[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Harmonies Unconquerable, goblin Harry, gen, 5/5
Part Four.
Part One.
Title: Harmonies Unconquerable (5/5)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: Violence, goblin Harry, present tense, angst, major AU, drama, gore
Pairings: None, gen
Wordcount: This part 5700
Summary: The second half of goblin-raised Harry’s fourth year and the first half of his fifth year at Hogwarts. Voldemort would probably like it if he had Harry’s attention all to himself, but let’s face it, Harry has a Tournament to ruin, insults to get revenge for, the Argent Ocean to research, more goblin and human magic to learn, interfering humans to handle, and a godfather to keep in line. Voldemort will have to wait his turn.
Author’s Notes: This is another in my series of fics that includes, so far, “Music Beneath the Mountains,” “In Their Own Secret Tongues He Spoke,” and “The Dragon-Headed Door,”and “More Marvellous-Cunning Than Mortal Man’s Pondering.” Don’t try to start with this one, or you’ll be seriously confused. The title is a slightly changed line from Tolkien’s poem “The Horns of Ylmir,” which is quoted below. The section titles also come from this poem.
Thank you again for all the reviews! While this ends “Harmonies Unconquerable,” it doesn’t end the story. I’ll be writing another part of the series in my next series of seasonal fics that will run from June to August 2021.
A Hollow Thing of Shell
The next morning brings an owl that simply bears a note summoning him to the Astronomy Tower. Harry goes up and is delighted to see Fleur there herself. Because of the Veela’s old feud with the goblins and the fact that they weren’t close during the Tournament, Harry thought she would take days to get here.
But Fleur, who nods to him coolly, immediately explains why she’s there. “We owe you a debt for rescuing my sister from the lake,” she says. “I do not fight well underwater. I would not have been able to reach her.” She blows out a harsh, high note of cold air. “And I may be living in Britain soon, if my courtship achieves…the result.” She looks at Harry, who nods to show her it’s the right word in English. “I do not wish for the British Ministry to be spreading these lies.”
Harry beams at her. “Congratulations on your courtship, and I’m glad that you’re a guest here.” He holds out his arm.
Fleur visibly wavers back and forth between the insult that touching a goblin will bring and the insult that refusing his escort would bring. In the end, she reaches out and lays her hand on his arm. “I can only do this because you were born human,” she warns him as they descend from the Astronomy Tower.
“I know that,” Harry responds, a little surprised. “I would never expect you to do it otherwise.”
Fleur looks at him from the corner of her eye. “You are truly a goblin. A human boy would be bending under my allure.”
“That’s what I keep telling everyone,” Harry says complacently.
*
“As long as he doesn’t kill anyone while he’s in the school.”
Magorian, the centaur leader, gives Harry a frown. “I would not send someone who would kill anyone in the school.”
“But he might kill someone outside of it?” Harry only shakes his head when Magorian blinks at him. “I listen, you know. And this is going to be infuriating, because she’s like that, a prejudiced, spiteful human. If Bane can’t control himself, then it’s only going to be a disaster instead of the triumph we want to make it.”
“I can control myself.” Bane stomps forwards, frowning mightily, and then draws the bow and quiver off his shoulders and lays them on the grass at Magorian’s feet. “To prove it, I will leave my weapons here.”
Harry studies him, then nods slowly. That’s an enormous concession, like him laying aside his daggers to enter the Ministry would be. “All right. Thank you, Bane.”
“There is the question of how he will make his way to the classroom,” says Magorian, with a little snap of his tail, although Harry can’t see any flies close to them.
“The stairs will reform themselves for him if I ask them to,” Harry tells them. “We already discussed that with the castle. The stones are thrilled to feel the tread of hooves again. The centaurs used to be frequent guests.”
Magorian and Bane exchange looks of surprise, and then Bane nods. “This might be tolerable after all.”
Harry ignores the temptation to ask why Bane planned to accept his invitation if it wouldn’t be at least tolerable. This is just the way centaurs are. “I need to make a detour to the lake to gather the merfolk’s representative, if you wouldn’t mind joining me? Fleur is making a spectacle of herself at breakfast to distract people from wondering where we are.”
“Bloody Veela,” Bane mutters, but follows Harry out onto the grounds and towards the lake. Harry can see the bubbles rising from the edge of the water before they even get there. He wonders if the merpeople will simply enclose their representative in a huge bubble of water to float along with them, and he’s a little concerned about that. The oxygen in the enclosed water will probably get very stale, perhaps even before Umbridge finishes the speech Harry fully expects to be greeted with.
It’s the queen herself who’s waiting for them at the edge of the water. Harry bows to her and sticks his head under the water with a Bubble-Head Charm, sending images through the water of the enclosed bubble.
The queen rejects them with a little shake of her head that makes the shells braided into her hair clatter, and sings to him.
“This is a threat that all of us must meet.
I may not be able to walk on human feet,
But I can meet the challenge by journeying the land.
To ensure that I can, please give me your hand.”
Overwhelmed, Harry extends his hand. The webbed, clawed one placed in his feels odd, but only for a moment, and then the merqueen is rising from the water, her body twisting in the center of a glittering column.
Bane gasps something, or maybe gibbers it. Harry doesn’t know. He doesn’t look at him. His eyes are locked on the merqueen in wonder as she draws more and more of the water from the lake, visibly lowering the level, and then leaps forwards, arching her body like a dolphin’s. The gesture rips her hand from his.
The water splashes ahead of the queen, digging a shallow basin in the earth and filling it, receiving her. The queen probably breathes right then, and leaps with another arch of her body and flip of her feet. Harry laughs in delight as he watches the water dancing around her like a rainbow of only one color, and digging another basin, and filling it, and then running ahead of her to create another basin to fill.
“I didn’t know they could do that.” Bane sounds shaken.
“Only their royalty can do it this well,” Harry says, and hurries ahead. He wants to make sure the water fixtures of Hogwarts are waiting to welcome the queen.
Luckily, it seems she knows that, and she’s waiting in a pool at the base of the front doors. Harry runs through them to the nearest bathroom, which is down the first flight of stairs that lead to the Hufflepuff common room.
He calls loudly to the sinks as he enters the bathroom, asking them if they’re help him welcome the visitor, and they respond, spinning themselves all on at once. Water rises from the loos as well, which is more than Harry dared to hope for, given how finicky they are and how superior they hold themselves to the faucets. (It’s silly, when they swallow human waste and the sinks help wash it up, but Harry has accepted that he’s never going to understand the internal politics of bathrooms).
The combined puddle of water flows past him and in a narrow stream out the doors. Harry leaps over it and runs back to the doors, bowing to the queen.
The water puddles and shines down the steps, and the merqueen pulls it into the pillar of water that surrounds her, digging another hole, and dancing into the school through pools shallow enough that Harry winces for her. But she doesn’t seem to notice any impact from the stone. Perhaps the water itself cushions her?
The merqueen finally reaches the level of the entrance hall and swims through the stream with little sliding motions of her body. Students are gaping from the stairs and the Great Hall entrance and the railings above. Harry waves at them and then turns to the front stairs, asking them to let Bane in.
The stairs flatten themselves in seconds. Harry wanted them to stay steps until the merqueen was past in case they interfered with her water magic, but it’s easy for them to become a ramp now.
Bane walks in, switching his tail and ignoring the gapes and screams that follow him. He stares at Harry. “Was it that simple all along?”
“I don’t know,” Harry says. “The steps are temperamental sometimes, you know. They don’t always do what I ask them. And if I wasn’t here, I don’t know if anyone would know enough about speaking to objects to convince them.”
Bane laughs abruptly and reaches out to pay Harry on the head. “It sounds to me as though you sincerely respect objects.”
Harry blinks. “Well, yes? Don’t you?”
“I think I might have to do more of it than I have,” Bane says, and starts walking towards the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the first floor. The merqueen has already drawn water from other bathrooms, by the swollen look of the stream, and doesn’t have to jump from pool to pool this time. She simply swims uphill, her green hair pouring behind her.
When she reaches the top of the stairs, Harry asks them, and they turn into a ramp for Bane, too. Bane trots up them, still chuckling to himself for some odd reason that Harry doesn’t understand.
“Harry Potter.”
The voice is low and deadly. Harry turns around to see Dumbledore standing in the entrance of the Great Hall, his hands reaching out to steady himself on one of the doors. He needs that because he’s swaying in place.
Harry blinks. “Have you been drinking, Dumbledore? You know that Blackeye forbids you that much alcohol.”
“Harry Potter,” Dumbledore repeats, and he does sound drunk, but it also sounds like it might be with rage. He stalks towards Harry.
Harry waits for him, unimpressed. Dumbledore can do a lot of things, but scaring Harry isn’t one of them.
Dumbledore reaches out and grabs his shoulders for a sharp shake. Or he probably means it to be a sharp shake. Harry leans to the side, grabs Dumbledore’s arm, twists it a little, and puts him down on the floor. He doesn’t do it hard, because then he’d have to face Blackeye’s axe, but he does it.
The rest of the students gasp aloud at seeing Dumbledore kneeling like that in front of Harry. Harry shakes his head as he steps away. Maybe that will shift the internal power dynamics of the school, but honestly, the smart ones always knew he could do that, and most of the rest should after seeing the gift-scar on his cheek.
“You can’t touch me like that,” Harry says gently. “You can touch me to help me, and you can use all the words you want, but you can’t touch me to hurt me.”
Dumbledore stares up at him from his kneeling position. Then he whispers, “Have you gone mad?”
“That’s the question I should be asking you. What were you thinking, hiring Umbridge to teach Creature Culture?”
“I had no choice!” Dumbledore’s hands clench in front of him. “The Ministry foisted her on me, and said they would remove me from my position as Headmaster otherwise.”
“And you didn’t think to ask for help? To turn to the Board of Governors, some of whom probably aren’t in the Ministry’s pocket? You didn’t do anything but go along with it?”
“I-it would be political suicide.”
Harry shakes his head. “Only suicide is suicide. Everything short of that is just something unpleasant you don’t want to do.”
Dumbledore opens his mouth and closes it without saying anything for a long moment. In the end, he whispers, “And what if you have made things worse?”
“There’s not a lot that’s worse than a bigoted professor telling students everything she thinks she knows about creatures.”
Dumbledore only shakes his head. Harry pats his shoulder and goes into the Great Hall to retrieve Fleur for Umbridge’s class.
*
“Mr. Potter. What is the meaning of this?”
Harry smiles. The classroom is a little crowded, since Professors Hagrid and Flitwick are there-Professor Hagrid is squeezed in at a little desk and cringing in apology for his size-and Bane kneeling on the floor in front of the first row of desks and Fleur standing haughtily beside Harry and the merqueen floating in the pool that the waters dug for her not far from the door, listening intently. Harry’s not sure what magic she worked to allow her to listen above the water, but it seems to be working fine so far.
“You said that you were going to teach Creature Culture,” Harry says. “I thought the creatures should be here to listen.”
Umbridge looks at the other students in the room as if she thinks they’re going to contradict Harry. But everyone from Gryffindor is grinning, and everyone from Ravenclaw is interested. Michael is already writing down questions that, from the way they look on the paper, Harry suspects he wants to ask Bane.
“Is anyone going to complain?” Umbridge asks. “Or are you all too intimidated by this little half-breed?”
“I’m going to complain,” Harry says. “About your lack of any argument except insults.”
“You insolent-”
“See what I mean?” Harry asks Fleur. “I can’t imagine why they asked her to teach. She’s absolutely incapable of being fair and unbiased.”
Fleur sniffs. “Yes. The professors at Beauxbatons, they are much better.” She looks down her nose at Umbridge, which is so spectacular is makes Umbridge back a step away from her. “I am disappointed with the quality of education at Hogwarts.”
Umbridge appears to be swelling up. Harry hopes that they’ll get lucky and she’ll burst, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, Umbridge stabs her hands onto her hips.
“Detention, all of you!” she shrieks.
“Sorry, but we are not students.” Fleur flicks her hair over her shoulder. “But we are awaiting most anxiously the content of this class.”
“Mr. Potter is a student!”
“You think I’m going to come to any detention that you assign me?” Harry snorts. “You’re wildly optimistic for a Ministry plant.”
Umbridge stares around as if expecting someone to stand up and champion her. The students just goggle, though, and Professor Flitwick frowns sternly. Harry can see the giggles he’s trying to hide.
Bane slaps and flicks his tail hard against his flanks, not taking his stare away from Umbridge.
“Fine,” Umbridge says finally, teeth so gritted that Harry is surprised she doesn’t break them. “Here are the books for the class.” She waves her stubby wand, and the books soar out of a bag placed against the wall that she must have brought with her.
Harry studies the one that lands in front of him, and then shakes his head. “I think there must be some mistake. This is a pamphlet, not a book.”
“Mr. Potter, you will be silent.”
“You’re going to silence me for speaking facts?” Harry holds up the pamphlet, a shoddy thing that has Living Quietly in a Pureblood World: A Guide for Creatures on the front. “Look at the binding. It’s a pamphlet. Also, you didn’t know you were going to have so many creatures showing up to listen to your classes, so why is this just meant for us?”
Umbridge draws herself up. “Other children must know how to act to teach creatures their place.”
“Is the place stabbing you?”
Umbridge looks absurdly happy. “The Minister told me what to do if you made threats,” she begins.
“I just asked a question, is all.” Harry leans his elbow on the desk and smiles at her. “After all, I need to know what my place is if I’m going to fit into it, don’t I?”
Umbridge might be chewing one of the Headmaster’s lemon drops, but she finally nods. “Your place is at the feet of purebloods,” she says. “Accepting that you are lesser than they are. Creatures can have their place, can even have certain limited rights, like the right of goblins to guard our gold. But they are not as powerful as purebloods, and not as worthy.”
“Not as powerful,” Bane says, with a shake of his head. “When a kick from one of my hooves could cave in your chest?”
“Threats!” Umbridge shrieks, pointing with a finger.
“Not at all, Dolores,” Professor Flitwick says. “it was merely a question, like Mr. Potter’s. And it does bring up something everyone should think about.” He glances around at the other students. “What does power mean? Is it magical? Physical? Financial? Political?”
Hermione Granger from Gryffindor leans forwards, her face going lively. “I think it’s all those things, sir, in different contexts.”
“Very good, Miss Granger. Two points to Gryffindor. In that case, we must ask Professor Umbridge to define her terms some more.” Professor Flitwick turns back and looks pointedly at Umbridge. Harry is impressed that he can speak of her as a professor without laughing. “What kind of power is it, Professor?”
“All kinds of power. Purebloods are undoubtedly superior.”
“Superior?” Fleur tosses her hair over her shoulder again. “But we have already proven that centaurs are physically stronger than wizards, and you admitted yourself, madam, that goblins hold the gold in Britain, giving them the financial power. I myself have greater power of beauty than any student here.” She glances around the room, and a few of the boys begin drooling. Harry supposes that’s the “allure” she’s gone on about.
“I think I’m pretty strong magically,” Harry volunteers. “I can do lots of things that most wizards can’t, like talking to objects and wielding a basilisk-fang dagger.”
The merqueen blows some bubbles from her pool. They reach the surface and emerge into a soft, beautiful singsong.
“The folk who dwell beneath the waves
Know the power that no one braves,
The power that strangles life and breath:
We in the water know the power of death.”
“Threats!” Umbridge shrieks, pointing at the pool.
“No, a cultural statement,” Fleur says.
Harry ducks his head a little to hide his grin. Umbridge is just so furious, and it’s really entertaining.
Umbridge stands taller. “The book explains all the kinds of power,” she says, with a stamp of her foot. “Pureblood wizards have all of it, and we tolerate the rest of you living here, in our world, and practicing your little customs and acting out your little dramas, but the power is ours!”
“You can explain all of those in a pamphlet?” Harry asks, looking down doubtfully at the thin thing on the desk.
“It is a book!”
Harry flips through the pamphlet, which seems to feature mostly crude sketches of goblins and centaurs bowing to figures in robes. “No, sorry,” he says, holding it up so that the last page number clearly shows. “This only has 32 pages, and they’re small. I’m pretty sure that a certain thickness is required in books.”
“Does it say anything about Veela?” Fleur leans over his shoulder.
“No, but we should ask Umbridge what she knows about them,” Harry says, and smiles at Umbridge. “After all, last night she mentioned Veela in her speech, and said that she would be teaching Creature Culture Classes about all sorts of creatures.”
“What does it say about centaurs?” Bane cranes his neck.
“It shows you bowing down to wizards and witches.” Harry extends the pamphlet to show him, and Bane flips through the pages then, then snorts.
“No natural centaur bends like that. I’m sure the person who drew these has never seen a centaur in his life.”
Harry grins. “Well, you can’t be surprised by that, Bane. These people would hardly have seen a centaur bowing to them, in any case.”
“Enough!” Umbridge screams.
The firework spell that goes off from her wand lofts and explodes against the ceiling. Sparks rain down on everyone in the room. Harry lifts a quick shield and watches some of the burning pieces roll away.
He frowns at Umbridge when he’s sure no one’s immediately hurt. Even Moody-even fake Moody last year-doesn’t use those kinds of spells in his class unless he’s put up shields first, and he’s about the toughest Defense professor they’ve had.
“You can’t just cast spells like that in front of a bunch of kids who can’t defend themselves,” he says.
Professor Hagrid clears his throat for the first time. “Yeah. ‘Snot right.” He grimaces at Umbridge. “What’s the big deal, Professor Umbridge?”
This time, when Umbridge points, it’s with her wand, and it’s straight at Professor Hagrid. "You are a half-breed who belongs in Azkaban!”
“Then I belong in Azkaban, too, right?” Harry asks, bouncing to his feet and striding across the room to get between Umbridge and Professor Hagrid. Even though he’s so big, Professor Hagrid is blushing and mumbling, and it’s a goblin warrior’s part to defend the defenseless. “And so does Fleur, and Professor Flitwick.”
“This half-breed was expelled from Hogwarts for opening the Chamber of Secrets,” Umbridge says, her eyes sparkling with cruelty, while Professor Hagrid bows lower and lower in his seat. “That’s why he can’t use his wand. It was broken. And you dare to say that he belongs out of Azkaban?”
“They couldn’t have found proof, or they would have done more than expel him,” Harry says. “And anyway, he wasn’t the one who opened the Chamber of Secrets.”
Something, maybe the absolute confidence in his voice, makes Umbridge turn and glare at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Tom Marvolo Riddle was the one who opened the Chamber of Secrets. He let a fragment of himself behind in a diary, and that was what came to the school and possessed someone to open it a few years ago, too. Riddle is Voldemort’s human name.” Harry doesn’t know for sure now if the spirit who possessed the kelpie-body in the graveyard was Voldemort or not-it seems like it would have been easy to trick poor mad Barty-but whoever he is, he isn’t human any longer.
Umbridge flinches. “The Dark wizard known as You-Know-Who is dead,” she snarls.
“Maybe he is,” Harry concedes, “but the one known as Voldemort isn’t.”
Umbridge leans towards him. “Do not say that name.”
“Or what?” Harry asks, leaning in far enough that Umbridge jerks back because she apparently believes that she’s going to be polluted if he touches her. “Will you draw your wand and duel me? Or do something else?’
“I am not going to duel a half-breed.” Umbridge sniffs and steps away. Harry sighs. She does it just enough to avoid being insulting. “Let alone a child. You are not worth the honor of dueling a pureblood.”
“Well, you’re not worth the honor of dueling a goblin warrior, but we all have to make concessions sometimes.”
Umbridge catches her breath in what sounds like an angry gasp, and turns her back on Harry to look around the classroom. “Who can tell me what the laws pertaining to goblins are?”
“That’s a broad questions,” Granger says, with a small frown. “Could you explain which ones you’re thinking of, Professor?”
“The answer would be obvious to any pureblood.” Umbridge sneers as she turns to look at Granger. “Who are you, girl?”
“Hermione Granger, professor.”
Umbridge doesn’t take the warning in Granger’s tone, even though she really should. She laughs nastily. “Right. A Mudblood. The Gryffindor Mudblood, the one that stands out most in the House. Professor Snape warned me about you.”
Granger leans back in her chest, her face very pale and her eyes wide. Harry thinks that must be the first time she’s ever heard something like that from a professor, despite the way that he knows Snape goes after Gryffindors in his classes.
It makes Harry angry.
He waits until Umbridge turns around, probably in search of another victim, and then stalks back to his desk, picks up the stupid pamphlet, and rips the cover off.
The pamphlet squawks at him, but now that the cover is separate from the rest, it’s telling him that it never wants to connect to the rest of the “book” and have to admire its childish drawings ever again. Harry nods, while keeping one eye on Umbridge.
She falls for it. “How dare you destroy your book, you little brat!”
“Pamphlet,” Harry corrects.
Fleur is watching him out of the corner of her eye, no doubt wondering what Harry’s plan is. Harry smiles at her, and just waits for Umbridge to stomp back over to him and snatch the rest of the ruined pamphlet off his desk.
“One of the laws about goblins,” she spits, “is that they may not destroy Ministry property without permission!”
“But you gave the pamphlets to everyone in class.” Harry blinks around the classroom with innocent eyes. “Doesn’t that mean that they belong to Hogwarts students, and we can’t get in trouble if we destroy them?”
Terry seems to be the one who gets it first, but Granger is the one who acts. She snatches up her pamphlet and rips the cover off, too. “Oops,” she says, her tone sugary while her eyes flash. “So sorry, Professor.”
Dean Thomas follows her, and Ron Weasley, and then Terry, although he’s grimacing, as if to destroy a kind of book goes against his Ravenclaw sensibilities. Harry pats him on the shoulder for doing it anyway.
“You-stop that!” Umbridge stares around the room as she watches more and more people rip the covers off. “Why are you doing this? You’re wizards! Purebloods! You should be cheering me on!”
“I might be a witch, but I’m no pureblood,” Granger says, and tears off a few more pages.
Fleur sniffs. “And I am a witch, while also being a Veela,” she says, and swirls her hair around her shoulders. “We did not discuss in enough detail what power my people hold.”
“What are you talking about?” Umbridge’s voice is a wail.
Fleur lifts her eyebrows a little, holding Umbridge’s gaze. Umbridge backs up, shuddering, and puts her hands over her face.
“No, I don’t want that!” she whispers. “I don’t want it, I don’t!”
“What are you doing?” Harry whispers to Fleur behind his hand. The other students are staring at Fleur now as if they think she’s using her allure on Umbridge, but Harry doesn’t think that’s true.
“We are creatures of desire,” Fleur murmurs back, without looking away from Umbridge. Apparently she can affect her even though Umbridge isn’t strictly looking at her now. “We can draw the desires of a person forwards and make them feel them.”
“What does she want?”
“Something she thinks she should not want.”
Fleur doesn’t seem to know the specifics, but she also seems unconcerned. Harry can understand that. As long as the tactic defeats the enemy, one doesn’t need to understand everything about how it works.
Umbridge suddenly tears her hands from her eyes and glares at Fleur. “You cannot make me want it!”
“No.” Fleur is unruffled, and she smiles as she seems to drop a certain kind of power Harry didn’t realize she was projecting. “But I can make you remember that you wanted it at least once, whatever it be.”
Umbridge shrieks and comes running across the classroom. Harry isn’t sure whether she’s going to punch Fleur in the face or try to do something else. She seems to have forgotten entirely about her wand, though.
She never gets there. Bane sticks out his leg and Umbridge trips over it. At the same moment, her hand splashes into the pool that the merqueen is floating in.
Harry jumps to his feet, concerned that the disruption of the water means the merqueen will lose her control over the pool, but instead, the merqueen rises and blows a huge bubble in Umbridge’s face.
It acts like a pail of cold water, perhaps, if actually falling over Bane’s leg didn’t. Umbridge sits up, panting heavily, and stares around at the classroom. There’s a silence so complete Harry isn’t sure who’s the first one to break it.
But he does know that the person who breaks it laughs.
Umbridge pants heavily as she reaches out to the nearest pamphlet, the one that’s lying on Michael’s desk, and flings it into the air. “I quit!” she screams, and then stands up and storms out of the classroom.
Bane’s tail almost trips her again.
When she’s gone, the students look at each other. “What do we do now?” Granger asks, sounding a little lost. Harry reckons that she’s never had free time when a class was supposed to be meeting before. If a professor is sick, like Professor Lupin got around his transformations, someone else always took over.
Professor Flitwick gets up and walks to the front of the classroom. He turns and winks at Harry, then says, “It occurs to me that, at least for this period of time, some of my students are supposed to be learning about creatures, and I have no Charms class to teach. I suppose that some of you would like to learn about the real goblin culture?”
“Yes!” Granger says eagerly, and is echoed by other people cheering and throwing the torn covers of the pamphlets into the air. Harry casts a small charm to gather them all up and float them over to him.
“Mr. Potter, will you come up here and help me demonstrate a real goblin warrior’s fighting skill?”
Harry grins. It’s not often that he’ll get to demonstrate those skills outside of battle, or training with Ginny. This ought to be fun.
A Sigh Arose
Harry has waited for almost ten minutes now, but Dumbledore has yet to lift his head out of his hands.
“What am I going to do?” Dumbledore finally whispers, when Harry has made his mind up to go find Blackeye right away if another minute of silence passes.
“Tell the Minister that Umbridge quit on her own.” Harry shrugs. “She did.”
Dumbledore stares at him with dazed eyes. “What am I going to do about the water in the Great Hall?”
“The merqueen took most of it with her back to the lake. And stone can dry, you know.” It helped that Harry went and found the Hogwarts house-elves in the kitchens, and they were happy to clean the stones once they heard that the stones didn’t like being wet.
“What am I going to do about you?”
“Offer me an Order of Merlin First Class for driving Umbridge away?” Harry suggests. He doesn’t know that much about Orders of Merlin, but he knows that they’re things humans give people they feel thankful to. If Dumbledore wants to give him one, then Harry will graciously accept it.
Dumbledore drops his head back into his hands, and screams. But he doesn’t get up and stomp off, so Harry doesn’t think he has Mermish heritage after all.
“The Ministry insisted on the Creature Classes,” Dumbledore whispers. He sounds as if he’s talking to himself, but Harry can still hear him, so he thinks that he can answer.
“Then have a real creature teach them. I know that Blackeye would be happy to. She likes to be at Hogwarts, you know, and it would let her supervise me and you. She likes that.”
Dumbledore pushes his chair back so suddenly that it falls over. He stands up and paces back and forth across the room. Harry waits in polite silence. He doesn’t know what Dumbledore is on about, but this is better than the terrible silence of before.
Dumbledore spins around and points a finger at him. Harry thinks of telling him that he has bad associations with that movement because of Umbridge, but Dumbledore is already speaking, panting a little as he does it.
“We are going to begin the hunt for the Horcruxes. It might take us a long time to identify them, and Voldemort might come back before we find them all. Yes. Yes. That’s what we’ll do. That will keep you occupied.”
Harry smiles. “All right.”
Dumbledore eyes him. “What do you mean, all right?”
Harry shrugs a little. “I’ve been wanting to hunt the Horcruxes for months, you know that. So we’ll start. Maybe you and I can go and look in Gringotts. It’s so secure, Voldemort might have put one there.”
“Yes, yes, we will.” Dumbledore’s voice is rapid, and he almost pushes Harry towards the door of the office. “Now, why don’t you go and speak to a goblin-not Blackeye-about teaching the Creature Culture classes. Or a centaur. Or the merqueen. Just so long as you leave me alone for a while.”
His door slams behind Harry, and Harry shrugs as he rides the moving staircase down. He can’t hear any shrieking behind the door, which is probably an improvement. Dumbledore must be wondering what kind of Order of Merlin to give Harry.
Harry smiles as he steps out into the corridor and leans on a windowsill to look at the rising full moon. He hopes Remus is somewhere turning into a happy werewolf and not hurting himself. Sirius is probably with him.
Fleur is going back to France in the morning, but he and she have promised to write. And Bane said he would speak a good word to the other centaurs about Harry, so Harry might have some allies there, too.
The merqueen invited him to come spar with her warriors whenever he likes. Harry thinks he might do that this evening, and take Ginny and Luna with him.
Mostly, though, he’s really satisfied that some things are going right. No more Umbridge. Dumbledore finally including him in the hunt for the Horcruxes. The Ministry’s attempt to interfere at Hogwarts blunted. Other creatures coming together and talking to the goblins for the first time in a long time.
Harry straightens up and walks away from the window when he’s had enough of watching the moon. He has to eat dinner, and he has to go find Ginny and Luna, and he has sparring to do this evening.
But first, he does have to find Blackeye and tell her about the teaching position. Because he does think she’s the best fit to teach the Creature Culture classes.
And so does Dumbledore, deep down. Humans just have a hard time admitting things like that.
It’s for his own good, really.
The End.