Chapter 154 - The Salamander's Tail

The moment Slughorn's words fell, students from the other three houses turned like a field of sunflowers, every head swinging in unison toward where Praeris stood.

Over five-plus years, Hogwarts students had grown accustomed to Praeris's strength.

But since September, she had unexpectedly lost in the subject she excelled at most, to Harry Potter, of all people. Time and again.

Many students had assumed Praeris was finally going to stumble in Potions. Take her lumps.

No one expected that by late October, she would have already fought her way back to a clean, decisive victory.

Many students present arrived at the same thought, unprompted: As expected of the student Snape thinks so highly of.

As for the Slytherins, apart from Draco, whose face had gone pale, everyone else wore expressions of reflected glory, finally able to hold their heads high.

The moment Slughorn dismissed the class, Praeris stood and walked briskly to Harry's seat.

Harry had been stuck on one thought: the Half-Blood Prince's method actually lost. He looked up at her in surprise.

Ron wore the same expression. A jumble of thoughts tumbled through his head all at once:

What? No way.

She won, and now she's coming to gloat?

She doesn't seem like that kind of person, though.

As for what kind of person the Praeris in his mind actually was... Ron couldn't quite say. He could only sense, vaguely, that she was a different sort of good person, like Winnie, the Order of the Phoenix member. Even if Ron still held his prejudices against Slytherin.

The Slytherins, meanwhile, had no such confusion.

Closing ranks against outsiders: non-negotiable.

Without hesitation, they fell in behind Praeris, forming the same confrontational wall as before. Among them, Draco was half a beat slow. He ended up at the very back. In his own chest, he couldn't tell whether he had genuinely lagged behind, or whether he had chosen to.

Praeris was as composed as ever. No one could find a trace of smugness on her face, nor any hint of provocation. She stood before Harry like just another person passing through.

With a distinctly academic air, she asked politely, "Potter, may I take a look at your Reviving Tonic?"

"Er... sure." Harry searched himself for other words and found none.

Praeris lowered her gaze to his potion, blinked, and tilted her head slightly to one side, as if turning something over in her mind.

After a long moment, she nodded.

"I see. Your method is different, but it's also correct. If you were more practiced in the brewing process, it would be hard to say who would have won."

Praeris felt she was being perfectly polite. Exceedingly modest, even.

But in truth, she did possess that particular Slytherin pride, and Slytherin's regard for honor.

The first time she lost to Harry, she had not fully trusted Slughorn's judgment. She'd had to see Harry's work with her own eyes before she was willing to admit defeat.

This time, winning against Harry, she still didn't rely entirely on Slughorn's assessment. She had to personally look at Harry's work before she would accept her victory as complete.

This was Praeris's own extreme definition of honor: she could spend boundless effort and employ any means necessary to reach her goal, but the honor itself could not carry the slightest shadow. Not one trace.

She wanted total victory. Beyond all doubt.

Praeris looked down at Harry. "Potter. This time, I won. By my own ability alone. No one else's."

Harry's ears flushed red with anger and shame.

Praeris was simply too arrogant.

Not only did she have to win, she had to come stand in front of him and spell out exactly where he'd lost, and how. And at the very end, she had to add one final shot, making clear with every word that her victory was hers alone.

A thought surfaced in Harry's mind before he could stop it: Could it be she's already discovered...

He cut himself off. Reflexively.

In front of his former Occlumency instructor, any instability would lay his mind completely bare. Even if Harry knew she had no interest in rifling through other people's thoughts.

Am I acting like a guilty thief... Harry thought.

Having delivered her words, Praeris turned and left with crisp finality. Not a trace of lingering.

As if, having defeated Harry, both he and his work had become somewhat dull and unremarkable in her eyes.

But that was only Harry's perception.

In truth, Praeris still held a high degree of recognition of Harry's potion-making instincts, and wariness toward them. Enough to keep her from growing complacent in her own research.

Still, this victory wasn't meaningless. At the very least, it proved that this opponent was not invincible.

And this win over Harry freed up enough of her attention to turn back toward the problem she'd been holding at arm's length: breaking Dumbledore's curse.

At present, the treatment for Dumbledore was divided into two parts.

Professor Snape prioritized stability. His focus was controlling the spread of the curse, keeping it confined as much as possible to Dumbledore's finger. It was no easy task, without that treatment, Dumbledore and Katie Bell would both have been dead long ago.

Praeris took the opposite approach. With Professor Snape providing the safety net, she took the risky road, combing through the library, the book collections from Knockturn Alley, and every scrap of information Winnie had come across, trying out methods from ancient texts and half-forgotten legends.

Every bottle of antidote Praeris produced made Professor Snape frown. She could even see, on his face, a rare expression: genuine concern for Dumbledore's life.

"The venom gland of a salamander?"

Snape's gaze moved slowly from the potion vial, thick, dark-brown slurry pooled at the bottom, to his student's face.

Salamander blood had healing and restorative properties. But the venom gland was something else entirely. That was a lethal poison. The kind that killed.

Praeris met his gaze with steady black eyes and nodded earnestly. "Yes. Actually, I also considered the blastema of the salamander's tail. You know — salamanders have a remarkable ability to regenerate..."

It was an extremely high-risk approach.

Her plan: Professor Snape would drive the entire curse into Dumbledore's finger. They would cut the finger off in one clean stroke. Then, using the blastema from a salamander's tail, they would brew a potion capable of limb regeneration and grow Dumbledore a brand-new finger.

Yes, there were potions like Skele-Gro in the magical world. But Skele-Gro could only grow bones back. It couldn't regrow a severed limb.

In an old tome of witchcraft notes, a bargain Winnie had scavenged from a secondhand stall in Knockturn Alley, a steal at only 10 Sickles (about 0.6 pounds), scrawled in the margins was a legend:

A legendary wizard born of flame cut off the tail of his companion salamander and gave it to his Muggle friend. The Muggle, who had lost the use of his legs, swallowed the flame-wreathed tail and gained new limbs.

Praeris had done her research. Salamanders did possess powerful regenerative abilities. Their blood carried healing properties, that much was documented.

Which raised a bold hypothesis: could the legend of the salamander's tail hold some truth?

She had pored over a vast number of texts and zeroed in on the blastema of the salamander's tail. She planned to request a few live specimens from Professor Snape to begin her limb-regeneration experiments.

A strange expression appeared on Snape's face. One not easily interpreted. His brows pulled together, lips pressed into a taut line, head tilting slightly to one side.

After a long moment, his student of over five years finally decoded it.

He was cursing her in his head. And he'd made only the most cursory effort to hide it.

Polite. But not very.

Snape's thoughts were a tangle. His mind was full of noise:

Am I the Dark wizard, or is she? Can I truly keep Dumbledore alive while she does this? And what exactly is that idiotic white-headed eagle of Brown's scavenging all day?

In his mind, Winnie Brown had become the magical equivalent of a junk-heap collector, turning up secondhand books that bordered on utter nonsense everywhere she went and poisoning his student with them in the process.

"Miss," Snape said, in his most sardonic tone, "should I thank you for your confidence in me? Your expectations of me are remarkably high. It appears you believe I can drive the entire curse into Dumbledore's finger. Is that it?"

"Can't you?"

Praeris asked with complete sincerity. She had the utmost faith in her teacher.

The plan had two points of difficulty.

First: Snape had to drive the entire curse into a single location, Dumbledore's finger. Otherwise, even if they cut the finger off and regenerated it, the curse would still be living somewhere inside Dumbledore's body.

Second: Praeris had to guarantee she could achieve limb regeneration. Otherwise, Dumbledore would spend his remaining years missing a finger, like Peter Pettigrew.

And it wasn't just any finger. It was the index finger of Dumbledore's wand hand.

Snape gave a cold laugh. "First: I am limiting the spread of the curse. Not driving it to a single location. These are not the same thing."

"Second: Dumbledore's entire right hand is affected by the curse — not merely the finger. The finger is simply where it is most visible."

His meaning was clear. To carry out any limb-regeneration plan, it wouldn't be a matter of cutting off a finger. They would have to cut off the entire cursed right hand.

Dumbledore wielded his wand with his right hand. If the regeneration failed, he would either have to switch to his less-practiced left hand, or fall back on wandless magic entirely.

Against an opponent like Voldemort, any minor deficiency could become a fatal error. And most wizards knew that wandless magic was far weaker than magic performed with a wand.

Praeris drew a sharp breath. She hadn't realized the condition was this severe. If the whole hand was involved, the success rate of this plan had just dropped considerably.

Snape delivered his verdict. "Miss. Don't you think your approach to healing is a little too Gryffindor?"

For Snape to call something "too Gryffindor" was practically synonymous with calling it reckless and absurd.

Praeris lowered her head in embarrassment.

This plan left zero margin for error, for all three of them.

Snape had to ensure the curse didn't spread to the arm. If it did, they'd escalate from cutting off a hand to cutting off an entire arm, and the regeneration risk would skyrocket.

Praeris had to guarantee the regeneration would work. If it didn't, their side's most important fighter would lose half his combat strength.

Dumbledore had to have the boldness and the will to allow any of it to proceed at all.

Praeris scratched her head, frustrated. "Then..."

"Then let's leave it at that for now." Snape straightened up, voice level. "Go to Professor Slughorn. In my name, ask him for some horned toads."

Praeris stared at him.

She hadn't expected Professor Snape to agree to this plan of hers, the one he'd just called overly Gryffindor.

She stammered, "You... you're agreeing?"

Snape swept a cold glance over her. "Obviously — no. But as for Dumbledore, that's another matter entirely."

A Gryffindor-style plan should be left for a Gryffindor to worry about, shouldn't it?

Praeris obtained a small half-bucket of horned toads from Slughorn without difficulty.

The only thing that irritated her was that Slughorn had the nerve to ask whether her success in today's lesson had come under Professor Snape's personal guidance.

Praeris felt a flicker of irritation she couldn't quite suppress, and said coolly, "Sir. A trifling matter like this hardly warrants troubling Professor Snape, now does it?"

Slughorn seemed entirely oblivious to the offense. He moved on naturally to asking about her connections with certain Slytherin graduates.

"Speaking of which." Slughorn seemed to recall something. "I once taught a student with the surname Prince — a few years after your Professor Snape."

"Ah!" He finally placed it. "Yes, a Gryffindor. Silvia Prince. A witch with a remarkable talent for Divination. I haven't heard her name come up since, though..."

Praeris brushed him off with deliberate slowness. "Oh? Is that so? What a coincidence."

She left the office carrying her little bucket, and her mood was thoroughly foul.

"Crabbe?" Praeris stopped on the ground floor, frowning. "What are you doing? Practicing circus tricks?"

"Praeris!" Crabbe bellowed. "My feet — my feet!"

It was, she had to admit, a spectacular sight. She had never seen toes that long in her life.

They had burst clean through his shoes, shredding through the leather, making his already enormous feet look almost dainty by comparison. And they were still growing. No signs of stopping.

It was, objectively, quite funny. Praeris fought hard to keep the corners of her mouth from creeping upward, reminding herself: the person currently living this must be absolutely mortified. Do not laugh.

She pulled her wand from her pocket. "Finite Incantatem."

Crabbe's toes stopped growing. He immediately bellowed again: "They haven't gone back to normal!"

Praeris shot him a look. "By all means, shout louder. Let Filch come and catch me using magic in the corridor."

This was a jinx she hadn't encountered before. To restore the toes, she'd either need the counter-spell to shrink them, or lift the jinx entirely.

Crabbe was lucky. Standing in front of him was Praeris, and counter-jinxes happened to be one of her stronger suits.

It took several minutes. But using the method Winnie had taught her, Praeris finally unraveled the simple little prank, and Crabbe's feet were, at last, his own again.

➤ Next: Dido's Disappointment