Valentine’s Day approached with a flurry of pink decorations and gossip. Harry found himself watching the older students flirting and slipping away to snog in the corners. They giggled, and blushed, and postured, and there didn’t seem to be much point to it all. If you liked someone, why wouldn’t you just tell them? Harry couldn’t understand all the… the anxiety. And the hesitation.
He could see how it would be useful to flirt well. It was pathetic how easily a lovesick girl or boy would trail after their crush making puppy dog eyes and just generally trying anything to get their attention. He even heard mention of a couple people trying to brew illegal love potions in abandoned classrooms.
Parkinson somehow knew everything about everyone. Harry kept an eye on her: she seemed to be everywhere in the common room at night, inserting herself with casual ease into groups of older girls. Eavesdropping taught him that she used excuses like asking for advice with hair and makeup charms, or by bringing illicit Muggle fashion magazines to trade, and then she’d just sit and chatter with them. It was the same in classes. Somehow, Parkinson seemed to know at least a few people in every House. Harry spotted her with Mary Doyle and Cole St. Clair, Gryffindor third years, several times; and she seemed to talk a lot with Mandy Brocklehurst of Ravenclaw and Hannah Abbott and Evelyn Crockett of Hufflepuff from their own year.
The only other Slytherin in the younger years who seemed to rival her was Blaise, but Harry couldn’t figure out just how the quiet boy was getting his information. It wasn’t gossip: Blaise didn’t talk to anyone in particular very often, and definitely not often enough to know the things he did. And it couldn’t be snakes. Raza would have noticed if there was another parselmouth around, calling other serpents to him. The scent of other snakes, apparently, was distinct.
It took a whole week of having Raza follow Blaise–something the snake only did after much persuasion, several Blood Pops with the sticks removed, and a lot of whinging–to figure out that Blaise was doing something with some kind of information-gathering spell. Raza had seen him cast a spell, or several different ones, several times throughout the castle. All were in places like the common room or main corridors or classrooms. But they couldn’t possibly be feeding Blaise sound all the time; Raza had counted at least six of the spells, and there was no way anyone could possibly eavesdrop on six places at once while staying sane and also managing their own life.
Eventually, Harry decided to let Blaise do his thing. He’d figure it out, or Blaise would tell him, and in the meantime, he would just be careful to cast anti-eavesdropping charms. There were a few good ones in the Slytherin common library, including one he’d found scrawled in the margin of an old potions book, muffliato, that he couldn’t wait to try.
He was woken on Valentine’s Day by a shouting match between Malfoy and Goyle. Harry pulled a pillow over his head but he could still hear them. Apparently Goyle had somehow spilled Malfoy’s hair gel, and Malfoy had come storming into their room to complain about how he would have to go about the day looking terrible when there was a girl he wanted to ask on a date. The stupidity of it all–who needed that much hair gel anyway?–was already giving him a headache and he literally hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet.
Slytherin generally had avoided the decorations. Not so much as a hint of pink Muggleish decor graced their common room. The rest of the castle was another story: Harry’s eyes felt downright assaulted when he walked into the Great Hall for breakfast.
“What in Merlin’s saggy ballsack is all of this?” he heard Flint snarl, gesturing wildly.
Sparkly ropes of silver and pink fluff as wide as Harry’s entire body had been strung back and forth in a loose net about fifteen feet above the tables. Tiny little pink-and-white babies of animated stone flew around beneath the fluffy things, singing some idiotic love song.
Harry almost tripped when he realized it was a Muggle love song. Who the hell would be playing a Muggle song here?
One look at the head table told him all he needed to know. Professor White was looking incredibly smug, and somehow, the horrid man was wearing pink robes without looking like a complete moron. Snape was seated next to the Muggle Studies professor and looked like he was about to repurpose the hideous garlands as a strangling cord.
“I cannot even begin to express how… absolutely tacky this is,” Blaise said. His usual aloof mask had dropped completely as he stared around with a look of utter disgust. “I… This is… what?”
“Let’s just eat.” Harry managed not to stomp over to his seat, but it was a near thing. He really, really just wanted this day to be over.
“Don’t forget, dueling club tonight,” Theo said.
Merlin. Harry revised his wish: he wanted someone to clock him on the head so he could go to the hospital wing until the world came to its senses.
Luckily, most of the professors seemed to have made a personal crusade out of keeping the fervor very far away from their classrooms. The first class was a Potions double with the Gryffindors. Snape took twenty points from Gryffindor in the first five minutes because Brown, Patil, and Rakepick had been sneaking peeks at Witch Weekly under their desk.
Between Potions and lunch, they had a free period; Harry spent it hiding in the greenhouse, which was rapidly becoming a meeting place of sorts for his immediate circle. Thomas shook off the Gryffindors in the library and joined them after five minutes or so. Harry, Theo, and Thomas–he had not yet shown Blaise the greenhouse–worked on the stunning spell stupefy in the free. So far none of them could cast it properly, but Harry’s jets of red light managed to make Theo feel woozy for a few seconds.
After lunch, he just had to sit through a Charms double and then History. Not the best afternoon but bearable. Vihaan and Vance both relied largely on a lecture format to get through their classes and if Harry kept his head down, didn’t challenge them, and performed spells when asked, they’d ignore him.
“Come on, cheer up. Dueling club next. You can pair off with Weasley and get a few jinxes in,” Theo said as they left History.
Harry managed a grin. “That’s true.”
“If you could accidentally light those garlands on fire, I would appreciate it,” Blaise added.
“I’ll see what I can do.” If he timed it right, people would assume it was just that pyromaniac Gryffindor Seamus Finnegan. No one would even be surprised.
They discarded their bags and cloaks inside the doors of the Great Hall as usual, and joined the group of first and second years milling about. Harry noted Oriana Grader seemingly having some kind of heated discussion with the Weasley girl, he forgot her name. Theo saw it too. “Two galleons on Grader if that turns into a duel,” he said quietly.
“No bet.” Harry had seen Grader’s spellwork when they practiced: she was quick and bold, like a battering ram. He wasn’t sure what Weasley was like, but he wouldn’t bet on spoiled purebloods against someone who’d grown up having to fight for everything.
They congregated in a corner with Thomas, Zacharias, Neville, Tracy, and Portia. Harry looked around. “Where’s Luna?”
“Where are Flitwick and Vihaan is the better question,” Zacharias said.
Harry did a double take. He’d assumed Flitwick was just blending in with the students, given his height, but he wasn’t here and neither was Vihaan. Strange.
“If the professors don’t show up soon, this is going to go badly,” Tracy said, eyeing the assembled students. Grader and Weasley weren’t the only point of heated emotions. Granger appeared to be upbraiding Runcorn and Weasley the elder for something (a situation Thomas looked more than a little relieved to have escaped), Ernie Macmillan was talking at some blonde Hufflepuff who looked about ready to hex his mouth shut, and Anthony Goldstein was actually stabbing a finger in Caius Dearborn’s red face.
Blaise lounged against the wall, looking unimpressed. “Ten sickles there’s spells flying before the professors show up.”
“Done,” Zacharias said.
Harry sat on a bench against the wall and listened as his—his friends chattered quietly about their day. Were they friends? It must seem like they were, to everyone else, but Harry didn’t think he felt the way you were supposed to feel about friends. They weren’t minions though, not like Muggle and magical bullies both seemed to gather around them. And Harry guessed he did respect them all in their own way. Friends was probably the closest word for it. Or at least this was the closest he’d ever get to having friends. Certainly it was closer than he’d ever thought he would get. It left him feeling weak and vulnerable but he couldn’t convince himself that going back to his mostly solitary existence would be better, either tactically or… on an emotional level.
Would he miss them?
Sudden screams distracted him before this thought could cause a panic attack. Harry shot to his feet, wand out, looking for whatever had scared people.
In a wave, the students looked where others’ eyes were looking, and panic promptly followed.
Emblazoned on the wall in four-foot-tall letters was a message:
THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED
ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE
The doors to the Hall shot open with a bang. Everyone jumped and fresh screams rang out. But it was just Snape and Vihaan, striding into the room and both visibly doing a fast head count.
“There has been another attack,” Vihaan said in a harsh voice. “All students are to return to their dormitories until further notice.”
-----
Albus looked down at the bodies in their beds and felt far older than his actual age.
Six new students had been found attacked. In two separate attacks. There were two Hufflepuffs and two Gryffindors who had been found near the library, comatose in the middle of a hallway, and two first years from Slytherin and Ravenclaw who had collapsed near the kitchens, carrying enough food to host a picnic for a family of five. The elves confirmed that they had visited not an hour before and had been polite in their request for food. Albus was pleasantly surprised to hear of such behavior towards house-elves from a Slytherin, but that thought was necessarily sidelined, given the gravity of the situation.
And then there was the message in the Great Hall.
Several hours later, the sickening swoop his stomach had taken when he saw the words had not yet abated. The Chamber of Secrets. Words out of a nightmare, seemingly come back to haunt him.
He was dead. Albus was certain. There had been seven. The boy had been the easiest to deal with practically, although the most difficult emotionally.
He had found the ring next. The compulsion on it had been strong and, given Albus’ unique temptations, irresistible. Fortunately for all parties involved, he had had the sense to bring Alastor with him, who had in turn had the sense to drown the thing in Fiendfyre before Albus could pick it up. His right hand was still scarred from its close brush with the hellish flames, but he’d gotten back all the feeling in his fingers, and Alastor’s quick thinking had likely saved his life.
Then there was the locket. Nigh impossible to find: the cave, the Inferi, that cursed potion, all had been dealt with—the potion consumed by a Muggle serial rapist Albus had spirited away from one of their prisons—only to find that it was a fake. In time, however, he had concluded that the initials R.A.B. belonged to the one person who had been close to Tom at any point, who had those initials, and who had died or disappeared during the war: Regulus Black. The Black properties were shut down, but he’d managed to convince Andromeda to make use of a loophole in their agreements with the goblins to temporarily return to a few of them to “collect personal effects,” as she had never been magically excised from the family. In Grimmauld Place, she had found the locket and returned it to him. Albus still regretted not using the opportunity to make his way through the old house’s library, but he had had other problems.
It was only through sheer luck that he found the diadem. Albus had been hunting through the Room of Lost Things for abandoned broomsticks to replace a few of the school’s brooms that had broken or worn down from use. There just wasn’t enough room in the budget to buy them new. The Room, which occasionally decided to be a bit capricious, had refused to let him simply summon or request brooms, and so off he’d gone on a treasure hunt that exceeded all expectations.
A clear pattern had emerged, of priceless historical artifacts often connected in some way to Hogwarts. Gryffindor’s sword was out—he knew the damn Sorting Hat could give it up if necessary, but the stubborn thing had refused without an explanation, and certainly wouldn’t have yielded it to Tom—so the next step was Hufflepuff’s cup. It had taken over a year of painstaking detective work to first trace how Tom had gotten it and then where it had gone. Multiple forays into imprisoned Death Eaters’ minds had been taxing, but eventually Rabastan Lestrange, always the weaker of the Lestrange brothers, had yielded a memory of Bellatrix bragging that her Lord had entrusted her with an object of great importance and she had hidden it in her most secure personal vault. The whole thing had turned his stomach a bit but it had been what he needed. Andromeda had once again come to the rescue, since many of her possessions had ended up in Bellatrix’s vault one way or another. She’d managed to steal the cup, and Gringotts’ enchantments didn’t detect its unapproved exit since Bellatrix had never formally registered it with the bank. Secrecy was her undoing, a bit of karma that delighted Albus to no end.
After that, the trail ran cold for a long time, and Albus had taken to going through the confiscated belongings of Death Eaters that the Ministry had not been able to sell or use. The diary had given him a spark of hope when he first saw it in Lucius Malfoy’s things–perhaps the thing contained reference to some clue, if a Death Eater had written in it–and then as soon as he picked it up he knew exactly what it was.
The snake had been the hardest. It was only after years of fruitless searching and incredibly draining (also wildly illegal) forays into Death Eaters’ minds that Albus had noticed the remarkable intelligence displayed by the snake, Nagini. Paying close attention to it had jogged his memory: she was familiar, too familiar.
Then the term maledictus drifted out of the depths of his memory and he’d nearly fainted in shock.
Why that woman had ever let Tom near her voluntarily, he could not understand, but it mattered not. She would not accede to his attempts to help and he very much doubted whether a dementor would be interested in the soul of a snake. Ergo, she had to die. The last three years of his merry horcrux hunt had been spent chasing the maledictus across four continents before he finally caught up to her in Nepal and killed her with Fiendfyre.
Albus had imagined he heard the pained and distant shrieking of Tom’s disembodied soul-wraith as she died, but that was probably just fancy.
The point was, Tom was as thoroughly dead as anyone could conceivably be. So what on earth was going on?
The message on the wall was cleverly set up with runes to appear at a certain time. Whoever had done it had known that the youngest students would be in the hall at that time, and arranged it so that the professors were distracted by the attacks. It was all very cleverly done and it might have been the work of a younger, saner Tom, but one piece of incontrovertible evidence proved it could not be Slytherin’s monster. These attacks were not petrifications.
Oh, Albus knew Slytherin’s monster was a basilisk all right, even if he had never managed to find his way to the Chamber himself. It was the only magical beast that could petrify. That it was also a snake only made him more certain. But the monster was clearly quite harmless if left alone, and this was clearly not its work.
Reluctantly, inevitably, Albus’ thoughts turned to Harry Potter.
Rumors had swirled across the castle that the young man was somehow behind the attacks. Student rumor mills were always borderline hysterical and rarely even close to accurate, so Albus did not doubt that the stories of the boy’s frightening demeanor were wildly exaggerated, but the fact remained that he was Tom Riddle’s fated equal. He was a Slytherin, one of the best students in his class, and certainly cunning enough to do something like this. The runework was perhaps above his level but it would be a simple thing to bribe (or threaten) from an older student.
Or maybe it had nothing at all to do with young Harry, and Albus was merely being paranoid. He couldn’t discount the possibility, not knowing his own tendency to jump to premature conclusions as intimately as he did. Harry was by all accounts a reserved but polite child, a model student who’d surrounded himself with a healthy mix of students from all Houses. The Heir of the Ancient and Noble House of Nott willingly spending time with a muggleborn Gryffindor, the Thomas boy, was not something he had ever expected to see. And while Harry was certainly not a normal child, Albus had never detected the same level of… profound break between him and others that had characterized the young Tom. Harry’s emotional development had been perhaps permanently stunted but he at least retained some capacity to invest in those around him and Albus had no intention of discouraging him from befriending Light scions such as Longbottom and Smith.
Mostly, though, he was inclined to think this had nothing to do with Harry because he couldn’t fathom what the boy’s motive might be. Albus had turned up no reference, in his passive legilimency scans of students and staff, of bad blood between Harry and the students attacked. Two of the most recent group were actually, if rumor was to be believed, casual friends of Harry’s who studied with him sometimes, although gleaning knowledge from Slytherins was always risky as their minds tended to be better protected than the general student populace.
Blood purity was always a consideration but Harry himself was a halfblood and had not been known to shun or disregard others based on blood status. He seemed to quite vehemently dislike the Granger girl from his year, but frankly, Albus wasn’t surprised. Miss Granger reminded him of himself at that age: it would likely be a few years more before she learned that her eagerness amounted to rubbing her classmates’ noses in her intelligence, which never earned anyone any friends. Harry’s dislike of her was almost certainly based on her personality alone, and again, he’d been spending a lot of time lately with another Gryffindor muggleborn. And one with a distinctly lower-class accent than Granger’s.
The only other possible motive was pure sadism. Again, however, Harry had shown no signs of truly antisocial behavior—nothing like the cold and absolute disconnection from others that defined a sociopath.
No, Albus could think of no motive that would drive Harry to this.
Which merely led him back to square one, with no real idea of the perpetrator or purpose behind the attacks, and several minutes wasted pondering the mind of Harry Potter.
The whole thing was a mystery. Albus had so dearly hoped that he was done with those.
-----
Harry woke up, and for a second he wasn’t sure why his sheets were so tangled that Raza, at his side, was hissing irritably about Harry having disturbed his sleep. Then he remembered. Chamber. Attacks.
Samantha Carran and Mercer Kershaw.
Twelve hours later, Harry still couldn’t quite decide what he was feeling. If he was feeling anything. Which he didn’t want to be.
Snarling in frustration, he yanked his curtains aside with more force than was really necessary and allowed himself the childish satisfaction of stomping to the bathroom, given that neither Theo nor Goyle was awake to witness it.
Theo and Harry waited in the corridor for Blaise to emerge from the room he shared with Malfoy and Crabbe. As usual, Blaise looked halfway between murderous and asleep, a look which Harry knew from experience would last until he’d had at least half a cup of strong coffee, at which point the odds were fifty-fifty he would make some form of complaint about how inferior British coffee was to a proper Italian espresso. Tracy met them in the common room for the walk up to breakfast.
Eyes turned to them and whispering sprang up the second they walked through the doors.
“What’s going on? Why’s everyone staring?” Tracy glared at a particularly owl-eyed Ravenclaw, who flinched back, away from them.
“Me,” Harry said sourly. “They’re staring at me.”
“Well somebody thinks highly of himself,” Blaise sneered, but there was no heat in it.
They sat down and Harry ate with precise movements. He was used to his peers watching him with a mix of fear and ill will. It wouldn’t affect him. He wouldn’t let it.
He was above their stupid opinions anyway.
Malfoy was looking far too smug about it, though, which set Harry’s teeth on edge and made him badly want to hurt someone. So many nasty curses he’d been learning, you could do a lot of damage with low power things even a second year could cast…
Before those thoughts could drag him too far from the present, Theo elbowed him. “C’mon, time for class.”
***
It was like running a gauntlet.
Hexes and jinxes and the occasional more serious curse found their way to Harry over the following days. Whispers stalked him through the halls and he became very adept at a silent protere shield, protego being a bit beyond his nonverbal abilities. And then there were the rumors that the school might close if this didn’t stop.
The urge to hex someone, usually Malfoy, dogged his steps. Harry took to practicing magic from Rookwood’s book of curses with Theo and Zacharias, who had the sense not to ask where he’d gotten it.
Harry could tell the practice was paying off. He could now cast a stunner powerful enough to knock Theo back a step and black out for a few seconds. Every time he cast it felt like a punch to his magical core but the blows lessened as he got better. That or he just got better at absorbing them, which amounted to the same thing. And every day he could cast a little longer before he felt his core start to strain with the effort. Zacharias and Theo were both making good progress with the spell; Theo had a few times made Harry’s vision fade for a few seconds until he woke up slumped against a chair.
Zacharias also started teaching them both the basics of hand-to-hand defense. Theo took to it with immediate glee; Harry knew it was useful, invaluable even, but he would be content with a passing competency in physical fighting. He tried to focus more on magical responses to physical attacks.
After a few sessions, they started inviting Thomas, Tracy, and Neville to those practices. Privately Harry was hoping it would help Neville’s self-confidence a bit. Portia didn’t usually come, but she studied physical defense magic with Harry, saying she wanted to do things with creatures and she’d best be able to shield herself against something trying to take a bite out of her.
Tracy surprised Harry the most: not only did she show an interest in combat that went against her usual avoidance of conflict, but she had quite a knack for it. She wasn’t particularly strong either physically or magically but she was creative and determined.
Using those hours as an outlet helped Harry manage his temper, but the stronger he got the harder it was to keep himself from reacting when people lashed out at him. He was already widely believed to be up to some evil scheme. If he hit back the rumors would only get worse. So he controlled himself.
It sucked.
***
“I want you to focus on figuring out these attacks. Other projects can wait.”
Luna just nodded, but Graves looked back at Harry with defiance he didn’t even try to hide.
A test. Good: he’d been too agreeable. Suspiciously so. Harry leaned forward and let his magic off the leash a little, enough to raise the temperature around Graves. Sweat started to shine on the older boy’s forehead.
In contrast, Harry’s voice was icy. “What will become of your little experiments if you’re sent home? If the school closes down and you can’t get into this lovely little library for free?”
Graves’ eyes narrowed, but he nodded all the same. “So mote.”
***
“I, uh, I have a question,” Neville said hesitantly.
Harry looked up from his notebook, which was open to a page full of notes on the headache relief potion. “What is it?”
Neville’s eyes flicked over Theo, Portia, Tracy, Thomas, and Zacharias, all of whom were sitting with Harry at the large table they’d hauled up to the greenhouse. “Can I sit?”
“You don’t have to ask,” Harry said, using his foot to shove out the chair opposite him. “This is your space too.”
“T-thanks.” Neville sat. His face was oddly blotchy and he kept twisting his hands together. “I… w-well, I was wondering… you said… not all the magic the Ministry says is Dark is… you know, evil or… or whatever.”
Harry gave Neville his full attention. The rest of the table had started to look over too. “Right.”
“Back up,” Thomas said. “What’s this about Dark magic?”
He looked alarmed. Harry tried not to let his irritation show; couldn’t Neville have done this when Thomas wasn’t here?
“It’s complicated. Dark magic, that is.” Zacharias took over, thank Merlin. This would be easier to stomach from a Hufflepuff. “There’s what the Ministry calls Dark, and then there’s what would be called “dark” in magical theory. The Ministry’s version of Dark is basically anything it thinks is too powerful or dangerous for people to be able to use.”
“Like what you said about… b-blood magic,” Neville said.
Tracy nodded. “My aunt uses blood magic sometimes as a Runes Master. It makes some runic stuff a lot stronger, like protection wards. But it’s illegal so she only does that for… some customers.”
“Oh.” Thomas frowned. “And that’s called Dark?”
Harry nodded, grinning on the inside. Maybe this would go better than he’d thought. Minds had to change eventually—if he could start with a muggleborn Gryffindor, that was a good sign.
“What counts as Dark in… theory, then?” Thomas asked.
“Well, there’s some spells that need you to keep a certain frame of mind to cast them,” Zacharias said. “I forget what they’re called–”
“Esoteric spells,” Theo said.
Zacharias nodded. “Those. Some of them are protective, some aren’t. Dark magic used to be called black magic, and it’s basically the spells that you can only cast if you want to hurt the person. Most of them tend to be addictive and take an unpleasant toll on the caster. There’s not much magic that’s inherently that… twisted, though. Certainly less than the Ministry classes as Dark.”
“There might be a reason that’s, y’know, maybe not as evil for wanting to hurt someone,” Thomas pointed out. “Like, I dunno, trying to hurt them so they can’t hurt you.”
Theo looked down at his hands. “And the real black magics don’t involve stuff like that. The Cruciatus Curse… can only be cast if you want to hurt the other person for no other reason than the pain itself. Won’t work if wanting information, revenge, or whatever else is your primary goal. It can be used for those sorts of things but only if you first and foremost want to cause pain for its own sake. It’s pretty much only useful to an actual sadist.”
“That’s awful,” Thomas said.
“My parents got hit with it a few times during the war,” Neville said quietly. “At the end… the Lestranges attacked us… Dad was under it for almost three minutes. It took a team of mind healers six months to help him recover.”
Theo looked around nervously, even though they were protected in the greenhouse under silencing wards Harry and Zacharias had been practicing. “It also… well, the Cruciatus and the other Unforgivables… the other reason they’re black magic, according to my father, is that every time you cast one it makes a sort of imprint on your mind. A conviction that you’ve done something totally unforgivable. A good mind healer can ease the effect of using them a few times, the Aurors who used them during the war had to do intensive therapy afterwards, but if you don’t get treatment, or if you cast them a lot… well, people will naturally do a lot worse stuff if they’re convinced they’re already terrible beyond any hope of redemption.”
Everyone at the table looked a little ill by the time he was done. Even Harry felt disturbed by the idea of the Cruciatus. He’d read mentions of it as a bad thing, of course, one of the Unforgivables, but so far no actual description of the intent you needed to cast it. He doubted he’d ever be able to do so: Harry only caused pain when he believed it to be justified, and he might enjoy it, but never for its own sake.
“You said traditionally that stuff was called black magic,” Thomas said suddenly, breaking the heavy silence. “What was Dark magic, then, traditionally?”
Zacharias hesitated. “Well, it’s kind of hard to tell, actually. A lot of that history has been lost—the Ministry banned the books. I don’t think there really was any Dark magic back then.”
“Banning books?” Thomas looked outraged. “They can do that?”
“Muggles can’t?” Zacharias said.
“No! I mean—not in a civilized country anyway. It’s like the first thing any wannabe dictator does, ban the books. We learned all about the Nazi book burnings in primary school. And I’ve read 1984 and stuff.”
Harry found himself nodding along. “It’s common practice here, Thomas. Loads of the books in the Restricted Section are there because you have to have a special permit to even own them. Any edition of Hogwarts, A History earlier than… I think the twenty-fourth, is also illegal to own, because the earlier editions aren’t as censored. They try to seize and destroy any copy they catch someone possessing.”
Thomas scowled. “That’s horrible.”
“Lots of the old families have secret libraries where they hoard the old texts, trying to protect them,” Zacharias said.
Neville frowned. “We don’t.”
“You might just not know about it. My grandfather didn’t show me ours until I was nine.” Zacharias patted Neville’s shoulder.
“I have a question,” Thomas said.
Harry waved at him to go ahead.
“Why ban all that stuff, though? The… blood magic you mentioned.” He flailed a bit wildly at Tracy’s direction. “If it’s sometimes useful and sometimes not, then… why not just, I dunno, ban the use of magic for harm, and be done with it all?”
Theo laughed caustically. “And in one sentence he picks apart the entire Ministry policy on banned magic.”
“People are harder to control if they know more of that sort of thing,” Tracy said, more calmly. “A protective ward strengthened by voluntary blood sacrifice could potentially keep out a whole squad of Aurors.”
“Still… seems like it’d be better to not just get rid of it all.”
“That’s what I tend to think,” Harry said. “But we’re just schoolkids.”
It was a deliberate opening for a rebuttal, and Theo provided it with a quick smirk. “But one day we won’t be. I mean… four of us will be the Heads of our Houses someday, and we’ll be on the Wizengamot.”
“Could I be?” Thomas wanted to know.
“Depends,” Harry said. “I gather there’s some elected seats–” Zacharias nodded– “and a certain number of those have to go to muggleborns.” Not a policy Harry disliked, theoretically, but he thought in the long run it would only reinforce the idea that muggleborns were some separate other class of magical, which was counterproductive.
Then again, he was just a schoolboy.
“Wait, that’s… aw, hell, I can’t remember what my teacher called it. Where you have to have a certain number of one kind of people in government or whatever?” Thomas looked around. “Anyone know?”
“An ethnic quota,” Harry said, his own Muggle school lessons coming back. They hadn’t been entirely useless. Which made him wonder why the wizarding world didn’t have schools for anyone younger than eleven. Something to look into.
“Right, that. So I could get one of those seats?” Thomas said.
Tracy nodded. “Would you want to?”
“Maybe… still not sure what I want to do when I’m older, I guess.” Thomas laughed. “I wanted to be an artist when I was a kid, you know? Wish Hogwarts had an art class or club or something.”
“You could start one,” Neville said.
“Huh. True.”
“Well I for one would not want to be in government,” Portia said drily. “Spend all day dealing with a bunch of politicians? No thank you.”
Everyone laughed, and the tension eased up somewhat.
Until Neville took a deep breath and said, “So what did the Death Eaters really want?”
Everyone froze.
Harry looked at Theo, Tracy, Zacharias. Theo was guarded, Tracy nervous, and Zacharias… he’d shut down completely.
Neville looked around, blushing. “I… sorry, I’ve just put my foot in it, don’t…”
“Why do you ask?” Theo said, looking at him intently.
“W-well… I… it seems like a children’s story!” Neville blurted.
Harry blinked: that was not what he’d expected. “What do you mean?”
“It’s… it’s only in stories that… everyone is all evil or all good.” Neville fidgeted. “So… I mean, V-Voldemort was insane… but… that many people… they c-can’t have all been… murderous lunatics. It j-just doesn’t make sense. There m-must have been… something, they wanted, beyond just k-killing… and stuff…”
He trailed off, but it was obviously a speech Neville had been working on for some time. Harry was oddly proud of the shy Hufflepuff for having put all that together and then daring to bring it up.
Zacharias looked at Theo, one eyebrow raised. “Yeah, there must have. Care to share, Theodore?”
Thomas looked between them. “Am I missing something?”
“I am probably the best able to know what the Death Eaters may have wanted,” Theo said, speaking very precisely and looking at no one in particular, “as my father was… somewhat involved in the movement.”
“What?” Thomas said, looking like he might be about to leave the table.
Portia touched his shoulder. “Stay and hear them out,” she said softly.
Looking uncertain, Thomas nodded. Neville picked at his nails.
“My father knew… Tom Riddle in school. They were… friends. From what he has told me, it was originally a political group. They called themselves the Knights of Walpurgis.” Theo took a deep breath. “Over time, however, Riddle seemed to grow… unstable. Insane, even. He favored… people with similar instabilities. Bellatrix Black, for example. My father… he tried to leave, and was… not allowed.” Every word seemed delicately chosen; Harry suspected Theo’s father hadn’t really tried to leave, but that was the official story that had kept Lord Nott out of Azkaban. “He was sentenced to house arrest for life as punishment for having been involved at all, but as his participation in the… actual crimes was not voluntary, the Wizengamot saw fit to show mercy.”
“Oh.” Thomas bit his lip. “So you don’t, you know… want to kill all the Muggles or… anything like that?”
“Of course not, don’t be ridiculous.” Theo straightened and glared at him.
“Just asking.” Thomas put his hands up. “All I know about it is what the other Gryffindors say, mate, don’t look at me like that.”
“There is a lot of wrong information,” Zacharias said.
“Their original goals?” Harry prodded, before they could go off track.
Theo nodded. “Right. Well, at first, it was about some cultural stuff, I think. Wanting to stop banning rituals and books and holidays that were traditionally practiced here. They didn’t have a huge problem with muggleborns, not at first, just with Muggles, because they thought Muggles were a threat to our world.”
“How?” Thomas shook his head. “Wizards have magic.”
“There aren’t as many magicals as there are Muggles, not by a long shot. And Muggles have some pretty horrifying weapons, I’ve heard,” Theo said.
“Nukes,” Tracy supplied.
Thomas’ eyes got wide. “Oh, right.”
“What are those?” Neville said.
Harry let Tracy and Thomas explain about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War. The purebloods at the table looked stunned and terrified at what they were hearing; they’d known, probably, that Muggles weren’t dirty stupid monkeys like Malfoy seemed to think, but this was a lot to swallow. Harry understood. It had been a lot to take in even for Muggle kids who knew about the wars their grandparents and great-grandparents had gotten up to.
“But they weren’t pushing for like… genocide,” Thomas said.
Theo shook his head. “Not at all. Just… better separation, I guess. Enforcement of the Statute of Secrecy. Muggleborns were dangerous to them because, no offense, you come with parents and siblings who learn about magic. We still haven’t forgotten the witch hunts, you know.”
Thomas winced.
“So yeah, they saw it as a risk that muggleborns came to the magical world at eleven, when they already had family and ties to the Muggle world. They thought it was bad that muggleborns would always have one foot in both. And what if it came to war between magicals and Muggles? What side would you choose?” Theo looked Thomas dead in the eye.
“I… um. I… guess it would depend.” Uncertainty made Thomas blush.
“Exactly. And it’s not your fault,” Theo added, “it’s just how people are. No one can fault you for feeling loyalty to your family and friends and the community you grew up in. And that’s a risk.
“But things didn’t really move when they tried the political route. Father says for a decade or so after he graduated, it was all completely legitimate—this was when he was still voluntarily involved, when it was a political movement pushing for change. Classes on wizarding culture, early classes so muggleborns wouldn’t come into Hogwarts unprepared, legalization of blood magic and ritual magic that wasn’t inherently harmful, stuff to keep squibs in our world instead of making them go live Muggle. There were some people, mainly Dumbledore, who fought everything they wanted, though, and Dumbledore is… really powerful. That was when Riddle started going downhill and things went… wrong.”
Understatement of the year, Harry thought, but he applauded Theo internally for the summary.
“So they weren’t all evil.” Neville took a breath. “That’s… reassuring, I guess, except… why don’t we learn any of this?”
Theo hesitated.
“Oh, I’ll say it,” Portia said irritably. “Politics, Neville. The people in charge right now get reelected and get their tax raises passed because everyone is convinced Riddle was evil incarnate and the current leaders saved all of us. If anyone even proposes something like a wizarding culture class at Hogwarts for muggleborns to learn about our world, they’re labeled a Death Eater and shut down faster than a niffler swallows gold.”
“That seems bad,” Thomas said.
“It’s terrible politically. We’re basically living in a fake democracy with Albus Dumbledore’s people in charge,” Portia said. “And none of the Slytherins will say it because they’re clever enough to care about what would happen if certain teachers learned they’d been saying shite like this, but I do not care, hence I’m not in Slytherin.” She slammed her book open on the table again in a way that said she was done with the conversation.
Thomas looked at the rest of them. “Would it really be that bad?”
“You have classes with the Slytherins, right? Pay attention. Almost all the professors favor the rest of us,” Zacharias said grimly. “It’s not fair, and it’s not right, but that’s what it is. I could probably get out of it. I’m a Hufflepuff and a noble and my family has, shall we say, clout. They’d be in trouble.”
“Me and Harry especially,” Tracy said. “Neither of us has… well, influence.”
“And Dumbledore has it out for me,” Harry muttered.
Neville shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense, Harry–”
“He abandoned me to my magic-hating Muggle relatives,” Harry interrupted, not in the mood for this. “Like yesterday’s milk. On their doorstep, in the middle of the night, in November, with nothing but a note. He’s legally my guardian but I never met him before Hogwarts. Not when my cousin tried to suffocate me, or my aunt locked me in the cupboard under the stairs for a week without food, or my family ditched me at an orphanage because they didn’t want to deal with me.”
Okay, that was maybe a little too much. Everyone except Theo looked badly startled: they were used to Harry’s iron composure. Damn it. He took a steadying breath and carefully unclenched his hands, letting his angry magic flow away from him.
“I… Merlin, Harry, I had no idea,” Neville whispered. “I’m… I’m so sorry… how could he do that?”
Thomas’ skin had taken on an ashy undertone. “And how did no one ever notice? That’s—that sort of thing is so illegal for Muggles!”
Harry laughed hollowly. “Oh, some people noticed, but whenever a teacher got worried or a neighbor saw something, it went nowhere. I don’t know if my aunt and uncle were just that good at wiggling out of trouble, or people refused to think bad of a group of nuns raising poor orphaned kids, or if someone was trying to keep me there, but given that one of Dumbledore’s squib friends lived near me my whole childhood and then moved across the street from the orphanage, I think someone had to know something was wrong.”
“You should report that,” Zacharias said, eyes like ice. “That isn’t right.”
“I can’t do anything right now. He’s legally my guardian, and he controls my trust vault. I couldn’t so much as go to a law office without his permission. And if I went to the Ministry, well, he’s got that place by the balls.” Harry shook his head. “No, I just have to weather it until I come of age.”
Neville got a determined look on his face. “Well, if you need anything l-let me know, okay?”
“And me,” Zacharias said. “House Smith will offer you shelter should it become necessary. Even Dumbledore cannot openly contradict my grandfather without fear.”
“...thank you both,” Harry said. That was… more than he had expected from them, and it made him feel something odd that he decided to analyze later.
Luckily, the conversation changed back to easier subjects, and Harry was able to stay out of the debate Tracy, Thomas, and Zacharias got into about magical and Muggle sports.
Theo and Tracy hung back with him as curfew approached and the others trickled away to go back to their own dorms. “You all right?” Theo said quietly.
Harry shrugged. “I meant to let it out… eventually.” What Dumbledore had done to him would shake anyone’s faith in the man, as it had Neville’s and Thomas’. Which was exactly why Harry had intended to reveal it someday. The conversation had just blindsided him, and as on edge as he’d been lately… “I didn’t mean to be quite that heated about it.”
“It worked though,” Tracy said softly.
Harry and Theo looked at her sharply.
The Slytherin girl folded her arms and glared at them. “I’m not an idiot. You’re collecting people around you. Trying to get their loyalty and get them to see things your way, at least about big topics. I don’t know for sure what your endgame is but if it involves going against Dumbledore, even a little, you wouldn’t have been able to stay friends with Neville and Dean unless they quit kissing the man’s robes.”
Huh. “You grew a spine since last year,” Harry said.
Tracy flushed but didn’t look away. “You want people who’ll speak their mind. Or am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.” He smiled thinly. Apparently she’d been waiting to figure out what he wanted, and been clever enough to figure it out. “Any other thoughts you care to share?”
“Parkinson,” she said instantly. “And Zabini. Bring them closer. Parkinson wants to split from Malfoy but she won’t unless she has a reason. It’s complicated, but her family has wanted to marry her off to the prat since she was in diapers.”
“What a fate,” Theo said. “Married to Malfoy. I’d sooner walk off a cliff.”
Tracy laughed. “My point exactly.”
-----
There was something very wrong with this picture. Elias could not stop staring at the parchments in front of him. Luna Lovegood had already seen these, and confirmed his findings.
They knew who was behind the attacks—or, at least, who likely had information about how they were being carried out.
“We have to find Harry,” Luna said. Her airy voice was for once focused, like a telescope, or a curse.
Elias nodded. “Let’s go.”
They left the library in a hurry. At this hour, Harry Potter would almost certainly be in his lair, which he would of course never admit was a lair. Elias laughed softly to himself as they ran through the halls.
Ahead of him, Luna turned a corner and froze with a shriek.
Elias tried to stop: he could not. He could only hurtle around the corner and into the very same trap which had pinned Luna like a butterfly in the air.
They were facing exactly who he had most and least expected to see.
“You little eaglets are far too clever for your own good,” their attacker said, approaching them with something glinting in their hand where anyone else would carry a wand. “I was trying to keep this to the nobodies, but I suppose exceptions must be made.”
Elias felt a prick in his arm and hoped, as his vision went dark, that Harry Potter would be clever enough to figure it all out.
-----
Harry couldn’t not think about the irony. A few weeks ago, he and Portia had been sneaking Luna in here to take blood samples of the victims. Now, they were here officially, names on the visitor log and everything, to visit her in her own hospital bed.
“She looks so small.” Portia brushed a bit of blonde hair off Luna’s forehead. Unconscious like this, she looked even odder than usual. If the fey still walked the earth, Harry would have suspected Luna was one, but even he had read the histories of the fey’s withdrawal from the mortal world around the sixteen hundreds.
“Mr. Potter? Miss Bole?”
They both flinched and looked up at Madam Pomfrey, who stood over them with a sympathetic look. “You’re the first visitors the poor dear has had, you know.”
“She doesn’t have a lot of friends,” Portia said in a low, fierce voice.
Madam Pomfrey sighed. “I suppose it’s best if I leave her belongings with you, then. Miss Bole, do you know an Elias Graves, in your House?”
“I do, we’re study partners sometimes,” Portia said, the cover they’d come up with for the way the two of them exchanged books so often.
“I suppose it’s best to leave you his belongings, too. No one has come to visit him and we haven’t managed to contact either of their parents.” Madam Pomfrey’s expression said exactly what she thought of such negligent parents as she handed two bundles over.
“Thank you,” Portia said, accepting both.
As soon as Pomfrey was gone, they opened Graves and Luna’s bags.
Harry struck gold, metaphorically, in Graves’. There was a bundle of parchments tied messily into one large scroll sitting right on top of the boy’s schoolwork. As soon as he opened the scroll, he knew this was big.
“Portia.”
The Ravenclaw scrambled over to look. Her eyes widened. “This is… Muggle stuff. Chemistry, right? I’ve seen some older Ravenclaws study it.”
“They identified some of the chemicals in their blood.” Harry couldn’t believe how far Graves and Luna had gotten. “They’re Muggle drugs.”
“Not all, look—there are some components of Dreamless Sleep,” Portia said, pointing at another parchment.
“A mix of potions and chemistry? How has no one else figured this out?”
Portia looked around to make sure they were still alone. “Most healers and mediwitches don’t look for Muggle medicines. Why would they?”
“But a couple of kids thought to,” Harry muttered.
“Should we… tell someone?” Portia said uncertainly.
Harry’s eyes fell on the next page, and he stopped. Froze, really. Glaring up at him was a moving photograph, taken inside Professor White’s office. The angle suggested the camera had been hidden in someone’s bag. And right there in front of him was a clearly Muggle cardboard box with a printed label spelling out some complicated medical words. Words that matched what Luna and Graves had scribbled in the margins of the tests they’d run on the blood samples.
“No,” he said. “No, we can’t tell anyone. Look.”
Portia figured it out in less than ten seconds, and sucked in a shocked breath. “Why is it always the Muggle Studies professor?”
“And if we tell anyone, we have to explain how we got the samples for Luna and Graves to test. Involuntary blood draws, done by someone without a license for medical spells, and then experimenting on the samples… we’d all be expelled in about two seconds flat.”
Portia swore.
Harry took a deep breath. “We’ve got to get into his office.”
In the end, he took only Zacharias and Neville with him. Theo, Portia, and Tracy all wanted to come, but Harry flatly refused. They were more vulnerable, for a number of reasons: Zacharias and Neville were noble Heirs and Harry was the Boy-Who-Lived. The others were all from disgraced families with little or no influence. It was too big a risk.
They waited until they knew a Muggle Studies class was in session. Oddly enough, White’s office wasn’t magically locked, protected only by a deadbolt.
“Alohomora,” he whispered. The lock clicked, and under Neville’s hand, the door swung open.
“That’s odd,” Zacharias said. “No wards?”
Harry led the way into the quiet office. “Lumos.”
The others lit their wands as well, and they looked around curiously. Neville and Zacharias, both purebloods, seemed a little baffled by the plastics in the room, poking at the chairs with identical confused faces. Harry grinned, watching them. “It’s plastic. A Muggle thing. Lighter than wood or metal, and durable.”
“How’s it made?” Zacharias said, eyeing it.
“I’m not actually sure. Chemical stuff. I could look into it over the summer,” Harry said. It would be good to have something that he could work on where the Muggles might see him.
Zacharias nodded. “I would appreciate it.”
“Guys…”
They turned towards Neville’s shaky voice, and found a stack of white cardboard boxes in the corner, hidden behind a very Muggle filing cabinet painted a distressing shade of beige. Harry knelt and snapped a picture of it with the camera Thomas had borrowed from someone for the evening. Harry hadn’t explained why he needed it, and the Gryffindor, thankfully, didn’t ask.
Standing, he tucked the camera away in his bag. “Let’s look around a bit more. The files, maybe.”
He was just reaching for the top drawer when the door flew open, and the wizarding lamps along the walls flared to bright, angry life.
All three boys whirled around and plastered innocent looks on. Well, tried. Neville’s was terrible. Surprisingly, Zacharias had a perfect fake-innocent face, and Harry made a note to try to figure out why a Hufflepuff from such an obviously warm family had had to learn that skill. Later, though, when they weren’t facing off with a furious–looking Professor White.
“I would appreciate if one of you could explain what you are doing in my office,” White said.
Harry cleared his throat, mind spinning. “Well, sir, it’s… about what you asked me a while ago, about muggle religion?”
White stared at him. “Go on.”
“I, well, I talked to Neville and Zach, and they were interested,” Harry improvised wildly. Zacharias hadn’t batted an eye but Neville had turned to look at him as soon as he said the religion thing, which was a tell he’d have to break Neville of. “And I reconsidered, I mean, you’re right, I grew up with muggles but it’s sad I don’t know more about them…”
“I see. And you thought breaking into my office would be the best way to initiate this conversation.”
Harry shuffled his feet, trying to play the schoolboy caught doing something he shouldn’t. At least Neville had that one down pat, since they were schoolboys and had gotten caught. “Sir…”
“It was my idea.” Zacharias looked at his shoes. “I’m sorry, sir, I thought since the door was unlocked you maybe hadn’t heard us knocking, so I opened it, and then I was curious about the chairs and stuff. Harry said they’re called plastic but he didn’t know what they were made of?”
For a long, terrible moment, White just looked at them impassively. Harry felt himself starting to sweat a little and got annoyed. He’d talked himself out of worse spots than this. Probably.
“How about that, then. Sit down, my boys, sit down!” White’s switch to jovial and warm was so sudden that Harry almost didn’t notice that teeth-grating my boys. So similar to Dumbledore. Did they know each other? But of course, they had to, Dumbledore hired White after all. And White was just old enough that Dumbledore might have taught him.
They edged into the plastic chairs in front of the clearly synthetic and factory-made desk amid a somewhat convoluted explanation of plastics manufacturing from White. All this muggleness made Harry’s magic itch in a way he associated with the orphanage. He wondered if he was imagining it or if there really was something about muggle-made things that bothered magicals, or vice versa. If so, it would explain a lot.
White offered them all tea, pouring and preparing it the Muggle way, and they settled in for what would probably be one of the most awkward conversations of Harry’s life.
“What do you know about muggle religions? Mr. Longbottom, I believe?”
“Oh, I, uh… not much, just… what Harry’s said,” Neville said, with a quick guilty look at Harry, who sat in the middle.
“And what has Mr. Potter said on the subject?”
Neville swallowed. “Well, mostly that… they don’t like witches much… sir.”
White laughed. “That’s true, they don’t, but it is by and large a misunderstanding, dear boy. Muggles believe that any powers they consider ‘magical’ to come from the Devil, the embodiment of ultimate evil. Witches are people who sell their eternal souls to the Devil in exchange for those powers. Since we don’t engage in any soul-selling, we aren’t evil the way muggles usually think of it.”
“But that’s true only for Jews and Christians and… maybe Islam, I think,” Harry said. “Hell, and the Devil, I mean.”
He wished he hadn’t spoken almost immediately. “I’m sorry, Mr. Potter, I thought you said you didn’t know much about muggle religion?” White said, zeroing in on him.
Harry tried to blush. “Not specifics about any one of them, sir, but I read a lot, and Britain isn’t just Christians, is it?”
“True… true, it is not. Nonetheless, my boy, Christianity and its sects is the dominant religion in the culture of the West, and the most relevant to our own history and nation.”
“Muggles in the East historically were much less hateful towards magicals,” Zacharias said. “Or that’s how my grandfather tells it, anyway. He traveled there years ago, with his father and grandfather.”
White’s fingers tapped out an irregular rhythm on the tabletop. “True, but the religions of the East have a much more… flexible view of divinity and the gods. They harken back to an older time when people worshipped many gods rather than the one true God.”
“Are you a believer, sir?” Harry said.
White hesitated. “Why do you ask, Mr. Potter?”
“It’s just, you talk about it like you are. ‘The one true God.’ That sort of thing.”
“I think there is much merit in Muggle religion,” White said slowly. “Many of the ideas in the Bible are timeless and as relevant now as they were in the life of Christ.”
He hadn’t answered the question, but Harry decided not to push.
“I–I just realized…” Neville blurted. He quailed under the sudden attention from White, but pushed on. “Sorry, sir, just I told Professor Sprout I’d go see her about a p-plant she wants me to help grow, and I d-don’t want to be late…”
“Oh, go on, do.” Professor White waved a hand. “I thank you boys for stopping by. Perhaps you should return next week? About an hour later, though, else I may still be in class, and we wouldn’t want anyone thinking you can just gander on into the Muggle Studies professor’s office without so much as a by-your-leave.”
His warm smile invited them to laugh, which Harry and Zacharias did while Neville tried to smile, but Harry wasn’t fooled and he didn’t think the others were either. They agreed to come back and made good their escape.
“That—that bastard!” Zacharias spat as soon as they’d gotten a few corridors away. Harry looked up, startled. The prickly Hufflepuff was normally reserved but now his pale cheeks were flushed with rage that spilled over into his shaking voice. “He laughed! Like the witch hunts and—and all the dead magicals are funny! Ha ha, let’s have a good joke out of it, now that it’s been a few centuries and we can just forget how many tens of thousands of us died!”
“Zach,” Neville said. “Zach, shush.”
“Portraits,” Harry added, catching Neville’s nervous look at the walls. There were no portraits immediately near them but if Zacharias got too loud, maybe one would overhear them, and rumor had it the portraits reported to Dumbledore.
Breathing deeply, Zacharias stopped and slumped against the wall, arms crossed. “I really do not care for that man.”
“Me neither.” Harry rubbed his temples. “To be fair, that could have gone a lot worse. I’m just glad I had an excuse.”
“And we got this,” Neville said, holding up the camera.
Zacharias and Harry stared at it.
“What? I stuffed it in my bag when he was busy trying to explain that plastic stuff,” Neville said. “Which seems really weird and kind of gross, but maybe practical, if you can’t conjure stuff.”
“Nice one,” Harry said finally.
“We’ll make a rebel of you yet,” Zacharias added, throwing an arm around Neville’s shoulders.
Neville blushed but grinned under the attention. “I mean, I can’t lie, but I’m p-pretty good at making people not pay attention to me.”
“No, that was perfect,” Harry said firmly. “Let’s just hope the film turns up something good.”
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