Two days before the end of term, Daphne plucked up her courage and resolved to seek out Aries Black. Ever since he returned from his mysterious disappearance several weeks before, he had seemed to her to be strangely distant. Not only had their cooking lessons not continued, but he hadn't even seemed to notice her in the library or in the corridors.
'You must have done something to upset him,' Pansy had told her, that maddening 'I-told-you-so' look in her eyes. 'I'd guess you weren't giving him enough compliments. Flattery is very important with boys.'
Daphne had scoffed at that notion. 'Aries Black is the wealthiest, most pureblooded, smartest and best-looking boy in all of Hogwarts,' she had replied. 'Why would he need any compliments from me?'
All Pansy had done was smirk in response. 'You've got it bad, haven't you?'
Daphne had given her cousin an annoyed glare and stormed out of the Slytherin Common Room in a huff, deciding to walk directly to the library and figure out what was going on. It was a Wednesday evening, and she had observed that Aries tended to spend his Wednesday evenings studying.
Of course, exams were now over, so it was perfectly possible that Aries would be taking the evening off, perhaps flying a bit, but she thought it was a good place to start. Besides, she generally did her best to avoid the Gryffindor Common Room altogether. The last time she had sought Aries out in the lions' den, Ron Weasley had hexed her for her trouble.
Daphne willed herself to ignore the horrible churning in her stomach. She had always dreaded direct confrontation, and was willing to go through nearly any amount of scheming and plotting in order to avoid it. That was why the Hat had put her in Slytherin, after all. That, and her excellent breeding, of course. Her family might have only come into money a couple of generations before, but their pureblood lineage stretched back at least ten generations on all sides.
A horrible thought suddenly crossed Daphne's mind. Might that be why Aries had been avoiding her? Was she insufficiently pureblooded for him?
Everyone knew the Black family motto: Toujours Pur. They were one of only a select group of families that could trace their fully magical heritage back into the mythic mists of time. It was generally accepted that Betelgeuse the Black had been an adversary of Merlin – though the Blacks themselves claimed that their illustrious ancestor had been Merlin's teacher and mentor.
The Malfoys did not stretch back quite as far, having only come to England at the time of the Norman Conquest, but Sir Foulques Malefoy had been the court wizard of William the Conqueror, best known for smiting the Saxons with a wide array of unsavoury curses.
And the Greengrasses? They could only trace their ancestry twelve generations, back until just before the implementation of the Statute of Secrecy. Delphinus Greengrass, a Devonshire merchant, had been executed by the Cromwell regime for 'Royaliste Sympathies, the Observation of the degenerate Papisticall Celebration vulgarly knowne as CHRISTMAS, the Practice of Blacke Sorcerie & Assistance at an unlawful and heathenish Spectacle on the Sabbath Daye.' But even the fact that he had been caught and executed was something of a smirch on the family's reputation.
It was only the poor and less powerful wizards who had suffered under Cromwell. Such exalted families as the Blacks and Malfoys had simply Portkeyed to their French estates and stayed there until the Restoration, happily celebrating Christmas, watching plays and practising black sorcery without fear of puritanical Muggle governments.
Then again, her bloodline might not be the issue. The Greengrasses had made the grievous social blunder of making their wealth, rather than inheriting it. That didn't matter to most people - the Fudges, for example, had always embraced the philosophy that money was money.
But the Blacks were another story. Was Daphne simply too bourgeois for the aristocratic boy? Too nouveau? Her family had been in trade for many years, after all, though her father now held a respectable position at the Ministry. Daphne's grandparents had even grown up without the benefit of house elves. Mighn't Aries have decided that Daphne just wasn't good enough to spend time with him?
.....
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