His Hope: Sirius Black's daughter Book 3

The real sneak

As much as I loved the fact that Umbridge found Firenze, a centuar, teaching at Hogwarts, personally offensive, I was not too fond of the idea either. Centuars had a whole different opinion on Seeing. 

"Let us begin," said Firenze on his first lesson. He raised his hand and the light in the room dimmed, so that we now seemed to be sitting in a forest clearing by twilight, and stars emerged upon the ceiling. There were oohs and gasps.

"Lie back upon the floor," said Firenze in his calm voice, "and observe the heavens. Here is written, for those who can see, the fortune of our races."

I stretched out on my back and gazed upward at the ceiling. A twinkling red star winked at me from overhead.

"I know that you have learned the names of the planets and their moons in Astronomy," said Firenze's calm voice, "and that you have mapped the stars' progress through the heavens. Centaurs have unravelled the mysteries of these movements over centuries. Our findings teach us that the future may be glimpsed in the sky above us..."

"Professor Trelawney did Astrology with us!" said Parvati excitedly, raising her hand in front of her so that it stuck up in the air as she lay on her back. "Mars causes accidents and burns and things like that, and when it makes an angle to Saturn, like now" — she drew a right angle in the air above her — "that means that people need to be extra careful when handling hot things —"

"That," said Firenze calmly, "is human nonsense." I raised up my head in disbelief.

"Trivial hurts, tiny human accidents," said Firenze, as his hooves thudded over the mossy floor. "These are of no more significance than the scurryings of ants to the wide universe, and are unaffected by planetary movements."

"Professor Trelawney —" began Parvati, in a hurt and indignant voice.

"— is a human," said Firenze simply. "And is therefore blinkered and fettered by the limitations of your kind."

"Are you by any chance insulting the Seers' art?" I blurted out.

"Sibyll Trelawney may have Seen, I do not know," continued Firenze "but she wastes her time, in the main, on the self-flattering nonsense humans call fortune-telling. I, however, am here to explain the wisdom of centaurs, which is impersonal and impartial. We watch the skies for the great tides of evil or change that are sometimes marked there. It may take ten years to be sure of what we are seeing."

"Centuars spend years calculating the meaning of the stars only to conclude absolutely nothing. What we do is foretell what little we see and make wholesome conclusions." I told him.

"Of things that you cannot change? In the past decade, Miss Black, the indications have been that Wizard-kind is living through nothing more than a brief calm between two wars. Mars, bringer of battle, shines brightly above us, suggesting that the fight must break out again soon. How soon, centaurs may attempt to divine by the burning of certain herbs and leaves, by the observation of fume and flame."

We burned sage and mallowsweet there on the classroom floor, and Firenze told us to look for certain shapes and symbols in the pungent fumes, but he seemed perfectly unconcerned that no one could see any of the signs he described, telling us that humans were hardly ever good at this, that it took centaurs years and years to become competent, and finished by saying that it was foolish to put too much faith in such things anyway, because even centaurs sometimes read them wrongly. His priority did not seem to be to teach us what he knew, but rather to impress upon us that nothing, not even centaurs' knowledge, was foolproof.  I could not believe that this was what Dumbledore had left our education in the hands of.

As March progressed into April, things between Blaise and I were great, in a calm before the storm kind of way.

"So, Michael and I had another argument." Ginny told me one night.