The North Tower was dedicated to the study of Divination. As the tallest tower of Hogwarts castle, it provided the best views for physical and mystical vision alike. This was little consolation to Harry as he and his friends made their way up to class. They weren't going to the very top – that was reserved for the NEWT students – but even going half way was a testing exercise. This was to be his second Divination lesson and he was already dreading the next 3 years – at a minimum - of climbing the tower.
When they had begun the climb they were fresh from brewing their first potion, flushed with the excitement of successful magic, sharing opinions on how they thought they had done. "I think mine was a bit too green," Alexandra had kept saying, "the book said it should be toad green. Mine was more evergreen, don't you think?" Harry – whose potion Professor Slughorn had picked out as a perfect example of toad green – tried to mollify her.
"Well, at least it was closer to toad green than my levitation charm is to levitation," he said. Though he said it as a joke, its truth still stung. Selwyn laughed at the quip; irrationally, Harry resented him for it. He was over a week into his Hogwarts career and he still couldn't get the spells he learnt in class to work. He had taken to casting the spells he already knew with increased vigor, just to prove that he was a wizard. He was actually getting rather good at the various domestic charms Marissa had taught him, figuring out how to stretch them to their limits. The bed-making spell had proven to be particularly useful: it could be used to twist any fabric into any shape he wanted, and all it took was a bit of mental gymnastics to convince himself that he was still making a bed. Well, that and an extra twist of the wand at the end, and a slightly different intonation. It was a surprisingly useful spell: Harry had used it on Monday to trap Dorian in a heavy drape while playing Merlin and Rebels.
Still, it grated that the spells they learnt in class were apparently beyond him. Certainly he wasn't alone in his predicament – Neville Longbottom, a Gryffindor boy scared of his own shadow, was equally dismal with a wand in hand. But Harry was unique in that his understanding of theory was as good as anyone else in the year – including Hermione Granger. Magical theory was meant to be the key to magic: if you understood the theory, you could cast the spell. That was why Neville Longbottom was so hopeless – the dimwitted boy couldn't even tell the difference between Blood Energy and Spell Energy, never mind how incantation declension affected spell direction.
Harry was therefore coming to love the words "wands away, please" at the beginning of lessons. The sciences, in particular, fascinated him, and he relished the opportunity to do magic without a wand in Potions. He had held similar hopes for Divination, but so far it had been a disappointment. Their first lesson had involved no Divination at all, and instead Mr. Wilkes had given them a two hour lecture on all the things that Divination was not. He had gone through everything from tea leaves and tarrot cards to crystal balls and prophecies, debunking each one in turn.
Harry had never believed in fortune telling and, if he had thought about tarrot cards at all since finding the magical world, would have dismissed it as Muggle hocus pocus. However, many of the wizard-born seemed quite shocked by everything Mr. Wilkes was telling them, some of them going so far as to not believe him. Apparently, prophecies and the Fates were a recurring theme in wizarding childrens' literature. After the lesson had ended, Alexandra threw her charm bracelet out the window. As it fell towards the ground, Harry idly wondered how much it was worth. A few months previous he might have been shocked by such a disregard for wealth, but he was slowly becoming used to it.
They were slightly out of breath by the time they reached the classroom. The room was circular, with a high ceiling and filled with natural light from a series of large windows. There were no displays on the cold grey walls – in fact, there wasn't any kind of traditional educational paraphanalia at all. Instead, the room was filled a ring of stone plinths. Upon each rested a silver bowl, wide and shallow, with runes carved around the inner edge. At the centre of the ring was another plinth and bowl, much larger than the rest, beside which stood the white-haired Mr. Wilkes, speaking with some early arrivals. The gentle sound of running water could be heard over Wilkes; its source was a network of gutters carved into the floor, through which water ran. Each plinth was surrounded by a circular gutter, and each of those circles connected to the circles on either side, and the one around the centre plinth.
Mr. Wilkes turned to Harry, Alexandra and Sebastian as they walked in.
"Ah, good. Find a bowl, you three – we'll be starting soon," he said. An otherwise unremarkable man, he had a wonderful voice: soft and soothing, it made the back of Harry's neck tingle in anticipation. After some indecision, they took the bow furthest from the door, putting their bags down outside the circle of water. There were no chairs in Divination, so they had to stand while they waited for the class to start.
"Think we'll get to do magic today?"