Chapter 2: The Croft That Isn't There
Harry's cottage on Skye didn't exist on any map, Muggle or magical, and only three people had ever been inside it, and two of them were Ron and Hermione.
He'd bought it four years ago with the last of the Black money that he couldn't bear to spend on himself, a low whitewashed croft at the end of a sheep track above Loch Bracadale, with a turf roof and a peat stove and walls two feet thick. He'd put his own wards on it and his own Fidelius and he was his own Secret-Keeper. It was the place he went when the job got too much, when he'd lost a witness or found a body. He'd never brought anyone from work there. He'd never told Robards it existed.
"Article Four," said Draconia, standing in the low doorway at dawn on Wednesday with the rain pouring off the eaves behind her. "The protecting officer shall not relocate the witness without authorisation."
"There's nobody I trust to authorise it."
"So you're breaking your own rules."
"One of them." He took her bag. "Just the one."
She looked at him sidelong as she ducked under the lintel, and he could have sworn she said, very quietly, "For now."
The croft was small. That was the trouble. It had one main room with the stove and a table and two old armchairs, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom with a tin bath that you filled with your wand, and a single bedroom with a single bed, because Harry had never in his life expected to share it with anybody.
"I'll take the chair," he said.
"You'll take the bed," said Draconia, "because you are six feet of exhausted Auror and you haven't slept since Monday, and I've seen you trying to stay awake in that farmhouse, Potter. You fall asleep with your eyes open like a horse. I'll take the chair."
While he lit the stove she wandered the room, touching nothing, looking at everything. She stopped at the deep stone windowsill, where he kept the only photographs he'd brought here: his parents waving from a garden in Godric's Hollow, Sirius astride the motorbike with his hair blowing back, Remus and Tonks laughing at something out of frame. Nobody from work. Nobody from after.
"This is where you come to be sad," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Sometimes."
She looked at the photographs a moment longer. Then she turned the one of Sirius very slightly towards the window, so that the light fell across his face, and said, "My mother's cousin. He's got her eyebrows," in a voice so careful that Harry had to look away.
They argued about the bed for twenty minutes, which ended with neither of them using the bed, because at eleven o'clock in the morning Draconia found the tracking hex.
She'd been sitting at the table going through her bag with one of her silver lenses screwed into her eye, methodical, item by item, quill by quill, because, as she said, "they found us through a Fidelius, which means they didn't find the house. They found me." She'd turned out every pocket of her coat. She'd taken her boots apart. Then she picked up her Gringotts identity disc, the little bronze seal that every curse-breaker carried to get past the bank's ward-dragons, and held it up to the grey light from the window, and went very still.
"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, you clever, clever bastards."
"What is it?"
"Come and look." She handed him the lens. He leaned over her shoulder to look through it, close enough that her hair brushed his cheek, and saw it: a hairline glimmer of red running round the inside rim of the seal, finer than a spider's thread. "It's a Seeker's Thread. Very old, very illegal, keyed to the bearer's blood. Fidelius can't stop it, because it isn't looking for a place. It's looking for me." She took the lens back, and he straightened up, and became aware that he'd had his hand on the back of her chair, very close to her shoulder, and moved it. "Someone at Gringotts put it there. Or someone at the Ministry who licenses Gringotts discs. Which is Transportation."
"Can you break it?"
"Of course I can break it. I'm the best curse-breaker in Britain." She was already reaching for her needles. "But it'll take an hour, and the moment I start, it'll know. It'll scream. They'll know where we are."
Harry went to the window and looked out at the empty hillside, the grey loch, the rain coming in off the sea in long slanting curtains.
"Then do it fast," he said.
They came at twenty past twelve.
Four of them, in grey cloaks, Apparating onto the hillside below the croft in a ragged line, exactly where the Seeker's Thread had told them she'd be. Harry was waiting for them behind the drystone wall with his wand out. He'd spent the hour laying every nasty ward he knew across the sheep track. The first one hit a Tripwire Jinx and went flying backwards into the bracken. The second walked into a Bluebell Flame Barrier and dropped his wand, screaming, to beat out his cloak.
The third and fourth were better.
Harry fought them on the hillside in the rain for four minutes that felt like an hour. Stunners and Disarming Charms and a Bone-Breaker he only just turned aside, the heather catching fire in patches and hissing out in the wet. He put the third man down with a Stunner to the chest. The fourth one was quick and vicious and he knew what he was doing, and he got a Cutting Curse past Harry's Shield Charm, low on the left side, just above the hip.
It felt like being hit with a cricket bat and then set on fire. Harry staggered, and the man raised his wand to finish it, and then something silver came flying from the doorway of the croft and hit the man square in the face.
It was a teapot.
It burst on impact, and whatever she'd put in it was not tea, because the man went over backwards with a howl and lay in the heather clawing at his eyes. Harry Stunned him. Then he Stunned the other two again, to be sure. Then he sat down quite suddenly in the wet bracken with his hand pressed to his side and blood coming out between his fingers, and Draconia was there, on her knees beside him, white-faced, her hands already moving.
"Idiot," she was saying. "Absolute idiot. Lie down. Lie down. Let me see."
"Did you throw a teapot at him?"
"I always throw teapots. It's my thing. Lie down, Potter, or so help me Merlin..."
He lay down. She cut his shirt open with a flick of her wand and sucked in a breath at what she saw, and then her face went calm and absolutely focused, the way he imagined it went when she bent over a cursed snuffbox. She put both hands flat against his side, either side of the wound, and started to sing.
It wasn't French this time. It was something older, low and strange, in a language he didn't recognise, and he felt the curse in the wound fighting her, writhing like something alive. He felt her chase it. Her hands were very warm. Her hair had come loose and was dripping rain onto his chest. He lay on his back in the heather and looked up at her face above him, intent and pale and fierce against the grey sky, and the pain went from fire to ache to nothing, and the only thing left was her hands on his skin.
When she stopped singing, the wound had closed to a thin pink line. She didn't take her hands away.
"You're all right," she said. Her voice wasn't level anymore. "You're all right."
"You're touching the witness," Harry said, because he was light-headed and couldn't help it.
"You're not the witness, you absolute halfwit. I am." Her fingers spread against his side, very slightly. "I'm touching the Auror. There's nothing in your two pages about that."
They looked at each other. The rain fell between them. Four unconscious wizards lay in the heather around them, and the smell of scorched bracken drifted up off the hillside, and her palms were warm on his bare skin, and her face was a few inches from his.
She leaned down. He felt her breath on his mouth.
"Draconia," he said.
It was the first time he'd ever used her name, and it stopped her like a hand on her chest. She went very still, close enough to kiss, close enough that he could see the rain caught on her eyelashes.
"Not like this," he managed. "Not because I nearly died. Not when you're frightened. If you still want to on Friday, when you've testified and you're safe and you don't need me anymore..."
Something flashed in her grey eyes. Hurt, and then something else, something much more dangerous.
"You think I want you because I need you," she said softly. "You really are an idiot."
She sat back on her heels. She took her hands off him, slowly, one finger at a time.
"I'll be in the croft," she said, "breaking the rest of that Thread. I'll be there all night. The bedroom door," she added, getting to her feet, "doesn't have a lock. I checked."