Chapter 25

Chapter 25

What had happened?

When Suer arrived in the Great Hall for breakfast, he found every little lion at the Gryffindor table shrouded in gloom, as though each of them carried a personal patch of grey mist.

From the Slytherin table, he heard a certain Draco jeering loudly, “Potter ought to go back to his Muggle home.”

Then Suer looked at the four differently coloured hourglasses before the staff table.

Only a few stubborn grains remained in the upper half of Gryffindor’s hourglass.

They had still possessed a hundred or two points yesterday. How had they lost everything overnight?

Back to square one in a single evening?

After listening to a Slytherin’s loud proclamations and Morn, Hufflepuff’s resident expert on everything, Suer pieced together the story.

The famous Boy Who Lived had led a flagrant breach of school rules. Instead of sleeping at midnight, he and his accomplice had played dominoes with suits of armour in the corridors and broken into the forbidden area on the fourth floor.

Peeves and the caretaker, Filch, had joined forces to catch the gang of “criminals” led by the Boy Who Lived in the act, then marched them straight to the office of the Head of Gryffindor.

Professor McGonagall had been furious. With ruthless impartiality, she had sacrificed her own House for the greater good and deducted nearly every point Gryffindor possessed.

Rumour even claimed that Professor Severus Snape had wanted to expel the two culprits as a warning to the rest.

“Give them another chance. They are still children,” Professor Dumbledore had said, intervening to stop him.

And with that, Gryffindor had effectively been sentenced to death in Hogwarts’ annual battle for the House Cup.

Unless, of course, a certain old bumblebee forcibly reversed the situation.

As a Hufflepuff, Suer ought to have been delighted by Gryffindor’s early elimination. At the very least, Hufflepuff would not be taking home the glorious honour of last place this year. They were guaranteed bronze!

He showed none of this on his face, however. He was worried about Hermione.

The girl had been almost fanatical about marks since childhood. Malfoy’s provocation and Harry’s and Ron’s impulsiveness had caused the entire disaster; Hermione and Neville were actually the two most innocent people involved.

Knowing Hermione, she was certain to blame herself beyond reason.

Strangely, Suer did not see her at all on Friday–or throughout the entire weekend.

Snape seemed to be in an excellent mood during Potions that day. Even when Justin, Suer’s partner, accidentally knocked over a glass bottle of powdered moonstone, Snape did not erupt in fury.

The young witches and wizards completed their lesson on brewing the Calming Draught in a state of frightened disbelief.

The potion soothed agitation and restored emotional calm, making it particularly suitable for stressed office workers.

Suer gave it another name: the Post-Nut Clarity Potion.

Its ingredients had to be measured with precision down to the decimal point, however. Too much of anything turned it into a sleeping draught. The effect would be rather like swallowing an entire bottle of sleeping pills, plunging the drinker into an irreversible slumber.

Potions were endlessly fascinating. Any one of these formulas could generate enormous value if introduced to Muggle society.

“It’s still too early… I’ll keep looking.”

He added the potion to his planning sheet and marked it as undecided.

Compared with such a basic potion, he was more interested in the Draught of Living Death. A pure sleeping effect had a much larger potential market. His adoptive father, Mr. Ellison, often suffered from insomnia because of work.

For two straight days, Suer sat in the library with a copy of Elementary Potion Refinement and failed to encounter the girl who might be in need of comfort.

That was very unlike Hermione.

Just as he began to wonder whether all four children had already boarded a little train home, Suer finally saw Hermione on Monday morning.

“Good morning, Hermione.”

He patted the bushy head sitting at the Gryffindor table with its back to the entrance.

“Good morning.”

Hermione actually seemed to be in a fairly good mood.

How strange. Had someone swapped her for a duplicate?

Driven by curiosity, Suer sat down at the Gryffindor table, drawing looks from the little lions around him. With some indirect questioning from Suer and supplementary details from Neville, who arrived a little later, the full story emerged.

Suer could only sigh. The protagonist’s luck was impressively dreadful. At the same time, he had to admire the plot’s determination to push events forward.

After parting from Suer, the four Gryffindors had encountered Peeves drawing graffiti on a classroom wall on the fourth floor. Delighted to catch students out after curfew, Peeves had naturally begun shouting at the top of his voice.

“They could have escaped by making a bargain with Peeves,” Neville explained, “but Ron just had to take a swipe at him.”

Peeves was the only ghost in Hogwarts Castle capable of touching solid objects.

His retaliation soon drew Filch, who had been patrolling the castle. To avoid capture, the four had been forced into the corridor on the right-hand side of the fourth floor.

“It was terrifying.” Neville still looked badly shaken. “There’s a dog in there bigger than a troll, and it has three heads.”

The roar of the three-headed dog had sent all four fleeing in panic. They ran into a corridor lined entirely with suits of armour, where the unfortunate Neville tripped over a piece lying on the floor.

That had produced the enormous series of crashes Suer heard outside his dormitory.

They had been forced to run for their lives yet again.

At some point, Hermione became separated from Harry and Ron. With pursuers behind her, she wisely chose to take Neville back toward their dormitory.

The result was that Filch dragged Harry and Ron to his office while Hermione and Neville escaped by sheer luck.

“I realised the three-headed dog is guarding something,” Hermione said. “It was standing over a trapdoor, and there was a chain fastening it in place. What do you think is underneath?”

Suer knew the answer, but he could not reveal the mystery without any grounds.

So he said, “Whatever it is, it’s either extremely dangerous or extremely valuable.”

“That’s what I thought too. But I’m not curious about it.” Hermione smiled brightly. “I did manage to cast Alohomora successfully, though.”

“Congratulations,” Suer said without much sincerity.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the Boy Who Lived and his faithful sidekick Ron coming through the doors, both looking utterly defeated.

The punishment had evidently been severe.

According to Neville, the corridor contained at least a hundred suits of armour. Reassembling and polishing all of them without magic would be an enormous undertaking.

Tsk, tsk.

Suer shook his head, said goodbye to Hermione, and returned to the Hufflepuff table.

Hermione truly did seem uninterested in whatever the three-headed dog was guarding. For the entire week, she kept pulling Suer away to study transformation spells with her.

This was material normally taught in fourth-year Transfiguration.

Top students truly were top students.

The magic of first-years could not support such an advanced spell, however. A transformation spell was a branch of Transfiguration, an advanced operation that altered the fundamental form of the original object.

Such magic could transform a person into an animal, or turn one object into something entirely unrelated.

Suer thought he might have found a way to turn a chair into something resembling a unicorn. He still remembered his promise to his little sister, Angel, so the spell held enormous interest for him.

Professor McGonagall approved of their eagerness to learn and agreed that Suer’s idea was theoretically sound. She patiently answered their questions about transformation spells.

“Turning a chair into a horse is quite straightforward,” she told them.

“Giving that horse a horn and making the result move, however, requires far more advanced Transfiguration. I suggest borrowing the 1981 issues of Transfiguration Today from the library. Headmaster Dumbledore published a paper there which explains the deeper theory behind this form of magic.”

Professor McGonagall wrote out a reading list for them and said they could visit her office whenever they had questions.

Very well. First-year Suer clearly could not manage a unicorn yet, but he could at least try turning a chair into a horse.

Professor McGonagall advised him to choose an object similar in size to the intended result. Transforming objects of roughly equal dimensions greatly reduced both the magical power required and the difficulty of the spell.

Apart from Potions, Gryffindor shared all its lessons with Hufflepuff that week.

Hermione spent every day with Suer, Neville and Hannah following along beside them.

Suer and Hermione studied Transfiguration, while Neville and Hannah huddled together over a copy of How to Cultivate Magical Plants More Effectively.

Professor Sprout appeared to be particularly fond of Neville. Much of the time, she assigned him and Hannah to help her tend the plants in the greenhouses.

And so an entire week passed in absorbed study.

Peaceful and serene, Hogwarts Castle welcomed the arrival of Halloween.