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Chapter Text

Harry was trying not to panic.  Just because he was standing in a London train station with no idea how to get to Platform Nine and Three Quarters was no reason to panic, was it?

At least the Hogwarts teacher who had come to visit him had talked Aunt Petunia into driving him to London in the first place.  She hadn’t been happy about it, as the family had no other reason to go there, but when the teacher had said, ‘Of course, I could collect him from here by Side-Along Apparation.  But a stranger holding onto your nephew’s shoulder and disappearing with him in broad daylight might cause comment, might it not?  What would the neighbours say?’ Aunt Petunia had just glared at him.

It had been – interesting meeting a real wizard, to say the least.  Harry had thought all wizards had long white beards like Merlin, but this one was beardless, with black hair, and quite young for a grown-up.  Harry had also thought that wizards lived in cottages in the middle of a forest, but this one lived in Cokeworth, the Midlands town with the grotty hotel that Uncle Vernon had taken them to in an attempt to escape all the letters to Harry that had been arriving at home.  The wizard had confronted them in the foyer before they had even had a chance to find their rooms, and Aunt Petunia had shrieked, ‘You?  You’ve got a nerve showing your face, after what happened to Lily!  If it hadn’t been for you, she’d never have found out she was a freak, never have gone to that freaks’ school, and…’

This had led to a three-way shouting match between Harry’s uncle and aunt and the wizard, which had been so full of invective that Dudley hadn’t even complained about missing his favourite television programmes.  By the end of it, the wizard, who turned out to be a teacher from a magical school, wasn’t sure whether to be angrier at Aunt Petunia for calling Harry’s mum a freak, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon jointly for not being good foster parents to Harry, or the Headmaster of the school he worked at when it came out that the Headmaster had dumped baby Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the middle of the night and disappeared without stopping to check whether Petunia and Vernon were actually going to take him in.  At least the three of them could agree that Harry’s dad had been an obnoxious, self-centred git, but Vernon and Petunia were highly indignant at the suggestion that they were bringing Dudley up to be exactly the same.

And so this had been the start of everything – finding out that he was a wizard, and that he had been offered a place at a magical school in a castle in Scotland, which could only be reached by a train which went from Platform Nine and Three Quarters, King’s Cross Station.  If he could work out how to get to Platform Nine and Three Quarters, that was.  And if the train hadn’t already gone.  His aunt had already left.  He didn’t have any Muggle money or a phonecard, so he couldn’t use a payphone to call Vernon and Dudley to tell them if he was stranded here.  He wished he hadn’t let Professor Snape talk him out of buying a pet when they’d shopped in Diagon Alley. At the time, it had made sense that an owl wouldn't have a good life in Privet Drive if Harry wasn't allowed to let it out for exercise.  But at least if he had an owl, he would be able to send a message to Hogwarts.

Maybe he would just have to go out on the streets and busk?  He could read up on a few of the simpler spells from his textbooks and try to make them look like conjuring tricks, until he could earn enough to buy food and a bed for the night.  Or maybe he’d get arrested by some sort of magical police for doing underage magic.  Well, if he was arrested, it would at least mean someone had found him.

He heard the sound of other people pushing trolleys laden with luggage like his own, and looked round to see a wrinkly old man smoking a pipe, and two red-haired boys who could have been his grandsons.  They looked about Harry’s age, but even skinnier and smaller for eleven than Harry.  One of the boys had curly hair and thick glasses like Harry’s, limped slightly and had a face half covered with eczema and half covered with acne, and was holding a box containing a cat.  The other had wild hair that stuck up even more than Harry’s, and was holding a box containing a small green reptile, who was complaining vigorously, though with a slight stutter: ‘W-w-want to get OUT!  Toothless does not b-b-belong in c-c-cat-carrier!  Toothless is not a cat!’

‘I know,’ said the wild-haired boy soothingly.  ‘We can let you out when we’re through the barrier.  Only you mustn’t eat other people’s pets, and you mustn’t poo in the train carriages.  I need you to tell me when you need to poo, and I can take you to the toilet, okay?’

‘Ssshhh!’ hissed the curly-haired boy.  ‘If Muggles hear you speaking Dragonese…’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the old man.  ‘The only person here who’s paying any attention doesn’t look like a Muggle to me.  Are you looking for Platform Nine and Three Quarters, too?’ he added, turning to Harry.

‘Yes,’ said Harry thankfully.

‘Got any family with you?’

‘No.  My aunt dropped me off, but she’s gone now.’

‘People are always in a rush,’ said the old man.  ‘My daughter and son-in-law didn’t have time to come down to London, so I brought young Hiccup, and his friend Fishlegs.  What’s your name, lad?’

‘Harry.’

‘Really?’  The old man blinked, as though ‘Harry’ was a very unusual name compared to Hiccup and Fishlegs.

‘Yes, really.  What’s your name?’

‘Most people just call me Old Wrinkly.  Now, let’s have a go at this barrier, shall we?  Remember, if you just walk straight at it, it gives way easily.  Much easier than facing a giant Sea Dragon, eh?  Who wants to go first?’

The two red-haired boys looked at each other nervously.  ‘I’ll go,’ Harry offered, trying to sound brave and feeling stupid.  He took hold of his trolley, closed his eyes, and ran forward, waiting for a crash and a sharp jolt of pain as he collided with the wall…

Instead, he collided with another boy who was standing with his parents and sister.  At least, presumably they were his parents and sister, though he didn’t look particularly like them.  In fact, the tiny man with a long pointed nose and spiky red hair who was sitting on his shoulder looked more like the grey-haired, bespectacled man standing beside them than the black-haired boy with a friendly, open face did.

‘Sorry,’ said Harry.

‘It’s okay,’ said the boy.  ‘Well, I’m not hurt.  Are you all right, Twigleg?’

‘Master, don’t you think we should move out of the way?’ suggested the tiny man worriedly.

‘Yes, you’re right, we should.  Only can’t you get used to calling me Ben, instead of Master all the time.  You’re my friend, not my slave!’

‘Yes, Master Ben.  But at school, I’m your familiar,’ Twigleg argued.

Harry and Ben moved aside as first Hiccup, and then Fishlegs, appeared through the barrier.  ‘C-c-can I eat the little man?’ asked Toothless.  ‘He’s not a pet.  He’s not a cat or a rat or a toad or an owl.  Can I eat him please-please-PLEASE?’

‘No, he’s a person, and you mustn’t eat people, either,’ retorted Hiccup.  ‘I’ve got some whelks, if you’re hungry.’

‘Is that a dragon in there?’ exclaimed Ben, delighted.

‘Yes, a very naughty dragon.  He wants to eat your friend,’ warned Hiccup.  Twigleg had already understood this, and was hiding in Ben’s jacket pocket.

Ben bent down to address the little green dragon through the walls of the cat-carrier.  ‘Twigleg is my friend.  He is also a very brave and clever person who is a friend to dragons.  He helped to defeat someone who was trying to hunt down and eat all the dragons in the world.  So you’re not to hurt him, okay?’

‘Oh, p-p-please!’ snorted Toothless.  ‘D-d-dragons don’t do gratitude!  We’re not p-p-puppy-dogs!’

‘Well, I’ve met much bigger dragons than you, and they know how to be kind and gentle, and don’t eat anyone,’ retorted Ben.  ‘Being kind doesn’t mean you’re weak.  It means you’re strong enough that you don’t have to show off by hurting people, because you’re not afraid.’

‘Can you understand what he’s saying?’ asked Ben’s sister, in English – which suddenly made Harry realise that the conversation that had been going on was in not-English, but a hissing, whistling tongue.  ‘I can understand what Firedrake and Maia say, just as if they were speaking German.  But what language are you speaking to this dragon?’

‘German – I mean English – I don’t know!  I was just talking to him in the same language he was using.  But I thought all fabulous beings could talk to anyone, anywhere in the world.  When I met Firedrake and Sorrell the first time, I didn’t even know they’d come from Scotland, because they sounded just as easy to understand as if they were speaking German.’

‘Many fabulous beings speak a common tongue, but some have their own languages as well,’ explained Twigleg, cautiously poking his head out of Ben’s pocket.  ‘This dragon is speaking the North Sea dialect of Dragonese.  I don’t taste good,’ he added to Toothless.  Harry laughed.

‘Can you understand that language, too?’ asked Fishlegs, looking curiously at Harry.

‘Yes – it’s not that different from snake language,’ said Harry.  ‘I found out I could talk to snakes a few months ago, at the zoo, when I got chatting to a boa constrictor.  My aunt and uncle were furious when I made the glass disappear, because they thought I’d set the snake on my cousin on purpose, to ruin his birthday.  But I just felt sorry for it, being a Brazilian snake who was stuck in an English zoo and had never even seen South America, and I thought that was like me, being an orphan and not even remembering my parents.’

‘I’m an orphan, too,’ said Ben.  ‘I mean, I’ve got cool parents now, obviously – and a wonderful sister.  And Twigleg is my family, too – and so’s Firedrake, even if I don’t get to see him much these days.  But until I was ten, I didn’t have anyone.  And neither did Twigleg.’

‘I’m a homunculus; I was created by an alchemist, hundreds of years ago,’ said Twigleg.  ‘I was one of a group of twelve brothers, created to be slaves to the monster he had created, who ate him, and also ate my brothers.  He let me live because he needed someone to polish his scales.  I didn’t manage to escape until last year, when I met Ben and decided to choose him as my master instead.’

‘I don’t have a family, but I don’t know if I’m an orphan or not,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘I was abandoned for being a runt.  I think a dragon looked after me for a while when I was a baby, until Hiccup’s granddad found me and took me in.  He’s a Seer, so that’s probably where Hiccup inherited his magic from, but I don’t know if I’ve got any magical ancestors.  Maybe a grandmother who was a witch, or something.’

‘It’s interesting,’ said Hiccup.  ‘I can speak Dragonese because I’ve learned it, because I used to spend hours listening to wild dragons calling to each other, before I got Toothless.  And if Fishlegs had been brought up by a dragon for a bit longer, he’d probably have grown up speaking Dragonese as a first language.  But I didn’t know there were people who could instinctively speak to dragons or snakes.  And dragons who can speak human language are quite rare.  What sort of dragon is Firedrake?’

‘He’s big and silver, with golden eyes.  He breathes blue fire that doesn’t hurt, but can heal wounds and undo enchantments.’

‘Curved horns?’

‘Yes – young males like him have curved horns, and the females have straight ones.  The older males have curly horns.’

‘A Silver Moondance!’ exclaimed Hiccup, delighted.  ‘I’ve only seen those once.  There was a big migration of them, last year.’

‘Yes.  That was Firedrake’s colony.  It was in the Muggle newspapers, but most Muggles assumed they were birds or bats.’

Harry was still getting used to the wizarding world, but he had gathered from his trip to Diagon Alley that some wizards were snobbish about having magical ancestry, and that almost all wizards, regardless of their ancestry, didn’t like to have much to do with the Muggle world.  ‘So – your parents – your adoptive parents – aren’t Muggles, then?’ he asked Ben.  The way Ben and his sister and parents were dressed was casual and not especially fashionable, but they wouldn’t look out of place in a Muggle street.  Hiccup, Fishlegs and Old Wrinkly looked somehow awkward, as if they normally wore horned helmets or animal skins and had only dressed up as 20^th century Muggles in order to be able to pass through London on the way to King’s Cross Station.

‘No, but we live in a Muggle town and work in a Muggle university,’ said Ben’s father.  ‘I’m an archaeologist – my name’s Barnabas, by the way – and Vita is an art historian specialising in Asian temple art.  Both jobs that give us a lot of cover for travelling the world studying magical creatures.  We’ve moved around quite a bit, over the years, so we didn’t know which school Guinevere – and Ben, once he came into our lives – would be going to once they turned eleven.  But I’m glad it’s the one which produced Newt Scamander.’

The train pulled in and the pupils had to scramble on board.  Harry, Hiccup, Fishlegs, Ben, Guinevere and their assorted familiars found a carriage together, with Fishlegs calling through the window, ‘Give my love to Horrorcow,’

Old Wrinkly called back, ‘I will. You did say she’s vegetarian, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.  Worst hunting dragon ever.  Don’t let Newtsbreath and Hookfang hurt her, will you?’

‘I’ll keep an eye on them.  But truly, she’s safer than Toothless or Fiddlesticks would be.  She may be gentle and peaceful, but she’s big enough that Stoick’s dragons can recognise her as a dragon and not a snack.’

‘I didn’t know you could bring dragons to Hogwarts – or homunculuses,’ said Harry, as the train pulled away.  He was sure his letter had only stated ‘an owl OR a cat OR a toad’ – but then, the letters were personalised, magically finding their way to wherever a pupil happened to be, so perhaps they magically filled in whatever creatures each pupil might bring?

‘Our letters said we could bring any creature up to the size of a cat,’ said Hiccup.  ‘Toothless is unusually small for a Garden Green, so he’s allowed in, but Horrorcow is nearer the normal size for the breed – she’s about the size of a field spaniel now, and she’ll probably be about the size of a Labrador when she’s finished growing.  But my dad’s hunting dragons are a good bit bigger, and vicious, and my dad doesn’t try to stop them chasing smaller dragons or cats, so we needed to bring Toothless and Fiddlesticks with us.  And obviously, we’re not allowed to bring riding-sized dragons.’

‘How did they come to live with you?’ Ben asked.  ‘We’ve got several other magical creatures living with us apart from Twigleg, who moved in with us when they lost their homes: grass fairies and hobgoblins.  I wish we lived somewhere we could start a proper sanctuary for fabulous beings, though – you can’t hide a big dragon like Firedrake, or even a Pegasus, in Manchester without people noticing.  So, did Toothless and Horrorcow move in with you like that?’

‘Uh – not exactly.  Where we live, there’s a tradition that when you turn ten, you have to catch a young wild dragon and train it to hunt for you, or you get thrown out of the tribe.  Fishlegs and I only just made it back alive with our dragons, but getting Toothless to do what I tell him was the hard part.  That’s still ongoing, isn’t it?’ he added to Toothless, who, let out of his cat-carrier to sit on Hiccup’s lap, had decorated Hiccup’s new Hogwarts robes with a steaming pile of dung.

Ben frowned thoughtfully.  ‘What do you think about living with Hiccup, Toothless?’ he asked.  ‘Do you like it?  Or do you miss living wild, without humans?’

‘F-f-food’s better, with humans,’ said Toothless.  ‘Got any m-m-mackerel?’ he added to Hiccup.

‘No, last time I offered you mackerel, you said it was gross and you only liked whelks,’ said Hiccup.  ‘So I brought whelks for the journey.’

‘D-d-don’t like whelks!  W-w-whelks are yucky!  Can I eat the c-c-cat?  Or T-T-Twigleg?’

‘No.’

‘You’re no fun,’ grumbled Toothless.  ‘T-t-tell me a joke.’

Hiccup kept Toothless regaled with jokes and lots of tummy-tickles until the food trolley came past and they could buy refreshments.  By now, Ben looked even more thoughtful.

Chapter Text

(excerpt from The (in)Complete Book of Dragons, by me, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, with help from my friend Ben the Dragonrider)

SILVER MOONDANCE

Silver Moondances were once common from East Asia to North-West Europe, but have now largely disappeared from Europe.  Their closest relative was the now-extinct Three-Headed Forester, and, like this species, they live on moonlight and do not always need to eat.  Moondances are thought to have evolved in Asia, but are part of the European family of dragons (lizard-like body, powerful wings, fire-breathing) rather than Chinese dragons (snake-like body, can fly without wings, possesses magical power to control water).

Silver Moondances are intelligent and benign but mostly avoid humans, though they are happy to share their caves with other humanoids such as kobolds or dwarves.  If you have the good luck to form a friendship with a Moondance, do NOT treat him/her as a pet to be trained.  Especially, do not attempt to train them by yelling at them.  Bribing them with food doesn’t work well, either, as they rarely eat.

STATISTICS

COLOURS: Silver.  At the end of a Moondance’s life, his/her scales darken on the surface and become opaque, making absorption of moonlight more difficult.

ARMED WITH: Basic teeth and claws.  Fire is not usually a weapon (unless you are a magical/alchemical construct, in which case the Moondance’s fire can undo the spell that created you).  However, Moondances who have been turned to stone and recovered possess a modified breath weapon which can turn other people or things to stone.  This may or may not be permanent and fatal – but if you are flying or swimming at the time, it probably will be.  4 for normal Moondances, 9 for post-Petrified Moondances.

DEFENCES: Possess back-spines and horns, but mostly rely on speed, staying out of sight, or, if necessary, roaring to intimidate attackers who may mistake them for dangerous monsters.  2

RADAR: Not radar in the normal sense, but can detect the presence of other magical beings.  Moondances also have a keen sense of smell, and trained Moondances sometimes help dwarvish miners by sniffing out veins of valuable minerals.

POISON: None 0

HUNTING ABILITY: None, since they are not carnivores.  In addition to absorbing moonlight, Moondances will sometimes eat plants or fungi, but are always careful not to eat sentient mushroom-folk. 0

SPEED: Variable.  Silver Moondances, as the name suggests, normally depend on moonlight to fly, which depends on (a) night-time (not sure why, as the moon can be visible by day – maybe sunlight counteracts its effects?), (b) a phase when the moon is visible in the sky at night, and (c) the moon not being obscured.  On a clear night at full moon, a young but mature dragon can cover vast distances in a single night, but a sick or out-of-condition dragon, or any dragon in the daytime or on a moonless night, cannot fly at all, and does not walk particularly fast.  However, Moondances can also gain energy from the dew that collects by moonlight on the dragon-flower.  Moondances who have drunk this can cross continents in days, flying day and night without stopping, and can also manoeuvre quickly in caves.  So Speed = anywhere between 1 and 10

FEAR AND FIGHT FACTOR: Extremely protective of those they love, and do not tolerate bullies.  6

SIZE: 8

DISOBEDIENCE: Not Applicable.  Silver Moondances are friends, not pets or servants.  If they let a human ride on their back, or agree to sniff out ores for a dwarf, it is because they want to be helpful, not because they are tame.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t long before Ben was cuddling Toothless on his lap, crooning lullabies to him in Dragonese, while Hiccup wrote in his notebook everything that Ben had told him about Silver Moondances.

‘Are you going to add a page on Toothless Daydreams?’ asked Fishlegs.

Hiccup looked at him oddly.  ‘But Toothless Daydreams don’t exist,’ he pointed out.  ‘You just made them up to convince my dad that Toothless was something cooler than just a Common or Garden.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘It’s just – he might actually be an exotic species.  He doesn’t look much like Horrorcow, does he?  It’s getting more noticeable as they get older.’

‘He’s beautiful, whatever he is,’ said Ben.  ‘Not as awesome as Firedrake, but – I’ve just never met a baby dragon before.  Mind you, Firedrake and his wife are planning to start nesting soon.  So I might be able to go and stay in their cave for a bit when their eggs are hatched, and help babysit the hatchlings.’

Hiccup and Fishlegs both shuddered.

‘What?’ said Ben indignantly.

‘Just – memories,’ said Hiccup.  ‘We nearly died the last time we went into a cave full of dragons.  I still have nightmares about that, sometimes.’

‘Last year I was in a cave helping two dragons fight a cyborg-monster who eats dragons,’ said Ben.  ‘I still have nightmares about that, too.  And about the roc that tried to feed me to its chick.’  Twigleg didn’t say anything, but from his expression he evidently felt the same way.  Still sitting on Ben’s shoulder, he huddled rather closer to the boy’s neck for reassurance.

‘Have you ever had to escape from monsters?’ Guinevere asked Harry.

‘Only my cousin Dudley,’ said Harry.  ‘The first time I did accidental magic was when I found myself flying up onto the roof when Dudley’s gang were after me.’

‘Sounds a lot like my cousin Snotlout,’ said Hiccup.  ‘My dad keeps trying to convince me I ought to choose Snotlout as my best friend rather than Fishlegs, but frankly the fact that Snotlout keeps trying to kill me puts rather a damper on things.’

‘You mean as in yelling, “I’m going to KILL you, you miserable little wretch, or…?’ asked Harry.

‘I mean as in he actually wants me dead,’ said Hiccup matter-of-factly.

‘Why?’ asked Ben.

‘Because while I’m alive, Snotlout can’t be my dad’s heir.’

‘I don’t think Dudley would actually want to kill me,’ said Harry.  ‘Not until my uncle buys him a proper punching-ball, anyway.  There hasn’t been anyone trying to kill me since I was a baby, and I don’t really remember that.’  (Unless that was where the nightmares of a high, cold voice, red eyes and a flash of green fire came from.)  ‘I only found out about it back in July: that someone came and murdered my parents when I was a baby, and I was the only survivor.  My aunt and uncle used to tell me my parents were killed in a car crash.’

‘My parents – my original parents – really were killed in a car crash, when I was three,’ said Ben.  ‘We were just driving out to a nature park for my birthday treat.  I didn’t understand that Mutti and Vati were dead, I just couldn’t see why we couldn’t get on with the journey and see the park with the wolves and the pot-bellied pigs.’

‘Did you have to go and stay with an aunt?’ asked Harry.

‘No, I didn’t have any family.  I was in an orphanage most of the time, then with a foster carer, but he was really creepy.  I think later on he was banned from fostering, after he was sacked from his job as a teacher for photographing a child changing into a werewolf.  But anyway, I ran away and lived on the streets, until I met Firedrake and Sorrel.  And then Nettlebrand – the cyborg-monster – started hunting us, and sent Twigleg as a spy, and Twigleg decided to join our side instead, which of course meant that Nettlebrand was out to kill him as well as the rest of us.’  He cupped his hand reassuringly around the homunculus.

‘Has anyone tried to kill you?’ Fishlegs asked Guinevere.

She shrugged.  ‘Just some of the creatures I’ve been to look for with my parents.  Gorgons are much nicer people than the legends claim, but Scylla and Charybdis aren’t.’

‘Well, that makes all of us, then,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘At least, I don’t have proof that my parents wanted to kill me, but you don’t put a baby in a basket and push the basket out onto the waves if you particularly want the baby to survive, after all.’

It was dark by the time the train arrived in Hogwarts.  There wasn’t any lighting on the station platform, and Toothless’s snorts of flame offered the only glint of light until someone – presumably a member of the Hogwarts staff – arrived, carrying a lantern, and boomed out, ‘Firs’-years!  Firs’-years follow me!’  The – giant, from what Harry could make out in the gloom – well, wizards were real, and so were dragons and homunculi, so why not giants, he thought wearily – was about to lead them off, when he caught sight of Toothless’s fiery breath, and bent closer. ‘Is that a dragon?’ he exclaimed, evidently delighted.  ‘Wha’s his name?’

‘Toothless,’ said Hiccup.

‘Wha’ sort is he?’

‘Common or Garden,’ said Hiccup, as Fishlegs said, ‘Toothless Daydream.’

The giant shook his hairy, bearded head.  ‘If tha’s a Common or Garden, I’m the Minister of Magic,’ he said.  ‘Tha’s a baby Gian’ Seadragon yer got there, lad.  They start off tiny, then grow massive, big enough ter swallow ships, and when they’re old, they get little as that again, see.  Wha’s your name, anyway?’

‘Hiccup, Professor.’

‘Not a Professor, lad.  Not even a proper wizard, stric’ly speaking.  I’m Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of Gates and Keys at Hogwarts, an’ very glad to meet you.  There aren’ many wizards that appreciate dragons, these days.’

‘Then you should meet Ben and Twigleg, sir,’ said Hiccup.  ‘They saved probably the last Silver Moondances in the world from extinction, last year.’

‘Ar, Moondances are right beautiful,’ said Hagrid.  ‘Always had more of a soft spot for Gian’ Seadragons, myself, though.’

As Hagrid chatted with Hiccup, Ben and Twigleg about dragons, Harry felt relieved that nobody seemed to have noticed him.  Professor Snape hadn’t said anything about it directly, but when he had taken Harry to Diagon Alley to pick up his school supplies, Harry couldn’t help noticing that everyone kept gasping, ‘Harry Potter – such an honour to meet you!’ and wanting to shake his hand, while Snape had scowled and made remarks along the lines of ‘Do you want his head to swell too much to fit into a pointy hat?’  At least, because Snape was as uncomfortable with the whole expedition as Harry was, he had hurried Harry through it as briskly as possible.  But now that they were at Hogwarts, Harry could see that he was likely to have to go through the whole rigmarole all over again.

In the meantime, Hagrid, while making even more of a fuss of Toothless than Ben had, guided them down a steep, narrow path through woodland, and then into a fleet of little boats which took them across a lake and through a dark tunnel into the mountain on the far side, beneath the castle which must be their destination.

‘Are you all right, Twigleg?’ Harry heard Ben whisper.

Twigleg was clearly trying not to let his voice shake as he whispered back, ‘Yes, Master.  It’s just – it’s the first castle I’ve been in since…’  His voice tailed off.

‘I know,’ said Ben.  ‘But it’s not that castle.  And we’re together.  I’ll take care of you.’

The boats landed on what felt like a shingle beach.  Hagrid located the owner of a toad which had hopped aboard the boat he and Toothless had been occupying (and which he had only just managed to prevent Toothless from eating), and they all stepped out of the boats and made their way up another tunnel, out into the open air, and to the door of the castle.

Hagrid knocked, and a tall, stern-looking black-haired witch, whom Hagrid introduced as Professor McGonagall, led them into a side-room.  ‘Welcome to Hogwarts,’ she said.  ‘The start-of-term banquet will begin shortly, but first, you will be sorted into your houses, which will be like your family within Hogwarts.  You will have classes with the rest of your house, sleep in your house dormitory, and spend free time in your house common room.  The four houses are called Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin.  Each house has its own noble history and each has produced outstanding witches and wizards…’

‘What, Hufflepuff?’ sneered a blond-haired boy.  ‘Name one distinguished wizard from there!’

‘At least Hufflepuff isn’t full of Death Eaters like Slytherin!’ retorted a red-haired boy with a rat sitting on his shoulder.

‘At least Slytherin isn’t full of paupers with second-hand robes and second-hand pets – was your rat cheap because of the missing toe?’

‘C-c-can I eat the rat?’ interrupted Toothless.

‘No,’ said Hiccup.  Toothless ignored him, and made a jump for the rat, who fled.  Both boys scrambled to grab hold of their pets.

‘Silence!’ snapped Professor McGonagall.  ‘What are your names?’

They mumbled their names apologetically.

‘Well, Draco Malfoy and Ronald Weasley, you have each lost ten house points from whichever houses you are sorted into.  Hiccup Horrendous Haddock, you have lost twenty points for failing to keep your pet under control.  I shall return when we are ready for you.  Please do not allow anyone to eat anyone before I return.’

She stalked out.

‘What are house points?’ asked Hiccup.

‘It’s a sort of contest,’ said Weasley, the boy with the rat.  ‘Whichever house is awarded the most points wins a trophy at the end of the year.  My brothers say Slytherin keeps winning it, six years in a row now, and it’s about time Gryffindor got a chance.’

‘Well, my father says with Gryffindors as biased as Dumbledore and McGonagall as Head and Deputy Head, it’s a wonder Slytherin is allowed to win anything,’ retorted Malfoy.

‘Is that all the punishment we get, though?  Just losing points in a contest?’ said Hiccup, amazed.  ‘At my old school, the teacher used to make us live on limpets for a week if we answered back.  And we all nearly got exiled – the whole of our school and the school from the next island – after Toothless picked a fight with my cousin Snotlout’s dragon and everyone else’s dragon joined in.  But then they forgave us after Toothless saved us from a Giant Seadragon that was attacking our village.’

‘T-T-Toothless is a hero,’ said the little dragon, his scarred chest swelling with pride.

‘I know,’ said Hiccup, tickling him behind the wings.  ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to eat other people’s pets, okay?  Even if they’re only rats or toads.’

Chapter Text

Professor McGonagall led the first-years into a huge hall, lit by thousands of hovering candles and by, somehow, a starry sky overhead, even though Harry could feel that they were indoors and not out in the chilly night air.  There were four long tables of students, which must be for the four houses, and a table for the teachers.  Harry noticed Professor Snape looking extremely displeased, though Harry wasn’t sure whether this was because of seeing Harry again, or because he was trapped in conversation with a decidedly creepy-looking man in a purple turban, or just because he didn’t feel ready to deal with another school year when he had barely recovered from the last one.

Harry wondered how they were sorted – was it just random, or did they have to take an exam, or did the teachers choose which pupils they liked the look of, like picking teams for a game?  But instead, Professor McGonagall brought out a wooden stool with a battered old hat sitting on it – and singing.  The hat sang about how Gryffindors were brave and chivalrous, Hufflepuffs were just and loyal and hard-working, Ravenclaws were wise and scholarly, and Slytherins were cunning and ambitious.  Harry wondered which he was.  He didn’t feel very brave, and while he got better marks at school than Dudley, that wasn’t saying much.  He certainly wasn’t very scholarly or hard-working.  Was he one of those who ‘use any means to achieve their ends?’  Maybe.  But he didn’t think he was all that ambitious – unless just wanting not to get chucked out of Hogwarts and sent back to Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia counted as ambitious?

Professor McGonagall called out their names in alphabetical order, and each of them in turn sat on the stool and tried on the hat, which called out the houses they should be in.  A girl with frizzy hair and buck teeth seemed to take the hat a long time to decide before it eventually called out ‘GR-R-RAVENCLAW!’

‘Greenbloom, Ben!’ called Professor McGonagall next.  Ben, with Twigleg on his shoulder, went over to sit down on the stool and put the hat on.  It twitched its tip before announcing, ‘Greenbloom, Ben – GRYFFINDOR!  Henbane, Twigleg – RAVENCLAW!’

Twigleg buried his face in his hands, and Harry got the impression that he was trying not to let Ben see him crying.  ‘I’m sorry, Master,’ he said, somewhat muffled.

‘It’s all right,’ Ben reassured him.  ‘We’ll still be best friends.  It’s just that we’ll be in different dormitories.  Like when we first moved in with the Greenblooms, and you slept in the cellar so you wouldn’t be kept awake by the sound of all those hobgoblins snoring.’

‘But – I’ve failed you.  I wasn’t brave enough to be in Gryffindor with you.’

‘Of course you’re brave!’ said Ben indignantly.  ‘You’re just not reckless like Lola.  I think you’re a lot braver than Lola, really, because you’ve got enough sense to know when to be frightened and you’re still brave anyway.  It’s just, you’re really, really clever, so there’s no sense in you not being in Ravenclaw.’

‘But – I should be with you.  I’m your familiar.’

‘The hat doesn’t think you are.  You’re not just a pet, like a cat or an owl.  The hat thinks you’ve got as much right to be a pupil here as I have.  I don’t know why it thinks you even need to go to school, though – you probably already know more than most of the teachers here!’

‘He probably does,’ said a silver-haired old wizard with a broken nose, who wore a bright magenta robe.  ‘Nevertheless, the hat evidently thinks Mr Henbane should have the chance to gain some formal qualifications.  Welcome to our school, both of you!’

‘Do you want a lift to the Ravenclaw table?’ Ben asked.

‘No, thank you, Master.  I’ll walk.’

Ben ruffled Twigleg’s spiky ginger hair affectionately, and Twigleg hugged Ben’s hand before climbing down Ben’s robes to the floor, crossed to the Ravenclaw table, and then climbed up a chair-back to leap onto the table next to Hermione Granger, the previous pupil to be called.

‘Are you a real homunculus?’ she asked, delighted.

‘Well done!’ said Twigleg.  ‘Not many people get that right first time.’

‘There was a picture in my Alchemy textbook,’ Granger explained.  ‘Hogwarts doesn’t teach Alchemy any more, so there were lots of second-hand Alchemy books returned to Flourish and Blotts, so I picked one up for some background reading.  It was horrible, some of the things people used to do homunculi in the olden days, wasn’t it?’

‘It was,’ Twigleg agreed, sounding uneasy about being stuck with someone who could clearly chatter non-stop.  Fortunately, Guinevere was sorted into Ravenclaw next, and, shortly afterwards, so was Hiccup.  Toothless crawled right inside the hat, but it didn’t offer to sort him into a house.

Neville Longbottom, the boy whose toad kept escaping, was sorted into Gryffindor, and Draco Malfoy into Slytherin.  ‘No-name, Fishlegs!’ Professor McGonagall called out next.

‘You’re actually named “No-name”?’ whispered Harry. 

‘I’m a foundling, remember?’ retorted Fishlegs, before limping over to the stool.  The hat didn’t need to scan him for long before calling out, ‘HUFFLEPUFF!’

A tall, thin boy called Theodore Nott and a smug-looking girl called Pansy Parkinson were sorted into Slytherin, then identical twins, Padma and Parvati Patil, were sent to Ravenclaw and Gryffindor respectively.  A girl called Sally-Anne Perks was also sorted into Gryffindor, and then it was Harry’s turn.  As Professor McGonagall called out, ‘Potter, Harry!’ he could hear the outbursts of excited whispers all over the school, and wished the hat would swallow him up instead of merely coming down far enough over his head to cover his eyes.

‘Hmm,’ the hat said.  ‘Interesting.  An orphaned half-blood, neglected and unloved, brought up by uncaring Muggles.  There’s anger in you, and fear, too.  The urge to prove yourself, a certain disregard for rules – and you can talk to snakes.  Not many wizards can do that, you know?  You’re only the second I’ve seen this century – and there haven’t been many since Salazar Slytherin himself.’

That doesn’t mean I have to be in Slytherin, does it? thought Harry.  Just because I can talk to reptiles?  My friends can, too, and they’re in Gryffindor and Ravenclaw.

‘Precisely,’ said the hat.  ‘Ben Greenbloom is the Dragon Rider because he is the sort of person who would drop everything to join a quest with a dragon and a kobold he’s never met before, so he’s a Gryffindor.  Hiccup Horrendous Haddock understands Dragonese because he had spent most of his spare time for years watching wild dragons and learning to understand their language, long before he ever got a dragon of his own, so he could have been either Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff.  But you are a Parselmouth by the gift of Salazar Slytherin himself, so – better make it SLYTHERIN!’

Harry walked over to the Slytherin table uncertainly.  Most of the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw tables, and quite a few of the Hufflepuffs, were hissing him now rather than cheering, and the Slytherins were looking at him uncertainly as if they weren’t sure they wanted him.  Draco Malfoy smiled.  ‘Good decision,’ he said.  ‘You wouldn’t want to be with those strange islander boys, or that peculiar boy with the thing like a Bowtruckle on his shoulder.’

‘Yes, I did.  And I still do,’ said Harry hotly.  ‘You’re supposed to be my “family” here.  Well, fine.  I don’t like my real family, either.  Hiccup and Fishlegs and Ben are my friends, and so’s Twigleg, and he’s a person, not a thing!’

‘And it’s not a Bowtruckle, it’s a homunculus,’ said a red-haired boy (another one).  ‘Didn’t you hear that girl say?’

‘Oh, shut up, Icicle.  And as for that girl – what sort of a name is Granger?  She’s not one of our sort, at all.  They shouldn’t let mudbloods in, should they?’

The boy called Icicle scowled.

‘What does mudblood mean?’ asked Harry.

‘People who aren’t of pure blood,’ said Malfoy.  ‘You’re a Potter, so I suppose the hat thought you were pure enough, even though my father says your mother was Muggle-born.’

Icicle looked as though he was seething with fury.  ‘Knock it off, first-year,’ growled a big, muscular older boy.  ‘Blood isn’t everything.  I mean, Icicle here’s the son of a Squib and a Muggle, but that doesn’t stop him being the best Keeper we’ve had in years.  If you want to win, be pragmatic.’

Ronald Weasley was sorted into Gryffindor, to the cheering of much of the table, with older boys who were apparently his brothers thumping him on the back.  In fact, Harry noticed that the identical third-year twins weren’t so much clapping their young brother on the back to applaud him as taking the opportunity to punch him.  The fifth-year prefect who solemnly shook his hand looked genuinely pleased to welcome him, in a reserved sort of way.  Icicle sighed with disappointment.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the big Slytherin to Icicle.  ‘Weasleys aren’t all bad, we know that.  You’ll just have to get your revenge on your cousins in the next Quidditch game.  And did you say your little sister was showing signs of magic, too?’

‘Yep,’ said Icicle, proudly.  ‘Not sure Mafalda’s going to be into Quidditch, though.  At the moment she wants to be a spy when she grows up.’

Finally, an elegant, strikingly good-looking boy, Blaise Zabini, arrived at the Slytherin table.  There was just enough space for him to distance himself by a couple of places from either Harry or Icicle, with a gaunt, bloodstained ghost occupying the seats between them (Hogwarts, not surprisingly for an old castle, seemed to have lots of ghosts).  ‘Snob,’ muttered Icicle in an aside to Harry, but making sure it was loud enough for Blaise to hear.  ‘I’d rather be Muggleborn than the son of a serial killer, anyway.  His mum’s bumped off seven husbands so far.’  Blaise studiously ignored them, staring into space much as the ghost beside him did.

‘I’m Marcus Flint,’ announced the older boy.  ‘Captain of the Slytherin Quidditch team.  Gryffindors pride themselves on being braver than anyone else, so it’s a great way to rub it in their faces when we beat them at a risky game.  And as long as the referee isn’t completely biased, it’s harder for the school to deny our achievements in that than in anything else.  It’s usually Madam Hooch, and she’s not too bad.  Professor McGonagall – she’s the deputy head, and she’s the Head of Gryffindor – hates all Slytherins because she reckons we cheated her of a goal back when she was a girl, which must’ve been practically back in Merlin’s time.’

‘Who’s the Head of Slytherin?’ asked Harry.

‘Professor Snape.’

Harry was surprised.  Most of the teachers at Hogwarts seemed to be quite old, whereas Professor Snape seemed to be one of the youngest, except maybe the man in the purple turban.

He wondered what having Professor Snape as his ‘family’ at Hogwarts would be like.  It couldn’t be any worse than life with the Dursleys, but he wasn’t sure it would be much better.  When Professor Snape had taken him up to London to get his school supplies, it had been awkward, but they had coped with it by being as brisk as possible and hoping they wouldn’t have to see too much of each other at school.  Even though Professor Snape had evidently known Harry’s mother, and Harry wished he could have asked him, ‘What was my mum like?  Were you friends?  Did you know my dad as well?’ he hadn’t felt comfortable enough to ask.

He looked at Professor Snape now, still talking to the man in the purple turban.  Snape looked directly at him – and a pain that felt like a bolt of fire shot through the scar on Harry’s forehead.

‘You all right?’ asked Flint.

‘Just – hungry,’ said Harry, which was true enough, as it happened.

‘Food will be here in just a moment.  Oh, and this is the Bloody Baron.  He’s our ghost.  The twit in the ruff over there is Nearly Headless Nick; he’s the Gryffindor ghost.’

At this point, plates of food materialised on the table.  Harry piled his plate with meat, roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, as did Flint, while Blaise Zabini fastidiously kept to peas, carrots and chicken.  Harry still had a mass of unanswered questions, but for now, he was very relieved to be able to avoid conversation and concentrate on eating.

Chapter Text

After dinner, Professor Snape led the Slytherin pupils along yet another maze of underground passages before stopping at a blank stretch of stone wall.  ‘Observe,’ he said.  ‘The common rooms to the other houses are guarded by portraits which demand passwords, or doors with talking knockers which ask riddles.  What are the disadvantages to this?  Potter?’ he added, ignoring Icicle’s waving hand.

Harry yawned.  He had eaten rather too much at dinner, from roast beef and Yorkshire pudding to treacle tart and rice pudding, and he felt on the verge of turning into a pudding himself.  ‘We could be stuck out here if we can’t answer the riddle?’ he suggested.

‘And?’ demanded Snape.

‘It’d get cold sleeping on the floor?’

‘It’d get cold sleeping on the floor?  Is that the worst problem your minuscule brain can imagine?  You don’t think that, for example, not being able to get out of the way of a stray Acromantula might be a greater inconvenience?’

‘What’s an Acromancer-thingy?’ asked Harry.  He knew his answer hadn’t been a good one, and there were worse things than being cold – what if someone like Dudley came hunting him? – but how did Professor Snape expect him to know what the main dangers were at Hogwarts when he hadn’t even heard of Hogwarts until a couple of months ago, and had never been here before?

‘The sort of creature that a Gryffindor would think makes a good pet,’ was all Professor Snape would say.  ‘Someone else, then – Malfoy,’ he added, again ignoring Icicle.  Apart from getting cold sleeping on the floor, what are the disadvantages of having a portrait or a talking doorknocker marking the entrance?’

‘People from other houses can see where it is,’ said Draco Malfoy primly.

‘Exactly.  Here, as you can see, there are no obvious signs that this stretch of wall is different to any other, but if you take note of the precise irregularities in the stonework, they will become familiar to you.’  Professor Snape made each of the first-years stand in front of the patch of wall in turn, committing its markings to memory.  Harry noticed a crack in the stone above him that looked like a snake.  That would do for a landmark.

‘Remember that the relevant stretch of wall will not always be in the same place,’ Professor Snape continued.  ‘You will need to stay alert in looking out for it, wherever it appears.  Now, what is another disadvantage of sentient portraits or doorknockers as guards?  Weasley?’

Icicle Weasley looked relieved at being allowed to add something at last.  ‘They can be fooled,’ he said.

‘Precisely.  Portraits are as eccentric as whoever was their subject was in life, or more so.  Some are naïve enough to let in any stranger who can find out the correct password; others can be intimidated by the threat of paint-stripper.  A guardian who asks riddles might let in anyone whose answer strikes it as clever, original, or amusing.  This wall, by contrast, has no imagination, no fear, and absolutely no sense of humour.  It does have a good enough visual memory to recognise who is or is not a member of Slytherin house, but, in case of intruders disguising themselves, it will also demand the password, which is currently – Rincewind!’

Icicle sniggered at this, while everyone else looked baffled.  The hidden door slid open, revealing a long, low underground room with rough stone walls and ceiling, lit by green lamps hanging from chains.  There were hard wooden chairs around the fireplace, with the backs decorated with knobbly carvings of strange beasts: dragons and snakes and three-headed snakes and something that looked like a cross between a pelican and a flying horse, and many more that Harry could not put a name to.  He wondered how many of them really existed, and perhaps even lived in the grounds of Hogwarts.  Mainly, though, he wondered why the common room couldn’t have cosy armchairs and sofas.

Professor Snape gestured to all of them to sit.  Harry felt a strange squirming behind him, and realised that the carved wooden dragon was giving him a massage.  It felt much more pleasant than he had expected, and some of the tiredness left him as the dragon wriggled its long, snaky body – very different in shape from Toothless – against his shoulders.

‘Welcome to Slytherin,’ said Professor Snape.  ‘How many of you expected to be sorted into this house?’

Virtually everyone except Harry, Icicle, and Flint raised their hands.

‘Oh?’ said Professor Snape, rounding on Harry.  ‘And why not?  Because you had been told that only evil people become Slytherins?  Did you dream of being a heroic Gryffindor instead of a villainous Slytherin?’

‘No!’ said Harry angrily.  ‘I’d never heard of the houses or sorting until tonight, so how was I supposed to expect anything about which one I’d be in?  All I knew was that when the hat started calling out who would be in what house, my friends were sorted into Ravenclaw and Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, so I thought maybe I’d be with one of them.’

‘The people who were your friends,’ Professor Snape corrected him.

‘They’re still my friends!’ Harry retorted.  ‘Just ’cause we’re in different houses doesn’t have to change that!’

He felt awake enough by now to want to have an angry argument, but instead of being angry, Professor Snape just looked unbearably sad.  ‘Yes,’ he said.  ‘When I was eleven, I used to believe that was possible, too.

‘In theory, Hogwarts is divided into four houses.  In practice, as even any first-years who were paying attention will have noticed, it is divided into two factions, one of which is three times the size of the other.  As Slytherins, you will find that everyone in Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and particularly Gryffindor, will regard you as evil, disgusting, and beneath contempt, fit only to be used as target practice for their hexes.  Therefore, as a matter of survival if nothing else, all of you have a responsibility to take care of each other, because no-one else will.  Never be alone, or you will make yourself a target.  Never accept anything that a member of another house offers you to eat or drink without testing it for concealed potions.  And finally – you may know that Slytherin has a higher proportion of pure-blood wizards than the other houses.  This does not mean that half-blood and Muggleborn Slytherins are any rightfully less members of this house.  All of you are here because the hat chose you for Slytherin, and you will treat each other with respect and loyalty.’

‘What if they’re part troll?’ drawled Draco, looking pointedly at Flint.

‘Exactly the same applies.’

‘Well, I suppose part-troll isn’t as bad as part Squib accountant,’ Draco conceded, turning his eyes to Icicle.

‘I’d rather be either than the son of a cowardly Death Eater who wriggled out of going to Azkaban by pretending he’d been Imperiused and wasn’t responsible for his actions,’ retorted Icicle.

‘SILENCE!’ roared Snape.  ‘Have any of you imbeciles been paying attention to anything I’ve said?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ yawned Draco.  ‘We need friends to watch our backs in case any of those scary Gryffindors sneak up behind us.  Well, I’ve already got my two minions,’ – he gestured to Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle – ‘and Potter doesn’t think he needs friends in Slytherin because he’s got friends in the other houses…’

‘That’s not true!’ retorted Harry.  ‘I don’t not want to be friends with you because you’re a Slytherin.  I just don’t want to be friends with you, Draco, because I don’t like you.  Okay?’

‘Yeah, lots of us don’t like you,’ Icicle chimed in.

‘You really weren’t listening, were you?’ said Flint.  ‘It’s not about liking each other or not.  It’s about needing to work together as a team.  You’re bickering like little kids, because you’re tired and you’ve had too much sugar.  So, everyone in third year and under, go to bed now, or you’ll be in no shape for anything in the morning.  We fourth and fifth years will be along in half an hour.’

Yawning and grumbling, the younger pupils made their way to the dormitories and fell asleep.  Harry dreamed that he was re-taking his sorting, and this time pleaded with the hat, ‘Not Slytherin.  Not Slytherin.’

‘Not Slytherin, eh?’ said the hat.  ‘Well, in that case, better make it RAVENCLAW!’  It turned into Professor Quirrell’s turban, coming low over Harry’s face and covering the scar on his forehead, except that Harry could feel that it wasn’t just a scar but a second face, which hissed, ‘Yesssss!’  There was a flash of green light, and Harry woke up, screaming.  His scar was searing with pain again, but he tried to stifle the scream.  The others in the dormitory would laugh at him, he knew.

He felt something patting his hand.  ‘I’m all right,’ he mumbled crossly.  Sympathy would be even worse than being laughed at.

‘Harry Potter is not all right,’ said a squeaky voice.  ‘Harry Potter needs his friends.  Dinky will take Harry Potter to his friends now.’  A small hand grasped his more firmly, and Harry felt as if his body had been separated into atoms and sucked one by one through a wormhole.  He emerged in a warm, candle-lit place which was obviously a kitchen.  Dinky, the creature who had taken his hand, he could now see, was a humanoid who looked a bit like Yoda, but with bigger eyes.  He – or she? – was even smaller than the goblins Harry had met at Gringotts (but a lot bigger than Twigleg), and wore a tea-towel tied around one shoulder and slung rakishly under the other arm.  There were many more of these around, some washing dishes, others preparing food, including a dish involving smoked haddock, curry spices, hard-boiled eggs and rice, which smelled delicious even though it was obviously a long way off being ready.  A few napped, snuggled together in big comfortable armchairs that looked the right size for a large human and could easily seat four or five snoring whatever-they-were.

Sitting on the floor beside a table which had obviously been built at Dinky-height rather than human height were Ben (with Twigleg on his shoulder), Hiccup (with Toothless snoring loudly on his lap), and Hermione Granger, the girl who had been sorted into Ravenclaw just before Twigleg.  Ben and Twigleg looked cheerfully at home, if sleepy.  Hiccup looked wide-eyed and curious.  Granger looked shocked and indignant.

Dinky offered them tea and scones, even finding a thimble as a teacup for Twigleg.  Everyone gratefully accepted except Hermione.  Toothless woke up long enough to try to steal a piece of smoked haddock, but when the creature who was preparing it offered him some, he mouthed it for a moment, spat it out on the floor, and went back to sleep.

‘Couldn’t you sleep either?’ Ben asked Harry.

‘I did, at first.  But I woke up, and, uh, Dinky decided I needed to come here.’

‘Me, too,’ said Hiccup.  ‘I was having a nightmare about my archnemesis.’

‘Your cousin?’

‘No, worse than Snotlout.  Snotlout just wants me to die because we’re rivals.  And most of the predatory dragons I meet just want to eat me because I’m edible.  But Alvin keeps trying to kill me because he wants revenge because he thinks everything in his life is my fault because, let’s see… before he met me, a trap that had been laid over a hundred years ago by an ancestor of mine cut his hand off, and apparently being the descendant of Grimbeard the Ghastly means I inherit the blame for doing that; then when Alvin got eaten by a Strangulator because he’d trapped us in a cave while searching for treasure, Fishlegs and I didn’t stop to cut him out of the Strangulator after I killed it because we assumed he was already dead; and then when he kidnapped us to force us to fight as gladiators and we had to escape in a balloon and he tried to climb up to the balloon to attack us, we threw him down.  Every time you’d think he must be dead, he keeps coming back.’

‘Like Nettlebrand,’ said Twigleg.  ‘I still have nightmares about him, too.’

‘So do I,’ said Ben.  ‘Was that what woke you, tonight?’

‘No, Master.  I just couldn’t sleep, with Toothless snoring.  He snores even louder than the hobgoblins at home.’

Hermione glared at Ben.  ‘You keep house-elves like these to wait on you, too?  And you expect Twigleg to call you “Master”?’

‘Well, they’re kobolds, but I think they’re a slightly different species to Dinky and Lolly here,’ said Ben.  ‘But they look more like these ones than like the goblins at Gringotts, or forest brownies like my friend Sorrel, or leprechauns or Dubidai.’

‘Brownies is lazy!’ snapped Dinky.  ‘They does one good turn a day, no more, if they works for humans.  And most of them prefers dragons.’

‘Why should you have to work for humans?’ asked Hermione indignantly.  ‘Why should you have to work through the night?’

‘House-elves likes the night,’ said Dinky.  ‘Only a few of us has to work the day shift, poor souls,’ he added, gesturing to the group curled up on the armchair.  ‘But we takes turns.’

‘But why do you have to work for humans at all?’ Hermione repeated.

‘Not for humans – not here!’ retorted Dinky.  ‘Some of us, yes, we belonged to wizards before – bad wizards.  Some hurt us, made us hurt ourselves.  Sometimes, was even given clothes, if masters very angry with us.’  The elves looked sympathetically at those of their number who were wearing an item of human clothing – perhaps a hat or a vest – while the others wore scraps of cloth such as tea-towels or pillow-cases.  Harry noticed that many of the elves had old scars or ragged ears, but they didn’t seem to regard being tortured as nearly as terrible as being made to wear clothes.  ‘Others ran away from bad masters, came here, get Albus Dumbledore to buy us free from old masters.’

‘But are you free?  If Professor Dumbledore bought you, doesn’t that mean he owns you, now?’

‘No!  Hogwarts house-elves does not belong to a man!  Hogwarts house-elves belongs to the castle!  Brownies belongs to the forest – most goblins does too, except the ones at Gringotts – Dubidai belongs to the mountains, nisses to farms, klabautermanns to ships, knockers to mines, and hobs and house-elves belongs to houses.  Humans comes and goes, but house-elves belongs to here.  And we belongs to each other.  In a wizard’s house, maybe just one house-elf.  Here, we has our tribe.’

Hermione stayed to argue politics for a while longer, but all the other visitors were soon yawning.  Harry fell asleep, and woke up to find himself back in his bed in the Slytherin dormitory.  He might have thought the whole thing was a dream, if it hadn’t been for the scone crumbs on his pyjamas.

Chapter Text

When Harry woke, he found that someone (presumably Dinky or another house-elf) had left a piece of parchment with his school timetable on his bedside table.  Professor McGonagall had said that children were grouped by house for their classes, but what she hadn’t said was that they usually doubled up with one of the other houses.  Slytherins were mostly with Gryffindors, which was strange if they were supposed to be traditional enemies, but at least it meant he would have plenty of time with Ben.  On the other hand, it also meant they would have to hear a lot of Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy bickering.

Presumably that meant that Ravenclaws were mostly with Hufflepuffs.  It was just as well that Fishlegs and Hiccup would mostly be together, as they were so close that they were more like siblings than Ben and Guinevere were – but on the other hand, it also meant that Twigleg wouldn’t have much time with Ben.

Oh well, they had been told to spend their free time in their house common rooms, but nobody had said there was actually a rule that everyone had to sit with members of their own house to eat, had they?  Harry put on his hat and robe (which he noticed were now trimmed with Slytherin green and silver, again presumably by the house-elves), hurried to the Great Hall, and headed for the Ravenclaw table, where dishes of breakfast were already appearing.  There were only enough plates, cutlery and chairs set out for the number of Ravenclaws present, so Harry fetched his from the Slytherin table.  Fishlegs, presumably catching sight of this (though he had such a bad squint that it was hard to tell), fetched his own supplies from the Hufflepuff table.  Ben got up to sit next to his sister (and Twigleg, who was sitting on the table nibbling the edge of a cornflake), swapping places with Padma Patil who wanted to sit with her own sister at the Gryffindor table.

‘Are you sure this is allowed?’ asked Hermione Granger, yawning.  She looked as if she hadn’t gone back to sleep after the midnight trip to the kitchens.  Toothless was curled up asleep on Hiccup’s lap, not even bothering to scrounge or steal kedgeree, which tasted even more delicious than it had smelled the night before.

‘Nobody said we can’t eat together,’ said Harry.

‘Nobody said we can’t be together outside, either,’ said Hiccup.  ‘I need to take Toothless out at least twice a day anyway.’

‘And they can’t object to the rest of us going out with you to get some fresh air,’ said Harry.  ‘At my old school, they always made us go out at playtime unless it was pouring.’  Dudley, whose brain never engaged for any other purpose, had been an expert on finding opportunities to beat him up in the playground without attracting the dinner ladies’ attention.

‘At our old school, nearly all our lessons were outdoors anyway, even in a blizzard,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘It always brought on my bronchitis.  But the teacher was usually still in shorts and bare feet, even in the snow.’

‘I’ve seen him wearing a coat, in that really bad winter a few years back,’ Hiccup reminded him.  ‘It made him look like a bear, remember?’

‘And we can study together in the library,’ added Hermione, cheering up.  ‘I’ve been a member of the public library back home ever since I was a baby – my parents used to take me there every week to choose picture-books – but I’ve never been in a magical library before.  I read a story once about a magical university where the head librarian had been Transfigured into an orang-utan by accident and refused to let anyone turn him back, because he liked the way people were terrified enough of him to bring their books back on time.’

‘The nearest librarian in our area might as well be an orang-utan,’ said Hiccup.  ‘I’ve never been into his library, though.  It’s called the Public Library, but it’s in a heavily guarded castle and no-one is allowed in.  The only reason we had a book on our island was that my teacher broke in once and stole it.  And it was a really disappointing book, too,’ he added disgustedly.  ‘It’s supposed to be about dragon-training, but none of it worked on Toothless.  I’m going to write my own version, when I grow up.’

‘Maybe that library is full of dangerous magical books, and it’s guarded to protect people from them,’ suggested Hermione.  ‘In the story I was reading, some of the magical books ate people who tried to read them.  The hero was a wizard who only knew one spell, because he’d once read a book with a spell so powerful and dangerous that it took up all the space in his head and wouldn’t let him learn any other spells.’

‘My parents used to tell me stories about a girl from a magical family who lived in a castle with a library of magical singing books,’ said Guinevere.  ‘But their books were much friendlier.’

‘No, where we come from, they just think reading or learning anything is dangerous,’ sighed Hiccup.

‘My aunt and uncle are a bit like that,’ said Harry.  ‘Our teachers used to take our class to the library in the High Street to borrow books, but my aunt wrote a note to the school saying the teacher wasn’t allowed to let me borrow fantasy stories in case they gave me unrealistic ideas.  My cousin isn’t into reading – he just likes computer games and television – so my uncle said I was a nerd if I ever read a book.  But somehow, it was okay for Dudley to watch cartoons about heroes with superpowers, or a young Ewok training to be a shaman, but if I liked them, my aunt and uncle just complained about how ridiculous they were.’

‘I think books are only dangerous if you’re Twigleg’s size and you’re trying to climb down from a shelf carrying a book bigger than yourself,’ said Ben.  ‘You are allowed to ask people for help, you know,’ he added directly to Twigleg, ruffling the homunculus’s spiky red hair.

‘I’ve been handling books in an alchemist’s library for more than four hundred years,’ Twigleg reminded him.  ‘Most of those were much bigger than modern books.’

‘I know.  You’re strong for your size, and you’re good at being independent.  It’s just – you’re my friend and I don’t want you to get hurt.’

‘Yes,’ said Twigleg, rubbing his head more closely against Ben’s hand, like a cat.  ‘Friends.  Until I found you – after my brothers were eaten – I didn’t have any friends.  Except books.’

‘I didn’t have any friends at my old school, either,’ said Hermione.  ‘Except books.’

‘I didn’t have any friends, until yesterday,’ said Harry.  ‘And now you’re apparently not supposed to be friends with me – especially Ben – because Gryffindors and Slytherins have to be enemies.  Did your head of house give you that talk last night, as well?’ he asked Ben.  ‘About how the other houses are your enemies, so Gryffindors have to stick together to defend each other?’

‘No, Professor McGonagall didn’t come in to talk to us at all,’ said Ben.  ‘I think she had a meeting with Professor Dumbledore.  But the prefects and the head of the Quidditch team told us that Slytherin had been winning the House Cup and the Quidditch championships for years and it was time we won them back.’

‘Professor Flitwick told us that as the house of the brightest students, we had no excuse for not getting better marks than the other houses in every test,’ said Hiccup.  ‘It’s good having a teacher who actually wants us to read – quite a change from Gobber the Belch, isn’t he?’ he added to Fishlegs.

‘So’s Professor Sprout,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘She doesn’t yell at us “SHUDDUP AND GET INTO LINE YOU MISERABLE TADPOLES!”, for one thing.’

‘But why do they want the different houses to be enemies?’ Harry asked.  He could feel the eyes of his fellow Slytherins glaring at him for betraying them by sitting at the Ravenclaw table.  ‘It’s bad enough living with Muggles who hate magic, without coming to school and finding out that wizards are supposed to hate each other as well.’

‘It’s tribalism,’ said Hiccup.  ‘It’s like – well, Fishlegs and me, we’re from the Outer Hebrides, and on a good day we’re about a thousand years behind the times.  On a bad day, it’s more like two thousand.  So, we’re still under the feudal system – as in, we all feud against each other, all the time.  Basically, every island is a separate tribe, with names like the Hairy Hooligans – that’s our tribe – and the Meatheads and the Bog-Burglars, and most of them hate each other.  Last year, some terrorists kidnapped Fishlegs and me and the daughter of the leader of the Bog-Burglars, to try and trick the Hooligans and the Bog-Burglars into blaming each other for stealing each other’s children, so that they’d fight.  So we were imprisoned together, and the girl wouldn’t stop shouting that the only good Hooligan is a dead Hooligan.’

‘She’s completely mental,’ said Fishlegs.

‘Yeah, but she is brave, isn’t she?’ Hiccup added.  ‘She punched out a guard and disguised herself in his clothes to try to escape – and it might have fooled anyone who didn’t notice that she was an eight-year-old girl and only four feet tall.’

‘I suppose it’s like football teams,’ said Harry.  ‘There’s no point being an Arsenal fan unless you hate Spurs.’

‘It’s bad enough that different species hate each other,’ said Ben.  ‘Kobolds despise dwarves for being greedy for treasure, dwarves despise kobolds for being greedy for mushrooms, Asian kobolds quarrel with European kobolds and Asian dwarves quarrel with European dwarves, fjord trolls despise mountain trolls for being stupid, mountain trolls hate dwarves for hacking into them with pickaxes, dwarves hate mountain trolls for stamping on them, griffins are the enemies of dragons…’

‘Selkies and mermaids are rivals over who rules the oceans,’ added Guinevere.

‘And people kidnap young dragons and keep them as pets like dogs, and wizards expect house-elves to work for no pay and won’t let house-elves or goblins or centaurs own magic wands because they’re afraid of letting them get too powerful,’ added Hermione.  ‘I still can’t understand why the house-elves here seem to like humans.  Do other fantastic beings?’

‘No, most of them are afraid of humans,’ said Ben.  ‘When Firedrake and Sorrel met me, Firedrake was willing to give me a chance even though I was a human, but Sorrel didn’t trust me as far as she could spit.’

‘They hadn’t met a good human, before,’ said Twigleg.  ‘I hadn’t, either.  Until I met you, and Professor Greenbloom, the only human I had ever known was the alchemist who made Nettlebrand and me, and he was even worse than Nettlebrand.  And by the time I realised I liked you and didn’t want you to die, I was already helping Nettlebrand to hunt you down – and I had already led him to Professor Greenbloom…’ he broke off, dissolving into tears.

‘Yes, but it worked out all right,’ said Ben, cupping his hand affectionately around his friend.  ‘My father’s used to dealing with much worse monsters than Nettlebrand.  And you helped us defeat Nettlebrand, didn’t you?  Because you could convince him that you were still on his side and just pretending to have gone over to our side.  You’re a hero.’

‘A Slytherin hero,’ suggested Twigleg, half-comforted.

‘Probably.  And if you had been sorted into Slytherin, it still wouldn’t stop us being friends.’

‘You’d probably be way better at being a Slytherin than I am,’ said Harry.  ‘I’m not really cunning enough to qualify.  But the hat said I had to be there, because I can talk to snakes, and now everyone thinks that means I’m not supposed to be friends with the rest of you.’

‘Maybe it’s just random, who’s a friend and who’s an enemy,’ said Hiccup.  ‘I mean, Toothless here is the best friend that any dragon could be – any dragon who isn’t a Silver Moondance, anyway.  But if Hagrid’s right – and I think he is – then Toothless is the same species as the three dragons who came to attack our village last year.  The first one was big enough to swallow a ship whole, but he got eaten by another, bigger Giant Seadragon, who got eaten by another who was even bigger.  The third one swallowed me for pudding, but Toothless helped me escape.  That’s how he got the scar on his chest, fighting that massive dragon – he nearly died, risking his life to protect me.  But – suppose, instead of meeting Toothless when he was a cute baby dragon, I’d met him when he was a bit older – big enough that I could ride on him instead of the other way round – and he was attacking our village?  Probably we’d have fought, and maybe I’d have injured him so that he couldn’t fly, in which case he’d have a grudge against me, like Alvin.  I don’t know if we could have become friends, if we’d got off to a bad start like that.’

Chapter Text

Over the next week, more people followed Harry’s example and ate meals with friends from different houses.  Apparently, just because Harry had been nearly assassinated when he was a baby, this made him famous and everything he did automatically ‘cool’.  Harry tried to ignore it and just enjoy being with his friends, but he didn’t mind having started the ‘being friends with people who aren’t from your own house’ trend.

At Monday lunchtime, when Harry joined Ben at the Gryffindor table, Percy Weasley took the opportunity to go and sit with his cousin Icicle among the Slytherins, calling over his shoulder to his younger brothers to ‘Be good!’  At dinner, when Ben went to sit with his Ravenclaw friends again, a very pretty fifth-year Ravenclaw girl came to sit with Percy.

The disadvantage of all this swapping about was that if Harry wasn’t with the other Slytherins, he didn’t always see where they went as they headed out to a lesson.  Nobody found it easy to navigate around Hogwarts Castle anyway, but at least most of the Slytherins had wizarding parents who had told them what to expect, whereas Ben and Guinevere’s parents hadn’t gone to Hogwarts (in fact, from the stories Guinevere told them, Barnabas Greenbloom had moved around a lot throughout his life and had old friends and old enemies in almost every country of the world), Hermione and Harry had been brought up by Muggles, and Hiccup’s grandfather hadn’t told him or Fishlegs anything very specific about what to expect from the castle. 

Even Ben, who had navigated a dragon from Germany to Pakistan, found Hogwarts Castle confusing without a map.  ‘There’s a rat I know who makes the most amazing maps,’ he said.  ‘Maybe we could ask him to come here for a holiday.’

When a lesson took place directly after breakfast or lunch, they could follow a teacher there, but otherwise they were left to wander and ask for directions from any passers-by, whether older pupils (Harry soon learned not to ask Fred and George Weasley), the ghosts, or the grumpy caretaker, Argus Filch.  There had been a Potions lesson timetabled on Tuesday mid-morning, but Harry and Ben had been lost in the dungeons corridors for an hour without finding the laboratory, until it was time for Herbology.  So it wasn’t until Friday morning, when they had a Potions lesson first thing, that they could follow Professor Snape to the right place.

Breakfast was half finished when Hiccup came in, with Toothless fluttering behind him, and joined Ben, Harry and Twigleg (at the Slytherin table this time).  ‘I saw Hagrid, while I was out,’ he announced.  ‘Ben, he says do you want to come to tea this afternoon, around three?’

‘And Harry?’ asked Ben.

‘I don’t know,’ Hiccup admitted.  ‘He only said Ben and Toothless and me.  But I’m sure it’s okay for Harry and Twigleg and Fishlegs to come too.  Probably,’ he admitted.  ‘Grown-ups can be a bit weird about who it’s okay to be friends with, but…’

But there wasn’t time to discuss it further, as everyone was getting up to go out to classes.  Ben and Harry only had time to call, ‘See you later!’ before they hurried off, trying not to lose sight of the end of Professor Snape’s long black robe.

Professor Snape called the register, and made a tick without comment when Ben called, ‘Present!’ but paused when Harry did the same. 

‘Ah, yes,’ he said.  ‘The great Mr Potter decided to grace us with his presence for once, did he?’

‘That’s not fair!’ protested Ben.  ‘We just couldn’t find the class, on Tuesday.  I missed it too, so why are you picking on Harry?’

‘I do not recall asking you to speak, Mr Greenbloom.  That will be five house points each from Slytherin and Gryffindor for your absence last time, and an additional five from Gryffindor for interrupting.’

Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, who had been enjoying laughing at Harry, now turned to glare accusingly at him.

‘So, Potter, as you clearly do not believe you need to attend every lesson, doubtless you are already an expert.  What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?’

Harry blinked.  Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle were now roaring with laughter, even though from what he had seen of them in Herbology, Harry was sure they couldn’t have answered this either.  He had Herbology next, with the Ravenclaws – Twigleg was sure to know the answer to this, even if Hermione didn’t.

‘Where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?’

Harry’s mind raced.  ‘Uh – in the supplies cupboard under “B”?’ he managed.

‘Very funny,’ sneered Professor Snape.  ‘What is the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?’

This one Harry did know, as Twigleg had been telling him about them as they worked together in the last Herbology lesson.  ‘They’re both species of aconite, but monkshood, Aconitum napellus, has indigo flowers, while wolfsbane, Aconitum vulparia, has white or straw-yellow flowers, except that Aconitum lycoctonum is also called wolfsbane or northern wolfsbane, and that has purple flowers, and it’s the only one that can be pollinated by butterflies as well as bumblebees.’

‘Oh, quite the expert, aren’t we?’ said Professor Snape sarcastically.  ‘And which alleged “wolfsbane” would you use to treat lycanthropy?’

The only treatment programme for lycanthropy that Harry had heard of (from Guinevere this time) involved a vegetarian diet and a special amulet, but he was fed up with being interrogated.  ‘How should I know?  You’re supposed to be the teacher!’ he burst out.

For a moment, Professor Snape looked as though he wanted to throw something, preferably Harry.  Then he paused, as if thinking something over.  ‘Potter,’ he said more gently, ‘did your family allow you to read and study in the summer holidays?  I know some Muggles don’t take kindly to having a wizard in the family.’

Harry knew that Professor Snape was thinking back to what he had seen of Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia.  It would be so easy to get out of trouble here by lying, claiming that they hid his books and kept him locked in the cupboard all the time (and make it sound as if it was a tiny box where he was kept chained and blindfolded, like that man who got kept as a hostage in Beirut).  But then again, Professor Snape could quite possibly read minds.

‘They mostly just ignore me,’ he said.  ‘And I ignore them.  And I have been reading, only I couldn’t remember what the book said about asphodels and bezoars, and I only knew about aconites because a friend was telling me about them.  I’m sorry, sir,’ he managed.

Professor Snape looked very slightly mollified.  ‘Would that be the homunculus or the girl with teeth like a rabbit?’ he asked.

‘It was Twigleg.  But Hermione’s good, too.  If she was in this class, she’d have been able to give you all the answers straight off.’

‘Yes, Miss Granger answered everything perfectly.  She also managed to find this classroom the first time round.  However, since your friends will not always be here to help you, and, as you were kind enough to remind me, I am the teacher, let me inform you that there are over one hundred and twenty species of aconite, several of which are commonly known as both wolfsbane and monkshood.  For homework, in addition to the whole class’s assignment, you will write me two sides of parchment on the differences between Aconitum anthora, Aconitum carmichaelii, Aconitum ferox, Aconitum fischeri, Aconitum flavum, Aconitum heterophyllum, Aconitum coreanum, Aconitum lycoctonum, Aconitum soongaricum, Aconitum uncinatum, Aconitum violaceum, and Aconitum vulparia, to be handed in next Tuesday.’

Harry wrote these down while Ben fetched the ingredients they would need for the first practical lesson, a potion to cure boils.  Thankfully, Ben was methodical and careful at Potions, and hard as Professor Snape tried, he couldn’t find anything to criticise when he passed their table.  Before they could complete the potion, however, Neville Longbottom’s toad leapt up from the table where he and Ron Weasley were working, knocked into Harry and Ben’s cauldron and sent the potion hissing and bubbling all over the floor.

‘Onto your chairs!’ Professor Snape shouted. 

Everyone obeyed except Neville, still trying to recapture his toad.  He slipped and fell over in the smoking green mixture, and struggled to his feet, sobbing with pain and fright as the potion bubbled his skin into a mass of boils, and desperately calling out, ‘Trevor!’

Harry caught a glimpse of movement of a small, crawling creature heading towards the spreading puddle.  He leapt over the edge of the pool of potion and bent down just in time to pick the squirming little amphibian up.

‘Very pretty,’ growled Professor Snape, vanishing the spilled potion from the floor.  ‘Save the display of athletics for when you make it onto the Quidditch team.  That will be five points each from Gryffindor and Slytherin for disobeying, and another five from Gryffindor for causing the accident by bringing an out-of-control animal to class.  Weasley, take Longbottom to the hospital wing; Finnegan, get that animal out of my sight.  Longbottom, when you’ve recovered, report to my office to discuss what your punishment will be.’

Neville went white with terror.  ‘You’ve already taken ten house points off him!’ Harry shouted.  ‘And he’s hurt!  Isn’t that enough punishment?’

‘Silence, Potter.  That remark just cost another five points from Slytherin.’

As Neville Longbottom, Ron Weasley, and Seamus Finnegan holding Trevor the toad all left the room, Professor Snape took out a fresh piece of parchment and wrote out a notice:

ABSOLUTELY NO PETS ARE PERMITTED IN THE POTIONS DUNGEON UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.  UNAUTHORISED ANIMALS WILL BE USED AS EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECTS OR POTIONS INGREDIENTS.

‘We’ve got to warn Hiccup,’ Ben said, as they left the lab with notes of the class’s homework (an essay on common causes of potions accidents and how to prevent them).  ‘He takes Toothless everywhere with him, even more than Neville does with Trevor.’

‘I know.  I’ve got Herbology next with the Ravenclaws.  I’ll tell him then.’

In fact, he didn’t have the chance to have that conversation, but didn’t really need to, as Toothless proved the point for himself.  As Professor Sprout led the assembled Slytherin and Ravenclaw first-years down to Greenhouse One, Toothless, who had been draped around Hiccup’s shoulders like a scaly green scarf, suddenly rose into the air and darted into Greenhouse Three, which housed the more dangerous plants.

‘Toothless!  No!  Come back!’ called Hiccup in Dragonese, running in after him.  But it was too late.  Toothless had found something interesting in one of the plant-pots, and was digging it up.

‘Cover your ears!’ called Professor Sprout, clamping her hands firmly over her own.  All the students copied her (including Twigleg, sitting on Guinevere’s shoulder), but it wasn’t enough to block out the sound of a hideous, high-pitched screaming.  After a short while the sound became more muted, and Professor Sprout, after looking into Greenhouse Three, nodded to the class that they could uncover their ears.

Hiccup was lying unconscious on the floor, beside a broken plant-pot with a chewed stalk and a few rather hairy green leaves.  Toothless, on the other hand, was flying frantically in circles, babbling nonsense: ‘Issa purple-spotted three-head Hippogriff!  Toothless’s t-tail is an oak-tree!  Toothless’s wings are m-m-melting!  Toothless need to chuck-up now!  Toothless need to poo-poo now!  Toothless can’t SEE!’ he ended in a wail of terror, collapsing in a frightened green heap in Professor Sprout’s arms as he spurted out a jet of foul-smelling gunk from both ends.  Then he was silent – but his stomach, and the puddles of vomit and diarrhoea staining Professor Sprout’s robes, could still be heard faintly screaming.

‘And this is why we no longer use animals to harvest mandrakes,’ said Professor Sprout.  ‘Mr Potter, can you take this dragon to Hagrid, please?  And’ (she conjured a stretcher) ‘Miss Greenbloom and Miss Granger, can you take Mr Haddock to the sickbay?’

‘I think he’s not the only one we need to take,’ said Guinevere.  They all noticed that her hand had gone up to her shoulder to steady the body of Twigleg, who was also unconscious.

‘Be careful!’ said Hermione.  ‘You mustn’t let Twigleg get near the mandrake juice!’

‘No, indeed,’ said Professor Sprout.  ‘Can anyone else explain why?’

No-one could – except Hermione.  ‘Because he’s a homunculus!’ she explained.  ‘The mandrake root is used to return people who have been cursed or transfigured to their original state.  And a homunculus is created by transfiguring a minibeast such as an insect or spider.’

Guinevere’s mouth opened in horror.  She checked Hiccup very carefully for any trace of mandrake before lifting him onto the stretcher and laying Twigleg carefully beside his head.

Harry, meanwhile, picked up the filthy, unconscious, and still faintly noisy body of Toothless and carried him across the grounds to Hagrid’s wooden cottage on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.  As he approached, he could hear a large-sounding dog barking, and Hagrid quieting it before calling, ‘Ye’re early.’

‘Professor Sprout sent me,’ Harry explained.  ‘Hiccup’s dragon’s been poisoned – he ate a mandrake.  Professor Sprout thought you could help.’

‘Aye?  Poor li’l beas’.’  Hagrid went to a cupboard, and took out a large flask of potion.  He measured some out into a teaspoon, and dribbled it into Toothless’s open mouth.  Toothless swallowed, and then went stiller than ever.  Harry could feel his body growing cold.

‘I think he’s dying,’ he said.

‘Nah, tha’s a healin’ coma.  A unicorn, now, or a centaur, they’d just lie down an’ feel sick fer a bit.  But dragons, when they’re hurt or sick, they go still an’ cold, as if they’re dead, same as when they’re hibernatin’.  Yer friend Hiccup must’ve told yer that, surely?’

‘Yes – he told me about that happening to Toothless before, when he was hurt in a fight.  He went all still and cold for days, like this, and Hiccup’s dad thought Toothless really was dead and was all ready to cremate him, and he only just woke up in time to avoid being burnt to death.’

‘Well, he’ll be safe from that, here,’ said Hagrid reassuringly.  ‘Never heard of a Gian’ Seadragon eatin’ mandrakes before, though – they’re not exac’ly noted fer bein’ vegetarian.’

‘Oh, he isn’t.  I think he was just curious.  What was that potion you gave him?’

‘Calabar bean an’ Manchineel fruit.  The unicorns gets into the greenhouse every so offen and tries ter see wha’ mandrakes tas’e like, so Professor Snape brews up a batch of antidote when I’m gettin’ low.  I’ll need some more, soon.  Where is Hiccup, anyway?’

‘He got knocked unconscious by the mandrake screaming,’ said Harry.  ‘So did Twigleg.’

‘The homunculus?  Poor fellow,’ said Hagrid.  ‘The size mandrakes are at this time o’ year, they won’t do much ter a human, but fer li’l chaps like Toothless or Twigleg, they can be right nasty.  Specially considerin’ how sensitive a homunculus’s ears are, or a dragon’s.  Tha’s bad.’

‘I ought to go back to class,’ said Harry.  ‘I don’t know if Hiccup will be here this afternoon, but if he’s woken up, I expect he’ll probably want to come and see Toothless.  But if Twigleg is still ill, probably Ben will be with him.  But – did you want me to come?’

‘What?’ said Hagrid, sounding startled and rather guilty.  ‘Why wouldn’ I?’

‘I don’t know.  But I do know that you told Hiccup to invite Ben, and didn’t say anything about me.  And – well, Professor Snape told us that everyone would hate us for being Slytherins, and that Gryffindors would in particular.  So – do you?’

‘O’ course not!  Do yer think Professor McGonagall hates Professor Snape fer bein’ a Slytherin?’

‘Maybe not,’ said Harry.  The two Heads of House seemed to be rivals, but in a mostly friendly way.  ‘But – did you hope I wouldn’t be a Slytherin?’

‘I’m just – surprised,’ said Hagrid.  ‘Thought fer sure yer’d be a Gryffindor, like yer mum and dad.’

‘Why?’ demanded Harry bluntly.  ‘People don’t have to be the same as their parents, do they?  Most of my friends don’t even have wizards for parents.  But Hiccup reckons that if his parents were wizards, his dad would be in Gryffindor, and his mum – well, he says she’s away on quests most of the time so he doesn’t know her very well, but she’s ambitious for something, so maybe she’d be Slytherin.  And he’s a Ravenclaw.’

‘Nothin’ wrong with bein’ Ravenclaw.’

‘But there is with being Slytherin?’

‘It was a Slytherin that killed yer mum an’ dad, Harry.  Nearly all his followers was Slytherins, too.’

‘Nearly all isn’t the same as all, though, is it?’ Harry persisted.  ‘Are you really saying there aren’t any bad Gryffindors?’

Hagrid looked deeply uncomfortable, but eventually honesty won out.  ‘All right.  It was a Slytherin that killed yer mum an’ dad, but he couldn’ have done it without help from a Gryffindor.  One o’ yer dad’s closes’ friends, at that.’

‘So, not all bad people are Slytherins,’ said Harry.  ‘And do you think all Slytherins except me are bad people?’

‘No,’ admitted Hagrid.  ‘No, they’re not.’  But he still sounded uncertain.

‘Well, you can take as long as it takes to make your mind up,’ said Harry.  ‘If my own aunt and uncle can hate me for being an orphan they were forced to foster and turning out to be a wizard and I can just ignore them, then if you want to hate me for being a Slytherin, I can ignore you, too.  And if you want to be friends with my two best friends but not me, that’s up to them to decide.  But when Hiccup and Twigleg and Toothless are better and you want to invite people round for tea, you can decide then whether you hate me or not.’

And he strode off.  He could hear Hagrid calling, ‘Wait!  I’m sorry!  I didn’ mean…’ but he refused to look back.

Chapter Text

The afternoon after the Herbology lesson was the most glorious weather he had seen at Hogwarts so far.  It would have been a wonderful day to hang around outside with Ben and Hiccup, watching Toothless practise his flying.  Instead, Toothless was still in a healing coma in Hagrid’s cabin, Hiccup and Twigleg were in the hospital wing, Ben was visiting Twigleg, and Fishlegs was visiting Hiccup.  Harry had tried to visit his friends as well, but Madam Pomfrey, the matron, said they were each allowed only one visitor, so as not to tire them out.

Instead, Harry sat in the Slytherin Common Room, drawing get-well cards on folded pieces of parchment.  Hardly anyone else was there, apart from Draco holding forth to Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle about Quidditch, how unfair it was that first-years weren’t allowed to be on the house team even though he’d been flying ever since he was a toddler knocking his house-elf over with his first baby broom, how he could get Marcus Flint to give all three of them places on the team next year, with himself as Seeker and Vincent and Gregory as Beaters, once he had bullied his incredibly rich father into buying the entire team new brooms, and on, and on.  Harry tuned him out, the same way he did when Dudley was prattling about his favourite computer games that he never let Harry take a turn on.

‘What’s the matter, Potter?’ Draco raised his voice, realising that Harry was ignoring him.  ‘Bet you’ve never even been on a broom, have you?’

‘Maybe.’  Harry couldn’t remember, but he did remember climbing astride Aunt Petunia’s vacuum cleaner when he was a little boy, urging it to fly and crying with frustration when it wouldn’t move, so perhaps the little boy he had been then had remembered being an even littler boy who had ridden flying brooms?  ‘I’ve flown on a motorbike,’ he said.

‘Motorbikes?  They’re just Muggle machines.  They don’t fly,’ sneered Draco.  His friends laughed sycophantically.

‘Yeah, that’s what my uncle said, too,’ said Harry.  ‘’Cos he’s nearly as stupid as you are.’

‘You wait,’ said Draco.  ‘Wait till next Thursday, and you’ll see what I can do.’

Harry didn’t think that waiting nearly a week just to watch Draco showing off was much of an enticement, but it seemed that nearly everyone was excited about flying.  By dinner-time, Ben was back from his vigil in the hospital wing, sombre because Twigleg still hadn’t regained consciousness.  Ron Weasley was trying to cheer him up by explaining to him about Quidditch, and Harry and Icicle came over to the Gryffindor table to join them, Icicle to help with the Quidditch lecture, and Harry just to be with his friends and away from Draco.  Ron and his younger sister had, like Draco, been flying for as long as they could remember, though in their case they had borrowed their older brothers’ brooms while their brothers were away at Hogwarts.  ‘Everyone says Ginny’s sure to be on the Gryffindor team, like Charlie and Fred and George,’ he said.  ‘I bet I don’t get in.’

‘Bet you do,’ said Icicle.  ‘I did, and I’d never even seen a flying broom until I came to Hogwarts.  It’s in the family.’

Harry said nothing.  At his old school, he had been good at PE because he was quick and agile, but nobody had ever picked him for playground games, because Dudley punched them if they did.  And here, if he was chosen to be on a team, everyone would say it was just because he was famous.  Either way, he couldn’t just succeed on his own merits.

‘My gran wouldn’t let me near a broom,’ said Neville.  ‘She says I’m too clumsy and I’ll probably kill myself if I tried it.’

Harry narrowed his eyes.  ‘She let your insane great-uncle keep on trying to murder you on purpose, but she wouldn’t let you play with a broom in case you got hurt?’

‘Great-uncle Algie’s not insane!  He just – has high standards,’ said Neville, blushing furiously.

Hiccup cupped a hand to his ear.  Unlike Twigleg, he had recovered enough to be released from the hospital wing, and Madam Pomfrey said his hearing would come back in a day or two, but in the meantime he carried a notebook so that people could write messages to him.

Fishlegs wrote: ‘They’re talking about a game called Quidditch.  It’s probably a bit like Bashyball, but with flying on brooms.  They’re worried that they won’t get into the teams.’

Hiccup said, rather out of sync because he couldn’t hear the conversation, ‘No-one ever wanted us for teams, either.  The teacher kept going on about how useless we were.’

Harry wrote, ‘Yeah, I got that at my old school, too.  It’ll be different here.’  He hoped it would.  He realised that he was starting to feel a bit excited about flying lessons, after all – even though he would be in the Gryffindor-Slytherin class, and wouldn’t be there to see how the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs got on.

Now that he was looking forward to learning to fly, the weekend, and the rest of the week, dragged on.  By Sunday afternoon, Hiccup’s hearing was back to normal, and Toothless was almost fully recovered and back to being his usual mischievous, annoying self.  However, the other teachers had agreed with Professor Snape and Professor Sprout to impose a ‘no pets in lessons’ rule.

On Monday morning, Hiccup came down with Toothless on his shoulder as usual, and the two of them hurried through breakfast.  ‘Aren’t you supposed to leave him in the dormitory?’ Hermione asked.

Hiccup rolled his eyes.  ‘Toothless would cause chaos if I left him in the dormitory unsupervised!  No, Hagrid offered to look after him while I’m in lessons, so I need to take him there now.  Come on, Toothless, do you want to fly?  It’ll do you good to stretch your wings.’

‘W-want a ride,’ grumbled Toothless, snuggling inside Hiccup’s robe.  ‘W-wings still hurt.’

‘Anyone want to come with us?  Harry?  Fishlegs?  Ben?’

‘I can’t,’ said Ben.  ‘I need to see how Twigleg is doing, first.’

‘Is he awake now?’ Hiccup asked.

‘Yes, but he’s still very weak.  Madam Pomfrey says he’s allowed to read, but only if someone’s there to turn the pages for him.  She doesn’t want him tiring himself out clambering all over books all day.’

‘Harry?’

‘No, I’ve – got an essay to finish,’ Harry lied – not that it was a lie that he needed to finish the punishment essay Snape had set him, but that wasn’t the reason for not going.  Hagrid was a Gryffindor, and Gryffindors – apart from Ben, who was friendly to everyone – didn’t make friends with Slytherins.

Over the next few days, the group of friends took turns to visit Twigleg in the hospital wing and bring books for him to read.  Unlike Hiccup, he hadn’t been deafened by the mandrake’s screaming; on the contrary, it had made his ears even more hyper-sensitive than usual, so that Madam Pomfrey had to keep his head swathed in bandages to protect him from being overwhelmed by background noise.  There were dark shadows under his eyes, and Harry suspected that at the moment his eyes would have been red with exhaustion even if they hadn’t been naturally that colour.  Even when sounds from outside were muffled, he complained that the sound of the mandrake screaming for help kept echoing in his head.

‘Screaming for help?’ Harry wrote on a notepad when Twigleg told him this.  ‘You mean mandrakes talk?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Twigleg said.  ‘This one was only a seedling, so it didn’t have a very big vocabulary yet, but it knew enough to shout “NO!” and “SAVE ME!” and “DON’T EAT ME!”

‘So you can speak mandrake language?’

‘I can’t pronounce it very well – especially the language they use undersoil.  But I can understand it.  My creator used to grow them.  After Nettlebrand ate him, there was no-one left who was interested in harvesting the mandrakes, so they grew to maturity, set seed and had seedlings of their own.  There was quite a colony of them by the time I left.’

‘What do they talk about?’

‘The weather, mostly.  The look of the sun on their leaves, and whether they can see any shadows that might mean a predator approaching, or feel vibrations in the soil that might mean a gnome tunnelling towards them.  Gossip about which boydrakes are courting which girldrakes.  Worrying about the safety of their seedlings.  Nothing very intellectual.’

‘But – they’re people?’

‘Of course.’

Harry wondered about this.  After Toothless’s accident, Professor Sprout had explained to the class about why it was important to pay attention to safety instructions, and how next year, they would be learning to grow, harvest and cook mandrakes so that potions made from them could be safely drunk.  She seemed to think they were just a crop, like potatoes.  Did she know that mandrakes could talk?  Or had the mandrake’s screaming made Twigleg so ill that he was delirious?

Madam Pomfrey chivvied him out before he could ask any further questions, and after that he was kept busy with the afternoon’s lessons, including, finally, the first flying lesson of term.  As he and the other first-year Slytherins filed out to join the Gryffindors on the lawn, on the opposite side of the castle to the Forbidden Forest, he waved to Ben, but Ben was busy reassuring a despondent-looking Neville, and didn’t see him.

‘What about in winter?’ Neville was asking.  ‘By December, it’ll be nearly sunset by the time we start the lesson.’

‘We’ll have had more practice by then,’ Ben said cheerfully.  ‘Flying’s more exciting in the dark.  When I was travelling with Firedrake, we always flew by night.  Anyway, Madam Hooch won’t let us get hurt when we’re practising.’

He reached into his robes, fingering something silvery that hung on a chain round his neck.

‘What is that, Mr Greenbloom?’ called Madam Hooch.  ‘Are you wearing jewellery in a flying lesson?’

‘Just my locket,’ said Ben.  ‘A – a friend gave it to me.’

‘Is it from your boyfriend?’ jeered Draco.  ‘Who is it?  Potter?  Hiccup the Useless?  Or the homunculus?  That little creep’s way too old for you!’

‘It’s none of your business!’ retorted Ben.

‘No, Mr Malfoy, it doesn’t concern you,’ said Madam Hooch sternly.  ‘But no-one is to wear jewellery in flying lessons.  It’s too easy for it to get damaged, or catch on a tree and strangle you.  Take it off at once, boy!  And that goes for anyone else wearing dangling ornaments, too.’

Nobody else was, so everyone’s eyes were on Ben as he took off his locket and laid it carefully on the grass.  Ben noticed that it had an engraving of a unicorn on the front.  Perhaps it had been a present from his parents?  Or was it from a dragon’s hoard?  Though from what Ben had said, Firedrake didn’t sound like the sort of dragon who was interested in hoarding treasure.

‘Come on now, everyone by a broomstick,’ called Madam Hooch.  ‘Now, stick your right hand over your broom and say, “Up!”’

Harry’s and Ben’s brooms leapt into their hands at once when they gave the command.  Draco muttered, ‘Call this a broom?’ at which the battered old broom nearest him gave his legs a slap with its bristles before allowing him to catch hold of it.  Draco, seeing that most the Gryffindors were bursting out laughing, hurriedly sought to distract their attention.  ‘It’s no wonder the steering’s all out on this thing – it’s the sort of rubbish even a Weasley would be ashamed to own,’ he said loudly.  ‘It just needs to learn who’s boss, that’s all.  What’s the matter, Longbottom, does yours know you’re afraid of flying after your uncle chucked you out of the window, or is it just that you’re a Squib?  Magically bounced, indeed – I bet you just fell into a tree and had to climb down like a Muggle…’

Neville’s broom vaulted suddenly into the air, taking him with it as he grabbed hold of it and hung on by his fingertips before his brain caught up with his hands and realised that this wasn’t where he wanted to be.  As if the brain could read his thoughts and guessed that he suddenly didn’t want to fly after all, it dropped suddenly, and Neville, not bouncing at all, collapsed onto the muddy grass in a heap.

Ben ran to him at once.  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.  ‘Can you hear me?’

Neville managed to mumble, ‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Yes.  My broom decided to start flying, then decided to stop.’

‘Is anything broken?’

‘I’m okay!’ said Neville hastily, and not very convincingly.

‘Neville, it’s all right,’ said Ben gently.  ‘You don’t need to lie.  We know you’re not a Squib, and I wouldn’t let anyone harm you even if you were.  But if you’re hurt, you ought to see a Healer.  Can you stand up?’

Neville got to his feet, admitted to having a bruised wrist, all right, probably sprained, but it wasn’t anything serious. 

‘Can you wiggle your fingers?’ Ben asked suspiciously.  Neville couldn’t.

‘It looks broken to me,’ Ben said

‘To me, too,’ said Madam Hooch.  ‘Don’t worry, Madam Pomfrey can sort that out with a quick spell – shouldn’t even need a Skele-gro potion.  Come on, boy!’

Neville clung to Ben with his good hand, refusing to let go, and Madam Hooch reluctantly allowed Ben to accompany him to the hospital wing.  ‘None of you is to move until I get back!’ she called over her shoulder as she went.  ‘Don’t touch those brooms, or you’ll be out of here, either on the Hogwarts Express or in a body-bag!’

‘Okay, I was wrong,’ admitted Draco with a snigger.  ‘Greenbloom’s boyfriend is definitely Longbottom.  The name’s a dead giveaway, right?  I bet there’s a picture of him in the locket.’  He made a grab for it.

‘Leave it alone!’ shouted Harry.  Draco, the locket clutched firmly in one hand, leapt onto a broom and soared off into the air.  Harry, mounted on his own broom, chased after him.

This was wonderful!  This was even better than his faint memories of someone (Hagrid?) carrying him on a flying motorbike.  This must be like Ben’s experience of riding Firedrake – not that a broom was a living creature like a dragon, of course, but this one seemed almost alive.

‘Give it here!’ he called.

‘Oh, I’ll just leave it somewhere safe,’ sneered Draco.  ‘How about – in a tree?’  He glanced mockingly at the nearby oak tree beneath them, dangling the locket mockingly as if about to toss it in among the branches.

‘Give it here or I’ll knock you off your broom!’ shouted Harry.

‘No!’ called Ben, now running back to the training ground.  ‘Just leave him!  I can get it back later!’

‘Oh, yeah, the oak tree’s too easy – you could climb up that,’ Draco admitted.  ‘Better make it the Whomping Willow, don’t you think?’  He circled around, trying to get enough height to soar over the castle to the willow tree on the far side which attacked anyone who touched it.  ‘Your precious locket’ll probably be smashed to pieces as soon as it touches a branch!’

‘Don’t you dare!’ shouted Harry, but then he was distracted by something else.  Heat.  His broom was on fire.  Was Draco trying to kill him?  His broom was cracking into cinders under the heat.  He was going to fall…

He didn’t fall.  Instead, he leapt clear of the broom and soared through the air, snatching the locket out of the hands of the astonished Draco, and hovered gently down to the ground.  He didn’t exactly bounce, the way Neville had described, but just stood on the ground as if he had planned this all along, holding out the locket to Ben.

And then there was a shout behind him.  ‘HARRY POTTER!’

Harry spun around, to find himself facing Professor Snape.

Chapter Text

‘So, you thought rules only applied to other people, did you?’ Snape hissed.  ‘Thought you’d take the opportunity to show off on a broom?’

‘It wasn’t his fault, sir…’ began Ben.

‘He wasn’t showing off on a broom, he was flying without a broom,’ breathed Pansy Parkinson admiringly.  ‘Is it true he’s the Dark Lord’s son?’

‘He wouldn’t have had to fly without a broom if Malfoy hadn’t set fire to his broom,’ retorted Parvati Patil.  ‘Malfoy was trying to murder him!’

Professor Snape now rounded on Draco.  ‘Is this true?’

‘No!’ said Draco, sounding quite genuinely shocked at being wrongly accused.  ‘I was busy just flying!’

‘Then who did?’ demanded Professor Snape, glaring at everyone present, Gryffindors and Slytherins alike.  ‘Out with it!  This is no time for fingers-crossed-inside-your-robe and “No, sir, not I, sir,”!  SOMEONE HAS JUST ATTEMPTED TO MURDER A HOGWARTS STUDENT!  So unless the Dark Lord has made a return and is lurking around the grounds, the implication is that it was one of the nineteen people here – including Potter himself, if we allow the possibility that he may have set fire to his own broom for dramatic effect.  If you confess now, your punishment might be limited to expulsion.’

Nobody said a word.

‘Then you leave me no choice,’ said Professor Snape.  ‘Everyone, follow me.  Anyone not with us by the time we reach the dungeons will be deemed to have fled and be expelled.’

They filed down to the Potions room.  On the way, Professor Snape called to a couple of sixth-year students who were playing wizarding chess in the Great Hall, telling one to fetch Professor McGonagall and the other to fetch Professor Dumbledore, the white-bearded old wizard with the colourful robes, who Harry by now knew was the Headmaster.  The two older teachers arrived in the dungeon shortly afterwards, both looking at Professor Snape as if he was a melodramatic small boy.  But then, Harry realised, they were both so old that they had probably taught him when he was Harry’s age.

‘Really, Severus, is there such an emergency?’ asked Professor Dumbledore in an amused voice.  ‘I was quite busy reading a Muggle murder mystery.’

‘There has been an attempted murder here – again,’ said Professor Snape.  ‘This time I am not going to be let it be brushed under the carpet, even if I have to examine the entire class under Veritaserum.’

‘Murder?  Are you so sure?  Who was the intended victim?’  Professor Dumbledore slid his half-moon spectacles back up his crooked nose.

‘Potter.  An understandable temptation, I know, but nonetheless, students have the right to be protected – even if they are Slytherins,’ he added bitterly.

‘Of course.  But we need to know whether this was intended murder, or an accident,’ said Dumbledore smoothly.  ‘What happened, exactly?  Mr Potter, can you explain?’

‘I had to get on a broom and fly after Draco, because he flew off with something that belonged to someone else,’ said Harry through gritted teeth.

‘What sort of something?’ interrupted Professor Snape.  ‘Something worth risking breaking your neck for?  Something crucial to defeating a dangerous Dark wizard once and for all?  Or a toy?’  He spat out the word.

‘He stole Ben’s locket,’ said Harry.  He was going to throw it into a tree.’

‘And it didn’t occur to you to use a Summoning charm to get it down?’ retorted Snape.

‘How am I supposed to know how to do that?’

‘Clearly, it isn’t just my lessons you have been neglecting.  Did you expect to get by on fame and sporting prowess?’

‘Severus, that’s enough,’ said Professor Dumbledore.  ‘I think it’s best if you allow me to handle the questioning.  Harry, what happened after you took off on the broom?’

‘It caught fire, and I had to jump off it, and I caught the locket, and I just sort of floated down to the ground,’ said Harry, only belatedly realising that Professor Dumbledore was the first member of Hogwarts staff to have addressed him as ‘Harry’, if you didn’t count Professor Snape yelling it at him.

‘You don’t sound particularly surprised.’

‘No, well, I’ve done it before.  It was the first magic I did, when my cousin was chasing me and I was suddenly up on the roof.  I bet loads of people here can do it.’

‘Indeed.  Young witches and wizards often display impressive feats of magic in times of danger.  Nonetheless, Professor Snape has a good point.  It sounds as if someone was trying to kill you.  Do you know who it might have been?’

‘No – I mean, no, sir.  Draco doesn’t like me, but it wasn’t him.  Like he said, he was busy just flying and being a git.’

‘It wouldn’t have been a Slytherin,’ insisted Professor Snape.  ‘We have a strong tradition of house loyalty.  And none of these supposedly brave Gryffindors was willing to confess.  If you don’t want murder attempts to continue, I suggest we question everyone under Veritaserum.’

Harry wondered what Veritaserum was.  Was it some sort of torture?  Or a magic mirror that could detect lies?

‘For a prank that didn’t injure anybody?  Isn’t that rather an overreaction?’ protested Professor McGonagall.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Professor Snape grimly.  ‘If we let the perpetrator get away with it, “pranks” like this will continue until someone does get killed.  I have seen what happens when nobody takes attacks on students seriously.’

‘And I have seen what happens when someone is punished without proof, simply because of their track record,’ said Professor Dumbledore.  ‘I agree with Severus.  Severus, if you have supplies of Veritaserum and the antidote prepared, I suggest we question the students one by one in private, while Minerva waits outside with the rest of the class.’

The students huddled warily together.

‘Or team up with a friend, two by two, if it would make you feel safer,’ Professor Dumbledore conceded.  Almost everyone started forming into pairs, with the exception of Blaise Zabini, who stood proudly aloof.  Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle paired up, leaving Draco thin-lipped with rage.  Harry wondered for a moment why neither of them had chosen him.  Weren’t they his two best friends, the way Ben and Hiccup were Harry’s friends?

No, he realised.  Vincent and Gregory were each other’s best friends.  They followed Draco around like dogs, and he treated them about as well as he would a pet (i.e. more kindly than he treated his house-elf, but with far less respect than Hiccup showed Toothless).  Draco didn’t seem to have any real friends.

The Gryffindors were pairing up, too: Seamus Finnegan with Dean Thomas, Parvati Patil with Lavender Brown, Sally-Anne Perks with a girl whose name Harry couldn’t remember, though he knew that she, like Sally-Anne, was a day pupil who lived in Hogsmeade and that the two of them had been best friends since they were toddlers.  Ron Weasley glanced around, looking for someone to team up with, since his best friend, Neville, was still in the hospital wing.

‘I’ll go with you,’ Ben offered, casting an apologetic glance at Harry.

‘You see, Potter?’ said Draco.  ‘You can’t trust a Gryffindor to be a friend.  You’d better come with me.’

‘I can go in on my own,’ growled Harry.

‘You will go in with Mr Malfoy and stop drawing attention to yourself, Potter,’ said Professor Snape sharply.  ‘Or do you want everyone to think you have something to hide?’

Harry scowled as he took his place alongside Draco.  Professor Dumbledore and Professor Snape led the first pair, Parvati and Lavender, out of the room with them.

‘What is Veritaserum?’ Dean asked.  ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Nah,’ said Seamus.  ‘It’s just a potion that makes you have to tell the truth.’

Dean’s eyes widened as he took this in.  ‘So, do, like, wizard police and judges use that to make sure witnesses can’t lie to them?’

‘Don’t think so,’ said Seamus.  ‘It’s probably really expensive to make, or something.’

‘Yeah, but it’s got to be better than keeping the wrong bloke in prison for years while the real murderer goes round bumping off more people, can it?’

‘Professor McGonagall, what did Professor Snape mean about attempted murder again?’ asked Sally-Anne.  ‘Have students been murdered here before?’

‘Students have died here – whether by deliberate murder or by accident,’ said Professor McGonagall.  ‘There was an incident back in 1943 when a girl was found dead in a bathroom.  A student was accused of letting their pet roam loose and kill her, and was expelled, but the dead girl’s body didn’t show any marks, and nobody ever proved what had happened.’

‘What happened to the pet?’ asked Ben anxiously.  ‘Was it killed, too?’

‘No, it was released into the wild, in the Forbidden Forest,’ said Professor McGonagall.

Lavender and Parvati came back, looking rather subdued.  ‘Are you okay?’ Sally-Anne asked them.  ‘Does the potion hurt?’

‘No,’ said Lavender.  ‘It’s just – it makes you feel all light and happy when you’re on it.  So going back to normal afterwards isn’t so much fun.’

‘Snape wants Millicent Bulstrode and Pansy Parkinson in next,’ said Parvati.

After them, it was Vincent and Gregory’s turn, then Dean and Seamus, then Ben and Ron, and then, at last, Harry and Draco.  Neither of them had been into Professor Snape’s office before, even though it was in the part of the castle that they lived in.  It looked even less cosy and home-like than the Slytherin common room and dormitories, which Harry had started to find quite home-like now that he knew which of the carved wooden chairs seemed to like him and offered him back massages.

Ben looked rather melancholy, like the other students who had taken the antidote to the Veritaserum, but Ron looked as if he was on the verge of crying.  ‘What’s the matter, Weasley?’ sneered Draco.  ‘Did you not manage to weasel your way out of trouble?’

‘Of course not!’ snapped Ron.  ‘It’s just – that room is creepy.  There are jars of pickled spiders the size of cats!’

‘And I thought Gryffindors were supposed to be brave!’ said Draco, sniggering as they went in, until Professor Snape threw then a quelling glance.

‘Who wants to go first?’ Professor Dumbledore asked the two boys, who looked at each other uneasily.

‘I’m sure Potter will be eager to seize the limelight – after all, attention-seeking runs in his family,’ said Professor Snape.

Harry felt like punching him, teacher or not, but muttered, ‘All right.’

‘Well done,’ said Professor Dumbledore.  ‘Now, I have to explain to you, as I have to the others, that while someone is under the influence of Veritaserum, only one person should question them, to avoid confusing them with too many questions.  So Professor Snape and Draco will keep quiet until you take the antidote, and then I need you, in turn, to remain quiet while I question Draco.’

Professor Snape glowered at this, but Harry merely nodded.  Professor Snape poured a few drops of what looked like plain water into a teaspoon, and held it out to Harry, who swallowed.  It didn’t taste or smell of anything, but Harry felt suddenly free of worry.  Of course no-one was trying to kill him!  Everyone here was his friend!  He loved everyone, including Professor Snape and Draco!  He grinned.  Draco smirked.  That was good – Draco was happy, too.  Everything was all right.

‘Do you know who set fire to the broom you were riding?’ Professor Dumbledore asked him.

‘No.’

‘Can you describe what happened when you felt it breaking up?’

‘It smelled smoky and I thought it might be a bonfire, only it’s more than a month till Fifth of November.  Do you have Fifth of November here?  Hermione told me about a story she read that’s set in a sort of anti-Hogwarts in a world where Muggles still know about witches and wizards and they hunt us, so the bonfires are bone-fires of witches who get burnt, and witches’ children get sent to a boarding school where people can watch them in case they turn out to have magic, and it turns out that history split back in the seventeenth century because in that world, Guy Fawkes succeeded in blowing up the Houses of Parliament…’

‘That Mudblood reads Artemis Wix-Jones novels?’ interrupted Draco.  ‘How does she even know they exist?’

‘Draco, be quiet.  Harry, what happened after you smelled smoke?’

‘I could feel the broom breaking up under me, so I jumped off it and I found I could fly, like when Dudley and his gang were chasing me, but it was more fun this time because it wasn’t so new, and flying by myself was even better than flying on a broom.  Ben’s flown on a dragon and that sounds fun, but this was like flying as a dragon, and that’s even better.  And I caught Ben’s locket and gave it back to him.’

‘And do you know anyone who might want to hurt you?’

‘Yeah, loads of people.’

‘Who?’

‘My cousin Dudley.  Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon and Aunt Maud and her dogs.  And Draco, and Professor Snape probably feels like giving me a clip round the ear sometimes, too, but then I think he feels like that about everyone.’

‘Do you think any of them might have been trying to kill you?’

‘No, of course not!’

‘Then do you have any idea who might have set your broom on fire?’ 

‘Well, it could’ve been whoever it was who killed my parents, only apparently he died, but I think Professor Snape isn’t sure he’s really dead, and I think you aren’t, either, but you won’t tell me anything!’

‘Well done, Harry.  That’s enough.  You can take the antidote now.’

Professor Snape fed Harry a spoonful of another potion which was nearly as tasteless as the Veritaserum, but Harry could feel a chill spreading through his body as reality returned to him.  He was an unwanted orphan, a boy from a Muggle town in a mostly pure-blood house, all his friends were in different houses and would grow away from him, but hardly anyone in Slytherin liked him either, especially Professor Snape.

Now it was Draco’s turn for the potion.

‘Draco, did you set fire to Harry’s broom?’

‘No, of course not!  It must’ve been one of the Gryffs, fire is their house element, ours is water, it was probably Weasley, everyone knows wizards with red hair are strong in fire magic, anyway, I don’t want to kill Harry, I don’t see why he can’t be friends with me, I mean, not just because he’s the Heir of Slytherin, but he’s the first interesting wizard my age I’ve ever met, father wouldn’t allow me to play with anyone except Vincent and Gregory in case their blood wasn’t pure enough, but anyway, he’ll see now how it is, when Greenbloom wouldn’t even walk to this room with him now that everyone knows he can fly like the Dark Lord and he’s probably the Dark Lord’s son.  I suppose he just thought he had to be friends with Greenbloom and that spotty cripple in Hufflepuff just because they’re all orphans, but now he knows his true power, it’ll be different.’

‘That’s enough,’ said Professor Dumbledore.  ‘Severus, the antidote, please.’

Draco grimaced as he swallowed the antidote, then glared at Harry, obviously wishing he could retract his words.

‘Can we go now?’ asked Harry.

‘Not until we discuss the matter of your punishment,’ said Professor Snape.

‘What?  But we’re both innocent!  You’ve just proved that!’ protested Harry.

‘You are innocent of setting fire to a school broom.  However, you are both guilty of taking off on your brooms without supervision.  I am sure Madam Hooch warned you that the penalty, should you survive, was immediate expulsion?’

‘But that’s ridiculous!’ burst out Draco.  ‘I’m not a beginner – you’ve been to our house, you’ve seen what I can do on a broom.  The “no flying without supervision” rule is for Mudbloods who’ve never seen a broom before…’

‘Enough!’ growled Professor Snape.  ‘That will be five points from Slytherin for using offensive language.’

‘What’s the point in taking points off your own house?’ yawned Draco.  ‘Do you want Gryffindor to win the house cup?’

‘No, I want you to learn to behave properly and not make the other three houses think that Slytherins are a lot of insolent little brats.  Now, back to your original crime: tempting as it would be to send both of you home at this point, it is my job to keep you safe.  Potter’s aunt and uncle expect to be rid of him until the end of next June, and I could not be responsible for what they would do to anybody they saw bringing him back in mid-September – nor for the safety of any Muggles who got in the way of an angry, untrained, over-emotional and impulsive eleven-year-old wizard. 

‘So, I will offer you a suspended sentence.  You are both grounded until the end of the year.  During flying lessons, you will do detentions under the supervision of Mr Filch.  I am sure he can find plenty of useful work for you to do.’ 

‘But that’s totally unfair!’ protested Draco.  ‘He’s just the caretaker – Father says he isn’t even a proper wizard!  You can’t make us help him clean the place – that’s house-elves’ work – worse than that – it’s Muggles’ work!’

‘Then perhaps it will help you to appreciate what life will be like if you leave school without a magical qualification.  Should you manage to remain at Hogwarts until the end of this year, you may join a first-year class for remedial flying lessons next autumn.  In the meantime, I’ll leave it to you two to explain to Marcus Flint why you won’t be ready to join the Slytherin Quidditch team in your second year.’

‘That’s outrageous!’ complained Draco.  ‘I’ll write to Father about this – I never wanted to come to Hogwarts in the first place, Durmstrang sounds way better.  There was a piece in the Daily Prophet about a boy there who’s only fourteen and already playing for a Bulgarian professional team and they say he’s likely to  be in the national team by the time he’s seventeen.  Do you think he’d be there if the teachers at Durmstrang grounded him for technically breaking some petty rule?  My parents won’t like this!’

‘Your parents wouldn’t like it if you died, Draco.  Has it not penetrated your thick skull that it could just as easily have been your broom, instead of Potter’s, that broke up in mid-air?’

‘And the Gryffindors think you favour us!’ groaned Harry.  He felt more cheerful now, knowing that, even if he wasn’t allowed to fly for a whole year, at least he wasn’t being expelled.  And if Draco persuaded his parents to let him transfer to a different school, life might get better.

‘Believe me, I do.  Professor McGonagall’s idea of a suitable punishment for a first-year would be going into the Forbidden Forest to track down whatever has been killing cockerels.  Personally, I believe that punishments should leave pupils alive to learn from the experience.’

Something occurred to Harry.  ‘Sir,’ he asked Professor Dumbledore, ‘are you going to question Professor Snape with the Veritaserum, too?  After all, he says anyone could have put a spell on my broom, so it could’ve been him, too, couldn’t it?’

‘You have the makings of a true detective,’ said Professor Dumbledore with a smile.  ‘But I don’t need a potion to know if someone is telling me the truth.  Believe me, you can trust Severus.’

‘And right now, you can trust me to mean it about the detentions,’ said Professor Snape.  ‘You can report to Mr Filch’s office for the first one now.’

As they left, Harry wondered whether he would have preferred the Forbidden Forest after all.  It would have been interesting to find out what had been killing the chickens, and whether it was whatever had killed that girl all those years ago – or whether whatever creature had been exiled for doing that was just some misunderstood pet.  Perhaps it was another dragon.

Chapter Text

‘There’s no hurry,’ drawled Draco, when they were well away from Professor Snape’s office.  ‘Filch doesn’t even know he’s expecting us yet.  Hey, watch this!’ he added, catching sight of Filch’s cat, Mrs Norris.  He cast a quick charm to silence the animal before levitating her into the air, paws thrashing desperately.

A minute later, they heard frantic footsteps.  Draco hastily lowered the cat to the ground before anyone could come in sight.

Filch was not mollified.  ‘How dare you?’ he roared.  ‘Poor love, are you all right?’ he added, stroking Mrs Norris’s dust-grey fur reassuringly.  The cat miaowed mournfully, as she slowly recovered from the muting spell.

‘As if trying to skive off your detention wasn’t enough!’ Filch growled.  ‘And you, Potter, you did nothing to stop him, did you?’

‘Sorry,’ mumbled Harry.  He hadn’t been particularly bothered, as he didn’t like Mrs Norris, but she had looked terrified, and he knew that he would have stopped Draco if it had been Toothless being hexed.

He wondered how Filch had known to come here so quickly.  It was like when Harry had decided to run away, when he was three years old.  He hadn’t understood then that his parents were dead, but he had just known that he missed them, and his magical toys.  So, when he had woken up in the night when Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were asleep, he had crept out of his cupboard, fetched a box to stand on to unlock the front door, and set off on a journey to find his way home.  He had only paused for a few minutes to play with a kitten, and then set off again, and he had been just about to try to cross a road on his own when Mrs Figg, a neighbour who sometimes said hello to Harry when Aunt Petunia took him and Dudley out for walks, came running out in her dressing-gown and slippers and grabbed him and took him back to her house and made him look at boring pictures of every cat she’d ever had, until it was morning and she could take him back to the Dursleys’.  Maybe she had a mental link with cats?  Maybe Filch did, too?

‘Potter, you’ve extended your detention to supper break for letting Malfoy do that,’ said Filch.  ‘Malfoy, you’re doing this session, supper and lunchtime tomorrow, for tormenting my cat and trying to bunk off.’

‘You can’t do that!  You’re not a teacher!  You’re not even a wizard!’

‘Of course he’s a wizard!’ snapped Harry.  ‘How else would he have known what we were doing?’

Filch didn’t answer, but dragged them to the trophy room to polish the school’s old collection of silver medals, cups, plaques and special awards, all without using magic.  Many of the awards had the name of Tom Marvolo Riddle, including an engraved trophy in 1943 for ‘Special Services to the School’.

‘What was Tom Riddle’s special service?’ he asked.  Had it been to do with World War Two?  His class at primary school had studied World War Two in History last year, decorating the classroom with papier-maché barrage balloons in Art, reading stories in Literacy about children being evacuated to the countryside to protect them from the bombing raids on the towns, and practising baking with tiny rationed amounts of sugar, fat and dried eggs in Cookery.  Had Hogwarts students needed to be evacuated, or had the castle been too remote for German bombers to find it?

But then he remembered what Professor McGonagall had said about a girl being found dead in 1943.  ‘Did Tom Riddle solve the mystery of who killed that girl?’ he asked.

‘No idea,’ grumbled Filch.  ‘Get a move on!’

‘They’d never have given him an award if he’d been a Slytherin,’ whispered Draco when Filch had subsided behind his book.

‘Riddle was a Slytherin,’ pointed out Harry.  ‘Look, he was a Slytherin prefect from 1942 to 1945, and Head Boy from 1944 to 1945.’

‘Really?  It must’ve been before Dumbledore became Headmaster and decided only Gryffindors were allowed to be prefects,’ said Draco.

‘What?  We’ve got six prefects.  There are six prefects in each House.’

‘Well, yes, six!’ sneered Draco.  ‘You heard what Professor Snape said – all the other Houses gang up on us, so we’d need eighteen Slytherin prefects just to be equal with the eighteen in the other Houses.  We’re never allowed to win anything…’

‘Last night Marcus Flint was saying that we’d won the House Cup six years running and we were going to make sure we won it a seventh,’ Harry pointed out.

‘Yes, yes, but the point is that everything has always been stacked against us, even before Dumbledore was Headmaster.  My father told me about a brilliant young boy from a noble Pure-blood family once who was orphaned as a baby, and Dumbledore left him to grow up in a miserable Muggle orphanage because he was going to be sorted into Slytherin…’

‘How did Dumbledore know which House he was going to be in?’

‘Because he was the descendant of Salazar Slytherin himself!  His family had fallen on hard times, but they’d always kept their blood pure, no matter what.  So when his mother died destitute, out among Muggles…’

‘So if it was in a Muggle town, how would Dumbledore even have known she had a baby?  He’s not God – he can’t be everywhere and know everything!’

‘Well, okay, maybe he didn’t know the baby existed then,’ Draco conceded.  ‘But he knew when he was sent to the orphanage to meet the boy when he was eleven and explain to him about Hogwarts.  And he’d always had it in for this boy and wanted to ruin his life, just because he was Sorted into Slytherin.’

‘What happened to the boy?’ Harry asked.

‘I don’t know.  I expect maybe he got expelled when he was about fifteen or so – probably framed for a crime some Gryffindor had committed.  Everyone in the entire school loved him, but Dumbledore used his influence to get him expelled, just for being a Slytherin, and he got his way because everyone has always hated and bullied Slytherins.’

Harry thought about the contradictions in that sentence, but knew it wouldn’t achieve anything to point out the inconsistencies.  ‘Just for that?’ he said.  ‘A quarter of the whole school are Slytherins – Dumbledore can’t expel all of us!’

‘Well, maybe there was more than that.  Maybe it was because this boy was poor and an orphan.  You don’t stand a chance as a Slytherin if your parents can’t afford to buy gifts for the school…’

‘I said, no more chatter!’ growled Filch.  ‘You can’t have done any work, like that…’

He inspected the items they had been set to polish.  ‘Not too bad,’ he admitted grudgingly, looking at Harry’s gleaming range of trophies.  ‘Have you done this before?’

‘Yeah, when my aunt has my uncle’s business contacts to dinner, she digs out the silver and makes me polish it,’ said Harry.  He didn’t know why he was making conversation with Filch, except that he wanted to make up for Draco’s rudeness.  ‘I’ve seen that book before,’ he added, looking at the paperback novel Filch was reading.  ‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about an orphan girl who lives with her rich cousins who bully her, until her aunt decides she’s a bad influence and sends her off to a horrible boarding school where the kids are starved on burnt porridge and get punished for being dirty because they can’t wash because all the water’s frozen solid, and most of them are dying of typhus or tuberculosis.  Well, this girl manages to survive, and becomes a governess when she grows up, and falls in love with the father of the girl she’s teaching, but then it turns out he’s got a dark secret.  Personally, I reckon he’s a serial killer, and the reason the book ends when they get married is that he murdered her after she wrote the chapter about getting married,’ said Filch with relish.

‘Is that your favourite book?’ asked Harry.

Filch considered.  ‘One of two.  The other’s about a girl who – well, she’s not technically an orphan, but she might as well be, as her parents can’t afford to keep her and all her brothers and sisters, so they send her to live with her rich aunts and uncle, and her uncle is away on business most of the time and her aunts treat her like a servant because they don’t want her outshining their own children, and her girl cousins bully her, so one of her boy cousins is her only friend, but as she grows up, she’s in love with him while he’s in love with another girl.’

‘Is he a serial killer, too?’ asked Harry.

Filch laughed.  ‘No, it’s not that sort of book.  He’s a total goody-goody who’s training to be a vicar.’

Harry thought the books sounded very girly and uninteresting.  Now that he thought about it, the other person he knew who read books like that was Mrs Figg.

Draco peered at the publisher’s mark on the paperback.  ‘Penguin?  What sort of a name is that for a publisher?’

‘Where did you get it?’ asked Harry.  He could have told Draco that Penguin books were everywhere, but he had to admit that you didn’t see them in Flourish and Blotts, any more than you could buy Penguin chocolate biscuits on the Hogwarts Express snack trolley.

‘Professor Snape lent it to me,’ said Filch. ‘He’s been introducing me to these exotic Muggle writers for the past ten years.  The first ones he tried to get me to read were science fiction, but I didn’t like those at all.  But a good love story, that’s a different matter.’

When Harry and Draco would usually have been going to the dining-hall for supper, a small, young-looking house-elf whom Harry hadn’t seen before brought sandwiches for Harry, Draco and Filch as they continued their work.  The elf glanced worriedly at Harry, but said nothing.

Chapter Text

Eventually the boys were let out so that they had just enough time to complete their homework before bed.   ‘Come on,’ said Draco.  ‘Back to the dorms. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘You’ve had all evening to talk to me,’ snapped Harry.  ‘I’m going to see my friends now.’  With that he set off for the library to join Ben and Hiccup and the others.  They usually did homework together, either there or at a dining table in the Great Hall.

‘Are you all right?’ Guinevere asked.  ‘Filch didn’t hurt you, did he?’  Everyone heard Filch muttering about wanting to bring back torture – and not just beatings, but thumbscrews and dangling students by their wrists.

‘No, he just made me clean stuff,’ Harry said.  His arms were tired, but it was nothing terrible.  ‘Did you get to go back to flying?’ he asked Ben.

‘Yes, Madam Hooch let us go on a bit longer to make up for the time we’d lost.  She talked us through calming our brooms and showing them we weren’t afraid.  And Madam Pomfrey had healed Neville’s wrist while the rest of us were being questioned, so he didn’t have to miss the lesson.  I’m sorry you did – are you really grounded for the whole year?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry.  ‘I’ve got to clean things for Filch, every flying lesson.  How did yours go?’

‘It was good,’ said Ben.  ‘But not quite as good as flying on a real creature like a dragon – or a kelpie,’ he added with a smile at his sister.

‘No-one could ride a kelpie,’ objected Hermione.  ‘Or not unless you’ve put a bridle with a Placement Charm on it, anyway.’

‘Guinevere doesn’t need a bridle,’ said Ben.  ‘The first time she met a kelpie before I knew her – how old were you?’ he asked his sister.

‘Eight,’ said Guinevere.  ‘I helped dad look after an injured kelpie he’d rescued from hunters, and when she got better, she offered me a ride.  They’re intelligent beings, and they’re quite offended if you try to control them like ordinary horses.’

‘But it says in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that offering people rides is how kelpies hunt – that they plunge into the depths to drown their riders,’ argued Hermione.

‘Newt Scamander isn’t right about everything,’ said Guinevere.  ‘He’s very prejudiced against trolls, dismissing them all as vicious and stupid.  One of my dad’s best friends, Hothbrodd, is a fjord troll, and he’s probably the most intelligent person I know, except maybe Twigleg.  He’s invented aeroplanes that can use seawater, sand or leaves as fuel, and he builds magical tables that adjust their size depending on how many people are coming to dinner.  Hothbrodd says mountain trolls are just as stupid as Scamander claims, but my dad says it’s just that they evolved to live in cold climates in the mountains and their brains don’t function well in warm weather.’

‘Thank you for saving my locket,’ said Ben.  ‘Draco didn’t open it, did he?’

‘No, I made sure he didn’t get a chance.’

‘What is in the locket?’ asked Hermione.

Ben opened the silver lid to show them, inside, a silver dragon-scale. ‘It’s how Firedrake and I keep in touch,’ he said.  ‘Literally.’

‘How do you mean, literally?’ asked Hermione.

‘When I touch it, Firedrake can feel my emotions,’ said Ben.  ‘I make sure I touch it only when I’m feeling happy, so that he’ll know that I’m okay.  I don’t want to worry him by touching it when I feel sad about missing him, because he’s got enough to deal with.  He’s effectively the leader of a colony of dragons made up of two different colonies, one from Scotland and one of local dragons in the place they migrated to, and when the dragons quarrel they always ask him to sort the problem out, but they don’t actually listen to what he tells them to do, because he’s only two hundred and they think he’s too young to know anything, even though he’s the one who found a safe homeland for dragons and defeated the dragon-hunter who had been killing them.  And he’s about to become a father, as well.  So, all in all, he’s a busy dragon.’  He fell silent a moment, lost in wistful thoughts, and then added to Fishlegs, ‘Seriously, Madam Pomfrey is really strict about not wearing jewellery when flying.  Have you got somewhere safe to put your pendant?’

Fishlegs fingered the lobster-claw necklace around his neck.  ‘Do you think it’d be all right if I put it in a robe pocket I could button up?’ he asked.

‘Maybe.  You’d have to ask Madam Hooch.’

‘I just – don’t ever want to lose it,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘I’ve had it ever since I was a baby.  I was wearing it when I was washed up on Berk.  So my mum or someone must have given it to me as a good-luck charm, to say they didn’t really want to abandon me and they hoped I’d survive.’

‘Do you think it could be an actual charm?’ asked Hermione.  ‘I mean, is it magic?’

‘I don’t know.  I just know it’s the only thing my mum or whoever left me, and it’s important.’

‘Yeah.  I wish I had anything to remind me of my parents,’ said Harry.  ‘A photo or a letter or something.’

‘Why did Filch keep you so late?’ Guinevere asked.

‘Because I didn’t stop Draco from levitating his cat.  I think he has a telepathic link with his cat.’

‘Like Tonino in The Lost Song, you mean?’ said Hermione excitedly.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s one of the Enchanters series by Artemis Wix-Jones, like Bonefire Night,’ said Hermione.  ‘Tonino is a young boy who thinks he’s a Squib because he seems to have barely any magic except communicating with cats.  Come to think of it, a lot of Wix-Jones’s heroes start out as apparent Squibs – Cat and Christopher in the Enchanters series, Gair in The Three Peoples…  And Sophie in The Heartless Wizard not only doesn’t know she’s a witch, but she thinks that because she’s the oldest of three siblings she has to be the first to fail and that it has to be her youngest sister who is the heroine of the story.’

‘Wow – how many books has Artemis Wix-Jones written?’ asked Fishlegs.  Some people would have asked this sarcastically, but Hiccup and Fishlegs had grown up on an island which harboured precisely one book, and were still awed at discovering how much literature existed.

‘I don’t know.  I’d read about 25 in the versions published in the Muggle world before I got my Hogwarts letter,’ said Hermione.  ‘But I’d never heard of The Reluctant Dark Lord and The Griffin Student before I saw them in Flourish and Blotts.  I think the Ministry of Magic hasn’t given her permission to sell that series to Muggles in case hordes of Muggle tourists really did come rampaging through wizarding villages and wrecking everything the way they do in the books.’

‘You should swap books with Filch,’ suggested Harry, half-jokingly.

‘I tried,’ said Hermione sadly.  ‘I offered to lend him A Dog’s Life, but he got angry and said he hated Artemis Wix-Jones’ books because they offer Squibs the hope that they can be magical, when it’s just a cruel joke and in real life Squibs have to get used to being what they are.’

‘Does “Squib” mean the same as “Muggle”?’ asked Harry.

‘Not exactly.  It means someone who’s been born into a wizarding family but can’t do magic.  But because most wizards do have magical parents, it’s probably genetic, so Squibs are probably people born with the magic gene but also with another gene that means they can’t actually do magic – or maybe there’s another reason why they can’t, the way there is for some of the characters in the Enchanters books.  So even though I’m called a Muggleborn because my parents aren’t wizards, maybe they’re really Squibs from a long line of Squibs, and I’m just the first in as long as anyone can remember who can actually do magic.’

‘But if Filch can communicate with cats, he isn’t a Squib,’ Harry reminded them.

‘No.  But if he’s not the same kind of wizard as everyone else here, he probably feels as though he is.  That’s the trouble with having only one magical school for the whole of Britain and Ireland: if you don’t have the right kind of magic, you don’t get invited to Hogwarts, so you don’t get taught how to use the magic you do have.’

‘It’s tribal,’ said Hiccup.  ‘Dividing people up one way, the four Houses of Hogwarts are the four tribes here, among humans, and then there are the elves, but they have their own society.  But then, dividing them the other way, there are the tribe of students, the tribe of teachers, and the tribe of ghosts who were once linked to Hogwarts and each feel they belong to their House.  And then there are Hagrid and Filch, and they’re the only human or part-human grown-ups here who aren’t teachers and don’t seem to fit with anyone except their pets.  And they won’t even be friends with each other, just because Filch likes cats and Hagrid likes dogs and dragons.  And – if things had gone just a bit differently, Fishlegs and I would have been exiled from our tribe when we were ten years old, because we’re runts and on Berk, “Only the strong can belong.”’

‘I’m going to start my own tribe for misfits when I grow up,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘If you and Toothless get exiled, do you want to join?’ he added to Hiccup.

‘I’ll join,’ said Hermione.

‘Me too,’ said Harry.

‘I’m – not sure,’ said Ben.  ‘I used to be someone who didn’t belong anywhere.  But now I have too many places to belong – with my family, and with Firedrake and the other dragons, and now here at Hogwarts.  But I belong with you, anyway,’ he added to Twigleg.

‘We’re not even in the same House, now,’ said Twigleg.  ‘But – I know I belong with you, my Master.  Only – I miss my brothers.  I wish I wasn’t the only homunculus left in the world.’

‘Maybe you’re not,’ said Ben, gently pressing a finger to the tip of his friend’s long nose.  ‘It’s a big world.  We’re bound to find others.  And if you want to stay with them rather than with me, when you do, that’s fine.  It won’t stop us being friends, the same as having a human family hasn’t stopped me being friends with Firedrake.’

‘I know I belong with my family and their friends,’ said Guinevere.  ‘But half of my family’s friends are Magizoologists and the other half are magical creatures.  I didn’t manage to make friends with any other human children until I met Ben.’

‘I’m definitely a misfit,’ said Hiccup.  ‘But – joining another tribe doesn’t solve that.  I think I need to grow up to be someone who can show people how to get on with each other – humans and dragons, wizards and Muggles, people who like cats and people who like dogs – everyone.’

Harry wondered about the story Draco had told him, about a Slytherin orphan.  Who had the boy been?  Had he and Slytherin golden boy Tom Riddle known each other?  And did either of them have anything to do with the ‘Dark Lord’ Draco had mentioned after drinking Veritaserum?

When he arrived back in the Slytherin dormitory, Vincent and Gregory were playing Gobstones, Blaise was anointing his flawless skin with an anti-acne potion, and the curtains around Draco’s bed were already closed.  ‘Draco?’ Harry called.  He wasn’t sure what to say – he couldn’t pretend to like Draco, but all the same, Draco was lonely and wanted to be Harry’s friend, and until recently, being lonely had been Harry’s constant experience.  He ought to make up and be friends, both because it was the right thing to do, and because Draco had something to tell Harry which Harry suspected he needed to know.

‘Leave him,’ said Blaise.  ‘He’s already asleep.’

Harry climbed into bed himself.  Whatever it was, it could wait till morning.

Chapter Text

The Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff class had their flying lesson the next day.  When Harry joined them for lunch, Hermione was urging Hiccup, ‘Well, now will you go to Madam Pomfrey?’

‘What’s wrong?’ Harry asked.

‘Broken arm, I think,’ said Hiccup cheerfully.  His right arm was dangling by his side, and looked quite swollen.

‘Did you fall off?’ Ben asked.

‘No, my broom hit me the first time I tried to call it.’

‘It was Madam Hooch’s fault,’ said Hermione.  ‘She told everyone, “Summon your broom with your right hand,” rather than, “Summon your broom with your dominant hand,” and Hiccup was too polite to ask whether that still applies if you’re left-handed.’

‘I didn’t know I was allowed to be left-handed!’ protested Hiccup.

Hermione stared at him.  ‘How are you not left-handed?  You write and draw with your left hand, you use a wand in your left hand, you stir potions with your left hand…’

‘Yes, but at home, nobody thought any of these things were important,’ explained Hiccup.  ‘Gobber shouted at me if I didn’t use my right hand for important things like sword-fighting.’

‘Well, he shouldn’t,’ said Hermione.  ‘My dad was in the fencing team at university, and he says lots of the best fencers are left-handed, because they’re used to fighting both swordsmen whose sword is on the same side as theirs and ones whose sword is on the opposite side.’

‘Anyway, I didn’t want to give up, so I called the broom again, with my left hand, and it flew, and it was amazing,’ said Hiccup.  ‘Amazing in a terrifying, airsick, my-stomach-is-about-to-turn-inside out way, but still amazing.’

‘What was it like for you?’ Harry asked the others.

‘Like that, but without the “amazing,”’ said Fishlegs.  ‘But – I suppose I’m feeling a bit less terrified of starting  dragon-riding lessons when we go home for the Yule holidays.’

‘Me too,’ said Hiccup.  ‘I’m more worried about what Toothless is going to say when I bring a riding-dragon into the family.  You know what he’s like with other dragons.’

‘What are you going to get?’ Fishlegs asked.  ‘A Silver Phantom, like your mum?’

‘Maybe.  I don’t know.  I think I’ll just wait and find who’s the right dragon for me.  When I sensed Toothless, back in the cave, I just knew that we were meant to be together.  Maybe it’ll be like that with my riding dragon, too.  What about you?’

‘I’ll probably end up with whatever dragon people don’t want,’ said Fishlegs.  ‘I hope that’s because it’s one who’s a bit lazy, rather than too terrifying to go near.  I wouldn’t mind a Zebramount.  Or a Long-Eared Caretaker Dragon.  One of those used to look after me when I was a baby.’

‘They’re incredible, aren’t they?  The way the males carry their eggs in their ears.  If you’d stayed with the dragon for longer, maybe you’d have grown up speaking Dragonese as a first language.’

‘If I’d stayed with the dragon any longer, I wouldn’t have any skin left.  You know what dragons do to my eczema, and my sneezing.  Did, I mean.  Until Madam Pomfrey gave me a potion for dragon allergy.’

‘I didn’t even know there were potions to cure allergies,’ said Hiccup.  ‘My granddad never said anything about treating allergies, and he’s the only Healer we’ve got, back home.  Maybe if my dad disowns me as heir, I can be a Healer instead.’

‘If your dad disowns you as heir, Snotlout will be the next chief and we’ll both get banished,’ retorted Fishlegs.  ‘Or it might happen sooner, if we fail the dragon-riding class.’

‘You’ll be fine!  And you might get a really cool riding-dragon.  I think you’d be good with a Deadly Shadow.  They’re the traditional dragons for bards, because the personalities of their three heads contain the right mixture of inspiration and caution.’

‘Like Runespoor snakes?’ asked Hermione.

‘Yes,’ said Hiccup.  ‘I wonder whether they’re related – maybe the Runespoor isn’t a a true snake, but a mutation of the Deadly Shadow that lost its legs and wings.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Guinevere.  ‘My dad says fossils of Runespoor skeletons go back earlier than any three-headed species of dragon except Foresters.’

‘Anyway,’ said Hermione, ‘Fishlegs, please will you bully Hiccup into going to Madam Pomfrey to get his arm healed?  The way Professor Snape bullied you into going to her about your allergies after the incident with the powdered dragon-scale and the explosion and…’

‘You promised not to mention that again,’ said Fishlegs reproachfully.

‘Okay, okay, just make sure Hiccup gets his arm sorted!  I’ll save you both some lunch.  What do you want?’

‘Anything that’s not limpets,’ said Fishlegs.  Hiccup had already explained how their teacher at their old school back home, Gobber the Belch, forced the entire class to live on limpets when someone misbehaved or screwed up in a task.

Hermione set aside two extra plates, one with steak-and-kidney pudding and one with shepherd’s pie.  The rest of the group continued to chatter about the flying lesson.  Hermione hadn’t enjoyed it much, but had asked Madam Hooch to allow her to continue into break for extra practice in future.  Guinevere had loved flying just as much as Ben had the day before.  ‘I think Air might be my element after all,’ she said.

‘Air isn’t an element,’ objected Hermione.

‘Yes, it is.  Most people are aligned with one of the four.  Ben is Fire; that’s probably to do with being the Dragon Rider.  My dad is Earth.  Mum and I are both a mixture of Air and Water, but I’d always thought I was mostly Water.  Twigleg is definitely Air; that’s why he’s so light, even for his size.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense!’ said Hermione.  ‘Water’s a compound, not an element, and air and earth are mixtures of different elements and compounds, and fire isn’t even a substance.  And there are over a hundred elements, not just four!

‘Draco Malfoy said the Houses here have their elements, too,’ said Harry, remembering some of the other things Draco had said when he’d been made to drink Veritaserum, about wishing Harry would be his friend, and about how Harry was the son of the Dark Lord.  ‘He said Fire is the Gryffindor house element and ours is Water.’

‘Yes, and Ravenclaw is Air and Hufflepuff is Earth,’ said Guinevere.  ‘That’s why Ravenclaw and Gryffindor have their dormitories and common rooms in towers while the Hufflepuff rooms are on the ground floor.  Fishlegs said they look like a badger sett.  What are the Slytherin rooms like?’ she asked Harry.  ‘Are they near the lake?’

Harry was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone where the Slytherin rooms were.  ‘Did you have a good flying session?’ he asked Twigleg, the only person who hadn’t spoken since coming in from the lesson.  He hadn’t even tasted the pea and the half a chip that Ben had set aside for him, but just huddled against Ben’s arm, his long spindly arms and legs folded up, making him look more like a spider than ever.

‘I – couldn’t get my broom to move,’ he admitted, ashamed.  ‘It must have sensed my fear – that after riding on a raven that was really a Transfigured crustacean, and fighting in a dragonback battle, and being flown anywhere by Lola, I didn’t want to risk anything to do with flying, ever again.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Guinevere.  ‘That broom was far too big for you.’

‘It was a toddler’s safety broom for children aged one to three, guaranteed not to rise more than 60 cm off the ground,’ retorted Twigleg.  ‘Madam Hooch borrowed it from a friend whose children had outgrown it.  If I couldn’t control a broom like that, what chance do I have with anything bigger?  The broom knew I was a coward.’

‘You’re not a coward!’ retorted Ben.  ‘If anything, you take too many risks, climbing up bookshelves to pick up heavy books that weigh twenty times as much as you do, and climbing down with them.’

‘I’ve been climbing bookshelves for centuries,’ retorted Twigleg.

‘Exactly!  You’re not scared, when you know you can manage.  And you’ll be the same with flying, when you get used to it.  But it’s not fair that nothing here is homunculus-sized.’

‘Dad’s picking you up Saturday to go to Diagon Alley to get your wand and robes and books and things, isn’t he?’ added Guinevere.  Since he hadn’t expected to be a student in his own right, Twigleg had been continuing to wear his own clothes for the time being, though he had allowed Professor Flitwick to Transfigure the ends of his long-tailed black jacket into a long cloak.  With its rather Dracula-like high collar, it now looked like a miniature version of Professor Snape’s robe.

‘What classes are you going to be in?’ asked Ben.

Twigleg had been sitting a succession of past OWL and NEWT exam papers (which Harry now knew stood for Ordinary Wizarding Level and Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test, and which seemed to be the wizard equivalent of GCSEs and A-levels) to establish what level he should be studying at.

‘Professor Flitwick said I’d be fine to take the language exams at Christmas, and Arithmancy,’ said Twigleg, much more cheerful now that they’d got off the subject of brooms.

‘You could take them now and get Outstanding,’ said Ben.

‘Well, maybe, but I’d like to brush up.  I’m not bad on Runes and Latin and Mermish and Troll, but my spoken Gobbledegook is terribly rusty.  Professor Flitwick said he’d find a goblin friend of his whom I could practise with.’

‘Doesn’t Professor Flitwick speak Gobbledegook?’ asked Hermione, surprised.

‘No, his parents always spoke English around him, he says,’ said Twigleg.  ‘They wanted him to grow up sounding as human as possible, so that no-one would think of him as anything else.’

‘What about the other courses?’ asked Ben.  ‘You already know all about Astronomy and Potions and Care of Magical Creatures and Alc…’ he tailed off, sounding ashamed.

‘I’m not going to panic just from hearing the word “Alchemy”,’ said Twigleg with dignity.  ‘I may have had some decidedly unpleasant experiences of alchemists, but I read all the books on the subject that I could find in my creator’s castle, and I did fairly well on the written papers.  On the other hand, I don’t have much practical experience, and they’re not running an Alchemy course this year because nobody else has signed up for it.  And I’m not used to wizarding magic, because it’s rather different from the way alchemists work, so I’ll be starting at third-year level for Herbology, Defence Against Dark Arts, Transfiguration, and Charms, at the same time as joining the sixth-year Care of Magical Creatures and Ancient Studies classes.  I don’t know how good I can be until I’ve got a wand, and I don’t know yet whether I’ll be able to brew potions on my own at all.  I can’t reach to stir a full-size cauldron, and nobody knows yet what happens when a homunculus tries to brew something in a miniaturised cauldron with all the ingredients scaled down to a thousandth the quantity.  So Professor Snape wants me to stay in the first-year class for that, because it’s such a dangerous subject to get wrong, but work on my own instead of in a pair while I test how well the miniaturised recipes work.  And I’ll still be in the first-year class for History of Magic, because I’ve got so much catching up to do on what’s been happening in the past few hundred years.’

‘When you’ve got your NEWTs in some subjects, does that mean you can teach here?’ asked Ben.  ‘Even if you’re still a student in other classes?’

‘I don’t know.  Maybe.  I’m not sure I could face talking to a whole class.  It isn’t like just tutoring you and Guinevere.’

‘You’ll be fine!’ said Ben.  ‘You were all right translating for me in front of that whole village in Pakistan.  You can be shy sometimes, but you’re a real showman when you get going.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Twigleg thoughtfully.

Harry felt relieved that the conversation had moved on from him.  He could so nearly have mentioned that the Slytherin common room was in the dungeons, and then he would have been a traitor to his House.  What would he have done if he had gone to the dormitory and found Draco murdered by someone from one of the other Houses who had a grudge against Draco’s parents?  Maybe Professor Snape was right and he couldn’t be a Slytherin and be friends with non-Slytherins.

‘Harry?’ said Ben, trying to get his attention.  Harry realised he had been lost in his thoughts.  ‘I said, Hagrid asked if you’re coming to tea tomorrow afternoon.’

Last week, Harry had been hurt at not being invited.  Now, he wondered what the point was.  Ben and Hiccup, and Fishlegs and Twigleg for that matter, could talk to Hagrid about dragons, and flying (Harry had noticed a motorbike in Hagrid’s cabin which looked like the flying motorbike Harry sometimes glimpsed in his dreams, and there were no wheel-tracks outside the hut, so presumably it was enchanted to fly).  Harry didn’t have a dragon, and he wasn’t allowed to fly.  And he was the only Slytherin.

‘I’ve got loads of homework,’ he said.  ‘Maybe next week?’

Tomorrow afternoon, he needed to talk to Draco and find out what he had meant about Harry being the Heir of Slytherin.  He had noticed graffiti here and there on the corridors: ‘PARSELMOUTH + FLIES WITHOUT A BROOM + SORTED INTO SLYTHERIN = HEIR OF SLYTHERIN!’  He had no idea what a ‘parselmouth’ was, and as none of his friends had had parents at Hogwarts, he very much doubted that they knew what Heir of Slytherin meant.  But Draco knew something.  And Harry needed to know.

Chapter Text

At dinner-time, Harry sat at the Slytherin table for once, between Draco and Blaise.  Draco smirked.  ‘What’s wrong?  Did Greenbloom give you the push?’

‘No,’ said Harry.  ‘I just felt like sitting here for a change.  Do you have a problem with that?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Draco.  ‘You grew up in the Muggle world; you didn’t know what Gryffindors are like.  We did try to warn you, but I suppose you had to find out the hard way.’

‘Ben is still my friend, and so’s Hiccup,’ retorted Harry.  ‘They’re friends I chose.’  Though if anything, ‘friends’ seemed too weak a word.  The connection he had felt when he sat with Hiccup and Ben as soon as they met was like the bonds they seemed to have with their dragons: a sense of being destined to be together.  ‘But the Sorting Hat chose you and me for Slytherin, and that makes us – I dunno – brothers?  Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘No,’ said Draco.

‘Neither do I.  I always wished I did.’  Harry turned in Blaise’s direction, wondering whether to ask him whether he had any siblings, but Blaise was busy chatting to two second-year boys, Cormac McLaggen and Marcus Belby, who had become close friends of his.  Remembering that Blaise’s father was dead and that he had had a long line of stepfathers, Harry realised just in time that he might not want to discuss his family.

‘You want something, don’t you?’ said Draco flatly.

‘Well – yes,’ Harry admitted.  ‘None of my friends knows much about this place, because they’re either Muggleborn or from other countries.  So I thought maybe you could explain…’

‘Not here,’ said Draco.  ‘We can talk about it in the Common Room.’

In fact, Draco didn’t deem anywhere private enough to have a conversation until Friday afternoon.  The Slytherin first-year boys’ dormitory was unoccupied, as Blaise was chatting in the Common Room with Cormac and Marcus, while Professor Snape had summoned Vincent and Gregory to a remedial brewing lesson, since, as he said, they needed to know how to brew a potion safely when Draco wasn’t there to tell them what to do.

‘You’ve seen the graffiti, haven’t you?’ Draco said.

‘Yes.  And you said before that I was the son of the Dark Lord.  But everyone else said the Dark Lord killed my parents – and tried to kill me.’  When Professor Snape had taken Harry to London to buy school supplies, he hadn’t been in any mood to answer questions, just trying to get the errand over as quickly as possible.  But Harry had noticed the way people whispered, and he remembered the man in the wand shop, Mr Ollivander, telling him that the wizard who had tried to kill him when he was a baby had a wand made with a feather from the same phoenix as the feather in Harry’s own wand.

‘Oh, that’s what people say,’ agreed Draco.  ‘That you’re the son of two Gryffindors, that the big bad nasty Slytherin Dark Lord decided to murder you, an innocent Gryffindor baby, and that your parents died protecting you but you somehow fought the Dark Lord off and killed him.  But it doesn’t fit the facts, does it?’

‘Which facts?’ Harry retorted.  Grown-ups who had known James and Lily Potter, like Hagrid and Professor Snape, all seemed to agree that he looked like James and Lily, so why shouldn’t he be their son?’

‘Think about it!’ retorted Draco.  ‘You’re in Slytherin.  You can fly without a broom – that’s something only the Dark Lord could do.’

And, Harry remembered, the Hat had told him that his ability to talk to snakes and dragons, without having studied animal language the way Hiccup and Twigleg had, was the gift of Salazar Slytherin himself.

‘But why would I look like the people everyone says are my mum and dad, if they weren’t?’ retorted Harry.  ‘And if the Dark Lord was my real dad, why would he try to kill me?’

‘How do you know he did?’ said Draco.  ‘Maybe he was trying to rescue you, your kidnappers duelled him, and you got hit in the crossfire and left with a scar.  Some say he’s not really dead,’ Draco added.  ‘He’s the only wizard Dumbledore ever feared, and now Dumbledore is convinced that he’s coming back, and that you’re going to be the weapon to defeat him.  So Dumbledore has to let you live until you’ve done whatever he wants you to do to, and since you turned out to be one of us, that means he has to tolerate Slytherin House and let Professor Snape keep an eye on you.  But when the Dark Lord is dead for real, you’ll just be sent to Azkaban along with all the rest of us, for being sorted into Slytherin.’

‘What’s Azkaban?’

‘It’s a prison on an island somewhere.  Patrolled by Dementors – they’re creatures that can suck out your soul.  Most people go mad and die before long just from being near them, though, even without having their souls sucked out.’

‘And you think Professor Dumbledore’s planning to send all of us there?  A quarter of the school?  How’s he going to be allowed to do that?’

‘Because if the Dark Lord is defeated, he’ll be the big hero who can do what he wants, because he’s a Gryffindor.’

‘Why would he want to, anyway?’  Harry’s impression of the Headmaster hadn’t been that sinister – or at least, not compared to Professor Quirrell, the Defence Against Dark Arts teacher, who really gave him the creeps.

‘I told you – he’s a Gryffindor!’ exclaimed Draco, exasperated.  ‘Gryffindors don’t need a reason for wanting to commit genocide against Slytherins.  They’re Fire and we’re Water.’

‘Who is this Dark Lord, anyway?’ Harry asked.  ‘Is he the same person as that orphan boy you were telling me about, in detention?’  He remembered the story-book Hermione had shown him, about a peaceful wizard who had to pretend to be the ‘Dark Lord’ for the entertainment of Muggle tourists who wanted to have the satisfaction of ‘defeating’ him.

‘Yes,’ said Draco worshipfully.  ‘He wanted justice for Slytherins – and justice for wizards in general, to cleanse the school of the wrong sort of students, and free the world from the control of Muggles so that wizards can take their rightful place as rulers.’

‘What do you mean, “the wrong sort of students”?’ retorted Harry.

‘I don’t mean you!’ Draco hastily assured him.  ‘Even if you really are the Potters’ son, you’re still the son of a witch and a wizard, even if they were Gryffindors.  But people who claim to be wizards when their parents were Muggles – they can’t ever really belong here, can they?’

‘So, what, is Icicle “the wrong sort” because he’s the son of a Squib and a Muggle?  Is Marcus “the wrong sort” because he’s half-troll?  Are you going to tell him that before or after he lets you join the Quidditch team?’

‘No, they’re all right – the Hat wouldn’t have chosen them for Slytherin if they hadn’t been.  But that Ravenclaw with the sticking-out teeth – Grungy or whatever she’s called…’

‘So Icicle is “the right sort” because he’s in Slytherin, but you’d want to “cleanse the school of” him if he was in Ravenclaw?’

‘Maybe you’re not the Heir of Slytherin after all,’ said Draco.  ‘You’d understand, otherwise.’

‘Or maybe Salazar Slytherin wasn’t an idiot like you!  Who’s the most famous Slytherin ever?’

‘Merlin, of course.’

‘Exactly!  Even Muggles have heard of Merlin!  And he was friends with King Arthur, who was a Squib adopted by a Muggle knight.  Not with Arthur’s sisters who were all witches.’  Harry took out his History of Magic textbook and turned to a woodcut of Merlin and Arthur together.  Merlin had a tawny owl sitting on his head and a badger at his feet, and cradled a grass-snake in one arm.  Arthur had a goshawk sitting on his gloved fist, while his other hand caressed a hound’s head.  ‘Merlin wasn’t trying to “free the world from the control of Muggles”!  He just brought Arthur up to be a good king, stayed with him for a few years after he became king, and then left him to get on with it.’

‘Right, and look how that turned out,’ retorted Draco.  ‘Arthur and his nephew killed each other in a war over the throne, and then Muggles started burning witches.  They’re like animals, and Mudbloods – Muggles who think they’re wizards just because they can do magic – are just as vicious and stupid, only with power.  Do you want that?’

‘I don’t know how vicious Hermione can get, because I’ve never fought her,’ said Harry.  ‘But if she was stupid, she wouldn’t be in Ravenclaw, would she?  Anyway, what about Blaise?’

‘What?  He’s a Pure-blood.’

‘Yeah, I know.  But some Muggles, like my Aunt Marge, would say he can’t be British because he’s black and because his surname is Zabini.  She says being born in Britain doesn’t make you British any more than a dog is a horse because it was born in a stable.’

‘See?  You’ve proved my point: Muggles are stupid.  Blaise is British, so what’s the point in saying he can’t be British?’

‘What’s the point in saying Hermione Granger can’t be a witch when she is a witch?’

‘Forget it!’ yawned Draco.  ‘I was wrong; you’re not the Heir of Slytherin.  Go and play with your Mudblood friends, if they’ll have you.’

‘Yeah, I will,’ said Harry.  Talking to Draco hadn’t achieved as much as he’d hoped.  After all, they had both been toddlers when the Dark Lord had died, so Draco only knew what grown-ups had told him.  If he was going to find anything out, he needed to ask an adult, and Harry didn’t have much experience of talking to adults.

Chapter Text

Harry made his way to Hagrid’s hut.  Hagrid, Ben, Twigleg, Hermione, Guinevere, Hiccup and Fishlegs were outside in the warm afternoon sunlight, watching and laughing as Toothless played with Hagrid’s dog Fang, swooping almost near enough for the dog’s teeth to catch him and then soaring into the air, crowing ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ in triumph.

‘Never heard a dragon soun’ like that before,’ remarked Hagrid.

‘Are you sure he’s not part basilisk?’ added Ben, jokingly.

‘What?  Toothless doesn’t look anything like a basilisk!’ said Hermione.  ‘They’re giant snakes – and it said in one of the books in the library that the crowing of a cockerel kills them, not that the basilisks crow like cockerels.’

‘Well, my dad fought a basilisk last year, and he said it looked like a cross between a chicken and a snake, with a cockerel’s head and wings and a snake’s tail,’ said Guinevere.  ‘Only he couldn’t take a proper photo of it, because it exploded, and then he had to ask the dragon he’d been protecting from the basilisk to burn the remains to get rid of the smell.  So all I’ve seen is his drawings of it.’

‘Maybe they metamorphose, like Windwalker dragons?’ suggested Hiccup.  ‘After all, they’d need a beak as hatchlings, because it says in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that they hatch out of chicken eggs…’

‘Cockerel’s eggs,’ corrected Twigleg.

‘No, it just says chicken’s eggs,’ said Hermione. ‘Cockerels don’t lay eggs.’

‘They don’t usually,’ retorted Twigleg.  ‘Hens lay eggs that hatch into chicks.  Cockerels wouldn’t normally lay eggs, and they aren’t often fertile if they do, but if a cockerel lays an egg and if it’s fertile and if there’s a toad willing to incubate it, which also doesn’t happen very often because most species of toad don’t even guard their own eggs, let alone a bird’s egg – then you get a basilisk.  I suspect that Newt Scamander wrote a deliberately imprecise account, so that people wouldn’t start growing their own basilisks.’

‘And you’ve just told Hagrid how to grow one,’ sighed Hiccup.  ‘Can you promise me you won’t, Hagrid?’

‘What’ve yeh got against basilisks?’ retorted Hagrid.  ‘They’re jus’ misunderstood, prob’ly, same as dragons.’

‘They’re not,’ Ben insisted.  ‘My dad’s an even bigger animal-lover than you, Hagrid.  He’ll never hurt any creature if he can possibly avoid it.  But he still killed that basilisk to stop it killing Firedrake.  And I’m sorry I joked about Toothless maybe being part basilisk,’ he added to Hiccup.

‘Not as if I can breed one this year, anyway,’ sighed Hagrid.  ‘Haven’ got any cockerels left.  Whatever killed them only took the cockerels – left the hens alone, an’ hasn’ been back since.  So I don’t reckon it were a fox or a marten – they’re not so choosy.’

‘Hi, Toothless,’ said Harry in Dragonese.

Ben spun round to see him, and beamed.  ‘You came after all!’

‘Yeah, I just needed to talk to Draco for a bit first,’ said Harry.

‘What’s he been tellin’ you?’ asked Hagrid suspiciously.  ‘Tryin’ ter convince yeh yer the Heir of Slytherin?’

‘Yeah, but he’s given up on that now,’ said Harry.  ‘Only – who was “the Dark Lord” anyway?’

‘Don’t go callin’ him that!  Only his followers called him that, and yer not one of those.’

‘Well, I don’t know what else to call him.  Doesn’t he have a name?’

‘Don’ like ter say it,’ mumbled Hagrid.  ‘We mos’ly jus’ call him You-Know-Who, or He Who Must Not Be Named.’

‘You mean, like a sort of evil version of in the Enchanters books, where saying the Enchanter’s title three times summons him?’ asked Hermione.

‘All right, but I don’t know who!’ retorted Harry.  ‘Are we still talking about the man who killed my parents?’

‘Aye, that’s the one.  Killed any good wizards who tried ter stand up ter him, like James and Lily.  Started ’bout twenty years ago, back when yer parents were first years like you now, an’ it jus’ got worse over the years.  Anyone might be an enemy, people were getting’ killed all over the place – Muggles, wizards, goblins, elves, anyone.  Hogwarts was about the only place safe from him, ’cause Dumbledore was the only wizard he was ever afraid of.’

‘And – he hated people from Muggle families, like my mum?’

‘Nah, he wouldn’ care about that!  Some o’ his followers might, mind, but they wouldn’ dare say so, if their boss wanted ter take a bright Muggleborn on his side.  Yer mum was a powerful witch – always had been, ever since she was a little girl – an’ he’d’ve been glad to have her if she’d ever join, but he knew she wouldn’.  So, he killed her, and yer dad, an’ tried ter kill you, too.’

‘But do you actually know for sure if they were my parents?’ persisted Harry.  ‘I mean – is it possible that You-Know-Who was my real dad?’

‘You mean, like in Star Wars?’ said Ben.

‘Is that the film Lola made me watch?’ asked Twigleg.  ‘The one with the robots in the desert, and the giant slug?’

‘What’s a film?’ asked Hiccup.

‘Yer not You-Know-Who’s son!’ said Hagrid.  ‘I’ve known yer parents since they were your age, and I saw Lily again an’ again over the time she was expectin’ you.  Yer look jus’ like James, ’cept yeh’ve got Lily’s eyes.  That’s prob’ly why Professor Snape isn’ sure what ter make of yeh.’

‘Could my parents talk to snakes?’ Harry asked.

‘No, not that I ever heard of.  There’s not many can – an’ it’s best not ter talk about it,’ said Hagrid.  ‘That was something You-Know-Who could do.  Had a girt great pet snake that some said was a witch who’d turned herself into a snake an’ forgot how ter turn human again.’

‘But if someone else could talk to snakes, would that make them – linked to You-Know-Who?’

‘Nah!  Wish I could!  It’s jus’ – bes’ not ter talk about it, in case people get the wrong idea.  Yer not a bad lad, Harry Potter, even if yeh were sorted into Slytherin.  I wasn’ sure about yeh at firs’ – hadn’ seen yeh since yeh were a baby, an’ I thought, if yeh’d turned into a Slytherin, mebbe those Muggles yeh live with had messed yeh up good an’ proper.  But yer friends say yer decent, an’ I trust them.  Jus’ – don’ spend too much time with the likes o’ that Draco Malfoy, okay?  His parents were in deep with You-Know-Who, especially his dad.  Yeh can’ trust that sort.’

‘What about Professor Snape?’ Harry asked.  ‘I know he doesn’t like me, but should I trust him?’  Draco was too young to know anything much, and Hagrid was biased against Slytherins, but the Head of Slytherin must be able to explain things, surely?

‘Yes,’ said Hagrid firmly.  ‘Trust him.’

By now, it was time for dinner.  Professor Snape wasn’t in the Great Hall for the meal, but afterwards, Harry went to his office.  He could hear Snape muttering under his breath, ‘For Merlin’s sake, Granger, I said two pages on the use of unicorn horn, not five in tiny writing on everything you’ve ever heard about unicorns!’  Harry knocked on the door.

‘Potter?  Now what is it?’ Professor Snape growled, as if Harry were in the habit of pestering him every day over trivial things.  There was a large stack of essays on his desk.

‘I just wondered if you knew whether it’s true that I’m the son of – the wizard who killed James and Lily Potter,’ said Harry.

‘What do you know of the Dark Lord?’

‘I don’t know anything!  That’s the problem!  All I’ve heard is rumours, and some people say he murdered my parents and other people say he was my real dad, and loads of people think he was evil but some say he was expelled from here for being too brilliant and because Dumbledore was afraid of him and he just wanted justice for Slytherins.’

‘That was the impression he liked to give his followers, at first.  He was very good at telling people what they wanted to hear.’

‘Were you one of his followers?’

Professor Snape rounded on him, furious.  ‘Is that any of your business?!’ he demanded.

‘Yes, it is.  Because you said we Slytherins need to look out for each other because no-one else will.  But if your “Dark Lord” was a Slytherin and so am I, and he wants to kill me, whose side are you on?’

Professor Snape breathed slowly in and out, visibly trying to calm himself.  ‘Potter, I am on the side of this school.  I would never side with anyone who was trying to kill any Hogwarts student, however tempting it might be in the case of some.  That would apply whether you were Slytherin, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or even Gryffindor.  Is there anything else?’

‘Could I be the Dark Lord’s son?’ Harry asked.  ‘People are saying that flying without a broom was something only he could do.’

‘Then they’re talking nonsense,’ said Professor Snape.  ‘Your mother could fly when she was nine years old, before she even knew she was a witch.  Your father was an arrogant, bullying menace, but he wasn’t a terrorist or a murderer.’

‘Is it true that the Headmaster is letting me live for now because I’m his secret weapon to defeat the Dark Lord, but once he doesn’t have a use for me he’s going to send all of us to Azkaban?’

‘How should I know?  Do you imagine I can see into his soul?’

‘Well, no, but – I don’t think you’d be teaching here if you thought he was likely to do that.  You’d have moved us all to Durmstrang.’

‘Then if you can answer your own questions, I suggest you do so in the privacy of your own head, and leave me to get on with my marking.’