Harry Potter and the Song of Time

Chapter Seven : The Game is Afoot

Last time, in the Song of Time, Harry and Draco were discovered to be two of the most powerful Magids ever tested, and Hermione discovered an old prophetic text which she believes indicates that Harry is the descendent of King Arthur of legend, the Pendragon, who will rule over all Britain.

"Er...Hermione," Harry said, the room quietening to pin-drop level. "What makes you say that?"
"Well," Hermione said, pointing to the top of the scroll, "look. Your birthday is on the thirty-first of July. If you discard the differences between the Gregorian, Julian and true-lunar calendars, your birthday is actually Midsummer's Eve. Second," she said, pointing to the next line, "I remember you telling me that you were born just at sunrise. Right?"
"Yeah," Harry said, not looking too convinced. "So what? Is this all you're basing your theory on?"
"Harry..." Hermione groaned. "Listen! 'Ere year has turned, shall murder see'. And didn't you? Three months after your first birthday?"
"Congratulations, Sherlock," Draco drawled. "You've just figured something out that the entire magical community has known for just about two decades now."
"Draco," Harry admonished with a warning look. Draco shrugged nonchalantly and looked away.
"Fourth," Hermione continued, throwing a dirty look at Draco, "'two friends through youth, one enemy,". Isn't that Ron and me and Draco? 'the foil to friend, through change of heart'? Well?"
"Okay," Harry said. "You've got me there. What else?"
"Well, there's a bit about you going North and East and being by the sea while you become a man. Isn't that St Andrews?" Hermione was, Draco thought, starting to sound a trifle irritated.
"Yeah, okay," Harry said, trying to placate her.
"And as for the companions," Hermione said, "the Former Foil has to be Draco. I'm obviously the Tomewatcher since I work in a library."
"Makes sense so far," Draco admitted.
"Why, thanks, Draco," Hermione said in mock courtesy. "Skip the Seeing One for now. The Crone and Guide...I reckon that's McGonagall and Dumbledore. Right?"
"Crone being Minerva? She'd just love that, wouldn't she?" Harry said.
"The Baron is Kensington. Has to be. He's the only one with a 'de' in his name. de Plume." Hermione paused to take a breath.
"Let me guess," Xanthe said. "I'm the Yellow Woman, since 'xanthic' means 'yellow-coloured'."
"Correct," Hermione said. "The Slave Freed is Dobby, I'm pretty sure. Minty, I reckon you're the Country Girl since you live in the Westcountry. I'm not too sure what the bit about your clothing has to do with anything, but I'll certainly check it out, and should be able to sort it in a few days. As for the Outlander and the Daughter of the New World...I'm going to have to think about those too."

"Well, that's just fucking great," said Ron from the doorway, and everyone turned to look at him. "Once again, the Weasley gets completely left out while everyone else has a part in the Magic Parchment Of Doom that -- what was your title again? The Booknerd? -- Hermione just happens to find. Don't you all think that it's a little bit too straightforward?
"What do you mean, Ron?" Harry asked, looking crestfallen.
"I mean," said Ron, advancing into the room and pointing a finger at Harry's chest, "that this is all too stereotypical. Once again, Our Hero must overcome the Powers of Darkness and Conquer All. Someone insert me a bloody character here! And the worst thing, Harry, is that you can't see it. You have no idea how fucking stupid this all sounds. Tomewatchers and Daughters of the New World...it's like a bloody fantasy written by a twelve-year-old!"
"Weasley, you're just envious that you're not mentioned," Draco said cuttingly.
"Eat shit and die, Malfoy," said Ron. "Harry, don't you see?"

"No, Ron, I'm afraid I don't," Harry said exasperatedly. "All I see is someone who I thought was my best friend who's being both envious and jealous for no bloody reason. You've always had this chip on your shoulder, about being one of so many siblings, about the fact that the Prophet always writes about me and occasionally Hermione. Ron, it's just not funny any more. Think about it -- all that you come across as is a whining little child who can't stand up for himself and is just hanging onto the last vestiges of childhood like a toddler onto his mother's apron strings."

Harry stood up and moved closer to confront Ron.

"Well, I never knew my mother. I never had apron strings to hang onto. I never had jumpers made for me that I could say were horrible and roll my eyes at. In your haste to bitch about how life is so horrible to poor Ron Weasley, you've forgotten all the great things that you have -- a family that loves you, that's always there for you, that you can take advantage of and never worry that they're going to take offence. You have to just grow up! Draco's right -- you've hung onto everyone's coattails, including mine. And I want mine back."

"You little prick!" Ron yelled, and jumped at Harry, and the two of them went down in a tangle, slamming into the kitchen table and knocking it backwards, pinning Hermione, Minty and Xanthe behind it. Siriol was knocked off her feet and her long, flowing robes became entangled in the mass of table and chairs as Harry and Ron punched and kicked each other. Draco was the only one who was free to try and stop the brawl, and he did, earning a bloody nose from somebody's foot in the process. As he bled onto his robes, fishing for his wand, he noticed something which made him stop cold. Harry was wrestling some sort of furry animal.

But it wasn't any sort of furry animal in particular. It had a weasel's claws, a lynx's teeth, wild glaring eyes and looked particularly murderous at that moment. "Stupefy!" Draco shouted, having finally managed to get hold of his wand, and blasting both Harry and Ron in the process. "Stupefy! Stupefy! Stupefy!"

Finally the mass of bodies stopped moving and lay still. Draco floated the big table up and into the center of the room, and helped Siriol, Hermione, Xanthe and Minty up. Kensington rushed into the room, having heard the fracas from his room.

"What the..." he said, eyes flicking from Harry and the Ron-animal on the floor to the tipped-over chairs, the people dusting themselves off and the very frightened-looking house elves cowering next to the Aga.

"Well done, Draco," Siriol said, regaining her composure. "Quick thinking saves the day again."
"What happened to Ron?" Xanthe asked, smoothing her robes and making sure that everything was in her pockets.
"Never mind now, dear. I've seen it before, and I'll explain it all once we've got him into his room and a Ward around him to stop it happening again. You girls make sure Harry's all right. I'll go sort Ron out." She waved Ron into the air with her wand and he floated out. Draco knelt by Harry and pinched his earlobe. "Harry? Potter?"

"Mmm, mumble, lorry, urgh," Harry said, opening his eyes, which were crossed and trying to focus. Hermione zapped his glasses with a reparo charm and handed them to him. Minty brought over a glass of water from the sink. "What the fuck was that all about?" Draco asked.

"I think I know," Hermione said.
"What a surprise," Draco put in.
"Shut up, Draco. No, I think Ron is in the first stages of multimagia."
A pregnant pause ensued, with Harry, Draco, Minty, Kensington and Xanthe looking first at each other and then expectantly at Hermione.
"Which is...?" Xanthe asked.
"Multimagia," Hermione said as she leaned against a wall, "is what the condition of being a Multimagus is called. A Multimagus is similar to an Animagus, but Multimagi are able to transform into pretty much any animal they want to. The only drawback, however, is that part of the animal they turn into feeds back into their human personality. So, for instance, if Ron turned into a hyena, the human Ron would possibly take on hyena-like qualities for a while. Similarly, if he turned into a squirrel, he'd probably have cravings for nuts for a couple of hours as the multimagia wore off."
"So how does that explain him turning into that...cat-thing?" Harry asked, dabbing at a scratch with his handkerchief.
"Being a Multimagus takes even more training than being an Animagus," Hermione said. "The person must have a particularly good mental image of the animal into which he or she wants to turn, otherwise they take on characteristics of several different animals. Like Ron did..." she trailed off.

"He'll be fine, Herm," Harry said, putting a reassuring arm around Hermione's shoulders. "Siriol's taking care of him."
"Nice job baiting him, Potter," Draco said, opening the fridge and taking out a Corona.
"No, Draco, it's not his fault," Hermione said. "A wizard in the early untrained stages of multimagia is like a kid going through puberty or a woman going through menopause. Total hormonal and emotional imbalances, which can manifest itself in all sorts of different ways. Anger, resentment and 'teenager syndrome' are all part of it. Harry didn't know about the multimagia, so it's not his fault." She gave his hand a small squeeze.

"Right," said Draco, unconvinced. "If you say so, Hermione..."
"Draco, stop being an arse," Xanthe said, popping the top off a Smirnoff Ice, taking a big swig and handing one to Minty. "It's not Harry's fault any more than it's Ron's fault. So stop being a fuckwit."
"Sorry, Miss Jones," Draco sneered. "Am I being v. v. bad?"
"Go fuck yourself, asshole," Xanthe retorted hotly, throwing him a very dirty look and stalking out.
"Nice one, big D," Minty said, hopping up to sit on one of the kitchen countertops.
"Oh, please. I really need to put her out of my misery," Draco said, taking a pull from his beer.
"Suit yourself," Minty said, hopped down and headed out the door of the kitchen.
"Master Draco is making other Masters and Mistresses very cross," a small voice came from near Draco's left knee. He looked down to see a house-elf.
"Can I help you?" Draco asked pointedly.
"Tiddy is thinking that it is Tiddy who should be helping Master," the elf, obviously called Tiddy, said.
"And how is Tiddy thinking that he should be doing that?" Draco asked, imitating the elf.
"Tiddy is thinking that Master Draco is needing to be careful who he is offending. Tiddy knows that house elves is not all that clever, but we is knowing the big people, Master Draco, and we is sometimes hearing things that the big people is either not knowing or not caring that we is hearing. House elves is making very good spies if some witch or wizard is asking us to," Tiddy said as he polished a set of silver spoons with a tea-towel.

A thought struck Draco. What a novel idea it would be to use a house elf for espionage purposes. The elf was right -- no wizard from an old family would even think about guarding their speech in front of a house elf. Draco knew different, of course, but he could remember what he had thought of house elves, and he was one of the very few people who knew quite how influential and importand house elves had been in the fight against the Dark Lord.

"That's...particularly interesting, Tiddy," Draco said.
"Tiddy is pleased that Master is finding him interesting," Tiddy said, jiggling with pride as he polished his spoons.
"I might have a couple of ideas to share with you at some point, particularly about that last point you made."
"Tiddy is looking forward to it, sir."

Hermione and Harry were talking very quietly in low voices, the former pointing excitedly to various bits of the parchment which she had rolled out on the now-upright kitchen table. Draco inwardly rolled his eyes -- he'd never admit it, but Weasley had had a point, despite his hormone-crazed actions. Potter did always seem to be the one to whom interesting things happened. Of course, Draco reasoned, he (Draco) was far more fortunate than Weasley, who was known for very little apart from being Potter's sidekick. Draco remembered back to their Hogwarts days, and the periodic Potter/Weasley fights, when neither of them would speak to the other for weeks, even months, on end. Weasley would hang around with his brothers (reluctantly), or with some of those other Gryffindor airheads like Finnigan and Thomas (more reluctantly). Amusingly enough, Draco thought, he was finding himself hoping that Weasley could get his act together at university and make a path for himself. At least he and Potter weren't doing the exact same courses, for once, and he'd have to do his own work and research.

Draco decided that he'd go see how Siriol was getting on with Weasley, and headed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the corridor leading to Weasley's room, where he found Siriol just closing the door to Weasley's room.

"Is he all right?" Draco asked, actually concerned.
"Yes," Siriol said. "I've sedated him and placed an Inmorphus charm around his bed so that he won't change into a cat and claw the covers to shreds." She smiled slightly and indicated that they should walk down the corridor.

"How common is Multimagia?" Draco asked.
"Oh, extremely uncommon," Siriol replied. "I think the statistics are one in every 150,000 Animagi is a Multimagi. In fact, I only know one Multimagus out of every witch or wizard who I've come into contact with. I'll be dropping old Remy a quick owl to see if he can't come up and show young Ron how to deal with it."
"Remy? Not Rembledon Darcy?" Draco said, mouth opening slightly. "I know him! I never knew he was a Multimagus..."
"Who's he going to tell? The three or four other people worldwide who are like him?" Siriol asked. "No, he tends to keep his...abilities rather quiet, somewhat like Hagrid used to. It does rather help to keep the wackos at bay. Animagi are accepted, but Multimagi are freaks." Siriol snorted. "Yeah, right."
"Huh," Draco said. He remembered Rembledon Darcy as something of an old buffer, and had never even suspected the man to be in any way unusual. I suppose that was rather the point, Draco remarked to himself.
"Right," said Siriol, "time to send that owl, I think. Ciao, Drakes."
"Drakes?" Draco was a little shocked. Actually, he was more than a little bit shocked. "Drakes?"
"You got it, Drakey-baby," Siriol said, blowing him a kiss as she heaved herself up the stairs towards the Ivory Minaret, where her owls were kept.

Drakey-baby...holy shit. Hope that never bloody gets out.

Rembledon Darcy arrived that rather foggy evening (a haar had descended on St Andrews and the streetlamps made the entire town glow that sickly yellow color one associates with sodium lights) on the Knight Bus, and Draco waited with Harry and Siriol for the large purple triple-decker to arrive in front of the Castle. And arrive it did, with a loud pop! and the sound of crunching wheelie-bins full of bottles and other rubbish from some student party or another.

"Remy, how good of you to come," Siriol enthused, enveloping the rather frail old man in a bearhug.
"It was -- oof -- nothing, Miss Washington," Darcy said, smoothing off his old, rather worn, tweed jacket. "Ah!" he said, spying the scar on Harry's forehead. "Harry Potter, I presume."
"Mr Darcy," Harry nodded politely.
"And Draco Malfoy," Darcy said, his old eyes flicking to Draco more agilely than Draco would have assumed.
"Indeed, sir," Draco replied as the Knight Bus trundled down the road to the screech of a cat and another pop!
"Well, I understand that there is a young man who requires my expertise on a certain matter," Darcy said as Siriol guided him around the pathway step which was still feeling a little peckish, making a snap for Harry, who dodged out of its way with a muffled curse.

They entered the Castle and Siriol showed Darcy quickly to his room, after which the old man slipped quietly into Weasley's room, asking Harry, Draco and Siriol to give him some time alone with the other Multimagus. A great yowling suddenly erupted from the room, followed by a crash. Siriol and Harry exchanged somewhat worried looks, and Rembledon Darcy emerged from the room a few moments later, followed by a rather contrite-looking Ron.

"There we go," Darcy said with a smile. "All sorted."
"Just like that?" Harry asked skeptically.
"Just like that," Ron replied. "Oh, and sorry, Harry," he murmured under his breath.
"I will, of course, need young Mr Weasley to accompany me back to London for a period of time," Darcy said. "I have some particularly useful training sessions and advice which I wish to impart to Mr Weasley in order that he control his...animal impulses, shall we say." Ron flushed red at that.
"Whatever you think best is all right by me," Siriol said. "Ron, would you like to return home for the time being?"
"I'd rather stay here," Ron said, "if that's all right with you, I mean."
"I have placed a temporary restriction on Ron's Multimagus abilities," Darcy said to Siriol. "He will be perfectly safe."
"Well then, Ron, you're welcome to stay here for as long as you like."
"Thanks," Ron said gratefully.

Draco didn't see much of Harry or Hermione over the next two days. They seemed to be hanging around Weasley, storing up as much of his inane banter as they could before he had to go down to London. The only people he really talked to were Kensington de Plume and Martha Mkenyo, and the latter only on the way to and from lectures. He discovered that, to his amusement, Kensington and he got on rather well. For a Ravenclaw, Kensington wasn't a bad sort -- well-dressed, not too clever for his own good, but hardly an intellectual slouch.

Weasley and Rembledon Darcy left on the night of the second day, the Knight Bus driving as poorly as usual and leaving one of the neighbourhood cats looking particularly put out, as it'd had to sprint madly for the safety of a wall as the large purple triple-decker bore down on it.

After watching them depart from his window, undressed and got into bed, but was unable to get to sleep for ages. He stared at the ceiling, on which was a rather accurate representation of Michaelangelo's Sistene Chapel. Why was he here, he wondered. What was he here to do?

The next few days passed in a blur for Draco. The Magid Studies schedule increased dramatically, and the amount of 'recommended reading' would have sent Hermione into paroxysms of joy, including titles such as The Pseudopsychophysical Elements and Wizards Who Love Them, The Joy of Magid Earth Forces, and Chicken Soup for the Magid's Soul, Vol. XXVIII.

Lectures, seminars and tutorials started to get really serious, which is why Draco found himself standing with a group of ten or so other young Magids at the top of the Tower in their multicolored Magid cloaks, where they had all been classified. It was overcast and grey, and above the Impervius rain shield which hung over the Tower, it was raining, that sort of irritating British rain that soaks through anything that one happens to be wearing. Draco involuntarily shivered under his several layers of clothing just at the sight of it.

He was standing next to Minty Hemberley, who was looking somewhat more confident than Draco felt, despite his cool, calm and collected outward demeanor. Harry was standing on Minty's other side and looking somewhere between worried and excited. Behind a dumpy-looking witch who Draco remembered was one of the Institute's instructors sat five older-looking students in their Magid cloaks.

"Now," said Mildred Hubble, who was one of the most powerful Sky Magids in the world, "I'm going to release the bottlenecks on all of you as a temporary measure. If there is anyone who feels that they are not ready to do that, please speak now and your Magid training will be in no way imperilled." Nobody spoke up. "Very well. I would like you all to relax, and my graduate students and I will now release your bottlenecks."

It was like a great rush of wind. Draco felt power flow into him that he hadn't actually noticed missing at all, but he certainly noticed it returning now. He breathed in and it was as if the greatest sugar rush or caffeine high of all time had hit him. His senses were alive -- every color, every sound, every smell, every breath of wind on his exposed face and arms.

"You will probably notice a heightened state of awareness," Mildred Hubble was saying, "and this is perfectly normal. If anyone is not yet ready to proceed, please raise your hand now, and lower it when you are ready." One wizard to Draco's right raised his arm for about ten seconds and then lowered it slowly. "Excellent. We will begin."

Hubble stepped forwards a few steps and raised her arms in front of her, palms out. "I am about to induce you all into what we here call otherworld. Otherworld is whatever you make it, somewhat akin to your safe place but at the same time from your subconscious rather than your conscious brain. It may change slightly over time -- additions to it, subtractions from it, changes to it -- and this is nothing to worry about. Should, however, your otherworld change significantly in any way, or change in a way you feel concerned about, you must immediately contact me or one of the other instructors here at the Institute. Any questions? No. Well, all please relax."

It was as if a wall of freezing Arctic cold hit Draco. He was the coldest he had ever been, colder than the Death Eater stronghold on Svalbard, colder than he could imagine. It only lasted for a millisecond yet Draco thought he would never warm up. That feeling too lasted for the very briefest of instants as he was hit with what felt like the inside of the sun -- hotter than he could ever have imagined a desert in midsummer in the middle of a heat wave.

The extremes of temperature receded and Draco found himself looking around in what appeared to be an enormous courtyard, yet he could see no walls. The stone floor of the area was apparently made from one limitless block of a light grey rock, smoother and at the same time more irregular than the grittiness of concrete. It stretched as far as Draco's eyes could see between enormous metallic violet-colored vertical cylinders which stretched upwards to the sky for hundreds if not thousands of feet. He couldn't really get a scale for it -- it was as if the rules here did not play by the rules elsewhere. In amongst the cylinders, which were in a seemingly random arrangement, colored translucent domes containing precisely nothing were scattered. About ten times his height (or so he thought) and as wide as the columns, the blue, green and red domes warped the view through them so that everything looked smaller when he peered through their colored sides.

Draco walked forwards, his footsteps echoing strangely off the curved surfaces surrounding him. He walked past one cylinder and, to his surprise, found a rather old yet apparently serviceable broomstick floating in the air about a foot off the ground. He walked around it and could see nothing the matter with it, so he extended his palm over it and said "Up" firmly. The stick did just that, and Draco mounted it. The Cushioning Charm was a little worn and a twig was poking into his left buttock, but it seemed responsive enough as he leant from right to left.

He pulled upwards and the broom climbed slowly and ponderously skywards. He was above the domes now, and could see that they reached to the horizon. He continued to climb, passing the top of the shortest cylinder, then the next shortest and the next, all the while revealing a horizon further and further away, despite his gaining height. He was above all but the tallest cylinder now, and that one he crested a few seconds later. He considered going further but decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and that he wasn't particularly sure whether or not magic would work here in otherworld, so didn't want to end up with the stick stalling some distance above the hard stone ground. Landing on top of the tallest cylinder, he took a good look all the way around him. He could still not distinguish any sort of pattern to the cylinders' positioning, but as he rotated around to where he had originally started his 360-degree lookaround, noticed that the broom had floated away and hovered about thirty feet away from him, on the same level.

"Shit," Draco thought aloud. "Accio!" The broom wiggled a bit but didn't move. "Accio broomstick!" It wiggled again. "Accio broomstick!" Nothing now. "Accio broomstick! Accio bloody broomstick!" The broom began to float further and further away from him.

"Oh, bugger," Draco said, sitting down on the cylinder and crossing his lgs to think. But he didn't have all that much opportunity to do so. "Oh, holy fucking shit!" he shouted as the top of the cylinder began to tilt. He scrabbled for a hand-hold on the smooth metallic violet surface but could find none. He reached for the top of the tilting cylinder but found no hold there either. Draco felt himself starting to slip. He pressed his hands against the metal and they squeaked as he slid down, inch by agonising inch. His feet were scrabbling to find purchase against the side of the cylinder, and then he slipped off.

Falling through the sky, Draco let out an involuntary, unconscious yell. The wind was whipping through his hair and clothes now, the multi-banded Magid cloak flapping behind him as he plummeted at terminal velocity towards the ground, looming up at him. Except that the ground didn't seem to be looming all that much. Or at all, in fact. While Draco was falling, face down and arms and legs back in typical parachutist pose, the ground was staying right where it was, thank you very much, and so Draco felt a little relieved. Not much, since the ground could always decide to start rushing towards him, he rationalised, but a little relieved all the same. He noticed that he had stopped screaming.

He decided that, since the ground was currently appearing rather cooperative, he would try some aerobatics. Bringing his arms down (it was harder than it looked on the Muggle TV), Draco swung to the left, and began to rotate. He swung his arms to the right and rotated in the opposite direction. He muscled downwards, Superman-style (it was one of his favorite Muggle movies), fists out in front and plummeting downwards. He came out of the dive and resumed his previous belly-flopping pose, contemplating the next steps he could take, when the ground decided that it would continue to rush towards him. He started to scream again.

The ground rushed up at him. Draco passed the top of cylinder after cylinder, maniacally steering himself with his arms so that he wouldn't hit one of them and die early, just in case he could cast a Cushioning Charm on the ground. With all his might, he pointed his right finger at the ground and yelled "Bounce!". And bounce he did, plopping into what felt like an enormous trampoline, which stretched tighter and tighter as his descent slowed. It was, of course, invisible, which was a trifle disconcerting, but Draco continued to hold his finger out until he was about six feet from the ground and almost stopped, at which point he said, quite firmly, "Finite incantatem". He felt the trampoline-cushion-thing disappear from beneath him and he fell heavily to the ground, winded.

"Well," he said to nobody in particular as he got up and dusted himself off. "That was a whole fucking lot of fun." He looked up and saw a rapidly-descending shimmer of a silvery substance, much like mercury would look from above if one poured it into a bowl. Unfortunately, Draco remembered, mercury was poisonous, and he was at the bottom of this place, whatever it was. He didn't really have time to finish his thought before the liquid silvery stuff reached him and he felt the fusion-hot/vacuum-cold transition again. As he willed his eyes open from their involuntarily-shut position, he saw that he was back on the top of the Tower, and that he was not the only one to have had a somewhat-disconcerting time. Minty Hemberly's normally-ruffled hair was sticking up as if someone had just zapped her with an Electrifigus charm, Harry was clutching his glasses and muttering "Fucking hell, fucking hell" at nobody in particular, and the other seven Magids were looking equally ruffled.

"You have just seen," Mildred Hubble cut in to kill off the worried babble that was starting, "the power of Sky. The power to confuse, to illude, to deceive, to mock. To scare. To harm. And the power to jubilate. Welcome, Magids, to the Magid Earth Force of Sky." Behind Hubble, the previously-blue sky was torn asunder by an enormous bolt of lightning which, flung down from above as if by an angry goddess, exploded into an all-encompassing shower of sparks just above and behind the tower. Each spark landed on the platform in circle around Hubble.

"You will be able to do that." A tornado swooshed down from a small white cloud that Draco thought looked rather like a house-elf and started to rush toward the tower. "And that." The tornado pulled back into the cloud in a second. An enormous red-faced devil's head swung down as if on a hinge from above a large cloud. "That," and the devil turned into an angel, "and that."

Draco goggled. This was unlike any form of magic he had ever seen before. Even the most powerful of normal magic folk would have been completely drained from just one of Hubble's little demonstrations. The Dark Mark had relied on Voldemort's fiddling with Old Magic in order to let it be activated by only one wizard, and without a death in the near vicinity would have rebounded on that wizard unless a certain protective ward had been erected around the wizard weeks in advance.

Hubble lifted off the tower, her long sky-blue cloak billowing behind her as she hovered several dozen feet off the ground. Her voice seemed louder now. "Perhaps the most impressive of all Sky abilities is levitation. It's remarkably easy once you know how. My job, and the job of my assistants behind and somewhat below me, is to teach you how. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I will leave you."

Hubble turned, piked as if to dive, smoothly dove into the air and disappeared. "That will be all," her disembodied voice echoed across the platform. Draco felt the bottleneck descending on his Magid abilities again, and this time he did notice the absence of the feeling of power that he got from his full Magid abilities. Draco realised with a feeling of some irony that he was now aware of a literal meaning of the phrase "power is a narcotic" -- he could certainly become addicted to this, he reckoned.

On their way back through the Transflection chamber, Draco, Minty and Harry looked a little shaken. "Was the intention of that little exercise to scare us away or to make us want to go through with this whole thing even more?" Draco asked.

"Possibly both," Minty said absently. "You know, scare away the fuckwits and make the rest of us have to really, really want this."
"So what happens to the people who drop out?" Harry asked. "They can't just be left alone, can they?"
"Does the word 'bottleneck' mean anything to you, Harry?" Draco said snippily. "They'll just leave them on, rather than have untrained, unconstrained Magids flying around through the air, blowing up islands and all that jazz."
Harry blushed. "Fuck off, Draco."
"Oh, of course. 'Fuck off, Draco'. 'Get stuffed, Draco.' It's always the fucking same, isn't it? When I know something that you don't, it's always 'fuck off, Draco'. Why can't it ever be 'you're right, Draco'? 'I suppose so, Draco'? No, it's always 'fuck off, Draco'."
"Fuck off, Draco," Harry and Minty said at the same time, and then burst into guffaws as they were Transflected back to St Andrews.

That night, in his room, Draco returned to his field. He sat in the warm grass and ran his hands through it, feeling the slight spiky resistance to his fingers as he rubbed the blades of grass the wrong way. A songbird chirruped somewhere off to his right towards the tall tree, which was rustling in the slight breeze which Draco felt on his face. He looked down and noticed with some bemusement that he was stark naked. He smiled appreciatively. Narcissistic? Moi? he thought to himself as he looked up to see the small songbird flitting about around the tree. I wonder what that signifies, Draco thought, knowing that nearly everything in a wizard's safe place had some meaning or other. Caged bird? A singer waiting to come out?

The bird flitted behind the tree and must have perched on one of the branches at the back of it, because it didn't fly out the other side. Draco lay back and looked up at the fluffy white clouds scudding past rather quickly. There was one which looked like a broomstick, and one that resembled a cross between Pansy Parkinson and a small yappy dog, not that there was much to cross in that pair. Draco sat there for a long while, observing the clouds and allowing the mental fluff of a day to blow away with them. He was brought back to conscious thought by what sounded like a car horn beeping in the distance. As he frowned at it in irritation, it seemed to get louder, coming from the opposite end of his field from the tree. He stood up in order to get a better view, and there it was -- a rather battered-looking Japanese four-door from the Eighties, boxy and rust-encrusted blue. Leaning out of it was Xanthe Montrose, yelling at him. As she stopped honking the horn, he could hear what she was saying.

"Draco! Get back to reality immediately! Harry's been kidnapped!"

Draco's eyes went very wide indeed, and in the blink of an eye he flicked from his field to the leather chair in his room, where Xanthe was standing, looking distinctly panicked.

"Kidnapped? By whom? Why? When?" Draco's questions spilled out like a waterfall as he pulled on a pair of black jeans and a dark grey button-down shirt, having stripped down to just a pair of boxers to go to his field.

"He was with Hermione, walking home from Macgregor's bakery with a couple of loaves of bread, when a big black Bentley screeched by, nearly knocked Harry over and then two people inside grabbed him. Hermione didn't see much of it as she was dodging bolts of balefire from the front driver's seat."

Draco was pulling on his warmest outer cloak now, the black alpaca wool one from Donna Charon with the thick silver clasps going all the way down his body. Cramming his feet into a comfortable pair of Kenneth Troll ankle boots, Draco strode over to his desk and slid his wand into the specially-sewn wand pocket of the cloak. Into the expansive other pockets he slipped a scrying mirror and pendulum, a large piece of red jasper and some ylang ylang incense powder in a small, tightly-closed alabaster jar.

"Come on, Draco," Xanthe urged, opening the door. "No need to take the fucking kitchen sink."
"I thought I'd forgotten something, Draco said sarcastically, striding ahead of Xanthe into the hallway. He flung open the door leading downstairs and ran down the stairs, feet a blur. As he got to the hallway he found Hermione looking as if she was trying to get control of herself, Siriol looking very angry indeed, Kensington and Minty looking worried and Sirius looking as if he was about to rip the balls off the person who'd just kidnapped his grandson.

"Right, search party," Siriol said. "Sirius, you, Kensington and Draco will take Big Bertha and sweep the surrounding countryside. We can't risk too many people on brooms, but put a stick for each of you into Big Bertha in case they took Harry over water. Xanthe, Minty, Hermione and I will search St. Andrews itself, seeing as we're the ones who know the damn place the best, and in case they're clever enough to fool a Bloodhound spell and leave Harry in town, right where we won't look for him. If there's any sign of him at all, contact me using these." She handed out a compact Nokia mobile phone to each of them. "Wizards won't detect them, and they work on all the Muggle frequencies, changing number and telephone network on each call. Press the big button to cycle through the names listed to call each other. Hermione," Siriol turned to Hermione as they all tucked the phones away. "What did you bring of Harry's?"

"Well," Hermione said, sounding a lot braver than she looked, Draco thought, "he did his washing this morning, so all we have are a pair of pants and an unwashed sock from under his bed." She looked apologetic.

"Right, Draco, take the sock. Hermione, keep the pants. Did the Bloodhound Charm work?" Siriol asked as she opened the door.

"Yes. They're pointing towards the west," Hermione said, holding the pants up on the end of her wand, which twitched until it was pointing due west.

"Right, people, go, go go!" Siriol boomed, slamming the door behind her.

Draco, Kensington and Sirius jogged quickly towards Big Bertha, parked just outside the gate of the Castle. Sirius threw Draco the keys, explaining that he was going to turn into Padfoot for the extra-sensitive smell that the large black dog had. Draco flung the door open and slipped into the driver's seat, with Kensington sliding in next to him. Padfoot bounded through the back door which Kensington held open and stuck his head up between the two front seats. Draco turned the key in the ignition and the huge imported American engine roared to life. Reminding himself that this was an automatic gearbox, Draco pulled the stick down to the Drive setting and touched the accelerator. Big Bertha roared into life, hurtling westward down The Scores past a group of obviously inebriated students in gowns and dinner jackets (some in tartan trousers and Prince Charlie dress jackets), who were singing the Muggle University's official song, the Gaudeamus.

Kensington muttered "Trovare" at his wand, hanging Harry's sock over the end of it. Out of the corner of his eye Draco saw the wand twitch until Kensington leant it slightly to the left. The wand swung hard left as Draco drove past a left-hand turn, so he took the next one and doubled back on North Street, maneuvering carefully around the bend in Abbotsford Crescent and along Hope Street. At Market Street the trail turned right at the Balaka Bangladeshi restaurant and headed across the roundabout next to Hope Park Church, down Doubledykes road and onto Argyle Street. Cursing at Big Bertha's size compared with the nimble (and half as wide) Fiat he had learned to drive in, Draco narrowly avoided a collision as he squeezed the car between an oncoming eight-seater taxi minivan and a parked Fiesta as he sped Big Bertha up Buchanan Gardens and away from the main part of St Andrews. Past a school and several churches (houses were becoming larger, detached and further-spaced now), the trail took a left turn and then they were out of town.

The road became a little less smooth and definitely less lighted now, and Draco flicked the headlights up to illuminate the countryside around them. "Lumissimo," he muttered at the lights, and they became even brighter, piercing through the dark of the moor as they raced along the (fortunately) fairly straight road. Draco hit 70 at the top of one hill and Big Bertha actually got some airtime, the big Chevy engine roaring as the driving wheels spun in the air. Bertha landed with an almighty squeal of tires as the rubber found the road again, and Draco saw a hazy cloud of burnt rubber in the reddish light of the rearview mirror.

He put the pedal to the floor and the engine roared once again, flinging the two men and the dog back against their seats. Padfoot growled at Draco, who muttered "Hey, you want him back?" in retort, to which Padfoot gave something which sounded suspiciously like a snort. They skidded around a corner, the back of the car fishtailing slightly until Draco recovered, for the umpteenth time thanking Harry for insisting that he learn to drive a Muggle car when he turned 17, and for suggesting the Pass Plus scheme, which taught one how to recover from a skid and other perilous things like burst tires or losing a gear.

Harry. Who was in danger. Draco pushed the pedal down even further, but let it out slightly as he spotted a nasty s-bend coming up ahead as the road went around an isolated old crofter's house.

As they sped past a country lane which crossed the road, Kensington gave a yelp and nearly dropped the wand. "Go right back there!" he stammered, regaining control of his wand.

Draco slammed on the brakes, throwing them against their seatbelts, did a U-turn at thirty miles an hour and accelerated for the turn, now on the left. The suspension of the Chevy got a real workout as Draco bounced it at the highest speed he dared down the unpaved road, listening to Kensington dialling Siriol on his phone.

"Yah, about ten minutes out of town, just going down a very bumpy country road. No sign of him or the Bentley yet. You?"

Draco heard a muffled voice from the phone, and Kensington said, "Bugger. We'll keep looking, Siriol. Good-bye."
"No luck?" Draco asked.
"None," Kensington answered. "Slow down, mate. You'll do Harrers no good if you get us all killed on the road." The wand gave another lurch in Kensington's hand, and he pointed slightly to the left. "That way, if you get the opportunity."

Draco stopped the car next to the open gate of a field, flicked off the lights and slipped himself out through the window and climbed up onto the roof, where Padfoot joined him a couple of seconds later in one giant bound. As Draco's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that Padfoot had one paw pointed in the direction that Kensington had given them. Draco could see nothing, so he slid off the roof and back into the car, flicking the lights back on and continuing down the lane.

Draco's eyes narrowed as the lights illuminated several pieces of black and silver metal on the road which looked like they'd come off a car. He slowed and, sure enough, a tree at the side of the lane had a big gouge mark out of its trunk. He continued, more slowly, until Kensington gave a little yelp, pointing towards a large piece of tire and a hubcap lying in the road a little way beyond a pointy rock which stuck out of the road. Around the next bend, a mangled, crumpled mass of scorched black and silver metal was wrapped around a large tree which had burn marks on it. Draco's heart stopped. "Harry..." he whispered almost to himself.