Disclaimer: Potterverse stuff not mine. JKR can even have the story line if she wants it, but I doubt she'll ever be that hard up. Oh, and I should probably give thanks to Asterix for the golden sickle idea. Or Getafix, anyway.

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Chapter 16: The Potions Book

Last night's research had gone very well. Neville and Ginny had come back from their walk flushed with exercise and the brisk cold wind (at least, that was what they told Ron) and found Harry, Ron, Luna, Hermione and Trudi in the library. Draco was, by the unspoken but unanimous decision by all non-combatants, at the opposite end of the long table from Ron, especially after the Asian Wild Ass Incident when Draco had started sniggering and, when Luna asked what the joke was, he'd happily informed the rest of the table in general and Hermione in particular that Equus hemionus was a species of monogamous donkey.

"…Which is lucky for you, eh, Weasley?"

Right now, assured by demonstration that even if his blindness didn't stop Ron (whose ears were still pink) from taking a swing at him, Harry would, he was yawning every few minutes and looked like he wanted nothing better than to curl up on a shelf for a nap. But he had found some interesting books on metallurgical applications in wizardry and kept his finger brushing over the pages.

Harry, the quietly simmering Ron and Luna looked for historical references to Helga Hufflepuff's life and habits. Hermione thought she'd found a spell to harvest mistletoe for disruptive magic. It was in a slim potions book written two hundred and ten years ago and last published sixty years ago that Draco had found when he finally lost his temper and snapped: "Show me they key to breaking the barrier!", and noted through with the thin, spidery writing she was showing to Harry.

"It's really familiar," she said.

Harry studied it. The ink was fading. It hadn't been good quality to start with, and could have been anything from ten to sixty years old. "Not another Tom Riddle book?"

"Merlin, what a thought! Don't tell Ginny…"

"Don't tell Ginny what?" A shock of red hair leaned over Harry's shoulder. "No. that's not Tom's writing. It's Professor Snape's. Well, a lot like it, anyway. Although I'm more used to seeing it in red, with nasty comments about my handwriting. Hypocrite. Maybe it was from when he was a student?"

They peered closer.

"Why would he write about mistletoe? And write in a library book?" Hermione wondered. Of the two, evidently defacing library property was the greater astonishment. "Oh…" she breathed, having skimmed through the writing faster than the other two, "he's written about harvesting it. He thinks the white sheet is necessary, but has to be linen, not cotton."

"What's the difference?" asked Ginny.

"Linen is made from flax," said Harry, who'd had to wash so many sheets and iron so many more shirts for Aunt Petunia that he was something of an expert. "And it wrinkles easily. Other than that, I dunno. What else does he say?"

Hermione turned the page and let out a short, ironic laugh. "Here's a mistletoe-based potion to dissolve the boundaries of a spell that's been set up to isolate a place by shifting it slightly in time using – get this – three oak trees as anchors for the spell."

There was a stunned silence.

Draco, who'd been too far away to hear the whispers, broke it. "What's so interesting?"

Hermione shook her head helplessly as Harry said, "Snape wrote in a library book about a potion which might be what we need to break the barrier."

Draco's pointy nose wrinkled. "Snape wrote in a library book?"

"About a potion that…"

"Yes, yes. Wow. But… that's kind of suspicious, don't you think?"

"I don't know," Harry whispered. Trudi was standing at a shelf just out of earshot, diligent as a Hufflepuff on Draco's behalf as she slogged through a mountain of books looking for references to golden sickles. "He was a Death Eater. He might have been the one who devised the spell Voldemort … oh, look, he's not going to come crawling out of the woodwork … that Voldemort Voldemort Voldemort used to cut us off from everywhere else. And if he did, then wouldn't it have been prudent to have devised a counter to that spell?"

"I guess," said Draco sullenly. Harry regretted being childish over saying Voldemort's name… and for pointing out that Snape had been a Death Eater. Draco didn't need his nose rubbed in either issue.

Hermione was still flicking through the pages, most of which had the margins filled with the ghostly writing. "He says if the spell has been cast by a master wizard you need the most powerful mistletoe to counter it, and that can only be harvested with the greatest of care."

"Well, we already knew that," said Neville, who looked a little shaken at having his personal nemesis come back to haunt him in this way.

Luna, from where she was reading Fables of the Founders, said, "Anything about finding a certain artefact?"

"No… no… no… no…" Hermione was flicking through the pages. "No… euch, I didn't know you could use that for that… no… no… no… why are these pages stuck together… open up, book… No… n- Merlin!"

That, combined with the way her eyebrows drew together, Harry knew, meant 'Bingo.'

"Apparently Hufflepuff hid it. Or so Phantom Snape says. It's real. The Golden Sickle – he actually states so right here…" She drew her finger down the page. "But 'you can't move the truth through time'… what on Earth does that mean? And why did he draw a little lightning bolt next to 'time'?"

They all, even Draco, stared at Harry, who brushed his hair down over his scar. It was reflex these days.

"It means we have to stop looking in space and start looking in time," said Luna.

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Draco, who still looked a little peaky, as Molly Weasley might say, was reading aloud to Harry and Luna from one of the books he'd found while Harry practised riding in broad circles around the meadow and tried not to think of Snape's cryptic messages left in an old, obscure book. The day was gorgeous after an unpromisingly cloudy start, and Harry, Draco and Luna had silently agreed that a Sunday morning like this should be spent outside in the sun. A riding lesson was an excellent excuse.

Luna stood in the middle of the circle, with a long thin rope between herself and Simon. Harry was finding this riding business much easier after a few lessons from Luna, and had tried a canter earlier. With Simon's big stride he'd felt like he was riding a camel rather than a horse, but it was still exhilarating. Not half as exciting as being thrown through the air, though: Simon was in an extremely good mood today and expressed himself by bucking Harry off over his head the first time Harry tried to trot the horse.

Luna decided to ride Simon for a bit after that, and sat out the exuberant bucks and leaps peppering the circles she rode as Simon tried to prove that horses and kangaroos have a closer common ancestor than current evolutionary theory would suggest. Rather her than me, Harry had thought. But Simon had calmed down – eventually – and grudgingly accepted that a rider's idea of fun wasn't necessarily a horse's. Luckily the only souvenir of Harry's flying lesson sans broomstick was a green stain on his backside from the thick (and soft) clump of grass Simon had aimed him at. The horse had remarkable aim when he was throwing people around. Pillows and thick grass. Most kind of him.

Right now Harry was concentrating on finding his centre of balance – Luna told him it was the width of two fingers below his belly-button and once he had it he'd find it easier to stay on when Simon decided to do gymnastics again (Harry didn't like the 'again') – and only half-listening to what Draco was saying. Information drifted into his mind in disembodied sentences.

"… and Mackelbeth the Third had two ponies he used to pull his chariot, and … the second time he tried it there was … but when the silver was tried it gave much superior … Weyland Smith was the one who shod the River King's warhorse, and the River King's enemies tried to undermine him by bribing Weyland Smith, but the Smith was … That blue isn't your colour, Potter…"

That was weird.

Harry reined in Simon. "That can't have been in The Annals of the Forest Empire."

Draco, sitting on the log with the heavy book on his lap as he ran his gloved hands over the pages and filtered the information through his fingertips, was looking in his direction.

No.

Draco was looking at him.

Harry was wearing an old blue sweater, one of Molly Weasley's gifts.

"Malfoy? You can see me?"

"I can see blue. And black – large black, which was moving before but now it's stopped. It's Simon. I know you're on Simon and I can hear your voice coming from over there. Luna… you're wearing dark green, I think… Or it could be that you're standing behind a bush."

"I'm wearing green, Draco," Luna said softly. "My green riding coat."

"Just so long as you're not wearing that ridiculous necklace…"

"The butterbeer cork one? Oh, I stopped wearing that last year. I don't know why people don't understand modern art."

Draco put the book down carefully on the log and stood up. He put out his hands then shook his head and tucked them into his robes instead.

Slowly, steadily, surely, he walked over to where Simon was standing. Three pairs of eyes watched his progress. When Draco was standing directly in front of the motionless horse, he lifted one hand to stroke Simon's nose.

"You can see," said Harry.

Draco nodded. His face was a mixture of joy and barely restrained terror. Harry instantly understood the joy but it took him a moment longer to realise why Draco was frightened: now that he wasn't blind, Lucius would expect him to be a Death Eater.

And Draco didn't want to be one.

If he didn't want to be one, then, by Merlin and the four Founders, Harry would make sure that he didn't need to become one.

"I've been getting shadows in the darkness since yesterday, when Weasley and I fixed Simon. She – I think some of her magic knocked out the acromantula toxin residue… maybe…" Draco fell silent and scowled at his toes, possibly wondering when he'd started wearing such scuffed boots, but probably not if all he could see were blurs of colour.

Harry stared at him. "Do… do you want us to tell anyone?" he asked softly.

Luna was frowning, but stayed silent when Harry shook his head warningly at her.

"No… not yet." Draco said eventually. "I have things I need to think about first." By the extra pale tint to his face those things were weighty and not sweet.

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He didn't tell anyone that evening. Even when he met up with the others working on 'The Extrapolation Project,' as Hermione had labelled it, he made a show of using his gloves. It was as if he was desperate to hide his returning sight. If he hadn't had a quieter, tenser air to him Harry might have thought his vision had gone again. But he didn't ask. It wasn't his business.

His business was sorting out Voldemort. And stopping Hermione from doing something stupid – now that was a switch. "What do you mean, send yourself through time?" he said.

Hermione closed Temporal Dynamics for Dunderheads. "Because I'm the best choice, of course."

Harry and Ron exchanged looks. They'd argue this one out with Hermione later.

"How can you be sure the person who's going isn't just going to commit suicide?" Ron asked. "I mean, if this sort of thing was allowed to be used don't you think Bill would be using it all the time to find things for Gringotts?" He was being very careful not to pick a fight with Draco, although Harry could tell it was giving him a bile attack having Draco in on their plans. Luckily Draco was behaving himself around Ron. For now.

But they still sat as far apart from each other as they could without moving to different tables.

"I'm trusting to the underlying temporal laws of the universe to make sure I don't go anywhere I shouldn't. Do you think Time Turners can take you to just any old time? They can't. The universe has an in-built clause that refuses to let you interfere with past events unless it is already pre-determined that your interference is part of the unfolding of history. If you try otherwise then nasty things can happen, but I've allowed for Ascott's Universal Law of Temporal Interrelations to stop the spell if it's not meant to be. As to committing suicide using the spell… I don't know. But I doubt the spell would be lethal – none of the spells within it are dangerous in the physical sense. Apart from the temporal locator spell to draw you in to the time and place of the artefact you're searching for, it's like the spells used in Time Turners, which, thanks to Bilgeworthy's Universal Temporal Constant, are more benign than popularly supposed – in fact, if anyone has any Timesplitz bug powder I'd like to hear it."

After the time it took for those not doing Arithmancy to catch up with Hermione's logic, Draco said:

"There's some in the Potions storeroom. The last time I got detention for – um – I can't remember but it must have been something good, because Professor Snape was the one who gave me the detention... oh yes… Filch caught me trying to test out a spell on Mrs Norris."

"What was the spell?" Ron asked, leaning forward.

"Nothing nasty. Only one to make a cat laugh."

It made Ron laugh, anyway. "Did it work?"

"She had the giggles for three days. Sort of a 'snh-snh-snh!' sound."

"At the beginning of the year? Oh! I thought she had a cold," said Hermione.

"No, but I nearly got one after cleaning out that storeroom. It's freezing in there and I had Filch standing over me going on about his poor precious little darling…"

His impression of the caretaker was cruel but spot on.

"Third shelf up, second aisle in, on the left."

Hermione nodded. "Now I just have to sneak in…"

Draco frowned. "I've heard the wards are pretty fierce."

Hermione, Harry and Ron exchanged looks. "I'll figure something out," she said with a hint of a smile. And dived into an explanation of her plan.

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