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Caelum didn’t mean to overhear his parents discussing the Rigel Black Child. He didn’t care about the Rigel Black Child, who to make their lies work must have spent hours, days, weeks, with the Brat and yet couldn’t shaped imbue. Caelum had taken only two lessons from the Brat, and with practice had managed it. If the imposter couldn’t figure it out with far more time for lessons, he wasn’t potioneer enough to deserve consideration for that reason, and that was the only reason Caelum could have bothered to care about.
The tournament was definitely not a reason to want to find the kid. “Rigel” had made a mess of the tournament, winning as a halfblood, taking the pureblood spot as a halfblood. The SOW party should want to bury the story, not keep it splattered across the papers and featured in all the gossip by loudly hunting the imposter.
But no, Lord Riddle couldn’t be that smart. Which meant his loyal followers couldn’t be that smart either.
And so, apparently, Caelum was going to overhear his parents, who did want to find the halfblood potioneer. Nominally for Lord Riddle, who could not rely on the Malfoys for this. In his fathers case, perhaps even truly for Lord Riddle. Bellatrix probably meant to find the boy for Voldemort.
"We're getting too far into hypotheticals!”
Well, yes. Because you should be ignoring this entirely and encouraging everyone else to do the same. Not drawing more attention to it.
“We're looking for a halfblood who loves potions and has strong magic.”
Not that hard; Caelum could name two who weren’t the imposter: Master Severus Snape, and the Brat, more publicly known as Harriet Potter.
“They were under polyjuice the entire time they were at Hogwarts.”
That’s actually impressive to have pulled off, given that Polyjuice only lasts one hour. Unless they found a way to make it last longer. Or if Brat had, via shaped imbuing. But. Caelum rolled his eyes. But that wasn’t the kind of tricky that would help anyone find “Rigel”: anyone who could manage to stay under Polyjuice that long at Hogwarts could clearly change their appearance at need. If anything, that would make them harder to find. Which. Stop trying to find the boy; it won’t help anyone.
“We have no idea what they could have looked like.”
Fair. Who cares. Really? A halfblood imposter, and their looks are the concern? If the marriage law had passed, a halfblood as powerful as “Rigel” would have been married off to a lesser, legal “pureblood” for his power, not his looks. And if he had continued to pass as pure, he’d either marry and have children or not, likely depending on whether or not his children would be (legally) eligible for Hogwarts. Though he supposed the real Arcturus Rigel Black would have taken his own life back at some point.
“They could have even been a girl!”
Oh.
Oh.
Rigel claimed not to be able to shaped imbue.
Rigel was a liar. That much was obvious – he’d been caught as one at the end of the Triwizard Tournament, when Caelum learned exactly what the potion he’d been commissioned to brew was really for.
Harriet was a liar. She’d admitted as much after their internship presentations, if not what she was lying about.
Rigel was obsessed with Potions. How else could he have been working individually with Master Snape?
Harriet was obsessed with Potions. She claimed, now the game was (partially) up, that she had been living in the Lower Alleys, brewing potions and homeschooling herself. A good story. One Caelum had in fact already made fun of her for, that she’d not even know what looked right without a proper teacher. But just that: a story.
Rigel was magically powerful. People who watched the tournament all agreed he had to be.
Harriet was magically powerful. Caelum, learning and practicing first wandless magic and then her shaped imbuing technique, knew she had to be. Caelum, who had brewed a double dose Liberespirare with her providing the magic, knew she was.
Caelum groaned. He knew one halfblood potioneer with strong magic who wasn’t the imposter. And one who so totally was the imposter. Brat.
Brat who had worked on the Wolfsbane breakthrough that rendered most of his internship work obsolete before it was even presented. He should turn her in just for that, really. Two potions-obsessed halfbloods making a ground-breaking change to Wolfsbane, rendering everything known to date about the long-term effects of Wolfsbane for regular users … not fully obsolete, in fairness, but changed. The long-term effects would certainly change when werewolves only needed to consume a third the doses. But would the effects be less? Different? Effectively the same, but slower? Questions he’d had, when he refocused on his initial question, but which he hadn’t been able to answer because, quite simply, there were no long-term users of the New Wolfsbane yet.
There still weren’t, not really. Two years wasn’t really long-term use for something like Wolfsbane, where one expected to need it for a lifetime.
And it was partly Harriet’s fault his internship research had been disrupted.
And yet he was not going to turn her in.
She invited him to eat, after the presentation she had unwittingly helped overshadow. He had thought at the time that she could go out to dinner with her cousin Rigel, as Potions-obsessed as she was, and get the same thing she claimed to want with him – to have dinner with someone who understood what she’d actually been doing all summer. But if (since) she was Rigel, that was impossible. She couldn’t go out to dinner and discuss her summer’s work with herself.
Caelum put his head in his hands. Once you considered that “Rigel” could be a girl, it was obvious.
And his mother might be evil, and book-learning might not be where she showed it, but she was clever.
How could he stop her from recognizing Harriet Potter as Rigel Black?