Chapter 17 — Dumbledore Already Knows

The plant on McGonagall’s windowsill offered a clear target with stone beneath it and enough space around the leaves. Those were the reasons I selected it. Unfortunately, I gave considerably less thought to whether being asked for a demonstration included permission to destroy something my teacher had been keeping alive.

‘Sorry,’ I said towards the pot. McGonagall began asking what I intended just as I flicked the talisman from my fingers.

‘Incendio!’ I followed the paper with my eyes as it crossed the office. Fire opened around it, swept through the leaves and vanished after a few seconds, leaving blackened stems above the soil. The curtain remained untouched, but that seemed a poor point to lead with when the professor rose from her chair.

She examined the plant, then the windowsill around it. I stayed where I was, with the uncomfortable knowledge that I had proved my point rather more thoroughly than she had requested. Nothing remained of the prepared piece that I could put back in the pouch.

‘The Fire-Making Spell,’ McGonagall said. She turned from the pot with an expression which discouraged celebration. ‘Next time, Mr Mercer, you will establish what may be used as a target before making that decision.’

I apologised to her properly. The fire had stayed where I meant to direct it, I explained, and the cinnabar version ended quickly. The sap preparation lasted longer, which was why I hadn’t chosen it for an office. Halfway through explaining my restraint, I realised I was describing a larger range of ways to burn her furniture.

‘I can’t cast Incendio directly with the wand,’ I added, returning to the reason she had called me here. ‘But I can prepare that effect. The paper is used up when I release it.’

McGonagall looked at the brush and then at the ruined plant. She had seen both methods now, under conditions where lack of attention couldn’t explain the difference. I waited for her assessment, suddenly much less interested in defending the target I had chosen than in hearing whether this changed what she thought was wrong.

A portrait cleared his throat before she answered. An elderly wizard had joined the shepherdess in a frame opposite the door. I remembered looking at that landscape when I came in; apparently the sheep had acquired another visitor while our attention was on the desk.

‘Minerva, Albus would like you to bring Mr Mercer upstairs,’ the painted man said. McGonagall thanked him, and he walked out through the side of the frame without troubling himself about the wall beyond it.

I looked from the painting to her. ‘How many people have heard about this already?’ I asked. The shepherdess had turned away, offering no help with an answer.

‘Come along, Mr Mercer,’ McGonagall said. She waited while I put my notes away, then led me out of the office. I took one last look at the pot, which remained precisely as ruined as I had left it.

The Headmaster’s entrance was guarded by a stone gargoyle. McGonagall gave it the password, ‘Sherbet lemon,’ and it moved aside to reveal a spiral staircase. After several days of climbing to Gryffindor Tower, I was particularly pleased to discover that these stairs would do some of the work themselves.

‘Does he always choose sweets?’ I asked as we rose. It seemed an unusually cheerful way to control access to the person responsible for the whole school.

‘His choice of password is his own affair,’ McGonagall replied. I kept my thoughts about how many sweets a determined visitor could name to myself. Being escorted to one office after damaging another seemed a bad time to discuss weaknesses in the arrangements.

The room above was circular and crowded with things I wanted to examine. Silver instruments clicked on slender tables, portraits followed us with their eyes and books filled the shelves beneath them. The Sorting Hat rested beside a glass case containing a sword. I kept my hands close to the pouch, where they were less likely to create a second apology.

Dumbledore greeted us from near his desk. When McGonagall began to explain, he said several professors had already spoken to him about my practical work. His description of the problem sounded much kinder than watching me spend a lesson failing to alter a matchstick. I suspected the reports had still been fairly discouraging.

‘May I see one of the talismans?’ he asked. His attention moved towards the pouch. ‘Perhaps a demonstration which leaves the plants in better condition than before.’

‘You heard about that too?’ I asked. One of the portraits behind him stirred, which suggested the speed of the news had little to do with how long it took to climb the staircase.

Dumbledore said the castle offered very few places beyond the reach of an interested portrait. He indicated a dry plant pot on a side table, settling the question of a target before I could repeat my mistake. I chose the small water exercise I had prepared after Charms, checked my position and threw the piece with its spoken formula.

A brief stream splashed into the soil. The paper was spent, the water stopped and the pot remained intact. It was a modest effect beside the fire downstairs, but the absence of further destruction gave me a much better chance of hearing what the demonstration meant.

‘Thank you,’ Dumbledore said. He offered us chairs and a bowl of sweets. I took the chair, while McGonagall settled nearby with her attention still on the damp soil.

I had spent the walk wondering how to ask the question. Once I was sitting opposite him, with two different professors having seen what I could do, there seemed little point in disguising it. ‘Am I a Squib?’ I asked, keeping my hands still in my lap.

‘No,’ he said. The answer came without the pause I had been bracing for. ‘You have just demonstrated magic, Mr Mercer. The difficulty is in understanding how you are directing it.’

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I let out a breath slowly. Hermione had made much the same objection to the idea, but she was another first-year trying to make sense of a problem from books. Hearing it from the Headmaster removed a worry I hadn’t enjoyed admitting even to myself. I could concentrate on what to do next without imagining the school deciding there was nothing to teach me.

Dumbledore had spoken to the Sorting Hat too. It had noticed something unusual about my magic, he explained, although its ability to recognise that didn’t supply a complete account of the cause. I remembered the voice under the brim and the care it had taken over placing me. Apparently I hadn’t become any easier to explain since leaving the stool.

‘May I examine your wand?’ he asked. I handed over the brush and watched him turn it gently between his fingers, studying the wood and the fibrous tip without attempting to cast anything.

I gave him the details Ollivander had supplied: withered wood, ten and a quarter inches, no conventional core, a piece from his grandfather’s time. Dumbledore listened, then returned it to me. He was not a wandmaker, he said. Ollivander might eventually be able to tell me more about why it had responded when the other wands had failed.

‘So you don’t know why I can’t use it normally either,’ I said. I put it away, trying not to let relief about staying at school become disappointment with the person who had provided it.

‘Not yet,’ Dumbledore replied. ‘That is a reason to investigate, rather than to decide there must be something wrong with you.’

He asked what I knew about magic before the modern wand became widespread. I described what I had read in Dad’s notes about longer preparations, rituals and movements which took time to perform. It was difficult to imagine relying on some of those methods while someone impatient tried to hit you. That part of the problem had interested me well before I came here.

McGonagall listened more closely as Dumbledore explained that wands had made directing magic faster and more consistent. They had not erased every other way of doing it. Old practices had used different tools or arrangements, and the surviving accounts didn’t always tell us enough to reproduce them.

‘Do you think my family used one of those methods?’ I asked. I leaned forward before remembering how often an interesting possibility had sent me back to the beginning of an experiment.

‘It is possible,’ he said. ‘Your family history contains gaps I cannot presently fill. The financial records are rather easier to follow than some of the things we would wish to know.’

That sounded familiar enough to be frustrating. I had inherited money with much clearer instructions than the paper which might explain my magic. Dumbledore cautioned me against fitting all the unanswered questions together simply because they belonged to the same family. The wand, the research and my response to Runebark might be connected; none of us had proved the connection.

I wanted a name for what I was, preferably followed by a book which told me how to manage it. Instead I had several possibilities and a professor willing to admit where his knowledge ended. It wasn’t as satisfying, but I had spent too much time testing confident guesses to mistake certainty of tone for a useful result.

‘What am I supposed to do in lessons?’ I asked. Whatever had happened centuries ago, tomorrow’s classes were going to present the same difficulty as today’s.

Dumbledore asked whether I could spare enough prepared pieces for the practical work. I told him I could manage some exercises, but not attempt everything as often as the others. Each successful release consumed paper, and I couldn’t replace it by tearing a fresh sheet from an ordinary notebook. The treated supply I had brought was limited.

McGonagall considered that for a moment. My written work could help establish when I was ready to try a practical exercise, she said, so I wasn’t spending material on attempts I didn’t yet understand. Where my method couldn’t perform the lesson, I would still have theory to learn while we looked for an alternative.

‘I will speak to your professors,’ Dumbledore said. ‘Where it can be done safely, you may use the talismans. We shall judge the work you can perform and address the difficulties as they arise.’

I looked at McGonagall, who nodded. There would still be failed attempts, awkward explanations and a stack of paper I needed to make last. But I could see a way of attending the next lesson without pretending that enough repetitions would make my wand behave like Harry’s.

I asked whether I could keep investigating the other questions. Dumbledore encouraged me to do so carefully and to bring him problems when I needed help. His willingness didn’t make him certain about the answer, or turn my parents’ notes into a finished set of instructions. It did mean I wasn’t being left to work out everything behind a closed bedroom door.

‘Thank you, Professor,’ I said as I stood. For once, there wasn’t a joke ready to fit after the words. I was grateful enough to let them do the work on their own.

Dumbledore suggested I find my friends, who were probably wondering what had happened. McGonagall escorted me to the stairs, leaving the portraits to discuss whatever they had found interesting. I went down with the same peculiar wand and fewer answers than I had hoped for, but at least I knew what I would tell Harry and Ron first.

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Severus Snape waited until the staircase carried Minerva and the boy out of hearing. Then he stepped from the narrow side chamber beside Dumbledore’s shelves. Through the open doorway he had watched the demonstration, including the familiar way the child had held a strip of treated Runebark between his fingers.

Ken Mercer had held it like that. His own experiments had usually ended with a table full of notes and a growing argument about what had gone wrong. The boy had thrown his preparation across the room and made it do precisely what he intended, which was an improvement Severus found difficult to look at without remembering the work that preceded it.

‘Well?’ Dumbledore asked. He remained beside the desk while Severus inspected the newly watered pot. ‘Does that answer any of your questions?’

‘It adds several,’ Severus said. ‘If you expect an explanation of the child, I have no more to offer than you do.’

Dumbledore reminded him that the material had come from his work with Ken. Severus knew that without being told. There had been hours spent correcting preparations and warning Ken away from tests which enthusiasm did not make sensible. Between them they had learned to stabilise a property of the tree; making a stored spell release usefully had remained beyond them.

‘The treatment was ours,’ he said. ‘The talisman is his. We never solved activation.’

Dumbledore asked whether another wizard could use one. Severus said that had not been tested. It might depend on the boy’s magic, the wand or something they had failed to isolate in the preparation. If Oswald alone could activate the pieces, they would be of little practical use to Severus himself.

‘They appear to be of considerable use to him,’ Dumbledore observed. He glanced at the closed door, then back towards Severus. ‘You could have spoken with him.’

‘He came for help with his lessons,’ Severus said. The answer arrived more quickly than he liked, and he steadied his voice before continuing. ‘There is no reason to make the occasion a discussion of his parents’ acquaintances.’

Dumbledore watched him without replying at once. Severus preferred the silence to any expression of sympathy, although he disliked the impression that both men knew what had been left unsaid. In memory, Ken was still leaning over a stained worktable, and Mary was telling them that she could smell the experiment from the next room.

‘There may be work worth finishing for the person who inherits it,’ Dumbledore said at last. Severus looked again at the pot before turning towards the door.

‘Then let the boy finish it,’ he said. He left without waiting to hear whether Dumbledore considered that an answer.