Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (183 page)

After Captain Brodski had learned that Draco Malfoy was in the Forbidden Forest, seemingly in the company of Rubeus Hagrid, Brodski had begun inquiring to find out who had authorized this, and had still been unable to find out when Draco Malfoy had missed check-in. Despite Harry’s protests, the Auror Captain, who was authorized to know about Time-Turners, had refused to allow deployment to before the time of the missed check-in; there were standard procedures involving Time. But Brodski had given Harry written orders allowing him to go back and deploy an Auror trio to arrive one second after the missed check-in time. There had been a Patronus Charm to locate Draco, which Harry had successfully willed to take the form of a ball of pure silver light, and the flight of Aurors had arrived on time to the second.

“I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” Harry replied evenly. Professor Quirrell was still a major suspect, and it was good for him not to know the details. “Now why are you eating unicorns?”

“Ah,” Professor Quirrell said. “As to that…” The man hesitated. “I was drinking the blood of unicorns, not eating them. The missing flesh, the ragged marks upon the body - those were to obscure the case, to make it seem like some other predator. The use of unicorn’s blood is too well-known.”

“I don’t know it,” Harry said.

“I know you do not,” the Defense Professor said sharply. “Or you would not be pestering me about it. The power of unicorn’s blood is to preserve your life for a time, even if you are on the very verge of death.”

There was a stretch of time when Harry’s brain claimed to be refusing to process the words, which was of course a lie, because you couldn’t know the meaning you weren’t allowed to process, without having already processed it.

A strange sense of blankness overtook Harry, an absence of reaction, maybe this was what other people felt like when someone went off-script, and they couldn’t say or think of anything to do.

Of course Professor Quirrell was dying, not just occasionally ill.

Professor Quirrell had known he was dying. He’d volunteered to take the Defense Professor position at Hogwarts, after all.

Of course he’d been getting worse the whole school year. Of course illnesses which kept getting worse had a predictable destination at their end.

Harry’s brain had surely known already, somewhere in the safe back of his mind where he could refuse to process things he’d already processed.

Of course that was why Professor Quirrell wouldn’t be able to teach Battle Magic next year. Professor McGonagall wouldn’t even have to fire him. He would just be -

- dead.

“No,” Harry said, his voice a little shaky. “There has to be a way -”

“I am not stupid nor particularly eager to die. I have already looked. I had to go this far simply to last out my lesson plans, having less time than I had thought, and -” The head of the dark moonlit figure turned away. “I think I do not want to hear about it, Mr. Potter.”

Harry’s breath hitched. Too many emotions were bubbling up in him at once. After denial came anger, according to a ritual someone had just made up. And yet it seemed surprisingly appropriate.

“And why -” Harry’s breath hitched again. “Why isn’t unicorn’s blood standard in healer’s kits, then? To keep someone alive, even if they’re on the very verge of dying from their legs being eaten?”

“Because there are permanent side effects,” Professor Quirrell said quietly.

“Side effects?
Side effects?
What kind of side effect is medically worse than
DEATH?
” Harry’s voice rose on the last word until he was shouting.

“Not everyone thinks the same way we do, Mr. Potter. Though, to be fair, the blood must come from a live unicorn and the unicorn must die in the drinking. Would I be here otherwise?”

Harry turned, stared at the surrounding trees. “Have a herd of unicorns at St. Mungos. Floo the patients there, or use portkeys.”

“Yes, that would work.”

Harry’s face tightened, the only outward sign behind his trembling hands of everything that was welling up inside him. He needed to scream, needed some outlet, needed
something
he couldn’t name and finally Harry leveled his wand at a tree and shouted
“Diffindo!
”

There was a sharp tearing sound, and a cut appeared across the wood.

“Diffindo!”

Another cut. Harry had learned the Charm only ten days previously, after he’d started getting serious about self-defense. It was theoretically a second-year Charm, but the anger pouring through him seemed to know no bounds, he knew enough now not to exhaust himself and he still had power yet.

“Diffindo!
” Harry had aimed at a branch this time, and it plummeted to the ground with a sound of twigs and leaves.

There didn’t seem to be any tears inside him, only pressure with no outlet.

“I shall leave you to it,” Professor Quirrell said quietly. The Defense Professor rose from his tree stump, the unicorn’s blood still moonlit on the black cloak he wore, and drew his hood back over his head.

Harry stood, panting, in the midst of a brief wasted circle amid the forest, more destruction than a first-year should have been able to reach, by himself. The Severing Charm wouldn’t bring down a tree, so he’d started partially Transfiguring cross-sections through the wood. It hadn’t let out what was inside him, bringing down a small circle of trees hadn’t made him feel any better, all the emotions were still there but while he was destroying trees he at least wasn’t thinking about how the feelings couldn’t be let out.

After Harry had run out of available magic he’d started tearing off branches with his bare hands and snapping them. His hands were bleeding, though nothing that Madam Pomfrey couldn’t fix in the morning. Only Dark magic left permanent scars on wizards.

There came a sound of something moving in the woods, like the hoofbeats of a horse, and Harry whirled, his wand rising once more; some part of his magic had returned while he was working with his hands. It occurred to him for the first time that he was out in the Forbidden Forest alone, and making noise.

What emerged into the moonlight was not the unicorn Harry had expected, but a creature with a lower body like that of a horse, gleaming white-brown beneath the moonlight, and the bare upper chest of a male human with long white hair. The moonlight caught the centaur’s face, and Harry saw that the eyes were almost as blue as Dumbledore’s, halfway to sapphire.

In one hand the centaur held a long wooden spear, with an overlarge metal blade whose edge did not gleam beneath the moonlight; a gleaming edge, Harry had once read, was the sign of a dull blade.

“So,” the centaur said. His voice was low, powerful and male. “Here you are, surrounded by destruction. I can smell the unicorn’s blood in the air, the blood of something innocent, slain to save oneself.”

A jolt of sudden fear brought Harry into the now, and he said quickly, “It’s not what it looks like.”

“I know. The stars themselves proclaim your innocence, ironically enough.” The centaur took a step toward Harry within the small clearing, still holding his spear upright. “A strange word,
innocence.
It means lack of knowledge, like the innocence of a child, and also means lack of guilt. Only those entirely ignorant can lack all responsibility for the consequences of their actions. He knows not what he does, and therefore can be without harmful intent; so says that word.” The deep voice did not echo in the woods.

Harry’s eyes flickered to the spear-tip, and he realized that he should have grabbed his Time-Turner the moment he saw the centaur. Now, if Harry tried to reach beneath his robes, the spear could strike him before then, if the centaur was fast enough. “I read once,” Harry said, his voice a bit unsteady as he tried to match deep-sounding words to deep-sounding words, “that it’s wrong to think of little children as innocent, because not knowing isn’t the same as not choosing. That children do little harms to each other with schoolyard fights, because they don’t have the power to do great harm. And some adults do great harm. But the adults who don’t, aren’t they more innocent than children, not less?”

“The wisdom of wizards,” the centaur said.

“Muggle wisdom, actually.”

“Of the magicless I know little. Mars has been dim of late, but it grows brighter.” The centaur took another step forwards, bringing him almost within striking distance of Harry.

Harry didn’t dare look up to the sky. “That means Mars is coming closer to the Earth, as both planets go around the Sun. Mars is reflecting the same amount of sunlight as always, it’s just getting nearer to us. What do you mean, the stars proclaim my innocence?”

“The night sky speaks to centaurs. It is how we know what we know. Or do they not even tell wizards that much, these days?” A look of contempt crossed the centaur’s face.

“I… tried to look up centaurs, when I was checking out Divination. Most of the authors just ridiculed centaur Divination without explaining why, wizards don’t understand argumentative norms, to them ridiculing an idea or a person feels like casting that idea down just as much as bringing evidence against it… I thought the part about centaurs using astrology was just more ridicule…”

“Why?” the centaur intoned. His head cocked curiously.

“Because the course of the planets is predictable for thousands of years in advance. If I talked to the right Muggles, I could show you a diagram of exactly what the planets will look like from this spot ten years later. Would you be able to make predictions from that?”

The centaur shook his head. “From a diagram? No. The light of the planets, the comets, the subtle shifts in the stars themselves, those I would not see.”

“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well,
project
onto the night sky.”

“Perhaps,” the centaur said thoughtfully. His head lowered. “The others would strike you for saying such a thing, but I have ever sought to know what I do not know. Why the night sky can foretell the future - that I surely do not know. It is hard enough to grasp the skill itself. All I can say, son of Lily, is that even if what you are saying is true, it does not seem useful.”

Harry allowed himself to relax a little; being addressed as ‘son of Lily’ implied that the centaur thought of him as more than a random intruder in the forest. Besides, attacking a Hogwarts student would probably bring some kind of huge reprisal upon the non-wizard centaur tribe in the forests, and the centaur probably knew that… “What Muggles have learned is that there is a power in the truth, in all the pieces of the truth which interact with each other, which you can only find by discovering as many truths as possible. To do that you can’t defend false beliefs in any way, not even by saying the false belief is useful. It might not seem to matter whether your predictions are really based on the stars or if it’s an innate talent being projected. But if you wanted to really understand Divination, or for that matter the stars, the real truth about centaur predictions would be a fact that matters to other truths.”

Slowly the centaur nodded. “So the wandless have become wiser than the wizards. What a joke! Tell me, son of Lily, do the Muggles in their wisdom say that soon the skies will be empty?”

“Empty?” Harry said. “Er… no?”

“The other centaurs in this forest have stayed from your presence, for we are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens’ course. Because, in becoming entangled in your fate, we might become less innocent in what is to come. I alone have dared approach you.”

“I… don’t understand.”

“No. You are innocent, as the stars say. And to slay something innocent to save oneself, that is a terrible deed. One would live only a cursed life, a half-life, from that day. For any centaur would surely be cast out, if he slew a foal.”

The spear made a lightning motion, too fast for Harry’s eyes to follow, and smashed his wand out of his hand.

Another powerful blow smashed into Harry’s solar plexus, and he went gasping and retching to the forest floor.

Harry’s hand reached up toward his robes, for his Time-Turner, and the spear-butt knocked his hand away, almost hard enough to break fingers, he reached with his other hand and that was knocked away too -

“I am sorry, Harry Potter,” the centaur said, and then looked up with widened eyes. The spear spun about and came up, intercepting a red spellbolt. Then the centaur dropped the spear and leaped away desperately, a green flash of light went past him and another green flash of light followed in its wake, then a third green flash hit the centaur straight-on.

The centaur fell and did not move again.

It took a long time for Harry to catch his breath, to stagger to his feet, to pick up his wand, to croak, “What?”

By that time the sense of doom, of power almost tangible in the air, had approached once more.

“P-Professor Quirrell? What are you doing here?”

“Well,” the man in the black cloak said thoughtfully, “
you
needed to fly into a rage and have a loud tantrum in the Forbidden Forest in the middle of the night, and
I
needed to go just outside your ability to detect me and keep watch. One does not leave a student alone in the Forbidden Forest. That should be obvious in retrospect.”

Harry stared at the fallen centaur.

The horse-form wasn’t breathing.

“You - you
killed
him, that was Avada Kedavra -”

“I do not always understand how other people imagine morality to work, Mr. Potter. But even I know that on conventional morality, it is acceptable to kill nonhuman creatures which are about to slay a wizard child. Perhaps you do not care about the nonhuman part, but he was about to
kill
you. He was hardly innocent -”

The Defense Professor stopped, looking at Harry, who had raised one trembling hand to his mouth.

“Well,” the Defense Professor said then, “I have made my point, and you may think on it. Centaur spears can block many spells, but no one tries to block if they see that the spell is a certain shade of green. For this purpose it is useful to know some green stunning hexes. Really, Mr. Potter, you should understand by now how I operate.”

The Defense Professor came nearer the centaur’s body, and Harry took an involuntary step back, then another, at the terrible rising sense of
STOP, DON’T -

The Defense Professor kneeled and pressed his wand to the centaur’s head.

The wand stayed there for a time.

And the centaur rose, eyes blank, breathing once more.

“Remember nothing of this time,” the Defense Professor commanded. “Wander away and forget everything about this night.”

The centaur walked away, the four horse-legs moving in strange synchrony.

“Happy now?” the Defense Professor said, sounding rather sardonic about it.

Harry’s brain still felt broken. “He was trying to
kill
me.”

“Oh, for Merlin’s sake - yes, he was trying to kill you. Get used to it. Only boring people never have that experience.”

Harry’s voice emerged, hoarse. “Why - why did he want to -”

“Any number of reasons. I would be lying if I said I’d never considered killing you myself.”

Harry stared at where the centaur had wandered into the trees.

His brain still felt half-broken, like an engine misfiring, but Harry did not see how this could possibly be a good sign.

The news of Draco Malfoy nearly being eaten by a horror had been sufficient to summon back Dumbledore from wherever he’d gone, to wake Lord Malfoy and the Lady Greengrass’s handsome husband, to bring forth Amelia Bones. The supposed presence of the horror had provoked skepticism even from Dumbledore, and the possibility of False Memory Charms had been raised. Harry had said (after some internal debate about the consequences of people believing a demon was on the loose) that he didn’t actually remember making the same effort he’d put forth to frighten the Dementor, the dark thing had just left; which was what you would expect someone to create as a False Memory, if they hadn’t actually known how Harry had done it. The names of Bellatrix Black, Severus Snape, and Quirinus Quirrell had been mentioned in connection with wizards strong enough to subdue everyone present and cast False Memory Charms, and Harry had known that Lucius was thinking of Dumbledore. There had been Aurors testifying, and discussions going in circles, and glares of accusation, and cutting remarks at 2AM in the morning. There had been motions, and votes, and consequences.

“Do you believe,” Headmaster Dumbledore said quietly to Harry, when all of it was done, and the two of them alone, “that the Hogwarts you have wrought is an improvement?”

Harry sat with his elbows on his knees, his face resting on his palms, in the conference room from which all the others had now departed. Professor McGonagall, who did not use a Time-Turner as routinely as the two of them, had departed swiftly for her bed.

“Yes,” Harry answered after too long a hesitation. “From my perspective, Headmaster, things in Hogwarts are finally, finally normal. This is how things should be, when four children get sent into the Forbidden Forest at night. There should be a huge fuss, constables showing up, and the responsible party getting sacked.”

“You believe it is good,” Dumbledore said quietly, “that the man who you call responsible was, as you put it, sacked.”

“Yes, in fact, I do.”

“Argus Filch has served this institution for decades.”

“And when given Veritaserum,” Harry said tiredly, “Argus Filch revealed that he had sent an eleven-year-old boy into the Forbidden Forest, hoping something awful would happen to him, because he thought the boy’s father had been responsible for the death of his cat. The three other students in Draco’s company don’t seem to have fazed him. I would have argued for jail time, but your concept of jail in this country is Azkaban. I’ll also note that Filch was remarkably unpleasant to the children in Hogwarts and I expect the school’s hedonic index to be improved by his departure, not that it matters to you, I suppose.”

The Headmaster’s eyes were impenetrable behind the half-moon glasses. “Argus Filch is a Squib. His work at Hogwarts is all he has. Had, rather.”

“The purpose of a school is not to provide work for its employees. I know you probably spent more time around Filch than around any individual student, but that shouldn’t make Filch’s inner experiences loom larger in your thoughts. Students have inner lives too.”

“You don’t care at all, do you Harry?” Dumbledore’s voice was quiet. “About those you hurt.”

“I care about the innocent,” Harry said. “Like Mr. Hagrid, who you’ll note I argued should not be considered malicious, just oblivious. I was fine with Mr. Hagrid working here so long as he didn’t take anyone into the Forbidden Forest again.”

“I had thought that with Rubeus vindicated, he might teach Care of Magical Creatures after Silvanus departs the position. But much of that teaching is done in the Forbidden Forest. So that too shall not be, in the wake of your passage.”