"Why are you calling everybody by their mascot animal?"

She shrugs. "Because it's much less of a mouthful to say 'Lion' than 'Gryffindor' or 'Eagle' than 'Ravenclaw,'" she explains.

"Anyway, have fun mixing things."

"Have fun balancing on a flying stick!" she laughs.

Ravenclaw table, predictably enough. Wave!

Wave back! She beelines to them and asks, "How'd the whole flying wooden sticks thing go?"

"It was great! I fell three times and scratched my hand!" she says, showing a scratch on her right palm. "But after that I managed to stay on the broom all the time!"

"I didn't fall at all! I have to work really hard to not fall when I'm walking, so that's pretty impressive. And flying is great."

"It was good."

Sadde giggles. "That sounds fun! Can't wait for my turn!"

"We have transfiguration and then history this afternoon," Karen says. "You?"

"Defence Against the Dark Arts and then Astronomy!" she says. "It says something that school teaches Defence Against the Dark Arts to eleven-year-old children."

"Well, it got to be quite important, recently."

"Yeah, so I heard."

"I wonder if the position's still cursed."

"Oh, for a long time now nobody's kept the Defence job for more than a year. But supposedly it was You-Know-Who who cursed it, and now he's dead. I suppose it will be worrying if something happens to Professor Spukhafte after all."

Sadde blinks again. "Um. I don't know who," she says.

"The Dark wizard involved in the war. It's not customary to say his name."

"For a while if you did they'd find you and arrest you," murmurs Karen.

"Hooooold up," she says, her brain braking hard and almost crashing. "If you said his name you'd be arrested?"

"Well, it was already... not customary... to say it, so the people who said it were mostly the people working against him who liked to say it as a defiance thing."

"That is so not the point," she says. "You're saying there was magic cast on everyone that would listen to everything they said and then detect when they said this guy's name?"