Very Midsummer Madness

Chapter 2: Even so quickly may one catch the plague

The lazy morning is ripening. Fleeting clouds drop ribbons of shadow that ripple across the bony ridge of hilltop and slither down steep slopes. In this place, the sun is never far away.

Look below you. The thread of road winds through a shimmering fabric of treetop, unfurling from the crest of the seaside hill and running inland. At the western end, where life moves slowly to the rhythm of waves upon sand, the road begins at the gates of a honey coloured stone castle - you know it, of course: it belongs to the Duchess Virginia Orsino.

From a height, trees and sea and road are no more than patterns, idly pleasing in their movement and curve. But as we descend - take my hand now - as we descend, the detail emerges. Can you see? A lone figure moving eastward along the road. Closer still and you can detect the reluctance in its step. A slender figure in a trailing green dress, dark hair almost concealed by a paler green shawl.

Harry Potter, of course. At the eastern end of the road, the alligator mouth of Draco, Lord Olivier, awaits him.

Three days have passed since last you were here. In those three days, Harry has learned to carry the name Viola without strangeness. The corset bites him and fits more like a straightjacket each time he laces it, but the guise of girlishness has become second nature. He has always been a fast learner.

You have missed his frustrated searches for an exit from this strange world. He has tested the façade of his companions, slipping words like "Hogsmeade" and "Snitch" into late-night conversations and watching for an unconscious response. Nothing. Perhaps they are, as they claim, the citizens of a land called Illyria. One slow-moving morning he asked Her Grace's gentlewoman, a prim old maid who wears the name Curio and the face of Professor McGonagall, whether she has ever dreamed she was a cat. She pursed her lips, looked appraisingly down her nose at him, and went back to her accounts. He has learned the futility of addressing questions to the musician who inhabits Professor Dumbledore's body: he merely smiles gently, as if words were an unnecessary encumbrance upon him, and continues stroking his lute.

And if, over time, his efforts have lost their edge of urgency, who can blame him? The castle has its own rituals and rhythms, gentler paced than the strict school life he has been used to but every bit as rassuring. His days are marked at one end by the aroma of the morning bread which unwinds into his room not long after dawn, and at the other by the gentle hiss of the snuffing of candles. Sometimes he has to stop still and concentrate to see past the vivid colours of the present back to his last memory of Hogwarts. He pictures Hermione striking Dumbledore's desktop with her index finger as she convinces him to devote more staff and more time to finding Harry; Ron sending furious owls to Fred and George to demand in increasingly obscene terms that they explain what they hell they did to that wand; the real Professor McGonagall perhaps stroking her Gryffindor scarf anxiously as the Quidditch season draws closer. Each image tightens his chest until he finds himself startled by the crash of a slammed door or looks down to find a heap of shredded flowers at his feet.

Still, this place has a way of sapping the anger out of him so that, at the end of a long afternoon lazy with the low clang of bells around the necks of goats, he will look around for it and feel that he has been robbed.

And what of the duchess? The straight-backed creature of silks and jasmine scent who wears the Weasley pigheadedness like a martyr's faith. When the tingle of unrequited love hardens into the real pain of wanting, it is to Harry that she unburdens her heart, listing the perfections of the cold Lord Draco Olivier as if they were a litany which might bring about divine intervention.

Harry listens. Sometimes he murmurs sympathy. The way that, when she is most given over to frustration, he will place one sisterly hand over the back of her wrist, has the action become less impatient, more tender over time? Well, perhaps. Or perhaps it is only their reflective youth and beauty that make the fantasy appealing.

But now the morning light tips over into noon and Harry-Viola in the green dress continues along the eastward road. The tale is running ahead without us.

The tension in Harry's stomach felt like vicious baby dragons by the time he reached the villa of Draco, Lord Olivier.

In the real world, an army of Draco Malfoys could barely raise him to fear, but in this place Malfoy was a count who, according to rumour, spent his days riding around the hills resembling a sun god, and Harry's position was the very definition of compromising.

"I have gone so long without hope," Ginny had said to Harry as he left the castle gates that morning. "You come from another place, Viola. You bring change with you. I know you can convince him, if anyone can soften his heart."

All the way along the road, holding his skirts above the grass, Harry had tried to think of what words of love he could say on Ginny's behalf. "Shall I compare thee to a violent storm? Thou art about as lovely and as temperate". He mined his memory of Malfoy for any traces of virtue and found none. He was a cowardly little snob who, in the five years of their acquaintance, had failed to perform a single unselfish act. "Conceited", "vile" and "obsessed" were all good rhyming words, but he suspected these were not the ones Ginny had had in mind.

All too soon, the black front door of the Olivier villa loomed before him, its stone gargoyles leering down at him from either side. Knocking on it would only hurry the moment where he would have to look Malfoy in the face and lie. A winding path ran down the side of the villa. He followed it and hoped he could get himself lost.

He had not taken ten steps when he heard Ron's voice, the familiarity of it piercing him and hurtling him forward in time to a world of wands and broomsticks. He fought the disorientation and hurried to the open window from which the sound came to peer over the sill.

Ron was sitting beside a rough wooden table, leaning back in his chair with his boots on the tabletop and his hands behind his head. The fledgling ginger beard, mustard coloured doublet and white stockings proclaimed that he was not the Ron Harry knew, and yet the indolent pose was so distinctive they could have been back in the Gryffindor common room. For the first time, the stab of homesickness caused him pain.

Ron was in the middle of a rant.

"All this mourning is more than I can bear, Maria," he was complaining. "It's unhealthy. It's a year since his father died, and yet Lord Olivier still expects us to move around on tiptoe."

At the other end of the table, a woman in a white bonnet worked on her embroidery using stitches so speedy Harry had to look carefully to be sure she wasn't using magic.

"Was that you I heard tiptoeing in the kitchen before sunrise this morning?" she chided as she looked up. "I wondered if a whole regiment was tiptoeing along beside you."

It was Hermione. No wonder she could sew like the devil's own seamstress, and at that rate a whole army of house elves was due for a liberation. Harry caught himself and remembered, in this place she was Maria and, if he mentioned elves, he was the one who would be thought peculiar.

Ron was defending himself vigorously.

"That was hardly my fault! I didn't see that pile of pots. How was I supposed to know it would be there?"

Hermione smiled into her needlework.

"The slatterns! Shame on the cooks for hiding their pots on top of the kitchen cabinet! Toby Belch, you are a trial! What were you doing there? Climbing in the window?"

"Don't be absurd."

"Hunting for cooking sherry?"

Ron gave a sly smile.

"Lord Olivier guesses you've been drinking, you know."

"Well bully for him!" cried Ron, slapping his thigh. "What tipped him off d'you suppose? The constant drinking, the drunkenness, the screaming hangovers?"

Hermione's frown - affection streaked with frustration - made Harry feel at once at home and very far from it.

"I am quite serious. His Lordship can cut you off, you know. He was saying at breakfast - as you would know if you had deigned to attend - that you tried to present a pompous knight to him yesterday. He said you were too drunk to remember his name, while the knight kept trying to bow and falling on his nose."

Ron laughed uproariously at the memory and began rifling through the cupboards which lined the wall of the small dining room.

"That was Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a fine fellow with a brilliant education and a stupendous head on his shoulders. Speaks five languages and dances like an angel. His Lordship's new clerk, scribe and household treasurer." A pile of trinkets and papers was growing as he emptied the cupboard. Hermione watched him suspiciously.

"I didn't know we had a new treasurer."

"Neither does his Lordship, but he will be delighted to find out! All I have to do is get Sir Andrew drunk enough to approach him and sober enough to keep his balance, and the job will be his. Ah! There she is!" He removed a tall gourd from the back of a shelf and plucked out its false top to disgorge a pottery flask which he put to his lips.

Hermione's tutted. Ron imbibed. Then the door creaked open and Percy Weasley strutted in wearing a superior expression and a green velvet cap which sagged under its fountain of peacock feathers.

"Sir Andrew!" Ron roared magnanimously, spreading his arms. "Maria, may I present to you the distinguished Sir Andrew Aguecheek, soon to be clerk, scribe and household treasurer to his Lordship, the Count Olivier. Sir Andrew, this is Maria."

Percy took Hermione's hand in his, yelping high and sharp as his finger collected her needle.

"Mistress Maria, I give you both my hand and my heart."

Hermione was nonplussed.

"And I return them to you for I can't see what use they'd be to me. Toby speaks highly of you, sir - five languages indeed! I suppose you are something of a connoisseur."

"Not at all, I assure you," Percy replied speedily. "It's just an allergic reaction - I expect the rash to clear up any day now."

Chortling quietly and making Harry long for the days when the solidarity of the Weasley family was the one thing he could count on, Ron held out his flask.

"A drink! A drink, Sir Andrew, to soothe your sluggardly tongue."

The newcomer pressed his knuckles to his temple and winced.

"Dear Sir Toby," he croaked in the flat tone that was so distinctively Percy. "Please be so good as to keep that deadly substance away from me. There was too much wine on the pheasant last night, it must be that because I felt quite lightheaded by the end of the evening. I fear I may have disgraced myself before his Lordship the Count."

"Of course you didn't!" Ron declared, clapping him on the back. "You danced like an angel!"

Percy gulped. "I danced?"

"With one of his Lordship's pigs, who I must admit had the better of you in the second waltz." Percy let his head sink to the table with a moan of despair.

Ron and Hermione's grins met above his head and reminded him that, a long time ago in the days where grinning was a simple act and free, the three of them had laughed until their eyes ran at the thought of Percy locked inside a pyramid, Percy chewing Bartemius Crouch's lunch for him, Percy demanding that Penelope write him an agenda of the places she most wished to be touched in order of increasing pleasure. Who had taken that easy laughter from him?

"Excuse me."

Three faces turned to him. He waited three beats for the slightest hint of recognition, but it didn't come.

"I'm here to speak with Lord Olivier," he ended up demanding. "I have a message from her Grace the Duchess."

"You're not the usual messenger," Hermione noted, hand on hip.

"No." He willed her to find something familiar about him. "I'm new in Illyria. My name's Viola."

"And my name is Sir Toby Belch. Welcome to our lair, lovely Viola!" Ron proclaimed with a broad grin and shattered Harry's hopes. "Do you drink, lovely Viola? This is His Lordship's finest."

He raised the flask to Harry's lips and a sweet, rich wine burned down his throat, almost too strong to bear. Harry coughed and wiped his lips.

"And now, lovely Viola, you must walk around through the rose garden to the courtyard, where you will find his lordship basking in the sun and tormenting the serving boys. I shall go before and announce you."

"Do you think that's wise?" Hermione cautioned him but he waved her away.

"I am no more than merry, my dear Maria. My spicy banter will only enliven his lordship's morning and - ooh, they've put a step in here, fancy that, nearly made me fall."

As Harry walked away, he heard Ron saying "Now, good Sir Andrew, can I prop you up with another drop of His Lordship's finest?" and Percy groaning painfully into the tabletop.

*

Quickly now! No time to smell the roses. The courtyard awaits us, the courtyard and its lord.

Stand with me here, in the dappled shade of the trellis, under the vines. Leave the grapes alone. You don't know this place. If you eat its fruit, it may claim you forever.

Now can you see? The narrow shelf of land, squeezed between the villa and the slope which plunges down into the northward plain, is dotted with cypresses turning their silver-backed leaves flirtatiously up to the breeze. Here and there a fountain, a stone god, a flowerbed blooming in perfect geometry.

Its centrepiece is the courtyard, a cool square lined with a mosaic of green, grey, blue and black. Cypresses mark the lower edge, while to the east and west loom rows of lemon trees, protecting ungenerous fruit and pointing barbarous thorns in every direction

Beneath a particularly gnarled and ancient citrus, a slender figure reclines on an upholstered chaise longue, grey breeches and a silk shirt in pale blue making an oddly serene brushstroke of pastel among the vivid hues of leaves and flowers. Its grey-stockinged legs are crossed with one foot pointing skyward. Even the languid stretch of body makes a criticism, proclaiming that there is nothing here worth sitting straight for.

Who else but Draco? Do stay and watch.

Reaching the end of the rose garden, Harry swung around the corner of the villa, but, when he saw Malfoy's recumbent form, he halted and stared. And all at once the empty space under his stomach was filled again with tension and slow coals.

His face turned away from Harry, Malfoy was plucking grapes from a bunch and tossing them idly into the foliage. The thwack and rustle of wasted fruit washed rhythmically over the courtyard until Malfoy, with a growl of frustration, flung the remainder of the bunch to splatter on the tiles.

"Feste!" he called in a voice that strained pathetically with the inconvenience of having to shout. "Feste, come here at once! This boredom is squeezing the breath out of me."

He glared at the ruined grapes as if uncertain whether or not to pick them up and dash them again.

In a mad streak of colour, Fred and George Weasley bounded out from the back of villa and into the courtyard, their limbs swathed in loose harlequin robes of purple and orange, many-peaked caps fastened onto their heads by some force which defied gravity. Bowing with flourish and perfect synchronisation, they cried in booming ringmasters' voices:

"Feste and Feste: jesters, acrobats, minstrels and adulterers at your service! We sing! We dance! We expose our buttocks at propriety! Can you lend us a florin until Tuesday?"

Without permission, the corners of Harry's mouth tugged upwards. Malfoy, however, wore a sour expression.

"Where have you been?"

"Out in the world." Fred's eye glinted conspiratorially. "We have rescued damsels in distress, we have searched in treacherous places and found hidden treasure -"

"Treasure? Where is this treasure?"

George winked. "In your pocket. Can you lend us a florin until Tuesday?"

Malfoy passed his hand over his eyes.

"I've seen funnier things spilled down Sir Toby's shirtfront. You've become stale, Feste. And you're unreliable. I shall cast you out in the wilderness unless you find something to amuse me."

"Hard words, my lord." George grew serious. "Then let me mend. I shall tell you the funniest thing I have ever heard."

And he recited:

"There was an Illyrian lord
Whose grief was as deep as 'twas broad
All around him love stirred
And the bees shagged the birds
But he scorned maiden, duchess and bawd."

The blond nobleman's face became so pale and tight Harry feared the twins were in for a beating, but at that moment there was a sudden clutter of breaking pottery and oaths from which Ron stumbled forward and plonked himself down on a wooden chair at the end of Malfoy's chaise.

"I have a message for you," Ron declared and added a half-hearted "my lord".

"If you've come to tell me the wine stores are empty, I can guess that by the way you smell."

"The wine stores are empty?!" Ron panicked.

"You'll just have to lick the inside of the barrels, or have you already done that?"

That brightened Ron up.

"I think I will. Which brings to mind the messenger. Her Grace the Duchess has sent another emissary, a big-eyed young lass called Lovely Viola. I sent her down the path through the rose garden."

Malfoy turned to survey the area and Harry's cheek scraped the stone corner of the villa as he hurried to conceal himself.

"Malvolio! Find this messenger!" Malfoy commanded.

From a spartan stool concealed beneath overhanging branches, the unmistakable pointy form of Professor Snape unfolded, so like a spider it surprised Harry to see he had only two legs. The sunlight seemed to dim a little.

"Tell her I'm sick. Yes, tell her it's the Black Death. Tell her any lie you please - what you will - only see to it that she leaves."

"I most certainly will, my lord."

Snape began to take long strides towards Harry's corner of the courtyard, his black cloak rippling behind him to expose the equally black costume he wore underneath. Harry retreated along the side of the building and made a show of studying the little pink roses which grew up the side of the wall. He looked up with his best impression of innocence as Snape approached.

The professor studied him with such distaste that Harry felt sure he had recognised him. When finally he spoke it was if he had just bitten down on a particularly noxious variety of cockroach.

"Lord Olivier will not see you. You may go."

He turned to make that pronouncement a fait accompli and there it was, the clash of powerlessness and fury which only this man could produce in Harry. But in the act of lowering his eyes to quell the angry retort, he remembered that detention belonged to another world. This Snape - this petty bully - had to fight here without the protection of his status as teacher. It was as close as he would get to even ground and, against all wisdom, Harry determined in that moment that he would deliver Ginny's message to Malfoy if he had to pass through nine levels of hell to get to him.

"Lord Olivier doesn't have to see me," he offered with a smile that stopped just short of sarcastic. "I can speak from another room, but I won't leave without delivering my message."

"His lordship is asleep."

"Then he will not be disturbed when I deliver my words."

Snape's brows were descending lower to cast angry shadows over his eyes.

"His lordship is unwell. He has a mortal illness."

"Then my mission is all the more urgent. My mistress would never forgive me if his lordship died before he heard her message."

Snape turned on his heel and strode back through the garden. There was a heated conversation from which snippets carried to Harry: "extremely ill-mannered ... very bold for a maiden ... appeared to mock my authority!!". Finally Malfoy proclaimed in a voice he might have used to order a tooth removed:

"Very well then. Bring her to me."

He reached beside his seat to retrieve a large black mourning hat whose wide brim soon obscured his face. Snape announced: "You may approach" and Harry picked his way along the path to stand before the reclining figure. Snape was turned away from him, arms folded in high dudgeon. Ron was nodding off under the sunlight in his chair and the twins were watching silently from under a low-hanging bough. Swallowing hard to quell his rising distaste, Harry began with all the sincerity he could fake.

"My most noble lord - am I right to presume that you are the lord of this house?" Malfoy's mouth, the only part of his face visible under the hat, twitched slightly.

"I am Lord Draco Olivier. You may begin, but be succinct. I'm very busy."

"I wrote some rhyming couplets. Only two but they're quite good. I'll do those first."

"No."

"Fine. The sonnet then-"

"No."

"I'll do the first four lines. It's not easy to find something to rhyme with Olivier."

"That will be all." Malfoy waved his thin hand dismissively. "That ridiculous duchess has sent bad poets before but none quite as tongue-tied as you. Malvolio, show her out."

As Snape descended upon him gleefully, Harry snapped.

"What do you expect in a place like this? There's a snoring drunk man, two fools and a hovering vulture. It's not like I'm here to put on a puppet show. I won't tell you her secrets in front of an audience."

"I did not request it."

Harry ducked the bony arm of Professor Snape and skipped away. The professor's triumphant leer goaded him almost as much Malfoy's presuming to give him orders.

"Let me put it this way. If I said these things in public, they'd only sound cheap. They should be spoken in confidence. They should be ... whispered in your ear. Let me speak to you alone."

The thin lips, the only feature Harry could see under the hat, fought a smile, and Harry felt triumphant.

"Very well. You may leave us. Yes, Malvolio, I wish you to leave. And take that reeking Toby Belch with you. "

The space felt too vast, too empty and quiet when only two people were left in it. For a long moment, Malfoy sat concealed under his hat, watching the twitching hem of Harry's skirt as he shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Abruptly, he spoke.

"You have a strange manner. Where are you from? What is your lineage?"

Not two minutes and already they were onto pedigree. It made Harry short.

"My lineage is no lower than yours. Should I begin with the poetry or the praise?"

"If you utter one word of poetry I'll have you whipped."

Harry clenched his teeth and remembered his status in this place.

"The praise then."

"The praise is becoming tedious."

"I took a long time thinking of how to put it."

"Then it will hardly be sincere, will it?" Malfoy's lip was curling. "I granted a private audience because you promised me something too confidential to say in company. So let me hear it. Unless it's truly filthy I'll have you scrub out Malvolio's chamberpot before you go."

"Well," Harry stalled. " It's strange talking to a hat. I'm sure I could praise you better if I could see your face."

Malfoy's voice lilted in amusement.

"I don't think your mistress would wish for you to look upon what I deny to her. That pleases me."

He whipped off the hat and threw it into the garden behind him, biting meditatively on his lower lip with his gaze fixed on Harry. Then he stretched and crossed his arms behind his head.

"Well then. Is it worth all this wailing and bad poetry?"

And Harry found that his hard-planned words had deserted him.

The change in Malfoy was not something he could put his finger on. As with Ginny, it might be no more than the clarity of light in this place and the loquacious beauty of the background. Certainly his paler than pale colouring was the same, only the sun had added healthy undertones where once there had been bluish shadows under the eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks. It couldn't be the hair - though it fell to a uniform length at his chin, it was the same fine-textured blond Harry knew.

"Your verdict?" Malfoy queried with an idle quirk of eyebrow and Harry knew what was different. It was as if someone had taken an eraser to Malfoy's portrait and rubbed out the lines - the mean ones that gathered on his forehead in moments of disappointment or defeat; the vindictive ones that hardened his eyes when he said words like "Mudblood". It was the difference between the harsh blaze of a flash photograph and an impressionist's smudged contours.

There was haughtiness, undeniably, but not the whipped-dog defensiveness and redoubled aggression to which Harry was accustomed. Malfoy had always carried himself as if he ought to be royalty, and Harry had to admit he had been right. The constant affirmation of "My Lord" appeared to have leached the ugliness out of him, and even his smallness seemed made for the close fit of breeches and the caress of silk.

And beauty? The word took shape on Harry's lips and caught there. Clarity of eyes, smoothness of skin, whiteness of hair all worked on him, but there was something else, a fierce self-possession that tipped mere symmetry over the edge and made it more. Yes, that was beauty, Harry realised, and blinked twice, and found himself looking at a complete stranger.

"Speak, girl. Say something."

"I ..." Harry began. He thought that, given the circumstances, it was a good start. "There's nothing wrong with your face."

The words were miserly and Malfoy's expression confirmed it. Perhaps if he could dissociate the face from the person attached to it, he could be more generous.

"Fine. They were right. All those people who can't stop telling me how beautiful you are, they weren't completely mad."

A familiar smug look stole over Malfoy's face.

"But there's more to a person than how they look. You're also vain, and cruel and cold." The sharp eyebrows angled upwards, in astonishment or offence Harry couldn't say. "You hide up here with your beloved beauty as if you were too good to share yourself with the world."

"Oh, everybody has a piece of my beauty," Malfoy told him with a scrape of bitterness. When he rose from the chaise the fine shirt stretched across his torso and, completely unbidden, the realisation that riding must do more for the figure than Quidditch popped into Harry's brain. "I sit for portraits. I endure the farm girls pointing and giggling when I pass. My famous beauty is everybody's but my own."

With a flick of his hand he dismissed it.

"Enough of it. Tell me what land you come from."

The way Malfoy stood by Harry's side, just a little closer than polite indifference allowed, set him on edge and he shrank back, rounding his shoulders, suddenly aware of the flimsiness of his disguise and the boyish shape of his body beneath it.

"My home is far away. You would never have heard of - don't do that!"

He turned his face away from where one thin-boned finger was tracing the line of the shawl as it fell along his neck. Malfoy withdrew his hand, letting it trail over the bare skin covering Harry's collarbone. The flesh, so rarely exposed to air or to scrutiny, prickled at the touch.

"Who is your family?"

"They're noble born and none of your business!" Both the sharpness of tone and the lie surprised him. Muscles he didn't even know he had were tensing along his back. The best place to have a Malfoy was Siberia, but failing that it was wisest to keep them where you could see them and this Malfoy had edged around behind him, his voice dropping to the edge of a whisper.

"I think I'd like to hear those words of praise you wrote for me."

Harry plunged a mental hand into the murky water of memory, but his snatches of rhyme had long ago become heavy and sunk to the bottom. The process wasn't helped by the fact that Malfoy had suspended his hand at thigh height, where it couldn't help but brush against Harry's skirts. This conversation was becoming one endless stumble.

"The Duchess Orsino never tires of describing your virtues," he tried. "She says you are the very essence -"

A long sigh cut him off and Malfoy appeared again on his left side.

"Do you see why I turn her messengers away? These words are formulaic. They lack sincerity. Why don't you try telling me in your own words. Tell me what you think, not your mistress."

And he slid the back of his fingers along the plane of Harry's stomach, giving off heat even through shift and corset. Harry removed the hand as if it were a dead thing.

"I think you are the most cold-blooded man in Illyria to treat my lady the way you do."

That made him step back, his eyes losing their hooded sensuality and hardening with all the abruptness of a slamming door.

"I have told the Duchess I can never love her. She's ..." His mouth made a bitter shape as he paced. "Your mistress is wet eyes and tumbling hair and cloying female sentimentality. Oh, I suppose her pretty enough and possessed of the usual accomplishments. And yet with each emissary she sends I find I like her less."

Malfoy plucked a lemon with enough viciousness to leave the branch shaking.

"She's unhappy."

"That's not my doing," came Malfoy's swift reply. "I have always been plain with her. She should have given up this vain pursuit months ago."

Yes, Harry thought. She should have. But he remembered how, one afternoon in the orchard, Ginny had chastised him: "Don't preach to me of other men. It's his face I shall see on my wedding day, whoever my groom might be." Then she had gone back to her reading but had not turned the page for some time.

"If I were the Duchess, I wouldn't understand your answer, no matter how plain you made it. If I loved you with her passion, it wouldn't make sense."

Across the courtyard, Malfoy leaned against the slender trunk of a cypress.

"What would you do?"

Passion was an exotic creature to Harry, dangerous and clumsy. But he knew its movements. He had observed how, when Ginny recited the sonnets that reminded her of Malfoy, her skin flushed and her breath became feverishly fast until her thumbs left damp prints on the edge of the page.

"I would stand at your door and tell you how I loved you. In different languages, in songs - I would write it in blood if I thought it would move you. And I would chain myself to your gate so that no-one could make me leave. You wouldn't sleep because every day and night you'd hear my calling out your name. Nothing but your name. In the end, I'd wear you down."

Through the long silence that followed, Harry felt the piercing gaze on him and shifted under its intrusiveness.

"You might do much," Malfoy said finally and stepped forward. Even at a distance, Harry shrank back. Malfoy paused, checked himself and slipped a silver ring from his finger.

"Take this. Keep it as a fee for your services. Or give it to your mistress as the price for ceasing her entreaties. I care not which."

It twinkled in the sunlight as he held it out.

The ring nestled in the hollow of Malfoy's curved hand, lying over a deeply etched lifeline, the perfect excuse for him to leave and return to Ginny. But as he reached out for it, the fingers curled in and the hand slowly retreated. His determination provoked now, Harry followed its movement as the glitter of metal climbed into the air until it was suspended, dangled some way above the blond head. Of course Malfoy was playing a game, but damned if Harry was going to let him win even this point.

With teeth clenched, he reached up, but Malfoy was leaning his hand back so that Harry could only scrape his wrist. There was nothing for it but to ignore the warm breath on his cheek, stand on tip-toe and reach again, steadying himself with a hand on Malfoy's chest. That laugh, victorious and low in Malfoy's throat, stung him into making one angry lunge.

As his fingers closed on the ring which those spidery hands refused to relinquish, a warm, wet mouth closed on the corner of his lips and kissed him twice - slow, testing kisses accompanied by a hand on his waist and the length of Malfoy's body bending to press itself against him. He overbalanced and fell forward into the embrace.

Silk was the thinnest of fabrics, Harry learned, fitting exactly over the skin to give a very accurate feel for the nakedness beneath. "Sun god - so warm - Malfoy" was a close translation of the tangled thoughts which clogged his brain during the three seconds of contact. Then he snatched at the ring and tore himself free, hitching his skirts to run back along the path through the rose garden. His feet kicked up messy clods of earth as he went.

"Come back tomorrow with another message," called the imperious voice behind him but he didn't turn.

Draco, Lord Olivier, leaned back against the tree and put a hand to his lips.

*

Listen. What can you hear? Settling of leaves. Far away, the regular beat of an axe on wood. Birdsong, fleeting then subsiding. And a whisper.

The blond nobleman in the cypress shade, see how his lips move as his gaze fixes on the point where the path disappears at the corner of the villa. Can you catch the muffled words which escape through barely parted lips? "Too fast!" he speaks. Then later and with anguish: "Soft, soft!", the sharp features alternately blank then contorted.

Did you miss that reluctant fragment?

"Even so quickly may one catch the plague?"

He crosses back to his seat and lowers himself onto it. Absentmindedly, he plucks a grape from the broken bunch on the tiles and puts it in his mouth. Then, apart from one finger which rubs along the blue silk at his forearm, he is perfectly still.

And so we must leave him.

*

This way now. The afternoon is burning down into evening and we have one more visit to make. Over the ridge and down the steep slope, across the long northward plain to the blue bay which cuts back inland. In the ramshackle fishing village, inside the hut nearest the water, a young man is tying up his frugal pack.

Yes, you should know him. He wears dark brown breeches and a linen shirt that ten summers ago might have been white. He would be aghast at the thought of a green dress - and yet this young man is Harry also. He, too, has been in Illyria for three days and he, too, is prey to twofold musings: firstly, how to get home and, secondly, whether to get home.

Now, finally, he speaks.

"I can't stay, Antonio." He ties the last knot in his pack and lays it down, but keeps his eyes on the pack. "This isn't where I belong."

A tall man with callused hands and a mess of dark hair had been watching him pack.

"Where will you go?" asked the older man, leaning on the door frame.

"The Duchess Orsino's court. You said it's not far. I'll leave as soon as I can."

He looked away as his companion scratched at the fabric at his shoulder and caught a finger in one of its many holes.

"You must forgive me for not offering to go with you. I'm an outlaw in that part of Illyria. You will take care, won't you Sebastian?"

He pulled the young man into a rough hug.

"Antonio," Harry said quietly into the weave of hessian at his companion's shoulder. "Does the name Sirius Black mean anything to you?"

The tall man frowned. "You said that name once before. I don't remember him. Should I?"

Released from the embrace, Harry's arms didn't seem to know where to put themselves.

"I knew him once, in another place. You could be the same man. Almost."

And now the man with Ss^ face was awkward too, his gaze intent on the ill-fitting boards of the wall.

"You will find your answers at the court. I'm sure of it. But it's too late to start your journey now. Stay one night here where you're safe, and we can drink to your adventure." Brightening, he dipped into the chest made of old ships' planks, he took a single amphora, chipped and badly made. "To your health, Sebastian!"

"Harry." The younger man examined the contents of the mug. "My name's Harry. That first day, when you pulled me out of the water, the sun was so bright and I couldn't see where I was. When you asked what my name was, I thought you shouldn't have to ask. I wasn't sure who I could trust."

"You lied."

"Yes."

"You were afraid."

"Not just that."

"You're not making this journey alone, Harry. There's no danger if I'm careful. I'll come with you, never mind the risk."

And, though the lone window was small and the fire had burned down, the whole room seemed alight with the look Harry turned on him.

***