Chapter Three: Standing Stones
"Ready for a new year?" Harry asked Hermione, who looked up and smiled at him. They were unpacking a set of used books that a student who had graduated several years ago had sent over for the still relatively new Somnarium. After the year during which the first-years had formed their Sleep Club, Draco Malfoy had spearheaded an effort to create a large common room for all houses, where the students or professors could go if they had insomnia or nightmares. It had started as nothing more than a large room filled with beds and a carefully-tuned cauldron of Drowsiness Potion, and it had grown slowly over the past five years. Now, the walls had been enchanted with a spell that allowed any occupant to call up a desired scene, most of which were nature-based (Ral Zarek called it "screensaver mode", much to Harry and Hermione's amusement and Draco's bewilderment), and there were couches and large pillows in addition to beds.
They had recently begun fleshing out the library with donations from students and former students of books that people thought made soothing bedtime stories, and there was another new room being constructed that Hermione hoped to open soon, where she, Ral, and a few other of the Muggle-born students had been trying to figure out a way to even out the magical energies enough to allow a computer with internet access to be installed.
Hermione sat back on her heels and brushed her hair out of her face. "Getting there," she said. "Last year was a bit uneventful, though. I keep finding myself wondering if that's a good sign, or if something is going to happen again."
"Let's go with good sign," Harry replied, though he was honestly a little surprised that the previous year had been as uneventful as it had. They had a number of trouble-makers at the school right now, especially Jace Beleren and Ral Zarek. Maybe the fact that the two had been studying for their O.W.L.s had helped keep them out of the trouble they had managed to find themselves in every previous year.
Harry mentally went down the list: first year, nearly getting themselves killed by a boggart, though that hadn't been entirely their fault; second year, finding a hidden passage that had been disenchanted during the Wizarding War and using it to play hide-and-seek in until they woke up a very angry dragon; third year, forcing the school to be evacuated when their attempts to make a Bottled Dreams potion went very, very poorly; and fourth year, managing to get lost in Venice during the school trip and accidentally destroy a coven of vampires that had been terrorizing one of the smaller wizarding schools in the nation. These were, of course, all in addition to the sundry minor pranks and moments of really astonishing stupidity that had cropped up over the years.
Fifth year, though, not only had they both been studying for O.W.L.s, but Hermione had had the frankly brilliant idea of giving both of them individual research projects to work on—she had already been giving Ral private lessons for years, and it was mostly a matter of formalizing things and getting the resources for them. Several other students had also benefited from what turned into a new, individual projected-oriented class, but Harry definitely thought that the greatest benefit had been confining most of Ral's and Jace's overwhelming mental energy to a specific problem.
He glanced up at the clock to check the time. "I'd better get going, I'm supposed to meet Jace in five minutes," he said to Hermione. "We have a legilimency lesson." Despite Jace's unrivaled power as a legilimens, he still needed a teacher, and it had fallen to Harry, as the teacher with the most experience dealing with legilimency. Jace's talent was one of the things that Harry sometimes still found a little disconcerting. He knew what it was like to have a lot of power and not much control, but Jace was a very different person from Harry in many ways. No matter how much he tried, he thought he'd never really been able to mend his interactions with the boy since his first year. Jace was always polite but guarded around him, and, even if Harry had no one but himself to blame, it still stung. At least he and Draco seemed to get on well.
Hermione waved him off, and he headed out the door to his office, which he reached a minute or two late, and was getting ready to apologize when he realized Jace wasn't there yet, either. Harry ran a puzzled hand through his hair as he unlocked his office. Jace might be something of a troublemaker—a status that was probably exacerbated by his association with Ral Zarek—but he was also generally an overly conscientious, punctual student. It wasn't like him to be late.
When he heard a knock on his door ten minutes after the lesson was supposed to start, his mild concern vanished to be replaced with irritation, but he called out, "Come in!" as calmly as he could.
Jace breezed in the door with the hood of his cloak pushed back, his hair ruffled, and his robes askew. He was breathing hard, his cheeks flushed bright red. "Sorry I'm late, Professor," he said, not sounding sorry at all.
"Hm," Harry said, noncommittally. "Please don't be late again, Mr. Beleren. In the meantime, let's review what you were working on over the summer."
At the end of his fifth year, Jace's mental defenses had been strong, but clumsy. Harry was no longer able to brute force his way in, even using all his power and the methods he knew to increase his power. Jace had, however, still been susceptible to subtle assaults; he couldn't always tell when something was his own thought or someone else's, and that made it relatively easy to slide in through the cracks. His mental exercises over the summer had been tailored to work on that weakness. Harry intended to see how much progress he'd made.
"Legilimens," Harry said. Though he was capable of performing it wandlessly, he preferred to signal to Jace that the lesson was about to begin. He needed Jace to feel that he could trust him.
As was typical lately, Jace's mind felt like a smooth, blank wall beneath Harry's mental fingers. He felt carefully along it, feeling for the soft chinks, the little holes that the boy hadn't learned to close up at the end of his fifth year, and found one almost immediately. It was surprisingly large, actually, Harry thought he'd been getting better at closing up this kind of vulnerability. Nevertheless, he slipped inside—and was immediately assaulted with sensory input.
Hands on his shoulders, sliding down his waist, a pair of lips on his own. He heard his own voice loud in his ears, and for a moment, he didn't realize that it wasn't his. Harry pulled back right away, feeling his ears flush with embarrassment as he realized both why Jace had been late and what kind of memory he had stumbled into accidentally.
He sat still for a minute to recover himself, trying to make the twin awkward feelings of arousal and serious discomfort go down. That had not been something he'd wanted to see or think about, much less experience. He would have to be more careful in future, especially if Jace was likely to be having any more snogging sessions. Harry supposed he was sixteen, after all, so it probably shouldn't be all that surprising.
"Professor? Is something wrong?" Jace's voice sounded almost smug, and Harry looked up sharply. There was a faint smile hovering at the corner of his student's lips, almost a smirk, and he suddenly realized that the effect of accidentally—as he'd thought—invading the boy's privacy had been to cause him to reflexively pull back entirely.
"Did you do that on purpose, Jace?" he asked.
"Well," Jace grinned, looking very pleased with himself, "you said at the end of last semester that I needed to stop letting people trick their way into my head."
"Did it occur to you that—" Harry paused, trying to choose his words carefully. "Don't do that again," he said. "I want to make this very clear. That was seriously inappropriate."
"I figured it would work," Jace shrugged. "It would keep most people out. Or distract them, I guess." He smirked again.
"If I catch you deliberately showing me memories like that again, you will have detention for a week," Harry said. "The idea is good, I can't fault that, but if you're going to be practicing with me, you need to come up with something else."
"Sorry," Jace said, sounding slightly chastened, but still more pleased with himself than Harry would have liked. He sighed mentally. Horny teenagers were almost impossible to deal with, and Jace really was very talented, which made the whole situation worse. Time to have a long discussion with Draco again. Somehow, he always ended up feeling better after talking to his friend, even when it didn't manage to resolve anything. And, of course, Draco had a much better handle on how to interact with Jace. Harry grimaced slightly. It was going to be a long year.
Hermione sighed with satisfaction as she sank into one of the Hogwarts library chairs. In the hustle and bustle of the beginning of term, it had been almost a week since she'd had a chance to sit down and just relax with a good book. So far, the year was going reasonably smoothly, although, she thought cynically, that it probably wasn't going to last. She had also drafted three different letters to Ron, all of which she had set on fire after penning one or two sentences. She kept wanting to ask Harry for help, but she didn't really know how to explain her feelings in a way that wouldn't make him think she wanted to get back together with Ron—and she certainly did not want that.
A sudden shriek dragged her out of her thoughts. Somebody unauthorized was trying to take one of the books out of the Restricted Section. Of course, Hermione thought, as she put her book down and hurried off toward it at a half-jog. She couldn't even get five minutes of peace around here.
She rounded the corner to find, to her surprise, a somewhat flustered-looking Luna Lovegood shouting at a book. The book was screaming back, and it was louder than Luna, so Hermione had no idea what her friend was saying. She whipped her wand out and shouted, "Silencio liber!"
The book went quiet immediately, and somewhat apologetically flipped itself closed.
"—you stupid volume! Oh." Luna turned to Hermione and gave her a smile. "Thank you. It seems the books don't recognize me yet."
"I expect someone forgot to cast the proper spell on you at the beginning of term," Hermione said apologetically. "Actually, I'm not sure who was supposed to do it. It's been a while since we've had a new addition to the faculty."
"It's fine," Luna said vaguely. "I was afraid the books didn't like me, but if we simply need to be properly introduced, that's no trouble." She smiled at Hermione, who smiled back, not quite sure if she ought to laugh or not. She couldn't always tell when Luna was joking.
"Right," she said, after a moment of awkward silence. "Well, I can do that for you now, if you'd like."
"Yes, please." Luna nodded, and Hermione raised her wand.
The incantation was a little more complex than she might normally have volunteered to do without preparation, especially since she hadn't performed it herself since Harry began working at Hogwarts five years ago. But something about Luna's calm gaze made her want to try. Luna wanted to meet the books, and she clearly fully believed in Hermione's ability to make that happen.
So Hermione took Luna's hand gently, traced the complicated sigil on the back of it with her wand, and murmured in Latin, "By the power vested in me as Professor of Hogwarts, I bestow the rights of ownership upon Luna Lovegood. There," she finished, as she felt the soft hum of acceptance from the library around her. "You should be recognized now."
Luna blinked at her, and her lips twitched just slightly further upward. "But you haven't introduced me yet," she said. Hermione stared at her, unable to tell if she was serious or joking.
"Well—er—" she replied after a moment. "All right." She squinted at the book. "Um, Darkest Myths of Ancient Britain, this is Luna, er, Lovegood. Luna, this is…Darkest Myths of Ancient Britain?"
"Pleased to meet you." Luna stroked a gentle hand across the front cover and opened the book. Hermione found herself oddly captivated with the movement of her friend's hands, and she had to shake her head and look away. "I'm afraid, though, that you aren't the book I was looking for."
Shaking her head slightly, she slid it carefully back on the shelf.
"What book are you looking for?" Hermione asked.
"I'm…not entirely sure." Luna shuffled her feet and stared pensively to one side. "It was quite a large book, I remember that. I think there was golden script along the spine, and it was bound in either black or very dark blue leather. And for some reason, it makes me think of boats…"
"How can you not be sure?" Hermione asked practically. "Why were you looking for it, then?"
"It was a book we used for the DA, a long time ago. And when I saw the stones, I thought perhaps they were the stones it had mentioned."
"Stones?"
"They were broken, and it felt—" Luna cut herself off abruptly, shivering. "Sorry," she said. "I don't think I'm telling this story the right way round."
"Are you all right?" Hermione asked. Her friend was pale and shivering, and when Hermione looked closer, she saw that Luna had marked circles beneath her large eyes. Her forehead was damp. "Do you have a fever?" She automatically reached out to feel Luna's forehead, but the other woman ducked backwards with a small smile.
"Oh! No, I'm all right," Luna replied. "I've just been feeling a bit under the weather."
"Why don't you come back to my study and tell the story the right way round, then? I could make you some herbal tea."
Luna smiled suddenly, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. "I'd like that," she said.
The tea seemed to help with the shivering, at any rate, though Luna still looked pale and quite thin with her long fingers clasped around Hermione's favorite china mug. Luna chewed on the corner of her mouth a little before she started to talk again. "I don't know how much you know about what I've been doing," she started, eventually.
"You were doing a lot of traveling, I know that." Hermione poured herself a cup of tea as well. "I couldn't figure out where to send letters to you. I actually feel pretty bad about that."
"Oh." Luna traced a finger around the rim of her cup. "I—didn't realize you wanted to send me letters. I'm sorry."
Frowning, Hermione took a sip of her tea. It was too hot, and she hissed in pain as she burned her tongue. "You're a really good friend," she said fiercely. "Of course I want to know what's going on with you. I want—" She wasn't sure if she could explain everything she wanted. A small voice at the back of her mind piped up, Are you sure you know what you want?
Luna nodded. "I did do a lot of traveling. I ended up in some pretty strange places—I have some photos I can show you later. But there was one place…well, I thought I might be on the trail of the Crumple-horned Snorkack finally, and I accidentally stumbled on a place in the northern part of Wales. It was—" she shivered again, pressing her hands more tightly around the teacup. "It was very dark. You could tell. There had been something buried in the earth there—there were still the remnants of a powerful spell and a befuddlement charm of some kind, which I imagine is why it had been undisturbed for so long. And I tried telling the Ministry about it, but they didn't really seem to want to know. I guess they didn't want to have something else to deal with so soon after the war."
Hermione nodded, quashing a sudden instinct to reach out and take Luna's hand. "What about the book?" she prompted.
"Oh, yes." Luna smiled dreamily and sighed. "I got lost out there. It was a bit frightening, really. Some kind of charm I'd never dealt with kept making me come back to the open casket."
"Casket?" Hermione echoed.
Luna nodded. "Oh, yes, there were bits and pieces of stone, and I'm fairly sure that's what it was. Do not awaken, said one of the bits."
Despite herself, despite the coziness of the firelit study, Hermione found herself shivering as well. It was a horribly eerie story.
"It made me think of a book I'd read, quite a long time ago. There were pictures in it of a casket in a fairy ring that said something in Welsh on it. The trouble is, I can't remember what the book was called. I just know it was here. So, well, I'm afraid that's one of the two major reasons I decided to come back and help out at Hogwarts."
"What was the other reason? You really missed the delicious Hogwarts food?" Hermione tried to joke, but it fell a little flat when Luna put her head on one side with a considering look.
"I don't think I'll tell you the other reason just yet," she said, with a small smile. "Maybe later."
"Well," Hermione said, trying to reign in her curiosity, "anyways, that does sound serious. Can I help you look? In between classes and preparation time and research, I mean."
"Yes, please," Luna smiled. "It—it might be nothing. I hope it is."
The chilly atmosphere that had been growing in the room seemed to subside, and this time, Hermione couldn't quite stop herself from reaching out and brushing her fingers across the back of Luna's hand.