𝐑𝐄𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐒-ℍ𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕪 ℙ𝕠𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣❥

𝐇𝐁𝐏 𝟏𝟓

The next day Harry and Emily confided in both Ron and Hermione the task that Dumbledore had set Harry that Emily could help with, though separately, for Hermione still refused to remain in Ron's presence longer than it took to give him a contemptuous look.

Ron thought that Harry and Emily were unlikely to have any trouble with Slughorn at all.

"He loves you two, " he said over breakfast, waving an airy forkful of fried egg. "Won't refuse you anything, will he? Not his little Potions Prince and his little project."

"Thanks, Ronald." Emily said, offended that she had been labelled as a project.

"Just hang back after class this afternoon and ask him."

Hermione, however, took a gloomier view. "He must be determined to hide what really happened if Dumbledore couldn't get it out of him," she said in a low voice, as they stood in the deserted, snowy courtyard at break "Horcruxes . . . Horcruxes . . . I've never even heard of them. . . ."

"You haven't?" Harry was disappointed; he had hoped that Hermione might have been able to give him a clue as to what Horcruxes were.

"I didn't know what they were either." Emily admitted quietly, "They must be really advanced Dark Magic, or why would Voldemort have wanted to know about them? I think it's going to be difficult to get the information, Harry, we'll have to be very careful about how we approach Slughorn, think out a strategy. . . ."

"Ron reckons we should just hang back after Potions this afternoon. . . ."

"Oh, well, if Won-Won thinks that, you'd better do it," she said, flaring up at once. "After all, when has Won-Won's judgment ever been faulty?"

"Hermione, can't you — ?"

"No!" she said angrily, and stormed away, leaving Harry and Emily ankle-deep in snow.

Potions lessons were uncomfortable enough these days, seeing as Emily, Harry, Ron, and Hermione had to share a desk.

Today, Hermione moved her cauldron around the table so that she was close to Ernie, and ignored both Harry and Ron, talking over the table to Emily.

"What've you done?" Ron muttered to Harry, looking at Hermione's haughty profile.

But before Harry could answer, Slughorn was calling for silence from the front of the room.

"Settle down, settle down, please! Quickly, now, lots of work to get through this afternoon! Golpalott's Third Law . . . who can tell me — ? But Miss Granger can, of course!"

Hermione recited at top speed: "Golpalott's-Third-Law-states- that-the-antidote-for-a-blended-poison-will-be-equal-to-more-than- the-sum-of-the-antidotes-for-each-of-the-separate-components."

"Precisely!" beamed Slughorn. "Ten points for Gryffindor! Now, if we accept Golpalott's Third Law as true . . ."

Harry was going to have to take Slughorn's word for it that Gol- palott's Third Law was true, because he had not understood any of it. Nobody apart from Emily and Hermione seemed to be following what Slughorn said next either.

". . . which means, of course, that assuming we have achieved correct identification of the potion's ingredients by Scarpin's Revel- aspell, our primary aim is not the relatively simple one of selecting antidotes to those ingredients in and of themselves, but to find that added component that will, by an almost alchemical process, transform these disparate elements —"

Ron was sitting beside Emily with his mouth half open, doodling absently on his new copy of Advanced Potion-Making. Ron kept forgetting that he could no longer rely on Hermione to help him out of trouble when he failed to grasp what was going on and Emily refused to help him as a consequence for his actions.