lomonaaeren

Chapter Three

Harry lost control in bed that night.

Their “beds” were simple pallets made of Transfigured, broken chair legs and covered with their robes. Nott had said it would do until they could get something else, and Harry could see that. He’d slept on less comfortable things, certainly, even in the past few years, when he’d had to spend the night somewhere on a case.

Harry lay beneath his own outer robe, covered with a Warming Charm, and swallowed back the sobs again and again. He hardly thought Nott would be a sympathetic audience. He just had to get used to what had happened. At least Al and Ron were alive again, and that was all he could ask for.

Even more than that, they wouldn’t even have the sense that anything was lost. Harry had seen his replica forming to accompany Ginny, the kids, and Ron and Hermione in Hogsmeade, after he had stayed as long as he’d dared. He’d stepped out of the way into an alley and heard nothing but Ginny chattering away about whether Lily needed new robes.

And he’d heard his own voice, low and tolerant and amused, answering.

No one would notice any difference. Ron and Hermione would still have their best friend, Ginny her husband, Al and Jamie and Lily their father. Nott had assured him that the replica would form with perfect memories, too, never noticing a gap between the entrance into Diagon Alley and their decision to go to Hogsmeade.

No one would, except them.

Harry rolled over and buried his head in his robes. It didn’t matter. The sobs were working their way up his throat, and the tears crawled down his cheeks. He held his breath, and tried to stutter out the weeping to make it sound like he was just breathing normally, sleeping. Nott was just on the other side of the curtain they’d conjured and drawn across the middle of the room. He could still be awake.

If he heard…

Harry wasn’t sure what he would do, but he curled up tighter anyway, and did his best to weep into his hands.

He didn’t know how long that had continued before the curtain went reeling back on the hooks they’d strung it on. Harry turned on his side, groping for his wand on the floor next to the pallet. If Nott had come with scorn or taunts, then Harry would hex him and at least manage to feel a bit better.

“It’s all right, Potter.”

Nott’s words were almost emotionless, blurred as they were with sleep. But he dropped into a crouch next to Harry’s pallet, and reached out to lay a hand on Harry’s shoulder.

Harry lay there stiffly beneath it. He had never been good at this, he thought. Even Ginny knew better than to touch him after he’d had a nightmare or a bad case. He would go and sleep in their guest room, the way he had in those terrible days after Al’s death, and meet her the next morning with a cheerful smile.

But Nott didn’t try to come up with soothing words or pretend nothing was happening. He sat there, yawning occasionally, hand locked on Harry’s shoulder. Even when Harry bunched his muscles and rolled a little, Nott didn’t release him.

It was as if Harry had been drifting in a sea of black water, and seen a sturdy rock in front of him. He reached out and grabbed it, and then he wasn’t drifting anymore.

Nott remained sitting there as Harry stopped shaking. He lay still, and finally, Nott stood up with a gesture that might have been a nod or a wave, and then slipped back to his pallet on the other side of the room. With a wave of his wand, the curtain between them drifted up and hung back in place as if it had never been removed.

But Harry knew it had been. And that made all the difference.

- - - -

“I was thinking that we could begin scouting the alley today,” Nott said over breakfast, which was toast and marmalade and scrambled eggs. Nott had made sure the eggs were actually from a chicken using some spell that was like the one he had cast at the butcher’s, and Harry had cooked them. Merlin knew he felt pretty useless otherwise. At least the walls of the flat were a mixture of dark greens and blues now.

Harry nodded. “You want me to look for someone who would hire me as a duelist or a teacher?”

“If you can, without giving yourself away.” Nott sat back and gave him a long, critical glance over the cup of the tea that they’d also bought in the market. “If you can, try to look less like an Auror.”

Harry bristled a little. “I only had the one set of robes when we came back, but they’re not Auror robes—”

“I didn’t mean that, Potter. I mean that you walk as though you’re ready to pounce on someone, and you stare at people like you’re expecting them to break a law in front of you at any second.”

Harry blinked. “I don’t know what you mean by that, either, so I don’t know how to stop it.”

Nott gave a slight grimace that Harry supposed might mean he was thinking. “Well, not all of it’s a bad idea. You need to know how to protect yourself in Knockturn Alley, so you can retain that stride, I suppose. But you have to stop glaring at people. Learn to avert your eyes, mind your own business. And can you do something about your cloak?”

Harry stared at him. “What cloak? I didn’t bring one.” He would have slept under it last night if he had.

Nott’s eyes widened a little, but he wiped all expression off his face in the next moment, so Harry supposed that he hadn’t meant to look as surprised as he did. “You haven’t heard the term cloak used for a wizard’s power before? It—goes behind you, mostly. It’s invisible, but people who are sensitive or alert or paranoid can sense it. Yours streams. If you could mask that, you’d have more of a chance to pass through the alley safely.”

Harry felt extraordinarily stupid. “I thought I was sensitive to magic, but I’ve never felt something like that.”

Nott drew his wand. Harry tensed against the immediate impulse to draw his. Nott hadn’t actually been a Death Eater, he reminded himself, and he had helped Harry. It would be stupid to get upset at him now.

“If you’d permit me, I’d like to cast a spell on you,” Nott said. “May I?”

“Your word that it won’t cause me more than slight pain.”

Nott eyed him again “It won’t cause you any pain.”

Harry nodded, and watched as Nott sketched his wand through patterns in the air that were completely unfamiliar. Harry frowned. Damn, he really had thought he was smart, but maybe he had only been educated in certain channels…

Nott watched as the spell, whatever it was, presumably surrounded Harry with some kind of visible effect. Then he sighed and put his wand away, pinching his nose.

“You’ve never sensed it because your cloak goes in front of you,” he said flatly. “It attunes you to smaller manifestations of magic than normal, like a…” He waved his hand.

“A spell being cast to silence someone or block a sound,” Harry said, because that was an example from the last case he had worked. The last case he ever would work, as an Auror.

He swallowed against that realization and kept focusing on Nott. He really did need to learn this stuff. Letting his own sorrow blot it out would be stupid.

Nott bobbed his head slowly. “And that means that you don’t feel other people’s cloaks, because you sense the smaller spells before their power would reach you, and you can’t easily control your own.”

Harry licked his lips. “Sorry?”

“It might work to our advantage. Give me a moment to think.”

Harry allowed him that moment and more, sipping his tea and trying not to think, himself. He had to survive in a new world, without Ginny and the kids, without Ron and Hermione, without the comforting routine of the Auror department that he’d wrapped around himself like a—like a cloak for nearly twenty years now. And he had to figure out facts that were apparently second nature to people like Nott and key to surviving in Knockturn Alley, which had an extra level of difficulty to them because Harry was, once again, a freak.

At least I’m not alone.

“All right,” Nott said at last. “We don’t go looking for trouble, but we also don’t try to hide the way I was planning on. If you have it…” For a moment, a smile like a ghost of pain crossed his lips. “Flaunt it, as my Elizabeth would say. So we’ll put up heavier wards around this place, and make it known that a pair of predators live here.”

“Wouldn’t that possibly draw attention we don’t want, too? From the Aurors?”

Nott shrugged. “It might, but honestly, how much did your lot bother about Knockturn Alley when you were part of them?”

“Not much, you’re right.” For the most part, Harry could only remember organized raids into Knockturn Alley when they’d received word that some large smuggling operation was happening there, or when there were reports of a notorious criminal like Fenrir Greyback in the area. Rumors of unknown powerful people, no matter how intriguing they might be, wouldn’t be enough to make the Aurors show up.

Another idea occurred to him, and he glanced at Nott. “How much power would it take to make people’s mouths shut completely? To make sure they weren’t spreading rumors?”

Nott sat back and considered him, putting down his empty teacup next to his plate. “Normally, I would say there’s no amount of it that would be enough. Make people fear us to the point of terrified silence, and someone would get resentful eventually and talk. Money would be better, but we don’t have enough.”

“I meant,” Harry said, and struggled to keep the snappish tone from his voice, “doing enough favors for people in Knockturn that there’s no way they would want to betray us to the Aurors because they don’t want to lose their source of help.”

Nott’s eyes widened a touch. Then he nodded slowly. “That might work,” he said, with a wealth of doubt in his voice.

“With the amount of power I have?”

Nott analyzed him from the corner of his eye, then again with his head tilted and an openly appraising look on his face. Harry waited it out. They still didn’t know each other very well. Old ideas from school were probably still operating, and he suspected Nott was struggling not to tell him that he was a Gryffindor softhead.

“I think so,” Nott said finally, and smiled.

- - - -

Harry stepped out of the flat and noticed the way that heads snapped around on the street, staring at him.

Harry ignored the stares as best as he could—it was easier now after years of being Head Auror—and walked down the steps. By the time he reached the pavement, heads had appeared at windows, too, and people were leaning out of shops down the alley to stare.

Harry stood there and let his power, what Nott had called his cloak, flare out around him. He actually hadn’t done that often, although not because he’d known about things like people able to sense him coming. It had just seemed like bad manners.

But now, he permitted it to flow out around him, and saw more than one person sigh, more than one head lift and pair of nostrils wrinkle. He supposed that werewolves, or people with more-than-human senses, living in Knockturn Alley wasn’t much of a surprise.

“I wanted to say that I’m new here,” Harry said, “but I know already that I can’t really hide from you. So I’m willing to trade magic for favors. If you have a wound you can’t heal yourself, or you need wards put up on a building and can’t afford the prices that everyone else charges, come to me. I’ll take payment in information as well as favors. And certain foods are better than others.”

He heard a low-voiced buzz of speculation arise from some of the spectators. Nott had warned him he would. This was Knockturn Alley. People’s minds would go to the blood requirements of a vampire or the raw meat requirements of a full Veela before they would turn to simply preferring one of kind of food over another.

And so Harry had phrased it that way deliberately, as self-protection.

Someone stepped forwards to confront him. Harry watched her in interest, especially the way she walked. She had the hooked nose and warts of a hag, but her stride was light and balanced, making Harry suspect she was hiding more than just a hunchback under those baggy black robes of hers.

She halted near him and stared at him with watery blue eyes—well, one watery blue eye. The other was brown and glowing. It didn’t move, but Harry would have wagered a small amount of money that it was a magical eye like Moody’s had been.

“Why d’you make the bargain?” she demanded, in an accent thicker than Hagrid’s. “When y’could take what y’want?”

Harry shrugged. “I need allies to defend my back, and my neighbors not to try and betray me to the Aurors because they’re angry about what I took,” he said flatly. “Power isn’t everything. It’s just another bargaining chip. You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.” He kept his voice as calm as possible, so that he was both telling the truth and making it clear that he didn’t need any one person in particular to ally with him.

The hag, or whoever she really was, squinted at him again and moved her hand a little. Harry tracked the movement in case she was going for a wand. On the other hand, he made out the claws on the tips of her fingernails and thought she probably wasn’t.

“A test? What d’you say to a test?”

“As long as it’s a test that pays me whether I succeed or fail,” Harry responded. He had already hardened his heart to the necessity of this. Nott had warned him that he couldn’t go around doing favors for free or people would just take advantage or strike at the perceived weakness. And come to that, doing something like this was much better than becoming an assassin or the—other possibilities Nott had suggested.

The hag, or whoever she was, studied him with both eyes for some moments, then snorted and turned on her heel. “Come with me, yer.”

Harry followed, ignoring the way that the some of the people behind him closed in. According to Nott, most of the people living here were those who had no right or ability to use wands, or were legally outcast, like werewolves, or on the run from the law. Harry wasn’t truly worried about a strike to the back.

He kept his stride unhurried and confident as he and his guide turned down a few of the smaller alleys that ran off Knockturn. The place she led him to was unexpectedly bare and open, a space of dirt and a few weeds where Harry had so far seen nothing but streets and buildings. He cast a glance at the hag.

She gestured with one clawed hand at the barren space. “Was cursed,” she said shortly. “Nothing can build, nothing can grow. Remove the curse.”

Harry took a deep breath and resisted the urge to protest that he wasn’t a Curse-Breaker. He had set himself up for this. He crouched down and studied the soil, drawing on his magic-sensing to figure out what was going on.

It was—

It was spoiled.

Harry rocked back on his haunches and then scrambled to his feet, only not covering his nose because he had an audience. He made a face, half-spitting out the musk that crawled along his tongue. It was the—the olfactory equivalent of biting into a mushy apple, he thought.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“Cursed the ground,” the hag said unhelpfully. “Nothing can build, nothing can grow.” She folded her arms and tapped her claws against her elbow. “Going to do something about it, yer?”

Harry nodded slowly. He wanted to demand more details, but that would probably also make him look weak in the way Nott was talking about. Not a great beginning to the new career and network of alliances he was hoping to establish.

He drew his wand, which produced the noise of scuffling from behind him. Harry ignored it, since it didn’t seem to be coming closer. He crouched down again, ready for the smell that met him this time, and darted his power out in little probing tests of the curse. The sensation of spikes came back to him. This curse had been settled in the ground a long, long time, and it guarded its heart.

Harry paused. Now that was an odd thought. And he had found that odd thoughts, at least when dealing with curses and ancient artifacts and the kind of rituals that mad wizards and witches tried to practice, were valuable.

Harry prowled along the borders of the spoiled piece of ground, a square about twenty paces on a side. He glanced at the weeds that were growing in it, wondering why they were there if the hag was right and “nothing could grow.” He bent down near one and sniffed and watched as it moved slowly back and forth, in air with no wind.

Harry combined that with the thought he’d had about the heart and nodded. He gestured to the hag, who had followed him. “You’ll want to stand back.”

She peered at him and uttered a liquid chuckle. “Long, long time since someone cared for old Min’s safety.” But she moved until she was standing a good three meters back from the spoiled ground, after which she didn’t seem inclined to move any further.

Harry shrugged. It was her funeral.

And yours, if you don’t do this right.

Harry aimed his wand straight at the center of the spoiled ground and spat between clenched teeth, “Diffindo!”

Someone made a noise behind him that might have been a shocked gasp or the beginning of a contemptuous laugh. It didn’t matter, not when Harry’s spell sliced straight into the middle of the ground and struck a target.

There was a hoarse sound, and all the “weeds” convulsed and waved at once. A blunt worm-shaped head clad in what looked like scales the color of shit jerked up through the ground. The weeds, splayed feet or maybe tentacles, waved back and forth and then rolled as the beast tried to get them beneath it. Harry aimed his wand at it and once again cast towards what he thought might be the heart.

Grey sludge began to run from the cut, but its body was still hidden under the dirt, and Harry couldn’t see what he’d hit. He thought someone might be screaming, but he heard nothing but the ringing that filled his ears whenever he was in the midst of battle. This time, he aimed his Cutting Curse for the head.

The worm-like creature flowed or rippled towards him. He hadn’t wounded it yet. Harry pushed away a brief temptation to use the Killing Curse—what was wrong with him?—and hit it again, this time with a Blasting Curse.

That opened a rent in its back, and at last the thing seemed to collapse into two halves. Harry still couldn’t see its whole body under its long cover of dirt, but the head was drooping and seemed to be tilted in a different direction than the tail that he could see like a hump pressing against the surface.

Harry took a deep breath and shook his head. He’d seen that kind of creature before, but he hadn’t recognized the smell. The one he’d seen might not have been as far gone as this—thing—rotting as it slept.

“What is it?” Min demanded, coming back towards him and crouching for a moment as if she would touch the thing. Harry shook his head, and she backed up, but continued to stare at the creature. “What’d y’do?”

“I don’t know what they call themselves, if they even speak,” Harry said. “I call them rotworms. I’ve seen them several times in the—in the job I used to do.” No good spoiling everything now by saying that he’d been an Auror. “They come from another realm, I suppose you’d say. Through magical gates. They make a lair under any place where magical creatures or people live and start draining it of life by sucking the magic into themselves. I’ve never seen one like this, but I suppose someone must have cursed it to sleep at some point. And then it started spoiling the ground, since it couldn’t reach anything else.”

“How’d you know what it was?” called someone from their audience.

Harry turned around and saw what seemed to be half Knockturn Alley there. He ignored the way his skin crawled. No one had cursed him in the back, after all. “I saw its legs sticking through the soil, and I thought it was odd that weeds were growing in a place where supposedly nothing could grow.”

“And that was it?” Min wrinkled her lips at him in an oddly cat-like gesture.

“I got you the results,” Harry said, and gestured at the dead rotworm, which was already beginning to dissolve into the same sludge that its wounds had let go. “Are you going to argue with how I did it?”

There was a sweep of muttering back and forth, but no one actually showed up to say they would argue. Harry turned to Min. “I passed your test. What information or favor do I get in return?”

“An alliance, with old Min.” Min dipped her head, the glowing magical eye fastened on Harry while she turned her head slightly to watch the crowd with the ordinary one. “That enough for you?”

“Yes,” Harry said, and smiled.