Something Better Than This

Chapter 9: Slytherin's House

Harry stared. Salazar Serpent-Tongue? Salazar Slytherin? He would have assumed the man was lying, or perhaps playing some very peculiar sort of joke, but the features did look something like the monkeyish ones on the statue in the Chamber of Secrets, though the beard was shorter. And it might explain what had happened to the missing main road. But how and why could they have been transported a thousand years into the past? The locket had been Slytherin's, but Dumbledore hadn't mentioned anyone else being spontaneously dragged across centuries for a visit as a result of handling it.

Would Voldemort arrange for one of his Horcruxes to travel through time? Was he even capable of a spell like that? What possible use would it be? Could this be Voldemort pretending to be his distant ancestor? But Harry's scar didn't hurt, and at any rate he couldn't quite picture Voldemort fixing up a nice little cottage and planting a vegetable garden. Nor did the girl really act like any of the Death Eaters he'd met.

"Well?" asked the man who had introduced himself as Salazar. He sounded impatient.

Harry realized that he had been gawking, and if this wasn't some strange trick of Voldemort's, he probably ought to be polite. "We -- we do come in peace," he began hurriedly, and was for once relieved to hear it come out in Parseltongue, particularly as the annoyed expression faded from the older man's face. Looking at Voldemort had never had that effect, but meeting this man's intense gaze did. "I'm Harry Potter." His hand went up to smoothe his fringe down self-consciously over his scar, but he changed his mind when he realized what he was doing and pushed his hair back from his forehead instead. "These are my friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger."

The man -- Harry gave in and decided to think of him as Slytherin -- inclined his head to them gravely but didn't take his eyes off them. "And have you come seeking me, or by chance in your travels? I'm afraid I have given up teaching, but I can direct you to Hogwarts. Unless you want training in Parseltongue spells."

"We, er, that is -- excuse me," Harry said, feeling rather out of his depth at this offer. "May I stop and translate for my friends? They're not Parselmouths themselves, and none of us understood the language your... er... the girl...."

"My daughter."

"The language your daughter was speaking."

"Foreigners. Should we speak Latin, then?" Slytherin waved a hand. "Interpret, by all means."

Harry tore his gaze away from Slytherin to look at Ron and Hermione. "He says he's Salazar Slytherin."

"What?" Ron gripped his wand.

Hermione darted a nervous look at Slytherin and grabbed Ron's arm. "Are you, er, sure you understood him correctly, Harry?"

"I'm sure." Harry would have been irritated if it weren't such a bizarre thing to be telling them that he'd had trouble believing his own ears. "Well, actually he said we'd found Salazar Serpent-Tongue, but you said once that that was something they used to call Slytherin. I told him our names, and he said he didn't teach anymore but he could direct us to Hogwarts."

Hermione looked baffled. "He said he could direct us to Hogwarts? But... but if the school already exists and he's living away from it... and gave up teaching...."

"Why would he direct us back to it if he's already left?" Ron finished, as Hermione seemed to have bogged down in incredulity.

"I don't suppose Hogwarts: a History said anything about his referring students after the split?" Harry shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not even sure whether to believe it's really him. I mean, a thousand years? But he's being civil enough. I can't figure out how to answer him about why we're here, though."

"If it's a thousand years ago...." Hermione's eyes went distant. "That might explain the language that girl was speaking! Old English, maybe, or one of the other current ones...."

"He says she's his daughter, by the way," Harry said. "And he offered to speak Latin. I'm not sure that would help."

"Maybe later," Hermione said dubiously. "I know a lot of the roots, and I've had to read old texts in Latin, but I'm not at all sure about carrying on a conversation in it. Oh, I wish I had a copy of Beowulf!"

"Beowulf?" Slytherin repeated the name in an interested tone; when Harry turned back to look at him, he continued in Parseltongue, "Beowulf's line became distant kin by marriage to my ancestors, on my mother's side, some time ago. And Helga Hufflepuff claims a more direct kinship with Wiglaf who stood by him against the dragon, at the last."

"We've, er... heard of the story." Harry relayed this biographical information, which caused Hermione to look at Salazar Slytherin as if he were an interesting book, and after another short consultation they decided that telling at least part of the truth was probably their best move. "As for why we're here... we did come by chance. Actually, we're a little lost, and not quite sure how we did get here. But we've heard of you and of Hogwarts." He hesitated. "We, er, didn't think you were still... exactly... on good terms with Hogwarts?"

Slytherin snorted, though he didn't seem terribly offended by the question. "No. Godric insulted my daughter, and that was the last straw for me." That wasn't the story Harry had heard. "But we made it the best place to learn magic," Slytherin continued, "for all its faults, and that hasn't changed. Particularly as I haven't been taking apprentices myself." Was that a glint of humor in his eyes? "Well, you look fairly fresh for travelers, but I imagine you'd like a chance to sit down. Why don't you come inside and tell me how you managed to get lost, and I'll see whether I can set you back on the right path." He glanced down at Crookshanks. "Bring your cat, if it can behave itself around serpents."

Harry smiled involuntarily at that, remembering Crookshanks feeding Maeve, but thinking of the little basilisk he'd left in Ginny's care reminded him of the one Slytherin himself had left concealed in Hogwarts, and that reminded him to be cautious. Still, he couldn't think of any better course of action; if they were really back in the tenth century or thereabouts, Salazar Slytherin might be the only person any of them could actually talk to and understand within miles. Annoying him to go wander around in the woods hardly seemed like a brilliant idea.

So Harry merely said politely that Crookshanks seemed to be quite well behaved so long as the serpents were, and after he passed the invitation along to Ron and Hermione, they followed Slytherin into the little cottage.

It was dim inside, but the house looked much better than it had, or would, several centuries later. It had definitely been remodeled and updated at some point during the intervening centuries, but with the Gaunts taking care of it -- or rather not taking care of it -- the modernization hadn't produced any lasting improvement. Slytherin and his daughter didn't appear to be content to live in squalor and disrepair. Perhaps it came of having moved out of a castle.

At any rate, the stone walls were sturdy and vertical, and sturdy wooden doors closed off what Harry assumed were the house's other two rooms. While the thatched roof had been blackened by smoke inside, it didn't actually seem to have been burnt and looked as if it wouldn't leak easily. There was no glass in the window, but there were heavy shutters standing open and no dirt on the windowsill. Slabs of stone formed the floor, and there were clean rushes strewn across it. The room they had just entered still (or already) looked like the kitchen and sitting room the Gaunts had used it for, but was much more inviting. Poor Merope's grimy stove wasn't there, but there was a fire-pit in the center of the floor and something that looked rather like a kiln to one side of it. A wooden table with benches on either side of it took up a considerable part of the space, and the end of it nearest the fire-pit held several utensils, lined up in a neat row, and a variety of plant parts arrayed in a circle like the spokes of a wheel, though a substantial wedge was missing.

A cauldron simmered over the fire; Slytherin stopped next to it and looked in, then picked up a long wooden spoon from the table and stirred it. Apparently satisfied, he proceeded to one of the wooden doors and called through it. His daughter came out, with her hair braided back, partly hidden under a grey cloth that matched her cloth belt, and the Runespoor on her arm. She let the Runespoor down onto the floor, where it promptly slithered over to get into a staring contest with Crookshanks. Its three heads muttered to each other.

"My daughter, Jakinda," Slytherin said, then repeated the name without hissing it, presumably for the benefit of Ron and Hermione, before turning to the girl and speaking in whatever other language they were using. Harry thought he caught his own name and his friends', and wondered how Slytherin had managed to pronounce them so closely when he didn't think he'd actually said them except in Parseltongue.

"Jakinda," Hermione said. "That's a pretty name. Very unusual."

This prompted Salazar to explain with a note of pride in his hissing that it was, like his own, a name belonging to the people on his father's side of the family, witches and wizards and sorcerers and fierce warriors, who lived in the mountains between Gaul and Iberia and had given Charlemagne what for.

"Is your daughter not a Parselmouth too?" Harry asked curiously. He knew it was an unusual talent, but it still seemed odd, when even a thousand years later Slytherin's descendants had been chatting to each other in Parseltongue, that Slytherin should have to translate for his daughter.

Slytherin's eyes narrowed at the question. "My daughter is a Squib," he said, the words clipped and cold even in Parseltongue. "One word against her and you will go your way with no help from me."

"I wasn't going to say anything against her," Harry said, quite taken aback. "I haven't got anything against her. I just wondered." He blinked and asked further, hardly believing it had occurred to him, "You didn't mean that's how Godric Gryffindor insulted her, did you?"

"Didn't I?" Slytherin let out a wordless hiss of disgust and contempt. "The last time we quarreled -- the last time we spoke -- he turned the talk from whether we were wasting our time and resources on dealing with Muggle-borns to claiming it was a waste and a pity for her to live at the school! That was enough, and more than enough, and would have been even if we had been able to agree on a bloody thing for the past decade. I resigned from my work there at once and brought her away with me."

"Er," Harry said, blinking. "I see." He was inclined to think that Gryffindor had been trying to say it wasn't a waste of time or resources to teach Muggle-borns, and also that Slytherin was leaving out a good deal of the story. But perhaps this wasn't quite the best time to argue the point or to announce that his mother had been Muggle-born and so was Hermione, and they had both been able to best most if not all of their wizard-born classmates at magic. Besides, it seemed to say something that Jakinda Slytherin really was a Squib, and her father Salazar was protective of her (if perhaps, Harry suspected, at least a bit embarrassed), whereas Merope Gaunt had been bullied by her family until her attempts at magic all blundered into disasters, and then been mocked for it. He wouldn't have expected it of Slytherin. Maybe blood trumped magic (or the lack of magic), at least when the blood was his. "Anyway, I really didn't mean to, er, offend you. I'd just assumed she was at first when I saw she had a Runespoor in her hair outside. I suppose you set it to look after her?"

"He's better than a guard dog," Salazar told him, nodding decisively and relaxing a little. He looked down to the floor, where the Runespoor and Crookshanks had not started any overt hostilities but were still eyeing each other. The Runespoor's heads were taking turns. "Here, now. Be polite. That's a guest, and unless I miss my guess he's nearly half a Kneazle." This had presumably been addressed to the Runespoor, which gave a sort of serpenting shrug with the upper third of its body and made an elaborate bow to Crookshanks before sliding around to the other side of the fire-pit and coiling itself on a warm stone. Slytherin raised his eyebrows at Harry. "I'm surprised he hasn't been able to lead you home if you're lost; Kneazles are good at that."

"I think we might be a little out of his range," Harry said weakly. "I'm sorry. Might my friends and I have a little time again?"

"By all means." Slytherin pointed to the other end of the table. "Sit down. We've soup to prepare."

Well, it did smell better than most potions. Harry led Ron and Hermione to the free end of the table while Salazar spoke to Jakinda, who pulled a bright knife from the sheath at her belt and went outside. Salazar himself picked up another knife from the table and began chopping several purple roots, humming to himself.

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