HP and the Price, part 4 (Patreon)

“Sev’ris!” Harry called out. Severus had no idea when it had happened, but he had developed a finely tuned sense of panic when Harry got that particular tone in his voice. Casting a quick stasis spell over his potion, he hurried out into the great hall. The last time, Harry and Dinae had been pretending that the various chairs and couches were icebergs and attempting to leap from one to the next with absolutely no regard to what would happen if a small and fragile bone were to strike a marble floor with any velocity. Fools. Both of them were fools.

When he reached the hall, there were no sobbing children or hysterics. Far more terrifying, there was only Harry and Dinae standing around one of the coffee tables and staring at it.

“What are you scalawags up to?”

Harry pointed to the coffee table. “Look!” The moment Severus did, his heart fell to the pit of his stomach.

A wand sat there.

The dark rich wood of the handle was scarred with tiny lines that looked suspiciously like Fay runes. In the center of the wand was a brilliant red gem that, were the wand human-made, would compromise the integrity severely enough to make the wand unusable. But nothing about this wand spoke of human hands crafting it.

“Can I have it?” Harry asked. The child was not yet ten, and yet his greed for that wand had stripped him of all common sense—Severus could see it in Harry’s eyes.

“I want it!” Dinae protested. Giving Severus two children was a cruel trick, even for the Fay.

“Neither of you can have it,” Severus said as he crossed the room in a few great strides.

“But you already have a wand,” Harry complained. “It isn't fair for you to get two wands.”

“Don't argue with me you obstreperous little brat. You have not had your tenth birthday and a wand is traditionally the gift of one’s eleventh birthday.” Harry crossed his arms over his chest and narrowed his eyes. The expression did not disprove Severus's claim that the child was obstreperous.

“What have I always told you about magical objects?”

Both children have the audacity to roll their eyes at him. “Don't touch them,” they said as if by rote. Severus would take comfort in that answer if he believed the children would follow that stricture.

“No one may touch it until I have done a full diagnostic to determine whether it poses a danger to any of us.” Both children were clearly unhappy with his answer.

Severus brought his wand close to whisper the diagnostic spells, but a surge of magic shoved his hand away, nearly tearing his own want out of his grip. Before Severus could recover, Harry darted forward and grabbed it, swinging it through the air.

Green sparks flew in an arc, and Severus grabbed Dinae and pulled her away before some excess of accidental magic reduced both children to a bloodied pulp. “That means it's mine!” Harry shouted.

Severus never should have shared his own memories of going to get his wand. Despite the fact that his own foolishness had contributed to this bad behavior, Severus would not tolerate the children acting like dunderheads. He put Danae behind him and considered Harry with the professorial glare that had sent many a first-year potion student crying out of the dungeons. “Did I give you permission to touch that?”

Harry clung to the wand with both hands. Severus stepped closer. “Did I?”

Harry gave a minute shake of his head. “Do you believe that you are so special that you can handle magic without any training? How would you feel if Dinae died because you did not listen to sensible precautions when faced with unknown magic?”

Harry looked at Danae and drew himself up as tall as he could. The child was three weeks shy of ten; that was not terribly tall. Severus used every inch of his height to stare down at Harry. “If you were to seriously injured Dinae, do I have any way of seeking assistance? How would you feel if you and I were trapped here watching her die because of your foolishness?”

Tears began for real, and Severus let out a breath as he finally got through to his headstrong ward. “It felt like mine,” Harry whispered.

Severus rubbed a hand across his face. “And it might be yours. But we do not take risks. All we have is the three of us, and we do not risk each other's lives or make ridiculous Gryffendor errors out of hubris. Now put that wand down immediately.”

Harry slowly complied, setting the wand down on the coffee table with great hesitation.

“You will go to the library and get Monarchies Wandcraft, Lore, and Warnings from the lower shelf,” Severus said. “If this wand is yours then you will only get it after you have written me no less than 10 inches on all the ways an unwary wizard can cause harm to himself or others through stupidity in the handling of a unfamiliar wand.”

Looking very much like a puppy that has been kicked and then left out in a storm, Harry went.

Severus called after him, “If you attempt to make your essay longer through abominable handwriting, then I will make it 16 inches. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said before he darted out of the hall.

Danae had watched all this with wide eyes. She waited until Harry left the room before she turned big eyes towards Severus and offered up her most pitiful pout. “If he's in trouble, can I have the wand?”

Snape hated that this child had learned to manipulate at such a young age. Eight years old and she was already attempting to take advantage of Harry's fall from grace in order to get herself the items she coveted. Perhaps Harry would be a Gryffendor and perhaps his ridiculous need to hold both Severus and Dinea close was proof of his Hufflepuff nature. However, Severus had no doubt which house Dinae would be sorted into. Severus gave her a look as cold and dismissive as the one he had just given Harry. “Do you believe the wand is yours?”

“It could be,” she said she looked at the wand with envy in her eyes, that alone told him that she knew it was not hers.

“And what will the Fae say if they return and find that you have claimed the treasure they intended for another?”

“They might've intended it for me.”

“Impertinent brat. They are Faye. They are creatures of wild magic and raging emotion. Do you feel some overwhelming and wild need to pick up this wand?”

Dinae flinched.

“If you take something that belongs to another, you need to defend it. If you pick up that wand, if you claim a wand that the Fae have clearly intended for another purpose, then you are telling me that you would fight the Fae and Harry and me to retain possession of that wand. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to challenge all of us to get your way?” Danae's lower lip started quivering. The Carrow family had done her no favors in her early upbringing, not when she lived at the mercy of the Fae. “Foolish child,” Severus said wearily. “Choose a book and go to your playroom and read. I do not want to see you until I call you out.”

She cast one more covetous look at the wand and then darted away through the kitchen doorway. Merlin, what had he done to deserve children? Severus did suspect that his years of serving the False Lord as a Death Eater might have tipped the karmic scale somewhat.

With both his children out of the way, Severus turned his attention to the wand. He hovered his hand over it and felt the magics coil, preparing to themselves against him. Clearly, he would not be taking into it into the lab. Instead, he cast a number of spells to reveal any traps that might lie in its magical core or the runes that decorated the exterior.

He was not an expert in wandcraft, but he could tell that the wand was powerful. From the way the magic shifted, it had at least two magical cores. No human crafter would ever attempt to balance two different magical cores in one wand due to the inherent instability. However, no human had produced this wand. Severus could not tell if the two cores lay above and below the inset gem or to either side, but he could tell that the gem provided some form of focus for the power.

This was not a child's weapon, and the idea of handing this over to Harry made Severus feel old down to the marrow of his bones. Severus had thought he had had more time before he had to begin the more serious aspects of magic. After all, the ministry outlawed giving children a wand until they were 11. That was the minimum age for a child's core to be stable enough to work with, and even then many young wizards and witches struggled to perform even the most basic magic in their first year. But the Fae had offered this obscene a gift to a mere child. No. Not a gift.

For Harry, a gift would be an afternoon playing tag through the playroom. It would be sharing a memory through the pensieve. It would be sitting up with him after he had had a nightmare and reading his favorite book.

This wand was not a gift.

This wand was the Fae sharpening the weapon they had chosen. They were preparing Harry to move onto the battlefield before he was grown. Severus had suspected it earlier. The magic that ran through the keep was wild and strong and soaked into everything, including Harry and Dinae. And him.

Never before had Severus felt so helpless. Harry was nothing to them but a weapon, and Danae either a second weapon who would quickly get her own obscenely deadly wand or a child chosen for her dark core and her disposability to be a companion who could ease the loneliness of Harry’s life.

Despair pulled at Severus's soul until he sank onto the couch and stared at the offensive wand. He had vowed to protect Lily's child, and just like he had failed Lily, he had failed her child. Severus had sought an escape from the trap he had built for himself and in doing so he had delivered that little boy to monsters who could not even understand humanity. How many times would Severus trade someone else's life to save his own before he learned that he was beyond salvation?

The sun slowly sank, casting long squares of light across the marble floor. A ray struck the gem and a red glow not unlike the light of a hex encircled the wand.

“Lily, what am I supposed to do?” he whispered. “They are clearly going to put him into a position where he needs that wand to live. But if I give it to him, the minute I see you in the next world, you are going to curse my soul to oblivion, and I won’t stop you.” Severus wasn't sure how long he had sat staring before Harry stuck his head in.

“Severus? Are you mad?”

“Utterly furious,” Severus said honestly, although most of his anger was at himself. Harry came over and sat next to Severus on the couch. At Harry’s age, Severus had been trying to escape his parents’ touch. Both his father's anger and his mother's stifling guilt left him cold. However, Harry was not him. Harry slipped his hand into Severus's, embracing Severus’s hand and his own ridiculously Hufflepuff nature. If the child every put on the hat, the damn charms would break as it tried to figure out if Harry would fit better with the naïve badgers or the idiot lions.

“If it's not good for me, I don't need it,” Harry said softly. Severus studied him. Were Danae to say that, Severus would know exactly what she was thinking. Her manipulations were almost charming in their utterly artless way.

Harry was more of a mystery. “Are you saying that because you're trying to convince me to forgive you so that you can claim the wand, or do you mean it?”

Harry bit his lip. “The wand feels like mine.” His fingers twitched. “I really want it, but if you tell me it's not for me, I'll listen to you. I always listen to you, Severus.”

A dark laugh slipped free. “Child, you never listen to me unless you have already attempted it 17 ways for yourself, and you have given up any hope of finding a solution that does not require my assistance.”

Harry turned red.

“Did you finish your essay?”

Harry held it out to him. The handwriting was small and neat, so he had not attempted to circumnavigate the rules. “I didn't know it could be that dangerous,” Harry said, and that sounded like a genuine apology.

“We are alone out here. If you cause more damage to yourself or Danae than I can heal, then I will have to watch you die.” Sometimes Severus wondered if he should show Harry just a few of those memories. He wondered if he should let Harry catch a glimpse of a man crying out for mercy or a woman whose blood spilled out in gory chunks from an abdominal wound. Maybe Severus had made magic too much of a game. Severus let his hand hover over the wand. “Do you know what it means for them to give you this?”

Harry shook his head.

Severus pinned Harry with his most serious expression. “Anyone who gives you a weapon this fine expects you to use that weapon to fight for them.”

“Fight who?”

Severus wished he had that answer. He had thought it might be the False Lord, but Severus had found Dark Art books in his trunk that he could not imagine any family parting with, not even for Voldemort. They talked of the first wixen and a time when Fae and Goblins vied with human magics. Severus continued to study manuscripts so old that the pages would crumble to dust without stasis spells, and Severus still didn’t have an answer. “When I was young, I wanted something very badly.”

“What?”

Severus considered his answer. There had been so many things he'd wanted—revenge, respect, power, a chance to exist without fear smothering him. But Harry was not ready to hear that answer. He would probably never be ready to hear that answer, nor would he understand it unless Severus chose to show the boy everything he had done. And if he did that, he would break the trust between them. Living in a Fae keep, Harry's magic might be growing wild and dark, but he didn’t have enough evil in him to fill an inkpot. He would never understand Severus. So Severus shared the only answer that had even a small chance of making sense to this strange child he had been saddled with. “I wanted to learn potions. I wanted to learn more that I could at school. I wanted to be a potions master.”

Harry's eyes lit with pride. “And you are,” he exclaimed happily.

“Yes,” Severus admitted. “But the person who paid for me to obtain that weapon asked me to fight in battles that I did not want to fight in. But when you accept a gift, sometimes it obligates you to do things that you regret later.”

Harry frowned as he considered the beautiful wand in front of him. “Do you think I will regret getting a wand?”

Severus suspected very much that he would. But given their precarious position inside a Fae prison, he also suspected Harry would regret it if he did not. He sighed. “I don't know Harry only you can answer that.”

Harry frowned, the wrinkle between his eyes deepening in concentration. “I really want the wand, Severus,” Harry said. “I know what I did was super dangerous, and I promise I will never again wave it around, and I will listen to you, and I will follow your instructions just like I follow them in the potions lab so that I won't put you or Danae or myself in danger. I double promise.” The whole time he spoke, his gaze was focused on the wand, almost worshipfully.

Severus had no hope of keeping this from Harry, and if he tried, the Fae could punish all of them.

Severus sighed. “If you do not listen to me, being locked out of the library will be the least of your concerns. I will cut you into pieces and use you in my next potions experiment.” Severus knew that had been the wrong tactic to take the moment the brat’s lips started to quiver in a barely poorly disguised attempt to not smile.

“You can have it after I have checked your essay, and not before, and do not make me regret this leniency.”

Harry quickly concealed his emotions beneath a mask of obedience. Picking up the essay, Severus started reading. At this point, the most he could do was read as slowly as possible and hope Harry lost interest. That was about as likely as Albus Dumbledore flying in on a herd of thestrals and offering them a ride to Hogwarts. But at least for the next few minutes, Severus could pretend that he had a way of protecting a nine-year-old child from embracing a Fae-made battle wand.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Harry grunted as Dinea landed in the middle of his stomach. “Wake up. It’s your birthday!”

“Oi. Get off.”

She threw herself to one side of the mattress and started poking him in the shoulder. Harry considered rolling over and sticking his head under his pillow, but once Dinae was worked up, she wouldn’t let him rest. He could suggest she go bug Severus, but the man might kill them both. “Merlin’s toes, you’re annoying.”

“The magic flashed, but Severus says I can’t go exploring without you.”

“It flashed?” That woke Harry up. He loved their mountain keep. He did. Maybe Severus was cranky, but he never abused Harry or made him go hungry. Maybe Dinae treated everything from wizard chess to tag like a competitive sport requiring all rivals to be obliterated, but she never hit him. Well, not really, although she did have very sharp fingers for poking. But overall, Harry knew how much worse he could have it—how much worse he had it with the Dursleys before Severus came.

However sometimes it was a little boring. But if the magic had flashed, something had changed. The Fae had left new books or changed something about the keep.

Harry narrowed his eyes when he saw her practically vibrating out of her skin. “You think they left you a wand.”

“I’m ten now.”

“It’s my birthday.”

“Yeah, but eleventh birthdays are for wands, and you already have one. It’s my turn.”

“You’re not getting presents on my birthday.”

“I am if the Fae and Severus say I am.” She rolled out of Harry’s bed and ran out of the room, leaving the door open as he yelled at Severus, “He’s awake. Can I go explore now?”

“No, little jackanapes. I will have you scrubbing potion pots ‘til your fingers cramp if you ask me that one more time.”

Harry got out of bed and pulled on his robe before racing through the playroom into the back corridor. If something had changed on his birthday, he wanted to find it. A door slammed behind him, and Harry laughed at Dinae’s indignant yell. Even better, Harry could see a new door ahead—a wide double door that led to a new room beside the library and behind the greenhouse. Harry threw the door open and stopped in awe.

This was the biggest room yet. In the center was a wide flat spot nearly half as big as the great hall, all covered in green moss. Around it stood weird shapes and stairs that went nowhere and charmed trees that leaned drunkenly and weird piles of wooden boxes stacked precariously. In the far back stood several shapes that looked like straw people holding weapons.

“What is it?” Dinae asked as she came in behind him, her outrage at not finding the room first forgotten under the curiosity.

“It’s a dueling room,” Severus said.

“Dueling? Like Wixen dueling with wands?” Sometimes he and Severus would play tag with color-staining hexes or pants-falling hexes, but they didn’t do anything like dueling, not like in the books where the insulted wizard always challenged his rival in the middle of a grand field, and each would choose a second, and sometimes one of their seconds was really a girl in disguise who liked the wizard and sometimes the duel was broken up by the real villain of the story riding in on a dragon. Harry loved those books.

Severus looked around. “Exactly.”

“Merlin’s rune stones,” Dinae said reverently. “A dueling room like in a palace.” When Harry turned to talk to her, he saw a strange look on Severus’s face.

“Severus?”

The expression vanished. “Happy birthday, young brat. Now, let’s get food in you two before you become more disagreeable.”

Harry followed Severus back to the kitchen where he was making pancakes and sugared fruits. While Dinae prattled on about all the books she’d read with wixen duels, Harry watched Severus. He didn’t like the Fae gift. He probably hoped that he could keep Harry here forever, always learning and never going into battle. But Harry wasn’t stupid. First the Fae had given him a wand more powerful than Severus’s and now they’d made him a dueling room.

Something was coming.

And Severus knew something about it.

After breakfast, they all settled into the great hall to share favorite pensieve moments. As usual, Dinea was taking too long, and Harry’s gaze wandered to the balcony. The shield charm that protected their keep never failed and never needed reinforcing. It kept out the wind and cold while making it look like the room was open to the frozen mountain ranges. But something looked different.

Harry got up and wandered closer to the balcony. “Severus, what’s that?” he asked. The balcony had a weird bulge that stuck out away from the mountain.

“Get back,” Severus said as he strode past Harry, wand drawn. Harry backed away, catching Dinea by the arm to make sure her curiosity didn’t get ahead of her common sense. Severus stopped at the charmed barrier and pressed his hand against it.

Normally the charm acted like glass, keeping anyone from falling off, even if the someones in question had been playing magic carpet by running as fast as possible before jumping on rugs and trying to slide across the marble floor. Harry had hit the barrier hard, and it held. But now Severus was pushing slowly through it. The winds whipped his hair around his head, and his shirt was pulled free of his trousers. If he’d been wearing his potions robes, he might have flown away like a great bat.

Severus turned, now facing the charm wall, but on the opposite side. Fear clawed at Harry and he took a step closer. Severus stepped back inside the barrier.

“Severus?”

He cast a warming charm on himself and stepped closer to the fire that magically warmed their whole home. “It’s an apparition point.”

“Like for travelling?” Harry asked.

Dinea clutched Harry’s hand painfully tight.

“Do we have to go somewhere?” Harry asked, his chest aching.  He wasn’t ready to fight, and he didn’t want to leave home now.

Severus frowned at this for a moment before his eyes grew large. “I’m not taking either of you back to those people. Ever.  They do not get to have you.” The ferocity in Severus’s voice made the fear knots in Harry’s stomach ease, and Dinae stopped trying to strangle his hand.  “However, what happens on a wizard’s eleventh birthday, Harry?”

Harry looked at Dinae for help. She knew more about the milestones since he had to learn about wizarding culture from books. But the brat looked away.

“That’s when the Hogwarts letter comes, but this is Fae land. Not even a magical owl could reach this place, and even if they could find it, they couldn’t get through that weather.”

“Yes, what else?”

“That’s when witches and wizards get wands, but I already have mine.” Harry frowned, trying to figure out what else happens at eleven.

“That’s when heirs claim their first title,” Dinea said. “Before that, your parents can say you’re the heir, but you have to go to Gingotts and register it, and the magic has to judge you worthy because sometimes the person the Lord or Lady chooses isn’t compatible with the family magic.”

“I should take points for not letting Harry figure that out on his own. No one likes a know-it-all. However, that was well-explained, so we shall overlook the faux pas,” Severus told Dinea.

“I have to claim an heirship?” That was also very common in wizarding books, but if Harry was an heir, why had he been living in a cupboard with Muggles. That didn’t make any sense.

“You do,” Severus said. “You are definitely heir to the Potter estate, but the old families are all interrelated, so you may have one or two other heirships to claim.

That was exciting. That made this the best birthday ever. He got to go to a wizarding bank and having his magic tested and he could be an heir. And in the books, once someone found out they were an heir, they could take revenge on everyone who hurt them. Harry wouldn’t really hurt Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, but he could scare them a little. Or a lot. They weren’t nice people. “Can we go now?” Harry asked.

Severus sagged. “Harry, you have to understand something. People will know you’re alive because your name will not have vanished from the extended genealogies of a number of families. And I had no right to take you from your Muggle relatives.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“I rather think the Aurors will,” Severus said dryly.

Aurors. Wixen police. Harry had understood that he’d been kidnapped, but until this moment it never occurred to him that the police would consider that a crime instead of a rescue. They would take Severus to jail and Harry would go back to the Dursleys. Harry’s vision started graying, and he started breathing faster as his lungs couldn’t get enough air.

“Breathe, foolish child.” Severus caught Harry around the shoulders and pulled him down onto the couch, sitting next to him. “I’m not going to let anyone take you. The False Lord himself taught me to duel, so if anyone tried to take you away, they would regret ever seeing the wrong side of my wand.” Harry grabbed Severus’s hand and clung to it.

“Then why did that show up on my birthday?”

“Clearly the Fae want to make sure that you claim your family magics.”

“So we have to go?” Harry looked at the apparition point with horror.

“Eventually, yes,” Severus agreed. “But we are Slytherins. We solve problems through stealth and intelligence, not by rushing into a problem without thought. The Fae have provided both a dueling room and an apparition point, but there is no magic requiring us to us either right now.”

“How does that help?” Dinae asked. Harry was glad she did because panic was making his brain move slow.

“I’ve told you that the world foolishly gives Harry credit for the False Lord’s fall.”

“But you said that was most likely blood magic my mother did as she died,” Harry said.

“Most likely. Lily was brilliant with charms, and even though she was Muggleborn, she had as wild a magical core as any Pureblood family. She could have set up blood wards, ready to fuel them with her own death. A willing sacrifice related by blood would be magic that would impress even the Fae.”

“My uncle would kill you for saying that,” Dinea whispered.

“I knew your uncle, so I am quite aware,” Severus said dryly. “However, as your uncle is a fool and he could not negotiate with the Fae if his life depended on it, I don’t care,” Severus added. Harry knew she was frightened because she never brought up her family. Never. Severus put an arm around her and pulled her closer.

“Wait,” Harry said, “if the Aurors know I’m alive and they know I have to claim my heirship before time runs out…”

“And we do not know how long your family allows for that ritual, only that the Pureblood families always used blood magic and that is, by definition, finite.”

“They’ll be waiting for me today. It’s my eleventh birthday, so today they’ll have everyone looking for Harry Potter.” Harry smiled slowly. “But if we wait a few weeks, people will get tired of looking. And no one would have their heirship limited to a few weeks because these sorts of blood magics started back when people rode horses from town to town. The families wouldn’t want an heir disqualified because a horse broke a leg on the road.”

“So we wait until the advantage shifts to us,” Severus said. “I can assure you that the Goblins are no friends to the Aurors, so as long as we can get into a bank unnoticed, they will stay out of anything as petty as a human kidnapping. We may yet make a Slytherin out of you, brat.”

“He’d be Hufflepuff,” Dinea said. That was not a complementary tone.

Severus sighed.  “Probably.”

“Hey! Loyalty and hard work are good things.” Harry poked Severus with his elbow. “And you, missy, owe me a penseive memory, something birthday worthy.” Harry might have to wait a few weeks, but he was going to get to see a real wizarding street. Even with the delay, this was still the best birthday ever.