Surpassing Danger
Chapter 18: Deep Magic (Year 6)
By Anne B. Walsh
Hand in hand with Ginny, Harry climbed the stairs of Gringotts. They'd come through the Vanishing Cabinet from Sanctuary (where one large and three small dining halls, a three-sided "open-air" stage, and a full dozen small and soundproofed multipurpose rooms were nearing completion under the wands of the yearmates) to the Pepper Pot.
Safer than the Floo Network or brooms, safer than Apparating—I may have figured that out, but I'm still not licensed, I can't Side-Along yet, and there's always that spell Malfoy used on Padfoot way back when—and safer even than the Roads. Not that they aren't safe, but the Death Eaters might be able to figure them out. Some of them are more Muggle than they let on, it's always possible they could work out the trigger phrase and get onto them.
Though I like what Percy set up in that case. Harry snickered under his breath. If anyone Marked tries to ride the Roads, all the Cheering Charms disappear, so they'll come off the other end more angry and depressed even than your average Muggle. Snape helped him test it, Percy said, and it worked just like it should.
Of course, with Snape, I'm not sure how you could tell.
Percy himself, along with Charlie and Tonks, had been waiting at the restaurant, closed for the evening, to escort Harry and Ginny safely through Diagon Alley to the towering marble edifice which was the aboveground portion of Gringotts. The elder Weasleys had hugged their sister for luck and shaken Harry's hand, while Tonks had treated them both to one of her patented big-cousin knuckle rubs. If he looked over his shoulder, Harry knew, he would see them still there, watching.
But looking back means I'm nervous, and the goblins are probably watching already. I know I'd be watching, if it was goblins coming to see me. Especially if I had a feeling they wanted something out of me, something I might not be willing to give up. What if they don't believe me? What if they do, but think maintaining their reputation for protecting their vaults at all costs matters more? What if—
"What if you calm down?" Ginny murmured, her voice almost too low for Harry to hear even over the few inches separating them. "They're definitely not going to be impressed if you go in there all knotted up with nerves."
"Easy for you to say," Harry began heatedly, then forced himself to stop. "Sorry. It's just…"
"That you've never done anything like this before, that the whole war could turn on it, and so on and so on," Ginny finished for him. "All true, but I have a feeling this won't be the last time you're in that situation. And this one, at least, isn't likely to kill anybody." She glanced up at the tall, bronze doors. "I hope."
"Only with embarrassment." Harry squeezed her hand lightly. "But I don't have to do it alone. That counts for a lot."
"Good." Ginny smiled and lifted her free hand. Harry did the same, and together they pushed open one of the enormous outer portals, stepping over the threshold as one.
The silver doors beyond gleamed dimly in the fading evening light. Harry's mind provided the words carved on them, the words he could still remember proudly reading aloud in chorus with Neenie to the strange, shy boy standing beside them.
But if you seek beneath our floors
A treasure that was never yours…
We're not here to steal. We're here to talk. He and Ginny passed through the second door together as they had the first. Maybe to talk the goblins into stealing for us, but that's beside the point.
The interior of Gringotts' vast hall was darker than Harry had ever seen it. His eyes adjusted quickly, if not as fast as Wolf's would have, so that within a few seconds he could see the long counter, the hanging lamps, the roped-off waiting areas. To his left, near one of the doors which led down to the carts and the vaults, stood a small figure, a shaded lantern in its hand.
That's got to be our contact. Harry was about to tug on Ginny's hand, drawing her attention to the waiting goblin, when she turned her head in the correct direction without prompting, and Harry caught the change in her scent as she saw what he had seen. A quick squeeze told him she thought he should take the lead, but that she was aware, alert, ready to follow any cue he might give her.
Here we go, then.
"Good evening," Harry said, pitching his voice just loud enough to carry. "My name's Harry Potter. This is Ginny Weasley. I believe we're expected."
"You are," the goblin replied after a brief pause, unshading his lantern to reveal the features of his dark, pointed face, not materially different than any other goblin Harry had ever seen—
But then, that's what I used to think about house-elves, until I started spending more time in the kitchens at Hogwarts, and then training with the DA. They're really not that hard to tell apart, once you start taking the time to look. Bet goblins are the same.
"If you will follow me, please," the goblin continued, turning on his heel and setting off. Harry exchanged a small smile with Ginny as they did so—the words had been polite enough, but the tone was brusque, as if to say that the speaker didn't much care what they did one way or another.
He's trying to annoy us. Trying to get on our nerves by showing us how little he thinks of us. A laugh threatened to escape Harry at this tactic, and was firmly suppressed, but the smile won the day with its rearguard action. On a lot of wizards, I'm sure that works, but I grew up with the Pack and Ginny has six older brothers…
They were working their way through a maze of passages now, and Harry could see Ginny's lips moving. He suspected she was trying to keep track of the turns they were making, just in case everything should go impossibly sour and they had to fight their way out.
We can always follow our own scent back, though. Unless they know we're Animagi and they're leading us in circles on purpose…except that we'd figure that out pretty quickly, once we started getting fresher scent of ourselves, and then we'd just cast about for an older one…
Pulling himself out of his own double-think, Harry ducked his head to follow the goblin through a low doorway. Ginny's red mane just brushed the lintel as she stepped inside.
Everything's sized for them. Another test. They get along in our world, where things are always too large for them, so how will we do in theirs?
Harry let his eyes roam without, he hoped, being too obvious about trying to get his bearings. The room was the size of the bedroom he and Draco shared at the Den, with a vertical pole in the corner resembling the coat tree at Headquarters, on which the goblin who'd guided them was just hanging his lantern. A low, oblong table took up the room's center, with four chairs clustered at the end furthest from him. One of them was occupied.
"Ma'am," he said with a bow to the seated goblin, feeling rather than seeing Ginny's curtsey beside him. It was only a guess, but he thought a fair one, given what his great-aunt had told him about goblin negotiations, along with the more delicate, sculptured features of this goblin's face as opposed to their guide, who was just taking a seat beside her. "Sir," he added, broadening the bow to include both goblins. "Thank you for agreeing to meet with us."
The goblin woman's eyes widened, and she said something to her companion in Gobbledegook. He replied, shooting small, sharp glances in Harry and Ginny's direction. "Be seated," he added in English in the middle of the discussion. "This will take only a moment."
Ginny frowned, but Harry tugged her elbow lightly, guiding her down to the floor beside him. He gets one for free, he signed once his fingers were available again. Soften him up a bit, let him think he has the upper hand.
If you say so, Ginny signed back, her face dubious. But I don't see…
"I am Rarzal," the goblin man announced, turning back to them. "Twelfth in rank in the clan of—" Here followed a word in Gobbledegook that Harry could only liken to chewing a mouthful of rocks. "My clan has exchanged blood three times with the New World clan of—" Another mouthful of rocks, this one adding gargling to the chewing. "Landog, third in rank of this clan, exchanges money and services with the witch Amy Freeman, whose brother's daughter is the wife of your godfather, Harry Potter. Is this so?"
"Yes," said Harry, careful to keep the word neutral, a statement of fact and nothing more.
"And Ginevra Weasley." Rarzal turned to look at her. "Youngest sister of William Weasley, with whom my clan has exchanged money and services for some years now. Is this so?"
"It is," Ginny acknowledged, then let her eyes slide sideways to the goblin woman. "May we be made known to your companion?"
Rarzal did not move, but his scent eddied a waft of surprise in Harry's direction. The goblin woman made a small, breathy sound which, in a human, Harry would have called a suppressed laugh—
Which means that's probably what is for her too. We're not that different.
"I am Kunora," she said, her voice carrying traces of a guttural accent but entirely understandable. "The clan of my birth is—" Yet another name in Gobbledegook, this one with a spitting hiss in the middle of it. "I hold no rank as men reckon such things, but my voice is heard in the councils of the women." A quick, sidelong glance at Rarzal. "Both in the clan of my birth, and in the clan of this, my work-partner, with whom I have exchanged blood twice in the five years since our contract was signed at the Feast of the Shining Fire."
Harry hoped Ginny had understood this better than he had himself. It ought to be obvious, he knew, and if he just had a moment free to think about it, he was sure his mind would be able to translate Kunora's statement into human terms, but taking that moment would give the goblins more of an edge than he was willing to cede them—
"Congratulations," said Ginny warmly. "What sort do you have? Or is it one of each?"
"One of each, yes." Kunora smiled in return. "They are a great blessing to us."
Ah, got it! Harry tapped his fingers against Ginny's hand in the pattern which meant "thanks", letting his new knowledge settle into his mind. Work-partner, that's one of the basics of goblin society and it can mean lots of things in human terms, but in connection with a contract and changing clans it means they're married. And exchanging blood, that much I should have been able to figure out on my own, especially after everything Moony and Danger have been through—they've got kids, a boy and a girl…
"And the two of you?" Rarzal took back over, a trace of hostility creeping into his tone. "Are you paired only for the convenience of these negotiations, or is there something more to it?"
Ginny bristled. Harry pinched the webbing between her finger and thumb to stop her from saying anything she'd regret. "Ginny is already my work-partner, and my friend," he said. "We'll be signing our own contract at the beginning of May, though we won't be exchanging blood until late in the summer."
"A human claims another as a work-partner?" Rarzal's hostility edged up from trace to streak, with a healthy dose of sarcasm joining in. "How is that? Do you place your hands together on a wand you did not craft as you parrot your little spells in a corrupted form of a language you do not understand?"
Here we go with the rudeness. Counter with…just honesty, I think, we can always ramp up to rude later if we need to. "We've both mastered some skills that don't need wands," Harry said, releasing Ginny's hand and taking a small scoot away, adjusting his posture as he did, so that he was kneeling rather than sitting. Ginny did the same, arranging her legs to one side of her. "And we helped each other with the incantation we did have to craft for ourselves, and understand, to finish that work. Ginny gave me the missing piece of mine when she wasn't even thirteen, and I did the same thing for her not quite a year later."
"But even before that, we'd joined our magic to make something," Ginny took over smoothly as Harry paused. "Something special, and important." With a practiced hand, she scooped her pendants out of her robes, holding them up so as to display the four medallions. "These."
Kunora's eyes widened. Rarzal breathed what Harry thought might be a curse, then wheeled to face him. "Do you have such as that?" he demanded, pointing towards Ginny's pendants. "Show it to me!"
Harry leaned forward, willing his pendant chain free of his clothing, then sat back. "There," he said, indicating the chain and its contents where they hung against his robes. "You've been shown."
Rarzal cursed again, at greater length. Kunora hissed like cat-Neenie in a bad mood and smacked her husband on the arm, then held out one palm, demandingly. With a scowl, Rarzal reached into his pocket, counted out three small coins to her, and shoved his chair back from the table, stalking off to the far corner of the room.
"This is a custom of ours," said Kunora, facing the humans again, jingling the coins in her palm and smiling faintly. "I believed one thing and Rarzal another, so we each risked money on our own belief—"
"We bet on things," Harry interjected, indicating himself and Ginny. "My fathers and her brothers, especially, do it all the time. Not us personally quite so much, but we have."
"Ah, good." Kunora nodded. "But when a—bet, do you say? When a bet is lost or won, what each must do is decided by custom. Rarzal has lost, so he must…" She frowned, seemingly searching for a word. "He must be angry, and hurt, and go to be alone for a time," she said finally. "And I, who have won, must…laugh, but with words." Her smile returned, more wicked this time. "Our ancestors found that we would do these things in any case, so they made them a matter of custom. It gives them…walls?" She shook her head, her smile twisting ruefully. "Your English is not an easy tongue."
"No, it's not," Ginny agreed. "And of course it's turning into the one people use all over the world. But let me think about this. Rarzal has to…sulk, would you say, Harry? Because he lost?"
"'Sulk' sounds right," Harry agreed, glancing at the goblin thus named, who had his back to the room and his shoulders hunched petulantly. "And laughing with words…'gloat', maybe?"
"I like that. But 'gives them walls'…" Ginny shaped a circle in the air with her hands in front of her, as though she were using her clay to model a Quidditch stadium or a dragon's holding pen. "Kunora, do you mean that having these things, the sulking and the gloating, as customs instead of just doing them, that it gives them limits? Makes sure they start and stop where they should, that people don't hold onto them for too long?"
"I do." Kunora tossed and caught her handful of money. "You are very clever, Ginevra Weasley."
"Just Ginny for everyday. And I like that idea." Ginny laughed. "Harry's little sister could use it for sure. Sulking and pouting for days on end are her specialties."
"Oi, no picking on Meghan," Harry protested. "What about Fred and George? When was the last time they knew when to stop gloating over one of their pranks going right?"
"They're getting better. Especially George. But you've got a point." Ginny looked back at Kunora. "What did you bet about?" she asked. "Or aren't we allowed to know?"
"You may know." Kunora pocketed her winnings. "Rarzal believed, when we received the request for this meeting, that even though the one who spoke for you took care to tell us that proper speakers would be sent, that nothing would truly change. That you would ignore me and speak only to him, hurrying into your business, though it is not right for any speaking to begin until all the speakers are known to one another. That even if you spoke to me, you would not show me, or him, honor. And most of all, that you would seek to…" She frowned, first laying her hands over each other, then separating them and pressing her palms together. "To be always at the top, or at the bottom. Not to meet as one, as the same."
"And you bet the other way?" Harry asked, keeping his grin in check but allowing it to escape in his voice.
"I thought that if you were clever enough to offer proper speakers, that you might also be clever enough to learn how to speak properly." Kunora grinned in her turn, and pushed her husband's chair out for him as Rarzal returned to the table. "And I was right."
"You were right, my partner," Rarzal agreed, taking his seat. He turned to Harry and Ginny, looking them each in the face for a moment. "May I examine the work you wear around your necks?" he inquired. "And learn how it was done? It bears traces of remarkable magic, and very little of that the sort I would expect from your people."
"Mine you can hold, if you're careful with them," said Ginny, removing her pendants. "Harry shouldn't have his off, there's magic on them he needs, but I think…"
Harry took his chain in both hands and pulled it out longer, causing Kunora to frown and Rarzal to pause in the act of reaching for Ginny's. "More yours, I think, than mine," he murmured to his wife. "Would you agree?"
"I would." Kunora accepted the medallions Harry deposited in her cupped hands and spread them delicately across one small, callused palm. "But the flare we saw before, that was more of your type."
"Indeed." Rarzal laughed under his breath at the confused look on Ginny's face, and the one Harry was sure matched it on his own. "Goblin magic makes a sharp distinction between male and female," he said. "Both are strong, both necessary to life, but the difference is there and cannot be removed."
"And you can tell, just from seeing the magic get used, whether it was first done by a witch or a wizard?" Curious, Harry drew his dagger, careful to move slowly and keep the weapon's point away from the goblins. "What about this?"
"Male," said Rarzal immediately. "Strongly male. Power, giver, and master, all are male, and the power is one which is also here." He tapped Ginny's pendants against his palm. "But for your dagger to have taken you as its master, Harry Potter…I had not thought wizardkind remembered the ancient rites so well. Or at all. Who taught you the way of the blade?"
"My godfather and my foster father. My blood-father, now, though he wasn't then." Harry laid the dagger on his palm, watching the reflection of the lantern's flame in the blade. "But I don't know that they ever had us do anything with these that was magic…"
"Perhaps not, but magic was done nonetheless. And you speak of blood." Rarzal reached over with one long finger to stir the pendants in Kunora's hands until the tiny locket containing Harry's and Moony's bloods was revealed. "You mean this."
"Yes." Harry frowned. "Why, what else would you—"
Then he remembered his own thoughts in the Hogwarts Den, the day he'd written to Aunt Amy.
"I cut myself, the first day we had these," he said, planting a finger on the flat of the dagger's blade. "Letha, that's my godfather's wife, Amy Freeman's niece, she made it wipe it right away, told me never to leave a blade dirty, but I bet it still counts." He turned to smile at Ginny. "And then the lady of my heart girded me with my weapon. Even if we didn't know it yet."
"Maybe you didn't." Ginny looked smug.
Harry and Rarzal exchanged a glance which went beyond species boundaries.
"So wizards begin to learn again the magic of blood." Kunora wrapped Harry's chain around her fingers. "Blood shed freely, that is." For a moment, her eyes were bleak. "They know all too well the Dark power born from shedding the blood of others."
"Some wizards think that's the only kind of blood magic there is." Harry sheathed his dagger again, recalling Cho's horror at discovering the Pack and Pride had sworn to one another in blood. "That all magic done with blood is Dark and dangerous."
Rarzal snorted. "Do they consider their own lives dangerous?" he asked. "Blood is life. Necessary to it, and the strongest symbol of it. It has power, yes, but so do all things have power. Power is to be controlled, not to be controlled by. And what is fear but a form of control?" He nodded towards Harry's and Ginny's pockets. "Do you fear your wands?"
"Maybe we should." Ginny drew hers speculatively, stroking its length with two fingers before setting it on her lap. "More than we do, anyway. Do you remember, Harry, the last Defense lesson with Professor Moody—I'm sure he would have done it with your class the way he did with mine—"
"A wand is a deadly weapon," Harry quoted. "But so's my dagger. So could these be, if I used them that way." He reclaimed his pendants from Kunora's hands and tweaked the chain to return it to its usual length. "So could I be, with the training I've had. The difference is me. I don't go around randomly hurting people with what I know, whether that's fighting or magic or even just knowledge."
"Because words can be more painful than any blade or spell." Kunora nodded, her face approving. "Were there words in the making of the work you wear?"
"Yes, there were." Harry tapped four fingers against his palm. "Not anything long or complicated, but it's ancient." The tense recitation around the Den's kitchen table, the awkward partial swearings in Ron's room at the Burrow and in the antechamber at Hogwarts, the uncertain full-Pride circle on the floor of Neville's bedroom at Longbottom House, flickered through his mind. "I suppose you could say it's come down in the family."
"And blood." Rarzal's tone made it a statement of fact, rather than a question, as he returned Ginny's pendants to her. "Blood freely shed, and words freely spoken, and items of power. Items through which hope, or faith, or love, or all of them together, had already been channeled."
"Rings." Ginny slid her pendants back over her head, then touched the interwoven silver circlet Harry had placed on her finger a little more than a year before. "Harry used his parents' wedding rings, I had my mother's promise ring from my father, my brother put in a ring he got from our grandfather…"
"So young, to know so much." Smiling, Kunora displayed her own left hand, on which a gold ring gleamed. "This too was forged from blood, and words, and gifts given in love, on the day my partner and I signed our contract." Her long fingers curled around Rarzal's, putting Harry strongly in mind of his own parents, whether seeking comfort through a moment of trouble, sharing and amplifying some little daily joy, or simply affirming by touch that the beloved one was near. "We are more alike, I think, than we are different."
"More alike than different to these, my partner," Rarzal corrected. "And I think their similarity to us makes them more different than they know from the majority of their own kind." He turned a penetrating gaze on Harry and Ginny. "Yes?"
If we're more different than we know, how would we know it? Harry almost asked, but stopped himself in time, helped by Ginny's sidelong look. She had obviously been taking mindreading lessons from his mothers, or her own. "We are different from most wizards," he acknowledged. "But it's a difference that, once people understand it, a lot of them like it. Some of them even want to be part of it for themselves. It might not work for everyone, but it does for us."
"So it does." Rarzal was still looking intently at them, first at Harry, then Ginny, then at a spot between them. "And I believe I see one of the reasons. Do you know that you are bound by magic not your own? Not inimical," he added quickly, raising a hand as Ginny sucked in her breath and Harry started to speak. "It means well by you. She means well, I should say. Female, strongly so—yes?" he asked Kunora.
"Yes." Kunora tilted her head to one side, then the other, as though seeking a better angle of sight. "She is no blood to either of you, but there is great love here, and many sorts of love. Bindings on bindings…" She broke off and started to speak rapidly to Rarzal in Gobbledegook, gesturing emphatically as she did so.
"Who'd have put magic on us both that's a witch?" Harry murmured to Ginny while the goblins conferred. "We're Gryffindor honorary, and it wasn't Maura who chose us…"
"Maybe try closer to home," Ginny began, but stopped, forming the Pride-sign for Later with her free hand, as Rarzal looked up again.
"There seems no good word in English for what the magic is that we see on you," he said without preamble. "It is like that which permeates your pendants, and like that which binds your dagger, Harry Potter, though it is more…lively than those. Still, they are all of the same type, and if I did not know better, I would wonder how you had come so far into favor with my own people." He smiled faintly. "As it is, I can tell that this work was done by a witch, but there is no trace as would be left by a wand, no sign of any potion. It is an older magic, more…" His hands shaped aimless circles, moving ever lower. "…broad. Less defined than your narrow, everyday spells. The magic which underlies all, which has always been and will always be…"
Harry smiled to himself as words in Padfoot's story-reading voice echoed in his distant memories. "Deep magic," he suggested, "from before the dawn of time."
"A good way to say it." Rarzal nodded. "Are the words yours?"
"No, it's something I read once." Or had read to me. Though I've read them all at least once for myself, if not as many times as Hermione has. "Do you think you can tell us anything else about the witch who put the deep magic on us? Maybe what it's meant to do, if you can tell that?"
"It…binds you." Kunora linked her forefingers together, tugging at them. "Not to hold you or hurt you, but to make you strong. Stronger together than you are alone. And not just the two of you, but others as well…"
"Six others, maybe?" Ginny suggested, flipping aside her pendant with the battery and muffin tin to display the one with the carvings representing the Pride. "These six?"
"It could be." Kunora peered more closely at the pendant. "Yes. And the power was given to all of you, when you were linked as one. Linked in…" She waggled her hand, searching again for a word. "A…work-trance, my partner?" she asked Rarzal. "Such as we share when we work as one?"
"Work-trance sounds good," Rarzal agreed. "For English, that is." He smiled toothily at Harry and Ginny. "Is it a time you recognize?"
"When we made these, would be my guess." Harry tweaked Ginny's pendant chain between his fingers. "The second time, when Ginny was along, not the first…"
Ginny sat up straighter. "The light," she said intensely. "The red light, Harry, do you remember, that connected us all just when we'd finished swearing the oath? That didn't happen when the Pack swore, did it?"
"No, it didn't." Harry shut his eyes. "And it started…" Calling up his memory of that night in Neville's bedroom, he watched the light spread through his Pride, though they hadn't been called that then, then made it run backwards, tracking the light to its source. Ginny and Luna, Ron and Draco, and from there…
"Hermione," he said, opening his eyes to the dimly-lit room. "It started with Hermione. My sister," he added to the goblins. "Foster sister, I suppose, technically, but we've been together so long I can't really imagine being without her. Pack-sister is what we call it, after our family, the Pack. And what Ginny and I lead, that's the Pride, and that's what ended up getting affected by this magic. But the magic started around Hermione, so that means it's connected to her somehow…" He shook his head. "Never mind, it's not important now. We'll figure it out later."
"How long have you been together, then?" Kunora asked curiously. "Your…Pack?"
"All of us?" Harry did the calculations in his head. "Coming up on thirteen years, this July." Even if we won't all be here to see it. "Hermione and I, a bit longer than that. Fifteen years, starting out when her big sister Danger used to mind me for my Muggle relatives…"
He stopped as the answer spread itself naturally across the front of his mind.
Danger. Hermione's sister, one of the strongest blood-links there is. No blood to me or Ginny, but there's no question she loves us. And her wild magic was almost out of control all those times through my first year at Hogwarts, but then it seemed to go away some, quiet down to the way it was while we were growing up, and I just thought she'd learned to handle it better, or that the Founders had helped her get it settled…
"That's the answer, isn't it?" Ginny murmured, proving to Harry's satisfaction that his fiancée no longer needed a pendant chain to read his mind. "It's Mrs. Danger's magic, or it was. She must have given it to us the night we swore the Oath. That's why we've always been able to do more together than we can alone. It's not just our own powers multiplying—there really is magic that's dependent on the Pride-bond, magic we can only tap when we're all working together." She frowned. "Or most of us, anyway…"
"This…Danger." Rarzal frowned, as though trying to trace the logic which made this word a name, but shook it off after a moment. "What is she to you, Harry Potter? What role does she play in your life?"
"She's my mum, my other mum than Letha." Drawing his wand, then glancing at the goblins for permission, granted by Kunora with a flicker of fingers, Harry outlined a square in the air, called up his memory of the portrait which now hung in the entrance hall at number twelve where Walburga Black had once held sway, and focused his mind on the word Exstaetheris!
The rush of colors from his wand's tip, instead of dressing Snape in Augusta Longbottom's clothes as Harry had done at the Hufflepuff Halloween Extravaganza, filled the frame he had delineated with eight variously-garbed figures of wizards and witches. Kunora laughed aloud as Meghan and her cauldron were revealed, and Rarzal made a faint noise of satisfaction as he regarded the three standing cubs, Hermione in the center, Draco and photograph-Harry on either side of her.
"They make sense together," said Ginny quietly. "The Pack. You can feel, you can almost see, how they keep each other going, how they balance out and make each other stronger. They've always been that way, since I can remember, and they came to live near us before I was even seven years old."
"The day you saw me cross my fingers." Harry held up the named body parts, already in the mentioned configuration. "We were still in hiding," he told the goblins, "so I had to claim I wasn't Harry Potter, and Ginny spotted that I had my fingers crossed behind my back, because I was lying. No one else ever caught me out on that."
Both goblins burst into laughter. "More alike than different indeed!" Kunora chortled. "I was six years of age when I began to see mistakes in the work of one of the boys of the clan who lived in the next cavern to ours, and to point them out, and sometimes even to make them right with my own power…"
"And I was most offended that a girl not of my own clan, and one younger than myself, should be so perceptive about my work, and thus I returned the favor when she grew old enough to begin learning her own techniques. Which, in turn, offended her, until we squabbled every time we met." Rarzal smiled, sliding a fingertip back and forth across Kunora's ring. "I could not understand why my parents, and hers, and the other elders in our two households looked so satisfied with us both."
"We swore ourselves as work-partners, as children will, with some of our clan-siblings from both sides, when Rarzal was just ten and I a year younger than that," Kunora took over again. "With the signing of our contract, we became…" She frowned again. "Two-partnered, would you say?"
"Double-partnered, maybe," Harry suggested. "So it's extra powerful to swear an oath twice over with some of the same people?"
"It is." Rarzal nodded firmly. "And you, Harry Potter, and these…" He pointed at the figures of Hermione and Draco in Harry's replica Pack-portrait. "Such a doubled bond, if I am not mistaken, binds the three of you, as well as this younger one." His finger moved down to Meghan, before returning to the twins. "And even a further binding upon these elder two, of which I have heard—a full binding in blood, done upon their bodies by one who wished them ill, but that they have embraced to turn to good…"
Kunora shuddered. "We do not alter the blood in our bodies," she explained when Harry and Ginny both looked at her. "Not unless there is no other way. Amulets or talismans, like yours, Harry Potter, can be crafted and worn for a particular work, but they are always ended when that work is done. To change the source of one's blood is to die a little death, like having a piece of one's work destroyed beyond hope. To think of that being done to someone…"
"Verging on Dark magic, or even all the way there?" Ginny guessed, squeezing Harry's hand once. Harry nodded, sitting back to let her take the lead on this part. "And having your work destroyed being like dying a little—that's because there are souls in goblin-wrought things, aren't there? Bits of soul, anyway. Bits of the goblin, or goblins, who made them, who loved them, who worked hard over them and wanted them to be the best things they could possibly be."
"You know a great deal, Ginny Weasley." Rarzal crossed his arms, his expression shading back down into hostility. "One might wonder why you have come to speak with goblins, if all our secrets are already unfolded to you."
"It's because we know something that you may not know," said Harry, vanishing the Pack-portrait and re-outlining the frame. "Information we've been given by one of our elders, information we thought you ought to have."
"And for this information, what price?" Rarzal rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. "Nothing in this world comes free, Harry Potter."
"No, it doesn't," Harry agreed. "But in this case, the only price we're asking is that you do something about it. What you do, or how you do it, is up to you."
Which is the biggest risk we're taking, because what if they decide that the best thing to do is to sit tight and wait until all this Voldemort business blows over? But no, if they consider their work being destroyed as a 'little death', they won't take the introduction of a wizard's soul bit torn off by murder lightly…
"What is it that you would have us do something about, then?" Kunora's question sounded light, almost casual, but Harry's nose was sending him signals of curiosity, of worry laden with fear. Clearly the goblin woman, inexperienced outside her home caverns as she might be, was very far from stupid.
"This," he said, repeating his earlier spell to fill his invisible frame not with the faces and forms of his Pack, but with the images of a delicate golden cup with two handles and a bronze, blue-enameled brooch in the shape of an eagle. "We think one of these two things—possibly both—is here at Gringotts. Stored in a vault, the vaults your people pride themselves on holding secure against all outside invaders."
"We do," said Rarzal slowly. "And our pride is justifiable. No thief has ever escaped goblin justice."
"What about someone who defiles goblin work?" Ginny tossed the words lightly into the center of the room, where they hung on the air, almost visible. "And I don't mean just the stupid wizards who don't understand that a part of you remains with your work always, and what that ought to mean about who owns that work. I mean someone who works Dark spells, the sort you have to power with murder, on goblin-wrought artifacts. Someone who might even be interfering with the magic, with the souls, within those artifacts. What would goblin justice have to say about that?"
Kunora had her hands pressed against her mouth, breathing heavily as though she were trying to keep herself from being sick. Rarzal was glowering at Harry's painting on the air, his eyes narrow and fierce. "Do you tell me this has happened?" he said harshly, his gutturals more pronounced than before. "From your own knowledge, do you tell me this is so?"
"Not from my own knowledge, not about these," Harry admitted. "But this…" He twirled his wand in a small circle, adding the picture of a gold locket the size of a hen's egg engraved with a serpentine S. "This, I've seen, even touched it once or twice. My magic reacts to it, and not in a good way. Wizards and goblins may not get along, but I wouldn't be responding to goblin magic the way I do to this thing." Casually, he brushed his left hand along his forehead, momentarily exposing his lightning-bolt scar. "And a wizard I trust, one I'm sworn to obey, tells me these other two things have been bespelled in this same way. By the same person."
"We can show you the locket, if you need to see it," Ginny added, "but you'll have to come where it is. It isn't safe for us to take it away from there."
"No." Rarzal shook his head jerkily. "No, it would not be." He turned to Kunora and spoke one rapid sentence in Gobbledegook, to which she responded with a torrent of words, her long forefinger stabbing towards Harry's picture, then snapping shut into a fist which she pounded into her opposite palm. Her husband, for his part, jabbed his hands back and forth as though slicing at something, then twisted them in opposite directions as though he would like to snap whatever it was in half.
I think we got them, Ginny signed to Harry. Good idea, to make it their problem what they do about this—then we're not the nasty wizards who're demanding they open their vaults to us or hand over something they were given in trust by their customers, just the good neighbors who're telling them what they didn't know themselves…
It wouldn't have worked if you hadn't been able to dance around what we can and can't say under the Jinx, Harry signed back. How do you do that so well?
Ginny grinned. Practice, my dear Wolf. Years and years of practice.
Harry was about to respond to this when Rarzal whipped his hands to the side, cutting Kunora off mid-sentence, and looked up at them. "We must consult," he said brusquely. "Not just our two selves, but our elders, perhaps all our clans. We will contact you when a decision has been made." His chin jerked towards the door, a clear dismissal.
Kunora bridled again and swatted Rarzal's shoulder. "We thank you for the information," she said clearly. "It is an act of right thinking to share knowledge." Rising, she stepped around the table and extended her hand to Ginny. "The action of a friend."
Rarzal hissed in shock, his own hand making an abortive dart, as though he had contemplated for a split-second trying to snatch his wife back to their own side of the table. Harry buried his amusement under a layer of fire as thick as any he'd ever used defending his mind against Snape. Laughing at goblins, though it wasn't as stupid as some of the things he'd done, still didn't seem like an entry on the list of ways to ensure a long and healthy life.
Of course, I haven't been anywhere near that list since I was about eleven…
"Friends," Ginny agreed, and met Kunora's hand with her own. "And thank you, for being willing to listen to us."
"Thank us when the decision is made." Kunora curtsied briefly to Harry. He gave her a seated bow in return. "Until then, fare you well."
"You too." Harry vanished his picture, got to his feet, bowed to Rarzal, and took Ginny's hand as she straightened from her curtsey. Side by side they left the room, and Harry let Ginny guide him back the way they had come, until they were opening first the silver doors and then the bronze ones, walking down the marble steps together. Percy and Charlie's Disillusioned figures emerged from the night as an elderly wizard with a straggly white beard straightened up from his hunch and became Tonks with her zebra-striped hair.
"How'd it go?" Charlie asked, scooping Ginny off the steps and planting a kiss on her cheek before setting her back on her feet.
"It went." Harry glanced over his shoulder at Gringotts, as towering and impassive as it had ever been. "We got our message across, but the goblins have to talk to their clan elders. We'll find out what they have to say when they're good and ready to tell us."
But whatever happens, we made another friend. That's never a bad thing.
And maybe, just maybe, we're a little closer to settling the problems between wizards and goblins for good.
"Let's get going," he said, taking Ginny's hand in his again. "Percy, any chance of some dinner when we get back to the Pepper Pot? We neither of us ate much at Hogwarts, too many nerves…"
"You call what you put away not eating much?" Ginny snorted. "Two pieces of chicken, three scoops of peas, and a potato bigger than my hand?"
"He's a growing boy," Tonks said before Harry could. "He needs his nourishment."
"He's growing all right," muttered Ginny. "Going to be growing right out of his Quidditch robes if he doesn't watch it."
"More likely out of my hats, with all these compliments you keep giving me," Harry returned. "And here I thought you were supposed to be the nice Weasley…"
"I do believe you've mixed her up with me," said Percy dryly.
Laughter echoed from the walls of Gringotts as the wizards and witches went on their way.
Sorry for the wait, everyone. I spent this past weekend at Shevacon in Roanoake, VA, which was AWESOME! I got to meet, among lots of other fun people, Jim Bernheimer, our very own JBern of fanficauthors, who let me camp out at his table (I paid him back by selling a few copies of his book Confessions of a D-List Supervillain), and author Gail Z. Martin, whose latest book is Ice Forged and for whose podcast I recorded a segment, complete with a random slamming door in the background…
The bits about Cheering Charms on the Red Roads over the last couple of chapters, and their being removed if someone Marked attempts to ride the Roads, come from a wonderfully long and funny rant about British roads I received from a reader pen-named "Colour Coded Chaos". Thanks a ton, and your character will be appearing within the next few chapters!
If you have a chance, please do buy yourself a copy of Homecoming (available in e-book on Amazon, Smashwords, and very soon other e-book retailers, and in paperback through Createspace and Etsy), and if you've already bought and read, please consider reviewing. Reviews are how other readers, who may not be familiar with my work, decide whether or not they would like to read it, and the more books I sell, the closer the day when I can spend all my time writing…
One final note. I have decided to declare Lent, which starts tomorrow (happy Mardi Gras, everybody), Anne Novel Writing Lent. NaNoWriMo is 50K words in 30 days, so I should be able to get about 70K in the 40 days of AnneNoWriLent, wouldn't you say? Now the only question is, 70K words of what? Suggestions welcome!
Next chapter: The Slytherin St. Valentine's Soiree!