The Winter Glass

Part II: Mornings in Spring

Chapter Five: Fealty Unwavering

I could hear him talking outside the window. "Pip's too big to sleep on my bed. He likes the floor better anyway, I think," Harry told Ginny. "So I sleep on the floor with him."

For all his bravery, I suspected that there was more to the story. We'd had rooms below the Weasleys for six springs now, and Harry hadn't ever slept in the cupboard bed in his room. I'd tried to get him to see reason. It was warmer to close the doors and stay inside, but he insisted on making a bed on the floor. My only consolation in winter was that he had Pip to keep him warm.

As the years passed, I grew comfortable in our new home. The suite was small but spacious enough for our needs, and we'd had no more scares, since the seekers hadn't recognized Harry. Even a false sense of security is a sense of security.

It was too warm that day for a cloak; spring winds had come early that year and the crocus had pushed up to meet them. "Harry," I called. "Come here, please."

Harry craned his neck and looked in from the balcony. His hair was sticking every which way and his green eyes were sparkling with amusement. "I'm already here." At eleven, nearly twelve, he had a knack for getting around the rules whenever he could.

"Comb your hair," I demanded, feeling like a mother hen. "You're going to school today."

This brought him over the sill. "School? What do you mean, school? I'm going to be a soldier, like you. I can't go to school."

"I'm not a soldier." I reached for the key hanging next to the door. "I've never been a soldier," I lied, thinking of the sword I had secreted in Dumbledore's attic. I wished Harry would forget what he knew. "And I've never been a scholar, but you need to be."

Flustered, Harry looked around the room. He turned back to the window where Ginny peeked in. "I want to go to school. I'll be a scholar. And a soldier in the army." Her voice turned pleading. "Please, can't I go? Everyone else is going. I'll be the only one left behind."

I couldn't help chuckling. "You can go next year. I wish some of your enthusiasm would rub off on Harry. Now, run along, and Harry, let's see about your things."

"But it's finally spring! You can't mean I'm to stay inside every day now that the weather's clear." Harry looked from me to the outside world and back again. Five years ago, when he'd called me father, I'd promised him he could go out and play in the spring. I'd never refused him the outside world before.

"Not every day," I told him. "The scholars won't stay more than a few weeks; they'll go back to teach and study well before the freeze."

Though Dumbledore was not a miser, my wage would not stretch enough to allow Harry a private tutor. A few enterprising men and woman had banded together to make a living teaching the town's children, if one had the money to spare. In the winters, they journeyed to warmer lands and settled there until the heat became unbearable, so we needed to take advantage of their season in town.

Today we had a list of things to find, some harder than others. The first item on the list was writing materials. Quills were easy enough to come by, but securing parchment proved fairly difficult. As we searched the shops, I wondered how Dumbledore was able to keep a stock at hand. I decided that he must have been able to conjure it out of thin air.

After an hour's search, we purchased a roll from a trader who was passing through. "Finest parchment," he told us. "Hand-carried from the east." In addition, the students were required to have inks, a variety of herbs, and an abacus to use for numbers. By mid-morning, we had the things we needed and were thoroughly tired of bartering.

After the noon meal I delivered Harry to the low stone building where lessons were to be held. The teachers, two men and two women, ushered the children inside. Before I could say a proper goodbye to Harry he disappeared into the school.

I sat down heavily on a bench across the road. Today, after many days of being without care, memories were haunting me.

I've spent a good many years attempting to forget what my life was like before I was sent to live with James's family. As I was fostered at a young age, the memories are more impressions than anything else. I have images of a forbidding and gloomy keep, and of parents whose faces were dour and cold. Other children shared the nursery with me. Some lived; some sputtered out like candles left in a draft. The place was ancient and noble and dark and ill-kept. I have had no occasion to inquire, but I do not believe that anyone was ever sent to foster there.

Besides, my days were too full to think of places far away. I'd spent three days huddled in the back of a wagon with bags of fine flour and kegs of mead, and had been unpacked in a muddy yard without ceremony when we'd arrived at Godric's Hollow--not the most defensible place for a monarch to reside, but a beautiful one.

All had been arranged by messenger the spring before and my father's guard left me sitting on an upturned barrel behind the kitchens with hardly a nod when a winsome kitchen maid gave him a wink and a smile. Perhaps this is why I, to this day, object to the treatment of anyone as a commodity to be bargained with or sold.

I'd nearly killed my mother when I was born and she never forgave me for that. I was to be treated no better than a servant, though she mollycoddled a younger brother. The household followed her lead. I would wager that many forgot I was the child of their master. So it was that I was left alone.

James was the first person who spoke to me. He did not have the bearing of a boy who would one day be king.

Who are you?

The cat had my tongue. Who was I? I could give my names, but there was no moment in time I could point to that could define me as a separate human being. A wise man once told me this: It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. Until we begin to think, to choose, we are no one, nothing, nonexistent. Or so I believed.

When James spoke, I knew who he was even though he was wearing the simple clothing of a stablehand and a slouch like a peasant. I knew who he was because when he opened his mouth his question was so impertinent and so smoothly voiced that he could only be the one I was sent to serve.

I had assumed that the prince would be many years older; I had expected to see him brandishing a sword under my nose to intimidate me, if I saw him at all. This boy was no taller than I and he could have been my brother, we looked so much alike. I suppose we might have been cousins; my family was noble as well and the bloodlines were far too tangled for all but those with a possible claim to the throne to worry over.

My lips stuck to my teeth. I'd waited a split second too long for a lighthearted answer, and I didn't know how to give a formal reply. I swallowed past the throbbing lump in my throat as I jumped down from the barrel to give the only answer I knew to be true.

"I am yours."

James looked me over from head to toe and I bore his scrutiny with a slight resentment. He could look at me like so much dry goods and I could not examine him so closely, not while he was watching. It was a good lesson, though. One must learn to control one's curiosity, or at least learn to conceal it, when meeting one who may be friend or foe. With James I was always learning something new.

He stepped nose to nose with me as if to measure my height against his own. I did not back down or away, but waited until he spoke again.

"You vow your life for mine?"

No one had ever honored me with such an important job. My life for his. I looked at my boots so he could not see.

"Yes."

"You will protect me and my kingdom against all who trespass?"

"Yes."

"You will swear your loyalty upon all that is holy?"

"Yes, my lord."

"No."

"No?" Startled, I raised my head. James's face was screwed up in an expression of amusement and disgust.

"No. I don't want to be anybody's lord." He grinned. "At least, not yet." Catching my arm and pulling me along, he took off at a run for the kitchens. "The cooks are making bread, and we can have it warm with honey."

It was sweet, that first spring. I can still remember the way the grass smelled when we ran through it as soon as the sun came up. Before the cooking fires were lit we would be over the hills and down to the river, catching fish or skipping stones to scare them off so we could have a swim without having our toes nibbled by the silver things.

James would sleep in the long hall with the other pages and day servants and the boys not old enough yet to be soldiers. There was such an awful crush of them; boys slept with feet hanging off the ends of beds rather than give up the comfort of ticking to a smaller boy on the floor. Still, there was a sort of camaraderie. If you lived through the cold of winter and fever did not take you, there might be space and comfort waiting next year.

Some mornings we watched boys not much older than we were lift swords that weighed half what they did. Other times James gave the stableboy a coin and we would take horses out for a race. Afternoons were best for climbing trees and watching the soldiers march in formation away to other lands to fight. They were a fearsome parade of men and wagons and horses and banners held high. We were not scared; the war was far away and could not touch us.

It was a shock when someone finally realized what we were doing. A formidable woman stomped into the sleeping room one morning earlier even than James and I were awake. "James," she bellowed, and I think James only sat up because he was still befuddled from sleep. He was normally quick to slip away from the eyes of any adult.

The woman--it was immediately clear that this was his mother--hauled him to his feet by the scruff of his neck. "What in the world makes you think you can be down here? What if you were needed? What if I had come for you and found out that you had run off like that boy I told you about?"

James had been about to make some obnoxious retort, I was sure, but he cocked his head to one side and asked, "What boy?"

His mother's face softened and she released him and put a hand on his shoulder. "I'd forgotten, then. I meant to tell you. A new boy was supposed to arrive here several weeks ago. He didn't say anything at all to anyone. We found the board for him, and the mead, but not the boy. He ran off before anyone could bring him in. It's our fault for not meeting him, I suppose." Her eyes glittered in the torchlight as she brought her other hand up to cup his chin with love unfamiliar to me. "I don't know what we would do if anything happened to you."

He laughed. Right in her face. I wondered that he didn't see it, how hurt she was--but perhaps he did, as he explained himself straightaway. "He's here. Right here, Mum." James pointed at me. "He was here with the mead and flour and we went off fishing. You never said anything about another one coming. I didn't know he was new."

James's mother rounded on me and pulled me into a better light. She studied my face shrewdly before giving me a tongue-lashing the likes I have never had again before crushing me in her embrace and taking me to her sitting room, where she dictated news of my whereabouts to a messenger (who ran for my parents' home posthaste). With this done, she sent James to his rooms.

"Can he stay?" James asked, not budging.

"Of course," his mother replied. "Now run along, your tutor is feeling better and he'll be wanting lessons after breakfast."

"No, can he stay with me?" The question came out as a statement. Well, a demand, really. They stared each other down. The queen outranked him.

She sighed. "You know that the advisors don't want anyone but your father's personal guards in the rooms while we sleep. First it will be one playmate, then another, and perhaps one will have a knife--"

"He would never do that." The shout contorted James's features. "He has sworn to protect me."

The queen looked me over. "Is this true?"

"Yes, your majesty," I replied. My knees shook, but I don't think she noticed.

"I believe you speak your heart." Then, she addressed her son. "If he is sworn to protect you, then he must be trained to protect you. Better he go with the guard now than grow soft at your heels. He'll still be in the castle and if you have a free hour you can meet." Behind every good man is a good woman, and the woman had outmaneuvered us both by appealing to James's sense of reason and my sense of duty.

For the rest of the spring, we had to eke out the most from the few spare hours that were not spent in lessons and whatever training it takes to be a king, and the hours on my part not spent shining armor and polishing saddles. A fire burned in James. He often told me of battles far away and injustices done. I cared not for this, and I understood less of the tactics at the time. I sometimes felt left out, because I hadn't such passion for anything except, perhaps, the mincemeat pies the cook would make if I promised not to hide her favorite spoon again.

Blame it on my youth.

I had hardly sat down when Harry and none other than Ron Weasley came out of the school building, flanking a smaller girl who looked like she had been crying. Where had the time gone? Dumbledore would have missed me today. He'd been telling me to take a few days of freedom, so I knew he wouldn't be angry, but I hadn't meant to spend my free day spinning wool on a hard bench.

"Hello, Ron." I greeted him first, wondering where his parents had come up with the money to send him to school. Some of his brothers came out of the school a moment later, laughing or not as their personality dictated.

"Hello," he returned. He'd grown tall and thin. "This is, er, Hermione." He indicated the girl with a shrug of one shoulder. Clearly, her tears made him uncomfortable.

"Some of the others were teasing her." Harry spoke in a clear voice as a few children came by, snickering behind their hands. Not the words but the tone made me blink a few times. For a moment, I had seen James again.

Ron broke the mood. "We didn't really mean it." He handed the girl a handkerchief and she blew her nose with gusto. "Really. I--I got carried away." He looked to Harry for approval the way I know I looked at James when I was Ron's age.

"It's all right," she said. "I know."

Ron beamed at Harry triumphantly and I followed behind as the two walked her home. She lived with her parents over the shop where they made false teeth. They were obviously better off than we were, but apparently unable to afford better schooling for their daughter. The neighborhood children who had to scrape for the coin needed to gain an education that might lead to an offer of apprenticeship instead of hard labor had surely resented her presence in the school today.

Once home, I quizzed Harry about his day, and he did not disappoint. My questions were met with shrugs and 'nothing' or 'I don't remember.' He did, however, add a bit of mint from the school's garden into the tea, making a refreshing brew. Apparently he was to apply his knowledge rather than speak about it.

I persuaded Harry to go over the day's lessons with me. Purely out of selfishness, of course. I'd made sure he could read and do sums at least as well as I could over the years, but I was almost morbidly curious about his day at school. Was it anything like the years I'd spent training for the battlefield? Was it the same, with the fighting transformed by ink and parchment?

"I have to make this grow," he offered at last, removing a sprig of green from his pocket.

I examined it carefully: thorns, rounded leaves, the tiniest bud. His mother's favorite flower. "You have to plant it. It's a rose." I could almost smell the enormous, showy blooms that Lily would decorate the castle with in summer.

This Harry had no comprehension of. "Where?"

Just then, there was a tapping at the glass. Ginny was on the balcony holding a small pot. We opened the window and beckoned her in, but she shook her head. "I thought--Ron needed one." She handed the pot, half-filled with rich, dark soil, to Harry. "If you give it a little water and leave it in the sunshine, maybe something will come of it."

Something did. It was magical, if you believe in that sort of thing. By midsummer the vines crept over the balcony and roses of pale white perfumed the air. Not a single other student managed to keep their cutting alive.