A Sea Change

Chapter 10:

Longstone, 14 October.

"Five minutes to nine; they should be here any minute." Moody tucked the big silver watch away in a pocket and finished his coffee.

A roar outside, different from the roar of the storm, proved him right; he nodded with satisfaction. "That lad always was prompt, more to spite me than anything else, I used to think." He grinned, not a pretty sight. Alice held up the coffeepot inquiringly, but he waved a refusal and stood up.

"Lad, I want you out of sight when they come in."

An urgent knock on the door followed; Alice waited until Harry had retreated into the pantry, then opened the door. Gwynneth and Sirius entered on a gust of wind, shaking water everywhere and removing helmets and jackets.

Gwen's eyes were shining, her voice soft and breathless with excitement. "Alice! I am so happy to see you! To be in your house again. It smells good, like things I remember." She wrapped Alice in an enthusiastic hug.

Alice smiled a bit shamefacedly, returned the hug, patted Gwen's hair awkwardly, and muttered, "Well, there, lassie, I'm that glad you've come back for a visit. I missed you. And that big hound of a boyfriend of yours, as well." She grinned over Gwen's shoulder at Sirius, who winked at her before moving to the table and greeting his old mentor.

Moody nodded amiably at Sirius, but kept his eyes on Gwen, as if expecting something.

"Come in, lassie, and sit down; I understand you want to talk to me...?"

"Yes, I want..." Gwen hesitated, then turned to Alice, her eyes wide and questioning. "Who else is here? It smells—it feels—someone is in your house. Is that all right?"

Moody broke into his alarming grin, and nodded in satisfaction. Thumping a fist down on the table, he called, "Potter—you can come out now! She knew. I knew she'd know, or I hoped she would."

Harry emerged from the pantry, smiling shyly, his gaze moving from one grownup to the next, but fastening on Sirius, who jumped up from the table and greeted his godson with a gigantic bear-hug, touseling his hair and beaming.

"How'd you get here? Why aren't you soaked? Flying in this weather is no joke; I'd think...."

Moody boomed out,  "Apparated. You taught him yourself, didn't you? Lad’s a natural talent. He’s doing a great job for us, by the way, up at the School.”

Sirius took Harry by the shoulders and stared at him with concern. “Yes, of course I taught him, but… he’s never been here before; he just began Apparating a couple of months ago, and then only to places close by. Moody, you….”

“You never used to be this much of a nervous nellie, Black—the boy does fine. I just had him follow me, and he never even stumbled. Didn’t you think he could apply it to any distance?” Moody watched Sirius with what was probably amusement, his real eye half veiled, his magical one staring balefully.

“Of course he could. It never—I just didn’t have as much to worry about, back then.” His look of concern changed to one of embarrassed pride, and he dropped his hands, freeing Harry. “Sorry, lad. I shouldn’t have worried; I only….”

Gwen watched closely as Sirius talked; so this was Harry. Harry was important to Sirius, and therefore to her. Family. He was bigger than she had expected— bigger than the Armstrong girls— but Moody had called him  “boy.” Perhaps male children were larger than females. He seemed happy. And he seemed fond of Sirius. She turned to Alice, to gauge her reaction to Harry. Alice was smiling. It was all right then….

Sirius turned to her, then, his arm once again around Harry’s shoulders. “Gwen, this is my godson Harry. I hope the two of you will like each other.” His eyes said, I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t, but neither of them was looking at him as he spoke.

Gwen smiled at Harry, putting out her hand. “I like you very much. You make Sirius  happy.”

Harry took her hand hesitantly, not sure how to reply, finally settling on “Pleased to meet you.” She was incredibly pretty, he decided, but disconcerting. And she had on Andie’s blue jumper; the one with the mended collar…. He supposed she was a Packmate now.

 Then he thought, irrelevantly, with sudden regret, that this probably meant when he went home for Christmas, Padfoot wouldn’t be sleeping on his bed any more. He blushed and quickly looked down at the tabletop as his mind, all on its own, chose to think about where Sirius would be sleeping.

As he sidled awkwardly past Moody to sit in the chair by the wall, he firmly told himself that Sirius deserved this happiness; he’d said he loved her. Harry would learn to love her too. He would. He sat down and wondered why Moody wanted him here—and what this meeting was for. He found his half-full cup and sipped at the tea: cold. But it was something to do with his hands.

Moody fixed Gwen with his real eye. “So, your lad here tells me you want to work for me. I have to tell you, I like the idea. We can pay you a bit while you train; it’ll be nice to be earning your own money, won’t it? And there’s a bit we can offer Sirius, as your trainer. But there’s going to be work involved; can you work? I’ll be wanting you to learn quite a few things you probably haven’t covered yet.”

Gwen returned his stare. “I can work.” She began counting off her skills on her fingers. “I like to catch things. I can Repel thrown stones; I can use Sirius’s wand to do anything I want it to do. I can detect smells, better than humans. I can run. I can see things far away, that Sirius cannot see. I like listening to you. I think it will be fun, learning the things you know.” She suddenly grinned at him, her eyes twinkling with excitement, and Moody grinned back, ferociously.

“Oh, it should be fun, all right. And the sooner we get you started, the better. I don’t think I want you living in towns for a while yet. Can’t have you picking up any more civilised habits, at least not right away.”

Keeping Gwen fixed with his real eye, Moody turned his magical stare onto Sirius.

“Dumbledore tells me you’ve got a house, out in the middle of nowhere. I want you to take her there, and spend a while teaching her the things on this list.” He picked up his ancient leather rucksack from the floor by his feet and poked around inside it, pulling out a small notebook. Muttering to himself, he flipped through the pages and finally tore one out, handing it to Sirius.

“So the first thing I want you to do is give her some elementary training. Flying, evasive moves, a few spells for concealment and detection, some hexes for immobilising a fugitive, things like that. I don’t think any of it will give her any trouble. Then, when she’s got some of that under her belt, I’d like to have you meet Harry for some three-man exercises. I have a feeling the three of you could make an unbelievable team, and just watching you together this morning convinces me.

“Oh, and here’s an Aurors’ Manual, somewhere.…” He rummaged in the rucksack once more, bringing out a severe-looking grey book with an eye and an ear on the cover. He handed it to Gwen.

“You don’t have to bother with the bits about the Ministry and the chain of command; you’ll be reporting just to me. But the chapters on detection and emergency procedures are worth reading. Are you reading yet?”

“No. I know some letters.”

Harry looked up. “Um, Gwen—I know a charm you could use. This year, since we’re doing O.W.L.s and all, lots of kids—I mean, most of us—use this. If you’re eating, or in the shower, or something, and you want to keep studying, you can tap the page you want to hear, and say “Lectio” and the book reads itself to you. Then you say, “Mutus” when you want it to stop.” He glanced at Moody. “I mean, if that’s OK.”

Sirius grinned in surprise. “Brilliant—I never heard of that one! Of course, I had Remus—he used to think James and I never did enough studying, and took to reading us things he thought we wouldn’t have read…sometimes he was right.” He glanced at Gwynneth, noting her eager smile with satisfaction. “Gwen will love this, though.”

Harry sipped his cold tea again. “Hermione found it somewhere, a couple of weeks ago. It was cool at first, but then everyone learned it, and it got pretty noisy, in the Common Room. We made a rule that you can’t use it unless you really have to have your hands doing something else.”

Gwen took the Aurors’ Manual and opened it carefully. She pulled Sirius’s wand from her sleeve and tapped the first page. “Lectio?” she said softly, looking up at Harry for confirmation. He nodded, as the book, in a dry, rasping voice that somehow sounded vaguely like Moody’s, intoned,

“Aurors’ Handbook: A Training Manual. 1948, London, by Alastor Moody. Additions and Corrections added 1960, 1972, 1979, by Alastor Moody. Issued by the Ministry of Magic, division of Magical Law Enforcement and Security…”

“Mutus.”

The book fell silent and snapped shut.

She turned to Harry, her dark eyes dancing. “This is brilliant. Thank you. It will work with any book at all?”

“I think so.” He smiled back at her, completely charmed, forgetting to be nervous. She was really amazingly pretty.

 

Gwen returned Sirius’s wand to her sleeve, placed the book carefully on her lap, and said, “Yes, please” when Alice offered her tea and a scone.

                                         ***********************

Sirius waited until Gwen’s immediate future had been sorted out, with a schedule of study at the Hut, and weekly meetings with Harry at the cave in Hogsmeade planned, before he asked any of the questions in his mind.

“What’s all this in aid of, since you’re not officially working as an Auror? Whom, exactly, are we working for?”

Moody and Alice exchanged a quick look, and Alice spoke. “It’s the old Order, I’ll bet you remember. Dumbledore’s Order of the Phoenix. Albus, and a few of us here and there, are pretty well convinced that if Voldemort’s got his strength back, it’s only a matter of time before he’ll need serious opposition. The Ministry are so out of touch that they’ll be useless, at least at first. So Albus and Moody and I, and a few others, are just gathering up some useful people and making plans….”

She glanced at each person in turn. The storm outside had darkened the sky so much that Alice’s candles had lit themselves and floated above the table, casting weird patterns of  light and shadow on the faces around the table. Alice stopped talking and gave Moody a look that was impossible to read, her lean, brown, wrinkled face like polished wood in the candlelight. Harry stared at him, seemingly mesmerised; Gwen waited; Sirius nodded his approval.

Moody took up the explanation.  “We all thought we’d start with folk we knew we could trust, folk who had a score to settle with Voldemort, who wouldn’t be waiting around for the Ministry to protect them. We’ve been collecting names, and visiting with people all over Britain, for the better part of a year now. There’s a fair few, more than you might think.”

“So you would have called on me anyway, if I hadn’t written you?”

“Laddie, you’d BEEN called. Dumbledore figured you were in. He just hasn’t contacted you lately; he knows you and Harry needed some time to connect. And now you have Gwen as well; we didn’t know what her presence would do to your willingness to go fighting Death Eaters…”

“We’re willing.” It was Gwynneth who answered, her eyes meeting Moody’s unwaveringly. “It’s wrong that people from the Ministry are hunting Sirius. I want to find Pettigrew and make him tell of his guilt. Then I want to kill him. I will kill other Death Eaters too, if you like.”

Moody grinned with delight at this statement. “Well, lassie, I like your spirit, but it won’t work quite that way. We catch Death Eaters, right enough, and that’s where you and Black, here, will come in useful. But by and large, we don’t kill ’em, and you don’t have to do it alone. Humans don’t hunt like seals; they help each other. We have some very good people working with us, some in their spare time, and some hired on full time, like you two. We don’t want anyone to starve, doing this work.”

Sirius raised his hand, as if he were in a classroom. “That’s the other thing I wanted to ask about: where’s the money coming from? That’s a fair salary you’re offering Gwen, to say nothing of paying me to train her.”

“Thought you’d never ask.” Moody leaned back in his chair, grinned at Harry, who was listening silently, open-mouthed, and went on. “The money, you’ll be amused to know, comes from the Black family coffers: the Pureblood Blacks, the Blacks who disinherited your granddad.

“The heir to the family fortunes is a second cousin of yours: young Andromeda, a bit older than you, I think. She married a Muggle-born wizard, had a child— when her father died the whole lot was hers. Enormous amount of money. Huge old barn of a country house, property in seven counties, and an evil old town mansion they’re trying to clean up to use for a Headquarters. She has her reasons—we don’t need to go into them just now—but she’s giving most of the money, and the town house, to Dumbledore, to use as he sees fit.

“Alice and I knew him, by the way, your old granddad. He was in our year at school. Never cared two pins for the Black family reputation, or the family money: a great character, bit of a loner, handsome devil. Looked like you. Women queued up outside his door, but none of  ’em wanted the life he chose to lead.” Moody stopped, pointed his wand to summon the coffeepot, poured a new cup, and went on.

“He studied Care of Magical Creatures, went off to the West Coast of Scotland and set up a little outpost, looking for sea monsters. Found ‘em, too: apparently his books are well thought of in the field. Did you know any of this?”

Sirius shook his head. “He was killed before Andie and I were born, and my dad never talked much about any of his family. Did you ever meet—I mean, did you know my grandmother?”

“Met her a few times. They lived way out beside the ocean, away from any other folk. She didn’t talk much, but she was as kind and careful of the boy—your dad—as any mother could be. A sweet woman, unearthly pretty. Like….” He glanced at Gwen, who blinked.

“What is ‘pretty’? Most words are not difficult to understand, but I cannot tell the meaning of ‘pretty’. Is it a human thing?” She turned from one of the companions to another, until finally Harry spoke.

“Pretty, well, that’s just something, or a person—someone, then—who looks good. Someone you like to look at.”

Gwen nodded. “I see. Like all of you. Like Alice. I was so happy to see Alice when we arrived; I wanted to look and look at her. Alice is pretty, isn’t she.”

Nobody answered her at first; Alice made a strangled sort of noise and quickly lifted her cup to her lips.

Moody smiled at her, set down his cup and said gruffly, “You won’t hear any argument from me.”