Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (138 page)

In one sense, it might have been easier for Draco to win the true loyalties of his new soldiers if they’d thought Harry hadn’t wanted them. In another sense… well, it wasn’t easy to put into words. Harry had given him good soldiers with their pride intact, but it was more than that. Harry had showed kindliness toward his soldiers, but it was more than
that
. It wasn’t just Harry playing fair, it was something that… that you couldn’t help but contrast with the way the game was played in Slytherin House.

So Draco hadn’t offered the slightest insult to Mr. Thomas, but brought him straight to his side, subordinate to himself and Padma but no one else. It was a test, Draco had told Mr. Thomas and everyone, not a promotion. Mr. Thomas would have to show himself worthy of rank within Dragon Army - but he would be given a chance, and the chance
would
be fair. Mr. Thomas had looked surprised at the ceremony of it (the Chaos Legion, from what Draco had heard, didn’t stand on formality) but the Gryffindor boy had stood a little straighter, and nodded.

And then, after Mr. Thomas had done well enough in one of Dragon Army’s training sessions, he’d been brought into the strategy session in Dragon Army’s huge military office. And a few minutes into the session, Padma had happened to ask - as though it was a perfectly normal question - whether Mr. Thomas had any ideas about how to defeat the Chaos Legion.

The Gryffindor boy had said cheerfully that Harry had predicted that General Malfoy would get one of his soldiers to ask him that, and that Harry had given him the message that General Malfoy should ask himself where his relative advantage lay - what Draco Malfoy could do, or what Dragon Army could do, that the Chaos Legion couldn’t match - and then try to exploit it for all it was worth. Dean Thomas couldn’t think of what that advantage might be, but if he
did
come up with any ideas for beating Chaos, he’d share them. Harry had ordered him to, after all.

Sigh,
Draco had thought, since he couldn’t actually sigh out loud. But it was good advice, and Draco had followed it, sitting at his bedroom desk with quill and parchment listing out everything that might be a relative advantage.

And, almost to Draco’s own surprise, he’d had an idea, a real one. In fact he’d had
two.

The hollow bell sounded through the forest, somehow sounding more ominous than ever before. On the instant, the two pilots cried “
Up!
” and leapt onto their broomsticks, heading into the gray sky.

Mr. and Mrs. Davis had now slumped slightly against each other, more from sheer muscle exhaustion than from any decrease of tension. Before them, the vast blank white parchment flickered with three great windows, as though holes had been cut through into the forest, showing three armies on the march. Lesser windows showed the six riders upon their broomsticks, and the corner of the parchment showed a view of the entire forest, with glowing dots to indicate armies and scouts.

The window into Sunshine showed General Granger and her Captains marching in the center of the Sunshine Regiment, protected by
Contego
screens along with a number of other young witches. The Sunshine Regiment, the Defense Professor had remarked, knew well that it had now acquired a strong advantage in experienced soldiers, and it meant to protect those soldiers from a surprise attack. Aside from that, the Sunshine Soldiers were moving forward at a steady march, conserving their strength.

The soldiers in General Malfoy’s army, at least those with higher Transfiguration scores, were picking up leaves and Transfiguring them into… well, if you looked at Padma Patil, who was almost done with hers, it looked like her leaf was becoming a left-handed glove bearing a dangling strap. (The window had zoomed in to show this.)

Lord Jugson was watching the screen with a flat expression; his voice, when he spoke, seemed to ooze and drip with disdain. “What
is
your son doing, Lucius?”

The foreign-born witch who stood at Draco Malfoy’s right side had finished Transfiguring her glove, and was now bringing it before the Dragon General like a sacrifice.

“I do not know,” said Lucius Malfoy, his tone calm though no less aristocratic, “but I must trust that he has good reason for doing it.”

All Dragon Army stopped for a moment as Padma slid the glove over her left hand, strapped it in place, and presented it before Draco Malfoy; who also stopped in place, took several deep breaths, raised his wand, executed a precise set of eight movements and bellowed “
Colloportus!
”

The Dragon Warrior raised her gloved hand, flexed it, and gave a small bow to Draco Malfoy, who returned it more shallowly, though the Dragon General was staggering slightly. Padma then returned to her place at Draco’s side, and the Dragons began marching once more.

“Well,” remarked Augusta Longbottom. “I don’t suppose someone would care to explain?” Amelia Bones was frowning slightly as she gazed at the screen.

“For some reason or other,” said the amused voice of Professor Quirrell, “it seems that the scion of Malfoy is able to cast surprisingly strong magic for a first-year student. Due to the purity of his blood, of course. Certainly the good Lord Malfoy would not have openly flouted the underage magic laws by arranging for his son to receive a wand before his acceptance into Hogwarts.”

“I suggest you be careful in your implications, Quirrell,” Lucius Malfoy said coldly.

“Oh, I am,” Professor Quirrell said. “A
Colloportus
cannot be dispelled by
Finite Incantatem;
it requires an
Alohomora
of equal strength. Until then, a glove so Charmed will resist lesser material forces, deflect the Sleep Hex and the Stunning Hex. And as neither Mr. Potter nor Miss Granger can cast a counterspell powerful enough, that Charm is invincible upon this battlefield. It is not the original intent of the Charm, nor the intent of whoever taught Mr. Malfoy an emergency spell for evading his enemies. But it would seem that Mr. Malfoy has been learning creativity.”

Lucius Malfoy had straightened as the Defense Professor spoke; he now sat erect upon his cushioned bench, his head held perceptibly higher than before, and when he spoke it was with quiet pride. “He will be the greatest Lord Malfoy that has yet lived.”

“Faint praise,” Augusta Longbottom said under her breath; Amelia Bones chuckled, as did Mr. Davis for a tiny, fatal fraction of a second before he stopped with a strangled gargle.

“I quite agree,” said Professor Quirrell, though it wasn’t clear to whom he spoke. “Unfortunately for Mr. Malfoy, he is still new to the art of creativity, and so he has committed a classic error of Ravenclaw.”

“And what might that be?” said Lucius Malfoy, his voice now turned chill once more.

Professor Quirrell had leaned back in his seat, the pale blue eyes briefly unfocusing as one of the windows shifted its viewpoint within the greater screen, zooming in to show the sweat now on Draco Malfoy’s forehead. “It is such a beautiful idea that Mr. Malfoy has quite overlooked its pragmatic difficulties.”

“Would someone care to explain that?” said Lady Greengrass. “Not all of us present are experts at such… affairs.”

Amelia Bones spoke, the old witch’s voice somewhat dry. “It will tempt them to try to catch hexes that they would be wiser to simply dodge. The more so, if they have had little practice catching them. And the casting of so many Charms will tire their strongest warrior.”

Professor Quirrell gave the DMLE Director a half-nod of acknowledgment. “As you say, Madam Bones. Mr. Malfoy is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. Malfoy’s best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.”

Lord Malfoy simply turned to watch the screens again, as though the Defense Professor had used up his right to exist.

“But -” said Lord Greengrass. “But what in Merlin’s name is Harry Potter -”

Sixteen remaining soldiers of the Chaos Legion - or fifteen plus Blaise Zabini, rather - marched confidently through the forest, their shoes thudding over the still-dry ground. Their camouflage uniforms blended into the forest even more than usual, all colors washed out by the tints of an overcast day.

Sixteen Chaos Legionnaires, against twenty-eight Dragon Warriors and twenty-eight Sunshine Soldiers.

The common consensus had been that, with odds that bad, it was practically impossible for them to lose. After all, General Chaos was bound to come up with something really
spectacular,
facing odds like that.

There was something almost nightmarish about how everyone seemed to now expect Harry to pull miracles out of his hat, on demand, any time one was needed. It meant that if you couldn’t do the impossible, you were
disappointing your friends
and
failing to live up to your potential…

Harry hadn’t bothered complaining to Professor Quirrell about ‘too much pressure’. Harry’s mental model of the Defense Professor had predicted him looking severely annoyed, saying things along the lines of
You are perfectly capable of solving this problem, Mr. Potter; did you even try?
and then deducting several hundred Quirrell points.

From above, from where two broomsticks watched their march, the high young voice of Tess Walsh cried “Friend!” and after another moment, “Gingersnap!”

A handful of seconds later, the soldier who’d code-named herself Gingersnap returned bearing a double handful of acorns, sweating slightly in the cool but humid air from the jog that had taken her to the oak tree Neville had spotted. Gingersnap approached to where Shannon was holding a uniform-shirt with the neck tied off, in lieu of anyone having to Transfigure a bag. When Gingersnap brought her hands forward to try and dump her acorns into the holding-shirt, Chaotic Shannon, giggling, jerked the shirt to the right, then to the left again as Gingersnap made another effort to dump the acorns, until a sharp “Miss Friedman!” from Lieutenant Nott caused Shannon to sigh and hold the shirt still. Gingersnap dumped her acorns into those accumulated, and then headed out for more.

Somewhere in the background, Ellie Knight was singing her very own version of the Chaos Legion’s marching song, and around half the other soldiers were trying to step along with it despite not knowing the tune in advance. Nearby, Nita Berdine, who had a high Transfiguration score, finished creating yet another pair of green sunglasses, and handed them to Adam Beringer, who folded up the sunglasses before tucking them into his uniform pocket. Other soldiers were already wearing their own green sunglasses, despite the cloudy day.

You might guess that there was some sort of incredibly complicated and fascinating explanation behind this, and you would be right.

Two days earlier Harry had been sitting amid his bookcases in the comfy rocking-chair he’d obtained for his trunk’s cavern level, pondering silently in the quiet span between classes and dinnertime, thinking about power.

For sixteen Chaotics to defeat twenty-eight Sunnies and twenty-eight Dragons they would need a force amplifier. There were limits to what you could do with maneuver. There
had
to be a secret weapon and it had to be invincible, or at least moderately unstoppable.

Muggle artifacts were now illegal in Hogwarts’s mock battles, banned by Ministry edict. And the trouble with finding some other clever and unusual spell was that an army twice your own size could brute-force
Finite
almost anything you tried. The Sunshine Regiment might have missed that tactic with the Transfigured chainmail, but nobody would miss it again now that Professor Quirrell had pointed it out. And
Finite Incantatem
was a brute-force counterspell which required at least as much magic as the spell being canceled… which, if you were severely outnumbered, made it a whole new order of military challenge. The enemy could
Finite
anything you tried, and still have enough magic left over for shields and volleys of Sleep Hexes.

Unless, somehow, you could invoke potencies beyond the ordinary strength of first-year Hogwarts students, something too powerful for the enemy to
Finite
.

So Harry had asked Neville if he’d ever heard of any
small, safe
sacrificial rituals -

And then, after the screaming and the shouting had subsided, after Harry had stopped trying to argue about Unbreakable Vows and just given up the whole thing as impossible from a public relations standpoint, Harry had realized that he hadn’t even needed to go there. They taught you how to invoke potencies far beyond your own strength in ordinary Hogwarts classes.

Sometimes, even though you were looking straight at something, you didn’t realize
what
you were looking at until you happened to ask exactly the right question.

Defense. Charms. Transfiguration. Potions. History of Magic. Astronomy. Broomstick Flying. Herbology…

“
Foe!
” screamed the voice from above.

It was a good thing that Neville Longbottom hadn’t the tiniest idea that his grandmother was watching; or he would’ve been more self-conscious about screaming scary battlecries at the top of his lungs while casting
Luminos
every three seconds as he rocketed through a dense forest of trees, hot on the tail of Gregory Goyle.

(“But -” Augusta Longbottom said, her expression showing almost as much astonishment as worry. “But Neville is afraid of heights!”)

(“Not all fears last,” said Amelia Bones. The old witch was favoring the great screen before them with a measuring gaze. “Or perhaps he has found courage. It is much the same, in the end.”)

A glimmer of red -

Neville dodged, very nearly into a tree but he did dodge; and then Neville somehow also managed to dodge
almost
all of the branches before they smacked him in the face.

Now Mr. Goyle’s broomstick was pulling further and further away - even though the two of them were riding exactly the same broomstick and Mr. Goyle weighed more, somehow Neville was still falling behind. So Neville slowed down, pulled back, angled up out of the forest and began to accelerate back toward where the Chaos Legion still marched.