[This Lord Business Series]: I Have Been a Brother to O.W.L.S., 20/?

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Twenty—Working Together

“They’ll see me.”

“Who will?”

“The goblins.”

Hermione leans over towards Harry with wide eyes. “They will? What—what did you write to them?”

Harry keeps his voice down, a murmur for Ron and Hermione’s ears only. It’s not that he thinks the other Gryffindors would run around betraying them, really, but that he doesn’t want this particular gossip to spread before he’s ready. “I told them about Stardim and Gorgallant and how I might have an alliance with the centaurs in the future. I told them about not knowing about the centaur connection to the herd that Theo mentioned and apologized for any assumptions I might also have made about their use for wands. So they’ll see me.”

“And that’s the supposed secret of asking goblins to pay attention to you,” Hermione mutters, shaking her head. “Be humble and apologize to them when you get something wrong.”

Harry grins a little and tucks away the letter from the goblins. “Yeah. And they said that we could renew our dialogue about the wands, as they put it. That they might have something to say that would explain their reaction in more detail.”

Hermione beams at him. “This is so great, Harry! You’re using the power of Lord Slytherin for good, and not to just benefit some purebloods, the way they’d want you to use it—”

Harry is smiling at her, and paying attention to her, and so he doesn’t see the large owl that’s sailing towards him in time. That enables it to land on the table and the Howler it’s carrying to explode, puffing smoke up towards the ceiling and releasing Olive Hornby’s screaming voice. “DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT KIND OF GRUDGE YOU HAVE AGAINST ME—”

More than one person at the neighboring tables turns around to watch and laugh. When the Howler finishes, the absent Olive Hornby gets a round of applause, led by Fred and George.

Hermione frowns at Harry through the dissipating smoke. “Harry, seriously, are you ever going to tell us what that’s about?”

“Honestly, Hermione, I have no idea.”

*

“I have a practical demonstration for you today.”

Harry immediately narrows his eyes. There’s far too much enthusiasm in Sirius’s voice, especially given that Harry thought they would spend this class revising. It’s only a few weeks to the O.W.L.S., after all.

“A practical demonstration of what, Professor Black?” Daphne asks, blinking at Sirius. She really has calmed down from when they first knew each other, and now spends most of her time sounding like a human being.

Sirius beams at her. “I’m so glad that you asked, Miss Greengrass. It’s a practical demonstration of what it’s like to fight for your life, based on some of my own memories of the war.” And he casts a Smoke Charm and vanishes behind it with a cackle, while everyone else is coughing.

Harry immediately dives to the floor. He can hear some of his friends echoing him. Hermione is choking on the smoke, and Harry takes the time to cast an Air-Clearing Charm on her, then look around sharply.

Something is charging towards his feet.

It appears to be a rat—no, wait, the forerunner of a horde of rats. Harry leaps to his feet with a disgusted yell and starts stomping and kicking with grim determination. None of the rats make it up his legs, but some of them are leaping into the air, and it won’t be long before they do.

Harry would like to use some of the more lethal spells on them, but not everyone in the fifth-year Defense class is part of his practice group, and he doesn’t want to frighten the ones who aren’t. So, instead, he Transfigures the floor beneath the rats to water.

They begin to squeal and slip at once, then plunge in and start paddling around. Harry uses more Transfiguration, raising the sides of the pool so that they can’t just climb out once they get to the edge of the water. He makes the sides as smooth as possible.

“A passable first attempt!” Sirius’s voice booms from everywhere and nowhere, and then he comes charging out of the smoke and straight at Harry.

Harry’s had enough dueling training now not to hesitate, or to assume that his godfather will go easy on him. He tangles Sirius’s feet up with a rope, and has to leap a similar prank spell that his godfather’s aimed at him. In the meantime, Sirius is changing into a dog and shedding the rope with a triumphant bark.

Harry promptly snaps his wand down, yelling out an incantation that he thought he would never use when Sirius taught it to him. “Sulfurus!”

Sirius yelps and skids to a stop as the smell of rotten eggs fills his nose—his very sensitive canine nose.

He’s only disoriented for a moment, but it’s enough. “Serpensortia!” Harry yells, and the floor fills with conjured serpents. He hisses to them, “Attack the dog in front of me and any rats you find.”

The snakes set out with great enthusiasm. They pause for a moment when Sirius turns back into a man, but it doesn’t put them off for very long, probably because most snakes, despite what Ahalam would say, aren’t that smart. They race towards Sirius and climb him, and he’s involved in banishing them.

Meanwhile, Harry takes the opportunity to cast a quick glance over his shoulder.

Most of his people appear to have dealt with the rats well, even before the snakes Harry conjured started ripping into them. Some have drowned the rats, or frozen them, or put up barriers of stone that the rats are flowing back and forth in front of without being able to find their way through. Harry snorts a little when he sees that Theo has blown the little bodies apart. Of course he would.

“My lord! Look out!”

Harry dives without looking, trusting Theo, and Sirius goes down with a thud and a groan. Harry turns to look and sees that Theo has trapped Sirius with chains that are winding back and forth like snakes themselves, tightening every time Sirius tries to escape.

Harry falls back and looks around to see who’s having trouble. It seems that Pansy Parkinson is. Harry catches her eye and repeats the sharp motion of his wand that he used to Transfigure the floor to water.

Parkinson looks startled, then wary that he would help her. But she does it, and falls back and raises a stone wall beyond that when the rats start to scramble out, wet and squeaking and furious.

Ron, who Transfigured something into a terrier that’s attacking the rats, catches Harry’s eye and grins. “It seems to me that we have one enemy here,” he says in a loud voice. “All for attacking Professor Black at once?”

That gets a cheer, and Harry whips back around to focus on Sirius just as he says something that bursts Theo’s chains asunder. He promptly starts setting off firework prank spells, but Harry, Ron, Theo, Hermione, and a few of the others press towards him anyway.

And suddenly it’s much easier. Harry knows that the others are at his shoulders casting spells to defeat the ones that Sirius tries to send at him, and he raises shields when it seems as though some of the fireworks will hit Theo and Ron, right beside him. Sirius has to retreat, even as he comes up with more and more creative distractions.

This is the lesson he was trying to teach us. To fight together, instead of individually.

They corner Sirius at last against a wall, and even though he turns into a dog and tries to leap out of the way, Hermione is ready for that. She catches him with a muzzle that wraps around his face and muffles his yelp, then links to a chain that Theo already conjured. Sirius rolls over on his back and waves his paws pathetically in the air.

“We won!” someone yells.

Harry grins and cheers with the rest of them. Then he takes pity on Sirius and Vanishes the muzzle and the chain so he can turn back into a man.

Luckily, Sirius is laughing hysterically when he stands up, and he beams around at them. “Good job!” he declares. “You’ll need to work together more effectively against foes who are actually trying to hurt you, but this was a good start!”

“The rats weren’t trying to hurt us?” Blaise demands, holding up his wand. It looks like it’s been lightly gnawed on.

“Of course not!”

“They chewed into my bag and ruined a few of my books!”

“Oops?”

Blaise starts to turn his wand on Sirius with what seems to be an honest intention of cursing him, but Theo and Harry act at once, with Theo stepping up to Blaise’s side and whispering in his ear, and Harry getting between Blaise and his godfather. Harry shakes his head subtly at Blaise as he turns to face Sirius. “What’s next, Professor Black?”

“Next is illusions!” And apparently completely unfazed by the fact that some people are still angry at him for the rats trick, Sirius waves his wand. The air shimmers, and illusions of him appear everywhere.

All the illusions stick out their tongues and pull faces, and then dart away. Harry sighs tiredly.

“We should just be able to find the one who doesn’t do things like that, and we’ll have found the real Professor Black,” Theo mutters next to him.

Harry shakes his head. “Sirius will imitate them and stick his tongue out sincerely.”

“Why?” Theo stares at him in astonishment.

“Because he enjoys it.”

Theo is still looking at Harry blankly. Harry laughs in spite of himself and turns to face the nearest illusion, hitting it with a charm that’s meant specifically for banishing visual traps. It impacts instead of functioning as it should, and the real Sirius runs away with a yelp.

Harry pursues.

*

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Illdark.”

“You have sworn the oaths.”

Harry nods agreeably He and his escorts had to swear a few different oaths to be allowed into Gringotts. They can’t use their wands in the presence of a goblin without permission unless they’re defending themselves. They can’t cast a spell on any goblin without permission. They have to pay for any damage they cause, in any manner.

Harry thinks that last vow is there mostly because his escorts for today are Fred and George.

It says a lot, that the reputation of the Weasley twins has spread like that even beyond Hogwarts.

Illdark stares at him in silence. She’s a tall female goblin with chains braided into her ears and around her neck, and maybe under her skin; Harry thinks he sees bits of them emerging in a few places. She has incredibly large dark eyes that fasten on Harry and seem to drink in his words and intentions. He won’t lie; he’s a bit intimidated by her.

But she’s the one that the goblins have appointed to discuss the wands issue, so he’ll speak with her.

Illdark leans over the enormous stone desk that she’s sitting behind. They’re in the middle of a cell-like room deep in the bank, and Fred and George are standing behind Harry and snapping suspicious glances around at the walls. “Why did you send wands to us in the first place, Lord Slytherin?”

“As part of a larger effort to challenge the Ministry’s laws, and fight for the rights of nonhuman people.”

Illdark pauses for a long moment. Harry waits. He’s made enough missteps with the goblins so far that he’s not going to guess which part of his words was wrong.

“What other peoples have you been fighting for?” Illdark asks, her voice a sound like water bubbling in dark caverns.

“I’d like to ally with the centaurs, but a few of them have tried to capture me for Voldemort, and there’s a current challenge going on for leadership, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to ally with them.” Magorian won the wrestling march between him and Larodian, from what Hagrid told Harry, but there are other centaurs who think he did the wrong thing by exiling his son. Who knows how long that will take to work out. “I have some allies among the werewolves, and I’ve offered an emissary to the merfolk who live near Hogwarts. So far, they haven’t responded.”

Illdark flashes her teeth, which are long and pointy and quite impressive. “So you have few alliances so far?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What would you fight for us to be able to do?”

“Carry wands, if you want to. Have your own laws, or sue in wizarding courts, if you’d prefer. Be called people instead of beasts or beings. Strip out some of the language that’s made its way into treaties over the years. Have History classes that include magical nonhuman peoples taught at Hogwarts. Have leaders from your nations come to treaty negotiations. End the prejudice against people like Filius Flitwick and Rubeus Hagrid at Hogwarts who are partially human and partially other. Say that—”

Illdark raises one hand. Harry falls silent and waits. He can feel Fred looking around the room as if he thinks an ambush is coming from somewhere, and George is similarly tensing on the other side of him.

But Harry doesn’t think that’s it. Illdark is staring at him with far more shock than anything else—at least if wide eyes and a slightly open mouth mean the same thing for goblins as humans. Maybe not.

“Why would you do all this?”

“Because they’re the steps I think will lead to the greatest equality between humans and nonhumans. I’d like to fight for house-elves, too, but I need to talk with more of them and figure out if they are happy the way so many purebloods say or—”

“You misunderstand me.” Illdark’s voice can sound like grinding stones when she wants to, Harry thinks, leaning back in his chair and eyeing her a little uneasily. “Why would you fight for these rights? At all?”

“It’s the right thing to do, and I’m one of the few humans who has the power to do it. And I think we can agree that waiting on the Ministry isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

“No human has done this for us in living memory.”

The way she says it makes Harry sure that she’s old and that her living memory extends far back beyond any human’s. He nods. “I know. That’s one reason that I need to speak with you the way I didn’t about the wands—which I’m sorry for, by the way—because I don’t know how to achieve these things without you.”

“You assume we want to achieve these things.”

“What would you rather do instead?”

“You assume we want human help.”

Harry blinks. “All right. Would you like money instead?” He’s sure that he can get Sirius to donate from the Black vaults, which are apparently enormous. And it’s just the sort of chaos that he’d like to foment against the Ministry.

“You assume we want to move against the Ministry at all.”

Harry manages to hold his laughter in, although he thinks it makes his voice tremble when he says, “Well, I’ve had years of History of Magic, for what it’s worth when it’s a ghost teaching it. It sounds like the goblin rebellions were about winning some freedom for your people and avenging insults.”

Illdark leans forwards and hisses at him hard enough to make Ahalam stir in Harry’s robe pocket, although he knows she’s not a Parselmouth. “You dare to joke about things you do not understand?”

“No, sorry.” Harry shrugs. “All right. Then I suppose that you can decide what to do with the wands, and I won’t bring any more unless you tell me directly that you want them, and you won’t need to participate in anything my allies and I do against the Ministry, either.” He stands up. “Are we done here?”

“You assume you can simply walk away?”

Harry narrows his eyes, feeling Fred and George stir behind him. “We do have an exception in the oaths we swore for self-defense,” he says quietly.

Illdark twitches one hand. “I do not mean to attack you. I mean that you think you can dictate the terms of our participation in your alliance?”

“You say that you don’t want human help or to achieve the things I’m fighting for. I thought I’d move out of the way and allow you to do your own thing, and I’ll do my own thing with the allies I have. At least it ought to get the Ministry looking in more than one direction.”

Illdark hisses at him again. “You think that you can do this without us?”

“You think that I’m just going to sit here forever while you ask a lot of meaningless questions?”

Illdark pauses. Harry wonders if she’s communicating with someone he can’t see. The way she turns her head and lifts a hand as if signaling someone to silence sort of indicates it.

But she turns back to him and speaks as though she’s alone in the room. “You will change your goals and the things you are fighting for because we say so.”

It takes Harry a minute to realize that it isn’t another question. Then he can feel his face cool. He shakes his head. “No. It’s true that our alliance is tiny right now, but I think wand rights and participation in the Ministry is worth it for other nonhuman people even if you don’t want them. So you can work with me or work on your own, or you can do nothing, for all I know. But you won’t be able to stop me from doing what I want.”

Illdark studies him in silence. Then she says, “You may go.”

Harry barely keeps from shaking his head again as he turns away. For a mercy, Fred and George don’t speak until they’re out of Gringotts and blinking in the sunlight.

“What do you think that was all about?” Fred asks.

“Not a clue, Ford,” George says, and they both look at Harry.

Harry shrugs. “I don’t know, either. Maybe it was a test to see if I would just let them do whatever I wanted or dictate the terms of the alliance. But either way, I suppose we can go on planning from here and just leave the goblins out of it.”

Privately, he’s a bit sad about that. He did hope the goblins would join him. But the last thing he wants to do is force them.

I’m not going to be like the Ministry.