The first Tuesday session with Dumbledore began at seven in the evening, after dinner, in a room off the corridor behind the Transfiguration classroom that Ron had not known existed until Dumbledore directed him to it.
It was not large — perhaps thirty feet by twenty, the stone walls bare of everything except a single high window and the specific quality of a space that had been used for significant work and had absorbed that use over time. The floor was stone, clear of furniture. There were two chairs against the wall, which Dumbledore had apparently placed there in advance and which communicated, in their arrangement, that the sessions would involve sitting eventually but would not begin there.
Dumbledore was already in the room when Ron arrived. He was standing in the centre of the space with the quality he had in sessions rather than in the headmaster's office — no desk between them, no institutional setting, simply the man himself in a room cleared for the specific purpose of understanding what someone could do.
'Mr Weasley,' he said. 'Before we begin, I should like to assess what we are beginning from. It would be inefficient to teach you something you have already learned, and inadvisable to attempt something before you're ready. Both errors have costs.'
'Agreed,' Ron said.
'Show me something difficult,' Dumbledore said. 'Not your most difficult — I'd prefer to arrive at that gradually. Something that requires sustained output and precision simultaneously.'
Ron thought for a moment. Then he cast the field binding — the sustained-output version he had developed in fourth year, the one that covered a fixed area and dampened offensive magic within it, anchored to the floor and ceiling simultaneously. He held it for sixty seconds, maintaining the precision on the edges that kept the field clean rather than diffuse.
Dumbledore watched. His expression did not change during the sixty seconds, but something behind it was updating with the focused attention of someone receiving significant information.
Ron released the field.
'How long have you been able to do that,' Dumbledore said.
'Since fourth year,' Ron said. 'The theoretical framework is Arithmancy-based. The anchor method I developed from the ward construction work.'
'And the output cost,' Dumbledore said.
'Sustainable for approximately four minutes at that intensity,' Ron said. 'At a higher output level I could increase the field's coverage area significantly but reduce the duration. I've been working on the balance.'
Dumbledore was quiet for a moment. Then he said, with the specific quality he had when he was deciding how to begin something: 'One of the principles I discovered with Grindelwald, before we diverged completely, was that the gap between power and application is not narrowed by adding more power. It's narrowed by understanding what the power is actually doing at the point of use. Most witches and wizards never develop this understanding because they find their power sufficient without it. You will not find your power sufficient without it in the situations you are preparing for. So we begin there.' He looked at Ron steadily. 'Can you show me that field binding again, and tell me, while you hold it, what the magic is actually doing at the anchor points?'
Ron cast it again and began to speak.
The session lasted two hours and covered less ground than it would have with a less advanced student and more ground than it would have with a less receptive one. At the end of it, Dumbledore sat in one of the chairs against the wall with the quality of someone at the end of something that had required a great deal of attention and had found the attention worthwhile.
'Tuesday evenings,' he said. 'Same time. I will tell you in advance what we're covering so you can prepare.'
'Duelling principles,' Ron said. 'Starting from the anchor point analysis and moving forward.'
'Starting from there,' Dumbledore confirmed. He looked at Ron over his spectacles with the expression he rarely showed — not the benign mild thing, not the headmaster's attention, but the quality of someone who had been waiting for a specific kind of conversation and had found it. 'You've been preparing for this conversation for two years.'
'Three,' Ron said as he walked out of the office. 'Since I arrived. Goodnight professor'
Madam Pomfrey's sessions had moved in their fourth year from maintenance to education, and in their fifth year moved again — this time into something that had the quality of field medicine rather than hospital medicine, which was a different thing entirely and required a different frame.
She made this explicit on the first session of term.
'What we have been building,' she said, setting the diagnostic chart on the table between them with the brisk efficiency of someone who had prepared for this, 'is a working healer's vocabulary. What we are going to build this year is judgment. The ability to make the correct decision in the absence of the correct tools, in the incorrect environment, with insufficient time.' She looked at him. 'The situations you are preparing for will not take place in a hospital wing.'
'No,' he said.
'Then we stop pretending they will.' She opened the chart. 'First scenario. You are in an open field. One of your group has taken a Blasting Curse to the left leg. The leg is intact but severely damaged — arterial involvement. You have your wand, a basic potions kit, and whatever you carry as a matter of habit. Walk me through the first four minutes.'
He walked her through them. She interrupted three times — not to correct, but to ask him to explain the reasoning behind each decision, which was how she had been teaching him since second year and which he understood was the point: not the actions, but the architecture of the decisions that produced the actions.
By the end of the session they had covered four scenarios. He had been correct, broadly, in all four. She had found gaps in the reasoning in all four and had addressed them with the specific clinical precision of someone who considered gaps in reasoning more important to address than gaps in technique.
'The Pomfrey standard,' she said, at the end, putting the chart away. 'Since you seem to have adopted it informally, I should clarify what it actually is. It is not perfection. It is not even consistency. It is the correct decision at the critical moment. Everything before the critical moment is preparation. Everything after is recovery. The moment itself is the only thing that cannot be recovered from if you get it wrong.'
He nodded.
'You will get it wrong sometimes,' she said. 'What I am teaching you is how to get it right often enough that the people around you survive the times you get it wrong.'
He looked at her. 'Is that how you think about your own work?'
She looked back with the quality she had when she received a question she had been asked before and had a considered answer for. 'It is how every healer who has worked in difficult conditions thinks about their work,' she said. 'Eventually.' She picked up the chart. 'Same time next Thursday.'