Disclaimer: Still not my little puppet people.

Kudos and as many points as she wants to Morena Evensong for guessing "The Horse Whisperer." Any particular House you want them assigned to? And yes there really is a Practical Guide to Horseshoeing. "Potty's Horse Dictionary" is a prize in its own right even apart from the name – read it and you'll be amazed a horse can so much as stroll across a paddock without croaking.

ooOOoo

Chapter 11: A Bubble in Time

There was mist prowling the grounds in thick wisps of dampness when Harry went out before breakfast. Ron was asleep and Hermione probably still wasn't talking to him – she'd barricaded herself in her room and even Ginny couldn't persuade her to come out. In a rare moment of sisterly solidarity with Hermione, Parvati and Lavender were giving him and Ron the evil eye, having decided it was their fault for being male and (by definition) stupid.

Harry was thinking of visiting Simon to make sure the blanket wasn't falling off the horse or something else minor – anything where blood wasn't involved was good – when he heard the muffled slow triple-drumming of hoofbeats.

His first thought was, Oh no… he got out of the paddock!

His second thought was, when he realised the hoofbeats seemed to be confined to one area and almost with the rhythm of a waltz – not what he'd expect from a panicking runaway horse – someone's playing silly buggers.

He strode through the damp grass, his cloak fluttering around his ankles, his wand in his hand, following the sounds.

He could believe his ears – it was his eyes he was having troubles with. For a second he thought someone had jinxed his glasses.

There, weaving through the mist, was Luna. On the horse. She was wearing a dark bottle-green frock-coat cut darted at the back to allow her to sit astride. She was also wearing some sort of cross between white tights and trousers. They clung to her legs like a second skin and were tucked into knee-high black boots.

Simon was wearing a bridle and saddle. He was cantering in a slow circle with his neck arched and his head lowered slightly. His ears were back, but not in anger. He looked as though he was concentrating hard on his rider.

Harry walked forward. One of the horse's ears flicked in his direction, just enough to tell him he'd been noticed and dismissed as unimportant. Luna didn't notice him, though; she had her eyes half-closed and her lips parted as she concentrated on the horse. Her slim back and hips rocked to the rolling canter and her legs stretched down to give subtle signals to Simon, her hips tilting and her hands squeezing just that fraction needed to bring the horse to an almost stop then stretch out into that slow, ground-eating canter again.

Harry's mouth was dry and he felt hot and cold all over.

He watched entranced as Luna brought Simon down to a trot, first slow and calm, before at some magical signal making Simon lengthen his stride so that they floated over the ground through the mist. Then she brought the horse back so that it was slowly and carefully trotting on the spot, its ears still back in ferocious concentration, then somehow she had Simon trotting sideways, tail swishing, all the time with that amazing, graceful fusion between horse and rider.

She had said she knew how to ride a horse a bit. Harry was pretty sure this wasn't what most people meant when they said "a bit."

And Simon… if he didn't know better, he would have said Luna had the horse under the Imperius.

Yesterday they had still been discussing whether they should try training the horse. Even if Luna had been up all night after leaving them in the library, she had trained him remarkably quickly. Now Simon was trotting on the spot once more, but slowly turning ninety degrees before Luna sent him striding out again across the gleaming turf. Were all horses this fast to train? Harry doubted it. And what was this odd, tingly feeling he got all over his skin watching them? It was like watching living artwork, but Harry had never been particularly interested in art before. It was like seeing Luna discover on a horse what he had discovered the first time he caught the Snitch. He felt -

He felt a presence behind him, a shift in the mist, and turned to see Madam Hooch staring at Luna and Simon, her eyes wide with disbelief, and wasn't sure if he was relieved someone was here who would back him up when he told Luna what she was doing was dangerous, anger at having this private moment interrupted, or worry that Hooch was going to blow her stack.

Had he been this confused before Luna? Maybe with Cho a bit, but Luna wasn't Cho. Not in the least.

Merlin; when did Luna get such lovely legs?

"Someone is going to be very angry about losing that horse," Madam Hooch said quietly when she saw Harry looking at her.

"How do you mean?"

"I mean that's a good horse. A very good horse. Very, very, very, very, very…" she took a breath "… very good. Luna just had him doing piaffe and passage, and very nice examples of the movements, too… Circe… Look at that…" she breathed.

Harry turned to see that Luna had somehow coaxed Simon into standing up on his hind legs. It wasn't high and half-crazed with fear like when Simon had nearly brained Harry after the vrikolaki – it was low and controlled with carefully precise angles, and Harry fancied he could hear the creak of the knees in the horse's back legs (hocks, he remembered from the Potter's Horse Dictionary) as they strained under the weight. The horse managed to hold his balance for all of a second, frozen like a Greek statue, and then dropped back to all four feet. Luna gave him a pat on the neck for a reward, and then they were back into that lovely, floating canter Harry had first seen.

"Levade," Hooch said.

"I beg your pardon?" Harry wondered if she'd just sworn because Luna was off, well, being Luna.

"Never mind. Suffice to say I've only seen that twice before in my life, and once was when I went to the Spanish Riding School."

"So… only Spanish horses do that?" Harry asked, confused.

Hooch gave him a look of amused superiority. "The Spanish Riding School is in Austria. But you've got the right idea – not a huge number of horses can do that trick. I wonder if he can – oh, yes, it looks like he can," she added, laughing helplessly as they watched Simon rear again before jumping up into the air and lashing out with his hind legs. "A bit clumsy, but then perhaps he's out of practice. Oh dear, Harry… you do tend to find the most amazing things in your travels… How about taking a walk in the hills after breakfast and finding a map to Atlantis or the gold at the end of the rainbow? Should be simple enough after your Simon." She ruffled his hair. And his sixteen-year-old dignity. "Come on. Lets see how she explains this one away."

ooOOoo

Luna explained it away by saying that having an adult watch her while she was riding made her self-conscious, and that made her more likely to make mistakes. It wasn't like, or so she claimed, she had been careless; Simon had taken having a bridle and a saddle on him so calmly that she had felt quite confident in trying him out with a rider as well.

"So you just jumped on the back of a horse you know nothing about, with only Mr Malfoy and Miss Ricci here to help if something went wrong…"

"To be fair, Luna wasn't the one who was first on the horse," said Draco. He and Trudi were sitting on a log by the side of the meadow where Luna had been working Simon. Harry had only seen them when he and Hooch came closer. "She said it was better to have someone who knew what they were doing holding the horse's head."

Madam Hooch's expression turned from exasperated to one of sour disbelief. "Are you going to tell me you were the complete idi – the one who decided to find out if the horse was going to go up like a match in a crate of Filibuster's finest?"

Draco shrugged. He couldn't see her face, but it wasn't likely he couldn't hear her displeasure. "Well I wasn't about to throw poor old Trudi up there. Besides – Luna's done pretty well so far. And I have ridden the horse before; who brought me out of the Forest after the spider bit me?"

"Um, that might in fact have been me," Harry said sarcastically.

Draco sniffed. "It was my horse. I was there. I remember the early part of it quite well. Saddles are much more comfortable than bareback riding. The point is, he was quite gentle and from what I've heard, he only panicked when he saw a werewolf. I can't fault him on that one."

Harry felt his face growing hot at the slur against Remus. Lucky Remus wasn't here… or Sirius, for that matter. They'd been so busy patrolling and investigating the parameters of the barrier he'd seen them even less than Hermione and Ron.

"I also remember him kicking buckets at Hagrid and I," Hooch retorted tartly.

Harry wondered if he should say he'd had a bucket bounced off his head as well, then decided Luna might think he was ganging up on her and Simon.

"He was perfectly calm," Draco insisted. "And as I had Trudi helping me – keeping an eye on things, as it were – I didn't feel too worried about letting Luna try riding my horse. Trudi is quite capable of calling for help – After that whole fiasco with Sinistra – oh, I'm sorry – Professor Sinistra – Bulstrode had the foresight to equip all the first and second year Slytherin students – and myself," he added, looking a trifle embarrassed "– with locator charms. And the passwords are keyed to our voices. So if we get into trouble fifth, sixth, and seventh year students will come to our rescue. Theoretically."

"Impressive."

Draco smirked. "Poor old Milli' – everyone thinks she's too stupid to come up with something so common-sense."

"Well, I never said that, but… yes. Twenty points to Slytherin," said Hooch. "If you haven't already been awarded them. Jolly good show. As for you, Miss Lovegood…"

"Didn't it look like she knew what she was doing?" asked Draco. "I mean, I don't know an equestrienne from an éclair and I can't see anything, but I can hear well enough and there weren't too many screams, so it seemed to me she was quite in control of Simon. And the whole situation."

Hooch hesitated. "Be that as it may, she was specifically told – as were you all – not to try riding that horse without adult supervision. Ten points from Ravenclaw, Miss Lovegood. But if you show me how to get that horse to do a capriole again I'll give you fifteen."

Luna grinned and picked up the reins. "Do you want to ride him?"

Hooch grinned back, her hawk's eyes gleaming in the rising sun. "Hell, yes."

ooOOoo

After a surreal quarter hour watching Luna give Hooch a riding lesson (Simon seemed a bit perplexed by the change of passenger, but submitted gracefully if with less enthusiasm than he'd had with Luna, and although he wouldn't perform any of the fancy leaps for Hooch, she did manage to coax him into those beautiful, flowing movements Harry had watched earlier, and at the end of the lesson a glowing Hooch gave Luna twenty points), Draco and Trudi went back to the castle with Hooch while Harry and Luna took the horse back to the paddock. Luna spent nearly half an hour grooming Simon from nose to tail until the black coat gleamed, then put the rug back on. Up close, the white trouser-tights of Luna's were even more flattering. When she bent and ran a hand down Simon's leg to pick up his hoof Harry had a surreal image of himself doing the same to Luna. Simon was giving him a highly suspicious look of 'what do you think you're looking at?' which made Harry blush.

After all, it wasn't as if Harry and Luna needed a chaperone.

They left Simon happily munching on a bucket of horse food, which reminded Harry of how hungry he was. If they hurried they would just catch breakfast. Harry sighed to himself. It had been lovely spending time with Luna alone, but as soon as they were with other people – people who made fun of her for being, well, just Luna, he got terrible tight bands around his ribs. Maybe this was what Trudi felt like walking around with Draco, he thought glumly.

Back in the castle Luna disappeared in the direction of the Ravenclaw common rooms to get changed and Harry found to his relief Hermione was talking to him again, but only when she wasn't burying her nose in a book on magical applications of metallurgy. "Did you ask Malfoy?"

"What? Oh – the gloves. No, sorry, I forgot. I'll ask him later," Harry said, grabbing some sausages as a plate floated past. A plate of hot, buttered toast popped into existence in front of him. Dobby. Harry grinned. Having an insider in the Kitchens was a bonus. When was Dobby's birthday? He'd have to get him something special – matching socks – no – unmatched socks. Dobby hated matching socks. Maybe the house elf thought they were boring or something.

"What are you thinking about?" Hermione was saying, an amused look on her face.

"Dobby and mismatched socks," Harry replied honestly. "And when his birthday might be."

Hermione laughed. "Never change, Harry."

Harry couldn't decide if that was the sweetest thing he'd heard or incredibly patronising. "Pass the jam, would you? And what are you thinking about?"

Hermione gave him a strange, sideways look as she handed him a jar of blackberry jam. "It's a bit vague…" she said.

Harry shrugged. "I've been spending a lot of time with Luna." Realising how that must have sounded, he quickly added, "It's teaching me to be more open minded, I guess. Fire away."

"All right…. You know how the Death Eaters have us basically sliced out of the rest of the real world…?"

"I may have noticed that in passing, but do tell."

She cuffed his arm lightly. "Well, it's turned out to be a little bit more literal than a simple Blockade. This barrier… it's a new manifestation. It seems to be a temporal thing."

"How do you mean?" Harry should have asked Dumbledore more about it when he had the chance.

"I asked Professor Lupin about it. He said it's created a sort of bubble in time. But no-one's really sure how it works yet. I was wondering about finding a way to break through it and all the wards the Death Eaters erected. I might have overheard the headmaster and Professors McGonagall and Flitwick talking about the magical energy Voldemort used being cyclical and almost self-sustaining and that the new barrier is a solidification and culmination of the previous selected layers of wards…"

"Yeah – Voldemort's managed to trap us in a bubble." Harry stabbed at a sausage. "On the plus side, he's out of it and my scar hardly bothers me these days."

He wanted to think it was because Voldemort wasn't busying himself torturing people, but didn't kid himself. It was the Blockade. Even before the barrier had gone up, Harry had gradually felt the connection through his scar becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. Since the barrier, nothing.

Hermione leaned closer and whispered excitedly, "But don't you see? That's part of the magic. We're so totally removed from the rest of the world – most days even owls can't find the place and the floo network is completely useless – Dumbledore (I was in McGonagall's office at the time – oh, and she was helping me with an assignment before you accuse me of eavesdropping), Dumbledore was saying he thinks Voldemort didn't really take control of it, not properly, he just moved us all in space and time so that the fireplaces are no longer aligned. If we could somehow break the wards we could realign the floo system and get help. Or reliably co-ordinate something using owls. As it is, only Voldemort and a few owls – oh, and that crazy horse of yours, and I didn't know horses were so interesting – have been able to get through the wards. Nothing since the barrier, of course. No wonder he's finding it so easy to blackmail the rest of the Wizarding world into doing what he wants – he's got their children locked up and accessible to him and his followers…"

Harry, who had been wondering why she suddenly thought horses were so interesting, blinked. "You think he's blackmailing parents?"

"I know he is – Mum managed to get a clipping through to me this morning via Crookshanks – the Daily Prophet was running an article about how long the wards would trap us here."

"And? How long did it say?"

"Indefinitely."

"Oh. Damn." Harry ran his hands though his hair, toast and sausages forgotten. "Do you know what the anchor points for these wards are? And how we can break them?"

"I don't really know. That's why I thought Draco's gloves might be useful. But I think one anchor point must be inside the barrier. Trees, probably – you need something solid but alive for spacio-temporal magic of this magnitude."

"That's good."

"Well, yes. But the other one – or two, and I suspect it's a triple-anchor – would be outside the barrier."

"That's not good."

"Well, no. Even if we could get to them we'd need a strong counter-curse to lift the spell."

"Remus might know…"

"I already asked him. He said nothing short of a myth would help."

"What did he mean by that?"

"I think he meant that I should stop chasing around after things the grown-ups are meant to take care of," she said acidly. "But I do have some ideas…"

"So? And?"

"Well, when he said 'a myth,' I started thinking of counter-curses from history. But the trouble is that there aren't that many of them, and most are to do with boils or shingles or love-potions or something like that. So then I started thinking about magical weapons – those generally lend themselves to myth quite well. I thought about the sword of Godric Gryffindor, but that's more for your bog-standard attacking monster –"

"– Quite right –"

"– and not really what you need for destroying the link between a source and an effect, which is what you get with wards where you have a standing wave of magical intent. So then I re-read Hogwarts: A History, and found that Helga Hufflepuff had made something for containing the magic of plants – especially the really ancient Celtic magical plants, and wand trees," she hissed excitedly, "which is what I think Voldemort would most likely have used as an anchor. It seems to have been something made of gold, although the legend isn't clear. I tried to find out more about it, but everything ends up back in myth. It's one of those things where there was probably only one source of information, and the people who wrote about it later on in history used that one source and interpreted it according to the fashion of the day – or their own personal whims. One wizard – Dygrin the Dyspeptic – speculated that it was nothing other than her gardening tool of choice, stained by rust and usage."

"Great. So where do we go from here?"

"Charms class. Here's Ron – oh, he brought your books down for you. That was thoughtful. Now you won't be late," she said, beaming with pride at Ron, who grinned back goofily.

Harry rolled his eyes, but they didn't notice.

ooOOoo

He mentioned it to Luna that evening as they were grooming Simon. She'd taken the right hand side and Harry took the left. Simon flicked his ears bemusedly at first, then must have decided the two young humans weren't going to do anything too crazy and dozed off. Harry noticed Simon did this a lot: be extremely suspicious of anything new and then, when it didn't do anything too crazy he'd ignore it and go to sleep. Horses were natural paranoids.

Harry could relate. After Dursleys and Dark Lords and Malfoys and Snape he was kind of paranoid, too.

"…So Hermione thought there might be some way of disrupting the link…"

"'Fruit of the Moon, Cut by the Sun's Halo'," said Luna. It sounded as if she were quoting something.

"Huh?" Harry stopped brushing and stared at her over the dip in Simon's back.

"That's what you were talking about, wasn't it? Something to disrupt the spell?"

"Was I?"

Luna frowned at him as if he was the one being daft. Maybe he was. "If Voldemort has anchored the barrier to a living medium to prevent it lapsing back into an unstable flux, which is what an uncongealed mixture of the previous wards would have been, then he's probably used a tree. A wand tree. And if I was him I'd use oak rather than rowan or holly. If you want to overcome something anchored in oaken magic you need a potion made from the botanical equivalent of quicksilver. Mistletoe."

Harry wondered how long he stared at her before Simon shifted and stood on his foot. "Aargh! Get off, you brute!" He pushed the horse's shoulder hard until Simon sighed and moved his hoof.

Simon turned his head to see why he was making all the commotion. Harry sighed and patted the long nose. Simon snorted and shook his head.

"He's not a brute," Luna's mouth was set in a firm line. Harry hated it when she did that: it was her 'I'm going to take a gazillion points off Gryffindor' expression. Maybe she'd been hanging around McGonagall.

"I know. But I don't like being stood on."

"Fair enough," drawled a familiar voice. Fair hair gleamed in the last light of the day.

Blast. Malfoy. He moved too quietly for someone who was meant to be blind. What had happened to all that falling over he used to do so well? Oh, Trudi Ricci was with him. That explained that.

"What was all that about mistletoe?"

Luna beamed. "Harry's had the most marvellous idea. Voldemort –" she ignored Draco and Trudi's automatic flinches, although Harry saw it and marked it down as something in their favour "– might have anchored the barrier spells in trees."

Draco turned his face to Harry. His eyes looked just past Harry's right ear. "Oak?"

"That was Luna's idea," said Harry. "And the tree was Hermione's idea." He quickly related what Hermione had learned and hypothesised about the barrier, and waited for a sarcastic comment about Mudbloods or Harry being too dumb to come up with anything on his own, but Draco only nodded as if he was giving the idea serious consideration. "She thought wand trees. Luna thought oak."

"Oak seems likely. But it could be any wand tree. I certainly wouldn't rule out ash."

"Do you think your gloves could find them?" It felt odd asking Draco, almost like he was betraying Hermione… or everyone he held dear. Draco was still a Malfoy, of course. But Draco had been civil to Hermione last night, and she'd asked Harry to ask about the gloves…

Draco frowned, chewing on his lower lip. He held out one hand. "It's worth a go, I guess. Right: glove… direct me to a tree anchoring the Dark Lord's barrier spell."

He spun ninety degrees so fast he nearly smacked Trudi across the face.

"Hey!"

"Trudi? Sorry – did I get you?"

"No. I duck fast."

"Huh. Good girl… Looks like we've got a tree. And Granger must be right about an anchor. The glove feels very definite." He started walking down the hill, Trudi scampering after him with her robes hiked up to the knees to avoid catching the hem in the heather. Luna clipped the leadrope on Simon's headcollar and unlatched the gate. She slipped under Simon's neck to Harry's side. "Give me a leg-up, will you, Harry?"

"What's that?"

"Oh… never mind." Luna grabbed a handful and mane and half-vaulted, half-swung up onto Simon's back. Simon snorted and sidled but, when she just sat there talking to Harry, calmed down again.

"Come on," Luna was saying. "Walk near his head; it'll be good for him to get used to a break in routine."

Harry didn't see how this was helpful, but obeyed. He was too interested in what Draco was doing to worry if Luna knew what she thought she was doing.

Ahead of them, Draco had tripped over a bush. There was mild swearing, but not with any real rancour. Simon didn't put his ears back and bite anyone which was always a good sign. The horse was moving easily down the slope, Luna balanced fluidly on his back, holding the leadrope without tugging on it. Simon seemed to know that she wanted him to follow Draco. It didn't look like a very reliable method of control, however. So Harry walked alongside, ready to grab the rope if Luna found herself in difficulty and trying not to notice the way her slim thighs held her in place.

By the time they reached the outskirts of the Forest Luna was still doing fine. There was one part where Simon balked, snorting uneasily, but Luna murmured to him and squeezed her legs and he dropped his head unhappily but followed Draco, the blond head like a beacon in the fading light.

"How far in, Malfoy?" Harry called out softly. The hush on the Forest this evening seemed like one that shouldn't be broken.

"We're close," Draco called back, equally softly. Maybe he felt it, too. He stopped so fast Simon bumped the back of his head with his nose. "Ouch. Careful, Simon." Draco reached back and found Simon's nose, patting it and looking relieved to find the horse. "It's this tree right in front of me." He waved his hand forward. "Simon!"

The horse had his teeth in the shoulder of Draco's robes and was tugging the boy backwards. Trudi was moving from foot to foot nervously, clearly wanting to save Draco from the Muggle Monster, but just as clearly not having a clue how to go about it.

Harry cleared his throat. "Um, Draco…"

"What?"

Harry felt bad saying it, but… "There's no tree in front of you."

"Huh? Then what's this?" Draco pulled his robes out of Simon's teeth and darted forward, arm outstretched.

There was a crack and a flash of green light.

Simon reared as Draco fell.

ooOOoo