Chapter 280: The Long Road to Freeing House-elves
On a narrow country lane far from any town, three figures appeared with a soft pop.
One clutched a photograph and rubbed his temples, still slightly dizzy. Another looked around with open curiosity, as if she had never seen such a landscape before.
Between them, a small, wrinkled figure lifted his head and gazed up at the young man beside him with shining gratitude.
As the last of the vertigo cleared from his mind, Evans compared the scene around them to the picture in his hand. Once he was sure they matched, he turned to the small, wrinkled figure and said quietly:
"Thanks, Dobby."
He didn't know any local witches or wizards who could help them extend the Floo Network out here, and the nearest Ministry-connected fireplace was more than two hundred kilometres away. If they travelled to the Ministry first and then flew all the way here, any little mishap on the way back would see them missing curfew at Hogwarts entirely.
Fortunately, Dobby had been willing to help.
The house-elf had once been a servant of the Malfoy family. After the basilisk incident, Dumbledore had followed the trail left by "Mr Smith" and dug up a number of threads connecting to Lucius Malfoy.
They were not enough to put Lucius in Azkaban, but they were more than enough to squeeze him for some… reasonable compensation.
Evans had been the one tasked with "obtaining compensation". Having seen Dobby's behaviour during the affair, and realising how very unlike other house-elves this one was, he had taken the opportunity to ask for the elf as part of the price.
He'd then sent Dobby to work in the Hogwarts kitchens for more than half a month and made a habit of dropping by every night to "borrow" a meal, hoping to build a bit of rapport.
It hadn't worked.
Dobby was deeply grateful to the wizard who had freed him, but gratitude and friendship were clearly not the same thing.
With Harry, on the other hand, the house-elf had already crossed that line. The proof was in the food: Dobby brought Harry something to eat almost every day. In barely two weeks, Harry's cheeks had rounded out noticeably.
Evans, the one who had actually removed the pillowcase and broken the bond, received no such special treatment.
Then again, that might have been because he turned up in the kitchens every evening anyway. Perhaps Dobby thought there was no point in bringing food to someone who never missed a meal.
"There's no need to thank Dobby, sir!" Dobby's bulging eyes were full of feeling. "You freed Dobby. Dobby must follow your orders!"
"There's no 'must' about it. You're a free house-elf now. There's nothing you have to do," Evans said. Seeing the unchanged gratitude in those huge eyes, he could only sigh and let the matter drop.
The slavish obedience of house-elves came partly from the magic of their old contracts and partly from deliberate breeding. Asking them to go against their nature was always going to be an uphill battle.
He had prepared himself for a very long campaign.
Dobby was the most open, cheerful elf he'd been able to find. One way or another, Evans meant to build a real friendship with him.
Having renewed that vow, he turned to the girl at his side with a slightly helpless expression.
He had planned to come alone. The Sprite King's report, just two brief flickers in the mark, meant there was no danger. If there had been, its defensive enchantments would have triggered automatically, alerting every magical creature with a mark within a hundred miles—and sending a much stronger warning back to him.
"First day on the job, you send half the students to the hospital wing. Second day, you're asking for time off," he said. "You're really not worried about getting sacked?"
The girl, however, only waved a hand, completely unconcerned, and took another interested look at the surrounding fields.
"Don't worry. I asked around," Sothia said casually. "As long as nothing truly awful happens, Hogwarts doesn't just toss out Defence Against the Dark Arts professors."
Evans's mouth twitched. He wanted to argue—and discovered, to his irritation, that she was probably right.
Dumbledore had all but exhausted the British wizarding world's supply of witches and wizards with actual combat experience or specialised knowledge of Dark Magic. At the current rate, if they kept changing professors every year, they would soon be scraping together fresh graduates to fill the post.
Fine. If she wanted to tag along, she could tag along. There shouldn't be any real danger. They could treat it as an outing.
He lifted his head and took in the view.
They were far from any city, and the land hadn't been marked out for farming. The result was a stretch of countryside oddly untouched by modern life—rolling grassland, clean air, and at one edge, a stone castle standing against a cliff, casting its own quiet air of mystery over the plain.
Before coming here, Evans had even made a detour to a library in the Scottish Highlands to search for information about this castle.
He had found nothing.
He still had no idea how the Chocolate Frog company had first heard that there was a portrait of Morgana hidden in this place.
The vantage point in the magical painting Dumbledore had lent him lay only a few hundred metres from the castle walls. With such a short distance, Evans hadn't even considered flashing them in. Instead, he'd walked across the grass with Sothia and Dobby, strolling at an easy pace.
They had barely reached the castle doors when a blue-iron shape came darting out through a gap in the stonework. It swooped down, bit a clump of hair from the top of Evans's head, bobbed neatly out of reach of his hand, and drifted back up into the air with an insufferably smug air.
"Where did you even pick up that habit?" Evans muttered, rubbing his scalp. He gave the hovering Sprite King a long-suffering look and decided to ignore it, focusing instead on the castle.
"You called me out here. Did you find something?"
The tiny sprite tilted its head and let out a delighted cry, then began gesturing energetically with both hands and feet as it chattered.
"So, after you activated the mark, a door appeared in the castle?" Evans translated, an eyebrow rising. His mood shifted at once from relaxed to alert, and he peered up at the looming façade.
He had assumed the Sprite King had sensed some leftover enchantments in the stone. As former "magery sprites," creatures of its kind were far more sensitive to magical marks than most beings.
He'd first met the Sprite King while testing a new mark designed to help his magical friends distinguish friend from foe.
Now, though, it looked as though the offhand suggestion he'd made when asking the sprite to scout—"try flaring the mark once before you go"—had actually done something.
If his own gift really had grown out of nature magic, as Merlin's portrait claimed, then any mark he created and bound to these creatures would also be rooted in nature magic.
And if this particular activation didn't result in an attack the way the Dark Wizard King's pyramid had, then the door the sprite had seen was very likely tied to Merlin himself.
And if it was tied to Merlin…
Evans slipped his left hand into his pocket. When it came out again, it held a small crimson sphere.
He looked from the orb to the sealed doors of the ancient castle, and the smile that curved his lips went steadily, unmistakably wicked.