Chapter 170 - Settling Accounts — Tears Unshed

Praeris shot him a long look, sneered, and turned and walked away without a moment's hesitation.

Then her steps stopped.

She spun around and fixed her gaze on Harry, and the look in her eyes made his skin crawl.

Harry dawdled until only he and Slughorn remained in the classroom, hoping to coax something useful out of the man.

But Slughorn seemed to have noticed the rift between him and Praeris, and offered consolation instead: "Harry, this is something the strong cannot avoid. Athens could not stand Sparta, and Sparta could not tolerate Athens — isn't that right?"

Slughorn was referring to the Peloponnesian War.

Athens and Sparta had once joined forces to defeat the Persian Empire, but the Delian League under Athens kept expanding, its methods increasingly heavy-handed, and the Peloponnesian League under Sparta grew suspicious. The two sides ended up fighting each other to the death.

In Slughorn's view, if two powerful geniuses had no conflict whatsoever, that would be the strange thing.

But Harry knew the truth was nothing like that. He tried to steer the conversation toward Horcruxes, but the moment the word left his mouth, Slughorn's expression changed completely. Every trace of his cheerful smile vanished.

Before Harry could get anything more out of him, Slughorn stormed out and slammed the door, leaving Harry standing alone.

Maybe he really should try Praeris's methods. The ones for getting inside people's heads.

For a moment, frustration simmered through him, at the failure of the whole mission, at Ron and Hermione's attitudes, and at Praeris.

What infuriated him even more was that Hermione wanted him to admit his mistake to Praeris.

"Did you catch that? Pra — Talia already knew you beat her by relying on something else," Hermione said, every word righteous. "You should tell her about the Half-Blood Prince! We just asked her how to deal with Slughorn, and now you've gone and made her furious!"

Even now, Hermione kept her voice down, watching for ears in the walls.

Harry said, irritable, "You think I don't want to? I tested the spells from the Prince's book on Crabbe, and she was the one who undid them! If I tell her the truth now, won't that make her even angrier?"

"I told you ages ago not to use spells from that book!" Hermione's eyes went wide. "What if one of them was some kind of dark curse —"

"I know it wasn't!" Harry said urgently. "It was just a spell that makes your toenails grow. And later, when Crabbe annoyed her, she used the exact same spell on him!"

"Talia isn't like you — she knows her spells!" Hermione shot back. "Professor Brown used to review spells for a living. And Talia has taught us so many of them herself!"

Hermione insisted Harry come clean to Praeris. Harry insisted he wouldn't. In the end, he was forced to say, "Once I get the memory Dumbledore wants from Slughorn, I'll tell her everything. All right?"

Hermione stormed off, tossing one last line over her shoulder: "It had better be!"

Harry scratched his head in agitation and said to Ron, "Has she been like this the whole time?"

Ron had stayed silent throughout the argument. Now, he looked equally unhappy. "How would I know! I'm not her Will!"

Right. Now Ron and Hermione were at odds. Hermione and Harry were at odds. All they needed was for Harry and Ron to add some gunpowder to the mix.

What made it even harder to believe, and here Praeris meant Hermione specifically, was that Hermione had failed to find anything about Horcruxes in the library. Nothing except one useless line in Magick Moste Evile.

"Maybe we should ask Talia, but she's definitely still furious right now," Hermione said, biting her nails.

She'd already forgotten her anger at Harry for using the bezoar as a shortcut. But she hadn't forgotten to push Harry to confess to Praeris.

Harry pursed his lips. "I don't think Talia is more knowledgeable than you."

Hermione said, perfectly serious, "Thank you for the compliment. But I think she is."

Hermione believed she was a clever witch, but her cleverness and Praeris's were not the same kind. She still needed to go to the library to look things up. Praeris's brain was a library of a different sort entirely.

The person they kept muttering about had, after leaving the classroom, fallen into something beyond ordinary fury.

Of course she had seen the textbook on Harry's desk this time. That battered copy of Advanced Potion-Making, covered in dense, tiny, rounded handwriting.

Handwriting that bore a striking resemblance to Professor Snape's.

Not that it was identical to the handwriting Professor Snape used when marking homework. Professor Snape's current handwriting was more flowing, more elegant than that.

The reason she connected them at all traced back to the books she had seen in his office during her first year.

In the bookcases of his office, among the countless volumes on potions, herbology, and magical creatures, Praeris suspected he didn't much care for the last category, but liked certain parts of those creatures for use as ingredients, there were Muggle books hidden among them.

"Our Slytherin Head of House reads Muggle books?" First-year Praeris crouched in front of the bookcase, poking around with all the curiosity of a Niffler on the hunt.

As it turned out, he not only read them, he underlined passages and made notes. Even more astonishing was how many there were. Not just a few. A great many.

He had read Shakespeare's Sonnets, underlining "Thou art thy mother's glass," and drawing a double line under "O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind! Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?"*

He had read Macbeth. Tracing the chronology of the annotations, Praeris found he had underlined "Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires."*

Beside "I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er," he had written: Beggars can't be choosers.

Then he had underlined "The man who taught murder ends up murdered himself; the man who drops poison into a goblet ends up drinking it himself."*

And finally, he had copied out this line in full: "I 'gin to be aweary of the sun, and wish the estate o' the world were now undone."*

On those last two pages, the paper seemed to have been dampened by some kind of liquid. Praeris had thought about it. Probably alcohol. Yet she had almost never seen the professor drink.

Beyond these, there were many, many more books, buried in the deepest recesses of the bookcase, every one of them sending up choking clouds of dust when lifted.

The ambitious undone by desire. It seemed a tragic footnote to Slytherin.

Reading the professor's Macbeth in her first year, Praeris had felt countless worries rise in her.

If we come to Slytherin because of some kindred quality in our souls, then the pain the professor once suffered, is that the very path I am about to walk?

Back then, Praeris did many things, yet always felt hesitation, confusion, and uncertainty about what she had done.

It was unlike her. She had never shown the slightest mercy to Fiona or Sophia.

But she revered Professor Snape, who taught her then, more than she could say. She could not help being shaken by his reflections, just as Muggle primary school children listened to their teachers.

(Of course, a few years later they turned into those universally dreaded London teens.)

With such an impression burned into her memory, Praeris would never forget the handwriting in those books. That dense, tiny, rounded script.

The professor did help Harry Potter. Yet he loathed Potter from the bottom of his heart. It was contradictory. And it was real.

But if the professor ever learned that Potter was using his textbook to show off, Praeris felt as though a fishbone were lodged in her throat, stuck neither up nor down, utterly sickening.

The books from the professor's bookcase crashed and churned inside her, making it impossible to focus on anything at all.

She didn't want to believe the book in Potter's hands was the professor's. But too many clues converged on the same answer.

The Potions classroom had originally been Professor Snape's. Professor Slughorn had reached casually into the cupboard and pulled out two books for Potter and Ron. How could it possibly not be Professor Snape's?

The knowledge in a single book had allowed Potter to surpass her with ease. It had given her a sense of crisis. It had forced her to spend so much time honing her potions skills.

But if the opponent she'd actually been facing was, in fact, a seventeen-year-old Professor Snape, then none of this was so surprising after all.

Around half past three in the afternoon, Praeris stood before the familiar wooden door.

After lunch, she had found Astoria playing chess with a classmate.

Astoria answered without even asking what the question was for: "Defense Against the Dark Arts... the most recent class I know of is second period this afternoon. It's the Hufflepuffs in our year."

Praeris used that window of time to go to Professor Snape's office.

Getting in without leaving a trace was not easy, especially since Barty Crouch Jr. had used the place as a dispensary.

But Praeris knew it well. It was no different from coming home.

The Unlocking Charm was useless. Professor Snape had used an Anti-Alohomora. The door had to be picked with wire. After picking the lock, she had to temporarily dispel the wards set inside, then restore them when she left.

She followed the path she had taken before, found the lower bookcase, and pulled open the handle.

COUGH, COUGH, COUGH! The dust was incredible. Professor, all these years, and you haven't cleaned even once?

She pulled out a book at random. Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Ha. The French.

"Believing that with cheap tears we can wash away all our stains."

Praeris imagined that when her teacher read this line, he would have worn his usual sardonic smile.

Many people thought Professor Snape was stern and cold. In truth, he smiled quite often. But those smiles were mocking smiles, smiles reserved for fools, or the kind born of fury so extreme it tipped into laughter.

Praeris ran her fingers over the ink on the page: Tears are cheap currency, the self-righteous redemption of cowards.

This handwriting fell somewhere between the annotations in Harry's textbook and the professor's current script. Not enough to prove anything on its own.

Praeris then found the copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets she had looked at before, and confirmed what she already suspected.

At this point, Praeris found she was no longer angry.

Or rather, she had gone past anger.

She replaced Les Fleurs du Mal and the Sonnets in silence. Her heart stirred, but she held herself to her usual rule, she did not probe into Professor Snape's past.

This was the unspoken understanding between them. The respect they kept for each other. Professor Snape never asked about Dipple and Sylvia. Praeris learned to close her eyes in turn, and not pry into his.

She raised her wand and murmured: Reparo Maxima.

The disturbed dust rustled softly and settled back into place. The bookcase clicked shut.

Praeris restored the office as she went, her pale face blank, nothing left in it but a cold, empty calm.

February in the Scottish Highlands brought rain almost every day. Even when it didn't, the sky stayed heavy and gray. The snowfields had given way to a thin layer of brownish-green scrub, but the wind was still fierce, driving hard from one end of the corridor to the other.

Harry had been watching Malfoy closely for days. The moment he spotted anything suspicious, he stowed the Marauder's Map and rushed in the direction it had shown.

He was so caught up in his own thoughts that when he rounded a corner, he nearly walked straight into someone standing directly in his path.

"Who — Praeris?" Harry nearly choked.

This was a corridor. Wasn't Praeris worried about someone seeing the two of them together?

Praeris stared at him without blinking, held out one hand, and said, cold as ice: "The book."

"What book?" Harry had no idea what she meant.

Praeris let out a mocking smile and stepped closer. "Can't bear to part with it? Advanced Potion-Making!"

"Don't you have your own?" Harry shrugged. "You're asking me for one?"

Praeris bared her teeth and looked at him the way you'd look at a dog. "I mean that old, battered copy of Advanced Potion-Making. Feels good, using someone else's things? Feels great riding someone else's brilliance and calling yourself a genius? Being the Chosen One wasn't enough, so now you need to be a Potions prodigy too, just to fill that insatiable pit of yours?"

She was almost beyond caring what she said. She knew perfectly well that Harry had never wanted to be the Chosen One, that he was even embarrassed by it, and yet she used it against him anyway.

"What's it to you?" The fire in Harry flared up at once. "Whether you lose to me or to someone else, what difference does it make? You're still the loser either way. Been at the top so long you can't handle one loss?"

After the argument with Hermione, Harry had felt uneasy. He'd already been thinking, quietly, about how to eventually tell Praeris the truth.

But ever since Slughorn had first made a grand performance of praising him, Harry had been trapped. He found himself driven by something called vanity, and he couldn't bring himself to admit he wasn't as impressive as everyone seemed to think.

Since first year, Harry had been called out more times than he could count. This was just one more. And yet, at first, he'd held onto a sliver of hope that the whole thing might simply blow over. Then came the task of extracting information from Slughorn, and that hope had grown harder and harder to hold onto.

➤ Next: My cousin — Words Unspoken