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lomonaaerenTitle: Jade Hearts
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo/Blaise
Content Notes: AU starting in fourth year, violence, gore, angst, minor character death, told as a series of vignettes, underage (teenager/teenager)
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 4700
Summary: Studying for the First Task in his fourth year leads Harry down a different path than merely learning the Summoning Charm. And he finds two people who want to walk it with him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice series” chaptered fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. LukeJames requested a fic about Harry/Theo/Blaise starting to learn blood arts in their fourth year and becoming more powerful. The title refers to the toughness of jade and its association with nobility and wealth in some mythologies. This will have a second part, to be posted tomorrow.
Jade Hearts
Harry took a book on dragons from the shelf, and another one shifted behind it and thumped on the floor. Harry picked it up, glancing nervously over his shoulder in case Madam Pince heard and came charging over to ban him from the library.
Then he looked down at the book’s title and froze.
The Properties of Darkest Blood.
And on the cover was a bleeding dragon with a triumphant-looking man standing next to it.
Harry went to read the book at the table in the back of the library where he sat whenever Hermione wasn’t with him (she was off spending time with Ron that day), Summoning Charm forgotten.
*
Harry walked out to stand in front of the dragon with his head held high.
He could feel his heart beating wildly. This would change everything. People would want to know where he had got the magic. But he was going to do it anyway. The book on blood magic had so consumed him that he hadn’t had time to come up with another plan.
If it failed, well…he could still try the Summoning Charm and call for his Firebolt. But then he would probably be dead.
Harry felt iron calm settle in him as the Hungarian Horntail reared and screamed at him. He was actually glad that he had drawn her instead of the Chinese Fireball or one of the others. Horntails were wilder, more dangerous, Darker, according to the book. Harry could summon the darkness in her blood to incapacitate her more easily than he could have with a calmer dragon or one that breathed hotter fire.
He waited until the magic built up in him and then lifted his wand. “Nox sanguinis,” he breathed.
The magic surged out of him, so powerful that it made Harry fall to his knees. He lifted his head, wondering hazily for a moment if he would even spot the dragon coming for him if he’d failed.
The Horntail screamed as his spell slammed into her, looking like a whirling tornado of black lace. And then she screamed again as the blood in her veins thickened and turned to pure darkness, and trembled as she lurched back and forth above her eggs.
Harry experienced a distant pity. He didn’t really want to kill her or harm her eggs. But he wanted to live more. And the Dragon-Keepers and everyone else who had organized the Tournament had thought it was okay to bring these mother dragons to Britain and pit them against the Champions, so maybe it was okay in that sense.
No one had tried to help him, except Hermione, who’d helped him practice the Summoning Charm, and Hagrid, who’d shown him the dragons.
No one else.
He had to look out for himself.
The dragon slumped forwards, her veins shining darkly through her leathery skin for a second. Then she was gone, and her body dissolved into a mist of darkness, hovering above her eggs.
In the burst of silence that followed, Harry walked over and calmly picked up the golden egg.
Noise followed that. But Harry was more interested in the sensation of eyes watching him from the stands. He looked up, but the crowd was too dense, and too many people had a reason to stare at him right now. He didn’t know who was looking.
It didn’t matter. He was alive.
*
Harry paused as he stepped off the bottom of the moving staircase that led up to the Headmaster’s office. Of course Dumbledore had called him up to give him a disappointed stare and tell Harry that such “Dark magic” wasn’t worth the price of a dragon’s life.
Harry had asked him whether it was the worth the price of Harry’s life. Dumbledore had stared at him and said firmly, “You would not have died.”
How he knew that was beyond Harry.
But as if that wasn’t enough, there were two people waiting for him at the bottom of the staircase and trying to look as if they weren’t. Harry knew one of them for sure. Blaise Zabini, the handsomest of the Slytherins in Harry’s year and also the one with the darkest rumors swirling around him.
The other one…right, that was Theodore Nott. Harry remembered him mostly as a pale, quiet boy who always seemed to be in Malfoy’s shadow and half the time just stared at the professors when they called on him.
They were trying to ignore each other, too, Harry saw. Strange. He’d had the impression that the Slytherins in his year were a pretty tight pack. He shoved his hands into his pockets, touching his wand, and asked, “What do you want?”
“To talk about the magic that you used on the dragon.” Nott’s voice was quieter but also higher-pitched than Harry had thought it would be.
“Yeah? So does everyone else.”
“But we,” Zabini said, “want to know where you learned it.”
“So does everyone else,” Harry took some pleasure in repeating.
“And we,” Nott said, glancing at Zabini and taking a little step away, “want to help you get better at it.”
Harry felt his eyes widen, which probably meant they’d won. But now he was pretty sure whose eyes he’d felt staring at him from the stands during the First Task.
And he smiled.
*
It turned out that Nott and Zabini had their own motives, of course.
Nott wanted to protect himself from a father he never talked about in detail, but whose existence made his whole face tighten. Zabini was in the shadow of his mother and said only that she was good at poisons and he wanted to be good at something different.
Harry decided that it wasn’t really his business if they didn’t want to explain their reasons fully. He lived under the shadow of Voldemort. He sort of understood.
And as long as they didn’t try to drag him away to Voldemort, he had no objection of studying with them. If they did try…
Well, Harry was still better at the blood arts than they were.
That was what they were called, the blood arts, or the Arts of the Highest and Darkest Blood, according to a book that Nott turned up with one day and handed to Harry and Zabini without explanation. Apparently, ordinary blood magic just meant that you could use your blood to draw things or in rituals or to seal and guard things. But blood arts like the kind that they were studying involved changing blood into other things.
Darkness. Water. Boiling lead.
*
The first time Zabini asked to experiment on Harry, Harry raised his eyebrows at him and leaned back. They were at their private table in the library, tucked away in a corner and warded with a drifting mist of darkness Harry had spilled his own blood to enchant. It was sort of like “ordinary” blood magic, except for the part where the mist wouldn’t just keep people out but would grab their minds and take them away into darkness.
“How do I know that you wouldn’t kill me?”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“Yeah, but you might anyway. You’re not experienced like me.”
“You killed one dragon,” Zabini argued, leaning forwards. Harry smiled at him and let the words hover and die in the silence of the library. Zabini paused, then sighed. “Fine. It’s sort of…I just want to make sure I can do it.”
Harry let himself be convinced and laid his arm on the table, palm tilted upwards. “Go on, then.”
Zabini drew his wand and focused on Harry’s arm. Harry closed his eyes. He could feel a sharp tingling making its way up towards his fingers, under the skin. He glanced down and saw his veins flowing with darkness, the way he had made the dragon’s do.
Zabini made a soft shocked sound and lost control of the magic. Harry watched the darkness snap back down his arm, and lifted his eyes to Zabini’s.
Zabini had his hands braced on the edge of the table, and looked as if he might bolt. Harry shook his head a little. “It didn’t hurt,” he said. “I suspect that’s one reason it’s such dangerous magic. You wouldn’t even know that you were dying before your blood changed.”
“The dragon knew she was dying,” Zabini whispered.
“She was bigger. Or maybe she was more sensitive to magic, or something.” Harry tilted his head back. “Planning on fighting a lot of dragons, Zabini?”
“At least one.”
Zabini’s eyes were dark and complicated. Harry reached across the table and carefully squeezed his hand.
*
Nott studied the incantation that would change blood to boiling lead with a focus that not even Zabini had shown.
Harry leaned a shoulder on the bookcase and watched him. Nott stepped back from the book and closed his eyes. Harry thought he would trace his wand through the movements and whisper the incantation, given that he couldn’t do anything else. There was no one to practice on.
But instead, Nott pressed his wand against his arm and whispered it. Then he screamed, a short sound that immediately cut off.
Harry hurtled across the distance between them and grabbed Nott’s arm, staring down. The blood felt normal to his senses when he extended them, magical senses that he hadn’t even known he had until after the first time he cast blood arts spells. It was sort of like having a magical net spread all around him that was attuned to people’s blood.
Harry didn’t think that Nott had messed up the spell, though. He’d probably lost control of it when he started to suffer, and the lead had reverted to blood.
“What were you thinking?” Harry snapped, shoving Nott so that he ended up against the bookcases in almost the same position Harry had taken a few minutes before. Harry shook him, hard enough that Nott’s head snapped back and forth. Harry’s heart was pounding fast, so furiously that he was panting. “What were you…you idiot!”
“I didn’t want to test it on you or Zabini,” Nott whispered, his grey eyes wide and shadowed. Harry stared at him and decided that it wasn’t indifference or arrogance that had carved the lines Nott had on his face. It was desperation. “I didn’t want to just practice it and never do it. I have to know I can do it, when I need it. So I did this.”
“You…” Harry pushed away from Nott and ran a hand through his hair. “So you practice on an animal.”
Nott blinked and looked a lot more human than he usually did. “Oh. I didn’t think of that.”
“Obviously.”
Nott’s mouth twitched when Harry glanced at him. “You’d be willing to watch that?”
“I killed a dragon. Whatever you’re trying to survive, I think it’s at least as bad as the Tournament.”
All traces of a smile vanished from Nott’s face. “Yeah, you have that right,” he said, so quietly that Harry would have missed the words if he’d been pacing the way he wanted to. “I—how are your friends taking this, Potter?”
Harry accepted the subject change. He would just Transfigure a cup into a mouse or something and bring it with him next time. “Not well,” he said shortly. “What about yours?”
Nott’s mouth curled again, his eyes getting more shadowed. “You presume I have friends, Potter.”
*
Ron and Hermione didn’t hate him. But they didn’t understand.
Hermione had asked Harry where he’d found that spell, and he’d lied and said he’d studied so many books he didn’t remember. Mostly, he just didn’t want them to find the book and take it away. Besides, as Nott and Zabini said, a lot of people did know about that kind of blood arts even if they didn’t practice it themselves. They could find out if they really wanted to.
But no one came and took the books from the library. Harry wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Ron was more straightforward. Harry had accepted his apology after the First Task, because being alive meant so much more to him than a silly fight. But he’d also said, “I don’t think you ought to be doing that kind of magic, mate.”
“I would have died without it.”
“The others didn’t.”
“I don’t have the kind of skill in Transfiguration or curses that they had. And I’m not a Veela.”
“All the same…”
All their conversations went like that, circling around the main point, which was that Ron wanted him to stop studying this and Harry wouldn’t. But Ron wouldn’t outright forbid him from doing it. Harry didn’t know if that was because Ron had no idea how Dark this kind of magic really was or if he was scared about driving Harry away again.
It didn’t matter that much. Harry got consequences he could ignore, and he kept on learning.
*
For the Second Task, after Harry had figured out the clue in the golden egg and told them about it, Nott and Zabini exchanged looks at the library table. Then they tried to pretend they hadn’t.
Harry hid a smile. It was endlessly hilarious to him how they both kept insisting they weren’t really friends, which meant they got upset at themselves and each other whenever they acted like it.
“How can you use blood arts to find something hidden below the lake?” Zabini asked, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t think merfolk have blood that’s exactly the same as ours. And you don’t know how the magic would affect it if it isn’t. And they might not know where your hidden object is anyway.”
“He could just use ordinary magic,” Nott said, but his eyes were shadowed. “He could use the Bubble-Head Charm to let himself keep breathing underwater.”
“I’ve tried it already, and I suck at it,” Harry announced. It was true that he could have got better at it if he practiced, but he didn’t want to. Studying the blood arts and sneaking off to secret meetings with Zabini and Nott took up all his time that wasn’t taken up by ordinary classes and homework and trying to figure out the clue in the egg. “No, I’ll figure out a way. I have figured out a way.”
“What, then?” Zabini asked.
Harry smiled at him.
Zabini swore, and broke a quill. Nott tried to coax it out of Harry by what he thought were probably subtle words. Harry ignored both of them.
If he was right, the Second Task took place entirely beneath the surface of the lake, and out of sight. So no one would be able to see what he was doing and interfere. Harry thought it would probably be something special to him that they took, like his Firebolt broom, and he could mark that with his blood and track it down.
If it was a person, a thought Nott had thrown out there and Zabini had shot down but which was possible…
Well, Harry could track them by their blood, too.
*
The whistle for the beginning of the Second Task sounded.
Harry dived beneath the water, casting the Bubble-Head Charm as he went. He didn’t do it well, and it wouldn’t hold out for the whole task, but he could use it for about ten minutes, and that was all he should need. The important thing was that he still had the air inside the charm to speak incantations.
Once he was safely beneath the water and out of sight of the audience, Harry pulled up, floating. He ignored the other Champions, who arrowed past him and disappeared quickly, although he was impressed by Krum’s shark-head Transfiguration. Harry didn’t want to win this, not really. He wanted to survive.
Harry closed his eyes and shaped the incantation on his lips that turned a person’s blood to water. It wasn’t hard when so much water ran in someone’s body already. And then he reversed it, speaking it backwards, and the water all around him turned to a small puddle of blood, whipping red tendrils through the clear.
It started to dissipate immediately, but Harry spoke the incantation again, and again, and again, and a huge puddle of blood built up around him. Harry dived, murmuring and whispering and ignoring the drain on his magic.
With a quiet pop, the Bubble-Head Charm disappeared. Harry lifted his head and breathed—
As easily as air. The blood around him poured into his lungs and sifted out of them again, and he breathed.
Once a wizard or witch mastered a certain amount of this kind of blood arts, they would ensure he or she lived, no matter what.
Harry smiled quietly, and swam down, following the call of Ron’s blood that he had learned to hear and understand. If they had been going to take a person, there wasn’t a large group of them who would actually matter to him.
The blood that had been water danced around him, and he breathed it, and he was free, and whole, and in a few minutes he had grabbed hold of Ron, the ropes parting with a simple Cutting Charm that he mouthed inside the blood. He hadn’t been sure that would work, actually. It was one thing for the blood to allow him to breathe, another for it to allow him to speak. And he hadn’t known the spell would work underwater.
But a certain amount of improvisation was necessary to the skilled user of blood arts.
Harry turned and paddled for the surface, and broke it just as the last traces of his transformed blood danced away. Harry was sure that he could have created more if he’d needed it, buoyed and allowed to speak by those last traces.
Ron coughed as his head broke the surface. “What the hell, mate?” he asked, staring at Harry. “I thought you’d use a Bubble-Head Charm or gillyweed or something!”
“I used a Bubble-Head Charm for a while,” Harry replied, and then swam towards the shore, ignoring the way that Ron was still trying to ask him questions.
It was hard not to swagger as he left the water. He’d done so well, alive and with Ron unscathed and the first of the Champions to make it back, not that that mattered as much as the rest.
He couldn’t find anything to criticize in his own performance.
*
Nott and Zabini, it turned out, didn’t agree.
“You breathed blood underwater?” Zabini said, and folded his arms, glaring at Harry.
They were in their private corner of the library again. It was the one where Harry had found the most books on the blood arts, tucked away and forgotten. He leaned back in his chair now and snorted a little at the way both Slytherins were glaring at him.
“Yes? I changed the water to blood with the reverse of the incantation that turns blood to water, and I knew that magic of that kind won’t let a mage who practices it come to harm. It was an obvious decision.”
“An obvious decision,” Nott mocked to the ceiling in a high-pitched voice.
“You could have died,” Zabini said.
“And I could have died when I faced the dragon,” Harry snapped, and leaned forwards over the table. Both of them looked startled. “That’s what whoever put me in this stupid Tournament wants, isn’t it? I have to figure out ways to survive.”
Nott shook his head and turned away.
“What dearest Theodore means,” Zabini said, ignoring the way that Nott scowled at him for using his first name, “is that you didn’t test this beforehand. You just jumped into it and tried it. You didn’t know it would work.”
“I didn’t know the spell to change blood to darkness worked on dragons before I tried it, either.”
Zabini massaged his brow and muttered something under his breath. Harry tried not to fold his arms and pout, but it was difficult. What did they want from him? Exactly what was he supposed to say, that he was sorry for living?
“We’re learning from you,” Nott said, “but not fast enough. If you die before we learn everything that we can…”
Harry relaxed a little. He understood, now. Nott was desperate to escape—whatever it was he wanted to escape from, and the thought of losing a source of knowledge was terrible to him. “You could continue on with the books. But I do understand what you mean.”
“What are you going to do for the Third Task?” Zabini asked.
“Blood arts.”
“I mean,” Zabini said, leaning nearer and looking as if he would have loved to strangle the life out of Harry given half a chance, “in what capacity?”
“How can I know that until I know what the Third Task is?”
Muttering and sighing, they settled back into something like their normal camaraderie. Harry watched them out of the corner of his eye and saw the tight way that Nott’s fingers closed around a quill, the slashing way Zabini’s mouth seemed to cut across his face.
Yes, all right, perhaps they were sort of friends and it wasn’t just losing a teacher they were worried about.
*
Harry tried desperately to change the blood into his veins to darkness or water as Wormtail came towards him with the knife. If he could just prevent Voldemort from using it—
The knife touched his arm. Harry was out of time, and he didn’t have his wand. He flung his will into his blood, recklessly trying to convey that it could do anything it wanted, just as long as it saved his life.
The blood didn’t do anything to prevent Wormtail from cutting him. Harry sagged back against the headstone.
Then Wormtail shrieked and reeled back with his hands clapped to his face. Harry stared. Blisters were rising on Wormtail’s skin. They spread as Harry watched, and so did burns so severe that Harry half thought he knew what had happened before he even looked down.
His blood had turned into molten lead as it left his veins. It was spraying Wormtail’s feet now, and he shrieked and turned to run, only to slump to the ground. The lead was climbing his arms and swirling around him and consuming him, and Harry could only stare and stare, as the death of the man who had betrayed his parents was seared into his brain far more effectively than Cedric’s death had been.
“Nagini! Kill!”
Voldemort seemed to have decided rescuing Wormtail was useless, and so was using Harry’s blood. The giant snake who had been gliding among the tombstones turned and came for Harry with her fanged mouth gaping.
Harry had only one weapon that he could use. He directed his arm towards her and squeezed the wound Wormtail had cut into him.
The blood spurted, becoming lead on contact with air, but not burning Harry even when he touched it directly. It splattered into the snake’s mouth and drove her back with a high whistling shriek that made Harry wince away from the unnatural sound. She didn’t die, but Harry wouldn’t have expected such a small thing to kill an obviously magical creature.
“Potter!”
Voldemort seemed to be cursing in Parseltongue. Harry didn’t bother stopping to listen. He turned and sprayed the lead-blood across the ropes that tied him to the headstone. It seemed that at least some of them must have already burned through, or he wouldn’t have been able to move at all.
The ropes dissolved under the impact, and so did some of the stone. Harry scrambled to the ground and fell as his legs cramped beneath him. He could see the snake moving towards him again, and Voldemort was also calling, although he didn’t seem to be coming closer. Maybe he couldn’t move the baby-like body Harry knew he was in without someone to carry him.
“Accio wand!” Harry yelled as loudly as he could, even as his head turned in the general direction it was in. He had tagged his wand with blood along with everything else that might have been taken for him in the Second Task, and the mark endured and lingered.
The wand came flying, and Harry scrambled back towards the Triwizard Cup. He hesitated when he saw Cedric’s body. He might be blamed if he didn’t bring back the body.
On the other hand, what would happen if he did bring it back and was accused of Cedric’s murder?
Certainty about what had happened to Cedric might hurt him less than uncertainty, though.
Practicality made Harry grab hold of Cedic and then of the Cup, hoping it would a two-way Portkey like some of the ones Mr. Weasley had talked about this summer, and—
*
“You nearly died.”
Nott’s voice was flat and hopeless-sounding. Harry rolled towards him in the hospital bed. He knew Nott was talking about the way that Harry had been grabbed by a disguised Crouch after the Tournament. That news had leaked all over the school shortly after a Dementor had eaten Crouch’s soul. Harry didn’t know how, but then again, it seemed that a lot of the adults didn’t try very hard to have private conversations. Probably Fudge or Dumbledore or Snape had said something too loudly around the wrong set of ears, and that person had started the gossip spreading.
“Yeah,” Harry said.
“Where did the Portkey take you?” Nott came a step nearer the bed. Harry glanced over his shoulder and saw Zabini leaning against the doorway into the hospital wing, obviously listening.
“It took me to a graveyard where Voldemort tried to use my blood in a resurrection ritual.”
Nott flinched, but more from the name than anything else, Harry thought. Curiously, he’d never thought that they might not believe him. Zabini came a step nearer, and asked, “How did you get away from that?”
“Turned my blood to lead and sprayed it at Wormtail and Voldemort’s snake.”
“Wormtail?”
“Peter Pettigrew. He was there.”
“He’s alive?”
Harry nodded, but said nothing about Sirius’s guilt or innocence. They were both smart enough to get it without that input, and from the silent, intense way they stared at him, Harry knew they would understand.
This way, he could truthfully say that he hadn’t revealed any secrets about Pettigrew and Sirius to anyone else.
Nott and Zabini exchanged significant looks. Then Nott said, his voice deeper and more confident than Harry had ever heard it, “But he didn’t manage to complete the ritual and use your blood to come back.”
“No.”
“Will he?”
“He’ll keep trying to kidnap me and do something like it, I suppose,” Harry said. “I don’t know if he could do the exact same ritual when the only person helping him right now is a snake. Or Pettigrew if he recovers.” Harry was pretty sure Pettigrew was dead, was pretty sure he’d seen him die, but Voldemort had accomplished coming back himself, so maybe he could raise the dead.
Nott and Zabini exchanged another glance. Then Nott reached up and fished something from around his neck. Harry held out a hand without their asking, and Nott dropped what looked like a Sickle on a chain into his hand. Admittedly, Harry could see even in the dim light of the hospital wing that the Sickle had a lot of carving and images on it that didn’t normally come with them.
“A Portkey?” Harry whispered.
“Neither of us have a place where we can transport you without someone in our families finding out,” Zabini said, a trace of apology in his voice. “But it’ll allow you to survive one deadly strike before it breaks. If it breaks, then either Theodore or I can home in on the place where it broke and find you that way.”
Harry half-smiled. Theodore and I. It was the closest Zabini and Nott had come to showing that some kind of friendship was developing between them. He nodded and dropped the Sickle around his neck. “My thanks.”
“Don’t die,” said Nott.
The deep tone of his voice made it almost a command, and the same thing was in Zabini’s gaze. Harry let his smile blossom and widen just a touch. “I won’t.”
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo/Blaise
Content Notes: AU starting in fourth year, violence, gore, angst, minor character death, told as a series of vignettes, underage (teenager/teenager)
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 4700
Summary: Studying for the First Task in his fourth year leads Harry down a different path than merely learning the Summoning Charm. And he finds two people who want to walk it with him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice series” chaptered fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. LukeJames requested a fic about Harry/Theo/Blaise starting to learn blood arts in their fourth year and becoming more powerful. The title refers to the toughness of jade and its association with nobility and wealth in some mythologies. This will have a second part, to be posted tomorrow.
Jade Hearts
Harry took a book on dragons from the shelf, and another one shifted behind it and thumped on the floor. Harry picked it up, glancing nervously over his shoulder in case Madam Pince heard and came charging over to ban him from the library.
Then he looked down at the book’s title and froze.
The Properties of Darkest Blood.
And on the cover was a bleeding dragon with a triumphant-looking man standing next to it.
Harry went to read the book at the table in the back of the library where he sat whenever Hermione wasn’t with him (she was off spending time with Ron that day), Summoning Charm forgotten.
*
Harry walked out to stand in front of the dragon with his head held high.
He could feel his heart beating wildly. This would change everything. People would want to know where he had got the magic. But he was going to do it anyway. The book on blood magic had so consumed him that he hadn’t had time to come up with another plan.
If it failed, well…he could still try the Summoning Charm and call for his Firebolt. But then he would probably be dead.
Harry felt iron calm settle in him as the Hungarian Horntail reared and screamed at him. He was actually glad that he had drawn her instead of the Chinese Fireball or one of the others. Horntails were wilder, more dangerous, Darker, according to the book. Harry could summon the darkness in her blood to incapacitate her more easily than he could have with a calmer dragon or one that breathed hotter fire.
He waited until the magic built up in him and then lifted his wand. “Nox sanguinis,” he breathed.
The magic surged out of him, so powerful that it made Harry fall to his knees. He lifted his head, wondering hazily for a moment if he would even spot the dragon coming for him if he’d failed.
The Horntail screamed as his spell slammed into her, looking like a whirling tornado of black lace. And then she screamed again as the blood in her veins thickened and turned to pure darkness, and trembled as she lurched back and forth above her eggs.
Harry experienced a distant pity. He didn’t really want to kill her or harm her eggs. But he wanted to live more. And the Dragon-Keepers and everyone else who had organized the Tournament had thought it was okay to bring these mother dragons to Britain and pit them against the Champions, so maybe it was okay in that sense.
No one had tried to help him, except Hermione, who’d helped him practice the Summoning Charm, and Hagrid, who’d shown him the dragons.
No one else.
He had to look out for himself.
The dragon slumped forwards, her veins shining darkly through her leathery skin for a second. Then she was gone, and her body dissolved into a mist of darkness, hovering above her eggs.
In the burst of silence that followed, Harry walked over and calmly picked up the golden egg.
Noise followed that. But Harry was more interested in the sensation of eyes watching him from the stands. He looked up, but the crowd was too dense, and too many people had a reason to stare at him right now. He didn’t know who was looking.
It didn’t matter. He was alive.
*
Harry paused as he stepped off the bottom of the moving staircase that led up to the Headmaster’s office. Of course Dumbledore had called him up to give him a disappointed stare and tell Harry that such “Dark magic” wasn’t worth the price of a dragon’s life.
Harry had asked him whether it was the worth the price of Harry’s life. Dumbledore had stared at him and said firmly, “You would not have died.”
How he knew that was beyond Harry.
But as if that wasn’t enough, there were two people waiting for him at the bottom of the staircase and trying to look as if they weren’t. Harry knew one of them for sure. Blaise Zabini, the handsomest of the Slytherins in Harry’s year and also the one with the darkest rumors swirling around him.
The other one…right, that was Theodore Nott. Harry remembered him mostly as a pale, quiet boy who always seemed to be in Malfoy’s shadow and half the time just stared at the professors when they called on him.
They were trying to ignore each other, too, Harry saw. Strange. He’d had the impression that the Slytherins in his year were a pretty tight pack. He shoved his hands into his pockets, touching his wand, and asked, “What do you want?”
“To talk about the magic that you used on the dragon.” Nott’s voice was quieter but also higher-pitched than Harry had thought it would be.
“Yeah? So does everyone else.”
“But we,” Zabini said, “want to know where you learned it.”
“So does everyone else,” Harry took some pleasure in repeating.
“And we,” Nott said, glancing at Zabini and taking a little step away, “want to help you get better at it.”
Harry felt his eyes widen, which probably meant they’d won. But now he was pretty sure whose eyes he’d felt staring at him from the stands during the First Task.
And he smiled.
*
It turned out that Nott and Zabini had their own motives, of course.
Nott wanted to protect himself from a father he never talked about in detail, but whose existence made his whole face tighten. Zabini was in the shadow of his mother and said only that she was good at poisons and he wanted to be good at something different.
Harry decided that it wasn’t really his business if they didn’t want to explain their reasons fully. He lived under the shadow of Voldemort. He sort of understood.
And as long as they didn’t try to drag him away to Voldemort, he had no objection of studying with them. If they did try…
Well, Harry was still better at the blood arts than they were.
That was what they were called, the blood arts, or the Arts of the Highest and Darkest Blood, according to a book that Nott turned up with one day and handed to Harry and Zabini without explanation. Apparently, ordinary blood magic just meant that you could use your blood to draw things or in rituals or to seal and guard things. But blood arts like the kind that they were studying involved changing blood into other things.
Darkness. Water. Boiling lead.
*
The first time Zabini asked to experiment on Harry, Harry raised his eyebrows at him and leaned back. They were at their private table in the library, tucked away in a corner and warded with a drifting mist of darkness Harry had spilled his own blood to enchant. It was sort of like “ordinary” blood magic, except for the part where the mist wouldn’t just keep people out but would grab their minds and take them away into darkness.
“How do I know that you wouldn’t kill me?”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“Yeah, but you might anyway. You’re not experienced like me.”
“You killed one dragon,” Zabini argued, leaning forwards. Harry smiled at him and let the words hover and die in the silence of the library. Zabini paused, then sighed. “Fine. It’s sort of…I just want to make sure I can do it.”
Harry let himself be convinced and laid his arm on the table, palm tilted upwards. “Go on, then.”
Zabini drew his wand and focused on Harry’s arm. Harry closed his eyes. He could feel a sharp tingling making its way up towards his fingers, under the skin. He glanced down and saw his veins flowing with darkness, the way he had made the dragon’s do.
Zabini made a soft shocked sound and lost control of the magic. Harry watched the darkness snap back down his arm, and lifted his eyes to Zabini’s.
Zabini had his hands braced on the edge of the table, and looked as if he might bolt. Harry shook his head a little. “It didn’t hurt,” he said. “I suspect that’s one reason it’s such dangerous magic. You wouldn’t even know that you were dying before your blood changed.”
“The dragon knew she was dying,” Zabini whispered.
“She was bigger. Or maybe she was more sensitive to magic, or something.” Harry tilted his head back. “Planning on fighting a lot of dragons, Zabini?”
“At least one.”
Zabini’s eyes were dark and complicated. Harry reached across the table and carefully squeezed his hand.
*
Nott studied the incantation that would change blood to boiling lead with a focus that not even Zabini had shown.
Harry leaned a shoulder on the bookcase and watched him. Nott stepped back from the book and closed his eyes. Harry thought he would trace his wand through the movements and whisper the incantation, given that he couldn’t do anything else. There was no one to practice on.
But instead, Nott pressed his wand against his arm and whispered it. Then he screamed, a short sound that immediately cut off.
Harry hurtled across the distance between them and grabbed Nott’s arm, staring down. The blood felt normal to his senses when he extended them, magical senses that he hadn’t even known he had until after the first time he cast blood arts spells. It was sort of like having a magical net spread all around him that was attuned to people’s blood.
Harry didn’t think that Nott had messed up the spell, though. He’d probably lost control of it when he started to suffer, and the lead had reverted to blood.
“What were you thinking?” Harry snapped, shoving Nott so that he ended up against the bookcases in almost the same position Harry had taken a few minutes before. Harry shook him, hard enough that Nott’s head snapped back and forth. Harry’s heart was pounding fast, so furiously that he was panting. “What were you…you idiot!”
“I didn’t want to test it on you or Zabini,” Nott whispered, his grey eyes wide and shadowed. Harry stared at him and decided that it wasn’t indifference or arrogance that had carved the lines Nott had on his face. It was desperation. “I didn’t want to just practice it and never do it. I have to know I can do it, when I need it. So I did this.”
“You…” Harry pushed away from Nott and ran a hand through his hair. “So you practice on an animal.”
Nott blinked and looked a lot more human than he usually did. “Oh. I didn’t think of that.”
“Obviously.”
Nott’s mouth twitched when Harry glanced at him. “You’d be willing to watch that?”
“I killed a dragon. Whatever you’re trying to survive, I think it’s at least as bad as the Tournament.”
All traces of a smile vanished from Nott’s face. “Yeah, you have that right,” he said, so quietly that Harry would have missed the words if he’d been pacing the way he wanted to. “I—how are your friends taking this, Potter?”
Harry accepted the subject change. He would just Transfigure a cup into a mouse or something and bring it with him next time. “Not well,” he said shortly. “What about yours?”
Nott’s mouth curled again, his eyes getting more shadowed. “You presume I have friends, Potter.”
*
Ron and Hermione didn’t hate him. But they didn’t understand.
Hermione had asked Harry where he’d found that spell, and he’d lied and said he’d studied so many books he didn’t remember. Mostly, he just didn’t want them to find the book and take it away. Besides, as Nott and Zabini said, a lot of people did know about that kind of blood arts even if they didn’t practice it themselves. They could find out if they really wanted to.
But no one came and took the books from the library. Harry wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Ron was more straightforward. Harry had accepted his apology after the First Task, because being alive meant so much more to him than a silly fight. But he’d also said, “I don’t think you ought to be doing that kind of magic, mate.”
“I would have died without it.”
“The others didn’t.”
“I don’t have the kind of skill in Transfiguration or curses that they had. And I’m not a Veela.”
“All the same…”
All their conversations went like that, circling around the main point, which was that Ron wanted him to stop studying this and Harry wouldn’t. But Ron wouldn’t outright forbid him from doing it. Harry didn’t know if that was because Ron had no idea how Dark this kind of magic really was or if he was scared about driving Harry away again.
It didn’t matter that much. Harry got consequences he could ignore, and he kept on learning.
*
For the Second Task, after Harry had figured out the clue in the golden egg and told them about it, Nott and Zabini exchanged looks at the library table. Then they tried to pretend they hadn’t.
Harry hid a smile. It was endlessly hilarious to him how they both kept insisting they weren’t really friends, which meant they got upset at themselves and each other whenever they acted like it.
“How can you use blood arts to find something hidden below the lake?” Zabini asked, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t think merfolk have blood that’s exactly the same as ours. And you don’t know how the magic would affect it if it isn’t. And they might not know where your hidden object is anyway.”
“He could just use ordinary magic,” Nott said, but his eyes were shadowed. “He could use the Bubble-Head Charm to let himself keep breathing underwater.”
“I’ve tried it already, and I suck at it,” Harry announced. It was true that he could have got better at it if he practiced, but he didn’t want to. Studying the blood arts and sneaking off to secret meetings with Zabini and Nott took up all his time that wasn’t taken up by ordinary classes and homework and trying to figure out the clue in the egg. “No, I’ll figure out a way. I have figured out a way.”
“What, then?” Zabini asked.
Harry smiled at him.
Zabini swore, and broke a quill. Nott tried to coax it out of Harry by what he thought were probably subtle words. Harry ignored both of them.
If he was right, the Second Task took place entirely beneath the surface of the lake, and out of sight. So no one would be able to see what he was doing and interfere. Harry thought it would probably be something special to him that they took, like his Firebolt broom, and he could mark that with his blood and track it down.
If it was a person, a thought Nott had thrown out there and Zabini had shot down but which was possible…
Well, Harry could track them by their blood, too.
*
The whistle for the beginning of the Second Task sounded.
Harry dived beneath the water, casting the Bubble-Head Charm as he went. He didn’t do it well, and it wouldn’t hold out for the whole task, but he could use it for about ten minutes, and that was all he should need. The important thing was that he still had the air inside the charm to speak incantations.
Once he was safely beneath the water and out of sight of the audience, Harry pulled up, floating. He ignored the other Champions, who arrowed past him and disappeared quickly, although he was impressed by Krum’s shark-head Transfiguration. Harry didn’t want to win this, not really. He wanted to survive.
Harry closed his eyes and shaped the incantation on his lips that turned a person’s blood to water. It wasn’t hard when so much water ran in someone’s body already. And then he reversed it, speaking it backwards, and the water all around him turned to a small puddle of blood, whipping red tendrils through the clear.
It started to dissipate immediately, but Harry spoke the incantation again, and again, and again, and a huge puddle of blood built up around him. Harry dived, murmuring and whispering and ignoring the drain on his magic.
With a quiet pop, the Bubble-Head Charm disappeared. Harry lifted his head and breathed—
As easily as air. The blood around him poured into his lungs and sifted out of them again, and he breathed.
Once a wizard or witch mastered a certain amount of this kind of blood arts, they would ensure he or she lived, no matter what.
Harry smiled quietly, and swam down, following the call of Ron’s blood that he had learned to hear and understand. If they had been going to take a person, there wasn’t a large group of them who would actually matter to him.
The blood that had been water danced around him, and he breathed it, and he was free, and whole, and in a few minutes he had grabbed hold of Ron, the ropes parting with a simple Cutting Charm that he mouthed inside the blood. He hadn’t been sure that would work, actually. It was one thing for the blood to allow him to breathe, another for it to allow him to speak. And he hadn’t known the spell would work underwater.
But a certain amount of improvisation was necessary to the skilled user of blood arts.
Harry turned and paddled for the surface, and broke it just as the last traces of his transformed blood danced away. Harry was sure that he could have created more if he’d needed it, buoyed and allowed to speak by those last traces.
Ron coughed as his head broke the surface. “What the hell, mate?” he asked, staring at Harry. “I thought you’d use a Bubble-Head Charm or gillyweed or something!”
“I used a Bubble-Head Charm for a while,” Harry replied, and then swam towards the shore, ignoring the way that Ron was still trying to ask him questions.
It was hard not to swagger as he left the water. He’d done so well, alive and with Ron unscathed and the first of the Champions to make it back, not that that mattered as much as the rest.
He couldn’t find anything to criticize in his own performance.
*
Nott and Zabini, it turned out, didn’t agree.
“You breathed blood underwater?” Zabini said, and folded his arms, glaring at Harry.
They were in their private corner of the library again. It was the one where Harry had found the most books on the blood arts, tucked away and forgotten. He leaned back in his chair now and snorted a little at the way both Slytherins were glaring at him.
“Yes? I changed the water to blood with the reverse of the incantation that turns blood to water, and I knew that magic of that kind won’t let a mage who practices it come to harm. It was an obvious decision.”
“An obvious decision,” Nott mocked to the ceiling in a high-pitched voice.
“You could have died,” Zabini said.
“And I could have died when I faced the dragon,” Harry snapped, and leaned forwards over the table. Both of them looked startled. “That’s what whoever put me in this stupid Tournament wants, isn’t it? I have to figure out ways to survive.”
Nott shook his head and turned away.
“What dearest Theodore means,” Zabini said, ignoring the way that Nott scowled at him for using his first name, “is that you didn’t test this beforehand. You just jumped into it and tried it. You didn’t know it would work.”
“I didn’t know the spell to change blood to darkness worked on dragons before I tried it, either.”
Zabini massaged his brow and muttered something under his breath. Harry tried not to fold his arms and pout, but it was difficult. What did they want from him? Exactly what was he supposed to say, that he was sorry for living?
“We’re learning from you,” Nott said, “but not fast enough. If you die before we learn everything that we can…”
Harry relaxed a little. He understood, now. Nott was desperate to escape—whatever it was he wanted to escape from, and the thought of losing a source of knowledge was terrible to him. “You could continue on with the books. But I do understand what you mean.”
“What are you going to do for the Third Task?” Zabini asked.
“Blood arts.”
“I mean,” Zabini said, leaning nearer and looking as if he would have loved to strangle the life out of Harry given half a chance, “in what capacity?”
“How can I know that until I know what the Third Task is?”
Muttering and sighing, they settled back into something like their normal camaraderie. Harry watched them out of the corner of his eye and saw the tight way that Nott’s fingers closed around a quill, the slashing way Zabini’s mouth seemed to cut across his face.
Yes, all right, perhaps they were sort of friends and it wasn’t just losing a teacher they were worried about.
*
Harry tried desperately to change the blood into his veins to darkness or water as Wormtail came towards him with the knife. If he could just prevent Voldemort from using it—
The knife touched his arm. Harry was out of time, and he didn’t have his wand. He flung his will into his blood, recklessly trying to convey that it could do anything it wanted, just as long as it saved his life.
The blood didn’t do anything to prevent Wormtail from cutting him. Harry sagged back against the headstone.
Then Wormtail shrieked and reeled back with his hands clapped to his face. Harry stared. Blisters were rising on Wormtail’s skin. They spread as Harry watched, and so did burns so severe that Harry half thought he knew what had happened before he even looked down.
His blood had turned into molten lead as it left his veins. It was spraying Wormtail’s feet now, and he shrieked and turned to run, only to slump to the ground. The lead was climbing his arms and swirling around him and consuming him, and Harry could only stare and stare, as the death of the man who had betrayed his parents was seared into his brain far more effectively than Cedric’s death had been.
“Nagini! Kill!”
Voldemort seemed to have decided rescuing Wormtail was useless, and so was using Harry’s blood. The giant snake who had been gliding among the tombstones turned and came for Harry with her fanged mouth gaping.
Harry had only one weapon that he could use. He directed his arm towards her and squeezed the wound Wormtail had cut into him.
The blood spurted, becoming lead on contact with air, but not burning Harry even when he touched it directly. It splattered into the snake’s mouth and drove her back with a high whistling shriek that made Harry wince away from the unnatural sound. She didn’t die, but Harry wouldn’t have expected such a small thing to kill an obviously magical creature.
“Potter!”
Voldemort seemed to be cursing in Parseltongue. Harry didn’t bother stopping to listen. He turned and sprayed the lead-blood across the ropes that tied him to the headstone. It seemed that at least some of them must have already burned through, or he wouldn’t have been able to move at all.
The ropes dissolved under the impact, and so did some of the stone. Harry scrambled to the ground and fell as his legs cramped beneath him. He could see the snake moving towards him again, and Voldemort was also calling, although he didn’t seem to be coming closer. Maybe he couldn’t move the baby-like body Harry knew he was in without someone to carry him.
“Accio wand!” Harry yelled as loudly as he could, even as his head turned in the general direction it was in. He had tagged his wand with blood along with everything else that might have been taken for him in the Second Task, and the mark endured and lingered.
The wand came flying, and Harry scrambled back towards the Triwizard Cup. He hesitated when he saw Cedric’s body. He might be blamed if he didn’t bring back the body.
On the other hand, what would happen if he did bring it back and was accused of Cedric’s murder?
Certainty about what had happened to Cedric might hurt him less than uncertainty, though.
Practicality made Harry grab hold of Cedic and then of the Cup, hoping it would a two-way Portkey like some of the ones Mr. Weasley had talked about this summer, and—
*
“You nearly died.”
Nott’s voice was flat and hopeless-sounding. Harry rolled towards him in the hospital bed. He knew Nott was talking about the way that Harry had been grabbed by a disguised Crouch after the Tournament. That news had leaked all over the school shortly after a Dementor had eaten Crouch’s soul. Harry didn’t know how, but then again, it seemed that a lot of the adults didn’t try very hard to have private conversations. Probably Fudge or Dumbledore or Snape had said something too loudly around the wrong set of ears, and that person had started the gossip spreading.
“Yeah,” Harry said.
“Where did the Portkey take you?” Nott came a step nearer the bed. Harry glanced over his shoulder and saw Zabini leaning against the doorway into the hospital wing, obviously listening.
“It took me to a graveyard where Voldemort tried to use my blood in a resurrection ritual.”
Nott flinched, but more from the name than anything else, Harry thought. Curiously, he’d never thought that they might not believe him. Zabini came a step nearer, and asked, “How did you get away from that?”
“Turned my blood to lead and sprayed it at Wormtail and Voldemort’s snake.”
“Wormtail?”
“Peter Pettigrew. He was there.”
“He’s alive?”
Harry nodded, but said nothing about Sirius’s guilt or innocence. They were both smart enough to get it without that input, and from the silent, intense way they stared at him, Harry knew they would understand.
This way, he could truthfully say that he hadn’t revealed any secrets about Pettigrew and Sirius to anyone else.
Nott and Zabini exchanged significant looks. Then Nott said, his voice deeper and more confident than Harry had ever heard it, “But he didn’t manage to complete the ritual and use your blood to come back.”
“No.”
“Will he?”
“He’ll keep trying to kidnap me and do something like it, I suppose,” Harry said. “I don’t know if he could do the exact same ritual when the only person helping him right now is a snake. Or Pettigrew if he recovers.” Harry was pretty sure Pettigrew was dead, was pretty sure he’d seen him die, but Voldemort had accomplished coming back himself, so maybe he could raise the dead.
Nott and Zabini exchanged another glance. Then Nott reached up and fished something from around his neck. Harry held out a hand without their asking, and Nott dropped what looked like a Sickle on a chain into his hand. Admittedly, Harry could see even in the dim light of the hospital wing that the Sickle had a lot of carving and images on it that didn’t normally come with them.
“A Portkey?” Harry whispered.
“Neither of us have a place where we can transport you without someone in our families finding out,” Zabini said, a trace of apology in his voice. “But it’ll allow you to survive one deadly strike before it breaks. If it breaks, then either Theodore or I can home in on the place where it broke and find you that way.”
Harry half-smiled. Theodore and I. It was the closest Zabini and Nott had come to showing that some kind of friendship was developing between them. He nodded and dropped the Sickle around his neck. “My thanks.”
“Don’t die,” said Nott.
The deep tone of his voice made it almost a command, and the same thing was in Zabini’s gaze. Harry let his smile blossom and widen just a touch. “I won’t.”
