Chapter 37 — The Other Side of the Fire

Cold passed through me with the black flames. I emerged on a narrow stair with one hand against the wall, expecting to find my sleeve alight. It was whole, though I checked it twice before looking back at Harry. He stumbled on the next step and pressed his palm against his forehead when I asked about his scar.

The stairs descended into a chamber with stone pillars along its walls. Light from the fire moved across the floor, and a tall mirror stood near the centre. Quirrell was facing it. He looked over his shoulder when my shoe scraped the last step, his wand already in his hand.

I had spent most of the day considering the possibility of finding him here. The sight still made something drop inside my chest. Until now, he had been a name crossing paper or a theory I could argue about at a table. In person, he was much taller than I was, and the only exit behind us was full of fire.

‘Professor,’ I said. Harry reached the floor beside me, keeping his hand near his scar.

Quirrell looked between us. ‘I wondered who was making all that noise,’ he said, without the stammer I had heard in his classroom.

‘So you are helping him.’ Harry’s voice carried through the chamber, making the accusation sound less private than anything we had said upstairs. Quirrell smiled as though he had expected a different greeting.

‘And I thought there might be another accusation against Severus. Has he disappointed you?’ He turned his wand slightly between his fingers. I let my hand hang near my pouch, trying to give the movement as little attention as he gave his own.

‘He was trying to stop you,’ I said. ‘At Halloween. You raised the alarm, everyone went towards the dungeons, and he went the other way.’

‘An irritating man. He did not even wait for the feast to empty.’ Quirrell glanced at the mirror before returning his attention to us. He seemed prepared to continue talking as long as it cost him nothing more important.

Harry drew in a breath. ‘You let the troll out,’ he said. Quirrell agreed with no sign that admitting it troubled him. Snape had chosen that evening to investigate the third-floor corridor, he explained, and Fluffy had taken an interest in his leg.

I moved a little away from Harry. Standing together made us one easy target; separating across the room would leave me unable to help him. I settled for enough space that our elbows no longer touched, while Harry asked about the Quidditch match. His voice changed on the word ‘broom’, and I remembered him hanging beneath mine.

‘You were remarkably difficult to shake off,’ Quirrell told him. ‘Then Severus started his counter-curse.’

I had thought confirmation might feel satisfying. Instead I saw Harry’s feet kicking at empty air and heard Flitwick’s careful explanation of what we might have witnessed. Snape had been helping him. We had sent Hermione to stop the person holding him up.

‘Until his robes caught fire,’ Quirrell continued. ‘He jumped backwards into me. Another moment, perhaps two, and Potter would have fallen. A stupid accident.’

I looked at Harry. If Snape had stepped the other way, Hermione’s attempt to save him could have interrupted the counter-curse while Quirrell continued. I had made the decision with her, then watched the smoke and believed we had chosen well. There was nothing I could say in that chamber which made the mistake smaller.

Quirrell watched us long enough to enjoy the silence. Then he asked how I had eventually worked it out. I told him about Hagrid’s trust in Snape, the threat Harry had overheard and the question I had asked in Charms. It had been enough to consider another explanation, not enough to know what we would find beneath the trapdoor.

‘A fortunate collection of accidents,’ he said. His eyes returned briefly to the mirror.

‘You make a lot of those sound like somebody else’s fault.’ His smile thinned at that, and I was glad to have his attention again. While he answered me, he was not doing whatever he had come here to do. Talking was the only thing we had tried so far that a first-year could plausibly keep up with a teacher.

‘You should have gone to Dumbledore,’ he said. I answered that we had spoken to McGonagall and sent another message. ‘Yet here you are.’

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‘And here you are without the Stone.’ I watched his fingers tighten round the wand. I had not known he had failed to obtain it, but I could see no better explanation for his repeated glances at a mirror while intruders stood behind him. His reaction made the guess look more promising.

‘What brought you down tonight?’ he asked. ‘You cannot have followed me.’

I took the parchment out slowly, using the hand farther from my prepared spells. Harry recognised it at once; Quirrell watched it unfold. I opened only the little section of corridor we had been studying and told him what the Marauder’s Map had shown. There was no reason to offer him every passage I had found, even to keep him talking.

He leaned closer, then laughed. ‘All the precautions in the world, and children find something like that.’

‘You should have paid more attention to the children.’ I folded the map and put it away while he was still considering it. He let me, which frightened me more than an attempt to seize it would have done. He did not seem to regard anything in my hands as a serious obstacle.

Harry whispered that this was the mirror he had told us about. I looked at its tall frame, understanding his interest without having any wish to stand where Quirrell stood. The professor turned towards the glass again and touched it with his free hand.

‘I see myself holding it,’ he murmured. ‘I have the Stone. Why can I not take it?’ His voice had lost some of its composure, and I was not certain the question had been intended for us.

A different voice answered him. ‘Use the boy,’ it said, close enough to make me turn towards the pillars. Nothing moved between them, and no other person stood where I could see. Beside me, Harry had gone very pale.

Quirrell held out his empty hand. ‘Come here, Potter.’ I stepped in front of Harry, and the professor’s expression changed to a sudden, ordinary irritation, as though I had failed to hand in an essay. ‘Move, Mercer.’

I took a shield strip from my pouch as his wand rose. There was time to throw it and shout ‘Protego’, but none to judge the spell coming towards me. Light flattened in front of my face. The impact drove me backwards into Harry, and both of us stumbled before the shield broke with a sharp crack.

It had stopped the spell. It had neither reflected anything at Quirrell nor left protection between us for a second attempt. I caught my balance and drew a breath that hurt where I had collided with Harry. Quirrell lowered his wand slightly, looking almost curious about how I intended to continue.

For weeks, older students had described the man he had been before travelling: clever, well read and keen to find practical experience beyond his books. Those accounts had fitted poorly with the teacher who flinched at noises in his own classroom. Watching him now, I had no difficulty joining the two versions. He could kill us, and I did not need another demonstration to establish the difference between his magic and mine.

I pulled two strips from the pouch. The first left my hand with ‘Incendio’, opening into flame while I threw the second through its wake. I spoke ‘Impello’ before it reached him, hoping the grey-marked preparation would pass close enough while his attention remained on the fire.

Quirrell turned the flames aside with his wand. The second strip slipped beneath their diverted edge and released its pulse near his arm. It struck, making him jerk, but the wand stayed in his hand. For an instant, I thought I had spent both pieces for nothing.

Then he looked at his sleeve and recoiled. There was no fire on it, but he hit the cloth with his free hand, once and then again. His eyes followed something down his forearm that neither Harry nor I could see. The herb had affected him; whether he saw flames, insects or something else, I had no way of knowing.

I used the distraction before he could recognise it. Another strip flew from my hand as I called, ‘Petrificus Totalus!’ His arms snapped down and his body stiffened. He fell backwards, striking the floor hard enough that I winced despite everything. His wand landed close beside his hand.

Harry seized my shoulder. ‘You did it!’ he said. ‘You actually stopped him.’

I could not look away from the wand. My body wanted to sit down, laugh or shake until the room stopped seeming so sharp. None of those things would prevent Quirrell from getting up if the binding failed. I told Harry we needed his wand and started towards him, making myself watch his hands instead of his face.

The professor’s eyes still moved. They followed something above us, then snapped towards me as I approached. I had never used the herb on a person or held a teacher with a Body-Bind. The result on a mouse gave me no reliable measure of how long this would last, particularly against somebody with more magic and experience than either of us.

‘Hermione should be coming back,’ Harry whispered. I added that she should be coming with help. The two of us had reached the end of one idea that had worked, and I was unwilling to test how many more chances Quirrell might give me.

I bent towards the wand. ‘Get up,’ said the second voice, so close that I jerked back before my fingers reached it. Quirrell’s hand moved against the floor.

For a moment, nothing else happened. Then his fingers closed round the wand, his shoulder twisted and he dragged himself upright, using one elbow against the stone. Harry reached for his own wand. Quirrell’s spell knocked it from his hand before he could raise it, sending it skittering away across the floor.

I threw another shield strip between us and shouted the word. The answering blow tore it apart, forcing me to turn my shoulder into the impact. Harry asked how Quirrell had got up, but I could supply no explanation beyond the voice. I caught his sleeve and pulled him towards a pillar, watching the professor follow us with his wand.