Wish Upon A Star

Opals

Halfway through October came their first trip of the term to Hogsmeade.

Ron had come downstairs with a highly amused expression. He filled in Hermione and Ashlyn, as they sat down for breakfast, about the new spell Hary had found in the Prince's book.

". . . and then there was another flash of light and I landed on the bed again!" Ron grinned, helping himself to sausages.

"Levicorpus," Ashlyn muttered with a small smile.

"Yeah!" Harry said excitedly. 

Hermione had not cracked a smile during this anecdote, and now turned an expression of wintry disapproval upon Harry.

"Was this spell, by any chance, another one from that potion book of yours?" she asked.

Harry frowned at her.

"Always jump to the worst conclusion, don't you?"

"Was it?"

"Well . . . yeah, it was, but so what?"

"So you just decided to try out an unknown, handwritten incantation and see what would happen?"

"How is it unknown?" Ashlyn said. "It's levicorpus. It literally levies your corpus," she scoffed.

"Why does it matter if it's handwritten?" said Harry

"Because it's probably not Ministry of Magic–approved," said Hermione.

"And also," she added, as Harry and Ron rolled their eyes, "because I'm starting to think this Prince character was a bit dodgy."

Both Harry and Ron shouted her down at once.

"It was a laugh!" said Ron, upending a ketchup bottle over his sausages. "Just a laugh, Hermione, that's all!"

"Dangling people upside down by the ankle?" said Hermione. "Who puts their time and energy into making up spells like that?"

"Fred and George," said Ron, shrugging, "it's their kind of thing. And, er —"

"My dad," said Harry.

"What?" said Ron and Hermione together.

"My dad used this spell," said Harry. "I — Lupin told me."

"Maybe your dad did use it, Harry," said Hermione, "but he's not the only one. We've seen a whole bunch of people use it, in case you've forgotten. Dangling people in the air. Making them float along, asleep, helpless."

"That was different," Ron said robustly. "They were abusing it. Harry and his dad were just having a laugh. You don't like the Prince, Hermione," he added, pointing a sausage at her sternly, "because he's better than you at Potions —"

"It's got nothing to do with that!" said Hermione, her cheeks reddening. "I just think it's very irresponsible to start performing spells when you don't even know what they're for and stop talking about 'the Prince' as if it's his title, I bet it's just a stupid nickname, and it doesn't seem as though he was a very nice person to me!"

"I don't see where you get that from," said Harry heatedly. "If he'd been a budding Death Eater he wouldn't have been boasting about being 'half-blood,' would he?"

"The Death Eaters can't all be pure-blood, there aren't enough pure-blood wizards left," said Hermione stubbornly. "I expect most of them are half-bloods pretending to be pure. It's only Muggle-borns they hate, they'd be quite happy to let you and Ron join up."

"There is no way they'd let me be a Death Eater!" said Ron indignantly, a bit of sausage flying off the fork he was now brandishing at Hermione and hitting Ernie Macmillan on the head.