Of Pranks & Princes

The start of term feast flew by in a flurry of announcements and introductions, accompanied by home-cooked delicacies rivalled only by her mother’s holiday cooking. Afterwards, all of the Ravenclaws were brought up several flights of moving stairs to a thin spiral staircase which let out to a door. There, they convened.

Robbie Hilliard spoke up first, of the six Prefects who were there, each identified by a shimmering blue pin. “This is the Ravenclaw House common room. You’ll spend much of your free time here with your Housemates and friends.”

Another prefect piped in, “And while most of the other common rooms require a password or code to get in, ours works a little bit differently.” She lifted the bronze eagle-shaped knocker and let it fall back against the door.

“Does a circle ever end?”

The voice that sounded from the knocker’s beak was soft, dancing in the air like a song. A woman’s voice with echoes of a Scottish accent.

“Let’s work it out together,” another prefect suggested.

As the Ravenclaws’ chatter continued, nearly fifty students discussing circles, Emily was distracted by the moving staircases, watching as they shifted. There must have been a pattern, but she didn’t see it. She could see over the edge of the spiralled stairs, down to the very bottom floor and wondered where the boys wound up.

When she looked back at the door, it was open, and the students filed in.

The Ravenclaw common room was larger on the inside than its door made it seem, decorated in stunning midnight blues and silvery whites with bookcases surrounding the room. There were sofas and armchairs strewn throughout and a large marble statue of a woman against the back with a staircase on its right.

“You’ll have plenty of time to explore tomorrow, since classes won’t start ‘til Monday morning,” said Robbie Hilliard with a yawn. “Dorms are up those stairs; boys to the left, girls to the right. We’ll see you for breakfast in the morning.”

The students’ trunks were already set at the foot of beds in the girls’ dormitory when they arrived. Emily’s was neatly packed and set at one of the beds nearest the door. The blond girl from Kings Cross was next to her.

She flopped down on her bed, flinging her body with a melodramatic sigh. The other girls in the dormitory began unpacking their pyjamas and preparing for bed.

“On the one hand,” the girl began, sitting up on her bed and folding her legs beneath her, “I’m incredibly tired.”

“Then go to bed, Briggs!” another girl called from the opposite side of the room.

“But, on the other hand, how could I possibly be expected to just sleep?”

“What do you mean?” Emily asked, looking up from her own trunk as she set aside her clothes for the morning.

“I mean I’m far too excited to just fall asleep right now. It isn’t even that late!”

A slightly older girl, with curly blond hair draping down her back like velvet curtains, replied, “You’d best get sleep or else you won’t be up for breakfast.”

The Kings Cross girl waved her hand. “Oh, pish-posh, Penny. I’ll sleep eventually, and I’ll be quiet.” The girl then turned to Emily. “Are you planning on sleeping right off? Because I have books I could read, but I prefer, you know, human company.”

“I, uh… no, I wasn’t.”

“Lovely then.” She went over to her trunk and dug through it, pulling out her a pair of polka-dotted pyjamas, a thick book, and a small blue pentagonal box. She held one up and asked, “You want a Chocolate Frog?”

As appealing as chocolate sounded, frog sounded substantially less so. “No thanks.”

She shrugged and tossed the box onto her pile before sitting back up on her bed. “Your name is… Amy?”

“Emily.”

“Emily. Right.” She paused and took the blue box – the Chocolate Frog, she had called it – into her lap. “I’m Violet.”

Emily smiled, taking her own pyjamas and toiletries from her trunk. “Nice to meet you, Violet.”

She unwrapped the small box, revealing a piece of chocolate, which jumped from its container and onto the other bed. “Oh, shoot. Could you catch that for me?”

“Catch it?” Emily went to grab the chocolate, but it was gone.

“Drat.” Violet’s face fell, and she continued with a sigh, “That does happen. I was hoping for Chocolate Cauldrons, but the trolley woman was all out.” She reached into the empty box and pulled out a card. “Oh, Newt Scamander! I think my brother needs him.”

“Who is he?”

“Wrote a book on dragons or something, I ‘unno.” Violet held the card out to her, giggling. “But he’s quite the looker!”

The man on the card was older with high cheekbones and a fair complexion, speckled with light freckles, and donned in bright magenta robes. He was smiling, his eyes crinkling in the corners, and then turned away.

“Has he gone yet?” Violet asked, and when Emily nodded, she said, “Yeah, they do that.”

Had she not noticed the moving portraits on their way to the common room from the Great Hall, then the moving picture disappearing on the card might have surprised Emily more than it did. The framed paintings of famous wizards and former headmasters had stirred about on the walls as the students had walked past, reminding them to be good and congratulating them on their sorting into the House of “Hogwarts’s best.” The phenomenon seemed somehow less shocking the second time.

Emily handed the card back to Violet, who placed it back in her trunk, setting a piece of parchment aside with it. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Shrugging, Emily replied, “Well, I’m from Chard in Somerset.”

“No. From here.” When she was still confused, Violet clarified again, “Your parents… they’re not wizards, are they?”

Emily shook her head. “No.” Then she remembered her dad – what her mum had said about him. What Severus had said. “Well, yes, my dad was.”

“Your dad was a wizard, and you’ve not once had a Chocolate Frog?” Violet seemed astounded, staring at Emily with big, green eyes.

“He, uh…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it and bit the inside of her cheek as a distraction.

Violet shot her a sympathetic glance. “It’s okay.”

Emily’s eyes nervously wandered the room, her anxiety only slightly quelled by Violet’s understanding. The dorm’s decorum, she noticed, was largely based off of the House colours: blue and bronze. Most of the other girls had their curtains drawn and were asleep, somehow unbothered by Violet’s unintentionally loud voice.

“You know what?” Violet began, drawing closed the far side of her curtain. “I’m going to bed, I think. I’m tired.”

“Finally!” came a voice from one of the closed four-posters across the way.

Violet rolled her eyes. “G’night, Em.”

“Night.”



Emily had learned three things at her first day of wizard school: 1, pictures could apparently move; 2, staircases had a mind of their own; and 3, if you put a bunch of girls in the same room to sleep, at least one of them was bound to snore – loudly. And lucky for her, that was Violet.

If it had been quieter in the dormitory, Violet’s snoring might have bothered her more, but it was just another clash in the cacophony of sounds that rang in her head. She could hear every breath, every toss and turn, the chirping of every cricket outside. It all kept her awake.

The blues of the Ravenclaw dorms seemed like such a foreign, cold colour, and for a moment, she wished the hat had stopped looking into her head after it mentioned Slytherin. Sure, the House had a terrible reputation, and she was sure being placed there wouldn’t have impressed her new friends, but at least she’d have had a place. At least she was connected to Slytherin in some way. Fred and George and their brothers were all placed in Gryffindor without much thought, and there was no doubt that Violet was fulfilling some grand family legacy by being sorted into Ravenclaw. But not Emily. And Severus’s glare burned in the back of her mind.

She wanted to call this stomach-churning stress that entangled her intestines excitement, but… it wasn’t. It was fear. It was anxiety. Beyond that, it was panic. She felt the air catching in her throat as she struggled to force it through her windpipes. She was shaking, her skin covered in raised gooseflesh even though she felt on fire. And the tears came, sudden and silent, choking her until she couldn’t breathe, strangled by her sobs and her own anxiety. For a while, she was too paralyzed to even move and just let the overwhelming wave of emotion wash over her, like could maybe be cathartic. But it wasn’t.

Her legs were sweating, despite the late-night chill of early September penetrating the walls of the tower, and she kicked the blankets off herself, letting them slide to the floor in a messy heap. She shuffled herself around on the bed, trying to get comfortable enough to fall asleep, but the sheets were sandpaper against her skin.

She wanted to scream, but not at the risk of waking up a dorm full of sleeping girls, so she crawled out of bed and felt around blindly for the door that led down into the common room.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, it dawned on her how much larger the common room was when empty. Its midnight blue carpeting was plush against her bare feet. There were ceiling-to-floor bookcases throughout the room, each filled to capacity with novels, textbooks, notebooks, parchment stuffed into every nook and cranny. Her fingers brushed against the spines of the oldest looking books, feeling the embossed titles against her skin with the smell of old pages lingering in the air. The silence of the room was calming, Violet’s snores only an echo in the distance, and only the dim glow of the moonlight streamed in from the space between the window’s dark draperies.

It was surprisingly hard to navigate the common room in the dark. Outstretched hands were all that stood between her and the large armchairs or her and the floor or her and the walls.

Until, that is, the walls moved, and she fell through them.

She spun herself around just in time to see the common room door slam shut behind her.

Shoot.

The door was bare of a doorknob and keyhole, bare of anything save for the large bronze knocker shaped like an eagle. Emily lifted it and knocked it quietly against the wood of the door, waiting expectantly for it to swing open and let her back inside.

“Is this question impossible to answer?”

Shoot – the riddle. She had almost forgotten about the riddle and cursed herself for not having paid more attention to its answer earlier.

“Yes?” Her response was met with silence. “No?” Nothing. “I don’t know!”

“Is this question impossible to answer?”

“I already said I don’t know,” she whined, rubbing her hand against her eyes. “Don’t I get any credit for honesty?”

“Is this question impossible to answer?”

Apparently not.

It went on for what felt like forever, a verbal volley between Emily and a door knocker. The light that fed through the small window opening gave little indication of how late it was. She only knew that she was exhausted.

With a groan, Emily slid to the floor, her head and back dead weight against the door. “Please let me in,” she said, her request punctuated with a yawn. There was no answer. She fought against heavy eyelids and felt herself slowly drifting into…

“Is this question impossible to answer?”

“Are you serious?” She glanced up at the knocker through half-closed eyes. “Listen, if you won’t let me in, at least be quiet.”

There was a moment or two of silence, lulling her to…

“Is this question –?”

“Please stop asking me.” She had expected her voice to come out as a snap, but she didn’t have the energy. “I just want to sleep. I don’t even care to go in anymore.”

The voice stopped, and with one last yawn, Emily closed her eyes, leaned her head back, and fell asleep.

After what felt like only five minutes, the voice jolted her awake. “Is this question impossible to answer?”

As her eyes opened, slowly and groggily, the voice repeated the question.

“I don’t even believe that there is a right answer!” Emily replied with a frustrated moan, and her head fell back, slamming against the stone floor of the common room.

Finally…

There were students already flittering about the common room, most of whom were dressed and ready for the day ahead. She couldn’t bring herself to ask what time it was. She probably didn’t want to know.

With her head leaning against the floor in the doorway, her whole body both in and out of the common room, she closed her eyes and sighed, too tired to even feel ashamed.

“Emily?”

She looked up to see Violet Briggs standing over her, with platinum blond hair falling over top of her face. As Emily groaned in response, Violet repeated her name and offered a hand to help her up.

“How long were you out there?”

Emily’s response was an unintendedly curt grunt. “Bed. So tired.”

Her large emerald eyes sparkled. “Well, we’re heading off to breakfast in a bit, if you want to come.”

“So, so tired.”

“It’ll be a while, though,” she said as she walked Emily to the stairs which led up to the dorms. “You’ll have some time to nap ‘cause Amina told us about this secret book her brother told her to find in the common room, so –”

“So tired,” Emily repeated again, her mouth moving independently of her mind.

She pointed to herself and a dark-skinned girl with long, spindle-straight black hair. “Well, you know where to find us if you change your mind.” And she was nice enough to walk with Emily back up to the dorms before she left.