Chapter 6
"Thank you for your help, Professor. I genuinely couldn't have gotten a handle on those spells without you," I said, and meant it, aware that the Christmas holidays were drawing to a close and my supplemental sessions with the aging half-goblin were coming to an end along with them.
"Think nothing of it, Mr. Lupin. Truthfully, I enjoyed our sessions myself." The professor waved me off with an ease that suggested he hadn't quite forgotten that small prank Lupin and the others had pulled back in first year — before the older Gryffindors had sat them down and explained that mocking a half-goblin's height was a catastrophic mistake.
At least now I understood why the professor had been so unenthused about my joining his extra lessons in the first place. He'd been worried that I'd manage to cause trouble even without the other Marauders around, distracting the older students who were preparing for their Ministry examinations. Nothing of the sort had happened — I'd trained in charms earnestly, and that was that — but still.
*I need to factor in my own reputation among the teaching staff going forward. Better yet, find a way to repair it. As practice has shown, independent study isn't always the most effective way to develop magical skill.*
I filed the thought away, promising myself to think more carefully about it later.
For now, I had one last day left in the calm, half-empty castle, where the worst things I could name were the drafts in the corridors and Severus Snape's permanent scowl.
"I wouldn't have thought Gryffindor company weighed on me so much," I said to myself with a wry smile, aware somewhere deep down that I genuinely didn't want Sirius, James, and Peter to return just yet.
I hadn't even been pleased by the Christmas gifts they'd sent. Staying in sync with a group of chaotic teenagers took more out of me than I liked to admit. Even Peter was difficult to call a calming presence — he might occupy second billing, but he loved pranks, mischief, and schemes every bit as much as the others.
In the moment, all of that was tolerable, sometimes even amusing. But the instant they'd disappeared from view, I'd realized how much easier it was to live without them. Steady training and unhurried study, uninterrupted by a group of teenagers in the middle of cooking up their next scheme, suited me rather well.
So I greeted the end of the holidays with the same faint melancholy as nearly any student would. Although, if I was being honest, I had missed their company after a while — enough that the return of three-quarters of the Marauders to Hogwarts didn't strike me as an entirely unwelcome event. A minimum of social contact with someone who wasn't a Hogwarts professor had turned out to be something I needed after all.
On top of which, Sirius and James had brought back a great deal of news from the holidays. So much of it, in fact, that I didn't fully follow what they were saying at first.
"Word is the Travers family is caught up in all of this too. And the Notts almost certainly didn't sit it out either," James was saying with animated certainty, and Sirius was nodding along rapidly.
"The Notts have been on his side for ages, take my word for it. And my own family has been in bed with the Lord for a long time. He's even visited us at home a couple of times," Sirius said, his voice flat and sour.
"What are you two talking about?" I finally set down my Potions textbook and looked properly at the pair of them. "Did something happen while I was here trading curses with Snape?"
They both went almost identically blank with surprise.
"Moony, mate — you don't read the papers at all?!" James descended on me like I'd committed a personal offense.
"No," I said, shrugging. "I'm not subscribed to the Prophet, and honestly I haven't had time. McGonagall had me working off that fight with Snape for almost the entire holidays. Then Flitwick's extra sessions on top of that — it ate up a lot of time."
"Rough luck, mate," Sirius said, nodding with a sympathy that acknowledged my "great suffering" in full. "Though I'm still amazed you didn't even hear rumors about the attack on Diagon Alley. The whole magical community has been talking about nothing else!" He shook his head. "How did you miss it?"
"Some lunatic decided to declare war on the entire wizarding world?" I guessed, already sketching a mental portrait of who that lunatic was likely to be. Up until recently, "Lord Voldemort" had made no effort to hide himself whatsoever. On the contrary — in his campaign for the position of Minister for Magic, the man had actively sought press coverage and positioned himself at every fashionable gathering he could find.
"Not just some lunatic! Voldemort himself declared himself Dark Lord, took the sub-title Lord of Fate, and issued an ultimatum to the current government." Sirius was practically bouncing on his bed. "And when Jenkyns refused to step down, he attacked Diagon Alley." His voice went thick with contempt at the mention of Eugenia Jenkins, the woman currently occupying the Minister's chair.
"Well," I said, drawing the word out, mentally completing it with: *here we go.*
"What's actually happening out there while I'm languishing in here?"
"Honestly, mate, it might not be so bad that you stayed in the castle over the holidays. The attack on Diagon Alley caused an uproar you wouldn't believe. A lot of casualties and injuries, and the Dark Lord's speeches calling for the wizarding world to reject Muggle-borns entirely and strip half-bloods of their rights are making everything worse," James said, apparently trying to reassure me — he'd clearly misread the expression that had come over my face.
"Maybe," I said. "Though I doubt half-bloods will actually be Voldemort's primary target." I paused, remembering that I wasn't, in fact, a pureblood. My mother had been an ordinary woman without a trace of magical talent, which made me exactly the kind of half-blood whose rights the Dark Lord was publicly calling to revoke.
Strangely, I'd almost forgotten about my own "blood status" in wizarding society. That particular detail was entirely overshadowed by my lycanthropy, which gave me far more pressing things to worry about than the finer points of my parentage. Besides, roughly one in four people in the magical world was a half-blood — it wasn't exactly a distinguishing characteristic.
"Fair, but Britain is genuinely unsettled right now. It's not for nothing that my father told me to be careful even at Hogwarts," James said with a frown, though he clearly didn't fully share his father's anxiety. "The old man thinks things might get tense here too. Probably just paranoia, though. No Lord is going to attack an ancient castle while Dumbledore's sitting inside it."
"Right, your father's lost his mind if he thinks Voldemort could pull off something like Diagon Alley inside Hogwarts," Sirius agreed, familiar enough with James's parents to have an opinion on the matter.
"Actually, you two might not be wrong about that — but also not entirely right," I said, deciding it was time to weigh in.
"What? You genuinely think the Dark Lord has the nerve to attack Hogwarts?" Sirius shot me a skeptical look. James was wearing much the same expression — both of them visibly doubting they'd just heard what they'd heard from me.
"No, not that. The Lord himself almost certainly won't try something like that — especially with his own supporters' children studying here. But Hogwarts is still going to get tense very soon. Possibly even dangerous." I was frowning now, genuinely displeased with my own conclusions.
"How do you figure?" Sirius wasn't connecting the dots yet, which prompted a small shake of my head. From the corner of my eye I could already see James starting to get there.
"The same reason the Dark Lord won't attack Hogwarts himself," James said slowly, eyes narrowing, then giving me a quick nod of acknowledgment. "Too many students here whose parents support Voldemort."
"Oh." Sirius went still. "I hadn't thought of that. You think they'd actually start something? On their parents' orders? Or — what, try to recruit students into the Death Eaters?"
"Voldemort is unlikely to order the Slytherins to openly riot inside the castle. But recruiting supporters among the older students?" James said, still frowning. "That's entirely plausible."
"You're right, James, but it probably won't stop at recruitment," I said. "Don't forget — there are plenty of people in this castle who are furious about what the Lord of Fate has done. Which means conflict is coming regardless. Starting with the upper years, most likely. But it'll reach us eventually."
The two of them came around to that quickly, understanding perfectly well how the castle functioned. Once a spark caught, the fire of interfaculty rivalry had a way of filling every corridor of Hogwarts.
And a basic accounting made it depressingly clear. Most of the children of known Voldemort supporters were in Slytherin or Ravenclaw. Gryffindors, by and large, fell firmly in the opposite camp. And Hufflepuffs were mostly the children of Ministry workers and employees of various magical guilds — exactly the people who had suffered most from Voldemort's attack on Diagon Alley.
It would surprise me very little if the hospital wing was overflowing with upper-year students by tomorrow, the result of some magical brawl in a remote corridor. Teenagers were an impulsive breed — direct, prone to acting first and thinking second.
Which was precisely why, after a relatively brief discussion, I managed to convince the others to stick together for the next few days and avoid wandering the castle without good reason. I had absolutely no interest in becoming collateral damage in a fight between older students. I could probably protect myself from a stray curse well enough, but there was nothing appealing about getting caught in someone else's conflict.
*And never mind how much Sirius disagrees with me. They push him hard at home, and his family's reputation is formidable, I'll grant that. But even he should be able to see that a battle between older and more experienced wizards is no place for a group of third years.*
I sighed inwardly, reading clearly enough from Sirius's tone that he'd jump at the chance to wade into exactly that kind of fight if it presented itself.
Overconfident boy. What else could you expect.