The incident spread rapidly among the students. Before the day was over, most of them had heard about it.
That afternoon, after getting to the bottom of what had happened, Snape kicked Harper straight off the Quidditch team. Harper had started the trouble, after all.
Then he deducted fifteen points from each of them—Snape's reasoning was that making their fight common knowledge throughout the school had damaged Slytherin's reputation.
After all, hardly anyone had known when Will nearly blew up the Common Room in his first year.
Slytherin had always believed in keeping its dirty laundry behind closed doors and settling internal matters internally. The two of them had made Snape lose face.
The captain, Ulrich Urquhart, was practically boiling with anger for several days straight—he had been responsible for the Slytherin Quidditch team tryouts, and with something going wrong, Snape would almost certainly hold him accountable.
Sure enough, Snape gave him a dressing-down, but fortunately, nothing else came of it.
The incident had not caused much of a stir within the school—at most, it was a fight between two people. Could that possibly be more shocking than a Basilisk invasion or Dementors disrupting a Quidditch match?
Still, a few days later, a letter flew into Hogwarts...
Snape tossed the letter onto the desk. "A letter from Lucius. He's very confused. What exactly happened that made you kick Draco out of your group?"
Will glanced at the letter without even picking it up. "If Lucius wrote to Draco first, he'd know everything."
But the man had sent the letter straight to him instead, as though he considered himself Will's elder.
Snape was rather helpless as well—Draco had become Head Boy with his approval, so naturally, he knew what Will intended to do.
He also knew that Draco would be making