[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Shadow-People Singing Ancient Songs, Realm of Song, 4/7

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Bygone Noon

“This information changes everything, Harry.”

Harry nods. He’s sitting with Blackeye in the Creature Culture classroom, where he stayed after the other students left. “It’s disgusting,” he says quietly. “I thought better of Dumbledore than that. I knew he was frustrating and didn’t take care of himself properly, and he was a little cowardly and annoying, but I didn’t think…” He trails off.

“Humans are often worse than they appear to be at first,” Blackeye says wisely. “And, of course, it appears that my efforts have not come to fruition. I thought I was being good for Dumbledore.” She shakes her head. “Instead, I was tormenting him, and that means I am guilty of one of the greatest faults a Healer can be guilty of.”

“Do you blame me for asking you to see him?”

Blackeye looks at him, and Harry looks down at the floor, squirming. “Um, I meant, no one could have made you decide to treat one patient or another,” he mutters.

“Yes, thank you, young warrior.” Blackeye shakes her head. “No. I think both of us simply lack enough experience with humans to always figure out what to do. And now…what shall we advise the clan to do? Make war on Dumbledore? The Minister? The Ministry? All of them?”

“I think it has to be all of them,” Harry says quietly. “Plus Voldemort, because he won’t stop coming.”

Blackeye smiles grimly. “We were already guaranteed to carry the war to him, with the Horcrux that corrupted Graveltooth. But I agree. It’s time to pull back from such tactics as closing vaults and trying to heal the humans. They don’t work. We’re about to begin a full-scale rebellion.”

Harry nods. He once hoped he would never have to live through a rebellion, but that was before he heard the absolute disdain and contempt in Fudge’s and Dumbledore’s voices.

And there are people he’d like to warn. But until the clan makes an official decision and declares rebellion one way or the other, he can’t. It’s his people’s collective voice that has to speak, not his alone.

*

There’s absolute silence as the clan watches the memory of Fudge’s conversation with Dumbledore in the Pensieve that lifts all memories into the air in a wash of silvery light. Harry stands quietly by. It’s not the end of term yet, and so Dumbledore hasn’t made a move to expel him yet, but he did slip away to come to Gringotts by the tunnels because he had to. The matter of potentially declaring a rebellion is too sensitive to do otherwise.

The light of the memory fades, and Blackeye stands. “Harry asks for the clan’s advice,” she says. “And so do I. My counsel is for rebellion, but I appreciate that the voices of the clan must speak.” She sits down again.

Harry glances around. They’re in the Great Gallery, where normally only weddings and funerals are held. But rebellions can be declared there, too, and from the soft hisses and teeth-champings making their way back and forth along the seats, he thinks he knows what the vote will be.

“Harry is the goblin most like a human, having their kind of body and experience in living among them,” says Sapphireborn, a large warrior with a knife whose hilt is covered with sapphires. “What does he say?”

Harry sighs and stands up a little. He ignores the way that the eyes fastened on him make him feel. His people thought he was adult enough to make a warrior and give a place in their council. That means that he’s fierce enough to do this.

“I thought that simpler measures would keep the humans at bay,” he says, “like the curse I cast on Fudge to make him speak only the truth and the way that I asked Blackeye to provide her healing skills to Dumbledore. But I was wrong. That was my error, and I take responsibility for it. It seems that this is another case of human cowardice.”

“You would separate that from goblin cowardice?”

“Yes.” Harry turns to face Toothsplitter, who has to question him harder in a public setting like this to show that she didn’t promote him to journeyman because of undue favoritism. “When our people are cowards, they know that they have committed an offense worth a duel at the very least. Or they might be very young and have made a mistake,” Harry adds, because that happens sometimes, not often. “With humans, they know what is the right thing to do, but they also make excuses for it, and allow themselves to be prodded away from it by someone who is weaker than they are, the way Dumbledore is doing with Fudge.”

Toothsplitter nods slowly. “You are saying that we are cowards because of a failure of courage, and they are cowards because of a failure of will.”

“Most of the time. I have seen some that cross the line into the goblin kind of cowardice,” Harry says, thinking of Pettigrew. “But all the examples that my memories demonstrated today are, as I hope I have shown, the human kind of cowardice.”

Sapphireborn claps hand and knife together, calling everyone else’s attention back. “This changes my vote.”

Harry watches Sapphireborn curiously, wondering what a warrior so high-ranked in the clan might have decided to vote for before, and what it will be now.

“I was about to say that human faults need not concern us, and they should not weigh with us when we consider the grave question of rebellion.” Sapphireborn makes slow eye contact with goblin after goblin, nodding a little to encourage them. “But I see now that this kind of cowardice does. Dumbledore is weak enough to fight back against classes he permitted to be taught, to permit professors to bully students in his school, to find facing up to his wrong decisions harder than making them in the first place. And this kind of cowardice is insidious. It could infect other wizards and witches, even ones who are allies, and make them turn against us.”

Harry thinks of the way Hermione thought he should be more understanding of Madam Marchbanks’s flight from her convictions. He wouldn’t say Hermione has been infected, but she certainly stands a better chance of it than a goblin who grew up in the embrace of the clans.

“Therefore, my vote is for rebellion.” Sapphireborn sits down again.

The murmur runs around the room, and goblin after goblin speaks in favor of rebellion. Harry can see some of the people at the edge of the crowd, once they’ve spoken, peeling away. They’ll go as diplomats to other clans, he knows, and encourage them to join the rebellion.

Not all of them will, but that’s okay. Harry already knows that his clan can cause more pain to humans than humans ever think they can.

And it’s only pain, not dishonor, not cowardice, not shame, that makes humans change their minds and actions.

Unhappy Folk

“Harry, can I speak with you, please?”

Harry turns around with as polite an expression of astonishment as he can manage on his features. Dumbledore comes to a halt behind him and smiles at him. There’s strain to the smile if you know what to look for, though, and not the kind of strain that Harry has seen visits from Blackeye cause in the past.

“What do you need to talk with me about, sir?”

“I think we should go to my office.” Dumbledore’s eyes dart around the corridor. Lots of people are halting on their way to Potions or Charms to frankly stare. Harry knows that some of them are staring because they’re his Goblin Dueling students, but others just seem to do that because they find anything involving the Boy-Who-Lived or the Headmaster of Hogwarts fascinating.

“If you want to,” Harry agrees easily. He can feel the Resurrection Stone twisting in his robe pocket, and conceals a sigh. He’s taken to carrying all three of them because he wants to carry the Invisibility Cloak, and it doesn’t want to be parted from the other two.

He regrets it in the case of the Elder Wand, though. It’s always fighting with Harry’s holly wand, bragging about how it’s the better one and Harry should use it. The holly wand nobly ignores this most of the time, but now and then the Elder Wand finds a taunt it can’t resist, and then Harry is the center of an insult contest being conducted across his chest.

As he and Dumbledore walk, Harry catches Malfoy’s eye. Malfoy’s face is pinched, and he alternates his stare of hatred between Harry and Dumbledore as if he can’t decide who he hates more. Harry shows him his daggers, helpfully, to let Malfoy know he’s there if Malfoy ever makes a formal dueling challenge.

Malfoy tears his eyes away and hurries down the corridor.

Harry sighs to himself. He knows human cowardice isn’t literally a sickness, but it sure is rampant in Hogwarts.

*

“I hope you can help me with something,” Dumbledore says, when they’re in his office. Fawkes crooned a greeting to Harry that made Dumbledore look at him suspiciously, but he didn’t jump off his perch or anything. Harry’s fairly sure he got away with his visit to Dumbledore’s office.

“If I can.” Harry stretches his legs out and frowns around the room. The silver instruments that Blackeye got rid of are back.

Harry shakes his head. If humans want to surround themselves with things that hurt them, then goblins can’t help.

“I have the feeling that I have lost something very valuable,” Dumbledore says, and smiles at Harry in a friendly way that makes Harry tilt his head a little. “That means that I need you to help me find it.”

“You have a feeling?”

“Yes, only a feeling.”

Harry promptly whips his wand out and casts a series of Detection Charms all over the room. Dumbledore leans back in his seat, staring at him and looking perplexed. Meanwhile, the Elder Wand starts telling the story of how it once cast seventy Detection Charms at once, but Harry’s wand maintains its smug silence. After all, it is the wand that Harry is using right now.

“What are you doing, my dear boy?”

“I don’t think I’m very dear to you at the moment,” Harry says, frowning at Dumbledore, thinking about the way the man just crumpled before Fudge. “And I’m looking for signs that someone tried to use a Memory Charm on you or something similar.”

Dumbledore’s eyebrows creep up. “Why would you think that, my—Harry?”

“Because if you lost something valuable but you only have a feeling about it, that means someone might have been interfering with your memory.” Harry eyes the room again as all his charms tell him there’s no poison or harmful magic in sight. He frowns. He supposes that’s possible, but it does seem to be a huge coincidence that Blackeye would withdraw her care of Dumbledore and then Dumbledore would fall prey to a Memory Charm.

Dumbledore sighs and pinches his nose. Harry shakes his head again at the sign of this self-abuse. “It’s an expression, Harry. I mean that I have lost something valuable, and you might be able to tell me where it went.”

“If it left, have you considered that maybe it got fed up with you and it doesn’t want to come back?”

Dumbledore stares at him for a second. Then he says, with a harsh edge to his voice, “Objects don’t make decisions like that.”

“Sure they do,” Harry says, raising his eyebrows back. “Some can’t, like doors who are fixed in their frames, but they can still make decisions to shut or not when someone asks them. My friend Hermione was having a problem like that last year, when she wanted to ask the door to shut after she was already in bed, and—”

“Harry.” Dumbledore hisses the word, and it seems to have some magic. The fire dims, and the desk grumbles about this being yet another time that Dumbledore is making it witness to a confrontation it would prefer that he have elsewhere. “I do not have time for goblin nonsense right now. Did you, or did you not, steal my wand?”

Harry glares at him. Theft isn’t as big a crime among goblins as lying or cowardice, but it ranks fairly high. “Of course I didn’t.”

Which is true. He took the wand because it wanted to go with the stone and the cloak. If it wouldn’t cause the stone and the cloak to start shrieking because they miss it, Harry would give the wand right back to Dumbledore.

Fawkes shifts in place on his perch. Harry glares at him, too, out of the corner of his eye. Fawkes is as much to blame for the constant war in Harry’s robe pockets as the objects are.

Fawkes shakes his feathers out and trills. He looks pleased with himself.

“I need you to assure me that you didn’t.”

Harry snaps his attention back to Dumbledore. “You don’t trust my word?”

Dumbledore cowers for a second, then grinds his teeth and pushes himself through his own good sense, which is a shame. “I insist that you allow me to look within your mind with Legilimency, Harry. I need to know where my wand went.”

“Away from you,” Harry says patiently, because isn’t that obvious?

Dumbledore’s hands twitch on the desk. Maybe he’s dreaming about strangling Harry, but Harry thinks it likely that the tremor Blackeye was working to cure him of has come back again. Harry sighs. Humans have so little good sense, and then they send the Healers who could help them with it away.

“Look into my eyes.”

Harry draws his daggers.

Dumbledore sits back in his chair, looking shocked. “You are going to attack me, my dear boy?”

“I’m an adult goblin,” Harry says with weary patience. “And you were giving me an order and talking about something that sounds very much like an attack. It would dishonor me down to my bones to leave myself defenseless before such an attack.”

Dumbledore leaps to his feet and levels a shaking finger at Harry. Harry looks at it politely.

“I have had it!” Spittle flies out of Dumbledore’s mouth and onto his desk, which complains. Harry sympathizes. “You are not a goblin! You are a human boy with delusions of grandeur! You have insulted my staff, and flouted my rules, and acted as though the restrictions of a school don’t apply to you! I have to warn you, my boy, you are done. Your Goblin Dueling class is never going to be taken at the NEWT level, the Creature Culture class will be discontinued after this year, and all goblins will quite likely lose their right to carry weapons in public in the future!”

Harry stares at him, appalled. Dumbledore’s insanity is a new thing, and he wonders how Blackeye missed it.

It’s a matter of honor, of course, that she not treat any enemies of the goblins who would see such horrible things happen to them. But Harry wonders if he could convince her to send some books through the post to help Dumbledore recover his sanity.

Probably not, he thinks with a sigh as he watches Dumbledore. His finger is starting to tremble from the effort of holding it up. He’d probably pitch the books in the bin because they came from a goblin.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Dumbledore finally snaps.

“You can’t take the right to carry weapons from us,” Harry says simply. “And if you try to do the other things, then you’re going to have an even bigger rebellion on your hands than is brewing right now.”

Dumbledore’s hand finally drops, probably because he’s exhausted but also because he might be thinking better of it. Maybe Harry is too much of an optimist. “Rebellion?” he whispers.

Harry nods. The formal declaration of rebellion is going to the Ministry today, which means he can tell anyone he wants about it. “We wanted certain things, and you’re on the verge of taking them away. And probably trying to expel me from the school, too,” he adds, although it hurts to add that “probably” in there and pretend that he wasn’t spying on Dumbledore and Fudge. The thought of spies still makes him vaguely ill. “So we’ll hold a rebellion so that we can have the classes taught, and a Goblin Dueling NEWT, and have me stay in school, as well as prevent you from restricting our rights further.”

“I have no idea why you should wish to,” Dumbledore mutters, and folds his arms. “It sounds like you would be better back in the bank, with the rest of your filthy kind.”

“I bathe regularly,” Harry objects.

Dumbledore gives him a sharp, baffled look that melts into exasperation. “You know very well that that kind of insult is not meant literally,” he snaps.

“Then why do you use it?”

Dumbledore raises his hands as if he’s about to massage his temples and then lowers them again. “The goblins cannot be allowed to rebel,” he says, quietly, forcefully. “You do not know the kind of damage that could result.”

“Yes, we do,” Harry says, eyeing him. “That’s why we’re rebelling in the first place.”

Dumbledore doesn’t scream, but it looks like it’s a near thing. Then he turns back to his desk and picks something up from the far side of it. Harry cocks his head, but can’t see it well. All he can make out is the brown flash of a mug, which isn’t talking about anything but the liquid it’s filled with.

“Are you drinking mead, sir?” Harry somewhat approves of that. It’s often a warrior’s drink in his clan, so maybe that means Dumbledore will put aside the non-literal insults and attack him like a proper fighter.

“No, a calming potion,” Dumbledore mutters.

“The mug says it’s mead. It doesn’t like the feel of the honey.”

Dumbledore ignores him and downs part of it. Then he turns around and points another finger at Harry. “Listen to me—”

Abruptly, he chokes. Dumbledore’s eyes widen, and he sags to his knees, his hands rising to claw at his throat. Harry is out of his chair in a flash, ignoring the way that Dumbledore tries to bat his hands away, and grabbing him to guide him to the floor, so that he doesn’t hit his head on the fireplace and injure himself.

“Fawkes!”

The phoenix is already in flight from his perch. Harry draws back and sighs with relief as he watches Fawkes weep his tears into Dumbledore’s mouth. Harry knew enough about human health to recognize the signs of poison, but he has no idea what he would have done if Fawkes wasn’t right there. It’s not as though he has the formal training of a Healer, and his skills as a smith and warrior won’t help here.

It takes a few minutes, but eventually Dumbledore’s face turns a deep pink and he sits up. He stares at Harry, ignoring the way that Fawkes perches on his knee and croons anxiously at him. Harry thinks that’s rude, and wonders why Dumbledore doesn’t hear his own companion telling him to go to bed.

“You poisoned me,” Dumbledore whispers.

Harry opens his mouth, outraged, to deny that, but Fawkes gets there before he can. Fawkes flings his head back and lets out a loud trill, then stomps back and forth on the floor in front of Dumbledore, flicking his tail and jabbing at the stones with his beak. The floor doesn’t like it, but it dislikes Dumbledore sitting there more, so Harry ignores that and focuses on what Fawkes is saying.

He smiles. Fawkes has evidently had enough of Dumbledore’s anti-goblin attitude and is letting him know it.

When Fawkes finishes his rant, Dumbledore is sitting with his head half-bowed. His lips tremble with what looks like uncertainty. He looks back and forth between Harry and Fawkes for a moment, then clears his throat.

“Is it—is what he said true?” he asks hoarsely.

“I don’t know if I translated all the subtleties. But he thinks you’re prejudiced and a git. And you don’t listen enough.” Harry eyes Dumbledore. “And that you immediately leaped to the worst conclusion instead of realizing that I didn’t have anything to do with your mead. You’re the one who lied to me about it not being mead.”

Dumbledore closes his eyes. “I should not have gone against you,” he whispers.

Harry shrugs. “You should have fought like a warrior if you did.” He can’t be upset that someone wants to fight him. It’s just that too many people aren’t honorable about it.

“You possibly saved my life.”

“No, Fawkes did that,” Harry says. He knows that Dumbledore probably has the common wizarding beliefs about life-debts, and Harry doesn’t want him to owe Harry one. It would be clumsy and uncomfortable, given how different their beliefs are. “But you should listen more closely to people who know something instead of people who don’t.”

Dumbledore looks down at the spilled mug of poisoned mead, and swallows. “I have—not handled you well, Harry, have I?”

“I don’t know that many humans can handle a goblin,” Harry says, willing to give him an out on that one. “But you should know that I’m one, and I’ll react like a goblin. If you know how goblins react, you’ll know how to be friends and allies with me.”

Dumbledore closes his eyes and nods. Then he says, “You will not, of course, be expelled.”

“And the Creature Culture and the Goblin Dueling classes?”

“They are divisive enough that I have to end them,” Dumbledore says. “You can see that they are divisive.”

Harry can’t, actually, because the people he knows well enjoy those classes and they’re learning things that might save their lives. He shrugs and agrees, “All right. Then we’re still rebelling.”

Dumbledore clears his throat. “I was not kidding when I said that it would cause more damage than you can know, Harry.”

“What kind of damage?”

Dumbledore is silent.

Harry nods, saddened but not surprised. “All right, sir. Then you might as well know that we’re going to rebel anyway, and that the first steps of the rebellion have already been taken. Gringotts was locked down this afternoon.”

“I have not—received news of it.”

“You were up here insulting me and poisoning yourself, sir. Why should you have heard of it?”

“Imagine all the people who will starve if they are locked out of their accounts, Harry,” Dumbledore appeals to him, and actually clasps his hands in front of him. Harry looks away a little, embarrassed for Dumbledore by the sudden revelation of his weakness. “They need gold each day. And the shopkeepers who will need coins for change, and the families who will not be able to buy warm clothes—”

“Not everyone will suffer.”

“All the people I just named to you! More people than you can imagine!”

“You still only think of humans as people,” Harry says, and climbs to his feet. He glances down at Fawkes. “Maybe you can get through to him? I don’t envy you your task, but you did choose him as your companion.”

Fawkes flicks his tail at him in a motion Harry understands perfectly—birds use it as a gesture of acknowledgement and dismissal both, like a shrug—and then hops up to sit on Dumbledore’s knee. He starts to croon to him, with a distinctly scolding tone in the back of it.

Harry leaves. He’s done the best he can to warn humans of what’s to come, and spoken with Dumbledore, and he isn’t going to give back the Elder Wand, which is currently sulking because Harry didn’t use it to finish Dumbledore off. Harry will have to explain to it again tonight that killing is not the only approach, or even the most tactical one.

But there is a worthy opponent he can hunt, Harry remembers when he’s halfway down the moving staircase. Whoever poisoned that mead and sent it to Dumbledore is exactly the kind of sneaky, dishonorable person both humans and goblins will enjoy seeing put down.

Harry grins, and begins the hunt.