Hagrid hadn't stopped them at first. Young wizards trading a few words hardly counted as trouble in his book.
Small children, hot tempers, a spat when they crossed paths. Ordinary enough.
Or perhaps he was slow to catch on, because by the time he came round to it, the pair of them were close to boiling over.
Cuthbert drawled out another line, James's pitch went up, his arm came up with it, and the whole thing was a breath away from wands. That was when Hagrid moved.
"Enough out of the lot of yeh!"
The bellow came out thick and heavy, a bear growling in its throat, and both sides flinched.
Flossie's ears shot up and she burrowed behind his legs, tail clamped.
"Didn' get yer fill yesterday, is that it?" He glared at the Gryffindors first, the tone hard, the temper under it forgiving. "James, you again. How many times have I told yeh, stop lookin' fer trouble! One day gone, injuries not even healed, an' here yeh are."
Then that broad face swung round to the Slytherins, and the words came out flat and cold.
"You lot. Any more of this an' I'll walk yeh back to Professor Slughorn myself, an' I'll tell him every bit of how yeh carried on!"
Cuthbert's mouth twisted, but he let it drop. Alex took the chance to pull him back.
Hagrid glanced up at the sky. The sun had gone entirely, the canopy of the Forbidden Forest cutting a black silhouette against the horizon, the clouds overhead gone from grey-white to deep grey.
He turned back to Cuthbert's group, brisk and stiff, all business. "You lot follow Flossie an' find the ingredients." He jerked a thumb west. "That dry gully out west, follow it to the end an' there's a scree slope. It's all through the cracks in the rock at the bottom. Don' go in deep. Watch the dog. When she stops, you stop. Past that collapsed old stone wall counts as deep, an' nobody crosses it. Trouble, send sparks up. Red fer help. I'll see 'em."
Cuthbert gave a grunt through his nose, his chin barely moving.
On the walk over he'd been going on about the gamekeeper. A man that size living alone at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, keeping dogs and chickens, the whole forest his territory. It had sounded splendid.
Meeting that face had cooled the curiosity through.
Cuthbert was no fool. The difference in Hagrid's manner was too plain to miss.
The Slytherin faces had all gone cold.
Hagrid turned back, and the warmth flooded straight into his voice for James. "You're with me. We'll take the eastern stretch. That mushroom grows thick over that way."
A huge hand clapped James's shoulder and rocked him on his feet.
He steadied, raised an eyebrow at Cuthbert, and grinned, smug all over.
The Slytherins watched him coldly, and none of them gave him anything.
James's brow furrowed, and he let it go.
Hagrid was still talking. "No wanderin' off, you hear me? Someone gets separated, I can' go huntin' through that forest one by one."
"Off we go."
He waved James's group on and turned east, footsteps heavy, the ground going dull under them.
James followed. Peter trotted to catch up. Lupin looked back once at the Slytherins.
Alex held Flossie's lead, and she went reluctantly in the opposite direction, glancing behind her every few steps.
Sirius walked last of his group. A few paces out, he looked back at that patch of air.
Still nothing.
He didn't look again, only raised an eyebrow, as though annoyed at himself for the whole groundless feeling.
A shake of the head, a turn, a few quick steps to catch James, and his arm went around his friend's shoulders, the shapeless notion tossed away behind him.
Out at the western gully, the canopy closed tighter overhead.
Alex crouched, wound the lead once around his wrist, and patted Flossie's head. Her tail lifted and gave a wag.
Cuthbert went after them, Hermes behind, Lina and Samuel walking side by side at the rear.
Regulus followed at the very back, heading west into the Forbidden Forest.
---
The outer reaches of the Forbidden Forest and its depths were two different worlds. Deep in, the black ran thick enough to choke on, canopy stacked on canopy, no moonlight getting through, every step taken by feel alone.
Out here the trees grew thin. The canopy never closed, and moonlight spilled down between the branches to lay silver-white coins across the ground.
Glowing plants scattered in clumps. Moss sprawled in the cracks between stones, giving off a cold white shimmer.
A few luminescent ferns hugged the rock faces, their glow a warm yellow that cut clean against the moss's chill, like someone had hung a handful of small lanterns through the wood.
Farther off, Luminous mushrooms crouched beneath an old oak, caps pulsing pale green, bright then dim, the rhythm slow as breathing.
Others had no name he knew. Red, blue, violet, pinpricks strewn among rotting leaves and root systems, as though a fistful of shattered light had been flung across the forest floor.
Evening wind moved through, and the lights swayed with the grass blades. Flaring. Guttering.
The deeper they went, the denser the points of light.
In the hollow of one old tree a nest of deep blue fungus lit the opening into a half-lidded eye.
A puddle by their feet held orange seed pods sunk at the bottom. Wind creased the surface and the glow broke into pieces, then gathered itself slowly back.
Overhead some insect carried a speck of cold green past them, leaving a streak that vanished before the eye could hold it.
Damp and rot hung in the air, threaded with the magic bleeding off a hundred different plants, a scent too tangled to name.
The place was quiet. Not truly quiet.
Under every faint glow something lived, brightening and dimming with its own breath.
All those colors made the outer forest look like the bottom of a lake. Still. Dreamlike. Not quite real.
Spend long enough inside the castle at Hogwarts and you forget what kind of world this is.
Out here the forgotten thing surfaced again. This ground underfoot, that sky overhead, and everything hidden between them, far more than any textbook admitted.
Regulus walked at the back of the line, taking it in, and an unserious thought wandered through his head.
A dog, leading several young wizards into the Forbidden Forest.
Put that way it fell apart under the lightest scrutiny. Make it Hagrid's dog, and somehow it held together.
Hagrid took the Gryffindors east. A dog took the Slytherins west. Perfectly reasonable. As though it could hardly have gone any other way.
The forest was dangerous. No secret there. Anyone in magical Britain with a functioning head knew you didn't wander into it casually.
Even the outskirts, even staying shallow, weren't what you'd call safe.
The professors knew that too.
Older students slipping in for a look around, fine, look the other way. But these were second-years.
Chase the thought a little and something came of it.
Every member of staff knew Hagrid. Decades on the grounds. Every professor knew Dumbledore trusted Hagrid, and every professor trusted Dumbledore.
Run the arithmetic and all of them trusted Hagrid.
Hagrid trusted his dog. So tonight Gryffindor got Hagrid in person and Slytherin got Hagrid's dog. Neat division of labor. Nothing to object to.
Hagrid knew the forest too well. He could find those creatures' dens blindfolded, so a dog seemed like plenty of guidance to him.
Whether the dog was up to it was another question. In Hagrid's eyes Flossie was reliable, no doubt. The forest, after all, was full of sweet little things exactly like her.
Dumbledore's trust had taken the long way around and come to rest on a cowardly hound.
Regulus let it go. The professors could worry about that.
As for tonight, with him walking behind them, they could cross the whole forest end to end and nothing would go wrong.