Chapter Four: Bezoars and Other Disasters

By Thursday, Electra Lucia Malfoy had a system.

The system had evolved over the course of three days and it had not been written down anywhere, obviously, because writing it down would have been an admission that there was something to write down. It existed entirely in her head, where it had been refined and polished and justified several times over, and it ran approximately as follows.

At breakfast, one sat facing the hall, at the fourth seat from the end, which gave the best angle. One did not look at the Gryffindor table. One looked at the doors, which happened to be in the same general direction as the Gryffindor table, and one noted, in passing, and without any interest whatever, the arrival of various persons.

In corridors, one walked at a brisk pace and did not alter it for anybody. If a person was coming the other way, one did not step aside. If the person was Harry Potter, one did not step aside with considerable emphasis, and one said something as one passed, and the something had to be good, because there were only about two seconds available and the acoustics of a stone corridor were unforgiving.

And in lessons, one sat where one could see.

The system had so far produced four encounters, which Electra had catalogued privately and had decided were going extremely well.

Monday: she had informed him, in the entrance hall, that a hundred and forty-two staircases was a great many for somebody who had grown up in a cupboard, which she had meant as a general insult about his clothes and which had got an extremely odd look from him and which she had been unable to stop thinking about since.

Tuesday: she had said, outside Charms, "Nice robes, Potter," and he had said, "Thanks," and gone into the classroom.

Wednesday: she had said nothing at all, because she had turned a corner and walked into him and had dropped her books, and he had picked up two of them and handed them back and said sorry, and she had said something that she could not afterwards reconstruct and that Pansy maintained had been the word "fine" spoken four separate times.

Thursday morning she had cut him in the courtyard, which was a technique, and which involved looking straight through somebody as though they were a window, and which she executed flawlessly and which he did not appear to notice at all, because he had been looking up at an owl.

"It is going very well," she told Pansy, over toast.

"What is?"

"Nothing."

And then there was Potions.

Potions was the first lesson of the year that Slytherin took with Gryffindor, and Electra had known this since Sunday evening, when the timetables had come round, and she had looked at the little block on Thursday afternoon for slightly longer than was necessary to absorb the information contained in it.

Severus Snape was her godfather. This was a fact of considerable usefulness which she had so far mentioned to eleven people. He had come to the Manor at Christmas every year of her life and had given her a book every single time, always the wrong book, always a book intended for somebody about four years older, which she had privately found rather flattering. He had taught her to pronounce four Latin roots when she was six. He had once told her, in the drawing room, with her father out of the room, that she was far cleverer than her surname and that this was going to be inconvenient for her.

She had taken all of this to mean that Potions was going to go well.

The dungeon was cold and there were things in jars along the walls, and Electra took a seat directly behind and two along from the place where Harry Potter and the Weasley sat down, which gave her a clear view of the back of his head and his hands and his cauldron, and which she had selected on the grounds that it was nearest the window. There was no window.

Snape took the register.

He paused at Potter, Harry, and Electra watched her godfather's mouth do a thing she recognised from Christmas.

"Ah, yes," said Snape softly. "Harry Potter. Our new celebrity."

Pansy Parkinson and several others sniggered. Electra sniggered too, slightly after the others, and discovered when she had finished that she had not enjoyed it.

Then Snape started to talk about Potions, and the room went quiet, properly quiet, because whatever else was true about Severus Snape he could hold a dungeon full of eleven year olds with his voice alone. He spoke about the shimmering fumes and the delicate power of liquids that crept through human veins, bewitching the mind and ensnaring the senses, and Electra, who had heard him say approximately these words at a dinner party when she was nine and had thought them magnificent then, watched the back of Harry Potter's head to see if he was impressed.

The back of Harry Potter's head was impressed. The ears had gone slightly forward, which she had learned on Tuesday meant he was paying attention.

"Potter!" said Snape. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"

Electra sat up.

She knew this. She knew this absolutely cold, because she had been made to learn it, because her mother had bought an unreasonable quantity of asphodel in Diagon Alley in August and had told her exactly what it was for while she was buying it, and Electra's hand went up before she had made any decision about it.

Harry Potter said, "I don't know, sir."

"Tut, tut. Fame clearly isn't everything."

Electra's hand was still up.

Snape ignored it, which was, she felt, a shocking piece of behaviour from a godfather.

"Let's try again. Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?"

And the Granger girl's hand went up like a flagpole, and she stretched so far out of her seat that she was essentially standing, and Electra, whose own hand was also up, found herself in competition with a person whose arm appeared to have additional joints in it.

"I don't know, sir," said Harry Potter.

"Thought you wouldn't open a book before coming, eh, Potter?"

Electra forced her eyes to the front and her hand higher.

"What is the difference, Potter, between monkshood and wolfsbane?"

The Granger girl stood up.

Harry Potter said, "I don't know. I think Hermione knows, though. Why don't you try her?"

A few people laughed. Seamus Finnigan winked. Electra Lucia Malfoy sat with her hand in the air and her mouth slightly open and experienced an emotion that she had no name for and would not have admitted to if she had, which was the specific and unwelcome sensation of watching somebody be brave on behalf of a person they had known for four days.

"Sit down," Snape snapped at Granger. "For your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood make a sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of Living Death. A bezoar is a stone taken from the stomach of a goat and it will save you from most poisons. As for monkshood and wolfsbane, they are the same plant, which also goes by the name of aconite. Well? Why aren't you all copying that down?"

There was a sudden rummaging for quills and parchment.

"And a point will be taken from Gryffindor for your cheek, Potter."

Electra put her hand down.

She put it down slowly, and she looked at her godfather at the front of the dungeon in his black robes with his arms folded, and she had a thought that was so disloyal she had to physically turn it over and face away from it, and the thought was: that was unfair.

Not clever. Not cutting. Unfair, in a specific technical sense, because he had asked three questions that a first year could not be expected to answer and had taken a point when the boy had run out of ways to say no, and Electra, who had been raised in a house where unfairness was a tool like any other and was deployed daily before lunch, discovered that she objected to it enormously when it was being pointed at somebody she had decided to dislike personally.

She was still working on this when they were put into pairs to brew a simple cure for boils.

"You're with me," said Pansy Parkinson, delightedly.

"Yes," said Electra, who had been intending to engineer something else entirely and who had been outmanoeuvred by a girl she had, until that moment, considered to be no sort of threat at all.

Snape swept around the dungeon in his long black cloak watching them weigh dried nettles and crush snake fangs, criticising absolutely everybody except Electra, whom he praised twice.

The first time was for the way she had stewed the horned slugs.

"Look at the way Miss Malfoy has stewed those horned slugs," said Snape, and stopped by her cauldron, and Electra lifted her chin and permitted the praise to settle over her like a cloak, and glanced, with enormous care and in a manner she was certain was undetectable, across the dungeon to see whether Harry Potter had heard.

He had not. He was looking at his own slugs with an expression of someone attempting to work out whether they were supposed to look like that.

The second time was for her chopping, and that time she did not even bother to look, because she had developed a theory somewhere in the preceding four minutes that the entire practice of being praised in front of a person was a waste of effort if the person was concentrating on a slug.

Then Neville Longbottom melted Seamus Finnigan's cauldron.

He did it with such comprehensive success that it had to be seen to be believed. The cauldron buckled and then slumped and then became a twisted blob, and the potion went across the stone floor in a wave, burning holes in people's shoes, and within seconds the entire class was standing on their stools while Neville, who had been drenched when the cauldron collapsed, began to sprout angry red boils all over his arms and legs and face.

"Idiot boy!" snarled Snape, clearing the spilled potion with one wave of his wand. "I suppose you added the porcupine quills before taking the cauldron off the fire?"

Neville whimpered as boils started to pop up all over his nose.

"Take him up to the hospital wing," Snape spat at Seamus. Then he rounded on Harry and Ron, who had been working next to Neville.

"You. Potter. Why didn't you tell him not to add the quills? Thought he'd make you look good if he got it wrong, did you? That's another point you've lost for Gryffindor."

And this, Electra reflected later, was the moment at which the entire afternoon came off its hinges.

Because she heard herself say, from the top of her stool, in a voice of carrying clarity, "That's not fair."

The dungeon went completely silent.

It went silent in the specific way that a room goes silent when something has happened that nobody present has a procedure for. Twenty children on stools turned their heads. The Weasley's mouth opened. Pansy Parkinson, beside her, made a small noise like a deflating cushion.

Severus Snape turned round very slowly.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Malfoy?"

And Electra Lucia Malfoy, standing on a stool in a dungeon with the eyes of her entire year on her, and with the eyes in particular of one boy in a Gryffindor tie who was looking at her with an expression of complete astonishment, did the only thing available to her, which was to go directly and at full speed into the nearest escape route.

"It is not fair," she said, "that Longbottom gets to go to the hospital wing when he has ruined the lesson for everybody else. I have been working for forty minutes and I have had to stand on a stool. He should be made to clean it up."

The dungeon exhaled.

Pansy laughed. Several Slytherins laughed. Theodore Nott said, "Hear hear," in his strange voice. And the boy in the Gryffindor tie, who had been looking at her with astonishment, stopped looking at her with astonishment and looked at her instead with something considerably flatter, and then turned back to his cauldron, and did not look at her again for the remainder of the lesson.

Electra sat down on her stool.

She finished her potion. It was, she was informed at the end of the hour, the best in the class, and she received three points for it, and she carried those three points out of the dungeon and up two flights of stairs feeling like a person carrying something she had stolen.

"That was brilliant," said Pansy. "About Longbottom. He should be made to clean it up."

"Yes."

"Are you coming to dinner?"

"In a moment."

She went and stood in a window embrasure on the second floor for about four minutes and looked out at the grounds, which were green and enormous and had a lake in them, and conducted a review.

The review did not go well.

It established that she had said a true thing out loud by accident, which had never happened to her before and which she considered to be a serious lapse in training. It established that she had then taken the true thing back and replaced it with a cruel thing about a boy whose parents had gone mad. And it established, finally and most inconveniently, that she had done the second thing specifically and entirely because Harry Potter had been in the room, which was the precise opposite of the result she had been attempting to achieve, and which meant that her system was not a system at all but was in fact a form of illness.

"This is extremely stupid," said Electra Lucia Malfoy, to a window.

She went down to dinner.

She was intercepted in the entrance hall by her godfather.

"Miss Malfoy."

"Professor."

Snape looked down at her from his considerable height with his arms folded in his sleeves and an expression that would have stopped most children's hearts and which Electra had seen attempting to work a sprout out of a cracker at Christmas.

"You were about to say something else," he said.

"I w-was not!"

"In my classroom. You said that's not fair, and you then said four sentences about Mr Longbottom, and the four sentences arrived considerably faster than your usual speaking pace, which is a thing you have done since you were four years old when you wish to get past a subject."

Electra said nothing.

"Your mother does it as well," said Snape. "It is not a family trait I am fond of."

"It was unfair," said Electra, at the floor. "He did not do anything. Longbottom put the quills in. He was sitting next to him. You can't take a point off a person for being near a cauldron."

"No," said Snape. "You cannot."

She looked up.

Her godfather's face did not change at all, which she had expected, but something behind it had shifted in a way she was unable to read and would not be able to read for another six years.

"I am aware that it is unfair," said Severus Snape. "I shall continue to do it. You will find, Electra, that there are a number of things in this castle that are not what they appear to be, and that some of them are standing in front of you, and I would advise you very strongly not to attempt to work out which."

"That is an appalling thing to say to a child."

"Yes," said Snape. "Go to dinner."

She went two steps and then stopped.

"Why do you dislike him?"

"I do not dislike him."

"You asked him three questions he could not possibly answer, and you did it in the first eleven minutes of his first lesson, in front of everybody, and you did it on purpose, and you did it well." Electra turned round. "I know what that is. I have watched my father do it to people at dinner for my entire life. That is not disliking somebody. That is a demonstration."

There was a pause in the entrance hall of some length.

"Go to dinner, Electra," said Snape.

She went to dinner.

She sat at the Slytherin table at the fourth seat from the end, which gave the best angle, and she looked at the doors, and in due course the doors admitted a quantity of Gryffindors, among whom was a small boy with his hair standing up at the back, who was in the middle of an animated conversation with the Weasley about something and who did not look across the hall once.

Not once. She counted. She counted for the better part of forty minutes, during which she ate a very small amount of shepherd's pie and said four extremely funny things about Hufflepuffs that were repeated at the Slytherin table for a week, and Harry Potter did not look over, because Harry Potter was eleven years old and had just discovered that there was pudding every single night, and because he had decided in a dungeon that afternoon that Electra Malfoy was somebody who thought a boy covered in boils was funny.

At nine o'clock she wrote a letter home.

Dear Father, she wrote. Potions is going extremely well and Professor Snape has praised me twice and awarded me three points for the best cauldron in the class.

She looked at that for a while.

Potter is as arrogant as you said, she wrote, and does not know the first thing about anything, and he was publicly humiliated this afternoon and had two points taken off him in front of everybody, and I thought you would like to know.

She looked at that for considerably longer.

Then she put her quill down and put her head in her hands and said, into the desk, with enormous feeling, "I hate it here."

Pansy Parkinson, who was lying on her bed reading a magazine about somebody's wedding, did not look up.

"No you don't," she said.

"Shut up, Pansy."

"You've smiled about nine times today."

"I have smiled zero times today."

"You smiled when he got the thing right about Granger," said Pansy Parkinson, turning a page. "In Potions. When he said why don't you try her. You went like this."

And she did an impression, without looking up from the magazine, which consisted of a small involuntary movement at one corner of the mouth followed immediately by a scowl of enormous ferocity, and which was so accurate that Electra Lucia Malfoy threw a pillow at her with such force that it knocked over a lamp.

"My father," said Electra, "will hear about this."

"About the lamp?"

"About all of it," said Electra, and blew out the candle, and lay in the dark under the lake listening to the water, and thought about a boy standing up in a dungeon saying I don't know, sir, four times in a row without once sounding sorry about it, and fell asleep about an hour later than she intended to.

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