Harry Potter and the Forests of Valbonë
Chapter Twenty Five
When Harry awoke he was freezing, his teeth were chattering and his head was throbbing with pain. He realised, with annoyance, that he didn't just yet have the capability of moving, so while he waited for his body to catch up, he took a moment to assess his situation. He was submerged up to his waist in icy water, in a ruined car that seemed to be producing a dull wail that echoed around his already aching cranium. However it wasn't just his head that throbbed with pain, his entire body was a bag of cuts, contusions and jarred joints.
Falling backward into the seat seemed to alleviate the annoying sound that filled the air and belatedly Harry realised he'd been leaning on the horn, his face pressed into the steering wheel. He gave a little sigh of pain, magically amplified by the charm he'd been unable to dismiss, that echoed around his head like a gunshot, bringing a fresh wave of winces.
As his brain slowly began to regain some ability to work cohesively again, he looked around himself, drinking in the surroundings.
He appeared to have crashed into a lake of some sort and muddy brown water was gushing through the open windows and the numerous holes in the car's underside. Around him was what appeared, to Harry's dismay, to be another forest. Which, if he was honest, was exactly the last thing he wanted to see right now.
He leaned across the car and put his head under the water, groping around in the passenger footwell until his fingers closed around something below the surface. He pulled it clear and watched in amusement as Sternley spluttered angrily, water dripping from the sodden mess that had once been the Sorting Hat.
"I can't believe you did that," moaned Sternley, shaking himself slightly in an attempt to get dry. "I mean why would you put me in the footwell?"
"I'M SORRY!" boomed Harry and immediately winced again.
"For Merlin's sake boy, Quietus! Kwai-Uht-Us! Pronounce the 'uht' stronger than the 'us'."
"QUIETUS," enunciated Harry as he directed his wand at his throat.
He concentrated with all his might, focusing his wand toward his neck and little by little began to feel the tendrils of magic that made up the charm peel away.
He coughed as the last vestiges of the magic slipped from his body and he was relieved to note that he sounded vaguely normal again.
"Much better," he declared happily. "Tergeo."
Sternley seemed slightly mollified by Harry's new ability to speak at a normal tone. Possibly too by the fact that Harry's spell removed a vast quantity of dirty water from his fabric. Another flick of Harry's wand pushed the driver's side door open and Harry waded to shore. Managing to hold the sword, his wand, his wolf-skin cloak, his firesticks and Sternley out of the water as he did so. It proved no mean feat.
When they eventually floundered to shore, Harry quickly stripped his wet robes off and lay them over a branch to dry. Then he turned to get a good look at the surrounding area. He realised, with relief, that he was not in fact in the middle of a forest, but merely amongst a small group of trees gathered at one side of an enormous lake.
"We shouldn't linger too long," said Sternley, from his vantage position on Harry's head. "You've given both the goblins and the Albanians a black eye and a bloody nose but it won't keep them off our backs for long."
"You think the car's fixable?" asked Harry, turning back to it.
"Possibly," replied Sternley, though with obvious reticence. "But I think we ought to choose a moment when we're not about to have every auror and goblin in Eastern Europe simultaneously descend upon us."
Harry glanced at the car and immediately realised that Sternley's assessment was indubitably correct. The Anglia was sunk half way into the lake and seemed to be slipping deeper by the second. That, combined with the fact that there were probably more pieces of the car strewn across Albania than there were still attached to it, left it in a sorry state.
Harry nodded his agreement.
"You should probably try and pull it out of the lake though," said Sternley. "Otherwise it'll disappear forever."
"Do, or do not. There is no try," observed Harry wisely.
He promptly lifted his wand, added the necessary swish and flick that Hermione was so fond of and removed the Anglia from the lake. It came softly to rest on the grass between them, muddy brown water and green slime oozing from between every nook and cranny.
"Should I hide it?" asked Harry, gazing miserably at the wreck of his beloved car.
"Why bother? Any auror worth his salt will find it and you know they're going to confiscate it."
Harry nodded glumly, but then something occurred to him.
"Will Mr. Weasley get in trouble for this?"
"Don't see why he would," said the hat. "He's already been punished once, I don't see how they can have expected him to do anything about it this time."
Harry nodded again, still slightly gutted to be losing his car.
"I know I shouldn't," he said. "But I feel really bad. I was getting quite used to her."
"It was a good car," offered Sternley, but Harry knew he didn't really get it.
"Where do you think we go from here?" asked Harry.
"Honestly, I've no idea. Glancing back over what you saw in the midst of all that confusion, I think we went predominantly north, which would probably put us over the border with Montenegro. But I couldn't even give you an approximation of where. I only knew we were in Valbonë because it's so important, magically."
"In that case," said Harry, turning to face the river that fed the enormous lake. "I'm going to head up stream. It ought to take us to the mountains and I don't feel like being in a forest any more."
"Works for me," replied Sternley. "One more thing, no more magic once we've left the car. I suspect they'll start tracking us from here, but the last thing we want to do is alert the aurors and goblins as to our precise location."
Harry nodded and shuddered at the thought of goblins and Albanian wizards hunting him through the countryside. It was a horrible thought; to be prey.
The pair of them took quick stock of their resources — which amounted to precious little — and took a moment to clean themselves up, dry Harry's clothes and repair his shoes as they were looking slightly worse for wear. Then with a final salute to the Anglia, Harry began to walk.
The hike wasn't as arduous as Harry had quite anticipated. Though he could still feel the deep set physical exhaustion of the last couple of days, the blisters on his feet and the incessant drooping of his eyelids. Yet, everything he'd been through seemed to have overwhelmed him so much that he was able to drift through it in an almost trance-like state.
For much of the rest of the morning, Harry didn't speak, eat, drink or do anything other than walk. Indeed he was so out of it that when Sternley asked him what he thought of the mountain air, he started violently. Staring around in amazement he found that he was clinging to an almost vertical stone ascent with the sounds of a waterfall crashing by to his right. It took him several minutes to stop hyperventilating in panic and for Sternley to talk him to the top.
"You alright, Harry?" asked Sternley as the young wizard lay panting, stretched out across the large expanse of rock atop the cliff.
"Tired," admitted Harry, breathlessly.
"I'm not surprised," replied Sternley. "It's almost noon. There's a little mountain pool and stream over there, you can see where it meets the main river. You ought to go and have a drink and lie down beneath those trees while it's so hot."
Harry, agreeing more with Sternley than he'd ever let on, dragged himself over to the small copse of trees that jutted out of the rock. He lay on the mossy rocks beneath the shade and closed his eyes against the blinding sun.
"Hey, Sternley," he said, sleepily. "You'll wake me when the sun passes over, won't you?"
"Absolutely," replied Sternley and although Harry knew he was lying, he couldn't find the energy to care. "Go to sleep Harry."
"Mmkay," replied Harry, and let sleep take him.
When Harry awoke again, he could feel something cold and wet resting against his bottom lip. He reached up without opening his eyes, only for his hand to touch something cool and fleshy hovering above his face. He examined it with his fingers, prodding this way and that, in an attempt to discern precisely what it was. Before he could make any deductions however, he heard a flighty giggle and his eyes flew open in shock.
A couple of inches away from his face were the strangest eyes he'd ever seen. Where they ought to have been white, they were bright yellow and where there should have been a pupil and iris, there was just a dark slit. At first, Harry was certain that these must be the eyes of a cat, but a second later all that Harry felt was slack-jawed amazement as the owner of the eyes drew her face away. For Harry's gaze had fallen upon the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.
She was about Harry's height, but that was where the similarities ended. Her skin was pale and fair, in stunning contrast to her bright eyes, and her hair fell away in deep red locks. Her features were sleek and exotic and she wore the widest of smiles that ended on each side of her face in tiny, wonderful dimples. Her lithe body was hidden beneath a filthy, shapeless white slip that was an awful lot like Dobby's pillow cases except that it was almost see-through which brought the slightest of colour to Harry's cheeks.
For a boy who'd never truly considered girls this way before, it was a startling eye-opener.
Her eyes — cunning, playful and mischievous all at once — gazed at him with obviously intelligent interest and though she was shaped and proportioned like a person, when she moved, there was an obvious feline grace to her figure.
"Hi," said Harry softly and sitting up slowly, not wanting to alarm her at all. "I'm sorry if this is your pond, I didn't mean to intrude."
"Not my pond," replied the creature, in a silkily soft voice ever so slightly coloured by an accent that Harry couldn't place. "Nobody's pond. What someone owns a pond? Does it own the earth or the sky or the breeze. Madness."
Harry gazed blankly for a minute and then couldn't help but laugh. He wasn't sure if this was just the way that the creature spoke, he knew from experience that magical creatures often had alien thought and speech patterns, or merely her unfamiliarity with his language. Oddly enough it was only after the creature smiled at him, the corner of her mouth turning up, a faint echo of his laughter, that he even considered that he ought to be alarmed. Surreptitiously, he moved his hand toward the pocket that contained his wand.
He felt a little embarrassed, especially considering the creature seemed friendly, but after all, he didn't know anything about her, or even what species she was. Then it occurred to him; Sternley would know. But then, Sternley had been oddly silent until this point. Had the hat fallen asleep too? He glanced around, looking for his friend and was greeted with his friend's obvious absence. He looked to the creature again, who stared back with obvious interest.
"I don't suppose you've seen a hat?" he asked, awkwardly.
"What's hat?" asked the creature, blinking in surprise.
"Uh, you wear it on your head to keep the rain off," he said, hopefully.
"What's head?"
Harry decided to try a different tact.
"He's about this tall," he gestured. "He's black, he talks when he shouldn't and his name is Sternley."
"Talks when he ought not to!?" exclaimed the creature, as though Harry was daft. "Who said who talks and who ought not to?"
"Well he's a hat," replied Harry, feeling slightly awkward.
"What's hat?" asked the creature and Harry felt like hitting himself on the head.
"Sternley," he said eventually. "His name is Sternley."
"Oh," said the creature. "The talking cloth."
"Yes!" exclaimed Harry, perhaps a little too violently, for the creature jumped, clearly startled. Harry winced. "The talking cloth. Did you see where he went?"
"Up there," she said, pointing up at the sky.
"He flew?" asked Harry in astonishment.
"He didn't flew, he cloth," she said again, as though he was thick.
"Cloth doesn't fly?" countered Harry quickly, grinning. "Who said who flies and who ought not to?"
The creature stared at him.
"He cloth," she said, very slowly and Harry let his face fall to the palm of his hand.
"How did he go up there?" he asked finally.
"Bird took Sternley to nest on top of hill," she said and pointed to the very top of the mountain. Harry balked when he saw quite how high he had to climb.
"Oh right, what kind of bird?"
"A birdy-bird."
Harry realised that he wasn't going to get much more out of her and so stood, lifted the sword from the mossy stone beside him and bent to drink from the pool.
"Wouldn't do that," said the creature quickly.
"Why not?" asked Harry, pausing a few inches above the surface.
"Birdy-bird crapped in it," she said, her eyes gleaming with mirth.
"Right," said Harry delicately, leaning backward and staring up at the sky. What had he done to deserve this?
"You go to find birdy-bird? I come with. I lead," she stated firmly and Harry smiled
"Thank you," he said. "I appreciate it."
"No thanks. No appre— No appreeshee—" she began, then, as she tried to pronounce the troubling word, made a face as though she'd just swallowed a bug. "No need. Birdy-bird crap on Ksheta too."
Harry stifled a laugh and then extended his hand.
"Your name is Ksheta?" he asked. "Well my name is Harry."
Ksheta examined his hand momentarily then took it in both of hers and licked it once with a long pink tongue that tickled Harry's skin. She released his hand and offered her own in its place. He repeated the gesture and she gave him an odd look of confusion, then scampered off, following the small tributary.
"Come, come," she beckoned, seeming excited to be moving. "Come, Harry, together we will climb the hill of peril and slay the birdy-bird!"
Harry, feeling much better after his sleep, turned to face away from the mountain. The sun was sitting just over the horizon and the dark clouds that hung above it were turning a deep orange. Harry stared at the sunset with a small, sad smile on his face and wondered where Hedwig was at this precise moment and how she'd gotten on delivering the letters.
Out there somewhere, perhaps just over the horizon, the Brotherhood of Goblins was preparing for a war the likes of which hadn't been seen for two thousand years. Nearby, surely, the magical governments of Europe were likewise preparing their forces, even if they'd prefer to barter peace.
More than a thousand miles away, Ron and his family would probably be sipping cool drinks in the front garden, they might even have the wireless on, listening for the latest quidditch scores. Hermione would almost certainly be poring over some sort of book. Hagrid would be tending to his pumpkin patch, bent double over his fork with sweat beading on his forehead.
And he? While the rest of magical Europe readied for bed or war, Harry Potter was climbing up a mountain called 'the hill of peril', with a creature he couldn't identify to kill a bird she couldn't name, to rescue a talking hat.
Just another average day in the life of The Boy Who Lived then.
"The hill of peril," snorted Harry. Then he turned his back on the view, adjusted the wolf skin cloak across his shoulders, and began to climb after Ksheta. "Why, just for once, couldn't it be called the hill of sugar quills and chocolate frogs?"
A/N: You guys are awesome. I think I got like a hundred and fifty reviews in the last day or so. You have no idea how much I appreciate that, it's really cool of you all. Major thanks to Shezza, who pimped out my story. If you don't know who Shezza is, you're probably living under a rock, but the profile is at fanfictionnet/~Shezza88 and there you'll find hands down one of the best Fanfiction series ever. His writing and imagination is incredible. Also props to TbD who reviewed every chapter (I don't recommend you do, but it was freaking awesome), Wyrd, who went through loads of my old chapters and pulled out mistakes that I'll be correcting and 'An' who has some of the most entertaining reviews I've ever read. Final thanks to Bill Door again, because he went to town on this chapter and everyone at DLP who tossed suggestions and corrections at me. Much love :3