At lunch, a downcast and simultaneously anxious Zacharias sat down beside me.
"Hector."
"Yes?"
I was loading up a fairly generous portion for myself, scanning today's menu for anything worth having.
"Our team's… well, it's not great."
"I know. They're new, after all," I looked over my resulting portion with keen anticipation, but still found it in me to look up at him. "Though a few of them clearly had some experience with Quidditch, or at least flying, before."
"Yeah, that's true… But we need to gel as a team. You're going to have to come to training, Hector, or it just won't come together properly. Skip the fitness sessions if you want, but the flying ones — I really, really need you there!"
"Ugh… You could just get someone as a reserve for my spot, seeing as I won't be around forever anyway."
"I already did!" Zacharias protested, though he kept it to something close to a whisper. "Only he needs training too."
"I'll try to carve out the time. When are your flying sessions?"
"Thursday evening and Saturday morning."
"Fine. I'll do my best."
"Excellent!" Zacharias brightened, and quickly piled together his own lunch. "Brilliant news!"
After lunch I met up with Daphne and we headed off to Potions together.
"You're going to brew something strange, aren't you?" she opened with the topic of the coming lesson.
"Hm? Where's that idea coming from?"
"It's written all over your face. A barely noticeable dreamy look, but clearly a practical one, with a dash of anticipation and calculation. If you can see straight through me, what makes you think I can't do the same to you?" she smiled quite openly, though only because there were no acquaintances, or otherwise, close by — just various little clusters of students dashing this way and that before the lunch break ended.
"You're right. I need a potion for some experiments."
We carried on walking calmly down the corridors, nearly reaching the Potions classroom.
"And you're not going to ask which one?"
"I'll find out either way."
"Fair enough, I suppose."
The classroom doors stood open, and part of the class was already inside, though they weren't sitting at the tables where all the necessary tools and cauldrons had been laid out and the seats claimed, judging by the bags and personal cutting knives and other such paraphernalia — instead they were standing off to one side, chatting about their own business.
Daphne and I took a table closer to the professor's spot and set up our workstation. While we waited for the rest of the class and for Slughorn himself — the professor arrived fairly promptly, greeting everyone cheerfully — we talked about the "girls'" tea party Daphne and the other girls had thrown yesterday, and various odds and ends besides. All in all, an unremarkable, perfectly ordinary conversation.
A couple of minutes before the lesson began, the rest of our classmates arrived, and I went up to the professor.
"Professor…"
"Yes, Mr Granger?"
"I hope you won't mind terribly if Miss Greengrass and I brew our own potion, off the syllabus?"
"Why, of course I don't mind!" the professor smiled. "Though I would like to see the recipe, just to avoid any errors in it. You understand, the recipes I set for lessons are all safe to an appropriate degree."
"Yes, yes, Professor, I quite understand," with an unnoticeable flick of the hand, I conjured a glove-charm holding a note, on which was written out the recipe I had in mind.
"What a delightful charm, Mr Granger," the professor cooed, taking the note from thin air and carefully cross-checking it against his own knowledge, presumably. "Oh, that's a rather specific potion you've chosen. Oh dear, do please don't tell me you're planning to…"
"Best not to say it aloud."
"Ah, quite," the professor apologised. "Still, I do hope this is purely out of scholarly interest? Experiments of that kind are rather… dangerous. Not for you, no, but for… you understand what I mean, don't you?"
"Of course, Professor," I nodded back with a faint smile.
"Well then… ahem… In that case, you have my permission."
Back at the table with Daphne, I showed her the recipe and started pulling out ingredients while she read through it.
"How ancient," she smiled modestly. "So, you're making a wand?"
"You recognise the recipe?"
"Don't forget, I was into potions long before you and I ever met. I might not have brewed complicated formulas back then, but I certainly read up on all sorts of potions with interesting applications."
"You say that as if meeting me shattered your entire worldview, darling."
"To some extent. Though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad of it."
The potion's recipe was fairly simple, even if it did call for a good many different ingredients. The process itself wasn't especially complex either, though it did have some particular quirks, mostly tied to stirring, sensing the magic within the cauldron, and strict timing at a couple of stages. Oh, and one more wrinkle — at one stage you had to drop two ingredients into the cauldron simultaneously, with the ratio of their magically active substance needing to be exactly equal. And magically active substance is almost never a synonym for either ordinary volume, or mass, or any other conventional measure — everything has to be measured out in advance.
I, however, can afford to simply feel the magic and its resonance within a substance, and settle on the correct quantity for the correct reaction that way.
In any case, simple as the potion was, Daphne and I worked with real focus, and didn't even allow ourselves the usual little jokes and chatter we normally use to liven up the more tedious stages of brewing other potions. After all, the potions in textbooks, manuals, and various manuscripts and monographs have already been studied and tested many times over by other wizards, and don't require quite such intense attention to every small detail. This recipe, though — hadn't been tested even once. What's more, wandmakers themselves are the ones who brew it, adjusting it as they go depending on the properties of the materials it will ultimately be applied to. Daphne and I did much the same. Or rather, I did the theoretical adjusting, she helped bring it into practice, and sometimes used runes to diagnose the ingredients as well.
Work was in full swing. Literally and figuratively.
Unsurprisingly, the two of us — a pair of apprentice potioneers, with the rare support of an actual professional in Slughorn — finished brewing our potion on time, before the end of the first of the two lessons, bottled it up, and were awarded five token points each for Slytherin and Hufflepuff — for not blowing up the classroom and successfully brewing an ancient potion requiring a rather particular touch.
The second lesson had us sitting through one of Slughorn's improvised lectures, during which he had the whole class watch the interaction of two reagents. Then another two. Then another couple after that. And finally, the interaction of the resulting products. Why? The professor was talking about complex compatibility tables and how to work out and calculate compatibility on one's own. It's important material, and, unsurprisingly, exactly the sort of thing taught specifically in advanced Potions — not the tables themselves, no, but the principles behind constructing them, the formulas, and the test reactions used for the calculations. There's no time for that in the lower years — there, it's more a matter of knocking the nonsense out of everyone's heads and teaching them to at least read a recipe before they start chucking ingredients into a cauldron.
After lessons, our whole little group of potion enthusiasts headed off to dinner.
In the Great Hall, quiet conversations and whispers about my upcoming duel with Nott kept springing up at the House table every so often. And not a magical duel, either — a sword duel! The subject was being raised at the other House tables too. The Ravenclaws, for instance, were busily reciting historical facts to one another about that sort of thing, discussing documented cases and the like. The Gryffindors were simply waiting for bread and circuses. The Slytherins were considerably calmer about it, though a few of them thoughtfully recalled that swordsmanship traditions had once existed in their own families too, though they'd mostly died out something over a century after the Statute was established.
"Not worried?" Ernie, sitting beside me, wasn't even looking at me — he was hypnotising the roast beef on the big shared platter and clearly weighing up whether to take another couple of slices or not.
"No. Should I be?"
"Honestly, I've got no idea," Ernie finally caved and took a couple more slices of roast beef, then scattered on some small potatoes roasted crisp, and didn't forget the gravy either. "I read in the family diaries that swordsmanship was quite the respected skill, a good while back. A lot of the traditions of wand duelling actually came from those old Muggle sword-duelling customs, as it happens. So I don't know. Nobody ever taught me. I was a spectacularly clumsy kid, and terrified of pain to the point of shaking, crying, snot, the lot."
"You were a child, though."
"Well, yeah."
"And how did you end up going in for Quidditch with a history like that?"
"Oi, oi!" the lad protested, though not entirely seriously. "Let's not have any of those insinuations, thank you very much!"
Personally, I saw plenty of opportunity in this whole duel challenge for Nott to try and set me up somehow and put on some display of supposed superiority. What struck me as far stranger, though, was that the professors hadn't so much as intervened. Fine, McGonagall — she mostly just tries to keep her own charges from getting into trouble. Madam Sprout, for her part, apparently doesn't see a problem here at all. Probably has something to do with the fact that our House doesn't have any particular habit or inclination toward stirring up trouble, and our inter-House relations are fairly smooth with everyone, or nearly everyone. Snape… well, that one's complicated. I imagine that, as Headmaster, he simply doesn't care, and he's no longer Slytherin's Head of House anyway. He probably reckons that if a bunch of idiots brewed this mess themselves, they can jolly well clean it up themselves too, and if they want a Head of House's help, they've got a friendly fat old fellow named Slughorn for that now.
After dinner, practically the whole student body — unsurprisingly — made their way toward the Ballroom. In fact, everyone had only found out the room even existed during the Triwizard Tournament. That was when McGonagall had finally been generous enough to have it unsealed, since up until that point, absolutely no one, under any circumstances, could get into that spacious room with its tall stained-glass windows.
But it wasn't only students hurrying along — a couple of professors were too. Flitwick's presence was hardly a surprise — as if the resident duelling master would miss a duel, even one like this! Unheard of! The second professor was Slughorn, and quite what he was doing there wasn't clear. I can't see any reason for him to be present besides curiosity or concern, given that on one of the staircase landings we passed Madam Pomfrey with her "emergency kit" — a set of potions for any magical or physical injury.
The professors quickly put together a duelling platform, though unlike the sort used for magical duels, this one was wider and, in fact, oval in shape — for moving around on, presumably? Of course, it would have made more sense to arrange seating for all the uncounted spectators and let Nott and me fight it out "down below," in some sunken area like a Colosseum, but traditions being traditions, there was no getting around them.
I'd have liked my duel with Nott to be something more striking, more memorable, but I hadn't seen anything so mundane in quite a while.
The preparation itself was simple enough — we shed the unnecessary layers, our robes, and I also pulled off my school jumper, left standing in just my white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Flitwick conjured us something resembling rapiers — a sword like any other, basket hilt, one-handed grip.
"You won't manage to kill each other with these," he explained, looking up at the pair of us. "But they'll knock any desire to walk onto a blade right out of you, permanently."
There really was a whole complex of charms woven into the blades, and judging by the way my brain was interpreting them, they genuinely wouldn't let either of us run the other through. You could leave cuts, shallow slashes, shallow puncture wounds, enough to knock an opponent out from blood loss, but that's fixed with a snap of the fingers and one Blood-Replenishing Potion. You couldn't even take out an eye with a blade like this! You could damage it, sure, but as long as the eye itself was still there, however sliced up, it could be healed. And on top of that, cuts from a blade like this feel more painful, but without hitting the nerves and brain properly — you wouldn't drop from pain shock, not even if you managed to "finish off" the unluckiest possible nerve.
We moved apart, took up our stances, and waited for Flitwick's countdown — he was in charge here. Seconds had been named, though there was no real point to it, since we hadn't gone through any of the traditional "songs and dances" of challenges and so on, and the seconds themselves had nothing to arrange between them, nor would there be a corpse to carry off the field. As it was, both Malfoy and Zabini — Nott's second, and thoroughly displeased with the role, not to mention with being dragged into this absurdity at all — simply stood next to each other and… took bets, the scoundrels!
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