Chapter 57 — The Wrong Shape

By Monday, several people had decided that the attack was a prank. They usually explained this in well-lit rooms with plenty of company. The corridors after dinner had become quieter, and even those who thought Filch deserved a fright lowered their voices when Mrs. Norris was mentioned. Calling something harmless did not seem to make anybody eager to meet it alone.

McGonagall began Transfiguration without inviting theories about the corridor. Animals waited on the desks, with clean goblets on the front table and instructions already on the board. Leo sat beside my place, studying a school bird as though the perch had brought him an opportunity beyond education. I moved him farther away before we could discover what he intended.

We had been working towards the exercise in earlier lessons. Elementary transformations through talismans were familiar to me; changing a living bird into a drinking glass and returning it unharmed was another matter. McGonagall demonstrated both parts. The bird became a clear goblet, then reappeared at the reversal and shook itself before settling on its perch.

‘The complete form,’ she said. ‘Do not think only about the cup and forget what you intend to do with the feet, wings or tail.’ She warned us that remaining feathers did not become decoration because we were pleased with the rest. Ron looked down at Scabbers, who had grown thinner and, he said, had not been eating properly. McGonagall had checked the animals, but I was still glad she would restore them afterwards.

I laid out the inscription prepared from our exercise notes. Simpler targets had helped me understand its structure. Leo was larger and inconveniently alive, making the distance between theory and practice feel wider than it had on the page. When McGonagall told me to begin, I checked the strokes once more before charging the strip.

‘Vera Verto!’ I threw it towards the perch. A goblet stood where Leo had been, most of its shape clear enough to make me feel relieved. Then the fringe round the foot moved. Small feathers remained at the base, providing an exact demonstration of the warning I had just heard.

McGonagall came beside me and pointed them out. I had retained the idea of the bird’s feet while changing the rest, she explained, then restored Leo before I attempted anything else. He blinked and settled on the perch. I checked that he was steady, then returned to the line she had indicated rather than accepting most of a goblet as a successful transformation.

The next preparation took longer. I worked towards a complete form instead of picturing the parts separately, then charged, threw and spoke again. This time the goblet was clear from rim to foot. McGonagall examined it, turned it gently and called the result very good before returning my owl to his proper shape.

Leo stretched a wing and attended to his feathers. I recorded both attempts while the difference remained clear, with two spent preparations and an owl who appeared more interested in grooming than in my improvement. McGonagall moved to Ron next. His damaged wand stayed on the desk beneath its untidy wrapping of Spellotape.

Harry handed him his own wand, and McGonagall checked Ron’s grip before allowing him to cast. The words were clear. Scabbers became a goblet with a grey coat and a tail, drawing laughter from the nearest desks. Ron’s ears reddened while he looked at the result, but the professor spoke before he could begin blaming either wand.

‘The movement was correct,’ she said. ‘You lost part of the intended form.’ A borrowed wand could make the task more difficult, she added, but practice could improve it. She reversed the transformation and asked him to describe the whole shape before trying again. His broken wand remained where he had left it; the tape had not become a repair merely because borrowing was tiresome.

Near the end of the lesson, Hermione raised her hand and asked about the Chamber of Secrets. The room went quiet. McGonagall set down the parchment she was holding, looking at us for a moment before answering. There was a legend, she said, and we must distinguish it from knowing who was responsible for Saturday’s attack.

She described the four founders establishing Hogwarts more than a thousand years earlier. We knew their names, but the disagreement which divided them was less comfortable to hear in the classroom. Salazar Slytherin had wanted to exclude children born to Muggle families. The others had refused, and in time he had left the school.

‘According to the legend, he built a hidden chamber within the castle,’ McGonagall said. ‘He sealed it so that only his heir could open it.’ I asked what opening it was supposed to achieve. She explained that it would release something left inside to rid the school of those Slytherin considered unworthy to study magic.

‘Muggle-born students,’ Hermione said. Her fingers tightened round the quill. McGonagall confirmed it, and I looked beyond her at the other desks. Some students lowered their eyes; others watched the professor as though waiting for the explanation to become less personal. The writing on the wall had acquired a more precise target than anybody could comfortably dismiss as a joke.

I asked what was inside. A monster, McGonagall replied, if the story was to be believed, but accounts did not describe its nature consistently. Many searches had failed to locate the chamber. A legend surviving for centuries did not make every detail attached to it reliable, she warned, and it was dangerous to select whichever version best suited an accusation.

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Nor did being sorted into a house make a child responsible for the founder’s beliefs. We were to bring information about the attack to a teacher and refrain from accusing one another. She allowed the instruction to settle before returning us to the end of the lesson. I packed the brush while Leo watched, apparently finding less cause for concern in the discussion than the people around him.

We went to the bathroom afterwards. Myrtle was absent when we arrived, though I had learnt that this did not promise an uninterrupted afternoon. Hermione sat beside the boxes and opened her notebook. Ron immediately announced that Malfoy knew something, with the confidence of somebody whose preferred suspect had just acquired a suitable legend.

‘He wanted people to think he did,’ I said. Ron reminded me of the threat, and I told him I had reported it. That still did not show whether Malfoy had known what happened before reading the wall. Harry leaned against a basin and suggested that his family might know more of the story than we did. I thought that was a better question than whether disliking him made him the heir.

Ron had reasons ready, beginning with the family and ending with Malfoy’s expression in the corridor. I understood the suspicion without being able to turn it into proof. Being unpleasant did not make him capable of opening the chamber. Being frightened would not prove he could not do it either, however tempting it was to remember the forest and dismiss him on that basis.

‘Somebody in Slytherin, then,’ Ron said. I asked why a person’s ancestry had to match their school tie. Ron came from an old magical family and was sitting with us. He considered that without appearing pleased by it, while Hermione kept the page open rather than writing a name at the top as though the discussion were finished.

The serpent on Slytherin’s crest brought an image to the edge of an older memory. A very large snake belonged somewhere among the fragments of things I had once heard about Harry’s world. I could not attach it confidently to this chamber or this year. Treating it as an answer would be a way to give uncertainty a much more impressive voice.

I suggested looking at creatures, including large snakes. Slytherin’s choice of a serpent gave us a place to begin, even if it meant nothing about what he had kept. Hermione added methods of petrification to the notes. Harry agreed that we should look, then asked how we intended to question Malfoy when he would refuse to tell us anything.

‘He might tell somebody he trusts,’ Hermione said. Ron offered Crabbe and Goyle as possibilities, then frowned when nobody volunteered to persuade either of them. I asked whom she expected to do the questioning. She closed the notebook and told us to come to the library, with the expression she wore when she wanted a book to supply the next part of an argument.

The first volume described Polyjuice Potion. Correctly brewed, it could temporarily give someone another person’s appearance. I read the passage again and understood why Hermione had mentioned trust. Malfoy would recognise us if we asked him directly; he might speak differently to somebody he believed was already on his side.

The summary was not enough to brew it. The full recipe required a book in the Restricted Section, and Hermione said she knew whom to ask for permission. I accompanied her to Lockhart later that day. She asked whether the volume would help her understand advanced magic mentioned in his accounts, and he appeared delighted to have been consulted.

His attention settled on the signature more readily than on the title. Madam Pince examined both before fetching Moste Potente Potions. She made her expectations about its return exceptionally clear. I carried it carefully to the table, where the recipe proved much less inviting than the description which had made the idea sound so straightforward.

A sample from the intended person was needed, and the potion was meant for transformations between people. Hermione marked the warning about using anything from an animal, then went through the stages twice. Her expression changed as she read. I waited until she reached the end before asking whether she could manage it.

‘I can try,’ she said. ‘It’s much harder than anything I’ve made before.’ When I asked how long, she explained that it required at least a month from the beginning, possibly longer if something went wrong. Some preparations took weeks. Heating everything more fiercely would not persuade those stages to finish sooner, however urgently we wanted an answer.

Harry sat back at the delay. I examined the ingredients, recognising some and finding others which would need care to obtain and identify. Being able to pay did not mean every supplier had them ready for delivery that afternoon. I offered to arrange the materials, provided we checked what arrived before beginning and continued looking for information while the potion brewed.

Hermione reminded us that the plan broke a considerable number of rules. Ron stared at her and pointed out whose idea it was. She replied that suggesting something did not make the rules disappear. I looked down at the recipe, considering the difference between agreeing to a difficult brew and pretending that difficulty was the only problem with using it.

Dumbledore knew about the voice. McGonagall knew about Malfoy’s threat, and nothing prevented us from giving them further facts without waiting for a potion. What we wanted was information Malfoy would not choose to tell us. Getting it this way meant impersonating other students, a choice we could not excuse simply by saying we were worried.

‘I understand what we’re choosing,’ I said. ‘And we don’t assume everything he says is true. He can boast to Crabbe as easily as he boasts to us.’ Harry nodded, followed more slowly by Ron. Hermione kept the recipe open, leaving the warnings visible beside the preparation stages as we settled the work between us.

The orders went through in parts. Hagrid agreed to collect the items I asked him to find, while Leo carried a separate request to the supplier in Diagon Alley. Availability accounted for some of the division; keeping the full project to ourselves accounted for the rest. I did not pretend either reason removed our responsibility to inspect what we received.

I included a self-stirring cauldron. Ron welcomed the purchase until Hermione explained that it would stir at the chosen rate, not decide when to add ingredients or correct the heat. Somebody still had to attend to the potion and keep the record. Buying movement had not bought judgement, though I expected Ron to appreciate it whenever stirring became his job.

When the materials arrived, we checked them and arranged the work in the bathroom. Myrtle came and went without promising to keep the room free for us. An interruption would not pause the recipe’s requirements. Hermione wrote the starting date on a new page, and I looked from the calendar to the first stage, aware of how long an answer could take when we had to make it ourselves.