“Ah, yer right, yer right,” Hagrid deflated reluctantly. He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck, still staring into the fire.
“But like I say, maybe there’s a better way. A way that’ll keep Norberta from gallivantin’ off unsupervised into London while also givin’ ‘er what nature demands. But I’ll need help. Yeh three would come along, wouldn’ yeh? After all, yeh’ve come this far already, translatin’ the letter an’ all. Yeh’ve earned it.”
“You make it sound like it’d be a sort of happy holiday,” Ralph shook his head wonderingly.
James tried to imagine what Hagrid was planning. “Ralph’s got a point. This won’t be some half-crazy, potentially dangerous, completely unworkable scheme that will land us all either in Azkaban or dead, will it?”
“O’ course not,” Hagrid shot him a reproachful look that James could clearly see through.
Rose shrugged. “I’m in.”
Ralph boggled at her, his eyes wide with betrayed surprise.
“Of course I’m in,” she repeated to him firmly. “And you are, too! If it keeps Norberta out of the city, then it’s our obligation as citizens of the magical world.”
Ralph’s eyes bulged even more. “You’re as nutters as he is,” he pointed at Hagrid. Rose merely shrugged.
“My uncle Charlie works with dragons in Romania,” James suggested. “I bet if we could somehow get Norberta to him, he’d know how to introduce her to a real male dragon, not some tamed, performing giant snake named Montague Python.” He rolled his eyes.
Hagrid was nodding vigorously, leaning forward in his chair again. “At’s right! Charlie Weasley would know jus’ what to do! All we’d need to do is get Norberta to ‘im!”
“Oh, that’s all, eh?” Ralph said with mock relief. “All we need to do is transport a five ton Norwegian Ridgeback across international borders while keeping her secret from both the Muggle world, who would faint in droves at the mere sight of her, and the magical authorities, who would arrest us on sight for transporting an illegal beast and endangering the Vow of Secrecy.”
Rose shrugged and suppressed a smile. “You make it sound so easy, Ralph.”
“It’d be one thing if she could fly,” James mused. “One of us could just ride her. But her wing’s never fully healed, right Hagrid?”
“Over land is the only way,” Hagrid nodded, grimacing at the thought of the dragon’s handicap. His eyes sharpened as a thought struck him. “Over land or…”
“Or what?” Ralph clarified skeptically.
“Er, nothin’,” Hagrid said, suddenly pushing to his feet.
“Nothin’ at all. Ferget I said anythin’. For now, it’s late. I should’a sent yeh three back to yer dormitories hours ago. What kind o’ teacher am I?
A ruddy irresponsible one, t’ keep yeh out like this.” But he was merely babbling. James could tell that the big man was caught in the unaccustomed grip of an idea. The mad glint in his eyes was almost comically intent. James half-expected steam to burst from Hagrid’s ears.
“You won’t do anything stupid without us, will you?” Rose asked, shrugging into her coat as Hagrid virtually broomed them from the hut.
“Don’t listen to her,” Ralph countered. “Feel free to do all the stupid things you want without us.”
“G’night, yeh three!” Hagrid bid them, smiling tightly through his bristly beard. “Straight back to th’ castle with yeh now. No lollygaggin’.”
A moment later, the door boomed shut, closing off the glow of the hut. The warmth of it still surrounded the three students, but James could feel it tattering away in the snow-flecked wind.
“Come on,” he shrugged. “He’ll call on us when he needs us.”
Ralph shook his head as they started their tramp toward the wintry-frosted castle. “You make it sound like you’re looking forward to it.”
“You don’t have to come along when the time comes, Ralph,”
Rose said primly.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Ralph moaned in a terse voice. “But I know how these things go. I’ll end up getting sucked along anyway, somehow. I always do. And James will end up needing my wand for some reason because he lost his or broke it somehow. Or there will be some task that only I can do because, I don’t know, I’m the right height, or the rest of you are in mortal danger, or busy battling mythical beasts of terror or something.”
“And that seriously makes you not want to come?” James grinned.
“It won’t be like that this time,” Rose said firmly as they shuffled into the courtyard, kicking snowy powder before them. “It’s a simple enough job. Uncle Charlie will know exactly what to do. All we have to do is get Norberta to him.”
“Ah, I know all about simple, easy, totally safe jobs with you lot,” Ralph sighed dourly. “Turns out they never are.”
James didn’t say so, but he expected that Ralph was more right than even Rose was willing to admit.
11. – Blackbrier quoit
No word came from Hagrid before the Christmas holidays, leaving James free to attend to his packing and planning and general trepidation about his trip with Millie. He remembered to bring his dress robes and secretly dreaded having to wear them. He thought about being alone with Millie outside of school and felt both nervous and feverishly excited about the prospect. Would they be unsupervised a lot of the time? Or even more supervised than they were at school? What would her parents and family be like? Millie had attempted to describe them and warn him of certain eccentricities, but he hadn’t absorbed much of it. The only thing he understood for certain, based on her descriptions, was that the Vandergriffs had a much different lifestyle than any James had ever encountered. Scorpius had summed it up when he had described them as “old magic”, although James had only the vaguest idea of what that meant.
The train ride back to London was typically raucous, the compartments filled with happy students, the corridors decorated with pine boughs, colourful enchanted light globes, and foot-long candy canes. The cart lady’s wares consisted entirely of holiday cookies, miniature mincemeat pies, sugar snowballs, cocoa cockroaches, and pepper-imp snaps. Millie bought several of everything and distributed them to the crowded compartment they shared. James accepted a palm-sized mince pie with a sheepish smile. He barely knew any of the people crammed into the compartment, most of them being Millie’s friends, her fellow Hufflepuffs, although a few were at least familiar faces from Night Quidditch. For their part, they seemed to accept James as one of their own, based solely on his connection to Millie.