[A/N: I'm touch-typing this in the dark on a plane somewhere over Alaska and quite chuffed with myself at how well I'm doing. I even found the square brackets in the dark for this note. Anyway, I wanted to give proper credit to Phil & Kaja Foglio for the joke in this chapter about bad plans and missing supper, which I took from one of the early volumes of Girl Genius and modified a bit. Definitely check that out if you haven't read it!]

Summer passed with no major progress on the horcrux front, not that Harry could help with that search. They'd destroyed three now, but they had no idea where others might be or even where the locket had been originally. Kreacher would almost certainly not come at Sirius's call anymore, and nobody would risk telling him anything that could get back to the Malfoys. Sirius suspected that, if Bellatrix had been given one, Lucius had probably been given another, but there was no proof of that or way to get a warrant to search his home without giving up the larger game.

Harry's worries that summer were more immediate: deportment lessons. When Sirius and Augusta came up with a plan to have a large party for Neville's birthday at Longbottom Manor and then a smaller, friends-only celebration for Harry's birthday at Sirius's house, Hestia suggested they learn Wizarding etiquette and deportment. Andromeda agreed to help with a gleam in her eyes that made Harry nervous, and they'd spent almost every Saturday in June and July learning etiquette, dancing, and other such things. Hermione seemed to find it reasonably interesting, but Harry found it frightfully dull.

By the third lesson, Andromeda was fed up with him. "Don't you want to learn to charm all of the other little witches you'll meet at the party?" she asked him.

"Not really," Harry said. "The only witch I want to charm is Hermione, and since you're teaching her the same stuff, the best I can do with this is stay even with where I was. It's like that Red Queens Racing thing Hermione told me about."

Hermione blinked. "You remembered the 'Red Queen's Race'?"

"I thought it was a neat idea," Harry said. "I got this mental image of a lion chasing after a gazelle, but they're both wearing big poofy red dresses while running on treadmills with scenery flashing by them on big scrolls like in cartoons. I thought it was pretty funny."

"That's a surprisingly good way to put evolutionary biology into cartoon terms," Hermione said. "I would never have thought of that."

"You two…" Andromeda sighed.

"Think about all of those pirates in movies," Hermione said. "Aren't they all debonair and swashbuckling?"

"I suppose…" Harry said.

"We've already established that you can be a good pirate when you put your mind to it," Hermione said. "Look at how your letter to Oldknowe Books made the owner ignore Molly Weasley! But people will never respect you as a great pirate unless you're a true swashbuckler: charming, debonair, and deadly."

"Oh." Harry had to think about that for a minute.

"Wait," Andromeda said, "I'm not teaching him anything about harming anyone."

"Don't worry about it," Hermione said with a casual wave of her hand. "We'll handle that later."

"I'd much rather you did no such thing."

Harry shrugged. "I'd much rather, too, but I don't expect Old Mouldy's followers will give us a break."

"You could always keep a low profile like Ted and I have done," Andromeda said. "That's kept us out of trouble so far."

"The Boy-Who-Lived can keep a low profile?" Harry asked, a touch incredulously if he was being honest with himself.

Andromeda sighed. "Never mind."

"My father's mother had relatives who tried to keep a low profile," Hermione said tightly. "They all disappeared into Treblinka. You can't appease bigots by hiding from them." She turned to Harry. "Well, what do you think? Do you want to be a common brigand, or do you want to be a pirate?"

Harry thought for a moment. Being a pirate was all well and good, but this sounded like a lot of work. Was it really worth it?

"This was not worth it," Harry thought as he tried to gently extract himself from the grasp of one of the Indian girls present (he was doing his best with the names, but he thought the presence of twins was deeply unfair). Neville's birthday party had thus far been a disaster, and he blamed it all on Andromeda's training.

She'd done much too good a job.

Everything had started out nicely, with everyone being introduced and having some deliciously moist cake, but hanging out together afterward hadn't gone well at all. Harry hadn't considered what would happen if a bunch of children met a child celebrity who was also doing his best to be charming. Everyone was pretty much ignoring poor Neville, and Hermione, too, once the novelty of meeting a muggleborn witch at an event like this had worn off. This wasn't what he wanted!

Being surrounded by simpering witches and obsequious wizards wasn't much fun, either. He had the feeling he could have talked about using the loo that morning and they'd have treated it like the most fascinating thing they'd ever heard.

Wait…

Harry, lost in his plan, zoned out right in the middle of a self-congratulatory 'question' from some pompous boy named Smith.

"And that's why…" Smith trailed off. "Potter, is everything alright?"

"Oh, my apologies, Smith." Harry clapped him on the back and the other boy beamed at Harry's remembrance of his name. "I just remembered that Neville promised to take us on a greenhouse tour. I can't wait! Nev has the best greenhouses ever. Way better than mine."

Harry was almost positive he didn't own any greenhouses, but that still wasn't technically a lie.

"What about the greenhouses at your castle?" Sophie Roper asked.

Harry sighed. "Didn't I tell you all that the books are made up?"

"Yes, but you have to still have a castle," she replied. "I mean, you're…you!"

"I don't…OK, I might have a castle, but I don't live there. I live in an ordinary house—with Sirius—and not a castle." Harry gestured to Neville. "We should get moving. It's Nev's birthday and I don't want to keep him waiting."

Without further ado, he made his way past the other children and over to Neville and Hermione. "Hullo!" he said to them. "Happy Birthday in case I forgot to say it earlier! I'm sorry I delayed you starting your tour of your greenhouses."

Nev blinked. "Um…my tour?"

"Yes, your tour." Hermione held out a hand to him and raised her eyebrows at him. He stared at her for a moment, confused, then got the hint and helped her up just as Andromeda had taught Harry to do and Hermione to expect. "Didn't you just get a new Madagascarian Lemur Lure Tree?"

"I think so…yes, I did, you're right," Neville said. "How did you remember that?"

She smirked.

"Right, right, silly question." Neville waved to everyone. "Thank you all for coming to my party," he said. "Since we're finally old enough to bear wands, I've been helping out some more with the more dangerous greenhouses. I can show you some much more interesting plants now, but you'll all need to be careful."

Behind him, Harry heard Sophie Roper grumble, "Flobberworms are more interesting than most of his plants."

Harry had no idea why parents who knew their children disliked Neville would force them to go to his birthday party. Nobody ended up happy. "It's worth it," Harry said loudly. "That venomous tentacula was fascinating."

"There's a venomous tentacula in there?" one of the twins asked. Ernie MacMillan, who was toward the back of the group, started edging further away.

"Oh, yes," Neville said. "She's a sweetie as long as you don't feed her any dragon dung."

"What…um…happens if you feed it dragon dung?" the twin asked. Harry was starting to realise she was as assertive as her more outgoing sister, but more careful in how she deployed that assertiveness.

"Brute force vs. careful thrusts, like the difference between a falchion and a rapier," Harry thought. "Swords are cool. I need—oh, right, Nev's talking."

"So you really can't blame her for nearly killing my uncle," he was saying. "That stuff's poisonous to her. Of course, he still has a twitch in that hand—"

Hermione latched onto Neville's arm. "Moving along," she said briskly. "Nobody's got any dragon dung fertiliser on them, so I think we're safe."

"Oh, of course," the clever twin said weakly. "Totally safe."

"Relax," her sister told her. "Harry Potter's with us. We're fine. Oooh, look at those flowers! They're like little jewels in the sun."

Harry sighed and added "credulous" and "easily distracted" to his mental profile of the other twin.

Neville took a bit to warm up to the job of docent, but Harry knew he had it in him and after a few minutes the other boy began to get the hang of it. It helped that the more dangerous plants did genuinely look cooler for the most part, enough so that even Sophie Roper and that prat Smith were paying attention. The Slithering Snakeweed was resplendent in iridescent yellows, greens, and blues as it tried to slip tendrils out of its enclosure and reach out to the children, while the Uruguayan Lorelei Flower lured a rat (helpfully provided by Spriggy the house elf) to its doom right in front of them. Its musky scent and gentle song lulled the rat into walking right into the water in front of it, at which point tendrils caught it, pulled it under, and tore it apart under the surface.

Everyone got very quiet after seeing that, even Smith. Poor Hannah Abbott looked a little green.

The Poisonous Frog Pitcher Plant was almost a letdown after that, since it had only eaten two days before and was still digesting the previous frog. Neville described how the poisons it ingested from the frogs it ate contributed to its bright colouring and defence against predators.

As Neville was taking them to see the caged-in section for the Kerguelen Night Hunting Cabbage, an absolutely vicious plant that had denuded its entire home island of all other plant life, Hermione asked, "Will we see the Lemur Lure soon? I'm really quite curious about it after hearing your description last month."

"Oh, right," Neville said. "That's a clever little tree. I think we actually passed it just a moment ago. It looks like an ordinary tree, but with shiny gold bits hidden in the leaves to attract the attention of lemurs."

"Wait," the clever twin said, "shiny gold bits?" She began to turn around. "Parvati?"

"Oh," Harry thought, "so that's the name of the easily distracted girl who likes shiny things."

He was already moving by the time Padma had finished turning around.

Parvati was at the back of the group. "What?" she asked as she reached into an ordinary-looking tree.

Harry winced as he sent Susan Bones staggering into Ernie MacMillan, but he didn't stop moving. He hit Parvati just as the tree branches whipped out to encase her in a thorny cocoon.

The impact sent the two of them tumbling to the ground several feet away, but the tree just reoriented itself and kept attacking. Harry managed to roll on top of Parvati just as the thorns came down.

The pain came first, dozens of fiery pricks along his back, rear, and legs. Beyond the pain came stiffness, his muscles beginning to lock into their current position. He was dimly aware of screams, mostly Hermione's, but Neville's voice roared out over all of them.

"Stand aside and stay calm!" he said. "Hermione, don't cast that yet."

"I will bloody well—"

"No! That will just make the tree try to kill him faster so it doesn't lose its prey. We need to distract it first. Spriggy?"

A pop heralded the arrival of the elf, barely audible over the whimpering girl in his arms and the pain roaring through his head.

"Get all of the raw meat in the house and throw it right there."

Another pop; the elf was gone.

"As soon as that meat appears there, the tree will turn most of its tendrils to that," Neville said. "That's when we hit the ones on Harry with the Cutting Charms. Harry, once you hear us casting, make a break for it."

"Can't. Move." Harry spat out, trying to keep the pain out of his voice.

"I can," Parvati said, the fear ebbing away from her voice. "Just give me the word and I'll get him out of here."

Harry's inner monologue appended "spine of steel" to his list of descriptors for the girl.

Harry heard another pop and suddenly Neville, Hermione, Padma, Susan, and Ernie were screaming "Diffindo" repeatedly at the top of their lungs. Vines fell away around him and he thought a few thorns wrenched out in the process. It might have been his imagination, but more vines seemed to fall whenever Hermione cast than the rest of them combined.

Parvati grunted and pushed from below him, rolling Harry onto his back and inadvertently pushing some thorns deeper. She ended up on top briefly, tears and fierce determination in her eyes, before rolling him again to push them another few feet from the tree. More vines fell away as they moved, before a surprising weightlessness enveloped them and they floated away.

"Spriggy has them now, Young Master," the elf said.

"Nice work!" Neville said, ceasing his Cutting Charms.

Hermione and Padma ran up to them while Spriggy was gently laying them back on the ground. Padma pulled her sister into a tight hug, but Hermione was laser-focused on pulling the remaining thorns out of Harry's body. He'd normally have been embarrassed at some of the places she had to grab him, but the fact that his heart seemed to be slowing down a bit struck him as a more pressing problem.

"He barely has a pulse!" she screamed as she worked. "Neville, you'd better have a bloody antidote or I swear to God I will—"

"Right here!" Neville said. "Roll him onto his back."

Hermione flipped Harry over, making him glad she'd gotten most of the thorns out. He was really bloody sick of those things. Neville pulled his mouth open a bit and poured in a vial of watery liquid that tasted like a weird combination of orange, sweat, diesel fuel, and fresh-cut grass.

"There we go," Neville said. "Here's some for you, Patil."

"No, thank you," Parvati said. "I want to wait till I'm sure Potter's had enough."

"Parvati, you're twitching!" Padma said. "Take the potion!"

"I would rather die than take a drop of potion Potter might need," Parvati said.

From what Harry could see of the look in Hermione's eyes, he had a feeling Parvati's death might still be on the table regardless.

Another pop heralded the return of Spriggy, this time with Madam Longbottom. "Neville Francis Longbottom! What happened here?"

"Accident with the Lemur Lure." Neville's finger didn't move from the pulse point on Harry's neck as he spoke. "We got them out with Spriggy's help and I administered the antidote to Harry. Could you get some more? I believe I've enough here, but it would make Miss Patil feel better if she were sure Harry had enough before she took any."

"Spriggy, get another vial of the Lemur Lure antidote," Madam Longbottom said. "Why didn't you summon me immediately?"

"Because I didn't have time," Neville said, still not looking at her. "I wanted to get the antidote into him as fast as possible, and with all four of us casting Cutting Charms, I thought we had it covered. Hermione's are incredible."

"You mean you risked Harry Potter's life on the casting skill of a muggleborn?" Madam Longbottom asked.

"She was cutting two vines at a time," Padma said. "I had to aim for vines one of the others weakened to have a chance of bringing them down."

"Same here," MacMillan said. "I don't know who's been teaching her, but I'm jealous."

"Sirius…I mean, Lord Black," Hermione said. "Harry and I work hard with him almost every weekend."

"I know my friends," Neville said, "I know my plants, and I know my antidotes. Speaking of which, Spriggy is right behind you, Ms. Patil."

"Oh, thank you." Parvati turned around, but Padma reached out and stopped her hand.

"You're still twitching, Parv," she said. "Let me."

Parvati nodded and allowed her sister to take the vial from Spriggy and pour it into her mouth. "Ugh," she said. "I hope that stuff kicks in soon. That was disgusting."

"I think it's starting to work for me," Harry said. "I can talk again and my heart feels normal."

"Oh, Harry!" Hermione lunged forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. "I was so worried for you."

"Ahem." Padma said pointedly.

"Oh, hush." Parvati gently slapped her sister on the arm. "That was one hundred percent my fault and you know it. I don't blame her for being less interested in my well-being."

"I think," Madam Longbottom said, "it would be best if everyone who's unhurt went home now. Neville and Spriggy will help see you safely out of this greenhouse."

"I feel a lot better," Parvati said. "Neville, is it safe for me to go home?"

"Absolutely," he said. "The antidote is completely effective, since the poison the plant uses is barely magical at all."

"Great!" Parvati said. "By the way, do I owe someone a Life Debt now? I feel like I do, but I'm not sure who."

Madam Longbottom raised her thick, grey eyebrows. "It's not to Mr. Potter?"

"It might be," Parvati said, "but Mr. Longbottom was the one who organised my rescue and Miss Granger was the one who did the most to cut us free."

"He…did?" Madam Longbottom said.

"Oh, yeah," Harry said. "Neville was stone-cold calm and awesome the whole time."

Hermione and Padma nodded, as did most of the other children.

"Oh…well, good work, Neville," Madam Longbottom said.

"Harry," Neville said, "can you stand, or should we levitate you back into the house?"

"I can—"

"Levitate him," Hermione said immediately. "Harry James Potter, you nearly died just now and I will not have you exerting yourself, do you hear me?"

Harry shrugged. "Levitation it is, then." If he was being honest with himself, he wasn't positive his legs would hold his weight right now, but he hated to admit that in front of all of the other kids. It was also kind of nice to have Hermione fussing over him. The Dursleys always used to expect him to get back to work immediately regardless of how hurt he was.

After Harry and Hermione finished explaining the whole situation for the third time, this time to her parents after Sirius and Hestia had brought them home, Isaac and Miranda just stared at them for a moment.

"Well," Isaac finally said, "that sure turned into a shitshow."

"Isaac!" Miranda shouted. "Language!"

Hestia elbowed Sirius. "You laughing is not helping matters."

Isaac shrugged. "Language, indeed. Do you have a better word for it?"

"Yes!" Miranda said. "Disaster! Catastrophe! A cock-up of massive fu—oh, fine, you're right, it was a shitshow. But Hestia is right that Sirius laughing is not helping matters. We shouldn't be encouraging bad habits in the children."

Hermione nodded. "Harry has enough of those already."

"Oi!" Harry said. "What did I do?"

"Nearly get yourself killed!" she shot back.

"What was I supposed to do?" Harry asked. "I realised she was in trouble and thought I could get to her in time."

"If you'd stayed back with me," Hermione said, "we could have cut her free even faster. No offence to the other children, but I would have rather had you helping me than the rest of them combined."

"I had no idea the tree had that kind of range," Harry said. "I knocked her pretty far away."

Sirius cleared his throat. "I have a hunch I understand what happened here. Harry, you were basically raised as a muggle, so you instinctively reach for muggle solutions to a problem. Hermione has never been as…physical as you are, for lack of a better word, so I think she's having an easier time adjusting to the Wizarding World. There's nothing wrong with instincts, but part of growing up is learning to control them."

"I see," Harry said. "So I need to learn when to tackle a problem physically and when to curse it magically."

"Exactly," Sirius replied.

"Not every problem requires violence," Miranda added. "Remember to think of non-violent solutions, too."

Harry grinned. "But if I blow up a problem, I won't have to deal with it ever again."

"True," Hermione said, "but then other people get upset with you, you have to blow them up, even more people get upset with you, and it's a vicious circle till you end up missing supper."

"Good point," Harry replied. "If it leads to me missing supper, then it's probably a bad plan."

Miranda shook her head. "I'm not sure whether to be more worried about Harry's thought processes there or the fact that Hermione understood them so well."

Hermione shrugged. "Weren't you the one who once told me the way to a man's heart was through his stomach?"

"I was joking!" Miranda blushed so deeply it was actually visible on her black skin.

"No, she wasn't," Isaac muttered.

Harry grinned. "I find Mrs. Granger's ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to her newsletter."

Miranda facepalmed. "Focus, please. We're discussing Harry's near-death experience, not my poor taste in jokes."

"I have an idea," Hermione said. "I was reading about an American pilot, a Colonel Boyd, at the library a few months ago. He had this concept called the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, in that order. I think Harry and I need to drill those parts so we can make better decisions in the heat of the moment."

"That sounds like a promising idea," Isaac said. "I've read a bit about that Boyd fellow, too, and I think there's something to his approach as a training methodology."

Sirius nodded. "Let me research Auror training and see if there are any drills I can teach Harry to help him get a read on a situation before bursting into action. Harry's goal was laudable today; we just need to refine his methods." He paused. "And learning more powerful explosive spells is not the solution. I am not teaching the Bombardment Curse to a ten-year-old."

"I understand," Harry said. "Maybe after my Third Year, though?"

"Fourth Year," Sirius said. "That's an awfully dangerous spell."

"Fourth Year?" Isaac asked. "He'll be all of fourteen!"

Sirius shrugged. "It's on the Fifth Year curriculum, regardless."

"You teach fifteen-year-olds to cast the equivalent of magic grenades?!"

"It's not so bad," Hestia said. "Most of them can't summon the intent to cast the spell for large-scale destructive effect, so it's more like a small muggle firework."

"Ah." Isaac nodded sagely. "So you're teaching them a spell that only the violent psychopaths among the student body can use effectively. That makes much more sense."

Hestia blinked. "I…never thought about it like that."

"It doesn't seem like anyone has," Miranda said. "Why is that spell taught at all?"

Sirius shrugged. "There are only three illegal spells. The Torture Curse, the Mind Control Curse, and the Murder Curse that was used on Harry as a child. Other lethal curses like the Blood-Boiling Curse or the Entrail-Expelling Curse are perfectly legal to use in self-defence, though. I think the Murder Curse is illegal mostly because the void it creates by severing the soul from the body draws the attention of the Unnamed Things in the Void Between Universes."

Isaac and Miranda stared at Sirius, then at each other, then back at Sirius.

Hermione cleared her throat. "Um…we hadn't gotten around to telling them about the Nameless Things yet."

"That," Miranda said a touch shrilly, "is a rather large thing to forget!"

"In their defence," Sirius said, "it is best not to think about them."

Isaac shook his head. "Ignorance is no defence."

"Father?" Hermione raised her hand. "He meant that literally. It's really best not to think about the Things Without a Name. That's why we keep referring to them by different phrases, too. Considering them too carefully could give them form in our reality."

Isaac's jaw dropped.

"Sirius?" Miranda asked. "You mentioned something about different universes. Is it too late to move to a different one?"

"I've researched that a little," Hermione said.

"You have?" Hestia and Miranda asked simultaneously, though for slightly different reasons.

"Yes," Hermione said. "I wouldn't mind living in a reality impervious to the Never Yclept Things, myself."

"Yclept?" Isaac raised his eyebrows. "That's a good one."

Hermione smiled at Harry and they high-fived. "That was all me," Harry said. "After we learnt of the Nominally Challenged Things, I spent some quality time with a thesaurus and made Hermione a whole list of phrases she could switch between to help keep her safe while she read."

She nodded. "It was really thoughtful of him."

"I used to get Miranda flowers," Isaac said. "Couldn't you just get her flowers?"

"How would those help her research?" Harry asked.

Isaac sighed.

"Anyway," Hermione continued, "I checked and, from what I've read so far, most Wizarding authors think travel between universes is impossible for living things, basically due to the Anthropic principle. It turns out most other universes they've tested are hostile to human life at the level of basic physical laws."

Now it was Hestia's turn to raise her hand. "I'm sorry, but I'm woefully ignorant of muggle science," she said. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you know how your body is made up of lots of little bits?" Hermione asked. "Those little bits are made up of even smaller bits, and in other universes, those smaller bits explode or disintegrate rather than holding together to make bigger bits. So if you went there, your body would instantly convert into what I can only describe as a cloud of gas dissipating on an endless wind."

"That's somehow not the most horrifying thing we've discussed this evening," Hestia said, "but it feels like it is."

"The multiverse is shockingly hostile to human life," Hermione said. "Harry snaps me out of it whenever I start thinking about that too hard. It never ends well."

Harry nodded. "I try not to worry about it. We're here now, so what does it matter that we're not elsewhere? I don't want to be elsewhere, anyway."

Hermione smiled fondly at him. "I don't want to be anywhere else, either."

"I feel," Miranda said, "like I just got schooled in philosophy by a ten-year-old."

"We all did," Hestia said.

"Does that mean we can have supper now?" Harry asked.

Isaac and Miranda stared at each other again before breaking down into helpless laughter.

The next day, they had Harry's birthday party at Hermione's house, this time with just Neville and Luna as guests. Neville was deeply apologetic about the incident with the tree, and when Luna discovered what happened she gave both of them such a thorough guilt trip that Hermione briefly wondered if Luna was related to her paternal grandmother.

Luna also astutely pointed out that the story was bound to come out in the press soon because of Harry's fame, so he might as well get ahead of it. Since none of them wanted to disabuse Xenophilus of his notion that Harry was Stubby Boardman's son, she instead suggested her father interview some of the participants in the incident.

Xenophilus loved the idea and immediately interviewed Neville and Hermione about the incident, citing both of them as "unnamed sources involved in the events." The next morning, the Daily Prophet ran an article with some clearly out-of-context quotations from Sophie Roper and Zacharias Smith, the latter of whom made it sound like he personally saved the Boy-Who-Lived from Neville's negligent handling of his bloodthirsty plants. Below the fold was a short article about an attempted theft at Gringotts that went largely unnoticed in all of the excitement.

The Quibbler, on the other hand, ran a detailed and factual blow-by-blow account of events, including a prepared statement from Harry (delivered via Neville) stating he had full confidence in Neville's management of his plants and that he'd personally buy him another Lemur Lure if anyone forced him to burn his existing one.

Malicious gossip was always a reliable sale for the Prophet, but in this case it couldn't hold a candle to a real-life action thriller starring the Boy-Who-Lived and Xenophilus sold even more papers than he had for the issue containing the conclusion of his search for the Tomb of Genghis Khan.

The Prophet followed up with another couple of even more salacious articles making allegations about Parvati and Neville, but Hermione came up with the idea of applying direct negative reinforcement by having Harry send a new story to the Quibbler each time that happened. (The first time, it was a statement in his own words about the pain from the tree, and the second was praise for Parvati's bravery.) The Prophet's editor eventually got the message and left the story alone.

The whole incident caused a renewed flood of fan mail for Harry, which Sirius paid the goblins to monitor for nasty potions, Charms, and threats. Two letters with Compulsion Charms on them from grown witches were sent to the Aurors for evaluation and the rest received a polite form response duplicated from Harry's own handwriting. This, of course, meant it was somewhat incomprehensible, but that letter still got Spello-taped to the wall of many a young witch or wizard.

In Devon, though, a little girl with long red hair stared at the form letter and sighed. She knew it was silly to ever think Harry Potter would have time to be her friend.

That evening, in a cosy room in the professors' quarters of Hogwarts, a pale, nervous man folded up the day's Daily Prophet and cringed as his Possessor raged.

"Potter's power and influence grow daily while I am trapped in this wretched existence!" the Dark Lord said. "I must learn the source of his strength, or at the very least my own weakness. We shall need assistance."

"B…but, Dark Lord, I thought you did not wish to summon your servants until you had regained your strength," the man said.

"I do not, but I must risk it," the Dark Lord replied. "Fortunately, not all of my servants outside of Azakaban would disdain my present condition."

After sundown that night, deep in the North York Moors, the four dozen muggles of the small farming hamlet of Marsett slept peacefully as a shadow glided between the handful of old stone houses. It came to a stop at a little stone house on the outskirts of town with an overgrown lawn and moss covering the roof. The good citizens of the town would have been horrified if they had seen the condition of the house, but magic spared them the sight.

Inside, two blonde siblings in filthy, threadbare robes laughed wheezily as they played another game of Gobstones, at least till a knock at the door startled them so much that they dropped their pieces.

"Get the door, brother," the woman said as she drew her wand. "Company so late should be welcomed for supper."

"Indeed," the man said. "It would be lovely to have them for supper."

He drew his own wand and shuffled to the door. "It's late for travellers to be abroad," he said loudly, breathing heavily as he spoke. "Have you come to feed us?"

"I…I…I come at the behest of a…a…a…a mutual f…friend," a quavering voice said from the other side of the door.

"A mutual friend?" With a wave of his wand, the man flung open the door to find a pale man no older than thirty. He wore a dubious expression and a turban. "I doubt that."

"You may doubt my tool," the man's voice took on a deeper, more resonant tone and spoke with no hesitation, "but to doubt me is death." As he spoke, he touched his wand to the inside of his left wrist.

The pain of being boiled alive shot through the blonde siblings and they dropped to their knees, screaming and clawing at their hair. A few excruciating seconds later, the pain ebbed away.

"My…my Lord," the woman said, prostrating herself before their visitor.

Her brother did likewise. "We…we feared the worst, so we hid. Please forgive us, Lord. Had we known where you were, we would have followed you anywhere."

"Th…the Dark Lord has a t…t…task for you," the pale man said. "Succeed and b…be f…forgiven."

"Name it and it will be done," the woman said.

"You m…m…must retrieve a P…Prophecy," the pale man said.