Chapter Eighteen of 'Seasons of War'- A Lure and a Vision
Chapter Seventeen.
Title: Seasons of War (18/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, torture, sex, angst, profanity, ignores the DH epilogue.
Summary: The war against Nihil enters its final stages, Harry and Draco train as partners, and they may actually survive to become effective Aurors. Maybe.
Author’s Notes: This is the final part of the Running to Paradise Trilogy, sequel to Ceremonies of Strife, and won’t make much sense if you haven’t read the first two stories. I don’t yet know how long this one will be, but based on the others, I’m guessing 45 to 50 chapters.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eighteen-A Lure and a Vision
“Do you think this will work out any better than the Fellowship did?”
Harry felt a little silly asking the question. It wasn’t as though Draco knew the future. They were both in the same place, with the same knowledge or lack of knowledge about the other Aurors involved, except that Harry knew he gave more credit to Ketchum and Hestia for being good Aurors than Draco did. Why should Draco have the answers?
Because I trust him, Harry thought abruptly when Draco laid down his essay and looked at him. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve followed him as a battle leader or something else, but I do trust him to be able to tell me the truth and give me the best estimate when other people can’t.
“I don’t know,” Draco said quietly. “I do know that, in the last Fellowship, we put too much emphasis on the Aurors involved. We trusted them to lead, and we didn’t take up the slack when they couldn’t. I think, this time, that we are older and wiser, and if they won’t cooperate with us, then we’ll know to break free that much sooner.”
Harry nodded, more comforted than he would care to explain aloud, even to Draco himself. “It just seems ridiculous that we don’t have a group of older Aurors than we can trust,” he muttered. “I thought the Aurors had been preparing for war with Voldemort for years. I don’t know why this one caught them so off-guard.”
“Best time to start a war, perhaps, is in the wake of the reeling from another war,” Draco said, and leaned back in his chair, gaze fastened on the far wall. “Everyone thinks they can relax. Some people desperately need to, and that’s why they’ll downplay the threat as much as possible. And so far, Nihil’s attacks have been isolated and more frightening than fatal, except when he destroyed the barracks. I can imagine that some of the Aurors, even now, see him as less than a threat than the Dark Lord was, because he’s concentrating his attentions in different ways instead of declaring his intentions aloud.”
“I would have thought that unbalancing the forces of life and death was serious enough for them,” Harry said.
Draco eyed him sideways. “And if we hadn’t been the ones to discover that, then do you think that we would believe it had happened?”
Harry blinked. “Oh,” he said at last. “I thought they were just being stubborn.” The thought of them simply not believing that Nihil had managed something so awful was-well, was more palatable, actually.
Draco shook his head. “I’ve been listening to them, partially so that I can seem like I’m fulfilling my obligations to Robards and Holder. From the mutters, they don’t think that anyone can unbalance life and death that way, and they resent being asked to believe it. Some of the trainees have been fuming that the Aurors still can’t tell them the truth because it’s too awful, so they make up this stupid story and expect them to believe it.”
Harry nodded. “All right. So how do we go about convincing them that this is real? Will the weapons do it?”
“The weapons will help, but I don’t think they’re sufficient alone, or the mutters would have stopped.” Draco stroked his essay, his gaze distant. “We have the lure out for Nemo now, those rumors circulating, and if he takes it, that might suggest enough proof to the others. Of course, we don’t know what Nihil will do then.”
Harry shrugged. “So, basically, we wait and hope that something happens that might convince them.”
Draco gave him a superior look. “No, of course not. We can try and convince them along the way, too.”
“How?” Harry demanded.
“I don’t know yet,” Draco said, and snorted. “Do you really expect me to have an answer for everything?”
“I do, but it’s not fair,” Harry said. “I think I should work more with Portillo Lopez and see if she and I can sense the current state of the-the imbalance, or whatever. I mean, there were the unicorn ghosts and the shade of your father. Those were signs of life and death being different. What other signs are there? Why haven’t we seen more of them?”
“Those might simply have been the ones we were ‘lucky’ enough to run into,” Draco pointed out, with such a bitter smile twisting his mouth that Harry knew he considered neither of them to have been lucky. “But yes, studying with Portillo Lopez is a good idea.”
He turned a warm, gentle smile on Harry that made Harry feel proud of himself, in a way that no one else managed to make him. He knew only one way to deal with the melting sensation in his knees, or return as good a gift to Draco. He leaned forwards and kissed him.
Draco caught his breath and then shut his eyes, reaching up as though he wanted to caress Harry’s cheekbones. They were, of course, leaning across too much space between their chairs for that to happen comfortably, and they ended up tumbling to the floor of the tent. Harry laughed while Draco looked put out, but Harry quickly dragged him into a more comfortable snog, and then into bed, and that was the end of all scowls for the evening.
*
“Yes. That ought to work.”
There was a strain in Granger’s voice that Draco understood. As far as he could tell, she had invented an amazingly convincing glamour as well as a way to make it permanent and a way to make it seem guarded-but not in a way that Nihil’s tricks couldn’t get past-all in the same evening.
He walked around the platform set up near the edge of the training camp. That was all it was, in reality, a simple white platform, though it appeared to be hedged around with gleaming traps of metal and wards that shone like the sun whenever anyone passed near them, crackling angrily. Since Draco had been in this place when Granger began casting the illusion, he could see the platform that was the base of it all, but barely. The glamours were thick and convincing, layered and blazing. The book in the middle, though entirely false, looked like exactly the sort of leather-bound grimoire that most wizards would be tempted by. The binding shone with silky temptation. Draco could feel his fingers itching to pick it up even though he had watched Granger build it bit by bit.
“Done,” Granger said, and stepped away from the wards, staggering. Draco caught her. In an instant she was on her feet again, brushing the dust off her cloak and glaring at him. Draco smirked back. He had wanted to make sure that she didn’t go crashing to the ground, yes, but he had also known that his assistance would hardly be welcome, which made her straighten up so that he didn’t have to watch her weakness. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ll have two of the comitatus or our allies on guard with their weapons at all times,” Draco said calmly. “They’ll know to use them the moment Nemo appears. And we’ve warned them that he’s capable of wearing many disguises and bodies, so the only thing that would keep them from using the weapons is if it’s obviously the living dead or Nihil himself,” he added, as Granger opened her mouth.
“I wasn’t going to ask that, actually,” Granger said, and it was her turn to smirk a bit. Draco knew that his face must have been disconcerted, and tried to smooth the expression away. “I was going to ask how you would manage to have two of us on guard at all times. We’re sure to be missed.”
“When you have Auror instructors on your side, it’s amazing how much can be accomplished,” Draco murmured. “Weston, Lowell, Ketchum, Gregory, and Jones have agreed to cover for us and use illusions of us being in class, if not performing all that well, so that we can have our turns on guard. Their time, of course, is their own, and if they say that they have something more important to do than be where they’re expected to be, I don’t think Robards and Holder can force them to do otherwise. And then there’s Portillo Lopez and Raverat, who aren’t teaching right now but working in other capacities. They’ll provide an extra baffle for prying eyes.”
Granger nodded a moment later, expression neutral. “I reckon that’s the best that can be accomplished,” she said, with one more dubious glance at her trap.
“Dissatisfied?” Draco asked coolly, though he had already noticed that she always was. Granger had brilliant ideas, good research skills, and a commitment to her friends that was truly breathtaking, but she still always acted as though she could have done better, could have anticipated some trick that Nihil would pull, or outwitted someone superior to her.
“I think it’s ridiculous that we can’t trust the Aurors, that we have to engage in conspiracies,” Granger said, turning back to the camp. Draco walked with her, watching her cloak flap in the wind. “I know we have to, that we can’t just go to Holder and Robards and demand that they trust us. But it bothers me. We shouldn’t be so divided against ourselves.”
“The adults refuse to trust the youngsters, the youngsters think they know better, and the oblivious mistake themselves for the intelligent,” Draco murmured dryly. “So it has ever been.”
“That sounds like a quote,” Granger said, turning her head and eyeing him as though it was illegal for anyone to know something she didn’t. “What is it from?”
“I couldn’t have made it up?” Draco widened his eyes.
“Not something that sounds like that.”
Draco put aside to be examined later the notion that Granger apparently did think him smart enough to come up with some kind of pretentious words, if not that kind. It might be intriguing to hear what she thought he would say. “It’s a translation of a remark that Suetonius Malfoy made centuries ago,” he admitted. “My father’s translation, from Latin. I use it whenever I start thinking that the present is much worse than the past. They thought that their own times were much worse than their past. The Greeks and the Babylonians probably thought the same thing.”
“They did,” Granger said, and her face came alive. “I remember reading something about it. There was a lament written on cuneiform tablets-”
Draco listened tolerantly as she spiraled off into Muggle history. At least she sometimes said something interesting. He thought that he could work with her, appreciate her, now. And of course that wasn’t a problem to be overcome with Ventus or Harry.
He still wasn’t sure what to do about Weasley or Herricks, mind you. But then, not even the most brilliant general’s mind could solve all the problems of military strategy at once.
*
“I don’t understand,” Harry said.
“You never do.”
Harry rolled his eyes, but secretly he was pleased that he had managed, finally, to rattle Portillo Lopez’s composure. She glared fiercely at him and then smoothed away the drawing she’d been making in the dirt in front of him with a flick of her wand. Harry wondered why she couldn’t use parchment like anyone else, but the moment the snow had melted, Portillo Lopez had started making maps, diagrams, and any other images that explained what Harry needed to know in the soil instead.
“Think of our world, the world of life that we know, lying atop the world of death like a plate on top of another plate,” Portillo Lopez said. She was sketching a pair of ovals, which Harry thought privately didn’t look like any plate he had ever seen. “There are interconnections between them, but there are also thick places, places that no one can get through unless something unusual happens. Necromancers calling through the dimensions, for example, or someone opening a gate like the one your partner managed to open.”
“That’s not the way you explained it last time,” Harry said, just to be difficult.
“This is less complicated.” Again Portillo Lopez dug the tip of her wand down, and sliced it sideways. The line cut the ovals in two. “But now another kind of connection has been opened between them. That is what I think happened. Rather than a simple imbalance, which can refer to all sorts of changes, what has happened is an opening, a flow, between the worlds. Nihil has brought through too many living dead. He is too immortal. He has reached into death too many times to escape, to transform, to reach a source of infection for his grief magic or his other magic-and perhaps to resurrect these beasts that we spoke about the other day.” It amused Harry that Portillo Lopez still checked over her shoulder before she said the words. She was more cautious of their privacy than either he or Draco were, most of the time. “We must close that gate. Or, if not so simple as that, if it is a new connection, we must plug it. Fill it in with something else.”
“You think you can do that based on principles that your Order has researched,” Harry said dubiously. He understood the concept she was talking about a bit better now, but not her confidence that she could succeed.
“Yes.” Portillo Lopez gave him a small, challenging smile. “We would not have been able to construct weapons that work against the living dead if we did not understand the principles of life. We can move further than that now that we have those, like you, who understand Nihil better than we do. We can create a-a form of insulation for the connection between life and death.”
“And how long will that take?” Harry asked.
“I do not know.”
Harry bit his lip and studied the drawing in the dirt again. “And is there any way that I can help?” He assumed there was, or else Portillo Lopez wouldn’t have been explaining this to him; she would have already been consulting with her Order. But she hadn’t yet said what that was.
“I believe we may draw some of the raw material we need from your connection with him,” Portillo Lopez said. “Especially now that you have been stupid enough-” her voice flicked like a whip, and Harry jumped “-to read his memories.”
“I read the memories of the ball of nothingness,” Harry began again, because this seemed to be something that Portillo Lopez, the brilliant witch who regularly made him feel stupid, couldn’t understand.
“I know that,” Portillo Lopez said, though with a frown that seemed to indicate she preferred to forget it when convenient. “But they were still his memories. His activities. The presence of a mind that was inhuman and that nearly destroyed you when you encountered it before.” She leaned across and rested her fingers against Harry’s temple, staring into his eyes. “Some members of my Order are quite skilled with working with the minds of necromancers. I will bring one to meet you.”
Harry grimaced. “I’m not sure I want more new people to know about this. And didn’t you say that you couldn’t tell anyone else in the Order about me, because they wouldn’t understand you supporting and succoring a necromancer?”
Portillo Lopez shook her head. “You are not a necromancer. The tests I did on the nature of your magic, and the fact that you can call illusions to attack rather than the dead, are proof enough. Besides, you have already met this man, and I would not have brought him to meet you in the first place if I did not think he would be sympathetic.”
“Who-” Harry began, and stopped. “Raverat.”
Portillo Lopez nodded. “He is a Seer, the same way that I am a Battle Healer. That is not a pretense. But he is in my Order.” She gave Harry a sharp look. “I trust that you will not spread the news around.”
At least she hadn’t forbidden him to tell anyone at all, Harry thought. Of course, by now she probably realized that it was useless telling him to keep such information from Draco. “I won’t,” he said.
“Very well,” Portillo Lopez said. “He is busy with his own duties right now, but he will come and meet you in a few days.” She turned her back and began to write in a book. “For now, go away. Attend to your classes, and to your duties maintaining the guard over the trap that we have set.”
Harry nodded, and left. For some reason, Portillo Lopez seemed convinced that he and Draco would be the ones to catch Nemo. As long as she continued to take her turn at the guarding, though, Harry thought he could live with the conviction.
*
“He’s a member of this Order, too?” Draco frowned, and then blew out his breath to watch the cloud that it made. They had enough wards around them, courtesy of Granger, Weston, and Lowell, that he wasn’t worried about the cloud alerting anyone who might examine the trap that they were there. “I wonder how many people have allegiances that we don’t know about.”
“Lots of them,” Harry said in a sleepy tone. Draco nudged him with a shoulder to keep him awake. Harry sat up and cleared his throat, which apparently was supposed to convince Draco that he had never yawned in his life and never intended to. “I mean, we have allegiances to the comitatus that most of the camp doesn’t know about, and I don’t think most of the Aurors we’re working with realize how deep they run.”
Draco shrugged with one shoulder and decided that he wouldn’t try to explain the, to him, obvious difference between keeping a few secrets about who one’s friends were and how well one could fight and secret oaths to a whole secret Order. “Have you been practicing with that focus trick that Weston and Lowell taught us?” he asked instead.
Harry sighed. “I’m not good at it,” he said.
“That’s why you practice,” Draco said, rolling his eyes and wondering if he should be grateful that Harry couldn’t see him. “To get better.”
Harry sighed again. “You’re better at it than I am,” he said. “You show me how it’s done, and then maybe I’ll know how to do it next time.”
Draco raised his wand, lit it enough so that Harry could make out his face and hands, and then closed his eyes and laid the wand on the ground. He had found that holding it distracted him. As Weston and Lowell kept saying, the purpose of this tactic was to sense the direction and condition of his partner’s magic, not the condition of his wand. And it actually made matters worse that Harry had used Draco’s wand for a time; he was all the more likely to respond to the hawthorn wood, which could be taken away, rather than the power that thrummed through Draco and couldn’t.
The first version of the trick that Weston had mentioned seemed to work for Draco and not for Harry, which was probably one thing discouraging Harry, although Draco thought it just meant he had to find a different one. He pictured a crystal in his mind, a six-sided crystal with gleaming sides through which separate flecks of light darted. The flecks of light moved faster and faster as he thought about it, and then began to whirl in coordinated patterns. Draco reached out lightly and imagined that there was another crystal a short distance from him, while at the same trying not to imagine that it lay in Harry’s direction.
This trick was supposed to let them find each other even behind muffling wards and other means that Nihil could raise to baffle their bond. Draco thought it useful and impressive, especially in its effects, and hoped that Harry would give up on the pretense that he couldn’t make it work well enough to be worthwhile soon.
The crystal in his mind suddenly rang as though someone had sung a high note at it, and Draco felt a tremble traveling through the points of the crystal and leading away from him in the direction of that imaginary second one. He raised a hand and curved it, and imagined the crystal falling into his palm, followed by the second one.
He actually felt a brief weight pressing against his fingers, smooth and slick in the way that the crystal would have been, and shook with wonder. That he could call something from his mind into the physical world, without the aid of his wand or glamours, was a source of delight to him, and, he thought, would be for a long time.
He took a deep breath-this part of the magic was still sometimes disorienting for him-and then opened his eyes.
He could see through Harry’s eyes. He looked down, moving his perception of Harry’s eyes rather than the physical ones, and saw the folded hands on his knees, the loosely separated, lithe legs, and the holly wand clutched in one hand. He raised them and saw the lines of the wards around them, the gleam of Granger’s illusion and the dim shapes of the hills beyond. He smiled, and felt his own lips stretch, on another face.
It was splendid, and difficult. He had to let it go soon and fall back into his own mind, opening his eyes with a little whoosh of breath.
“Master that, and they can never hide you from me,” he told Harry. “I’ll look through your eyes into every place they take you, and if we go a step beyond and master that next trick Weston mentioned, then we’ll be able to speak in our minds from a distance, too, undetectably. Don’t you think this is worth striving for?”
Harry’s eyes were shadowed. He shrugged and looked away. “It just seems to me that I can’t envision a crystal like that,” he muttered. “Every time I try, I lose track of the way all the lights are supposed to be moving. I lose track of the individual flecks.”
“You don’t have to imagine every single gleam of light as being the same,” Draco said patiently, the way he had said before. “I don’t. Just keep enough of them in mind that you can be sure that the other person’s image-mine, in this case-would be roughly the same.”
“I don’t know your mind that well,” Harry muttered, and flicked a spot of dirt off his robes.
Draco suppressed the temptation to yell and reached out with his hands. “Then touch me, for a short time, and think about that second image they told us to use,” he murmured. “A wheel of flowers and light, rather than crystal. You said it was easier.”
“A wheel made of flowers and light?” Harry objected, although he didn’t hesitate to take Draco’s hands. His fingers were cold. “What does that look like?”
Draco gave him a stern look, and then began to breathe more deeply. “Think about roses,” he murmured. “A wheel of roses, with roses for spokes and one huge white rose in the center for the axle, and light bouncing and shimmering off it…”
Harry closed his eyes. And if they didn’t catch Nemo that night-the glamours Granger had woven would have informed them if he approached-then at least, by the time that they left their shelter later to give place to Portillo Lopez and Raverat, Harry could envision the wheel, and was even doing better with the crystal.
And Draco had thought he felt, now and again, a tremble in his mind as it strained in the direction of Harry.
Chapter Nineteen.
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