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Chapter Text

Hagrid had sent him on his way back to the Dursleys’ house with all the supplies he’d need for school, so there was no real reason for Harry to go back to Diagon Alley. And in fact, Harry was pretty sure he shouldn’t go back there alone at all. But there were a lot of new, interesting -- magic! -- things to see there, now that he knew they existed -- and Harry did want to get out of the house, where his Aunt might come up with a new chore at any moment. This was a thing that tended to happen when she saw that Harry was even momentarily unoccupied.

For his part, Harry still wasn’t convinced that dusting all the light globes in the house was a real chore.

Getting there wasn't that hard. He had an assortment of small coins stashed beneath the thin mattress of his cot. They were mostly collected when he was cleaning in odd places, like when he had to pull the cushions off the couch and hoover the underneath – people always seemed to lose small coins down the side of the couch for some reason. He’d gone on the busses plenty of times when Vernon had the car and Petunia had needed to get out for some sort of errand. (Some days, Petunia seemed to feel that out of sight was out of mind with regard to Harry, but on other days she demanded he stay within her line of sight lest he get ‘up to’ something.) So after his morning chores were complete, it was straightforward to dig under his cot in the familiar dusty dimness of the cupboard under the stairs, grab what coins he had saved up, and walk blinking into the bright sunlight outside to go and catch a bus right into London.

Once Harry made it to London he remembered the way because he'd already made the trip earlier in the week. He got in through the small and dingy Leaky Cauldron just the same. This time, he ducked his head low and smoothed his hair down to cover over his scar – but without Hagrid’s giant bulk to distinguish them, it turned out to be relatively straightforward for a small boy to pass by unnoticed.

In the alley behind the pub, it took Harry a couple of tries to get correct the combination of stones to tap with his new wand. Then he was treated to the sight of the very stones of the wall peeling away, rolling back, and revealing to him Diagon Alley in all its weird wonder.

He quickly shoved his wand away, brushed down his fringe and headed in to explore.

He didn’t really have any intention of buying anything – he’d never had money that he could just spend before, and it did not immediately occur to him – so he didn’t bother with going back to Gringotts. Those goblins had not seemed terribly friendly last time anyway. Instead he peered into windows, marvelling at their contents.

The displays were sometimes like those in the regular – muggle – shops, like those of books in the window of Flourish & Blotts (although of course they were not books on any mundane topics, with strange titles like The Handbook of Hippogryff Psychology and Curry Charms for the Conscientious Witch) and sometimes they seemed utterly alien. One store in particular, Quality Quidditch Supplies, hosted a display of broomsticks, all of them hovering in the air, hanging frozen with nothing to support them. They were very polished, and something called the Nimbus 2000 still held pride of place, front and centre.

As far as Harry could tell, with no reference but the display itself, Quidditch Supplies were the wizarding equivalent of sporting goods. It was a bit hard to tell if ‘Quidditch’ just meant sports in general, or if it was a sport, but that didn’t matter so much to Harry. He’d never been allowed to spend much time wandering around busy districts just looking at things, and he was just entranced by all the bright and strange displays.

Harry wandered for a while, drawn from one window to the next, but honestly the witches and wizards in the alley were worth a stare or two themselves. They dressed so differently, and often in ways of which he thought the Dursleys would not approve. Robes seemed common, although he quickly recognised that often ‘robes’ meant outerwear, worn loose over whatever the witch or wizard had on beneath. He saw a person in a stiff, shaped bodice that laced right up the front and kept her standing quite straight, and a man wearing a tight, long-sleeved shirt done all in blue animal hide, stitched with sunshine yellow. There were odd, wide belts with enormous polished, ringed buckles, and everybody seemed to wear the brightest colours they could find, sometimes with intricate patterns stitched into them. There were wild hairstyles, too, of which he was sure his Aunt would disapprove – perhaps even more than she did of ripped stockings and short skirts. One woman had a towering pile of curls swept high on her head, around which glittering butterflies were charmed to flutter. Another, older lady had an entire stuffed bird on her hat.

Just watching the crowd passing through was plenty of entertainment, actually.

After wandering down, and then up, Diagon Alley, peering into windows and trying not to get caught staring at the afternoon shoppers, Harry began to contemplate the less familiar magical streets. Although he distinctly remembered Hagrid saying that they would go to ‘Diagon Alley’, and although on that trip with him Harry had never needed to leave Diagon Alley, it was actually not the only obviously magical street in London. There were several side streets crossing Diagon Alley, and they all seemed perfectly magical to Harry.

The first he thought to turn down seemed to house not much but pubs and bars – including one called ‘Lady Agatha’s Legs’, where the windows were pasted over with moving posters so nobody could see in. Upon a closer inspection, all the posters were of a pair of long legs in sheer stockings and high heels and garters, which danced around the broad red slogan ‘Open All Night!’

Harry decided not to turn down that alley.

The next one was Knockturn, and he peeked down there with more trepidation this time. It was drab, dreary, and a little dirtier looking than Diagon Alley, true, but it seemed equally interesting: he could see a shop advertising ‘unusual antiquities, bought and sold’, a locksmith and what seemed like a wizarding bookie… from the end of the street, that was all Harry’s poor eyesight could make out. It did not seem to be, erm, like the previous street, so he shrugged and decided to have a look.

It felt cooler and darker the moment he stepped into Knockturn Alley, a soft shiver over his skin, like a cloud had drifted across the sun. When he looked up, however, the late afternoon sky was the same cloudless expanse it had been all day, just coloured a little with the blush of sunset. It was one of those rare summer days that was all bright, clear skies and mild weather. Strange, he thought, but he didn’t dwell on it. There were many more exciting things to look at.

Only a few shop fronts in was a barber shop. Harry hadn’t given a thought to magical hair cutting – given the state of his own hair, it might well be said that he wasn’t much concerned with any kind of hair cutting, actually – but the possibility of magically enchanted scissors that would float through the air and snip menacingly at stray hair was definitely not what he expected. He paused to look in through the angled window, where an older gentleman was sitting in the barber’s chair, gold-rimmed spectacles balanced on the bridge of his beaky nose. The sharp angle of his beard became clear under the swift snip-snip of the little silver scissors – which appeared to be following the directions of someone on the other side of the room, who was comparing hair care potions from a shelf.

Harry watched until the hook-nosed old wizard noticed his stare, and then he ducked his head and moved on before anybody came to yell at him.

In contrast to the brightness of Diagon Alley, this place seemed a lot more... well, shabby and suspect. The colours were muted, darker and more sedate, the people were fewer, quieter and had a sly and furtive air about them, when they didn’t seem just sort of mad.

“In the market for some fingernails, my dear?” an old witch asked him, nearly across from the barber shop, and he blinked up at her face, which was covered in warts. She looked like a storybook witch, and when he stared at her she flashed him a smile, all uneven mossy teeth.

“Oh,” he said, looking at her tray, which she held out to show him, and which was indeed covered in a carefully-arranged array of what seemed to be whole human fingernails. “Erm, no, thank you.”

“You sure? Good for potions and poisons. I wouldn’t steer you wrong,” she promised. She leaned a little too close, breathing in. Was she smelling him?

“I’m sure,” Harry said firmly. “Sorry.”

She sighed, but whatever she was going to tell him next was drowned out by an eerie screech from just a little further down the street.

Harry whipped his head around. “What was that?”

“Pfft. That’d be Agnes – again. And Martha. She should just give it up, this fighting is bad for business.”

And she was right, too, because a moment later three or four witches and wizards came scurrying past, keen to get out of the alley. When Harry looked around, it was just him and the fingernails-witch, and whatever was causing the sounds of screeching and splintering wood from only a door or two down.

He thought it might have been coming from what he’d taken to be a pub, where a wooden sign painted with a white… blob, he guessed… hung creaking from its chains in the inconsistent breeze. The White Wyvern, it read below.

“Should I go, too?” he wondered. He didn’t think it would be a good idea to get caught up in whatever that was.

“Not put off by the screaming, then?” the lady asked him conversationally. “That’s why that lot is all gone,” she added, nodding after the witches and wizards who’d fled already.

She put a particular emphasis on ‘screaming’ but Harry didn’t know entirely what she meant. He cocked his head and listened more carefully. The screeching sounded almost like a regular woman, but there was something strange, layered and choral about it, as though the sound was in three or four perfectly synchronised, equally angry voices all at once. But, overall…

“It sounds a little bit like my Aunt Petunia when she’s especially cross,” Harry admitted.

“Ha!” The fingernails-witch gave a loud, brittle-sounding cackle in response.

Harry didn’t see what was so scary about the screeching. Those responsible were still in the pub, so he was probably safe to keep looking around, as long as he kept his distance from that place specifically.

“Are Agnes and Martha ...witches?” Could witches sound like that?

“Hags,” advised the fingernails-witch, sounding perfectly matter-of-fact. Harry blinked. That seemed... well, perhaps not wrong, but rude. And it also didn't answer his question. “You’re really not concerned by the screaming, lad?”

“You’re not bothered by the screams,” Harry pointed out feeling both put out and confused by her line of questioning. He wondered if he was missing something – after all, he’d only known himself to be a wizard for a few d--

The wall of the pub smashed with great shattering of glass windows and a crashing of wood. Splinters and shards spewed out onto the paving stones.

Harry jumped in shock, and the old lady beside him twitched in surprise herself. She spilled several fingernails from her tray onto the dirty stone.

A second later, a dazed woman stumbled out from the brand new hole in the side of the building. There was dark, dark blood streaming from her hair line and down her pointed and warty face. She flung one long-fingered hand out into the air for balance, misjudged the movement and smacked her palm into the paving stones. Her skinny, bony body swayed there for a moment, and then she straightened up, cracking several joints loudly enough for Harry to hear even from feet and feet away. She turned back to face toward the pub with her dark eyes burning like coals beneath her brows, and she licked the blood from her mouth.

Harry stood still, staring, while she set her mouth and stalked back inside through the hall in the wall. He’d never seen anything like it. The broken wall, the splintered wood, the blood – the way she’d just gotten back up, bared her mossy teeth and gone right back in for more. It was all much more dramatic and violent than any of Dudley’s games of ‘Harry Hunting’, and it seemed so much more dangerous.

He breathed out, realising suddenly how fast his heart was beating.

Another screech came from inside the broken building, wordless and even shriller with a potent mix of fear and rage.

“Oh, that’s torn it,” said the fingernails-witch crossly. Harry twitched, having forgotten she was even there. “They’ve gotten all dirty!”

This snapped Harry right out of his daze. “Let me,” he said, ducking down to gingerly but carefully collect the nails. The witch wasn’t young, and there was nowhere to safely put her tray while she gathered her, er, wares, anyway.

He presented her with the mangy fingernails cupped loosely in his hands, and she watched with a bemused face – at least, he thought it was bemused beneath all its lumps and bumps.

“Well,” she mused, balancing her tray one handed and clearing a section so as to keep the ‘dirty’ nails separated, “aren’t you sweet. Here, my dear.”

She tapped the tray where she wanted the fingernails, and Harry blinked to see that her own fingers were tipped in long, sharp-looking nails of their own. He tipped his handful carefully onto the tray as she indicated, and then quickly wiped his hands on his jeans, cringing a little. Fingernails. A bit disgusting, really.

“Thank you,” said the witch politely, and equally politely Harry, who had not been thanked very often before, responded with a stilted, “You’re welcome.”

And then there was another screech, more broken wood and an entire table came sailing from inside the pub, straight through one of the edges of the broken wall, to flip in an uncontrolled arc through the air and smack into the window of the barber shop opposite. It broken the glass with a thunderous crash and a long, echoing tinkling as the glass continued to settle in the shocked, ringing silence that ensued.

From inside the barber shop there was a steady cursing. The same underfed-looking, hatchet-faced woman heaved herself out of the wreckage, ignored the angry barber and his cranky client entirely, and shoved the heavy wooden table out f her way with more strength than Harry would ever have expected from someone so small and bony.

From the pub came a screechy laugh and two other women – using that term loosely – emerged into the alley proper.

“Look what you’ve done to my pub, Martha,” chided one, an equally warty, equally skinny woman in a long dark robe. She waved her hand, long nails gleaming and wet, indicating the giant hole in the wall above which the roof was not looking all that sound. The person who was with her seemed vaguely womanlike, but came equipped with a cruelly pointed beak sticking out of her face, long talons and enormous feathery wings. She, Harry heard when she laughed again, was the source of the screeching noise.

“Your pub?” snarled the bloodied witch, who must have been Martha, reaching aside to heft the table. She did it with one taloned hand, muscles in her wiry, wart-speckled forearm clenching when her robe shifted with the motion. “It’s my bloody pub!”

“I think,” Harry began, realising that now he could smell the fight, a pervasive and rusty reek in the cooling air, “I should probably get going.” Back to Diagon Alley, he thought, looking around.

Martha heaved on the table, throwing it with a terrible force, and it went flying again, right across the street toward the bird-lady and the other witch. It went wide.

The fingernails-witch grabbed Harry’s collar and hauled him clear, and the desk slammed into the stone not a foot away from them both.

Harry stared, wild-eyed. That could have hit him! That could have killed him.

“Yes,” she agreed with him, in her creaking voice, “now might be a good time to get out of here. Don’t be a stranger.”

But Harry wasn’t listening to her anymore. “HEY,” he yelled, balling his hands into fists. His heart rate threatened to skyrocket, and he knew he was shaking but couldn’t seem to stop it. “You could have killed someone!”

Martha glanced at him dismissively. “Yes,” she said, returning her attention to the other witch and the bird-lady. “That’s the point.”

Harry’s face contorted into a fierce frown. “Well,” he said hotly, “you – you all just need to stop.”

Everything went still. Completely, utterly still. Even the fingernails-witch beside Harry stilled, and inside the barber shop the garrulous voices stopped.

Harry’s hands shook. His breath came hard and painful in his chest.

And around him, everything remained eerily still and silent.

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.

Chapter Text

There was a party in Knockturn Alley that night.

Harry saw at least three fights break out, none of which anybody did a single thing to prevent or stop. After full dark fell, two grindylows (as the short, horned creatures were called) set alight a series of enormous shallow, copper dishes of water which burned in eerie, watery greens and blues and threw strange shadows across the Alley. One of them laughed and wiggled her long fingers at Harry as he was watching, transfixed, and caught her eye by accident.

And although the hot, sweet-spiced drink that the harpy Thusnelda had given him made him numb and kind of befuddled, Harry was fairly certain that the bookie’s shop had not been flooded when he first got here this afternoon.

Suffice to say, a party in Knockturn Alley was nothing like one of Aunt Petunia’s dinner parties, or like the huge, lolly-fuelled extravaganzas that he’d seen thrown for Dudley.

As the crowd thronging the flickering shadows of Knockturn Alley got progressively drunker, they also got, uh, rowdier.

“Tell her to stick her head in the dish!” said Thusnelda, shoving a second cup at Harry. The first one had already made him feel so dizzy that he didn’t even want to contemplate another, so he took it from her, clutched it in one hand and didn’t drink from it. The warmth of it and the soft smell of cloves and honey was kind of nice, though.

The dish was one of their lights, full of water and somehow also on fire with a sickly chartreuse flame.

“That dish is,” he began, and found that he had to concentrate quite hard to make sure all the words came out right. He changed what he was going to say to something a bit easier for his leaden tongue to negotiate. “That seems… bad,” he settled on.

The witch Thusnelda was harassing shot a look that was half-relieved and half-wary at Harry.

“She’ll be fine!” the harpy insisted. “Witches are fireproof! And they float!”

Harry was pretty sure… not completely sure, mind, but pretty sure, that witches were not actually fireproof. He’d burned himself on Aunt Petunia’s gas stove enough times to know that he certainly wasn’t fireproof. He was still hazy on the differences between some of the people he’d met – a witch wasn’t a hag, and neither was an insult, exactly, but a hag looked like what people thought a witch should be, and maybe some people didn’t know the difference and then… something about the evils of movable type printing rotting children’s brains that an exceptionally drunk hag had been explaining earlier. But he was almost certain that ‘witch’ and ‘wizard’ were like the ‘madam’ and ‘sir’ of a specific kind of person, which was what he was.

Yes.

Very carefully, he gave his cup to the witch instead. “Here.”

“Tell her to drink it all at once,” Thusnelda suggested. “Wait, no, that’s boring! Tell her to throw it on Burke.” She flapped one wing wildly, knocking over a little glowing ball of whispy light, who hissed and flickered, but who twitched once at Harry and backed away, dimming.

Harry wheeled around to see who Thusnelda was talking about. He spotted the ancient, wrinkled wizard lounging in a conjured armchair some distance away. He had set himself in the mouth of a tiny, cooked alleyway, out of the way, but it was immediately clear to Harry that he was ‘out of the way’ in part because a space had been cleared around him by all the people who did not want to get too close. He was watching the goings-on with old, watery blue eyes – but he nonetheless noticed Harry’s attention and met him eye to eye across the dim, firelit alley. He did not smile.

“Excuse me, Master,” said the witch, bowing her head low to Harry and backing away. Her dark eyes cut a mean look at Thusnelda as she went.

“Masters?” Harry mumbled, weaving slightly as he turned back, “I’m Harry.”

“You’re a riot,” Thusnelda corrected. “Come on, there has to be someone you’ll order to do something funny. What if you tell that blonde bint over there to jump in the lake or something?”

“Excuse me?” said the lady in question, turning around. Harry had thought she was a witch, for her long pale hair had been so cared for, spilling around the polished leather of her boots, but when she turned her skin was a deathly grey-green and her eyes were voids in her pale skull. Her voice was even odder than Thusnelda’s. Although it sounded pleasant, Harry felt his heart give a strange and ugly jolt in his chest when she spoke. It could not have been only him, either, because around her every creature flinched. Even Thusnelda.

The harpy rubbed her sternum with her taloned hand. “Stupid, vapid bloody spirit,” she muttered, glaring distrustfully at the blonde. “Can’t take a bloody joke.”

The – spirit, Harry guessed – did not answer this. Her eyeless skull turned toward Harry, and despite it being clearly impossible, he felt the weight of her gaze.

“King Harry,” she said, in a voice so quiet he had to strain to hear it over the crowd, but which did not hurt quite so much in his chest. “I am very likely, I flatter myself, to be the representative of my people sent to your court--”

“No!” Thusnelda’s bronze wing snapped out between them, filling Harry’s vision with unkempt feathers. He leaned sideways, trying to peek out at the spirit from behind it. “No politics at the coronation party!” she insisted in a high, warbling screech that nevertheless did not even hurt as much as the eyeless woman’s whisper.

The spirit sighed deeply and backed away, and Harry found himself pulled away by the harpy’s clawed grip on his arm.

“Is there anything fun you’ll tell someone to do?” Thusnelda whined eventually, having grown tired of dragging Harry around by one arm. He hadn’t exactly tried to stop her – he’d been distracted by the party.

“Uh,” he said. Then he turned to a tall, whispy-thin man (… probably) not three feet away and said, “excuse me, can you get Thusnelda another drink?”

Given Thusnelda’s attitude toward, well, everything, he guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised when the man – who had golden eyes, he realised then, and sharp teeth, and black lips and dark little claws instead of fingernails – said, “Sure,” and upended his own cup in her face. “Cheers.”

Thusnelda gave an ear-splitting, multilayered shriek that sounded more like delight than rage, and lunged at the man with her talons forward.

Harry got out of the way just as a crowd of people – and other things – materialised to encourage their brawling. He didn’t want to get trampled.

Freed from his chaperone, if you could call her that, he wandered. Knockturn Alley seemed to have doubled or trebled in size without any notice whatsoever.

In the spaces between knots of monsters, whispy creatures floated, changing colours slowly and lighting the way with tiny, adorable little lanterns in their not-hands. He couldn’t figure out if they were more like people or just animals, but they were happy to let him stroke his fingers over their lights. They were cool and strangely static to touch.

Despite how loud and chaotic everybody seemed, and how they were all getting steadily drunker, nobody was antagonistic or even slightly rude to him as he walked down and up the alley, listening to them and watching them roll dice and shove each other and shriek with inhuman laughter. He didn’t test their patience by being rude, either, but it was still unexpectedly nice. Harry had never really been allowed at a party before, and it was rare that anybody treated him like he was wanted.

Shortly after midnight, Gork’s towering shadow descended and he scooped Harry up from among the crowd – a lucky thing, because there was an odd mist rising right up from the stones and he was feeling very dizzy and a little lost, perhaps from playing with the lights – and shoved him gently through the hole in the wall to the pub.

Harry blinked wildly in the warm, normal, orange-yellow firelight of the pub. He immediately stumbled over a loose wooden plank that had been left laying across the floor. He caught himself on a table.

“Easy,” said Martha, who instead of being outside with the party, was sweeping up the glass and wooden splinters inside the pub. She had a straw broom with a gnarled wooden handle. Harry wondered, inanely, if she could fly with it. “You trip over and kill yourself at your own coronation party, and I’ll...” she paused. “Try not to do it in my pub.”

Harry found this strangely hilarious in that moment, and he startled himself with a little hiccough of laughter. He made his way around the table, careful to pick his way through the debris of the fight between Agnes and Martha without tripping, and sat on a roughly-made wooden bench, big enough across for three or four – or just one Gork, perhaps.

Now that he was inside, away from the loud and busy crowd, he felt a little shell-shocked by the relative stillness. Even the noise was slightly muffled by the remaining walls.

“Is it always so...” Harry glanced outside through the hole in the one wall. Thusnelda had, at some point, joined a knot of people screaming and jeering at what seemed like two very drunk grindylows who were scuffling out in the street. He could see the gleam of blood on her shoulder, but she didn’t seem much the worse for her own fight.

He wasn’t quite sure how to characterise the noise and violence and sheer chaos of the celebration.

“Hmm,” mused Martha. She paused in her sweeping, leaned upon her broom and followed his gaze outside. “No. They’re all on their best behaviour right now – usually with such a mixed crowd, you’d get more fighting. Plenty of sorts who can’t or won’t make it to Knockturn Alley, too.”

Harry wondered at this because from where he was sitting, all he could see outside was one short, horned thing doing its level best to choke the lights out of another short, horned thing.

“Should somebody, erm, stop that?” he wondered. He supposed technically, if they were all correct, he could stop that. He hadn’t really considered that before. He could go outside and yell at them to stop fighting and they’d all have to do what he said, wouldn’t they? He didn’t want to go around telling people to throw their drinks at each other or drown themselves, but he could just tell people not to fight, and--

“Why?” Martha asked, baffled.

Harry peered muzzily after the brawl but the crowd had obscured them both and he did not feel like getting back up. He did hope that the creature hadn’t lost a horn. “Because… someone will get hurt?”

Martha grunted. “They’re not wizards, your Majesty. They’re grindylows. They’re like hags, or giants, or any of a million other people. They fight – an’ that out there isn’t even a duel, it’s just a scuffle. Have you been living under a rock?”

Harry frowned, looking away from the strange crowd and back over to Martha. She was peering at her floor, and must have decided that it was clean enough, because she leaned her broom against the bar and went to examine the hole in the wall instead. The floor wasn’t what Harry would have called clean, and certainly not what Aunt Petunia would have called clean, but he supposed it was Martha’s pub. Er. Unless it was Agnes’s. He… was not completely clear on this point.

“I’m not sure about ‘under a rock’, but this is all a bit new to me, you know,” he pointed out.

“I reckon it is,” laughed Martha, poking her long clawed finger at one edge of the hole, testing the strength of the splintered wood there. After a second she grunted, then reached out and tore most of the plank free, apparently without effort.

“I didn’t know I was a wizard until I got my Hogwarts letter this week,” he said slowly. “My relatives are all – not magic. Not like this,” he waved at the hole expressively. The light from the grindylows’ fires outside had turned an odd periwinkle now.

Martha paused and turned to him, eyeing him through a spill of her ragged dark hair. “Muggles,” she said shortly. “You’re a – what they call a muggle born wizard, then?”

“Um,” he said. He thought back to the pale boy in Madam Malkin’s robes shop. “My parents were wizards? I mean, a witch and a wizard. But they’re dead.”

This seemed to reassure Martha somewhat, but her warty face remained concerned. “Do they… still have kings?”

“Who?” Harry blinked. “Muggles? You mean the Queen?”

“A queen,” she said, almost to herself. “I bloody knew it, of course queens are still the thing--”

“Some places have kings,” Harry said. He could not actually name any of them, but he was very sure of this. “But not here. We have Queen Elizabeth?”

“Well, we don’t,” laughed Martha. “Obviously, we have King Harry.”

Harry blinked dizzily. He still felt very well insulated by the drink Thusnelda had pressed upon him, but the idea of a coronation party was beginning to sink in, with all of its alarming implications. “Are you… is all of that, erm, serious?”

If he sounded lost and confused, it was because he was lost and confused – and a little disbelieving, all told. It wasn’t as though he truly believed, intellectually, that the entire street had just decided, all as one, to prank him, because that would be ridiculous. But the alternative seemed… you couldn’t just show up and be a king, could you? That seemed like the sort of job that ought to have a lengthy application process! Or… or at least there should be a general election, or something.

Martha squinted at him. “I suppose this Elizabeth of your relatives’ – she had to pull an, an arming sword from a bit of rock or something? Yes? That’s how the muggles tell, isn’t it?”

“What,” said Harry, who had not become any less lost or confused over the course of this extraordinary sentence.

“Dark magic doesn’t need swords and stones and golden crowns,” Martha said, ignoring his confusion – if she even noticed it. She was staring pensively out at the crowd, through the hole in her wall. “Creatures of dark magic know. That’s why it’s magic, and not, say, politics.”

Harry swallowed tightly.

“Come on, no politics at the coronation party,” she said, clapping her hands. “That will have to wait until tomorrow. This place is as clean as it’s getting anyway. Have you ever played darts?”

“Sorry?” said Harry, feeling quite fuzzy and not entirely following her train of thought from coronation to cleaning to darts.

“Excellent,” Martha said, smiling in a way that was a little too wide, and which warped her warty face into a visage of true ugliness. "Just let me go catch us a target."

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.”

Chapter Text

Borgin did begin immediately, but it did not automatically follow that Harry understood what he was talking about -- and what he did understand did not make him feel any more comfortable with the situation.

“The Ministry of Magic does not recognise this kingdom as a legitimate authority – and does not recognise as any kind of authority any group or gathering of Dark creatures – yet we all live in their territory," Borgin said. "This can, and likely will, complicate your relationship with vassals and subjects who hold ministry positions or Wizengamot seats.”

Harry opened his mouth to ask what on Earth a Wizangamot was. Borgin glowered at him, his lined face dark and cranky in the pale light of his kitchen. Harry shut his mouth again without interrupting.

“The Wizangamot makes laws and operates as the highest and most final court for serious offences – do not interrupt me – and several wizards I would bet are dark wizards, are a part of your court, will be those with hereditary seats and a great deal of power. Including… actually, including House Potter, I should think,” he added abruptly, frowning. “I believe so, in any case. It’s been many decades since I Kept up with the ins and outs.” He grunted sourly, and then added a note to his scroll. The pen he was using had a large and inky blue feather at its end, and it swished as he wrote. “Gork will know what to do about that. I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Excuse me,” Harry said politely.

Borgin sighed and looked up, with an expression that Harry really did not felt he had done anything to earn. Maybe this, in the end, was just Borgin’s temperament: frustrated and annoyed.

“You keep saying ‘dark’ creatures and ‘dark’ arts and 'dark' wizards -- but I don’t actually know what that even is,” Harry admitted. "Is it just bad magic?"

"No." A pause. "Hmph," grunted Borgin then, sourly. He stopped, huffed, and then started again: "That is, It can be, but it isn't defined by being bad."

"Okay," said Harry slowly. He waited for an addition but Borgin just stared at nothing for a while and drummed his fingers on the table top. Further explanation did not seem immediately forthcoming. "So... what is it?"

"I'm thinking!" Brogin snapped.

"Oh. Sorry." Harry waited.

The pause went on for a while, and then finally Borgin put his quill down and rubbed his thumb over his beard. “Dark magic is… tricky to define. It’s an area of magic that encompasses most anything that interferes with, stops or modifies a series of natural forces: life, death, time, the soul, and… some other things that don’t quite fit into those categories. Incidentals. A dark creature, which means any being or beast that is either animated by that kind of magic – like a vampire, for example – or uses that kind of magic as part of its fundamental nature – like a basilisk.”

Harry knew not a thing about vampires or basilisks, but he felt like he understood some of the explanation, at least: life, death, time, the soul, and a category he guessed he’d have to consider ‘misc’, because the alternative was asking Borgin for more information. He nodded slowly.

“Witches and wizards are different only in that, speaking generally, the diversity of our magic allows us more leeway to choose. There are other factors in some cases, but that accounts for the majority of it. A dark witch or wizard is just somebody who uses this kind of magic – not once or twice, and not under duress, but willingly and habitually.”

Harry frowned. “Am I a dark wizard, then?” he wondered. “I don’t do any magic.” Not on purpose, anyway.

Borgin grunted again. “That’s one of those other cases, I think.” He leaned forward and pressed the rough tip of one finger to Harry’s forehead, right against his scar. Harry twitched. “Fascinating things, magical scars,” he said reflectively. “Most magical creatures are – unsurprisingly – excellent at trapping residual magics. You, your Majesty, are the only creature in the world to survive being hit directly with the one curse specifically designed for killing. How much do you know about the Killing Curse?”

Harry shook his head mutely.

Borgin hummed. “There is no other curse like it. It does not hurt. It does not maim or injure. It doesn’t even really damage what it touches. It has one single purpose, and all it does is to cause the state of the person so cursed to change from ‘alive’ to ‘dead’.”

He withdrew and let Harry’s hair flop forward over his scar again, leaning back in his seat. He steepled his hands beneath his chin, elbows braced on the arms of the old chair.

“Ten years ago, I would have said that the only defence against that curse was to make sure you didn’t get hit by it. And the wizard who did it… well.”

Harry looked away. Hagrid had said that Voldemort was a wizard who had gone ‘about as bad as it was possible to go’, but equally Harry recalled Ollivander’s glassy eyes and soft-breathed, “Terrible, yes – but great.” Voldemort was kind of an enigma like that. People seemed to agree that he’d been bad, but they also seemed kind of curiously awed by him, too.

“The Killing Curse is very, very dark magic,” Borgin informed him then, in a more normal tone of voice. “And whatever protected you from it was… I’m not sure I even know. That’s why you’re so very famous, I suppose,” he drawled, like he found the very idea of Harry’s fame bitterly funny rather than impressive. Harry wasn’t sure if this was more or less discomforting than his experience in the Leaky Cauldron. He remembered, abruptly, Doris Crockford, who had kept demanding to shake his hand – and how he’d just kept letting her, baffled and bewildered. “The mystery, eh?”

“So you think I’m a dark wizard,” Harry said, trying to avoid any further, complicated details.

“If it hadn’t scarred, maybe you’d have more of a choice, but as it stands --” Borgin shrugged. “That kind of magic leaves its mark on someone.”

Harry swallowed. Well. Good to know, he guessed.

“Enough of that,” Borgin decided then. “Of the most immediate concern to you, your Majesty, needs to be where you’ll hold court. A ruler must meet with the representatives of his subjects, and you will need to do it very soon. After last night, word will spread, and if you don’t find somewhere to host a court gathering, you’ll find yourself accosted on the street. I would recommend against the White Wyvern, you’ll look like you’re favouring the hags. Do you have a place in mind?”

“A… place?”

Harry was blank. He wasn’t completely sure what it meant to ‘hold court’ but he was pretty certain that, firstly, he wasn’t qualified to do it, and secondly, he absolutely did not have a place in mind. Was Borgin expecting him to produce a hall from thin air or something?

“Like ..a palace or something?” he wondered.

“Where do you usually stay?” Borgin asked. He didn’t wait for Harry to finish, and continued irritably on instead: “Your house would do, I suppose. If you must.”

Harry didn’t understand about four fifths of what Borgin had just dropped upon him, but he did know what the Dursleys would think about him showing up with a horde of magical creatures and things at their home. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said slowly.

It didn’t really seem like it would matter if his Aunt and Uncle were uncomfortable, but – so far the hags and harpies and even Borgin all seemed a lot nicer than his Aunt and Uncle, and perhaps it would be, erm, embarrassing, to expose someone like Thusnelda to them.

“No,” Harry added, feeling increasingly certain that whatever else happened, it couldn’t be that.

“Well, if you don’t pick somewhere, you’ll be hosting it in the street. I’m sure the grindylows and hinkypunks won’t mind, but you can bet the witches and wizards – and werewolves, and hags and vampires and harpies, mind you – will care.”

“Where else…?” Harry trailed off. Where was he supposed to go? “Do you not have some kind of… communal building… or something, where these things can be done?”

“Like I said,” Borgin reminded him, “no such gathering is considered legitimate by the Ministry. If we did have such a building, it is so well-hidden as to have been forgotten.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know where you’ll hold it,” Borgin said shortly, standing up. His chair scraped loudly. “But you’d best come up with something. And – find something to wear, I should think.”

“Erm,” said Harry, glancing down at his clothes. Castoffs of Dudley’s, of course. He had his school robes – plain, black work robes, as specified – but they were buried in his trunk in the house at #4 Privet Drive.

“Enough of that,” Borgin said, getting up. “I’ll show you to Gork, and you can be his concern.”

Harry, too, scraped his chair back. He felt even more overwhelmed now than he had the night previous, even though he was no longer faced with a crowd of monsters howling his name. A venue for a court? Clothing? Somehow this was so much worse.

He followed meekly in Borgin’s footsteps as they wound back through the shop and out into Knockturn Alley again. Gork’s business, when Harry made it there in the wake of Borgin’s dark cloak, was fronted by a cracked, frosted-glass door between the barber and a shop that sold poisonous candles and, apparently, nothing but poisonous candles.

(“It has to be a front, really, doesn’t it,” Borgin opined, casting it a speculative glance. “How would they even stay afloat otherwise?” “Um,” said Harry intelligently.)

Despite it being a tiny doorway – which Harry was not convinced could even reasonably fit Gork – when they stepped through, it was immediately evident that the inner dimensions greatly outstripped the outer ones.

Otherwise, however, it seemed to be...

...a very large version of a very small office.

There was a filing cabinet, an enormous desk (with a worn red couch cushion incongruously left sitting on wooden one corner), a huge chair (holding the equally large Gork), and a comically tiny window that looked out upon Knockturn Alley even though it was facing the wrong direction to do so. What looked like a big, brass rotary telephone made a sound like a struck gong as they entered.

“Majesty!” roared Gork.

His chair slid back with the screech of its thick wooden legs upon the stone floors, and he got up, looming terribly above them both. His shadow seemed to plunge the whole world into twilight.

“What brings King Harry to Gork so early?”

He took three enormous strides forward, shaking the floor and the walls, and beamed down upon Harry.

“Here,” said Borgin, handing over his scroll of parchment without ceremony. “He’s all yours. I’ve done my good deed for the month. And don’t you forget it, your Majesty. I’m not a babysitter. I’ve a business to run!”

He spoke, bewilderingly, like he hadn't come voluntarily, all on his own, to get Harry and bring him back to his shop.

Gork ignored this extraordinary speech in favour of taking the page, which he held carefully between his huge thumb and forefinger. He hummed thoughtfully as he squinted at its contents. A thoughtful hum from Gork was so huge ad deep that it seemed to vibrate in Harry’s bones.

In the time that took, Borgin turned in a swirl of cloak and cane and exited the building, without further conversation or even a goodbye.

“Wizard Borgin,” said Gork when the door – much larger on this side, of course – slammed after him. He shook his enormous shaggy head and clicked his huge tongue after him. “Always like this. Grump.”

At least it wasn’t just Harry getting the full experience of his personality, Harry supposed.

Gork then waved the parchment at Harry. “No account supervision – bad for fees. For properties, for taxes. Not good.”

"I'm sorry," said Harry, although he wasn't actually sure if he should be sorry or not.

Gork shook his head like an animal shaking off flies, sending his thick hair swinging. He rumbled in a way that was either a language Harry couldn’t decipher, or just a very deep breath. “No. We fix,” he assured him. “Fix good. King Harry not worry."

He lumbered back to his desk, and indicated a step ladder that would let Harry climb right up to the surface. Harry only hesitated a moment before stepping up. This, he figured suddenly, must have been the purpose of the cushion. He'd seen many relatively person-sized people in Knockturn Alley -- but only one giant like Gork.

"Good, good. Be comfortable. Business goes long time. No worry," he added, apparently reading the utter unenthusiasm Harry felt about that statement just from his face, "Gork does not know Potter accounts yet – but Gork know goblins.”

He smiled, showing his teeth, huge and blunt like yellowed tombstones all lined up in a row.

“Oh,” said Harry. He smiled weakly back. “Good?”

“Good,” Gork agreed.

Chapter Text

It was after four before Harry made it out of Gork’s office, with the enormously deep and ominous growl that he was to go to the Ministry and access the records of the Probate, yes, now, right now, today.

Having spent hours talking to a series of increasingly tense and hostile goblins by magical fireplace – using a thing called a “Floo” network – in Gork’s office, and being befuddled and confused by such phrases as ‘ten years of backdated land tax upon the vacant properties,’ and ‘not technically eligible for automatic exemption so your accountant may help you apply,’ as well as, just, reams and reams of paperwork to assess and sign, he had not had the opportunity to ask Gork about any of the things he’d wanted to know when he was sitting under the pale light of Borgin’s kitchen.

Worse still, he now had a whole host of completely new questions – starting with, ‘can an 11 year old legally agree to a contract, anyway?’

When he stumbled, blinking, back into Knockturn Alley’s afternoon sunlight, he was just as confused as he had been upon waking up that morning – and certainly no better prepared to hold court, whatever that meant.

He felt like he was on the verge of a stress induced breakdown when he walked past the White Wyvern pub again and thought: well, I’m not going to get anywhere if I don’t eat, and the Dursleys can’t stop me anymore.

He found Martha eyeing the hole in the wall with a considering eye from her spot behind the bar, where she was unpacking a box of opaque glass bottles to add to the array of them shelved behind her wooden bar top. Harry was no expert on the contents of bars, but not a single bottle had a label he recognised: they were instead called things like Ogden's Old Firewhisky and Aunty Wilhelmina's Wormwood Absence. When he perched on a stool, though, he realised with some despair the one thing that could reasonably stop him eating: despite hours upon hours discussing his accounts with Gork (and talking about what needed to be paid and how payment for some things had not been collected), he still did not have any actual wizarding money on him. What he’d taken out at the bank with Hagrid was still locked away in his trunk at the Dursleys’!

“Don’t fret,” said Martha. “You look done in. This one’s on the house.”

What was ‘on the house’ turned out to be a heavily watered wine and a dish of sliced liver and onions which was – well, Harry wasn’t inclined to be picky. He’d eaten a lot of questionably fresh foods on occasions when the Dursleyes had declined to allow him to eat for some infraction or other.

“Don’t worry,” she added, leaning forward far enough that her long and ragged hair brushed the bar top, and he could have reached out and poked any one of her many facial warts, “it’s not human liver.”

Harry had not, in fact, considered that it might have been human liver and he paused with a fork in between his plate and his mouth to weigh up the many implications of her oddly specific assurance.

“Okay,” he said then, and kept eating. It really wasn’t that bad, even though it had the too-rich, iron-heavy taste of offal, which he didn’t much like. And hey, it wasn’t human liver. “You’re a good cook,” he said, instead of asking for more information on that one.

“Well, bless you,” murmured Martha, leaning on the bar and watching him eat. “Not much call for cooked food here – but I like to keep my hand in.”

“Do you know what a probate is, or where I go to find it?” Harry asked her. It wasn’t a graceful switch of topic.

“Some kind of wizarding inheritance court, I think. Hags aren’t eligible so I couldn’t tell you more… could probably find a wizard to show you, though. Ministry offices close at four-thirty, though, pretty sure.”

“What time is it now?” Harry asked. His watch, which was a cracked cartoon one he’d inherited from Dudley once his wrists had outgrown their child-sized band, had stopped working entirely at some point last night, and now when he looked at it the hands spun aimlessly, whirling like a confused compass.

“’Bout a quarter past, Majesty,” said Martha. “Wouldn’t bother.”

“Oh.” Harry hung his head over his reassuringly non-human meal. Gork had really wanted him to go today.

“If it’s an inheritance matter,” she pointed out soothingly, “most of the people involved’re likely to be dead. Can’t be anything that won’t keep, can it? Don’t let it trouble you.”

“Right,” Harry agreed, nodding. She had to be right, he decided. He knew from listening to Uncle Vernon complain over dinner that legal processes always took ages – and besides that, Harry had to be a decade late for any of these inheritance things anyway. This was a reassuring thought.

He drank some of the heavily watered wine and then frowned down at it uncertainly. If the wine had been added for flavour, he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t very good.

Something went thump right outside and Harry turned toward the scrunch of boots on the stones – easy to hear, right outside the big hole in the wall – just as someone called out, “Hello? Martha?”

Martha straightened from her relaxed slump against the bar. “It’s the middle of the bloody day!”

“What kind of monster makes her place of business her home?” called that same voice again. “It’s discrimination!”

“What are you doing wandering the city in broad daylight?” Martha demanded.

Plaintively: “Can I please come inside before my hair catches fire? Again?”

“Yes, yes, you utter fool, come inside--”

Through the hole came a shaggy pile of robes and cloaks, all in mixed shades of blues and greys. It angled itself so it could close its umbrella – a huge, wood-ribbed one, which looked very sturdy, and seemed absolutely unnecessary given the clear skies – and draw it inside afterwards.

“God’s blood,” said the pile, sweeping over to the dimmest corner of the pub and then immediately tearing off its thick gloves. The hooded cloak and mantle followed suit, and then something like a balaclava, followed by another long wrapped cloak. From within the pile, a figure began to emerge – beginning with a log tail of plaited blond hair, and ending in a pair of high boots laced, oddly, with satin ribbons.

“You would not believe how awful the trip over the channel was – I still have dirt lodged under my nails. Pour us a drink, Martha,” he added, flinging the top layers over a rickety wooden bar stool. Now that he was peeling himself out of his cocoon, his voice was clearer. He had a wildly mixed accent, sort of old-fashioned, sort of French, perhaps even a little bit American in some places.

“Can you pay for a drink?” Martha wondered drily.

“Pay? What? No,” he said, finally removing the last blue layer and tossing it over a seat as well. “Pour it anyway,” he suggested. “Don’t know you, do I?” he added to Harry, leaning down to peer at his face.

He wasn’t a tall man, but everybody was pretty well taller than Harry, who was short even for an eleven year old. Despite what must have been a suffocatingly hot outfit, no part of him seemed flushed or sweaty, although there were little bits of hair that had escaped his plait coming down on one side of his face. He had the sort of pale, symmetrical face that made it seem intentional.

“I don’t think so,” said Harry. The man was, all behaviour aside, so very normal looking – no horns or warts or new appendages or missing pieces – that Harry felt sure he’d have remembered meeting him at the party the night previous. “I’m Harry Potter,” he offered. And then, because it was polite, he added, “How’d you do?”

“‘Harry’,” repeated the man thoughtfully. “Good name, good name. Named for Godwinson or Hardrada? Not the Plantagenet ones, surely? Aurelius Malfoy, at your service – more or less.”

Harry had a vague memory of a ‘Hardrada’ from a history class once, but he remembered very little about the context. “Aurelius,” he repeated. The man smiled, and Harry got a glimpse of very sharp teeth. Oh, he thought.

“Yes. Dreadful, common name. I don’t know what my father was thinking. Did I miss the party?” he asked, looking up over the bar to Martha again.

“Only by thirteen hours,” she said.

Aurelius made a disgusted noise. “You’d think it would be easier to get a bunch of muggles to deliver six little boxes of dirt to be shipped on short notice, but you’d be extremely wrong,” he complained. “They haven’t gotten any more organised since the nineteenth century. Are you going to pour me that wine?”

“No,” said Martha, “you can’t pay.”

Harry hunched over his own – free – meal and wondered if he should come back and pay for it later.

Aurelius made a second, short, disgusted noise and from somewhere on his person withdrew a dark wine bottle streaked with dust, which he banged down upon the bar. “Pour that, then.”

Martha took it from him and uncorked it with one of her long, sharp nails. She poured him a cup and, without pausing to ask, poured herself one too.

“Anyway, they weren’t even ready to go until midnight, and I had to charm the port authority – do not drink it like that, Martha, I swear, it is twelve years old, it needs to breathe – God’s blood, you disgust me, you vile wretch,” he went on, when Martha tipped back her own glass and drank a cup of his wine all in one long swallow without ever breaking eye contact.

“She’s disgusting, isn’t she?” Aurelius said flatly to Harry.

“I’m not really a wine drinker,” said Harry, who felt he should not have to defend this position until he was at least sixteen.

“Oh, everyone’s a wine drinker,” Aurelius opined blithely. “They just haven’t found the right one, yet.”

“Right,” said Harry, mostly so he wouldn’t have to discuss it.

“So I clearly missed the coronation. Has our new Emperor of the Unhallowed Seas set a court location yet?”

“I don’t know,” said Martha. “Why don’t you ask him?” She nodded pointedly to Harry, who had begun to wonder if there was some way he could sneak out and avoid having to answer the question with nobody any the wiser.

He paused, frozen over his food, with a large bite of liver in his mouth. “Um,” he said.

“Swallow first,” Martha advised.

This seemed like good advice. Harry finished chewing and swallowed the definitely-not-human liver.

“Oh, is it you, then? You should say so when you introduce yourself – if you don’t mid my saying.” Aurelius did not give the impression of a man who took what other people might mind much into account before speaking. “I suppose informality is all well and good in a pub amongst friends,” he added dubiously.

“Oh, erm, sorry,” Harry said, “I’m a bit new to… all of this, I suppose, I don’t--”

“Well, don’t tell people,” Aurelius interrupted. “Goodness.” He sniffed his cup of wine, evidently decided it had ‘breathed’ enough, and took a large sip. “So?” he prompted. “Court this evening?”

“Er,” said Harry, but it really did seem like he’d have to start making some decisions. “Not until after sunset. Proper sunset, too, not dusk.”

“Oh, good,” said Aurelius, taking another looong sip. “Very polite – not like certain persons who decided to live in their places of business,” he added, looking pointedly to Martha. She ignored him.

“I’m not sure where yet,” Harry said. “As I only have a very small idea of what people do at court.”

Aurelius widened his eyes, looked away, and then took another very long drink. “Another,” he said brightly, and Martha poured.

“People will come and say hello, dear. I mean. Your Majesty,” she corrected. Aurelius laughed. “You’ll get to know everybody important – hopefully – and people who want to have disputes mediated might show up for that – probably not tonight because tonight should be all introductions and that sort of thing.”

Harry didn’t like the sound of having to mediate disputes for other people, but he supposed that just introductions wouldn’t be so bad. He had met a lot of people the night before, but he didn’t remember most of their names.

“Okay,” he said slowly. He remembered Borgin saying something about taking it back to his house, which he definitely couldn’t do, and although he’d seen signs in the windows of muggle cafes and churches, he wasn’t sure how many of them would able to accommodate someone the size of some of them without, erm, help.

“Outside somewhere?” he said hopefully. It was summer, so being outside after full dark shouldn’t be a hardship.

“Outside?” Aurelius wrinkled his nose.

“Well, how would, ah, Gork fit inside…?”

“Ugh. Giants. That’d be a feature, not a flaw. I suppose it doesn’t matter, as long as there’s something to drink.”

“Right,” said Harry, who had not realised he was apparently organising, like, an entire reception in under four hours.

He picked a space he was sure could fit all of them entirely on the basis of it being the only place he could even think of. “St James’s Park, then?”

Martha raised her eyebrows, shifting the ugly topography of her face. “If you like, Majesty.”

“Does the king still fornicate with his ladies there?” Aurelius asked, eyeing the bottom of his empty cup.

“The queen does not, no,” Harry said, feeling like although he had no idea what the queen did or did not do, this was a reasonably safe bet. Also, who used the word ‘fornicate’? “Has anybody in the wizarding world heard of the queen?” he asked Martha.

“No, dear,” she said serenely. “Not even in passing.”

She poured Aurelius another cup. “You’ll want to get someone to do the spell to make the muggles go away, I think,” she added.

“He’s a wizard, isn’t he?” Aurelius said, eyeing him critically.

“He’s young yet. Might not know,” Martha said.

“Mmm. I have a nephew. I mean. A very great-nephew, anyway. Tiny wizard. He’s three or four or something, can’t do a single spell yet. Absolutely useless.” He shrugged.

Harry, upon realising that he actually had a great deal to get done that very afternoon, thanked Martha for her help and her food, said a cautious goodbye to Aurelius, and went to get some money at the bank so he could figure out how to organise the business of ‘holding court’.

“Majesty,” Aurelius said, eyeing him once he’d stood up properly. His eyes, which were the grey of an overcast sky, strange and luminous, lingered on the loose hem of Dudley’s tee shirt. “You don’t have to take my advice, of course, and I should never presume to tell you what to do…” This, Harry was soon to learn, was a phrase that regularly preceded what were pretty much always direct instructions, “but do consider making someone else do it. I mean. Not me. Obviously. But someone. They’ll probably be better at it, and you’ll have time to change out of… whatever this is called. I expect it’s very, ah, post-modern, but it’s not very formal.”

He raised his cup to Harry and then commenced more drinking.

Chapter Text

Harry took a deep breath as soon as he stepped away from the pub. It was fresh, mostly clean air, perfumed only slightly by what he assumed to be the fumes of poisoned candles.

Okay. It was almost five now – he just needed to make sure there would be no muggles at St James’s, and find…. A cloak or something? Harry wasn’t at all sure what kind of clothing this would need. Although he’d often felt like he couldn’t fit in wearing Dudley’s enormous cast-offs, he had no idea what he might actually want to wear now that he had the opportunity – “it fits” and “there are no holes” and “covers the rude bits” were essentially all of Harry’s standards for clothing. This, he suspected, wasn’t going to cut it.

If he had been going to meet the queen – well, no, he was certain that Aunt Petunia would never have allowed him out of his closet to meet the queen. But if Dudley had been going to meet the queen, Harry was sure there would have been a great fuss about what he wore to do it. It seemed like it could only be worse if one was the queen…

Harry rubbed his hands through his hair. He would go first to the bank, and then see if he could find something to wear – there had to be a clothing shop in Knockturn Alley, right? – and then… he needed a witch or a wizard. It sounded as though a spell to make muggles go somewhere else was a pretty common thing that any wizard, properly trained, could cast. And then, if he believed Aurelius, possibly he needed wine. He had no idea how much wine, or how many people.

He decided he was never going to get anything done if he didn’t get moving, so he rubbed his glasses clean on his tee shirt and headed out, back to Diagon Alley, to find the bank.

Diagon Alley seemed almost garishly bright now, compared to the muted and complex colours in Knockturn Alley, but it was also a good deal cleaner and busier. More people seemed to look at him, and Harry found himself hunching with his head down and his hair smooshed low against his brow, hurrying toward Gringotts at a pace that he hoped would deter anyone from asking him anything.

When he got to the bank, the goblins looked at him with the same hostility as they had earlier that week – but now there was wariness, too. He realised immediately upon entry that his key was still with his trunk at the Dursleys’ house, but, quite oddly, a goblin quickly came to take him to the Potter vault anyway.

“Last time,” he said, “we had to wait in line and find a key?”

He climbed into the cart when the goblin – a tall, unhappy looking fellow called Grindgear – indicated.

“It is not Gringotts policy to keep foreign royalty waiting in line,” Grindgear said flatly. “Hold on, King of Darkness.”

Harry wondered if he should start trying to remember the titles people used for him, if they were significant. He didn’t know if ‘King of Darkness’ was better or worse than ‘Emperor of the Unhallowed Seas’; he had no concept of what either ‘darkness’ or the ‘unhallowed seas’ really were, or if either actually needed governing in some way. However the car began to move immediately, and the roar of their momentum through the tunnels made answering impossible. It seemed it was Gringotts policy to put foreign royalty in rickety carts and send them on a screaming roller coaster ride through the dark bowels of the bank.

When they got out, he came to the same vault, and the goblin opened it for him with a touch of one long and clever finger, and then waited outside.

Harry took the opportunity to shovel gold into his bag. Several times he paused, considered, pulled a face, and then shovelled in some more. Who even knew how much nice clothes and ‘enough wine’ would cost him?

Grindgear never commented, and the cart ride back to the surface was just as loud and dizzying as the one down had been. When he re-emerged, blinking, into the light of Diagon Alley – in less time than he’d really expected, all up – Harry was significantly heavier. He took a few long moments to get his bearings, blinking around at the colourful street.

“Mum,” he heard a high voice say nearby. “Look at that kid, look at his face! Mum!”

He twitched, turning toward the sound and meeting the eyes of a child a few years younger than he was.

Happily, the boy’s mother was discussing something with a wizard in a purple top hat outside the apothecary. She smoothed her hand over his hair and did not even look down. “Mu-um,” whined the child again, yanking on her arm. He pointed right at Harry. “He’s got a scar on his forehead, like--”

“Don’t point at people’s deformities,” she said sharply, much more loudly, “and don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking.”

The kid quieted beneath her rebuke but didn’t stop staring. Harry decided it was time to go back to Knockturn Alley, immediately, where at least all the people who recognised him didn’t seem to do it because he was famous for his parents being dead. He wasn’t sure someone like Gork would have known who ‘famous Harry Potter’ even was, distinct from ‘King Harry’. They paid as much attention there, and they were equally demanding in some ways, but -- the quality of their attention felt very different.

Harry shoved his hair down flat over his forehead and headed away from the bright colours and loud noises – and prying eyes – of Diagon Alley.

Webster & Distaff was the only store on Knockturn Alley that looked like it even contemplated selling clothes – unless you counted Borgin & Bourke, which sold… cursed hats. A cursed hat was technically clothing, Harry guessed. But he did not want a cursed hat, or in fact a cursed anything, really.

He went to Webster & Distaff instead.

The door to the shop was closed, but the opening hours (‘Wednesday – Sunday, 4pm – 10pm, excepting new moons, bad weather and laziness’) indicated that the store should probably be open. So he pushed open the door with a slow, rusty-sounding creak and crossed the threshold. Inside was dim, lit by an assortment of candles floating seven or eight feet above the floor, and one breath made him want to sneeze – the air was thick with sweet incense, and the layered red carpets underfoot were thick with dust.

There were mannequins at least, which seemed to indicate some kind of tailoring going on. They were draped in styles of robes that looked strange and fanciful to Harry (as pretty much all robes did, if he was honest). Large bolts of cloth were arrayed against the walls, in all sorts of colours and textures, from a workaday plain wool in black, to the shifting iridescent scales of some unfamiliar animal, to a bolt of what looked like birds feathers all woven into loose cloth.

“Hello?” he called uncertainly. The dust and fabric seemed to make his voice that much smaller.

“Just a tic,” called a voice from deeper within, followed by a thump and several words that Aunt Petunia had once punished Harry for ‘teaching to her poor Dudders’. He winced. “I’m fine!” yelled the same voice. “It’s fine!”

It did not sound fine.

When she emerged, the witch who’d spoken was a short redhead with huge, tortoiseshell-framed glasses. One of her arms appeared not to be an arm at all -- instead of a human arm with a hand at its end, there was a long, smooth tentacle. She had taken no pains to hide it: he could see it right up to her shoulder, where a mound of leathery stitches and heaped scars signified where it was attached to her. Curiously, her robe covered her other, more human, arm entirely.

“Oh, it’s you! Good afternoon, you Majesty,” she said cheerfully, dropping into a little bob that, belatedly, Harry realised was meant to be a curtsy. Well. That was new. “What can I do for you?”

“Afternoon,” said Harry automatically. He wasn’t sure of her name and did not think they’d been introduced. Was this Distaff, Webster or neither? “I’m looking for… something to wear?”

“Little wonder,” she said, eyeing his clothes. “I’m sure that’s some sort of muggle fashion… thing, of course, but it’s positively hideous if you don’t mind my saying. A full wardrobe, then?”

Harry felt suddenly very self-conscious in Dudley’s cast-offs. He tugged at the hem of his tee shirt. It had a picture of a blue hedgehog on it, and Dudley had only gotten it this year, but there was already a large hole in the side, so Harry had been given it immediately. It was big enough that his shoulder slipped out through the collar if he wasn’t careful.

“Oh, no, I meant… for, er, this evening?”

“Ahh. Court robes?” she prompted.

Gratefully, he nodded. Harry was not by nature a very snobbish young man, and some part of him rebelled at the idea of ever being the sort of person who could just show up somewhere and ask for ‘robes for court’. He didn’t feel like a king – mostly, he felt like an idiot.

“Well,” said the witch slowly, circling him and peering at him from all angles, “there’s not really an accepted style. There’s been no dark monarch for centuries – not one I’m aware of, anyway. The stylings of various minor lords and nobility, they’re, er, pretty diverse. And you’re the king, of course – a bunch of people, especially the witches and wizards, will end up taking cues from whatever you decide on. So what sorts of clothes do you like?”

Harry had never been allowed to choose his clothing before, and didn’t have a clue what he really liked. If pressed, he might answer, ‘not Dudley’s clothes’. This, while reasonable, was not very helpful.

”I’m not sure,” he admitted. Then, looking around at the robes, he wondered, “Is there anything that’s just trousers?”

She nodded, sending her red hair fluttering around her eyes. She knocked some of it away from her glasses with her tentacle. “Yes, of course. It’s not usually popular among the traditional crowd, but there are several styles – usually with a short robe or a tunic, let me see if I have any pictures...”

In only a few moments, Harry found himself sitting next to the witch on the many dusty carpets, blowing more dust away from the yellowed pages of a large book. The artist had sketched several kinds of outfits, but some of the sketched figures had taken them off and left the page, so they weren’t all that helpful.

“My grandma drew it. See those? Those are the ugly ones,” the witch said, pointing to another abandoned plate in the middle of the book, where the clothes lay crumpled in one corner of the page. The sketch also said Webster 1708, which Harry guessed resolved his issue of not knowing her name. “Even the sketches don’t like them. Now, for a court occasion it’s better to dress it up.”

It wasn’t that Harry didn’t understand that, in principle, but he felt a bit ridiculous thinking of himself in the kinds of finery Webster kept suggesting. Gold embroidery washed with actual gold? Seed pearls sewn down his chest? There was even one design edged with the pink and lime green feathers of something called a ‘fwooper’. “I don’t have pink in stock – it’s not a colour people like much now, and they’re fairly dear – but we could do orange instead,” Webster suggested.

“I don’t think I want to wear orange feathers,” Harry said distantly.

“Oh, well. Yellow ones? I think I still have some yellow ones?”

“Erm,” said Harry. “Miss Webster, I’m sorry, I know I’m being difficult, but I really don’t want to wear any feathers. Or gemstones, or, erm, precious metals, or –”

“Ah,” she said. Finally, after a pause, she curled the tip of her tentacle around the leathery cover and flipped the book shut.

“Sorry,” said Harry, reflexively. He was very aware that he’d already taken up a lot of her time, and now he was immediately vetoing every suggestion she made without offering anything constructive in response.

She ignored his apology. “Your Majesty, part of getting dressed up is that it denotes status. You won’t need to dress grand to prove you’re the King, everybody already knows that much. You get dressed up to show everyone else that you have command of the subtle messages we convey with our presentation.”

Harry glanced dubiously at her. There was nothing subtle about those fwooper feathers.

Webster sighed. “Think of it this way: you’re not dressing up for you. You’re dressing up to reassure everybody else. You don’t want to be uncomfortable, and you won’t be, in my clothes – but you still need to dress up a little.”

Harry thought about this and he reluctantly nodded, but it still left him with the dilemma of finding what clothing he could tolerate looking ridiculous in.

“We can make up a lot of the richness in layers of suitable fabrics,” Webster reassured him, if one could call this an assurance.

His clothing, in the end, was chosen entirely by Webster herself rather than Harry. She coaxed and prodded him into it with endless patience. Despite her initial suggestions, she stuck mostly to colours that weren’t overwhelmingly bright, and saved extravagances for embellishments.

“The benefit of loose layers is that we can use some of the grander embroidery I’ve already got done, which we wouldn’t have time for otherwise. See?” She showed Harry the hem of his mantle, which was stitched in tiny, beautifully-turned little stitches and knots, and which showed an odd scene of three small figures confronting a great monster with eyes all over at a bridge. The eyes seemed to drift out of the body of the monster and into the landscape, keeping watch across the whole scene. Harry peered along further and found that past one thin border the monster seemed to be handing out gifts.

“It’s a folk tale,” Webster explained cheerfully, running a finger of her regular hand over the delicately sewn edge of a bridge. “Death and the Three Brothers. It’s well known.”

Harry supposed that stories about death were probably well received among dark witches and wizards, but he did not find the scene especially comforting. He could admit it seemed like incredible work, however, especially done by hand. He nodded.

At one border, one of Death’s floating eyes rolled to meet his gaze, and then winked at him. He resolved to look elsewhere.

Webster did find him trousers, although they were nearly buried beneath the layers of tunic and several belts and sashes of different colours. The trousers were dragonhide, so strong that she’d had to smear it with a thick paste before she could cut it when she’d adjusted them for his height. All of it had to be adjusted, in some way, and although Webster with her dexterous tentacle arm was quick and extremely efficient, she still muttered around the pins in her mouth about taking shortcuts and cutting corners.

“This will do for tonight, and that embroidery is some of my better work, but you must come back, or at least write to me for better, your Majesty,” she insisted as she went.

Despite how gentle she had been in other ways, there was no mercy in her when she pulled him this way and that and commanded him to I beg your pardon but stand straight for Merlin’s sake, your Majesty!

When they were done, Harry stared into her large mirror. He wasn’t entirely sure if he liked what he looked like, but it the dark, warm-toned, heavily-embroidered layers and asymmetrical angles of his robes – cut and tapered, to show long slashes of proper trousers beneath, which he supposed was something of a compromise – were a step up from Dudley’s cast offs. Webster’s embroidery moved, sometimes obviously, and sometimes so subtly it seemed only like a trick of the light. Death sprawled across the hem of his mantle, and new vines grew quietly from fields of bones on his belts. The phases of the moon twirled very slowly in muted greys along the ends of his sleeves.

“So,” said Webster, interrupting his mesmerised staring, “can I burn these?”

Harry blinked and looked, finally, away from the mirror to see her wrinkling her nose down at Dudley’s old clothes.

He contemplated how annoyed his Aunt and Uncle would be. He could picture the exact puce of Uncle Vernon’s face, exactly how it would colour with rage.

“Sure,” he said brightly.

Webster took him at his word and flicked her long fingers at the rumpled pile.

They burst into bluebell flames at her feet, hissing and crackling merrily. Harry watched them go, heart beating fast between his lungs. He felt a little horrified by his own daring, like he wanted to take it back – but also excited. He didn’t say a single thing.

The clothes turned into navy ashes on the carpet in short order, and he stared for a second or two before Webster flicked her fingers at them again and they swept themselves up and fluttered right on out the door.

“I feel so much better,” she said, with a satisfied sigh, looking around her shop in satisfaction as though some terrible contaminant had been removed.

“Me, too,” said Harry, surprised to find how true it was. He had known, after all, that he did not like wearing Dudley’s old, huge, misshapen things. But perhaps he had not known quite how much. He turned back to his image in Webster’s mirror.

“I shouldn’t wonder at all,” said Webster, and shook her head. “Well, out with that lot of rubbish, and you can send back here when you need more clothes. I’ll set you right.”

Harry nodded. That seemed like a good idea. “Is that hard to learn?”

She looked confused. “What? Tailoring?” Her expression shifted a little, sour now. “Harder than people think.”

“Oh, sorry, no,” Harry shook his head. He’d been thinking of the plethora of Dudley’s vile old things that he still had at the Dursleys’ house. He was sure learning how to make meticulous embroidery was plenty difficult. “I mean setting fires.”

Webster laughed, startled. Her tentacle came to rest over her heart upon her skinny chest. “Oh, no, your Majesty. That’s easy as anything.”

Chapter Text

Setting things on fire was easy and Harry was great at it.

He couldn't do it the way Webster could, with a wave of her fingers and no words at all, but she took a look at his wand and helped him hold it correctly, and it turned out that setting things on fire was one of the easiest charms a witch or wizard could learn. There were three or four charms just for different kinds of fires, and the one Webster had used conjured flames the colour of newly-bloomed bluebells, which did not require fuel to burn unless you wanted them to. They cast eerie shadows across the walls of Webster and Distaff.

"Doing it without a wand is mostly a matter of practice," Webster said, once he'd gotten the hang of the spell. She was standing back, one arm crossed across her waist, chin resting gently on her tentacle. "You're a natural, Majesty; if you do it often enough I'm sure you'll be able to cast without words in no time."

Harry beamed up at her. It was something of a relief, actually, to take a moment out and learn something new that he could actually understand and accomplish without much difficulty. Everything else seemed... needlessly complicated.

And speaking of needlessly complicated-- “Webster, do you know where I can get, um, wine, for this meeting?” Harry wondered. Was it a meeting? Perhaps he should call it a party, or maybe just an 'event'. What was the difference, anyway? He felt lost, although he was nominally the person in charge and organising it.

“Hmm,” she mused, evidently not very concerned about an eleven year old asking about getting wine—not even enough to joke about it, apparently. The wizarding world was a little different in that respect, Harry gathered.

She tapped her chin with the tip of her tentacle. The lighting in the shop had gotten brighter, candles circling them more fully as Webster worked to dress him, and now he could see that she had a great many freckles. “The Curiosity Shop definitely has centaur made wine right now, saw ’em unloading it. You could get a couple of barrels there… The Leaky Cauldron will have casks, but they won’t sell it to anybody under seventeen.” She paused to roll her eyes. As the legal drinking age was not seventeen, Harry wasn't quite sure why this was the case. But he nodded anyway. “Agatha’s Legs has importing contacts, too, but in the short term, Vinum Vinters is about twelve yards that way–” her tentacle spread left, gesturing to the wall of her shop, “–and right up the stairs. It’ll cost you, probably, but can’t be helped.”

Harry chewed his bottom lip. “Thanks, I’ll ask there.”

“Want me to pick up a few casks up at the Leaky Cauldron?” Webster offered. “I’m not paying for them, mind, your Majesty. But I’ll pick them up for you.”

“Yes, please, if you don’t mind.”

And so Harry left Webster & Distaff in his new clothes, and they were already so comfortable, and he so preoccupied, that he did not much notice he was even wearing them. It was reasonably warm outside, but the clothes remained at exactly the temperature they’d been when he put them on, and he didn’t really notice this, either.

Vinum Vinters was a little more difficult to find than he’d expected. The stairs to access it were inside the mouth of a tiny side-alley, and by the time he emerged, puffing, at the top of them he felt as though he’d climbed up about five storeys, not two.

The store was cold and dark, lit only by three candles, which were melting slowly in piles of wax down the sides of large, lop-sided shelves. They flickered fitfully, little flames gleaming on the dusty curves of dark bottles and old wooden casks. The proprietress was cloaked and covered so completely that he couldn’t see her face, but when he described what he needed she was very helpful. She, too, had obviously never heard that the legal drinking age across the whole United Kingdom was supposed to be eighteen, because she didn’t even pause.

She did charge him rather a lot, but at least it included instructions for unpacking and unshrinking his purchases, which had had to be made small in such a way as to avoid ‘contamination or corruption of the wines’.

“Shrinking them makes them go bad?” Harry wondered, watching her make them teeny-tiny without so much as a hint of a wand. He was fresh off his brief and poorly-understood magic lesson with Webster, and wondered how that could even be possible.

“No, but it turns them all into chardonnay,” she shrugged.

“Oh,” said Harry. Wasn’t that also a wine? “I see.” He hoped this answer did not illustrate exactly how much he didn’t see.

The proprietress, if she noticed his confusion, didn’t bother to address it. “There you are now. Will there be anything else?”

He paid her—rather a lot, he thought, although life with the Dursleys had given him some indication that wine was an expensive sort of thing, so that didn’t seem strange—and then headed back down the many, many stairs. He was pleased that the trip had been, by and large, so painless.

St James’s Park was, according to the sign, open from 5 am until midnight, so at least Harry didn’t have to climb over anything to get in.

There were some muggles around, and no, he did not know how to make them go away. He picked a well-shaded spot beneath a copse of trees and far from the paths, tossed down a picnic rug and settled in to wait for Webster and the delivery of wine from the pub.

She arrived with a soft pop, right out of nowhere, only a few minutes later. Her tentacle was hidden beneath a dark cloak.

“Oh, nice spot,” she said, looking over the expanse of grasses and over a winding path, beyond which was the water. “This’ll look pretty come sunset.”

“Yeah,” said Harry, choosing to act as though this had been his intention all along. “Do you know the spell that makes muggles go away?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, yes. I suppose you’re subject to the Trace out here in muggle London, aren’t you? Poor thing. Here we go.”

Webster shoved her cloak back over her tentacle and used it to whip her wand out and describe a wide arc in the air.

“Let’s say, up to the water?” she said thoughtfully.

“Maybe a bit in, if you can?” Harry suggested. He definitely remembered seeing some animals or people or… something… that came out of the water at that party.

“Righto,” Webster agreed, and Harry had only a second to wonder if she was doing what he said because she agreed with the suggestion, or because of the Queen’s Command thing Borgin had told him about. He shut his teeth before he could say ‘but only if you want,’ because she’d already begun to wade in. The ducks noticed her, scattering, but the eyes of the passing muggles seemed already to skip right over her.

Harry did not hear what she said, but he did witness a woman talking on her mobile phone blink in dazed confusion, stop mid-sentence and wander away in the opposite direction, chewing thoughtfully on the chunky machine’s antenna. He guessed that meant that it was working.

If Webster did feel that she had been unfairly ordered to lay the repelling charms, she didn’t mention it or show it in any obvious way – she just flicked her wand again, dried her hems and returned to Harry’s tree where she unshrunk the casks she’d brought with her.

“Would you mind doing that with the rest of this stuff?” Harry asked her.

“Course,” she said cheerfully. “I was kind of dubious about a picnic but this’ll be nice, actually. I brought my own rug,” she added, pulling a huge patterned carpet out of of nowhere and unrolling it as the boxes, bottles and casks resized themselves around her. The rug unfurled across the green grass and she flopped over upon it. “Yep. Nice.”

At full dark, when Harry was getting bored out of his skull (Webster had rolled onto her belly on the rug to flip the pages of a novel with her tentacle while a pale light bobbed just over her head, and he felt it rude to interrupt her), people finally began to show up.

And by ‘people’, Harry meant… creatures the size of a red cap, with huge flappy ears and eyes that glowed like something you’d find deep in a cave. They arrived in a series of weird pops, and then half of them disappeared again after only a quick glance around.

One, an odd-looking fellow with a nose like a long, thin pencil, peered closely at Harry and crept toward him like he perhaps thought that Harry could not see him in the dark. He was wearing what seemed to be a truly filthy pillowcase.

“Hello,” said Harry, and the little thing froze. One of his ears twitched. It was, Harry reflected, quite spectacularly ugly. The soft, pale light Webster had summoned did not do it any favours, either, casting it in strange shadows and brilliant highlights and streaming its ugly little silhouette across the grass’s bumps and dips.

The creature did not take another step, but it leaned right forward, as close as it stood and said, “It is being true,” in a quiet voice.

“What’s true?” Harry wondered. “Do you need, erm, help with something?”

He only asked because the strange, ugly little person seemed a bit lost—relatable, that—but as he registered the words, the creature’s huge eyes widened even further and filled with tears.

“Harry Potter wants to know if Dobby needs help? Help from Harry Potter?”

“Erm,” said Harry uncertainly. “Not if you don’t want it?” he tried. Webster, a few metres away, coughed to hide what he presumed to be a laugh at his expense.

“Harry Potter asks to know Dobby’s feelings,” he choked out, and then began immediately to bawl into his pillowcase as his enormous eyes overflowed. It was loud and messy.

Harry looked on in helpless confusion and baffled guilt, until he finally found a distraction in the pop! of another small, bat-eared creature (rather more cleanly dressed) appearing with a floating pile of pillows and a large rug. It very pointedly did not even look at the sobbing one before it popped away again.

“Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house elf cry before,” said Webster, kicking her feet in the air.

The house elf continued to sob, heedless of her comment and apparently overwhelmed.

“I have,” said Borgin, approaching from the opposite direction to the one where the path actually ran through the park. He did not seem to be struggling with the grass or tree roots or lighting, and seemed not to have much use for his cane as an aid to walking at all; he just melted out of the darkness as a stern figure striding toward them. His robes, Harry noticed, were hemmed in a strange shimmery fabric that shifted colours in the dim light, ranging from a deep green to a glittering purple. “But it’s tacky to make other people’s servants cry,” he added, eyeing the elf.

“I only asked if he needed help!” Harry protested. “Should we do something?”

“We, majesty?” wondered Borgin.

Harry scowled. “Excuse me, Dobby? Are you all right?”

This just made the elf sob even more loudly. “Harry Potter is so kind,” he howled.

Noisily, he blew his nose on his pillowcase.

“Disgraceful,” muttered another elf viciously, and it, too, set down a pile of things and disappeared.

“Look, erm, perhaps you can,” stop crying, Harry thought savagely, but did not say it, “just sit somewhere quietly for a—”

There was an odd, whistling noise as he began talking, and then his last word was drowned out by a shriek and the tremendous thud of three human-sized bodies hitting the grass.

“I WON,” screamed a voice that Harry recognised as Thusnelda’s.

“You never did! You cheated, slattern!” snarled a voice with the same layered, multitonal quality.

“Oooh,” cooed Thusnelda’s voice loudly, “Sandravdiga is slow and a sore loser—!”

One harpy’s voice shrieked and one figure dove for another, and then they were all lost in a caterwauling ball of feathers and unholy howling.

“There is no way the muggles can’t hear that,” Webster muttered.

Borgin cocked his head. “Have you ever heard the wild hunt?” he said, after a second.

“No,” said Harry, who was not sure what this even was.

“Sounds just like that,” he opined.

“What, like… screaming geese?” Webster suggested, covering the ear nearest the noise with her tentacle. Her face was scrunched up in concern and distaste.

Borgin gave this suggestion a moment’s consideration. “Not… not like screaming geese,” he said. Then, “Majesty, I was going to recommend against a public park as a choice of venue, but upon reflection perhaps it is better that some elements not be invited indoors.”

“Fortune, imagine that echo,” Webster muttered.

Indeed, the harpies were extremely loud and very enthusiastic. There was no way they were all within the boundaries of Webster’s spell, either. Harry spared a thought for how normal people—muggles—might view them, but he discarded it quickly. The harpies had been avoiding notice, somehow, or what was apparently all of recorded history. They’d figure it out. Probably. Hopefully.

Chapter Text

While Harry had been watching the harpies, the sobbing house elf had taken himself off somewhere else, and Harry didn’t need to address… whatever that had been.

He was further distracted by the spectacle of a lean, ragged beast emerging from the water. It was sort f roughly horse-shaped, but Harry did not think he’d be in any danger of actually mistaking that for a horse any time soon: its coat ad an oily sheen and its mane seemed to be made all of seaweed, and its eyes burned in their sockets, intent and hungry. It was not the only strange creature emerging from the water, merely the largest. A few grindylows followed it, as did several things for which Harry had no name.

From the air, what he thought were witches and wizards (probably, unless they were also hags, or something else), appeared with sharp cracking sounds, in swirls of heavily decorated cloaks and mantles. Above, a cloud of bats streamed across the moon and stars, briefly dimming their light.

Borgin grabbed a grindylow by its horn and demanded—on Harry’s behalf, apparently—that he create some lights of their own, so in short order there appeared a series of bowls of water, growing with sickly greenish fire. And amid that, the hinkypunks lit their lanterns. The glow of the lights must have looked very odd indeed from far away and through the trunks of the trees.

“Oh, well, this is all right, isn’t it?” said Martha’s voice somewhere nearby. “Has anyone opened those casks? What’ve we got in them?” Although when Harry looked he couldn’t see her in the crowd.

Someone had indeed opened the casks, Harry noticed, and now several of the house-elf things were darting around, doling it out into conjured glasses. An enormous shadow fell over him, and Harry looked up to discover that Gork had arrived, although he had not the faintest idea how he’d gotten here.

“Majesty!” he boomed in his earthshaking voice, leaning down to see Harry more clearly in the dim light. Harry waved up at him, glad to be surrounded by friendly faces—even if one of them was almost as large as his whole body.

Gork wasn’t the only enormous thing to appear, however: several big, roughly person-shaped creatures had come along with one of the wizards. They had tough grey hide and stood as tall as two big men atop one another, and the biggest of them was harassing the harpies—or being harassed, perhaps, Harry thought, upon watching for a moment. The fast, shrill harpies were much too quick for his huge, swinging hands, but they kept flying lower and closer to provoke him. Whoever eventually got caught would probably be in a lot of trouble.

“Give it at least another half hour,” said Borgin, looking bored. His was perhaps not a ‘friendly’ face, but at least it was familiar. “If the mountain trolls bothered to show up, you’ll be sure to get more of a turn out than this.”

“Right,” said Harry, who did not in any way even know what he was supposed to be doing, and was therefore not averse to waiting to do it.

He looked out over the crowd of strange dark beings and creatures, even more numerous and diverse than they had been at his ‘coronation party’. Borgin thought they should expect more even than this?

Something soft and warm nosed at Harry’s collar, and he jumped and whirled, but nothing seemed to be there when he looked. It nevertheless lipped thoughtfully at his hair and snorted softly.

“Erm,” said Harry, feeling a bit silly. “Hello?”

He got another soft snort for his trouble, and a large, warm head shoved against his shoulder. A gentle and careful exploration with his fingers revealed a long, equine skull and soft pointed ears. Is mane seemed thick and entirely like hair, but its build seemed uniquely… skeletal? And, of course, he couldn’t see it at all.

“I don’t suppose you can make yourself uninvisible,” he suggested.

The horse-thing shook its head and made a noise that he could only interpret as laughter. He guessed that was a ‘no’ then.

“Well… it’s good to meet you anyway,” he said. He wasn’t sure if it understood, but considering the shapes of some of the things that could understand him, it seemed wiser to assume. It butted its skull against his shoulder one last time and withdrew. He felt the sweep of what seemed to be a large, leathery wing against his hair as it turned and departed silently, so… maybe it was not an invisible ‘horse-thing’ after all. It could have been anything.

Borgin turned out to be right, and although the crowd seemed large at the outset, it only grew.

A few creatures who arrived were very obviously not dark creatures—Harry knew it the moment he set eyes on them, the same way he knew how to breathe, or to blink, or to lift his limbs. The first of these was a goblin. He’d seen several at the bank, and he’d had no idea that he could feel that all the creatures around him were dark things until he looked over at the goblin and thought, not very happily: what is he doing here?

It felt like encountering a pothole in an otherwise smooth road.

He frowned. But maybe the goblin just wanted to see what was happening? He tried to ignore it, but his gaze drifted again and again to the goblin, who did not seem to have many conversational partners among the throng, either.

It seemed like Harry wasn’t the only one who could feel when something didn’t belong.

The second such surprise was a big, broad-shouldered, blond centaur with astonishingly blue eyes. Harry noticed him in the crowd as soon as he arrived—he had a gleaming palomino coat, and it stood out all glowing and pale against the muted shades of the rest of the crowd.

Their eyes met, and the centaur also looked as though the meeting gave him no pleasure.

“Mars has been bright for moons now,” he said gravely to Harry when he came within speaking range.

Harry tipped his head back and looked up, but to his eyes—which weren’t that great at long distances anyway—the night sky looked pretty much like the night sky. Nothing seemed any brighter or dimmer than usual up there to him.

“Erm,” he said. “All right?”

The centaur shook his head—not like a man saying ‘no,’ but rather like a horse, shaking off a bothersome insect. His pale golden hair, a perfect match for his coat, fluttered around his face and his nostrils flared. “Mars,” he said pointedly, “is the harbinger of battle. Rarely does it shine so bright for no reason.”

Harry did not roll his eyes, but it was a near thing. This sounded like the sort of thing that Aunt Petunia read about in her women’s magazines. With Neptune in the third house, all Sagittarians will be unlucky in their romantic life this week… (Harry rather thought that anyone married to Vernon Dursley was unlucky in her romantic life every week, actually, Neptune or no Neptune, but that was none of his business).

“You’re not a dark—creature, or being, or anything,” he pointed out, deciding to ignore that planets and stars stuff, “so why are you here?”

“I came to see what you would be.” His blue, blue eyes lingered upon Harry’s forehead, where his scar was. “Of my herd, I am the most interested in the doings of outsiders, and the stars indicate that we will not remain unaffected by what is to come. I will report back to my brothers about what I learn here. Meeting you here has… cleared up several questions I have had,” he said.

There was no indication in his tone that he felt one way or another about whatever he thought he’d learnt. And while Harry said, “Er, okay, then?” in uncertain response, he tilted his head and looked back up at the sky, frowning.

“Is it okay?” he mused.

“Right,” said Harry.

He was saved from having to make any further conversation because a soft, sweet and absolutely heart-freezing voice said from behind him, “If I might have a moment of your time, your majesty?”

The centaur flinched. His huge hooves skimmed the earth, kicking up clods of dirt and grass as he danced nervously in place. He was not that close, but Harry could nevertheless see the whites of his eyes.

Harry knew that soft voice—he’d heard it last night, and it was hard to forget—but he still shuddered at the terrible wrench it gave his heart deep in his chest. He turned around to see the blonde lady spirit he’d met the evening previous.

“Sure,” he agreed, and followed her away from the shivering, stamping centaur. Just in time, too, because a moment later a grindylow tried to ride the centaur and was swiftly and violently trampled.

“I am Lucille,” said the eyeless blonde in a whisper that did not hurt quite so much as her regular speaking voice. “Tonight, I wish to make myself known to you as the representative of my people.”

“Oh,” said Harry. “Right, yeah, of course.” What was he supposed to say? “Well, I’m Harry, and… I hope we can get on? I don’t know much about spirits, but I’d like to learn.”

“By ‘my people’,” Lucille clarified carefully, “I mean the banshees. I cannot speak for any other spirits.”

“Oh,” said Harry, who had by no means come to terms with ruling a bunch of humans, let along a hoard of scary mythological monsters, “All right, I’m pretty knew to this, so—”

She smiled, a terrible thing in her pale eyeless face, and sank to her knees in the dirt. Her long, silvery-blond hair pooled around her like a cloak.

“Um,” said Harry.

Lucille the banshee offered him her hand, pale as bone with long slim fingers and long, manicured nails. “My oath of fealty, your majesty,” she murmured.

“Right,” Harry agreed.

The next thing she said was long, and loud enough to be heard, even above the harpies’ screeching. From the way the crowd swayed and twitched, and a circle opened up wide around the pair of them as people scrambled to get further from Lucille’s voice, Harry gathered that he wasn’t the only one whose heart lurched unhappily in his chest in response. “On behalf of my house and my people, for whom I have authority to speak, I, Lucille Vivant, swear to be faithful to you, King of Darkness, in all matters of life and honour, and never shall I bear arms against you. This I do so swear in the fastness of my magic.”

Although the words seemed pretty simple, and the oath was itself quite short, Harry could feel the weight of it drape over him like a cloak in the night air. He wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

...Actually, there were a lot of things going on, and Harry was sure everything had multiple meanings, and he was uncertain about every one of them.

Lucille was still, head bowed, hair spread all around her kneeling form.

“Erm,” said Harry. “That’s good. Thank you?” It would probably have been better if it hadn’t come out sounding like a question.

It seemed to be enough for Lucille, though, because she rose easily to her feet. Her hair and cloak swung like curtains around her, and her eyeless face smiled down at him. “I shan’t take up any more of your time, my lord,” she murmured.

She glided away, and the crowd fell all over themselves to part for her.

“Have a good night,” Harry said, feeling that this was only polite. It seemed to amuse her, anyway, if the curve of her mouth was any indication.

After that bizarre interlude with the centaur, and this even stranger moment with Lucille, Harry found himself edging closer to Borgin despite the old wizard’s dark looks in his direction.

“You’re supposed to be meeting your court,” he pointed out. “Even if you didn’t bother to create a process to do it in an organised fashion–” Oh, was that Harry’s responsibility, too? Harry wondered if there were things that weren’t his responsibility, but he hadn’t heard of any of them so far. “– that’s no excuse not to do it at all.”

So far Harry had managed to make a house elf cryand hear nonsense from a guy who was half horse. The only part that hadn’t been awful was Lucille.

“Is there some reason why they can’t introduce themselves to me?” he wondered crossly.

“It’s rude,” said a half-familiar voice from above, and Harry craned his neck to see Aurelius – the vampire – in the tree above, perfectly balanced along a branch and apparently very relaxed, with one long leg dangling indolently in the air. Harry had not noticed his arrival, but he could see from the gleam of the glass that he’d been here at least long enough to rescue a bottle from the stores that Harry had gotten.

“Unlike eavesdropping,” Borgin said, “which is polite, apparently.”

Harry glanced back at him. Despite his casual voice and manner, Harry couldn’t help but notice that Brogin had a white-knuckled grip on his wand.

Aurelius ignored this. He gestured with the bottle. “You’re supposed to wait until you’re invited to speak or have someone else introduce you, not just barge into a conversation.”

Harry had regarded Lucille’s interruption more like a rescue than a ‘barging in’, but he took Aurelius’s point… in theory. In practice, Harry could see a lot of the grown ups trying to pretend they weren’t eyeing him, and a much greater number of fanged and furred and slimy beings waiting a lot more obviously.

Harry wasn’t sure he was really ready to imperiously demand the attention of any of the adult witches and wizards. He’d never had a good outcome from intentionally drawing the attention of an adult before, and usually at parties he had been strongly encouraged to stay silent and pretend he did not exist. There was no part of Harry’s childhood that meaningfully prepared him for this.

He grimaced, and looked away from the humans – mingling in their isolated little groups where no nonhumans seemed to venture – and looked towards the others, instead.

He was lucky he did, actually, because Thusnelda was flying for him like a missle and her earsplitting roar of, “INCOMING!” came so late as to be functionlly meaningless.

He leapt aside, she hit the ground and tumbled, cackling, and Borgin’s hat went flying. Dirt sprayed, fine and powdery.

The smell of freshly torn grass came up with her when she rolled to her taloned feet, kicking up a clod of earth. Close up, Harry could see that there were hits of metal in her feathers, where the long and sturdy ones had been painted with metallic gold. She wore chains that hung around her with little charms and gleamed in the low light. Her talons, too, were painted, a shifting multicolour metallic…

Harry guessed that meant that she, too, had ‘dressed for court’ even though she was looking pretty dishevelled now.

“Your Majesty,” she said, like she hadn’t nearly knocked him over.

“Hi, Thusnelda.”

“I run the united clans,” she said, “which is all ten of them on this island.”

“You mean, erm, England?”

Until he saw her wrinkle her face around her beak, he would have sworn the expression wasn’t even possible. But she definitely managed it. “Sure, I guess,” she agreed. “Anyway, the point is, you get my oath, I take care of the harpies, and – and anything about us goes through me. Not the others. Me. Doesn’t it, Sandravdiga?”

“Of course,” agreed a second harpy, who Harry had not even noticed in the chaos of Thusnelda’s arrival. It was the same one from earlier, when they'd been screaming at each other. Maybe that was playing, to them. They were totally different right now, though. “Sister, I wouldn’t –”

Whatever Sandravdiga would not, never came to be heard, because Thusnelda smiled and said, “Of course you won’t,” and Sandravdiga shut her beak with a sharp, definite click.

“I’ll… keep it in mind,” Harry said slowly. This seemed to constitute a binding agreement, because once again he felt that old dark magic drape over him, and from the shudder of Thusnelda's feathers and Sandravdiga's sudden stillness, they felt it too. It had not been so informal with Lucille, but the feeling was very similar.

Thusnelda breathed out and her feathers puffed up, shaking out the tension. “Well, great! Hey, you wanna play tag? You gotta broom or something?”

“Erm, no,” said Harry, even though the idea of flying with them seemed daring, dangerous and really fun. Way more fun than what he was meant to be doing. “Do you think you could introduce me to some people? You seem like you know a lot of people.”

Borgin made an exasperated noise in his throat, but Harry didn’t turn to look back at him, and since he was plainly trying his level best to avoid involvement with the harpies in any way, whatever protest he might have made went unheard.

Thuselda’s eyelashes fluttered over her golden yes, but then she laughed, sharp and surprised. “Can I,” she said.

He heard Borgin sigh as she pulled him away.