Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Five

After a pleasant and all too brief few hours learning the fine art of Exploding Snap from Neville Longbottom, Rebecca soon found herself following the craggy, hunched frame of Argus Filch through the cold, dusty, cobwebbed passages that led to the Potions classroom. It was eerie without the scrape and shuffle of feet and the soft swish of robes. The silence was broken only by the soft click of her joystick and the whining burr of her chair´s motion as she navigated through the dark.

"Got on the wrong side of Professor Snape, did you?" Filch asked in his nasally rasp.

"Unfortunately, yes, sir."

"You´ve no idea just how unfortunate you are," he answered. He sounded gleeful, and this did not ease her already jangling nerves in the slightest. Filch seemed to revel in punishment, and if he was happy about her circumstances, then it was a foregone conclusion that she would be most unhappy by the time Snape allowed her to return to her chambers.

He stopped in front of the Potions classroom door and raised the lantern he carried to illuminate his ghoulish face. He favored her with a predatory, unsympathetic grin. "Here we are. Enjoy yourself," he cackled, and moved off, muttering happily about the fact that Snape, unlike most of the teachers, still knew how to punish errant students.

She watched him until he was out of sight, then turned to look warily upon the Potions door. Here in the dark and silence it wore a sinister aspect it had not possessed earlier. It seemed to grow and yawn before her eyes, becoming a monstrous, leering mouth that beckoned in dark, irresistible invitation. She involuntarily moved her chair back a few paces, unnerved.

What´s the matter with you, girl? said a gruff, garrulous voice inside her head. It was the voice of her deceased grandfather, a pragmatic, hard-headed Irishman who saw any flight of imagination as cotton-headed foolishness. Had he lived to see it, the idea of his only granddaughter attending a school of witchcraft and wizardry would have sent him into paroxysms of affronted horror. Magic wasn´t practical. He would have protested that a bright girl such as she belonged in a normal school learning normal, useful things like mathematics or chemistry. Yet it was his voice that had given her the will to endure the Potions Master´s cruelty. The thought of his disapproving face looking down on her as she blubbered and whined in front of her teacher had more power over her than Snape´s forked tongue.

Besides, she knew what was troubling her, and it wasn´t the grimy oak door before which she now hesitated. It was the person behind the door that was making her heart rattle in her chest like a kettledrum and the hair on the nape of her neck to stiffen and tingle. Snape. She didn´t want to open the door and come face to face with his merciless, cutting tongue again. Her defenses were strong, tempered as they were by years of ridicule and scathing rejection, but they were not that strong; his tongue was a velvet sledgehammer, and if battered her long enough, the walls of her resistance would crumble like sand.

Pretty words, groused her grandfather in his ghostly speech; fat lot of good they´ll do you with that fellow.

About that he was quite right. Snape would flay her alive to the accompaniment of a lively tune if she were as much as half a second late. She felt her chest tighten with painful tension, and she took a deep, steadying breath to drive it away before it could lay a firm claim. If he caught her outside his classroom, wheezing in the thrall of an anxiety attack, she would be very sorry indeed. She raised her hand to knock, drew back, and then rapped on the door as smartly as she dared before her courage failed her.

"Come." Brusque. Brutal.

Saints preserve me, she prayed, and opened the door.

He was sitting at his desk, squinting by the faint light of the candelabra behind him and slashing across homework parchment with his harsh quill. The candle flames flickered and danced across his pallid, pinched face like the nubile, writhing forms of Dark Witches at a midnight Sabbat. He cut such a solitary, lonely figure there in the puddle of light that she felt a brief moment of empathy for him, her previous antipathy fading in the face of her melancholy. He looked up as she entered, black eyes reflecting the candlelight. He glanced at the hourglass on his desk. When no cutting rebuke came, she assumed she had arrived on time.

"On time. More Filch´s doing than yours, I venture," he greeted her, confirming her supposition. "Come in and close the door. You´re letting in a draft."

"Yes, sir," she answered, trying to keep her tone neutral. All her goodwill on his behalf had evaporated the moment he opened his mouth.

"Since you failed to complete your assignment on time, you will complete it here with me. You will have the same amount of time as your classmates-three minutes to gather your ingredients, and forty-five to brew the potion. If at the end of that time, you have not succeeded, I will collect everything, and you will start again from scratch. You will remain here until you produce an acceptable potion. I can wait all night. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"One more thing. All of the ingredients have been restored to their places. Sadly, Mr. Longbottom is not here to help you." A brief smile flitted across his face at the thought. "Any questions?"

"No, sir."

"Begin."

She rolled to the storage closet, struck by a profound sense of déjà vu. Everything was in the same place it had been earlier, right down to the bottle with the chipped top facing south. She looked up, knowing already what she would see. The rosehip gleamed from its space atop the highest shelf, as mocking and cynical as the hand that had crafted it. She sighed and gathered what she could, settling the heavy bottles inside her cauldron. She would worry about the rosehip when she came to it.

When she had managed to gather all of the other vials, she set her cauldron on the floor so it wouldn´t slide off her lap while she worked, and studied the rosehip. The only way to get it would be to stand up and reach for it, and that was as likely to happen as drawing water from the desert. She cast a discreet glance at Snape and saw that he was standing silently in front of his desk with his arms folded across his chest. He was so still that she wasn´t sure he was even looking at her.

"Sir, am I correct in assuming that the use of magic is prohibited?" she whispered, feeling it would be inappropriate to disrupt the calm and quiet with her normal speaking voice.

"Quite." The answer was a soft susurration, but it carried effortlessly to her ear.

She nodded imperceptibly. It was what she had expected. "Am I free to use whatever implements are at hand in the classroom to complete my work?"

There was no answer, only a long contemplative silence. He was no doubt scrutinizing her request for signs of duplicity. The seconds ticked by with no response, and she stretched forth her hand to try to reach the rosehip even though she knew it hopeless. The silky rustle of a cloak caught her attention. She froze, waiting.

"You may use whatever you wish, so long as it is in this room. Use it carefully. Break anything, and you will regret it. Ninety seconds, Miss Stanhope."

"Thank you, sir."

Silence. She dropped her upraised arm and pivoted her chair away from the shelf. She knew what she was looking for. Her large blue eyes scanned the shadowy room, flitting over the vague outlines of silent, sentinel desks and wraith-like glass tubes. They fell on the ledge below the blackboard, and she felt a smirk surfacing on her lips. There was the first part of what she needed.

"Forty-five seconds."

She barely heard him. She rolled toward the object in question, the slender wooden pointer stick he and most of the other teachers used, mostly for effect and sometimes to bring it smashing down upon their desks to recapture the wandering attention of their students. She moved carefully around the brooding hump of his desk, sure that if she upset the contents upon it with an ill-timed nudge, he would swoop down on her like black vengeance and throttle her with his delicate-fingered hands.

"Touch nothing on my desk," he warned, his voice brittle with threat.

"Yes, sir." Not a terribly trusting fellow, she thought wryly. Bit paranoid.

So are you. She supposed she was. But she had a right to be. She had been rejected, isolated, categorized, and shunned since her mother brought her emaciated form home from the hospital in what should have been her burial shroud. She saw the ugliness and cold brutality of the world in every human face. What did Snape have to worry about? He was a skilled Potions Master with a coveted, prestigious position at the best wizarding school in the world. Judging by the rich fabrics from which he fashioned his clothes, he was comfortably well off. He had the respect of his contemporaries and students.

Respect? That´s fear, child. Fine. Fear, then. Whatever it was and however he came by it, it was power, a level of power about which she could only fantasize. He was everything she was not-strong, capable, renowned. As far as she could see, he had no reason to be such a brooding, gloomy soul.

He is alone. Certainly; the way he conducted himself, it was no surprise. He was insufferable. Arrogant, overbearing, cold. Who would want to be around such a man? If he was annoyed with the insipid idiocy of the human race, he should never have applied for the job of teacher, where intellectual deficiencies were at their most glaring. He should have chosen a life of boring anonymity. A life very much like hers.

You are alone. What does that make you? She bristled at the thought, hating her grandfather´s blunt, logical practicality. She was nothing like Snape. She would never use her power to crush the spirits of those beneath her. Of course, she had no power to abuse, so that was a moot point. Even if she had been so lucky, she knew too much about the horrors of being under the heel of tyranny to bring it down upon the head of someone else. At least, so she hoped.

A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she turned her head to see Snape taking the vials out of her cauldron and putting them back in their places. "Time is up," he said without looking at her. He straightened, brushing a stray forelock of greasy black hair from his forehead. Without a word, he glided to her, plucked the pointer from her fingers, and replaced it on the ledge. "Begin again." He spun away from her and resumed his post in the middle of the room.

She watched him without comment. Now that she had a plan, she found she wasn´t quite so nervous. He moved with easy, leonine grace, and she thought that perhaps he could have been a dancer. An image of Snape preening and pirouetting in his conservative attire while scowling at his audience filled her mind, and a small titter escaped her.

"Do I amuse you?"

"No, sir," she said quickly, the faint tickling of mirth driven from her like a roundhouse slap by the ice in his voice.

"A joke you´d like to share, perhaps?" One eyebrow rose in dangerously polite inquiry.

"No, sir." Although it was cold, sweat prickled on the nape of her neck.
"No? Then get to work. You´re wasting time."

Her eyes scanned the room in search of the second item she hoped to use to capture the rosehip without causing herself too much pain. Finally, they lit upon a heap of discarded parchment in the wastebin. The wheels of her mind began to turn. "Sir, may I use that parchment?"

Another contemplative silence. Then, "As you wish."

She rolled to the wastebin, leaned over, and pulled it onto her lap with a soft grunt. It was perfect. There was more than enough. She rolled to the desk and put the bin beside the cauldron. Quickly, mindful that the sand in the hourglass was trickling inexorably away, she retrieved the paper from the wastebin, crumpled it, and jammed it into her cauldron, padding the hard bottom. She was aware of Snape´s pitiless eyes watching her, and she sent a wordless curse in his direction. Damn him and his loveless, cold stare.

"Two minutes," came his quiet warning from the cool shadows.

Damn, but the time seemed to fly when she toiled before his lash. She wondered for a moment if he had enchanted the hourglass to move faster than it should. After his initiation by fire this afternoon, she would put nothing past him. The cauldron didn´t look nearly padded enough, but she was running out of both time and paper, so she stuffed one last crumpled wad of parchment inside and rolled to the blackboard. She grabbed the pointer and headed to the storage cabinet.

The rosehip gleamed at her in challenge. She bared her teeth in unconscious defiance; the bottle would not defeat her. She had roughly ninety seconds to topple it into her cauldron and gather up the stores Snape had replaced. If she didn´t, she would have to collect the wadded papers all over again, a task that promised tedium and pain. She had to get this right on the first try. She looked up at her goal, then down at her cauldron, aligning them as best she could. When she was sure they were in line, she raised her left arm as high as it would go, lessening the gap between the small copper kettle and the winking glass vial. With her right and steadier hand, she guided the slender pointer behind the rosehip vial, using every ounce of concentration to avoid sending the adjacent bottles tumbling to the floor in a crystalline, tinkling opera of guaranteed consequences.

Please, God, she silently begged, and though she had often thought that same fevered phrase when faced with an insurmountable obstacle, never had it been said with such desperation, such need. She was terrified of Professor Snape. The thought of what he would do to her should she break a single vial sent a cold, congealed lump of terror into the pit of her stomach like a piece of rancid gristle. The pointer tickled and jittered against the glass in a soft staccato. She closed her eyes and tapped the stick against the rosehip, swallowing a roiling spasm of nausea.

She waited for the explosive crash of shattering glass, but there was nothing but a muted plop. She opened her eyes and saw, to her immense relief that the vial lay cradled in the nest of crumpled parchment, miraculously unbroken. She let out a breath she had not known she was holding. There was one hurdle out of the way. Her relief was short-lived. A serpentine hiss brushed the back of her head like an accusation.

"Forty seconds."

She moved as quickly as she could, hoping that her muscles and jangling nerves would not betray her by seizing up, thereby impeding her already laborious progress. In her heightened state of awareness, she was certain she could hear the sibilant hiss of the sand as it slithered through the hourglass, conspiring against her with its silent speed. From Snape there was no sound at all, not even the quiet, rhythmic rasp of indrawn breath. He seemed a living statue.

She hurriedly clutched the remaining vials to her sunken chest and whirled around, one eye trained on the traitorous timepiece on the edge of the professor´s desk. Twenty seconds. She dropped the vials into the cauldron and reached over to the speed control knob of her wheelchair. She had hoped not to have to increase her speed, afraid that she would damage some of the countless priceless relics in this castle; she saw no choice now. Snape had forced her hand with his ridiculous demands, demands no one else had ever dare make on her, and she no longer worried about wreaking destruction in his classroom. Only her fear of him and his scathing wit kept her from ramming into the walls in childish petulance. She turned the knob as far to the right as it would go.

She pushed the joystick forward as far as it would go and shot across the room, surprised into exhilaration. She had forgotten how fast her chair really went. She smiled as she careened toward her desk, watching Snape scowl at her from the corner of her eye. She was going to pay for this, but at least she would make it to her seat in the nick of time.

"Ten points for recklessness," he said when she skidded to a stop. "Against all odds, you have returned to your seat on time. You have forty-five minutes."

Snape turned away from her and settled himself behind his desk. He still had papers to grade, and this willful little miscreant was not going to disrupt his routine. He had been grading parchments here after supper since before her unfortunate birth, and he wasn´t about to stop now. He would not mother her through the decoction, no matter how much he wanted to retreat to his chambers and ponder other, graver things. He waited until he heard the methodical click of her cutting knife as she chopped her jackal meat before he dipped his quill into his inkwell and set to work.

He looked at the parchment without seeing it, marking the mistakes by instinct. He didn´t need to see it to know it was a mass of pitiful drek. Everything his students turned in was generally deplorable to the point of unreadability. Only smug, know-it-all Hermione Granger, the insufferably intelligent Gryffindor fifth-year who spent far too much time with the even more gall-inducing Harry Potter had ever managed to turn in exceptional work, and it pained him mightily to have to give her top marks. Just once, he longed to slash and mar her homework with his morale-shattering quill, but the opportunity had never presented itself. Everything with her name on it garnered grudging top marks. Just considering it made his mouth rise in a reflexive sneer, and he tore into an unsuspecting second-year´s essay on the history of the Sleeping Draught with unbridled disdain.

He supposed there was one other student that did not send him reeling in teeth-gnashing despair with his submitted scribblings, and that was Draco Malfoy. Aside from Granger, he was the most competent pupil under his tutelage, which was a good thing considering his perilous position. Lucius Malfoy, Draco´s wealthy, influential father, was Lord Voldemort´s second-in-command. If he ever found it necessary to give Draco a failing mark, he could be assured of trouble. The Malfoys were unaccustomed to failure of any kind, and a poor mark, no matter how well-deserved, would earn Snape a less-than-friendly visit from the elder Malfoy. By tacit agreement, the Death Eaters looked out for one another, and low marks would be seen as a gauche breach of that implicit compact.

Thinking of Draco turned his mind to darker, deadlier things, namely his next summons by Voldemort. It was overdue by several days, and that made him profoundly uneasy. The Dark Lord was fanatically punctual; latecomers to the meetings of his inner circle paid for their tardiness with a healthy dose of the Cruciatus Curse. Their screams reverberated throughout the decaying manor where the rejuvenated Voldemort concealed himself. Sometimes, Snape awoke in the night in a cold sweat, the weeping, groveling screams of tormented Death Eaters echoing in his ears. Sometimes the screams were his own.

That the expected summons had not come was an ill omen, indeed. The annual initiation ceremony was to have been earlier this week, just before the start of the term, but it had never happened. Lucius, privy to nearly every movement or decision made by his revered Lord, had made no mention of it in his weekly correspondence, correspondence that was promptly burned in his fireplace after being committed to memory. The Death Eater initiation rites were as much a part of the fall as the vaunted Halloween feast, and its unexplained delay could only mean that greater plans were afoot, plans which could only spell trouble for Hogwarts and the wizarding world in general.

He pushed a parchment aside and perused the one beneath it, needing only a cursory glance to determine that it was a terrible as he expected it to be. Satisfied that he was not overlooking a landmark treatise by the next Voltaire, he let his mind drift back to the subject of Voldemort, the Death Eaters, and the postponed initiation ceremony. He had a pretty good idea of whom the inductees would be this year. None of them boggled the mind; most of them had been destined for the left-hand path since before the Mediwitch had wiped the afterbirth from their soft, misshapen foreheads. All of them came from respectable or wealthy Pureblood families-Voldemort would have it no other way. Any Mudblood foolish enough to seek entrance into his sacred cabal would be slaughtered before their tainted breath could befoul the air he breathed.

He ticked off the list of definite initiates in his mind-Crabbe, Goyle, Bulstrode, Flint, Parkinson, Delacour, and Malfoy. He winced at the last. Draco had always been a brash, haughty, ambitious child, but he had always entertained the feeble and futile hope that the boy´s headstrong, cunning nature would lead him to take the harder, better path simply to be arbitrary and unpredictable. It had not been so. He had known from the way Lucius had written of his only son in his most recent letter. I am most proud of Draco; last night he announced to me his wishes to help restore the wizarding world to its rightful, purified glory. He choked back a scoff at the sheer arrogance of that sentence as he wrote a brutal critique of a third-year Hufflepuffs logic in his meticulous flowing script. Had he ever believed such things?

His quill paused but a moment in its unceasing trek across the parchment and his eyes narrowed as he considered the thought. He sifted through the memories in his mind, pausing at some and recoiling from others. Some were too painful to look upon, and he shunned them like leprous, diseased things. The quill resumed its fluid, hypnotizing motion. His past was murky even to him, eroded as it had been by countless bombardments of the Cruciatus Curse and his own desire to suppress it. It came to vivid life again only in his dreams, and he chose not to remember those.

Another grating scratch of the quill. He could answer the question if he really tried. No, he hadn´t really believed that, not deep down in the bone and sinew and viscera that made him. He had believed in nothing but himself, trusted only his savage intellect and ambitious instinct. His tenure as a lone outcast at Hogwarts had given him no reason to behave any differently. But Voldemort had offered him the tools he himself had not possessed-the supreme, unwavering self-confidence, the irresistible magnetism as a leader of men, the righteousness of his vision. He had been caught up in it as so many others had, intoxicated by the newfound illusion of power he suddenly found thrust into his hands, hands he had bloodied in his ravenous quest to take that which the world had denied him. He hadn´t wanted to purify his world; he´d wanted to punish it.

He tossed a parchment aside, furious with his thoughts for taking this unwanted turn. He had several other things to worry about rather than sitting here foraging among the ruins of his ignonimous past; for instance the disquieting postponement of a critical initiation ceremony. None of the possibilities that presented themselves were good. Voldemort was likely planning something of a very large scope, and that was bad. The fact that he had been excluded from the planning of such an undertaking was worse still. It meant that Voldemort was losing faith in him, and people in whom he lost faith did not survive for long.

That was not a thought with which he was comfortable, and he tried to banish it, but it refused to go. He knew what happened to them, the fallen that no longer pleased the whims of the Dark Lord. They met most tragic ends. Nasty ends. Ends like that of poor, unfortunate Collier Greaves, at whose demise he had been present. Mr. Greaves, a handsome blond youth who had stupidly botched an inconsequential delivery of blighted toad stools to an apothecary, had been forced to watch the murder of his wife and aged, blind mother. Then, while the tears of his grief were still slick upon his cheeks, Voldemort had calmly removed every scrap of flesh from his face, peeling him like an orange until he was reduced to a grinning, weeping, screaming skull, tears from his lidless eyes dripping onto bloody bone. Voldemort had let him scream and gibber for forty-five minutes before sedately reaching over to snap his neck with one brutal twist. That episode had given him nightmare for the next six years.

He looked down to see an untidy splotch of ink on the parchment he had been grading and shook himself. What in the devil was the matter with him? He was going to pieces like a sheltered schoolboy. Sitting here conjuring up scenarios for his gruesome death and wallowing in the sins of his past would do him no good. If Voldemort wanted him, Voldemort would have him, one way or another. He was safe at Hogwarts, but he would eventually be called forth to kneel at the feet of his enemy, kneel and die in screaming indignity while his former comrades looked on with polished marble eyes.

To distract his mind from its ghoulish wanderings, he glanced up at Rebecca. Absorbed in her work, she did not see him, her twig fingers grappling ungracefully with her cutting knife. Though it was impossible to tell from the shadowy distance, he would have wagered a year´s salary that the jackal meat was still too raggedly chopped. The girl was too clumsy to manage such a precise operation. He watched in disgusted fascination as her frail neck extended slowly forward in a hesitant turtle motion, her sadly striking blue eyes squinting myopically in search of some ingredient or other. Her eyes relaxed as she found what she was looking for, and a mangled arm lunged dramatically forward to drag it toward her.

He tried to come up with a reason why Albus had chosen her as a transfer student and couldn´t. Surely there had to have been dozens of other qualified, normal candidates. Hogwarts was the preeminent wizarding school in the world. Thousands of requests for transfer had been received and politely declined over the years. What reason could he possibly have had to take her? Watching her was surreal; it was like watching an alien creature imitate a human being.

But she resisted you, pointed out a matter-of-fact voice in his head. That´s more than any of these "normal" children have accomplished, isn´t it?

She had, at that. Resisted his well-honed cruelty with the unshakeable stoicism of someone three times her age, a stone rampart standing steadfastly against the maniacal buffeting of the wind. Those opaque eyes staring back at him had disconcerted him, though he had not let it show. There had been nothing in them. The essence of whatever she was had retreated far beyond the scope of her eyes, retreated until there was nothing to be seen but wary, taunting blankness. After that, she had been out of his reach.

How? How could someone so small, so shrunken, so contorted and drawn in on herself, rebuff his vitriol? It hadn´t been without effort. He had seen the tremendous cost of it in her face, especially at the last, when he had finally struck home by questioning her right to be here, by throwing a pall of doubt over what she very clearly considered an honorable achievement. He had nearly breached her iron façade then, but at the last instant she had sealed him off, shutting out the effect of what he had said as neatly and quickly as snuffing out a candle. Irritation bubbled in his blood at the memory of it.

He studied her. By the dim light, he could just make out her ravaged, incredible form. Her flawless golden hair caught the candlelight and refracted it in thousands of brilliant flaxen sparks. He couldn´t make out her face, which was bent over her bubbling cauldron, but he could see the sharp jut of her gaunt, Nordic cheekbones and the wide, pasty plane of her forehead. The crooked part of her hair revealed a nearly translucent scalp. The crown of her skull was so thin one concentrated blow would shatter it to pieces. Still, she had survived fifteen years and was now sitting in his classroom, depriving him of a decent night´s sleep.

He thought of her parents. What must they have thought when faced with the wet, shivering, puling imp that had made a mockery of all their hopes and dreams? Had pride turned to frozen horror, or had they clung to the stubborn, blind love all parents held for their children? He couldn´t see how they could have. She was everything parents prayed not to receive, the antithesis of the rosy, chubby, cherubic brat for whom they hoped. He wondered if they had ever considered leaving her to the mercy of the Fates, abandoning her on the doorstep of a ramshackle orphanage for some unlucky Samaritan to find. Had they ever pondered forsaking her at a river´s edge in the dead of winter and letting Nature correct its mistake? Had they thought of drowning her like an unwanted pet? It might have been a mercy.

Her blue eyes turned up to his face, a questioning look on her skeletal face. "Something else about me that you find fascinating, Stanhope?" he sneered.

"No, sir." She looked at him a moment longer, and then her head dropped as she resumed her work.

Her apparent serenity at his jibe did nothing to assuage his rancor. He dropped his quill onto the desktop and fixed the top of her head with a black scowl. "You´re inept," he said simply.

She dropped her rosehip into the cauldron and stirred it a few times. She was clearly ignoring him. "Did you hear me, Miss Stanhope?"

She turned her head slowly, "Yes, sir."

"Well," he said in growing exasperation, "what do you have to say for yourself?"

Bony hands grasped the ladle again. "Nothing, sir."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing. Would it make a difference if I did, sir?" The ladle clinked solemnly against the cauldron.

Snape gazed at her a moment longer, caught between fury and incredulity. You stubborn strip of a girl! I´ll make you weep if it´s the last I ever do, he thought fiercely. Then he picked up his quill and resumed his assault on the confidence of his pupils.

Rebecca worked quietly, one eye drifting occasionally to the hourglass. She had ten minutes before he came to ravage her work. She carefully measured out the powdered dung beetle mandible, stopping just long enough to give the brew a perfunctory stir. She knew already that this batch was going to fall well short of Snape´s expectations. It was bubbling far too much and developing a thick, glossy skin over its surface, something it was most assuredly not intended to do. She suspected it had something to do with the uneven cut of her jackal meat. It was far from uniform, some small and neatly squared, other bits large and jagged. Had she had her enchanted cutting knife, it would have been a simple matter to correct, but without it the mistake would be repeated again and again.

She transferred the powdered dung beetle mandible into her mortar, added in an ounce of rabid dog´s blood. And began to pound and crush it with short deliberate strokes. Her mind turned Snape´s last remarks over and over in its tireless centrifuge, breaking it down into its component parts. What have you to say for yourself? he had asked. Clearly, he wanted a few careless words to slip out, words that would belie her weakness, but what for? He already knew where her vulnerability lay, as he had so deftly proven with his remark about performing the work in the same manner as everyone else.

He wants to hear it from you. Don´t you give him the satisfaction, whispered her grandfather´s gravelly voice. It was so clear now, even six years after his death. Well, he needn´t worry about that. She wasn´t going to give this miserable tyrant any more of herself than she had to. She could-had to-keep him at arm´s length if it meant she could stay here. This was a good place, a safe place. She could learn here if given enough time. She could make something of herself, and she wasn´t going to let him take that all away from her. She shot an ugly, unobserved glare in his direction and redoubled her efforts with the pestle, determined to succeed.

She thought of the Headmaster. He seemed such a kindly, wise man. Why would he hire a man like Professor Snape, who seemed to have neither patience nor wisdom in dealing with students? The man was a bully, a personality more suited to that of a jailer than an imparter of knowledge to impressionable young minds. Even if he were eminently qualified, surely his surly, antagonistic demeanor would have earned him marked reprisal and dismissal by now. It wasn´t as though she were the only pupil he frightened and tormented; the reactions of her classmates this afternoon had shown as much, and Neville had admitted it outright.

That´s none of your concern. What is your concern is finishing your work and getting the hell out of here as soon as you can. True enough. Even a generation of students´ complaints hadn´t sacked him, nothing would, especially not the weak-voiced whining whimpers of a transfer student on the grounds for a mere forty-eight hours. Besides, it wasn´t as if she were about to go running to the Headmaster. That wouldn´t look well at all. It would make her look weak and unfit, and it would give Snape more venom to hurl at her when the mood took him. She would deal with him as with everything else-in her own way and in her own time.

She felt a dark pressure above her and knew that he was standing there, a living darkness, standing there and judging her behind those black satin eyes. "Time is up," came the voice, a sentence of predetermined doom.

She sat back from the desk and looked up into flat black pools. His face loomed out of the gloom like pitiless moon shedding diseased light on tainted ground. She fought to keep her face expressionless when he gave her a tight, compassionless smile. He exuded bitterness and wormwood, and being near him made her flesh prickle with nervous energy.

"Let´s see how you´ve done, shall we?" he said softly, not sounding the slightest bit hopeful. A delicate, spidery hand materialized from the folds of his robe and floated out to finger the ladle handle. He leaned down over the cauldron and sniffed, his long, crooked nose twitching delicately. His face betrayed nothing. In an instant, he straightened, eyes glittering. "Unacceptable. You´ll have to do it again."

She watched as he withdrew his wand and wiped away all the work she had done in the past hour with a thoughtless flick of his wrist. The potion faded from her cauldron like the last wisps of a mirage, the only evidence that it had ever been at all the faint, lingering odor of scalded rosehip. The ingredients flew back to the storage shelves, the wadded parchment strewn on the floor unfurled and flew back to the wastebin, and the pointer fled back to its perch on the ledge beneath the blackboard. She strangled a sigh of frustration, not wanting to let Snape know much he had demoralized her. She was tired. It had been a long, strenuous day, and she was not accustomed to such physical exertion. At D.A.I.M.S., most tasks were completed with magic, from the combing of hair to the lifting of heavy objects. It was simpler, quicker, and reduced the risk of a student with Muscular Dystrophy collapsing from stress and exhaustion. The bone-numbing weariness in her bones told her she was treading the very fine line between simple fatigue and serious overexertion. If she didn´t get the potion right this time through, she would never get it. Her always erratic coordination was deteriorating quickly. Soon she would be seeing double.

"Begin again," Snape ordered. "I trust you know the time limits by now?"

She nodded and rolled back to the storage closet, gritting her teeth through a spasm that tore at her right wrist. Hold yourself together, dammit, she thought, and once again went about the monotonous task of gathering her weapons against the unreachable rosehip, cataloging every ache and twinge as it came. Hips groaned as she bent forward to collect the parchment. Knuckles cracked as fingers wrapped around the pointer stick. Shoulders throbbed as she raised the cauldron and the stick. Her jaw ached from clenching as she strained to tap the vial into its cushioned trap.

This time there was less than one second to spare when she jerked to a stop at her desk, a fact Snape dourly pointed out before letting her set to work. She set the cauldron down with a heavy thud, too tired now to work daintily. She was more worried about amputating her own fingers with the cutting knife. Awake and alert, handling the blade was an awkward and risky proposition, an uneasy truce between frail human body and strong, ravenous steel. Now with her eyelids drooping and her concentration slipping, there was no guarantee that it would not slip its ill-fitting tether and lunge traitorously at its wielder.

She forced her irritated eyes to focus while she chopped yet another piece of jackal meat. Her hand trembled with fatigue, and she paused a moment to let it calm before resuming. Snape was an idiot for insisting she continue. The risk of injury was too great. Professor Kravitz would never have done something like this. She pressed her lips together in a thin smile at that. Professor Kravitz was one of the few things she would miss about D.A.I.M.S. Jovially incompetent, he cheerfully screamed out instructions and encouragement while knives, beakers, and ingredients went sailing through the air. Eventually, the neighboring professor, the Transfiguration teacher, would stick her head in the door and ask him to quiet down. He would-for about thirty seconds. Then the profoundly deaf Potions professor would resume bellowing merrily at the top of his voice. Granted, no one ever learned much-the potions were childishly simple-but at least they had been safe.

A loud clop jolted her back to the here and now, and she was dismayed to see that the knife had glanced off the meat and scored a deep groove in the desktop.

"Something wrong, Miss Stanhope?" Snape´s voice, cold and suspicious.

"No, sir. The knife slipped, that´s all."

"See that it doesn´t happen again. We wouldn´t want any ...accidents."

She intensified her concentration, angry with herself for having given him another opportunity to chastise her. If only she weren´t so tired. She blinked, wincing at the irritated scrape of her eyelids against burning, stinging eyes, and tried to focus on the dwindling piece of jackal meat in front of her. Her hands were wavering badly now, stiff and cramped, unruly and unwieldy from too much toil. The tendons in her wrists throbbed in strident protest. The cuts she was making were little more than general tears, and on one particularly erratic pass, she nicked the tip of her index finger, drawing a dewdrop prick of dark, rich blood. She raised no alarm, fearful of provoking Snape into another litany of cutting jibes. She worked on, the warm blood pooling beneath her fingertip.

The knife slipped twice more before his cold shadow fell over her again, and predictably, inevitably, the potion did not meet his approval. Her hands, wrists, and shoulders sang out in despair even as her lips remained stubbornly silent when he ordered her, in his dead, clinical voice, to start again. The tears she longed to weep at this injustice festered unseen behind her eyes, held in check by her fierce, unconscious pride. He was hard, but she would be harder.

It took her three tries to gather all her materials the third time around. Her body had long ceased to be an ally in this fight. Elbow and knee joints cracked and drew in as feeble defense against the growing cold. Her breath puffed out in a gossamer fog as the curtain of the hours beyond midnight smothered what little heat the slick, cold stones of the dungeon walls had managed to steal from the day. Always she felt his critical eyes on the bony crown of her head or the gnarled length of her spine. Watching. Waiting.

The work this time was drudgery beyond telling. Muscles ached and nerve endings sizzled as she forced them through the same tasks they had tried in vain to complete twice before. Accurate cutting of the meat and other sundries was far out of the question at this point; she focused on not slicing off any of the parts God had seen fit to give her. As the hour grew later and later, her fumblings grew more pronounced, the blade weaving dangerously above its target. The thought that Snape knew she was tiring surfaced dismally through the veil of relentless fatigue, but it could do nothing to buoy her badly flagging spirits.

She barely registered his skulking presence when he came to review her latest offering. It was a waste of both his time and hers-the potion was a disaster. The meat had been hacked and mutilated beyond recognition, and the finely measured powders and mucosa had been carelessly tossed into the mixture. She kneaded her bleary eyes with her knuckles, stifling a yawn as Snape scowled down at her with frosty contempt.

"This is a disgrace, Miss Stanhope. Remedial first years could do better. Do it again."

She fought to keep her emotions in check. "I´m sorry, sir. I´m just a little tired." She knew she was whining, but she couldn´t help it. It was a losing battle simply to keep her eyes open. She swiped her hand across her face.

"Weariness is no excuse for this travesty." He looked ready to say something else, but then he stopped, and his hand reached out to brush something brusquely from her cheek. He examined his fingertips closely. "Are you bleeding?" he snapped.

She started, momentarily reinvigorated by the acid in his voice. It was not concern for her well-being that made him ask the question. She tried to remember if she had cut herself. Something floated in the back of her mind a moment before she could snatch it from the haze of her drifting thoughts. She had cut her finger. It was just a small slice on the tip. Nothing to be concerned about, really. She held up her finger. "Just a small scrape, sir."

"Ignorant girl! In this potion, your blood would do little more than render it ineffective. There are others, however, to which the introduction of blood would be most catastrophic. Fatal. Clean up this blood and start again." With a wave of his wand, everything returned to its place.

Now struggling just to hold her head up, Rebecca rolled through the motions of collecting everything again. By the time she reached the storage shelf, her entire body was a monument to pain. Her shoulders were hunched, overworked muscles thrumming beneath cold, taut skin. Her neck was stiff and unyielding, a dull cramp traveling up the side of her face and giving her a tic. Her pelvis, strapped into the same position for the past twenty hours was shrieking, each movement scraping like ground glass in her joints. All she could think of now was the warm, four-poster bed awaiting her upstairs in the dormitory and Winky´s gentle tuttings as she tucked her into bed.

Maybe that was why the rosehip, instead of clinking gently into the bosom of the cauldron as it had done all the times before, dropped into it with a tinkling crash. The sound cut through her sleepy stupor like a thunderclap. She stared in wide-eyed horror at the corpse of the potions vial, knowing what it would mean. Her heart, which had been beating drowsily in her chest, began to gallop. There was the terrible, seductive swish of cloak.

"You´ve broken my rosehip vial. Fresh rosehip is not easy to harvest. Ten points for breaking my vial and thirty for the inconvenience of having to harvest more," he seethed. His anger seemed to magnify his scent, and she was dizzied for a moment by the rich smell of allspice.

"I´m sorry-," she began, her voice slurred with weariness, but Snape cut her off with an impatient stomp of his foot.

"Enough of your maudlin apologies. They will do you no good. You´ve done enough damage for one night. Come. I will return you to Gryffindor Tower," he snarled, and without another word, he wheeled around, jerked the door open, and strode out.

She followed him out, her chair whirring mournfully, as if it understood how badly she had made a mess of things. Her head bobbled jerkily on her neck, the muscles too spent to hold it still any longer. She took a little comfort in the fact that in a few moments she would be wrapped in the toasty warmth of her four-poster, but not much. She couldn´t see much of Snape in the cold, flickering darkness of the corridor, only his outline moving briskly through the pitch, but she could hear the smart clip of his shoes along the stone floor, and they spoke volumes about what he thought of her at the moment. The rapid, assured steps radiated frank disapproval, made clearer by the fact that he made no attempt to see if she was keeping up.

She watched the dense shadow she knew to be her professor as it moved with lithe, sensual grace, bitterness gleaming in her blue eyes. Damn him. Of course he was good at Potions; his entire body was a testament to undeserved grace and fluidity. His beautiful, tapered, alabaster hands belonged on a statue of Venetian marble, not on his sour, craggy frame. She wondered if he would have been able to become a vaunted Potions Master with hands like hers, hands bent and skewered on misaligned wrists. Would he be able to chop and grind so finely, so perfectly, with such obscene ease, with hands such as hers? For the most fleeting of moments, she wished he could somehow know the answer to such a musing, could know the shame of not being able to carry out what he knows must be done, of having the world´s perception of his intellect and worth marred by the warped looking glass of his crippled body. She wished him pain and humiliation and despair.

Just as quickly as the feeling came, it vanished, replaced by familiar remorse. She shouldn´t think that way. No one deserved to be crippled or suffer, not even Snape. It was selfish and ugly of her to want others to share in her misfortune. It was the voice of her bitterness. She had worked for many years to quell it, to exorcise it, and though she had made great strides, she had never wholly succeeded. It still crept unbidden into her thoughts now and then, on the days when she felt particularly weak and vulnerable.

The steady tapping of Snape´s shoes halted abruptly. "We´re here."

"Thank you, sir. I´m sorry about your vial."

"Spare me your trite apologies. I expect to see you in my classroom tomorrow at eight o´clock in the evening. Goodnight, Miss Stanhope." He turned to go.

"Sir?" she called, confused. "Tomorrow?"

He turned back to her, bending down so that she could see the grim delight in his eyes. "Yes, Miss Stanhope, tomorrow. And the night after that. And the next, if need be. You will serve detention with me every night until you achieve a perfect Camoflous Draught, even if it takes all term. I am most looking forward to it. It should be a long association, don´t you think?" An unpleasant smile shimmered on his thin lips. "Goodnight, Miss Stanhope. You´ve detained me long enough."

He turned away from her and was gone, the sound of his footsteps swallowed up by the darkness. She gaped after him until he had faded from the range of her hearing. Then she turned, muttered the password, and went inside to muster what comfort and courage she could from her soft bed and Winky´s musical little voice before the dawn brought another round of toils and trial, and another night in the clutches of the merciless Professor Snape.