"If you say 'I can't imagine why anyone would want to marry a Muggle' then people'll volunteer reasons. You say 'there are no reasons so they must have been desperate and using potions or worse' and people'll just hate you."

"If I tell him that it won't work like an apology at all."

"No. What you do is you find out some reasons why people might marry a Muggle, then you say to him 'I was wrong when I said that, I know it's not true'. Not an apology but achieves the same thing."

"Well, do you know why anybody might do that."

"Hate their parents and want to rebel. Expected to marry someone in particular, wants to back out but doesn't know how to be assertive, runs off with a Muggle so it'll be over and no one'd dream of trying to fix it. Meet a really pretty Muggle and have a fling, get her pregnant and decide to be a man about it -"

He makes a face. "I guess those are things people might do. None of them are very flattering to Corner, but he obviously doesn't care if he's hearing all the hypotheses, does he."

"I don't think so, no."

"He should've been a Gryffindor or something. Punching people."

"I bet he'll grow out of it. And you'll break the habit of provocative-errors-in-mixed-company now instead of when you're old enough people'd duel you for them."

"Where do you even go to have a real discussion, since apparently the Ravenclaw common room isn't it - I can't go into Phelps's dorm -"

"Learn a spell for conversational privacy, form a study group and only invite people you trust to be reasonable, drag people off to stock potions with you..."

Snort. "Is there a good spell for that?"

"Conversational privacy? Yeah -" and he describes it and then spends the rest of the hour supervising while Ares tries to get the hang of it.

There is also some potion putting in there. Sixty points is sixty points.

Sixty points Timothy's perfectly happy to award him; the potions are all stocked and Ares gets the spell down. "Thanks so much. Take care."

"Thanks." And off he goes.

Miranda goes looking for Michael.

He doesn't spend much time in the common room because he can't sing while people are studying. While the weather's still good he's down by the lake.

So she goes down to the lake on a school broom, and hovers, listening, until he pauses.

"Hi, Swan," he says when he's done.

"Hi! I want to learn how musical notation works."

"Sure thing, why?" He summons his bookbag. He always leaves it out of reach so that he can summon it when he needs it.

"I want to invent notation for wand movements that is easier to use than drawing a series of pictures of hands and more precise than 'swish and flick' and I think this might be more like writing music than like writing words."

"- huh. Yeah, maybe. Can you read music at all -"

"The lyrics."