Having finished that work, I made a new hammer head — this one serving a different purpose: the production of bracelets with a Protego Totalum function. An excellent spherical shield that, unlike standard Protego, holds for exactly as long as the caster needs it. The downside, however, was equally clear — it worked in both directions. Protego Totalum blocked spells passing through it from either side, whereas with standard Protego one could, with effort and practice, learn to push other spells through one's own shield — technically and executionally difficult, of course, since it was one wizard, one wand, one spell at a time.
But even this spell had a serious weakness — maintaining it during movement was nearly impossible, which was why it was generally treated as a stationary spell, much like Protego Maxima. The latter was genuinely stationary by design, cast over an area while the witch or wizard who cast it could move freely both inside and outside the shield. Totalum, by contrast, tended to collapse the moment its caster moved — though if the caster was genuinely skilled and managed to hold it, the sphere would travel with them.
It occurred to me, now that I thought about it, that this might have something to do with the fact that Totalum was a sphere — and if you cast it at ground level, part of the surface was always inside it, destabilising the shield if you tried to move it. Though perhaps the same didn't apply in mid-air? But then nobody used Totalum airborne either — though that might be nothing more than intellectual inertia. The books said you couldn't move, so no one tried? Worth investigating.
Musing on the finer points of defensive magic, I didn't notice until I was quite done — the bracelet work was finished along the same lines as the rings.
A Tempus told me that if I lingered any longer, I risked being late to dinner — or worse, missing it entirely. I hastened to tidy up, pack everything into my bag, and head to the Great Hall, joining the hungry students in the noble labour of reducing Hogwarts' strategic food reserves.
At dinner, I took the opportunity to finally broach an important topic with Susan.
"Susan, I have a small favour to ask," I mentioned, as if in passing, while we were unhurriedly making our way through beef and vegetable sides.
"You really have no idea how to open a conversation," she smiled — as did the rest of the group sitting nearby, who had caught my words despite their own quiet discussions.
"I just don't like circling around a subject. So I mean to sound casual and end up being completely blunt."
"All right, out with it then," our red-haired friend said graciously, blushing just slightly in the process. I wondered, not for the first time, when she would stop being embarrassed by everything. Though, to be fair, it suited her — and never got in her way, since she had no lack of decisiveness when it counted.
"So. Given everything going on around us, a thought occurred to me and some other people who aren't inclined to sit quietly."
"Interesting," Hannah said, switching her attention definitively from her conversation about nothing with Ernie and Justin to focus on us. The others followed suit.
"Well... Given the sorry state of affairs in terms of artefacts — and active defence in particular — we've decided to alert the MLE and the Auror Office to the possibility of supplying them with genuinely useful items at an absurdly low price."
"I expect," Susan said, with a smile, "you'd like me to contact my aunt about this?"
"Yes. That would be the ideal route."
"Only I can't just go up to her and say: 'Buy some unknown gadgets for the MLE and the Aurors that some kids at Hogwarts are making.'"
"Naturally," I agreed entirely.
Noticing that I'd already cut the meat in my plate into convenient pieces, I helped myself to another slice and began cutting that too — I eat a lot in any case, so why not prepare it in advance while talking?
"And so," I continued, unhurriedly cutting the meat, "I'm suggesting you see the artefacts in action. If you like what you see, you could put your impressions down on parchment and send it to your aunt along with a covering letter and some samples."
"That sounds reasonable."
"Can we watch?" Justin and the others lit up with the desire to see it for themselves.
"I don't see why not, in principle. Though honestly, it's not entirely my decision alone... Although... These two reprobates will be nothing but enthusiastic about the publicity. With one caveat — not among the Slytherins. Some of them have close relatives who actively support the Dark Lord, and they'd be sure to pass along any word of a potential boost to the forces of law and order."
"Fair enough," Justin nodded, and the others looked at him with mild puzzlement. "What? If my relatives were mixed up in something like that, I'd warn them. Even if I didn't share their views. Family's family, when all's said and done."
"So..." Zacharias, who tended in moments of group discussion to stay mostly quiet, decided to summarise what he'd heard. "If things are that sensitive, let the demonstration happen without us — without any extra witnesses, full stop. If they — whoever 'they' are — decide to show it to everyone or to many people, they will. That's that."
"Yes, honestly," Ernie agreed. "I'd like to see it, but better to keep some secrecy."
"Right," Hannah said, smiling wryly. "Which is why we're talking about it in the middle of the Great Hall, sitting at the house table."
The group laughed at that rather good point and returned to their various conversations — none of them noticing that I had quietly wrapped us in a simple, unobtrusive privacy charm that turned our words into unintelligible noise for anyone nearby.
After dinner, Susan and I left the Great Hall and almost immediately ran into the twins, who were waiting for me.
"So?" The twins glanced expressively in Susan's direction, the question plain: Can she hear this?
"Time for a demonstration," I said simply. "Any ideas where?"
"Why invent something new?" Fred looked at me with mild surprise. "Where we train — that's where we'll do it."
"Perfect."
Chatting about the weather, exams, and other innocuous rubbish purely for the sake of appearances, we walked briskly through the castle corridors and up the staircases in the Main Tower — conspicuously using the main, well-travelled routes rather than the hidden passages, and keeping an eye out along the way for anyone following us, even under magical concealment. Naturally, that was difficult to determine, since everyone was going somewhere after dinner.
Reaching the Room of Requirement, we checked the surrounding corridors with detection spells — no one. George quickly summoned the training hall for our anonymous Defence club, and we went inside.
"So then?" The twins were practically vibrating with anticipation.
"Oh, yes—" George produced a neatly folded piece of parchment from an inner pocket of his robes. "We drafted a text. Neat and tidy. If anything needs fixing, just say—"
"—actually, you do it yourself. Your handwriting's brilliant."
"Fine, I'll read it later. Right, then—"
I produced the first prototype — the ring.
"As agreed — a ring," I showed it to the twins and Susan. "Worn on the index finger — easiest to activate by touch. Produces three varieties of Protego simultaneously, as planned. Uses remarkably little magic. Duration — approximately two seconds."
"Slightly above standard," Fred said, with the air of one who knows his stuff — which made one of my eyebrows climb in an unconscious impression of Snape. "What? We might not have been interested in combat magic before, but lately we've been catching up — in knowledge, if not necessarily in skill."
"Fair enough," I smiled. "Right... As a security measure, so that a hypothetical enemy couldn't help themselves to the artefacts by taking them off a downed officer... Primary blood-bonding. I hope that won't raise any objections?"
"It shouldn't," Susan said. "Except possibly from people with very little connection to the magical world."
"Good," I felt a faint wave of relief. "I was already worrying that blood-based manipulation would be taboo, or some such thing."
"Nah," Fred waved it off. "Primary bonding, as you call it, is perfectly ordinary. Although a lot of blood-based practices are genuinely prohibited. Come on, let's test it."
I slipped the ring onto my finger, stepped back a couple of paces, and touched the artefact with my thumb. For two seconds, a dense, even magical shield appeared before me — exactly as before, adaptive in size. The proportions of the shield relative to the caster's body were always constant, which meant even Hagrid could shelter behind it, even if it required somewhat more energy.
I activated it a few more times — nothing changed.
"One other important point," I said, and activated the spell, then swept my arm the way you'd move a real shield — the defence followed the hand.
"And in motion—" now I simply began activating shields while walking back and forth, jumping a couple of times, even breaking into a short run. "Go on — cast something."
The twins didn't need asking twice. Wands out in an instant, they began pelting me with spells. I found I genuinely enjoyed deflecting them with the shield — there was something to it, something interesting and oddly playful, almost childlike.
"Brilliant! Any more?" the twins said in unison, and I handed them a ring each.
A few seconds, and they were already tearing around the hall, enthusiastically pelting each other with magic while activating their shields. Without a shred of seriousness — laughing like idiots, flinging joke curses and light spells at each other, including feeble Stupefy attempts. More than once they even managed to raise a shield and counter-attack simultaneously — precisely the combination the artefact had been designed for, aside from pure defence.
"Rather useful thing," Susan said, watching the spectacle with a smile that she couldn't entirely suppress, though the two of us had needed to take cover under a large Protego Totalum dome, since some of the spells were bouncing off the twins' artefact shields and whizzing around in a decidedly threatening manner, whistling past like bullets.
"You really think so?"
"I'm certain!" Susan nodded firmly, twice. "Nothing like this exists in the MLE or the Auror Office. And I don't know anyone who has anything comparable."
"I'm sure someone must. The point is that we don't."
"That's true..."
The twins eventually tired of it — or possibly just wore themselves out. Coming over to me, they asked to keep their rings — too good not to. Naturally, I had no intention of refusing them such a small thing. After that, we moved on to testing the bracelet artefact with its Protego Totalum function. A fundamentally different kind of defence, operating on somewhat different principles, so the twins couldn't run about and muck around with it — but they did apply themselves earnestly to the task of trying to break through the shield I held. They failed — the artefact used the energy channelled into it considerably more efficiently than a wizard could. The failure didn't disappoint them; if anything, it seemed to fire them up. Susan, too, liked the idea, though it made less of an impression on her than the ring had.
"Good work, Hector," Susan said, satisfied with the demonstration — and I'd go so far as to say the girl was visibly restraining herself from looking too delighted, from bouncing on her heels and clapping her hands. "I'll write to my aunt, and send along your letter and the artefact samples."
"Just ask Madam Bones to think it over as quickly as possible," I said, without humour or a smile. "Not in the usual wizarding fashion — a month to read the letter, another month to think, a month to compose a reply. I have a feeling this is urgent."
"Of course."
The twins' letter was read over, and Susan even offered a couple of suggestions for rephrasing certain passages so that her aunt would receive it in the right spirit. While I was rewriting the letter, Susan quickly wrote her own; we assembled a single combined parcel, and all five of us went up to the owlery. The dispatch went smoothly, and soon we were heading off to our respective common rooms.
Whatever ease remained in the evening, however, was not destined for me. The prospect of doing homework with my housemates, as the schedule demanded, vanished on the very threshold of the common room — the Head of House met me there and informed me that Headmistress McGonagall wished to see me. What on earth could she want?
It turned out to be quite simple. In the office — which had changed little since Dumbledore's departure, save for the absence of Fawkes' enormous, perpetually open cage — McGonagall asked me to take part in the search for a highly significant artefact. Moreover, in doing so, she had layered on such powerful and complex privacy charms that I nearly twitched an eye. The object in question was Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem — and that was not even the most notable detail. There was a possibility that it would emit a barely perceptible trace of Dark Magic, and the artefact itself was capable of mental attacks. The source of this intelligence? According to McGonagall, Dumbledore had been digging earnestly, and needed this artefact badly. Besides myself, Potter had been asked to search, and he in turn had sought the help of almost the entire DA. Everyone, naturally, except me.
"Professor Dumbledore felt it was a significant oversight," McGonagall said, "that you, Mr Granger, were not involved in the search owing to Mr Potter's mild antipathy towards you. The situation is serious, a decision is needed quickly, and there is no room in this matter for petty ill-feeling."
"Thank you for the trust placed in me, Professor," I said, with a nod. "I'll do my best to devote as much time as possible to finding this relic."
"Without neglecting your primary responsibilities," McGonagall allowed herself a slight smile. "You are not, after all, the only one who will be working on this."
Well, that was something to look forward to. But I didn't object. There were legends about the peculiar properties of that diadem. This had the potential to be interesting, at the very least — and with my particular abilities, to not even attempt to search for such an object in any spare moment would be nothing short of a waste.
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