Very Midsummer Madness

Chapter 1: Conceal me what I am

Lay down your preconceptions and travel light. Put aside the things you think you know.

I give you three guiding principles:

Time is short.

Reality bends.

Love is the end of all things.

Now open your eyes.

See how the shimmering green waters curve teasingly against the bleached sand like the arch of a lover's back against the beloved. See how the sun graces both with its golden benediction. Honeysuckle and ripe figs throw out a scented net from which no living creature escapes, and the light - the light! - the air is clear as if newly washed.

But as we swing low over the beach, see how the pristine sand is scarred with jagged brown wounds: timber, warped and torn, litters the centre of the crescent, coughed up from the very belly of the sea. A sail. A stretch of shredded rigging. Shipwreck.

Movement.

A figure lies encrusted with glittering sand, its toes lapped by the rippling waves. The dark head covered with shaggy damp locks finally raises itself and green eyes blink uncertainly.

No! Too far, too soon! You will not understand. To begin, we must go back. Take my hand. Close your eyes. Feel the coolness of time rushing past your ears.

Transfiguration lesson. Twenty minutes past eleven with a long day to go. Sun and sweltering fruit are far from here. There is only the straight figure of Professor McGonagall standing at the front of the classroom, her hands clasped around either end of her wand.

"Who can explain to the class the most important difference between creating light and creating darkness?" McGonagall asked. "Anyone apart from Miss Granger? Anyone at all? Very well then, Miss Granger."

Harry threw down his quill in disgust. Voldemort was out there somewhere, regathering his army as he picked at the wounds from their recent skirmish, and here they were wasting time on cutesy little tricks of light. It was no wonder the blood of their liberation would be on his hands when all they wanted to do was paddle about in magical theory. Four weeks into his sixth year, he found himself returning obsessively to the moment he had won his reprieve from expulsion and wondering if that was the first place he had gone wrong.

As Hermione lowered her arm, Harry retrieved the quill and began to carve the outline of a horse's head into his desk.

"Creating light requires producing energy from a particular source," Hermione was expounding. "In the lumos spell, this is simply the manifestation of the power in our wand cores. On the other hand, creating darkness means the removal of light, which is a more difficult task because it requires drawing in energy from the environment."

"Very good." Professor McGonagall produced a smooth grey object from the pocket of her robes. "The common put-outer. Today we will perform the spell that makes it function. Transfiguring light into darkness is particularly advanced magical theory, however. I don't expect any of you to achieve it on the first attempt."

Ron nudged Harry under the desk and hissed:

"I thought we were doing goldfish into gold again. I can't do advanced magic!"

"You'll be fine," Harry comforted automatically, adding a ragged wing to his engraving. "She doesn't expect us to get it right the first time."

"You don't understand! I lost my wand - it fell out of my pocket while I was teaching Sloper the Bludger Backbeat. I was so busy wiping the blood off my nose I forgot to look for it."

A sharp tapping interrupted him and they looked up to see McGonagall striking the side of her desk with her wand and watching Ron beadily.

"Weasley, since even the most advanced magic does not require your full attention, perhaps you would care to be the first to demonstrate for us. Step forward please."

Harry nudged him, but Ron scrabbled among the papers on his desk and whispered desperately out of the corner of his mouth:

"I can't! You remember the wands we found in Fred and George's dorm when they scarpered? I had to grab one of those. I don't trust it!"

Harry turned his face to shadow his scowl.

"Take mine then. If it's not supposed to work anyway." Ron shot him a grateful look and plucked the wand from his desk.

"'Dedite noctem' is the spell you will require. Concentrate on a small area and see if you can't create a patch of shadow."

Ron did concentrate. He pointed his wand commandingly into the corner of the room. Etched on his forehead were furrows of supreme dedication which never appeared when he was seriously attempting a spell.

"Dedite noctem, ah well, looks like it didn't work, Professor," he said speedily and all in one breath. "Too bad." His mouth made a wide, apologetic curve.

Harry snorted and immediately wished he hadn't. He and Ron often joked that McGonagall's forehead ought to be calibrated so that her arching eyebrows gave an accurate reading of her displeasure. Right now they were nudging towards hazardous. He'd seen her reach critical more than once in the past year, but the moment when her primness tripped over into full-blown fury still made his stomach lurch in a way he preferred to avoid.

"I presume, Potter, that your expression indicates your keen anticipation of your own moment of glory. You may be the next to demonstrate the spell."

Harry opened his mouth, bit back the indignant retort, and closed it again. Should have seen that one coming.

"In your own time."

Lying on Ron's desk was the twins' wand. It had been part of a cache Fred and George had secreted behind a portrait in their dorm (it was most likely illicit) and left behind when they fled the school (it most likely didn't work). He eyed it suspiciously.

"Any further delays will result in the deduction of points. Begin, thank you."

Harry picked up the wand with the tips of his fingers and pointed it experimentally at the space above the goldfish bowl on the professor's desk. The fish flickered from red to gold and back again as they wove among the waterweeds. It was surprising just how wrong the unfamiliar wand felt - its fibres too coarse, its weight uneven. There was no way it would perform the spell, but he couldn't care less about that. He just worried that it would produce a shower of dungbombs or dissolve the back wall into butterbeer. With a chill, he remembered that far worse acts than creating unexpected butterbeer lay both behind and before him, and that put his present anxiety in perspective. Still, his mind was only loosely grasping the slippery spell words when he shrugged and commanded:

"Duodecimus noctem!"

Everything went dark.

A black flash engulfed the classroom, drawing him into it, leaving him blind. He blinked pointlessly against the darkness. It didn't weaken but, worse, it began to move. Harry felt currents tugging at him, spinning him until he had lost all sense of up and down.

Nausea pushed at his throat, but when he opened his mouth to cry out, liquid poured in and filled him until he panicked and clawed at the oily blackness. Shooting stars of white light sputtered across his vision and he felt the strength draining from his limbs, but he gave one last despairing kick and finally he was rising. He kicked again, harder, and the water shifted, painfully slowly, from black to deep blue to crystalline green until be broke onto the surface, spewing liquid from his lips.

Sucking sweet air into his lungs, Harry flailed down the side of a wave and wished he'd been taught how to swim. A swell washed over him and he took another gulp of salt water before bobbing up again. On every side he could see nothing but waves, pitching and collapsing, a many-backed fiend. Nowhere was there stillness, only reeling, living darkness over which a greying dawn sky cast the bleakest of lights.

Borne up on a high crest, he thought he saw the pale blur of a face in the trough below him. Wild eyes looked up at him then vanished. Then the water closed round him and he saw no more.

*

Come back with me now. The fine-grained beach, the honeysuckle, the overpowering push of the sun on your back. The young man storm-tossed on the shore, blinking around him in confusion. He brushes wet hair from his forehead and raises himself to his knees. Watch with me.

Harry coughed the last of the sand from his throat. Gritty specks still rubbed the inside of his mouth and he spat, but awkwardly, then wiped his lips. There was no getting rid of the taste of salt.

This was not Transfiguration class. Transfiguration was not known for the gliding sound of waves nor for the weighty sun which scorched the raw skin on the back of his neck and had already made the ends of his hair crisp and dry. It was very quiet. He raised his eyes warily.

At the end of a wide beach, the land rose steeply to a point in front of him, and to his left and to his right, the hills tumbled down into gentle plains. In a hazy row, far away, the white needles of mountain tops pierced a crisp sky. The last stormclouds glared menacingly as they retreated over the waves behind him.

Harry glared back, at the clouds and the sun and the gem-hard shards of light which made his eyes ache. He was sick and bloody tired of the unexpected. So many surprises had opened like trapdoors beneath him that, for the last year, he had never lost the sense of falling. The constant newness, a Bludger-shaped flash in the corner of his eye, stimulated reflexes stretched well beyond exhaustion.

This beach and this sun were the last in a long line of betrayals and, if he only had the strength, he would tear them to pieces with his bare hands to get back to the unwavering grey of the classroom. His fingers made the habitual curl into fists.

This particular mirage was just insulting. Too perfect to fool anybody. The only question was who should bear the blame and the brunt of his rising anger. It had all started with the spell, the spell and -

Yes, a hallucinogenic wand would be a Fred and George special - a wand engineered to perform one beloved spell, surreptitiously with no more than a flick of the wrist. He could picture George casting a quick one under the table as Binns listed the chief provisions of the Cross-Border Trade in Magical Plants Regulations, transporting his mind to this hidden place and no-one the wiser. If the theory held, it would either fade over time or be dispelled with an enchanted word.

He tried "firewhiskey", "Nimbus" and "Angelina's knickers", but the mirage remained obstinate and the waves continued to murmur at him. He rubbed his eyes and that was odd because, although he could see with perfect clarity, his glasses were apparently somewhere on the seabed being ground down into smooth jewels. He touched his eyelids again (they felt as they should) and ran his fingers over his face (all in order), down his neck and over the damp fabric of his doublet, his stockings, his jutting codpiece, his --- what?!

He jumped to his feet and gaped at the foreign clothes as if they were a demon clamped around his body. They were wrong. They were clothes he had never seen before. And yet ... the silk of the doublet ran smoothly under his tentative fingertips, the colouring a warm malt shade. It fastened around his front in a suspiciously precise fit, and when he lifted the hem from his upper thigh, he peeped down at a rather ambitious codpiece, fashioned from hard brown leather and adorned with swirling engraved patterns. He shifted it on top of his still-damp woollen stockings and blinked at the audacity of its size and tilt.

It was the shoes that gave it away. They were flat and rectangular and slapped like ducks' feet against the sand. There was no way he could have hallucinated those, and no way even Fred and George could have made them up. Shoes like that did not lurk even in the most unacknowledged depths of the subconscious. The thought that perhaps this place was real began to flutter, moth-like, against his ears.

He was going to find Fred and George and make them eat that wand. What could they have done to it? Fred and George, or someone more sinister. In an instant, he could name a half dozen people who hated him enough to put a sabotaged wand in his path. But ... this? It was an odd method of assassination. The most dangerous thing he could see was a glittering trail of jellyfish leading down from the highwater mark.

He went back to combing the shallows in search of the wand, but all he saw was penitent water, its clear ripples concealing nothing. Wood was everywhere, splintered and lying sopping on the sand, big scabs of it and narrow strands, tangled with shreds of rope and canvas and a bleached wooden goddess who pointed an authoritative nose up the beach. Shipwreck. That seemed familiar, and he imagined he had heard voices calling to him from far away as he had tossed in the surf. If there was a wreck then there must be ...

"Ho there!" a deep voice called from the top of the beach and an exceptionally large figure strolled down the sand toward him, its messy thatch of brown hair still wet and clinging close.

Survivors.

"Hagrid!" His eyes stang, no doubt from the salt. "Hagrid, am I glad to see you!"

The older man was frowning by the time he reached Harry's side.

"That name yeh call me, young master, I don't know it. Has the seawater confounded your head?"

Harry looked around but saw no-one for whose benefit this charade could be intended.

"What do you mean, Hagrid?" he snapped. "What else would I call you?"

"The Captain, as yeh've always done before." Hagrid gave a testing grin which faded.

"The Captain?"

"Yes, lad. I've never had no other name and nor shall I, until the sea may swallow me."

He looked like Hagrid. His voice was Hagrid's. But the clothes were wrong, and so was the stately turn of phrase he seemed to slip into. Harry thought about it hard and felt certain he would have noticed if the Hagrid he knew had worn a wooden leg. Frustration began to wriggle again in his stomach.

"How far are we from Hogwarts?" he asked brusquely.

"Very far, young master. I've been sailing these seas nigh on thirty years and I can't say's I've ever heard of it."

One of them was crazy. For one tilting moment Harry thought it might be him. Perhaps Hogwarts never existed - perhaps he had dreamed it, made it up - perhaps reality was a cupboard under the stairs and smothering, endless conversations about the drill market. And, for an instant, he felt light enough to let the breeze pick him up. But then he remembered Vernon and Petunia. They were not daydreamers: even imagining furniture in any print but beige herringbone was beyond them. If they had seen the letters, flinched from the real Hagrid and shaken their fists at a flying car, then those things must be real. But this beach and this stranger, those he would see about.

"What's this place then?"

"This, sir, is Illyria!" Hagrid's broad arm took in the expanse of sea, sand and hills.

"Right. And where is that exactly? Are there wiz-" He wondered whether this not-Hagrid even knew what a wizard was. "Who lives here?"

"All kinds of people breathe Illyria's air. I myself was born but three hours march from here. Yeh're in the land of the Duchess Virginia Orsino."

Harry sat down heavily on a pile of crumpled timber.

"Virginia." This was looking worse and worse. "What's she like, this duchess?"

"She is lady of noble birth and temperament. 'ad we not missed the scarlet sunrise, I could 'ev shown you the very colour of her hair."

So Ginny existed in this mad place as well. Hagrid. Ginny. Bad shoes and a shipwreck. No matter how he shuffled the pieces, he couldn't make it look like something Fred and George had cooked up one rainy weekend. And yet he'd lived through enough Death Eater plots by now to suspect they'd leave a familiar taste in his mouth - licorice or garlic or something sinister which he didn't detect here. Still, real or illusive, this place was convincingly solid and he wasn't going to escape it just by clicking his heels and invoking home. He resigned himself to investigating.

Fortunately, for a roving seaman, Hagrid knew a great deal of scuttlebutt.

"Ah! The young Duchess was a child when I last left these shores - a little cherub with a halo of curls. She's become a maiden now, and folk say that Lord Olivier has caught her eye."

In what way, Harry wondered. The matter-of-fact affection which the Ginny he knew had for Dean, or the quivering obsession he recalled from not so long ago? Either way, when he checked himself for jealousy, he found none.

"And who is he, this Lord Olivier?"

"He is the son of a count who has recently passed on, and these last two months he has scarce left his halls for walking the corridors and bewailing his loss. He admits no visitors, not even the Duchess Orsino and her emissaries. The ladies who've seen him on horseback say it were as if Apollo himself had left his sun-chariot to ride among men. They say -"

Harry didn't give a toss what they said. Nothing in this fictitious place could rouse him to so tiring an act as caring. He was going to get out of there, and he was going to do it immediately, before the uncertainty and the sweetness of the air made him too heavy to move.

"What am I supposed to do in Illyria? Where was I going when ..."

"When the storm hit?" Hagrid grinned and winked at him. "Aaargh, your business is your own, sir, and best to keep it so in foreign lands. I ne'er made so bold as to ask where yeh might be headed. What yeh do in Illyria, that's up to your whim."

"Good. I want to speak to this Duchess Orsino." Harry managed a couple of strides towards the wooded hills and the shadows that lurked under its boughs, but the hills looked claustrophobic after the open visibility of the beach, and as he swept his gaze once more over sea and sparkling sand the beauty of this place took on a sinister shade. The light was almost too clear, the air too heady and alive. His instinct scoped the nearby sand for a weapon.

"You're right. I have to be careful until I know more about this place. I need to go armed, or disguised." He brushed his hair carefully over the scar but it was a waste of time.

"Yeh may be grateful yet for those two actresses we lost in the storm. It seems they carry all manner of disguise," Hagrid confided as he kicked a waterlogged chest that lay among the wrecked pieces of his vessel and it burst open to spill brightly coloured cloth onto the sand. He beamed meaningfully and tapped the side of his nose. "I'll not tell your secret, sir. Or madam."

Harry looked over the side of the chest. The clothes were all women's and, unlike his own, they were dry. It was a pretty flimsy disguise but it would mean getting rid of this irritating codpiece. And it wasn't so different from his everyday robes, only more fitted and virtually impossible to walk in. Oh, why bother fighting it when every second's doubt was another delay to his escape? Recently he'd had a number of lessons in choosing his battles, and this one didn't seem strategic.

Discarding the silks and velvets as too conspicuous, he slipped off his doublet and chose a robe of plain dark green linen. The sleeves were made of a lighter fabric, pale and almost transparent. Once the challenge of undergarments had been dealt with, it whispered against his skin. Hagrid chuckled as he fastened the hooks painfully at the back.

"It fits a bit tight around the shoulders, but yeh've got exactly the waist for it, and if yeh don't scorn the word of an old seafellow I can say that colour on your white skin, it's no discomfort on the eye."

A light shawl in the same dark green covered his hair so that only his fringe showed, and he picked up the largest looking pair of slippers.

"Now be off with yeh! Follow the stairs up the hillside. The duchess's castle is on the top of the ridge behind yeh." He pointed and graced Harry with a grin that bordered on lecherous. Harry hurried up the beach, distracted by the unfamiliar tickle of sand between his toes.

As he climbed the clumsily hewn stairs, he cursed the twins, McGonagall, Hagrid, Ron, Sloper and this whole sweaty, heat-buzzing land. The hillside was steep, though, and before long he had no breath to spare for complaining.

*

See how he picks his way quickly up the stairs, the boy in the green dress, holding his petticoats awkwardly as he winds under laurel and cypress. Bare legs stretching up with each step, head bent in determination. Far above, he stops, where a grassy hillock swells out of the rock, stops and watches. Can you make out his expression as he scans the sea, from the shore to each corner of the horizon? Long moments pass. Look behind you. There is nothing to be seen but sea.

Would he fool you? Certainly there's a girlish shape to his face, which has never lost the soft contours of childhood, and the strands of dark hair visible at the edge of his veil. Yet even with the aid of a corset, the chest and shoulders are too square for an athletic maiden, and the furious will in him makes you wonder whether he can make his body bend into a feminine gait. Perhaps the echo between eye and fabric will save him. They are too alike in greenness, so good a match that the beholder finds their gaze travelling from one to the other wondering which has stolen the shade from which. His body may not be the first thing to be noticed.

As he disappears back into the trees, he plucks an early season fig and puts it to his lips.

*

The castle was magnificent. Smooth-cornered square turrets revealed themselves above the hilltop, weathered gargoyles standing guard in rings around each crown. The stone was struck with golden hues and pinks in the early afternoon light. Unlike the grey stone of Hogwarts, it seemed to be warm, living flesh. Harry noticed the hallmarks of aggression first - the high encircling wall and the rusted portcullis - but as he approached he saw the changes wrought by time and peace. Gardens had been nurtured, trees overhung the cobbled path and the guard post at the gate was scattered with last year's dried leaves. Still, Harry imagined the roar of cannonfire rolling down to the water.

What he heard, though, was music. Floating out from one of the higher storeys were the notes of two stringed instruments, more breathily sweet than guitar or violin. With quickened step, he followed the sound through the gaping front entrance and up a broad staircase to the first floor. He peered cautiously around the door of the high-ceilinged chamber at the top of the stairs.

Professor Dumbledore was playing a lute. Truly. Not only that, he was playing it the Muggle way: with his fingers, which he watched intently as they danced over the strings. Beside him, Gilderoy Lockhart had a larger, flatter version of the same instrument clamped in his lap. His head swayed from side to side as the rhythm gripped him. Two hundred besotted maidens weren't swooning over his every move, but the way he posed brought them to mind. A pair of drums were squeezed between Professor Sprout's commanding thighs.

Harry willed Professor Dumbledore to meet his eyes. For all that had passed between them, he was still the most likely person to have their wits about them. But their dedication to playing was all-consuming and none of the musicians looked up.

From the unseen end of the room came a voice. It was rich with melancholy, it was ringing and it said:

"If music be the food of love, play on!"

Harry twisted his head further around the door. Perched on an ottoman at the far and of the room was the unlikely figure of Ginny Weasley. Professor McGonagall stood at her side.

"Play more, and keep on playing. Play until I am sick with it! Play until I never want to hear music again! Let me kill my love with overfeeding. Play, my friends. Play on!"

Harry had known the voice but not believed it. The pitch was Ginny's exactly, only the words weren't delivered in the practical tones he knew - they rolled across the room, there was melody in them, and poise. It was all in the way she sat: straightbacked and with her jaw on a perfect horizontal. From the long red hair that fell down her back to the pale eyebrows and skin, she was Ginny, but there was a difference beyond the sculpting corset, the pearls and the ivory silk dress. It was as if someone had taken the timid romantic he had met on Platform 9¾ and blended her with the straight-talker who now beat all comers to the Snitch. Her lips were painted in a bold red flourish and he knew in that instant that she would not recognise him.

"No! Stop!" Ginny rose from the ottoman and started across the room. She pulled up half way and her skirts swirled around her feet. "That piece, it's not so lovely as before. Everything is fickle in love. The most glorious objects become worthless in an instant. Only love itself has an value. Only love."

Professor McGonagall unfolded her arms from the loose sleeves of her deep green velvet gown.

"My lady, will you ride today? The weather is mild and the sky is clear."

Ginny let out a frustrated breath and didn't trouble to glance at the narrow windows which lined the western wall.

"What use do I have for sun and sky? There is only one thing I would look upon, and that is locked behind the doors of the Olivier villa. Leaves and flowers, sea and sand, I refuse to look upon them until my lord Olivier beholds them with me."

Her fingers traced the white lilies pinned in her hair, brown decay already invading the edge of their petals. In a swift movement, she turned to face a portrait at the far end of the chamber, imposing in its thick gilt frame. The subject was instantly recognisable: the assured grace, the unnecessary parting of the knees, the hint of both cruelty and mirth in the thin mouth, the slightly hooked eyebrow that challenged the viewer. Harry scowled. This place was already unnerving and the presence of a Malfoy suggested it might actually be Hell. Draco Malfoy, Lord Olivier. It was too horrible to think about.

There was a rattling noise from behind and a slender form brushed past him into the room. Surprise was well beyond him now. He merely raised curious eyebrows at Professor Trelawney, whose voluminous skirt in moonlight grey was so extravagantly layered with glittering glass beads that she almost out-jangled the musicians.

"What news from him this time, sweet Valentine?" Ginny asked, her mouth nervous and small.

Professor Trelawney gave a dramatic heavenward look and spoke with a tremolo.

"Lord Olivier would not receive me. Once more, he sent his steward Malvolio with a message."

"Does he -"

"Yes, my lady. He sends you another refusal. His lordship begs you to remember it is but twelve months since the death of his beloved father. Grief rules him, and he declares that he cannot consider marriage until ... my lady, you may care to sit down."

"I shall stand. What is his message, Valentine?"

Professor Trelawney put a hand to her bosom.

"He refuses to consider a match, my dear lady, until seven years have passed."

"Seven years." Ginny repeated in a hollow voice and began to unfasten and pin the flowers in her hair with vicious short strokes. It was some time before her movements slowed, and all the while Professor Trelawney's lips quivered in sympathetic emotion.

"It is a mark of passion, dear Valentine," Ginny concluded with a new certainty. "It is passion that makes his grief run so deep. And if this is how he loves a mere father, then when he chooses a wife, she will be the most cherished creature in Christendom."

This was definitely Hell. And Hell was not other people: it was other people wittering about Draco Malfoy. It made his stomach turn to think that, somewhere not more than a spell away, Voldemort was turning wizard against wizard and unleashing bloody chaos across the only world he had ever loved, and yet here there was no more pressing question than whether Malfoy might be capable of any sort of love which did not involve a mirror.

"Seven years is not so very long, and I have youth on my side," Ginny was rationalising as Harry opened his mouth to give her a short speech on priorities, and then it happened. "Valentine, who is the girl you've brought with you?"

Harry looked over his left shoulder. Then his right. Then he remembered.

"I'm ... I have..." Striking a balance in pitch between feminine and just plain squeaky was hard enough without having to use words and he found himself floundering like the shy twelve year old he thought he'd left far behind. "I just arrived today. My lady. On a ship. I stowed away on a ship."

Stowed away was good. He congratulated himself.

"They ... that is ... the Captain, he told me I should find the Duchess Orsino. So I came here to find her. Because I ... need work. Yes. Work."

He could have kicked himself. Where had that come from? In this place where he had no history, the possibilities were overwhelming. He felt as if he were running on dry sand, his feet slipping out from under him. However, Ginny smiled kindly.

"I am the Duchess Orsino. What is your name, little one?"

Harry did feel that he should have seen this flaw in his strategic planning somewhat earlier. A girl's name. "Cho" was still the first name that came to him, followed closely by "Hermione", but neither seemed to fit the sensuality of this world of silk and glittering stones. Harry's eyes overturned every object in the room for inspiration, and he had just fixed on the decidedly uncunning "Harriet" when Ginny interrupted.

"No! I can guess. Your accent comes from a faraway place and your voice, it's deep and mysterious, like a musical instrument."

One lie was as good as any other and he didn't plan to be wearing this pseudonym for very long.

"Very clever of you to guess, my lady, for my name is ..." Tuba? Recorder? Hammond organ? His eyes flicked to the corner where Gilderoy Lockhart was caressing the strings of his lute. Ah! "Viola. My name is Viola."

"Then I welcome you to Illyria, Viola. Come and sit with me." She alighted on the ottoman, making herself a white streak against the red upholstery and autumn coloured cushions. "Tell me what work you would do in my household."

Though the struggle with uncooperative skirts left him flustered, he sat.

"Do you sing? Can you play?"

His fingers filled with cloth and squeezed tight in frustration. He had come here to find out what this place was and how to leave it, not to be quizzed on his social accomplishments.

"Your hands are fine." She took up his free hand and brushed her thumb over its knuckles. "With such lean fingers you must be a master worker with needle and thread. Am I right?"

The hand, swathed in green fabric, pale and clean from the water with its typical abrasions healed in the ten months since he had last held a broom, seemed to belong to a stranger. But the warmth of the touch he felt right up to his shoulder.

"I can't sew. But I can-" he began in a sudden desire to please and then stumbled. Rarely had he felt so deeply the absence of his wand, without which he could barely open an envelope these days. After five years at Hogwarts he could think of two things he could do without it. Faking divination and - "I can tell you stories. In the place I come from, there are travellers who tell strange tales of giants living among people and pixies kept in cages. They say there are huge snakes which can kill just by looking at you."

She hadn't believed a word of it, this Muggle Ginny.

"I've never had a storyteller before." She mused and then laughed. For the first time it chased the melancholy out of her eyes. "Maybe the distraction will be good for me. I hope you will stay with us, Viola."

At the other end of the hall, Gilderoy Lockhart was plucking the opening strains of a galliard. Harry looked down at the shaft of sunlight that pooled at the hem of his skirt and wondered what was happening in the dim halls of Hogwarts.

*

That evening, when cool night air was stealing into the castle and Harry was washing the salt from his skin, she came to him. At her tentative knock, he whipped the shawl over his telltale short hair.

"I hope they have made you comfortable, Viola." From the doorway, she cast a critical eye over the narrow room, unadorned but for the meagre straw mattress piled high with compensatory blankets. "Though you would have a gentler night in Valentine's chamber and two may sleep comfortably in her bed."

The case against sharing a bed with Professor Trelawney was fairly compelling. It was enough that close quarters would quickly reveal his unfeminine body, even without his suspicion that she might be in possession of a matronly snore. On a blank beach among ruined timber, building himself into a girl's life had seemed a simple matter of choice, but already it was a burden.

"My lady, it's time for me to be plain with you."

"Tell me this first," Ginny said in a rush as she slipped into the room and leaned on the door which closed behind her. Her eyes glittered with excitement. "Have you been in love? I have no company here, apart from Valentine and old Curio, and I've always wished to have a companion - someone who could understand the extravagance of my heart, someone who had the learning to make sense of it for me. It was a sister I wanted, Viola. And now I have you."

She drifted a small kiss onto Harry's cheekbone, leaving heady floral scent where she moved. He folded concealing arms around the boyish angle of his ribs.

"I can't tell you much about love," he said.

He remembered Cho in late afternoon light by the Quidditch pitch, straightening the bristles of her broom, cheeks bright after the practice session, a figure of perfect contemplation amid the bustle of chattering students around her. He remember Cho with her nose running and her eyes red as her heaving breaths filled the tearoom. He remembered an odd dream in which Luna had wept into a wooden basin and washed his feet in it, again and again, until the world receded to the rhythm of her touch. He didn't have a name for the way those memories made him feel, but he didn't think it was the same thing Ginny meant when she used that word.

"How can that be?" she puzzled. "You spoke of travellers and tales, and all stories worth hearing have love at their centre. What can we aspire to if not to love? It's the one thing that crosses the ravine between the human and the divine."

It was doomed to be shattered, this charming illusion she had built for herself. Harry had seen the chillingly superior portrait and suffered the extremes of Malfoy disdain at first hand.

"It's dangerous, my lady. Putting all your happiness in the hands of one person, when that person ..." He tried to find a more delicate way of putting it. "When you don't even know -"

"Do I fear his rejection?" Ginny's voice grew harsh and her small fingers traced over the pearls at her throat. "I am no fool, Viola. He returns the gifts I send. He dismisses my messengers with evasive words. I have no place in his heart. And yet how vain and imperfect is love if it quails at the first sign of hardship. What a pitiful emotion it must be!"

"Suppose he never loves you at all. Some men just don't do that."

Ginny's eyes flashed.

"Is that your sisterly counsel? Not to risk my heart because there's a chance I will fail? What a cowardly life you would have me lead! No matter, Viola. He will come to me. He is only one man, and I have all the patience of the mountains."

In her determination, she reminded him of the persistent, red-braided girl who for three years had swung always in his orbit without ever quite standing in his path. For the first time, he wondered how she would have explained the blushes and half-swallowed sentences and truculent silences if he had been curious enough to ask.

"You will understand in time. He is educated and quick-minded. Not even the smallest of social graces escapes him. He is elegance itself. Nothing puts him to fear and everyone from the hardest peasant woman to the Pope in Rome can be made to eat from his hand." She put her fingers to her lips and a wicked sparkle leapt from the corner of her eye. "You will see for yourself when you take my message to him."

Harry gulped. "My lady, I -"

"I will not be swayed. You must be my emissary. You sailed in on a new wind today. For three days we were plagued by storms and untiring rain. Until this morning, when the clouds were driven off and you stepped over my threshold. It's midsummer, Viola. The season is turning. Now is the time to work for change."

She unfastened the spray of lilies from her hair and left them on the blanket, where they gave off a scent sweet with decay.

"Tomorrow we can pick fresh ones. For now, you must sleep. You've had a long journey."

When she was gone, Harry peeled off the dress and the merciless corset and slumped onto the bed. Tireder than ever, he felt a throbbing in his muscles where the furious tension had faded to confusion. It wasn't fear of danger which drained him - for all his earlier suspicions about this place, he had emerged unharmed from a wandless day when anyone could have killed him armed with nothing more than a ladle. Nor was it the constant battle to keep a straight back and a feminine step, nor even the knowledge that, far beyond his ability to help them, his friends might be in peril. Much worse than these things were the rich fabrics, the smell of fruit and flowers on air, the deep colours and the sun so close overhead he felt he could almost touch it.

Harry had misplaced his rage and lost his road. He feared he was becoming drunk.

*

Time to move on.

Come with me now, pass through the walls of stone into the night air. A yellow moon reigns here, casting thick light which hangs like a syrup over the landscape.

From above, you can see how the Duchess Orsino's castle crowns the highest peak of the hills. Follow the ridge that runs inland from that peak - see there where the torches burn? That is Count Olivier's villa.

We must descend now onto the long northward plain. Can you feel how the air loses its crispness? Here the green pastures are washed of colour, but every now and again a dollop of moonlight falls on a thatched roof or a low wall of piled stone. Up ahead to the west the sea curves back inward and on the shores of the wide bay there is a cluster of tumbledown houses, village is too ambitious a name.

Come to this small shack nearest the water. Where the light breaks through the window you can see a young man curled up on a sparse pile of straw. You know him instantly, don't you? The obstinate dark hair, the round, pale face, the cramped posture which recalls the outline of a long-vanished cupboard under the stairs.

This Harry is sleeping now. It is not yet his time. Tomorrow we will see him arise.