lomonaaeren

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Chapter Forty-Six—Leopard’s Eyes

I notice that you haven’t yet come up with a plan that would make it viable for you to take your littermate’s father from his keeper.

Harry opens his eyes. The shadow leopard has appeared above the hearth in the Slytherin common room, the place it occupies most of the time when it comes to visit Harry. Harry watches as it flows down the walls and pounces to the floor, stretching long legs, grey talons rippling out of the paws, cat-like.

It is not a cat. Never forget that, he tells himself.

Harry inclines his head. “If I asked Lyassa for access to him, she would know something was wrong at once. I wondered if I might call on you to lend me your assistance?”

The leopard stalks a little closer, tail lashing in the air. What is this? Have you grown to depend on me?

“I want this to succeed. It has to, for Theo.” Harry wills his extreme belief in this and devotion to Theo to well down and fill his words. He thinks it works. The leopard halts, appeased, and cocks its head. “I don’t have any other way to save him from the Soul-Breaker except for the ritual sacrifice, and you know that the sacrifice has to have a connection to Theo. His father is the only one alive who has that kind of connection.”

You could, of course, sacrifice yourself. You have the connection of loyalty and friendship.

“I need people to help with the ritual who would intervene if they saw me about to do that. They won’t intervene with Tarquinius.”

The leopard laughs softly, a sound that runs up and down Harry’s spine like a hundred ants. Ah, yes. I did forget that. And what will you give me if I free Tarquinius from the control of your Speaker?

“I thought you were already getting what you wanted,” Harry hisses, flinching for a second. “My cooperation and my corruption, so that the Speakers don’t have an uncorrupted Parselmouth in the world.”

I do not wish to corrupt you. I wish only to help you.

The leopard snaps and stretches towards him like a great cloth, and Harry flinches again as the whiskered nose suddenly appears right in his face. Lion gives an unhappy little hiss, but he no longer tries to participate in the conversations between Harry and the leopard. He just clings to Harry’s shoulder and watches.

“I know you think that’s what you’re trying to do…”

But I have been the greatest enemy of the Speakers as long as they have existed, and they have been good to you. You do not know how to reconcile the ambiguity.

Harry nods, fidgeting, his eyes on his hands. He hates speaking like this, flinching like this, cringing like this. But if the leopard doesn’t underestimate him, then it might think he’s rebelling against its plans.

Which he is.

But only sometimes.

The leopard nuzzles his face, a wash of prickling cold that makes Harry flinch a third time. You can trust me. You can trust that I am getting exactly what I want out of this, and you do not have the power to make me regret it.

Abruptly, it pulls away from Harry and flows back atop the mantel, as if it’s no more than an ordinary flame-shadow, or even a cat who likes to doze there. How much trouble have you had finding a jewel of sufficient size?

“You still haven’t really told me the right size, you know. I’ve just shown you the ones I’ve found and you’ve said they’re not enough.”

They need value. In your eyes as well as the eyes of other wizards and witches. For a moment, a grey shadow twitches like a tail. And in mine.

“If you would just give me some guidance—”

I have. More than anyone else has ever received from me.

Harry exhales shortly. “All right. Then I’ll try again to find a jewel and bring it to you in the common room tomorrow. I can’t promise that it’ll be the right one. I need to owl-order it, and that takes a while.”

The leopard yawns, a flash of light that cuts through the shadow of it as if someone is kindling a fire deep inside it. As if it’s the hearth. I will look at it and tell you what I think of it. Tomorrow. Go to bed, child.

Harry stands, his gut churning. He hates the leopard, hates everything about it, wishes he could reach out and find something solid to strangle with his hands around its throat.

And that won’t do. He can’t lose his temper before the ritual where he intends to have the leopard and Tarquinius there. All it would do is melt back into literal shadow and probably strike at him from behind when he isn’t anticipating it.

“All right,” he hisses, and turns around to climb the stairs. He’s sure that the leopard briefly laughs behind him.

If it can do anything so human, of course.

*

“Harry, you’re worrying me.”

Hermione watches the way that Harry pauses outside the Room of Requirement and spends a moment rubbing his scar. That’s worrying, too. He hasn’t talked about it hurting lately, and it hasn’t bled, and Voldemort hasn’t possessed him, but Hermione is sure that his link to the evil bastard is only dormant, not gone.

She and Theo have stepped up their research into Horcruxes. It’s one of the few things that Theo seems able to concentrate on.

But there aren’t that many books left to read on it, honestly, even though Sirius has sent them some from the library at Grimmauld Place. The lack of knowledge nags and bites at Hermione, making her frantic and furious by turns.

“Why am I worrying you?”

Hermione forces her thoughts away from Horcruxes and back to Harry. He’s gazing at her with impatience, hands on his hips. Already she can see some of the Slytherins lingering down the corridor, waiting for him.

This might be the only time for a week or more that she’ll have to talk to him in private. Sometimes Hermione wishes Harry was in Gryffindor again for the sheer convenience of being able to talk to him in the same House.

And sometimes she thinks that it would be better for Harry, even if not for everyone who’s chosen to cling to him for protection.

“You’re so focused. Are you thinking about what you’re doing? About what teaching your Gift to other people will mean?”

Harry focuses entirely on her at that statement. Hermione can feel herself trembling a little. But she lifts her chin and keeps staring back, because the day she lets one of her best friends scare her out of doing the right thing is the day she breaks her wand.

“What do you mean?”

“Your Gift is—savage, Harry. You know that. You can teach it to someone so they can apply it to a Patronus, but what happens if they teach it to a Death Eater? If they apply it to something other than a Patronus? I wouldn’t hold you responsible for that in the same way as I would the person doing it, but it’s still a terrible thing making its way into the world, you know?”

Harry nods a little, and then he flicks his wand and raises a Silencing Charm around them. Hermione starts a little. It’s as intense and focused as his gaze. She can actually feel the magic involved humming against her skin.

“Don’t tell anyone this right now, all right? Severus and Sirius are the only ones who know about it.”

“Okay.”

“I can teach them the Gift, and I can take it away again.”

“What?” Hermione whispers. Harry didn’t even hint at something like that when he started teaching their study group a few weeks ago, which means—

She doesn’t want to know what it means if Harry has started distrusting even people who are so close to them, but she thinks she’ll have to.

Harry smiles in a way that stains his face. “If someone teaches it to a Death Eater, say, I can take the Gift from the Death Eater and from the person who betrayed us. It’s not done that often, from what I can find, because it damages the magic of the person I take it from. But I wouldn’t care about doing that to Death Eaters, and I would only care about doing that to a traitor if they were under the Imperius Curse or something like that.”

“Do you know how you sounded just now when you said the word traitor?”

“How did I sound?”

Harry sounds genuinely curious, so Hermione takes a deep breath and tells him. “As if you couldn’t wait to rip those—traitors—to pieces.”

“I wouldn’t be able to wait.”

“But this—where are you even getting your information about the Potter Gift, Harry? What tests are you conducting? I thought you hadn’t read any books about it.”

Harry tilts his head and examines her in a way Hermione can’t remember him doing before. She stands there and hopes to pass this test of his, whatever it is. She has to pass it. If Harry is alone without someone there to be a voice of reason, which she fears none of the Slytherins are capable of doing…

“I tested it.”

“How?”

“I taught it to a snake that the Speakers conjured for me. Then I ripped it back. The snake’s magic was visibly damaged. Lyassa showed me.”

Hermione pauses. She supposes testing that kind of thing on a snake is better than testing it on a human, and a conjured snake at that, which is probably a lot like the Transfigured animals they make from buttons and the like. Hermione hasn’t ever worried about those animals, because they didn’t exist before the Transfiguration and won’t exist afterwards. She has more of a qualm about the ones who are animals first, and the many animals whose ingredients are used in Potions making.

“You promise me that you did it?”

“Yes.”

“And Lyassa thought this would work on a human?”

“Yes.”

For long moments, Hermione searches Harry’s face. He continues to look back at her, and he doesn’t seem mental. Not exactly like the friend she knew their first few years here, but at some point, she has to trust him, doesn’t she?

Hermione sighs and nods. “Just—be careful, all right, Harry?” And before he can say anything or try to fob her off with something that won’t be sincere, she flings her arms around him and holds him, tight.

Harry freezes in surprise. But then he tentatively puts his arms around her and pats her back. It’s not the kind of fierce hug he gave her a few times, either, but Hermione isn’t the naive girl of their first years here. She can’t blame anyone for changing.

“Thanks for always being there, Hermione.”

Hermione gives him a tremulous smile, and then turns and runs away. She has the library to get to. She has a few ideas for more places to look—books that wouldn’t give them information about the Horcruxes directly, but might give them information that can still apply.

And she wants to leave before she starts doubting Harry, despite herself.

*

“The girl that smells of ink is very strange.”

Harry shakes his head, staring after Hermione. “I think I’m the strange one, Lion. I’ve changed in ways that my friends didn’t expect, and that makes them worried about me.”

“Your Gift is worrying. You should talk to the Speakers about it again.”

“We did that test with the conjured snake. That’s what I was telling Hermione about. And taking the magic away from the snake did work exactly the way I said.”

“It may be different with a human.”

Harry nods slowly, raising his hand to trace his finger around the outside of Lion’s wing. That’s true enough. He hasn’t tested it with a human, and maybe it would have more consequences than just damaging their magic.

The problem is, if they’re a traitor to him and his?

Harry doesn’t think he really cares.

*

You have the gemstone. You took an extra day to get it.

“I know, but it turned out the lapidary I ordered it from didn’t have one of the right size on hand. It took an extra day. It couldn’t be helped.”

Harry hopes that his tone is right as he unfolds his hand to show the shadow-leopard the bright, jagged emerald shining in his palm. He has to be desperate, but sounding as he’s trying to be aloof and cool and above it all. Trying, and failing.

He doesn’t know if he succeeds, but the leopard at least deigns to leap down from the mantel above the Slytherin hearth and prowl over to him, whiskers extended as it sniffs delicately at the jewel. Harry can’t feel anything, col or delicate or otherwise.

It may do.

“The size should be sufficient, for what I paid for it,” Harry grumbles. He did use some of the Black Galleons for it, although Sirius knows precisely what he spent them on. He didn’t question Harry. He probably thinks it’s some kind of Slytherin thing. Or maybe he hopes that Harry is buying it for some lucky girl.

Harry doesn’t think that will ever happen, but as long as Sirius doesn’t realize what’s really going on, he’ll be fine.

It will do, the shadow-leopard says, considering it from several different angles. Why did you choose an emerald?

“The color green stands out to me. Everyone talks about the color of my eyes. It’s the color of the curse that Voldemort used to mark me. It’s the color of some snakes. I thought the symbolic value of the gem might be important.”

It is, the leopard says, and its tail twitches slowly back and forth a moment before it leaps onto the mantel. But I did not tell you that.

“You didn’t tell me a hell of a lot.”

I could cease to help you.

Harry sucks in a sharp, panicked breath that he doesn’t need to feign at all. He needs the leopard to keep helping him, or he stands no chance of healing Theo. “No. Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Sorry.”

The leopard studies him for a moment with invisible eyes and a trailing grey paw that obscures the fire. Then it snaps the paw back into itself and stands. Apology accepted. I will come tomorrow night to teach you the beginning movements of the ritual.

“Thank you,” Harry whispers, and waits until the leopard has departed, although it probably doesn’t matter, to start shaking and put his hand over his face.

Everything is so close to the edge now. He can’t let this ritual collapse or drive the leopard away just when he might be on the verge of really helping Theo. He can’t.

*

“What do you think you’re doing, my lord?”

Theo thinks he’s speaking the way he used to with Harry when he had all his memories and wasn’t a half-broken husk of himself. But maybe not, given the blank stare he gets from Harry.

“Coming back from the bathroom?” Harry asks slowly, glancing around as if he expects someone else to emerge from behind their closed bedcurtains and question him.

Theo sighs. He deliberately chose a time after the others went to sleep to speak with Harry, and raised a few Silencing Charms that he still remembers. How he remembers spells is odd; sometimes the words are on his lips while his hands falter to a stop, and other times his hands make movements he must have made before while his words are stumbling around and fading.

But this time, they worked. He leans forwards a little. “Plotting with the leopard, my lord.”

“Oh. That.”

Theo doesn’t miss the way that Harry’s eyes dart to the shadows on the wall near the fireplace. He frowns. Does Harry think the leopard could be lurking in every shadow, intending to listen to them no matter what they’re saying?

Well, yes. He probably does think that. And he’s probably right. At the very least, Theo can’t afford to act as though Harry’s paranoid.

He takes a little step back and asks, “Do you think I would want you to endanger yourself even to fix me?”

“No.”

“Well, then—”

“I’m not endangering myself.” Harry speaks lightly, his eyes once again darting to the shadows gathered around the hearth. “I promise.”

“Who are you endangering?”

Harry’s smile deepens, and he gives a little nod, as if glad that Theo has managed to guess the right way to phrase things. “Your father,” he says, on less than a sigh of breath.

Theo clenches his hand. He still doesn’t remember everything his father did to him; some of those things have fallen between the cracks in his memories, and he doesn’t know if they’ll return. But he remembers his mother. He remembers his efforts to kill his father, and what succeeded, and what did not.

“You don’t have to kill him,” Theo says. “I know that that Speaker feels he’s more valuable under her control.”

“She’s never said so in so many words,” Harry says, and his eyes grow brighter and darker at the same time. Lion curls around his neck and watches Theo with flat, bright eyes of his own. “And he’s worth less than you are, Theo, even if he matters to her plans.”

Theo blinks a little. Then he blinks a little more.

He hasn’t grasped all the emotions and memories that he had before the Soul-Breaker Curse. He doesn’t know if they will return, either, even if they were important to him before.

But suddenly, he understands how he and Harry could be friends, and not just follower and lord.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You’re welcome.”

Harry gives Theo a final smile and walks over to drop into his bed and pull the curtains around him. Theo sits up for a while, and turns over the revelation in his head.

If I can understand things with my new experiences, I don’t have to mourn the old ones so much.