Chapter Eighteen

When life gives you lemon, make lemonade. When it gives you fish, multiply it. When it gives you water, turn it into wine. Given basic blocks, transform them. The child knows not what a pyramid is, but give him blocks of wood and he'll stack them up. Make one a pyramidal-shaped one, the others ever-growing cubes, and while he may not stack them all properly, he'll know which one goes last on top.

Then, it's all a matter of artistic preferences.

"Encore," I said, swinging my wand with the graciousness of an angry sea lion. "Get the violins in shape!" I snarled, the violins' quartet picking the pace up. With this magical orchestra, I did not need kindness, or gentleness. I needed a firm grip, an even firmer idea of the score in my head, and an iron fist.

"The tuba will sing, or it will shatter!" I snapped in the direction of the tuba, who had been trying to stop its music. It sang once more with renewed vigor. "Come on lads," I cheered them further, "We're nearly there!"

The drums began their score. The violas joined the violins. Somewhere in the back, a piano played. My left hand directed the strings, my right one with the wand decided the pitches. I had finally understood some of the logic. The left hand pointed at an instrument in an invisible orchestra, depending on the number of fingers pointing at the instrument in question, I was implying different things.

The right hand gave the rhythm and the volume.

"Point three fingers at the clarinet, get him to go on a solo performance," I muttered, glancing down at the agenda which, contrary to my expectations, I had been filling with the instructions on how to properly work the spell.

"Some other people would be practicing deadly curses or the Protego, and here I am, guiding an orchestra of dumb players," I grunted, catching my breath as I called for the general silence, the main violin taking the lead with some kind of warbled country music.

I was getting there. At least, they knew how to make it sound like some specific genre. Now, as soon as I managed to get an electric guitar into the mix, I could move from classical orchestral pieces and orchestral versions of famous pieces into actual electronics.

Christmas had left the place to January. January had surprisingly turned into February. Nobody had died. Nobody had come to bother me. Hermione every now and then hung around to do homework, but now had finally returned to her previous flock. It made sense. She was a busybody who needed to aid the duo of Ron and Harry not kill itself. I remained happily in touch as merely someone to share homework with, but that was all.

I was glad things had been patched up and Gryffindorish-tendencies had won over.

Still, I dimly realized one fine day that I had spent a whole afternoon without human contact, and that strangely bothered me more than it should have. I was sitting at my table in the library, literally considering it mine because I had claimed it under the rights of first come first served, and as I had finished the latest homework, I glanced around. There were other students studying, and doing their things generally, but in groups.

While there I stood, alone.

Thoughts filled my mind of how humans were social creatures, constructs of bonds, people who couldn't live alone without at least some basic contact, and then I took a good look at those thoughts, those inner thoughts of mine, and sighed.

My steps brought me out of the library, and down into the depths of the dungeon. My eyes glanced at the Bloody Baron swishing by, and past him to the potions' classroom, where no one was currently doing lessons. Technically, we could practice our potions only with the agreement of Professor Snape. This in turn meant that if you wanted to practice, you had to stand in front of the classroom and wait until he either came around, or ask him. If you weren't a Slytherin, you'd get a chance at practicing only if you were an OWL student on a meritocratic occasion, and only if you weren't a Gryffindor.

Gryffindors would die poisoned by their own potions rather than ask for extra practice, so in a certain sense it wasn't like Snape was giving them a disservice by refusing to let them practice unless they were lucky enough to come in after someone else had already done so, but still...

I stepped inside, quietly taking an empty spot near the end of the classroom. Professor Snape barely lifted his gaze to look at me, and then returned to his work, uncaring.

I tapped the smooth surface of my potions' desk, "Oddment?" I whispered, and in seconds I had my stuff at the ready.

I flipped open the book on potions, the Forgetfulness Potion coming to the fray. I began to work on it, crushing the valerian sprigs and dipping them in the waters of the river Lethe.

I drew short on them, and winced. Since I was an orphan set to Hogwarts with the Orphan fund, I didn't have the money to order the potions' materials. Thankfully, those materials normally could be asked to the potions' master. Unfortunately, our potions' master was a certain Severus Snape.

"Uhm...professor?" I asked in a whisper, coming to a halt in front of his desk. "Sorry to bother," I added quickly, "But I'm practicing the forgetfulness potion and I don't have enough Lethe water."

Snape's eyes coldly rose from the grading of his homework. "Mister Umbrus," he drawled. "That will be five points from Ravenclaw. A potion-maker is expected to always have all the necessary ingredients at hand before attempting any potion whatsoever. Misjudging quantities is a grievous problem." He then pointed a finger at a cupboard at the far end of the classroom. "Recover what you need from the cupboard. Do not bother me again."

I hastily nodded, and did just that.

Opening the cupboard, I found myself face to face with countless vials, crushed ingredients, and sliced up stuff. Some eyes even stared accusingly at me from within a large glass pitcher, and a few salamander tails twitched within a box.

The show of horrors didn't even faze me, the one man who had killed more mice than a house cat could.

Still, as I rummaged as quietly as possible in the cupboard, my eyes were naturally drawn to a thick book of advanced potion-making. I stared at the book briefly, and then left it there. I needed Lethe Water, not a book scribbled with Severus Snape's corrections on potions.

Also, it would have been a tad difficult to get it out of the room without the man noticing. I did manage to filch a bezoar though, mainly because I could hide it in the sleeve of my robe. I gathered a vial of Lethe water, closed the cupboard, and moved back to my spot to get the potion started and finished.

I brought it up to the professor, who had kept doing the grading of the homework assigned to him. Even though he was an ass, and an horrible person, he still gave grades fairly. Hermione's homework, the latest on the pile, received an Outstanding. Even Harry Potter's one got an Exceeding Expectations.

"Professor," I whispered, "The forgetfulness potion," I awkwardly looked at him lift his face from the latest homework, and glance briefly at it. He gave a curt nod, tapped with his wand the side of the potion, and as the liquid within disappeared entirely, he resumed his grading.

"Professor," I whispered once more, catching his attention as well as his annoyance. "Why did professor Quirrell try to kill Harry Potter?" I muttered.

This got much more than his annoyance. It got his undivided attention. "Mister Umbrus," he hissed. "Such preposterous..."

"You were counter-cursing," I retorted. "He was the one cursing. Why is he still teaching if he tried to kill another student?"

He looked at me.

I looked back at him.

"To discern a curse from a counter-curse," Professor Snape mused, "a Ravenclaw's intelligence is not something to be underestimated, is it?"

"I wasn't interested in the match to begin with," I mumbled.

Professor Snape nodded once, solemnly. "That will be ten points for Ravenclaw, Mister Umbrus," he acquiesced. "Now, return to your practice and speak of this no more."

"I'm not selling another student's life for points, professor," I retorted. "I want to know if this is the kind of thing where you're setting a noose to hang a criminal's neck, or if it's the kind of thing where you can't intervene because you don't want to." I stared into his eyes, "Because the former, I can understand. The latter, I will not."

"You presume too much with your arrogance, Mister Umbrus," professor Snape sneered.

"Intelligence is just one trait of the house, professor," I whispered back. "Wits and wisdom are two others. Wits is about knowing when to press to get a leeway, wisdom is knowing when you need to fold."

"Oh? If it had come from a Slytherin, I would have been impressed," he mused. "Sadly, it's from a Ravenclaw."

"Nobody is born perfect," I dryly replied. Still, Snape maintained eye-contact, and refused to answer.

Was he digging in my head? It probably made sense to him that some student had seen the act rather than the match, and had been witty enough to understand what was going on. What he couldn't probably understand was the knowledge of the difference between a curse and an anti-curse spell. Perhaps he believed I had thrown a coin.

"The headmaster is informed of this," professor Snape caved in, perhaps acknowledging I wouldn't be moving until I got an answered.

"Thank you professor," I said with a nod.

"Also," professor Snape continued, "For talking back to a professor, that will be fifty points from Ravenclaw."

I winced at that.

Still, those were points well-spent.

It proved one fundamental weakness of my Cassandra Curse. As long as I could logically infer things from viewing them, then I could speak and draw conclusions from them. It didn't matter if I had no previous knowledge of what a curse or an anti-curse were. I could infer what they were from the circumstances, and thus actually be allowed to speak of the events.

I returned at my place, and began to brew a herbicide potion.

My dreaded second-best enemy, pollen, would need to be defeated before spring arrived.

For pollen was coming...

...and it would make no prisoners.