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Burning Day	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10061 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Six—The Clever People
            “You didn’t say that you were going to bring us such a prize.” Niamh’s voice was soft, but her tail coiled around her flanks as though she was using it to whip herself.
            Harry nudged Killian with his foot. He had bound him with both magic and rope so there was no chance he could break free and harm any centaurs before they could subdue him. “Until today, I didn’t know that my people would be able to track him down so easily. But although I know he killed a foal, I don’t know how he’s connected to the other people who were trying to sneak into the forest.” He looked at Niamh. “I was hoping that you could find out for me.”
            Niamh inclined her head, without a smile. “If you do not care what we do to him, we can find out much.”
            “I didn’t care what you did to the last wizard who violated your boundaries and territory,” Harry said. “Although I was angry enough that I nearly burned this one to death. One of my colleagues managed to remind me that you have a better claim to his life than I do.”
            Niamh had been bending down to check on the knots that tied Killian, but she looked back up at that. “I would like to meet him.”
            “I’ll bring him if he agrees to come,” said Harry. Killian was still alive, and would know it was Draco Harry was speaking about, and while Harry highly doubted that Killian would come out of the forest and be able to talk to anyone about it, he was still going to be cautious. “It might not be politically advantageous for him.”
            Niamh nodded, then did a complicated folding trick with her legs that left her kneeling down but still able to reach out and use her arms fully. She heaved Killian onto her back, draped across her withers. He moaned and tried to garble out something, but Niamh didn’t seem inclined to pay attention. She stood up instead, and nodded to Harry. “Thank you for bringing him to us. We will see that he pays for the foal’s death, and gives us the information before he dies.” She cantered into the Forbidden Forest.

            Harry listened to the noise of her hoofbeats and Killian’s moans fading, and felt viciously satisfied. Then he sighed and turned his back on the forest, making his way towards the castle.
            Briseis met him just outside the gates, shaking her head. “Please tell me that I’m not going to have another political crisis to control.”
            “No,” Harry said. “I did think about killing the apothecary, but Draco stopped me. So I burned his shop to the ground and ensured no other shops would be burned, and then took Killian and gave him to the centaurs.”
            Briseis considered that, then nodded. “That might be for the best. We need you to maintain somewhat of a threatening image, so that our enemies don’t simply start attacking the Court again.”
            “I agree.” Harry turned and fell into step beside her. “Now, tell me about the new arrivals I can see you’re bursting to mention.”
            “It’s sometimes creepy that you know that much about me, my Lord,” said Briseis, and then held out a sheaf of papers. “There are a lot more in the last few days. I don’t know why. I would have thought they would start staying away once they heard about your new reputation.”
            “Maybe some will once they hear about the burning of Darkest Signs,” said Harry absently, and flipped through the top papers. “But right now, there are so many people who are uncertain about that council in the Ministry and their ability to control anything that I’m not surprised we’re getting more immigrants.” He paused on seeing a name on the paper in front of him. “Nott?”
            “Not what, my Lord?”
            “No, the name,” Harry said, and held out the paper. “There was a Slytherin named Theodore Nott in my year. I don’t recognize this name, though. Hortenisa Nott? Do you think she could be his sister?”
            Briseis looked at the paper with the slight frown that Harry knew meant her mind was really racing in concentration. “Yes, I think she is. She says that she wants to immigrate to the Court because you treat Slytherins fairly.” She looked sideways at Harry. “Considering that I am high up in your hierarchy and you’ve shut down the House rivalry that used to flourish at the expensive of the Slytherins, I think that’s right.”
            Harry nodded. “Maybe Draco can give me tips about how to handle her, if I think the interview with her doesn’t go the way I want it to.” He pulled Hortensia’s parchment to the top of the pile. “Tell Miss Nott that I’ll interview her next.”
*
            “Do you think that going to the Dark Lord’s Court would really benefit us?”
            Draco sighed. He had answered almost a hundred questions from various people in Knockturn Alley since Harry had burned Darkest Signs, and there seemed to be no possibility of getting away anytime soon. Even the hags and warlocks and other people Draco had thought would avoid him, since he was running for Minister, had approached him.
            On the other hand, they had seen him speak to the Dark Lord of Hogwarts without bad consequences. Perhaps they thought that was enough to make him sympathetic to the Dark.
            “I don’t know,” he told the hag who had asked him that last question. She was done up to her eyes in a thick cloak and hood that hid everything about her, even the color of her hair. She had black eyes, though, he could see that much. “You have to consider that it would prejudice some of your family against you, if they’re on the Ministry’s side, and that the Ministry might seize your property if you do it.”
            The hag waved a hand. “All my property is the sort that can be carried on my back.” She looked deeply into his eyes. “And I know that I have skills that would prove of value to the Dark Lord’s Court.”
            “Really?” Draco knew hags were skilled with Dark spells and potions, but Harry had people around him who could do that already. “Like what?”
            “I see more than most people do,” said the hag. “Call it the Sight if you wish. I never have. I see that you and the Dark Lord are closer than you like people to think, and that the main reason the Dark Lord did not destroy that idiot today was as a favor to you.”
            Draco’s hand shifted to clench on his wand. The hag cackled. “And it wouldn’t do any good to curse me, either, boy. I can melt away and be gone much more easily than some of these fools.”
            Draco released his wand with a sigh. There was no way he could know her name when he hadn’t seen her face, and he thought a hag was one of the last people who would go to the Ministry with news of his connection with Harry, anyway. “What do you want?”
            “Sometimes even wanderers long for a home. I’ve been content with wandering a good long time, but I could fancy a Court.” The hag spread her hands. “Put in a good word for me, and I’ll use those eyes on your enemies.”
            “Fine,” said Draco. “But just because I put in a good word doesn’t mean the Dark Lord will accept you. I might be able to—calm him down, sometimes, but that doesn’t mean I control him.”
            “Why would I want to serve a Lord someone else could control?” The hag cackled again and turned away. “Tell the Dark Lord to look for Nightshade when he wants to speak for me.”
            The people who’d been waiting to talk to Draco almost melted out of the way when Nightshade walked past them. Draco stared, then snorted. At least he thought he’d have less trouble finding her when he wanted to.
*
            “Will you tell me why you want to enter my Court?”
            Hortensia Nott looked a little like Theodore, or at least Harry thought so; he had to admire he didn’t remember her brother that waell. She was tall and long and skinny, with a nose to rival Snape’s. She drew her robes around her at all times as though she expected the floor to be crawling with dirt and diseases. She examined Harry’s face as if all the dirt and diseases focused there, then nodded.
            “No one will hire me for the work I want to do in the Ministry,” said Hortensia, her voice also thin and her hands working restlessly in front of her. “And it is not a work that is easy to do outside it. I must compete with others in the same field. I wish to be in a Court where my work will be valued and rare.”
            “I have people who can brew potions here.”
            Hortensia paused, and then her hands stopped working. She sat up. Harry held back the urge to laugh. Yes, he had read her right. She wanted to be challenged, and she took blunt honesty as part of that challenge.
            “I brew poisons,” she said. “And I can work out cures for most of them. But supplies are expensive, and the Ministry won’t fund research into creating poisons. They only want cures. They’re ridiculous. How can I work out how to combat poisons unless I know what goes into making them? And the truly new and experimental ones are invented mostly for assassination attempts. It would be useless for me to never do anything in that line. It would leave me facing a weapon compounded of ingredients that I did not understand and could not counter or trace back in time.”
            Harry cocked his head. “Very well. But how do I know that you wouldn’t turn on the other people in my Court and use your poisons against me?”
            “How well will they treat me? If someone is prejudiced against me for coming from a Slytherin family and spits on me, then I would be more tempted to use a mild poison that would cause them some stomach pain, at least. Not all poisons are fatal,” she added, probably because Harry could feel his eyebrows rising. “I am a master of the ones that are not.”
            Harry leaned back and considered her. It was true that Hermione and Lucy could use some help in tracing back the ingredients of the poisoned Wolfsbane, and Harry would like someone in his Court who counteract it if the werewolves ever suffered from the same fate.
            But he didn’t know how well someone who talked intensely about her love for poisons would do in his court. “What about people who distrust you because of what you love to do?”
            Hortensia shrugged. “If they distrust or fear me enough not to attack me, I don’t care. It’s only a problem when they decide that my work means I need to be destroyed.”
            “I don’t know if I could trust you,” Harry said, and stood up to pace back and forth across the room. It still felt empty without Persephone on her perch, preening sometimes and giving him a stare that told him how pathetic he was other times. “That would be the most important factor in whether I could give you shelter. How stupid would I be to invite an enemy right into my home?”
            “The magic of Hogwarts answers to you, I’m told.”
            Harry glanced at her. “Yes, it does. But I don’t know if I could command it to stop me from ingesting poison in time.”
            “Set it to watching me,” said Hortensia. “Portraits or whatever else you wish. The very stones can watch those you tell them to watch, I’ve heard. Very well. But it can act against me and attack me if I make a hostile move against you.”
            Harry frowned and didn’t answer. In truth, it was a clever answer, and it impressed him with Hortensia’s determination to work in an environment that was literally hostile. But he didn’t know if Hogwarts’s magic was intelligent enough, put bluntly, to recognize when Hortensia was concocting a poison for use against him or someone else in his Court.
            “Very well,” he said at last. “I’m going to need a magical oath from you that you won’t use poisons against me.”
            Hortensia paused expectantly, and then said, “Why didn’t you require the same vow against me using any poison against the members of your Court?”
            “Because I don’t have control of them the way I do of Hogwarts and my own reactions,” said Harry. “If someone attacks you, you deserve the right to defend yourself. What your vow will say is that you can’t fatally poison anyone in my Court.”
            “I was told that I could trust you. I’m glad to see my informant was right.” Hortensia drew her wand and unhesitatingly held out her wrist. “Who will you invite to be our Bonder?”
            “It doesn’t need to be an Unbreakable Vow. I was thinking more of a blood oath.” Blood oaths blended back into their maker and could turn Hortensia’s veins against her if she broke it. Harry thought that pain was a better lesson than death, the way that being sick to their stomach might impress someone more than dying.
            “You think like one of us, after all,” said Hortensia, and smiled at him. “They’d told me that you did, but I wasn’t sure.”
            Harry shook his head and gathered up the magic of Hogwarts, surrounding Hortensia’s chair with it in a silently orbiting cloud of grey and green particles. Hortensia watched it calmly, politely, without moving. Harry raised his hand, and the particles settled until they were drifting around her. “Us? Them? What do you mean?”
            “I meant the clever people,” said Hortensia, drawing her sleeve back to bare her arm, “mostly former Slytherins. But not all of them are. And by them, I meant the same people, the ones who told me that I should take my chances here.”
            “These particles of my magic are going to go into your blood,” Harry told her. “Your idea about having my magic watch you is a good one, but it’s going to watch you from the inside. And it’ll react defensively if you try to hurt me, or kill anyone inside the Court’s borders.”
            Hortensia smiled again. “I can see that others of the clever people will want to come here once I tell them about this,” she said, and made a little incision in the skin of her arm with her wand. The blood trickled out, and Harry shook his head and directed some of the particles of magic down into her blood. Hortensia laughed. “It tickles.”
            “You’re talking about it like it’s an honor,” Harry said. “That’s not how most people would think of it.”
            Hortensia looked him dead in the eye. “Then most people are stupid.”
            Harry laughed in spite of himself. “Maybe I can learn to think like you,” he said, and lit the particles of his magic with a touch of his will. He was certain that they would still function even when separated from the rest of his magic and surrounded by blood now. Well, reasonably certain. “That this is an honor, and that my magic will comfort some people instead of upsetting them.”
            Hortensia still hadn’t blinked or looked away. “You should always think that, my Lord. Why wouldn’t you? Your magic is strong enough to protect you from the consequences of any mistakes you do make, and then you can avoid making them in the future.”
            Harry thought of the centaur foal. “My magic isn’t strong enough to protect everybody.”
            “Protect who you can. Stay alive to defend the rest.” Hortensia lifted her arm. The blood under the surface of the skin sparkled and blazed with light. “Should I make the oath now?”
            “Yes,” Harry said, feeling as though she had punched him in the stomach, but with her attitude more than her words. “Say this: I will never try to harm Harry Potter in any way, direct or indirect, and I will not use any of my skills against any members of his court fatally, and only use them at all against other members of his Court if they attack me first.”
            Hortensia nodded and repeated the oath word-for-word, other than substituting in “my Lord” for Harry Potter. Harry supposed the oath would accept that. At least, there was no change in the soft sparkle of his magic in Hortensia’s blood. He’d take it.
            Hortensia stood up after that and asked, “Where can I move in? When can I move in? I want to bring some of my poisons and equipment with me as soon as possible, but I need to buy more ingredients before I potentially cut off contact with other markets.”
            “There’s the Forbidden Forest, if you can go into it without violating the centaurs’ territory,” Harry said. “And I have to forbid you from chopping up magical creatures.”
            “Non-magical plants are the best ingredients for many of my poisons in any case,” said Hortensia. “You will not regret this decision, Lord Potter. I can be loyal to those who will back me and believe in me.” She departed in a swirl of skirts.
            Harry leaned back against his desk, and thought some more. He wanted to protect his people from harm. One reason he had been so angered by the death of the centaur foal was the thought that he had failed in doing that.
            But when it came to him, and taking risks accepting new people into his Court, and making alliances…yes, his magic could enforce order if he had to. And he could discourage people without killing them, or even binding them. Just frighten them, and that changed the game. Already, they were attacking his people instead of him. He didn’t much like that, but at least it argued that they were too fearful to go after him directly.
            Something he did was working.
            Harry grinned a little. He and Draco had thought he would have to manipulate the public through fear of retaliation and Dark magic alone. But what if he cultivated another image? Of someone who could attack strongly if he had to, but was otherwise above it all, other than for a few sharp remarks?
            Yes, that might be worth doing.
*
BAFan: And so is the profit motive. Killian did what he did because it would make money for him, and nothing else mattered.
The Ministry could try to set a trap. Given that Harry is more ruthless now, it’s possible that it wouldn’t work very well.
Thank you!
SP777: At least he terrified him, and gave him to people who will hurt him a lot more.
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Burning Day