"I dunno what I'm doing wrong," she mutters. She tries the spell again before heading out to breakfast. Only mist.
Breakfast! They're a little early; Feral and Tony are nowhere to be seen.
The rest of the first week of school progresses without much incident. Bella's friends make progress with their Patronuses. Bella does not.
Bella will find this out when it appears next to her one afternoon - a tall, skinny horse with dragonlike wings folded neatly on its back and a bony crest with an exposed-vertebrae look running from the top of its skinny dragonlike head to the tip of its skinny dragonlike tail. The silvery spectral look of a Patronus helps tone down the ghastliness somewhat, but it's still not something you'd want to meet suddenly in a dark alley.
Bella startles, briefly, then laughs. "Tell Feral his patronus is weird-looking and I want to know what it is," she instructs it. (This one is way too big to be Tony's and it doesn't look Sherlocky at all; it is definitely Feral's.)
"Yeah. This book isn't really answering all my questions, I'm going to have to find another one, but I have the impression that either the British Ministry steals from goblins a lot or goblins have weird notions about property compared to humans?"
"Well, the goblins keep having rebellions over wizards having stolen their stuff," says Bella. "Except this book is adamant that wizards know better than to cheat goblins and they always pay for their stuff. There aren't any interviews with goblins or anything in this book, but that seems weird, I read a book about centaurs last year and it had a section about the herds in Britain and when they say wizards have stolen from them the answer is 'well that was other wizards', not 'no here's the receipt'."
"Dunno, I'm going to see if I can find out. I'm definitely going to take Being Studies when social studies goes into specialties."
"I don't know what I'm going to be able to stand to drop. Maybe I'll just make do with the one elective slot," says Bella. "I want to take Healing and I can probably get in bits of everything else I need before I qualify for it."