Chapter 19: Monday afternoon

2 September 1940

The fourth-years made it to the Hall in time to make and eat quick sandwiches before Professors McKinnon and Shylock sent a flurry of notes summoning the dual-enrolled Divination/Runes students to their meeting. Tom and Hermione joined fellow fourth-years Alethea Malfoy, Tamsin Shaunassy, and Cameron Terrance from Ravenclaw, Filius (Fil, seriously, don't call me Filius) Locke from Hufflepuff, and Neville Masters from Gryffindor (and about thirty students from the third, fifth, sixth, and seventh-year cohorts) in moderately sized first-floor classroom.

The outgoing Fil welcomed Hermione to their year's "Overachievers' Club" and explained that there were also a couple of honorary members who were taking both Care of Magical Creatures and Arithmancy, but that Divination/Runes/Arithmancy was much more widely considered to be the more difficult arrangement. Cameron, he added, was the only person in their year currently stupid enough to be taking all four electives.

The professors joined them after a few minutes and, consulting several sheets of parchment, quickly explained that fourth-year Divination would have their Practicals on Monday, while Runework would be applied on Wednesdays. Then, as they would be missing her introductory class, Professor Shylock outlined her expectations for their semester before handing them syllabi, and assigning their reading for the week and their first essay, to be turned in on Wednesday. She did not take questions.

Hermione was most impressed by the young Runes instructor's brisk attitude, and the syllabus, which was the only one she had seen at Hogwarts. Tom was irritated, but not at all surprised that they would be expected to turn in work their first class period. The rest of the club joined him in good-natured grumbling for a few minutes, before talk turned to gossip about the other fourth-years.

Professor Shylock, Hermione learned, had a reputation as one of the strictest taskmistresses in the school, second only to Professor Russell, the Arithmancy Mistress, in her expectations for her students. She listened closely as the other fourth-years talked about their fellows, not knowing enough to contribute much to the discussion. Tom didn't seem to be paying attention, his gaze wandering the room, and no one spoke to him directly, though his occasional comments to her suggested that he was not quite so disinterested as he pretended.

Cameron had not, apparently, realized that Melina was flirting with him in Potions, and was not at all interested in pursuing her. In fact, he asked Fil to put in a good word with Amy Pond, one of his housemates. Thea and Tammie talked about Tammie's family's summer trip to America, and Neville said he had heard that Leslie Benton's family was considering immigrating to avoid the war. The other Ravens said that it wasn't true, though the Gruenfelters and Blumengelds, Jewish muggle families who had had students in the younger years, had left, fearing that Germany would manage to invade England, despite their resistance so far. There was an awkward moment as the students considered the war, and Fil quickly changed the subject, offering the news that Anamaria Le Parc had hinted after Potions that she was going to ask Damocles Smith to the first Hogsmeade weekend. Tammie looked scandalized, and Neville made a crack about bold French ladies.

Eventually the professors called the students to order, to speak for a few minutes about office hours and what students should do if they should become overwhelmed, before dismissing them to head to their next class. The fourth-year cohort walked to the Divination classroom together.

Hermione was pleased to find that, unlike in Trelawney's time, Divination was held in a normal classroom on the second floor, rather than an over-heated Rastafarian tea-shop at the top of North Tower. She was less pleased to find, when Professor McKinnon asked the students to demonstrate what they remembered from the previous year, that she was woefully behind in scrying. Her term and a half of reading tea-leaves for the mad old bat had not prepared her for studying any other aspects of divination.

Professor McKinnon informed Hermione that she would report to his office for remedial studies every Saturday morning until she had caught up with her peers, or she would have to drop the class. She flushed fiercely, hating the professor for highlighting her weakness in front of the other students, but did not argue, not wanting to draw even more attention to her failure. She returned to her mirror and attempted to allow her magic to pool on its surface.

"Have you forgotten we have plans this Saturday?" whispered Tom, with whom she was sharing a table.

"What was I supposed to do? Tell him, no I can't make it? Drop the class? You're the one who insisted that Divination is important," she hissed back. "You'll just have to go without me."

Tom looked rather put out. She wondered why.

"It's probably for the best, anyway. Introduce yourself before bringing in a new person, you know."

"Fine," he huffed, and changed the subject. "You're doing it wrong. You have to reach a meditative state before you ask your magic to do things."

"'Ask your magic'? What is that supposed to mean?"

"Scrying," Tom explained, "Is mostly a wandless art. You might enchant your mirror or basin or whatever before you start, but infusing it with your power to create the window, that you have to do without a wand, and once you've done it, the mirror acts as your focus."

"I know that. It was in the book. But how do you get your magic into the mirror in the first place?"

"Like I said, you have to relax. Let your power rise up around you and then you kind of suggest to it that it should pool around your mirror. It's really not that hard. Look, even Le Parc has managed it," he nodded at the little French girl at the next table.

She was staring intently at her mirror, but aside from that, Hermione couldn't see anything that indicated the girl had managed to pool her magic.

"How can you tell?"

Tom looked at her like she was an idiot. "The puddle of silver light in her hands is kind of a dead give-away."

"What are you on about?"

"Are you blind?"

"No, I'm not blind, thank you very much. I just don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about."

Tom glared at her. "I'm not making it up."

She rolled her eyes. "Did I say you were? I just don't see what you're talking about."

"Oh, Merlin's balls," Tom swore in frustration. He pushed power into the link on their left hands, and fairly dragged Hermione's consciousness into his mind, so that she was looking through his eyes. Her body froze in her seat as it reflexively tried not to fall over. Suddenly the other students were surrounded by various degrees of shimmering clouds. Several were apparently holding pools of the shimmering light in their outstretched hands. Now do you see? thought Tom.

Hermione wrenched her mind back into her own body with a shudder. "Not okay, Tom! Don't do that again! At least warn me first!"

"Did you see?"

"Yes. And that's weird. No one else I know has ever talked about seeing magic. I haven't even ever read about it."

"That's stupid. Everyone sees magic when they cast spells. Don't they?"

"Well, yes, but it doesn't look like that."

Tom shrugged. "It's undirected."

"Why should that make a difference?"

"I don't know."

Professor McKinnon had been making his way around the room, advising the students as they tried to recall their lessons from the previous term. He interrupted their furiously whispered debate. "If you two can't focus on your work, I'll have to ask you to separate," he said mildly.

"Yes, sir," said Tom, turning back to his mirror.

Hermione nodded, then asked, "Sir, is it normal for people to see magic when other people are scrying?" Tom kicked her under the table.

"It's not unheard of, but not common." He looked between the two students, observing the Riddle boy's glare and the new girl's frustration. "An unusually well-tuned sense for magic would explain Mr. Riddle's aptitude for the subject," he added. "That doesn't mean that one needs to be able to sense free magic to excel, you understand. I just wouldn't compare myself to your friend too much as you're starting out, if I were you. We can talk more about it on Saturday, if you like."

"Yes, sir," said Hermione, suitably reassured that she was not some sort of squib, with a special inability see magical auras around her meditating peers.

Tom was torn between satisfaction in learning that he was special, even among wizards, and irritation that McKinnon knew. He did try to make a point of not letting adults know anything important about himself, after the Flaming Wardrobe Ploy. They were much easier to handle if they underestimated you.

The professor moved on, and Hermione returned to her meditation. Tom focused on scrying the morning's events, and was pleased to confirm at the end of the class period that Avery and Nott had indeed interrupted Dumbledore's welcome-back speech, and that the professor had been most put out, giving the boys a week of detention for "failing to appreciate the importance of others' time and tardiness to the first lesson of the term."

The fourth-years moved on to Arithmancy, Tom and Hermione were joined by the other Slytherins, while about half the Hufflepuffs and all of the Gryffindors except Neville and Melina Sparks left for Care of Magical Creatures.

Professor Russell was perhaps forty years old, and had already developed an aura of severity around her that Hermione thought was comparable to Professor McGonagall on a bad day. She outlined their objectives for the term – they would be focusing largely on modeling intermediate Charms (a continuation of their first year's studies in arithmancy) and also begin to model inanimate to inanimate transfigurations – and kept them right up until five with a lecture reviewing the key arithmantic principles (and basic algebra) she expected they had forgotten over the summer.

Hermione thought this review was most useful, as it gave her a good idea of the state of the discipline. It had developed rather a lot in fifty years, and she thought that if their first lesson had been an application session, she might very well have given away the fact that she was completely out of time, given that the first-year techniques she had learned were well advanced over even the most cutting-edge research in 1940. She resolved to spend some time on Tuesday evening looking over the previous year's text so that she would not accidentally use an analytic that had not yet been invented on Wednesday.