“I know,” Sophia agreed with him despondently. “Why can’t I do this?!”
“Try harder,” Mark suggested.
“I believe that the effort Miss Lupin is putting in is more than satisfactory,” Severus gave a slight shake of his head as his students started to rise to line up, “stay where you are.” He joined Sophia and Mark at the table they were set up at. “I have been doing a considerable amount of thinking on your problem Miss Lupin, and I believe I have stumbled upon the cause for the drop in your grades.”
“I really am trying my best, Professor,” Sophia said earnestly as she looked up at him with hopeful eyes.
“I am well aware of that, and your grades on practical assignments reflect that. Tell me Miss Lupin, was it Kalliope that taught you to read?”
“Yes sir.”
“From what?”
Sophia shrugged, “a couple of books that worshipers had left behind at the temple.”
“And was this a practice that she encouraged?”
“No sir.”
“So, she’s coming from an almost illiterate background…” Mark mused, “so it’s a problem with the actual reading and writing of assignments…”
Sophia blushed, suddenly feeling very inadequate. It took her hours to work through relatively short reading assignments, and even then she was certain that there was much she was missing.
“Do not make it sound so degrading, Mr. McKean,” Severus reproached the Head Boy. He methodically drummed his fingers on the table top, “Miss Lupin, if I were to ask you to tell me the story of the Trojan War, could you do so?”
Sophia looked utterly confused, “of course, but…”
“Could you do so in both the Greek you learned it in and an English translation?”
Sophia nodded, still looking very lost.
“Would it be in verse, and if I asked you to recite it for me tonight and then a month latter would you give me the same version nearly word for word?”
“Of course.”
“How long do you think it would take you to do so?”
Sophia cocked her head to the side and frowned as she thought, “I’m not sure… depending on the amount of detail I went into… and I’m not familiar with the sagas of all the different warriors… perhaps 12 hours.”
“Oral tradition, Mr. McKean,” Severus had noted the Head Boy’s shocked expression, “is something of a lost art. The capacity for memorizing so much deteriorated as the written word increased. Miss Lupin, do you think that if someone read your reading assignments out loud to you that you could memorize them on the first time through?”
Sophia took a moment before nodding, “I think so sir.”
“There are certain parts of your education that are lacking, hopefully this will provide a remedy for the situation. From now on Miss Parkinson will read aloud all assignments to you. If she finds it is too large a drain on her time than Mr. McKean will do some of the reading. Does this sound agreeable to you?”
“Yes sir,” even if it didn’t Sophia would not have dared to say no.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Have you seen Nimue?”
“No Lady, I haven’t seen her at all today,” Theodora answered as she looked up from the tally she was taking.
Kalliope frowned, Nimue had not seen to her duties in the temple that morning and no one had seen her. She walked down towards the beach where Remus was practicing archery with Cadmus and several of his men. She would get him to go look for her.
“Glorious Lady! You don’t often join us down here,” Cadmus hailed her as she came down the path.
Kalliope gave him a tight smile, but headed straight for Remus, “have you seen Nimue?”
Remus lowered the bow he was holding, concern instantly washing over his face, “no, not since last night.”
“Take one of the horses, check the Satyr camp first, then head towards the village. I am going to…”
“That won’t be necessary,” Cadmus interrupted her.
“You know where she is?” Some of the panic left Kalliope’s eyes.
Cadmus nodded, “she headed towards the grove with the altar of Persephone early this morning. I had Aias and Polykleitos follow her. One of them would have alerted me if anything had happened to her.”
“Do you want me to go?” Remus asked.
Kalliope sighed, “no, I will.” She dearly wanted to hear Nimue’s excuse for disappearing like that.
Remus still thought he should go. He didn’t want Kalliope going off by herself, his gaze drifted down to her expanded waistline.
“Do not worry my friend,” Cadmus placed a restraining hand on Remus’ shoulder, “Darius will follow her.” As he spoke one of the warriors set his bow down and unobtrusively left the group, trailing behind Kalliope close enough to keep an eye on her, but far enough away so as not to attract attention to himself.
“She may be a little angry, but she will be fine,” Cadmus motioned for Remus to retrieve his bow.
He was right, Kalliope was angry. She was responsible for the girl and she had just wandered off without telling anyone! She had thought that the girl was more responsible than that. That she realized how precarious her position was.
She acknowledged Aias and Polykleitos with a curt nod as she passed them. Just as Cadmus had said, they had set themselves up at the edge of the grove. However, they retreated a bit upon the arrival of the High Priestess.
Kalliope paused at the edge of the grove. There was a circle of trees and in the center of them was an altar on a stone dais carved with inscriptions to Persephone. Sitting on the dais, knees pulled up to her chest, head buried in her arms, and sniffling quietly was Nimue, “what happened child?”
Nimue jumped and looked up, reminding Kalliope of a startled deer. She looked up at the High Priestess mournfully, “I Saw something.”
Kalliope crossed the small clearing and lowered herself onto the dais so that she was sitting next to the novice, “what did you See?”
Nimue looked at her with anguished eyes, eyes that were far older than they should have been, but couldn’t answer. Not that she needed to. Kalliope could see the answer clearly written there. Death.
She scooted closer to Nimue and wrapped the girl in her arms, pulling her close as her small body shook with sobs. “Let it all out child,” she murmured against her hair, “it’s a terrible thing that you have seen.”
Nimue cried for what felt like hours, until she had no more tears and was gasping for air.
“Shhh… you need to breathe child.”
“I want to go home.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I need to go home.”
“I can’t let you go Nimue. Unless something you Saw indicates that you are in mortal danger here.”
Nimue shook her head, “please let me go home.”
“I can’t.”
“What I Saw… will it happen?”
“That is a hard question to answer child. Yes it will, but sometimes the Goddess hides things from us until we are ready to know them. And she doesn’t always explain herself.”
“Please, let me go home,” she pleaded.
“I wish I could, but you must stay here,” they sat there for a long time, Kalliope gently stroking the girl’s hair.
“Why did I have to see it?”
Kalliope, not knowing how to answer, replied in another way, “I Saw my own death when I was about your age.”
Nimue was tempted to ask what the older woman had seen, but figured that it really was a private matter.
Kalliope glanced up and saw Remus standing at the edge of the grove. She had no idea how long he had been standing there. Aias and Polykleitos had also moved in closer. She smiled sadly, they were all so protective of her and Nimue.
Realizing that they had been spotted the two warriors came forward. Polykleitos moved to lift Nimue in his arms, but she brushed him off, declaring that she was still capable of walking on her own. Aias helped Kalliope to her feet, “you shouldn’t walk so far from the temple without an escort in your condition Lady,” he gently chided her.
Kalliope’s eyes flickered upwards towards Remus’ face as he took her arm, obviously he had been talking to the men about what he thought of her keeping as active as possible.
“You never told me you had a vision of your own death,” Remus said quietly as they followed the others back towards the temple.
“How much did you overhear?” Kalliope asked as she watched Polykleitos and Aias each wrap an arm around Nimue, bending their heads to talk softly to her.
“Just about everything I think.”
Kalliope tightened her grip on Remus’ arm, “stay with her the rest of the day, you are the closest connection she has to her home,” she glanced up at him, “and do not worry yourself too much, I have many years left to spend with you.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Harry entered his classroom and smiled at the disarray. The NEWT students were constantly trying to test him out. However, Sirius said that they were doing the exact same thing to him and he’d been teaching them since they were all first years. He had a feeling they were doing this to all their instructors this year. Except Snape. No one would dare do this to Snape’s classroom.
The desks had been pushed around so that any semblance of rows had been obliterated and the seventh years, from all four Houses, were sitting [I]on[[/I] the desks. “I’m thrilled to see that you are taking this class so seriously.”
“Since we’re working on Patronuses again, which means that we have to be thinking of something happy, we figured it wouldn’t hurt to throw a party in here first.”
“Nick, your line of reasoning leaves much to be desired,” Harry said as he leaned against his own desk. “Since we are continuing our lesson on Patroni would anyone like to say anything with some semblance of relativity to the subject before we start practicing?”
Not one hand went in the air, however, several of the boys were engaged in a heated, whispered conversation in the back, “gentlemen, would you care to add anything?”
“Well…” one of the drawled, “you see Professor, we were practicing and we discovered that you don’t necessarily have to use happy thoughts to produce a patronus. The sort of emotions that are produced from perusing an issue of
An avalanche of paper balls, supplied by the female members of the class, pelted the boys.
Harry managed not to smile, just barely, “alright, let’s try to keep this classroom appropriate.” He divided the class up into small groups and had them start practicing while he walked around offering suggestions and corrections. He was constantly amazed at how much their secret defense meetings from his fifth year had prepared him for this job.
He was watching the Hufflepuffs, who were getting progressively closer to their goal, when an excited squeal triggered his reflexes and he spun around just in time to see a silvery lioness burst from the end of Serena’s wand.
“Excellent job Serena!” he congratulated her as the lioness loped around the room before fading away.
Dierna snorted, “you were thinking of that mangy cat of yours, weren’t you?”
Serena grinned cheekily at her sister, “you’re just jealous because I got it first.”
Dierna’s eyes lit up at those words, “at least I’ll produce one before Nick.” She summoned every happy thought she could think of, but finding out that Stefan was alive quickly became the one she focused on, “Expecto Patronum!” She grinned in triumph as a large slivery raven burst forth from her wand. Half the class ducked out on the way as the bird flew in a tight circle, dipping its wings low, before coming in to perch on Dierna’s shoulder.
“Wicked…” Dierna lifted her hand to touch the silvery bird, but it disappeared just then. She looked up to find their professor giving her a very strange look.
Harry quickly recovered himself, “well done!” but it sounded forced. “Alright the rest of you, let’s see if someone from another House can do that!”
~~~~~~~~~~~
