Chapter 49
My third year at Hogwarts flew by almost too quickly. Not so quickly that I missed it — I'd made staggering progress in magic over the course of that year — but in every other respect, it had genuinely been the quietest, most peaceful, and most productive year I'd spent at that school.
Britain's finest wizarding institution had, for once, actually done its job. No one pulled me away from my studies. No one threw obstacles in the path of my relationship with Daphna. That included Albus, who had gone conspicuously quiet and hadn't bothered to wear at my patience or scheme against my chosen partner.
The old man had stopped inviting me to tea altogether, limiting himself to private meetings with Sirius and whatever plots he was weaving around the Greengrass family. But the family didn't seem troubled by it, and their matriarch's correspondence with us had continued on an entirely positive note. So I didn't lose much sleep over that front either.
Hell, even Remus Lupin and his furry little problem hadn't caused any serious trouble this year. If anything, the opposite — that worn-down man had teamed up with Sirius and managed to arrange some genuinely worthwhile practical training for me and the girls, letting us get acquainted with creatures that weren't usually covered until much later at Hogwarts.
He'd also agreed, eventually, to spar with me in dueling magic. Getting him to agree had taken considerable persuasion — a lot of pressure applied through Sirius — but the effort paid off. Nearly a full school year of practical combat training against an adult wizard who actually knew what he was doing was exactly the kind of experience I needed.
There's simply no comparison between drilling spells in isolation and actually trying to dominate a more experienced opponent in live practice — even if those sessions weren't entirely serious. Even if that opponent wasn't particularly powerful. Lupin admitted it himself: in raw magical ability, he'd always fallen short of Sirius, or of my father.
Age hadn't done much to close that gap, either. By this point, even I — with my nonverbal casting and my collection of difficult spells — surpassed my instructor in many respects. He was genuinely solid in Transfiguration, and had helped me considerably with that subject in particular. But overall…
Lupin was a middling wizard. Average in both power and mastery, which was strange in its own way, given that he'd graduated with better marks than any of the so-called Marauders. My suspicion was that life simply hadn't given him the spare time or energy to develop his craft. Being a werewolf was hard enough on its own. Being one in thoroughly bigoted wizarding Britain was something else entirely.
*Poor man, honestly. It hasn't been easy for him. And after that recent article in the Daily Prophet… it's not about to get easier.*
I grimaced at that thought. Near the end of the year I'd let myself hope, just a little, that maybe this time I'd get lucky — that such a comfortable Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher might stay on for another year. He hadn't made the canonical mistake of transforming in front of students. But it wasn't meant to be.
Whether it was someone's scheming, the iron pull of canon, or an actual curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position — and in the wizarding world, that last option was entirely plausible — the fact remained: right at the end of term, the Daily Prophet, the primary newspaper of wizarding Britain, ran a devastating exposé about the horrors unfolding at Hogwarts and the senility of a headmaster who had seen fit to hire a genuine werewolf as a professor.
Rita Skeeter had done her work brilliantly. The uproar she stirred in wizarding society was severe enough that some people practically tried to storm the school, while simultaneously sending students into a panic at the exact moment they should have been preparing for exams. It wasn't the most pleasant chaos — it hadn't stopped me from finishing the year with distinction, but it had soured my mood all the same.
In every other respect, though, I was more than satisfied with the year. Practical training had borne fruit. My theoretical understanding of magic had continued to grow. My mental abilities had advanced as well — I had now developed certain practices that, if I pushed myself, could replace sleep without any serious toll on my health.
That said, pulling a full night of true wakefulness was still something to avoid. Completely replacing sleep with specialized meditations — the kind that also raised overall concentration, awareness, and mental energy — wasn't something I could manage yet. But the new skill was a welcome addition to my repertoire, and it made me more grateful than ever to Black for his help and for the books he'd shared from his family library.
Without my godfather's assistance, I wouldn't have achieved nearly as much this year. The majority of the information I'd found on how emotions affect magic — including some of the darker subdivisions of that subject — had come from Sirius, and it had spared me the need to throw myself into an emergency deep-dive on runes.
I did study runic magic, of course — mostly as a companion to Daph, who had developed a sudden and genuine passion for it — but I kept it measured, without turning it into a personal challenge. I had enough of those already. Training the girls alone was a significant undertaking, to say nothing of the occasional sessions that included Daphna's younger sister and her friends.
Meanwhile, I kept steadily converting my ever-growing spell repertoire into nonverbal forms. It had reached a point lately where learning a new spell meant spending a day or two drilling it verbally, then almost immediately beginning to push it into silent casting.
And God, was it hard. Despite all my experience and my supposedly recognized gift for nonverbal magic, learning at that pace was absolutely brutal and exhausting. My mind ran hot. My magical reserves hit zero three or four times a day. I'd even developed a dependency on certain potions-based supplements — nearly entirely harmless, but infuriatingly expensive.
It was worth it, though. Especially since that intensive training turned out to have a remarkably productive effect on my wandless magic as well.
The two were deeply intertwined, it turned out. I hadn't understood that at first — I'd initially assumed wandless magic was a higher, purer form of casting, essentially independent of my other skills. I was wrong.
Silent spellwork, and the deeper understanding of magic and spell structure that came with translating everything into nonverbal form, substantially expanded my wandless arsenal. My control over spells I'd long since mastered had genuinely improved too, turning me into a fairly capable wizard who could make an impression in this world even without his focus.
Progress on all fronts, in short. No possessed wizards. No life-threatening Horcruxes. No basilisks roaming the corridors. I'd even found the Horcrux in the Room of Requirement. It had taken some digging through my own memory and skipping a few sessions of our little club, but I'd located the diadem of my House's founder.
I hadn't touched it. Hadn't gone near it. But I'd found it, and I planned to deal with it in the coming year. I wasn't eager to rush — I still remembered the trouble destroying the last Horcrux had caused me. And even with everything new in my arsenal, I hadn't yet learned Fiendfyre, and I had no intention of teaching myself in isolation. I wasn't suicidal.
Without that or something equally destructive, I simply had no reliable method for destroying a fragment of someone's soul. Fortunately, Sirius had already promised to consider teaching me that spell over the summer — the training grounds at the Black family manor had specialized runic arrays specifically designed to contain Fiendfyre if it slipped out of control.
So the odds of learning it without dying in the process were reasonably favorable. Though, if I was being honest with myself, I had some doubts. Spells of that caliber weren't exactly intended for students. But during our periodic meetings in Hogsmeade, Sirius had checked my skill level, and by the end of the year he'd assured me that if anyone had a real chance, I did.
Sirius himself, by his own account, had begun learning Fiendfyre right after his third year at Hogwarts. That had been his mother's rather unhinged initiative — she'd wanted to teach her son a harsh lesson and hadn't really expected him to succeed. By sixth year, however, after his escape from home, my godfather had mastered the spell to a fully functional level.
I was already, in many respects, capable of more than Sirius had been at the time of his O.W.L.s. Regular, multi-hour training sessions pushed to the edge of my limits — limits that were already expanded by mental magic and my ability to directly regulate my own emotional state — had produced results. And my magical inheritance hadn't hurt either.
By the accounts of the wizards around me — Lupin, Sirius, McGonagall, and Flitwick, who'd let it slip once or twice — I was supposed to grow into a very powerful wizard regardless of any training. Natural talent and heredity were firmly on my side. Factoring in the work I'd put in… in terms of raw magical power, I was already a match for even the most gifted seventh-years.
Not that I intended to stop there. Because however much the past year had given me, the next year might turn out to be a trial of an entirely different kind.
"So — see you at ours in a week?" Daphna asked.
I wasn't about to waste the time remaining before my fourth year on anything foolish, so I accepted the invitation from my fiancée and Agatha Greengrass to spend at least a couple of weeks as their guest that summer without a second thought.
"Of course. I can't exactly turn down the illusion magic lessons your mother promised me." I smiled brightly at my friend and at her younger sister, who was standing slightly sulky beside her, a little envious — and a little resentful — of the attention their mother was paying me.
That was the issue: Lady Agatha had taken a conspicuously active interest in me, including through letters to both her daughters, which had left Astoria nursing a mild grievance toward me and her older sister both. Nothing serious, but the young lady indulged her sulking quite regularly.
"Don't say it like that — like the only thing waiting for you at my home is practice and enchantments," Daphna said, with a small, slightly reproachful hiss in her voice.
She had changed over the course of the year. The girl who'd arrived in September had, quietly and definitively, finished becoming a young woman — one who had already developed a clear understanding of what boys could mean to girls.
"Naturally, it isn't only that," I said, smiling gently at my fiancée. "But you've been desperate for your mother's proper instruction too, and you know it. The two of us never quite got to grips with her workbooks on our own."
I understood exactly what was bothering her. And I also knew that redirecting to this particular topic would satisfy her completely.
Besides, this time the redirect didn't require any particular effort on my part. Mrs. Greengrass's instructional notes — passed along to me the year before — had been worked through by Daphna, me, and the girls to perhaps half their full depth. Even that half had been weighted heavily toward household and cosmetic charms, which we'd handled without much trouble.
Illusions were another matter entirely. True magical illusions. On a purely mechanical level, all of us had long since gotten the basic motions right. But actually producing something convincing — something real, or at minimum something beautiful — with illusion spells was still beyond us.
Agatha Greengrass's written explanations hadn't helped as much as we'd hoped. Partly because illusion magic had never quite been a top priority for us. But I had no intention of passing up my future mother-in-law's offer. Not when I genuinely wanted to understand this branch of magic properly.
However specialized it was, the potential of illusions was enormous. And Daphna and Astoria — let's be honest — were simply curious to learn something that was their mother's particular specialty, the work that had allowed one of the Charms masters of the age to bring something genuinely new to the field of magical study.
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