Chapter Text
Grimmauld Place was having a hard time reaching out to Malfoy Manor.
There was a space between all magical houses. Grimmauld Place had spoken with one of its daughters once who had compared it to the space between human thought and human thought. Never having been human, Grimmauld Place didn’t know how accurate this was, but it did know that once it could have reached across the space and connected with another house like building a wall that they both shared.
Now, it was having a hard time doing that.
The space between them remained empty no matter how it reached. There was no sense of Malfoy Manor hearing or responding to it. Grimmauld Place had even tried reaching towards the mind of Narcissa Malfoy, who had been Narcissa Black before she took her husband’s name, and had no luck.
(Why would she take her husband’s name? Grimmauld Place did not understand. The Black name was older and infinitely superior).
There was also a small problem in that every time it spent too long trying to contact the Manor, its child interrupted it.
“What do you think of this potion?”
Grimmauld Place slowly formed the face that was like changing part of itself into a forest from a mountain, and opened the eyes it always chose to make green. Its child was holding up a book so that Grimmauld Place could look at it.
“That potion is…deadly,” Grimmauld pointed out. Its voice was thick, but it spoke aloud, because Harry liked it.
“Yes, I know.” Harry looked as though he didn’t know what Grimmauld’s objection was. “That’s why I want to brew it. To have for enemies. You won’t always be around to eat them.”
“I will…always be around.”
“But you don’t know that. You might have to leave sometimes to strengthen the wards, the way you did my first term there.”
“You are not to brew that potion, Harry.” Speaking more quickly took a toll on the magic of Grimmauld, whose main ways of communication were so different from human words, but Harry appreciated it. And it could be quicker and more lively than usual when its child was thinking about brewing a potion that could flood half the lab with venomous fumes.
“Why not?”
“The fumes are so poisonous that you would die.”
“But I could have Great-Grandpa Arcturus cast the kinds of spells that would keep me safe! Or cast them myself.”
“Why are you so intent on…brewing the potion, child?” To Grimmauld Place’s annoyance, it was already beginning to lose its strength. It tried to stay focused on Harry, to remind itself of what was at stake here, but its concentration continued to slip back into the wall. It had spent too much strength trying to reach Malfoy Manor.
“Because I have to be able to master all the weapons that will allow me to survive. That means knowing how to brew potions, not just use them.”
“Go talk…to your great-grandfather.”
Harry gave a huge sigh and trotted out of the front hall. Grimmauld Place pulled back its consciousness and raised its magic as it turned back to the aether that separated it from other magical houses.
By the time it reached Malfoy Manor, it thought, it would be irritated enough to make its fellow being listen.
*
“You could buy the potion,” Arcturus pointed out, and watched Harry shake his head so fast that his hair flew.
“It’s illegal to buy. I looked it up. I want to brew it myself, and I want to know and understand all the steps! The house said the fumes were poisonous, but you could cast the spells for me so that I don’t get overwhelmed and pass out. Or die,” Harry added, after what seemed to be clear consideration of the matter.
Arcturus sighed. Harry had brought him back to life and out of his seclusion, and Grimmauld Place could help with the pain of the curse lingering in his chest. He would forever be grateful for that.
It just meant that sometimes he had to deal with things like Grimmauld Place’s adopted child wanting to brew highly dangerous potions on his own.
“I could brew it,” he said, to buy time.
“Thank you, Great-Grandpa Arcturus!” Harry beamed at him. “But I would rather do it on my own.”
“What if I got you the potion for your birthday?” Arcturus tried. Even in his “retirement,” news of the Boy-Who-Lived had reached him, and he knew Harry’s birthday was only a few weeks away.
“I was going to ask for something else for my gift.”
Harry was mumbling, his head hanging and his eyes fixed on his feet. Arcturus stared at him, then gave up any notion of resisting. Harry was just—impossible to resist. That was the way things were. Arcturus counted himself lucky that he wasn’t one of those people Harry was likely to destroy in the process of existing.
“What did you want, Harry?” Arcturus kept his voice gentle. It seemed possible that Harry could ask for anything, from something simple and easy—because of his past—to something destructive—because he had learned from the house.
I must take over teaching him some of the lessons, and stop leaving the house to give all of them to him.
“I wanted a snake as a pet.”
Arcturus blinked and leaned back on the couch, glancing around to distract himself. The first-floor sitting room looked much better than it had been when he’d first moved in. Rikki had decorated it in blues and whites, like the ones that Melania used to favor, and cleaned the windows so that sunlight poured in. Arcturus usually found it calming and reassuring.
Less so now, when he didn’t know what kind of snake Harry would ask for.
He cleared his throat and glanced back at Harry. “If you want a venomous one or a dangerous one, you wouldn’t be allowed to take to Hogwarts with you.”
“But I don’t think I’d be allowed to take it to Hogwarts with me anyway, right?” Harry had lowered the potions book and was staring at Arcturus with shining eyes. “Because the rules say that you can only have a toad, a cat, or an owl?”
“True enough,” Arcturus had to admit.
“So I want one small enough to hide, but venomous enough to defend itself. I was thinking maybe a krait?”
Arcturus gave a great, long sigh. “Harry…”
“Just a small one!”
“It would still be dangerous,” Arcturus explained as gently as he could. “A krait could be temperamental and bite you as easily as anyone else. And snakes don’t make good familiars. They don’t understand English in the way that owls and even some cats do. They’re too—different from us. Cats and owls have both been the pets of magical people for a long time. Snakes haven’t.”
“But I was planning to cast a spell on it that would make it my familiar! Why wouldn’t it listen then?”
Arcturus hesitated. Then he said, “Where did you even read about spells that could make an animal a familiar?”
“The library, of course.” Harry was giving Arcturus a look as though he were mad.
Arcturus shook his head and sighed again. “Then you can have a snake. But not a krait. I don’t even believe that they would sell kraits in Diagon Alley. They’re not that useful for potions, and no one would take them as pets.”
“Except me!”
Arcturus rolled his eyes as Harry ran away to begin planning his expedition to Diagon Alley. Arcturus wished he could have escorted Harry as himself, but that would give away too much about where Harry was living. As it was, he and Harry would both have to wear disguises, and they would have to make sure that none of the purebloods who might have known Arcturus well when they were younger were on the Alley, so that they couldn’t recognize him by the feel of his magic.
But still, Arcturus felt interest and curiosity stir in him.
It would be good to get out of the house again.
*
Harry looked around with eyes that he knew were wide as Arcturus escorted him down one of the turnings of Diagon Alley and towards an area that Harry hadn’t been in before. He hadn’t had much reason to wander before. He’d always gone to Gringotts, or to shops where he could buy basic things. Or he’d got what he needed from the house, like Regulus’s wand and most of his schoolbooks.
But this was a dark, quiet side street that was burning with invisible fires of magic. Harry turned his head as they passed one shop and saw a man with a long horn projecting from his head and hooves instead of feet bargaining with a hag. The thing they were arguing over, floating between them, seemed to be a crystal sphere filled with green liquid.
“Great-Grandpa?”
“No, Harry. Not right now.” Arcturus kept his voice down. He was wearing an illusion that disguised his face to make him look maybe ten years younger, and even made his cane look as if it were carved of ebony. “Not right now.”
“But it looks so interesting!”
“We can always come back.”
Harry sighed, and again when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in a nearby shop window. His disguise had blond hair and freckles on his cheeks and brown eyes. Harry didn’t mind that people weren’t swarming around him, but the glamour was itchy. He would have been happier to wear something else instead.
“When?”
“Soon.” Arcturus had his attention focused ahead of them, and was nodding a little as though he remembered this place. “Now, we won’t be able to spend much time here, in case someone comes in who recognizes the feel of my magic. I need you to choose quickly, and then we can pay and leave, all right?”
“Fine,” Harry said, and tried not to kick at the ground as he saw a shop where a young woman stood with a flight of bats circling her. He would just have to coax Great-Grandpa Arcturus into bringing him back before he returned to Hogwarts.
The shop they stepped into was filled with rustling and hooting and croaking and mewing, but somehow, the sounds weren’t overwhelming. It was hard to see how big it was, both because the ceiling was high and the shop went a long way back, and because it was cool and dark. Everything seemed to be made of wood, except the glass and metal walls of the cages.
A shopkeeper stepped forwards and bowed to them. Harry was a little disappointed that she just looked like an ordinary grey-haired witch, but then she showed him piercingly blue eyes and fangs in her mouth, and he gasped in delight.
The woman gave him a sharp glance. “Can I help you?” she asked, her breath whistling a little between her teeth.
“You already have. I was afraid that you were going to turn out to be boring, but you aren’t! Thank you!”
The shopkeeper stared at him blankly, and then turned to Great-Grandpa Arcturus with a faint frown. “I can recognize your magic even in the depths of the glamour you wear, Mr. Black. But I don’t know this rude child, or why you would have come to visit me after so long away from our nest.”
“This rude child is Harry Potter, Sabetha, and we’re in disguise because it wouldn’t have been the best idea for me to be seen escorting him.”
“Really.” Sabetha gave Harry another glance. Harry didn’t know if she was a vampire or something else, but he didn’t really want her to explain it. It would have destroyed the mystery. “Who could object to someone with a family connection to Harry Potter’s godfather showing him around the magical world?”
“The Albus man.”
“What?”
“The Albus man wants me to live with Muggles,” Harry said, shaking his head. Fron the round-eyed way Sabetha was staring at him, he thought she probably agreed with him that that would be horrible. “He’s obsessed with figuring out where I live and taking me away. So we came to you in disguise, because it was safer. I wish I knew why he was so obsessed, so I could make him stop being that way.”
Sabetha continued to stare at him for a second, then faced Great-Grandpa Arcturus. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” Arcturus sounded dry. “He might be rude, but he generally tells the truth. And he wants a snake to create a familiar bond with. You can see why we came to you.”
“Of course.” Sabetha looked at Harry and spent a moment tapping her long nails, which were painted the same vivid blue as her eyes, against her chin. Then she nodded and glided towards one side of the shop, where there were a lot of cages that were made of glass. “We have some right here.”
“Does she sell a lot of snakes?” Harry asked Great-Grandpa Arcturus in a soft voice as they followed her. “Is that why we came to her?”
“We’ll discuss it when we’re at home.”
“I was trying to be polite!”
Great-Grandpa Arcturus just looked at him. Harry sighed. He supposed he needed more lessons in “courtesy,” which was what the house called it. He seemed to do the wrong thing even when he was trying really hard to be polite.
And then he saw the snakes in their cages, and he forgot about his upset.
There were so many of them! Cobras and boas and pythons and small grass snakes and others Harry didn’t know the names of! They were sunning themselves under charms, or hunting mice through little habitats, or bathing in pools, or lying submerged in dirt so that only their eyes showed, or scratching against stones to get their dried skins off. And all of them were talking at once.
“This kind of magic makes me itchier than normal.”
“If I have a human of my own, then I’m going to order them to keep the magic this warm all the time.”
“I want to hunt a rat, not a mouse!”
Harry turned to Sabetha with a huge smile. “I know why we came to you,” he announced, ignoring the way that Great-Grandpa Arcturus was trying to hush him. “Your snakes talk! That’s so cool!”
Sabetha froze and blinked at him. Harry bit his lip. Had he been rude again? Was he not supposed to say that in case other people came into the shop? Were they supposed to discover the secret of the talking snakes themselves?
“My snakes do not speak,” Sabetha said slowly.
“But I can hear them!” Harry pointed towards the one who had said that they were going to order their human to keep the magic warm. “I can hear that one! They said that they were going to order their human to keep the magic warm all the time if they got a human. How can they order someone else around if they can’t talk?”
Great-Grandpa Arcturus and Sabetha exchanged a loaded look. Harry scowled a little. That usually meant trouble. Grandpa Phineas often exchanged ones with the house, and it always meant that Harry had done something he wasn’t supposed to.
“Harry,” Great-Grandpa Arcturus said slowly, “can you tell the snake who said that something for me?”
“Okay, what?” Harry didn’t see why Great-Grandpa Arcturus couldn’t just tell the snake himself if it was so important to him, but he had accepted that adults sometimes did weird things.
(If nothing else, sir had proven that last year).
“Ask it if it will rear up against the side of the cage so that we can see the colors on its belly?”
“Her, in this case,” Sabetha said. Her eyes were still fastened on Harry, and she was tense and still. Harry sighed. He really had done something wrong without meaning to, hadn’t he? “That snake is female.”
“Ask her, please.”
Harry nodded and turned to face the snake in question. This one was banded with shades of green and gold that blended into each other and were probably really useful if she wanted to hunt under leaves in sunlight or something. “Hey, can you hear me? My grandfather wanted to know if you would rear up and show us the colors of your belly.”
The snake whipped towards him. Harry gasped a little as her eyes fixed on him. He didn’t think snakes were supposed to have eyes like that. They were as blue as Sabetha’s.
“You can talk to me!”
“Yes,” Harry said, a little exasperated. Human adults and whatever-Sabetha-was adults were going to be strange, but he thought it was a bit much for a snake to be strange, too. “Of course I can. You were talking about the magic being warm.”
“But few humans can understand me.”
“All right,” Harry said, thinking as he did so that that was weird. What was the point of keeping magical talking snakes in a shop and selling them if most people couldn’t understand them anyway? Were there that many people who wanted to cast the spell that would enchant a snake to be their familiar? Strange. “But can you rear up and show us your belly?”
“Very well. It’s rare that a human makes a request of me in the first place.”
The snake stretched up along the glass. Harry blinked. Her belly was a bright and shining gold, so bright that it looked as if she’d crawled through Galleons.
“Thanks,” Harry said, and then looked up.
Both Great-Grandpa Arcturus and Sabetha were staring at him with wide, bright eyes, and looking a little freaked out. Harry sighed. “Is it that strange to be able to hear talking snakes?” he asked. “And for the snakes to talk back? Why do you sell talking snakes if most people can’t hear them or speak back to them?”
“You have the gift of Parseltongue, Harry,” Arcturus said softly. His hand shook a little as he reached out to place it on Harry’s shoulder. “Have you heard of that?”
“I—no?” Harry thought he recalled a fleeting mention of Parseltongue sometime last year when some of the older Slytherins were talking about Salazar, but he didn’t remember the context. “So not everybody can talk to magical snakes?”
“Most people do not speak their language, no.” Sabetha had a faint smile on her face now. “If people establish a familiar bond with them, they can feel emotions and understand the snake’s simple desires, or issue simple orders. But what you did is like being able to speak to someone directly, instead of having to rely on their body language.”
“Oh.”
“And Parseltongue is a gift that both Salazar Slytherin and the Dark Lord Voldemort had,” Sabetha carried on blithely, ignoring the sharp look that Great-Grandpa Arcturus gave her. “So you might be judged as a Dark wizard if you reveal that you have it.”
“Oh. But I already am?”
“Harry.”
“Sorry,” Harry said, abashed. Right. That had been one of the rules that Great-Grandpa Arcturus had tried to make him accept. We don’t talk about being Dark wizards in front of outsiders.
Even if Harry thought it was obvious, because he cast illegal spells and went about with a trunk that ate people, he supposed that most of the random ones he met, like Sabetha, wouldn’t know that about him and didn’t need to.
“Should I assume that you’ll be buying this snake?” Sabetha smiled and looked back and forth between Harry and the green and golden snake.
“Can I have her, Great-Grandpa Arcturus?”
Arcturus sighed and spent a long moment rubbing his hand over his face. Harry watched him as intently as he could. Apparently the green color of his eyes got more intense when he did that, and harder to resist or something.
“I assume she’s highly venomous?” Arcturus asked at last, speaking to Sabetha and not Harry.
“She is. But the main concern is the large quantities of flesh she requires.”
“Oh, I was already hunting at the school last year because they didn’t serve enough meat for me. I can get her meat!”
Sabetha studied Harry for a second. He did his best to look like a competent hunter, which, honestly, he was. Sometimes the creatures in the Forbidden Forest still got away from him, but he’d improved a lot over the year. And he’d also got better about not letting other people see him hunting.
“There’s another problem,” Sabetha said at last.
“What’s that?” Arcturus glanced at the snake in her tank again. She was still reared against the side, showing her belly, and she flicked her tongue at Harry. Harry knew she wanted to come home with him.
“She’s—very intelligent. She’ll need a lot of talking to and playing with. Mock hunts. That sort of thing. It’s not good to just leave her to her own devices.”
“Ignore her and leave her in a tank?” Harry asked, with an accusing glance at Sabetha.
“She’s been in stasis for the last few months.” Sabetha shook her head. “I unfroze her today because I had an impulse. I probably should have ignored it.”
“She’s the one for me, Great-Grandpa Arcturus! I promise I’ll take excellent care of her!”
“What species is she?” Great-Grandpa Arcturus was reaching for the pouch of Galleons with a heavy hand. But he was reaching for it! Harry ignored the temptation to dance in place. Great-Grandpa Arcturus had said it made him look undignified.
“They’re generally called Devourers.”
Great-Grandpa Arcturus closed his eyes and stood there for a long moment as if caught in the middle of a wince. Harry looked at him in concern. Great-Grandpa Arcturus finally shook his head and continued taking out the Galleons, which was good. It meant Harry could go back to the tank and the snake.
“We’re buying you and taking you out of here,” he told her.
The snake turned her head back and forth fast. Harry thought it was probably excitement, although he didn’t know for sure. “Good. I am growing bored with nothing but mice to hunt.”
“What’s your name? Or do you want me to give you a name?” Harry held his hand out so that the snake could climb onto his arm. To his pleasure, she was small enough to fit easily under his sleeve, the way he had thought a krait might be.
“I am called Sylvie at the moment.”
“Why Sylvie?”
“It was the name of the last person I ate.” Sylvie coiled around his arm and flicked her tongue at him. “When I eat someone else, then I will change my name. You will give me large amounts of meat? And allow me to hunt? It was boring in the tank.”
Harry could feel his smile widening across his face. “Of course. I have someone else who lives with me and eats people. You’ll like it.”
“It? I thought that humans usually bore the shellless young or sired them.” Sylvie’s voice indicated what she thought of humans being born without eggs. “Not just didn’t do either.”
“This isn’t a human. It’s a house.”
“How interesting! You must tell me of this house.”
Harry waved to Sabetha as Great-Grandpa Arcturus paid and then walked out of the house, talking softly with Sylvie. He didn’t need Arcturus’s advice to keep his voice down. If lots of people thought badly of Parseltongue, then Harry would need to keep it secret, the way he did living in Grimmauld Place and having a Preserved Trunk.
It didn’t matter. Harry was pretty used to keeping secrets, and Sylvie was a brilliant one.