The room was dead silent.
Vance stood there, arms still half-raised from catching the ball, studying him. His voice, when it came, was quieter than before.
"You took that hit on purpose," said Vance.
Aegeus looked back at him. "The three balls were coming at me at once. I could dodge one, block one, but could not do so with all three without leaving myself open..."
"Why the stomach and not the shoulder or the ribs?" Vance asked in wonder.
"My ribs can crack, and that would affect my fight. The shoulder would be an instant loss. Stomach would just hurt." A beat. "Assuming, of course, it's a physical blow and not a real spell."
Vance lowered his arms.
"I think I've seen enough. Sit down, Granger," he said. There was something different in his tone now.
After Aegeus sat back down, Vance ran the rest of the students through the single-ball version of the challenge, as if to check whether anything had changed now that they'd watched his attempt. It hadn't.
One flinched and threw his arms up too late, catching the ball on the middle of his forehead. The other dodged but only because she had started moving before Vance had even finished the throw.
Vance didn't say much to any of them. A few kids kept glancing sideways at Aegeus.
Rosalind's turn came near the end— she caught hers clean.
Vance paused. "Ashworth. Again— three this time."
She stepped back up. Three balls came at once— she dodged the first one, caught the second against her forearm, and the third on her shoulder.
She rolled her shoulder once and sat back down without comment.
When the lesson ended, and the class started thinning out, robes rustling, voices picking back up now that the tension had broken, Vance's voice cut through it.
"Granger, Ashworth, stay behind."
Aegeus paused, then peeled off from the group heading for the door with Rosalind in tow. Marcus glanced back at him once before disappearing into the corridor.
Vance waited until the door swung shut, the sound echoing once against the stone, before he spoke again.
"That wasn't normal first-year reflexes," he said, his eyes shifting between them. "And that certainly wasn't normal first-year judgment, either."
What truly impressed Vance about Granger, however, was his situational awareness— the boy hadn't naively assumed the attack was a single engagement. Had Granger dropped his guard after dodging the initial volley, Vance had been fully prepared to teach him a painful lesson with a second strike.
"I'm offering you both the opportunity to join my dueling club," Vance continued. "It is only for a select few."
Vance had only agreed to take the Defense post at Dumbledore's personal request— and partly because Alastor Moody wouldn't stop yapping about how soft the newest batches of Auror recruits had become.
He had planned to hand-pick a small group from the upper years to put through proper combat drills, fully intending to skip the first and second years entirely.
Looking at the two standing before him, he thought maybe— just maybe— those two may be able to shut that old man up.
"So," Vance said, looking between them. "Interested?"
"Yes, sir," Aegeus answered quickly. "I am."
Books could only teach so much when it came to combat; direct instruction from someone with real field experience was far more efficient. Beside him, Rosalind also gave a nod of agreement.
Vance nodded back, as if expecting nothing less. "Tuesdays, after dinner. First session is next week."
Both of them nodded.
"Good." Vance was already turning back toward the equipment crate, dismissing them. "Go on then. You have a Herbology class to get to."
Marcus was waiting just around the corridor bend, arms crossed, doing a remarkably poor job of pretending he hadn't been straining to hear through the heavy wood.
"Well?" Marcus asked, falling into step as they emerged.
"Well what?" Aegeus asked.
"Don't 'well what' me! What did he want with both of you?"
"He wants us to join the dueling club," Aegeus said plainly.
Marcus stopped short for a second, then jogged to catch back up. "Vance wants to give you two extra lessons! As for me, I nearly took a hit to the face. Why— why was I cursed with an overachieving pair of friends?"
"You didn't nearly," Aegeus said. "You flinched early and closed your eyes and caught it square in the face."
Marcus let out a short, strangled sound and gave up on the conversation in favor of checking his schedule for the fourth time since breakfast, as if the greenhouses might have moved, and given his experience with the moving staircases, it very well might have.
Fortunately, they hadn't moved, they were exactly where the schedule said, down past the vegetable patches, glass walls fogged faintly from the inside with a kind of warmth. Rosalind sat down to examine a pot of something with serrated purple leaves, eyeing the plant with a look that suggested she was mentally calculating whether or not it was going to bite her.
The witch who taught Herbology was— squat, sun-browned, wearing patched gardening gloves that looked older than most of the students— and she was already moving between the tables, setting down trays in front of each table.
"Spiky Bushes," she said, prioritizing introducing the plant over introducing herself. "The name is Professor Sprout. And no, before anyone asks, no one is firing spiky shoots across my greenhouse today unless they want detention scrubbing pots."
A low murmur of disappointment— primarily from the boys— echoed through the greenhouse. Aegeus looked down at the tray in front of him. The potted Bush sat stiff, its stems covered in needle-like thorns that twitched at regular intervals— a rhythmic expansion and compression of the plant's outer bark, charging small projectile thorns along its main branches.
"Gloves on before you touch the shears, and don't forget to put the goggles over your eyes!" Sprout continued, working her way down the row. "Prune from the base upward. If you pinch a stem too hard, it will instantly eject its thorns straight at you. These are young specimens, so their spikes are still soft, but they'll still hurt— so pay attention!"
Aegeus pulled on his dragon-hide gloves and turned the pruning shears over in his grip. And then observed the Bush's movements carefully as he started the pruning process, fully prepared to duck the moment it showed any sign of ejecting its spikes.
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TO BE CONTINUED
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