"And you, Harry?"
Slughorn beamed at Harry.
He noticed that Harry's cauldron held no antidote at all.
At the same time, he noticed the way Harry's right hand was clenched shut and, trusting in his star pupil, he asked anyway: "What have you got to show me?"
Harry took a deep breath, held out his hand, and opened it to reveal a bezoar.
Slughorn stared down at it for a full ten seconds.
Just as Harry began to worry, he was about to be shouted at, Slughorn threw back his head and roared with laughter instead,
"You've got nerve, my boy!"
Slughorn plucked up the bezoar and held it high for the whole class to see.
"Oh, I must say—just like your mother! I can't fault you for it, either, because a bezoar would cure every poison on this list!" The whole class turned to look, and not one of them said a word.
"This is the independence of spirit a true potioneer needs!"
Slughorn said happily,
"Just like his mother—a natural instinct for potions. There's no doubt he takes after Lily…
"Yes, Harry, yes—if you happen to have a bezoar on you, of course it'll do the job, so…
"Ten points to Gryffindor, for daring to take the initiative!"
For a moment, the entire class was struck speechless.
It was plain to see, Slughorn and Snape were two absolute extremes.
One of them was forever scheming up new ways to dock Harry points.
The other was forever scheming up new ways to award him points.
Compared to the deeply satisfying business of losing points, this business of gaining them was far harder to stomach.
The first few lessons had been bearable enough, but today Harry had done, quite literally, nothing and still come out top of the class.
It was simply outrageous.
Slughorn, meanwhile, carried on.
"That said, while a bezoar cures most poisons, it can't cure every one of them.
"And they're quite rare besides, so it's still worth knowing how to brew the antidote properly. Now then—"
Just as Slughorn was about to dismiss the class, he suddenly froze mid-motion.
Until that moment, his eyes had held room for Harry and Harry alone—he hadn't so much as glanced at Hermione, who was only a bit from finishing her own antidote.
But now, for the first time, someone else had entered his field of view.
"Sherlock!"
Slughorn's eyes widened in delighted surprise.
"You've finished your antidote!"
The words were barely out of his mouth before every head in the room turned toward Sherlock.
Slughorn peered closely into Sherlock's cauldron, and his smile only grew wider.
"Very good—excellent, in fact. You seem to be having a particularly good day today?"
Harry watched Sherlock with a tense, worried expression.
He wasn't worried Sherlock might steal his title as the class's top potioneer even if he genuinely did, that would hardly be the end of the world.
What worried him was the thought of Slughorn finding out that Sherlock had been deliberately holding back for him all along.
Put plainly, that would amount to deception.
But Sherlock only smiled faintly and gave an answer that sounded, somehow, both unexpected and perfectly reasonable.
"I suppose it's simply that I have a certain gift for the making and unmaking of poisons."
"Ha ha ha!"
The moment he heard it, Slughorn burst into an exaggerated fit of laughter.
"Who would have guessed our great detective had such a sense of humour!"
Just then, the bell rang for the end of class.
"Right then, pack up your things!"
Slughorn chuckled warmly.
"And ten more points to Gryffindor, for prescribing precisely the right remedy!"
By rights, this should have been nothing more than a minor footnote in the day.
Instead, it left both Hermione and Ron rather sulky.
Hermione, naturally, was indignant that Harry had won top marks without having done any real work at all.
Ron, for his part, was aggrieved that Harry hadn't slipped him a bezoar of his own.
Watching his two friends sulk, Harry finally lost his temper:
"If two people did the same thing, it would just look ridiculous!"
He was honestly astonished that Ron couldn't grasp something so obvious.
"What is wrong with the two of you—look at Sherlock, he doesn't care in the slightest!"
"Of course he doesn't care!" Ron snapped.
Hermione gave a little huff. "Sherlock spoils you rotten!"
"If one of you two were a girl," Ron added, throwing more fuel on the fire, "I daresay you'd have gotten married on the spot by now!"
Harry: "..."
Sherlock merely shrugged, entirely unbothered.
"I'm off to find Lavender!"
Harry watched Ron storm off in a huff and could only feel utterly baffled.
"Is something wrong with him?" Harry demanded. "Seriously, is there something wrong with that boy?"
For several days afterward, Ron went on being cross with Harry over the whole business.
Hermione, by contrast, had more or less forgotten about it.
"At least you didn't have Sherlock brew the antidote for you outright," she said loftily. "Small mercies, I suppose." As for the attitude of his two friends, Harry found the whole thing simply incomprehensible.
"That," said Sherlock, "is a sign of immaturity."
So, Sherlock declared.
And just as Hermione opened her mouth to object, Sherlock added, "Though of course, Harry, the same goes for you."
Hermione promptly fell silent.
Fortunately, within a few days a new topic of conversation had arrived to take its place.
It was startling enough that it made Ron forget he was still supposed to be angry with Harry over the bezoar. "Mad-Eye Moody and Umbridge have both started exercising their powers as High Inquisitors!"
Ron told them, looking thoroughly stunned.
"Mad-Eye's been going through the teachers' offices, and Umbridge has been sitting in to inspect everyone's teaching!
"I heard Snape's given up on regular teaching entirely over it now he's only taking sixth- and seventh-years!
"Umbridge, meanwhile, has started teaching first- through third-years herself, and Mad-Eye's got fourth and fifth.
"But since the two of them are both busy with their inspection duties, it's Karkaroff, of all people, who's ended up teaching the most classes!
"He's got to take every single year group!"
It was a result nobody had seen coming. But something even more astonishing was still to follow.
By the time February arrived, the snow blanketing the grounds had finally begun to melt.
As the saying goes, the snow itself isn't the cold part—it's the melting that chills you to the bone.
And so, a raw, damp cold settled over everything in its wake.
Great slabs of grey-violet cloud hung low over the castle, and the endless drizzle turned the lawns slick and thick with mud. Because of this, the sixth-years' very first Apparition lesson was moved from the grounds into the Great Hall.
The lesson had been scheduled for Saturday morning, so as not to eat into the regular timetable.
McGonagall, Snape, Flitwick, and Sprout—all four Heads of House came along with the Ministry-appointed instructor to teach the first class. According to the instructor, the essence of Apparition could be boiled down to three D's:
Destination, Determination, and Deliberation. In plain terms: when Apparating, fix your mind on your destination, resolve to occupy that exact space, and carry it out without hesitation.
"As some of you may already know, it's generally not possible to Apparate or Disapparate anywhere on Hogwarts grounds.
"But today, the headmaster has specially lifted the enchantment—the restriction is suspended for one hour.
"Only within the Great Hall, of course—this is purely so that all of you can practice.
"I'll say it plainly: do not attempt to Apparate beyond the Hall's walls. Anyone foolish enough to try would be making a very poor decision indeed."
Given that this was an exceptionally difficult piece of magic, the outcome of the first lesson was hardly a mystery.
At first, nothing happened at all—until one girl's body did manage to arrive inside the wooden hoop that served as the target.
Except her left leg was still standing several feet away, exactly where it had started.
The Heads of House rushed to her side at once.
There was a loud crack, a burst of purple smoke, and when it cleared, the leg had been reattached.
Clearly, this was precisely why four Heads of House had been brought along in the first place.
Still, it wasn't hard to imagine that having one's upper and lower halves briefly parted ways was not a pleasant sensation.
Needless to say, by the end of the first lesson, not a single student had managed it.
The Ministry instructor, for his part, seemed entirely undiscouraged.
Fastening his cloak, he addressed the class: "Same time next Saturday, then. And don't forget your three D's—Destination, Determination, Deliberation!"
"Phew—"
Ron let out a long breath.
"Sherlock, finally, a class you haven't just picked up in one go!"
Harry sighed. "Ron, this course runs twelve weeks—Cho told me managing it in half that time would already be impressive…"
"Right, right, I know you've got yourself a seventh-year girlfriend now—speaking of which, how'd you do just now?
"I thought I felt something, right at the end a sort of tingling in the sole of my foot."
"I expect your trainers are just too small, Ron—Won-Won."
Hermione teased, then turned to Sherlock with obvious curiosity. "And you? How did it go?"
Sherlock gave a small shake of his head and said nothing.
"Don't worry about it—Apparition isn't like the other subjects. Not managing it in the first lesson is perfectly normal—"
"No way!" Ron let out a strangled yelp. "Don't tell me you actually thought you'd master this in one lesson!"
Hermione ignored Ron's interruption entirely, because at that moment Lavender had already come running toward them, calling out "Won-Won!" at the top of her voice.
Up to that point, everyone had assumed that Apparition would remain the hottest topic of conversation, then and for some time to come.
No one could have guessed that, barely a week later, everything would suddenly change.
When word got out that Igor Karkaroff a man who had, by then, earned something of a reputation as a model teacher had been placed on probation, it caught everyone off guard.
Truth be told, back during the Triwizard Tournament, Gryffindor students and really, students across all of Hogwarts hadn't thought much of him at all. After all, the man had a rather ugly history of deliberately marking down Hogwarts's own champion.
But ever since he'd stepped down as Headmaster of Durmstrang the previous year and taken up teaching at Hogwarts, his reputation had been steadily climbing back up. It seemed the news of Voldemort's return had rattled him badly enough that he'd become remarkably low-profile simply teaching his classes properly and keeping out of everything else.
And it was precisely because of this that the flamboyant, showy side of him that everyone remembered had been quietly buried.
That, and the fact that he genuinely did know a great deal about the Dark Arts as a former Death Eater, he was second in the whole school only to Snape in that particular expertise (though, admittedly, most people had no idea about that second part).
Dumbledore, naturally, didn't enter into the comparison at all.
Whatever the case, over these past two years, Karkaroff had left people with a genuinely favourable impression.
So when news of his probation began to spread through the school, almost everyone felt a real pang of dismay.
Naturally, people went digging to find out what had actually happened.
And what they discovered was that it had been Umbridge's doing.
At first, everyone had been fully prepared to erupt in outrage over it.
After all, Umbridge had already proven last year that she wasn't exactly a decent human being.
But what nobody had expected was that Umbridge produced a justification that, however grudgingly, was enough to win over most people. Karkaroff had once been a Death Eater.
For children raised in wizarding families, "Death Eater" was a word they'd been hearing since before they could remember.
In a certain sense, the name carried almost as much dread as Voldemort's own—the crimes committed under his reign of terror were, after all, common knowledge.
Hogwarts had no shortage of students who were relatives of the victims.
Beyond Neville Longbottom, there was also Susan Bones of Hufflepuff, who fell into the same category.
She had started at Hogwarts the same year as Sherlock.
Everyone remembered that the very first name called out to try on the Sorting Hat that year had been Hannah Abbott.
But few people remembered that the second name called, right after Hannah Abbott's, had been Susan Bones.
Her surname alone made the connection clear—she was related to Amelia Bones.
Her father had been Amelia's brother, and during the war against the Death Eaters, her grandparents, her aunts and uncles, and her cousins had all been murdered by them.
She was also the very girl who'd lost her leg during the first Apparition lesson.
"If that's genuinely the reason, then I suppose I can understand it," she confessed to Sherlock and Harry during Herbology, unable to hold the thought in any longer.
"With people who have that sort of history, you can never really be certain they won't do it all again."
She said it plainly enough, but Harry found himself unconvinced.
"She probably doesn't know Karkaroff turned in other Death Eaters," he murmured to Sherlock. "He'd never dare go back to them now—otherwise he wouldn't still be here, would he, once the Triwizard Tournament ended."
"Harry, you've spotted the blind spot."
Sherlock slapped away a Venomous Tentacula that had tried to take a swipe at him and murmured, almost distantly:
"Others might not realize it, but Umbridge, working for the Ministry as she does, ought to know it perfectly well and yet she went ahead and did this regardless."
"She must have done it on purpose. She's jealous that Karkaroff teaches Defence Against the Dark Arts better than she does, so she's trying to get rid of him that way she might get to take on more year groups herself."
"I'm afraid I can't agree with you there, Harry," Sherlock said, shaking his head. "The Defence Against the Dark Arts post is certainly a position of some weight, but set against the authority a High Inquisitor holds, it's really rather small potatoes by comparison."
"Sherlock, are you saying—"
Hermione couldn't help but cut in at that.
And in the moment her attention slipped, she accidentally tipped in far too much dragon dung onto the seedlings of Snargaluff.
They immediately began writhing and shrieking in distress.
"Er—sorry—"
"What I'm saying is that something is very likely already beginning to shift."
Something in Sherlock's gaze deepened.
He didn't tell Harry or Hermione about the unsettling theory that had begun, slowly, to take shape in the back of his mind.
Because if that theory turned out to be true, it would mean that some judgment he'd made in the past had been wrong.
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