Her Dark Artifice [t.r]

Chapter 15: The Leaky Cauldron

XV

Evadne boarded the Hogwarts Express alone. She put her trunks away and sat idly by the window of one of the ubiquitous compartments at the rear, her head against the glass as the exterior - caked in a mosaic of snowflakes - showed the platform at Hogsmeade blanketed in heaps of snow gradually recede into the distance as the train took off and began a seven-hour journey down to Kings Cross. It was so cold aboard the Hogwarts Express that icy wintry afternoon that when Evadne breathed, she could see her hot breaths curl up into the air before her. She shivered underneath the fabric of her clothes.

There was a light tap against the compartment door.

The door opened and Tom entered. He was wearing a long black coat over a pair of black slacks and a white button-up shirt, a pair of two-tone lace-up oxfords and a knitted cashmere scarf around his neck. His black hair was messy and he looked a little frustrated.

"Good afternoon," Tom said, passive-aggressively taking off his gloves and shoving them into the pockets of his garbadine trench coat. "Thank you for waiting for me. Can I sit here?"

Evadne rolled her eyes. "I don't know, can you?"

She watched Tom surreptitiously above the volume of a novel she'd taken out of her satchel as he put his single trunk away and sat opposite her by the window. He had a copy of the Daily Prophet on his lap. An image of Gellert Grindelwald was plastered on the front page. He was a horrid-looking man, the epitome of what Evadne thought a dark wizard like him ought to have looked like.

"What's Grindelwald done this time?" Evadne asked nonchalantly.

"Fiendfyre on a muggle village in Eastern Europe. Thirty dead - mostly women and children because the men are obviously away fighting in World War Two - and over a hundred are injured. He did it to make a point to the German Ministry, apparently. They captured and killed one of his followers  ... Rosier," he added pointedly.

Rosier, Evadne thought. One of Nicholas' French relatives. There was a reason  Nicholas never spoke of his French branch of the family. They'd all turned to the dark side, one-by-one, slowly indoctrinated into Grindelwald's maniacal, pureblooded cause that had been going on for decades now. He'd been captured, escaped, an ongoing game of cat and mouse in which he slipped through cells and evaded death on numerous occasions.

His escapade of 1926 in the American Ministry was by far the most infamous of Grindelwald's outlandish debacles, in which Grindelwald had stolen the identity of an Auror named Percival Graves for months, tricking even the American Minister for Magic herself, Seraphina, leading the entirety of New York City to be obliviated.

Evadne felt disgusted. "That's barbaric."

Tom didn't utter a reply.

"Do you not think it's barbarism?" Evadne pressed on. "What have innocent muggles ever done to be caught in this nonsensical crossfire?"