Harry amidst the Vaults of Stone
Chapter 23 (Intermission)
Harry awoke at precisely the hour he was accustomed to, sneezed, and groaned. That was not enough sleep after such a late night. Memory of the cold breeze and the wide-open sky and the astronomy teacher's slightly luminous eyes rushed through Harry's head as he lifted it from the pillow.
Watery dawn light trickled into the dormitory, lapping over Kevin where he sat at the writing desk. The boy's sleep-mussed hair and dark-ringed eyes gave him the appearance of a cave ghast.
"Morning, Harry."
"Morning, Kevin. Ash and fulcrums, my head feels like it's full of pupating slitherlings."
"Of what?"
"Ah, never mind."
At breakfast, Harry borrowed the Thursday Prophet from an older Ravenclaw. He seemed to be one of a small of handful of younger students who made any attempt to read the newspaper, and most of them just wanted the Little Spellers' Crossword on page eight. At age eleven, most of the human childr- most of the other human children didn't read anything they didn't have to.
The paper was a habit Harry was trying to get into, on his parents' advice. It was difficult; the news was so often vapid or just unintelligible to him – he had no idea why a lot of the content was considered 'news'. And then there were all the names and places he didn't recognise, but which were bandied about like the small, disgusting lichen cigars which a certain class of middle-aged goblins favoured.
Towards the end of the squawking cloud that represented morning mail delivery, and before Harry had got past the front page, a charcoal-grey owl dropped a letter in front of him and absconded with the single piece of bacon that had found its way onto his plate.
The parchment was smooth and cream-coloured and filled with sapphire-blue ink in rows of neat, slanting handwriting that spanned several feet.
He read it.
Then he read it again, unsure whether it was a joke.
Different bits of the letter kept dragging at his attention. The name at the bottom, "Lady Helena Vanderbald". The reference to "my son, Blaise". The words "sponsor" and "options" and, at one point, "adopt". Phrases like "begin the process of lodging affidavits" and "third cousin to the then-Earl of Leicester" and "lines from the Houses of Edward and Augustus".
Then there was "thereby enjoying the opportunity to learn the decorum essential for a young man of exceptional breeding", that was a good one.
"Problem, Harry?" Terry had finally emerged, yawning, for breakfast. His other dorm-mate didn't seem to be a 'breakfast' person.
"Well. You know Blaise?" Harry asked slowly.
"Um, yeah. Tanned boy. Fidgets."
"Apparently fewer than a thousand people have to die for him to become King of England."
"Huh?"
"Also, his mother appears to have decreed that I will become her son. Or... something." Harry turned the letter over, in case he'd missed a part.
"Ah." Terry digested this for a moment, then looked down at himself. "Gosh. Normally when I dream I'm being talked at in gibberish in a public place, I'm standing there naked. I guess I lucked out this time."
Harry stared at him.
Terry pinched the back of his hand. "Ow. So, it's for real?"
"It appears to be a real …I hesitate to use the word 'offer'," Harry finished. "It's fairly strongly-worded. I'd better go send a copy to my parents, actually."
The crowd around the staircase was densely-packed. It said a lot about Harry's impressions of the Wizarding World that he immediately assumed there'd been some sort of terrible accident, and that people had congregated to watch and gossip about it.
After hoisting himself onto a stone pedestal to see over the heads, his hypothesis only slightly changed.
"What's going on?" Harry asked aloud, watching the teetering figures on the stairs.
"Weasley twins," said an older boy in a Hufflepuff tie, gloomily. "Up to no good – as usual."
Harry appraised the pair. He'd heard about them already from the Ravenclaw prefects, and in rather different tones from Jan Runcorn.
The twins were gangly, but still more muscled than most young humans he'd seen so far. And they moved with a disconcerting coordination that suggested they'd practised it. Even if he didn't know their motivations, this was something he quietly approved of.
Of the fact that they had apparently cajoled two suits of armour into giving them piggyback rides up and down the staircases, not so much.
The inevitable happened, and Harry thoughtfully watched the clanging, clamouring heap resolve itself, before disappearing towards the Owlery when Professor Snape turned up.
After copying out the entire letter for Badluk and Sibilig, and wishing he knew a clerk's charm that would save him the labour, Harry went to the library for the remainder of his free period. Then it was time for Herbology, and a confrontation with Blaise, in which Padma had plucked the fine parchment from Harry's hand before he had got a few words out.
The Slytherin girl read it with interest, as Blaise shifted from one foot to the other in agitation. Professor Sprout was circulating through the class, who were meant to be separating the rhizomes of Heterochromic Irises.
"So, 'Vanderbald', not Zabini?" Padma said. "I'd have thought it might be double-barrelled, actually."
Blaise winced. "If she just added on a new surname each time she remarried, she'd have twice as many names as Dumbledore. Can't believe she wrote to you already," he added quietly.
"I like the fact that she points out I'm an orphan three times," Harry commented, reading the letter again over Padma's shoulder.
"These bits about 'appropriate fiscal considerations' and 'care of the estate' and 'proper grooming' are interesting," Padma said. "Makes it sound like you're a horse. Are you really in line for the throne, Blaise?"
"Nine hundred and thirteen ahead of me at her last reckoning," Blaise replied, expression dark, "and she keeps an uncannily close eye on the count. There were quite a few more at the time I was born. One of them was my father."
His cheeks coloured a little. "It's an earnest offer, of course, but my mother- she- I mean, I'd be happy to- but Harry, you're not going to..."
"You thought I might accept?" Harry frowned, a flicker of anger burning in him. He wondered if he would ever shake the public assumption that he had some sort of miserable life of toil and squalor amongst the goblins.
"Well..."
Harry shook his head and took the letter back from Padma. "Don't be ridiculous. I'll hold onto the original in case there's any legal stuff my parents need to deal with."
Blaise winced. "And they'll reply to her, will they?"
"Of course."
"Yes, that's going to go down well."
A neat row of rhizomes on the bench in front of him, Harry watched the bee fly in lazy circles and occasionally bounce off a window pane. Blaise, Padma and Terry had fled from it to the far end of the bench, and even Theodore was keeping a cautious eye on the tiny, fuzzy insect.
The sting, he was informed, was extremely painful. Harry observed the droning creature warily, and when it got a little bit too close, jabbed slightly at it with his wand. To his surprise, the yellow-brown buzzer banked sharply in the air and flew off at speed.
Had it just been the motion of his wand through the air? Or were bees a magical species? He pondered aloud, but no answers were forthcoming – even when his schoolmates cautiously returned to the scene of the bee.
Come lunchtime, Harry was not particularly hungry. Ignoring the chivvying of Blaise and Hermione, he followed a single bee as it danced sluggishly across the grounds, scrambling around between the little pale yellow surface flowers.
He lost track of the insect as it joined several compatriots in a bushy plant near the edge of the forest. A few flicks of his wand sent the bees' random patterns into new, sometimes more geometric shapes. Conjuring coloured motes, as Professor Flitwick had shown them, seemed to have no more effect than aimless jabs. Interesting.
The Forbidden Forest looked calm and sedated. Not at all like the fungal forests of the Below, and yet unlike the semi-ordered medley of Greenhouse One. Stippled sunlight made an intricate mosaic of the forest floor.
The iron-grey water of the distant lake looked much more forbidding – too forbidding to tempt him to make contact with the merpeople. Perhaps at the end of the year, when surface Summer would be making an appearance again. And he might, too, find the time to become just a little more comfortable around water.
Harry shivered, thinking of disastrous tunnel floods, and turned back to the forest. It felt... alive somehow, and watchful, but at ease. Like a beautiful, venomous lizard trying to warm its cold blood on a rock not quite radiant enough. Not ready to strike, but still filled with understated menace.
Bees buzzing above him, Harry lingered at the edge of the treeline for a while, thinking about centaurs.
He walked slowly along the edge of the forest, following the fascinating flow of bees until their scattered thrumming became a low roar.
Ragged rows of small structures, made of wood and clay and woven reeds, stood in a small clearing. They were clearly manmade, but bees thronged around them, flying in all directions through the woods.
At the edge of the clearing, lying exactly on the line that divided the pristine turf of Hogwarts school grounds from the dry undergrowth of the Forbidden Forest, was a sprawling wooden dwelling. Several small saplings had sprouted in its thatched roof. A woodpile was stacked high against one wall, and a crumbling stone water trough lay empty near the massive wooden door.
A small, ragged garden had lain down to die out front. Harry looked at it carefully. A mere natural inclination to rambling chaos and a dire need of weeding couldn't have achieved the effect this garden did; surely trained engineers of wrack and ruin had worked hard for months to coax it into the state of disorder and decay before him.
Harry jumped a little at a prickling sensation, and carefully brushed off the bee that was stumbling across his collar.
When he looked up again, it was to a cry of "'ere, you! What d' you think yer doin', pryin' an' snoopin' around?"
Rubeus Hagrid had just rounded the corner of the hut, smeared with soil and a shovel over one shoulder. The giant man's paces slowed as he focused on Harry, and a look of confusion shot across his broad face, which was etched with weary lines.
"Er, ah – huh, Harry Potter."
The man brought the shovel down to bite the earth between his boots, and his broad fingers fidgeted with the handle. "That was, ah, some brave work you did below th' bank, Harry. Never got th' chance to say so. Now though, yer, ah, best scram back to th' school. Yer not meant to be this close to th' forest, y' hear?"
Harry nodded slowly, and glanced back at the bee-houses again. Maybe he could find a book that would tell him how to make them.
The gamekeeper opened his mouth again, but stopped. Then he suddenly bit back a swearword and brought his vast hand up to the side of his neck. It clenched into a fist, and then dropped several crushed insects to the turf below. "Ruddy bees. Bleeders don't seem ta like me fer some reason."
"So I see," Harry said, and nodded politely before turning to leave the clearing. "Very well, good day, Mr Hagrid."
Only silence, and the background humming of bees, drifted after him as he left the forest's edge.
Hermione had saved Harry lunch, which he dutifully ate some of, ignoring her fussing. Following that came Transfiguration, which featured no new content, only an hour and a half of practise with matchsticks. Couldn't people have worked in their own rather ample free time, so the instructor could move on and show them something new?
Harry swished his wand back and forth, slurring the incantation more and more, until his latest half-transformed matchstick responded by leaping into the air like a glittering salmon. It curled into a ring of shiny wood, did an acrobatic pirouette off the surface of the desk, and rolled into a crack in the stone floor.
He was docked one House Point for 'messing around', to his shame, and Professor McGonagall stood near his seat for the rest of the lesson.
The Ravenclaws had their final period free, as flying lessons hadn't yet started. Harry wandered the castle alone, missing the more alive caverns of Underfoot, and for the first time feeling a little more frustrated than fascinated with the unique space-bending architecture of Hogwarts.
He had found what should have been the entrance to a secret passage, but this time, it took him to a low-ceilinged stone room filled with exhibits in wooden display cases. A wooden sign had Alcove Of Curios carved into it in heavy Germanic text, and Harry was fairly sure he wouldn't be able to find it again if he left.
His feet stirred up a leaf litter of dust, mouse bones and discarded placards as he wandered the room. A blackened iron shield told the story of how important it was to go against a dragon well-equipped. A three-eyed rabbit once abjured by Deacon Rothe of Banffshire floated pickled in a jar.
There was a high-backed chair upholstered with nauga hide, now yellowed with time. It must have required literally hundreds of horned nauga to gather enough skin. Or, perhaps- Harry made a note to look up whether there was some larger type of the troll-frog that he hadn't heard of.
Behind dusty glass was an assemblage of items on a crude mannequin. A long cloak lay over some sort of heavy, high-necked gown. There were elbow-length gloves, a wide-brimmed hat and a stiff leather mask with built-in eye goggles of brass and smoked glass, with a long, strange beak. The black leather and canvas of the costume was smeared with what looked like beeswax.
A simple wooden cane, shorter and thinner than Harry's staff, was propped against the helmet-like mask. A spider had spun its web in the gap between them, and then died, left to hang indefinitely in the threads of its own trap.
Harry read the accompanying set of placards with interest.
The raiment of plague doctor Guie Hansjepetto "the Loony" (equipment in de Lorme style, recovered 1637). Hansjepetto, although commonly regarded as little more than a squib, went out amongst muggles in 1620, a time when few wizards left their community, to practise healing the Black Plague amongst those afflicted. This plague had a simple magical treatment, introduced from Greece, that ensured no deaths in Britain's wizarding community. Hansjepetto's journal suggests he used it to cure several hundred muggles, for which he was cautioned and then arrested by the magical authorities of the time.
The journal also indicates that Hansjepetto himself contracted the plague no less than four times over the course of his ministering, putting the lie to the contemporary muggle verse stating that the type of garment displayed here would ensure
" That foulsome air may do no harm,
Nor cause the doctor man alarm,
The staff in hand must serve to show
Their noble trade where'er they go "
Said staff was the nonmagical cane on display here, a rod used by muggle doctors to examine their patients with a reduced risk of contagion.
Harry shuffled the last dog-eared piece of card out from behind the others. He squinted, trying to read ink half scoured off by passing years.
Hansjepetto "the Loony" is largely remembered for his multiple indiscretions resulting in breach or near-breach of the Statute of Secrecy. These indiscretions led to his wand being removed from his person and incinerated, his estate confiscated, and his chest marked with the Malefactor's Brand. Records show that in 1635 he was tried as a witch by muggle provosts and executed by sword.
That said it all, really.
The dust and decay of the Alcove Of Curios was affecting him, and Harry stepped out into the corridor. The door sidled away from behind him and disappeared around a corner. He massaged his temples in an attempt to rid himself of a headache he hadn't even realised he had, one that had been building all afternoon.
He had to do something, he had to do something. He had to talk to someone not involved in this world. He was sick of being surrounded by people who treated him like a curio, a specimen on display.
He was annoyed at Professor Sinistra's belittlement and Draco Malfoy's persistent childishness and the likes of Lady Helena Vanderbald. Irritated at the tone Hermione had used when she couldn't believe he didn't know what a beehive was. Wearied by a whole culture that he felt was exemplified by the story of Guie Hansepetto "the Loony". Bemused and perhaps slightly frightened by the whole new world around him.
He was aware that there was a little bit inside him, a tiny little bit that had driven him to go seek out the wretched grue in the unlit tunnels when everyone thought he was at Grammer Burlap's puppet show – sought them out with neither torch nor sulphur match in his meagre inventory, and lucky for him they hadn't turned out to be real. The same little bit had got him lost in the Hundred Shale Valleys once, looking for bigger and better fossils. The little bit had always led to shame, led to there being words, and he wasn't sure why it kept coming back.
Pacing through the corridors, Harry tracked his fingers along the wide fifth-floor windows that overlooked the Black Lake. He suppressed a shiver at the sight of it. Yes, certainly too cold …and wet... for merpeople. And he didn't want to seek out the house elves; from what little he'd read of them he didn't know if he could bear it. Not without engendering trouble and fury of a magnitude he'd seldom known before. Filius was too old, too tied to the school to understand.
Which just left...
"Jan," Harry said. "Can you set me up a meeting with those twin Weasleys?"
Author's notes:
→ I'm back, kind of, and my apologies for the long absence are as numerous as they are genuine. Over the last fortnight or so, I've patched this (what I'm calling an 'intermission' chapter due to tone, length and pacing) together from bits and scraps. I'm sorting various notes on other chapters to come. For full details, check out my user page. Thanks for your patience, and as always, please leave a review.
→ A public service to anyone who likes stories like... well, this. I'd like to recommend to you four quite different fics.
→ I've mentioned "When In Doubt, Obliviate" by Sarah1281 before. It's an interesting premise, a compelling read, and it's just wrapped up.
→ For a more adult read, try "Coming Back Late" by alchymie. Gritty and plot-driven.
→ "Harry Potter and the Discworld" by JK Pratchett is the first Discworld fanfiction I've been able to read without cringing. Against the odds, it's a crossover, AND it's good.
→ Finally, "Harry Potter and the Forests of Valbonë" by enembee is updating again. Once you get into it, it's thrilling, intriguing and charming by turns.