Tuesdays started off with Transfiguration with the Gryffindors after breakfast. Ron Weasley and Michael Corner still didn't know when to shut their mouths, but I endured.
Their ill-conceived digs at me due to their jealousy, however, were nothing compared to Malfoy and his Slytherin clique at Charms right after. If looks could kill, Malfoy would have killed me a million times over. He stayed quiet, sure, but not once had he taken down a single note or cast a spell. Flitwick didn't call on him, but it was clear the boy wasn't paying attention at all.
No boy from Slytherin other than Theodore Nott and Castallon Burke did. They all just tried to... I guessed intimidate me?
But it seemed they learned that they were no match for me. Not just in a magic fight, even verbally, Malfoy finally got the last wakeup slap he needed. He finally recognized that he needed something different to come after me. Something he was sure of beyond a sliver of a doubt.
So it was that I merely endured the looks, went to lunch with the few I still considered friends - even Lavender and Parvati who both reassured me they were on my side as we walked to the Great Hall, and eventually found myself at the Black Lake again.
I was quite eager to get more plants from the lake because Sprout promised to show me how to properly pot aquatic magical plants and care for them if I brought more.
The small group of Ravenclaw girls once again followed me since we'd have no more classes until the Astronomy class an hour before midnight. And though they kept talking amongst themselves, I keenly felt more looks on me when we reached the shore of the waters. The moment I took off the robe, I slowly turned back and saw... the Ravenclaw girls weren't the only ones at the lake.
Most Slytherin second years, who were friends with Isobel like Daphne, Tracey, Natalie, and Isodora, as well as plenty of upper year witches from all houses, were there too. They all pretended to be here for a leisurely sunbathing hour as they caught up with their friends at the start of the school year... but they all stole almost eager glances in my direction.
Slowly scanning the many witches near us, my gaze slowly settled on Mandy.
She was squirming with a deep blush that only grew the longer I looked at her.
"Got something to say, Mandy?" I asked with an exasperated smile.
"It's not my fault! Not entirely, okay? I talked to some of the older girls about y-your body. Some didn't believe me when I d-described it, and it somehow got away from me. All the girls are here to see if what I said was true," she squeaked out in utter embarrassment.
Despite cheating with the elixir, I was actually quite proud of my body and not just how it looked. I wasn't about to put on a show or something, but I still loudly said, "Next time, I'm selling tickets for anybody who's not my friend."
Too shy, unfamiliar with the concept, or stubborn to start any catcalls, a huge group of witches and even a few wizards watched me slowly undress and transfigure my pants into swimming trunks like the day before.
Just as I took out the knife I used the day before as well, Hermione, with her head buried in a book, got the courage to ask, "Um, Talion? Could you... could you use that spell for the rocky beach again? The one where they are nice to sit on?"
"Sure. But I'll teach it to you, and you'll use it yourself in the future," I counter-offered with a small roll of my eyes.
The studious little witch didn't fool me. She deliberately waited until my upper body was bare and my pants transfigured into snug fitting swimming trunks. Clearly, I wasn't the only one struggling with hormones, apparently.
Once I was done, Parvati and Lavender asked for the same treatment after the Ravenclaw second years made themselves comfortable - and even the Slytherin girls asked for it. Well, Natalie and Tracey did. Isodora and Daphne were busy trying to stare a hole into the clouds as they pretended not to care.
After making a boulder into a bench for three Gryffindor fifth years, I finally had enough and chided, "You're witches. Do it yourself, or I'll really charge for this service in the future."
Walking away with a huff as I heard giggles from some of the groups of witches closest to me, I jumped into the water and cast the bubblehead charm immediately.
I didn't see the giant kraken, not even a piece of it, but since I dove down at a different spot on this day, I looked around for a while to get my bearings once I was a good distance under water. This time around, quite a few grindylows were fighting over food near the lake's ground at a deeper spot, and their fight murkied the waters surrounding them. With my Eagle Vision active, I also saw four humanoid creatures watching the dark creatures some distance away.
They had to be mermen.
That put a wrench in my plan because Hagrid, at more than one point, told us to just stay away from these mermen. They weren't nice and cuddly like the cart-sized acromantula, apparently, and that had to say something coming from Hagrid of all people. The only one truly allowed to meet and talk with them was Dumbledore, who had a non-aggression pact going with them like every headmaster before him. In return for not bothering their society in any way, the mermen were offered a completely safe environment that they only needed to keep clean and orderly with the help of the kraken.
And apparently, that was what they were doing because when a few more grindylow joined the feeding frenzy over whatever they found, the four mermen, equipped with tridents and nets started attacking a few stragglers on the outside of the battle.
I sighed and swam in an entirely different direction. Only when I found yet another Luminous Mirage Fern, this one much bigger than the one from before, did I make my way back up. With a last look back, I saw two of the four mermen watch me intently as I swam back up with the fern wrapped around my left arm.
I gave them a friendly wave but continued to swim back to the surface.
Back at the beach, I scoffed at the Ravenclaw girls who pretended to still read their books as I laid out the fern near my things. And then I rolled my eyes because even more witches had gathered here during the half an hour I was under water.
"I'm taking another dive," I said after posing with a mocking grin for a short moment. It was a little annoying and I was just a tad bit shy, but I was still a teenage boy with dozens of young witches there to steal glances at me - not anybody else, just me.
I could admit that a small part of me enjoyed that attention.
This time around, for my second dive, I swam along the shore with a propelling charm to take me away from the spot of the first dive of the day, away from the mermen.
As I dove deeper than ever before, the sunlight started to fade more and more. It no longer reached deep enough and instead cast long murky shadows on my surroundings. The waters around me darkened significantly - but I still saw enough with my enhanced senses and the Eagle Vision. A small barnacle looking coral that was a short swim away was clearly a magical plant or creature of some kind, but I was sure it would not survive me harvesting it. I merely memorized where it grew and vowed to look up what it was later. Swimming a little deeper still, it started getting too cold. I was shivering a little despite my trained physique - but just as I wanted to turn around, I froze in place.
One of the kraken's tentacles had been hiding below a small cliff, and I only saw the white outline of the appendage after turning around in an effort to swim back. The huge limb was just lying there. Its enormous tip seemed to almost... absentmindedly caressed a polished stone slab that stuck on the cliff wall.
The slab was golden in my Eagle Vision, and my interest immediately piqued.
Looking around to see if the kraken was anywhere close, I firmed my footing on the ground and gently pushed the tentactle's end away a little with 'Aquamenti' cast at a moderate pressure with a wide diameter. I hoped it felt like a small and normal undercurrent to the prehistoric aquatic monster, and it didn't react much as the suction cups a little below the tip allowed the tentacle to largely stay in place.
But I still saw what was on the slab, and I couldn't have been more surprised even if I tried.
'Wait, that's the Ravenclaw emblem carved into the slab! But not the coat of arms version everyone is familiar with from the Hogwarts insignia! No, that's the old one from the viking clan before Rowena fashioned the Ravenclaw family name!'
With the kraken's tentacle not moving an inch for the day, I branded the position of this slab into my brain as best I could and swam to a different place. My brain was urging me to search for Helena or the talking hat and ask what the slab was about, but the slab should have been in the lake for a thousand years. It wouldn't vanish anytime soon.
I found another midnight black water lily that grew below a rock deep underwater and took it back with me before I resurfaced. I wasn't sure what it was, only that it wasn't part of the plants that Sprout had me memorize that I should never pick barehanded because they were highly poisonous.
Back on the surface, the lily started blooming in a rainbow color, its smell simply enchanting. I quickly noticed, though, that it was quite literally enchanting and transfigured a large rock into a wooden bucket that I filled with lake water to place the lily inside. Some of the girls seemed to be ready to jump me to continue smelling the lily, but I just put the bucket down, got dried and dressed under the stares of tens of witches, and intended to make my way to the greenhouses.
"Wait up!" Isobel called out with the fern wrapped around the bucket that I had in hand, and I allowed her to fall into step with me. "Where'd you find that flower?"
I looked at her with a questioning gaze before I mockingly looked back to the lake and asked, "Did you think I found an underwater window to the Slytherin common room and stole it from Snape's living quarters?"
She blushed a little and called me 'prat' under her breath before she asked, "I'm willing to buy it for 1500 galleons!"
"Oh? You know what it is? And it's worth around the same as three Firebolts?"
"I... I actually don't know how much it's worth. But my aunt has a flower just like it in a giant aquarium in our manor. It's... it's really important? I think?" Isobel's blush deepened as she stared down at the ground while we continued to walk. Eventually, her shoulders sagged as she simply said under her breath, "Let's just wait to see what Professor Sprout has to say."
On our way, we were suddenly kind of quiet. I searched for a topic until I found something that was bothering me since my birthday.
"Hey, Isobel. I'm not sure if you remember, but on our first day at Charms, you introduced the other Slytherin students to me," I said with a thoughtful expression.
"Uh, yes. I think I remember. Why?"
"When you talked about Natalie and Isodora, you mentioned that they would have been raised in an orphanage like me if they weren't lucky enough to get raised by Lady Vinda Rosier, who had since passed away before Hogwarts started," I pointed out and received a nod in return.
"Yep, that's true," Isobel confirmed.
"You know, on my birthday, I met Natalie and Isodora. They introduced me to Lady Beatrice Selwyn, Isodora's mother?"
"Ohhh," Isobel exclaimed as she shook her head with a fond smile, "You're wondering if I told a small lie?"
I could only shrug and earned myself an earnest headshake from the witch next to me.
"That's actually a really heartbreaking yet also heartwarming story. Not really something you just tell someone on the first day you met. I suppose it just never came up again. Lady Beatrice used to reside in the permanent spell damage ward at St Mungo's for over a decade after the war ended. Her snapping out of the nightmares that plagued her was described as a small miracle at the time. A mind healer hired from a tribe in Jamaica more or less wiped her mind of anything that happened to Lady Beatrice during the war - including the birth of her daughter," Isobel explained with a patient and empathetic smile.
Seeing me thoughtfully nod along, the young raven-haired witch clarified, "As a patient, she would have been no good to her daughter. After she lost her memories, Lady Beatrice did not know she was a mother. Only after Lady Rosier's death did Natalie and Isodora move back in with Lady Beatrice at the Selwyn Estate. They are friendly enough, but Isodora and her mother have a very complicated relationship. They obviously don't talk about it much - especially not openly."
"Makes sense. Thanks for sharing, Isobel," I replied with a nod. It wasn't a very important topic, but it was still a small wrinkle in my brain since then.
When we reached the greenhouses, Sprout was busy teaching a N.E.W.T. level class, but I kind of had a 'come whenever you like' pass with the witch at this point, and the older students were busy milking some weird flower. I recognized it as one I found in the Forbidden Forest last year and sold to Sprout directly.
"Ah. Here, we have the little hero who is responsible for you being able to learn milking a Widow's Elusive Tear in today's class. He found me four of them last year, and as I told you before, they are notoriously elusive in the wild. Those four at the front are the ones I managed to clip for your little saplings that came along nicely after spring," Sprout proudly announced, and I gave the older students a small wave. "What have you brought me this time? Ah, another fern? You'll have to wait a little before we can go to greenhouse three."
"That's fine. I also found this lily here in the bucket. It grew below a rock where it was really dark. It was midnight black underwater but bloomed into rainbow colors when I took it out? It also smelled really, uh, magical? Do you know what it is, professor?"
I brought the bucket to the portly old witch to show her the flower that was still blooming, its petals moving in the bucket as if there was a gentle current waving it along.
"Oho! A Blind Love's Delight?" Sprout excitedly asked. Before I could ask anything else, she instructed her class to stop what they were doing and dragged me along as she ordered, "You're about to smell something few wizards and witches have smelled in their lifetime, students. Another great and unexpected find by young Macnair."
We were almost running to the greenhouse three at that point, the one with the aquariums and large pond inside for the aquatic plants Sprout raised.
"Blind Love's Delight is a waterlily few have seen in their lives. The tale behind the name starts with a blind mermaid princess who fell in love with the singing voice of a young wizard who sang love songs at the beach after his childhood sweetheart died early. Think about it too much, and the story makes no sense at all, so I won't bore you with it. What makes this plant such a delight, however, is not even the story or its enchanting smell. No, it makes fish taste better if they swim in the waters near it. I wouldn't be surprised if our little hero became enemy number one of our local mermen tribe if they knew the special water lily grew there. Even for the mermen, it is said to be notoriously hard to find," Sprout explained grandly before we reached the pond where my fern from the day before was already softly swaying in an area of water the professor had enchanted to move a little just like the plant needed.
"How my Talion managed to find it is once more beyond me, you'd have to ask him for tips and tricks. I have only had the pleasure of caring for two of these remarkable plants for a short time, and I can assure you, I would not have found the lily myself. It thrives while growing in dark shadows and perfectly mimics the color of the shadow to seemlessly disappear," Sprout continued to explain and with my approval, took the bucket from my hand and continued the apparently exotic lesson. It was a little funny to me that she addressed me thrice thus far, differently each time, and went from 'little hero' to a more formal 'young Macnair' all the way to 'my Talion'.
I learned many things during Sprout's impromptu lesson on the fern and the lily together with N.E.W.T. herbology students and Isobel. First off was that Isobel's family was so rich, her aunt was apparently a rich and bored housewife who splurged on such a lily she bought in Portugal in an auction and the flower she had in her 'aquarium' was one of the two plants Sprout had worked with before.
Though, the actions of the bored housewife resulted in the MacDougals using this aquarium to breed salmon for Britain's high-end fish market once it was set up properly. The tank was gigantic and a marvel of enchanting from increased inner size, water climate control, and strong, continuous, magical currents all the way to having a giant glass window that could 'zoom in' to follow certain fish. It likely cost more than my current networth, and that was counting my muggle money and the town I was about to own.
Sprout also wasn't sure if Isobel had low-balled me with the offer because the plant notoriously lacked a market. The one Isobel's aunt got was sold at a little over two thousand galleon, but the second such flower Sprout worked on was privately sold at 'just' six hundred galleon. Not everyone had the money to build a tank like the MacDougals and start a breeding pond with unrivaled water quality. Plus, the Blind Love's Delight helped. It didn't make stinky fish smell and taste like a gourmet dinner all on its own. The fish had to be delicious to begin with, and only then would they start tasting even better.
Together with how to best care for it and the fern I found and what to use both for, Sprout extended her usual lesson by almost an hour before someone's stomach loudly growled. I made my way to the Great Hall with Isobel in tow but without the plant with me.
I was going to allow Sprout to take care of the lily and study it until I found a body of water near Goldsborough that would allow me to breed delicious fish. I'd win a lot if the herbology professor figured out how to make the flower reproduce, whether in the form of seeds or offshoots until next summer break.