"A temporary setback, your Majesty. Our Pawn and his ally have infiltrated Hogwarts. Knight Summoner has prepared his trap for whoever is foolish enough to break into Brise-Roc again. The rest of our pieces are in place. Everything is still on schedule."
"I disagree. This 'ally' is a Dark Lord with delusions of grandeur, who believes he is destined to rule wizard kind. At the soonest opportunity, he will try to betray us. When the Stone is recovered, eliminate him."
"As you wish, your Majesty. Is there anything else?"
"Tell your Pawn he has a year to accomplish this mission. If he fails, death will be a mercy compared to his ultimate fate."
"I will relay your orders at once, your Majesty."
Alexandra's last month with the Dursleys wasn't what she could call very enjoyable. True, Dudley was now scared of her, and believed she would use magic on him if he stayed in the same room with her. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's reaction to her official affiliation to the magical world was even more drastic: they didn't speak to her any more. Half-terrified, half-furious, they tried to act as if she didn't exist inside the boundaries of their home. Although this was an improvement in many ways considering the way she had been treated so many times in the last ten years, it did become a bit depressing after a while.
Alexandra continued to stay outside number four Privet Drive the majority of the day. Early in the morning and late at night, she kept to her room, with her owl Atalanta for company and magic books as reading material. The school books she had bought were very interesting, and for the first time in her life she was really excited to go to begin her school year. The single fact that Dudley Dursley and his gang would be nowhere in the vicinity was enough to make the magical school attractive.
She also learnt that the haughty girl she met at the clothes shop had been correct: Hogwarts was divided into four houses, in the alphabetical order Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin. Their emblems were respectively a lion, a badger, an eagle and a snake. Each new student entering the school was introduced to his new House at the "Sorting Ceremony", although History of Hogwarts gave no details on how this selection was done. The book just listed the supposed qualities of each House: courage and nobility for Gryffindor, loyalty and hardworking for Hufflepuff, wisdom and intelligence for Ravenclaw and cunning and ambition for Slytherin. While the book described it as a perfect system, she already had her doubts: any person could be courageous in certain circumstances, and every human has an ounce of ambition in him. Even Dudley has the ambition to become larger than an elephant for example.
Unfortunately, while she marvelled for the most part in front of her school books, the surplus history books horrified her. When her account manager Grimjaw had given her the basics of the war, she had honestly thought the old goblin was exaggerating things. It appeared it was to the contrary: the situation had been completely desperate when she was one year old. The period between 1978 and 1981 was just a period of massacres, bloody ambushes and vicious battles between witches and wizards. Despite the huge amount of propaganda in it proclaiming victory was in sight, it gave her clues how bad the situation had been. Hundreds of casualties every month in the best of cases. Thousands when a major offensive or battle was fought. Studying the book she had taken on the so-called 'pureblood' magical families, the disaster was even more evident. For a war fought on the ideals of blood purity, a quarter of the pre-war nobility was outright extinct. Others, like Alexandra's own family, but also the Bones family, the Longbottom family and many others were reduced to one or two members for the main line with a few cousins to take the name if the persons carrying the name died without heirs.
There was also a heavy effort to present her father as the right hand of the Dark Lord Voldemort, despite the fact he was 'only' a spy, and apparently like all his family before him had fought for the so called 'Light side' for many generations. The Potter family descended from Linfred of Stinchcombe, a rather popular wizard of the twelfth century who had been credited for inventing so many potioneer recipes that he was known as 'The Potterer'. His helpful nature and his affability had made him so universally liked in the magical and non-magical communities that he was a reference in potions by the time he died, and his eldest son Hardwin took the name 'Potter' from an adaptation of the nickname 'Potterer'.
In the centuries which followed, the Potter family had generally been considered of an average standing in the ranks of the nobility, often standing on the frontlines when a threat to Magical England manifested itself. That James Potter had been sent to Azkaban prison without a trial and apparently on hearsay in spite of this positive reputation (the author of the book seemed perfectly happy to explain a certain Bartemius Crouch had passed a law in 1981 which authorised the authorities to send every suspect to prison without any need for evidence) did not give her a very positive appreciation of how justice worked in the magical word. Although Alexandra had to admit that with her experiences at the Dursleys she was hardly an impartial judge.