Chapter 47: The Little Note
The corridor outside Potions felt even more oppressive than the dungeon itself.
Harry Potter dragged himself along beside Ron and Hermione with the air of a boy marching to his own execution. His shoulders were slumped, his expression dark, and the copy of Magical Drafts and Potions tucked under his arm might as well have been made of stone.
It was not merely a textbook now.
It was evidence.
It was a reminder.
It was, above all, another instrument of Professor Snape's personal campaign of torment.
"I still don't understand it," Harry said at last, frustration spilling out of him as they rounded the corner. "Honestly, I don't. He said I had no concept of timing just because my valerian boiled to mush, but the book clearly says ten minutes. I counted. I didn't even go over by a second."
Ron, who considered Snape's existence a long running insult to human decency, snorted at once.
"Snape doesn't need a reason. He wakes up every morning and decides to make your life worse for entertainment. If your potion had come out as perfect as Riddle's, he'd probably have said you were breathing too loudly and taken points for it."
Hermione, walking on Harry's other side with her books clutched to her chest, frowned thoughtfully instead of joining in.
"Actually..." she began, her brow knitting tighter as she tried to reconstruct the instructions from memory. "Actually, Harry, the book says to simmer it over a low flame for ten minutes."
Harry turned to her.
"I did."
"No, you didn't," Hermione said with mild but merciless certainty. "You kept the flame too high. Professor Snape's attitude was horrible, obviously, but he wasn't wrong about the result. Valerian root is delicate. If the heat is too fierce, it starts to break down long before the ten minutes are up."
Ron pulled a face.
"Brilliant. So now we're agreeing with Snape."
"I'm not agreeing with him," Hermione said sharply. "I'm agreeing with the principles of potion brewing."
A few paces behind them, Tamara Riddle heard every word.
She had no intention of listening, but their voices carried, and Harry Potter's academic suffering was apparently too loud to ignore.
She regarded the entire conversation with the sort of cold disdain one might reserve for people trying to sharpen knives by rubbing them against bread.
Stupid.
Valerian root was notoriously fragile. Its medicinal fibers reacted badly to overly aggressive heat, and any idiot with a basic grasp of ingredient structure should have known that. Boiling it carelessly for the full duration was not potion brewing. It was culinary vandalism.
Tamara was about to pass them, take the corridor toward the Library, and rid herself of the sound of their collective incompetence.
Then the system struck.
[Ding! Detected that the savior is currently in a period of academic confusion.]
Tamara nearly stopped dead.
[Triggered daily quest: The Invisible Tutor.]
[Quest description: Harry Potter is the future hope of the Wizarding world, though current evidence is debatable. As an erudite and talented Slytherin, it is your responsibility to correct his academic misconception.]
[Quest requirement: Help Harry Potter understand the true reason for his potion failure.]
[Reward: wisdom +3.]
[Failure penalty: Publicly call Harry "Sister Potter."]
Tamara's steps came to a violent halt.
For one rare, shining moment, she was too offended to think.
Then she hissed inwardly, I refuse.
Absolutely not.
Teach him?
Teach the idiot who had once brought about her downfall?
Teach him how to brew a potion?
The very idea was so grotesque she felt her soul recoil.
[Host, please calm down.] The system's voice became infuriatingly reasonable. [The quest does not require detailed tutoring. It only requires that Potter understand the reason.]
[You may use any method.]
[A note would count.]
[Besides, are you truly willing to continue losing valuable class time because Professor Snape must spend half the lesson verbally flaying Potter for the same mistake over and over again?]
That gave her pause.
Tamara's eyes narrowed.
There it was. The only argument with even the slightest merit.
Harry Potter's stupidity was not merely distasteful. It was disruptive. Snape's obsession with humiliating him prolonged lessons, ruined the classroom atmosphere, and wasted time that could have been devoted to learning something useful.
A single note, then, she decided coldly.
No conversation.
No guidance.
No recognition.
And certainly no gratitude.
Fine.
Let the savior receive a scrap of mercy he would never understand.
By the time the trio entered the Library, Tamara's plan had already taken shape.
The Library was quiet in the solemn, reverent way she preferred. Dust motes drifted in the pale winter light. Tall shelves loomed like orderly sentinels. The scent of old parchment and ink wrapped around the room like a private blessing.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione settled at an empty table not far from the centre aisle.
Harry dropped into his chair, opened Magical Drafts and Potions to the section on Forgetfulness Potion, and stared at it as if the book itself had betrayed him.
"I still think Snape was just picking on me," he muttered, glaring at the page. "There's nothing here about the flame changing the result."
Hermione had already gone off in search of supplemental texts, doubtless planning to produce a stack large enough to crush him beneath pure scholarship. Ron, having contributed all the theoretical rigor available to him, pulled out his wizard chess set and began absently setting up the pieces.
Tamara chose a table in a secluded corner, three shelves away and partially hidden from their view.
From there, she tore a neat square from a piece of parchment, uncapped her ink, and began to write.
Her hand moved quickly, decisively.
Valerian roots contain heat sensitive fibers and must be reduced to a simmer just before the water reaches a full boil. High heat causes the fibers to collapse early, releasing bitter inhibitors that cloud the potion and ruin the effect. This is common sense, you idiot.
Tamara reread it once.
The explanation was precise.
The insult was deserved.
The balance, in her opinion, was admirable.
Now came the part that mattered.
She was not going to walk up to Harry Potter like some patient school tutor and hand it to him.
That would have been degrading.
It would also have made denial impossible later.
No. Subtlety suited her better.
She watched the table through the narrow spaces between shelves. Hermione was still gone. Ron was engrossed in a mutinous argument with his own chess pieces. Harry sat hunched over his book, brooding into the page.
Perfect.
Tamara stood, selected another book from a nearby shelf to complete the illusion, and moved down the back aisle as though merely changing reading material.
She passed behind Harry's row without a sound.
At the exact moment she reached the gap between two shelves, she flicked her fingers.
The folded note flew.
It cut through the air in a neat, whispering arc and dropped with exquisite precision onto Harry's open textbook, landing directly over the entry for valerian root.
Plip.
Harry jolted.
"What was that?"
He looked up sharply, glancing left, then right.
Nobody near him had moved.
Ron was still poking irritably at a chess knight. Hermione was nowhere in sight. The nearest Ravenclaw at the next table had not even blinked.
Harry picked up the folded scrap and opened it.
As he read, his expression shifted by degrees.
First suspicion.
Then concentration.
Then that unmistakable widening of the eyes that came with sudden understanding.
"Heat sensitive fibers..." he murmured under his breath. "So that was it..."
His gaze darted back to the book, then to the note again.
"No wonder it went cloudy."
He sat up straighter.
For the first time since Potions had ended, his frustration began to loosen its grip.
Then came the next, inevitable question.
Who had sent it?
Harry stood abruptly and scanned the Library.
At first he saw nothing out of place.
Then, at the far end of the aisle, just before a figure slipped around the corner of a shelf, he caught a glimpse of dark green robes and long black hair moving with cool, unhurried grace.
It lasted less than a second.
But it was enough.
"Riddle?" Harry whispered.
"What?" said Ron, looking up. "Did you see that terrifying woman lurking around again?"
Harry sat down too quickly, folding the note at once.
"Nothing. I just thought... never mind."
But it was not nothing.
He looked down at the handwriting again.
It had clearly been disguised, written in an impersonal print rather than a flowing hand, yet the ink gave it away. Deep dark green, almost black, with the faintest silver sheen when it caught the light.
Harry remembered that ink.
Tamara used it in Charms. Once, Ron had muttered that it looked expensive enough to poison someone just by being near it.
And there was something else.
A scent clung faintly to the parchment. Not the must of shelves, nor the dry smell of old paper.
Something cleaner.
Cooler.
Like winter cedar touched by frost.
Harry knew that scent too.
He had noticed it the first time she passed him in the corridor after the troll incident, though at the time he had not known why he remembered it.
His fingers tightened on the note.
She could have ignored him.
She usually did.
She could have let him blunder through the same mistake again next week, let Snape sneer, let Ron complain, let Hermione explain it afterward.
Instead, she had written this.
Secretly.
Without putting her name to it.
And though the final line was insulting, it somehow did not feel cruel.
Not like Malfoy.
Not like mockery.
More like... irritation from someone who had expected better.
What a strange girl, Harry thought.
"What are you grinning at?" Ron asked suspiciously. "Have you inhaled too much potion vapor?"
Harry only then realised that the corners of his mouth had lifted.
He quickly tucked the note inside the textbook as though hiding treasure.
"No reason," he said. "I just suddenly understood what went wrong."
Ron squinted at him.
"You're acting weird."
Harry ignored that.
Across the room, his gaze drifted once more to the place where Tamara had vanished between the shelves.
Cold.
Arrogant.
Sharp tongued.
And somehow, infuriatingly, quietly kind in a way that made no sense at all.
What a complicatedly decent person, he thought.
Back in the corridor leading down to the dungeons, Tamara received her reward.
[Ding! Quest completed: The Invisible Tutor.]
[Reward: wisdom +3.]
[Current wisdom: 27.]
[Detected: Harry Potter's favorability has increased.]
[Current impression label from Harry Potter updated to: Cold faced Guardian Angel.]
Tamara stopped so abruptly she nearly walked straight into the wall.
For a few seconds she simply stood there, staring ahead in silence.
Then she pressed two fingers to her temple.
"Guardian angel?" she repeated inwardly, with the kind of horror normally reserved for discovering a live spider in one's teacup.
So not only had that dim witted savior worked out who had sent the note...
he had actually liked the insult.
Tamara felt faintly ill.
If this was the intellectual calibre of the wizarding world's chosen hero, then perhaps her earlier defeat had indeed been the greatest humiliation of all.
She closed her eyes and took a slow breath, fighting down the urge to march back to the Library and strangle him with his own scarf.
"When I get the Philosopher's Stone," she thought darkly, "and when my power returns, I am absolutely going to crack his skull open and check what is inside."
A pause.
"Fluxweed, perhaps."
Then, robes whispering behind her, Tamara swept down the dungeon corridor in a thoroughly murderous mood.
.....
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