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There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump.
Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending.
It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other and Aurora was sure the coats of armour could walk. This made using any kind of landmarks to find your way impossible.
The ghosts didn't help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Peeves the poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. He would drop waste-paper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!"
Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Filch owned a cat called Mrs Norris, a scrawny, dust-coloured creature with bulging, lamp-like eyes just like Filch's.
She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later.
Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone (except perhaps the Weasley twins) and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him and it was the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs Norris a good kick, no matter how fond they were of cats.
And then, once you had managed to find your classrooms, there were the lessons themselves. Aurora loved studying the night skies through their telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learning the names of different stars and the movements of the planets. She felt she had an advantage as her father's side of the family had very astronomic names. Her father himself was named after a bright part of the star system, Leo.
Three times a week they went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where they learnt how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi and found out what they were used for. Aurora wasn't sure Herbology was her thing, but she did enjoy the pretty flowers Professor Sprout introduced them to.
Widely regarded as the most boring lesson was History of Magic, which was the only class taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff-room fire and got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up.
