HP and the Price, part 6 (Patreon)

Standing in the middle of their greenhouse with the crystals above glittering brightly, Harry mourned the loss of another shadenut bush. “What am I doing wrong?”

Neville came over and looked down at the brown, shriveled remains. “You watered it too much. The roots have to dry out between watering because they attract mold. The dry kills the mold. Your plant’s roots never dried, so the mold pretty much ate the plant from the bottom up.”

“You couldn’t have warned me?”

“And get another lecture from Severus about how I couldn’t do your homework when you were a grown man trying to keep a plant alive long enough to harvest potion ingredients?” Neville’s voice had a touch of amusement, and Harry glared at him. Neville raised both hands as if to hold Harry off. “And you could have asked. If a plant is not doing well, giving it more water is not always the solution. In fact, it’s often not the solution.”

Harry sat on the edge of the raised bed, his shoulders hunched. “Severus is going to be cranky.” Of course, that meant Severus would grandly announce that Harry had lost points, which was useless because they didn’t keep track of points. But still. Harry hated disappointing Severus. “I’m so good at potions and defense and even transfiguration. And I’m pants at herbology.”

“I’m great at herbology and my potions are improving, but my math is embarrassing. We all have strengths and weaknesses.”

“I’m not great at maths, either,” Harry said. If he could give up arithmancy, he would. In a heartbeat. However, Severus said that a respectable wizard had a solid understanding of all forms of magic. He even made Harry study the different forms of divination and the advantages and disadvantages of each. “Sometimes I feel like there’s so much to know that it won’t all fit in my brain, ya know?”

Neville sat next to him. “I usually feel like that. You and Dinae know so much more than me that sometimes I feel like a squib sitting in a Hogwarts classroom waiting for someone to figure out my secret.”

Harry caught Neville’s hand in his and squeezed it. “That’s not true. You’re brill at herbology and even Severus called your shrinking potion adequate the other day.”

Neville smiled. “He did, didn’t he?”

“Yep.”

“I’ve learned more in seven months here than I have my whole life. Slughorn always ignored me in potions class, and I melted a few cauldrons because I was rushing to finish before the period ended and I lost track of what I was doing.”

“That’s dangerous in potions.”

Neville nodded. “I know. And I tried to not blow anything up. I heard that last year, one of the students had a potion explode and twelve students ended up in the hospital wing. That teacher didn’t come back this year, that’s why we have Slughorn. He was the potions professor before Severus and he came out of retirement.”

“And if the Fae are only taking children who are in danger, that means Quirrell is willing to kill his students. I don’t have a high opinion of Hogwarts’ teaching staff.” Harry was glad he’d never had to go. He’d always had his own space, even if it had been a cupboard under the stairs, and he wasn’t sure he would have felt safe sleeping in a room with other boys. Anything could happen when a person slept. And from what Neville had said, he would have been rooming with Ron Weasley who was the center of most of Fred and George Weasley’s pranks. Like Neville, Harry was private and he didn’t want everyone staring because he had green skin because of some stupid prank. Ron sounded nice enough, but Harry would have avoided him just to avoid being ground zero of sibling pranking. Prince Keep was way better than Hogwarts. And he hadn’t needed to wait until he was eleven to start learning. That was stupid.

“Professor Spout was great and I liked Professor McGonagall who taught transfiguration.”

“Two out of how many?” Harry asked.

Neville didn’t have an answer for that.

“Besides,” Harry said, “they teach weird stuff about dark magic. There’s no such thing as dark or light magic.”

Neville frowned, but at least he didn’t change the subject or leave. He usually did when the topic came up, and Harry understood. Neville had been taught wrong his whole life, and it took time. Harry waited to see how Neville would react. For a long time, he just used his fingers to draw furrows in Harry’s planting bed. Harry waited. Severus always said you had to listen to someone’s concerns before you could convince them to change. He said the False Lord’s greatest talent was in listening to prospective recruits and then telling them exactly what they needed to hear. Of course, his words had been lies, but the strategy was still valid.

“What about the Unforgivables. Those are dark.”

Harry considered addressing Neville’s real objection—the cruciatus curse. However, that was a wound too deep for him to poke the first time Neville showed a willingness to listen. “One of my favorite books is about a prince who falls in love with a duke. But his father, the king, wants him to marry this princess and have a dozen children to carry on the family name. So the king tricks the duke into accepting a challenge to play wizards’ chess, with the condition that neither of them could resign. They had to play to the end. The duke didn’t know the king had a life size board where the two opponents took the positions as kings.”

Neville leaned closer. “So the king would have his chess piece advance until they checkmated the Duke, and because wizard chess means the pieces bash each other, the Duke would die, assuming he lost.”

“The king was a champion player,” Harry confirmed. He’d loved the book. He’s sat up with a lumos spell on his wand, reading so late into the night that he had botched his algebra exercise the next morning and Severus had been crankier than usual.

“What does this have to do with the Unforgivables?”

“The prince cast a silent imperious curse. He guided the Duke until he checkmated and killed his father. Then the Prince and the Duke declared their love to the whole kingdom and they planned a lavish wedding after the Prince’s coronation.”

Neville blinked at him, clearly struggling with the story. Harry let him sit for a while before he continued. “When I started trying to brew veritaserum, I really struggled. I could make a passable potion, but I couldn’t make mine as powerful as Severus’s, and it wasn’t stable for as long. He kept telling me how to flick my wrist and trickle magic through my wand to encourage the ingredients to bind to one another, but I didn’t get it.”

Neville’s eyes grew wide. He wasn’t stupid; he saw exactly where Harry was going.

Harry nodded. “I asked Severus to use the imperious curse to show me how my hand and magic should move during the spell.”

“What did he do?” Neville asked in a voice full of horror.

“He looked at me like you are right now,” Harry said. “And he told me that I was an unmitigated fool and a blunderbuss and an unforgivable scamp who was going to drive him to his grave early and that one should never make such an offer.”

“He’s right.”

Harry shrugged. “After I produced three more caldrons of weak veritaserum, he finally agreed. Having him move my hand and feeling what he did helped me understand what he was saying in a way words never would. If someone did that to me without my permission, I would hex their balls off. Or whatever parts girls have that are like balls.” Harry frowned. Girls must have something, but he didn’t know exactly what. Every time he’d asked Severus, Severus said he was too young to think about such things. “However, when imperious is used to teach, it’s not such a bad spell.”

Neville still considered him with something approaching horror.

Harry looked at his dead shadenut bush and vanished it before smoothing the dirt to create an improvised writing surface. “What dark spells do you know?”

“Blood magic,” Neville said without hesitation.

Harry wrote BM in the dirt in one quadrant of the cleared space. “But inheritance spells are blood magic. Are those dark?”

“Yes, but they were cast a long time ago when it didn’t matter.” Neville frowned. Good. He’d realized the illogic in that argument. If dark were evil, it would be wrong across the board. Time wouldn’t matter. “What else?”

“The Unforgiveables.”

Harry added AK, CC, and I in the same quadrant. “What else?”

“Legilimency.”

Harry added an L in the same quadrant. “Expelliarmus can make a wand change allegiance, and dark wizards use it a lot. Is it dark?”

Neville frowned. “No, not really. Either side can use it.”

Harry added an E at the center of the top, near the other letters but set off a bit. “What about patronus?”

“That’s Light,” Neville quickly added. “I love that spell.” Neville should. His griffin was gorgeous as it flew around the keep. Harry’s bison would charge after it, but bison versus griffin was never a fair fight. Still, the two patronus would charge each other until both boys were laughing and the spell would dissolve into shimmers of light.

“Obliviate?”

Neville frowned. “I want to call that dark because erasing someone’s memory is really bad, but I know the ministry uses it to make sure muggles don’t remember seeing magic. I guess maybe that’s in the middle.”

“So, in the middle closer to the dark side?” Harry compromised.

Neville nodded.

“But didn’t Dumbledore use legilimency to help the Light win the war? Are you sure it’s dark magic? Maybe we should move it next to obliviate, dark but sometimes necessary.”

“Okay,” Neville agreed. They added more spells, fidelius charm and fiendfyre and protego. Then Harry started bring up less powerful spells: accio and lumos and diffindo. These went on the bottom as spells that were less powerful and more useful day to day. No one cast the high-powered spells every day, and many witches and wizards couldn’t cast them at all.

Harry considered the mess they had made in the dirt. The top was crowded with letters across the spectrum—mostly light, neutral, mostly dark, really dark, unforgivable, perfectly light. They all crowded together and many had required debate to determine where on the scale to put them. On the bottom were spells a person could cast without feeling any emotion. All they took was focus and practice.

“The distinction between light and dark is so confusing I don’t know where to draw a line,” Harry said.

“That’s why there are only three Unforgivables, even though people frown on blood magic.”

Harry nodded. “But I can draw a line here.” Harry drew a line separating the powerful spells on the top from the practical spells on the bottom. “This distinction is clear.”

Neville frowned as he considered the scratchings in the dirt. “But…”

Harry pointed to the top, all the spells from the killing curse to the patronus. “Wild magic. Unpredictable and powerful and driven by emotion. We can’t choose the form of our patronus or decide how the killing curse will manifest. Severus said he’s seen it stop a person’s heart or rip a person’s chest out. It’s unpredictable, although it always kills.” Harry touched his scar. “Almost always kills.”

He pointed to the bottom. “Calm magic that pulls from the pool of magic in the earth. No emotion necessary, and every person who casts it gets the same result. A wizard can put more or less magic in to change the amount of light in a lumos, but a lumos is a lumos. There’s no unpredictability.”

“But…” Neville opened his mouth, closed it, opened it and then his frown deepened.

“I’ve got to get my arithmancy chart done before Severus gets cranky,” Harry said as he left the greenhouse. Neville needed time to think.

Harry was surprised to find Severus standing in the corridor. He draped an arm over Harry’s shoulders and escorted him back toward the library. “You might have made an adequate Slytherin,” Severus said. Harry was fairly sure he’d never received a better compliment.

- - - - - - - - -

“No fair teaming up,” Dinae said as she stood in the dueling room, huge yellow and blue hexes covering her.

“I thought Slytherins considered alliances were smart strategy,” Harry said as he peaked around the set of stairs he was using for cover. He wouldn’t put it past her to act like the game was over and then hex both him and Neville until their teeth were stained green.

“Not when I’m not part of the alliance!” Dinae practically shouted.

“You and Neville teamed up on me yesterday!” Harry shouted back.

“And he refused to team up with me today!”

“Because Harry had already asked!” Neville added. He was flat on his stomach on one of the platforms, taking the high ground to get a better angle on her.

“Oh.” Dinae crossed her arms. “Will you team up with me tomorrow?”

“Yep,” Neville said as he stood.

Dinae brought her wand up and hexed him with such a strong spell that Neville’s chest and face turned violent green. “Then I yield for today,” she said before Harry could get her with a blue color-changing hex.

“Brat,” Neville said, echoing Severus’s favorite term of endearment.

“Don’t assume an injured enemy is out of the game until they yield,” Harry said with a shrug.

“Never count me out,” Dinae said darkly, “even after I yield.” Then she gave a prim little curtsy and pranced out of the room, her face still yellow and blue.

“Harry! Severus! Neville!” she yelled a second later. Harry and Neville exchanged one look before they raced for the great hall.

Severus was ahead of them, his wand drawn. Only then did Harry remember to draw his own wand and Neville followed suit. They found Dinae standing at the bottom of a spiral staircase that had appeared in the great hall. Ornate scrolls and stylized dragons decorated the railing as it rose up impossibly high and disappeared into the ceiling. There must be hundreds of steps up into the dark hole that had appeared.

“Stand back,” Severus ordered as he approached cautiously.

“But the Fae gave it to us. We should explore.” Dinae had still not pulled her wand.

“Or it is a challenge and they want to know if you are too foolish to invest any further in your care and magical training, addle-minded little scamp. So allow me to go first and have your wretched wand at the ready.” Severus cautiously climbed a few steps, and then magic took over. The stair spun, sending Severus up into the hole and to the new chamber above.

“Severus!” Harry threw himself forward, catching a stair and clinging to the railing as he caught himself on the railing. He barely held onto his wand as the magical stair threw him up and up. By the time the spinning had stopped, Harry was clutching his wand and trying to avoid throwing up. The stair dumped him into an enormous cavern. All four sides were open to the storm outside, but the corners of the room were giant stone arches that held up the ceiling where stalactites glittered. Harry had seen a picture of a pavilion, and that’s what this looked like, only it was large enough to fit entire houses inside. And the ground was a thick layer of sand, like the playroom.

A few seconds later Neville appeared, and Dinae came a minute or so after that.

“Foolish children. I had not yet cleared this space,” Severus complained, but his words had no real fire behind them. Harry suspected that he appreciated that all of them would support him if he went into battle. Yeah, he complained that none of them were allowed to fight until they were seventy, but he’d had to stand alone too much. From the stories he’d shared, Harry didn’t think either the False Lord or the ridiculous warriors for the Light had supported him.

Something shimmered, and a ghostly figure appeared on the far side of the chamber. It wasn’t a Fae but a man. He had red hair pulled back into a ponytail and broad shoulders, and he was chanting over a steaming caldron. Harry didn’t know the ritual, but Severus must have because he stepped forward. “What favor would you ask of us?”

“None for myself,” the man quickly said. “I ask for one of your creatures.”

“Explain,” Severus snapped, sounding as angry as Harry had ever heard him. The red-haired man kept his gaze on the floor as he spoke.

“I have been trusted with a dragon, a creature of great beauty, but she rejects the company of her kind, and as she grows large enough to fight, she is a danger to herself and others. I ask that you find her a place where she can be safe.” The man swept his hand and a dragon appeared behind him, clearly trapped in spells. The dragon was beautiful chocolate brown with black ridges along its back and on its wings, and brilliant emerald green scales surrounded its eyes, but it thrashed in its bindings and Harry could feel the fire trapped in its body. It wanted to burn the world.

Sound came slower. The rustling of the dragons wings, the low growls and hisses, and slowly Harry realized that he could hear words. Curses and threats and demands for freedom before she destroyed the world. The dragon was definitely a she.

“I will reduce the human to ash and sit on his remains,” she snarled.

Harry moved forward, but he only got one step before Severus caught his arm and held him. “He is asking for a favor. He wants us to find you a place where you can be happy,” Harry told the dragon. He could feel the shift when he spoke parselmouth to the illustrated snakes in his books, and he had that same feeling now—like the words slipped from him instead of him pronouncing them.

“Who are you?” she asked at the same time the human asked, “You can speak draconish?” in a shocked voice.

Harry ignored the human. “I’m Harry.”

“All humans are hairy. You have entirely too much hair,” she said.

Harry ignored that misunderstanding. “What is your name?”

“I am Slashstrike, but the human I liked called me Norbert. These humans call me Norberta.”

“My friends call me Harry, but my whole name is Harry James Potter. Potter is the name of my family.”

“What is James?”

“Some people just have two names, and my parents gave me that middle name because it’s my father’s first name.”

The dragon had stopped fighting her bindings, and she cocked her head to consider Harry. “Then I am Norbert Hagrid Slashstrike.”

“May I call you Norbert?” Harry asked.

She raised her head the small amount allowed her by the binding spell. “You may. I will call you Harry but that does not mean I will not eat you later. I can eat someone, even if I use a friend name.”

“Agreed,” Harry said. “The human who brought you here says you are unhappy.”

“I want to go back to Hagrid. I don’t like dragons. They don’t scratch my nose or compliment me, and I don’t like them. They make me want to eat them and their young.” Harry thought this dragon must be Dinae’s spirt animal because they did have a similar sort of mercenary streak.

Harry focused on the man to force human language into his tongue. “Can she return to Hagrid?”

“No, My Lord,” the human said as he bowed deeper. Having someone bow to him made Harry deeply uncomfortable.

“Why not?”

The human hesitated. “Um, she wouldn’t be safe and I’m pretty sure she would kill a lot of people. Too many people,” he added after a second.

Harry felt a pull toward the dragon. He looked at Severus before pulling away from his tight grip. Severus’s lips were pressed into a thin line, a sure sign that he was furious, but something pulled Harry toward Norbert. Severus released his hold, but when Harry stepped forward, Severus moved with him, standing just at his back.

“The Fae have made a place for you with me, but I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

She tilted her head the other way. “Will I have to live with other dragons?”

“No.”

“Will I be able to hunt?”

Harry considered the storm raging outside the shield charm. “I don’t know if you want to. It storms here a lot and it’s so cold that the air is like ice.”

“I carry my own fire. I don’t care about cold.”

“Then you could hunt. I’ve seen herds in the distance, but you would have to be careful to not get caught by the Ice Giants.”

She jerked her head upward. “Could I hunt Ice Giants?”

“They would hunt you back,” Harry warned.

“Acceptable.” Norbert seemed to consider that done, but Harry had other conditions. Maybe he would have jumped at a chance to own a dragon when he was young, but now he was more cautious.

“You can’t hurt my family. Even if you’re angry and you want to burn them to ash and sit on their remains, you can’t hurt them at all.”

“Are they annoying?”

“Um, yes,” Harry said. “My sister is going to try to get you to kill people she doesn’t like. She might even draw you a map and ask you to burn her family to the ground. She’s violent that way.”

“Then she is reasonable,” Norbert said. “Where is this reasonable human?”

Harry turned around and held out his hand. “Dinae, come here.”

Dinae looked at Severus before she moved cautiously forward to take it. Harry pulled her closer, feeling Fae magic shimmer around them. “This is Dinae Medusa Carrow,” Harry introduced them. Norbert tried to reach forward, but the magical bindings pinned her in place. Harry flicked his wand in her direction, slicing the magic so she could shuffle forward. Norbert thrust her nose forward and snorted Dinae’s scent.

“She’s beautiful,” Dinae said reverently. She crossed the veil to scratch Norbert’s nose, and behind them, Severus gasped.

“Very reasonable,” Norbert concluded. Harry urged Dinae to step back, but she fought him. However, Severus grabbed her by the back of her shirt and yanked her away.

“Neville,” Harry said. Neville stepped forward, his back stiff with fear. But he didn’t back down to the challenge. “This is Neville Longbottom.”

“He smells of fear.” She didn’t come as close.

“You terrify him.”

“How unusual to find so many reasonable humans in one place.”

“And this is my Severus,” Harry said. He stepped to one side to let her see Severus, and he edged forward, his wand out, and his hand on Harry’s shoulder.

“Is Severus your nest mother?”

“Um…” Harry had no idea how to explain their relationship in dragon terms. “My nest mother died and the nest mother who took over was really bad, so Severus decided to steal me out of her nest.”

Norbert tilted her head to the side. “Good. Dragonlings should be stolen if the nest mother is stupid.”

Harry changed his mind. She was definitely Severus’s spirit animal. “Can you promise you won’t hurt them?”

“There are too few reasonable humans. I will not harm any who live in your nest. Can I see where I would live?”

Harry looked around, not sure how to help her cross over to their side of the shimmer. Not sure he was doing the right thing, he reached through the curtain of magic and pulled. She took a step forward, and her head was suddenly in the room with them. She looked up at the high ceiling and the deep sands. “You said it would be cold,” she said.

“It is out there,” Harry pointed out into the storm.

“Where do your reasonable nestmates live?”

Harry pointed at the railing that marked the top of the spiral stair. “We live down there. You would have the sands to yourself, although we might visit if you allow it.”

“The choice is mine? I could choose whether to allow anyone to visit? I could be undisturbed when I was not in the mood for nose scratches and compliments?”

“Of course,” Harry assured her. No one would argue with a dragon who wanted privacy. Well, Dinae might, but Severus could ward the bottom of the stairs. Norbert stepped forward, more of her body passing through the shimmering veil until she was fully inside Prince Keep’s new dragonry.

“This is acceptable,” she said. “I am tired from stupid humans caging me. Leave me alone.”

“Right away,” Harry said. He turned to promise the man that they would take care of Norbert, but the shimmering veil was gone. And Prince Keep had inherited a dragon.

“She wants to be left along for a while,” Harry said.

“But I want to pet her,” Dinae protested.

“Obstreperous little dolcop, do not annoy me right now when your muddleheaded brother has insisted on risking his fool neck by touching a dragon. My heart is going to fail me by the time I teach you fools how to avoid danger instead of running straight into it like idiot Gryffindors. Get yourself downstairs now, before I decide to use your nose as potion ingredient, little rascal.” Severus herded her toward the stairs.

“What is he saying?” Norbert asked. Harry translated and a thin plume of smoke rose from her nostrils. “Very reasonable for a human.” Neville had already retreated, and Severus got Dinea onto a step so the magic stair case whisked her downstairs. Now he stood beside the stairs, clutching his wand and clearly waiting for Harry.

“She likes you,” Harry said.

“Yes, the goal of my life is to be liked by a Norwegian Ridgeback, a species second only to Hungarian Horntails in their insatiable need to kill and maim. Get downstairs, brat.” Severus grabbed Harry’s shirt and hauled him onto the stairs. Maybe that hadn’t been Severus’s life goal, but it didn’t change the fact that Norbert approved of him. And she should. Severus was pretty great. After all, Aunt Petunia hadn’t even let Harry keep a garden snake he’d found under the rose bush and Severus was letting them keep a whole dragon. That was kinda awesome.