SIX.
'This is not right, Harry—I'm going to cross out this whole paragraph—'
'No, it's mine, leave it!'
'Harry, I just don't want you to fail Potions—'
Hermione yanked at the parchment, knocking over the open ink bottle at his elbow. Black spilled on the table, swept over Harry's essay, soaked the parchment until it was coming apart in his stained hands—
'Look at what you've done!'
'Harry, stop—no, I'm sorry—'
Anger spread like the ink, flooding, turning him into something else. The ink was not ink anymore but the dark waters of a deep, deep lake. From this lake Harry drew, drank, filled himself on the trembling power until he was swelling and growing. The walls shook. Soaked through with black water, the floor fell away.
Suddenly there were screams all around him: Fred and George were falling, and Ginny was trying to hold onto the edge, and Harry leapt forward to grab at Hermione, sliding on his stomach toward the edge of the awing cavern, reaching—
His hand closed on Hermione's wrist. He kept her suspended over this great height, and now that he was looking down, he realised the enormity of what he had done: he saw bodies contorted strangely on their distant landing, blood staining their clothes, brain fluid trickling from shattered skulls. Ron lay there, and Mrs Weasley, and Snape, and there among the bodies Harry saw the auburn hair of a little girl he knew only from pictures. His mum. It startled him to see it, and for a moment he lost all thought.
He let go.
'Hold on!'
Harry's body went careening against the wall, his head smacking on the wood with a sound that made his teeth ring. He straggled aware, arms and legs splaying instinctively to grab at balance, and found himself three feet from the bench he'd been sitting on before he'd dozed off, the furs he'd been given to cover himself scattered across the floor of the cabin. There was at least an inch of standing water, and on its surface shards of glass from a shattered window drifted in spirals and jerks, as though compelled to join one point to another in an invisible game of dot-to-dot.
'This sort of passing, just off shore—strange things,' the man at the wheel said with an eerie calm. 'Weather's gone odd.'
But it wasn't the weather, realised Harry when he peered through the shattered window. The waves gnawing at the sides of their small boat were dark as ink and just as angry.
'Are we going to sink?' asked Harry weakly, because he couldn't very well say that it was him who'd caused the sea to try and kill them.
'Boat has magic on it.'
It was not a yes, but neither was it a clear no. Harry eyed the man, who now that he was awake he remembered had introduced himself as Ludvig, wondering if he had the courage to ask for more reassurance.
There were scars on the man's face, some angry red and others a faded, disfiguring white, and one of his eyes was cloudy and turned in on itself. Though he wasn't looking anywhere near Harry's direction, he gave the impression of being tired of the sight of him.
Not for the first time since setting sail, Harry wished Durmstrang's resident giant was a little more like Hagrid.
Ludvig wasn't a giant, really. He was the size of a regular man, if tall and broad-shouldered, but there was something large in the way he walked and even in the way he stood. Harry couldn't help the comparisons. Like Hagrid, Ludvig had been sent to bring Harry to a magic school and like Hagrid it seemed as though Ludvig didn't use magic himself. Unlike Hagrid, though, he carried a rifle not an umbrella, and he was certainly not the chatty sort.
As Harry's nightmare faded from his memory, the seas calmed. Soon, they were drawing into a small harbour where one large ship and a number of smaller boats sat floating on the water. A fully outfitted dogsled awaited their arrival. By its side stood a small woman holding a weak lantern. The light drew a circle on the ice around her and picked out her features, grey and ancient.
She snapped up the rope Ludvig had thrown with practiced ease and held up the light for him as he carried down Harry's trunk, Hedwig's cage and finally Harry himself. Looking into the darkness ahead, Harry would have sworn they were on a large plane with mountains looming on the horizon; but when he looked down at his own feet in the light thrown from the lantern, he saw there was nothing beneath him but sheer ice.
Ludvig and the woman exchanged a few gruff words in a language Harry didn't know. Otherwise, it was silent. Harry was loaded into the sled and covered with every pelt and coat they could find—he pulled one off so he could secure it around Hedwig's cage, who did not appreciate it—and he felt warm enough once this was done, except that he couldn't feel his nose or any of his toes.
'Fottur!'' Ludvig barked, and after the initial lurch that sent Harry's heart into his throat they were moving, the sled rails sliding so smoothly on the thin layer of snow that it felt a little like flying.
It would have been wondrous if it weren't so cold. It would have been wondrous if the pelts and the dogs didn't smell, if it had been light enough that Harry had been able to see past the edge of the sled. The speed, which knocked him there and back at each turn, soon lost its urgency, and with nothing but the ice plane visible on either side, Harry started to feel as though they'd stopped moving entirely, suspended in this smelly, frosty, uncomfortable pocket of the night.
'How far is it?' he tried to ask. His words were lost in the crystal wind and the harsh, fire-hot breaths of the dogs.
'What?'
'What time is it?' Harry shouted, which wasn't at all what he wanted to know but now he'd got all turned around.
'Soon it will be four,' Ludvig said. 'We'll be there five.'
He glanced over his shoulder at Harry. He must have read his confusion because he chuckled. His smile was nightmarish. 'Enjoy the daylight while you can, wizard. Soon it will be winter, and the night will settle for good.'
But Harry could see no daylight wherever he looked: only a dark tinted here and there a lighter purplish, spread over a space too empty and too cold for the sun.
When he'd been told he was going north, he'd expected a place not unlike Inari. He'd known he would have to brace a harsh winter with little light because Leeni and Kauko had told him of the Inari winters, but Harry himself remembered from Inari only the golden light, the dark-green forests, the wide skies. This was, it seemed, a different kind of north entirely, with a wide enough sky but no greenery and no life, except what little clung to the furs he was covered with.
The cold nearly made him doze off again, but he caught himself in time. Merlin knew how much natural magic was frozen in the ice beneath them. Harry worried he would dream another nightmare.
By the time Ludvig was helping him out of the sled, Harry's legs had gone to sleep and so had his brain, made mushy with cold and exhaustion. He had to catch himself on Ludvig's arm to stop his knees buckling. He felt the man shudder at the touch, though the reaction failed to show on his face.
One of the dogs, a beast the size of Harry and made of all muscle and thick fur, barked at him. He staggered back into the sled, knocking a bruise into his side. In her cage, Hedwig hooted discontentedly.
'Durmstrang,' Ludvig told Harry, as though it needed telling.
Before them stood the castle at the end of the world. It looked a real castle, too: they'd had to pass through the heavy iron gate in the defence walls that rose around it, and the towers stood low but imposing, built for durability not magnificence. Harry did not know about castles, but it looked old, older perhaps than Hogwarts, and certainly less inviting. It looked like it would have been a prison if it had the good sense to follow its purpose. It looked like it would have seen a war if wars ever ventured this far up north. Harry didn't imagine they would bother.
Behind them, the iron gate rose and stuttered shut.
Despite Harry's weak protests about Hedwig, Ludvig had him leave his things in the sled and led him inside. The main castle door, so low and narrow that Ludvig had to bow his head and file in after Harry to fit, opened not on a grand entryway as Harry had expected, but a long, unlit room that looked to be growing fur. Ludvig's lantern revealed that it was only an illusion given by the rows of coats and scarfs that lined the walls. Placed in neat order on the stone floor underneath stood heavy winter boots. There were dozens of them—hundreds, maybe—Harry gazed around, taken by a sudden fear that any one coat might turn and reveal a student sunken into the wall.
Ludvig ordered him out of his clothes, then disappeared to fetch him a uniform. Harry stood, half-naked and shivering, and thought that Ludvig must have been either a little dim-witted or a little sadistic for choosing to do those two things, the searching and the disrobing, in that particular order.
Harry received a uniform made of crimson red wool fitted close to his frame, a rich fur coat, hat and scarf, and a pair of boots. The boots and the outwear he was instructed to leave in this strange fridge of an anteroom.
'Do I wear my own shoes then?' Harry asked, looking longingly at the leather boots lined with fur.
'We leave shoes outside,' Ludvig said harshly. He made a gesture as though urging on his sled. 'Well? Come. Fottur.'
Harry thought to say to him that he was not a dog, but again his courage failed him.
Meekly, he followed Ludvig deeper into the castle. The corridors were unlit and windowless, black and cold except for the light of Ludvig's lantern. Little feet scuttered in the dark blind spots at the edge of each wall, and Harry couldn't decide if they were real rats or only loud fears. The doors all looked the same: black wood with iron nails, heavy to open, kept shut against the chill. Harry could not see how he would ever learn which led to where, and when Ludvig finally opened one into a room full of people and smells of hot food, he thought he was going to cry because he felt sure that he would never find it again.
The room was nothing like the Great Hall at Hogwarts. The ceilings were low, domed over the palisades, and the students within crowded in the small space. The benches and chairs around the assortment of tables did not seem enough to satisfy the need for them: red-clad girls and boys sat on tables, legs down between their friend's knees; others stood and heaped rich fare from neighbouring tables into their ceramic bowls, and others still nestled on reindeer pelt rugs by the fantastically large fireplace, which filled the room with delicious warmth. Harry was so hungry, so thirsty, so cold—and yet he found he could not force himself to step over the threshold, anticipating already that he would not know where to sit or what to eat. For some strange reason the promise of that humiliation felt greater to him than the hunger and thirst and cold combined.
Then came salvation.
'Ludvig,' a voice called from the dark corridor behind them. 'I saw you arrive—why lead him here? No, no—on his first night, he must dine with me, no?'
A man with scraggly dark hair and a beard stiff like a goat's emerged from the shadows. Next to Ludvig, he appeared small and underfed, but there was something disquieting in his angular body, some odd sense of threat that made Harry think this was not a man to be crossed.
The man said something else to Ludvig in another language, then extended his hand to Harry.
'Headmaster Igor Karkaroff,' he introduced himself. 'Welcome to Durmstrang, Mr Potter.'
Harry shook Karkaroff's hand. He tried to return his smile but found he couldn't quite get there.
On they went, Ludvig lighting their way with his lantern, along corridors and then up narrow, winding stairs with steps so small Harry imagined at least one student must have broken their neck falling off them.
Compared with the rest of the castle, the lights in Karkaroff's rooms blazed so bright they made the tight space almost sunny. Fire burnt resolutely in the fireplace and the gleam from hundreds of candles was amplified tenfold in golden-rimmed mirrors and magnifying glasses. At the table set for dinner sat a young woman Harry might have mistaken for an upper-year student if not for her glimmering dark-blue robes. Her hands were folded in her lap as she waited.
'Professor Vernyhora,' Karkaroff said, too-fast and too-accented for Harry to repeat. 'Sit, Mr Potter, please.'
Harry sat. As he did, he noticed that Ludvig had not entered the room with them. He wondered if he'd gone somewhere to find his own meal, or if he'd wait by the door with the lantern until Harry was ready to be brought to his next destination. The latter was strange to think, but it would be the sort of thing to happen in a fairy-tale, which Harry was becoming fast convinced this might all be, with every minute he grew more flushed with tiredness and novelty.
He was much too hungry at first to think on anything other than the food—fat, plentiful, with thick slices of bread to bite into and heavy goblets of drink—but soon enough he became aware of the silence. No conversation had been struck to cover up the sounds of chewing and gulping, which Harry realised suddenly he was making rather a lot of.
He noticed Karkaroff watching him with an unkind little smile.
'We'll need to teach you some table manners before winter closes,' he said. 'Say what you wish about strong blood, but good breeding can't be passed down, can it?'
Harry flushed. He peered down at his hands, sticky with sauce and grease.
Nothing else was said. Karkaroff continued eating, gaze affixed to a point in the corner of the room behind Harry. The professor at the other end of the table, who Harry examined from the corner of his eye and decided looked like she wasn't all there and also like she had a very large nose for the rest of her face, never said a word. Harry remembered distantly the meals he had sometimes shared with his aunt and uncle when they had company over, and still he was sure they hadn't been nearly as awkward.
'So,' Karkaroff spoke suddenly. 'Our professor here studies these old magics, your wild magics and this sort. Find her when you settle in and you can have some lessons together, is that right?'
The professor with the big nose didn't look at all happy. 'I am a theoretician,' she said in a voice that matched the big nose but not the rest of her. 'I do not practise the magics, I only read—'
'A good education always begins with reading,' Karkaroff interrupted with mock joviality. Harry tried to imagine him properly jovial and couldn't manage it. 'Dessert?'
'Sir,' Harry spoke up. He swallowed. 'Excuse me. Could you—could someone show me where the owlery is? I wanted to send my owl out tonight with some letters, but I don't know where to find her.'
Karkaroff laughed, loud and grating. 'Letters? You're not here a day and you want to send letters? Letters to who?'
'My friends,' murmured Harry, feeling oddly embarrassed at once about a thing so normal as having friends.
'Weather is too cold for an owl.' Karkaroff waved a hand dismissively. 'She will take weeks, and if a storm comes she will not live. We are soon entering winter—no owls will fly now.'
Harry's stomach sank. He'd left Hogwarts in a rush of confusion and never managed to say all the things he'd wanted to say. He had told himself it would anyway be better done in a letter.
Worse yet, he'd been afraid of leaving Hogwarts for a place where he would know no one and understand nothing but had told himself at least Ron and Hermione had sworn they would write him every day. With the promise of letters removed, Harry thought suddenly he couldn't do it, not any of it, he couldn't be here—but short of begging Karkaroff to send him home, what was there to be done?
The luscious cakes all tasted like the burn of tears in his throat.
After, Ludvig led Harry to his room. Two bunk beds were pressed against two adjacent walls, the space swelled on heat from the hot embers in the fireplace. No one was here, but traces of activity remained: a thick tome lay open on someone's pillow, a towel was thrown over a chair by the fireplace, photographs and posters moved and flashed on the walls.
'Good night,' Ludvig said in a tone that made Harry fearful of ever sleeping again, then shut the door behind him.
Only now that he was alone did it hit Harry that this was real. His trunk, which belonged by his bed in his Hogwarts dormitory, stood in a looming dark corner. The posters, which should have shown the Chudley Cannons and Dean's favourite football team, read things in languages Harry couldn't understand. Even the air smelled different, thicker and more oppressive than it did back home. In the corner, a small door led to the bathroom, but Harry knew already that it would not be the same as their Hogwarts bathroom, and he felt he could not bear to see it.
On the upper bunk, which was dressed in clean sheets and flush against the small window, Harry found a thick roll of parchment, a beautiful, white-feathered pen, a crystal bottle of black ink and a set of school books. His first thought was that he could test these out and write a letter. Then, he remembered.
Maybe it was for the best: what would he have written anyway? I'm sorry I almost killed you. I won't do it again. Who would ever accept an apology like it when they knew that Harry couldn't possibly be sure he could keep the promise?
There it was. Who cared if he was uncomfortable here, or lonely, or miserable? He should have been happy to be sent away from those he cared about so he couldn't hurt them again. Yes. Right. He would dedicate himself to studying natural magic with a diligence that surpassed even Hermione's, and maybe one day he would be able to look his friends in the eye again.
He could start now. It couldn't have been very late yet, and now that he'd eaten and warmed up, he should have been able to brave the dark corridors again, and go find the big-nosed professor, or at least a library.
But he was so tired.
He climbed on the top bunk, uniform and all, pulled the thick duvet over his body and head, and cried himself to sleep.
I've been doing well on editing, which means I have an extra chapter to share with you today!
