Chapter Text
Harry stopped in front of the wooden panel that had caused a tickling feeling in his magic since the very first time he had visited this cottage. He had ignored it because that was what he always did with these kinds of perceptions. He had never heard from anyone else that they could interact with their magic in this way and his second year had taught him what a bad idea it was to reveal a special magical ability.
The magic prodding at him from this wall had grown more insistent with every time he passed it, and he was finally not able to ignore it any longer. It was a relief that only Neville was with him right now, and his friend should be outside in the garden, deciding if anything there could be saved. They had gone to the auror academy together after the war, but Neville had diligently worked on his mastery in herbology at the side and had finished it just half a year ago, so there was no one Harry would trust more with the overgrown mess this property had turned out to be.
Harry cocked his head as he studied the wall. There was nothing special in the decorative carvings of the part that was tickling his senses. He wanted to go away again, but his feet were frozen in place. Harry scowled and decided to tell Ginny that this was not the right property for them to move into. They should purchase a new one instead of opening up one of the old Black properties. Grimmauld Place should have taught them that old Black properties were a bad idea all around, but Harry seemed all too often unable to refuse his fiancé a wish.
"Are you alright, Harry?"
He flinched and turned his head to Neville. "Yeah, sure. Found anything interesting outside?"
Neville huffed. "Interesting is one word. There is no way even with magic that the garden will be in any kind of good shape in eight weeks when you return from your honeymoon. On the other hand, you'll be able to make a fortune with some of the things growing out there."
"I'm not exactly hurting for money," Harry muttered.
"You were staring very intently at this wall," Neville said as he stepped to his side and turned to face the wall. "Any magic prodding at you?"
Harry frowned and fisted his hands. "No idea what you are talking about."
Neville furrowed his brows. "If there are any secret rooms here, you should try to find them before moving in and bringing a child here. Between his mother and you magically adopting Teddy, he will have enough connection to the Black magic even as his age to be drawn in by such enchantments."
"I thought I was going crazy," Harry muttered.
He blew out a breath, content with the explanation his friend had offered. He was sure the magic he was feeling had nothing to do with his connection to the Black family magic, but he would not remind Neville how flimsy that connection was. Aside from that was Neville one of two people he would trust with everything, so he was prepared to take the risk of his friend discovering that something else was going on with Harry.
Neville shook his head. "You are the head of the family. The family magic lingering here has to be so eager to connect with you. I was surprised that you weren't overwhelmed with it when you came here for the first time."
Harry shrugged. "So, you think there is a secret room here because the family magic is ... doing what exactly?"
"Drawing you in, eager to reveal all its secrets to you it has guarded here for the two hundred years of abandonment." Neville crossed his arms over his chest, still eyeing the wall with a deep frown. "What exactly are you getting from the magic?"
Harry pursed his lips and allowed himself to stop ignoring the prodding. The magic swept over him, and part of the wall started to shimmer. He raised his hand without thought, surprised that now he was able to take a step forward. Harry brushed his hands over the edges of the carvings. He jerked his hand back with a hiss when a sharp edge cut into his finger, cursing his own stupidity.
Neville snorted. "We should have really expected something like that from a Black enchantment."
Before Harry could say anything, the wall started to change. His blood, despite it being only a couple of drops, started to spread over the wall in a thin line and it took barely any time for Harry to recognize the shape of a door drawn by the line. When the line connected its ends, a loud crack sounded through the room at the same time as his blood sank into the wood and left behind a real door.
"I don't like this," Harry said.
"It just never gets boring with you around," Neville murmured. "If Ron and Ginny had known what they would miss, they wouldn't have bailed out on us."
Harry shrugged, not so sure about that. Ron had complained both times he had accompanied him here in the beginning, and Harry had come to the conclusion that it was easier to accomplish the work without Ron here who had not done much anyway. Ginny, on the other hand, was attending the last fitting of her wedding dress, so there was nothing that would have brought her here today.
"Let's see what's in there!" Neville decided.
Harry grabbed his hand to stop him from reaching out to the door. "How can you still be so excited about secrets passages after Hogwarts and Grimmauld Place? We have no idea what's in there!"
"Is your magic warning you?"
Harry opened his mouth only to close it again without saying anything. The magic he felt was not warning him, it was enthusiastically greeting him, but that did not mean he would trust it. Auror training had taught him what neither his years in Hogwarts nor the war had accomplished, if only because his instructors had driven him harder than anyone else.
Neville sighed. "Look, family magic is ... protective when you are part of the family. You are the regent of the Black family, the family magic accepted your blood to open this passage. If it didn't want you in there, nothing would have happened."
"It rejected me when I tried to claim the lordship," Harry said, shaking his head.
"There could be any number for reasons for that. And you'll try again after your birthday, right?"
Harry shrugged. "Molly is encouraging me to do that, but I don't know if I'll go through with it."
It had been such a big disappointment to be rejected not only by the Black magic but also by the Potter magic. He was the last living Potter, and still, the magical legacy of his family had been denied to him. One reason could be that his second magical maturation was still to come, but for all everyone had been able to tell him, such a rejection had never happened for that reason when the petitioner had been the last of his or her line.
"I think you should try it," Neville whispered. "I know it hurt when you were rejected, but ... there is no reason you should be rejected after your birthday at least for the Potter legacy."
Harry swallowed and rubbed his fingers over his forehead. The scar had faded, and only Ron and Hermione knew about the Horcrux he had once carried because they had decided not to tell anyone that Voldemort had created them, but he suspected this stain on his magic and his body was the reason for the rejection. It would not go away just because he would turn twenty-five and go through his second magical maturation.
"Let's take a look, okay?"
This time when Neville reached for the door, Harry let it happen. The door opened silently and revealed a library behind it. Harry stepped into the room behind Neville, awed by the sheer mass of books. The preservation charm on the rest of the property had failed some time ago, which was the reason why Harry and several of his friends had worked hard the last three weeks to repair the damage, but in this room, there was no indication that the cottage had been abandoned for a little more than two centuries.
The room was huge, rows of shelves trailing down to both sides of the door for at least the whole lengths of the cottage and looking down the slightly larger passage right in front of the door, Harry would guess the whole room was at least as big as the library in Hogwarts. Right in the middle between the end Harry and Neville were standing at and the other end of the room was a wide, spiral staircase leading up and down. From the outside nothing had hinted at such a large room in the cottage, so all of it had to be a magical expansion of space.
"Hermione would love this," Harry said quietly.
Neville laughed. "Maybe that could finally be a reason to bring her back."
Harry shook his head. "I haven't gotten an answer to my letters from her for over a year. I think she has abandoned us for good." He could not fault her, but it still hurt. Without her, he would have never survived his years in Hogwarts. She would always be his best friend, and he hoped she had found a place where she could be happy because England had not been able to provide such a place for her after the war.
"Why would the Blacks hide a library?" Harry asked.
"If we were talking about the last two generations, I would say because something very dark is hidden here," Neville said. "But their reputation changed with the war against Grindelwald, at least as far as my grandma has told me. The Blacks were once akin to royalty."
Harry walked down the aisle to the staircase, letting his fingers trail over the wood of the shelves. The books and scrolls were in a good condition at first glance, but Harry stopped abruptly when he saw a familiar title.
"This book was only published after the war!" he exclaimed.
Neville shrugged. "Self-updating. Must have cost a fortune to make that enchantment robust enough to last for so long. And the business they made the deal with must still be in operation. I guess this library was truly forgotten by everyone still alive when Voldemort rose, otherwise I can't imagine it would have survived the war. He would have gutted it for the knowledge and the gold he would have been able to make with it."
"Was there a reason two hundred years ago to hide such a treasure?" Harry asked. There had been so many things after Hogwarts he had suddenly become aware of that he knew nothing about, including history, and he was still struggling to catch up with many of them.
Neville blew out a breath. "No idea. I don't remember anything at the top of my head."
Harry nodded and continued his way to the staircase. He felt drawn in that direction, and as reluctant as he was to follow that urge since he had opened himself up to it when touching the wall earlier, he seemed unable to resist it. The shelves opened at the staircase into a small room and revealing another passage through the shelves to the left and the right. There stood two desks in that room build by the shelves and beside him a lectern with a big, leatherbound tome on it.
Neville was the one to step to it. "Looks like this is the register." He shook his head with a grin. "Hermione would really love this. You should send her pictures to seduce her back! This is basically her dream come true."
"Her dream come true would be re-discovering the lost magical part of the Library of Alexandria," Harry said.
Once, during the time it had only been the two of them during their year hunting the Horcruxes, Hermione had told him about going to search for it. Harry had not even known there had been a magical part of that library, he had not even known more than the name about the one that had been known to the muggles, but Hermione had told him all about the things she had learned about it when she had visited France with her parents several years ago.
"This is near enough, don't you think?" Neville looked up at him and cocked his head. "Is the magic still prodding you?"
Harry shrugged, peering down the stairs.
"Then let's go down there!"
Harry frowned. "You trust a lot in this family magic."
"There was a time when you trusted your instincts more than this," Neville whispered. "I wish you would get that trust back. It saved your life over and over again when you were facing Voldemort. Does anything here feel in any way hostile to you?"
Harry shook his head. "It feels very eager."
"If we do end up in some trap, I'll have your back," Neville said. "But I really think you should follow whatever this is. It wasn't the first time you stopped in front of the door earlier. I've seen you hesitate at that exact same spot several times in the last weeks. The only way to make the magic stop in pushing you is to follow it."
Harry laughed. "Ever the Gryffindor."
Neville grinned. "Exactly!" He gestured to the staircase. "Lead the way."
Harry nodded and started to follow the stairs down. He had expected another room filled with books, but instead, the staircase led to a narrow hallway that ended at an iron cast door. Harry half expected it to be closed as he pulled on the handle, but it opened smoothly and silently. The room behind was small, maybe ten feet by ten feet, lid up by two torches. On the opposite wall stood another lectern with a book on it.
Harry stepped into the room, and he could feel Neville right behind him, but his gaze was drawn to the small book. The cover was dark brown leather with a symbol burned into it that seemed vaguely familiar. It was this book he had been drawn to all along, and as that realisation hit, he reached out his hand for it.
"Wait!" Neville started, but Harry's fingers already brushed over the dark lines burned into the leather.
The next thing Harry knew was that he was lying on the floor and staring into Neville's worried face. His whole body felt sore, he felt nauseous, and pain was burning behind his eyes. "Not such a good idea after all?"
Neville snorted. "At least touching the book was not. You were thrown through the whole room and I didn't manage to catch you before you hit the wall. How are you feeling?"
"You remember when I fell from the broom second year? It comes pretty close." Harry frowned, deciding it was not worth the trouble trying to sit up. "I'm just a lot dizzier this time."
"You were out for two minutes," Neville informed him. "I ran a diagnostic on you and ... then on the book. The Harry-Potter-factor struck again."
"No!"
It had become a pro-verb during their time at the auror academy. Whichever group Harry was part of during an exercise, it was always them who found the kind of trouble even their trainers had not anticipated. As most of the trainees had gone to Hogwarts with him and seen what had happened there to him over the years, it had been decided that Harry was a magnet for trouble and adventure. Thankfully, everyone had grown up, and everyone had been aware that they needed to be prepared for the worst in the field, so being part of his team had been a very popular position.
"You didn't recognize the symbol?" Neville asked.
Harry shook his head slowly. "I've seen it before, but I don't know where."
"When I first saw it, I thought this book was an exact replica of the Book of Souls."
"Ginny and I visited it a year ago."
It had been shortly before they had finally started to plan their wedding. Harry had not been bothered by the fact that had needed to wait for the wedding until his twenty-fifth birthday because of some regulations of the Black family, but Ginny had been anything but happy about it. It had been mostly a gesture to placate her when he had agreed to visit the Book of Souls. He had heard a lot about the myth surrounding it, but he was still not convinced that soulmates were something that actually existed, despite the book revealing him and Ginny to be such.
"I remember." Neville nodded. "It's not uncommon for a couple who plans to marry to visit it."
"Why should the Blacks have a replica of it? And why should the family magic lead me here?" Harry rubbed a hand over his face. "And most importantly, why the hell did it throw me to the room?"
"Because this is not a replica, it's steeped in soul magic. And soul magic is known to react badly to those petitioning it who are under the influence of any substances." Neville closed his eyes and sighed, while Harry wondered how one could even detect soul magic. "Though I have to say I wasn't expecting that reaction, I just found it suspicious to find it here."
"Influence of what?" Harry asked.
"Any kind of substances," Neville said. "Didn't you need to go through a purge before visiting the one in the Ministry?"
Harry shook his head.
"That's..." Neville sat back with a frown. "You weren't seen by a healer? Was Ginny?"
"We just turned up to our appointment, were shown into the room and left alone. We touched it together as instructed and it opened to a random site that declared us as soulmates," Harry said.
"That's not how grandma told me how it should..." Neville turned his head. "I think we have a bigger problem than I thought."
"Did we find a second Book of Souls?" Harry asked.
"I don't know."
"Are we calling our colleagues? Or the Unspeakables?" Harry frowned about the uneasiness he felt about his own suggestion. The thought to bring it to the ministry felt wrong, nearly painful.
"Are you taking any potions right now?"
Harry shook his head.
"That's what I thought. Why exactly was the soul magic reacting so violently to you then?"
"Voldemort," Harry muttered.
Neville frowned. "What?"
"There is something I never told you. Ron, Hermione and I decided to tell no one ever. We made a vow over it. But ... I'm tainted by him, by his magic, and I can imagine that what he did would be deeply offensive to soul magic."
Neville shook his head. "A person's magic can't be tainted by something someone else does. You can only taint your own magic with your own actions. Whatever Voldemort did wouldn't linger in you in this way."
"It was enough for my family magic to reject my right to my magical inheritance."
"That's what you think?" Neville asked surprised. "Why the hell would you think that?"
Harry shrugged. "It's what the goblin conducting the ritual told me."
Neville froze, staring at Harry as if he had grown a second head. "Yeah, I begin to see that we have a bloody big problem that has nothing to do with this book. Do you remember at all that we talked about the word 'goblin' being a slur?"
"What?" Frowning, Harry shook his head and pushed himself carefully up into a sitting position. "No, we never had such a discussion."
Neville stared at him with the kind of darkness and desperation contorting his face that Harry had not seen since they had faced Voldemort's troops for the last time on the ground of Hogwarts. It took Harry nearly a whole minute before he was catching on to two important things Neville had not said in the last minutes.
"We had conversations I don't remember," Harry whispered. "And you think someone is giving me some potions."
"Something that's not being caught by the ministry despite you being checked out regularly," Neville said, his voice hoarse. "I mean, I knew things were not perfect after the war, that there was still a lot of work to do for us, but this..."
Harry shook his head. "Why should someone do this? And who?"
"You have a lot of influence, Harry, you just don't notice it most of the time. The things you say and do have the potential to set precedents," Neville said quietly. "Putting your foot down about giving every single person accused of anything either during the year of Voldemort's reign or afterwards a fair trial to clear their names without a doubt or to properly convict them made a huge difference. I know you did this in remembrance of Sirius and not because you wanted to steer the public opinion in any direction, but it nevertheless shaped the public opinion greatly."
"I really had enough of conspiracies surrounding me at the latest after third year," Harry muttered angrily. "It just never stops, does it?"
"I really don't think we should go to our ministry about this," Neville said. "I would have suggested Gringotts, but ... your bad relationship with the dverger could be a hindrance there."
Harry furrowed his brows. He was sure he had never heard the word 'dverger' before, but suddenly there was all this knowledge about it in his head that far exceeded everything he had ever learned about goblins, in Hogwarts and afterwards. The last doubts about Neville's theories started to fade because he knew that was a textbook reaction to being confronted with information that had been distorted because of their connection to something that had been hidden by a memory charm.
"You would trust the go-dverger with something like that?"
Neville pursed his lips. "Normally, yes. It's ... complicated, and probably nothing I should explain now. I already explained it once to you, but for some reason, I never got suspicious of your continued ignorance on the subject until stepping into this room."
Harry stared at his friends. "That's not good."
"That's the understatement of the century", Neville muttered. "Because it means I'm not free of influence either, and that as well wasn't caught or wilfully overlooked by our healers."
"So, what does that leave us with?"
"The ICW. Or more pricelessly, the Magical World Court. Since the muggles founded their own version, the MWC was moved to The Hague as well because as Grindelwald proved, sometimes a crime concerns both sides."
"And you think two British aurors being under some kind of undue influence will be of any interest to them?" Harry asked. He had learned about the ICW and all its institutions at the academy, but it had always stuck with him that they had not bothered to come to their aid when Voldemort had risen to power.
Neville shook his head. "With whom you are? Maybe. But there is still the matter of this book. There shouldn't be a second Book of Souls. There are, of course, several sacred objects tethering soul magic to our plane of existence, but each is unique. And I have to question ... I triple checked my spell work earlier, I didn't make a mistake. If this is the Book of Souls, why does the ministry proclaim to guard it? And what is it really they a guarding there that they claim is the Book of Souls?"
Harry glanced at the lectern. "I hate my bloody bad luck. -- Does that mean we are making a trip to The Hague now?"
Neville nodded. "Now is probably exactly the right idea. Without telling anyone because..."
Harry sighed. "Yeah. There is no telling who we could trust."
Having to repeat that kind of phrase again hurt. It had been bad enough during his years in Hogwarts and during the war, but back then he had spent his whole life knowing there was no one he could count on but himself and most of the time Hermione in the end. He had thought he was beyond it, that he had found a place in which he could trust the people around him.
Neville smiled sadly. "At least we know we can trust each other, right?"
Harry nodded and stood up, offering Neville his hand to help him up as well. "You are right. Let's get on with this. There is no point in wasting time."
A dark foreboding rose in him as he stared at the book that had called him here. Maybe he should have kept ignoring his magic's prodding.