The Clockwork Locket || SIRIUS BLACK

The Heist and the Heart

The compartment was deathly quiet. Normally, the chugging of the steam engine would have provided some escape from the stifling silence pressing down on them, but the train was no longer moving, squatting somewhere just outside of London with nothing but soggy grey fields and damp grey sky around them, the rain still coming down in pattering sheets.

Cassie stared at the portrait, her heart thumping wildly. Every ounce of logic and reasoning within her attempted to pass the picture of the woman off as irrational, or even an elaborate hoax, but there was a reason she had not been meant for Ravenclaw, as her parents had hoped; no amount of philosophy or rationale could explain what she was seeing.

"Cassie, er, why don't you sit down?" James said. "You look like you're about to faint."

She sagged back into her seat next to Remus, her eyes still on the portrait. The longer she looked at it, the more she realized that the woman was not an exact doppelganger of herself; rather, she appeared to be some kind of relative with an uncannily, disturbingly close resemblance, perhaps.

She had Cassie's angular face, and the brown of her hair and eyes was precisely the same shade of her own, though that was where the most obvious similarities ended. Upon closer observation, her skin was a faintly darker hue, dusted here and there with a few freckles, and her nose was small and round, whereas Cassie's was longer and slimmer, and slightly upturned at the tip. Her brows hung low over deep eyes, giving her a perpetual pondering expression that conveyed wisdom and thought, something Cassie could never pull off with her arching brows and sharp cheekbones, which just highlighted her imperious features and made her look dour all the time. The discrepancies did nothing to ease her anxiety, however, and she finally became so unnerved that she tore her gaze off the page, looking to Remus.

"I don't understand," she said helplessly. He winced at her tone, obviously not knowing what to say.

"Is there any context at all?" Sirius asked.

"No," she said, glancing back to the book. "All of it is in Old English; I have no idea what it says."

James looked surprised.

"Your tutors never taught you Old English?" he said incredulously.

She shook her head, frowning. "No, Latin." Her perplexed gaze shifted to Sirius, but he merely shrugged.

"Some Latin, but mostly French for me," he said. Remus and Peter both shook their heads mutely, but Cassie wasn't surprised; both boys had attended Muggle primary schools.

"Can you read what it says on the other page?" she asked James, almost desperately.

"I can try," he hedged, scrunching his nose when Cassie passed him the book, as if reluctant to touch it, "but it's been years since I've studied this stuff, so I might not be the best translator."

"Anything helps," she said.

James sighed at her hopeful expression, scratching his head and causing most of his hair to stand up wildly.

"Well, the title is Of the History and Genealogy of the Alderfair Line," he began, flipping through the first brittle pages gingerly, "and it looks like it was started sometime in the early Hellenistic Era." His eyes widened at the revelation. "Your family is ancient," he said, a hint of awe lacing his voice. "Merlin, Cassie, your bloodline was there when Rome was created! Merlin wasn't even alive back then!"

"That's not that old," she said uncomfortably to everyone's slack jaws. "Most pure-blood families trace back hundreds of years."

"Yeah, but not thousands," Sirius pointed out. "The Sacred Twenty-Eight didn't even become the Sacred Twenty-Eight until the Middle Ages, when all this pure-blood mania started."