"W-would you like to c-continue where we left off last, last time?" Professor Quirrell asked Harry after the Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson on Wednesday. Harry was perplexed until he added, "After dinner, p-perhaps."
As a matter of fact, Harry did not at all want to continue the impromptu dark arts tutoring from the previous week, especially not if it gave Professor Quirrell ample opportunity to curse him again. However, it occurred to him immediately that if he refused outright, Professor Quirrell might get suspicious that he had caught on, and do something more drastic.
So Harry said, "Er, sorry sir, I'm busy after dinner today." He cast around for a plausible excuse and gratefully seized on an event that all Ravenclaw House had been in an excited uproar about for the past few days, namely, "Quidditch tryouts! They're from seven to curfew. Maybe, er, next week?"
Professor Quirrell agreed about next week easily enough. Harry's gut churned. Perhaps the curse was more of a long-term sort, and Professor Quirrell only wanted to monitor the progress? He had to figure it out, and soon, which meant practice. He had looked up the structure sight spell that Petri had mentioned, but was so far unable to get it to work.
Except now he had to go to Quidditch tryouts. Harry wouldn't think to be concerned that a professor would actually check up on whether he had been honest, but this was Quirrell, who clearly had some nefarious motivations involving him. He supposed he could just go watch the tryouts, along with probably two-thirds of the house. Nobody said he had to participate.
Of course, he changed his mind that afternoon.
It was just past three, half an hour before their flying lesson was set to begin, but a spirited mass of Ravenclaw first years were already marching intently across the grounds towards the Quidditch pitch, having abandoned their free period early. Nobody said anything, for they were all busy mentally preparing themselves. The time for empty boasting was over. Even Lisa, who had spent what felt like every waking moment of the past few days emphasising her aerial prowess, and how beneath her the lesson was going to be, looked a little pale now that it was actually about to happen.
They arrived in the middle of the flying instructor's preparations. She shot them a good-natured but exasperated smile before shooing them off to the side.
Terry sprawled out on the verdant grass, eyes shut against the glare of the sun, and was soon joined by Anthony, Lisa, and Oliver. Stephen sat daintily, folding the back of his robe carefully under him, probably in fear of wrinkles or grass stains.
"Those brooms look a thousand years old," said Morag with a sniff. Harry's gaze snapped to where the flying instructor was laying out broomsticks. He didn't know the first thing about brooms of the flying type, but he had to agree with Morag's assessment. Some of them would hardly pass sweeping standards with their bent twigs and prickly-looking handles.
Michael made a sort of abject moaning sound.
Just then, the Hufflepuffs arrived, chattering noisily, and made a beeline for their group.
"Hi Harry," said Hannah, giving him a small wave and coming near, followed closely by a sallow-faced girl and the plump boy with the green potion who had been the unfortunate recipient of Professor Snape's ire. "This is Susan and this is Ernie."
"Nice to meet you," said Harry. "I'm Harry."
Susan and Ernie sat down, but Hannah remained standing. She clutched her hands close to her chest and twisted back and forth. "Oh I'm so nervous," she muttered, though she was grinning.
"We won't have to go high up," said Susan. "Just keep calm and hold the broom steady."
"I know, I know," said Hannah, her voice getting more high-pitched, "But it's just it's not the same when you're actually up there, you know. Hah. I just need to stop thinking about it. What about you Harry, do you like flying?"
Harry shrugged. "Never tried it," he said. The Hufflepuffs looked astonished, as if he had just admitted to never having ridden a bicycle. Well he really had never ridden a bicycle, either.
"Well I suppose that's why they have the lesson," said Susan.
Soon they heard the high screech of a whistle, and everybody scrambled to their feet to go line up. The flying instructor introduced herself as Madam Hooch, and told them each to stand by a broom.
Harry ran ahead, hoping to be able to select a slightly less beaten-up specimen, but all the options were about equally dismal. He finally settled beside a broom whose handle, at least, did not look like it would instantly give him a thousand splinters on contact.
"Don't pick them up yet!" Madam Hooch said sharply, and a few students dropped brooms guiltily back in the grass.
"Put your hand over the broom, and say 'Up!' You need to be firm," she told them.
Harry wondered what the advantage of this was to simply bending down and taking the broom, as a cacophonous chorus of "Up!" echoed around the field and most peoples' brooms only twitched or rolled over. His broom, unlike the others, leapt into his hand immediately with a heavy thwack that stung his palm.
"Mount your brooms," Madam Hooch said, when everybody had finally managed to grab theirs. Harry had definitely seen some surreptitious bending down when Madam Hooch's back had been turned. "On my whistle, kick off the ground gently, and hover at chest height. Do not go higher!"
Harry gripped the handle tightly and waited. The broom thrummed slightly beneath him, as if eager to get off the ground. At the whistle, he barely bent his knees and straightened out when it began to rise into the air. How was he supposed to stop? Even at the thought, however, he found himself leaning back and pulling on the handle, which brought the broom to a gentle halt.
Occasionally the broom would twitch slightly, as if trying to wander off, but it was easy enough to correct for the motion. Once everyone had managed to hover and remain there, Madam Hooch set them to flying in straight lines, and then took them on a low-elevation circuit of the Quidditch pitch, which was an oblong, rounded rectangle surrounded by a raised terrace of stands for spectators.
As they picked up some speed and skimmed above the first row of stands, Harry could not help reaching out with one hand to feel the breeze rushing through his fingers. He was trailing behind a little, distracted. How to go faster? He tugged at the handle, and found himself drifting upwards, higher and higher, his classmates a river of black robes beneath him.
Almost on instinct, he hugged the broom, pulling up his legs and bracing his trainers against the bristles. He shot down like a rocket, whooping with exhilaration as he easily overtook the others, zooming past a blur of yellow and blue, and finally past Madam Hooch herself.
He didn't care if she yelled at him. Nothing could stop him right now.
She didn't yell. Harry relaxed marginally and gained more elevation, before falling forwards again. Up and down, up and down, and soon he had made an art of it, pulling up again before he quite lost his forward momentum each time, so that he picked up continuous speed. Feeling daring, he rolled upside down on the broom, and for a heart-stopping moment, almost lost his grip on the handle, before gravity re-asserted itself and forced him back against it.
He caught back up to the rest of his classmates as they were coming back down, having lapped them completely, and it was with great reluctance that he brought himself back to land. He had hardly managed to dismount when he was accosted by a mob, with Terry in the lead.
"Never ridden a broom before my arse!" he shouted.
"It's true, I never," Harry began, but was soon drowned out by various other exclamations.
"How did you do that?"
"That was amazing, mate!"
"Show-off!" said a surly Hufflepuff boy.
"Stuff it, Smith. You're just saying that because you know you couldn't pull off anything that wicked," said Ernie.
Harry smiled sheepishly, feeling a little disconcerted by all the attention. But he couldn't regret what he'd done. It might have just been the best five minutes of his life.
"So, Quidditch trials today," said Terry, clapping a hand on his shoulder.
"I'll be there," Harry told him, and grinned more genuinely. Then his face fell. "Er, I don't know all the rules of Quidditch, exactly."
Lisa and Terry spent what felt like the better part of the afternoon educating him on the positions, the plays, and his likelihood of making it onto the team.
"He's a shoo-in," said Terry.
"He's competing against older students," said Lisa. "I think you should go for seeker. You've got the perfect build for it."
"Are you joking? Weren't you just talking about older students? I heard Patil has been seeker since like, the dawn of time," Terry protested.
"But in this case it's a disadvantage for him that he's seventeen and tall," Lisa said. Terry shook his head.
"Harry is obviously brilliant at flying and all, but experience is different. Harry, you should definitely just go for one of the open positions. All of last year's talent have left, I heard. You could be beater or chaser. Probably chaser. I mean you need some serious arm strength for beater."
"Can I try out for more than one position?" Harry asked.
"Good point," said Lisa. "You might as well try out for them all."
There were, indeed, tryouts for all the positions. The keeper and seeker, of course, being incumbent, were unlikely to be unseated, but the Ravenclaw captain, a tall, broad girl with a dark, intense gaze named Eliza, was firm about seeing what everyone had to offer.
Harry had been right in his expectation that pretty much all Ravenclaw House was gathered to see the tryouts. He was simultaneously gratified and irritated to see that Professor Quirrell, too, had shown up. Discreetly, Harry checked that he still had his amulet for protection against the Evil Eye. The blue glass bird was reassuringly cool and smooth under his hand.
"I used to, to be a Ravenclaw, you remember," Professor Quirrell was saying to Professor Flitwick.
"Alright you lot, line up!" Eliza shouted. Her voice boomed across the pitch, cutting through the chatter easily—she must have used a sonorus. Her wand tip lit up then, casting a huge beam of light that cut easily through the dim twilight, and she swept it across the mass of Quidditch hopefuls who had huddled around the goal posts.
Most people, Harry was a little bit intimidated to see, had their own brooms, which all looked a sight sleeker and more polished than the battered school brooms. Still, that meant that, as he had arrived early, he had managed to borrow the newest of the lot from an enthusiastic Madam Hooch. The silver lettering on the handle had not yet been worn away, and Harry could actually make out the outline of the brand: "Shooting Star."
"There are way too many of you here, as usual," said Eliza, extinguishing the tip of her wand and leaving everybody momentarily blinded in the dark. "I want you all to fly three laps around the field. It's not a race. This isn't bloody broom racing club. Let's just make sure you know what you're about. There will be bludgers. GO!"
There was a confused rumble from the crowd, and then everybody was scrambling to mount their brooms and take off. A pair of bludgers, as promised, zoomed threateningly into the air and started to pelt those who lagged behind.
Harry had tugged sharply on his broom as soon as Eliza had given the go, and found himself instantly dragged high into the air with his legs still dangling freely. Heart hammering in his throat, he made an awkward lunge and tried to roll his body up onto the broom. Thankfully, it followed his intent and swept under his leg. He hugged it securely and then he was off.
It wasn't a race, Eliza had said, but people certainly were doing their damned best to get to the front. Some of the horde of people who had come to try out were obviously unfit, Harry noticed with some relief. They could hardly keep their brooms straight at high speed, and some even fell off without any help from the bludgers.
The bludgers, head-sized black wrecking balls of destruction, were also executing swift and silent slaughter. They were just short of impossible to see in the slightly misty darkness, and though they made a telltale rushing sound as they passed, it generally came too late to be anything more than a harbinger of regret. Harry quickly racked up several close calls, and once even had to repeat the rolling move he had tried earlier, except this time under duress. He actually let go of the handle entirely for a terrifying split-second this time, and only some miracle (or perhaps magic) had him flipping back on top of the broom the next moment, rather than in free fall.
The responsible bludger paused in the air, glinting subtly under the moonlight, as if perplexed at having missed its prey, and then zoomed back for a second round. This time, Harry was ready, and pulled nimbly out of the way.
He'd noticed that as he sped up, the broom would begin to vibrate a little, and move more jerkily. It wasn't all bad, though, because it made it easier to jump from side to side in the air, which made for a useful dodging manoeuvre.
When the bludger tried to go for yet another pass, Harry decided that he had had enough and dove sharply downwards, straight into the mass of remaining contenders. Somebody yelped in the distance as he careened past, and then there was a satisfying crunch and accompanying scream as the pursuing bludger found a replacement target.
Eventually, after the loosely-defined "laps" had dissolved into sufficient all-out chaos for her taste, Eliza screamed a sonorus-enhanced, "STOP! EVERYBODY COME BACK!" and what was left of everybody, about a dozen contenders, landed with rather less energy than they had had at the start. Some of them looked to have been smacked by a bludger or two, but managed to remain on their brooms.
"Okay, we'll start with the beater tryouts," Eliza said. Harry decided to spare his strength in favour of the other positions. He wasn't sure he would even be willing to play beater. Dodging the bludgers was bad enough—having to constantly face them head-on seemed a bit much, even if he had a bat to help.
Also, the beater hopefuls were an intimidating lot, all tall and broad and built like bulls. It turned out that Eliza herself was a beater, and she flew up with the rest and smacked bludgers viciously at them until they all dropped out of the sky. Harry winced at each elimination and was glad he had abstained, even as he saw Professor Flitwick casting a slew of deceleration and cushioning charms at the falling students.
In the end, surprisingly, only the smallest of the lot, Inglebee or something like that, remained, and so he was made beater.
"He's got a head for strategy, obviously, unlike the other brutes," Harry heard Eliza saying to the others in the previous year's team. "He'll grow into it."
Next was the seeker tryout, which, though Eliza announced it as a free-for-all race to catch the snitch as quickly as possible, was really everybody against Patil, the lithe incumbent seeker whom Terry had described as playing "since the dawn of time."
The seeker hopefuls were all noticeably younger and smaller than the others. Lisa was trying out as well, and Harry recognised Cho Chang among several second-years.
It was almost pitch dark by now, with the moon having crept behind some thick cloud cover, so Harry really had no idea how they were supposed to find the snitch, golden or not. Nonetheless, they all kicked off at Eliza's whistle and shot into the sky.
Most of the others followed after Patil like a comet's tail, so Harry decided to employ a different strategy and went in the opposite direction. He had no idea what he was doing, however, and whatever his aerial prowess, he couldn't chase after something he couldn't find.
After about five minutes there was a loud cheer from the crowd, and Harry spun around to see Patil standing in the spotlight of Eliza's wand, arm raised and fluttering snitch in his grasp.
The next three rounds went about the same way. Patil caught it every time, even the last round when Cho caught sight of the snitch first. She had split off from his tail, but Patil had outstripped her despite her lead and swooped underneath her to snatch it away.
At this point, Eliza called an end and confirmed Patil's spot as seeker, while keeping an elated Cho on as reserve.
Finally were the keeper and chaser tryouts, and Harry supposed it was not in fact possible to try out for both positions. Besides last year's keeper, Grant Page, there was one other sixth or seventh year trying out for keeper. Harry decided to go for chaser. Eliza split the chasers into two groups of three, one for each keeper, and assigned them each one side of the pitch.
Harry found himself paired up with Lisa and one of the incumbent chasers, Roger Davies. They were up against Page.
"Eliza will be looking for team play," said Davies, drawing them into a huddle. "Grant's got a long reach and has this double guarding trick with his broom. The only way to get past him is with a really good feint."
That was all the time they got for advice before Eliza blew her whistle and launched two quaffles into the sky.
Harry flew up in the air, unsure of himself, but Davies obviously had no reservations zooming up and snatching the quaffle from where it had been levitating lethargically. Lisa flew parallel to him, so Harry hurried to catch up.
Davies's broom was clearly better than the school brooms by some orders of magnitude. He seemed to be coasting easily while Harry found his broom to be in the vibrating, jerky phase, and Lisa had fallen somewhat behind.
They made straight for the goalposts, and Davies let go of his broom to throw the quaffle. Page had arranged himself sideways, so that he was halfway between two of the goalposts. Instead of aiming for the unguarded hoop, Davies did a strange curving toss, and Harry was startled to see the quaffle flying right at him. His hand darted out automatically to grab it, but it was a bit large and he fumbled slightly.
Seeing the goalposts approaching, he tried to go for the hoop behind Page, but the keeper punted the ball away and anyway, Harry suspected he would have missed even had he not been blocked.
The quaffle remained levitating some meters away from the goalposts, as if it had rolled away in midair. Harry flew over to retrieve it and then went back to where Davies and Lisa had regrouped some distance out of Page's earshot.
"Sorry," he said as he approached, aware that he wasn't performing so well.
"No worries," said Davies, who, Harry supposed, really didn't have anything to worry about.
The rest of the tryout went about as well. Davies attempted to assist Lisa and Harry in scoring a goal, but they were both unable to, and finally he just went on his own and managed to get past Page with some quick manoeuvring.
In the end Davies and the other original chaster, Stretton, both got their positions back, and a third year, Randolph Burrow, got the last position. Page also remained keeper, to nobody's surprise.
Defeated, Harry and Lisa returned to join the other first years.
"Too bad, mate," said Terry. "But good show. I couldn't even make it past the bludgers."
"Are you okay?" Lisa asked him. Harry looked him up and down and didn't see any cantaloupe-sized bruises.
Terry laughed. "Don't worry. Professor Flitwick fixed us right back up. Nobody even had to go to the hospital wing."
"You're all mental," said Michael. "I can't believe you would volunteer to go near a big metal ball that's actively trying to put a dent in your head."
"You came to watch, didn't you?" said Lisa.
"Watching is totally different," said Michael. "Watching is great fun."
"I couldn't really see much," Oliver admitted.
"That's why you need these," said Stephen, tapping the bulging sky blue goggles on his head. "Omnioculars."
"I've never seen omnioculars like that," Lisa said, bumping Harry aside to peer at Stephen's strange accessory.
"Well they're mini-omnioculars technically. But the idea's the same. You can't record much but you can zoom in on the action and everything's lit up for perfect visibility," Stephen explained.
Harry thought about his own spectacles, and wondered if they had a similar function. He tried pushing them up his nose, as one usually did when hoping for better visibility.
He wasn't disappointed. Though everything appeared sort of grainy, his field of vision increased drastically and where he could see only dim shadows before, he could make out the features of older students, and even see the distinct lines of the Quidditch pitch behind them now. He wished he had discovered this feature ten minutes ago, though realistically it would not have made much of a difference in the tryout results.
"Being on the team would have been brill," Terry was saying, "but also a lot of work. They practice every day at an ungodly time for hours, you know, and they still have to do schoolwork on top of it. So I'm sort of glad we all failed."
"Looking on the bright side, huh?" Lisa murmured.
But Terry had had a point. The volume of homework picked up drastically after the first week. If they thought McGonagall and Snape had been bad, now they had to contend with effectively self-studied essays for Binns, boring worksheets on wand movements for Flitwick, and frustratingly vague writing prompts from Quirrell.
Harry, having failed to make it onto the Quidditch team, ran out of ready excuses for Professor Quirrell soon enough, and had to accept another evening meeting with the man the next week.
He decided to try the Enemy's Curse on his own again, just in case. Since it was not technically illegal, and didn't even cause damage to objects, he figured it would be fine to cast it in the usual empty classroom he used for practising.
Funnily enough, he had no problems casting it now. All it took was the image of Professor Quirrell whispering the sinister mantra for the Evil Eye, sending a shiver down his back, and the blue beam erupted with alacrity from the end of his wand. He cast it at the wall several times for good measure, just to make sure he could.
The sound of heavy footsteps reached his ears, and Harry quickly looked around for something else he could plausibly be doing instead of questionable and possibly dark magic. He dug around in his pockets but found only his remembrall.
A moment later, Vince walked into the room. Harry tried not to look guilty or anything, and acted as if he had just been, well, looking at his remembrall, which seemed a bit stupid.
"Oh hey, Harry," said Vince. "Look, I have one of those too now."
He produced a remembrall that was slightly larger than Harry's, and which had a filigreed golden band around the equator.
"Where did you get it?" Harry asked.
"Draco got it off that wimpy Gryffindor, Longbottom," said Vince. Harry frowned.
"You mean he just, took it from him?" Harry asked. Vince nodded and shrugged. "And now you have it?"
"Draco threw it away, but I went to go find it," Vince explained. "Seemed useful."
Harry couldn't imagine why somebody would bother to steal something, and then just toss it. Draco Malfoy made no sense.
"You don't think Neville might want it back?" he asked.
"What's he gonna do about it?" Vince said. Well, that was a good point. Harry couldn't imagine Neville Longbottom actually reporting Malfoy, or going up to him and settling it one-on-one.
Harry went for a different angle. "If you give it back to him at charms club I bet he'd be grateful," he said.
"Oh, you mean, he'd owe me one," said Vince, looking thoughtful. "I suppose so."
He put the remembrall away in his pocket and traded it for a familiar white magazine. It was another issue of Martin Miggs.
"So what's this one about?" Harry asked.
Vince squinted at the cover, which looked more or less the same as that of the previous week's issue, as if in deep concentration.
"Something about music, I think. Cellos. Ah, probably the Strange Sisters!" he said.
"Strange Sisters?" Harry asked.
"It's like the Weird Sisters, but they didn't want to use the real name I guess," Vince explained. Harry didn't know who the Weird Sisters were either, but decided it wasn't important.
"Is there a plot summary or something?" Harry asked, moving closer to see if there was something he'd missed. But no, only Martin Miggs's awkward smile and slouchy beret greeted him. "Have you read it before?"
Vince shook his head. "It's new, just came out yesterday," he said.
"I don't get it," Harry finally said. "How do you know what's going to happen, then?"
"I'm reading it," Vince said.
"Without opening it?"
"It doesn't work as well," said Vince, "but I can still tell the main points. Can't you? Here, get a better look at it."
He shoved the magazine into Harry's hands. "I don't think looking at it is going to help," Harry said. "Can you do that with all books? Just, er, read them without opening them?"
"Not all books," said Vince. "Some are easier than others. Our textbooks are pretty hard."
"Let's go to the library," Harry said, eager to test out Vince's perplexing talent. Was it really what it seemed to be?
"What?" Vince said, bemused. "Why?"
Harry handed Martin Miggs back to him and steered him into a chair. "After you finish this."
Vince shot him another confused glance before turning to the comic and quickly becoming engrossed. Harry produced his remembrall again, some legitimate use for it having just occurred to him.
He set it down on a chair and pointed his wand at himself, sketching in a careful spiral, in and out. "Structuram vedo," he intoned. Nothing happened, which was better than what had occurred the first few times, when sparks had shot out of his wand towards his own eye.
The structure sight charm was supposed to allow the caster to see spell structures, as the name suggested. According to the Compendium, an expert at the spell could eventually see each of the many hundreds of basic spell functions as different colours and shades, though the inexperienced caster was at first likely to see only a uniform, silver or white light. Harry would be glad to see anything at all.
He guessed that his wand movement was still incorrect. There had been a description and an animated diagram in the book, but it had been rather complicated.
"I'm done," said Vince, after far too short of a time. Harry shoved his uncooperative wand and remembrall into his pockets.
"Library then," he said.
"You take this," said Vince, giving him the magazine, as he had the previous week.
"Why?" Harry asked. "Don't you want it?"
"No, it's yours," said Vince. "I never had it, okay?"
"Okay," Harry agreed, bemused by Vince's insistence on not being associated with the comic. It wasn't as if it were some sort of contraband, or embarrassing to be seen with. Actually it seemed quite popular. Now that he knew what it was, Harry had begun to notice it everywhere. There were often various issues lying around in the Ravenclaw common room, and he had seen a whole stack of the things on Terry's nightstand.
"That's a lot of books," Vince said as they arrived at the library. Harry tried not to look at him too incredulously.
"It's the library," he said. "What did you expect?"
Vince shrugged, looking away. "Dunno."
"Wait, you haven't been here before?" Harry deduced suddenly. He counted on his other hand the number of times he had already had to come here for some assignment or other, and ran out of fingers before he got past the tally for Professor McGonagall. "How did you do your homework?"
"Homework?" Vince asked, and Harry almost gaped.
"You know, those essays we had to write? For classes?" And he remembered, distinctly, he thought, Vince claiming that he couldn't write. But that just could not be right.
Vince shrugged again. "Draco helped," he said.
By helped, Harry wondered if Vince meant that Draco had completed it all for him. However, he just couldn't imagine why the other boy would bother doing something like that.
"What was in it for him?" Harry asked.
"I owe him one," said Vince. "I owe him lots of ones."
Harry was still unsure what Draco could possibly be getting from the arrangement, but there were more important matters at stake. He walked up to the Divination shelf and picked a book titled Xylomancy, which was something he had never heard of and was fairly confident Vince had never heard of either.
"Here, what's this book about?" Harry asked. He half hoped that Vince was just going to flip the book over or look inside for some kind of summary or preface, but instead he just stared intently at the utterly unfathomable title and matte green cover.
"Er, looking at the future with sticks. Dropping some sticks on the ground is supposed to make special patterns or something. I dunno, seems stupid," Vince said.
"Let me see that," Harry said, grabbing the book back. He opened it up and read the first few passages of the introduction, which was more than enough to convince him that Vince had adequately summarised the contents, if clumsily. Harry was startled to find that his fingertips were sweating a little where they pressed against the parchment pages, and that his heart had raced up into his throat some time ago without his notice.
This was incredible. This was impossible.
He shoved the book back into its place and grabbed another one. The Fateful Word: Grammatica in the Past. He had literally no guesses on what the book was even about, other than, well, divination.
"What about this one?"
"Why are you making me read random books?" Vince asked.
Harry did not understand how Vince did not recognise his own amazing talent.
"I just want to see how you read. It's, er, different from how I, how everyone else I've met reads," Harry said.
"Er, okay. This one is about how words can change what happens in the future. I think, depending on how you say something, people will act different," Vince told him. "What do you mean I read different from you?" he asked, looking on in confusion as Harry flipped through the tome in an attempt to verify his words. "You're reading the same way."
"I'm skimming," said Harry. "If I read the book it'd have to be like, well, this." He shut the book with a rather heavy thud and then opened it up to the first page. "Preface. As I write this book, the Fateful Word Effect is the most hotly debated topic in the entire field of Grammatology, and perhaps even all of Divination. Though in recent years its existence has, I should think, been established beyond a reasonable doubt…" Harry paused and looked up expectantly at Vince.
"Oh," said the large boy, blinking slowly, before he looked down at his feet. "You can get all that? I'm not, er, not that good yet."
"What do you mean?" Harry demanded with some exasperation.
"Quiet in the library!" Madam Pince whispered very loudly, from across the room. Harry froze and quickly replaced the book on the shelves.
"Let's get out of here," he muttered, and ushered Vince down the aisle and nearest staircase.
"Let's go to lunch," said Vince.
It wasn't lunch yet, Harry was sure, but he figured the Great Hall was as good a place as any to continue their conversation.
There was already a smattering of students in the hall despite the lack of even any silverware set up. Harry checked the time and discovered that they were an hour early.
"Look it's Draco and Goyle," said Vince, pointing to the Slytherin table. Harry, seeing little other alternative, followed him.
"Where have you been all morning?" Draco demanded, upon seeing Vince. His gaze shifted doubtfully over to Harry's face, and then slid down to somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. "Oh, you. You know we don't have to wear the uniform on weekends, don't you?"
"I know," said Harry, who had not really given it much thought. His casual wear consisted of even more black robes. It hardly seemed worth even taking it out of his trunk. Draco, on the other hand, was clearly endowed with a more exciting wardrobe, and wore a light grey robe embroidered with shimmering vines.
Vince, who was also black-clad, though not in school robes, sat down, and Harry joined him. Draco had not stopped staring at him.
"What are you doing? This is the Slytherin table," he said.
"Is there a rule against that?" Harry asked. It would be a right stupid rule, if there was.
"Well," Draco began, and then paused. "I suppose not." He finally turned back to Vince. "Have you seen the Gryffindor point glass? Or better yet, Weasley?"
Vince shook his head.
"Oh it was glorious," Draco crowed. "Remember that supposed duel that I challenged him to? Dunce didn't even realise dueling is against the school rules. Walked right into Filch in the middle of the night. You should've seen his face! Looked like his whole family had died, all dozen of them, and he had to sit alone at the end of the table. Didn't stop him from stuffing his face like a boor though. Speaking of which, where were you? I cannot believe you missed breakfast."
"Didn't miss breakfast," said Vince. "Was early."
"Early?" Draco repeated. He glanced over to Goyle. "We went at what, eight? What did you get up so early on a Saturday for?"
Vince looked oddly uncomfortable, and the silence dragged, so Harry said, "We were studying."
"Studying? Early morning on a Saturday?" Draco said again. "Are you seriously converting Vince into a Ravenclaw? That's—I cannot even begin..."
"Well he reads in an, er, interesting way," Harry said.
"He can read?" Draco said, looking a little astonished. Vince looked abashedly at his lap and Harry frowned.
"Of course he can," he said, "look," and he pulled out the only reading material he had on him, which was the Martin Miggs comic.
Vince looked up very suddenly and all the blood seemed to drain from his face. His mouth formed into a panicked "No!" but no sound came out at all. Harry held up the magazine awkwardly, seeing as it was obviously too late to put it back.
"You read that mud—muggleborn rubbish?" Draco demanded immediately.
Oh. Harry felt a little relieved that it was just this.
"Not really," he said coolly. "Terry loves it so I nicked one to see what it was about. Why, is it really bad or something?"
"It's written by a muggleborn," Draco explained, as if that were the most relevant thing upon which to judge a periodical. "Also the drawings are almost muggle—they barely move, and it's sub, er, subversive."
Harry wasn't sure either he or Draco knew what "subversive" meant, but he nodded anyway.
"Oh. Too bad then," he said. "But anyway, Vince can read you know? I bet he's never seen this comic in his life and he could tell you what it was about."
"That's hardly reading," said Draco dismissively. "It's just a comic. An infant could do that." He turned to Vince. "Last time I checked, you still cannot even get paragraphs."
"Can't," Vince mumbled, looking away.
Harry wondered what Draco was even talking about, and had to concluded that he must also have this same ability that Vince had, or perhaps a better one. However, he wasn't sure it was safe to ask about it.
His bemusement must have shown on his face, because Draco sneered suddenly. "What is it? Don't tell me you read like a mu—muggleborn."
Reading like a mudblood? Reading and writing making somebody a mudblood—it sounded awfully familiar.
"Maybe I do," Harry said, trying to sound casual and not at all defensive.
"You mean you had to memorise every single word, and read them one at a time? That must take an eternity," Draco said. Harry blinked. He supposed that that was sort of how one began to read, but sooner or later it became possible to skim texts or read whole sentences or even paragraphs at a time.
"Not exactly," he said. "Nobody literally reads the words one at a time. Not even muggles."
"And you write all your essays that way too?"
"Well how do you write essays?" Harry demanded.
"There's a spell," said Draco. "Like the professors use for the board."
"What's the spell? Can you show me?" Harry asked, and Draco flushed slightly.
"I er, I can't do it that well yet," he admitted. "I use a dicta-quill."
"Are those even allowed in exams?" asked Harry. He remembered exams from primary involving complete silence.
"Well, no," said Draco.
"So what do you do then?" Harry pressed. Draco frowned for some time before answering.
"I suppose then I'd have to write like, like a muggle."
"So you can write. Like that," said Harry.
Draco's face lost its strange, uncertain look and he broke out into another sneer. "Well of course I can."
But Harry noticed that Vince and Goyle seemed rather surprised.
"But you," Draco said to Harry, "ought to learn to read and write like a proper wizard."
"How exactly is that, anyway?" Harry asked.
"Writing is like casting half a spell actually, and when you read it it's the other half of the spell. Magic is the purest kind of communication. If you're a true wizard you should understand everything the writer meant to say," Draco explained.
Later in the library, Harry tried very hard to find some kind of magical understanding in books, but was met with no success. He'd think Draco had been having him on, but for the fact that it had all started with Vince. There was definitely something to the idea of reading like a wizard, something different.
"How do you learn to read?" Harry asked Vince as they walked up to charms club together.
"Dunno," said Vince. "You just know, if it comes natural to you, or it doesn't."
He said it like reading was a sort of innate talent. Harry mulled over the unsatisfying thought until they made it to the crystalline rotunda and were promptly set upon by Elaine, who leapt up from her seat by her sister and practically sprinted across the room to meet them.
"You came! I mean, welcome back," she said with a beaming smile. "Harry! I saw your suggestion. That charm looks brilliant. It didn't win this week but I'm definitely gonna learn it so you lemme know if you need help, okay?"
"I'll definitely take you up on that," said Harry, somewhat disappointed but not surprised that others had not voted for the charm. "So what charm are we learning today then?"
"The human-revealing spell! Or well, just the revealing spell too, if you don't know that one yet," said Elaine.
A whoop sounded from behind them, and they turned to see the pink-haired Tonks strolling into the room. "Who picks the most wicked spells every time? That's right, me," she said.
"All your spells are straight off the Auror Academy list," said Elaine. "They're totally useless for normal people."
"Defence is dead useful," Tonks argued. "What if you get mugged by dark wizards?"
"I'll be sure to use the human-revealing spell while being mugged by dark wizards," said Elaine dryly. "They'll be so revealed that they run away screaming. Actually, regular revealing spell would probably be more useful there."
Tonks sighed theatrically and slumped down on a nearby bench. Elaine sniffed.
"Where's Gabriel?" she asked.
"Dating," said Tonks, rolling her eyes and making air quotes. "More like snogging."
"He picked a girl over charms? Traitor. Whatever. We'll wait a few more minutes for everyone to show up."
Cassius arrived just then, followed by Hannah and Neville. Then came Penelope and a tall, ginger boy in Gryffindor robes, who also had a prefect badge pinned to his chest. Close behind them was yet another prefect, this one a girl from Slytherin.
"Hey Penny, Percy. Hey Gemma," said Elaine.
"Where's Gabriel?" asked Gemma, upon giving the room a once-over.
"Snogging Dawlish in a broom closet," said Tonks.
"Shame, thought we might get the full set," Gemma said with a sigh.
"Can't be too predictable," Tonks told her, "or all the troublemakers will know to come out when it's charms club time."
"I still can't believe we all made prefect," said Gemma.
"I still can't believe Gabe made prefect," said Tonks.
Gemma made a face and turned to Elaine. "What charm are we doing?"
Elaine told her, and then decided they might as well officially start.
"So this is a variant of the revealing charm, only instead of revealing disguises on one target it just shows if there are any humans in a certain radius, and you can even figure out how many," she said. "The incantation is homenum revelio, and you have to sweep your wand like this." She held out her wand at arm's length and turned about, tracing an arc.
"How does that have anything to do with the revealing spell?" Gemma demanded. "They don't have remotely the same properties!"
"They both reveal, don't they?" said Tonks.
"I think it's syntactical similarity," said Penelope. "Sort of like in Transfiguration."
"This is charms," Gemma protested.
"Who cares?" said Elaine. "According to my charm family book it's a variant, so that's that. So who doesn't know the revealing spell? I'll show you real quick."
All the first years raised their hands, and she herded them into a corner. Harry supposed that the revealing spell was probably related to the charm-revealing spell as well, but he'd never had occasion to learn it.
"Okay, so this spell is actually pretty rubbish. I mean, in real life. You can't tell if you got it right, or if there's just nothing to reveal. It's really easy, in principle, but could also be really hard. Depends on how hard the target is trying to hide, I suppose. Works on stuff that resists finite though. Incantation is just revelio, and you kind of flick your wand."
Elaine flicked her wand, pointing it at Harry. "Revelio!"
She lowered her wand and stared in surprise, and Harry automatically reached up to touch his face. That wasn't it, though—it was his hair, he realised. He rolled his eyes up to see that his fringe was black, rather than the blond that he had almost got used to.
"Er, sorry," said Elaine. "I didn't think—"
"It's fine," said Harry. It wasn't as if anybody could recognise him. He had no idea why Petri had even bothered with renewing the charm on his hair after they had finished settling in Knockturn. Perhaps it had just been to avoid awkward questions from the likes of Silviu.
"That's perfect, though," said Elaine. "Maybe you can use the hair colour charm to test the revealing charm."
Harry did not actually know how to cast a hair colour charm, but he supposed it must be a variant of the colour-changing charm. Once Elaine had left them to their practice, he tried to cast it on himself.
Hannah immediately covered her mouth to stifle a giggle, and Vince and Neville broke out into grins. Harry tugged a bit of his fringe down to get a good look at it. It was canary yellow.
"It's hard without a mirror," he said. "Why don't you all try too?"
They hadn't learned the colour-changing charm in class yet, but Harry knew that it was an easy spell to get working, if difficult to master entirely. Even Neville managed to turn his sandy hair pitch black on the third try.
The revealing spell was also surprisingly easy. Harry wondered what good disguises were, if first years could cancel them with so little effort. He considered what Elaine had said about how hard the target was trying to hide.
"Wait, try it again," he told Hannah, who was practising on him. He charmed his hair yellow again, managing to get the shade somewhat more realistic, and concentrated on not being found out.
This appeared to have no effect, because Hannah managed to rid him of the disguise instantly.
"Again," he said, this time thinking about permanence while casting the colour-changing charm itself.
This time, it worked, and the charm resisted Hannah's attempt to reveal it.
"I thought I had it," she said.
"I tried to make my disguise more powerful," Harry told her. The relationship between a disguise spell and the revealing spell reminded him somewhat of the severing and mending charms, where the severing intent behind the severing charm could be strong enough to overpower an attempt at the mending charm.
Meanwhile Neville and Vince were taking a break, and Vince returned Neville's remembrall, which the Gryffindor took ecstatically. Immediately as he touched it, the smoke turned bright red.
"Oh no," he mumbled. "What did I forget now?"
"Your homework?" Harry suggested. Neville stared at the orb blankly.
"Can't remember," he finally said.
"Where did you get your remembrall?" Harry asked.
"My gran sent it as a gift," Neville said.
"Is your gran an enchanter?" Harry asked. Neville shook his head.
"I reckon she bought it somewhere," he said.
"Oh! That's right," said Hannah suddenly. She rummaged about in the rucksack she had brought and produced a roll of thin parchment. "Here, Harry, this is the catalogue for Wilma's Wools. They've got everything, not just wool, and they deliver owl orders within two days."
"Thanks," said Harry, having forgotten all about last week's knitting adventures. His needles were still under his bed in his cauldron.
His needles! He owed Elaine a sickle, or else. He patted his robe pockets hurriedly, and to his relief discovered that he had outsmarted himself, and placed a sickle there the previous week.
"Oh, thanks," said Elaine when he handed it to her. "How's the revealing spell going? You lot ready to move on to revealing humans?"
"Yeah," said Hannah, and nobody protested.
The human-revealing spell was a sight more difficult than the revealing spell. In particular, it was exceedingly odd in that it gave both false positives and false negatives. Casting it while the humans it was meant to be revealing were in sight was completely trivial—Harry felt like he had a long feather duster that swooped over all the people in the room, and rustled whenever it passed over somebody's head. Casting it with his eyes closed was another matter.
Elaine recommended that they walk around a bit while the others were casting, to put up more of a challenge. Harry found frustratingly that if he thought that Hannah, for example, was in front of him, that the spell would find her there even when she was actually behind him. Or if he did focus on finding her, it would fail to detect anybody at all.
"I think the trick is to want to find people without guessing that they're there, or where they are," Hannah said. "If you already think that they're in a certain spot, and they're not, then it doesn't work."
This was all well and likely, but not so easy to achieve. Still, at least they had all managed to get some reaction from the spell by the end of the hour.
Harry wasn't sure what he would ever need the spell for, anyway. It seemed far less useful than structure sight.
"Hey, Elaine, I really am interested in learning structure sight. Do you think we could meet up to practise it?" Harry asked.
"Oh sure. How about after lunch tomorrow? I usually go to eat around noon," Elaine said.
"Sounds good," Harry agreed.
"It's a date!" said Tonks, while Gemma and Penelope snickered.
"Don't say things like that!" cried Percy, looking scandalised.
"Don't be such an uptight arse," Tonks suggested.
"Club's over, go home," said Elaine, shooing them out the door, where they all made their way down the narrow spiral staircase in an awkward queue, before splitting to return to their respective house common rooms.
True to her word, Elaine stopped by the Ravenclaw table after lunch the next day and gestured for Harry to join her.
"Come on, I've got a great spot we can practise at," she said.
"Not the rotunda?" Harry asked.
"Rotunda's always booked," she said. "I think choir is in there most Sundays."
They went up the grand stair, and then up some more, and some more.
"Sorry, it's a bit of a walk, but it's worth it," Elaine said, as Harry huffed and struggled to catch up to her longer stride. "Anyway, where did you even find this spell? I'd never heard of it before you mentioned it and I'm in NEWT Charms."
Trust Petri to have dropped the name of a spell that was probably light-years above his level. Then again, he was normally good about only teaching Harry spells he could actually cast.
"My uncle," Harry said, finally getting somewhat more used to this response. "He's an enchanter."
"Really? Wicked! My mum's a charms mistress. She works for Cleansweep," Elaine told him. "I s'pose it makes sense we're both charms enthusiasts, huh? Phew. We're almost there; just a little farther."
They went up a steep staircase and emerged in a familiar burgundy hallway. Surely Elaine was not going to take him to the Gryffindor common room? Maybe it was different with other houses, but Harry had never seen a non-Ravenclaw in Ravenclaw Tower.
But no; instead, she took them two feet down the hallway, spun right back around, and led them back out onto the landing, where the staircase had transformed mysteriously into another corridor. This too was familiar. Were they going to the rubbish room that Draco Malfoy had been so intent on finding the other day?
Indeed, they stopped right in front of the tapestry with the dancing (or rather, not dancing) trolls. Instead of just staring at the wall intently or saying some sort of password, however, Elaine turned on the spot three times. A door poofed into existence.
"There's a wicked study room here," she said. "It has literally everything you'd ever need. You can even use it to conveniently borrow library books."
Harry waited with some scepticism as she pulled open the door, half-expecting to see the shambling piles of other students' discarded rubbish that Draco had implied were here. Then Elaine stepped through to reveal a small, tidy classroom, reminiscent of Professor Flitwick's, which was lined on all sides with ceiling-high wooden shelves that seemed largely empty. There was no lectern, only a neat assortment of desks and chairs.
All in all, it seemed fairly ordinary for how out of their way they had gone to come here.
"Come on," said Elaine, ushering him inside and then shutting the door. "Take a look at this. The room's already prepared with what we need," she said, making for the shelf directly across from them.
Harry hurried after her. She reached her hands into a shelf that was rather taller than Harry could see over and resurfaced with several books, which she slammed onto a nearby desk.
"Refining the Structure Sight," was the top one.
"There's a whole book on this spell?" Harry demanded, a little daunted.
"There's a whole three books on this spell," Elaine corrected, pushing the pile over in a way that would have made Madam Pince wince, or perhaps scream at her.
Indeed, the other two books looked also largely to be about the structure sight.
"Isn't this place brilliant? A thousand times better than trying to find a book you don't even know exists in the library, and Pince-free."
"Yeah it's neat," Harry agreed, a little preoccupied by how much studying this single spell might take him. Did he really have the time for that? Even those books would take him a while to read.
Well, if he read the muggle way.
"Hey, Elaine," he began, "is there some way to read books faster than word for word? Like one of my friends, he can just look at a book without even opening it and know what it's about. Said it was wizard reading."
"You're such a Ravenclaw," said Elaine with a bark of laughter. "Sometimes it does just happen that you can sort of, get what a book is about before even properly picking it up, but it's kind of tricky. Dunno if it's even really possible with printed or auto-quill books. It's the old handwritten first editions that the writers really put their ideas into, you know? But we don't have to read all these books. They're just here for reference. Dunno 'bout you but I like to learn by doing."
And with that, she pointed her wand at Harry and said, "Structuram vedo!"
Harry reeled as his vision lit up silvery white. It wasn't painfully blinding like he had half-expected from reading the description of the spell, but it was hard to make anything out in any case. He couldn't even see the desk or the books that he knew were in front of him—everything was a nearly uniform grey, with no indications of depth.
"Er, I didn't realise we were casting it on each other," he said.
"I read that it helps to have somebody else cast it at first," said Elaine. "Well, do you see anything?"
"Everything's grey," he informed her. She sighed.
"Yeah, that's what I thought. No idea how to make all the magic look different, or not block out your regular sight yet."
Harry frowned. "Wait, you're actually just casting this on me so you don't blind yourself, aren't you?"
Elaine laughed sheepishly. "Well, maybe. Don't worry, you can cancel the spell with finite. But you know, it's really hard to get the right wand movements when you can't see. Finite."
Harry blinked rapidly as his regular vision returned. He rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. "That was odd," he muttered. "I can't even get that much to happen, though. Mine just doesn't work."
"Can I see your wand movement?" Elaine asked. Harry demonstrated. "Looks good enough, though I think the last swirl can be a bit tighter. The focus behind the charm's a bit tricky, though. It's sort of like with the human-revealing charm we did yesterday. You need to focus on seeing your surroundings."
Perhaps that was the problem Harry had been having before. He had always been focusing on some enchanted object whose structure he wanted to see.
He pointed his wand at Elaine. "So can I cast it on you?"
She chuckled nervously. "Well, I s'pose that'd be fair," she agreed.
"Structuram vedo!"
Elaine recoiled a bit, suggesting that something, at least, had happened. She straightened out a moment later and gave a thumbs up.
"It worked. Well, about the same as mine. Can't really see much," she said.
"What now?" Harry asked.
"So according to this book," said Elaine, tapping the first book on the desk, "you can practise refining the spell by tuning out certain sorts of magic, like by trying to ignore weak or short-term spells."
"I don't think that's going to work here. I bet Hogwarts is long-term spells all over, and that's why we can't see anything," Harry pointed out. Also, he realised somewhat belatedly, his own spectacles were probably heavily charmed, and were in effect blocking his vision. He quickly removed them and set them on a nearby desk.
"That's a good point," Elaine muttered. "So let's just do the reverse. Tune out long-term magic."
Doing that was more difficult than it seemed, as Harry found it unnatural to think of less-powerful magic as brighter than more-powerful magic. If one tried to think of it purely in terms of duration, all magic, however, long-term, had some sort of expiration date, so without preexisting knowledge of how long this or that spell ought to last, the tuning was very inexact.
"I still don't see anything," Harry said after the tenth or so time Elaine had attempted to block out everything except a simple colour-changing charm on one of the desks. "Maybe it'll be easier if we cast it on ourselves?"
"Maybe," she said.
Harry tried the spell on himself and was again plunged into a sea of silvery light. An idea suddenly came to him—why couldn't he cast the spell again while it was already active? That would at least cut down on the cancellation spells needed between attempts.
Then again, casting it on himself a second time, he could hardly tell if it had worked or not. Everything still looked the same, namely uniformly bright. He attempted to turn and look around, but found his balance precariously compromised, and so elected only to move his head. Something in a different shade of grey caught his eye. It was somewhere to his right, he thought, but otherwise it was impossible to place the location without any kind of depth perception. There was a lumpy, dark oval, which presently lightened until it became rather invisible again, though Harry thought he could see flickers of tone or even colour there every few seconds.
Now that he tried it, in fact, he thought he could see flickering in the corner of his eye whenever he focused on a single spot. Perhaps if he focused there, and cast the charm again...
The ordinary, if blurry world of colours and objects came back into view and Harry sighed, rubbing at his temples.
"This is tricky," Elaine said. She was flipping through one of the books. "Not helpful. Everything after the first chapter assumes you're able to do this tuning out thing. I'm getting a headache from looking at all this magic."
Seeing that Elaine was clearly ready to call it a day, Harry said, "Thanks for your help. I'll stay here a bit longer."
"Good luck," Elaine said before slipping out the door.
Harry thought he had an idea as to what he had seen earlier. He cast the spell again and then immediately looked down at his wand. Indeed, there was a dark spot in the grey, which lightened and then disappeared within a moment. Wands had all sorts of long-term, complex enchantments on them. If he could distinguish his wand from the surroundings, that would be a good start.
Unfortunately, he couldn't seem to get past the phenomenon where his wand vanished moments after he cast the spell, and eventually gave up as the irritation in his eyes escalated to a stabbing pain. He collected his glasses and one of the books and made for the exit.
Before he reached the door, however, the book wrenched itself out of his hands and flapped through the air like a bird until it reached its original shelf, where it landed with a thump. Harry took that to mean that he was not permitted to remove it from the room. He resolved to come back later, as there was no way he would be reading anything right now with his headache.
As he left, the door vanished behind him. Suddenly struck by a thought, he spun around three times, thinking about the room with other people's rubbish that Draco had been searching for.
The door reappeared, and Harry pulled it open, grinning as he was met with an entirely new room, this one gargantuan, with a vaulted ceiling like a cathedral. As promised, it was full of precarious towers of stuff. He saw countless dusty cloaks, books, bits of parchment, broken toys, hats of every description, and even jewellery strewn about atop piles of cracked and rusted furniture. Harry didn't think he'd seen ever seen so many broken things in one room, and, given that he'd regularly seen inside Dudley's second bedroom at 4 Privet Drive, that was saying something.
He glanced around for some non-dysfunctional souvenir that he might bring back, and his eye caught on something shiny in the corner. It was underneath a large, raised armoire with one of its legs broken off. He shuffled over to it and saw that it was a round, handheld mirror. Casting a quick spell-revealing charm, which told him that it was heavily enchanted, but not cursed, he deemed it safe enough and picked it up.
Catching a glimpse of Professor Quirrell's pale, turbaned visage, he dropped it almost immediately and whirled around, but of course there was nobody there. A moment later rational thought reasserted itself and he figured that the mirror was a foe glass, like the one Petri kept in what passed for the parlour of their coffin. He took another look. As with Petri's foe glass, this one did not reflect him at all, and showed only his enemies. Professor Quirrell, while a little blurry, was in full colour, which meant that he was nearby and threatening. There were some other indistinct shadows in the background. Petri seemed to have faded from Harry's list of enemies, he noted dubiously, and also Silviu was distinctly absent. Perhaps the glass was faulty. It had after all been lying in a pile of rubbish.
He pocketed it anyway and returned to the Ravenclaw common room to finish up some homework. Tomorrow, he reflected glumly, was Monday again and that meant new homework, most likely, and worse, much more of Professor Quirrell than he cared to see. It was bad enough that they had Defence nearly every day; the after-hours meeting, or lesson, or whatever it was, that Harry had been coerced into attending made it positively dreadful.
Defence Against the Dark Arts wasn't so bad, if one discounted the part where Professor Quirrell managed to make no sense whatsoever and contradict himself multiple times while lecturing on how curses differed from other spells. Harry thought the single-page treatment in the textbook was more informative, which was just depressing. At least the professor had no opportunity to pay Harry any extra attention during the lesson.
That evening was another story. Professor Quirrell missed dinner entirely, so Harry had some reprieve with his roast chicken and potatoes before he had to trudge up to the third floor.
When he knocked on Professor Quirrell's office door, there was no response. Just as he was wondering if it would be acceptable for him to consider it a no-show and leave, he was suddenly assaulted by a pungent garlic odour and with it, the sight of the professor coming around the corner. It was the wrong corner, Harry thought. He must have come from beyond the door that was mysteriously out of bounds. Harry had asked around, but even the prefects did not know why the left-hand side of the corridor had been decreed forbidden. Apparently, it had happened suddenly after the winter holidays last year, with no accompanying explanation.
"Mr P-Potter, g-good evening," said Professor Quirrell, and Harry immediately felt the onset of a headache. There was no way at this point that it was a coincidence that his head hurt in the man's presence, but according to Petri it had nothing to do with vampirism. He wondered for a paranoid moment whether Professor Quirrell had somehow managed to curse him already on his very first day at Hogwarts, but then dismissed the idea. What reason could he have had to do such a thing?
What reason did he have now to do whatever it was that he was doing? Harry stepped back to allow Professor Quirrell to pass him and unlock the office door. "Good evening, sir," he mumbled.
Professor Quirrell held open the door and waved him inside. "I was, I was thinking," the professor began, "Y-you might want to learn some stronger spells. Say, dueling spells, maybe, so you can hunt down that vampire."
Harry frowned, something having just occurred to him. "But sir, why can't I just report it to the aurors?"
Professor Quirrell looked quite surprised. "Why, why didn't you report it to the aurors? I assumed you did, and, and they did nothing."
It was awkward to have that escape strategy turned around on him, and Harry wasn't sure how to respond for a moment. He finally went with the truth. "I er, didn't think of it until just now."
"It's probably too late now," Professor Quirrell said. Somehow, even though he spoke very solemnly, Harry got the impression that he was actually rather amused. "Even if you don't end up seeing that v-vampire ever again, you c-could have some, some peace of mind if you knew how to d-defend yourself."
Unfortunately, Professor Quirrell did have a good point. Hadn't Harry already found himself in multiple situations where it would have been nice to know some more offensive spells than the fire-making or severing charms, which literally did not even count as jinxes? He knew the Enemy's Curse, he supposed, but he still wasn't confident he could trust it to work without an actual enemy in mind.
"Like what kind of spells?" he asked.
"Did you practise the Enemy's Curse?" Professor Quirrell asked.
"I couldn't think of an enemy," Harry lied.
"Oh, of course," said Professor Quirrell, though he sounded rather surprised. "But, that's easily remedied. Have you, have you heard of a foe glass?"
In fact, Harry had the one from the rubbish room in his pocket, and he supposed it would have worked to identify his enemy for him, had he had doubts. He remembered that he had a question about it, and so he took it out and showed it to Professor Quirrell, carefully not looking into it. He had no desire to see how terrifying the professor's face would look up close in its twisted, high-definition mirror world.
"I have one right here. I think it's broken, though. I can't see anything in it," he said. "Not even the vampire."
"Vampires aren't visible in silvered mirrors," Professor Quirrell said, immediately diagnosing the problem. He took the offered glass and peered into it. Then he glanced quickly at Harry, as if startled, before his expression smoothed out again. "P-perhaps this one really is broken, though."
"You don't see anything either, sir?" Harry asked, the gears in his mind already whirring as the professor shook his head. The foe glass probably was functional, after all, if Silviu was meant to be absent. That meant that Professor Quirrell was lying. It didn't take much of a leap of logic to suspect that Professor Quirrell had seen Harry in the mirror. The man obviously had it out for him for some reason.
But it was impossible to "eavesdrop" and find out another person's enemies by looking into the mirror at the same time, so why had Professor Quirrell bothered to lie? It didn't make any sense.
"Perhaps we should try a different c-curse," the professor said, returning the foe glass, which Harry pocketed again.
Harry nodded and waited, all ears for this new curse.
"It's c-called the c-conjunctivitis curse. It makes the target's eyes swell swell painfully so they c-cannot open them. G-good on vampires since they use their eyes to cast magic. And there's no c-counter-c-curse. You have to drink a p-potion," Professor Quirrell explained.
Actually, that did sound very useful, and the lack of countercurse meant it might actually be effective against the likes of Silviu.
"The incantation is oculi tumescunt. I will c-conjure something and show you. Serpensortia."
Professor Quirrell twirled his wand and a garden snake flopped out of the tip and landed on his desk. He promptly cast the curse at it—evidently the wand movement was a very simple forward jab.
Harry did not see anything happen, exactly—the snake's eyes were rather small—but a few moments after the curse hit the reptile raised its head slightly flicked its fork tongue in agitation.
"Dark," said small voice, "Can't see. Pain! Danger!"
"Is it talking?" Harry blurted.
"If it didn't talk, how would you know if the curse worked?" said Professor Quirrell sensibly.
"It's not sentient is it?" Harry asked, just in case.
"It's conjured," said Professor Quirrell simply, and Harry nodded. Magic could not create will, only an approximation of it. As the curse could not be easily cancelled, Professor Quirrell had to vanish the snake a moment later and conjure a new one for Harry to practise on.
Harry was not exactly sure what he should be imagining, as he was not well-acquainted with the anatomy of snake eyes, but he supposed "can't see" and "pain" were probably in the right direction.
"Oculi tumescunt!" he cried, trying to make a controlled jab. Nothing happened. He tried a few more times with a similar lack of results.
"You need intent," said Professor Quirrell. "Perhaps..."
He banished the garden snake and conjured a rather more threatening cobra to replace it.
"Attack him," Professor Quirrell suggested to the snake, and suddenly it shot off the table right at Harry, who stumbled backwards and found the small office now dangerously confining as his back hit the wall and crunched against some newspaper clippings.
Was this secretly some plot to "accidentally" kill him with a snake?
Harry tried to run at an oblique angle to avoid the bright ribbon of colour on the floor. How was he supposed to aim?
"Oculi tumescunt! Oculi tumescunt!"
At least now, there was definitely some kind of magic coming out of his wand, but he kept missing the snake as it came at him. After another circuit around the office he finally wised up and aimed a foot ahead of it, striking true as it slithered up to meet the curse.
The snake continued to pursue him, apparently not much hindered.
"Stop," Professor Quirrell said, and the snake obligingly stopped. Harry moved as far away as he could get from it and then paused as well to catch his breath and calm his thudding heart. "It seems to have worked."
Harry had some choice words pent up for the professor, but decided to keep them to himself. That hadn't been much worse than anything Petri might have done to motivate him, he supposed. Instead, he said, "It worked? How? I wasn't really thinking about anything."
"Curses are different from ordinary charms," Professor Quirrell said, and Harry hoped this wasn't going to be a repeat of the disorganised morning lesson. "The key distinction is the importance of willpower. A curse brings the caster in direct conflict with the target, so it will only work if the will to inflict the curse is more forceful than the target's will to resist. Put simply, you must mean it."
That made sense, Harry supposed. It was also nothing like what he had heard earlier that day from the same man. "That's not exactly what you said in class, sir," he said, feeling a little petulant.
"It's not the most standard view," said Professor Quirrell, "but I personally think it is the correct one."
"I see, sir," said Harry. "Can I try again, er, without the attacking snake?"
"Of course," said Professor Quirrell, and obligingly conjured a less-threatening specimen.
Later, walking back to Ravenclaw Tower just before curfew, new curse under his belt and an agreement to meet every Monday evening, Harry realised suddenly that Professor Quirrell had made it through his entire explanation without stuttering once.