The Darkest Hearts || REGULUS BLACK

Chapter Fourteen

She dreamed of a girl with ribbons in her hair and a village on fire. Sometimes she only watched as the girl was devoured by the flames, and other times she was the girl, drowning in smoke as the flesh melted from her bones while a boy with silver eyes loomed over her. It was only when she awoke, sweating and panting like she had run a marathon, that she realized it was just a nightmare.

It took her a moment to adjust to her surroundings; she had expected the warm fairy-lights and yellow curtains of her four-poster in the Hufflepuff dormitory, but when faced with a large bay window streaming sunlight and a daybed covered in a daisy-patterned quilt, she remembered that she was at home and not Hogwarts.

Diana scrubbed the sand from her eyes and sat up, her throat uncomfortably dry. She reached for a glass of water on her bedside table but was met with only books and small diaries crammed with loose pages. She sighed. I miss my dorm.

She got out of bed and shuffled into a pair of threadbare slippers, scooping her hair back from her face. Exhaustion urged her to climb back into her bed. The journey from Hogwarts to her family home in Norfolk was an all-day affair, and after exchanging nearly two dozen hugs with her mother and father the night before, she had gone to sleep without having eaten dinner, and her stomach hated her for it that morning.

Diana made for the door but cursed when she bumped into the trunk lying haphazardly in the middle of her floor. The lid was open and the contents within jumbled in her haste to find her nightclothes, and she rubbed her shin, grumbling. She threaded a path between her trunk and the old wardrobe propped against the wall across from her bed. One of the doors jutted out, the brass knob hanging at an angle from when she had been six and bragged to Carina that she could do a handstand before falling over and breaking the door with her foot. She had still never told her parents about the door to that day, and if Carina had, they had left it alone regardless. She preferred it that way, honestly; the memory always brought a smile to her lips at her own youthful confidence. It was the same with the myriad singed holes in her pastel butterfly wallpaper from practicing spellwork in secret. Or the dent in her doorframe when she had tripped carrying an empty cauldron.

She opened the door and was hit with a cloying scent of rosemary, cloves, and tea, which was rather a pleasant smell compared to the ones that usually assaulted Diana whenever her mother was making potions. She followed the scent from her room in the back of the cottage and through a heavy brown drape that separated the front of the cottage from the rest. Sure enough, her mother was already in the kitchen, snipping rosemary stems and humming under her breath while a kettle heated in the hearth. A cauldron simmered below it while a ladle stirred the contents gently, as if directed by an invisible hand.

"Morning," Diana said, pecking her mother's cheek and reaching for the pitcher of water beside her. "Need help with anything?"

"There she is!" Diana's mother set down her shears and the rosemary and threw her arms around her. Diana wheezed into the crook of her mother's neck as she hugged her with a strength that belied the small woman's petite frame. "Good morning, sweetheart! How did you sleep? Are you hungry? There's bread and jam in the larder and I have tea going; I can make you some eggs and bacon too if you'd like – yes, let's do that, this leftover rosemary will make a wonderful garnish—"

Diana was released as her mother whipped herself into a frenzy, and she staggered slightly, clutching the pitcher and smiling in bemusement. Celine Fairchild was a force of nature unto herself, and Diana had accepted at a young age to simply ride out her mother's gale. Her father often teased that brewing one too many Alihotsy Draughts had put her mother in a sustained mood of cheerfulness, with which her mother would return that it was actually Elixir to Induce Euphoria. She still wasn't entirely sure if it was a joke or not.