Jul-95

Chapter 8

July 1995

* * *

"Charlie's in the Order too," said George, "but he's still in Romania. Dumbledore wants as many foreign wizards brought in as possible, so Charlie's trying to make contacts on his days off." – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 4

* * *

30 June, 1995

Dad

Charlie smirked. Bill relocating back to London was an interesting tidbit, and he rightly suspected there was far more to this story than his father had let on. But the rest of it was nothing but inane drivel. Molly Weasley not remembering a random domestic fact like where something was stored, no matter how trivial? Dad's testing the limits of plausibility there.

Charlie tapped the worthless note with his wand and muttered a soft, "Veritas revelio." Instantly, the words on the page began to float and swirl about, the ink dissolving and rearranging into the message his father had really intended to convey. Continental distances like the one that separated him from his family were too great for Patronuses to navigate, so the Order had keyed some special parchment to recognize Charlie's magical signature alone, thereby keeping communications between him and the rest of the Order secret.

Charlie – The worst of news, I'm afraid. Horrible tragedy at the Triwizard Tournament – Harry was kidnapped during the final trial by You-Know-Who. Harry escaped, thank Merlin, but You-Know-Who's fully re-corporealized now and, according to Harry's testimony, has reassembled his minions. We've no idea yet what He's got planned, but reckon Harry likely remains a target. The Ministry's no help at all – Fudge has stuck his head in the sand on this for so long that he's retaliating against anyone who tries to tell the truth or sound a warning. We're not at home this summer, so don't respond to this message or attempt to contact us unless it's an emergency. Dumbledore's got Bill back in England to keep a closer eye on things at Gringotts. He wants you to focus your efforts on supportive relations and recruitment if possible, rather than any more of that nasty bear business.

Stay safe, son.

Charlie tossed the scrap of parchment into the hearth and incinerated it. He stared at the flames as they quickly consumed the fuel, then watched the glowing embers die until a last gasp of smoke left the crumbling ash.

"Not good news?" Sasha asked softly, pressing a steaming cup of tea into Charlie's hand.

Charlie gazed out the window at a picture-perfect, rosy dawn breaking over the meadow. "Not good, no," he repeated, suppressing a shudder.

Sasha silently squeezed his shoulder, then left him to his thoughts.

Voldemort. He's back. For real.

By the time the sun rose fully on the warm midsummer day, Charlie, Sasha, and several other keepers were stationed on a large, elevated observation platform – one of many on the rez – peering out in every direction through Omnioculars. It was the height of mating season, and the keepers were attempting to track new dragon mating pairs. The quiet task of scanning the horizon did little to dispel the growing worry in Charlie's mind, however.

The thought of Voldemort returning to power filled him with leaden dread. The vision of his baby brother constantly standing beside his best mate Harry, offering little more to the Death Eaters than a ginger target, sickened him further. He tried to rationalize that, with the entire Order working to ensure Harry's safety, it might mean Ron would benefit from all that protection, too.

He was glad for the distraction when he spotted movement on the horizon. Spinning the Omnioculars' dials to bring the scene into better focus, he called out, "Western quadrant, section seventeen, heading southwest." On a portable desk situated behind him under a protected area of the platform, a Dicto-quill dutifully recorded his observation in an official reservation log book, automatically tagging the entry with a date and time stamp, as well as his initials as the witness.

As the view through the Omnioculars resolved, Charlie uttered a small snort of surprise upon recognizing one of the dragons in flight: it was Norbert, a body length ahead of three older males Charlie also recognized on sight. The little rush of semi-paternal pride he felt to see the young fellow again was tempered with wry sympathy. At a mere three years old, inexperienced Norbert wouldn't have an icicle's chance of catching a Ridgie female in her mating flight. Poor fellow! Maybe next year, mate.

He called out their identification codes, Norbert's first, as he was in the lead (for the moment, anyway). "NR-1992-c, NR-1989-a, NR-1989-d, NR-1986-a." Only one of the other three males had actually hatched on the Romanian reservation – incidentally, the oldest. The other two had been brought in during the ensuing years for breeding purposes – which they were in the process of fulfilling. The Dicto-quill scratched against the parchment of the log book, entering the data.

He was a little surprised the other males even tolerated Norbert's presence at all. By now, an adolescent male like him usually would have been put in his place by the older, more experienced males, either with an in-flight blast of fire, body-slam, or tail-whip. With another mild flush of pride, Charlie reckoned it might be due to Norbert's unusual size, which really was impressive. He could hardly blame the young fellow for giving it a go, after all. Good on ya, Norbert! he chuckled to himself.

After watching the three older males jostling for position behind Norbert for another minute, Charlie at last scanned the horizon ahead of them, searching for the female in heat leading them on. Then he did a double-take, unable to find her. What the...?

A thought occurred to him, and he sucked in his breath. Could it be? Carefully, he scanned the horizon once more, searching for confirmation. Sure enough, there was nothing but the four Ridgies in view.

Female dragons were generally a bit larger in size and a little faster in flight than males of the same species. But aside from these vague and unreliable distinctions, dragons had no external gender characteristics upon which to base a designation of male or female. Thus the sex of a newly hatched dragon couldn't be determined until his or her first mating flight...

"Merlin's rotten knob – Norbert's a girl!" Charlie shouted. As the other keepers on the platform chuckled at his shocked exclamation, he marveled at the effect a mere name had on one's impressions. Even though he'd known on a technical level that Norbert's gender was indeterminate, the name Hagrid had christened the baby dragon with had led Charlie to unconsciously presume otherwise. He'd always thought of the dragon as a male.

"I'll be hexed!" Charlie chuckled as he watched the courtship enfold. The older male began fighting with one of the youths, the two of them blasting fire and bellowing threats. Meanwhile, the other young male ignored them, keeping his eyes on the prize ahead. Soon, Norbert and the young stud left the other ones well behind.

Apparently satisfied with the outcome of the race, Norbert slowed enough to allow the pursuing male to fly even with her. He then mounted her, performing the contortion of draconian copulation: his legs gripped her body, his long neck and tail wrapped around hers. Now fully supporting both their weights on her wings alone, Norbert began to lose altitude.

"Oi, go easy on her, you bastard," Charlie grumbled quietly as they plummeted precariously, and several chuckles answered him. Somebody murmured, "Proud papa," which was followed by more chuckles.

The amorous act itself didn't take long to complete – less than thirty seconds, according to the timer on the Omnioculars. Then the groom disengaged himself and, trumpeting in a manner Charlie could only guess was alluring, beckoned his bride to follow him back to his lair. There she would lay her eggs in October, soon after the first snowfall, sit them until they hatched the following spring while he brought kills back to feed her, then they would share equally the rest of the parenting duties from there on out. Norbert would make her home with him for the next two and a half years as they raised their offspring together, then the two would part ways once the dragonlets finally left the nest, never to cohabitate again. As a species, dragons were notoriously non-monogamous.

He cleared his throat and, for the Dicto-quill's benefit, pronounced, "NR-1992-c confirmed female. NR-1989-d successfully mated with NR-1992-c."

The excitement of Norbert's revelatory mating flight soon faded and was eventually replaced as the most interesting event of the day when a lightening-fast Hungarian Horntail romeo out-maneuvered a small crowd of lumbering Ironbelly males to mate with a female Ironbelly. Wagers began flying fast and furious between the keepers as to whether the Horntail's lair was big enough to house her, whether the resultant hybrids would be viable, much less fertile, whether the nasty beasties wouldn't kill each other once hatched, and what the hell such an unholy union might look like. A behemoth with such wicked armor promised to be intimidating, to say the least.

That evening, Charlie and Sasha joined a large group of keepers at a tavern in one of the four magical villages that bordered the rez. Of the four towns – Piteşti (meaning "you hide", but not to be confused with the Muggle town of the same name), Rataciti ("the lost ones"), Nevazut ("unseen") and Comoara ("treasure") – Comoara was the most populous. Each were busy little communities in their own right, populated and frequented by wizards and witches buying, selling, or bartering their wares, having largely escaped the economic effects their Muggle neighbors' experiments with communism. The cheeriness of the magical denizens contrasted sharply with their dour, depressed Muggle counterparts elsewhere.

The Comoaran tavern most frequented by the keepers – Afumaţi (which meant "never sober" in Romanian slang) – was certainly aptly named. The cozy log edifice with a sharply peaked roof was inviting and, whenever patronized by the local keeper population, generally rowdy. The owners, Marku Bălan and his daughter, Ileana, were friendly and mostly tolerant of the boisterous antics of the keepers. Ileana, in particular, was pretty but sharp-tongued, serving as the object of many rebuffed advances and the source of a few broken hearts over the years.

Charlie and Sasha sat at a table away from the clamor at the bar, joining Ghenadie Negrescu, the Head Keeper, and his Hungarian partner, Zoltan Nagy. Ghenadie was in his early sixties, and his partner was perhaps a decade younger, but such distinctions were difficult to discern in their equally wizened faces. The exposure to years of harsh mountain environment aged keepers prematurely, and Charlie understood he was looking at his own likely grizzled future.

The four of them sat quietly, drinking their pints. Charlie watched as Ileana served shots of ţuică, fended off a flirtatious Bohdan Grabowski, then scurried away from Laslo Petkov's inebriated attempt at an embrace. But while the rest of the keeper crowd laughed uproariously at the failed advances, Charlie couldn't even summon a grin.

"You're awfully preoccupied. What's got you so worried, young Weasley?" Ghenadie asked.

Charlie gave a halfhearted smile and small shrug, not intending to answer, but Sasha said, "He got bad news from home today. Probably about this Voldemort character, I'm guessing."

Charlie shot him an irritated look – Why does he insist on saying the name? He'd explained to Sasha everything about the Order and their suspicions about You-Know-Who ages ago, but hadn't yet shared the morning's news about the Tournament fiasco. Small wonder Sasha had correctly deduced what about the letter had triggered Charlie's distraction, and he'd been encouraging Charlie to go to Ghenadie with his Order concerns for a while now. But Charlie didn't like feeling pushed into it.

Ghenadie and Zoltan both stiffened at the mention of the name, and Ghenadie scowled. "I have not heard this name in many years. Why do you bring it up?"

Charlie felt the need to tread a bit more carefully now. The majority of the keepers on the Romanian rez had been schooled at Durmstrang, after all. Charlie had heard You-Know-Who had many sympathizers there, but Sasha could neither confirm nor deny the rumor. Still, if his mission was to recruit possible allies against him and his Death Eaters, he'd have to feel out everyone's loyalties at some point, something he couldn't very well do without declaring his own.

"My parents fought against V-Voldemort when I was a boy," Charlie explained, stammering slightly when he uttered the horrible name out loud. "They have reason to believe he was not destroyed but, instead, hid out all these years in Albania in some disembodied form or another. He's now returned to England, conjured his body once more, and reassembled his followers."

Charlie's announcement resulted in some grumbling from Ghenadie and Zoltan both. He wasn't sure what this signified, but decided to make the leap anyway. "My family and I are members of an organization sworn to fight against them. So, yes, I'm worried."

Ghenadie looked hard at Charlie for several moments, then sniffed. He took a drink of his beer. He looked at Zoltan for a few more moments. Then, he leaned against their table with one elbow, edging slightly closer to Charlie, and spoke in a low voice.

"When I was a younger man, a fellow I went to school with tried to recruit me and several others to serve this Dark Lord person, promising unlimited power and untold rewards to be reaped for loyal service. And I told him what I'm about to tell you now: why the hell should I give a toss? I'm my own man here, and I do as I please. That greedy bastard isn't my problem, and I don't fancy makin' him mine any time soon.

"Now, I understand you're family's involved, Charlie, and I respect your loyalty to them – it's right and proper." Then he fixed Sasha with a pointed stare. "What you and any of my keepers do on their own time, on their own conscience, is their business. But I'm not stupid enough to join some crusade fought halfway around the world..."

"You think that's where it'll stay?" Charlie countered. "If he gets what he wants, takes Britain under his thumb, you think he'll be content with that? I don't need a damned crystal ball to tell you a megalomaniac like him is gonna set his sights elsewhere. And, no offense intended, but he's likely to assume a certain fellowship with Durmstrang alumni. It very well might bring him here next."

"That a threat?" Ghenadie growled.

"Don't be stupid, Ghenadie," Sasha countered before Charlie could reply. "Charlie's only arguing that such a dangerous madman is everyone's problem. Regardless of any ethical imperative, on a purely practical, self-interested basis, it would behoove us all to defeat him before he has the chance to gain any more power or allies."

Ghenadie sat back in his seat and gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment, conceding Sasha's point. Charlie shot his partner a thankful look, grateful he hadn't managed to land himself in any more trouble with his boss.

"That idiot, Karkaroff didn't seem to fare too well for as long as he was aligned with him, that's for sure," Zoltan offered.

"You mean the Durmstrang Highmaster?" Charlie's interest perked immediately – he recognized the name from the Triwizard Tournament last year. He'd known, of course, that Karkaroff had been a Death Eater – but not his role within them. He wondered if this might be information Dumbledore would be interested in.

Ghenadie snorted disdainfully while Zoltan gave a little nod. "Like Ghenadie said, Igor tried to recruit more followers amongst us. I don't think he was very successful, though, nor did this bode very well for him with his master. My impression of this Dark Lord fellow is that he's not a very pleasant one, or very good at taking disappointment in stride."

"Knowing Igor as I did, I suspect he promised his master rather more than he could deliver," Ghenadie chuckled morbidly.

"He did become quite desperate toward the end of all that, didn't he?" Zoltan agreed. "Still, the slippery bastard landed on his feet, eh? Managed to set up his own little fiefdom at Durmstrang, he did."

"He was my Curses Professor," Sasha grumbled. "And I wasn't the only one who hated his guts. I heard he made Highmaster the year after I left."

Charlie spared a sympathetic glance for Sasha. He knew his partner had been very unhappy at Durmstrang but little else about his experience there – Sasha disliked talking about his school days. "Karkaroff was a convicted Death Eater. Spent some time in Azkaban. He sold others out to buy his own release," Charlie said, offering what little he knew about the man.

"If what you say is true, and this Voldemort fellow is back, he might very well be indisposed toward our dear Igor," Ghenadie mused. "Karkaroff's probably holed himself up in his precious Durmstrang office, pissing himself at the thought."

Charlie took another drink before trying once more to persuade his audience. "Karkaroff or not, You-Know-Who is going to seek out influence here. Just like he did last time, he's going to come looking for support. And I don't think he takes no for an answer. One way or another, you're going to have to choose a side."

Ghenadie leveled a piercing look at Charlie. "Keepers take care of their own, boy. We'll fight to the death to defend you from attack, just like you'd do for any of us. That's our way. But if you're asking me to join some idealistic army to defend a bunch of foreigners from one of their own, no matter how mad or evil... the answer's no. I'll deal with the bastard when he's on my doorstep and not before. And then, by God, he'll regret the day he ever thought to cross a keeper."

"And who will come to our aid, Ghenadie, when that day comes?" Sasha pressed.

"We won't be asking for help," Ghenadie growled.

"Then we'll all be dead," Sasha argued, glaring right back.

"I'm not invincible, but rest assured I'll be taking several of them to hell with me," Ghenadie warned malevolently.

The pending confrontation was headed off when Ileana appeared with four new pints. "You look ready for a fresh round, boys," she said, then set the glasses on the table before each man without asking.

"Ah, Ileana, you're the light of my life," Zoltan chuckled, eager to change the subject. "Run away with me, doll."

"And what would Lizuca say to that?" Ileana countered, referring to a local woman that could loosely be described as Zoltan's girlfriend – whenever he bothered to look her up, that is. Zoltan viewed romantic relationships in a very stereotypically keeper-ish manner: he participated in them only insofar as they were at his convenience.

"What she doesn't know won't hurt her," Zoltan teased back, daring to lay a hand on Ileana's hip.

Her hand darted out in a lightening-quick slap to Zoltan's face – though Charlie couldn't detect any real anger or force behind it. Suffering such liberties was the price to be paid by a pretty barmaid, he supposed, and he strongly suspected Ileana viewed the situation similarly. As long as business was good and bills were paid, such behavior, while discouraged, was mostly tolerated.

The rest of the table laughed genially – Zoltan certainly didn't begrudge her, offering a wink and a smile that signaled he enjoyed such spunk from a lass. As she collected their empty glasses, Ileana yelled in vain at a small group of whores who'd just entered the bar to take their business elsewhere. Bohdan yelled back, insisting these women were his cousins, and he'd duel anyone who called them whores again. Everyone knew his claim for the preposterous lie it was, but Ileana only rolled her eyes, and the rest of the keepers in the bar laughed.

The rest of the evening played out as was typical. Four keepers slunk off with the four whores, a few others left to pay visits to their "girlfriends" or whatever other woman they could finagle into bedding them for the night. A townie ribbed Viorel Iliescu about his name – which meant "bluebell," and Merlin knew he'd been teased enough about it that he ought to be able to take the jibes a bit better – but an all-out brawl ensued, wrecking several tables, chairs, and a vast amount of glassware before Charlie, Sasha, Ghenadie, and Zoltan managed to shove them outside and break it up. Ghenadie escorted the local yokel home while Zoltan marshaled Viorel back to the rez. Meanwhile, Charlie and Sasha offered to help Marku and Ileana clear up the mess.

Marku accepted their offer gratefully. "Ah, my quiet friends. I can always count on you two to keep your heads, yes? Not so hot-blooded, thank goodness!" He beckoned Sasha over to help him right the toppled furnishings and repair the broken ones.

Charlie made his way over to Ileana, who was sorting her way through a carpet of broken glass, filtering out the largest pieces. "Sorry about this mess," he offered.

"It isn't your fault," she sighed. She summoned two brooms and, while she charmed the larger fragments back together again, he began directing the brooms to sweep up the bits that were beyond repair. When she'd salvaged two trays full of reconstructed glasses, he helped her carry them back to the bar.

As she sent each glass back to its proper place in the cupboards, she said in an almost distracted manner, "My father's right. You and Sasha, you never cause trouble. Never chase after the whores like the others. What's your story?"

Charlie shrugged a little nervously. "No story. Just prefer quiet to trouble, I suppose."

Ileana gave him a measuring look that made him want to squirm. "Is it a broken heart you're nursing? Some stupid woman mistreated you in the past? Is that why you never take up with any of the bimbos here?"

Unsure of what to say, he just shook his head and shrugged again, riveting his attention to sweeping up the detritus of the fight.

But instead of quelling the conversation, his reticent behavior somehow drew Ileana closer. She squeezed his bicep, and her hand lingered on his arm until he looked at her. "I can see you're a private man, as should be expected from someone so quiet and well-mannered. I respect that." Then she pressed a soft kiss to his cheek and whispered into his ear, "If you ever want someone to help you forget whatever that bitch did to you, you know where to find me."

Charlie swallowed. Guiltily, he stole a quick glance at Sasha. Much to his chagrin, Sasha was looking right at him, a slight, patient smile on his face. And to his further mortification, Ileana noticed, too.

"It's okay," she murmured, stepping slightly away. "I understand. You're shy about this. No one else needs to know. But the offer stands, Charlie. Anytime."