Troll: 33. Hook. Line. Sinker.

Chapter 33: Hook. Line. Sinker.

Blaise Zabini
Hogwarts, Great Britain

Cogitum revelio, that was the charm that Professor Flitwick had recommended. It was a NEWT-level charm on a technicality, mostly because anything relating to the mind tended to be rated higher than it should be. Reading up on it was a trip and a half.

It worked a bit like a bat’s echolocation, just as every other iteration of the “revelio” charm did. It sent out a pulse of magic, bounced off the desired target, and then returned to the caster with information. Except, instead of searching for a physical object, like a human body, it pinged off sentient minds.

That was stretching the echolocation analogy as it was, but the part that really confused me was how the spell interpreted sentience and cognition.

Centaurs? Sentient. Obviously.

Giants? Sentient. Sure, they were dumber than rocks, but they did experience emotion and possess cognitive awareness, however rudimentary.

Acromantula? Not sentient. Aragog was smart enough to master plain ol’ English. He understood the concept of friendship and still revered Hagrid even so many decades later. But no, the book I was reading explicitly included old acromantulas as an example of a species that wouldn’t register to the spell.

And of course, no explanation was provided. I could only conclude that this was because the creator of the spell defined “sentience” in a way that psychologists today would not agree with.

That was a problem I’d encountered more than once. As useful as an ancient library of magical books sounded, sometimes, details like this would slap me in the face. The spell had been developed in the thirteen hundreds and that fact was reflected in the spell’s inner matrices.

It wasn’t especially relevant. I was only interested in human minds that happened to temporarily occupy nonhuman bodies. Still, as a former academic librarian, the lack of clarification annoyed me anyway.

I let out a tired groan and stretched. My spine let out a staccato of satisfying pops. My suite, and by now, the suite was most assuredly mine, was the best place to study. People saw me at the library and took it as an invitation that commissions were open. Money was nice, but the regular interruptions were distracting.

My prediction had been correct, not that I needed my crystal ball for this one. It didn’t take long for Rita to come out with her typical garbage. I’d wondered why I hadn’t seen her snooping around Hogwarts already, but her latest article answered that question.

It seemed she was saving Hogwarts while she primed her audience. I figured that if I kept track of everyone she’d already “interviewed,” I’d been keeping an eye on her articles because I figured that I would be able to draw some conclusions about where she’d show up by process of elimination.

Violet Potter’s Custody Conundrum

By: Rita Skeeter

Lord Sirius Black’s trial is scheduled for New Year’s Day. It is being called the trial of the century, and for good reason. A lord of one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight had not stood trial in a court of his peers since the sixteen hundreds. A New Year, a New Dawn, some say.

But is it really a trial when the defendant has already been proven innocent of murder? A trial examines evidence to pass judgment and well, the “murder victim” is alive and well so the outcome seems a foregone conclusion. It seems likely that Lord Black will return to Magical Britain, ready to shake the political sphere down to its bedrock.

And that’s all well and good, but I would like to ask you a simple question, dear readers: Just who is Sirius Black? Not the Lord of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, but Sirius, the man. It strikes me that a man’s politics is most certainly influenced by his character. And so, to not ask such an obvious question would be a grave injustice to the public.

Moreover, as we all know, Lord Black was and remains the designated godfather of the Girl Who Lived, Violet Potter. Should he be proven innocent, there is a real chance that he will have an outsized say in her life moving forward.

So who are we meeting this New Year’s Day, hmm?

Admittedly, there isn’t much even this industrious reporter can find out about him. The man did spend the last thirteen years in Azkaban, after all. However, I can’t call myself a reporter if I leave it at that. I did some digging and, dear readers, the memories people have of Lord Black from his Hogwarts years are… not flattering.

I was fascinated. Really, it was genuinely impressive how much shit Rita could sling with a single article. She had a gift. Sure, a despicable gift that made every sane person want to tear off her weevily limbs one by one, but a gift nonetheless.

What followed was a series of “interviews” with the previous generation of Hogwarts grads. They were a mixed bag. Some had been clearly distorted to paint Sirius in as controversial a light as possible while others were unfortunately accurate.

More than one person had been happy to talk about the Marauders’ less than stellar pasts. Were they drunk? Slipped a mild tonic to loosen their tongues? Blackmailed? Nostalgic and naive about who Rita was? Or just plain happy to pour oil into the fire?

Didn’t matter. In a single article, Rita called Sirius a bully. She also suggested that he used the Black name to intimidate anyone who dared stand up to him and his posse.

Most damaging of all, she called him a manwhore, not in those exact words, but the message was clear. More than one of his supposed escapades were illustrated in lurid detail.

That wouldn’t send him back to Azkaban of course; his case was airtight. No, what the article was really doing was questioning the authority he’d have over Violet.

The article concluded:

After all, dear readers, Sirius Black had been the exact kind of man fathers warned their daughters about. My own father certainly mentioned him by name more than once! Are we sure that he can be trusted with the custody of Magical Britain’s favorite daughter?

And that isn’t even taking into account the harm Azkaban must have done to an already reckless man’s psyche. I’d heard that nothing makes a man reflect like prison, but this reporter would wager otherwise. I certainly wouldn’t chance it, not with the well-being of the Girl Who Lived on the line.

Why, even muggles might be better. As the esteemed members of the Light faction like to remind us, the absence of magic is not the absence of moral fiber.

This cannot stand, dear readers. Lord Black was designated as Miss Potter’s godfather in a time of great strife and confusion, by a couple who were themselves only a year out of Hogwarts. We, as Britain’s people, have a duty to protect our savior from harmful influences, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

I’d heard the puffs and ravens whispering in hushed voices this morning. The worst part of this was that she wasn’t wrong; I’d loved Sirius as a character in the movies and books, but even I could admit he wasn’t exactly fit to be a primary caregiver.

Getting Violet away from the Dursleys would have been nice; that had been one of the things I’d been hoping to get out of freeing Sirius. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see that happening at this rate.

Magical Britain was fairly anemic when it came to guardianship laws. Typically, the godfather or godmother, if they’d been appointed, took custody of an orphan, but that wasn’t always the case. It certainly wasn’t a legally binding rule. Sirius’ rights as Violet’s godfather were likely to be overlooked given his presumed mental health.

“Guess she’s going back to the Dursleys,” I muttered. It was a shame, but I wasn’t too broken up over it. I saw her getting to 12 Grimmauld Place early as a bit of a longshot anyway.

Having Violet hand me the keys to that ancient library would have been nice, but such was life. I’d have to find an alternate route.

No, what had me concerned was just why Rita had written this article. There was a chance that she’d simply taken a swing at anything to drum up readership, she thrived off this kind of controversy, but something told me that this wasn’t the case.

The question of Violet’s custody was a bit too niche. It wasn’t a topic people cared about because the general assumption was that Dumbledore had taken care of it already. If I had to guess, someone bankrolled her into this.

My first guess was Dumbledore himself. I was now sure that this wasn’t some weird, fanfiction alternate universe. Dumbledore wasn’t a secret dark lord who turned his pet phoenix into a familiar or something, but the man definitely had a “greater good” focus regardless.

He genuinely thought the protections afforded by Lily’s sister was worth keeping Violet with Petunia, no matter how miserable it made her. What if he thought Sirius might push to take her from the Dursleys, and that he might succeed? Then the old goat just might seek to damage Sirius’ name before he could defend himself as the reinstated Lord Black.

Or was this an attack from the Dark faction? I could also see someone like Lucius Malfoy trying to undermine Sirius. He had to know that Sirius wasn’t a Death Eater, after all. What if he thought Sirius would squander the Black fortune out of raw spite to ensure Lyra never inherited a single knut? Or that House Malfoy would lose too much political capital with the return of the Black seat?

Politically attacking a lord of the Sacred Twenty-Eight was hard. It was one of those things that just wasn’t done in Magical Britain. Malfoy might have been trying to set the precedent for Sirius’ fragile mental state through a seemingly unrelated case. Then, the man could bring it up later as a legally established fact if and when the two inevitably clashed in the Wizengamot.

Lastly, this might not even be about Sirius. Dumbledore was the one who took custody of Violet. No one questioned it at the time, but if someone thought they could use Sirius to damage the old man’s reputation, I could see how a few people might be interested in taking a swing. It’d cost them almost nothing to try.

I didn’t know and all scrying got me was a migraine. There were just too many variables, too many independent actors surrounding Sirius’ case. The only way I would find out would be if I captured Rita and squeezed the answer out of her directly.

Which, conveniently, was what I’d planned on doing anyway.

X

Today was the seventh of December, the first Saturday of the month. And, like every other first Saturday, today was the start of Hogsmeade weekend. We also only had one last week to go before the holidays so most students were in a good mood. With the Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff quidditch game tomorrow, most kids were choosing to go into town today.

That worked out well for me. I rounded up the first year Slytherin boys and dragged them out to Hogsmeade to hang out. Really, I felt a bit like a CEO or company director announcing a “voluntary” happy hour.

After several months of me occupying the private suite, the competition to be the best in our year had largely settled. Nowadays, even Theo didn’t give me any grief. 

A part of that was fear after what I did to Terence. Another reason was that he saw himself as being a politically astute individual who could read the wind. He’d been willing to bend to Lyra’s whims and had simply begun to realize that trying to contest me wouldn’t get him anywhere.

It felt strange, talking about fourteen year old boys like they were politicians, but such was the norm in Slytherin. The house itself was a microcosm of Britain’s wizarding elite.

I stepped out of the carriage and headed to The Magic Neep. The littlest snakes obediently followed behind me like not-so-adorable ducklings.

“Why the sudden generosity, Zabini?” Theo asked.

“Why not?” I said with a languid smile. “It’s the start of the holidays and I’ve made plenty of money this semester. This trip’s on me, boys. Honeydukes, Zonko’s, lunch at the Broomstick. Sounds good?”

He nodded carefully. He knew what I wasn’t saying: If Terence had been set up as an example of the stick, this was the proverbial carrot. “Nice, but what are we doing at the grocer’s?”

“Why, Nott, don’t you know? It’s always polite to tip the drivers.”

“The what?”

I chuckled and made for the butcher’s counter. “Ask Parkinson.”

Of course, this wasn’t just about making amends with my housemates or showing my future minions that I could be generous. My main goal was to capture and blackmail Rita Skeeter before she could do any more damage to the upcoming trial.

Seeing how the semester was all but over, I was quite positive that she’d be here this weekend. Sunday would be taken up by the quidditch game, which, like many high school sporting events I was used to, was publicized. If she wanted to latch onto someone for some gossip, the best time was today. 

And sure enough, my scrying confirmed she was somewhere in Hogsmeade. I’d already prepared a jar, enchanted to be unbreakable by a helpful seventh year. Now, all I had to do was convince her that I was the one she should spy on.

Rita wasn’t stupid. She’d made a career out of destroying people’s lives, people who’d love to retaliate, but couldn’t. She was a social butterfly who possessed just enough cunning to secure important backers. She was used to picking her targets, which meant that despite her bombastic personality on parchment, she was actually a cautious individual in-person.

If I wanted her to come to me, I needed to make her abandon that caution. I needed her to believe that there was something I could, and would, give her.

A seer who wandered around Hogsmeade talking loudly about how close he was to Violet Potter would be suspicious as hell. But a group of Slytherin first years gossiping? Why, we were so inherently smug and full of ourselves, we’d never consider an eavesdropper.

I took the boys around town on a bunch of random errands, casting cogitum revellio every time I could get a moment alone. I still wasn’t proficient with the spell yet so I had a limited range, which was why I needed Rita to come to me.

I spent lavishly at Honeydukes and Zonko’s, kept Vincent and Gregory from starting a fight with the lions, and allowed Zacharias from Hufflepuff to talk shit about me. I even pulled Heath back when he started mooning after Lyra, which might have inadvertently gotten me some brownie points with her. The whole morning was like herding cats, if cats were capable of verbally expressing their entitlement and elitism.

Occasionally, I received a ping off cogitum revellio but was unable to spot Rita. One even happened to be a false positive, an old man who turned into a warthog rooting around his neighbor’s garden. Whatever beef he had with his neighbor’s rose bushes wasn’t any of my business.

Whenever I got a ping, I steered the conversation towards more relevant topics until those pings became more consistent. And when I could be reasonably sure that she was following me, I finally steered us to the Three Broomsticks for lunch.

The homey pub was as welcoming as ever. Lunchtime this time of the month, it was almost exclusively occupied by Hogwarts students. I wondered how that came to be. It wasn’t as though the Three Broomsticks was the only pub in town and while Madam Rosmerta certainly had impressive “assets,” there were just as many schoolgirls as schoolboys.

For all I knew, Madam Rosemerta had a deal with her regulars to let the students have the pub once a month. Hogsmeade was the kind of small town where that was possible.

“Come on, in here. Lunch is on me, boys,” I said as I ushered them inside. We filed into a booth and waited to order. The food here was about the same quality as served at the castle, but something about going out to eat made it feel special.

“So, Zabini,” Vincent said. Crabbe and Goyle weren’t quite as dull as the movies made them out to be, not that that was much of a standard. “Who’s winning the quidditch game tomorrow?”

“No clue.” At their disbelieving looks, I clarified. “Really, I haven’t looked at all.”

“Why? It’s quick money. The other houses shouldn’t whine about it since we’re not even playing,” Heath said.

“I was approached by both Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw captains yesterday. They pooled their spending money and paid me.”

“Wait, together? How’s that work?”

“They bought his silence,” Theo said. He was a bit faster on the uptake than the others. “The house of fair play and the house of wit? Yeah, that sounds like them.”

I nodded. Of course, I didn’t mention that I gave them most of the money back. “Yup. The ravens figured it out and told the puffs. They made me promise that I won’t interfere in this game no matter who asks me to, even if the one asking isn’t from their teams or houses.”

“Smart. Otherwise, the ravens would have had a friend from our house do the asking for them.”

“That’s right. So no, I won’t help you bet on the game, Parkinson. I’ve got a rep to keep. My contracts will only be respected if people know that I’ll always keep my end of the deal, even if my part is merely silence.”

“Aww…”

While we waited for the food, I nudged Theo out of his seat so I could use the bathroom. There, I quickly cast my detection charm.

I smiled when I received a ping. The range was only about as large as the pub, but that was all I needed. Rita was circling, which meant it was time to set out the bait.

I returned and redirected the conversation to something more her speed. “So, have you been reading the Prophet? Lord Black's been in the papers an awful lot lately.”

“Skeeter isn't to be trusted,” Theo said disdainfully. “Father thinks her vitriol has gone too far. Knowingly or not, she is undermining the sanctity of the lords of the Sacred Twenty-Eight.”

“Huh, I didn’t think you’d say that,” I told him. “I thought your lord father would be upset about the return of Lord Black, what with him likely undermining the Dark faction.”

“Will he? The Black seat has been empty since Lord Arcturus passed a few years ago. Really, it’s been functionally empty for a decade prior since he more or less withdrew from society. The Dark faction’s persisted this long without House Black and it will continue to persist with or without him.”

“He’ll likely join the Light under Dumbledore. That’s a lot of money and political pull.”

“Maybe not as much as you’d think. A decade of absence is a long time. Many of House Black’s old allies have found other connections. Besides,” Theo said with a devious smirk. “Don’t you think this is a hit for House Malfoy more than us traditionalists as a whole?”

I considered the comment and found that he was right. I’d been thinking of British politics in terms of Light, Dark, and Gray, but that was perhaps an overly simplistic perspective. The Dark, conservatives, weren’t necessarily all united. They probably jockeyed for position amongst themselves just like any muggle political party.

In that sense, I got what Theo was saying: From Lord Nott’s perspective, even if the political bloc as a whole suffered a little bit, it might be worth tolerating if it undermined a political rival. He likely saw this as a chance to improve his relative position compared to Malfoy.

“I really am out of touch with British politics,” I said ruefully. “Makes sense when you put it like that.”

“You said something interesting just now though: Lord Black is going to join the Light, then? A few people have been sure that he’d lead the Dark, or maybe even distance himself from it all like his grandfather had.”

“Almost positive,” I said. It wasn’t a big secret to spill anyway. Everyone knew who he’d been best friends with in school. Then our food arrived. I picked up a huge chunk of cod and tore it in half, watching the steam rise from flaky flesh. “Am I crazy for finding Skeeter entertaining though?”

“She’s a gossip, Zabini. Figures you’d like her,” Theo muttered, rolling his eyes.

I leapt at the assist. “Of course. We’re practically kindred spirits, you know.”

“That sounds like a stretch, Zabini. You’re a seer, the best one in like, centuries,” Heath said. He was a kissass, but not an inaccurate one. “She’s Skeeter, as close to a bottom-feeder as there is without being a mudblood.”

“Oh, I’m not saying we’re in the same league. Of course not, I’m obviously superior,” I said, injecting some of that trademark Slytherin arrogance. I could pull off “pompous, preppy rich kid” pretty damn well by now. “I’m saying that I empathize somewhat with journalists like her.”

“Heh, must suck for them. You can just find out anything you want to know with a crystal ball. Skeeter’s gotta make up bogus quotes to sell her shite.”

“True. But she understands the first rule of the trade: Information is a commodity. I don’t need to like her to find her work entertaining or effective. If nothing else, I can respect the hustle.”

“Don’t you know Potter?” Greg muttered. He was barely intelligible between mouthfuls of food. “I thought you two were friends.”

“Yeah, you were real chummy with her before you rigged quidditch,” Vincent added.

I groaned in agitation, not all of it feigned. “I was. It’s why I was so harsh on Higgs. He fucked up and made me burn a lot of bridges with Gryffindor. It annoys me that the person to set my plans back furthest didn’t even mean to. No, he’s just a bloody moron.”

“Bet you can tell Skeeter loads about her.”

“I could.” I spotted a flash of green. It could have been a trick of the light, but I doubted it. “For example, I could tell Skeeter exactly what happened that night. Scrying something that’s already happened is so much easier than scrying the future.”

“Interesting. With how chaotic things were back then, I doubt even Lord Black has a clear recollection,” Heath said from between forkfuls of greens. He was on a diet apparently, something about trying to slim down for the winter gala, the poor bastard.

“That’s if he remembers anything at all after more than a decade in Azkaban,” Theo scoffed. “Care to share, Zabini?”

“Not this instant, and definitely not for free,” I said leadingly. “Like I said, information is a commodity, and that’s the kind of intel that’s really worth something.”

“Bloody tease is what you are.”

“I’m a merchant, Nott. Besides, I really don’t know at the moment. It’s something I should scry ahead of time though. I do like to preempt clients’ questions and someone’s bound to ask eventually.”

“We’re asking now.”

“With fatter pockets.”

“Fine, be that way.”

I polished off my meal and placed several galleons on the table, a fair bit more than strictly necessary. “I will. It’s been fun, boys. Enjoy yourselves.”

“Yeah? Where’re you off to?”

“Oh, you know. Plans to make, secrets to unravel.”

I left the pub with a self-satisfied smile. The chill of the December air greeted me as the pub’s conversation faded away. I hadn’t missed the way a green, rhinestone-sized beetle attached itself to the hem of my robe.

Hook. Line. Sinker.

Author’s Note

If you’re wondering why Rita’s article is a big deal, you’ve never fought for custody over a child before. Neither have I, but I recommend listening to people who have. It’s fucking wild. I’d imagine it’s even worse in a society without libel laws, or when said child is the single biggest celebrity in the world.

Slytherin is firmly under Blaise’s thumb. Well, at least the first year boys. Rita’s following along like a lamb to the slaughter, no jar necessary. Violet’s going to be upset that she doesn’t get to punch Rita.

Animal Fact: Dolphins have names. They have specific whistles they use to address individuals of their species and to identify themselves. 

What? Did you think I was going to talk about the woman who manually jerked one off in the name of science? Not every animal fact needs to be about dicks, you perverts.