They say even the fiercest tiger will not devour its own cubs. But there are always people who come along to break that rule.
Unfortunately, Kate's grandfather — the father of Katherine and her sister, Corbin Winyard — was exactly that sort of person.
"My sister never told me that after the first letter arrived, that man began to hound her.
"He haunted her daily life like a ghost. Apart from Hogwarts and the Shafiq family home, there was hardly anywhere she could go to escape him."
Katherine turned her head, her voice low and distant, and looked out at the towering castle before them. "Everard Shafiq — the two of them had liked each other for a long time already. It was during those years that they finally came together."
"And you?" Kate asked, puzzled. "He never came knocking on your door?"
"No. Not once." Katherine shook her head with a self-mocking smile. "It was as though he'd forgotten I existed. I didn't even learn the man was alive until I came back from my travels."
There was something tangled in her face. She clearly loathed the father who had thrown them away, and yet, dredging it all up again, a trace of regret still clung to her.
No child grows up without hoping for some love from a parent. But her own father had abandoned them first, and afterwards come only for her sister, as though she had never existed at all.
Once, as small children and then as girls, the two sisters must have imagined what their real parents might be like.
"It wasn't the daughter he cared about," Kate said slowly, feeling her way towards it. "He only wanted the one carrying the Curse."
Katherine's face stilled for a beat; then she lowered her head and gave a short laugh. "Yes. He went looking for my sister to trigger the Curse.
"Because of it, she was the same as you — she couldn't bear the cold in winter, and she was far frailer than other children her age.
"Back then I never understood it. We were twins. So why could I ride a broomstick and play Quidditch while two steps at a run left her gasping?"
Intolerance of cold. A weak body.
Kate had both. And on top of that she was very likely a Squib; without the System, things would have been considerably worse.
So the Curse's effects didn't fade as they travelled down the generations.
She composed her face and pressed, unable to wait any longer. "What exactly does the Curse do?"
"It's simple," Katherine said, lifting her eyes to meet Kate's. "A life-swap."
Silence dropped over them.
For a moment Kate thought she'd misheard. She sat blank for several seconds before the meaning caught up with her, and then she was on her feet in disbelief, knocking the cake off the table onto the ground.
"A life-swap? You mean the kind where you graft your own life onto another person, trade your life for someone else's — that dark magic that's been banned for centuries?"
The magical world had a long history, and across those hundreds and thousands of years there really did exist forms of dark magic that almost nobody had heard of.
The one Kate had just named, for instance. She had come across it exactly once, in an ancient volume in the library.
That man, that shameless old wretch, truly hadn't thought his own flesh-and-blood daughters worth anything — he'd meant to use them to buy himself more years?
"Miss, you're getting worked up." The old butler, who hadn't made a sound until now, spoke — and remembered, even then, to drape a warm blanket around her shoulders.
Katherine glanced at him. "At the start, none of us knew the Curse would keep passing on through the bloodline. Not until my sister gave birth to you.
"She found that the Curse on her had vanished — and that the newborn she had just delivered was suddenly at death's door. The mysterious person was already running rampant by then, and the rest of the Shafiq family had no time to spare to help. All they could do was watch the child be tormented by illness for two years, until she was very nearly gone."
Something clenched in Kate's chest, and she drew a thin, cold breath.
Yes. When she had crossed over into this world, the body had been exactly two years old.
Which meant she had only been able to come here because the original Kate had already been tortured to death by the Curse.
A side effect alone was enough to kill an infant?
That man had not only murdered his wife and ruined both his daughters — he had killed a granddaughter he had never once laid eyes on.
"Then... what happened afterwards?" She couldn't bear to keep thinking about the original Kate, and it took an effort to steady herself enough to ask.
Katherine watched her with concern. "You don't look at all well. Perhaps we should leave the rest for another—"
"It's fine. If I don't hear the rest of it tonight, I won't sleep a wink."
Kate waved the offer away, and it cost her no small effort to sit down again and go on listening.
The old butler spoke up, guilt heavy in his voice. "The fault was mine. There was business at the manor that day, so I went back for a while. The moment I returned I found him about to lay hands on you — that was when I drove him off."
"Then what about the Memory Charm on me?" she pressed, her face going odd. "Wasn't he the one who cast it?"
The words had barely left her mouth before the old butler's eyes slid away from hers.
He didn't need to say it aloud. Kate knew at once who had put the Memory Charm on her.
Carrying a knot of feeling she couldn't begin to untangle, she held it in for a long moment before she finally managed, "It's all right. You did it for my sake."
There was no way she could turn her anger on the old butler.
For all these years he had been both father and mother to her. After what happened that day, right up until she turned eleven, he had barely left her side, guarding her every hour.
She couldn't blame him. She couldn't blame him.
The sheer weight of it all was starting to give her a headache. Kate glanced at the two elders planted in front of her.
The instant she met those looks — concern with a careful edge to it, as though they were terrified she'd take it badly — her head seemed to swell another size.
"I... I need a moment." She pushed the blanket off, worn down, stood, and walked out of the long shelter into the wind of that late Christmas night, trying to clear her head.
She had barely been standing in it a minute before the old butler came out with a hand-warmer cradled against his chest. "Miss, you're delicate. You really shouldn't stay out in the wind."
And with that he moved to press the little jar into her arms.
It was an everyday gesture. Before tonight it would have meant nothing at all.
But Kate had just been handed the fact that she ought to have been a frail-bodied Squib, and that perfectly ordinary little warmer suddenly hurt to look at.
She had trained so hard, for so long. Anyone else would have been rolling about in the snow in a single layer by now. And her?
Because of one wretched Curse, she couldn't even stand in the night air.
And the people closest to her had known it all along — and kept it from her!
The feeling she'd been holding down was close to boiling over. She dragged her voice back to something level. "Thank you. I don't need it."
"But Miss, your health—"
"I said I don't need it!"
The jar was knocked out of his hands and struck the ground, shattering to fragments.
The old butler stood frozen for several seconds, then bent to gather up the pieces. "I'll fetch you a new one."
Kate staggered back a few steps, hollow-eyed, and everything churning in her chest tore out of her in a shout with the crack of tears underneath it. "Enough! I told you, I don't need it!"
The next second, she vanished from in front of them both.
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