cxxxviii. the argonauts

Sunlight on the grass, sparkling in the morning dew. Mountain air in her lungs, the wind whipping by faster and faster as she leaned into the broom's handle. The smell of pine, green things, and broom polish, pulling up and into the clear sky—.

Harriet sucked in a breath. "Expecto Patronum!"

Silver light pooled from the end of her wand to form something reminiscent of a shield, but it dispersed just as quickly as it had appeared, zapping another chunk of the bespectacled witch's energy. Frustrated, Harriet considered slumping into the lake's shallows and letting the tide take her out to sea. Or into the Giant Squid's gullet, whichever happened first. She could live with becoming squid food.

"Harriet," Hermione hissed. "Stop mucking about and help."

"I am helping!"

Elara, standing on the shore, snorted.

"Oi, you're not even in this class. You get no say."

A small Stinging Hex hit Harriet's arm, and she almost jumped out of her wellies. "Ouch!"

Hermione slapped another handful of thick, slimy weeds into the canvas sack strapped to her hip and pointed at them. The gesture held more threat than usual, considering she gripped her pruning knife in that hand and looked fed up with their antics. "Will you two behave already? You're going to get us into trouble!"

Nearby, the Merman set to guard them against grindylows or other malicious water creatures gave them a telling look, then returned to inspecting the rocks for interesting shells.

The third-year Care of Magical Creatures class dotted the shallows all along the lake's shore, harvesting strands of gillyweed that had matured under the ice as an exercise in interspecies cooperation. Much of the lake remained frozen, and the water was bloody cold, but the shore had thawed and wildlife began to creep back into the world as winter dragged its legs to its end. Most of the class had drifted over to Professor Grubbly-Plank, as Professor Dumbledore had come down with Fawkes and everyone wanted to fawn over the preening bird. The phoenix had taken to stealing from Harriet's bag and pockets whenever he happened upon her out in the grounds, and so Harriet was decidedly not impressed and grumpy. Fawkes shot the group a smug, avian look as the Boy-Who-Lived praised his plumage, and Harriet hoped the bird got a stomachache from nicking her expensive Honeydukes fudge.

Nudging a stone over with her toe, Harriet eyed the revealed clump of foliage but didn't spot the tell-tale shimmer of green against the almost black strands that indicated gillyweed. On the beach, Elara had the glass lens in hand and traced Transfiguration constructs over the top of it, the light blazing bright red before it faded and sunk into the glass. She continued to tilt and turn it every so often and angle it just so, looking for the thin, magical meniscus where their Charms meshed together and found their home. Satisfied, she called Harriet's name and tossed the lens to her.

"Don't throw it!" Hermione cried.

Harriet jumped to catch it, and water sloshed into her wellies. "Ugh!" she complained, the icy liquid soaking into her trousers. The Warming Charm on the boots did its job, resulting in a murky, uncomfortable soup swimming about her socks. "Great. It has an Unbreaking Charm on it, Hermione. It's fine."

"Yes, but not an Unsinking one!"

"…is there such a thing?"

"No!"

Harriet went on to discuss the merits of strapping the lens to a floaty, Hermione growing more and more irked until she realized Harriet wasn't being serious. By then, Draco Malfoy had decided to abandon Goyle and Crabbe and swan his way over. Really, it was more of a waddle, given the boots, and Harriet rolled her eyes as she tucked the lens away and went back to harvesting gillyweed.

"Granger," Malfoy said in that supercilious drawl of his, nose up in the air. Harriet had long decided it had to be a pure-blood thing, putting one's nose up in the air like that. Elara did it too and got teased by Harriet every time. "Are you going to the Quidditch match this weekend?"

Hermione looked as if the git had asked her if she had plans to boil her socks and chew on her hair. "No?" she replied. "Why would I? It's a perfectly good waste of study time."

"But—but Slytherin's playing against Gryffindor again in the qualifiers!" Malfoy balked. Harriet started edging farther along the shore to get away from him, and unfortunately, Hermione took this as a cue to follow, the blond menace trailing after. "Where's your House pride?!"

"In my academics—where yours should be as well, unless you want your father to go into another strop."

The skin of Malfoy's ears, already pink from the cold, darkened. "You won't go because Potter's not playing anymore!"

"That does factor into my reticence, yes. That, and Quidditch is dreadfully boring."

"It's not boring!"

Malfoy kept on with his whinging, and despite the distance Harriet tried to put between them, he followed Hermione like a bad smell, arguing the merits of attending Quidditch and ignoring her studies for at least one afternoon. Usually, Harriet wouldn't have disagreed with what Malfoy was saying, but she found herself disinclined to give the ponce or Marcus Flint's team of arseholes an ounce of her consideration, so when he continued droning on at some volume much too close to her ears, Harriet snatched a frog from the lakebed and dropped it on his head.

He shrieked, possibly from the frigid liquid trickling through his blond hair, then shrieked again when the frog leaped for the water, leaving grubby footprints on his brow. "Potter! You nasty little beast—."

Harriet cackled as she shook sediment from her gloves.

"Where did you find that frog?" Hermione asked, puzzled, staring at the ripples where the amphibian had disappeared.

"Over there."

"Strange. I would have thought they'd be hibernating still."

"I manifested it through sheer force of w—."

Mud struck the side of her face, cutting off Harriet's remark, and she sputtered, spitting out grit. Malfoy sneered as he bent to wash his hands off. Bastard. Dripping muck, Harriet narrowed her eyes and pointed her wand at him. Malfoy glared.

"Do it, and I'll tell Snape."

"You're such a tattle-tale."

"He'll have you scrubbing the Floo with your toothbrush for a week."

"Berk." Harriet lowered her wand—and jabbed it at his boots. "Finite Incantatem."

"What—?" Malfoy looked down, confused, then sucked in a startled breath as the Warming Charm failed and the cold seeped in, blanketing his legs. "Ah!"

Malfoy ran for the shore, and Harriet allowed herself a smug smile, ignoring the glop sliding into her collar. Hermione covered a laugh with a slight cough and pretended to look for more gillyweed.

"Are you pleased with yourself? He's going to be insufferable."

"Yes, I'm satisfied."

"He's going to write his mother, and she's going to tell you off."

"I'll send Mrs. Malfoy a frog too, just for her trouble."

Eventually, with begrudging assistance from an irritated Elara, Malfoy stomped back into the water, and Harriet sighed, concentrating on her task. She just wanted to finish up so she could go inside and take a nice hot shower.

The tide swelled and sloshed against the sand, threatening to rise over the cusp of her boots again. Letting out an exasperated breath, it hung by her mouth in a paltry, pale haze, and she scratched at the mud on her skin, muttering about Malfoy being a prat. They were getting rather far from the class and their Mer chaperon now, and Harriet picked her way among the rocks, wanting to find one last clump to see if they could be excused. She stepped around an overgrown crowberry bush, turning where the shore jutted out and curved in on itself, forming a natural jetty—.

A gasp escaped Harriet before she fully comprehended what she was looking at. Her boot caught on the rocks, sending her tumbling, the jagged peaks abrading her palms through the gloves. "Hell!"

"Harriet! Are you all right—?!"

Hermione came to a sudden stop when she spotted what Harriet had and shrieked. Malfoy screamed as well—with considerable volume and length, his voice echoing across the water. Elara turned heel and vomited her breakfast in the nearest bush.

It was a centaur. A very, very dead centaur.

At first, Harriet didn't understand the whole of it, and she thought it was an ugly plant or weird rock formation—until her brain realized there was a human torso buoying up from the black silt. Time in the frigid water had leached the original color his skin held, leaving it as pale as a rotten fish's belly, his cloudy eyes staring unseeing into the gray sky above. Huge claw marks tore across his equine belly, pieces meant to go unseen exposed to the daylight, little fish having come to settle among the milk-white bones and tangled seaweed.

Harriet thought she might be sick, and she cried out when a hand gripped her the arm and hoisted her upright with surprising strength. Professor Dumbledore had joined her in the rocks, heedless of the cold water soaking into his robes, his blue eyes sharp and alert as he studied the centaur. "Are you well, Harriet?"

"Y-yes, sir. I'm okay."

He nodded, then sighed as he looked again at the dead creature washed ashore, Fawkes warbling on his shoulder. Professor Grubbly-Plank arrived and jolted, placing a hand over her heart as she whispered, "Merlin have mercy."

"We will have to send word to Magorian and the herd," Professor Dumbledore said, his tone calm and level. "Wilhelmina, please see the students back into the castle. I believe Mr. Malfoy could also do with a Calming Draught." Hermione had dragged Draco back to the shore and did her level best to get him and Elara upright, the latter pale and shaken after getting sick. Professor Grubbly-Plank moved into action, shooing those curious students who'd gotten closer, the Merpeople gathered together, talking in that harsh, guttural screech of theirs.

"Professor Dumbledore?" Harriet asked. She trembled, her hands aching inside the stiff gloves. "What could have done something like this?"

The Headmaster didn't answer immediately, his fingers tightening against her arm. "Nothing good, my dear girl," he admitted. "Nothing good at all. Let's get you back inside."

x X x

News of the dead centaur didn't filter far in Hogwarts, surprisingly; no one aside from Harriet, her friends, and Malfoy had seen him, and they weren't inclined to give a description. Those who'd been in the class with them asked questions, but Harriet only shook her head or shrugged, refusing to provide further explanation. The Headmaster thought it best to excuse them from classes for the rest of the day, and Harriet almost wished he hadn't; the image of the body drifting in the shallows took up permanent residence behind her eyelids, and she could have used the distraction. She and her friends skipped lunch without a word shared between them.

"It had to have been Fenrir Greyback," Hermione announced, resolute, her fingers working along Crookshanks' back. They sat together in what had become their favorite place in the Aerie, the lounge with the Founders' portraits, though they'd shifted the furniture about to better suit their needs. A large table resided near the hearth now, and around it, they'd placed three comfortable wingchairs. The Aerie could still be a creepy and oppressively silent space, but Harriet thought the arrangement was far better than fighting for a good table in the library, and it spared them from Malfoy's persistent nagging.

"The full moon was a fortnight ago. That's when I would guess that poor centaur lost his life. The Prophet has reported almost nothing on Greyback—no sightings, not like with Black. But I told you before, he isn't far from here," Hermione continued. "And either the school is making a concerted effort to keep it quiet, or the Ministry is, because it's technically their fault Greyback and Black are loose in the first place, so any potential repercussions of their actions reflect on the Ministry. Of course, I'm mostly surprised they haven't tried to use rumors of their presence to drag Dumbledore or Slytherin in for inquiry again, as they did last year. Although, the Board has a lot of power in such matters, and a few seats changed over the summer—."

Harriet listened to Hermione's theorizing with half an ear, leaning her chin on her scraped palm as she stared into the fire she'd lit in the hearth. Livi hissed on the floor, his nose butting against her ankle, the whisper of his tongue felt against her skin. "The loud one isss noisssy."

"Hmm," Harriet whispered, trying to pull her mind away from the morning's gruesome imagery. It stuck like old gum despite her revulsion, and she didn't know why. She'd seen a lot of things working with potion ingredients, gross things, and she'd been in the presence of two dead bodies before—Quirrel's and that wizard who'd come into her tent. Something about this was different. Maybe it was the…decay, the thoughtlessness of it. He'd been attacked—murdered—in the dark and must have fallen into the lake, forgotten under the ice until it started to peel away like some sick wrapping paper. The callous loss and disregard of a person's life upset her.

Across the table, Elara had the lens in hand again. She consulted an open text, then drew a sigil with the tip of her wand, the blazing orange light blending with the fire's soft flickering.

Fenrir Greyback. Harriet couldn't say if Hermione's hypothesis was correct; she didn't know what a bloody werewolf attack looked like after all, Slytherin having glossed over that chapter of their instruction because he couldn't bring in a real werewolf to terrorize them. Other creatures lurked in the Forbidden Forest, dark creatures forced into its depths as the rest of the world modernized—or creatures who'd always been there, beasts born when the forest was young, claiming that bit of the realm as their own. Every teacher in the school drummed it into their skulls that the forest was dangerous for a reason.

Had Greyback killed the centaur? Maybe. Just maybe.

Livi raised himself higher on Harriet's knees, glaring at Hermione. "Too noisssy." He wished to nap, obviously, but Hermione's nervous prattling had been going on for some time now and didn't have an end in sight. Harriet addressed her familiar without looking at him.

"She doesn't mean to be. She's just scared."

Livi's head swayed, his tongue flickering again. "The loud one isss ssscared?"

"We're all scared. There's people out there who want—and would—hurt us. It's scary."

The serpent stared, coils tightening about the chair's legs. "I would protect the Misstresss and her loud one. Sssuch petty things to fear." He hissed and bared his fangs. "I would bitesss it!"

Harriet touched his scales, fingertips roving higher toward the gem atop his skull. "I know you would." But would she let him? Her eyes strayed to the crack in his horn and the scar upon his face, Tom Riddle's lingering gifts, and the thought of putting Livius between herself and something as dangerous as a werewolf turned Harriet's insides. Her familiar was not a convenient, venomous shield. She'd never forgive herself if she got him injured again.

Elara stopped her work and once more inspected the lens, just as she had out at the lake. "Here. That should fix the Transfiguration issues interfering with the Protean Charm."

Hermione stopped muttering to herself, her gaze sharpening. "How did you fix it?"

"I divided the Transformation from the ward; adjusting the size kept fluctuating the scope of the ward and the information the Protean Charm was trying to interpret, causing it to—."

"—overheat," Hermione finished. "Brilliant, Elara! Why didn't I consider that?"

Brow raised, Elara said, "Because you get fixated on the bigger picture and muddy the details," as she slid the lens across the table's cluttered top. Hermione caught it, peeved, but didn't deny the other witch's assertion. Harriet nudged Livi off her knees and came around to Hermione's side, watching as she withdrew her wand and aimed it at the lens. "The map should work properly now—or not catch fire, at the very least."

"I think the Aerie's seen enough fire to last a lifetime."

"Ha, ha. Very funny." Biting her lip, Hermione tapped the lens and incanted their chosen passphrase, "Non Ducor Duco."

Harriet held her breath, expecting another eyebrow-singeing burst of flame, but instead the lens shifted, growing from the size of a Galleon to a tea saucer, blue light flittering like butterfly wings toward the bronze rim. Harriet leaned over her friend's shoulder and her grumpy feline to read the letters blossoming to life—.

"'The Argonauts' Atlas?'" she said, smirking. "You named it? Like the Marauder's Map? I thought you thought the Marauders and their mischief were silly?"

Pink invaded Hermione's cheeks, and she gave Crookshanks' ears a self-conscious rub. The cat purred. "They are silly," she grumbled. "But all great inventions need a good name. The Argonauts were—."

"—a group of adventurers who sailed on the Argo with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, yeah. It's a good name." Both Elara and Hermione looked at Harriet with shocked expressions, and she huffed, offended. "What? You know I like to read."

"Yes, but sometimes we forget."

"Bloody rude."

"Don't be upset, Harriet; we don't mean anything by it." Hermione plucked the lens—the Atlas—up from the table and tested the temperature, one fingertip gently prodding the glass. "Here, look. It's working."

Still feeling stung, Harriet accepted the proffered olive branch and took the Atlas. The letters had long since faded, replaced by the ghostly image of a room's outline etched and copied in Harriet's own hand, and there in the 'Aerie Portrait Room's' center lingered the names Harriet Potter, Elara Black, and Hermione Granger. Her own name flickered like a light bulb, then steadied. The area beyond their sanctuary remained indistinct, blurred by the Aerie's obfuscating magics.

"Tell it to show you a part of the castle where you've taken it before."

Harriet thought for a moment. "Show me: Slytherin common room."

The image blurred, replaced by another outline, this one more complex, tiny labels bearing the titles of the different corridors and dormitories branching from their common room's main floor, names fading in and out of definition as they entered and exited the Atlas' purview.

"Eventually, it should be able to show people when asked, so long as they're somewhere the lens has been before, but for right now—." Hermione lifted one shoulder and dropped it, still stroking Crookshanks. "I haven't figured out the proper Charms to index how the Atlas should search for a specific, moving person instead of stationary, pinned labels, and if I ask Professor Flitwick anymore pointed questions, he's going to think I'm trying to stalk someone, I swear."

Elara snorted and made no effort to hide her amusement. Harriet walked over to her, handing off the Atlas, and Elara called out a few places, testing the needed volume of her voice. At one point, she asked for a room the Atlas hadn't been—Professor Burbage's Office—and the Atlas hummed, growing hot like a stubborn, confused child about to throw a tantrum. She quickly called for the Aerie Portrait Room again, and it quieted. "How do you close it?"

"Finite. With your wand."

"And that won't cancel the other spells?"

"No. Harriet's runes anchored them—which, in retrospect, proves what a fool I am. Of course the Transformation would be impaired if it was tied to the anchored circumdo ward; I didn't give it any room to breathe, for goodness' sake! What was I thinking…?"

Harriet and Elara shared a look as Elara tapped the Atlas with her wand, saying, "Finite." The light blinked out, and the lens shrunk back into its typical size, deceptively simple in appearance. "Go on. Take that one."

"Really?"

"Yes. I need to fix the other two lenses later."

Taking the Atlas, Harriet rubbed her thumb over the faultless glass. "The Argonauts, huh?" she said, grinning. "Does that mean—?"

"No, you can't give us nicknames."

"You ruin all of my fun."

Harriet pocketed the Atlas and returned to her chair, pulling Livi into her lap. Hermione returned to her private Greyback paranoia, and Elara turned into her Animagus form, finding a nice spot by the hearth to nap. Tracing her fingers over Livi's scales once more, Harriet thought about that strange dog in the forest and wondered.

x X x

Later, in the dead of night, with the sound of slumbering dormmates surrounding her, Harriet laid in bed and held the Atlas above her head. The blue light glinted off her spectacles as she studied her own name and watched it fade.

The nameless centaur inhabited her dreams, wilting chrysanthemums sprouting between the white bones of his ribs. No matter how hard she tried to listen, Harriet couldn't hear what he was trying to tell her.

A/N: "Non Ducor Duco" - I am not led; I lead.