BAD DREAMS: A Snape/Draco Romance

Severus was dreaming that he was asleep in his bed, and dreamed he awoke. Nothing unusual about that these days, but Draco wasn't beside him. He didn't even have a date with Draco. He had awakened with an idea about a chess game he'd played against Dumbledore about a month before, and was eager to try it out.

He jumped out of bed. A wand wave and Lux! turned the candles on. He went to sit at his writing table. A couple of Summoning Charms and Placement Charms brought his chessboard and chessmen and set them out on the writing table. A Replay Charm (Re-pe-pe-plu-pludens) started his chessmen walking through the moves of that previous game. As it had been played in Dumbledore's office, with Dumbledore's chessmen, this was the first time that Snape's chessmen had seen that game, and they were commenting on it in their faint, tinny voices.

It was always understood between Snape and Dumbledore that Severus played Black and Albus played White. White's play here seemed both timid (reluctant to lose any piece) and bumbling (some moves seemed to have been made simply at random), while Black played boldly (willing not only to sacrifice pieces, but to risk giving White an opportunity) and subtly (setting up a trap). Then White made some little move apparently at random and put Black's king in check. Black moved to defend his king, White made some other apparently meaningless move, and Black was checkmated. Dumbledore had smiled gently at Severus as he studied the board and came to grasp the situation. Then Dumbledore had elaborately consulted his pocket watch and murmured: "Too late to start another game. In fact, it's past my bedtime. Good night, Severus. Sweet dreams."

Both wizards had risen to leave during Dumbledore's dismissal, but that last, unexpected phrase set Severus's head spinning. He stared down at the chessboard, pretending to be trying to figure out just how White had done that, as an effort to conceal his confusion. Dumbledore rarely if ever said "Sweet dreams", and had he said it in a particularly meaningful tone of voice? Did he mean that he knew about Severus and Draco and the dream potion and what they were doing with it, and was he warning Severus to stop before the Headmaster was forced to become officially aware and punitive of this misbehavior? Or did that gentle smile mean that he knew and, incredibly, gave his blessing? Or did Dumbledore know nothing about it, and was Severus being paranoid, seeing messages and portents in random words? "Good night, Headmaster," he had mumbled.

This time, Snape ordered his chessmen back to a certain point in the endgame, so he could try what would have happened if he had made a different move. The pieces criticized his new moves and then the remaining Black knight refused to go where he was told. Severus put out his hand to physically move the reluctant knight, and suddenly felt himself falling head-first onto the chessboard. He flung out his other arm to grab the table for support, or at least cushion the blow to his face of landing on the table — but his arm flew in front of him as if the table wasn't even there, and he landed sprawled on the floor.

A different floor. It was cold, smooth stone, but had scraped his skin as well as bruising his flesh and rattling his bones. It was alternating squares (about a yard on a side) of black marble and green marble. The white and grey streaks and swirls in the black marble square he was looking at were starting to look like a picture of a black horse rearing up to smash its (his, the horse was clearly male) front hoofs down on the viewer, so he turned his attention to the blobs of various shades of green that made up the next square. They looked like a cross-section of a liver wrapped with lengths of intestine beside a raw steak full of fat and tendons. All in colors of lime, mint, melon, and pistachio. Yuck.

As Severus stood up, he noticed that he was dressed in daytime robes, but the chessman was still in his hand. Maybe it was a Portkey. He saw that he was in some unfamiliar and empty Great Hall, whose walls seemed to be golden colors. The one nearest him was butter-yellow marble carved into an excruciatingly baroque exuberance of detail surrounding an apse-like niche in which was displayed a bigger than life statue of an armored knight on an armored horse which was rearing up like the horse in the imaginary picture he'd seen in the black marble. He looked at the chessman clutched in his hand, and it said: "Damn you, you stubborn son of a bitch. I may never forgive you for making me worry like this about you. Please don't die."

Severus raised an eyebrow at the chessman. There was no reason for anyone to be worried about him, and no reason to expect him to die anytime soon. Unless the chessman knew something he didn't about being in an unfamiliar Great Hall in an unknown place.

* * *

Teen-agers rarely are morning people, so the sixth-year Slytherin girls' conversation on the way to breakfast wasn't particularly enthusiastic. Regina was telling about the strange dream she'd had last night, which included being a leather suitcase full of Cuban cigars that was being carried in the mouth of a tiger who had extremely bad breath. The others dutifully roused themselves to heckle her.

"Oh, a cigar!" said Amanita. "Everybody knows what that means. And you dreamed you were full of cigars."

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," Regina defended herself with the famous quote.

"Considering that cigars smell like shit, and look like turds," said Morag, "Maybe she was dreaming that she's full of shit."

"Then it must have been about my Transfiguration essay. It is such a pile of padding. I couldn't think of anything to write. Do you think the tiger was McGoner? Does it mean she's going to kill me?"

"No, it means you should put on a leather mini-skirt without knickers and tell her to eat you. Prissy old maids like that are always dykes," Millicent said, not recollecting that Regina was the least appropriate person to whom to mock lesbians.

Taking seats at the Slytherin table, this time Amanita and Morag were the lucky ones who got to sit next to Pansy, with Regina beside Morag and Millicent beside Regina. None of the sixth-year Slytherin boys were at breakfast, but Blaise arrived when the girls had filled their plates and were in the midst of "Please pass the salt, please pass the sugar, please pass the cream, please pass the butter." Blaise strolled up behind Morag and kissed her on the top of her head. Some of his uncontrollable shoulder-length black curls fell on her and instantly became entangled with her uncontrollable ear-lobe length copper curls.

Morag felt someone unknown suddenly touch her head, yelped, and whirled around. When she saw that it was just her boyfriend, she relaxed and raised her face for him to brush lips with her in greeting. Since those two were especially not morning people, their friends were spared any more intense public display of affection. Blaise would have sat beside Morag, but Regina was in his way. Regina would have slid over to make room for him, but Millicent was in her way.

Blaise took a seat next to Amanita, and announced in a tone that was trying to sound casual: "I don't think the other guys are coming to breakfast. Vin and Greg were still snoring away when I left."

* * *

Draco had quite enough to think about without worrying about old Arse-enius's girlfriend trouble or his old soldiers' tale. If there had been a tidal wave fifty feet tall and fifty miles wide, surely it would have left permanent marks on the landscape. He was thinking about Memory Charms, memory potions, and memory in general. His father had taught him to always keep a journal and write legibly in it everything that might be useful to him to know in some future time. For example, if he hid anything, he should write down the hiding place. "When things are fresh in your mind," Lucius had said, "you feel like you'll never forget them. But memories do fade with the passage of time, and can be destroyed by Memory Charms, and then one is grateful to have written it down." Draco had asked why he didn't just use a Pensieve. "Placing a memory into a Pensieve removes it from your mind. I hope to keep all my memories in my mind."

Lucius was aware that written documents are a vulnerable point, and guarded his journals in many layers of magic. He cast charms on the text so that it looked like an undecipherable jumble of random letters and symbols and cast charms on the volumes so that no one could open them except himself, or his heir after his death. He Shrank the volumes and disguised them by Transfiguration and hid them in a secret compartment half-way between his desk drawer and another dimension. Perhaps his preference for journals was because a Pensieve can't be Shrunk or Transfigured or magically locked. But Draco, pretty good snoop as he was, knew where his father's journals were hidden and believed that he knew all the spells that had been cast on them, and the counter-spells to all of them except the one personalizing the magical lock.

Surely Lucius's journals would contain all the information about the Memory Charm he had cast on Severus. Surely the Charm could be removed safely once the details of casting were known. All Draco would have to do was to remove the spells guarding the journals — and replace them so well that nothing would be noticed — and get into and out of his father's office without being detected — and get from school to Malfoy Manor. Well, getting to Malfoy Manor would be easy enough, and he was pretty sure that he could cast a Confundus Charm strong enough to make the journal think that Lucius was dead, so it would allow Draco, as heir, to open it.

* * *

Vinnie and Greggie rushed into the Great Hall, rushed to the Slytherin table, glanced all around in a panicky way. Greggie had sleep-ooze stuck all around his eyes and was wearing his robe backwards. At least Greggie's crew-cut never needed to be combed. Vinnie's hideous peasant-bowl haircut had obviously not been combed and was even more hideous than usual, his face also was obviously unwashed, and his buttons were all in the wrong button holes.

"We've lost him!" Vinnie told Pansy.

"Vinnie, wash your face and comb your hair and you have to un-do and re-do all your buttons. Put them in the right holes this time. No, not here, go to the boys' loo. Greggie, you have to wash your face, too, and you have your robe on backwards; you need to turn it around. In the boys' loo." Pansy instructed them.

They returned looking slightly more presentable, and Vinnie announced: "He isn't in the boys' loo."

"Who isn't?" Pansy patiently asked the leading question.

"Draco," Vinnie answered at the same moment that Greggie asked: "Where is Draco, Pansy?"

"He isn't in our room or the shower or the common room or here in the Great Hall or in the boys' loo." Vinnie added.

"He always tells me he likes to go out for a morning fly." Pansy suggested.

"Not without us!" said Greggie.

"Yeah, he always makes us get out of bed and come fly with him, and then he goes really fast and does his Seeker tricks and leaves us behind," said Vinnie. "I don’t know why he bothers to make us come along just to lose us."

"Vinnie, you go check if he's in hospital wing. Greggie, you check if he's in the library."

After they'd left, Millicent said: "Draco is going to be so angry." Her tone sounded a little bit scared. Pansy turned her head to look straight at her, bending forward a little to see around Morag and Regina.

"You mean he'll be angry at me for helping them find him?"

"No, he'll be angry at them for losing him. They're supposed to be around all the time. Even when you and him are having a private conversation, I can only make out with one of them, because one of them always has to be waiting in the common room. They take turns."

"Millicent, you are too intelligent to be brainwashed into believing those guys' stupid ideas. If they can't find Draco, it's because Draco doesn't want to be found. Go check the broom shed. If his broomstick is gone, check the Quidditch pitch to see if he's practicing alone."

* * *

Fortunately, it was still dark, so Draco didn't have to worry about flying high enough to obey the Ministry's regulations about daylight flying over Muggle areas, intended to prevent being seen by Muggles. The regulations for nighttime flying were nuisance enough. He was more concerned about not being seen by wizards, but he didn't need any trouble from the tight-arses at the Ministry just now. It was a relief that he had reached Malfoy land, free to fly as low as liked, by the time the sky lightened with dawn. He looked down on Malfoy Sodbury, coming into view in the morning light as if it were coalescing from the gray dawn air, and his mind fell into its usual habit of wondering why all the textbooks said that Hogsmeade was the only wizarding village in Britain and never mentioned Malfoy Sodbury. On the other side of the village was Malfoy Manor, with its extensive grounds. Over there was Nott Hall, a somewhat less grand house with rather smaller grounds. Under him were a dozen comfortable cottages and pleasant houses, occupied by wizarding families who paid rent to the Malfoys.

Mr. Avery was a newcomer, who worked in the Taxation department of the Ministry of Magic and rented a house whose previous inhabitants had all been killed or sent to Azkaban. The other villagers were all tremendously inbred, and surnamed Crabbe, Goyle, Bulstrode, and Bole. Most farmed rented Malfoy land. The ones who didn't farm were Mr. and Mrs. Bole who ran the village pub, named The Verdant Serpent, and the widowed Mrs. Bulstrode (Millicent's mother) who taught the primary school children. Except that Vinnie and Greggie, and little Reggie from Nott Hall, had been invited to share Draco's lessons at Malfoy Manor from his tutors.

Draco's thought drifted on to his old Nanny Bole, who happened to be Mr. Bole the innkeeper's grandmother. She'd still been there to give him uncritical approval and sweets when he was a schoolboy, really too big to need a nanny. She had been welcome to stay at Malfoy Manor as a dependent for the rest of her life, because the Malfoys understood noblesse oblige, not like Severus's awful family. Draco thought of Snape Senior firing the nanny when little Severus was only four years old: "That witch was coddling you! Coddling will make you soft. I don't want a weakling for a son. You must learn to be strong. Discipline will make you strong. I've chosen a governess for you who understands discipline." Draco shuddered, not sure whether he was shuddering at Snape Senior's cruelty or his vulgarity.

Having passed Malfoy Sodbury, Draco flew even lower and even more surreptitiously over the grounds of Malfoy Manor. He used his Seeker skills for a quick landing.

In the last couple of years, Draco had gotten along well with the Golden Rose. She was his many-times-great-aunt who had been drowned in the moat by her father because she refused to marry the ugly old wizard he'd chosen for her, and she liked to flirt with Draco. She often hung out in a decrepit shack near the moat. It had been built as a boathouse, really quite recently, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, by a young Malfoy who wanted to row on the moat to keep in practice. Apparently in those days, it had been faddish for aristocrats to imitate Muggle peasant water-men. No one had been interested in the boat-house since then, allowing it to become the kind of ruin that just cries out to be haunted by a ghost. Draco landed his broomstick beside the boat shack because he expected the Golden Rose to be his best ally for infiltrating Malfoy Manor, as old Nanny Bole had left, during Draco's second year at Hogwarts, to look after some other children.

"To be honest, I didn't cut school just to visit you," Draco told her, "although I can't imagine ever being willing to miss a chance to watch you taking off your clothes." She giggled, called him a wicked boy, and pulled the low-cut neckline of her transparent silver dress even lower, to show more of her transparent silver flesh. If Draco ever persuaded her to take all her clothes off, that would be the most sex a human could get from a being that he can't touch without turning to ice, and who can't touch him because her hand would go right through him. Of course, he might turn to ice just from hanging around in an abandoned shack in March, with nasty wet slush everywhere there wasn't snow.

"I need to find something in my father's office without him knowing that I ever was there, and you of all people know that the proverb for dealing with parents is respect them but don't ever trust them."

The Golden Rose giggled at him and shifted the position of her shoulders to show her bosom to best advantage, and adjusted her long skirts so that one shapely leg was exposed. Draco dutifully leered at her. "You've made a good start: your parents have gone to Egypt for a week of sun."

"What about the librarian, the curator, and my mother's secretary?" The librarian of the library in Malfoy Manor, the curator of the art and antiques in Malfoy Manor, and the secretary who answered Narcissa's mail, wrote cheques to pay her bills, and kept her appointment calendar updated were the only human servants, since Nanny Bole had left. The tutors had only been hired by the year. House Elves did the boring work.

* * *

The patina'd bronze horse was suddenly no longer still. He was moving fast, in mid-rampage, flourishing his front hoofs at the top of his uprising before they hit the floor with a crash of metal and weight, and charging at Severus. To be trampled under those hooves would be even worse than to be bitten by those large metal teeth... Severus leapt out of the way. The horse reared up again, to wheel around almost instantly, to charge Severus again, with the mounted knight aiming his lance…

"Expelliarmus!" Severus had pulled his wand immediately: he had good reflexes. The lance flashed green but didn't even waver. "Stupefy!" But the Stunning Charm bounced off the horse with a thunk! Severus thought faster than words: a blow that knocked the knight off would unbalance the horse, a Stunning Charm aimed… right there, where the gorget came over the chain mail shirt. "Stupefy!"

The spell hit the knight where it was aimed, and rider and horse both froze back into a statue, while purple lightning flashes danced over all the knight's armor. When the sparks faded away, the knight fell very very slowly off the horse. When he landed on the marble floor, the suit of armor came apart in the middle. The helmet rolled to one side, the shirt of mail collapsed into a heap of links, the plate mail cuisses and greaves lay like discarded beer cans, quite clearly empty. Severus looked at the pile of armor pieces and the immobile horse; he raised an eyebrow and said "Interesting", vaguely aware that when he had an audience, he should ration the use of that gesture so that it wouldn't lose its effect.

There was no audience here. Severus waved his wand and threw some Detection Charms on the armor pieces. None of them seemed to be traps, although they changed from green to shining silver. Surely they should have been copper, to have a patina of that color. Only the lance and the sword seemed to actually be magic artifacts. Severus walked over to examine them.

Interesting had been no overstatement. The lance and the sword were both wands of a sort — both were built around cores of material from powerful magical creatures. Specifically, each had a fragment of the shed skin of a basilisk as its core.

* * *

Assured that the secretary had gone to Egypt with Narcissa, and that the librarian and the curator were sleeping off last night’s drunken celebration of his lordship’s absence, Draco flew his broomstick to his bedroom window and cast Alohomora while hovering by it. Once inside, he cast a Confundus Charm on the window, so that it wouldn’t remember that he had entered (and later exited) in March. If questioned, it would remember only that he had entered in cold weather, probably just one of many entrances during the Christmas holidays. After all, the Golden Rose had told him: "The house doesn’t take sides between Malfoys."

"What?"

"The house is loyal to the Malfoy family, not individuals, and therefore doesn’t take sides between two Malfoys. It will help any Malfoy who asks properly, but it won’t go out of its way to help your father just because he’s the head of the family, nor to help you because you’re so cute and cuddly. Your father will probably get more help from it than you will, but only because he knows more about what to ask for and how to ask."

Draco put the broomstick neatly in his armoire, along with his winter cloak and boots, and watched himself in the mirror as he changed his appearance to look much older, darker, and just generally different. The portraits throughout the house and the tapestries in the Great Hall gave him confidence that he looked like any generic Malfoy through the ages, even though old Arsenius looked nothing like most of the family. It occurred to Draco that if he ever did this again, he would first search for a potion, charm, or amulet to make a living person look like a ghost. He cast Confundus on his bedroom and all its furnishings, and then he went into the fireplace, into the perpetual green flames that shed heat in winter and coolness in the heat of summer. The Golden Rose had, rather impatiently, showed him where there was a keyhole in the usual Flame-Freezing Charm, and how to make his mind into a key and insert it into that keyhole and move it in a certain way inside the keyhole – a movement which she described by a metaphor that almost shocked Draco, and he made a mental note to remember it and find good opportunities to repeat it. The Golden Rose had, fortunately, been correct when she said that this enhancement of the Flame-Freezing Charm (which she said could be done only by Malfoys) would make it work on the green flames as well as on normal flames.

Bare feet were a great help when climbing around on the filthy, slippery, stone surface of the inside of the chimney, with not as many hand- and foot-holds as would be convenient. So was the Spiderman Charm that Draco had learned, and even taught to Vinnie and Greg, for use in climbing up the vertical part of the route from their secret exit of Slytherin House. The Spiderman Charm, for one’s hands and feet to stick to the wall when desired, worked much better on the clean wall at Hogwarts than on the sooty wall here. At least he had the Golden Rose floating through the chimney system ahead of him, snickering at his climbing difficulties, warning away any chimney-sweep House Elf she might encounter (if there was such a thing as a chimney-sweep House Elf, which seemed unlikely from the condition of this chimney), and leading him through the maze-like route to his father’s office. Once there, he would be able to Floo back to his own room – his father’s office had one-way Floo as a security measure.

He arrived to his father’s office: the familiar large room made to look small by its overwhelming furnishings. Black deep pile carpet, black velvet draperies hanging over the dark wood walls, immense black leather sofa next to the black wooden bookcases, huge black wooden desk with towering black leather wing chair behind it, black marble fireplace that he had just emerged from. The first thing he did was cast a few Good Grooming Charms on himself to remove the soot, dust, dirt, and cobwebs. (Cobwebs? What kind of spider lives in those green flames? Draco thought maybe he would rather not know.) The Golden Rose mocked at him: "Why are you wasting time trying to look pretty? It’s not as if you were anything special even when you are clean."

Draco resisted his desire to insult her right back, used his self-control, and murmured: "Doesn’t that make it even more important that I try to look my poor best for you?" Then he walked around the desk and sat in his father’s chair; time for wand work. A few gestures caused the desk drawers to become visible, and Draco cast a rather powerful Unlocking Charm on a particular drawer. Compared to that charm, telling it to open itself was trivial. Wand in hand, he felt around inside the drawer, awaiting the distinctive feeling (like a hard jolt transmitted through his wand to hand) that meant he had found the secret compartment.

Wand gestures opened the secret compartment. He reached into it, feeling around with his wand, attempting to enter the trans-dimensional extension. Suddenly he felt something tugging on his wand, and jerked it back. That is, tried to jerk it back. He exerted his strength, but the wand didn’t budge. He stopped pulling – and it pulled him. He fell headlong into a deep, dark hole, and insane memories of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Even if a dormouse and a tea-tray had been falling beside him, he wouldn’t have seen them in the dark.

"Lumos!" revealed only a blur of grayish wall rushing by. No dormouse, tea-tray, ground below nor entrance above was visible. Draco (like most other young wizards and witches of an experimental bent) had worked out a variant of the self-levitation charm for resting five foot sideways from a vertical wall. But it didn’t work here. Draco felt unpleasant anticipations of smashing into the bottom when he landed.

* * *

. Severus carefully picked up the lance to examine it more carefully. It was painted with a complicated, gaudy design of silver bees, golden apples, and green serpents.

"Damn!" Severus would have sworn more eloquently if he had sworn less spontaneously. Why had he fallen amongst Malfoy family artifacts? This lance was clearly decorated to commemorate the founders of the Malfoy family, Melissargyros and Avallanta, and presumably the skin inside came from the basilisk they had stolen from Apollo’s prophetic shrine at Delphi back in 800 BC.

Modern Muggles are so stubbornly determined to believe that there is no magic that they instead believe that the Delphic priestesses took drugs and went into convulsions, croaking out nonsense syllables, while the priests, pretending that they were translating from the language spoken by the priestesses, wittily invented ambiguous prophecies that would be correct no matter what came to pass. And the Classical Greeks, who invented science and philosophy and history and theoretical mathematics as known to the West, were foolish and gullible enough that for a thousand years they never noticed that the prophecies from Delphi were not merely fraudulent, but useless. Wizards know that it is no co-incidence that Delphi was said to be occupied by a large snake named Python, and the priestesses were called Pythonesses. The matriarchy that had occupied the Balkan peninsula before history began had learned to breed basilisks, and passed that knowledge down in secret until it was stolen and revealed by Herpo the Dark. And they knew how to keep a basilisk safely confined, so that no one would be turned to stone unless so ordered by a court of justice. And they knew that such a huge snake as a basilisk was a very powerful Diviner. And a guild of Parselmouth witches ran the oracle, having no husbands but accumulating great wealth, and passing down the oracular tradition to their Parselmouth daughters, and equipping their other daughters with weapons and wealth to make their way in the world.

When the Hellenes conquered what came to be known as Hellas, they eventually conquered Delphi, and they dedicated the shrine and the Pythonesses to their shining god Apollo. They decreed that the Pythonesses were all priestess brides of Apollo, vowed to lifelong virginity, and any found to have broken her oath was executed by being buried alive (that’s where the Romans learned how to punish unchaste Vestal Virgins). Business-like priests managed the money and searched the land for Parselmouth little girls to be purchased from their fathers with money or promises of divine blessing.

And Melissargyros was a prince whose father the king had sent him to get the oracle’s advice for the kingdom’s troubles, but as soon as he saw Avallanta the Pythoness, he forgot all about his father and his kingdom, and cared only to steal her away. He was sufficiently skilled and powerful a wizard that he Apparated into her bedroom in the priestesses’ dormitory as if it were not entirely surrounded in many layers of enchanted walls and mazes and poisons to keep out males. And in just one conversation, Mellisargyros persuaded Avallanta not only to elope with him, but also to rob Apollo’s treasury on the way out. That name, Melissos Argyros, means "honey silver", and Severus could not prevent himself from forming a mental image of Melissargyros looking as silver-blond beautiful and elegant and arrogant as Draco; in which case, it was no wonder the witch had broken her vows, abandoned all loyalty to her colleagues, and risked terrible punishments to be with him.

Melissargyros and Avallanta stole the prophetic basilisk and they stole the famous lance of Apollo, whose blade would wound anyone it touched regardless of armor or protective Charms, but whose butt would heal any wound. Then they ran away to Huy Braseal, the island that used to be west of Ireland (it moved to a quieter neighborhood when Muggles got too enthusiastic about fishing the Grand Banks), where apples of gold grow on trees of silver.

* * *

If Draco had been standing on the ground, watching someone else fall, he could have cast a Levitation Charm on that person to slow his or her fall. A sufficiently powerful and skilled wizard could cast the Charm well enough to slow the person’s fall so much that he or she drifted as light as featherdown, and even stop the fall completely, keep the person floating in mid-air as long his wand was pointed at him or her. But there was no one here to cast Levitation on Draco except Draco himself, and all that bloody Levitation Charm could accomplish when cast on oneself was to suspend one exactly five feet above the ground. Well, nothing to do but try.

Draco cast his self-levitation charm, but it didn‘t seem to slow his fall at all. Perhaps he would fall just as fast, and land just as hard, but crash into five feet above the ground rather than into the ground. Merlin’s balls, what he would give to be able to sprout wings, or transform into a bird and fly away… Fly! Broomstick! His beloved Nimbus was in his armoire. When Summoned, it could open that closed door, and make its way through the house, but could it follow him into the hole in his father’s desk? Nothing to do but try. Intensely: "Accio!"

Remember to breathe. "Lumos!" The blackness below looked rather like the bottom, and no Nimbus had arrived yet. If only he’d learned a Cushioning Charm, one that would have the effect of a giant soft squishy pillow to break his fall… Cushioning Charm... Per-cussion… Seized by desperate inspiration, he waved his wand in a giant swish and flick, shouting: "Anti-cussio!"

And felt very much as if half a dozen large blokes had all jumped on him at once, knocking him off the feet he wasn’t on, and punching and kicking him everywhere. No large blokes were visible and the kicking and punching had stopped. He felt bruised, but also as if he were embedded up to his chin in a giant marshmallow confection. Sticky. Stuck. It took tremendous effort to make even the smallest movement of his arm or his leg or his finger, like trying to swim underground. Well, that’s better than crash landing, thought Draco. Hey! I invented a Charm and it worked! Now to dismiss it, as his feet were mere inches above the stone floor.

Except it didn’t go away.

Draco wondered whether this was how it felt to be a fly trapped in amber. Well, he wasn’t suffocating, so maybe more like a fly trapped in a spiderweb. The difference was whether a monster would come along and kill him while he was immobilized, or whether he would remain in place until he died of starvation or old age. Like being caught by Gringotts Bank’s burglar traps. Maybe I should try to climb out the top, thought Draco, far enough to get my hands free for wand work. Maybe the more the captive struggles against it, the tighter this thing entangles him… Is it an invisible thing, or is it a hex?

"Aparecium!" Nothing happened. Draco didn’t know whether the commonplace Revisible Charm had failed to work, or if it had worked but there was no magically invisible object to become visible. Well, there was a very complicated Charm that they’d been studying in Flitwick’s class for two weeks already. Among its variations, it could reveal both magically and naturally invisible objects, detect Curses, detect disguises, find hidden objects, and one version, named Homorphus, could force a Transfigured human or an Animagus to transform momentarily back into his or her real human form.

Draco tried to remember all he had learned about that Charm and to summon up and concentrate his magic powers. His hand clenched on his wand as he tried to move it in the gestures that Flitwick had taught, although the sticky surroundings kept it from moving much. "Ostendo!"

Nothing happened.

When cramming for O.W.L.s last year, Draco had memorized a dozen dozen Curses for DADA and a hundred Hexes for Charms. Now he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and started to run through the lists in alphabetical order, each spell’s name, summary, and counterspell if any, like revising except this time he was trying to compare each summary to his situation.

* * *

There was a quite impressive-looking tall witch writing on the chalkboard in the Potions dungeon. Her hair was as pure white as Dumbledore’s, and fell loose to her knees like a thick cloak. Her skin was as white as her hair, but unmarked by age, and her lips and fingernails were very red indeed. Her hat and robe were heavily brocaded in orange and red and yellow. It looked magnificent, but also as if it would give her heat prostration anywhere outside the dungeons. At the top of the chalkboard, she had written "Professor Zeleskaya-Sakharova" and under that she wrote "Lassie Come Home Potion" and a list of ingredients. Pansy spread her Potions kit on her desk and sorted out the ingredients and equipment according to the writing on the board. At the side of the room, there was a lectern with a huge, well-worn, leather- bound book chained to it. Like the white-haired witch, that was a new addition to the classroom.

First Vinnie and then Greggie arrived before the bell rang to start class, but Millicent hadn’t arrived yet when Professor Zeleskaya-Sakharova, in a pleasantly but heavily accented voice, started her lecture. She briefly mentioned the purpose of Lassie Come Home Potion: if you feed your animals a tablespoon of it every Monday, then if they wander off or are stolen, they will make every effort to return to you. Pansy overheard those Gryffindor girls, Patil and Brown, giggling to each other about whether it would work on boyfriends. The professor then went on to explain the purpose of each ingredient of the potion, and wrote Arithmantic diagrams on the board to show why it had to be stirred three times clockwise and four times counter-clockwise at a certain point. While most of the students rushed to write it all in their notes, and that Granger girl had an expression like she was falling in love, Pansy was staring at the diagrams hoping to find a relation that she could use to prove Arithmantically that it didn’t matter in which direction the potion was stirred.

Millicent rushed in and took her seat with a clatter that interrupted the lecture. Professor Zeleskaya-Sakharova glanced at her, then at the seating chart, then back at Millicent: "Miss Booolstroood?"

"Yes, ma’am."

"Five points from Sleethaireen for tardiness. As I was saying, the decision to use pennyroyal and butter, or catnip and olive oil, is based on the animal’s state of cardiovascular health, but the quantity depends on the weight of the animal. I have written the weight charts for carnivores and for herbivores on the side chalkboard, and advise you to copy them down for memorization. Each one of you will now please place a blank parchment on the center of your desk."

The students obeyed – Pansy put an extra piece of her parchment in front of Millicent, who was still fumbling in her bookbag. Millicent started whispering to Pansy: "His broomstick is gone and he’s not on the Quidditch pitch." The professor waved her wand and some information about an animal appeared on each piece of parchment. Pansy saw that she had been assigned a forty-year-old female white dromedary named Cuddles, who had a blood pressure and a temperature and other medical statistics. Obviously, the first part of this exercise was to look up camels and find out whether they eat plants or people, and what a veterinary wizard expects to find when he takes their temperature, pulse and so on.

Greggie had been assigned a gorilla, Vinnie a tarantula, and Morag a parrot. Millicent’s parchment said: "Five more points from Slytherin for talking during the lecture." Pansy patted Millicent’s shoulder comfortingly, and Millicent repeated: "Draco’s broomstick isn’t in the broomshed and he isn’t on the Quidditch pitch."

"Thanks, Millipenny. I’ll ask the sub for an animal for you, so maybe you won’t have to actually speak with her."

"But what about Draco going missing?"

"I still think he knows what he’s doing, but I’ll owl him after class to make sure. We sure can’t just walk out of this class to chase him!"

It cost Slytherin five more points, for Pansy’s arrogance in taking it upon herself to speak for Millicent, but Millicent was assigned a nice normal dairy cow. Unfortunately, Millicent was so distracted by her urge to search for Draco immediately that she couldn’t think any more than Vinnie and Greggie could. Pansies had to look up all four animals in the big book chained to the lectern, and supervise all three of Draco’s childhood friends, while doing her own work without Draco’s help. And while trying not to show that she, too, was worried about Draco.

* * *

Finally. The class was over, the equipment cleared up, and a homework essay on those Arithmantic diagrams assigned. Pansy headed to her dormitory to fetch some Owl Treats, then to the Owlery. Vinnie and Greggie and Millicent all wanted to tag along with her, but she ordered them to go to lunch.

In the Owlery, some of the owls sleeping overhead stirred at her entrance, with a rustling of feathers, a few sleepy hoots, a few eyes opening briefly to look at her, a few heads turning one-quarter, half, or three-quarters around on their necks because the birds had not been facing toward her. Pansy’s own pinkish-brown screech owl, Strega, recognized her by the sound of her footsteps, awoke, and sleepily flew down to perch on her shoulder. Strega made a sad little weeping meow-like noise that was her version of hooting hello, and pecked Pansy affectionately on the cheek. Strega was only eight inches tall, a quarter the height of Draco’s eagle owl Caesarion, and her hoot sounded like a broken heart, and she was not the snowy owl that little eleven-year-old Pansy had planned to buy when her father said she could have an owl of her own to take away to school, but she was the owl that Pansy had fallen in love with as soon as Strega had awakened in her cage at Eeylops, looked into Pansy’s eyes, and uttered her weepy little greeting.

Pansy gave Strega an Owl Treat and told her: "Go back to sleep, darling. I need to owl Draco, and I think his own Caesarion might appreciate seeing him more than you would." Strega gave a hoot that somehow sounded both sad and affronted at the same time, and flew up among the sleeping owls. She landed on Caesarion’s perch, waking him up, and he hooted indignantly at her. Pansy whistled four notes in the rhythm of da-dum-di-da and Caesarion looked at her. She wasn’t Draco, but she was whistling Draco’s call for him.

"Wake up, sleepyhead," Pansy said in a normal speaking tone. Speaking any louder would have awakened the whole Owlery, and even this tone awoke enough nearby owls that there was quite a flurry of irritated wing-shaking. "I need to send you to Draco." And Caesarion recognized the name and flew down to her. Pansy gave him an Owl Treat and a note she had written in class: Draco – Vinnie and Greggie, and even Millicent who usually is not that stupid, have all freaked out because they can’t find you at Hogwarts and your broomstick is gone. They think you’ll be furious at them for not being with you. I think you left them behind because you don’t want them with you and that you know what you’re doing, but please write back and tell them it’s okay so they’ll calm down. All my love, Pansy.

And Caesarion flew off.

* * *

Draco was up to H in the hexes, with Hair Loss, when he was interrupted by the flutter of wings. Looking up, he saw his own owl Caesarion, and whistled da-dum-di-da. The owl hooted a greeting and swooped down to land on Draco’s head. "My hands are stuck," he told the owl. "You’ll have to show me the letter."

Caesarion hooted a bit scornfully, and hopped about on Draco’s head. Draco noticed that eagle owls are heavy. Caesarion was hanging on to his hair for balance with one clawed foot while the other was dangling the scrap of parchment before his eyes….you know what you’re doing… While it was usually nice that Pansy had such a high opinion of him, right now it might have been more useful for her to be worried about him. At least she had sent Caesarion. The only thing a wizard in trouble would want more than an owl to go fetch help, was a wand.

Draco reflexively tried to reach out his hand to take hold of the note. His hand didn’t budge, not even when he struggled to move it. Well, he could use the Scriptorius Charm to write his message on the back of Pansy’s note, explaining his situation and asking for a spell, or better yet an amulet, to identify the trap he was in and find how to dissolve it. To ask whom? Not Severus, who was probably still unconscious. Not his father, unless he was certain that the situation was so bad that his best chance was to throw himself on Lucius Malfoy’s mercy. Draco didn’t really think his father would kill him, but torture, and Cruciatus, and the risk to Severus, was another thing altogether. Dumbledore? But the cost would be to spend the rest of his life hiding from the Dark Side under Dumbledore’s protection, lonely for friends turned into enemies, and acting as servant to Muggles and Mudbloods as his payment to Dumbledore. It would have to be Pansy.

But even though his wand was in his hand, he couldn’t cast Scriptorius without waving his wand and tapping it on the parchment. He could feel nothing happening as he said the incantation. If Pansy had sent a pencil, he could have written with the pencil in his mouth, like a quadriplegic Muggle beggar asking for a handout. If she’d sent a quill, he’d have had to scrape the ink from her writing and re-use it. If he pulled a feather from Caesarion, he didn’t have a penknife to sharpen the point for writing. Oh well. He stuck out his tongue (as if to wiggle it lasciviously at Pansy) and licked up some ink, then urged Caesarion to turn the parchment around so he could lick a few letters onto the blank side. After a lot of urging Caesarion to turn the parchment around and around again, and a lot of licking, he had written I’m trapped in a dim. pocket DMNSNL.

"Take the letter to Pansy. Pansy. Reply to sender, you know," Draco told Caesarion intensely. Caesarion flew off with the note. Draco resumed his list of Curses.

* * *

Severus was considering the sword with the basilisk skin core. Although the name Fernabrant, heir of Avallanta, was written on the blade, he was quite sure that it was not the same sword that famously had been stolen from the merfolk either by Fernabrant or by Merlin around 500 AD. Those two then kept stealing it from each other, as each planned to give it to his Muggle protégé. Merlin’s protégé Arthur was wielding it in the battle that took Huy Braseal away from Fernabrant. Fernabrant’s protégé Modred was wielding it when he killed Arthur. Fernabrant ended up killed by Merlin, but not until after he had built a house on the mainland that was inherited by his descendents, the Malfoys. Merlin ended up trapped in a cave, and Huy Braseal ended up belonging to Morgana. So much for Merlin’s big plans about establishing a kingdom with the rule of law even though the Roman legions had left Britain. He had wanted wizards and Muggles to co-operate against foreign invaders, local rebels, and Dark Wizards, with the wizards serving as warriors, healers, and just and merciful rulers. Fernabrant had wanted the most powerful wizard to rule over everyone and act only on whim. He said it was the way of nature that strong men fight for power and weaklings (such as Muggles) are mere slaves to serve their master’s amusement. Even the Romans had enjoyed gladiatorial games.

Severus frowned in thought. He had the edge of a glimmer of a recollection that, if he was trapped in Malfoy family history, there was some other sword he should be thinking about. Severus had run across quite a few interesting books when Lucius had given him free run of the Malfoy library. At the time, he had felt guilty that he was slacking off from his real research in Potions, allowing himself to be distracted by (among other things) centuries-old lab notebooks of experiments in Dark Magic. In those days, he had believed that the books of Dark Magic were of only antiquarian interest, as no modern Malfoy would ever use Dark Arts. Now that he had more accurate knowledge of Lucius Malfoy, he found himself regretting the missed opportunity of finding out about the resources available to Lucius and, through Lucius, to his master, Voldemort.

Something about the North Wind, and the North Star. Boreas. Or Bellerophon. A sword that was actually a magical guide, and totally useless as a weapon. Someone famous had been killed because of trying to use it as a fighting sword. If he could remember the spell to activate the guiding sword, he could check whether this sword was it.

* * *

Caesarion swooped down on Pansy during dinner in the Great Hall. She eagerly took the parchment he handed (footed?) to her, and let him perch on the pumpkin juice decanter and peck the bits of steak from her steak and kidney pie.

"Oh, shit," Pansy said when she had read the note. Other Slytherins promptly clustered around her, trying to read over her shoulders. She shoved the note down her neckline, jumped up, and ran to the girls’ loo. The Slytherins looked around at each other, hoping to be given a clue as to what they should do now. Not having found any clue, Millicent and Regina got up and followed Pansy.

"Neither of you will say one damn word to anybody without my permission," Pansy told them. "Not one whisper. Not to Vinnie, not to Greggie, not to that Hufflepuff girl." They nodded. Pansy pulled the note out of her dress and waved it in their general directions while saying: "Draco says he’s trapped in a dimensional pocket."

"How do you know he means ’dimensional’?" Regina asked, having gotten a glance at the note.

"I don’t, but it makes a lot more sense than thinking he meant to write Demon Snail or an abbreviation for Draco Malfoy is Not the Son of Narcissa and Lucius." Despite her distress, which she was not entirely successful at concealing, she hadn’t lost her wry tone of voice.

"How do you know it was even Draco who wrote this?" Millicent asked, "He has pretty handwriting, not like that."

"He wrote it with his tongue," Pansy said as though that should have been obvious. "His hands must be tied, although whoever tied his hands was an idiot not to gag him. I admit he’s so good with his tongue that I’m a little surprised that this isn’t calligraphy… but how in Hell do you even find someone who’s in a dimensional pocket, let alone pull him back?"

"His father," said Regina. "If Mr. Malfoy doesn’t know how to do it, he knows who to hire to do it."

Pansy looked at Regina with some scorn. "I think there’s some reason why he sent Caesarion to me rather than to his father or his mother. Some reason why he doesn’t want his father to know about this little misadventure. Maybe even something more important than when you didn’t want your father to find out that you had wrecked your broomstick."

Regina blushed and didn’t say anything. Millicent said: "What Regina said, if Mr. Malfoy could hire some specialist to find Draco, so could we."

* * *

Severus had satisfied himself that this was the guiding sword. When he asked it to point toward Hogwarts, it spun around like a whirlygig. The same spinning when he asked it to point toward North. But it responded quite accurately when asked which way is Up, and where is the exit of this Hall. That’s how a properly functioning pointer would behave on another planet, or in another dimension. Or in the dream world? Neither wizards nor Muggles have yet determined whether the dream world is a real place, or places, or a set of hallucinations produced by the sleeping brain. If the latter, then one can hardly expect even the Laws of Magic to be consistent, so there is no use in thinking about it.

"Guide me home," Severus told the sword. It spun to point toward the exit of the Hall, so he picked it up and started walking that way. On a recollection, or a hunch, he picked up the spear and carried it with him, too. As he carried the sword, it glowed bright when he was walking in the right direction (at least, the direction the sword recommended) and faded to normal when he diverged.

The sword led Severus through a labyrinth of narrow hallways whose walls were covered with mosaics. Mosaics which depicted unpleasant, in fact disturbing, subjects. Children being burnt to death, women being disemboweled while still alive, men screaming in agony from the Cruciatis Curse. The images got worse as he went on. He forced himself to look attentively at the mosaics, telling himself that perhaps he could use them as landmarks to retrace his steps back to the Great Hall (if there were any reason to think that being lost in the Great Hall was better than being lost in the labyrinth) and also telling himself that only a worthless sniveling weakling would be distressed by mere pictures. Then he had no energy to spare for calling himself names, as he needed it all to endure the two ultimately hideous pictures between which he found himself. One picture showed Lucius Malfoy and the red-eyed snake-man Voldemort taking a black-haired woman apart, and the other showed Malfoy and the woman putting Voldemort together. The depictions of pain and mutilation were much less disturbing than the clear depictions of the Dark Magic being used. Severus forced himself to look at those pictures and try to learn those Dark spells just by looking at them.

The labyrinth rather abruptly dissolved into open air.

He was outdoors, on some kind of grassy mountaintop, which he shared with a tree on which was growing golden apples, and a horse trough, to which was tied a black horse. And the sword was pointing insistently at the horse.

It was a winged horse. The wings were folded closed, so Severus hadn’t noticed them at first. The beast’s fur was as silken and velvety and plush as a well-petted housecat’s fur, and so black that it swallowed all light that touched it. His tail was as soft and smooth and flowing as Draco’s hair, and as black as his fur. The long, stiff feathers of his wings and his mane were black as crow’s feathers, but faint rainbows sparkled where the light touched them. And the horse had a saddle (the tiny kind used by Muggle jockeys) and a bridle – which were bright green and silver, so it shouldn’t have been so easy to overlook them.

Severus’s main reaction was irritation. Trees of golden apples might grow on mountaintops just minding their own business, but horse troughs with winged horses tied to them do not just grow on mountaintops. Someone had put it there, and Severus felt that it had been put there for him. Probably the horse and knight statue, the lance and the sword, the mosaic labyrinth, and that whole Great Hall also had been put there just for him. He did not like the implication that he was being controlled, was being put in pre-arranged situations while being kept ignorant about them – being treated, in fact, like a chess piece. That reminded him of the black knight that had been in his hand, and he noticed that it was no longer with him. Severus hoped that the unknown person who had set all this up was intending to harm him, as that way he might be able to crush that person like a bug simply by defending himself. If the person’s intentions were friendly, then crushing like a bug was off-limits. Still, it wasn’t the horse’s fault.

He freed his hands by securing the sword and the lance to his belt, stepped over to untie the knot, and found that it was quite a complicated knot. No loose end was showing, as one long loop extended from the knot to encircle a part of the horse trough, and another long loop extended to encircle the glowing metal links that joined the bridle’s bit to one side of the reins. Two long loops extending from one center knot is like a figure-eight shape, like the infinity sign over the head of The Magician, Trump I of the Tarot. The loose end might simply be hidden by being tucked into the knot, so Severus tugged experimentally on each exposed bit of rope. None gave way. Alexander, he remembered, had cut the Gordian knot. And Alexander had died at age 32. Better to use mathematical knot theory to solve the knot.

The horse, whose normal breathing was quite loud anyway, snorted at him. The horse’s shoulder was as tall as Severus’s head, therefore higher than his eyes, so that he saw a wall of black fur when looking straight at the horse, and the horse looked down his long face at him. Body heat radiated quite a distance from the horse, while his smell resembled grass and sweat and dirt. A person who spends most of his time indoors is always surprised each time he notices how much bigger a horse is than a Great Dane. Severus dutifully skritched the horse’s cat-fur neck, and the horse responded with a sound between a purr and a groan. He examined the bridle with dextrous fingers, and found that one of those metal links could be opened to separate bit from rein, let the rope slip out, and be closed again. Severus’s mouth twitched with something like amusement at his thought that the Gordian knot problem had been solved without solving the knot.

Still, he couldn’t stand on a mountaintop next to a horse forever. A sudden thought led him to the apple tree. Finding that each apple was marked with a letter, it amused him to pick Alpha, Omega, and Kappa, and stuff them into a pocket. He turned back to the horse. He had been on the left side of the horse all along. Left hand on the base of its neck, where the mane feathers ended. Left foot in the stirrup, although he felt the unaccustomed stretch in his thighs. Right hand on the saddle, for balance. The horse startled him very much by unfurling its huge wings, as big as a tent. Then Severus realized that the horse was being co-operative: getting its wings out of the way so that he wouldn’t sit on them. Up, with muscle exertion, and swing the right leg over, and the right foot must find its place in the stirrup without clumsily feeling around. Severus sat, or crouched, in the saddle and tried to remember how to do so correctly. He had never had horse riding lessons and had only ridden a horse once in his life: on a sixth-year outing in his student days. That hadn’t even been a winged horse… which, it was now obvious, was why this saddle was so tiny: so that it would fit behind the horse’s wings.

He picked up the reins and trailed them through his left hand, in what was supposed to be the most flexible way for pulling them slightly to signal the horse, and remembered that actually he had been supposed to do that first, before putting the hand on the horse’s neck to mount. At least there were no witnesses to laugh at him.

The horse opened his wings further, and flapped them, making a wind that shook the leaves on the tree and Severus’s robe and hair. Still flapping, the horse leapt forward and up, and then was flying through the sky, taking Severus somewhere, for some reason, according to someone’s plan.