Chapter 71: The Notes
The cauldron's warmth could not mask the cold fury boiling off Snape.
Nimbus 2000.
The words were a key, snapping open a coffer crammed with memories of humiliation, envy, and helplessness.
When those eyes linked again with that foolish sport, a sharp, scorching anger of betrayal and mockery surged up.
He nearly loosed the most venomous sarcasm he possessed, ready to smash that broom and the filthy memories it represented.
Shawn worked his ingredients with careful focus, entirely unaware of the predatory gleam in Professor Snape's eyes.
Professor Sprout had just taught him how to handle galangal powder, oxalis, bush wormwood, and aloe juice.
If he did not follow his notes with full concentration, he would inevitably miss some small detail.
So he picked up the notebook and, by the light of a magical candle, examined the page closely.
Sensing something amiss, he glanced back and met Professor Snape's glacial stare.
Deep in the tunnel of his focus, he took no notice and quietly turned back to processing the oxalis.
He reviewed his own handling step by step, wondering which link in the chain had gone wrong again.
Snape was unquestionably severe. He wished to teach only geniuses, not the merely average.
His teaching was like holding doctoral standards over children barely past primary school, and what seemed self-evident to him read like a cipher to many of the young.
To the vast majority of students, he was so cutting that wizards quailed at the thought of him.
But to Shawn…
He could be called a good Professor.
Shawn minced the oxalis with care. The herb was a pale pink with a faint, sour scent reminiscent of vinegar; since it resembled groundcherry in its acidity, it was called oxalis.
In the wizarding world, it went into a number of potions.
When the notes were whisked from his hand and the small wizard before him fell back into the flustered fumbling of his early brews, Snape's anger ebbed in the face of those steady green eyes.
Something complicated flickered in the cold, depthless dark of his gaze.
He watched the boy toil for a long while, then looked down at the poorly prepared ingredients and could not hold back.
"Idiot. If you use those half-ground, juice-starved ingredients again, get out of my dungeon."
Shawn silently drew back what he had been about to drop into the cauldron and reprocessed the lot exactly as Professor Snape had taught.
Now Snape's stare became almost an audit. He would not tolerate the noble art of potions being linked in the slightest to that filthy game.
Nimbus 2000. Brewing potions. Making money.
He arrived, all at once, at a tidy conclusion.
An orphan with no means, studying the costliest broom, intends to sell potions to buy it.
How vulgar. How pitiful.
Pitiful enough to wring a cold laugh from him.
"Heh… an utterly pathetic orph—"
The words strangled when Shawn set the notebook down, and a new charge of ingredients sent the cauldron into a sudden, rolling boil.
The blast of heat warped the air and Snape's shadow on the stones. The rising wave flipped a page, and a single line lay plain before Snape's eyes.
Nimbus 2000, during the morning's flight test, showed excellent emergency turning ability. The trick to control does not lie in core muscles but in using intent to guide the second charm cluster at the left rear. This is almost identical to the final guiding step in a potion. As expected, magic is joined by a single primal thread.
Shawn turned in a hurry, and the words stuck in Snape's throat.
"Utterly pathetic heat control. I doubt your troll's brain can grasp the grace of a slow simmer. Then study what is written on the lower left of page sixty-three of The Book of Potions. When the Deflating Draught reaches a boil, the heat should be set to double the usual constant."
Shawn seemed to ignore the rebuke. He counted the seconds and adjusted the flame.
Bubbles surged and burst, and a heady white steam coiled up from the cauldron.
In his mind, he paged back through the book he had just begun to read.
It was by Zygmunt Budge, a famous potioneer who left Hogwarts. At fourteen, he had been the best in his class and could even correct his teacher's mistakes when brewing with shrivelfig tails. When he felt fully prepared, he asked the Headmaster to let him enter the Wizarding Schools Potions Championship.
The Headmaster refused; Budge was not yet seventeen, and the contest would be too dangerous.
In anger, Budge left the school in protest.
He believed Hogwarts sought to throttle his ascent to mastery, and he never once regretted leaving.
What struck Shawn most, though, was an anecdote from Budge's schooldays.
A rival splashed Love Potion over himself and promptly fell head over heels for the Potions professor. Ever afterward, whenever Budge needed the loud, uncontrollable laughter to finish his Laughing Potion, he thought of that incident.
It sounded like little more than a trivial, comic note, but Shawn sensed something beneath it.
If the Laughing Potion required loud, ungovernable laughter, could it be reasonably inferred that other draughts required emotion as well?
Perhaps the emotion shown in Master Libatius Borage's ritual was not a destination, but a focus and a hunger for success.
In other words, a strengthening of conviction.
And the advancement of potions, like the advancement of spells, might require more refined emotions.
The release that lifted the Levitation Charm. The yearning for light that kindled Lumos.
Potions and spells ought to be joined by a single primal thread.
In the firelight, Snape's face was unreadable. His anger vanished in an instant. He stood again in the dungeon's shadow.
Shawn Green already had a broom. Where it came from did not matter.
What mattered was that he loved potions, and that fact had already been proven twice—by Snape and by Borage. Those slips of paper never went to anyone who did not love potions.
So what was he suspecting?
The anger that had twisted his judgment and the slips in his hand brought back that irretrievable sentence. Today, the moment had nearly replayed itself.
"Shawn Green…"
His robes stirred. His cold gaze looked down on the boy at the cauldron.
"Heh. Perhaps you would care to explain this. With that foolish broom, what foolish acrobatics do you intend to perform?"
His eyes went back to a far-off Hogwarts. If he had not let anger twist his reason, if he had not spoken that line, if he had done now as he did then…
The cauldron burbled. Sunset spilled through a crack. The knot in Snape's eyes spun a cocoon in the moss between the flagstones.
The spiders that had lived here so long seemed, for the first time, to bask bare in sunlight.