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lomonaaerenTitle: A Path of Stones and Thorns
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Eventual Harry/Draco/Theo, references to canon pairings
Content Notes: AU (Slytherin Harry), Neville is the Boy-Who-Lived, Potters live, angst, drama, blood prejudice, violence, Dark Harry, bullying, references to child abuse
Rating: R
Summary: AU. Harry Grayson comes to Hogwarts, knowing himself the bastard son of a Muggle woman, his Aunt Petunia’s sister, and an unknown father. When he’s Sorted into Slytherin, the only Muggleborn there, he does what he has to to survive. If that means allying with Slytherins who are willing to overlook his blood for how useful he can be to them, that’s what Harry will do. Honestly, he considers himself lucky to find as much joy as he does along the way.
Author’s Notes: This is a new fic based on a request for the backstory of my one-shot “The Peculiarities of Professor Potter.” You should read that first; it details how Lily and James Potter accidentally magically disowned Harry and left him to grow up in the Muggle world, considering himself a Muggleborn, while the same magic prevented them from telling the truth. This should be fifteen chapters long. The title is a variation of a quote by Kahlil Gabran: “March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.”
A Path of Stones and Thorns
“Grayson, Harry!”
Harry took a step forwards. His stomach was churning, but he didn’t care. He had to resist the temptation to throw up. That would make him look weak. He’d eavesdropped on several conversations between purebloods on the train, moving between groups so that no one would really notice he was new, and they’d all said the same thing.
They hated Muggleborns, which he was. They expected them to be weak and pathetic and of no account. They looked down on them. They laughed at them.
A few people had hinted at doing worse things, too. Harry might not have recognized those shadowy hints, but he’d had years of the Dursleys laughing about him in the same way with their neighbors.
The purebloods would do their version of Harry Hunting at Hogwarts if Harry didn’t put them off. Except worse, because they had magic.
Harry was going to have to show them right away how strong he was, blood or no.
He sat down under the Sorting Hat, and the Hat gave a little hum. Then it said, “SLYTHERIN!”
Harry’s heart thumped hard as he stood and handed the Hat back to Professor Potter, who looked beyond surprised. No one was clapping for him as he walked over to his House table, but Harry had expected that. They were either upset by his last name or stunned by the idea of a Muggleborn being Sorted into Slytherin.
And some of them, Harry saw with a glance at the Gryffindor table when he sat down, had already assumed that he’d been Sorted there because he had the same attitudes as the rest of the Slytherins.
Nothing he could do about it. He had to survive, and that didn’t include worrying about things he couldn’t change.
The Sorting picked back up after that, and there were loud cheers from the Gryffindor table when Neville Longbottom was Sorted there. Harry watched, a little curious. What exactly Longbottom had done to get rid of the Dark Lord was a matter of debate in those conversations Harry had listened to. Some of them thought he hadn’t done anything, had just been protected by his mother’s love.
That seemed likely to Harry. He hadn’t had a mother to love him, but he knew other people did, from lots of experience with Aunt Petunia and Dudley.
“So you’re a Mudblood, Grayson?”
Harry had heard that word in those conversations he’d spied on, too. He turned around with a flat smile. A blond boy that some of the others had called “Draco” was sitting there, staring at him. Harry hadn’t heard his last name, Malfoy, until the Sorting, but he did recognize the name itself, from some of the history books that Professor McGonagall had helped him buy with the orphan and Muggleborn charity fund.
“You know what I am?”
“What?”
Malfoy wasn’t the only one who leaned forwards. Some of the others did, too. They would attack him or not probably based on the way he reacted now, Harry thought.
“Someone who cares more about power than blood,” Harry said. Holding his left hand out without taking his stare from Malfoy, he drew on the moisture in the air around him and conjured a small, whirling ball of water.
Someone swore. Other people at the table leaned as far away from Harry as their seats would let them go. Harry smiled around pleasantly, and saw people avoiding his eyes. He let his hand drop and the water fade away.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic, Malfoy.”
Harry had always been able to do some simple things that he knew now were wandless magic. But before he’d started understanding them more, how they functioned, what they did, they’d been random and uncontrolled. He certainly hadn’t wanted to turn his teacher’s hair blue, not when it resulted in him being locked in his cupboard and wasn’t true revenge for her favoritism of Dudley anyway.
But it became easier to conjure water when he knew he was getting moisture from the air, fire when he knew about heat, and ice when he could glance at water on the pavement and think about how it would freeze. He’d been able to unlock his cupboard for years now by picturing how the lock worked.
Malfoy looked into Harry’s eyes and seemed to see someone he would rather not challenge. He leaned away and snapped, “What are you looking at, Goyle?’
“I was just—”
Harry ignored the spluttering and the speculative stares from people around him. He cared about impressing them exactly enough to make them leave him alone. In the meantime, he was looking around the Great Hall.
There was a large professor at the Head Table who was wearing what seemed to be green velvet robes and giving Harry an encouraging smile. Harry imagined he had something to do with Slytherin. And there was Professor Potter, with her red hair and pretty green eyes, who was staring at him.
Harry did give her more than one glance, because her eyes were the exact shade that he’d always seen when he looked into the mirror. Even though other people told him his eyes were blue, or hazel. Harry had always reckoned it had something to do with his poor eyesight.
But he didn’t know her. So he ignored her.
He had more than enough to think about.
*
“…must say that anyone would think you were a pureblood, Mr. Grayson, from how good you are with Potions!”
Harry smiled up into Professor Slughorn’s face. His opinions about Muggleborns were stupid, but he was Head of Slytherin House and had so many useful connections that he could guarantee Harry a smooth path in life. “Thank you, sir. That means a lot, coming from an accomplished brewer like you.” He ducked his head.
“And you told me that you’d had no brewing experience before you came here?”
“Oh, no, sir!” Harry widened his eyes. “I lived with Muggles. I didn’t even know that the odd things I could do were magic. Of course I couldn’t have.”
“And I did hear tell,” said Slughorn. He glanced around as if for an audience, even though they were alone in the Potions classroom because he’d asked Harry to stay after. He lowered his voice. “You performed wandless magic at the Slytherin table on the night of the Sorting?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“Remarkable, my boy! Just remarkable!”
“Oh, is it, sir? Only one of my roommates was saying something about how lots of kids have accidental magic?”
Slughorn waved a finger at Harry as he chuckled, hard enough to make his robes creak. “Now, now, Mr. Potter! Accidental is the defining word there. You’ll need to learn how to pay attention to the nuances of language if you want to succeed in the pureblood world! Yes, children have accidental magic, but it’s as likely to, for example, rip up the toy they want as it is to Summon that toy to them! It’s all emotion, undirected desire. And when they find their wands, that kind of ability stops, because the wand channels it.”
“Oh,” Harry said, in the tone of a revelation. “So I’m unusual because I can keep doing it and because I can direct it to do what I want?”
“Quite so, my boy, quite so!” Slughorn beamed at him. “I should introduce you to my old friend Ersemina Selwyn in a few years. A prodigy herself, and she’s always advocated for the use of wandless magic in both dueling and brewing. Never found an apprentice who was equally good at both! But she might take one, yes, indeed, she might…”
Harry made little gratified noises. And he was gratified. He recognized the name Selwyn from some of the history books on Death Eaters, so she might not accept him as a student if she was a blood purist, but at least Slughorn was willing to make the recommendation, and Harry had only been his student for a few weeks.
If that was the case, then it wouldn’t matter if one pureblood refused to apprentice him. Harry would find others who cared more about ability than she did.
And he would make them useful.
*
“Grayson.”
Harry looked up. Nott, the quietest of his roommates, was standing in front of him. Harry casually covered his essay with one hand. Duels in the common room were rarer than ones other places in the school, but he’d had his essays ripped up before. He’d punished Malfoy for it by making him feel as if he were drowning, and that had ended, but someone else could still do it while Nott distracted him.
“Yes?” Harry asked, when Nott only remained looking at him. He was taller than the other boys in their year, stretched and thin, with a pale face and light brown hair. His eyes were crystal grey and extremely cold.
Harry had dueled Malfoy and Zabini a few times, and ignored Crabbe and Goyle. He’d also dueled Parkinson and Greengrass, and they’d decided to leave him alone. But he had avoided Nott as much as possible. There was something living under his skin that Harry had no desire to engage.
“You’re the best student of our year in Potions.”
“You don’t want to be tutored by me.”
Nott paused. “Why do you say that?”
“I’ve heard you talking about Mudbloods. Tutoring is the only favor I’d be willing to extend to you, and you won’t ask it of me because you’re afraid it would make you look weak, the way you think people like me are. So you should leave before you ask me something I won’t want to grant and I’d have to refuse.”
“You would refuse me?”
“Yes,” Harry said softly. No, he didn’t want to make an enemy of Nott, but precisely because Nott was so dangerous, Harry would strike with everything he had to lay him out. And Harry would rather do that than become Nott’s slave, or whatever it was that he was thinking of at the moment.
“I could tell Slughorn that you were the one who almost drowned Malfoy.”
“A hex that he didn’t even go to the hospital wing for? Why would he whinge about that?”
Nott nearly smiled. “You’re clever enough that I don’t care about your blood.”
“Bollocks. Granger is smarter than I am, and you hate her.”
“Granger prates to everyone around her about how smart she is, and thinks that she has the right to lecture people on things she knows nothing about. Like house-elves.”
Harry raised his eyebrows and said nothing. He actually thought house-elves were a lot closer to slaves—to cringing creatures used by their masters, the way he had been with the Dursleys—than the purebloods claimed they were. But he could see why they wouldn’t take it in good part if Granger said otherwise.
And Granger should be smart enough not to shove it in everyone’s faces.
Decision made, Harry kicked the chair across the small table from him out. “You can sit down. But if you call me a Mudblood, then this ends. And you’ll have to do something for me to earn the favor of tutoring.”
“Yes, of course.” Nott sat down and looked at him expectantly.
“You have to get me the Potions ingredients I want.”
Nott paused. Then he said, “Slughorn’s stores don’t have what you need.”
“Not if I’m going to brew and sell really expensive potions,” Harry said shortly. There were two potions in the third-year curriculum that the book had said a lot of people couldn’t brew. Harry knew he could accomplish them, because he already had, with a small amount of ingredients “liberated” from the Potions master. But there was no way, especially accounting for practice and mistakes, that he could do everything he needed to get as good as he had to be.
“You have some specific goal in mind.”
“Of course I do.”
“It would help if you would tell me how many Galleons, specifically, you needed to earn. So that I could know how many ingredients to source.”
Harry considered him. Then he said, “Two hundred, that I should earn before next summer.”
He hadn’t asked specifically about prices when Professor McGonagall escorted him around Diagon Alley, but she had mentioned the existence of Knockturn Alley, and warned Harry sternly to stay out of it. Harry thought that a bit of shelter and some food down there couldn’t cost more than that for a summer.
He wasn’t going back to the Dursleys again. Not to people who wouldn’t even have known he was Harry Grayson if not for the note that had been dumped with Harry on their doorstep, people who refused to tell him his mother’s name, and didn’t know his father’s, and blamed him for all his parents’ sins.
Nott frowned a little and tapped his fingers on the table. Harry watched him. He knew Nott was thinking about whether the favor of Harry’s tutoring would be worth all the ingredients he would have to source.
“I’ll do it,” Nott said abruptly. “If you do something for me besides the tutoring.”
“What?”
“There’s a Gryffindor in the year above us who’s annoying me. Cormac McLaggen. Professor McGonagall and other professors are going to blame me if something happens to him.”
“I won’t take this bargain if you want them to blame me instead.”
Nott shook his head. “I want you to use that wandless magic of yours to make it look like an accident. But a humiliating accident, in front of a bunch of other people. Do you think you can do that?”
Harry took a moment to consider. Then he smiled. There were some tricks he could use that wouldn’t produce satisfactory results, but there were also ones he could think of that would do a lot with minimal risk to himself.
“Done.”
Nott took out his Potions book. “Good. Now, why do we have to be so careful with moondew? It’s a small ingredient, and it’s non-reactive most of the time, but Slughorn was going on and on the other day about how you never mix it with water, and it has to be contained in a crystal flask, and…”
Harry smiled. He did have a bit of natural talent for Potions, but more than that, he had invested in study because he was pretty sure it was the quickest path to money of his own. And he knew the answer to Nott’s question.
“Moondew is non-reactive most of the time, but it plays a neutral part in potions. And when you have water playing that neutral part, you can’t mix them.”
“Tell me more about why.”
There was a challenge in Nott’s expression, but Harry shrugged. It was a challenge he could meet.
And it would be good to have an ally, although he would guard his back to make sure that Nott couldn’t turn on him. One thing he’d learned early on was that he could rely only on himself.
*
Professor Potter had come up to Harry that morning when he was leaving the Great Hall and tried to say something to him, but choked. Harry had just frowned at her. She’d turned around and left after a moment.
Now she was standing outside the Charms classroom next to Professor Flitwick, her eyes wide and hopeful and fixed on him. The Gryffindor second-years were leaving Charms, laughing and joking with each other. Harry wished that the professors weren’t right there, since it would make the trick he wanted to play on McLaggen harder, but he had dealt with worse obstacles.
He moved his hand behind his back as he visualized drawing moisture from the air and pouring it over McLaggen. Luckily, the loud, braggart Gryffindor was facing Harry as he joked with his friends about something, waving his arms, and Harry could easily see the front of his robes.
And so could everyone else, when a huge, dark stain poured down them. There were a few gasps, but then the laughter started.
McLaggen stared around. “What?”
“Cormac, mate,” said one of his friends at last, almost choking on laughter from the sound of it. He waved his hand at McLaggen’s robes.
McLaggen looked down and then yelped and gathered his robes close to himself. “I didn’t—that isn’t—”
“Sure it isn’t,” said a Gryffindor girl who appeared more than a little delighted with the whole thing. Harry hid a smile. It seemed that even most of his own House didn’t like McLaggen, which made this so much easier. They weren’t even looking for alternative explanations, or culprits. The girl who’d spoken turned to her friends and rolled her eyes dramatically.
“Merlin, McLaggen, how much did you have to drink?” someone else taunted as McLaggen’s robes started to cling to him.
“This isn’t urine!” McLaggen yelled, as red in the face as Dudley got whenever he ran more than a few steps.
People burst out laughing again. The professors were thoroughly distracted by the noise, too, so Harry was able to step back and glance at Nott. Nott nodded back, with a thin smile that made Harry sure he would have some ingredients soon.
“Mr. Grayson?”
There was Professor Potter again. Harry sighed and turned to her. She taught Muggle Studies, which wasn’t even a class first-years could take. She had no reason to be interested in him. “Yes, Professor?”
“I—I—”
But once again she couldn’t say anything, and Harry shook his head and walked into Charms.
*
“Was that you, Grayson?”
Harry looked up from the tome on Defensive spells that he’d found in the library’s shelves. “Was what me, Malfoy?”
“McLaggen.”
Harry eyed Malfoy thoughtfully. Well, he supposed he should have known another of his roommates would figure it out. He knew Harry could conjure water, and he’d been standing about like the rest of them, waiting to enter the Charms classroom.
“Yeah, it was,” he said.
“Why did you do it? I didn’t think you had a particular grudge against McLaggen.”
Harry shrugged. “That’s not entirely my secret. I wouldn’t be able to tell you without the other person saying I should.”
Malfoy cocked his head and examined him. Harry examined him right back. Malfoy was a lot more tolerable when he didn’t have an audience to perform for.
“All right,” Malfoy said. “So how do I become someone you would do things like that for?”
Harry smiled.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Eventual Harry/Draco/Theo, references to canon pairings
Content Notes: AU (Slytherin Harry), Neville is the Boy-Who-Lived, Potters live, angst, drama, blood prejudice, violence, Dark Harry, bullying, references to child abuse
Rating: R
Summary: AU. Harry Grayson comes to Hogwarts, knowing himself the bastard son of a Muggle woman, his Aunt Petunia’s sister, and an unknown father. When he’s Sorted into Slytherin, the only Muggleborn there, he does what he has to to survive. If that means allying with Slytherins who are willing to overlook his blood for how useful he can be to them, that’s what Harry will do. Honestly, he considers himself lucky to find as much joy as he does along the way.
Author’s Notes: This is a new fic based on a request for the backstory of my one-shot “The Peculiarities of Professor Potter.” You should read that first; it details how Lily and James Potter accidentally magically disowned Harry and left him to grow up in the Muggle world, considering himself a Muggleborn, while the same magic prevented them from telling the truth. This should be fifteen chapters long. The title is a variation of a quote by Kahlil Gabran: “March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.”
A Path of Stones and Thorns
“Grayson, Harry!”
Harry took a step forwards. His stomach was churning, but he didn’t care. He had to resist the temptation to throw up. That would make him look weak. He’d eavesdropped on several conversations between purebloods on the train, moving between groups so that no one would really notice he was new, and they’d all said the same thing.
They hated Muggleborns, which he was. They expected them to be weak and pathetic and of no account. They looked down on them. They laughed at them.
A few people had hinted at doing worse things, too. Harry might not have recognized those shadowy hints, but he’d had years of the Dursleys laughing about him in the same way with their neighbors.
The purebloods would do their version of Harry Hunting at Hogwarts if Harry didn’t put them off. Except worse, because they had magic.
Harry was going to have to show them right away how strong he was, blood or no.
He sat down under the Sorting Hat, and the Hat gave a little hum. Then it said, “SLYTHERIN!”
Harry’s heart thumped hard as he stood and handed the Hat back to Professor Potter, who looked beyond surprised. No one was clapping for him as he walked over to his House table, but Harry had expected that. They were either upset by his last name or stunned by the idea of a Muggleborn being Sorted into Slytherin.
And some of them, Harry saw with a glance at the Gryffindor table when he sat down, had already assumed that he’d been Sorted there because he had the same attitudes as the rest of the Slytherins.
Nothing he could do about it. He had to survive, and that didn’t include worrying about things he couldn’t change.
The Sorting picked back up after that, and there were loud cheers from the Gryffindor table when Neville Longbottom was Sorted there. Harry watched, a little curious. What exactly Longbottom had done to get rid of the Dark Lord was a matter of debate in those conversations Harry had listened to. Some of them thought he hadn’t done anything, had just been protected by his mother’s love.
That seemed likely to Harry. He hadn’t had a mother to love him, but he knew other people did, from lots of experience with Aunt Petunia and Dudley.
“So you’re a Mudblood, Grayson?”
Harry had heard that word in those conversations he’d spied on, too. He turned around with a flat smile. A blond boy that some of the others had called “Draco” was sitting there, staring at him. Harry hadn’t heard his last name, Malfoy, until the Sorting, but he did recognize the name itself, from some of the history books that Professor McGonagall had helped him buy with the orphan and Muggleborn charity fund.
“You know what I am?”
“What?”
Malfoy wasn’t the only one who leaned forwards. Some of the others did, too. They would attack him or not probably based on the way he reacted now, Harry thought.
“Someone who cares more about power than blood,” Harry said. Holding his left hand out without taking his stare from Malfoy, he drew on the moisture in the air around him and conjured a small, whirling ball of water.
Someone swore. Other people at the table leaned as far away from Harry as their seats would let them go. Harry smiled around pleasantly, and saw people avoiding his eyes. He let his hand drop and the water fade away.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic, Malfoy.”
Harry had always been able to do some simple things that he knew now were wandless magic. But before he’d started understanding them more, how they functioned, what they did, they’d been random and uncontrolled. He certainly hadn’t wanted to turn his teacher’s hair blue, not when it resulted in him being locked in his cupboard and wasn’t true revenge for her favoritism of Dudley anyway.
But it became easier to conjure water when he knew he was getting moisture from the air, fire when he knew about heat, and ice when he could glance at water on the pavement and think about how it would freeze. He’d been able to unlock his cupboard for years now by picturing how the lock worked.
Malfoy looked into Harry’s eyes and seemed to see someone he would rather not challenge. He leaned away and snapped, “What are you looking at, Goyle?’
“I was just—”
Harry ignored the spluttering and the speculative stares from people around him. He cared about impressing them exactly enough to make them leave him alone. In the meantime, he was looking around the Great Hall.
There was a large professor at the Head Table who was wearing what seemed to be green velvet robes and giving Harry an encouraging smile. Harry imagined he had something to do with Slytherin. And there was Professor Potter, with her red hair and pretty green eyes, who was staring at him.
Harry did give her more than one glance, because her eyes were the exact shade that he’d always seen when he looked into the mirror. Even though other people told him his eyes were blue, or hazel. Harry had always reckoned it had something to do with his poor eyesight.
But he didn’t know her. So he ignored her.
He had more than enough to think about.
*
“…must say that anyone would think you were a pureblood, Mr. Grayson, from how good you are with Potions!”
Harry smiled up into Professor Slughorn’s face. His opinions about Muggleborns were stupid, but he was Head of Slytherin House and had so many useful connections that he could guarantee Harry a smooth path in life. “Thank you, sir. That means a lot, coming from an accomplished brewer like you.” He ducked his head.
“And you told me that you’d had no brewing experience before you came here?”
“Oh, no, sir!” Harry widened his eyes. “I lived with Muggles. I didn’t even know that the odd things I could do were magic. Of course I couldn’t have.”
“And I did hear tell,” said Slughorn. He glanced around as if for an audience, even though they were alone in the Potions classroom because he’d asked Harry to stay after. He lowered his voice. “You performed wandless magic at the Slytherin table on the night of the Sorting?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“Remarkable, my boy! Just remarkable!”
“Oh, is it, sir? Only one of my roommates was saying something about how lots of kids have accidental magic?”
Slughorn waved a finger at Harry as he chuckled, hard enough to make his robes creak. “Now, now, Mr. Potter! Accidental is the defining word there. You’ll need to learn how to pay attention to the nuances of language if you want to succeed in the pureblood world! Yes, children have accidental magic, but it’s as likely to, for example, rip up the toy they want as it is to Summon that toy to them! It’s all emotion, undirected desire. And when they find their wands, that kind of ability stops, because the wand channels it.”
“Oh,” Harry said, in the tone of a revelation. “So I’m unusual because I can keep doing it and because I can direct it to do what I want?”
“Quite so, my boy, quite so!” Slughorn beamed at him. “I should introduce you to my old friend Ersemina Selwyn in a few years. A prodigy herself, and she’s always advocated for the use of wandless magic in both dueling and brewing. Never found an apprentice who was equally good at both! But she might take one, yes, indeed, she might…”
Harry made little gratified noises. And he was gratified. He recognized the name Selwyn from some of the history books on Death Eaters, so she might not accept him as a student if she was a blood purist, but at least Slughorn was willing to make the recommendation, and Harry had only been his student for a few weeks.
If that was the case, then it wouldn’t matter if one pureblood refused to apprentice him. Harry would find others who cared more about ability than she did.
And he would make them useful.
*
“Grayson.”
Harry looked up. Nott, the quietest of his roommates, was standing in front of him. Harry casually covered his essay with one hand. Duels in the common room were rarer than ones other places in the school, but he’d had his essays ripped up before. He’d punished Malfoy for it by making him feel as if he were drowning, and that had ended, but someone else could still do it while Nott distracted him.
“Yes?” Harry asked, when Nott only remained looking at him. He was taller than the other boys in their year, stretched and thin, with a pale face and light brown hair. His eyes were crystal grey and extremely cold.
Harry had dueled Malfoy and Zabini a few times, and ignored Crabbe and Goyle. He’d also dueled Parkinson and Greengrass, and they’d decided to leave him alone. But he had avoided Nott as much as possible. There was something living under his skin that Harry had no desire to engage.
“You’re the best student of our year in Potions.”
“You don’t want to be tutored by me.”
Nott paused. “Why do you say that?”
“I’ve heard you talking about Mudbloods. Tutoring is the only favor I’d be willing to extend to you, and you won’t ask it of me because you’re afraid it would make you look weak, the way you think people like me are. So you should leave before you ask me something I won’t want to grant and I’d have to refuse.”
“You would refuse me?”
“Yes,” Harry said softly. No, he didn’t want to make an enemy of Nott, but precisely because Nott was so dangerous, Harry would strike with everything he had to lay him out. And Harry would rather do that than become Nott’s slave, or whatever it was that he was thinking of at the moment.
“I could tell Slughorn that you were the one who almost drowned Malfoy.”
“A hex that he didn’t even go to the hospital wing for? Why would he whinge about that?”
Nott nearly smiled. “You’re clever enough that I don’t care about your blood.”
“Bollocks. Granger is smarter than I am, and you hate her.”
“Granger prates to everyone around her about how smart she is, and thinks that she has the right to lecture people on things she knows nothing about. Like house-elves.”
Harry raised his eyebrows and said nothing. He actually thought house-elves were a lot closer to slaves—to cringing creatures used by their masters, the way he had been with the Dursleys—than the purebloods claimed they were. But he could see why they wouldn’t take it in good part if Granger said otherwise.
And Granger should be smart enough not to shove it in everyone’s faces.
Decision made, Harry kicked the chair across the small table from him out. “You can sit down. But if you call me a Mudblood, then this ends. And you’ll have to do something for me to earn the favor of tutoring.”
“Yes, of course.” Nott sat down and looked at him expectantly.
“You have to get me the Potions ingredients I want.”
Nott paused. Then he said, “Slughorn’s stores don’t have what you need.”
“Not if I’m going to brew and sell really expensive potions,” Harry said shortly. There were two potions in the third-year curriculum that the book had said a lot of people couldn’t brew. Harry knew he could accomplish them, because he already had, with a small amount of ingredients “liberated” from the Potions master. But there was no way, especially accounting for practice and mistakes, that he could do everything he needed to get as good as he had to be.
“You have some specific goal in mind.”
“Of course I do.”
“It would help if you would tell me how many Galleons, specifically, you needed to earn. So that I could know how many ingredients to source.”
Harry considered him. Then he said, “Two hundred, that I should earn before next summer.”
He hadn’t asked specifically about prices when Professor McGonagall escorted him around Diagon Alley, but she had mentioned the existence of Knockturn Alley, and warned Harry sternly to stay out of it. Harry thought that a bit of shelter and some food down there couldn’t cost more than that for a summer.
He wasn’t going back to the Dursleys again. Not to people who wouldn’t even have known he was Harry Grayson if not for the note that had been dumped with Harry on their doorstep, people who refused to tell him his mother’s name, and didn’t know his father’s, and blamed him for all his parents’ sins.
Nott frowned a little and tapped his fingers on the table. Harry watched him. He knew Nott was thinking about whether the favor of Harry’s tutoring would be worth all the ingredients he would have to source.
“I’ll do it,” Nott said abruptly. “If you do something for me besides the tutoring.”
“What?”
“There’s a Gryffindor in the year above us who’s annoying me. Cormac McLaggen. Professor McGonagall and other professors are going to blame me if something happens to him.”
“I won’t take this bargain if you want them to blame me instead.”
Nott shook his head. “I want you to use that wandless magic of yours to make it look like an accident. But a humiliating accident, in front of a bunch of other people. Do you think you can do that?”
Harry took a moment to consider. Then he smiled. There were some tricks he could use that wouldn’t produce satisfactory results, but there were also ones he could think of that would do a lot with minimal risk to himself.
“Done.”
Nott took out his Potions book. “Good. Now, why do we have to be so careful with moondew? It’s a small ingredient, and it’s non-reactive most of the time, but Slughorn was going on and on the other day about how you never mix it with water, and it has to be contained in a crystal flask, and…”
Harry smiled. He did have a bit of natural talent for Potions, but more than that, he had invested in study because he was pretty sure it was the quickest path to money of his own. And he knew the answer to Nott’s question.
“Moondew is non-reactive most of the time, but it plays a neutral part in potions. And when you have water playing that neutral part, you can’t mix them.”
“Tell me more about why.”
There was a challenge in Nott’s expression, but Harry shrugged. It was a challenge he could meet.
And it would be good to have an ally, although he would guard his back to make sure that Nott couldn’t turn on him. One thing he’d learned early on was that he could rely only on himself.
*
Professor Potter had come up to Harry that morning when he was leaving the Great Hall and tried to say something to him, but choked. Harry had just frowned at her. She’d turned around and left after a moment.
Now she was standing outside the Charms classroom next to Professor Flitwick, her eyes wide and hopeful and fixed on him. The Gryffindor second-years were leaving Charms, laughing and joking with each other. Harry wished that the professors weren’t right there, since it would make the trick he wanted to play on McLaggen harder, but he had dealt with worse obstacles.
He moved his hand behind his back as he visualized drawing moisture from the air and pouring it over McLaggen. Luckily, the loud, braggart Gryffindor was facing Harry as he joked with his friends about something, waving his arms, and Harry could easily see the front of his robes.
And so could everyone else, when a huge, dark stain poured down them. There were a few gasps, but then the laughter started.
McLaggen stared around. “What?”
“Cormac, mate,” said one of his friends at last, almost choking on laughter from the sound of it. He waved his hand at McLaggen’s robes.
McLaggen looked down and then yelped and gathered his robes close to himself. “I didn’t—that isn’t—”
“Sure it isn’t,” said a Gryffindor girl who appeared more than a little delighted with the whole thing. Harry hid a smile. It seemed that even most of his own House didn’t like McLaggen, which made this so much easier. They weren’t even looking for alternative explanations, or culprits. The girl who’d spoken turned to her friends and rolled her eyes dramatically.
“Merlin, McLaggen, how much did you have to drink?” someone else taunted as McLaggen’s robes started to cling to him.
“This isn’t urine!” McLaggen yelled, as red in the face as Dudley got whenever he ran more than a few steps.
People burst out laughing again. The professors were thoroughly distracted by the noise, too, so Harry was able to step back and glance at Nott. Nott nodded back, with a thin smile that made Harry sure he would have some ingredients soon.
“Mr. Grayson?”
There was Professor Potter again. Harry sighed and turned to her. She taught Muggle Studies, which wasn’t even a class first-years could take. She had no reason to be interested in him. “Yes, Professor?”
“I—I—”
But once again she couldn’t say anything, and Harry shook his head and walked into Charms.
*
“Was that you, Grayson?”
Harry looked up from the tome on Defensive spells that he’d found in the library’s shelves. “Was what me, Malfoy?”
“McLaggen.”
Harry eyed Malfoy thoughtfully. Well, he supposed he should have known another of his roommates would figure it out. He knew Harry could conjure water, and he’d been standing about like the rest of them, waiting to enter the Charms classroom.
“Yeah, it was,” he said.
“Why did you do it? I didn’t think you had a particular grudge against McLaggen.”
Harry shrugged. “That’s not entirely my secret. I wouldn’t be able to tell you without the other person saying I should.”
Malfoy cocked his head and examined him. Harry examined him right back. Malfoy was a lot more tolerable when he didn’t have an audience to perform for.
“All right,” Malfoy said. “So how do I become someone you would do things like that for?”
Harry smiled.
