Harry Potter 06 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

McGonagall. ‘Very well, Potter, here is your timetable. Oh, by the way – twenty hopefuls have already put down their names for the Gryffindor Quidditch team. I shall pass the list to you in due course and you can fix up trials at your leisure.’
    A few minutes later, Ron was cleared to do the same subjects as Harry, and the two of them left the table together.
    ‘Look,’ said Ron delightedly, gazing at his timetable, ‘we’ve got a free period now … and a free period after break … and after lunch … excellent !’
    They returned to the common room, which was empty apart from half a dozen seventh-years including Katie Bell, the only remaining member of the original Gryffindor Quidditch team that Harry had joined in his first year.
    ‘I thought you’d get that, well done,’ she called over, pointing at the Captain’s badge on Harry’s chest. ‘Tell me when you call trials!’
    ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Harry, ‘you don’t need to try out, I’ve watched you play for five years …’
    ‘You mustn’t start off like that,’ she said warningly. ‘For all you know, there’s someone much better than me out there. Good teams have been ruined before now because captains just kept playing the old faces, or letting in their friends …’
    Ron looked a little uncomfortable and began playing with the Fanged Frisbee Hermione had taken from the fourth-year. It zoomed around the common room, snarling and attempting to take bites of the tapestry. Crookshanks’s yellow eyes followed it and he hissed when it came too close.
    An hour later they reluctantly left the sunlit common room for the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom four floors below. Hermione was already queuing outside, carrying an armful of heavy books and looking put-upon.
    ‘We got so much homework for Runes,’ she said anxiously, when Harry and Ron joined her. ‘A fifteen-inch essay, two translations and I’ve got to read these by Wednesday!’
    ‘Shame,’ yawned Ron.
    ‘You wait,’ she said resentfully. ‘I bet Snape gives us loads.’
    The classroom door opened as she spoke and Snape stepped into the corridor, his sallow face framed as ever by two curtains of greasy black hair. Silence fell over the queue immediately.
    ‘Inside,’ he said.
    Harry looked around as they entered. Snape had imposed his personality upon the room already; it was gloomier than usual as curtains had been drawn over the windows, and was lit by candlelight. New pictures adorned the walls, many of them showing people who appeared to be in pain, sporting grisly injuries or strangely contorted body parts. Nobody spoke as they settled down, looking around at the shadowy, gruesome pictures.
    ‘I have not asked you to take out your books,’ said Snape, closing the door and moving to face the class from behind his desk; Hermione hastily dropped her copy of Confronting the Faceless back into her bag and stowed it under her chair. ‘I wish to speak to you and I want your fullest attention.’
    His black eyes roved over their upturned faces, lingering for a fraction of a second longer on Harry’s than anyone else’s.
    ‘You have had five teachers in this subject so far, I believe.’
    You believe … like you haven’t watched them all come and go, Snape, hoping you’d be next , thought Harry scathingly.
    ‘Naturally, these teachers will all have had their own methods and priorities. Given this confusion I am surprised so many of you scraped an O.W.L. in this subject. I shall be even more surprised if all of you manage to keep up with the N.E.W.T. work, which will be much more advanced.’
    Snape set off around the edge of the room, speaking now in a lower voice; the class craned their necks to keep him in view.
    ‘The Dark Arts,’ said Snape, ‘are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible.’
    Harry stared at Snape. It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous enemy, another to speak of them, as Snape was doing, with a loving caress in his voice?
    ‘Your defences,’ said Snape, a little louder, ‘must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the Arts you seek to undo. These pictures,’ he indicated a few of them as he swept past, ‘give a fair representation of what happens to those who suffer, for instance, the