Chapter 18 — Ron Volunteers for Testing

Harry spotted me at the entrance to the Great Hall and waved me over. Ron joined in, although I had already started towards them and wasn’t likely to mistake another table for ours. Hermione waited opposite the space they had kept. I sat down, reached for the potatoes and gave them the answer I thought mattered most.

‘I’m not a Squib,’ I said. Hermione put her fork down with the satisfaction of having been right about something she hadn’t enjoyed discussing.

‘The talismans were proof,’ she reminded us. ‘You couldn’t make those work without magic. What did Professor Dumbledore say about the wand?’

I told them he didn’t yet know why I couldn’t use it normally. There were old methods of magic worth investigating, possible connections in my family history and several questions which remained questions despite being discussed in the Headmaster’s office. Harry passed the serving dish without interrupting. I appreciated him more with every spoonful I managed to put on my plate.

‘I can use Runebark in lessons when the professor agrees it’s safe,’ I added. ‘That should make the next practical a little more useful than the last one.’

Ron immediately wanted a demonstration. I told him he could have one after lunch, provided I was allowed to eat it. Hermione began another question, looked at my untouched food and agreed that we could discuss the details somewhere quieter. It was a generous concession from somebody who visibly had quite a lot of details in mind.

Afterwards we found an empty courtyard away from the main paths. I finished describing the two demonstrations while Harry checked one entrance and Hermione looked down the passage at the other. Ron suggested we test the talismans in a duel, and I liked the idea enough to begin considering which prepared pieces would tell us something useful.

‘Absolutely not,’ Hermione said. ‘We haven’t been here a week. You can’t start duelling just because you’ve been allowed to use paper in class.’

Ron protested that we weren’t trying to hurt each other. I agreed, but Hermione looked at the stones under our feet and asked what happened if someone fell. That gave us a more useful problem to solve than arguing over the word duel. We moved towards the grass and worked out what each of us would do before anyone raised a wand.

Hermione would supervise the turns, with Harry watching the casting. Ron and I agreed to use the Leg-Locker Curse, which would give an obvious result without needing fire or a forceful impact. Locking somebody’s legs could still make them fall badly, so we left space and kept the test small. Ron volunteered to receive the first attempt with considerably more enthusiasm than the job required.

I had worked on the curse and a simple Shield Charm during the first few days of lessons. The notes weren’t enough by themselves: inscriptions had failed to settle, and spoiled paper had joined the cost of finding out what I didn’t understand. Eventually I had prepared usable pieces. None of that work had persuaded the brush to cast either spell directly.

‘Oswald first,’ Hermione said when we were in position. ‘Ron, try to avoid it. Don’t cast back until we’ve checked what happens.’

Ron raised his wand and fixed his eyes on the piece between my fingers. I warned him that watching the paper would only tell him part of what was coming. He said he was ready, shifting his feet on the grass as I drew my hand back.

‘Locomotor Mortis!’ I threw the talisman towards him. The effect released while his eyes were still following the paper, and his legs locked before he finished stepping aside. He tipped onto the grass, startled enough to forget the wand still pointing from his hand.

Harry exclaimed at the speed of it, but I was already going to Ron. He rolled onto his back and assured me he was fine, grinning as though being knocked down had confirmed everything he hoped about the experiment. Hermione lifted the curse before he tried to stand. We checked that he hadn’t hurt himself, then looked for the spent paper.

She crouched beside the blackened fibres. ‘It released before it reached him,’ she said. ‘The paper didn’t have to touch him at all.’

‘The throw directs it,’ I explained. ‘I’ve already done the work of preparing the spell. I don’t have to reproduce the whole wand movement when I let it go.’

I asked her to keep the remains with the notes so we could compare them with the shield. For the next turn, Ron would cast and I would defend. Hermione had him repeat the formula first, then made certain we both understood when to begin. Calling this an experiment had given her a reason to organise it, which was useful even when Ron began objecting to the instructions.

I moved two prepared pieces into my throwing hand. Hermione noticed, but Ron was concentrating on his wand. He spoke the Leg-Locker incantation and sent the curse towards me. I released the first talisman immediately, saying, ‘Protego!’ as the paper left my fingers.

The shield caught his spell and broke its approach. I sent the second piece after it with a separate ‘Locomotor Mortis!’ while the brief defence faded. Ron had barely finished his own movement when his legs locked again. He landed on the grass with an expression which made his opinion clear before he spoke.

‘That’s cheating,’ he announced. Harry was still watching my hand, trying to follow how close together the two releases had been.

I went to help Ron while Hermione cancelled the curse. ‘Against somebody attacking for real, I’d rather have the second piece ready,’ I said. ‘You don’t get extra time for being polite.’

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Hermione reminded me that this had been a test with agreed turns. I conceded the point; surprising her hadn’t been part of what we needed to measure. Ron wanted to know whether I could always cast two spells together, so I explained that he had seen two releases in quick succession. I had prepared the spells separately and spent both pieces to do it.

That was the advantage and the limit. If I filled the pouch with fire talismans and discovered I needed something else, the preparation wouldn’t become more helpful merely because I had done a lot of it. Hermione looked at the remaining pieces with renewed interest. What I chose to carry determined what I could attempt.

Ron asked for one to try. I offered him an inspection and a test, without promising it would work for anybody else. The water exercise seemed a better choice than another curse, so I took out an intact piece like the one I had used upstairs. Hermione received it first and examined both the fibre and the inscription before asking how to release it.

I showed the motion and supplied the formula. She copied them, sending the talisman a short distance across the courtyard, where it dropped without producing anything. Ron retrieved the same piece and announced that the difficulty must be technique. His attempt carried it slightly farther, with precisely the same lack of water.

‘A considerable improvement,’ Hermione said. Ron inspected his hand as though it might contain evidence of what had gone wrong.

Harry asked to try before they could settle the argument. He picked up the piece and threw it flat and straight, using the formula as I had shown them. It travelled much better than either previous attempt, then landed on the stones. I looked from the paper to him, recognising a movement practised more than once that afternoon.

‘Playing cards,’ he explained when I asked. ‘There wasn’t much else to do sometimes at the Dursleys’. I got quite good at throwing them.’

His demonstration made it harder to blame the first two failures on clumsiness. It didn’t rule out a bad preparation, though, so I retrieved the same talisman and inspected it for damage. The fibres looked intact. I aimed towards an empty flowerpot, threw with the spoken formula and watched water splash into the soil as the paper blackened and broke apart.

We stood looking at the pot. That piece had survived three failed attempts by other people and released when I used it. It was better evidence than comparing different inscriptions, but it still didn’t tell us what part of the difference mattered.

‘It only worked for you,’ Hermione said. She looked towards the remains, then back at the brush in my pouch. ‘We’ll have to work out why.’

I agreed that it belonged in the notes. She wanted to help investigate, and I was happy to have someone willing to look carefully at a failure without insisting it ought to behave like an ordinary wand. We still had an afternoon lesson to reach, however. Harry and Ron made certain we left enough time to find McGonagall’s classroom without another explanation at the door.

Using prepared magic there changed what I could show her. The practical work still needed correction, and Hermione understood the transformations more quickly than I did, but at last there was a result for the professor to examine. She could point to a mistake in the work instead of watching me repeat an action which produced nothing at all.

When I reached for another piece, McGonagall stopped me. She turned my notes towards her and indicated the step I had rushed. Dean, nearby, could repeat his attempt with the same wand; mine would consume more of the treated material. I needed to understand the correction before spending it.

I looked at Dean’s partly altered object, then returned the unused talisman to the pouch. ‘His method is cheaper,’ I admitted. McGonagall told me to make the next attempt count, and I took up my quill to work through the step she had marked.

By dinner, the demonstration had travelled well beyond our classroom. Oliver Wood wanted to know about the throw, particularly whether I could change its direction after releasing the piece. I couldn’t. Once it left my hand, I had to rely on where I had aimed, a limitation which interested him more than the unusual material itself.

Cedric Diggory asked what the paper actually stored. Was it a complete spell, or magic given a particular shape during inscription? I didn’t have an answer precise enough to satisfy either of us. He suggested the difference might help explain why other people couldn’t use my preparations, and I wrote down the question before the next visitor distracted me.

Some people wanted explanations; others wanted prices. A third-year offered to buy several pieces, then treated my refusal as an invitation to raise his offer. I told him they weren’t for sale. He tried another figure, apparently certain we could find the point where that stopped being true.

‘The material is limited, and it belongs to work my father left me,’ I explained. ‘Besides, nobody else has managed to activate a piece. You’d be paying rather a lot for something to keep your place in a book.’

That finally discouraged him. Harry had been struggling not to laugh into his drink, while Ron looked torn between amusement and disappointment at the money leaving our table. He said I could have accepted it. I asked whether he wanted to be here when the buyer returned with three expensive pieces of paper and no spells.

Ron considered that and decided the refund conversation might be less enjoyable. I returned to dinner, glad the pouch still contained my own limited supply instead of somebody else’s purchase. The questions from Wood and Cedric remained beside my plate. Those seemed much more likely to be useful by the end of the week.

Neville found us on the way out with a note Hedwig had delivered for Harry. It was from Hagrid, inviting him to tea the following afternoon and extending the invitation to the rest of us. Harry asked if we wanted to come. Ron checked the next day’s lessons in his head and said the afternoon was free, after a double period of Potions with Slytherin.

His tone made Harry ask what was wrong with Potions. Ron explained that Professor Snape was Head of Slytherin and, according to Fred, considerably more forgiving towards his own House than ours. When Harry described the black-haired man from the feast, Ron confirmed that he had identified the right professor.

The name stirred a scrap of recognition in my old memories. Severus Snape belonged to the face I had seen in pictures and brief pieces of film, but remembering that he mattered didn’t tell me why. I couldn’t build an opinion of the man from fragments which supplied so little useful detail.

His subject interested me much more. The notes I had inherited were full of preparations I could use without properly understanding how their ingredients behaved. Here was somebody whose job involved precisely that knowledge. Ron was still describing reasons to dread the classroom when I said I was looking forward to it.

‘Did you hear any of that?’ he asked. Harry glanced between us, evidently unsure whether I had misunderstood the warning or simply decided it didn’t apply to me.

‘I heard that he knows Potions,’ I said. ‘That’s the part I’m interested in.’

Ron shook his head and started towards the common room. I followed, thinking about what I might ask the next morning. With luck, the answers would justify whatever else we had to endure to get them.