Two minutes later, Harry and Malfoy were standing side by side in the village square in a very impossible situation. Dozens of goblins formed a tight semi-circle around them, the murky village pond completing the barrier. All possible means of escape were blocked.

Between Harry and Malfoy stood Urg the Severely Unmerciful, propped up on a shield supported by two goblins of lesser rank. With a smirk that reached right to his beady black eyes, Urg slung his arms around the boys, a move that threatened to waft Harry into a stench-induced coma.

Malfoy whimpered pitifully.

Harry, on the other hand, was not about to give up and let a mob of stinking goblins extract his vital organs. He'd faced worse than this on a yearly basis since that first cave troll's nostril at Hogwarts. Steeling his jaw and breathing through his mouth, Harry glanced down to the chain around his neck and prepared to engage in some Gryffindor-style recklessness.

"Fellow goblins," cried Urg, his foul breath steaming out into the pre-dawn chill. "We are here to stand up to our oppressors! We are here to claim what is rightfully ours! We are here to extract the innards from these wizards with a variety of blunt instruments, and parade their heads around the village!"

As the goblins roared their hideous approval, Harry moved quickly. Ever since Urg's pronouncement of their doom in the Three Broomsticks, Harry had redoubled his efforts to loosen the rope around his wrists. Now, before Urg could so much as extract his arms from around their necks, Harry wrenched his hands free and grabbed for the Time-Turner, slinging the chain wildly around Malfoy's neck, catching Urg in between.

With a hideous snarl, Urg overbalanced on his shield. Arms wheeling, he tumbled backwards into the pond, pulling Harry and Malfoy in after him. Shouts of alarm came from the goblin audience, and then the sound of running feet.

"How dare you?" Urg spluttered, choking on pond water and the golden chain, but Harry didn't stop to answer. As soon as he could catch a breath, he grabbed for the hourglass pendant and spun it forwards with an almighty flick, sending all three of them careering blindly into the future.

Maintaining his focus through increasing nausea, Harry concentrated hard on Hogwarts, and was distinctly relieved to recognise the Whomping Willow when the world stopped spinning.

"Well, thank Merlin for that," groaned Malfoy, and Harry, in between great gasps of air, slapped him on the back. Urg, knocked out by the time travel, was sprawled across the lawn like the dead, all sodden with pond water and undoubtedly cleaner than he'd ever been in his life.

Against all odds, they were alive. With an enormous huff of relief, Harry collapsed onto the lawn, sucking in lungful after lungful of blessedly fresh air. When his heart had slowed to a normal rate, Harry propped himself up on one elbow.

"So what do we do with him?" he mused, prodding at Urg with a squelchy toe. "Use him for the report now or later?"

Malfoy looked down on Urg with clear disgust. "Later."

Harry shrugged. "We'd better get on with it, then. We've got two more pivotal historical figures to collect before dinner tomorrow." With a bit of a grimace, he extracted the chain from Urg's soot-blackened neck.

"Who's going to watch him while we're gone?" asked Malfoy, screwing up his nose. "No way he's going in my dormitory. He could go in yours; after Longbottom, Urg would probably act like an air-freshening charm."

Harry frowned thoughtfully at Urg's prone figure. Somehow, he didn't think Ron and Hermione would take kindly to yet another goblin companion. With a sudden grin, he clicked his fingers.

"Winky!"

As he pressed himself into the shadow of the thatch-roofed parsonage, Harry could feel Malfoy's eyes on his face. He wouldn't normally have let this bother him, having ignored such behaviour all year, but the attention suddenly seemed too personal. Like it or not, he and Malfoy had shared something that morning. This didn't make them friends, obviously – but it did make Malfoy's staring rude.

"What do you want?" Harry hissed without looking back, peering around the corner into the mediaeval street beyond.

Malfoy stuck his head over Harry's shoulder, surveying the street before condescending to respond. "Nothing, Potter. Only, I thought you lot were into ending house-elf exploitation, not landing them with blood-thirsty goblins."

Harry pulled back into the shadow and turned to stare at Malfoy with some incredulity. "First off, Malfoy: why do you care? And secondly, you saw Winky's face. The chance to look after Urg is like winning the house-elf lottery– so much filth to scrub and all that."

Malfoy, somehow managing to look disdainful despite his pond-drenched hair and rumpled robes, leaned haughtily back against the parsonage wall. "And I suppose that's what you'll tell Granger before she does what Urg couldn't, and rips your spleen through your elbows. Without magic."

Harry shuddered, and turned back to the street with more than a twinge of guilt. Still, Winky had looked uncharacteristically animated at the sight of the feculent goblin. Upon waking, Urg had seemed slightly less eager – but a good dose of disciplinary house-elf magic had soon sorted him out.

Focussing back on the scene at hand, Harry motioned Malfoy forward, and the boys crept gingerly along the street-facing wall until they reached the next building along, which looked like it might have been some sort of church. It was hard to tell; everything in the Middle Ages vaguely resembled the Shrieking Shack, but the enormous crucifix above the doorway cleared the matter up somewhat.

"Look over there," said Malfoy suddenly, pointing down the street at what appeared to be the village green, being green and at the centre of the village. "That looks like an appropriate witch-burning area. Is that a stake? It looks like a stake."

Harry craned his neck and beamed at the sight of a row of blackened stakes pricking into the sky. "Excellent," he murmured. "She'll be there sooner or later, won't she?"

As it turned out, Wendelin the Weird was not due to be burnt at the stake (for the thirty-eighth time) until the next morning. Harry and Malfoy, busy staking out the stakes, only became aware of this when the witch herself Apparated directly into their midst.

"Hello, boys," she said with a lascivious grin and a flick of her flame-red hair, and then everything went black.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

After sending Winky off with an armful of Urg, Harry and Malfoy had sat on the lawn and argued for a good ten minutes about which historical figure to collect next. Malfoy was all for travelling to 18th century France and whisking away a member of the Malfoy noblesse, Scarlet Pimpernel-style.

Harry had been less eager.

"Figures," Malfoy had muttered, picking up a long stick and taking a jab at the Whomping Willow, whose branches were fruitlessly straining towards them. "You won't pick anyone but Dumbledore, will you? Never mind how socially uncomfortable it'd be for me."

At Malfoy's words, Harry was struck with a sudden burst of inspiration. "Right," he had said, digging frantically through his pockets with a grin. "We're going to do what we should have done in the first place."

Malfoy had perked up immediately, dropping the stick at the mercy of the Whomping Willow, eyes glistening with interest. "Steal Granger's history notes?"

"Even better," Harry had promised; and besides, after years of their licentious abuse, Harry and Ron had been summarily barred from all access to Hermione's study materials. It was with a grin that he had offered Malfoy the contents of his pockets.

"Pick a card; any card."

From Harry's deck of Chocolate Frog cards, Malfoy had selected Wendelin the Weird.

Had he possessed a whiff of Divination talent and managed a glimpse of the near future, Harry might have thought twice about letting Fate (and chocolate) direct the course of their history project.

"Urg," he moaned, waking with a start and a splitting headache. Wishing for death, Harry let himself dangle forward until he was struck by the strange realisation that he appeared to have been sleeping upright. Already regretting the move, he opened his eyes a crack and squinted blearily into pale morning light.

"You dumped him with a house-elf, remember?"

Harry shut his eyes, and didn't think he'd bother opening them again any time soon.

"Malfoy?"

"Yes, Potter?"

"We're about to be burnt at the stake, aren't we?"

"Oh yes."

"Just checking."

After a minute, during which Harry sagged in his ropes and pretended he was back in the comfort and safety of the Three Broomsticks, he sighed and asked another pressing question.

"Why are you wearing a tablecloth?"

There was a notable lack of response from the stake next door. Despite the wretched pounding in his head and the fact that he was about to be burnt alive, Harry found it within himself to have a bit of a snigger at Malfoy's expense.

"Oh, that's it," he said finally, feeling a great deal cheered. "She pinched your clothes while you were in that bath, didn't she?"

"Bloody weird if you ask me," Malfoy muttered darkly, making no effort to deny Harry's summation of the events.

"Well, Wendelin would be, wouldn't she?"

Malfoy turned his neck sharply and glared. If looks could kill, Harry would have gone up in flames a little earlier than planned. "You do realise this is all your fault, Potter, don't you? If you hadn't gone and drunk half the mead in the Middle Ages, you might've been able to stop that – that witch from – from –"

"Touching you up?" Harry suggested, and snorted through his nose. His headache had almost disappeared; really, he couldn't have had all that much to drink if that was the extent of the hangover. In fact, he couldn't remember taking more than a sip of the stuff – and then he'd only tried it so as not to offend their convivial hostess.

Rather too convivial in Malfoy's case, it seemed. He actually growled at Harry's words, which only served to make Harry chuckle harder.

"Weren't laughing last night, were you, Potter?"

"I wasn't?" Harry paused and trawled through recent memories for the hilarity that must have ensued upon first sight of Malfoy's costume. An image of a yelling, linen-sheathed Malfoy popped to mind – Harry grinned hugely – but strangely, he couldn't quite remember finding it amusing at the time. To tell the truth, he couldn't seem to recollect a large part of the previous night's events.

Wendelin had stunned them as they were watching the village green; that, Harry remembered. And then she must have dragged them away to her little one-roomed hut before casting the counter-curse. Harry could clearly recall waking on the hard earth floor and pulling his wand on the witch; Malfoy had taken a different tack, using the distraction to scuttle towards the door.

Before either could get very far with their efforts, Wendelin had held up her hands and explained that two such obvious wizards had needed to be removed from the sight of the Inquisition. She had seemed so repentant that Harry had felt quite ashamed. She'd even offered Malfoy a bath to rinse the pond scum from his hair. Malfoy, rather rashly, as it turned out, had accepted – but after that, the details blurred in Harry's mind.

From what Malfoy had said, and from the general toilet-floor taste in his mouth, Harry surmised that he must have (equally rashly) accepted a drink. Or five.

"So, er," he began, rather keen to drop the topic of the previous night's mysterious events; Malfoy's words had made him distinctly uneasy. "Burnt at the stake, eh? Not a very dignified way to go." After all, wasn't witch-burning something that happened to, well, witches? These Inquisitorial Muggles were hard-hearted indeed.

Malfoy, who had let his head loll back against his tall wooden post, released a rude sort of snort. "We wouldn't even be in this mess if it wasn't for your mad attack of jealousy, Potter."

Harry started at the insinuation. "Jealous? I wasn't jealous! Was I?" He stared at Malfoy with some incredulity. "Why on earth would I be jealous of you?"

"Not of me," said Malfoy, glaring forward into the village as his cheeks turned red. "Of Wendelin, you pervy twat. You kept swatting at her hands and yelling, 'Back off, he's mine!'"

Blurry memories took some shape at Malfoy's words, but Harry, flushing hotly, shook them from his mind. He stood a little straighter against his stake and cleared his throat. "I was hardly jealous of Wendelin, was I?" Was he? "I must have been trying to protect you. Obviously. She's clearly barking, fancying you."

Honestly, the very idea of it – jealous over Malfoy? What nonsense. He hated the slimy sleek-haired ponce. Malfoy must have got the wrong end of the stick somewhere – probably while fleeing Wendelin's busy hands.

Meanwhile, Malfoy was leaning forward in his bindings and giving Harry an infuriatingly knowing look. "Protecting me from the wicked witch, were you? You big, brave Gryffindor, you. Saved me from certain death, you did." He shook pointedly at his ropes, nodding to the flaming torches in the surrounding crowd.

"Wouldn't be the first time," Harry snapped, and Malfoy shut up immediately. Irritated, embarrassed, and already regretting his words, Harry knocked his head none too gently against the post.

"Well, look, at least you won't die completely starkers," said Harry in an attempt to ease the tension that had settled between their posts. He glanced sideways at Malfoy to see if he looked mollified, and couldn't help snorting anew at the sight of the makeshift tablecloth robes flapping in the breeze.

"Oh, shut up," Malfoy growled through gritted teeth, and Harry was forced to choke down his laughter and face his approaching death with a straight face.

"Hey, Malfoy?" he said finally, as the head of the witch-burning assembly came and thrust his torch into the bales of straw beneath them.

"What?"

"How did we end up getting burnt at the stake as witches?"

Malfoy sighed a long, drawn out sort of sigh. "Well, Potter, after you challenged Wendelin to an impromptu duel for my honour, you charged out into the village square and roused the peasantry to judge the fight. You used the words 'magic', 'witch' and pointed at me a lot. It somehow seemed to work against us at the trial."

"Oh," said Harry, which didn't seem to be much of a response, but it was all he had. As flames flickered up through the straw bales, less malevolent than Fiendfyre but just as deadly, Harry made a hasty vow to never drink again.

He turned to Malfoy, who had gone quite pale amid the smoke and dancing light, and raised a sheepish shoulder. "Sorry about that."

"Now, now, was that really so difficult?" sprung a new voice from behind, and Harry flung himself about in his bindings until he could peer around.

"Wendelin?" he coughed with great incredulity. "You were standing behind me this whole time?"

"Sorry, Harry," she said with a throaty giggle; "I've been a bit tied up, you see."

Feeling like he'd been punished quite enough for the foolish endeavours of the night before, Harry turned back around and shook his head. "How in Merlin's name did she end up on a Chocolate Frog card?" he muttered, and Malfoy shrugged.

"On the count of three, boys," Wendelin said loudly with laughter still in her voice. "One – two," – Harry and Malfoy looked at each other – "Three!"

A piercing shriek erupted from Wendelin's stake, and Harry, seeing no viable alternative, joined in with a shout. His feet were getting uncomfortably hot, and he hadn't had a very good morning, and on top of everything, he was sure to fail his stupid, bloody history assignment for stupid, bloody Binns, and all the trauma of the last two days would have been for nothing.

Malfoy stayed quiet, or might have muttered something that sounded a bit like a Flame-Freezing Charm, and suddenly the flames at Harry's feet began to tickle instead of burn.

"Keep screaming!" screamed Wendelin, and Harry complied. After all, the batty old witch had had a lot of experience at this by all accounts.

"The fire's burnt my ropes away!" he yelled hoarsely at the smoke-cloud that resembled Malfoy.

"It's burning my sodding tablecloth away!" Malfoy hollered back, and Harry couldn't help it – he erupted into a fresh stream of laughter.

"Shut up and use the Time-Turner!" Malfoy shouted, sounding entirely unamused, and Harry bit his lip and pulled out the hourglass.

"Are we taking the she-devil?" he called, jabbing a thumb over his back in Wendelin's general direction. Malfoy nodded, so Harry sighed and threaded the chain around each of their necks.

"Picture Hogwarts," he said, trying not to squirm about as the flames tickled mercilessly at his belly. "Allons-y!"

Hermione had been even less amused than Harry had expected.

Ron, at least, had had the good sense of humour to snicker at Malfoy's surprising lack of clothing when he darted through the portrait hole. And then his mouth had fallen open at the sight of Wendelin's threadbare, fall-away robes, and Hermione had been less amused still.

"Er," Harry had explained, raising his soot-blackened hands and gazing pleadingly at Hermione's stony face. "You do want me to be an Auror, don't you?"

"Illegal use of a Time-Turner," Hermione had fumed, jerking one furious hand at Wendelin (who was busy making coy glances towards Malfoy's lack of tablecloth; Harry felt a strange flame of anger in his stomach). "Cheating in a history project. Destroying the past–"

"Well, that's not really fair, is it?" Malfoy had interrupted with a scowl, peering up from behind the shelter of a convenient armchair. "We haven't destroyed anything – I don't think."

Harry had crossed his arms and joined Malfoy at the armchair. "Yeah, Hermione. And we're going to put them back," he said – quite reasonably, he thought.

"Them?"

Ron had just gaped, and then shook his head with a grin. "Bloody brilliant," he'd enthused, clapping Harry on the back and shooting Malfoy daggers. "Shame you have to do it with him."

"Shame you have to be alive, Weasley," Malfoy had spat, but Harry had hastily intervened; if there was any chance he was going to convince Ron and Hermione to watch Wendelin, he couldn't have Malfoy being a tit.

It had been surprisingly easy to secure Ron's consent – or perhaps unsurprising, given Wendelin's flirtatious handiwork. Hermione had taken off to her dormitory in a huff, but Ron had assured them that she'd get over it.

"She's a jealous one," he'd said with a fond smile in Hermione's direction, and Harry had dragged Malfoy away before he could do more than open his mouth. Somehow, Harry didn't think Ron would be too pleased with Malfoy's version of the previous night's events.

"Don't let her give you a bath!" Malfoy had called over his shoulder as Harry shoved him out of Gryffindor Tower. Malfoy was now clothed in a pair of second-hand trousers and a Weasley jumper; privately, Harry thought that Wendelin's linen cloth had suited him rather better.

Now they stood back at the back of the Entrance Hall, examining the rest of Harry's Chocolate Frog card collection.

"It has to be Merlin," said Malfoy, pointing to the famous wizard blinking solemnly up from the card. "If anyone's pivotal in wizarding history, it's him, isn't it? He's the most popular wizard in the Chocolate Frog business; I must have got his card three times out of five."

Harry nodded, stepped closer to Malfoy and looped the Time-Turner around his neck. "This is it, then," he said with a sigh of utmost relief. "One more trip and we're done, and they can't kick us out."

"Think Merlin," said Malfoy the second before Harry could say the words, and they grinned at each other for a brief moment before looking away and clearing their throats.

Without another word, Harry delivered a perfunctory flick to the hourglass pendant, and away they whooshed through time and relative dimensions in space.