In the darkness, something chimed.
Sarah woke with a crick in her neck, no real idea where she was, and a sudden, very intense longing for her bed. Her legs ached, her head felt stuffed full of cotton, and she was pretty sure both her hip and her tailbone were beginning to bruise.
She lifted her head and looked around. The room was still dim, but in a distant corner, she saw the faint glow of the clock. Its hand almost pointed to breakfast.
When her eyes adjusted, she realized she'd fallen asleep with one cheek pillowed on Jareth's bony shoulder. Jareth himself was sprawled against the armchair with an arm wrapped around her. He had shed the armor at some point and his skin was warm through their clothing.
Which, okay. What was she wearing, and why did it not feel like the robes she'd been wearing the night before? Without turning on a light, she patted herself down to see just what she was dressed in. It turned out to be a soft tee shirt and pajama pants.
She definitely didn't remember either of them undressing. Sarah blinked, trying to make her fuzzy, tired, dehydrated brain think back. After a couple of moments, she concluded it had probably been the same magic that let Jareth change clothes eight times in ten hours.
Sarah gently disentangled herself. from him. He stirred, mumbling something sleepily, but didn't wake.
She grabbed a dark bundle of fabric from the floor, slipping it on around her shoulders. Once again, she didn't bother to really close or belt the robes. It was breakfast time; just a few days before, she'd seen the runes professor — Bathsheba something; she hadn't been in during the summer and wasn't in Sarah's 'neighborhood' of suites, so Sarah forgave herself not knowing her well — in hair curlers.
She hardly noticed how the robe tickled her cheek as she knelt to put on shoes and socks.
It wasn't until she'd already entered the Great Hall, sat down, and was pouring milk into her tea that she realized she was wearing Jareth's feathered cloak. She sighed as she ran her fingers through the feather ruff that had tickled her cheek and looked up at the drizzly, gray ceiling. Her hair was probably a rat's nest of tangles and flattened flowers.
Minerva gave her a very, very long look.
Getting up to go change at this point would only draw more attention to what she was wearing and how she looked. So Sarah finished with the milk, put it back, and stirred her tea.
She was spreading butter on her toast when her chair slid to the side and a new one appeared next to her. Jareth dropped into the conjured chair then poured himself pumpkin juice. His hair was even more unruly than usual.
Considering that his hair usually looked like someone had given a very angry mop a mullet and then shaken it around, that was saying something.
Snape looked up from a grapefruit. He turned his gaze on the two of them for a moment before he wordlessly resumed eating. Honestly, even Flitwick looked at them from the corners of his eyes for a moment before resuming his own breakfast.
In a tone that was surprisingly mild and supremely unconcerned, Minerva said, "This is a school for children."
Jareth reached for the platter of fruit, taking both a grapefruit and a cantaloupe. He wrenched the grapefruit in neat halves with his bare hands, then split the cantaloupe. After a moment, he heaped sugar on both halves of the grapefruit.
Sarah took half his grapefruit. She left him a piece of honeyed, buttery toast as a trade.
"The children won't see anything salacious or unusual in my joining Sarah for breakfast," Jareth pointed out.
"The older teens will."
"Older teens are no strangers to the idea of dalliance. Their assumptions about Sarah's actions — and mine as well — will be neither true nor harmful."
Minerva raised an eyebrow. Jareth raised an eyebrow back.
He finished his grapefruit and her toast, drained his pumpkin juice, and stood. The chair he'd conjured vanished. With a shrug that managed to be both elegant and ask the assembled staff just who they thought they were to judge the deeds of the Goblin King, he turned and strode away.
Sarah probably wouldn't have watched him go if Septima Vector hadn't asked, "What is he wearing?!"
As it was, she turned her head to watch, and privately agreed with Septima. The striped pajama pants looked almost normal, if one ignored that they clung in ways fuzzy pajama pants ought not cling, but the back of his tee shirt was incomprehensible. Emblazoned across his back was the word HATERS, just beneath which was burned a big black arrow pointing left.
"What do you think that means?" Vector asked the table.
"I have no idea," Sarah sighed.
Sarah used that day's class to introduce the history and progression of the combustion engine. Most of her students were surprised to discover that non-magical people only had cars because of trains.
"So you mean," Alan Donovan asked, gesticulating vaguely but with typical Gryffindor intensity, "that the Hogwarts Express is the great-grandfather of the modern car?"
"Five points to Gryffindor for enthusiasm," Sarah said, grinning. "But five from Gryffindor for over-simplifying."
"But trains —"
"Are very big engines," Sarah agreed. "Anybody want to talk about the key difference?"
Another Gryffindor raised her hand. "Trains are steam engines. They run on heating water. But cars are combustion engines, they run on... on... fire."
"Five back to Gryffindor. Anybody want to finish Jones's thought? It's not just fire."
"Tiny controlled explosions," said Nott, the class's lone Slytherin.
Between classes, Sarah drafted three letters to her mother. None of them got farther than So a funny thing happened to me at Charing Cross.
One letter was too light. Another started too heavily. The last she just stopped writing, suddenly, acutely aware that her mother would never answer it anyway.
So she set the letters on fire with incendio and tipped the ashes into her wastebasket.
Her afternoon class was even more full of excited children than her morning class. It was actually adorable, in a gawky, awkward thirteen-year-olds sort of way.
She enjoyed herself. And, with classes to teach and students thirsty for knowledge (or excitement, in the case of the Gryffindors), it was easy to forget about the ashes of the letters to her mother.
In fact, it was easy to forget her mother. To put the beautiful but difficult Linda Williams back in the box and tuck the box away in the back of her mind. Just like she'd been doing for years.
She was feeling pretty good about the class. Then Persephone Greengrass smiled and raised her hand.
"Questions, Greengrass?"
"Um, yes. Why was Jeremy at breakfast with you today?"
Evans raised her hand, too, but before Sarah could come up with answer to Greengrass — or correct her on Jareth's name, or even call on Evans — she asked, speaking quickly, "And what did his shirt mean? Was it some sort of non-magical culture thing?"
She was not going to pinch the bridge of her nose and groan. And she wasn't going to take House points either. Yet.
So Sarah put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. "I thought we were only going to ask about things relevant to our class."
"But what did his shirt mean," Evans insisted. "I want to know!"
"Honestly, I have no idea."
"What's a hater?"
"I'm guessing someone who hate something. But with the arrow, your guess is as good as mine what he was trying to say." Sarah sighed, then snapped her fingers. "Alright, everybody rip out a sheet of notebook paper."
Twelve students all ripped paper out of their notebooks.
"Okay. Thought exercise. A non-magical person has just used a word you don't know. Write down on the paper what you would do. No using spells like Obliviate or Confundus."
"I think that's about enough time. Everybody put your pens down and trade with a neighbor."
Ballpoint pens were capped. Pieces of paper shuffled around the room.
"Alright, starting over there, we're going to read out what was written down."
There was nothing like a pop 'methods' quiz to get the students off an uncomfortable subject. Sarah made a mental note of the strategy.
After dinner and her transfiguration reading, Sarah set the books aside and headed to her mirror. She stared at it — at herself in it, pale and drawn looking, not at all like her mother had at her age — for a few moments.
And then, slowly, she reached out. She pressed her palm to the cool silver and drew in a breath.
The metal seemed to ripple under her touch.
"Jareth," Sarah said.
After a moment, she wasn't looking at her reflection. He'd placed his hand against his own mirror, leaving the impression that their palms were almost touching. Only a world and a thin layer of silver in the way.
"You wanted to talk, precious thing?" He arched an eyebrow.
"I just..." She took deep breath. There was no reason this had to be difficult. She was making this difficult all on her own. So, deep breath, open your mouth, and say what you meant to. "I just wanted to thank you for staying with me last night."
His eyes widened and his mouth curved up. His lips were thin, his face sharp. He was beautiful; she'd never denied that. But he was beautiful like one of Tolkien's elves: she could cut herself to ribbons on him.
"You are... welcome," he said. He didn't seem accustomed to being thanked.
And once again, she felt light. Warm. Happy. She wondered if it was crazy to like making him happy so much.
"Next weekend is the third year students' first Hogsmeade weekend," she said. "I've been roped into chaperoning."
"Is that so? And why are you telling me, precious thing?"
"Because I was wondering if you'd like to come with me."
"Well, I am terribly busy with important King things," he hedged. Sarah raised an eyebrow at him, which he returned. After a moment, he added, "But I suppose I can fit you into the royal schedule."
"Words cannot express my gratitude," she replied, tone dry.
Days passed. Jareth didn't leave any more flowers in her mirror, for which she was a little grateful Right now, they'd just be reminders.. She spent most of her time gathering steam for her idea, talking to students without witch or wizard parents.
Hermione usually stopped by her office in the evenings. Sarah noted that she seemed lonely and as a result had been throwing herself into her studies.
One evening, Hermione looked up abruptly from a transfiguration essay and asked, "Am I insufferable?"
"I've never seen you in class, Hermione. All I can say is I certainly don't mind having you around."
"Snape says I'm an insufferable know-it-all."
Sarah managed, somehow, not to say 'Snape is a dick.' Hogwarts professor solidarity demanded it — not to mention it would be unprofessional. Then she stopped. "Wait, wait. A Hogwarts professor is calling you names? In class?"
"Yeah. He's really mean to Harry Potter, but he's hardest on Neville Longbottom."
"I don't know any Longbottom boy."
"He keeps losing his toad at the breakfast table. Snape terrifies him."
Ah, the round-faced Gryffindor kid with the hair that was slowly darkening to brown. He seemed gawky and clumsy, but why on earth would Snape target him? Scaring him when he was around chemicals and potions would only make matters worse.
Wizards, Sarah sighed. No common sense at all.
September Twelfth was a beautiful fall day. The air tasted crisp, the morning sun made the lake glisten, and dry, crunching leaves blew across the grounds. Sarah watched through her window as the leaves drifted around.
She smiled, and picked a green-gold robe with bronze leaves embroidered along the border before she headed down to breakfast.
She didn't teach classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so she did more transfiguration reading. Once she got above the third year, the books got more and more interesting. She found herself writing down questions to go over with Minerva.
At one point, she heard a chime in the distance and ignored it. In fact, it wasn't until an hour or so after noon that Sarah looked up from her books. The hand on the clock had distanced itself from "luncheon" and was moving on toward "dinner".
She looked down at the list of questions, then shrugged and made her way to Minerva's office.
Minerva actually looked happy to see her. Apparently she'd been forgiven for bringing Jareth to breakfast.
"I missed you at noon," Minerva said. "Would you care for some tea?"
"Oh! Yes, please."
Yet again, Minerva offered sugar and actual cream. Sarah used the cream sparingly, but Minerva's cup looked as though she'd poured only a little tea for herself. Sarah wondered where Minerva had developed the taste.
Minerva saw her quick glance at the little white pitcher and smiled thinly. "I find I prefer it to milk, since I've become an animagus. Once you've become an animal, it never quite goes away."
"An animagus?" Sarah looked back down at her list of questions, then looked back up. "You turn into an animal?"
"Why, yes," Minerva said. "A housecat, specifically. No one told you?"
—your McGonagall is almost fae in how she views matter. The shapeshifters usually are.
"I think Jareth knows," Sarah said. "But he was pretty cryptic. Nobody else said anything."
At the reminder that her student spoke regularly to Jareth — and had been seen wearing his cloak at breakfast little more than a week ago — Minerva's brows drew down for a moment. But then the older witch said it aside.
"Are there any other animagi on staff?"
"Well, Rolanda Hooch is a hawk animagus."
Sarah thought back to Hooch's golden eyes and the fact that she'd seen Jareth at the Sorting Feast.
"Is that why her eyes are that color?"
"Most think that, but no. The animagus form adapts one's human shape as closely as it can, but eye color remains consistent." Minerva took a sip of her tea, and gestured to indicate Sarah. "You, for example, would be green-eyed in an animal shape, whatever it took. Even if green eyes weren't natural for that animal."
Sarah nodded, about to ask whether she would be permitted to train the skill while at Hogwarts, but a flicker outside the window caught her attention. "Minerva...?"
Minerva set down her tea and stood. They both hurried to her office window. Harry was on a broom, diving straight for the ground in pursuit of something shiny and small. When he was just a foot from the ground, he swung on his broom, stretching out a hand, and scooped up the shiny thing.
"A Delacour Dive," Minerva breathed. "Excuse me, Sarah, I believe I've found Gryffindor's Seeker."
Sarah never looked away from Harry as Minerva hurried out her office door.
What was a Seeker? Sarah watched Harry dismount his broom — she gave a ragged breath of relief — holding the shiny thing for the other students to see. After just a few moments Minerva McGonagall streamed out the castle door and onto the pitch, robes billowing as she went.
Harry looked terrified. Sarah cringed for him.
At dinner that night, Hooch ranted. "Poor boy was just in for a comedy of errors the moment he held out his hand for his broom."
"Longbottom, I assume," Sarah said. "Looked like Harry Potter did pretty well."
"Yes," Snape sneered. "A Delacour dive. Minerva's been glowing."
"And well she should!" Hooch snapped. "Can you think it? An eleven-year-old took his broom down forty feet in half as many seconds, scooped up a Rememberall, and dismounted. On the school's rickety broom! Not a single twig scraping the ground, Sarah?"
"He never touched the ground. Just dive-bombed like he wanted to die, and then swung himself to the side. I don't know a thing about brooms, but it looked gorgeous to me."
Snape made a disgruntled noise and went back to his soup.
"So what happened to Longbottom, anyway?" Bathsheba leaned forward. "Poppy, how long will he be in the hospital wing?"
Poppy Pomfrey shook her head. "Broom accidents are the worst for broken bones, I swear. It was easiest just to pull the bones out of his arm — all the way up to his shoulder blades, poor dear, so he'll be in at least overnight while they re-grow."
"Poppy!" Hooch stared at Pomfrey. "Not once in thirty years have you pulled the bones out. You've always called that quack, quick-fix mediwitchery."
"That fall ground his upper arm to dust and make no mistake, Rolanda Hooch. You should never have let that broom go up."
Pull out his what? Sarah just stared in shock. She looked down at her soup, then set aside her spoon, feeling queasy.
Snape picked up something from the fruit platter — it looked almost like a stick of cinnamon — and broke it in two with his hands.
Sarah winced at the cracking sound.
According to her alarm clock, she woke at seven on Saturday. She rose and dressed. Today, she left most of her hair loose, pulling the top layer of her hair into a braid that ran down her back and tamed the lower layers.
Jareth was waiting for her at the main stair. He had worn the feather cloak and his usual pendant, though he'd eschewed the armor for a poet shirt. Students moved past him, toward the great hall. No few of them whipped their heads back to stare as they left. A pair of Slytherin girls had stopped their progress from the dungeons, looking up with wide eyes.
Sarah couldn't blame them. They couldn't have been more than fifteen, and they probably had an impressive view from that angle.
"It's September," Sarah said. "You're either dressed too warmly or you'll get cold."
"Will I?" He raised an eyebrow.
Sarah shook her head and laughed. He was absolutely the type to use magic to stay comfortable in pursuit of style. Why had she thought he wasn't?
So she asked, "Have you eaten?"
He let the eyebrow drop. His mouth curved into a satisfied smirk. "I thought I would break my fast at Dumbledore's table."
She grinned at him and headed into the Great Hall. Snape was eating another grapefruit, probably unsugared, judging by the sour look he was giving them.
Sarah speared a couple of pieces of toast, then spread butter and honey over them. Jareth, who had been heaping a plate with berries, wordlessly stole half her toast. He smeared even more honey over it, then dusted it with powdered sugar.
In response, Sarah took half the berries from his plate. She wondered at ripe berries in September; was it the last fruit of summer? Did wizards have greenhouses? Did they charm their fruit trees into bearing off-season?
Minerva looked up from her breakfast. Her gaze lingered on Jareth eating Sarah's toast, but then she looked for a moment at Sarah, and her expression softened for an instant. Apparently, Jareth's arrival in the castle having been witnessed — and the two of them showing up for breakfast actually dressed — left her less to object to.
Sarah just smiled at her and added some sausages to her plate. Meat had been a rare treat at Oxford; it was nice to see it so often on the table at Hogwarts.
After breakfast, the Heads of Houses gathered the third and fourth years in the entrance hall. Students were separated out into groups.
Sarah found herself chaperoning a group of third year Ravenclaws. Two boys and a girl smiled shyly at her.
The fourth child was Constantia Evans.
Constantia looked between Sarah and Jareth and smiled. It was the smile of a Ravenclaw confronted with an error in the text, or a library full of books they'd never read.
They were walking to Hogsmeade. Heaven forfend they make portkeys; walking was traditional. Jareth didn't seem to mind, but Sarah had to constantly pick up the skirts of her robes to avoid the mud from a recent rain. They were only a quarter of the way there, but Sarah was already tempted to just let the skirts fall where they may and Scourgify later.
Sarah had just lifted her skirts to step across a mud puddle when Evans asked, "So how did you two meet?"
She felt her fingers loosen their grip on the heavy fabric. It dropped down past her calves, past her ankles, directly into the mud. Fantastic.
"I've known her for some time, but we only met five years ago," Jareth said. His tone was airy, but Sarah could have sworn she heard a subtle tension underneath his words. "Sarah said her right words, and called me to her."
"Right words?" Evans tilted her head.
"Oh, not just any right words. Her right words." Jareth smiled. "Her very right words."
Evans looked to Sarah. The girl had piled her hair on her head in a messy bun. Her gray eyes were wide behind her glasses. It was, Sarah suspected, a silent plea for more information.
Sarah shook her head. "I'm not telling you what they were. I'm not proud of what I did."
Evans's eyes shuttered as she filed away the new information, but she soon brightened. "And why was Jareth at the Sorting Feast?"
Sarah gave Jareth a sly grin. "Yes, why was Jareth at the Sorting Feast?"
Jareth addressed his answer to Evans. "Why, to see how Sarah was doing, of course. I thought she might be intimidated by her first Feast as an actual Lecturer."
"Kind of you," Sarah said in her very driest voice.
Jareth sighed. "You think so little of my generosity."
Carrick cut the mood in two by asking, "But how did you just appear like that? Everyone knows there's no Apparating on Hogwarts grounds."
Jareth rolled his shoulders in an eloquent shrug. "Perhaps not even Hogwarts commands a King."
Four children stared wide-eyed and gape-mouthed.
Evans managed to squeak, "You're a king?"
Carrick, once he'd closed his mouth, was a little more skeptical. It was actually rather heartening to see that wizard children wouldn't actually believe just anything. She'd wondered about that — their world was so strange, she'd been worried the children would fail to examine anything sufficiently weird enough.
"So what are you king of, then?"
Jareth's voice was matter-of-fact, but his expression hinted at sublime amusement. "The Goblins."
Carrick went quiet. They all kept walking — Sarah let her skirts drag through the mud; it wasn't like they could actually get worse now — and while Evans goggled at Jareth and his kingship and his criminally tight pants, Carrick gave every appearance of thinking hard.
At last, they passed a rickety sign. It leaned forlornly by the side of the road, its two faces spattered in mud. Forward, it pointed, led to Hogsmeade. Back led to Hogwarts.
The halfway mark.
Carrick said, "But you can't really be king of the goblins."
"I can't? That will be news to my subjects."
"But the goblins don't have a king!"
Jareth widened his eyes. "Don't they? Yet more important news for my subjects!"
Carrick looked to Sarah. Sarah just smiled.
"But the history books... and Professor Binns. They've never said anything about the goblins having a king!"
Smythe finally looked up from her conversation with Rogers. "The histories do all say that the goblins like to keep themselves to themselves. Maybe they just didn't want us to know they had a king."
"But wouldn't a king of the goblins be a goblin himself?" Carrick furrowed his brows. "It's only logical."
Sarah watched Jareth's patience fray. He changed directions and stopped still in front of Carrick. "Tell me, Ryan Carrick, would you like to be a prince?"
Carrick stared up at him. He trembled just slightly as he met the Goblin King's eyes. Jareth's irritation was plain; that the offer Jareth was making was unfriendly was also plain.
"I can give you a principality, you know. The position is open. You'll never smell quite the same, but if you want it, you have only to say the right words." Jareth's smile was sharp, predatory. His lips had thinned.
Carrick shook his head. "N-no, sir. Thank you, sir."
Jareth retreated a step, but raised an eyebrow.
"I'm sorry, your majesty?"
"Much better!" He clapped his hands together, smiling again.
They walked on. Smythe and Rogers returned to their conversation. Sarah caught a mention of the book fort, but she didn't make any particular effort to listen in.
Hogsmeade had just come into view when Evans asked, "So why were you at breakfast last week? And what did that shirt mean?"
"You are just full of questions, aren't you?" Jareth stopped walking to peer at Evans. He tilted his head at an angle that looked almost unnatural, until Sarah remembered his habit of turning into an owl. "Is there anything you don't want to know?"
Evans shook her head.
Jareth laughed. But he didn't actually say anything, and they walked down the hill to Hogsmeade.
"Meet back here at sixteen thirty," Sarah called after the children as they passed through the village gate.
The children drifted off with a dutiful chorus of agreement. Sarah watched them go — Evans, Smythe and Carrick all headed for Tomes And Scrolls; Rogers surprised her by making for the joke shop. Well, she supposed, no social child could spend all his time with books.
After a moment, Jareth turned to face her. His expression was almost flat. His lips curved up very slightly at the corners, his eyes narrowed. He looked like a predator. He looked at her like she was prey.
He offered her his arm. "Shall we, Sarah?"
Sarah smiled, but didn't take it. "I can't go walking arm-in-arm with you in front of the students, you know."
"And if the children were not here?"
She had to think about that one. They had passed the boundary of 'friends' when she'd fallen asleep crying against his shoulder. They weren't quite more than friends.
But she suspected it would be time to negotiate that soon.
"Maybe," she said, smiling up at him. "If we weren't chaperoning."
Hogsmeade itself was a charming place. It reminded her of picturesque German villages: triangular roofs, window boxes, wooden shutters, striped paint. Brown stripes were popular.
Jareth, on the other hand, didn't seem to be seeing the same thing. His brow furrowed at certain buildings — marked with plaques saying they were 'Historic.'
"What's wrong, Goblin King?"
Jareth shuddered. It wasn't the shake of a simple chill, and it didn't look like fear-trembling, either. It was a long, rolling tremor that reminded her of the time she'd seen a pony stung by a biting fly on a National Geographic video.
"Jareth?"
"When they say Historic," he spat, "they mean from the Goblin wars. They attacked my subjects for daring to want wands, for daring to demand respect from their equals, and now they make little plaques and let my subjects control their economy. Because none of them can be bothered to do their own math or ensorcel their own vaults. That's beneath them."
"From what I've seen," Sarah said slowly, "wizards think a lot of things are beneath them. And they're wrong."
"Do not teach these children to believe what their parents do."
"I won't. I want them to stop and think for themselves, not... mindlessly go through their lives sure they're above everything." She offered Jareth a smile, and then pointed toward the High Street. "Let's keep going. I want to find something I can send Toby."
That drew a smile from the Goblin King.
They ended up heading into a shop that displayed sweets in its window. Not just fancifully shaped chocolates — she saw what looked like a solid milk chocolate pomegranate; the shopkeeper had opened the window model and revealed tiny seeds made of chocolate with a white chocolate pulp — but also sugar-spun fruit, and pies, and mice that looked like they'd been spun of snow and ice. Or perhaps sugar and coconut?
A little bell jangled as she pushed the door open. Sarah drew in a deep breath and found that that shop's smell was a cacophony of sweetness. She smelled chocolate and licorice and coconut. There was the scent of something baking in a back room somewhere.
On one wall, Sarah saw blood-red suckers, what looked like clusters of roaches, and things she wasn't sure she wanted to identify. Halfway across, the gross candies gave way to actual honeycombs that drizzled delicious-looking golden honey. Another wall had the sugar-and-coconut mice, and what looked like wands made of licorice...
"This has got to be some kind of kid heaven."
"I'm sure it must be. I once had a wish-away with Droobles in his pocket." Jareth wrinkled his nose.
"Droobles?"
"Droobles Best Blowing Gum, love," said a witch in an apron with a honeycomb logo. "Leaves big bluebell bubbles all over any room it's chewed in for days."
Not a gift for Toby, then. She could trust him with the Labyrinth; even if he slipped up, he was young enough to have imaginary friends and talk about going on wild adventures. But she couldn't leave him with evidence of the wizarding world. That, her parents would be hard-pressed to deny.
"I'm looking for something to send to my younger brother. HIs parents aren't magical," Sarah said to the witch.
"Well, there's always a licorice wand, but I think they're boring. I'd say chocolate frogs, maybe — we make and charm our own; they've only got one good jump."
"Something that doesn't come alive. Or, well, look like it's alive."
"Ice mice, then. They don't do much but freeze your mouth. Rather like biting into a very hard gelato, in my opinion. They come in spearmint, arctic mint, and aurora borealis."
Sarah stared for a moment before saying, "Okay, I have to know. What does the aurora borealis taste like?"
"It's just a colder spearmint," the witch said, grinning. "His breath'll fog colors, though."
Jareth laughed. "Sarah, you must choose those. Can you imagine his face?"
She could. She could very easily imagine the delighted smile, the brightened eyes, the look of wonder. Unfortunately, she could also imagine her father's face. And Irene's. She could imagine a trip to the hospital because their son should not be breathing colorful steam.
"I think I'll have to go with plain spearmint, at least until I tell them about Hogwarts." Sarah sighed. "Can they be sent in the non-magical post, or will they melt?"
"Oh, a quick stay-fresh charm and they'll be fine."
Right. That didn't sound like magic one worked on one's armpits at all. But Sarah just smiled and selected a box of spearmint ice mice.
She was on her way to the counter when she saw the display of truffles. A sign advertised Custom Truffles! Choose your truffle, choose your filling! Three sickles for a dozen!
Sarah stopped to look at the fillings. There were the usual cremes and mousses, but they also offered liqueurs. They even offered offered a peach liqueur.
After a moment's hesitation — did she really need all things peach in her life? Did she need to go ordering something peach flavored in front of Jareth? — she looked at the truffles.
After she'd paid for the ice mice and the wizard at the counter had cast a stay fresh charm, Sarah leaned in. "Can I order some of those custom truffles?"
The wizard beamed. "I'd be delighted if you did. What'll it be for you? The dark chocolate with hazelnut creme?"
Sarah laughed and shook her head. She cast a glance over her shoulder, but Jareth had bent to his knees and was playing peekaboo with a customer's toddler.
"The white chocolate and peach liqueur," she said.
The wizard cast a puzzled glance at Jareth, who had tilted his head at an angle that would have looked more normal on a bird, but then smiled and nodded. "Of course. That's three sickles, and we can have them ready by Wednesday next. Would you like them Floo'ed?"
"Floo'ed?"
"You know, through the fire. A little purple dust and then poof?"
This time, Sarah's laugh was forced. "Sorry, silly me. We don't call it that in the States. I'm sorry, I just moved into an office in Hogwarts, can you Floo it there?"
"Oh yes! And if it won't go through to you, I'll just send it on to Minerva McGonagall."
"Perfect!" She slid her coins across the counter and shoved the ice mice into her bag.
Outside the shop, and back on her way to the city gate to await her students, Sarah discovered it had indeed been too much to hope that Jareth hadn't heard.
"Peaches, precious thing?" Jareth's wore a wicked smile.
"They're my favorite fruit," she replied. "Don't read into it."
"One would think you'd avoid them, if you were so ashamed of your conduct."
"I regret being a person who would wish away her baby brother. But the Labyrinth helped me learn to be a person who would never give up on Toby — or any child. I don't regret it."
That answer seemed to please Jareth. He turned in the street, walking backwards. His boots and tights seemed to repel the mud that speckled the cobblestone streets. His gaze never left her eyes.
On the walk back, her students were much more interested in talking about Hogsmeade than digging for information about Jareth. Sarah was grateful for it, honestly. She took refuge in the argument between Smythe and Rogers about whether Tomes's DADA section was larger than Flourish & Blott's.
Even Evans seemed to have abandoned the subject of the Goblin King. Instead, she was all full of excitement about the packages she'd sent home. Evidently she had a younger brother not at Hogwarts.
"He was really upset this year. I guess because he'll get his letter and come in next year. So I've sent him cockroach clusters — they're his favorites — and Fizzing Whizbees."
Sarah nodded as if she knew what Fizzing Whizbees were.
They were only halfway to the castle when Jareth took his leave.
"I told you I would pencil you in, Sarah," he said, voice soft. "And now our allotted time, regrettably, comes to a close."
Sarah almost pointed out that he could re-order time. But would a friend insist on that? Hell, would it even be fair to request that of a lover?
So she said only, "Goodbye, Jareth. Thank you for a lovely day."
He gave her a slight bow — as archaic and polite and regal as when he'd bowed to her parents — the world around her seemed to shine from the inside out — and then he was gone. Not even an over-large barn owl remained in his place.
