiar.
An orphanage.
The same one she and Katherine had visited - the abandoned orphanage where, so the story went, Katherine and her mother Grace had grown up.
In this memory, though, the grounds were green and thriving, nothing at all like the derelict place she had seen.
Kate looked this way and that, and was about to go inside when she caught sight of a man in a crisply cut suit and a hat, two sleeping baby girls cradled in his arms, walking toward the orphanage.
Behind him came a woman in a loose-fitting suit, pale-faced, every movement stiff and uneasy.
"No, you can't do this!"
The woman spoke German. Kate had never learned a word of it, yet inside this memory she understood her perfectly.
The man stopped and turned around impatiently, and the face half hidden beneath the hat brim came into view at last.
Beside the woman he was remarkably handsome, though his expression burned with a fanatic's fervour. "Don't be absurd. Didn't we settle this long ago? Send them away, and I can follow in the Master's footsteps with nothing weighing me down. As my lover, you must be sensible about this."
"But... but they're our children, yours and mine..." The woman's eyes reddened, and she looked ready to weep and snatch the babies back, until the wand in the man's hand made her flinch away several steps.
He gave a cold laugh. "Two half-bloods, nothing more. Nothing worth clinging to."
With that, he strode into the orphanage.
Kate watched them in silence. From that brief exchange, the man was a Wizard and the woman was presumably a Muggle, which made both infants half-bloods.
Yet the man clearly held half-bloods in contempt, which marked him out as a blood purist. How he had ended up with this Muggle woman was anyone's guess.
Love, perhaps?
The thought amused her all by itself. If he truly loved the woman, he would hardly be handing his own two daughters over to an orphanage.
By the look of it, the two little girls were her mother Grace and Katherine, which would make the man and the woman her grandparents.
What puzzled her was whose memory this actually was. And who was this "Master" the man spoke of?
Then the scene whirled, and between one blink and the next the ground around the orphanage had been reduced to rubble.
She saw a street torn to pieces, men and women scattering in every direction, fleeing from something dreadful.
Soon enough she saw exactly what.
Wizards. Wizards in numbers - wizards completely out of control.
They flung spells at ordinary people as though the spells cost them nothing at all, reaping Vitality amid gale after gale of mad laughter.
The orphanage was stormed as well, of course, but the ones who charged in were somehow held at the threshold.
Kate was rather surprised. She walked closer and found the woman from earlier standing there, a wand in her own hand, shielding the huddle of children and women behind her like a hen over her chicks.
A Squib, then.
A Squib - broadly speaking, a Muggle born into a wizarding family, with no magical ability, and looked down upon by certain pure-blood wizards all the same.
Hm? Hold on a moment.
By the wizards' traditional definition, the offspring of two pure-bloods was also pure-blood, and even a Squib with no ability whatsoever still counted as pure-blood.
Which meant... her mother and her Auntie were half-bloods, so it was the man who was the Muggle-born Wizard?
So what, "I despise myself"?
Before she could untangle that snarl of relations, someone arrived in front of the pack of wizards by Apparition - the very same man.
He exchanged a few words with the woman, apparently urging her to get out of there at once.
But her children were inside. How could she possibly leave?
Behind her stood her companions. In front of her, barring the way, stood the man she loved.
Kate had seen enough of human darkness written into films and novels to guess exactly what he would choose.
Sure enough, his wand came up and fixed on the woman.
A flash of green light, and the woman's body slid slowly to the ground amid the screaming.
The wizards howled with laughter and made to start on the rest - and then, at last, another group of wizards arrived.
Aurors, most likely, sent by the German Ministry of Magic. They swept in like a thunderclap and set about trading volleys of spellfire with the others.
Kate had no interest in watching amateurs peck at one another. Her gaze roamed instead among the children who had been herded hurriedly together.
At last it came to rest on a narrow crib, where two baby girls slept as peacefully as if no battlefield existed at all.
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