"Today's flying lesson is the one I've been waiting for. Though I do wonder if I even need the training at all. I've been riding a broomstick since I was a child, I used to play Quidditch with the neighbours all the time. I was always the ace, always the Seeker. I found the Snitch first every time, and not a single Bludger ever came near me."
On Thursday morning, as Mirabelle sat at breakfast, Malfoy's self-satisfied voice carried across the table without pause.
He was meticulously explaining to everyone within earshot just how accomplished a broom rider he was. Mirabelle paid none of it any attention. What mattered now was how one properly savoured breakfast.
British food was generally regarded as lacking, but its breakfasts were a notable exception. The novelist W. Somerset Maugham had famously observed that if one wished to eat well in England, one should eat breakfast three times a day. Mirabelle considered this a genuinely profound piece of advice.
"I was flying high on my broomstick last year when a Muggle helicopter came right at me. Muggles are such helpless creatures, they can't get off the ground without one of those enormous metal boxes. I dodged it at the last second, just at the very edge of a collision. You might think we nearly crashed? Not at all. It simply looked as though we'd both stopped moving."
Mirabelle cut her fried egg with a fork and took a bite. The absence of soy sauce was a small disappointment, but it was not bad. She savoured the mild flavour, then moved on to the sausage.
When she bit into it, the crispy surface gave way and the juices spread across her tongue. She swallowed, then lifted her cup and took a measured sip of tea with milk.
This. This was what breakfast ought to be.
She reached for a slice of toast spread with strawberry jam. Even in Britain, where cooking could be rather haphazard, the bread itself was reliable. The sweetness of the jam and the flavour of the toast complemented each other cleanly, a genuinely pleasant combination.
It was a wonderful breakfast. It would have been a perfect one, if not for the noise.
A vein appeared at Mirabelle's temple. She rose from her seat, crossed to the one two places behind Malfoy, seized him by the hair, and pulled hard enough that he nearly came off the bench entirely.
"What?! B-Beresford, what do you think you're—?!"
"Malfoy. Take your bragging somewhere else. You are ruining my breakfast."
When eating, one required stillness and peace. Mirabelle did not consider it a meal if someone was talking loudly with food in their mouth or carrying on as though the table were a stage.
That was a profound disrespect towards the ingenuity of humankind that was cooking. God might forgive it. She would not.
She forced Malfoy to face her, narrowed her golden eyes to a sharp glint, and held his gaze.
"Eat in silence. If you cannot manage that, I will put you through the stained glass. Are we understood?"
"...Y-yes."
Malfoy would later recount, with some feeling, that those eyes had been entirely serious.
He was not wrong. She showed absolutely no mercy to anyone who disrupted a meal. Had he offered so much as a word of resistance, he would very likely have gone through the window. She returned to her seat and enjoyed the remainder of her breakfast in pleasant quiet.
======
Half past three in the afternoon. The flying lesson that a great many students had been anticipating with excitement had finally arrived.
First-years from Gryffindor and Slytherin gathered on the lawn, talking noisily. The conversation ran to favourite Quidditch teams and preferred broomstick models. Mirabelle and Edith were no exception, carrying on their own easy conversation about nothing in particular.
"Mirabelle, do you have your own broom? I have a Cleansweep Seven."
"I have one I'm quite fond of, a Silver Arrow, specially tuned for me."
"A Silver Arrow? I don't think I've heard that name."
"It's an old model, handmade by a single craftsman named Leonardo Jukes. Production has long since ended, but my father knew the man personally and had one rebuilt for me using current techniques."
Madam Hooch, the instructor, arrived before the assembled students and took her position. She had short, neatly cropped white hair and sharp yellow eyes that put one in mind of a hawk. She began issuing orders almost before she had stopped walking.
"What are you all standing about for? Everyone beside a broom. Now, quickly!"
The students scrambled to their positions. Mirabelle and Edith were already in place.
The broom at Mirabelle's feet was a flimsy, cheap thing with the incongruously grand name of Shooting Star.
The Shooting Star had been produced by Universal Broom Ltd. in 1955 and was notorious for deteriorating rapidly. Its poor quality had led to an equally poor safety record, many riders had come down rather faster than they went up, flooding the company with complaints until it eventually went bankrupt. It was genuinely baffling that such a broom served as the standard school model.
Then again, it was cheap.
"Hold your right hand over the broom and say, 'Up!'"
Everyone called out "Up!" in more or less enthusiastic unison, and Mirabelle followed along with mild reluctance.
She had been made to do precisely this sort of exercise at the age of three until she was thoroughly tired of it. Failure had been met with a switch each time.
The broom rose smoothly into her hand. Not everyone was so fortunate. Of the assembled students, only Malfoy, Harry, Mirabelle, Edith, and a handful of others managed it cleanly on the first attempt. Even Hermione, unusually, was struggling.
Once everyone had their brooms in hand, Madam Hooch moved down the line correcting their grips and adjusting their stances. Then, at last, she gave the instructions for the lesson itself.
"When I blow the whistle, push off hard from the ground. Keep the broom steady, rise to roughly two metres, then lean forward slightly and come straight back down. Ready? One, two—"
"NOOOOOOO!"
Before the whistle reached her lips, Neville let out a shriek and launched himself upward.
He had almost certainly panicked, overcome by the tension and, perhaps, a fear of being left behind. Madam Hooch shouted for him to come back, but anyone calm enough to do that would not have jumped in the first place.
Neville shot approximately six metres into the air, then released his broom entirely. He came straight back down without it, face first, and hit the grass with a sickening crack.
Then he started crying.
He had broken his wrist, but he was conscious. Quite a resilient boy, in his way.
"My arm — it's broken—!"
Madam Hooch rushed over, lifted him off the ground, and ran towards the hospital wing, offering words of encouragement that were somewhat undermined by her visible urgency.
She stopped partway and turned back to address the remaining students in a severe voice.
"No one is to move while I am gone. Leave the brooms exactly where they are. Is that understood?"
"My arm—!"
"Yes, yes, I'm taking you now!"
What happened next required little explanation. It unfolded almost exactly as Mirabelle had known it would.
Malfoy snatched the Remembrall that Neville had left behind, a small glass ball that glowed red when its owner had forgotten something, and took to the air with it. Harry went after him to get it back.
And Professor McGonagall, who happened to be watching from above, appeared and removed Harry from the courtyard.
"Hahaha! Did you see Potter's face? He's definitely going to be expelled!"
Malfoy's laughter rang out across the courtyard the moment Harry and McGonagall were out of sight. Those around him picked it up, and for a moment the lawn was full of it. Hermione and Ron looked miserable, powerless to object when they could already see where the story was going.
It was, then, a surprise to everyone present when the voice that interrupted Malfoy's triumph belonged to another Slytherin student.
"Malfoy." Mirabelle stood with her arms folded, expression unimpressed. "Hate to disappoint you, but Potter is not going to be expelled."
Malfoy's laughter stopped. "...What did you say?"
"If Potter is to be expelled for flying without permission, then so are you, you were up there with him. Did you not find it odd that only Potter was taken away? And look more carefully at what was in McGonagall's eyes when she left." She paused. "It was not anger. It was delight."
Every eye in the courtyard turned to her.
She was right, and the students felt it as soon as she said it. If the rule had been the issue, Malfoy would have been taken along. He had not been.
"W-well then, why was it only Potter?!"
"Because of the difference in what they can do, and what that means. Think about what you just watched. Potter rode a Shooting Star for the first time in his life, dived sixteen metres, and retrieved a falling object without a scratch. On a defective school broom." She looked at Malfoy without blinking. "Could you have done that?"
Malfoy's mouth opened. The words did not come. He wanted badly to say yes, to insist that of course he could have, that he was more than capable of that and more.
But something about Mirabelle's golden eyes made the lie impossible. They created the distinct and deeply uncomfortable sensation that everything one said was being measured against the truth, and that the gap between the two was visible.
"Potter is a natural. A once-in-a-generation Seeker. McGonagall recognised it on the spot, that is why she took only him. Malfoy, you did not get Potter expelled today. You handed him to the Gryffindor Quidditch team. You made him Slytherin's most troublesome opponent."
"That's insane! Are you seriously telling me Potter was taken away to be made a Seeker?! He's a first-year, the same year as us!"
"He is also a genius. Look back over the past two years, or seven, and you will not find a better natural Seeker."
Harry was in Gryffindor. He was, by any reasonable measure, Slytherin's enemy. And yet Mirabelle spoke of his talent with something that was unmistakably genuine, admiration, even. That was simply who she was. Talent and ability commanded her respect regardless of the person who carried them. An uncompromising meritocracy, held without exception.
"Do you remember what I said to you at Madam Malkin's before term began?"
Malfoy's expression shifted as the memory surfaced. "...Ah... 'Only the truly excellent...'"
"'Only the truly superior will attain glory, and the inferior will be set aside.' Potter seized an opportunity today because he had the talent to recognise it and the skill to act on it. You served as his stepping stone. Nothing more."
The colour drained from Malfoy's face. Mirabelle leaned towards him and spoke quietly, almost gently.
"This is how the world works, Malfoy. Ability and talent. Do you understand now, even a little, how little lineage has to do with any of it?"
"N-no — that's a lie — I don't accept it, he's going to be expelled, that's what's going to happen—!"
Malfoy turned and ran, his voice breaking as he went.
Mirabelle did not watch him leave. She returned to her original position, where Edith was waiting with an expression of profound exhaustion and a thin sheen of cold sweat.
They had not known each other long, but Mirabelle was already familiar with that particular look.
"...That was merciless, Mirabelle. You more or less just told him he was second-rate to his face."
"I said nothing of the sort. He can fly, and with dedicated practice he could become the house representative by his second year. He is not without ability."
Edith blinked, surprised. She had not expected that.
'So she does actually think reasonably well of him.'
"Well," Mirabelle added, "he is perfectly ordinary. He will simply never reach the level of the real thing."
Edith almost stumbled.
Every time. Just when it seemed as though Mirabelle had offered something almost generous, this was what followed.
After spending the past several days in her company, Edith had understood clearly that she was a person of extreme and uncompromising meritocracy, but even so. This was genuinely, pathologically harsh.
She often found herself wondering why, exactly, she had become friends with someone like this. She suspected she would never arrive at a satisfying answer no matter how long she thought about it.
When Madam Hooch returned and the lesson resumed, Mirabelle demonstrated with complete calm that she had not been boasting. Her flying was effortless, precise, and rather spectacular, acrobatic in a way that made it look entirely incidental.