Very Midsummer Madness

Chapter 8 - When the fool delivers the madman

Trip no further pretty sweeting

Journeys end in lovers meeting

As every wise man's son doth know.

Feste II(iii)

As Harry laid aside the sorry scraps of his self respect and tore his fingernails in the front of Malfoy's shirt, the last thing he thought to wish for was Percy Weasley staggering into the clearing with his face the colour of custard and his much abused peacock feathered hat staunching a wound on his forehead.

Yet Fate is fickle, and Fortune does not always wear her crown.

"For the love of God, your help!" Percy cried as he crashed through the bushes. "He has broke my head across and has given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too!"

"What is this clamour?" Malfoy demanded as icily as he could with the scant breath that Harry had left him.

"The girl, the messenger girl, she set upon us! In truth, she was provoked - it was Sir Toby pushed me to it, and him escaped with barely a scratch! She is a devil, this girl of yours. Oh, I had rather than forty pound I were at home!"

"This girl?" Malfoy took Harry's shoulders and spun him around to hold him forward like a shield. "Is this the girl you mean?"

Percy looked quizzically at his bloodied cap, then at Harry with his wet and bruised lips and his eyes still flashing anger. He gulped. "I had rather than fifty pound I were at home."

"'S that you, Aguecheek?" It was Ron's voice, slurring from nearby. "Lily-livered rogue! Valorable in the face of danger, you say? Ha! Put the girl in trousers and watch you flee like a dog! A dog, I say- why how now my lord! How is't with you?" He slumped contentedly onto a fallen pillar and peered suspiciously at Harry.

Malfoy's lip curled. "You are vilely drunk, cousin."

Ron grinned. "I should hope so, after all that ale!"

"You are a disgrace."

"Nay, my lord. I am but a humble fellow who woke up to find himself betrothed to Mistress Maria. Alas, from my wedding day I'll envy the monks their merriment."

"Who began this affray?" Malfoy scowled. "And who was it gave this knight his wound? Certainly not you. You could scarcely see your sword to - to - oh."

The sight that stole Malfoy's voice was Harry, who jogged through the trees, sword dangling from his grasp, borrowed silk on his back and his skin bright and alive with exertion.

"There you are." Harry-Sebastian threw Malfoy an easy grin as he stuck the sword into the turf and brushed the damp hair back from his face. "I let you sleep. I guess you're not used to early mornings."

Malfoy's mouth hung open. For sheer shock, perhaps. Or was it the surprising intimacy of seeing his one-night lover unblushingly dressed in his own clothes? Or simply the fact that the newcomer had immediately chosen Malfoy as the centre of his attention, fashioning with his private words a space between the two of them from which the others were excluded.

Harry-Sebastian continued, "I'm sorry if I've upset your friends. They've been spoiling for a fight since-" Then as he nodded towards Percy, his gaze skittered past his twin and stopped dead.

There was a moment as their eyes met, Harry in the green dress and Harry in the borrowed shirt, when the air around them seemed to warp and fizz with improbability. In the silence, you could believe you heard the beating wings of the white butterflies that dipped between the grass blades slowing down to an occasional thud, then climbing again as normality reasserted itself. In each of their minds was astonishment, then curiosity, and behind it the sour taste of suspicion.

Someone swallowed hard. Malfoy murmured: "Most wonderful!" and unconsciously gripped the pediment behind him for support.

Ron had tilted his head sideways as if that might make more sense of the view. "Perhaps there's something to be said for sobriety," he admitted.

"Most wonderful," repeated Malfoy. "One face, one voice, and two persons."

It was hardest, perhaps, for Harry-Sebastian who found himself looking at the ghost of his mother with her dress hanging awkwardly off one shoulder and her striking green eyes examining him.

"It's witchcraft!" Percy was the first to master his tongue. "If there has been fraud or deceit or unnatural conjuring you will certainly answer for it!"

They laughed, the lookalikes, and it one laugh they shared, with the same falling pitch and the same thread of bitterness running through it. If they were both remembering their last Transfiguration lesson and the disconcerting weight of Fred and George's wand as it cast its fateful spell, neither could think of how to say it.

Harry-Sebastian stepped closer to his sword. "How did you come to this place?" he asked cautiously.

His twin straightened his dress and gave him a hard look. "How did you?"

They glared at each other across the silence.

"And one obstinate temper," Malfoy observed in an undertone.

"Shipwreck," Harry-Sebastian finally, watching the minute flickers in his twin's gaze which revealed he was testing the broken blocks at their feet, weighing them up in his mind to see which ones might make a weapon. "Eight days ago. A fisherman pulled me out of the water and looked after me. Even if you could get them off the ground, they're too big to throw far. You're better off making a grab for the sword. How fast can you run in that dress?"

Harry-Viola shrugged. "As fast as I need to. I washed up on the beach, on the headland under the castle. Eight days ago exactly. I suppose you know how to use that sword, do you?"

Harry-Sebastian ran his fingers over the hilt. "Quick learner. It's like riding a ... never mind." He shot a quick glance at the puzzled onlookers. "And before the shipwreck. Where did you come from?"

"You first."

Ron chuckled. "This is the most wretched reunion I've ever seen. It seems, your lordship, that here is a family to equal yours for joy and warm feeling."

Turning from one to the other with an increasingly displeased expression, Malfoy was too preoccupied to reprimand him.

"This is no family of mine," Harry-Sebastian said dismissively. "I don't have a sister and my parents are dead."

"Really?" retorted Harry-Viola. "So are mine. Lily and James. Murdered. Godric's Hollow. Yours?"

"You're lying," Harry-Sebastian growled, wrenching his sword from the grass and advancing.

"Enough!" came Malfoy's startled cry.

"Am I?" his twin countered unflinchingly as the blade-point settled over his heart.

Harry-Sebastian had known as soon as his hand was on the hilt that he couldn't do it. Each passing second made it more ridiculous, standing there glaring at his own eyes and his own stubbornly clenched mouth with the sword holding them apart. His stomach was already turning at the thought of drawing blood. An orange butterfly swooped between them riding a gentle current of summer air. In its wake, on a sun-drenched hillside on a fragrant afternoon, the killing weapon in his hand seemed unreal and silly.

"Enough," Malfoy repeated firmly. "Sebastian."

He lowered the sword. It was impossible to say which of the two was more relieved. His twin's face was pink with the heat and exertion, and the scar on his forehead stood out more whitely than ever. His gaze caught on it, fascinated. He reached up and ran his finger over it lightly. "Does it hurt?"

Harry-Viola let out a long breath. "Not here," he answered. "Not at all." There was no-one else he would have allowed to touch him like this. The intimacy of it made him blush. He coughed. "And no dreams either."

"Me neither. I guess it's too far away from-" The name, unthought by either of them for several days, fell like a clouding of the sun, and each of them read the spasm of grief which passed across the other's face. Harry-Sebastian cast the sword away. "I don't understand," he said quietly. "What are you?"

"Shall we say ... your brother," suggested Harry-Viola. Percy crossed himself furiously as Malfoy lost himself in a knowing smile. "It's a very long story."

It was Percy who cut to the heart of the matter. "Of course," he crowed. "If there is a question of gender, the duel we fought was invalid and I am victorious by default."

Then Harry-Viola remembered. "The duel. Sirius - He's here. They call him Antonio. He's-"

"Waiting for me at the Elephant," Harry-Sebastian recalled guiltily.

"-been arrested. They're going to hang him."

In an instant, Malfoy was between them, pulling Harry-Sebastian away. "That's absurd. There is no cause for panic. I am not unreasonable. If this pirate is your friend, he shall have clemency."

His words were not quite soft enough.

"Oh shall he?" Harry-Viola demanded darkly.

Malfoy's smile was terse. "Naturally. Was it ever in doubt? Come with me now and we shall see to it." And before the matter could be re-opened, he guided Harry-Sebastian back towards the road.

Through the haze of slanted sunlight and the slow dislocation of drunkenness, Ron watched them all go: the lord of the manor with an anxious hand on the young swordsman's sleeve, and the messenger girl - this most unlikely twin - making angry, mannish strides beneath the green skirts, and three paces behind them all, Sir Andrew Aguecheek still scrubbing anxiously at the spots of blood on his cap.

Finally alone in the clearing, Ron leaned back against the weathered pillar and heaved a hearty sigh.

"An apple cleft in two ..." he mused under his breath, then more surely: "An apple cleft in two is not more twin than these two creatures."

The sound of it carried authoritatively. He snickered and shared a sly wink with a toppled goddess.

"And I'll warrant his lordship means to take a bite of both."

*

Hurry now! Do hurry, for though we can bend time, we never escape its governance completely. You will not want to miss this. The hillside, the lazy air, the nodding sunflowers: leave them. Summer will come again. This moment is slipping from us already. Quickly now!

Observe. The entrance hall of the Olivier villa, cavernous and quiet, watched over by stiff portraits of Lucius Malfoy and his long-dead Countess. Four of the town's guards lounge against the walls. In a corner, Sirius slumps uncomfortably with his hands bound behind him and a great welt flowering across the side of his face. The one who stands over him - you know her even in man's costume by the fleshy, amphibian face and the eyes minute with malice to be Dolores Umbridge - shakes the ache out of her knuckles and clasps her hands behind her back as she hears footsteps on the stairs outside. The way they stride in from the brightness outside, with Lord Olivier all in white and the long sword in the hands of the youth beside him hurtling a lance of reflected light across the dim chamber, already there is something in them that speaks of retribution and Umbridge wets her lips in anticipation.

The footsteps hush and the soldiers begin to stir.

"Wretched boy!" Sirius growled as he saw the newcomers, and ripped his elbows open on the stone as he pushed his way up the wall. "A traitor, a turncoat, a liar and a coward! If my hands were free you'd feel them on your throat. And here, not content with robbery you come to gloat over my punishment as well. I hope you choke on your victory, my young Judas. I hope you choke on it."

The point of his sword made a jarring scrape on the floor as Harry-Sebastian blinked against the indoor gloom. "There's a reason I didn't meet you at the Elephant," he said falteringly. "I guess it's too much to expect that you might ask me before you start calling me a liar."

Sirius hissed quietly between his teeth and fixed him with a lethal glare.

Umbridge, too, was eyeing Harry-Sebastian with interest. "Robbed, you say?" Her fingers caressed the knife sheathed at her hip. "We must bring the boy to some implements of persuasion and see if we can coax the truth out of him. I think we might begin with the Iron Maiden: I can see that gentler methods will be wasted on him."

"Over my dead body!" Sirius roared as he rushed at her, wrenching his shoulders vainly against the shackles. A pike and a heavy boot felled him long before he reached her and his chinbone clacked sickeningly on the stone. There was an echo as he tumbled down - two voices nearby calling his name. As the sparks of light cleared, through the humiliation of helplessness and the taste of blood in his mouth, he saw a curtain of stained green linen swing before him. As he looked up along it, something caught in his throat. Breathing heavily, he allowed the green-robed imposter to help him to his feet.

"What is this?" Sirius demanded, the confusion coming out as accusation. "Have you made division of yourself? Which is Sebastian?"

"He is," Harry-Viola said. He cleaned Sirius' bleeding chin with his sleeve and turned him around to work on his bindings. "We met on the road yesterday. You thought I was your Sebastian, I think. You intervened in a duel and gave me a strange speech about money."

"This?" cried Harry-Sebastian in disbelief. He grappled with the unfamiliar silk shirt and pulled a hessian pouch from beneath it. "Is this what you wanted?" He held the bundle before Sirius' eyes and slipped its twine cord around his neck. "Did you think I would lose it without fighting to the last drop of my blood?"

Sirius wore a bewildered grin and staggered a little as his arms were freed.

"My boy," he murmured deeply, and Harry-Sebastian hugged him in the rough, easy way he had learned from Sirius himself. Even after all these days away from the water, a faint scent of fish still lingered in his clothes and he closed his eyes and let it into his lungs.

"Be there two crimes or only one." It was Umbridge who interrupted, gracing Malfoy with a thin smile. "A punishment is surely necessary, my lord."

Malfoy turned his scowl from the prisoner to the guard. "What should I care?"

"I would not wish to trouble you. Only, when your most gracious father was lord of -"

He interrupted her curtly: "Those days are gone." He kept his gaze fixed on the doorway, the one corner of the room where his father's cool gaze would not look back at him, and considered. "Antonio - notable pirate and salt-water thief. Your crimes against my family -"

With two quick steps, Harry-Sebastian was at his side, one hand claiming the inside of Malfoy's elbow and tilting him closer as he leaned in to murmur in his ear. Only the sputter of breath could be heard. That and - faintly, if you concentrated, if you knew to listen for it - the words "anything I desire".

The young count's jaw tightened and he snapped, "I am well aware of the terms of our bargain."

There was more whispering, delicate consonants slipping from Harry's mouth into Malfoy's ear. If the whisperer leaned in too close, if his lips must have brushed against skin, there was no objection. In fact, it looked almost as if the young count was fighting a smile. Harry paused, his grip on the count's elbow becoming gentle, and he smiled. Brushing aside the fine hair that was irritating his nose, he whispered a final few syllables which made Malfoy break away with the colour rising around his collar.

"Very well," Malfoy said quietly. "But I shall hold you to that."

Harry gave an easy shrug and a smile that made his eyes dark. It was Malfoy who looked away.

"Antonio." With one deep breath, the lord of the manor tried to resume the mantle of his authority. "Your crimes against my family are grave and your life would be a fitting penalty." He shot one last communicative glance at Harry-Sebastian. "However. You have shown yourself honourable in your rescue of this young man from the sea and I understand you have been a loyal and selfless friend to him in his trials. The quality of mercy is ... over-rated. Nonetheless, I declare your years in exile to be sufficient punishment for your crime. You are pardoned."

Sirius slumped dumbly. From behind him came a tiny cough. It repeated.

"Perhaps your lordship does not appreciate the magnitude of this man's crimes." Umbridge, the same smile fixed on her face. "There are innocent citizens to be protected. The criminal mind draws others to it."

There might have been a magnetic pull in Harry-Sebastian's lips the way Malfoy leaned into them. More whispering. This time he laughed - a sudden, reckless sound in the solemn hallway and the portraits seemed to sneer down from the walls at the intrusion.

"You have performed a loyal service for me this day," he told Umbridge gravely. "I should like to make you a gift in gratitude."

Even in a gruff soldier's uniform, Umbridge could manage a girlish simper. "Your lordship is too generous."

"Perhaps. In the old sanctuary above my estate there lie a number of sculptures. One of them, I suspect, is Justice. Tis a godhead in your very image. Somewhat crumbled, only a little stained with lichen. Madam, I should like you to place it near the watch house to commemorate your services today."

Umbridge gave a smile. A small cough. Another smile. "I am honoured, deeply honoured, of course. But I'm afraid we shall have to trouble your lordship for a horse and cart."

"Oh, we keep no horses here," Malfoy assured her innocently. "Something so weighty as Justice, surely, is worth the trouble of carrying yourself. Tis no more than ten feet tall and you have four men of the law to assist you. Come now. Who is protecting the township while you dally here? I will detain you no longer."

If a viper could smile it would have resembled Umbridge as she backed out of the room, hissing under her breath at her luckless soldiers as she went.

Malfoy spared one distasteful glance for the recently reprieved Sirius, who was still wearing a dumbstruck smile as Harry-Sebastian and his twin fussed over him awkwardly and rubbed the circulation back into his hands.

"A feast," Malfoy declared. "I will have a feast today, as soon as the table can be prepared. There will be wine and music and every delicacy that can be prepared in short time. We shall celebrate the reunion of these two brothers. Feste - where is the fool? Reinstate him to my service and have him sing. Take word to Her Grace, I will have her presence at dinner. Her household as well, and the mayor, the priests - whom does one invite to these occasions? Maria will take charge of the invitations."

Hermione pulled a pencil from the depths of her skirt and scouted around for some paper.

"And tell Her Grace nothing of this afternoon's revelations," Malfoy added archly. "Let us observe her surprise."

The feast's guests of honour, who were talking over the top of each other in their rush to explain the confusion of the last two days to Sirius and to each other, gave no indication of having heard a word of this. When Malfoy laid his hand flat over the small of Harry-Sebastian's back, feeling the flesh firm and warm through silk, no objection was made. Only Harry-Sebastian was close enough to see the short, quick breaths escaping between Malfoy's lips and the reckless pulse that vibrated under his collarbone. But he didn't turn to look.

*

You close your eyes to blink and when you open them you are in hell.

The air is thick with smoke, dust swirls, and the heat strikes the side of your body like a mace. The sweat rises in your hair as quick as rainfall - will you choke or will you faint, your poor body is trying to do both at once - and the soot is gritty and foul in your mouth.

Welcome to the Olivier kitchens in all their glory. Perhaps it is only the firmness of my grip that stays you from seeking the door, yet linger a little, I beg you. Close your eyes to keep out the sting of the ash. Let the subtler sensations of the kitchens seduce you.

The workaday smells of cooking, these you know already: the ancient sheep meat, the feathers, the spices, the stench of blood. But there are new aromas - can't you taste them in your mouth? A pig has been brought from the village and the air is sticky with the fat of it where it roasts succulently alongside the deer and the young calf. Bread and cakes are in the oven and the hot yeasty smell puts a clench of homesickness in your heart, a yearning for a rustic childhood you never had. There is fruit also - great pots of peach, pear and quince bubbling in honey and sweet wine, and the too-sweetness of it is tempered by the fragrance of cardamom and cloves. The spice merchants in the town are counting their silver. This is a meal for which no expense has been spared.

And listen. All about is a clatter as pots are drawn from shelves and cupboards leaving everywhere a fine mist of dust, for they are dank with disuse: it is almost fifteen years since the old countess died and the young master had shown every sign of inheriting his father's distaste for company. Polishing rags fly and bit by bit they coax the gleam out of tarnished copper.

Above the clash of metal and the wheeze of the bellows rises a higher note also - a sound little heard in this place this last year, and before that only in furtive tones. The kitchens, from the darkest corner of the scullery to the great chimney of the roasting oven, are raucous with laughter. It rises and bursts forth, and something of the flavour of it is mingling with the spices in the pots and the ale in the servants' mugs. Later - much later- stories will be told of a castle whose whole household, under an evil spell, slumbered for one hundred years before rescue came. This is the house they will be remembering, and these the servants, who slowly are casting off the rites of mourning and turning their voices to their old songs of merriment which still sit half-remembered in their throats.

And at the centre of this storm of activity, amid the musicians' pealing galliard and all the eddies of laughter and Feste the fool juggling melons (badly) in the doorway, sits Draco: the young count, the lord of the estate and the twelve-month orphan. Less composed than he is accustomed to presenting himself - note, for instance, the gash of torn stitching along his left shoulder, or the thickly laid powder which doesn't quite hide the purple bruise under his jaw - still there is an excitement in the way he holds himself forward just now, a bright anticipation in his eye.

Take your seat - here beside me, at the foot of the table where the music and the conversation are loudest - and observe.

The pageboy bowed and retreated at his command.

"Let none of you speak," Malfoy instructed and cast his eye gravely along the row of guests to either side of him, from Sir Toby's weary glance into his ale to the nervous half-smile of the town's new curate. "We shall see what Her Grace the Duchess makes of her messenger girl now."

He reserved a particularly wolfish grin for Harry-Viola, who sat at his left hand. At his right hand Harry-Sebastian frowned.

So perfectly alike were the two that Harry-Viola had to keep his gaze averted from his twin to avoid the vertiginous lurch that swept over him each their eyes met and suddenly he was outside his body looking in. And yet a persistent observation would reveal the differences their opposite genders had wrought on them. Though Harry-Viola was now dressed in nondescript brown breeches and a cream-coloured shirt that strained a little where it was accustomed to Malfoy's narrower waist, though the only physical souvenir of his femininity was the length of green crepe he wore tied at his neck, yet still the grip of the corset was upon him in the way he sat straight enough to put the table-legs to shame and in the unconsciously furtive crossing of his arms. In unthinking contrast, Harry-Sebastian sprawled slightly against his chair's unfamiliar stiffness, giving with his expression of impatience and the nonchalant drape of his dirty-nailed hands on the tabletop the impression that at any moment he might turn his face away, without apology or embarrassment, to spit.

And so they sat as Ginny, flanked by McGonagall on one side and Trelawney on the other, marched into the room, her expression fierce enough to make Feste back away and Dumbledore nod his players to a halt. Silence fell - as did three airborne melons, one after the other with an uncomfortable silence between their splatters - as the Duchess noted the assembly of feasters and included them all in her displeasure.

"To what purpose am I summoned?" She rounded on Malfoy instantly, who reflected her gaze. "A matter of importance requires my presence, your errand boy informs me, and it cannot await my convenience. But no more than this can he disclose. He turns his face to the ground and flinches from my questions in mortal terror. I trust, my lord, that nothing less than death or plague or the second coming would embolden you to such incivility."

No answer came, save for Malfoy's enigmatic smile.

"Which is it?" Ginny snapped.

Though not exactly unkempt, she was groomed carelessly now, with her ringlets shaken out and lashed into an unravelling plait at her back. There was a hoarse, harsh thread in her voice and what might have been a red rim around her eyes. Anyone but Malfoy - leaning back with a version of Harry at either hand and intoxicated more with the tension than with the wine - might have feared her a little. Her gaze flitted around the table and returned with ice in it.

"Where is Viola?" she demanded. "What mischief have you worked upon her? Speak!"

Malfoy took a sip of his wine and let the silence draw out. "You will not see Viola again."

"If you have brought her to grief," she articulated grimly as she approached the table, reached across it and snatched the glass from his hands. "If you have done her the slightest harm, neither your rank nor your overstated charms will protect you."

Dark pools of wine splattered across the tabletop and, finally, Malfoy flinched.

"Save your threats," Harry-Sebastian said quietly at the same moment Harry-Viola stood up.

Ginny looked from one to the other and laid the glass down unsteadily. The only sound in the room was the grinding of its rim as it tipped and rolled, backwards and forward, along the wood.

"Monstrous!" Trelawney trilled as recognition sank in. "This is a reprehensible deception! Shame on you all!"

But Ginny remained silent. As she studied Harry-Viola with her hand tangled unconsciously in her necklace, many around the table looked on sympathetically, wondering how the flatness of his ribs and straightness of his hips could have deceived them so completely. No girl, not even the kitchen attendants with arms grown thick from the pestle and the cleaver, had such an angle where the spread of shoulderblades tapered into ribs. Nor was Ginny the only one to note how the black curl of his eyelashes and the reflective effect of the green crepe around his neck still left upon him a beauty that was not entirely masculine.

Let her study him all she wished, Harry would not falter. He felt like he was breathing properly for the first time in weeks, and it wasn't only the change of clothes that caused it.

"Well go on then," he invited. "Call me a liar. Or a fraud, a traitor - any names you like. It won't be the first hasty judgment you've made today."

Her quiet scrutiny made him uncomfortable and if the table hadn't lain between them he might have shaken her.

"I've never told you any lies except my name." Didn't it ring out convincingly in his natural voice, and wasn't it almost true. "I told you I was shipwrecked and lost, and that was true. I promised I'd work for you, and I did. This morning I told you I'd never laid a finger on your beloved Lord Olivier."

Her raised eyebrows challenged him.

"And he didn't," his twin cut in swiftly with a proprietorial hand on the arm of the young count's chair. Malfoy shifted uncomfortably, eyeing his distant wineglass, as Harry-Sebastian dipped one finger off the arm of the chair to stroke at his sleeve.

"No, he didn't," Malfoy admitted finally with his eyes averted.

In the doorway, servants hovered and whispered and the aroma of the approaching feast was stealing insistently into the room. "Pheasant," declared one guest in an undertone and his companion murmured agreement. For the first time, Ginny took in the size of the gathering and the set of the table.

"If I have misjudged you," she began formally, "then you have my apologies. And yet tell me, Viola - that name is false, isn't it, Viola? I've never known your name. What then should I call you?"

Last time he had heard that question, with his head still dizzy from sunlight and his skin itchy with salt, he had scrambled for an answer. This time, he didn't have to think. "Harry," he said. "Just Harry."

His twin's cough of indignation was lost in the gluttonous sigh that went up as the first of the platters appeared in the doorway.

"The kitchens are ready," Hermione announced. Malfoy glanced once more at the drama in which he himself could play no more than a peripheral part and nodded. The musicians struck up again and the feast commenced.

Though cavernous, the dining hall was long and thin, and the noise bounced around in it like a box full of bees. Tongues loosened with wine and abundance - and the knowledge that they would not be asked to pay for it - the guests' chatter was loud and easy. Those with long-held grievances against the count and his family had politely hung them up at the door along with their travelling cloaks. In the whole room, the only thing strained was the table-legs.

Harry had seen no want of food over the last five years - the Hogwarts dinner table rarely allowed empty space between the platters and tureens and jugs of pumpkin juice. But this was something different. As the dishes emerged from the kitchens on great silver platters, their aromas preceded them like unearthly heralds: whole chickens, baked ducks, rabbit pie and the calf so bulky it took two grown men to bear it. This was not the placid fare he was used to. The empty eye sockets of the lamb's head stared back at him.

When he raised a cutlet of venison to his mouth and bit down, the taste flowed over his tongue. Hot and sweet and bloody. He let his breath carry the taste of it through his throat, down into his lungs, and he bit again. As he sucked the juices from his fingers, the memory of using a fork seemed so entirely nonsensical that he laughed.

"Who could think of going home?" the mayor was chortling, two seats to his left, as he helped himself to another serve of pheasant pie. "I could eat until daybreak. Who can say when we may see a feast to rival this one?"

Beside him, the town's doctor belched heartily and sopped up the last of his gravy with bread. "To the most generous host in the kingdom!" he bellowed and took up his glass. The toast went up around the table.

Malfoy coloured. "More wine!" he cried to the pageboy behind him. "And if the supply runs low again, sent to the village for more! Malvolio will see to ..."

When the master of the house fell silent, so did many conversations around him.

"What has become of Malvolio?" he asked suddenly. "Maria! What has become of my steward?"

Hermione looked up guiltily from where Ron was whispering in her ear, his face almost hidden by her loose hair.

"He remains ... much distract."

"Distract?"

"Mad," Ron clarified happily. "Quite mad. He's violently besotted with you."

Malfoy gave a shrug as if to remark that it was hardly surprising.

"And he believes you return the sentiment."

This time Malfoy choked on his wine. "Bring him here. We shall question him and set this right."

It was some minutes before Fred and George returned, supporting a rather worse-for-wear Severus Snape between them. Apart from the scraps of straw and feathers that stuck to his clothing and the unrepentant blare of the yellow stockings, his neck and wrists were still encased in the stocks.

"I regret to inform it appears I've misplaced the key," George reported solemnly as if there wasn't a key shaped bulge in his breast pocket. "But then what can you expect of a fools and rabble and base carousers?"

Snape might have protested at this point if it weren't for the fact that someone had thoughtfully inserted an apple in his mouth. Malfoy dislodged it gently.

"Good Malvolio-"

"You!" Snape accused in a voice deep and hoarse with two days' abuse. "You should hang your head in shame."

Malfoy drew himself up straighter. "Take care, sir. If you have a grievance, you may state it plainly."

There was a fierce black light in Snape's eyes. "What need of grand speeches when the instrument of your betrayal is here in my pocket? Go ahead, my lord. Take it. May you blush to revisit your forked-tongued words."

Malfoy retrieved the battered sheet of paper and cast his eye over the text, as Harry-Sebastian reading over his shoulder grew wide-eyed.

"A love letter? I didn't write this," Malfoy protested, and it was not to Snape that he spoke. The joins of the stocks creaked in anger. "Though the hand is like to mine."

He was not the first to notice that Ron was giggling. It was the sort of giggle that spread to people who had no need to understand the joke.

"This is your doing?" Malfoy concluded dubiously over the rising laughter and sighed. "Very well. Someone take him outside and whip him."

Hermione laid down her glass with a clatter before the laughter had died on Ron's lips. "I wrote the letter."

"Of course you did." Malfoy leaned back in his chair, supremely satisfied. "Why?"

She had to hesitate a moment to remember. "Sport," she said. "But not only that. Your steward is wont to think himself above his fellows. He uses his authority to press personal grievances with no care for fairness. A lesson in humility was no more than he deserved."

Snape's eyes burned and his words came out like cannonballs. "This is all falsehood."

Malfoy considered. "Not entirely. Still, this duplicity must be punished. Someone take her outside and - enough!" He threw Harry-Sebastian's hand from his elbow and scowled. "Will you object to this too? I may not even regulate my household without your leave? As you will then. Maria, since it appears I shall be judged the worst sort of tyrant if I dare chastise you, this is your penalty. I hear idle talk of a romance between yourself and the upstanding Sir Toby Belch. You will marry him. Tomorrow. That should be sufficient punishment for both of you."

"Spineless." Snape's low growl carried through the room.

As Malfoy plucked a roasted fig from the platter of hare and toyed with it, his voice sounded like it was clinging by its fingertips to calm. "Come now, Malvolio. You have been a loyal and loving servant, as you were to my father before me. Your place is at the head of my household. I will not have bad feeling between us."

With finger and thumb, he held out the fruit. Snape turned his glare on it, where it hovered invitingly before his lips. No cat sniffed unfamiliar food more suspiciously than he did now. A drop of juice ran down his master's thumb, following the raised vein at his wrist, and then fell. Snape bit. The flesh tore and melted in his mouth; the tiny seeds crunched like dry bone.

"Tell me there will be an end to this ridiculous feud," Malfoy coaxed as he pressed the moist remnant of the fruit into the steward's mouth. Snape swallowed hungrily but the tendons in his neck still strained.

"I will have revenge."

"No," Malfoy murmured, leaning closer. There was sweet juice on his fingers, and he offered the tips of them against Snape's lower lip. "You shall have satisfaction, my friend. Satisfaction. On condition that first we have peace."

Snape took one slender finger into his mouth much as a fish might taste a hook. Despite his superiority in height and undiminished hauteur, he seemed captive to its pull as he sucked it clean. When no reprimand came, he closed his lips around a second finger and then the thumb.

"Peace?" Malfoy insisted, making no move to retrieve his hand.

Snape gave a jerk of his head that might almost be a nod.

"Then play on!" And at Malfoy's command, the musicians struck up.

*

In the dancing and resumption of conversation that followed, Harry-Sebastian finally found a chance to tug lightly on his twin's sleeve and lead him into the hallway. Out here, the music had a muffled sound and the air was easier to breathe.

They turned to each other, as kitchen maids balancing tottering piles of platters passed them in the corridor, and shrugged at the enormity of what had to be said now that they had their first moment alone.

"So you're ..." Harry-Viola left the conclusion hanging.

"No," Harry-Sebastian corrected, perhaps a bit more sharply than was necessary. "You are."

There was a sullen silence as it became obvious that this line of argument was unlikely to be fruitful.

"Don't suppose you know how this happened."

"No idea. Last thing I remember is Transfiguration and -

"That bloody wand. What did it do? If we were splinched, we'd be missing bits. I'm not missing anything. You?"

"No."

Another cautious silence fell.

"So you've moved in here then," Harry-Viola summarised with a gesture of disdain that encompassed the building and its occupants. "Made your peace with Malfoy and started playing with swords."

His twin grabbed at a drumstick on a passing platter, bit it casually and replaced it on another. "Not only that. I learned to sail. I walked thirty miles through the mountains with Antonio - with Sirius. I know how to cure sardines. What have you been doing?"

"Trying to find a way out of here. I looked around the town. And around the castle."

"You seem to have made quite an impression there," Harry-Sebastian's mouth turned unkindly. "I really thought Ginny was going to slap you before. She looks like she could do it, too. Still, I can see why you've stayed there so long. That dress does impressive things to her-"

"Don't start!" Harry-Viola felt the colour rising in him and loosened the scarf at his neck. "I'm not interested in ... that."

Harry-Sebastian's mouth had a mocking curve he might have picked up from the count himself. "You think I don't know exactly what you're interested in?"

There was a long moment of silence as the ramifications of that occurred to them both. Then from not far away came Malfoy's voice irritably speaking Sebastian's name.

"Look, I've tried every spell, every password I can think of." Harry-Viola put aside his antagonism and illustrated his frustration with fretting hands. "The spell that got me here - got us here if you like - I've tried it backwards and forwards, I've spoken it under the full moon, but I can't for the life of me work out how to get out of this place."

His twin laughed. "It must look very different from where I'm standing."

"What do you mean?"

Harry-Sebastian shrugged. "Doesn't any of this seem familiar to you? Twins and shipwrecks and boys dressed as girls? I didn't realise until I saw how Ginny looked at you before, the shock on her face, like something out of a pantomime. Reminded me of that play - don't you remember? The Smeltings/St Winifred's end-of-term play. Dudders played a soldier. The girl with the red wig had a lisp. Pus-face Polkiss kept saying "Come, sir" and leering."

Harry-Viola frowned. "I remember bits. But none of it made sense. I never got who ended up with ... wasn't it the girl twin who ended up with the older guy. There was a priest and a wedding ... that would be ... " He stopped dead. "What exactly have you done with Malfoy?"

The smirk on his twin's face, like the shirt, might have been borrowed.

Harry-Viola soothed: "Look, it's okay. You couldn't help it. I know what he's like, all those threats and the wandering hands."

The smirk intensified. "Actually, I don't think you know what he's like. Not at all." Catching the widening in his companion's eyes, he looked over his shoulder to see Lord Olivier himself sauntering through the doorway, smiling as he saw them.

Harry-Viola whispered urgently, "What about this play? We must be near -"

"Shh!" his twin cut him off angrily, hissing. "When it happens, it happens."

And then Malfoy was upon them, proclaiming "They're playing lavolta and it strikes me that I have never seen you dance," and guiding them back into the dining hall.

The racket in the room - music, clatter of feet, laughter and raised voices - hurt Harry-Sebastian's ears. It was all wrong. This time of evening was for kneeling in the sand alongside Sirius, picking the nets clean in the last of the light and listening to stories. He thought longingly of the night just passed: a mug of wine, a book, and Malfoy's quiet presence on the cushions behind him.

An elbow jolted into him and he turned just in time to catch the snarl which twisted his twin's mouth as he jerked himself free of Malfoy's grip and stalked away.

Harry-Sebastian detained the count with a firm grip on his arm as his suspicions took shape. "Tell me. What were you two doing up in the sanctuary when I arrived? How did your shirt get torn?"

"Nothing," Malfoy answered too quickly, taken off guard. "I don't recall." With shadows on his face from the torchlight behind him, he had never more resembled the Slytherin prefect who snickered and pointed in Potions lessons. Now he seemed to be weighing the silence to gauge whether his answer had been sufficient. He surrendered suddenly to Harry's grip and, with one small step, crossed the line between polite distance and deliberate intimacy.

"It was nothing," he repeated, quietly determined as he worked himself between Harry-Sebastian's arms. For all his assumed languor, he still had his Seeker's reflexes. He waited for the exact moment when Harry opened his mouth to argue and then he kissed him.

The kiss, by Malfoy's usual standards, was brief and chaste. But it left Harry flushed with confusion, his arms full of manipulative aristocrat and a crowd of spectators looking on. All day he'd put off the thought that he needed time to think. About how far he was prepared to let Malfoy take this. About whether things he did under a false name in a world he didn't believe in could have consequences that were real. And, most practically, about the method of it: whether he intended to take control or make Malfoy work to persuade him past the limit concessions he had made the night before. Now there was a hush in the nearby conversations and from behind came a drunken cheer of encouragement. The strategy of it appeared to have been taken out of his hands.

Malfoy was looking more than usually pleased with himself as he reached for Harry and kissed him again, this time with the sort of thoroughness that made onlookers turn away and launch sudden conversations about the weather. Harry had two choices available to him and he did not intend to back away. Instead, he closed his ears to the scandalised muttering and set about reacquainting himself with the fundamental paradox of Draco Malfoy: provided you were doing precisely as he wished, he could make himself as pliable and sweet as butter warming on a window sill. Right now, he was squirming slightly against the touch of Harry's hands on his hips as he wound his arms around Harry's shoulders. It was almost girlish the way he moved, with his smooth hair and slender limbs and the extravagance of silk and perfume. But he kissed Harry with a man's mouth: hard and unapologetic.

"There," said Malfoy, whispering with breath that belonged to both of them, and nipping gently at Harry's swollen lower lip. "Consider your question answered. We need not speak of him again."

And just as suddenly he disentangled their limbs and sauntered away through the sea of shoulders and backs which his guests turned to him. A wake of hissing and mumbling followed him. At the door the curate threw him one expressive glance of disgust as he left with the mayor and most of the guildsmen. Malfoy's brittle laughter seemed to hang over the room long after they had gone.

*

The drink was abundant, the firelight bright and Dumbledore's musicians played spiritedly enough to make the dead get up and dance. It did not take long for the guests to succumb to merriment once more.

Sirius, who had taken down a slender scimitar from its clasps on the wall, was tossing it from hand to hand with the glow of reminiscence in his eyes. With a chuckle, he fastened Percy's hesitant fingers around the hilt and guided him through the back-handed slashing of an imaginary throat.

"Achilles himself would have faltered if he'd fought with that in his eyes," he scoffed as he snatched the sorry remains of Percy's cap and tossed it into the fire. "Come on lad, show me some spirit!"

Dragging his mortified gaze from the sparking peacock feather, Percy tightened his grip and swung again, ripping a great whoosh of sound from the air and following through viciously with an invisible dagger in his left hand.

"Not bad," Sirius grinned and gave his new protégé's shoulder a long squeeze of approval. "Not bad at all."

Percy bent over his blade to inspect an apparent flaw in the joinery and did not look up for quite some time.

Ron had never looked so happy. A smile was on his lips, a rosy glow lit up his face and a rim of ale froth surrounded his mouth as he leaned his cheek against Hermione's left breast. She sighed deeply and stroked his hair. Romance was in the eye of the beholder, and she chose not to behold the trickle of ale-flavoured drool that sat ominously at the corner of his mouth. When she laid her hand across his throat, she could feel the rumble of his snore and, beneath it, the sluggish and contented rhythm of his heart.

"A terrible waste," Professor McGonagall was observing to Professor Trelawney, and if her voice carried loudly to the corner behind her where the steward was delicately removing his yellow stockings, this was no more than co-incidence. "Her Grace will no longer deign to have the portrait in her sight. It will have to be burned. A pity. Tis a good likeness. Young Lord Olivier has such a delicate tournure of calf and the chiton does flatter him."

"Good ladies." Even after the evening's privations, it seemed Snape could still force his mouth into the distant cousin of a smile. "It would be uncharitable of me to refrain from mentioning that I may be in a position to assist you. Come, let me pour you some wine while we converse."

McGonagall raised one critical eyebrow. "Wine? Do you mean to tell me the cellars here hold nothing stronger?"

"Nothing. Except the former Count's prized collection of aged port which is ..." As their eyes locked, the sound of Malfoy's voice rose above the music and faded. "Entirely at your disposal."

Professor Trelawney tugged her bodice a half-inch lower as she watched him leave. "I do have a weakness for the colour yellow," she murmured. Where a pessimist might see a man rank with barn dust and the stench of foul, in her mind's eye she could picture the moment he would upend the pitcher to send water streaming through his hair, smooth and silvery where it clung to his chest.

McGonagall's fancies were altogether less complex. A good deal of fine port and later, perhaps, a dance.

Harry-Viola gave up. The painting had nothing more to offer. He had been studying it for the last ten minutes and still couldn't see any purpose beyond the illustration of some particularly gruesome ways to die. It was the story of a saint, no doubt, who had preached his unfashionable gospel with failing conviction as his heathen audience jeered and sharpened their pokers. He turned back to the room.

Taking off that dress had transfigured him. It had turned him into a leper, or a foreigner, possibly both. The men of the town had taken to addressing him with a parody of ebullience - a slap on the back, a guffawed "Well that was a spectacle!" - before they backed away warily as if the urge to wear a green dress might be contagious. Even Professor Trelawney had broken off part way through her commentary on the eligible bachelors in the room with a startled "Oh, but of course ..." and excused herself. Ron alone, with his drunken lack of affectation, appeared untroubled by the change. But Ron had spent a great part of the evening conversing with an empty suit of armour which, to judge by his reaction, told the bawdiest jokes in the kingdom.

As expected, nobody noticed as Harry slipped out into the hallway. Though the space was empty, it seemed crowded with the noise of the revelry inside and the competing din from the servants' celebration in the kitchens. He headed in the opposite direction, seeking quiet.

He had almost passed through the entrance hall when a flicker of movement caught his eye. Ginny. She was standing on the landing of the grand staircase with the marble bust of Draco Malfoy in front of her and all the portraits of his pointy-faced ancestors looming down from the wall like a sky full of malign stars. Harry could find no words strong enough to voice his disgust. When he'd first met her, ringing out bold words about music, food and love, there had been something reckless and good in her obstinate belief that love was simply a matter of persistence. Her faith - the very idea of pure faith, which was as rare as Runespoor eggs in the world he knew - had drawn him to her. Bit by bit, it had infected him too. He'd grown fretful, felt his heart skip a beat for no reason in a room she had just left, found himself pacing impatiently in the times they weren't together.

But this, this was no kind of faith. In the face of today's events, it was stupidity gross enough to bring a blush even to Fudge's cheeks. He drew a long breath to speak his mind.

She stepped back.

At first he thought it must be a trick of the light. But, no, the marble Malfoy had been remodelled. With flour and water and judicious use of chicken feathers, he had gained a full beard, ponderous eyebrows and a mottled complexion which, Harry thought, better reflected the state of his heart. The dripping paste formed a stalactite beneath his pointy chin.

As he climbed the stairs Ginny turned to him and shrugged. "Alas, I am no artist," her lips twitched. "Do you think I've captured the soul of him?"

The profanity of her vandalism astounded him. This was the funeral pyre of the last of her idolatry. She blinked quickly with the effort of not laughing out loud. "Not quite," he frowned very seriously and, with a quick tweak, puckered the dough at the corner of Malfoy's thin mouth so that his expression turned down sourly. "There."

Beside him, the empty chamber pot on Lucius Malfoy's head was a definite improvement. Ginny wiped her fingers on the plinth and looked upon her work in satisfaction. The quiet and the darkness seemed to grow. Her smile faded. The beads at her wrist were jingling as she twisted her hand in her skirt and he could hear the delicate sound as she swallowed. That dress had made all the difference. To stand so close to her in a man's clothes was a sexual act. He retreated down a step.

"Harry, tell me," she said quickly, and stopped. When she bent to place the bowl of feathers and flour on the step, the distant torchlight threw emphatic shadows under her eyelashes and lips, and around the curve of her breasts. "Tell me. When you were Viola, were there not moments you feared being discovered?"

Her voice was warm with excitement. It drew him back to the easier days when she had laid her head in the skirts of the green dress and scoffed at his stories.

"Every day," he told her. "It was better when I didn't have to say anything. And I could never get the walking right, so I spent as much time as could sitting down. There was one morning Valentine burst into my room before I was dressed."

"What did you do?"

"I had to knock over a candlestick to distract her." Ginny laughed. "I nearly set fire to the bed. She told me I was the clumsiest girl in christendom and even an armless cripple would have no use for me as a wife."

She laughed again - her laugh he remembered chorused with Fred's and George's, Ron's or Dean's, never on its own. It was the same laugh as her brothers', a little higher, a little rounder, possessing none of the musical curlicues that most women so artfully strove for. In the silence of the staircase, he listened to the echo of it. Under the cover of merriment, she had eased down a step closer and he found he couldn't think of a single thing to say.

"What would you think," she asked softly. "If I said I envy you? If I said I should like to dress up in breeches and doublet and find myself shipwrecked on a foreign shore. Pretend to be what I'm not."

Across the height advantage created by the stair between them, she reached down and ran her fingers over the remnant of green linen tied at his neck. Her eyes were very bright. "Is that the only difference between men and women - the cut of the clothes we wear? Are you still Viola, or aren't you?"

Her hand slipped onto his shoulder and the realisation hit him suddenly that she had no intention of removing it. As her thumb rubbed over the bare skin at the base of his neck, the heat surged down through his chest and into his belly.

"No," he mumbled. "Yes."

And before he could master his tongue to tell her that, so long as she stayed right where she was, he would make himself whichever or whatever pleased her best, she had kissed him. Fleetingly. The sort of kiss that allowed a casual retreat. His lips tingled as the touch of her disappeared. Where her hair had brushed against him, thin lines stung his skin like lash marks. She was observing him obliquely as she pulled her lower lip between her teeth.

Breaking free of his control, his hands found her waist and pulled her back to him. Willingly she came, steadying herself on his shoulders as their mouths bumped together. If their second kiss was messy, it was also the sort of kiss that laid aside all defences. There was no shame in the way she leaned down into him and opened her mouth into his.

This was the moment of all his fantasies: his arms full of the luxurious length of her hair and those tactile cascades of silk, but beneath it her body was hard and strong as it strained in his grip. He laid his hand flat over her back and felt the flexing of her shoulder blades as she pulled him tighter against her body. There was no art to her kiss, not like Malfoy's calculated seduction. It was simple, a bit too eager, a bit too wet, but utterly lacking in subterfuge. When she had had enough of the taste of his mouth, she stopped. Though she drew back very slightly, her arms were still looped over his shoulders.

Harry ventured an uncertain smile.

She laughed again, and kissed his mouth hungrily, and murmured with her face pressed against his hair, "You have rescued me from sin and damnation!" He could feel the laughter clenching her ribs; there was a hysterical note in it. "Every night you were in my dreams, with your deep voice and your clever hands, and every morning you made me wake up ashamed. I needed marriage more than ever to escape the unholy passion you put in me. The things I did with you! I couldn't tell you even now the things you whispered to me in my sleep."

He took a guess at what one of those things might have been and breathed it into her ear.

"Now you can tell me that," her eyes sparkled wickedly as one finger trailed into the angle of his shirt. "Now that you're no longer my maidservant. Say it again."

He did so. Then he did what he'd spent ten days dreaming of and ran his hands from the constrained clench of her waist up along her sides until his thumbs were pressed into the pert flesh of her breasts. She watched him with her lips slightly parted and laid her hands over his wrists.

"I've not forgotten what you said. No man could replace me in your heart. It was a riddle then, a nuisance." She touched a finger tenderly to his pouting lip. "Will you say it again, now that your secret is known?"

It was almost too much, the liberties she was allowing him, the faint mist of her perfume, the desire in her breath and the silk that slid beneath his fingers. It was only the fear of this moment ending, which dug between his ribs like a blade, that kept him from delirium. "If it pleases you."

When she had kissed him once more, lazily and with an experimental roughness, she slipped out of his arms and climbed away from him. "Well then?" As she disappeared at the top of the stair, there was no mistaking the invitation in the smile she gave him.

For a long moment, Harry couldn't make his legs move. Then, as he took his first jerky step, there came a roaring in his ears. Either the wind outside had picked up or the blood in his veins was in flood.

*

Harry-Sebastian was listening to one of Sirius' tall tales - of bare-breasted mermaids who bore no resemblance to the dignified creatures Harry himself had met - when he felt it, like a change in the air pressure, like the sun slipping behind a cloud. When he looked around, Malfoy was no longer in

the room.

"The chiefest peril of the mermaid is her deadly siren song," Percy was proclaiming pompously at his elbow. "Of course," he added with a rush of sincerity that brought a blush to his own cheek and to Sirius', "I expect you've mastered far greater perils than a few mermaids in your adventures."

Harry couldn't fight it. He'd become so used to Malfoy's presence - pushing and provoking and throwing out impossible demands like confetti - that his absence seemed to leave a shadow in the room. It itched, the nagging curiosity as to what the capricious young count might be doing, and with whom.

In the end he found Malfoy easily enough. On the balcony outside his bedroom he was stretched out with his legs along the balustrade and his back against a pillar. With barely a shimmer of starlight breaking through the clouds, he might have been undetectable except that he was humming absent-mindedly under his breath. Sweet and twenty ... sweet and twenty.

"There you are." He spoke without turning and his edge of reproach made Harry instantly bad tempered.

"What do you mean?" He crossed his arms and leaned in the door frame. "You don't even know which one I am. We're both the same to you."

Malfoy laughed softly. "Really? Do you imagine any of God's creatures has studied you more closely than I have? I could tell you apart from a single word. A single footstep."

The stillness of the night was working on Harry. Out here he was finally free of the noise and the curious stares and the guildsmen who showed him miniatures of cow-eyed daughters wearing fat jewels around their necks like bells. With the familiar salt in the air and the fluttering of the cypress leaves he felt himself giving way to calm. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could just make out the pale strands of Malfoy's clothes catching the light as he shifted. White breeches tailored by expensive fingers to fit like a second skin, and the silk shirt which had slipped off one shoulder in pretended nonchalance.

"Or a single kiss," Malfoy murmured.

A gust of wind put an urgent flutter in the branches - or was it the heaving of the distant sea? - and just as quickly was gone.

"All right then," Harry challenged as he made his way forward. "Which one am I?"

Malfoy was already leaning down from his perch to meet him. Their mouths came together smoothly, wetly. Had it been little more than a day since the first time they had done this? It felt like longer. How else could he know without thinking that if he put the heel of his hand just by Malfoy's chin, his fingers would reach exactly to the hollow behind Malfoy's ear with his thumb resting over the cheekbone? How else could he know that touching him in this way would cause Malfoy to moan softly and kiss him with redoubled fierceness?

In the space of one night - one quick and curious night - the ridge of Malfoy's jaw had become as familiar under his palm as broom handle or wand ever was. Beneath his skin he was as jagged and unyielding as the thrust of rock that held them up above the plain, but the wet heat of his mouth opened up, as always, to Harry's advance.

Their first kisses had been combative and clumsy. In scattered moments through the night, Harry had come back to himself without warning, feeling like a visitor inside his own body with his ungoverned fingers straining to force themselves beneath Malfoy's waistband and Malfoy's tongue hot and fat in his mouth. Malfoy seemed to take these moments of hesitation in his stride, running the tip of his tongue over Harry's palm that had clamped over his mouth and drawing lazy, insistent patterns that worked their way down Harry's nerves and into his stomach. Sometimes Malfoy hissed impatiently and gave a scowl that was palpable even in the dark. Sometimes the hiss threatened to form the first syllable of a name, only to bury itself in Harry's skin and vanish.

Whatever he did, Malfoy strove to provoke. How many times had Harry simmered under that triumphant laugh each time Malfoy goaded him into roughness? Harry, who proved to have the advantage in upper body strength, found he could pin Malfoy beneath him thrashing angrily like a landed tuna fish until the fight went out of him and became a slow rocking of hips that made Harry's blood hot. But Malfoy, with his long legs and talent for the unexpected, was no easy conquest. Harry bore the tooth marks and bruises to prove it.

The fierceness was going out of their embrace, a sure sign that Malfoy had his mind on something more.

"Sebastian," he pronounced, trailing his finger down Harry's windpipe. His voice grew musing. "Sebastian who made me a solemn promise today. A promise I intend to remember."

Harry's hand still rested flat over the bottom of Malfoy's ribcage, just beneath his shirt, where he could feel the strain of his twisted posture, each intimate movement of muscle. He jerked his hand away and straightened the silk. "You've been away from your guests a long time."

Malfoy's voice was as cold and pointed as a blade-tip as he swung his legs around. "Have I?"

The silence pressed in on them. The breeze had died, the salty tang fallen from the air and the owls and foxes gone quiet. Harry strained his ears to catch the sounds from the feast below, but there was nothing. Would he get any warning before this world spat him back to the one in which he belonged, or would it simply vanish in yet another devastatingly unprepared moment?

Malfoy slipped off the balustrade, taking care to make contact with every available inch of Harry on the way down, and stepped away.

"What you will," he was biting out when Harry caught the back of his shirt and restrained him.

"No," Harry whispered, with an edge of urgency he hadn't intended. He pressed himself against Malfoy's back and wound his arms around the narrow span of his waist where the muscle flexed as it tried to repel him and press into him both at once.

The struggle between pique and desire was conclusively decided when Harry bent down to lay his lips against Malfoy's neck. Above all the many places Malfoy liked to be touched, this one most effectively reduced him to murmurs and broken entreaties. Harry, whose body after diligent exploration had yielded up precisely two places it liked to be touched, was fast developing a fascination for it. He trailed the point of his tongue gently up Malfoy's tendon and worked his lips into the hollow where his jaw met his throat.

Malfoy struggled free, but it was only to tear the shirt over his head and lean back with liquid ease against the length of Harry. As Harry's hands hovered uncertainly, the bars of Malfoy's ribcage seemed to him like the looms he'd seen in the town. Until the next cargo of flax reached the ports, they would sit idle in the sheds, their complex mechanisms inviting a deft touch that Harry would never know how to give. Malfoy arched back onto his shoulder, opening up his throat invitingly, and Harry still wasn't sure how to touch him. There was hot breath against Harry's ear and then the first ministrations of Malfoy's lips.

That mouth, it was that mouth which had been his undoing in the night before. Malfoy's hands, clawing and always just a bit too eager, he had no difficulty brushing away. But when his coaxing, shameless lips traced the same path, Harry could barely find the will to breathe, let alone speak a refusal. Right now, Malfoy's mouth was grazing Harry's ear and whispering a rather astonishing request.

"Where do you learn these things!" Harry snapped and pushed him away, unbalanced by the feeling that he was losing control of what happened between them.

Unconcerned, Malfoy turned and ran his fingertips down Harry's sternum. "Where does anyone receive their education?" His index finger pushed playfully at Harry's navel through his clothes. "I had a lover."

Harry stiffened. "How-" Calculating the months back from their meeting, through the year since the old count's death and the months of illness before that, his lips curled in disgust. "You were ... You couldn't! Who?"

Though Malfoy seemed a little surprised, he answered matter-of-factly and hooked his fingers over the top of Harry's breeches. "He was a captain in the town guard whom my father consulted on matters of defence. He trained in Venice. Served eight years in Candia. From time to time he taught me archery, a little swordplay." He shrugged. "And this."

Harry was shrinking away from his touch.

"There's no cause for envy," Malfoy frowned as he pressed closer. "You have no rival. Unless ... Surely you're not -"

Apparently he found Harry's expression eloquent enough, for he did not wait for a response. With a pale flash of bared teeth, he turned back towards the bedroom.

"Spare me your pious distaste," he spat as he went. "I do not answer to commonplace castaways for the health of my immortal soul." There was a thump and a muffled cry as his foot collected something in the dark and, from inside, his voice rose venomously: "Particularly not castaways who comport themselves with as little thought for virtue as you did last night."

The air was still and judgmental. From inside he could feel Malfoy's silence as he waited and watched to see what Harry would do. It wasn't only Malfoy who wondered. He leaned his elbows on the balustrade and let his body hunch over it.

A wet and chilly breeze eddied around in the grass cover and rose up high above him. Although the view on all sides was murky, he knew what lay before him: the sweeping slope down to the plains, and then out to the coastline where he had first retched a lung-full of seawater and turned his head to see Sirius kneeling in the sand beside him. As the faint scent from the climbing roses drifted up to him now, it was hard to believe that his first thoughts upon waking in this place had been of death. The brutal shift of location had felt like a Portkey: it was Cedric Diggory's dead wrist he'd thought of first, limp as wet cloth, then the wheeling rage as Dumbledore had wrenched him away from the Ministry building and his last link to Sirius.

With this in his mind and his mouth cramped with too much salt, he had opened his eyes to a light so dazzling it was as if the sky itself and all the air below were knitted from threads of glass.

He seemed a stranger now, that ten-day-younger Harry with his morbid thoughts and his shadow in front of him long and fat with the burdens he bore. The same Harry who had pushed aside Sirius' fishheads-and-barley broth and wished for the pallid familiarity of mashed potato. Not for the first time, Harry wondered where his rage had gone. If he tried, he could replicate the turns of speech and the shape of his body, fists curled and jaw tight and his whole chest like a brick. But there was something cleansing about the salt in the air that forced itself into his veins, and he could not hold onto his anger. It slipped away from him, like shallow waves and wet sand receding between his toes.

So Malfoy had had a lover. Maybe more than one, if he cared to ask.

If he let it speak, the nagging voice he'd been smothering in some dark cellar of his mind for the last thirty six hours, he knew it would say there was a difference between a Malfoy who liked Harry and a Malfoy who liked men, and that this difference altered the meaning of everything Harry had done with him. He started to hum under his breath, a sure way to keep the voice at bay. He went through the things he knew. He was not Harry Potter. He was a fisherman's apprentice whose worldly possessions slung easily over one shoulder and whose breeches were fastened with a makeshift piece of twine. He was the object of Malfoy's desire, an obsession that made the young count spiteful and tender by turns and left him open to the scorn of his peers. He was in a world that, one way or another, had to end. He was curious. And, without the heat he drew from Malfoy's body, he was cold.

Inside, Malfoy would be waiting - most likely draped across the end of his bed like a preening Siamese in a pose that would be foolish and meaningless until the moment when Harry returned to see it. His fingers closed around the curve of marble. It was no substitute for flesh.

On the ground floor, the lights in the kitchen were put out and the last faint yellow squares in the courtyard vanished. There was a new briskness in the breeze, high and unforgiving. It was a force for cleansing, for sweeping away.

Malfoy was waiting.

And time was short.

Inside, he shoved the doors closed until they stuck fast, as if they might hold back not only the daylight but all the days to come after that, the whisper of common sense and the gravitational pull of reality reasserting itself. He drove his shoulder against them until the wood creaked, then he groped around for the jewelled cross and wedged it into the handle to hold them.

The darkness was complete. In two steps, he had forgotten the room's layout and faltered.

"Where are you?"

There was no answer. His eyes tried to break open the gloom. His stomach was pressing up into his lungs. Surely Malfoy couldn't pick now of all times to lose his faith.

"Draco?" That word sounded terribly naked, hanging in the silence. "Draco, where are you?"

A half-step forward brought his knee against the corner of a chest. He swore.

Finally there was a laugh in the darkness, gentle despite the satisfaction in it. With a swish of silk-stockinged feet Malfoy's hand was in his. It was like holding a small snake, nimble and smooth against the fisherman's scars that marked his own skin, but Harry gripped tight and reeled Malfoy in towards him. Malfoy made no resistance, not until Harry's grip settled on the vulnerable flesh just above his hipbones. A gasp. A shiver that wasn't entirely arousal. It was deceptive how Malfoy recoiled from the first touch that promised anything more intimate than a kiss. He'd felt that tremor of cowardice enough times to know that just beyond it lay clumsy-mouthed abandon.

Running one hand down from the shoulder, Harry sought Malfoy's free hand. The unexpected sharpness made him flinch. Malfoy was clutching one of his strands of rosemary. The scent of it spilled into the air as Harry dislodged his fingers one by one. It was a fresh smell and clean. It took him back to the hillsides he'd strode up with Sirius ten paces in front of him; to the open air and the undemanding companionship of the road. Rosemary was for remembrance. Malfoy had told him that. He slid the twig into his pocket and pulled Malfoy into his arms.

He bent to kiss Malfoy's shoulder, on the bare flesh and on the ridges of bone. For a few moments, Malfoy squirmed uncomfortably, as if trying to find an angle from which their embrace might seem less personal, less invasive. But Harry persisted, laying his hands flat over the moving sculpture of Malfoy's spine as the short, broken breaths fell onto the top of his head. That same muscle that flinched under his mouth perhaps wrapped its other end around a blunt plane of shoulder blade, touched another tendon that tugged between Malfoy's ribs. Strand by strand, this warp and weft of straining sinew threaded his body together. The absence of light had erased Malfoy's angular beauty and left him animal, elemental. A complex knot of muscle and bone for Harry to unravel.

He dragged his teeth lightly over the base of Malfoy's neck, as gently as peeling the skin from a peach as it released its fragrance and clung flirtatiously to the fruit beneath. He let the pulse run up into his jaw and did it again, slower. That was all it took. With a groan that seemed wrenched from him, Malfoy wound his hands into Harry's hair and made his last surrender.

Outside, the breeze whipped and dived and swept in the storm.

*

One storey below, by the fireplace in the great hall, the twins had left off drinking for singing, to little gain. It was the sort of song whose ending seemed always to be imminent but never quite arrived. The lines not only went round in circles, they attempted figures-of-eight.

"Trip no further pretty sweeting

Journeys end in lovers meeting

Every wise man's son doth quote

Meetings end in journeys greeting

Hear my lover sweetly bleating

Wise man's journey ends in goat.

What is love? Tis not hereafter,

Find it in the barn and pasture.

Love has tail and beard and horns.

Come and kiss me sweet and twenty

Keep your fame and wealth and plenty

Love is better left unshorn."

And present mirth had present laughter. And present ale had predictable effect. George slid contentedly down the wall and into the land of nod. Fred fell forward into a bowl of egg custard. The song slipped away gratefully. And, finally, softly, inevitably, the curtain of silence fell down upon the hall.

*

A room in the villa, it makes no different which. The darkness is making its first slow steps of retreat. And Harry, for the last time, is waking.

At his side, another figure, it makes no difference which, is sleeping still, one hand flung up onto the pillow and curled against Harry's neck.

Harry lets his eyes fall closed. He has a lover. He is a lover. And that transforms him. More than the fancy clothes, the funny turns of speech, the new colour in his skin, this remakes him. He holds his hand up in the gloom. It looks the same.

When his lover stirs in sleep and presses closer against Harry's hip, Harry burns. Where he feels it is that old familiar place, the chamber in his chest that has ached each time he has thought of Voldemort's victory and all the things it would destroy, of good wizards enslaved, of families bereaved and the extinguishment of hope. Today, this place in his heart has a face. Not only a face but a mouth that has been gentle beneath his, lithe and fearless hands, and eyes that are at their most beautiful when he turns to find them fixed on him with their curious, searching intensity. This slender body beside him is like a lightning rod for all the fleet and primitive impulses he has never been able to name. If Voldemort walked through the door this instant, Harry thinks he could strike him down with a word.

He counts them again, the four fingers and thumb. Square nails, slightly spaded fingertips. This is not the same hand.

As he bends to touch his lips to the white-skinned shoulder, he is thinking of the square kites which the scruffy children outside the town walls dragged behind them as they ran and screeched. That's how he feels. Anchored, yes, in a way that is new to him, but also dipping and skittering and buffeted by breeze. He is too happy to be still.

He slips off the bed, moving carefully so as not to wake the sleeper, and dresses.

Out in the gardens, the sodden ground retreats under his feet and even though the rain has stopped for breath, the air is still thick and wet. As he walks towards the voices in the distance, he fancies that he hears his name called - his own name - but the sound is so high above him that it has to be the branches bending under the wind.

He finds Feste and Feste on the narrow platform of land between the cypress courtyard and the precipice. Through the thinning mist, he can just make out the lighter grey of the ocean and, beyond it, a tinge of violet along the horizon. The twins do not appear to have slept, not really. With their mugs filled and their voices gently hoarse with long work, they are winding their way through their tune from the feast. Acknowledging Harry with a sombre nod, they leave off the old refrain and begin anew:

"When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With a hey ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy.

And the rain it raineth every day."

It is a few moments before sunrise. Surely the timing of it is more than fortuitous. The coldness he feels is not only caused by the wet air. When he hears his own twin's footsteps behind him, his doubts become certainty. This is a curtaincall. A swansong. These words are the spell that brings everything to an end. The song is four verses old and a blade of orange runs across the edge of the sky. He feels for his twin's wrist as the singers' voices turn slow and melancholy and split into a harmony that floats over the empty courtyard and down toward the plain where it meets the spreading light.

"... and we'll strive to please you every day."

Liquid gold begins to bleed over the horizon, first in a fine point and then flooding outwards. Then the first spear of the sunlight strikes out at the sky and everything around him dissolves into light. Helpless and spinning, he presses his feet down but there is nothing beneath them. Up and down become one and his white-blinded eyes are useless as he grapples with the air. A shudder goes through his limbs, the impact of two soft bodies colliding, and he feels the awful pull of gravity grabbing at him once more.

*

Silence.

A young man, lying face down with his black hair obscuring his face. Sprawled and unconscious; storm-tossed. He stirs on the grey floor of the Transfiguration classroom.

Hermione is on her knees beside him in an instant, shaking his shoulder and calling.

"Harry?" The sound still seems to come from a very long way off. "Harry!"

As Harry comes round, his vision is murky and grey. He slowly becomes aware of the insidious cold of the stone under his right side and a few hushed voices not far away. Hermione rescues his glasses from beneath the desk, mends them with a flick and a whisper and hands them back to him. They feel cold on his skin, but the world that squeezes back into focus within their circumference is the world he knows. The classroom looms above him and the twins' wand lies innocently a few inches from his hand. He closes his fingers around it and he closes his eyes.

"Well, Potter," McGonagall is saying. "We lost you for a few moments there." She turns briskly to the students gathered around him. "Let this be a lesson in concentration. As the rest of you will recall, the words of the spell are dedite noctem. What Potter uttered, if it meant anything at all, would be-"

"Twelfth night," Harry breathes.

"Indeed."

Ron takes a fistful of his jumper and helps pull him to his feet, where he sways slightly and pulls his robes tighter around himself. His right ear and shoulder throb where he must have landed on them. On the floor where he had fallen, a strand of rosemary lies. The professor regards him severely.

"Where did you get this?"

"Picked it."

"On the school grounds?"

Harry shrugs.

"Let me have that wand, Potter." She turns it over on her palm, then swishes and flicks: "Leviosa!" The goldfish bowl shoots up through the ceiling leaving a clean-cut tunnel and a shower of shattered masonry. McGonagall drops the wand quickly onto her desk.

"Professor Flitwick will need to have a look at this. Are you certain you're feeling quite well?"

Harry slips the rosemary into his pocket and grins hesitantly. "Yes, Professor. Never better."

As he resumes his seat, the quill fits into his hand like it had never left. He twirls it to make the feather scratch his skin. But the fingers that grip it, sure and tight as a piece of rigging, look out of place.

"Where did you get that wand?" Hermione whispers across the aisle, and Harry finds himself smiling as he mouths, "Twins".

She shakes her head. "Typical! There's a reason why unstable wand cores are illegal. It could have killed you. I expect it's Nundu whiskers or some untested hybrid. You're lucky you didn't turn the whole school into a mushroom!"

"You all right, mate?" Ron asks quietly and Harry nods. He has to concentrate hard to detect it, but somewhere nearby is the faintest scent of ale.

The lesson continues as Lavender takes her turn. On the desktop is a dimly remembered carving of a Thestral, all sharp lines and fearsome muscle. The twins' song is still in his ears: Sweet and twenty ... lies no plenty ... sweet and twenty. Harry traces his quill tip idly over it. With a few careful strokes and a willing imagination, the downturned wing becomes a smudgy figure, lean and straight, which stands by the horse's flank with a hand on its neck. The beast seems to calm a little. Harry smiles.

*

Forgive me. I don't want to do it. Don't want to tell it. Every word now is a snapping strand in the rope that holds us suspended in this world. In the chasm below lies our ending and I cannot, will not, let you go.

But I must. Onward now, for without an ending we cannot trace our journey and see where we have been. The journey matters - oh yes, a story is no story without a journey and telling is only another way of travelling. But the journey is not the only thing. The destination is paramount. Only from this high point can we look back and see the pattern in our steps.

Climb the stairs with me, then, slipping unseen between groups of students carrying their piles of books. Time slips by us as we move through the darkening corridors. By the time we reach the door to the owlery, the torches have all sprung into life and the air is chilly with night.

Inside, the silence is marred only by the birds shifting and scratching on their perches. Wait with me. There is no warmth but here where our elbows come together. The darkness deepens. Now and then, one more bird slips out for the hunt.

There it is. The door slowly opens and closes. Harry struggles to pick out Hedwig in the gloom, but when she alights on his wrist he murmurs "Sorry, girl. You're too obvious."

She is turned to the wall in pique as he ties the small scroll to the leg of a badly groomed barn owl with anonymous brown plumage.

What he whispers to the owl is lost in Hedwig's hoot of reprimand, but you can see how his right hand is still grasping the edge of the parchment tightly and leaving a sweaty mark. There is colour high in his cheeks as his gaze lingers on the scroll. Grave doubt is etched on his forehead. Then he nods to himself and strokes the bird's back gratefully. In a flutter of robes, he turns and hurries from the room.

And where the letter goes, and the expression of astonishment or disgust on the recipient's face when it arrives, those stories are for the future. Their reality is yet to come. Now is not the time to tell them.

*

There is one last story to unfold.

You. Me. A room full of night. The soft beat of owl wings.

Your cheek is warm beneath my lips. We have left traces upon each other, you and I, this story. The salt crystals still cling to your skin, tiny diamonds deep in your pores, and in the ends of your hair is the fragrance of climbing rose. Perhaps only I can detect it. Outwardly you appear the same, but the acts of telling and listening leave their marks. Like the spring floods slowly changing the face of the mountainside. It isn't only the story that matters.

And me? Understand if I hold you too tightly; be gentle if I tremble. I am only afraid of this parting. My heart is heavy with the loss of you. Do you blame me?

Give me your hand now. This is the last time I will ask it.

Here.

Take this one silvery owl feather - the colour of sand under moonlight, of sea under cloud, of a morning sky too early to disclose its intentions. Thread the feather into your buttonhole. Take this memento. Take my blessings.

Now go safely on your way.

Do you call this an ending?

Or is it, perhaps, a beginning.

What you will.

*

end

*