As they try to keep learning about what they deem is needed to get through this assignment, the two of them seem to find their only comfort in eating apple pie together. And, of course, Emmanuelle and Vaidilute being close.

  But then Sabrina, Mektaq, Ishkode and Elias sit next to them, in an attempt to learn more about the exchange students they will be with for the next 6 months.

  “I would never have thought of using Arithmancy to predict No-Maj goings-on the way you do!” Ishkode exclaims in front of Nurcan, in reference to the last Arithmancy club meeting. “Is it normal for you guys to be that close to No-Majs?”

  “I’ve traveled some, and Ottoman wizards are closer to No-Majs than you guys ever would be…” Nurcan asks the other guests at her table.

  Sabrina gasps. “Never did I believe there would even be wizards interested in that kind of No-Maj stuff! We were always told about how No-Majs were untrustworthy, and all that…”

  “This reminds me of how Muggle-borns, erm, No-Maj-borns, were treated with disdain at my home institution!” Vaidi talks about life at Durmstrang.

  Even I, the greatest wizarding expert on the French Revolution, would have seen it coming; a lot of wizards, even Muggle-borns, would be indifferent to Muggle affairs, and often pure-bloods might treat Muggle affairs with disdain! So maybe passing off the Revolution as a divinatory prediction would be the only way for me to keep engaging with it for the next 6 months! Nurcan starts feeling a little uneasy about how closed off to the Muggle world Ilvermorny is.

  “Nurcan and Vaidi here are perhaps the best-traveled witches I’ve met in my life!” Jace comments on the experiences of their fellow exchange students.

  “Really?” Mektaq gasps.

  “By now, Vaidi, you know that No-Maj-borns aren’t evil, or inferior wizards!”

  But that night, even at the Horned Serpent’s dorms, Nurcan seems to have trouble sleeping when she feels like her experience seems to be going just as poorly as the early stages of her first stay at Beauxbatons.

  Durmstrang, along the border between Denmark-Norway and Sweden to the far north. Both Dorcus Twelvetrees and Nurcan were invited there, but for vastly different reasons. The two witches were freezing cold and were keynote speakers invited by the Divination department.

  But before they could step onto the school’s main hall, the two mingled with each other.

  “People at Ilvermorny talked about you, Dorcus, as some legend. I would love to ask you why would Durmstrang believe that you would be able to put the Divination department back on track? I might be able to make Durmstrang’s Divination department compliant with ICW standards again, but you?” Nurcan asked Dorcus, questioning what use Dorcus would be to Durmstrang’s failing Divination department.

  “Durmstrang gave me a chance when I needed it most! A fresh start away from home!”

  “Welcome to Durmstrang!” A Jadranka still bearing scars from her injuries sustained by the flight from the cockatrice a few months prior approached the two, before turning to Nurcan. “You little Mudblood! I really hope that you don’t plan on using your possible position teaching Divination at Durmstrang to carry over Muggle wars to the wizarding world; the Triwizard Tournament was a complete disaster caused by… what did you call them again?”

  “Royalists!” Nurcan, feeling steam was about to come out of her ears, answered Jadranka.

  “You seem to be implying Hadrian was a Royalist twit! No, Nurcan, you know the French Revolution better than any other wizard alive, Hadrian wouldn’t have done such a thing for Muggle political aims!”

  “What makes you think that, as an overt Revolutionary, I would use Durmstrang to preach for the Revolutionaries, even though I know full well that both Austria and Prussia are Royalist countries? Because Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire both side with the Revolutionaries, the latter in secret, that would turn Durmstrang into a wizarding theater of the War of the First Coalition if that was the case!” Nurcan tried to allay Jadranka’s concerns.

  “What are you on about?” Dorcus asked.

  Eugene, Dorcus’ former EAGLE-level Divination instructor came out of the Great Hall, while facing Nurcan. “Unlike you, who have clearly sided with the Revolutionaries since the very beginning, Dorcus, on the other hand, can be trusted to remain politically neutral!”

  “You’re talking about someone who leaked to the American Muggle press information about key aspects of the Statute of Secrecy, as well as the locations of both Ilvermorny and MACUSA’s headquarters in Washington!” Herodotus, the History of Magic department chair, retorted, while brandishing an issue of the Washington Ghost about Dorcus’ arrest. “And also the one who caused MACUSA to get censured by the ICW over its poor handling of the breach!”

  Eugene then turned from Nurcan to Jadranka. “If it really must come down to Nurcan vs Dorcus, I’d rather have Nurcan: she seems to know more about Divination than Dorcus ever would, and on top of that, Nurcan managed to contribute to the scholarship on the French Revolution without breaching the Statute!” He then turned to Dorcus. “Sorry, Dorcus, but there’s no way you could put Durmstrang’s Divination department back into compliance with international standards!”

  Dorcus looked more confused than ever. “Why? What are those standards like anyway?”

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  “Nurcan scored top grades on the French ASPIC on that subject, while you, meanwhile, scored a C on the EAGLE without even knowing how you achieved it!”

  The two ladies were brought into the Great Hall in an attempt to entertain the student body with divinatory tricks, and Durmstrang teachers watching. Especially the Divination ones, since they felt that this one new hire might decide the entire future of the subject at Durmstrang.

  “Before we begin, for those among you who lodged complaints about the divination department, we would like explanations as to why the department was allowed to remain out of compliance with international standards for so long!” Nurcan asked the audience. “That field’s lack of precision isn’t an excuse to disregard its educational standards!”

  “That’s a very Ottoman thing to say!” Herodotus, feeling the heat, tried to deflect the conversation.

  “Says the person who’s responsible for Durmstrang’s pass rates on ICW-recognized tests in Divination to be at an all-time low!” Eugene lashed out at Herodotus.

  “If that’s who Durmstrang alums could locate to teach Divination, and maybe even take over the department, I’m afraid that neither should be hired: Nurcan, while she might know Muggle geopolitics like virtually no other in the wizarding world, and know the subject well enough to achieve the stated aim of bringing the divination department back into compliance with international standards, she’s a Muggle-born who could risk contaminating the student body with Muggle ideas that could cause discipline issues, even if she passed these Muggle ideas off as divinatory predictions!” Herodotus voiced concerns over her.

  “Dorcus, on the other hand, is clearly an incompetent diviner, since she doesn’t even know how she passed ICW-recognized tests!” the Divination department chair decided.

  “I will let them deliver their guest lectures. However, once they are done, they must leave immediately!” Jadranka made Dorcus perform divinatory tricks first.

  The two guest lectures went by as a blur in Nurcan’s dream, while Nurcan’s lecture made a lot of attendees question what they believed about Muggle-borns and, to a lesser extent, the Muggle world.

  When their guest lectures ended, Jadranka herded the two witches at the exit of the institute’s main gate:

  “Obliviate!”

  After being hit by the spell, Dorcus wandered aimlessly with her hand mirror and parrot, not remembering what she was even doing at Durmstrang. Even as she got past a Triwizard Cup-shaped monument to the deaths of past Triwizard Tournaments, with each school having its dead on two sides apiece, sorted in chronological order of death, and Britta was buried underneath it.

  However, Jadranka couldn’t be certain that Nurcan completely forgot what she wanted her to forget. Nurcan’s memory is just too good… she mused as Nurcan’s oneiric self volatilized, causing the dream to end.

  The following morning, Nurcan comes across Vaidilute right as she leaves her room. Vaidi announces to her that she has reached a decision about the Divination HARE.

  “I’m going to take the Divination HARE at year-end!” Vaidi announces to her. “I’m not going to live the rest of my life with regrets!”

  “I know exactly with whom you could study it, and then you can make peace with the subject. So let’s start with the three core concepts of dream interpretation, which I know is part of the test!”

  “Dream interpretation? Really? You can do divination from a dream?” a clueless Vaidi asks.

  So many people in my mold tend to have regrets over educational choices. Like when someone, despite their best efforts, has nothing to show for it, and then regret having taken a course in the first place, or regret not having re-taken a test, especially when success was realistic, Vaidi ruminates.

  “There’s a reason why Muggles might still have some success in dream interpretation, it’s because finding meaning in a dream’s manifest and latent contents through the symbolism that links both doesn’t require any magic at all. However, it requires some thinking to do well in. But it’s recommended that, for practicing divination, you need to start with yourself!”

  It's one of the main methods that makes Ottoman wizards feel like divination requires “lots of brains, but little (or no) magic”, Nurcan muses while Vaidi tries to recall her dreams from last night.

  “And, of course, dreams don’t take place in a vacuum, so understanding the context they take place in, that is, its setting, as well as the dreamer’s personal context, is key, since the same dream doesn’t mean the same thing if made by two different people. That’s one of the main traps that trip beginners in dream interpretation!”

  A Lumos charm is cast in Vaidi’s mind. “Ooh… now I have a better idea of how to get started doing dream interpretation!”

  Vaidi then talks about her dreams, about how her dreams often seemed to take place on her lonesome lately.

  “It feels like you have some regrets about this exchange…” Nurcan sighs after listening to Vaidi’s most recent dreams.

  “I can kind of tell you have some regrets of your own!”

  “This place is a prison to me… cut off from the Muggle world, it feels like I’m thrown into a different world altogether, and, as indifferent to blood status people might be here, people seem a little closed to other wizarding cultures here, let alone Muggle ones!”

  “Maybe that’s why I tended to stick with Jace and you: we both had the same shared experience of the Triwizard Tournament!”

  Anne overhears the duo. “Maybe you could try to join any of the subject clubs; don’t be afraid to talk to other people about these clubs. They tend to have high achievers, too…”

  “So it seems like I had a crazy dream about Durmstrang’s Divination department…” Nurcan seems willing to discuss that dream with Anne along for the ride. “The department was so bad that they thought Dorcus was an improvement over what they already have!”

  “Dorcus?” Vaidi gasps. “Who’s Dorcus?”

  Anne turns to Vaidi. “I’m Anne. Let me put it this way: how could someone who couldn’t even understand how she could pass the Divination EAGLE be an improvement?”

  “Now, in that dream, they turned both Dorcus and me down, and they placed no value on No-Maj geopolitical expertise!”

  “I’m Vaidi. Durmstrang placing no value on No-Maj geopolitical expertise is nothing new to me, since they don’t offer… No-Maj Studies!”

  Anne then turns to Nurcan. “You said you saw, in a capnomancy reading, a very dark future in which Louix XVI getting guillotined will carry its load of consequences, both for France but also for the rest of Europe. What exactly are those consequences?”

  “From France’s standpoint, there are two categories of consequences: internal and external. Mostly No-Maj for now, but suffice to say that the Revolutionary government will be surrounded by enemies in all directions, against which they will desperately need manpower and allies to supply it…” Nurcan provides a basic overview of what she feels awaits France if Louis XVI was guillotined. “And Revolutionary radicalism will reach a peak!”

  I guess, Nurcan has a point: maybe joining a subject club could help me break out of my Triwizard Tournament-borne shell, Vaidi muses while she’s reminded of how abnormal it is for Durmstrang students to desire a better understanding of Muggles and Muggle-borns. Then again, Alejandra and Nurcan might have been key to opening me up to the world of Muggle-borns and of Muggles! But even then, these two were not your ordinary Muggle-borns.