Waking up the following morning, I threw back the curtains around my bed, gathered by my change of clothes and headed to the privy as these Englishmen were prone to call it. Upon entering the privy, I set the linen pants and wool shirt on the sink countertop with my robe underneath, all in a neat pile, hanging off the side of the counter. Quickly stepping on my toes to the tub, I set the water running, much too eager to get into the tub and off the cold stone which has done a wonderful job of waking me up.
In my haste I made a crucial mistake we have all made in our lives: stepping in a tub with all too hot water. As I find myself in this precarious predicament, there are three options: jump out back to the cold stone and chilly air, in the buff (another fancy English term), stay standing until the water cools off while my feet burn, or commit to it entirely and lay down in the hot water. Of course the latter was out as I am not a masochist and prefer my appendages to not scald themselves. The next option that goes out is the first one as I definitely do not want to bear the cold as winter stone. Thus, I did what most of us have ever done, I turn the cold water on and begin paddling. Yes, paddling with my hands going back and forth ensuring the proper distribution of the cold disperses the heat in a uniform manner. Eventually the water feels warm enough to my hands that I turn the water off and slowly lower myself into the water. I do this slowly so that my posterior, should the water be too hot, shall take one for the team. As I squat and the untouched part of my body hits the water, I am harshly reminded of the bitter truth: there is something lower than my rear that just so happens to dangle just a couple of inches past, my boys, the family jewels, my balls dagommit!
"Ow! Ow-whoa-oh-OH-ho-ho-hoo!"
Just like a certain blue haired cat, I feel an innate shout of panic but alas I lack a certain disrespect to physics and must commit. The most precious of troops has made a valiant sacrifice and it shall be worth it. Plunging into the water I bear with the heat, taking shallow breaths, until at last the heat is bearable. Using some soap made from herbs and animal fat, I wash and scrub until my skin is wrinklier than a hag. Rinsing my hair, I come to the sad realization that shampoo is not yet a thing, or too expensive for magic wielding men to have. Thus, most men actually look fairly reminiscent of Severus Snape and his ever-oily head, oily-locks? Eh, not that funny I guess.
Pulling the drain plug, I grab the cloth meant to serve as my towel and dry myself as best I can. Making use of the medieval toiletries, I freshen up as it were and make my way out of the room, just in time to see the sun peeking through the foggy windows and my roommate rising from his sleep. Give a quick greeting, I enter the common room and find a place to wait.
By the time I stepped out of the privy proper, Thomas was already up and about, sitting on the edge of his bed in his nightshirt and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He looked as though the day had gotten the better of him before it had even truly started. I gave him a nod, he returned it, and that was that. We had learned in the tower that mornings were not a time for conversation. You woke, you washed, you dressed, and you got on with it. There was a comfort in that, honestly. No need to pretend you were happy to be out of the warmth and coziness that was your bed.
We made our way down to the common room, where Margaret and Eleanor were already waiting, Margaret's braid neat as ever and Eleanor looking as though she'd slept about as well as I had, which was to say adequately but not abundantly. A few of the older Hufflepuffs were moving through on their way to the Great Hall, giving us the occasional nod or good morning as they passed.
The Great Hall looked quite different in the morning than it had the night before. The candlelight of the feast had made the whole thing feel grand and a bit theatrical. In the early morning, with gray daylight filtering through the tall windows, it just looked like a very large room where people ate breakfast. Which, to be fair, was exactly what it was.
The food was laid out already when we arrived: bread, hard cheese, a porridge of oats with a small pitcher of milk beside it, and some kind of salt fish I decided immediately to avoid. There was also small beer, which I had learned was not the same as proper ale in strength but was the common morning drink because the water in most places could not be trusted. Given we were at Hogwarts with presumably clean water from Slytherin's plumbing, I was willing to chance it and poured myself a cup of water from the pitcher instead. Thomas looked at me like I'd done something unusual and said nothing.
Before I touched anything, I closed my eyes for a moment and said grace quietly to myself, my lips barely moving. It was the same short prayer I had said every morning of my previous life, and this one if you counted the two years in the tower. There was something grounding about it. The world had changed completely around me in ways I still had not fully reckoned with, but that small act of gratitude remained the same. I said amen to myself and reached for the bread.
Partway through the meal, Professor Blackwood came around to the four house tables with a stack of folded parchments and set one before each first year. I unfolded mine and read it over.
Monday through Saturday. Six days of classes. I had known this was coming from the books, but seeing it laid out plainly in ink made it more real. There was no elective nonsense, no Divination, no History of Magic in the sense of sitting in a room listening to a ghost drone on. The schedule was lean and, when I thought on it, sensible for what the school was actually trying to accomplish: produce useful members of wizarding society who did not blow themselves up or starve to death.
The schedule read as follows: Herbology on Monday and Thursday mornings, Potions on Tuesday and Friday mornings, Curses and Countercurses on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. Afternoons rotated through Transfiguration, Charms, and what was listed as Practical Studies, a catch-all for the kind of knowledge that kept a wizard alive in day to day life. How to preserve food with charms, how to mend cloth, how to identify plants that would kill you versus ones that would not, basic healing. Saturday afternoon was listed simply as Work Assignment.
That last one was interesting. Work Assignment meant exactly what it sounded like. Students whose supplies had been paid for by the school were expected to contribute labor in exchange. Whether it was tending the greenhouses, cleaning and sorting the potions stores, helping maintain the castle grounds, or assisting in the kitchens, every student had a rotating task. It was not framed as punishment. It was framed as contribution. Hogwarts was not running on goodwill alone, and the school was not shy about saying so. Think on it for a moment. A school like this has several dozen students at any given time, all needing food, clothing, heat, and instruction. The old families paid tuition. But muggleborns had nothing to pay with. The surplus from the Herbology greenhouses went to the apothecary in Hogsmeade. Upper year Potions sessions produced brews sold or traded to healers and wizarding households. Students who showed aptitude in a particular area were directed toward it not out of pure academic interest but because it would eventually produce something the castle needed. It was, when you stepped back and looked at it honestly, rather efficient. Capitalism in its infant stages!
"What dost thy schedule read?" Margaret asked, leaning over to compare. I showed her mine and looked at hers. They were identical. All four of us were in the same classes, which made sense given there were only four Hufflepuff first years.
First class that morning was Herbology, which suited me well enough. I had no particular passion for plants, but the tower had given me a working knowledge of what grew in this part of Scotland and what it was used for, which was more than most eleven year olds in my previous life could have said. We were walked out to the greenhouses by a short, wiry woman named Professor Graves, who introduced herself without ceremony and then set us to work before we had fully oriented ourselves to the space.
The first greenhouse was nothing special. Pots of standard herbs lined shelves along the outer walls. Dittany, which I recognized for its healing properties. Fluxweed, a common potions ingredient. Mandrake seedlings in clay pots, very young, barely more than shoots, so no ear protection required yet. Professor Graves made us learn the name, the use, and the proper handling of each before she let us touch them. She did not repeat herself. She pointed, she named, she moved on. I liked her immediately.
The actual work involved repotting a row of puffapods, which were fat green pods that had been getting too large for their containers. The trick with puffapods was not squeezing them. Squeeze one and the pods burst open, scattering seeds all over the greenhouse and into every crevice they could find. A puffapod seed was not dangerous in any serious sense. But if left in the soil of adjacent pots, they would sprout and crowd out whatever was growing there, and they smelled like boiled cabbage while doing it. Professor Graves did not explain any of this. She simply held up a puffapod, looked at us, and said, "Do not squeeze it."
A boy from Ravenclaw named Edmund squeezed his within three minutes. Seeds went everywhere. The smell was immediate and horrible, it reminded me of the Chinatown meat shops in Philadelphia. Professor Graves made him clean it up by hand while the rest of us continued.
By the time we finished and made our way back to the castle, my hands were dirty up to the wrists and my back was mildly sore from bending over the pots. There was something satisfying about that. The kind of tiredness that came from actually doing something rather than sitting and thinking about it. Hmmm, manual labor, good for you it is…..
The afternoon brought Charms with Professor Ashford. He was a middle-aged man with a mild disposition and the patient demeanor of someone who had explained the same thing to frightened eleven year olds for so many years that he had arrived at a kind of peace with the process. He corrected, demonstrated again, and moved on. I appreciated that. In my previous life I had had professors who treated mistakes as evidence of stupidity. Ashford treated them as information.
The first lesson was not spellwork in the way I had expected. No incantations, no wand movements. Instead, Professor Ashford spent the better part of an hour discussing intent. What did it mean to want a thing to happen? Not to wish for it, not to will it in the vague sense, but to truly intend it: to know what result you wanted, to understand why it was the result you wanted, and to direct your focus toward achieving it without letting your attention slip sideways. He called it the foundation beneath the foundation, and said that every student who struggled with spellwork did so because they had tried to build on top of a gap.
I sat and listened and thought about the months I had spent in the tower learning wand movements with no spells attached to them, just the movements themselves, over and over until they were muscle memory. Goodwife Fletcher had been doing exactly this, in her own way. Getting the physical habit in place so that when the intent was added, the wand would not have to think about where to go. The same principle as drilling a task until it became automatic. I had done that in engineering, in carpentry at Master Woodwright's shop, in hauling firewood day after day. Repetition until the hands knew what to do without the mind narrating every step.
At the end of the lesson, Professor Ashford had us attempt a simple lighting charm. Hold the wand, make the correct movement, speak the incantation clearly, and intend the candle before us to produce a small flame at its wick. Not light the room. Not create fire in some general sense. Light the wick. That specific wick. That specific small flame.
Three students lit their candles on the first attempt. Margaret was one of them. I was one of the others. The third was a Slytherin girl whose name I had not yet learned. Most of the class took two or three tries. Two students produced nothing at all, and Ashford pulled them aside at the end without comment. Thomas got a small spark on his second try, which Ashford counted as partial progress and said so plainly, without making it feel like consolation.
Walking back to the common room that evening, I thought about what I had noticed. The students who struggled most were the ones who said the incantation with feeling, putting emotional weight into it, as though trying to impress the candle. The ones who did it quickly, Margaret included, said it the same way you would read a line aloud from a page. Clearly, precisely, without drama. The intent carried the work. The incantation was only a frame for it. I stored that away. It would matter later.
The rest of the week followed much the same shape. Herbology was physical and quiet, the kind of work where you thought without meaning to because your hands were busy and your mind was left to wander. Potions was the opposite entirely. Professor Thorne was exactly as the fourth year had described him: precise to the point of severity, utterly uninterested in excuses, and genuinely pleased when a student produced something correctly. He did not smile exactly. But there was a particular quality to his silence when he looked at a well-brewed sample that communicated something like approval, and it turned out that was worth working for.
On Wednesday we had our first Curses and Countercurses lesson with Professor Crane. She was not what I had pictured. I had expected someone martial, sharp in the way of a soldier. Instead she was a tall woman with an unhurried way of moving and the kind of calm that did not read as gentle so much as controlled. She made us sit in a circle rather than at desks, which immediately set it apart from every other class. Then she told us the purpose of the course.
"The world beyond these walls doth not care whether you are talented or well-read or kind-natured," she said. Not dramatically. She said it the same way someone would say it might rain tomorrow. "It cares only whether you return home at the end of the day. The purpose of this course is to ensure that you do."
Nobody said anything to that. I thought a few of us were remembering where we had come from.
She did not have us cast anything that day. Instead she walked us through the categories of dark magic we would eventually need to recognize and counter. Not in detail, not yet, but enough to understand the shape of the problem. Curses that targeted the body. Curses that targeted the mind. Curses that worked through objects or through proximity. Countercurses, she said, were not opposites so much as interruptions. You were not reversing the intent of the caster. You were breaking the connection between the spell and its target. That distinction, she said, would matter a great deal later. She told us to sit with it for now. I sat with it. I was still thinking about it when I went to bed that night.
Transfiguration with Professor Blackwood came on Thursday afternoon. I had been wondering how that class would feel, given everything. She had pulled me out of a pit of corpses two years prior. She had spoken to me clearly and without condescension when I was still barely holding myself together. Walking into her classroom felt strange in a way I did not have a simple word for. She gave no indication that she remembered me as anything other than a student, which was probably the correct approach. She was a professor now. I was in her classroom. The relationship had shifted and she had shifted with it. I could respect that even if it felt a bit like being reset to zero.
Transfiguration was the hardest class that week by some distance. The principle was simple enough in theory. You were changing the fundamental nature of one thing into another. But where Charms worked on how a thing behaved, Transfiguration worked on what a thing was, and the magic required for that distinction was of a different order entirely. Our first exercise was turning a small piece of wood into a piece of stone of the same size and shape. Same dimensions, different material. Blackwood put a matchstick on my desk and looked at me and said nothing, which I understood to mean begin.
My matchstick went silver-gray at one end and stayed wood at the other for three attempts before I managed to get the whole thing to change over. Blackwood looked at it, then looked at me, and said, "Better." I counted that as high praise given the context and moved on.
By Friday, the four of us had a rhythm going. We ate together, walked to classes together, sat near each other, compared notes in the common room before bed. Not quite friendship in the way I understood it yet, still mostly proximity and shared circumstance, but it was something.
On Saturday, after the morning Curses and Countercurses session, we reported to the greenhouses for our first Work Assignment. My task, along with two third years I had not yet met, was weeding and watering the rows of potions ingredients that Herbology classes had not yet gotten to. The third years showed us which plants to leave alone and which to pull, then went about their own row. I did not mind the work. I had spent months hauling firewood over a mile of uneven ground. Pulling weeds in a heated greenhouse was not a hardship. It gave me time to think, which by now I had come to understand was its own kind of luxury.
The week had given me a great deal to turn over. The way Charms relied on precision of intent. The way Potions demanded your full attention or punished you without apology for the lapse. The way Curses and Countercurses was already, in its very first lesson, asking something from us that went beyond technique. And Transfiguration, with its particular requirement that you not only want a thing to change but understand that the object had a nature to begin with, a nature that had to be met and moved rather than simply overwritten. It was a lot to carry. But it was the kind of a lot that I found I did not particularly mind.
That evening, back in the common room after supper, I sat with my runes book and listened to the sound of the other Hufflepuffs around me. Someone was playing a quiet tune on a small stringed instrument in the corner. A pair of fourth years argued in low voices about something involving a charm that had gone sideways. The fire crackled steadily in the hearth. Margaret was across the table from me, reading her copy of Magical Drafts and Potions with the focused expression she wore when she was actually interested rather than merely doing what was expected.
I thought about where I had been a year ago. The Muggleborn Tower, learning to haul firewood and speak correctly and not embarrass myself when someone used a subjunctive construction I hadn't yet internalized. The year before that, a pestilence pit, cold and confused and thoroughly certain my situation could not be worse. And now this. A warm room, a good book, people around me who did not know what I was but had, through some confluence of circumstance and the founding philosophy of one particular house, decided to be decent about it anyway.
I said a quiet prayer of thanks, the same one I said every night, and turned the page.