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Transfigurations
by Resonant
For Julad, sine qua non.
1. Homing
The fifth stall in the men's washroom at King's Cross station had had a "Closed For Repairs" sign on the door since 1973.
The stall was large enough to admit a wheelchair; in fact, it was large enough to admit a small car. Occasionally a man using one of the other stalls would report odd sounds from behind its pale-green door. This happened frequently enough that station personnel noticed the pattern, but infrequently enough that references to "the haunted toilet" were mostly in jest -- though the more credulous night employees tended to answer nature's call in pairs.
On this late-summer morning, anyone who had been in the men's room would certainly have been able to report strange sounds -- a muted pop, a series of faint thuds, a man's weary sigh, and even something that sounded like the squawk of a bird.
But no one was in the toilet to hear it. And when a young man, his green eyes weary behind wire glasses, emerged from the toilet, no one thought to wonder how -- or why -- he had gotten such a quantity of boxes and suitcases into the stall, or what sort of animal he carried in that blanket-covered cage, or how he had come to have that lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.
Several station employees noticed him dragging his burdens across Platform 9, but all of them looked away before they could make eye contact and thus be obligated to help.
No one could remember seeing him board a train. It wasn't long before no one remembered him at all.
Harry laid his head against the seat back and sighed. Transatlantic travel was faster by portkey than by airplane, but it couldn't be said to be more pleasant, and maintaining the Inconspicuus spell that kept the Muggle world from noticing him required more attention than he had expected. His lower back ached a little, and the first hints of a headache lurked behind his eyebrows. Getting a compartment to himself on the Hogwarts Express was the first thing that had gone right all day.
Beside him, Hedwig climbed through the open door of her cage, hopped onto the back of the seat, and began to smooth her travel-ruffled feathers. Harry smiled at her and she gave a lock of his hair an affectionate tug. "Not the easiest trip in the world," he said, "but we're coming home at last."
It had been restful, Florida. The death of Voldemort, the occupation of Hogwarts, the Dementor Rebellion, the Ministry purges, the Death Eater trials -- in Florida they'd been stories played out in the pages of the International Herald-Divinator. His own name had been less familiar to some of his new colleagues than Viktor Krum's. He remembered gathering up the courage to scrabble back his hair and show the scar to Sunday Coneskey, who had given him a blank look and then touched it carelessly with one long finger ...
It had been a relief.
But it hadn't been home. And now Hogwarts was reopening, and Harry was going back to teach, and everything was going to be better.
"It will be different," he warned Hedwig, but he found he couldn't believe it. In his mind stood Hogwarts as he'd first seen it, untouched by war and time.
Well, that was a dream. But he'd do everything he could to make it a reality again.
The students would already have arrived on the Express, and this train was empty except for a few Hogsmeade residents returning from errands in the Muggle world, so Harry could relax a bit. He opened his smallest suitcase and pulled out his everyday robe, neglected for five years while he padded around Florida in shorts and sandals. As he shook the wrinkles out of it, he knocked a sheet of paper from the suitcase to the floor of the compartment.
Harry pulled the robe over his head without bothering to unbutton it, then picked up the paper, unfolding the heavy page to show the Hogwarts crest and Minerva McGonagall's rather spiky blue-black script. After the usual greetings and well-wishes came the part that had set Harry on his homeward journey.
"Obeah Bokor tells me that you have done far more than regain your strength over the five years you've spent on the staff at the Coven of the Americas -- that you have in fact developed your power and discipline far beyond what we saw during your time at Hogwarts. I was pleased to hear this from him, though not surprised.
"Many changes have occurred here during your time in Florida. With the departure of Cornelius Fudge and the reorganization of the Ministry, we at last have a Minister of Magic who will not refuse to acknowledge a threat, nor resist change -- which means that we will be working with the Ministry rather than against it. A better leader than Circe Stormlaw cannot be imagined, and of course I have the utmost confidence in her deputy, Neville Longbottom."
Harry smiled. Neville's unprecedented rise through the Ministry of Magic, placing him in the second position at the unheard-of age of twenty-three, had shocked even those who had known him as a youthful war hero. Harry wished, with some malice, that Professor Snape had lived to see it.
"With the support of this new leadership, we at last feel that it is safe to reopen Hogwarts, and we are calling back a number of our former students to teach. To that end, I am pleased to offer you the position of Professor of Transfiguration."
Harry skimmed the rest of the letter -- room and board, salary commensurate, sabbatical allowance, reply earliest, yours most sincerely. Sunday and Tyndall and the rest of his American friends had been stunned that he would accept a position without a firm salary, until Kat Bonifay had examined his face and said to the others, "Y'all don't get it. He's not climbing, folks. He's homing."
And as the train approached the familiar vista of Hogsmeade Station, Harry felt a great lifting of his spirits. He was coming home to rebuild Hogwarts.
If he was lucky, he'd be busy enough to forget about being the Boy Who Lived when so many others hadn't.
At the foot of the wide stone steps, Harry dropped his boxes, panting. His knees ached -- when had he got so out of shape? and what had possessed him to bring so much baggage? He was looking at the pile in dismay when a familiar voice growled, "Abou' time yeh came back where yeh belong!"
"Hagrid! Are you teaching too?" The last words were smothered in Hagrid's coat as Hagrid folded him into a cheese-scented embrace.
"My! Got some height on yeh in Americer, eh? Don' have that Seeker's build no more." Hagrid held Harry out at arm's length, beaming. "Nah, jus' came back for one las' feast before I go. I'm not fit ter look after the animals in this state, Harry. Can't even help yeh wi' yer bags."
He released Harry's shoulders and held out his hands, and Harry was shocked to see that they were shaking. "Oh, Hagrid --"
"Jus' me war wound," Hagrid said carelessly. "Wasting curse, like as not, only o' course it couldn' kill me on account o' me bein' what I am." Now Harry noticed the deep hollows around Hagrid's eyes, the lines etched on either side of his mouth, and he felt his stomach contracting in horror. But Hagrid sounded as unconcerned as though he were talking about catching cold. "Wizard healers can't do anythin' fer me, but they've got a spot fer me in the giants' sanatorium at Greater Wrenching. I'll be righ' as rain come summer, jus' wait an' see."
"Ah, Harry. And Hagrid -- excellent." Harry turned to see McGonagall coming down the stairs. "If we hurry, we can all get to hall without delaying the Sorting. Let's get this lot to your rooms."
Harry lifted his largest suitcase. "No, no," she said, "leave it to me." She tapped the suitcase with her wand, and with a few short words transfigured its handle into a pair of feet. She did the same to the rest of the suitcases and the owl cage.
"Follow Hedwig, do you understand?" McGonagall said to the luggage. The cage nodded its perch importantly.
"Ground floor, Hedwig," she said. "Blue rooms, first door past the staff common room. Avoid the staircases and heed the spell barriers." Hedwig set off slowly, landing every now and then to let the jostling pack of luggage catch up.
"I may," Harry said dubiously, watching his bags hurry away, "need some refresher work."
When McGonagall clicked off for the Great Hall, Harry lagged behind with Hagrid, trying not to notice his halting movements and occasional grimaces.
"Y'look better, Harry," Hagrid said, already a little out of breath. "Terrible worried abou' yeh I was, las' time I saw yeh, lookin' like yeh couldn' hardly stand up -- but yeh got yer color back now."
Harry looked away, then made himself look back. "I'm fine now."
"Always said yeh would be," Hagrid said stoutly. "Jus' needed a bi' o' time, yeh did, 's wha' I told 'em all. Awful clever to think o' goin' to Florida, though. Bi' o' sunshine's jus' what you wanted."
"It was Dumbledore's idea," Harry said. "After -- after. Dr. Bokor was an old friend of his -- something about an international folk-dancing festival, I didn't quite catch it -- and he said I should look him up and help him with this new project of his."
"Great man, Dumbledore," Hagrid snuffled, fishing a magenta handkerchief out of his pocket.
They had arrived on the staff platform in the Great Hall, which was already buzzing with a dozen conversations, and Hagrid was already shouting, "Charlie! Forgot to tell yeh -- the young gryffalcons, they'll be needin' --"
Harry nearly ran headlong into a small, neat figure walking behind the table with an open book.
" 'Scuse me," they said in unison, and then: "Hermione!" Harry caught her up in a hug that lifted her feet off the floor.
"My! Harry! Weren't we the same height before you went to Florida?" Hermione stuffed her book into a huge shoulder bag as soon as Harry set her down.
"Maybe I grow in sunshine, like a plant."
"You look good, though, Harry," she said seriously. "Are you completely recovered? Because it was really --"
"I'm fine," he interrupted, then added, "You look great." It was true, too; she'd done something different with her hair, and the pinkish color of her robe suited her better than the drab shades she'd chosen when they were at school.
"Thanks," she said. "I've been longing to talk to you -- you're awful about answering letters, you know."
"I was busy," he protested guiltily.
"Right. Busy sunbathing naked with some girl named after a day of the week." She stared him down until he took a seat, then towered over him with a mock glare. "Justin's driving me mad -- he's writing the history of the war, you know, and he wanted an eyewitness account of your duel with Voldemort, and I kept telling him, the Transauditum spell is just like a Muggle walkie-talkie, I could hear some of what was going on but I couldn't see anything at all -- and you wouldn't answer any of his letters --"
"I was busy," he said a little more firmly. She gave him a sharp look.
"You're going to have to talk about it sooner or later, Harry," she said. "I know it's hard for you, but --"
"Hermione --" He looked over her shoulder, searching for something that would distract her.
He succeeded a little better than he would have liked. First he caught a flash of pale hair in the shadows behind the top table. Then the shape came clear. An expensively tailored robe, an expensively bejewelled hand, an expensively barbered head, an expensively curled lip --
Was he never going to be free of Draco Malfoy?
Hermione followed Harry's eyes, and then she straightened up suddenly, crying, "Draco!" and ran to clasp Malfoy. Harry stared dumbly after her. "Mother sent a book for you, and some biscuits, they're in here somewhere --"
"Never mind that," Malfoy said, hugging her roughly. Harry felt a pang of fury. Since when was Hermione so cozy with Malfoy? "What I want to know is, did Mrs. Spenser ever find Bratleigh's tooth?"
"Oh, yes, it turned out to be in his little brother's forearm -- but how are you getting on without mechanical pencils?"
"Musgrove's Magic Pencils are nearly as good, though not quite so satisfying to click ..." Harry watched their two heads bent together, the dark and the fair. They were exactly the same height, like a matched set of figurines. Something extremely strange must have happened while he was in Florida.
Malfoy was still affecting the look of a wizard-bard from a storybook, Harry thought scornfully: pale hair falling to his shoulders, deep-plum robe heavily embroidered in the same color around the collar, narrow hands heavy with silver rings. Harry hadn't remembered his mouth being quite so red.
He looked up and caught Harry looking, and something crossed his face that wasn't quite the expected sneer. Hermione was tugging him over by the arm. "Harry just got in today from America, Draco, he didn't tell anybody he was coming, I think he forgot how to write a letter --"
"He's forgotten a lot of things, I imagine," Malfoy drawled, but he offered a hand. "Potter. Welcome back."
Damn it, even his languid, lingering handshake felt as though there was an insult behind it.
McGonagall stood up, and Harry suddenly noticed that the hall was full of children milling about. Everyone sat down in a great hurry, and by the time Harry noticed that Malfoy had got into the seat between him and Hermione, it was too late to change, because McGonagall was speaking.
"After five long years, we see the Great Hall filled with students once again." Her voice was rougher than Harry had ever heard it. He turned quickly to look at her and caught what could have been tears in her eyes. "I think I speak for all of us at the top table when I say that your faces are one of the loveliest sights I have ever seen." She paused a moment, getting hold of herself, and when she spoke again, she sounded more normal.
"We have a long Sorting ahead of us, and I'm sure everyone is eager to get on with the feast. But first, I'd like to introduce the staff, as many of us will be strangers to you."
She began with the four teachers who sat on either side of her in the center of the U-shaped table. "Michelle Verte, Herbology professor and head of Hufflepuff House. Remus Lupin, Defense Against the Dark Arts professor and head of Gryffindor House. Madeleine Aerie, Deputy Headmistress, Potions professor, and head of Slytherin House. And Cypherus Summs, who has kindly agreed to emerge from retirement to teach Arithmancy and look after Ravenclaw House."
Now she introduced the opposite leg of the table: "Oliver Wood, Quidditch coach and Apparation instructor." A great cheer went up from the older students. "Penelope Clearwater, librarian. Daisy MacMillan, Divination profes-- yes, Daisy?"
"Phoenix Skye, please, Headmistress." The new Divination professor was younger than Harry, with a cloud of curly copper hair and a robe decorated in a rather loud paisley of orange and pink. There was a flower tucked behind her ear.
"Very well." McGonagall's voice betrayed her opinion of name changes. "Ursa Polaris, Astronomy professor. And Pedantius Binns, History of Magic professor." Harry wondered how many Sorting feasts it would take before Professor Binns noticed he couldn't eat.
"On my other side: Charlie Weasley, Care of Magical Creatures professor. Sofia Andriescu-Weasley, our medic, whom I hope you won't be meeting too soon." Harry looked up, startled, at the name. One of those notes from Ron must have been about Charlie getting married. "Harry Potter, Transfiguration professor." There was a muted murmur when Harry's name was spoken, and he tensed as he saw some students craning their necks for a closer look.
McGonagall spoke a little louder over the buzz. "Draco Malfoy, professor of Muggle Studies."
Harry was so busy choking on his pumpkin juice that he could barely hear McGonagall introducing Hermione as the new Charms professor.
"Now," McGonagall said over the noise, "we'll need to move briskly through the Sorting, as there are five years' worth of students to be assigned to their houses, so let's begin."
The Sorting Hat, seeming to understand the need for haste, cut its introductory poem to half the usual length, and then McGonagall began calling up the students. The handful of sixth- and seventh-years who were already seated looked up from their conversations. "Banks-Martin, Jonathan?"
"So, Potter," Malfoy said quietly as a boy with a rather superior expression was sorted into Ravenclaw. "Did you enjoy your time doing wizardry for the surfing set?"
Harry, with difficulty, prevented himself from answering back as if he were fourteen again as McGonagall called, "Bates, Niamh?"
"Harry was helping start up the first school of wizardry America has had since Salem, Draco!" Hermione said enthusiastically from the other side. "When we wanted to write to him, our owls had to relay their letters to transatlantic message geese, because an owl could never make it all the way to Disney World --"
Malfoy laughed out loud. "Disney World?" McGonagall aimed a glare in his direction, and he lowered his voice. "Should we prepare for an onslaught of magical mice?"
"You have to admit, it's a perfect camouflage," Hermione said. "I've read they set off hours of fireworks every night and have parades every day. So no matter what people saw, they'd never suspect anything."
"The Magic Kingdom," Harry offered gamely. Beauchamp, Simon, stopped taking notes long enough to get sorted to Hufflepuff. Malfoy smirked. His robe was turned up at the cuffs, leaving his pale wrists bare. And on his left arm Harry caught a glimpse of the Dark Mark, its grinning mouth like something out of a nightmare.
Malfoy caught Harry looking and turned his arm over. "What, you thought it was just a rumor, Potter?"
It still made Harry's skin crawl after all these years. "I would think that even you would be ashamed to show such a thing," he said icily. Cabot, Jasmine, took off for the Slytherin table at a run, robe trailing behind her.
Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Shame has nothing to do with it, Potter," he said. "Everything important leaves a mark somewhere. Or hadn't you guessed that yet?" He looked pointedly at Harry's forehead.
Before he could say anything, though, he caught another sharp look from McGonagall. "Dozier, Mignonette?" she said rather more loudly than necessary. Harry had to content himself with glaring at Malfoy and then turning to watch the Sorting.
It seemed to take hours before Young, Lydia, took her seat at the end of the Hufflepuff table, still nervously tugging on one caramel-colored braid. And then the students, who had begun to jostle and whisper among themselves, suddenly fell silent except for the occasional gasp or shriek as the ghosts floated in.
Nearly Headless Nick and the Fat Friar, the Gray Lady and the Bloody Baron ... all the familiar ghosts of the four houses sailed across the air ... and last of all, ghostly eyes a-twinkle, came Albus Dumbledore.
Harry's hands felt heavy and tingly at the sight. Dumbledore made a tour of the student tables, then came up to greet the staff. He wasn't gaunt and bruised and shaky as he'd been at the end, but looked just as he had at Harry's first Sorting Feast, from the spectacles on the end of his nose to the high-heeled boots -- only silvery, translucent as smoke.
Like the rest of the ghosts, he seemed to carry a breath of cold and damp with him, like a portable fog. The hair stood up on the back of Harry's neck.
He felt a sudden sharp pain in his ribs, and started -- Hermione had reached around Malfoy to poke him. He took a breath, almost a gasp. Another, and another, until he was no longer in danger of collapse. He looked up again, still breathing hard.
Dumbledore's ghost looked at him with that same warming, annoying combination of clairvoyance and cheerfulness that he'd always had in life, and winked. "Welcome back, my boy," he said, and blew away like a cloud.
Malfoy was looking at Harry without expression -- taking note of his weakness, no doubt. When Harry gathered his wits, with difficulty, and looked back at him, he raised an eyebrow. "Why, Potter," he said, pushing a glass of pumpkin juice over to him. "You look as though you've seen a ghost."
Harry looked away from Malfoy's considering face and Hermione's sympathetic one and noticed that his plate was full of food. He took a blind bite of a sausage, and at once felt a burst of warmth. Food! Food that tasted like home! Food that wasn't pizza! The whiplashing of his emotions was exhausting him, and quite consciously he closed off part of his mind and sank into the relief of feeling nothing, for the moment, but hunger.
The students, too, were eating as though they'd been starved for months. Harry vaguely remembered a few of them -- Hannah Abbott's youngest sister was passing food to the new Hufflepuffs, and the tall graceful girl at the head of Gryffindor must be Macy Prewitt, who'd had an embarrassing crush on him seventh year when she was twelve and spotty.
There were lots of empty seats at all the tables, but still a good selection of students to choose from. Filling out a Quidditch team -- that was a safe topic to think about.
They'd all be beginners, of course, even the older ones, but that was a handicap that all the houses would share. There were several promising possibilities in Gryffindor. Jack Talos, tall and muscular and at least fifteen, with "champion Beater" written all over him ... Aoife Murphy, a comprehensively freckled girl, with the alert look of a Chaser about her ... and if Taliesin Jones was as fast as he was small, he'd have the makings of a marvelous Seeker.
He looked past Malfoy to Hermione. "Gryffindor kids look good," he said.
"Yes," Malfoy said before she could respond, "nearly all of them look sensible enough not to jump off a roof on a dare."
Harry felt his mouth tighten. He really wished Malfoy would give it a rest; he was worn out from travel and his control of his own temper was uncertain.
Hermione, though, picked it up as though it was a continuation of an earlier conversation. "Oh, Draco," she said. "The Slytherins will be all right. They're young, that's all."
"Young," he said contemptuously. "Look at them. Sneaks, paranoiacs, and Type A high achievers."
Harry followed his gaze to the Slytherin table. Most of them really did look as though they had something to hide, but what was new in that?
"There was a time," Malfoy went on, "when Slytherin attracted serpents -- not jackals."
"Not when you were there," Harry said before he could stop himself.
"Harry!"
But Malfoy didn't even pause. "It's not just the Slytherins, either. Look at Ravenclaw. Nothing but precocious smart-alecks. And Hufflepuff -- they're about to expire from sheer earnestness." Harry could hear Hermione trying to stifle a giggle.
Now McGonagall was giving the students the usual cautions -- no going into the Forbidden Forest, no venturing out after curfew. Rather more than the usual cautions, in fact. "You'll see barriers in places which are still considered unsafe. In particular, the old Potions wing is off limits to all students and staff as well. I cannot stress strongly enough how important it is to heed any barriers you see. Any student caught trying to cross a barrier will be expelled immediately." Harry looked around, hoping the barriers would be easy to spot; he hadn't seen any yet.
"The Gryffindors are all right -- as all right as Gryffindors ever get, anyway," Malfoy went on, nodding at Lupin, "because Fenris understands the history of the place." Harry set his teeth at the cruel nickname. "But the rest of the houses -- look at them. I told you so, 'Mione. They're parodies of themselves."
Hermione shot Harry a fondly impatient look over Malfoy's head. "Draco believes the Sorting Hat is somehow reacting to the wishes of the Heads of House," she said. "And he's not happy with the Headmistress's choices for Heads."
There was no need to wonder who Malfoy thought was a better candidate for Slytherin head, Harry thought as the table was cleared for dessert -- no, wait, pudding.
A Malfoy was out for himself, first, last, and always. It was strangely reassuring to know some things hadn't changed.
2. Ruins
Fortunately for Harry's flagging sense of direction, the teachers left the feast en masse and headed for the staff common room. It looked very much like the student common rooms except that it was larger and decorated in purple and gray rather than in house colors.
Many of the staff were already heading to bed -- it was nearly midnight now, and Harry wasn't the only one who'd had a long journey -- but others seemed to be settling down to stay in the common room for a while. Charlie and Sofia had already set up a chess table in the corner by the larger fireplace, and were playing a fierce, fast game full of shouts of triumph and outrage.
Harry could hear Hagrid making his farewells, and he lingered by the hallway door, wanting to speak to him. To Harry's surprise, Hagrid had a long, low-voiced conversation with Malfoy, leaving him with a laugh and an odd forearm clasp.
"Ah, I never can forget wha' a wonder it was we got Draco back in one piece," he told Harry, nodding at Malfoy, who was now engaged in a friendly-sounding exchange with Professor Lupin. Harry wished Malfoy would get out of earshot so he could ask Hagrid if they'd all lost their minds.
"Harry," Hagrid said fondly. "The old place'll feel like home again, now yeh've come back. Almos' wish I could stay. But I've got ter trust that Charlie'll take good care o' th' creatures, an' yeh'll take good care o' yerself." He gripped Harry's forearm with one huge, shaking hand, as he had done with Malfoy. "It's the way me people greet a true comrade," he said proudly. "Look after yerself, Harry, an' if all goes well I'll see yeh come summer."
Harry sadly watched as Hagrid finished his farewells and left, then looked around for Hermione, but she was drawing Malfoy over to a couch under a tremendous bas-relief map of northern England, still arguing as they both sat down. "Then maybe it's time to abolish the House system altogether," she said, and Harry felt his mouth drop open.
Eager as Malfoy was to change everything that made Hogwarts Hogwarts, Harry was surprised to hear him disagree. "You say no houses, 'Mione, but in practice that would mean the whole school was one big house, teaching nothing but Ravenclaw magic or nothing but Gryffindor magic."
"You always think --" she began, but Malfoy interrupted her: "Or nothing but Slytherin, it doesn't matter. The point is there are different kinds of wizards and they need different things. And the House system --"
Obviously Harry wasn't going to get a chance to talk to Hermione as long as Malfoy was here. Funny how he'd been too good for her at school, and now he couldn't get enough of her.
He probably ought to go to bed, but his internal clock had decided that it was early afternoon. So after a moment's indecision, he poured himself a cup of tea from the self-replenishing pot on the sideboard and went off to sit down on another couch. After a moment, Professor Lupin dropped down beside him.
"You look good, Harry," he said.
Harry stirred his tea with more than necessary force. He was getting really tired of that comment. "You too, Professor," he said. "Sorry I didn't write to you more often." He winced inwardly, remembering all the times he'd turned the delivery goose away without even unfolding the message it had brought, unwilling to have his fragile peace disturbed by a message from home.
"Remus, please. And it's quite all right, I understand," he answered mildly, and took a sip of his own tea. Harry was afraid he understood all too well, and he looked away from Lupin's -- Remus' -- sharp eyes.
Behind the couch were several layers of purple and gray curtains, but they framed nothing but seamless stone. "Is this the normal way of decorating in the teachers' quarters? Curtains on a stone wall?"
Remus smiled rather sadly. "It used to be a window," he said. "All the windows have been filled in, didn't you notice?"
Harry hadn't. "Whatever for?"
"To stop the curses, of course." Remus looked at him curiously. "But I suppose you were out of commission that first autumn, and by the time we'd retaken the school and removed the Death Eaters, you were in America." He rose and resettled on the couch. Must be a long story, Harry thought.
"It all began with a first-year who --"
"Even in St. Mungo's we heard about Lark Brown." His voice was sharper than he intended, and he grimaced in apology, but Remus only nodded.
"Yes, when a curse kills a little girl on her way to the Sorting feast, I suppose the word gets about. And her aunt was a classmate of yours, if I remember correctly."
Harry had wanted to send Lavender a letter of sympathy, but even if he had known what to say, owls were frowned upon in St. Mungo's. As were quills, for that matter.
"Then you heard about the other attacks?"
Harry blinked, then shook his head.
"Well, the Brown girl's death was blamed on Death Eaters who had escaped justice, and Medusa Macallan eventually confessed. The Ministry ... well, no one could say they weren't very zealous in making certain all suspected Death Eaters were accounted for."
Harry glanced over at Malfoy, who was leaning toward Hermione, gesturing wildly, cheeks pink, not looking at all accounted for. If it was ever possible to account for Malfoy, which he doubted.
"But," Remus went on, "even after the school was closed, the workers cleaning up the war damage were harried by attacks. It didn't matter how many Death Eaters were captured -- the next day there'd be injuries, explosions, fires.
"The best theory anyone could offer was that someone was still on the grounds somewhere, casting curses from some hidden stronghold. First the Ministry tried adding more and more security on the grounds themselves. When that didn't solve the problem, we filled in the windows in the hopes of protecting the interior.
"We worked all night in teams, closing up every window we could find," Remus said. "This was in November, just after the last of the Dementors were put down, and we still thought we'd be able to open the school late and finish out the year. And in the morning we came back, and ... "
Remus took a breath, then placed his cup and saucer on the table with careful precision. "Sirius was the first to arrive, as usual, you know, and he used his cane to push open the door --"
"Oh, no." Harry closed his eyes. When he opened them, Remus was staring down at his own clasped hands. "His wounds weren't that serious," Harry said softly. "Everyone was so sure he would recover, and then the next thing I heard --"
"Minerva turned the cane to stone and put it over the door, did you see it? It's the newest of the new memorials." Remus looked up with an off-center smile. "He always used to say he was going to use it to do something unspeakable to Cornelius Fudge."
There was a long silence then. Harry could faintly hear Hermione and Malfoy still arguing over something, McGonagall calling down goodnights as she tripped up one of the curving staircases, Sofia saying "Checkmate" in a rather smug tone.
Kat, Harry thought, would be rolling her eyes. "Unbend and give the guy a hug already, Har. You could both use one." He leaned his shoulder against Remus', and Remus leaned back briefly and sighed.
"Who did it turn out to be?" Harry said at last. Remus shrugged. "They didn't catch anyone?"
"They caught a great many people. Entirely too many, some say. But no one was ever able to explain the Hogwarts attacks."
"Are you certain it's safe to reopen?" The back of Harry's neck felt cold. He had thought he was done with this, this damned impotent worry ...
"No," Remus said flatly. "But with Durmstrang permanently shut down, and Beauxbatons crammed so tightly they don't even have seats for all the students, and all sorts of unscrupulous wizards setting themselves up as private instructors ... well, Minerva felt there was more risk in remaining closed than in reopening."
Hogwarts was still said to be the safest place in the world.
After a long moment Harry said brightly, "Well. I've been home nearly six hours and nothing's gone wrong yet."
There was no immediate explosion. He decided to take that as a good omen.
The door to Harry's rooms was guarded by a painting of a very pretty young milkmaid, who blushed and stammered when Harry introduced himself. To his surprise, she was there again on a painting hung inside the door, where at a word from him she could open the door to visitors.
"Your doorkeeper is lovely," Remus said, setting the girl to trembling and blushing again. "Mine's an Irish setter, which suggests that Albus Dumbledore's sense of humor is not altogether absent from Hogwarts." He flicked his wand to light some candles in the sitting room. "Minerva asked me to apologize for the rooms -- the ones on the upper storeys are more interesting, but none of the vacant ones are in good repair at the moment."
"Oh, no," Harry said. The sitting room was spacious and comfortable, with a fire crackling in the hearth and a wide, squishy couch. Under the filled-in windows was a study corner, with an enormous desk and a wall of bookshelves. Beyond, through an open door, Harry could glimpse a bed with bright blue curtains. "It's wonderful. But how will Hedwig --"
Before he could finish the question, there was a clicking noise, and Harry saw that a decorative panel above the outer door was actually a smaller door, just the right size for an owl to use. Hedwig greeted Remus with a friendly hair-tug, then settled down on her perch and tucked her head under her wing.
"Owls are meant to be nocturnal," Remus said curiously. "Are they subject to portlag?"
"Dunno," Harry said, and then yawned widely. "Humans are, though." He closed his eyes. It took him several seconds to open them again.
Remus smiled. "I'll let myself out."
As soon as he saw the place when he was wide awake, Harry understood why McGonagall was anxious to get on with training the next generation of wizards. Hogwarts was rather a mess.
His own rooms were normal except for the filled-in windows. Just on the other side of his door, though -- he couldn't think how he had missed it the night before -- a passageway was closed off with protections both magical and mundane, black ribbon laced through the faint shimmer of a spell barrier. And beyond that he could see that a staircase was simply missing, with nothing left but a bit of the old banister ascending into empty air.
Coven students and teachers had occasionally been called upon to treat victims of vengeful cursing or to lift the mal de ojo from an infant, but Harry had spent most of the last five years on more benign forms of magic. He'd almost forgotten the unpleasantly slippery feeling that the nastier curses left in the air until he felt it now. He turned his back on it quickly, ignoring the tension in the back of his neck.
Rubbing his forehead to smooth away the headache that still clung to him, he walked through the deserted staff common room. On the other side of the door, he paused, trying to remember the way to the Great Hall. Left at the first hallway, then right at the third -- or was it left at the third and then right at the first? Or was he turned round altogether?
"Straight ahead to the portrait of Usher the Untidy, Mr. Potter," came a very familiar sneer. "After that, right, right, left -- do pay attention, Mr. Potter; I had hoped perhaps even you might have made some progress in mastering that elementary skill --"
"Professor Snape?" Harry whirled, nearly stumbling over his robe, and winced as he heard his voice squeak.
The door to the staff common room had been held open the night before. Now that it was closed, Harry could see the statue that guarded it: the late Potions master in gray stone, nine feet tall and captured in full sneer.
"Your grasp of the obvious remains unparalleled, I see." The statue held a cauldron in one hand, and a lock of stone hair fell forward over its left eye. Like Dumbledore's ghost, Snape's statue was less ravaged by war than the man had been when Harry last saw him alive, though no less imperious. One robe sleeve was drawn back to reveal a shallow etching of the Dark Mark. It was possible, Harry thought with distaste bordering on disgust, to take realism too far.
"R-right, all right," he stammered. "Usher the Untidy, right, right, left --"
"Talking to inanimate objects again, Potter?" Malfoy swept through the door in a swirl of ice-blue robes, looking as if he'd slept for twelve hours rather than four. Harry scrubbed at his unruly hair. Malfoy inclined his head to Snape's statue, a sort of minimal bow, and went on down the corridor.
The statue's lips twitched, but it made no further comment. After a moment, Harry stifled an absurd urge to say, "Can I go now, Professor?" and walked off toward the dining hall.
It was still quite early, and the student tables were empty except for three Hufflepuffs who obviously thought there was no such thing as too much of an early start. At the staff table, Remus and Michelle Verte were sitting side by side, glancing at each other occasionally as though they wanted to have a conversation but couldn't decide how to get started.
Harry headed for the other end of the table, where he'd spotted Hermione eating bacon with one hand and turning the pages of the first-year Charms textbook with the other.
"You're up early," she said as he sat down beside her and helped himself to the first kippers he'd seen in five years.
"My brain thinks it's yesterday afternoon," he said. "And my head hurts. Maybe I should go ask Sofia for a portlag cure."
"Oh, no, Harry," Hermione said, closing her book. "Portlag's one of the Incurables, like hangovers, don't you remember? She'll just give you a sleep draught and a lecture. Not that you couldn't use one. A sleep draught, I mean -- if a lecture would help you'd have been better ages ago."
"Hush," he said, smiling, and on that one word his accent sounded just like Kat's. He'd catch himself saying "y'all" next if he wasn't careful.
Now that the special feast linens had been removed, he could see that the edge of the table in front of him was scraped and splintered. He looked around the dining hall and felt his chest tighten as he saw the marks of damage everywhere.
Most of the tables were scraped or chipped, and a few had been broken in half and mended. There were great gouges in the wall behind the staff table, as though something heavy had been flung against it at high speed, and marks in the floor that looked as though they had been made by claws.
He wondered what it had looked like before the staff spent the summer cleaning it.
Here, too, the air was soapy with the residue of Dark magic, so strong that Harry wondered whether it was entirely the result of old curses. He looked over his shoulder.
"Expecting to see an old enemy, Potter? Your luck is in," Malfoy said, brushing past him to sit down on Hermione's other side. Harry didn't leap out of his chair, but only through force of will.
Have a little pride, Potter, he told himself. The guy's still an arrogant weasel, but that's no reason to be so jumpy. "Listen, Malfoy," he said. "Hermione may trust you, but I'm reserving judgment."
Malfoy just raised one eyebrow. "Not jumping to a conclusion yet, Potter? Now there's a first," he said. "If you're too full of homecoming spirit to eat, I'll take that baked apple off your hands."
"Stop mooching, Draco." Hermione smacked his hand as it passed in front of her. "Harry needs all the food he can get. Didn't you eat at all in America? You're gaunt."
"I'm fine," Harry said for what seemed like the hundredth time.
The noise level in the room was rising as more students arrived. Harry hated to see them sitting at the damaged tables. Teaching was going to be a challenge, but he vowed he'd spend as much time as he could working to get Hogwarts back to normal.
"Are your rooms nice, Harry?" Hermione said. "I'm on the fourth floor -- Penelope's going to help me find the charm they used on the ceiling in here, because if I can enchant the walls I'll have a view of the lake --"
Suddenly there was a shriek from the student tables. Harry looked up in time to see one of the young Slytherins collapsing backward, chair and all, with a strange, broken wail.
McGonagall was the first to get to her, with Malfoy close behind. "I don't want to hear any more of this superstitious nonsense," McGonagall was saying severely as Harry arrived.
"But, Professor, the Crabbe chair -- " "Nobody ever sits --"
Malfoy was kneeling by the girl, whose heels were drumming on the floor. "Petrificus Totalus," he said, and she fell still. He looked up at McGonagall. "Kitty, get these bloodthirsty little boggarts out of the way, will you, while I --"
McGonagall herded the students back as Malfoy began to murmur in a soft, slurred voice. Harry tensed, but then recognized the words as transfiguration spells -- Malfoy was turning the chair into a stretcher. He still pronounced his spells like a native speaker, all elisions and dropped endings. Harry's spells were perfectly functional, but compared to Malfoy, he had always felt as though he were reading the words out of a phrasebook.
The girl's eyes were still open, moving wildly, and in her arms and hands and jaw Harry could see muscles clenching against the restraint of the spell. His eyes fell on someone's boiled egg, shell still unbroken. He snatched it and knelt on the girl's other side, running it over her face and murmuring, feeling a faint tingle under his fingers. Tyndall de Soto, the Coven's specialist in Latin American magic, had taught him to pull enchantment into an egg, and apparently the spell worked even when the egg was breakfast.
He was dimly aware of Malfoy on the other side of the girl, still tapping the chair with his wand and murmuring. The stretcher began to sprout wheels, then bands to hold the girl's arms and legs. She stopped tensing just as Malfoy's last words transfigured her rather gaudy necklace into a pillow to cradle her head.
Harry put the egg in Malfoy's hand. "Tell Sofia it was boiled. She may still be able to interpret the yolk. If she hasn't done it before, I can help when we're done with crowd control."
"Well," wheezed Cypherus Summs as a prefect hurried up to help Malfoy wheel the stretcher away. "That's what I call teamwork."
McGonagall declared the Slytherin common room to be the safest place for the students. The room was underground and draped all over with protective spells, but Harry was still uneasy about their safety.
"I haf removed the Petrificus and placed upon her a Consopium -- a magical coma," Sofia told Harry in her soft accent when he came to the infirmary later. "I could not otherwise stop the confulsionss, and I feared she would damage herself. But, 'Arry, I do not know what you wanted me to do with this egg."
The rest of the staff gathered round to watch as Harry broke the egg into a glass of water, but apparently this part of Tyndall's curanderismo only worked with a raw egg; he couldn't make anything at all of the shape of the yolk, no matter how he squinted at it.
"Harry, are you singing?"
He shut his mouth, embarrassed, and poured the mess of water and soft-boiled egg into the infirmary sink. Hermione was still looking at him expectantly. "Cherokee chant," he told her. "Supposed to call your manito to you -- your power, your magic, whatever. Sunday got everybody in the bad habit of humming it when we worked on something. A Potions lesson at the Coven is really something to hear."
"You always work without a wand?" Charlie said, and Harry realized his wand was still in his sleeve.
"Two weeks after I arrived in Florida, I helped Dr. Bokor lift a curse with a spatula. After that I understood what wands were for."
McGonagall was bending over the girl's bed. "I am very much afraid that this is the same curse that hit Argus Filch when he attempted to re-open the Potions wing," she said.
Filch had survived the war, but the state of the school made it quite obvious that he wasn't working as a caretaker any longer. Harry had assumed he'd simply retired. "What happened to him?"
"Poppy had a small amount of Nervalitum, a powerful nerve regrowth potion of Severus' invention," McGonagall said. "As long as she was able to administer this to Argus, his seizures were held in abeyance and his body was able to work on healing itself. When it ran out ..."
"You couldn't make more?"
"It requires powdered narwhal tusk," said Madeleine Aerie. "Which is impossible to find, now that the Ministry's reclassified it. We couldn't get at Professor Snape's supplies, and none of us has his shady contacts, more's the pity."
"Ironically," McGonagall added, "the reason Argus was in the Potions wing to begin with was to search Severus' quarters for books, notes, and ingredients that we couldn't get elsewhere." She sighed. "Poppy kept Argus alive for ten months using Animaserum, which is a more general systemic strengthener, but his convulsions continued, and his body wasted itself away."
"Where is Madam Pomfrey, anyhow?" Harry said.
"Dead," McGonagall said shortly.
She stared at the spot where the window should have been, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand and looking entirely exhausted.
Finally Harry asked her, "What was that about the chair?"
"That was Victor Crabbe's chair, and the sillier students believe it's cursed," she said.
She had already undone Malfoy's transfiguration on the chair. It stood in the corner, looking like a perfectly ordinary chair.
"We've questioned everyone," Charlie said, "and there's no sign of anything unusual. She sat down, she screamed, that's all we know."
McGonagall stared at the chair. "Something," she said, "is badly wrong."
3. Sacrifice
"I'm afraid," McGonagall announced in the staff common room, "we may have to shut down again and send the students home." Her voice was shaking.
"You can't," Harry said without thinking.
There was a roar of comment. The headmistress raised her voice. "If our current security measures are inadequate to the task of protecting students from these curses, or even finding out who's casting them --"
"But that's exactly why --"
"Potter's right," Malfoy said suddenly. Harry's mouth dropped open. "Kitty, if this is a new threat, we need trained wizards. And if the Death Eaters are recruiting -- well, don't look so shocked, you know you were all thinking it -- if they're recruiting, we need to be doing the same."
"Lark Brown," Wood said pointedly, and McGonagall said, "Precisely. To expose children to these sorts of risks ..."
Malfoy smacked a stone-filled window with the palm of his hand -- a disgustingly theatrical gesture, Harry thought, though he had to admit that it captured everyone's attention.
"I thought Gryffindors understood sacrifice," he said, turning back to face the roomful of silent teachers. "Hogwarts or no Hogwarts, wizard children are going to learn something from someone. Right now they're out there untrained, unchanneled, with no positive influence. Children are going to be risked regardless. But if we're open, we can make the risk good for something."
McGonagall looked as though her throat hurt. After a moment, she said, "You make a good point, Draco. I believe I need to consult with Albus on this -- Friar, could you fetch him? We'll discuss it further tonight. Perhaps Miss Rolfe will regain consciousness by then and have more to tell us."
In the roar of discussion that followed, it was almost impossible to make out any conversation. Phoenix Skye was trying to get Summs and Malfoy to join her in a meditation for positive vibrations. Charlie and Sofia were whispering very quickly, finishing each other's sentences. A head in the fireplace -- no one Harry recognized -- was bellowing potion ingredients to Madeleine Aerie.
Only Hermione was silent in her armchair. Harry sat on a nearby footstool and looked at her, but she kept on staring blindly at the wall for several minutes. Then she looked right past Harry.
"Draco," she called, "who was the last person to sit in the Crabbe chair?"
"Crabbe himself, I should think," he said, leaving Phoenix behind with a sigh of relief. "All those little geese believe it was cursed. The older ones whispered it down to the newcomers at the Sorting feast."
He perched on the arm of Hermione's chair, and she looked up at him. "But he didn't really curse it, surely?"
"Do you know any way to put a seizure curse on a chair?" He looked from Hermione to Harry, and then to Remus, who had come up to stand beside Harry's footstool. When they were all silent, he nodded. "Thought not. And if you don't know, then you can be sure Vincent didn't know. He could scarcely spell his own name without help."
"You've always known how to choose your friends, Malfoy," Harry said tightly, ignoring Hermione's noise of protest. "What are Crabbe and Goyle doing now? Standing outside the walls casting curses on unsuspecting children?"
"Oh, I don't imagine Vincent would have that sort of courage," Malfoy said carelessly. "He'll be hiding in some safe place with what's left of the Death Eaters, I suppose, unless he's dead." He shifted back against the back of the chair and crossed one knee over the other. "As for Gregory," he added blandly, "I killed him."
Harry went cold with shock and anger. Was Malfoy not just annoying but dangerous? Could he be casting curses on students?
Beside him Remus made an impatient gesture. "Draco, that isn't funny," he said. "Harry's been gone a long time, and he hasn't had a chance to catch up yet."
Malfoy shrugged. "He ought to be able to handle unpleasant truths like a good Gryffindor."
"I already know all the unpleasant truths I care to know about you, thanks," Harry said through gritted teeth.
The Animaserum quieted Charlotte Rolfe enough that Sofia was able to release her from the Consopium, but as the afternoon wore on, her seizures started again, and Sofia once again spelled her into unconsciousness.
The staff huddled in the common room, talking in hushed voices. McGonagall and Dumbledore's ghost sat murmuring in a secluded corner, heads so close together that their foreheads appeared to intersect. Remus and Michelle Verte went off to take a turn watching over the students, and Penelope and Oliver came back staggering under the weight of several dozen library books with unsettling titles.
Harry wished there were windows to look out of while he was thinking. Lacking that, he stood for a long time gazing into a painting, watching a ship toss on a stormy sea, trying to imagine who had cast that curse, and how, and what could be done to stop someone from doing it again. He could feel the old feeling bearing down on him, the one he'd shed with so much difficulty in America -- because he didn't know what to do and they were all counting on him, their lives depended on him, and he was going to fail them all again, let them all down, let them all die, just like --
He felt movement beside him and started violently, but it was only Hermione. "Stop brooding, Harry," she said impatiently. "Here," she added, tugging him toward one of the sideboards, "they've brought up some cold chicken for supper. Eat, and then come and tell me what you know about casting a curse through a solid stone wall."
"Did you ever think," Harry said, as quietly as he could manage, "of the other possibilities? Honestly, Hermione, why are you looking outside the walls when there was a Dark wizard right there in the room?"
She sighed impatiently. "Harry, look over there." She nodded over at where Malfoy stood, talking very seriously with a group of teachers. Charlie was standing beside him, and McGonagall and Dumbledore's ghost were both listening and nodding as Malfoy waved one long-fingered hand toward the closed-up windows, the spell-guarded doors. "Would Minerva trust someone who was dangerous? Would Dumbledore?"
Harry looked from Malfoy back to Hermione. She had never been gullible, but ... "He's a Death Eater, Hermione," he said.
"He was a Death Eater," she said. "And then he was a spy, and then he was in the Wizard Protection Program, and now he's -- "
"-- very probably a traitor, and definitely a sneaky, lying, superior --"
Hermione looked at him sternly. "We don't have time for this, Harry," she said, sounding frighteningly like McGonagall. "Something is threatening the students, and us, too. And it is not Draco Malfoy. I know him, Harry. I was here."
Oh, that stung. It must have shown on his face, because to his shock, she leaned forward and took both his hands. "Oh, Harry." Her fingers were very warm. "We'll tell you everything, I promise -- as soon as there's time we'll tell you the whole story. But in the meantime -- well, I understand if you can't trust Draco just yet, but you're going to have to trust the rest of us."
Four-thirty in the morning, and Harry was wishing he'd just nodded off in the common room like Cypherus Summs, who'd been snoring away in a wing chair when Harry'd gone off to bed.
After so many nights in the converted motel that housed the Coven, he was finding it hard to breathe in a room with no windows. It was so dark that he could hardly tell the walls from the furniture, and so quiet, with Hedwig out for the night, that he could hear his own breathing echoing back off the half-closed bedcurtains.
He turned over, punching his pillow and wishing that he'd gone to Sofia for that sleep draught after all. If there were a window, he'd be facing it, and perhaps he could see the moon, or at least a bit of the grounds. Or a robed, masked Death Eater, wand in hand, prowling around, looking for a gap big enough to cast a curse through --
He turned over again, so quickly that he shook the bed. Breathed in, breathed out, closed his eyes and tried to picture ocean waves, the way Kat had taught him. Breathe in, breathe out, let it go, Har, let it go.
Wave. Wave. Wave. Breathe in. Breathe out.
The air was filled with an icy fog, though, not like Florida where it was warm even in winter, but cold as a Dementor's breath. And that roar wasn't the ocean at all but his own panting breath.
Or perhaps it was the fire, because Dumbledore had set Voldemort's body on fire, and the flames threw warmth on his face. Ron and Sirius were warm, too, where they held him up, and Snape's Animaserum was warm inside him, and Dumbledore's hand on his arm ought to have been warm too but it wasn't, somehow, and he was saying urgently, "You must go now, my boy. You have done your part and the task that remains is not for you," but how could they know Voldemort was dead, how could they be sure, it was absolutely vital for them to be sure ...
Harry sat up with a start, his own whimper waking him from the dream. He ran clammy hands over his face. "Lumos." His voice was shaky.
When his heart stopped racing, he got out of bed and lit every lamp and candle in the room.
When Harry returned to the common room, Summs was gone and McGonagall was sitting on a couch surrounded by books and empty teacups. If she hadn't had on a different robe, Harry would have been sure she'd spent the night there. "Morning," she said indistinctly as she rubbed her face.
"The girl --"
"No change."
Breakfast was already laid out on the sideboards -- coffee as well as tea, Harry was relieved to note. As he was buttering a scone, the common room door opened and Hermione and Malfoy came in.
Hermione was already talking rapidly. "No, but it's odd, isn't it, that they'd choose a Slytherin? If it really is Death Eaters, you'd think --"
Malfoy was wearing dark green today, but Hermione was still in yesterday's robe. Harry didn't care for the implications of that; now was not the time for dalliances, even if it had been someone other than Malfoy. "What, they'd spare the old fellow's house out of some sort of old school loyalty?" he was saying to Hermione. "Or perhaps -- oh, raspberries." He descended upon the fruit, looking almost human.
Harry pushed aside some books to sit next to McGonagall. Hermione sat in a nearby armchair and stared at both of them. "Neither of you got a wink of sleep last night, did you?" She herself was looking rather weary.
"Maddie and I combed over every inch of the Great Hall," McGonagall said. "And then Albus and the ghosts combed it again. There is no gap in the walls or ceiling large enough to admit the slightest breath of air." She rubbed her eyes again.
Hermione was frowning, deep in thought. "How does a curse travel?"
"In a direct line, like a beam of light," Harry answered promptly. It was almost word-for-word from the sixth-year Defense Against the Dark Arts text. "It can bounce like light, or reflect like light --"
" -- but it can't disappear one place and appear another, and it can't cross a large body of water, and it can't curve," Hermione finished the quote. "And it can't pass through a solid stone wall," she added as Malfoy arrived with a plate piled high with raspberries. "I'm surprised you didn't just bring the serving bowl, Draco."
"House elves fastened it to the table somehow," he said, mouth full, and once again perched on the arm of her chair.
"They're wise to you." She held out her hand and he dropped three berries into it. Harry looked at McGonagall to see if she found the display as sickening as he did, but she was already turning the pages of a book again, rubbing her temple with her fingers.
Hermione spat raspberry seeds delicately into a napkin. "I still say we should at least consider the possibility that there might be an element of truth in the superstition about the Crabbe chair. That there might be something unusual about the chair itself."
"We did examine it very closely," McGonagall said.
"But not until after," Hermione said.
"Fine," Malfoy said. "I'll say it again, 'Mione -- do you know of any way to put a curse on a chair?" When she was silent, Malfoy looked around her. "Potter? Did your Yank mongrel magicians have some method for doing that?"
"Shut up, Malfoy," Harry said.
"Harry!" Hermione glared at him.
"Well, the answer is no," Harry said. "I could turn a chair into something else, or turn something else into a chair. Or ... make it fall apart when someone sat in it ..."
"Put one of those blasted Weasley cushions on it to make a rude noise when someone sat down ..." Malfoy said.
"Make there appear to be a chair where there really wasn't one ..." Hermione mused.
Harry blinked suddenly. "Well, I don't know how to do this myself, but there's a Dark method for putting something of yourself into an object." He swallowed. "Like Tom Riddle's diary."
There was a moment of silence. "We don't really believe that ... that Voldemort did this, do we?" Hermione said hesitantly.
"Voldemort is dead," Harry said flatly. "Believe me, I have it on very good authority that he's gone for good." He stopped himself from touching his scar. "Though I'm not convinced that he doesn't still have active supporters," he added.
Hermione ignored that. "This would have to be like enchanting an object to set off a spell when it was touched." She seemed to be thinking out loud. "Like a land mine."
"A land what?" McGonagall said, but Harry saw what Hermione was getting at and interrupted her.
"Headmistress -- tell me what happened to Lark Brown. Tell me exactly."
"I was waiting on the shore when Hagrid brought in the boat with the first-years," McGonagall said. "And she hardly even waited until the boat arrived on shore -- I remember thinking we'd all have our work cut out for us, keeping up with this one --" She blinked rapidly. "And before I could offer her a hand, she'd boosted herself over the edge of the boat and put her foot on the ground ..." She trailed off. "She put her foot on the ground and screamed --"
"As if the curse came from the ground itself," Hermione said.
Harry straightened up suddenly. "Remus told me that Sirius wasn't killed until he touched the entry doors with his cane."
"Yes," McGonagall murmured, almost to herself. "And Irma Pince was hit with a Lockjoint Curse at the moment when she first touched the door to the library."
"Professor Aerie couldn't stop vomiting for two days after she first tried to get into the old Potions classroom," Hermione pointed out.
"She isn't the only one," McGonagall said. "No one has been able to set foot in that wing since we re-took the castle. It seemed as though everyone was cursed, everyone who ventured down there after -- after Severus --" Her eyes flicked to Malfoy.
"After Professor Snape and my father killed one another there," Malfoy said flatly, and McGonagall's face tightened, but she nodded.
"Sofia has already knitted four broken bones," Hermione said after a moment.
Malfoy finished her thought: "-- which probably occurred the first time a student opened a dormitory door, didn't they." McGonagall nodded.
They all looked at each other.
"Someone has mined Hogwarts," Hermione said slowly. "That's why we can't keep the curses out -- because they're not coming from outside. Someone could have done this months ago, and the curses would just sit there quietly, waiting for someone to touch the wrong thing ..."
McGonagall cast a nervous glance around the common room. Harry could see her point. All the furniture, the doors, the floor, suddenly looked threatening.
But Malfoy sounded relieved. "Then it really is over," he said very softly. Harry looked up quickly and saw him looking, not at the furniture, but at the filled-in windows.
"All but the cleanup." Hermione was looking thoughtful. "Neville says they've had a rash of strange occurrences at the Ministry, too." She sat up. "And if that's mined ..." She didn't even have to finish her thought. "We've got to do something."
"Well, by all means, if you know a way to lift a curse when you don't know either the curse or the victim ..."
"Wait," Harry said. "I used to know a gris-gris against hidden enchantments." At their confused looks, he clarified: "A spell, a potion. I'll send a goose to Dr. Bokor and get the details."
"Better get 'Mione to do a Transauditum for you," Malfoy said. "It may be the middle of the night out in the wild colonies, but we haven't any time to waste."
"Rosemary," Harry said. He had roused the headmaster from a sound sleep to ask for the recipe for the gris-gris while McGonagall went to explain the situation to the other teachers. Then Harry, Hermione, and Malfoy had headed for the new Potions classroom, a former storeroom hastily fitted with sinks and cutting tables and the rather inadequate supplies that the staff had been able to buy to replace Snape's inaccessible store.
"Got it," said Hermione, handing the branch to Harry. He added it to the cauldron of boiling water.
"Pennyroyal."
"Got it."
"Ammonia."
"Phew -- really? Well, all right."
"Gunpowder."
"Got it."
"Now what?" Malfoy said.
"Now we let it cool," Harry said, looking at his notes, "and then we wash our hands and feet in it and let them lead us to the secret enchantments."
"Oh?" Malfoy inquired with exaggerated interest. "And when do we say bibbiti-bobbiti-boo?"
"Shut up, Malfoy." Harry clenched his teeth.
To make matters worse, Hermione was giggling. "Harry," she said. "Now, admit it. If someone like Ron had said something like that, you would have laughed."
"Yes, well, I like Ron," Harry muttered.
"The question is," Hermione said, "when we find these enchantments, what do we do about them? I'm almost sure Stheno's De Rerum has a way of identifying an unknown curse -- or maybe it was Opinicus ..." She dug through her shoulder bag and began flipping through books. "Wait -- here it is. 'When thy Wande upon ye source of Enchantement be well trained, then do thou pronounce Patefaco abstrusi, and verily, by thine own eyen shalt thou enlightened be.' "
"Well," Harry said after a moment, "it's worth a try." And he kicked off his shoes.
"What have you got there?" Malfoy was staring at his ankle.
"Oh." Harry touched the braided leather thong. "My ... Sunday made it for me. It's a speedwell. Sort of a folk charm."
"How fascinatingly primitive," Malfoy drawled. Harry glared at him, but he was still looking at Harry's ankle.
"Be quiet, Draco," said Hermione. "What interesting knots," she went on to Harry. "They look rather like some of the simple calligromancy sigils. I wonder if ..."
"Not really magic," Harry said hastily to head her off from another digression. "Just a pretty superstition, Sunday said. And this stuff is probably cool now."
"Phew," Malfoy said when they'd all bathed their hands and feet. "We smell like Weasley's kitchen. Now what?"
"If our theory is correct, it would make sense to go somewhere that's been deserted since Before," Hermione said.
Malfoy took a step, then stepped back, frowning. "I feel --"
Harry was walking toward the back corner, still piled high with items that had been stored in the room. "An impulse," he said, and reached for the handle of a cabinet.
"Wait!" Hermione stopped him, pointed her wand at the cabinet, and said, "Patefaco abstrusi."
There was a light so bright Harry shut his eyes. After a moment he opened them, still squinting. The cabinet was lit with a tracery of what looked like yellow neon. A squiggle of it hung from the latch.
"Wow," Harry said.
"That's some very advanced calligromancy," Malfoy said.
"You're sure you're not just thinking that because of Harry's speedwell?" Hermione said.
Malfoy glared at her. "My father had a special interest in the subject."
Hermione had a notebook. "All right, then, I can start with Bodoni's Calligromancy," she said happily. "And we need a way to disarm them without hurting anyone. And then we need a way to expand the spell so it works without having to find the enchantment first, and ..." She looked up. "Go get Minerva and the rest. Meet me in the library after dinner."
4. Synergy
By the time they arrived at the library, they could barely see Hermione's head over the pile of books. She looked up, beaming, from a translation of a German work on magical law enforcement.
"It's amazing! There are spells you can use to create a sigil -- a calligromancy character -- without using paper. With the right spell, you can just -- " She waved her wand as though it were a quill -- "write it on the air. What we saw on the cabinet was a simple explosion, but on the other side of the room I found one that was more subtle -- it causes a slow swelling of the joints, so after a week or two the victim begins to experience something similar to arthritis."
She paused, blinking. "Which they've been having an epidemic of at the Ministry." She began to scrabble for another book, mumbling to herself.
"Iubo, 'Mione," Malfoy said.
Harry stared at him, shocked -- it was the spell you used to bring a dog to heel -- but Hermione laughed and said, "All right, you're right. I'm getting off on a tangent."
"Shockingly, yes."
McGonagall read the scroll over Hermione's shoulder. "This is very well done, Hermione."
She beamed. "The problem," she said, "is that we still can't make a sigil visible unless we already know it's there. I suppose we could just walk around doing an abstrusi at random objects until we -- "
Harry frowned. "Hermione, there's another gris-gris I once learned to avenge a murder, and the Orisha use it even when they don't know who the murderer is."
She was right there with him. "So elements of that sort of magic might let us act on any enchantments in an area ..." She flipped open Endor's Metamagics, and in an instant she had forgotten they were there.
It took her all the next day to break down the potion and identify which ingredients were critical (ginger and cornmeal, as it happened), and most of another day, in close collaboration with Professor Aerie, to figure out exactly what the potion did and then develop a way to do the same thing with a spell.
"It's the same process we used for Remus' monthly Contraluna spell," McGonagall told Harry as they watched the two of them at work, "because no one but Severus could make a reliable Wolfsbane potion."
"I told you Hogwarts could be restored to its former glory as a research institution, Kitty," Malfoy said.
"Don't call me Kitty, wretched boy," she said fondly.
The students were still having an enormous slumber party in the Slytherin common room. Having been informed of the new developments, they were very careful not to touch anything, but the teachers who took it in turns to chaperone them reported that on the whole they seemed to see the unmining of Hogwarts as a holiday.
At last, after dinner on the second night, Hermione called them all together in the staff common room to test the new spell. "I'm not yet sure of the spell radius," she said. "It might cover the whole room or only a few feet around me." Then she dripped a few drops of sour-smelling oil on a candle -- "Harry's contribution," she said, "and it turns out you can't dispense with it" -- and pronounced a few words in what sounded like a mixture of Latin and French. Harry closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he thought at first that the candle had gone out. Then he saw that it was only that the room was so bright with enchantments.
There were fine lines around all the doors and windows. "Hogwarts security spells," McGonagall murmured. And there was a delicate tracery over McGonagall's tartan hat, for which she offered no explanation.
In the hall they could see faint glows from some of the sealed-off areas. When they went to the outer door, they could see light as far as the Whomping Willow.
"I'm surprised every student in the castle isn't running to us for explanation," McGonagall said.
"It's the scent of the candle that allows us to see these," Hermione said. "When it goes out, they'll fade away."
"What's that one?" Harry pointed to a knot of enchantment on the door of one of the unused suites. Hermione's eyes widened.
"Ooh, Harry. That's a pain spell. It's a complicated one, too. See the knots? Each of those is a separate spell, and the spikes are 'If' clauses ... I can take it apart, but it will probably take five or six iterations of the Exstinguo spell, each with the appropriate noun, you know. I mean, it's not as though you can take on the entire conglomeration of knots in a single spell ..."
Malfoy raised his wand. Harry, feeling suddenly competitive, lifted the quill he was holding.
"Nodum exstinguo."
"Nodu'stinguo."
The entire tracery winked out.
After a moment's pause, Hermione said, "How long have you two been spelling synergistically?"
At their blank looks, she rolled her eyes: "You know. Where a spell you do together is more than twice as powerful as if you'd done it separately. Honestly! You'd think neither of you had read a book since you left school."
Malfoy looked nervously at Harry. "Probably purely accidental."
"A fluke, yeah --"
"Try it now," Hermione suggested.
Malfoy sighed and picked up his wand with the air of one humoring a silly whim. "Very well, then -- Potter, shall we summon a glass of water?"
Harry shrugged and readied his wand.
"Accio water."
"Acci'aqua'."
"Bloody hell!"
After a moment, Hermione looked up, wiping water off her face. The entire tabletop was drenched, and there was a sizable puddle on the floor.
"Not a fluke, then," Malfoy said blandly.
"But don't you see!" Hermione was twitching with excitement. "If you two have spell synergy, you can clean up these enchantments in a fraction of the time."
Harry glanced at Malfoy, who looked as if he was feeling dismayed too.
"The faster the cleanup, the fewer students will get hurt," McGonagall said. "Do you two know everything you need to know about the spell? Hermione, how quickly can you train them to interpret the sigils? And we'll need to set up tests to see if anyone else on the staff can spell synergistically."
"I'll start tonight," she said, beaming.
Harry shrugged at Malfoy. "I suppose we're the cleanup crew now."
"Oh, good," Malfoy said. "My CV needed some high-level management experience."
"Nodum exstinguo."
"Nodum exstinguo."
"Weasley and Weasley, five," Malfoy said.
"Which is better than either of you did with anyone else," Hermione said, making a note. "All right, you two are a team."
It seemed as though they'd been testing for hours, two by two, trying to identify pairs who could spell synergistically, with long gaps while Hermione looked up each sigil in her book and made sure they didn't take on anything they couldn't identify. Nearly every pair did better together than separately, but the improvement was usually small -- three or four knots with a single spell, perhaps. Only Harry and Malfoy seemed to be able to unravel an entire set of curses at once.
Charlie and Sofia went over to where McGonagall had set up a map of the school on one of the library walls, and Harry could hear them debating the relative urgency of the west and south wings of classrooms. Little by little the map was filling with color as each pair was assigned an area to unmine.
All but Harry and Malfoy, whose skills were to be put to work immediately unspelling the areas that posed the most danger to students. Except that "immediately" apparently meant "after wasting hours in the most boring way possible," because Malfoy seemed to feel that Hermione couldn't possibly manage the testing without his help. So while team after team went out to do something useful, Harry was stuck here in the common room, watching Remus Lupin pair up with all the remaining teachers to unspell an unused storage closet.
"Nodum exstinguo." Remus' hoarse voice.
"Nodum exstinguo." Michelle Verte's nearly inaudible murmur.
"Beauty and the Beast, four," Malfoy said, and Hermione wrote it down.
"We'll start with the Slytherin dormitory," Malfoy said. The testing was finished at last, and no one remained in the library but Malfoy, Harry, and McGonagall.
Naturally. Whatever was best for Slytherin. "I think the dining hall is more critical," Harry said stiffly.
"Oh, certainly, let's ignore the fact that the entire student population is now sleeping in Slytherin."
"Come now," McGonagall said impatiently. "A dozen of these curses could have been triggered while you two stood here bickering like schoolboys. Why not start where you are?"
So, rather sullenly, Harry dressed the candle and lighted it, and Malfoy murmured the revealing spell.
It was easy to recognize the Hogwarts security spells and the ones that kept the younger students out of the restricted section. Harry noted with curiosity that a number of books had their own protective spells, including several of the ones Hermione had piled on the table.
"There," Malfoy said, and Harry looked and saw a row of small knots around the edge of one of the little-used tables. He flipped through Hermione's pages.
"Pain -- no, wait, paralysis."
"Looks like an explosion to me."
"Did you even look at the picture? Explosions have that vertical line that runs into the --"
"Let me see the scroll, you stupid --"
"It's right here, a perfect likeness for anyone who isn't too --"
There was a hiss, and the tracery disappeared. Harry turned and saw that the candle had burned out.
"Lovely," he said. "A whole candle wasted because you're so stubborn." He thumped the second candle down on the table and shook entirely too much oil over it.
"Fine, you --" Malfoy broke off to sneeze. The smell of the oil was making Harry's eyes water, too. "You can have it your way, if you're so bloody certain."
But they turned out to be explosion spells after all.
"Wait." Malfoy pushed Harry's hand down so that his wand pointed at the floor rather than at the knot.
"What?" Malfoy's fingers were cold. Harry irritably shook his hand free. "What is the matter with you?"
"Are you insane? You can't unspell a spell you can't read."
"Sure I can. Watch me."
"Potter." Malfoy shoved Harry's wand hand down again. "Don't you see the 'if' clause? Are you blind?"
"Yeah, I see it. So what?"
"So for all we know, it says 'If knot unspelled' like that one in the library. Commit suicide on your own time, please, and leave me out of it."
"If we unspell it, it might go off. If one of the kids trips it, it will go off," Harry said. "But trust a Slytherin to save his own skin and risk somebody else's."
"Trust a Gryffindor to risk everybody's skin rather than take the time to think about what he's doing for a change," Malfoy said. "Look, we'll just do this --" A mutter and a showy little wand flourish, and he put up a spell barrier around the mine. "There. Now the poor little Hufflepuffs can use their common room again. And we can leave that one alone until we understand it. Unless that concept is too difficult for you to understand."
Harry pointed his wand at the next set of knots. "All right. Can we do this, or are you afraid of this one, too?"
Malfoy consulted Hermione's scroll. "That one's a paranoia spell. We've done those before. Ready?"
"Nodum exstinguo."
"Nodu'stinguo -- oh, hells." Malfoy hit the floor, rolling, just as a large chunk of plaster fell with a loud crunch on the spot where he had been standing.
Harry looked up at the hole in the ceiling. "I, uh, think we may have overlooked an 'if' clause."
"As the poets of your adopted country would have it: No shit."
Harry flung himself into a couch in the staff common room. Every muscle in his body ached.
Across from him, Malfoy laid his head against the back of the chair and groaned. There was still plaster dust in his eyebrows. His skin was faintly shiny with sweat, and his long hair was limp and bedraggled. He'd probably be mortified if he knew how filthy he was, but Harry didn't even have the energy to mock him for it.
More than anything, Harry wanted to fly -- fast and aimless, just turning loops in the air until he could stop thinking for a while and just be. But all he could see in the future was more sigils, more Malfoy, more falling plaster. More little failures.
He was almost nodding off when Hermione arrived. "There you are!" she said. "You've missed lunch." She sat down next to Harry and brushed something out of his hair. "How much did you get done?"
"Two bedrooms and the common room in Hufflepuff," Harry said.
"That's all?"
"Hey, it's hard work," Harry said, stung. "You try it for a while."
Hermione patted him. "I don't mean -- but why? You two can take out a whole mine with one spell."
"If we can figure out what it is," Malfoy said faintly. "And if it doesn't set off a cascade of new spells as soon as we touch it. And if it allows itself to be touched and doesn't disappear as soon as a wand is pointed at it. And if it doesn't knock a chunk of the ceiling down on our heads."
Without raising his head from the back of the chair, he turned it to look at Hermione. "Don't worry. We left a lot of the trickier ones for you."
"Oh, dear," Hermione said. "It sounds as though this is going to be more difficult than we expected."
"You've always had such a talent for understatement," Malfoy said.
"Well, if you can't do any more spell work today, why don't you come to the Ministry with me, Harry? I'm about to floo over to train some unspelling teams." She knocked Malfoy's hand away from her plate of apple slices. "Neville'd be thrilled to see you. He asks about you all the time."
Dear Harry, Neville's first letter had begun. After the big state funerals, the women from Gran's wyvern-breeding group sent me scrolls and scrolls of their memories of Gran and my mum and dad. Made me cry my head off, of course, but it really helped. So I thought that since Dumbledore --
Harry had dropped the letter and left it where it fell. "I don't think so," he said to Hermione. "Tell him I said hello, though."
She drew a breath, undoubtedly to tell him that she saw right through him, and Malfoy put a hand on her arm, diverting her attention back to himself, as usual. Harry clenched his teeth.
"Well, all right, if you're sure. Here, Draco, you finish these." She handed the plate of apples to Malfoy, then dipped a pinch of floo powder out of an urn decorated with skeletons dancing at a masquerade, and Harry heard her saying, "Ministry of Magic," as she stepped into the fireplace.
"Never still, is she?" Malfoy said lazily. The fondness in his tone made Harry's lip curl. "Care for some?" He pushed the plate toward Harry.
"You should have gone with her," Harry said. "Two of you might enjoy a nice little date away from school."
Malfoy looked at him blankly, and then smiled. "A date?"
Harry frowned, puzzled. "What?" He was a little insulted on Hermione's behalf. "She's not good enough for you?'
"Far too good for me, actually, if goodness were the issue," Malfoy said, still smiling. As Harry went on frowning, Malfoy's smile faded a bit. "You mean to tell me that all this time you've been thinking I was straight? My goodness, Potter," he went on in an exaggerated version of his usual drawl, "which stereotype did I miss?"
Harry could feel that he was staring, but he couldn't quite stop.
"Sorry," Malfoy said, not sounding especially sorry. "Didn't mean to shock your delicate sensibilities."
"No, it's ... it's no big deal," Harry said a bit numbly. "I just wish you'd told me."
"What?" Malfoy looked like he couldn't decide whether to be angry or amused. "When I was twelve and I had that dream about Oliver Wood? Perhaps I should have ducked out of the Wizard Protection Program long enough to drop you a little update on my love life. Or at that first banquet, when you were glaring at me as though I had a Dementor under my cloak."
He put Hermione's plate down on the chair and stood up. "Don't worry, Potter," he said over his shoulder. "I certainly have no designs on your virtue."
"I wasn't worried," Harry said stiffly as Malfoy swept out of the room.
Harry watched the door swing shut behind him, too tired even to be properly angry. If he were in Florida, he could go lie in the sun, and maybe Kat would come out and tell him stupid jokes until he laughed, and maybe Sunday would come out and just sit silently beside him and make him calm without even trying. And maybe the ocean would come and wash him away.
And that ... was just about enough self-indulgence. He stood up and headed for his rooms for a nap.
5. Lessons
Among the hoots of the morning owls, Harry heard a definite honk.
"Spielberg! Over here!" Before Harry could clear a space on the table, a gray goose landed with a disgruntled squawk in his oatmeal. "It's the Coven's transatlantic delivery goose," he explained to Hermione while he cleaned Spielberg off with a napkin, and the goose nipped his fingers happily and then loudly greeted Hedwig.
Harry untied a parcel from one web foot and undid the waterproofing charm on it.
Har, you doofus, Kat's note said, did you really think we'd let you get away with leaving all your letters behind? You want to neglect your friends, fine, but leave us out of it. And if you're not going to read these, for goddess' sake put them someplace safe till you come to your senses. Miss you -- say tally ho to them all for me and owl us if you find out you can't live without Twinkies.
Harry looked at the thick bundle of letters with distaste. The one on top of the pile was folded with the message out; he could see the Ministry crest and a few words: In accordance with the terms of the will of Sirius Black ...
But he couldn't quite bring himself to burn them, and given the way Hermione was trying to look over his shoulder, someone would surely snoop if he threw them away.
Eventually he took them back to his room and put them in the very back of the spare wardrobe, behind his trunk and his suitcases.
He really didn't have time to look at them.
"For the second time," McGonagall announced wryly, "I'd like to welcome you all to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry." There was a small patter of applause from the student tables.
"I trust," she went on, "that you've made yourself as comfortable as you can manage in the rather tight quarters available in the dormitories. As the staff continue to remove spells, more space will become available. And finally, I'd like to announce that tomorrow we will finally begin classes --" a groan from some of the students -- "and Quidditch practice." At that, the groan changed to a cheer, which went on for several minutes and then broke off abruptly when the food appeared.
Harry sighed in contentment. Hot food, for the first time in days -- and the house elves had outdone themselves with things that couldn't be eaten off the sideboard in the common room. The table was laden with roast beef and vegetable soup and mashed potatoes.
Harry dug in, ignoring Malfoy's lazy drawl from the other side of Hermione. Now things could start going back to normal.
"Got room for another?"
He looked up -- and then up again. "Ron? Ron!" He dropped his spoon into his soup with a great splash and stood up to fling his arms around Ron's shoulders as far as they would go -- surely he hadn't been this broad the last time they'd met. "What on earth are you doing here? The last time you owled me you were in Bulgaria!"
Ron squeezed him back. "Ran into a mate of Wood's in Morocco. Said they'd had a bit of trouble back here, so I thought I'd see if you could use a hand. Got a bit of a knack for fixing things, I have, and it looks like there's a bundle here that needs fixing." He tugged the lock of hair behind Harry's ear -- the same one Hedwig liked to nibble, with much the same meaning. "Y'look rough, Harry -- what, no barbers in America? Or were you too busy taking midnight swims with Tuesday or whatever her name was --"
"You look fantastic," Harry said hastily. He did, too. He was even taller than he'd been the last time they'd met, and he'd filled out considerably, too. He'd finally managed a tan under his freckles, and the sun had lightened his hair to the color of a freshly polished American penny. A battered dragonhide backpack hung over one shoulder with the hilt of a large knife emerging from the top. "Wait till Hermione sees you."
"Wait till I see wha -- " Hermione came to a full stop in mid-word. "Ron?" Her eyes got wide.
Ron grinned shyly. "H'lo, Hermione," he said.
"But -- last time you owled me you were in New Zealand! And -- but I -- " At last she got up and gave him an awkward hug, still looking very flustered. Ron was blushing. Harry hid a smile.
"Ron," Hermione said rather pointedly when they separated, "you remember Draco, of course."
Harry went very still, watching them. If Malfoy said one word out of line, he would --
Malfoy stood up slowly. "Weasley," he said in a slow, musical, completely unfamiliar voice, and Harry could see his eyes going down to Ron's sunbleached blue sweatshirt and back up to his sunbleached hair. "Good to see you back." He offered his hand.
"Malfoy," Ron said cautiously, and let go of his hand a little too soon for real politeness. He looked from Malfoy to Hermione and his eyes narrowed a little. But by now Charlie had come over to greet his brother, followed by nearly everyone at the staff table, so Harry only had time to give Ron a silent "Tell me about it" look and be glad that it all looked as strange to Ron as it did to him.
"Like a land what?" Ron frowned from the couch in the staff common room.
"It's a Muggle weapon," Harry said. "An explosive, and they bury it, and it can sit there for years until someone happens to step on it and set it off and get killed by the explosion. Or in this case, get hit by a spell and sent into magical convulsions or something."
Ron nodded. "A spell that could do the same thing -- that'd be a hell of a weapon." He frowned again. "But if you could do that, why settle for this small stuff? Convulsions, fires, explosions, pain -- why not just plant one that'd blow up the whole place and be done with it?" He scooped another spoonful of sugar into his tea.
Harry glanced at Hermione, who was watching Ron's hand on his spoon. Malfoy, in his usual perch on the arm of Hermione's chair, grinned slyly and poked her. "Got an answer to that conundrum?"
"Hm? Oh -- right -- actually I was thinking about that, because of something Phoenix and Ursa found. Let me show you." She summoned a scratch parchment and drew a somewhat familiar knot. "Now, you recognize this, right, Harry?" Harry looked at her blankly; all the knots still looked alike to him. She sighed. "Draco?"
"It's one of those swelling-in-the-joints spells, isn't it?" The show-off.
She nodded, beaming, and then drew a long curve hanging from the knot, ending in another knot. "What would you make of this?"
"It's an If clause of some sort ... no, wait, it isn't, is it. It functions as a direct object, but I can't tell what it says."
"What it says," Hermione said grimly, "is, 'Minister of Magic.' "
They all stared at her.
"That," Malfoy said, "is astonishing." He took the parchment out of Hermione's hand. "A trigger in the halls of Hogwarts to get to people who are miles away, even years after the spell was cast -- the caster could be dead, even -- seven hells, that's elegant." He traced Hermione's drawing with a long finger. "An enduring legacy of chaos and ruin. Whoever made this spell was definitely a Slytherin."
Harry looked at him, sickened. Malfoy gave him a challenging stare. "Well, Potter?" he said. "Wouldn't you rather have that sort of mind on your side?"
At midnight Malfoy, with more swirling of robes than could strictly be explained by physics, swept off up the wide staircase to his rooms. For a moment or two after he left, the common room was silent, and then Ron turned to Hermione and said, "If you were that hard up for friends, you could've owled me. I'd have dropped by for a visit." Harry snickered.
"Ron," she said.
"Fine, then, explain it to me, Hermione," Ron said irritably. "How'd you go from --" he stumbled slightly over the word -- "from 'Mudblood' to 'Mione' in such a short time?"
"It wasn't that short a time," she said. "We've been working together since not long after we left Hogwarts, when Draco contacted Professor Dumbledore from the Death Eater camp and offered his services as a spy. I had just worked out how to set up a Transauditum link, and since it doesn't require the person on the other end to do any magic, it was perfect for staying in touch with him without putting him at too much risk."
"Because heaven forbid Malfoy put himself at any risk," Harry said.
Hermione gave him a look of pure disgust, but didn't respond. "He fed us information for about a year -- he's the one who overheard the discussion about the Fratrium spell, Harry, the bit that got me started doing research on how to lock your wand up with Voldemort's."
Harry had known his duel with Voldemort was a group victory -- research from Hermione, the potion from Snape to keep him going despite his body's exhaustion, Ron and Sirius and Dumbledore all but holding him up at the end while everyone else held off the Dementors and the Death Eaters -- but it irked him that Malfoy had had a part in it. "I thought you came up with that on your own."
She shook her head. "Anyway, eventually he was discovered, and it wasn't safe for him to stay with them any more. This would have been shortly before your duel, Harry. So Minerva got him out of the camp somehow, and I got him at the other end and sent him right into the Wizard Protection Program."
Ron laughed out loud. "You didn't!" he said. "No wonder he's stopped all that 'Mudblood' nonsense!"
Hermione smiled. "Yes. Now he says we're --" she mimicked Malfoy's lazy drawl -- " 'no worse, on the whole, than most wizards. Though that's not saying much.' "
"What is the Wizard Protection Program?" Harry asked.
"You've never heard of it?" Ron said. "No, I suppose you haven't -- it isn't as though you grew up listening to 'Aloysius Grimble, the Scrying Eye.' Always reckoned it was just stories, though."
"No, it's real," Hermione said, "though it's a lot more difficult than it sounds in the wizard detective stories."
"What exactly is it?" Harry said again.
"Well, we made him into a Muggle temporarily."
Harry nearly spilled his tea. "You what?"
"It was the only way to protect him," she said earnestly. "Of course you knew that magic draws power, right, Harry? And the Dark Mark draws its power from the person who wears it, everyone knows that. So as long as Draco had magic, Voldemort could trace him magically everywhere he went. But if we used an Emagium curse to separate him from his magic, it was nothing but an ugly tattoo. He could hide out for as long as he needed to, until the Dementors were gone and we were fairly sure that the Death Eaters who were still around weren't a threat to him."
"But what did he do?" Harry tried to imagine Malfoy working in one of Uncle Vernon's drill factories or trimming Aunt Petunia's hedges.
Hermione grinned. "He was the worst office assistant my parents ever had." She shook her head. "You'd think any intelligent person could put paper in a file, wouldn't you? Just last week Father found Anson Durham filed under L, and when he posted to Draco to ask him why, Draco said, 'Isn't that where you put the loud ones?' "
"Are they all right?" Harry said. "Was he just awful to them?"
She frowned at him. "Surely after all this you're not still thinking he's evil, are you, Harry?"
"Maybe not, but he's still obnoxious." Harry liked the Grangers very much. "Hate to think of him ordering them about and calling them 'Mudblood.' "
"He calls Mother Prudence, actually," Hermione said, smiling. "Some joke between the two of them. They've never explained it to me."
"What does he call your father?"
"Papa," she said.
"Reckon that's what happens when you travel," Ron said later as he spread out a blanket on Harry's couch. "You lose track of your friends, and then they get involved with weirdos." Harry snickered and handed him a pillow. "Guess if I have to, I can be civil, even to Malfoy. But if he hurts her, I'm going to rip out his spinal column and strangle him with it."
Harry sat down beside him. "Er, I don't think you have to worry about that."
"I dunno. He may not be a traitor any more, but he's still a smug, selfish, good-for-nothing ferret."
"Of course he is," Harry said, "but he's -- I mean, they're just friends. I mean, he's a. He's not interested in girls." He was irritated to realize he was blushing.
"Oh. Oh. One of those Malfoys." Ron didn't look as surprised as Harry expected. "Should've guessed, only he made such a production of always having a girlfriend at school. Well, all right, then, I'll rip out his spine if he hurts you." After watching Harry sputter for a moment, Ron nudged him. "Harry. Joke."
"Right," Harry said, glaring at Ron, "really funny."
Ron grinned at him. "Brain's slowing down, Harry. Better get some sleep or your first class will transfigure you into a blotter by mistake."
Harry looked out over his Gryffindor first-years with something close to despair.
Hogwarts had been closed so long that a first-year could be anywhere from ten to sixteen. Some of them had been receiving private tutoring, some of them had been left to their own devices, and the Muggle-born ones had never seen a wand until Ollivander put one in their hands a month ago.
And they were Gryffindors. Bold and chivalrous and -- well, stupid. No more basic common-sense caution than the overfed squirrels at Disney World.
There was Steele, repeating the first word of the spell without waiting to hear the second one. There was Jones, who had mis-heard the spell, but would rather make up an approximation than ask for clarification. There was Osborne, who already knew the spell and was transfiguring random objects with a bored expression.
A few matchsticks turned into needles, while others burst into flames or melted into puddles or began to attack other matchsticks. Harry groaned; he hadn't had enough sleep to deal with this. Five silver needles rose up in formation and flew toward Harry. There wasn't enough sleep in the world to deal with this.
"Wait," Harry said, holding up a hand, and the needles all dove for his palm. "Ow! Wait! Commutati rescendeo! Mr. Osborne, put that down -- Miss Rainbird, stop that at once -- finite incantatem -- will y'all just sit down and shut up!"
The classroom fell silent as the students stared at him, and Harry realized that in scrambling for an authoritative inner voice, he'd ended up channeling Kat Bonifay.
He sighed. They were lucky he hadn't completed the sentence with " 'fore I jerk a knot in each and every one of you."
Harry met Ron on the way to the Great Hall for lunch. Ron wasn't limping, exactly, but he was walking very gingerly.
"What's wrong?" Harry asked.
"New feet," Ron said. Harry looked down. Ron's feet were bare, and as pink and soft as a baby's.
" 'Stromkarls,' Charlie says. 'Musical spirits,' he says. 'C'mon and watch, it'll be a nice safe first lesson.' But they're Ravenclaws, and they can't bear it if there's anything they aren't allowed to know."
"What happened?"
"Banks-Martin asked the stromkarls to play the Forbidden Measure."
Harry frowned. "Forbidden what?"
"Seemed like hours we spent casting an Auremclaudium over and over before we could break the enchantment so the students could stop dancing." Ron sighed. "Sofia thinks she'll be able to re-grow all their feet in time for classes tomorrow."
Hermione was already at the table. There were faint traces of blue ink all over her face and hands. "What a disaster. Quills flying everywhere. It took me an hour to uncharm them." She laid her head on the table. "Slytherins," she said. "If they can't use a skill right then and there to get what they want, they can't be bothered to learn it at all."
"Malfoy must've had Hufflepuffs for Muggle Studies," Ron said. "Wonder how he made out?"
The hall door opened and Malfoy walked in. There was a Styrofoam cup stuck firmly to the middle of his forehead.
"About as expected, then," Ron said.
By dinner Harry's other hand was bandaged, too, and two quills pierced the sleeve of Hermione's robe, still quivering and attempting to get free.
"Are they unusually terrible students, d'you think?" Ron asked.
"Worse than Fred and George?" Harry said.
"Point."
"Maybe we're unusually terrible teachers," Hermione sighed.
Malfoy dropped down beside Ron. He'd broken off most of the Styrofoam cup, but Harry was maliciously glad to see the base still stuck to his forehead.
Malfoy glared at Hermione, who'd been unable to stifle a giggle. "Not one word, do you hear me?"
"What are we doing wrong?" Hermione moaned.
"It's the mix," Harry said. "You just can't mix up the ages like that without trouble."
To his surprise, Malfoy agreed with him. "Not to mention the different ability levels. I have students in my class who've lived with Muggles all their life, and students who've never heard of an automobile. How can I teach them all at once?"
Hermione nodded. "Osborne has had a private tutor since he was six, and he wants to teach all his advanced charms to Jones, only Jones has never spoken Latin before and keeps slipping into French ... and 'noster' and 'notre' mean the same thing, but in a spell the effect is entirely different ..."
"We're going to have to split up the houses," Malfoy said. "What we need to do is test them out and then place them in classes based on ability instead of on house." He rubbed irritably at the bits of Styrofoam on his forehead.
"Want a hand with that?" Ron said.
"I already tried the unsticking spell," Malfoy said. Ron, ignoring him, picked up something with his left hand, gripped Malfoy's face with his right, and began murmuring the spell for taking things apart. "I mean, by all means, you wouldn't be the first bloke who couldn't keep his hands off me, but ..."
The pieces of the cup fell to the table in front of him. He stared at Ron.
"Sometimes you need an unsticking spell and a butter knife," Ron said.
The students began arriving at their tables just as most of the teachers finished eating. "Well," Malfoy said, "Potter, I suppose it's time you and I went and started unspelling dormitories." The first day of teaching had been so eventful Harry had almost forgotten that there were more magical mines to disarm. "Otherwise -- well, the whole of the student body is crammed into two rooms per house -- I shudder to think. Don't know which would be worse, the rivalries or the romances."
Harry nodded stiffly. "We'll start with more bedrooms in Gryffindor."
"I hardly think --" Malfoy began, but Hermione glared at them and handed Malfoy a pyramid-shaped coin. "Very well," Malfoy said, giving Harry a suspicious look. "Weasley, you toss."
The coin fell on its red face, and Harry couldn't resist a grin. Another small victory for Gryffindor.
The occupying Death Eaters had destroyed a good bit of the furniture, and what was left looked rather smaller and dingier than Harry remembered.
They disarmed a few small curses there and in the two rooms where the students were currently sleeping, then broke the black ribbon on the first of the closed-off rooms. It was strange to see the room so empty; it had belonged to Angelina, Alicia, and the rest of their year, and last time he'd been inside, he hadn't even been able to see the walls.
When they lit the candle, they found the room bright with hidden spells. After the first four times Malfoy beat him to identifying them, Harry grudgingly admitted that Malfoy was better at that part than he was, and began letting him handle it.
"Explosion, pain, pain, and mumps -- a rare one, that." Malfoy's long hair divided at the back of his neck as he bent over Hermione's scroll, but he was too vain to tie it back. "Ready? Nodu'stinguo."
Harry had to admit it was satisfying to remove the row of spells in perfect rhythm, especially after the chaos of the day. Malfoy wasn't too bad to work with as long as he didn't say anything that wasn't Latin.
They unspelled the girls' room from Ginny's year without episode, and after a bit of a rest back in the common room -- which very nearly turned into a nap -- Harry could no longer avoid his own room.
It looked the same and yet different -- no football posters behind Dean's bed, no Remembrall glowing red on Neville's nightstand, no Firebolt leaned against the wall. Just wallpaper torn down in strips and a great gouge taken out of the floor. Harry dressed the candle with a lump in his throat.
His old bed was so heavily mined that the light made him squint. "Your popularity doesn't seem to be waning with the years, Potter." Malfoy's usually silky voice was rough.
Harry sighed, pushed up his glasses to rub his eyes, and sat heavily on one of the beds. "If anyone had slept in that bed, it'd be a wonder if he survived the term." One of the curses was sleepwalking, and another was aggressive impulses. "And didn't kill all his friends."
"And I'm certain," Malfoy said with deceptive mildness, "that this would the first time anyone ever suffered because of being associated with Harry Potter." He peered more closely at the spells. "We're going to have to ward this one and come back to it later."
"Found something else you're scared to take on?" Harry glared at him. "And what's that remark supposed to mean?"
"Aren't you used to it yet, Potter? Didn't you get two of the Weasley litter in trouble before they even had a chance to finish puberty? Not to mention Dig--"
"Even you couldn't be enough of a jerk to suggest I'm putting my friends in danger on purpose, Malfoy."
"I'm suggesting nothing of the sort." Malfoy looked surprised. "It's the price of power, Potter. Those who are close to the powerful person will be targets of his enemies, everybody knows that. I'm sure even the Weasleys figured that out eventually. If they wanted to warm themselves in the light reflecting off the great Harry Potter, they'd no one to blame but themselves."
Malfoy must have managed to convince McGonagall that the age mix was a problem, because she canceled classes again for two weeks so the students could be sorted by ability. Oliver Wood put together a sort of tournament, with students matched against one another in trials of skill created by each teacher. So instead of the tense and nervous feeling of exams, Hogwarts had the slightly chaotic high spirits of an extended holiday.
After the fourth piece of furniture was pulverized by a misdirected spell, though, McGonagall suggested that they carry out the testing outdoors as long as the good weather held out. And as there were still parts of the grounds that even the birds wouldn't fly over, this meant that Harry and Malfoy had to spend several days together squinting to disarm mines that barely showed up in the sunlight, with the oil-dressed candle spelled to float nearby.
Hermione followed close behind them, levitating half a library's worth of books, ready to look up any spell they couldn't recognize. "That one's in Chinese, hang on, I've got it right here," she'd say, or, "You'll have to ward that one -- look, there's a bit of it that's charmed to be unreadable except when the moon is new."
Harry couldn't escape from Malfoy when they weren't working, either, because Ron made excuses to be where Hermione was, and Hermione was never far from Malfoy. Harry watched him out of the corner of his eye as he stole food from Hermione's plate and made terrible jokes and generally behaved like a small, spoiled child at a family party who knows that everyone in the room thinks he's adorable. It made Harry sick.
Since the episode with the Styrofoam cup, Malfoy seemed to have decided that Ron was his personal servant, too. He was forever tugging Ron aside to ask him if there was a way to re-weave the couches in the Slytherin common room or rebuild some of the staircases destroyed during the Death Eater occupation or silence the squeaky hinges on the Great Hall door or tighten a shaky banister.
"Tightening spell's good as far as it goes, but nothing beats a tightening spell combined with some wood glue and a couple of matchsticks," Ron said, digging them out of his dragonhide backpack, and Malfoy beamed at him as though he'd just uttered a line of poetry.
"Think Malfoy's got a crush on you," Harry told Ron as they parted at the door of Ron's new rooms.
"Course he has. Toffs always have," Ron said. "I don't mind. He mostly keeps his hands to himself."
Harry dreamed of a sheet of paper, folded three ways, lying on a table. The paper was thick, and the top fold was lifting, as though the paper were on the verge of unfolding by itself.
He woke up panting with terror. "What is the matter with you?" he said to himself. "What on earth is so scary about a sheet of paper?" But his hands continued to shake.
Hermione dropped her spoon when he came into the dining hall. "Good lord, Harry, what happened? You look terrible."
"Oh, thanks, Hermione, that's good to hear." He shook her hand off his arm and pushed his chair in, wincing as he bumped the edge of the table and made all the glassware rattle. "I'm fine. Just had trouble sleeping, that's all."
He pushed a plate of sausages further away -- he could still smell them, but at least he couldn't hear them popping and sizzling. Nothing on the table looked even remotely edible.
"Rough night, Harry?" Ron sat down beside him and gave him a quick pat on the shoulder. Harry nodded morosely and began peeling an orange. The back of his neck still felt clammy and cold.
He was forcing down his third orange segment when Malfoy sat down across the table. He braced himself for a sneering comment, but Malfoy only gave him a long, narrow-eyed look. Then he pointed his wand at Harry.
"Hey!" Harry said, going tense all over. "What --"
"Finit'incantatem," Malfoy said. "No, no, too obvious. All right, how about this: Noloconturbo."
Harry was suddenly warm all over. It felt like eating chocolate after a brush with a Dementor. He stared at Malfoy, who shrugged.
"Someone tripped a paranoia mine with you as the direct object, obviously," Malfoy said, putting a disgustingly large blob of marmalade on his toast. "You were jumpy as a cat yesterday."
"Ooh, Draco, I can't believe I didn't think of that!" Hermione said. "I'm sorry, Harry."
Harry felt off-balance. "You don't just throw a Finite at somebody like that," he mumbled. "You knocked the anti-smear charm off my glasses."
One corner of Malfoy's mouth quirked. "How careless of me." He reached across the table, took Harry's glasses off his face, and polished them with a cream-colored handkerchief. "There you are."
Harry took the glasses, feeling much less exposed when they were back on his face. "Uh, thanks." He made himself look Malfoy in the eye. "I mean -- thanks."
Malfoy took the rest of his orange off his plate. "You're quite welcome."
"Good morning. Wands on the table, please." Harry had a mix of three houses in his first Level 1 Transfiguration class. All the Slytherins had tested into Level 3 or better, and Malfoy's gloating was almost intolerable.
"On the table, not in your hand, Mr. Chun." Chun, Chun ... Ravenclaw? Or perhaps Gryffindor? Harry couldn't remember, but he sighed with relief when the boy finally stopped pointing his wand at books, quills, and classmates, and dropped it to the table.
Harry didn't allow them to pick up their wands until they proved they had memorized the words properly, and then he let them loose on the matches-to-needles transformation. Osborne had sorted into Level 5 in Transfiguration, and Jones turned out to be quite a good learner when taken out of the bigger boy's shadow. And he really would make a good Seeker. Harry hoped he wouldn't be one of those boys who went home for summer holidays and came back a foot taller.
"How did everything go?" Hermione asked at lunch.
"Better. You?"
"Much better," she said. "Draco? How about yours?"
There was nothing stuck to Malfoy's forehead, but he looked a bit frazzled. "I'm going to have to split Level 1 into two classes, I think," he said. "I've got all the new Slytherins, every single one of them, and the little fools are proud of how ignorant they are about Muggles."
Hermione's hand came down on Harry's arm, hard. "What?" he said. "I wasn't going to say anything."
"Right," she said.
6. The Ripple Effect
On the first Hogsmeade weekend of the term, Harry stepped into Willow and Wombly's and bought an inexpensive camera. It was difficult to look at it without thinking of poor Colin, a war correspondent at seventeen, still snapping action shots for the Prophet right up until the moment a curse brought him down.
Harry shook off the uncomfortable memories and caught up to Hermione and Penelope in the Three Broomsticks. "Smile," he said.
He photographed Oliver and Charlie flying a one-on-one match on the Quidditch pitch, Remus and Michelle playing Hounds and Jackals at the staff table, McGonagall gazing sadly at the closed-off windows in the staff common room. His sixth-level students proudly holding up quills they'd transfigured into daisies. Ron looking up from a half-rebuilt wall with a prybar in his hand and his wand tucked behind his ear. Malfoy stealing grapes off Hermione's plate.
Hullo, Kat, he wrote. Here's Hogwarts, only a little smaller than I remember, and with a bit more rubble. Things here are --
He rubbed out "fine" and chewed his quill for a moment before continuing.
-- rather more complicated than I had expected, to tell the truth.
Even as he explained the situation -- the mines, the hapless half-educated students, the bloody handprint outside the prefects' bath that no amount of scrubbing would remove -- he knew that none of his words would sound quite real when Kat read them out loud by the swimming pool in the bright morning sun. Either that life was a dream or this one was. He sighed.
Anyhow, I'm sending pictures -- you do the same. Say hi to everyone and give the cats a pat. Tell Sunday --
But he and Sunday had pretty much said everything that there was to say when he'd left Florida, so perhaps the best strategy was dignified silence, or at least refraining from putting his foot in his mouth again. He rubbed it out and wrote, I miss all of you, but I suppose it was time to come home.
After dinner, Harry spent long minutes in the Ravenclaw common room waiting for Malfoy, too tired to go looking for him -- too tired even to generate much annoyance that he wasn't where he was supposed to be.
Eventually he gave up and stumbled blearily out of the Ravenclaw wing, thinking vaguely of taking a nap and letting Malfoy find him when he was ready to work.
The door of the staff common room was shut. The Snape statue's head was slightly inclined, and Malfoy sat on the base, eyes half-closed.
"And for two of them we couldn't identify the direct object, so we figured we'd better leave them alone," he was murmuring. "And then there were the ones where the whole knot would come undone and change its shape, as though it could tell you were looking at it, can you believe that? Or they'd look one way when we first saw them, and then when we came to unspell them they'd look like something different." He leaned his head against a stone knee and let his eyes fall all the way shut. "Some of them are in Arabic."
Harry felt oddly reluctant to interrupt him, but after a moment Malfoy seemed to sense that he was there. "Ah, Potter," he said. "Back to the salt mines, is it?" He stood up, staggering a bit, and caught himself on Snape's outstretched hand. He looked as tired as Harry felt. "Well, let's toddle on, then." He brushed past Harry toward Ravenclaw wing.
Harry looked at the Snape statue. It raised its eyebrow at him, but made no comment.
After a moment he raised an eyebrow back, then went after Malfoy.
"Oh, my. Look at this."
"What?" Harry put his glasses back on and looked over at Malfoy, who was looking at a bookcase in one of the Ravenclaw boys' rooms.
"Pain on the person who triggers it."
"You're joking. You mean it's one that we can do something about?"
Malfoy nodded. They spelled it out swiftly, then went on to the next one.
Harry leaned against the wall while Malfoy went through the parchment. He kept his eyes open -- he was so tired that he would begin dreaming the moment he shut them -- but he lost track of time. After a while he noticed that Malfoy was awfully quiet. "What is it?"
Malfoy pointed without speaking. Harry looked at the spell. "Heart stops, right? We've seen that before."
"Follow the first curve upward -- that's the direct object."
Harry found the curve and followed it, but couldn't make heads or tails of it. He raised his eyebrows at Malfoy.
"The first thing you learn, when you take Introduction to Calligromancy, is how to write your own name." Malfoy traced his wand through the air, a tight, complex knot of loops and spikes. "Malfoy ... Draco." It was identical to the knot that topped the direct-object curve.
Harry stared, appalled. "If we'd let Malik and Banks-Martin and the rest loose in this room, they'd have killed you the first time they did homework."
Malfoy nodded. "Pity it wasn't Gryffindor," he said. "I wouldn't have been in any danger then." He rolled up the parchment crisply. "Would you like a few more minutes to admire it, or shall we move on?"
Kat's reply arrived one morning after breakfast while Harry, Hermione, Malfoy, and Ron were lingering in the staff common room.
Har! The way you used to ignore all the owls from home, I figured we wouldn't hear from you until you were ready for us to find you a room at the Charmed Acres Wizarding Retirement Center.
You settling in OK? Sounds like y'all have your work cut out for you with the mines and all. Wish we could help, but nobody here has ever heard of calligromancy. Dr. Bokor says you're using some of his gris-gris, though, so at least we know a thing or two that you Brits don't.
I'll ask Mama and Daddy if they know any more of the old magic that might help, but don't hold your breath. Near as I can tell, the only spells that survived from the Huguenot side are ones designed to make your kids' lives a living hell, and the only ones that survived from the Seminole side are ones that make stuff you can sell at a souvenir shop. But you've heard that tune from me before.
Harry smiled. Kat was an historian, among other things, and had gone into ecstasies of jealousy over the unbroken centuries of European magical teaching.
Had a cold snap last week -- it got down into the sixties, and a couple of the houseplants lost some leaves. And somebody claims to have seen a Plat-Eye in the woods, but Dr. Bokor says it was probably a stray dog. Anyway we're all carrying packets of gunpowder and sulfur, just in case.
Tyndall says Marisol can hardly get up out of her chair even though the baby's not due till January, and they're still trying to explain to Atzi why they don't want to name it Jasmine Ariel Belle. Tituba finally had her kittens -- two of them look like Mischief and two of them look like Jefferson and the fifth one is unique unto himself. My cat gets around more than I do.
Thanks for the pix. Next time put some notes on the back to tell me who everybody is. I recognize Hermione from the picture on your wall when you were here -- tell her hey, she sounds like a kindred spirit -- but who is the pocket Apollo on the arm of her chair? and is he available for export?
Harry folded the letter quickly before Malfoy could look over his shoulder and get his ego puffed up even more than it already was. He picked up the pictures instead, and Hermione and Ron leaned around to look over his shoulder.
There was Tyndall playing guitar while his little daughter Atzi danced in her frilly dress. Dr. Bokor stretched out in his usual chaise at poolside, wearing only a pair of cargo shorts and a red flannel bag on a thong around his neck. Kat and Purity brewing a potion at the continental breakfast station in the hotel lobby. The junior/senior class, all sixteen of them, ankle-deep in the Atlantic.
"Oh, my." They all turned to look at Malfoy, who had picked up the next picture on the stack. "Oh, my, my. I've been unjust to America if it can produce the likes of him." He passed the photo to Hermione.
"He is stunning," she said. "That hair."
Until that moment, Harry had been hoping that it was another shot of Tyndall, or Purity's boyfriend down from Boston, or some random undergraduate who'd caught Kat's eye, but when Hermione said "hair," his heart sank.
"So," Ron said, looking over her shoulder. "Who's he?"
Nothing for it. "Sunday Coneskey," he said.
"Harry!" Hermione glared. "You lied to us!"
"Not exactly," Harry said, and it was true. Being very careful with pronouns wasn't the same as lying.
Ron was giving him a look that said he saw right through that argument and found it rather amusing. And Malfoy --
"Evidently your candor leaves something to be desired, Potter," he said, "but I certainly admire your taste." He laid the photo on the table and Harry got to see it for the first time. "Though he's not a very friendly fellow, your Sunday." Where the other photos had waved and grinned, Sunday just stood there with his rather impressive arms crossed over his rather impressive chest, glossy black hair falling almost to his waist, and gave a nod and a half-smile.
"See, that's the other thing," Harry said to Hermione. "It wasn't -- it was only a --" He started over. "His grandfather is Let-Us-Stop Coneskey, the top wizard for the whole Eastern Band Cherokee, so it's not as though he was going to settle down with some random English wizard. He wanted a more advantageous match." He felt a little deja vu; he'd had exactly this conversation with Sunday himself before he'd left Florida.
"Ah, dynastic marriage," Malfoy said. "I suppose I should be grateful to the war for sparing me that."
Harry blinked at him. "But you're ... they would have expected you to get married?"
Malfoy smirked. "You are middle-class through and through, aren't you, Potter? Invert though I may be, I had a duty to carry on the Malfoy line."
Harry fiddled with the packet of photos, and something else fell out of the bundle: a little pine-needle basket, about the size of his thumb. Sunday used to weave them carelessly, without even looking. Harry pushed it back under the photographs. "So ... who?" he said to Malfoy. "Pansy Parkinson?"
"Nasty common family like that? Her great-grandfather was a clerk." He faked his father's voice pretty well. "No, if the wizard world hadn't been split in two the way it was, my father probably would have encouraged an alliance with Susan Bones. Or Macy Prewitt might have been an option, I suppose."
"Your student?" Hermione sounded scandalized.
"Stop thinking like a Muggle, 'Mione. When she's a hundred, I'll only be a hundred and six." Malfoy's smirk was even more pronounced. "But as it was, my choices would have been limited to the Death Eater side -- Marguerite Rosier, perhaps, or my cousin Amaryllis, horse-faced child that she is. Or one of the Snape girls." At Harry's look of surprise, he smiled. "His second cousins, three of them. Unfortunately, the younger ones got their brains from the DeLapin side. I was actually rather fond of Fausta, though. And of course her bloodline is excellent. Powerful all the way back, the Snapes."
"What a shame for her," Harry said, "that your father isn't around to see to it that you give her her fair share of Malfoy DNA."
Ron snickered, but Malfoy just smiled. "Yes, I'm sure she's very disappointed, especially as I'm now head of the family and hence a doubly good catch." He pushed back his hair with the thumb and forefinger of one long-fingered hand, looking every inch the young wizard scion -- funny how the gestures and the lazy confidence stayed the same, whatever the culture.
Harry looked away. Trying not to want the smug bastard was more trouble than it was worth.
"As we've both got the afternoon free, we'd better examine the pitch for mines," Malfoy said one day at lunch.
"Good idea, Draco," Hermione said. "I know Oliver has been anxious to start playing real matches now that things have settled down."
"I don't see the purpose," Harry complained. His wrists and ankles hurt, and everything anybody did got on his nerves. "There was nothing at all out there when we looked the first time. It will just be a whole afternoon of flying back and forth."
"Yes," Malfoy said pointedly. "Exactly. A whole afternoon of flying back and forth."
Oh. "Well, if it will make you happy," Harry said.
"Delirious," Malfoy said.
There were, of course, no mines. They had to fly slowly so as not to put the candles out. Harry's broomsmanship was embarrassingly rusty, but Malfoy kept to the far end of the pitch, too far away to make any snide comments. Malfoy still flew just as Harry remembered -- with perfect comfort, as though the air were a cushion and the broom were another limb. Harry turned his eyes away quickly before Malfoy caught him watching.
That night at dinner, there was another empty space at the staff table. "Ursa Polaris was hit with another seizure mine this afternoon," Penelope said.
"We've got to work faster, then," Harry said. Malfoy's mouth tightened, but he nodded.
"Pain, pain, fire, nightmares," Malfoy said, pointing to each glowing knot. "Tooth loss, more pain. Ooh, new one here -- paranoia and hallucinations, direct-object clause on the Chief of Aurors -- hang on, I'll need to draw that one for 'Mione's records before we put it out."
Harry still found it disgusting the way Malfoy seemed to admire the more creative mines, but he spelled out the candle so as not to waste it while Malfoy recorded the new mine.
Sarah McDuff and Medea Martin, older students who had a free-study period most mornings, watched them curiously from a safe position in the hallway as Harry lit the candle again and the two of them unspelled the room and went on to the next. Hufflepuff dormitory was nearly deserted as they worked their way through the bedrooms, but Harry couldn't shake an uneasy sensation, as though he were being watched. He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Stiff, Potter? Perhaps you should join Phoenix's yoga classes."
"I'll just rush right out and sign up." It was cold in here, too, and damp. Harry turned up the collar of his robe. He would be glad when they were finished with the dormitory and he could go change into something warmer.
Malfoy was looking at him with his usual expression of supercilious amusement. "Looking a little pale, there, too. Perhaps a Dementor walked over your grave?"
"Shut up, Malfoy." Harry rubbed his forearms. "Let's just get on with it."
"That's a nice start, Mr. Chun." Harry levitated Chun's turtle high enough for the class to see his progress in turning it into a change purse. "You notice how the legs are beginning to withdraw into the body, and the head is turning silvery? The first step in a successful transformation --"
He felt a damp chill on the back of his neck and shuddered. After a moment, he realized the class was waiting for him to continue.
"Right. As I was saying, the first step is to look carefully for similarities between what you have and what you want. Can anyone tell me why? Mr. Jones?" Harry let the turtle float back down to Chun's desk.
"The Law of Conservation of Magic," Jones said.
"Very good. Everyone return to zero and start again." He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Professor? Professor, you've got to --" The whole class turned at the voice from the fireplace -- Aoife Murphy, one of the Gryffindors, freckles standing out on her pale, frightened face. "Come back with me quick, Professor, we can't --"
Harry glanced around the room quickly. Nathaniel Hobbs was the eldest in the class, and a Hufflepuff; he'd do. "M