The Half-Blood Prince

by J. K. Rowling

  There was a scraping as everyone drew their cauldrons towards them, and some loud clunks as people began adding weights to their scales, but nobody spoke. The concentration within the room was almost tangible. Harry saw Malfoy riffling feverishly through his copy of Advanced Potion-Making. It could not have been clearer that Malfoy really wanted that lucky day. Harry bent swiftly over the tattered book Slughorn had lent him.

  To his annoyance he saw that the previous owner had scribbled all over the pages, so that the margins were as black as the printed portions. Bending low to decipher the ingredients (even here, the previous owner had made annotations and crossed things out) Harry hurried off towards the store cupboard to find what he needed. As he dashed back to his cauldron, he saw Malfoy cutting up valerian roots as fast as he could.

  Everyone kept glancing around at what the rest of the class was doing; this was both an advantage and a disadvantage of Potions, that it was hard to keep your work private. Within ten minutes, the whole place was full of bluish steam. Hermione, of course, seemed to have progressed furthest. Her potion already resembled the ‘smooth, blackcurrant-coloured liquid’ mentioned as the ideal halfway stage.

  Having finished chopping his roots, Harry bent low over his book again. It was really very irritating, having to try and decipher the directions under all the stupid scribbles of the previous owner, who for some reason had taken issue with the order to cut up the Sopophorous Bean and had written in the alternative instruction:

  Crush with flat side of silver dagger, releases juice better than cutting.

  ‘Sir, I think you knew my grandfather, Abraxas Malfoy?’

  Harry looked up; Slughorn was just passing the Slytherin table.

  ‘Yes,’ said Slughorn, without looking at Malfoy, ‘I was sorry to hear he had died, although of course it wasn’t unexpected, dragon pox at his age …’

  And he walked away. Harry bent back over his cauldron, smirking. He could tell that Malfoy had expected to be treated like Harry or Zabini; perhaps even hoped for some preferential treatment of the type he had learned to expect from Snape. It looked as though Malfoy would have to rely on nothing but talent to win the bottle of Felix Felicis.

  The Sopophorous Bean was proving very difficult to cut up. Harry turned to Hermione.

  ‘Can I borrow your silver knife?’

  She nodded impatiently, not taking her eyes off her potion, which was still deep purple, though according to the book ought to be turning a light shade of lilac by now.

  Harry crushed his bean with the flat side of the dagger. To his astonishment, it immediately exuded so much juice he was amazed the shrivelled bean could have held it all. Hastily scooping it all into the cauldron he saw, to his surprise, that the potion immediately turned exactly the shade of lilac described by the textbook.

  His annoyance with the previous owner vanishing on the spot, Harry now squinted at the next line of instructions. According to the book, he had to stir counter-clockwise until the potion turned clear as water. According to the addition the previous owner had made, however, he ought to add a clockwise stir after every seventh counter-clockwise stir. Could the old owner be right twice?

  Harry stirred counter-clockwise, held his breath, and stirred once clockwise. The effect was immediate. The potion turned palest pink.

  ‘How are you doing that?’ demanded Hermione, who was red-faced and whose hair was growing bushier and bushier in the fumes from her cauldron; her potion was still resolutely purple.

  ‘Add a clockwise stir –’

  ‘No, no, the book says counter-clockwise!’ she snapped.

  Harry shrugged and continued what he was doing. Seven stirs counter-clockwise, one clockwise, pause … seven stirs counter-clockwise, one stir clockwise …

  Across the table, Ron was cursing fluently under his breath; his potion looked like liquid liquorice. Harry glanced around. As far as he could see, no one else’s potion had turned as pale as his. He felt elated, something that had certainly never happened before in this dungeon.

  ‘And time’s … up!’ called Slughorn. ‘Stop stirring, please!’

  Slughorn moved slowly between the tables, peering into cauldrons. He made no comment, but occasionally gave the potions a stir, or a sniff. At last he reached the table where Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ernie were sitting. He smiled ruefully at the tarlike substance in Ron’s cauldron. He passed over Ernie’s navy concoction. Hermione’s potion he gave an approving nod. Then he saw Harry’s, and a look of incredulous delight spread over his face.

  ‘The clear winner!’ he cried to the dungeon. ‘Excellent, excellent, Harry! Good Lord, it’s clear you’ve inherited your mother’s talent, she was a dab hand at Potions, Lily was! Here you are, then, here you are – one bottle of Felix Felicis, as promised, and use it well!’

  Harry slipped the tiny bottle of golden liquid into his inner pocket, feeling an odd combination of delight at the furious looks on the Slytherins’ faces, and guilt at the disappointed expression on Hermione’s. Ron looked simply dumbfounded.

  ‘How did you do that?’ he whispered to Harry as they left the dungeon.

  ‘Got lucky, I suppose,’ said Harry, because Malfoy was within earshot.

  Once they were securely ensconced at the Gryffindor table for dinner, however, he felt safe enough to tell them. Hermione’s face became stonier with every word he uttered.

  ‘I s’pose you think I cheated?’ he finished, aggravated by her expression.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly your own work, was it?’ she said stiffly.

  ‘He only followed different instructions to ours,’ said Ron. ‘Could’ve been a catastrophe, couldn’t it? But he took a risk and it paid off.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Slughorn could’ve handed me that book, but no, I get the one no one’s ever written in. Puked on, by the look of page fifty-two, but –’

  ‘Hang on,’ said a voice close by Harry’s left ear and he caught a sudden waft of that flowery smell he had picked up in Slughorn’s dungeon. He looked round and saw that Ginny had joined them. ‘Did I hear right? You’ve been taking orders from something someone wrote in a book, Harry?’

  She looked alarmed and angry. Harry knew what was on her mind at once.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said reassuringly, lowering his voice. ‘It’s not like, you know, Riddle’s diary. It’s just an old textbook someone’s scribbled in.’

  ‘But you’re doing what it says?’

  ‘I just tried a few of the tips written in the margins, honestly, Ginny, there’s nothing funny –’

  ‘Ginny’s got a point,’ said Hermione, perking up at once. ‘We ought to check that there’s nothing odd about it. I mean, all these funny instructions, who knows?’

  ‘Hey!’ said Harry indignantly, as she pulled his copy of Advanced Potion-Making out of his bag and raised her wand.

  ‘Specialis revelio!’ she said, rapping it smartly on the front cover.

  Nothing whatsoever happened. The book simply lay there, looking old and dirty and dog-eared.

  ‘Finished?’ said Harry irritably. ‘Or d’you want to wait and see if it does a few back flips?’

  ‘It seems all right,’ said Hermione, still staring at the book suspiciously. ‘I mean, it really does seem to be … just a textbook.’

  ‘Good. Then I’ll have it back,’ said Harry, snatching it off the table, but it slipped from his hand and landed open on the floor.

  Nobody else was looking. Harry bent low to retrieve the book and, as he did so, he saw something scribbled along the bottom of the back cover in the same small, cramped handwriting as the instructions that had won him his bottle of Felix Felicis, now safely hidden inside a pair of socks in his trunk upstairs.

  This Book is the Property of the Half-Blood Prince

  — CHAPTER TEN —

  The House of Gaunt

  For the rest of the week’s Potions lessons Harry continued to follow the Half-Blood Prince’s instructions wherever they deviated from Libatius Borage’s, with the resul
t that by their fourth lesson Slughorn was raving about Harry’s abilities, saying that he had rarely taught anyone so talented. Neither Ron nor Hermione was delighted by this. Although Harry had offered to share his book with both of them, Ron had more difficulty deciphering the handwriting than Harry did, and could not keep asking Harry to read aloud or it might look suspicious. Hermione, meanwhile, was resolutely ploughing on with what she called the ‘official’ instructions, but becoming increasingly bad-tempered as they yielded poorer results than the Prince’s.

  Harry wondered vaguely who the Half-Blood Prince had been. Although the amount of homework they had been given prevented him from reading the whole of his copy of Advanced Potion-Making, he had skimmed through it sufficiently to see that there was barely a page on which the Prince had not made additional notes, not all of them concerned with potion-making. Here and there were directions for what looked like spells that the Prince had made up himself.

  ‘Or herself,’ said Hermione irritably, overhearing Harry pointing some of these out to Ron in the common room on Saturday evening. ‘It might have been a girl. I think the handwriting looks more like a girl’s than a boy’s.’

  ‘The Half-Blood Prince, he was called,’ Harry said. ‘How many girls have been princes?’

  Hermione seemed to have no answer to this. She merely scowled and twitched her essay on ‘The Principles of Re-Materialisation’ away from Ron, who was trying to read it upside-down.

  Harry looked at his watch and hurriedly put the old copy of Advanced Potion-Making back into his bag.

  ‘It’s five to eight, I’d better go, I’ll be late for Dumbledore.’

  ‘Ooooh!’ gasped Hermione, looking up at once. ‘Good luck! We’ll wait up, we want to hear what he teaches you!’

  ‘Hope it goes OK,’ said Ron, and the pair of them watched Harry leave through the portrait hole.

  Harry proceeded through deserted corridors, though he had to step hastily behind a statue when Professor Trelawney appeared round a corner, muttering to herself as she shuffled a pack of dirty-looking playing cards, reading them as she walked.

  ‘Two of spades: conflict,’ she murmured, as she passed the place where Harry crouched, hidden. ‘Seven of spades: an ill omen. Ten of spades: violence. Knave of spades: a dark young man, possibly troubled, one who dislikes the questioner –’

  She stopped dead, right on the other side of Harry’s statue.

  ‘Well, that can’t be right,’ she said, annoyed, and Harry heard her reshuffling vigorously as she set off again, leaving nothing but a whiff of cooking sherry behind her. Harry waited until he was quite sure she had gone, then hurried off again until he reached the spot in the seventh-floor corridor where a single gargoyle stood against the wall.

  ‘Acid Pops,’ said Harry. The gargoyle leapt aside; the wall behind it slid apart, and a moving spiral stone staircase was revealed, on to which Harry stepped, so that he was carried in smooth circles up to the door with the brass knocker that led to Dumbledore’s office.

  Harry knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ said Dumbledore’s voice.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ said Harry, walking into the Headmaster’s office.

  ‘Ah, good evening, Harry. Sit down,’ said Dumbledore, smiling. ‘I hope you’ve had an enjoyable first week back at school?’

  ‘Yes thanks, sir,’ said Harry.

  ‘You must have been busy, a detention under your belt already!’

  ‘Er …’ began Harry awkwardly, but Dumbledore did not look too stern.

  ‘I have arranged with Professor Snape that you will do your detention next Saturday instead.’

  ‘Right,’ said Harry, who had more pressing matters on his mind than Snape’s detention, and now looked around surreptitiously for some indication of what Dumbledore was planning to do with him that evening. The circular office looked just as it always did: the delicate silver instruments stood on spindle-legged tables, puffing smoke and whirring; portraits of previous headmasters and headmistresses dozed in their frames; and Dumbledore’s magnificent phoenix, Fawkes, stood on his perch behind the door, watching Harry with bright interest. It did not even look as though Dumbledore had cleared a space for duelling practice.

  ‘So, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, in a businesslike voice. ‘You have been wondering, I am sure, what I have planned for you during these – for want of a better word – lessons?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, I have decided that it is time, now that you know what prompted Lord Voldemort to try and kill you fifteen years ago, for you to be given certain information.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You said, at the end of last term, you were going to tell me everything,’ said Harry. It was hard to keep a note of accusation from his voice. ‘Sir,’ he added.

  ‘And so I did,’ said Dumbledore placidly. ‘I told you everything I know. From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork. From hereon in, Harry, I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher, who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron.’

  ‘But you think you’re right?’ said Harry.

  ‘Naturally I do, but as I have already proven to you, I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being – forgive me – rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Harry tentatively, ‘does what you’re going to tell me have anything to do with the prophecy? Will it help me … survive?’

  ‘It has a very great deal to do with the prophecy,’ said Dumbledore, as casually as if Harry had asked him about the next day’s weather, ‘and I certainly hope that it will help you to survive.’

  Dumbledore got to his feet and walked around the desk, past Harry, who turned eagerly in his seat to watch Dumbledore bending over the cabinet beside the door. When Dumbledore straightened up, he was holding a familiar shallow stone basin etched with odd markings around its rim. He placed the Pensieve on the desk in front of Harry.

  ‘You look worried.’

  Harry had indeed been eyeing the Pensieve with some apprehension. His previous experiences with the odd device that stored and revealed thoughts and memories, though highly instructive, had also been uncomfortable. The last time he had disturbed its contents, he had seen much more than he would have wished. But Dumbledore was smiling.

  ‘This time, you enter the Pensieve with me … and, even more unusually, with permission.’

  ‘Where are we going, sir?’

  ‘For a trip down Bob Ogden’s memory lane,’ said Dumbledore, pulling from his pocket a crystal bottle containing a swirling silvery-white substance.

  ‘Who was Bob Ogden?’

  ‘He was employed by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement,’ said Dumbledore. ‘He died some time ago, but not before I had tracked him down and persuaded him to confide these recollections to me. We are about to accompany him on a visit he made in the course of his duties. If you will stand, Harry …’

  But Dumbledore was having difficulty pulling out the stopper of the crystal bottle: his injured hand seemed stiff and painful.

  ‘Shall – shall I, sir?’

  ‘No matter, Harry –’

  Dumbledore pointed his wand at the bottle and the cork flew out.

  ‘Sir – how did you injure your hand?’ Harry asked again, looking at the blackened fingers with a mixture of revulsion and pity.

  ‘Now is not the moment for that story, Harry. Not yet. We have an appointment with Bob Ogden.’

  Dumbledore tipped the silvery contents of the bottle into the Pensieve, where they swirled and shimmered, neither liquid nor gas.

  ‘After you,’ said Dumbledore, gesturing towards the bowl.

  Harry bent forwards, took a deep breath, and plunged his face into the silvery substance. He felt his feet leave the office floor; he was falling, falling, through whirling darkness and then, quite suddenly, he was blinking in
dazzling sunlight. Before his eyes had adjusted, Dumbledore landed beside him.

  They were standing in a country lane bordered by high, tangled hedgerows, beneath a summer sky as bright and blue as a forget-me-not. Some ten feet in front of them stood a short, plump man wearing enormously thick glasses that reduced his eyes to molelike specks. He was reading a wooden signpost that was sticking out of the brambles on the left-hand side of the road. Harry knew this must be Ogden; he was the only person in sight, and he was also wearing the strange assortment of clothes so often chosen by inexperienced wizards trying to look like Muggles: in this case, a frock-coat and spats over a striped one-piece bathing costume. Before Harry had time to do more than register his bizarre appearance, however, Ogden had set off at a brisk walk down the lane.

  Dumbledore and Harry followed. As they passed the wooden sign, Harry looked up at its two arms. The one pointing back the way they had come read: ‘Great Hangleton, 5 miles’. The arm pointing after Ogden said: ‘Little Hangleton, 1 mile’.

  They walked a short way with nothing to see but the hedgerows, the wide blue sky overhead and the swishing, frock-coated figure ahead, then the lane curved to the left and fell away, sloping steeply down a hillside, so that they had a sudden, unexpected view of a whole valley laid out in front of them. Harry could see a village, undoubtedly Little Hangleton, nestled between two steep hills, its church and graveyard clearly visible. Across the valley, set on the opposite hillside, was a handsome manor house surrounded by a wide expanse of velvety green lawn.

  Ogden had broken into a reluctant trot due to the steep downward slope. Dumbledore lengthened his stride and Harry hurried to keep up. He thought Little Hangleton must be their final destination and wondered, as he had done on the night they had found Slughorn, why they had to approach it from such a distance. He soon discovered that he was mistaken in thinking that they were going to the village, however. The lane curved to the right, and when they rounded the corner, it was to see the very edge of Ogden’s frock-coat vanishing through a gap in the hedge.