Chapter Nine of 'An Offering of Dragons'- Ukrainian Ironbelly
Chapter Eight.
Title: An Offering of Dragons (9/13)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Warnings: Light angst, established relationship
Rating: R
Summary: Harry decides that he really needs to take a holiday. He hits on the idea of touring the respective dragon sanctuaries of the world, and invites Draco, who he’s casually dating, to come with him.
Author’s Notes: This story will probably be relatively short in terms of total numbers of chapters. It should update every Sunday.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nine-Ukrainian Ironbelly
“This way,” said Vira, their guide, striding out along a path that she seemed to be making up as she went along.
Still, Harry followed her, raising his eyebrows warningly at Draco when he would have complained. Vira had met them at the fireplace they’d Flooed into, which seemed to be part of a small, cold station where Harry would have expected to see more people. She’d told them her first name but not her last, nodded without expression as Harry recast the Translation Charm, and then hurried them out of the station.
Harry had tried to ask whether there was a place they could rest, but Vira had said, “If you want to see dragons, you must come with me.”
Harry had sighed and cast Refreshing and Relaxation Charms over both himself and Draco. Their trunks were shrunken in their pockets, so it wasn’t like they had a lot of luggage to carry. It was just that traveling by Floo was exhausting, and he and Draco had been looking forwards to a bed and a fire.
Vira led them up two slopes and down one more. Now they were moving along through the depths of a shaggy pine forest. Harry eyed Vira’s back cautiously. She was brown-haired, slim, maybe nineteen years old at most, and…
She looked grim and desperate, actually.
Harry dropped back a little to make sure Draco was okay. He’d stumbled as they came out of the Floo, and Harry thought he’d twisted his ankle. But Draco only shook his head with a chiding expression when Harry asked, so Harry settled on something else to ask. “Does she seem strange to you?”
“She’s a Dragon-Keeper. Of course she is.”
Harry smiled, but he had to persist. “I mean, she looks as though she’s-I don’t know, getting ready to run.”
“How would you know?” But Draco answered before Harry could. “Right, the being an Auror part. Does she look like a criminal to you?”
“That’s just it.” Harry watched as Vira paused ahead of them to scan the sky, then apparently noticed they’d fallen behind. She motioned at them jerkily and kept moving. Harry hurried up, because she’d be out of sight in a second. “She doesn’t. Just-I don’t know, as if something’s threatened her.”
“Well, in most cases I would say a dragon is threatening enough. But…”
Harry nodded. “Yes, I know. Not with Dragon-Keepers.”
“You know me so well.”
“Someone has to.”
From the little jerk of Draco’s head, Harry thought he would question that statement, but then Vira lifted her hand ahead of them, and they stopped. Harry craned his neck and tried to see beyond her. He couldn’t. This forest was even thicker and darker than the one Margit had led them through to see the Hungarian Horntails.
“You need to be still,” Vira whispered. “The Ironbellies are the biggest dragons. You know that? They are extremely dangerous and like to attack when something moves in front of them. You know that?”
“Yes,” said Harry, and heard Draco mutter the same thing in a dry voice behind him. Vira tilted her head in answer, eyes rising above him. Above the trees. Harry looked up. For all he knew, above the clouds.
And then he saw-he hadn’t seen it before because his eyes had been looking for a smaller shape-that there was a dragon above them.
Draco had already frozen. Harry had to believe that, because he couldn’t reach back and touch him, not with the chance of attracting the Ironbelly’s attention. It soared in lazy swoops over the forest, something he hadn’t realized a dragon could do. Its neck stretched down. Harry caught a glimpse of the burning ember eyes before it turned its head and flew on.
Vira waited until it had vanished behind a cloud. Then she turned to Harry. She was trembling. “You need to be still,” she whispered. “You need to be quiet. Can you do that for me, no matter what you see?”
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Harry hissed back.
“I know.” Vira gave him a fragile smile. “That’s why you’re so valuable to me.” She reached up and took out the tie that Harry hadn’t realized was confining her brown hair. It tumbled down the middle of her back when the tie was gone. “No matter what happens, I won’t need this any longer,” she said, and moved smoothly forwards, one foot and then another.
Harry followed her gaze upwards again. There was nothing in the sky now. He thought. He wondered how hard it was to see Ironbellies unless you looked for them. It shouldn’t be that easy to miss a bloody huge dragon.
“Dragon-Keeper Melnyk.”
Harry leaped hard enough that he was honestly surprised his heart was still beating when he came down. The call came from behind them, and sounded as though it had been enhanced by a spell. He saw Draco turn his head-he was in a better position to see than Harry-and a second later he held up a hand with all five fingers extended.
Five people. Harry turned around and stared at Vira again. She hadn’t paid any attention to the call, which Harry assumed was of her surname. She still stood looking up at the sky, her lips a little parted.
“You are to come out at once. Raise your hands and lay your wand on the ground in front of you.”
“Wonderful,” Draco said, his head dropping into his hands.
“Who are they?” Harry asked Vira without moving. “Aurors?” He didn’t know exactly what the word was in Ukrainian, but it didn’t matter. He knew the Translation Charm would take care of that.
“Oh, no. Fellow Dragon-Keepers.” Vira was frowning, but not the kind of frown Harry thought she would have if she was frightened. She moved a few steps further, towards a huge pine tree, and drew her wand. Harry tensed, but all she did was cast some kind of charm that made the pine resound like a drum.
“What did you do?”
Harry thought it was Draco who’d asked that, but he didn’t know. He honestly found it hard to hear in the echoes springing from the pine-tree, and Vira moved her head a little without answering at first.
Then she smiled at the sky. “Why do you assume it is something I have done?” she asked, amid the dying echoes.
Harry supposed he ought to say something, but he didn’t get the chance before the other Dragon-Keepers down the path started casting curses into the wood, and before the Ironbelly dived past the trees.
It was impossibly large, impossibly metallic. Harry rolled under one claw and held his hand out to Draco, who raced towards him and ducked under another one. Then the dragon was down, and it had smashed trees underneath it, and its tail waved above them, and its eyes blazed and then looked like iron, as its grey eyelids covered them up. It whipped its neck down and touched Vira with the underside of its jaw.
Vira leaned against it and murmured a spell.
Harry had no idea what the spell was; he couldn’t hear it anyway under all the cries and the creaking of trees and the sounds of the dragon’s breathing. He was busy making his way over to stand in front of Draco, ready to cast shield spells that would hold off the fire when it came hunting them. He didn’t know why it seemed so hard. Only when he crouched in front of Draco did he realize that the dragon’s wings were still beating. There was so much wind that he could hardly keep his balance.
A spell soared over him and splashed against the Ironbelly’s scales without affecting it. The dragon lifted its head and roared.
So did something else, a second later.
Harry stared. He felt Draco grab his shoulder. The other Dragon-Keepers stopped firing spells from behind them.
There was something shadowy and twisting where Vira had been, and her robes were falling to the ground. Harry wondered for a second if she’d decided to commit suicide. Or the dragon had breathed fire on her, shadow-fire, a mixture of dark and light that didn’t make sense-
But no. What rose from Vira’s dropped robe was another dragon, an Ironbelly growing its, or her, tail and wings as Harry watched. Her neck spiraled up and up, and her eyes opened, blazing red. The eyes got further and further away as Harry watched, as Vira grew and transformed.
Harry couldn’t turn away. Neither dragon looked at him or Draco. They faced each other, and Vira’s jaws gaped as she hissed something. Meaning brushed against Harry’s ears for a second, making him wonder if he could understand the words dragons spoke after all because he was a Parselmouth.
But he didn’t grasp what was happening until the dragons launched themselves upwards. Then he grabbed Draco and sheltered him in the folds of his cloak, because Vira and the other Ironbelly broke the branches with their wingbeats, and then they both fell over and tumbled a short distance. Sand and rocks blew around them and cracked against Harry’s shields.
Then they were gone, vaulting overhead. Harry dropped the shields so he could watch the dragons fly. They vanished behind the clouds, and Harry shook his head. He didn’t think they were coming back.
“Did you know you were helping her escape?”
“I don’t understand anything of what’s going on,” Harry said. It took him long seconds to turn from the sky to the Dragon-Keepers who were on the trail behind him. Draco, at least, had risen to his feet and assumed a calculating look, and Harry was sure he would be just as able to confront these people as he had Ask. “If you could explain things to me, that would be great.”
“To us,” Draco added, and his voice had a subtle vibration of power. Harry looked at him and smiled.
*
As far as Draco was concerned, the Dragon-Keepers had done little to nothing to make up for the indignities he and Harry had suffered so far. They’d taken them back to the Floo station and set up small tables with tiny sandwiches and cups of tea on them. Draco had sat down in his chair and gazed remotely off into the distance until they’d relented and allowed both him and Harry to use the loo. Then he’d nodded and stared at the plates until someone sighed and got out more food.
Then the Dragon-Keepers had asked about Vira and escapes and so on in a way that erased all of Draco’s previous good will. He went back to staring into the distance again.
Harry kept trying to answer, but his answers only frustrated everyone, since he knew nothing and the Dragon-Keepers took his fumbles and pauses as evidence of some master plan to conceal secrets. Draco finally reached out and squeezed his hand underneath the table. Harry stopped.
Draco then said, “Suppose you tell us what crime Vira committed.”
“You should call her Dragon-Keeper Melnyk,” the leader said. He hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. He was a huge, barrel-like man with a permanent frown who reminded Draco of Walden Macnair.
But such memories no longer had the power to intimidate him. Draco said, “What crime did she commit?”
“How did you help her?”
“We can’t answer that because we have no idea what was happening. Tell us what crime she committed.”
“We can keep you here if you don’t answer.”
“You can try,” Draco said, and there was a deliberate cruelty, and darkness, in his voice that he knew surprised Harry, who turned his head. Draco ignored that. He smiled at the Dragon-Keeper. “Do you have any idea what kind of power Harry has at home? And what kinds of protests you would get from Britain for keeping him hostage here?”
“Then maybe no one will miss you.”
Harry stood up. Draco didn’t have to see the wand in his hand to know where it was aiming. He watched the Dragon-Keeper’s face convulse a little, and added helpfully, “No one should miss someone who’s stupid enough to threaten me in front of Harry.”
“You would-you would not kill me.”
“Are you going to tell us the truth about Vira, and let us leave?”
Draco smiled. It was never the reason he had fallen in love with Harry, of course, but he had to admit it was extremely satisfying to hear the power in Harry’s voice and know it was being wielded in defense of him.
The Dragon-Keeper turned and exchanged a glance with the others behind him. Finally, a woman with white hair in a short cut shoved herself forwards. The others fell back, and the woman raised her wand. Harry tensed, but all she did was Summon a series of larger plates with some ham and mutton on them, and some larger cups. Draco sipped from his, and nodded. It was hot chocolate.
“Now,” said the woman. “My name is Oksana. I am-kin to Vira on her mother’s side.” She traced her fingers in a circle on the table for a moment. “And Vira committed species flight. We knew she was getting ready to, but we didn’t get there in time to stop it. We thought she’d enlisted you in it, since you were strangers and you might not know it was a crime.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
For the moment, Harry was handling this. Draco could study Oksana and look for other threats that would be harder for Harry to spot, like lies. He didn’t think she’d lied so far.
“She wanted to stop being human. It is-a sickness that some humans have. They want to stop being human. They want to change into dragons, or change into an Animagus form and vanish into the world of animals. At the very least, they want to marry Veela or goblins or some other species that can mate with us, and have children who are less than human.”
Harry’s face settled into studied neutrality. Draco waited, but he said only, “Why is this such a big crime here? It wouldn’t be in Britain.”
But we would still want to keep people from doing it, Draco thought. Of course, bringing that up now would probably only confuse the issue as far as Oksana and her people were concerned.
“Because,” Oksana said, her voice bursting with something before she brought it under control in the next second, “we are losing so many wizards. Our Muggleborns almost always go back into the Muggle world, and we don’t have many of them anyway. Our most powerful wizards don’t have many children, because they prefer research and studying to marriage. Everyone needs to stay here and have children. Vira was young. She had all her choices of marriages in the world. She could have had many children. And instead, she chose to be a dragon.”
Draco watched Oksana, the way she looked at the table. He touched Harry’s hand when Harry would have said something else. He thought this was something he could understand better than Harry could.
All those lines crossing on our tapestry. All the pure-blood families who only had one child, or who disowned their Squib children.
“Why did you let her be a Dragon-Keeper?” Draco asked. “If you knew she was already planning to do it? Why expose her to that temptation?”
Oksana jerked a little and stared at him. “Are you a mind-reader?”
“Yes. But not this time.”
Harry shifted uneasily. Draco thought it was because of the way he and Oksana were staring at each other. Well, Draco couldn’t help him with that. Harry would have to wait on the outside, the way Draco had waited for him when he was chasing that damn dragon in Sweden.
Oksana finally whispered, “I was the same as she was. When I was young. I thought of having wings and soaring above the earth. But I overcame the temptation. I thought letting her work with dragons for a little while would show her what she could have as a human.” She drew in a deep, painful breath.
“And instead, she managed to go where we weren’t watching her and use your arrival to cover her escape.”
“She would have found some way. This was just the one she happened to take.”
Oksana looked at him with motionless eyes for a long moment. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better? To lessen what she did?”
“No,” said Draco. Harry had thought Vira looked like someone had threatened her. Draco had formed his own impression of her. “Just that-if someone wants something that badly, it’s useless. You could have watched her for years, and that would only have made her want it more. She would have got it sooner or later.”
“I do believe that you know what you’re talking about. Why?”
Draco shrugged. He wouldn’t have told everyone this, but he didn’t believe Oksana would spread it around. “My father followed a powerful Dark Lord. My mother was willing to support him in that, but not when the Dark Lord set me up for a task I would fail so that he could kill me. She did impossible things to keep me safe. Things that meant someone else had to die. Multiple people had to die,” Draco added, thinking of the part that the Unbreakable Vow had ended up playing in Professor Snape’s death. “And she lied to the Dark Lord at the last. Even though that could have meant her death, too. Because she wanted me safe more than she wanted anything else. And he couldn’t keep his eyes on her at all times. And it worked.”
Oksana was utterly silent for a moment. Then she said, “That doesn’t solve the problem.”
“No.” Harry spoke this time, leaning forwards. “But it might make you feel better about Vira, specifically.”
Oksana sat, visibly thinking. Then she inclined her head and stood. “You will be let go tomorrow, then, as soon as we make sure that Vira isn’t going to fly back and try to meet with you for some reason. I’ll send someone to take you to a secure house later.” And she turned and strode out of the station. Draco waited, then shrugged and turned to Harry.
“Think they’ll keep their word?”
“You’re the Legilimens. You’re the one who’s supposed to be able to tell when people are lying.”
“Yes, I think so.” Draco leaned back and looked out the window again, over a fall of forest and up to the mountains. That hadn’t been enough for Vira, walking through those forests and climbing those mountains. She had wanted to soar above them.
She had her wish.
And there was someone else Vira didn’t look like, besides a criminal, Draco thought, as Harry leaned against him. She didn’t look like Harry. Draco had feared Harry leaping into the rush of his own risk-taking and leaving him behind, because the risks mattered more to him than Draco did.
But now he knew what someone looked like who was sick for their heart’s desire and willing to risk everything to leave everything else behind. It wasn’t the way Harry’s eyes lingered on him, or his arm around Draco’s waist.
For a moment, Draco thought he might have seen the shapes of iron-grey dragons twisting above the mountains in the distance. But when he blinked again, they were gone.
Chapter Ten.
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