I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Apprentice of The Red Witch
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Harry woke before the others, which was no longer strange. Waking early had become routine for him. Somewhere across the room, Crabbe was snoring like a blocked drain. Harry lay still for a moment, listened to the castle being quiet, and then got up.
He dressed one-handed out of habit, though the bandaged hand was good enough now to manage buttons if he was patient with it. He was not patient with it. He went down to the Great Hall.
Daphne and Theo were already at the Slytherin table when he got there, the only ones who woke up earlier than Harry. Daphne had her plate arranged in straight lines, with the toast stacked by some private law. Theo had his head propped on one fist and was looking at a bowl of porridge.
"You're up early," Harry said, sitting down across from them.
"I am not up early," Theo said. "I never went properly to sleep. The staircase by the dungeons moved three times in the night. I heard it. It does it on purpose."
"Staircases don't have purposes," Daphne said, without looking up.
"This one does. It has a vendetta. Against me, specifically."
Harry reached for the eggs. "Why you?"
"That," Theo said, pointing his spoon at Harry as if he had finally asked the correct question, "is what I intend to find out."
Daphne set down her knife. "Theo. There are many staircases in this castle. They move because the castle is enchanted, not because one of them has a personal grievance with a first-year who can't get to Charms on time."
"I am late to Charms," Theo said, "because of the staircase."
"You are late to Charms because you stop to look at every painting that talks to you."
"They're rude if you don't."
Harry put a second piece of toast on his plate and listened to them argue with each other, and it was the first morning in a while that he had wanted to. The weeks since Romania had been heavy in a way he hadn't had words for. He had a name for it now, sitting here. The weeks had been quiet, and not the good kind. This was loud and stupid, and it felt like a window being opened.
"I'll map it," Theo announced.
"You said that about the third floor," Daphne said.
"The third floor map was extremely useful."
"The third floor map nearly got us eaten."
"That wasn't the map's fault."
Harry nearly choked on his toast. "It wasn't the map that had three heads, no."
"Thank you," Theo said. "Harry understands the distinction."
"I understand the distinction," Harry said. "I just think the distinction doesn't help when you're being looked at by six eyes."
Daphne picked her knife back up. "If you map the staircases, you will have a piece of parchment that is wrong by the time you finish drawing it. That is the entire point of a moving staircase. The map is obsolete the moment it exists."
Theo looked genuinely wounded. "You've ruined my morning."
"You said you hadn't slept. There wasn't much morning to ruin."
Harry laughed properly, then Theo looked betrayed by both of them at once, which only made it worse, and even Daphne let the corner of her mouth go.
He was still grinning when Daphne went very still.
Harry knew that face. It meant she forgot something.
"What," he said.
"I have to go." She was already swinging one leg over the bench, gathering her bag in a single motion.
"Go where? We've got Transfiguration."
"I know we've got Transfiguration. I'll be there." She was tucking the strap across her shoulder. "I have to do something first. It's quick."
Theo lifted his head off his fist. "Is this a secret thing? I love a secret thing."
"It is not a thing for you." She was already moving. "Save me a seat. Don't let him," she pointed at Theo without slowing, "talk to the paintings."
And then she was gone, up between the tables and out through the doors, fast enough that two Ravenclaws had to step sideways for her.
Harry looked at Theo. Theo looked at Harry.
"She didn't say what it was," Theo said.
"No."
"That's the most interesting thing that's happened all morning and she just walked off with it."
"She'll tell us if it matters," Harry said, and went back to his eggs, because the part of him that wanted to know was a part he had decided some time ago not to feed. Daphne kept things in straight lines. If she'd left it off the table, she'd left it off the table on purpose.
Daphne's point of view
The owlery was cold and stank of straw and droppings, Daphne noticed, and didn't care. She'd come to write a letter.
Her family's owl was on the third perch down, a foul-tempered grey screech that had her mother's exact opinion of being disturbed before noon. Daphne made it wait. She'd seen enough hurried letters go wrong; this one had to be right.
Father. I need a tutor and access to the locked shelves in the lower library. I will explain when I am home. I am not in trouble, and I am not behind in my marks. I am behind in something the marks do not measure, and I have decided to stop being behind in it. You will understand when I tell you who I have been sitting next to.
She read it twice. She considered crossing out the last line, then left it, because it was the line that would actually get her what she wanted. Her father did not move for vague requests. He moved for precise ones, and he moved fastest when a Greengrass had decided not to lose at something.
She thought, for a moment, about the girl three years older than Harry in that stone pit in the mountains, and the flat way Harry had told it.
That was the gap. Wanting it gone was not the same as closing it.
She tied the letter to the owl's leg, told it to be quick, and watched it drop from the tower and bank south into the grey. Then she ran, because she had a class to reach.
Harry's point of view
They saved her the seat. Transfiguration was joint with Gryffindor, which meant the room filled up in two halves that didn't mix, green on one side and red on the other. Harry and Theo took a bench with a gap on Harry's left, and Harry put his bag on the empty stretch and dared anyone to ask about it.
Daphne came in with under a minute to spare. Her cheeks were pink from running, and her hair had come slightly out of whatever it was usually held with, and she dropped onto the bench beside Harry and pulled her things out as though she had been sitting there for an hour.
"Owlery," Harry said. It wasn't a question. There was a feather caught on her sleeve and the cold of the outside was still coming off her cloak.
"Don't," she said, which told him he was right, and gave him a look he chose to enjoy rather than be wounded by; then McGonagall came in, and the room went quiet on its own.
The lesson was matchsticks again, refining them, and Harry's went silver on the second try with only a faint suggestion of wood in the grain, which McGonagall noted with a small downward tilt of her head that he had learned to read as approval. He was halfway through trying to lose the grain entirely when it happened at the other table.
"At least my parents could afford a wand that works," Draco said. Not loudly. Just loudly enough.
The girl he said it to was a small Gryffindor whose name Harry didn't know, who went red to the ears and bent further over her matchstick. It was the kind of thing Draco did most days, the way some people clear their throat, a habit more than a cruelty, though Harry was not sure the difference counted for much if you were the one being cleared at.
"Mr Malfoy." McGonagall did not raise her voice either. "You will keep your opinions on other people's families to yourself, or you will keep yourself to my classroom this evening. Is that clear?"
"Yes, Professor," Draco said, in the flat voice of someone who had calculated that this was the lowest price and paid it.
It would have ended there. Harry had already gone back to his matchstick. But Daphne hadn't, and Daphne, beside him, made the smallest sound, a short breath through the nose.
He glanced sideways. She wasn't looking at Draco. She was looking just past him, at the Gryffindor bench, where Hermione Granger had looked up from her own matchstick at exactly the wrong moment, and where, for about as long as it takes to decide not to, Hermione and Draco were looking straight at each other.
Then they both stopped, at the same time, the way you pull your hand off a hot pan, and went back to their work as if the work were the most interesting thing either of them had ever seen.
Daphne turned the silver matchstick over in her fingers and said, very quietly, so it stayed on their side of the room, "Have either of you noticed that he's never once said anything to her."
"To who," Theo murmured, not looking up.
"Granger."
"He doesn't talk to Gryffindors."
"He talks at Gryffindors constantly. That girl just now. Thomas, last week. The Creevey one." Daphne kept her eyes down and her voice level. "He has insulted every muggle-born in our year. Their wands, their robes, their parents, their teeth. Every single one." She set the matchstick down precisely. "Except her. Not once. And she's the easiest target in the school, she answers every question, she's top of the year, he could go at her all day. And he doesn't. He looks at her and he doesn't."
Theo did look up at that. "Maybe she scares him."
"Everything scares you and you never shut up about any of it."
"That's different. I have range."
Daphne didn't laugh. She was still half a step inside the thought. "I'm only saying. You don't avoid the easiest target unless there's a reason you're avoiding her specifically. That's not nothing. That's a feeling, or the start of one." She finally looked up, first at Theo, then at Harry. "Don't you think?"
And there it was, a small unwelcome turn somewhere under Harry's ribs, quick and hot and gone almost before he'd registered it, at the way she said it. At Daphne sitting there working out who might have a feeling about whom and finding it worth the working.
He didn't look at it directly. He'd got good at that. He put it back wherever it had come from and shut the drawer, and his face did nothing at all.
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe he's just decided she's not worth the breath." He turned his matchstick over. "Either way I'd rather talk about something that's actually our problem than Malfoy's."
Daphne tipped her head, conceding it. "Such as."
"Such as Hagrid." Harry lowered his voice another notch. "We said we'd go down. He knows what's under that trapdoor. We should go and have tea and let him tell us."
Theo's head came up. "Tea and possibly espionage."
"Tea," Harry said. "The espionage is a side effect."
"Not after class," Daphne said. "I've got the library, and you," to Theo, "are not capable of being subtle when you're tired, you said you didn't sleep. We go down later. When the day's done and there's no one watching where three Slytherins are walking."
"Later," Harry agreed.
"Later," Theo said, and then, because he couldn't help it, "I'm bringing him the journal."
Harry had forgotten the journal. He remembered the deal. "If he cries on it, I'm replacing it."
"You're replacing it if he so much as sniffs," Theo said, and McGonagall said "Mr Nott" from across the room without turning round, and all three of them bent over their matchsticks and said nothing else at all.
The day wore on through Charms and lunch and History of Magic, and the light was already going long by the time the last class let them out.
They went down to Hagrid's in the last hour of the afternoon, which Daphne had decided was the correct hour. Late enough that the lawns were emptying and nobody cared much where three Slytherins were walking. Early enough that arriving at a man's door looked like tea and not like a plan. Harry thought that was the whole of Daphne's genius in one decision, picking the time of day at which a thing stops being suspicious.
Fang heard them before Hagrid did and threw himself against the inside of the door so hard the whole hut shook. Then the door opened, and Hagrid filled it, beard first, and his face did the thing it always did when he saw Harry, went soft and pleased and slightly wet around the eyes, all at once.
"Harry! An' yeh brought, er." He looked at the other two.
"Daphne Greengrass," Daphne said. "And Theo Nott. We won't stay long."
Inside, the hut was one enormous room and all of it was hot. There was a fire going that could have roasted an ox, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and dog and something baking that Harry hoped was not for them. Fang got to Theo first and put his entire head in Theo's lap and a quantity of drool on Theo's robes that Theo looked at the way other people look at a death in the family.
"He likes yeh," Hagrid said, delighted.
"I can tell," Theo said.
They were given tea in buckets and a plate of rock cakes that lived up to the name. Harry took one out of politeness and held it without illusions. Daphne took one, and set it down with quiet decision. Theo, pinned under the dog, was in no position to take anything.
Harry waited. That was the first thing Natasha had taught him about getting things out of people. Don't go in asking. People close when you ask. You sit, and you let the room get comfortable, and you make the other person want to fill the quiet, because most people cannot stand a quiet the way she could. Hagrid in particular could not stand a quiet. Hagrid filled quiets the way water fills a boot.
So Harry let it sit, and drank his tar, and after about a minute Hagrid was telling them, unprompted, about a hippogriff he'd known in 1973.
When it felt right, Harry nodded at Theo. Theo, with some difficulty, got an arm free of the dog and produced the parcel.
"We brought you something," Harry said.
Hagrid went still. "Yeh didn'."
"Theo did, really."
Theo unwrapped it the rest of the way and held it out, and Harry watched Hagrid's face as he took it, because the whole thing turned on this. It was a slim book, foxed at the edges, bound in cracked green leather. A field journal. Newt Scamander's own, a first printing of the private edition, the one with the sketches in the margins that never made it into Fantastic Beasts. Theo had owned it for two years and never opened it.
Hagrid opened it. He turned one page, and then another, and his enormous hands went very gentle. His mouth moved without sound. Then his chin began to go.
"Aragog," he said thickly, to a drawing of a spider. "Look at that. Look at the legs on 'im."
A drop welled up at the corner of one eye and hung there.
Harry caught Theo's eye across the table. Theo gave him a look that said, with total clarity, if that lands on the page you owe me twelve Galleons, and Harry gave him a look back that said he was aware of the terms of their agreement. The drop hung. The drop wobbled. Hagrid sniffed it back up his face with a sound like a drain reversing, and turned another page, and Theo exhaled through his nose.
"This is," Hagrid said, "this is the kindes' thing anyone's done fer me in I don' know how long." He wiped his face on his sleeve, which was the size of a tent, and looked at the three of them with such open feeling that Harry felt briefly like the worst person in the room. Which, given that they had come down here on purpose to take something out of him, he probably was.
But the door was open now. Harry could feel it. A man who has just been moved is a man who talks.
"You must see incredible things," Harry said. "Looking after the grounds. Things most people never get near."
"Oh, yeh'd be surprised." Hagrid leaned back, warm and loose now, both hands cupped round the journal. "Things in that forest as'd turn yer hair white. An' that's not the half o' what comes through here. Why, only this year I've had charge of, well." He stopped. "Never yeh mind."
There it was. Harry didn't move toward it. He let his eyes go to the fire as if he hadn't noticed Hagrid stop, and he took a sip of the tar, and he said nothing at all, and beside him he could feel Daphne doing the same, because she had understood the technique within about thirty seconds of him explaining it once.
It was Theo who couldn't hold.
"Charge of what?" Theo said.
Hagrid's face shut like a window. "Now, that's, no. That's not, I shouldn'ta. Forget I said it."
And that was nearly the end of it. Harry felt the whole afternoon tip toward the edge of the table. Theo had pushed, and Hagrid had felt the push, and Harry watched him stop being a man having tea.
Daphne saved it.
"I don't know how you manage it, honestly," she said, comfortable, almost bored, as if Theo hadn't spoken. She reached down and scratched Fang behind one ear. "A creature large enough that the school doesn't talk about it. The feeding alone. What does a thing like that even eat?"
It was perfect. She had not asked what it was. She had assumed it, made it ordinary, and handed Hagrid the one subject on earth he could never resist: the care and feeding of a dangerous animal. Harry watched the window close halfway back up.
"Dead chickens, mostly," Hagrid said, before he'd decided to. "Raw. An' he likes a bit o' music, calms 'im right down, which yeh wouldn' think, on account of, well." He caught himself again. "On account of there bein' three of, no. I'm not, look. I'm not sayin' another word abou' Fluffy."
The name dropped into the room and sat there. Harry kept his face exactly where it was. Three of. He had filed it before Hagrid finished the sentence.
"Fluffy," Daphne repeated, gently, the way you'd repeat a child's word back to them.
"That's, I never said tha' either." Hagrid put his face in one hand.
"You haven't said anything," Harry told him, which was kind and a lie. "We're just having tea."
Hagrid peered at him between his fingers, wanting to believe it. And then his eyes, traveling over Harry the fond way they always did, snagged on Harry's left hand where it rested on the table, and the fondness sharpened into something else.
"Harry. What've yeh done to yer hand?"
The bandage had ridden up past his cuff. Pale, almost see-through, threaded with the stuff that caught the firelight. Harry moved it into his lap without hurrying.
"Caught it in a door," he said.
"That's no door bandage. I've seen door bandages." Hagrid leaned forward, and the table groaned. "That's proper healing cloth, that is. Who wrapped tha' for yeh?"
"It's nothing. It's already better." Harry let a little laugh into it, gave Hagrid the easy version. "You should see the door."
Theo, recovered, helped. "He's being modest. He lost. The door's fine."
It worked, just. Hagrid huffed a laugh, though his eyes stayed on the place where the hand had gone for a moment longer than Harry liked, and Harry could see him deciding whether to push it and deciding, because he was kind and wanted the afternoon to stay good, to let it go. Harry made a note to keep his cuffs down.
The light was changing. Harry hadn't watched it happen, which annoyed him, because he was supposed to watch everything happen now. The square of window over Hagrid's shoulder had gone from gold to a flat grey, and the fire had quietly become the brightest thing in the room without anyone asking it to.
They should have gone. Harry knew they should have gone. But Hagrid was deep in it now, happy and talking.
"Yeh were at Gringotts, weren' yeh," Hagrid said to Harry. "Over the summer. With yer." He paused, picked his way round it. "With the woman who's got yeh."
"My aunt. Yes." The carts. Harry remembered the carts. "We went down to the vault."
"Funny place, innit. I was there meself this summer, matter o' fact. Same sorta time. Doin' a job." He said job with a small swell of pride he couldn't keep down. "Official Hogwarts business, that was. Collectin' summat fer Professor Dumbledore, out of one o' the deep vaults. An' would yeh believe, that very same day, some, well, somebody only goes an' breaks into Gringotts. Same day. Front page o' the Prophet an' everythin'."
"That's frightening," Daphne said, on cue, giving him the reaction that kept him going.
"Ar, but here's the thing." Hagrid lowered his voice to what he believed was a whisper. "Whoever it was, they broke into the very vault I'd been in. That same one. An' there was nothin' in it. 'Cause I'd already took the thing out, see, that mornin', an' brought it up here where it's safe, where it's, where there's, " he stopped, but he was rolling now, and the stop didn't hold, "where it's guarded proper. 'Cause what's down that trapdoor's between Professor Dumbledore an' Nicolas Flamel, an' that's, "
The hut went silent except for the fire.
Hagrid's eyes had gone enormous over the top of his beard. He had heard himself. The whole of it, Gringotts and the trapdoor and the name, all of it lay out on the table in front of three first-years he had known for one afternoon.
"I should not've said that," he said, in a small voice that did not belong to a body that size. "I should definitely not've said that. Flamel, I never, yeh didn' hear," he put both huge hands flat on the table as if to physically hold the words down. "Don' ask me no more. I mean it now. Yeh shouldn'ta got me started, an' yeh certainly shouldn' know that name, an' I'm not sayin' it again, an' nor are you three, not to no one."
"We didn't hear anything," Harry said.
"No," Daphne agreed.
"What name?" said Theo, who had his uses.
Hagrid looked at the three of them, and at the dark window, and seemed to arrive all at once at the same fact they had. "Blimey. Look at the hour. Yeh've got to get back, an' yeh've got to get back without bein' seen, 'cause if Filch finds three of yeh out o' the dungeons after dark it's me that let yeh stay, an' it's all of us in it."
They went. Hagrid pressed the rest of the rock cakes on them at the door and Harry took them because there was no version of events in which you said no to Hagrid twice in one night, and then the door shut behind them and the warmth shut with it, and the three of them were standing in the cold and the dark with the castle a long black shape up the hill, windows lit here and there, much further away than it had looked on the way down.
Nobody spoke until they were past the greenhouses.
"Three of," Harry said, very quietly. "Heads. Fluffy. We knew that part."
"We didn't know the rest," Daphne said. Her breath showed. "A vault. The break-in over the summer, the one that was in the paper. The thing that's under the dog came out of Gringotts the day someone tried to steal it."
"And a name," Theo said.
"And a name." Harry tested it in his mouth, and it told him nothing. It was just a name, two words. Nicolas Flamel. He had never heard it before in his life, and he had the strong sense, walking through the dark with it, that it was the most important thing he'd learned all year, and no way at all of knowing why.
They came to the side door by the dungeons, and Harry put his good hand on it and stopped, and the three of them stood listening. Somewhere off in the castle a cat was complaining about something. Then it stopped, and there were no footsteps after it, and Harry eased the door open, and they slipped in one at a time into the dark, the name going in with them.
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