Disclaimer: I don't own this.

Chapter 2

"A wild, dark flower of woman, deep rose of my desire,

an eastern wizard made you of earth and stars and fire."

-C.G.D. Roberts

Two months later, James met with the Marauders in the Leaky Cauldron.

"I can't believe you're leaving, mate," Sirius complained. "We're in the middle of a war after all. People will think you're running away or something."

"Let them think that," James smiled at his friends. "You guys know we need new magical technology. We have no other way of winning otherwise."

Sirius made a face but didn't say anything more. He was just entering the Auror's Program and he had already heard about the immense pressure on the Department of Innovative Magics to create bigger and better weapons.

Remus slapped him on the back, chuckling. "Just think of it as a delayed honeymoon."

Peter was quietly sipping on his butterbeer. "I've never been to America. I've always wanted to go there."

James ruffled his friend's light hair. "I'll bring you back lots of souvenirs. I heard they made the best candy."

Sirius flicked firewhiskey at him. "Where's your patriotic spirit, mate? Nobody makes better candy than our dear motherland."

Remus burst out laughing. "You're just addicted to Bertie Bott's."

Peter rolled his eyes. "You'll be back soon, though. Right?"

James smiled. "Of course. America is just over the pond after all."

India was terribly hot and dusty.
James and Lily stayed close together amidst the crowds. They had taken a muggle flight to America and then they took a series of interconnected portkey jumps until they reached Delhi. They could have gone directly, but they needed to erase suspicion from their friends and to cover their tracks.

James hadn't wanted to lie to Sirius or Peter, but Dumbledore had been adamant that nobody else should learn about their destination. India was big enough to disappear in, but as they would be arriving in the capital, it wouldn't do to invite pursuit.

James tried not to cover his nose against the rising stench of the people and the various vegetables and spices that they were selling. Lily, meanwhile, craned her neck trying to remember the directions of Sriveya Karamchand.

Sriveya had fled India with her mother after her father died. She didn't want to leave, but her homeland was not kind to unprotected women. And her mother was not powerful enough to keep her safe. They arrived in England and Sriveya promptly received a letter from Hogwarts inviting her to join the magical school. Ten years later, and she was working with the Order alongside Remus and James trying to pool different magical concepts and create better offensive and defensive spells. Muggle-born Leonard Patil was on the same team, trying to adapt muggle spyware to their magical needs.

In two month's time, their team had produced ways for them to communicate safely through a normal looking transistor radio with some sort of scrambler attached. They also had a way to return quickly if necessary; both Lily and James sported a bracelet of woven hemp and an opal bead.

Lily saw a sign at the corner of the market with some weird linked squiggles. She had tried to learn the rudiments of Hindi, but in between research and brainstorming sessions, there had simply been no time. With a swift glance around, she reached for the wand inside her white robe and muttered a quick translation spell for both of them.

'Ganesha Inn,' the sign now read. At its corner was a crescent moon under a single eye. Sriveya had told her it meant the place welcomed muggles and wizards alike.

Lily herded James along towards the sign, trying her best to ignore the many children holding out their hands for rupees from the two foreigners. She felt her heart wrench, thinking of her own future kids. She couldn't do anything to help them. There were just too many, their faces utterly without hope. They looked like Voldemort's victims back home. Lily shuddered, she knew very well that normal humans could perpetuate such horrors just as worse as Voldemort's.

The inn was a breath of fresh air after the crowd outside. It looked deserted, but there was a young lady at the counter, her brown skin accented by the jewel tones of her green sari, and the golden hoops that hung from her ears.

"May I help you?" She asked them in accented English. It wasn't the result of the spell as Lily could read her lips.

James took charge, asking for a room and paying for their stay for a month. They had large sacks of rupees in their bags. The exchange rate from galleon to rupee had been difficult to believe. Which was good, because they didn't know when they would be able to return to England. They could stay there for years.

By the end of that first month, they had found a small place of their own further north above a city called Saharanpur. The village was almost at the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains, surrounded by dense forests. Lily wanted to follow the tracks of Voldemort immediately, but James had persuaded her that their first priority was to save the world by having sex. A lot.

Harry Jahan Potter was born about one year after they had moved into their own home. Draupati, the owner of the Ganesha Inn, had recommended the place, and it was beside a small school of Indian magic. It was therefore easy to find a healer. Thus, Harry's birth was relatively painless, instead of the usual muggle travesty as Lily had feared.

Afterwards, even James turned his interest towards the war they had left behind. True to the excuse he had given Sirius and the others, he studied with the Hindu shamans in the school, both to gain insights into different forms of magic and to gain the trust of the Indian wizards they encountered.

Lily chafed a little at being left at home, but she knew she had less chances of earning the shamans' trust than James had. So she spent her days learning a spatter of Hindi and the local Kashmiri from the women while taking care of Harry, and going through the clippings again to see if she missed anything.

Harry was a cheerful baby, and learned English as quickly as he learned the local dialects. He turned nut-brown under the sun and gobbled up the spicy curry and sticky jalebi candy that Lily had learned to cook. He was accepted into the different muggle and magical homes sooner than his parents were. There were few children his age, so he made friends with everyone from the old men with white beards and long memories to the young women who were charmed by his babble.

He listened quietly to the stories the old men told. His favorite storyteller was Shuntab, the head shaman. He had a powerful voice that could make a whisper reverberate inside Harry's head. He talked about the leopards and the tigers and the snakes in the forest, about the elephant god and the goddess with many arms, about the heroes of the old with names like Ramayana and Buddha and Gandhi.

Harry stayed at Shuntab's home so often that he got to know the old man's daughter well, a pretty young lady named Sushmita. She didn't say much while he was around, but he loved to watch her nimble fingers as she embroidered silver elephants and peacock feathers to different-colored saris. She also taught him to read Hindi and to carve on softwoods and clay. She was a witch herself, but women were not taught at the school. Instead Shuntab gave her lessons at home.

After awhile James was able to send to Remus reams of information about rope magic, which the shamans used to bind and to add power to spells through knotwork. They were warming up to him, he knew, largely because of Harry's easy presence among them. Even as Lily and James taught him basics of Latin spells, he was learning about the 'charming' that the shamans did using music, as well as the rope magic alongside Sushmita.

They had given the boy a makeshift wand bought from a seller in the wizard's market in Delhi. It didn't choose him like Ollivander claimed his wands able to do, but James figured it gave Harry a better chance at using other people's wands as effectively as his own. So they alternate the one they bought with each of their own as they taught him. But Harry liked his own wand. It had been made from teak, and contained leopard whiskers and ground python skin.

James wondered at the combination, completely non-magical, yet able to work with Harry's magic. Lily told him that the animals especially in Indian mythology had their own kind of magic. There were many snakes around the village, and they responded well to the pipes of the shamans. Harry learned to charm a snake by the time he was five years old. He didn't let on that he could talk to them years before. His mother never seemed to be comfortable around them.

Lily discovered she was pregnant with her second child not long after. That was when she realized they had been there for so long: six whole years. Remus had reported that the small skirmishes continued to wage between the Order and the Death Eaters. The werewolf clans in Ireland and up near Sweden and Finland were being courted by Voldemort's men, but Severus' invention of a potion to give werewolves control over their beast form had helped to attract the clans to their side. Remus was acting as speaker for the Order while he searched for clues about the horcruxes.

So far, only one had been confirmed. Voldemort's pet snake Nagini was one of the horcruxes that they sought. It was a revelation, this discovery that even living beings can act as a vessel. Voldemort's soul inside her changed Nagini into a vicious yet intelligent creature. But Severus was already working on a way to kill the beast.

Remus also told Lily that he had at least discovered that Voldemort had only scattered two in Asia, two around Europe and two close by. Lily already knew from the clippings that one was in India somewhere, and the other in either China or Japan, the two other countries that Voldemort visited in the past.

One of the shamans had let slip to the Potters about a certain snake that lived up in the mountains. It was an Indian python, one of the few that survived there. But this one was cunning beyond measure and avoided even the best of their magical and physicals traps, even as it sometimes hunted their livestock and occasionally their own children.

"Can't we go see the king snake, mum?" Harry turned his pleading eyes on his mother, who had forbidden him to roam the forests. "Dad will be there, too. Right?"

James was convinced that Voldemort placed his soul into another snake in the Indian wild. He was strapping on one of the prototype detectors he and Remus had been perfecting through correspondence. He watched his wife on the bed. She was just in her fifth month, but he still hated to leave her alone. But he had an idea Harry's snake charming could be augmented by his own magic.

Lily massaged her lower back. "You know I think it's too dangerous, Harry."

"But everyone's gonna be there, mum!" Harry extended his arms like he was holding a huge object between them. "The shamans won't let anything happen to me."

Lily sighed. At almost six years of age, Harry was like a small copy of James: irrepressible, completely optimistic, and infectious in his enthusiasm. She nodded yes, and listened fondly to Harry's whoop of joy.

"I'll keep him safe, love." James kissed her on the forehead as he finished getting ready.

"You better, mister," growled Lily before whispering, "Hurry back."