Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Only True Lords	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54573 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 11
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 15
- 16
- 17
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Sixteen—Blood Bargains

            Pansy didn’t know where she was, but she didn’t like it.

            She kept quiet for the moment, though, just peering out around the edges of the Obscuring Ward that someone had bound over her head. Whoever had done this wasn’t very good at it. They left the corners visible, and the ward wavered up and down like a flag in the breeze, rather than mimicking a perfect black hood the way it was meant to.

            She could see the changing shadows and orange color that she associated with firelight, and hear low voices talking and footsteps passing back and forth. Behind her was a wall that felt like solid stone. Her hands were bound in front of her, the rope having a small gleam that Pansy thought was probably a sort of alarm in case she tried to undo it. She still seemed to be wearing the robes she’d gone to prison in, and that made her want to wrinkle her nose. She was overdue for a shower.

            But she wanted to know what the hell was going on more than she wanted to be clean. She turned her head the slightest bit to one side, and the firelight tilted with her. Pansy thought she could make out a giant door, maybe made of iron or dark wood banded with iron.

            She grimaced a little. She didn’t remember the wizards who had snatched her from the cell distinctly; she thought they’d Confunded her. She knew that she’d started to stand, to fight and panic, but someone had hit her with a spell that stopped all that.

            “Parkinson.”

            Probably no word other than her name could have made Pansy decide she was really hearing that and not someone mumbling incoherently. It was that soft. She tilted her head slowly back in acknowledgment, not trying to see in the direction the voice was coming from—her right.

            “Zabini,” said the owner of the voice. “And I think Malfoy is over there. Do you know where we are?”

            “No,” Pansy said, her own voice a little thread of sound. “What did they do when they took you?”

            “Came in, asked if I wanted to be free of Ministry control, and then hit me with a Calming Charm,” Zabini muttered. “I don’t know why they bothered. Yes, I want to be free of Ministry control, and I wanted to be free of Potter. I would have followed them in a hot second.”

            Pansy thought a second, but although the remnants of the Calming Charm still clung about her brain, making her thoughts loose and foggy, she decided why a few seconds later. “They don’t want us to escape,” she whispered. “Or, I mean, that’s not really what they want. They wanted to be sure that the Lordship bond couldn’t sense we were in danger and have Potter follow us. It would have, if one of us panicked.”

            Silence from Zabini. Pansy turned her head towards him, rustling it along the stone as if naturally turning it in her sleep, but she still couldn’t see much, just a solid black blur.

            “So Potter might not even know we’re gone.” An undercurrent of something in Zabini’s voice, too low for Pansy to identify.

            “I think he will shortly, now that we’re awake,” Pansy said. “He could follow you into the Forest when he didn’t know beforehand where you were going. If we’re in danger and awake, then he knows.”

            “Maybe I ought to go back to sleep.”

            Pansy didn’t get the chance to ask him whether he was joking. Someone marched towards her, crouched down in front of her, and dispelled the Obscuring Ward.

            “Sincerely sorry for this,” said the white-haired man in front of her, who had a beard so long that it touched the stone floor. “But we can’t have you warning someone who’s dangerous to us.” He touched his wand to Pansy’s temple and whispered the Calming Charm.

            Pansy, in the moment before she went soft-headed again, clung to a scrap of what she knew about Lordship bonds, or thought she knew.

            We were awake, and I was aware that we could be in danger and upset about being where I was. That might be enough.

*

            Harry sat up, clapping his hand to his right arm. His shield mark was blazing, so much so that he almost expected his palm to be charred when he pulled it back.

            There was nothing there. Harry eyed the mark for a moment, then considered the green dots around the edges of the silver shield. He hadn’t paid attention to the mark all during his interview with Skeeter, except holding up his arm so she could snap photographs, because there was no sense of danger from or to any of his vassals. He had thought that they were probably doing what he was doing, sitting in cells and anticipating their next meal, although they didn’t have as interesting a time of it as he did.

            But this…

            Harry still didn’t know much about the Lordship bond, about what he could do and what he couldn’t. And the heat that filled his arm this time was almost neutral. It was nothing like the intense tugging that had taken over when he followed Zabini into the Forbidden Forest. Or the spike of flame that had touched him when Draco was confronting the blood-ghost and needed Harry to save his life.

            It was intense, though. What was he supposed to do? Harry slumped back against the wall and breathed, focusing on the shield mark.

            “Lord Potter? What are you doing?” Skeeter had called him that throughout the interview, probably because it would make the eventual article she printed and the book she wrote about him sound more impressive.

            This time, Harry ignored her. He didn’t think that this could be hurried, whatever it was. He slid his palm over the shield mark, from top to bottom, and thought, Show me where they are. Show me!

            When he took his hand away, he noticed that the shield’s color had brightened, the silver turning the shade of a mirror. Harry bent towards it, and a reflection of his face moved in the skin-branded metal. He breathed out, and his breath fogged on the surface, too, the way it would on a mirror on a cold day.

            Then the fog slid away, or became part of the picture, and Harry could see a cloudy image. It was a cavern, he thought, or at least someone’s underground house; the stone walls were too regular for it to be a natural cave. A huge door banded with iron and shimmering with protective spells was set over a hole in the earth, and steps led down it. The door was at an angle compared to the rest of the room, which made it hard for Harry to sort out the perspective and make sense of what he was seeing for a second.

            There were five shapes set along the wall, all of them with Obscuring Charms around their heads and their hands bound in front of them. Harry could make out Draco’s limp hair, Snape’s height and even limper dangling head, Zabini’s hands, Parkinson’s slumped shoulders, and only a little of Goyle’s face.

            The wizards moving around the big fire in the center of the room all had their hoods back, but Harry didn’t recognize them, either. They were older, for the most part, with white hair and beards, but that might not mean anything.

            No. It means something.

            A different kind of fire was rising inside Harry, one that had little or nothing to do with the shield mark. With every breath he took, the heat grew more intense, roasting his ribs from the inside, bearing his heart up on a wave of flame.

            Someone took them. Someone took them and they’re going to threaten them and me and it’s nothing they did.

            This time, Harry was utterly sure that all his vassals had been cursed and taken somewhere else because they were connected to him, not because they were Death Eaters or Slytherins. Some of the wizards around that fire might be Slytherins, although Harry thought they were more likely to be Wizengamot members or their friends, so old they had gone to Hogwarts a long time ago.

            They had taken the five people connected to Harry, not the elder Malfoys. Not all the people who had come to the Ministry with him. Not even his friends.

            They didn’t have any right to do that.

            “Lord Potter?” Skeeter’s voice had an eager, sharp tone that made Harry look back at her. “What are you seeing?”

            Harry turned back to the shield mark, angry enough to describe it, and then paused. The image had vanished from his skin, and even the mirror-brightness had faded. So had the heat. Harry reached out and tried to polish up the shield mark the way he would glass, but it just sat there under his hand, just skin.

            “I don’t know, exactly,” Harry said, trying to reach out and feel for his vassals the way he could before. Nothing happened. Had the people he’d seen found some way of blocking the Lordship bond? Or at least the way Harry could feel people along the Lordship bond? It explained why Harry hadn’t known that his vassals were gone until now, even though it must have taken the wizards who’d kidnapped them a while to collect them all, Stun them, and take to that place. “But I really need you to publish that interview as soon as possible.”

            Skeeter agreeably started packing up her parchment and quills. “And you’ll tell me about this the next time?”

            “Maybe the time after that.” Harry was on his feet, pacing back and forth as he thought. If he couldn’t feel his vassals, did that mean the bond wouldn’t give him any help in getting out of this cell to find them? Or did he just have to know how to ask it, the way the bond had shown his vassals in his skin when Harry had asked it to show him?

            “I must say,” Skeeter said, standing up and giving Harry a look that was impossible to interpret, “I like you much better like this, when you’re willing to cooperate with me. I could have made you a star long ago if you had said you wanted it.”

            “Before this, you weren’t worth cooperating with.”

            Skeeter opened her mouth a little. Then she studied his face, said, “This will be interesting,” and changed back into a beetle and scuttled under the door.

            Harry turned his attention to the shield mark again. Maybe he would pay for that remark later, and maybe he wouldn’t. The important thing was that he needed to figure out a way to consult the bond, now, and get moving so that he could rescue his vassals before someone started torturing them.

            Harry touched the shield mark with a finger in the center of it. Nothing happened. He worked his fingers around the outside, touching each of the green dots in turn. Still nothing. Harry nodded. They had done something to block the Lordship bond. When he’d done that before, even though it was absent-minded, he had known who each of the dots represented. Now, Malfoy’s dot might as well be Parkinson’s.

            Okay. So. He had asked the bond for help by accident before. What would happen if he did the same thing on purpose?

            He put his hand on the shield mark and said, “Get me out of here.”

            Nothing happened, again. Harry sighed. The bond didn’t think they were in danger, so it wouldn’t help him that way.

            “Please?” Harry added.

            Nothing.

            “Lead me to my vassals.” Harry tried to sound strong and confident, the way he imagined a Lord would sound, and the dots began to heat up on his arm. Harry bit back a gasp and watched eagerly.

            The dots fell into a line on his shield, all of them aiming at the same place, at least to Harry’s inexperienced eyes—the right lower corner of the mark. Then they turned and whirled and clustered together, forming one tiny clump of emerald on his skin.

            And then they stopped moving.

            Harry threw his hands up in the air and took another turn around his cell. Damn it. He was without his friends, without his wand—because of his “brilliant” plan to let the Aurors arrest him—and without anyone he would trust to ally with him. Skeeter would spread the word, but even if she was capable of somehow taking him with her when she changed into a beetle, Harry doubted she would. Too much risk for her, not enough reward.

            Who says I’m not a good judge of character?

            There was…one more possibility. It could be dangerous, in fact, it almost certainly was, but Hermione hadn’t come back to tell him anything about it yet. And Harry didn’t know what else to do.

            He cleared his throat and tried to sound as impressive as he could when he announced, “I call forth the blood-ghost of the Helton line.” That was the only thing he knew to refer to the man as. If he had a name, Hermione could probably discover it, but she wasn’t here right now.

            The air in front of him wavered and turned slowly to steam. Harry squinted and did his best to see through it. He knew the blood-ghost had formed a solid enough body to attack Draco once before. There was no need for him to appear with all these dramatics, Harry thought. He fell back against the bench and waited, folding his arms.

            The blood-ghost came into being so slowly that Harry thought he was probably reluctant. Too fucking bad. If he could use him to find his vassals, then Harry would. The blood-ghost was the one who had insisted that his purpose was to protect and help the last person with any sort of Helton blood in them.

            “What do you wish?” The ghost’s voice was low and wary, and the only thing Harry could see under his hood as it peered at him was the green eyes.

            “I want to find my vassals,” Harry said. “Someone took them prisoner and removed them from the Ministry. I managed to get a vision of them sitting in a large stone room around a fire, but whoever took them must have blocked the bond somehow, because I can’t feel their emotions or get a good sense of their direction.”

            The ghost half-shook its head. Harry thought he heard the hood rustling, but it remained unsubstantial, so maybe not. “I would say that is a good thing. It means that you will soon be rid of the binding of the Malfoy heir to you.”

            Harry snorted. “Then you know some way of breaking the Lordship bond that no one else does?” He had to pause and think about that a second later. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. The blood-ghost was from a long time back, and people might have had more magical knowledge about Lordship bonds then.

            “No,” the ghost said. “I think they will kill the Malfoy, and then you will be free from that encumbrance.”

            Harry sneered at him. The ghost, as much as Harry could see of his face, looked startled. “Fat lot you know,” Harry said, folding his arms. “They took my vassals from me as quietly as they could, and they didn’t hurt them. I know they didn’t, because I would have felt their pain. The mark on my arm was warm, but it didn’t burn the way it would if they were in danger.”

            “Perhaps the block they put on the bond blocks that, as well,” the blood-ghost pointed out, a helpful little lilt in his voice. “Perhaps they are torturing them to death right now, and you can’t feel it.”

            Harry choked back the desire to shout at the idiot. The blood-ghost was the only idea he had right now. “Maybe,” he said. “But they looked unhurt in the vision I had of them. Besides, if my enemies kill them, they lose any hold they have on me.”

            “What would they want to force you to do?”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Probably some kind of political non-interference. I scared the Wizengamot when I talked to them, and they don’t like the idea of me running around being both the Boy-Who-Lived and a Lord. The best thing to do is keep my vassals hostage, because then I can’t act for fear of harming them.”

            The blood-ghost shook his head, so slowly that Harry didn’t hear his hood this time. “I cannot help you,” he said. “I am only sworn to our line to protect you from the machinations of Malfoys, who hurt our family so badly.”

            “Then answer me another question,” Harry snarled. “Why didn’t you help me when Lucius Malfoy threatened me before?”

            “He was not the end of the line,” the blood-ghost said.

            “Presume that I don’t understand anything of what you’re going to say,” Harry snapped at him.

            “He is not the end of the line,” the blood-ghost repeated. “It would avail nothing to harm him, not when he had a son who could continue the work of engendering Malfoys. I had to wait for a time when his son was a burden on you, and near the place of my power, in order to manifest and deal with him.”

            “You’ve got a twisted sense of responsibility,” Harry said, staring at the green dots on his arm, the clump of green, and trying to figure out again why he didn’t feel anything more than that intense warmth. If one of his vassals died and he could have protected them, would he die, too? What about all of them? He hadn’t had Hermione read up on that, because the world had been going mad in too many other ways.

            “I am meant to deal with Malfoys,” the blood-ghost said. “Not with anything else.”

            “Right, you said,” Harry muttered. “And you won’t deal with helping me rescue this Malfoy, because he’s the end of his line.”

            “Yes,” said the blood-ghost.

            Harry closed his eyes. He didn’t know what to do, and the thought galled him. What would his vassals feel and think, as they felt death closing in around them and didn’t know why he couldn’t come? If he was—

            Then something else the blood-ghost had said finally caught up with him, or Harry caught up with it. He sat up, staring. “Near the place of your power,” he whispered. “The place of your power is the Ministry?”

            The blood-ghost went still.

            “It is,” Harry said. “Although that still doesn’t explain why you didn’t interfere when Lucius attacked me in the Department of Mysteries.”

            “He was not—”

            “Right, then that does.” Harry waved his hand. His mind was racing, and strange, inchoate thoughts whirled around and around. “Look. Would you—would you be able to attack someone else in these cells, if Draco wasn’t the end of his line?”

            “He is.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “I asked you if you could, not if you would.”

            The blood-ghost seemed to mull over his answer for a long time before he gave it, as though he wanted to be sure that there was absolutely nothing in it that would help Harry. “Yes,” he finally said.

            “Good,” Harry said. “And if you could attack someone else, then you could manifest and speak to them. Then I want you to carry a message to Lucius Malfoy, and ask if he’s willing to sacrifice himself to save his son.”

            The blood-ghost was so silent, so still, that Harry thought it had disappeared until he looked up again. Then the blood-ghost said, “You are—asking him to perform an exchange. You are asking him to become my victim, the Malfoy who would exorcise the blood vengeance that his family owes the Helton line, in place of his son.”

            “Yes,” Harry said simply. “And I’m asking you to accept the bargain, because Draco is far away now and might not ever return to become your victim, but Lucius is here, and he could.”

            “But there is nothing he can do for you, not if his son is far away,” the blood-ghost said. “He does not even have the power to pass between one cell and another here, as I do.”

            Harry licked his lips. “I think he might be able to do something. Can you carry things between one cell and another?”

            “Yes.” Less hesitation on the answer this time, as if the blood-ghost was interested in getting one Malfoy victim to kill.



            “Then you could bring back some of his—his blood,” Harry said. He was striking wildly in the dark now, his mind more full of images of the ritual Voldemort had used to come back than anything else. But blood was powerful, wasn’t it? And everyone, the blood-ghost included, was always going on about how it linked the family. “His blood might allow me to get a hold on Draco and find him that way.”

            Silence, so deep and thick that Harry could hear the sound of the blood-ghost shaking his hood again. “You cannot think that Lucius Malfoy will sacrifice himself for his son.”

            “How well do you know him?” Harry demanded. “Well enough to make up stories about him, it seems, but not that well, not if he didn’t come near the Ministry holding cells often. But I saw him during the Battle of Hogwarts. I know what he would do for his son.”

            The blood-ghost was silent. Then he pulled back his hood and his green eyes fixed on Harry once more. “He would agree to give you his blood and let you find his son in any case. But why should he agree to become my victim?”

            “Because I need to bribe you to carry the blood and the message between cells,” Harry said simply. “And that’s your price.”

            “I cannot change my nature.” There was what might be a very slight sneer of apology in the blood-ghost’s voice.

            “I know,” Harry said. “But you can carry the message for me, and see what he says. Remember not to let anyone see you.”

            “I have existed centuries without that happening,” the blood-ghost said, and flickered away.

            Harry sat down in the center of his cell and sighed. His brain was racing, his arm was burning, but part of him wanted to collapse into a dark hole and never come out. What was Draco going to say when he found out what Harry had asked Lucius to do? What about the rest of them? What about Lucius?

            The problem, though, was that no one else was here to help him or tell him what a good plan was. He had to do it himself.

            He was dozing when he felt someone else in the cell with him. He lifted his head and opened his eyes.

            It was the blood-ghost, and in one hand he held a potions vial filled with gleaming blood.

            “He agrees,” said the blood-ghost simply, and gave the vial to Harry.

*

            moodysavage: Unfortunately, he’s not the only one in danger.

            SP777: He plans to spread the news of his imprisonment and the way the Wizengamot is treating him. There will be people who can be influenced by that, just as there are some who can be influenced against him.

delia cerrano: And arguably this is another, but Harry can’t just go charging to the rescue when they’ve blocked the bond.

Genuka: Maybe not in one piece, since hurting his vassals would tell Harry where they are, but getting him back at all could be a problem.
- 15
- 16
- 17
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Only True Lords