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Chapter Fourteen—Potions and Poisons

“Look carefully into the cauldron, Mr. Potter, and tell me what you see.”

Harry swallowed and looked down into the cauldron in front of him, but honestly, he couldn’t see anything except a kind of brown sludge. He shook his head. “Sorry, Professor Enfield. I don’t know.”

Professor Enfield just nodded instead of getting upset, and Harry relaxed. He had been a little more cautious of potions ever since Professor Riddle had told him that he might have to have his magic restrained by one. Professor Enfield was pretty brilliant, though. Harry hadn’t seen him get angry yet except the one time Justin was messing around and had nearly made a cauldron explode.

“Anyone else?” Professor Enfield looked around the room. He was a tall, thin man with pale skin, thinning grey hair, and wide blue eyes behind glasses. He pointed at Dean. “Yes, Mr. Thomas?”

“It looks as though it’s very slowly bubbling, sir. I just saw a big bubble come up and then disappear.”

Professor Enfield smiled. “Ah, yes. Right now, this is not so much a potion as an inert base. But not completely inert, or it would be impossible to make into a regular potion. The slight bubbles are your clue.” He rubbed his hands.

“Clue, sir?” Hermione asked.

“I want you to make a potion out of this,” Professor Enfield said happily. He waved his wand, and a whole bunch of ingredients appeared next to the cauldrons. Harry could recognize phoenix feathers, crushed cockroaches, salt crystals, and shredded lavender petals on his table. “Feel free to experiment and look up recipes in your book, work together, or swap ingredients. I’ll be on hand to prevent explosions.”

“But what potion should we make?” Justin asked, sounding frustrated.

“Anything you want, Mr. Finch-Fletchley. You have until the end of class.” Professor Enfield glanced up. They were in one of the towers near the edge of Fortius that looked as though they were designed for war, and there were only a few slit-shaped windows that let light through, but a crystalline clock perched on the wall over the windows. “Just a little over seventy-five minutes, now.”

Harry began flipping through his book, frowning. They had received training in basic things like cleaning their cauldrons and taking care of their cutting knives during the first fortnight of class, and had been making “real,” simple potions since then. But he hadn’t expected anything like this.

For a second, he wondered what would happen if he wasn’t good at it, and then shook his head sharply. So what if he wasn’t good at it? He wasn’t going to be kicked out of Fortius.

And he was so good at offensive magic that he’d needed his magic restrained, he reminded himself.

Harry nodded, and set himself to doing as good a job as he could.

*

Hermione scowled at the bubbling base of the potion. She’d added pixie dust and dried deaths-head moths’ wings to it, trying to nudge it in the direction of a Calming Draught, but the only reaction was to make the bubbles pop more energetically.

She put up her wand. Professor Enfield turned smartly away from Terry Boot’s cauldron and walked over to hers.

“What happens if we don’t have a functioning potion by the end of the class, sir?”

“Then we talk next class about why, and what this base could possibly have added to it to encourage it to form into a potion.”

Hermione fidgeted for a moment. Professor Enfield just waited her out instead of asking what was wrong, the way some of the other professors at Fortius did, and Hermione finally gave in with a small huff. “But, sir, why? Why not at least give us more of a hint as to what kind of potion we’re supposed to make?”

“I’ll tell you that at the end of class,” he said, and winked at her, and walked away.

Hermione scowled at the cauldron and her book, and decided to concentrate on the powdered boomslang skin next. It was a more powerful ingredient than she’d dared to add so far, but Professor Enfield had said he would prevent explosions, and it was clear that the pitiful little ingredients she’d chosen so far weren’t doing anything.

*

Harry ducked and yelped as Justin’s cauldron abruptly overflowed with blue fumes and bubbles. Professor Enfield was there in seconds, waving his wand hard as he conducted the fumes and the smell away from the cauldron and imprisoned them in a corner of the ceiling. He nodded to Justin, who was bright red.

“You’re all right, Mr. Finch-Fletchley,” he said bracingly. “A mistake that I was expecting someone to make. Spend the rest of class looking at the ingredients you added and writing down notes on why you think they reacted that way, and what you could do to prevent that kind of reaction in the future.”

Harry turned back to his potion with renewed determination. Yes, it was all right if he didn’t make anything, but he still wanted to make something.

Unfortunately, what he made was a suddenly-grey sludge that twisted itself into a solid ashy-colored lump on the bottom of his cauldron and began to melt through it. Harry raised his wand and hopped frantically in place, and Professor Enfield dashed over and froze the whole thing. Harry sighed. “Can I get my cauldron out of the ice later?”

“Yes, of course. I managed to stop the process before it could develop more than rudimentary intelligence.”

Harry stared at the cauldron, and then up at Professor Enfield. “Potions can be intelligent?” His voice was wavering a little.

Professor Enfield winked at him. “Under certain circumstances, yes. You should watch out for the ones that begin to melt through your cauldrons, though. Usually it means that they want to eat everything in sight and are hostile intelligences.”

“Professor Enfield!”

“Same assignment I gave Mr. Finch-Fletchley,” Professor Enfield told Harry as he leaped to Terry’s rescue.

Harry sighed and began to scan the list of ingredients. At least they had already had the habit of taking detailed notes, because half the time Professor Enfield wanted to look at them. He started to flip through his Potions textbook, looking for what it said about interactions between bicorn horn and doxy eggs.

*

Hermione scowled at the blue liquid in her cauldron. It smelled like a Calming Draught, but she was willing to bet it wasn’t.

“Very good, Miss Granger! That would be an effective poison.”

Hermione jerked back and turned to stare up at Professor Enfield. “But I didn’t want to make a poison, sir! I was trying to make a Calming Draught.”

“Then write down the ingredient interactions and try to work out why you made a poison instead, and what the poison would do.” Professor Enfield cast a Stasis Charm on her cauldron that Hermione knew would hold it until the end of class.

“Did you want us to experiment because you wanted us to make poisons?” Hermione demanded. She would never have dared be so straightforward with a Muggle teacher, but she was coming to see that the professors at Fortius valued that, as long as it didn’t cross the line into outright disrespect.

Professor Enfield chuckled at her and looked up at the clock. “We only have five minutes until the end of class, so you won’t have long to wait to find out, Miss Granger.” He bounced away again.

Hermione sighed and began to write down the possible reasons that her potion had become a poison, but she didn’t concentrate as hard as she might have. She was much more interested in Professor Enfield’s explanation than her own work, and kept one ear cocked for it, putting down her notes the minute she heard the crystalline chime that signaled the end of class.

They didn’t have anything right away after Beginning Potions Study except lunch, and it looked like everyone wanted to hear what the professor had to say. He beamed at all of them and nodded.

“As some of you have probably figured out,” he began, “the base I used today wasn’t one that would produce any specific potion. There’s no magical combination of ingredients that you could use to transform it into one of the potions we’ve already studied. I did this to see what you would come up with instead.”

“But why?” Hermione couldn’t help asking. “Isn’t that just a waste of time and ingredients, Professor?”

“No, Miss Granger. And I can assure you that the school has plenty of ingredients on hand.” Hermione tried not to blush at Professor Enfield’s obvious amusement. “This is to teach you to think more critically, especially about Potions ingredients and interactions. Not all of you will be capable brewers without recipes, but I wanted to see what you would create in any case.”

“Did you want us to brew poisons?”

“I wanted to see what you would create,” Professor Enfield repeated. “If poisons were among those creations, that would be all right. And if it was an intelligent creature like Mr. Potter’s, then I would be fascinated to see how it arose, since that’s not a result I could have reasoned to get to myself.”

“Intelligent creature?” That was Terry, luckily, so Hermione didn’t feel like she was just talking all by herself. They all turned and stared at Harry’s cauldron. He flushed a little and gestured to the ice that encased it.

“It’s okay,” he said feebly. “Professor Enfield contained it before it could get out.”

“I didn’t know you could make intelligent creatures with Potions,” Alita whispered. Hermione looked over to find that her eyes were huge and she was taking a step back from her cauldron. Hermione thought that whatever was in there was inert, since Alita had still been brewing when the class ended instead of taking notes, but she could understand the caution.

“Potions can do many things that you are not aware of, as can the other subjects you are studying at this school,” Professor Enfield said evenly. He wasn’t smiling as hard now, and his eyes swept over them. “Legilimency can damage an opponent’s mind. Defense includes spells that can kill someone. Knowledge of history changes your thinking as you approach propaganda and narratives taken for truth in the modern-day wizarding world. Even Astronomy teaches you about the influence that stars and planets have on our world from so far away.” He paused. Hermione watched him, hardly breathing.

“You know what we’re trying to do here,” Professor Enfield said softly. “You know that we’re trying to change the world, as well as give you an education. Always remember that, whether you’re working with ingredients in a cauldron or words in your mind or a spell at the end of your wand, you have the power to alter the world both for yourself and others.”

He stepped back with a smile to the nearly-silent room. “Class dismissed.”

*

“Are you all right, Arthur?”

Molly was glad to see that Arthur smiled a little as he looked up at her, but his face was still far too haggard, and he didn’t move away from Evangeline’s bedside. Then again, he hadn’t done that since they got her home from St. Mungo’s. Molly sat down on the other side, smoothing her hand absently over Evangeline’s hair.

“I just keep thinking,” Arthur said, and his eyes rested briefly on their youngest daughter. “Of the price.”

Molly shook her head slowly. She didn’t like thinking about it, either, but that was one reason she made it a point to not think about it all that often. “We paid it. We can’t go back and unpay it. And would you really want to give up Evangeline?”

Molly would have thought she would be the one most desperate to have daughters, but that had been Arthur, somewhat to her surprise. He had asked her to drink what were, at the time, highly experimental potions when she was a few months pregnant.

And they had worked. Ron and their little Victoria had been born, and Molly would never forget the look on Arthur’s face when he’d held Victoria for the first time.

Given that, she didn’t know what Arthur was saying now. She waited patiently for him to say something.

It took a longer time sitting in silence than she had anticipated, sitting in Evangeline’s little room just under the roof of the Burrow, before Arthur finally cleared his throat. “No, of course not. I would never give her up for anything.” He looked down and ran his hand over Evangeline’s shining hair. She was the one who had the brightest shade of red, Molly thought, although sometimes it was hard to be sure, when her brood never stopped moving around.

“Well, then. What did you mean?”

Arthur looked at her, then away. “Do you ever think that our—that going along with—that accepting some of the pureblood ideology isn’t what Albus would have wanted?”

Molly sighed. Yes, they’d both been part of the Order of the Phoenix that Albus had been trying to raise in the last years before he was imprisoned. But it wasn’t actually clear to Molly what its goal had been. Rebellion against the Ministry? But Albus had yielded without a fight in the end, when he could have killed at least a dozen purebloods if he had unleashed his full strength.

To resist the restrictions on Muggleborns in Hogwarts and elsewhere? But that couldn’t be true, either, not when Albus had supported some of those restrictions.

“I think,” Molly said quietly, reaching out to cover Arthur’s hand with her own, “that if we were going to prioritize what Albus thought, we should have done it before I took that first potion when I was pregnant with Ron and Victoria.”

“Do you think the potion actually created Victoria?”

Molly blinked. “Of course it did.” She’d thought Arthur knew this. “I went to a midwife early on in the pregnancy, and although she couldn’t tell the sex of the baby, she knew there was only one. And then, after I drank the potion, she could tell that there were two, and the one that read as female to her magic was younger than the other one. Which shouldn’t be truly possible with twins, of course. But yes, it created her.”

“And Ginny and Evangeline?”

“I didn’t take it with Ginny,” Molly said staunchly, which was true. She snorted at the look of shock on Arthur’s face. “Really, dear, you should pay more attention. That distinctive shade of red should have been easy to see on the table if I was. But I was a little worried about the consequences of the potion then. You remember how hard it was for Victoria to nurse? How sick she was that first year? I was concerned about it and wanted to see if I could have a daughter without the potion. And obviously, we did.”

“But Evangeline…”

Molly sighed. “Ginny’s birth was harder than I ever told you, Arthur. The Healers were convinced I would never have another child again. But you kept talking about wanting one, and another little girl. The potion would coat my womb in a protective layer of magic and allow me to have one. So I did.”

Arthur was staring at her in what looked like horror. Molly looked calmly back. Was it because he believed she had nearly died with Ginny? Well, she hadn’t. She would have lived no matter what, but it was true that Ginny’s birth had damaged her ability to bear children. Or should have, except for the potion.

“I didn’t—I didn’t know,” Arthur whispered. “I wouldn’t have asked you to take the potion and have another girl if I’d known.”

Molly stared at him. “Yes, you would have.”

“No! I promise, Molly, I love you! I wouldn’t have wanted you to risk your life!”

But even as Arthur reached his hand out to her, his gaze darted sideways to Evangeline. Molly rolled her eyes a little while taking his hand.

“You wanted daughters,” Molly said quietly. “Because few men in your family ever had them. You wanted sisters growing up, you told me, and aunts. Well, I could give you that, and by the time we had Evangeline, the potion had been tested as quite safe.”

“Now that we know the consequences…”

“We are not having another child.”

“I didn’t mean that, Mollywobbles. I mean, do you regret that you took it with Evangeline and Victoria? Because of the health problems they could have?”

Molly looked her husband in the face and wondered what he would say if she told him everything she was thinking. But she looked back down at the little girl who was hers and chose the gentler words, the lie.

“I think that they’re here, and we need to love them.”

Arthur nodded and let go of her hand. Then he went back to murmuring gentle words of his own as Evangeline stretched fretfully and reached for the cup of Calming Draught that stood on the table next to her bed. Molly rose and let herself out of the room.

She stood with her eyes shut on the stairs outside Evangeline’s door, breathing slowly out. She had been committed to survival for so many years. That had meant doing nothing to jeopardize her marriage, and it had meant acting as though she was grateful for the Malfoys’ support, and it had meant not calling attention to herself or her children. One of the things she was proudest of was the disdain in Lucius Malfoy’s eyes whenever he spoke to her through the Floo or visited the house.

But she had started thinking otherwise long ago. It was simply that she had never seen a way in which she could act without getting herself killed, and she had too many people depending on her to do that.

But now, now that they knew more about the potion and the costs to everyone, including themselves, of the children born from it…

Molly’s eyes snapped open, and she walked carefully back down the stairs. Arthur would be occupied with Evangeline for a good hour, she judged. Time enough to get a Patronus messenger about his and Lucius’s latest conversation off to Professor Riddle.

*

“How much Potions talent do you see among them?”

“More than I expected,” Jonah Enfield said, accepting a glass of wine from Tom with a nod. He dumped it down his throat and settled back with a sigh into the chair in front of the fire. “It’s always more nerve-wracking than I remember, darting around the room to make sure one of them doesn’t explode it.”

“Or eat holes in the wall, or release a hostile entity?”

“That, too. But I can tell you that you were right about the Potter boy. The base in the cauldron reacted to his offensive magic. That’s the first time in a decade that I’ve had something as hostile and aware as that form in a first-year’s cauldron.”

Tom nodded and sat down in the chair across from Jonah. While the lesson to see what first-years made of a seemingly inert base and random Potions ingredients was one of Jonah’s own design, it was one that Tom was always interested in hearing more about, since it revealed a lot about the first-years’ critical thinking and brewing talents.

“The Granger girl formed a poison that would have done for a dozen full-grown people,” Jonah added, with another sip.

“Really? I hadn’t thought that she was particularly talented in that kind of magic.”

“I haven’t let them brew poisons up until this point,” Jonah pointed out with a grin. “It’s poisons that will be her area, much more than traditional potions.”

“How did she react to that?”

“She seemed at least mildly horrified that it was a poison. But she’ll probably get used to it over time. She has a streak of ruthless practicality. She’ll realize that you can’t always fight your enemies wand to wand in the broad daylight.”

Tom nodded. That was the same sense he had of Hermione, but it was pleasing to know that another professor besides Lavinia shared it. And Lavinia tended to mark out things in students’ minds, because of teaching Legilimency, that might not ever express themselves outwardly.

“Anything else that you can tell me?”

Jonah finished his wine and put it down on the table next to the fire, wrapping his fingers around his knee. “Justin Finch-Fletchley created a particularly malignant version of the Calming Draught. I don’t know that it would be useful until we could make it less explosive, but he’s worth keeping an eye on…”

*

“Ready?”

Sirius grinned at Remus from beneath the hood of the concealing cloak that Riddle the Stuffy had insisted they wear. “I was born ready.”

“Of course you were,” Remus said, and gave him that gleaming smile that went so well with the more golden eyes he’d acquired in the last few years. Then he stepped out of the bushes that had been concealing them.

Sirius followed with a will. They were on the edge of the main Yaxley property, a large pureblood house surrounded by tracts of woodland and swamp. The Yaxleys, fervent supporters of Lucius Malfoy’s regime, raised magical creatures for the table and the hunt. Riddle had been a little concerned that some of those creatures would attempt to prevent Sirius and Remus from reaching the wards, if only to eat them.

Remus had looked at Riddle and then explained, calmly, what would happen when those creatures smelled a werewolf. Riddle had looked flummoxed in a way that Sirius immediately decided would be good for him and had resolved to put on his face more often.

“Ready to go through the wards?” Sirius took one of Riddle’s weapons that he wanted tested from the pouch on his belt. It looked like nothing so much as a half-size crystal ball used in Divination, except a deep, dark blue color that swirled like mist under the surface.

“Like you,” Remus said softly as he dropped the cloak that was the only clothing he was wearing right now, for ease of transformation, “I was born for this.”

Which wasn’t quite what Sirius had said before, but Remus was already changing, the gleaming silvery grey wolf bursting out of him. Remus threw his head back with a howl that provoked a few terrified brays from somewhere in the dim forest around them, and charged the Yaxleys’ wards.

He hit them full-speed, and the yellow fire of them ignited around his fur. Sirius winced despite himself. Remus had told him what embracing his wolf had done for him, besides the obvious, but—

The wards hiccoughed and died. The night was suddenly a lot darker in front of them, and Remus tore through it like a shadow, straight for the house.

Sirius ran behind Remus, fighting off the temptation to giggle hysterically. That was one reason so many purebloods had trembled in the wake of Remus’s threat to return and bite their children instead of simply dismissing him or thinking they could hide behind wards. An ordinary werewolf might be able to bring down wards by sheer brutal strength and the full moon rage that would make them ignore any pain in pursuit of prey.

A werewolf wizard fully in control of himself and his change went through most of them as if they didn’t exist. He was inimical to everything the purebloods who had created those wards had woven into them, including their pride in only using wand magic, their contempt for magical creatures, and their desire to keep themselves safe. Remus wanted to kill people far more than he wanted to keep anyone safe.

And he would get to kill some people, although not as many as he doubtless wanted to. Riddle had asked Sirius to deploy the orb, his experimental weapon, after all.

Sirius ran behind Remus, hearing the terrified cries from inside the house. Lights were popping up all over, dim ones, as people fumbled for their wands and lit Lumos Charms. Remus howled again, and the front door opened, their first opponent coming out. Sirius couldn’t see much in the dim light, but had the impression, from her height, that it was probably Crystal Yaxley, tallest woman in and leader of the family.

Remus went airborne between one stride and the next, hurtling at her with a long, trailing snarl. By the time Sirius reached the doorstep, less than half a minute later, Yaxley was down and more than half her body simply gone. She didn’t have a head anymore, or her throat. Remus had bounded over her and into the house, which exploded with more screams.

Sirius came in behind him and caught a Stunner on a shield, then began silently counting in his head. Riddle had told Remus that two minutes was his limit. Neither Sirius nor Remus had been happy about that, but Sirius had to admit that Riddle’s plan with the orb was intriguing enough to hold them back.

And despite the threat he had made, Remus didn’t really want to kill or infect the Yaxley children, the ones who would be old enough to be home from Hogwarts. Which meant something had to happen.

Sirius ended up removing one Yaxley’s wand arm himself as he waited, but the minute he hit the 120-count mark in his head, he yelled, “Moony!” as loudly as he could. Everyone in front of him flinched back.

Remus came soaring down the stairs, his fur black in the faint wandlight from all the blood that covered it. He paused beside Sirius, half-bowing, and Sirius flung his leg over Remus’s back as he lifted the orb. Riding a werewolf would be the only way to get out of range in time once the orb began its work.

“Bye, fuckers,” Sirius said with a grin, and threw the orb as hard as he could at the nearest Yaxley, who looked like he might be twenty or so. The boy flinched back, and the shield he’d been lifting in front of himself hardened as he pushed more magic into it.

Exactly what Sirius had hoped would happen. The orb shattered against the shield and began to pump the mist through the house.

Remus ran.

Sirius nearly got left behind because he only had one leg over Remus’s back when he should have been gripping with both, but hey, riding a werewolf sidesaddle was a new experience, too. He held his breath as they cleared the doorstep and traveled across the garden faster than he would ever have thought possible. A breathless whoop worked its way up his throat once he was sure he could make it.

Remus leaped through the place where the wards had been and shook himself. Sirius slid to the ground and ignored the blood that covered him. “That was fucking brilliant,” he said. “We need to do that again.”

Remus snorted at him, more expressive as a wolf than he ever was as a human, and turned back with a little shudder and clang of bone. He reached for the cloak, listening. There were no screams behind them now.

“You think it worked the way Riddle said it would?” he asked.

Sirius stretched his arms over his head, grinning. “I think that we’ll find out tomorrow.”

Riddle had estimated that was how long the mist inside the orb would take to act. It would possess and twist the mind of every Yaxley still alive. They would find one of their own to blame for the deaths, and dump that one on the tender mercy of the Ministry, who would either get them Kissed or send them to Azkaban. Riddle was hoping for the latter, Sirius knew, so that he could extend a hand to some of Azkaban’s prisoners. But even if that particular person was Kissed, it meant the death of an enemy. And their minds wouldn’t provide anything except memories consistent with the accusations, Riddle’s weapon changing and adapting to the circumstances.

The other Yaxleys would carry on as usual, or seemingly as usual, not knowing they were essentially sleeping weapons that Riddle could awaken at any time, unleashing them on Fortius’s enemies at convenient moments. And in the meantime, he could reach out to their minds and perceive the world through their senses whenever he wanted.

Riddle was, Sirius could admit, a really Merlin-be-damned scary bastard.

But Sirius was starting to think that he no longer cared, as long as they got to kill some people.

Eleven years ago, he would have hesitated to murder people. But Lily and James’s deaths and harvesting and ten years of house arrest lay in between then and now.

Kill them all. Use them all.

Sirius glanced to the side, and caught the way Remus’s eyes were gleaming. He grinned, and hoped Riddle would send them out on their next mission soon.