[This Lord Business Series]: I Have Been a Brother to O.W.L.S., 21/?

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Twenty-One—The Stone of Truce

“Harry Potter.”

Harry turns around, surprised. Ahalam gives a sad hiss in response. “Are we not to have cheese? There was cheese promised!”

“In a minute,” Harry says, interested to note that the unfamiliar boy behind him, an older Slytherin, doesn’t flinch at the Parseltongue. Of course, most of the students in the school know that Harry’s a Parselmouth by now, but some of them still get upset about hearing him speak it, unless they’re one of his followers and used to that kind of thing.

“Yes?” he asks, when the Slytherin just stands there.

The boy bows. He has hair so dark that it has a blue sheen to it, and large, protruding dark blue eyes that remind Harry a bit of Luna’s. “My queen sent me to you with an offer of alliance,” he says.

“Your queen?”

The boy produces a stream of sound that Harry can’t understand. After a moment of staring, though, the boy adds, “She is the queen of the merfolk in the Hogwarts lake. We were given to understand that you were seeking an alliance with us?” By the end of his speech, he’s starting to look uncomfortable, as if he thinks Harry might have been lying.

“Oh! Yes, of course! Sorry, I just hadn’t talked to anyone official yet so I didn’t think she would have heard about it.”

“We heard from the goblins.”

“Oh!” Harry blinks some more, and Ahalam winds out onto his shoulder. The boy looks at Ahalam with what seems to be intense interest, and Harry abruptly hopes that sea snakes don’t eat merfolk eggs. Or babies. Or whatever they have. He’ll have to learn. “I—didn’t think they were very disposed to ally with me.”

The boy smiles a little at him. “Goblins have their own customs which my queen would not dream of questioning.”

Harry thinks of asking whether the goblins are his allies or not, but the boy’s reply seems to say he won’t say. Harry half-shrugs and pushes the thought away. “Thanks, then. Should I meet you or someone else at the lakeshore this afternoon? Or some other time soon to talk about it?”

“The queen has deigned to grant you an audience,” the boy says, his voice a little repressive. “That means meeting underwater, so she can speak clearly and you can understand her clearly.”

“But I don’t speak Mermish!”

“I have been authorized to offer you a token that will allow you to breathe underwater and understand our language for an hour.” The boy offers a silver bracelet on his palm, a solid thing that looks as if it’s been ornamented all over with a pattern of fish scales. “And of course you may examine it for harmful spells first.”

Harry nods and floats the bracelet over to him instead of touching it. Ahalam flicks his tongue at it. “It is pretty. A good gift for a beautiful snake.”

“No. We don’t know if it has harmful magic on it.”

Ahalam sulks.

“Please allow me to test this with some of my followers first,” Harry says, hardly believing the words coming out of his mouth. Merlin, if the Harry of three years ago could hear this, he’d be laughing his arse off. “Then we can set up a time for the meeting.”

“That will be acceptable, Lord Slytherin. Please contact me when you are ready to discuss it.”

“Er, but what’s your name?”

The boy’s dark blue eyes widen, and Harry wonders if he’s committed some kind of error by asking, but then the boy shakes his head. “Not your fault, Lord Slytherin. I was extremely remiss in not introducing myself. I am Isidore Ramath.”

“Nice to meet you, er, Ramath.”

“You must call me Isidore, my lord, since you are of a higher social standing!”

Isidore looks to be on the verge of fainting. Sourly, Harry thinks that Theo would probably approve of him. “All right, Isidore. I’ll let you know when I think I can make this meeting.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Isidore says, with a bow of his head that luckily doesn’t turn into a full-on bow, and he turns and glides away as though he’s achieved everything he wanted, after tracking Harry down in this corridor on the way to the Room of Requirement.

After he leaves, Harry stares at the hovering bracelet and sighs a little.

At least he’s meeting Theo and Susan in the Room of Requirement, so they can tell him what they think of this and if it’s dangerous.

“Bracelet for the snake,” Ahalam says hopefully.

“No.”

“Bracelets are second only to cheese!”

“But you told me before that you also need sunlight, and honesty, and for me to talk to you more than I talk to Salazar, and—”

At least arguing with Ahalam makes the walk pass quickly.

*

“This bracelet is set with a Stone of Truce.”

Harry can practically hear the capital letters as Theo says them. He blinks a little. “And what’s that?”

Theo gives him a disapproving look. Harry ignores him. Theo should know as well as anyone that Harry hasn’t actually had the chance to study much about gemstones and their properties, and that there’s no reason he would know this specific one. Which must be pretty rare in the first place.

I don’t think merfolk go around giving them out to just anyone.

“This means that as long as you wear the bracelet and are in the meeting speaking with the queen that Ramath informed you about, none of the merfolk can harm you.”

“Why is that different from just the wording of a truce, though?” Harry asks.

Susan laughs a little. Harry glares at her, but Susan leans forwards and lets her fingers rest on the gleaming pale stone that Harry didn’t notice in the bracelet until he got to the Room of Requirement. “As long as you wear it and are obeying the rules yourself, the merfolk literally can’t harm you. Their spears or tridents would just dissolve into dust if they tried to hurl them at you. And any harmful spells would do the same thing.”

“What about their songs?” Hermione asks, looking at the stone. Harry sent his Patronus, Godric, to go get her when he realized they would be talking about the merfolk’s offer, because she’s so interested in the rights of magical creatures. “Would those also fail to enchant him?”

“The merfolk in our lake can’t sing those sorts of songs, that’s only sirens—”

“I’ve read that some sirens pretend to be merrows or selkies so that their human neighbors don’t drive them away—”

“That’s stupid, if they were really sirens they could just enchant their neighbors and that wouldn’t be a problem—”

“It’s a problem because humans are stupid about merfolk—”

Harry clears his throat loudly, and both Susan and Hermione flush and stop arguing. “Well, it sounds like the Stone of Truce would affect their songs if they can even sing them.” He turns to look at Theo, who’s been silently amused by the whole thing. “Ramath said something about how the goblins informed them of my wish for an alliance. What do you think the goblins are actually doing?”

“I wouldn’t presume to speculate, my lord.”

“I’m asking you to.”

Theo raises his eyebrows, and Harry thinks he’s going to get another pseudo-diplomatic answer, but in the end, Theo shrugs and says, “I think that the goblins will make an alliance with you, but on their own terms, and some of the questions Illdark asked were to see if you would react in a certain way.”

“Which way?”

“If you would get upset. If you would snap at her. If you would accept everything she said to you. And from the memory you showed me in Black’s Pensieve, she was especially surprised that you referred to goblins as people.”

“But they are,” Harry says, a little blankly.

“Not to everyone, my lord. Remember?”

Harry scowls at the reminder, then sighs. Yes, that does make his conversation with Illdark make a little more sense. He turns back to Susan and Hermione. “Do you think we should ask other people to be with me when I speak with the mer-queen?”

“You mean, besides us?” Susan asks.

“Yeah. I didn’t know if it might be offensive to bring guards, or a certain number of people. I suppose I should have asked Ramath.”

“I can ask him. It must be so fascinating to talk to someone with merfolk heritage—”

An alarm squeals from Hermione’s wrist, and she gasps and grabs it. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Harry! It’s time for me to leave so I can get back to the Tower in ten minutes and start studying for Charms!”

Harry manages not to laugh. In fact, all he wants to do is smile at her, an enormous fondness moving through him. Hermione wouldn’t be Hermione if she were more relaxed about this. “It’s all right, Hermione. But I’ll make sure to ask Ramath—”

“I want to ask him!”

“Someone will ask him,” Theo says.

“If I can have people come with me, and you’ll definitely be one of them if I can,” Harry reassures her.

Hermione beams at him and runs away as the alarm that shimmers like a barely visible watch on her wrist shrills again. Harry shakes his head. “She’ll probably be a brilliant spell-crafter someday,” he mumbles. “I think she probably invented that spell.”

“She did, yes,” Susan says.

There’s a kind of smug satisfaction in her voice that makes Harry look at her curiously. “Did she tell you?”

“No.” Susan leans back in her chair and folds her arms, grinning. “I might have been working to develop my mage sight. I might be able to see spells’ signatures.”

Theo gapes at her. Harry is glad that he seems stunned, even though Harry is mostly stunned because he doesn’t know what she means. At least Theo doesn’t know everything, either, even if he is plotting with Susan.

“What does that mean?” Harry asks.

Susan turns to smile at him. “When you cast a spell, my lord, it leaves a trace on the air—or the world around it, that would probably be a better way to put it. An imprint, like the footprint of a creature. It doesn’t last long, and most people can’t see it. And if you’re in a duel or something like that, you would be too busy dealing with the spell’s effect. But if you can see signatures, then you can retain that imprint longer than other people. And recognize new spells when you see them.”

“That’s so brilliant! What does it look like? What color is it?”

Susan laughs. “There’s all sorts of different colors. But mostly they look like fireworks, in that they have colors but they also form patterns. And I know when I’m seeing one that’s new. The spell on Hermione’s wrist is new.”

Harry smiles at her. “That’s awesome.”

“I agree,” Theo says, and his voice is soft, but his eyes are calculating. Of course, he wouldn’t be Theo if they weren’t. “I think it’ll be important that you be with Harry when he talks with the merfolk, Susan. And that you guard him at times when you can, especially if McLaggen and I can’t.”

Harry sighs a little, but doesn’t dispute the guard plan. It doesn’t sound like it’ll work.

Instead, he just thinks happily about how brilliant his friends are.

Ahalam interrupts by poking his nose into Harry’s cheek. “There could now be a pretty bracelet for the prettiest snake.”

“No, I need it for something else.”

Ahalam sulks.