Roman Holiday

Chapter Forty-Six

“Any luck?” Hermione asked, looking up from the final draft of her Arithmancy term paper. If proofreading text was tedious, she thought, setting down her quill and stretching, proofreading formulas ranked right up there with Professor Binns’ version of the Goblin Rebellions.

She didn’t know who had said it, but it was true.

Sometimes, presentation was everything.

Draco, shooting her a disconsolate look from behind his cauldron in the laboratory corner, tossed aside his wand. “No,” he said, coming over and flopping into the armchair opposite her. “And that was our last hope, too.”

He pushed sweaty blond hair back from his forehead, which had gone slightly pink and blotchy from heat. “We’ve now officially tried every insect with magical properties that the Potions lab stocks. Plus all of the more likely candidates I found in Hogsmeade, and a couple of mysterious bugs I found in the greenhouses, just before first frost.” The hair fell back across his forehead; he blew it up again impatiently and frowned in Hermione’s direction. “Nothing works at all,” he said. “Except the lacewings. But then, you already knew that.”

Hermione grimaced. It was the first Saturday in December - the month of November had passed in a frighteningly fast blur of cold nights and Quidditch matches, and her complicated love life (though still contemplated at length, late on certain nights when sleep eluded her) had necessarily taken a back seat to the two gnawing problems presently set before them.

First of all, as Draco had just pointed out so succinctly, they’d made no progress at all with the Protection Potion, in spite of Draco’s near-daily experiments and Hermione’s reams of carefully-catalogued, much-pored-over notes. Clearly - as they were learning to their chagrin - there was an excellent reason why no one had developed a better Armoring Fluid during its scores of years in the public lexicon, and it was this:

Nothing else worked.

The lacewings, flawed as they were, were the only possible option; in the month since Halloween night, they’d made more than twenty-five batches of the Protection Potion, and none of their variations on the original formula, however viable they looked on paper, offered even token resistance against either blade or hex. They’d mangled oranges in piles, to the point that neither of them could even stand the smell any longer, and nearly run themselves out of Illuminata in the process - luckily, there was commercially-prepared concentrate of lemon balm on hand in the Potions stockroom, and Fawkes had molted right on schedule this month.

Snape’s classroom smelled like lemons again - that was the good news. The bad news was that the potion wouldn’t be finished until well into the Christmas holidays. And now they’d run themselves out of new Armoring options, which meant that the whole exercise might be moot if they didn’t come up with another idea soon.

Hermione glared in the cauldron’s direction. “There has to be something else,” she said, “that no one’s tried before.” Draco shrugged.

“Can’t think of what it might be,” he said, fanning the notes out in front of him on the low table. “I mean, we did all the logical stuff first - we tried every single thing listed in Snape’s Potions Index that’s supposed to have the same properties as lacewings.”

He picked up a sheet of parchment, studied it briefly, then dropped it back on the table with a sigh. “For the last two weeks, I’ve been grasping at straws,” he said heavily. “I didn’t tell you this, but I even went down to Filch’s office and asked him to find me some cockroaches.” He laughed. “You can imagine what he had to say about that.”

Hermione snorted. “Cockroaches? Why?”

“Well,” Draco said reasonably, “they do seem to be pretty indestructible, don’t they? I thought it was worth a shot.”

Hermione pushed her Arithmancy paper aside. “So there must be some element in the lacewings,” she said thoughtfully, “that’s unique just to them. Some chemical element.” She tapped her quill emphatically against the arm of her chair. “If we could figure out what it is,” she mused - “isolate it, maybe even concentrate it …”

Draco looked blank. “Muggle-speak,” he said apologetically. “All Greek to me. Haven’t the foggiest, sorry.”

Hermione head came abruptly up from the stack of notes. “Muggle-speak,” she repeated slowly, then suddenly threw her quill across the room, let out a jubilant whoop, and jumped to her feet. “Omigod, that’s it. That’s it!”

“That’s what?”

She grabbed him by the hands and hoisted him out of his chair. “Come on,” she said, heading for the door as if the castle were on fire. “We’re going to the owlery.”

“What for?”

She was already shrugging into her cloak. “Note home,” she said. “I’ve just decided that I want a chemistry set for Christmas.”

**

The note was duly sent, received, and replied-to; Hermione’s parents, who Once Upon A Time, in the Days Before Student Loan And Mortgage Payments, had been science nerds themselves, were more than happy to oblige any bent their brilliant-but-capricious daughter might wish to explore in the direction of logic. Experiments would re-commence on Christmas morning, and this time, Hermione thought, they just might have something.

All those chemi-wizards who had gone before them … they might have exhausted every possibility known to the magical world, in their attempted revamps of the Armoring Fluid. But she sincerely doubted that they’d gone in for Muggle techniques.

Time would tell, wouldn’t it?

Unfortunately, time was the one thing they might not have - and even if their new round of experiments worked, the results might be too late.

Because the Slytherins were most definitely up to something.

**

It had become apparent weeks ago that a plot was afoot - one by one, morning after morning, a series of ominously distinctive letters began to arrive in the Great Hall and find their way to the Slytherin table. Delivered by an enormous black raven whose wingspan, in flight, probably exceeded the measured length of an average first-year’s outstretched arms, the scrolls were small and dark, each sealed with a smudge of green wax and written in shimmering, oily-looking ink (Draco had managed a brief but fairly close look at Crabbe’s).

Hermione, who from the very beginning had been keeping a list of recipients in the back of her Charms notebook, found the very presence of the scrolls chilling - the only thing more disturbing was the Slytherins’ carefully-blank lack of reaction to their contents. The Dark Mark wasn’t anywhere on them, of course - Voldemort was cocky, but he wasn’t stupid. Still, his influence behind the messages was apparent beyond question; one look at Albus Dumbledore’s face, the first morning of the raven’s appearance, had told her everything she needed to know.

Almost certainly, they were Death-Eater initiation notices.

The raven came eight times in total, bearing one scroll with each visit. Draco, who was most familiar with Slytherin House’s inhabitants, surveyed Hermione’s completed list grimly.

“Four sixth-years, four seventh-years,” he said, tapping the column of neat script with a pensive forefinger. “That’s good news, believe it or not: he must not have been set up for new members yet last year. I don’t remember seeing that raven ever before, do you? And those four -“ here, his finger paused at Avery’s name - “are the worst of the lot, for their year. Looks to me like he’s only targeting the sure things.”

Hermione read over the familiar names of her Potions classmates, feeling a cold fist of dread clench in her gut.

Bulstrode. Parkinson. Crabbe. Goyle.

And then, beyond the obvious, a whole new set of potential issues popped into her brain, leaving her reeling with their terrible possibilities. She hadn’t forgotten Sal’s graphic warning of Halloween night, after all - once it was set in place, their enemy didn’t need anything by way of equipment to implement the Fils du Couteau curse, except for an ordinary table knife and an opportunity.

This combination of knowledge and events had her skipping lunch for an emergency visit to the sub-dungeons.

“Sal,” she said urgently, dropping her book bag by the empty armchair and coming over to perch on the arm of his, “can anyone do it? Anyone who’s … well, who’s loyal to - to Him?”

Slytherin put his book aside and lowered his headphones. One look at her strained, white face, and any gentle raillery he might have prepared to deliver on the subject of compensation died on his lips.

”I’m afraid so,” he said quietly, and laid one ghostly hand over hers to still its shaking. Though chilly, the contact was a comfort - Hermione stared at him with tears trembling on her lashes.

“Eight of them, Sal,” she said dully. “Eight brand-new Death-Eaters, roaming the halls as of January first, and any one of them might have a knife. How the hell can we watch them all at once?”

They both stared into the fire. After a moment, Slytherin cleared his throat and gave her a long level look.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that everyone involved would be better off, if those eight misguided children never made their appointment.”

“Well, of course,” Hermione said. “Them most of all, the twits. But that’s beside the point - they’ve obviously already made their decisions … or had them made for them,” she amended.

Right now, Muggle parentage was a big fat check in the Plus column, in Hermione’s book. After all, the worst her parents could have done to her, in terms of familial career expectation, was send her to medical school; the fact that four of her fellow sixth-years had been brought up to become killers, with the full knowledge and blessing of their families, was a thought she still had trouble grasping.

Sal was looking thoughtful, but she’d known him long enough now to tell when he had something up his transparent sleeve. “What?” she demanded, and he gave his attention to the painstaking process of arranging a ghostly lap robe over his knees.

“Beside the point,” he echoed, staring at his lap. “But is it, really?”

Hermione threw up her hands in impatience. “Sal, I’ve got Transfiguration in a quarter of an hour,” she said sharply. “I don’t have time for your riddles. Of course it’s beside the point. It’s not as if we can stop it; we’d have to keep all eight of them from going home for the holidays, and that’s impossible.”

“Impossible,” he said, his eyes beginning to twinkle. “Is it?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Hermione sprang from her perch on the chair’s arm to stalk back toward the bookshelves, sure he’d lost his mind and was on the verge of driving her out of hers. “What are we going to do? Lock them in their rooms?”

“Or somewhere else, perhaps,” Slytherin suggested quietly.

Hermione stared at him open-mouthed, then followed his pointed gaze to the “Shades of Blue” jewel case on his lamp table.

Oh, she thought, her eyes widening. She sat down again, heavily.

The Trapping Spell. Well, that did it.

She was going to have to come up with an excuse on her way back upstairs - in the Greater Order of Things, the Transfiguration lecture she was about to miss didn’t even make the same page as this conversation.

“Is it dangerous?” she asked, after a long moment of consideration.

“Yes.”

“Illegal?”

“Yes.”

Oh, dear God.

Hermione gulped. “Will it … will it hurt them?”

Salazar waved a dismissive hand. “Keep ‘em there more than a couple of months, and they’ll start to get dizzy and lose short-term memory,” he said off-handedly. “But for the winter holidays? Fine.”

Well, that was something, at least. Hermione stared at the fire, trembling on the brink of decision, then deliberately withdrew a blank roll of parchment from her book bag and turned to the ghost in the next chair.

Sometimes, as Harry and Ron delighted in reminding her, rules were made to be broken.

“Sal,” she said, in a small voice that shook only slightly. “I’m going to need to know everything you can tell me.”

**