A/N: Another couple of borrowed lines here. Things start to head south at Hogwarts. Our Potions master and his students face mortal peril. You know how it goes...
Chapter Fourteen: Poison Prince
Hogwarts broke up for Christmas, and Hermione wished that she'd gone to join the boys at the Burrow. She had a pleasant, uneventful holiday, if that was the sort of thing you liked, but it was a very Muggle Christmas, and to her eternal shame she found it all a bit pedestrian, sat at home with her parents, opening presents that didn't explode, speak or otherwise do anything of any particular note. To be fair, they had gone out of their way in their efforts - her mum had given her a beautiful greenish-black Augurey feather that she must have had to go to Diagon Alley to find. Hermione didn't have the heart to tell her that it would be useless as a quill, due to its natural ink-repelling properties, but smiled warmly and thanked her mother regardless.
On returning to school in the New Year, she had been horrified to hear the details of Bellatrix Lestrange and Fenrir Greyback's devastating attack on the Burrow. Harry was continuing his lessons with Dumbledore, and gaining more insight into Voldemort's history from the Pensieve memories, which he shared with his friends as he formulated a plan for how he should approach Slughorn to try and obtain the professor's real memory of his encounter with Tom Riddle.
Buoyed by Snape's words of encouragement the previous term, Hermione was making great progress in their new Apparition lessons, much to the boys' annoyance. The best Ron had managed so far was Splinching a toenail, and they'd heard about nothing else since he'd returned from the Hospital Wing with his foot in bandages, hopping about the common room.
"I tell you - that Apparition instructor? I'm going to Splinch him if he doesn't give it a rest...!" Ron ejaculated angrily.
Hermione barely looked up from her book (the copy of Moste Potente Potions that she'd recently borrowed from Professor Snape, seeing as she wasn't allowed to remove Madam Pince's edition from the Restricted Section). Peering over the top of it briefly, she tutted.
"Honestly, Ron! Destination, Determination, Deliberation - it's not hard!" She sighed, and went back to reading. Ron glowered at her through the cover of her book, pulling faces at Harry to show he thought she was being unnecessarily snooty about it.
She had felt bad, not long after, when he had eaten Harry's Love Potion-laced chocolates on the morning of his seventeenth birthday and been subsequently poisoned by Slughorn's celebratory mead. After dashing to the Infirmary to meet Harry and Ginny, and sitting by Ron's bedside with them, she looked up as a group of professors made their way into the room and started to discuss the circumstances around the accident. Dumbledore took the mead from Slughorn, gave it a cursory examination and passed it over to Snape, and he in turn passed the neck of the bottle under his nose like a sommelier examining the bouquet of a fine wine. He must be incredibly well-learned to be able to identify poisons by scent, she thought. The Potions master then held the bottle clasped in front of him, and looked up to stare at her at the bedside.
Hermione was then slightly appalled to see Lavender Brown arrive in the hospital wing as well, and even more irritated when the girl finished cooing over her friend lying prone in the bed and turned on her.
"What's she doing here?!"
"I might ask you the same question!" retorted Hermione, hotly.
"I happen to be his girlfriend!" shrilled Lavender.
"And I happen to be his... friend." Beside her, Ron croaked her name weakly.
"Her-my-nee... Hermione..." Suddenly self-conscious, and rather embarrassed, she jumped up. Lavender had caught his words though, and dashed from the room in tears. Hermione looked up to see if the other occupants of the room had heard. Slughorn was shuffling about awkwardly; Dumbledore looked almost droll. Snape's face was a blank mask, his eyes still fixed on her, unblinking.
"Oh, to be young, and to feel love's keen sting." The Headmaster broke the uncomfortable silence.
She thought she saw just a flicker of something on Professor Snape's face just then, but couldn't put her finger on what it was, or even if it was anything at all. She blinked, and his demeanour was wholly inscrutable once again. Leaving Ron in Ginny's capable hands, she and Harry left the hospital wing together and returned to Gryffindor Tower.
Snape hoped that his carefully composed neutral expression hadn't faltered upon hearing the old man's words. 'Love's keen sting' indeed! He felt faintly nauseous, although he couldn't quite determine why exactly. He'd felt 'love's keen sting' in his own youth, and could vouch for the pain it wrought. A prickling, niggling feeling picked away at him though, and he got the impression it was related to something a lot less ancient than his unrequited adoration for Lily Potter. He squashed it down hurriedly. He was not the only gifted Legilimens in the room, and it wouldn't do for Albus to find out his prize Death Eater was experiencing a moral crisis. The Headmaster already had enough qualms about trusting him, seeing as the Potions master 'spent so much time dangling on the arm of Lord Voldemort', as he'd put it! Snape tried not to be insulted.
He put his own life on the line each and every time he went to the Dark Lord's call, concealing his own thoughts and feelings. If he could do it so well for his own secrets, he didn't see why Dumbledore had any less faith that Snape could hide the details of the Order of the Phoenix's plans from his other master, if he were privy to them, just as efficiently! But Albus wouldn't be swayed. All the same, the old man maintained his insistence that Snape needed to stick to the plan. Curse the old fool - he'd get them all killed, with his crackpot machinations and stubborn, blind faith in the abilities of a bunch of dunderheaded teenagers.
Unsurprisingly to everyone but herself, Hermione passed her Apparition test with flying colours, and was excited to get her licence at last. She had already turned seventeen at the start of the school year, and was revelling in the increased freedom afforded to her with regard to practicing magic. Not that she'd ever really held back from furthering her magical education in the past though - permitted or otherwise. Ron had failed (by Splinching his eyebrow this time) and he tried valiantly to hide his annoyance with Hermione for sailing through it so effortlessly. Privately, Hermione would have rathered that he just sulk again for a bit, and get it out of his system. He'd spent most of the year in a funk with her, for one reason or another, so it probably wouldn't make much of a difference she figured. Ronald Weasley was a simple wizard - unsophisticated and lacking the ability to express himself in a healthy manner. She remembered chastising him the previous year for having 'the emotional range of a teaspoon', and it seemed to her that things hadn't improved all that much now that he was - on paper at least - an adult.
Harry's mission from Dumbledore to obtain Slughorn's memory took a rather odd turn after he drank the Liquid Luck potion. Magic sometimes worked in mysterious ways she reminded herself, as she watched her best friend march out of the castle, attend the funeral of a giant, murderous spider, and get drunk with a couple of professors. Also in a stroke of good luck, Katie Bell returned from the hospital wing after getting cursed by that deadly opal necklace. Slightly less luckily, Harry then went after Draco, still believing him to be responsible, and managed to gravely injure the Slytherin with one of the Half-Blood Prince's stupid spells. Hermione encouraged him to hide the textbook to make sure nobody else could ever exploit, or fall victim to the dark magic contained within its margins.
She was still making efforts to try and discover the Prince's identity, but had hit something of a wall and couldn't think where else to look. Not that it mattered really, she supposed. 'Prince' almost certainly didn't denote any sort of connection to royalty, seeing as the wizarding world had none. 'Half-Blood' had turned out to be of very little help either. There were a great many half-bloods who had passed through the doors of Hogwarts over the years. Harry was a half-blood - so was Lord Voldemort for that matter, going by the information she had gleaned from Harry's lessons with Dumbledore about his investigations into Tom Riddle's past. And the spells being dark in nature wasn't all that surprising either. Plenty of half-bloods were Sorted into Slytherin, despite the house's emphasis on blood purity. Even the Head of Slytherin house, Professor Snape-... She paused, remembering.
He'd told her during the Quidditch match, "My father was a Muggle, it's true - however my mother was a witch..." Her investigations had uncovered only one witch named Prince who had studied at Hogwarts in recent times: Eileen Prince. Trying to picture the Daily Prophet clipping she had appeared in, Hermione thought. She'd been a thin, dark-haired girl, with sallow skin. She drew in a breath sharply. What if... Perhaps Eileen Prince was Snape's mother? She was certainly about the right age, and the book was old enough to have originally belonged to her while she was at school here... Maybe Snape had inherited it from her and made his own annotations? Racking her brains, she tried to remember the handwriting in the textbook. She had thought it looked vaguely familiar, but had never quite been able to place it. Spiky, and slightly feminine. Silently chiding herself, she realised that it bore more than a passing resemblance to the instructions that were often found on the chalkboard in the Potions classroom. For the last five years, she'd seen Professor Snape write on that board with his wand at the beginning of every lesson, and yet still it hadn't clicked! He was the Half-Blood Prince! That explained the slightly dubious effects of some of the jinxes then... The man made almost no effort to disguise his ongoing interest in the Dark Arts, and she knew he had once been a fully paid up member of the Death Eaters: she had seen his Dark Mark on several occasions.
Now in possession of this new information - she was sure she was right, she had to be - Hermione felt a great weight lift from her. Her continued failure to find an answer to the author's identity had been niggling away at her. Harry would not be pleased with her theory, she knew. He near-idolised the 'Prince', although he had lost a little of his shine since Harry had discovered the effects of the Sectumsempra curse. Hermione nearly smacked herself in the forehead. Who had come to Draco's aid, and healed him of his wounds? Snape! Who better to fix the damage from a spell, than its own creator? Certain now that she was correct, she resolved not to tell her friend unless it became relevant. Harry was already mentally stretched to breaking point at the moment, and it wouldn't do to upset him further. Besides, the book was now hidden, and Snape's spells could do no more harm. She might have to find a way to let him know of its location in some way though, although she herself didn't know precisely where in the Room of Requirement Harry had concealed it.
Ginny had chosen that particular moment in time to reveal her feelings for Harry, and while Hermione was glad it was now public knowledge and the pair of them could get on with it having danced around each other for so long, she was uncertain how his budding romance with Ron's sister would affect the group's dynamic, or Harry's ability to think rationally in the future. The Weasleys were already despised enough by Voldemort's followers for being blood-traitors, and she was nervous that a closer relationship to the Boy-Who-Lived would put them at further risk, and leave Harry with another weakness to exploit.
Before he left with Dumbledore on the hunt for another of the Horcruxes, Harry had given her the vial containing the rest of the Liquid Luck. She hoped they wouldn't have to use it. Sneaking around the castle in the dead of night, keeping an eye out for anything suspicious that might be a sign that things were afoot, she and Luna had stationed themselves outside Professor Snape's office - half out of reluctantly following Harry's instruction to keep an eye on the Potions master in case he tried to do anything underhand in the Headmaster's absence, and half out of the feeling that if anything did happen that night in the castle, that it would be a good idea to have a member of the Order of the Phoenix nearby with whom to join forces.
After who-knows-how-many hours, Hermione had lost count, the door to the dungeons flew open, and the diminutive Professor Flitwick appeared, sprinting down the hallway towards Snape's office. He didn't even look at the girls, before flinging the heavy wooden door open and launching into a fevered dialogue with his fellow Head of House.
"Death Eaters! Death Eaters, Severus! In the castle!" The door had banged shut but bounced open again slightly in the Charms master's haste and Hermione and Luna could hear him squeaking in alarm.
"You must come and help!" A few seconds of silence, presumably Snape was replying to him in his usual calm, measured tone, and then there came a loud 'thump' from inside the office. Suddenly the door flew wide open again and a whirl of black hurtled out. Drawing himself up at the sight of the two sixth-years in front of him, Snape fixed Hermione with a firm stare. Even in the gloom of the dungeons, she made out a violent twitch of his cheek, before he spoke.
"Miss Granger, Miss Lovegood. Professor Flitwick has suffered a collapse of some kind in my office. Perhaps overcome with anxiety. Please tend to him, and make sure he gets to the infirmary. I am required elsewhere. The Death Eaters have breached the castle and I must go and help fight." He started off down the corridor again at a dead sprint. Hermione and Luna looked at each other puzzled, before nervously passing through the office door and going to aid Flitwick. They didn't notice as Snape cast one last look back over his shoulder at them as he ran, just before he left the dungeons and made his way up to the main part of the castle.