Harry walked with Ginny down to Hogsmeade, holding her hand as she expected. At least she wasn’t reminding him of her mother anymore. Ron and Hermione were a bit behind. As he peeked back at them, a pang hit him. There was a scar across half of Ron’s face. It was thin. It wasn’t grotesque, but Harry felt as if he’d caused it himself.
He’d often caught Hermione looking at the mark of Christmas with sorrow written in her features.
“Don’t worry, Harry. Perhaps it was a bit bad before, but Hermione’s back to normal, I think,” whispered Ginny.
“What I don’t understand still, is what was going on before.”
Ginny scrutinized his face, and even tripped a bit for her lack of attention on her feet. She giggled to herself. Quickly, she mumbled, “She wanted someone else,” with her hair hiding the thoughts on her visage.
“What?” he growled quietly.
“I don’t know when it changed . . . sometime around when I learned how to do our readings . . . but suddenly, she stopped paying attention to Ron, and started, er, noticing someone else . . .”
“Who?” A deep ‘v’ was entrenched in his forehead. Just as they were beginning to get along again. “She didn’t “ “
“No! She would never! And I can’t tell you who. It was very short-lived, and it doesn’t matter “ “
“How can it not matter? And if she didn’t do anything, and how could nothing be short-lived?”
Ginny shrugged and began to stroke his hand with her thumb. The music blared in his mind and shivers crawled up his spine, causing his thought process to be completely lost. Instead, he mindlessly watched as black shadows crept around, through and over Hogsmeade. There was a far larger population of overly-hooded people roaming about. Harry knew it was the Order, acting as guards for the students. It seemed Dumbledore had taken Harry’s and Ginny’s warning seriously.
“Will you stop that annoying humming?” Ron shouted at him from behind.
“I wasn’t humming!”
Hermione and Ginny giggled and gave each other a knowing grin. Suddenly, his red-haired counterpart spotted the ghastly McKee. “You have got to get more friendly friends,” Harry declared.
“You’re right. You bunch are a bit mean,” she smirked.
“Hey! I meant that evil thing over there.”
“Stop it. I’ll see you later,” Ginny said stiffly, leaving Harry looking both confused and annoyed.
He heard the monster speak. “Honestly, Potter, what are you afraid I’ll do?” she called out before joining Ginny in a stroll.
“Freeze her and bite her head off, you Medusa Mantis,” he grumbled.
Ron and Hermione caught up to him on either side. “The Three Broomsticks?”
“Oh, I could use a butterbeer right about now,” Ron looked down at his protesting stomach.
The door chimed as they walked in. It was bustling with students, professors, shop owners and shoppers alike. Dishes scraped and clanged while hearty laugher colored the air. No one seemed to be perturbed or put off by the presence of the guards. On the contrary, they seemed to feel safer. All around was friendly camaraderie and jovial conversation. Harry couldn’t help but smile as the three strolled over a recently vacated booth. Hermione made a movement with her wand after they sat down, tracing long lines in the air and whispering in a low, guttural sound. When she finished, she stowed away her wand and placed her hands on the table.
Harry and Ron just stared at her.
“What?”
“What did you just do?”
“Oh, you know how the Imperturbable Charm works, right?”
They nodded while Harry rolled his eyes.
“Well, I found a spell one day that will allow the caster to create an imperturbable box. Quite handy, really, but fairly obvious. Most people don’t use it for that reason “ if they know about it at all. It’s much easier to allow people to assume you’re not talking about something important than to blatantly make it known you’re talking about something important.
“Then why are you making it obvious?”
“Hold on and I’ll show you,” she said hastily as Madam Rosmerta approached them. She flicked her wand in a complicated curl.
She took everyone’s order, and brought it to them rather quickly.
“Did you know that in History of Magic, I learned all about how cauldrons have changed over the centuries?” she said loudly, then reenacted the curled motion.
“What do we care about that?” asked Ron suspiciously.
She was clearly self-satisfied. “Exactly! No one will care.”
Harry again allowed his eyes to roll. “So what is this great thing Ron thinks you’re going to tell me?”
“What are your suspicions?” she asked coyly. As he began to think about his answer, he felt a bit of pressure in the front of his head, and instantly recognized it as Hermione gently prodding into his mind. It felt almost like when the Muggle doctors in his youth were giving him a shot, and the needle was just pushing in his skin, but hadn’t broken through quite yet. As he felt it, he instinctively directed the prod to a memory of him walking down Wisteria Walk. The probing persisted, as did his memory (he’d taken long walks over the years). But then, it was as if the needle had broken through. It was aggressive. He felt like a cornered animal. So he guided her to gruesome images he’d seen over the years of children beat up by Dudley, of horrifying images from the television.
Then, he wondered. In his mind’s eye, he turned around as he did in his readings with Ginny. He saw the connection and touched it, drifting into her own mind. He spotted the druid before he was carelessly shoved out by Hermione.
“What did you do?” Ron spat.
Hermione had her head in her hands, pushing the pain out of her head by breathing hard through her teeth. Harry felt similar. He looked dazedly between his two friends.
“I was just testing you, Harry.”
“I noticed,” he said calmly. He wasn’t sure why he felt calm. He’d just had a pretty brutal attack. However, he felt as if the waters had receded, and he could see the bottom for what it was. “You’ve been holding back in the lessons.” It wasn’t an accusation. It was merely a statement.
“Well, in a way, I guess.” She kept her palm pressed up against her temple. Harry’s scar held an odd thrum. “It was more like, I wasn’t sure how strong I was supposed to put it. I only tried it here to see how strong you were.”
“Why?” He was feeling quite annoyed at her audacity. “Was Dumbledore’s testing not good enough for you?”
“It’s not that. I just wanted to . . . see for myself.”
They glared at each other for a moment before Ron took a large slurp. “We’re all a bit sidetracked. Let’s get to the good stuff.”
Hermione sighed, giving up the argument. “Well, I’ve said that I’ve got most of the parchment translated, and that I couldn’t tell you anything because neither of us were trained up enough in Occlumency. Well, I guess we both really put in effort over the last week, because we seemed to both be rather good at it.” Harry nodded formally. “So . . . I suppose it’s time I told you all that I know.”
Harry’s eyebrows flew beneath his hairline, and his heartbeat grinded through his chest like the dull roar of a train. This was it. He would finally learn . . . something . . . about his past . . . or his ancestral past anyway.
“Wait!” he nearly shouted. “Can they,” he motioned to the public in The Three Broomsticks, “see us?”
“Well of course they can!”
Ron caught on. “Can’t someone read lips?”
A boy standing on one of the tables caught their attention. He seemed to be making a toast, although they couldn’t hear him. He then brought a girl on to the table with him, where she smiled shyly and held onto him for dear life.
“Interest diverted,” Hermione said quickly. “I will try to say this quickly. Over a thousand years ago in Ireland lived a man named Ambrosius and another named Salazar “ you know of him, of course. Ambrosius is also known by the name of Merlin. He’s in the Muggle King Arthur legends, but it turns out he was actually a person! Ambrosius was a displaced king ““
“What does that mean? Then he wasn’t king.”
“He was king for a short time. So short, in fact, that there is no record of his ruling years. All that King Arthur bit came afterward, when he was already an old man. Even then, most of it is unconfirmed legend. Muggles made most of it up to suit their times. It does say that he served as an advisor to the king.”
She paused for a moment, and gathered her thoughts before continuing. “So Merlin was a pureblood “ there were more of them back then “ and the prejudice that exists now was the same back then. He fell in love with a Celtic priestess . . . a druid. Druids were involved in an ancient magic that is much closer to the Muggles than our brand of magic. Merlin sought to be with her.”
“So how does Salazar fit into this?” Harry wondered aloud.
“Salazar had an ongoing feud . . . no, more like a bit of a war . . . with the druids. He despised Muggles, and saw the druids as Muggles, teaching magic arts (however gained) to those unworthy. He saw it as a sort of fake magic, but was still angry that it existed. Salazar was determined to wipe what he thought of as his land of the Muggles. First, he decided to take care of the druids that were teaching them a ‘fraudulent’ brand of magic. He and his comrades had attacked them throughout the years, and fought with a particular tribe the most. In it was the Celtic priestess, Enid.”
“Enid?” Ron wrinkled his nose.
“You’ll know why in a moment. I can’t tell if the bard who wrote this named her, or if it was her real name.” She sighed.
“I don’t really know how best to say this. It happened all the time in the past, but it’s so terrible. During one of his attacks, he found Enid and raped her. It was very brutal, and she was left with many scars.” Hermione avoided Ron’s eyes. “At some point, when Merlin was courting Enid, she told him of the battles . . . and the rape. She’d told him that her people could not find the haggard wizard. Merlin, with his many magical talents, located him, froze him, and brought him to her.”
“Froze him? How did he do that?” Harry asked.
Hermione only shook her head. “That is one of those spells that could have been lost in time. I’ve never found it. It had to be strong to overcome Salazar.
“What did they do?” groaned Ron, who was sure he wouldn’t like to know.
“They cut it off. They cut . . . his male parts off. Then Enid put some type of druid potion on there to stop him from being able to grow it back . . . in any way.”
Harry thought of the painting that was a bit of transfigured skin. Her face looked so strong and serene. Now, the face he saw was contorted in uncontained rage.
Hermione continued, undeterred, as Harry and Ron stared at her without blinking amidst the silent hubbub. “They sent him away ‘across the sea’ as it says. I don’t know where, but it took a long time for him to arrive back in Ireland. Enid became pregnant with Merlin’s child and gave birth, before Salazar came back to Ireland. He’d come to kill her and Merlin. When he learned of the newborn baby, he was furious that an atrocity of ‘Muggle magic’ was created. He sought to murder the baby, along with his parents.”
“Gee, that doesn’t sound familiar,” Harry grumbled.
“That’s just the thing, Harry! History is cyclical! And it plays a role in your situation.”
Harry motioned for her to press on.
“He hated them with all the wrath he could muster. He decided to go after Enid first, because she was the one “ in his mind “ that caused all of it. You see, Salazar wanted an heir, and Enid had taken that away from him with a magic he despised and yet didn’t acknowledge. And of course, he wasn’t keen on Merlin for helping her.
“He was her husband, what did he expect?”
“No, he wasn’t,” Hermione corrected. “Priestesses were not allowed to marry.”
A silence preceded Hermione’s persistence. “He seemed determined to destroy not only her, but all of the druids, and he was successful in doing so as he neared her home. When she heard he was only a day’s journey away, she called her brethren together. She said she’d seen the future and the time had come to protect the Muggles. They worked together and created a very complicated spell that required a sacrifice. She wanted to save her child, to protect him from Salazar, and the only person she saw fit to sacrifice was herself. Then, the parchment was a bit vague. It says her body was used for the spell.”
“I don’t really want to think of what that means,” mumbled Ron while staring into his glass.
“It said that as she went, she threw herself into a ring she’d crafted for her lover, Merlin. She called it the ring of hope. Hope is the meaning of that symbol carved into your ring, Harry. It’s the same symbol that appeared on her chest. The woman in the painting was Enid. Enid means ‘spirit’ in that ancient language.
“So what happened?” Harry prodded.
“The druids gave the child to Merlin quickly after the sacrifice, seeing the danger the baby brought them. With the child were the ring and a spell. It was said the world sang when he put the ring on his finger. The spell was the one she gave her body for “ the spell that would cast a protection over all those who were born without magic. He knew what he had to do. It took five days and four nights to prepare, but Salazar would soon find him, so Merlin had to work quickly. As he set up the space in which to work, his son walked to him for the first time. He gazed into the child’s eyes, and found his love for his son stronger than his love for the rest of humanity. When he began to cast the spell, he gave half of the blood protection to his son, and gave the rest to the masses of Muggles. The spell took so much out of him, that when Salazar arrived, he was quickly able to kill Merlin once and for all. Salazar searched for the baby, but could not find him.”
“Where could the baby have gone?”
“A hand-maiden assigned to watch the baby fled in terror once she saw the angry wizard approaching the castle. She ran down by the river bank and hid among the trees and rocks. When a potter stopped by the river for a bit of a drink, he spotted the frightened, incapacitated woman. When he couldn’t bring her to her senses, he took the baby home, and raised him as his own son. He took the last name Potter.”
A hush fell over them as they contemplated the ramifications of such a story. “So,” Harry cleared his throat, “is it true . . . then?”
Hermione stared uncomfortably deeply into his eyes. “It’s only a parchment telling a story, but tell me this.” She grabbed his hand and let her thumb roll over the ring. “Does the world sing when you wear this ring?”
“Only around Ginny,” he said blankly.
Hermione nodded. “I would have thought as much. You are the result of this ‘myth’, Harry. You are the descendant of a half-blood prince. The interesting part is that one half is Muggle magic, and the other half is wizard magic. The fact that your mother made the same sacrifice for you only adds to your protection. You haven’t had ‘dumb luck’ all these years. Instead, you’ve had a very ancient and powerful protection that stems from the love of a mother for her child.”
“How can Muggles be killed, and tortured like they were at the Quidditch World Cup, if they have this protection on them?” Ron inquired.
“Quite frankly, the protection is still there, but there are so many more people alive now than there were then. The protection is diluted. That’s my best guess. That, or it just needs a trigger to become active once again.”