The Old Hogwarts Try

Harry did his best. That was the trouble. He did his best from the moment he woke on Monday to the moment he fell into his four-poster, and his best did not seem to get him very far.

The castle, for a start, would not stay still. There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts, by Hermione's count, and Harry was prepared to believe that every one of them had it in for him. Some were wide and grand, some narrow and crumbling, and a surprising number had a step that vanished the moment you trusted your weight to it. Worse, they moved. You set off up a staircase to the fourth floor and arrived, after a slow and stately swing that nobody had warned you about, at a blank wall on the fifth. Doors were no better. Some would only open if you asked nicely, some would only open if you tickled them in the right place, and some were only pretending to be doors at all and were, on closer inspection, solid wall. The people in the portraits went visiting, so that you could never rely on the lady with the lute being where you had left her, and the suits of armour, Harry was almost sure, walked about at night.

Then there was Peeves. Harry had met bullies before. He had lived with one. Peeves was a bully with no body to hit, which made him a great deal worse. If you asked him the way he sent you the wrong way, delighted. He tipped wastepaper baskets on people from the gallery above the Entrance Hall, pulled rugs out from under first-years in full view of the fifth-years, and once, when Harry and Ron were already late for Transfiguration, pelted them the length of a corridor with pieces of chalk while singing a song about Harry's hair. Ron called him a git, and worse. Harry thought Ron was being generous.

It took him most of the week to learn that the whole school was staring at him. They queued up outside classrooms on tiptoe to get a look, doubled back along corridors to pass him again, and whispered behind their hands. Harry wished they wouldn't. He had enough to do finding his way to lessons, and when he got there the real difficulty began.

For it had turned out that there was a very great deal more to magic than pointing a wand and saying a few words in Latin. Latin was what it sounded like, anyway. Harry had never been any good at the little of it they'd had at his old school, and he had hoped nobody at Hogwarts would notice. It made no difference. Everything was new, everything was astonishing, and nearly all of it was strange in a way that would have made Uncle Vernon's moustache stand on end and sent Aunt Petunia straight to the floor in a faint.

Take Astronomy. Harry had assumed, in so far as he had thought about it at all, that the stars were something little old ladies bothered with, the sort who read the horoscopes in the magazines Aunt Petunia bought at the newsagent. He said as much to Hermione on Wednesday night, as they climbed to the top of the tallest tower at midnight with their telescopes under their arms.

'That's Astrology,' said Hermione at once. 'This is Astronomy. They're different.'

'Right,' said Harry.

'Though of course they're very closely linked. The old sorcerers thought the planets governed magic itself. Greek ones and Roman ones. Professor Sinistra says the phase of the moon affects almost everything, Divination, obviously, and Potions, and whole families of charms and curses that only work properly on a waxing moon, or only on a waning one. I'm a Virgo, so naturally I've read a lot about it.'

'Naturally,' said Harry, who had no idea what a Virgo was and did not want to find out at midnight.

Professor Sinistra was a tall, severe witch who said very little and expected her classes to say less. They lay on their backs on the cold stone of the tower top, and she walked among them and pointed with a long thin finger at the sky, and they drew what she pointed at. Harry drew the Plough three times before she accepted it, and by the end of the lesson he had learned the names of twenty-two stars, a chart of the moons of Jupiter, and the fact that Hermione Granger could whisper the Latin name of a constellation faster than he could find it.

Then there was History of Magic. This was the only lesson at Hogwarts taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old and very dull when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff-room fire, and had got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him in the armchair, and in Ron's opinion he hadn't noticed yet. Nobody had told him. Harry suspected that nobody dared get close enough for fear they'd be bored to death. He drifted in through the blackboard, opened his notes, and read them aloud in a voice like a bath draining, and within five minutes the room had the glazed, far-off look of a congregation on a hot Sunday.

The notes were full of names and dates and the doings of what Professor Binns called the most ancient and noble houses. Wizards, it was becoming clear to Harry, set a great deal of store by their blood. There were lists of who had married whom going back nine hundred years, and whether the match had been pure on both sides, and Professor Binns gave these out in exactly the voice he used for goblin rebellions, which was to say no voice at all.

'What does it even mean?' Harry said to Ron afterwards, as they fought their way out into the corridor with the Slytherins, who had the same lesson, pushing out of the other door. 'Pure?'

'It's how it's always been with wizards,' said Ron, shrugging. 'Mum's always on about it. She says we might not have much, but the Weasleys are still an old family and a proper one, and blood is power. Dunno what she means by it, really. Fred says it means we can't afford new robes but we can trace them back to a goat.'

'Blood is power because it still is,' said Hermione, who had come up behind them with her bag over her shoulder and the look of somebody who has been waiting all lesson to say something. 'The Celts used blood in their rites, and so did the Norse. Druidic magic was practically all blood, oaths and bindings and things. And then the Normans came over with William, and the big Norman wizarding families won him the Conquest with dark magic, mostly, and the old Anglo-Saxon families were light wizards, you see, much more pagan, and they lost, and the Normans have looked down on everyone else ever since. It's all in A History of Magic, and in Blood and Bone by Bathilda Bagshot, which isn't on the list but you really ought to...'

'Hermione,' said Ron. 'You're as boring as Binns. Shut up.'

'My family goes back further than that,' said a cool, drawling voice.

Dracina Malfoy had stopped a few feet away, with Crabbe and Goyle at her shoulders. She was not looking at Ron or Hermione. She was looking, as she always seemed to be looking, at Harry.

'The Malfoys were in Britain before there was a Britain,' she said. 'Father has the family tree in the drawing room. It takes up the whole wall.'

'That's not right, though,' said Hermione, before anybody could stop her. 'The Malfoys came over from Normandy. With William the Conqueror. Armand Malfoy was given his land in Wiltshire by William himself. It says so in...'

'I know what it says.' Two spots of pink had appeared on Dracina's cheeks. 'I am a great deal more English than you are, Granger, with your great bushy hair, big nose, and your teeth. Father warned me about people like you.'

Harry wondered what Dracina was talking about. Aunt Petunia once warned Dudley and Harry about Uncle Vernon's boss who also had a big nose and curly hair. The Goblins of Gringotts reminded Harry of that man which put him on edge around them.

He spoke up

"Do you mean the J-"

But Dracina got there first.

'Mudbloods,' she said. 'I mean.' looking oddly terse at Harry.

Ron drew a sharp breath, as though somebody had trodden on his foot. Hermione looked at the floor. Her ears had gone red, and she said nothing at all, which Harry had never once known her to do.

'What?' said Harry. 'What did she say?'

'Hermione's annoying,' said Ron, and his voice had gone oddly tight. 'But that's no excuse. That's a filthy word, Malfoy. You don't say that.'

'You're a fine one to talk, Weasley,' said Dracina. 'I've heard the sort of language that comes out of you. I am a Malfoy. I don't need to use lower class swear words like you. I was simply stating a fact about what Granger is.' She turned her grey eyes on Harry, and her voice softened a shade. 'I've said it before, Potter, and I'll say it again, because you plainly weren't brought up to know better. You ought to be keeping company with your own kind. The Potters are an old family, an ancient and pure family. There's no need to go slumming it with the Weasleys. You'd do far better allied with us.'

Harry had not had a good week. He had been lost, laughed at, chalked, stared at, and told the names of twenty-two stars at one in the morning, and he found that he had no patience left for Dracina Malfoy.

'I told you on the train,' he said, very coldly. 'I can tell who the wrong sort are. You're not the sort of girl I'd want for a friend.'

For a moment she only stared at him. Then that same spoiled look from the train station came over her face. She said the first thing that came into her head, which was, ' Fine then, pottyhead!'

Harry felt a bubbling laugh force itself out of him. He couldn't help it. It was the worst insult he had ever heard in his life, worse than anything Dudley had managed in ten years of trying, and it had come out of her so grandly. Ron snorted. Even Hermione looked up.

Dracina went scarlet to the roots of her white-blonde hair. She opened her mouth, shut it, and turned on her heel, and Crabbe and Goyle lumbered after her down the corridor.

'You'll see! Come along, boys!' she snapped at Crabbe and Goyle like she was ordering the posh wine Aunt Petunia preferred.

'Pottyhead,' said Ron, wiping his eyes. 'Blimey.'

Harry looked at Hermione, who was still rather pink. 'What did it mean? The word?'

'It means somebody with Muggle parents,' said Hermione quietly. 'It means dirty blood. I read about it.' And she walked off towards the library before he could say anything else.

Harry did his best in Charms, too. Professor Flitwick was a tiny wizard who had to stand on a stack of books to see over his desk, and who gave a squeak and toppled off them when he reached Harry's name in the register. The lesson after that was all theory, and the theory was all wand movements, the swish and the flick and the difference between the two, and Harry's wand would not swish in the least. He did his best in Transfiguration, which was taught by Professor McGonagall, who had turned her desk into a pig and back again before any of them had sat down, and who warned them that anybody messing about in her class would leave it and not come back. After that she had them trying to turn a matchstick into a needle. By the end of the lesson Hermione's match had gone silver and pointed at one end, and Professor McGonagall had shown it to the class. Harry's match was still a match, though he thought it looked slightly more tired than it had.

He was nearly giving up hope of ever being good at anything when Ron reminded him of Defence Against the Dark Arts.

'That's where they do the real spells,' Ron said on Thursday, as they went down to the classroom. 'The good ones. Hexes and jinxes and how to block them. Charlie says you learn a Shield Charm in the first year, if the teacher's any good.'

Harry's spirits lifted. A Shield Charm sounded exactly like the sort of thing he had come to Hogwarts for.

The classroom stank of garlic. It hung in the air so thickly that Dean Thomas, who sat at the back, spent the whole lesson with his sleeve over his nose. Professor Quirrell stood at the front in his purple turban and stammered. He stammered through the register, he stammered through what might have been an introduction to the subject if anyone could have followed it, and when Seamus asked him whether it was true he had fought a vampire in Romania, he went white and knocked over his inkwell. The turban, Ron said afterwards, was stuffed with garlic too, so the vampire couldn't come for him in the night. Harry thought that was a very good story, and a great deal more interesting than the man who was supposed to be in it. They had learned nothing at all in an hour and a half, and he came out of the room feeling as flat as he had felt all week.

On Friday morning, for the first time, Harry and Ron found the Great Hall without getting lost once.

'What've we got?' said Harry, reaching for the porridge.

'Double Potions. With the Slytherins,' said Ron. 'Snape's Head of Slytherin. Everyone says he favours them. We'll find out.'

'Wish McGonagall favoured us,' said Harry. She was Head of Gryffindor, and it had not stopped her setting them a foot and a half of parchment on the Transfiguration of inanimate objects the day before.

The post came in. Harry was used to it by now, though it had given him a fright on the first morning, when a hundred owls had come pouring through the high windows in the middle of breakfast and swooped the length of the tables, dropping letters and parcels into laps. So far Hedwig had brought him nothing. She sometimes came to nibble his ear and take a corner of toast before flying off to sleep in the Owlery with the school owls. This morning she landed between the marmalade and the sugar bowl and dropped a note on his plate.

Harry tore it open. The writing was large and untidy and leaned in several directions at once.

Harry,

I know you lot get Friday afternoons free. Fancy a cup of tea about three? Want to hear how your first week's gone. Send Hedwig back with an answer.

Hagrid

Harry borrowed Ron's quill and wrote Yes please, see you then on the back, and Hedwig took it and went.

It was as well he had Hagrid's tea to look forward to, because Potions turned out to be the worst thing that had happened to him yet.

At the start-of-term feast Harry had got the idea that Professor Snape did not like him. By the end of the first Potions lesson he knew he had got it wrong. Snape did not dislike Harry. Snape hated him.

Potions was taught in a dungeon. It was colder than the castle above, and it would have been creepy enough without the pickled things that floated in jars along every wall. Snape took the register as Flitwick had, and like Flitwick he stopped at Harry's name.

'Ah,' he said softly. 'Harry Potter. How very... famous.'

Behind Snape's back, Dracina Malfoy stuck out her tongue at Harry. Crabbe and Goyle sniggered.

Snape finished the names and looked up. His eyes were black, as Hagrid's were, but there was no warmth in them at all. They were cold and flat and made Harry think of deep water in the dark.

'Potion-making,' said Snape, 'is a precise art and a subtle thing.' He spoke barely above a whisper, and they heard every word. He had the same gift as Professor McGonagall of holding a room silent without seeming to try. 'There is very little foolish wand-waving in this room, and so a good many of you will doubt that it is magic at all. I do not suppose you will ever truly understand what can be done with a cauldron that simmers gently, with fumes that curl and glimmer, with liquids that slide through the veins and bewitch the mind and bind the senses. I can teach you to bottle renown, to brew glory, to put a stopper in death itself. Provided, of course, that you are not the usual collection of blockheads I am made to teach.'

Silence followed this. Harry and Ron raised their eyebrows at each other. Hermione was perched on the very edge of her stool and looked desperate to begin proving she was no blockhead.

'Potter,' said Snape suddenly. 'Powdered root of asphodel, added to an infusion of wormwood. What do I get?'

Powdered root of what, in an infusion of what? Harry looked at Ron, who looked as blank as he felt. Hermione's hand had shot into the air.

'I don't know, sir,' said Harry.

Snape's mouth curled.

'Dear me. Fame, it seems, is not everything.' He paid Hermione's hand no attention whatever. 'Let us try again. Where would you look, Potter, if I sent you to fetch me a bezoar?'

Hermione's arm stretched as high as it would go without her leaving the stool. Harry had no idea what a bezoar was. He tried not to look at the Slytherin side of the room, where Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle were shaking with laughter and Malfoy was making a rude gesture at him behind her hand.

'I don't know, sir.'

'Didn't think to open a book before you came, Potter?'

Harry made himself go on looking straight into the cold eyes. He had looked through his books at the Dursleys', in the small hours with a torch, but did Snape really expect him to have the whole of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by heart when he could still scarcely believe he was a wizard at all?

Snape went on ignoring Hermione, whose hand was now trembling with effort.

'Monkshood and wolfsbane, Potter. What is the difference?'

Hermione stood up. Her hand was pointing at the dungeon ceiling.

'I don't know,' said Harry quietly. 'I think Hermione does, though. Why don't you ask her?'

Several people laughed, and Harry couldn't think why. He had meant it. Hermione read everything; of course she would know. He caught Seamus's eye across the room and Seamus winked at him, which was more puzzling still.

Snape was not laughing.

'Sit down,' he snapped at Hermione. 'For your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood together produce a sleeping draught so strong that it is called the Draught of Living Death. A bezoar is a stone from the stomach of a goat, and it will counter most poisons. Monkshood and wolfsbane are one and the same plant, which is also called aconite. Well? Why is nobody writing this down?'

There was a sudden scramble for quills and parchment. Over the noise, Snape said, 'And Gryffindor will lose a point for your impertinence, Potter.'

Things did not get better for the Gryffindors as the lesson went on. Snape paired them off and set them to brewing a simple potion for curing boils, and swept among them in his long black robes while they weighed dried nettles and crushed snake fangs, finding fault with nearly everyone. The exception was Malfoy, whom he seemed to like. He was in the middle of telling the whole dungeon to come and admire the way Malfoy had stewed her horned slugs, and Malfoy was in the middle of turning to make quite sure Harry had heard him, when the room filled with clouds of acid-green smoke and a loud, furious hiss.

Neville had somehow melted Seamus's cauldron into a twisted lump. Their potion was spreading across the flagstones and eating holes in people's shoes. In seconds the whole class was standing on its stools, and Neville, who had been soaked when the cauldron gave way, was moaning as angry red boils bloomed up his arms and legs.

'Idiot boy!' snarled Snape, and vanished the mess with one sweep of his wand. 'You added the porcupine quills before you took the cauldron off the fire, I suppose?'

Neville whimpered. Boils were coming up on his nose now.

'Take him to the hospital wing,' Snape spat at Seamus. Then he rounded on Harry and Ron, whose cauldron stood next to Neville's.

'You. Potter. Why didn't you tell him to leave the quills out? Thought you'd look better if he got it wrong, did you? That is another point gone from Gryffindor.'

It was so unfair that Harry opened his mouth, but Ron kicked him hard behind the cauldron.

'Leave it,' he muttered. 'I've heard Snape can turn really nasty.'

Across the dungeon, Malfoy gave a small, superior snigger, and looked at Harry as though she had just beaten him at something and wanted to be certain he knew it.

As they climbed the dungeon steps an hour later, Harry's head was spinning and his spirits were somewhere round his shoes. Two points lost for Gryffindor in his very first week. What had he ever done to Snape?

'Cheer up,' said Ron. 'Snape takes points off Fred and George all the time. Can I come to Hagrid's with you?'

'Course you can,' said Harry, and found, as he said it, that he was already feeling better. At five to three they came out through the great oak door into a bright, cold afternoon, and set off across the grounds towards the little wooden house on the edge of the forest, and Harry walked faster with every step.