Harry had conceded to the necessity of spending at least a full 24 hours in the Dursley's house. Given those 24 hours would be ending just as evening was beginning, Harry had agreed to spend a second night at the Dursley's before heading Luna's house with Hermione in the morning. So bright and early Monday morning, Hermione arrived at Harry's house to help him with his things.
When she knocked on the door of Number 4 Privet Drive, there were shouts inside before the door was suddenly wrenched open. A large, blond boy stood in the doorway, looking at her. What was an undeniably cranky expression fell off his face as he took her in, and he looked faintly stunned instead.
"Um, hello," Hermione said, offering him a strained smile. "You must be Dudley?"
"Me—I'm—yeah, Dudley," the boy said hurriedly, stumbling over his words. He gave her wide smile, anxiousness causing his lips to twitch. "Dudley Dursley, that's me!"
"Pleased to meet you," Hermione lied. "Is Harry home?"
"Harry?" Dudley's smile dropped and crashed on the floor, and he scowled. "Yeah, why? What d'you want with that—"
"Hermione!"
Harry pushed past Dudley, bodily shoving him out of the doorway. It didn't really work, given his cousin's bulk, but Dudley was taken off-guard enough to stumble sideways a few steps, revealing a very relieved Harry.
"Glad to see you," Harry said, shooting a pointed look at his cousin. "I have all my things ready to go."
"Do you want help carrying them?" Hermione offered, thinking of her own trunks of books. "I can—"
"Nah, I'll be right back," Harry dismissed. "Stay right there!"
He ran up the stairs two at a time, and Dudley watched him go before he gave Hermione an incredulous look.
"You go to school with him?" he sneered. "With the other freaks?"
It was odd, maintaining a civil façade with a perfectly blank smile. Inside of her, Hermione's magic was crying out for vengeance. She could feel her fire elemental practically burning beneath her skin, trying to tempt her into burning their whole house down, and it took all her skill as a Slytherin to not betray her hatred and utter loathing on her face.
Maybe she shouldn't have come here, given it was the desire to wipe out the Dursleys that had helped her master Fiendfyre. But she didn't want to not be there for Harry.
"It's a school probably not unlike your own," Hermione said calmly, taking slow, even breaths. "Harry's hardly a freak among other people like him. He's champion of his House's sports team, as a matter of fact."
Dudley looked highly suspicious at this. There was a shout from inside, and Dudley grudgingly turned back inside.
"He'll be down in a minute," he told her. "Wait there."
He closed the door, and there was the sound of yelling and arguing inside. Several minutes later, there was a loud thumping sound of something heavy being dragged down the stairs, before the door was finally wrenched open, an exhausted and irritated-looking Harry dragging his trunk out onto the porch, Hedwig's cage in his other hand.
"—not support Dudley!" his uncle was yelling. "This whole family needs to support him, and you're abandoning him and this family, you ungrateful little twerp—"
"Bye, Uncle Vernon," Harry said loudly, shutting the door firmly. He turned to Hermione with flat, dead eyes. "Let's go."
Hermione nodded wordlessly, and they went to the edge of the road.
Once they were both safely on the Knight Bus and rocketing away from Privet Drive, Harry finally relaxed, stretching and letting out a groan.
"I'm so glad to be leaving them for the summer," Harry groaned. "You have no idea."
"Was it worse than usual?" Hermione asked. She was fighting the urge to offer to go back and burn their house down – Gryffindors didn't tend to view offers like that in the same way other Slytherins did. "What was your uncle talking about?"
Harry snickered.
"Dudley was put on a diet by his school," he told Hermione. "He got too big to fit into his uniform. So Aunt Petunia put everyone in the house on the diet to 'help support him', but really it was just so Dudley could see he still got to eat more than me."
Hermione's mouth fell open. "Really?"
"I mean, she'd never say that, but that's what it really was, I bet," Harry said, shrugging. He smirked. "Curious to see how they'll handle it now that I'm gone."
"Have you not eaten, then?" Hermione asked cautiously. "We can stop at Tesco's or something on our way—"
"Nah, I'm good," Harry said, relaxing into the Knight Bus seat. "It was only a day, and I still had some Chocolate Frogs around. Luna said we could all have dinner tonight together, anyway, so that'll be good."
Nodding, Hermione tried to push the matter from her mind. It still troubled her, but she didn't want to nag her friend. And dwelling on matter and emotions that helped her cast Dark magic didn't seem like the best idea for her mental stability.
The Knight Bus dropped them off in Ottery St. Catchpole, the small wizarding village where the Weasleys, the Lovegoods, and the Diggorys lived. Together, Harry and Hermione made for Luna's house, where she was waiting outside.
"Susan and Blaise aren't here yet, but Daddy just made breakfast!" Luna said, beaming. "Come on inside."
Xenophilius Lovegood's idea of breakfast was one of the oddest Hermione had ever seen. There was marmalade, but nothing to spread it on. There were eggs, but they were from quail. And there were very dense bread buns of some sort that tasted of lavender and sage (once Hermione finally managed to bite into one). Xenophilius himself was just heading out to get to work, and he was very apologetic about abandoning them at the breakfast table.
"It's just—Stubby Boardman and Sirius Black were seen in the same place at the same time for the first time ever," he explained, putting on a hat over his straggly blond hair. "It's breaking news. Doris Purkiss is having a breakdown over the photos. This changes everything."
He left the house in a rush, Harry and Hermine exchanging wide-eyed glances.
"It means Stubby Boardman and Sirius Black can't be the same person," Luna supplied helpfully. "Daddy previously published that they were the same wizard."
Harry blinked. "…right."
Susan and Blaise arrived an hour or so later via Floo, both of them grinning widely.
"Look!" Susan crowed as she entered the house.
"Look at what?" Harry asked, frowning.
Susan's mouth dropped as Blaise followed her out of the Floo. "Don't you notice anything different about me?"
Harry immediately looked anxious. "Err—did you get your hair cut?"
Susan sputtered and threw her hands up, ranting about the inability of men to notice anything significant, and as Blaise stepped out from behind Susan, Hermione immediately realized.
"You—you're both wearing muggle clothes!" Hermione exclaimed.
"Thank you, Hermione!" Susan cried, throwing her hands up again. "At least someone noticed I was wearing something I've never worn before!"
"How was I supposed to know?" Harry protested. "You're wearing normal clothes. I didn't think there was anything special about them—"
"Normal? Normal? I'm wearing slacks made of blue canvas, how could that ever be normal—"
Blaise greeted Hermione with a grin and a hug.
"Miss me?" he quipped.
Hermione scoffed. "It's barely been a day since I've seen you."
"And I counted the hours," he told her, fluttering his eyelashes, and Hermione laughed, pushing him playfully.
Soon enough, they were all traipsing through the woods toward the tree house.
"Aren't you glad you're wearing denims now?" Blaise teased Susan. "I told you."
"Yes, well…" Susan rolled her eyes.
Blaise grinned at Hermione. "She didn't want to get them at first."
"I'm very excited to see the house," Susan went on, climbing over a fallen log. "I barely remember what all we put in the design."
"I remember we put in a kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom," Harry said. He paused. "Wait, did we do one bedroom with five beds, or did we do five bedrooms each with one bed?"
"I think we did a main bedroom to share, but there were individual towers as well we thought we could put beds in," Blaise corrected. He frowned. "I think we forgot to put in a shower."
Luna laughed. "Let's wait and see."
As they got closer, the trees grew thicker together.
"If I recall correctly," Hermione said, leading the way through the underbrush, "it should be right over this hill…"
She trailed off, staring.
"What, Hermione?" Harry came up next to her, his jaw hanging open a moment later as he gawked, and everyone was there a moment later, eyes wide and astonished.
"Is… that what we asked for on our blueprint?" Susan asked, her voice hushed.
"No," Hermione said hoarsely. "But I love it."
The tree house was spectacular.
Spiral wooden stairs around the trunk of the London Plane lead up into an enormous, two-storied house with windows and openings galore. Scattered doors on the sides of the building led out to rope bridges and wooden walkways that connected to other smaller buildings, individual circular huts with conical roofs. There were platforms periodically in the trees, places to pause when going from one structure to another, and the entire thing was surrounded by the brilliant foliage of the forest and trees around them.
It was stunning.
"I thought we planned the base of the house to be on the ground," Susan said finally. "To take advantage of the protective wards stones we buried."
"Apparently, the builders had other ideas," Blaise said dryly.
"It's magnificent," Hermione breathed.
"Look!" Luna said. She skipped over to a tree, resting her hand on it, then beaming up and smiling. "They planted this over one of the stones I buried."
Harry craned his head up. "There's a little house up here. A tower, maybe? It's hard to tell."
Susan looked fascinated. "Will that work? For the protection to still hold?"
"Wait," Blaise protested. "They grew a tree in a couple months? They grew a tree that tall?"
"It's magic, Blaise!" Hermione laughed, skipping towards the main tree in her joy. "Come on, let's go see!"
Hermione ran up the spiral stairs, pushing open a trapdoor at the top and clambering up. She helped pull the others up inside too, careful. Blaise whistled as he made it up, eyes wide.
"These builders were certainly not messing around, were they?" he commented. "Damn."
The main room was large and airy, with high ceilings. There was a wooden table and chairs, and another room that looked to be a kitchen, judging from the plethora of cupboards. There were bookshelves around the walls, almost anywhere there was room for one where there wasn't already a door, and there were low couches around the edges with oddly-patterned pillows all over them.
"I didn't realize it would come furnished," Susan said. "This is awesome."
More spiral stairs led up to the second floor, which they immediately realized was a communal sleeping room.
"Wicked!" Harry ran to one of the hanging hammocks, clambering up into it. "Oh, this is so cool. Everyone has their own little shelf for their wand and glasses! We could have a slumber party here."
"There's two dozen or so hammocks here," Blaise said, counting. He smirked. "We could put up all of the Slytherins in our year."
"Or the Gryffindors," Harry shot back.
Blaise made a face. "Yeah, but why would we want to?"
"Neville and Ron are much better company then Crabbe and Goyle—"
Hermione tuned out their bickering as she walked around, amazed. All the hammocks reminded her of the Island of Lost Boys from Peter Pan, and it was a fond comparison to draw. As she reached the walls, she realized that, jutting from the wall, were bunk beds, one elevated mattress on a platform below another, with a rough-looking wooden ladder at the side to help the top bunker climb up.
"This is so much more than I thought," Hermione said, amazed. "We could fit so many people up here."
"I like the aesthetic," Blaise said, running his hand over one of the logs used to make a platform. "They left the character of the wood. It feels very connected to everything."
Susan grinned. "It does."
They picked a door at random, going one by one across a rope bridge to a smaller round structure, one with a hut-like roof.
"Okay, but this is awesome," Harry said, grinning.
"Are these our bedrooms?" Susan asked.
"Can't imagine what else they'd be," Blaise said, shrugging.
Luna laughed.
"They're whatever we want them to be!" she exclaimed, skipping. "Oh, this is so much fun!"
The smaller room was round and had the tree it was built in coming up directly through the floor. The roof was structured around it, wooden beams coming down from the peak like the bones of an umbrella, and the roof boards were connected on top of them, creating an open, homey feel. There were shelves and a large, blue, cushioned piece of furniture, and Hermione genuinely wasn't sure if it was a particularly large couch, or a bed for seven people.
"This is fantastic," Harry said. "Are they all like this?"
No, as it turned out – five of the little round offshoot-rooms were decorated similarly with different color accents, but there were five that were set up very differently.
"This is a Potions laboratory!" Blaise said, surprised. He looked around, astonished. "How did they get this much stone up here? Stone is heavy."
"Good thinking that they did, though," Susan said, looking around. "Lighting a fire on a wooden floor? Probably not the best idea."
Another round room had a stone floor and shelves but little else, save cauldrons made of precious metals. There was a stone workbench all the way around, and it was only when Hermione found an assortment of colored chalks in front of a large, open slate wall that she realized.
"This is an alchemy room," she said. She looked around, viewing it through new eyes. "Did we ask for that?"
"Who cares?" Harry said, grinning. "They clearly knew what we needed better than we did."
They left for the main house again, only to have Luna exclaim and point.
"There's a third floor!" she said. "How do we get up there?"
They found a hidden trap door with a rope ladder in the ceiling of the hammock room, and they all climbed up to find just a sheltered deck with chairs that looked out over the forest. It was a stunning view.
"Look, there's a guard tower," Blaise said, looking out and up from the railing. "I wonder how we get up there?"
As they continued their slow tour of the tree house, Hermione began to notice things - things she hadn't considered before, but now, strange little oddities were starting to add up.
For one thing, there were no nails. She'd expected thousands of nails would have been needed, to hammer the boards together to construct the house. But no matter where she looked, there was nary the head of a nail to be found. As she examined the join between two planks of wood, it looked like they had somehow grown into each other, as if they were one piece of a whole – a very, very oddly and impossibly-shaped whole, but that's what it looked like. Hermione had never heard of magic to manipulate the cellulose of a tree, but whatever the builders had used, it was undeniably effective – the entire structure felt incredibly sturdy and sound.
The bathrooms, the few that there were, seemed very oddly placed and designed. One had just an odd, primitive sort of stone toilet, and when Hermione illuminated down into it, she realized it didn't flush or have water – your waste just went down into the trunk of a hollowed-out tree, where mushrooms grew at the bottom of the narrow pit. They didn't have sinks or accommodation for water, and though they found one room that had a drain on the floor (presumably for a shower), there were no glass doors to separate the shower from the rest of the room, no towel rack to hang clean clothes, and no mirror anywhere to be found.
Susan seemed to be noticing odd things too, Hermione though, considering the frowns she saw flickering on her face. She was caught off-guard, though, when Susan finally said, "So. Where is it?"
"Where's what?" Harry turned back to look at her.
"The Ritual Room," Susan said, raising an eyebrow. "Arguably, the whole reason we have a house as a coven was to give us a safe place to do rituals."
"Oh," he said. "Err—I don't know."
Hermione looked around, considering. The tree house was lovely, and more than she'd ever dreamed. If she were going to be doing rituals, though, she wouldn't want to do them suspended in air, vulnerable all around on all sides. She'd want to—
"I have an idea," Hermione said.
It took her a while to find it. The entrance was in the kitchen, purposefully concealed and hard to see. But there was a small golden star etched onto the trunk of the central London Plane, and when Hermione ran her fingers over it, a door popped open, hanging ajar.
Blaise's mouth fell open. "They put a room inside the tree?"
Hermione lit her wand. "There's only one way to find out."
The trunk of the tree did not, in fact, have a room inside of it – instead, it had a tight spiral staircase that led down into darkness. Hermione had to be careful as she walked – the passage was extremely narrow, and she felt like she was scant inches from hitting her head on the stairs above her as she went down.
"How did they do this?" Susan marveled. "I was worried they'd killed the tree to do this. But look at these stairs! They're still connected to the rest of the trunk – alive. It's like they only took out what they needed to not be stairs."
Finally, Hermione reached the bottom. A door made of solid gold stood in front of her, with a large pentacle on the front. There were five hand prints on the door, each at a vertex of the pentacle, each surrounded with a different color of precious gem.
"Is this… us?" Harry's voice was hushed as they crowded around the door.
"These are our hand prints," Luna said softly, laying her hand on the print surrounded by sapphires. It fit perfectly. She turned to look at the others. "But how did they know what those were…?"
Harry shook his head, wordless, and put his hand on the print surrounded by rubies.
"I hate to be the one to ask," Susan said, laying her hand on the print surrounded by yellow topaz, which fit perfectly, "but what happens when someone's hand grows? The boys aren't done with puberty."
"Somehow," Blaise said, settling his into the one with emeralds, "with a door this magical, I don't think that will be an issue."
Hermione swallowed hard. Last, she reached her hand up and fit it into her own space at the top of the pentacle, surrounded by purple stones, and there was a loud, heavy THUNK noise, and the door silently swung open. She held her lit wand aloft and nodded, leading the way into the room.
"Oh, wow," Luna breathed.
"Now this," Susan said, her eyes wide. "This is a ritual room."
The room was circular, entirely carved from stone. There were stone shelves at the side with anything they might need – baskets of gems, stone bowls, salt, dozens of candles, silver ritual knives. The floor was the most breathtaking, though, and Hermione couldn't stop herself from staring.
The floor held a ritual circle, or many ritual circles, perhaps – it was all the ritual circles they would ever need. Instead of it being one circle, it was many concentric circles, with veins and channels carved shallowly into the floor all over. Hermione recognized some of the shapes – there was the pentacle, but also the trigram she'd used for summoning an elemental. There were even the curved transference lines for her self-made Occlumency ritual. It was incredible, to have everything marked out this way in advance. Curious, she dragged her wand around one of the circles, and she watched in astonishment as that channel began to glow purple, and the others rose up to become flush with the rest of the stone, leaving only the path she'd indicated.
"Merlin," Blaise breathed. "That's incredible."
A tap restored the circle to what it had been, and Hermione stood, walking around. She wondered how the builders had managed this. This should be where the tree's roots were, but instead, there was this stone egg of a chamber. Had they managed to convince the tree's roots to shift around the room? So the chamber was held safely in its roots, somehow still part of the tree house and granted its protection?
"There are runes here," Susan said, looking at one of the walls. "I don't recognize any of them, but if you look closely, you can see – there are runes carved into the walls and filled with silver. It practically blends in."
Hermione went over, lighting her wand again for a better look – that was another odd thing: no torches anywhere in the house, even though they wouldn't be the wisest underground – and peered closer to see the same as Susan had.
"These are so tiny," Hermione marveled. "How do you even get runes that small?"
"I mean, Ollivander manages it," Harry said, shrugging. "There's got to be some magic way, right?"
One after the other, they all left the ritual chamber, the giant heavy door swinging shut after the last of them left. The ascended back up through the trunk and out into the kitchen, where they all promptly collapsed on the couches.
"So," Harry said. He turned to Luna, grinning. "Your Dad clearly needs to fire the builders. They didn't follow our blueprint at all."
They all started laughing, their joy at the coven house spilling over into an unstoppable fit of the giggles. Hermione couldn't stop smiling and laughing, and every time she came close to stopping, Harry would say something like, "And they added a third floor! The audacity!" and she'd dissolve into giggle fits again with the others.
Hermione's cheeks ached by the time their laughter finally subsided, and she smiled, just staring into the air of the tree house.
"We'll need to get lights," she mused aloud. "I thought torches were an oversight, but the more I think about it, torches in a wooden house aren't a great idea."
Blaise raised an eyebrow at her, and Hermione flushed and hurried on.
"We'll also need to figure out how to get running water up here," she said. "Not that I expected it to be outfit with muggle plumbing, but we need to figure out something for up here."
"We can look for books on magical construction?" Harry suggested. "I've been to the Burrow – that's the Weasley's house – and there's no way water gets up to their top bathroom by anything but magic."
"It'll be a project, but necessary," Blaise said, shrugging. "Especially if we want to eventually cook up here."
"You can use my house for water until then," Luna assured Harry. "The last thing you want is to start stinking and your scent to attract a Horklump."
Harry stared at Luna.
"Thanks, Luna," he said finally. "I definitely don't want to attract any Horklumps here."
As they all got to their feet and started exploring again, Susan and Blaise planning out loud where to put sinks and showers, Hermione pulled Luna aside.
"There isn't a polite way to ask this, really," Hermione said, keeping her voice low. "But—I feel like with all this, I need to know—"
"Then ask," Luna said, blinking up at Hermione.
Hermione took a deep breath.
"Luna," she said, "was your mother a Faerie?"
Luna's lips quirked, mischief suddenly sparking in her eyes.
"Nooooo," Luna drawled. She raised an eyebrow and Hermione (who wasn't stupid) tried again.
"Was she part-Fae?" Hermione asked, and Luna grinned.
"I honestly couldn't say," she admitted. "My Dad… we don't talk about it much. But… I'm fairly certain she was."
Hermione nodded. "Do you know how much?"
Luna considered. "I think a quarter. I know… she had second cousins, I remember, who were almost entirely Other. I think she was one quarter, while they lacked one quarter. She talked about playing with them, growing up."
Luna grew quiet, thinking about her mother, and Hermione gave her a moment.
"Luna," she said finally. "Was this house built by the Fae?"
Luna glanced back at her, surprised.
"Is it a problem if it was?" she asked.
"I don't think so?" Hermione ventured. "I just—they terrify me."
"That's good," Luna said, nodding wisely. "You should fear them. They aren't to be trusted."
"But we trusted them with the construction of this tree house," Hermione argued. "How is that different?"
Luna considered this, twirling a piece of her hair absently.
"I think because it's to serve magic," she said finally. "If Daddy contacted them and they agreed to it, they did it for a reason, and probably not a mean one. If I remember anything about them, they're very keen on serving magic, and that's exactly what our coven means to do."
Hermione still felt vaguely uneasy about the whole thing, but as she continued exploring, planning with the others where to put a bulletin board and where they could put their ritual magic books, she slowly relaxed. There were runes for sturdiness carved into the bookshelves, so tiny she could barely see, and the walls had tiny ward circles of protection on the outside, runes channeling magic to prevent rain and other weather damage, as well as external threats.
No one who meant them ill would spend so much time on this, Hermione thought, no matter how much gold they were paid. If they'd wanted to hurt them, they'd have designed it so, not designed it with enough invisible warding to protect them from a bomb.
She'd just have to figure out what they did want, then, Hermione decided, before she could put the matter fully to rest.
