Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

Remembrance Day

Take these; in memory of the hour
We strayed a space from home
And saw the smoke-hued hamlets, quaint
With Westland king and Westland saint,
And watched the western glory faint
Along the road to Frome.

***

The fires of the Great Army
That was made of iron men,
Whose lights of sacrilege and scorn
Ran around England red as morn,
Fires over Glastonbury Thorn -

Fires out on Ely Fen.
***

He sang of war in the warm wet shires,
Where rain nor fruitage fails,
Where England of the motley states
Deepens like a garden to the gates
In the purple walls of Wales.
***

The first blood woke the trumpet-tune,
As in monk's rhyme or wizard's rune,
Beginneth the battle of Ethandune
With the throwing of the sword.
***

'The high tide!' King Alfred cried.
'The high tide and the turn!
As a tide turns on the tall grey seas,
See how they waver in the trees,
How stray their spears, how knock their knees,
How wild their watchfires burn!'

***

In the days of the rest of Alfred,
When all these things were done,
And Wessex lay in a patch of peace,
Like a dog in a patch of sun -
The King sat in his orchard,
Among apples green and red,
With the little book in his bosom
And the sunshine on his head.
***

'Will ye part with the weeds for ever?
Or show daisies to the door?
Or will you bid the bold grass
Go, and return no more?
'So ceaseless and so secret
Thrive terror and theft set free;
Treason and shame shall come to pass
While one weed flowers in a morass;
And like the stillness of stiff grass
The stillness of tyranny.
***
'And though skies alter and empires melt,
This word shall still be true:
If ye would have the horse of old,
Scour ye the horse anew.'
- GKC, The Ballad of the White Horse

[T]he Deverill valley ... has been continuously inhabited by farming people since at least 3500 B.C. The first settlements were on high ground, as this was drier and easier to clear. Archæological evidence has been found on Cold Kitchen Hill, possibly a Celtic name meaning Hill of the Wizard.

- Wilts County Council: Wilts Community History

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again;
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods . . .
But there is no road through the woods.

- Kipling, 'The Way Through the Woods'

_________________________

i. Draco: The Trumpet Shall Sound

The dream was fading.

_________________________

ii. Harry: And All the Trumpets Sounded For Him on the Other Side

The night was ending.

_________________________

iii. Dumbledore: For If the Trumpet Give An Uncertain Sound, Who Shall Prepare Himself to the Battle?

An uncertain dawn was breaking, when dreams cease and the sleepers begin to stir, and the peace of night is flown.

_________________________

iv. Going Home

Once again, the dreams. Once again, as ever, framed by the scene of the two of them, wounded but alive, meditating the uses of victory amidst the groans of the wounded and the dying.

'Now we both have what we wanted. And we can do as we damned well please. That is what victory is, Harry. And that is what was worth fighting for.'

And Harry remembered the words of a seer from years before: neither may live while the other survives.... Perhaps, now, it would be possible to get on with life: to live, at last. Life in its cycle, in my end is my beginning....

_______________________

v. Evening Hymn

If these were dreams, let them not wake....

They had had a good, long innings.

From the morrow of victory onwards, the days had been kind to them, as if in belated repayment for the sufferings that had brought them to where they were. They had had few fights - sometimes, they had almost longed for a quarrel, simply for the sake of the making-up - and no real tragedies.

There had been changes, of course; in the surreptitious relations between the Muggle and the Wizarding worlds, in the ordering of their own world, in the regular course and passage of seasons and years. Some old friends had died, but none by violence, and all having had a chance to live fully and without fear before their deaths.

Dobby had died at an advanced age, his small, work-worn hands resting comfortably in theirs, free and honoured and a patriarch amongst his people, a prophet finally honoured in his own country.

And Severus had gone as well, after having found such peace as was in him to find, if alone: Harry had spoken to him, once, about that, and gotten a surprisingly straight answer for his pains. 'Potter, I would not sleep with me. Any sane Witch would rather bed and have a relationship with a Venomous Tentacula or a Devil's Snare plant than with me, and with reason, they being safer and less prickly - and less ill-favoured, I am well assured. No: I am well enough content with my life now. As for ... bodily need ... you need not concern yourself so intrusively and impertinently with my affairs. I am a Fellow of Paracelsus, the most famous Potions master ever to have been master at Hogwarts, skilled in magical operations. If I can bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death in a flask, do you seriously imagine I am not capable of conjuring such illusions as allow me to satisfy, satisfactorily, my animal needs?'

Harry well knew that many, perhaps most, couples in their world found potions an integral part of their bedroom experiences: there was no little seduction in the very notion of having the ability to change appearance, even sex, or swap bodies through Polyjuice, or indulge in even more arcane and esoteric pleasures. Yet despite Draco's being as competent and innovative a brewer of potions as ever Severus had been, they had never been moved to attempt any of these: how on earth, they agreed, could even Wizarding life-spans be long enough for all the delicious exploration of one's true love's body?

No, there had been quite enough adventure in their lives without their looking for it. As Draco had observed, it was rather like Blaise's realisation that Justin's simple decency was more than merely comforting, that the English countryside was more exciting in its way than the Tyrolean heights: after war and murder and sudden death, the quiet and the homely was appreciated, and what they had all been through had made them Augustans rather than self-consciously Romantic seekers after 'wilderness'. After wandering the wastes, one found that a garden was a lovesome thing, God wot.

Harry remembered, also, something Narcissa had once said. 'Severus, as I well know, no more needs a partner for his magic to be whole than Minerva ever did. I, however, have grown used - on numerous levels - to having a man in my life. Harry, darling, there is a reason why, in our world, so many school romances last, and marriages are so early. It is also why couples with any sort of bond, let alone that that you and Draco possess, do not generally die very much apart in time: as a widow, I am an anomaly, but, then, I never actually cared for Lucius once he showed his true colours. Do try and keep my son alive, won't you - for both your sakes?'

No, there had been more than enough excitement in their lives, raising children and seeing them off to Hogwarts and Domdaniel, seeing the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren off to Hogwarts and Domdaniel, and not infrequently teaching them there as well. Draco remembered the day he and Harry had arrived back at Hogwarts to take on deputy masterships even whilst attending Domdaniel, and Albus instructing them in the art. 'Surely, my dear young men, this is not a shock? Of course you will be elected Fellows of Paracelsus so soon as you have finished at Domdaniel. We at Hogwarts are not in the habit of inflating titles; you will be Fellows, and only then properly Professors, here, at Hogwarts School. Although Domdaniel itself was long closed, Paracelsus, as a constituent college of the University, has always perpetuated itself, and elected Fellows, and it is in right of those fellowships that most of your schoolmasters have been entitled to be addressed as "Professor" - hardly a natural term in a school, after all. But, then, Hogwarts, you see, has always been attached to Domdaniel, as - well, as if it were a cathedral or a choir school, like the cathedral school attached to Christ Church, Oxford. Or the choir school at King's, Cambridge, to be sure.'

And Justin, who had been present by right of his boyfriend's being Blaise-the-Bursar, had looked sour, and complained, 'Bloody Oxford. You lot always put the Other Place first.' For Justin came of a long line of Cambridge men.

They had taken Albus's extremely plain hint, as well, when it came time to overhaul the Wizarding education system, so as to prevent Wizarding children, to whomever they were born, from being kept in ignorance until their eleventh years, and they had created, on the model of cathedral and choir schools, a preparatory programme at Hogwarts. Like its Muggle counterparts, it cost the earth - between 350 and 400 Galleons per student per term, over half of what Hogwarts itself cost - but they had also seen to it that its endowment, like Hogwarts's own in these days, was such as to allow each family, even the poorest, to pay only what their means afforded.

Such reforms, and the new Wizarding generations that emerged from them, were their truest and most cherished monument.

Theirs had been long and content and rewarding lives, with few quarrels and never a moment's ill faith or infidelity, never a moment not sustained by love. They had helped create a world that was better than that that they'd been born into, and even when minor manifestations of the Dark had arisen, as inevitably they had done, the world they had crafted had been prepared to deal with them, without any need for heroics and the burdens of heroism.

They were fortunate and they knew it - not for nothing had Tony Goldstein taught them the history of Rabbi Akiva, the simple outsider, the shepherd who became a sage, and who, alone of the four who entered pardes, left, as he had entered, whole and in peace: Tom Riddle, by contrast, the anti-Harry, had become Aher, the Stranger-Apostate, under the stress of magical study - they were blessed, and they were duly thankful.

It had been a good, long innings for them, and many books could be - were being - written of all that had passed since the day of Victory; but they were content to reflect upon the quiet, un-historic moments, the hours, months, decades of love, amidst orchards and quiet fields and gardens, in which nothing occurred that would excite the historian or thrill the youth thirsting for tales of valour.

They had watched with calm eyes alarms and excursions, and laughed at the panic, their very unconcern heartening the affrighted; knowing that the world they had built was secure on its foundations. It was like the great white horses cut into the Wiltshire chalk: the weeds might obscure and encroach, but they could never unmake the abiding forms.

'Will ye part with the weeds for ever? ... If ye would have the horse of old,
Scour ye the horse anew.'

They had travelled much in their long years, being welcomed as Wizards even when distrusted as gauje, as Gorgios, outsiders, non-Rom, by the Romanichal caravans; they had travelled much and afar, to the ends of the earth. And they had cherished those travels, and learnt much. Especially had they enjoyed the Americans and the Australians: stolid Midwesterners, yes, and Californians like unthinking Athenian playboys, fit companions for Alcibiades with never a Socrates in sight: but especially the donnish, genteel New England lads, the aristocratic, languid Virginians, the grand and lordly youths, polite as duellists, of Carolina and the Deep South ('damnedest thing,' Draco had said, 'd'you know that over there, "shag" means something altogether different?'), and most of all, the magnificent, careless, open-handed Texans, living high and wide and loud, the last Elizabethans, modern Raleighs and Drakes and Leicesters and Essexes. Lovely lads to look at, though never to touch; and the Australians, young gods, the Texans of the Pacific. Yet after all they had seen and sampled, it was in the end a lesson best learnt that home was better than all wonders, and one's own sole ground the truest education.

So they had gone home, to put down roots and watch the long, slow course of years.

They had watched with wise eyes the passing seasons and passing scenes, the great world's news and tragedies and the small triumphs and sorrows of their neighbours, discovering that, with their Wizarding life-spans, they possessed a perspective denied to the shorter-lived Muggles. (Draco could almost hear Dean Thomas laughing. 'Bloody Wizarding space! Plays old hob with perspective, dunnit? Who'd be a poor bleeding Wizarding artist, eh? Bloody hell!')

At Pottersfield, they had seen the seasons and the generations pass. PC Austin's granddaughter going off to Oxford from her comprehensive, the Lumbers and the Merchants making a go of the new shops, Beards and Byrts stunned to find Wizards appearing in the family as the generations went on; old Mrs Hebditch and the bull and the five-bar gate ('Muggle be damned, Harry, no woman of ninety-odd could make that standing jump without magic'), the scandal surrounding Mr Snook's second marriage, the devastation in every orchard in the district wrought by the Lintern twins ('Are all twins, always, a threat to the King's Peace?'); the new brewery that Martin Cude and Fred Tizzard opened, and the pub that the Dinhams bought. And, as well, they had seen out the time that the Fussells's hayrick caught fire, and watched the unfolding of Dr Brodrill's remarkable discoveries, and all the doings of the local families: the kindreds of Zelley, Gane, Dorvill, and Gulliford, of Hodder and Dimberton, Trippick, Withy, and Scurr, of Voake the vicar and Weetch the farmer, of Wescombe and Standerwick and all the rest in their course and order.

And when they went to the Burrow, year after year, they were certain to ask after the local folk of the Otter Vale and all their doings, as generation succeeded generation. Aplins and Voyseys, Turpins and Notts - and not all of those Muggle, nor all Wizard, nor all Squib - Selleys and Maunders and Gibbingses all. They knew the families in and out, harking back to grandsires long dead, from Tar Barrel Nights and Pixie Days and long afternoons at church fetes: Crimps and Reddaways, Chudleighs and Cloads, Burrowses and Oldreives and Farrants alike - and Drakes and Churchills, as well, to be sure.

And in Wiltshire, from their seat beneath the eaves of Grovely Wood and from the park at Malfoy Manor, they watched the years pass and the faces pass with them, new and old, red with the first cries of birthing and lined and waxy as gentle death gave surcease, serried ranks passing in review in the slow diurnal course of years. Whole forests of Archards. The Garlicks who kept the sub-post-office and shop. Goodfellow the butcher and Goodenough the greengrocer, the school-mastering Imbers and Matterfice the water-bailiff. Reddish and Purse, Crocker and Roles, Helm the constable and Tudgay the poacher, the aptly-named Fouracres at their trim, prosperous farm, and that dustily Dickensian firm of solicitors, Hodney, Hodnett & Hoddinott, where the partners by now were all Poldens and Witchells and Joliffes. A Mildenhall had become bishop in their time, a Snelgrove their MP, a Macey the mayor; the county regiment had been merged and renamed and restored and reorganised more times than they could count, but Crockers and Dowdells and Blandfords still served, the 'Farmer's Boys' of the old regimental march-tune, from the colonelcy of old Sir Jacob Radcliffe to the colonelcy of young Andrew Felton.

And then, also, there had been the chance to recover and preserve history, so as to prevent its callous repetition....

_____________________

Further back, in dream-memory of their lives when the children were young.

Ginny had been against it.

Oh, the Seconds Club - daft buggers that they were - fondly believed that they and they alone were Harry's - yes, and Draco's - last protection against harassment, nagging, and repeated pleas to save the world. Harassment, nagging, and pleas that the men attributed solely to the women. Daft, as she had noted, buggers.

But the Seconds Club were a greater threat to Harry's peace - yes, and Cousin Ferret's - than ever the Witches of their acquaintance were. Nev and Colin were the least hopeless of the lot - well, and Blaise, perhaps, but Blaise was more than half a foreigner, and she tended to avoid him for the sake of her own peace of mind as a married woman (dearly as Ginny loved Colin and gay though she knew Blaise to be, Blaise was simply too toothsome for Ginny's comfort) - Nev, then, and Colin, and Blaise were the least hopeless of the lot, but the best of them had, in her sister-in-law's words, the emotional range of a teaspoon, and for sheer, piggish insensitivity, her brothers could annoy for England.

Ginny knew these things; it was her job. Poor, thick, darling Harry ... well. She'd gotten over that a very long time ago, and very thoroughly. He was as toothsome as Blaise, certainly, and, if anything, less gay, she suspected, though the question was immaterial given the nature of his bond with Draco, and had he remained the hero-acquaintance of her first year at Hogwarts, she might never have gotten shut of her unhealthy interest in him. But having him as a House-mate at school, a team-mate, and an unofficial foster-brother in the Summer Hols, had cured her. Familiarity had not bred contempt, but it assuredly hadn't bred, either. The Ginny of some twelve summers could easily have worshipped Harry. By her fifteenth year in age, she could jest with him on a level few others could attain, but she was freed to do so only by the stark fact that she had no more interest in him as a boyfriend than she had in Ron, Charlie, Bill, the Twins, or Percy the Pompous Prat. She had seen his toothbrush stuck by its own shed tooth-powder to the enamel of the sink, not even put properly away in his tooth-glass, too many times. She had glimpsed him picking his toenails, digging Mum's rather stringy Sunday joint out of his molars with a fingernail, laughing at Ron's competitive belching, and generally ponging up the Burrow like any other brother of hers, far too often to see him as anything save an extra brother, midway on the 'irritating' scale between Bill and the Twins. It had sometimes caused to her wonder if this sort of thing was why arranged marriages lasted longer and better than those that followed upon some years of living together in the modern fashion.

And, too, Harry had changed markedly, since - and in part because of - the War. Freed of the weight of the prophecy, freed also by the loss of the parasite Riddle, his energy had if anything increased, his intellectual curiosity trebled, his interests and focus expanded. Like Ron, also, he had suffered in his school years from a failing that went with their sort of cleverness, one different to Hermione's omnivorous passion to know everything: Harry simply would not put forth effort in any discipline that bored him, or that failed sufficiently to challenge him. At Domdaniel, however, and in his public life that he had not been able to evade, he had blossomed swiftly, even as Ron and Draco had: they had required and responded to challenge. He was like the young Churchill in India, after Sandhurst, making up for lost time by reading everything he could get his hands on (Ginny consulted her copy of Colonel Bellowes every morning: it was her job).

Yet even now, he remained dear, thick Harry, never capable of seeing the next emotional shock coming for all his cleverness and wisdom and sense for danger. And those shocks were generally delivered, in all innocence, by his equally thick, emotionally clueless mates (quite often named Weasley).

Ginny knew these things: it was her job. Harry - darling, thick Harry - had led their world into adopting Constitutional safeguards and the rule of law, checks and balances, and, man-like, had thought his job done when the formal structures were in place. It had occurred to few people - Dad, and perhaps Draco, and an amused Nev, and Minerva; certainly not to Hermione, who had a touching faith in rules, and certainly not to Harry or Ron - it had occurred to few people that in a community as small as Wizarding Britain, personal relationships and Old Boys's and Old Girls's networks would remain far more important to the actual working of things than any paper charts and books of rules. It was the 'old Spanish practices', off the slate, that truly governed; and it was typical that Ginny was one of the few to realise that it was the marriage of Colin Creevey, the managing editor of the Prophet, to the Ministry's chief of intelligence, that did by far the most to effect the protection of secrets of state, just as it was the personal importance of that paper's publisher and proprietress, and of her husband (dear, avuncular Nev!), that best protected the freedoms of the press against ministerial overreaching ... at the hands of one Ginny Creevey. It was, after all, her job to know these things, as Head of the Department of Mysteries and Chief Unspeakable as successor to old Dung Fletcher.

No, Ginny was against what the Twins were going to ask of Harry, but while it was perhaps her job to know what was in the offing, it was no part of her duty to intervene.

Besides, whilst she had no doubt she could handle the Twins, she had a Minister to answer to, and Hermione would not be in the least pleased were Ginny to step in, both in principle ('unprecedented meddling in private affairs outside our remit! You stick to legitimate concerns, Ginny, and don't play spy-mistress') and personally.

Still, she could only hope that Harry's skin was as thick as Harry himself sometimes was.

Draco, whom the Twins had wisely consulted before approaching Harry - no one wanted to encounter a possessive Draco, breathing fire in his mate's defence - was of two minds about the proposal. He would not have given Fred and George even that much consideration had he not known that Harry was much less sensitive on the point these days, and that the idea was in fact a worthwhile one. Still, if it ended by making Harry unhappy, he would be making a couple of ginger weasels at least as unhappy. Although he pretended not to know, he was well aware that Ginny Creevey had a very extensive dossier on him - including that perfectly explicable incident at the drag club whilst Harry had been at home asleep and innocently unaware of Draco's absence at said club - but largely devoted to the file labelled, 'MALFOY D, THINGS HE HAS SAID THAT WILL GET HIM KILLED SOONER OR LATER BY SOMEONE'. He was also well aware that that file included not only some pyrotechnic oratory uttered on the floor of the Wizengamot, and duly reported in the official pages of Wandsward over the years, but also inflammatory comments made in his personal capacity, both publicly and privately, and not spattered over the pages of the newspapers only because Colin was married to Ginny. It included its share of treasures: 'I've more respect for Death Eaters than for those who spent the War with a finger in the wind, waiting to see who won. I'd ask what hole you hid in, but that would beg the question of where your finger had been before you poked it up to test the prevailing breeze', for example, and, 'Aside from congenital idiocy, what are your qualifications?', and, 'Purity of blood? I've seen better results from one of Hagrid's experimental breeding projects', and so on. If the Twins managed to hurt Harry with their questions, though, Ginny would need a whole new quire of parchment for what Draco would have to say to them.

Luna, who was always mildly amused by Ginny's innocent belief that no one else had any idea of what Luna in fact allowed Colin to spike in the way of news items, found Ginny's concerns overwrought and Draco's waffling typically neurasthenic. Harry was much more stable than they all of them wished to think. They simply didn't care to accept that fact, for fear that a stable Harry was a Harry who didn't need them so. Which would of course be intolerable to them. They needed Harry to need them. It was a symbiotic relationship like that of nargles with mistletoe. No, Luna reflected, Harry could stand the gaff. It was the others who might crumple like a Snorkack's horn.

Nev, meanwhile, sitting happily in his potting shed with his pipe drawing well and a pint positioned rather precariously next his elbow, was amused alike by Draco, Ginny, and his beloved Luna. Harry would go his own road, any road, and that were t'whole of it. No one else's worriting would have slightest effect, b'gum. And if truth were told, Twins had better notion than usual. But Harry would react as Harry would, and there weren't anything they could do about that. Besides, he reflected, chuckling - which caused the flutterby-bush cuttings he was grafting to jiggle sympathetically - if Harry got worked up over aught, he had therapy to hand.

Nev thought back to that comedy of errors.

_____________________

'"Throwing pots", Harry? Throwing pots? You may call that therapy,' Draco had huffed, tossing aside his half-read Arbiter - the Wizarding world's Spectator - 'but to me, heaving crockery at the wall and smashing up the tea set is a tantrum, and I'm rather by way of being an expert in the art of the tantrum!'

Harry had openly laughed at him. Indeed, Nev had laughed at Draco.

Then Harry had grasped them both, Neville and Draco alike, and Apparated them all to a steeply Westwards-trending hill, rising above a village high street, keen with breezes.

Below them the village straggled along its road, the parish church - St Mary's, of course, like every second church in Wiltshire, a largely unmarred Early English jewel - dominating all from its own knoll at the North end of the road. Across from them, the land rose again, less sharply, towards a wood; the Pewsey Vale fell away behind the screen of trees. 'Where are we, hmm?' Potter's voice was amused.

'Somewhere in the exurbs of bustling metropolitan Devizes, I should think,' Draco drawled, trying to seem casual: casual and not at all bewildered.

Harry wasn't fooled. 'The village of Potterne,' Harry said. 'South and East is Potterne Wick. North and East, Potterne Field. Devizes to the North, Marlborough to the Nor'-Nor'-eastwards.

'Potterne, then. A Mesolithic settlement. An Iron Age pottery centre, there, at Blackberry Lane. A Roman pottery centre at Blounts Court. We're standing on Court Hill.' He gestured to the Westwards. 'And there of course the clay begins.' Harry drew his wand, and flicked it, muttering a half-heard incantation, a magic ancestral to and exclusive to his line: one of the family magics that all the old lineages possessed and rarely if ever shared, like those possessed of the Blacks, the Malfoys, the Weasleys, the Fawcetts, Diggorys, Lovegoods, the Longbottoms.

Shimmering, the outline of a building emerged, long and low in parts, its silhouette punctuated by sudden heights where tall rooms with pitched roofs and clerestory were set in the midst of all, flanked by curious shapes that resolved into mighty kilns. It solidified, took on form and detail, became real. A house-elf with the bustling air of a master foreman came towards them at a trot, nodding to Harry with dignity and due but not overawed respect.

'Just showing Mr Malfoy and Mr Longbottom the works, Slippy,' Harry said.

'Ah,' said Slippy, his accent richly Wessex. 'They is ould volk, of they ould names. Is Master Harry a-wishin' to zhow them about?'

'Not today, thanks. Lightning tour of all the properties, I think. Carry on, Slippy.'

'Ah,' Slippy said, in assent, and vanished with the customary pop. The works dislimned behind him, leaving the hill as seeming-empty and untenanted as before.

Draco opened his mouth to speak - probably to demand explanations - but Nev, knocking the dottle of his pipe into his hand, caught his eye, winked, and shook his head, with a smile. Occasionally, Draco was capable of taking a hint: he shut his mouth without uttering a sound.

'Well,' Harry said, briskly, 'come along. We've too much to do to be dawdling, even so close to Marlborough.' Nev chortled. Wiltshire and Somerset, to a man, chose to believe that Marlborough's place-name was derived from 'Merle Barrow', Merlin's Tomb. It might even be true, though Merlin, like Arthur the dux bellorum, was held to have been born and to have lived and to be buried in every third town in Britain - even in Lancashire. He and Draco took Harry's hands, and prepared for the next Apparating.

'Crockerton,' Draco said immediately as he opened his eyes. 'South of Warminster, next the Deverills - Harry, really, I can damned near see our house from here. What in the name of Merlin would you have hidden in bloody Crockerton?'

'We're on Potters Hill, looking down towards the Shear Water and its clays, in a village called after crocks, and you ask me that?'

'Dear God,' Draco breathed, in abject horror. 'I've married a man in trade. My great-grandfather strikes again.'

Neville laughed at him openly. Harry, for his part, leaned over and tapped Draco on his pointy little nose with a gentle finger, then dropped a kiss where he had tapped. 'Do you know one of the innumerable things about you that I love?'

'Tell me,' Draco said, eager to be made much of.

'You've grown up enough to show a select few of us your vulnerabilities. Even if you still try blustering past them.'

'Would... Would you love me better if I didn't? Bluster, I mean.'

Nev chuckled: he knew what Harry was going to say. T'lad were predictable.

'No, love. But only because I couldn't possibly love you any more or any better than I do.'

Nev recognised his cue to look away for a moment.

'Right, then,' he heard Harry say, his voice inexpressibly tender. 'Off we go to the next spot. No time to show you the Crockerne works.'

The next Apparition was further afield. 'Crock Street,' Harry said. 'We're about twenty or so miles from The Burrow. Chard's that way, Ilminster there, and we're here on clay, a bit more'n thirty miles from Pottersfield, Pylle, and Shepton Mallet. Somerset has the southernmost coal seams in England, love: with that and clay, it was a super place for kilns and a works.'

Pop.

Disapparition.

Crack.

Apparition.

'And this - can you guess, love?'

'If that was the Avon, we must be over in Dorset.'

'Indeed we are, near Verwood. This was an old mud pit, a Muggle clay-quarry, as it were.'

'Potter Something?'

'Actually, the pit was called Ferret's Green.'

'Bastard.'

'But there in the woods is the way to the heath, in what is now a Muggle conservation area. Potterne Heath. All this is ancient clay and pottery centre, and the local footer and cricket is played at Potterne Park. We have pits here, for some speciality clays, but no works. Come along, no dawdling, love.'

Pop.

Crack.

'Crockernwell. Devon. Exeter's dead East, Crediton's to the North and East. Devon and Somerset prehistoric pottery - well, prehistoric as Muggles measure history - is stuffed into every museum in the Three Kingdoms. We made a goodish bit of it - and those pieces are not in Muggle museums.'

Draco looked small and abashed. It worked: Harry hugged him. Over Harry's shoulder, Draco ghosted a wink at Nev, who was smiling broadly, shaking his head. T'ferret were fawce, sly, and incorrigible.

'Come on, love. Nev. There's more yet to see.'

Pop.

Crack.

'Where are we now?'

'Wiltshire - just.'

'I thought - but.' Draco furrowed his brow. 'The land looks right, but the houses aren't like ours. Thatch? Brick? Neither flint nor slate nor stone, nor even timber as in Steeple Ashton! Are you sure we're in Wilts?'

'Yes, love. Not all that far from Salisbury, really.'

'Must be Muggle country,' Draco said, looking at the unfamiliar surroundings.

''Tis thi country, lad!' Nev's voice was affectionate, but stern, paternal. 'Seven thousand year, folk have lived here, Wizard and Muggle the like, and it's nobbut the blink of eye in that time, sithee, the two've been sep'rate. And t'were us, not they, first withdrawed. Not thi folk, lad? Balls, pureblood balls. What were Tom Riddle but t'Muggle Hitler writ large? Thi folk, Muggles 'round, for all Malfoys hid in house and wouldn't see them: thi folk, bone of bone and flesh of flesh. Potters at least were sharing in t'life of all, any road, and t'lot of them not even living near as thi oawn folk and kin, at Manor. Dost tha think t'Lovegoods and Fawcetts, Diggorys and Weasleys, don't know hummer about their own neighbours? Being Wizard's no licence, sithee, to know nowt - that were a Malfoy notion, not a Wizarding 'un. 'Tis called t'Statute of Secrecy, lad, not "Segregation" nor "Seclusion".'

'I didn't know,' Draco stammered. 'No one told me.'

'Well, lad, time you were learnt of it. Harry, lad?'

Harry took Draco in his arms, and petted him, soothingly. 'I never got to hear it from my parents, either, you know. Or my grandparents. Not about our Somerset, not about our Devon and our Dorset and our Wiltshire, not about Mum's Wales and the old places where Helga the Founder can still be felt, in presence and peace. And I understand, love. This is not Narcissa's country, hers and Sirius's and Aunt Andy's; and bloody Lucius was never going to know or care about these things, much less pass them on.

'Thank God, Albus was from Somerset himself. He - and Remus, who made himself a local historian all for my sake, so that I could know the lands my fathers knew - taught me all this. And you and I will teach it to Rhys, and the Two, and the Four, and any after, and their children, so that they will know the land that bred them.'

Draco squared his shoulders, and looked, truly looked, at the countryside. 'Tell me,' he said, firmly.

'Well, look, there's a reason Southampton was an early site for industrialised pottery-making, just as Brislington and Bristol were, in other corners of, well, Potter country. Look around you. That's Downton, of the Cuckoo Fair, and there is the way to Redlynch, and this there's the good ford from Sarum to Southampton. Fritham's that way, where we have a small works: it was once in Wilts, though it's in Hants now, and we're on London clay hereabouts. There's been pottery-making here since at least the Romano-British days, and Landford's been a centre of cider-pressing, time out of mind. And through it all, the Muggles have weaved in and out, learning sometimes of us what we would teach, following some of us who chose to live and lead and be lords and lore-masters to their world, sharing our land and world and the fields we know. We've repaid them but ill for that, though I suspect that their limekilns and brickworks owe something to our tutelage.

'And this, where we stand, is Morgan's Vale.'

'Mor- -.'

'Yes.'

Draco was speechless.

'Right here, where St Birinus's Church now stands. It was Morgan's Bottom, Morgana's bottomlands, once, before it was ever a village. All this was forest, and then common, and most of the parish has only been built up and dwelt in by Muggles in the past two hundred years. But when this was the Forest of Melchet, it saw Morgana in her greatness.'

Draco dropped to one knee, grace instinct in every movement, and lightly laid his hand upon the warm turf, closing his eyes for a brief moment as he said a simple Culdee prayer. Then he rose again, and composed himself to listen to his Harry.

'Appledore in Devon, which is Avalon, and Glastonbury in Somerset, and Godric's Hollow; and here, in Wiltshire, with Morgana in the South where Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Dorset meet, and Merlin's Barrow at Marlborough away to the North, and the Plain and the Downs and the Henges and the Ring amidst all! Lord, my love. Thought you that the Prewetts and the Prewitts and the Pruitts of Shipton Bellinger and the Long Barrows, the Potters in Potterne and Crockerton and here at Morgan's Vale, the Malfoys on the great chalk - thought you, love, that we were all centred here in jest?'

'Tell me,' Draco repeated, taking Harry's hand in his.

'Lad, lad,' said Nev, at his most avuncular, pointing to the horizon with his pipe-stem. 'T'Muggles's history here, in any country hamlet or village, is much t'same the length and breadth of England ower. The great ones struggled for t'throne and for power, and tide of war washed past, leaving villagers to look after t'dead and dying. T'Black Death came. Cromwell's troopers wrecked church, happen they clashed with Cavaliers nigh enough by, happen King Charles's men ambushed Roundheads. They lit beacon fires when French were out, they died in Flanders, they endured Blitz and stormed Normandy beaches. It's nowt different to any place in England, lad, but it be thi country and thi folk.'

'There were hill-forts, love, and Iron Age tribes. And the Wizards moved amongst them in honour. There was a Romano-British villa here, the lords of the manor in their day, and now it is under grass and only the land remembers the whole of it, the life of it, as it was lived, not as it's researched and catalogued by the cleverest don at all Oxford. That same grass was cropped by a Saxon thane's sheep and cattle, and then measured to its last grain for Domesday Book and handed to a Norman, and a Latinised place-name that appears there as a feudal holding, is now abraded into countryman's English as the name for a field or a farm or a lane. And the lane leads to the village centre, and in the market is a cross, as there's been since Harry of Anjou's day, and the cross, now, is a memorial. From the fields and the farms and the little lanes, every able-bodied man left his work and his wife and set forth for France in 1914. And one in ten never returned.'

'So it were,' said Nev. '"Our king went forth to Normandy / With grace and might of chivalry; / There God for him wrought marv'lously, / Wherefore England may call and cry: / Deo gracias!"'

'And where the Romanised Briton had his baths, or the Wessex moot was called to rally against the Dane, or the Norman built his castellations and the smugglers cached brandy and helped a French marquise and her daughter escape the Terror, and a sergeant of the Wiltshires came wounded home from the Somme ... there, in the next war after the one the cross stands testament to, there was fire in the sky, One-of-Ours crashed or a Junkers was shot down.... And a lad who saw that aeroplane fall from the sky, perhaps, was old enough to be with the Glorious Glosters at Solma-ri, on the Imjin River, where they stood to the last in the Korean War, threw back the Chinese, and held for four eternal days against an army. And they cut new names in the stone around the base of the cross.'

'"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old",' Nev recited, his voice gentle: '"Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them."'

'Yes,' Harry said. '"Their name liveth forevermore". It's all England, love, the same story in every blessed foot of ground. And there were the quiet times, as well, here as on every acre of English earth. Fairs and marryings, bonfires and feasts, fetes and festivals. Nelson's heirs took up his title and lived over there, at Trafalgar House. You'd've liked the third earl. He always tried very hard to mix with the villagers and never quite managed. Once, noticing that a local labourer seemed not to have all that many changes of clothes - they were both active in the parish, the earl was a great churchman - he asked him, "How long do you wear your shirts?" The poor fellow was respectful, but not sure what the earl was driving at. "About three inches below m'arse, my lord," he said.'

Nev's shoulders shook with silent laughter.

'Love, there've been Muggles here for seven thousand years, and for most of them, we dwelt amongst them in harmony. Their stories are the stories of our shared land, the fields we know. They're here because of the ford and the way and the land and the clay; well, so are we, still, with a small works at Fritham and the distribution centre hidden behind Morgan's Vale C of E Primary School. The house-elves sometimes help the children on the sly. They do love children, the eccentric little beggars.

'Come along, though. We've somewhere else to be.'

Pop.

Crack.

'Hullo,' Draco said. 'I know this isn't Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire, or even Hampshire.'

They were looking down upon a market town, framed by ancient beechwoods behind on the downs. They could see an ancient church and an impressive market house that spoke of the fat and settled prosperity of the reign of the second George.

'All the brick houses,' Draco said, wonderingly. 'So trim. Like little boxes. Amazing. Harry, where are we? This is lovely.'

'Listen,' Harry smiled, and cast a charm. Suddenly, if seemingly remotely, they could hear it: a highly trained male voice choir, rehearsing.

'Harry, I know damned well this isn't Wales.'

'True. Work it out, love.'

Draco concentrated: on the topography, the beechwood, the all-but-Welsh commitment to a men's choir. 'Gloucestershire? The Cotswolds?'

'Full marks, love. We're in the South-western margin of the Cotswolds, the old Southwolds, at the head of the Vale of Berkeley. See? There's the Cotswold Way, and the slogging recreational infantry, walking it. And face about, and see the Severn, and beyond, misty as ever, Wales. This, where we are, is Stinchcombe Hill.'

'Harry -'

'Love?'

'But where are we?'

'I told you,' Harry laughed. 'Gloucestershire. Stroud District. Looking down towards St James the Great parish church.'

'Harry! This is a place I'll want to come back to. Now tell me the name of the bloody town, so we can.'

Harry grinned. 'Dursley.'

'You're taking the piss.'

'No, love. This is Dursley town. Don't look at me like that, I can't help it if Vernon looked more like a Gloucester Old Spot than a man whose family derived from a quaint village.'

'You're not telling me the Potters had a pottery here.'

'Lord, no. All limestone oolite, this. No good clay. This was a wool town. And then heavier industry, after. But the wealth that built that church and that market house? All wool.'

'You're no Finnegan.'

'No. But speaking of Old Spots, there's a well-regarded pub here by that name. Real ale. And the Vale of Berkeley has always been famous for its perry pears and cider apples.

'Come along, though. We've one last stop. And I'll show you, there, how pots are thrown.'

Pop.

Crack.

'Harry, lad, is this end of Apparating?'

'Yes, Nev, for now.'

'Ah. Pipe do keep a-going out, Apparating.'

Harry chuckled, and looked over at Draco, who was wide-eyed.

'Harry, love? I know this place.'

'I know you do.'

'I mean, we're nearly home - be a damned sight nearer still if the damned Ludlows hadn't backed the wrong horse in the Muggle Civil War and ended losing Maiden Bradley. Honestly, letting Bradley House be lost to the duke of Somerset....

'But. Here?'

Nev looked at them, mildly. 'And where's here, then, that has Ferret thrown off stride?'

'Cold Kitchen Hill,' Harry said. 'Monkton Deverill, Brixton Deverill, and Kingston Deverill are a mile or so off. We're near four miles from Pottle Street, by Horningsham - lovely church in Horningsham: St John the Baptist. And Pottle Street's midway between Maiden Bradley and the Somerset border, and Crockerton and Potter's Hill and the Shearwater headsprings in the clay.'

'Tell him, Harry. Don't faff about. Tell him what the nonsense English name of this place comes from, what it Anglicises from the Celtic or some lost pre-Celtic tongue.' Draco was pale, and his eyes glittered.

'Well. There are those who insist that "Cold Kitchen" is the English twist on an un-English phrase.'

'Harry. Tell him.'

'Fine. There was a Romano-British temple here -'

'Harry -'

'Fine. Fine. Um. This, where Wilts and Somerset meet, nearly, was once known as the Hill of the Wizard.'

'And it's Potter country,' Draco said, flatly. 'Isn't it, Harry. A place more - more sacred - than the Henges or the Ring or the Horses, and it's Potter country, and I never knew until this hour.'

'Love?'

'I'm not angry, love. Or not with you. And I'm glad this was in the keeping of your house, and glad that Albus and Remus were able to pass on to you the knowledge that would otherwise have been lost - that would have died with, with ... with your father.'

'But?'

'But, damn it all! Will I never reach the time when I am not still casually uncovering the lies and the rubbish Lucius spoon-fed me with? Damn it, if I had the bastard here before me, I'd kill him all over again!'

'Now, lad,' Nev rumbled. 'No way to treat your pet budgie.'

Draco tried to preserve his comforting anger, and suddenly failed, collapsing against Harry, the three of them alike snorting with laughter they tried in vain to suppress. 'Only the bloody Gingy-Twins,' Draco gasped. 'Only Fred and George....'

'All right now, love?'

'All right, love.'

'Good.' Harry executed the Potter family spell, and they stood and watched as the hidden splendour was revealed. 'If you still want soothing therapy, you can throw pots,' Harry said.

Before them, casting off its airy cloak, there materialised from its guardian glamour a vast complex, its foundations of incredible ancientry, its ramifications massy: the Pottery. From immemorial beginnings as a draught-kiln on a windy slope, it had grown, grand and awful, its mighty kilns billowing smoke that vanished in an evanesco ward, its very fabric crackling with magic, walls pierced too full of light-embracing windows to support a tenth of its weight without spell and wizardry. An alert and keen-eyed house-elf, as like to Slippy as two peas, and as imbued with the magisterial air of a master foreman and a master of his craft, appeared, and inclined his head to Harry.

'Is Master Harry comin' in to zee the works?' Like Scrumpy at Pottersfield, like all the Potter household elves in Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Wilts, the House-Elf spoke in the accents of the West.

'Yes, Blanxy. Thanks. I know you're busy, if you can't manage, Cuppy can show us about.'

'Blanxy is zhowin' Master Harry and his Dragon the works, zur, and Master Nev. Blanxy is being proud to do. Master Harry is honourin' the works by bringin' his Dragon here - and not before time, Master Harry, zur.'

Draco smiled to himself. Mummy had always said, The very grammatical structures the little buggers bring over from their own tongue are passive-aggressive. Still, it was past time Harry had let him in on this aspect of their joint holdings. And he supposed it was better to be 'Harry's Dragon' than - as his cousin the Weasel was - 'Harry's Wheezy.'

Inside the Pottery, Draco stood at gaze. This was the eldest magic: earth and water and air and fire. God had formed Adam, Red Clay, of the dust of the earth. Adam's distant heirs, the first of all Wizards, had made the first of all magics of earth and water, air and fire. The pot and the potter, clay on the wheel. He could almost hear the soprano and the tenor and the bass, and Handel's immortal wizardry. Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. But who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner's fire. Yet once a little while and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land.

'Harry, lad,' Nev said, pointing at a china figure, newly glazed and painted, that was poignantly the figure of Sirius Black in his Animagus form: Snuffles to the life, the Padfoot of old: 'Harry, lad, you never made and modelled that yourself.'

'Never, Nev. You damn well ought know Dean Thomas's work when you see it. He and ... well, let us say, a certain former Slytherin too oft dismissed as mere "muscle"' - Draco had the grace to blush - 'are to be two of our premier designers, when we can cajole them into fitting a commission in.

'But you want to see where it all begins.'

It began as clay, and metals and minerals, and feldspar itself, and feldspar decayed into kaolin clay, and bone-ash. ('Animal bones, love. We're not bloody Death Eaters.') Earth, and then water. 'We Wizards were using clays from as far afield as Cornwall before the Muggles had the means of transport, and we were millennia ahead of them in technology, be it the wheel, delft and blue-dash, majolica, salt-glazing, enamel, soft-paste porcelain, hard-paste porcelain ... it's the despair of archæologists, who keep finding impossibly modern potsherds in ancient deposits.'

'Soft-paste? Salt? Harry, darling, you want a translator with you.'

'Blanxy is bringin' thik thur vinished work to be a-zhowin' you,' the house-elf said. 'Master Harry is zhowin' you the steps between.'

Show them he did, from the greenest materials to the biscuit-fired pieces in progress, from the creamy slip - 'there's many a slip betwixt cup and lip,' he joked, to universal groans: potter's humour doesn't always translate well - to the careful application of enamels, fine glazes, liquid gold and silver, the careful hand of art in the etching of design in sgraffiato (or sgraffito).

Show them he did, throwing an elegant, lipped, soon to be green-and-silver-banded mortar on the wheel, and shaping its accompanying pestle by hand. 'That's for you, love. Don't let Snape see, he'll be envious. And covetous, the greedy sod.'

'But this is like potions,' Draco said, watch Harry's deft manipulation of the materials. 'The oxides and the elements, the grain and the decorations, and all. You're absolute pants at potions.'

'Yes, well, they're not tactile enough. I'm rather a tactile person.'

'I know,' Draco grinned, trailing the merest touch along Harry's jawline.

'Keep that up and I'll bollix this, and then you're sans gift,' Harry warned.

As he and Blanxy showed them the kilns and they watched the bone china glaze and colour and take its final form and lustre, Draco shook his head. 'Do you - all right, all right, do we - sell this in shops, then?'

'Trust you to worry about that. No, we don't. We sell to shops. There's not a potions-maker in Britain that doesn't use our mortars and pestles to grind ingredients, nor a pint drunk in any Wizarding pub that can't come in one of our tankards. And the nose-biting teacups that Fred and George sell as wheezes are now, by God, ours, proprietary, patent, and have been patent since before Zonko's so much as opened a shop, in my grandfather's time. But the bellarmines and the flasks and the bloody chimney-piece shepherdesses are sold by us wholesale. So, no, you infernal snob, we're not in trade.'

'But why - with all these house-elves, with the best of Wizarding artists on commission, with all this - why are you, literally, dirtying your hands?'

'In the first place, because it is therapeutic. It's a hobby, if you like. Secondly, because this is not, in case you'd not noticed, a Muggle factory. There's magic involved, and I'm the one who, at the end of the day, must provide it. Also - well, look here.' He steered them back to the wheel that was reserved for his use. 'Blanxy, this will be a new production design. You see, Draco, what I made for you is a one-off, because I chose that it be. But just now, I've invoked the magic to mass-produce this next item.' As he spoke, he was crafting a tankard. It took shape in his hands, and Draco could all but see how the magic flowed from Harry into the shape, which took on the shadowy forms of the relief figures - a Quidditch match - and shadowy tints of the colours and metals that would decorate the finished project. 'That's magic,' Harry said, concentrating hard. Satisfied, he nodded to Blanxy. 'Stoneware for this one, salt-glazed, then under- and over-glazed with the base colours. (Muggles can't do that, not this way, with three firings before the last; we can.) Plain slip for the relief figures, sgraffiato incising on the handle, down to the base colour, a Quidditch hoops pattern repeated, gold rim.'

'Blanxy is a-zeein' to it, zur.'

'Now, watch.' As Harry spoke, Blanxy tossed the clay model into the air, and it vanished with a pop. Harry gestured to Neville and Draco, and they walked to a kilning area, from which a score or more of finished pieces identical to that shadowed in Harry's handicraft were already emerging from their final firing. 'Magic, you know. Black basaltes, bone china, soft-paste, it all starts, really, with the vision and the magic. You could do the same, right now, with your hands in the clay and your concept in your mind, moulding the matter with your magic alone.'

'I could? I mean. How interesting.'

Neville jogged him with his shoulder. 'Lad's still going on about gentlemen and artisans, Harry.'

Harry rolled his eyes. 'Love. Look at me. Even in Muggle terms, that's rubbish. I mean. We do farm, technically.'

Draco knew that much. He quite liked cows: sweet-breathed, doe-eyed Jerseys and Guernseys with their rich milk, and Juno-esque Ayrshires; docile, well-set British Whites, good milkers and good beef cattle, and living history on the hoof; beefy South Devons for the table, mighty Welsh Blacks, tiny, dual-purpose Dexters. And he loved their orchards.

'But we do so on a large and gentlemanly scale, and traditionally, that preserves your blessed social status: gentlemen are allowed to sell excess agricultural produce and not be considered "in trade", like most English conventions it makes no sense. But - your status is secure. Even whilst we're members of a union - or did you forget last month's NFU do?'

'Only effective union in England,' Nev grunted. 'Pity t'miners weren't so good at reputation, public faces. Bloody idiot, were Scargill, Gran always said, an' wi' no sense of tactics.'

'But. Love, more than all this, we're not Muggles. Is Severus a dispensing chemist because he makes potions? When the Founders raised Hogwarts, did they become jobbing builders? Bowman Wright was half-Muggle, but his other half was, well, Potter: was the Golden Snitch the mere product of a mechanic? Love, we're Wizards, damn it. If a Muggle made a cauldron, it would be inert, useless, of no worth for the potions-maker. We make our own tools and devices, because we are magical, and they want to be magical as well if we're to get any use of them. Dean's not a house-painter, nor even a Muggle portraitist. When we sell, you and I, in a gentlemanly way, our cider and perry, it's Wizarding provender, and for Wizards alone. Well, they couldn't be expected to drink that out of their cupped hands, could they? How in bleeding Hell'd you think we got into the wholesale business of selling tankards to go with our ancient specialities, our magical items for Healers, Medi-wizards, potions makers? It was to have jugs and firkins to put the damned cider in, from Shepton Mallet to Dursley town!'

'Christ,' said Draco, his shoulders slumping. 'Did my - did Lucius ever once tell me the truth about anything? Or was it all pure balls?'

'Did he ever, even when you were quite small, tell you that you were special, and worthy, and destined for great things?'

'Well, yes. Of course.'

Nev snorted, but Harry ignored him. 'Then, Draco, my love, at least once or twice, he told you the truth.'

'Right,' Draco said, blushing a fetching shade of rose. 'Potter, take me to your damned wheel and show me this pot-throwing thing.'

_____________________

No, Nev thought, chuckling as he remembered, Harry wouldn't cut up rough over the Weasley Twins's latest notion.

_____________________

They were being received in state, Fred and George reflected. It was typical of the Malfoys never to release anything they had once grasped, and typical as well that they had never ceased to add to it, and the Manor was proof of that. From its beginnings as a true manor house, it - like the House of Black's Atrum Old Hall, in Staffs - had been added to and built over, but never torn down, displaced, or rebuilt, and the cold, Whig portion, all icily chaste stone and gelid geometry, in itself resembled Wilton House on acid.

Or had done. Although it was now indwelt largely by Narcissa, the Malfoys, inexplicably, never having run to a dower house, it was after all Draco's and Harry's property now, as purged by Tonks and Nev and by Harry's and Draco's own magic. And, like all Wizarding buildings, Hogwarts being the classic sample, it absorbed and reflected back, radiated, its owner's or master's mood and character.

The Great Hall, where they now stood waiting for Harry and Draco and meditating devilment - they had insisted on kicking their heels there rather than being shown to someplace comfortable, intimates of the house though they were and assiduous though the House-Elves, Hudgey, Naumpey, and old Zammy the butler, had been: they knew that their cap-in-'and, 'umble-dependants turn would wrongfoot their hosts - the Great Hall, once the most frigidly pretentious of places, reflected the new regime. (It had been typical of Lucius's pretentiousness, he being at bottom as non-U as Vernon Dursley'd been, that, in a county in which the greatest of country houses were called Something House, he had held out for the ostentation and alliteration of 'Malfoy Manor'. Surprising, really, that the old bastard hadn't tried to dub the pile, 'Castle Malfoy', or something equally grand and parvenu.) The Malfoys had filched ideas from everyone from Wren and Vanbrugh and Grinling Gibbons to Wyatt, Jones, Repton, and the Brothers Adam, and the Great Hall, as chillingly formal as anything could well be in its design, offered mute testimony of the thievery. The cantilevered quadruple staircase ended in newels of which the finial balls revolved, slowly and unnervingly, a few scant, levitated inches above the tops of the newel-posts. The floor had a disconcerting tendency to change itself when one wasn't looking, from parquetry (itself sometimes spinning slowly like a kaleidoscope) to marble to alternate marble squares, chessboard style, that changed pattern or colour or both so soon as one looked away.

In Lucius's day, the effect would have been sinister in the extreme, with the very floor beneath one's feet changing like a Streeler (and leaving, one would suspect, uneasily, the same, venomous track); these days, it was whimsical - as whimsical as the way in which the finial balls on the stairs, in the post-Lucius era, had developed a trick of changing into Quaffles and taking off to hover about the more frivolous and receptive guests.

But they could hear their hosts approaching now. With an exchange of grins, they assumed their most innocent faces, and each palmed the newest sample of their experimental Parrot Pastilles.

_____________________

'Well,' Harry had said, 'let's go see what the Twins are on about, and what you've kept from me.'

'You're a fine one to talk.'

'Love, I know when I'm being managed. And so long as it's you doing the vetting, I don't object: it shows you care. I don't even mind your little surprises, like that time you snuck off - as if you'd be unfaithful: you're too fastidious for that - to that drag club for nights on end, just so you could pull off that Marilyn Monroe, "Happy Birthday, Mr Minister" turn for my fortieth. I thought Ron would syncope from laughing.'

'You - you knew about that?'

'All along. You do look ravishing in a dress, you know, but I'm best pleased we've not done that again: had I wanted to marry a woman, I should have done.'

'Damn.'

'But what d'y'mean, I'm a fine one to talk, hmm?'

'Well, how long did it take you to let me in on where you were sneaking off to with the Pottery, Potter? I mean, fine, perhaps I needed a lesson about, well, snobbery, and how the Malfoys had kept themselves too much apart and all that, and, well, trade, but I was pretty damned embarrassed to be lessoned in front of Neville, of all people, and -'

'Love! Is that still rankling? And more than that, do you really think I didn't take you to see the works so soon as they were back in shape?'

'What? We'd been together for how long by then? And in the cider and perry business from the start -'

Harry had stopped stock-still and faced Draco, frowning in disbelief and worry. 'Draco. The orchards took care of themselves from the time my parents ... died. Their magic is the magic of the created order. But it took all that time, with Albus first, and then with Remus and even some research by Hermione, to locate, uncover, repair, and restart the potteries and the clay-pits. So many of the spells and secrets that my father would have passed on to me had he lived had been lost, and wanted research to recover. Remus didn't spend a decade in our muniments room for his health. You and Neville saw the first week of operation.'

'Oh, hell.' Draco was becoming truly upset. 'I. Damn it! Is love not enough? Will we ever learn to communicate?'

'It's always enough, is love, my love,' Harry said, urgently, taking Draco in his arms. 'I'm sorry -'

'No, no, it's my stupidity -'

'Balls! Look, I'm unobservant and inarticulate and you're, well, um -'

'Naturally too damned secretive?'

'Well, yes. But we're getting there. Ah, ah - don't forget, in Muggle years, we're barely twenty-five. We'll be fine. Now. Let's gather ourselves, shall we? The Twins can scent weakness,' he chuckled, and Draco couldn't help but smile back.

_____________________

But it had been Harry who was sufficiently upset by the conversation that the Twins's latest jest backfired.

Harry and Draco strolled through the doorway to be greeted by the sight of Fred and George, tugging their forelocks, and then, as Harry said something impatient, popping pastilles into their mouths. With a sudden Fwoop!, they transformed, not into canaries, but into six foot tall parrots.

Harry's wand was in his hand and trained on them in the instant, his face working with fury, and then, before Draco could react, he had spun on his heel and slammed out, boiling like one of Neville's cauldrons in Potions class, long ago.

Draco followed, calling over his shoulder, 'When and if you two idiots change back, you want to get Lupin here, I may want help calming him.'

_____________________

When Remus arrived, as, in haste, he did, Harry was barracking the Twins in tones that rang from the marble as with a clash of swords.

'- Rope in the house of the hanged! I have never, God knows, expected much in the way of sensitivity from the two of you, but this was so far beyond the pale it's damn near in Connaught! This is Draco's father you were mocking! By Merlin -'

'Harry! The man sired me, he gave me some genetic material, but he was never a father,' Draco said, in tones as steely. 'I appreciate your consideration, but you don't see me cutting up rough, and he was my sire, after all! I am not,' Draco added, 'a delicate flower who wants protecting, even by you -'

'It's not about that, though, is it,' Fred said, dispassionately. 'It's about fathers, Harry's as well as yours, and about his not having had the chance any more than you did to learn -'

'- That you can love and respect your pater,' George finished, 'and still take the mickey, sometimes. But with Harry's situation, I mean, having lost his dad, and your father -'

'It is about,' Remus said sharply, from where he stood outside their line of sight, 'memory, and the way it varies.' His countenance was equally stern and incisive, matching his tones. 'Now come along, all of you, and let's get out of this damned hypertrophied mausoleum, it's much less easy to have a sordid quarrel under God's clean skies.'

They followed him, abashed and silent, suddenly feeling themselves schoolboys once more, and schoolboys caught behaving poorly by a much-loved and respected master.

'Right,' Remus said, once they were out from underneath a roof and open to the heavens. 'Now. What is going here?'

'We came -'

'- To ask Harry a favour.'

'Your diplomacy seems to leave something to be desired.' Remus was very dry.

'Actually, it has its own peculiar -'

'Charm? Hardly.'

'It's connected, in a way. Memory, you said, and how it varies. You see, for us -'

'- It will warm our old age -'
'- To remember the sight of Lucius Malfoy -'
'- At the climax of the Last Battle -'
'- Charging in with his wand out -'
'- Only to find -'
'- The hard way -'
'- That we'd nicked his wand -'
'- And replaced it with one of our joke wands -'
'- Available at all Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes shops, or by owl -'
'- For a mere one-Galleon-and-two-Knuts.'
'VAT not included.'

'I admit,' Draco said, 'that his sudden, unintentional transformation into the world's largest budgie was inspired. However, it was Harry's casual swish-and-flick, creating a cage for him -'

'Don't forget the mirror and the cuttlefish and the eucalyptus leaves,' Fred grinned.

'- That nearly lost us the war, as most of the Order were laughing too hard to fight for a moment or two.'

'It distracted the other side as well,' Remus said, neutrally. 'Their sense of humour was of the sort that turns readily upon their own kind. It left Harry free to engage Lord Folderol without distraction.'

'Yes, well,' Harry said, still noticeably angry, 'my own memories of the engagement are rather different to yours.'

'Which is we are here, o silent partner -'

'- Friend of our youth -'

'- Old butty, mucker ours, pal.'

'We want to have a Pensieve copy of those memories.'

'If the Ministry are commissioning the two of you to rewrite the Official History, Hermione's gone mad and wants to be in Mungo's.'

'Not precisely that -'

'- Though any woman who willingly married Ickle Ronniekins without being Imperius can't really be called sane -'

'- But forget that Doctor Hermione's presently Minister -'

'- And remember what she really does for a job of work.'

'If she thinks, if you think, that my memories of Riddle and the War are appropriate for children to be exposed to in a History of Magic course, she is mad!'

'Now, Harry -'

'- Be reasonable, and think. You see, we've developed -'

'- For the gamer's market, the same punters who play our Quidditch-manager sim -'

'- A game engine for war-games. And -'

'YOU MUST BE RAVING! WAR-GAMES? WAR-GAMES? WAR? WAR'S NOT - IT ISN'T A BLOODY GAME, AND I CANNOT BELIEVE I'M FORCED TO REMIND THE TWO OF YOU OF THAT!'

'Harry! No! No one's suggesting that our war's a fit subject for a Wizarding strategy game! Too recent and too bloody. But we were kicking the historical aspects around with Hermione -'

'- Our learned sister-in-law -'

'- And she started planning lesson plans around it.'

'Well,' Draco said, judiciously, 'it would have made Binns's incessant drivel about Goblin Rebellions more exciting.'

'Precisely what Hermione said -'

'- And that playing it out would give one a better sense for what happened and might have happened otherwise and why -'

'- For students, undergraduates, and ... Aurors.'

'Oh.'

'You're the one who pushed through the reforms, Harry -'

'- Creating an ATC Auror-cadet corps at Hogwarts to train future Aurors and reservists -'

'- Because, as you said, we'd face another Dark force sooner or later -'

'- And there was no reason this time 'round for our world to be caught with nothing but its wand in its hand. You pointed out that even the Muggles knew better -'

'- And that the reason Great Britain still punched above its weight in international affairs was -'

'- The Special Relationship, a history of victory, and a small but supremely professional cadre that was the nucleus of a national fighting force in an emergency.'

'Hermione's counting on you, Harry, to make Binns's approach to history, history. You wouldn't let Hermione down, Harry, would you?'

'So you lot are offering this game engine of yours to the Ministry, the school, and the University gratis, are you?'

They laughed. 'Harry, Harry. What sort of mugs do you take us for?'

'We'll use it for less sensitive topics.'

'Such as?' Remus's question was sharp. 'Provoking a new Goblin Rebellion by dredging up the old ones?'

'Er. Well, no. But what about all the Muggle wars? They reenact and game those all the time.'

'Because,' Remus said, 'they're their wars. Theirs. I remind you that Dr Hermione Granger-Weasley is not the only historian in Wizard-dom.'

'Remus....'

'I spent a good long time doing history myself, as you, Harry, have cause to know every time you throw a pot.'

'And we're very grateful, Remus -'

'Are you? Then I shall give you the opportunity to show that gratitude.' He stooped and picked up a pebble, and murmured, Portus. 'Well? Don't stand about, come along.'

They port-keyed.

Shepton Mallet and Hurlingpot, pottery sites and the Fosse Way: it was all familiar, too much so, perhaps, as they stood silent beside Remus - Professor Lupin, now, every inch the academic - on the summit of Beacon Hill, amongst the ancient barrows and graves of prehistory.

'The Church Hill,' Remus said, his voice sharp as the wind that cut them, 'overlooking Silver Street, in Ottery St Mary, just over Stoats Hill from St Catchpole, is the probable derivation of an East Devon surname - a Muggle name, we'd have said before Draco and Hermione turned our world upside down with their researches. But the great duke of Marlborough and the great Prime Minister of the war years do not impinge upon the consciousness even of Arthur Weasley, let alone his sons.

'In Shepton Mallet and its district, there were Muggle potters in Roman times as well as our Potters, a whole industrial settlement straggling along beside the Fosse Way, and it was there that Muggle scholars discovered an amulet of silver, bearing the monogram of Christ, the Chi-Ro, thus putting back their estimate of when Christianity reached the West Country by more than two centuries.

'The pottery known as Shepton Mallet ware is in every museum in Britain. Was it Muggle-made? Was it the craft of the Potter line? Whence sprung all the Crockers of these Wessex shires?

'These questions are senseless.

'In Devon, near Chudleigh, on the River Teign, are the highest waterfalls in England, at Canonteign. The manor was once held by a Norman abbey: the Chudleigh canons, if you will.

'Muggle? Wizard? These questions have ceased to be meaningful. We are all one people. We are human. Simple, vulgar, glorious common humanity. Human. Can you, any of you, conceive what that means to me, how I have held and held desperately to that fact, in my condition? The common core of a common humanity.

'That is what killed Lucius, in the end. When, having survived the battle as a budgie, he was restored to his proper shape and tried, you know, you all well know, the choices he was given. To be stripped of his magic and put to work, helping to rebuild what he had destroyed - yes, as a common labourer, a Squib by court judgement, and working under House-Elves. Or to be stripped of magic and set to work, closely watched, as a Muggle. He considered the second alternative even worse than the first, holding Muggles to be lower than beasts of the field, and - well.'

They certainly remembered. Lucius had been left in a warded room with a wand enchanted to have only one function, a single function which could affect only himself, and he had wasted no time in subjecting himself to that Killing Curse he had so often meted out to others.

'In Shepton Mallet,' Remus said, 'they will tell you, as you should well know, of the legend of Nancy Camel, taken away to Hell in a fiery chariot by the Devil himself. That is legend. But the inexplicable Disapparition of Owen Parfitt is a true story, and neither Wizard nor Muggle has ever solved that ... riddle. They burnt witches in Shepton Mallet, not in the darkest of ages, but in the enlightened years of the first George. Or they thought they did do; they burnt, in fact, poor women who suffered from mental instability, on the testimony of a disturbed child reinforced by the hysteria of a country community. Yet there were Wizarding folk there, and they were glad enough that it was the innocent who suffered and they themselves remained hid. We threw them to the - wolves. It was an ill requite for neighbours to make one to another.

'And not neighbours only, but kin. Do you remember when we were at Seamus's father's house?'

They remembered. They remembered Seamus's laughter. 'Finnigans and Finnegans, and not two hand's measure between them, and never intermarried until me mam and da, at all.' And Seamus's father, laughing also: 'I thought at first, knowing that we were here in it, that the two were too close to marry, cousins and all sorts. And when they told me that hadn't been th' reason ever, I thought, with your mam's Finnigans intermarrying with the Ogdens and the Murrays, well, I thought, perhaps the Finnigans were Prod heretics. Ah, fool that I was, I did! You could light a candle at my eye with the shame that's in it, but I did think so, whatever.

'And then I did say the hard word, and she told me she would marry me after all, and then I found after that the reason there'd never been such a wedding was that they were Wizards, and I thought, ah, it's destroyed I am, surely!'

Remus shook his head, shaking off the memory. 'Potters and Crockers, Finnegans and Finnigans, and Muggle and magical Prewetts and Prewitts and Pruetts of Molly's all in the same parish,' Remus said, 'and still we will not see. None so blind as we who will not.

'Your father,' he said, bending a glare upon the Twins, 'is fascinated by Muggles, and warms to them, but there is that even in Arthur that cannot believe, viscerally, deep down, that we are one common humanity. You wish to make a game of their wars and history, gentlemen, yet you do not recognise that it is your own as well. That is what is amiss.

'You, Draco, helped establish that fact, our common humanity, our unity, yet you do not internalise it.

'And you, Harry. You took it upon you teach Draco these lessons, but you have not learnt them yourself. You and Hermione, all of you who were not raised in a "pureblood" family, have your own distance now from your Muggle relations. As you have become a part of our world, absorbed by it, you have forgotten the rock from whence you were hewn.

'As did we in my generation who were also not "pure" of blood.'

'Remus....'

'You even swear by Merlin, Harry, as I well know. As do we all.'

'That does not mean - Remus, you know that's not some affectation, or some foolish pseudo-religion -'

'Of course I know that, Harry.' Remus passed a hand over his face, abruptly weary, the fight gone out of him. 'It's no more that than his saying, "By Jove!" meant that Justin's grandfather, say, worshipped the Roman pantheon. But it was a marker, a way of parading, subtly, the fact that he was a gentleman, and had had a Classical education. You are signalling that you are a Wizard. And you are a Wizard, Harry - "and a crackin' good un, I reckon". But you must not let that distinction become a difference, to the detriment of your recalling your share in our common humanity, Muggle and Wizard alike.'

'Oh, Remus. I am so, so sorry -'

'I'm sorry, Harry.' He opened his arms, wide, and gathered all four of them in as best he could. 'It's just that - in the time I spent making myself a local historian and an expert on the lost arcana of the House of Potter, I kept up other studies as well. I did not share your experiences, Harry, your scar or your destiny. But in my own way, I'm afraid, I know, perhaps bar you and Severus, more about Tom Riddle than any Wizard living. I know how he became what we was, and how important it is that he not become, as he is beginning to, a half-remembered bugbear, a figure of fun, a caricature. I made certain I learnt that some years ago, in the first flush of the peace.'

_____________________

Children, as predators, are pack animals.

Children, as prey, are herd animals.

Children, accordingly, can sense, even when they cannot articulate, that something is off in one of their fellows. As a rule, they either avoid the oddity and its possessor, or exploit the oddity to bring its possessor to grief.

Weakness is feared as contagion: it slows down the herd. Let the wolves take the hindmost.

Weakness is seized upon as an opening: it attracts the pack. The hindmost are a windfall to the wolves.

Yet what children, the herd and the pack, do 'as a rule', is not what children, the pack and the herd, will invariably do. There are exceptions to most rules, and this rule is no exception in its possessing some exceptions.

Remus John Lupin knew these exceptions well. Long before he had come to terms with his attraction to Sirius Black, long before the concept of attraction had occurred to him, he had learnt the ways of the closeted, as a very small boy. The art of slipping in and out of rooms, conversation, notice, mind. The tight, unrelenting, tensed control, hyper-controlled, forever guarded, never relaxing: the mounting of ceaseless and unsleeping guard over a locked door with a secret behind it.

It had had its fateful consequences, this engrained and desperate habit.

Coupled with the arrogance of youth in his friends, their casual and callous certainty that they knew better and were infinitely more clever than Old Dumbledore, it had nearly left a fellow student dead or worse.

Coupled with the arrogance of youth in his friends, their casual and callous certainty that they knew better and were infinitely more clever than Old Dumbledore, it had then sent that fellow student into the arms and the ranked armies of the Dark, a loss revocable and redeemable only by that fellow student's supreme exertions and by the cunning of Silly Old Dumbledore.

Coupled with the arrogance of youth in his friends, their casual and callous certainty that they knew better and were infinitely more clever than Old Dumbledore, it had played into the hands of Peter Pettigrew, who sowed dissension by the lightest words, caused James and Sirius - who, always, shared a brain, if not always a particularly good one - to suspect Remus's loyalties, and, in the end, led directly to James's and Lily's deaths.

Remus John Lupin knew well the curious - sometimes sinister - consequences, those common and uncommon alike, that derived from children's sensing weakness, illness, madness, or oddness in their peers.

Tom Marvolo Riddle had known these curious reactions earlier, and better, and more nearly.

It was 1928. The talkies were coming to the picture palaces. War had been outlawed by the Kellogg-Briand Pact - though the Froggies, queerly enough, were building a fortress even so, their Maginot Line, however the devil one was meant to call that. That American aviatrix was winging across the Atlantic, Red Russia had announced Stalin's first Five Year Plan, and a few boffins were beginning to talk about something called 'penicillin'. The General Strike had long since failed, and Parliament had finally done something sensible with the passage of the Trade Disputes Act 1927 - although the silly sods had then promptly shown their true colours by granting the flappers the vote.

Even so. Thank God for Stanley Baldwin, at least. That bloody Bolshie government was finally done and dusted. Making men who had actually been labourers in receipt of daily wages, ministers of the Crown? By God, what was the country coming to? And these ribbon-built dog-kennels filling the land, trippers, agitators seeking paid holidays - appalling. The idea of a dole and this iniquitous Pensions Act - preposterous: what else had rotted Rome? - and the usual fevers of the Celts were damnable, yes; but the Great War was behind them, the upper classes were firmly in the saddle notwithstanding that jack-in-office Ramsay Macdonald's brief, now mercifully past, tenure in office, and the Jazz Age still swung on.

The Tyne Bridge is up, there's dry gypsum in Billingham, and the Flying Scotsman is whirling past.

What the bloody Christ does Thomas Riddle want with a baby born of a mentally defective woman who, pregnant, claimed to be a witch and to do magic? Magic. Faugh. Didn't save the silly bint from dying in childbirth, did it? Sweet God, Thomas was yet a young man, son of Jabez Riddle of Riddle House, great-grandson of Jasper Riddle, MP, JP: he had a future before him and a family's fortunes yet to retrieve: what use to him was this all-but-bastard child of a hasty and regretted marriage to a madwoman? No, no, better for all concerned to close the books on the unsavoury episode. There was no room in Thomas Riddle's life and future for the accidental consequences of a brief stupidity, a youthful indiscretion, a hole-and-corner folly that it were best to forget. Besides, the whelp was sickly, of self-evidently poor stock on the dam's side, of tainted blood. It was amazing that the spawn had managed to hang on to see his first birthday. But something had to be done. If it weren't going to do the decent thing and disembarrass them all of its presence, these stopgap measures would not serve, fobbing the nuisance off on the servants. It was past time to send it away. With any luck at all, it would die soon enough.

His first impulse was to send the annoyance as far away as was practicable, out of sight and most assuredly out of mind. To London. To an orphanage engaged, better still, in the triangle trade of shipping orphans off like so much ballast to Australia or Canada, as thousands of orphans and poor children were shipped off, all but kidnapped. But that would have entailed, as he soon found, some very tiresome paperwork. Not for nothing had Jasper Riddle seized so much of the Hangles; not for nothing had Japheth Riddle and Jabez Riddle in their turns hung on with a death-gripe to what they could save. The Riddles might have had their wings clipped for a time - something Thomas Riddle, unencumbered by any mewling, puling infant, was determined to set to rights - but they were still a power in the land.

Mr Verity at the orphanage would bend to his will. Were not the Riddles amongst its governors, time out of mind? The little wretch should be readily enough disposed of and accounted for, without any boring documentation.

Children, as predators, are pack animals.

Children, as prey, are herd animals.

Weakness is feared, as contagious.

Weakness is seized upon and exploited.

Those were the simple rules Tom Marvolo Riddle learnt from his earliest years.

He was a gentleman's son. He was an unacknowledged and unloved inmate of an orphanage.

He was Young Mr Riddle's rightful son and heir. He was presumptively a mere bastard.

His father and grandfather sat on the orphanage's Board of Governors. He was a charity case who had damned well better tug his forelock or doff his cap to the gentleman governors, or those who had the management of him would impress the lesson upon his ungrateful hide.

He came to hear and believe the rumours and from them to know and speak the truth of his birth and parentage. He was soundly whipped for being an inveterate liar, a fantasist, and a slanderous one at that.

He found that he could cause inexplicable occurrences. His explanations were not believed, and he was birched until he bled for it.

When Tom Marvolo Riddle was in the eleventh year of his age, the unimaginable, that he had formlessly, unconsciously imagined behind all his imaginings, happened. He was a Wizard. Magic was real. All his tales, those he told in the grim, cold dormitories to the other orphans of an evening, those he told to himself in his threadbare cot after the feeble and grudging lights were firmly doused, were true. He was vindicated.

And he could tell no one. It was forbidden.

He was someone of worth, someone his father could now acknowledge and take pride in. His unacknowledged father was horrified, and damned him as still more worthless than he'd feared, and set yet greater distance between them.

He was eleven years old, and it was necessary that he travel clear to London to take a train to Scotland, and the imposition this put upon the staff was intolerable, and they took out their change with the singing cane. He was eleven years old and off to London and thence to school, far from the mean streets of a grim and begrimed North Riding market town.

He was eleven years in age. The year was 1938. The Empire Exhibition in Glasgow seemed hollow, somehow. Ulster was simmering. Germany's new and steely Reich had absorbed Austria. The Beano was put in circulation. The Prime Minister and the French were throwing Czechoslovakia to the wolves, at Munich, as the Hogwarts year began.

He was sorted into Slytherin. The reputed bastard. The half-blood - and there were those who thought that designation generous. The child condemned to continue to call an orphanage his home, outwith Hogwarts.

Children, as predators, are pack animals.

Children, as prey, are herd animals.

To be odd, to be different, is to be weak.

Weakness is feared as being contagious.

Weakness is seized upon and exploited.

Those were the simple rules Tom Marvolo Riddle learnt in Slytherin House.

But he learnt more complex rules as well, and learnt, also, the exceptions to the rules.

He learnt that Wizards could believe ten impossible things before breakfast, for they lived in a world that accomplished the seemingly impossible on a regular basis. (It had laws, and those laws were not arbitrary, but - far more so than in the Muggle world that was already on its way to manipulating nature and splitting the atom - those laws were so subtle that few if any Wizards fully grasped them.)

He learnt that, having long since found ways to hide and to evade punishment at the orphanage, he - who was condemned at his Muggle orphanage as a liar when he spoke truth - could make the most outrageous lies plausible: far more so with Wizards than with the sceptical Muggles he had left behind.

He learnt that eccentricity could be power, not weakness, if managed correctly, with style.

And he learnt in the library that his mother had been of no mean descent, and he learnt in the Forest that he - he, Tom Marvolo - shared with Salazar himself, who had in his own time been a refugee and a man of dubiously mixed parentage, half a foreigner, the gift of Parseltongue. That did more than lend colour to what he had come to believe and deduce regarding his ancestry: it sealed it. It was proof.

Bearing within him a secret pride that swelled so that it all but strangled him, he returned to the grim, dank orphanage, to the meaningless beatings, the routine and mindless threats, offers, and solicitations to buggery, the grey and unappetising stodge and the unmeaning rote. Nothing could affect him: not the real Tom Marvolo, hidden cunningly, like a masked battery, behind the façade of the friendless orphan. He was the Heir of Slytherin. What were the Mudblood Riddles to that?

He was now aged twelve. It was September. The year was 1939. As he arrived in London, Hitler's SS were manufacturing a casus belli against Poland. As the Hogwarts Express steamed Northwards, the panzers rolled into Poland and Stukas dived upon Krakow and Warsaw, as HMG and the French issued their toothless ultimata. As the first Sunday in Hogwarts's disjointed time, that never quite matched the Muggle calendar - even when, as now, the dates and days coincided - ground on, freighted with the prospect of the start of term, the Second World War, the Hitler War, enveloped Great Britain. Prime Minister Chamberlain, his voice throttled, his tone as dispiriting as a miasmic fog settling in, addressed the nation: 'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany'. The Navy received word of a new First Lord, in a two-word signal to the fleet: 'Winston's back'. This did not prevent the sinking of the Athenia by a U-boat, or the rape of Poland. And Tom Marvolo began to ponder just how bestial the Muggles, his contemptible father's contemptible species, were.

The year was 1940. Tom Marvolo was thirteen years in age. He saw with his own eyes the feral savagery that fear inspired even in the Muggles's cast-aside children, displaced by war, sent deep into the countryside to hide from death dealt from above by other Muggles in soulless machines. The Muggles did not even invest the effort of facing their enemies and seeing their eyes; they struck from a safe distance, raining death upon women and children and the huddled old. Upon the poor and the outcaste: the rich - Thomas Riddle and his parents at the great house above the village - seemed to survive unscathed. In London, he saw and smelled and tasted the Blitz and all its works.

They had fled, these Muggles, from their own venomous, vermin-like kind, from fear of death and pain, seeking isolation. At Hogwarts, they, the Wizards, were thrown together, in Slytherin, thrown upon their own resources, shared when politic, hoarded when possible. They were isolated. In Muggles, such circumstances can be conducive, under the impress of a dominant yet disturbed personality, to folie à deux, to folie en masse, to the creation of a cult.

Tom Marvolo began to hint at his descent and his destiny. Few regarded him, until he proved it upon them with the aid of a serpent.

It was 1941. Britain stood alone. The machined, sleek tyranny that represented the Muggle ideal, the ultimate Muggle ends, was poised to conquer. Tom Marvolo saw this with his own eyes and had no doubts.

It was not only the gift of Parseltongue that he possessed, but of persuasion. His wildest claim - the heirship of Slytherin the Founder - was validated and sealed by his being a Parselmouth. Claims less wild could but be accepted without cavil. He was drawing more and more of his House, and not his House only, into his intimacy, the deliciousness of a shared secret, the thrill of being favoured by one marked and born to greatness, the Heir of Slytherin. Already he had fashioned him a name, one that someday, he vowed, Wizards would fear to speak, so powerful would it be. He was in the fourteenth year of his age, and to his favoured inner circle, he was already their lord and they his vassals. Lord Voldemort.

It was 1942, and only a train so magical as the Hogwarts Express was running to time and by day, and not dedicated to war. Tom was now aged fifteen. The Muggles continued to die at the hands of their own. It was well. The sooner the earth was cleansed of them, the better. Then there were a place for Lord Voldemort.

It was 1943. A youth of sixteen summers stalked through the rubble, in London south the river, killing time in a time of killing. The Muggles had reached an equipoise in their murder of one another. Presidents and prime ministers and commissars and kings, duces and fuehrers and emperors, all waged war against one another. What was conquering a Muggle king or chancellor, though? They were easy meat, capable of dying at the mere hands of their fellow mere Muggles. What was world conquest? A bauble for a Mudblood dictator to covet, vainly. No: to conquer Death itself was the only conquest worth essaying. The only quest worthy of a great Wizard.

Idly, the youth picked up a cheap Muggle diary. It was a feeble thing in itself, shoddy, catchpenny, tuppence-coloured as any Muggle artefact. But it might be made the subject of some amusing enchantments.

He hastened towards King's Cross station. It was time to shed his Muggle mask, the honest orphan boy, in favour of that mask he turned upon the school at large, at Hogwarts: 'poor but brilliant, parentless but so brave, school prefect, model student', the pride and plum of Dippet's headship and the leader already of Salazar's House. Later, when the Sorting was done and the new intake of Slytherins were presented to be indoctrinated, he could lay that mask aside as well, and allow them the privilege of beginning to know him, and, eventually, if trustworthy, to compete for the favour and approbation of their destined lord.

It was 1944, and the Great Crusade in Europe had begun. The Muggles were killing one another in greater numbers and with greater efficiency than ever. But these events were now of little moment to the seventeen year old Tom Marvolo Riddle. Muggle wars and Muggle vengeance-weapons were like phantasms of a dream already half-forgot before one fully awakened. He - the hidden lord - had triumphed already, having opened the Chamber, having watched that filthy hag Myrtle's eyes dim in death - the excitement had overcome him as nothing had roused him in his life - and with the same clever ploy rid his ancestor's great foundation of that half-beast, that less-even-than-Mudblood oaf, Rubeus Hagrid of Gryffindor House.

His great cleansing work had begun, on a scale Mudbloods could not hope to imitate.

And he had found himself in contact with others of like mind: the tumults of the Mudbloods's feeble warfare had impinged upon true Wizards not at all. He would learn, and gladly, of the Knights of Walpurgis; learn of them all they had to teach, use them, suck them dry - and then lead them. Was he not Lord Voldemort, the Heir of Slytherin? They would follow. They would learn their place.

It was 1945. His last year at a Hogwarts that had remained resolutely unscoured, unpurged; a Hogwarts invigilated by that annoying Mudblood-lover, Dumbledore. The old bastard had even had the temerity to defeat the noble Grindelwald, before Tom could absorb all of that Wizard's knowledge and use him to the full. Tom had been deprived of an advantage and balked of his rightful prey after. The Muggles at least had spent themselves in a final orgy of destruction, which was some comfort.

It was clear what he must do. So soon as he could leave Hogwarts an accredited Wizard - Head Boy, indeed, and bearing with becoming public modesty the award of a Medal for Magical Merit - he must begin on a journey to deeper knowledge than the fools, cowards, and Mudblood-lovers at Hogwarts could grasp. The Knights would assist, there. But it wanted that he fit him for that task, that he make himself worthy to solicit those acerb, dark, and fastidious powers that are behind the world. So soon as he was free - for now: for he would return in time, and purge his ancestor's noblest creation - so soon as ever he was free of Hogwarts and its watered-down tutelage, he would make a sacrifice of rare power and import. Parricide was a powerful magic. And this sacrifice, so meet and proper, were a pleasure as it was a duty.

And then Lord Voldemort would begin his true journey to his destiny.

Such, step by step, as subtle and sinuous and serpentine as a Potions formula, had been the process that created the so-called Lord Voldemort of Tom Marvolo Riddle.

Remus Lupin was determined to eradicate anything in his own character that resembled, however faintly, that in Riddle's, and that had been born, in both, out of secrecy and a sometimes inevitable dishonesty - or at least, in Lupin's case, an extreme economy of the truth.

It was time he renewed himself and gave some thought to self-examination. The War was over, and he was soon to take a wife.

_____________________

'And that,' Remus had said, 'is why any tool that keeps the true history before us, a minatory warning, is a thing good in itself. And it is why the spells that drive this form of historical learning, though in themselves there's no vice in them, ought really not be turned to games and profit.'

The Ministry had agreed, and had paid the Twins handsomely, but no game had ever evolved from their invention, which ever after had been a tool for teaching.

It had played its part, as all their decisions in the lengthening years had done, in keeping their world safe.

Yes, Harry and Draco had had a good, long innings.

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vi. Last Post

They had had a good, long innings.

Yet Wizards, although long-lived, are no less mortal than their Muggle kin.

Hermione had gone on ahead, full of wisdom, years, and honours, the first to go of their innermost circle - 'a trailblazer to the last', Draco had joked through his tears in his eulogy at the state funeral - dying peaceably at the ripe age, for a Muggle-born Witch, of 170 summers, her inherent power having long extended her days. Bereft of his Hermione, wholly lost in a world without her immediate presence, Ron had followed soon after, within the decade; which was a middling short span for a pureblooded Weasley, really, and the only argument against mixed marriages that had ever had the faintest relation to reality. It was with Ron's death that the autumn leaves had begun really to fall. Justin, being Muggle-born, had died the year after Hermione, and Blaise, forlorn, the year after that, but the autumn of the War Generation was truly measured from the leaf-fall symbolised by Ron's death, his passing into the West. Bill and Charlie and Percy and the Twins had followed soon after, as if the Weasley Boys had no use for a life without Ron in it, and Ron's loss had bewildered and diminished Colin within the month, before the daffodils had ceased to bloom. Dennis had not long outlived his idolised elder brother, and Ginny, determined, obstinate, fiery Ginny, had ceased swiftly to relish existence in the absence of brothers, husband, and brother-in-law. It had been only willpower and magical force - and, perhaps, a stubborn Weasley insistence upon keeping an eye on Harry and Draco - that had kept her hanging grimly on for a decade after.

Dean and Seamus had doddered on, frail but still incorrigibly merry, but their time too had drawn to its close a year or so before.

Benedict Goldstein, himself by no means young, had said the final mourner's Kaddish of avelut for his father the year before: for Anthony Goldstein of Ravenclaw, scholar and kohein, fierce fighter, fond father.

Remus was long gone, of course, and Tonks, Andy and Tinker, Molly and Arthur, Rubeus and Olympe; and gone also were Narcissa, and Severus, going anything but gently into that good night, and Minerva was long since legend, an immortal memory rather than a living presence now for several Wizarding generations; but they had all in varying degrees been of an elder generation, after all. It was the War Generation, the Victors, the Wizarding Few, who were now fading from the scene.

And the last to compose themselves to die, to lay down the burdens of mortality, were the two who epitomised that generation.

A month before, Neville and Luna, like the Flamels before them, had put their affairs in order, gathered their family, rank upon rank, generation upon generation, about them, and sent to Harry and Draco, one last time.

Together, with the hovering support of children and the great-grandchildren of grandchildren nearby, the two aged couples had paced slowly through the gardens of the old Lovegood farm in the valley of the River Otter, the four of them talking softly, and as softly falling silent, recalling old battles and far-off victories, and scenes of long ago.

Then they had summoned all their remaining strength, and port-keyed to the top of Pendle Hill, in Nev's beloved Lancashire, whence they gazed down with Wizarding eyes upon Hurstholme Thorpe, a tumble of sandstone in a wild garden, laved by the cold, high airs of the Pennines. There, upon the summit from which George Fox had seen his calling, the two Friends, borne up by their grave, still family, solemn in their respect, joying in the lives now passing even as they were grieved by their own loss, took leave of their dearest friends and the company of their kin, and, hands clasped, wands touching, did lay them down upon the green, green turves, and there closed their eyes, and commended their spirits to the God Who had made them and had granted them the Inner Light.

In the space of a breath never drawn, they were gone.

Austen Longbottom, their eldest son, and now head of the houses of Lovegood and Longbottom, spoke the words of William Penn over the bodies of the Friends, as he would repeat them a week after at the 'Meeting for Worship in Thanksgiving for the Grace of God, as shown in the lives of Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood':

And this is the Comfort of the Good,
that the grave cannot hold them,
and that they live as soon as they die.
For Death is no more
than a turning of us over from time to eternity.
Death, then, being the way and condition of Life,
we cannot love to live,
if we cannot bear to die.

They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can Spirits ever be divided
that love and live in the same Divine Principle,
the Root and Record of their Friendship.
If Absence be not death, neither is theirs.

Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas....

It had been a month now since Luna and Neville had died, in green old age.

Now Harry and Draco had made their final dispositions.

It was time.

Surrounding them stood a dynasty, restored, renewed, refounded, and redeemed, the Black-Potter-Malfoy kinship, from the babe in arms to the reverend old. It was an English success story, a testament written in flesh and blood.

Rhys's youngest son, whose mother had been Molly Creevey, Colin's and Ginny's daughter, was present, all but presiding: James Arthur John Alphard Jones-Morgan, DD, James Sarum, the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, successor to his father as Ravenclaw Seeker, successor to his father as Bishop of Sherborne before his translation to the See of Sarum.

The Rt Hon Hermione Potter-Malfoy (Mrs Arthur Longbottom-Weasley-Boot), late Minister of Magic, Muggle and Wizarding Privy Councillor, late Member for Salisbury in the Conservative interest, living testament to the hidden relationship between the Muggle and Wizarding governments whose liaison she had long been, was there also, speechless for the first time in her long and varied life.

Ranked about them were past and present and future Heads of Hogwarts, senior Ministry officials, Domdaniel dons, heads of the Auror force, Unspeakables, bankers, publishers, and country gentlefolk in leggings still vaguely muddy from the field. Many of them, in the way of generations within their closed and self-contained world, had been at Luna's and Nev's side as family the month before, and at Creevey and Abbott and Fawcett and Wood and Weasley and Lupin obsequies before that; indeed, there was not a Wizarding family in Britain that was not represented there in blood within the veins of Harry's and Draco's getting. It showed: here in a face that had a sudden cast of Nott or Prewett, or there, in a laugh that echoed Aunt Andy's or Sirius' Black humour, or in a cast of mind or turn of speech that called up memories of Albus or Remus or Hermione.

It was the final passing in review of the last veterans of the War, of the two old men who had shaped the peace and been honoured above all measure by their world and, in their time, by the Muggle governments as well, for services that the Muggles could explain only by metaphor and were forced to cloak in parables. But the late Queen, and King Charles, and King William, had known the truth, as had a succession of premiers. In addition to their Wizarding honours, these two old men had had conferred upon them the Muggle OM at the Sovereign's personal insistence, had served in turn as Deputy Lieutenants of the County, had long been the local JPs, and had humbly and politely refused still greater honours and recognition.

Yet for them, the bells heard by Muggles would not, could not, toll, nor would the Cathedral see their catafalques, for their years alone would shock the Muggles and raise questions. Their state funerals would be held far from Muggle eyes, within the confines of the Wizarding world; and with this, they were well content.

They had embraced, tremulous with age though they were, all of those gathered, from the wide-eyed infant to their children who were striving not to weep, and to each they had imparted a blessing and a quiet, personal word. Now they walked outside, beneath the open sky, into the shade of the ancient orchard trees, amidst the last wind-fallen apples, their family in all its arched branches and ramifications pacing behind them, surrounding them when they stopped at a restful place.

There, they bowed creakily to one another, and solemnly broke their wands in twain, letting them fall in pieces upon the earth.

There, beneath the canopied boughs and the eternal and eternally changeful Wessex skies, they lowered themselves at length upon the ancient turf, immemorially green, amidst the song of late birds and the last susurration of bees and the melodic stillness of the English countryside as the autumn died away towards winter.

Draco, as countless times before, as he had too many times to measure or conceive of, kissed Harry lightly, tenderly, and rested his head upon Harry's shoulder, as they both turned their faces to the heavens.

His old voice quavering slightly, but even yet elegant, silvery, and honed, Draco spoke, softly, intoning. 'Nunc dimittis,' he began.

'Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine,

'Secundum verbum tuum, in pace:

'Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum,

'Quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum:

'Lumen ad revelationem gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel.'

And Harry, his voice raspy with age, responded.

'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word:

'For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

'Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;

'A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.'

And Draco replied, in the rhythms familiar from a thousand Evensongs,

'My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

'For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden.

'For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed.

'For he that is mighty hath magnified me : and holy is his Name.

'And his mercy is on them that fear him : throughout all generations.

'He hath shewed strength with his arm : he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

'He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.

'He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.

'He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel : as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.

'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son : and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be : world without end.

'Amen.'

And Harry finished, drawing first his cloak over them, and, at the last, as his voice fell away in the final Gloria, his ancient invisibility cloak.

'Magnificat anima mea Dominum

'Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.

'Quia respexit humilitatem ancillæ suæ: ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

'Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est, et sanctum nomen eius.

'Et misericordia eius a progenie in progenies timentibus eum.

'Fecit potentiam in bracchio suo, dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

'Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles.

'Esurientes implevit bonis et divites dimisit inanes,

'Suscepit Israel puerum suum recordatus misericordiæ suæ,

'Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini eius in sæcula.

'Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum, Amen.'

The Bishop of Salisbury knelt, and felt with his priestly, scholar's hands for the unseen fabric - blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed - and, finding it, twitched away the last physical heirloom left by James Potter, from a patch of English ground no longer occupied by the evanesced bodies of the two most powerful Wizards of their age.

'Well,' said Harry Weasley the Younger, once Captain of the England side and Fellow, now, of Paracelsus. There was a hitch in his voice. 'Well. Draco Malfoy has scored, and Harry Potter has caught the Snitch.'

So ended the mortal lives of the last of the Victors over the Dark. Their name liveth forevermore.

And the family filed slowly away from the ever-fruitful trees and the deep, lush grass beneath.

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vii. Rouse

But for Harry, he opened his eyes and saw: Albus, and Minerva, and Hagrid, James and Lily, Sirius and Remus, Ron and Hermione and all the Weasleys, in a light that had no one source but that welled from within all things, dappled in leaves and green in grass and stem and meadow and flower, the Platonic ideal of that lesser light that falls upon the fields we know, and he felt the light touch of a young and now ageless hand upon his own, now itself no longer spotted with age and corded with many winters: and he took Draco once more into his arms and they went to meet all those who had preceded them there, and who were calling now in welcome.

'Hullo, son.'

'Hey, Harry!'

'Ah, my dear boys, here you are, then.'

'Wotcher, Harry!'

'Weeell, Harry Potter?'

'Harry!'

'Harry!'

'Harry!'

'Harry!'

'Harry!'

This was the waking, and all that had gone before but a vision and a dream.

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The END of Chapter Ten.