The Scent of Trouble

Chapter 3/8 - Butterbeer

Just my luck, thought Ron Weasley, for a tree that has stood for two thousand years to get hit by lighting while I'm stuck in it.

The tree was there when Hogwarts was founded, when the Normans conquered, when the last of the Roman legions marched away, leaving these hills to the Celtic magicians. Even in this ancient forest, it was a giant.

Ron wondered if its last hour had come, as another flash of lighting penetrated the forest's gloom, followed almost immediately by a crack of thunder.

The growling from the foot of the tree intensified with the approach of the storm. Either the lighting disturbed the red-eyed thing, or the glimpses it gave of the three children clinging to the tree just out of reach excited it. Hope it likes its meat barbecued, thought Ron, and lighting flashed again.

"Ron! Harry! There's a hole in the trunk about twenty feet up!"

"How big? Can we climb?"

"I only saw it for a sec, but I think we could fit. And it's no worse than what we've climbed already."

Ron groaned. "If it were any worse we'd have to be lizards to climb it. Where is it?"

"Straight up from you and me." Hermione responded.

"We'll never last all night in this storm. The rain will be here in a few minutes. Let's do it, and now." Harry's decisiveness made Ron feel better. "Ron, I'm going to climb around the trunk to you. Hermione, stay where you are till I say go."

Ron wanted to say "Be careful", but knew it was unnecessary.

Like any large tree, this one's limbs were few and far between. It was only climbable because the bark had thickened and fissured through the centuries. They'd climbed as far as they had by sticking their fingers and toes into crevices. At least there was one advantage to being barefoot.

Soon Harry's hand, groping in the darkness, found Ron's, and then he was straddling the branch behind Ron. "Ron, wrap your legs around the branch as tightly as you can. Put your arm around me. Like this." Despite hours in the cold, Harry's arm still seemed warm across Ron's back as his hand grasped his ribs. Ron wondered if Harry could feel his heart beating faster. "Now you lean left and find a really good handhold with your left hand, and I'll lean right."

A gust brought the first drops of rain. "Ron, now we both lean back. All set? O.K., Hermione, climb! If you fall we're set to catch you."

Ron looked upwards, but Hermione was no more than a white blur, mostly blocked by the limb she'd been sitting on. The next flash of lighting showed her like a white X against the blackened bark.

The flash after that showed nothing. How could she have fallen, Ron thought. Then came her call. "I'm up! Come on, there's a hollow in the trunk. It'll hold us all. Hurry!"

"Harry, go on up. I'll wait here till you're in."

"There's no time. The rain's here. We'll both go."

"Together, then." Odd, Ron thought, that he felt happy, treed by a red-eyed thing in a thunderstorm. "But you go ahead and I'll watch your footholds."

"O.K." Harry's hand gave the briefest of squeezes, and his arm moved up over Ron's head to find a handhold on the bark. His leg rubbed Ron's back as he swung off the branch. Soon he was moving upwards.

Ron followed. Close behind he could see roughly where Harry's feet went. The ever more frequent lighting flashes helped, too.

As they reached Hermione's branch the downpour arrived. Harry had waited for Ron, giving him a hand up. They clung to the trunk, Ron pressed against Harry.

"The leaves won't hold off this rain for long. Let's go!"

Harry was moving faster now, and Ron was hard put to keep pace. Water was already trickling down the trunk. Had it been a cliff they would surely have fallen, but the rough bark gave a surer grip than stone. Now Ron was grateful for the bark, in spite of all the cuts and scrapes it had given him on the climb up.

By the time they reached the hole it was like climbing in a waterfall.

Ron looked up. Harry's legs weren't there anymore. His heart pounded, but a flash of lightning showed two hands reaching for him, and Hermione's and Harry's heads nearly filling a hole in the bole of the ancient tree. Ron grabbed Harry's hand then Hermione's, and in a moment his head was in the hole, his weight resting on his elbows.

Harry reached for his shoulders, but Ron shook his head. "Hang on a moment. It looks like we're safe now, and I really need a shower."

Ron ducked his head back out of the hole, and let the frigid water running down the trunk sluice through his hair.

The rain lashing against the leaves drowned out the growls of the red- eyed beast at the foot of the tree. It no longer worried Ron. A fall from here would be fatal even without the beast.

The fresh cold rainwater seemed to wash away the remaining effects of the magicked butterbeer, just as it washed the filth from his hair.

As the adrenaline rush from the climb passed, he felt weak. Hermione had warned that weakness was an effect of the spell that animated the golems. In the afternoon sun by the bank of the mountain stream, digging clay for the golems, they'd worried not at all about weakness. It had seemed as distant and abstract a problem as old age.

But now that the immediate danger was past, he could give in to the tiredness. It was almost the same delicious sensation he'd had the winter the Durmstrang students had built what they called a "sauna" heated by a fire imp, and Ron had sweated as long as he could stand it and then jumped into a hole in the frozen lake.

Still, the headache remained, and his stomach was knotted with both hunger and nausea. He couldn't even blame Hermione for throwing up all over him. He'd thrown up too, and she just happened to be above him in the tree. And the butterbeer was his idea. Ron vowed he would never drink again. What ever made him try that spell on the butterbeer?

The idea had come in Hogsmeade several weeks before.

Hermione, Harry and Ron were huddled over butterbeer in the tavern, discussing the different golem spells that Hermione had found in the books on the Restricted Shelves.

So far they had not found any spell that would make a golem behave itself all the way through dinner. They'd dropped the problem for a bit, and were silently sipping their butterbeer and looking about the tavern.

At the next table a wizarding family was trying to control two toddlers. Hermione had described a golem as behaving like a spoiled brat, and Ron tried to imagine a golem that looked just like him acting in the Hogwarts dining hall like the screaming four-year-old was acting a meter away. He shuddered.

The toddler pushed over his father's drink. The wizard looked at his wife, and they rose. Each picked up one of their offspring and headed for the door.

The odor wafting from the puddle on the neighboring table wasn't the rich toffee aroma of butterbeer. It wasn't even sweet. But it was tantalizing. Ron glanced around, and saw no one looking. He reached over, dipped a finger in the puddle, sniffed it, and licked it.

"Harry! Hermione! Try this stuff!"

"Not bad." Hermione said a moment later. "What is it?"

"I don't know, but I like it too." Harry said. "You know, butterbeer is really good, but have you noticed that the teachers almost never drink it? They have the bartender mix them potions from the stuff in those bottles behind the bar."

"I think some of this would be really great for the picnic."

Hermione shook her head. "They don't sell it to kids, and if we were caught with it at school there'd be sure to be trouble."

Ron dipped a finger into the puddle again. "There's got to be a way."

While Harry and Hermione talked about golems, Ron's thoughts kept coming back to the potion on the table. He watched the adults coming into the tavern, and sure enough not a single one ordered butterbeer. It was always a potion from one of the bottles behind the bartender.

"Ron!" Harry's hand was shaking his shoulder. "We've got to get back to school."

"Sorry, Harry. I was thinking about the potions, and I've got an idea. Could you buy a dozen bottles of butterbeer to take back to school? If my idea doesn't work, we'll still have butterbeer for the picnic."

"Sure, Ron." Harry's parents had left him plenty of gold in his vault at Gringott's. He saw no reason to be stingy with it.

Carrying four bottles of butterbeer apiece left their arms aching by the time they reached Hogwarts. The bottles didn't hold that much butterbeer - only about a liter each - but the dwarf-made glass was irregular and thick. Dwarves could do beautiful work, but considered bottle-making beneath them, and consigned such work to the most inexperienced apprentices.

The bottles were stashed under Ron's bed, and he spent unaccustomed hours in the library over the next several days.

One night he arrived almost late to dinner, full of barely suppressed excitement. "I've found it! All those potions in the tavern have the same basic ingredient, and I've found a spell to make it!"

"Let me see." Hermione demanded. Ron reluctantly surrendered several sheets of parchment covered with his scrawl. He'd finally gotten something out of the library that even Hermione didn't know about.

His resentment melted as she smiled. "Good work, Ron. You not only found a spell that's easy to cast, but one with ingredients that are easy to get. So many spells need dragon's blood or something. But this is just sugar and yeast?"

Ron nodded. Harry clapped him on the back. "The house elves can get that for us!"

Hermione was still reading the sheets of spells. "It takes weeks, though. We don't have that long."

Ron smiled. "Don't you remember that time-dilation spell we used last week in Potions?"

"That's it!" Hermione leaned forward. For a moment Ron thought she would kiss him on the forehead. Then she settled back. "When will we do it?"

"There's no Quidditch practice tomorrow. That will give us the whole afternoon." Harry paused a moment. "Let's use Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Ron and I will carry the bottles down. Hermione, can you get sugar and yeast from the house elves and meet us there?"

"No problem, Harry. Dobby won't tell."

The first few bottles went badly. The first turned into very acceptable pancake syrup, with the toffee smell of butterbeer. But it had nothing of the aroma of the tavern's potions, and certainly wasn't drinkable.

The second bottle exploded, drenching them with a yeasty liquid and scattering glass about the room.

Ron and Harry took an oaken stall door off its hinges. Sugar, yeast, and bottle went into one of the bathtubs, and the heavy oak door went over it. Then Ron cast the spell. The next two bottles also exploded, but the mess was confined to the tub.

After the fourth explosion they reread the parchment.

"I think I see it." said Harry. "This spell is supposed to be done before the potion is bottled."

"Well, I suppose we could open the bottles, pour them into one of the bathtubs, and cast the spell there. Then we just pour it back in," said Ron without much conviction, eyeing the layers of dust in the long-disused tubs.

"Maybe if we could spell water out of the butterbeer, at the same time we spell in sugar and yeast?" Harry looked at Hermione.

"A dehydration spell? That's easy. But we still won't know when we've got it right. Unless . . . there's a spell for testing purity. Let me think."

The three of them cast spells over the next bottle. Hermione cast the transformation and time dilation spells, Ron the dehydration, and Harry cast the purity spell.

The result was another explosion.

"I'm sure we're getting, there, though. Hermione, maybe if we toned down the time spell?"

"How far, Harry?"

"Try it a quarter speed. If that works, we'll go faster next time."

That bottle was a success. At the end of the process it glowed purple under the purity spell.

The three looked downcast. Ron counted off on his fingers the explanation Snape had given the week before. "'Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.' We're a long way from purity."

"We'll do the same spell again on the same bottle," Harry declared. They did it, and then again, and again. Finally the bottle glowed green.

"It's still not pure," Ron complained. "What does green mean, anyway?"

Hermione's forehead wrinkled. "It's one of those funny measurements witches used to use. I asked Snape after class. I think he said green is 'one hundred proof'."

"Well, if red is pure, this in only half pure, if that. It'll have to do, though." Harry decided. "The last repetition improved it hardly at all. Let's do the same procedure on the rest of the bottles. Ready, team?"

They had only one more explosion. Harry surveyed the bathroom, littered with the remains of half of the dozen bottles they'd started with. "We'd better clean this mess up. It wouldn't be nice to Myrtle to leave it in her bathroom. Someone might smell it from the corridor, too. Let's hurry. We'd better change our robes before dinner, or the whole school will smell us, too."

"Do you think that will be enough for the picnic?" Ron asked dubiously, looking at the six bottles of butterbeer.

"I don't know," Hermione said, "It's only half pure, and it's only two bottles apiece."