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You can get help from people who need help. |
He had no doubt he could befriend her... |
Though as the warlocks cleared out, and Harry tried to get a starstruck clerk to ring up his purchases, it occurred to him there was another option. In the Muggle world, he was "that awful Potter boy", the one who dressed in funny clothes and spent his time with the weird kids. But in the wizarding world, he was the Bo... |
"Harry! Over here!" |
He picked up his bundle of books and looked to Hermione. Her father was lowering her own, much larger, bundle into a rucksack that seemed much too small to fit them all. (Harry made a mental note to pick up one of those bags.) |
The thing was, though, he liked Hermione. Sure, she spent too much time reading, and judging by how she’d lingered over the planners she’d probably be a nightmare around exam time, but she was, in her own way, rather fun. |
Either way, he decided as he walked over to her family, I’ll keep her. |
"Thanks for shopping with me today," Hermione said shyly. "It was fun." |
"Me too," Harry said. "I had a great time." |
Now to really catch her attention. Hermione seemed a curious sort of girl, and Harry had learned years ago, as he taught another girl how to use the sorts of knives she wasn’t even allowed to touch, that nothing bound new friends together quite like a shared secret. |
Harry stepped to the side a bit, so he would be blocked from most of the store by one of the shelves, and swung his rucksack off his back. |
"Harry?" she asked, brow furrowing. |
He reached into his pack and withdrew his silvery Invisibility Cloak. |
"What is that?" |
"A necessity for any Boy Who Lived," he said with a cheeky grin, and swung it over his shoulders. |
All three Grangers gasped. |
"I’ll show you on the train tomorrow," Harry said from thin air. He was gone before she could agree—he didn’t need to hear her response to know what it would be. |
Once he’d left Flourish and Blotts, Harry headed back to the Cauldron, ordered lunch from the bar, and went up to his room. |
The owl, who was perched on one of the posts at the corners of his bed, barked a greeting and swooped down to land on his shoulder. |
Harry’s trunk was still missing, so he set the bundle of books on the bed and started sorting them out. He turned at a knock on the open door behind him; Tom was standing in it with a tray of steak pie. |
"Your lunch, Mr., er, Evans." |
"Thanks, Tom. Just put it on the desk, yeah?" |
Tom did and then left, closing the door behind him. Hedwig flew over to the desk, landing beside the plate; Harry picked up his new book on magical items and sat down to lunch. He skimmed the book as he read, occasionally picking some steak out of his pie and feeding it to Hedwig. |
After lunch, Harry snuck back into Diagon Alley and started exploring the most interesting looking shops he could find. He was lucky he’d looked at the book over lunch, for when he saw a mokeskin pouch in a secondhand shop for only two Galleons, he knew to snatch it up. He also got a Bottomless Backpack like Hermione’s... |
Then, to prepare for his last mission of the day, he went back to Madam Malkin’s. He bought several more sets of casual robes, but he also bought a hat, one that would cover his scar without being too tall or outlandish. |
He stopped back at his room to drop off the clothes and backpacks, moved his new knife into the mokeskin pouch hanging from his neck, and put his new hat on. He set up Hedwig’s new perch and filled her water dish; she butted her head against his cheek and swooped to her new home for a drink. Then he threw the Cloak bac... |
The Ministry of Magnates had mentioned this place, noting that the only way it could possibly be so bad was if the Aurors (a kind of elite police force, he’d read) meant to patrol it were being paid to look the other way. The glimpses he’d caught of it earlier today had suggested it was too dark and narrow to use his C... |
He ducked into the doorway of an apartment building near the entrance, took off the Cloak, and stuffed it into his mokeskin pouch. Then he drew one of his throwing knives and palmed it in his left hand. |
And finally, he built a façade with his body language, just as Ellie had taught him. |
My presence is not worth any special notice. I am not afraid to be here. I am not an easy victim. I can take care of myself. |
He squared his shoulders and stepped into Knockturn Alley. And as he navigated the twisted street, nobody bothered him. |
If Diagon Alley had been eye-popping, Knockturn Alley was stomach-churning. There were shrunken heads on display in a cart and dog skeletons scratching at the doors of kennels in a shop window. An old witch with disgusting teeth seemed to be selling whole human fingernails in front of a building offering unspecified "e... |
Even so, there was an awful lot of interesting stuff in Knockturn Alley. An apothecary carried hundreds of ingredients he hadn’t seen in the one on Diagon Alley, and some of them seemed to be merely rare, not revolting. A shop called Borgin and Burkes had a variety of apparently one-of-a-kind objects, including some ra... |
AWLTHROW’S ARMORY |
Purveyor of fine goblin-made weapons |
Visits by appointment only |
Most of what he saw he simply noted for later; he didn’t know what a lot of it was yet, and wasn’t about to buy anything from such a shady-looking area until he was sure it wouldn’t kill him. The sole exception was a book he found in a secondhand shop. |
It was titled Ninety-Nine Charms the Ministry Doesn’t Want You To Know. |
When Harry returned to his room that night, his trunk was at the foot of his bed; on top of it was a pair of heavy silver keys on a ring. Unlike a Muggle keyring, this one was a loop of solid silver, but when he touched his Gringotts key to the metal, it passed through the ring as though it were smoke. Harry added the ... |
When he opened the lid, Harry found that his clothes had been hung from a rod on the right end of the trunk and were dangling towards the left end. Below them, most of his other belongings were neatly arranged on shelves. He poked his head into the trunk, and found that the space inside it extended well past the front ... |
"I love magic," he murmured. He grabbed the rest of his knives—he’d packed his whole collection—off the shelves and closed the trunk, then reopened it with the second key. |
The bookcase within had two shelves, each divided into two sections. Each divider had a wooden handle on it. The whole bookcase was expertly crafted from pine; characters Harry didn’t recognize were carved on the faces, and much to his fascination, they silently acted out scenes. |
The books he’d brought with him from Privet Drive were arranged within; they barely filled one section of one shelf. Harry started adding the books he’d purchased at Flourish and Blotts. When he ran out of room, he pulled one of the handles to the right, and the entire bookcase slid to the side, revealing more empty bo... |
Mixed in among his original purchases, Harry spotted one he hadn’t bought: a brown leather-bound volume titled The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Recognizing the title, he picked up the book and re-shelved it upside down. |
Something clicked behind the bookcase, and the entire case slid down. Behind it, he found a painting of an elderly black-haired couple. |
The first thing that he noticed was that, like the bookshelf carvings and Professor Dumbledore’s tie, the painting moved. The people depicted in it seemed almost alive. |
The second thing he noticed was that the man in the portrait had the same messy black hair he did, and the woman had his nose. |
The third thing he noticed was that the subjects of the painting could speak. |
"Hello, young man! I’m a portrait of Charlus Potter, and this is my wife, Dorea. We’ll be guarding your secret compartment." |
Harry looked at him with wide eyes, his skin white as a sheet. |
"G-grandfather?" |
After he had put his knives and illegal charms book in the secret compartment, Harry and the portrait of his grandparents talked late into the night. |
The first thing he'd asked them about was how they'd ended up in his trunk. It turned out that the Potters had been quite the businesspeople, and after their deaths, Samson Strong had commissioned a portrait of his shrewdest investors so he could keep asking their advice. |
"When one of his employees said she'd just sold a trunk to Harry Potter and wanted to use our portrait to guard something inside it, though, he couldn't say no," Dorea said. |
Why not? Harry wanted to ask. What was this man thinking when he gave a boy he didn't know something he found so valuable? |
After a bit of thought, Harry came up with a couple ideas: perhaps he'd done it out of loyalty to his old investors, or perhaps he wanted to ingratiate himself to the Boy Who Lived. |
In either case, Harry decided to send a thank-you note later. |
The rest of the evening had been spent in deep discussion of the Potters. The Cloak, Harry had learned, had been in the family for generations. Even Charlus didn't know how many Potter fathers had given it to their eldest son on the day he received his first wand. Apparently Invisibility Cloaks were forbidden at Hogwar... |
Mostly, though, they had talked about his parents. Charlus and Dorea had doted on their only son, and had been quite taken with the woman he fell in love with. And though they had never gotten to meet Harry in person—James and Lily had already been in hiding when he was born—they'd spent hours cooing over the photos Ja... |
They'd ignored Harry's eyelids drooping, but when he gave a jaw-cracking yawn, they'd told him it was time for him to go to bed. "We can talk again any time you'd like," Dorea told him. |
"I'm sorry," he'd told them. "It must be boring guarding a secret compartment all the time..." |
"Don't worry," Charlus had said. "Samson wasn't the only person who owned a portrait of us; we can travel to our other frames. Just give us a shout if we're not in this frame—we'll be able to hear you no matter where we are." |
And so Harry had pressed down on the top of the bookcase sitting below their portrait, just as they'd instructed him to. It slid back into place with another click; Beedle the Bard, the book he had shelved upside-down to reveal the secret compartment, was back in its proper orientation. He closed the trunk and went to ... |
Now it was the next morning, and Harry was unexpectedly in a hurry. |
He'd awoken at seven, figuring that would give him plenty of time: a half-hour to shower and dress, a half-hour for breakfast, an hour to get to King's Cross, and he'd be there two whole hours early. That had all gone out the window when Hedwig fluttered in through it, carrying a letter with a Gringotts seal on the bac... |
It was his first bank statement, and besides his trust vault and the Potter family vaults, it listed a vault for "post sorting, curse-breaking, and storage". The inventory of that vault included eye-popping numbers of letters, items of clothing, and magical objects, plus more books than he owned himself, even including... |
But most importantly, it said there were photographs. Harry had realized with a jolt that some of them might be of his parents. |
So instead of pulling his now-lightened trunk out the front entrance to Muggle London, he was carrying it out the back entrance and all the way down the Alley to Gringotts. |
Much to his irritation, the goblins acted like, well, every other goblin he'd met so far. They tried to charge him a fee for the "inspection visit", then when he pointed out that his statement had said there was no fee to withdraw items from the vault, they'd acted all surprised that he intended to actually put anythin... |
When he finally got down to the postal vault, he gasped. It was an enormous space, like a warehouse hewn from stone instead of built from steel. On the left side, dozens of filing cabinets contained every letter he'd ever received, apparently organized by date and sender in some sort of grid. In front of him, racks of ... |
Harry turned to the goblin in charge of his mail sorting. "This is an impressive operation." |
"Thank you," Inkeye said. |
"If I provided you with a form letter, could you send it to everyone who's mailed something to this vault?" |
"For a price," Inkeye agreed. |
The price he proposed, though, was one hundred Galleons. Harry balked, then spent the next fifteen minutes haggling, his irritation growing with Inkeye's toothy grin. In the end, he talked the goblin down to nineteen Galleons, sixteen Sickles and twenty-eight Knuts. |
All this had taken so much time that he had to shelve the books in his trunk without even glancing at the titles; he quickly sorted through the clothes, putting a few things that looked to be about the right size in his trunk's closet compartment and leaving the rest, and stuffed the packets of photos into his mokeskin... |
The strange thing was, he got the sense that the more he argued and fought with the goblins, the more they liked him. |
Even with all that, he still reached the Tube station at nine-thirty. Unfortunately, there was some kind of horrible problem on the Victoria Line, and he'd had to backtrack to Leicester Square to catch the Picadilly Line instead, then pull his trunk through what seemed like miles of underground tunnels to reach the tra... |
Then he'd stopped and stared at the gorgeous scarlet engine, a thing out of a dream, for two whole minutes until the train blew its whistle. He ran through clouds of steam, pressed through crowds of parents and children, and felt the train start to lurch out of the station mere seconds after he set foot upon it. |
Harry started pulling his trunk down the corridor, a bit unsteadily in the moving train, looking for Hermione. He found her in a compartment with three boys looming over her. |
The smallest boy, the one in the middle, was mid-sentence when Harry arrived; all he heard was "—move if you know what's best—" |
"Is there a problem here?" Harry said, stepping into the compartment. |
The three boys turned to look at Harry. The two boys on either end looked thickset and mean, but probably none too bright; the boy in the middle was smaller, with blond hair and a pale, pointed face. "Just making sure this witch knows her place," the pale boy drawled. "She seems to think this compartment is hers. You'r... |
"Yes," Harry said, glancing to Hermione. She looked small and frightened; it was a look he'd seen many times before, most memorably on a girl climbing a tree across the street years before. |
"I thought so. This is Crabbe and this is Goyle," the pale boy said, carelessly indicating the boys next to him. "And my name's Malfoy, Draco Malfoy." |
Hermione stifled a giggle. Draco Malfoy looked at her. |
"Think my name's funny, do you? You shouldn't even be on this train to hear it, not with your filthy background." |
Malfoy turned back to Harry. "You'll soon find out some wizards don't have the heritage to back up their powers, Potter. You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there." |
And Malfoy offered his hand. |
Harry recognized the surname from The Ministry of Magnates—Lucius Malfoy was one of the title characters, a wealthy, powerful man whose sterling reputation had fully recovered once it was "confirmed" that he'd been forced into Voldemort's thrall. Malfoy, Harry realized, would probably be a popular boy, at least in some... |
But he was also a bully. He was Dudley Dursley with a wand and a diet. And Harry knew how to handle bullies. |
"Malfoy...your father is Lucius Malfoy, I take it?" |
"That's right," Malfoy preened. |
Harry smiled and took his hand, and as he shook it, he said, "Then I guess you'll want to thank me, right?" |
"Tha-thank you?" Draco stuttered out. Harry risked a glance at Hermione; she looked half-crushed, half-confused. |
"Well, yeah," Harry said, still smiling sweetly. "I mean, maybe your father didn't like talking about those long, dark years when he was bewitched by Voldemort—" |
Draco's hand jerked in Harry's, but Harry didn't let go. "You said the Dark Lord's name!" |
"Well, of course I did," Harry said. Dumbledore had mentioned that most wizards didn't, and Hagrid had started every time Harry used it, but Harry affected puzzlement. "I killed him, after all. But think about those terrible years," Harry said, his voice going soft in sympathy, "committing one atrocity after another...... |
Malfoy didn't go red, but a pink tinge appeared in his cheeks. He tore his hand from Harry's. "I'd be careful if I were you, Potter. Unless you're a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't respect their betters either." |
Harry narrowed his eyes. |
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