Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!

The title of this Intermission is taken from the English ballad "Tom O' Bedlam's Song": By a knight of ghosts and shadows/ I summoned am to tourney/ Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end-/ Methinks it is no journey.

Intermission: Ten Leagues Beyond the Wide World's End

Snape did not know what he felt as he stood in the graveyard outside Little Hangleton, beneath the falling snow, and watched Harry lean back into Draco's arms and Evan Rosier Apparate away. He did not know what he felt even when the thorns trembled and then coiled around the graves like snakes all binding up into a nest against the winter cold. He did not know what he felt when the wind stirred and sent flakes of snow skittering up into his face, proving beyond doubt that it was real and not just another manifestation of the Dark, or wind and rain frozen into pellets.

He felt—empty, he thought, fitting the words carefully around the thoughts. Yes, that was the best description. He had surged with so many emotions, awe and terror and horror and rage, as he watched the flashes of lightning tilt through the clouds and occasionally caught a glimpse of beautiful, impossible things, that it was as if he were bled dry. He reached out a hand, and it trembled as it brushed Harry's shoulder above Draco's arm. Then it steadied.

Harry turned and looked at him.

And then Snape felt a surge of fear again, because that was the first time he really understood how close they had come to losing Harry.

Harry's eyes were blasted, like forests scarred by fire, like green lands newly turned into deserts, like villages fallen into pestilence from a nundu's breath. He was empty, too, numb and in shock. It made a jarring contrast to the fire that still fluttered beneath his skin like a little live thing, beating wings like the phoenix Snape was slowly accepting would never come fluttering out of the clouds again.

They had nearly lost him to greatness, to Dark winds and Light dawns, to sights that Snape couldn't imagine and didn't want to. He had known, on some abstract level, all his life, that Lords and Ladies wizards faced and saw things that other wizards and witches didn't. He had sometimes caught a glimpse of that in Dumbledore's eyes, but Dumbledore had compensated with his slightly mad persona, and Voldemort had, of course, paid the price with his sanity. Snape had never really known either of them as mortal, had never seen the cost of their magic burning away what had made them, once, human and like others.

A large swathe of what Harry had been was gone now.

And Snape knew exactly what he felt—the desire to heal what he could, and to preserve what was left.

He gathered Harry roughly into his arms, drawing him away even from Draco. Draco tried to say something, but Snape shut him down with a glare that would have made Neville Longbottom faint dead away. He held Harry close to him. Harry leaned in a little, but made no attempt to embrace him back, and that chilled Snape's mind with worse fear.

"We are leaving," he said, not caring who heard him, not caring who followed, and he left the graveyard with his arms closed around Harry like steel bands. His goal was to reach the Apparition point and then return to Hogwarts, where Harry might learn something of what it was to be human again.

Harry, of course, being Harry, stirred as they passed the graveyard wall, and whispered, "But the Muggles—the ones the storm snatched—"

Snape paused with a frown and looked towards Little Hangleton. The houses stood there exactly as they had done, the lights showing through their windows. Snape shook his head. "The storm didn't disturb the Muggles, Harry. What is wrong?"

Harry struggled upright enough to look on his own, then shrank back within Snape's hold as if the sight of the houses standing untroubled had upset him more than what he'd faced in the clouds. "Perhaps the Light put them back," he whispered. "But I saw the Dark kill two Muggles, and the dragon who came to help me. And Fawkes gave up his life for me. I don't think any of them are alive again."

"No," said Snape quietly, thinking of the great shape he had seen come hurtling out of the sky to land with a thump that jarred the hills miles away. "We'll alert the Ministry, Harry, and let them investigate. I think you're right, and the Light made it as if it were a bad dream for the Muggles, but it couldn't have brought the dead back to life. No magic can do that."

"I should go look—"

"No," said Snape. That was the voice he'd once used to silence Rosier, and Harry fell quiet, too, before it. "Not you. Not tonight. The Ministry can do it, Harry. I'll send an owl to Scrimgeour the moment I see you safely settled."

He kept walking, ignoring all the silent offers to take Harry from him, ignoring Draco trotting beside him, looking anxiously upwards. He should have grown tired long before they reached the Apparition point, but he did not. He kept on walking, and around him the snow shone as if every flake were a window with a candle beyond it.

And then they came out on the Hogsmeade road, and the true Hogwarts was before them, with its hundred lighted windows with candles behind them, and it was a welcome sight indeed.

Lucius thought he had had the best view of all of them.

He had cast a spell to make his eyesight clear the moment Harry had risen into the clouds. He knew there was very little—likely nothing—he could do to interfere, but if a chance for his help did come, he wanted to be ready.

No chance had come. He had seen the Dark snatch Harry from the back of the dragon and rise, and then he had seen little more until the dawn had arrived in the middle of the storm. Those moments had been spent in grim silence, cold white silence polluted, just a little, by his shadow of curiosity over the way Draco had charged forward. He would be talking with his son later, learning what the reason behind his strange behavior might be.

He had seen the gryphon of Light appear, and take over Harry, and he had felt a mingling of both apprehension that the Light would take their ally away completely and the worshipful hatred he felt before a respectable enemy much more powerful than he was.

The gryphon had fought, Harry had fought, and the clouds had slid past them and around the dancing Dark beast. Lucius thought it looked like a chimera, neither one thing nor the other, an ugly, lumpish beast that every sane creature in the world disdained. They danced on a dark stage, with a golden backdrop splattered with black clouds that shone as flat as the most inexpensive scenery, and above them the stage closed into a funnel that Lucius's eyes, even helped by magic, could not penetrate.

He had not known what gave the light to Harry until he returned to the ground and pulsed gently, with a phoenix's heart, in the snow, and then he had been, for one of the few times that he could ever remember—the last had been when he heard that a one-year-old baby had defeated the Dark Lord—at a loss for words. Phoenixes did not die. They rarely bonded with wizards, and when they did, it was a condescension and an honor. Lucius was willing to admit that, even though phoenixes were creatures of Light and he was a creature of Dark. The idea of a phoenix loving a wizard enough to die permanently for him was foreign, utterly outside Lucius's element.

And he might even have been able to assimilate that, if not for the light beneath Harry's skin. Fawkes had apparently given part of himself to Harry, passed into his body. That was stunning. That was too sharp to grasp. That was new.

For the first time, Lucius had the feeling that he wasn't participating in just another political struggle, but that he had come close to something higher and mightier than his world.

It made him—quiet for a while.

Hawthorn had smelled the battle.

The air had been sharp with the smell of a storm when they appeared in the Apparition point near Little Hangleton, and the only thing that had displaced it until the arrival of the Dark Lord himself was the shack they had passed on the way in. The reek there made Hawthorn growl and want to raise her hackles, even though she didn't have hackles as a human. It smelled like camel dung in the desert sun. Hawthorn had never smelled camel dung in any kind of weather; that knowledge came from the wolf inside her. The chant of blood and hatred and killing in the back of her mind had gone silent, and the wolf had sniffed warily, knowing it was in the presence of evil and not just darkness, before it dived into a corner of her soul and refused to come out.

But Hawthorn could still smell with its nose—they were too thoroughly united now for it to be otherwise—and she had smelled the storm brewing, and then foul flesh as the Dark Lord appeared. Apparently, the wards he'd cast on the graveyard were not enough to keep out odors. Of course, Hawthorn was rapidly finding that non-werewolves didn't care that much about smells. She did, and she had to pinch her nostrils shut to keep her mind concentrated on rescuing Harry. The smell of the worm and the vines would drive her mad otherwise.

The wards had broken, and the Light had come with a scent like bluebells, so thick and overwhelming that the wolf had risen out of the back of her mind to complain about not smelling anything else. For a moment, as she watched the white flood slam into Harry and fill him with power, Hawthorn had felt ridiculously cheerful, even though she didn't serve Light.

The storm had arrived, and put an end to that, and an end to the bluebells. There was only sharp tin, then, the fragrance of brewing rain. Hawthorn had watched as Harry rose with his phoenix and his dragon, and she did not expect him to return again. Whatever her human heart might say, her nose announced that the Dark was just too strong.

And then…

And then…

And then she might have pinched her nostrils shut again, except that the scents lapped her like magic itself, and she didn't have that much presence of mind.

She breathed terror, hope, despair, clarity, things she had never known had a smell until just then. She smelled justice, and it was like white fire, but not very like it; that was simply the best analogy her thoughts could come up with. She smelled the moment when the phoenix sang and died, and she saw the golden flowers like drifts of sweetness around her knees, and she trembled and wanted to do nothing but bathe in unicorn spoor until the end of her days, and she compared the winged horse of the stars to snow and lost her heart in longing to see one. She smelled the moment when the light passed into Harry, and saw him come nearer and nearer, like a tumbling comet that would grace and not hurt the earth when it landed, but she could have closed her eyes and seen him just as well; his scent was that sharp.

She sniffed as he landed, and found that his scent had changed. It had a garnish of fire that had never been there before.

She needed no one to tell her that a phoenix had died and yielded part of his light to Harry. It was there for anyone who wished to smell it.

Ignifer saw little of their journey back to the Apparition point, because she was lost in the memory of an old tale that her father had told her.

That had been in the days before she knew she would ever Declare for Dark, when her father could set her on his shoulders and wander in the Apollonis autumn garden and she had not the least shadow of a suspicion that it would ever be different. He'd walked under the red trees with her one day, when she was nine years old, and told her one of the history chants that made up their family's most precious legacy. Other families sang history songs. The Apollonis family chanted, in Latin, the language Ignifer had learned at her mother's knee.

Calypso McGonagall, he'd told her, had been the last Light Lady truly worthy of the name. She had defeated the Dark, in the form of the Eagle Lord, when she had to, but then she had lived in peace, and used her power in the service of those who came to her requesting help. Nothing had changed in years on years except to grow better, as the British Isles flourished in the reign of the Light and all the snakes lost their fangs.

All had gone on this way until Lady McGonagall was one hundred and fifty years old. At that time, there had been one of their ancestors working in her home, a young woman by the name of Praeferox Apollonis. She had been a gardener, and she had taken well to the humble work, since she was a naturally humble person. But she was very curious, and she would follow any sound or investigate any strange happening if she was done with her duties for the day.

She had heard a strange sound one day just as she finished planting a new stand of phoenix flowers, and she had followed it down the garden's winding paths, until she reached the decorated window of her employer's house that looked out on the gardens, a place where she almost never dared venture. Praeferox turned and would have gone away again, but the sound repeated itself. It was a clear song, one perfect note held and sustained. Curiosity made Praeferox step up to Calypso McGonagall's window and press her face against the silver of it, spun to a lightness clearer than glass.

She saw a golden stone on the floor, alight with a shimmering, vibrating flame. It sounded the note one more time as she watched, and then collapsed into stillness. It had words written on it. Praeferox hesitated a long time, thinking of Lady McGonagall's unpredictable experiments, but at last she opened the window and climbed through it, so that she could read the fire-bright letters incised into the rock.

Do not mourn for me, they said. I have gone where you cannot follow.

The letters faded as she watched, and Praeferox blinked as one of the servants burst into the room, saying anxiously that they couldn't find the Lady anywhere, had she seen her?

They searched everywhere, but they never did find Calypso McGonagall. They theorized at last that she must have Transfigured herself into the golden stone, and been unable to undo it. They tried, they brought in experts to try, and they performed rituals on the rock, but of course no other wizard or witch was nearly as powerful as the Lady of Light, and none of them could unwind her invocation.

Praeferox told no one of the letters she had seen, for she was only the gardener, and no one would believe her. But she preserved the story, and passed it on to her daughter and her sons, and since then the Apollonis line had clung to it. It was Praeferox's theory that Calypso McGonagall had indeed gone where no one could follow, assumed herself into the Light as she had sometimes spoken of doing, walked the strange roads that wizards and witches of lesser power could not comprehend, much less see or walk.

Ignifer remembered her younger self going silent in awe, and her father stroking her hair, walking with her along the scalloped paths, the red and golden leaves tumbling down onto their shoulders.

Ignifer was sure the same thing had nearly happened to Harry tonight. It would explain the shattered look in his eyes, the way he kept his face buried in his guardian's shoulder other than that one glance at the Muggle village, the flicker and blaze of radiance beneath his skin.

She did not know if he would have gone to Light or Dark, and she knew it was none of her business. She only felt honored to have witnessed something so near to a fading, and if her father ever lifted the sterility curse on her and she had children of her own, she would tell them the story, as Praeferox had told her children hers.

"Harry?"

Draco wouldn't have voiced the question if he hadn't been startled. He'd noticed that Harry turned his head when someone spoke to him since they'd arrived back at Hogwarts, but did nothing else. And the sight of those shattered eyes, so terribly attentive, made Draco prefer to just hold him and lean his forehead on Harry's shoulder and not meet his gaze.

Yes, that wasn't terribly brave. But bravery was for Gryffindors.

He'd fallen asleep in one of the hospital beds, with Harry in his arms; Madam Pomfrey knew better than to scold them for that, after one look at Harry. He hadn't even felt Harry wake and slip free of him, walking towards one of the open windows in the hospital wing. Then he'd opened his eyes, and seen the small figure standing in front of the windowsill, and spoken without thinking.

But Harry didn't turn towards him. He continued staring out the window. Draco wondered what he was seeing. It couldn't be anything very clear. Even though the clouds had parted, the stars were the only light available tonight, and Harry had left his glasses on the bedside table, beside the faint glow of his own wand, which Draco had retrieved from the graveyard as they left. He hadn't wanted to leave Harry entirely alone in the dark.

Draco wondered what he saw, but not for very long, because then he heard Harry singing.

The song was soft at first, a trembling whisper that probably wouldn't have awakened Draco if he'd managed to stay asleep. Then it built, and acquired the sound of a sob. Draco stirred, thinking he should move from the bed and go to cradle Harry, but his arms wouldn't move more than one inch. They froze as Harry's voice climbed higher and higher, swirling around the towers and walls of Hogwarts like spreading wings, as if he were embracing it from above.

Draco lay there and listened to phoenix song blended with a human voice, and thought he might die of it. The purity of the grief in it touched him to the quick. A wizard would have been choked with tears, a phoenix would have mourned in such a high and unearthly fashion that Draco might have escaped tears of his own, but this dirge was both, humanity mingled with clarity, and it hurt.

The song flurried, beating back at the darkness with small sharp flashes of light; Harry had a fire burning in his palm, casting his face into edged shadows. Draco watched the shadows dancing around him, and saw them grow human forms, robes and arms, swaying and bowing. What they bowed to wasn't visible.

Harry's voice soared, and Draco heard other people crying, or calling out in confused tones, but they fell silent as the song continued. It didn't have words. It didn't need them. It fed the proper visions into students' minds, showing them, the way Harry had said Fawkes showed him, scenes from a life of mountains and meadows and moons. It showed them immortality cut short, and Draco didn't feel ashamed of the tears that soaked his cheeks; he knew that his parents, sleeping elsewhere in the castle, would be crying the same way.

Harry's song turned one more time, and then came diving down, becoming softer, pursuing the path it had climbed. Draco heard no more than a golden corkscrew, at last, and then that faded and went out at the same moment as the fire in Harry's palm did.

He waited a moment more, and found he could move. He climbed slowly out of bed and went over to Harry, tucking his arms around his waist and his chin onto his shoulder.

"Is that the gift Fawkes gave you?" he whispered. "His voice?"

Harry glanced up at him. The green eyes weren't human, for a long moment, reflecting shining, shifting shadows from a moon that wasn't there. Draco saw him somewhere in darkness, in light, lost ten leagues beyond the wide world's end, and shivered. The wild Dark, he thought, had been the greatest threat to Harry tonight, but not in the way they all believed. What if it had tempted Harry to come with it?

Then Harry trembled, and he was human again.

"Yes," he whispered. "His voice, and some of his fire, and—maybe other things that I don't know about yet." He shook his head. "I can't tell you what it was like, Draco, up there, seeing the way the Dark and Light saw, for just a moment, knowing—"

"You don't have to," Draco said, ducking his head and whispering into Harry's hair. "I don't want to know. Honest, Harry, I don't."

After a moment, he felt Harry nod against his neck. "All right, then," he said. "I know it's not over. I know I'm going to have to learn better, so that none of my enemies can ever force me to make a sacrifice like that again." His voice was horribly weary, and made Draco want to cry once more. "But for tonight, I just want to sleep."

Draco nodded, and cast a powerful Dark Arts locking charm on the doors of the hospital wing, though in truth he didn't think they needed it. The students and the professors and their guests for the night might wonder, but they wouldn't intrude on someone who sang like that. He climbed back into the hospital bed, and held out his arms, and Harry climbed into them and leaned against his chest.

Long after his breathing had evened out, Draco remained awake, watching the dancing shadows on the wall from the fire glowing beneath Harry's skin.