By Harry's eighth birthday he had mastered more combat spells than the average Auror. Not that he knew more spells overall, or had more skill, though in some cases certainly so, but he had true understanding and mastery over those that he knew.
In general 'spells' and magical knowledge he varied. He had many charms from higher years mastered, but lacked knowledge of several simpler ones. In transfiguration he fluctuated even more wildly, being able to transfigured things on large scales and with significant power and skill, but several more basic applications and fundamental laws escaped him. In these cases he simply wandlessly accomplished his desire, but both Bella and Cissy insisted he learn how 'normals' did it for further knowledge that might aid him, and so he could blend in.
Potions at a higher level intrigued him with their subtle possibilities and powers, but basic recipes bored him. Why brew a potion to cure minor burns when a more potent one could do so far more quickly, and heal much deeper injuries? He had the problems that arise from learning from the best and studying what interested him; he had skipped the basic lessons and so had no patience for recipes used to teach beginners.
So he knew the most efficient recipes, and the most basic ones that could be made from virtually anything if need be, and studied those that interested him. It was something of a passion of his, which surprised the sisters, but when magic came so easily and with such power, what could hold his interest more than the means to accomplish things he could not?
Felix Felicis, for one, had effects he could never replicate. Ridiculously good luck? The sheer number of things the potion had to effect and manipulate to accomplish its design was infinitely more complex than any charm, and to do so for an extended time? Well beyond any personal magic, no matter how powerful or refined. Even his would never be capable of replicating.
History fascinated him. How could it not, with two intelligent teachers debating it before him? Narcissa would begin a lesson very professionally, but before long Bellatrix would interrupt with snarky commentary about this Dragon Raid, that Dwarf Undermining, or that other Goblin Rebellion, and things got even more interesting. Bella was snarky, but Cissy had this cool, collected way of getting back at her.
Sometimes Harry would watch his own pensieved memories of one such lesson several times and find new insults and implications with each new viewing. His record was watching the one scene six times before fully catching each and every insult.
The pensieved history lessons were rather dull, but the debates afterwards more than made up for it. Bella or Cissy would pick a situation, be it a battle, a war, an international incident or trading proposal or something else, and ask him what could have been done better, on each side. He wasn't very good at this at first, but the sisters were brilliant and they helped him a lot. Harry was convinced that had either of them been around a hundred years ago, Cissy would be puppetmaster of the world, and Bella would be ruling it with a bloody wand.
Sometimes he wondered who would have won if both existed back then, on opposite sides.
Bellatrix had more personal power and practice wielding it, and she had delved further into the intricacies of magic. Her fiery, cruel, sadistic nature made her a force to be reckoned with and she had the cunning to wield the fear she inspired to great effect.
Narcissa had less power but was more inventive, less direct with how she used it. Bella wielded her spells like a master swordsman would their weapon, but Cissy used hers like a dagger to supplement her finely honed scheming. A small smile and a sharp silver tongue complimented her politician's mind.
After several days pondering it, Harry came to the conclusion that Bella would likely win a war between the two, but Narcissa would make it a Pyrrhic victory after years of conflict, followed by decades of sabotage in all forms. That being said, they were so evenly matched that the slightest bit of luck either way would change everything.
Together, with Narcissa controlling the politics and Bellatrix handling everything of a more direct nature, the two sisters were perfect. As far as he could tell.
Astronomy was nothing but rote memorisation of constellations, star moments, and their meanings with the added bonus of mythology and legend thrown in. Those stories were the only thing to keep him awake during the long hours spent watching the lessons in the pensieve.
Herbology was interesting only so far as it pertained to higher potions. Or if the plants were deadly, or cool.
Likewise Care of Magical Creatures held his interest only subjectively, but with more of a focus on an imaginary army of dragons, griffins, hydras, acromantulas, basilisks, and all manner of deadly and dangerous things.
Speaking of snakes, Harry could speak to snakes. That had been an interesting discovery.
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"Stupefy! Incarcerous! Bombarda!" Bellatrix cast as she spat out the words aloud, more for her student's sake. She had long passed the need for silly verbal incantations, even before she found Harry she had been easily capable of casting the Killing Curse silently.
"Protego!" Harry blocked all three incoming spells with the one altered shield, much to Bella's annoyance and growing pride. That the shield held even while he sent curses sailing through it back at her only made her smile more. Now if she could get him to pay attention to the lesson and reduce his apparent skill level like she had been trying all morning...
She dodged his wordless spells and frowned at them. She'd have to tell him off later, this was meant to be about pretending to lack nonverbal spell casting, not to mention that shield he sustained and altered wandlessly, but for now she'd continue as she had before.
If he could maintain that shield, she would simply have to go around it.
"Serpensortia!"
A long black snake shot from her wand and slithered quickly towards its target, pushed on by the compulsion charm built into the slightly dark conjuration. Bellatrix had to shield it from several verbalised cutting curses as her little Harry attempted to do away with it so he could focus wholly on her. She smiled, he must have caught her frown and remembered something of what this was about.
He kept trying to kill the snake, and it made her laugh to see his annoyed expression when she stopped him. He was sometimes so single minded in his desire to keep things simple, going after one thing at a time. Perhaps she and Cissy should start training him against larger numbers...
Even as she planned out future lessons, Bella ducked a stunning spell and wandlessly pushed the snake further along while retaliating with a flurry of bright spells chosen to distract him. If he could cheat then so could she, and besides, more than a few Aurors could do one or two spells wandlessly. Better to be prepared.
Meanwhile the snake, having righted itself from its abrupt trip across the duelling platform, recovered from its compulsion and hissed its confusion and anger.
"Sstupid, arrogant humanss, pushing us around in their light-fighting. Why can't they jusst kill each other and leave us alone?"
So absolutely shocked was Harry at hearing the snake speak that he forgot about the practice duel and promptly found himself knocked back against the wall and relieved of consciousness.
Bella, horrified at the thought that she had actually hurt her darling little love, vanished the snake without thought as she rushed over to help her Harry. A quick diagnosis spell found him simply stunned, the cushioning charms on the walls and floor having prevented any actual harm, so she woke him with a smile on her face and prepared to gloat about besting him with a simple stunner.
Harry woke up to her smug smile with his usual eloquence following revival. "Urg amahm gah. What- Bella? The snake! It talks! Where'd it go?"
A quick glance around revealed his fear that she had vanished it. Not losing hope, he looked back to her now confused face.
"Summon it back! It could speak! Can you call the same snake back? Serpensortia transports an already existing snake here, right? Can you call back that exact one? What's the matter? I'm fine! You must have heard it!"
He swatted away her wand which was in the middle of performing another diagnosis spell. She looked concerned. "Harry, my love... it was only hissing, and barely at that as I wanted it to sneak up on you. You must have hit you're head harder than I thought. Either that or you're a Parselmou-"
Bella straightened as if struck by lightening. "You heard it speak- Are you sure? What am I doing, I can just-"
And with that, she wordlessly brought forth another snake and sent it to the middle of the room. At first Harry heard nothing but angry hisses and was beginning to think it had been only that last snake, which was rather disappointing. But then the snake seemed to reach its goal and abruptly began looking around, cursing in sibilant English, much to Harry's delight.
"Where am I? Puny humanss steal be away from my ssleep. Drag me through that horrible space and make me crawl on their strange ground. I should bite them, oh yess I should, but they'll slay me with their cursed spells. Damn those fleshy warm sacks of meat."
Harry chuckled a little and replied.
"Sorry about that, we didn't mean to drag you here. Are you alright?"
The serpent blinked and froze in shock, as did Bella.
"A sSpeaker! It has been so long... I apologise, master. What must I do?"
"Erm, nothing really. I just wanted to talk. I've never spoken to a snake before, how is it I can understand you?"
"Master wishes to sspeak? It is my pleasure. One of the first was Herpo the Great. He discovered the ssecrets of the Kings, the Basilisks, and how to breed them, and wished to sspeak with them. sSo he stole the gift from one blessed, and bound it to his bloodline, so they would all have the gift.
"It was one of his egglings who went further. sSalazar sSlytherin the Wise used his arts to bind his cunning to all sSerpent kind, so hisss mind would survive him. sSadly much was undone by fools, but we are still cunning.
"Does that answer your questionss, master?"
"Yes, thank you. How do you know all this, anyway? Do you teach your- egglings?"
"No, master. It is born knowledge to us, it iss seared into our scales."
Harry found himself nodding along, it made sense to him that this Herpo the Great and Salazar Slytherin would want their influence known. Salazar was not exactly known to be humble.
"Thank you for telling me, it was very interesting. Is there anything I can do for you?"
The snake shook its head, which resulted in its body swaying side to side in a rather interesting movement. "No, master. It iss enough to serve. May I be ssent back"
"Ok. Umm, bye then, I guess. Thanks." And with a flick of his hand, the snake was vanished and sent back to exactly wherever it came from.
Harry turned to find Narcissa had joined them at some point, probably called by Bella, and both sisters were standing there in shock.
"Umm, are you ok? What's wrong?"
Cissy was the first to come back to herself. "Nothing is wrong, sweety. It's just that Parseltongue, the ability to speak to snakes, is rather rare. The last to have this ability was Voldemort. We didn't know you had this gift, and it changes a few things."
She and Bella shared a look. They had thought the horcrux inert, or benign, but for it to pass on something as complicated as a magical language... They would have to start studying his scar once more. Bella joined in.
"This is excellent! Parseltongue is a valuable gift to have, Harry. The ability to control snakes, to speak an ancient magical language... This could have many interesting uses. We should look into spellcrafting in Parseltongue. The added power of so rare and ancient a language- and a magical language at that! I wonder if this language could be taught, even if to a small extent it could be very useful. Hmm.
"But we will speak of that later! What did it say? What did you say? It gave me such shivers to hear you hissing like that."
Harry's face shifted in confusion. He had been hissing?
"But I was just speaking in English. So was he! Well, with a few drawn out Ss..."
"Harry, my love, you were speaking Parseltongue. We could hear nothing but hissing, from either of you." Narcissa nodded along with her sister.
"...ok. Well, er, at first he was upset at having been brought here, and wishing he could bite us but knowing we'd probably just kill him with a spell." Both sisters were surprised at that; this snake apparently knew wizards.
"Then I apologised and he called me a 'speaker' and became very polite and called me 'master'. I asked how I could understand him, and he told me about how someone called 'Herpo the Great' discovered how to breed Basilisks and stole Parseltongue from someone 'gifted' with it so he could speak to them, and bound Parseltongue to his bloodline.
"Then he said Salazar Slytherin was one of Herpo's 'egglings', and made it so his mind was bound to snakes, but that 'some fools' had undone much of it, but not all. Umm, I think that was about it. Oh, and snakes are born with that knowledge, apparently."
Bella and Cissy exchanged another look. Bella sighed, and left without word to go collect the various books she just knew would be the bane of her existence for the next few weeks. Meanwhile, Narcissa conjured a desk and chair and summoned parchment and a quil.
"Now, Harry, conjure a snake and write down everything either of you say."
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The extensive research following the discovery had almost been enough to make Harry wish it had never been made, but he had conceded that it was better to learn as much as possible about his new ability.
That didn't change the fact that he was now on first name terms with what felt like half the population of all snake kind. The first time they had summoned a snake for the second time, it had been amusing. The second time, a little less so. Now they had to perform the spell several times to find a snake that he hadn't interviewed more than once!
He knew it was getting bad when he started recognising their different dialects.
Still, it was worth it. Bella now had another pet project; trying to breed him a pet basilisk. It was trickier that they had thought, several failed attempts had resulted in snakes without the killing glare, and those were the better ones. She thought she had it worked out now, apparently, but Harry wasn't really holding his breath.
Narcissa had taken to studying a certain goblet that she wouldn't talk about. Apparently it was some ancient heirloom that Bella had retrieved from her vault, but neither sister were willing to talk to him about it yet. They said maybe next year, so he decided to wait.
What really annoyed him about the discovery was that both sisters had renewed their study of his cursed scar. Sometimes it was fine and they would do it while he slept, but other times it would prick and ache and hurt more than the time he had pressed Bella to hit him with her Cruciatus Curse. By hell that had hurt.
In the end nothing seemed to come of it, but both sisters were dreaming up something. He knew they were, but they had made him promise not to look into it, and to wait until they told him next year. It was meant to be a surprise, or something.
Gah.
But they had promised they would tell him for his ninth birthday, so he let it go.
But still. Gah.
That didn't mean he let them get away with keeping secrets unpunished. The moment he got his chance, he had Sirius apparate them off for another runaway trip to the muggle world. A few black market international portkeys later, and they were in America watching Emperor Palpatine wandlessly blast lightning at the foolish Jedi, while munching happily away on popcorn.
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