Amelia Potter and the Chamber of Secrets PART 1

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'I spoke a different language? But – I didn't realise – how can I speak a language without knowing I can speak it?'

'You get used to it. I was speaking dragon the other day with Sharptooh and didn't know it.'

Ron shook his head. Both he and Hermione were looking as though someone had died. Harry couldn't see what was so terrible and Amelia didn't seem to care.

'D'you want to tell me what's wrong with stopping a dirty great snake biting Justin's head off?' he said. 'What does it matter how I did it as long as Justin doesn't have to join the Headless Hunt?'

'It matters,' said Hermione, speaking at last in a hushed voice, 'because being able to talk to snakes was what Salazar Slytherin was famous for. That's why the symbol of Slytherin house is a serpent.'

Harry's mouth fell open.

'You are not a codfish,' Amelia commnted. Harry closed his mouth. 

'Exactly,' said Ron. 'And now the whole school's going to think you're his great-great-great-great-grandson or something ...'

'But I'm not,' said Harry, with a panic he couldn't quite explain.

'You'll find that hard to prove,' said Hermione. 'He lived about a thousand years ago; for all we know, you could be.'

Amelia moved to stand right in front of Harry looking him up and don like a hake. 'Nope! He is to cool.'

*
Harry lay awake for hours that night. Through a gap in the hangings round his four-poster he watched snow starting to drift past the tower window, and wondered.

Could he be a descendant of Salazar Slytherin? He didn't know anything about his father's family, after all. The Dursleys had always forbidden questions about his wizarding relatives.

Quietly, Harry tried to say something in Parseltongue. The words wouldn't come. It seemed he had to be face to face with a snake to do it.

'But I'm in Gryffindor,' Harry thought. 'The Sorting Hat would- n't have put me in here if I had Slytherin blood ...'

'Ah,' said a nasty little voice in his brain, 'But the Sorting Hat wanted to put you in Slytherin, don't you remember?'

Harry turned over. He'd see Justin next day in Herbology and he'd explain that he'd been calling the snake off, not egging it on, which (he thought angrily, pummelling his pillow) any fool should have realised.

*
By next morning, however, the snow that had begun in the night had turned into a blizzard so thick that the last Herbology lesson of term was cancelled: Professor Sprout wanted to fit socks and