Thirteen years after The Battle of Hogwarts, two wizarding children are about to embark on their own adventure. They both have been lied to their entire lives, one to protect her from the wrath of the wizarding world, and the other to protect him fr...
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The girl staring back at her from the mirror did not look very happy. In fact she looked positively livid. Her wild black hair was doing its usual impression of a centaur's mane. Bel was fairly sure that the curls had managed to eat several bobby pins, but as it would be impossible to find them in the mass she could not prove it. Even though she was much too old for the stool that she was standing on, she had to use it in order to see the mirror on her dresser. Her cheeks stood out red against her pale skin, as they always did when Bel was angry. Her bright green eyes flashed in the mirror. On top of all that, they were threatening to keep her back from Hogwarts this year. Again!
Bel was not supposed to know this yet of course, but even if she was forbidden to ever leave the grounds of Malfoy Manor, Scorpius and Cat were allowed more freedom. Not very much, but enough to smuggle some extendable ears from Weasley's Wizard Wheezes into the house. The three of them had been tutored together in the Manor since they were five, and it was not very many years after that that they had begun to listen at doors. It was Cat's idea, as they always were, but after the first few tours on kitchen duty, Bel had taken over the planning and execution of their escapades. It had always been obvious that theirs was not a normal childhood, and that the rules that applied only to her were even more draconian than those that governed her friends. But it was only after they started eavesdropping that things started to get really strange.
It always started out the same way. Friends of Uncle Lucius, Scorpius's grandfather, would start to arrive just after midnight. They would appear on the front stoop in black cloaks and under the cover of darkness and they would stay exactly one day. She would be required to be at breakfast, all three of them were, but Scorpius and Cat were always allowed to eat in peace. Bel, however, had to endure an endless string of questions from the guests. When this was finally over, Bel and her friends would be sent out of the room. Lessons were always cancelled and they were left to their own devices while all the adults in the house locked themselves in the dining room. Not even the house elf, Saeth, was assigned to watch them.
This was the critical mistake made by the adults. For years there had been an illicit audience of three children trying to make sense of their lives from the scraps of information that filtered through the crack under the door. In the past six years of listening to these meetings two or three times a year, they had learned depressingly little. Most of the conversations were conducted in what could only be described as code. It was as if the witches and wizards in the room were worried about eavesdroppers much more important than three children. In fact, Bel and her accomplices had only learned three pieces of real information. The older witches and wizards in the room were what was left of the Dark Lord's inner circle of Death Eaters. This, while no doubt interesting to the Ministry of Magic, came as no surprise to any child growing up in the Manor with half a brain. The second was that Bel was, for some inscrutable reason, important to them. The third was that they were deathly afraid that the truth, whatever it was, would come out if Bel were allowed to attend Hogwarts.
