The Potions Master's Daughter

CHAPTER 4 The Hogwarts Express

King's Cross Station was only a five-minute walk from the hotel, and the Hogwarts Express was due to leave at eleven o'clock sharp. Still, Alice woke up at seven in the morning, and her mind was instantly flooded with waves of excitement impossible to contain. She lay awake in the quiet room, the silence interrupted only by Aunt Honora's thundering snoring.

Upon checking if her wand was still lying on the bedstand, Alice slid out of bed and crept silently to the school trunk. She opened the cover, trying to keep it from creaking, and took out her newly purchased Potions textbook.

She sat cross-legged, opened the book on the first page, and suppressed a smile. ' Magical Drafts and Potions , written by Arsenius Jigger '. Alice slid her fingers across the familiar pages; she must've known that book by heart. Not only had Snape made her memorise most of Arsenius Jigger's recipes, but he also showed her how to brew the very potions included in the textbook. All thirty-one of them Alice could prepare in a heartbeat, without even having to look at the book at all. She felt ecstatic again; she imagined the faces of other students once they saw how good she was at Potions, one of the hardest arts to master in the whole wizarding world (or at least according to Snape).

But then she felt her stomach turn. She couldn't be too good, she thought, that would be suspicious. She shut the book and put it back in the trunk. First, she had to test the waters; find out how much knowledge other students already had. After all, some of them surely came from magical families where doing spells and making concoctions was as normal as having afternoon tea.

Alice went back to bed and stared at the ceiling. Her hand trave to the bedstand, and her fingers wrapped around her new wand. Last night, after she signed her journal, she stayed up and read a few chapters from The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1. She imagined testing out the Levitating Charm on the sleeping Aunt Honora.

Then, she remembered the meeting at the Ministry, and the witch's screeching voice telling her that the use of magic outside of school was illegal. Alice decided she wouldn't risk getting expelled before even getting to Hogwarts, so she put the wand down, worried that the mere thought of doing magic would cause the spell to dart out of the wand. Wasn't that what Ollivander meant when he spoke of 'nonverbal spells'?

Aunt Honora woke up around nine and ordered Alice to get dressed. They went downstairs to the lobby – only to be met with another suspicious look from the receptionist – and walked outside. The hustle and bustle of London were mesmerising. Swarms of people rushed back and forth across the streets, and in and out of underground stations.

Aunt Honora took Alice to a small café nearby to have breakfast, where they sat by the window looking out on the street. No sooner had Alice finished chewing the first bite of her pastry, than a pair of tall boys with violently orange hair walked through the door. They looked around in awe, and the looks on their faces suggested that they were just as fascinated by the café as Alice had been by the Diagon Alley. One of them poked the other in the ribs with his elbow and pointed at a large coffee machine behind the counter.

Alice looked around. Just like Aunt Honora, most of the Muggles in the café were reading their newspapers. None of them seemed to have noticed the boys, whose attire would've normally caught anyone's attention. They were wearing mostly worn-out, slightly tattered clothing that in no way seemed to match the tidy interior of the café. On top of that, they were both sporting hand-knitted wool sweaters, one spelling out the letter F , and the other a G .

'There you are!' a short, slightly plump woman burst through the door, causing everyone to look up from their newspapers. The woman, whose hair was the same shade of flaming red as the two boys, grabbed them by the arms and pulled them out of the café.