"Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all..."

There were so many things that they needed to know, before they traveled to Hogwarts the next month, and Snežana was doing her best to prepare accordingly, albeit in her own rather unusual way. She had read all the books, practiced some spells that she thought (hoped) she might be more fit to compete in the Triwizard Tournament for knowing, written a lengthy letter to her mother that would never be sent because she had to express all her hopes and fears somehow and that was the next best thing to being able to actually tell Majka about it, and made solid plans to acquire some garlic to pack with her things for good luck, but she was still oddly anxious. She hated the uncertainty of it, the part where she simply didn't know what was coming and a lot of it wasn't within her control, but the fact remained that time only ever passes at the rate of one second per second, and the only way to find out what the next one would hold was to live it.

One of the more concrete worries that Snežana had was that she would be expected to speak English with the students from the other schools. It was polite, after all, to learn the language of the host country when one went to visit a foreign school. Here, at Beauxbatons, her English seemed to be passable, but she didn't know whether that would hold up once she got there. Would she remember enough? Would her accent be understandable to those she tried to converse with? (After all, she had learned English as spoken by a native speaker of French, as heard by a native speaker of Serbian, which was rather many intermediaries.) She worried about this, and to soothe herself she had taken to applying her studies of English in a direction she liked. Poetry spoke to her soul and soothed her heart, so she had taken to memorizing poems in English when she could. For practice, she said.

As she recited one particular poem under her breath, she was walking purposefully through the beautiful halls of Beauxbatons. She had made plans to spend some time today with her dear friend Mihai; because they were in different Houses (she Sureau, he Rosier), they did not always see each other in the natural course of the day, but they were close enough anyway that they often went out of their way to join each other for various kinds of talk and study and fun. For now, everyone was talking about the upcoming tournament, so doubtless they would be discussing that. Snežana was certainly curious to know what Mihai thought about it all; she could guess some things, but the details would be interesting in the unraveling...