Very Midsummer Madness

"you are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion;

where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard"

Fabian, III.2

No stillness on a night such as this. The sky is awash with brilliance. The stars shimmer and jerk, a hasty in-out of respiration so wild and without rest it makes you wonder if the sky will last the night before its black surface shatters with the sheer weight of light. It's a night to make you believe in falling stars. No celestial bodies, these, but shining jewels which at any moment might tear themselves free from their setting and float down through the stratosphere to settle in the palm of your hand, crystalline and sharp-edged with the white curd of the universe clotting in -

No!

That won't do.

Forgive me, I beg you.

It's not the stars that matter. For you to see stars yourself is only a matter of choosing. It's Harry that matters. I brought you here to see Harry. For here, under the starlight, under a ragged length of cloak, he is cold.

The tree trunk against his back sucks warmth rather than giving it, so he winds the torn cloak tighter around his shoulders and presses his hands under his armpits until they stop quivering. His badly made shirt and breeches are poor barriers against the chill, and yet Sirius, lying not far away and dressed in less, stretches his long limbs on the rocks and roots as if he slept on eiderdown.

Harry watches the coals which smoke between them, remembering another time and place where a mere flick of his wrist could have sent them roaring. Five days now since he last held a wand - the twins' treacherous wand in a dull Transfiguration class in the last moments before the world went mad. He remembers a mumbled spell, a sudden swoop of darkness, a hideous tearing feeling along the length of his bones and then seawater tossing him and smothering him until the darkness descended once more. And then this. A world which, day by day, so impresses its bright colours and insistent smells upon him that the memories he knows to be true - the stiff weight of robes, the Snitch's first flirtatious flutters, the sun-bleached pale streak along the red upholstery of the cushions and chairs nearest the common room windows - these memories have started to fray at the edges.

He knows he has to go home. He has tried. He has shaken walls so crudely held together they resemble a hasty set. He has climbed every high point to scrutinise the landscape, turned over writhing sardines and strands of jasmine in his hand, felt the texture of stone and wood and cloth, always searching for flaws to prove they are false. But the illusion is perfect to the smallest detail. If his progress has been slow, it is only because of the time he has spent with a troubled eye on his companion, pondering how he might hold onto this one phantasm when all the others disappear.

As the sky lightens, Sirius stirs. Watch with me.

"Sebastian," Sirius muttered and raised himself on an elbow. "Why aren't you sleeping? Did something disturb you? You must have been cold with the fire burned so low."

"No," Harry said quickly as Sirius sat up and stretched his long legs in front of him. Never did he so closely resemble the hunted outlaw of Harry's memory as in those first moments of waking, his hair tousled with dead leaves and twigs and his eyes blinking itchily into the shadows.

"You look miserable, lad," he observed. "Food. That's what you need after a long day's walk, and at your age more than any. That'll put the colour back in your cheeks."

Before Harry could protest, he had drawn a pungent cloth bundle from his pack. Salted fish. Harry's stomach tightened. For three meals now, he hadn't had the courage to mention that the salt was too frugal and the flesh beginning to decay. He watched queasily as Sirius laid the untidy white-grey corpses on shards of hard bread.

"I'm not really hungry," Harry said and banished the image of the tables in the Great Hall, piled until their legs shook with pudding, roast chicken, muffins, pies, potatoes, mushy peas, trifle, pumpkin juice, sausages. "You have the fish. The bread will be enough for me."

Sirius gave a hoarse chuckle.

"And I suppose you live on bread and water in that noble house you come from, do you? You shall eat fish as long as I have any to share."

They were inescapable, these wild fancies Sirius wove about Harry's history. Harry had not been awake an hour in this unwelcome land, bruised and dizzy with the seawater still damp in the armpits and pockets of his clothes, when this impossible Sirius had bent over him with a bowl of pale brown tentacles in watery broth. As the brew caught in his throat, he had coughed: "Salt?", if only to cover his revulsion, and ventured a weak smile. "May I have some salt? Or pepper?"

If he had asked for crushed emeralds, Sirius could not have been more shocked.

"Salt, is it?" he had repeated, colouring, and withdrawn the bowl. "You'll find no such fineries here, my young lord, nor nutmegs and sacks of tea either."

And from that moment, there had been no defeating the power of Sirius' imagination. When Harry was evasive about his past, he must be a runaway royal fleeing a bloody plot. If his fury with this treacherous world made him sit on the doorstep in mulish silence, Sirius imagined him an exiled prince grieving for his people, and when sheer boredom drove him to help with mending the nets, Sirius hid his delighted flush and grinned that it had been long years since such high-born hands had been turned to fishermen's work.

It made him sick. It made him furious because Sirius had no right to flatter and fawn when Harry, in another place but still so vividly it poisons his dreams, had failed him. Might as well have pushed him through that gateway himself. Even though this Sirius didn't know it, it was always there, lying on the ground between them like a dead body - rank, pestilent, Harry's worst betrayal.

"Let's see if that revives you a little." Sirius passed him the fish on bread and its accompanying stink. Averting his gaze from the meal, Harry watched him wiping his fingers on his shirt. Watched those hands with the easy strength in them, the long calluses and the knife scars that made them so different from the Sirius of his memory, and the restlessness that made them exactly the same.

Harry gobbled the bread and fish. He would get to the Duchess Orsino's castle, he would find someone who could tell him what this place was, and he would go home. It was better.

*

Professor Trelawney cut off a dripping corner of honeycomb and slid it from the knife between forefinger and thumb.

"And the letter from Petruccio of Messaline. Will you answer him today?"

Shovelling tiny morsels of bread and cheese into his mouth as if the daintiness of the pieces could disguise the boy's appetite he was feeding beneath corset and gown, Harry paused with his mouthful halfway to his lips.

"If time permits," Ginny shrugged. "It is no great matter. I shall give him the same answer I give the others."

She frowned at her empty plate and Professor McGonagall pushed a platter of ginger cakes across the table towards her. Clasping the monocle that hung at her neck, she studied her young mistress, who turned a cake in idle circles in front of her, shifting it with her small fingers.

"By all accounts, he is a fine man," McGonagall said carefully. "His estates are as they should be. He is godly. He is educated. He has travelled."

Ginny looked up, grave and calm.

"He will not do."

If a twitching in the corner of her lip might have betrayed doubts, she conquered it and made herself still. It was misleading the way she did it, Harry thought. Without giving the least hint of open rebellion, she would make her will a great block of stone that the world would have to work its way around. She would smile politely, she would answer in the same even tone, but she would absolutely not be moved, whether the matter at hand was a card game or a citation from St Paul or the happiness of all her life ahead. He who had felt her skin under his fingers knew it to be warm and fine, and yet as she faced McGonagall across the table, she was as cold as marble with her hair wound back in its compact morning knot and the skin of her shoulders and neck a white parchment on which every freckle showed like deliberate characters.

McGonagall's disapproving pursing of lips did not escape her.

"He is almost forty, Curio. There is scarcely a fleck of colour left in his beard. When he was young he may have travelled the world, but now he struggles for breath after one flight of stairs. Why would I take him when there are men who can ride the day long and still not tire? I would wake every morning in Petruccio's bed to wish that his cheek were smoother, his neck more slender, his tournure of calf more graceful. It won't do, Curio. He can't compete with youth and beauty."

As Ginny stabbed a fig and added it to her untouched collection, Harry remembered grapes flung away with a snarl and a thin mouth which all the delicacies of the world could not coax into a genuine smile. The bread looked dry in his hand and weevil-shaped shadow slithered over it.

"Youth and beauty? He won't have those forever, your wonderful Lord Olivier." Harry's scorn turned into outright revulsion. "He'll have thinning hair and rotten teeth and a taste for laying hands on the servants. Will you love him then? When the only thing you recognise is that famous foul temper, will you love that?"

Ginny laid her knife down and looked at him appraisingly.

It was Professor Trelawney, however, who leaned down the table to give his wrist a reassuring pat.

"Don't worry, dear," she said. "You won't always be plain. Certainly you'll grow into your figure soon, and then you shall have suitors aplenty."

And Harry was so taken aback that the moment slipped away from him completely.

*

"Out of my sight."

Percy's spoon clattered into his bowl. He straightened it fastidiously and frowned at it, then drew a deep breath.

"It is a matter of unimpeachable logic, my lord. Let me be brief. My talents are not inconsiderable, and your household is in need -"

"I do not wish you to be brief," snarled Draco, Lord Olivier, and tore his bread in two. "I wish you to be gone. You may well be able to recite The Iliad in its entirety - in Greek or Oriental, it's all one to me - but I am in no mood for your prattling. Feste, escort this babbling ninny to whichever dungeon he dwells in. If he utters one word further, put him in the stocks and whip him."

On the opposite side of the table, Ron's gaze met Percy's and he gave an anxious nod. Percy's napkin fell into the butter as he rose and departed. The vacant chair teetered, wobbled and finally fell still.

"Not a word from you either." Draco fixed his glare on Ron, who stuffed a hunk of bread and salami into his mouth and grinned around it. "Where has Malvolio got to? There is no idle chatter when he is at table."

No-one answered him. The ritual of breakfast resumed in silence, broken only by the splash of Ron swigging messily from his mug and the soft swish of Draco's silk sleeves on the tabletop as he diligently shredded his meal until it was a feathery pile of torn bread.

"No appetite, my lord?" Hermione asked hesitantly as she reached for the salami. Ron's hands got there first, though, passing the sliced meat to her balanced on the knife. Somehow in this simple act, their fingers brushed, and she coughed furtively.

"Disgusting," Draco spat and pushed his plate away.

*

Ginny had barely grazed her ginger cake when Neville Longbottom in his blue pageboy's livery burst through the doors in the eye of a flour-and-soot cyclone and tripped on the end of the carpet.

"Fire!" he cried as he stumbled to his feet and wiped ash into his eyes. "Fire in the kitchen!"

He had not stumbled three steps back the way he had come when Harry was on his feet, struggling with his tangle of skirts and staggering across the room. The end of the hallway disappeared in smoke and only the orange light spilling from them marked out the doors to the kitchen. Harry lifted his hem and ran.

"Viola!"

That tone, Harry knew it all too well. It had played like background music in the most horrible moments of his life: impotently, in terror, in malice or in reprimand, someone calling out his name. It washed over him unnoticed and she called again.

"Viola, what are you thinking of?" Raising her voice now, Ginny stood in her seat and fixed all her Weasley fierceness on him, and this time he caught the door frame and halted. "Curio and the kitchen boys will take care of this."

It took a moment for him to translate the unspoken addendum to that sentence. And you need not. Professor McGonagall passed him with efficient steps, wiping her lips. And you need not. The crash of pottery down the corridor called directly to his reflexes. He had to hold himself still.

"Come back to the table," Ginny said more gently and unwound the napkin from her fingers.

Professor Trelawney's astonished mouth reminded him. He was a girl and therefore incapable of mastering anything more dangerous than a spinning wheel. His only responsibility was obedience. Though he dragged himself back to the table, his limbs, denied the activity they'd been roused to, draped awkwardly in the chair. Professor Trelawney swung her legs and cut off another chunk of honeycomb. He had only sat a short while - stiffly and counting the knots on the tabletop - when the shouts and clatter down the corridor quietened and McGonagall's brisk steps headed out to the gardens. Ginny let out a long breath.

"There was no cause for you to place yourself in danger," she said. Her hands hovered uncertainly before she pushed the plate of fruit across the table towards him.

Harry opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it. Instead, extracting his fingers from their vicious tangle, he put a peach to his lips and bit.

*

Breathe.

Breathe it in.

Breathe deeply and let it go to your head.

The air in this place is clean like you have never known it. Clarified by its long journey over the frozen mountaintops, it is a new substance, pure and crisp and sweet. It works on you like alcohol. It pumps immortality through your veins, right down to the lobes of your ears and the tiny capillaries behind your knees. It is a liquor that could revive dead men and make the birds fall drunk from the sky.

The air here is so benign that, if you cast yourself forward over the abyss, you know it would catch you in its cool folds and bear you up. Try it, if you like. In this place, petty realities will not stand in your way.

In front of us - eastward before the sun - stand the mountains, high enough to draw down the snow which melts and flows over their sudden edges to trickle a thousand sparkling paths down to the great river. The river roars down from the heights, blasting out the rock to make a thin, jagged valley, but here below us, it changes. It halts its tumbling course and flattens to turn lazy loops across the northward plain, where little hamlets and farmsteads and monasteries draw their living from its waters. One day - perhaps, if weather and temperament permit - the old snowfall with its memory of flight will make it to the sea.

Above this point where the river loses its rage, perched on the eastern tip of the long ridge, lies the town.

Sitting on vertical shafts of rock, it might have been set down by some divine hand, long ago, and forgotten. But see how, despite its precarious position, it seems to angle its walls outwards over the crumbling rock as if curious to see what lies beneath. It's a mangled thing, a deformed pentagon of walls packed with higgledy-piggledy buildings: one storey, three storeys, attics tacked on like swollen tumours and houses clambering over streets or fusing into the wall itself. The only cleared space is the wide cobbled square outside the town hall, in which the market day crowd already scurries.

On the western edge of the town, two roads diverge: the low road running down to the plain, steeply enough to make a man's lungs ache in either direction, and the rarely used high road which leads to the Duchess's

castle and the old defences against the Venetian conquerors.

In the shadow of the town's wall, at the juncture of the two roads, Sirius Black stands. His face is turned to the masonry and one broad hand conceals the worst stains - fishguts and ash - on the sleeve of his shirt.

"Rotten as ever, this stinking little slum," Sirius grumbled, but Harry, laying down his pack a couple of paces away, didn't miss the flash in his eye. "Even the air smells of syphillis. But here's where you'll find your answers, Sebastian. All the travellers come through here. The seers and water-readers and the charlatans as well."

On the last stretch of hill, an old man with a face full of plague scars pulled at the reins of his stationary donkey and its load of hessian sacks filled with onions and wrinkled purple-white carrots. For a long moment, their wills did battle, man and donkey regarding each other with the same drooping eyes, then finally the beast bowed its head and continued its slow climb. Two girls with lazy plaits escaping from mop caps snatched an onion as they passed, laughing softly to each other.

"Where should we start?" Harry's wand hand tingled because the buildings which rose before him, ancient and chaotic, were like a squashed down Hogwarts, full of surprising stairways and little rooms waiting to divulge their secrets. He was eleven years old and standing on the lake's shore, and this time Sirius was beside him.

"You must explore the town without me."

Harry examined his face for jest. "Why?"

A scrawny grey cat sidled up to Sirius and he busied himself with nudging it teasingly as it brushed against his boots.

"It's best I wasn't seen here. I haven't set foot in this place for ten years. If the Count's men recognised me ... well, I wouldn't be welcomed back."

The cat turned its face full of scabs and seeping eyes up to him and he kicked it away. Harry's eyes hardened.

"You've never told me, Antonio. What did you do to get yourself exiled?"

"It was a long time ago."

"It must have been serious. Did you kill someone?"

Sirius laughed uncomfortably.

"Nothing so bloody. Nothing important. I'll meet you in the evening. There's an inn called the Elephant. Behind the guildhall - you'll know it by the trail of blood and vomit leading from the door."

Under Harry's judgmental silence, Sirius grew even less comfortable, his long arms swinging pointlessly against his side.

"Take this," he said abruptly. The roughness of hessian pressed into Harry's palm: a small bundle tied with twine.

"Don't give me this, Antonio. I don't need your-"

But Sirius had already stepped out of reach and, since there was no alternative other than dropping the gift into the dirt, Harry slipped the twine strands around his neck, making the parcel's few coins clink forlornly. When he fumbled and cursed, Sirius' larger hands closed over his and deftly made the knot.

"You won't spend my money idly."

And there, with Sirius' arms, strong and straight as the beams of houses, reaching out to grasp his shoulders, and Sirius' trust written plainly on his face, Harry could have stayed, and damn the miserly world he thought of as real.

In the silence, Sirius cleared his throat awkwardly.

"I sank one of his ships. There. Loosened its moorings and watched it float away. Rashness of youth. No more than that. You see?" He shook Harry's shoulders gently and waited for the little curve of smile that touched the corners of his lips. "Now go."

The gently spoken words were like a shove in Harry's chest. He wasn't sure he had the willpower to walk away.

A high shriek split the air, turning all heads. Around the last bend in the road came a troupe of Arab merchants: three men whose flowing robes and easy stride made Harry piercingly homesick, their heads swathed in white cloth so that only the coals of their eyes showed, one of them spitting out a date seed, another carrying a rolled scarlet carpet under his arm, and the third with a monkey screeching and capering on his shoulders, and all of them, right down to the black serving boy who led their mule, reeking of cumin and of coffee. The one with the monkey threw back his head and laughed.

When he looked back, Sirius was thirty feet along the high road:

"The Elephant."

"I do remember."

With a grin as brief as it was bright, Harry snatched up his pack and plunged through the gates.

Though the town's streets were narrow and dark and swallowed him up immediately, Sirius stood a long while at the roadside and watched.

*

The morning still had a long way to go.

"My love, more noble than the world,

Prizes not quantity of dirty lands.

The parts that fortune hath bestowed upon you,

My lord, I hold as giddily as fortune.

As giddily as fortune ... as giddily ... what in all heaven did I mean by that?"

In the shaft of light under the window, Ginny stopped. A drop of black ink fell from Harry's quill onto the paper below, glittering briefly as it soaked in. The new blot was barely noticeable next to the thicket of false starts and erasures which covered most of the page.

"This is tiresome, Viola. It should be enough that my family has ruled these lands for two hundred years and that I love him. All these fine words, all these pretty rhymes and degrees of untruth demean us both. I refuse to do it."

Harry laid the quill across the paper.

"Good."

She was doing it again, squeezing the amber beads she wore at her throat - each one in turn until her resolve gave out. Three beads, four. The room was small and filled with the honeysuckle scent she favoured.

"And yet to lose my chance through trivial pride ... no. I have wasted dignity enough on him before now. A little more is no great matter. Now let me see if there is anything to be salvaged."

The page lay on the very edge of the desk, resting against Harry's ribs to shift and rustle as he moved. She had to reach over him to flatten it against the tabletop. Her beads clinked just above his ear and the perfume rose drunkenly from inside her bodice as she reviewed the massacred draft.

"'Oh when mine eyes did see Olivier first, methought he purged the air of pestilence.' I can imagine his response. He will read it aloud to his companions. He will lean his head back just so, and he will laugh. This couplet here is no better ..."

Harry watched the dancing of her short-nailed fingertips over the paper as they followed each line. They were plain fingers, clean and blunt, and yet the strength of them could hold her steady on a broom in vertical flight. They could work deliberate miracles in embroidery. They had steered Dean's much larger hand as he trailed after her wearing his surprised, contented smile. Harry laid his finger in the hollow of her elbow - in a tiny, surprised movement, she turned the tender underneath of it towards him - and traced it down to the gathering of veins at her wrist.

"Come, Viola." She whipped the paper away, hardening into the stiff formality she reserved for the young maid who had chipped the glassware or the doorman drunk at his post. "You say you are my friend and yet, when my need is greatest, you have no help to give me. You have spent more time in his company than I have. Tell me then. Why do my letters fail to move him?"

Strange how the more she put on the airs of nobility, the more he remembered how she had always failed to notice the mud which clung to the bottom of her robes in the excitement of a victorious match.

"They don't work," he said evenly. "Because they don't sound as if you really mean them."

Ginny gave a splutter of disbelief and straightened her beads. That familiar quickening of pulse was coming back to him, the surge of rebellion, and he wondered how he had lived without it these last few days. He titled his chair back on a precarious angle and threw an unladylike arm over the back of it.

"Purge the air of pestilence? The air around him -" ... smelled of lemons, and powder, and new sweat along his hairline ... "- was just like the air anywhere else. He's not stupid, you know. Purged the air! Of course he'll laugh at you, because even he knows that's rubbish."

Very still and pale, she considered him.

"It is poetical, Viola. It does not need to be literally true. The aim of a love letter is not to capture reality but to show the leaps in perception which the object of the letter inspires. Yet you, you would have accuracy. Should I write, then, that his height is five feet and seven inches or that he has ten fingers and toes? Shall I address my letter "Yond Sovereign Cruelty"?"

Harry reached for the quill.

"That one isn't a bad start."

She laughed - a startling burst of sound which echoed in the room.

"Yond Sovereign Cruelty," Harry read aloud as he straightened a new piece of paper and scrawled, and she gave that guilty laugh again. "Shall we be plain, my lord? I own most of Illyria and you have all the charm of an angry scorpion. Do you really expect to get a better offer than this? I advise you to marry me now before I realise what a fool I've been. Yours ... how shall I sign it?"

It struck him how odd is was to see her with her head bent down, she who - unlike his own Ginny - had been schooled to keep her back straight and her chin level. When she looked up, he understood. It was mirth she hid, and the wicked glitter of her eyes made him think she would reach out and show him a cache of Extendable Ears.

"I leave that at your discretion, since you will be the one reading it to him."

The chair thudded back to the ground and ink sloshed over the rim of the well.

"I'm not taking any more messages."

Malfoy malice was a thing he knew intimately, intimately enough to recognise that what he had seen at their last encounter was something deeper and more bloodthirsty than that. Apparently there were now two things which could raise Draco Malfoy to the sort of fury that left his hands shaking and made all his little teeth glint white and saw-sharp when he spoke it. And, unlike in the guarded halls of Hogwarts, in this place he had the power to take all his vilest fantasies of vengeance and make them real.

"It is not -"

"No."

His voice was hard and his shoulders tense and square, and for a moment she seemed at a loss.

"Nobody else can do this for me," she murmured from behind him and, with a soft rustling of skirts, moved to lean against the side of the desk, dark blue silk spilling over the chestnut wood. "You must let me persuade you."

Gently, she took the quill from his fingers, brushed its ragged end as if idly across her palm and then her lips. She turned her big, dark eyes down on him.

"You are very dear to me, Viola. Will you not do this one small thing for our friendship?" Before he could speak, she reached out to smoothe a lock of hair from his forehead. "Are you so very cold?"

"Cold?" It wasn't as calm as he intended, but he held back from shouting and bit back the furious indignation that was building in him. "Well I suppose I must be. I'm not taking any more messages. I'm sick of hearing about him. I'm sick of all the stupid pretending. I'm ... sick."

It was the clenching in his jaw that had made him think of it.

"I have a toothache. I'm walking to the market to get ... something. You can take your message yourself if it's so important."

Shaking off her placating touch before she could give it, he tore open the door and left it swinging behind him.

He had come to resent the way she had taken to calling his name, softly and with an idleness which implied that he might have the freedom to refuse. However, in that moment, he found he liked her silence less.

*

As he strode through the gates, Harry slipped onto the third finger of his right hand the only object he had which he thought could be traded: a silver ring which had lain three days under his bed before he could bring himself to look at it without his stomach clenching in discomfort.

He had almost passed the Olivier villa when he heard the scream. He had gathered his skirts and hurtled ten feet before his conscious mind registered to whom the sound belonged.

*

The straight form of Draco, Lord Olivier, could have been a shard of bone in its white costume, with the morning sun washing the front of him in brilliant light and burning a black shadow on the ground behind. He stood on the frontier of the Olivier lands, where precipice dropped down to plain. His arms were tangled in front of his chest. The set of his back disclosed, precisely as he wished it to, nothing.

Above him, unbearably bright and reflecting the fierce light like a weapon, stood the previous lord of the estate. Atop a rearing stallion with straining flanks and teeth bared forever in a frightful grimace, the old count betrayed no emotion, from the sure grip of his thin fingers on the reins to the hair spilling in sleek obedience down his back. Indeed, the sharpness of cheekbone and unimpressed slant of mouth were scarcely colder in marble than they had been in life.

Draco made no move to acknowledge the footsteps approaching.

"I do not care for conversation," he snapped without looking around.

Hermione gave the statue a quick appraisal and turned her shoulder to it.

"Perhaps I could send Feste to you."

"I have no use for a clown." Draco gave a dry laugh. "I have comedy enough as it is. No, there is no company I would keep. Unless you bid Malvolio come to me. He is sad and civil - yes. Send Malvolio to me."

Hermione's fingers worked quickly, straightening sleeves which were perfectly arranged.

"Malvolio is not himself, my lord. A sort of madness has -"

Dry earth eddied at Draco's feet as he whipped around.

"Am I no longer master of this household? Send Malvolio to me. I will have no other, and the next time I find my directions questioned it will mean an afternoon in the stocks, servant and gentlewoman alike."

For a moment it seemed that Hermione would stare him down. Then, with a noncommittal nod and a curt "Certainly", she was gone. The silence changed with her departure. It seemed judgmental. Malfoy kicked at the base of the statue, where the plaque proclaimed platitudes about the giant who had been his father and the rosemary was already sending adolescent shoots into the air. He kneeled to uproot a length of it and crushed it between his fingers until the scent rose.

When he looked up, Snape had cleared the last of the cypresses and halted stiffly, slowing the rush of his breathing. He smiled. No. That was no mere smile. The corners of his lips snaked upwards, yes, with slow deliberation, but there was no mirth in his eyes. They were dark, darker than Draco remembered seeing them.

"I see you at least are in fine spirits today," Draco said bitterly.

Snape's low, intimate laugh jolted him.

"Any man would be intoxicated by the letter I have received. Not entirely unexpected, I must say, but no less a delight for that."

Draco glared at him from between the horse's legs.

"I did not summon you here to tell me idle news. Speak of plain things, Malvolio. Make your report of the month's accounts. Tell me - oh."

Snape had rounded the statue and now posed in all his glory. Jerkin, doublet and codpiece, all in their customary black, seemed to fit more sleekly than before and their contours were no longer hidden by the cape which the steward had flung in debonaire disregard over his shoulder. It was the stockings that made Draco doubt his eyes. A shade of yellow that would put sunflowers to shame, they were bound by a lattice of gartering which carved his calves into diamonds of flesh that begged to be pricked with a pin to see what might ooze out. A bow in the same colour flourished behind each knee. Draco stood.

"Malvolio, are you feeling quite yourself today?"

The smile - if that's what it was - widened.

"Shall we say, my dear master, that I am not yet feeling what I intend to be feeling and - you are quite correct - it is not myself."

Snape's palms smoothed the length of his doublet where it hung from his fleshless waist and ballooned just under the hips, ran back up and repeated the gesture.

"You misunderstand me. Are you unwell?"

"I need not hide it from you, these garters do constrict the bloodflow. And, I confess, I slept little last night for a recurring dream which was, to put it delicately, vivid."

"I have no interest in -"

"Come now, my lord," Snape fairly purred and came a step closer, the cape slipping down to drape nonchalantly over his arm. "We are both of us men of candour. Let us speak directly. I believe there is something you would say to me."

Draco turned his chin up haughtily as he considered.

"Very well. Your speech this morning is vulgar and well above your station. I suggest you retire for a time and reflect on your conduct."

Snape shook his head and took slow steps closer, bringing with him the smell of old ink and candlewax and not for a moment losing that smile. Despite Draco's desperate glance, the statue gave him no help.

"Then I order it. I insist you go and lie down until - "

"O ho!" Snape smirked. "Now we reach the heart of it. I must lie down! Very well, my straight-bodied young master. Let us retire to your bedchamber."

Draco's pulse quickened at his temples and the base of his throat, but still he stood firm as the taller man drew up to him, the only sign of anxiety a defensive curling of his hands.

"It was your bedchamber I had in mind, Malvolio," he advised in his iciest tone, leaning away from Snape's advance. "I meant for you alone, as was perfectly clear."

It was not becoming for a man of rank to lay hands on his steward and push him, or else Draco would have done just that as a lock of Snape's hair fell against his cheek.

"This is very midsummer madness! Step away immediately, sir!" He knew exactly the descending tone that would have made that command incontrovertible, but somehow his voice couldn't hit it. Panic gripped him. He stepped back too quickly and the statue's base caught him in the back of his legs and knocked them from under him. This was what weakness led to, he heard his father sneering as his head knocked against the steed's hind leg and his foot struggled for purchase on the marble. Snape leaned over him.

"Remove your hand," Draco hissed, but breathlessly.

"With pleasure, my lord. I shall remove my hand from here." The fingers digging into the outside of his hip disappeared. "And place it here."

Wide-eyed and speechless, Draco watched as a yellow-clad knee slid onto the pedestal between his thighs.

"Tutor me, Draco." He had a voice on him, Snape, that could run like pure honey when he had a mind to use it, and Draco felt it working unbidden in the pit of his stomach. "Guide me. Show me where you have imagined my hands exploring. Teach me to touch you in all - " and he bit softly at Draco's jaw " - the places - " and he bit less gently at Draco's chest " - you long - " and Draco felt the warm breath at his navel through the silk of his shirt "- to be touched."

And his teeth skimmed lower. Draco was falling - the lurching in his stomach told him so - and the paper dry fingers of the family steward were sliding under his clothes. He looked helplessly up at his marble father and shrieked.

"Maria! Come here! Toby! Feste! This instant I say!"

"No more obfuscation." Those black eyes glittered at him, now from very close. "I will hold nothing back from you. Nor you from me."

Draco wasn't sure how much of what met his hand was codpiece and how much flesh; all he knew was that the more he struggled, the more Snape's grip crushed his wrist.

"How dare you presume to touch me!" he snarled and, though it might have been only the play of sunlight through his father's arms, that leer did seem to falter.

"What ho, Malvolio!" Although it was already slurred and the sun not yet at mid-morning, Ron's voice was salvation itself. "Such festive dress, and you a Puritan man! Now what is this wild behaviour?"

"Toby, remove this man from me."

"What do you think, Feste? Is this behaviour worthy of our most esteemed household treasurer?"

Ron and one of the twins were circling around the statue, craning their necks in gleeful curiosity. A little way off, Hermione stood with Percy and the other twin. None of them moved to his aid and Snape pressed closer to shut out their gaze.

"Feste, make haste," Draco snapped.

"My dear Sir Toby." The twin was wallowing in the moment. "Malvolio appears to be, though it pains me to conclude thusly, carousing. Indeed, to the experienced eye, this would appear to be base carousing."

Ron tutted sadly. "How can we hope to mend our ways when this is the example we are set?"

Snape looked up with his eyes dark and his teeth bared and his hand still on Draco's bare stomach.

"Leave us."

In the merest flicker of silence, Ron and the twins shared a malicious glance, then they grabbed Snape roughly under his arms and dragged his raging form upright. All his kicking and wrenching of shoulders was useless against three assailants and in time he stilled.

"You fools," he spat, wedging his chin under Ron's freckled arm that held his throat from behind. "You will regret every wrong you have done me, for I speak with your master's voice now."

Ron laughed outright and Hermione crossed her arms over chest, but all eyes turned to Draco.

"My lord?" Hermione prompted.

From the way Draco continued straightening his doublet, it did not appear that he was trying to restrain his gulping breaths and fumbling for a master's well-aimed words.

"Malvolio is unwell. Attend to him carefully, for he has been faithful to my family until today." Draco looked anywhere but into the eyes of the stranger who had recently been his steward. "Maria, you will take charge of his duties for the time being. See to the household accounts and the supervision of the servants."

The smell of crushed rosemary was everywhere; it would ever after make him nauseous.

"And if the messenger comes again from the Duchess, conduct her to the library. Lock her in and bring me the key."

A strange hissing sound came out of Snape's mouth, grew, then cut off as he bit, hard and vicious, into the first limb he could reach. Ron screamed loud enough to deafen as he ripped his arm free and cradled it against his chest. In one brutal burst of muscle, Fred and George launched Snape onto his back, knocking the breath out of him so that his curses trailed off into spluttering. They fell upon him with all of their combined weight.

Draco watched him for a very long while as he bucked and growled and his choking obscenities finally gave way to a dusty cough. One garter had slipped and a bony stretch of knee, grazed and bloody, protruded from the silk stocking.

"Take him out of my sight," Draco said in a quiet, passionless voice. "Take him somewhere cold and dark and lock him in. Use whatever force you wish."

He cast a last glance over the steward with his shoulders pinioned in the dirt and his two yellow legs flapping impotently in the air, and then he turned back toward the sunlight.

*

Stand here by Draco's side and see what he sees.

The messenger girl - Harry - is running through the rose garden. She runs with her green skirts hitched at the top of her thighs and both white stockings on display, her legs stretching in great, wide steps reaching up high in front of her. She swerves nimbly around the chaise longue in the courtyard and he believes he can see the tense trembling of muscle in her thigh each time she changes direction. Her shawl is hanging loose behind her and the hair which has been so carefully hidden from him until now is short and very black and flies back, unkempt, from her face. All her fierce will is bent on the task of running. Her skin is shining with exertion, and the whole picture of her is utterly, naturally, unconsciously indecent.

He wants to claw at Time itself, to tear his fingernails into the flesh of it so that it halts, or slows, so that this moment never passes. He wants to throw her into the grass by the fountain and devour her. He wants to sink to his knees and bury his face in her thighs. He still wants to cut out her tongue.

She passes through the cypress border and stops, and when she drops her skirts he has to bite his lip to keep from protesting.

*

Finally Draco's breath came back to him.

"Viola."

"Are you hurt?" Harry asked, but he was speaking to Ron, who stood by the statue gaping, white-faced, at his broken flesh with its half-circle of blood spots making thin trickles down his arm. Gently, he lifted Ron's protective hand from the wound so he could inspect it.

"The wound is shallow," Draco snapped. "Maria will see to it. Where have you been?"

Watching Hermione out of the corner of his eye, Ron pulled away from Harry's inspection.

"Answer me, Viola."

But, with a tiny nod which was no substitute for a courtesy, Harry announced: "I'm sorry to have disturbed you," and took his leave.

Draco caught him in the rose garden, matching Harry's pace without giving the appearance of hurrying as the hardened thorns tore at his sleeve.

"I would have you stay a while." Harry only walked faster. "Viola, you are messenger to the Duchess, who is, according to her rather unmaidenly correspondence, my willing slave. And you will find that my servant's servant is, as it were, my servant."

That stopped him. By the great gilded sundial, Harry took his stand.

"I am leaving the Duchess' household." Harry paused. "No. I have left it already. This morning. So I am nobody's servant, and certainly not yours."

Then he leaned in until his breath condensed warm against Draco's ear. He steadied himself with a hand on Draco's shoulder and he whispered:

"I hope her next messenger is a Turkish blacksmith who will tear off your arms if you lay a finger on him."

For an instant, he smirked into Draco's face, just close enough for Draco to make out the hazel rim around the green of his irises and the pale, knitted slash of skin on his forehead. Then in one swift movement he was gone, knotting the shawl under his chin as he made his way back toward the road, concealing the windswept hair and the sweat-slicked contours of his collarbone.

No threats or curses passed Draco's lips as he watched his visitor walk away, but only a hesitant smile. For he had not failed to notice the silver band on Harry's finger which glared blindingly each time it caught the light.

*

"My lord Malvolio, your chamber."

The chicken coop lay behind the stables and Fred and George hovered just outside its door.

"We hope you'll feel at home," George grinned. "You've always strutted about like a rooster, and now - why, look! - your very own brood of hens."

"That one is sweet on you. I have never seen such an amorous fowl. It must be the colour yellow that excites her so. Hmm. Feste, I wonder whether the stocks were too much."

"No, Feste," George said regretfully. "For my lord Malvolio, nothing is too much. In fact, I think we ought to consider the honey and goosefeathers."

From inside the coop came a growl of rage and a chorus of terrified squawking.

"Toby, I would have words with you." Pink in the face, Percy lurched around the corner of the building and collided with a stable boy carrying a saddle. "Take care, lad! Haste makes waste. Toby, I know you're here somewhere."

He found Ron poking a long stick through the netting of the coop and chuckling.

"My dear Sir Andrew." When he looked up, Ron's eyes were wet with laughter.

"Sir Toby, It comes to this. My funds have run dry. I have done as you said - provided a generous supply of wine and every proof of my intellect - and yet your master does nothing. You swore on your oath that I would be steward in Malvolio's place. And yet His Lordship will no longer hear my arguments. Just now, when I approached him, he called me a wittering nonce and bade me fetch his cloak. I have no prospect of a position and, unless you repay the moneys I have lent you, I will be penniless within the week."

"You must be bold, my dear Sir-"

"Bold, you say? Very well then. You and the fools owe me thirty florins between you and I would be repaid by tomorrow."

He missed the familiar look which passed between George and Fred.

"And so you shall be," George grinned. "You have my word on it. As a sign of good faith, let me fetch you a mug of ale."

"Your word? You swore to pay me before breakfast and still my -"

"The girl is to blame!" Fred declared with a dramatic clenching of fist and Percy was silent for sheer amazement. "The messenger girl. You were well on your way to promotion until she arrived but, since that day, His Lordship has been distracted. One minute he wants wine and music, the next we must draw the shutters and silence the songbirds. There is no reasoning with him. "

Percy considered a long moment.

"Yes, I have observed it." His chest protruded just a little. "She is a silly chit and not even a beauty at that. I shall tell His Lordship so. But first, we must settle the matter of payment which -"

Abruptly, George closed the door of the coop.

"You must fight her."

Percy deflated. "A girl? You would have me fight a girl?"

"Well you could hardly beat a boy," noted Ron.

"There is no other way." Fred nodded somberly and laid a hand on Percy's shoulder. "It is thusly. Malvolio is out of favour and this is your chance to unseat him. But you are sailed into the north of His Lordship's opinion. You have spoken too much and acted too little. Only a display of valour will convince him."

"And do you not think," George picked up. "That His Lordship will be grateful for the humbling of this little trollop who leads him such a merry chase?"

Percy sighed and knitted his brows together.

"I will not harm her. I have made that clear, have I not? I will be gentle with her."

Ron snickered. Fred clapped his hands.

*

The passers-by were becoming more numerous and Harry thought he must almost have reached the town when the shout came from behind him. Fred Weasley jogged up, small beads of sweat at his temples and his purple and orange cap under his arm.

"Hello Feste," Harry said uncertainly. "Are you going to the market?"

Fred was eying him shrewdly.

"My dear Viola," he said. "I bear unhappy news. You have offended Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a knight of the royal codpiece." He nodded back along the road, where Harry recognised Ron's mustard coloured garb, Hermione's prim white cap and, standing hand-on-hip in front of them, Percy. "He would challenge you."

"Him?" The derision in Harry's voice made Fred fight a smile.

"Oh yes. We have made every effort to calm him, but Sir Andrew is a demon in a rage."

"I haven't done anything to him," Harry shrugged as George joined them.

"He is offended by your dishonest attentions to Lord Olivier - no! Don't deny it. We have all seen how you dally with him, flashing your ankles and curling your lip at him with your eyes all big and bright and angry. Oh, we've seen it. And this is what your wiles lead to. You must defend yourself."

Harry almost said yes. He hadn't forgotten the mindless, anaesthetic release he had felt as he pounded Draco Malfoy into the Quidditch pitch. A fistfight might be just what he needed to quell the roiling that had plagued his gut since he walked through the castle's gates. And it was only Percy.

"I don't want to fight him," he made himself say, and realised too late he had missed the obvious defence of femininity. "Tell him I apologise."

"He will pursue you," George said in a grand voice. "He will hunt you down. He has killed men for less."

Fred suppressed a chuckle and tried a different tack. "You have nothing to fear. Truly. He'll never lay a hand on you. I doubt that he even knows which end of the sword to pick it up by, in fact it's a miracle his hands aren't bandaged today."

When Fred drew a squat sword from the sheath at his waist, Harry blanched and the word "Expelliarmus!" rose in his throat.

"No."

"Then I must try to calm him," George announced, but there was a wicked quirk in his mouth as he made his way back to where Percy stood, now slightly hidden behind Ron's taller form.

When Harry made to leave, he found Fred's wide shoulders blocking his path.

"Courage, Sir Andrew!" George was proclaiming in the distance, and flakes of conversation carried on the breeze. "... won't be gainsaid ... her father was squire to the King ... could swing a sword before she ever held a needle ... face her wrath ..."

"Her wrath?" Percy mouthed silently.

"Her blazing wrath."

"This is stupid," Harry muttered and raised his voice. "Sir Andrew, I will-"

Fred's large hand swooped over his mouth and silenced him.

"I withdraw my challenge," Percy proclaimed loudly. "Only a scoundrel would wish to frighten a young lady."

But George was shaking his head and Ron squeezed Percy's arm in sympathy.

"You are too late," Ron said sadly. "See how Feste has to hold her down to stall her from running at your throat? If you will not defend yourself, I fear you will be slaughtered."

"I will give her money!"

"You forget, you have none. Come, sir! Now is the time to show your true heart!"

Harry felt cold steel pressed into his hand and struggled against Fred's muscly grip.

"You need only keep him occupied," Fred whispered in his ear. "Injure him a little if you can - no more than that. Give him some tales to tell and you can be on your way."

He gave Harry a push, and the next thing Harry knew, Percy was rushing down the hill towards him, sword outstretched like a lance, and Harry could have sworn he had his eyes closed. He raised his own sword hesitantly. Its weight - so unlike the lightness of his wand - unbalanced him and he gripped the hilt with both hands. Percy's face was grim and pale as he approached.

"Stop that!" roared a deep voice from behind him. Percy dropped his sword.

A tall figure was striding up the road towards them and Harry's stomach lurched with that familiar queasy feeling. It had happened to him almost daily since the end of fifth year: a familiar tone of voice, a note of anguish hidden in a laugh, a hunted gait that so resembled Sirius it felt like he was resurrected and slain again before Harry's eyes. The man came closer, the dark hair tied back, the long legs, the angled brow. Harry's sword knocked against his ankle.

"What are you doing, Sebastian?" this flawless imitation of Sirius Black snapped at him. "I've not left you more than an hour and already you're brawling. I had thought better of you - and, saints preserve us, where did you get that dress?"

For a long time, he was unable to do anything more than scan the stranger's face, looking for differences and finding none. Then he managed:

"Not Sebastian. They call me -"

"Harry, I know," Sirius said under his breath.

Harry reeled. Was he in a dead place after all? The smell of fish on Sirius was unmistakable and rank, and he wondered if the next world was perhaps very different from what he had been told.

When he put his hand on Sirius' arm, living warmth flowed into it. Living warmth. Living Sirius. He slid his finger through a tear in the shirt and the skin he touched could not be doubted.

"It's him."

That voice spun Harry around and made him reach for his wand before he recognised the speaker. There she was. As toad-faced as ever and dressed in a soldier's uniform instead of cardigans and bows, she pursed her thin lips.

"There is no doubt. He is the one. Apprehend him." Delores Umbridge clasped her hands behind her back and nodded to her companion.

"I trust you'll come quietly. Wouldn't want to cause a scene." Jovial, blustering and Cornelius Fudge down to his lime green cap, the second soldier approached. The sword had turned slippery in Harry's grip and for a moment - the briefest moment - he wished he had never left the security of the castle.

"Let's make is easy then." Fudge gave a nervous grin. "What do you say, Antonio?"

"You are mistaken," Sirius said flatly.

Without warning, Fudge jammed his pike against Sirius' throat.

"No, no, Antonio. We are quite certain."

Harry launched himself at Fudge and knocked him to the ground, his sword clattering away uselessly. He swung two punches into the soldier's ribs before that awful sound made his blood run cold.

"Hem hem."

Slowly he raised his head to see Umbridge smiling down at him with a thick dagger pressed into Sirius' gut. Harry froze. She turned her gaze down the road, where three more soldiers murmured ominously and watched. Harry rolled back onto his haunches and straightened under her vile, victorious smile.

"If you were a man, we might have to discipline you," she said, fingers working busily as she bound Sirius' hands. "As it is, I suggest you stay out of our sight."

The muscles along Sirius' shoulders twitched with the effort of submitting. When his hands were fastened, he inspected the knots with disdain. He shuffled hesitantly and said:

"They say the cells in the guard house are none too comfortable. There will be expenses if I mean to eat. It seems I must ask you to return my purse. "

He could have had Harry's liver, kidney or heart if he had asked for it.

"Of course. Where is it?"

Sirius' mouth twisted; his words were hostile. "It hung around your neck this morning. Have you taken so little care of it?"

"I don't know what you mean," Harry said helplessly and turned his empty palm up to the sky.

The look Sirius gave him then came from his nightmares. It played endlessly, fast or maddeningly slow, silently, backed by screaming, his screaming, Neville's blubbering, sometimes distant and others so close it was just beyond the reach of his fingers, but always that same expression: Sirius' face blank with shock, except for his eyes which were edged with the first light of fear. After it lay a fall and thump of heavy cloth and the long silence.

Sirius slumped and for the first time looked like a prisoner.

"It is enough that you have spent my money recklessly. Your lie demeans us both." His eyes were black with anger. "I had thought my love deserved better of you."

Umbridge shoved him into the first steps back toward the town. The morning sun cast a black chasm of shadow behind him as he went.

Fudge's pike slammed across his chest before Harry had stumbled his first step.

"We have laws to deal with disturbers of the peace, girl," he hissed. "Be off before we arrest you."

Harry stood, hair and sweat and dirt in his eyes, as their figures dwindled in the distance. The sun climbed. Not far away, fat yellow grapes leapt off vines in their eagerness to complete the summer cycle of growth and decay and rebirth. And Sirius had been taken from him again.

*

There is a cautious space around where he stands, alone in the middle of the road with his dress streaked with dust and his head bowed. The few market-goers stare in open curiosity as they tug their goats or turn their barrows to give him a wide berth. How slender he looks, standing with his arms hanging limp and the brutal corset cinching his waist. Green and still and straight, as if he could throw down roots and join the trees which grow thick at the roadside, passive and sighing.

But Harry has mastered grief before and will do so again. It starts with a step, then he is climbing toward the town. His stride is wide and masculine with no thought left for feminine pretence. Under the shawl, he ruffles his hair in the heat. Soon he will be lost in the crowd.

Stay with me.

Wait here with me, in the dappled shade of the fig tree with the ants crawling over its trunk. The wait will not be long. Feel the breeze on your face and watch toward the east, for that is where he will come from.

There. A figure striding towards us: his step loose and easy in dark breeches, his white shirt unfastened at the neck to let the air onto his skin, his hair sticking to his brow in patches with the rising heat of early afternoon. Harry. Sebastian. He wears both names with equal discomfort now.

Fred Weasley straightens as he sees the newcomer.

"Back for more, are you lass?" he says, not kindly.

Harry pauses. Then, as he finally notes the menace in Fred's tone, sees the discarded swords and wipes his hands carefully on his shirt, he hears it for the first time.

Rhythmic and growing, drumming along the westward road.

Hoofbeats.

***