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Smokepaw turned her back on the corpse of the manyleg and scraped dirt towards it with both back feet. {Now you,} she told Ashtail, and panted approval as her daughter's small paws thrust soil in the direction of their deceased enemy. {Good. That signifies that this thing is too foul and filthy even for us to eat.}

{But I thought the manylegs could talk, like the centaurs can, and the twolegs—I mean, the humans,} Ashtail corrected herself with a wag of pride, cocking her head in the direction of the man and girl who were quietly conversing across the clearing with Grasseye lying beside them to listen. {If they talk and they live in the home trees, we couldn't eat them anyway, could we? By the Great Agreement?}

{No, we could not.} Smokepaw licked the top of her daughter's head lovingly. {Clever girl, to remember your lessons. But the manylegs are not part of the Great Agreement, because they have no honor. They believe that a promise holds only the one single person who makes it, not an entire people along with it, so that even if the leader of their tribe promised that his people would uphold the Great Agreement henceforth, the other manylegs would see no reason they should not break that promise.} She growled softly. {My parents and grandparents learned that lesson in blood, before you or I were ever born. The People do not forget.}

{I won't forget either, Mummy.} Ashtail bared her teeth in the direction of the manyleg's body, then glanced back at the two humans. {But what about them? They don't live in the home trees, and I know we shouldn't eat them…}

{They do not taste good, in any case.} Smokepaw snorted a laugh at Ashtail's wide-eyed astonishment. {Silly cublet! Use your nose! Do they smell like the deer and rabbits we chase, who eat only the plants of the ground, or do they smell like us and the bone-horses?}

{Ooohhhh.} Ashtail wagged furiously in understanding, stirring up a cloud of dust. {But…} She looked over at the third human present, who was speaking to Alcyone with some heat. {Does that mean we can be friends with them?} she asked finally, lowering her head as though already expecting a rebuke from her mother. {Or should we stay away?}

{That is a very good question.} Smokepaw ignored the half-stifled curse she could hear emerging from the undergrowth nearby. If her mate wanted a certain outcome from this chance encounter, he would have to come out here and cause it to happen himself. {Why don't we listen, you and I, and find out what would be best.}

Side by side, mother and daughter padded towards the human boy and his companion.


Draco wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting on the ground, fighting his hardest against crying. Pureblood wizards never cried. But he'd been so scared, and hurt, and confused (werewolves were supposed to attack people, not defend them, and they certainly weren't supposed to talk), and then the huge spider had tried to bite the little werewolf cub and that wasn't right, she was just a baby, and he'd been running to try to get her out of the way before he quite knew what he was doing—

A hand touched his shoulder, gently, but startling him enough that he flinched away from it. "Are you hurt?" a woman's voice asked, full of concern. "I thought your shield had protected you."

"N-no." Draco clamped his lips shut over his treacherous stutter and scrubbed at his eyes with his sleeve, forcing himself to calm down, to not show weakness, to be as brave and strong as he knew he was expected to be. "I'm fine," he said when he thought he could, trying to ignore the fact that the hand remained in its place against his robes. "It didn't hurt me."

Belatedly, the voice matched itself with a face and a body in his mind, and he jerked his head around.

From the waist up, the person kneeling beside him could have been his mother (if his mother would ever have consented to wear so very little clothing, which Draco strongly doubted). From the waist down, she was nothing of the sort.

"You're—but you're a—"

"Centaur?" the other finished, with a grave nod. "I am, and my name is Alcyone. What is yours, young wizard?"

"Draco." He was staring, he knew he was staring, but he couldn't seem to stop. "I didn't know centaurs talked."

Alcyone raised an eyebrow, for all the world like his mother when she was not inclined to tolerate foolishness gladly (which was most of the time). His mother, of course, did not have a long tail, exactly the same shade as the hair on her head, which twitched restlessly in time with the raising of the brow. "Didn't you," was all she said, but Draco heard a world of meaning in the two words.

He scowled. "I'm not stupid," he said, pulling his shoulder out from under the hand still resting on it. "I just haven't studied centaurs yet. I'm still on things like gnomes and jarveys, I won't get to part-humans until next autumn—"

"Part-humans," Alcyone repeated, smiling slightly. "Is that what you have been taught to call us. How would you like it, I wonder, if I called you a 'part-centaur'?"

"Don't do that." Draco bristled. "We have a name for ourselves."

"As do we." Alcyone's smile broadened, for some unfathomable reason. "And as I told another young student of mine recently, it is always politest to call a people what they call themselves, unless it would cause undue confusion and there is another name available which gives no offense. Such as…" She motioned to the two figures now sitting beside them. "The wise wolves."

An instant of shock—how could something that big move so quietly—froze Draco in place, and in that instant, the smaller wolf pounced.

{You're all right, you're all right, you're all right!} she cheered, her front paws planted on Draco's shoulders, her tail slapping against his knees and her tongue busily washing his face, dodging his ineffectively shielding hands. {Your false-fur smells funny, but you're nice. Let's be friends. My name's Ashtail, what's yours?}

The larger wolf coughed once, a sound Draco knew well from his own mother. {No one can say anything,} she stated in a tone of infinite patience, {when he is being loved very nearly to death. Sit down and give him a chance to answer you.}

{Yes, Mum.} The smaller wolf, Ashtail, licked Draco's cheek once more, then leaped neatly back and settled into a sit, looking intently at him.

"You do talk." Draco wiped his face with his sleeve, trying to regain his balance and get back some semblance of the world he'd known half an hour ago. "I mean, you don't talk out loud, not with words, but I know what you're saying, and that doesn't make sense—"

{If I may?} the larger wolf asked Alcyone, who nodded. {Your magic is still somewhat unformed, Draco,} she said to him, her meaning conveyed by the angle of her pointed ears, the direct look in her brown eyes, the slow swish of her long and furry tail. {You have not yet been paired with a wand, as is the human custom. Sometimes, under great stress and great need, wandless magic takes unusual shapes. In your case, that of understanding the speech of my People as clearly as you do your own. And my name, if you are wondering, is Smokepaw.} She bent her head in what was clearly a bow.

"So…" Draco thought this over. "I was scared and I needed to understand you…so I did?"

{Very good.} Smokepaw let her tongue loll out in approval. {Though it was not me you understood first, but my son, Grasseye, Ashtail's elder brother. He is very nearly your age, as far as I can tell.} She nodded to the third wolf, who was lying beside the vaguely-familiar looking adult wizard across the clearing, both of them listening to the Muggleborn girl, Hermione. {Perhaps you will become friends.}

"Friends?" For a moment, Draco considered the thought, let it grow inside his mind, let it shimmer in all its glory—to have a friend, a real friend, someone to talk and laugh and play with, even if he did have four legs and fur, and someone else to look up to him, as Ashtail was looking up with shining eyes right now—

"I can't," he said regretfully, dismissing the idea with a pang. "I have to go home soon, and Father wouldn't understand. He doesn't allow animals in the house, and he wouldn't be able to hear you. So I can't."

{I see.} Smokepaw glanced once at Alcyone, who rose to her feet and moved delicately away. {Let us talk of other things, then. Tell us about your home, Draco. I have visited the Stonehouse for which our Pack is named, and my mate, Moonfur, has told me more about what it is like, but Ashtail has never been inside a human dwelling.}

"The Stonehouse? Oh, you mean Hogwarts, the castle." Draco nodded, understanding. "My house is big, but it's not that big. We call it Malfoy Manor, after my family, and I have a set of rooms all to myself…"


Movement from across the clearing caught Sirius's eye in the middle of Hermione's eager explanation of Muggle dentistry, as practiced by her parents (the young wolf looked as though he couldn't decide whether to be fascinated or appalled). The she-centaur was coming towards their little group, her eyes of pale green focused quite firmly on him.

"Hang on a tick," he said when Hermione paused for breath. "I do want to hear this, but in just a second." He leaned a little closer. "You don't want to offend centaurs," he murmured, "and ignoring them is pretty high on the offensive list."

Hermione's eyes went wide, and she nodded hard.

"Thanks." Sirius got to his feet. "Ma'am," he said with his best pureblood bow as the centaur approached to conversational distance. "Sirius Black, assistant professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts."

"Alcyone is my name." The centaur inclined her head. "Yours I knew, but your introduction is welcome. Tell me, am I right in believing you have some relation to the child named Draco?"

"Little Malfoy? We're related, all right. Let me think." Sirius rubbed his fingers together, noting that Hermione and the young wolf were both eavesdropping shamelessly on the conversation above them. "His mum's my first cousin, so that puts us at once removed, doesn't it?"

"It does. And makes you the person to whom I believe this information should come first." Alcyone administered a stern look to the young wolf, who lowered his ears and scooted away. Hermione looked momentarily confused but followed suit with a little yelp when an urgent set of teeth closed around her sleeve and tugged.

"The kids shouldn't hear it?" Sirius turned his shoulder to accommodate Alcyone's obvious precautions to this end. "Can't be good, then."

"It is not." Alcyone scuffed a hoof against the forest floor. "Draco has great potential, but if he remains where he is, I fear it will be wasted. The thought of friends was a welcome one to him, but almost an alien concept. He seems far more wary of his father than I believe is normal in a human child of his age. And then there is what it means that he is here in the Forest at all."

"Which is, Lucius was so caught up in whatever he was doing at the castle that he never bothered to look around and see Draco wandering off." Sirius sighed between his teeth. "Typical. And you're probably right about him being wasted where he is—he's going to learn the straight-up pureblood purity line, and that's a hard mindset to break away from. Trust me, I know."

"You would." Alcyone smiled at Sirius's raised eyebrow. "I told you that I knew your name," she said. "Shall I add that I have heard a great deal of your history, including your nearness to several famous figures on the better side of the human war?"

"Not like I did them any good by it." Sirius scowled, but then shook off his mood. "And not like it matters right now, either. What're you proposing?"

"Very little in a magical world happens by chance." Alcyone's sweeping gesture took in both sets of children, Hermione and the young wolf playing mirror-me on one side of the clearing, Draco scratching the ears of his lapful of fur while chattering nonstop to a larger wolf on the other. "This moment, this meeting, may well be a cusp point for the future. Will you help me seize it, and shape it as we would all like it better?"

"You mean the kids." Sirius nodded. "I was already thinking about something of the sort. Seeing if Draco and Hermione would agree to be pen pals, owl back and forth, learn about each other's worlds. Maybe even meet every so often, though we'd have to find some way to hide it from Lucius. He'd burst a blood vessel." A snicker broke through his words. "Maybe that means we should tell him, then. Not until we're well on the way, of course. See what he does when he finally realizes just how far we've corrupted his only son."

Alcyone's face remained straight, but her tail swished in what Sirius suspected was restrained laughter. "It is a good thought," she agreed, "but it does not address the immediate problem with Draco. If his father is so neglectful, and his mother too, since she allows it…"

"As much as I hate to say it, give Lucius his due." Sirius grimaced, fighting the urge to spit against the foul taste the words generated on his tongue. "Whatever he's here for, it's got to be something pretty damn urgent to pull his attention away from his kid. Normally he's overprotective to a fault. Malfoys don't tend towards the prolific."

"We can find that out." Alcyone dusted her hands idly against her furred sides. "But the fact remains that if we had not been present, both children would likely now be dead. That cannot occur again."

"True. And the Muggleborn tours are easy—just a simple Tracking Spell over the kids should stop any of them wandering off without the tour guide realizing it. But that's not why Draco's here, and we can't exactly…" Sirius trailed off uneasily as Alcyone regarded him with cool eyes.

"I know that you cannot take him from the custody of his lawful parents," the she-centaur said with calm assurance. "It is against your human law. But I am not a human, and you stand within my world now. If I choose to keep this child here with me, to take him deep into the Forest where no human ever goes, to raise him and train him as once my people trained the greatest heroes of old, do you have either the power or the desire to stop me?"

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Author Notes:

And I think that is a good place to leave it for a little while. My apologies for the waits on this, and on Surpassing Danger. I know what ought to happen there, I promise, but the words are just being slow at the moment.

Words are being doubly slow on originals, which frustrates, but I'll get there. Hugs, reviews, sales, blog comments, Facebook likes, Twitter follows, whatever you can manage, everything helps!