A Dartmoor Eclogue

A Dartmoor Eclogue

Dudley Dursley had spent the first seventeen or so years of his life being a complete swine. He had resolved - and what was more, he had succeeded, thus far - in living the rest of it as quite a decent human being.

The Dudley Dursley who was the terror of Privet Drive could not have done so. The Dudley Dursley who had survived a brush with Dementors and uncovered thereafter enough of innate decency within him, however decayed for want of nurture, to thank his cousin for saving him and to wish him well as he set out to save the world, had reached a tipping point. The Dudley Dursley who scraped into a plate-glass university - Brunel - and applied himself, as he had never done at Smeltings, sufficiently to take a degree (a BSc in Sport Sciences), was upon the cusp of becoming a decent man. And the Dudley Dursley who had there met and thereafter married Elspeth Bulstrode, to his parent's moans and mutterings, had set his feet upon the path to redemption.

A Squib, as it happened, and very much a cut above the semidetached Dursleys, Elspeth - cousin to Millicent Bulstrode - was a jolly-hockey-sticks Old Girl who had ended up at Brunel, for all her St Trinian's sort of background, due to a quite invincible distaste for those odd academic buildings that had inexplicably been attached to the playing fields of her youth. Curiously enough, when given her head at university, she had embraced her chosen field, and had done herself credit in attaining her BSc (Hons) Physiotherapy qualifications and her NHS, CSP, and NHC registrations. She had also kept Dudley up to the mark for all that time and through and since their marriage, such that he was nowadays a fit, healthy, muscular, and remarkably calm and contented man: Elspeth Dursley was a born Matron.

Despite Vernon's disdain for Dudley's choice of degree - impractical tosh; can't making a living with that sort of rubbish, boy: although even the Dursleys had had sense enough to realise, privately and utterly unvoiced, that any degree from any university was more than their parenting methods had made at all likely for Dudders - it had stood him in surprisingly good stead. Even as Elspeth had been headhunted as an administrator for the Physiotherapy Unit of the Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Trust, Dudley, who had seen his fair share of injury and insult in the ring, and it may be a trifle over, had joined the offices of a registered charity devoted to various causes related to brain injury. Nowadays, Dudley Dursley was a well-regarded staff member of Headway UK's London office, a markedly happy and productive person, and, with Elspeth, a proud parent, of a surprisingly pretty daughter, named, to her grandparents's horror, for her cherished godfather: Harriet Dursley.

Vernon and Petunia had been still more despairing when it had transpired that little Harriet was, indeed, a Witch. Her and her parents's visits to her Dursley grandparents had become increasingly strained, and increasingly infrequent. This did not sadden Harriet unduly: Dudley and Elspeth were determined that it not be allowed to do, and the elder Bulstrodes were more than happy to do double duty in making much of the child. Moreover, in addition to the freer and more magical air of the Bulstrode place in Hants (near West Green, Hartley Wintney) - the Bulstrodes, as may perhaps have been noted, were very much a cut above the Dursleys of Little Whinging - Harriet was early made free of the Potter-Weasley-Granger-and-Every-War-Hero-One-Cares-to-Name ménage in the West Country, amongst whom she was simply another of the seething mass of sprogs (though one of the less annoying ones, actually), who all indiscriminately called one another's parents 'aunt' or 'uncle' and who were all some form of cousin to one another in any event.

This weekend the Dursleys at one of those magical house parties, not, this time, in the Otterys, but, rather, at the reclaimed Griffin Priors, with Chantry Farm hard by: ancient, mellow Griffin Priors, where to the north, beyond the gates, Godric's Hollow sat at ease and dozed in summer sun, secure once more in the shelter of the Potter demesne and the Potter lordship, linked indissolubly to the Potter magic and the Potter story, village and manor forever joined by the hallowed ground that had been an estate cottage hard by the dower house and the gatekeeper's lodge, near the site of the old Roman villa, where, as the Fidelius charm was broken about them, James and Lily Potter had sacrificed themselves to save their son, and, in saving him, had saved the world.

Beyond the coombe and the hollow, the classical West Somerset landscape rose, less grand and more intimate than that near Pottersfield House and Potterton Mallet, away upon the Mendips, on the other side of the county. Godric's Hollow and district hid themselves away, doves in the rock, in the shadow of the everlasting hills, upon the margins of the moor. North-westerly stood Gryphon Hill, with its trig point and its ruined castle; beyond it brooded Exmoor, wild and free. To the north and east of the village, the Sam Brook rose, to make its merry way, chortling over the rocks, to the greater tributaries of the River Exe, and thence to the Exe herself and so to the ever-changeful sea. It was the long vac., and High Summer, a golden god of jocund aspect, sat enthroned upon the land. And this was not Dudley's common Earth, water, or wood, or air: it was Merlin's isle of Gramarye: yet it was not so far from, it was none so alien to, the fields he knew. For all its subtle thrum of magic in the breeze, in the soil and the roots that filamented that soil, in every vein of every leaf, this was as much England as it was Faerie: the intersection of the timeless moment, England and nowhere, never and always. The Summer-God was a kindly divinity: for the loss of the honeyed flowers in the bluebell wood of Springtide, he gave as recompense the first flowering of eyebright, white and gold as priestly vestments, purple and gold as the robes of a Byzantine emperor: and outwith the magic of this place, the same exchange was made in the fields the Muggles knew, on Heydon Hill and Heydon Common, on Haddon Hill, at Potter's Cross and Huish Champflower, Clatworthy and Chipstable. Gorse and whin, dog-rose and bittersweet, maple, oak, and elm, took the Sun's grace here just as they did in the fields the Muggles knew, in Skilgate or Gupworthy, for in every season, in may time with its hedges white with voluptuary sweetness, in Summertide of the children in the apple-tree, in wintry Pentecostal fire in the dark time of the year, in the autumn of burnt roses and ash on an old man's sleeve, this was the ancient history behind the history, a pattern of timeless moments, now and England.

There were adults playing leisurely cricket, and adults playing, still more leisurely, a game of bowls; there were youths - and the more irrepressible adults - playing a deadly serious and highly competitive Quidditch match (it no longer surprised Dudley in the least that Harry, Ginny, and Ron were aloft, with that frighteningly intense Wood bloke, showing the callow youths How It Was Done). Hagrid - who had ceased to inspire horror in Dudley some years before, and now inspired only a fond respect - and Luna, whom Dudley, like everyone else, would always be the tiniest bit in love with, were leading the more adventurous of all ages on a nature walk in the wood; Molly, the Widow Tonks (if he'd the name right), and that formidable headmistress who made one feel all over thumbs and bumptiousness, were sitting in the dappled shade, knitting - and yarning - away (that aged and donnish sybarite, Professor Slughorn, had laughingly called them the Fates, and been set to bring them tea and cakes as penance, after which he had remained with them, gossiping merrily and dropping names as droppeth the gentle rain from Heaven). Arthur was still attempting to get the Grangers and the Creeveys to explain to him how, precisely, Muggles managed to get the milk to float without magic (Mr Creevey had long since regretted revealing his calling as a milkman to Mr Weasley). Numerous War Heroes were reduced to watching over that seething and indiscriminate mass of mischievous magical children, and looking rather the worse for wear as a result - apparently, had the Dark Thingummy ever recruited an evil army of children, he'd have won the War in a fortnight - as other equally harried Heroes of the War recruited their fellows and themselves with tea and cakes or stronger waters. Tony and Eleanor Goldstein were being persuaded to explain the laws of kashrut to a dangerously interested George Weasley, who was turning an artificial ear to the entreaties of his wife Angelina and of his brother Percy (Dudley foresaw a new series of edible Wheezes that could be counteracted only by the victim's keeping kosher for some days after incautiously consuming the proffered sweet, and in this he was quite right); Tony's banking partner, Blaise Zabini, was nervously avoiding the swarm of children and not quite quietly enough telling Theo and Pansy Nott how glad he was that he and Justin would not be becoming parents, ta ever so. Justin, quite sensibly, was having a pint of cider in the shade of a vast sessile oak with Bill and Fleur and her sister Gabrielle and Gabrielle's husband, little Den Creevey, Justin being for evident reasons one of the few men who could reliably be trusted in the presence of two part-Veelas without making an ass of himself before their respective husbands or a nuisance of himself to the ladies. Sitting with them, discussing Charms and Mediwizardry, were Susan Bones and her partner, Elspeth's cousin Millie; Elspeth had been waved over, as Susan in particular was fascinated by Muggle medicine, but had found an excuse in dealing with various small children (Elspeth was quite fond of Millie, really, and everyone adored Susan, but talking comparative medicine at a house party was too much of a busman's holiday for Elspeth's tastes). Lee Jordan was giving a suitably bowdlerised and quite useful elementary commentary on the Quidditch match to the youngest children - Dudley would have gone over and listened, were he not too comfortable to want to move, as Lee's tuition was always enlightening: Dudley was able by now to hold his end up surprisingly well when Harry and Ron, and Ginny, for that matter, got stuck in to yet another dinner table colloquium on Advanced Quidditch Tactics - whilst Dean Thomas, comically assisted by Seamus and usefully supported by Lavender and Parvati (Dudley was too drowsy and sun-drunk to remember who they'd married), was cheerfully painting the faces of a long queue of eager children, most of whom wanted to be made to look like Gryffindor lions despite Padma's urging, from the touchline, that they try being Ravenclaw eagles for a day, if only for a change from the last several summers. Hannah and the ever-reliable Ernie were doing a hilarious send-up of Rosmerta and Aberforth, dispensing drinks, with Aberforth himself sitting astride a goat and chaffing them; Cho and her thoroughly Muggle husband were seated, quietly drowsy themselves, a scant yard from Dudley and Elspeth: like the Grangers and the Creeveys, they tended to gravitate towards the Dursleys as kindred spirits when the sheer oddity of Wizards became too much for - Leslie, that was the chap's name, of course it was, Cho's husband. Sensible man; something in the City, as Dudley recalled. Angelina being occupied with George's future mischief, it had fallen to Terry Boot to move through the crowd in the wake of various Weasley offspring - and not Fred and Roxanne only - performing counter-charms, accompanied, if one stood tall and looked closely, by Professor Flitwick, who was taking copious notes and chuckling to himself. Hermione was doing her best to head off Professor Trelawney, who was hovering so as to pounce upon the Grangers if ever Arthur were done with them: the batty old Seer was forever trying to talk to Hermione's parents about Australia, for reasons no one cared to delve into. Minister Shacklebolt, Augusta Longbottom, Katie Bell and Alicia Spinnet - who played for the Harpies under their maiden names, which always buggered Dudley up, as he was hopeless at remembering their husbands - Pomona Sprout, and Charlie Weasley were deeply engrossed in a debate on gardening (Charlie was extolling the merits of dragon dung in compost), from which hardy perennial of British conversation Nev had wisely absented himself: he and Jack Sloper and several others whom Dudley didn't know terribly well were amongst those playing workmanlike, thoroughly Muggle cricket under the cloudless sky....

Surveying the scene from a comfortable chair with a long drink on the table next his elbow, Dudley thought back to his early acquaintance with the woman who would become his wife. The talk had turned to families, and he had sensed a common reticence in them both; the talk had turned to cousins, and Dudley, much daring, had tired of walking on thin ice and deliberately smashed a foot through. Certainly the shock of his finding that Elspeth had a cousin who was a Witch, and knew of - indeed, had been at Hogwarts with - Harry Potter, had been a shock like falling into icy water; Elspeth had been equally staggered to find that Dudley Dursley was Harry Potter's cousin, and, indeed, thanks to the Blacks, that Elspeth, being a Bulstrode, was Dudley's cousin at some removes, she being after all, as a Bulstrode, a distant cousin to the Potters.

Sometimes, it was still an overwhelming thing, a shock to the system, to find himself - the practical and highly non-magical son of the vehemently Muggle Vernon Dursley - here, amidst Witches and Wizards and Squibs. The other Squibs, he supposed: there was obviously some magic in the Evans bloodline, although it hadn't manifested in his mother or in him. But it was by no means an unpleasant shock: not to the man he had become. After all, he was here, Harry's cousin, Harriet's father, Millicent's cousin Elspeth's husband; in an odd sort of way, he fit (and dear old Arthur was always particularly pleased to see him: Dudley felt he owed it to the old buffer to spend hours talking of Muggle technology, and didn't mind terribly, really, although the experience had clearly palled long since for Den Creevey's parents and for Mr and Mrs Granger).

Elspeth, sitting next him, was listening indulgently to Lily Potter, Harriet's dearest friend - at least this week - who was chattering happily away. He sat up, fighting the overpowering urge to doze a bit in the sun, and did his best to be An Involved and Attentive Uncle.

'- Weasleys, of course, Aunt Elspeth, but because of, well, what happened....' Lily fell silent and looked over at Uncle Dudley, clearly weighing her words. 'Well, as he was sent to stay with his mum's family, Papa never really had much knowledge of the Potters. Uncle Remus and Aunt Andy -'

'I'm sorry, Lily, who again is, er, Aunt Andy?' Who the devil names a daughter 'Andy', even amongst Wizards, I'd like to know.

'Andromeda Tonks, Uncle Dudley. She was Andromeda Black before she married Ted Tonks, he was killed in the War, Scorpius's grandmother Malfoy is her sister, Scorpius never comes to these dos because his father and Papa never really got on even though Papa saved Mr Malfoy from being killed in the War, but Aunt Andy and Narcissa Malfoy get on nowadays, and they were first cousins to Sirius Black, Papa's godfather who was killed in the War, and Aunt Andy's daughter Nymphadora, except she hated to be called that and everyone was to call her "Tonks", married Remus Lupin who was grandfather's and Sirius's best mate, they were killed in the War, they were Teddy's parents, I mean Tonks and Remus were, and of course Grandfather Potter and Grandmother Potter and Sirius Black were killed in the War as well but what I meant was that Remus and Tonks were also killed in the War but of course after they'd had Teddy - and I'm sorry, Uncle Dudley, because after all Grandmother Potter was your Aunt Lily after all and I probably shouldn't have reminded you that she was, er -'

'Killed in the War? It's all right, Lily, I did know that, you know.'

'Well, but.... Well. All right, then, before Remus was ... well, he was killed in the War, there's no point in not saying so, practically everyone was until Papa stopped it, and -'

Dudley's voice was carefully modulated: grave, but not condemning. 'I know that also, Lily. I was very nearly killed in the War myself, Muggle though I am, when I was attacked by Dementors. I'll wager you can guess, if you don't already know, that it was your father who saved me.'

Lily nodded, with all the seriousness and gravity of a child. 'He's very good at that, Uncle Dudley. So we all of us look out for him and try to save him as well. I think that's what Remus was doing before he was killed in the War, and also he was putting together some notes for Papa on the Potter history, you see, because what with saving people and all sorts he hasn't time to take care of himself or do as he likes, and Aunt Andy has been continuing those, she says that great-, ah, well, hold up -' and here Lily was visibly seen to concentrate on some mental arithmetic - 'great-great-great-grandmother Violetta Black, she was a Bulstrode, Aunt Elspeth, before she married Cygnus Black, and she was something of a historian, Aunt Andy says, and it runs in the family, Aunt Andy says, she makes certain that when Teddy sits his NEWTS he'll excel in History of Magic, but be that as it may, you see, everyone wants Papa to have a shot at knowing more about the Potters, because they're said to be a very old family and he never knew any of them due to their being -'

'Killed in the War,' said Elspeth, a trifle drily. 'Yes, dear. I think it an excellent idea and I imagine your father will be very grateful. I do think, dear, that we've talked enough about the War for a time, don't you? Now. Albus starts Hogwarts when, exactly?'

It had been right of Elspeth, Dudley thought, as they waited resignedly at Basingstoke on the interminably rail journey back to London on Sunday afternoon - leaves on the line, no doubt - it had been quite right of Elspeth to turn Lily's conversation - well, monologue, really - to lighter topics. But he made sure that Elspeth felt, as he did, that Harry deserved this closure, to borrow a word they both heard all too often in their allied fields. Doubtless Elspeth, naturally attuned to the importance Wizards put upon such things, was thinking of how terrible it was that Harry, arriving at Hogwarts amidst any number of cousins (good, bad, and indifferent, from Millicent, to Marcus Flint, to Vince Crabbe of execrated memory, to Malfoy, to the Weasleys, to those thoroughly decent chaps Ernie Macmillan and Neville Longbottom, who had done so much to make Dudley feel at home in his cousin's - and soon his daughter's - world), should have thought himself alone and without family: Elspeth, growing up a Squib, had suffered her own sensations of rejection and distance, although her branch of the Bulstrode family was a lightish one of decent and relatively unbigoted elders. For his part, Dudley had never felt any curiosity about the Dursley family, although idle speculation in his dreadful childhood about Harry and the Evans family had since become more interesting as he planned for the future of young Harriet: she should know who Lily's family were, whence she had inherited her magic. But then again - was the blasted train finally moving again? No. False hopes. Bugger - but then again, he wasn't, as Harry was, a national hero, an officer and a gentleman with medals and decorations across his tunic, and a hereditary legislator (because as far as Dudley could make out, all of these youthful war heroes were granted hereditary seats in their magical parliament, and if that wasn't the equivalent to being in the House of Lords before all those changes, Dudley would like to know what was). No, Harry deserved better, and Muggle though Dudley Dursley might be, he would put his shoulder to the wheel with the rest and give things a push - pity it didn't work on these damned trains....

There were moments, in the next few years, when Dudley, immured in stone and steel, using and being used through by wheels and machines, in the city that covers over what were once the fields men knew, almost forgot: almost, but never quite. Harriet had gone off to Hogwarts, now - an ornament of Hufflepuff House, naturally - and her friends and cousins and schoolmates had become small individuals now, with personalities of their own (and rather rum personalities some of them were, to be sure), no longer an inchoate mass of fledgling energies. Andromeda Tonks, and her grandson Teddy Lupin - for Teddy, like, it appeared, his late father, was indeed a born academic, and, as his gran had prophesied, a born historian at that - had never wavered in their determination to make the Potter heritage live and be apprehensible to Harry, and they'd let no one else slack in the effort, from bluff, steady, reliable Nev, still perhaps Dudley's best and oldest friend, bar Harry, in Harry's world, to stalwart Minerva, to the always enthusiastic Arthur, to dogged Ernie Macmillan, to the terrifyingly clever Hermione and her petrifyingly intelligent daughter Rose, to, remarkably enough, the alarming Draco Malfoy - Dudley recognised a fellow bully belatedly reformed when he saw one - and his surprisingly witty and charming mother, Andromeda's sister Cissy: it was to Cissy, Dudley suspected, shrewdly, that the recent thaw in relations between Harry and the drawling sod was attributable. What was more, the more immediate aftermath of the War was now done and dusted, and the reforms that mattered most had been effected, including the final and hard-fought reforms that made the MLE forces into proper policemen and the Aurors into a true Army, in consequence of which Harry, in the absence of mass insurrection or foreign threat, now had considerably more time to devote to his own life and family, for all his increasing seniority as an officer of what was now, proudly, the Royal Corps of Aurors.

And now it was once more summer, and Hogwarts, broken up for the summer hols. And in the rota of the long vac., once more Griffin Priors was to host the summer stay of the old soldiers and their families and such connexions as the Dursleys. Dudley and Elspeth were now sufficiently senior to take their hols when they listed, so they would spend almost a fortnight with the Potters this year; Harriet would spend a month. ('Do feel free to send her home early if she becomes tiresome,' had said Dudley; Harry had laughed, and countered, 'If I keep her, can we send you lot, ours?' - to which Elspeth had only half-humorously replied with a very firm and very swift, 'No', to Ginny's howls of laughter.)

Harriet having gone before by Floo, it was left to her parents to make their own way to Godric's Hollow and Griffin Priors. Without Harriet's wand to summon it, the Knight Bus was - gratefully, as it was a succession of terrors even to Wizards and Witches, much less to a Muggle passenger and a Squib - an impossibility; Apparition, like the Floo, was inherently barred to Dudley and Elspeth. Fortunately, with the return of peace and prosperity, there were other resources now to hand, and his being Harry's cousin - or, rather, his being the father of Harry's joint-favourite goddaughter, and husband to one of Harry's favourite people - meant that those resources were very much to Dudley's hand. The closure of the British Museum Underground station in 1933 had had causes other than those - efficiency, mainly - given out to Muggles, just as Dr Beeching, thirty years later, had wielded, not an axe, but a wand, in reserving and restoring several rail lines to exclusive Wizarding use. And of course, if there is one place in the Muggle world, let alone Britain, where Wizards and Muggles can mingle without so much as an eyebrow's being raised, it is the British Museum and its purlieus: even more so than at Oxford, or that place in the Fens. So it was that Dudley and Elspeth met the Grangers and the Creeveys - who'd had an appalling time on the Muggle trains from Staffs up to town - at the BM tube station, to sink with relief into the 1920s, and the magical 1920s at that: the magical tube (Central Line) to Finchley Road and thence on the magical Metropolitan Line to Brill, all change for the Godric Express, via Boarstall, Oxford Magdalen, Calne, Black Dog Halt, Dilton Marsh Halt, Twatford Mulliner, Sutton Littlecombe Halt, Fisherton de la Mere, Potterton Mallet, dipping down to and through Ottery St Catchpole, and then back to Exeter St Aldhelm, Brompton Pixie, and on to Norton Fitzwarren, where they would be met. All by steam! O ghosts of Kipling's memsahibs, all by steam! The journey, like the appointments of the various carriages and the service of the free-elf wine-waiters, respectively, was plush, opulent, and smooth, and very swift: yet not so swift that the Creeveys hadn't time to relax from the agonies of the Muggle up train that had - eventually - managed to get them to London, a prospect that had at times seemed doubtful, nor so swift that Dudley and Mr Granger hadn't time to think dark, envious thoughts, and voice them to one another, about the invidious comparisons to be made between Muggle and magical rail companies. Even so, in less than an hour, they had made their winding and characteristically eccentric magical way from the fringes of Bloomsbury (after all, the BM tube station was conveniently close to Elspeth's beloved Great Ormond Street Hospital, even if that convenience were paid for in Mr Creevey's several and ill-conceived puns: 'GOSH, it's a BM' was by no means the worst of these) to the heart of the Summer Country.

And awaiting them at the terminus were several elves. And an ancient shooting-brake that could not possibly hold their luggage, let alone their party. Except of course that it could, as Harry's elves quite competently demonstrated, magical space being what it is; and when they had piled into to an interior that could have been crafted by the works at BMC and was approximately the size of a state apartment at Frogmore House, a snap of an elfin finger transported them, bag and baggage, shooting brake and all, to the surround of Griffin Priors, half a yard from the doors outside which Harry, Ginny, Jamie, Al, Lily, Harriet, Ron, Hermione, Rose, Hugo, and a seething mass of ruddy little perishers, many of them ominously ginger, waited, smiling cheerfully. Dudley was simply grateful that his fears, of a mad elf, ears flapping, sitting on forty four-folded blankets to peer through the lower reaches of the windscreen, chauffeuring them wildly through the countryside, had not been realised.

Bindweed, bramble, brier, traveller's-joy, ivy. Once, Dudley had thought, the prospect of stopping with his cousin would have been a weight and a binding; nowadays, even as he journeyed into this half-tamed countryside, it was always a slipping free of care; even as he entered into this world of trammelling bindweed, of bramble and brier, traveller's-joy, and ivy, it was his cares that slipped from him even as the trailing plants and the kindly magic of the genius loci bound him fast with creeper and vine.

It was High Summer in the Summer Country: an embroidery of splendour upon the hem of Exmoor. Dudley had grown to love the Summertide, of all seasons the best, and not only for its precious hols with wife and daughter; Harry, he knew, father of three children, old soldier of an incalculable war, loved best the autumn, the harvest home, the mellow fruitfulness achieved, the crown of the year's labours, all safely gathered in. Autumn, fox-red autumn, autumn all ruddy and golden, red as apples ripe and poppies at the Cenotaph upon Remembrance Sunday, red-gold as Ginny's and Jamie's hair, red and gold as Harry's regimentals, gold and ruby as Gryffindor: that was Harry's season. Yet for Dudley, it was the burning stasis of the summer noon, the stillness at the apogee, the poise and pause at the peak of flight before the balanced cycle turned again, that was dear, a time as pallid-gilt and flaxen as Harriet's hair - for she had taken her colouring from her parents, even as she had taken her fine bones from the Evans in her - and as emerald as the eyes she shared with her great-aunt Lily and with Harry, Lily's son.

And at this peak of the spinning year, the still point of the turning world, where better could a man be than with his family in some magical home, amidst this homely magic, knowing and feeling, however dully, what his family's keener senses more keenly felt and knew, the magic in the everyday, the great chain of being that linked them all. The charlock and the small whites that it fed, the hare's-foot clover and the shepherd's-purse, sorrel and chervil and harebell and weld, the bugle and the dog-violet that fritillaries loved, the crab apple and, carolling from its utmost twig in the lashing storm, the mistle thrush; the elder and the woodpigeon; the hornbeam, the rowan, the oak and the birch, the wild cherry and the elm; and the bracken and the ling, the gorse and the whin, bordering the fields we know, with the whinchat singing from its upland fastness and the crisp carpet sheltering the vixen with her cubs (Dudley found Ginny rather plain, if truth be told: as he had grown into a Viking figure, so he had taken a shield-maiden to wife, and his taste was not Harry's: yet there was about her something free and swift and cunning and wild that put him always in mind of the moorland vixens, fiercely fitted to this witching land, and Harry was a lucky lad, Dudley knew, and deserving of his luck).

There had been a time, Dudley well recalled, when he would have shut his mind to Harry's world, or seen it as a horror, the backward half-look over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror; a time when he had thought it, if he could believe it at all, a world that scryed omens, fiddled with pentagrams, conversed with spirits in the Edgware Road, driven by dæmonic, chthonic Powers; where chill fingers of yew curled down upon the leaves full of children, and the dancers were gone under the sea, gone under the hill, and deceit waited in a bramble, on the edge of a grimpen. How could he have guessed, how was he to have known until he knew, the stillness, the light answering light in the flash of the kingfisher's wing, the deep lane, shuttered with branches, that led insistently to the trim village, the dignified and commodious sacrament, the sharp compassion of the healer's art? How known or hoped for the laughter in the garden, the lifetime burning in every moment, redeemed from fire by fire?

Dudley felt these deep-registered notes, as a man feels sounds too deep upon the scale for him to hear, great notes that move his bones within him: felt them, knew them in his heart, without his being able to articulate them. Yet in his halting way, sitting with Albus Severus beneath a stag's-head oak, he tried, haltingly, to convey something of this sense. Al - so like Harry and so unlike, a chance to begin again and to do right, to expiate a bullying childhood - Al was of all of them his not-so-secret favourite, to Harry's discreetly unvoiced and wry-smiling delight.

'I can see that,' said Al, judiciously. His current years were such that he was at the age of unremitting candour and preternatural gravity - a stage that Jamie had managed wholly to miss. Of course, Al was a Ravenclaw, to boot, as Jamie was the quintessence of titrated Gryffindor and Lily was currently engaged in setting Slytherin, and the remnants of its pre-War reputation as suspect and making, altogether by the ears. With Harriet busily setting out to show precisely why she had been sorted into Hufflepuff, the Evans strain in the lineage was definitely showing its paces in this new generation. 'Teddy, of course -' Al's worship of Teddy was never concealed, at any age, and in fact any such attempt would have been doomed from the start - 'is rather like Harry, or perhaps the other way 'round.' Al was also now of the age to insist on addressing everyone solely by Christian names, save at school, where different conventions prevailed. 'Wasn't immersed in it from the first, as Andy did rather keep him in cotton-wool as a puling infant.' Al was looking particularly owlish as he donned the mantle of the sage. 'So of course he badly wants to know everything about his people and his place. Well, you of all people see why that's so for Harry.' Dudley carefully refrained from wincing at that too-true statement.

'Or I suppose,' mused Al, 'it may be a Black thing. Scorpius's a bit taken that way, and from what Andy and Cissy say, Sundays chez Black were devoted less to Morning Prayer - or Mass, I suppose, they being RC - than simple, straightforward ancestor worship. But I rather suspect Ted Tonks - Andy's husband, you know, who was killed in the War - and Nymphadora - Teddy's mum: she was killed in the War - would've thought it silly. Well, she would have done, Ted, by all accounts, 'd thought it non-U. I mean, look at Justin, he's never bothered his head about what his people did in Charles 1st's time or any of that rot, he knows he's a Finch-Fletchley and that's all he wants to know. Or -'

And here Al broke off, for they could both hear Harry, sternly, albeit without raising his voice to any parade-ground and square-bashing bellow, ticking off Jamie. '... don't care what the devil they do, they've a long history of being aristocrats-behaving-badly. We are -' and Al, with a wry grin very like Harry's in other moods, repeated along with his distant father what were surely well-worn words '- a Service family.'

Al turned to Dudley once more. 'Well, you see what I mean. I expect Jamie's done something like Vanishing the ham. Torrid summer or no torrid summer, one can have too many slices of cold ham for luncheon, day upon weary day. But that's Jamie.'

'I notice,' said Dudley, 'you still call him, "Jamie"....'

Al stared at him, shocked by Dudley's being so unutterably thick. 'Well. Yeah. Gets right up his nose.'

'Ah.'

'He's spent his Hogwarts years insisting on being called "James" by anyone who doesn't call him, "Potter" - thumped a few people, when wanted. Hopeless, of course. He thinks he wishes to be an Auror.' Al shook his head over his brother's naïveté. 'Given the structure of the commands, he's more likely than not to end up in a regiment from the Celtic Fringe, and be doomed to be "Jamie" until he dies. He never was awfully clever at seeing things in advance.

'Take Quidditch, though. I'm not altogether hopeless on a broom myself, you know.' Al's casual tone was not quite good enough; what was more, even Dudley knew, had seen and understood, that Al could have been a better flyer and a better Seeker even than Harry had been - or Ginny, to be sure. 'But it's not on. So long as no one calls him by name, Jamie can pass amongst all the other Weasleys, so it's not an issue if he plays. And Lily's not bad at all, really; she can't make her mind up to it, just now, with Molly going on about how unladylike it is and Hermione torn between equality for Witches and her disdain for sports and unintellectual pursuits and Mum -' Al flushed - 'I mean, and Ginny pushing her. But can you imagine if I went in for Quidditch? I've enough people wanting me to be Harry redux, or seeing me as that and assuming. Bloody cheek, really. All this wanting to know if you're more like your great-uncle or your old granny's Squib cousin or what not. Rubbish, if you ask me. I suppose, though, if it makes Harry happy.... Bugger! Is that Mum calling us to the feed?'

_____________________________________________________

As they sat in the leaf-dappled noon beneath the ancient oaks, the inevitable cold ham before them, Dudley surveyed his wonderfully - he could admit that now - eccentric family and friends. A stranger, out of earshot, looking upon them, might not at first have seen anything odd, bar the extraordinary number of gingers. Simply a gathering of family and friends, eating a summer luncheon out of doors in the West Country. Vernon, Dudley fancied, would no doubt have expected the very food and drink to involve dancing toadstools and boiling cauldrons. As things stood, the only criticism even Petunia might have made of the table was its superior extravagance and the presence of food far above the reaches of her Privet Drive kitchen. For the cold ham that was Jamie's bane was by no means unaccompanied. There was a cold roast of beef, and had an observer come nearer, he should have seen it slice itself to the desired thickness. There was chicken chaud-froid and a raised ham and veal pie that raised and levitated to the diner's plate upon request, a galantine of chicken that seemed never to run out, and gondolas of melon and ham that bobbed and rowed to plates, singing tuneful Venetian catches and glees. There were chilled soups and proper salads, great wheels of cheese, a hot soup (broad bean and bacon), boiled eggs and angels on horseback (Dudley had been present when Lily's earliest instance of accidental magic, some years before, had transformed a dish of devils on horseback to angels thereon: Lily's utter loathing of prunes had begun early and was likely to persist for the next century or so); asparagus rolls and gentlemen's morsels, mushrooms in a score of preparations, jugged steak, cress sandwiches, a rabbit cider hot pot that Ron Weasley was defending against all comers, Coronation chicken, a Somerset fish pie, a smoked trout pâté, carrots in green-butter, tiny and tender new potatoes in dill sauce, sliced cucumber, scones and jam and clotted cream, summer pudding, queen of puddings, tea, Pimm's, lashings of cider, and - the only thing that would have puzzled a Muggle - butterbeer in inexhaustible amounts.

Gravely munching his healthful and non-fattening salad beneath Elspeth's watchful eye, Dudley considered the odd fact that the two worlds considered themselves so very different, and were at bottom so very alike. This facile observation - true enough in its way, and yet at the end, so very misleading - was brushed aside when Andromeda tapped her spoon against the side of her glass of Bollinger. (Teddy had been all of four years in age before he had twigged - loudly, vocally, innocently, and in the most public forum possible - to the fact that what Grandmother was downing was not in fact 'a special sort of elderflower barley water, Teddy, dear': Andromeda was even yet hearing about that error from time to time, usually when Teddy had decided that the best way of diverting her from his own scrapes was to back-foot her, pre-emptively.)

They looked at her attentively, most of them, like nestlings open-mouthed to the return of the parent bird with something tasty. Even the children (Jamie, who had been staring mutinously at his plate a few moments before, trying wandlessly to vanish the ham, his hair glinting ruddily in the sunlight, his hazel eyes expressive of a mortal loathing of Yet More Ham; Al, so unnervingly Harry in miniature, distracted from making Scorpius Malfoy, so new an addition to the establishment of regular guests, feel at home, and Scorpius himself, whose equally unnerving resemblance to his father and grandfather, Dudley could not yet recognise; little Lily, whose startling combination of Weasley-red tresses and emerald Evans eyes anomalously rendered her the most classically Scots-appearing person at table, Ernie and Minerva included; stout, sensible, douce Hugo, who looked suspiciously like the more mischievous sort of Weasley or Prewett but wasn't, and earnest, bookish Rose, who, by and large, was earnest and bookish and above suspicion, and could be the most dangerous prankster of the generation when the mood was upon her; devilishly handsome Freddie, already a heartbreaker, and coolly elegant Roxanne, who was as horrifically clever as Rose when she wished; Teddy, come now to man's estate, and as solemn when bent upon merriment as when engrossed in research, and his doting Victoire, for a smile from whom men would sack cities; and all the rest) - even the children were listening avidly: Andy never spoke save to come out with something bracing, shattering, or portentous. Only Hermione, Ginny, Molly, Cissy, Minerva, and old Filius Flitwick looked on with the sort of smug assurance that betrayed that they had already been let in on the news. Several of the others had been also, but were better at keeping their countenances and unwilling to reveal their foreknowledge even now.

'Harry - and I must apologise in advance for what I must say, Dudley, dear - Harry, those utterly dreadful Muggles who'd the raising of you, did you, amongst many other disservices, a grave disservice in keeping your family history from you.'

'Hear. Hear,' said Dudley, quite firmly.

'Thank you, Dudley. I may as well say at once, Harry, that we in our world did you no better service, in not bothering to tell you about your parents and yourself: although I trust that Sirius, had he been spared to us, or Remus, should have done so soon as time permitted. The - is there a problem, Tony?'

Tony Goldstein was staring sternly at the table before him, his wand in hand. 'Yes, Andromeda, there is. It's this ham -'

'Oh, dear,' cried Ginny, as her eldest child muttered something to the effect that he could've warned them all that the ham was possessed. Two house-elves appeared and wrestled the trencher and the cold ham upon it into submission, although it kept trying to break free and throw itself upon Tony's and Eleanor's plates. 'That charm is always so fiddly, here, I'll -'

Harry, with a sort of exasperated patience, waved a negligent hand and stilled the ham. 'Sorry, Eleanor, Tony. Forgive the implied insult, if you would: the plates are only Semi-Sentient Salvers, after all, and can sense only that they've failed to serve a guest. Don't know treyf from tent-pegs. George, make a note, and fix the damned things before you start selling them to innocent customers rather than inveigling your long-suffering family into testing them.

'Sorry: go on, Aunt Andy. If you must.' Harry was clearly less than inspired by the prospect of being forcibly initiated into the grand traditions of the Potters.

Andromeda favoured him with the sort of look he'd become long since accustomed to from Minerva and from Hermione. 'I shall. Now. Over the past few years, all of us - and I must thank you all for your contributions - have laboured mightily to put Harry fully in possession of his inheritance and his heritage, and Harry has kindly suffered it, apparently for the sake of the children.'

As Scorpius looked at Al in some confusion, although only Al could have known whether its source was that Aunt Andy thought 'the children' gave a three-Knut dam, or that Harry evidently did not, Harry spoke and corrected the misapprehension. 'I am not in fact unappreciative of the effort, Andy, and I very much regret if I've been disobliging. But there were enough of those involved who ought damn' well have known I don't particularly like, or learn from, being lectured: I didn't at Hogwarts, I didn't as a cadet at Norsworthy, I didn't at Staff College at Bradninch, and I didn't when I took leave and went up to university at Domdaniel. The material Remus collected was a doddle for me - Remus was always able to teach me something. All of it has been valuable ... as I've gone through it at my own pace. And I'm greatly obliged to all of you. However -'

Hermione's smile was positively feral. With a sinking sensation, Harry recognised that he'd walked into ambush. Nev shook his head, and smiled compassionately, commiseratingly, in his direction. Narcissa simply winced: even now, Harry's Slytherin sensibilities were all too severely suppressed in him, and Andy had trapped him with pathetic ease.

'Yes, dear.' By her tone, she might have been speaking to Teddy - a decade before. 'We've found you a member of the Potter family to go and see and stop with and have speech of.'

'Living?' Dudley blinked, and then realised that, in a world of animated portraits and what not, Harry's question had been perfectly rational, and perfectly natural as well, as clearly it had taken the combined wits of the cleverest people in the Wizarding world several years to run whoever it was to earth, and everyone had hitherto thought that there were no Potters living of the prior generations, they having a tendency to die heroically at what were, for Wizards and Witches, comparatively unripe years.

Andromeda's hesitation was almost imperceptible. 'Very much so. Now, if you don't object, Hermione is wanted to cast a spell that will determine who best to accompany you.' The which Hermione, neatly, precisely, and still rather smugly, promptly did.

A blue, dancing flame appeared over the heads of those chosen, to Hermione's initial (and even now rather smug) satisfaction: over Harry, naturally; over Ron, predictably enough; over Charlie (and not, thankfully, over George), most acceptably; and over Neville, quite satisfactorily. Hermione's smile became a trifle strained when the flame appeared above the head of one Rubeus Hagrid, although, she supposed, it was quite reasonable under the circumstances. Her face betrayed a certain surprise when everyone began looking fixedly at Dudley, who was beginning to feel uneasily that he'd been roped in to a project he wanted no part of and couldn't possibly understand. Her demeanour waxed markedly impatient as she noticed that the charm had failed to select a single academical person and, worse still, had failed to select a single Witch. She appeared to relax slightly when one last flame appeared, flickering with a rich blue, and began to approach Narcissa Malfoy, around whose fair poll it then circled indecisively for a moment. When it split and its other half appeared, alarmingly, near Scorpius, Hermione frowned. When the two halves of the blue glede rejoined and streaked purposefully off towards the eastwards, she fell into her chair, bereft of speech.

And when a markedly displeased and bewildered Draco Malfoy unintentionally Apparated in, beating ineffectually at a flame of electric blue spinning furiously above his head, and for a long moment unaware that he had suddenly appeared - and in a undignified attitude, at that - in the presence of acquaintances (they were hardly friends) whose invitation he had declined, and in full sight of his mother and his son, who were giving him twin looks of glacial annoyance, Hermione emitted a strangled noise that suggested a duck that had been suddenly and unexpectedly Banished to a Tory MP's pond.

Harry, having had long experience of the inventive ways in which the Fates delighted in buggering up his life, could only laugh, brokenly, as the clamour rose about him on every side.

_____________________________________________________

Hermione - who was a dear, really, but whose abiding belief in her own cleverness could occasionally create problems for her and everyone else in earshot - had still had her nose badly out of joint and had contributed little to the furore that had ensued. It had fallen to Minerva to state, crisply and with absolute finality, that the spell had done what it had done and they'd best live with it (Percy, whose memory was longer and more intrusive even than his Weasley nose and more prominently displayed than his Weasley hair, and always at the worst of all possible moments, had made an unfortunate reference to Binding Magical Contracts and the Goblet of Fire, which had neither pleased nor persuaded anyone), and Luna had answered the question that Hermione was as yet too browned off to ask by talking of the Male Principle (and the Potters, historically, had always produced an uncommonly high number of sons and remarkably few daughters, even as had the Weasleys), and Hagrid and Charlie, bless them, had simply started selecting and gathering what gear they thought would be wanted: with the result that, without quite knowing how they'd acceded to the mad idea, Harry, a bemused Dudley, and a mutinously temperamental Draco Malfoy found themselves, not a week after, Apparating in to the Royal Magical Military Academy Norsworthy, the Wizarding Sandhurst, in the upper reaches of the River Meavy, accompanied by a dragon-tamer, a half-giant Fellow in Magizoology, and the world's foremost academic Herbologist.

This was familiar enough territory to Harry and Ron, for self-evident reasons. Draco surveyed the area with distaste ('not enough peacocks' was Ron's whispered verdict, to which Harry replied, 'just the one', with a nod in Malfoy's direction); Neville, with interest; and Hagrid, with satisfaction, breathing deeply of the aromatic, conifer-scented and resinous air. Charlie's reaction was dispassionate: there were, after all, no dragons (not their natural habitat thereabouts); Dudley's, curious, a trifle taken aback, and uneasy to the extent that he felt himself in unwonted and unwelcome sympathy with Malfoy's evident displeasure.

It was a very short bit of Apparating to Two Bridges, but Harry, Hagrid, and Charlie insisted that the day was so fine that they owed it to themselves to walk. The others found this idea worthwhile if only for the look of absolute and helpless horror that it was met with on Malfoy's part. Yet there was no help for it, and in that cool, blue early morn, they set out, at the pace set by two hardened Aurors who were sensible of their half-giant friend's natural stride. Even the new, improved Dudley, kept up to the mark by Elspeth and kept in training by an incredibly active daughter, was soon beginning to find the pace a bit hot, and his envy of Neville's easy rolling along - pipe lit and eyes sparkling: the years had made Neville, for all his tweedy, doctorally-gowned shabbiness and his scholar's stoop, a very fit and athletic man, far removed from the podgy lad he'd been at the age of eleven years - was mitigated only by his rather wicked pleasure in Malfoy's incessant whinging. They slogged across the tors towards Tor Royal beside the Devonport Leat - Princetown, and HMP Princetown, was not a place in which they wished to become entangled - with Nev audibly botanising all the way.

They took their elevenses on the bank of the Blackbrook, beneath the ancient cists north of the bridge. It was a fine day, disturbed only by the moaning of a blistered Malfoy: a reed bunting took a vocal interest in their presence.

They strode - or limped, as the case might be - into Two Bridges not so very long after, for all the leisureliness of their later walking (even Hagrid had concluded that coddling Malfoy was less trouble than listening to another diatribe), and secured accommodations for the night. The next day bid fair to be abiding fair; they would simply be forced to trust to charms and the magic of the Tor to hide them from Muggle eyes. They spent the afternoon with several OS maps, and took a walk 'round the village, paying particular attention to the pub. Afterwards, they eat heartily, guiltily admitted that Molly nor Ginny could have bettered the meal (Malfoy professed to find it plebeian; Dudley was privately seized with guilt, as his empty plate winked back at him, as Elspeth would never have approved the menu; and Ron declined, loyally, to comment upon Hermione's notorious lack of competence in the kitchen: Hagrid thought Hermione a brilliant cook, of course, but Hagrid's standard of cookery was all too well known), had a last pint or four of scrumpy, and, yawning, bade one another goodnight.

After Harry had retired - indeed, after they had all done, ostensibly at least - Malfoy, for all his complaints of being utterly knocked up by the slog (he'd made out that it was the next thing to Boney's retreat from Moscow, although it hadn't so much as fagged the others in the slightest), took it upon himself to knock up both Weasleys.

'Are we mad?' Ron refused to take the question as rhetorical, and pointed out rather acidly that he and Charlie must have been to accept the Ferret as a companion on this trip, much less to let him drag them out of their beds and jaw at them; but Malfoy was not to b diverted.

'Do you two thickies realise what we're let in for tomorrow? We are being told off to go up on the Tor, between Crockern and Parson's Cot, by the Pillow Mounds, and head straight into Old Crockern's parlour and - if we're spared - up to Wistman's Wood! Adders are the least of it, and the place is crawling with them! The Spirit of the Moor himself, the Wild Hunt, the Wisht Hounds - the Wood's their bloody kennels, damn it all - magic older than Merlin? All to find some Potter no one's ever met who is supposed - supposed - to live on those godforsaken wastes and has never been seen? And we're walking into this with no support bar a savage, a Longbottom, a muscle-bound Muggle, and you two? It's madness! We're all going to die!'

'You are if you don't belt up, go to bed, and let honest folk sleep,' said Harry, from the doorway, in which he stood more tousled than ever and considerably grumpier. 'And I'll thank you not to speak that way of Nev, Hagrid, and my cousin, is that clear? Excellent. Now go to bed, all of you. And do try not to cower, tomorrow: after all, I'll be there, that should be a reasonable pledge of your safety.' Harry did not quite slam the door. As Charlie and Ron left Malfoy's room, with but one withering glance apiece, Ron took great pleasure in supplying the deficiency: the report the door made could have been made by cannon.

The morning did indeed break fair: breaking, spilling down, like the chrism of anointing: a blue and gold morn, jewelled and delicate. After a hearty breakfast (Dudley manfully confined himself to what he thought he could walk off: Elspeth would slaughter him without compunction if he let himself return to the old days of greed and gluttony, and he'd a daughter to think of), they set off for what ought to have been a short journey.

Being Wizards, and able to conceal their presence from other walkers - and, what was more, being able to walk upon the land and leave it undisturbed - they were under no obligation to hold to the paths. They did do at first, steeping out briskly upon the footpath that followed the West Dart to Crockern Farm.

The rhôs pastures and valley mires of Dartmoor are famously a haunt of snipe. Unfortunately, all the glories of a summer morning upon Dartmoor were not sufficient to still the sniping between Harry and Malfoy. The latter's incessant whinging brought out the worst in Harry, as it had ever done, causing him to revert to the intolerant and, withal, priggish and censorious schoolboy he had once been. Malfoy's complaints and doubts were met with fiercer and fiercer insults, to Malfoy's stamina, courage (or evident lack thereof, as Harry increasingly pointedly insisted), and unmanly softness ('you go about posing as an angler at least, if not a shooting and hunting man, but you're about as outdoors a chap as a suburban clerk, aren't you, for all your posturing as the lord of the manor': Harry's increased and adult sophistication made him much more cutting, when he reverted to adolescent sledging, than ever he had been when adolescent). Malfoy in turn was at his most waspish, and the years had honed his already cutting tongue into something lethal. Dudley, who didn't feel he'd the right to say anything to Harry, was becoming uneasy; Hagrid was beginning audibly to disapprove of the both of them; Nev, whose post-War stature (no one ever forgot, nowadays, the Neville who'd defied Voldemort in the darkest hour, let alone the Carrows before him, and slain Nagini) sufficed to give him the gravitas to slap even Harry down, was on the verge of doing so; Charlie, who had never really formed a personal opinion of Draco and whom through long residence abroad from an early age, held no particular views on Malfoys as such, was drawing breath to tell the both of them off, and even Ron was on the verge of suggesting that Harry was going a bit far in barracking the Ferret, when it happened.

'- and if you're frightened of running into some danger, you little -'

'Oh, no,' sneered Malfoy, fatally adding, 'of course not, we shouldn't be at all worried, we're with you -'

- And that inadvertent reminder, that unwitting echo of some of Albus Dumbledore's last words, was the crisis point. Ron, forgetting his disapproval of Harry's being rather a shit just now, drew his wand to hex Malfoy into the West Dart, and then seriatim into the Devonport Leat, the Blackbrook, and the Cowsic, but Harry, snapping like a rope pulled too taut at last, was before him, with a punch to the jaw that sent Malfoy sprawling.

Malfoy, to give him his due, came up again, boiling, prepared to give as good as he'd got, but Hagrid was swifter still, seizing both of them by the collars and shaking them as a terrier shakes a rat. 'That'll be more'n enough o' that! Nobbut vules, the both on yer, actin' like misbelievin' chillurn, and worser, Al nor Scorpius'd make damn' zammies o' theyselves this-a-way, no more sense 'n a brace o' billy-buttonses. An' yeh do want ter walk small and careful-loike and not be brawlin' loike common hedge-wizards, on the very thresh-yold o' Old Crockern's house. You two come along o' me, an' no nunny-fudgin'. Mebbe the air'll clear yer wits up-along, we get ourseln away from thick yere plashy ground an' all they rhynes.' And he shoved them, not too gently, before him as they turned eastwards and began to trudge up the slopes towards Crockern Tor.

As they ascended the stiff slope past the Pillow Mounds, it was Dudley, in a dead heat with Nev, who noticed the increasing oddity of the scene. Neville was professionally attuned to the natural order and to magic; Dudley was disturbed and set on edge by the oddly fierce dispute of a few moments before, sensing in a way he could not hope to articulate that there was some malign influence at work, driving Harry and Malfoy to savage one another: an influence that could not be explained away by an old, schoolboy rivalry, however deep. Hagrid and Charlie and Ron were too much occupied with preventing another such outburst to see the first signs that something very odd was going on.

Nev and Dudley were not. Their shared glance was one of alarm. It is not uncommon for ground mist and fog to wrap the West in an impenetrable blanket above and without which only the high moors, Bodmin, Dartmoor, and Exmoor, stand free. It is not altogether unknown for the lower elevations of the moor itself to be suddenly swathed in mist and impenetrable fog, whilst the tors ride above it in a keener air of their own. Yet the sudden cutting off of the site of their quest from all mortal ken, by a fog that was in no way natural, one almost palpable, and the sudden knowledge that they were alone in what had been, but a moment before, a not deserted landscape, was more than ominous. Hagrid was not far behind them in noticing. The birdsong had stilled. An utter silence enveloped them, in which their own sounds, increasingly tentative as they slowed to a halt, sounded oddly.

And the landscape itself was as suddenly and ominously changed. The turf, the clitter, the tors, the sky, all were as they had been, yet changed utterly, like a scene in a dream of fever. The turf was no longer the field they knew, Muggle or Magical; its whites were white of bone, its greens the oozing green of putrescent corruption. The characteristic pattern of moorland vegetation was now like the last fleece on the carcase of a dead and rotting moorland sheep. The grey granite of the tors, the blocks of protruding clitter and the growan, were like bones poking through the decaying hide of a fallen Dartmoor pony. And all the reds and browns and purples of the moorland were now visibly only as blood.

They were suddenly and utterly alone.

_____________________________________________________

Some forty miles away, a Griffin Priors, an alarm spell was ringing. Hermione was the first to reach the scrying stone; Asteria Malfoy, who had necessarily stopped at the Potter demesne - not that she minded: it was Draco who had been difficult about it all this time, only relenting so far as to allow Scorpius to stop with the Potters when Narcissa had put her dainty foot very firmly down - who was the second. Hermione's first reaction was to fire-call Kingsley; Asteria stayed her course.

'My dear! They're with Harry. Of course they don't want aid or reinforcement.'

'Asteria, I do realise that most people regard Harry Potter as some mythically heroic figure, but I do know him - Harry, the real Harry - perhaps rather better than do you, dear -'

'Yes,' said Asteria, coolly. 'Precisely. You cannot forget the schoolboy, the hesitant youth who didn't wish to be a hero. But he's not that Harry any longer. He's a very senior Auror, the most powerful Wizard alive, and the Master of the Hallows. I've not seen him as you've done, and that's an advantage to me. I've seen him only in his triumph - and as reflected in my husband's eyes. Ginny, darling, you mustn't tell anyone, but Draco secretly hero-worships your husband.' Asteria smiled.

'Lot of that going about,' said Ginny, with an answering smile.

'Yes,' said Narcissa, 'but Draco was one of the first, and always quite hopeless at hiding it as well as he thought.'

'We're missing the wood for the trees, aren't we.' Ginny did not make it a question, and Hermione, her mouth open in a small, surprised 'o', did not take it as one. Molly, Andy, Cissy, and Aster merely smiled, and Luna shrugged and blamed it upon the nargles in the metaphorical wood.

'Oh, very well,' said Hermione, the least bit crossly, and trying very hard not to think uncharitable thoughts of Luna. 'We shall watch, and wait.'

_____________________________________________________

Forbs and weeds, fescue and bindweeds; thistle, burdock, and flax; bracken and wort. Heather, gorse, bilberry, and broom. The chest-wound lung-shot carmine of stabbing, needled bell-heather in flower, beneath which the day-shy grayling, like chips of bark from a dead tree felled in anger, camouflaged, hid from light of sun, and upon which the hallucinatory silver-studded blue fearfully fluttered and, fugitive, fed, both as ephemeral as all butterflies are, born but to die as swiftly as hope. Hidden away from the eye of the day, also, the nightjar lurked; the stonechat and perhaps the Dartford warbler, rare and far from his kindlier home, were silent, daunted presences in the silent, daunting landscape.

The ling, the vulgar heather, like old blood on a rusted blade, its flowers hangdog, head-bowed, dreading to face an honest sun.

Wet-glistening raw-meat visceral round-leaved sundew, a carnivore in ambush.

Bastard asphodel, the bog asphodel, yellow as cowardice, death of sheep.

The dried venous-blood colour of purple moor-grass.

The grey-green grime of lichen.

Tormentil, cowering down, its jaundiced flowers crouching to ward off a blow.

A cutting wind, a sterile air, flaying, a scalpel, inhuman, dispassionate, an air too pure to be borne.

A blue enamelled sky, screwed down, clamped and hammered shut, from zenith to horizon, like the inner lid of a sarcophagus above the face of a corpse, its sun like the one burning bulb of an interrogation room.

This was Crockern Tor and the Littaford Tors, the caput of the Stannaries, the ancient land of Dart-y-moor.

This was fear.

Awe.

Numinous terror.

At the Ministry, some one hundred miles and eighty to the eastwards, the reports were beginning to come in. Dartmoor was a place of concentrated magic, and on several watch lists; in the highest pitch of summer, especially, it was crawling with Muggle trippers and tourists, as well, like so many emmet-ants. When, as now, a moor-fog unforeseen equally by the Muggle Met Office and the Ministry's Neph Office, suddenly arose, cutting off a distinct area of highly magical ground, the Ministry went immediately upon high alert.

The only thing that stayed Kingsley's hand, and Arthur's, and Seamus's in the Department of Mysteries, was the knowledge that - as was by now commonplace when sudden and inexplicable magical occurrences befell - Harry was at the centre of the happening. Even so, they would have sent reinforcements, on the off chance that Harry wanted them, had not Hermione fire-called them immediately to intervene.

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'Warned yeh,' said Hagrid, quite curtly. 'Playing up that-away in Old Crockern's front garden. Wish Fang were here.'

They were no longer alone in the ominously silent land. An old man was approaching them, tall and unstooped by age. He wore a cloak of West of England cloth, grey and grim as the tor behind him; his long, white beard, which reached to his waist, rivalled Dumbledore's. His eyes and brow were shaded and occulted by the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, blue-black and battered. In his hand was a staff, not as walkers and ramblers use; and circling lazily above him, purposeful, menacing, their calls harsh and cold, flapped two great carrion crows.

He raised his head and stared at them, challenging, keen, with the glint of a single eye.

'And what, my fine young fellows - and yon gentle giant - do you think yourselves to be doing upon my land.'

Charlie and Ron had already gone for their wands. It was far too late. Wandlessly and wordlessly they, with Nev and Hagrid, were Petrified where they stood. 'No. no, this won't do at all,' said the old man. 'Yours is not the test.'

He bent his glare upon Harry and Draco. 'Well? Or will you displease me further by standing there, all dumb insolence? Eh?'

'I don't,' said Harry, with an icy and a foreboding calm, 'know who precisely you think you are - it's not Wednesday, after all -' (far away at Griffin Priors, the watchers at the scrying stone gasped or groaned or smiled, and Hermione made to stand and go and call for help, until Molly gestured her back into her seat) - 'but this is public land.'

The old man laughed, unpleasantly. 'My land. I do assure you, mine. And has been for a mort of years, as some country-folk do say. I'll ask it again - I've all the time in the world - who are you, eh?'

'It's for you to introduce yourself,' said Harry, implacably. He was, Dudley knew, playing for time: for whoever this - creature - was, he seemed not to notice the eminently Muggle Dudley Dursley, and Dudley was taking full advantage of the fact, circling quietly and slowly 'round to get behind the bugger. Magical he might be, but Dudley was determined to see if he were impervious to a Muggle rugger tackle and the scientific application of a Muggle boxer's fists. He exchanged a quick glance with Malfoy, who was still and wary, doing nothing to divert the old bugger's attention from Harry, and took another cautious step to the side.

'Still playing up in my front garden, I see,' said the old man. 'The Saxons saw me as you see me. But I was here before them, boy. What time the Druids held court upon Bard-dun -' and here he gestured across the now hidden vale to the fog-screened Beardown Tors, north and west of them, and the menhir of Beardown Man - 'in the bard Essara's day, they called me "Belenus", and saw me thus.' His appearance transformed, swift as quicksilver, into that of a naked warrior in the prime of life, his long, unbound hair as red as any Weasley's. 'And Brai and Essara they drove away, for speaking of the Lord Christ, when the bards called Belenus a god. My land, I say: for when men glimpse me now, they see me as you see me now.' The old man transformed once more, into a very old man indeed, yet clean-shaven, and as well-muscled as the warrior of moments before; yet now his hair was grey as granite, his face weathered, his eyes like pools in the peat, fathomless, the wells of the River Dart, and his shaggy brows like reeds hanging over the pools. 'Whom else would you meet, then, on Old Crockern's Tor, save Old Crockern?'

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Miles away, at Griffin Priors, where Godric's Hollow sheltered by its park, Aunt Andromeda turned her gaze from the scrying stone, and spoke, briefly and to the point.

'Bugger.'

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Dudley was in position now. Harry nodded, and answered. 'And I, perhaps, am he whom you would not expect or wish to meet. Sorcerer, Auror, and Master of the Hallows, I stand. Now, Dudley!'

Dudley was already in motion. And as he hit Old Crockern in the small of his back with a hard and driving shoulder, Draco drew his wand and threw himself before Harry, casting first a shield on Harry - not on himself - and then a stunner. 'You'll go through me first, damn you,' said Draco through clenched teeth. The old man - Crockern, the 'gurt sperrit of the moors' - vanished. Dudley, already plunging through the space where the Old Crockern had stood, was stunned by Draco's spell as he fell. And behind his prone body, Old Crockern reappeared, laughing.

Harry's spell took him in the midst of his glee, and laid him flat. With a sigh, Harry reversed the Stunner, helped Dudley up, cast a healing charm, and turned, half-smiling, to Draco. 'Thank you. That was very courageous.'

'But futile.' Draco was seething, angry with everyone and everything, but most of all with himself.

'Not at all. Well done,' said Harry, 'well done indeed.' He cast Finite upon Ron, Neville, Charlie, and Hagrid. 'Only - well, that's thing about the Hallows. They own you. Whenever they seem to think I want them, the Elder Wand, the Ring, and the Cloak show up. The Cloak's in my rucksack, with the sandwiches and the flasks.' Harry gestured with his wand hand, which, they all now realised, held a wand that was assuredly not his own holly-and-phoenix-feather one, and upon which hand a ring he'd not been wearing earlier now glinted. 'And that is why you should not be afraid when I'm on strength: I've the tools. But it was well done, all the same.'

'So it was,' said a cheerful voice from behind them. 'Professor Hagrid; Professor Longbottom. Mr Weasley and Mr Weasley: my apologies. Mr Dursley: well done. There's magic and more than magic in you, you know. Mr Malfoy? Very well done indeed. You two, and Mr Potter, have passed my test. I welcome you to Crockern Tor.'

They had turned, and the man who stood before them now was different again. He was an old man, yet hale and fit, of middling stature. His eyes were peaty brown, like the waters of the infant Dart, but his trim brows were now black and moulded precisely as Harry's were. And his thick mop of hair, mostly white, yet still showing strands of its earlier sable, was as unruly as Harry's own, and in the same fashion. He was dressed on ancient, shabby, gentlemanly tweeds, and the lineaments of his face were indisputably Harry's own, as they had been James Potter's before him. 'Well, grandson? Grandsons all, in a way. Come along. After all, it was your purpose to meet and stop with and have speech of me, was it not?'

And as he smiled upon them, the unnatural fog that had hedged and trammelled them fell away, and a glory of light and colour returned to the land, and all things were restored to their proper nature.

'I'm sorry,' said Harry, 'we were here to meet the last of the Potters, bar me and my family.'

'And so you have done, to be sure.' Old Crockern clicked his tongue. 'Dear, oh, dear, this will never do: aren't "crocker" and "potter" the same, after all? Close your mouth, Mr Malfoy, that stunned look has never worked on any of your face and family, it never deceived anyone when your great-grandmother - at some removes - Morgan le Fay tried it on.'

They had fallen in beside him, unconsciously, walking northwards beneath a flawless sky. The crows were fled now, and dunlin and plover, whinchat and skylark, took riotous grace in the clean air. About them on every side, the bugle and the asphodel, the milkwort and the gorse, flourished in pure colours, violet and imperial purple, periwinkle, gamboges and gilt.

Heather, clad in Tyrian, its flower-heads bowed in prayer.

The moor-grass in its vestments, celebratory, imperial, lines delicate and pure.

Bilberry, where soon the berries would gleam, blue as the Navy and the wine-dark sea.

The hare's-tail cotton-grass, white and pure as summer clouds, as cosy as a well-worn comforter in a grandmother's house.

A bracing wind, a purer air, fleet and clean and free.

Lichen and moss, celadon and sea-green.

Bedstraw, all cream and pear.

'We'll stop at my place by the wood, shall we? And I'll not say no to some of those sandwiches and that flask of tea.'

'W- Wistman's Wood?' Draco was beginning to feel the bite of old doubts and fears.

'Where else? The Wood of the Wise, the Wood of Wizards. One waxes fond of home after many years.'

Harry was shaking his head. 'And just how long have you been here?'

'Well, now, that would be telling. There's no denying I'm a long-lived fellow. Just about as old as Dartymoor. And of course, well, one sees the children off, and the generations come and go.... It's been many a generation since we've had a green-eyed Potter. You'd be descended of my - well, I left off numbering wives a long time ago. I've been a widower more times than you've had hot dinners. Belesama - she was a dryad, of course: in fact, a hamadryad, which is how I lost her. No relation to the river-nymph of that name, up Humber way: I always married close to home, amongst folk I knew. Well, that's longer ago than I care to think. A daughter of hers - the Dumnoni and the folk in what's now Wales were still one in those days: they called me "Beli Mawr" then - well, as I was saying, our daughter Branwen married across Severn, married Sabrina's son, in fact: I'm not surprised the Evanses kept those eyes. Mind, now, I'm not referring to the Branwen who was Llyr's daughter, the one who married the Irishman. So you see -'

'I'm sorry.' Harry was polite, but implacable. 'What precisely are you? Sir.'

'My dear grandson! If you're fretting over Horcruces, don't. There's not a Wizard in Britain - nor a Muggle, come to that - who's altogether human, you know. Not that I'm a god or any of that rubbish, and I always tried to discourage the Druids on that score, not that they listened, they were on to a good thing, you know, power and place ... where was I? Ah. Yes. Well. I can't really explain it fully, you know. It is what it is. But there you have it. I'm as Christian as the abbot yonder, any quarter-day. We're simply ... an older people. We were the first, well before the Phoenicians came here for tin: the oldest craft and mystery. Potters. Just as there were some like us in the Forest of Dean - your father's people, Rubeus, of course; not poor Fridwulfa's. Your friend the Wolf, Harry my lad, had explained it much better, had he been spared to us - but here we are.'

And there they were, at Wistman's Wood, a dwarfed forest of oaks, with some holly, willow, and rowan, set amidst lichened clitter. Had they come upon it in other company, it might have seemed even to Neville a dread and uncanny place; standing before it at merry Crockern's side, it charmed them, a sort of bonsai garden in the English manner. 'You'll want to meet the hounds - they're really quite affectionate, save to their quarry, of course: best pack in Britain, and I'm proud to have been Master for so long - but luncheon first, I think. Mind the adders - Harry can talk them down, eh? You can relearn the tongue, you know, it wasn't all Tom Riddle, dear boy, and if Albus could learn Mermish, well.... But come along.' And he led them past Wistmans' Wood to an ageless hall, anciently hidden from Muggle eyes, which Dudley was surprised to find that he could see.

'The, ah, usual offices are down that corridor, you'll want to wash. And then, remote descendants all in your degree - yes, even you, Neville, and you Weasleys - we'll have luncheon, and I'll tell you all about it.'

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They were, in the end, three days together with Old Mr Potter, Crockern of the Tor, who dinned more knowledge into their heads - Dudley's included - than three generations of Ravenclaws should have managed.

And when they returned to Griffin Priors, all of them thick as thieves (Malfoy included: he and Harry were now appallingly amicable), Harry at once apologised to Hermione, Andromeda, Minerva, and the rest, for doubting them, and having resisted their tuition. They were not mollified by the recollection of that handsome apology, in the ensuing months - months embittered by Horace Slughorn's loudly unspoken 'I told you so' - when they heard, as they far too frequently did, Harry's latest maxim, now equally familiar in his speech as the old 'we are a Service family' saw: 'that's not the Potter way': to which the children, quite as much as Aunt Andy, soon found themselves thinking, 'Oh, bugger' (whereat Harry, inwardly laughing, never once permitted himself to smile, even when catching Ginny's amused eye).

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FINITE

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