The N.E.W.T.s eventually arrived and brought dread with it.

Cassian was sprawled on the stone bench outside the main entrance with a bag of popcorn balanced on his knee, doing absolutely nothing that resembled work. Since Bathilda had stopped arguing with him about exam difficulty roughly two years ago, after the Ministry’s little scheme to make his papers harder had backfired spectacularly, he was quite free. Every fifth and seventh-year had walked out with an Outstanding. After that, Bathilda looked at his syllabus, looked at the results, and had a quiet word with herself about picking battles.

Luna was seated beside him with her legs folded, watching the garden which she apparently found perfectly acceptable, because she was humming. Ginny sprawled on the grass just below them, chin resting on her arms. Astoria sat cross-legged a few feet away with a small smile she was clearly trying to suppress.

The seventh-years were scattered across the garden. Some were pacing. Some had books open on their laps and were staring at them without reading.

Cassian reached into the popcorn bag. “You know what’s lovely about this time of year?”

“The flowers?” Luna offered.

“The panic,” Cassian said. “Look at them. Beautiful.”

Ginny turned her head. “You’re horrible.”

“I know.”

Seamus pointed at Cassian with his quill. “Are you eating popcorn?”

“No,” Cassian said, eating popcorn.

Seamus stared at him for a moment, then turned back to his notes with the energy of someone who had decided not to engage with that.

Dean leaned over from the bench beside Seamus. “Sir, you could at least pretend to be anxious for us.”

“I could,” Cassian agreed. “I won’t, but I could.”

Ron pulled his arm off his face. “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one sitting the exam.”

“Correct,” Cassian said. “That’s why I’m eating popcorn and you’re sweating.”

Ron scowled at the sky. “Brilliant. Thanks for that.”

Hermione didn’t look up from her book. “Ron, stop talking to him. He’s doing it on purpose.”

“Am I?” Cassian said.

Hermione turned a page.

Draco, sitting further along the garden wall, had been pretending he hadn’t noticed them. He had, clearly, because he’d gone slightly stiffer in the last few minutes. He said, with the air of someone who refused to look over, “Do you have nothing better to do?”

“I had a full schedule,” Cassian said. “Cleared it just for this.”

Astoria pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

Pansy folded her arms and didn’t say anything, which was suspicious.

Theo sat slightly apart with his book held up like a shield. He’d already figured out engaging was a trap.

Luna reached over and took a small handful of popcorn. “I think the garden feels quite tense today.”

“Like a pulled bowstring,” Cassian said pleasantly.

Astoria turned to Cassian. “Were you this calm before your N.E.W.T.s?”

Draco didn’t even look up from his notes. “He bought them off. Why wouldn’t he be calm?”

The garden went quiet suddenly.

Blaise looked up from his book. Daphne’s quill stopped moving. Tracey stared at Draco. Pansy turned her head slowly. Hannah and Susan exchanged a glance. Even Ernie Macmillan looked up from his essay.

“He did what?” Blaise said.

Cassian pointed at Draco. “That’s a secret.”

Draco snickered into his notes.

Harry twisted round to stare at Cassian. “Hang on. I remember that. Sirius told me once. Said you bought your O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s both. I thought he was winding me up.”

“He was,” Cassian said. “Mostly.”

“Mostly,” Ron repeated, sitting upright now.

Hermione finally put her book down.

Cassian reached into the popcorn bag. “In my defence, the examiner was very reasonable.”

“You can’t buy Ministry exams,” Hermione said.

“No,” Cassian agreed. “You can’t. I’m charming and rich.”

Several people looked at Draco. He shrugged. “It’s true.”

“How is that true?” Ron sat up fully now, all pretence of studying abandoned. “You’re the best teacher in this school.”

Cassian ate another piece of popcorn and said nothing.

“He couldn’t light his wand,” Draco said. “My father spent months trying to work out what happened. Lost half his hair over it.”

Cassian looked pleased. “Eh, that’s his fault.”

“He was very stressed.”

Seamus leaned forward on his elbows. “Sir. You couldn’t light your wand. And now you split Killing Curses with two fingers.”

Cassian tilted his head. “People change.”

“That’s a transformation. Evolution. Ascension even!” Seamus gestured broadly. “That’s a caterpillar becoming a dragon.”

“Caterpillars would make beautiful dragons,” Luna said.

Pansy looked at Draco. “Your father really couldn’t explain it?”

“Nobody could,” Draco said. “He asked around. Nobody had seen anything like it. The laziest student goes from barely scraping Acceptable in anything to-” He gave a vague gesture toward Cassian. “Whatever that is.”

Cassian lifted the popcorn bag in a small salute.

“You were lazy?” Terry Boot asked, sounding truly baffled. “Or you actually couldn’t do it?”

“Both,” Draco answered before Cassian could.

Cassian looked at him.

“My father gave a very thorough account.” Draco added with a shrug.

Anthony Goldstein had his quill hovering over his parchment but wasn’t writing anything. “So when you graduated, you just… paid for the results?”

“It was a different time,” Cassian said.

“That’s not an answer,” Hermione said.

“It’s an answer,” Cassian said. “It’s just not the one you want.”

Harry was still watching Draco. “And nobody questioned it? The Ministry just let it go?”

“Money smooths most things,” Draco said simply.

Blaise nodded, as though that needed no further explanation.

Ron looked between all of them. “So you graduated with top marks you didn’t earn-“

“Bought,” Cassian corrected pleasantly. “Money is a skill, Weasley.”

“-and then somehow became… you”

Cassian considered this. “When you put it like that it does sound strange.”

“It is strange,” Ron said.

Susan had put her book down entirely. “How does that happen? Really.”

Cassian glanced at them, then at the rest of the garden, taking in the various expressions of outrage, disbelief, and sheer bewilderment. He leaned back on the bench.

“You lot are supposed to be revising.”

“We are revising,” Seamus said. “This is relevant. Motivation. The man who bought his N.E.W.T.s is now our most useful teacher. Meaning the exams mean nothing and we should all relax.”

“That’s not what this means,” Hermione said firmly.

“It could mean that.”

“It doesn’t.”

Cassian shook his head slowly. Ginny was grinning into the grass. Luna held out her hand toward the popcorn bag without looking at him. He passed it over.

“Did you know?” Neville asked. “That you’d get better at it?”

Cassian looked at him.

“No,” he said.

Draco flipped a page in his notes. “Father said the most irritating part was that there was no warning. No gradual improvement during school. No sign of anything. And then one day there was.”

“What happened to you?” Harry asked.

Cassian shrugged. “One day I stepped in front of a crowd to teach, and it changed my life.”

No one said anything for a beat.

Then everyone just stared at him.

“That’s it?” Seamus said.

“That’s it.”

Ron squinted. “You went from buying your N.E.W.T.s to fighting multiple Death Eaters?”

“Pretty much.”

Hermione folded her arms. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know,” Cassian said. “And yet.”

“There has to be more to it than that,” Harry said.

Neville tilted his head. “Teaching?”

“Magic through teaching,” Cassian said. “When you explain something properly, really pull it apart and lay it out for someone who’s never seen it before, you start understanding it differently yourself. You stop performing it and start actually knowing it.”

Seamus pointed his quill. “So you taught yourself by teaching other people.”

“More or less.”

“That’s mental,” Dean said.

The garden was quiet for a moment. A few seventh-years exchanged glances.

“I’m telling the truth,” Cassian said, “and nobody believes me. Tragic.”

“It’s not that we don’t believe you,” Hermione said carefully. “It’s that it’s not a satisfying answer.”

“Most true things aren’t,” Cassian said.

He took the popcorn bag back from Luna and settled against the bench again.

“Right,” he said. “Enough about me. You lot have an exam this afternoon.”

The collective groan that followed was almost musical.

***

The next few days blurred together in a haze of exams, parchment, and exhausted seventh-years staggering out of classrooms like survivors of a minor war.

For Cassian, it carried a strange feeling. This was the third class he’d seen through to graduation, the first that had trained in his Duelling Club for six straight years. Watching them sit their N.E.W.T.s felt oddly similar to watching apprentices finish a craft.

And their results… well.

They spoke for themselves.

He was seated at a long table in one of the examination review rooms, the kind of room with no windows and too many scrolls. Parchment was stacked across every inch of the surface. The N.E.W.T. committee had arranged themselves around it.

Miranda sat to his left, quill tucked behind one ear, already on her third cup of tea. Bathilda had claimed the chair at the far end, reading glasses pushed to the end of her nose. Two other witches from the committee, Rosalind Hetty and Eugenia Fawcett, were sorting through the Charms results. An older wizard named Edmund Crowley had the Defence parchments in front of him and kept making small sounds under his breath.

Bathsheda sat beside Cassian.

Crowley set down a scroll and looked up. “Incredible,” he said. “Potter summoned three corporeal Patronuses. Three. In a single exam sitting.” He pushed the parchment across the table like he wanted someone else to deal with it. “How do you even grade that?”

Cassian glanced at Bathsheda. She raised an eyebrow.

Since the night Cassian had ripped Tommy’s soul fragment out of Harry’s head, the boy had discovered something unexpected. He could call either of the three whenever he wished now.

It was, Cassian thought, quite something.

“That’s not all,” Rosalind said, tapping her own stack of parchments. “Every single one of them produced a corporeal Patronus.” She looked around the table. “I thought last year’s group was impressive. This is a different thing altogether.”

Bathilda peered over her glasses at Cassian. “Your doing, I assume?”

“I taught them,” Cassian said. “They did the hard part.”

“Don’t be modest,” Eugenia said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

Bathsheda didn’t look up from her notes. “It really doesn’t.”

Cassian pointed at her. “Rude.”

Goshawk was flipping through the Defence practical reports, making occasional appreciative noises. “The formation work is what gets me. The committee observer’s notes from the practical examination said they moved like Aurors.” She set the scroll down.

“The club,” Bathilda said. “They’ve been training together for years.”

Goshawk pressed on. “The Charms practical.” She slid a parchment across to him. “Granger’s spellwork in the advanced section. The committee observer awarded her Outstanding with supplementary notation. That means she exceeded the top grading bracket.”

Cassian looked at the paper. “She always does.”

“Greengrass and Longbottom.” Goshawk found another scroll. “The Herbology crossover work they submitted, the integration of magical plants into barrier spells, Sprout and the Charms examiner had a disagreement about which discipline it belonged to.”

Cassian snorted.

“They’re not wrong to argue,” Bathsheda said. “It’s really both.”

“Goyle,” Crowley said, and several people looked up. “Gregory Goyle passed his Defence practical with flying colors.”

A few looked up with squints.

“He passed,” Crowley confirmed, holding the parchment up slightly. “Outstanding. Clean casting, consistent shielding. The observer said he didn’t flinch once under pressure casting.”

Bathilda set down her quill. “Cassian. What does this year’s cohort do with their results, in your experience? Do they go abroad? Ministry? Research?”

“Some of them know,” Cassian said. “Some of them don’t yet.”

“And the ones who don’t?”

He picked up his tea. “They’ll figure it out. They’ve all grown into fine witches and wizards.”

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