Chapter 16
“We take the horses.” She answered. “We sell them in Dunland, claim that we only got them to get through Rohan. The other animals we leave in Gondor, back at that abandoned farm we spotted just before Merring. Cows and goats can manage on their own. Pigs won’t travel well. But the hens and rooster we can take, they can go in with ours, we’d just need to make larger cages and I can do that in a few minutes. Crookshanks, if it is him, can stay with us. What about grain and food?”
“We’d take that, anyway.” Harry said. “As for the rest? Yeah, I think we hunt up all the dwarf-sized weapons and clothes, keep them. I can take the man-sized weapons back to Pelargir and sell it. Anything that belongs to the idiots? I like Colin’s idea. Burnt it all.”
“If we’re going to clear this place by sunset, we need to get moving.” Fred said.
~~~
April 28th 2920
Fred apparated back to the walled farmstead, not at all concerned that he’d just killed a man in cold-blood. Killed, transfigured into a wooden statue, shrunk and sliced the statue into pieces, ready to add to the fire that they were going use to destroy a farmstead.
No, not a farmstead. Not likely. More a house of horrors.
Across the darkened farmyard, he could see a large glass jar, that glowed with the soft blue light of bluebell flames.
“You made it alright, then?” Harry appeared beside the floating jar.
“Yeah.” Fred nodded. “You good here?”
“Yeah.” Harry nodded as Fred reached him. “I set the fire, in a pile of clothes by the fireplace, in the upstairs front bedroom and it’s growing nicely.”
Fred had stayed behind at the farmstead, after they’d burnt the sliced-up statues, while Harry, Lavender and Colin, plus an illusion of Fred, had taken the caravan and moved it up the road, as though they had just dropped the boy and driven away. Then, once the three had set up camp for the night, Harry had apparated back to the farmstead, to meet Fred. The redhead had instantly informed Harry, that Harry had the task of lighting and tending the fire that would destroy the complex, while Fred saw to the Gondorian guardsman.
“What did you use as bodies?” Harry asked. Fred had told him that there needed to be bodies or the remains of bodies in the fire, just in case someone was looking for them. It also meant that taking the two horses wasn’t going to be a problem, because between the guardsman vanishing, the fire and finding the remains of the guard’s tunic and helmet, which Fred had to bring back with him, that it would be assumed that the guard was responsible for the fire and had taken the horses, himself. There was no reason to suspect a dwarven caravan that had dropped the boy off and left, passing by two other homesteads, seemingly with ponies but no horses. Harry and Lavender had worked together to forge and cast a transfiguration sequence, that shrank the horses to a similar size to the ponies. It was tied to their headstalls and would have to be reinforced every day, until they were through Rohan.
“I went out to the forest and… I found a group of boars eating the remains of these monsters’ last victims or what was left of them.” Fred said, with a wince.
“Shite…” Harry whispered.
“Yeah.” Fred sighed. “I know that they were just being wild animals, but it was people they were eating. I… I didn’t react well.” He dropped his head. “I hit them with Heart-Stoppers and brought them back here, transfigured them into human shapes and cut off a couple of toes. Once they’re no longer whole, they can’t transfigure back without a cancelling charm.”
“Well, they looked spooky, that’s for sure.” Harry shuddered. “That’s why I decided to set the fire there, burn them first. As skeletons, they should look the part. You done? I can’t wait to get out of here. Gives me the creeps.”
“Give me a minute to take the statue pieces, that I brought from the Guard-Station, and add them to the fire.” Fred said. “Then, yes, let’s get out of here.” He trotted into the timber house, that was just starting to show flames through a couple of windows.
When Fred emerged, Harry wasted no time in grabbing the redhead’s arm and apparating them away.
At the campsite, Lavender and Colin were anxiously waiting for their two friends. When the pair appeared, both leapt to their feet and ran to them, enveloping them in hugs.
“Oof…” Fred gasped and then laughed.
“… umf…” Harry made a squashed sound.
Colin and Lavender stepped back and when they let go of the two older boys, they snickered as both collapsed to the ground.
“I think that could have given your mother a challenge.” Harry wheezed to Fred.
“Assault hugs.” Fred said, with a laugh. “You get used to them, after a while.”
“Six years, Fred.” Harry countered. “If I haven’t gotten used to them by now, I’m not going to.”
“Hmm… Maybe not…” Fred mused, nodding slowly.
“Everything go okay…?” Colin asked.
“Yeah, we’re good.” Fred nodded.
“Think you can eat?” Lavender asked with a grimace.
“Urp…” Harry shook his head violently.
“Nope, me neither.” Fred agreed.
“A cuppa, then?” Lavender suggested.
Harry blinked a few times, clearly thinking about it. “Yeah… I think I can manage that. Fred?” The redhead nodded and crawled to a seat and dragged him up into, while Harry just lay on the grass, he couldn’t be bothered trying to get up, just yet. The relief of having the whole thing over, had drained him of any energy.
“You rest there and Colin will fetch you both a mug of tea, while I fetch Teddy for Harry.” Lavender ordered.
“Yes, ma'am.” All thee dwarves nodded.
Harry cuddled the little boy close, letting the burbling and occasional laugh sooth him, as much as his scent had soothed Teddy, at Barric’s. A few minutes and he felt calm enough to face the mug of tea that Colin had brought him. As he sipped at it, letting the tiny dose of Stomach Soother do its work, he glanced down at Teddy and blinked.
“Guys?” He called quietly.
“Yeah?” Fred answered but didn’t look his way.
“Can someone check this, please?” Harry asked, his question making Fred’s head rise in concern.
“What? Check what?”
“Teddy’s eyes.” Harry never let his focus drift from Teddy’s smiling face, even as Fred and Lavender appeared, one on each side of him. As he watched, Teddy’s eyes changed from Harry’s brilliant green to Fred’s golden brown, then to Lavender’s stormy blue, and as Colin looked over Harry’s shoulder, to the blonde boy’s dark blue.
“Oh, my…” Lavender whispered.
“Oh, hell, he’s got Tonks’ Metamorphmagi.” Fred groaned.
“Oh, that’s going to be fun…” Harry’s groan was nearly as bad as Fred’s. “I’m glad eyes are all he can do, so far.”
“I hope he doesn’t start on the rest, for a while.” Fred added.
“Meta-morph-whatsy?” Colin asked.
“Metamorphmagi is the ability to change your own body.” Fred answered. “Change the skin colour, hair colour or length.”
“Or make your nose into a duck’s bill.” Harry added.
“I’ve heard that Tonks even made herself look like a man, a couple of time, for undercover work.” Fred saw the confusion on Lavender’s face and hurried to clarify what he meant. “Tonks was an Auror.” Lavender nodded. “I’ve seen her look like an Asian girl and an old lady, all hunched and bent up.”
“She was really good at it.” Harry agreed. “I heard that she even impersonated Remus on a couple of full moons, when he should have gone to work.”
“Wow…” Colin blinked and looked at Teddy again. “Look his eyes are green again.”
“Oops.” Harry grimaced as Teddy’s eyes flicked between green and blue. “Better let him settle down, I remember Tonks saying that too much changing in too short a time could give her a headache.”
“Let’s try and avoid that, shall we?” Fred suggested.
~~~
April 29th 2920
Even when morning came, Harry and Fred were still subdued. The sight of a column of smoke south-east of them, making them both shudder and quickly turn away from it. No training session was held that morning, instead they dawdled over breakfast. A plain breakfast, no bacon or sausages to be seen.
Lavender had listened to both boys’ nightmares and gently bludgeoned them into talking. So? Yeah, no bacon for a few days.
They eventually packed up their camp and harnessed up ponies and transfigured horses, ready to travel. What surprised both Fred and Harry, was that no-one came after them, with questions. In fact, no-one came looking for them at all. It seemed that their subterfuge of pretending to drop the boy and leave, had worked.
They planned to travel for another two days before they stopped and discussed exactly what they would do with what they took from the farmstead. How they would use it, how they would divide it and who they would help.
The day’s travel was easy, but even the mares were feeling tired, it seemed, and moved sluggishly as a result.
They camped at the end of reasonably short day, in the lee of a broken foothill of the mountains, against a cliff decorated with a tiny waterfall filling an equally tiny pool. It gave the boys a chance to excavate out the hole, until it was the size of a backyard swimming pool, and line it with dark, heavy clay and what was probably a tonne of rubble from the edges of the cliff. A few minutes of aguamenti to fill it enough and the outgoing water wasn’t swallowed up by the new pool. Yes, aguamenti created water would evaporate faster than natural water, but by that time, the natural water levels in the pool would have risen and the overflow would continue at the creek’s normal levels.
The ponies were led into the pool, one at a time and scrubbed down, then the three boys paddled about, relaxing and putting the last few weeks behind them. Putting everything since Hogwarts, behind them.
“It was…” Colin paused and tilted his head. “I was going to say scary, but I wasn’t scared. I was just confused. I’d been at Hogwarts, fighting a pair of DeathEaters and a Slytherin from my year, one moment and the next I was in a beautiful wildflower garden and this woman was telling me that I was going to be needed. Then it was night time again and I was alone, in an unfamiliar town. I ran down a street and when a man called out to me, I reached for my wand but it wasn’t there, that distracted me long enough for the man to catch me and take me to a building that had lots of other boys in it. It took me days to figure out that while they might have been muggles, they weren’t British muggles, and I wasn’t sure where I was. I thought everyone in the world knew where London was or at least knew what it was, but these people didn’t. They kept asking where London was. Was it in Harad, Eriador, Arnor or Rhovanion? I’d never heard of those places. If they’d said, ‘hey, you’re in Minas Tirith’ or Gondor, I possibly would have stayed with them.” He huffed.
“But you didn’t, did you?” Fred asked.
“Nope, I ran, the first chance I got.” Colin said. “Went back to where I’d woken and looked for my wand. Nothing. That was where the courier boys found me, Mik took me under his wing and I stayed with him for a while. He convinced Bon, the couriers’ boss to give me a chance and the next day he was caught by the guard and disappeared. It was only a couple of days later that Van and I nearly mowed Harry and Teddy down.”
“I wondered how you came to be here.” Harry nodded. “But at the time, I was more concerned with getting us out of there, safely.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.” Colin dunked his head under the water and came back up. “It wasn’t a good place for orphans. At least the couriers saw that I had enough to eat and somewhere to sleep.”
“And now you’ve got a wagon room to yourself.” Fred said. “Enough money, materials and knowledge to start your own business.”
Colin grinned. “I do. And like my safety at Hogwarts, I owe huge part of that to Harry.”
“That we do.” Fred laughed.
“What about you, Fred?” Colin asked. “How did you get here?”
“George, Percy and I were fighting, up on the seventh floor.” The redhead answered. “Percy was telling a joke and George was laughing. There was an explosion and everything went black. When I opened my eyes next, I was in a ditch full of water, without my wand. I tried to apparate back to Hogsmeade, but couldn’t and I figured I’d try a few other places and when none of them worked, I decided to wait for morning. But in the morning, I found the same thing that Colin had. No-one knew where London was, no-one had even heard of it. I can do a few spells wandlessly, a sort of mini-version of a Patronus, accio if I was within a couple of feet, lumos, aguamenti and a couple of prank spells, nothing particularly useful. So, I tried to send George a Patronus and it wouldn’t go. I realised that either George was dead or I was. And as I was the one, that was someplace where no-one had heard of England, let alone London or Hogwarts?” He huffed. “I guessed I was the dead one. And I… I didn’t handle it well. I found a tavern and filched enough coins to get drunk and continued to filch enough to stay that way. Every so often the tavern keeper would toss me out and I’d wander around for a few hours before going back again. Well, one day I tripped and fell at Harry’s feet. He took me back to his wagon, washed me, fed me and put me to bed.” He mock glared at his raven-haired friend. “Then the next morning he woke me up by shaking the entire wagon. Then he wished me a good morning. Oh, so bright and cheery, I wanted to smack him, but I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t finally gone mad.”
“Obviously, you hadn’t.” Colin splashed water at Fred.
“No, but it took a few minutes to figure that out.” Fred shook his head and flicked water back at Colin. “Once I did…? Well, you know all about that.”
The four of them had discussed pretty much everything that had happened, since each of them had met up with Harry, but little about before they first saw him. Or in Lavender’s case heard him.
“And Lavender?” Colin asked, tentatively.
“Greyback got her.” Harry said, quietly. “The last thing she remembers is him pinning her to the ground and biting her neck, then suddenly… she was locked in a room and the man that had her, never let her out of it. As far as she’s concerned, she was only there for a week. When I busted into the room, she was fighting with him and there were forty-odd people just sitting and watching. I reminded her of Hermione’s lessons and told her to put him on the floor. She did and after a little back and forth, she stripped out of the clothes that he’d bought and we left. Two old ladies helped her remove his clothes and another man gave us the money that the audience… I guess they were actually guests, at what they were told, was a wedding. Anyway the… the groom… told them that his bride would want to do her own buying and so everyone was giving them money. The male guest put all of it in a pouch and gave it to Lavender, as an apology.”
“Harry to the rescue.” Colin said.
“Again.” Fred laughed.
“Hermione always said, I had a ‘saving people’ thing.” Harry shrugged.
“Boys!” Lavender called. “Dinner!”
“What’re we having?” Fred called back, as he left the pool. He still wasn't sure about having bacon or sausages.
“Roast chicken and vegies.”
“Yum.” Colin slapped Fred arm and ran off in front of him. “Last one to the table gets the dishes.”
“Oi!” Fred took off after the blonde boy.
Harry shook his head, dishes weren’t really a threat, when you could use magic to do the washing up.
~~~
April 30th 2920
What Harry called a light training session left all three of his friends, collapsed on the ground.
“Bloody hell Harry.” Colin moaned. “I hurt all over.”
“And I thought he was hard on us in the D.A.” Lavender groaned.
“If I could move, I’d hex him.” Fred muttered.
Harry leant over them. “No hexing, unless you’re inside the wards. We can’t afford to have the local magicals’ attention on us. Especially as their leader is a traitor.”
“What?” Fred sat up quickly, belying his earlier statement.
“Currently, the leader of the local magicals is the one that wears white. At some point in the next eighty years... which is next to nothing to them, they live for thousands of years, not decades. Sometime in the eighty years, he falls to the Enemy, unfortunately his reputation is spotless and no-one believes it, until he directly attacks one of the other magicals.”
“Played his hand a little too early?” Fred asked.
“Not according to his plans, he just underestimated the one he attacked.” Harry answered.
“If we’re dwarves, will we still be around when that happens, or do dwarves not live that long?” Colin asked.
“Ah, I didn’t explain that, did I?” Harry grimaced.
“Explain what?” Lavender asked.
“If you have to ask, then I didn’t.” Harry muttered. “Right, back to the wagons and get cleaned up and I’ll explain.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were all clean and sipping a mug of tea, while Teddy sucked down a bottle of formula.
“Right, Dwarves.” Harry said. “I’m not too sure how the Tolkien dwarves did this, but I confundused an older dwarf and got him to give me a brief lesson on dwarves. Dwarves grow at much the same rate as humans, but once they’re physically mature, their aging slows down. To the point where a dwarf of one-hundred looks little different to one of twenty-five. The average life expectancy of a dwarf is between two-hundred-fifty and three-hundred. But when they start to show their age, they tend to live less than another fifty years.”
“So, we’ll still be around when this guy turns bad?” Colin said.
“Yeah.” Harry nodded.
“Can’t we stop him, before then?” Lavender asked.
“Short of killing him? No, not really.” Harry replied. “Twenty-odd years from now, someone will pick up an item, that belongs to the local Grindelvoldy.” Harry happily mangled Grindelwald and Voldemort in one word. “Unfortunately, the only magical that our collector knows, is so focused on a necromancer that he ignores the signs of what our collector picked up.”
“Ah, Harry?” Fred frowned. “Why aren’t you using names?”
“Because Tolkien implies that his Grindelvoldy did much the same as Snakey-Voldy and put a taboo on his name and I don’t know if the traitor’s done the same, or not.” Harry answered.
“Ah, right. Got it.” Fred nodded.
Harry gave him a bitter smile. “At the same time as our collector tries to tell his magical friend; the traitor, who may not have turned at that point, is working with at least three others, when they find out about the necromancer. These three go to confront the necromancer only to find that the collector’s friend got there first and needs rescuing. Together, the three rescue the friend and deal a blow to the necromancer, who they find out is actually Grindelvoldy, in spirit form. If we can help our collector in disposing of the item, shortly after that, it will cancel out the war that Grindelvoldy is trying to start, so the he can get his item back and use it to control the whole world.”
“Oh…” Fred nodded slowly.
“Great.” Lavender sighed. “Another war.”
“At least this time not all the opposing side are magical?” Harry phrased it as a question.
“They’d better not be.” The blonde girl muttered.
“They come after me and I’ll treat them like DeathEaters.” Colin huffed.
“Same.” Fred nodded.
“Alright.” Harry grinned. “Time to pack up and get moving again. Think about what we’re going to do with the farmstead gold and we’ll talk about it, this evening.”
~~~
That night they made camp, by fencing off a valley, that was as much a wide crack in another cliff-face, as it was a valley. The space was bordered on two sides by the almost vertical cliffs and the third fronted towards the road, it was fifty yards wide at that point, but at its widest was closer to one hundred yards across and about four hundred yards deep. Plenty of room for the ponies to run and stretch their legs before settling to grazing alongside the tiny brook. The waterway was barely deep enough, or fast enough, to allow them to collect water for their barrels, but with a little bit of magical assistance, once Harry had activated the wards, they were able to made a hole, big enough to put a bucket into, and line it with flat rocks.
They had a collection of two dozen water barrels that were emptied into the ponies buckets. The idea being that they had at least a week’s worth of water that was constantly used and replenished, on rotation, to ensure that water stayed fresh and didn’t get the chance to stagnate.
An hour before dark, Crookshanks trotted up to Harry and dropped a fish at his feet. Not just any fish but a massive trout, large enough to feed four hungry magical dwarves and still have enough for the orange kneazle’s dinner. The kneazle sat back and yowled at Harry, until the dwarf leant down and patted him.
“Are you feeding us, too, Crookshanks?” He asked the part-kneezle, who meowed proudly, in reply. “Well, thank you very much. Colin’s cooking tonight and I know that he’ll appreciate the fish.” With that Harry, picked up the fish and with his other hand, gave Crookshanks a scratch behind the ear. He stood up and headed for the wagons. “Hey, Colin? Crookshanks brought us dinner.” He brandished the fish and watched as Colin’s smile grew.
“Fish and chips!” Colin cheered.
“Dinner’s sorted.” Harry told his friends. “Colin’s put together a treat for us. Oh, and there’s a lemon drizzle cake for supper.”
“Great.” Fred said. “The ponies are done and the water barrels are full.”
“Brilliant.” Harry grinned. “Ideas on the farmstead stuff?”
“Do we know how much is there?” Lavender asked.
“Barrels.” Fred sighed.
“But how much is a barrel?” Lavender refined the question.
“I don’t know.” Fred blinked. “Give me a minute and I’ll find out.” He crossed from the camp stove to his wagon and climbed the ladder into it. A few rustling and quiet thumping noises and he retraced his steps with a box in his hand.
A few flicks and swishes and tiny barrels flew from the box, they hung in the air, until one-by-one, they reverted to their original sizes.
“Three and a half barrels of coins.” Fred pointed to four barrels off to one side. “One of gold, half a one of silver, half a one of mithril and two of gems.”
“Okay…” Lavender’s eyes widened. “That’s a little more than I thought.”
“Oh, and a bucket of sceptres.” Harry added.
“Oh, Merlin…” Colin whispered.
“I know it looks like a lot,” Harry told them, “but it’s not. Not really. It’s about the same, the coins and sceptres, anyway, as what you already have. Gold and silver is less than twice what you have. Gems and mithril, though. Yeah, there’s more of them.”
“Really?” Colin blinked.
“If we put our stuff in barrels, we’d have that much?” Fred asked.
“Pretty much. Yes.” Harry nodded.
“Each?” Lavender looked amazed.
“Each.” Harry nodded, again.
“So dividing this up and adding to what we already have…?” Fred didn’t finish the question.
“Isn’t going to alter your balances, drastically.” Harry shook his head.
“No.” Lavender disagreed.
“No?” Fred asked.
“No.” Lavender repeated. “Split it in half. One half is for us, divide it up. One part each for us and Teddy. That’s five. One part for a charity purse. That makes six. One part added to each portion that we already put aside for any others that might appear. That makes nine? Ten? Whatever... And the other half goes into the communal funds for buying a home, at some point.”
The three dwarves winced. Lavender had been quite firm that they needed a home, somewhere that was theirs.
“Keeping a separate charity purse, probably isn’t a bad idea.” Harry allowed. “But maybe we should look at using the smaller coins for that, not a smaller amount, but the smaller coins. I know we have thousands of pennies and ten-pences between us, what if we swapped some of them for these? And some of the florins? Not all of them just… some…?”
“At the markets?” Lavender said. “We didn’t use pennies much, for either buying or selling. It was mostly florins and the odd sovereign.”
“It was, too.” Colin nodded.
“What if we each keep two hundred pennies and the same of ten-pences? And put the rest in the charity purse?” Fred suggested.
“And what about florins?” Colin asked.
The negotiations went back and forth between the four, for nearly an hour, but they came to an agreement and the barrels’ contents were divided up and what they planned to use for charity was swapped out with what smaller denomination coins they were prepared to part with. But only coins went into the charity purse. No sceptres, no raw gold, silver or mithril and no gems. The charity purse’s shares of these, were purchased by one of them, depending on their interest. Of the two buckets that made up the purse’s share, Fred bought nearly nothing, while Harry and Lavender bought a half bucket each and Colin bought the remainder. This was also the system used for the metals, but Harry opted out when it came to buying mithril, instead allowing Colin and Lavender to split it between them. While Harry exchanged the sceptres for crowns from his own funds.
After tucking into Colin’s fish and chips and leaving very little behind, each of the four brought out their stash of coins, metals and gems and reorganised them. Harry’s gem drawers interested Colin and Lavender very much and after a bit of hunting they found stationery drawers that would do much the same job. Lavender set aside two-thirds of her stash and asked Fred and Harry to work out if they could cast a Fidelius on it. The thought of having so much readily accessible money scared her. Putting most of it under Fidelius would give her some degree of security.
As yet, that was out of their abilities, but both agree to spend some of their time while taking breaks from driving, reading the books that Hermione sent with Harry, in the hopes that incantation and instructions for the spell were recorded in one of them.
~~~
May 1st 2920
Another training session that morning, softened a little by Lavender’s glare, wasn’t nearly as bad as the day before. This morning breakfast was had on the move, it was going to be a long hard day’s travel, as the road veered slightly away from the mountains’ foothills. It was also unlikely that they would see any water but what they carried, unless they stumbled over a tiny spring.
Today they planned to push for six hours, break long enough to eat and swap ponies, before continuing on. Thanks to Harry’s skill with the Map Making charms, they knew that there was a decent sized stream that emerged from the mountains of what the Rohirrim called the Eastfold. There were settlements along the stream but further back, closer to the mountains and away from the North-South Road. If they made camp close to the road and activated the wards, they should be safe.
But until they were out of Rohan, they would be at risk, simply for being outsiders.
~~~