Harry looked utterly speechless. "The more shattered it is, the harder it'll be to fix. We have to return it to the professor after class."
The smile on Ron's face instantly froze. His gaze shifted to Malfoy, who sat across the aisle.
Compared to Riddle, whom they couldn't afford to provoke, these two Gryffindor idiots made much better opponents.
Malfoy had been behaving himself lately. He hadn't picked on Tom again, focusing instead on mulling over Lucius's advice. It boiled down to one thing: pick on the weak, cling to the powerful, and grab whatever benefits you could.
He couldn't manage the last two just yet, but he was putting the first into practice quite nicely.
He shot Ron a snide look. "Weasley, if you can't fix it, you'll have to pay for it. Can you afford that with your pocket money?"
Ron's face flushed bright red. Harry immediately stepped in to stand up for his friend, and the two of them started arguing with Malfoy, neither willing to back down.
Now those were opponents on equal footing.
Beside Daphne, Tom had already repaired his plate.
This time, he hadn't been the first to finish. Hermione had beaten him to it.
Tom didn't care about the points. Instead, he was pondering the limits of the Mending Charm.
Wands were the most common magical objects, and the longer they were used, the more magic they accumulated within them.
Wizards generally believed that once a wand broke, it couldn't be repaired. Even if the Mending Charm could piece it back together, the wand's core would be ruined, making its magic extremely unstable.
But Harry had later used the Elder Wand to repair his own wand. Had the Mending Charm itself surpassed its limits, or was the Elder Wand simply that special?
He