Disclaimer: My name is Regina Lacrimarum. I own no stories. Please, don't sue.

Saturday morning was bright and blue, with the faintest hint of cloud. For all the beauty of the sky, Hermione wished she were inside the castle. It was chilly at nine o'clock that morning, and as Hermione headed down towards the gates that marked the boundary of Hogwarts, the wind was picking up. Blowing McGonagall's cloak around her, the gusts made her look like a Druid princess in the middle of a sacred rite. Snape just looked like Snape with the wind tugging at his robes.

The professors greeted Hermione with widely differing amounts of pleasure and then they set out. As soon as they passed through the gates separating the school from the hazards of the world, McGonagall extended a hand and Hermione took it. She got a nasty shock when Snape took rough hold of her arm. She almost knocked it away, but stopped herself in time. McGonagall was carrying a bulky instrument in her other hand and Snape was nearer to Hermione, anyway.

Hermione just thanked her lucky stars that her hand was full, although she didn't imagine that Snape would have taken it anyway. She was holding a small grey book. On the first page she had pasted her contract and on the second she had put McGonagall's list of concerns about the castle. On the front was emblazoned in gold letters the legend "Hogwarts: A History." It was technically true, since she was essentially recording the history of a new Hogwarts, and it made damn sure that no one would think about messing with the book. According to Ginny, there were rumors that Hermione slept with a copy of this particular book. Ridiculous as the gossip was, Hermione was willing to use it.

A moment later Hermione felt the unpleasant sucking in her stomach that meant she was Apparating. When she recovered, she was on top of a hill in the most beautiful place she had ever seen. Rolling green hills spread out in all directions, though there was a suggestion of a town in the distance. Over the hill just to the east of the trio ran a merry little brook.

Looking about her in awe, Hermione didn't try to speak. Neither of the professors talked, either, but she thought that was professionalism more than wonder at the natural beauty of their surroundings. Snape was fiddling with a kind of tripod that had materialized from somewhere in his clothes and McGonagall was adjusting her bizarre instrument.

For lack of anything else to do, Hermione took out her book and wrote with her wand on the third page:

England site

-Hills make for good Quidditch pitch. Here Hermione paused for a moment and then dutifully recorded the negative aspect of this, though she liked the place already. Poor visibility, though, and not much good for any other sports.

-No dangerous areas like the Forbidden Forest.

-No village for special weekends and so on.

-Hard to build the castle and foundations like this, though I imagine magic makes it easier.

-Shouldn't be any security problems.

A sort of thunk-plink made Hermione look up to see McGonagall stepping back from the magical instrument with a look of satisfaction. "Miss Granger, come here, if you will."

Hermione stowed her notes under her arm and obeyed.

"Do you know what this is, Miss Granger?"

Hermione studied it for a second before replying. It was a wooden sphere a foot in diameter with a little metal diamond on the top and several spindly iron tentacles that dangled helplessly in the air. Here and there a serrated semicircle like half of a clock gear stuck out from a slit in the side. "It looks like it measures..." She took a stab. "Magical potential?"

McGonagall allowed herself a small smile. "Indeed. To be honest, though, I've never used it before. Severus, care to get it working?"

Thus applied to, Snape stepped forward and tapped the diamond thrice. A gold spark ran out from his finger to the silvery surface of the shape, which told Hermione that he was using wandless magic. The gears began to spin and click together within the sphere. The instrument rose slowly off the tripod and hovered in the air. Hermione thought it stayed there for two minutes, but she wasn't sure. During that time, Snape stood calmly with his hands folded behind his back and McGonagall was surveying the landscape. Hermione couldn't take her eyes off the sphere.

When the instrument-a tickling memory told Hermione it was a Knott's compass-settled back onto the tripod, Hermione saw that the diamond had shifted down and to the left. She came even closer to the compass to get a good look at the shift and saw that there were small markings running from 1 to 200 Kns in a circle around the diamond. Apparently the site had a magical potential of 162 Kns. Hermione had only a vague notion of what that meant but she dutifully recorded it in her grey book.

"Professor McGonagall," she asked timidly, "what exactly does 162 tell us?"

"It's high, you dimwit," Snape snarled. Minerva gave him a reproving look, which he ignored. "Can't you read a scale?"

"I can read-" To her great credit, Granger stopped herself there, though he could see he'd provoked her.
Out of respect for this rare show of self-control, Snape stooped to be helpful. He didn't have to be nice while he did it.

"It tells us, Miss Granger, that this is an area of unusually high magical activity. It tells us, Miss Granger, that a school planted here would probably flourish. It tells us, Miss Granger, that spells will practically work themselves here."

He liked the way the girl flinched when he said her name, but even her obvious misery wasn't enough to cheer him up. He had visited both sites before and he had felt the high Knott reading at this one in the same way he felt a storm coming, felt it somewhere in his bones. Snape knew how attractive a child like Granger would find that. For himself, he couldn't stand all the green and the cloying mysticism of those hills. If you stuck in a shovel into one, what came out would probably be pure magic.

McGonagall explained, "Hogwarts has a Knott reading of 100, and 90 is standard for wizarding dwellings and public buildings. You don't want to make things difficult for yourself, but much harder than 90 is difficult to find. We were lucky this area was on the market."

Minerva insisted on walking the area for a good half hour more. It had to be for Granger's sake, because she had seen the place more often than Severus himself had. The student wrote busily in her book the whole time, pausing occasionally in her walking to note an unusual land formation. She had charmed her wand to act as a quill, which was a nice touch, but she really shouldn't have needed any writing tool at all. It was hard to believe she was the pride of Gryffindor.

With every step Granger took, Severus saw her loving the site more. It had fresh air and space for healthy running, everything the British schoolchild needed. That meant it was going to be this site chosen. Despite what Severus himself had told the girl about the irrelevance of her personal preference, he knew that Dumbledore would see to it that her selection was the final choice.

Still, there was still the formality of viewing the other site. Snape took Knott's compass from McGonagall and seized her hand. She extended her other hand to Granger and they were off.

They landed with a bit of bump, but Snape managed to stay upright. Granger couldn't say the same. She fell over and skidded a few feet, but her thick robes saved her any bruises or abrasions in which the fall might otherwise have resulted. As she got up, brushing the dirt from her robes, Snape saw the exact moment when she registered her surroundings. Her eyes went wide and her lips twitched oddly.

They were standing on rock at the base of a cliff, above which the point of a mountain could be seen. Here and there a few flowers grew, but there was mostly just rock for a hundred yards, at which point there was nothing. The three approached it and gazed solemnly over to where a few yards of jagged rocks led to a network of shallow pools on a vast moor of greyish green.

"Hippocampi live down there," McGonagall explained. "They don't like the sun, so they're probably underwater at the moment, but they come out to graze if it's cloudy and the plimpies are scarce." Granger only nodded without seeming to comprehend.

In a daze Granger led the way to the cliff and in a daze she climbed the small stairs Minerva showed her. In a daze she took in the vast, gently sloping area, a much larger ledge, and followed the increasing slope as it became a forbidding mountain.

Everywhere they went, Granger just stared. Snape had thought she had widened her eyes as far as they would go, but he had been wrong. As she stared, they stretched farther and farther up until he thought her eyebrows were going to crawl off her head.

Somehow, Snape hated to see anyone look at this place with such horror. "Well, Miss Granger," he asked sarcastically, "what do you think?"

Now she was staring back down to the lower of the two ledges and she didn't seem to hear him. Snape repeated his question, noting that it lost some of its impact when said a second time.

The girl turned and looked straight at him with a defiant look. "I think it's perfect."

Under his incredulous eyes, Granger flushed scarlet. "I mean, obviously we'd have to do something about students falling from the cliffs-oh, and bothering the hippocampi, since they're a protected species, I think. The castle and the Quidditch pitch can go up here, and then I think Hagrid might like to set up down below. He wouldn't live in the castle for anything, I don't think. Those trees, "she gestured vaguely behind her, "look like they probably have clabberts and definitely runespoors, but we had the Forest and that went all right for the most part, so-"

Snape raised one eyebrow one millimeter and Granger broke off in the middle of a thought. McGonagall didn't comment, simply establishing the compass on its tripod. A little while later, they had the reading and Hermione sucked in a breath.

"Twenty-five? How can that be?" She jabbed wildly below. "The pools are the right size to be teeming with hippocampi and you said, Professor, they lived here. How can they if there's so little potential for magic?"

"For human magic," Snape said impatiently, but not as impatiently as was his wont. "Hippocampi do a little bit of their own kind of magic, but they don't think about it the same way humans do. They search for a different kind of potential, one this compass won't measure." Granger looked crushed under the weight of her own ignorance, so against his better judgment, he added, "You wouldn't have learned that in Care of Magical Creatures. You'd only know it if you'd dealt with magical potential before. You haven't."

Severus shut his mouth. Granger had barely seemed to notice that this was the longest speech he'd ever made to a student, at least the longest speech that wasn't overtly hostile, but McGonagall was giving him a look that said it hadn't escaped her attention.

"Does that absolutely preclude building here?" Granger's eyes were still wide.

McGonagall, who had opposed even considering this site, sighed. "Not exactly, but it would make things considerably more difficult. The building of the school would require much more magical energy. Once we got the students here, they would struggle to perform on their normal level. Second-year students would need to start off doing first-year spells. In the end, we'd probably have to switch to an eight-year school cycle."

Granger's eyes narrowed suddenly and Snape could see the wheels in her head turning. "But that would mean... in the end, we'd be a lot stronger, wouldn't we? As a group, I mean."

"That is correct," Snape said. "One point to Gryffindor." Now he could see her wondering if her house would actually get that one point. She was an open book. It was amazing the Death Eaters had bothered to torture her for information. Everything she knew must have been stamped on her features.

The open book of Granger closed as soon as the three were back on Hogwarts soil. Her face shut down and Severus watched her assemble a neutral expression. First came the mouth, which softened and settled into a relaxed position. Then there was the nose, which flared a little and settled too. Last of all were the eyes. She didn't quite manage the eyes.

As she was preparing to separate from her professors in the Great Hall, Granger asked, "Professor McGonagall, do you know anything at all about the Knott compass? I feel like I read about it somewhere, only I can't quite remember."

Minerva professed her ignorance and Snape decided not to mention that he knew exactly what book she meant. He had gone looking for it in the Hogwarts library the day before. The geography and architecture books weren't due to be moved for another week, at least, but that book was nowhere to be found. Curse Albus. He planned for things like Granger sticking her nose in books on the subject.

The student disappeared up a staircase, leaving the two colleagues standing together in the midday light of the Great Hall.

Presently Minerva said, "You liked the second site, didn't you, Severus?"

"Yes."

"Miss Granger did, too."

"Yes. She made that abundantly clear when she went off on a tangent the likes of which the world has never before seen."

She'd said one more thing, right before they'd apparated, but she'd been so quiet Snape almost thought he'd imagined it. Staring into the sky over the cliff, she'd said, "Here's true."

And it was.