FOURTEEN.

The lift sputtered and screeched as it descended. It was not right for any lift to carry on falling quite so long. Where was it trying to go? To the very centre of the Earth? To where they would be melted into lava and pushed out as black, smeary coal, to be mined and burnt and drawn with?

Snape had shown Harry once how to draw with charcoal. It was on a night they'd argued because Harry had butchered some root or other, and he couldn't be trusted around cauldrons, and yada-yada, and Snape must have felt a little bad for making a huge deal out of the very obvious fact Harry was bad at potions, because he had shown him the charcoal.

He'd been drawing Hogwarts from memory. It was quite good: the lake and Hagrid's hut and the castle's towers rising in perfect proportion. Snape had let Harry do the Forbidden Forest. Harry's fingers had come away stained so black it was as though he didn't have fingers anymore.

Now, that same black was all around him. As they stepped out of the lift at last, the black glistened silver in the light of their wands. The narrow walls of the tunnel were etched in irregular shapes, caving then sticking out again, the edges sharp and canted. Above them lay tonnes and tonnes of the same: miles of rock and rock and rock. Harry felt as though they'd been swallowed by a coal monster. A mole, maybe, the size of half the world, whose insides were lined with black mineral and whose stomach acid dripped in orange rivulets down its walls.

'Can you feel the people who were buried here?' Lisa asked. 'Can you feel their fear?'

Harry nodded into the dark. He wasn't sure if it was really the dead miners' fear he felt, or only his own.

'You have to listen to what the magic wants. That is the key. You can't expect the magic to do for you what it wasn't bred for. What does this magic hunger for?'

She was really trying today, Harry could tell. Lisa's problem was that she just wasn't very good at explaining things. Everything was always so complicated, and any time Harry thought he'd understood, when he repeated it back to her she would hum and say, 'Well, yes, in a way, but…' Sometimes, Harry was tempted to tell her to go away and come back to him once she'd got her facts straight.

He never told her that, though. It would have been rude. Harry didn't want her to think he was rude. She told him in their first lesson that she knew the theory of wild magic but Harry knew the practice, so as far as she was concerned they were both teachers and students at once. Harry felt a certain responsibility then, because while it might have been fine to say something unkind to her if she were his teacher, it seemed significantly less fair to do so if he was meant to be teaching her, too.

'Are you sure it's safe to be down here with me?' he asked now with a nervous laugh. It sounded so stupid. 'If the mine magic wants death?'

'What do you want?'

'I don't—I don't want to bury us alive if that's what you mean.'

'Then we are fine.'

Harry considered telling her the optimism was bordering on overconfidence. But he wanted her to be right.

'Old muggle folk tales are full of muggles lost to horrible fates because they ask for what they do not want, or they ask the wrong magic, or they ask without knowing what they are asking. That is important. Never cast unless you are sure your wants and the magic's wants align.'

'I don't really know what I want most of the time,' admitted Harry. 'So, I'm not sure I'll be so good at that. I guess that's because I'm thir—fourteen.'

He wasn't fourteen, but she didn't need to know that.

'I'm twenty-four and I don't know what I want, either.' Lisa was trailing the wall with her fingers now, feeling out the magic. Harry felt it plenty enough without.

'So how old do you need to be before you know what you want?' he asked.

'I don't know.'

They both snorted. It made Harry's tightened stomach relax a little.

Lisa stopped then and turned to him. Illuminated silver, she looked like a ghost. Harry thought again of the dead miners and had to swallow hard against fear.

'You said the magic wants death and burial?'

'Uhm—I guess?'

'I don't think that's all it wants. What else do muggles dream of when they go down into the earth? What do dwarves wish for every time their pick strikes stone? Close your eyes, then tell me.'

Harry obeyed. When his eyes fell shut, he heard her murmur Nox. His wand was still lit at his side, but it wasn't nearly enough light to fight off the pushing darkness, and with his eyelids now in the way he felt the black grow deeper, take on mass—pull him in—

And there at the bottom, he saw a glimmer of light.

'Gold,' he said. 'Jewels. Salt and coal. Richer lives.'

'Yes.'

Beauty, he wanted to add, but he was too embarrassed. He concentrated instead, pulling at the magic and then letting the magic pull back at him, and he did not need to open his eyes or hear Lisa's little gasp to know what he'd done—the light of it shone bright enough that it drew its shape on the skin of his eyelids.

'Look,' said Lisa.

Harry looked. Threads of gold and red ran now through the corridor's black confines, twining between the juts of coal and illuminating it from within. The walls shone and they bled warmth, bathing everything in a yellow light that smoothed out imperfections and made eyes and mouths glimmer and dance.

When they emerged back out, the light half-blinded Harry even though the sun had already begun setting. Everything was pink and special. Ludvig waited for them by the sled, his gloves thrown across his shoulder as he scratched one of the larger dogs under the chin.

'Did you not want to see the mine?' Harry thought to ask when Ludvig helped him up into the sled.

'I know what mines look like,' said Ludvig. 'When I am old maybe I will go work in one.'

Harry didn't think they wanted pensioners working in mines. He shuffled to the side to make room for Lisa. 'It doesn't look like it'd be a nice time,' he told him over the top of her hat.

'No small wizards,' Ludvig said. 'It is how I would like to die.'

They rode for the better part of three hours, and by the time they'd got back to the castle Harry's stomach was making rebellious little sounds. He was surprised to discover the clockface on the wall of his dorm showing just after two o'clock. They'd set out at the crack of dawn, which Harry had hated—but now he was happy to realise this meant he had nearly the whole of Saturday to himself.

He washed the char and smell of the mine off his face, and he was just about to go find someone to have food with him in the kitchens when a thunderous knock sounded on the door.

'Harry!' Inna exclaimed, sounding entirely too excited to see him. 'How are you?'

'Good,' he said carefully. 'What do you want?'

'Want? What would I want but the pleasures of your tiny little company—and your Invisibility Cloak. That would be a nice bonus.'

'My Invisibility—how do you know about that?'

Inna shrugged. 'Gossip?' she offered. 'I don't know. News spreads. Anyway, we're going to Longyearbyen in ten minutes. If we had the cloak, we could wrap up some stuff in it to make sure no one finds it—not that they'd look, but an extra precaution, you know.'

'Longyearbyen—isn't that the muggle town?'

'Yep.'

'You want to—but are we allowed to go there?'

Inna's tone turned conspiratorial. 'Actually—' she looked around, as though to check whether there was anyone who could overhear, then leaned in close to whisper into Harry's ear, '—no.'

Harry bit his lip to stop the laugh. It was not a time for laughter.

'There's a spell on the cloak,' he explained. 'It will burn you if you touch it unless I'm there and I let you.'

'Even better—invisible and untouchable!'

'No, but—I would have to come with you, see—'

'Well, of course. We have to show you the sights. Grab the cloak and meet us at the doghouse in ten.'

It was not okay. Harry did not want to go. Well—he did want to go a little. Inna and Danila would probably both be there, and Krum for sure, and maybe Blom or someone else. And there would be other people, too, and houses that weren't made of Durmstrang stone, and Harry was dead curious what the lot of them might be up to visiting a muggle mining settlement. What was there even to do?

He should not go. But then Inna had spoken as though she was wholly convinced he would come with them, and Harry could think of little worse than to try and tell her now that he wouldn't.

'So, have you guys heard of Sirius Black?' said Harry uncertainly once he'd been packed again into the pelts and blankets of the sled. They'd taken only one between them this time, and were crushed tightly against each other, legs tangled between them.

'No,' Blom said, sounding disinterested. 'Who's that?'

'A convict who escaped from Azkaban last summer—that's our, uhm, our magic prison in Britain.'

'Yep.'

'He used to work for Voldemort,' said Harry. 'And he sort of betrayed my parents and got them killed, and now he wants to kill me.'

'That's rough,' said Blom.

'Merlin.' Danila stared at Harry. 'I thought they'd sent you here to study wild magic, but was it actually to protect you from that Black man?'

Harry cringed. 'It was sort of both.' And a couple other things on top of that, he added privately. 'I don't think he knows I'm here or anything—but just in case, can you, uhm, just be on alert if you see anyone suspicious? And—maybe don't call me Harry when people can hear—'

'Sure,' said Inna. 'We can walk you around under the cloak when we're out on the street, can't we? It will all be fine. I doubt the fellow's come here to freeze his ass off anyway. Oh, I wish someone was trying to kill me—imagine.'

She threw herself halfway across Danila as though swooning. Danila jabbed her in the side, but she didn't react.

'I would be a hero just for surviving another day,' she mused. 'I could tell you all to shut it and do everything I say, because tomorrow I might be dead in a shallow grave somewhere—just imagine.'

Harry wanted to point out he didn't need to imagine any of it. He kept his mouth shut.

Longyearbyen was nestled between two expansive mountain ridges. The houses had the same roofs and the same windows but differed by colour; in the low glow of the fizzing electric lights suspended from hanging wires, Harry made out oranges, reds and greens. Some of the houses stood on stilts. Harry had seen small villages before and had expected in the first place to find scarcity, but there really was so little here: no green squares with benches to rest on, no shops with wide open doors to welcome in customers, no afternoon strollers. Between the houses there was the road and the snow, and right where houses ended the mining began. The smell of coal and ash suffused the place, bitten through with the tang of frost.

'Here.' Blom straightened from where he'd been leaning into the sled. He produced a rifle gun. 'Hold it.'

'Me?' Inna hissed. 'I'm not holding it, you hold it!'

'I don't want to hold it, it's disgusting.'

'Well, someone has to—give it to Danila—'

'I'll take it,' said Krum, reaching out. When he saw Harry's concern, he explained, 'It's not loaded. But the muggles will notice if we do not have. Outside the town they must carry a weapon by law.'

'Why? Oh—because of the bears?'

'Yes, because.'

It was odd to see Krum with a gun across his back, Harry thought as he walked behind him, hidden under the cloak and safe to gawk. It would have been like seeing Uncle Vernon with a wand, Harry imagined—it made him smile a little, but then he started thinking whether Uncle Vernon would have been any different if he'd been a wizard, and he wasn't sure he liked thinking about that.

They went shopping first. They bought cassette tapes and a recorder on which you could tape endlessly over your own voice and play it back so it said things for you. They bought glitter pens, stickers, notepads and all sorts of stationery. They bought cheap paperback novels about monsters and romance and war. None of the books looked to Harry like they'd be much interesting, but the others looked at them with a fascinated sort of revulsion, running their fingers over the tanks and the surgical sutures in the cover pictures like they were trying to understand in this way what it might be like to touch the real thing.

When they left the shop, they met their first Longyearbyen resident, save for the woman at the register: a big, black hound who sat in the snow by the entry door, looking frazzled, dirty and sick. They gave it a wide berth in case it was rabid, but as they walked on, they found it had followed at some distance.

'She can smell the dog treats in your pocket,' Inna told Blom. 'Give her one and she'll leave us alone.'

'Treats are for our dogs,' Blom said importantly. He did periodically look over his shoulder at the dog, though, apparently waging a war with himself.

The real aim of these clandestine excursions into the muggle world soon revealed itself, and Harry had to admit to a tiny bit of disappointment.

'See this number here? The higher, the heavier,' Blom was explaining, his plastic shoes squeaking on the polished floor. 'This one should be good to start with.'

Bowling. The aim was bowling.

'You must strike the, uh, the things,' continued Blom. 'If they fall, you get points.'

'Pins,' said Harry.

'Points, yeah.'

'No, no—they're called pins.'

Blom looked down at him, confused. 'You said you haven't played before.'

Harry hadn't. Dudley had had a birthday party at a bowling alley once, but of course Harry hadn't been invited. It was strange to think the first time he'd gone bowling would now forever be the time a bunch of pureblood wizards brought him along and tried to explain the game without knowing what the pins were called.

The bathroom door at the opposite end of the row of lanes struck open. 'Is it my turn yet?' Inna called, emerging dressed in flared jeans and a denim jacket. It was a surprisingly cohesive set, Harry thought, much better than Krum's dungarees or the flowery woman's blouse that Blom was wearing.

'It's been your turn for ten minutes,' Danila complained. 'Go play. I will get drinks.'

The owner of the alley seemed to know the lot of them, because when he brought them drinks and food, he was all smiles and winks. 'We tell him we're from Barentsburg, one of the Russian settlements,' Danila explained to Harry later. 'And we tell him the food and the bowling are better here.'

'Is there bowling in Barentsburg?'

'I don't know. It's another half a day travel. We've never been.'

Harry decided he liked bowling, though he wasn't very good at it. He bolstered himself when he saw Danila and Inna fail spectacularly at knocking down a single pin over and over, which was a little funny considering how good Inna was at Quidditch. Krum did well enough, but it was nothing compared to Blom, who took on some new energy whenever he hefted the ball. Harry saw him eyeing the poses that the men at the other lane struck, all hooked feet and arms pointing to the ceiling.

'You're like a professional,' Harry told him.

'I am not a professional,' Blom shot back immediately. 'It is only not serious, this muggle game.'

This annoyed Harry. Blom had a particular talent for annoying Harry, even if he was nice enough most of the time. When Harry next picked up a ball, he made sure to breathe in the clapping and laughter, the smack of heavy balls against the floor, the smells of beer and sugar and fat—and he thought of the mine workers hands slipping into the three little holes—and it wasn't much magic at all, but it was plenty enough to force the ball suddenly sideways when it swerved too close to the gutter, and to get him his first strike of the day.

Danila and Inna whooped. Krum glared at Harry.

'No magic here,' he told him. 'It is not allowed to cast with muggles there. If they trace—'

'They can't trace wild magic,' Harry grinned. 'So I can do what I want.'

Krum did not seem happy with it, but behind him Harry saw Danila send him a wink.

Blom and Krum must have both looked grown-up enough, because when Harry came to sit, he quickly discovered that half the drinks on their sticky table were alcoholic. He would not partake in further crimes, so he drank his coke and felt just a little superior.

'Like if you mixed sugar into Skele-Gro potion,' Inna decreed when Harry let her try some. 'I will not understand muggle tastes. There's another one that Ella drinks—like that, but see-through. It's even worse.'

'Did you get the muggle money from Ella?' Harry thought to ask. Blom had just got up to aim his next strike. He was so far above them in the point ranking that no one was even trying to catch up anymore.

'Huh—yeah, I think. There's a fair few squibs in the kitchens who'll do exchange.'

'A lot of students come to town, then?'

Blom whooped as the pins scattered. Inna laughed. 'I wouldn't say so. Well, I don't know for sure, but you need the squibs to trust you with a sled and you need some actual guts to risk getting kicked out, so—'

Harry's body went cold. 'Kicked out? What do you mean?'

Inna threw him a look. 'Oh, don't worry, not you, probably—depends on Karkaroff's mood, I guess. Hm. No, I don't think he'd get rid of you. Viktor neither, obviously. But the rest of us, well. Danila would be gone for sure.'

'Thanks,' Danila said sourly.

'You know how Karkaroff gets with this stuff,' Inna added. 'He catches us with muggle contraband and we're dead. Some of us are dead.'

'He won't catch us,' Krum said grimly. 'We know what we are doing.'

Maybe they knew what they were doing, but Harry certainly didn't. He felt panic stir in his stomach and set his coke down quickly. It did taste a little like Skele-Gro now that he knew it could cost him expulsion. Why had he agreed to come? For pizza and coke and bowling? How did that make any sense whatsoever?

The others were ignorant to Harry's anxiety and seemed entirely unconcerned with the threat hanging over them. They were talking about Danila and Inna's plans for after graduation. Now they were talking about whether year six or year seven was harder work. Now they were talking about how hot Inna looked in jeans. Now they were—how long were they going to hang around? When could they go home?

'When do you become apprentice?' Krum was asking. 'Do you get a holiday?'

Danila shook his head. 'I don't think the apprenticeship is happening anymore.'

This knocked Harry out of his panic. Even he knew about the apprenticeship. It was all that Danila talked about when he did talk, which to be fair wasn't terribly often.

'What do you mean it's not happening?' Inna drew herself straight. 'Did the asshole change his mind on you?'

Danila gave a shrug. 'He didn't say it, exactly. But he will if I don't get the hint, you see.'

Inna gave him a searching look. Apparently, just through looking she had understood, because she collapsed back on the cushions. 'That bitch,' she said. 'Actually, you know what?' She rummaged in their bags for the cassette recorder, pressed the button and repeated that bitch into it, for safekeeping.

'Uhm, who's—who are we talking about?' Harry asked. He saw Danila cringe.

'Harkusha's mother's left his father,' Inna explained, 'and now she's marrying a muggle. We tried to keep it under wraps but by now I think everyone knows—the asshole Healer included.'

'Is that so bad? I mean, I know some people like that.' Harry thought of Leeni and Kauko. 'You know, couples were one person's a muggle. It's not so bad.'

'The problem, Harry, is that she isn't just any random witch, is she?' Inna fumbled with the cassette player until it crackled that bitch again, '—is a Harkusha. And now her son's life is going to be ruined.'

'Maybe—maybe she loves him, though—'

'Then she should have had an affair like a normal person. Merlin, it's not so hard, is it?'

Harry didn't know what to say. He looked to Danila, who was sitting quietly through all this, face empty of expression.

'His life isn't ruined,' Krum cut in. 'He will find some other apprenticeship.'

Danila again said nothing, though Harry thought he looked doubtful.

'It is romantic in one way,' Blom mused as he sat back, finally deigning to abandon the game in favour of food. 'To leave everything in your life behind so you can marry a plumber.'

'He's an electrician,' Danila said sourly. 'And it's not romantic.'

'No, it isn't,' Inna agreed.

'It is a little romantic,' said Krum. 'Harry agrees with me.'

Harry had given him no reason to believe that, but he did agree and he did nod quickly, feeling stupidly giddy that Krum had banded them together for this.

'It's not romantic!'

The words were shouted with such emotion that Harry had assumed at first they must have come from Danila. It took a moment for his brain to catch up and connect the timbre of the voice with its owner, who was sitting across from him with a heaving chest.

Gone red, Inna forced her voice to soften, though it held onto a sharp edge that made Harry a little scared of her. 'It is not romantic,' she repeated. 'It is selfish. You do not choose who you love but you can choose what you do. And leaving behind everyone you care about, everything you care about, leaving all this for a thing that will be spoilt eventually by your bitterness—there is nothing romantic about that.'

No one was willing to argue with her after that.

The evening wound down, and soon so did the game. Harry could feel himself melting into the sofa, breaths growing slower and better spaced out. His desire to return to the school had been overshadowed by knowing he'd have to get back out into the cold in order to do so. Better to stay here forever, and sleep and sleep and sleep until it was all revealed a dream.

At long last, they started moving. They changed again from their muggle clothes into Durmstrang uniforms. They wrapped their shopping in Harry's cloak and deposited it on the bottom of a bag. The bowling alley was closing up for the night, the lights going off and the pin machines humming and knocking their final shifts.

In the thin snow outside waited the dog.

'Do you think she's been here all along?' Inna asked. 'Merlin.'

Blom sighed. 'Do we take it? We can leave it in the doghouse.'

'And what are the squibs going to do with it?' Danila said, eyeing the dog with distaste. 'It's not a sled dog.'

The dog had its eyes trained on them. Even Harry, who did not like dogs as a rule—the teeth, he thought, were the worst of it—couldn't help but feel pity.

'We have no choice,' Krum decided. 'It will follow and I am not kicking it.'

They took the dog. It settled itself quickly with its head in Krum's lap, silent and apparently unperturbed by the motion of the sled. Its wagging tail struck Harry's arm over and again. It didn't hurt, it was just annoying; but if Harry knew one thing, it was to never grab a dog by its tail. Dogs didn't like that.

The ride back was spent in an exhausted, satisfied quiet. Even once they'd got off the sled and started to untie the dogs, they did so without speaking. Harry couldn't have told if the others felt the same, but for him the silence was borne partly out of relief: now that they'd got back unscathed, now that the whole stupid thing was over, the anxiety relinquished its hold on him and he wanted to lie in bed with his muggle sweets and muggle pens, breathing and looking back at the trip through the rose-tinted glasses that came with knowing it had all ended well.

And then, lights flooded their silent ministrations. Footsteps sounded on the snow, only to be covered again by the blanket of barks and whines. Krum muttered an expletive under his breath.

Harry's stomach went heavy with dread.

From the darkness appeared two figures, and when Harry saw the first, he thought for sure the latter would be Karkaroff. It would have been just his luck to have the two people he desperately did not want to find out about the excursion do just that, and both together—but no, Snape was trailed only by Lisa, whose wide eyes looked frantic with panic.

Without thinking about it, Harry took a step back—as if that would save him. He knocked into Danila, fixed into place behind him like a statue. When Harry looked up at his face, he saw a blankness that poorly concealed the raw fear underneath. He remembered what Inna had said. Danila would be gone for sure.

'Where the hell have you been?!'

Harry realised only now that he hadn't heard Snape properly shout in a long time. He'd shouted, sure, but not like that—not really.

'Do you realise the whole school is looking for you?'

'We went for a ride,' Inna said quickly. 'We didn't think anyone would even notice we were gone for a few hours, professor—or else we would have mentioned—'

'A few hours?' Snape yelled. 'You've been missing since this afternoon—do you have any idea what time it is?'

Inna was opening her mouth to argue but fell silent at his glare. Snape swept his eyes over each of them in turn, daring them to speak up, and finally he settled them on the bag and the dog packed still into the sled behind them. If it were possible for his face to go darker still, that would have done it.

'Where did you get the dog?'

'That's—that's Enok, professor. He's not been well, so we brought him along in the sled for some—'

'You're a terrible liar, Bogdanova. You picked the stray up somewhere and allow me to venture a guess that it wasn't out on a ride across the ice desert. Empty the bag.'

Inna did not move. She glared back at Snape. Harry noticed her hand twitching at her side.

Blom did not have as much of a problem with obeying commands. He opened the bag and showed it to Snape. 'It's empty,' he said. 'We had food in it for earlier.'

Snape's brows knitted with confusion. He was halfway to nodding before his eyes fell on Harry. Damn it, damn it, damn it—

Snape thrust his hands inside the bag and without issue produced the whole of the invisible package, the cloak unspooling in his hands. From it slipped free every last bit of their Longyearbyen bounty. When the last paperback hit the floor, Snape looked up with murder in his eyes.

'You herd of fools—you took him to—' He drew a harsh breath. 'You went to a muggle town. What were you doing there?'

No one dared answer.

'Potter?'

'Bowling,' Harry said softly, keeping his eyes down. 'And shopping.'

He heard Snape exhale twice before he spoke. 'There is a fugitive on the loose who is determined to take your life, and you are telling me you've decided it was worth risking it all for bowling?'

Harry bit into his lip quickly. If he laughed now, Snape would lose it for sure, and it wasn't even as though he was in a laughing mood. It had just been funny when he'd said it out loud.

'I will go tell the search party they've been found,' Lisa spoke up from behind Snape. She was studiously avoiding looking at Harry. It made him nauseous. The whole thing was making him nauseous: Snape's yelling, the terse silence of Krum and the others, the hot breaths of the dogs and the low lights of the doghouse. 'We need to bring in the squibs who've driven out looking for him.'

'Yes,' Snape sneered. 'I wonder how they'll feel once they have been informed they've given up their night to search for bear-mauled children, purely because said children needed desperately to bowl.'

'Wait, no!' Harry could feel the waves of Danila's fear seeping into him. Strangely, it made him brave. 'You can't tell anyone.'

Snape turned to look at him slowly. 'Excuse me?'

'You can't tell anyone because if Karkaroff finds out—please, you have to tell them that we were out sledding. If Karkaroff knows where we've gone, he's going to expel us for sure. Please, you know what he thinks about muggles and muggle things—if he found out that all of us, and Krum and all his favourites, that we went to—'

He had to convince Snape. If he didn't, he thought he would die. He felt like his face was on fire.

'You'd deserve it, all of you,' Snape spat. Harry opened his mouth to plead again, but Snape lifted a hand to stop him. 'Fine. I don't want to see any of you outside the castle walls until Easter break. No sledding, no Quidditch, no muggle toys. You move between class and your dormitories like worker ants. And if I see any of you step one toe out of line now or later, I will go straight to Headmaster Karkaroff and I will tell him exactly what his pet pureblood heirs like to get up to in their free time. Is that clear?'

'Yes?' Surprise coloured Inna's voice. 'Sure—of course?'

'Did you remember to use a ball, or were you knocking the pins over with your head?' Snape snapped. 'Thank me for what I am sure is a mercy I will regret and get out of my sight.'

'Thank you, Professor,' said Krum. It sounded sincere, even though Harry was sure Krum himself had never been in much danger at all. Scattered mutterings of thank you's followed before they all started to queue up to go, pushing through the narrow doghouse door one at a time so no one had to brush too close to Snape. Harry saw Blom cast a mournful look at the sweets and toys as he went, left in a heap on the dirty floor.

Harry made for the door. He wasn't all too surprised when he found his shoulder caught mid-step.

'Not you. I'm not done with you.'

Harry looked longingly past Snape's arm at the door out. Flakes of snow twirled in the dim air, but at this moment even the night cold seemed inviting. He was still running high on adrenaline, he could tell, but once that had gone, he would be left exhausted and scared and guilty, and he wanted to be in bed for that, where he could cry in peace.

'Can't we at least go back to the castle?' he tried. 'And you can—we can talk there—'

'No.'

'Why? It's nasty here—'

Snape had let go of Harry's arm and lowered himself to sit on the edge of one of the sleds. The dogs had all been locked away for the night, though you could still smell them in the air. The sleds looked strange and wrong without them, swirling their wooden intricacies and breathing with their hills of pelts like a herd of creatures in slumber.

Snape looked strange in the dim light, too, some features of his face shadowed and others made more obvious. He wasn't looking at Harry now but at the ground, as though trying to remind himself of where it was. Harry felt suddenly afraid of him.

'Let's just go back to the castle—'

'In a moment,' Snape said.

Harry hesitated. He felt like running. 'Do you—do you need me to bring you some water, or—?'

'I need you to try and not get yourself killed!'

Harry startled back, nails digging into the skin of his palms. He'd thought it had been horrible to have Snape shout a moment ago, but it was infinitely worse now that they were alone.

'I need you to not disappear without a word and make me think—what were you thinking? How difficult do you think it would be for Sirius Black to find out you've been transferred to Durmstrang? Very difficult? Answer me.'

Harry couldn't answer, but he did try and shake his head a little, hoping that was what Snape wanted.

'And how difficult would it be for him to establish the approximate location of the school? To go into hiding at a nearby village? Difficult? Well—not easy, certainly, but well within his capabilities, I would assume, considering how very motivated he seems to be!'

The worst of it was that Snape was right. Harry had known as much even as they were setting off, even when he'd first heard of the idea. Only it had been as though one smaller part of him knew it, and the other larger part decided maybe it would be okay—maybe if he were careful, it wouldn't be as big a risk—and that seemed stupid now, sure, but somehow back then it had seemed just right. And Harry knew he couldn't explain it this way, because even to his own ears it sounded weak.

'Well? Do you have anything to say?'

It would be easier to think of a thing to say if Snape weren't yelling. Harry couldn't think of excuses. He thought only of staying still and quiet, and choosing when to nod or shake his head, and beyond this thinking it felt almost as if he didn't exist—as if there were perhaps a Harry but only a Harry-doll, a Harry-thing, a Harry that didn't have a past or a mind or anything at all to say.

And then, he heard Snape laughing.

His head sprung up in surprise. It wasn't a nice laugh; it was a grating, sickly sound that made you think of tears and anger more than it did of laughter. It spilled from between Snape's tightened jaws, made him grab at his own chest to contain it.

'Goddamn bowling,' he said through another horrible chuckle. 'I've spent the last eight hours wondering if I'm going to find your dead corpse before the bears get to it, and you were bowling. Was that really all you were doing there?'

'And shopping,' Harry added lamely.

He looked at the line of Snape's shoulders, hunched over and tight. He was clearly having some sort of episode. That was disturbing, but at least it made Harry less focused on his own fear. He hunched down to where the muggle sweets they'd bought lay strewn on the ground and picked up at random a packet of gummy bears. It made a crisp, explosive little sound when he opened it.

'You should have one,' he told Snape, extending the packet carefully toward him. 'Get your blood sugar up.'

Snape snorted. Without looking, he extended a hand. Harry took two gummy bears from the packet and placed them there.

'You need to apologise to Vernyhora,' Snape said suddenly. 'I accused her quite vehemently of losing you in a mine.'

'What? Why should I apologise for that?'

'You're the one who needs to work with her,' Snape pointed out. 'I do not.'

Harry sighed the way people sighed when they were very annoyed. He wasn't actually annoyed. He felt precarious and threatened, but pretending he was annoyed made everything seem normal for a moment.

He ate a gummy bear, waiting for Snape to yell at him again. When he didn't, that calmed Harry down enough to risk taking a step closer.

'I'm sorry,' he whispered. It was very difficult to say somehow, hence the whisper. It didn't make sense that it would be so hard when he really did mean it.

Snape cleared his throat. It made Harry nervous. The small silence stretched. 'I know,' he said finally. 'But you cannot do this, Harry. I understand your anxiety around not being like everyone else—but the fact is you are risking far more than expulsion when you do something so monumentally stupid.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I know. Everything I have told your friends stands. Additionally, you will be doing lines as punishment for extreme stupidity. And if you leave the school grounds again, I am going to kill you personally. Do you understand?'

Harry nodded. Then, biting his lip, he said, 'Well, I won't go to town again. But what about just sledding? Not until Easter, I get that, but after—'

'Do you really want to try this with me now? At this moment in time?'

'It's just that it's not really fair. I go out with Lisa and Ludvig and you've never said that's too dangerous.'

'Yes, I don't consider going to abandoned coal mines too dangerous when you have an adult witch and a giant with a gun flanking you. And while some minimal risk remains, the benefits clearly outweigh—'

'Going sledding has benefit. I was so depressed before I went out sledding with everyone—it's fresh air and great sights, and it's company. It's good to have a social—'

'And exactly how many times have you gone out sledding without my knowledge?'

Oh. Harry hadn't meant to start talking about that. 'Not too many,' he said.

Snape closed his eyes. 'Good. Better not tell me. It might give me an aneurysm. Give me another of those gummy bears.'

Harry did. As he upturned the bag over Snape's palm, he kept his eyes on the action and his heart on the goal. 'It's just that it's the same sort of risk—'

'Excuse me if I don't consider your new pack of teenage delinquents adequate protection—'

Harry had reached his limit. 'Look, it's like polar bears and guns!'

It came out a little louder than he'd intended. Snape arched an eyebrow at him, the one he arched when Harry was on decidedly thin ice. He bolstered himself.

'The muggles who live in Longyearbyen, they have this rule,' he continued at a softer volume. 'If you leave town, then you have to take a gun with you in case a polar bear tries to get you. And it's not a guarantee that it will save you, but it's something. And people still go out of the town, because otherwise they'd just sit there in their houses and never do anything. And I don't want to just sit and not do anything because Black is out there. It could be ages until he's caught, and when it's not Black anyway there's some other danger, and I just think—I think that I have a gun now. With the magic, I feel like I can probably—like I am the gun. And it's not a guarantee, and I know going to Longyearbyen was a really big risk, but there are different degrees of risk. So, I won't do that again, but I want to go sledding after Easter.' He cleared his throat, gone dry from the talking. 'There. I'm done.'

'You are? Splendid.'

Harry shifted from foot to foot. Snape sounded angry again.

He stepped a little closer. His arm was brushing against Snape's. When he swung forward on the balls of his feet, he bumped into him gently and Snape didn't wince away or push him off. It made Harry feel a little better.

'I will consider your argument,' Snape said gruffly. He sounded tired, so Harry did his best to hide his smile.

Then, something moved in the dark. Harry's body reacted first, jumping back, before his brain deciphered the shadows and saw the dog scuttering from Krum's sled onto the floor. It was nosing around, verifying its surroundings. It must have disliked the earlier shouting. Now that they'd fallen quiet, it had remembered it was curious.

Harry climbed into the sled Snape was leaning on. This way, his feet were far away from the dog's mouth, and all the most vital bits of his body were either hidden behind Snape's back or well out of reach.

'I thought the dirt monster was a friend of yours?' Snape asked, amused.

'I don't like big dogs,' said Harry, scrunching his nose. 'Aunt Marge—my uncle's sister—she had a dog and it bit me once.'

'This one is more interested in your M&Ms than in biting anyone, I think. Though I will give it to you that it must be the ugliest dog I've ever seen.'

Almost as though it could hear the comment and take offense, the dog glared up at Snape.

'Come,' Snape told Harry. 'We'll go tell one of the squibs to feed it.'

'It's really late though—'

'Oh, I assure you they are all awake. A frantic search for a missing student will have that effect.'

Harry's face grew warm and itchy. The shame that had eased off a little returned in full force.

'Harry. Let's go. We'll talk more inside.'

He climbed off the sled behind Snape, then watched him gather up the sweets and gadgets from the floor. Harry would have helped, only the dog was sniffing around there still, and he could see from here how yellow its teeth were.

'Don't touch it,' Snape warned as they made to leave, circling around the dog that didn't seem at all happy to be left behind. 'It looks like it has every disease known to man.'

'I wasn't going to,' Harry huffed.

As the door to the doghouse was swinging shut behind them, the dog looked up at Harry with big black eyes.

There was something in that look that made Harry feel, despite what he'd told Snape, like it might have been nice to give its head a little pat.