Harry Potter and the Sect of the Serpent

CHAPTER NINE -- Charming

"Congratulations, all of you, for earning an O.W.L. in charms!" Professor Flitwick squeaked. He was perched precariously atop his traditional stack of books which was the only way he was able to see over his desk. "This year we will be attempting two much more advanced forms of charms: illusions and conjuring. Creating illusions and conjuring things are very closely related, and the one forms the basis of the other."

Down the row to Harry's right, Hermione was scribbling rapidly as Flitwick spoke. Between them, Ron was frowning at Hemione's notes, as if trying to determine what she thought was already so critical. Neville sat on the other side of Hermione looking like he wasn't quite sure he was in the right class.

To Harry's left, however, Gwyn didn't seem to be paying much attention to Flitwick at all. She had pulled out a spiral bound notebook in which she was now carefully doodling.

"Illusions," Flitwick continued, "require a great deal of concentration and energy on the part of the wizard. Thus, it follows that the illusion that you produce will only be as strong or as realistic as you make it." Harry turned his head slowly and -- he hoped -- inconspicuously to try to get a better look at what she was drawing, but all he could make out were a bunch of dots and squiggly lines. He glanced up at her; her expression was set in concentration, a single tendril of pink hair hanging loose in her eyes. She reached up to brush it behind her ear and--

"Please begin!" Flitwick said suddenly, and a flurry of movement alerted Harry that the lecture was over. He realized that he had missed most of it.

"What are we supposed to be beginning?" Harry asked Ron quietly as he drew out his wand. Hermione gave him an exasperated look.

"We're supposed to be trying to make an illusion of a Galleon," she replied, stacking her notes neatly. Harry wanted to ask exactly how they were supposed to go about that, but the telling off he would receive for not paying attention in class hardly seemed worth the information. He would just wait to see what Hermione did.

Gwyn, completely absorbed in her doodling, had not yet looked up. Still curious to see what she was working on, Harry turned to have another look, but this time, she caught him. She blushed slightly and moved her arm to cover what she'd been working on.

"Er... Do you have any idea what we're supposed to be doing?" Harry asked quietly, trying to cover for his curiosity.

"Illudere!" Hermione said suddenly. Harry turned back to look at her. Her face was scrunched up in concentration as she pointed her wand at the desk in front of her. At first nothing happened. Her frown deepened and suddenly, a very faint outline of a gold disc appeared. It didn't look much like a Galleon, Harry thought, but at least it was the right size and color, despite being translucent.

"Oh well done! Well done, Miss Granger! See here, everyone!" Professor Flitwick drew everyone's attention to Hermione's very faint illusion. Her wand hand was beginning to shake. Suddenly, she let out the breath she had been holding, and the disc disappeared. "Very good for a first try!" Professor Flitwick said happily. "You see, it isn't as easy as it looks. Five points to Gryffindor. Anyone else want to have a go?" His eyes passed Ron, who shook his head violently, and landed on Harry who gave him a somewhat panicked look.

"I will," Gwyn offered suddenly. She took out her wand which was quite long and pale and held it out over her desk. She gave a tiny frown and said, "Illudere." A perfectly formed Galleon popped into existence on her desk. It even had all the markings of a real Galleon. Professor Flitwick began clapping wildly, and the rest of the class followed, impressed.

"Excellent! Excellent!" he squeaked rapturously. "Ten points to Ravenclaw, Miss Griffiths!" Gwyn looked up and smiled at Professor Flitwick, and still her Galleon did not disappear. Harry grinned at her broadly. He turned back to Ron and Hermione. Ron was clapping enthusiastically, but Hermione looked as though someone had just told her all her classes had been cancelled. Seeing Harry looking at her, she turned red and quickly began trying to produce another Galleon. Gwyn gave a little wave of her wand as Professor Flitwick moved away and her Galleon disappeared.

"That was brilliant!" Harry exclaimed. "How did you know what to do?" Gwyn smiled sheepishly. She leaned over to Harry.

"We did illusions last year," she whispered in his ear. She gave a little shrug and went back to her doodles.

"Look at her!" Ron muttered to Harry out of the side of his mouth. Hermione was concentrating so hard on her, now admittedly more solid looking but no more detailed Galleon, that she was shaking all over. "She's going to pull a muscle!" Ron hissed, and Harry tried not to laugh.

"She's trying too hard," Gwyn said quietly, so that only Harry could hear. He turned to look at her.

"What?"

"She's trying too hard. She's too worried about the energy aspect of it. A simple illusion doesn't need any more energy than any other kind of spell." She paused, noticing Harry's rapt attention to her. "I'm being a know-it-all," she said, blushing.

"No!" Harry insisted. "Go on."

"Well," she said, suddenly sounding unsure of herself, "the trick -- for me anyway -- is really just being able to concentrate on two things at once: an image of the illusion you're trying to produce, and the charm itself. At least, that's what our teacher taught us."

"That makes sense," Ron said. Harry didn't realize he'd been listening; apparently neither did Gwyn, and she blushed even more deeply. Harry took out his wand. He tried to do what she had said: first he pictured a Galleon in as much detail as he could, then, trying to hold onto that picture, he concentrated on the charm.

"Illudere," he said. At first, he didn't think anything was going to happen, but then very slowly, a shape began to appear. It wasn't nearly as detailed as Gwyn's, and he could still see the desk through it, but it did eventually very much resemble a Galleon.

"Good work Mr. Potter!" Professor Flitwick said. His voice startled Harry, and, his concentration broken, the Galleon disappeared. "But then," Flitwick added with a smile, "I expected you might have a talent for illusions." Harry gave him a questioning look and Flitwick giggled.

"Well! Everyone knows you can produce quite an impressive Patronus," he said. "The Patronus is, in fact, based in part on an illusion spell! If you can master the Patronus, you can certainly master a simple illusion. Ten points to Gryffindor." Harry beamed.

"You can do a Patronus charm?" Gwyn asked as Flitwick moved away.

"Oh, yeah," Harry replied, feeling that the Galleon was more to celebrate than the Patronus which he'd been conjuring for almost three years.

"But Harry," Gwyn persisted, "that's very advanced magic! I mean, that's not even required for advanced placement tests in the last year at my old school!" Harry shrugged.

"Well, it's pretty much required when you've got a Dementor problem," he countered. Before Gwyn could say anything in reply, however, Ron suddenly said "Illudere!" and he too was able to produce something which vaguely resembled a Galleon.

"It worked!" he cried, breaking the spell. Harry and Gwyn smiled at him, but then Harry noticed Hermione who was still screwing up her face like she was trying to see something very far away.

"Not like that!" Ron tutted officiously. He proceeded to tell Hermione what she was doing wrong. She didn't look like she believed him, and only after Ron had succeeded in helping Neville produce something that looked vaguely like a Galleon, did Hermione finally listen. By the end of the lesson, she was able to produce a coin that was almost as good as Gwyn's, but she didn't seem very happy about it.

By the time they reached the Great Hall, it was apparent that Hermione was in no better mood. As soon as Gwyn bid them goodbye to go sit at the Ravenclaw table, Hermione slid into a seat and disappeared behind her charms book, grunting and muttering occasionally, and barely even surfacing long enough to snatch an apple from the bowl on the table. When Ron asked her to pass the pumpkin juice, she gave him such an nasty glare that he slid several inches away so as not to disturb her again.

After lunch, Harry and Hermione bid farewell to a rather smug looking Ron and agreed to show Gwyn to the Potions classroom. Harry made the journey down the corridor to the Potions dungeon with some trepidation. He was loath to once again lay eyes on Professor Snape, who hated Harry almost as much as Harry hated him, yet he knew that his marks in potions from here on would be the biggest thing standing between himself and a career as an Auror.

As they walked, Gwyn glanced around uneasily at the flickering torches in brackets on the damp stone walls and shivered.

"Don't you people believe in electricity?" she asked. Hermione rounded on her.

"Muggle inventions like electricity don't work at Hogwarts," she said knowledgably, "because there's too much magic and--"

"It makes things go all wonky," Gwyn finished with a sigh. "I've heard about things like that. It's very different back home. Wizards use lots of Muggle inventions, like phones and electricity."

"Why would wizards want to use Muggle inventions when they have magic to do things?" Hermione asked, in what Harry thought was a rather snooty tone.

Gwyn shrugged. "It's partly to blend in, I guess. And besides, just because something is magic, doesn't mean it's better." Hermione looked as though she wanted to ask Gwyn more about wizard/Muggle relations in America, but thankfully they reached the classroom and she held her tongue.

As they entered the dungeon, Harry was shocked to see how few people there were. Padma Patil was sitting with Justin Finch-Fletchly and a Ravenclaw boy that Harry didn't know. Padma smiled and gave a friendly wave to Gwyn as she entered. A small knot of Slytherins dominated the room including, to Harry's chagrin, Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson. Harry, Hermione, and Gwyn took seats near the Ravenclaws just as Professor Snape glided soundlessly into the room like a Dementor, waving the door shut behind him.

"This is N.E.W.T. level potions," Snape drawled in his low menacing voice. He glared down his beak-like nose directly at Harry. "And while most of you are here because you have displayed a certain aptitude for the delicate art of potion brewing, others," he sneered at Harry, "seem to have charmed their way in with dumb luck and on no merit of their own." Harry frowned, but continued to meet Snape's icy stare. Snape's voice dropped even further to a low growl. "Be forewarned that I will accept nothing less than exceptional work from each and every one of you, and that at the first sign of falling behind, I will remove you from this class permanently." Harry glared back up at him defiantly. He wasn't about to be bullied on only his first day back.

Suddenly, the door to the classroom banged open. Snape whirled around to stare at the intruder, and Harry recognized the fair-haired Beauxbatons boy who had stood up at the welcoming feast. He walked casually into the room and stopped in front of Professor Snape.

"Fontaine is it?" Snape demanded. The boy nodded and Snape's lip curled into a repulsive smile. "You are late. I do not tolerate latecomers. Five points from Hufflepuff and if you choose to arrive late again, it will be detention." The Hufflepuff boy stared at Snape for a moment and then nodded.

"Uv course Professer," he said with a thick French accent. "I am sorree." Across the room, Malfoy and the other Slytherins snickered loudly. Fontaine, however, looked utterly nonplussed. He strode purposefully across the room and took a seat right next to Malfoy, who stared at him with open contempt. Snape snarled.

"This year we will be studying poisons, antidotes, and medicinal potions. Your first project will be to complete the following antidote and surmise, from its ingredients, which poison it counteracts." He waved his hand at the blackboard and a list of instructions appeared in his messy scrawl. "Begin."

"What a jerk!" Gwyn whispered to Harry as they began assembling the ingredients they would need for the highly complicated antidote Snape had set for them to work on. "Is he always like this?" Harry nodded as Snape gave them both a menacing glare for whispering from his customary position near the Slytherins.

Determined not to give Snape any opportunity to throw him out, Harry concentrated with all his might on each step of his potion, cutting up his herbs and mushrooms into tiny, even pieces, measuring his liquids with the precision of a chemist, and adding it all together exactly as the instructions dictated.

About an hour into the lesson, the room was quiet save the soft rumble of cauldrons bubbling, the dull thud of knives against wood as ingredients were carefully chopped, and the relentless hissing of Malfoy and the other Slytherins whispering to one another. Hermione suddenly stopped what she was doing. She was frowning at the blackboard very intently. Snape had approached the Slytherins and was now talking to Malfoy loudly about the disgracefully easy questions that had been on the previous year's O.W.L. exam, and he did not notice when Gwyn leaned over and seemed to whisper a question to Hermione. Hermione nodded at Gwyn. Harry frowned as he watched them continue to whisper back and forth for several seconds. Then they both turned towards Harry and began to try to gesture unobtrusively at the black board. Harry frowned at them both, unable to understand what they were trying to tell him.

Quickly, Gwyn dug into her bag and produced a scrap of parchment on which she scribbled a few lines. She held it out and Harry was about to take it, when, out of nowhere, Snape sidled up behind them.

"Passing notes, Potter? Isn't that a bit childish? This is supposed to be an advanced potions class -- for advanced students!" Harry opened his mouth to protest, but Gwyn beat him to it.

"I'm sorry," she interjected coolly, "but I was just trying to warn Harry that you've reversed two of the steps in the instructions and that if he follows them as they're written, his antidote will go wrong." Snape's black eyes flashed.

"I beg your pardon!" he hissed. Gwyn never flinched. She began to repeat herself more slowly and clearly.

"I said that two of the steps in your instructions--"

"I heard what you said, Miss Griffiths, but I daresay that I, as potions master of this school, might know a bit more about the correct order of the steps--"

"I'm sure it was just an oversight," Gwyn interrupted. Harry stared at her. In his five years of Snape's classes, he didn't think he'd ever heard a student interrupt Professor Snape before. Snape seemed to be thinking along the same lines. His eyes narrowed dangerously to mere slits and a muscle twitched in his lip.

"I realize, Miss Griffiths, that in your country common courtesy is a rare thing, but in this school, in my class, you will address me as sir and speak only when you are spoken to!"

Gwyn gave him a very small, very wry smile.

"Yes sir, but in my country, it is also considered common courtesy to admit when one has made a mistake." Snape looked like he might burst into flames at any moment. Harry fancied he could almost see smoke beginning to issue from under his lank, greasy, black hair. Gwyn didn't wait for him to respond.

"You see, sir, Hermione believes that if we add the shredded boomslang skin after the dried feverfew, the boomslang will effectively counteract the anti-conflagratory properties of the feverfew, and the resulting antidote would be, to say the least, catastrophic for whomever might be unfortunate enough to have to test it." Hermione seemed to have shrunk several sizes as she slid further and further down in her seat trying to avoid being drawn into the altercation. "And I tend to agree with her," Gwyn added, apparently not noticing that her partner seemed to want to disavow all complicity entirely.

Snape's eyes snapped for a moment over to the blackboard and then back to Gwyn. There was absolute silence in the room. Harry hardly dared to breathe for fear that it might set Snape off.

Suddenly, with a brusque movement, Snape flicked his wand at the blackboard. The two offending steps reversed themselves. "Ten points from Ravenclaw," he hissed menacingly, "and another outburst like that from you, Miss Griffiths, will earn you a detention!"

Harry could barely wait to get out of the dungeon. He cleared up his potions ingredients at record speed and he, Gwyn, and Hermione dashed out of the dungeon.

"Brilliant!" Harry crowed, "Utterly brilliant! I don't think I've ever seen Snape look that buggered before!" Gwyn shrugged. But Hermione was shaking her head.

"It's ridiculous the way he plays favorites!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "I mean, we were perfectly right! He shouldn't have taken points off, even if you were being a tad rude..." Gwyn gave her a vaguely affronted look.

"He was the one being rude," she retorted. "Maybe he'll think twice before he tries to bully me again." Harry grinned, but Hermione gave them both a worried look.

At dinner that night, Harry gleefully recounted the story to Ron, including each and every one of Snape's pricelessly astounded reactions. Ron, however, didn't seem nearly as amused with the idea of rubbing Snape's greasy nose in his mistake as much as Harry would have thought. He just ate with his customary record-breaking speed and grunted in the appropriate places.

"I was thinking," Ron cut in as Harry was about to recall for the third time the look on Snape's face when Gwyn had told him he'd got the steps wrong, "that you ought to put up a sign up sheet for Quiddich tryouts." Harry nodded vaguely, a bit put off by the abrupt change in subject. "And," Ron continued eagerly, his eyes shining, "I was thinking we could have them this Friday. That way, we can start practicing with the new team right away."

"That seems a bit quick," Hermione said as she added salt to her peas and potatoes. "What's the rush?" Ron gave her a withering look.

"Hermione, new players can mess with the whole rhythm of a team! You have to practice about ten times more with new players than with an established team just to get used to one another, find your zone." Hermione raised her eyebrows.

"Your zone?" she repeated.

"Yeah! Like, when all the players know each other so well that they know what the others are going to do before they even do it." Hermione continued to look unconvinced. "Oh go on then. Harry knows what I mean." Harry was not exactly sure he did know what Ron meant. After all, Ron had been the new man on the team last year, and he certainly had never seemed to get into his "zone" -- at least, not while Harry was playing with him.

"So anyway," Ron continued, blatantly turning away from Hermione to signify that he was done explaining obvious things to her, "what do you reckon about Friday?" Harry shrugged.

"Yeah, I s'pose Friday is ok." Ron grinned broadly.

"Great!" he exclaimed, pulling a piece of parchment out of his pocket. "Then I'll just go on up and post this on the notice board!" Harry barely caught a glimpse of what looked like a sign-up sheet that had been painstakingly illustrated with flying bludgers, waving Gryffindor flags, and a tiny Golden Snitch before Ron had leaped up from the table and dashed out of the Great Hall.

"What's got in to him?" Harry asked, watching Ron practically skipping out of the room.

"I don't know," Hermione replied, "but I think it's serious. He didn't even finish his pudding."