Author(s): scoradh and cynicalpirate

Rating: NC-17

Warnings: None. We wouldn't want to spoil the surprise, now would we? (Only kidding. Nothing to see here, folks.)

Notes: Thank-you a thousand times over to sepiroth01, an excellent beta and a better friend. Also, cheers out to all the people in Rachel's class who gave her advice on the first line of the fic. She probably should have taken it.





Even amidst the fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.
— THE BHAGAVAD-GITA


Wherever the hell he is, it’s raining. Draco curses. Virulently.

His mother once had a spell to lave an impertinent tongue with soap bubbles—Draco has lost count of the number of times she used it on him when he was a child, furious and spewing obscenities. Now he can taste nothing in his mouth but the bile of terror. He’d even be grateful for a few soap flakes, and he’d used to think that there was no worse taste in the world. That, of course, was before he’d discovered Brussels spouts and Avada Kedavra.

His body operates independently of his head. It’s had lot of experience in so doing. Even as his lips open and close around gibbering imprecations against fate and God and Snape and Dumbledore, his hands are smoothing over his limbs. He hears again the desiccated voice of the Apparition tutor, warning them not to walk unless they’re sure they have something to walk with.

Two legs—check. Two arms—check. Nose, eyes, ears, hair—check. Eyebrows. As Draco’s fingers felt along his forehead, his legs go from under him.

All out of blasphemies, he whispers, “Oh, how—stupid,” and faints.

::

Clouds undulate against the blue, coy and innocent of all rain. Draco blinks and feels old droplets tremble on his eyelashes. Flexing, he realises that he’s lying spread-eagled across a muddy track, the leaves of a line of trees claiming borders on the sky. The sun dazzles his eyes and Draco is surely going mad, because he feels laughter bubbling against his lips.

After all, he’d never managed to Apparate before.

Dumble—his brain begins to remind him, so Draco screams instead. It comes out as a moan. Draco isn’t surprised; his brain and his mouth aren’t on very good terms. The things he says are rarely the things he wanted to say.

“Good grief!” exclaims a voice. Draco would think it was his own, only he’s never said ‘Good grief’ in his life.

There is a splashing sound, accompanied by an arc of brackish water that lands square on Draco’s face. The culprits—a pair of sensible black brogues—come to a halt by Draco’s head, and he turns his nose to them.

“Are you all right?” Draco is treated to a front-row view of two plump knees encased in thick stockings. A face, wrinkled in concern, pokes into his own.

Of course he’s not all right. It’s the sort of ridiculous question that means nothing except that the speaker has no idea what to say. Right at this very moment, however, Draco is overwhelmed by an tremendous sense of gratitude that the woman is as far from being a wizard of any sort as the trees that are her backdrop. The feeling shocks him almost as much as anything else in these last hours. His brain revolts at it, as does his stomach.

The woman strokes the back of his head as he vomits, and that in itself is so novel as to be terrifying.

“What’s your name, love?” The woman is squatting in the mud now, mud lying lightly on her stockings and shoes. The very sturdiness of her attire makes the dirt seem less than real.

Draco spits again as his mind whirls. If the Death Eaters follow him here, they’ll kill her. If D—the others follow him here, they’ll kill him. If Snape follows him here, he might kill them both. That thought stings like an unexpected hex.

“Harry,” he croaks. “Harry Potter.”

“You wait here, love,” says the woman, her voice fading in and out like a badly-tuned radio. “I’ll get help. Don’t worry, Harry.”


::


“Are you sure it’s safe to have him around?”

“Bert, look at him! He’s just a kid. He can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen.”

With his eyes still closed, Draco growls. Not a kid, his mind chants. He said it to Father once. He didn’t ever again, although he often spat the line at Mother because it worked on her.

“Yeah, I know seventeen-year-olds. Have one of my own, remember? They’re as stupid as geese and as vicious as dogs.”

“I think he was abused, Bert.” The voice is hushed, but Draco hasn’t spent years listening in on other people’s conversations for nothing. “He was in a terrible state when I found him—and he had nothing with him, only some odds and ends and a funny-looking stick—”

My wand! Draco forgets the woman’s suppositions about his ‘abusive foster family’ and ‘the neglectful Social Service,’ whatever that is. He sits bolt upright. In other circumstances, he’d have been interested in his surroundings, especially the way to the exit. Now, his wild eyes care for one thing only. With his wand he’s a would-be murderer, but without it he isn’t even that.

His shoes have been removed, as have his robes. He plucks at the thick stripy flannel in which he’s been swathed. A shaft of sunlight spears through a slit in the curtains and, in the new illumination, his gaze falls on a familiar, grimy black bundle by a sink. He hurtles out of bed and across the room. Even before his knees slam against the hardwood floor, his fingers are closing around his wand. He remembers to breathe.

He sees that his meagre possessions have been laid out on the floor like offerings before an altar. His robes, now sadly wrinkled; his shoes, socks and underwear; the small pile of money, not more than three Galleons in total; the lucky crystal dragon he keeps in his pocket, which Pansy brought him back from China. It’s as if the woman wanted to show him—what? That she’s pawed through his things, but put them all back? That she didn’t steal from him? That she saw him naked? What?

Draco begins to tremble—but only because the window is wide open and he’s freezing. The bed, when he crawls into it cradling his wand against his chest, is warm.

As his brain grows muzzy and his eyelids quiver, he decides that the world is divided into cold and warmth. He just wants to be warm forever.

Three smart taps come at the door and Bert enters behind the woman. Draco would have recognised Bert even if he hadn’t been muttering under his breath. Draco has an immediate effect on people—quite often one of blinding hatred. Bert is one of latter group. His ruddy face is all screwed up and he peers at Draco sideways, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his sludge-coloured coat. He’s wearing knee-high rubber boots and reminds Draco rather of Hagrid, except about three feet smaller in height and diameter.

“How are you, Harry?” asks the woman, in a tone of maternal solicitude. It makes Draco jump and look about for Potter, just before he remembers his choice of pseudonym. The woman looks sympathetic at his fright and Bert, a smidgeon less suspicious.

“I’m fine.” Draco clenches his fingers around his wand, under the blankets. “Where am I?” he adds. He hadn’t thought Apparating would work, so his only destination had been ‘away.’

“Got amnesia, have you, kid?” Bert’s voice is gruff, but it’s like a puddle of ice that has started to melt around the edges. Draco has to stop himself from sneering. It looks like he’s fallen into the headquarters of Bleeding Hearts Anonymous.

The woman sits on the bed and Draco automatically curls his feet up and away from her. He doesn’t like unsolicited touches. Bert clears his throat.

“I’m Iris,” says the woman, “and you’re in my bed and breakfast, in the village of Fernwood Lower.”

Draco looks about in vain for a breakfast for a moment or two. Iris doesn’t seem to expect an answer, for she continues, “Do you remember anything, lovey? Did you get injured, or did anyone…did anyone hurt you?”

Draco sees Dumbledore’s face shining in the moonlight a split second before he toppled off the tower. “No,” he says, knowing that his voice is too strong but also unable to control it. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Shh, Harry, don’t work yourself up, now,” soothes Iris, patting his leg. Draco flinches, resisting the urge to put his wand to her throat and curse her till she’s oozing. “I’m going to fetch you some beef broth and toast. You’ll feel miles better after a feed.”

Draco stares after her, wondering if she really thinks some Muggle slop will fix everything. How wonderful it would be to be so stupid.

Bert shifts his weight and treads on a creaky floorboard. “I don’t trust you,” he announces, once the clatter of Iris’ shoes on the stairs has stopped.

Come right out and say it, you great Gryffindor, you, thinks Draco. Suddenly it occurs to him that, due to his Muggle status, Bert would never have been to Hogwarts. It’s extraordinary to realise there are people out there who don’t have those standards by which to judge the rest of the world.

Draco thinks it’s a little bit liberating.

He doesn’t say anything, only tightens his lips. They engage in a staring competition before Bert cracks under the pressure and adds, “Iris is a good woman, but she can be a bit gullible. She likes to see the best in everyone. Me, now, I don’t, so I look after her. And I’ll be looking after you, too.”

Draco feels a grudging admiration for the man, that he’s able to pour such dire warning into these innocuous, casually-spoken words. “What do you think I am, then?” he asks, actually curious.

“A druggie, probably, or an alco,” says Bert. “Or one of them cultists—you were wearing some kind of monks’ robe when I carried you up here and you’ve got that odd tattoo—”

Draco shakes his head. He knows what monks are, or at least what monkshood is; as for the rest of it, Bert might as well have been speaking a different language.

“You’ve the look of a young hooligan,” finishes Bert. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“You know nothing, you stupid Muggle,” spits Draco. “You know nothing about anything!”

Bert raises one eyebrow. “I never said I did. I know about birthing calves, and seeding a field, and haggling with foolish businessmen over prices. You try preaching to me, laddie, and you’ll not get far, I’m warning you. Muggle, indeed. I suppose that’s one of your silly religious names, is it?”

Draco gapes at him, incandescent with rage. “Get out!” he yells.

“Me, get out of my oldest friend’s house? You’re the one who should be getting out.” Bert crosses his arms across his rotund chest and leans against the doorpost.

“Now, now,” fusses Iris. In all the noise, Draco didn’t hear her climbing the stairs. She’s holding a patterned tray laden with various steaming pots and bowls. “Don’t be upsetting the boy, now, Bert. He’s had a bad shock and a nasty fall.”

“Fall?” echoes Draco.

“Your head.” Iris nods her head at him. “It was bleeding when I found you. I suppose you don’t remember. I had Dr Callaghan in—he’s a lovely young man, now, he’d be perfect for my Nancy—he saw to you. He says you’re not to be worried for a few days. Do you hear me, Bert?”

Draco presses his palm to his head. His fingers curl around the edges of something that feels like a square of cloth, taped to his head. Barbaric! He needs a real Healer, not a Muggle butcher. Even the callous Pomfrey would be preferable.

“Don’t pull at the bandage, now, love.” Iris sets down the meal she’s brought on the bedside locker with a series of solid clunks. “You only needed one stitch, thank God, but you mustn’t open the wound or Jim will have to do it again.”

“Stitch?” repeats Draco, his voice faint. He has a vague idea what stitches are, has seen them in his clothing, but in his skin—!

“There, there.” Iris is holding a basin beneath his chin and rubbing his back in circles. “Better out than in.”

This time Draco does not throw up, but he continues retching for some time. If Bert wants to see a sick person, then that is exactly what he’ll get.

Iris passes Draco a mug of soup to sip from. The toast has been cut up into soldiers, the butter sitting on top in half-melted golden globules. It runs down his chin and he licks it off his fingers; he’s awkward without heavy silver cutlery between him and his food.

All the time he feels Bert’s eyes on him. He stretches, a flower to sunlight, under the scrutiny. Draco has been playing games all his life. Perhaps, when he met Harry Potter in a robe shop and found that he filled up spaces for hatred Draco hadn’t known were empty, the game began to play him. But his point is he’s a game piece and so is everyone else—the advantage lies in knowing it.

When he is finished, Iris strokes his hair. Draco lets her; he knows it must be dirty and bedraggled, so it isn’t like she can be gaining any tangible pleasure from so doing.

“Do you have anyone we could contact, any family who’d want to know that you’re safe?” she asks.

Mother.

“I’m so tired,” says Draco in a petulant voice, but when they’re gone he stares at the wall for a long time, wide awake.


::

Draco’s first waking thought is: I must get home.

However, home isn’t the crumbling grandeur of Malfoy Manor. It isn’t the cold marble hallways or the dusty library or the wild grounds crammed to capacity with dangerous magical plants. It’s Mother, her robes hitched up to the knee, crouched over on a gold brocade chaise and painting her toenails acid green. It’s Father, leaning back from the huge ledger perched in his lap and tapping his fingers on the book’s edge. Mother, collecting tiny Dancing Bluebells right from under the dripping leaves of a Naptha Rose-bush, all uncaring of the mortal danger. Father, holding his hand out to reveal the glow of a cluster of black diamonds between his fingers.

Father whirling Mother around in a crazy waltz—both in matching silver dress robes, her face laughing and carefree and his relaxed—before the guests arrive.

Draco’s hand goes to his collar, as if to tug away once more the matching silver cloth that itched so.

His mother slapped his hands down, her crimson mouth pursed at him; his father reminded him to show dignity at all times. When he clenched his small fists by his sides and raised his chin, resolutely ignoring the tickling, they both looked stern in their pride.

Father is in Azkaban now. Mother wrote a few weeks before…before…to say that she was going to visit friends; where, she did not say.

Home is not bricks and mortar, but a broken feeling scattered between a prison and a bolt-hole.

Draco swings his legs out of bed and moves to the window, twitching aside the cornflower-print cloth. He pauses a moment to marvel at it—he’s only ever known priceless damask and matted velvet to hang at windows.

A long and narrow garden stretches out to a rain-washed gravel road. The garden is well kept and very pretty, with stones set in a neat pattern to form a path to a polished gate. Draco watches as a Labrador pads past and out of sight. There is a Muggle shop across from him; curlicued letters spell out the words ‘Horgan’s Grocery.’ Blinds have been pulled down over the wide window, leaving no visible clue as to what a grocery is.

Buried deep inside Draco is the speechless terror that made him collapse and, according to Iris, hit his head on the way down. It reaches out with cold fingers. Draco lets it take his heart, but refuses it anything else. He has to control it or be controlled, and Draco hates to be controlled.

The only question is, is it safer to stay or to go? Draco can’t quite envision a future that doesn’t blur and coalesce into a tattoo, burning but dark. The Dark Lord will find out what happened, and that Draco Apparated away. For all Draco knows, the Dark Lord already has Mother. It would be the work of an instant to strike down Father as well.

For the first time, Draco wishes he were a Gryffindor. Some reckless bravery would come in handy, to impel him to storm the Dark Lord’s headquarters and rescue his family and get the hell out of this mess.

He wonders if Father has ever killed anyone.

“Morning, Harry!” Iris’ cheerful voice rings out and Draco turns so fast he falls against the window seat. He wonders what possessed him to choose that name. He wouldn’t put it past the devil, or at least a top-ranking Duke of Hell.

“Good morning,” says Draco, after a momentary halt. It occurs to him that he owes a life-debt to a Muggle. It’s a frankly disgusting thought.

Draco opens his mouth to add a more suitable epithet to his greeting, possibly involving the words ‘Muggle filth,’ but Iris has just uncovered a dish of sweet-scented porridge. It’s laced with honey, just as Draco likes it. He can’t help it—his mouth starts to water and his impatient legs take him to the frilly dressing table, where Iris is setting out a bowl and spoon.

“You look a bit more lively this morning,” says Iris in approval. She places the spoon in his lax palm. “Now, my Frank—he’s away at university, studying mucky old ruins or 'archaeology' as he calls it—is bigger than you, but you’re welcome to some of his old clothes—”

Draco swallows against the horror blocking his throat. He truly is turning into Harry Potter.

“—the doctor’s coming today to check your bandages, so you’ll be allowed out and about again. I’ll wash these.” Iris scoops up his robes and under things, but leaves behind the rest. Draco has his wand stuck in the back of the pyjamas he’s wearing. The wood is hard and smooth against his skin. “The bathroom’s the first door on the left. If you pop in for a shower, I’ll leave some clothes outside the door.”

Draco considers thanking her, but decides against it. She burbles on about her son and daughter, never mentioning a father and, as soon as Draco has sucked the last porridge from his spoon, she bustles out again.

::

After deciding that his only other alternative is to stroll around completely naked, Draco gets dressed in Iris’ son Frank’s hand-me-downs. The trousers only drag slightly, although they’re baggy around the waist, but the shirt completely dwarfs him. The gargantuan sleeves hang down almost to his fingertips.

Draco can see in the mirror that he looks awful, but since Iris hasn’t supplied him with any of the paraphernalia for basic grooming, he finger-combs his hair and decides not to worry about it. He sticks his wand into one of the voluminous pockets for safe keeping. It’s not exactly easy access, as he discovers when he spends nearly five minutes trying to fish the wand out again, but at least no-one who wants to have a sneaky look through his possessions will be able to get to it.

After a few minutes of being reluctantly impressed by the ‘electric’ light switch, Draco tries to think, flicking the light on and off at intervals. He can’t return to the Death Eaters, at least not until he has a story that will please the Dark Lord—or, failing that, a gift to placate him. He’s certainly not going to the ‘good guys’—not only would he be killed when Voldemort found out, they’d probably be none too pleased with him either, come to think of it. He’s got to lie low with the Muggles for now. Just until he can come up with a more viable option, one that won’t end in his untimely demise.

“Oh, Harry! You’re up!” Iris exclaims when she bumps into Draco skulking in the corridor, giving him the prerequisite ‘Harry Potter? Where?’ heart attack. She bustles over, smelling pleasantly of sausages. “Early riser, just like my Frank. How are you feeling, love?”

“Not well,” says Draco, in a feeble voice. He squints up at her as if he’s pathetically ill or short-sighted. Iris sticks out one of her large hands to take his temperature. Draco tries not to recoil.

“Come and get a spot of breakfast,” Iris orders, after gasping with dismay at Draco’s temperature. Draco feels underneath his fringe suspiciously. His skin feels extremely lukewarm.

“I’m not hungry,” he answers.

“You’ll feel better after you’ve had something more to eat.” Iris peers into his eyes. “You look awfully underfed."

“I’m fine,” Draco snaps. He thinks that if he eats anything else Muggle-tainted, he just might throw up all over himself. At that same moment, Draco’s stomach gurgles, disagreeing loudly with his brain. Iris shakes her head at the noise and begins to push him towards the kitchen.

“Best have something to nibble on, love.” Iris manhandles him into the bright, warm room. “My Frank who’s at university always had a huge brekkie, and now he’s six foot two and the strongest boy you ever saw.”

Draco is seated on to a stool next to a wooden table with a check tablecloth. Iris whirls around the kitchen, unscrewing glass bottles and pouring milk from them into huge jugs, cracking eggs into saucepans and filling up big, black kettles. Draco watches in awed silence as Iris fries some mushrooms and makes tea at the same time.

Draco’s never really thought about food being prepared, as such; all the times he’s eaten it, someone else got it to the table.

A silver box next to Draco suddenly explodes, shooting two golden-brown slices of bread into the air. Draco shrieks and dives under the table.

“Your toast’s ready, love.” Iris absent-mindedly plops some teabags into a china teapot. Upon seeing Draco she sighs good-naturedly and aims a playful kick at him under the table. “You young boys, always playing tricks. My Frank who’s at university, when he was little, was such a scamp, always tracking mud into the kitchen and climbing trees, and getting into scrapes. Do you like climbing trees?”

“No.” Draco climbs resentfully back on to the stool. His heart’s still beating at a furious pace, but more out of embarrassment than anything else.

“I thought you might do,” Iris says.

She sets a plate of the most redolent food Draco has ever smelt down in front of him. It smells so fantastic, it should be marketed as a perfume. “A lot of the strangers who come round here to stay at the B&B are naturist people. Hikers and the like. They like trees and that. They get sick of their tents and want a decent meal and, really, who can blame them? Awful weather for the time of year we’re having.”

“Mmm.” Draco is not really listening. He’d thought that he’d just eat a few mouthfuls of something to pacify Iris, but there are three obscenely large, steaming sausages on his plate, and he is starving all of a sudden…

“Eat up, love.” Iris grins as she pushes her way backwards through a wooden door, laden with plates. “I’m just going to take some grub out to the paying customers.”

By the time Iris returns, Draco has already devoured two of the sausages, one side of toast, a rasher of bacon, two mouthfuls of scrambled egg, several mushrooms and about a litre of orange juice. It all tastes amazing, although it’s frankly impressive that he can distinguish between the different flavours, given the sheer amount and variety of food that he’s putting away at one time.

“Good boy!” Iris enthuses, upon seeing the demolished remains left in Draco’s plate. She folds her arms across her capacious bosom. “I thought you weren’t hungry?” Draco ignores the jibe and shovels more food into his mouth.

“I want some more of that,” mumbles Draco, his mouth full of baked beans. He points at the overflowing platter of scrambled eggs.

“Now Harry,” Iris coos, rushing over to poke at a pan of bacon, which is hissing and spitting like a malevolent cat. “‘I want’ never gets.”

Draco swallows the lump of food in bewilderment and grimaces as it squeezes its way down his oesophagus. He can’t imagine why a simple thing like forgetting to chew makes you feel like your chest is being ripped apart.

“Come on, Harry,” Iris encourages, mock-stern. “You know the magic word…”

“I know plenty of magic words, you idiotic Muggle,” mutters Draco. Iris frowns, her pink face filled with disappointment. Draco realises suddenly that his chances of getting any more scrambled eggs have been very much decreased.

“Oh, all right.” Draco tries not to roll his eyes. “Um. Please, Iris.”

Iris beams and triumphantly empties what looks like an entire chicken farm’s worth of scrambled ovaries onto his plate.


::


“Go over and play with Bert’s son, cherub.” Iris brandishes her duster at Draco as he sits listlessly in an armchair, fingering his wand. “I’ve got to clean, and you can’t mope around the house all the time with your toy.”

“I’m ill,” Draco reminds her, pointedly, and coughs for good measure. Iris raises a sceptic eyebrow and Draco stows his wand in his pocket, offended.

“You’re looking a good sight better.” She rubs at the wooden coffee table with a blue rag. “You’ll just be in my way.”

“I’m very good at being quiet.” Draco is suddenly afraid that Iris might want to throw him out if his invalid condition improves.

“I’m sure you are, love.” Iris pushes her wispy fringe out of her eyes. “But I can’t have you in my hair while I’m cleaning, and little Richard is a lovely boy. My Frank who’s at university always liked him, but they didn’t get on because of the age difference.”

She looks at Draco with a plaintive expression. It makes him feel all hot and irritable and he doesn’t like it. “He hasn’t got a lot of friends.” Her tone changes, and she frowns down at him. “If you’re going to stay here, you might as well get to know each other.”

Five minutes later, Draco scowls as he presses Bert’s doorbell. Iris is meant to be the nice one and here she is, practically threatening to throw Draco out if he doesn't entertain poor little Richard, the Muggle boy with no friends.

Not that Draco himself has any friends right now, actually, but he doesn't need one in the form of Bert’s son. He’ll probably be just as annoying as Potter, only Draco won't be able to hex him because of Muggle-Protection Laws and the fact that the Ministry are probably closely monitoring magic in non-wizarding areas. And he’ll talk about inane Muggle things, like…whatever it is Muggles talk about.

The blue door swings open abruptly and Bert’s large, annoyed face hovers into view. Draco can hear the doorbell trilling shrilly inside the house.

“Hullo, Bert,” he says, in an attempt to be civil.

The expression on Bert’s face suggests that this is a failed attempt, as he looks about as pleased as if Draco had said ‘You’re a bloody stupid, disagreeable old Muggle and I can think of at least seven thousand things I’d rather do than spend time with your offspring.’ This is more or less what Draco is feeling, except a good deal more polite.

“Harry,” Bert acknowledges in a gruff voice. He glares at Draco’s finger, which is still ringing the bell. “You can take your hand off the button now.” Draco does so. Bert does not offer to let Draco in.

“You had breakfast?” Bert demands. Draco nods, rolling up the sleeves of his borrowed shirt, which is far too big for him.

“Iris feed you?” Draco nods again. Bert scowls and wipes his wet hands on the front of his grey overalls. “I see you’re kitted out in Frankie’s old gear. I bet she’s letting you stay there as long as you want, free of charge, isn’t she? If I were her, I’d make you do odd jobs to earn your keep. Not be sponging off kind-hearted souls who don’t know any better.”

Draco sneers in response. Bert is clearly a bad influence and should be kept away from Iris at all costs. ‘Odd jobs,’ indeed.

“Don’t you give me any of your cheek, boy,” warns Bert. “What are you doing here?”

“Iris said I should come over and meet Richard,” states Draco in a monotone. And then, as an afterthought, he adds, “Please.”

“Humph,” says Bert. He sounds disbelieving, as well he might.

He stands aside to let Draco through and Draco steps gingerly into the house, knocking a portrait of a fat woman in a sash that’s hanging on the wall. Bert re-arranges the frame, swearing, and latches the door behind them. There’s no escape, Draco thinks in resignation, gloom settling in the pit of his stomach.

“DICK!” Bert bellows, startling Draco, who jumps. His hand instantly flies to his pocket for his wand. “There’s someone here who wants to meet you!” There is a lengthy silence, and then Bert tries again, even louder. “DICK!”

There is the ominous sound of a creaky door opening and closing, followed by a long pause. Eventually there comes the sound of slow, unhurried footsteps on the stairs. Draco looks impatiently up the worn staircase and sees the shadowy shape of a teenaged boy at the top.

“Come down, then,” says Bert.

The small figure trudges down the steps as if sacks of cement are attached to his heels. The entire descent lasts about ten hours. Bert goes over to his son when he reaches the bottom and cuffs his ear in greeting. The boy flinches.

“This is my son, Dick,” announces Bert. He prods Dick somewhere in the vicinity of his spine. Dick shuffles forwards with every evidence of deep reluctance. He looks the same age as Draco, or maybe a year or two older. There is an uncomfortable silence.

“Well!” exclaims Bert, grimacing at the effort of trying to be sociable. “Say hullo to Harry, then.”

“Hullo,” mumbles Dick, sounding and looking sullen. Draco nods his head a little, inwardly shuddering at the thought they might be asked to shake hands next.

“I don’t know why he’s such a miserable sod.” Bert laughs uneasily, slapping Dick rather too hard on the back. Dick winces. “Always so grumpy, our Dickie.”

Draco knows why Dickie is so grumpy. It is because, quite simply, he is an unfortunate boy.

Dick isn’t unfortunate in the way the real Harry Potter is unfortunate, growing up an orphan and having a giant disfiguration on his forehead. Nor is he unfortunate in the way Draco is unfortunate, being currently on the run from just about every wizard imaginable. He isn’t even unfortunate in the way Neville Longbottom is unfortunate, for having a memory like a sieve and a talent for nothing but incompetence.

Dickie is unfortunate in the respect that everyone who meets him—even the other unfortunates—gains a great sense of perspective and thinks ‘Ah well. My life could be so much worse.’

Dick is shorter than Draco and rather overweight. Not grossly so—much like Crabbe is a bit more meaty than muscled—but he insists on wearing too-small tracksuit bottoms that stop mid-calf and expose a small section of nauseatingly pink flesh before rolled-up white socks shield his ankles from view.

Whether he’s been exercising or not is uncertain, but large patches underneath the arms of his shirt are certainly a much darker grey than the rest of the fabric and a fishy smell emanates from near his person. There is an inexplicable ripped blob of tissue sticking to a patch of skin just above Dick’s left ear. Upon closer inspection, Draco can see that Dick’s chin, neck and forehead are dotted with pinky-yellow pustules and more tiny scraps of tissue, presumably to hide nicks made while shaving. Why one would feel the need to shave one’s temples Draco can’t imagine, but presumably Muggles have very odd habits.

Dick wears glasses like Potter, although his are square and so thick that his eyes are magnified to huge proportions. This is a good thing, in Draco’s opinion, as Dick’s large, watery irises detract attention from his snub nose and mono-brow. His hair consists of little gelled sandy-brown spikes, giving him the look of a hedgehog that’s rolled in an oil slick.

Some people, when not gifted in the looks department, choose instead to cultivate their inner beauty by being warm, open and friendly. Dickie, who is currently scowling and muttering unsettling things under his breath, is clearly not one of them.

“So…tell Harry about what sort of things you like.” Bert seems a little irritated. “Tell him about the bloody mixtures and potions you bubble away up in your room.”

Potions. Draco’s eyes unfocus as Snape’s sallow face flashes abruptly into his mind. Snape, bending over the contents of Potter’s cauldron; Snape, scribbling feverish notes on the blackboard; Snape standing, wand outstretched, in front of Dumbledore…doing what Draco couldn’t…

“I like my chemistry set,” mutters Dick. He casts a hostile lazy eye on Draco. Bert is looking at Draco with mistrust, as if he thinks him certifiably insane. “It’s wizard.”

“What?” Draco yelps, alarmed. He takes a step back, nearly tripping on the hem of my-Frank-who’s-away-at-Unifer-City’s trousers. Everything and everyone are going mad, he is sure of it. Unfriendly Muggle and Son are bandying around decidedly un-Muggle words, therefore curly-tailed farm animals must be performing loop-the-loops in the grey sky outside. “Wizard?”

“Everyone else thinks it’s borin’,” Dick grunts in response, and falls silent. Bert sighs heavily.

“Look, take Harry up to your room, why don’t you?”

::

“Your knowledge of chemistry is abysmal,” Dick scolds Draco, tugging away the hydrochloric acid before he can contaminate it with his alien germs. Draco had refused to be sterilised for the 'experiments,' on the grounds that the antibacterial hand-gel dried his skin out and felt 'weird and tingly' when he wore it.

Having been provoked earlier, Dick now looks as dangerously near to launching into another one of his half-hour lectures on the merits of acids versus alkalis. Most of the morning has passed in this way, with Dick preaching about ions like a zealous priest on a quest to convert the unbeliever.

“Well, luckily for me,” Draco mutters grumpily, “I don’t care.”

“You don’t care about chemistry?” Dicks looks genuinely astonished. His bulbous brown eyes blink hard behind his glasses.

“Not really, no.” Draco abandons pretence in favour of straightforward honesty. All ‘chemistry’ seems to entail is looking at an array of dull-coloured powders and liquids, and Dick has an annoying tendency to slap his hand away whenever Draco tries to touch anything even remotely interesting.

“What about physics, then? Biology? Geology?” Dick demands. Draco shakes his head and Dick purses his lips in annoyance. “I see,” he says, bristling. “Tell me, what’s it like to be completely out of touch with the real world?”

Quite relaxing, Draco thinks. Sometimes I even forget momentarily about all the real world witches and wizards who want to kill me. Out loud he answers, “I’m not the one who stays locked in his room and does nothing but tinker around with his stupid little potions—chemistry—set all day.”

Dick ignores the jibe. In fact, he doesn’t even appear to notice it. The exasperated insults Draco mutters all-too-audibly under his breath just seem to bounce off Dick's baggy-sweatshirt armour. Perhaps they’re deflected off his mammoth glasses. Either way, they barely register when compared to the effect that barium sulphate has on him.

“Science,” says Dick, not flickering an eyelid, “is absolutely essential to seeing the universe with greater clarity. It shows us how everything works.”

“I’m not that bloody interested in how things work! I’d much rather have them just work for me.”

“Science does work for us,” protests Dick. “Without science we’d just be helpless, boorish savages, having to do everything for ourselves. Science can do anything.”

“That’s not true,” Draco bursts out, on a reflex. He’s surprised he even cares enough to dispute the statement. “This whole ‘science’ thing you lot have is completely primitive.”

“Primitive compared to what, exactly?”

“Oh, never mind. And you can’t do everything. You can’t…fly.”

“Aeroplanes,” states Dick, arms folded over his chest. “Last time I checked, they were pretty adequate at aviation.”

“Oh, do shut up.” Draco frowns, casting around for something that Muggles can’t do that isn’t in itself completely useless, like making a saltshaker waltz with a pepper-pot. “You can’t do lots of things with science. I don’t have to list all of them for you.”

Dick stares at Draco in amused consternation.

“You don’t really think you can fly, do you? Flapping your arms and taking a run up off a cliff, like?”

“No, of course I don’t,” Draco answers wearily. “That’s impossible.”

Dick takes a dropper and squirts a thin stream of indicator into clear liquid that smells faintly of lemons. He then swirls the conical flask reverently, like a wine connoisseur swilling a particularly fine Bordeaux. The liquid turns bright pink.

“My dad and Iris always arrange for the weirdest people to come and play with me,” Dick confides. He follows this revelation with prising a hardened wad of gum out of the ridge of his ear. “They’ve all been completely insane, every last one. But you,” Dick smiles matter-of-factly, chomping on the tiny grey square, “you are the biggest freak I've had yet.”

::

“What did you do with Richard today?” Iris asks when Draco bursts into the warm kitchen, declaring loudly that he is absolutely famished.

He slides onto his wooden stool and waits expectantly while Iris dollops an amount of stew onto his plate that would reduce a starving child in a Third World country to tears.

“Ell-ec-trick-city,” announces Draco, feeling a faint surge of pride at pronouncing the word correctly, “and wires and things.”

“You young boys, such an enthusiasm for your studies.” Iris picks up two columns of dirty plates and deposits them in the stainless steel sink. “Just like my Frank.”

“He’s at Unifer City, isn’t he?” says Draco smugly, through a mouthful of lamb. He’s getting quite good at this Muggle-impersonator lark, really. Then he remembers that it’s hardly anything to be proud of, and viciously spears a roast potato with his fork in annoyance.

“He is!” Iris exclaims. She appears surprised and delighted that Draco’s picked up on this fact, although he would have to be spectacularly obtuse not to, given the fact that Iris has been name-dropping her son ever since Draco first met her. “Smart as a whip, the both of you. I remember him studying over his silly old calculus with Richard after school…although Frankie was always more on the athletic side than dear Richard.”

Iris’s eyes soften as she looks past Draco, at the fridge. The fridge is one of those new and perplexing Muggle doodads that Draco is still trying to figure out. It’s a—far more primitive, obviously—equivalent of a Cooling Charm. However, Draco doesn’t think it likely that it’s the fridge’s talent for food preservation that’s making Iris come over all sentimental. He turns around.

A picture of Frank is resting on top of the fridge, in a bronze picture frame that gleams from being polished religiously. Draco can’t think how the sheen hasn’t caught his eye before.

Frank himself looks like something of an Ancient Greek god, if Greek gods shopped at Pull and Bear. He’s roughly six foot three—no wonder his clothes dwarf Draco—muscled and slightly tanned, despite the fact that the range of weather conditions in the vicinity of the B&B doesn’t seem to include sunlight.

Golden-brown curls frame Frank’s face and cheekily innocent blue eyes shine out of an honest, friendly face. Frank’s sitting on a boulder somewhere in the rain, hair windswept and tousled to perfection. He’s wearing a navy Muggle jacket made out of that odd waterproof material—plastic? Draco tests himself—and he looks so utterly wholesome that Draco reckons you could set him down next to a loaf of freshly baked bread and not know the difference.

“He doesn’t look much like you,” Draco observes.

He doesn’t mean anything by it. The simple fact of the matter is that Iris is about four foot tall, with nothing much except a constant smile to recommend her in the way of facial features, whereas Frank is a devastatingly attractive rock-climbing giant.

Devastatingly attractive, that is, if you like that sort of thing, which Draco of course does not.

Iris murmurs something inaudible and ladles more stew onto his plate, making the brown tides rise higher on his roast potato islands.

“What?” asks Draco absent-mindedly, still staring at the picture.

“He’s the spitting image of his daddy,” Iris says quietly.

Draco suddenly gets the feeling that he is blundering stupidly around the edges of some yawning psychological chasm and mentally backs away, shifting his gaze.

Next to the picture of Frank on the rock, there is another photograph in a wooden frame. It’s a close-up of Frank as a baby, gurgling happily and wearing something green with embroidered teddy bears on it. Even then, his eyes had that angelic twinkle, but in all other respects he looks—as all babies do—like a pampered, overweight and slightly balding politician. Baby Frank is being held up to the camera by a large pair of hands with a gold band on the ring finger. These hands are decidedly not Iris’ for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that they are male.

“Did you know,” says Draco hurriedly, “that current electricity is a flow of charged particles, usually through a circuit and, in all dry conductors, the flow is of electrons and therefore of negative charge?”

Iris shakes her head vigorously and stares at Draco as if coming out of a daze.

“No, I expect I didn’t, dear.” She beams. “But how fascinating.”

::

The rain sloughs down, creating such neat parallel lines in the mud that Hermione, had she not currently been engaged in a screaming match, would have wanted to get out her measuring tape and start analysing the phenomenon.

Harry crouches at the entrance to the cave, absently chewing his tongue as he attempts to skewer half a tomato on a long twig. He is failing on a consistent basis, as the flesh of the tomato is too soft for the twig to gain any purchase. His plastic poncho, spread out before his feet, bears witness to his previous efforts. It is splattered with skeins of tomato skin, enough pips to start a tomato plantation, and unappetising blobs of red flesh, which make the poncho look like its last home was in an operating theatre.

There is the option of conjuring up a frying pan in which to cook the tomatoes, as singeing off the distinct and disgusting tomato taste is Harry’s ultimate aim in the exercise. However, this would mean that his task would be completed in mere seconds, and he would have to return to adjudicate his best friends’ latest blazing row. For the first few Harry had been, if not eager, at least willing to do so. By the time the twenty-sixth one had come around he was beginning to weary of them.

“Stay, dammit,” Harry commands the tomato. There is a second’s pause during which the tomato swings from the twig, and Harry feels the stirrings of dismay at his looming success, before the tomato takes a suicidal leap on to, and all over, Harry’s boot.

“Bugger,” says Harry happily. He reaches into the net bag beside him for another. His fingers brush cold stone and, on looking down to investigate the anomaly, he finds the bag empty.

There comes the thud of feet trying to make as much noise as possible without much to do it with, and Hermione’s boots hove into sight. Harry moves his gaze up, taking in her crossed arms and mutinous expression. Her hair, never on the flat side even under normal conditions, has blown up to the size of a haystack.

“Hey.” Harry uses the utmost caution to keep his voice as neutral as possible. “How’s the fire coming?”

“It’s not,” says Hermione, panting through her nose. “The firewood Ron collected is damp through. It has to be dried out. When I reminded him that we’re supposed to limit our magic use to essentials, he said a fire is an essential—”

“It is,” complains Ron from the rear of the cave. “Tell her, Harry. Food, water, shelter and protection. I told her this.”

“Which one of those is a synonym for ‘fire,’ excuse me? We have food—well, tomatoes—the cave is shelter and we have our wands for protection.” Hermione catches a handful of hair and throws it over her shoulder, to very little effect. Three times as much shimmies forward to take its place, leaving her looking more like an electrocuted poodle than ever.

“Fire is a protection,” says Ron. “Against…wild animals. And stuff.”

“Wild animals, I ask you,” snorts Hermione. “In Cumbria! There’s none! Unless you’re going to start classifying foxes and rabbits as something we’re in danger from, instead of the other way around.”

“Er,” says Harry. “I think we do need a fire. For these tomatoes. I kind of massacred them.”

Hermione glances down at the miniature sacrificial altar and huffs. The look she throws Harry, before she stomps off to an outcropping at the opposite side of the cave, is one part irritation and two parts betrayal.

Ron lets out a none-too-discreet whoop of triumph. Hermione sends him a molten glare. Harry gathers up his poncho with a sigh.

Every time he is forced to make a call like this, one or the other of his friends goes off into a sulk. It doesn't matter if the eventual outcome is the most obvious and logical solution, such as two days before when Harry had to admit that Hermione would be the best choice for venturing into the nearest Muggle village for supplies.

Ron would only have drawn attention to himself with his ignorance about the currency and novel items like beans in tins. Harry had been out of the question—it was crucial that the Death Eaters remained in the dark about his movements. All the same, Ron had taken offence to ‘the way Hermione said’ that he couldn’t tell a five-pound note from a fungus on his big toe. He didn’t say goodbye when she left. In the uncertain times in which they lived, it was a cutting statement. After all, there had been a fair chance that she might not return.

By the next morning he had cooled down and could even allow that he wouldn’t have made as good a job of shopping as Hermione. Yet the fact that Ron spent an entire night under a dark cloud because of something so trivial is typical of his relations with Hermione these days. It’s coming to the stage where, in the darkest depths of the night, Harry’s regretting bringing them along. Or at least, bringing both of them along.

It’s early August. It’s not chilly enough to make a fire the difference between life and death, but still cool enough to make one the difference between comfort and numb feet all night. Not to mention that their meal will be somewhat more palatable if burnt. Harry doubts that Hermione’s bad temper is due to the fact that she actually craved the sensation of having ice-blocks around her extremities as she tried to sleep. No, it’s a simple case of one-upwizardship.

Harry shuffles over to a large stone, wondering why they don’t just carry a frying pan with them instead of expending magic on conjuring one everywhere they stopped.

Oh, he remembers. There’d been an argument over that, too.

He makes a couple of magical forays on the stone and produces something that might have been a frying pan, if it wasn’t more a rather notched stone that bore a superficial resemblance to a frying pan. He flicks his fingers off the base to a twang of metal and a dull ache in his nails; it’s good enough for him.

He adds an anti-sticking charm to the nominally flat part. Hermione returned from her shopping trip without any butter, claiming it to be an extravagance and, also, bad for your health. If that wasn’t a move calculated to annoy Ron, whose favourite food is bacon butties dripping with melted fat, Harry doesn’t know what is.

Whatever the case, it’s quite clear to Harry that Hermione has never done any real cooking in her life. The idea that food had to be greased to prevent it turning to charcoal during cooking was in the way of being a huge revelation to her.

Ron deposits an armful of branches and twigs on the floor beside Harry and squats down beside him. “All dry,” he announces, brandishing his wand. “You want me to start a fire?”

“Yeah, please,” says Harry. He turns his frying pan stone the right way up. Ron gives it a suspicious glance.

“What’s this? An axe? You’re not planning to go hunting any wild animals, are you? Hermione’ll go spare.” Ron pauses. “Well, more spare.”

“It’s a frying pan,” says Harry, with a tinge of exasperation. He prods it again with his wand, feeling the deprivation of another year’s honing of his Transfiguration skills. Seventh year was when they learned how to Transfigure things into food, according to Hermione. It would come in damn handy right now.

“Oh.” Ron makes the face he always does when he’s trying to tell a lie or a compliment, the one that suggests severe intestinal troubles. “Um. Do you want some help?”

“No,” says Harry. He feels testy, both because it’s really Ron’s fault that Hermione could not be persuaded to do this spell for him, and also at Ron’s silent criticism of Harry’s effort. “Just—go and make up with Hermione, will you? This is getting ridiculous.”

“You’re sure you don’t need me for anything? I could try and catch a rabbit with my teeth, or cut off my own hand with a pebble.” Ron takes in Harry’s expression, which, if Harry’s mental state is anything to go by, is fairly terrible. “All right, all right. But if I’m not back in an hour, tell Mum I love her, okay?”

After a punch to Ron’s arm which relieved both their tempers somewhat, Harry crawls over to their small pile of belongings. They are wrapped in a sheet of tarp that is magically charmed to resist water and the more adventurous races of marauding insect.

During the day, Hermione keeps it in her pocket by means of a Reducing Spell, but Harry pointed out that in order to keep up their façade of Muggle hikers they’d need some genuine equipment. That’s where the backpack, raingear and boots come in. As yet they’ve not encountered any Muggles to test their authenticity, but the blisters they have to magic away every night are real enough.

Harry rummages through the dwindling stockpile of food with one hand, his other going automatically to the locket he wears around his neck. He checks it every few minutes, unwilling to let it out of his sight or even allow his friends to touch it. It is now a habit as deeply-engrained as shoving his glasses up his nose.

He discovers two rather elderly sausages and some rice and carries them over to the crackling fire. He doesn’t have the energy to build a tripod, so he just piles everything into the frying pan and holds it over the flames himself. The heat soon becomes overwhelming, but Harry strips off his jumper to compensate. The smell of cooking food is the one bright spot in an otherwise fruitless and exhausting day.

He glances over at Ron and Hermione. Ron is perched on a pyramid of scree, looking tense. That might only be due to the fragility of his seat, however. He and Hermione do appear to be talking amicably.

The firelight washes the cave walls with splashes of gold and, for a moment, Harry could be back in the Gryffindor common room, watching his friends bent over their homework as he sits on the sofa with Ginny.

His chest tightens at the thought of her, but with an effort he wills the memory away. Harry doesn’t even know where Ginny and the rest of the Weasleys have taken refuge; neither does Ron. It’s safer that way, and a hell of a lot lonelier.

The despair that always wallows below the surface threatens to engulf Harry, but he fights it. Instead of ignoring the painful knowledge that unless he defeats Voldemort, he will never see Ginny again, he acknowledges it. It makes him all the more determined to succeed.

It also takes the edge off his irritation with his friends. He knows what it’s like, the emptiness that is the fact that you’ll never see your parents again. It’s all new to them. The spats are just a way to hide the real issue, the one that deals with the fear and inevitability of death.

Despite his dark thoughts, Harry’s heart is lightened. He tosses the knocked-up meal in the frying pan, noting that the tomatoes are slightly toasted. They very nearly look good enough to eat.

He puts the frying pan on the floor to let it cool and Transfigures three forks out of rock. They retain the texture and colour of dirty granite, but at least come fully equipped with three prongs each.

The first time they all ate from the same plate, Hermione could barely restrain her horror at the barbarity and Ron spilled half of the food due to a trifling hand-to-mouth miscalculation. Harry presumes the fact that they can now hunker down and eat off the ground and with their fingers is an improvement.

The familiar sound of Hermione’s husky laughter floats over to Harry, giving him a brief flash of well-being. He bites the end off a sausage to test it, finding it quite satisfactory. To complete the taste analysis, he does the same with the other end.

“Grub’s up,” he calls. When Hermione wonders about the bite marks on one of the sausages, he assures her that it’s a normal result of frying.

::

Harry has always been a light sleeper. Perhaps it once wasn’t so, but years of living on a butter-knife-edge with the Dursleys honed his sleeping skills to the point where he’d be the envy of an Army cadet. The slightest whisper still woke him in case it was Aunt Petunia’s hiss coming through his cupboard door, informing him that Uncle Vernon was ready for his breakfast and where were her symmetrically sliced pieces of toast, if you don’t mind?

This had lead to several embarrassing moments in the dormitories. Harry had often listened with a glowing face as his friends, either consciously or not, panted their way through the litany of their latest crushes. Harry didn’t find it hard to go back to sleep, but he often ended up with afterimages of just what his dorm-mates had been doing blazoned on his eyelids as he drifted off. It was an occupational hazard, just as, once, the chance of oversleeping and facing Aunt Petunia’s wrath had been.

Hermione and Ron, who haven't ever known what slumber was like on a trundle bed with a spring that wanted to make love to the fleshy part of their backs, found it harder to accustom themselves to sleeping on rock and under the stars than Harry did. Once they do sleep, however, they stay that way until Harry shakes them awake. It is Harry who wakes up two or three times a night to Hermione’s slumbering sniffles and mumbled ‘Mummy’s or Ron’s ‘Mmm, just like that, yeah.’

The cave they’ve stumbled across this time is spacious, however, and safe enough for Harry to position his sleeping bag near the entrance a good six feet away from his friends. They've both claimed warm spaces on either side of the fire. As Harry drops off, Hermione is still rooting around for some moisturising cream and Ron is struggling with the zip on his sleeping bag. Harry lets his eyes slide shut.

A jumble of incoherent voices guides Harry into wakefulness. He rolls over and checks the luminous dial of his new watch. It still stings a bit to look at it—it had been a seventeenth birthday present from Ginny. It reads one thirty.

He freezes as the sounds he’s hearing drop into place, like three anvils on a slot-machine. There’s a sort of breathy moan, followed by a soft, damp noise that Harry knows very well. The sighs and unmistakable rustling of clothing are the most embarrassing, though.

He almost prefers the fighting.

Rigid with mortification, both at the scene he’s an unwilling witness to and at his body’s uncontrollable reaction to it, Harry grinds his fists into his eyes and tries to convince his very alert brain that what it really wants is sleep.

At last, he does drop off again. When his eyes jerk open, it’s to the dim racket of birdsong. He shifts around in his sleeping bag, making enough of a scrape of silk to warn any snogging best mates that he’s awake now too. After rolling around for long enough to feel the gritty cave floor intimately against his back, Harry decides that his friends must be still asleep.

This time he doesn’t wake them straight away. They’re both back in their own sleeping bags, looking as innocent as babes in the wood. Hermione is curled up like the fossil of a sea anemone, only her shock of hair visible about the sleeping bag. Ron, who’s a hot creature, has his bag unzipped—or maybe he just couldn’t do it up again; fastenings are a great puzzle to him—and one pale leg is thrown over it, straddling the rucked cloth. Harry feels a queer jolt at the sight of him. He can’t decide if he disapproves, approves, or is indifferent to their night-time forays into each other’s clothes. Any way, he’s still the dupe, forced to put up with their bickering but shut out of their explorations.

Yes, he thinks he can definitely call a ‘bitter’ on that one.

Spying Hermione’s parchment and quill, he scrawls a hasty note to the effect that he’s gone for a walk. Hermione is supposed to be keeping a journal of their findings, but as yet there’s a depressingly small amount to report.

Harry pulls on his boots and scrunches his gritty hair out of his eyes. It’s so long that the strands keep startling him as they fall across his vision.

He supposes he can’t really fault Hermione and Ron for seeking comfort in each other’s arms. If he’s honest, he wouldn’t mind having a pair of arms to seek comfort in himself. Unfortunately for him, the only pair qualified are God knows where. Dead, even, for all he knows.

Harry pushes that stomach-churning thought from his mind, allowing the brief jealousy at the ease of Hermione and Ron’s love affair to fade. It was always right in front of them, but it would take a mission of high danger and secrecy make them realise it.

The morning air is crisp and almost sears his throat with its cleanliness. Nearby, the birds that roused him are at it again hammer and tongs. He even glimpses a drab brown bird swelling its tiny chest in song, before it sees him and deflates as if in embarrassment at being caught out. Harry almost smiles.

He climbs to the rise that they gave up the night before on encountering. Quidditch never kept him fit and he’s puffing by the time he gets to the top, but he’s certainly better off than he was on starting the quest. He thinks he might even have developed muscles elsewhere than in his thighs by this stage.

The view from the top is hardly worth the effort, composed as it is of field upon field of marshy grass, spotted with the odd, static-looking sheep. The clouds mass low on the horizon, as if sulky at being woken up so early. All in all, it’s an unprepossessing sight but for the castle.

Harry spots it just as the sun deigns to sidle out from behind a copse of trees and drench the sky with lurid spindles of pink and gold. It illuminates the biscuit-coloured stone with a rosy glow, making it look as pretty and unlikely as a picture postcard. Harry gives a low whistle, impressed despite himself.

He tries to judge the distance between him and the castle and gives up. Instead, his feet drag him onwards, drawn by a compulsion he can’t be bothered to deny. As he gets closer, he sees that the castle is derelict, wreathed in ivy like a bride’s veil and sporting more piles of collapsed brickwork than a builder’s yard.

It is a petite bridesmaid to Hogwart’s grandeur and scale. Harry, walking its circumference in ten minutes, decides it’s nothing more than a watch tower or belfry, a relic of some ancient monastic settlement desperate to hoard its chalices and reliquaries from Vikings and the tenets of priestly poverty.

At the same time, there’s something hallowed and hushed about the place. Harry, who on his aunt’s orders was always kept back from school trips, indulges in a childish desire to explore and play. He pushes aside a curtain of ivy and steps across the threshold, feeling a thrill he’s more used to getting from wandering around bigger castles at dark times of the night.

Inside, the little castle is dim and smells of mulching greenery. Spurts of light break through from slit-like windows and lance down on centuries’ worth of compost.

Harry finds a flight of crumbling steps leading up in a winding cascade to who knows where. Checking that his wand is firmly in his pocket and in reach, Harry mounts the steps, hands sliding over the mossy walls in an attempt at holding his balance. In spite of these great measures, as the steps go up and up, leaving the floor a tiny green circle far below him, Harry feels a tinge of vertigo.

He’s glad when he comes out on to a tiny parapet, even though the sight is hardly one to reassure his protesting stomach. Heights never bothered him when he was on a broom, but then again he’d always had something to propel him through the air and, if need be, to guide him back to the ground again.

A few of the ruined outhouses are visible far below him, looking as if they’d been crushed by a giant’s boot. Given, as it turned out, the former proliferation of giants in Britain, Harry wouldn’t be surprised if that was in fact the fate that befell the buildings. He leans out further over the parapet and feels the mortar crumbling under his fingers. His stomach puts up a full scale protest march complete with placards, and Harry retreats hastily, his back to the rotting shingles of the roof and his head spinning.

Spider-like, he inches around the side of the roof, keeping a good distance between himself and the edge. Yet more fields and toy houses span the distance; he can even see the mound of the cave. Closer to home, white initials have been scratched in the stone of the parapet, suggesting that he’s not the only one to have ventured up here for a lark.

A shingle makes a break for freedom and Harry jumps back just in time. It sparks off the floor of the parapet and skids over the edge of the disintegrating stone, finally making its farewell bid in slow motion. Harry has just enough time to imagine that the odd shaped knobbles on the underside of the slate were hissing at him, before it crashes down through the banked weeds a hundred feet below.

Feeling a potent shot of anxiety, Harry turns around.

The slate has left a gaping hole in the neat pattern, a far greater one than would be expected given its size. Instead of seeing down through a hole to the struts and timbers of the inner roof, Harry comes eye to eye with what looks very like a door handle, in the shape of a serpent biting its own tail.

“I was wondering if you were ever going to notice that,” says a pleasant voice from somewhere to his left.

::

Harry looks down at the small wooden box before him with rather dazed merriment. It is a simple thing, yet it gives off the impression of being very, very old. It seems to be from an age of masterworks that were so perfectly made that any ornamentation would have been an affront to the dignity of the genius that created it.

“Go on, then,” urges Elizabeth.

Harry looks up to meet her opaque gaze, still feeling vaguely uncomfortable about doing so. Of course, he’s seen ghosts before, talked to ghosts before, but it’s always been in context. The context being a place where the armour held philosophical discussions with the tapestries and there were lots of other people, other kids, to stick with, and share the knowledge that they were feeling a tiny bit freaked out as well.

It’s not quite as reassuringly occult when he can see through Elizabeth's pupils to the leaves behind her head. Or when the strong sunlight means that she flickers in and out of his vision like a scene on a television that’s reflecting back the room as often as it’s showing Coronation Street.

Harry cups both palms over the two longitudinal sides of the box, tenses his forearms and pops the lid off. Elizabeth lets out a contented sigh. It sounds like the wind rustling dry paper; it’s the most solid thing about her. Harry wonders if, over time, ghosts get worn out, fading away until they’re nothing more than voices on the breeze—but his attention is quickly captured by the object nestling in the scented wood-shavings that line the box.

It’s a very small horn. Harry lifts is out. Some of the wood-shavings flutter out as he does so, crunching against his fingers with a pungent smell of old rose-petals. The horn twinkles and sparkles in the sun, like a porcelain-and-platinum fashion model gyrating down a catwalk.

“What’s all this stuff?” Harry taps the various panels of shiny, flecked inlay on the horn.

“Lots of things.” Elizabeth shrugs. For a moment Harry can see her pointed slippers, insubstantial as smoke, beneath the translucent embroidered gown. Her feet rest on the air a few feet above his head. She seems to enjoy looking down at him, but if she were to stand on a level with him she’d barely reach his chin. “Chalcedony, white opal, a few sapphires. Ivory, of course.” She smiles to herself, covering her mouth with a dainty hand.

“Oh, right.” Harry’s education in gem work is severely lacking; he just thinks the horn is a pretty thing. He draws it out further, revealing an attached gold chain of two thick strands coiled around each other. “Can I blow it?”

“You could try,” says Elizabeth. “You’d probably get a mouthful of dust, though.”

“Oh.” Harry flicks a money spider off the chain, feeling his enthusiasm for the idea diminish. “I thought you said what was in here was a magical object?”

“It is,” says Elizabeth. “That does not mean that it is not subject to age. Age is the one thing that magic could never combat.”

Harry could think of a few things that could, Voldemort coming tops—not to mention that the Philosopher’s Stone combated age quite effectively. Elizabeth might have died before that discovery, however. In any case, Harry doesn’t feel like contradicting her. There’s something disconcerting about the fixed, burning gaze that transparency does nothing to dim.

Harry runs his fingers along the length of the horn. It fits snugly into the palm of his hand, but feels icy cold to the touch. Just like the locket. His hand flies to his neck, but the locket is intact, skimming his collarbones like an icicle.

He feels another sensation, but this time a more familiar one: sticking his hand into Fred and George’s esky to fish out the last beer. Harry looks up, not surprised to see that Elizabeth has placed her hand on his arm, or more technically through it.

“I had a feeling that you were the person who was meant to find the horn of Ravenclaw,” she said, her voice low and earnest. It sounded to Harry as though he was trying to listen to it through a thick wall. “I can tell you its history, if you make me a promise.”

“What’s that, then?” asks Harry. He is wary of this ghost-girl’s intentions. Her tumbling curls fall across her shoulder and she bites a plump lip, which retains the faintest hint of pearl-like fullness.

“That you promise to take me with you when you leave,” she bursts out, sounding agonised. “The last time, I did not force that promise. I allowed myself to be entranced by false vows. I swore that if the chance should come again I should not make such a dire mistake!”

“Okay,” says Harry, trusting her less and less. “But what’s that got to do with me?”

He doesn’t really fancy having a ghost as a walking companion; if nothing else, it will put paid to any interaction at all with Muggles, who seemed to regard ghosts as something scary and portentous instead of an infliction rather akin to rats. Although, faced by this girl’s wretched voice and penetrating stare, which suggests that she’s someone well versed in emotional manipulation, Harry is starting to revise his opinion on ghosts. There is something vaguely sinister about Elizabeth, like a pair of fluffy slippers with fangs.

“Well, you are going to take the horn with you, aren’t you?” she asks, sounding and looking genuinely surprised.

“I don’t know,” hedges Harry.

Certainly Hermione would be intrigued by it and want to subject it to rigorous tests that would reveal some stunning piece of information, like that the glue used was derived from Flobberworms. He doubts that this is a good exchange—a creepy ghost is not exactly this month’s most sought-after fashion accessory. Accessory to murder by fright-induced cardiac arrest, more like.

“But…isn’t that why you came up here?” she said, sounding forlorn. “To fetch it?”

“Not exactly,” said Harry. Either his hands are sweating or the horn is secreting an unpleasant, viscous substance on to his palms. He looks down, thinking he’ll see an oily sheen on his fingers, but there’s nothing there. The horn gleams innocently.

“Oh,” sighs Elizabeth. She ‘sits down,’ insofar as she crumples up beside Harry like a wet tissue, just preventing herself from sinking down through the roof. “I was so sure, when I saw that you were a wizard…and so like the other…”

“The other?” Harry wipes his hands on his jeans and frowns at her. Having the horn in his lap is like pressing an ice cube to his crotch, so he wastes no time in bundling it back into its box. The shavings are beginning to reek of dead lilies now.

“Tom Riddle.” Elizabeth regards him without blinking. “He came to take it the first time. He was the first one who knew what he was looking for.”

Harry gapes at her, several things clicking into place. The coldness of the horn, the slimy feeling, the snakes on the door handle; even the rotting scent of the wood shavings. It positively smacks of Voldemort’s corrupting touch.

Elizabeth looks more alert now—hopeful, even. She nods as Harry croaks out an echoing “Tom Riddle? He took this?”

“He swore he would not harm it!” cries Elizabeth. “He lied! But he did not lie when he said that he would send someone to fetch it, in years to come. I thought that person was you. I thought that you were his son.”

Harry clutches his hair, wanting to deny it until his throat is torn. However, he retains enough self-control to realise that shouting obscenities at Elizabeth will make her clam up faster than a shy oyster. And he needs the information she’s been proffering, even if it means letting her trail him, be his friend and going to her Deathday parties.

“Elizabeth,” he says, “you’d better tell me everything.” He gets to his feet. “Come on. We can talk as we—I mean, as I walk.”


::


The storm breaks just as Harry steps inside the cave. During the last few hundred yards, drops of rain have been spitting off the boggy ground around him. Without Hermione to chastise him, Harry felt free to use an Impermeable Charm on himself and is consequently as dry as a bone in an anatomist’s underground archive. The sky is a thick, ominous yellow and Harry stays for a minute to observe forks of lightning bisect the clouds, as if wielded by an angry giant who keeps missing the lettuce.

“Harry? Is that you?” Hermione’s voice trembles.

“Yup,” says Harry, digging his hands into his pockets. His informative chat with Elizabeth blanched the details of last night from his mind but now, faced with Hermione wearing bed-head-hair and pillow creases on her cheeks, it all comes flooding back.

“Oh, thank God,” sighs Hermione. “Is Ron with you, then?”

“No,” says Harry, frowning. “Isn’t he here? With you?”

“Oh, no! This means he didn’t find you…” In the murky light, Harry can see that Hermione is wringing her hands. “We thought you’d been captured or killed or something. Ron went out to look for any clues and I stayed here in case you came back.”

“But I left you a note!” says Harry in horror. He snatches up the parchment by Hermione’s bedroll and unfurls it. “There, look! I’m going for a walk to clear my head. See you in an hour. Harry.”

“Oh, no,” moans Hermione again. “I never saw that. I never thought of looking there. We’ve all been so good about not poking in each other’s things…”

“Is everything quite all right?” ventures a high voice from behind Harry.

Harry shuts his eyes and chafes his creased forehead. Now is really not the time to be regaling Hermione with wild tales of the Horcrux he’s just stumbled on, but letting Hermione think that she’s seeing a ghost that Harry can’t probably isn’t the best move either, in the circumstances. Besides, Elizabeth would hardly appreciate the gesture.

“Hermione, this is Elizabeth, a ghost I just met,” he says, his voice drooping with weariness. He’s had a full night’s rest, but all he wants to do is sleep and not wake up until someone else has sorted out this whole, ugly mess for him. It’s an un-heroic and unworthy thought, so Harry does his best to quash it before it has a chance to graduate into speech.

“Hello.” Hermione sniffles, but makes an effort to smile. “I’m Hermione.”

“My name is Elizabeth.”

She’s done something to her voice, Harry thinks. It sounds sweet and tuneful, as if someone is cranking it out of a music box, complete with velvet interior and twirling ballerina.

“I would shake your hand, but I seem to be rather challenged in that area of late,” adds Elizabeth.

Against the odds, Hermione laughs. True, it’s more like a bark, but it’s there and Harry stares at her in amazement.

“One of my friends has just disappeared,” says Harry, as much to remind Hermione of the fact as to inform Elizabeth. “I’m afraid I can’t—I mean, we have to start looking for him. Now.”

“It is raining,” observes Elizabeth, her tone cool. “And very misty. These moors turn into a maze when there is a fog. Even the locals dare not venture out for fear of becoming lost forever.”

“Is that what happened to you, then?” asks Harry nastily. He doesn’t like what Elizabeth is insinuating, both about Ron and his own tracking skills. Hermione gasps, and Harry belatedly remembers that it is very bad manners to ask a ghost how he or she died.

“No.” Elizabeth does not look shaken, although of course ghosts have far better facial control than their living counterparts. “But I would not recommend that you start searching for your friend until the weather has cleared.”

“How long will that take?” Hermione’s voice trembles with anxiety.

Elizabeth lifts one delicate shoulder. “On these moors? Days. Weeks, even. In my day, when someone got lost, a large party of searchers would go abroad with flaming torches. Even then, many people remained lost.”

“We don’t have parties of searchers,” Hermione states the obvious, chewing her lip. “We’ll just have to hope that it stops raining soon.”

“No,” Harry buts in. “I’ll go look for him now. It can’t be that bad. It’s the middle of the day, for Chrissakes, and I have my wand.”

“I have a better solution,” interjects Elizabeth. “Let me look for him and guide him home. I will not be fazed by the mists, for I can rise above them. Nor will thunder be a danger to me. I will search for your friend and return him to you.”

Harry narrows his eyes at her, wondering what she’ll want for this. Hermione, however, has let out a gasp of relief and an anguished, “Oh, would you?” Harry can’t very well demand to know Elizabeth’s motives when Ron’s life might be at stake. Privately, though, Harry only thinks that this would be the case if Ron came upon a cell of Death Eaters hiding out in a shepherd’s cot.

“Look, here’s a picture of him,” says Hermione, fumbling in her pockets. Harry peeks over her shoulder and sees a picture he can’t place. Hermione and Ron are squinting at the camera, blinded by sun and unacknowledged lust. Hermione’s sun-top is slipping off her shoulder with the help of Ron’s hand, which is flung across her shoulder.

Hermione makes to hand the photo to Elizabeth, then blushes and holds it up like an idiot board. Elizabeth regards it for a few moments. She looks a bit more at home in the dank surroundings of the cave, but Harry still doesn’t like the way her eyes flicker in and out of focus.

“Very well,” she says, her voice modulating to a velvety burr. “Do not fear, Hermione. I will bring your lover home.”

“He’s not—how did you—” gasps Hermione. Elizabeth just floats up a few inches and winks at Harry.

It’s the first human gesture he’s seen her make. Even as he fumes about sitting in the cave doing nothing, he feels a dart of camaraderie. As she fades out of view into the pelting rain, Harry crushes it. He has a hard enough time dealing with the friends he has. Particularly when they’re gibbering protests and blushing hard enough to power half a dozen red-light districts.

After a while, Hermione’s voice dies down and she sets to biting her nails, a habit she’s cleaved to with some assiduity. Harry’s own nails have been long ago reduced to whitish stubs; since his hair has got so long he’s taken to chewing that instead, so it looks more like a ratty seventies carpet than ever. His stomach cramps as he thinks of Ron, and he wishes very hard indeed that Hermione had thought to check her damn parchment. What was Ron thinking of, running off into the horizon like that? Trying to act the hero? Harry has his hands full just keeping his head above water…

To distract himself, he begins to compose a letter to Ginny in his head.

Dear Gin

No, that isn’t intimate enough.

Darling Ginny

Too intimate. Harry isn’t a 'darling' sort of person.

My dear Gin

Wins the award for stuffiest greeting in the history of the world.

Ginny

Is far too abrupt. He isn’t an army major. Yet.

I met a ghost today. Her name’s Elizabeth and she thought I was Voldemort’s son. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t because it turns out she’s the guardian of one of his Horcruxes…

Harry’s eyes flutter closed before he can figure out a way to tell Ginny how much he misses her.


::


The dark is drawing in when Elizabeth and Ron return, sketching lacy grey clouds against the horizon and shading in the foreground with incessant, drumming rain. Ron is stumbling. The mud coating his trousers, hands and in fact every part of him bar his nose bear witness to the amount of times he must have fallen. Hermione, whose practicality was once as firm as a rock but is now being eroded by love, runs out into the rain to catch Ron about the waist and guide him inside.

Harry is…

On some levels he’s furious at Ron for doing this, for bringing trouble down on their heads. On another level he’s grateful to have such a friend as Ron, who would go rushing out into a storm to find him. The gratitude leaves him embarrassed and unbalanced, so he stands aside to let Hermione rush Ron to the fire and ply him with Transfigured blankets and the last of the tea.

Harry moves back to engage Elizabeth in conversation. The ghost is hanging in the air just inside the cave, her expression as still as a pool in a Zen Buddhist temple. One shapely finger is tapping her lower lip.

“Was he far?” asks Harry. “From here, I mean. Did it take you long to find him?”

“He was sprawled in a ditch, soaking wet and chilled to the bone,” says Elizabeth. Harry is disgusted to hear a note of relish in her voice, and her roundabout method of answering questions leaves Harry searching for the fast-lane motorway. “Twas a fair distance from here as the crow flies, but as mortals walk I cannot judge. It has been long and long since I felt the earth beneath my feet. It took us twice the journey again to return, for your friend was in grave need of assistance that I could not render. He fell often to kiss the dirt.”

“Listen,” interrupts Harry, “could you lay off the poetic descriptions for a bit and start talking like a normal person?”

Elizabeth does the phantom equivalent of quivering in indignation; a ripple runs through her grainy image, like the crackle of static on a television screen. “I’m not quite sure I grasp your meaning,” she says, in a stiff little voice that suggests the music box of yore has started to rust.

“All you needed to say was how far away Ron was from here,” says Harry, “and you didn’t even do that! You could have guessed—three, four miles, maybe? Did they have miles when you were alive?”

Another ripple runs through Elizabeth. “Yes, they did,” she snaps. “I venture it was perhaps five miles from here. He started to wander in the mist. He was very near to a Muggle village when he collapsed.”

“Thank you,” says Harry, with a tinge of sarcasm. He can’t help it—there’s something about Elizabeth that rubs him up the wrong way. Even her narrowed eyes irk him, both with their insolence and their familiarity. He can’t think who she reminds him of, but he’s fairly certain that it’s no one he likes.

“Harry?” Hermione sounds wretched. “I—I think there’s something wrong with Ron.”

“Of course there is,” mutters Harry. “He’s been wandering moors all day in the rain.” Elizabeth’s eyes are slits, but Hermione, busy cradling Ron’s damp head in her arms, doesn’t appear to have heard him.

Harry sighs and kneels in the dirt beside Hermione. Ron does look in a very bad way. His lips are blue and his veins are popping out in his forehead and neck. Rivulets of sweat course down his skin but, when Harry lays a hand against it, it is icy to the touch.

“He’s running a fever,” guesses Harry.

Hermione nods, biting her lip. She brushes some tendrils of hair from Ron’s face, her movements tender, and Harry feels a fist of jealousy squeezing his chest. Harry’s been ill enough to require the hospital wing more times than he can count, but he’s never had someone to sit beside him and stroke his hair.

Harry shakes off his uncharitable thoughts to take up one of Ron’s hands—it’s like holding an iceberg with fingers—and call his name. There’s no response. Ron’s eyes do not flicker. He lies in Hermione’s arms like a limp rag-doll.

“I don’t know what to do, Harry,” whimpers Hermione. “I’ve studied a few Healing charms but I don’t know much about them, I never read up on diagnosis, I could give him the wrong magic and—”

“It’s not a magical sickness, though, is it?” says Harry. “He’s just running a fever from being out in the cold for too long.”

Hermione looks doubtful, which is a mighty feat; her worried expression leaves little room for any other emotion. “I’ve never seen someone with a fever to look so—” she objects, not finishing her sentence. They both know how it ends. Dead.

“We’re going to have to get help,” says Harry. “Can we, I don’t know, side-along Apparate to St Mungo’s or something?”

Hermione shakes her head. “Sick people must not be subjected to Apparition or Portkeys, I distinctly recall reading that. Chapter Two of The Home Guide to Magical Maladies. A person’s sense of themselves is scrambled when they’re ill or unconscious and they could get…lost. Ron’s definitely ill and unconscious.”

They both look down at him. Harry notices that Ron’s breathing has become shallow.

“There’s nothing for it,” says Harry. “We can’t risk going to fetch a Healer. That much magic will definitely alert anyone watching that we’re here. Especially—” He’s about to say, especially seeing as there was a Horcrux hidden in the vicinity up until a few hours ago, but he doesn’t want to frighten Hermione unduly. She’s got enough on her plate.

“How on earth will we know if there’s any Healers around here, though?” frets Hermione. “There mightn’t be another wizard for miles and miles!”

“Have you forgotten your roots, Hermione?” asks Harry. Hermione just stares at him, too anxious to even snap back a retort. “Elizabeth says she found Ron just outside a Muggle town. They’ll be sure to have some kind of doctor nearby.”

“Of course! Oh, Harry, you’re brilliant!” exclaims Hermione, sliding one hand from under Ron’s head to wrap her arm around Harry’s shoulder and kiss him soundly on both cheeks. “And if I make a stretcher for Ron, and we levitate it…”

Harry smiles, in what he hopes is a reassuring way. “It’s got to be worth a try.”


::


It’s the hardest five miles Harry has ever walked—or, more accurately, sloshed. The rain has turned the moors to a viscous goo that fills their boots and sucks at their jeans. The jeans become waterlogged in minus five seconds, leaving Harry feeling like he’s carting around plate armour made of denim.

He lets Hermione lead and contents himself with pointing his wand at the white splodge that is Ron’s stretcher. Harry's glasses are loaded with little droplets, so that he’s seeing the world through thousands of tiny refracted prisms. There’s hardly any difference between wearing them and not, but Harry feels better knowing that in a pinch he could see. If he had to. Out in the open, nearing Muggle habitation, they daren’t risk any more magic than is required to levitate Ron.

Elizabeth is scouting for them, against Harry’s better judgement. He wanted to leave her behind or help boot her into the next world, but not for her to accompany them like they were on a gay little picnic party. The effect of the rain falling straight through her makes Harry feel rather nauseous, so in one way the fogging of his glasses is a good thing.

At last she floats back to them and says, “We’re coming to the outskirts of the village now. You had best put down that stretcher, unless you want several fainting Muggles on your hands.”

Harry hadn’t thought of that part, having been too absorbed in just how very wet he was. He grinds his teeth, uncomfortably aware that Elizabeth has got one up on him and knows it. All unaware, Hermione guides the stretcher to the ground and tugs Ron’s soaking blankets closer to his body, a look of desperate affection on her face.

“You’d better make yourself scarce,” Harry tells Elizabeth, his tone brusque. “Floating stretchers are one thing, but ghosts will give the bloody Muggles heart attacks.”

Elizabeth inclines her head. “I will find you, then, when you have located shelter.”

“Fine,” says Harry in irritation. “Make sure you do it when everyone’s asleep.”

“I will,” says Elizabeth and, with a faint susurration, she’s gone. A faint shimmer lingers in the air for a few seconds; then that, too, disappears.

Harry stares at the space where she was. However, he has no time to dwell on it or the fact that he’s just invited a ghost to visit him in the witching hour. Ron and Hermione need his attention now.

Harry squats beside them, feeling the horn bulge in his pocket and the locket swing against his chest. A rough moaning sound escapes Ron’s lips, which have turned cerulean.

With unspoken accord, Hermione and Harry both take one of Ron’s arms and twine it about their necks, heaving him to his feet. There seems to be no alternative to dragging him along, until Hermione spots the Transfigured sheet they used to cobble together a stretcher. She drags a Severing Charm along it, producing several large strips that she proceeds to tie around her and Ron’s ankles. She proffers a strip to Harry and he does the same.

It’s the first time Harry has done a three-legged race. It would have almost been fun if it weren’t for the rain, which sends new shudders down his back every second, or the fact that Ron’s head is lolling between his and Hermione’s shoulder. The lank wet hair plastered to Ron's skull makes him look like he’s been bleeding profusely.

“Where now?” says Hermione, as they hobble down a street awash with water.

“Anywhere!” says Harry. “The first house you come to. We have to get Ron out of the rain.”

Nodding, Hermione forges onwards, leading them up the street to a tall, skinny house with white clapboard shutters. The gate to the garden is open, the garden itself a patchwork of snapped flowers and pools of water. They negotiate the steps up to the front door with what Harry can only describe as extreme difficulty. In the process, Ron’s head wobbles like a jelly and his legs bang off every protruding timber strut. Hermione and Harry come in for their fair share of blows as well, and Harry rips his shirt on a nail.

Hermione’s shaking finger finds the bell but before she can press it, Harry grabs her hand to stop her.

“Names,” he hisses. “We can’t have anyone knowing who we are. You be…Lucy. I’ll be, um—”

“Felix,” says Hermione. At Harry’s stare, she shrugs. “What? You picked mine. I like the name Felix.”

“Fine, fine,” says Harry quickly. “Ron can be Bill, that’s not too hard to remember.” He leans on the buzzer and props up Ron’s head. He can feel Ron’s pulse beat against his shoulder, slower and deeper than it should be.

An interminable time passes, although in reality it’s about two minutes. A shuffling sound makes itself heard over the pounding rain, and the door swings open with a creak of protesting hinges.

A short woman stands on the threshold, holding a broom. Harry’s brain is very insistent on the point of her height, or lack thereof, but his eyes want to disagree; her huge, bouffant grey perm adds about a foot of tightly curled hair to her stature. Columns of flashing purple crystals dropping from each ear don’t help in disabusing the viewer of her short status, as they seem to go on forever. She’s swathed in the sort of floral pinny Aunt Petunia favours, only on this woman it actually looks used. There are splashes of sauce on the front, along with a few frayed threads; the pockets bulge with pens, pegs and the miscellany of household cleaning apparatus.

“Hello, lovies,” she says, her motherly face pleating into a smile. “My, but you look like three drowned rats! Poor dears. Here, come inside and I shall fix you some tea, that I shall.” She opens her free arm and ushers them inside.

This is exactly what they were hoping for, but Hermione throws an aghast glance at Harry over Ron’s head. They manoeuvre him inside while the woman clucks her tongue and bustles around. She springs forward to move heavily laden occasional tables out of their path with deceptive ease and opens a door into a warm, bright kitchen. Harry keeps expecting her to bring out the axe from behind her back. She hasn’t even asked their names. No one is this welcoming to complete strangers, not in real life.

As the woman pulls out chairs for them and flicks on a kettle, then wipes her hands on her pinny and lays them on Ron’s forehead with a professional manner, Harry starts to wonder who’s life it is he’s got.

“My name is—” says Harry, trying to remember what name Hermione assigned him. It sounded like it belonged to a cat. His gaffe is overlooked by the woman, who merely flaps her hands and says “We’ll get to that soon enough.” Hermione glares and mouths ‘Felix’ in his direction.

“The poor lad’s got pneumonia, if I’m any judge,” pronounces the woman a few minutes later. “I’ll get on the bell to Dr O’Callaghan right this minute. He’ll have some pills that’ll set your friend right in a jiffy.”

“Thank you very much,” says Hermione tentatively. “You’re very kind. Only, who are you?”

“Be forgetting my own head next!” The woman laughs. She pats her perm, retrieving a pen from somewhere within its depths. “I’m Iris Mellor. I run this bed and breakfast. My father—he's passed away these five years, God have mercy on his soul—he was always telling me, ‘Iris, you think everyone in the world knows your name!’ He was right, too. My son, Frank—his father insisted on that—is forever bringing home friends, but they all just call me Ma too. I’m so used to it my own friends even call me Ma!”

She lets out a clear laugh that tinkles like the crystals in her ears.

“Well, I’m…Lucy, and this is my friend Felix,” says Hermione, nodding in Harry’s direction. Harry reigns in a scowl. He doesn’t want Iris to get the impression that he’s annoyed at her, when in fact it’s Hermione who’s the recipient of his ire. Felix, indeed. She might as well have just called him Puss-in-Boots and handed him a feathered cap.

“We were camping with our friend Bill, and he got caught in the rain,” continues Hermione.

Harry realises he shouldn’t have let her do the lying; she’s terribly bad at it, while deception comes to Harry with disturbing ease. It’s too late now, and breaking Hermione’s concentration will only make things worse. Besides, Iris is hovering around, pulling down biscuits and cake that set Harry’s mouth to watering. Iris is nodding along as if Hermione’s tale is the most convincing she’s heard since Bill Clinton’s.

“Ah, that’s terrible,” Iris sympathises. “Here, get some victuals down you. I’ll phone the doc and then you can help me make up a bed for your poor boyfriend, Lucy my love.” She plonks down a plate laden with enough digestives and Hobnobs to feed an army and whips out of the kitchen, betraying a surprising turn of speed given her stoutness.

Ron is sliding off his chair, wracked by shuddering convulsions. Hermione breaks up a Hobnob and tries to put it in his mouth, but his lips purse in rejection and the biscuit crumbles into his lap. Hermione and Harry share a worried glance, which is somewhat allayed by the sound of Iris clearly speaking to the doctor in the hall phone.

With a loud “Cheerio!” Iris comes back into the kitchen. “I’ve got a room downstairs that will suit Bill just right,” she announces. “No tricky stairs until he’s well, I reckon. Are you okay to help me with him, Lucy? And you can wait here and let in the doctor, Felix dear.”

“Of course,” say both Hermione and Harry at once. Harry is gripped by a hysteric urge to go, “Here, puss puss,” and thinks he might be suffering from shock, whatever that is. He helps them hoist Ron from his chair, after which Iris takes over, supporting most of Ron’s weight without batting an eyelid. By contrast, Hermione is breathing heavily by the time they reach the door.

Harry feels himself begin to steam-dry as he sits in the kitchen. He takes in the numerous nick-knacks that weigh down every surface, the wallpaper of grinning cows and sheep and other farmyard animals, the scratched wooden cupboards. There are about three ovens, if Harry’s identifying them correctly.

He polishes off half the Hobnobs and feels distinctly better. Iris, if a bit eccentric and obscenely good-natured, doesn’t seem to pose an immediate threat. Hermione has a Muggle bank account, which they can access to repay her if need be. The doctor is on his way to cure Ron, who will be horrified that they let a Muggle physician near him when he wakes. Feeling at ease for the first time in twenty-four hours, Harry drifts into a soporific daze.

He jolts awake to the sound of footsteps outside the kitchen door. He decides it must be the doctor, although he didn’t hear the doorbell ring. Standing up, he shoves back his hair into something that is a far distant relative of neatness, and brushes the crumbs off his shirt.

“Iris said I was to—” he begins as the door creeps open, almost as if whoever is pushing it couldn’t be bothered to exert much force.

The person coming through has his eyes fixed on the floor and his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his oversized jeans. If this is the doctor, Harry has some qualms about the quality of modern Muggle medical training. For one thing, they’re letting in candidates who are about a decade too young.

Then the boy raises his head, his expression of sullen disinterest flooding with horrified recognition. Harry looks into the appalled grey eyes of none other than Draco Malfoy.


::


Potter is staring at him.

After that first, searing flash of recognition, in which Potter leapt to his feet so fast that he resembled a bespectacled Jack-in-the-Box, his gaze fixed on Draco. Draco can see shock in Potter’s eyes, and there’s another, indefinable emotion there—one that borders on anger and verges on remorse and teeters over the dizzying precipice that is hate—but whatever it is, Draco can’t make it out clearly.

Draco can surmise, though, from the fact that eleven inches of holly is being aimed at his chest, that Potter isn’t very happy to see him.

To be fair, Draco’s not exactly ecstatic at the reunion either. His hand’s already hovering near his own wand, but it’s not drawn. He's not yet so pessimistic to expect to find his nemesis sitting in the kitchen, helping himself to Iris's oaty biscuits. If Draco had wanted to hold an epic death-match with Potter, he’d have told him to meet him inside a fiery volcano somewhere.

There’s a shuddering tension hanging in the air between them, as if the entire room is shaking in rhythmic, pulsing tremors. The fact that both of them are still as death doesn't help matters. Draco feels sick as he forces himself to return Potter’s stare with a stony gaze of his own. His heart’s fluttering madly somewhere around his oesophagus, and his mouth is so dry that it takes a gigantic effort to prise his tongue away from the roof of his mouth.

"Hi," says Draco, idiotically.

The single syllable falls into the silence with all the harsh poetry of an atomic bomb. It's often been hinted—usually by people he had to sic Crabbe or Goyle on shortly afterwards—that Draco is almost effortlessly offensive, but even he doesn't understand how he mutated a simple greeting into something so scathing, sneering, superior.

Potter reacts the way he always does when confronted by Draco. He sets his jaw and clenches his fists and generally looks like he's psyching himself up to wrestle a rampaging Hippogryff. He never was one for idle conversation. He seemed to much prefer diving headfirst into action—or trouble, for with Potter the two are rarely mutually exclusive.

"You." Potter shakes his head in disbelief.

"Me," confirms Draco, trying to surreptitiously grope for his wand in the bottomless pit that is Frank's pocket. He keeps his eyes trained on Harry, who is too busy smouldering with anger to notice the small movement. "I would say it's nice to see you, Potter, but I'm trying to get out of the habit of lying."

"What are you doing here?" demands Potter. "How do you know Iris?"

"Iris, eh?" echoes Draco. He pretends that he doesn’t notice Potter's wand, pointing straight at his heart. "We do seem to be getting a bit over-familiar, don't we?"

"You nearly killed Ron," Potter spits out, each word trembling with suppressed fury. Draco blinks, barely listening. He's managed to brush the tip of his wand with his fingers. Now, all he's got to do is ease it upwards and into his sleeve without attracting suspicion.

"The Weasel," agrees Draco. He's speaking partly to draw Potter's attention towards his face, and partly to dilute the channel of concentrated dislike that is flooding towards him from the other boy's direction. Potter looks lankier than when Draco last saw him. "Christ, is he here too?"

"And Katie," continues Potter, in a louder voice.

"They were accidents," mumbles Draco. He slides the cool wood of his wand up against his skin. He's concentrating so hard that the enraged boy with biscuit crumbs on his shirt slips out of focus and blurs into the hazy kitchen background. "It was hardly my fault. I wasn't even out to get them, I was—"

"Trying to get to Dumbledore," finishes Potter, his voice glacial.

Draco's hand jerks inexplicably as he opens his mouth to respond, making the wand slip. In his irritation, Draco's eyes flicker downwards for a split second, then dart back up to Potter's face, which is wearing a look of sudden comprehension.

"You little—" begins Potter.

Draco thrusts his hand into his pocket and yanks out his wand at the same time as Potter lunges forward and tries to grab it from him. Potter manages to latch on to it and pulls Draco forwards, making him stumble and shout an unintelligible curse. The curse misses its target and instead hurtles towards their feet, blasting them in opposite directions.

Potter crashes backwards into the fridge, catching the checked tablecloth as he goes and pulling it on to the floor. Draco, however, flies a foot backwards through the door and lands on top of a screaming Iris. She topples as easily as a blade of grass.

There's a bloodcurdling shriek from a brunette girl who's just burst out of a door and into the corridor, a flurry of bushy hair in her face. Draco peers in confusion. It appears to be a rather bedraggled Granger, who looks not unreasonably horrified to see him straddling a middle-aged bed-and-breakfast proprietor. Draco clambers off in a hurry, but Iris seems rather less inclined to pick herself up.

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dearie me," she whimpers, fanning her face with her hands. "Oh dear...I heard noises...bright flashes...where's Frank...Lights...your toy stick...oh dear, oh dear oh dear." She pauses dramatically, as if she is about to say something else, but continues relentlessly after a few seconds, "Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie dear. Oh dear oh dear..."

Draco watches her flounder, trying to think what to do. Granger rushes over and says something to the effect of Iris keeping perfectly still and trying to relax. As frantically quoting medical journals does not equate to a soothing bedside manner, Iris ignores her. Her grey hair is askew and she looks like a giant beached sea-mammal. Draco feels a jolt of an unfamiliar emotion. He tries and fails to pinpoint it, but he thinks it might be guilt.

Potter pushes past Draco, panting. He hoists Iris from the ground and tries to prop her up against the wall, but every time he loosens his grip, Iris makes a sound like a small puppy being kicked and sinks into a supine position once more. Eventually, Potter resorts to kneeling next to her and patting her shoulder at random intervals, while he and Granger survey their casualty with expressions of mingled concern and horror.

"Iris, calm down, you're just experiencing shock," says Granger, in what she clearly thinks is a reassuring manner. "I read once—"

"How...Where...lights?" Iris gasps like a fish. Potter kneads the hand not assigned to patting-duty through his mop of hair in confusion. Iris looks from him to Granger to Draco in desperation, fanning herself as if the slightest rise in body temperature could result in spontaneous combustion.

"What were...how did...I saw...oh dear..."

"I can explain," insists Potter, whilst tugging violently at his scalp. If stress doesn't give him a receding hairline, the nervous habit will. "Don't worry."

"This is stupid," mutters Draco, nursing his shoulder. He points his wand at Iris.

"What the hell are you doing?" demands Granger. Her voice is a disbelieving hiss, but it's tinged with a rough edge of fear. She's scared of him, Draco realises.

"What's that?" asks Iris in a faint voice. Her eyes widen in panic as she registers the fearsome toy stick that blows teenage boys halfway across her kitchen and emits loud blasts of coloured light. "Oh—dear."

"Obliviate!" shouts Draco.

A jet of blue light shoots out from the end of his wand and smacks Iris squarely in the forehead. She gapes for a second or two, blinking like someone with a slipped contact lens. An expression of dazed contentment settles on her lined face.

Potter turns to shoot Draco a look of angry incredulity, then takes the opportunity to lean forward and pull Iris to her feet. She stands obligingly and nods her head at him, the purple crystals in her ears clinking in harmony. Draco looks sideways at Granger, expecting her to let forth about improper and disrespectful treatment of Muggles. She sags with relief instead. It perplexes Draco for a moment, before he grasps that she'd thought he was about to cast a different spell.

"Thank you, lovie." Iris hovers in the doorway. She beams at Draco, pleased to see a familiar face. He somehow doubts she'd be so friendly had she known that he'd fired a Memory Charm right between her eyes a few seconds earlier. "I see you've met our new arrivals!" she exclaims. "You all look about the same age, I'm sure you'll have lots to talk about."

This observation does not fall on a very responsive audience. Draco grunts, Potter scowls and Granger looks dangerously close to tears. Iris frowns a little, blowing upwards to shift a wisp of hair out of her eyes. It swings towards the ceiling, as if on a hinge, then flaps back down again.

"Do you know, I'm all of a dither," confesses Iris. "It's terrible, when you get to my age. I honestly can't remember—" she gives a tinkly, bemused laugh "—if I was coming or going."

"You were going," Draco assures her, at the same time as Potter announces, "You were coming."

Iris's eyes dart from Potter to Draco in bewilderment. Draco steps closer to the other boy, to shield the view of the tablecloth that was dragged on to the floor.

"You were going and coming," Granger blurts out. It is clearly her idea of a decent cover story. "You were going..." she falters and coughs in embarrassment. "You were going to come...with me...away. You were going to come away with me to check on Ro—on Bill."

Despite the highly suspicious delivery, Iris nods gratefully at each word of the story, lapping it up. Then she frowns again.

"Bill?" Iris asks, eyebrows raised. "Who's Bill?"

"Our sick friend, remember?" says Granger. She steps forward and tries to nudge Iris through the door in a way that couldn’t be construed as kicking the woman out of her own kitchen. "He's called Bill. And I'm Lucy," she adds, glancing over her shoulder at Draco.

Draco rolls his eyes. Lucy, honestly.

"Oh, your friend," says Iris, as Granger half-pushes her out of the room. "Did I—did I call the doctor?"

"You did," says Granger. "He's coming soon."

"Ah." Iris nods as she's ushered into the corridor, looking rather more alert. “Harry, be good, you hear?”

The sound of their footsteps disappear rapidly down the corridor and into a ground-floor room. Draco reaches out and pushes the door shut. Potter stares at him.

"Before you start with any Muggle-loving blarney," says Draco aggressively, "I was perfectly within my rights to modify her memory. None of your pathetic excuses were going to work and she'd have kicked both of us out. I don't know how you found me, but I—"

"Shut up," Potter interrupts. Draco bristles. "I know this may shock you, but the Earth revolves around the sun, not your arse. I wasn't looking for you in the first place."

Draco snorts with disbelief and Potter raises an eyebrow over his smeared glasses.

"Right," said Draco with a sneer. "So, of all the Muggle shitholes in all the villages in all of England, you just happened to barge your way into mine?"

Potter makes no protest or explanation. This, Draco thinks with annoyance, probably means it’s true.

"How does that woman know my name?" asks Potter. His eyes are still on Draco’s face, as though he’s lining up a target. Draco heart sinks as soon it encounters this particular iceberg, but he tries to wave it away with a shrug and an eye-roll.

"She doesn't, obviously."

"She said, ‘Be good, Harry,’” Potter persists. "She called my name."

"Her memory had just been modified, for Christ’s sake." Draco scowls. "She was probably remembering her old pet hamster Harry. She was confused. You would be too, if you'd had your mind erased by magic."

"She wasn't confused," says Potter. "She looked right at us, and said ‘Be good, Harry.’ She'd been talking to us before."

"It could be rural slang," Draco suggests, rubbing his sore shoulder. It’s really beginning to throb. "For a really annoying boy in scratched spectacles."

There is a pause. Draco swallows a lump of damp air, because his mouth has dried up so much that there's hardly any saliva left in it. Enough for a small ant to use as moisturiser maybe, but nothing that would aid any kind of human lubrication.

"Maybe she wasn't talking to me," Potter concedes, adjusting his glasses.

"Clearly not," snaps Draco, trying to conceal his relief. "She was talking to the pet hamster she had as a child."

"She wasn't looking at me, either," continues Potter ominously. "She was looking at you. Hermione told her my name was Felix—" Potter pauses for long enough to convey significant disgust at the title "—and even if you made her forget that, she wouldn't call me Harry. She was talking...to you." Potter stares at Draco in amazement. "Why would she call you Harry?"

There is a loud clanging sound, as if someone's just banged a gong with a steel saucepan, and suddenly three frenzied bars of crashing, discordant music ring through the room. It sounds like someone playing an out-of-tune church organ with miniature cymbals attached to their fingers. Potter starts in shock, but after a series of occasions being scared out of his wits by the unearthly din, Draco has come to recognise the sound for what it is—the doorbell.

"That'll be the doctor," says Draco says, dodging the question. "I suppose you'll want to let him in."


::


Harry read somewhere that dogs can hear noises that are out of the human aural range. He’s never heard something that is out of the human aural range because that would clearly be impossible, but Iris’ doorbell comes as close as it is possible to be. Trying to bury his left ear in his clavicle to shield it from the din, Harry fumbles with the mechanisms holding the door shut. Just when he thinks his eardrums are going to pop from the pressure, he succeeds in yanking the door open and breathes a sigh of relief.

The man standing on the stoop is young, with rain-spattered shoulders, an air of scruffy benevolence and a battered black briefcase. He also has the bluest eyes Harry has ever seen. There’s something bewitching about them, for as the minutes stretch on Harry stands with his hand on the doorknob, his mouth slightly agape, while the man smiles at first in greeting and after a while in concern.

“Hello,” he says at last. “I’m Dr Jim O’Callaghan. You must be one of the guests.” He sticks out his free hand and Harry shakes it in a daze.

“H—Felix,” he gasps, the sound of their voices breaking the spell.

Harry comes to an abrupt consciousness of just how dumbstruck he’s been acting, but for some reason he doesn’t feel embarrassed. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that one of Dr O’Callaghan’s trouser-ends is tucked into his sock or the corn-circle the rain has flattened in his hair, or just that he looks like a confused baby bird. It’s clear that whatever embarrassment his stunning eyes wrought on Harry, it can never equal the embarrassment that Dr O’Callaghan achieves just by existing.

“I hear you have a sick patient.” Dr O’Callaghan tries to wring out his hair as he steps into the hall, and pokes himself in the nose. Harry looks past him, just making out a black car parked by the gate through the heavy rain. “I tend to come in handy at such times.”

“He’s just in here.” Harry indicates the door around which Hermione is peeping, her face ashen. “We think he has pneumonia, Dr O’Callaghan.”

“Oh please, call me Jim.” Harry raises his eyebrows, but Jim doesn’t see—he’s preoccupied with shrugging out of his coat. When at last he has it off, he looks around in faint bewilderment. Feeling sorry for him, Harry takes it.

“I’ll just put this in the kitchen for you, shall I?” he suggests, and Jim’s expression clears. He gives Harry a smile that is like sunshine breaking through clouds, and follows Hermione’s beckoning hand into the parlour.

Harry shakes his head. The damp cloth beneath his fingers awakens him to his situation. He’s just left Malfoy alone and armed in the kitchen of an innocent Muggle. Jim’s appearance distracted him somewhat, but Harry has come back to his senses now. With wings on his heels, he flies down to the kitchen, readying his wand as he does so.

What scenes of awful and bloody destruction his mind was able to create in a few seconds are wholly disappointed. Malfoy is sitting at the table, across which the tablecloth has been clumsily pulled. He appears to be doing nothing more dastardly heinous than eating a Hobnob. He looks up as Harry enters and his brows pull into a frown; they twist into a knot when he spots the wand in Harry’s hand.

“Any more magic and you’ll have the Inappropriate Use of Magic crowd in here,” he says, reaching for another biscuit. “I suggest you leave cursing me into a thousand slimy pieces for tomorrow.”

Harry looks down at his wand. Without quite realising what he’s doing, he lowers it, although he resolutely ignores the mental suggestions that he grab a biscuit before Malfoys scoffs the lot.

“I want some answers.” Harry sets his face into an appropriate scowl.

“Six hundred and eleven,” says Malfoy. “Petrificus totalis. A frog.”

“What are you talking about, Malfoy?” snaps Harry. “I’m in no mood for your antics.”

“You asked for answers,” says Malfoy, observing him with a still stare that unnerves Harry. It looks out of place on Malfoy’s normally mobile face. “I gave you some.”

Harry grinds his teeth. Obeying an urge stronger than his higher mind, he snatches the plate of biscuits away from Malfoy’s greedy hands and tips the remainder of the Hobnobs into his own palm.

“Hey, if you wanted those, all you had to do was ask,” says Malfoy. “I don’t like them that much.”

“What a pity,” says Harry. “I would have so liked to think I was stealing something you loved. Or killing it, even.”

The sudden lack of blood in Malfoy’s face tells Harry that the barb has hit its mark. Oddly enough, he doesn’t feel much satisfaction. He just gets the urge, much stronger now, to sleep for years. One day he’ll give in to that.

“Why are you holding that moth-eaten coat?” asks Malfoy, after an eternity during which Harry tries to find meaning in the whorls of wood in the cupboards. There isn’t much.

“It’s Jim’s—the doctor’s,” Harry explains, then wonders why he bothered.

“You really do have a problem with over-familiarity,” remarks Malfoy, drumming his bony fingers on the exposed tabletop. “I suppose it comes with the territory of being a enormous git.”

“I could kill you, right here, and no one would blame me,” hisses Harry.

Malfoy just curls one insolent lip. “You would have done it by now. The worse you could do is call the Aurors on me and even then, they couldn’t convict me of anything.”

Harry realises that this was far the more compelling threat to make and has to rein himself in from hitting Malfoy. Just to sink his hands into flesh and cause pain…Forget curses and spells where you were miles away on the other end of a wand—he wants visceral, he wants now, he wants to feel Malfoy twist and break beneath him.

Harry frowns, wondering if his rage is quite proportional to Malfoy’s comments. Then again, if it wasn’t for Malfoy, Dumbledore would not be dead, so any rage towards him is quite justified.

“Attempted murder,” he points out, after some time.

Malfoy laughs. It sounds like the cawing of a murder of crows. “When people are being tortured and killed left right and centre? Who wants someone who couldn’t do the job? The world is full of people who couldn’t kill other people.”

“Most people don’t try,” snarls Harry, who can barely see through the mist of righteous anger.

All of a sudden Malfoy is right up close. There’s biscuity breath on Harry’s face and a torso that is close enough to punch.

“Don’t,” says Malfoy, “even try to impose your standards on me, you filthy blood-traitor hero. You have no idea about me, so do not judge me.”

Harry lifts a hand to shove Malfoy away, but he’s already gone.

Absent-mindedly, his mind thrumming with confusion, Harry sets about putting the sadly tossed tablecloth to rights.


::


Harry vacillates between the door of the parlour and the main hallway. He doesn’t want to venture into the sickroom, where he can hear the clink and sighs of medical practice and Hermione’s palpable worry going on. Neither does he want to return outside. Even through the frosted glass panes of the front door, he can see the rain sleeting down in a determined manner that suggests that it’s not going to let up for the next century at least.

There are numerous other doors and a staircase, but Harry doesn’t want to try these—he is a stranger to the house, after all. He can catch the sounds of what is either a television or a very quiet killing spree echoing from one, so he assumes that the rest of Iris’ guests are watching it. He doesn’t think they’d appreciate it if he waltzed in and tried to engage them in light conversation about Home and Away.

His legs ache and his nose feels stuffy, so it’s quite likely that he’s caught a cold. The hallway has one small radiator, painted deep maroon with a decoration of vines. Harry takes to leaning against this and trying to absorb what little warmth it cares to give. It’s one of the old ones that is boiling at the top inch and could double as a fridge from there down. The back of Harry’s jeans are both singeing and crackling with cold.

At last, after Harry’s watched the mud on his boots dry, crack, and finally start to crumble on to the worn Persian carpet, the parlour door opens once more. Jim and Iris emerge, the latter talking nine to the dozen. Jim is nodding along, bits of hair fluffing out around his crown and a tag of shirt cloth peeking out of the fly of his trousers.

“Why, Felix, my love!” cries Iris, on laying eyes on Harry. “Whatever are you doing out here? Didn’t Harry take you upstairs for a chat? I would have thought you young boys would have plenty of things in common!”

“Harry?” repeats Harry, a suspicion growing in his mind.

“Yes, Harry.” Iris flaps her pinny. “You know, the skinny little lad you met earlier? Blonde hair? I found him, you know. Jim had to sew up his head. I gave him some of my Frank’s clothes and all. Poor mite had been kidnapped or abandoned, if you ask me.”

“Oh, Harry,” says Harry, feigning realisation. Inside, his mind is churning. “Of course I remember him. He’s just, er, gone upstairs.”

“Probably to play with his toy stick,” says Iris, in tones that can only be sentimental because they are so utterly devoid of innuendo. Harry catches Jim’s eye for a minute. His look of bewilderment only makes Harry’s sense of the ridiculous more pronounced, and he has to gnaw the inside of his cheek to prevent the hysterical giggles from escaping.

“I suppose you’ll want to go in and see your friend,” suggests Jim. “He’s got a bad case of pneumonia, but I’ve given Lucy a scrip for some antibiotics that will set him right in a few days. And Iris has offered to put you up while he recovers.”

“Oh, thank you.” Harry feels himself start to blush with gratitude. “We can pay you, we just need to get to a bank—”

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” Iris assures him. “Haven’t I got a whole rake of empty rooms? This awful weather is putting the tourists off. And you’ll be nice company for poor Harry. I’m afraid he feels a bit lonely, even though he has Richard, that’s my old friend Bert’s only son, for company. You’ll be a jolly little group now!”

Harry musters up a sickly smile. Whatever Malfoy and the minion he seems to have scrounged up will be, ‘jolly’ couldn’t possibly be an accurate description of it.

“Go on in, then,” encourages Jim. “I’ll be back to check on him tomorrow, Iris, in case he’s taken a turn for the worse. Just keep him warm and dry and don’t let him be disturbed. That means no wild raves, Felix.”

Harry manages not to roll his eyes. “I’ll be sure to cancel the ones I have planned.”

Iris mutters something about preparing supper and she shoos Jim to the door and Harry into the parlour with a remarkable economy of gesture. Harry finds himself propelled through the door into the stifling heat of the sickroom. After his entombment in the icy hallway, it feels like a flamethrower to the face.

Hermione is crouched over a makeshift futon made from what looks like a pull-out sofa, several embroidered bolsters and enough quilts to supply most of North America. Harry can just spot Ron’s head as a splash of red and white in amongst the riot of flowers, fantastic birds and other gambolling flora and fauna.

“How is he?” asks Harry, but before he’s even finished Hermione is putting a finger to her lips and hissing, ‘Shhh.’ If Harry’s question didn’t rouse Ron, Hermione’s snake impersonation most certainly would, but Harry doesn’t feel like pointing this out.

“How is he?” he repeats, barely moving his lips.

“Oh, he’ll be all right in a few days,” says Hermione, her voice louder than Harry’s first question. She plumps one of the pillows in the vicinity of Ron’s head. “Iris is very kind, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, almost too much so. What kind of person adopts every stranger they come across, especially a Malfoy?”

“Keep your voice down, Harry, or you’ll wake Ron,” admonishes Hermione. As she turns to smooth a wrinkle in a quilt, Harry relieves his feelings somewhat by poking his tongue out at her. Of late, Hermione seems to think that she’s the only one entitled to care about Ron. It annoys Harry, especially after all that nonsense in sixth year.

Harry remembers the part of sixth year that incorporated him tailing Malfoy with a start. It seems like years ago, yet it was only a few months. A few months ago that Malfoy’s bumbling ineptitude led to the death of the greatest wizard that ever lived…

Harry blinks back the sting in his eyes and tells himself fiercely that if he’s going to cry, it’s not going to have anything to do with Malfoy. He refuses to let Malfoy win even that miniscule, irrelevant victory.

“I don’t know,” Hermione is saying, with the thoughtful look that always summons up the faint aura of an earnest chipmunk. “Perhaps she