Chapter Text
For several long, quiet moments he just stood there. Nothing good could ultimately come from yelling at strange adult witches who were already brawling in the streets, for sure. But as he stood waiting there, with his temper slowly ebbing and his nervousness about the consequences steadily increasing, nothing… happened. Nobody moved.
“Well,” said the fingernails-witch from beside him, still unmoving as a stone gargoyle. “We’ve all stopped. What now?”
“Erm,” said Harry, who had in no way actually expected to have anybody stop just because he yelled it at them – it had never worked with Dudley, after all. “I don’t... know?”
The bird-lady laughed her shrill, multilayered laugh, but did not move from her spot.
“Shut up, Thusnelda,” hissed Agnes. There was a note of strain in her voice that seemed very ominous.
“Is this some kind of magic?” Harry wondered, bewildered. “Did I do something?” If it was, and if he had, it seemed an order of magnitude more impressive than just turning a mean teacher’s wig blue. This seemed like… a lot.
“Why don’t you tell everyone we’re allowed to move again?” the fingernails-witch said soothingly. “There’s a good lad.”
Well, they certainly had to move eventually, and if he didn’t let them go, they’d probably be mad when they got free. He just hoped that saying it was enough – he had no idea what he’d done when he’d yelled at them all.
“Um,” he said, “I guess you can all move again?”
The moment the last syllable had left his lips, there was a CRACK and the old wizard from the barber shop, with his beard half-trimmed and a pair of old rags stuffed right into his ears, was quite suddenly right in front of Harry. His wand was raised, and his eyes looked positively wild.
“--Imperius upon me, will you, boy?” He demanded, apparently finishing some sentence he had begun before his sudden teleportation.
Harry had about a quarter of a second to really appreciate the heart-thumping terror of the red glow at the tip of the old man’s wand, so close that he was blinded by the glare of it upon his glasses.
Then the ragged cloak of the fingernails-witch swept right around him, shrouding him in a strange, mossy-scented dimness, and he heard her say, “That would be extremely unwise, wizard,” in a voice that was not at all how she’d sounded just a moment ago when she’d spoken to Harry.
“Stand aside, hag! That boy cursed all of us – you felt it, too!” Firstly, Harry thought it was quite rude of the old wizard to call her a ‘hag’ (even though that was what she’d gone and said about Agnes and Martha – but they’d been behaving so badly, hadn’t they, breaking buildings and fighting in the streets), although he supposed she was quite old and very warty, and even perhaps a bit, erm, suspect. And secondly, he certainly hadn’t meant to curse anybody. It was probably just like what Hagrid had said, he was scared and the magic sort of… happened. That was why he had to go to magic school, wasn’t it?
“That’s no curse,” said another voice, multi-layered and shrill. That had to be Thusnelda, that lady with the wings and the beak. She sounded much closer, and Harry belatedly tugged at the long sweep of the fingernails-witch’s cloak. He wanted to see. She batted reprovingly at his hand with one of her old, gnarled ones, keeping him hidden and blind. “It affected all the dark ones in hearing range just the same.”
“Dark – excuse me? I’m not a dark anything,” the wizard blustered. "But I know a curse like that when I feel it! Now, hag, you stand aside, or I’ll go through you, and we’ll put the vaunted magical resistance of creatures like you to the test!”
“Borgin,” sighed another voice, and this time Harry didn’t know who it was. He really wished the witch would let him go so he could see what was going on. “You’re about as dark as they come, unless it suits you not to be, or else it would never have worked on you. Look around you again, and tell me you really want to attack the boy.”
There was a long pause, and then, slowly, the witch’s cloak slid away from Harry’s face, off his head, over one shoulder. He blinked in the sudden unexpected light, although it was dimmer than he’d expected now. The sun, which had been getting lower in the sky for some time, had finally edged below the skyline. The light was red and orange and the shadows were long, streaming strange and grotesque across the stones.
One of the witch’s hands, long and bony with its very sharp nails, clutched at Harry’s shoulder still.
The wizard, Borgin, had lowered his wand, and was glancing around uneasily. Harry could see why: all around them, peering from behind thick diamond-paned windows and around doors, slinking from dark corners and gutters, rising like smoke from the narrow shadows between buildings, strange and misshapen things had begun to creep forward in the dying light.
The bizarre diversity of form was at best unsettling. There was a horned thing, no more than three feet tall with hair like old weeds and three long strong fingers on each hand. There were more of the warty, bony, ugly women with their ragged cloaks and hoods and long sharp nails. Harry saw another set of wings, just like Thusnelda’s, too. There was even something he had no name for, flat and black like the inkiest shadow, which hissed as it slithered over the stones. Even the weeds growing in the cracks were dead after it passed. Harry saw fur and scales and things that were almost human, all converging on them in a chittering, wondering crowd, and if it hadn’t been for the witch’s strong hand on his shoulder he might have turned and run.
Above all these things and more, a huge – huge – man seemed to come from nowhere that Harry could easily see. He must have been the equal of three tall men, at least, and even Hagrid would have been dwarfed beside him. He blotted out the murky light of dusk with his gargantuan shadow.
“I felt the Queen’s Command,” he rumbled. “I am Gork. Does wizard Borgin say Gork lies?”
“Can it be Queen’s Command if he’s a boy,” someone wondered.
“It’s a figure of speech,” said another voice, in a tone of great eye-rolling. “Besides, you don’t know it’s a boy.”
“Do you say Gork lies?” bellowed the giant – for what else could such a man possibly be – even louder. Harry felt the vibration of his voice in the stones under his feet, clean up his spine.
“Yes, yes!” crowed one of the bird-women, flexing her wings so their feathers spread wide. “Borgin says you’re lying!”
“Fight,” came a voice like the wet slap of water on dirt, this time from one of the short, horned creatures, “fii-iight!”
The cry was taken up by someone else, and another person, and then suddenly the whole lot of them were roaring and shrieking and warbling, a cacophony of voices raised to a terrible din. They all thunderously stomped their feet on the ground. “FIGHT! - FIGHT! - FI-IGHT!”
“QUIET,” roared the wizard, in a voice that could have been heard right across a parade ground. Although the fingernails-witch was still clutching Harry’s shoulder and her sleeve obscured part of his vision, he could still make out the end of Borgin’s wand sticking out from where he had it held right up to his throat.
“I do not think Gork is lying,” he said, when the crowd had quieted enough for him to be heard. “And I have no intention whatsoever of duelling him in the street.” He lowered his wand.
The witch’s hand tightened on Harry’s shoulder.
“Coward,” she hissed at Borgin, leaning forward so her ragged hair tumbled against Harry’s face.
Borgin ignored her utterly. "Queen's Command," he said, turning a steely eye on Harry. Harry took half a step back, but bumped immediately into the witch. Borgin favoured him with a strange smile. "I wish you all the pleasure of it, boy," he drawled.
Then he tugged a rag away from his ear and hurled it spitefully at one of the bird-women before turning swiftly upon the heel of his boot and marching right back across the street to his antiques shop. The crowd jeered and hissed: coward, coward, coward, just like a wizard! Coward! but they parted for him all the same.
Harry was not so lucky – the moment he made a motion to slink away from the big, frightening, noisy crowd of monsters, the fingernails-witch took notice and drew him tightly against her.
“Er, excuse me,” he said, and he found himself ignored. “Miss?” he yelled, instead, and she bowed her head over him so her musty smelling hair trailed over his cheek again.
“We haven’t had a queen in centuries,” she said in her creaking voice.
“A what?”
One uncommonly strong, taloned hand wrenched his small, pale fist into the air, and then someone else – not the fingernails-witch, but one of the younger, more bloodied women who’d been fighting. Agnes, or Martha, he didn’t know – hooked her hands around Harry’s thighs and boosted him effortlessly up onto her bony shoulder.
Harry screeched in shock, mixing his own voice with the sounds of the crowd, which was even larger than he had thought, now that he was up high enough to see it. He clutched the ragged hair of the woman holding him.
Quick as a flash, the woman hauled herself up onto the back of some underfed, furred, oily creature that stank like something left rotting at the bottom of a lake for many years. Harry clutched her tighter because now he was level with Gork’s left elbow, and it seemed like quite a long way down.
He shoved, perhaps not wisely, at the hands that held him and wriggled futilely in her grip. “H-hey!”
“Your name, lad!” the witch demanded.
“What?”
“Your name! What’s your name?”
“I – Harry,” he said, automatically, and then: “What are you doing? Let me go!”
Contrary to his expectations, she did let him go, and he was utterly unprepared for it. Harry tumbled right into the crowd of claws and warts and feathers and teeth below, sprawling. Someone’s clawed hand caught him before his face met the stones, scooping him up by the back of his shirt.
“Hey!” he yelled, when something else jerked him completely off his feet, off the ground, away from the bodies – swept up, up, high, so fast that he felt nearly flattened by the rush of air.
Harry found himself high above the crowd, cupped gently in Gork’s enormous palm. He struggled to his knees, peering down – and down –
The alley, so empty earlier that afternoon, was now flooded with bodies, all talking and yelling, most not even close to human. They were all looking up at him.
“Your King,” howled the woman on the – lake creature, he guessed – in a voice that cut through all the sounds below. “King Harry!”
“What?” shouted Harry, clutching one of Gork’s huge fingers.
“KING HARRY,” Gork roared, louder, apparently for the things that had not heard the witch’s voice.
If he’d thought the strange crowd below was loud earlier, it was nothing compared to the explosion of pure noise they made now. The bird-women keened in the voices of an entire flock, the witch-women bared their teeth and bellowed, the short demons snapped and cackled. Something he couldn’t make out at all, inky black in the fading light, roared, and Gork gave a single thunderous whoop.
The sounds shook the windows in their frames and made all Harry’s hair stand on end. The air was so thick with – with something – that it felt as though it might choke him with cold, with thunder and thick stormclouds and rust, all at once. He felt like his chest would crack open at any moment, as though his lungs would split and his heart, pounding along, would fall, tumble out, spill into the clawed and upraised hands of the seething, boiling crowd below –
A wolf howled, except when Harry looked down he saw that it was a man instead, with bright eyes and teeth like needles in his misshapen mouth.
If Harry could have seen himself, then, he would have seen what the things below him all did: that the sun’s final, dying rays had at last given up, that dark had come, and that his own skin and eyes were aglow with a shining inner light like he’d swallowed the moon. Above it all, in the velvety darkness of the summer night’s sky, the stars shown down upon him and their light, caught at just the right angle upon Harry’s messy, inky hair, made a crown of silvery spikes.
From his terrifying, confused perch upon Gork’s hand, Harry could see, just at the edge of the crowd, Borgin standing in the door of his antique shop. When he saw Harry looking, and caught his eye, the dour old wizard raised blew out a deep breath and raised one hand as though to tip a hat. Then he disappeared back inside, and the door’s sign flipped itself to ‘closed’.
“HAR-RY,” someone in the crowd began to yell, and again the cry was taken up: “HAR-RY, HAR-RY, HAR-RY--” just as they’d screamed for a fight earlier, but louder.
Harry looked down upon the wild, savage, ugly throng below, and he thought that this time somebody had definitely gotten the wrong boy.