Spells in Silence (Harry Potter)
- Thread starter Silently Watches
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Ch. 13, How Does Wizard Work?
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
Jean Luc turned his head from one side to the other, and Hazel had to hold back a smile when she heard his next thought. "This would have been much easier if everybody had not already run off. What am I going to do to keep her occupied? Who is still here… Ah ha! Grégorie! Mind helping me out for a minute? He knows a little English, which is better than most. Hopefully it will be enough to muddle through since she can't talk back to us in a sensible language."
She frowned. She was by no means fluent, but she knew some French! A little bit, anyway. …She had tried to learn a few of the common words and phrases that were in the back of her dictionary. It was not great, she knew that, but she had thought it would be enough to cover the basics while she looked in her book to find the words she wanted.
She also thought there would be more people who could read English, she admitted guiltily to herself. She expected she might need to do charades to get her point across from time to time, but she had not thought it would be a frequent problem.
Of course, neither had she expected to run into a pack of werewolves who knew all about a magical society within a week.
There were only a few people this Grégorie chap could be, but she was still surprised when it turned out to be a scruffy-looking older man with brown hair turned almost entirely grey and a slight limp in his left leg. "Where is the fire, Jean Luc— A girl? What in the world is she doing in the middle of this forest right after a full moon? Making a new friend, are you?"
Jean Luc sighed and ran one hand over his bald head. "Something like that. This is Hazel. Seems she is a Née-Moldus who managed to stumble on us in the middle of the night. She was not bitten!" he said when Grégorie's eyes immediately jumped to her, horror peering out of them. "Not that it was not the first thought on my mind as well. Since she is already here, I was hoping you could take her with you and show her around. She says she understands French, but she is illiterate and can only write in English. I know it sounds crazy, do not give me that look. I will fill you in on the details later tonight," he added at the flat expression Grégorie shot him.
"The woods are no place for a little girl. Nor are we. And what are you going to be doing while we are wandering the woods?"
"I still need to finish the budget for next month, and now account for another mouth to feed. It is boring enough for me to do. Forcing somebody to watch me do it could only be worse. I also need to take some time to decide what options I have for the long term. If she really has no one like she says, I might not have any other choice but to take her to Paris so they can stick her with some family or another."
A small smile flickered over her face. Jean Luc, as deep in this thoughts as he was, could not see it, but Grégorie wore a small frown of confusion. "What could she find funny about accounting?" he wondered quietly.
It was not the the budget she found funny though. It was the assumption that she would go along with any plan that involved 'sticking' her anywhere she did not want to go. She could teleport! A hundred kilometers or more were nothing to her, and that meant she would never be caged again, especially not with people who did not care about her. Not like the Dursleys had done to her for years and years and years.
She was free to wander to her heart's content.
Grégorie sighed quietly and waved for her to follow along with her. "This is a terrible idea. I guess you should come along with me. If you plan to stay here for a time, I might as well show you our little sliver of paradise. I wish that were true."
Walking in his wake, she held her notebook under one arm and pulled her French dictionary from her satchel. A tiny weight dropped onto her shoulder, and she spared a look at Morgan before returning her attention to the path Grégorie walked and the words on the page. She took a minute to find all the words she wanted, but soon she had a simple sentence written out in French this time. Her steps quickened, and she tapped his elbow to get his attention and show him her message.
'I can leave if you do not want me here.'
"What does that mean…? No, it is nothing like that," he said after a moment. "It is… You know what we are, no?" She nodded. "And you want to stay anyway? We are not safe for little girls to be around. Nobody, really. You would be better off with other people who are not so dangerous. Although maybe she should stay, if only so we can teach her how verbs work. How could she understand what we are saying if she does not know that, I wonder."
She blinked in confusion at that last thought and quickly shook her head. That was… not unimportant, necessarily, but certainly not the most important thing this instant. Some more searching, and she carefully copied the words from dictionary to notepad. 'You do not scare me.'
Fragments of thought whirled through his head for a couple of seconds, then he shook his head. "We should." He started walking away again.
Another tap, and he looked at the pad again. 'Where do we go?' was the best way she could figure out what she wanted to ask, and she cast a glare at the book in her hands. How a dictionary of all things, especially one as thick as three fingers, could not have the words 'are' or 'going' in it, she hadn't a clue.
Still, he seemed to parse out what she was asking. "Whenever we are transformed into monsters, there is a strong chance that we happened to kill something, some innocent creature. I tend to walk through the woods and check to see if that is the case. We tend to kill one or two deer a month, sometimes something bigger. When I find them, I bring the bodies back to butcher. Ha! Squeamish, are you?" he added when he saw her grimace. "It is not pretty, but better to cook the meat and tan the hide than to leave it all to rot. Keeps the smell down, too."
'The whole forest belong to the pack?'
"I hate that word. We do not call ourselves a 'pack'," he told her with just a trace of heat in his voice. "We are people, not animals. We are a commune, a family. Not a pack." Before she could finish the French word for 'sorry', he was already waving her off. "I know you did not know that. The wizards we have to deal with do not appear to know it either, no matter that we have told them a thousand times before. I am just telling you that for the future.
"But to answer your question, no. This is a large forest, and most of it belongs to the Moldus. We live on a portion of it that my family had enchanted so Moldus cannot see it."
Now she had to ask about the word that seemed to keep coming up again and again. 'Moldus?'
"Moldus are people who do not have magic. That describes most of the people you have met, I expect," he said with a small, knowing smile. "Jean Luc said you were a Née-Moldus. That means you have magic, you are a wizard, but instead of being born to other wizards like we were you were born to parents without magic."
Hazel frowned and thought about it. She was not, not with her mother being a druid too, but Aunt Petunia's behavior did not make any sense if her own mother was magical as well. Maybe her mum was one of these Née-Moldus people? 'More or less,' she finally replied. 'You say your family own this land?'
"I do, now. I was bitten as a child like too many of us were, and my father wanted to give me the best life I could have. It was not as if I could ever go to school being like this. He and one of his old school friends, one of the only ones who did not desert him because he refused to throw me out, taught me all about hunting and tracking and everything else I would need to know to live on my own. He also had someone put a spell on the edges of the land so I could not leave on the full moon when I changed. I invited some of the other werewolves I knew to come live here as well since that spell means we can not hurt anyone. That is how our commune got started. When he died, he left the land to me. And I know he gave me more so we would not have to live on nothing, but we will never see a single coin with Violette's husband being such a greedy bastard."
Grégorie stomped away faster, his thoughts turning ever more grumbling, and she hurried to keep up. Only once the furious thoughts directed at whoever this Violette – a sister, maybe? – and her husband were had calmed did she rush forwards a little to walk beside him so she could show him her notepad without constantly tapping him. 'You do not go to school? Why? Where do you learn magic if not school? Teach yourself?'
A hand came down to pat her gently on the head, and he gave her a sad smile. "I think I see why Jean Luc wants to keep you, now. When was the last time we had somebody so innocent around here? Werewolves are not allowed to go to any school in France. There is too much of a risk of us biting another child and giving them this curse. There also are not enough of us to warrant a school all our own, assuming the government would let us have one even if there were more of us. That also means that most of us do not know any magic. Jean Luc reads a lot and taught himself some spells, and Marcel, who you have not met yet, attended a magic school until he and a friend of his were bitten. They were expelled. Elise used to have a wand, but it was broken years ago. The rest of us do not really know anything about magic. A few potions are as close to magic as we get."
Potions?! Hazel stared at him in shock and a little rising dismay. They could make magic potions? Those appeared in all sorts of stories and folktales. What did he mean, that was not magic?!
Shaking her head at the surprising attitude, she asked the question that had come to mind before he distracted her. 'Why Elise not buy another?'
He grimaced. "Wands are expensive. They are meant to last a wizard his whole life. We do not have a lot of money to throw around, and definitely not enough to buy a wand for everybody. Not like a wand would do any of us much good without knowing how to use it. Why did Marcel not pay more attention to his lessons when he went to Beauxbatons? The rest of us have to live without."
Hazel's heart felt like it was breaking as she listened to the resignation in his voice, and she could not help but think how lucky she was to be born a druid instead of a wizard. The idea of not being able to do any magic without a wand was bad enough, but then to be unable to get one? To have this amazing gift dangled in front of her face her entire life but never being able to reach out and grab it? That was terrible.
She sucked in her bottom lip as she thought furiously. She was not proud of it, but she had become adept at stealing. It was easy when she could make everybody ignore her and when she could pick pockets with a hand that was not really there. She had benefited from it immensely. Maybe… maybe it was time those skills were used to benefit people besides herself. Her pen scribbled on the pad, and she turned it around.
'Where do you find a wand store?'
"Eager, are you?" he said with a laugh. "You are not old enough to get a wand. You have to be eleven or turning eleven and getting ready to go to school. It will be a few years yet. I hope by then we have someone who can take you in so you get to use that curious brain of yours. I am sorry if that is a disappointment."
'Okay. But for the future, where?'
"Persistent little girl, aren't you?" He shrugged. "Place Cachée would be the place to go. That is where all the magical shops are in Paris. I am sure somebody can show you the way when you are older, or maybe Lucien can take her there one day just to show her around. If she was raised by Moldus, I am sure it would be a sight to see."
Place Cachée. Place Cachée. She focused on the foreign words, trying to burn them into her mind. She could head out tonight to Paris and start looking around for such a place. Or, she realized, maybe some of those bad jobs Jean Luc said these people had were located in this same location.
It was worth a try.
"Come along," he told her with a wave, his indulgent smile revealing that he had no idea of her intentions. "We are wasting daylight, and we have not even started looking. The deer we killed last night are not going to drag themselves to us."
For the second day in a row, Hazel awoke to the sun shining in her face. This time, however, it was intentional, and she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and pushed herself upright. Her movements were careful because this time she remembered that she was lying on a precarious perch. Not a tree limb today, but instead the gently sloped roof atop one of the cottages in Jean Luc and Grégorie's commune.
She needed to wake up before anyone else to be sure that her plan would succeed.
The previous evening, the werewolves who worked had all returned to this little village and had been surprised by the mute girl hanging around in their midst. It meant a night full of introductions, the majority of which Hazel was not sure she would be able to remember. There were too many names, too many questions posed, too many little facts given to her, for her possibly to keep straight.
And yet for all that it was overwhelming, for all that several of them were scared to have her around, not a single one had turned her away. Their near-immediate acceptance had only strengthened her resolved, and while she might not be able to remember all their names and where they were from, she could keep track of their numbers.
Fourteen. Aside from Jean Luc and Marcel, there were fourteen werewolves here who had been denied their magic. She could fix that.
Sounds began coming from the various small houses as the sun fully breached the horizon. She waited and waited, and just like the day before, a handful of men and women started a tired slog northwards. Breathing out her ignore-me smoke to be on the safe side – although with how worn down they all looked, she might be able to follow without its help and still remain unseen – she and Morgan slid off the roof to the ground and slipped into the trees.
The walk served to wake the adults up, and she made sure to stay behind and to their left as they trudged along a path through the trees. The dirt beneath them was packed down hard from the constant passage of feet walking the same route day after day, month after month. She danced through the tree line, dodging small shrubs lurking in the shade of the larger trees and knotty roots that broke through the ground. After fifteen minutes of walking, they reached a small gravel road that cut into the forest, coming from she knew not where and returning to the same destination. One of the women at the front of the group reached into a small purse hanging from her wrist and pulled out something small and slightly shiny.
It looked like a coin.
She raised the coin above her head, and Hazel watched with burning curiosity. What was it for? Would it create a portal to their destination? Turn into a giant eagle? Just instantly teleport them all elsewhere?
On the other side of the group from her, the road started to stretch. It was as if the bend in the road she could see in the distance was moving farther and farther away, and as it did a shape started to form, one formed of grey shadows and empty. The shape gained substance, and Hazel could only stare as a carriage drawn by eight horses sped its way towards the group before slowing down to a stop in front of them.
The werewolves started climbing into the enormous carriage, but Hazel's eyes were fixed on the horses. Mostly because they were not horses, or not living ones anyway. Instead of skin and fur, they had plates of a bluish metal that flexed and shifted in a rhythmic pattern almost as though they were breathing in truth. In the gaps between the plates she could see innumerable gears spinning and ticking in an intricate dance. As those gears moved, the horses shifted and pawed at the ground in a strange synchrony.
They were undoubtedly not as warm and cuddly as living ponies would be, but there was still an elegance to them that was fascinating to watch in action.
The two clockwork horses in front reared up in unison, as they came down the two behind them started rising as well in the exact same manner. The action rippled through the team, and the carriage started rolling forwards. Her eyes grew wide as she realized she had missed her chance to sneak into the carriage, which left her with few options. Before the carriage could move too far, she jumped—
—onto its roof and pressed herself flat. I really hope this doesn't puff into smoke or something and leave me here, she told Morgan.
The horses and the carriage behind them picked up speed, and soon enough everything twisted and warped. Lying on her belly as she was, she thankfully did not fall through and land on the ground. Instead she was able to watch with amazement as the world around her smeared and swirled just like a painting she had to do in class one day after Dudley dumped a cup of water on it. She was hit with a blast of vertigo as everything seemed to tilt and then fold onto itself. Before the nausea could get too bad, all the tilting and swirling and smearing reversed itself, and the world snapped back into place.
She was no longer in a forest. Instead the carriage was stopped in a large cobbled square with streets running outwards at right angles to each other in all four directions. At the corners of the square between the streets stood large bronze braziers, and while she watched one flared up with bright green flames only to disgorge a man in a dark grey robe carrying a briefcase. She looked around, and sure enough just about everybody in sight was likewise wearing robes or else tunics over either trousers or long skirts. There were a few exceptions, mostly a few teenagers she could see here and there wearing normal clothes, but very few indeed.
People started climbing out of the carriage and walking towards one of the four streets. And more people, and more people, far more than this carriage could have possibly held even if everyone was sitting in somebody else's lap. Was it like her satchel, she wondered as her hand moved to pat the bag in question, lots bigger on the inside than on the outside? That certainly would explain what she was seeing, and there were maybe a couple of stories she had read where the wizard's home was bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside.
Another brazier flared, and with a quick hop she was beside the green fire and behind the woman who stepped down out of the pan onto the stone floor. A long blow to wrap herself in her smoke again, and she started walking down one of the streets at random and looking around her in amazement. Over there was a store with a tall stack of cauldrons flanking both sides of the door. Next to her was a store with jars of animal parts floating in oddly colored liquids and barrels. Farther up the street was a building whose sign changed colors every second or two next to a building where the mannequins in the window turned and posed for the passersby to see the robes they wore in the best possible light. In the sky above her flew flocks of owls, all of them entering and leaving different shops before flapping away, and at the sight of them Morgan squeaked and pressed tightly against her neck for safety.
What did wizards do with their time, she thought as she started listening to the surrounding crowd. Did most of them work, and if so, what jobs did they have? Did they push the boundaries of what was possible? Were there magical creatures like dragons or demons running around that they spent all day wrangling, and they had gotten so good at it that that was the reason nobody who was not magic knew about them? Or maybe, now that she was thinking about all the things she had seen in the last few months, were they out exploring new realms and alternate realities like those where the fae dwelled?
Several boys ran over to a window, one of them waving to a few others. "Look, look! Tinnamack just released a new broom! It's supposed to be faster than anything coming out of Britain nowadays!"
"Two sous per bat spleen?" an older woman yelled from inside a store, her voice coming through clearly despite the closed door. "That is highway robbery!"
"Did you see the new poster of Mathieu la Noir in Musique Magique? He makes me want to drink him dry," a teenage girl said to several of her friends before all of them burst out giggling.
"Sulliman needs to learn to wait," one man said to a harried-looking and pimply teenage clerk. "I can only brew so much at a time, and he isn't my only customer!"
Hazel's eyes bounced back and forth over everything around her, but the longer she walked, the more her smile faded until it was a small, thoughtful frown. This place, these wizards, were… not what she expected.
They had magic. They sequestered themselves from normal people. They had shiny cauldrons and strange smells wafting about. And yet despite all that, if she closed her eyes, she could all too easily imagine herself back in Bristol during the two weeks she spent in that city. The words these wizards used might be different, but what they were saying was exactly the same.
Morgan twittered at her in confusion and concern, and she shook her head. I'm fine, just got my hopes up for no reason. I thought these wizards would be like the ones from the books I read, where they spent all day doing research or guiding hobbits and boy heroes or tricking dragons out of their gold. They aren't. They're just regular people like everybody else.
Let's keep moving. There is all this magic stuff everywhere. It can't be that hard to find a wand store where we can do some 'shopping'.
As the sun rose in the sky, the air grew warmer and warmer. The stones of the street became hot to the touch. Finally Hazel could take it no longer and slid down one wall to the ground, sweat dripping down her face and the sleeves of the thinnest shirt she owned pulled up as far as they could go.
Today is the worst, she complained to Morgan, who unlike her appeared to have no issues with the heat. She suspected it was because nobody would look at him oddly for flying around with no clothes on. With how hot it was getting, she was sorely tempted to do the same and hope her ignore-me smoke kept people from noticing that she was naked.
Pulling a plastic water bottle out of her satchel, she took several gulps and grimaced at how warm it too had gotten. Not that it had been truly cold when she last filled the bottle. That was the downside of filling a bottle from a sink rather than giving in to temptation and stealing refrigerated bottles of water from stores. This way, she only had to steal once.
She snorted. At the rate she was going, she expected she would not be doing any thieving at all. She had wandered around what had to be the entire shopping district, ducking in and out of nearly every story, but despite hours of effort she had not been able to find one single store that had wands on display. That was the sole reason she had come here, to find the wand store and bring some back for the werewolves, but she could not find it! It was incredibly frustrating.
About the only thing as frustrating as that was the one store she could not figure out the purpose of. It had been on the end of one of the streets, but its sign was blurry in a way that did not clear up no matter how she looked at it or how much she blinked, and the door and windows were completely blackened out. When she tried to go inside, the door was sealed shut, and despite several tries her skeleton key spell could not to unlock it. She had been seriously tempted just to break one of the windows and walk in, especially since she still harbored a suspicion that this was the wand store she was looking for, but she had no confidence in her smoke's ability to hide her if she did that. Nor, honestly, did she think she could get in, make sure it sold wands, stuff fourteen wands into her bag, and jump out before somebody caught her and cast a spell on her.
She was too young to go to jail.
Even the visit to a magical bookstore had been a bust! Out of all the books stacked floor to ceiling, there was not a single one she could find that was in English. That a bookstore in France would only sell books in French was not a complete surprise, of course it wasn't, but that did not mean she was happy about it. Trying to translate even one book with just her dictionary would take forever, and while she could ask one of the werewolves to read it out loud for her, or even just read it to themselves so she could overhear their thoughts, adults always said that stealing was wrong. She doubted they would want to be involved in her reading her way through the bookstore, especially if they could not benefit from the books because they did not have wands with which to cast any spells of their own.
This bites, she thought with a sigh. But maybe it isn't as bad as it could be. Grégorie said I would be going to magic school when I turn eleven, so while it's over a year away, that's a year where I can learn whatever I want. I've come a long way just in the last six months, and now I have something more than my own guesses. I could learn how to make potions from the group and just putter around seeing what is here to be seen. It isn't like I have a deadline when I have to have learned such-and-such. I can do whatever I like.
All else fails, I have a year to get really good at reading French so I can read these books on my own if I get bored. A frown crossed her face. Or just in general. For all I know, if I stay here I'll have to apply to that French school Marcel went to, which means I really need to learn how to read and write.
She nodded firmly at that thought. It was not as if she planned to stop learning, after all. She would just keep learning what she could. From the way Jean Luc and Grégorie had talked about what she had to look forward to as a Née-Moldus, she could guess that she was not expected to know much of anything before starting school. Whatever she learned in the meantime was a plus, not her catching up.
Taking another few sips of water, she poured a small amount into her cupped palm and held it up so Morgan could drink as well. So we don't have anything to do here anymore. I guess we should head back to the forest, shouldn't we? At least it won't be as hot over there.
Morgan looked up from the water and tilted his head. With a chirp, he hopped from her arm to her sweaty hair and screeched before flying away. She climbed to her feet and started following, and then she caught sight of the store he was flying towards and sighed.
Blast it all, it's like the pet store all over again.
Hazel's feet landed in the soft dirt of the forest, and she stretched with a resigned smile on her face. Yes, dear, you were right, she told Morgan, who was perched securely on what little cloth now covered her shoulder. I'm not listening to you about everything though, so don't let it go to your feathered head.
The flap covering the doorway of one of the cottages flew open, and Jean Luc stepped out only for his eyes to immediately fall on her. "There you are! We have been looking all over for you all morning! For all we knew, you had been eaten or kidnapped or something. You scared Grégorie and me half to death—" He blinked when he saw her new outfit. "She for sure was not wearing anything like that yesterday. Where did you go?"
She needed to search in her satchel for her notepad as it had slipped down deeper into her pile of stuff, but soon enough she pulled it out. 'I caught a ride to Paris. Wanted to see what it was like, and I needed more summery clothes. What do you think?' She accentuated the question with a brief twirl.
When Morgan took off from her disgusting sweaty hair, he had immediately flown towards the nearest clothing store. A store that happened to be stocked with light clothing appropriate for a French summer. Her jeans and her long-sleeved shirts went back into her bag, as did a couple of pairs of white linen trousers, two skirts, and several tunic-like tops that had extremely short or no sleeves at all. She had wanted to leave it at that, but Morgan refused to leave the store until she took the light blue sundress with a yellow ribbon around the waist that he had remained stubbornly perched upon, which she was currently wearing much to his delight.
"What has my life become that a little girl is asking me for fashion advice?" Jean Luc covered his face with one hand and dragged it down. "It looks fine. Wait," he continued, his hand dropping to show a confused expression, "how did you get back here?"
'Jumped.'
"That tells me nothing. What do you mean, 'jumped'?"
She teleported five feet to the side then back to where she had been standing, and she pointed at her previous answer.
"You can teleport." She nodded happily, but he just kept staring at her. "She is a little kid. How in the world can she teleport already? That is not a skill she should be capable of until she is practically an adult!" He took a deep breath. "That's – terrifying – nice, Hazel. Do not do that too much. It can be bad for you. How she can do that without leaving bits and pieces of herself all over the country, I do not know and do not want to know. I just hope she quits. I do not know any spells to put her back together if she makes a mistake. And since you are back, you can help us with making dinner.
"Meanwhile, I need a drink."
Hazel really needs to get a book on French soon so I can quit writing sentences that are so grammatically incorrect. It makes proofreading just painful. (For anyone who doesn't get it, she only has a dictionary so doesn't know how to conjugate French verbs. All the verbs she is writing are in their base infinitive, "to blank" form. Maybe it just made more sense in my head. *blush*)
How expensive are wands? Canon is nonsensical or at least inconsistent because on the one hand we have Harry buying his wand for 7 galleons and Rowling saying that a galleon is worth 5 pounds, so it's only 35 pounds each; on the other hand, that was too much for the Weasleys to buy Ron his own wand until they won a sweepstakes despite that being literally the most important possession a wizard has. Not to mention that with how rarely people should need to replace their wands, I highly doubt Ollivander could make a living off his business because he would be looking at an income no more than £2.100 (roughly $4,200) PER YEAR. Even if we assume there are other schools whose students also get their wands from Ollivander, it is unlikely that there are another couple of thousand students lining up to buy a wand.
I normally handwave how much a galleon is worth and make it more valuable to explain the strange pricing found in canon, but while I was planning this chapter another potential explanation came to mind. Considering Harry was chosen by a wand that was the brother to Voldemort's and is made of holly, the wood that per Pottermore is inclined towards people "engaged in dangerous quests", Ollivander may have given him the wand at a significant discount as his version of "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this". The 7 galleon cost would therefore be specific to Harry when in truth he normally charges much more.
She frowned. She was by no means fluent, but she knew some French! A little bit, anyway. …She had tried to learn a few of the common words and phrases that were in the back of her dictionary. It was not great, she knew that, but she had thought it would be enough to cover the basics while she looked in her book to find the words she wanted.
She also thought there would be more people who could read English, she admitted guiltily to herself. She expected she might need to do charades to get her point across from time to time, but she had not thought it would be a frequent problem.
Of course, neither had she expected to run into a pack of werewolves who knew all about a magical society within a week.
There were only a few people this Grégorie chap could be, but she was still surprised when it turned out to be a scruffy-looking older man with brown hair turned almost entirely grey and a slight limp in his left leg. "Where is the fire, Jean Luc— A girl? What in the world is she doing in the middle of this forest right after a full moon? Making a new friend, are you?"
Jean Luc sighed and ran one hand over his bald head. "Something like that. This is Hazel. Seems she is a Née-Moldus who managed to stumble on us in the middle of the night. She was not bitten!" he said when Grégorie's eyes immediately jumped to her, horror peering out of them. "Not that it was not the first thought on my mind as well. Since she is already here, I was hoping you could take her with you and show her around. She says she understands French, but she is illiterate and can only write in English. I know it sounds crazy, do not give me that look. I will fill you in on the details later tonight," he added at the flat expression Grégorie shot him.
"The woods are no place for a little girl. Nor are we. And what are you going to be doing while we are wandering the woods?"
"I still need to finish the budget for next month, and now account for another mouth to feed. It is boring enough for me to do. Forcing somebody to watch me do it could only be worse. I also need to take some time to decide what options I have for the long term. If she really has no one like she says, I might not have any other choice but to take her to Paris so they can stick her with some family or another."
A small smile flickered over her face. Jean Luc, as deep in this thoughts as he was, could not see it, but Grégorie wore a small frown of confusion. "What could she find funny about accounting?" he wondered quietly.
It was not the the budget she found funny though. It was the assumption that she would go along with any plan that involved 'sticking' her anywhere she did not want to go. She could teleport! A hundred kilometers or more were nothing to her, and that meant she would never be caged again, especially not with people who did not care about her. Not like the Dursleys had done to her for years and years and years.
She was free to wander to her heart's content.
Grégorie sighed quietly and waved for her to follow along with her. "This is a terrible idea. I guess you should come along with me. If you plan to stay here for a time, I might as well show you our little sliver of paradise. I wish that were true."
Walking in his wake, she held her notebook under one arm and pulled her French dictionary from her satchel. A tiny weight dropped onto her shoulder, and she spared a look at Morgan before returning her attention to the path Grégorie walked and the words on the page. She took a minute to find all the words she wanted, but soon she had a simple sentence written out in French this time. Her steps quickened, and she tapped his elbow to get his attention and show him her message.
'I can leave if you do not want me here.'
"What does that mean…? No, it is nothing like that," he said after a moment. "It is… You know what we are, no?" She nodded. "And you want to stay anyway? We are not safe for little girls to be around. Nobody, really. You would be better off with other people who are not so dangerous. Although maybe she should stay, if only so we can teach her how verbs work. How could she understand what we are saying if she does not know that, I wonder."
She blinked in confusion at that last thought and quickly shook her head. That was… not unimportant, necessarily, but certainly not the most important thing this instant. Some more searching, and she carefully copied the words from dictionary to notepad. 'You do not scare me.'
Fragments of thought whirled through his head for a couple of seconds, then he shook his head. "We should." He started walking away again.
Another tap, and he looked at the pad again. 'Where do we go?' was the best way she could figure out what she wanted to ask, and she cast a glare at the book in her hands. How a dictionary of all things, especially one as thick as three fingers, could not have the words 'are' or 'going' in it, she hadn't a clue.
Still, he seemed to parse out what she was asking. "Whenever we are transformed into monsters, there is a strong chance that we happened to kill something, some innocent creature. I tend to walk through the woods and check to see if that is the case. We tend to kill one or two deer a month, sometimes something bigger. When I find them, I bring the bodies back to butcher. Ha! Squeamish, are you?" he added when he saw her grimace. "It is not pretty, but better to cook the meat and tan the hide than to leave it all to rot. Keeps the smell down, too."
'The whole forest belong to the pack?'
"I hate that word. We do not call ourselves a 'pack'," he told her with just a trace of heat in his voice. "We are people, not animals. We are a commune, a family. Not a pack." Before she could finish the French word for 'sorry', he was already waving her off. "I know you did not know that. The wizards we have to deal with do not appear to know it either, no matter that we have told them a thousand times before. I am just telling you that for the future.
"But to answer your question, no. This is a large forest, and most of it belongs to the Moldus. We live on a portion of it that my family had enchanted so Moldus cannot see it."
Now she had to ask about the word that seemed to keep coming up again and again. 'Moldus?'
"Moldus are people who do not have magic. That describes most of the people you have met, I expect," he said with a small, knowing smile. "Jean Luc said you were a Née-Moldus. That means you have magic, you are a wizard, but instead of being born to other wizards like we were you were born to parents without magic."
Hazel frowned and thought about it. She was not, not with her mother being a druid too, but Aunt Petunia's behavior did not make any sense if her own mother was magical as well. Maybe her mum was one of these Née-Moldus people? 'More or less,' she finally replied. 'You say your family own this land?'
"I do, now. I was bitten as a child like too many of us were, and my father wanted to give me the best life I could have. It was not as if I could ever go to school being like this. He and one of his old school friends, one of the only ones who did not desert him because he refused to throw me out, taught me all about hunting and tracking and everything else I would need to know to live on my own. He also had someone put a spell on the edges of the land so I could not leave on the full moon when I changed. I invited some of the other werewolves I knew to come live here as well since that spell means we can not hurt anyone. That is how our commune got started. When he died, he left the land to me. And I know he gave me more so we would not have to live on nothing, but we will never see a single coin with Violette's husband being such a greedy bastard."
Grégorie stomped away faster, his thoughts turning ever more grumbling, and she hurried to keep up. Only once the furious thoughts directed at whoever this Violette – a sister, maybe? – and her husband were had calmed did she rush forwards a little to walk beside him so she could show him her notepad without constantly tapping him. 'You do not go to school? Why? Where do you learn magic if not school? Teach yourself?'
A hand came down to pat her gently on the head, and he gave her a sad smile. "I think I see why Jean Luc wants to keep you, now. When was the last time we had somebody so innocent around here? Werewolves are not allowed to go to any school in France. There is too much of a risk of us biting another child and giving them this curse. There also are not enough of us to warrant a school all our own, assuming the government would let us have one even if there were more of us. That also means that most of us do not know any magic. Jean Luc reads a lot and taught himself some spells, and Marcel, who you have not met yet, attended a magic school until he and a friend of his were bitten. They were expelled. Elise used to have a wand, but it was broken years ago. The rest of us do not really know anything about magic. A few potions are as close to magic as we get."
Potions?! Hazel stared at him in shock and a little rising dismay. They could make magic potions? Those appeared in all sorts of stories and folktales. What did he mean, that was not magic?!
Shaking her head at the surprising attitude, she asked the question that had come to mind before he distracted her. 'Why Elise not buy another?'
He grimaced. "Wands are expensive. They are meant to last a wizard his whole life. We do not have a lot of money to throw around, and definitely not enough to buy a wand for everybody. Not like a wand would do any of us much good without knowing how to use it. Why did Marcel not pay more attention to his lessons when he went to Beauxbatons? The rest of us have to live without."
Hazel's heart felt like it was breaking as she listened to the resignation in his voice, and she could not help but think how lucky she was to be born a druid instead of a wizard. The idea of not being able to do any magic without a wand was bad enough, but then to be unable to get one? To have this amazing gift dangled in front of her face her entire life but never being able to reach out and grab it? That was terrible.
She sucked in her bottom lip as she thought furiously. She was not proud of it, but she had become adept at stealing. It was easy when she could make everybody ignore her and when she could pick pockets with a hand that was not really there. She had benefited from it immensely. Maybe… maybe it was time those skills were used to benefit people besides herself. Her pen scribbled on the pad, and she turned it around.
'Where do you find a wand store?'
"Eager, are you?" he said with a laugh. "You are not old enough to get a wand. You have to be eleven or turning eleven and getting ready to go to school. It will be a few years yet. I hope by then we have someone who can take you in so you get to use that curious brain of yours. I am sorry if that is a disappointment."
'Okay. But for the future, where?'
"Persistent little girl, aren't you?" He shrugged. "Place Cachée would be the place to go. That is where all the magical shops are in Paris. I am sure somebody can show you the way when you are older, or maybe Lucien can take her there one day just to show her around. If she was raised by Moldus, I am sure it would be a sight to see."
Place Cachée. Place Cachée. She focused on the foreign words, trying to burn them into her mind. She could head out tonight to Paris and start looking around for such a place. Or, she realized, maybe some of those bad jobs Jean Luc said these people had were located in this same location.
It was worth a try.
"Come along," he told her with a wave, his indulgent smile revealing that he had no idea of her intentions. "We are wasting daylight, and we have not even started looking. The deer we killed last night are not going to drag themselves to us."
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For the second day in a row, Hazel awoke to the sun shining in her face. This time, however, it was intentional, and she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and pushed herself upright. Her movements were careful because this time she remembered that she was lying on a precarious perch. Not a tree limb today, but instead the gently sloped roof atop one of the cottages in Jean Luc and Grégorie's commune.
She needed to wake up before anyone else to be sure that her plan would succeed.
The previous evening, the werewolves who worked had all returned to this little village and had been surprised by the mute girl hanging around in their midst. It meant a night full of introductions, the majority of which Hazel was not sure she would be able to remember. There were too many names, too many questions posed, too many little facts given to her, for her possibly to keep straight.
And yet for all that it was overwhelming, for all that several of them were scared to have her around, not a single one had turned her away. Their near-immediate acceptance had only strengthened her resolved, and while she might not be able to remember all their names and where they were from, she could keep track of their numbers.
Fourteen. Aside from Jean Luc and Marcel, there were fourteen werewolves here who had been denied their magic. She could fix that.
Sounds began coming from the various small houses as the sun fully breached the horizon. She waited and waited, and just like the day before, a handful of men and women started a tired slog northwards. Breathing out her ignore-me smoke to be on the safe side – although with how worn down they all looked, she might be able to follow without its help and still remain unseen – she and Morgan slid off the roof to the ground and slipped into the trees.
The walk served to wake the adults up, and she made sure to stay behind and to their left as they trudged along a path through the trees. The dirt beneath them was packed down hard from the constant passage of feet walking the same route day after day, month after month. She danced through the tree line, dodging small shrubs lurking in the shade of the larger trees and knotty roots that broke through the ground. After fifteen minutes of walking, they reached a small gravel road that cut into the forest, coming from she knew not where and returning to the same destination. One of the women at the front of the group reached into a small purse hanging from her wrist and pulled out something small and slightly shiny.
It looked like a coin.
She raised the coin above her head, and Hazel watched with burning curiosity. What was it for? Would it create a portal to their destination? Turn into a giant eagle? Just instantly teleport them all elsewhere?
On the other side of the group from her, the road started to stretch. It was as if the bend in the road she could see in the distance was moving farther and farther away, and as it did a shape started to form, one formed of grey shadows and empty. The shape gained substance, and Hazel could only stare as a carriage drawn by eight horses sped its way towards the group before slowing down to a stop in front of them.
The werewolves started climbing into the enormous carriage, but Hazel's eyes were fixed on the horses. Mostly because they were not horses, or not living ones anyway. Instead of skin and fur, they had plates of a bluish metal that flexed and shifted in a rhythmic pattern almost as though they were breathing in truth. In the gaps between the plates she could see innumerable gears spinning and ticking in an intricate dance. As those gears moved, the horses shifted and pawed at the ground in a strange synchrony.
They were undoubtedly not as warm and cuddly as living ponies would be, but there was still an elegance to them that was fascinating to watch in action.
The two clockwork horses in front reared up in unison, as they came down the two behind them started rising as well in the exact same manner. The action rippled through the team, and the carriage started rolling forwards. Her eyes grew wide as she realized she had missed her chance to sneak into the carriage, which left her with few options. Before the carriage could move too far, she jumped—
—onto its roof and pressed herself flat. I really hope this doesn't puff into smoke or something and leave me here, she told Morgan.
The horses and the carriage behind them picked up speed, and soon enough everything twisted and warped. Lying on her belly as she was, she thankfully did not fall through and land on the ground. Instead she was able to watch with amazement as the world around her smeared and swirled just like a painting she had to do in class one day after Dudley dumped a cup of water on it. She was hit with a blast of vertigo as everything seemed to tilt and then fold onto itself. Before the nausea could get too bad, all the tilting and swirling and smearing reversed itself, and the world snapped back into place.
She was no longer in a forest. Instead the carriage was stopped in a large cobbled square with streets running outwards at right angles to each other in all four directions. At the corners of the square between the streets stood large bronze braziers, and while she watched one flared up with bright green flames only to disgorge a man in a dark grey robe carrying a briefcase. She looked around, and sure enough just about everybody in sight was likewise wearing robes or else tunics over either trousers or long skirts. There were a few exceptions, mostly a few teenagers she could see here and there wearing normal clothes, but very few indeed.
People started climbing out of the carriage and walking towards one of the four streets. And more people, and more people, far more than this carriage could have possibly held even if everyone was sitting in somebody else's lap. Was it like her satchel, she wondered as her hand moved to pat the bag in question, lots bigger on the inside than on the outside? That certainly would explain what she was seeing, and there were maybe a couple of stories she had read where the wizard's home was bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside.
Another brazier flared, and with a quick hop she was beside the green fire and behind the woman who stepped down out of the pan onto the stone floor. A long blow to wrap herself in her smoke again, and she started walking down one of the streets at random and looking around her in amazement. Over there was a store with a tall stack of cauldrons flanking both sides of the door. Next to her was a store with jars of animal parts floating in oddly colored liquids and barrels. Farther up the street was a building whose sign changed colors every second or two next to a building where the mannequins in the window turned and posed for the passersby to see the robes they wore in the best possible light. In the sky above her flew flocks of owls, all of them entering and leaving different shops before flapping away, and at the sight of them Morgan squeaked and pressed tightly against her neck for safety.
What did wizards do with their time, she thought as she started listening to the surrounding crowd. Did most of them work, and if so, what jobs did they have? Did they push the boundaries of what was possible? Were there magical creatures like dragons or demons running around that they spent all day wrangling, and they had gotten so good at it that that was the reason nobody who was not magic knew about them? Or maybe, now that she was thinking about all the things she had seen in the last few months, were they out exploring new realms and alternate realities like those where the fae dwelled?
Several boys ran over to a window, one of them waving to a few others. "Look, look! Tinnamack just released a new broom! It's supposed to be faster than anything coming out of Britain nowadays!"
"Two sous per bat spleen?" an older woman yelled from inside a store, her voice coming through clearly despite the closed door. "That is highway robbery!"
"Did you see the new poster of Mathieu la Noir in Musique Magique? He makes me want to drink him dry," a teenage girl said to several of her friends before all of them burst out giggling.
"Sulliman needs to learn to wait," one man said to a harried-looking and pimply teenage clerk. "I can only brew so much at a time, and he isn't my only customer!"
Hazel's eyes bounced back and forth over everything around her, but the longer she walked, the more her smile faded until it was a small, thoughtful frown. This place, these wizards, were… not what she expected.
They had magic. They sequestered themselves from normal people. They had shiny cauldrons and strange smells wafting about. And yet despite all that, if she closed her eyes, she could all too easily imagine herself back in Bristol during the two weeks she spent in that city. The words these wizards used might be different, but what they were saying was exactly the same.
Morgan twittered at her in confusion and concern, and she shook her head. I'm fine, just got my hopes up for no reason. I thought these wizards would be like the ones from the books I read, where they spent all day doing research or guiding hobbits and boy heroes or tricking dragons out of their gold. They aren't. They're just regular people like everybody else.
Let's keep moving. There is all this magic stuff everywhere. It can't be that hard to find a wand store where we can do some 'shopping'.
As the sun rose in the sky, the air grew warmer and warmer. The stones of the street became hot to the touch. Finally Hazel could take it no longer and slid down one wall to the ground, sweat dripping down her face and the sleeves of the thinnest shirt she owned pulled up as far as they could go.
Today is the worst, she complained to Morgan, who unlike her appeared to have no issues with the heat. She suspected it was because nobody would look at him oddly for flying around with no clothes on. With how hot it was getting, she was sorely tempted to do the same and hope her ignore-me smoke kept people from noticing that she was naked.
Pulling a plastic water bottle out of her satchel, she took several gulps and grimaced at how warm it too had gotten. Not that it had been truly cold when she last filled the bottle. That was the downside of filling a bottle from a sink rather than giving in to temptation and stealing refrigerated bottles of water from stores. This way, she only had to steal once.
She snorted. At the rate she was going, she expected she would not be doing any thieving at all. She had wandered around what had to be the entire shopping district, ducking in and out of nearly every story, but despite hours of effort she had not been able to find one single store that had wands on display. That was the sole reason she had come here, to find the wand store and bring some back for the werewolves, but she could not find it! It was incredibly frustrating.
About the only thing as frustrating as that was the one store she could not figure out the purpose of. It had been on the end of one of the streets, but its sign was blurry in a way that did not clear up no matter how she looked at it or how much she blinked, and the door and windows were completely blackened out. When she tried to go inside, the door was sealed shut, and despite several tries her skeleton key spell could not to unlock it. She had been seriously tempted just to break one of the windows and walk in, especially since she still harbored a suspicion that this was the wand store she was looking for, but she had no confidence in her smoke's ability to hide her if she did that. Nor, honestly, did she think she could get in, make sure it sold wands, stuff fourteen wands into her bag, and jump out before somebody caught her and cast a spell on her.
She was too young to go to jail.
Even the visit to a magical bookstore had been a bust! Out of all the books stacked floor to ceiling, there was not a single one she could find that was in English. That a bookstore in France would only sell books in French was not a complete surprise, of course it wasn't, but that did not mean she was happy about it. Trying to translate even one book with just her dictionary would take forever, and while she could ask one of the werewolves to read it out loud for her, or even just read it to themselves so she could overhear their thoughts, adults always said that stealing was wrong. She doubted they would want to be involved in her reading her way through the bookstore, especially if they could not benefit from the books because they did not have wands with which to cast any spells of their own.
This bites, she thought with a sigh. But maybe it isn't as bad as it could be. Grégorie said I would be going to magic school when I turn eleven, so while it's over a year away, that's a year where I can learn whatever I want. I've come a long way just in the last six months, and now I have something more than my own guesses. I could learn how to make potions from the group and just putter around seeing what is here to be seen. It isn't like I have a deadline when I have to have learned such-and-such. I can do whatever I like.
All else fails, I have a year to get really good at reading French so I can read these books on my own if I get bored. A frown crossed her face. Or just in general. For all I know, if I stay here I'll have to apply to that French school Marcel went to, which means I really need to learn how to read and write.
She nodded firmly at that thought. It was not as if she planned to stop learning, after all. She would just keep learning what she could. From the way Jean Luc and Grégorie had talked about what she had to look forward to as a Née-Moldus, she could guess that she was not expected to know much of anything before starting school. Whatever she learned in the meantime was a plus, not her catching up.
Taking another few sips of water, she poured a small amount into her cupped palm and held it up so Morgan could drink as well. So we don't have anything to do here anymore. I guess we should head back to the forest, shouldn't we? At least it won't be as hot over there.
Morgan looked up from the water and tilted his head. With a chirp, he hopped from her arm to her sweaty hair and screeched before flying away. She climbed to her feet and started following, and then she caught sight of the store he was flying towards and sighed.
Blast it all, it's like the pet store all over again.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hazel's feet landed in the soft dirt of the forest, and she stretched with a resigned smile on her face. Yes, dear, you were right, she told Morgan, who was perched securely on what little cloth now covered her shoulder. I'm not listening to you about everything though, so don't let it go to your feathered head.
The flap covering the doorway of one of the cottages flew open, and Jean Luc stepped out only for his eyes to immediately fall on her. "There you are! We have been looking all over for you all morning! For all we knew, you had been eaten or kidnapped or something. You scared Grégorie and me half to death—" He blinked when he saw her new outfit. "She for sure was not wearing anything like that yesterday. Where did you go?"
She needed to search in her satchel for her notepad as it had slipped down deeper into her pile of stuff, but soon enough she pulled it out. 'I caught a ride to Paris. Wanted to see what it was like, and I needed more summery clothes. What do you think?' She accentuated the question with a brief twirl.
When Morgan took off from her disgusting sweaty hair, he had immediately flown towards the nearest clothing store. A store that happened to be stocked with light clothing appropriate for a French summer. Her jeans and her long-sleeved shirts went back into her bag, as did a couple of pairs of white linen trousers, two skirts, and several tunic-like tops that had extremely short or no sleeves at all. She had wanted to leave it at that, but Morgan refused to leave the store until she took the light blue sundress with a yellow ribbon around the waist that he had remained stubbornly perched upon, which she was currently wearing much to his delight.
"What has my life become that a little girl is asking me for fashion advice?" Jean Luc covered his face with one hand and dragged it down. "It looks fine. Wait," he continued, his hand dropping to show a confused expression, "how did you get back here?"
'Jumped.'
"That tells me nothing. What do you mean, 'jumped'?"
She teleported five feet to the side then back to where she had been standing, and she pointed at her previous answer.
"You can teleport." She nodded happily, but he just kept staring at her. "She is a little kid. How in the world can she teleport already? That is not a skill she should be capable of until she is practically an adult!" He took a deep breath. "That's – terrifying – nice, Hazel. Do not do that too much. It can be bad for you. How she can do that without leaving bits and pieces of herself all over the country, I do not know and do not want to know. I just hope she quits. I do not know any spells to put her back together if she makes a mistake. And since you are back, you can help us with making dinner.
"Meanwhile, I need a drink."
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Hazel really needs to get a book on French soon so I can quit writing sentences that are so grammatically incorrect. It makes proofreading just painful. (For anyone who doesn't get it, she only has a dictionary so doesn't know how to conjugate French verbs. All the verbs she is writing are in their base infinitive, "to blank" form. Maybe it just made more sense in my head. *blush*)
How expensive are wands? Canon is nonsensical or at least inconsistent because on the one hand we have Harry buying his wand for 7 galleons and Rowling saying that a galleon is worth 5 pounds, so it's only 35 pounds each; on the other hand, that was too much for the Weasleys to buy Ron his own wand until they won a sweepstakes despite that being literally the most important possession a wizard has. Not to mention that with how rarely people should need to replace their wands, I highly doubt Ollivander could make a living off his business because he would be looking at an income no more than £2.100 (roughly $4,200) PER YEAR. Even if we assume there are other schools whose students also get their wands from Ollivander, it is unlikely that there are another couple of thousand students lining up to buy a wand.
I normally handwave how much a galleon is worth and make it more valuable to explain the strange pricing found in canon, but while I was planning this chapter another potential explanation came to mind. Considering Harry was chosen by a wand that was the brother to Voldemort's and is made of holly, the wood that per Pottermore is inclined towards people "engaged in dangerous quests", Ollivander may have given him the wand at a significant discount as his version of "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this". The 7 galleon cost would therefore be specific to Harry when in truth he normally charges much more.
- Location
- Here
I've seen others posit that the 7-galleon price for a wand is partially subsidized by Hogwarts for first-year students, but they don't cover anything past the first.
Honestly the price of a Galleon being only 5£ makes no sense given some of the things that you buy for the lower currencies. For example a newspaper subscription would cost only 1 cent then, or the value of the Super prize for the Triwizard tournament that would allow the twins to Open their own shop in the busiest shopping street in Britain would only be 5000£.
Just given the things that people actually buy with Galleons they are more likely worth something like 100 - 300£ each.
Just given the things that people actually buy with Galleons they are more likely worth something like 100 - 300£ each.
- Location
- New Jersey, USA
Also the weasley's having only one galleon in their vault, which Molly pondered on whether or not it was worth taking, would also make no sense if it's worth only five. I normally go with the flat 'it's worth 50, not 5 pounds. JKR just mispoke/mistyped and then was too embarrassed to admit it afterwards' 
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
It'd be funny if the wizards thought it was a £5 exchange rate, but that value was determined back before the switch to pounds sterling. £5000 in old money really was a fortune.
- Location
- India
This still wouldn't explain why the Weasley's couldn't afford a wand for Ron. On the other hand, that one time when Harry went to the Weasley vault, there was only a single Galleon and some Sickles in there, so they may just be that poor (making the 1 Galleon = 5 pounds conversion rather nonsensical).
Thank you for a chapter! Interesting to see hints of Hazel's disillusionment with the wizarding world - I suppose with the "magic is real" shock being long over, magical alleys are just strip malls for robed fellows.
Another explanation that I've seen regarding wand value is that wands are priced similarly to a new car - but that there is a government subsidy for non-purebloods that results in wands being affordable enough that every hogwarts student can be expected to have one, but that pureblood families (i.e. Weasley and Longbottom) don't qualify for.
Another explanation that I've seen regarding wand value is that wands are priced similarly to a new car - but that there is a government subsidy for non-purebloods that results in wands being affordable enough that every hogwarts student can be expected to have one, but that pureblood families (i.e. Weasley and Longbottom) don't qualify for.
I think its likely that Olivander's prices are crazy, because he makes and matches every wand artisanally, and most wizards would go through maybe a handful of wands in a lifetime, though kids being kids, the teenagers likely have to replace them quite a lot. Wand cores SOUND expensive as hell, but at the same time they use only a tiny amount of material.
But we've seen that any old wand could ALSO work, even Hagrid's pieces of wand stuck in an umbrella, which is essentially nothing but the wand core, but becomes kind of fiddly and unreliable.
The Weasleys case sounds odd in general, I think its less "can't afford a wand" and more that "A wand is a substantial expense and we'd prefer not to make". So trying to reason it out beyond Rowling's "Well the Weasleys are poor so they do poor person things".
-Weasleys are an acknowledge pureblood lineage, noble in a way.
-Weasleys have a LOT of kids, the older kids are already employed in some rather prestigious and well paying jobs and the head of the family works a government job. Are they sending money home? Probably, the family has strong bonds.
-Is it possible that most of the Weasleys' money is going towards maintaining their estate which isn't generating any money, but is eating a lot of money to keep from turning into some kind of monster infested horror show?
In which case I'd say its not that they can't afford a wand, but that they won't buy a wand as long as the old one works, even if its a bit finicky. Eyeballing, a wand sounds a lot like the relative price range for a smartphone
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- Location
- UK
You know, there's a great story seed there. Like, Ron casually mentioning Weasley manor and it turns out the Burrow is actually just the old groundskeeper's cottage gone horribly wrong and there's actually a mansion over the hill, half ruined and mortgaged to the hilt.
- Location
- New Jersey, USA
I remember one fanfic I saw said that the reason why the Wealseys are so poor is that they are bad at money management: notice how their response to winning the lottery was not to get general life improvement, but to spend most of it on a trip to Egypt.
ecs05norway
Zenryoku Zenkai!
As far as exchange rates go, I prefer to peg the sickle to the pound.
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
The Weasley aren't really that poor, honestly? There's no indication they don't own their house, and they have steady income. They just have a bunch of children to feed. There's only so far they can fall. And it's also looking up by the time they go on the trip, with their eldest two being employed. Which is probably why they feel they can go on the trip.
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
I actually have a bit of headcanon for some of that, too. Remember how back in book 4, Arthur was asking Harry about Muggle money and thought a 20 pound note was a fiver, even though it has the number 20 stamped on it in a big, hard-to-miss font? I have a hard time chalking that up to the standard answer of "wizards don't understand anything about Muggles".I think Arthur has dyscalculia, basically dyslexia for numbers. It makes math really hard, which in turn translates into being really just awful at managing money. I don't think they could have gone from riches to rags in just one generation or anything, but if they didn't have much to begin with and then you add a bunch of kids to feed and clothe AND the person in charge of the family's finances can't effectively balance their checkbook/ledger/whatever wizards use? I could see it driving them to abject poverty.
Which would also make it ironic that the Weasleys have a cousin who's an accountant of all things, but maybe that and not the cousin potentially being a Squib is the real reason they don't talk to him. He pointed out that they were screwing up and offended their pride because he didn't think they could take care of it themselves.
- Location
- Laniakea
The economies are different. There are less wizards, so less newspapers are produced and sold and prices are higher. Scarcity and demand affect the value of goods and currency, not their relation to other economies. Separate economies only affect each other when there is trade between them, which is not the case for magical and no-mag products and goods.
Take it a step further: It's only subsidized for immigrants and Muggleborn.
So, the reason they call it the Burrow is that it's actually a Barrow, and the name just got corrupted over the generations?
- Location
- New Jersey, USA
They couldn't (or wouldn't) buy a first-hand want for Ron, as well as at least some of the other brothers. Considering how important the ability to cast magic is to wizards, not prioritizing wands for their children means some really weird priorities.
And again, they only had one galleon in their vault, which required decision making to grab for book spending or not. Also, they have second-hand clothes all over the place (Ron's yule robes, for example).
Yes, they're paying for a lot of children and trips, but they also don't have a lot of spare disposable income for even clothes and books.
...Actually, them going on overseas trips instead of buying firsthand wand, books and clothes adds even more to the theory of them being bad with money management.
Unless international holidays are vastly cheaper in the wizarding world for some reason. I'm talking 'cheaper than a new wand' cheaper.
And Harry because he's the BWL.
Or maybe only for Harry, because he's the BWL.
I think that on the Galleon exchange it might have been that British wizards are still not used to decimalization that happened in Britain. That can be one way why they say that the exchange is still £5 when it could have been higher if a currency exchange would be conducted because of how the pound fluctuated and most wizards are longer lived than their non-magical counterparts. Decimalization of the pound was also only less than twenty years ago in the context of the story its still too short for the wizarding collective memory to stick.
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
That wouldn't surprise me if it's the way it's supposed to be read. Rowling going with "the poor are poor because they're bad at money", a very tired trope, wouldn't be out of character.
Or maybe Olivander doesn't give a damn and make people pay whatever he thinks is fitting. He seems like the kind of person to do that.
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
That would be odd considering (and I'm pulling this from memory so could easily be wrong) that I want to say she was poor and on government benefits for a while before writing the first book. It's why she made the Ministry so incompetent, because she had to deal with bureaucrats for a period of time and painted the entire government with that same brush.That wouldn't surprise me if it's the way it's supposed to be read. Rowling going with "the poor are poor because they're bad at money", a very tired trope, wouldn't be out of character.
In all honesty I think it's more an example of Rowling not thinking things through at all, but that also wouldn't be out of character.
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
That would be odd considering (and I'm pulling this from memory so could easily be wrong) that I want to say she was poor and on government benefits for a while before writing the first book. It's why she made the Ministry so incompetent, because she had to deal with bureaucrats for a period of time and painted the entire government with that same brush.
In all honesty I think it's more an example of Rowling not thinking things through at all, but that also wouldn't be out of character.
Sure, but she'd also claim to be one of the ones good with money, hence no longer being poor. Often the new rich are worse about it than the old rich. But yeah, it's possible it's pure thoughtlessness.
- Pronouns
- Yes
I hadn't thought about this, which is odd because my head!canon is that him getting all the muggle names wrong is due to Dyslexia and not having anyone correct him when he gets it wrong. That does fit, although stuff like them wasting the money on a trip to Egypt can't be explained with Dyscalculia, it's simply bad impulse control and terrible at handling a budget. Unfortunately no shortage of such people in RL who manage to accumulate huge debts and then complain about being poor and no one helping them then buying another TV or whatever.
Given how bad she is at numbers, I think that just makes it work even better as an unintentional message.
- Location
- Here
One thing to keep in mind – if you're poor, but not declining further, and you get a windfall, there's an argument to be made for spending it on a short-term luxury like a vacation. Say you're not making very much over expenses, but you're not in debt, and what income you do have is stable and just-about-sufficient for your expenses if you scrimp. You'd be in trouble if unexpected major expenses came up but you could continue as you are indefinitely if they don't. Now you win the lottery, or some other big, non-repeating income. It's not big enough to live off of forever, or to produce a useful amount of interest if you invest it and never spend the principal. As I see it, you have three options:
- Save the windfall for emergencies. Definitely an understandable and forward-thinking choice, sure, but not one that really helps you in the short term, and long term it'll still be gone after that happens. One moment of things-not-being-as-bad-as-they-could-have-been, months or years in the future.
- Use it on your usual expenses, not needing to be quite so penny-pinching. Maybe fix some things properly instead of patching them repeatedly, which will reduce maintainance expenses for a few years until they wear out again. Slight increase in quality-of-living for some period of time and then you're back where you were. Hopefully you haven't lost the habits for effectively saving money when it runs out.
- Spend it on one big splurge, like a vacation. Large increase in quality-of-living for a short period of time, and then you're back where you were.
I'm not sure I can conclusively say that option 3 is necessarily bad? I mean, sure, if the money is enough that (properly managed) you could live comfortably off it for years, or if you've got debts you could pay off, do that. But if you can't make a significant permanent change with it... you just have to choose what to do with the temporary.
If I won $1000, or even $10,000 or $100,000... well, it's not enough to buy a house, to not be stuck paying landlords for the rest of my life, which would be the major way to turn it long-term. It's not enough to get much from investment, either – even if I could get 5% per year, that wouldn't cover rent either. If I had student loans or a mortgage, I'd put the money to paying those off, but I'm lucky enough not to have the former and haven't even had the opportunity to get the latter. I'd put it towards medical expenses, but some people aren't trans. If I'd already handled that... Send some to any friends in worse financial situations than me, of course, but if any was left over, I don't think anyone could begrudge me the decision to spend some of it on something nice for now. I've never been much for travel, but I'd at least get some good food, some books or games, maybe a nice rug, or a proper desk instead of this little slightly-wobbly table that's slightly unfitting in every dimension.
- Save the windfall for emergencies. Definitely an understandable and forward-thinking choice, sure, but not one that really helps you in the short term, and long term it'll still be gone after that happens. One moment of things-not-being-as-bad-as-they-could-have-been, months or years in the future.
- Use it on your usual expenses, not needing to be quite so penny-pinching. Maybe fix some things properly instead of patching them repeatedly, which will reduce maintainance expenses for a few years until they wear out again. Slight increase in quality-of-living for some period of time and then you're back where you were. Hopefully you haven't lost the habits for effectively saving money when it runs out.
- Spend it on one big splurge, like a vacation. Large increase in quality-of-living for a short period of time, and then you're back where you were.
I'm not sure I can conclusively say that option 3 is necessarily bad? I mean, sure, if the money is enough that (properly managed) you could live comfortably off it for years, or if you've got debts you could pay off, do that. But if you can't make a significant permanent change with it... you just have to choose what to do with the temporary.
If I won $1000, or even $10,000 or $100,000... well, it's not enough to buy a house, to not be stuck paying landlords for the rest of my life, which would be the major way to turn it long-term. It's not enough to get much from investment, either – even if I could get 5% per year, that wouldn't cover rent either. If I had student loans or a mortgage, I'd put the money to paying those off, but I'm lucky enough not to have the former and haven't even had the opportunity to get the latter. I'd put it towards medical expenses, but some people aren't trans. If I'd already handled that... Send some to any friends in worse financial situations than me, of course, but if any was left over, I don't think anyone could begrudge me the decision to spend some of it on something nice for now. I've never been much for travel, but I'd at least get some good food, some books or games, maybe a nice rug, or a proper desk instead of this little slightly-wobbly table that's slightly unfitting in every dimension.
- Location
- UK
Option 4 is to give it/spend it as quickly as possible. It feels intuitively weird, but converting physical capital into social capital is one of the better ways of building a safety net when you're at the bottom. This year's deadbeat friend is next year's buddy willing to spot you his couch for a few weeks. Sure, it's not a strategy that will every pay off debts but if they're insurmountable then there wasn't any reason to try.
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
her resolve
every store
Kinda surprised wizarding shops don't have charms to prevent disallusionment or invisiblity cloaks, as you'd figure they've got some part of the population who engage in (petty?) theft. Although I don't think we ever saw 'living paycheck to paycheck' or 'off government handouts' poor in canon, come to think of it.