A single cauldron of Felix Felicis requires unicorn horn, gnarl tusk, leech, mandrake sap, bat spleen, precisely 284 lacewings (each crushed to powder separately), syrup of Arnica, two griffins (beak, tongue, fur, feather, tail, heart, and both intestines in their entirety), hand-dried fluxweed, a fully brewed Invigoration Draught minus the dittany (a bit of dew-water would keep it stable so long as you replenished it every few hours), Venomous Tentacula (both root and spore), nine separate cauldrons (including two solid gold), three simultaneous flames (coal, hickory, and conflagrated), and seventeen full moons (nine clockwise stirs on each plus a counter-clockwise half-stir on the third, sixth, ninth, etc.), ie: roughly a year and a half, to brew.
Or, in Bridget’s terms, 73 tablespoons.
When it takes the better part of two decades to get something right, she would be damned to spend it on anything but more.
A full batch of Felix Felicis yields 100 spoonfulls; all the luck in the world can’t make it yield more, and attempting to keep track of brewing more than one batch at a time had proved, let’s just say, inadvisable.
But, so long as she was disciplined, allotting 73 perfect afternoons solely to the brewing process and not so much as touching a cauldron while not under the influence, well. Then Bridget was a potion master to rival even Merlin himself.
And so this dreary afternoon found her whistling in the kitchen, munching the free pumpkin pasties an owl had mistakenly just delivered, while balancing atop a seemingly precarious stack of furniture to reach the leeches on the far back shelf. On the table cauldrons one through four bubbled happily, while seven and nine (the griffin bowels, finally finished their rather eccentric scented week of stewing) cooled off in the cellar.
Bridget unscrewed the jar of leeches and tossed three across the room into the furthest cauldron, then hopped down to stir in an impulsive fourth. She grinned as the fluid sparkled from grey to silver. It was impulses like this that made her wonder how she’d ever managed the first batch, without Felix there to guide her through the recipe’s finer points. Felix always knows best.
Outside a bird began to sing and Bridget suddenly fancied a walk—it had been weeks since she’d last ventured out, and at the thought of it the clouds were parting—but she hesitated. By now she knew too well how that story went. Each time Felix led her out of doors on a brewing afternoon she expected it to lead to a short cut in her process, but it was always something else. The day she wandered to the pub the Chudley Cannons were staying at and drank with them until the wee hours. The day she sold her mother’s jewellery at enough of a mark-up that she ensured she needn’t work for years. The day she befriended Owen Nott, most gifted wizard chef of our time. The day she found herself in the Diagon owlery just in time for the spring hatching.
Magical days. Perfect days. But all useless, utterly useless, when they sidetracked her from completing the next batch. Never mind her ever growing suspicion that people were catching on to her hobby (she couldn’t afford to waste potion just to make sure said potion wasn’t stolen in the dead of night. There was scarcely enough to last her as it was!). She shook her head and returned her attention to the table. She’d enjoy a discrete day out another time, when this batch was a little further along and she could be confident she had potion to spare on recreation. But not today. From now on she was putting her foot down. She needed to spend her Felix on more Felix, and she wasn’t going to let anything—even Felix itself—distract her from her cauldrons in the process.
Speaking of which: cauldron one had begun to spit. A depressing sign to a normal potioneer, but Bridget skipped over unconcerned. At once she knew it must be ready for the tentacula spores. Some part of her, the part that waited fearfully, each day, for the effects of the potion to wear off, reminded her that it was far too soon, the spleens were supposed to simmer in the mandrake sap for at least another week, but she confidently thrust the idea aside. She knew how to recognize a lucky impulse when she had one, and Felix always knows best.
Resuming her whistling, Bridget plucked the spores from the pot on the window, effortlessly missing the vine’s fangs as it lunged at her bare wrists. Then with another bite of pumpkin pastie she dropped the spores into the hissing cauldron.
A moment later the potion puffed into a cloud of smoke, leaving only a charcoal crust on the cauldron beneath.
It couldn’t be—she tilted her head quizzically. It honestly couldn’t, she’d had a spoonful not an hour ago, there was no way her luck had run out already.
She paused her whistling, shoved the remainder of the pastie in her mouth, and leaned over the cauldron. Deep in her stomach, a raw terror was mixing with the utter peace she’d felt only a moment ago.
The potion was ruined. She was four months in, and it was ruined. Gone! She leaped to the stairs and up to her room, tugging her reserves unceremoniously from the charmed cabinet beneath her bed. Two-thirds left. There could be enough, if she didn’t waste a drop of it on anything but the potion. There could be enough to begin again.
She let out a strained breath, feeling that same lucky confidence settling in her gut, but something was changed. For the first time, she didn’t quite trust it.
Felix Felicis is among the most challenging potions in the world. She knew she needed all her luck to prepare it on any sort of schedule. So why had it betrayed her? There’d been no accident, Felix had told her to add those spores, to ruin the potion. But why? It didn’t make any sense! Felix always knows best…
Ahhhhhh, the irony in this piece is too delicious!
