'You have performed your role,' the dryad said, her voice as dreamy and hypnotic as the other dryad's had been, if not more so. 'You need not guard the relic. This is not your burden. Bring it to us. We are its guardians. Ours is the task, granted from the beginning. Relieve yourself of its weight. Bring us the relic.'
James looked down and saw that, without realizing it, he had taken a step onto the bridge. The dragon's maw hadn't closed on him. He glanced up and saw that it had actually pulled upwards a bit, welcoming him. The junction of the fallen trees which formed the jaw creaked slightly.
'Bring us the relic,' the dryad said again, and she lifted her arms toward James as if she meant to welcome him with an embrace. Her arms were unnaturally long, almost as if they stretched out to him over the bridge. Her fingernails were a blue so deep, it was nearly purple. They were long and surprisingly ragged. James retreated a step, backing off the bridge. The dryad's eyes changed. They brightened and hardened.
'Bring us the relic,' she said once more, and her voice changed as well. The song had leaked out of it. 'It isn't yours. Its power is greater than you, greater than all of you. Bring it to us before it unmakes you. The relic destroys those whom it does not need, and it no longer needs you. Bring it to us before it decides to use someone else. Bring us the relic while you still can.'
Her long arms reached across the bridge and James felt sure he could touch them if he reached out. He backed away further, hooking his heel on a root and stumbling. He turned, pinwheeling his arms for a handhold, and fell against something broad and hard. He pressed his hands against it and pushed backwards, righting himself. It was the stone of a wall. Five feet away, a torch crackled in its sconce. James glanced around. The corridor of Hogwarts stretched away, warm and mundane, as if he'd never left. Perhaps he never had. He looked the other direction. There was the intersection with the statue of the one-eyed witch. The sense of dread was gone, and yet James felt certain that what had happened hadn't just been a vision of some kind. He could still feel the chill of the night wind in the folds of his cloak. When he looked down, there was a crumble of dry river mud on the end of his shoe. He shivered, then gathered himself and ran the rest of the way to the stairs, where he took two at a time climbing to the common room.
The only thing James was sure of was that something wanted him to give up the Merlin robe. He just wasn't sure it was the right something. Fortunately, the robe was still locked away in Jackson's bag in James' trunk. After his experience with touching the robe, James had no plans to take the robe out of the trunk again until he handed it over to his dad and the Auror Department when the time was right. The time wasn't right yet, but it would be. Soon. Either way, he wasn't about to hand it over to some mysterious entity, tree sprite or not. Confident of this, James reached the Gryffindor common room and prepared for bed. Still, long after he had settled under his blankets, he thought he could hear the whispering voice in the wind beyond the window, pleading with him endlessly, monotonously: Bring us the relic… Bring us the relic
The following Friday, in Herbology class, James was amused to see that Neville Longbottom had moved Ralph's transfigured peach tree out of the Transfiguration classroom, where it had become rather cumbersome, and into one of the greenhouses.
'All this from a banana.' Neville confirmed to James after class.
'Yeah. I bet Ralph was more surprised than anybody. He's amazing, but I don't think he knows his own power, really. Some of the other Slytherins think he's got some powerful old magical family in his bloodline. Could be, I suppose, since he never knew his mum.'
'That's the sort of thing they'd think,' Neville said with unusual candor. 'Muggle-borns can be just as powerful as anyone born of an old pureblood family. Some prejudices never change, though.'
James looked up at the peach tree, which had become rather large despite the fact that its roots were still twined hopelessly around one of the Transfiguration room tables. He knew Neville was right, but he couldn't help thinking about the look on Ralph's face the day he'd transfigured the banana. Ralph had never said so, but James had a sense that Ralph's power frightened him just a little.
The next day, the Gryffindor Quidditch team was slated in a match against the Slytherins. James sat in the Gryffindor stands with Zane and Sabrina Hildegard. Ralph, for purposes of maintaining his few Slytherin friends, sat in the green-decked grandstand across the pitch. James made eye contact with Ralph once and waved. Ralph waved back, but carefully, being sure not to be seen by his older housemates.
Below, on the field, the team captains strode out to the centerline to meet with Cabe Ridcully for the declaration of rules and a handshake, a tradition that nobody really paid any attention to anymore. James watched Justin Kennely shake Tabitha Corsica's hand perfunctorily. Even from his vantage point high in the grandstand, James could see the smarmy, polite smile on Tabitha's admittedly beautiful face. Then both turned and walked in opposite directions back to their holding pens beneath the stands, leaving Ridcully alone with the Quidditch trunk.
Zane happily munched a bag of popcorn he'd brought with him, having somehow convinced one of the kitchen house-elves to prepare it. 'This should be an excellent match,' he observed, taking in the highspirited crowd.
'Gryffindor against Slytherin is always a crowd-stopper,' Sabrina said, raising her voice over the noise. 'Back in my mum's day, everybody hated Slytherin because they were dirty players. A guy named Miles Bletchley was the team captain back then, and he went on to play for the Thundelarra Thunderers for a couple of years until he was booted from the league for using a corked broom.'
'A what?' Zane interjected. 'How do you cork a broom?'
James explained, 'It's a kind of cheating where a hole is drilled down the center of the broom and something magical is threaded into it, like a dragon's rib or a basilisk fang. Basically turns the whole broom into a magic wand. He was using it to cast Repelling Spells and modified Expelliarmus spells, making the opposing team fumble the Quaffle. Really crooked old bugger, he was.'
As he spoke, the Slytherin team streaked out from their holding pen to the sound of cheers from their grandstand. Damien, seated in the broadcast booth with his wand to his throat, announced the team, his voice echoing in the crisp January air.
'So,' Zane called over the cheers, 'doesn't seem like everybody hates the Slytherins anymore.'
Sure enough, there was scattered applause throughout the rest of the grandstands. Only the
Gryffindor stands booed and hissed. James shrugged. 'They don't seem to play as dirty as they used to. But they still field unusually strong teams. There's something dodgy about them, it's just not as obvious as it used to be.'
'I'll say,' Zane agreed. 'When we played Slytherin before the break, it was as clean a match as I've played all year. Ridcully barely called a single foul on 'em. Still, there was something just a little too slick about them. They're either the luckiest bunch of skunks ever to mount brooms or they've made a deal with the devil himself.'
James gritted his teeth.
Across the pitch, Horace Slughorn, red-cheeked and bundled in a fur-collared coat and matching hat, waved a small Slytherin flag on a stick and yelled encouragements to his House team. Ralph, seated two rows below him, applauded dutifully. James knew that Ralph wasn't much of a Quidditch fan, despite the almost studious attention he paid to the matches, and James guessed that it was because Ralph couldn't really choose a team to be loyal to. His friends, including Rufus Burton, cheered and hooted wildly.
