Chapter 22: An unexpected journey
The next morning (although one could hardly call it morning, it was five a.m. on Christmas Eve), Harry woke up to the raging scream of the alarm clock. Three candles floating above his bed flamed up and shed light on the four immaculately made vacant beds of his roommates, and on the mess around his own. A trunk full of cashmere pullovers and fancy multi layered dragon skin gloves stood open at the foot of his four-poster. Next to it lay Malfoy's satchel and Harry's borrowed Nimbus 2001 that he had brought back from the Room of Requirement, now that his suspicious fellow Slytherins were gone for the holidays. Today they were going to— Harry was wide awake in a flash.
The plan had emerged as a result of their mostly unsuccessful investigations of the last two weeks. Hyperion's memory left no room for doubt that the Malfoys had neither been planning for Flavia to swap back, nor had known how. Why, they hadn't even known that the girls would die on the same day! The only useful thing that had transpired was that the locket passed from Gerard straight to Hyperion skipping a good twenty generations in between, which dramatically narrowed the scope of the search.
Not that other things they had learnt weren't interesting. The whole affair with Flavia, Aurelia and the son of a Muggle earl... Not to mention Gerard who had traded his name and heritage for a quiet life as a Hogwarts caretaker. Since Harry had heard about Narcissa's intention to take PC classes, he was hardly surprised by anything any more, but was only now starting to appreciate the true diversity of Malfoy iterations. Draco and Lucius were just the tip of the iceberg.
Well, there was perhaps one more useful thing they had learnt, at least it seemed useful at first glance: Gerard used to be friends with the Fat Friar. The same evening, after they had left the chest behind in McGonagall's office, which now only contained the vials that were not on the Hogwarts list plus the four Harry had borrowed, the Fat Friar's dot appeared on the Marauder's Map wandering about the kitchens. And this was where they found him after dinner hanging above the sink and showering compliments on Swingy's new origami creation. By the looks of it, her new skirt was made of old Potions essays. 'Dreadful' and 'Troll' in Snape's handwriting showed here and there between the folds of the parchment.
Swingy beamed seeing her Young Master, talking about origami helped break the ice, and when they could finally steal the Fat Friar from her for a quiet chat in the larder, he was in the best of spirits and well-disposed towards both of them. But as soon as they mentioned Gerard FitzHerman Malfoy, his face fell and two thin stripes of silver crossed his cheeks:
"Don't get me wrong! It's lovely to have all the children around. But to talk to someone my age! It's just so rare. So rare!" Brother Boisil said and sobbed.
Oh yes, he did remember Hyperion Malfoy. No, he had never seen the locket, but, oh oh OH yes, he had heard about it! Gerard had been devastated when he had found out what the Malfoy girls had done with it. No, of course he hadn't known that the girls would die on the same day. If he had known, wouldn't he have told Hyperion? Of course, he would! Poor poor Flavia! Gerard had been so sorry! Still full of remorse on his deathbed! And speaking of death, why hadn't he stayed? They would have had so much fun together, and Slytherin would have had a much more amiable house ghost!
"Why did he give the locket to Hyperion in the first place?" Draco asked.
"As an olive branch, a symbol of peace," Brother Boisil said. "His father, Sir Herman, thought Gerard would have to fight for his rights to the estate in Wiltshire. And his idea was," the Friar lowered his voice to whisper, "that Gerard could reclaim it by simply swapping places with whoever was the supposed heir at the time." Brother Boisil straightened his back and raised his voice again. "But Gerard would never have done such a sordid thing! Never! He laughed at it, and did not hesitate to surrender the very weapon that would have made it possible."
"And Hyperion?"
"Oh, he handled it most graciously. He never acknowledged it publicly, of course. Their relationship. But he used to come to visit every year, on the anniversary of Gerard's reawakening day, until he married." The Friar's shoulders slumped. "The Rosier girl he brought from France, you know. Ancient house, great sorcerers! Very, very eligible." Brother Boisil leaned back, sank halfway into a cupboard filled with truckles of cheese, and sighed. "Then he stopped visiting. But when he took over the estate, he presented Gerard with a handsome sum of money, for the event of his retirement. And Mr Herbert, you know," he lowered his voice, "whom Miss Malfoy turned into a sparrow and back, got him a house in Hogsmeade."
After a long shower, Harry pulled on a set of fine woollen undergarments, and warmth enveloped his skin. The warmth he would need today so direly. He put on one of Draco's casual suits, closed the trunk, shrank it to the size of a match box, and dropped it into the satchel. He looked in the mirror and saw a handsome young Muggle, just the kind to sell insurance to Aunt Petunia.
If Gerard had known so little about the workings of the locket, Harry thought, running a comb through his hair, then Herman could hardly have known more. Which was not too surprising, if Herman indeed had stolen it from his parents, as he had confessed to Lucius the first. Herman's parents had probably never been given a chance to explain it to him properly. That is, assuming that they had ever known how it worked.
So Harry and Draco spent the next few days in the library, searching for Herman's parents. They kept pulling volumes after volumes from the shelves in the historical section. The tales of Herman Malfoy's glorious career read as if England was conquered by him personally, and the Duke of Normandy was just tagging along. In the end it was four of them—Harry, Draco, Thorny and Hermione—poring over the hundred versions of Herman's biography. Harry stopped wondering what kind of lie Draco had told Hermione to delegate half of his pile to her, and simply accepted the offer with silent gratitude.
After almost a week of study they knew every miracle Herman had wrought to subdue the English rebels, but nowhere was there a mention of when, or where, or to whom he had been born, as if he had miraculously come into existence on this side of the Channel as a grown man.
"Continental History of Magic is not one of our larger collections." Madam Pince's lips twitched as if she bit into something sour. "But if you know which title you need, we could order it by owl post from the Beauxbatons library."
No, they did not know the title, or titles, or even how many titles that would be. And then it was clear:
"We have to go to Beauxbatons."
Harry checked the contents of the satchel for an umpteenth time. There was his shrunken trunk, the locket, some Galleons, Draco's wallet with his credit card, the tickets, and the passport of Malcolm Drake. Harry grabbed the satchel, his broomstick and his coat and headed for the kitchens.
They had had one more Defence against the Dark Arts lesson before the Christmas break. But when they tried to approach Charnay with their idea of a Beauxbatons visit, he looked stressed, strangely disoriented, and not responsive to ideas. A pile of chocolate boxes adorned with gaudy Christmas cards towered on his desk, and he kept glancing at it with no-nonsense apprehension.
"After the holidays we will start a new topic," Charnay announced towards the end of the class, "the unjinxing of jinxed artefacts and the detection of unwanted magic in food, drink, and air."
He took one box from the top of the pile on his desk and placed it in front of the first row of students.
"For example, if these chocolates are enchanted, or contaminated with a potion, be that deadly poison or Cupid Crystals, we will learn to determine if and what kind of adulteration has been performed. In some cases, especially with personalised love potions, the identity of the offender can also be established." He looked with a challenge into the classroom and let his gaze wander over the rows of girls. Some went on to straighten the folds of their robes, others seemed suddenly preoccupied with the first years' broomstick practice upon which the classroom windows offered a perfect view.
"Here we have a whole selection to practise on in January." He indicated the pile on his desk.
When the class ended and the crowd of students swept past Charnay's desk on their way to the exit, the pile of boxes melted. Charnay heaved a deep sigh of relief and pulled an issue of Le Cri de la Gargouille over the remaining two boxes.
"How can I help you, Messieurs?"
Charnay was pleased to hear that Harry and Draco acknowledged that the wizarding world did not end at Dover. A reply to his owl came Saturday morning. Madame Maxime was overjoyed to welcome Harry Potter and his travel companion for a stay over the Christmas break. What a pity they had not announced it earlier, or they would have given them a proper reception!
Harry followed a path through the underground maze of corridors that Draco had shown him when they had visited the Fat Friar. As it turned out, the hallway between the kitchens and the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room was connected to the Slytherin dungeons via a secret passage. Sure enough, the passage showed on the Marauders' Map, but since Harry had never before been particularly interested in shortcuts between Slytherin and Hufflepuff, its existence had completely escaped his notice.
Third right, second left, and then fifth left behind the pipe. Harry followed a long corridor filled with layers of plumbing.
Given the circumstances it was perhaps lucky that they had not announced their visit to Beauxbatons earlier, Harry thought. Public attention was the last thing they wanted. On the other hand, they had had only three days left till the Yule Ball to plan their trip, and that was a close thing.
"All public Portkeys are booked up until the end of the year!" Draco said on Sunday afternoon, coming back from his clandestine quest through the secret passage from Honeydukes, which Harry had disclosed to him as a matter of urgent necessity. Secret passage for secret passage. "I could only get us one for the way back."
"We'll have to fly then, I guess," said Harry.
"Oh, good idea!" Draco said with enthusiasm, but Harry wondered what was so good about it. Since they were only allowed to fly in the dark, the journey to the Pyrenees would take two nights at least, and then they would need another day to catch up on sleep. That's three days wasted.
Harry threw a glance at the frozen window. Winter had finally kicked in. Icy wind was seeping through the leaky window frame. It would only be worse above the Channel.
"In this weather? We'll freeze to the broomsticks."
"Oh no no no! No broomsticks!" Draco said. "Airplanes!"
The next day Harry was in possession of a ticket for a flight from Glasgow Airport to Amsterdam and a connecting one to Toulouse, issued to the name of Malcolm Drake.
After a modest breakfast in the kitchens with Swingy and Thorny, they walked out of Hogwarts grounds, all packed in their coats, hats and gloves, rose into the air and headed south. A vague line between the dark blue up above and the jet black down below was the only thing the eye could discern. Somewhere behind their backs the Hogsmeade gate was sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness, the memory of Harry's last encounter with Ewen pulled at him, like an overstretched rubber band, and the monotonous struggle against a stream of cold air left him no other choice than to face it.
He had kissed Ewen. Or Ewen had kissed him, but he hadn't pulled away. Because he had liked it.
The level of confusion in the aftermath was very much like after his first kiss with Cho. But no. Very much unlike the thing with Cho, it was not the question of whether he was expected to ask Ewen out. Something told Harry that that would not be necessary. Ewen would probably do it, or worse, just shove him into the broom cupboard and— Or both. And now please someone tell him what he was supposed to do when— if— when that happened.
What did he actually want to do? To Harry's dismay, the answer manifested itself as an intense tingling sensation that rushed through his whole body, filling him with warmth, starkly at odds with the outside temperature. He felt every inch of his woollen undergarments and the pressure of the handle of his broomstick. Oh no, not again.
Harry took a deep breath of icy air. That a man could arouse such feelings in him was shocking, but only part of the trouble. The bigger part of the trouble was that he was Harry Potter. Never before had he so dearly wished he were indeed Draco Malfoy.
They reached the lowlands in less than half an hour, but it took another half hour to cover the last few miles to the airport. The outskirts of Glasgow had barely crawled into view but the huge aircraft were already blowing past a couple of hundred feet above their heads, turning, and lining up for landing. Occasional warm gusts of burned kerosene smelled of danger. They were forced to fly low, but that brought them into the range of high-voltage power lines and high-rise buildings. They chose their way carefully along the surrounding fields and above the roofs of lower structures, until they finally managed to land on the top level of a car park.
Draco hastily unrolled a ski bag and stuck his Nimbus into it. Harry added his, just in time before he was caught in a beam of the front lights of a passing car. Draco swung the ski bag over his shoulder and they headed for the terminal.
The whole plan to fly like Muggles, as attractive as it appeared at first glance, had one considerable complication.
"What?! You had four months to get yourself a passport, and you still haven't?!" Draco said, when the first wave of self-congratulatory joy passed and the realisation hit him.
"You had four months to get me a passport!" With all respect, if it was Harry Potter's face that was supposed to appear on the photo, only Draco could provide that.
"Are you good at non-verbal Confundus?"
"Why?"
"Tomorrow after classes, we walk out through Honeydukes, apparate to Heathrow, confund some suitable Muggle, and accio his passport. Then another Confundus at the check-in should do the job."
"No."
"Why not?"
"We're not going to steal from Muggles."
"Says who? Saint Potter who never steals evidence from the Archive?"
"Saint Potter, yes. Never done anything like that." The vials he had borrowed would by now have been back at the Ministry.
"Let's first get rid of the skiing equipment." They had arrived in the meantime at the check-in counter for oversize luggage and Draco dropped the bag with the broomsticks onto the conveyor belt. The belt pulled slowly into the X-ray machine and froze. So did the face of the security employee. He must have wondered how they were going to ski on that, but did not see in their liberal take on skiing any threat to the flight's security. The conveyor belt jerked back to life and the bag disappeared through the opening in the wall behind him.
The solution to the passport problem, which they absolutely owed to Professor Pye, was a tight compromise.
After spontaneous untransfiguration and the methods to delay it, they had turned to retention of sentience in animate-to-inanimate transfiguration. When Pye had turned Harry into a barstool for demonstration, and back again, he found himself standing on the opposite end of the classroom and had no clue how he had got there. His classmates told him that he had been turned upside down a couple of times and Terry Boot had even sat on him, but he had no memory of that whatsoever. The seconds or minutes (Harry could not tell) spent as a piece of furniture were absent from his life, and the thought was scary. Draco was equally terrified by his experience as a rubber duck during the practical with Hermione and refused categorically to submit to anything like that ever again.
"If this is how it feels, then I wonder, how for god's sake could that comic book have seen or heard anything at all?" Draco said, touching his face and neck with distrust for any remains of rubber.
But that question received an answer a week later. There were dozens of tricks to retain cognitive functions while being transfigured into an object, and if that object normally served as a carrier of information of some sort or other, which included pictures, records and, of course, books, then even communication with the environment could be achieved to a certain degree.
"Okay, Malfoy, turn me into a comic book."
There was a flash of golden light from Draco's wand, and Harry found himself falling, his spine hit painfully against the edge of the bench, he turned over and came to a standstill in an upside down position. He felt huge hands lift him up and could vaguely see Malfoy's face staring at him. Being opened felt as if your right foot was pulled across your left ear, but when Malfoy took his quill and started writing onto his pages, the text showed before his inner eye with faultless clarity.
"So, Potter, how does it feel to be at my mercy?"
"You're holding me upside down."
"I know." Draco's quill scratched sharply at his abdomen. "That's the whole point."
"Am I even a comic book?" Harry could see Draco quite clearly now, but he had absolutely no view of himself.
"Sort of," Draco said with a sinister smirk, accioed a small mirror out of Hermione's bag and held it down for him.
A pair of black stockings suspended to a leather garter belt and a generous offer of uncovered skin that didn't leave much to imagination stared back at him from the mirror.
"What have you turned me into, Malfoy?!"
"You asked for a comic book, I gave you a comic book. Blame the rest on your dirty mind!"
"My dirty mind?! Turn me back immediately!"
"Well. I'll think about it," Malfoy scratched at what felt like the back of Harry's thigh, and started turning the pages.
But compared to a senseless barstool, this was still an enormous improvement. When Harry suggested that they could use transfiguration to solve the passport problem, Draco's protest was mild at first.
"Nah. Muggle passports have all sorts of watermarks, and security threads, and special inks. If you want to recreate that from a used napkin, you'd first need a month to study the exact design, and we need a solution in three days."
"No, that's not what I mean. I mean," Harry said, putting down his napkin, "we won't need a second passport if you travel as a comic book or something."
Draco froze. "No. Fucking. Way."
It took Harry the rest of the evening to convince Draco that he did not mean it in a bad way. Draco swore his head off, but finally gave in to Harry's arguments. Yes, the fastest, safest, and least illegal travel mode for him would be to come along as hand luggage.
In order not to attract the attention of Muggles, Harry and Draco entered the men's toilets and locked themselves in a cubicle. There was barely enough space between them for Harry to direct his wand. Draco stretched out like a bolt, arms pressed to his sides, and blinked rapidly at the ventilation grid cover at the ceiling.
"Okay, Potter, go ahead!"
A small flash shot between the tip of Harry's wand and Draco's chest, and an elegant leather-bound notebook fell into Harry's left hand.
"You okay?" Harry asked turning the cover.
The word "Fine" appeared in black ink on the front page and faded out again. Harry stuck Malfoy into his satchel and exited the cubicle.
The cleaning lady, who was restocking the place with toilet paper, had given them a disapproving look when they entered the same cubicle. But when only one visitor came out of it instead of two, a look of sweeping horror spread in her face. She rushed to the cubicle, peered down the toilet bowl and up to the ventilation shaft, and let out an indistinct yawp, but the door of the bathroom closed behind Harry's back and he mixed into the crowd of Muggle travellers.
When Harry sat comfortably tucked in under his seatbelt and ready for take-off, he placed Draco on top of his lap and flipped in one stroke of his thumb through the first fifty or so pages. Was it because of Malfoy's great prowess in Occlumency? The pages were pristine.
Harry took a pen, but before its tip touched the paper, "Don't touch this page!" appeared on it.
"Why?" Harry wrote.
"Damn you, Potter, DON'T!"
Harry flipped a few pages.
"Not there either."
"Man, you're difficult!"
"Go more to the front. Yes. That's better."
"If you are travelling with children, make sure that your own mask is on first before helping your children," the security briefing continued spilling from the speakers and the stewardess held an oxygen mask theatrically before her nose. "In the unlikely event of an emergency landing and evacuation, leave your carry-on items behind..."
"Hey, did you hear that?" Harry scribbled onto the page that Draco had approved of.
Draco did not write back. A drawing of a hand, the middle finger stretched out upwards, appeared in the notebook.
The stop in Amsterdam passed largely without incident. Draco virtually dropped out of Harry's hand, landed on his backside, and a hurried Muggle almost rolled over him, in an attempt to overtake Harry on a moving walkway.
"Mind your step," reminded the voice of an invisible female. The Muggle swore in a language that sounded like Ron trying to speak Parseltongue at high speed, "Mind your step," repeated the voice in the air, and the Muggle resumed his sprint.
"Are you crazy? Here?" Harry looked around for Muggle witnesses of Draco's spontaneous untransfiguration.
"Couldn't hold it anymore."
Muggles were bustling around, busy with their bags, duty-free shopping, and children that were trying to escape.
"The more Muggles around, the less they give a damn," Draco said, stretching his back.
Indeed, no one seemed to be paying the slightest attention to the paranormal. When the boarding for their connecting flight was announced and they paid another visit to the men's toilets to get Draco back into transportable shape, they had to queue for a free cubicle. This time around, no one seemed shocked when they occupied one together. There was an occasional grumpy murmur, but face it—two at a time made a faster queue.
When they landed in Toulouse, the sun had set again. They pushed through the terminal awash with Christmas frenzy, unpacked their skiing equipment as soon as they found a secluded spot in the open, and surged into the air. A cobweb of lights in all colours of the rainbow crawled slowly backwards under their broomsticks. An enormous Santa-Claus-shaped air balloon glided passively towards them.
"I'm not too worried if Muggles see us," shouted Malfoy against the wind and sprayed half-moon spectacles over the flying Santa's face with luminous paint out of the tip of his wand. "They'll probably think we're part of the entertainment."
Malfoy continued babbling something, but Harry only caught unconnected words, his ears still clogged after fast descent. As they flew, the golden cobweb below was becoming thinner, patches in a lighter shade of blue, which Harry guessed would be snow, started to show here and there on the dark ground as they neared the mountains. The patches grew bigger, until they merged together into a single blue blanket, cut by black folds of the cliffs and interspersed with occasional bubbles of amber and gold where the snow was caught in a beam of a streetlamp.
Straight lines of ski lifts cut the curving landscape of the mountains like scars. Some lifts were still turning. The haul ropes hummed, pulling empty gondolas and folded seats, and rattled, straining at the sheave wheels. Piste bashers were loose all over the slopes, like huge acromantulas with three pairs of blinding white lights for eyes.
The wind grew harder and colder as they rose. They had left the top ski station behind and seemed to be the only people there for miles around.
"How are we supposed to see the bloody signs?" Draco lit his wand, but the narrow shaft of light only cut a small white spot out of the darkness.
"It must be here somewhere." If it was the right ski station. The piece of parchment with Madame Maxime's directions fluttered in Harry's hand and would break free and fly away any moment.
Suddenly, a speck of red and yellow dashed across the beam of Draco's wand. He backtracked slowly and they saw it. A wide red sign 'Risque d'avalanche' and a yellow triangle with an abstract human rolling headfirst down the slope in a contour of a cloud came into their view.
'Two hundred and nineteen degrees south-west from here,' said Madame Maxime's broad hand-writing. Harry checked his broom compass and took the course.
They soon saw another sign, with its menacing black on yellow: 'Danger permanent d'avalanches. Route interdite aux piétons! Pedestrians forbidden!' This was promising.
The third one was not difficult to spot. Two blinking yellow lamps swam into view from behind a black silhouette of a mountain. When they flew closer, a skull with a pair of crossbones gave them a welcoming smile. The message below read 'STOP NOW !'.
One of the lamps hissed and flickered. With a high-pitch pop the light separated from the light bulb and hovered in the air. 'Follow the yellow star,' said Madame Maxime's letter, the light started moving, and Harry and Draco surged after it.
The light flew higher up the slope and after a few minutes was the only thing they could see. They floated in a soup of dark grey milk, the yellow halo around the light grew bigger as the fog grew thicker around them. Harry lost all sense of space. There was no north and south, no above and below anymore, only their shining guide and the drone of the icy wind in his ears.
Suddenly, a vague shimmer started to spread before them. The halo of their guidelight shrank again, and another dozen lights in all colours took shape before their eyes. The solid black wall of an enormous building materialised in front of them. Taken by surprise, Harry braked and Draco spiralled up. A magnificent tower loomed above their heads. Harry looked around. Above a feathery carpet of grey clouds rose a grand castle, whose outline he could only guess by the spread of beaming windows.
The guidelight continued rising and they soon ascended above the battlements. Harry stopped breathing when the sight opened to their view. He could still hardly distinguish anything but the shine of the windows, lanterns, and a thin crescent at the horizon, but the totality of the illuminated fragments scattered in the darkness made him suspect, not a castle, a whole town in the sky.
They flew above a dark spot the size of two Quidditch pitches, which gaped like a black hole underneath their broomsticks and was probably a body of water. Or ice rather, in this season. Next, there were lines of lights forming perfect geometric shapes and patterns below them. The guidelight lowered and they followed the course of a broad park alley lined by burning lanterns at regular intervals. The facade of an oversized rectagular wedding cake of a palace approached as they flew. They finally landed at the top of a horseshoe-shaped marble staircase and dismounted from their broomsticks. The front doors opened and the guidelight led them inside.
After hours of flight the floor pitched like a boat under Harry's feet, as he walked after Draco into the warmth of the palace. The white beard of ice crystals that had overgrown Draco's broom head started melting, leaving a wet trail on the burgundy carpet. Whiffs of unfamiliar delicious smells grew richer and more insistent as they approached a double door covered in golden ornaments at the end of the hallway. Their guidelight sank through it. As the door opened and Draco was the first to set foot across the threshold, a voice somewhere above his head announced:
"Monsieur 'Arry Pottair!"
