Chapter Text
Harry woke up with sunlight on his face, which was his first clue that something had gone wrong – there was no sunlight in his cupboard under the stairs, after all. He blinked and the world resolved into a smudgy fuzz in front of his nose. He struggled into a sitting position, looking blearily around.
It took him a few seconds to remember why he might have slept in a strange, very old-fashioned looking room with a giant hole in its wooden wall. And why his stomach might be rolling uncomfortably.
There was sunlight streaming through it now, lancing over the floor and illuminating the mess of wooden pieces stacked nearby, the broken glass, several large brass tipped darts, a smear of something dark and rusty smelling… there was a pile of feathers sprawled beneath a seat nearby, which Harry thought was probably a harpy, and –
“Mother night, someone’s awake,” croaked a voice that had Harry whipping his head around. Over the tables – one of which had, at some point, been overturned -- and strung from a hook in the far wall of the White Wyvern Pub was a small sort of… person, he supposed, with glowing red eyes and very sharp little hands, which had been bound up in so much fabric that he seemed to be wearing mittens. He had a thin but viciously hooked nose, and when he spoke Harry could see needlelike, pointed teeth and a dark purple tongue. “Let a fellow down, eh?” he wheedled.
“Oh,” said Harry blankly. There was still one big, brass-tipped dart lodged in the person’s shoulder, and now that Harry was looking he could see a trail of dark blood dripping down from his cap, although he couldn’t tell where the injury that had caused it might be.
Harry scrambled to his feet. What he had taken to be a cloak someone – Martha, perhaps, although she didn’t exactly seem the type – had slung over him when he’d fallen asleep hissed at him and slithered away to hide in a patch of shadows beneath a table. Maybe cloaks just did that sometimes among magical people, Harry figured. The wizarding world was a pretty strange place.
“Not that it wasn’t a fun night, your Majesty,” the person said, swinging a little as he wriggled against the wall, “only my shoulders’re getting mighty sore.”
And well they might be – Harry had been held in a similar position by Dudley’s friends before, up straight with his own scrawny arms in the air. He’d started to ache after about ten minutes.
“You don’t have to call me that,” he said, shoving his glasses further up his nose and peering closely at the hook keeping the creature aloft. He could smell the blood on him, reeking and rusty, and he didn’t know where it was coming from. “Just Harry is fine.”
“That’s pretty rude,” said the creature, in a soft and unpleasant voice, quite different from its earlier babble. Harry paused and glanced at its – his – face, but the glaring red eyes hadn’t changed.
“I think we can just...” Harry twisted the fabric in the hook and all at once it released, depositing the little – gremlin? – upon the indifferently-clean floor.
Quick as a flash, he leapt back up and sank one long, sharp nail into Harry’s thigh.
“Ouch! Hey, what’s – wait, oof!” Harry stumbled as he rushed past, shoving one shoulder into Harry’s knee to throw him off balance.
He paused some distance away, out of easy lunging range, and shoved his claw into his mouth.
As Harry watched, his hat, which had been leaking a slow and steady trickle, began to well and gush with new, fresh blood. The whole room stank of it all of a sudden, and the person’s eyes seemed brighter.
“I think not, your Majesty,” he said, smiling through the rush of fluids that coated his face. “Blood will tell, especially yours, and especially for a red cap!” and then, while Harry watched this extraordinary display in confused silence, he darted out the door, snarling, “Out of my way!” at somebody as he passed them in the street outside.
“Erm,” said Harry uncertainly. He pulled off his glasses and cleaned their smudged lenses on the old shirt of Dudley’s he was wearing, avoiding the suspicious stains that he could not remember acquiring the night previous.
When he returned them to his face, things seemed… well, clearer in the literal sense, but in the figurative sense, nothing had changed very much. Unfortunately.
Now that he was up, Harry could see that Thusnelda was the pile of feathers who was dozing beneath one chair, and that there was a hag he only vaguely recognised wedged between one table and the bar. Neither seemed likely to wake up any time soon – the hag was even still snoring heavily.
Harry looked around, but he wasn’t sure what he should do – get out before anyone else decided to ‘your majesty’ at him, maybe. Although he doubted that this situation, however baffling and surreal, would be so easy to leave behind.
Usually by this time of day he was most of the way through cooking breakfast for the Dursleys… Harry winced at the reminder. He should have been back at Privet Drive hours ago – maybe fifteen or sitxteen hours ago, even.
Aunt Petunia would certainly give any one of the harpies a run for their money when she caught up with him. He’d probably end up stuck in his cupboard for days. It would hardly be the first time, but it wasn’t a thing he looked forward to.
There was a sharp rap on the wood outside the hole, the tap of someone’s cane. Harry hadn’t heard the person approach, too busy with his own woolgathering, but he turned to find it was the wizard, Borgin. There were dark circles beneath the man’s eyes, but overall he looked much better – his beard had been trimmed properly at last, he was wearing a set of thin-framed spectacles that improved his expression in some way, and he looked less angry overall. Despite the sunny morning, he was dressed in shades of black and grey, covered from head to toe.
He lowered his cane once he saw he had Harry’s attention and rested both hands upon it, allowing it to take much of his weight as he leaned forward. He regarded Harry from his oversized runners to his huge, stained teeshirt.
“Potter, isn’t it?” he asked at last. He did not smile.
Harry raised his hand and rubbed the hair down over his forehead – and then he wondered why he’d bothered. “Yes,” he said instead. “Harry Potter. Yes.”
Borgin heaved a sigh, leaning more heavily on his cane for a moment. “They wouldn’t have had a party like that for anything less than a true king – they’re fond of their rituals, and they take them extremely seriously.”
Harry would not have considered what had transpired last night to be a ‘serious ritual’. It had seemed… erm, a but rowdy for that.
Borgin must have seen something of this thought on his face, because he finally cracked a smile: thin, brief and sardonic. “Oh, yes. You’ve truly seen them at their best. And tamest. I imagine you have questions, this morning – and it’s best to get them in before the rush of oaths.”
“Er, oaths?” Harry felt his voice go a bit squeaky.
“Are you coming or not, your Majesty?” Borgin turned away from the hole in the wall of the White Wyvern, and Harry scrambled after him. He’d thought maybe he would need to ask the fingernails-witch – the fingernails-hag, he guessed in hindsight – or Martha for more information, but the night previous neither of them had seemed to really understand a lot about what he was saying. They didn’t have the context, really. Perhaps Borgin, being a human wizard, would be able to explain some things better. At least he probably wasn’t going to lecture Harry on the evils of this ‘newfangled movable type bullshit’.
Borgin took him down the alley only a few doors, to the antique shop that Harry had spotted during his wanderings yesterday before everything had gotten so very out of hand. It looked a bit sinister from the outside, even in the morning light. The window display was of tarnished silver cups, stained inside with something that had dried like rust, a collection of yellowed human bones and a long handled axe with a slender and wicked-looking head.
The inside of Borgin’s shop, when they stepped in – a bell rang, gently, although there was no bell above the door – was not much less suspect.
“I’d advise against touching anything,” Borgin said idly.
It sounded like good advice to Harry.
The array of human bones continued at the shop counter. The lighting was so dim that Harry got only a shadowy impression of rusty weaponry dangling from the ceiling high above. The ugly and grotesque masks hanging on the walls seemed to stare down with unkind intentions.
They travelled through the dim and dusty shelves of Borgin’s shop, out to a smaller room that must have been some kind of storage. It was even dimmer and dustier, and cramped to boot, so Harry was hard pressed to stop himself from touching anything. At the end of the store room, there was a door that was only revealed by the tap of Borgin’s wand. At this point, Harry had almost expected an even dimmer and dustier yet smaller room, like a matryoshka doll of deeply suspect home furnishing, but the room beyond was nothing at all like the ones preceding it.
The door opened onto a kitchen where a battered wooden table hosted not bones or strange artefacts, but a series of defaced newspapers and a tea set, yet to be washed. It was filled with light, and when Harry looked out the window he saw that they were above Knockturn Alley now, looking down upon it from a window in the upstairs of the shop. He chose to ignore that they had absolutely climbed no stairs, or moved upwards in any perceptible way. It was magic. You could probably do that sort of thing with magic.
“So?” barked Borgin, even as he waved his wand and set the tea pot to tapping out its own strainer and rinsing itself in the sink. “I don’t have all day, and my good will is not limitless,” he added, cutting a sly glance at Harry. He took a seat at the table, and when he waved a second one pulled itself out, so Harry cautiously took it.
“I don’t, er, I don’t suppose there any chance at all that you might have gotten the wrong King?” he asked.
He knew, at this point, that this was a bit of a stupid question, but he couldn’t quite stop himself from asking it. Now Borgin was eyeing Harry the way he imagined a lorry might regard a slow-moving badger on the highway late at night.
“Only,” Harry hastened to explain, “I don’t really feel very much like a king.”
Or even a wizard, really. What Harry really felt right then was sort of queasy with nervousness.
Borgin made a bored, contemptuous noise. “It is not the sort of thing you mistake. You showed you have what’s called Queen’s Command – or King’s Command, I suppose. I’ve never heard of a Dark King before, although I expect they must happen sometimes.”
“That’s the thing where they all had to do what I said?”
The look Borgin levelled at him was not a kind one. “Yes. All the dark creatures of the world will – from sundown to sunup, anyway. It’s not a common talent. They wouldn’t have mistaken them. As a wizard, and especially one of your –” he paused for a sneer, “– fame, you’ll find that you have the privilege of nobody assuming you to be affiliated with the dark arts. I strongly recommend you hang on to that – you are going to attend Hogwarts, aren’t you?”
“Erm… yes?” He’d certainly planned on it. Even if magic school had not sounded like the coolest thing ever – which it did – Harry would have jumped at virtually any opportunity to stay away from #4 Privet Drive for the entire school year.
At this, Borgin just grunted. “You’ll be in with some of the children of your own subjects in that case,” he said, and did not immediately elaborate on why or how this might be significant. “So you’ll need to keep an eye on that situation. And --”
“Sorry,” Harry butted in. “This is all, ah, well,” he said, absolutely incomprehensibly, and then he rallied under Borgin’s increasingly cranky stare. “I’m not entirely… what does a king actually have to do?”
Borgin paused.
He tapped the tips of his long, gnarled gingers upon the table. “That’s a question with a complicated answer,” he said slowly. “Leaving aside what a king in a different system of government might do, in your case – in our case, I shvould say, as I am also a practitioner of the Dark Arts in sufficiently significant measure to render me among your subjects – in our case, a king is a very absolute monarch. The role is both the head of state and the head of the government, which – yes,” he said, sounding already exasperated. “You don’t have to raise your hand.”
“Sorry. What does that mean, though? Head of government? Is that like the queen?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Borgin blankly. “Who?”
“You know,” said Harry, slowly, feeling increasingly confused. He’d thought that it ad perhaps made some sense that the hag, Martha, had not heard of the Queen of bloody England, but Borgin was a grown human man who lived in the middle of London. It seemed wildly unlikely. “The queen?” Harry prompted, as though saying it again, louder, with more emphasis, would make this phrase more intelligible to him. “...Elizabeth?” he added hopefully.
“That woman cannot still be in charge of the muggles, can she? Didn’t she die in the seventeenth century?”
“What,” said Harry.
“What?” said Borgin.
They looked at each other, both equally puzzled, although Borgin’s expression was at least half annoyed as well.
“… the Queen of England,” said Harry. “I don’t think she’s magic, though.”
There was a short pause. “Your Majesty,” said Borgin slowly, with such an expression on his face that Harry could almost hear the tumblers of his mind all falling into place, “would I be correct in thinking that you do not spend a great deal of your time among witches and wizards in general?”
“Well,” Harry said, fiddling with the corner of one of the newspapers on the table, “no. I didn’t – I live with my relatives, they’re muggles. They don’t like to talk about magic much.” This was something of a diplomatic understatement, he felt, but he was not absolutely sure how Borgin might react to a less varnished truth. He still remembered the threatening glow of his wand yesterday, and he’d already heard plenty of people say things about muggles.
He thought, unavoidably, of Uncle Vernon’s florid face bellowing, there’s no such thing as magic! down at him, spittle flying, moustache wild.
“I got my Hogwarts letter this week, and I hadn’t really known there was a wizarding anything before then.”
Borgin looked at him for a moment, and then he removed his spectacles, put them down on the kitchen table and rubbed his hands over his old, craggy face. He made a noise. It didn’t sound like a great noise.
“… Sorry,” Harry said, feeling as though he had to say something to acknowledge what seemed suddenly like a lot of suffering on Borgin’s behalf.
“Who has been taking care of business for you while you did – whatever it is muggles believe to be important? Your accounts?” he asked from behind his hands. He dropped them back to the table, blinked a few times wearily, and picked his spectacles back up. “No, of course, you’ve no idea. None whatsoever. Bloody clueless.”
Since ‘bloody clueless’ just about summed up how Harry felt at this point, he did not try to argue. “Er… I went to Gringotts to get money earlier,” he said, slightly proud to even have remembered the name of the goblin bank.
But Borgin was shaking his head. “No, no, not the goblins. They’re bankers, not… very well, you shall have to find out.” He summoned a scroll with one hand and produced a quill from somewhere with another. “I do not know,” he said as he wrote something in rapid and jagged strokes, “how the muggles run themselves, should they trouble themselves to do so. I do not choose to learn, either.” He finished a word with a flourish. “So. I am by no means an expert, but I will give you an overview, and then Gork will help you determine what is necessary to keep your own accounts in order going forward – he can also, perhaps, make certain inquiries on your behalf--”
“Gork? The… giant?”
“Yes, he is an accountant by trade,” Borgin said absently, to which Harry thought, excuse me, what, but said nothing.
”You will need to find your own advisers, of course, and do note that they will expect payment.” He added something new to whatever he was writing after a short pause for thought. “I do not, as I’ve said, have all day. The shop opens at twelve and I won’t miss it for you, your Majesty – so let us begin immediately.”