lomonaaeren

More than one person gaped at them as they strode into the center of the ballroom. Harry had to admit that he enjoyed that a lot, especially with the whispers that sprang up in their wake.

“…didn’t know they were dating!”

“They can’t be, can they?”

“Has Nott even been in Britain the last…”

“Potter isn’t gay!”

Harry turned and gave the Auror who’d voiced that last opinion a long, thoughtful glance. Auror Radford promptly shrank back, turning pale. Harry grinned. He didn’t know if Radford was more afraid of Harry attacking him or finding him attractive, and at the moment, he didn’t care.

“You’re making a scene,” Nott said out of the corner of his mouth.

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Not this way.”

“Then what way?”

Harry had the feeling that Nott would have answered, but Minister Emmeline Vance came bustling up to greet them just then. She always pretended that she’d never met Harry before he’d become an Auror, and Harry had allowed it.

Even now, he wasn’t exactly sure how legal the Order of the Phoenix’s activities had been.

“Auror Potter. Mr. Nott. What a delightful sight. I think your native shores have been lacking you for a long time, haven’t they, Mr. Nott?”

“They have indeed, Minister Vance.”

They got into some arcane discussion about things that bored Harry. He let his attention wander, mostly so that he could see what the people around them were thinking.

Hermione was standing on the far side of the ballroom, hiding a smile behind her wineglass. Harry knew that she was here mainly to drum up support for some of the changes she wanted to make in her department, so he shot her a subtle wink and let his eyes move on.

Pansy Parkinson, Robards’s Deputy Head Auror, had her mouth pinched with a sour look. Kingsley Shacklebolt was grinning and not bothering to hide it. Some white-haired man who worked in the Department for the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts was glaring openly at Harry. Harry serenely ignored him. He never remembered the man’s name, as a protest against the Ministry’s way of doing things.

Then Harry’s gaze snagged on someone he hadn’t expected to be here. Draco Malfoy stood in the corner near the buffet table, his face as pale as marble.

“Just a moment, Theo,” Harry murmured. “I see an old acquaintance.”

Nott waved a hand without turning away from his conversation with Minister Vance. He could handle the consequences later, then, Harry thought, striding towards Draco.

Draco drew himself up as Harry walked towards him, and cleared his throat. The slender blonde witch beside him looked back and forth between Harry and Draco for a moment, frowning.

“Auror Potter,” she said, her voice clipped. “My name is Astoria Greengrass.”

“That’s right, you work with Hermione, don’t you?”

“As a representative for the merfolk, yes.”

“Good for you! You must know Mermish, then?”

“I…yes.” Greengrass blinked and then straightened her shoulders. “My parents taught me when I was young. I had a facility for water spells as a child, and they thought it would be useful.”

“More wizards and witches in Britain ought to learn such languages.”

“Do you speak any, Auror Potter?”

“Just a touch of Gobbledygook. The really good swear words.”

Greengrass laughed, and seemed surprised at herself. Harry, meanwhile, turned melting eyes on Draco. “Hello, Malfoy, how are you?”

“Go away, Potter.”

“Draco!” Greengrass sounded mortified.

Harry let his mouth fall open a little and his eyes widen. Then he said quietly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you were still holding grudges from school.”

Draco’s face went so fast through pallor to redness to a haughty disdain that Harry had to work to keep from laughing aloud. “What are you doing here?” Draco finally burst out. “And why are you with Theo? He would never date anyone like you!”

“Draco, you’re being rude.”

Greengrass’s voice was low and firm. Draco glanced at her and then back to Harry. Actual sweat was breaking out on his forehead.

Harry’s chest hurt from holding in his laughter.

Greengrass leaned close to Draco and spoke in something that was almost a whisper, but the charms that Harry habitually cast on his ears to sharpen his hearing came to his rescue. “What in the world are you doing?” she was hissing at Draco. “You told me that you saved each other’s lives in the war and came to a truce! This is making you sound like a sulky child.”

I quite agree.

“You don’t know what he did, Astoria!”

“Then tell me. But later. For now, be polite.”

Draco turned to Harry with a strained expression that made it seem as if his stomach was aching from holding in something other than laughter. It was probably the way he would have looked if his mother had ever scolded him.

In fact, maybe he was with Greengrass because he wanted someone who would scold him and treat him like he was about three years old. Harry had never been capable of that. He’d wanted an equal for a partner, and Draco had been unable to provide that.

It was one of the reasons their relationship had ended.

“I wish you a pleasant evening, Potter.”

“Do you?”

Harry was adept, by now, at changing the tone in his voice just a little, so it would make him sound vulnerable without anything as open as wobbling or cracking in the middle. Greengrass gave Draco a sharp glance, no doubt taken in by Harry’s impression. Harry turned his eyes away for a moment so that he wouldn’t lose it.

“Yes. I—do.”

Harry lowered his eyes to the floor and nodded a little. “All right. Thanks. I’m glad that you can do that. I wish you a pleasant evening, too.

“P—Harry.”

Harry turned around with a bright smile and looped his arm through Nott’s. “Excuse me, Draco, Miss Greengrass. My partner wants to dance, and I have to admit that I’m eager to show off my skills in that area.”

“Please, call me Astoria.”

“Then you must call me Harry,” Harry said, and tipped his head down in a graceful gesture that wasn’t really a bow. He saw Greengrass staring at him speculatively before Nott swept him away in the direction of the dancing floor.

“You shouldn’t be flirting with someone else when we need to act the way we do.”

Harry blinked at Nott’s profile, which was turned towards him as they made their way into the middle of the floor and the other couples who were already dancing. “I wasn’t.”

“Astoria looked as if she were about to abandon Draco for you.”

“More likely that he told her he and I used to date, the same way he told you. And she’s trying to figure out what we ever saw in each other.”

“That, I admit, is something I’m curious about as well,” Nott said, and turned to face him. He put one hand on Harry’s shoulder and the other on his hip. “But you’ll need to tell me later, when we’re not in public or a place where you need to gaze adoringly into my eyes.”

“Why didn’t you say that you wanted me to do that, Theo?” Harry asked, and adopted his best lovesick expression.

Nott’s lip curled a little. Harry was getting a lot of practice holding in laughter tonight.

“You said that you were good at dancing. I hope for your sake that that’s correct.”

“Believe it or not, some of us have changed since fourth year.”

“Fourth—”

“The Yule Ball.”

Nott rolled his eyes. “If you can call that a ball.”

“What would you call it?”

“An embarrassment,” Nott snapped, and seemed about to say something else, but the first faint strains of the next song rolled out over the ballroom. Harry could see the musicians when he craned his neck, standing on a stage towards the back of the room with harps and delicate drums in front of them.

“Do keep up, Potter.”

“Always, Theo.”

Nott narrowed his eyes at Harry’s breathless tone, but the waltz started then, and he had to move.

And Harry moved, too. He’d had plenty of chances to learn to dance since fourth year, and he’d taken to them gleefully. It was like Quidditch on the ground. Certain moves were cheating, but he could still turn and glide in unexpected directions, and use his body as an instrument. His teachers had been surprised that he could dance like this, but so what? Harry had been surprising people for years.

If that ever stops, I’m probably dead.

He saw a few people gaping at him from the corners, especially Draco. Harry threw a wink towards him that he hoped landed in the right place, and then turned back and faced Nott.

The man was staring at him as if Harry had materialized out of nowhere, or as if Harry were a lot more handsome and talented than he was. Harry laughed quietly.

Nott snapped out of it and said, “They’re switching to a different song now.”

“Are they?”

“It’s a more languid song. Can you handle dancing to something with a slow tune?”

“How many hours did I spend hovering while I waited for the Snitch to show itself? Of course I have the patience that you don’t think I have.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Harry let his lips twitch even as he listened to the tune coming from the musicians. Honestly, he thought, Nott was exaggerating the slowness. It still required plenty of balance and skill and motion. “Never mind. Private joke.”

Nott looked as if he might have demanded to know what Harry was talking about, but they had to whirl then, and then he had to dip Harry. Harry went with it, grinning up into Nott’s face as he stared down in frank astonishment.

He didn’t think I would trust him that much.

Well, Harry might not trust Nott to protect his back in battle, but he trusted him not to let Harry sprawl on the floor. That would look embarrassing, and Nott seemed allergic to that.

Nott pulled him back up and danced with Harry held close to him for a moment, their chests almost touching, his eyes locked on Harry’s. Harry looked back, calm and bold, and saw the faint shades of grey and blue in Nott’s eyes. Shades of ice, of phoenix fire, and something deep and gold gleaming at the bottom of it all.

“Your eyes are so green.”

Nott was whispering. Harry smiled at him and said nothing about how that was the most common compliment he received.

“Your eyes are beautiful.”

Nott snapped his face back into a cold mask with a suddenness that must have hurt. “What did you see?”

“Different colors.”

“What colors?”

“What am I, your mirror?”

“Tell me which colors they are, Potter.”

Harry frowned a bit, disliking the way that Nott had switched back to his last name when people were watching them, but he complied. “Blue and grey and gold at the bottom.”

Nott hissed under his breath and whirled Harry in a circle that took them to the edge of the dance floor and out of the center of the mingling couples. “We need to leave, now.”

Harry wondered why, but he knew arguing about it would just make Nott angrier. He nodded, and made sure that his wand was loose in his holster as Nott strode with a quick pace towards the doors.

“Dearest Theo.”

The voice rang like bells shaken out of tune. Harry found himself hiding his wince as he turned around. He didn’t know who this was or why their voice sounded so odd, but he was partially prepared for the sight before him.

Even if it seemed no one else was. Or, really, no one else was looking. Harry checked with flicks of his eyes from side to side while he kept most of his attention on the person approaching them. No, the other attendees were all idly chatting with each other, and none of them was alarmed.

Glamour, then.

The person strolling towards them could never have been mistaken for anyone human. For one thing, she was taller than everyone else in the room, and so slender she looked as though someone had carved her from an icicle. Her skin was a dead white except for the glow underneath it, and her hair flowed down her head and neck only to vanish into mist a good way from the floor. Her gown looked like it was made of the blue kinds of icicles, woven around her and enchanted to bend.

Her eyes were large and triangular and so bright a green that it hurt to look at them, with some of the gold glow at the bottom that had marked Nott’s. And her mouth opened to reveal serrated teeth.

Sidhe. Or some relative.

The Sidhe came close enough that she could have reached out and touched Nott. Harry interposed himself. “Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

Nott hissed something wordless behind him. Really wordless. Then again, Harry wouldn’t have been that surprised to find out that Nott knew Parseltongue, not after everything else.

The Sidhe’s eyes opened wide, and she considered him for a long moment. Then she looked over his shoulder at Nott and said, “Really?” in a slightly disappointed tone.

Nott answered in a language that Harry didn’t know. However, it rang enough that he thought it was probably the tongue of the Sidhe. It would have suited the shaken-bell voice of the one in front of them better than English did.

The Sidhe’s eyes widened still more. At this point, Harry was pretty sure that she was stretching them beyond human limits. “And you wish to do this?” she asked in English. “You think that you could keep me from taking what I want?”

Nott said something in the Sidhe language again.

The woman turned to Harry. Her smile was so wide that it looked as if it might continue behind her face. “I think you’ve lovely eyes,” she said to Harry. “I’d like to take them.” And she stretched a clawed hand towards him.

Nott made a strangled noise. Harry was sure that almost anything he could do would cause some sort of diplomatic incident, especially since he didn’t know if this Sidhe wanted Nott’s mission to fail or just wanted to play with them. But there was one thing that might be fine.

“Sure,” he said, and reached up. His wand flickered, wordlessly casting an illusion spell he’d used often before. The illusion settled over him, and he appeared to pry his eyes out of his face.

Nott gasped behind him. The Sidhe woman took a step back, staring very hard, probably to see through the glamour. Harry tossed his illusory eyes into the air and let them fly in lazy arcs towards her.

In the end, the Sidhe stepped back, and the illusions rolled on the floor. Harry heard the kind of gasp that preceded a scream.

The Sidhe gave a gasping, croaking noise that sounded like the way a crow might laugh. “Incredible, young one,” she said. “I look forward to your challenge.”

And she faded. One moment she was there, and the next she wasn’t. Harry blinked. He’d assumed she’d wrapped herself in a glamour to look human, but maybe her whole appearance had been glamour.

Someone yelled just as the illusions of Harry’s eyes faded from the floor. Harry turned and winked at the yeller, who turned out to be Draco, letting everyone see his eyes unharmed in his face. “Sorry for the prank, everyone. There was a bit of a disagreement here.” He shrugged and smiled.

Draco turned puce with outrage. Someone laughed behind him. Harry smiled around at the crowd and turned to walk with Nott.

Nott was shaking with what looked like rage, given the twisted expression on his face. Well, fine. He could yell at Harry in private. Harry probably had ruined magical Britain’s reputation for decades or something.

Worth it.

*

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I think she might have really tried to scoop my eyes out of my face, and this gave her something else to focus on.”

“I didn’t mean…”

Harry lifted his eyebrows as he watched Theo Nott pace back and forth like a caged tiger. They’d retreated to the same small anteroom where he’d met Nott, and the man hadn’t said a word until now. Harry waited, and waited, and finally sighed loudly when Nott continued to swear under his breath and said nothing else.

“I was protecting you, as far as I could make out. If I did something wrong, you need to tell me what it was so I can try and correct it.”

“Try.”

Harry shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s anything I can do. Why don’t you tell me?”

Nott turned and looked at him. “Her name, or at least the one that she gave me, is Amarante. Her appearance here was a test. I was supposed to handle myself calmly and gently in front of her. She’ll be going back to the Court to tell the Queen that I failed the test, and can’t be trusted with the diplomatic deal.”

“You know that because of the way she acted?”

“You should have let her…”

“Oh, fuck you, Nott. I’m not going blind so that you can pass some test these bastards set up.”

Nott’s eyes widened until he looked as if he was the one who would lose them to go spinning across the floor. “You can’t call the Sidhe bastards, Potter.”

“I can and I will. And you didn’t bother telling me anything about what to do if a Sidhe appeared. Do you want me to go back to Robards and see about having another Auror protect you? Because at the moment, it would be an absolute pleasure.”

They glared at each other.

Nott looked away and rubbed the base of his throat, an interesting gesture that Harry would have to ask him about sometime when he cared. “The colors in my eyes are a warning system for the appearance of a Sidhe,” he said quietly. “And not just any Sidhe, but a high Court noble. I hoped that we might get out of the ballroom before she confronted us. But of course we didn’t manage that, and of course it was Amarante, not someone else.”

“Does she oppose this diplomatic deal, or not?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Then why don’t you clarify the complexity?”

“It doesn’t matter, Potter. As of now, the bargain is off. I’ll have to report back to the Ministry about this.”

Harry started to reply, and then turned around as someone knocked on the door of the anteroom. He drew his wand. Until Robards officially took the duty away from him, then he still had to protect Nott.

Infuriatingly cryptic comments and all.

Nott would have been a worthy student for Dumbledore.

“Go away!” Harry yelled, when the knock repeated itself but no one said anything. “We’re having filthy sex!”

Nott choked behind him. Harry winked at him and waited another moment to see if that would discourage whoever was knocking there. But it didn’t, so he sighed, cast an illusion on himself to make him look half-naked and as if his robes had been torn, and then flung open the door.

On the other side was a woman so beautiful that Harry promptly aimed his wand at her. She laughed a little, but her voice was gentler bells than Amarante’s had been. “Peace, Mr. Potter. I wanted to congratulate you.”

“For what? Fucking Theo?”

The woman blinked. Harry thought she was a little more human than Amarante had been, too. “I don’t think that anyone deserves congratulations for that, but I can offer that if you want it.”

“Come in, Isolde.”

The woman smiled at Nott over Harry’s shoulder and slid into the room. She was more like what Harry had pictured when he thought of one of the Sidhe, with golden eyes and silver hair and movements like she was dancing. Her ears had a slight point. “How well are you after that attack, Theo?”

“Harry stopped most of it,” Nott said, and gave Harry a look that he couldn’t interpret.

“Did he?”

Isolde turned around to look at Harry, her head cocked as though she would study him up and down and through. Harry posed, so that she could take a good look, although that made the illusion of his half-open robe dissolve. Isolde laughed softly and pivoted around to face Nott.

“You should know that Amarante came back to the Court with high praises for your having passed her test.”

“I thought I’d failed it.”

Harry knew from the furious blush on Nott’s cheeks a few minutes later that he wished he’d never said that at all, but Isolde didn’t seem to hold it against him. She only shook her head and gave one of those laughs that were more like bells ringing instead of being tortured. “Of course not. The test was to see if you or your lover would react with an attack. And instead, your lover met Amarante with her own brand of trickery. She was impressed.”

“I—see.”

Harry focused on Isolde, since Nott seemed to be overwhelmed. “What do you think we should do from here on out?”

“How much do you know about the bargain that Theo is trying to set up in the Court?”

“Not much, except that it’s been centuries since British wizards had a relationship with the Sidhe, and some people want to see it fail.”

Isolde nodded without looking surprised. “Well, there are essentially three factions. One of them is whom Amarante represents. They want to make sure that your kind won’t make us too human. Their tests will be on the order of seeing what you do when confronted with a fey situation.

“There’s another faction that might attack any time. They want the bargain to fail completely. They don’t want any human influence in the Court, and if they can kill Theo, they know that it’ll be a long time before your Ministry dares to send someone else.”

Isolde fell silent. Harry leaned towards her. “And what about the third one?”

“What third one?”

“You said there were three factions in the Court. Who’s the third one?”

“No, I said there were two.”

“No, you said three.”

Isolde stared him down, something deep and green stirring in the back of her eyes. It reminded Harry of the colors that he had seen in the back of Nott’s eyes, but not as pretty. He didn’t let that thought get to him. He just stared and stared back, and Isolde finally tilted her head back and laughed a little.

“The third faction is mine,” she said. “We want to see our worlds fully integrated, to the point that humans and Sidhe can come and go freely and without restraint between magical Britain and the Court. We need not fear human influence, we know, and you need not fear Sidhe influence, because at the end of this bargain, we will be one.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, the exact truth.”

Isolde winked at him and then abruptly turned into a shower of golden sparks, blending into the walls and floor so that she seemed to vanish. Harry lifted his wand, but she really did seem to be gone. He breathed out and turned to face Nott, who was staring at the place where Isolde had stood with a bleak look on his face.

“Is what she said accurate?” Harry asked.

“I think I heard something different than you did.”

“What do you mean?”

Nott looked at him. “She promised me death.”

Harry closed his eyes and rubbed his hand over his forehead. “All right, Nott, I think you should tell me about this in more detail.”

Nott started to answer, but the walls quaked and slid open at that moment, and gargoyle-like monsters began to rain from the ceiling.

Harry rolled his eyes and raised his wand.

If it’s not one bloody thing, it’s another.