Come Sunday night, however, the initial euphoria of Nurcan finding out that she made it to the Triwizard Tournament’s short list, and hence to Hogwarts, gives way to another issue:

  “Mesdames et messieurs, je dois vous prévenir. D’ici au vingt-huit octobre, vos horaires vont devenir bien plus serrés. Vous ne pourrez plus rencontrer vos amis autant qu’avant!” (Ladies and gentlemen, I must warn you. Until October 28, your schedules will become much tighter. You won’t be able to meet your friends as much as before!) Armand warns the 13 short-listees assembled near the Quidditch pitch.

  “Pour vous entra?ner, à chaque soir, on va installer une tache d’un Tournoi des Trois Sorciers passé, et vous juger en conséquence!” (For your training, each night, we will set up one task from a past Triwizard Tournament, and judge you accordingly!) Ronaldo instructs them.

  “Mais avant chaque pratique, vous aurez une le?on d’anglais!” (But before each practice, you’ll get an English lesson!) Sandrine adds, while she hands off the room to Mélisande as she leaves the room.

  Mélisande starts with the fundamentals of English grammar, while the other professors on the selection committee go on the pitch to prepare the practice of the day. Like verb conjugation, and syntax.

  All 13 seem to find the prospect of trying to get sufficient language proficiency to be able to survive 8 months of academic work at Hogwarts daunting, and they all seem to be on edge. Even Alejandra, Nurcan and Paulinho, who all underwent this process of learning a new language before, to say nothing of Thierry and the others, who only spoke French.

  Nurcan raises her hand near the end of their inaugural English lesson. “One question, Mélisande: will we be allowed an English-French dictionary on tests at Hogwarts?”

  “That remains to be seen, but we might give you an enchanted one prior to departure so that you won’t be able to write on it!” Mélisande answers the 13.

  And some of the other 12 ask questions to Mélisande, about what it all means, before she distributes a personality test as it appeared in a past Homeschooling Monthly issue, called: Which Hogwarts House Would You Be In. With a preamble about the sorting process, and how it differed for people who come in at the start of the school year vs everyone else, such as exchange students who don’t spend the whole year, as is their case.

  But when the Quidditch pitch is ready to be used for their training session of the day, all 13 are herded on the pitch’s ground level.

  “Pour la pratique d’aujourd’hui, vous devez trouver un indice caché sur une créature de la nuit dans ce labyrinthe de haies!” (For today’s practice, you must find a clue hidden on a night creature in this hedge maze!) Ronaldo yells.

  The draw designates Nurcan to go first. As such, she starts entering the maze, trying to navigate it, but finds her way blocked by what appears to be a grenadier-sized version of Alejandra, but wearing a Royalist grenadier uniform, aiming a Model 1777 Charleville musket at her at point-blank, while loading powder into it.

  “Expelliarmus!” Nurcan waves her wand at what seems to be a Royalist grenadier to her.

  The spell causes the musket to misfire as it gets violently thrown off the grenadier’s hands and becomes unusable for a bit, while also knocking the grenadier back somewhat.

  But how the grenadier reacts afterwards, as he gets backs on his feet, makes Nurcan realize that she isn’t dealing with Alejandra, nor with a real Royalist grenadier, since the real Alejandra isn’t “grenadier-sized”, i.e. isn’t that tall.

  “Little Revolutionary witch! You think your magic can save la patrie en danger from the Royalist threat?” a creepy voice, clearly not Alejandra’s, gets heard across the repurposed pitch.

  It can only be a boggart; there is no report of Royalist activity in the Couserans region, the administration would have warned us about Royalist troops advancing towards the school if they were on the move! Nurcan starts thinking while she tries to maintain some distance with the grenadier, who then draws a saber.

  “Riddikulus!” Nurcan yells in the grenadier’s direction, trying to dodge the saber being swung at her.

  The grenadier’s uniform poofs and the night creature becomes a sword swallower, attempting to swallow the saber that was previously swung at her, but starts bleeding profusely when the saber reaches a certain depth inside its body. The loss of blood causes the creature to vanish, even as her magical battery seems to be mostly drained.

  Yet, the musket from earlier has hung-fired, causing a loud noise, and the bullet in it appears to have dented the hedge it was hung-fired at. She looks at the now-empty musket, frantically searching for a clue, be it on its stock or elsewhere.

  “The next task… will make you… fall… in love… at… first sight?” Nurcan reads the etched clue out loud, in a broken English that she just started learning earlier tonight, before the boggart’s musket vanishes from her hands, despite having looked like the real thing, complete with a standard-issue bayonet.

  A task that would make me fall in love at first sight? The next task involves brewing a love potion of some sort, I guess… but I can’t even be sure whether tomorrow’s practice really is about brewing said potion! Nurcan then returns from the pitch, with the clue on the musket having been heard by everyone. Damn it, I feel like all shortlisters know about Revolutionaries and Royalists by now because of how my run inside the maze went… but people tend not to believe other people’s boggarts. Alejandra is the one here who knows most about the Revolution outside of me!

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  Yet, she tries to resist the temptation to question the other 11 shortlisters about their stances on the Revolution since she feels mere knowledge of its existence is insufficient for them to take a position.

  “De quoi tu parles?” (What are you talking about?) Paulinho asks her.

  “La prochaine tache va me faire tomber en amour au premier regard!” (The next task will make me fall in love at first sight!) Nurcan repeats the clue engraved on a magically vanishing gun, belatedly translated to French.

  When Thierry, who goes second, starts his practice run, Nurcan goes back to the personality test Mélisande gave all 13 earlier, only having answered part of it.

  A Mélisande who’s finalizing the grading of History of Magic homework in Isabella’s section about the Affair of the Poisons, while the other 12 attempt to go through the hedge maze.

  When Nurcan is done filling in the personality test, which, to her feels like one of those tests intended to be used as a joke, she uses the answer key to get a feel of how many answers of each type she obtained.

  I got Ravenclaw as the most likely house for me to be sorted into. But these kinds of things circle back to this whole 3/32 prediction of odds that’s seemingly stuck inside my brain for over a month now. Even when I make it to the short list, this number stubbornly refuses to budge! Nurcan ruminates while Thierry gets another encounter as the clue-holder.

  So it seems that, rather than to get a Royalist grenadier, Thierry gets a werewolf as his clue-holder, in wolf form. Even as Thierry is locked into a fight against what feels like a werewolf, Alejandra is let loose into the maze.

  But, in the coming days, it seems like they get drilled in spells, as well as in dueling, while the faculty realizes they may not have the energy to recreate older Triwizard Tournament tasks every day, so they reduce that component of drilling to two mock tasks per week.

  And, of course, this grueling regimen, to which English lessons are tacked on, starts to make the would-be champions more tired than they would have been otherwise. Especially since all they seem to do is coursework, eat and train for the TT.

  On September 21, a Friday night, after the third mock task, she gets yet another troubled dream, probably due to the fatigue:

  Here Nurcan was about to make a captured Muggle Royalist grenadier, towering over her, drink the love potion participants of the Triwizard Tournament of the edition Sunday’s mock task came from had to brew as a second task. As the Royalist was about to drink it:

  “Before I drink the love potion, I have some questions for you:” the Royalist prisoner asked her.

  “Just make it quick!”

  “Why did you use Expelliarmus rather than Flagrante?” he questioned her acts at practice.

  “Flagrante might have been dangerous because it could have caused the malfunctioning musket to kill me!”

  “Why didn’t you answer me about whether your magic could save la patrie en danger?”

  She deflected the talk. “We Revolutionaries won at Valmy yesterday without any magic, and the king was dethroned today!”

  La patrie en danger? The Assemblée Législative declared such 2 months ago, but never did I expect to hear about the patrie being in danger at Beauxbatons… someone seemed to be using magic to feed that information to her, but from outside.

  “Do you have any idea what the Declaration of Pillnitz and the Brunswick Manifesto imply should the king be dethroned?” the grenadier asked her.

  “The Declaration of Pillnitz seemed to require a prior agreement between the great powers to act should any harm come to the king. However, in the wizarding world, it’s taken more seriously than the Brunswick Manifesto!” Nurcan told him the cold, hard truth.

  “Paris would burn to the ground!” the prisoner summarized the Brunswick Manifesto.

  “By whom? Prussia?” Nurcan began to laugh at the prisoner. “Domestic Royalists are found mostly away from Paris!”

  Unlike Muggles, Revolutionary wizards worried about the Declaration of Pillnitz aren’t worried about Austria or Prussia; they’re concerned about Spain instead! Then again, maybe I’m projecting my entire deal with Alejandra as being representative of how Revolutionary wizards, as a group, feel about other countries! Nurcan tries to think whether it’s going to be by Muggle or wizarding hands.

  “You’re clearly a Revolutionary. But it’s a little bizarre to see a witch, especially one so young, position herself that clearly as such! What makes you a Revolutionary?”

  “It’s mostly in the fiscal domain: I believe that any hope for social justice would begin with fairer taxation, without which all other reforms would be undermined!”

  “I’m sorry, but, as a Revolutionary, you seemed way too focused on the fiscal aspect!”

  “I mostly kept quiet on issues such as separation of powers. I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but I didn’t make that much of a deal of separation of powers either! Yet, being of Ottoman origin, I know that a decentralized government would be better able to respond to local issues than a centralized one!”

  “You might secretly harbor these ideas in the wizarding world, thinking that, by wizarding standards, you would be branded a radical, but I can assure you, there are far more radical Revolutionaries than you, albeit Muggle!”

  She feels very Girondin. Not a radical Revolutionary by any stretch, but she makes me feel like even Girondins in her mold would be resented in some way among wizards… the prisoner thought before drinking what was ostensibly a love potion, but ended up being lethal to him.

  “But why?” Nurcan screams in a heavily accented English upon awakening.

  Which causes Christine to awaken as well, and question Nurcan when she awakens. “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” (What’s happening?)

  “Un mauvais rêve d’une pratique passée!”(A bad dream from a previous practice!)

  Nurcan explains to her that the Boggart in the hedge maze manifested to her as a Royalist grenadier during her first practice, and she dreamed that grenadier was a POW assigned to her after the second mock task, which was about a scavenger hunt for ingredients to brew a love potion.

  “Est-ce que ?a va bien dans les pratiques?” (Are practices going well?) Christine asks.

  “Un peu chacun pour soi, mais je m’en sors assez bien…” (A bit everyone for themselves, but I’m doing just fine…) Nurcan answers her roommate.

  “Ben s?r que tu t’en sors; c’est toi la plus brillante ici! Si je puis me le permettre, cependant…” (Of course you do just fine; you’re the brightest here! If I may, however…)

  “Ce rêve est à propos de comment le monde sorcier me fait para?tre ultra-radicale, mais également que le monde sorcier n’est peut-être pas prêt à réintégrer le monde moldu!” (This dream is really about how the wizarding world makes me look like an ultra-radical, but also how the wizarding world may not be ready to reintegrate the Muggle world!)

  Christine attempts to interpret the dream of her roommate. “Tu adhères à une vision plus pacifique des réformes révolutionnaires. Je ne dois pas mettre tous les Révolutionnaires dans le même panier, mais peu de sorciers pourraient en parler comme tu le fais!” (You adhere to a more pacifistic vision of Revolutionary reforms. I mustn’t put all Revolutionaries in the same basket, but few wizards can talk about that like you do!)