For Ravenclaw to say something like that, Joan really was something else.
Ravenclaw despised fools more than anything. Even Helena, back in her day, had earned her mother's scorn more than once. But set Helena beside Joan, and Helena might as well have been Ravenclaw herself.
And yet... she couldn't work up a shred of contempt for the girl.
Those wide, guileless eyes gave away everything going on in her head. She was genuinely trying, working harder than anyone else in that room. And still, none of it seemed to take.
Today alone, Ravenclaw had tried several times to force the relevant knowledge directly into Joan's mind through memory magic. It had worked, technically, but the results kept coming out tangled, half of it forgotten within minutes.
That was what had sent Ravenclaw spiraling into this crisis of confidence. She'd always believed her memory magic could do anything, turn a fool into a genius, turn a blank slate of a student into someone steeped in a lifetime of learning.
But apparently, run up against someone like Joan, who simply couldn't hold onto memory the way it was meant to be held, and even her magic hit a wall.
Tom doubled over laughing once she finished. Ever since she'd been summoned, Ravenclaw had carried herself with an unshakeable composure, as if nothing could rattle her, not even the hardest puzzles he'd thrown her way, which had only ever left her a little rumpled, never actually beaten.
And here she was today, thoroughly defeated by Joan of all people.
"Still laughing?"
Ravenclaw huffed and kicked out at him, only for Tom to catch her leg and, without quite meaning to, start massaging it.
Soft. Genuinely, remarkably soft.
Tom couldn't bring himself to let go, wanting to keep at it a while longer, but one look at the increasingly dangerous glint in Ravenclaw's eyes convinced him to release her, reluctantly, and change the subject fast.
"Rowena, you're actually working from a false assumption."
"A false assumption?" Ravenclaw straightened slightly, her attention caught exactly as intended. "You mean Joan isn't actually a fool?"
Ravenclaw was a proud woman. She rarely believed herself capable of being wrong, and she certainly wasn't about to admit it outright.
Without either of them quite noticing, Joan had become a pawn in the ongoing contest between her and Tom.
"You think Joan can't remember her letters, can't learn to read, because her memory is weak?" Tom said.
"Isn't it?" Ravenclaw shot back.
"Then did you know Joan can recite multiple full versions of the Mass liturgy from memory? The Old Testament? Dozens of devotional texts used in sermons besides?"
The Mass was a religious rite commemorating the crucifixion, reenacting the Last Supper, and its structure wasn't fixed. The priest presiding over it chose different scripture passages and commentary each time. No ordinary person would even think to memorize something like that, let alone actually manage it.
As for the rest, the French of that era was famously dense and difficult, and here was an illiterate village girl who'd retained it all regardless. Could anyone honestly call that poor memory? Low intelligence?
With Tom's prompting, Ravenclaw finally spotted the blind spot in her own thinking.
"Then why can't I get anything to stick when I teach her? I can tell Joan isn't the type to go through the motions. She takes everything seriously."
"She's not being careless." Tom put his finger right on the heart of it. "She's simply poured every ounce of her focus into her faith. Everything else suffers for it."
"So if you frame the material within religious terms, she'd pick it up far faster."
"Is it really that mystical?" Ravenclaw eyed him with suspicion. She believed in neither religion nor any divine power, only in herself and in truth, which made Joan's condition nearly incomprehensible to her.
The young man's smile spread, the look of someone who'd finally landed his hook. "Care to make a wager? Three days. I'll teach Joan to spell the simplest words in three days. Say... two hundred words."
"Waiting for me to walk right into that, were you?" Ravenclaw shot him a knowing look, seeing through his little trap instantly.
But she didn't refuse. If anything, she agreed readily. "Fine. Three days it is. What are the stakes?"
It was the crudest kind of provocation, but a scheme's worth was never about subtlety, only about whether it suited its target. And provocation happened to work beautifully on Ravenclaw.
"The stakes..."
Tom's gaze drifted toward the generous stretch of leg peeking out beneath her witch's robes, and he asked, testing the waters, "How about... I get to touch a few times?"
Ravenclaw laughed despite herself, furious, and nodded her agreement anyway.
"Fine. If you lose, at your school's evening banquet, in front of every student and teacher present, you shout three times that you're Rowena Ravenclaw's dog. No exceptions."
"Ha!" Tom sucked in a sharp breath. "Where did you learn something that vicious?"
If he actually had to shout that, it wouldn't cost him his standing among prospective wives exactly, but it would certainly earn a very prominent place in Hogwarts: A History, and the higher his profile climbed, the further and wider that particular piece of gossip would travel.
The woman waved a hand. "You said it yourself, talking in your sleep one night. I heard every word."
The wager was struck.
Not just struck, in fact. Someone upped the ante and demanded custom-made attire to go with the forfeit, and Ravenclaw agreed to that too, though she raised her own stakes to match: if Tom lost, he'd also owe her a thousand hours of massage.
Tom decided that the very first thing he'd do when he got back was research a spell to stop himself from talking in his sleep.