"One is supposed to say, isn't one, that there was a time when she was… not as she now is," Lucius said softly. "But if there was, I never saw it, and I've known the family since I was a child. At best there was a time when she was more discreet, or at least understood that she'd gain nothing and possibly lose a great deal by letting the extent of her little obsessions be known."
"She terrified me," Percy said, and hadn't meant to say it at all; but he hadn't slept well since his interview with Bellatrix, and new rumors about Death Eaters gathering strength and numbers had set the Minister's entire office on edge – the more so since no one was allowed to speak of them.
Lucius lifted an eyebrow. "You've no idea how many kinds of fool I would think you if you weren't terrified of her. Being afraid of Bellatrix Lestrange is a very useful survival trait. Being afraid of her and still able to get information from her is a more useful trait yet. What did you learn?"
"She thinks that You-Know-Who's ultimate goal is to destroy everything and everyone, even his own followers."
"Hm. Well, I doubt that that's his goal, but that may well be what it comes to in the end. Bellatrix may be mad but she's very perceptive. I wonder…" Lucius trailed off and looked thoughtfully out the window.
"She said something about not being the greatest of her Lord's servants. And said it as if she knew something, as if… well, as if he had some sort of elite force held in reserve. When I told her that I found it hard to believe that he had any greater servants than her, she said that I knew nothing. And that I'd come to know, and wish I were still ignorant."
He watched closely, but there was no flicker of recognition or realization in Lucius' face. There was only a small frown, and Lucius lifted a hand to run his forefinger absently back and forth across his lower lip. "Bellatrix was imprisoned two years after I was," he said finally, slowly, thinking. "It's possible that she's talking about developments that were after my time."
"Or that she was lying," Percy offered.
Lucius shook his head a little. "Bellatrix is a Slytherin to the bone. She doesn't lie very often. She misleads, misdirects, shades, distorts, and engages in verbal sleight-of-hand, but outright lying is… well, gauche, I suppose, and we resent being driven to it. It's possible she only meant that there are other Death Eaters still at large who are as dangerous as she – a belief I think I'd contest, but it's possible that she believes it. Or…" His frown deepened and he rose to go and stand at the window, clasping his hands loosely behind his back.
"Or?" Percy asked finally.
"Do you know, I wonder if she's talking about Peter Pettigrew," Lucius said thoughtfully.
"P-Pettigrew?" Percy stammered, feeling the blood drain out of his face. Scabbers, Percy's rat and then Ron's, watching them all with human eyes. "But – but he's nothing, a coward, a traitor, grovelling in front of the Dark Lord like –"
"Like you would, if you were in front of him and grovelling meant that you could get out of the room with your life, limbs, and faculties intact," Lucius interrupted dryly. "A traitor, yes, a coward possibly, certainly without Bellatrix's more, shall we say, florid traits – but more effective than any of the rest of us in bringing Voldemort back, more effective even than Bellatrix who passionately desired the return of her Lord. That alone would raise him in her esteem. And Pettigrew…"
He made a small, fluid gesture that looked as if it had some meaning just beyond Percy's ability to understand. "Pettigrew hates the way a child hates, clean and pure and endless, like a bottomless well. You've no idea how dangerous that makes him, that and his seemingly endless capacity for treachery and his encyclopedic memory for every slight ever given him. Well, put yourself in James Potter's place. Imagine being watched constantly by someone who is as well aware of your every virtue as of your every fault; who could list every one of your graces, large and small, and has in his heart promised you a hundred years in Hell for each of them; who could paint a more accurate portrait of you than the ones who love you the best and who would work every brush-stroke in poison if he could; someone who hates you for things that you cannot even remember doing and wouldn't have thought important if you did. Someone patient enough to let that hate fester until the time is right for a death blow and canny enough to prevent you from seeing it until it was too late."
Scabbers had slept on Percy's pillow for years. Percy might have thought Scabbers loved him, in whatever vague way animals love their masters, but he was under no illusions that Peter Pettigrew did.
"Pettigrew is dangerous," Lucius said. "Loathsome, graceless, whinging, but dangerous. He was the death of the Potters in spite of all the protection that Dumbledore could bring to bear. I don't know that Bellatrix was talking about him, but it's not outside the realm of possibility."
A moment of silence and then Lucius smiled, returning to sit across from Percy. "But tell me something else, now. Tell me what you learned about her. What are her weaknesses?"
Percy cleared his throat, shuffling his parchment a bit and pulling his mind roughly back to the task at hand. "She talks too much. Get her on the subject of bloodshed or the glory of her Lord and she says more than she should, or at least says it for longer."
"A trait she shares with said lord," Lucius said sardonically.
"And…" Percy said, then hesitated. This was Lucius Malfoy he was talking to, and no matter how cooperative he'd been it was as well not to forget that. Still…
Lucius was waiting, patient and interested. Percy made a decision and moved a pawn into play.
"Harry Potter," he said, and saw surprise flicker in Lucius' face. "I think if she saw a chance to – to keep him alive for –" Unable to go on with that line of thought, he took a breath and forged ahead. "I think she'd… do that rather than kill him. That she'd let him distract her. And that's unwise. Harry has a way of getting out of tight spots."
"True," Lucius said, looking a little exasperated. Percy almost found himself smiling, and sobered quickly. "Well. I said that if you went to speak to her I'd tell you something about the Dark Lord, and this has reminded me of what it was."
Percy swallowed hard and listened.
Lucius settled comfortably in his chair and steepled his fingers before him. "Tom Marvolo Riddle was born in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-seven; and in that year – as he tells it – the Muggle world was as different from the Muggle world of today as it was from the days when the streets of London were muddy footpaths filled with cattle and the clamor of itinerant peddlers, and the harbors were crowded with tall ships full of trade from the New World. It was still possible, in the days of Riddle's childhood, to find whole villages where the now-ubiquitous automobile was scarce or simply not to be found, and the telephone still a toy for the affluent – Riddle was born in such a village, as a matter of fact. But their technology was advancing, and there was one area in particular where the advances were fascinating to Riddle as a child, an area that to him represented magic when he had no idea what true magic was: the recording of human experience."
Percy frowned. "Recording… how, exactly?"
"On film. In sound recordings. In the combination of the two, which was still new when Riddle was a child. The very first wizarding photographs, the old daguerreotypes, are still, did you know? They don't move. It's a bit unnerving to look at them – one's ancestors staring fixedly back at one, not moving, not blinking; even in photographs that are not mementos mori the subjects look dead. But wizards quickly developed the spells that would set still images in motion, whereas Muggles, of course, did not; the technologies diverged, and Muggles developed what they call motion pictures, which are like photographs but much longer and with sound."
"I've heard of those," Percy said. "The Muggle-born students at Hogwarts talk about them sometimes, when they first arrive. I've never seen one."
"Nor have I," Lucius answered. "But Tom Riddle, when he was still Tom Riddle, was fascinated by them – can you guess why?"
Percy started to shake his head, then changed his mind. "If they preserve more time than photographs, and with sound… it could be, couldn't it, like taking a day out of your life and preserving it under glass? It seems like it would be hard not to feel that some part of you had stayed there with it." And, yes, now he understood a great deal more.
Lucius smiled. "Exactly. A small form of immortality. But film has certain flaws: an image on Muggle film is not sentient, not even to the extent that a portrait is sentient. One preserves only an image of oneself. But when Riddle came to Hogwarts, he found that more could be preserved than just shadows."
"His diary," Percy noted.
Lucius examined his fingernails. "Tell me, did your family take pictures of events? Of birthday parties, for instance?"
"Yes, of course."
"Every birthday, or just the first?"
Percy frowned, not quite following. "Every birthday."
"And why did you do that?"
"To… so that we could look back through the pictures later and watch each other grow, so we could –"
"So you could have a record of yourselves at all the different stages of your lives?"
Percy was silent, and suddenly cold to the bone.
"It took Riddle time to perfect the spells he used to create his diary," Lucius went on. "He poured a tremendous amount of power into these preservations of himself – I doubt Potter really has any idea of what kind of blow he dealt the Dark Lord when he destroyed Tom Riddle's diary. They're linked to him, you see; not strongly linked, but linked nonetheless. The earlier attempts were, I believe, all nullified and got rid of, but there are at least one or two others still in existence – one I know of for certain, a Muggle artefact. Theoretically, these recordings are as much a danger to Voldemort as to anyone else – they still contain some of his power, and if it were possible to use that connection to open a channel and drain still more of his power off, or even to distract him at a critical moment…"
"So you're saying that at least one more thing like Ginny's diary exists, and could be used against him?"
"Well, I did say theoretically," Lucius reminded him. "I don't know that I'd care to try it myself, not unless the need were dire. But the point I was really making is this: immortality is an illusion. Nothing is made everlasting but by making it unreal – pictures, portraits, taxidermy, film, nothing but a shadow of the original living being is ever left behind. That's not to say that those shadows can't be dangerous – not all ghosts, of course, are as benign as the ones at Hogwarts, where even the Bloody Baron has effectively chosen to spend eternity amusing small children – but it does place certain limitations on them, and on the spheres within which they can act. Every day, every moment, takes them farther away from the reality they sought to preserve. And consider: images in a mirror are illusory too; but if you spent your life in a mirrored room with reflections of yourself everywhere you turned, it might be difficult after a while to tell which was real, you or they."
He's telling me about the key to defeating Voldemort and I don't bloody understand, Percy thought, stunned; and he couldn't ask further without endangering their fragile rapport. For the first time since leaving his parents' house, he wanted to punch something.
Lucius gave a small, self-deprecating smile, disarming and oddly sweet. "Well. I did say that I didn't know how helpful it would be. But it's something to consider, anyway. Know your enemy, in whatever strange world he chooses to exist. And speaking of which, you should be proud of what you accomplished with Bellatrix."
"I wish…" Percy said, then trailed off. "I wish I'd been able to start her talking sooner. Maybe she would have said something a little more helpful."
"And maybe what she did say will in the end prove more helpful than it looks at the moment," Lucius pointed out. "Maybe it will come to nothing. Either way, you got her to talk, and probably to say more than she intended. That was well done, child."
Knowing he shouldn't, feeling ridiculous and guilty for it, Percy carried the glow of those words with him for the rest of the day.
One's Head of House, Remus thought resentfully, was supposed to care when one was choking to death on a mouthful of lapsang souchong. Especially when said Head of House had caused one's untimely demise to begin with.
"Would you like something a bit stronger in that?" Minerva asked dryly, peering at him over the tops of her glasses from the other side of the small tea table in front of her fireplace.
Remus waved her away and caught his breath, cleared his throat, and summoned what equilibrium he could manage. "It's just that… well, the last time I saw Draco Malfoy in person he was a scrawny thirteen-year-old with a permanent sneer, and he and Harry hated each other."
"Maybe I should start from the beginning."
"Maybe you should," Remus said austerely. "God knows when I asked you what was going on I didn't expect an answer like that. You'll have to forgive me for feeling a bit lost."
Minerva settled a bit more comfortably into her armchair and pushed the plate of jam tarts toward Remus. He took one and bit into it; excellent as always, but he had a sneaking suspicion that it was going to take more than jam tarts to fortify him for this.
"By the end of the term before last, it was clear that we were woefully understaffed," she began. "Harry was drowning under Defence and Quidditch both, and Severus was working himself to death trying to teach Potions and fill the Headmaster duties at the same time – and the more I tried to relieve him of some of those duties, the less time I had to teach Transfiguration well. No one knew anyone who could be pressed into teaching service, and we were all harried and short-tempered with the students and with each other."
Remus nodded.
"Then one day, just as we were about to start a search for a new faculty member, Severus got a frantic letter from Draco. Apparently he'd got himself into some sort of rather serious trouble, the nature of which Severus was extremely closed-mouthed about; it made me wonder at the time if it wasn't the sort of trouble that rich, spoiled boys his age do often get themselves, and other people, into, and then find themselves settling down much sooner than they'd planned – "
Remus blinked. "Draco Malfoy? Minerva, that boy was as queer as a brass galleon when I knew him."
"He's engaged to Pansy Parkinson, you know," she answered thoughtfully. "Though I suppose that doesn't necessarily mean anything. And anyway, that certainly isn't the only trouble he could have got himself into. You know there are rumors that he spent a year in Budapest training intensively in the Dark Arts?"
"The Árnyék Király?" Remus frowned. "They weren't wiped out during the Bolshevik Revolution? I wondered about that. I never quite understood how a Muggle war could have spilled over that drastically into the wizarding world."
"Well, at least one of you lot paid attention during History of Magic."
"It's the goblins," Remus said apologetically. "They really are rather tiresome, and Professor Binns tends to dwell on them."
"Yes, well, Albert's a godsend from an administrative point of view. He gifts his salary back to the school, never changes his curriculum or asks to have his budget increased, and still publishes. Sometimes I'm tempted to slip hemlock into a few teacups so we can have more like him."
Remus looked warily at his tea.
Minerva laughed. "At any rate, all the faculty were told was that Draco was coming to take up the position Severus had been trying to vacate, and to co-teach Defence to take some of the teaching load off Harry. I had no idea how he was going to manage it, frankly, teaching a course and a half and being Head of Slytherin House… but within the week there he was. I think Harry had almost forgotten about him, you know," she said thoughtfully. "Or at least if he thought of him at all it was as that obnoxious little boy he'd known when he was eleven, moved to France and playing Quidditch."
"And when he got here?"
"He wasn't eleven anymore," she said simply. "He's bright, beautiful, a powerful wizard, and a Malfoy to the bone, and he treats Harry with very careful and distant civility. Usually."
Remus rubbed a hand over his eyes. He could imagine all too clearly Harry's reaction to a Draco who turned up after years of absence and coolly refused to be either known or knowable. "Be that as it may, it still doesn't explain why Harry isn't sitting tight here and waiting for Ron to find Draco. I know full well he's developed enough self-control to do that, though possibly not enough to keep from driving everyone in the castle insane while he's waiting."
"I don't think he trusts Ron," Minerva said quietly. "Not in this. And I don't think he trusts Draco out of his sight either, if truth be known. Draco might have forgotten how close he was to taking the Dark Mark while he was at school, but rest assured Harry hasn't."
"But Harry's in love with him anyway?"
"The heart doesn't take orders from the head, Remus," she pointed out. "And maybe, you know, it's a little bit because of it. Draco with the Mark would have been nothing to Harry, at most one more Death Eater to get through on the way to Voldemort, and Harry would have known exactly what Draco was and why. Draco without the Mark is a bit of an enigma, and once that door was opened… well, you know what it does to Harry when he wants to know something and no one will tell him."
"I hope for Harry's sake that's not all it is," Remus answered, disquieted, and there was a sharp rap on the door.
"Come in," Minerva called.
Severus swept in and closed the door behind him, frowning a bit at Remus as though he hadn't expected to find him there. There was a letter clutched in his hand, and Remus could see a blank seal on it, broken.
"Is that word from Harry?" Minerva asked sharply.
"No, and I would have flayed him alive if he'd been stupid enough to stop what he's doing and send an owl," Severus answered. "This is… bad news, I believe. It might prove in the end not to be, but I don't know at the moment."
"Well, for heaven's sake, man, pull up a chair and tell us what it is." Minerva waved her wand, summoned another teacup, and filled it, pushing it peremptorily toward Severus as he sat down.
"Should I –" Remus began.
"Stay where you are, Lupin," Severus ordered. "This is Order business, or soon will be. This letter is from Nymphadora Tonks. She's been doing a bit of information-gathering."
Severus tapped the letter with his wand and said "Extendo," and the parchment lengthened until it brushed the tops of his boots.
"That's quite a bit of information," Minerva commented.
"Indeed it is," Severus said. "All of it information that the Ministry has managed, with unusual efficacy, to cover up. This is a list of Death Eater activity in the last year: locations, incident descriptions, number of casualties if there were casualties – and there have been. There are more here than even I knew about."
"How has the Ministry managed to keep activity on this scale covered up?" Remus asked.
"Memory charms. Controlling who within the ministry has access to the scenes. There are any number of ways," Severus replied. "But somewhere in this information is a pattern. This isn't mindless pillaging and burning. It's purposeful, and it's coming closer to Hogwarts."
"Why?" Minerva asked tightly. "Albus Dumbledore isn't here anymore."
"No, but Harry Potter is, and so are the children of nearly every wizarding family in Britain. It isn't wise to put all one's hostages to fortune in one place, as the wizarding world has done." Severus picked up his tea and looked at it as if it had botched a potion. "I'll tell the rest of the staff this in time and in my own way, but unless I have missed something critical and misinterpreted the meaning of this list, I can come to only one conclusion – Voldemort is coming to Hogwarts."
"Damn," Remus said softly, looking out the window at the gathering dark. Find Draco and come home, Harry, he thought, and watched Severus look into the fire, lost in his own serpentine thoughts.
Harry Apparated to the end of Privet Drive and stood in the yellow pool of a streetlamp, robes and broom shrunken down and stuffed into his pack. Somewhere down the block a dog was barking, a high, irritating, droning yip that echoed oddly in the stifling air.
It hadn't changed, not in all the years since Harry, seventeen years old and finished with school, had simply stepped off the Hogwarts Express and turned toward London instead of Surrey. A row of identical houses stretched out in front of him, immaculately manicured lawns oddly defaced by garden gnomes and miniature wells; shiny cars of leviathan proportions were parked ostentatiously in each driveway, intending to announce wealth and announcing something else instead. Harry had been around Draco long enough to know what real money looked like, and it didn't bloody drive cars the size of three-quarter scale tanks. Real money hung Titians casually on sitting-room walls, and had bookcases full of books dating from this year back to the days when the great Elizabeth was marvelous in the Lord's eyes.
Draco. He'd lost too much time already.
Harry set out down the street, his wand in his front pocket carefully concealed by a misdirection spell, an ordinary young man in jeans and a plain t-shirt, nothing for anyone to notice or remember. He could have found Number 4 blindfolded; after so long of trying to forget, it was unnerving how easily his eyes picked it out from the carbon copies to either side. As he drew near he realized that his hands were shaking, and he stuffed them irritably into his pockets. He was going to face worse than childhood ghosts before all this was over.
Mr. H. Potter, The Cupboard under the Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. It had taken him years to understand what that meant – that Dumbledore had known how the Dursleys treated him and done nothing about it. Years, and one long, shattering conversation with Draco in the Owlery in the dead of winter, the first time he and Malfoy had ever actually talked.
He said he didn't tell me about the prophecy because he couldn't stand to see me unhappy, Harry had said, and the look on Malfoy's face had been that of a boy who has fought a long and valiant battle against stupidity in the face of impossible odds and can only hope now to fall with honor.
Harry took a deep breath, forced his fists to unclench, tried to shove his anger back down where it wouldn't get in his way, and walked up the drive.
The house was dark; he would have wondered if they were out, but there was a car in the driveway. It was too early for them to be asleep already. Frowning, Harry stepped back and peered up toward the windows, but there were no lights to be seen. Wondering if he'd wasted his time, and suddenly wondering if the Dursleys even still lived here, Harry lifted a hand to knock.
The door swung open under his hand, unlocked and only barely pushed to.
Harry stepped carefully into the hall, giving his eyes a chance to adjust to the darkness. He could see light now, coming dimly from under the kitchen door. The house was unnervingly silent, and he pushed open the kitchen door slowly, wand at the ready.
The light over the range was on, spilling a cold, dim glow onto the stove and barely touching the rest of the room. Harry's gaze swept the kitchen nervously and landed on Petunia, sitting at the kitchen table, so still and unexpected that he jumped half out of his skin.
He swallowed hard. "Aunt Petunia."
She didn't look up from her tea, though her hands moved a little on the mug. She looked ghastly in the dim light, makeup uneven and too heavy, pallid against the unrelieved black of her dress, hair that was now mostly grey dishevelled. One of her shoes was off, on the floor beside her foot, and there was a wide ladder running up one leg of her nylons from the toe to just above her knee. "You're too late," she said in a cold, brittle voice. "The funeral was hours ago."
"I," Harry began, and felt a little sick. "I didn't... I mean –"
"No, of course you didn't," Petunia said tiredly. "You weren't to know, were you, and I doubt you would have come if you had. We buried your Uncle Vernon today."
Harry wanted to say I'm sorry. What he said instead was, "Your tea's gone cold."
Even in the dark it was easy to fall back into the habit, to round up the tea things and steep it the way he had been taught. Neither of them spoke until it was done and Harry had poured out mugs for both of them and sat down at the table across from her. When he was a child, sitting and taking tea like this without permission would have earned him sharp words at best and possibly a slap, and he found that he was still braced for it.
"It was a stroke," Petunia said finally. "At a business meeting. He died right there in the board room."
"Where's Dudley?"
Her attempt at a smile was horrible. "He has a job in London now. It's a very important job, at the Bank of London. He couldn't take more than an afternoon away for the funeral. We had to reschedule it, as a matter of fact, because he was meeting with a very valuable client this morning. He... he couldn't stay."
She took a drink of her tea and made a face as it scalded her tongue. "Funny old world, isn't it? All the years you lived with us I was afraid every day that what happened to your parents would happen to us, and then when Vernon's time finally came, it was an ordinary stroke that... that killed him."
"You were afraid?" Harry asked. Somehow it had never occurred to him that she might be.
"Well, of course I was," Petunia snapped. "Dumbledore told me that my blood would protect you but he didn't say a word about whose blood was supposed to protect Vernon and Dudley, or me, come to that. Albus bloody Dumbledore, lord high muckety-muck of Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, didn't he have more important things to worry about than the danger he'd put us in."
"Then why did you –"
"Because he let it be known that there were worse things that could happen to us than raising a cuckoo's chick, that's why."
"He threatened you?" Even after everything, Harry found that hard to believe.
Petunia laughed shortly. "Oh, no. He didn't have to. He had a way about him, that man. Always offering candy like a perv on a street corner, familiar as you please, always "Yes, Petunia," and "I quite agree, Petunia," never calling me Mrs. Dursley like he ought, like Vernon and I didn't deserve that much respect. Always dropping little hints that the house was being watched. And the one time you wandered off and got lost –"
A brief, sharp memory flashed in front of Harry's eyes – lawns and sprinklers from a toddler's-eye view, colors faded like an old home movie. He'd set out to find the end of the world.
" – he sent that bloody Howler and scared the piss out of every one of us, including you. Told me straight out that the Death Eaters were still looking for you, and if they tracked you here they'd... well, he said that the wards around this house were wards around you, and if you went, so did they." Petunia lifted her tea and looked at Harry for the first time over the brim of the teacup, sharp eyes surveying him angrily.
"I never loved you, you know," she said abruptly, making Harry blink. "You've no notion of what it was like, living with your mother. Pretty, perfect Lily, never put a foot wrong, never got a bad grade, never a cross word where our parents could hear – though, Lord love her, she had plenty where they couldn't, didn't she? I might have forgiven her for that, for never having spots or frizzy hair or starting her monthlies while she was wearing white trousers, but not for being a witch. Not for that."
Harry took a careful sip of his tea. "Why not?"
Petunia grimaced and set her cup down with a clatter. "I could have got good grades, you know, if I'd tried. I could have been pretty," she said; and Harry, looking for the first time at the bones under her thin papery skin, saw with slow wonder that she was right. "I could have done anything she could do, but not that. I couldn't do magic. We had the same parents, but she had the right gene and I didn't. I couldn't give our mum and dad a day ticket to some fairy-tale world. And that was all they bloody talked about – Lily learned this spell, Lily got that candy at Hogsmeade, Lily can fly a broomstick. What could I do that could compete with that? As soon as Lily started at Hogwarts, our parents stopped seeing me at all."
She sighed and rubbed a hand over her eyes. Harry poured some more tea into her cup, and after a moment into his own.
"I couldn't bloody do anything," Petunia said softly. "Nothing that would make them happy like Lily did. I'd come home from school with a prize from the hockey games and it'd be 'Yes, Petunia, that's nice. Run on and get washed up for dinner.' But bloody Lily sent home a letter about how she could make a feather fly and it was talked about for weeks. I didn't have a place anymore. And when Lily came down for her hols she'd expect me to be glad to see her and she'd have her precious feelings hurt because I wasn't. She'd want to do sister things and never understood when I told her no. I wanted her to understand. I wanted her to know what it was like to be ignored, to be treated like you were one child too many, to not have the love and attention that a child ought from their parents. I suppose I thought that if I could make her son understand, it would be, just a little, like making her understand."
Harry opened his mouth and then closed it again, wanting desperately to say something and having no idea what to say.
"You know, in fairy tales witches are wicked," Petunia said bitterly. "They fool you into thinking they're nice and harmless and then they give you a poisoned apple. They curse babies in their cradles. They take things away from you that you can never... get back..."
Her face crumpled and she began to cry.
Oh, bollocks, Harry thought miserably. There might have been no love lost between them but Petunia was the closest thing to a mother he'd ever had, and he didn't know how to comfort her, or even if he could. He sat in silence instead, looking down at his tea, and in a minute or two Petunia had regained control of herself. She wiped gingerly under her eyes, smearing mascara, and then looked dully across the table at Harry.
"Well, what do you want, then?" she asked. "You didn't come here for the funeral, and I doubt you came back for a nice chat. What did you come for?"
He almost found that he couldn't ask. Not this, not from this hard-faced, grieving woman he'd never really known. But… Draco. "I need to know if you have anything left that belonged to my mother. Something small, a piece of jewellery or… or anything will do, really, as long as it was hers."
Petunia sat for a long time looking down into her tea before she said, almost to herself, "Well, why not? Might as well make a clean sweep of things. I buried my husband today, might as well put paid to my sister. Wait here."
She rose unsteadily, leaning on the table, slipped her shoe on, and made her way out of the kitchen. Harry waited, listening to her slow footsteps up the stairs and into the hall. The darkness in the kitchen was oppressive; he wanted to turn on a light and couldn't bring himself to. Instead he sat and listened to the ticking of the clock in the sitting room, too loud in the stillness and unnervingly regular, as if the sound could wrench his heartbeat to its rhythm by sheer blind persistence.
Harry and Draco, toward the end of their seventh year, arguing at the top of their lungs in the Owlery – just the two of them for once, no Ron and Hermione, no Crabbe and Goyle; and maybe that had accounted for that strange raw intensity in Draco's eyes, as if he weren't arguing at all, as if he were trying to tell Harry something and was a hair's breadth away from grabbing him by the collar of his robes and shaking him until he listened.
"Haven't you ever thought about how much power Dumbledore wields, Potter? He wouldn't take the Minister for Magic position because it'd be a step down for him! He's bloody training every wizard in Britain from the shell up to be fanatically loyal to him!"
"I'm not going to listen to this!" Harry turned and stormed toward the door.
Draco's voice, gone quiet, reached his ears before Harry could get out and away. "Every wizard in Britain except Slytherin House, Potter. Have you never for one moment wondered why that is?"
Harry stopped, looking at his fingertips on the doorknob; and in a flash he understood that he was standing at some sort of nexus, and every path was shadowed.
Hating himself, he turned back.
Petunia's voice jarred him back into the present. "Your mother bought this when she was sixteen, or your father bought it for her, I don't remember which. She gave it me when she married him. I don't know why she thought I wanted it."
She sat down across from him, looking down at a brooch shaped like a gold dragonfly with eyes of dark, faceted green glass. It was small enough to sit on the palm of her hand, three or four inches long and a bit less across the wings. Harry had seen dozens like it in shops in Diagon Alley; the smallest touch of wandless magic, no more than a child too young for school could manage, would set the wings fluttering. He'd almost bought one very like it for Parvati once, but then he'd decided on something else instead.
"I couldn't remember if I'd even kept it," Petunia went on. "But it's all I have left that's hers. I don't know what happened to all her things after she was killed. Well, what would we have done with them, after all? We wouldn't have had them in the house and we could hardly have donated them for a jumble sale. But no one ever asked us if we wanted them anyway. No one sent word about the funeral or where she was to be buried. All we got was a note on the doorstep and you, just like we were no family at all."
Petunia touched a fingertip to the dragonfly's back, and its delicate filigree wings whirred into life.
"Aunt Petunia," Harry said, watching the wings glimmer in the scant light. "Does Mrs. Figg still live down the street?"
Petunia looked up with a frown. "Mrs. Figg? Yes. Getting on in years, poor soul, but she's –"
"If you ever need me for anything, anything at all, you can tell her and she'll get word to me," Harry interrupted.
"And what would I need with you?" she asked sharply. "We've got on just fine all these years without –"
"Yes, I know, but –" He looked helplessly back up at her. "You won't forget, will you? If you want me for anything, you'll tell her?"
For a long moment Petunia only looked at him, an unfathomable mix of emotions on her face. Then she nodded curtly. "I always knew there was something bloody odd about that woman. I suppose your precious Dumbledore put her there to watch over you and then forgot to call her off when you left."
"Dumbledore's gone," Harry said quietly, and swallowed a mouthful of tea. It was going cold. "He's been gone for years. We don't… we don't talk about him anymore."
"No?" Petunia was looking at him with the cynical expression of someone who wanted badly to say I told you so and was stopped only by the fact that she never actually had. "What did he do, then?"
Harry stared down into his tea. "He killed a girl," he whispered.
"He never!" Petunia exclaimed.
"I mean, he didn't kill her himself. But…" Harry rubbed a hand over his eyes. That he should be sitting in this kitchen of all places, telling this to Petunia Dursley of all people… but he needed to, he needed to tell it to someone, and she would be alone again with her grief when he left. Time was pressing on him but if he waited another hour, another half an hour, to head for Caithness, he'd have a better chance of getting in and out of wherever he was going unseen. Pansy was right – there was too much at stake to rush in with no eye toward the advantage.
"My godfather was killed at the end of my fifth year. It was partly my fault – mostly my fault – but partly he died because too many people were keeping too many things from me, things I needed to know to keep myself and other people safe." God, how long it had taken him to accept how much of Sirius' death was his fault, and it had taken him even longer to accept how much of it hadn't been. "Dumbledore told me that he kept me in the dark because he wanted me to have a childhood, because he loved me, because he couldn't bear to see me unhappy."
"Did you believe him?" Petunia asked in a tone that said very distinctly that, cuckoo's chick or no, no child raised in her house had better be stupid enough to buy that bill of goods.
"I wanted to," Harry answered. "I tried to. But Sirius was dead and it seemed like nothing was ever going to be all right again."
Why did he choose then to unload all that onto you, Potter? When your bloody godfather had just died, when you were half out of your mind with grief and rage? Oh, for God's sake, here, put my scarf on. You're freezing, and maybe some of the Slytherin will soak into your brain. Think about it. Why then?
"After that I started to understand that it wasn't just me who was going to get hurt if I kept rushing into things without thinking. I had nightmares, over and over, about people I loved dying because I'd done something stupid. For a long time I almost didn't want to do anything at all. And I was furious because I had to, because there was no one else, and all I wanted was for the wizarding world to find another bloody Boy Who Lived so I wouldn't have to watch anyone else I loved die."
"I remember you that summer," Petunia said unexpectedly. "We never saw you. You stayed in your room, and all those owls, you never let them in."
And they'd probably thought it was good riddance to bad rubbish, too, but at least Petunia hadn't said so outright. "I didn't want to do anything, but I had to. But if I did it without thinking, more people would die. So I started thinking, and started watching, and learned to question what I was told no matter who was telling me. And I started watching Dumbledore too."
Harry shook his head slightly, feeling as if he were trying to throw off a hex. It was still painful, even after all this time. "I saw things I didn't like. I tried to make excuses for them, I tried to put them to myself in a good light, and I succeeded for a long time." His mouth twisted in a bitter half-smile. "Well, I had help there, didn't I? Dumbledore needed me. He couldn't send me away when I stopped being blindly loyal to him. He knew when I started questioning things, and he knew what to do to pull me back into the fold, and not even Draco Malfoy shouting at me for an entire afternoon in the Owlery really convinced me, not then."
"So what was he doing, then?" Petunia asked.
Harry raked a hand through his hair. "You know – good and evil, there should be a difference between them. Not just who's on the right side, because everyone thinks they're on the right side, everyone thinks they're doing what they have to do to make sure the good side wins. There should be some sort of moral high ground. Because if there's not then it all comes down to which puppet-master is pulling the strings, and if you're the puppet then maybe it doesn't much matter. Dumbledore was pulling all our strings, and mine most of all. We were all pawns in his own private war, and even that would have been all right if I'd known we were fighting the right war for the right reasons, and that when it was done and over with the wizarding world would be a better place, or at least no worse off. But then…"
"What was her name?" Petunia reached for the teapot and refilled her cup; then, grudgingly, refilled Harry's.
"Hannah," he answered quietly. "Her name was Hannah. She was part of a group I put together in fifth year. We called ourselves 'Dumbledore's Army.'" Harry gave a short, harsh laugh. "Dumbledore's bloody army, all right. We called ourselves that, and never saw... He told her he was sending her to an abandoned Death Eater hideout, to see if she could find any evidence of what they were planning. He said he was sending her because she was good at finding things that were hidden, at knowing where to look. Well, the hideout wasn't abandoned."
"Did he know that?"
"Yes," Harry answered wearily, rubbing his hand across his eyes underneath his glasses. "He knew. He told me so afterward. He said that it was... regrettable, but he'd had cause to question her loyalty to him. Not her loyalty to our side, not her stance against the Death Eaters, but to him. He thought she was spying for the Ministry. So he sent her there knowing she'd be killed, and he explained to me afterward that in this war there were only two sides, his and Voldemort's. She wasn't a Death Eater. She hated them. But she questioned Dumbledore too many times and she died for it. He said I was old enough to understand."
"And did you?" Petunia asked cynically.
"No. I bloody didn't. I was twenty years old, I'd looked up to him since the day I came to Hogwarts, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know who to go to. He killed Hannah because she was disloyal, and I didn't know where to turn."
You have to understand, Harry. Voldemort will grow strong again. We cannot afford mistakes. We cannot afford uncertainty. If you don't see the necessity now, you'll come to before long. And he'd looked at Harry over the tops of his spectacles, twinkling kindly at him, and the lamps had been lit in his study and Fawkes was settled on his perch with his head tucked underneath one wing, and Harry could summon every detail of that moment in his memory down to the grain of the carpet underneath him. Not that he'd seen it then – what he'd seen, memory layered within memory, was the morning near the end of his sixth year when he'd woken with Hannah still sleeping in his arms, and the sunlight had come in through the window of the small room above the Three Broomsticks, and Harry had been almost seventeen years old and woken soaring with happiness and the conviction that he was invincible. Hannah had done that for him, and Dumbledore had killed her and fucking smiled at him and told him to understand.
Before he'd known what he was doing Harry had whipped out his wand and shouted "Legilimens!" and heard it come out as a wail. Dumbledore's mind had slammed closed against him, but an instant too late, and he'd seen, oh, he'd seen – and he'd found himself on his hands and knees choking bile out onto the carpet, arms shaking under his own weight and the weight of that vast cold that saw no worth but usefulness, no virtue but loyalty, no meaning but moves on a chessboard. It was what he'd thought Slytherins were, what the enemy was, it was everything he'd thought they were fighting against, and oh God how he'd been wrong. He'd almost broken then, almost curled up on the floor and cried, and he still wasn't sure why he hadn't.
He'd let Dumbledore soothe him with platitudes and meaningless mysticisms; and that night he'd sent word to Percy, the only person he could think of who might be in a position to help and owed no loyalty to Dumbledore. Percy had set the machinery in order to convene the Wizengamot, and then gone to the brothers he hadn't spoken to in years and sent them to get Harry; and within forty-eight hours Harry had been sitting in front of the Wizengamot and talking himself hoarse – everything he knew, everything he'd seen, everything he'd tried to close his eyes to, everything he'd feared about what Dumbledore would become, he'd told them all of it. He'd felt filthy doing it. But Hannah was dead, and every value that he held would have died with her if he'd watched her buried and done nothing.
He hadn't wanted to trust the Ministry. But he had to believe that there was a better way to defeat one evil than by becoming another. And he'd been terrified of what Dumbledore was becoming, and even more terrified of what Harry Potter might become at his right hand – and of what might happen to him when Voldemort was gone and he was no longer of any use.
"What happened to him, then?" Petunia asked.
"I don't know. No one knows. No one talks about it. Professor Snape called an assembly in the Great Hall one day and told us that he was taking over the headmaster's position." Harry took a gulp of his tea. "The thing that made it worse is that by the time Hannah died Voldemort had gone back underground. There were only a few pockets of Death Eaters left. For all we knew they weren't even a threat anymore. If she hadn't walked straight into them they'd never have risked breaking cover by killing her. He used them as a tool, like he would have used a headsman's axe, to punish someone for disloyalty to him."
"Well, that sounds like a cock-up, all right," Petunia said, which Harry supposed was as close to an expression of sympathy as she was ever likely to give him.
He smiled weakly. "Yeah, I suppose that's one way to put it." He reached out to pick up the dragonfly brooch from the table. It hummed a little in his hands, and maybe it was his imagination but he thought he could feel his mother in it. She'd worn this, loved it, and after years of sitting in Petunia's room gathering dust it still felt like her.
"Thank you for this," he said; then, hesitantly, "I have to go, Aunt Petunia. Will you be all right?"
"Of course I will," Petunia snapped. "I always have been, and I will be now."
There didn't seem to be much to say to that. Harry pushed his chair back and rose, taking his teacup to the sink before he went to the kitchen door.
One hand on the doorknob, he paused and looked back. "What will you do?" he asked, unsure why he wanted to know. Maybe he just needed to know how the story ended.
"I've enough set back to be comfortable, and the house is paid for. I'll manage," she answered stiffly.
That wasn't what Harry had asked, but he let it go. "Goodbye, Aunt Petunia," he whispered, and let himself out.
The coast of Caithness was like a cenotaph to the death of ships, sheer and rocky where Harry flew, with waves that crashed high and hard against vertical cliffs and crested with a glimmering luminescence like St. Elmo's Fire. A high, ruined castle loomed ahead of him, forcing him to alter his trajectory as he weaved around it; he barely noticed, scanning the ground for Unplottable land the way he'd once scanned the sky for the snitch.
You can see the ocean from the cemetery gates, Draco's portrait had said, trying to be helpful. Not from our crypt, that's toward the back, but there's a road to the cemetery that runs along the cliff face. Harry had been flying along the cliff for what felt like days and had no idea how to judge when he'd searched long enough and should turn and retrace his steps. This was bloody near hopeless, he decided grimly – flying along the north coast of Scotland as fast as he could push his broom, trying to find what might be no more than a small decrepit churchyard that was large to a child's eyes but nearly invisible from the air and at speed.
When he found it, though, there was no mistaking it, and no question of overlooking it in the bright moonlight. The Cemetery of the Holy Sorrows was huge, a vast necropolis that sprawled over acres of land at the cliff's edge, gleaming in the darkness with the cold white of moonlight on marble.
Harry curved his flight path and soared over the cemetery. Draco's portrait had said that the Malfoy Squibs were buried in a mausoleum, so that let out the plain just inside the gates, dotted with low, carved sarcophagi and marble angels bent with weeping or stretching supplicating hands toward the dark sky. They can't all be Squibs, Christ, not all of them, Harry thought, but he didn't see a separate section, and there was no running water. Even if he focused his search on the rows of mausoleums laid out in narrow streets like an abandoned city, it would take him well past dawn to find the right one.
But he'd found the cemetery, and that was most of the battle won. A wall ran across the length of the cemetery and separated the mausoleums from the rest of the graves; a dark tree-lined path led down toward a pointed arch in that wall, closed with a heavy wrought-iron gate before a flight of broad stone steps that led down into narrow streets between the crypts. Harry glided through the trees and over the wall and landed just inside the gates at the top of the steps, bracing himself half in the expectation of some sort of alarm.
For a long time he crouched at the gates with his robes blending into the shadow, broom still clutched in one hand, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness and cataloguing the graveyard's sounds. His whole body was crying out to move, to do something, to find the Malfoy crypt before the moon set and he lost its light – but rushing in where angels feared to tread was a Gryffindor virtue and patience was a Slytherin one, and Harry didn't know this land.
They couldn't all be Squibs and werewolves, all these dead, but they didn't have to be. There were others who might be buried here – suicides, murderers, heretics against some long-forgotten orthodoxy, condemned criminals, unbaptized children. If Draco's portrait and Harry's gut instinct about the layout of the cemetery were correct, this whole necropolis was unhallowed ground, and if Harry had learned anything in his life it was that the dead didn't always rest quietly.
When he'd listened long enough he rose from his crouch and straddled his broom again, gliding silently down the stairs. There was a marble angel at the bottom, almost Harry's size, the folds of her stone gown hanging loosely around her and her wings folded against her back. Her head was bent over a small pillar, resting on her arm, which was flung out straight before her, palm upturned to the moonlight. As he drew near, she stirred slowly, lifting her head to look at Harry with dead, empty eyes. He pointed his wand and pitched his whispers under the breeze, lulling her back into sleep.
He drew his wand back and held it over his palm, breathing a low incantation; a slow, thick stream of foxfire began to curl into his hand, building until a luminescent sphere the size of an apple hovered just above his skin, shimmering golden in the darkness. Harry raised his hand to his mouth and whispered "Malfoy!" into the soft glow, then blew on the foxfire and watched it shatter into a thousand glimmering sparks like tiny fireflies, flying outward into the rows of mausoleums. If the crypt bore the Malfoy name carved into it, the charm would find it and send a glowing spark back to Harry, stretching a slender line behind it as a path to the word. He hoped the crypt was labelled. It might not be, though, he knew; so he flew carefully to the row of crypts farthest to the west and began drifting down it, searching for the door that Draco's portrait had described.
His mother's brooch rested in an inside pocket of his robes, an unfamiliar weight against his chest. He hoped to God Filius' charm worked as well as it was supposed to.
The mausoleums here leaned close together, long low buildings each with five or six doors cut into the stone, framed by slender stone doorways topped by decorative carved triangles. Harry couldn't see more than a few inches into the doorways, or read the epitaphs carved into the walls, lists of names and dates worn almost to illegibility by age and shrouded in shadow by the moonlight. He could see them in his mind's eye anyway: Sacred to the memory. Here lies. In memoriam.
Ginevra Weasley, beloved daughter.
There was a good chance that he was going to kill Malfoy for dragging him through two nights of bitter childhood memories to an unquiet graveyard at the end of the world.
Harry reached the end of the lane and coasted around to the next one, seeing dim sparks out of the corner of his eye as they flickered in and out of the crypts. That none had come back to him was worrisome, but there was nothing to be done but keep looking; the portrait had remembered nothing but row on row of looming marble buildings, towering above an eleven-year-old boy small for his age. Another row, two, moving as fast as he dared and wishing that he could risk a light; the crypts were a little broader now, a little more ornate, newer. Stone doorways still opened into shadow, lined with the names of the dead; they were crumbling here and there, slabs of marble broken off and shattered into rubble in the doorways. Something long and low to the ground skittered out of one of the doorways, passing into the moonlight – a rat, big enough to stand on its hind legs and bite Harry in the knee. He glanced briefly after it as it scurried into another tomb, then turned back to face ahead.
There was a little girl standing in the path in front of him, moonlight glowing from dark hair, old-fashioned high-collared robes hanging from her small frame like rags.
Harry yanked the broom to a halt, feeling the charmed brooch heat warningly against his chest. "Hello," he said cautiously.
Silent, the child took a step forward.
Harry drifted back a little. "Do you know this graveyard? There's something I'm looking for."
She moved forward a little more, and Harry's grip on his wand tightened. "I'm lost," she said in a voice like the grating of rust on stone. "I want my Mummy. Can you help me find my Mummy?" She held out her arms to him; Harry drifted up and back, putting more distance between them.
A flock of birds took sudden flight from the trees behind him.
"I can't help you find your mum," Harry said. "I think you should go back to bed now." Don't make me kill a little girl. Not even one who's already dead.
She took another step toward him. Harry held his ground, senses straining in every direction. "Can you help me find my Mummy?" she asked again, and there was undisguised hunger in her voice now, predatory and foul. "Can you? Can you help me find her?"
Harry spun and whipped his wand toward the trees, shouting "Immobulus!" A hunched old woman froze, caught in the spell, a shrivelled, severed arm dangling from her hand. Even in the moonlight it looked gnawed.
There was a snarl from the child's direction, and even as Harry whirled back toward her the brooch in his pocket flared into life. A circle of fire sprang up around him, flames dancing into rune-shapes as they rose, stopping the girl's dash toward him and driving her back. Her face was ghastly white in their light, eyes dead except for a cold, feral hunger, and her mouth and chin were smeared with blood.
"I'm sorry," Harry whispered, raising his wand. She screamed in rage, high and raw, and Harry shouted "Requiescat!" and watched her robes collapse as she shrivelled into dust inside them.
"Requiescat," he said again, and the old woman crumbled from the inside out, brittle bones falling to the ground with a clatter.
The flames flared and vanished, leaving Harry shaken and nightblind; and of all the things he was one day going to call Lucius Malfoy to account for, bringing a child to this place, even in daylight, was suddenly prominent on the list. He let his broom drift upward, high enough to put distance between himself and anything that might come at him from the ground but not high enough to be visible above the mausoleums, and darted to the end of the row.
A small golden spark raced toward him, trailing a path of dim light behind it.
Harry breathed a shaky sigh of relief and flew back along the lightpath, flying fast now, weaving around crypts and under the branches of trees. The path ended in front of a broad arched doorway flanked by marble pillars and closed off by wrought-iron gates standing just a little ajar. Harry dismounted, keeping broom in one hand and wand in the other, and used the tip of his broomstick to swing the gates open. They opened into a tiny entryway with marble mourning statues set into niches in the walls to either side. The left statue's head was broken away, shadows pooling unsettlingly where it ought to have been. Harry stood with his back to the niche, keeping an eye on the outer door, and risked a small flare of wandlight. The inner vault was hidden behind ornately carved iron doors; twin serpents faced each other across the slim line of inky blackness spilling through the doors, each wound around an upside-down torch. Below them, divided in half, another serpent devoured its tail, encircling the Malfoy family crest.
Something tugged at the back of Harry's thoughts, cold and seductive as the distant voice of running water, calling him toward some dim floating oblivion, and with a shock he recognized something very like the Imperius curse in the feeling. He withdrew from it carefully, keeping beyond the reach of its control, and listened. The small sounds of the graveyard were suddenly silenced, and even the sound of the wind in the trees fell into stillness. The moonlight froze everything to crystalline clarity, and outside the crypt the fog was rising.
Come outside, come away, something whispered in his mind, impressions more than words. The dead are dead. Leave them to their rest.
"Nox," Harry whispered, and stepped back into the shadow, pressing flat against the wall.
A tall, slim man stepped out from the darkness between the mausoleums across the row, moonlight striking coldly from silver hair, and Harry's first thought was Draco and his second was No.
Come away. The dead sleep poorly in this place. Come away.
The touch on his mind was like a slick of foul oil over water, shimmering subtly and changing – and for a moment Harry's body responded to it, arching and gasping into unwilling arousal, burning with the sudden blinding image of Draco pinning him by the throat to the crypt door and taking him right there with death all around them and the smell of sex and decay soaking into their clothes. Horrified, he shook off the vision and levelled his wand at the vampire Draco's portrait had warned him about.
"Please," he said. "Don't make me kill anyone else tonight."
The vampire moved forward, and Harry slammed the outer gates to with a hasty locking spell. Moving fast, he aimed his wand at the stone floor and traced out a protective circle in front of him, running it from one edge of the entryway to the other, leaving not even enough room for a shadow to pass between it and the wall; that done, he sent a flare of wandlight far enough into the crypt to see that there was nothing waiting inside, slipped through the doors, and sealed them behind him with a spell that doubled as a barrier against dark creatures.
For a minute he stood in the blackness, listening, the brooch dimming to quiescence in his pocket. When he was sure that he was alone in the mausoleum, he leaned back against the door and slid down it, raking his hands through his hair, suddenly exhausted.
Okay, Malfoy, he thought wearily. This is where that Christforsaken family of yours buries their sins. Now what?
Harry lit his wand, trying to shake off the after-effects of the vampire's spells like a dog shaking off slimy water, and brightened its glow until the walls around him were lit nearly as brightly as if by torchlight. The mausoleum was much bigger on the inside than on the outside, and a few feet in front of Harry, a short flight of steps led down into an arched corridor. Along the corridor, as far back as his light could reach, black coffins were set lengthwise into waist-high niches, ancient caskets powdery with rot giving way to later ones as the corridor progressed – full-sized coffins intermingled with smaller ones, too many smaller ones, too many caskets the size of Quidditch ball cases. Harry thought of catacombs he'd once seen on television when he'd lived in a world where television existed, a stone room full of dead children hung row on row on the wall like glassy-eyed dolls in their old-fashioned burial clothes. He was alone with hundreds of years of Malfoy dead, and he had no idea what to do next.
Some days, he reflected, it did not bloody pay to be Harry Potter.
