# But… I'm Harry Potter. Chapter 61
"Wait, say that again? The Patil sisters came to you… asking to be admitted into my circle?" I stared at my fiancée with genuine bewilderment, feeling something deep inside my skull begin to itch and stir in a distinctly unpleasant way.
"It looked more like a request to be recognized as junior wives, but you've got the general idea right," the pretty blonde sniffed, her sarcasm and irritation entirely unconcealed, shooting me a reproachful look at what must have been my thoroughly confused and pitiful expression.
I couldn't even find polite words for any of this. I rubbed the bridge of my nose and tried to gather my thoughts. It wasn't going particularly well — most of my mind was still floating somewhere in the vicinity of applied magic and the freshly sharpened paranoia that had returned to haunt me.
A month and a half had passed since that unfortunate Halloween and the official start of the Triwizard Tournament. I had calmed down a little, let myself breathe, savored the intoxicating relief — and then thrown myself back into studying magic with three times the intensity, pushing Agatha and Sirius both as hard as I could in an attempt to raise at least my personal defensive capability in the shortest time possible.
Not that it was any particular cure-all. Experienced wizards — not some street-level riffraff from Knockturn Alley, not ordinary civilians or half-trained graduates of mediocre magical schools, but real combat veterans and the most capable Aurors — could still reach me one way or another if they wanted to. And nothing would stop the Dark Lord's allies from grabbing one of my friends to use as leverage, which I was grimly preparing myself for mentally, even if there was nothing concrete I could actually do about it.
My own education, at least, was something I could pour myself into completely. Meaningfully improving the defensive capability of the people around me was another matter entirely.
The primary targets for potential blackmail against me remained the two Greengrass sisters, Luna, and Ginny. And while I could feel relatively calm about Daphne and Astoria — at least in part because their family name and the influence of their relatives offered some protection; very few truly unhinged people would want to turn an entire wizarding family against themselves, one that had managed to maintain its neutrality through the last magical war — that still left the others.
Luna, at least, I could watch over personally, simply because she behaved like a little barnacle and made every effort to spend the majority of her time at my side. The fact that we were in the same house only made keeping an eye on her easier.
That left Ginny Weasley as the most exposed, but she had several older brothers who watched over their sister in their own way. There was no particular confidence to be placed in Ron, but the twins… weren't nothing, at least.
Unlike me, Ginny, Luna, and the Greengrass sisters were still relatively ordinary witches for their age. And while our friendship, our shared training, and the general influence of one ill-fated hero had elevated all of them well above their peers — combat skills included — they were still teenage girls, and that made them acutely vulnerable to other people's schemes and attacks.
It troubled me deeply, and I could do almost nothing real about it. I could only hope for the best, and plan to load the girls down with training by the end of the year and infect them thoroughly with my own paranoid anxiety, so that they wouldn't be able to stick their noses out of the castle even if they wanted to. Just in case the timeline of the Dark Lord's potential return matched the history I remembered.
*Right. I've gone off track again. The current order of business is the Patil twins, who according to Daphne practically came to propose themselves to her recently.*
I forcibly cleared my head and redirected my attention to the more immediate problem.
"Can I ask how exactly this happened, and why a pair of perfectly eligible witches from our year would try to push themselves into my circle as 'junior wives,' as you put it?" I said, having managed to rein in my thoughts enough to return to the conversation.
"Well, I may have been slightly hasty on the junior wives part… and taken certain liberties with interpreting their intentions," the blonde remarked, looking at me without a trace of guilt. "But the basic answer is simple — the twins know about our training sessions, they want to join them, and their parents are apparently prepared to pay for your tutoring services."
"Why now specifically? And where did you get all this nonsense about junior wives in the first place?" I asked calmly, not doubting for a moment that Daphne had perfectly convincing answers to both questions.
"According to rumors currently circulating through Hogwarts, every girl you teach has already been catalogued as your mistress," the Greengrass heiress said with a combative little smile, clearly hoping to provoke some kind of reaction from me. The fact that she and Luna, Ginny, and even Astoria were doing absolutely nothing to dispel those rumors was something we would calmly set aside and forget. "Which means the twins' request to join the garden can be interpreted in quite a few different ways — as they themselves are perfectly well aware. They almost certainly framed it that way on purpose. And as for their attractiveness as prospective wives, you're somewhat exaggerating."
"Right, we've sorted that part out. Will you answer my first question? Why are the Patils making their move now, specifically? Exams are still a long way off. NEWTs are practically two years away," I ignored the provocation entirely and repeated the question that actually mattered.
"That would be better asked of the twins themselves. But I suspect word of your recent exploits has reached outside the castle, and their parents pushed them toward taking more active steps," the girl said, shrugging with studied indifference. She was clearly annoyed at the whole situation.
And honestly, she had every right to be. I wasn't entirely blameless this time either.
My active study of body-anchored defensive charms had drawn a fresh wave of attention. That particular branch of magic was typically only studied by experienced Aurors or certain master potioneers who worked with especially dangerous compounds. The difficulty involved in maintaining a magical barrier of any kind around a wizard through constant low-level energy expenditure and sustained mental effort was simply staggering.
Without exaggeration, this kind of magic was a serious statement of future mastery in charmwork, and a very visible demonstration of present ability to anyone paying attention. A weak wizard would struggle with these charms even after seven years at Hogwarts — that was an undeniable fact, and one I would have strongly preferred to conceal. But trying to learn to sustain these charms continuously without actually sustaining them in front of other people was a fairly spectacular contradiction in terms.
So it had come down to a choice between revealing some portion of my abilities and learning this magic properly. I had chosen the former without much hesitation, because when forced to choose between a fresh wave of public attention and the inability to master charms that might genuinely save my life, the choice wasn't difficult.
Which was why Daphne was sulking at me — and had also found out about my wandless magic ability in the process. I had kept that reasonably well concealed before, using a fake wand transfigured from various scraps of junk to practice, but now… Mrs. Agatha had given me away, informing her daughters quite directly about certain particulars of the magic I was studying.
Specifically, sustaining a constant magical barrier around a wizard is simply impossible without at least some working knowledge of wandless magic and a sufficiently high degree of magical sensitivity. Without those, you can't maintain the continuous magical output the barrier demands, no matter what it's meant to protect against.
So I had been forced to disclose things, at least to the extent of explaining that the wandless Wingardium Leviosa I had mastered long ago had evolved into something closer to full telekinesis — something I could do quite a lot with even without a wand. Juggling a dozen solid objects in the air through magic alone, for instance, or anything else at a similar level of complexity.
"All right. What do you actually think about Parvati and Padma Patil, and this whole situation?" I pushed the circling thoughts back to the edges of my mind and returned to the conversation with my fiancée.
"What do I think about them? You genuinely want my opinion on these two Indian girls and their initiative?" Daphne looked mildly surprised, apparently having not noticed my brief moment of distraction. Thanks to mental magic, I really could drift into my own thoughts fairly freely during a conversation without it showing. It had become second nature.
"Well, who else would I consult about this, if not my head wife? You're my fiancée, and you still understand the magical world roughly a thousand times better than I do — so think about what's best for the two of us," I said, borrowing the exact intonation Daphne herself liked to use, framing the situation from the angle that suited me. She could keep her little jokes about junior wives and all the rest of it to herself.
"So… formally, you wouldn't object to taking on the Patil twins as students? And you'd allow them to join the garden too?" She studied me with a sharp look, making no effort to hide the baiting edge in her voice.
"You talk as though this genuinely is a harem," I muttered with faint amusement, meeting her gaze — and quite accidentally catching the surface of her thoughts, which did in fact reflect something rather close to that framing where our group was concerned.
That actually stopped me for a moment, even though I was well aware that Ginny, for one, still harbored certain designs on my modest self.
*But the betrothal contract with Daphne rules out anything of the sort, doesn't it, unless I want to find myself liable to some form of compensation to the Greengrass family? Or am I missing something again with my Muggle way of looking at things?*
I turned it over rapidly in my mind, genuinely uncertain how to feel about any of this.
"Very well… If you're leaving the decision to me, I'll speak with the Patil twins again," Daphne said, and managed to surprise me once more. She had reined in her jealousy quickly and seemed to be approaching the situation from a purely practical angle. "Assuming you can actually handle teaching a proper study group. You did successfully drive Pansy and Draco and his little retinue away from our training sessions."
"They didn't want to put in the necessary effort themselves," I said, dismissing the implied accusation with reasonable ease despite my surprise. "And let's be honest — Draco is much more interested in consolidating his position in Slytherin right now than in training magic with us. He's barely been in the library lately."
"Our dragon wants to become a house prefect next year, so he's working himself ragged now that the opportunity's actually presented itself," the Greengrass heiress said with a light smile, unbothered by her house's internal power struggles.
Nobody had dared to bother her or Astoria for a long time now. My very visible protection played a part in that, as did her good relationship with Draco and the general influence of her family. If Daphne had actually wanted to compete for leadership within Slytherin herself, she could easily have given Malfoy a serious run for his money.
Not that she needed to. She remained the Ice Queen of Slytherin regardless. Her academic achievements alone — along with the skills she demonstrated occasionally, skills that consistently outpaced the general curriculum — elevated her above most of her peers without any external assistance.
And this in a house that had very few genuinely struggling or even merely average students to begin with. Slytherin's ambitious serpents understood firsthand the importance of personal magical strength for any future career in wizarding politics or economics.
A Hogwarts diploma and a connection to the old wizarding families elevated most graduates well above the general population as it was. But students at Hogwarts compared themselves to other Hogwarts students, and rarely spared a thought for the far less prestigious schools scattered across the rest of Britain.
Even so, Daphne and Astoria stood above that already formidable cohort by a meaningful margin, which gave them a genuinely secure position within the house. Though my status as Daphne's fiancé made the Greengrass heiress quite untouchable — in the best possible sense — to ordinary students.
The rumors about my strength and certain methods I had employed to rid myself of particularly persistent idiots — and there had been no shortage of those in my early years, the Creevey brothers alone being worth several paragraphs — had long since evolved into something only loosely connected to reality. But whatever form they had taken, they worked clearly in my favor, and I had no complaints about the resulting peace and quiet.
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