The Tempest

The Tempest

By: Max

[Disclaimer: I unfortunately don’t own Harry Potter. It belongs to J. K. Rowling and her publishers. So I’ve only borrowed for a little playing …

By the way, I’ve got the “inspiration” for this story by Rilla’s wonderful “Fire and Ice”. If you didn’t read it yet, do so – you find it here at AFF.net

Author’s Note: That’s work in progress what means: The next update will need a few days.
And: Thanks to my beta readers Kristle and Bernadette.

Chapter 1: Narcissa’s Journal, part 1: A light in the darkness


Sometimes I think you read too much Muggle psychology. Or what was it what put the idea in your head that it would do me “a lot of good” to write down the story of my life? You think it will help me to get it “out of my system” and you’ve talked about “catharsis” and – you always know how to get me! – that you would like to learn more about me.

I lay next to you, my hand on your naked chest, feeling the beat of your heart under my palm, and as always when you’d made love to me – or, when we had made love to each other as you’d insist on calling it – I felt not only sated and content, but at home, for the very first time of my life. Then you started to talk about the journal you’d like me to write during the long hours I’m alone every day because you have to go away and, as you stated, you’d like to learn more about me, I asked you: “Why? You know what counts about me: That I love you. What more do you need to know?”

You rarely become angry. Your kindness – not a façade, not something you show people because it makes it easier to manipulate them, but a kindness which comes from your heart – I didn’t always understand and appreciate, but now I couldn’t live without any more. Yet I love your temper too. You rule it with hard discipline and all your willpower, but your eyes betray your always calm voice, sparking and radiating the sheer power which is you.

“You’re more than that!” you said firmly. “You were a person of your own before I came in your life and you’ll be one when I’m gone one day. You don’t need me to define yourself.”

I didn’t answer – not that night. But now, now that I’ve thought about it, you’ll get an answer that I know you’ll like because it’s almost as one of old king Salomo and there as like one of the answers you give to important questions. It’s “yes” and “no”.

Yes, I am a person of my own. I’ve lived 43 years out out you, or, better said: without being close to you. And I know I’ll probably have another 43 years to live without you in the future and I will manage, becoming a person of my own again.

But – I see you look at me now, laughing and saying: “No buts, dear” – you’re wrong when you state I wouldn’t need you to define me. What makes me the person I am, the person I’ve come to like over the past months, the person I’m even sometimes proud of, is – no, not your love for me, although, next to my son, it’s the most precious thing I have.

But what defines me is my love for you.

It’s the tenderness which fills me so much that I sometimes think I’m going to burst when I look at you sleeping in my arms; it’s the passion you to enflame in me; it’s my pride in you and, more than anything else, an overwhelming, sometimes terrifying need to make you happy. I would give my life for your happiness, joyfully; I would fight monsters and darkest evil for a smile from you, and it is for knowing that I am able to make you happy, that I am proud of myself.

You say I’m so “passionately discreet” that you are curious. Maybe you’re right. But for you I will give up the discretion of a lifetime. To you I will tell my story – and by doing so, I’ll probabrinbring my son to understand, too.


I grew up in darkness. Our house was dark, my father was dark, my sister and my brother were dark, and my mother, although she was the one I got my blonde hair from, was a person who lived in darkness, too. I can’t remember I ever saw her room – decorated in such a dark red it always reminded me of dried blood – ever lit up, not even on the rare occasions I came thereing ing a day. The curtains were always closed and mother mostly lay on her four poster bed with its red hangings, suffering from a migraine, or what she called her “depressions”.

Today I know it was probably neither depressions nor migraine but the after effects of too much alcohol and other drugs. But as a child I always thought I’d be the one who was responsible for her suffering, and if I only could manage to become a better person she’d probably become healthy anen sen she would rise and light a few candles and drive away the dars. Bs. But she never did and she died shortly after my sixth birthday. It didn’t make a big difference to the way we lived our lives, being linked through our blood and our name, but not in our hearts.

Our name – I always found it very fitting. “Black” like the darkness surrounding us. “Black” like the hair and the eyes of my father and my brother – and probably like their souls?

My father was very proud of our name. He rarely spoke to my sister and me – we were only girls after all and we wouldn’t have been both born had his first child been the heir he desired so much. It ike ike that in the most pure blood families. When they get daughters, it’s only because not even their magic can ensure their firstborn is a son. I sometimes wonder how they think they could survive without us women – but today I’m actually glad about this traditional way. I would hate to have a daughter to worry about and I would even more hate it if her father would have treated her as my father treated Bellatrix and me.

But even without speaking directly to us – we were still in the room where he taught our brother and so we heard how he said at least once a day: “You’re a Black – don’t ever forget it! It’s something you have to live up to!”

Even then, as the small child,I sometimes asked myself: What was it about the Blacks that Tiberius would have to live up to? I know our family had once been rich – our uncle still was. But my father was the second born and, fallen out with his elder brother, had only the big but almost-ruined Mansion which really needed an entire army of house elves to be kept in shape. Yet, with my father’s ding ing about with the Muggle financial market, the famous Black fortune had been lost and all of his attempts to get it back – even those which connected him to the Dark Lord – were unsuccessful.

So Bellatrix and I actually were his only chance to get back some wealth. Marrying us off to rich wizards was surely what my father intended to do as soon as we were born and, when both of us were hardly more then six or seven years old, he had already started to negotiate with the great families.

I remember the day in my tenth summer as Filthy – the last remaining house elf in our house, a creature even exceptional ugly and dirty for one of his kind – came to take me down to my father’s study where a very cold-looking man in black robes looked at me as if I were a kettle in the local market and then drawled in a bored voice: “Maybe you’re right, Black. This once could become a beauty.” And gripping in my hair and looking at the colour he added: gra grandmother was Veela, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, yes,” my father answered eagerly. “She seems to have inherited a lot from her.”

“Interesting,” the blonde man snarled. “And what’s with her magic? Any good at it, girl?” he addressed me directly.

I’ve always been proud on my magic since I got it in the age of six. And being a lonely child in a dark house with an elder sister who found it funny to make me cry I’d spent a good deal of time hidden in the attic of our house where I’d found a few boxes with books – mostly old schoolbooks and silly books like “1001 Charms for Bewitching Wizards” or “Beauty Spells for Witches”, probably books my mother had read during her school days. But the best thing I’d found there was a wand – old and splintered and pretty jumpy, often sending sparks out instead of obeying to me, but nevertheless; it was a wand and I could use it to practice.

But now it was the stranger’s wand which was presented to me, and with a malicious smile he said: “Show me what you can do with a wand, girl. Just something easy like …,” he looked around, then he poinwithwith his chin to a goblet on my father’s desk, “… levitating this old thing there!”

My father looked for a second angry and as if he’d have liked to forbid it. The goblet was one of the few really valuable things he still possessed – a beautiful golden foot supporting a bowl from finest Venetian crystal. I knew he’d hate losing it, but he didn’t dare to disagree with the stranger and so he only gritted his teeth together as I waved the wand once – I wanted to get a feeling for it – and then, after I’d an idea of how powerful it was, directed it at the goblet, softly commanding: “Wingardium leviosa!” The goblet hesitated a moment, but as I raised the wand a big higher, it followed my lead, hovering over the desk. Lowering both wand and goblet carefully back, I looked at the blond wizard with the cold eyes.

“Impressive!” he said with a glimmer in his eyes. “I think I’ll take her, Black.”It sIt sounded as if he’d buy me – and in fact, the offer he made then with my father after I was sent back to my room was something like buying me. He promised to pay not only for my education at Hogwarts, but for “appropriate dresses” too, and therefore my father gave his wizard’s word of honour that I would at my sixteenth Birthday become the bride of the blonde’s only son and heir.

First it didn’t bother me much. I was a child and the six years until I’d become 16 were more then half of my entire lifetime. It seemed eternity and so I felt little more than a mild curiosity about the boy who’d eventually – in a far away future – become my husband.

It was Hogwarts – the fact that I would go to Hogwarts soon, following my sister who was already there – that concerned me more. Just like every child in the magical world, I knew that the letters were sent out in July, but nevertheless I started waiting for it months before, and every time a brown barn owl – I even knew that Hogwarts used mostly brown barn owls – arrived at our house, my heart sped up. In June I became so nervous, I suffered almost every night through a nightmare. I dreamed of being the first Black in generations who didn’t get the letter.

It was a Monday – July 5, 1971 – as the letter finally arrived and even today, I see it before me:


HOGWARTS SCHOOL
OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY

Headmaster Armando Dippet, Order of Merlin First Class, Grand Sorc., Mugwump, International Confed. of Wiza/cen/center>


Dear Miss Black,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of witchcraft and wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of necessary books and equipment. Term begins on September 1. We await your owl by no later then July 31.

Yours sincerely
- Unreadable –
Deputy Headmaster


I danced with joy and, for this one day, I didn’t find our house dark. The letter was like a light and it brightened my days over the remainder of the summer. And there were other things – like the letter my father got a few days later. He’d obviously informed Achilles Malfoy about my being accepted at Hogwarts. The father of my eventual fiancée informed us that his wife, Valkyrie, would meet me on August 7th in Diagon Alley to provide me with “appropriate clothing”.

Despite my family’s lack of money I actually thought I was dressed well. In the attic of our house I’d found tons of dress robes and day robes in all colours and fashions, and with my mothers old books I’d learned how to make them fit me. I was so good in altering robes that my father’s mistress a me me to work on hers. For doing so she provided me with new things like shoes and undergarments.

So I felt well dressed – in a light blue robe with only a small golden decoration along the hems – as I walked in Madame Malkin’s shop to meet my future mother-in-law, who was a tall, blonde with an austere face and huge, but firmly corseted breasts. To me, she seemed to suit her name very well and later I learned that she really was a descendent from an old Nordic family and probably the great-great-great granddaughter of a Valkyrie.

If she liked me or not, I can’t say. I only know that she didn’t disapprove of me entirely and that was quite a lot when it came from Valkyrie Malfoy, who found most women simply “silly geese – only they aren’t as useful as geese” and probably every man, with the exception of her husband and her son, “blabbering idiots who think the possession of a more or less working penis would make them superior.” Having said so, she snorted – and snorting was something she often did. And it was with a snort that she looked at me, saying: “Tiny little thing you are. No arse, no tits – only legs and arms. Have you got at least some brain?” Yet she let me look for my new robes myself and watching me, she snorted again: “Seems you’ve got taste.” Nevertheless she disapproved of almost half of the things I’d picked because she found them “too ordinary” and so I got my first lesson for becoming a Malfoy: Nothing but the best will do.

A few weeks later I came to Hogwarts, was sorted – as it was to expected – in Slytherin house and met my future husband, Lucius Malfoy, for the first time. He was – or better said, he still is (isn’t it odd that even I who was never very close to him, have a tendency to speak in past tense about him as if he’d ceased to exit when I left him? Perhaps it’s wishful thinking that makes me do so) five years my senior, so he was already in his sixth year, leader of a group who was using every opportunity to sneak out of the school for visiting the “Saucy Sorcerers Club” at Hogsmeade, and naturally, he was not much interested in a little girl like me.

Yet he was aware of our connection and he obviously already saw me as his possession, which meant he made my elder sister stop harassing me. I never learned exactly how he did it, I only know that it was the beginning of Bellatrix’s hatred for him. But at this time she diddaredare to show it, but obeyed him. I was very grateful for it – it made my life easier, not only at Hogwarts, but at home. Besides Bellatrix, who was more like to our father than I and, therefore, hadn’t received a marriage offer from one of the old families, soon became very close to our Head of House, Hogwart’s potion master, Darius Lestrange. This made me avoid her even more than before because, even to me who grew up in darkness and with a father who found it as usual to use “Imperio” as to say “please” – Tiberius said once that father had used an “Imperio” on him just to get cream for his tea at breakfast – Darius Lestrange was too much of a dark wizard. He was a good looking man – with blue eyes and blonde curls who fell down his back to his belt and his face was – on first sight – almost too pretty for a man. But his eyes were icy and his smile forbidding and, even today, I shudder when I think what my 15-year-old sister had to do when she was with him in his bedchamber.

Yet she pretended to love him and “it” – whatever “it” meant – and I’m not entirely sure she only pretended or even then was already debauched enough to really love “it”. In any case she loved the power she saw in Lestrange and in summer 1972, after my first year at Hogwarts, Bellatrix became one day so bored during the break that she honoured me with her confidence. She told me then that headmaster Dippet was soon to retire and that her lover harboured high hopes to become Hogwarts’ next headmaster.

I think it was then that I spoke the name out loudly for the first time. Looking at Bellatrix I asked: “But what about Professor Dumbledore? He’s a friend of Headmaster Dippet, he’s the deputy headmaster and supposed to become Dippet’s successor.”

Bellatrix waved her hand. “Forget about him. Dippet likes him, but the governors aren’t convinced about him. They even didn’t make him head of a house.” She giggled then. “Darius says it’s probably because Dumbledore was a Hufflepuff. And look at him. He isn’t good for anything except transfiguration and even there he mostly lets his assistant McGonagall teach the serious stuff in the upper classes. He only plays around a bit with the first and second years.”

“But I’ve heard he defeated Grindelwald,” I said because I actually liked our playful transfiguration master. His classes were always fun and often the highlight of my days. I had never before really played, but in transfiguration I did, changing quills to lollipops, running around in chasing the mice our teacher wanted us to change into goblets and laughing as he demonstrated us hair transfiguration with changing his auburn-silver hair to a pink halo around his head – and sitting there with the pink hair he pretended he didn’t know how to change it back and so it was our task to look for a spell and to try.

Bellatrix snorted. “Poor, sheer luck, Darius says. Dumbledore just happened to be at the right place at the right time and got Grindelwald by surprise. Anybody with a little magic could have done it.”

Only a few days later Bellatrix got an owl from her lover, telling her that he was “tricked out by deardear transfiguration teacher”. But he swore to Bellatrix that Dumbledore wouldn’t enjoy being Hogwarts headmaster. He – Lestrange, I mean – intended “to make sure Dumbledore becomes the shortest serving headmaster in the history of Hogwarts. Give me only three months of the new term and you’ll see him packing his lemon sherbets!”

It came just the other way round – only it didn’t need three months, but only three weeks. T one one morning as we sat in the potions classroom, waiting for Professor Lestrange and already wondering because he’d never been late before, the headmaster himself – as ever an imposing sight in a dark blue velvet robe with tiny golden stars – swept in, smiled at us and said: “Unfortunately Professor Lestrange left us. That means you’ll have to put up with me until we’ll get a new potion teacher.”

I was so surprised I probably gaped like a goldfish out of water. But next to me sat Ravenclaw Persephone Fudge– the highly intelligent sister of a very stupid brother who unfortunately is now the minister of magic – my girlfriend and she noticed what I hadn’t seen. “Oooh!” she whispered at me. “Dumbledore’s mad like hell!”

I didn’t understand. “How do you come to that conclusion?” I asked her. “He’s smiling and he sounds as calm as always.”

“Look at his eyes and his hands!” Persephone advised me. “I’ve never seen his eyes so icy! They’re not twinkling. And his hands shakshaking.”


Later that day, as I came back to our common room, my curiosity about Lestrange’s sudden exit was satisfied by Lucius who shouted at my sister: “Lestrange is an idiot! He should have realized that Dumbledore was monitoring him closely! And to get caught in flagrante delicto – how thick must one be to let that happen? Now you only can hope that Dumbledore is discreet and doesn’t reveal who Lestrange was fucking. It wouldn’t do you or your family’s reputation much good.”

Just at that moment a house elf appeared and asked Bellatrix to go up to the main tower – the headmaster wanted to see her.

I had to attend my other classes. So I didn’t see Bellatrix again for the next few hours. She didn’t come to dinner; she wasn’t in the common room that evening, so I went to her dormitory in the night. She had cried – I heard it in her voice. But she didn’t show me sadness – this wasn’t her way. She only told me that I was – “as always” – the lucky one because the “headmaster didn’t inform the Ministry and the governors about the student who was with Darius. He said he wouldn’t want to ruin my or your future. So you’ll still become Mistress Malfoy.”

“And you?” I asked her. “Do you love Professor Lestrange?”

“What good is in that?” she almost screamed. “Dumbledore only refrained from pressing charges against him for his promise on the wizard’s word that he wouldn’t have contact with me until I’m of age.”

“But you will be age soon,” I tried to comfort my sister. “And if Lestrange really loves you he’ll wait fou.”ou.”

“Oh, Narcissa – what a silly fool you are!” my sister ranted at me. “Darius is a grown man and he’s a passionate one. He can’t live without sex and so he’ll get himself another mistress quicker as you can say ‘but Bellatrix’. So Dumbledore ruined my future today – he made me lose the only man I’ll ever love. But he will pay for it! I’ll make him pay for it!”

I really was a fool. I didn’t take Bellatrix seriously – neither in her love for Darius Lestrange nor in her hatred against the man who’d made Lestrange leave her. As Bellatrix started to date a Ravenclaw seventh year a few weeks later, I believed – with rf – f – she’d overcome her crush for the cruel potions master. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Bellatrix only was interested in the boy because his father owned the dubious potion lab in which Lestrange now worked. So my sister could claim now that she’s one of the few people who managed to fool Albus Dumbledore. She became so perfect in playing “cute couple” with her Ravenclaw that she actually got permission to spend one or another weekend during term at her boyfriend’s place. There the “cute couple” always immediately separated. Bellatrix fled to the arms of Darius Lestrange and her so-called boyfrienusedused himself with visiting the luxurious flat my future father-in-law kept in London for living out his “old Greek tendencies” as my mother-in-law casually called it.

Even if I had known about this arrangement, I couldn’t have blamed Bellatrix for it because when I was fifteen I fell in love with one of our teachers myself. Admittedly he was just the opposite to Darius Lestrange and I think what we had together couldn’t have been called an affair, but a romance.

It started on the first day of my fourth year. I came back to school – this time not only accompanied by Bellatrix, but by our brother Tiberius who was, as expected, sorted into Slytherin too. After the sorting the usual announcements followed – tark ark forest being out of bounds, magic not allowed in the halls, list of forbidden items to look at in caretaker Filch’s office – and then: “I have the pleasure and the honour tesenesent you our Defence against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Yven Constantin von Melanchton …” It was first time I heard our always so eloquent headmaster stumble on a name – the explanation followed immediately: “Professor Melanchton comes from Germany …”

I heard Lucius, who sat opposite to me, chuckle: “Let’s see how long it will be until he goes back there!”

The DADA position seemed already jinxed at this time – Yven’s predecessor had almost broken a record in staying three years before he had a nervous breakdown and landed in St. Mungo’s. Looking up at our new DADA teacher I thought: “He won’t make it longern a n a few months” – and I already started to regret it because he looked nice in a shy, boyish way.

He was far away from being as handsome as Lestrange; he even didn’t look very manly, bony and small as he was. And he had a huge nose and was already becoming baldt ast as I looked in his brown eyes I saw an openness and kindness I hadn’t seen before in a man. And there was more – already on this first evening he looked at me as if I were the most beautiful, precious thing he’d ever set eyes on.

I fell in love with him in an instant – and it was mutual although he fought it for weeks. Yet I wanted him and I’m not a Black for nothing. e see set our minds to something – especially if it’s getting a man – we’re rather determined. In his sixth week at Hogwarts, I provoked Yven in class – by then even Lucius had stopped laughing at him because he’d shown that he didn’t only knew what he was teaching, but was able to defend himself against the Slytherin’s duel champions spectacularly – so much he couldn’t let me get away without a detention. I knew he wouldn’t give me one with himself. He tried to avoid being alone with me at all costs and so he informed me about the evening I would spend with Filch, cleaning quidditch cups without magic, in front of the entire class. Yet he made the mistake to be in his office as I was done with the cups – and so I used my chance, stepped in and informed Yven that I was in love with him.

For the next half hour he tried to persuade me that I was too young for love and that my feelings weren’t more as a schoolgirl’s crush. Of course he didn’t succeed, but I eedeeeded in persuading him to meet me the next night at the Astronomy Tower – only once and only because I needed a chance to talk with him again, at least that’s what I told him.

Probably I should have asked my sister for advice then. She’d managed to carry an affair with a teacher for almost a year. I didn’t manage to more then two hours. But at least the situation we were caught in was not so totally embarrassing as Bellatrix’s. I didn’t lay naked, bound and spread-eagled in my teacher’s bed, but was still fully dressed. And so was Yven – we hadn’t made it farther than to a passionate kiss and his hand just touching my breast for the first time as we heard a rustle of robes, a sigh and a weary, familiar husky voice: “I would have thought I made entirely clear that I do nolerolerate affairs between teachers and students, Herr von Melanchton.”

Poor Yven! He drew his hand out of my robe as if he’d burned it. Blushing he stammered: “Head … Headmaster … es ist mir so peinlich …” In his excitement he fell in his mother tongue first, but changed then to English, his accent heavier as I’ve ever heard it before. “It is not as you zink, Headmaster …”

And I, suddenly becoming aware, that my insistence was probably to cost Yven not only his job, but his reputation, added: “It was me, Professor Dumbledore – I persuaded Professor Melanchton …”

A tender hand on my shoulder stopped me. “Miss Black, I appreciate your attempt and I’m glad to hear you’re here of your own, free will. Nevertheless I must hold Professor Melanchton responsible – he’s the teacher, he’s the adult. Therefore he will go to my office now where he will wait me me while I accompany you to your dormitory.”

We didn’t talk on our way down. I was suddenly so ashamed of myself. I had seen with Bellatrix where such an affair leads, I should have known I only would bring Yven trouble. And I was ashamed of myself about what the headmaster would now think of me. In this moment I didn’t think that I’d probably spoiled my good chances to become prefect and perhaps even head girl. I only thought: “He must believe I’m another Black with lose morals and a too highly developed sexdrive.”

To think that made my cry. I hadn’t been aware that the approving smiles I sometimes earned from the headmaster meant so much to me, but now as I feared he’d never again twinkle at me and he’d never again would answer my greeting with the cheerful “And aneciaecially nice day to you too, Miss Black” I felt as if I’d lost more than my first crush.

To my amazement I suddenly felt him touching my shoulder again. He tipped on it, then he gave me a handkerchief and said: “One of the things I’ve learned during the last century is that women never have a handkerchief when they really need one.t’s t’s why every man who doesn’t live in a monastery should always carry at least one spare one …”

Even today I find it a bit silly that I pulled out my own handkerchief, saying: “But I have one – and it’s even clean!”

He laughed. “It seems you’re an exception of the rule, Miss Black.” Becoming serious again, he proceeded: “Unfortunately I can’t make exceptions from the rules. As much as I regret it: Mister Melanchton will have to leave Hogwarts with the train tomorrow. And you will come at three o’clock in the afternoon to my office, Miss Black. We will have to talk about your future then.”


Of course I didn’t sleep this night. I told Persephone what had happened and though she tried to comfort me I cried for hours.

Yven I didn’t see again. The Seventh Years who had a DADA class first the other morning came toch, ch, telling under laughter that Melanchton even hadn’t last three months and started betting how long the headmaster would need to find “another poor sod” for the job. They obviously hadn’t the slightest clue why Yven had been sacked and I was glad of that. Yet Lucius noticed my red and swollen eyes and after lunch he managed to get me in a corner where he told me he wouldn’t mind if I’d had a crush on the “loser”, but “I would mind very much if you’d fuck around, Narcissa. I expect you to be still a virgin on our wedding night and I warn you: I’ll be very cross if you’re not. I’m a Malfoy and we don’t take another person’s leavings.”

I knew he meant it – and I learned for the first time that my handsome soon-to-be-fiancée wasn’t somebody I would want to cross. Being only 15 years old and fng ang as lost as I was on this day, I started to fear him.

For a long time after I often cursed my pride which forbade me to admit this fear in front of the headmaster although he asked me about my feelings for Lucius. He even offered me to help me out of my connection with the Malfoys – but I was too ashamed and … I didn’t trust him. I simply couldn’t imagine he could get me out of my father’s grip and so I lied about liking the Malfoys and even babbled about how much I’d look forward to marrying Lucius.

“And here I thought you were in love with Yven von Melanchton …” Dumbledore said calmly, looking at me over the rim of his spectacles.

I laughed nervously. My fear of Lucius was already bigger than the little love I’d developed for Yven and so I denied it with saying: “It was a schoolgirl’s crush, wasn’t it? I mean it has nothing to do with my feelings for my future husband. And who wouldn’t want to marry Lucius? He’s handsome, his family is rich, and he’ll give me every luxury a woman can dream off …”

“Well …” A long, piercing gaze out of rather cool blue eyes. “Then I want to advise you to play by the rules now, Miss Black. Achilles Malfoy is old-fashioned when it comes to his family and he isn’t a man a youitchitch should cross.”

“I won’t cross him, Professor Dumbledore. I’ve learned my lesson,” I said firmly.

For a long moment he only looked at me. Then he sighed and said: “If this is so then you’re dismissed.”

I rose with tears in my eyes. Walking to the door I turned around, swallowed and said quietly: “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

I was almost out of the room as the headmaster calleter ter me: “Narcissa …”

Turning, I saw once again his sad, blue eyes. “Yes, sir?”

“Pride,” he said slowly and quietly, “is important. It helps us to keep our dignity. But it shouldn’t rule our lives, Narcissa, especially not when we’re in danger of losing our heart for it.”


To be continued …