lomonaaeren

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Part III. Forest Primeval.

“And you have to go alone?” Ron stared at Harry and spun a quill between his fingers. Harry thought he was probably three seconds away from offering to go with him.

“Yeah, I do.” Harry reached out and clasped Ron’s hand. “But I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

“That isn’t much comfort, mate, given who you’re going to hunt.” Ron pulled his hand free and folded his arms, scowling. Harry knew how to tell when Ron was scared, though, and he knew how to respond. He and Ron hadn’t had a serious argument in years.

“I know that,” he said. “But—I always knew Draco better than you did. I spent so much time with him that I started quoting his opinions to you without realizing what I was doing, remember?”

Ron smiled for the first time since Harry had told him about his mission. “Yeah.”

“So.” Harry let out a harsh breath. “I think I would have noticed any signs of his turning to the Dark. I’m not certain, but I think so. I can’t believe that he’s responsible for this curse, or these attacks on the various people who’ve died, or whatever it really is. He’s much more likely to be a victim, the way he was when Voldemort was trying to use him against his parents.” Harry was distantly amused to see that the name still had the power to make Ron flinch and squirm in his seat.

“Just be careful,” Ron said.

Harry nodded. He appreciated that Ron didn’t offer to go with him, as much as he obviously wanted to. Both of them knew that his coming near Draco wasn’t a good idea, since Ron hated him. Kingsley had chosen Harry to investigate this for his expertise in Dark magic—and he should have come to him in the first place, rather than giving it to incompetents, Harry thought rebelliously—but his friendship with Draco would make him more dedicated to this, and he wouldn’t recommend killing Draco unless he found Draco eaten out from the inside, a shell with only Dark magic animating him. Ron was a good Auror, but he would be a hindrance in this situation.

And apparently he couldn’t resist making one final attempt to persuade Harry to his point of view. “He could have changed since he went to France,” Ron said, spinning the quill between his fingers again and keeping his voice elaborately casual, his eyes fixed on the desk. “Why did he move there, anyway? And why did you lose contact with him?”

“He went because there were still people in Britain who hated him for what happened during the war, and he had French relatives.” Harry sighed. He had tried to talk Draco out of going, but Draco had flung back incidents from his everyday life at Harry that Harry had had no idea were happening, and in the end he’d been forced to agree with Draco’s decision. “He thought he’d have a better life there. We stopped communicating just—because, I reckon. The way that most long-term relationships drift apart. The owls got fewer and fewer, and when he did write, it was in French half the time. He wanted to forget England, he told me. The last letter he sent me told me he was probably going to be out of communication for a long time, because he wanted to think about his life without any outside interference.”

“Some wizards become Dark with less prompting than that,” Ron said, just loudly enough for Harry to overhear.

“I know.” Harry ran a hand through his hair and turned towards the door again, slinging the bag on his shoulder higher. “But I want to rescue him if I can.”

“If you can’t?”

Harry paused with one hand on the doorway and glanced back at Ron. “Then that’s something I’ll simply have to accept.”

This time, Ron saluted him, a motion of his hand that looked entirely ironic but which Harry knew wasn’t. Ron had had a lot of proof in the last few years how Harry could deal with the consequences of situations he didn’t like and live with them, if he had to. The fact that he wasn’t ever going to marry Ginny, the way that he couldn’t escape his fame, his inability to persuade Draco to give up some of his attitudes about blood…Harry was better at compromise in the face of inevitability than he had been when he’d sacrificed his life to stop Voldemort, and Ron knew it.

“Good luck,” Ron muttered.

Harry nodded once more, waved, then stepped out and let the door of Ron’s office thump shut behind him.

*

If I were a Draco running scared of a curse on me that I couldn’t interpret and couldn’t control, where would I go?

Harry stood calm and relaxed in the middle of the Wiltshire field that Auror Brinsley had actually been killed in, to read the reports of the Unspeakables who had handled his body. He had his eyes closed, but he could hear the small sounds of grass rustling and a single loud bird calling cheep-cheeeer, cheep-cheeeer well enough. This was a protected wizarding area, meant as a place where the wizards of several counties could come together and negotiate local property laws, so he couldn’t hear Muggle vehicles.

If I was a Draco who caused death and didn’t want to cause death, where would I go?

The natural place to start would have been in France, but Harry, even though he’d looked carefully through the last letters that Draco had sent him, couldn’t find the names of his French relatives. And it would be less productive than doing nothing to wander around France. Kingsley wanted the decision to take or spare Draco’s life made quickly. Harry would ensure that it was, even though he also knew his choice would fall on the side of “spare” no matter what.

If I was a Draco who had already had three Aurors come after me and didn’t understand why, where would I go?

Harry opened his eyes. He had settled his mind enough that he could feel the vibrations of subtle magic in the roots of the grass, a spell cast to keep it trimmed and free of weeds. For a moment, he entertained amusing thoughts of what Snape would say if he could see him now. “Clearing your mind” didn’t mean to him what it did to Harry.

But such thoughts interfered with his smooth hunting, so Harry banished them and began to walk in a circle. All the while, he extended his sensitivity to magic outwards around him in a series of overlapping concentric rings, now and then pausing so that he could pay attention to his breathing or the motions of his legs. Falling too far into the trance that powered this method of hunting had the effect, sometimes, of making him fall over in cramps or stop breathing.

He couldn’t really explain how he did this, except that it had something to do with the curse scar and the legacy remaining from his dying to stop Voldemort. The only gift I ever got from the old bastard, he thought, but he kept the thought light, skimming along the surface of his mind like a water-strider on the surface of a pond. No breaking the trance. No breaking the trance…

He could sense Dark magic easily, and often follow the track of a spell to its source, as long as the trace wasn’t more than a month old. It was as if the protection that he had briefly granted all of Hogwarts against Voldemort’s spells had turned inside out and now was a means of detecting where such “innocence,” untainted by curses, was and where it wasn’t. He had caught more Dark wizards that way than any other, since his trance seemed to break through the most elaborate wards and spell-protections they cast around the sites of their deeds to keep them “safe.”

Any moment now, he should feel the Dark magic that had slaughtered Roger Brinsley. Any moment now. Any moment now…

His traveling awareness reached the edge of the field, and spread beyond it into the territory of Malfoy Manor and the surrounding Muggle areas. Still Harry kept pacing, though now and then he paused so as not to make himself dizzy. He could push his sensitivity further than this, if it were needed.

Funny. He really had thought he would encounter the operation of the curse by now. To his feeling for Dark magic, a curse was a curse, and it didn’t matter whether it was intentionally cast or carried by the kind of Curse-Bearer that Kingsley had talked about. The death had definitely taken place in this field, and he should have experienced the violence of it as a series of disgusting shivers across his skin.

And then he caught—

Something.

Harry wanted to pivot towards it and cast a spell that would sharpen his senses so he could fix the moment more easily in memory, but he refrained. He had lost traces by doing something that impulsive. Instead, he kept his breathing light and loose and calm, his mind still bubbling with thoughts, and drew his wand with his right hand. He spent long moments contemplating the grass at his feet before he flicked his wand, twice, and made the world come into shining, crystalline focus.

Yes. A trace of alien power crackled across the grass blades and dripped from their tips like dew. Harry started to smile triumphantly, but at the last moment, he had to give it up and concentrate on the magic again.

What is this?

It didn’t feel like any other curse he’d ever encountered. It didn’t have the taint of the Unforgivables, or the layered sense, like biting into a cake, of Dark magic mingled with simple hexes and jinxes that was one of the more sophisticated hiding techniques. Harry didn’t even sense what he had begun to think was the likeliest explanation, the bristling, sword-sharp bouquet of so many spells cast at once that they turned into a writhing tangle.

And yet, there was something maddeningly familiar about it.

What is this?

Harry dropped into a crouch and reached out to brace himself on the grass, his fingers spread. He widened his nostrils and closed his eyes again; sight was too distracting at a moment like this. He gave himself up to the subtle scents of sunlight, crushed grass, a musky insect, a hidden flower—

And the magic. It had a trace of almonds, of burnt sugar, of cinnamon. Harry sniffed again, and then his eyes popped open.

Sweet scents were associated with magic that wizards in general thought of as innocent—the pranks of children, in other words. But this scent was too strong for a simple prank spell, and it would have taken a great many of those spells to kill Brinsley, and there was no trace of them left, anyway.

Powerful, killing magic with innocent intent fit only one profile.

Wild magic.

No one had asked, in any of the reports Harry had read, whether Draco might be carrying a suddenly manifested wild talent instead of a curse.

As Harry’s initial impulse to dance around in circles and yell to the skies faded, though, he realized he still had a problem. What talent could Draco be carrying? He was thirty, just like Harry was. Most wild talents would have showed up before then. The rare ones that appeared long after puberty were always linked to both a family bloodline and a traumatic experience. Harry couldn’t have said what Draco might have suffered in France—

And why the fuck didn’t I insist on communicating with him, still? I should have. I should have. Even if he had a new life over there, he could have taken the time to answer a letter from me now and then.

—but he had studied the Malfoy bloodline before, when he was on a case where Lucius Malfoy was a suspect. No wild talents there. No signs of one, in eighteen generations of Malfoys.

Harry had no doubt that his suspicion about the wild magic was correct. However, it really left him no closer to an answer than before. What Draco might be doing, or feeling, or experiencing, at the moment was still beyond his ken.

But it’s possible that I missed something before. The Ministry’s records on the Malfoy line could be fragmentary. Luckily, I’m not far from a place where they would surely have more information, and I think the house-elves would still remember me and let me in. Harry knew he couldn’t count on a human presence at Malfoy Manor, since Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy had given up living there; it was too easy for anti-Death Eater activists to target them.

Harry still remembered the Apparition coordinates of Malfoy Manor well enough. He oriented himself in the right direction to face the house, closed his eyes in intense concentration for a moment, and then Apparated.

*

I got them wrong. How did I get those coordinates wrong when I spent every Sunday for two years of my life with Draco?

Harry spent a long few minutes staring around him incredulously. Then he shook his head. One thing Draco had helped him get over was his tendency to insist that reality must be wrong and substitute his own conclusions for it. If he had landed in the wrong place, then his Apparition had been at fault. It wasn’t like the Manor had a will of its own and could move around.

Harry drew his wand and moved cautiously forwards, glancing from side to side. From the looks of it, he was in an old forest, the trees hundreds of feet tall and practically interlacing their branches; not much sunlight escaped to the floor. Harry had to cast Lumos before long. His feet shuffled and thrashed through piles of dead and decaying leaves, which irritated him, but Stealth and Tracking classes had never covered how to move quietly in a place like this. He couldn’t move fast, either, because, although there was little undergrowth, the heavy crooked roots and the trailing strands of ivy around the trunks and the holes the leaves concealed were more than enough to trip him.

He compared the forest with several images in his head of other forests in Britain and had to discard them all. Not the Forest of Dean, either, he concluded at the end of his list. So either I somehow Apparated to the Continent—and I know that can’t happen—or this place is magical. I think I’ll take a local violation of magical law over magical law suddenly bending enough that inter-continental Apparition is possible.

Noises came and went around him. Harry could hear the scrape of what sounded like claws on bark, the chatter of birds that made the one in the field in Wiltshire sound positively polite, and, once, a howl that made his hair stand on end. He knew the sound. He’d hunted werewolves before.

Except that it’s not a full moon night, it’s still day, and so it can’t be werewolves, he reassured himself. Real wolves, maybe.

But who knows if that particular magical law holds here?

At last, after he’d wandered for perhaps twenty minutes without finding a clue to the forest’s true nature, the sound of water caught his ears. Harry turned down a faint path, probably made by deer, and cursed softly as he tripped over yet another root. Kingsley would be sure they’d wasted time and money on my training if he could see me now, he thought.

He came out on a sloping bank that led down to the river. Harry eyed the bank and cast a spell that would turn the steep slide of earth, mud, and leaves into a smooth ramp.

Correction, he thought, as he watched his spell fade and die. Should have turned the bank into a smooth ramp. The magic simply vanished the moment it touched the raw material of the forest itself.

Grimacing, he nevertheless forced himself to experiment in the careful way they had taught him during Auror training so he could learn the boundaries of the forest’s magical protection. There seemed to be one simple rule. Spells that were meant to work on him, like the Lumos on his wand or the spell that kept his glasses stuck firmly to his face no matter what, still worked. Anything meant to affect the forest didn’t, even a powerful explosive curse that Harry hurled at the ground straight in front of him.

And Hermione would say I was stupid for doing that, he thought, stepping over the place where the explosion hadn’t happened. But at least now I know. And I’ll just have to do this the hard way.

Scrambling, scrabbling, and threatening the uncaring air and dirt, Harry slid down the bank to the river. He ran a hand through the water, and shook his head. He couldn’t tell anything by that. Cold, looking pure but he wouldn’t want to drink it, flowing rapidly over small rocks in a direction that looked like south or maybe west, except he couldn’t tell for certain because the trees were so closely bunched and he’d always been shite at compass spells…it could still have been almost any river in Europe, or maybe Britain. No chance of telling what it looked like when it was at home.

He scooped up a handful of water and cast a purifying spell at it, hoping that would work on a piece of the forest separated from the rest of its natural environment. No. The water trickled through his unresisting fingers and back into the stream, unaffected.

Harry grumbled under his breath and stepped back into the narrow path that ran between the stream and the bank, then did his best to orient himself by the sun and went in the direction he thought was west. He didn’t know if he would find anything there, but he ought at least to explore before Apparating out—assuming the forest would let him, but it should. An unexpected forest in the place of Malfoy Manor might have something to do with whatever had happened to Draco.

Unlikely, Harry could almost hear Kingsley saying. He rolled his eyes. Well, he would feel untrue to himself and his friend if he didn’t investigate it anyway.

The scenery rolled past him, unchanging. More river, more trees, more roots, more darkness. Of course, there were probably all sorts of subtleties that he couldn’t see because he wasn’t a forest connoisseur. Harry snorted a little and picked up his pace as a particularly loud creak came from the branches next to him.

The creak came again. Harry stopped, glanced around for a boulder or tree to put his back against, cursed himself for following the river this closely, and then lifted his wand anyway, even though he wondered what good spells would do against a creature he couldn’t attack.

The thing blundered into sight. Harry stared. He was expecting a werewolf, a deer with pointed hooves and fangs, maybe even one of the cluster of Dark wizards who might be responsible for the forest’s existence in the first place…

But not this.

“Draco?” he demanded.

*

Draco jerked to a stop, trying to breathe, but he’d run too far, too fast. His sides ached, and his feet ached, and his hands were torn and scratched and scarred, and he could see his own blood running even when he looked away from them.

His pursuers were still chasing him.

But now one of them was ahead of him, at the stream that Draco had counted on to carry him away from the two horrible creatures behind.

He began to back up, shaking his head. He didn’t know why it should be so much more horrible to hear this creature speak his name than it was to hear the threatening growls of the others, but it was.

“Draco?” The creature splashed out of the water towards him. Draco had trouble seeing it. Its body was a dim, cloudy whirlwind, but it definitely had claws on the ends of its arms, and its teeth stood out from its head like pins of silver and gnashed and clashed together. “Don’t you know me? It’s Harry.”

And now they’d stolen the name of a friend from his past to get to him.

Draco decided, abruptly, that he was tired of this. He’d been chased from place to place for months, harassed and hurt and nearly killed, and he couldn’t remember what he had done to deserve this. Maybe he’d committed some crime, but if so, the creatures never allowed him to talk about it and never seemed interested in mercy.

He’d had enough.

He lowered his head and charged the creature in front of him.

They went over backwards into the stream, and Draco heard the creature shout. It did have a perfect imitation of Harry’s voice, he decided. But that didn’t mean it was Harry.

He raised his hands, found its neck, and began to choke the thing.

Part 4.