Author's note: What? Action? In one of my stories? You'd better make the most of it - doesn't happen often! Try and read Hestia's speeches in a Welsh voice and then she doesn't sound quite so much like Yoda.
To Eagle Eyes: I will load 4 and 5 soon - they follow on very closely from each other. But just wanted to get the seasonal story up first!
To Vert: Ragnarocket isn't a real word!
DECK THE HALLS
By Bellegeste
CHAPTER 12: 'RAGNAROCKET'
Tuesday 24th December
The fire coughed a puff of Kingfisher blue smoke, flecked with streaks of green flame. And another. A splutter of brilliant, jade green sparks fizzled in the grate, then more spurts of blue fire. Was a dragon choking in there?
"Disturbance in the Floo!" Snape was on his feet in an instant, wand raised. "Stand back! I'm not expecting anybody, are you?"
Harry and Hermione couldn't think of a single person who would dare to visit them at Snape's house on Christmas Eve.
"Se-ve-rus!" A wailing cry shrivelled amidst the blaze and was snatched back up the chimney. Snape motioned the two of them further away, and directed his wand into the heart of the fire.
"Aperio!" The sparking reduced to sea-green spits and, above the crackling, came broken phrases, a dire warning:
"Sever-us! Save the… …must go… …wards…Go!"
For an instant the face of Professor McGonagall was recognisable, curls of flame warping around her hair, licking through her eyes and nose…
"Aperio!" Snape repeated, focussing the full, diamond-tipped intensity of his concentration on the flickering features, drawing them in and together by sheer, tidal force of will.
"Professor! Tell me quickly!" He knew he could not long withstand the sucking drag of the failing Floo.
McGonagall spoke fast, seizing the precious window of coherence to deliver her message, the words intelligible now, and terrible.
"It is a raid, Severus. You must leave at once. The Cottage wards are breached. The Floo is unsafe, corrupted. Take the children and go. Get out of there. Do not… …not stay and fight…"
And then she was distending, distorting, the features sliding horribly apart and over one another, slipping away into the merciless green heat in a melt of grotesque inhumanity, the beheaded echo of her voice still writhing in the ashes:
"…breached… …Spinster's… …meet you… leave…"
Snape, his face white with shock, was already half-way down the hall.
"Harry! Get the broomsticks! Cloaks, gloves, hats - whatever. It's cold. Here -take a swig – Warming Potion. We're leaving. Now! Move! Both of you, hurry!"
As she fumbled into her cloak, haste making her clumsy, dropping her gloves, struggling with the clasps, Hermione could see Snape directing some kind of a spell at the entrance to the basement. Then he was hustling them roughly out of the door, flinging his own cloak carelessly round his shoulders as he went.
"Follow me. Stay close; hold tight; fly fast," he ordered, poised to kick off. "Hurry up!"
"No," said Harry.
"We have to go now, Harry. It's not safe. Questions later."
"I'm not leaving." Harry stubbornly stood his ground.
"Don't be absurd! We don't have time for this. Do as you're told! Get on that broomstick at once!" Snape barked.
"What? And let some - some who? We don't even know who they are - come and ransack the house? Wreck all our stuff? Not bloody likely! I'm going to stay here and fight!"
"You don't know what you're talking about, boy! You don't know the half of it. There's more at stake here than you realise. This is no time for Gryffindor heroics. I've got to get you out of here." A note of desperation joined the urgency in Snape's demands.
"I'm not a kid. I can fight. I've fought Voldemort before now - how can this be any worse? Do you honestly think I'm going to run away? This is my home too, you know! How can you be such a coward? I thought Death Eaters were supposed to be brave!" Harry was staunchly determined, challenging, unwavering. Snape's eyes flared with fury.
"I'm warning you, Harry. Do as I say! Get on that stick and fly. Now!"
"Make me!"
Snape grabbed him by his shoulders and for a moment they confronted each other, eye to eye, youthful bravado against the pragmatism of experience. Snape's fists tightened, his knuckles whitening in a grip that was equal parts anger and anguish, the iceberg professionalism cracking in the warmth of his son's misguided courage.
"Harry!" he implored in a hurried, low whisper, underpinned with emotion. "Do you think I want to leave my home? I have no choice. We have no choice. McGonagall would not send a message like that for nothing. It is my responsibility to keep you safe - and Hermione. I cannot allow you to put yourself at risk. Even if it means abandoning my home. Your safety is more important. Do you understand?"
Dumbly Harry nodded.
"Then get on that stick and stop behaving like an obstinate, arrogant little fool! Fly!"
x x x
As they soared upwards, the valley mist settled into the spaces left by their departure, shrouding the deserted cottage in swirling bands of foggy white, until it disappeared from view beneath them. Snape did not look back. He flew fast, so fast Hermione could barely keep up, his face set in stone.
Acutely conscious of the sacrifice the man had just made, Hermione felt like an encumbrance, a millstone. She was holding them back. Without her they could surely have Apparated out of danger, even if it meant another under-age rap for Harry. She wished she could fly down to the nearest Muggle church and sneak inside to sit out Christmas in safe anonymity. No one would bother what happened to her. She was insignificant in all this. What had Snape said? 'There's more at stake than you realise'? What was at stake? Who were the attackers? It had to be more than a gang of drunken Christmas revellers. In any case, how would they have got in? Wasn't the whole estate warded? Hadn't Harry laughed about his father, said he was so paranoid that the place was warded as securely as Hogwarts? Perhaps they wouldn't have been able to Apparate after all. No wonder he was alarmed. But why couldn't they have hidden somewhere? Watched what was going on? Crept back when it was all over? Were the attackers looking for them? For Snape? For Harry?
Suddenly she understood why hiding had not been an option. Voldemort could sense Harry's presence. If he were part of the gang… McGonagall hadn't said that though. Perhaps she didn't have to. Who else could penetrate Snape's wards? Who indeed.
Harry was flying alongside his father, shouting questions. The icy rush of air whipped the words back into their slipstream, flinging them away into the darkness, accusations and their answers dropping into the night like so much discarded litter.
"Where……going to?"
"…rendezvous… …Jones"
"How far?"
"…only… …miles..."
That was a long flight. Not as long as when they had travelled from Hogwarts to the Ministry of Magic on the thestrals, or when Harry had flown from Privet Drive to Grimmauld Place, but far enough. And those journeys had been in the summer, not on an arctic December evening. Hermione couldn't believe that there wasn't somewhere nearer, which would be safe enough for the time-being. This had to be serious. Now she was very frightened.
They were flying high - there had been no time for Disillusionment Charms to hide them from stargazing Muggles. Not that there would be that many about at this time on Christmas Eve - they'd all be at home tucking into their smoked salmon sandwiches and snuggling down to watch 'The Sound of Music' or 'It's a Wonderful Life' or whatever feel-good classic the TV moguls had unwrapped from its Christmas assortment this year.
Despite the Warming Potion, Hermione was already colder than she had ever been in her life. She'd taken a big swig of the stuff as per instructions (Harry had virtually emptied the flask, leaving precious little for Snape himself), and, at the time, the magic had scorched through her like a Salamander's kiss. For the first half-hour she had glowed, insulated, buffered against the weather, but gradually the freezing temperatures and icy winds were taking their toll. Away from the enveloping dampness that padded the valleys, the air was dry, thin and cold - brutally, bone-splinteringly cold. Under her woollen hat, Hermione's ears had numbed to non-existence; her fingers, locked around the broom-handle, were brittle twigs - she prayed that there was a wizard cure for frostbite: her dripping nose was going to need it.
Far below them the villages twinkled like tiny Santa's grottoes, and the lines of streetlamps winked through the frosty dark like strings of fairy lights on a distant Christmas tree.
Soon they had left the lights behind. Below them now the land lay bleak and windswept: long, low hills rising to the barren, flat-topped, granite tors of Dartmoor, stark and inhospitable. The air temperature around them had dropped by several degrees. Ahead, rashers of streaky cloud formed the pale, unappetising filling between two slabs of black: the moor and the night.
Snape slowed and motioned them downwards. Hermione marvelled that he could still move at all - her own extremities had long since stopped responding to signals. She suspected that if she attempted as much as a wave, she would simply topple off her broom and crash to earth like a frozen meteorite.
"Fly below the cloud layer," he called. "Warmer. No Muggles here."
Hermione blinked her reply - her eyelids seemed to be the only part of her still mobile. 'Warm', she thought, was a wildly optimistic adjective.
"Lower, Harry," he shouted, "not through the cloud… …too wet…"
Snape never flew through cloud. Over it or under it; never through it. Never again. Not since that time when… He could recall the facts, but the terror of that day… the childish panic at being alone and lost, … the vaporous, white blindness that had robbed his senses, choking in his throat and lungs, tasting of death, of damp souls lost and swirling in misty purgatory, muffling his seven year old cries for help… …all that was locked in the past, consigned to the safety of the Pensieve…
Dropping, they levelled out at a couple of hundred feet and flew on grimly, heading due North. Now, Hermione could make out features on the face of the moor - the contoured rise and fall of the fields, darker sockets - hollows - rugged projections; boundary lines furrowing the hills: low banks running in parallel down the valley slopes, dividing the land into narrow strips, the frowning, stony reaves crossing at right-angles, cutting enclosed land from the brow of the open moor. Dotting the landscape like acne scars, she could make out the grassy pits of early settlement, pounds and hut circles and, here and there, the ringworm round of a ceremonial stone circle.
A silent, blue-white disc shone up at her from the mercury slick of a reservoir, silvering the tors, mirroring back the sterile, profane perfection of the full-moon.
In the metallic moonlight all colours had become steel. Hermione found herself supplying a muted palette to the blueprint below, matching antiquities: Bronze Age browns of earth and winter heather; granite greys of the Iron Age, rusted in rocky outcrops; a greenish patina of the sparse and short-cropped grass.
In the far distance, away to her left, were the high tors - Whitehorse Hill, Yes Tor and High Willhays - pale and snow-sprinkled. There's my white Christmas, she told herself. Their summits were not sharp, Alpine crags but rounded by eternity, aged, mature, rumpled like grubby bedclothes covering the bulky form of an ancient, sleeping giant.
Now the dark land was looming up towards them and Hermione had the sensation of falling… until she realised that it was the hill ahead rising steeply, and they were approaching it at an angle. She looked over at Harry - he seemed as ice-welded to his broom as she was, and he showed no sign of pulling up and increasing altitude. Hermione calculated that they might skim the summit by thirty feet or so.
This tor rose in a swelling mound, topped by a pert, smooth-sided nipple of striated stone, an enormous cairn perhaps, hiding its modesty in the cloud that draped its diaphanous veils across the thrusting, granite breast.
As they cleared the summit, Hermione saw lights - torches, fire brands, dozens of them, ranged in swaying, concentric circles around a central, focal point – a single standing stone, three metres of rock solid symbolism.
"Up!" Snape shouted, the second he saw the torches, wrenching his broom back and accelerating towards the stars. Hermione and Harry shot after him, through the clouds, and then hovered, hidden from the ground, panting as the sudden adrenalin coursed through them, sending a tingled wake-up call to fingers and toes they had thought dead to the world.
"Muggles, do you think?" asked Hermione, her teeth chattering, her lips almost too numb to mouth the words.
"Who bloody cares! They've got a fire down there… We could… Wait… Where is he? Where's he gone? He was here…"
They looked around them for Snape.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash and a crack and a jagged bolt of pure fire ripped past them, searing into the night.
"Lightning!" Hermione screamed, "Get away! Fly, Harry!"
A second bolt of energy forked through the sky. Harry and Hermione jinked and twisted in the air, their brooms slicing the darkness, turning at impossibly acute angles, avoiding the raking blades of flame.
"They're shooting at us!" yelled Harry. "Let's get out of here!"
And then they saw Snape. He was emerging from a bank of cloud, flying slowly - too slowly - in a daze, disorientated… they could only watch as the next lightning flash stabbed the air… Then Snape's broom was spinning, wheeling backwards, helplessly out of control, a crazed, hurtling carousel of light and fire… and he was falling, plunging down towards the clouds, the hostile tor, the murderous ring of cheering shooters.
"Harry!" Hermione screamed again. He didn't hesitate. He flung himself after his father, urging his broom on, faster, faster, to its limit and beyond… flying faster than ever before, faster than in any Quidditch match - catching the Snitch was a stroll compared to this - diving after the plummeting figure… Now he was stretching, straining to catch hold of the flapping hem of Snape's cloak which streamed out vertically behind and above him as he dropped, like the useless folds of a tangled parachute. Harry felt his fingers touch fabric, and he hauled back, braking, slowing, and then, in a final, desperate lunge, grabbing the broom handle and heaving it upwards…
Snape's eyes were closed, he was stunned, but he hung on, will-power alone preventing him from tumbling to his death. Harry wrestled to steady the broomstick and guide it on, away from the lights, from the jeering rabble, away from the monolithic wrath of the menhir.
Hermione caught up with them as they came back up through the shielding blanket of cloud.
"Christ! Is he alright? Harry, we must land. He'll fall off. He might faint or anything. We'll have to stop."
There was a weak, murmured protest from Snape.
"No. Keep on… not far now…"
They flew in close formation, Snape between them, Harry steering two brooms, and Hermione supporting the semi-conscious professor.
"Where the hell are we supposed to be going?" asked Harry.
" 'and straight on 'til morning…'" Hermione found herself saying, appalled that she could be quoting Peter Pan at a time like this. Snape mumbled something faintly, and she leaned in closer to hear what he was saying, repeating it out loud for Harry's benefit.
"Lake on the left…"
"Yep, I can see that!"
"…villages… hill fort on the… right."
"Got it! There are lights down there."
"…river. Harry, we should be crossing a river, and there's a castle. What, Sir? It's Castle Drogo, up on the right hand side."
"Yeah, like I need the sodding names!"
"We're making for somewhere called… Spinster's Rock. It's some kind of a Neolithic barrow… We're to look for green broom sparks. That's the signal."
They peered down, not really sure what they were meant to be seeing. Far below, a single pair of yellow eyes - headlights - cut a slow, straight line through the blackness, indicating the route of a solitary road across the moor.
"We'll have to go lower!"
The crackling fountain of emerald green sparks took them by surprise. It was nearer than they had expected. It came again, a splutter of green in the night, and they headed for it, touching down onto springy grass. They were in a flattish, open expanse, a plateau on the edge of the moor. In the centre was a megalith - three massive upright stones, roofed by the biggest boulder Hermione had ever seen, the capstone.
Her frozen legs, numb and unresponsive, would barely take her weight. Harry was just as bad. They walked stiffly, knees refusing to bend, supporting Snape between them. He kept insisting he was fine, but the moment they relaxed their arms from around his waist, he staggered and would have fallen. Grudgingly he tolerated their help. When they reached Spinster's Rock, he sank to the ground, shivering.
"Cyfarchion1! It's chocolate you'll be wantin', is it?" A Welsh voice greeted them, and from behind the central stone a figure appeared. Were it not for the soft, lilting voice, it would have been impossible to tell if this person were male or female. She was dressed in sheepskin from head to foot: a chunky, fur-lined parka, fur trousers and stout boots, mittens and tawny woollen fur cap with dangling ear-flaps. She had a square-jawed, but otherwise rounded face and black, corkscrew curls shoved up under the hat. When she spoke her head nodded in rhythm with her words.
"Frozen, are you? Chilly tonight. Have this now, look you."
Tugging off a mitten she produced thick squares of chocolate.
"Professor! Bad business, boy-o! Didn't bring any Brandy. Chocolate?"
Snape sucked it slowly, feeling its reviving energy seeping into his iced muscles, clearing the fog in his brain. Harry accosted the furry Welsh woman.
"They were shooting at us! As we came over the Moor, this gang of maniacs started firing lightning at us. They shot him!" Delayed shock was making him angry, indignant, and she was the scapegoat. She folded to her fur-lined knees beside Snape.
"Wounded, are you? Did they get you?"
He shook his head.
"Just the broom. …knocked off balance… careless…"
Straightening up with a chuckle, she patted him cheerily on the arm. Snape glared at her.
"Well now, so you took a Rocket, eh? That's what we call 'em by 'ere… a Ragna-Rocket! We like our little joke, see?"
"Joke? That was no bloody joke!" Harry was furious. "It almost killed him!"
"I'll be guessin' you came up Hameldown from the south, yes? And then round the Tor by the right? Well, I thought so! What are you thinkin' of, man? You know better than to fly widdershins on the Ragnarok full-moon! Askin' for trouble, it is! Sure, they'd send up a few 'rockets' - purely as a warnin', mind you! No real harm in 'em!"
"What do they do when they get really nasty?" muttered Harry.
Hermione was studying the woman, trying to place the small, round face in context.
"I've seen you before, haven't I? Where was it?" Then she remembered - at a meeting of the Order at Grimmauld Place the previous summer. She hadn't looked like an Eskimo then.
"Hestia Jones." The woman introduced herself. "I'll be escortin' you to somewhere safe. Now then, it's a long way to the farm, and I'll be right in thinkin' you've both done enough flyin' for one night. So, Professor Dumbledore has got you an emergency Apparation licence - don't ask me how! Couldn't arrange it any sooner - everythin' 'appened in such an 'urry. Panic stations, it was! So, we'll be gettin' you home now; warm you up… Just leave it to me Hermione. Actually, you'd better both be holdin' onto me…"
They turned to speak to Snape, so that they could all Apparate together, but the place where he had been sitting was empty. The Potions master had gone.
End of Chapter. Next Chapter: AWAY IN A MANGER. Hestia's farm doesn't live up to Harry's expectations.
1 Cyfarchion - Greetings!