15th July 1995, Micheldever Wood, Hampshire, 6:14 AM
It was, by every account that would later be published, the hottest day of the summer thus far — and even at this earliest hour, before the sun had cleared the tops of the oaks, the heat lay over the Hampshire woodland like a held breath. The air shimmered faintly above the bracken. Dew had burned off the ferns by half past five. And through the deep green hush of Micheldever Wood, where the dawn light fell in long gold bars between the trunks, there had grown overnight a thing that did not belong there at all: a maze.
It was woven not of hedge but of flowers — towering blooms of impossible height and unnatural colour, blue and silver and a deep bruised violet, their stems thick as a man's arm, their petals broad as dinner plates. They rose in winding walls between the trees, and the whole conjured labyrinth gave off a faint sweet scent and a fainter hum of magic, beautiful and wrong, lovely as a dream and about as safe.
Through it, Harry Potter was running for his life.
Or near enough to it that the distinction hardly mattered. Spells came at him from five directions at once — sharp red bolts of stunning light that hissed past his ear, cracked the flower-walls, scorched the loam at his heels — and he ran low and fast through the winding green, his breath sawing, his shirt clinging dark with sweat between his shoulder-blades.
'Too many,' he thought, skidding round a corner of violet petals as a Stunner took the bloom where his head had been. 'Five at once. He's not being kind today.'
He needed a half-second. He bought it the only way left to him.
"Expulso!"
The charm struck the path before his pursuers and the woodland floor erupted — a great fountain of earth and torn root and shredded petal flung up into a blinding curtain, and through it the five figures staggered, their spells going wide.
Harry stopped. He turned. He dragged one ragged breath down into his lungs, and let the chaos behind him drop away, and reached for the stillness — the blue moon, the calm moonlight, the smoothing of the water — and as his mind steadied his hand closed hard around the Re'em-horn wand.
He struck back through the dust.
"Expelliarmus!" — twice, fast, the Runic concentration burning bright behind each word, and the wand took his intent and made it vast. The first bolt found a figure half-blind in the murk and flung it bodily through a wall of flowers; the second caught another and dropped it where it stood. Two down.
The third cleared the dust with a sweep of conjured wind — and the remaining pair fired together, a brace of Stunners crossing the air at his chest.
Harry was already moving.
He sidestepped the first with an ease that four years of Ethan's drilling had set into his bones, no wasted motion, a single shift of weight; the second he could not dodge, and so he met it — "Protego" — the shield flowering silver-blue before his palm and turning the bolt aside with a crack. And while it broke against his shield he raised his free hand, and a boulder lying half-buried at the maze's edge tore loose of the earth and hurtled at his attackers.
One of them flung up a wand. "Reducto!"
The boulder burst to grey ash in mid-air.
Harry flinched at the sheer destructive ease of it — 'that would have gone through me' — but the spell had cost his enemy a beat, and a beat was a door. He came through it. A perfect parry turned the next attack aside, and then — that strange cold prickle at the edge of his sight, the danger-knowledge that came now through his gaze before his mind caught up — he twisted, countered, and sent two more figures sprawling, one of them so hard that the light in its eyes guttered and went dark, its magic cut clean off.
One left.
It came at him low and fast. Harry gave ground on minimal footwork, light as he could make himself, and as he moved he whispered — and along the length of his wand a line of Ancient Runes kindled into being, hovering, burning silver: Thunder. Lightning. Purify. Judgement. Punishment. They slid down the wood and gathered at the wand's tip in a knot of crackling white light, and Harry loosed them.
A bolt of lightning-laced wind tore from his wand with a sound like a whip-crack and a shriek of riven air, struck the last figure square, and hurled it the length of the maze and clean out the far side, scorching a long black scar through the flowers as it went.
Silence fell over the woodland. Steam rose from the blackened path.
Harry let himself breathe.
It was then that the prickle came again — too late this time, far too late — a threatening attention from somewhere off among the trees, and before Harry could so much as turn a Stunner caught him square in the ribs and folded him neatly into the bed of flowers.
The maze dispersed around him as he lay there, the towering blooms thinning to morning mist, until there was only the ordinary green of the wood and the gold dawn through the oaks and Harry Potter flat on his back in the bracken, thoroughly and completely beaten.
Footsteps came unhurried through the trees.
Ethan Esther walked back into the clearing with his wand loose in his hand, looked down at his son sprawled among the flowers, and shook his head with the faint exasperated fondness of a man who had seen this particular sight a great many times. He crouched, and pressed a cold, damp towel into Harry's hand.
"Up you get, kiddo."
Harry groaned, and got.
They went together to gather what Harry had felled — and it was here, where the flower-maze had been, that the thing he had been duelling lay revealed in the morning light. Not men. Five figures of dark packed earth and faintly glowing Runes, man-shaped, their eyes dimmed now to dull coals — Atid Stella's wizard-noid golems, the newest prototypes, kin to the great construct that had carried Robert Thornwood from the Third Task maze.
Ethan stopped over the one Harry had struck with the lightning. It was split nearly in half, its Runes cracked and dark, one arm flung a clear ten feet from the rest of it.
He pursed his lips.
"You might," he said mildly, "be a touch gentler. These are prototypes, Harry. Each one of them costs Verrona a fortnight of swearing."
Harry's face did something eloquent. 'Seriously? It was trying to take my head off—'
But the protest died, because Ethan had already moved on into a calm, exacting account of the bout just past — what Harry had done well, where he had over-committed, the half-second too long he had taken admiring his own lightning before checking his flank. It was the last that had cost him the match, and Harry knew it, and listened, and the two of them walked on through the trees toward a clearing where a great old beech spread its canopy.
There, beneath the dappled green shade, Luna Lovegood stood at the centre of her own quiet working.
Three orbs of water hung in the air about her, drawn up from the brook that ran along the clearing's edge, and she turned them slowly with small movements of her hands — condensing each one tighter and brighter and clearer, until at a flick of her fingers they loosed, one after another, as fine hard jets of water that crossed the clearing and struck three makeshift flower-targets hovering far off, dead centre, every one.
"Lovely, little owl," Ethan said warmly. "Cleaner than last week. Your control's coming on."
Luna turned and gave him her serene, sideways smile — and standing so, dirty-blonde hair lit gold at its edges by the dawn coming through the leaves, the brook-light playing across her, three drops of water still circling her wrist like tame stars, she looked so exactly herself, so woven into the green and gold of the morning, that Harry quite forgot to wipe the sweat from his eyes and simply stood there gazing at her like a stunned owl himself.
A small, deliberate breeze curled out of nowhere and ruffled his fringe.
Harry came back to earth with a jolt, and got the cold towel up over the lower half of his face with all the dignity of a boy hiding a furious blush behind a flannel.
"How was the training, Hah-ree?" Luna asked, with terrible innocence.
Ethan shook his head, said nothing at all, and went to settle himself at the picnic table beneath the beech, where Jasper drowsed in a coin of sunlight and Osian lay sprawled like a small furred hillside, soaking up the warmth.
The two of them had been at it since a few days into the summer — Harry and Luna both, under Ethan's hand. Luna kept to her own path: divination above all, and ritual magic, astrology, Arithmancy, Ancient Runes and charms, the steady patient sharpening of her Sight — though lately Ethan had begun to thread a little combat into it, the better that she might defend herself in the days he could plainly see coming. Harry's road ran the other way, all combat-application of his Runes and charms, with ritual magic and the dry weight of his ordinary Hogwarts subjects besides.
And just this past week, Ethan had opened to them both a new door: a branch of Transfiguration he called Elemental magic. He had given them each a stack of books — his own among them, in his close careful hand — and set them to finding the element that answered truest to their natures. Harry's had come up lightning, and wind. Luna's, water, and wind.
They were learning Occlumency and Legilimency together, too, turn and turn about — and here it was Luna who shone, slipping into and out of a guarded mind with a quiet grace that had made Ethan smile with the particular pleasure of a teacher watching a gift come into its own. Harry, meanwhile, spent these sessions in a state of low private terror, frantically burying certain thoughts beneath the deepest stillness he could summon — thoughts that arrived, traitorously, every time the two of them brushed against one another, of how soft she had been, how warm, the shape of her pressed for one heart-stopping moment against his side—
'Blue moon,' Harry thought, very hard. 'Calm as water. Calm as water—'
By the time the sun stood high and the heat lay thick even under the beech, the morning's work was done. Harry and Luna had cleaned the sweat from themselves with a brisk Scourgify and changed into fresh clothes, and the four of them — five, with Jasper, six with Osian — were settled to a proper picnic in the shade.
There was banana ice cream, charmed cold against the heat. Jasper had a thimbleful; Osian had a whole bowl, which he demolished in roughly three seconds and then turned a mournful, hopeful gaze upon Harry's.
Harry met it with a glare of pure defiance. "Not a chance."
Luna, smiling, gave the great beast a spoonful of hers. Harry frowned — and then, grumbling, surrendered some of his own to Luna in exchange, which was, he suspected, exactly what she had engineered.
They talked, between mouthfuls, of where the others had got to this summer, gathered from a fortnight of letters. Draco was away in Norway, deep in some specialised course of his Healer's training. Hermione was learning Bulgarian at a frankly alarming pace — chiefly, it seemed, to keep up with the mountain of correspondence flowing to and from one Viktor Krum, a mountain that had very nearly been discovered by her bemused Muggle parents. And Ron was off in Italy, on holiday with the whole Weasley clan.
At the head of the table, Ethan sat with a glass of iced lemonade and the day's papers, and as he read, his brow drew down.
Harry caught it at once; so did Luna. Before either could ask, Ethan turned the Prophet round and tapped the front page.
Beneath the usual fawning over the Ministry's competence ran a smaller, uglier item: another company of overseas hit-wizards had been brought down in the field, hunting the Dark Lord, and the bounty on his head raised higher still for it. A box alongside carried interviews — hard men swearing loudly to take Voldemort's head for vengeance, for honour, for the fallen.
Everyone knew it was the money.
The warmth went out of the picnic. Harry and Luna exchanged a look. Out there, beyond the green, the gold and the cold sweet ice cream, the Dark Lord was loose in the world, and the world had begun, here and there, to crack.
Ethan gave a low, dry, almost-laughing breath. "Vanity," he said. "They go to him for coin and they go to him for glory, and he feeds them to the dark and grows fatter on the fear of it." He turned a page. "And see here — dark wizards showing their faces again. Troublemaking. Toasting his name in public houses. The Ministry's running itself ragged keeping the lid on. But it won't keep." His amber eyes lifted. "Soon he'll gather them — the bold ones, the scattered ones, the old faithful — and then the war begins in earnest, and there'll be no more pretending it hasn't."
Harry's face darkened, and Luna's with it.
Then Ethan set the paper down, and the line of his mouth eased.
"But — not today, and not tomorrow either. The ones in the Ministry worth their salt can see it coming, and they are not idle." A flicker of something like pride. "Sam will see to a great deal of that. And Dumbledore is still Dumbledore, and still where he stands. So you two—" he pointed his lemonade at them both, "—will study, and you will train, and you will eat your ice cream while it's cold. Leave the rest to those of us paid to lose sleep over it."
It was then that a fourth letter dropped out of the clear summer sky and landed beside Ethan's plate.
Harry knew the seal at once — the same Sirius always used.
Ethan broke it, read it, and his eyebrows rose. He folded it again, and looked up at the two of them with the morning's lightness gone abruptly thoughtful.
"Well," he said. "That's the morning over, I think. Pack it up, you two. We're for London."