Chapter 40: The Half-Blood Prince
"Who can tell me what this potion is?"
Professor Horace Slughorn gestured to the frothing, pink brew in the cauldron atop his desk. Next to him, Neville felt a rush of air current as Hermione raised her hand like it was reflex.
"Amortentia!"
"Very good! And what is its purpose?"
Hermione didn't even bother to lower her hand. Indeed, she didn't even wait for Slughorn to call on her this time. "It's the most powerful love potion in the world!" she bubbled. "When you sniff the contents, it's supposed to smell differently to each of us, by featuring the aromas of the person's most deepest desires. In other words, what is most attractive to them."
"Excellent!" Slughorn beamed, impressed. "Would you care to demonstrate?"
Hermione blushed, but Slughorn didn't wait for an answer as he deposited the cauldron onto her, Ron and Neville's shared table. Sweet-smelling aromas wafted up from the cauldron, and even if she hadn't meant to, Hermione would have sniffed a whiff of it anyway.
"For…. for example, I smell…." she inhaled deeper. Was it the pink glow of the potion, or did her cheeks turn even more rosy? "Freshly cut grass… new parchment…. and ginger hair." Her voice fell to a breathless whisper on this last description, and her face bloomed with even more color. For some reason, she was making a conscious effort to not look at Ron, who now chortled:
"So you're having a passionate affair with your cat, then? Never took you to be one of those cat ladies, Hermione!"
Hermione's face settled into something that might have been relief. "Oh, bloody shut up, why don't you, Ron?" she muttered. Except the mirth didn't reach her chocolate-brown eyes.
Neville watched as Slughorn seemed to be studying Hermione with fascination. It was better than the way Snape used to look at her, look at all of them, in this dungeon room. It made for a nice change…. or would have, if Neville didn't remember what Slughorn's appointment as Potions Master this term had meant for changes in the staff.
When Dumbledore had first introduced Horace Slughorn at the Start of Term Feast, Neville had simply assumed the man had been tapped to be his sixth (!) Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. But when Dumbledore had said Slughorn would be teaching Potions, gasps and whispers and shouts had gone through the entire Great Hall. The uproar had grown louder, and had been led by Neville himself, when it was revealed Snape would be cycled out of Potions… and into the Defense Against the Dark Arts position instead. Here, Neville had thought Umbridge's anti-democratic regime had been the lowest to which the position and the people who had held it could sink. Whereas Umbridge's disloyalty and hostility had been clear and confirmed, somehow it nevertheless seemed altogether worse to now have someone teaching them who harbored a merely suspected disloyalty to Dumbledore and Hogwarts.
Not that that mattered to Neville or anyone not in Slytherin. All the other students, to a boy and girl, hated Snape almost as fiercely as they had spent last term hating Umbridge. The difference with Snape is that they had been accustomed to such hatred. Like Umbridge, he disdained them right back.
As for Neville himself, Snape not only seemed to resent him for reasons never explained, it was more like, outside of that disdain, Snape felt…. almost nothing for Neville. Apathetic.
The Chosen One tried to put the greasy git out of his mind as Slughorn was now asking Hermione her name. When she answered, he mused, "Granger…. Granger… would you, by any chance, happen to be related to Hector Dagworth-Granger, who founded the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers?"
"Oh, I should think not, sir," Hermione replied politely, though she seemed tickled by the compliment. "I'm Muggle-born, you see."
A pause, then Slughorn clapped his hands in delight.
"Oh, ho! : 'One of my best friends is Muggle-born, and she's the best in our year!' I assume this is the friend of whom you spoke, Neville, during our little discussion about your OWLS grade?"
"Yes, sir!" Neville vouched happily.
Hermione looked simply delighted as Slughorn circled back to his desk. "Did you really tell him I'm the best in our year? Oh, Neville!"
"Really that surprised, are you? I or anyone else could have you told him that!" Ron smirked fondly, rolling his eyes. "You are the best in our year, and have been since first!" If it were possible, Hermione seemed even more pleased.
"Now it's your turn!" Slughorn called for order. "Each of you will be working individually to brew a draught of Amortentia. The student who replicates this cauldron sample the most accurately with their own concoction will receive, as a prize, a vial of Felix Felicius, better known as Liquid Luck!" He pinched between his fingers a glass vial of golden liquid.
It was almost amusing how eagerly everyone got to work, grabbing Potions textbooks off the small bookshelf in one corner. By the time Neville got to the bookshelf, there was only one, deeply frayed copy of the sixth-year Potions text left. Settling over his cauldron, he flipped to the recipe for Amortentia, only to become dismayed:
In some cases, where there were printed words on the page, these had been crossed out in favor of some previous student's scribbling in the margins. Frowning, Neville wasn't sure what made him do it, but he didn't ask for a fresh, un-defaced copy of the text. Instead, he proceeded to brew the Amortentia potion under the revised instructions.
Next to him, Hermione noticed and frowned. "Neville…. what are you doing? We're not supposed to add that much….!"
In five going on six years of friendship, Neville had come to understand there was always a time to listen to Hermione, just as there was always a time to ignore her. In this case, Neville chose the latter and simply continued his work. Following the printed instructions in her book, he could feel Hermione next to him racing to catch up. By the end of the lesson, when Slughorn called time, poor Hermione's bushy brown hair was frizzed and she looked quite frazzled; her potion was smoking slightly. Slughorn bent over each student's cauldron one by one to inspect it; arriving at Ron's, he pinched his nose and descended into a coughing fit, which didn't exactly surprise Neville. Ron had always been rubbish at Potions.
So had he too, for that matter, having to study his arse off for Snape's OWLS exam and he'd only managed an E. No one would have known this, however, from how Slughorn let out a yell of praise upon sniffing Neville's cauldron. "We have a winner! Just like your mother, Longbottom, very good! – Alice was quite remarkable in Potions. Why, she and Lily Potter together were some of the finest Potions students I've ever had!" In a row towards the back, Neville caught Harry brightening at this little tidbit about his mother, tragically now (and still) a shell of what had clearly been her accomplished former self. Slughorn presented Neville with the Liquid Luck and ordered the class dismissed.
Hermione's face was contorted with disbelief and a bit of jealousy as she rounded on her best friend upon leaving the dungeons.
"You cheated!"
"No, I didn't!" Neville blinked, trying not to appear hurt by her accusations.
"You had to have! You were brewing it all wrong, using those scribblings in that defaced book of yours…."
"What? Neville won a Potions competition with a defaced book?" Ron looked impressed. He tugged his own copy out of his satchel and thrust it under Neville's nose. "Can I copy off you, mate? Or would you rather replicate these scribblings exactly?"
With a huff, Hermione slapped Ron's book out of his hands. "Don't waste your time, Ronald!"
"Fine. I will, as soon as you stop acting like a poor sport!" Ron scowled, stooping to pick his text up off the floor. "You're a better bird than that, my girl." Hermione oddly flushed at Ron calling her 'his girl,' even innocently. Neville suppressed a smile, recalling a similar memory second year, and how Hermione had responded then: I'll always be your girl…..
As much as he wanted to dabble in Will They-Won't They wonderings (musing about it aloud might even provide a nice distraction from Hermione's allegations), Neville didn't have time to speculate on anyone's love life at the moment, least of all that of his best friends.
"You should hand that defaced copy in, and tell Slughorn that you got the Felix Felicius unfairly!" Hermione sniffed.
"Are you mad? I'm keeping them both!" Neville stuffed the Felix Felicius into his pocket, tuning out the sound of Hermione's footfalls as she stomped away, Ron dithering to catch up. As he made to stuff his Potions text into his bag, however, the front cover flopped open to reveal the title page. There, in neat, block lettering read:
THIS BOOK IS THE PROPERTY OF THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.