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Chapter Sixteen—Summer of Freedom

"Write to me over the summer, Potter."

"Back at you, Goldstein."

Anthony rolls his eyes and says something else, but Harry doesn't pay much attention. He's seen Neville lingering near the corner that leads into the Great Hall, and so he just nods absently along with what Anthony's saying, waves, and then jogs over to his friend. Neville gives him a faint smile, but it's miserable.

"What is it, Nev?" Harry asks, as gently as he can. Neville seemed all right after they were rescued from Quirrell—at least he didn't have to spend long in the hospital wing—but now he looks as though Quirrell succeeded in landing a blow after all.

"He's," Neville croaks, and stops as if fumbling for words. "He's out there, Harry."

"Voldemort?" Harry sighs as Neville rocks a little in place. He's expected to say the name by his grandmother, Harry knows, but he doesn't like it much. "Sorry. I just—yes, he is. I thought we already knew that? Or that he could be. That's the reason Snape was teaching you Occlumency."

Snape. Harry doesn't know how to feel about the professor anymore. He kind of wonders if the encounter with Quirrell changed anything between them, and he's seen Snape watching him with narrowed eyes in the days since, but they haven't been in class since then because the exams are over.

Harry supposes he'll have to wait for the autumn term and see what happens then.

"It was never real before," Neville whispers, looking even more upset.

Harry has to struggle to understand that, because Neville grew up knowing he was the Boy-Who-Lived and that he would have to fight Voldemort someday. But Harry supposes it's like the night that he made Artemis and made himself a Parselmouth. Before that, the burning boulder in his stomach was something unexplained and not all that useful. It seemed to explode at random times. After that, Artemis was real, so it was real.

"I'm sorry," Harry says quietly. "Do you want to write to me over the summer?"

"Can we meet over the summer?"

"Probably," Harry says. "If your gran will let you go to Diagon Alley or something. It would be easy enough to Floo there from Blaise's house."

Neville's eyes widen, and he says nothing. Harry waits. If Neville can't challenge his grandmother to let them meet up, then Harry reckons they'll just have to content themselves with letters. He certainly can't sneak into the Longbottoms' house.

"You're really staying with him."

"Yes? I stayed with him at Christmas. You know that."

"I just thought—that's one thing, a visit, but the whole summer? I know you grew up in the Muggle world. Isn't your family going to be looking for you?"

"My family hates me and I hate them," Harry says quietly. Neville looks lost. Harry sort of thinks Neville should hate his grandmother, but that's probably an even more alien mindset to Neville than training to defeat Voldemort. "Sorry, but that's the way it is."

"Oh," Neville says at last, and then he straightens his shoulders with a little gasp. "But just remember that you can talk to me and I can help you if you want, okay?"

"All right," Harry agrees, and reaches out to clap Neville on the shoulder. "Remember what I said about writing to me and meeting up in Diagon Alley if we can."

Neville nods, looking both determined and nervous, but more settled than he was just a minute ago. Harry watches him go thoughtfully. Artemis stirs in his robe pocket, and Harry ducks back into a corner out of sight as she pops her head out.

"Are you going to tell him about me?"

"No," Harry says, and rubs her back. "At least, not right now. I expected him to confront me because I was speaking Parseltongue in front of him in that room with Quirrell, but he didn't. I think he just wants to ignore it right now. He would find it a lot harder to ignore if he knew I had a snake friend."

"I should not be ignorable."

Harry half-smiles. "I agree with you, but we have to be careful. There's no telling what's going to happen because of this. Maybe Neville just needs some more time to think about Parseltongue and then he'll be fine with it. But I'm not going to push him."

Artemis flicks her tongue out so that she's touching Harry's pulse point. "I'm glad that we're going to stay with Blaise and Aradia for the summer. That they know all about me and would not try to make you ignore me."

"So am I."

"Have a good summer, Neville."

Neville knows that his smile is trembling, but he can't exactly stop it. His eyes go to Zabini, standing behind Harry. Zabini just nods to him and then turns and gently draws Harry with him to where the most beautiful woman Neville has ever seen is standing, not far from the train.

"Neville!"

Neville jumps, and flinches, and then hates himself for flinching. But Gran isn't a bad person, he reminds himself yet again. This is just her way. He can't blame her for being abrupt and loud when she has to raise the Boy-Who-Lived and when she lost her son and daughter-in-law the way she did.

"Coming, Gran," he says, and hurries over to her, glad that one of the upper-years cast the enchantment to make his trunk float. She got angry at him when he came home for Easter about it dragging on the ground.

Gran eyes him a lot like the vulture on her hat eyeing a juicy carcass, and then snorts a little and turns to walk towards the Apparition point. "How did your Occlumency lessons with Professor Snape go?"

She makes the question sound casual, but Neville knows it isn't. He bobs his head a little and says, "They were all right, Gran. I can meditate now, and I can block a soft Legilimency probe."

"You need to be able to do more than that, Neville! Albus tells me that You-Know-Who was actually in the school itself. If he had decided he wanted to destroy your mind, then nothing would have been easier for him—"

Neville bows his head a little. But a resentful voice that sounds more like Harry's than his own is speaking in the back of his mind.

How many people can even block any Legilimency at all at this age? Could you? Could Dad?

Neville clings to the memory of that skill, and the imagination of what Harry would say, as Gran drags him home through the Floo. And he listens to her plans for training in Occlumency and many other things during the summer, while thinking.

If I can really study all that, then I should be able to find some way to slip off to Diagon Alley.

"I wondered if you could make a small animal for me, Harry."

Harry studies Aradia for a second as she sits at the head of the table. They're both waiting for Blaise to get up. Apparently he always sleeps late the morning after a long Floo journey. Harry remembers that from Christmas, too. "I wouldn't want to."

"Why is that?"

Aradia at least sounds amused and is smiling at him over the top of the teacup, so Harry does his best to smile back. "When I made one for Blaise, it was for a gift, and I knew that he would like it even if it wasn't impressive. When I made Artemis, it was so I could have a friend. But I don't know what you want, and you're so impressive that I would worry about disappointing you."

"You could never do that," Aradia murmurs. "I don't think you realize how extraordinary your talent is, Harry."

"Have you heard of anyone who could do this before?"

"No. Only masters of Transfiguration would even try, and they could create a sturdy-looking creature that would eventually revert back to the base materials. I don't even know that they would try combining the materials. It would seem much more straightforward, to them, to turn a string into a snake than to try and combine dust and stone and buttons."

Harry starts to say something else, but the door opens and Blaise pads in, yawning, with Ignis on his shoulder. He slouches down in the chair between Harry and Aradia and says, "Scones," staring at his plate.

Aradia sighs and waves her wand to Summon a platter of scones that were under a Warming Charm. "You always want such English food after the smallest trip to Britain, Blaise."

"Yeah," Blaise agrees, still not sounding as if he's awake. He dumps so much milk and sugar in his tea that it looks like it's a frothing cup of cream, and inhales it. Then he reaches for another cup.

Harry smiles to himself and pulls Artemis out of his pocket. Neither Aradia nor Blaise mind if she eats at the table.

"Mice, mice are warm and delicious, delicious mice, I love mice…"

Artemis rambles to herself in Parseltongue when she's eating. Harry is glad that Aradia and Blaise don't mind her eating with them, but even gladder that they can't understand Parseltongue.

"I received an interesting letter this morning," Aradia says, when she's drinking tea, Artemis has finished eating, and Blaise is about halfway through his enormous plate of scones. Harry has eaten a few pieces of sliced fruit himself; he ate most of his breakfast before Blaise got up. "From Albus Dumbledore."

Blaise tenses, his eyes flashing for a moment to his mum's face. Harry cocks his head. He wonders if Blaise knows something about Aradia's tone or expression that Harry doesn't know her well enough to understand.

"Oh?" Harry asks, when it seems Blaise isn't going to say anything.

"Yes. He says that he tried to capture Voldemort's spirit, but he failed. And that Quirinius Quirrell will resume teaching Muggle Studies in September."

"No," Blaise says at once.

"He tried to kill us!"

"I quite agree that it cannot be allowed." Aradia swallows another sip and folds her hands in front of her. "The Headmaster said in his letter that Quirrell was possessed and cannot be held responsible for his actions. He offered no excuse for his own failure to capture the wraith, but at the moment, we do not know where Voldemort's spirit is and Dumbledore is too powerful to attack directly. Quirrell is the obvious target."

Harry feels a little thrill run down his spine, stronger than his outrage at the thought of Quirrell just coming back to the school and getting to teach like nothing happened. "You sound like you're talking about killing him," he says.

"And if I am?"

"Then—then I need to know. But I don't know if you want me helping yet, since I don't really know anything about killing and I might just get in the way or spread secrets around that you don't want me to tell. Not because I'd want to. Just because it might happen."

From the corner of his eye, Harry can see that Blaise has gone still. Harry doesn't know why. He raises his chin and continues staring at Aradia.

What a lucky chance Blaise had in Diagon Alley that day. Aradia does not know many children Harry's age who would insist on participating in a murder.

"You must understand," she says softly, "that you will not take part in the killing itself, Harry. But you will know ahead of time that he is going to vanish, and that might make the right composure hard to maintain."

"So I have to pretend to be surprised?"

"Yes, that is one thing you will have to do. But I might also make use of you in the cover."

"The cover?"

Aradia smiles slightly. For the most part, Harry fits seamlessly into the life of their home, so it can be hard to remember what it was like not to have him there. But in other ways, he is an eleven-year-old boy with no experience with this lifestyle.

"We will need some reason for me to appear at the school, so that it will not seem suspicious for me to be so nearby when Quirrell vanishes."

"Oh, okay. I didn't know that. I just thought no one would see you there because you would make sure that no one did."

"It is easier if I can come and go openly. And I think that you might develop some illness that's difficult to cure or treat about the middle of the first term. And you might insist that only a visit from your beloved foster mother can cure it. Perhaps with Italian sweets?"

Harry grins. "I can do that! I got to see my cousin act like he needed sweets to feel better all the time."

Aradia nods. She has plans for the Muggles, eventually, but those will have to wait until Harry is older, since he has the best right to handle them. "Then I will ask that you start thinking about how you can mope once the term starts…"

Harry leans forwards across the table, and Aradia has a moment of thinking that, as terrible as it is, she is thankful for his suffering as a child. There is no other way that he would have accepted this so easily.

And she and Blaise would have been deprived of a dear friend and a useful ally.

"I don't know what we're going to do about Gringotts."

Sirius grunts a little, falling back on the couch in their drawing room and spreading his arms wide. He and Remus had to face a gorgon to get the latest page of the book. And the page told them that the next Horcrux is in Gringotts.

Not which vault, of course. That would be too simple. And not exactly what the Horcrux is.

That will come with the next page, Sirius hopes, or maybe the next few. But the book is a lot more complete than it was even two years ago, and he and Remus will be able to go home to Britain soon.

To find and destroy the Horcruxes. To take Harry into their arms and hug him.

Will he ever forgive us?

Sirius sighs and rubs his right arm, which was stone until an hour ago and has only recently been transformed back to flesh thanks to Remus's skill with countercurses. He doesn't know, that's the thing. He's sacrificed everything he could have had after the war, except Remus, so that Harry can grow up in a world without Voldemort.

It isn't so that he can earn Harry's forgiveness. He's hoping for it. But Harry's cautious response to his letter and what Albus has said in his own post has lessened Sirius's hope a little.

"Sirius."

Remus's voice is so tense that Sirius bolts up at once, reaching for his wand. He only pauses a little when he sees the way that Remus's face has gone as pale as moonlight, lurching across the room to him. "Remus? What is it?"

"This page—it's about something more than Horcruxes." Remus turns the page around so that Sirius can read it, shaking.

The handwriting of the book, created by magic, is always a pain in the arse to read. Sirius leans over and manages to squint his way past the odd hooked letters and the lack of spaces between some of the words.

Hiding place of the rat.

The breath leaves Sirius in a rush. He and Remus came to the Continent to hunt Horcruxes, mostly, but they also came chasing the few clues Wormtail left behind him. They gave up that up when Albus explained the importance of Horcruxes to them, though, and they've never specifically asked the book about it. Nor has the book offered them clues to Wormtail's hiding place before.

Why shouldn't it, though? The magic of the book can probably sense how dear the quest for revenge also is to them.

Sirius looks up and meets Remus's eyes. His teeth flash. At the moment, he looks more like a two-legged werewolf than he ever normally does.

"We have to find him," Remus whispers. "Who knows but that he might come back and try to betray the Order again? He doesn't look that different from a normal rat to anyone except us. He could spy on us. You know that the others said they changed all the wards on the safehouses, but the Longbottoms are dead and most of the Bones and McKinnons are, too. The ones who are still alive might not have thought the expense was worth it."

"Or they weren't in the Order," Sirius agrees, nodding. Amelia Bones, who is raising her orphaned niece Susan now, is implacably opposed to Voldemort, but she was never in the Order. "Yes, you're right. We have to go after him."

"It might mean a longer time away from Britain and Harry."

Sirius takes a difficult breath. He hates thinking about Harry growing up with no connection to his parents. Since he went into Ravenclaw, he won't even have a Head of House who could tell him fond stories about them. And his closeness to the Zabini boy worries Sirius.

But the Zabinis don't seem to be harming Harry. He has someone to depend on, . And what will Sirius feel if he goes back to Britain early, just because he misses his godson, and it turns out that Wormtail manages to betray them again?

Harry could die because Sirius wanted to see him early. Another child could die.

"Let's stay and hunt Peter," he says, meeting Remus's eyes. "When we go home again, I want it to be permanent."

Remus's eyes are a bright and unforgiving gold, which comforts Sirius, who knows him better than anyone left alive now. "Yes. Let's hunt a rat."

"Be as calm as you can, all right?"

"I am always calm."

Harry grins at Artemis's words, which aren't even true, and leans back a little so that he can feel Blaise's hand on his back. "Yeah," he says. "All right."

Blaise nods, and then steps up to one of the warded doors Harry has known he was occasionally passing in Aradia's house. He reaches a hand out, and something silvery and made of teeth and claws forms in the air ahead of them, scraping a heavy paw down the air towards Blaise.

Harry draws in his breath, but Blaise only stands there as if he expected this. The silvery creature turns its head to one side, watching Blaise with an eye as large as a dinner plate and gleaming like chrome. Then it vanishes.

"What was that?" Harry whispers, stepping forwards. The heavy stone door is unlocked now, he can sense that, but Blaise still has to swing it open.

"One of the guardians that my mother has bound." Blaise looks at him, and his face is drawn. "You have to understand, Harry, you can't tell anyone about this. I would have, if I could have. Then not so many people would think Mother was a murderess. But you can't. Okay?"

Harry nods, impressed, and feeling a thrill burn under his breastbone. He knows that he's going to be invited into Blaise's and Aradia's most closely guarded secrets.

And even if he's not a Slytherin, he does so love secrets.

He treads on Blaise's heels as they step out onto a balcony. Harry blinks. Just from the way the house is set up, he would have expected an enclosed room.

But that only has a moment to pierce his head, because the purple light in front of him does a lot more piercing. It's an incredible brilliance, lingering on blue and green in its edges, but purple. Harry steps forwards, staring, even though his eyes water and he has to avert them from the brightest part of the light.

It's a purple sun.

"Welcome to the Court of the Undiscovered Sun, Harry."

Harry glances over his shoulder. His heart is doing odd skips and beats in his chest, and he doesn't calm down when he sees Aradia stepping through the door behind them. Of course he knows that she was the one who gave Blaise permission to show him this, but…

Somehow, the light of the sun bathing her, lighting up her face and her smile, makes her look more like a stranger, not less.

"What is the Undiscovered Sun?" he whispers.

"I suppose one should technically say the Suns, since many of them will shine separately, but there is one force behind this, so I say the Sun." Aradia walks towards the edge of the balcony and motions to Harry and Blaise.

Blaise drops back a little, maybe because he's nervous about Harry's reaction, maybe just because he's seen this view before. But Harry hasn't, and he scrambles up to the edge of the grey marble balcony. He stares with a mouth that he knows is gaping open down at the valley stretching below them.

He knows it's nothing like the country near Aradia's villa. This is a bright green on the sides and stones where the sun touches, but not like grass or moss; this looks as if the valley is a huge rift in a huger emerald. Where the shadow lies, it's grey. The river tumbling down the middle of it doesn't flash or fall like water. It's more like a tumbling rush of ice, Harry thinks, all solid grey chunks.

And in between the chunks, in the depths of the river, is a starless black that makes Harry's head reel.

"Do not look too closely." Aradia's hand rests on Harry's back. "While you cannot fall into it physically, given the barrier between the worlds, it is still not wise to stare too long into the place where magic came from."

"The place where magic came from?" Harry whispers. It is hard, harder than he expected, to take his eyes away from the cracks in the river. He blinks and steps back. Blaise grips his shoulder, and Harry nods to him, grateful that his friend is there.

"Yes. Or at least, the magic that we have. There are many other kinds, of course. Will you sit?"

Harry didn't even notice that there's a small round table encircled by three chairs on the part of the balcony closest to the house. Then again, the sun is pretty overwhelming. He takes a step back and blinks, then sits in one of the chairs. He becomes aware that Artemis has been silent, and gives her a concerned glance.

"I am fine. The sun is beautiful. It is warm. That is how I know it is a sun."

Harry smiles and strokes her back, then turns around to look at Aradia, who has sat down gracefully across from him. "I'm listening."

"The sun and the river and the valley are in a different world," Aradia says, her head tilted back. Her eyes glitter in the sunlight, and she smiles in a way that Harry thinks would probably still be eerie even if the light falling on her was yellow. "It doesn't look like it, but there is a transparent ward preventing us from accessing it, and the distance between this world and that one is much longer than a single jump would clear. That world is alive, with—forces. There is no single word in any of our languages that would explain them. But you can call them different kinds of magic.

"One kind of magic makes the sun shine and the river flow. The cracks between the chunks of ice—ice of a sort—in the river are the kind that produce our own magic, which long ago invaded our world through this hole and infected us."

"Infected?" Harry half-stands.

"It's all right, Harry," Blaise says gently. He's taken the chair on his mother's other side and is smiling at Harry. "It sounds alarming, but we've lived with it all our lives, and this magic is ours now. Not really an infection anymore."

Aradia nods. "Not anymore. In the beginning, it was, and it changed us profoundly."

"That's why we're not Muggles?"

"Yes, exactly. I've heard some theories, from the people who are aware of this other world, that we are natives of it. But we are not. The clash of our magic with the kind that makes the sun shine would have destroyed us long since." Aradia leans over the balcony. "Even this small touch of the sun's light would have begun to drive us down the path towards becoming Squibs if it weren't for the fact that this is only a hole and our worlds did not actually touch."

"Why doesn't it destroy the ward that guards us?"

"Very good, Harry." Aradia beams at him, and Harry feels something in himself relax. He's still partially braced, all the time, for someone to be upset that he's acting too smart. "It does not because the ward is renewed every month or so by the blood that I spill."

Harry swallows. "The people you kill."

Aradia nods. "Sacrifice is the proper term. I choose victims, as much as I can, whom I find morally repugnant. Although, most of the time, they have not hurt me as personally as Quirrell has, and I do not look forwards to their sacrifice as much as I am this one." She smiles, purple light sparkling in her eyes. "They renew the ward, and they close the hole between worlds a little bit more each time. I do not know when it will be fully closed, but probably not until after Blaise's lifetime," she adds, correctly anticipating Harry's next question.

Harry swallows and asks something he couldn't have imagined asking an hour ago. "The sunlight would come through the hole a lot more if it got bigger? It would destroy our wards and expose us to Muggles?" He waits until Aradia nods and asks the even more unthinkable question. "Why not—I mean, why not sacrifice a whole bunch of people at once, then? So that you can close the hole and not have to do it anymore?"

"The hole is resistant to too much blood spilled at once, just as it is resistant to one kind of ward. The sunlight spreads and buckles the wards much the way ice works on stone. It is not malevolent, simply the conflict of natural forces. It consumes the blood and shrinks a bit, but it would widen again if I tried to spill too much at once."

"I want to help."

"Do you?"

Aradia is as still as a cat, watching him. Harry glances to the side and sees that Blaise is, too. That tells him how nervous they are. They showed him an important secret, and they're waiting for how he's going to react.

"They are hunters," Artemis says, and wriggles on Harry's arm. "They hunt and kill their prey to survive. They should tell people about it. They are not evil."

Harry can see why the Zabinis don't tell many people about this. There are people who would want to use the hole and the magic on the other side to do things. They wouldn't listen to warnings or how important it is to shrink the hole. They would just think they knew better.

But he otherwise agrees with Artemis. He raises his head and says, "Yeah. I do."

"Despite the fact that I am sacrificing people?"

"I don't care about Quirrell, except that I want to make sure that he never hurts me or Blaise or Neville again," Harry says, meeting Aradia's eyes. "And I don't want him to tell people about my Parseltongue. If you can kill him because you want to renew the ward and because you want him dead, I can help because I want him dead, too."

Aradia's eyes widen a little. Blaise looks at him. Harry just waits for their decision, stroking Artemis's back.

As far as he's concerned, he probably made his decision the first time he shook Blaise's hand in Diagon Alley. But he means it. He wants to help them.

He doesn't care about most people. He doesn't necessarily want to hurt them, as long as they stay away and don't hurt him. But he wants to help the people he cares about a lot more than he wants to leave the rest alone.

Blaise chose well.

I chose well, Blaise thinks, and if he's smug, he can't help it. Not even his mother picked his father so well.

Harry is with them. He isn't trying to run away and calling Mother evil. He isn't demanding that Blaise help him contact the Aurors and get her arrested. He understands and accepts the Unconquerable Sun and the need to defend their world against it.

He wants to help.

Blaise smiles at Harry, and Harry smiles back, and he's pretty sure that Harry is thinking the same thing he is. We are one, always.