𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐜

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

- Sweets & Schemes -

Fi firmly believed if there was a heaven, it mightily resembled Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor.

It was a small shop, but inside Fi found the confectionery wonder of Florean's cold sweets to be worth every Galleon she could part with. She sat outside on the tiny patio beneath the brunt of late winter's watery sunshine and devoured a massive cone of blaeberry and pecan ice cream, licking her lips and luxuriating in the simple things as she watched the bustling witches and wizards go about their shopping. Curious eyes landed on her—the oddly dressed young woman sitting alone munching ice cream despite the cold weather—but Fi had yet to spy hide nor hair of her pursuers.

"Well, they'd have to be dunderheads to come after me during the day, but I would have thought they'd be looking," Fi muttered to herself, wiping her face on a paper napkin. "But I'm not infallible. Maybe they are looking and I just don't know it. Hmm."

She had yet to conceive of an idea of what to do about the wizards hunting her. Certainly she could fling a few more off a cliff, but Fi knew the more dangerous she proved to this enemy, the more wily he would become. More wizards would follow. If she escalated the situation without thought, without care, this "Lord" would do the same, and Fi was but one witch against an enemy she could not rightly name. Ever always liked to say "The wise witch runs before the dragon swoops," and Fi guessed any wizard with masked followers trying to kidnap women in the middle of the night qualified as a dragon.

Still, she couldn't stay with Grigor forever. She'd need to move on soon.

Fi finished her ice cream and, though Grigor had warned her against spending the borrowed coin frivolously, she went inside and ordered another from Florean, who gave her a bemused look as he went about scooping her selection. Still thinking of Grigor's less than pleased reaction to her distance from society, Fi picked up a folded copy of The Daily Prophet and went about flipping through the pages, her lips drawn back in a frown as she did so.

There's nothing of note in here. Just a bunch of gossip articles and basic political coverage. No odd disappearances or unexplained deaths.

She flicked to the adverts written in the rear of the paper. The mass of text blurred and the headlines shifted, the pictures giving her grumpy looks for wrinkling their paper. Pausing, Fi noticed a listed posting shuffled toward the bottom of the page. "Seeking instructor for Magical Theory at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Full-time employment with disclosed benefits. Inquire by owl with curriculum vitae to Prof. M. McGonagall."

"Hmm…."

At first, Fi thought little of the advert. She folded the paper back up and, after asking Florean if she could take it, tucked the issue under her arm. She accepted her ice cream from the wizard, pouring on enough effusive praise to raise a blush in the aging man's face, then went about picking her way to Knockturn Alley. The shop bell jangled behind her and Fi began to stroll, keeping her eyes open for the masked wizards.

Bet I wouldn't be chased by Dark wizards at Hogwarts.

It was an idle musing, one she gave little consideration, but even as Fi turned her mind toward more feasible options for her relocation, she came again to the idea of Hogwarts, the only place in all of the United Kingdom she could think of that was as firmly lodged in the old ways of magic as Fi herself. She could flee the country, but Britain wasn't the only wizarding world poisoned with nasty little Dark witches and wizards and their fair share of Dark Lords. Fi had fled countries before—Egypt, Morocco, France, Romania—and so she knew with certainty that fleeing only dissuaded interested parties for a finite amount of time.