Harry Potter and the Path of Knowledge
Part 3: The Other Side
"Get... off... me!" Harry Potter tried to yell, only slightly muffled by the heap of books and overturned shelf crushing his back.
"Who, precisely, is on top of whom here, Potter?" was the snarled response. "*You* get off *me*. This is all your fault anyway."
"Sure, Malfoy, like you're an innocent bystander-"
"Although God knows I've tried to be!"
"-and anyway this isn't helping," Harry finished. "Look, you try and go left, I'll try and go right...."
"And then what?" Malfoy sneered. "A waltz? A game of Quidditch, perhaps? We're trapped under a *bookshelf*, Potter! Twitching one way or another isn't going to help." He shifted weight slightly, as if turning his head. "Do you hear something? Like footsteps?"
"Don't change the subject! If one of us *moved*, I might be able to get at my wand." It really was pointless arguing. Malfoy disagreed with everything he said on reflex alone. "Or you'd be able to get at yours," he added grudgingly after a moment. "Which means one of us'd be able to lift this thing off. Unless you've got a better i-"
Harry didn't get to finish his sentence, what with the sudden, sickening sensation of gravity kicking in. The floor opened beneath the two boys, dropping them and a pile of books about twenty feet straight down, to land in an untidy heap on solid, but relatively open, ground. "I'm getting very sick of falling into holes with you," Harry mumbled woozily to the pale Slytherin, who for once didn't snap back an answer.
"My goodness me," remarked a girl's voice. "There's something that doesn't happen every day, that it doesn't. Human boys coming out of the closet, right along with the rest. Well, it just goes to show, doesn't it?"
Harry shook off the books on top of him and sat up, swaying only slightly. Beside him, under a small pile of books, lay an unconscious Malfoy. No wonder he didn't snap at me, Harry thought, and resisted the urge to slap him awake. Not only had Malfoy, by virtue of being underneath Harry, been the first to hit the ground, he'd then been hit by the falling books and by the bouncing weight of Harry himself. Hitting him wouldn't solve anything and he probably wouldn't even feel it. Besides, it would probably make him angry, although Harry was at a loss to explain to himself why that mattered; Malfoy had probably been *born* angry at him.
Instead of a slap, Harry carefully took the books off the other boy and checked him for injuries without bothering to look up at the girl, who'd begun talking again. "M'am? M'am, could you come here please?" she called.
"What is it, dear?" answered an older voice. "Didn't you find the dusting books? They're in the ceiling closet on the second floor, you can't be too far away from them-"
"No M'am! I found them all right, just where you told me! Only there's these two boys as has fallen out of the closet right along with them, M'am, and I don't know what I should do!"
It was, Harry decided, much easier to deal with Malfoy when he wasn't conscious and being a jerk. It was much easier to appreciate the fact that the pale boy was actually quite good-looking, certainly enough to account for the previously inexplicable giggling and blushing among girls who didn't know about his attitude problem. And there weren't any broken bones, either; at least they were spared repeating *that* aspect of their previous experience as a 'team'. Satisfied as to the relative well-being of his companion, he looked up in the direction of the girl's voice.
It wasn't a girl. She was actually a girl-sized fluffy gray rabbit, who regarded him with inquisitive pink eyes and nose that wouldn't stop twitching. "Oh, haven't you got pretty eyes, all green and that," she crooned at him. "And awake and all. How's your little friend?"
Harry didn't bother correcting her; it was too difficult to explain precisely why he was going around with the other member of his mutual-hate society. Besides which, the rabbit was wearing a pink floral-patterned apron, and since rabbits generally didn't wear aprons (floral or not), he was probably hallucinating. "He's okay, just dazed. Who... what are you?"
The rabbit-girl fluffed herself up proudly. "I'm th'maid, sir. At this inn, don't you know, and my name's Rachel." Rachel. A normal name, which somehow made the fact that she was a rabbit even more bizarre. "And Miss Robin ought to be up presently so I can get along with my dusting." Her expression changed, and it took Harry a moment to recognize sternness. Few things are as difficult for a twitchy-nosed fluffy grey rabbit, girl-sized or not, as looking stern and forbidding. "And she's a very important lady in Gemina, understand, so you'll be on your best manners with her-"
"Yes. Yes, of course," Harry agreed immediately. Few things are as intimidating as stern fluffy grey rabbits in pink floral aprons, by virtue of their rarity.
Malfoy groaned and opened his eyes, blinking them a few times. "Well, that was fun," he said indistinctly. "What a good plan, Potter. Fall through the floor. I wouldn't have thought of it. I suppose one of us has got a broken arm again?"
"Nope. Nothing broken. How... um... how do you feel?"
"Like my head's been beaten with a hammer and then filled with cotton." He stretched and arranged himself in a sitting position. "Probably a concussion."
He didn't venture how he knew what a concussion felt like, and Harry didn't ask. "I... know a few Healing charms," he offered clumsily. "If you wanted, I could-"
"Oh, don't help me. The last thing I need is you *helping* me," Malfoy snapped, sounding like himself. Footsteps sounded on the staircase behind them, and Rachel hopped over to it, nose twitching excitedly. "Then we'd bond, and I'd have to vomit." Silvery-grey eyes darted to the staircase, blinked, then looked back at Harry. "Was that a rabbit?"
"Yeah. Her name's Rachel." Harry got to his feet. "Need a hand up?"
"No!" The pale boy tried to stand up too, but swayed dangerously and fell back over. "Ah. Yes."
Harry did his best not to grin I-told-you-so as he took hold of Malfoy's arm and helped him to his feet. "I still know those Healing-"
"No!" Malfoy snapped angrily. Then, unexpectedly, he grinned. "Besides, you couldn't anyway."
"I can! We did them in Charms last term, remember? And I was really good at them-"
"Not without your wand, I mean," the other backpedaled. "Haven't you noticed?"
Harry blinked, then cast about for his wand. Malfoy was right. It was gone, probably still up in the library. "I hadn't... have you got yours?"
Malfoy shook his head. "No." He scowled. "I hate being defenseless."
They were interrupted at that point by the woman-sized yellow bird (a canary, specifically) who'd come up the stairs. Rachel stood respectfully behind her. She opened her beak in what Harry sincerely hoped was a smile. "Well, it is nice to have company again. It's been quite a while. Rachel dear, go get some tea." The rabbit bobbed a curtsy and bounced down the stairs. "From the green tin, mind, these poor boys look like they can barely stand without hanging on to each other."
Malfoy flushed red and let go of Harry's arm, practically shoving himself away. Harry nodded at the bird-woman. "You're... Miss Robin?"
"Ah, I see Rachel mentioned me. She's a good girl, and wonderful at dusting, but dreadfully in awe." Miss Robin clacked her beak, apparently laughing. "Come along downstairs, come along. You're younger than we usually get down here. And two at once, practically unheard of." She clacked her beak again and started back down the stairs.
Harry glanced at Malfoy and shrugged, then followed. After a moment, Malfoy joined him. "Excuse me, Miss Robin," Harry said respectfully. "But we accidentally left some things up in your library-"
"Oh, we haven't got a library. No, no, you fell out of the closet."
"A closet in the ceiling?" Malfoy asked skeptically.
"Well, where else would you have one? We keep our dusting books in that one."
"Dusting books?" Harry asked. "You use books to dust?"
"Yes, books attract dust, everyone knows that. Are you two sure you're supposed to be here? You don't sound prepared at all." Miss Robin flicked one wing. "Well, it's not for me to say, I'm sure."
"You know why we're here?" Harry asked excitedly, following the oversized canary into a perfectly ordinary kitchen. "What do we do next?"
"You're walking the Path, aren't you?" she asked, using one taloned foot to pour tea into cups and hand it around. Rachel bobbed another curtsy and bounced out of the kitchen, trying to hide the fact that she'd swiped a piece of lettuce. "Every time, we have a boy or a girl coming out of some odd place claiming to be walking this Path of theirs. We haven't had one in years, though." She sipped her tea; Harry wondered how she did it without spilling, as she had no lips. "As for what you do next, your guess is much better than mine. But stay and drink your tea first."
Harry did. It was surprisingly good tea, unlike any other he'd had before. Malfoy gave his a cursory taste, then set it aside. Probably didn't like tea, or something. "Do you have any suggestions?" Harry asked Miss Robin, as though he sat in kitchens and drank tea with giant birds every day. "For what we should do next, I mean."
"You could ask the fortune-teller, I suppose," Miss Robin said doubtfully. "But... not really very reliable, you see. People who spend their time looking at what hasn't happened yet seldom are."
"To put it another way," Malfoy put in unexpectedly, "how would you go about getting where you want to go?"
She beamed, somehow. Harry, for his part, didn't want to think about how. "Oh, that's easy. I'd take the train if I was leaving town, or if I was visiting Miss Shorie, who lives next door, I'd walk over and knock on the door. Now, it *has* been nice talking with you boys. Congratulations and good luck, but I have to go now. I *do* run a business." She vanished.
Harry buried his face in his arms, ignoring his tea. "Rabbits and chickens-"
"I believe she was a canary."
"-that just disappear! Or curtsy and hop off. And we don't even know what to do next!" He sat up suddenly, putting his chin in his hands. "Except visit this fortune-teller of hers."
Or take a train or knock on a door, Malfoy added silently, but he kept the thought to himself. Aside from the fact that only the train made any sense, it was too close to actually helping Potter to be worth saying.
"So where's this fortune-teller?" Harry mused. "Professor Trelawney's at the very top of one of the towers, I wonder if maybe it's like that."
"*I* wonder if you could just ask," Malfoy replied testily. "It would probably get this over quicker."
Harry blinked. "Why didn't I think of that?"
"Because you're a-"
"Thanks, Draco!" Harry bounded up and out. Now things were moving! Maybe the Grey Lady had been right in the first place to want Malfoy along. He felt almost friendly towards the pale boy. "'S all right if I call you that, right?"
"Wrong!" Lost cause. Harry wasn't listening. He sighed and stood up, followed the dark-haired boy out to the inn's main room. Harry bounded over to Miss Robin immediately, asking how to find the fortune-teller. Malfoy contented himself with looking around.
On the face of it, it was a perfectly ordinary room. It had armchairs, a fireplace, several small end tables and coffee tables, as well as a reception desk with a Muggle-style grandfather clock right beside it. It also had a number of strange... beings populating it. Aside from Miss Robin, there was a tall thing that looked like a walking leek, a fat splotched rabbit in a suit, and a teapot with small arms engaged in a fierce argument with what appeared to be a squirrel.
"At the marketplace!" Harry announced, giving no sign he'd noticed the assortment of creatures in the room. "Let's go!" He didn't wait for his companion, just raced out the door.
Miss Robin clacked her beak amusedly. "You must have a great deal of energy to keep up with that boy."
"You have no idea," the pale boy replied as he was leaving.
After the door shut behind him, Miss Robin clacked her beak and dissolved into the form of a slim girl made of fine silvery mist. "What a cute pair they *do* make," the Grey Lady remarked, then laughed and vanished. "I wonder what happens next."
*****
The marketplace was typical of open-air marketplaces everywhere. Loud, crowded, filled to overflowing with teeming life. It was surrounded on all sides by uniform red brick buildings separated only by narrow cobbled roads. Harry and Draco were the only humans in evidence, all the other people teeming around were animals or vegetables of some kind, but the stalls sold ordinary things. *Not* fruits and vegetables, obviously, but there were booksellers and cloth vendors, spice merchants and purveyors of fine tableware. "This place is a warren," Harry said, pulling the other close so he didn't have to yell to be heard. "How're we gonna find this fortune-teller?"
Malfoy jerked back. "You got directions, didn't you, Potter? Start looking."
Harry snorted. "My directions consisted of how to get here and the fact that she's hard to miss. Let's split up."
"What?" Malfoy asked suspiciously. Good and bad. Good: he might get five minutes where he didn't have to deal with Potter's incessant yammering. Bad: he might get lost and then have to deal with walking, talking vegetation for the rest of his life.
"Split up," Harry repeated. "We can meet back here in an hour or something."
"And why would we do this? We don't know who you're looking for."
"The fortune-teller. She's hard to miss." Harry darted off through the hordes. "In an hour, Draco!" He was quickly lost from sight.
"Don't call me that," the pale boy muttered reflexively. "You are *not* my friend." He sighed and began looking around. 'Hard to miss', ha. Anyone here was hard to miss. Well, unless he wanted to stand in one place for an hour... Malfoy left, after carefully memorizing landmarks so he'd be able to get back after his hour was up.
*****
Elsewhere, Harry was searching for a fortune-teller. Unfortunately, he envisioned someone rather like Professor Trelawney, and no one who looked vaguely like a jewelry-coated scarab beetle was much in evidence. "This is going to take some time," he muttered.
"You look lost!" said a bright voice off to his right. Harry started violently, then turned to see Rachel, the rabbit maid from Miss Robin's inn, staring at him with her unblinking pink eyes. "Can I help?"
Oh no, Harry thought, I think she *likes* me. "Hi, Rachel," he said somewhat weakly. "I'm looking for the fortune-teller-"
The rabbit shook all over, bobbing happily. "Oh, oh, oh! How lucky! I'm going there now, I am." She twitched her nose shyly. "Want to come along?"
Harry nodded gratefully (she was a nice girl, as rabbits went) and tried to think of something that wouldn't be mistaken for flirting as he fell into step with her. "Er... why do you need to see her? I thought you lived here."
Rachel's ears drooped. "Well, Miss Robin noticed I'd left the pile of dusting books up by the closet and not picked them up again after you and your friend came out, and one of our guests fell over it. So now instead of dusting I have to clean the silver, but we're out of polish. So I need to ask the fortune-teller where I can buy some today."
Harry wrinkled his nose. "Seems like a dull thing to ask someone who sees the future," he said, more for something to say than because it did.
Rachel giggled. "Silly. She sells maps, too, since she knows what the market's going to look like before anyone else. Makes a lot more money that way, too. If she waited for people to ask her about their futures, she'd starve. The only people who ask her things are Miss Robin's visitors. Like you."
It turned out that the fortune-teller always made her commercial home in the same location, for the convenience of the people who bought maps from her. Harry was not disappointed in his expectations. The fortune-teller was a great myna bird, brilliantly colored and apparently enamored of gold jewelry, at least judging from the amount festooned around her taloned feet and bright wings. She even had huge glasses that magnified her eyes to a creepily large and intimidating size balanced on her curved beak.
Rachle immediately bobbed over and asked for a map, which was given her with an opened-bea 'smile' and a placid remark of, "Left the dusting books out, did you, Rachel?" Rachel shuddered, took her map, and bounded off at her top hopping speed, with her apron-ribbons fluttering after her. "Always the same thing with her," chuckled the fortune-teller. "And what can I do for you, Harry Potter?"
Harry, now used to the oddness around him, didn't ask how a giant parrot-variety bird knew his name. "I need to know what to do next."
The fortune-teller clucked. "I can give you a map, telling you where everything here is. But I'm afraid questions concerning what to do next are rather-"
"You're a fortune-teller, aren't you?" Harry demanded. It was just his luck to get a fortune-teller who was a hybrid cross of Professor Trelawney's looks and Gilderoy Lockhart's mental acuity. "How do you make your maps, then, if you can't see the future?"
The myna bird laughed. "That's easy. The vendors ask me where they'll be that day, and I answer them. Then they go. I decide it all the night before."
Harry blinked. "You decide how the market's set up? What if you do it wrong?"
"It's just a matter of thinking it through, Harry," she said, ruffling her feathers importantly. "For example, I don't put cloth sellers right next to people who sell barbecued ribs, but I don't mind at all putting them there if they sell only napkins. Any problem, when attacked thoughtfully, can be overcome in style. You see?"
"So you don't actually see the future at all." Harry scowled. "So you can't help me."
The bird shrugged. "I can't give you a map telling you what to do, true, just one saying where things are. Where you go, what you do... those are your decisions. What do you think you're supposed to do?"
"I'm... I'm trying to save a friend of mine," Harry said, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of the big bird. "He'll die unless I hurry. So... even if you can't see the future, could you give me your advice?"
"I'd give you my advice even if I could see te future," the fortune-teller said sharply. "I can't tell you what to do. I advise, however, that since you feel speed is of the essence, you take the train. It's just leaving in a moment or two."
Harry surged back to his feet. "Where?"
The bird waved a wing languidly. "Turn around. There you are. The Gemina Train Station, platform One-and-only."
When Harry turned around, there was indeed a train sitting there. When he turned around to face the fortune-teller again, she was still there watching him, only not surrounded by the hustle of the market. Instead, the grey, rushing mass of a train station surrounded her, making her colors even more brilliant and eye-piercing. "Wasn't this where you wanted to be?" she asked innocently, bracelets jangling as she lifted a taloned foot holding a ticket.
"Well... yes, but... I mean...." Harry floundered, then rallied and tried again. "I mean, I've got someone with me. I said we'd back in an hour, and I don't want to ditch h-"
The bird cocked her head. "No? Well, I suppose you could go back. But this is the last train, you know. You won't get another chance. You *did* say speed was important. Do you really want to wait for someone else to come back, and then longer to find another way?"
Harry bowed his head. It was true. Every second extra he spent on this Path thing was one second less time Ron had. And when balanced against his best friend's life, how important was a 'we'll meet back in an hour' said to someone who hated him? It wasn't as if Malfoy was doing anything more than griping about everything and thinking up new insults, wasn't as if he was helping at all.
Harry took the ticket, and boarded the train just as it was leaving. He didn't look back.
With a sigh, the Grey Lady discarded the bright feathers of the myna bird. Not unexpected, though still a somewhat surprising development, she thought and vanished from sight. The train station dissolved around her, replaced again by the swirl of the obsessively busy Gemina marketplace. With a quick flip of her misty hand, she assumed another guise and settled down to wait.
Part 3: The Other Side
"Get... off... me!" Harry Potter tried to yell, only slightly muffled by the heap of books and overturned shelf crushing his back.
"Who, precisely, is on top of whom here, Potter?" was the snarled response. "*You* get off *me*. This is all your fault anyway."
"Sure, Malfoy, like you're an innocent bystander-"
"Although God knows I've tried to be!"
"-and anyway this isn't helping," Harry finished. "Look, you try and go left, I'll try and go right...."
"And then what?" Malfoy sneered. "A waltz? A game of Quidditch, perhaps? We're trapped under a *bookshelf*, Potter! Twitching one way or another isn't going to help." He shifted weight slightly, as if turning his head. "Do you hear something? Like footsteps?"
"Don't change the subject! If one of us *moved*, I might be able to get at my wand." It really was pointless arguing. Malfoy disagreed with everything he said on reflex alone. "Or you'd be able to get at yours," he added grudgingly after a moment. "Which means one of us'd be able to lift this thing off. Unless you've got a better i-"
Harry didn't get to finish his sentence, what with the sudden, sickening sensation of gravity kicking in. The floor opened beneath the two boys, dropping them and a pile of books about twenty feet straight down, to land in an untidy heap on solid, but relatively open, ground. "I'm getting very sick of falling into holes with you," Harry mumbled woozily to the pale Slytherin, who for once didn't snap back an answer.
"My goodness me," remarked a girl's voice. "There's something that doesn't happen every day, that it doesn't. Human boys coming out of the closet, right along with the rest. Well, it just goes to show, doesn't it?"
Harry shook off the books on top of him and sat up, swaying only slightly. Beside him, under a small pile of books, lay an unconscious Malfoy. No wonder he didn't snap at me, Harry thought, and resisted the urge to slap him awake. Not only had Malfoy, by virtue of being underneath Harry, been the first to hit the ground, he'd then been hit by the falling books and by the bouncing weight of Harry himself. Hitting him wouldn't solve anything and he probably wouldn't even feel it. Besides, it would probably make him angry, although Harry was at a loss to explain to himself why that mattered; Malfoy had probably been *born* angry at him.
Instead of a slap, Harry carefully took the books off the other boy and checked him for injuries without bothering to look up at the girl, who'd begun talking again. "M'am? M'am, could you come here please?" she called.
"What is it, dear?" answered an older voice. "Didn't you find the dusting books? They're in the ceiling closet on the second floor, you can't be too far away from them-"
"No M'am! I found them all right, just where you told me! Only there's these two boys as has fallen out of the closet right along with them, M'am, and I don't know what I should do!"
It was, Harry decided, much easier to deal with Malfoy when he wasn't conscious and being a jerk. It was much easier to appreciate the fact that the pale boy was actually quite good-looking, certainly enough to account for the previously inexplicable giggling and blushing among girls who didn't know about his attitude problem. And there weren't any broken bones, either; at least they were spared repeating *that* aspect of their previous experience as a 'team'. Satisfied as to the relative well-being of his companion, he looked up in the direction of the girl's voice.
It wasn't a girl. She was actually a girl-sized fluffy gray rabbit, who regarded him with inquisitive pink eyes and nose that wouldn't stop twitching. "Oh, haven't you got pretty eyes, all green and that," she crooned at him. "And awake and all. How's your little friend?"
Harry didn't bother correcting her; it was too difficult to explain precisely why he was going around with the other member of his mutual-hate society. Besides which, the rabbit was wearing a pink floral-patterned apron, and since rabbits generally didn't wear aprons (floral or not), he was probably hallucinating. "He's okay, just dazed. Who... what are you?"
The rabbit-girl fluffed herself up proudly. "I'm th'maid, sir. At this inn, don't you know, and my name's Rachel." Rachel. A normal name, which somehow made the fact that she was a rabbit even more bizarre. "And Miss Robin ought to be up presently so I can get along with my dusting." Her expression changed, and it took Harry a moment to recognize sternness. Few things are as difficult for a twitchy-nosed fluffy grey rabbit, girl-sized or not, as looking stern and forbidding. "And she's a very important lady in Gemina, understand, so you'll be on your best manners with her-"
"Yes. Yes, of course," Harry agreed immediately. Few things are as intimidating as stern fluffy grey rabbits in pink floral aprons, by virtue of their rarity.
Malfoy groaned and opened his eyes, blinking them a few times. "Well, that was fun," he said indistinctly. "What a good plan, Potter. Fall through the floor. I wouldn't have thought of it. I suppose one of us has got a broken arm again?"
"Nope. Nothing broken. How... um... how do you feel?"
"Like my head's been beaten with a hammer and then filled with cotton." He stretched and arranged himself in a sitting position. "Probably a concussion."
He didn't venture how he knew what a concussion felt like, and Harry didn't ask. "I... know a few Healing charms," he offered clumsily. "If you wanted, I could-"
"Oh, don't help me. The last thing I need is you *helping* me," Malfoy snapped, sounding like himself. Footsteps sounded on the staircase behind them, and Rachel hopped over to it, nose twitching excitedly. "Then we'd bond, and I'd have to vomit." Silvery-grey eyes darted to the staircase, blinked, then looked back at Harry. "Was that a rabbit?"
"Yeah. Her name's Rachel." Harry got to his feet. "Need a hand up?"
"No!" The pale boy tried to stand up too, but swayed dangerously and fell back over. "Ah. Yes."
Harry did his best not to grin I-told-you-so as he took hold of Malfoy's arm and helped him to his feet. "I still know those Healing-"
"No!" Malfoy snapped angrily. Then, unexpectedly, he grinned. "Besides, you couldn't anyway."
"I can! We did them in Charms last term, remember? And I was really good at them-"
"Not without your wand, I mean," the other backpedaled. "Haven't you noticed?"
Harry blinked, then cast about for his wand. Malfoy was right. It was gone, probably still up in the library. "I hadn't... have you got yours?"
Malfoy shook his head. "No." He scowled. "I hate being defenseless."
They were interrupted at that point by the woman-sized yellow bird (a canary, specifically) who'd come up the stairs. Rachel stood respectfully behind her. She opened her beak in what Harry sincerely hoped was a smile. "Well, it is nice to have company again. It's been quite a while. Rachel dear, go get some tea." The rabbit bobbed a curtsy and bounced down the stairs. "From the green tin, mind, these poor boys look like they can barely stand without hanging on to each other."
Malfoy flushed red and let go of Harry's arm, practically shoving himself away. Harry nodded at the bird-woman. "You're... Miss Robin?"
"Ah, I see Rachel mentioned me. She's a good girl, and wonderful at dusting, but dreadfully in awe." Miss Robin clacked her beak, apparently laughing. "Come along downstairs, come along. You're younger than we usually get down here. And two at once, practically unheard of." She clacked her beak again and started back down the stairs.
Harry glanced at Malfoy and shrugged, then followed. After a moment, Malfoy joined him. "Excuse me, Miss Robin," Harry said respectfully. "But we accidentally left some things up in your library-"
"Oh, we haven't got a library. No, no, you fell out of the closet."
"A closet in the ceiling?" Malfoy asked skeptically.
"Well, where else would you have one? We keep our dusting books in that one."
"Dusting books?" Harry asked. "You use books to dust?"
"Yes, books attract dust, everyone knows that. Are you two sure you're supposed to be here? You don't sound prepared at all." Miss Robin flicked one wing. "Well, it's not for me to say, I'm sure."
"You know why we're here?" Harry asked excitedly, following the oversized canary into a perfectly ordinary kitchen. "What do we do next?"
"You're walking the Path, aren't you?" she asked, using one taloned foot to pour tea into cups and hand it around. Rachel bobbed another curtsy and bounced out of the kitchen, trying to hide the fact that she'd swiped a piece of lettuce. "Every time, we have a boy or a girl coming out of some odd place claiming to be walking this Path of theirs. We haven't had one in years, though." She sipped her tea; Harry wondered how she did it without spilling, as she had no lips. "As for what you do next, your guess is much better than mine. But stay and drink your tea first."
Harry did. It was surprisingly good tea, unlike any other he'd had before. Malfoy gave his a cursory taste, then set it aside. Probably didn't like tea, or something. "Do you have any suggestions?" Harry asked Miss Robin, as though he sat in kitchens and drank tea with giant birds every day. "For what we should do next, I mean."
"You could ask the fortune-teller, I suppose," Miss Robin said doubtfully. "But... not really very reliable, you see. People who spend their time looking at what hasn't happened yet seldom are."
"To put it another way," Malfoy put in unexpectedly, "how would you go about getting where you want to go?"
She beamed, somehow. Harry, for his part, didn't want to think about how. "Oh, that's easy. I'd take the train if I was leaving town, or if I was visiting Miss Shorie, who lives next door, I'd walk over and knock on the door. Now, it *has* been nice talking with you boys. Congratulations and good luck, but I have to go now. I *do* run a business." She vanished.
Harry buried his face in his arms, ignoring his tea. "Rabbits and chickens-"
"I believe she was a canary."
"-that just disappear! Or curtsy and hop off. And we don't even know what to do next!" He sat up suddenly, putting his chin in his hands. "Except visit this fortune-teller of hers."
Or take a train or knock on a door, Malfoy added silently, but he kept the thought to himself. Aside from the fact that only the train made any sense, it was too close to actually helping Potter to be worth saying.
"So where's this fortune-teller?" Harry mused. "Professor Trelawney's at the very top of one of the towers, I wonder if maybe it's like that."
"*I* wonder if you could just ask," Malfoy replied testily. "It would probably get this over quicker."
Harry blinked. "Why didn't I think of that?"
"Because you're a-"
"Thanks, Draco!" Harry bounded up and out. Now things were moving! Maybe the Grey Lady had been right in the first place to want Malfoy along. He felt almost friendly towards the pale boy. "'S all right if I call you that, right?"
"Wrong!" Lost cause. Harry wasn't listening. He sighed and stood up, followed the dark-haired boy out to the inn's main room. Harry bounded over to Miss Robin immediately, asking how to find the fortune-teller. Malfoy contented himself with looking around.
On the face of it, it was a perfectly ordinary room. It had armchairs, a fireplace, several small end tables and coffee tables, as well as a reception desk with a Muggle-style grandfather clock right beside it. It also had a number of strange... beings populating it. Aside from Miss Robin, there was a tall thing that looked like a walking leek, a fat splotched rabbit in a suit, and a teapot with small arms engaged in a fierce argument with what appeared to be a squirrel.
"At the marketplace!" Harry announced, giving no sign he'd noticed the assortment of creatures in the room. "Let's go!" He didn't wait for his companion, just raced out the door.
Miss Robin clacked her beak amusedly. "You must have a great deal of energy to keep up with that boy."
"You have no idea," the pale boy replied as he was leaving.
After the door shut behind him, Miss Robin clacked her beak and dissolved into the form of a slim girl made of fine silvery mist. "What a cute pair they *do* make," the Grey Lady remarked, then laughed and vanished. "I wonder what happens next."
*****
The marketplace was typical of open-air marketplaces everywhere. Loud, crowded, filled to overflowing with teeming life. It was surrounded on all sides by uniform red brick buildings separated only by narrow cobbled roads. Harry and Draco were the only humans in evidence, all the other people teeming around were animals or vegetables of some kind, but the stalls sold ordinary things. *Not* fruits and vegetables, obviously, but there were booksellers and cloth vendors, spice merchants and purveyors of fine tableware. "This place is a warren," Harry said, pulling the other close so he didn't have to yell to be heard. "How're we gonna find this fortune-teller?"
Malfoy jerked back. "You got directions, didn't you, Potter? Start looking."
Harry snorted. "My directions consisted of how to get here and the fact that she's hard to miss. Let's split up."
"What?" Malfoy asked suspiciously. Good and bad. Good: he might get five minutes where he didn't have to deal with Potter's incessant yammering. Bad: he might get lost and then have to deal with walking, talking vegetation for the rest of his life.
"Split up," Harry repeated. "We can meet back here in an hour or something."
"And why would we do this? We don't know who you're looking for."
"The fortune-teller. She's hard to miss." Harry darted off through the hordes. "In an hour, Draco!" He was quickly lost from sight.
"Don't call me that," the pale boy muttered reflexively. "You are *not* my friend." He sighed and began looking around. 'Hard to miss', ha. Anyone here was hard to miss. Well, unless he wanted to stand in one place for an hour... Malfoy left, after carefully memorizing landmarks so he'd be able to get back after his hour was up.
*****
Elsewhere, Harry was searching for a fortune-teller. Unfortunately, he envisioned someone rather like Professor Trelawney, and no one who looked vaguely like a jewelry-coated scarab beetle was much in evidence. "This is going to take some time," he muttered.
"You look lost!" said a bright voice off to his right. Harry started violently, then turned to see Rachel, the rabbit maid from Miss Robin's inn, staring at him with her unblinking pink eyes. "Can I help?"
Oh no, Harry thought, I think she *likes* me. "Hi, Rachel," he said somewhat weakly. "I'm looking for the fortune-teller-"
The rabbit shook all over, bobbing happily. "Oh, oh, oh! How lucky! I'm going there now, I am." She twitched her nose shyly. "Want to come along?"
Harry nodded gratefully (she was a nice girl, as rabbits went) and tried to think of something that wouldn't be mistaken for flirting as he fell into step with her. "Er... why do you need to see her? I thought you lived here."
Rachel's ears drooped. "Well, Miss Robin noticed I'd left the pile of dusting books up by the closet and not picked them up again after you and your friend came out, and one of our guests fell over it. So now instead of dusting I have to clean the silver, but we're out of polish. So I need to ask the fortune-teller where I can buy some today."
Harry wrinkled his nose. "Seems like a dull thing to ask someone who sees the future," he said, more for something to say than because it did.
Rachel giggled. "Silly. She sells maps, too, since she knows what the market's going to look like before anyone else. Makes a lot more money that way, too. If she waited for people to ask her about their futures, she'd starve. The only people who ask her things are Miss Robin's visitors. Like you."
It turned out that the fortune-teller always made her commercial home in the same location, for the convenience of the people who bought maps from her. Harry was not disappointed in his expectations. The fortune-teller was a great myna bird, brilliantly colored and apparently enamored of gold jewelry, at least judging from the amount festooned around her taloned feet and bright wings. She even had huge glasses that magnified her eyes to a creepily large and intimidating size balanced on her curved beak.
Rachle immediately bobbed over and asked for a map, which was given her with an opened-bea 'smile' and a placid remark of, "Left the dusting books out, did you, Rachel?" Rachel shuddered, took her map, and bounded off at her top hopping speed, with her apron-ribbons fluttering after her. "Always the same thing with her," chuckled the fortune-teller. "And what can I do for you, Harry Potter?"
Harry, now used to the oddness around him, didn't ask how a giant parrot-variety bird knew his name. "I need to know what to do next."
The fortune-teller clucked. "I can give you a map, telling you where everything here is. But I'm afraid questions concerning what to do next are rather-"
"You're a fortune-teller, aren't you?" Harry demanded. It was just his luck to get a fortune-teller who was a hybrid cross of Professor Trelawney's looks and Gilderoy Lockhart's mental acuity. "How do you make your maps, then, if you can't see the future?"
The myna bird laughed. "That's easy. The vendors ask me where they'll be that day, and I answer them. Then they go. I decide it all the night before."
Harry blinked. "You decide how the market's set up? What if you do it wrong?"
"It's just a matter of thinking it through, Harry," she said, ruffling her feathers importantly. "For example, I don't put cloth sellers right next to people who sell barbecued ribs, but I don't mind at all putting them there if they sell only napkins. Any problem, when attacked thoughtfully, can be overcome in style. You see?"
"So you don't actually see the future at all." Harry scowled. "So you can't help me."
The bird shrugged. "I can't give you a map telling you what to do, true, just one saying where things are. Where you go, what you do... those are your decisions. What do you think you're supposed to do?"
"I'm... I'm trying to save a friend of mine," Harry said, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of the big bird. "He'll die unless I hurry. So... even if you can't see the future, could you give me your advice?"
"I'd give you my advice even if I could see te future," the fortune-teller said sharply. "I can't tell you what to do. I advise, however, that since you feel speed is of the essence, you take the train. It's just leaving in a moment or two."
Harry surged back to his feet. "Where?"
The bird waved a wing languidly. "Turn around. There you are. The Gemina Train Station, platform One-and-only."
When Harry turned around, there was indeed a train sitting there. When he turned around to face the fortune-teller again, she was still there watching him, only not surrounded by the hustle of the market. Instead, the grey, rushing mass of a train station surrounded her, making her colors even more brilliant and eye-piercing. "Wasn't this where you wanted to be?" she asked innocently, bracelets jangling as she lifted a taloned foot holding a ticket.
"Well... yes, but... I mean...." Harry floundered, then rallied and tried again. "I mean, I've got someone with me. I said we'd back in an hour, and I don't want to ditch h-"
The bird cocked her head. "No? Well, I suppose you could go back. But this is the last train, you know. You won't get another chance. You *did* say speed was important. Do you really want to wait for someone else to come back, and then longer to find another way?"
Harry bowed his head. It was true. Every second extra he spent on this Path thing was one second less time Ron had. And when balanced against his best friend's life, how important was a 'we'll meet back in an hour' said to someone who hated him? It wasn't as if Malfoy was doing anything more than griping about everything and thinking up new insults, wasn't as if he was helping at all.
Harry took the ticket, and boarded the train just as it was leaving. He didn't look back.
With a sigh, the Grey Lady discarded the bright feathers of the myna bird. Not unexpected, though still a somewhat surprising development, she thought and vanished from sight. The train station dissolved around her, replaced again by the swirl of the obsessively busy Gemina marketplace. With a quick flip of her misty hand, she assumed another guise and settled down to wait.