Before setting out that evening, Regulus stopped by his dormitory.
Baruk lay sprawled in the fireplace, flames wrapped around him.
Footsteps registered. He rolled out of the coals, eight legs pushing him upright, pincers clicking twice toward the door and kicking up a few sparks.
Regulus sat at the desk, pulled the soft leather pouch from a drawer, and drew out a cut of Swedish Short-Snout neck.
Baruk launched himself out of the hearth and landed on the desktop, legs scrabbling, pincers spread, and tore straight in.
He used to take whatever he was given. One platter at Malfoy Manor, picked over at his leisure, and he'd never settled for less again.
Not a problem. Regulus could afford it, so the creature could eat well.
Watching him strip the meat, Regulus considered taking Baruk back to Aragog's nest sometime.
Let that crowd of Acromantulas still gnawing on Gnomes see what a spider who ran with him ate these days.
Want some? I've hidden dragon meat at Hogwarts. Go find it.
He let Baruk eat a while longer, magical perception spreading over him out of habit.
The Salamander component had grown fully into Baruk's magical system.
A month and a half since Christmas.
The fire affinity he'd grafted in had started as a single isolated branch, wedged in the gap between the venom glands and the silk glands, propped up by a cushion of verdant magic that kept rejection from squeezing it out.
Now that branch had knitted into Baruk's original circuits.
---
With Baruk fed, it was his own turn. The group went down to the Great Hall together for supper.
Detention or not, you ate first. Nobody served out a punishment on an empty stomach.
The meal didn't run long. By the time they came out of the Hall the light had begun to drop.
Mid-February evening, half the sun already gone, the castle's shadow lying at a slant across the lawn and stretching all the way to the black edge of the Forbidden Forest.
The sun had caught behind the western slope, half a ring of orange left, the cloud layer sagging low and burned dark red.
Cuthbert led, long strides, talking fast, excitement coming off him in waves.
The Forbidden Forest was fun on its own. With Regulus along, better still.
His mouth never stopped. The forest, the gamekeeper, serving detention alongside Potter's crowd, which was bound to be worth watching.
Alex walked beside him, nodding now and then, pace steady enough, a thread of tension under it that never reached his face.
Hermes trailed at the back, listless as ever, hands in his pockets, eyelids at half mast, shoulders sunk.
His eyes had sharpened a little compared to the dormitory, though. The name of the place did something for him. More interesting than lessons, at minimum.
Lina and Samuel walked ahead of him.
Lina's head turned everywhere, excitement wrapped around nerves.
She'd speed up two steps to catch Cuthbert's chatter, then fall back to tug Samuel's sleeve, muttering about whether the forest held any of the things the books claimed.
Samuel kept his eyes down and said little, more nervous than eager, though not frightened.
She rose on her toes for another look at the treeline, then turned to hurry him along. He scuffed his heels twice and picked up the pace.
Stories about that forest had circulated at Hogwarts for centuries. Werewolves, Quintapeds, trees that ate people. First-years got warned off it on day one.
Break the rules and you got detention, and the detention was a trip into the forest. The whole arrangement carried the pull of the forbidden.
Regulus walked in the middle and left Cuthbert's stream of questions alone. The boy didn't need answers. His mouth was simply running ahead of him.
Ahead, Hagrid's hut emerged from the shadow of the treeline.
A crooked wooden thing, squat, a thin ribbon of white smoke off the stone chimney, a small vegetable patch fenced beside it, empty this time of year, nothing sown.
On the open ground by the door, the four Gryffindors had already arrived.
James's voice carried across the whole clearing. Sirius crouched by the vegetable patch, teasing a dog with a stick.
Lupin stood watching. Peter hung back a few paces behind Hagrid, glancing at the forest at intervals.
Regulus brushed a hand through the air in front of himself.
His improved Disillusionment Charm spread without a sound.
Cuthbert caught the vanishing at the edge of his vision and turned to look. Alex noticed too, one eyebrow going up and back down before he kept walking.
Both had seen the charm before, up on the Astronomy Tower, where they'd been under it themselves.
Hermes hadn't, but he recognized it.
A person disappearing out of thin air earned one lift of his eyelids before they drooped again. He pulled a hand from his pocket, shifted it, and put it back.
Lina and Samuel froze outright, the pair of them staring at empty air, slow to recover.
Lina's mouth opened. She turned to Samuel, on the verge of asking what spell that was and how a living person went missing like that.
Samuel clamped a hand on her arm. Over by the hut, Potter's lot had spotted them.
She tidied the blankness off her face fast and walked on as though nothing had happened.
The five of them crossed to the clearing beside the hut and stopped a few meters from Hagrid and the Gryffindors.
Cuthbert put the excitement away, chin lifting, shoulders settling back, nothing left of the boy from the walk over. He'd gone stiff and formal in a single breath.
Alex moved up two steps to stand at his shoulder. Hermes stayed behind them, flicking a glance toward Potter and withdrawing it.
Lina's chin came out from her scarf, arranged into something cool. Samuel stood beside her with his back straightened, a good measure taller than usual.
The front of the hut was noisy.
Potter's group had Hagrid surrounded, all of them chattering, audible from a distance.
James Potter stood dead center, head tipped back, talking with his hands going, black hair sticking up, energy pouring out of him with nowhere to put it.
"...they say there are unicorns, is that true? What else? What's the most dangerous thing in there?"
He fired off a string of questions, worked up, eyes bright, ready to bolt into the trees on the spot.
His grin split to his ears. "My father says there's a Manticore in there, and hardly any wizard can beat one. Is that right?"
Hagrid's beard quivered. His voice came rough and warm, carrying that natural fondness for Gryffindors.
"Rubbish, there's no such thing in there." He waved a hand, scratched at the tangle of his beard, and grinned. "It's the Acromantulas yeh want ter watch fer, though. Don' go wanderin' in. Those big fellas aren't ones ter cross."
He wore a thick leather waistcoat patched in several places, sleeves rolled to the elbow, two heavy forearms bare.
Old scars crawled all over them, most of them earned dealing with whatever lived in that forest over the years.
James's eyes went brighter still. He grabbed Hagrid's arm and hung off it bodily. "Acromantulas! Where? How big?"
"Can' tell yeh that." Hagrid looked down at him, raised the arm to lift him, then lowered it, indulgence blurring the words. "You lot are trouble enough without askin'. Dangerous, they are."
"We're not scared of dangerous." James dropped down and elbowed Lupin, squinting at him. "Right, Remus?"
Lupin staggered sideways, righted himself, and answered gently without much conviction behind it. "I think we'd be better off not..."
"So which part's the worst?" James cut across him and leaned back in toward Hagrid, all teeth. "The bit you absolutely can't go into."
"What're yeh askin' that for?" The smile pulled back and something wary crossed Hagrid's face. "Anywhere dangerous, not one of yeh sets foot in!"
"Only asking," James said, cheerfully unbothered. "How can we steer clear of the dangerous bits if we don't know where they are?"
Sound enough logic. Hagrid walked straight into it, scratching his broad face and rambling on. "Well, that ol' stretch east, there's a lot in there, bad ground. An' over west there's a place where..."
"Never you mind about all that!" Halfway through he caught what the boy was doing and stopped himself dead, glaring. "Yeh stick with me. Not one step anywhere else."
James didn't get the rest, and didn't mind. He turned and waggled his eyebrows at Lupin.
He had the technique down. Hagrid couldn't hold a secret. He'd insist he wasn't telling you a thing and then leak it himself after three exchanges.
Last term James had pried the same way and come away with a nest of enormous spiders deep in the forest, eight eyes apiece.
Ever since, that nest had been the thing they all wanted to go and see.
Sirius crouched by the vegetable patch, working a stick at Flossie.
Flossie was a hound, big enough that lying down she still stood half a head above him. Her great skull rested on her front paws.
Nervous creature, though. Tail tucked between her back legs, round eyes tracking the stick left and right, wanting to lunge and not daring, a low rumble in her throat.
Sirius swung the stick left and her head followed. Swung it right and it followed back.
He grinned. The tip of her tail crept out from between her legs and gave a few experimental wags.
He raised the stick high. She looked up, scrabbled twice at the ground with her forepaws, then curled into a ball and quit.
He reached out and rubbed her ears. Her eyes narrowed, a hind leg kicked without meaning to, and her tail slapped the ground, thump, thump.
He put some effort into it, muttering something to the dog, wearing that look of caring about absolutely nothing.
Peter huddled off to one side, several paces from Hagrid, unwilling to come closer, his eyes moving between the black of the forest and Hagrid's broad face. This detention terrified him.
Lupin watched James and Hagrid go back and forth, expression mild.
Whenever James's talk ran off the edge, he'd drop in a line and haul it back without any fuss, the only one there who seemed to remember they'd come for a punishment and not an expedition.
Regulus stood a few meters off, studying Hagrid from under the charm.
Second time meeting the big man properly.
The first was first-year arrival, Hagrid holding an enormous oil lamp at the station, bellowing for the first-years, ferrying boatload after boatload across the Black Lake to the castle doors.
At the castle his frame had filled half the doorway, his voice loud enough to wake the portraits on the staircase.
Hogwarts, where the dream started, and Hagrid was the one who led them in.
Not only twice, strictly speaking.
He'd made more trips into the forest than he could count, and most of his landings put him near this hut.
Through the window he'd seen that bulk several times, always asleep, snoring audibly through the wall, rattling the panes.
Plenty of sightings, then. Face to face, this was the second.
Magical perception followed his line of sight.
Beyond the weight and sluggishness his giant blood gave him, Hagrid's magic held nothing worth noting.
Crude, diffuse, showing traces of proper training but nothing skilled. Nowhere in the running among wizards.
That hide, though. That was interesting.
Blunt, thick, dense and solid, giant-born, carrying a natural resistance to curses.
Magic barely moved along the surface of it. Set into the skin rather than flowing over it, capable of bouncing an incoming spell off or scattering it.
A young wizard's spell probably wouldn't leave a mark. Even a grown one would have to put his back into it.
Nothing remarkable in the layer itself, purely physiological, no technique in it whatsoever.
Regulus withdrew his gaze, and a thought surfaced that struck him as faintly funny.
By one measure, Hagrid was the wizarding world's number one.
How many people had Voldemort personally framed?
Exactly one.
Tom Riddle, Slytherin's star pupil, Voldemort, the Dark Lord, had gone to deliberate trouble as a schoolboy to pin his crime on Hagrid.
He loosed the Basilisk. He killed Myrtle. And he dumped every bit of it on a big dim Gryffindor who kept spiders.
He opened the Chamber of Secrets.
Hagrid's wand was snapped on the spot. He went to Azkaban, lost his education, and was thrown out of Hogwarts.
And Dumbledore believed him.
Only a Transfiguration professor at the time, nowhere near the Headmaster's chair, and he still shielded Hagrid, kept him at Hogwarts as gamekeeper, a post he'd held for decades since.
Pull it apart and it was an early exchange between Dumbledore and Voldemort, fought at a distance.
One wanting the great oaf finished. The other wanting him saved.
Back and forth, and the prize was a half-giant with no wand left, fit only to mind a forest.
Two wizards at the summit of the wizarding world, and decades ago they'd fought a round over him.
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