Very Midsummer Madness

Come, stand by me.

Close your eyes. Feel the shifts in pressure as the world around you transforms itself: the lurch of gravity abandoning you, the explosion of sunlight on your shoulders and the head-spinning gush of fresh air filling out your lungs. Below you, the familiar landscape of Illyria: the draped green velvet of the plains, the buttons of rock which crown the hilltops, and seams of silver water threading them into one. The ground is very far beneath our feet.

Have you missed this?

If my grip on your hand is too eager, forgive me. This place changes when you are gone from it. The light loses its glass-edge clarity. The air itself grows dank and impatient. We continue to move, all of us, only with heavy feet. We go through the motions of our daily lives, oh yes, but aimlessly. The fruit in our mouths is like sand. The sand clogs between our toes like clay. It is your return we await, and when you come, we awaken. Your presence throws the light of purpose upon us and, suddenly, our paths are clear. The world is cast in bright colours: jubilant yellows, carnival reds and a newborn blue in the sky. We flourish.

Do you see? Your time here is precious.

Stay close to me as we descend. The story is poised, here, waiting for you. On the high road through the hills, just outside the Olivier villa, you can make out the form of a horse and rider. On the same road, not far beyond the town walls, a lone figure strides toward the sea. The scene is set. All that lacks is the breath of life which your presence provides.

Begin.

*

Draco sees his death in the path far below him.

Summer-hard and baked by the sun, the earth has all the softness of a brick in flight. It thrusts up glinting daggers of rock.

Draco clings desperately to the rearing stallion, one hand tangled in the reins and the other flailing as he struggles to get a grip in its mane and the pain strikes his thighs and his knuckles like hammer blows. The horse - his father's horse, an eighteen-hand Arabian and every inch a devil - seems to hang in the air forever as it bucks and shudders and rends the breeze with its forelegs. He squeezes his eyes closed and blindly curses the horse and the girl and his own stupid, clumsy, imprudent sense of hope that set him on this path.

Have you ever seen him look less smug? No powdered aristocrat this, but a thin-legged youth riding a man's horse, pink-faced with fury and very much afraid. In his mind is a vision of the girl in the green dress - her black lashes lowered and her lips apart and the lean strength of her throat bared for him - and it wracks him to think that death will rob him of this fragile possibility.

Would you like to see him fall?

That is an ending, perhaps. Draco, broken and bleeding, on the side of the road. Dust on his skin and blood in his mouth and his head full of Harry-in-the-green-dress. Perhaps there is a saviour come too late, whispered words of comfort, and arms - first cautious, then growing in tenderness - to die in. An ending, yes. But not our ending. Draco will not fall.

The Arabian quietens and lowers its gleaming mass of pure thoroughbred muscle. Draco, who has not ridden bareback since he was ten, slides bonelessly to the ground. With a wavering step, he makes his way back across the yard.

The stable-boy with the bloody lip and the red weal across his jaw cringes at his master's approach, and when Draco draws the whip from his belt, the boy tries to shrink into the shadowed stall behind him.

"You will mend this," Draco orders in a voice that would shake if it rose louder than a hiss, and he gestures to the scuffed saddle with its torn strap. "There is a journey I very much wish to make. If your clumsiness keeps me from it, I will make you howl."

The boy looks from the strap, frayed and broken off completely from the saddle body, to the over-bright eyes and trembling hands of his master. He gives a forlorn little nod.

Back outside, Draco - Lord Olivier and a count down to the ermine trimming on his cloak - climbs onto the railings of the stableyard to hoist his boots out of the muck. As he perches there, he winds the whip around his fingers until they are purple and numb. Surrounded by servants who trained under his father's hair-trigger temper and ruthless taste for excellence, he is used to finding himself provided with cool water or minstrels or eiderdown pillows almost before he is aware of desiring them.

He is not a man accustomed to wanting.

*

Harry looks down on a path made of light.

Great long strands of it twist themselves, sparkling, beneath his feet and bear him up. As he walks, he turns his face up to the sun, a welcome companion now that the raw burn along his shoulders and in the angle of his shirt has faded to brown. His mind is untroubled and his road runs downhill, dazzling and sunstruck and blazing white.

It is an illusion, of course. The sun at its highest point is picking out crystalline streaks in the stones which scatter the road's surface. It is only ordinary rock transfigured by chance and sunshine. But still, there is a particular lightness to Harry's step on this young afternoon. Don't you think? When was the last time you saw him eat up the miles with such a long, easy, boneless stride?

He smiles at the memory in his mind, which is of Sirius - Antonio, he corrects himself - taking a mended fishing net from his hesitant fingers, frowning critically at the knots, and then declaring: "Not bad," in a voice that made Harry's stomach light. "Not bad at all, Sebastian."

He stops on a stocky bridge and leans his forearms on the parapet. The glassy ribbon of water is far away and sluggish with summer. If there are times when he is bowed with the knowledge that his escape from this world will part him front Sirius also, this is not one of them.

After a morning spent in the town - where men playing dice welcomed him into their game and a girl in a yellow headscarf smiled shyly and laid down her basket of cherries to wrench his palm open and tell his fortune - he knows that, even if he still has no idea of where he is or how to get home, the answers cannot be far off. Before the commotion by the guard house and the ominous appearance of the military's crested pikes made him cautious and drove him out of the town, he had crouched in the marketplace, among the baskets of the spice merchants, rolling a cinnamon stick between his fingers as he searched for a subtle way to ask them what he wanted to know. Those men have an air of wizardry - not the staid and regimented version he is used to, but something wilder and more ancient: the magic that bred the first sphinx and filled the air with flying carpets when more northerly wizards still used their brooms for sweeping.

In time, he will question them. But for now, he is waiting for evening, when he will sit in the inn with Sirius at his side and something other than fish in his hands, and the easy talk of men will flow between them.

As he shifts the pack lightly on his shoulders and spits a cherry pip into the riverbed, Harry does not look like a man accustomed to grief.

*

Harry walks on, and where he goes, we must follow.

Stay with me. This is where reality bends itself to make unlikely roads meet and mingle.

*

Harry had not left the bridge far behind him when he heard it: a voice carrying distantly on the wind. The nasal monotone was one of a kind. Percy.

When he hurried around the bend in the road - his luminous path faded to dust and rock now - it was, indeed, his least favourite Weasley that he saw, tracking backward and forward through the grass with a great deal of extravagant feinting and the occasional lunge.

"Valorous is more the word, Toby," Percy proclaimed a little breathlessly as he nicked an imaginary shoulder. "Ha!" He smote his invisible adversary. "Be sure to use that word when you report this to His Lordship. Valorous. Tell him I fought like St George himself and would certainly have given the little tart the hiding of her life - knight's daughter or no - if I'd only had the chance to meet her face to -" Harry's pack made a conspicuous thud on the ground. "You."

Percy put the blade between them. His glance darted anxiously to where Ron was lazing on his back with his head on Hermione's thigh and trying to work a flask unobserved from his hip pocket to his lips, but no reassurance came from that quarter.

"Back for more are you, lass?" That was Fred, swaggering more than a little as he emerged from an olive grove by the road, while his twin sat on a log nearby, shading his face with a cap as uncompromisingly purple and orange as the rest of his costume. "And dressed like a man this time!"

At once, four days of constant uncertainty came back to Harry. They put steel in his voice.

"It's about time you two showed up."

What should he complain about first - the jerry-rigged wand the twins had left at the school, his near drowning in the sea, or the plain humiliation of being stranded here to feel his way blindly and alone? Or the fact that they'd waited until now - just when he was starting to feel at home in this world - to make their appearance and take him back to reality.

The twins bowed low. "At your command, my lady."

"Do you think this is funny? Yeah, really bloody hilarious, Fred-"

"Feste." This time there was quiet menace in Fred's tone. "You knew our name well enough an hour ago."

In the heat of the early afternoon, the road before and behind them empty, Harry was reminded of Warrington in the weeks after his rescue from the Vanishing Cabinet: how he had come back hollow-faced, sweating in the narrower corridors and shuddering at sudden noises, and then quietly disappeared before the end of exams.

"All right," Harry placated. "Feste, if you like. You still went too far. I could have been hurt."

"And you would have been, if you hadn't fled from me." The ostrich feather on the top of Percy's cap jiggled as he spoke.

"Fled?" Harry was dumbfounded. As fawning ministry official or gartered fop, Percy couldn't hold a candle to the very least of the Death Eaters he had faced. "Fled from you ?"

Percy coloured and his fingers strained around the sword's hilt. "If you mean to insult me - sir - the honourable course would be to make yourself plain. I shall then demand satisfaction."

There was a clang of metal as George struck a second blade against a rock.

"I think the lass is being plain enough. If you're determined to provoke a fight, girl, you shall have your wish."

He juggled the sword to hold it hilt-first towards Harry, who took it.

At once, it was as if the sun-warmed metal grew into him. The forward pull of its weight set his chest and shoulders in resistance, awakening the new muscles gained through days hauling fishing nets and his pack. Right down to his thighs, his body tensed, adjusting to the new mass and readying for fight. It could have been a broom he held for the first time: the promise of power was the same, the recklessness and the adrenalin of learning on his feet.

"Fine." Harry cut an arc in the air. Already he could feel how the control of it was in the balance of his steps as much as in his arms. The twins' apologies could wait until he'd seen what he could do with this and taught them not to call him "girl".

Percy threw his cap off and pushed a few sweaty curls out of his face. With one formal salute, he brought their blades together, deliberately making the edges grind. One thing you had to say for Percy, he didn't do things by halves. He wore the deep concentration of a diamond cutter as he pressed in and circled, testing his opponent's defences.

It was Percy who struck first - a sudden downward blow that echoed in Harry's elbows and knuckles as he blocked it - then took a startled half pace backward. He swung again, quick and testing, deflecting narrowly past Harry's shoulder. Already, the metal was becoming slippery in Harry's hands. The blade glinted. He remembered one evening at the end of his first year when he had turned his wand over and over in his hands, picturing it until the reality sank in: these eleven inches can kill a man.

The assault, when it came, was fierce. Percy was agile and determined, and what his blows lacked in power, they compensated for in speed and precision. The air resounded with his soft grunts of exertion as he attacked Harry from each side in turn, and Harry scrambled to parry. Then Harry perceived the rhythm in it. Percy's choreographed swordplay was more like a dance than a battle: thrust at the left shoulder then the right, lunge to the belly, low blow to the right. If he was quick enough ... Harry feinted back as Percy struck low and stretched his body to twist out of blade's path. Percy's own momentum did for him. He stumbled forward, overbalancing, and all it took was the flat of Harry's sword on the back of his knees to bring him down, tumbling onto all fours.

He laid the edge of his blade against Percy's neck. The muscle twitched beneath it.

"I concede."

Harry grinned. There was tension in his limbs like he hadn't felt for months, a nervous energy born of too much ambling up hillsides and nothing in the way of danger. Stultification had crept into him in this place. Waking from it was exhilarating.

"Anyone else?" he challenged.

Four arms grabbed him from behind.

"I think we've had enough of your lip, girl," growled one of the twins, possibly the one whose grip was bending his collarbone like a twig while Ron scowled at him in the distance over Hermione's shoulder. "You may have reduced the lord of the manor to a tongue-tied idiot, but don't you imagine you've made us your fools as well."

"Take care, Feste," Hermione warned. "You can expect retribution from His Lordship to if you cause any damage."

It was shocking, the sound of that false name on the lips of Hermione, who of all people could be counted on for uncompromising truth whether you wanted it or not. She should be telling the twins that their joke had gone too far, that swordplay was in breach of a half dozen school rules. Unfocused dread was growing in him when Percy rose from his hands and knees and said quietly:

"Let it lie, Feste. The fight is over. We had best return before His Lordship thinks poorly on our absence, and there is also the small matter of your debts to be-"

George laughed. With a great shove between his shoulder blades, Harry went lurching forward, his arms flailing as he careened into Percy's back and sent them both crashing into the grass. Percy's bony form whipped and bucked underneath him, all chivalry forgotten as he growled and landed an elbow to Harry's jaw to send him sprawling on his stomach. Long fingers closed around Harry's throat. A shower of spittle hit on the back of his neck as Percy spluttered:

"You -" Percy's knee jabbed into his kidney. "-conceited-" Somewhere, far off, Hermione was calling out, and George was still chuckling. "-little-" Before Harry's eyes, the grass started to blur.

The sound of a whipcrack split the air.

"Control yourselves!" A clatter of hooves and the scud of a rider dismounting. "End this affray immediately!"

The whip sang through the air again and, with an apprehensive moan, Percy let Harry go.

"Brawling? You are a disgrace to my household, every one of you. No discipline, no breeding, no regard for propriety -"

The machine-gun slurs, Harry recognised them even before he managed to twist his head to see, through the frame of Percy's limbs, Draco Malfoy - pointy and thin-necked and malevolent as ever. As a huge dark horse with its saddle sitting crooked stamped impatiently behind him, he directed the loop of his whip at each of them in turn.

"- even the pigs have a higher sense of decorum. You, Feste, have had your last warning - you are dismissed. And I might have known that Toby Belch would be caught up in this. I am confining you to the estate. You will rise for devotions each morning at sunrise. The cellar door will be boarded up. And you, the pestilential Aguecheek - "

Percy untangled himself from Harry's limbs and stammered: "My lord, you must forgive me. The girl - I took leave of my senses, my lord! A madness was in me. I assure your lordship, I should rather cut off my own hand than bring your family's great name into infamy."

There was always a hint of deferential hunching to Percy's shoulders. Under the weight of Malfoy's silence, he drooped. But Malfoy had lost interest in his obsequience the moment his eyes alighted on Harry, sprawled in the grass, rubbing the red marks on his neck. His whip hand fell limp against his side.

"Be gone. All of you," Malfoy murmured after a long silence, then managed to bark out: "Return to the villa. No-one has permission to leave without my order. Directly, Maria! One word in disagreement and you may join Malvolio in the chicken coop."

Though she wore a look that promised intricate and bloody revenge, Hermione took Ron by the wrist and departed. The twins doffed their caps sarcastically but did exactly as commanded, and wih that act crushed Harry last hope that they might not be part of this false, crazy world. Percy lingered, rotating his cap in his fingers like a rosary. It took one lick of the lash to make him take to his heels. The proud tip of his peacock feather settled, severed, into the dirt.

Harry had seen enough. "I'll be on my way."

Malfoy was before him in an instant, tucking the lash behind his back as he extended his free hand with its glittering rings. Suspicious of the gesture, Harry took it, but swung himself up too hastily so that Malfoy had to catch him by the elbow to stop him overbalancing. He felt the attention of that pale-eyed gaze on him, still and intent as a cat's, and he would have squirmed if there had been enough space between their bodies to do it.

"I like you dressed like that," Malfoy said in a very low voice. "I like you better."

With one whispered compliment, Harry found himself disarmed, far more effectively than the taunts he had spent six years learning to ignore. It was the shock of it. Open praise was not a thing you expected on Malfoy's lips. It had the currency of rarity, like an albino dragon or a vintage first model Cleansweep. He wanted to produce a breezy putdown that would show Malfoy immediately how the dealings between them were going to be. But more than that, he found himself curious to hear Malfoy - whose careful accent had a way of making compliments sound easy and authoritative - finding more things to like about him.

"Thank you," he mumbled, a touch truculently, in the end. He extracted his hand from Malfoy's insistent grip. "For your help. Before. Thank you."

He felt uncouth, with grass stains on his knees and elbows and his hair stiff with dust and sweat. Malfoy, however, looked deliberately crisp in his white silk breeches, and his doublet equally white with its darts of pearls running up from the waist. Even his blue cloak fell in parallel folds over his right shoulder, as if willed into neatness.

Malfoy frowned. "I see I was too late. That ungovernable oaf has hurt you."

"No. Not really. He hardly laid a - "

"Here." Malfoy put the pristine cuff of his sleeve to Harry's jaw and it came away bloody. He dabbed at it again, a gentle brush of silk across Harry's chin.

Harry stood dumbly, remembering: Malfoy's blood, dark in the webbed skin by his thumb, lodged under the quick of his fingernails; the bitter indignity of his Quidditch disqualification; Malfoy curled in a ball on the ground, gasping and spitting weakly, wetly, futilely, trying to clear his lungs to breathe; and the splatter of dry blood he had been sickened to find high up on his hairline, much later.

The wound stung as it was disturbed. Though the tilt of his mouth betrayed faint distaste, Malfoy was careful and slow as he steadied Harry's face with three fingers and touched his sleeve to the edges of the exposed flesh. If a wild Nundu had slunk up and nuzzled his hand, Harry could not have been more surprised. Malfoy seemed not to breathe with the concentration of it. These things spoke to Harry - the hushed voice, the sudden gentleness, the horse that had stalked off, forgotten - but in an undertone he could not quite catch. What he remembered was the words: I like you dressed like that. He willed Malfoy to repeat them as his wound slowly went numb.

Then the sun slipped behind a cloud and took the dazzle out of his eyes.

"Leave it." He shoved Malfoy's hand away, and the stained sleeved vanished into the folds of his blue cloak. "Leave it! I have to go. I'm meeting someone, back in -"

Instantly, he was looking at the Malfoy of his memory: sneering and tensed.

"How very prompt of you," Malfoy observed icily. A patch of bluebells was massacred beneath his boots as he made space between them. "I will not hinder you. However, before you leave, one matter remains between us. A ring you had of me. It was a trifle, nothing more, but a trifle which belongs to me. If you truly intend leaving, you will return it."

His tone was a snapping of fingers. In the flourish of it, Harry heard an unstated "and ten points from Gryffindor because Granger is a Mudblood". And, instantly, the terrain was familiar once more.

"No."

"I beg your pardon."

"No. Not a chance." This much was the same: he still got a malicious thrill out of seeing Malfoy thwarted. "I'd throw your precious ring in the river - if I'd seen it in the first place, which I -"

"Don't take me for a fool." Malfoy's lips curled up to bare the sharp points of his teeth. "I saw it on your finger not two hours past. Come now. You can return the trinket, or you can find another form of recompense."

Harry laughed outright. It was the wrong thing to do. There was an ominous thump of leather as the tail of the whip hit the ground.

"You will regret that." Malfoy 's voice shook slightly. "I can take my property by force if you-"

Harry winked. "Take it."

And Malfoy came for him.

Harry gave way before him, falling back toward the long grass where he knew two swords lay forgotten. When he was close, he turned and ran. The whip sang past his ear - Malfoy was evidently well acquainted with its use - and there was a growled obscenity close behind him as a spiny bush tore at his ankles. Silver gleamed in the grass. In one stumbling step, he gripped the sword's hilt, swung himself up and span the weapon around.

Malfoy skidded wildly and pulled up a hair's breadth from slicing open his throat. He gasped for breath.

"What are you?" he hissed down the length of the blade.

Whichever way he leaned, the steel clung to his neck. A sword, Harry thought as he shifted its edge slightly to watch Malfoy flinch again, was more than a wand. Its threat was immediate, actual, and very bloody. The barbarism of it appealed to him. He pressed forward and down, twisting Malfoy backwards in discomfort.

"You will be punished, girl," he snarled as he bent. "Do you imagine you can draw on a nobleman with no consequence?"

Threats from Malfoy - commonplace and empty - passed Harry's ears like so much air, and yet, as the pulse rush from the sudden activity died away, he did wonder how he was going to bring this encounter to an end. Nobleman or not, Malfoy was bound to pursue a nasty revenge if he felt himself wronged. The last thing Harry wanted was trouble. Not when he was travelling with Sirius, who risked arrest by his mere presence in these parts. He had to extricate firmly, but leaving Malfoy's pride intact.

He did not expect Malfoy to make this easy.

"I could hang you for this! Foolish girl. What do you think you can achieve at swordpoint that I haven't offered you of my own free will?"

That took Harry by surprise. "I don't know. What are you offering me?"

"Far more than someone of your station ought to expect," Malfoy snapped. He eyed the blade warily as Harry allowed him to stand straight. "Was I not clear in my terms? I have offered you the name of Olivier and all the privileges it entails. Wealth. Luxury. Fine clothes, if you want them, carriages and servants. Every delicacy you can think of: sweetmeats, spices, silks, rubies and sapphires, great jewelled books lettered in gold, holy relics -"

"Books."

The noun sounded dusty and cobwebbed as it dropped from Harry's lips. Beyond the handful of trade signs in the town and the weathered Latin inscriptions carved on the churches' facades, he hadn't read a word in almost a week. A craving for parchment and ink squeezed his heart. He was here to find answers and - this much he'd learned from Hermione - when you wanted the truth, it was a book you went to.

Something in Malfoy seemed to come alive then; he stopped bucking against the blade and went still.

"My library is yours," he murmured, back in that silky, low voice that was out of place in daylight. "You need only tell me that we have a bargain, and I can send to the far corners of the world for any works you desire."

And again, Harry found himself wrong-footed. The demands, the temper, the insults - these had always been the favoured weapons in Malfoy's arsenal. But he did not negotiate. He did not persuade. Yet here he was, waiting, with a violent pulse still beating in his temple, for Harry's answer.

Up close, you could see how the way this Malfoy carried himself fooled you into missing the flaws. There was powder collecting in his pores and bald patches in the velvet of his cloak. Some of the pearls were creamy glass. All down his sides, the damp silk stuck to him, and, if his hair smelled faintly sweet, it was nothing compared to the sweat on him and the unmistakable rankness of horse and saddle.

He tried to recall whether the Malfoy he knew might have scuffed patches on his robes, and couldn't remember a time when he'd ever looked.

"All this for a ring?"

Malfoy's smirk was familiar. "The ring, you may keep. You can't be ignorant of what I expect from you." Very gently, he shrugged the metal away from his throat and leaned forward, whispering now. "I can have them copied for you, the ancient scrolls of Baghdad and Constantinople, the treasures of Florence. Anything you desire. The learning of all the ages is as good as in your hands. Now say we have a bargain."

And behind each soft syllable, the same insinuating lilt that said more than just the bare words, a bassline to the melody that sank too low for Harry's ears but vibrated in his body and made his breathing shallower, faster. Anything you desire. Then Malfoy's fingers brushed the back of his knuckles and he understood: what Malfoy wanted, what he was offering, and why, with a blade still in reach of his neck, he looked like a tiger about to feed.

There was shock, yes, and a twinge of disgust, but also an unwelcome pride. Malfoy - this one, like the Slytherin he knew - liked valuable things. Expensive brooms, influential connections, silk and jewels. Now Harry was one of those things, and one worth paying a high price for. Malfoy's mouth was tightened in anxiety; Harry couldn't look at his eyes.

He imagined delivering a defiant rejection: the brief moment of victory, then the long uphill walk back to the town wishing for the texture of parchment under his fingers and looking over his shoulder to see if Malfoy had sent a lynch mob after him. He tried to imagine what would happen if he capitulated, and couldn't. He had never let himself be afraid of the unknown.

Harry let the sword fall with an anticlimactic thud into the grass.

And Malfoy kissed him.

In the broad daylight, in the middle of the road, Malfoy kissed him.

Except for the obviousness of mouths and breath pressing together, Harry almost wouldn't call it a kiss at all, this simple thing that somehow happened without a prelude of blushes and false starts and awkward bumps. Malfoy's lips were strange and dry and his eyes were closed as he brushed hesitantly at the centre of Harry's lips and, inch by inch, brought their bodies closer. He seemed to have foreknowledge of how their chins and elbows would fit together, as if this were not the first time he had pulled Harry into his arms. Smoothly, he raised himself slightly on the balls of his feet to make their lips level and Harry found his palms resting on Malfoy's shoulders.

There was cool silk against Harry's collarbone and white hair in the corner of his eyes, and Malfoy's mouth was coaxing and careful. The sun hammered on his head, so much more insistent than the sun at home. He let his lips come apart and the flick of Malfoy's tongue against his was so sudden and intimate it made him shudder.

Too quickly, the easiest kiss of his memory was over. Malfoy pulled back a fraction and watched him from under heavy-lidded eyes as his breath evened out. He sucked his lower lip meditatively into his mouth and waited. Then he smiled.

"Consider that an advance payment." His fingers were knotted in Harry's shirt, unrelenting, but gentle with the confidence that strength would not be needed. "A token of good faith." That one breathed against Harry's jaw, leaving a warm trail on his skin. "A prologue." He pulled Harry's face down to him. "Or what you will." And he kissed him again, now open-mouthed and demanding.

By the time Harry moved his feet, a column of foraging ants had made a path across them.

*

The breeze is picking up. A crow cries out and takes wing.

They're long gone, Harry and Draco, westward back toward the villa. You and I, we still have a long way to go. We have lingered too long here, with warm rock under our stomachs and the wild sage sweating scent in the heat. You have to watch the time in this place. It has its own slippery rhythm.

Quickly now. Up the hill, towards the town, the sun hot on your back and our shadows in front of us pointing the way.

In a growing babble and stench, the city walls approach. Make your way around the trodden heaps of animal leavings and pass through the gates to the turreted building just inside. You know from the shadows which hang gloomily from its high windows that this is a place of imprisonment. The guard house: its walls three feet thick and its lone dungeon penning in a man who you would swear was Sirius Black. He has given up pacing the cell, which is scarcely wider than two of his long-legged strides. He sits. His face in the murky light is grim.

A narrow alley runs between the guard house and the wall: at one end a midden of stunted cabbages left to rot, along its length the stained planks of old wine barrels strewn about like shipwreck, and Harry. Viola. Harry-Viola. He looks comical with his green skirts knotted at the top of his thighs and the white legs sticking out of them a mockery of femininity, all straight, lean muscle. His toes refuse to grip in the tiny spaces between the stones in the guard house wall. You can see, can't you, how the windows are too small to fit his shoulders through, and too high to reach? Harry can't.

Harry breathed warmly on his fingertips, where the raw flesh under torn nails was stinging. For the fifth time, he launched himself at the wall and lunged upward; for the fifth time he fell into the pile of damp planks which had been too rotten to support him.

A simple stone wall was all that stood in his way. Any number of spells could wrench it open, shatter it into tiny pebbles that wouldn't dare defy him. Solidity was only a starting point - it had taken him a good part of his first year to get his head around that. Massive cauldrons could be vanished and teacups turned into butterflies. And still, when he leaned his forehead against the wall, it was harder than ever and the cold seeped into his skull.

If there was no sneaking around the back, he would have to force his way through the front door. He would choose the sturdiest of these broken planks. No. There was a sword, perhaps, lying in the grass still, back along the road. If his threats were bold enough, the guards might never test his ability to wield it. No. Too far, too uncertain. All he had was one silver ring. He would bargain Sirius's release, and if they wouldn't bargain he would seize a pike, or a knife, or a chair, and luck would favour him, as it almost always had.

His heart was racing already as he rounded the corner into the street. There was only one guard at the door of the guard house, and as he turned to reply to an unseen voice inside, Harry marked how the pike swayed loosely in one hand.

"... six months since the last flogging. Most of the town'll turn up, and they'll get a spectacle all right. This one won't go quietly. Laid out three men when we tried to put him in the cell this morning. Of course, if they hang him -"

Harry quickened his pace and balled up his fists.

Someone whistled.

It stopped him dead. There was no mistaking that whistle; it said the same thing down the ages: I'll have you. He whipped around and saw, from a shadowed doorway, a red-faced man looking up from his work, his gaze fixed on Harry's thighs and the light from his forge glinting off his grin. Harry looked down at his bare legs and felt the heat rise in his face. He scrabbled at the knot in his skirts to pull them free. It was only his legs, he told himself, everyone had legs. But the whistle and the grin suggested he'd exposed much more. It was like Snape cracking open his head and rifling through his memories: violating. Helplessness became resentment; resentment became fury.

The guard was watching him with interest - leering openly.

"Vincenzo!" the guard called over his shoulder. "This is your sort of tart. Come and have a look."

His chances of a quiet approach were wrecked. Market goers and a passing priest stared in unspoken judgment. Three more guards appeared, laughed and muttered loudly to each other. Harry was colouring, despite himself. A hand clutched his buttock.

"Give us another peep, love," the blacksmith was smirking when Harry drove his fist into his sternum and, with the advantage of complete and utter surprise, doubled him up. The guards' chuckling died. Their weapons hovered, as if they were unsure whether to apprehend him or sit back and watch the show. The blacksmith gasped up from where he'd sunk to one knee, his mouth still opening and closing in disbelief. He had shoulder muscles as thick as Harry's thighs.

Harry had a fair idea of how women were treated here; what became of men who disguised themselves as women, he didn't care to find out. Though his limbs strained with the indignity of it, he made himself back away. There were shouts behind him as he reached the square and slipped into the crowd.

Wedged in behind one of the buttresses of the town walls, with the scraps and bones, the rubble and the neverending stink, Harry sank down into the shadow and waited for his pursuit to lose interest. Above him, the wall and the guard house were prised apart by a narrow ribbon of sky. Every so often, a gull sailed across it. For someone bred in a cupboard, he'd quickly got used to having fresh air and space around him. From the bottom of the castle's orchard, on the windward side where even the fig trees had to be coaxed out of the ground and grew sparse, you could look out over your own vast kingdom of sea. He'd done it, for hours on end, pulling the heads off poppies and grass stalks as Ginny lay on her stomach nearby and read those poems about love.

Ginny could get Sirius out of that cell. She was a duchess. He ripped a patch of moss from the stone. And she didn't care a jot about him, except as a means to make that lecherous Malfoy answer her letters. He could imagine what she would do if her told her about Sirius. Her eyes big and dark with anxiety, she would spend a moment in quiet consideration, her hand tangling in her amber necklace and tugging it until it bit into the sides of her throat and he had to fight the urge to reach out and restrain her fingers. Then, with a solemn crease between her brows, she would say: "That's all very well, Viola, but do find my lord Olivier's complexion to be more like to ivory or to alabaster?".

Oh no. He would rather eat his way through the guard house wall then go back to face her indifference.

When the bell on Santa Maria sounded evening prayer and the guardhouse door thudded shut, Harry was still working furiously at a plan. Fire, disguise, stolen knives - he'd even considered whether the cabbage leaves around him could be used as a weapon, but every plan ended with him in a room with a number of well-armed guards and no wand. And if it came to that, he was going to lose Sirius again.

He'd been making life-and-death decisions since he was eleven. You'd think it would get easier. There was a rotten looking moon in the sky by the time he found himself once more on the seaward road.

*

"The one about the greased turnip."

"No."

"The one about the two crabs and the fisherman's cap."

"No."

Hermione left off her stitching to glare at the twins, who lounged with their boots on the table and their caps on their bellies. In the humid silence of the kitchen, you could hear the rats abseiling into the larder while the cats licked themselves contentedly under the bench.

"The one that goes 'Hey Nonny Nonny'."

"No!!" This time even Percy joined the cry of objection from where he loitered in the shadows in the corner.

"That one's absolutely filthy," Hermione scolded.

Ron glared mutinously into his wine. "Well I think it's funny."

Fred whistled while George sang:

"With a hey nonny no and a hey nonny nonny

Fourteen pints and my goat looked bonny

With a hey nonny nonny and a hey nonny -"

"No more!" Percy menaced them with a mop handle. "I am bruised, my honour is bruised, and I am in no humour to be oppressed with lewd songs about goats."

"We can't procure a goat of your own now," Fred teased, "but Mistress Mary may oblige. She was free enough with Sir Toby all his afternoon, so I hear."

Ron hid a sly grin and straightened his trousers. An apple shot past George's ear and knocked a copper pot clattering off the shelf. He swung his legs down and retreated towards the door before Hermione could aim a melon.

"And you still owe me twelve florins," added Percy in a voice that presaged disappointment.

"To summarise then," Ron grumbled. "We have no ale, barely a thimbleful of wine, no money, no sport, and no prospect of getting any until his high-and-mightiness tires of his little tart and turns his mind to the household expenses."

George nudged the door open invitingly.

"We have one thing. We have Malvolio locked in a chicken coop."

It took only a few moments of furious thumping on the coop's wall to wake him.

"I didn't - what's the - my -" They heard a shuffle of straw as Snape pulled himself up. "You thugs! You barbarians! You block-headed vandals! How dare you wake me!"

The twins' grins gleamed in the dark as Fred leaned in to the two-inch gap where the loose latch let the door hang open.

"Malvolio?" he whispered. "Malvolio! Tis I, your own beloved, your Draco."

Snape let out a long, hissing breath. "Beloved? I think not. Your judgement was sorely wanting this morning, leaving me to the hands of these ruffians. It would shame your father to see it. Oh you may liberate me now, my reckless young lord, but do not expect my forgiveness."

Fred put his hand on his heart.

"Sweet Malvolio, your manly wrath inflames my mind like Anatolian wine, til I would break down this cruel door and make our wedding bed on broken eggs."

There was a silence from inside, and from outside too, though it took several hands over mouths and fiercely bitten tongues to make it so. Snape only growled: "Your soft words come too late. Open this door at once!"

Fred resumed: "My sallow prince, be soothed. If hard I seemed, twas grief that you declared yourself so late. The secret you have kept denied us both a thousand hours of wild and sticky lust."

"The door, foolish boy! Do you mean to release me at all? Your demeanour has changed greatly from this morning's coldness. I wonder if you are in your right senses now. I fear you are fickle and not to be trusted."

Fred gave a dramatic sigh.

"This token make I now: if you but kneel and put your lips to where this door doth ope, and if you keep your eyes shut blind throughout, I take my oath that you shall kiss my cheek."

The sound of swallowing could be heard from inside, then a dry sounding voice. "Very well. That first. Then you will see to my release."

George banged his forehead against a support beam to hold the laughter back as they heard the clatter of Snape manoeuvring the stocks to wedge his lips into the door's gap. Silently, Fred unbuckled his trousers. The smacking sound could not be mistaken.

"My most tender lord," Snape murmured drunkenly, "soft and untainted, your cheek. Pale and luminous and as smooth as a ... as a ... "

One eye prised open suspiciously.

Snape gagged.

Then he split the air with an almighty howl of rage.

*

The cry of a beast distracted Harry from his study. In a pool of candle-light, the hard-earned books lay stacked on the table in front of him. Without turning to look, he knew that Malfoy still rested recumbent on a pile of silk cushions that put Harry in mind of the princess and the pea, chipping fragments of mortar from the wall and tossing them into the huge brass urn by the fireplace. Doors and windows were fastened against the darkness. After three nights sleeping in the open summer air, Harry found it stifling.

the wytche may be knowne by its familiar which signifys a spirit in the forme of a beast

Every clunk of mortar on brass reminded him: Malfoy had kissed him. Twice, and then again in the stables with the strut of a coach pressing into his back, until he had wrenched his face away and gasped something about books and promises. It was Malfoy who had kissed him. Even if his name was something else here, even if the force of his single-minded attention made Harry feel like he was standing constantly under a spotlight, he would always be Malfoy. Harry threw a filthy look at the goblet of wine which stood, almost empty, at his elbow. It was getting harder and harder, in this place, to be sure of things like responsibility and consequences.

For instance, he had not forgotten that, back in the town at an inn called the Elephant, Sirius was most likely watching the doorway, waiting for Harry to come through it, perhaps giving way to the first needles of anxiety. He would explain, later, and Sirius would understand, because Sirius - his Sirius, and Antonio too - would want Harry to be here, where there were books that could help him. He repeated it to himself: Sirius would always want what was best for Harry.

Malfoy gave an eloquent sigh of boredom.

isolation does not spede the wytches work and she is wont to gather a coven about her personne

Without charms on them, the candles gave a skittish light that made the unpunctuated text even harder to distinguish. Now Malfoy was breaking his concentration by humming snatches of ballads, almost - but not quite - under his breath. In delay there lies no plenty. He took another sip of wine. The scent of rosewater was still on his hands, from the basin he'd been given to wash the dust and sweat off him, cautiously, while Malfoy had words with a page boy about his horse and at least did him the courtesy of pretending not to watch.

may send forth her spirite in the form of a raven or a cat

All afternoon and all evening, as the light contracted to a wavering circle around the writing desk, he had read. Religious tomes. Sonnets. Geographical texts mapping unrecognisable continents whose wriggling coastlines trailed off mid-peninsula where knowledge ended and the realm of monsters began. Harry knew little of Muggle history beyond where it intersected with the magical world and the snippets he'd gleaned from the dust jackets of Uncle Vernon's glossy books on famous military campaigns.

Was this history as it should be? Was it any place that had ever existed?

"A Treatyse on Wytches and Warlockes" lay before him, full of misguided facts about witches and not a single clue as to where or how he might find one.

through magick and lyes and the transmision of plague the wytche seekes to further her masteres desyres

The bloodthirstiness of the text shocked him. Witch burnings, which had seemed theoretical in first year History of Magic, were horribly plausible in this world where even the priests wore rosemary for luck and literacy was a skill considered marginally less useful than juggling. A few pages on, the blackest fruits of the Muggle mind loomed out at him: the thumbscrews, the scold's bridle and the wheel. Wearily, he closed the cover.

Behind him, the sounds of Malfoy's distraction had trailed off.

"Shall I take it," Malfoy asked quietly, "that you have had your fill of my library for one evening?"

The chair was unforgivingly hard, his eyes were tired, and his limbs throbbed from the strain of swordplay and wrestling. He rubbed at the ache in his neck and sighed:

"For now."

Sprawled on his dais of cushions, Malfoy raised himself on one elbow. He was a picture of indolence, with his feet bare and his hair tousled and his jaw imprinted with the line of a seam. Even his rumpled clothes hung artfully, draping away to bare his right shoulder and a ripple of muscle and hip bone around his middle, almost as if ... Harry turned back to the desk. Of course fabric didn't hang like that, not unless you meant it to. What else had Malfoy done for the last half hour but pose himself for that very moment? Harry would not succumb to flattery. He gulped a generous swig of wine, but it failed to wash away the image of Malfoy inclining his body backward to make gravity flex the muscle across his stomach.

He took another gulp to dull the recollection that there was a reckoning to be made.

Malfoy eased himself up onto the corner of the writing desk and let his ankle knock against the legs of Harry's chair. One by one, he slipped the rings from his fingers and laid them on the desk. Harry watched, thinking of how Professor Trelawney would have held the huge stones up to her eye and spun unlikely fortunes out of their flaws. He tried not to remember how, when Malfoy had left the room to have the wine brought, he had found the solitude eerie and unsettling and had read the same sentence over and over uselessly as he waited for the soft snick of the handle turning.

"I should have realised sooner, of course." Malfoy spoke lazily, his voice slurring and stripped of its practised drawl. "I should have realised from the moment I saw you."

"Realised what?"

"What you are."

Harry's stomach turned to stone. He knew. Somehow, Malfoy knew, and it was all over. A few more words and this whole hallucinatory world would come unravelling. Malfoy would be Malfoy again, and they would resume the rituals of their enmity - the sneers and the cold shoulders.

"And what am I?" he demanded in a brittle voice.

Malfoy laughed softly. "Entirely unfitting to be my wife." He reached out and ran the back of his fingernail over the point of Harry's collarbone, and down. "The way you carry yourself should have been a warning. I have a weakness for -"

Harry snatched his wrist and held it, even then not quite sure of his purpose.

"What are you doing?" The tendons under Malfoy's skin went taut as wire and his voice had its edges again: clipped and polished like a weapon. "I will not allow you to go back on our bargain. You will submit to me, or I -"

"Stop it!" The chair screeched as Harry rose to his feet. "No more threats!"

The candelabra tottered and the shadows lurched. Long ago, Harry had edged open the shutters to find that his escape was as simple as a one-storey drop; he knew the threat of force was empty. But the idea of submitting went against his every instinct. He would not be ordered. Not when Malfoy was showing himself to be surprisingly subtle in the art of slow persuasion.

"Is that how you usually get what you want? You lure people into your library and then you try and force them into ... that?"

Malfoy was preternaturally still and pale.

"I have hardly been inundated with company of that sort," he bit out stiffly. "How could it be otherwise when my father was six months in dying, coughing and seeing visions and calling for me night and day? For six months I didn't leave these estates. Then there was the mourning - twelve months, which would scarcely honour a cloth merchant or a simple clergyman, let alone my father. Do you imagine I would insult his memory by bringing lovers here?"

Damn him, Harry thought, for complicating this with grief. He had seen the pale-eyed portraits of Lucius Malfoy spreading their malevolence over the staircase and along the hall. It hadn't occurred to him to see his ghost as a rival for Malfoy's attention. It hadn't occurred to him that having a rival could wrench his ribs a notch tighter.

Malfoy's face was cast down now, as if trying to sink into the shadow made by the light behind him. No, you couldn't call him beautiful, not even in candlelight. His features were too pinched, his lips too starved looking. But his skin, where the veins showed blue as it stretched thinnest over his wrists and neck had the quality of eggshell or raw silk or old marble: its texture begged to be touched.

Harry ran his fingers over the line of Malfoy's cheekbone. A shaky breath condensed on his skin as Malfoy turned his face into Harry's hand and closed his teeth around the mound of his thumb. Idly he bit, then cruelly, running the tip of his tongue over the wound he made. And it struck Harry for the first time that, for all Malfoy's sound and fury, the control of this was completely and utterly his own. Books be damned, he could be out of that window and back on the road with Sirius in an instant. But if he left, he would take with him a yawning curiosity. Here was Draco Malfoy, perfume on his throat and, you could see from this close, a thin rim of kohl lining his eyelids, and all his pride in ruins as he offered himself up to Harry's touch. The wine warmed his belly when he thought about it.

A pale stretch of flesh, from Malfoy's jugular along to the tip of his shoulder, lay bare where he had shrugged the shirt off it, granting a glimpse of lean bicep. That moved him dangerously. Hadn't he spent three days finding his gaze drawn to the same muscles across Sirius' arms and shoulders as he lifted his pack or hauled his catch? More than ever Harry was aware of the tenuous hold of the silk on Malfoy's torso and the warmth and the tension rising from him.

"No more half measures," Malfoy murmured into his palm, his eyes veiled by lashes and shadow. "Tell me plainly. What do you mean to do?"

Harry found he had already decided.

He dipped his fingertips in the wine and snuffed out the three candles. Blindly, he laid his hands on Malfoy's shoulders, where the muscle resisted hard beneath the deceptive frailty of silk. There was smoke in the air from the candles' last gasp, wine going sour on his tongue and his fingers, and sweet rosewater rising from Malfoy's neck.

Reduced to touch and smell, the world around him was not what it was.

For a moment, he steadied himself against the body in front of him. Then he sought out Draco Malfoy's mouth in the darkness and kissed him.

*

end