Chapter Eighty-Three of IAATB: Gloryflower Owls
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Chapter Eighty-Three: Gloryflower Owls
Hawthorn sniffed deeply, and then shook her head. It was still hard, sometimes, remembering that she’d left her lycanthropy behind. If nothing else, the sense of smell that it had provided her would be quite useful now, as they walked into the Disillusioned tower that contained the Gloryflower owls. She had to place her feet carefully on invisible walkways and clutch at invisible walls and make educated guesses about how low the arches on the doors were, without a sense of smell.
And the softer air of May would even have been kind to her nostrils. One of the very few moments of joy her condition had ever afforded her was sniffing at the air when the seasons were firmly established. Hawthorn had never known spring had a scent all its own, or summer, but they did, and she missed them.
Then brew a potion that will give you just the keenness of scent back, she sniped at herself, and ducked under the final arch. She heard Lucius, following her, curse softly as his forehead apparently met the stone. She smirked, and then lost the smirk as she straightened and looked around her.
Magic washed around them in soft, cooling waves, but still powerfully enough to make the hair on the back of Hawthorn’s neck rise. The owls were compact birds made of gold, with emerald eyes. Hawthorn had seen them before, of course, since she’d voted in several Ministerial elections. Still, she had never seen this many, all crowded close together on small perches, all sleeping and motionless. It would take the touch of the candidates to bring them to life.
She stepped aside so Lucius could make his way into the room. Elizabeth was behind him, and then Laura Gloryflower, and then Cupressus. Hawthorn watched him as he gazed at the sleeping birds in silence. She wondered if he had ever thought he would stand here. It was impossible, most of the time, to tell anything from his face. The first time she had met him after the defeat of Voldemort, he had only nodded to her and remarked how wonderful it was that the battle against the Dark Lord had claimed so few lives.
The death of Voldemort.
Hawthorn stroked her left arm with her right hand. The hair had grown back into the burned place, and most people, even when they demanded a glimpse, couldn’t tell where the Dark Mark had once been. When she first stared down through the light, saw the snake and skull had gone, and realized what it meant for her, Hawthorn had locked herself in her office at the Ministry and cried tears that burned her eyes. A chapter of her life she had sought so hard to unwrite was finally gone.
And now she stood here, with the four other candidates for Minister, about to send a flood of owls into the air and ask people to vote for her, or for one of the others standing beside her.
She even thought she had a reasonably good chance of winning.
My loves, her thoughts said, on Pansy and Dragonsbane. What would you say if you could see me now? Would you be proud? Or would the concerns of the dead occupy you so much that you would only smile at me from behind a veil of mist?
Elizabeth Nonpareil’s nasal voice interrupted her reflections. “Is it right for her to be here?” she complained. Hawthorn turned, sure the insufferable woman would be complaining about her presence, only to see her glaring at Laura. “Her family made these owls, after all. Are we quite sure she won’t tamper with them?”
Laura gave Elizabeth a smile that had a hint of the lioness behind it. “The owls themselves will protect the honesty of the candidates,” she said. “That is part of the magic on the Tower. You may believe me willing to undercut the election, Mrs. Nonpareil, but I assure you I could not even if I wished to.”
Elizabeth’s nose stuck a little higher in the air.
Hawthorn shook her head. She was aware of the effort some of Elizabeth’s own family had gone to to rescue her image and promote her as a viable candidate in the election, but there were some things money couldn’t do.
“We all need to touch an owl,” she said, and nodded to the others. Lucius had already arranged himself a bit further down the line of golden birds, a hand extended to the nearest one’s breast. Elizabeth and Laura fanned out beyond him, still trading hostile looks. Cupressus strode to an owl almost the opposite of Hawthorn’s and stood waiting, blinking occasionally.
Hawthorn returned the glance. Of all the candidates, she was the most comfortable with him. They didn’t share an allegiance, nor even a generation, but they had the same attitude towards life. They cared most about Britain having a Minister, for example, rather than their own triumphs.
Cupressus gave her a little nod, but that might have been her imagination. At any rate, Hawthorn was not surprised when his hand struck his owl and began the circle of power that woke the birds up.
It was truly astounding to watch life flare in jeweled eyes, feathers shift, heads turn and orient on the candidates. Hawthorn shivered. She had cured lycanthropy, at least in potential, and she had used blood curses to kill and wound, and she had bred plants, but all those worked with materials originally alive in the first place. To call motion out of nothing but metal and magic-
That made her want to learn another art.
Hawthorn tamed her ambition as well as she could. For now, she would content herself with watching the birds, satisfied that the people come before them had the right to stir them, turn and leap out the windows. The air filled with a storm of golden wings that the Muggles below would see as nothing more than a gleam of sunlight, and the flock broke over London, clumps of them shredding as they sped in different directions, going to every wizard seventeen and older.
Hawthorn became aware that Lucius was beside her, staring after the birds in quiet satisfaction. Perfect. She would have made some excuse to draw him to the window if he had hung back, but now she didn’t need to. He was in the perfect position to see what happened next, and she was in the perfect position to watch his face.
Another storm of owls unfolded into the air from the middle of London-from Gringotts. They appeared identical in every way to the old birds, and where the streams crossed, it became impossible to tell them apart.
Lucius’s jaw fell gently open. He shut it almost at once, but Hawthorn could not have asked for a more satisfying reaction.
“Where did those owls come from?” he asked through gritted teeth, too stunned to be polite.
“Those are the owls that will allow the magical creatures to vote,” Hawthorn said innocently. “Forged by Gloryflower artisans, with goblin help, and given all the necessary enchantments that the old ones have-to only produce one ballot per bird, for example.”
Lucius looked half-ill now.
“Oh, dear,” Hawthorn said, as if this had only just occurred to her. “No one told you the goblins and the others were voting, did they?” She paused. “And you said many things in your speeches alienating them. How sad.”
She moved away from him, and leaned against the far wall to wait. The owls were all to return by the evening, and they would produce five piles of ballots when they did, one for each candidate. Those piles would then need to be counted by everyone, and their numbers compared and tallied.
She sat in a place where she could watch Lucius’s expression.
Killing him for the revenge she was still owed was no fun, she had decided, and in any case, it was quite impossible to arrange for the death of Lucius Malfoy in such a way that his son and Harry wouldn’t find out. Much better to cut him to pieces with the tools of politics, and in ways that he never saw coming.
*
Owen sighed as the owl landed on the table in front of him, and then glanced at Faustine Nonpareil, who sat in a chair across from him. She looked up and raised her eyebrows.
“Do you think I should vote for Elizabeth?” Owen asked, well-aware of how hopeless he sounded. “We did our best to make her a candidate someone would approve of. I almost feel I owe her this vote, in the name of solidarity.”
“I think you should do whatever you desire,” said Faustine calmly, taking her own ballot from the open beak of the owl that had landed next to her. “I will certainly not tell you how I vote.” She scribbled down the name with a flourish, shoulder ostentatiously hunched so he couldn’t look over her arm.
Owen looked down at his own piece of parchment, and then at the owl, who shifted from one clawed foot to the other and had no advice to offer. He bit his lip several times, and, in the end, followed the desire of his heart, the way Faustine had said he should. Merlin knows I have had enough of duty for a lifetime.
Michael’s face flashed before his eyes.
Owen put it gently aside. He had accepted that he would often be thinking of his brother, but he would not let the grief that image and name invoked control his actions. He wrote Hawthorn Parkinson down and handed the ballot back to the owl. It clapped its wings with a small clang, as though thanking him for the vote, and swallowed the parchment, which would come to rest in its belly. Then it turned and climbed out of the room in a dizzying sweep.
Faustine’s owl was right behind it. Owen wondered for a moment if that meant the name she’d written was longer than his, and tried to compare the length of the names in his mind, and then shook his head. It could just mean that she was a slower writer, or that she’d taken a bit longer to remember how to spell a certain name.
He didn’t intend to dwell on it. He turned back to the parchment in front of him, which contained suggestions to forge the Dark families into more of a united front for political action. “And you think we can persuade the Black Heron to our side with monetary assistance alone?”
*
Harry raised an eyebrow at Draco as he tucked the list of locations back into his robe pocket. “You’re sure that you want to come with me? It’s going to be a nasty, bumpy ride, with constant Side-Along Apparitions, and we’ll barely stay in one place long enough to have tea, except the Forest.”
“You wouldn’t do that on your own.” Draco folded his arms. “With me along, you’ll be forced to take care of my comfort, and that means that you’ll be forced to take care of your own.”
Harry frowned at him. “I’m eating and sleeping regularly, Draco. For those first three days-back-I did nothing but eat and sleep.”
“And talk to me,” said Draco, his face and voice growing perceptibly more smug. “I know which one I credit your recovery to.”
Harry bit off an impatient groan, and ended up shaking his head. “You haven’t said if you mind the Side-Along Apparitions.”
“Of course I mind them. You still can’t do it gracefully. And believe me, I do intend to complain about them.”
“You can’t be easy,” Harry said darkly, while wings briefly sparked above his shoulders before falling into oblivion. He was reasonably sure he should not be grinning like an idiot at the same time.
“If I was easy, then you’d know I was Polyjuiced.” Draco stepped forward and leaned his face against Harry’s, not kissing him. “Come on, hero. Let’s do your Side-Along Apparitions. I’ve already voted, so I’m not worried about my owl having to chase me all over Britain.”
Harry nodded, and slung an arm around Draco’s shoulder. He carried a precise list of Apparition coordinates for every place in the British Isles where intelligent magical serpents lived. He would have to go to them and translate their votes from Parseltongue for the owls. The magical birds had provisions to record voice votes for those who couldn’t write, but they didn’t understand the snake language, and Lucius, the only other one who could have helped, was a candidate and had to remain in the Tower the owls came from while the election continued.
Harry had voted already himself, for Hawthorn. He hadn’t asked whom Draco had voted for. It would be a hard enough choice between the Dark candidates he thought might do a good job, a Light candidate he might favor for sheer sense but feel constrained from voting for because of his allegiance, and his father.
“I am here! I have voted!”
Harry looked down in surprise. The arrangement had been that he would return to Silver-Mirror this evening and collect Argutus’s vote, because the Omen snake had been unable to decide whom he wanted for Minister. But here came Argutus with a piece of parchment held firmly in his mouth and an owl fluttering after him, clacking its beak and trying to take the parchment away.
“How in the world did you manage to write this?” Harry asked, taking the parchment from Argutus’s snout. The owl came and sat firmly on his shoulder, staring fixedly at the ballot. Harry shifted so that his hair stroked it, and unfolded the parchment. The writing was shaky, but clear. Laura Gloryflower.
“I have learned to write now!” Argutus swayed his head proudly from side to side. “Letters are not as complicated as runes, and I have learned to mimic them with a quill held in my tail! And soon I will understand English!”
Harry couldn’t help but smile, at least in the moment before the owl leaped, snapped the ballot from his hand, swallowed it, and coasted out the window. Argutus hissed in disappointment. “I wanted Draco to see my writing,” he said.
“Write it again today,” Harry assured him, slipping his arm through Draco’s. “You can show it to him when we come back.”
“And you’ll make him look at it?” Argutus tapped his tail in a meaningful pattern on the floor. So far as he was concerned, there had been many important things to show Draco in the three days immediately after Connor’s death when he was cooped up with Harry, but Draco had turned him away each time, unable to understand the Parseltongue and worried that the Omen snake would disturb Harry.
“I promise.”
Argutus bobbed his head, his approximation of a human nod, and slithered away. Harry looked around to see a slightly stunned expression in Draco’s eyes.
“Harry,” Draco begged quietly, “please tell me that your snake didn’t just vote.”
“Of course he did,” said Harry, a bit surprised. Draco had been in on the secret of the new Gloryflower voting owls; Harry would never shut him out from anything that important. “You knew he was going to.”
“I was picturing a vote translated from Parseltongue. Not-writing.” Draco gave a slight shudder. “He will read my letters and probably write one himself, if he takes the fancy. Merlin, Harry, sometimes your snakes are more than a bit frightening.”
“Says the one who got me this one,” Harry retorted, clasped his hand around Draco’s arm, and Apparated to the Forbidden Forest.
*
Syrinx gazed thoughtfully at the parchment in front of her. Had this been two months ago, she would have put down her cousin’s name. She had owed her everything, from the shared Gloryflower name to the fact that Laura had agreed to put her with Harry as a sworn companion.
But her mind had changed since then, quite literally. She was in the next-to-last phase of war witch training now, reintegrating herself with the world, learning to think things she had never thought. She was no longer tempted to vote for Laura simply because she was family. Syrinx had listened to her, and while Laura was a brave warrior, politics was not war. It had different rules and different requirements, and sometimes Syrinx thought Laura hadn’t realized there was no longer a Voldemort to be fought. There were people as bad, perhaps, but without that magical power to make themselves known, there was no Voldemort on the horizon.
So she thought about what she believed, sitting by the upper window of Silver-Mirror’s library in a flood of sunlight, and what Laura believed, and what the other candidates believed. The owl sat beside her, wanting the ballot but content to wait for however long it took her to decide. There were rumors of an election in the last century where the owl had waited two weeks for an old, deaf witch to have the positions of the candidates explained to her in detail several dozen times.
In the end, Syrinx wrote down Cupressus Apollonis, and the owl beside her began to hop from foot to foot like a small child who had to use the loo. Syrinx smiled and held out the parchment. With a little hoot of comfort, the bird snatched it from her fingers and sped out the window. Syrinx sat back to watch it go with a smile that would have been impossible for her before Harry became her anchor.
*
Harry knelt down next to the Many hive and hissed at the entwined ball of snakes. Draco raised his eyebrows. He could accept Argutus as a single being, nearly as intelligent as themselves though in a different way, and certainly it was even easier with the magical creatures who had some semblance of human form, like the centaurs, but he would never find the many minds spread among dozens of tiny golden-green cobras anything but alien.
Harry nodded, and then spoke softly to one of the owls who hovered overhead. Draco shook his head when he heard the name of Elizabeth Nonpareil. Ah, well, it was to be accepted that magical creatures who had never voted before would make mistakes; they might be impressed with the sound of her name in Parseltongue, or the impression that she had many eggs, or anything else that Harry had neglected to explain to make them understand just how unsuitable a Minister she would make.
When he had first heard that Harry would be translating Parseltongue votes for the magical snakes, Draco had assumed that this was a prime opportunity to throw a few more votes behind Hawthorn. Harry had stared at him for a moment, then told him he was merely collecting the votes, not assuring them. He would make as great an effort as he could to insure that he represented all the candidates fairly and the snakes could choose among them, just as if they were human and could read or enter the human debate about them in English.
On some things, Draco had concluded, he and Harry would never agree. He could understand, in an abstract manner, why Harry wanted to be fair, but politics wasn’t fair, and they should use any advantage they could get. It wasn’t as though anyone else would be present who could understand the votes and insist that a snake had said Elizabeth when Harry could pretend that it had said Hawthorn. This was the first election with magical creatures voting. Harry should guide them.
Harry had hissed at him when he suggested that, something that Draco was quite sure was an insult in Parseltongue, and stalked away. Draco shrugged. He himself had voted for Hawthorn, and done his part to secure a better future for wizarding Britain. She was the best of them, the most able and the most flexible and the most trusted by the other people in Harry’s alliance. It was not his fault if Harry tried to undercut that and ended up cutting Hawthorn out of office.
When the Many hives had finished giving Harry their votes, the Runespoors came forward and did so. That drove Draco quite mad, because the three heads of every snake had to agree, and that often took minutes of debate, or what sounded like debate: sharp hisses and two heads combining to threaten the other. Luckily, the list of locations they had to visit after this was not long. There were other Omen snakes living in Britain as friends of wizards, a few more scattered colonies of Runespoors, and apparently a crossbred snake of some kind in the north of Scotland that was rumored to have hydra blood. They would go to the shores of Loch Ness and call out, but Draco doubted that the kelpie in the lake would come to them wearing the form of a giant snake, or would be interested in voting if it did. It was far more likely to drown them.
A movement on the edge of his peripheral vision caught his attention, and he turned sharply. A small shape slid through the undergrowth, coming closer. Draco warily drew his wand. No matter what Harry thought, not all magical creatures were friendly to wizards, and some mindless magical snakes, incapable of voting, did live in the Forest and might be as happy to bite the vates as anyone.
The leaves at his feet stirred aside, and the golden-and-black shape of a Locusta revealed itself, coiled so that the broken skull-and-crossbones signs on its scales were visible. It hissed something in Parseltongue to Harry, who had just turned away from the last Runespoor.
Harry caught his breath and went very still.
He still misses Sylarana, Draco thought, lowering his wand as the snake danced and hissed but made no move to attack. He savors loss like a fine wine. I don’t think he’ll get over his brother any time soon.
It wasn’t that Draco had wanted Harry to stop thinking about Connor, exactly, so much as that he had not wanted grief to poison him. But if Harry reacted this way to the mere sight of a Locusta snake, who knew how long it would take him to stop freezing when his brother’s name came up in conversation?
Harry had a slightly dazed expression on his face as he hissed back. Then he turned to an owl and said, “Laura Gloryflower.” The owl flew back towards London at once.
“Laura Gloryflower?” Draco said, as he found his voice. “Why is a Dark snake voting for a Light witch? You did explain to it that she’s of a different allegiance than it is, right?”
“He,” Harry said absently, still seeming dazed. “And yes, I explained that. He doesn’t care. He rather thought the family of the creator of these owls should be his choice.” He licked his lips, and seemed to be avoiding Draco’s gaze. Draco felt his eyes narrow suspiciously. “And, um, well, his name is Yaraliss.”
“Yes?” Draco said, as neutrally as he could.
“Yes.” Harry hesitated a moment longer, then extended his arm. The Locusta slithered happily up it, and curled around so that his head rested on Harry’s shoulder. Draco found himself confronted with a pair of green eyes, at least as bright as Harry’s, or as Sylarana’s. “And he’s decided that he’s coming home with me.”
Draco shivered. He didn’t fancy sharing the house with an extremely venomous snake who would demand as much of Harry’s attention and time as Sylarana had. “And you think that’s a good idea?”
Harry avoided his gaze even as he stroked the golden-black scales. Yaraliss wriggled in pleasure. “He absolutely promises to get along with Argutus, and not to bite anyone unless they try to attack me. Really,” he added, when Draco opened his mouth. “That’s what he said, and we even defined ‘attack’ so he won’t bite someone who, well, tries to hug me exuberantly.”
“Harry-“ Draco began.
Harry looked up at him through his fringe. “I really want him to come with me,” he said in a tiny voice.
Oh, for Merlin’s sake. Draco sighed. “Just remember what happened last time, and don’t let him intertwine that deeply into your mind,” he said.
“Oh, Yaraliss is more interested in the outer world than-she was,” Harry said softly, and touched the Locusta behind his head. He wriggled again, but Draco thought there was a smug spitefulness in the green eyes that Harry’s other snakes definitely did not have. “He won’t blackmail me the way she did.”
Seeing the helpless adoration in Harry’s eyes, Draco decided that he was doomed and might as well give in now. He shook his head as the Locusta said something imperious-sounding to Harry and slithered into a pocket, then stepped forward and leaned on Harry’s shoulder. “Where are we going next?”
*
Lucius lifted his head. The last of the owls had flown into the room, and the Tower was filled with softly stirring bodies and cooing voices. At least they did not have the shed feathers and dust of real birds, he thought.
The owls cocked their heads forward and spat out ballots. They flew into five neat piles-one for each candidate, Lucius knew. He had heard the stories of this, and even known that he might stand here someday, though he had certainly never believed it would be at the end of the first election in which magical creatures could vote-
He cut the thought off sharply.
A number of owls hovered above the ballots for a moment, then separated and flew to certain piles. Those would be the owls with the voice votes translated from Parseltongue, Lucius knew, and sometimes owls who contained votes by wizards and witches who couldn’t write.
“Well,” said Hawthorn in a falsely bright voice, when they had sat there for some minutes contemplating the folded parchments. “Shall we?” She stepped forward to one of the larger piles, which was surely hers. The others moved as confidently towards the piles that would have their names on them. They would count the parchments for their names, then move and count those for the other names. Magic in the Gloryflower owls themselves would insure their counts were as honest as could be-prevent them from lying about the numbers, at least, though not from miscounting.
It did not escape Lucius’s notice that his pile was smaller than anyone else’s, save Elizabeth Nonpareil’s.
He told himself that was because the wizarding population of Britain was reduced right now, with many people fled and others dead.
He did not believe it himself.
Bending over his own pile and beginning the count, he coldly acknowledged to himself that he had made mistakes, and those would have to change. No, he had truly not expected to win the election, but he had expected to do better than this-better than Laura Gloryflower, for instance, who had depended on her name to carry her through too much of her campaign. He intended to use this as a rung up the political ladder, and if he could not do that, he had failed in far more than simply losing the election.
In silence, they counted, and switched piles, and counted again. Lucius could feel his cheeks burn when he saw how much larger Hawthorn’s pile was than his own-by more than a thousand ballots. He did not look up, and he hoped that none of the others saw his flush.
In the end, there could be no doubt. Elizabeth Nonpareil still looked stunned that she had lost, and Laura Gloryflower thoughtful over the fact that more people had voted for a Dark witch and former Death Eater than had voted for her. Therefore, it was Hawthorn’s task to incline her head and say, “Congratulations, Minister,” to Cupressus Apollonis.
Apollonis accepted the declaration with no more than a nod, which was like him. Lucius turned away before they could lock eyes. He despised the new Minister not because he was weak, but because he was the very epitome of Light, the opposite of everything that Lucius stood for.
“Shall we go down and announce this to them?” Apollonis asked, and the other candidates nodded. Reporters would be waiting at the foot of the Tower-they probably had been as soon as they saw the owls fly back, Lucius knew. The others turned and left the room.
Lucius lingered where he was for a moment, looking out over Muggle London. One by one, lights came to life, shining, and Lucius curled his lip. Not torches, not Lumos charms. Our worlds are separate, and better by far that they stay that way.
Currently, he was thinking less of the lost election than the fact that he had recognized his son’s handwriting on a vote for Hawthorn.
There was still work to be done to restore his reputation and name, that was clear.
But there was no one better to do it.
With silent dignity, resolved to do even better than he had in the past, Lucius turned and made his way down, composing answers in his mind all the while for such critical questions as, “What do you feel about magical creatures voting for the Minister, Mr. Malfoy?” He would answer that of course they had a place in magical Britain, and he had accepted that things must take their course. It balanced between his old position, which no one believed he would so easily abandon, and the future that was coming now.
It was time for a change.