The Theory of Magic (Book 1)

23 // Tessomancy & Bloodied Noses

The scritch of a quill's tip moving across parchment and purr of an Augurey's slumbering breath were the only sounds to be heard in Delphinia Dullahan's office on that quiet night midway through April.

Fi sat behind her desk doing what most professors were doing during the Easter holiday: grading papers. Truthfully, it seemed professors never stopped grading papers, but with finals looming on the proverbial horizon, Fi and the others had been forced to double their students' workload and, thus, double their own responsibilities. Fi lingered longer and longer in the candlelight these nights, watching the wavering flame, red ink slashed across a student's paper like fresh blood. She hummed Gaelic nursery rhymes under her breath and listened to Ever's nattering.

Tonight, the hour had grown late, curfew come and gone, Ever silent and gruesome on her shelf and Puck snoozing on his perch. Fi sipped her cold tea and considered the filmy dregs left to swirl about the bottom. She tipped the empty cup toward the light.

"Hey, Ever," she said aloud, bored. "What does this look like to you?"

Startled awake—or out of whatever trance the not-quite-living descended into—Ever grunted. "What?"

"What does this look like?"

A beat of silence, then, "It looks like a whelp who should have her backside switched for waking up a High Witch! Honestly, Delphinia! Tessomancy at this hour?"

Fi shrugged, swiveling the cup. "No, looks a bit like a sailboat this way. But if you turn it this way—." She flipped the cup around. "Looks like a bird. Like a hawk or a falcon or somethin'." She swallowed a yawn. "And this way, it looks like Puck when he flew into that window. You remember? And then he slid down the wall—."

"Yes, Delphinia."

"Like a crumpled ball of parchment—."

"Yes, Delphinia."

"I feel like you're just telling me what I want to hear."

"Yes, Delphinia."

"...Fine."

Grumbling, Fi returned to her grading, propping her head up on a bent arm. She spent far too much time correcting the grammar and spelling of half-bloods and pure-bloods while Muggle-borns had enough primary school under their belts to keep their words comprehensive. Fi wondered what had become of the tradition of schooling the newest generations at home. The vast majority of the Wizarding community was related to some extent, the pure-bloods more so, and a century ago they used to gather their children together by age group and tutor them at home before Hogwarts sent letters. Had that tradition gone by the wayside?

Or were there just not enough pure-bloods left?

Sad, Fi thought. But entirely plausible. After all, the Aeter witches had been providing fresh blood for the Wizarding world for nigh on two millennia. In days past, the coven had found their...conquests among the pure-blood Wizards, and had preformed that hallowed service needed by all barren family patriarchs; if the Aeter witch bore a son, the boy was returned to his father, no questions asked, and if she bore a daughter, then the coven got a new sister. Fi herself was the daughter of a proper English lord with more money than sense. She met him once as a child because her mother had something of a soft spot for the bloke, having given him two sons before Fi came along. He'd sniffed at her unkempt appearance but hadn't dared say a word, terrified of her mother. Insulting Melisande Dullahan was tantamount to suicide.

Every pure-blood family still alive owed their existence to an Aeter witch who freshened their bloodlines at some point in time. Fi pondered what would happen to Wizarding Britain without her coven, and whether the irrevocable decline had already begun.