Before long two young people came over from the greenhouses, hauling stones and odds and ends.
A man and a woman, both early twenties, in heavy work robes with the cuffs rolled, dragonhide gloves on their hands.
Agnes's apprentices. Young wizards who'd come to work the plantation after leaving school, or the children of Black family employees to begin with. Raised working the family's chain of estates, packed off to Hogwarts for a few years, then funneled back into the same system on the way out.
The man carried a basket of stones, granite, sandstone, marble, all different sizes and none of them light, his teeth gritted as he hauled it. Maybe to look like he was suffering, he hadn't even bothered with a Wingardium Leviosa.
The woman lugged a wooden board and an old iron pot, the bottom of the pot burned black, a strip of cloth wound around the handle.
They set the things down at the edge of the clearing. The man wiped his face and threw a glance toward the willow, branches still swinging overhead, and took a few steps back.
The woman dropped the pot to the ground and, straightening, looked at Regulus.
Her gaze lingered on him a moment, traveling from his face to his robe to the spider perched on his shoulder, then slid away, the corner of her mouth dipping faintly.
The little Black heir. Second year. He wanted two Whomping Willows.
Globally controlled stock. Living adult specimens barred from trade.
Two or three years on the plantation, and the costliest thing they'd ever handled was the batch of Mandrakes in greenhouse three, three hundred Galleons a plant at market, already top-shelf goods.
The Whomping Willow was a different order of thing. Outside Hogwarts, this might be the only living adult specimen they'd see in their lives, and the reason it was here was a twelve-year-old child.
The woman was perhaps tasting for the first time how uneven a life could be. She said nothing. There was nothing to say, no standing to say it from. At school they were classmates. Past the gates, they weren't the same class at all.
The man glanced at Regulus too, his mouth working as though to say something, until an elbow from the woman shut it.
Their hauling done, the two nodded toward Regulus, turned, and left, walking at no slow pace.
Regulus paid them no mind. Once they were well away, he drew the natural magic back.
The willow's response was near instant. The binding gone, the strike instinct fired back to life.
The branches' arcs swelled all at once, switching from the lazy patrol to full alert, every branch sweeping fast, every inch of the covered space crossed and recrossed.
Regulus stood at a safe distance, tapped a finger, summoning charm.
A fist-sized chunk of granite shot from the basket, arcing into the fifteen-foot strike range.
No gap in the willow's answer.
The stone had barely entered when the nearest heavy branch was already sweeping in, the air torn with a shriek, a white streak cut through the cold.
Crack.
The branch caught the granite, and in the instant of contact his magical sense caught the whole of it.
The oscillation had taken shape inside the branch beforehand, the magic running through its full sequence of narrowing and compression at the tip, the point packed with compressed magic waiting to fire.
The moment the branch met the stone, the point released, the compressed magic blew open, ordered conduction flipping in an instant to disordered oscillation.
The oscillation flooded into the granite.
His sense tracked its course through the stone's interior, boring along the structure, shaking at every face where the mineral grains joined, pulling at every point of concentrated stress.
The stone split from inside out.
Nothing showed on the surface in that first instant, but the inner structure was already wrecked.
The stone bounced off the branch, turned twice in the air, and landed on the mud, broken into three pieces.
Regulus walked over, crouched, and picked up a fragment to study the broken face.
The arrangement of the grains had been thrown into disorder. Gaps had opened between crystal lattices that should have meshed tight, the joins laced through with fine white cracks.
Nothing like the Decomposition Curse.
The Decomposition Curse acted on the living, stripping a whole existence of its definition and returning it to the most basic units that composed it, cells coming apart, tissue dissolving, the thing reduced to a heap of its smallest pieces.
This was a different effect. The stone broke into smaller stone, granite into smaller granite. Structure destroyed, but the material intact.
One made the definition vanish. The other made the structure collapse.
Two roads, parted at the root.
He stood and tossed in a board.
The branch caught it, the oscillation running with the grain, spreading from the point of contact in a fan, the board splitting down the middle, the break ragged, the wood fibers shaken apart from within, the face left bristling with splinters.
The iron pot next.
The branch struck the bottom, the surface whole, the inside already webbed with cracks spreading outward.
He flicked it with a finger. The pot rang dull, none of the clear note good iron should have.
He weighed it in his hand, then threw it to the ground. It struck stone and clattered into a heap of iron shards.
Professor Sprout's words held. The willow's shattering began inside.
Now he wanted to see the effect of repeated strikes.
He tossed in a thick slab of granite, this one half the size of a head, high density, tight structure.
The first branch hit it. The stone cracked along a single thin line.
He didn't throw another, instead working a Wingardium Leviosa to turn the slab, and the second branch swept across, striking the same spot.
The crack widened, fresh lines branching around it.
He kept adjusting. The third branch came down and landed precisely where those cracks met.
The stone burst from inside, scattering into a fine powder of grit, the small fragments flung out like a puff of grey fog hanging in the air.
One blow split a single crack. Three blows ground it to dust.
Watch only the surface and you'd take it for ordinary force stacking, the way anything struck three times in a row will break.
But his sense had the detail.
The first oscillation left a set of cracks inside the stone, cracks that altered the inner structure, conjuring thousands of tiny seams and faces out of nothing. The second oscillation bored deep along those ready-made seams, the contact area more than double the first. The third drew on every crack the first two had pried open, three oscillations shoving and rebounding through one shared crack system, tearing the whole stone apart from within.
Ordinary physical blows could stack damage too, but only on the surface, each one driving fresh energy in from outside, unable to use the cracks left by the last.
The willow's oscillating magic was different. Each strike sought out the inner cracks the last had left, boring deep along the breaks and seams, every oscillation twice as efficient as the one before.
Oscillation stacking.
A different thing entirely from simple force stacking. Ordinary repeated impact accumulated in a line, ten hits worth ten times one.
Oscillation stacking compounded. Three hits might be worth dozens of one, magic-driven chain destruction.
The willow itself didn't single out one point. Its attack was indiscriminate, anything in range got hit, front or back, wherever it landed.
But Regulus had stumbled onto the property.
If the oscillation could be made to land on one exact point and stack again and again, then with enough magic, how many times could it stack?
Was there a ceiling?
He set the question aside in his mind and didn't rush after it.
Night had fallen.
He went back to the hut.
Agnes had set dinner on the table already, roast chicken legs with mashed potato, a dish of salad, a pot of hot black tea.
Baruk leapt from his shoulder to the front of the hearth.
He found himself a spot on the flagstone before the hearth, about two feet from the fire, eight legs spreading slow as he settled down.
Acromantulas feared fire by instinct.
But after following Regulus, Baruk seemed to be learning, bit by bit, habits that didn't belong to his kind. He knew fire was warm, and knew too close would burn.
Now he lay at that spot, warm but not scorching, eight legs full spread, body flat to the stone, chelicerae opening and closing softly, soaking up the heat.
Regulus gave him a glance, sat down to eat, and turned the day's gains over in his mind.
---
The next day broke fair, the mist swept clean.
Sunlight rose off the eastern sea, the light passing through the glass roofs of the greenhouses to throw a warm gold over the frost on the grass.
The sea wind still carried a chill, lighter than yesterday's, salt on it, cool drawn into the lungs.
The sky had gone from grey-blue to pale blue, a few white clouds pinned high and motionless.
Regulus crossed the shrub wall and walked toward the willows.
He loosed the verdant magic, stepped into the strike range, and pressed himself to the trunk.
He began to extract.