"It tastes bad?" Harry asked, all sympathy.
"No, but that just makes it worse." Shuddering even more, Draco opened his mouth wider and took a bite. Harry thought he'd never seen anything so awful as the sight of his brother chewing and swallowing, over and over, deliberately poisoning himself. At least his victims wouldn't have known what was coming, but Draco did. It was a wonder he could eat the thing, knowing what he did about Venetimorica.
Draco slowly peeled back the gilded paper clinging to the sides of the cake as he ate, until he was down to nothing but crumbs, and Snape gently said, "That will do, Draco."
Draco suddenly moaned, clutching at his abdomen so fiercely that he wrinkled the lightweight robes he was wearing.
"I'll help you to the loo--" Harry started to say, but Snape interrupted him.
"If things were that simple Venetimorica wouldn't have such a fearsome reputation. Draco won't be able to sick up until it's been completely metabolised. In fact he'll be perfectly fine until late this evening."
Draco shuddered. "Best not to think about it, I suppose. So then, I... I'll just get back to my lines until..."
"I don't really believe that writing the same line over and over will supply much distraction," Snape gently inserted. "Actually, I thought you might like to spend the day helping us renovate the cottage."
"Renovate...?"
Snape pointed his wand and banished every last trace of the fairy cakes before he answered, and cast a few heavy-duty cleaning spells as well. "We'll all come here for the summer, and while I don't mind sleeping on a transfigured divan in the short term, I would prefer to have a proper bedroom when we return here in June. Harry thought a second bathroom would be a good idea as well. How are your construction spells, Draco?"
"Uh... I don't actually know any."
"You will after today."
"You're going to let me do magic?"
"Supervised only, and you'll return my grandfather's wand to me when we finish for the day."
Draco nodded eagerly, though he thought to ask, "How much construction can we do in a day, though? That's large scale transfiguration, or conjuring perhaps. I think we'd be lucky to erect even one wall."
"Ah. Well it will doubtless take more than a single day, though you might consider that we have Harry to help us."
"Wanded magic," murmured Draco, nodding.
"Harry and I suspect he'll have fewer episodes of accidental magic if he routinely exercises his dark powers," added Snape as he drew a wand from his robes and handed it to Draco. "So, shall we begin?"
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Construction spells turned out to be devilishly tricky to master. Harry, of course, had the added burden of devising Parseltongue versions of everything. He was glad he'd brought Sals along, though he had to apologise to her for leaving her as a bracelet for so long. He'd forgotten about her during that long, tense confrontation between his father and brother.
Sals said she didn't mind, though. She wasn't aware of anything except a dull sensation of warmth back in the dungeons, and then another one in Devon when Snape had uncharmed her.
When lunch time rolled around Draco didn't eat. No point, he said with a grimace. Harry found something to respect in the fact that Draco wasn't whinging on and on about how sick he was going to get. He joined Harry and Snape at the table for a few minutes, sipping a little water because he said his throat was dry. Then he went back outside to continue casting, his borrowed wand pointed at the bare earth they'd cleared earlier. Harry watched him through the window as he steadily conjured granite to form a floor, bit by painstaking bit. He'd only managed to create a section about the size of his hand before he stopped and leaned against an exterior wall, breathing heavily.
"In the Potions classroom that day you coated the floor with marble with just one spell and it didn't seem to tax you at all. Is your magic that much stronger than Draco's? Or is it hard for him to cast with a new wand? Or is it the Venetimorica starting to make him sick?"
Snape sprinkled a bit of balsamic vinegar on his salad. "I've noticed that he still needs to settle into using a new wand, yes. And magical strength often increases with maturity--unless one has direct access to dark powers," he added with a glint in his eye. "But more than that, my marbilization spell wasn't intended to last for decades, you understand."
"So its not the poison, not yet?" Harry worried his lip with his teeth and pushed his lunch away. He hadn't eaten much at all, probably because he couldn't stop thinking about what Draco was facing.
"Not yet. A sudden coma will accompany the onset of the Venetimorica beginning to work."
Harry lowered his voice, though Draco likely couldn't hear them. "Don't you think he should be resting? I mean, he didn't sleep at all last night and here he's doing all this strenuous magic and wearing himself out. Shouldn't he be saving his strength?"
"Actually, no. The coma will last until Draco's magical and physical energies are drained to a very low point. Going into it already weakened will shorten the duration. Otherwise I'd have told him last night to get some sleep instead of doing his lines."
Harry's stomach churned a bit as the implications of that came clear. "So last night, you knew already that you were going to make him eat a fairy cake?"
"I did not make him," Snape corrected, frowning.
"You know what I mean. You didn't give him much choice."
"Actually, I fully expected him to watch me resign." Snape shrugged. "Which brings us to another matter. Had I known Draco would choose his just desserts, so to speak, I would have offered at the outset for you to remain behind at Hogwarts. Albus will be in residence throughout the holiday, so you will be perfectly safe. If you wish to return--"
"You think Draco needs you to himself?"
"No, but you are not his father, Harry. There's no need for you to be present for this ordeal."
"Do you want me to leave? I offered to let you talk to him alone, you know, and you said no."
"I don't want you to leave," Snape insisted. "Nor does Draco, I feel certain."
"Then I'm staying. We're all in this together," said Harry, though he couldn't help but ask, "You really think it's going to do him good to go through this awful thing?"
"I do," said Snape in tones of finality.
Harry wasn't so sure. He wasn't sure of anything, actually, except that he was glad he wasn't the one having to rear Draco. He wouldn't have known what to do about an awful situation like this one. "Well I hope you at least brought a bezoar along, in case it gets too awful for him to bear--"
Snape shook his head. "Ineffective against Venetimorica."
"The antidote, then--"
"There's no antidote."
Harry's mouth dropped open. "Oh, God. You were lying about needing clover blossoms and eel skin and the sap of a stunted hickory tree."
"I needed to make Draco tell us the truth."
"Well that's a pretty strange way to go about it, isn't it, lying your head off so that he'll be honest?" Harry felt his face start to heat as the rest of it came rushing back to him. "And while we're on it, I didn't appreciate being put in the middle like that. Harry, I absolutely insist you eat that fairy cake... You're lucky I didn't kick you under the table!"
Snape raised an eyebrow. "Did you believe even for an instant that I would let you come to harm?"
"No," Harry grudgingly admitted. "I knew for sure you'd banish the stupid cake but were waiting until the last second to make Draco confess. I'm not stupid. But I still didn't appreciate it! You could have made him tell the truth without involving me!"