Chapter 279: Christmas Plans
Dingding Dingding Dingding
The bell at the end of class rang like a summons from hell, yanking Ron's soul out of heaven and slamming it back into his body.
He lay there in a daze for a while before he slowly opened his eyes. The flying roast chicken legs faded from view, and in their place loomed Wood's completely blank face at very close range.
"Argh!"
Ron jerked sideways on instinct, startled by Wood's sudden appearance, and immediately let out a strangled scream.
His left kidney felt as if it had just been rammed by his dad's flying car. His whole body curled in on itself, one leg twitching, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead.
A second later, two very familiar voices spoke, one after the other, right beside him.
"Looks hopeless."
"Shall we bury him?"
Hands grabbed his arms and ankles as if to hoist him up. With that agony stabbing his side, he couldn't have fought them off even if he'd wanted to.
"Let go! Let go! I'm not dead yet!"
Fortunately, George and Fred had no real intention of burying him. They dumped him on a nearby chair instead and left him to recover on his own.
They knew exactly what he was going through. They'd been in a similar shape themselves not long ago. Give it ten minutes, and the pain would fade to something less horrific, nothing that would actually stop him moving.
Harry, watching Ron's sorry state, wanted to laugh. The stabbing ache across his own back twisted the smile into something more like a grimace.
"Looks like you lot got 'special attention' from Professor Sothia too?"
Fred took a quick look around the classroom to confirm that Professor Sothia and Professor Kahn had both left. Then he clapped Harry cheerfully on the shoulder.
Harry immediately hissed and batted his hand away.
"Enough," Wood cut in, catching George before he could repeat the shoulder-smack routine. He cast a glance at Gemma and Dev, who were helping Hermione clear her head, then turned back to Harry and finally asked what they had come for.
They had planned to bring it up during Quidditch practice, but looking at Harry now, he clearly wouldn't be fit for training tonight.
"Penelope's been acting odd?" Harry echoed, frowning in confusion. He thought for a moment, then seemed to remember something. "Come to think of it, Percy asked me something similar a few days ago."
He went on to describe, in detail, everything that had happened the night they defeated the basilisk. By the end, Wood and the others finally had a full picture.
When he finished, Dev spoke first, her tone a little subdued.
"Penny really did ask a lot about her mother when she first started school. She only worked that hard because of her."
"Yes. I tried asking around for her back then," Gemma added, still looking puzzled. "I never found anything. If Penelope's mother really is one of Norway's worst criminals, I shouldn't have come up completely empty."
The Farley family might not have the long pedigree of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, but they were still a well-known pure-blood line. If Penelope's mother had been that significant, Gemma refused to believe she wouldn't have dug up at least a trace.
"Maybe the Norwegian Ministry of Magic buried it," Wood suggested. "If she did commit something serious, but never became famous for it, they might have smothered the whole affair to avoid bad publicity."
"If that's true, then Percy and Penelope…" George actually frowned for once, sensing how awkward this could become.
If things were as Harry described, then Percy and Penelope really were heading to Norway to track down Penelope's mother.
Going down to the lowest depths of the Sea of Wraiths in search of a dangerous criminal, Norway was desperate to hide… even he had to admit that was pushing the line.
As a master of pranks, George knew the difference between a good joke and getting yourself killed. The gap between those two things was very, very wide.
"Maybe we should talk them out of it," Fred said. "Worst comes to worst, we'll just quietly tie them up over Christmas, drag them back to school once term starts, and they won't have time to run off to Norway."
"I like that idea," Gemma said immediately, nodding.
"I think you're going a bit far," Wood muttered, a couple of dark lines practically visible on his forehead. He thought for a while, then asked, "Do any of you already have plans for after Christmas?"
"I don't think so. Why?" Gemma answered first. The others also shook their heads one by one.
Harry especially had none. He meant to spend the entire holiday at school.
"Then how about this?" Wood said. "After Christmas, we all meet up in Norway."
"That way, we can try to stop them if we have to. And if everything turns out to be less dire than it sounds, we get a trip to Norway out of it."
"I remember Professor Kahn mentioning that Norway has a forest called Viking's Tomb that's quite famous in the magical world. If we manage to head them off—or if it turns out they really are just planning a supervised visit—we can explore the forest afterwards."
He checked with each of them in turn. No one objected.
"Settled, then," Wood said firmly.
Far to the north-west, in the remote outskirts of Somerset, a crumbling old castle stood where few ever came.
A deep-blue creature slipped in through one of its broken windows and drifted into the corridor, hovering in the air.
It was a small sprite, a silver-translucent crown glimmering atop its head, starlight swimming in its eyes. It floated forward at a measured pace, wary of everything around it.
Before sending it here, Evans had pored over every scrap of information available on the place. Even so, he had warned it over and over to be careful. At the first hint that something was wrong, it was to flee.
With that warning in mind, the sprite inspected the castle inch by inch.
Every door was opened. Every corner was searched. It combed through the entire place and still found nothing that could be called unusual. Even the painting Evans had specifically mentioned—the one bricked into the wall—got a thorough going-over. No trace of anything odd.
It wasn't surprising. As a castle visible even to Muggles, the place had been combed through for years by every sort of opportunist. There was nothing strange left, and very little of any value either.
If the painting hadn't been sealed into the wall, it probably would not have survived at all.
Satisfied there was nothing here, the sprite prepared to leave.
Just then, it remembered something else.
Evans had said that before it left, it should try activating the mark, just in case that changed anything.
It had no idea why, but it closed its eyes anyway. A moment later, a silvery-white sigil slowly appeared on the back of its left hand.
The next second, a faint rustling sounded close by. The sprite's eyes flew open.
On the wall of the corridor—where there had been nothing moments before—a door now stood. Its surface was impossibly smooth, as if it had always been there.