Chapter 326: Let Father Have the First Taste |
The Whomping Willow was more stubborn than Regulus had expected.
Half a day of verdant magic, poured out without a pause, and only then did it grudgingly settle, sliding from patrol to wariness to that fine threshold where hostility hovered just below the point of attack.
He laid his magical sense across it and felt the violent oscillation still coursing inside the branches, bound, held back for now, not yet released.
Morning to noon. Five hours on his feet.
Agnes came by once in the middle, carrying a tray with a warming lid clamped over it.
Maybe she saw what he was doing. Half a lifetime with magical plants, she'd know verdant magic when she met it. Or maybe she didn't, and she'd simply come to bring food and asked nothing.
The lid lifted on a steaming Shepherd's Pie and a pot of Ginger Tea. A warming charm had been worked into the underside of the cover, breathing out heat, keeping the food hot for the next half hour.
Agnes set the tray on a wooden stake. "Young Mr. Black, lunch."
Beside the tray sat a small stone basin holding a slab of raw meat, still steaming, the cut surface pink, blood pooled at the bottom.
She glanced toward Baruk. He had his head out over Regulus's shoulder, all eight eyes fixed on the basin.
Regulus dipped his chin. "Thank you."
She didn't say much, though she gave Baruk a second look. Eight eyes looked back at her, chelicerae opening and closing once, like a greeting.
Then she said she'd come for the dishes in an hour, and turned and left.
He ate and kept releasing verdant magic, took two sips of the ginger tea, warmth spreading through him.
Baruk dropped from his shoulder, eight legs scrabbling fast across the ground, gripped the rim of the basin, and tore through the membrane on the surface of the meat with his chelicerae. He began to eat.
By evening, when he spread his sense over the two willows again, they were nothing like the morning.
Magic still ran fast through the loops, root to branch tip at the same speed as before, but the restlessness, the urge to lash anything it brushed, had drained away.
Conduction remained. Oscillation remained. Only the aim of the attack was gone for now. It moved, but it moved at ease.
The verdant magic had done two things.
It had made the willow file Regulus under the heading of environment rather than intruder. The branches' striking instinct was meant for intruders. When the tree decided that the thing before it was no different from soil, sun, and wind, the command to strike never fired.
And the verdant magic had a stabilizing effect on the willow's own magic. The way sunlight ordered a plant's growth, it smoothed the willow's circulation. The small disturbances left by the transplant eased away under its soaking, the branches swinging more evenly than they had that morning, more regular in their rhythm.
The magic was still lively. Now it was lively with discipline.
Regulus drew his sense back and worked the stiffness out of legs that had stood half a day. A knee cracked once.
He walked to the edge of the stakes and stepped over the rope.
The branches changed rhythm at once. A few turned toward him, their arcs widening a fraction, but none struck.
He kept walking, in no hurry to slow.
He wasn't worried about being hit. The constant Protego stayed up at all times, its defense proven past counting, and it was called constant for a reason. However savage the willow, in the end it was nothing but a mindless plant.
No branch could punch through a defense backed by Bellatrix's guardian aspect. He could stand here a full day and let dozens of branches take turns at him, and they likely wouldn't snag a single hair.
But there'd be no point. He hadn't come to be whipped.
What he needed was the magical data of a willow running normal. An enraged, frenzied willow ran its loops in overload, conduction speed and oscillation strength skewed off baseline. He wanted the steady state, every detail of stable operation. So he needed it to move quietly, not lash in fury.
With each step he sent the verdant magic to the branch tips ahead of his body, giving the willow a buffer. Something approaching. But this something was like nature itself, and needed no answer.
Ten feet or so from the trunk, a thin branch dipped down from above, its hooked tip pausing in front of his face.
Baruk went off on his shoulder.
Eight legs flung wide, chelicerae gaping, the front four feet lifting into a threat stance. He let out a shriek of a click, nothing like his usual lazy rhythm, fangs bared.
Regulus reached over and touched his back plate, pressing lightly with his fingertip. "It's fine."
The chelicerae stayed open, but the front legs drew slowly back in. Eight eyes locked on the branch, tracking it as it swayed.
The corner of Regulus's mouth twitched up.
The thin branch hung in front of him two or three seconds, then withdrew.
A few more came down, sweeping slow above his head and along both sides, retreating the moment they met the edge of the verdant magic, as though confirming what this thing was. Confirmation made, they all pulled back and went on swaying.
He kept walking, all the way to the foot of the trunk.
Tipping his head back, the twenty-five-foot willow loomed far larger from directly beneath than it had from a distance, the crown swallowing a great wedge of sky, branches crossing and swinging overhead, the light filtering through in flickers.
The scars and cracks in the trunk showed clearer at this range, each fissure inlaid with dark resin, old and hard as amber.
He didn't know what his father had paid for these two willows, or what he'd traded. His father hadn't said, and he hadn't asked.
Resources, politics, money. However you reckoned it, this was a thing measured in units of a hundred thousand Galleons, and even then it had a price but no market. The Whomping Willow was a rare magical plant under global control. A living adult specimen was barred from trade under the protection statutes of every country on earth. Getting two from Bulgaria to Cornwall took more than money. It took something else.
But he'd only said he needed them, and his father had found a way.
Any other family, even with a sound research reason, would likely have written this off as a child's passing whim, not worth resources of this caliber.
He was different. He could turn these things into other things.
The last time, with the Decomposition Curse, the first to try it had been Orion.
This time, his father would have the first taste again. Show the investor a return. Only fair.
Regulus pulled himself out of it, set the idle thoughts aside, and laid his palm flat against the trunk.
Seeing no danger, Baruk crept up to join him, spitting a length of silk from his shoulder that stuck to the bark, then tugging himself across.
Regulus left him to it, closed his eyes, and poured the whole of his magical sense in.
Direct contact. Precision far beyond the morning out past the stakes, every detail of the conduction paths laid bare.
The angle of each fork was exact enough to copy in his mind. The proportion of magic split at each node could be put to numbers. The decay curve from trunk to branch to tip sat plain in his sense.
And the full mechanism of the conversion at the tip.
Before, he'd caught only a blurred lurch, knowing the conduction turned abruptly to oscillation at the end without seeing how that middle step was done.
Now he saw it.
The willow's conduction ran without cease, target or no target, the way a heart beats whether you're running or asleep. Magic set out from the roots, climbed the main channel, split at every fork, and reached the branch tips. There it released once, the oscillation scattering into the air, and a fresh round set out from the roots again, around and around. The whole loop idled without end.
When a branch struck a target, that idle flipped in an instant to violence. The oscillation no longer scattered. It poured into the target's interior.
The only difference was whether there was a vessel to catch it.
His palm on the trunk now, the willow not attacking, the release at the tip still ran its course, and he could feel every link of it whole.
The magic ran bound along the branch, the path's width steady, narrowing from heavy branch to fine, but narrowing evenly and by degrees. At the very end the path closed off in a sudden cliff, the channel cinching from pipe to needle-point exit with almost no transition between.
There the magic was crushed.
What had spread evenly through the channel was forced together at the needle's point, its density spiking to dozens of times the normal. The compression itself changed the magic's nature. Past a certain threshold of density, order began to give way to disorder, the internal vibration swelling fast.
Then it was loosed from the point.
The instant the compressed magic squeezed out, the binding vanished, the density crashed, and magic crushed to the limit blew open into high-intensity oscillation. It carried tremendous penetrating force, and the moment it spread from the release point it would bore into the inner structure of whatever it touched.
Strike air, and the oscillation scattered. Nothing happened.
Strike a solid, and it flooded inside, bouncing through the structure, shaking at every joint, pulling at every load-bearing face, working the whole thing loose layer by layer from the inside out.
Narrow... Compress... Release... Detonate...
Four steps, finished at the very tip of a single branch, the whole of it under a hundredth of a second.
This was the willow's principle of attack. The full mechanism of breaking a thing from within.
Regulus lifted his palm from the trunk and opened his eyes.
The sky had gone dark. He'd stood beneath the tree close to two hours.
Baruk still clung to the opposite stretch of trunk, eight eyes still on him, motionless, well behaved for once.
"Come down."
Baruk spat a thread of silk and swung back to his shoulder.
He stepped out of the strike range and walked to the edge of the stakes.
Next he needed to watch it hit something. The static loop he'd mapped, but the violent state, the path the oscillation took once it flooded a target's interior, how it spread, how it behaved differently across materials, all of that he had to see with his own eyes.
He plucked a withered leaf from the low shrub wall, tapped it with a fingertip, and the leaf became a small paper airplane with a few lines of writing on it. The plane wobbled off crookedly toward the eastern greenhouses.
