Regulus followed behind without forcing small talk.
He'd met Agnes once during last year's property inspection. A brief visit: surveying the herb garden's scale from a distance, listening to the manager's report on yields and gnome infestations. They'd barely exchanged words.
But Agnes clearly remembered him. Her manner was warm without being servile, the kind of calibrated familiarity that came from decades of service to a single family.
The main house was a two-story stone building, its walls swallowed by ivy that covered most of the windows.
Agnes pushed the door open. The entryway was cluttered with clay pots of every size, some holding cuttings in the early stages of rooting, others sitting empty, drainage holes still caked with damp soil.
"Upstairs is clean. Downstairs is a mess. Don't mind it." She was already climbing the stairs.
The top-floor room was small, but the windows had been placed with care.
The east-facing one looked out toward a distant coastline.
Below the south window, the greenhouse complex spread out, glass rooftops stretching in unbroken rows.
"Quietest room in the house. No noise at night." Agnes pushed the window open, and damp sea air rushed in. "Anything you need, give me a shout. Mr. Black's letter said you're here to study Mandrakes?"
"Twenty mature specimens," Regulus said, setting his luggage on the low cabinet beside the bed. "I'll need a greenhouse to myself. No one else in or out."
Agnes didn't press for details. She nodded.
"Standalone greenhouse. Number Three on the east side is empty, cleared out last month. Sunlight and humidity both work. Twenty mature plants..."
She glanced up, her gaze fixing on some middle distance as though taking a mental inventory. "That's enough. I'll have it ready before lunch."
Regulus nodded.
Her expression stayed placid. "Get some rest first, Young Mr. Black. I'll bring the key to Number Three before the meal."
She turned and headed downstairs. Her footsteps faded around the bend of the staircase.
Regulus stood at the window, studying the row of greenhouses in the distance.
Mandrakes were not cheap.
He'd reviewed the procurement records for this category. A single Mandrake cultivated to full maturity ran between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty Galleons on the open market. Twenty of them came to roughly three thousand Galleons.
And a Mandrake's value extended well beyond the ledger.
In the wizarding world, it was universally recognized as an irreplaceable core ingredient in the field of healing.
The mature root was the sole component of Mandrake Restorative Draught, the only known cure for petrification curses. No substitutes existed.
Beyond that, a concentrated Pepperup Potion brewed from the root.
Leaf extract could neutralize residual traces of multiple curses. In ancient runic books, dried Mandrake root ground to powder served as a required medium for certain high-tier protective enchantments.
Its rarity, though, stemmed from the difficulty of cultivation.
Mandrake growth proceeded through three stages: infancy, adolescence, and maturity. Only a fully mature specimen could be used in potion-making, and each stage carried its own demands.
Young plants required dragon dung fertilizer. Adolescent ones had to be kept from interfering with each other. At harvest, proper ear protection was mandatory. A mistake at any point could kill the plant or injure the grower.
The humanoid root possessed sentient properties, making it one of the wizarding world's most iconic species. Young roots resembled crying infants. Mature ones entered a kind of adolescence of their own, growing moody, throwing parties, even climbing into each other's pots.
These peculiar biological traits gave Mandrakes additional collector and symbolic value on the magical market. A stable supply of mature specimens always carried a significant risk premium, and pure-blood families and potioneers alike were willing to pay top Galleon for them.
Regulus pushed the window open wider. Sea wind poured in.
Ten minutes before lunch, Agnes knocked and delivered the key.
Brass, with an intricate tooth pattern. It sat heavy in his palm.
He thanked her and pocketed it without hurrying out.
In the main house dining room, he finished lunch, drained a full glass of pumpkin juice, and waited until the sunlight outside had shifted to the warm gold of early afternoon before heading out.
Greenhouse Number Three stood at the eastern edge of the complex.
Isolated. Set apart from the others, ringed by a low stone wall whose surface still bore faint runes for repelling gnomes and Dugbogs.
Regulus unlocked the door and pulled on the protective earmuffs hanging by the entrance.
Inside, the light ran dimmer than outdoors. The glass ceiling had been treated for shade, allowing only about sixty percent of natural light through.
The stone-slab floor was faintly damp underfoot. Planting troughs lined both sides in neat rows, filled with specially blended soil so dark it was nearly black.
Twenty Mandrakes waited in their pots.
Each stood about a foot tall, broad leaves a deep, inky green with fine serrations along the edges. Where the soil surface met the base of each plant, the top of the humanoid root was visible, its contour like the shoulder line of a human infant, carrying a biological presence that no plant should possess.
Regulus crouched before the first trough, bringing himself level with one of the specimens.
He extended his hand, palm hovering three inches above the leaves.
His magical sense unfurled, shaping itself into fine threads that reached toward the Mandrake, seeking connection.
What came back was complex.
The Mandrake's Magic Circulation was a web. Multiple entry points, multiple exits, all interlocking, like the root system of an ancient tree. Follow one tendril and it connected to another, which connected to the main trunk, beneath which lay something deeper still.
He withdrew his hand. No rush to attempt extraction.
Eyes closed, he extended his magical sense again. This time he wasn't probing. He was listening.
Feeling its life. The flow of magic through its leaf veins. The core buried deep in the root.
That core was what made a Mandrake a Mandrake. The wellspring of all its power.
Regulus sat before that single plant for the entire afternoon.
His palm hovered in place. Tendrils of magic reached in, got pushed back, reached again, got pushed back again.
The Mandrake's sentience nature gave it an instinctive rejection of foreign magic.
I don't know you. I'm not used to you. I don't want you touching my core.
The first day ended, and he'd gained nothing.
Dinner was from Agnes, left on the small wooden table outside the greenhouse door. By the time he noticed, the soup had gone cold.
He drank the lukewarm vegetable broth, ate two slices of dark bread, and went back to his spot.
Dawn of the second day. He opened his eyes, his magical sense still extended.
The plant seemed to have grown accustomed to him.
Using natural magic to build a symbiotic link, Regulus began guiding gently. The Mandrake's magic started to loosen, flowing along the channel he'd constructed, slow as sap.
He let the condensed droplet of magic pass across his palm, feeling its texture, its properties, its inclinations.
It has the properties of decomposition.
Regulus understood decomposition, of course.
Weathering, erosion, decay, oxidation. Stone becoming sand. Wood becoming soil. Iron rusting. Bone turning to dust.
But those were natural-world processes, the orderly collapse governed by physical law.
Now he understood that the Mandrake's decomposition was something else entirely.
He saw, as if in a vision, a feather suspended in midair. Whole, white, every barb aligned in perfect order.
Magic flowed through it. The feather didn't burn. Didn't shatter. Didn't crumble to powder.
It simply lost the definition of feather.
The shaft was still there. The barbs were still there. The barbules were still there. But they were no longer parts of a feather. They were just many separate fibers at various angles, drifting apart, falling, no longer related to one another.
Then he saw a glass of water. Transparent, still, the window's outline reflected on its surface.
Magic flowed through. The water was still water. H₂O was still H₂O. But it was no longer "a glass of water."
Inside the cup were countless individual molecules, each independent, no longer composing a collective liquid.
The Mandrake's decomposition made ordered existence revert to a state before organization had occurred.
It invalidated the concept of wholeness itself.
Regulus opened his eyes. Outside the window, full dark.
He looked down at his palm. Nothing there.
But he knew that single droplet of magic had already carved an imprint into his consciousness.
On the third day, he began extraction in earnest.
Progress was slow.
A mature Mandrake held far more total magic than he'd estimated, and the resistance to extraction scaled accordingly.
By noon, he'd drawn roughly two tear-sized globules of magic from the first plant.
By evening, the second had yielded three.
Late into the night: the third, the fourth, the fifth.
Agnes came three times a day. Hot tea and toast in the morning. A simple meal at midday. Soup at night.
She never asked about progress. Never pushed.
Each time she slipped in quietly, set the food on the little wooden table by the door, and withdrew without a sound, pulling the door shut behind her.
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