"Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true." - Honoré de Balzac.
Before Harriet's first spell even left her wand, Daphne already had a shield up.
It wasn't reactive. It was anticipatory, the kind of defense that didn't wait to see what was coming. The Confundus Charm Harriet had opened with dissolved against it cleanly, and in the same breath Tracy was already firing back, three spells in rapid succession, each one arriving from a slightly different angle.
They had done this before. That much was obvious within the first ten seconds.
Daphne covered and Tracy pressured, the two of them moving like a single organism with two sets of instincts. Every time Harriet found an opening on one side, the other closed it. Every time she pushed, the shape of their formation shifted to absorb it. Tracy's aim in particular was something else entirely, her spell paths curved and unpredictable, leaving almost no clean angle to dodge through.
Harriet moved anyway, ducking and repositioning, returning fire when the gaps appeared. She was enjoying herself, she realized, which was either a good sign or a mildly concerning one.
For a while, neither side committed to anything serious. It had the quality of an unspoken agreement, a warmup, a mutual calibration. They were reading each other.
It was, she realized, her first duel that wasn't a matter of life or death. Surprisingly different. She had deliberately kept her output close to theirs, and even with reflexes that bordered on the inhuman, she hadn't gained the kind of advantage she'd expected. Maybe she had underestimated them. Maybe that was the point.
It made a certain kind of sense, once she thought about it. Slytherin had a reputation, and reputations of that kind had a way of teaching people to fight early. Dueling wasn't rare in that house, it was practically a social currency. Daphne and Tracy had clearly done this together before, many times, one covering while the other pressed. Tracy's status as a half-blood made her a target in a house built on blood purity, and Daphne's protection of her wasn't just loyalty, it was a system they had built and refined. One against two, coordinated and experienced, was always going to be difficult regardless of the gap in raw power.
Then, as if on cue, everyone stopped.
Harriet straightened. Daphne lowered her wand slightly. Tracy let her casting arm drop by an inch.
The warmup was over.
In the brief pause, Harriet found herself genuinely looking at them, not as targets or variables or pieces in someone else's game, but as people. It happened rarely enough that it still caught her off guard when it did.
Daphne was a few centimeters shorter than average, blonde, with the kind of composed elegance that didn't come from trying. Even now, cheeks flushed and breathing slightly elevated, she looked like someone who had simply decided that dishevelment was beneath her. Her eyes were the unsettling part. Sharp, pale, the kind that didn't miss anything and didn't let go of what they caught.
Tracy was darker, more compact, built for speed rather than precision. Less elegant, more efficient. She had answered every exchange aggressively, always controlled, always just on the edge of too much. A jaguar waiting for the exact right moment, Harriet thought. Not reckless. Patient in a way that was almost more dangerous.
She felt a small pang of something she didn't immediately have a name for.
Regret, maybe. Or correction.
She had been disappointed by people for so long, since long before she woke up in that graveyard with two lifetimes pressing against the inside of her skull, that she had quietly stopped extending the assumption of depth to strangers. She knew it. She had even accepted it as reasonable given the evidence. The magical world had handed her mediocrity at every turn and called it tradition.
But these two were not mediocre. And they had adapted to an ambush, a duel, and a privacy barrier they hadn't known existed, all within the span of ten minutes, without losing their composure once.
She made a mental note not to make that particular mistake again.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Daphne and Tracy had arrived at their own conclusions.
The Harriet Potter they had grown up reading about in breathless post-war accounts was a child survivor, someone who had endured impossible things through luck and love and whatever particular magic governed self-sacrifice. Impressive in its way. Also, fundamentally, a story about someone things happened to.
The person standing in front of them now was not that.
She moved differently. Thought differently. Even the way she had paused just now, looking at them with that quiet, assessing expression, carried a quality they recognized from older and more dangerous people. She wasn't performing confidence. She simply had it, the way someone has good posture, without thinking about it.
She was also, they both noticed independently, genuinely difficult to read. And that, more than anything else, was what made her interesting.
They resumed their stances.
This time, no one was holding back.
Daphne pressed the attack now, advancing with calculated aggression while Tracy covered every blind spot she left behind. The spells coming at Harriet were no longer safe. Bombarda. Reducto. Curses designed to maim rather than kill, dangerous enough to collapse stone and shatter furniture, stopping just short of the truly unforgivable.
Harriet's Protego flickered into existence whenever something slipped past her evasion, tighter and faster than standard issue, refined through months of practice into something that felt like an extension of thought rather than a conscious cast. She moved constantly, repositioning, reading the angles.
And still it was getting harder to find space.
She had tried to calibrate herself to their level. Gauging an opponent's strength had been an instinct for years, sharpened first by necessity and then by habit. But her experience of combat was almost entirely survival. Life or death, no rules, no referee. This was something else, a real duel, structured and bounded, and the shape of it was different in ways she was still learning to read.
Matching them wasn't working. And the bigger problem, the one she hadn't quite accounted for, was that the tempo wasn't hers to control. The longer this continued, the more she was ceding ground without gaining anything in return.
So she stopped holding back.
She gathered her magic in a way that made the air feel different, heavier, and without warning slammed a Bombarda straight into the floor.
The explosion was violent.
Stone shattered. Dust and debris erupted upward and the room collapsed into chaos. The shockwave broke their rhythm entirely, forcing both Slytherins into immediate defense as visibility dropped to nearly nothing.
They reacted fast, a Gust of Wind Charm clearing the smoke in seconds.
And that was when they saw it.
Every desk. Every splinter of wood. Broken chairs, fragments of stone, shards of metal. Everything that could be lifted now floated in the air around them, suspended as if time itself had decided to wait.
Harriet stood at the center of it all, wearing an expression that had no business being that smug given the circumstances. Despite the sheer scale of what she had just done, despite the very reasonable urge both of them felt to wipe that look off her face by any means necessary, it was difficult to argue with the result. The expression was earned. That didn't make it any less infuriating.
She had taken a simple Levitation Charm and scaled it beyond anything reasonable, encircling them in a three-dimensional cage of suspended debris. If she released it, there would be no escape. No shield fast enough. No counterspell that would reach her before the room did.
When technique alone wasn't enough, there was always the less elegant option. Raw force. And at her age, at this scale, it was difficult to remain unimpressed by it.
It wasn't until that moment that Daphne noticed what had been bothering her.
The corridor they had been taken from wasn't remote. It was still an active part of the school, even if it had seemed empty at the time. They had been here nearly ten minutes now. Spells had connected with walls. The sounds of it should have drawn someone, a student, a professor, anyone curious enough to investigate.
Nothing.
No footsteps. No voices. No movement beyond the door.
Tracy had even hit the wall deliberately at one point, as if testing it.
Still nothing.
Daphne's mind clicked into place. Someone had sealed the space. Not a standard Silencing Charm, something more nuanced than that. A distortion, not just of sound but of attention itself. The kind of spell that didn't simply block noise but made the noise not quite exist, made the minds of anyone nearby simply fail to register that there was anything worth noticing.
And she recognized, belatedly, that Harriet had built it around them before she had even spoken a word.
Daphne's eyes swept the room and found the edges of it, faint but undeniable, a distortion in the air just delicate enough to miss if you weren't already looking.
Her lips pressed together in something that wasn't quite a smile.
She looked at Tracy, who had already noticed, and was quietly working through the same conclusion. Daphne gave the smallest shake of her head.
"We surrender," Daphne said.
Tracy nodded, tense but honest.
Harriet lowered it all gently, every piece settling back to the floor without drama. Then, almost insultingly, she followed it with a wide-area Reparo. Cracks sealed. Furniture reassembled. Scorch marks vanished. The room looked as though nothing had happened at all.
After a display like that, indifference was no longer an option.
Daphne moved to one of the two chairs now standing in the center of the room. Tracy took the other. Harriet had repaired those too, and placed a third for herself.
"When did you put that barrier up?" Daphne asked.
"The moment we walked into the room, obviously," Harriet replied. "Wouldn't want anyone interrupting us." A brief pause. "I saw something like it in France once. It stayed with me. I've been trying to reconstruct it ever since."
She said it the way someone mentions having tried a recipe they liked. Casually. As though the feat itself was incidental.
"You've improved," Daphne said.
"Hard not to," Harriet replied, settling into her chair, "when the world keeps trying to crush you."
She let that sit for a moment.
"So. Convinced?"
Daphne glanced at Tracy. She wasn't fully sold. But dismissal was no longer on the table either.
"You've made your point," she said. "I won't promise more than this, but I'll tell you what's happening in Slytherin. Who's targeting you. Why. And how."
Harriet smiled.
She waved her wand and a small table materialized between them. From her pocket she produced an expanded tea set, china, cups, biscuits, arranged neatly on the surface.
"Isn't that what princesses like you do?" she said lightly. "Drink tea all day. I'm listening."
Daphne and Tracy stared.
They exchanged a look.
"I'm already starting to regret this," Tracy muttered.
Daphne, for her part, said nothing. She reached for the cup anyway, more out of reflex than anything else, the kind of social autopilot that kicked in when the situation had become too absurd to process consciously. The tea was good. That was somehow the most unsettling part.
She had expected an interrogation. Cold, calculated, the kind of pressure she knew how to resist. She had prepared for that on the walk over, running through responses in her head, mapping the angles. What she had not prepared for was this. The table. The china. The biscuits arranged with more care than the situation warranted.
Tracy, beside her, had gone very still in the particular way she did when she was recalibrating rather than retreating. Not thrown. Reassessing. It was a distinction Daphne had learned to read over years of sitting next to her in rooms that required careful navigation, and it told her that Tracy had arrived at the same conclusion: Harriet Potter was either genuinely this strange, or she was very deliberately making herself impossible to read.
Daphne suspected, with some irritation, that it was both.
Harriet's smile widened.
It was the beginning of something.