If I didn't work harder, soon I wouldn't even be worthy of speaking to him.
So while Tom rested, Daphne didn't slack off. She gritted her teeth and pushed her magic to its limits.
They took turns training from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. Only then did Daphne finish her eighty repetitions.
Her legs were so weak she could barely stand, and her eyes were about to close. All she wanted was to sleep.
Tom had no choice but to help her back to the Slytherin Common Room, where he found an older girl to take her to her dormitory.
The girl gave Tom a distinctly odd look, a knowing smile tugging at her lips. If they hadn't been so young, she would have imagined all sorts of steamy scenarios.
Tom watched them go up the girls' dormitory staircase, then turned and left the common room again.
He was going to the Owlery to borrow a school owl and send a letter to the Potions shop in Diagon Alley, ordering ingredients to brew a restorative potion for Daphne.
Repeatedly pushing her magic to its limits was unpleasant in the moment, but it had plenty of benefits: it could unlock her potential, increase her magical capacity, and help her reach the peak of her abilities sooner.
The dull repetition of casting spells laid a foundation, making magic second nature and new spells easier to learn later on.
Andros had taught him all these techniques. The old man had been even stricter with him.
Andros was always lamenting that wizards these days lived too comfortably. They had a complete system of magic, yet their middle ranks were weaker than they had been in the past.
In Andros's day, even if you couldn't beat your enemy, you still had to fight hard enough to tear a chunk out of them. Wizards now, by contrast, complained at the first sign of hardship.
The holiday passed in a flash. Before long, it was Sunday evening, and the selection of Shadow Prefects for every Slytherin year had ended.
But then trouble arose: Snape's judgment really was poor.
The fifth-year boy and girl Prefects and the sixth-year girl Prefect—all three official Prefects—had been soundly beaten by ordinary students.
Even Tom was surprised. He hadn't expected Slytherin to be hiding so many people who quietly made their fortunes.
If he hadn't come up with the Shadow Prefect system, some of them might have stayed under the radar until graduation.
The awkward part was that the school couldn't simply replace its appointed Prefects. Snape could recommend candidates, but he couldn't appoint or dismiss them.
As long as they hadn't committed any serious offenses, there was no reason to remove them. But the Shadow Prefects and the official Prefects weren't the same people. Whose orders were they supposed to follow?
In the end, Snape upheld the principle that strength came first: the three official Prefects would keep their titles, but they were mere figureheads and had to obey the Shadow Prefects.
It was a punishment, too. They wouldn't be off the hook until they won back their Shadow Prefect positions.
The tactic worked. The three former Prefects' faces turned green, and they couldn't bear to stay in the common room.
As soon as Snape finished making the announcement, they hurried off, probably to find somewhere to train hard and take revenge next term.
The common room was buzzing. Students crowded around the Shadow Prefects from each year. People naturally gravitated toward the strong, and whereas it had once been unclear who led each year, now the answer was obvious.
Only Malfoy and his two lackeys seemed out of place.
They huddled in a corner, while Malfoy glared at the Tom surrounded by admirers, his teeth grinding with hatred.
He'd been left hanging on the wall all night and had only woken when he fell in the morning. The pain was nothing compared to being humiliated in front of everyone. That was what had truly broken him.
He'd been spoiled since childhood and had never suffered such an indignity. Even losing a duel hadn't been this humiliating.
The first thing he did when he got back to the dormitory was write to Lucius and complain, demanding that this "Mudblood" Tom be expelled from Hogwarts.
He reasoned that his father was a School Governor. If the other School Governors agreed, even Dumbledore could be removed! His family should have received the letter by now.
"Shadow Prefect? Hmph. I'll make sure you can't even remain a Hogwarts student!"
Malfoy muttered a curse and left with Crabbe and Goyle. If Snape hadn't ordered every student to attend, he wouldn't have come out to face all those hostile looks.
Wiltshire, Malfoy Manor.
Lucius had indeed received his son's letter, but he didn't fly into a rage and storm off to Hogwarts to demand an explanation, as Malfoy had expected.
Instead, his face turned deathly pale. His hand trembled as he clutched the letter, and even his breathing grew ragged.
It was because of those three words in the letter: Tom Riddle.
Voldemort had always claimed to be of pure blood, but none of the old Pure-blood families believed him.
He hadn't sprung from a crack in the ground. Back at Hogwarts, he'd been the most outstanding student, and his history was well known.
Every well-informed Pure-blood knew that the Dark Lord had been brought into the wizarding world by Dumbledore from a Muggle orphanage.
In the end, he'd become someone everyone feared. As for his feud with the Gaunt family, that was an even deeper secret.
No one dared bring it into the open. It would only infuriate Voldemort, and wizards who opposed them would laugh at them, too.
A bunch of Pure-bloods who boasted of their noble ancestry had followed an orphan born to Muggles? It was utterly ridiculous.
So every Death Eater simply assumed Voldemort was Pure-blood. They needed the idea as a pretext to advance their interests; the truth didn't matter at all.
Lucius had heard all this from his father.
After so many years, he was hearing the name "Tom Riddle" again—and this time it belonged to a Slytherin student, gifted and domineering.
Could he have returned?
Lucius went cold and slumped in his chair, his palms slick with sweat.
He couldn't believe that man was still alive. He decided he would go to Hogwarts first thing in the morning to find Dumbledore.
If he could confirm that this Tom Riddle wasn't the Dark Lord, he could still help his son get justice afterward.
But if he was... Lucius couldn't bring himself to finish the thought. Cold sweat had already soaked his back.
On Monday morning, thick fog shrouded Hogwarts.
It had rained lightly the night before. The Great Hall smelled of breakfast, mingled with the damp scent of earth, while half-asleep young witches and wizards drowsily nibbled on bread.
They could barely tell if they were chewing toast or mud.
The Slytherins were tight-lipped, and word of the weekend's common-room fiasco hadn't spread. But students from the other houses still sensed something was off.
The Slytherins, who usually wandered around alone or in pairs, were suddenly moving in groups, with several of them clustered around a few people, like a pack of young pups with leaders.
No one paid much attention to it. Only Harry and Ron stared in disbelief.
Thanks to Tom's earlier suggestion, they'd managed to annoy Malfoy. Ever since, they'd found themselves paying a little more attention to Tom.
Before, Daphne had been the only person around Tom. Everyone else avoided him as if he had the plague. But today?
Harry rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was still asleep. "Did Tom spend the whole night charming the Slytherins?"
"Why's someone bringing him tea, cutting up his sausages, and even spreading butter for him? He's getting treated even better than my cousin Dudley!"
Ron stared at the towering pile of food in front of Tom, his eyes as red as his hair. He swallowed, envious.
"Now that's the life! Why does Riddle get to live like this? I want someone to wait on me, too!"
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