At dinner, Regulus was still thinking about the book.
What he'd found, after turning the last page, was an absence. Nothing in there could substitute for a Whomping Willow.
Not because the other plants lacked power.
Take the Shadowlight Grass. The moment he'd read its description, an idea had surfaced. A plant that glowed only in absolute darkness, its magical tendency almost certainly exclusionary. If that property could be extracted and shaped into a spell, it might counter his father's shadow magic directly.
That technique of Orion's, the one that created absolute darkness and crushed all perception, was at its core just another application of magical force. If exclusion could be made into a spell, one that rejected his father's magic outright, the next time Orion used it on him...
That ought to come as a pleasant surprise.
Then Regulus thought of Dumbledore's light.
Could that method of banishing darkness also be explained through exclusion?
No. Probably not.
Someone as powerful as Dumbledore didn't need exclusion. He might not need anything external at all. If he willed it, it happened. That was a different order of magnitude entirely.
Dumbledore had told him as much. He didn't pit one attribute against another. He simply removed darkness's reason for existing.
Regulus shook off the thought. That was a problem for another day.
Priorities. The Shadowlight Grass would be useful, but it was one more tool in the arsenal. The Whomping Willow's physical destruction complemented the Decomposition Curse directly.
That was what mattered most right now.
And what Professor Sprout had described, the conduction and resonance, Regulus kept circling back to it, certain there was something deeper.
Conduction drove force inward. Resonance detonated it from within.
Combined, if developed well, the applications might extend far beyond physical destruction.
Conduction alone was enough to set the imagination running. But all of it needed verification.
Which required a Whomping Willow.
He'd promised the Professor he wouldn't touch the one at Hogwarts. That left looking elsewhere.
He turned over the locations in his mind. The Bulgarian Magical Reserve. The Romanian Dragon Sanctuary. Some old estate in southern France. Deep in the Black Forest in Germany.
Getting to any of those places was within his ability. Bringing a Whomping Willow home, also within his ability.
The problem was officialdom.
Reserves were government operations by definition. Whether the local magical authority was strong or weak, if the thing could be obtained through proper channels, proper channels were better.
Legitimate meant clean. No one investigating. No Aurors knocking on the door. No inquiry letters from the International Magical Cooperation Office.
Trouble was the last thing he needed more of. Voldemort watching from one side, Dumbledore observing from another, Grindelwald waiting in the wings. No sense adding a pile of bureaucratic headaches just to save a few Galleons.
But if legitimate channels failed and he confirmed he needed the thing, well. That changed the conversation.
Sprout had said they were wild specimens.
Wild meant they'd happened to grow there. No inherent reason to call them government property.
If it came to that, it would be every wizard for himself.
Regulus chewed through these considerations, swallowed his lamb chops, and washed them down with pumpkin juice.
Try legitimate channels first. The simplest approach was money, and his father would back him.
Three thousand Galleons' worth of Mandrakes had produced the Decomposition Curse.
Orion had felt the spell's power firsthand and heard a thorough accounting of its effects. He knew it wasn't merely a powerful offensive curse. It was something that could erase an opponent from existence.
He knew what it represented: the depth of Regulus's understanding of magic, his ability to transform magical plants into formidable power, proof of how far the boy could go.
Three thousand Galleons for that. Was there a better bargain anywhere?
Run any family through the same calculation, tell them they could buy that kind of magic at that price, and not one would refuse.
Not one.
Now if a Whomping Willow cost tens of times more, it was still money exchanged for a chance at powerful magic. The kind of chance other people couldn't buy at any price.
Regulus wasn't short on gold. The Black family even less so.
Even if you tacked two zeros onto that three thousand, three hundred thousand Galleons, the Blacks wouldn't blink.
And it wasn't only money. The family had political reach. International connections.
Orion knew more names than Regulus could probably list. Old friends holding sinecures at the Ministry of Magic, distant relatives joined by marriage, foreign families that owed favors. Mobilized properly, that network carried real weight.
But if they went directly to an official body to buy, anyone with half a brain would recognize a Whomping Willow's value. A straight purchase put the seller in control. They'd inflate the price. Highway robbery wasn't out of the question.
Orion would see that. He was the Head of House Black. He understood the difference between dealing with individuals and dealing with governments.
So what would his father do?
After dinner, he stopped by the dormitory, pulled parchment and a quill from his drawer, and began writing.
[Father:
I need a mature Whomping Willow.
They're found in several locations: the Bulgarian Magical Reserve, the Romanian Dragon Sanctuary, a private estate in southern France, and deep in the Black Forest in Germany.
A mature specimen. Not a seedling.
Before Christmas, if possible.
The reasoning is the same as the Mandrakes. The Whomping Willow complements them.
Regulus]
He read it over once, folded it, drew his wand, and tapped. The Black family crest shimmered into view on the parchment.
Out of the dormitory, through the corridor, up to the Owlery beside the Astronomy Tower.
The family's eagle owl was perched on a rung, dozing. It cracked one eye open at his approach and cocked its head.
Regulus tied the letter to its leg. "To Father."
A single hoot. Wings spread. It launched into the dark and was gone.
He turned, descended the stairs, and headed for the Room of Requirement.
--
Breakfast the next morning. The Great Hall bustled as usual.
The long tables groaned with food. Owls swept back and forth overhead. Newspapers lay scattered everywhere.
Regulus sat down and had barely picked up a slice of toast when he caught the conversation beside him.
"Look at this."
A fifth-year boy tapped a small column in the Daily Prophet and read it aloud for the others.
"Ministry rejects house-elf emancipation appeal. Same old story."
The boy next to him glanced at it and scoffed. "Have those people got nothing better to do? What do house-elves need freedom for?"
"Who knows. Probably trying to impress someone."
"Impress who? People too poor to even own an elf?"
Laughter rippled through the group.
Regulus glanced at the paper. The headline was buried, wedged between a long report on Dark wizard attacks and Quidditch league scores. A footnote, practically.
Cuthbert reached over, grabbed a copy, scanned the item, and tossed it back. He said nothing. The corner of his mouth twitched.
From the Gryffindor table, a voice rose above the noise.
"You say they take pride in labor and feel shame in freedom? Let me ask you this. When did they first learn to speak? When did they first learn to read? When did someone first tell them, 'Your value is service'?"
The surrounding chatter died.
The voice pressed on. "You lock a living creature in a cage from the day it's born, then claim it doesn't want to leave. All that proves is how sturdy you built the cage."
Supporters chimed in from the Gryffindor side. Others pushed back. An argument erupted.
Regulus didn't turn around. He knew who it was.
That kind of fury, that defiance, that urge to smash every tradition to rubble. There wasn't a second person at Hogwarts who carried it like that.
He kept eating.
The house-elf question wasn't worth his attention.
Not because it was unimportant, but because it was impossible.
Slavery. Applied to people, the word was wrong. The concept itself was wrong.
But in the wizarding world, the relationship between wizards and house-elves couldn't be reduced to simple slavery.
House-elves were bound to wizarding families at a fundamental level. They knew a family's deepest secrets. The manor's magic recognized them as part of the household. They were woven into the fabric of the family itself.
Like furniture. Like walls. Like the ancestral portraits hanging in their frames.
Kreacher knew everything about the House of Black. From Walburga's secrets as a young woman, to the private items Orion kept in his study, to the spells Regulus practiced in his training room.
Were they enslaved? Yes. But it was closer to symbiosis.
The people pushing for emancipation legislation were naive.
They thought it was justice.
What they hadn't considered was where freed house-elves would go. What they would do.
Shove them out the door, tell them they're free, and then what?
They'd lose their minds.
And if every house-elf suddenly awakened to the idea of free will, the shockwave through wizarding society would be enormous. Once they remembered centuries of servitude and wanted revenge...
Most adult wizards couldn't match a single house-elf in a fight. They'd be disarmed before they could blink.
Even if such a bill somehow passed, what would change?
Pure-blood families wouldn't hand over their elves. Would the Ministry dare come take them by force?
Families with centuries of lineage had seats on the Wizengamot, connections in the International Magical Cooperation Office, people in every department of the Ministry of Magic. Even if the Ministry managed to pass the law, those families could ensure it was never enforced.
So this sort of thing was worth a glance and nothing more. A joke, if anything.
Never mind the present. Twenty years from now, the answer would be the same.
Regulus finished his breakfast, wiped his mouth, and stood.
Cuthbert and the others rose with him.
As they walked out of the Great Hall, the argument at the Gryffindor table was still going.