o─-o─-o─-─-─-─ WITHOUT THORN THE ROSE ─-─-─-─o-─o-─o

Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling.

Notes: Thanks for all the reviews, favs, and follows. If you guys want to see what I think a certain new character looks like, and various other things, you can check that out on my Pinterest, where I keep my reference materials. Same user name.

o─-─-─-─-─ 9. THE TWISTED STAIR ─-─-─-─-─o

Harry woke soaking wet in a cold, dark place, clutching his knees and rocking mindlessly. There were strange, guttural noises coming from somewhere. It took Harry a while to realize that the noises were coming from him. It took him longer to remember where he was and who he was. He was not a tortured blonde witch called Astraea Crouch. He was Harry Azrael Potter, and no one could ever take his wand away.

Harry wished more than anything that he could take a sponge to his brain and scrub out what he had just seen. But the idea of throwing away the memories, the way Astraea had been thrown away, disturbed him. So he sat in the darkness for long moments, fixing the scenes in his mind, until he was calm enough to do magic. Then he made several balls of light with his coral focus and tossed them in various directions so he could get a good look at where he was.

Harry stared in wide-eyed wonder, craning his head back to peer into the depths of the ceiling far above him. He was in a grotto of hexagonal basalt columns like those of the Giant's Causeway¹. They protruded from the ground, forming rough steps, and descended from the ceiling like broken teeth. Each column was just wide enough to stand on, and Harry hopped from one to the next, exploring the space. At one end of the grotto, the sound of the ocean hissed rhythmically from a downward-sloping tunnel, and at the other end, a set of narrow steps, carved by humans rather than nature, led up into darkness.

On a column next to the stairs was an crudely carved relief of a bare-breasted woman with black wings and the tails of snakes where her legs should have been. It was an eerie image, and the pale, wavering spell-light seemed to contort the face into hideous expressions. Harry shuddered, and turned away from it. The sight of the bare breasts was an unwelcome reminder of the wretched visions he had just suffered.

Throwing balls of light ahead as he went, Harry picked his way cautiously down the tunnel toward the sea, but was stopped after a dozen metres when the tunnel ended in roiling water. That at least explained why Harry was dripping wet. The dementor had obviously brought him into the cave that way, and if Harry wanted to leave the same way, he would have to swim.

An icy chill permeated the air, and Harry drew strength from the cold. He turned and made his way back to the staircase, where he found a dementor waiting for him. Harry lit the grotto brightly with balls of wizard-light, and the creature's bulk, half looming shadow, seemed to shrink under the bright illumination. By the shape of the scars on its hands, Harry knew it was the same one he'd met earlier.

"You," he growled. "You might have warned me!"

"It was u-u-unanticipa-a-ated," the creature croaked, "that her so-o-oul and yo-o-ours would be attu-u-uned."

"It's not…you're not…her, are you?" Harry asked warily.

The dementor shook its cowled head.

"What happened to me?"

The dementor tilted its head. "Your Hu-u-unger fought to possess her so-o-oul."

"I didn't mean to," Harry protested. He frowned into space, thinking. It was difficult. His brain was a disordered mess after the mental invasion he had experienced, and his head hurt. "I've got to go, but can we meet again soon? I want you to show me how to manipulate souls like you can do."

"For a tra-a-ade."

Harry wanted to shout at the single-minded thing, but instead he just ground his teeth. He knew he didn't have anything else to offer it.

"All right," he agreed finally. "But get rid of Astraea's soul, or send someone else."

The dementor bowed its head.

Harry took his leave, then. He should perhaps have asked the dementor to help him out of the grotto, but he resented the creature too much for the mental trauma he had sustained. Instead, Harry surrounded himself with cushioning charms, and plunged into the roiling sea alone, fighting the pounding surf with his magic until he made his way out under the light of the stars. When he staggered up onto the narrow beach, he saw the colossal bulk of the prison looming above him, and knew where the stairs in the grotto must lead.

─-─-─-─-─o─-─-─-─-─

¹ This is more or less based on Fingal's Cave in Scotland. They also have these formations in the Faroe Islands. Just go Google it, seriously.

─-─-─-─-─o─-─-─-─-─

That was the first time, but not the last, that Harry met with a dementor. He returned often in the weeks that followed, to the grotto hidden by the surf. Each time he met with a different dementor, and he questioned them relentlessly on everything from what souls were made of, to who had Kissed the first dementor, but the inscrutable creatures revealed little more than riddles.

Harry learned that souls were supposed to come from the 'magic of all things' and return there after death, but what that really meant, he hadn't any inkling. He learned that dementors perceived souls in everything, from plants to rocks, but Harry, strain as he might, could not see these. He learned that dementors had no memories of their former lives, but they could tap into the memories of the souls they consumed, as Harry had tapped into Astraea's. He learned that the dementors' power of flight came from their robes, not from themselves, but no dementor could tell him where the robes came from, only that they had always had them.

Mostly, Harry learned about his powers. With the guidance of the greedy beings, he became intimately acquainted with the Hunger that lurked in the empty void that half his soul had left behind. His power of frost became both more precise and more powerful. He honed his control to a surgical precision, practicing by writing icy letters on the glass of his attic window from across the room. He also improved his frost's potency, by freezing the surf until he could walk on it.

Most terrifying and exhilarating of all, he learned to perform a variation of the dementors' Kiss. He could not manage to consume a soul, no matter how small, but he could rip them out, and without the need to consume them, there was no need for proximity, so Harry could manage the feat even from several metres away.

The dementors taught Harry the basics, but their demands for recompense drove Harry increasingly to learn on his own. He spent many hours that winter experimenting and practicing: dampening the oscillations and fluctuations of souls, which induced unconsciousness, seizure, coma, and death; tasting souls, all summer, light, and sweetness, and trying, to no avail, to swallow them; condensing souls in an attempt to prevent dissolution, without much luck; ripping souls part way out and letting them snap back in; timing how long after removal a soul could be restored successfully; even removing souls and placing them back into different bodies, though this failed after a few minutes in each case.

And, with an intensity driven by personal need, Harry experimented with tearing souls into pieces, but here he had no success at all. He could pull pieces away easily, but a filament always remained connecting the parts, and no matter how he stretched it, this thread would not break. The dementors, too, reported no knowledge of how such a thing might be done. None among them knew how Harry's soul had been halved, or how.

Harry tried not to think too much about the things he was doing. He was conscious, on some level, of how his experiments would be perceived by an outsider—ghoulish and depraved—but he reassured himself with the thought that he was only trying to acquire knowledge about a branch of magic, that this knowledge would aid him in discovering who and what he was, and that, after all, academagicians relied on animal experimentation as a matter of course.

So Harry spent his days, under the noontime stars, playing the mad sorcerer of Azkaban.

─-─-─-─-─o─-─-─-─-─

"I got an owl at work today," James said, stopping Harry in his tracks. The dark-haired boy had been about to take his dinner up to the attic, where he had been eating ever since his ill-fated encounter with James' patronus.

Harry eyed his father warily through his fringe. Relations between them hadn't been so strained since before James' accidental manslaughter had set them packing for Azkaban.

James toyed with his food, not looking at Harry. "It's from your correspondence school. Apparently they haven't received anything from you in a couple of weeks."

"Mm," Harry grunted, as he tried to remember when the last time he had done any schoolwork was.

James glanced up, finally, and sighed. "Look, just sit down. This is getting ridiculous."

Harry sat down rigidly on the sofa across from James, and crossed his arms, hiding his scarred hands in his armpits.

"Why aren't you doing your school work? I thought you liked your classes."

Harry shrugged and said nothing. There was a small amount of satisfaction in leaving James floundering.

James raked a hand through his hair, frustrated. "Look, Harry, if you flunk out of school, that could be grounds to question my fitness as a guardian. Do you understand that?"

An incredulous laugh bubbled up from Harry.

James frowned. "Did I say something funny? Because the last I checked, having Lucius Malfoy get custody of you wouldn't be a barrel of laughs."

"I don't see how he could be much worse than you," Harry replied. His voice started out steady and strong, but by the end of the sentence, it had died down to a whisper, and he couldn't seem to maintain eye contact anymore.

James recoiled as though he had been slapped. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, fluctuating between expressions of anger and guilt. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Harry wanted nothing more than to whip his hands out and show James the silvery crescents that the man's magic had branded into Harry's flesh, but he couldn't, for then James would see Harry's coral focus, and know how many laws Harry had been breaking. So Harry just shook his head and glared at the wall behind his father's head.

James sighed. "Look, I know we haven't had much time together lately, and this place is pretty bleak. There's a reason that they gave me this job as a punishment. But I'm not going to let it break me—break us. We just have to get through this."

Harry squinted at his father incredulously. Was James really just planning to pretend that the incident with his patronus had never happened? Or had he actually blocked the whole thing from his mind? Explaining the real source of his anger would raise too many questions, however, so Harry simply nodded.

"Can I go now?" Harry asked flatly.

James sighed and nodded, looking morose, but Harry had no sympathy for the man.

"And do your bloody schoolwork, you hear?" James called after Harry.

─-─-─-─-─o─-─-─-─-─

Harry did his bloody schoolwork, but continued to practice his magic and his dementor powers more than could be considered healthy. But that was not all he found to occupy his time. From the start, the revelation of the grotto hidden by the sea had seemed a tacit invitation to explore where its mysterious stair might lead, but Harry held back, judiciously, until he could ascertain the dementors' probable reaction. Though their answers were often evasive and riddle-like, in time Harry came to understand that the dementors did not perceive their role at Azkaban as that of wardens. The island was simply their hunting ground, and they left the wizenguards unmolested in exchange for a steady supply of plump and juicy souls.

This was how Harry found himself, shortly after mid-winter, in the basalt grotto, climbing the narrow and winding stair. Its proportions were queer: narrow enough that a hefty adult could not have passed, with a ceiling so low that Harry's hair brushed it if he stood, and steps so steep that he was forced to climb with both hands and feet. After the first time he glanced over his shoulder and looked down, he resolved never to do that again. It reminded him all too much of certain nightmares in which he was clinging to the edge of a cliff.

It was a good thing Harry wasn't claustrophobic, because the stair spiralled and zigzagged without a single opening for what felt like a dozen stories. From time to time he saw souls, and even heard voices, close enough that he could have touched them if it were not for the stone walls, and he knew that he was deep within the prison. Perhaps the stair's proportions were simply a means of hiding it, he reasoned, resting momentarily and eyeing the nearness of souls that surrounded him on all sides. No one examining a schematic of the castle for unoccupied areas would imagine that this space was wide enough to contain a hidden passage.

At last the stair ended at a wall of smooth, dark stone, and Harry stopped, flummoxed. He looked for a handle or knob, but there was none, so he pushed instead. After bruising his shoulder, he pushed with his magic, and eventually was able to shift the stone enough to squeeze through the gap. After a few moments waiting to see if any souls would come near, Harry emerged into a blast of refreshing, arctic wind. His shaggy black hair blew into his eyes and prevented him getting a good look at first, but when he turned into the wind, he saw that he was on top of a tower.

The tower was crenelated, and when he poked his head into one of the crenels to see how high he was, he cursed. He was atop the highest tower of Azkaban, standing in the palm of the tower that he had often thought seemed to scratch the sky like a clawed hand. The island below him was hidden by a sea of rolling mist.

Harry made a circuit of the tower top and was startled to discover that there were cells here, and, worse, that they were open-fronted cells, separated from the bitter polar winds only by iron bars. There were eight cells in total, each one roughly four square metres, containing only a blanket, a bucket, and a prisoner. Each prisoner was huddled in a ball in the leeward part of the cell, wrapped in his or her blanket and shivering uncontrollably.

One of the occupants was a shaggy black dog, and Harry frowned at its outsized soul dumbly for a moment before he realized it was an animagus. Clever, that. The dog, like all the other prisoners, was curled into a quivering blanket-wrapped ball.

"You! Boy!" The man in the next cell called. His voice was rough, perhaps from disuse. "What are you doing here?"

Harry started, and turned slowly to the man, trying to decide how to respond. The man had long, tangled, auburn hair that partially obscured a finely boned face and pale green eyes. He was far too thin to be healthy, and his skin was caked with a layer of filth that rendered his original skin tone unknowable.

"Oh, I just like to tour ancient castles, take in a bit of history, you know," said Harry after a long moment.

The man stared at him blankly, then made a hoarse, repetitive noise that might have been a laugh or a cough. Flecks of blood spattered all over the man's hands and cheeks.

"Tourist, eh," the man growled. "You thrice-cursed hallucinations don't even make sense."

"No need," Harry agreed coolly. "We hallucinations answer to no one."

The man eyed him narrowly, and Harry got the uncomfortable feeling that the man hadn't lost all his wits to the dementors yet.

"How come you don't freeze up here in this wind?" Harry asked, drifting closer, within arm's length of the bars. "Surely those blankets aren't adequate. Unless they're enchanted?"

The man considered him for a moment. "If I tell you, you'll tell me what prisoner you're visiting."

"All right," Harry agreed.

"This," the man explained, sticking one bony arm out from under his blanket to a display a tattoo on the back of his hand. Harry moved closer to make it out under the moonlight. The tattoo was a complex runic design that Harry couldn't made heads or tails of, and below it was a serial number.

"What's that, then?"

"Horrid thing that keeps us from freezing or starving or dying of thirst."

"Why're you cold, then?"

"Didn't say it stops the cold, boy. Just stops us dying of it."

"That's sick," Harry protested, making a disgusted face. "They're torturing you with it."

The man snorted, spraying blood again. Harry jerked back instinctively. "What do you expect, it's the bloody Ministry. Savages and mudbloods, the lot of them."

Harry pursed his lips, considering. Surely only the worst prisoners would be immured in such cruel fashion. He wondered if he could Obliviate the man if he saw Harry's tell-tale scar; it was a good thing it was so dark.

"Who are you?" Harry asked. "Are you a Death Eater?"

"Ah-ah," the man taunted in his gravelly voice. "You haven't told me who you're visiting yet."

Harry snorted. "Please, do you really think they'd let a visitor up here unaccompanied?"

The man's eyes narrowed. "Every man has his price, and wizenguards are cheaper than most. What are you doing here, if not visiting someone?"

Harry smiled faintly, savouring the feeling of having all the leverage for once. "I answered your question. Now you answer mine."

"All right," the man agreed slowly.

"Who are you?"

"Rabastan Lestrange."

Harry froze. He knelt down closer to the huddled man-ball and searched the grungy face in the light of the half moon. The features were different, but the auburn hair and those bright green eyes were so like Lily's that Harry drew a sharp breath.

"And who are you?" the man asked hoarsely.

Harry bit his lip, pondering the wisdom of revealing anything. But this was the first blood relative of his that Harry had ever met, and he was overcome with sentiment. "I'm your great-nephew."

Rabastan squinted. "My brother doesn't have any children—thank the gods for that."

"Your other brother."

"My other brother's dead," Rabastan snarled.

Harry's face fell. "Dead? Are you sure?"

"Who are you, boy?"

"I told you, I'm your great-nephew. Rogerick was my grandfather. Is he really dead? I wanted to meet him…"

"He's dead. I saw the Dark Lord Avada him myself. Explain this drivel you're spouting, and tell me your name."

Harry huffed, annoyed. "Why should I?"

The man considered a moment, and smiled unpleasantly. "If you don't, I'll tell your father you're sneaking around here."

Harry opened his mouth to demand to know how Rabastan knew about James, and then closed it again. The man was bluffing.

"My father wouldn't care," Harry lied. Then he had a stroke of inspiration. "In fact, I reckon he'd be quite chuffed."

Rabastan frowned. "Why's that? He mad like you?"

"My father," Harry said in a low, conspiratorial tone, as he leaned forward and wrapped his hands around the frigid bars, "is a dementor."

Harry released a blast of carefully controlled cold that made the iron bars and his hands grow frost, and then he delicately teased at the man's soul with just a hint of pressure. It was barely enough force to make a gannet twitch, but the man screamed, and scuttled backward, hiding his face against the wall of his cell.

"No, no…" he moaned. "Oh, gods, please, go away! PLEASE!"

Harry released the pressure and frost, horrified. He didn't know what to say, but he felt unsettled at having so misjudged the situation. He thought of apologizing, but he didn't want to take back his lie or the threat it contained, so instead he aimed his coral focus at the man and concentrated on the idea of warmth—the kind of warmth one feels wrapped in a cosy down blanket, cuddled up by a roaring log fire, sipping a cup of hot cocoa.

The man stopped shivering suddenly, and after a moment his head emerged from under his blanket. He eyed Harry with awe and not a little fear.

"What are you?" he gasped.

"I'm your nephew," Harry answered quietly.

"You're not real."

"I am."

"Prove it."

Harry extended his arm slowly between the bars of the cell. Hesitantly, watching Harry with mistrust, as though the boy meant to strangle the man, Rabastan crawled forward. Then he clasped the hand.

"You're cold," he exclaimed fearfully.

"So are you. It's freezing up here."

"Are you really real? Really?"

Harry smiled woodenly. Perhaps Rabastan hadn't retained as many wits as Harry had hoped. "Yes."

"Don't leave me. It's horrible here." This was delivered in a strangled whisper. Harry was discomforted to see that Rabastan had tears in his eyes.

"I'm sorry," Harry said awkwardly. "I'll do what I can." He paused. "Your brother, Rogerick, he had a baby with Electra Black. She left the baby on a church's doorstep, and some muggles took her in. When she grew up, she got married and had me. That's how I'm your great-nephew."

Rabastan searched Harry's eyes for the truth. "I can believe the part about Electra Black, but I'll not believe a woman marrying a dementor."

Harry laughed humourlessly. "Er—no, my mum married a man."

The light of a soul moving closer, below them, made Harry jump in alarm. "I've got to go—there's a guard coming."

"No, please!"

"I'm sorry," Harry whispered, jerking his hand from Rabastan's. The man tried to hold on, but he was weak and Harry was desperate. "I'll come back as soon as I can."

He shot another warming charm at Rabastan, and, then, with a last, thoughtful look, darted back into the stairwell and forced the stone door shut. In the darkness there, he watched the guard's soul bob around the tower top twice and then leave. He could have returned to his uncle then, but he needed to think.

─-─-─-─-─o─-─-─-─-─

"So that's how I met my great-uncle."

Bjorn frowned at Harry over his steaming cup of hot tea. Harry smiled. He had never quite got over what a comical image the giant blonde north-man made, this scarred bear of a man, sipping from a dainty china cup.

"Rabastan Lestrange," Bjorn murmured contemplatively. "What did he do to get sent to Azkaban?"

Harry swallowed and pushed his tea away. It might have been the strong brew on an empty stomach, but he felt suddenly nauseous. "He's a self-professed Death Eater. And he tortured a couple of Aurors into insanity."

Bjorn stroked his beard. "And you want to get to know him?"

Harry made a face and shrugged. "I want to know what happened to my grandparents. And what the family was like. And…" He sighed. "I know it sounds mad, but the conditions are terribly inhumane, even for Death Eaters."

Bjorn smirked. "You have a soft heart, fugleunge."

Harry grimaced. "I wish I could get into the other parts of the prison, but there are too many guards around. If only I could make invisibility work…"

Bjorn nodded. "That's a tough one. I can only manage it if I hold still."

"Better than nothing," Harry pointed out. "All I've managed is making myself a bit blurry."

"Focus on the idea of directing the light around you."

Harry chewed his lip and lifted his hand, focusing intensely.

"Not bad. I can see through you now."

"But?" Harry asked pointedly, still focusing.

"I can still see you."

"Ugh, it's giving me a headache," Harry complained, dropping the spell and pinching the bridge of his nose.

"You want to be careful of that. My bestefar burst a blood vessel in his brain doing that. Don't push too hard."

Harry stared wide-eyed at the north-man, aghast. "You might've warned me earlier!"

Bjorn shrugged. "I didn't think it was a concern at your age. Most ten-year-olds can't concentrate long enough to find their way out of a paper sack. It usually happens to older folks, or those who've been sipping funny potions."

Harry glared at the blonde. "Well, you were wrong."

Bjorn grinned. "Clearly. You are special, fugleunge, no matter how you fix your hair."

Harry scowled and checked that his bangs were still covering his scar. Bjorn chuckled.

"I don't mind being special," Harry muttered, "I just don't like it when people expect things."

"'To whom much is given, much is required.'"

"What's that from, then?"

"The Bible."

"That muggle book?"

Bjorn snorted in mild-mannered disgust. "You pride yourself on knowledge, but you don't even know the basics about muggles, do you?"

Harry looked bewildered. "Why should I learn about muggles? It's not like they matter."

Bjorn gave him a hard look. "I forget sometimes how it is in your country."

Harry stared at him, puzzled. "Are muggles different in Norway?"

Bjorn tilted his head noncommittally. "In the south, no. They've largely intermarried with Danes and Germans, who intermarried with the English. But in the north, they still follow the old ways."

Harry's expression cleared. "Ah, you're talking about Merlin's poison. I wouldn't have imagined there was anyone in Europe still unaffected."

Bjorn nodded. "The poison spreads, but not so quickly as you think. Western Europe is largely lost, along with the Colonies, but the rest of the world remains unaffected on the whole. Of course, in the larger cities, the trade cities, the poison spreads more quickly."

"But those are all the most important places…"

Bjorn smiled. "The very places where wizarding culture is the most highly developed, yes. Well, that was the point after all. And do you know the places where muggle culture is most developed?"

Harry frowned. "No."

"The same places, fugleunge."

Harry frowned. There was something important in that, something that made him uneasy, but he couldn't put his finger on it. "Saying developed makes it sound as though it's all for the better."

Bjorn made a pensive noise. "That's a matter of some debate, to say the least," he remarked.

"What do you mean?" Harry's stomach was still roiling nauseously.

"Well, what do you think we've been fighting over for the last few centuries?"

"You mean the Dark Lord and all that? I thought that was all about pureblood rights."

"And what does it mean to have pure blood? They define themselves by rejecting all things muggle. But that's only your little British conflict. I speak of greater wars than that."

"What, Grindelwald's war?"

"Grindelwald, yes, and others."

"But Grindelwald didn't kill nearly as many people as Voldemort."

"Grindelwald didn't kill as many wizards," Bjorn corrected sharply. Harry was startled to see a cold anger burning in Bjorn's eye. He felt simultaneously intimidated and excited by Bjorn's ferocity. "He killed millions of muggles."

"Millions?" Harry repeated incredulously. "That's absurd."

Bjorn set aside his tea-cup and leaned forward in his seat, capturing Harry's gaze and holding it hostage.

"His henchman rounded up all those muggles who were still living side-by-side with wizards¹ and slaughtered them systematically. A few Imperio's on the right people and he got them to do it to each other. They were seething with hatred already and he provided them an outlet. He even tried to recreate the poison of Merlin, though he didn't succeed. The only way the poison has spread since the days of Merlin is by birth. So he created programs to breed the muggles like livestock."

Harry swallowed thickly against the bile that wanted to come up his throat. "How come nobody ever told me that?" he asked quietly.

Bjorn settled back in his seat. "'It's not like they matter,'" he quoted, matching the inflexion Harry had used.

Harry winced. Bjorn sighed and reached across the gap between them to pat Harry's hair. Harry blushed and looked away, ashamed of his ignorance. Someday he would know everything, and then no one would ever get the best of him.

"It's not your fault, fugleunge," Bjorn reassured him softly. "Not while you're a child, anyway. Most wizards either don't know or don't care. That was the sin of Merlin. He put wizardry on a pedestal so tall that we couldn't hear the cries of those we left on the ground."

"You think it was a sin, then?" Harry asked.

Bjorn sighed and picked up his teacup again. "It's always a sin to take another man's choice away."

Harry frowned. "Always? Even if one of the choices is wrong? Even if it's evil?"

Bjorn thought a moment. "I don't say we should let mad dogs run free, fugleunge, but…" He thought a while longer. Then, slowly, he began to weave a tale.

"Amongst the muggles, there's a story that is widely believed. The story goes like this: in the beginning, their god—the only god, according to them—created one man and one woman. He gave them a beautiful garden to live in. It was a paradise where the sky was always sunny and the fruit was always ripe. The animals didn't eat each other, and even the roses didn't have thorns. And the man and woman would never die, because there was a tree of life there for them to eat from. They were like children, completely innocent. They wore no clothes, but they didn't need them, for it was always warm."

Harry frowned, repelled by the idea of a garden with no dark, cold places to hide.

"But there was another tree there, that they weren't allowed to eat from, and that was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. One day, a serpent tempted the woman to eat from it, saying that it would give her wisdom. So she ate from it, and then gave the fruit to her husband, who also ate it. And they realized that they were naked, and covered themselves in shame. And then their god came, saw what they had done, and said: they are become as gods, knowing of good and evil. He cast them out of the garden and cursed them to have to toil and suffer and someday die."

Bjorn took another sip of tea. "That is what the muggles believe. It is their deepest shame, to know that they sinned from their very beginnings. That they let down their god and in so doing lost paradise for all their children and their children's children." He half-smiled.

Harry was silent a while, thinking. "That doesn't make any sense," he said finally, sounding irritated.

"No?"

"If they believe they were created by this god, then he must have given them their curiosity. And if it was his garden, then he put the tree there and made the walls so that the serpent could get in. He set them up for a fall, and then he punished them for it? Why would you worship a god that toys with you like that? It's worse than a cat with a mouse. At least the cat doesn't pretend to be the mouse's friend."

Bjorn hummed noncommittally. "And the fruit of the tree?"

"What about it?"

"Should they have eaten it?"

Harry stared into space, thinking about the serpent. "You know, even wizards think snakes are dark. But they're not dark. They're dangerous, but not dark. People don't like to be reminded that life is dangerous. It's ironic that it was a snake who gave the woman the idea. Maybe she realized that the good times couldn't last forever. That gods are jealous and petty. Maybe she did the only thing she could to protect herself and the man by arming them with knowledge."

Bjorn's eyebrows inched upwards. "That interpretation had not occurred to me, but it has some logic."

"Well, what's your take, then? You're always trying to sneak these little morals in." Harry favoured Bjorn with a not unfriendly glare. "Don't think I haven't noticed."

Bjorn laughed. "Forgive me, fugleunge, I'm a little rusty on these matters." He thought a moment. "You want to know what I really think?" He glanced at Harry, who nodded. "I think that without the fruit of knowledge, the man and woman were just dumb beasts like every other beast. They could behave like beasts and not be punished for it, because they knew no better. A man would be wrong to eat another man's child, but when a lion does it, it's simply nature taking its course. So I ask myself, what knowledge is there that humans have that stops them behaving like beasts? And the only answer I've found is the knowledge that everyone feels the same pains, the same joys, the same sorrows. That no man is an island. We have this knowledge, and it sets us apart. It limits us, in some ways, but it sets us free in others."

"Sets us free?" Harry asked, bemused. "How is that?"

Bjorn smiled indulgently. "It sets us free from the prison of self."

Harry blinked several times. Bjorn's words might as well have been Norwegian, but he tucked them away for later all the same.

There was a long silence, and Harry watched the horizon swing up and down through the porthole as the boat rocked. Beneath the dull grey surface of the ocean, tiny souls darted to and fro on their unknown business. He sensed that Bjorn's story, too, held hidden depths, but unlike the sea, Harry couldn't sense what lurked beneath this surface. He was out of his depth, and anything could be circling below him.

"I said it was wrong to take another man's choice away," Bjorn reminded Harry. "And that is because it is our choices that make us human. A wolf has no choice but to eat the lamb. He cannot master his instincts. But a man is different, and to take away a man's choice is to dehumanize him."

"But people choose wrong. They choose to destroy and steal and kill, all the time. They choose to follow people like Grindelwald."

"Would you herd us all back into the muggle god's garden, then? Have us all be his tame wolves who lie down with lambs? Cut all the thorns from the roses so that no one pricks himself?"

"No," Harry whispered. He lowered his eyes in defeat. "No, but I don't have to like it."

Bjorn reached out and stroked Harry's sleek black hair. "You will make a fine fugl² someday, fugleunge."

One corner of Harry's mouth twitched up. "Speak English, you stupid old bear."

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¹ Referring to the Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities, who were relatively isolated in terms of marriage from the rest of the Europeans

² Norwegian: fugl = 'bird', fugleunge = 'birdling'