EIGHT.

The wand lay heavy in Harry's sweaty palm, digging into skin. It could have been a piece of stick and it would have done him the same amount of good. In fact, Harry wished it were a piece of stick: then he would realise this was all a dream and could wake up from it.

'Go on, Mr Potter—Incendio.'

A small spark of fire was all that was required. He conjured it before his eyes as they'd been instructed, felt for the warmth and light of it, pooled in his intention. He opened his mouth. Something like an in sounded from it, but it was bit off before it could take form.

A spark could catch. In his mind's eye, he saw now a flame, swallowing the parchment laid out on the desk beside him. How much wood in this castle, gathered and saved up for the long winter ahead? He saw a great fire feeding on it. He saw it rise high toward the black skies.

Harry lowered his wand. He couldn't do it. He couldn't—

'Mr Potter. If you refuse to attempt the charm now, how do you expect to pass next week's examination?'

'I'll practise,' he promised, eyes fixed on the pattern of the wood circles on his desk.

'You are meant to be practising now! I swear—do they not have wands at Hogwarts?'

Harry said nothing. Behind him, he heard a muffled snigger.

He had received a grade of one for the class, the teacher informed him later. Harry could not be sure, but he didn't imagine this was good.

Exiting the Charms classroom, he passed a group of students laughing together.

'No, you see, but he's talented,' one of the girls was saying. 'He's a proper teacher's pet when he goes down to the kitchens to learn cooking and dusting from the squibs.'

When she noticed Harry, she said only, 'Oh, crap—' and turned promptly away, as though he wouldn't be able to tell she was laughing if he couldn't see her face.

Flushed, Harry walked away quickly, keeping his head down.

He had found over the past week that following the throng of students from his year-group was an easy enough way not to get lost. The crowd had fractured now, which meant they were set for a longer break, and he ended up pattering behind the girl who'd once let him copy her work when he'd got confused. She was surrounded by friends and did not notice Harry, which was just as well. Aside from a smattering of hushed comments from some of the students hailing from Britain, people rarely noticed him here. He'd always complained about drawing all that attention back at Hogwarts, so he really couldn't complain. Could he?

He was led to the dining room, where plates of sandwiches and mugs of tea had been set out for lunch. The seats were filling up fast, and even Harry's favourite corner seat where he was out of everyone's way had been taken up by a girl doing homework as she ate.

'Izvinite,' a deep voice said behind Harry. He startled, spinning around to see Viktor Krum and his entourage waiting to overtake him in the doorway.

'Sorry,' Harry said, stepping to the side. The tall girl with shiny hair at Krum's right looked to the ceiling. The tall boy with shiny hair at his left chuckled. Their uniforms looked glossier and better-fitted somehow than Harry's, and the jewellery they wore blinked pure gold and amethyst in the light from the fire.

'No problem,' said Krum. He had neither the height nor the glamour of his friends, but there was something inherently powerful about him, as though through presence alone he could have made up for it if he were bald, clumsy and wrinkled.

They pushed through, the tall boy knocking into Harry's shoulder as he went in a way that Harry doubted had been entirely accidental. They sat on the rugs by the fire, where room had been left for them. Harry thought bitterly that he'd been a celebrity back at Hogwarts and he'd never anchored for this kind of royal treatment. On the other hand, he recognised that Krum was a different type of celebrity altogether, and that this was a different type of school.

Like in History of Magic the other day, when the professor had pulled him up to the front of the class and spent the full hour explaining to them the research he'd done into natural magic. Harry had to stand by the board like a specimen as notes were taken and the professor's hands poked at his shoulders and face to stress a particular point. No one seemed to think the whole thing strange aside from Harry, and when the professor said that maybe Harry's talent had been passed down to him from a forgotten line of early wizards who had developed this art, everyone took out their heritage maps and started tracing the lines on the pages as though the task they'd been set was as mundane as solving a crossword puzzle.

'This is often the case with muggleborns, particularly those showing great magical prowess,' the professor said. 'So many lines of ancient wizards had died out and disappeared from history books that it is impossible to ever know for sure. But with Mr Potter, well, it might be that this trait had been passed down over generations without ever manifesting until his mother's magic awakened it and gave it to her son. Has anyone found an Evans? No? Mr Potter, what was the family name of your maternal grandmother?'

Krum's friend was looking at him across the room now, with the intense sort of look that Harry didn't think anyone his own age had the confidence for. It made him feel all strange, like his body had been put together wrong or like he'd forgotten how to stand normally. He snatched a sandwich off the table and made to retreat from the room altogether.

'No food outside,' barked a woman Harry hadn't seen before, halting him with a hand on his shoulder. She was big and tall, peering down at him like she was the warden of a prison and he a murder convict. Even the long wand held at her waist looked like a baton.

'Why?' The question escaped Harry's lips before he'd thought better of it, and he only clamped his mouth shut again when it was too late.

The woman's eyes narrowed. Harry had no idea which class she taught but prayed silently he wasn't taking it.

'Voles,' she said.

'Uhm—I don't—that is, I only speak English—'

'It is English, mister sir. The southern voles brought on muggle ships from Europe come into the castle in winter to use our heat and eat our food.'

'Oh—the rats!'

She looked as though he'd cursed at her. Harry swallowed, then corrected himself meekly, 'I mean voles.'

'Yes. Go sit at a table or give me the sandwich.'

Reluctantly, he placed it on her extended hand, trying to ignore the pang of light-headedness that resulted.

Whatever his next class was, he skipped it. He lay in bed, shaking minutely with a strange cold that would not pass, hands and feet clammy under the thick duvet. He thought perhaps he might be dying. How perfect that would be. On returning in the evening, his roommates would find him half-delirious with fever, and it would be discovered that he'd contracted an illness from a vole which had bitten him in his sleep, and that he would surely die from it unless they found a miracle cure. Ludvig would take him back to England on his tiny boat through raging storms and sheeting snows so he could be with his friends in his final moments, and Harry would never need to get up or talk to people he didn't know or do homework ever again.

In the evening, he slunk out of bed, threw on his Invisibility Cloak so no one would think to approach him in the corridors, and braved the darkness to reach the library. If he read even a little on natural magic, he thought, that would make up for the hours spent in bed doing nothing, and the day would not have been wholly wasted.

The library had been designed, Harry imagined, by the sort of librarian who preferred their books undisturbed by readers. Unlike the claustrophobic, domed pockets of classrooms and dormitories, the columns that framed the sides of the hall rose three floors into the air, meeting at last as spires in the centre of what he supposed the ceiling but might as well have been a black hole. Draughts snuck through the too-large windows and multiplied in the grand room, making the air feel wet and stale and chilly. Sometimes when he sat here in one of the rich satin armchairs, knees tugged into his chest so that his feet could nestle close to the warmth of his thighs, Harry would stare languidly at the place on the tall ceiling where no light reached and imagine a giant rat climbing in and out. He supposed he'd have to try and remember it was supposed to be a vole, now.

The books in the aisle he chose for today's hiding spot were all in Cyrillic. Harry didn't know where the books in English were. He tried to plan in his head how to ask the librarian, an old imposing man bent over his pulpit who looked very peaceful and very deceased, but every word he chose sounded odd and awkward in his ears. It was as though he had forgotten how to speak English over this last week of near-silence—when he did speak, people looked at him strangely as though they could not understand, and it made him replay every sentence in his head over and over in search for mistakes until it was no longer language, only strings of sound—and anyway the armchair was so comfortable, and the slide of the Invisibility Cloak over his face so silky if cool, and the librarian sat far away from everything—

When Harry next opened his eyes, his face, half his leg and one elbow showed from where the cloak had slipped down his body, and he could not feel his feet. In a panic, he bent to palm at them, and startled to see they'd been bared, his thick socks nowhere to be seen. His knapsack was also gone from where he'd dropped it to the floor. On the reading desk at his side sat a note.

The library had emptied. The lights had gone. Harry strained his eyes to try and make out the writing, then reached for the wand secured at his belt, only to discover it was no longer there.

No. No, no, he thought—this could not be happening to him, he could not lose his wand—the socks and the knapsack he could do without, but not his wand, too! Could he write to Ron and Hermione and ask them to buy a new one for him? But how would they choose the right one, and where would they get the money—they'd need to go to Gringott's for him, and they would need special permission to go to Diagon Alley, and then what if Dumbledore found out that Harry had allowed his wand to be stolen, of all things—worse, what if Snape found out?

What was wrong with him? How deeply must he have slept not to feel the touch of hands on his ankles, sliding off the socks? On his hips, pawing for the wand? Thank Merlin Snape had put a charm on the cloak to stop it being stolen, but why had Harry not thought to ask him to do the same to all his things—his wand—to his socks—

Wincing at the touch of the cold stone on the half-numb soles of his feet, Harry hobbled to the narrow window to read the note in the light of the skies.

Look outside, it said.

Harry looked. There, where the tall snow rose nearly halfway up the defence walls around the castle, sat in a neat pile his things: knapsack and socks and even what looked to be the coats and boots Ludvig had made him leave in the anteroom.

Arseholes, Harry thought. Bastard. Dicks. Who would even—why—

Cursing himself and Durmstrang and the whole of the world, Harry drew the Invisibility Cloak tighter around his frame and ran.

By the time he'd located the door out and found it mercifully unlocked, he was shaking with cold, and it was real cold and real shaking this time, not the pretend one he'd been doing back in bed when he was feeling sorry for himself. He climbed into a pair of someone else's boots, deep and large and sticky with a stranger's sweat, stole a fur coat whose weight nearly made him topple, and ventured out into the snow.

He had not gone outside since he'd first arrived at Durmstrang, and then it had not been full night yet, so he hadn't known. He hadn't realised that a cold such as this existed—that it was at all possible for cold to bite, to press hot needles into skin, to make eyes fill with burning tears and lips purse protectively over aching teeth. It was so cold it hurt to breathe. The falling snow made everything look white and unreal, even Harry's stiff hands in front of him as he felt at the snow to determine where it was safe to step.

From somewhere beyond the castle walls came a long, deep sound like a siren or like a laugh. There was something in that sound that made Harry suddenly think of death, close and sure, and he scrambled forward, clutching at his things and desperate to return behind the safety of stone and iron.

It was another age before he made it back to his dorm, the snow from his hair melted into rivulets of water that ran down his back, his glasses steamed from his rushed, gulping wet breaths. He found his three roommates sitting by the fire, steaming mugs in hand and blankets cast around the floor, bright grins stretching their faces when their eyes landed on him.

'Did you have fun in the snow?' one asked. 'Make any snowmen?'

Harry gaped. He was too surprised and too exhausted for anger, but some other desperate emotion took hold of him, something that felt like hunger and like fever. 'You did that? What the— For Christ's sake's, who does that—'

'For Christ's sake's,' another boy echoed mockingly. 'Where did you grow up? A muggle suburb?'

It should not have been an insult. Harry had indeed grown up in a muggle suburb, though he was sure that this particular expletive he'd picked up from Snape, who was always cursing out all possible figures at him, wizarding and muggle alike—but it was the way the boy had said it, the way his teeth had bared in a snarl, the way the others laughed uncomfortably along—

Harry drew his arm back, fisted his hand as tight as it would go, and punched him.

For a beat, all was silent and still. Harry's hand pulsated with pain. His knuckles felt as though surely they must have fractured. The boy Harry had just punched in the face stared at him, a glistening droplet of blood on his lip. He was taller than Harry and he looked stronger than Harry, too, but Harry felt at once that this didn't matter, that the only thing that mattered was whether you were willing and able to punch someone in the face—which Harry apparently was, and should that really be so shocking?

'Give me my wand, Linne,' the boy said. Linne, smaller and grim, bent to retrieve it from where it had rolled to the ground. In different circumstances Harry would have perhaps found their quiet composure threatening. Tonight, he could not have cared less for it, and simply shoved at the shorter boy, startling him into dropping the wand to the ground all over again.

'Oops,' Harry said.

'Don't put your hands on him,' the taller boy warned, blood still gleaming on his lip. 'Don't you dare put your hands on him—pull out your wand, you half-breed scum, but don't you dare—'

Harry shoved again at them both, then again at Linne specifically, and again—

And then for a beat everything erupted black and then light and then awful, and he was flung back to the floor, hands cutting on the sharp stone.

He touched his jaw, feeling at the bone and teeth. They were probably whole, though he couldn't really feel them. He could not have said where he was for a moment, or what had happened, or why it felt as though his nose was bleeding and in fact his hand did come away red. He would not have been able to tell what he had expected being punched to feel like, but he had not expected this: a shock so sudden it made everything seem new and pointless, a pain that came gradually even as his eyes were already shedding itchy tears.

'Well.' He looked up to the boy who'd punched him. 'That was a bit muggle of you, wasn't it?'


Next time, Severus arrives at Durmstrang.

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