Chapter 19 — Snape Gives Me the Wrong Homework

The Potions classroom was underground, cold and lined with jars containing specimens I hoped had died before anyone bottled them. Scales and ingredients waited beside the cauldrons, offering the reassuring suggestion that this lesson would involve things I could measure. I was examining our equipment when Harry spread his unfinished Transfiguration work beneath the edge of the desk.

I nudged him as the door opened. He kept writing, trying to finish a line before putting the parchment away. Professor Snape had reached the front of the room by then, and conversations were stopping without him having to request silence. The face matched the fragments I remembered. Unfortunately, they still supplied nothing useful about getting through one of his lessons.

‘Potions requires precision,’ he told us. ‘Incorrect quantities, careless preparation and the wrong temperature will not become less dangerous because you meant well.’

I sat straighter. Those were difficulties I had already met in my own work, and hearing someone promise to explain them justified some of my anticipation. Beside me, Harry added another word to his homework. Snape’s attention settled on the movement before I could nudge him again.

‘Mr Potter,’ he said. Harry’s quill stopped, and the students nearest us began watching with the interest of people grateful to be somewhere else.

Snape asked whether Potions required so little of Harry’s attention that he could afford to spend it on another subject. Harry put the work away and said it didn’t. That should have ended the exchange. Instead, Snape asked him what a bezoar was, while Hermione’s hand went up across the table.

Harry looked blank. I knew the answer from an ingredient reference I had been reading, and an old, unhelpful habit took over before I considered how closely the professor was watching. I whispered about the stone from a goat’s stomach without turning my head.

‘It can counter some poisons,’ Harry finished after repeating the description. Snape’s gaze shifted slightly in my direction, so I looked down at the cauldron as though its empty interior required serious study.

The next question concerned monkshood. Hermione raised her hand higher, while I supplied the connection with wolfsbane as quietly as I could. Harry repeated it. A few people looked impressed, and for a moment I allowed myself to believe that answering two questions had helped us out of the problem rather than further into it.

Snape asked a third, about measuring ingredients before heating began. Harry hesitated again. I had barely started a whispered explanation when the professor said my name, and the amount of attention reaching our desk increased considerably.

‘If you wish to answer for Mr Potter, raise your hand,’ he said. ‘At least then the rest of the class will know whose knowledge they are hearing.’

I told him I had been helping a friend. It sounded less convincing aloud than it had while I was doing it. Hermione lowered her hand, looking annoyed for reasons I couldn’t fairly argue with. She had known the answers and followed the procedure; I had managed to make both facts irrelevant.

Snape deducted five points for Harry’s homework and another five for my assistance. Then he told me to remain after class. Harry went red beside me, while I considered how quickly my ambition to ask intelligent questions had become an appointment I would have preferred to avoid.

Our practical task was a simple boil-treatment draught. It needed preparation, attention to sequence and control of the heat, all without asking my wand to perform anything. I began laying out the ingredients, relieved to have work which might improve the morning. Snape remained close enough to notice how we approached it.

The process interested me despite him. Pieces cut unevenly behaved differently in the cauldron, and changing the flame too late affected what happened after the next ingredient went in. I could follow a mistake from an action to a result. After days of a silent brush-wand, that was almost enjoyable.

‘Something requires your attention, Mr Mercer?’ Snape asked when he found me watching the surface. I decided I might as well use the opportunity before he supplied a less charitable explanation.

‘Does preparation change what an ingredient does, or does the rest of the potion change it?’ I asked. ‘If the same plant behaves differently in two mixtures, how do you know which part is responsible?’

He paused beside the desk. Preparation determined what was extracted, what was destroyed and what remained available to react, he said. The other ingredients then mattered as much as the first. Knowing the name of a substance without knowing its treatment would tell me very little about what I had actually put into the cauldron.

I wrote that down before I could forget the wording. Snape looked at the notes and remarked that it was pleasant to see parchment being used for the subject currently taught. Harry kept his eyes on the scales. I was beginning to understand that receiving a useful answer would not necessarily make the conversation enjoyable for anyone nearby.

For the rest of the lesson, he found reasons to return to us. Harry’s cutting required comment, as did my checking a measurement and then adjusting the flame a little too late. Snape made me explain what that delay had changed. I would have preferred to be corrected without the audience, but having to account for the result made it much harder to ignore the error.

There were other students making mistakes. I noticed because Malfoy had ample time to enjoy ours, while Snape’s visits to our desk seemed remarkably frequent. Ron began answering one of Malfoy’s comments until Hermione interrupted him with an urgent warning to watch his own work. I returned to the cauldron before the argument could give our teacher another reason to stay.

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By the time the draught reached the required colour, I was tired of being observed. Snape examined it and pronounced it acceptable in a tone which offered no reason to celebrate. I had learned things I needed to know, and I still wanted him to go away. Both feelings survived the end of the lesson quite comfortably.

Harry lingered while the others packed their bags. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have detention if you hadn’t tried to help me.’

‘I chose to whisper,’ I reminded him. ‘You didn’t force me to make it obvious. Next time, finish McGonagall’s work before we get here and spare both of us the exercise.’

He offered to stay anyway. Ron said he would too, with an enthusiasm which made me suspect the offer depended on Snape already having left. I caught sight of black robes behind him just as he began expressing a less generous opinion of the professor. A quick pull on his sleeve stopped the sentence before it became expensive.

Snape told Harry and Ron to leave unless they were asking for detentions of their own. Their commitment to sharing mine ended with impressive speed. Harry reappeared in the doorway long enough to promise they would bring me something from Hagrid’s, then vanished before the offer could be examined more closely.

A heavy notebook landed in front of me. Snape told me to copy it, and I opened the cover to find page after page of densely written entries. There were preparation methods, ingredient properties and warnings, with smaller observations squeezed between them. It was considerably more work than the answers I had whispered to Harry.

‘All of it?’ I asked. I lifted the edge of the remaining pages, hoping he might select a section before he replied.

‘You were eager to assist Mr Potter with his work,’ Snape said. ‘Now you have work of your own. You are not to leave it unfinished, and you will not use magic to shorten the task.’

He left before I could develop an argument about how long copying that much would take. I looked at the door, then set out fresh parchment. Whatever I thought of the punishment, discussing it with an empty room wasn’t going to get me to Hagrid’s. I began at the first entry and tried to keep my writing legible.

At first, I cared mainly about how much remained. The classroom grew quiet, my wrist began to ache and the light at the high window changed while I worked through instructions whose ingredients I didn’t recognise. Then I reached a section on cinnabar and slowed enough to read the entry twice.

It described mineral pigments in several preparations, including the effect of grinding and heat. Nothing mentioned Runebark. Even so, I could see questions I had been asking at home hidden inside problems the writer had approached for a different purpose. I turned back a page to check a warning I had copied without understanding why it mattered.

A section on aconite extracts followed. Its discussion of concentration and carriers made me think about Ken’s dark, bitter-smelling preparation, although I couldn’t identify a bottle with a damaged label from a general account in a notebook. What I could recognise was the kind of problem. Changing the liquid changed the result, and the reason might lie in more than the name of the plant.

Farther on, I found dragon-blood tree sap. There were warnings about mixtures which interfered with a wand’s responsiveness and methods of stabilising volatile ingredients after preparation. Each subject offered something I might compare with my own records. The more pages I read, the less I enjoyed treating their relevance as an accident.

These were not instructions for making talismans. I couldn’t copy a recipe onto paper and expect it to solve what the brush would accept. But Ken’s work had depended on prepared substances, and here were explanations of how those substances behaved. Snape knew a great deal about a part of my research which I had been handling with far more confidence than understanding.

That made disliking the detention inconvenient. I still resented sitting in the dungeon while Harry and Ron went to tea, but I no longer wanted simply to reach the last page. When an entry raised a question, I kept another sheet beside the copy to record it. My progress through the assigned work became slower and considerably more useful.

Some preparations required equipment I didn’t have. Others depended on techniques I couldn’t yet perform or calculations I needed to learn how to check. Ken’s records had given me particular results and the attempts behind them. Snape’s notebook showed how much language I was missing when I tried to compare those results with anything outside the original experiment.

I copied until the window went dark and my fingers cramped around the quill. An entry comparing three extracts from one plant needed doing again because my first version had become unreadable. Another warned that increasing concentration could reverse a result instead of strengthening it. I marked both on my question sheet, resisting the urge to turn every useful warning into another plan for the weekend.

Snape had not returned. I put the quill down, flexed my hand and checked the corridor. It was empty. At his office I listened, knocked and waited long enough to hear nothing more helpful than distant movement elsewhere in the castle.

The notebook remained nowhere near copied. Saturday was tomorrow, and our next Potions lesson would not be until the following Friday. There were responsible ways to handle the situation, beginning with trying harder to find the professor. None appealed as much as taking the work somewhere with a comfortable chair and a chance of food.

I gathered my copied pages and tucked the notebook under my arm. If Snape asked, I would have to explain leaving with it. If he didn’t, I intended to keep reading for as long as I could make that omission last. The book was his, however useful I found it; I avoided thinking too carefully about that while making my way out of the dungeon.

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Severus opened his office door after Mercer’s footsteps had faded. The classroom was empty, and the notebook had gone with the boy. He stood in the corridor a moment, considering the abandoned place at the desk before returning his attention to the route towards the stairs.

Ken had approached research with much the same impatience. Give him something irritating enough to argue with and interesting enough to keep him at the table, and the evening would disappear without him noticing. Mary had complained about the hours more than once. Remembering her voice made the quiet outside the classroom seem briefly less complete.

Severus had selected the entries deliberately. They supplied foundations the child lacked, without handing him answers to experiments he needed to understand for himself. Merely copying them would teach him something. Noticing why those particular subjects appeared together might teach him considerably more.

Taking the notebook had been a less elegant response than asking to borrow it. It was also familiar enough that Severus wasn’t surprised. He went back into his office and shut the door, leaving the boy to decide what he would do with the work now that it had followed him out of detention.