First Wednesday of March, afternoon, second floor of the castle, the Transfiguration classroom.
Slytherin shared the period with Hufflepuff.
The two groups sat cleanly divided, Slytherin on the left, Hufflepuff on the right, an empty row of desks between them.
None of the bristling tension of a lesson shared with Gryffindor. The Hufflepuffs kept to themselves and spared the other side hardly a glance.
A few Hufflepuff girls in the back had their heads together, one of them prodding her slate with her wand while she murmured something, and the two beside her clapped hands over their mouths and laughed.
No Slytherin glared back. Their eyes passed over the Hufflepuffs' heads as though that half of the room stood empty.
Hufflepuff was glad of the peace. Nobody wanted a nest of snakes staring at them for an hour.
Each side minded its own business, quiet laughter and chatter on the right, something more subdued on the left, though hardly solemn.
The solemnity hadn't arrived yet.
It arrived a moment later.
The front door opened and Professor McGonagall came in, dark green robes buttoned to the throat, hair pinned in a high bun without a strand loose.
She took her place at the front, set a stack of something on the desk, and swept the room.
The chatter died in an instant. Small witches and wizards straightened as one, backs up, hands set neatly on their desktops.
"Today's material." She lifted her wand and flicked it toward the blackboard. "Partial Cross-Material Transfiguration."
Lines of silver-white script surfaced on the board, edges crisp, the lettering precise.
"On a single slate," she said with her back to it, reciting the requirement, "you will turn one designated half to wood and hold the other half as stone. Both materials complete in themselves, the boundary clean, neither bleeding into the other."
Turning around, she picked up her own slate and touched it with her wand.
The slate divided along its center line. Grey drained out of the left half, grain rising to the surface in the pale tones of birch, fine rings spreading outward, the small pores of the wood faintly visible.
The right half stayed cold hard stone, rough-surfaced, its grit distinct.
The two met at the midline in a clean, exact border, wood and stone each keeping to its own side, neither straying so much as a hair across.
She held the slate up and turned slowly so the whole class could see.
"The difficulty of this lesson is not the transfiguration." She set the slate back on the desk, her tone severe. "It is that boundary. The half you change must change completely, and the half you hold must hold completely. A great many people fix their attention on the side that changes and forget that the unchanged side requires just as much restraint. Once your magic spills past the midline, the two mix. Your attention must fall on both halves at once."
Her gaze traveled from left to right. "Begin."
Rustling and muttered incantations filled the room as wands came up and slates were prodded at.
Once the first flurry passed, the gaps between students showed.
A Hufflepuff boy jabbed too hard and turned the entire slate to wood, no boundary held at all.
He stared at the block of timber. The classmate beside him leaned over for a look and snorted with laughter.
A Slytherin girl in the back hadn't changed hers thoroughly. Veins of unmelted stone ran through the wooden half, grey-white streaks embedded in the grain, the whole thing mottled.
She frowned and poked at the veins with her wand, and each poke made it worse.
Another Hufflepuff had the boundary tangled entirely, a half-wood half-stone transition zone taking up a third of the slate, lumpy and impossible to name.
He tilted his head at it and sighed.
McGonagall moved between the desks, bending over each slate.
"The whole thing has changed. Where is your boundary?"
She stopped in front of a Hufflepuff boy, who flushed and shrank into his collar.
Her wand traced above his slate. "Your spell isn't precisely aimed. The magic has already scattered by the time it leaves the wand. Start again, and lock onto the midline first."
Passing the Slytherin girl, she glanced at the stone veins and nodded. "Your magical output is unsteady, so the grain can't open. Keep trying."
Cuthbert sat two seats behind Regulus.
His slate had separated into wood and stone with a passable boundary, but it had split.
A crack ran straight down the middle of the join, the wooden half wood, the stone half stone, and the whole thing came up in two pieces.
He prodded the crack with his wand, swearing under his breath, glanced at the back of Regulus's head, then bent to wrestle with the split again.
Alex's boundary had drifted. The wood had crossed the midline and claimed a strip of what should have been stone.
But the grain had opened cleanly, wood and stone clearly distinct, both materials whole in themselves even if the join sat in the wrong place.
McGonagall looked as she passed. "Mind where your boundary falls."
He nodded quickly and set his wand against the edge of the grain, pushing it back, brow furrowed in concentration.
Hermes sat in the back row by the window, his slate finished long ago, boundary sharp, materials distinct, the join immaculate.
He'd left it lying on the desk, chin propped on his hand, head tilted toward the window. Sunlight came through the glass onto his face. He squinted and yawned.
Regulus sat in the front row on the Slytherin side.
In McGonagall's lessons the back seats always went first. Arrive late and the front was what remained.
It made no difference to him. He was a good student. One seat was as good as another.
He laid his wand across the slate and let his magic seep down through the tip.
Wood surfaced at one end, the edge taking on a faint cream tone before the grain crept inward ring by ring, fine and even.
He let it grow as far as the midline and stopped it there, the boundary immaculate, grain and grit meeting without strain.
Birch's silvery pale sheen locked against the cold hardness of grey stone, interlocking, not a fraction over the line.
Wood was wood, stone was stone, both growing out of the same slab, the join airtight.
Lift it and it was one piece. Set it down and it was still one piece. Apart from the two materials, nothing showed where anything had been added.
Finished, and it had cost him nothing.
He didn't pull back at once. His magic stayed pressed into the slate, holding the transfiguration, feeling it.
The wooden half was pulling. Constantly, back toward what it had been.
This was how transfiguration worked at his current level, short of permanent Transfiguration. A slate given a new shape carried a standing inclination to return to its own face.
It remembered being a single piece of stone. The wood was something he'd pressed onto it from outside.
Under pressure it complied. Release the magic and the grain would begin to fade back.
Not all at once. Residual magic lingered inside, his will hadn't withdrawn entirely, and it would hold a while, but reverting to stone was only a matter of time.
The more magic fed in, the steadier the caster's will, the longer it lasted. To keep it wood forever, you fed it forever.
None of this was new to him. He'd simply taken it out to turn over.
From the first transfiguration he'd ever learned he'd known it. Stop the spell and the effect disperses.
Every transfiguration behaved that way, at least every one taught at this stage.
For the overwhelming majority of wizards it stayed that way for good. Transfiguration was temporary, provisional. Withdraw the magic and it went home.
A question surfaced.
So what was permanent Transfiguration? How was it done?
A permanently transfigured object had clearly cut loose from its caster's magic. The caster dies and the transfiguration remains.
What sustained it, then?
Did higher transfiguration build the sustaining step into the incantation itself?
Or was there a component of will, the caster's will carved into the interior of the object the moment the work completed, so that no further magic was needed?
Or, more fundamentally, was permanence not a question of sustaining at all? Was the thing rewritten at the level of its essence in the instant it changed?
He stared at the half-wood, half-stone slate under his hand, grain still rippling outward, stone still drawing back.
Holding it, thinking.
The textbook didn't cover this. Second-year Transfiguration wouldn't touch Permanent Transfiguration, and had no reason to.
The advanced class might. Sixth years and above got their first look at theory on that level.
McGonagall certainly held a deeper system of transfiguration. Of course she did.
But he was in his second year, several years short of the advanced class, and the professor wasn't going to call him up early.
The bell rang. McGonagall cleared the script from the blackboard. "That will do for today."
Students began packing up, and the half-finished wood across the room faded back to grey stone.
Rustling filled the classroom, wands knocking against desk edges, satchel clasps snapping shut.
Cuthbert pressed his two halves together and they knitted themselves back into one. He picked it up, turned it over, and set it down again.
Alex's slate returned to normal. He let out a breath and slid his wand back into his sleeve.
Hermes pulled his eyes in from the window, stood, put his hands in his pockets, and headed for the door.
Lina and Samuel fell in beside him without being asked.
Regulus rose too and followed them out.
The Permanent Transfiguration question could wait for the office. Convenient, since he had other things to ask about as well.
McGonagall's office sat off a ground-floor corridor, right of the stairs leading up to the serpentine passage on the third floor, not far from classroom 3C, at the corner of the staff hallway.
He let Cuthbert and the others go ahead and walked the stone corridor at his own pace.
Stopping at the door, he knocked three times.
"Come in." Her voice from inside.
The professor sat behind her desk when the door swung open.
Several stacks of parchment covered it, essays from different years, some tied with dark green ribbon, some clipped with brass, corners squared off.
The ink bottle stood open, its cap not replaced, the quill resting in its stand with ink still on the nib.
She looked up, her gaze behind the square spectacles as sharp as it had been in class.
Taking in the boy in the doorway, she tipped her chin down a fraction.
"Mr. Black." She set the quill aside, her voice severe. "Have you come to hand in last week's Transfiguration essay?"
Regulus stood in the doorway with his hand still on the handle.
Hand in the essay?
He froze.
The question had never once crossed his mind. He hadn't so much as prepared for it.
Two weeks of leave, the journey home, his grandfather's funeral, the return to school, lessons resuming, everything sliding back into its groove.
Nobody had mentioned homework. Nobody had told him that taking leave meant making up assignments.
Where in the world was the justice in that?
Two lifetimes, and this was the first time anyone had chased him for schoolwork.
Nothing showed on his face. He let go of the handle, walked to the desk without hurry, inclined his head slightly, and spoke with perfect respect and perfect composure.
"I'm working on it, Professor."
She held his eyes, direct and sharp.
Whatever else could be said about this particular young Black, his talent and his ability were beyond reproach, at least in Transfiguration.
But talent was talent and an essay was an essay. However exceptional the student, owed work still had to be handed in.
That was the rule.
As for working on it, she didn't believe a syllable.
She'd been hearing that excuse for decades. Every year produced someone who used it, first years through seventh, and not one of them ever varied the wording.
The stare didn't trouble him. He met it without a flicker of guilt.
Working on it and never started made no difference from where he stood.
Something that had never happened at all could be described as happening or as not happening. Same thing either way.
Starting now and having started long ago made no difference to the final result.
She seemed to read something impervious in his expression, and in the end didn't press.
"The essay is due before Friday."
He kept his back straight and his manner deferential, and nodded. "Yes, Professor."
McGonagall tipped her chin toward the chair across from her. "Sit."
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