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Harry slipped out of the corridors of the Winter Court’s Forbidden Forest palace and into the caves they were connected to. He did not look over his shoulder; he knew he wasn’t being followed. He smiled, but it quickly fell away. He was pleased with himself for outwitting his guardians and sneaking out by himself…but at the same time he didn’t like doing it. Still, this was something he had to do alone.
He hadn’t understood at first. The Fey had treated him like an invalid for the first month he was with the Winter Court; he’d worn warm, comfortable pajamas every day, been very carefully and nourishingly fed, slept a lot, and gotten regular visits from the Fey equivalent of a doctor. Xander had slept on a cot in the room for the entire month as well, only leaving if someone else came to take his place. Harry had spent a good part of that month grieving for Hedwig, and just feeling sort of lost. He’d been a freak in a cupboard under the stairs for his aunt and uncle, then he’d been alternately the Wizarding world’s Great White Hope or its whipping boy – what was he supposed to be for the Fey?
Once his careful caretakers had approved his leaving his room, Harry had found out: the Queen of the Winter Court had taken him on as her ward. He was to be cared for and educated and trained to fulfill his responsibilities as head of the House of Potter…and that was it. Nobody wanted anything from him. Nobody expected him to do anything special. All he had to do was grow up, and that with an entire household full of lords, ladies, and servants around to guide and guard and mentor him.
He hadn’t believed it at first, of course. Nobody in his entire life had ever been interested in…in raising him. He’d always been either a nuisance or a tool, or both; actually being cared for just because he was a child was entirely outside of his experience. Harry had been nervous at first, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never had. Xander had assured him that it never would. And Xander did not, and would never, lie to him.
Harry didn’t know how he knew that, but he had from the first moment they’d met.
The cave mouth he’d been heading for loomed ahead of him. Harry pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders and stepped through the barrier, reflexively looking around, keeping one hand on the dagger he had tucked into his belt. He’d been well trained in being cautious, and those were not lessons he was going to forget. Seeing that nobody was there, he extended his awareness out a little distance around himself, verifying that there wasn’t anyone there he couldn’t see either. And then he walked purposefully away from the caves, away from the palace, and into the heart of the snow-shrouded Forest. Not that he’d seen the Forest without snow in years, he hadn’t. The Winter Court, like any royal court, did not spend all of its time in one place. This past year they’d spent the summer in the Black Forest, which was the queen’s favorite palace as well as a center of society for both the Fey and some of the Wizards as well.
The first time Harry had encountered Viktor Krum at a party, he’d been startled into speechlessness and the older boy had been quick to realize what the problem was. “Not all of the families joined in the Great War,” Viktor had explained quickly, referring to the war between the wizards and the Fey that the wizards for the most part refused to talk about. “Some of us were not so stupid. Magic? It is the Fey blood in our veins. And an honorable man does not turn on his blood.” He’d smiled then, clapping Harry on the shoulder. “You are one of us, and you need not fear – no wizard or witch you will meet while you are with the Winter Court would say one word of you to anyone. Not that they even could, since to do so would be to admit that they had been with the Winter Court as well. Now come! I will make introductions, I have friends here whose company I think you would enjoy, and they yours as well. And later the music will start and the girls will make us all dance.”
“I actually quite like dancing, now,” Harry had admitted. He’d had a dancing master, of all things, and once he’d learned the steps he’d discovered that he enjoyed dancing quite a bit.
That had made Viktor laugh. “You say that now,” he’d warned. “But the girls, they can dance all night. And then they laugh at us when we tire. You will see.”
Harry had seen, but he’d enjoyed every minute of it even if his feet had hurt almost too much to walk on the next day. He’d gradually grown used to the social ‘scene’ that was a necessary part of being a member of the Winter Court, he’d made friends with other young men of his own age and station, and he’d gotten to know some young women as well. He’d been relieved beyond measure that none of them did more than flirt prettily with him, very obviously not meaning anything by it… or at least he had been relieved, until Xander had explained to him that part of his being a ward of the Winter Court meant that the queen would be picking his eventual wife out for him.
Harry had been…well, horrified by that, but he’d calmed down once it was explained to him better – which apparently was the reason they’d let Xander explain it instead of one of his teachers or some other member of the Court. “It’s actually a really good thing,” Xander had told him. “You are seriously rich, Harry, and you’re seriously powerful too, and you have the favor of the Winter Court. How many people do you think would be willing to do just about anything to marry their daughter off to that package, hmm? Just imagine how nasty that could get – not just for you, but for the girls, too. Doing it this way, the queen and her people check out the available girls, see which ones you like, which ones like you, which ones aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. They narrow it down to the ones that are worthy of you,” that made Harry splutter, “yes, worthy of you,” Xander had emphasized. “You’re really something, get used to it. And then they start inviting that group to attend the same parties we’re going to be attending, to come for visits to the palace we’re currently staying in, stuff like that. And they keep winnowing down the list until they’ve got one or two really good ones…and that’s when the negotiations start. The dowry and bride-price stuff, to you and I that’s right out of a fairy tale…but hey, here we are wearing the cloaks and carrying the swords and everything, and here it’s really important.” He’d patted Harry’s shoulder. “The thing is, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You just have fun, meet people, make friends. The queen and her people will see to weeding out all of the gold-diggers and bridezillas and evil wenches for you, and when the time comes you’ll be offered a wife you already know and like and who you’ll know really likes you too.”
Harry smiled to himself. Xander had been right, of course – he usually was. He was starting to see more of certain people, including one of Viktor’s younger sisters, and he’d found that he wasn’t minding at all. The people he was seeing were people he honestly liked, people he had fun with. And best of all, they were people who understood the responsibilities he had because they had similar responsibilities of their own.
The one he was undertaking today, though…this one he hadn’t shared with anyone. He couldn’t, until it was done. Because today he was heading out to confront the other Queen of the Forest, to renew a treaty he’d learned his family had upheld for hundreds of years, and in doing so to take up the responsibilities that went with his title.
He was heading to meet the spiders that lived in the heart of the Forbidden Forest.
One of the most surprising things Harry had learned from his Fey tutors was his family history – something no one in the Wizarding world had ever so much as mentioned to him. Not all of it was good, mostly the more recent history, but much of it was very good indeed. The Potter family was extremely old, and extremely wealthy, and had for most of its history been extremely powerful. They had sat on the Wizarding Council, helped form the Ministry of Magic, and brokered treaties with other races of magical beings throughout the country. They’d been part of setting up the charter that had brought Gringotts into being. They’d made peace with the giants, after a fashion, although what it really amounted to in the end was ‘you stop killing us and we’ll stop killing you’. And they’d had a treaty with the spiders for hundreds of years, because the head of the Potter line also carried the mantle of Lord of the Forest.
It wasn’t about ownership, that title. It was about responsibility. A time had come when someone had needed to take responsibility for the Forest, and the Potters had once again stepped forward. It had been a dangerous responsibility to take on, because magical treaties were blood treaties and the penalties for breaking them were severe and far-reaching. Not that House Potter ever had broken any of their treaties, they hadn’t. But it was a dangerous thing to do, all the same.
While Harry had been thinking, his instincts had led him unerringly into the secret heart of the forest. He could feel the blood magic pulsing through his veins, connecting him to the Forest, even though the sensation was weak. It had been many generations since a Potter had renewed the treaty, the line having fallen considerably in recent generations, and the Forest had become Forbidden in that time – with no one to oversee it, the place had gone rather wild and become really dangerous. Add that to the fact that the Fey did have a palace here, even though until a few years previous they’d rarely visited it for any length of time, and that the Fey and the currently ruling Wizards had never given up their mutual grudges over the long-ago war, and you had a very wizard-unfriendly Forest to contend with.
Here at the heart of the Forest, the webs the giant spiders made became thicker and older the farther in you got. At the very center, they formed a sort of great hall where the Queen of the Spiders held her own court. Harry stepped into this space but advanced no further, waiting, and after a moment eyes began to appear along the upper levels of the web-walls, followed by black bodies supported by long, hairy legs. A spider descended in front of him on a piece of web, and Harry bowed. “I come to see your queen on a matter of mutual importance,” he said formally. “Is she available to speak with me?”
“Who might you be?” the spider inquired in a harsh, hissing voice.
“Someone whose line is known to her.”
The spider hung there, staring at him with its multiple oily black eyes, and then it scrabbled back up the strand and drew said strand up after it. A moment passed, and then a much larger spider – she was easily as large as a family car – ponderously lowered herself into the center of the web hall. She peered at him and hissed. “I remember you, Friend of Hagrid. You were told not to return.”
He bowed to her respectfully. “My lady, I have come to right a wrong.”
“You come for revenge?”
“No, I come to remind you of the treaty that has been between my family and your nest for longer than either of us have been alive,” he explained. “I am the Lord of the House of Potter.”
The spiders rustled, webs shaking as they hissed at each other. “That line is dead!” one of them hissed. “You lie!”
“The one who told you that did not speak the truth,” he contradicted, still politely. “My mother was killed when I was but an eggling; I knew nothing of my heritage. But I have learned of it, and I come to you to renew our treaty as should have been done years ago – and would have been done, had my family not been betrayed and murdered, leaving no one to tell me of the responsibilities of our House.” He drew the small dagger from his belt, ignoring the hissing the appearance of the weapon caused, and holding out his hand made a cut across his palm so that the blood dripped down onto the carpet of dead leaves and dry silk beneath his feet. “Your proof.”
The hissing became a small hurricane of sound, but a twitch of one of their queen’s legs made it die to near-silence again. She slowly made her way down out of the web, and then in a blur of motion she rushed him; Harry had been prepared for that, he didn’t so much as flinch. In fact, he sheathed his dagger and smiled at her. Red and black eyes took every inch of him in, reflecting him back at himself a dozen times, as one hairy leg reached out and its claw tip caught the last drip of blood as it fell from his hand. She drew the claw in, tasted it, and then took a step back. “You are as you say you are. What do you want from us?”
“I wish only to renew the treaty of my ancestors,” he told her politely. “They granted you this Forest to hunt in unmolested, and in return with your protection the centaurs and unicorns could live here unmolested by those who would hunt them and destroy all the world in their ignorance and greed. They promised you fresh meat to hunt, and in return your ancestors promised to spare those innocents who stumbled upon you unawares. And they promised to protect this Forest, your family home, and keep you and all your descendants safe from those two-legs who would seek to harm you, so long as you upheld your end of the treaty and acknowledged the head of the House of Potter as Lord of the Forest.”
This time she didn’t try to quiet the hissing. “What if I say there is no Lord?” she asked? “What if I say our people do not need a lord, especially not one with no power to back his name?”
“I would say I am that Lord.” Harry stood tall and proud, not reacting to either the insult or the challenge. “As you have already acknowledged when you tried my blood, Queen of the Spiders of the Forbidden Forest. I would say that you need the protection of the treaty more than ever before, as those who live within sight of the Forest have used you to their own ends and killed your kind whenever they encountered you. I would say that, in the days of old, no creeping abomination would have dared crawl into this forest to feed upon unicorns as though their deaths did not make the world shake. And I would say that I am the last of the Potter line, the heir to all bought by the blood of my ancestors, and therefore the power of their blood is my power and mine alone!”
All of the hissing stopped; you could have heard a leaf drop if there had been any left on the trees free of webbing. Harry met the many eyes of the Queen of the Spiders, looking at her rather than at himself as reflected by her, and after a moment she bobbed her head…and folding her front legs, bowed. “I acknowledge you, head of the House of Potter, Lord of the Forest and all it contains.”
Harry felt something break inside of him, something that had been holding back the hereditary power of his line, his blood, and a wave of golden light washed out and swept through the Forest. At the boundary, the barriers put up by both wizards and Fey fell with a crack that shook the ground and a new barrier rose in their place with a sparkle of gold. Harry held out the hand he had cut again, and this time the foot that was extended to him laid its claw across his bloodied palm. “I and my people accept the treaty,” she hissed at him. “Our home, our meat, ours to protect.”
“Your sanctuary, your meat, ours to protect,” Harry agreed, and a golden mist rose from the ground all over the Forest. One of the spiders, the one who had said the Potter line was dead, screamed when it touched him. He tried to climb back into the web, but the other spiders hissed and blocked his way with upraised claws and what sounded like cursing, and soon he lay dead upon the ground with his legs curled up. Harry withdrew his hand as the Queen withdrew her claw. He bowed. “You have lost a traitor. Shall I return to you a friend? I can make it possible for Hagrid to enter the Forest again, if you wish it.”
She nodded back. “I would wish it. He was a good friend to us, and to all else in the Forest. He may come and go as he pleases, help as he pleases, and if he is to die I will wrap him in my finest silk and eat him myself.”
“He would like that, I think,” Harry agreed, knowing that Hagrid probably would. “I will see it done this very day. I will take my leave of you now; but if ever you need me, I will come.”
“So you say it, so shall it be,” she replied, and then she turned away from him and began climbing back up to the center of the web. Harry didn’t wait to watch her, he turned and walked out of the clearing and began to make his way back to the palace of the Winter Court. As he walked he wondered if anyone in the palace had noticed what had happened, and then he laughed at himself for wondering – of course they’d noticed.
When he got back, he went straight to the common area he thought of as the ‘family room’ in his apartments. Xander was there, slouched in a chair in front of the fire, and Arctus, Harry’s arms master and bodyguard, was reclining in a chair opposite him, examining the blade of one of his daggers while apparently waiting on Xander to make a move on the chess board that sat between them. “Oh, there you are,” Xander said as Harry came in. “We were wondering where you’d gone off to.”
“But we were both feeling far too lazy to go looking for you; it is ‘one of those days’,” Arctus agreed, sounding as though he didn’t really care too much about it. Harry felt a flash of disappointment…but then he noticed that Xander’s boots were drying on the hearth, and that the bottom of Arctus’ heavy outdoor cloak was wet where it hung on its hook nearby. Not to mention, both men’s eyes were twinkling as they waited to see if he would figure it out; they had followed him, and then probably run all the way back in order to reach the palace before he did. Harry grinned, and Xander came up out of his chair with a whoop and swept him into a bear hug. “Knew you could do it,” he said. “I’d been expecting you to sneak out all this week.”
“As had I,” Arctus admitted, stepping in for a hug of his own once Xander had let Harry go. He pounded his young charge on the back. “It was well done, very well done. Her Majesty is much pleased, and she was standing outside of the caves laughing at us as we ran through the snow to return home before you.”
“I need to send a messenger,” Harry said once they’d both let go of him. “To Hagrid. He’s to be allowed the freedom of the Forest.” He shook his head. “Did you see what happened? One of the spiders was a traitor.”
“The centaurs suspected as much,” Arctus said, going back to his chair. “Well, go send your messenger and then return, you can watch me win this game and then we have much planning to do.”
“You’re only winning because we weren’t actually playing,” Xander told him, taking his chair back as well. “But I’ll indulge you just this once.”
Harry just smiled and went to find a messenger to send out. Although he had just taken the first step toward his independence today, the first step toward truly taking up the mantle of the House of Potter…it was still very good know that his adopted family was not about to stop looking out for him.