Suffocating In Darkness

Chapter 8

For or the rest of the week's Potions lessons Harry continued to follow the Half-Blood Prince's instructions wherever they deviated from Libatius Borage's, with the result that by our fourth lesson Slughorn was raving about Harry's abilities, saying that he had rarely taught anyone so talented. Lyra and I were also doing equally as well, we even had a look through the book and made our own adjustments.

Neither Ron nor Hermione was delighted by this. Although Harry had offered to share his book with both of them, Ron had more difficulty deciphering the handwriting than Harry did, and could not keep asking Harry to read aloud or it might look suspicious. Hermione, meanwhile, was resolutely plowing on with what she called the "official" instructions, but becoming increasingly bad-tempered as they yielded poorer results than the Prince's. Oliver didn't care, he seemed to be doing quite alright, not following anyone's recipes and getting quite good results. I wondered if he had been taught by Slughorn at a young age.

I wondered vaguely who the Half-Blood Prince had been. Although the amount of homework we had been given prevented us from reading the whole of his copy of Advanced Potion-Making, we had skimmed through it sufficiently to see that there was barely a page on which the Prince had not made additional notes, not all of them concerned with potion-making. Here and there were directions for what looked like spells that the Prince had made up himself. I refused to read anything that wasn't potion related and found the notes in Lyra and my books were incredibly similar.

"Or herself," said Hermione irritably, overhearing Harry pointing some of these out to us in the common room on Saturday evening. "It might have been a girl. I think the handwriting looks more like a girl's than a boy's."

"The Half-Blood Prince, he was called," I said. "How many girls have been princes?"

Hermione seemed to have no answer to this. She merely scowled and twitched her essay on "The Principles of Rematerialization" away from Ron, who was trying to read it upside down.

I looked at my watch and hurriedly put the copies of Advanced Potion-Making back into my bag.

"It's five to eight, we'd better go, we'll be late for Dumbledore."

"Ooooh!" gasped Hermione, looking up at once. "Good luck! We'll wait up, we want to hear what he teaches you!"

"Good luck! No Moose! Minnie, your new pet is bouncing on my homework!" Oliver moaned.

"Hope it goes okay," said Ron, and the pair of them watched us leave through the portrait hole.

We proceeded through deserted corridors, though we had to step hastily behind a statue when Professor Trelawney appeared around a corner, muttering to herself as she shuffled a pack of dirty-looking playing cards, reading them as she walked.

"Two of spades: conflict," she murmured, as she passed the place where we crouched, hidden. "Seven of spades: an ill omen. Ten of spades: violence. Knave of spades: a dark young man, possibly troubled, one who dislikes the questioner --"

She stopped dead, right on the other side of our statue.

"Well, that can't be right," she said, annoyed, and I heard her reshuffling vigorously as she set off again, leaving nothing but a whiff of cooking sherry behind her. I waited until we were quite sure she had gone, then hurried off again until we reached the spot in the seventh-floor corridor where a single gargoyle stood against the wall.

"Acid Pops," I said, and the gargoyle leapt aside; the wall behind it slid apart, and a moving spiral stone staircase was revealed, onto which we stepped, so that we were carried in smooth circles up to the door with the brass knocker that led to Dumbledore's Office.