CHAPTER 13: HALCYON DAYS AND HARROWING PURSUITS

If young Harry had been alive, these days might have been some of the best of his life, filled with love and joy. As it was, Sparhawk was getting increasingly restless. For most of his life, he'd been hopping from one crisis to another, fuelled by duty and love, but now, for the first time in a long time, he was stuck in peace. The most exciting thing they'd done was get him glasses, which finally fixed his busted vision, but the rest of his days were positively rosy. By the fourth day, he was ready to start tearing out his hair.

But that was before Adelaide did a little test of the breadth of his knowledge and was thoroughly astounded. "If I didn't know better, Sparhawk," she said, shaking her head, "I'd say you were from the middle ages or something." And then she'd put him to reading. Now, you might assume that fighting man as Sparhawk was, he wouldn't be much for the scholarly circles. You would be wrong. He might have been a knight, but his intellect had always been razor-sharp and now, with whatever it is that made young minds so, it was sharper than ever. He found he could pull off great feats of learning.

And Adelaide seemed to enjoy his curiosity. At first, he'd been a bit cautious, because it seemed he'd be living here for the near future and he didn't want to wear the lady's nerves thin, but it seemed Adelaide Baker had vast, enormous reserves of patience. Much more than his Pandion instructors had anyway. She'd even said that you'd never learn anything if you didn't ask any questions and he'd gone and abused that to the fullest. In a way, it reminded him of his days as a young boy delving into the secrets of Styricum with his teacher, Sephrenia. Sparhawk had far outstripped his fellow Pandions, both on the field and in the Arts and it was the constant delight of his tutor to lead him further into the arcane than the knights were customarily taught.

But that didn't mean she spent all her time being subject to his interrogations. She'd gone ahead and gotten him a dictionary, one of those little pocket ones, and a big bag load of children's books. Normally these would have been brought for a younger child, but there were strange gaps in his knowledge of the world. He certainly could read, and he certainly knew how to think, but often he wouldn't know the meaning of a rather simple word or he'd be completely clueless about some basic information or appliance or something of the sort. It was somewhat frustrating as Adelaide didn't know what exactly to do about his schooling. Should she send him to the local affair and hope for the best? Or should she spend a year teaching him at home, iron out all the wrinkles before she tried that? That is if he stayed with her that long.

Somehow, children just didn't last long with her. In the early days of fostering and adoption, it wasn't said outright, but a single woman wasn't exactly considered a suitable choice. Neither was a single man, but that was a completely different matter. Never mind that she strove to provide a better home than most married couples bothered to. It was just one of those things that was stupid about those days. She'd get a child, mostly as an emergency foster and as soon as they were able, the authorities would put them up with a married couple.

Then there were a few years after she'd returned from a long spiritual journey to the more esoteric countries of the world. She hadn't renounced Christianity, but she'd opened up to some of the better tenets of the other religions of the world and also gotten qualified as a yoga instructor. The authorities, as usual, didn't say it outright, but she was sure the various idols and paraphernalia she had in her home did nothing to boost their confidence in her. Well, they were fools anyhow.

Finally, when the world started changing for the better and the people above changed with it, she began to get more and more children. But it was as if fate was having none of that and the children that she fostered would magically see their problems go away in a few weeks. If they were young and lost, they'd get found. If their parents had been on the wrong side of the law, somehow they'd pull through and come clean, clean enough to get custody of their child back. Heck, if the child had been an orphan, a long-lost relative would come lovingly crawling out of the woodwork to claim him and make his world a happier place. And the superstitious ones among child services began to notice that. So she began to get all those children who had nary a chance of having a miracle come through for them and lo and behold, a miracle. And they would move on.

She didn't know how long Sparhawk would be with her. But that didn't mean that she wouldn't do anything but the best for the child.


Snape cursed Dumbledore as he hurried after the creepy Harry doll while hiding it from muggle eyes with some top-notch spellwork. Age had ruled out the more traditional tracking charms, and the one that Dumbledore had pulled out of his pointy hat, while able to sniff out age-old trails, had an irritating tendency to be quite non-specific as to the recentness. And so Snape was left to visiting nearly everywhere the boy had visited in the last few months or so. Which... turned out to be a depressingly low number.

At first, the doll had led him to the Dursley household. From there he'd followed it to the local primary school and various little locations around Little Whinging, all little lonely hidey holes, the only exception being the park. Snape wouldn't admit it for all the world, but this was really bringing back a lot of memories. He could have a very minuscule amount of things in common with Lily's son after all.

From there it had taken him on a nice meandering trail to a lonely little island off the coast in the middle of nowhere. Then he'd been forced to endure a visit to the London zoo, followed once more by a visit to the Dursleys. The darn doll seemed to come back there, to the little cupboard under the stairs with alarming regularity, which wasn't saying a lot of good things about the Dursleys. Sigh, sometimes he missed his death eater days.

After paying a brief visit to the station and following the rail tracks all the way to Charing Cross, God, all this back and forth was really wearing him out, he finally got his first solid lead. Railway staff was crooning over an owl that had been left in one of the trains. A snowy white owl, which seemed to match what Hagrid said about Harry's owl. A bit of unpleasant socialization later, he'd managed to wrangle the details of the train it'd been found in from one giddy young lady and it seemed to be one of the ones that headed in the general direction of Surrey. So the Potter spawn had gotten on the train but hadn't gotten off. Snape's heart sank. This wasn't good news.

He hurried out of the station to a nearby alley. Hiding behind a dumpster, he brought out the doll, and somehow it seemed to be more animated than before. It nearly sprinted out into the road and earned Snape a short stint in Azkaban before the Potions master grabbed it and stuffed it within his cloak. From then it had been a nerve-wracking couple of hours where he consulted the abortive escape attempts of the doll to get a general direction and finally managed to triangulate his destination to a seedy-looking building in one of the seedier muggle neighborhoods of London. Snape's heart lifted a little. If this was where he'd been taken, maybe there was hope still for Harry Potter. After all, no self-respecting Death eater would set up shop in such a muggle neighbourhood Or so he hoped. If it were a purely muggle kidnapping, he'd have a good chance of finding Potter.

Snape glanced around and finding the street to be mostly empty, he let out the doll and watched it scurry to the building, which seemed to be a run-down apartment of some sort. The doll was about to start climbing the walls, but a small swish of his wand had the front door open and it was clambering through. He followed it up a flight of stairs to an unremarkable little door. And even before he opened it, he knew something was terribly wrong.

The stench of rotting flesh assaulted his nostrils as he took in the scene before him and Snape's disquiet only heightened. The body looked vaguely familiar. Casting a bubblehead charm on himself, he muttered a discrete revelio and was disappointed. No traps or ambushes. Or Potters. He slowly walked over to the body and peered at the bloated, waxy features. So familiar. So...Oh, bloody hell.


A/N: As always read and review. My enthusiasm for your words is boundless.