Chapter 72 - Press-ganging — Words Unspoken

In the days that followed, the Slytherins fully exercised their innate talent for reading the room and stayed exceptionally well-behaved.

Their chief troublemaker Draco Malfoy was still serving detention. Mad-Eye Moody's madness still had the students rattled. And Professor Snape was visibly in a foul mood.

Some might question this: they're Slytherins. How could they possibly be afraid of their own Head of House?

What student isn't afraid of their teacher! And this particular teacher happened to be Professor Snape!

The fact that Professor Snape didn't deduct points from Slytherin didn't mean he wouldn't criticize Slytherin students. Under normal circumstances, Professor Snape only ever let Draco Malfoy off the hook. Everyone else got the same treatment, even his own rather gifted apprentice, Prince, was always on the receiving end of his harsh, cutting attitude.

This time, both the professor's favored student and his useful apprentice had been taken down by Moody in one stroke, and the professor hadn't even been present to brazenly play favorites.

So the Slytherins retreated. Every single one of them pulled into their shell, terrified of stumbling into the line of fire.

Then why did some people still consider it a good thing?

Because at the moment, Professor Snape's flames were burning in Gryffindor's direction. He found an excuse to hand Neville Longbottom a detention, for his sixth melted cauldron. Neville was forced to disembowel toads until he nearly broke down.

Potions office.

For Neville, the most terrifying thing was no longer disemboweling toads himself. It was watching Slytherin's Prince disembowel toads.

Praeris held a thin blade in her hand, the sliver of metal spinning between her fingertips. Within seconds, a toad's innards were cleanly extracted in one piece.

Two wet splats. The toad's body and its organs dropped into separate buckets.

Neville watched in horror. He kept a toad named Trevor, and he could not handle a scene this brutal.

"Something interesting, Mr. Longbottom?" Praeris narrowed her eyes. "Or is your workload not quite sufficient?"

"No no no no!" Neville shook his head frantically.

Praeris turned and looked at the other one. "And you?"

Draco immediately dropped his gaze back to his herbs and made himself look very busy.

The situation required some explanation.

Praeris had come to the office for legitimate reasons. She was there to see Professor Snape and test the latest results of her Occlumency studies.

Neville had simply walked into Professor Snape's line of fire and been punished with processing horned toads, raw materials for the potions being prepared for the tournament.

Draco was the one with nothing better to do. He'd actually had the free time to come here specifically to mock Longbottom.

Whether Professor Snape genuinely had matters to attend to, or whether the sight of these two ignited some nameless irritation in him, remained unclear. He simply dumped them both on his apprentice and told her to finish the remaining work on top of it.

And the man himself? One swish of his robes, and he was gone, off to busy himself with whatever filthy, thankless business awaited him.

The moment Professor Snape disappeared, Draco's ferret tail went right up. He turned to Neville with a smug look. "Longbottom, you ought to thank Professor Snape. I think this will do wonders for your courage, don't you agree?"

He glanced toward Praeris, clearly expecting her agreement.

Praeris pulled open a drawer, fished out a blade, pinched it between two fingers, and disemboweled a horned toad. Her expression didn't flicker once.

That exchange just now had been her warning to them both.

Having made her point, Praeris kept her head down and her hands moving, saying without expression, "It's obvious neither of you enjoys this kind of work."

She looked at Neville. "Mr. Longbottom. Growing up in the wizarding world, you must have heard about the dangers of the Triwizard Tournament."

Neville shrank a little and nodded.

Praeris said quietly, "These horned toads are used to prepare potions for the Triwizard Tournament. They might just save a Hogwarts student's life."

"Treat this as a punishment, and this hour or two will feel very long for both of you. Treat this as a chance to learn and sharpen your own abilities, and this hour or two will be worth thinking back on."

"Praeris, you're overestimating Longbottom's brain," Draco said, his tone dismissive. "You've said all that, and I'd bet he hasn't understood a single word. This is a complete waste of your time."

Praeris set down her blade and slowly clapped 3 times. The gesture was technically praising. It felt inexplicably like mockery.

The applause faded. She said, "Very spirited, Draco. What potion is made from the Indian redwood in your hand?"

Draco fumbled. "Er — that — I know this. Right, pain-relief potion."

"Barely passing. Longbottom, what about the horned toad in yours?"

Neville clutched his toad and shook his head in a panic.

"Take a guess," Praeris said calmly. "What characteristics might a toad have?"

"Poi — poisonous?"

Praeris nodded. "Yes, poisonous. Just like with plants — near a poisonous herb, you'll often find the antidote that neutralizes it. The innards of the horned toad can be used to prepare multiple antidotes."

Neville had walked in braced to spend the whole time drowning in the horror of disemboweling toads. He quickly discovered he had no time to be afraid.

This Slytherin girl acted as though she had no idea he was hopeless. After asking about the materials in their hands, she opened the adjacent storeroom and went down the shelves one jar at a time, asking about each ingredient's effects and uses.

She wasn't stern about it. Her expression said you absolutely know this and you're certainly capable of understanding this, treating him and Draco Malfoy as if there were no fundamental difference between them.

Draco's Potions marks were excellent, and he hit his stride quickly, answering Praeris in a smooth back-and-forth rhythm. Whenever he couldn't recall something, a prompt from Praeris would snap it back into focus.

Neville, meanwhile, began sweating. He felt as though he'd learned more in this 1 hour than he had in an entire year. Even so, he found himself hazily pulled into the thought circuit Praeris had constructed, following her questions without quite deciding to.

Questions or no questions, Praeris didn't allow anyone to stop working.

Without quite noticing, Neville's pile of toads shrank at an extraordinary rate. Down, down, down again, until there were none left.

By the time he reached the very last horned toad, he was racking his brain over the properties of crocodile hearts. He'd completely forgotten how frightened he'd been at the start.

Praeris rinsed her blade with practiced ease and called over to Draco. "Draco, that's enough. Put the rest back where they belong."

Then she walked directly to the wall, retrieved a transparent bottle from the shelf, and headed toward him.

"Hold out your hands."

The tone in which Praeris said "hold out your hands" was the same tone a person uses to say "it's raining" on a grey British afternoon, perfectly matter-of-fact, utterly unremarkable.

Draco instinctively hid his hands behind his back. "What?"

"Indian redwood stains. Alcohol removes it." She glanced at him. "You clearly don't need my help, so you can manage it yourself."

Praeris couldn't be bothered to work out why Draco was wearing that expression. She only found it faintly amusing. His face looked oddly like those virtuous maidens in classical oil paintings who've just stumbled across Zeus.

She pushed the thought away, set the bottle down on the nearest surface, and turned toward Longbottom.

"Hold out your hands." Same tone. Same face.

Draco's head snapped up. "Hey — he's a Gryffindor!"

"And?" Praeris looked at him, genuinely puzzled. "Scourgify."

All the grime under Neville Longbottom's fingernails disappeared.

Draco scrubbed his own palms furiously with the alcohol, his expression stormy, and shot several glares at Longbottom in the process.

Neville didn't notice the glares at all. He turned his hands over, genuinely surprised to find not a trace of toad innards left under his nails.

Praeris had failed to test her Occlumency and done over an hour of manual labor on top of it. She was not remotely happy about this. She locked the office door and walked toward the common room with a sour look on her face.

"Why did you teach Longbottom?"

Draco had long arms and long legs. Praeris walked fast, and he kept up without any effort.

"Do you enjoy this feeling? Flint's graduated, so now you're looking for the next idiot who can give you a sense of educational accomplishment?"

Praeris stopped and gave Draco a measured look. "You seem very interested in my answer."

She was as sharp as a snake. Changes in her surroundings never escaped her notice.

The argument with Millicent in second year had given her some pause, and that was understandable. No one liked being stripped bare in front of a friend, every thought laid open with no privacy at all.

She had tried to rein in her more intrusive curiosity and give the people around her room to breathe. To the point that Millicent and the others had almost forgotten the suffocating feeling Praeris had once given them.

But Draco's behavior lately was strange. This wasn't the first time he'd been so preoccupied with her relationship with Marcus.

In first year, he'd suspected Praeris and Marcus were dating. In second year, he'd pulled her aside to warn her about the rumors going around the house. Now he was using Marcus to needle her, to question her.

Praeris had thought she and Draco had been through enough together to count for something. And yet he treated Crabbe and the others far better than he'd ever treated her.

"Hmph! Interested? Get your head on straight!" Draco turned it back on her. "You're a Slytherin, and Longbottom is a stupid Gryffindor. Do you actually think any goodwill you extend is going to come back to you?"

Praeris had a sudden flash of understanding. So it was his Slytherin sense of loyalty acting up.

She shook her head plainly. "Professor Snape told me to keep an eye on the two of you in his place. I would have much preferred to go back to my books. Longbottom was too anxious, that would have dragged down his efficiency and added to my workload."

Every toad innard Neville failed to extract was one more for Praeris to handle herself. She might be quick, but she wasn't going to work for free.

She paused. "As for whether anything extra might come of it, my political studies instructor, Miss Stewart, believes you shouldn't be stingy with small kindnesses. Sometimes they produce returns you never expected."

After graduating, Stella had entered the Ministry of Magic's Department of International Magical Cooperation, working in the International Magical Office of Law, the standing body of the International Confederation of Wizards, responsible for reviewing draft legislation on behalf of the Confederation.

Entering the same department in the same cohort was Gryffindor's Percy Weasley, who became the assistant to Department Head Crouch. The fellow treated Crouch's every word as iron law and was utterly absorbed in writing reports on cauldron-bottom thickness.

In Stella's words: just recycle some old articles, tweak the wording and the figures, and be done with it. No one was actually going to read the thing.

Stella had written in her last letter: "Complete blockhead. Hasn't worked out for a moment that Crouch is just fobbing him off."

The Slytherin-faction officials were all quietly waiting to watch him make a fool of himself, waiting for him to realize that cauldron-bottom thickness was entirely irrelevant, and that even if the report he submitted read like it had been written by someone who'd drunk bad Firewhisky, it would make absolutely no difference to anyone.

Stella hadn't missed the opportunity to bring him into her orbit, of course. Percy's ambitions sat completely at odds with the rest of the Weasley family. He was a talent worth developing.

Unfortunately, he was so outstandingly rigid that he'd turned around and lectured Stella on the importance of not cutting corners.

But that was all just Stella's workplace entertainment. Praeris still agreed with Stella's principle of casting a wide net, after all, she herself had netted Stella as a political instructor, and Granger as a secret pen pal.

"You always have your reasons." Draco still looked rather unhappy.

Praeris patted him on the shoulder. "What are you worried about? Your father must have taught you long ago how to treat people worth bringing to your side, hasn't he? What's casting bait, what's worth investing in, what makes a genuine strategic ally, you and I both know how that works."

Draco looked even more unhappy after that.

The hearts of young boys were genuinely hard to understand. They didn't have the mature desires of adults, desires you could read through common sense.

They were more like Millicent's cat. You could never work out why it had stopped eating. Could be the weather. Could be its mood. Could be Milly's fault. Could be the other roommates' fault. More likely there was no reason at all, it simply didn't want to eat, and it was going to be sulky about it.

Praeris soon had no attention left for Draco's moods, because the first Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson was coming.

Before class, the mood among the Slytherins was flat and subdued. Every student held themselves in a state of quiet vigilance.

That was only natural. Many of the families represented in this common room had once included Death Eaters.

Before long, the thud-thud of Moody's wooden leg striking the stone floor echoed from the corridor outside. He came through the door, both eyes fixed unblinkingly on the Slytherin students, and there was something in his stare that made it easy to imagine him lunging forward without warning.

"Ha, " Moody's voice was like coarse grinding stone. "What are you pulling those textbooks out for? Expecting me to stand up here and drone on at you like the rest of your teachers?"

He let the silence sit for a moment.

"No need for that."

➤ Next: S.P.E.W