Theo
The letter from Father was not unexpected. Having escaped capture last year by the skin of his teeth, naturally the Nott patriarch had been keeping his head down, along with most other public-facing Death Eaters. Theo knew what the breakout meant, and this letter only served as further confirmation: things were about to get worse.
“You,” said Neville, startling Theo out of his thoughts, “have been staring at that for twenty minutes. What gives?”
Theo glanced up at him, then around the Chamber. He’d believed himself alone.
“I was in the statue reading,” Neville said, correctly guessing Theo’s thoughts. “Came out, saw you.”
“Decided to spy on me for a bit?” Theo kicked at the next chair over in the cluster that he had chosen at random as his momentary safe haven so that it rocked a little to face Neville. It was a halfhearted invitation, but Neville took it, sitting down with more unconscious self-possession than he’d had this time last year.
They were changing, all of them.
“You looked… I dunno, like you needed a bit,” Neville said. “But some thoughts are better with company.”
That was fair. “How are your parents doing?”
Neville’s face tightened. “They’re… well. Recovering. It’s slow. They have good days and bad.”
“Are they still thinking of going to that clinic?”
“In Switzerland? Yeah. It’s quiet, there.” A fleeting smile; Theo was glad to see it. “Lots of plants. Mum will like that, I think. She said she… liked them. Before.”
“No time like the present,” said Theo with a glibness he didn’t feel. “Better get them out while you can.”
A cold part of him understood what had been done to the Longbottoms. Admired the ruthlessness of it. Leaving them in play as powerful political and symbolic opponents would have been risky, especially with the Dark Lord’s eventual return weighing on Dumbledore’s mind. Or, he supposed, the culprit’s mind, since nothing could technically be proven. It was a bold stroke. Decisive. Clean. Effective, for a while at least.
Pity, for the culprit, that a Death Eater owed Harry a favor.
“So?” Neville said, indicating the letter in Theo’s hand.
Wordlessly, Theo handed it over.
Theo knew some Gryffindors with excellent control of their expressions, Hermione foremost among them, but Neville was not on that list: his growing anger was as easy to read as Father’s clear, precise handwriting.
“This implies you had to… talk to him last summer,” Neville said finally.
“He’s interested in Harry,” Theo told the ceiling. “Not in me. Or at least, he wasn’t then—he asked me questions, but I was… circumspect, about Harry and the Vipers. I led him to believe that I am of less importance and Harry more sympathetic to his cause than is actually the case.”
“And now he’s caught on?” said Neville, handing the letter back.
Theo glanced down at it. “Yes. Father’s warning me, in his own way. I don’t know whose report contradicted the Dark Lord’s beliefs.”
“Are you going to be safe over Yule?” Neville said in a voice as hard and sharp as a blade.
“Don’t worry about me.” Although Neville’s worry meant quite a lot. “I was careful not to lie outright. Maybe I edited out some… selective things, but any misconceptions are plausibly his fault, not mine.”
Neville huffed. “Bloody snakes.”
“We should all be more worried about Blaise, anyway,” Theo pointed out. They hadn’t really talked about that yet—he knew Harry and Neville had spoken of it at least briefly, enough for Neville to accept the rest of them keeping an eye on their friend. Theo was also quite sure Blaise knew and was ignoring it, which Theo chose to take as a positive sign of Blaise’s trustworthiness.
With a grimace, Neville scooted down into his chair. “He told me about… his mum, over the holiday?”
“I’d do it for him, if I could.” Theo considered. “Though I think he’ll be fine, provided it’s someone… objectionable.”
“We aren’t arbiters of who lives and who dies.”
Theo snorted. “Then who is? Fate? Luck? The Ministry? I know who I trust to make those kinds of decisions, and none of those people work for Shacklebolt.”
“I… guess.” Neville’s grimace was well on the way to a full-blown scowl. “It doesn’t… sit right.”
“You don’t trust Harry.”
Neville ran his hands over his face. “I don’t think I would trust any one person. I get Blaise is—in a corner. But ordinarily… Harry isn’t infallible.”
“Then do something about it,” Theo said, tone sharper than he’d intended but honestly no more than he thought reasonable. “We may not share all of your principles, Neville, but Harry listens to you, and none of us intends to lose. In a few years we’ll be in the halls of power. Probably too soon, but it’s the old guard’s fault for fucking up so badly that half the hereditary authority is falling on to teenagers and every competent civil servant is either dead or fired.”
“You sure Harry will listen to me?”
For fuck’s sake, didn’t they already settle this? Theo reined himself in: some decisions Harry made would never make sense to Neville and vice versa, and it wasn’t fair to either of them to expect otherwise. “He respects you,” Theo said instead, “and he values both your counsel and your good opinion of him. Just tell him that you’re worried and, I don’t know, suggest some kind of check among our group, so that if he or anyone else thinks of killing someone or some other extreme solution, he’ll only do it if all of us agree.”
“It might be nice to think he’d, I don’t know, do the right thing because it’s right and not because I or Hermione or whoever would be upset if he didn’t,” Neville muttered.
A sudden crack of emotion shook Theo so badly he momentarily lost the thread of conversation. What was he feeling and where the fuck did it come from and why—
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Theo set it aside to consider later. What were they—oh, right. “Does it matter, in the end?”
“What, Harry?” Neville said with a too-knowing look.
Theo nodded.
“I’d have said no, a year ago. I’m still sore about…” Neville waved a hand. “The whole thing, with Crouch.”
“He’s not so bad,” Theo offered.
Neville’s eyes narrowed. “And just how well do you know him?”
Oh, he had to be careful here. “Not personally. He’s…” dangerous, cold, easily overlooked, “not the worst of them, not by a long shot. I haven’t seen much directly, but from what I have, he’s certainly not one of the Death Eaters who’s in it to hurt people.” Like the morons in my bloody house last summer.
“Right.”
Theo eyed him, but saw nothing other than a general sort of pensive uncertainty. “Look, Nev, if it wasn’t personal for you, would you care so much?”
“No, alright? I—get it, but I still hate it, but I’m working on it.” Neville visibly steeled himself. “I’ve been thinking maybe I want to… meet him.”
“Him who? Crouch?”
“Yeah.”
Well, that was surprising. “I think,” Theo said slowly, “you’d have to talk to Harry about that, not me.”
“But what do you think of it?”
Theo’s stomach twisted. “Neville, I can’t keep talking about this.”
Neville frowned at him.
“You’re—my occlumency is only so good,” Theo hissed. Fuck. Yeah, he really couldn’t— “If, hypothetically, you do talk to Harry about this, then you could trust his judgment about whether meeting with Crouch would be safe. But you definitely shouldn’t tell me, because, hypothetically, if Crouch agreed to meet you, he’d be obliged to report it.”
And if he didn’t—
Theo didn’t know how deep Crouch’s loyalty to Harry went. But he did know Crouch was trusted enough to get away with quite a lot. Theo, on the other hand, was a security risk: the Dark Lord would have to be an idiot not to monitor him.
When he looked up, Neville was peering at him worriedly. “I don’t like this… this. You’re in danger.”
Oh, Neville. Theo smiled at him. “Aren’t we all?”
Harry
Looking at his official copy of the agenda for the Wizengamot’s upcoming session, Harry wondered if Voldemort had miscalculated, or if his timing had been deliberate.
The first thing up for debate was a petition from the Office of the Minister for an official Wizengamot response. What the Wizengamot could do about it, Harry wasn’t entirely sure, but given the immediate uproar after the Prophet’s article, the entire Wizengamot would want to be seen publicly and loudly calling for some kind of action. Some of them might even be sensible about it; Harry expected a measure approving emergency funds for the DMLE, and hoped someone other than House Black would suggest some kind of investigation into Azkaban’s policies. Sirius had been banging on about that for ages and no one ever listened. Too many of them were way too used to their pet monsters guarding the gates of hell on Earth.
Harry snorted. Complacent idiots really shouldn’t be surprised the monsters slipped their leashes. The whole situation had just been a disaster waiting to happen. Now the disaster was here and no one was prepared for it.
But for every helpful suggestion there would no doubt be three redundant or stupid ideas that served no purpose other than for their sponsoring Houses to get attention. It would take up an inordinate amount of the Wizengamot’s time, exhaust everyone involved, and make sure that the Dark Lord’s activity—or, he guessed, Dark wizard activity, if you were among the shrinking minority who still refused to believe Voldemort was back—would stay in the front of everyone’s minds for months.
For months now, Voldemort had been working in the shadows, doing little to draw direct, sustained attention from the press and wider wizarding public. That was no longer an option. So he had miscalculated… or, Harry thought with some alarm, it was intentional. Was the Dark Lord switching to an openly offensive stance? Surely his control of the Ministry wasn’t that consolidated yet, Harry would know if it was, from Marcus Flint and some of the other people he and Sirius kept in touch with. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to believe Voldemort miscalculated this badly.
Harry set it aside to consider after he’d looked over the rest of the agenda. Right away he saw a few things that shouldn’t cause much trouble—Marchbanks, one of Ogden’s allies, was sponsoring a petition from the Enchanters’ Guild which Harry marked for review. Depending on what exactly they wanted, it could be Ogden offering Sirius an olive branch, or Ogden offering a test to see how the House of Black responded. Or, Harry supposed, it could be just the Marchbanks seat doing right by a special interest whose desires aligned with that family’s. He’d have to talk to Sirius about different responses depending on what the Guild actually wanted. House Black’s general stance was in favor of more experimental licenses and stronger intellectual property protections but the Enchanters’ Guild wasn’t necessarily bringing up either subject.
And there it was, about two thirds of the way down the list. Empowering Law Enforcement to Discourage Organized Violence. Sponsoring seat: Peasegood, which was unusual; they were one of the less influential families, and, if Harry remembered correctly, tended to just vote whatever way the bulk of the Potter-centric bloc did. Well, formerly Potter-centric; they’d been coalescing around Doge, Abbott, and Macmillan since James died.
Peasegood proposing the bill implied it was coming from the Order side. But something about that didn’t quite seem… right to Harry. They’d never used him as a proxy for proposing legislation before, not that Harry could remember, nor had he ever given any indication of wanting or jockeying for more political influence than he had. Which led Harry to wonder what would prompt him to do so now. Sudden ambition sparked by unrest in the Wizengamot, maybe? Or had he been influenced by someone like Thorne, with ambition to spare but no Wizengamot seat with which to exercise it? And there was a third possibility, that the Death Eaters had gotten to Peasegood by bribery or coercion, so as to push legislation forward and sneak it past the voting majority Dumbledore’s bloc still maintained.
Regardless, something put forward by such a minor House wouldn’t draw much attention, not compared to the stink everyone was sure to make about Azkaban. Certainly not from among Peasegood’s usual allies. If someone wanted to sneak something through the Wizengamot this was exactly the way to do it. Was, in fact, exactly how Harry would consider doing it if he didn’t want people to know it had come from him.
Harry had to admit he could see the appeal. Make it legal to issue warrants for searches or arrests based on potentially seditious speech? All it would take was one person getting too deep in their cups and making an off-color joke about the Ministry, and they could be brought up on charges. It certainly had the potential to hunt down people involved in violent activity. But only if the Aurors, the DMLE, and the Ministry were all scrupulously just.
They did not have a great track record in that department, and, setting aside the run-of-the-mill sort of corruption that had been around for decades, it was an open secret that plenty of people among the Ministry’s ranks and even within the DMLE sympathized with the Death Eaters. Those sympathizers could manipulate this law to harass Muggleborns, political dissidents, people who hadn’t done anything wrong—and if (when, supplied Harry’s pessimism) the Ministry fell, Death Eaters in Auror robes could go after anyone they wanted, whenever, with the full protection of the law.
For all Harry might agree with many of the Death Eaters’ goals, he didn’t like the thought of them having that kind of free rein. Nor, for that matter, the Order. He’d have to talk to Sirius and come up with a plan now that they knew the bill wasn’t a hoax.
Attention clung to Harry like burrs on wool. Or, more precisely, on Harry and the others with him, in particular Theo and Pansy.
In the days since news of the breakout reached the school, most of Slytherin had taken to walking with certain of their House mates in the center of a large group. Tensions among the students ran higher than Harry could remember from ever before; already half a dozen people had gone to the hospital wing with some injury or jinx.
“I’m worried about this,” said Daphne quietly. She and Harry had drifted to the back of the Slytherins as they left Transfiguration, standing as a casual buffer between their House mates and the Hufflepuffs who took the class with them. “Pansy’s more upset than she lets on.”
“I know. And Theo…”
Daphne nodded, though Harry couldn’t really make himself put it into words, especially here where there was a risk of being overheard. Theo had drawn in on himself almost completely. Yesterday Neville had alluded to having spoken with Theo about it, but Harry hadn’t pried—he was just grateful Theo had someone to talk to, if that someone couldn’t be Harry.
It couldn’t. Harry knew that. Theo knew that, and Theo had chosen to trust Neville with this, and Harry would respect that by turning the conversation with Neville in another direction entirely.
“Have you heard anything about the investigation?” said Daphne when Harry didn’t continue.
“Nothing. I’m not surprised, though.” Harry smoothed away the frown that wanted to make itself at home between his eyebrows.
“I thought you said McKinnon seemed invested.”
“Yes, he did, but he’s just one wizard. Even if Tonks and, I don’t know, Robards maybe—I don’t know what other Aurors Dumbledore trusts this much—even if they all help out, they’re limited to whatever they can do on the quiet, and they’re stretched thin as it is. The twins tell me from what they’ve seen the Order’s still fixated mostly on protecting the Wizengamot.”
Daphne lowered her voice. “I’ve had another letter from home. Two of the votes we’ve always relied on might pull their support from House Greengrass when our trade agreements come up for renewal.”
“And two seats matter that much?”
“Two that we know of. There are only seven seats in the panel, and the DIC and DCRMC have a lot of power over this stuff too.”
This was not an aspect of Wizengamot and Ministry policy where Harry was confident in his own knowledge. For a moment they walked in silence, keeping an eye on Pansy, Theo, and Blaise’s conversation ahead, and an ear behind them in case any other students came close. Daphne waited patiently for Harry to sift through things in his mind and formulate a question.
“When do your House’s agreements next come up? What is the potential loss?”
“You have no idea how this works, do you?” she asked with a faint smirk.
“I have an idea.”
Daphne laughed; Pansy glanced back at them with an eyebrow raised, and half-smiled when her eyes met Harry’s.
“One of our biggest contracts is up for renewal,” Daphne said. Harry looked away from Pansy to study Daphne’s expression. Composed, as always. Giving nothing away. “Exportation of certain creature byproducts and derivatives of them—the substance isn’t important. It’s just—we work with the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures department regarding our House’s rights to keep magical animals, sell their byproducts, all that, all for the purpose of trade. And then the Wizengamot imports and exports panel—the seven seats—reviews how much of that we export and to what destinations and how much we can charge, and all of that is subject to review from International Cooperation.”
“So there’s quite a lot at risk, is what you’re telling me,” Harry said.
“Yes. Two of seven… and two of the seats on the panel like to drag their heels about exports in general.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re idiots, the market here in the Isles isn’t nearly large enough to want it all, but the point is that’s four seats out of seven that are at best unreliable.”
“And you think…”
“I don’t know what I think.” Now Daphne, too, spoke with visible care. “But it seems a strange coincidence that previously reliable allies of my House are changing their minds at a time when we know Wizengamot members are being targeted.”
“Has your family done anything to irritate… him?”
Daphne slid a sideways look at him. “My family hasn’t.”
Because they knew each other so well, Harry heard what she wasn’t saying. And because he did not make a habit of lying to himself, he grasped the implications of it immediately, with a chill.
The week of the Wizengamot’s December session arrived with no fanfare at Hogwarts. Relatively few students cared enough about politics to follow it with any great attention, and fewer still were the direct heirs to any Wizengamot seat. Harry didn’t allow himself to get distracted by it from his classes or his latest independent project for Gatlin, but it lurked in the back of his mind all day and in the evening when he finished dinner he went straight back to his dorms to check the journal.
Nothing yet.
A pillow whacked him on the head. Harry twisted around on his bed with a glare.
“You are not allowed to sit in here and brood until you hear from them,” said Theo, stowing his wand away. “Bring it with you if you have to but come out to the commons.”
“It’s late. I should have heard from him by now.”
“He hates writing.”
Which was a fair point. Harry gathered up his things and followed Theo back out to the common room and their friends, and tried to let the circle of them be a distraction: the core group of sixth-years, of course, but also Alex and Evalyn pestering Daphne about their arithmancy homework, and Noah and Celesta and Anita had come over too, though the three of them weren’t even pretending to study.
When the small crystal embedded in the journal’s spine finally lit up, Harry grabbed it, not caring for that one second that the others in the common room, like Seaton, would see his haste, and wonder.
“How did it all go?” said Celesta with sudden attention. She, as well as Theo and Pansy and Daphne and Noah and Draco, had immediate family on the Wizengamot, although Draco’s family’s seat was presently suspended as a consequence of his father being a Death Eater.
Harry skimmed the short missive in Sirius’ handwriting and then a slightly longer, much more useful one from Vanessa. Relief came immediately. “Nothing significant. The votes all went as expected, looks like. They opened the floor to discussion of the Azkaban breakout but haven’t gotten beyond a few statements that Sirius calls,” Harry checked, “pompous, hotheaded old windbags trying to cover their skinny white arses, and Vanessa says was just the usual political posturing.”
Celesta huffed. “Who in the seven seas thought it was a good idea letting the maddest of the mad Blacks take up that seat?”
“If he’s mad, then I’d hate to be sane,” said Harry, instead of getting angry: Celesta tended towards snappishness when tense or otherwise uncertain of herself, and her family’s Wizengamot status was, at the moment, quite uncertain.
“Well, you’re just lucky you have Vanessa looking out for him,” said Blaise with a wink for Daphne.
“Yes, they are,” Daphne said haughtily. She gave no sign of the anxiety she must be feeling too; next week, after the official session had wrapped up, the International Commerce Panel—which Harry had looked up—would convene and review the Greengrasses’ business.
Evalyn looked at Daphne a little too closely and asked a pointed arithmancy question. Harry didn’t protest as talk turned away from politics and back to school or, in the case of the seventh years, gossip.
Everything had gone as expected. No surprises, nothing unpleasant, nothing to worry about. But it was just one day out of five. Harry couldn’t shake the feeling that the rest of the session wouldn’t be this calm.
Tuesday and Wednesday presented him with similarly anticlimactic results. Debates were held, insults were shouted, a few things were added to the docket of bills and proposals and resolutions to be voted on in the next session. Orderly. Predictable.
Harry was so tense on Thursday evening that when the journal’s crystal lit up he nearly swallowed his own tongue. He opened it, and here on the page, entirely in Vanessa’s hand, was what he’d feared.
There was nearly a brawl today, she wrote, and it did not improve from there.
He read to the end, immediately started over and read it a second, slower time, and then let the journal fall to his lap while he stared unseeing at Draco’s empty bed.
Then he roused himself, grabbed his other journal, and started transcribing the relevant facts for those of his Vipers who’d want to know. Most of them would get a letter from home tomorrow, if their families cared; everyone would at least have the opportunity to read about it in the Prophet, should they be so inclined. Still, there was no harm in their knowing sooner.
As he did, he turned those facts over in his own mind, examining them. Peasegood’s proposal for a sedition bill had come up, as was inevitable, and, forewarned by Harry’s recommendation and Hazel’s research, Sirius had stood up and delivered a “blistering” (Vanessa’s word) opposition. Then Peasegood got up and accused Sirius of being a Dark wizard like all the rest of his “rotten family” and, though Vanessa didn’t list them all, nearly a dozen other seats from among the anti-Voldemort faction began vocally supporting what had previously been a minor bill no one much cared about. Condemnations and insults flew thick and fast. Most of the seats associated with the Death Eaters sat silent—letting their opponents play the fools, Harry suspected—and very few people had stood to defend Sirius.
Harry hated them for that, a little. Hated the Prophet and Ministry for running with the story of Sirius killing James. Hated Dumbledore for turning the Potters into unassailable martyrs of goodness, for condemning a man out of ideological dislike without even a pretense at a trial, for tarring Sirius with suspicion that might never really fade.
The only consolation was in a few critical voices opposing the sedition law, if not actively defending Sirius against Peasegood and the others’ ad hominem arguments. Foremost among them, Tiberius Ogden. Harry’s quill lingered over the name though he was writing quickly to summarize things for the Vipers in as little time as possible. They hadn’t thought they had made much progress with Ogden: perhaps this was a peace offering, or at the very least, a willingness to judge Sirius without the baggage of all the Blacks who came before him.
In the end, the moderates, led by Ogden, and a number of the crusty old Order crowd like Towler, had sided with Sirius. Harry’s concern stemmed from the support from younger Order-sympathetic seat-holders. Likely they hadn’t known about this in advance, but they liked what they heard of it in the debate, and that worried him.
Vanessa also noted that certain people, who stayed silent during the debate, appeared to find Sirius’ resistance both unexpected and unwelcome. Certain people that largely included those on the periphery of the Death Eater loyalists’ voting bloc—Jugson, Cosgrove, Burke, Carrow. Her conclusion, and Harry’s as well, was that Voldemort used Peasegood as a patsy for the bill. The only positive thing Harry could think of about that situation was that the majority of the Death Eater-sympathetic seats couldn’t vote in favor of Peasegood without suspicion.
Without their support, and with the moderates shifting against, the Greengrass seat rammed through a resolution to table discussion on it until the Ostara session, which meant that even if it passed a clearing vote on Ostara, the soonest it could take effect would be Litha. They’d successfully bought some time. Whether it would be enough, Harry couldn’t say.
By the time he finished putting a bullet-point summary into the journal for the Vipers, Hermione had already written several sentences of what appeared to be a truly scathing indictment of oppressive governments, and Draco and Celesta were hotly debating it on the page that anyone could write to. Harry wasn’t in the mood. He shoved the Vipers journal aside without reading any of their responses and, that responsibility discharged, did what he’d wanted to do from the start, which was write back to Vanessa and demand confirmation that Sirius was okay.
Within a minute, more writing appeared. He is well. Something clenched and unhappy in Harry’s chest loosened and he could breathe again. Startled, I believe. Angry. He went into his garage, and here Harry could all but hear her exasperated tone, when he returned to the house. A moment went by in which she added nothing else. Then: It might be good for him to talk to you, directly, on those useful little mirrors. Sometimes he gets locked in his own head and Hazel and I can’t draw him out.
I’ll talk to him, Harry wrote, thank you, and wanted to shut his eyes for just a moment against the world, but he couldn’t yet—the longer Sirius was left to sink into one of his black moods the harder it was to draw him out of them. If he was already past the point that Vanessa could needle or Hazel cajole him back onto solid ground then Harry had better get on with it.
He summoned the mirror but stopped. He was in no state to talk to Sirius. Harry occluded, not much but enough to calm his surface thoughts, until his reflection showed him only an even and sympathetic face, the kind of expression you trusted. And only then did he call his godfather’s name.
Ethan
The ache radiated from the corners of Ethan’s jaw down the sides of his neck and from there across his shoulders, forward under his collar, and back to crawl under his shoulder blades. He slapped his quill down and rubbed small circles into the muscles at the back of his neck with a grimace.
“You really need to stop grinding your teeth.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Ethan said to Zoey, whose nails were perennially bitten to the quick.
She shot him a two finger-salute. “Are you about done there? We need to get going if we’re to meet the others on time.”
“Just a minute.” Ethan took up his quill again, reluctantly; he didn’t really like this boring, endless routine of sitting at a desk sending letters and reading reports. Andromeda thrived on it. Sometimes he resented how easily she took in the information they received, held it all in her mind, understood it in reference to everything else they knew, and acted on it.
Was it just a Slytherin thing? Had Andromeda always been like that and gone to Slytherin because of it, or did that House just teach its sons and daughters to think like this? Ethan cast his mind back, but all he remembered of being eleven was anxiety, excitement, and a desperate desire not to let Mum down. He didn’t know if he’d been bold and forward-moving and direct before he went to Gryffindor. Though he was quite sure that Gryffindor at the very least nurtured those qualities, just as Slytherin did deception, cruelty, and slipperiness.
At last Ethan had finished writing another coded missive—this time to the Order proper, with a heavily edited report of his little sub-group’s recent activities. There was one more thing he really needed to deal with, but the sight of the scroll covered in anonymous Dicta-Quill script made him no less brassed off now than it had when he first got it a week ago, so he put it off yet again, and tossed the quill aside.
“Finally,” said Zoey, already rising.
Ethan grinned. They had grown closer in the last few months. She, along with Sturge and Alvar, had the right idea about things, and had proven themselves as loyal and brave as Ethan hoped he was in return. So far he didn’t yet know any of them as well as—his heart panged—as well as he had James, but that was all right, there was time. And if Remus wanted to pull away, if he wanted to bury himself in pointless spying on the werewolves and in Andromeda’s reports, that was his business. He’d always been a coward: James didn’t mind being the one to drag Remus out of himself and into motion, but Ethan had no intention of taking over that job, not when he had so much else to manage.
They apparated from the backyard and directly to the forest clearing Amalia had chosen at random for their meetings. Most of the others were already there—the usual crowd, the younger set of the Order’s veterans; but also several of the ones they’d been recruiting lately, looking so very young among the ancient, shadowed trees. Ethan looked at them and allowed himself to feel hope. Here they were, a new generation, answering the call. Taking up arms when they were needed most. All was not lost, when there were still young witches and wizards like these.
All told, they numbered seventeen, which was a marked improvement over the small parties of four or five he’d been able to scrape together when he and Andromeda started this over the summer. The Order’s central leadership wanted to focus on protecting the Wizengamot. And that was fine, that was important work—but they were too blinded by age, too shaken by their losses in the last war, to take real risks when necessary. So Ethan stuck his neck out where they would not and Andromeda made sure he had all the information he needed to do it.
“Right,” he said, looking around, both comforted by and proud of their determination. “We’ve got six targets tonight; that’s three of us each with one group of two.” Ethan looked to Alvar. “Why don’t you take Holly here, go check out that Montell bloke and see what you can suss out.” Montell was an easy target and Alvar would make up for Holly’s inexperience.
From there it wasn’t too hard to divvy them up. Conveniently, there were six veterans—himself, Alvar and Sturge, Vi and Amalia and Zoey—so he could send one with every group.
Ethan himself would team up with Barnaby Murdock and Lucille Pritchard. He didn’t know either of them well; Lucille had been in the DMLE at some point, but quit, or been fired, for reasons that she didn’t want to talk about, but Ethan suspected had a lot to do with the corruption in that department. Even that put her quite a bit ahead compared to the other recruits. She was definitely more reliable than Barnaby. Ethan would be glad to have her with him tonight.
Not that their target was in any way complicated. Ethan side-alonged first Lucille and then Barnaby to an alleyway a few blocks from their destination and filled them in: Silas Turpin, thirty-eight, employed in a seedy nightclub Asmodeus, where he was suspected of brokering information and smuggled goods for Death Eaters using his job as a cover.
“Asmodeus?” Lucille said. “They’re still open? The polyjuice—”
“They’ve been busted at least four times for potions abuse and other shite,” Ethan said grimly, “but the owners just pay the fines and keep doing it.”
Fines, in Ethan’s opinion, were an inadequate penalty for some crimes. What good were fines when the people paying them could afford it? In the end, rich pureblood snots like Malfoy basically just paid for the privilege of breaking the law, and everyone else could get fucked.
Lucille’s expression set in angry lines: obviously she saw it, or saw enough of it to get mad. Barnaby wasn’t as easy to read but at the very least Ethan was sure he saw no hesitation in the barely-graduated wizard’s body language.
The details of tonight’s mission were simple enough. First, they took turns changing behind obscuration charms into clothes that wouldn’t stick out in a nightclub, and then Ethan knocked back a vial of polyjuice and locked an agonized groan behind his teeth.
Fucking Merlin, you never got used to that.
It passed, though, like always, leaving Ethan with another man’s face and a body very similar to his own in size and shape. That was the ideal, with polyjuice, if you expected to be doing anything physical. Adjusting to a body with different proportions was hard, and in a fight, potentially lethal.
“Are we polyjuicing?” Barnaby asked.
“No. You,” Ethan pointed at them with a grin, “are on a date.”
Both of his trainees looked deeply unimpressed. “Oh, come off it,” he said, ushering them towards the street that would take them to Asmodeus. “You’ll do fine.”
Two hours in, and Ethan’s optimism had waned considerably. Not because of anything to do with Lucille or Barnaby. They were, in fact, doing fine, though no more than fine, at playacting a date. No, the source of Ethan’s frustration was Silas Turpin, who had done nothing but normal bartender things, and been a complete waste of an evening.
It made Ethan want to scream. There were just too few marked Death Eaters doing obviously Death Eater things and too many ordinary people happy enough to pass on information, or take a bribe, or look the other way. Tracking it all was an impossibility: Ethan needed more time, more power, more people. More.
He glanced at the bar where Lucille and Barnaby had installed themselves and now made lackluster conversation over drinks. Lucille caught his eye and casually lifted her hand to scratch just behind her left ear, their agreed-upon signal which meant she’d seen nothing interesting happen.
Merlin. Nothing useful, and they’d been here ages, and Turpin’s shift was almost over—
Now there was an idea. Ethan leaned up against the wall and nursed his pint: he was pretending to be a sullen and anxious type, so that people who looked at him would assume some other, more outgoing group had dragged him along and then abandoned him. It wasn’t hard. All he had to do was remember how Peter Pettigrew acted in school. It was better even than magical means of avoiding attention. People’s eyes slid right over him. Certainly no one cared when he pushed off the wall and wandered towards the short corridor leading to the bathrooms.
No one except for Lucille and Barnaby, the latter of whom frowned at Ethan. Ethan shot him a significant look.
Barnaby appeared in the bathroom just as Ethan finished making sure no one else was in there. “Are we leaving?” Barnaby said, hopefully.
“No.” Ethan grinned. “There’s been a change of plans.”
He explained. Barnaby appeared not to like it very much but that wasn’t Ethan’s problem.
Lucille, on the other hand, was breathless with anticipation when Barnaby led her outside to meet Ethan again. “Well?”
Ethan double-checked the anti-eavesdropping wards anchored to his robe-pin. They were still active and strong. “If we can’t catch him in the act, we’ll just have to find out another way. Intel says he usually leaves after his shift, stops by that restaurant—” he pointed— “and takes the food with him. He apparates out and we aren’t sure where, probably home but maybe not.”
“So what is it? Should we take him when he comes out? Or tag him with a tracking charm!” Lucille’s eyes gleamed.
Ethan patted her on the shoulder. “Not quite. Tell me, both of you, how are your disillusionment charms?”
Barnaby proved the better at them, so Ethan had him disillusion both himself and Lucille, while Ethan himself pretended drunkenness and went to start an argument with the bouncer at the club’s doors. It was late, the bloke was stressed, and it didn’t take much for him to get sick of Ethan and activate the wards with a snap of his fingers.
Magic picked Ethan up and hurled him backwards. He bounced when he hit the cobbles—not painful, but definitely disorienting—once, and then twice, and then came to a rest on the third one, groaning. People passing on the street sniggered and Ethan let out a slurred “Fugg off” before dragging himself up to sit against the building he’d been tossed near, which, due to the strategic angle from which he approached the bouncer, was right next to Turpin’s preferred restaurant. There he leaned his rumpled, borrowed head against the stone and pretended to pass out.
This was a seedy street halfway between Diagon and Knockturn: not Dark enough to be actively dangerous, but the sort of place where men passed out drunk on the cobbles around midnight didn’t raise eyebrows. Indeed, Ethan peered around through slitted eyes, and spotted at least two other people in similar straits, though they, unlike him, weren’t faking.
Or at least, probably not. He marked their positions in his mind just in case.
The reports from Andromeda on Turpin’s movements proved accurate. He appeared not even ten minutes past midnight and the end of his shift. Not one to linger with his coworkers, then. No friendly smiles for the bouncer on his way out either. Odd, for someone in such an interaction-heavy job to show so little sociability, but then again maybe he was just tired after several hours of talking to people and making their drinks. Or maybe, Ethan thought, studying the slightly-too-stiff way Turpin held himself, maybe it was a front.
Turpin came up the street and went into his restaurant with no more than a disgusted glance Ethan’s direction. “Evening,” Ethan heard his target say, and then the restaurant door closed on his heels and cut off all sound.
A light touch at Ethan’s shoulder startled him. He pretended to snort and jump a little, shifted, and calmed again, this time with the shimmer of a not-quite-perfect disillusionment charm in the corner of his eye: Lucille, positioned exactly where he’d told her to be. In the dark, with most people around them in some state of inebriation, their charms didn’t have to be perfect. Barnaby had done more than good enough.
Tension coiled in Ethan’s stomach as the minutes ticked by. Maybe tonight Turpin would disregard good manners and disapparate from inside the restaurant. Maybe for some reason he’d gone out the back. Fuck, maybe he’d noticed his tail, and was in there now, calling reinforcements—
The door opened and Turpin stepped straight out with a paper bag in hand. No awareness whatsoever in his face or body language of his present danger.
Good enough.
Ethan got staggeringly to his feet. “Oi, mate!” he said with a giggle. “Yeh… yeh got… what yeh go’ there, eh?”
“Piss off,” Turpin snarled, but Ethan threw himself forward and burst into a gratingly out-of-tune drinking song, which was immediately picked up by a group of wizards coming out of a pub a few doors up from Asmodeus, along with a great gout of laughter, and Turpin was so distracted trying to disentangle himself, everyone else so busy cackling at the spectacle Ethan made of himself, that two silent spells went unnoticed.
Stupefy was a useful curse, but flashy: everyone knew its bright red gleam. Somnus, on the other hand, was nearly colorless. Ethan would have to commend Lucille later for casting a less common charm so powerfully that Turpin didn’t get out a word before he slumped into sleep. Barnaby’s mobilicorpus hit Turpin’s body half a breath later, and between Barnaby moving his legs and Ethan pretending to lean on the slightly taller man, they put on a very convincing charade of a drunk and his angry, sober friend staggering up the street to an apparition point, where Ethan grabbed Turpin’s arm and cracked away.
They landed and Ethan shrugged off the act with a jerk of his aching shoulders. Lucille and Barnaby, who knew the destination, needed no side-along, and both appeared with a second, wands out. “Any sign of attention?” Ethan said.
Lucille shook her head. “None. I watched like you said while you and Barnaby moved him. No one seemed like they were looking too closely or anything.”
“Excellent work,” Ethan said, pleased. This had all gone perfectly to plan. To a plan he improvised, no less. Andromeda might have something to say about his impulsivity later, but Turpin had not and would not see any of their true faces. As long as Ethan could get some useful information out of him she’d have to agree the risk was worth it.
He appreciated that about Andromeda. For all her Slytherin circumspection, she understood that sometimes it was best to take a gamble, and in return Ethan felt he was learning quite a bit from her about the value, at times, of reserve and caution. Their discussions over the course of this summer and autumn had definitely helped him think more tactically. On some points, they disagreed—Andromeda was more willing to tolerate the use of Dark magic, within strict parameters and with careful oversight, whereas Ethan thought even opened the door that much would just give them another Sirius Black—but their goals were the same and their methods complementary.
Right now, for instance, Ethan was glad Andromeda had taught him foresight. This isolated mountain cabin was a Muggle place abandoned most of the year. He’d found it weeks ago, stocked it with certain useful potions and supplies, and kept it carefully a secret from all but his handpicked group of Order recruits in anticipation of just such an opportunity as this.
Lucille and Barnaby obediently searched Turpin for portkeys, spare wands, and anything else of interest, then secured him to a chair, while Ethan gathered the things he’d need. Facial obscuration hoods for all three of them, better than polyjuice for intimidation. Loose-lips draught, suggestibility solution, and Snape’s confusion concoction, which, administered together, had an effect pretty close to Veritaserum, though not as powerful. Genuine truth serum was way too rare and expensive to waste on a lowlife like this. Careful doses of each potion were tipped into Turpin’s mouth and a charm made sure he swallowed them.
Excitement bubbled in him like a boiling cauldron. Ethan passed out the hoods and then, after a critical glance, heavy billowing robes of the sort that hid the body shape and size of the people wearing them. A wave of his wand put out all the witchlights around the room and dropped it into shadow save for a single harsh ball of white light he carefully positioned right behind himself. Lucille and Barnaby went to stand where Ethan directed them, one each at the very corners of Turpin’s field of vision, so he wouldn’t be able to keep all three of them in focus, and so that while he looked at Ethan he’d have two other shadowed figures looming in the corners of his eyes. This too was something Ethan had learned from Andromeda—not the specific tactics, but the consideration for psychological factors, for all the ways one could loosen a man’s tongue without a single spell or one iota of pain.
“Alright,” he said, nodding to Lucille, who raised her wand.
The robes might disguise her body and the hood her face, but nothing could hide the eagerness with which she incanted, “Rennervate.”
Turpin came awake with a start and immediate, glassy-eyed fear.
Ethan smiled. Now they were getting somewhere.
Ginny
“And stay gone! Cowards!” Ginny shouted. Her hands shook with rage but she would not, could not give chase, not when it might be an ambush, not when Alex might be hurt.
But when she turned around her quiet friend—gentle Alex who used to want to be a healer—had already pushed himself up off the floor, and his face, which had been one of few that truly welcomed Ginny to Slytherin before she proved herself, was cold as stone.
“Alex?” she said quietly.
“I’m all right.”
“That’s a lie.”
Alex prodded at his ribs and winced. Blood gleamed on his lower lip, and one of his eyes was already puffy; a lifetime of being Fred and George’s little sister told Ginny that it would be swollen shut by dinner. “Okay, not all right, but I will be. They didn’t do anything permanent.”
Well. Ginny would like to do something permanent to them. “Pomfrey, or Chamber?”
“Chamber.” Alex took her arm, when she offered it, and let her half-support him down the hallway. “Evalyn?”
“In the commons, last I checked.” Ginny was really the only one of her age group who could walk the halls alone right now; Natalie, Evalyn, and Alex all had immediate relatives presently on the run from the law, and Finn and Aria, who did not, were still targets just by virtue of wearing green. The Gryffindors who’d taken to boasting about protecting Hogwarts from the Dark Lord’s influence liked to pretend Ginny didn’t exist and the Slytherins like Seaton and Rosier were far too busy harassing muggleborns to care about a pureblood semi-blood-traitor Slytherin.
Ginny was pureblood and a Weasley. Those were not the same thing. They were both useful in their way and both were parts of her. Those things were why she was hale and healthy and able to help her friend limp along with Merlin only knew what injuries because some arseholes assigned him his father’s blame; and why, just a few days ago, she had been able to come running when a frightened journal message from Malcolm Baddock informed the Vipers that a curse from an unknown student had hit Veronica. Ginny got there in time to hold the slow-acting burning curse in stasis until Theo and Anita could turn up: they then spent more than an hour unraveling it from her skin, cell by cell.
Veronica would be fine. No doubt Alex would too. But Ginny thought, back pressed to a stone wall waiting for the next corridor to clear, that the guilt of walking these halls safe and sound while her friends fell to curses might eat her alive. And then on the heels of the guilt came shame: what right did she have to wish that, when her insulation kept at least one of them in a condition to help? What right did she have to feel guilty and make their problems about her?
The grey of the steps down to the Chamber matched Alex’s pallor by the time Ginny got them to the nearest access point. It yielded to her whispered password without complaint and not for the first time she thanked Merlin and Morgana and magic itself that Harry had found this place.
While she was at it she decided to be grateful that she had forgotten to get her book back from Alex and gone running to catch him only minutes after he left their commons. The two idiots she’d seen standing over him ran at the sight of her; Ginny thought of what might’ve happened if she never showed up, and felt a chill that was more than the Chamber’s dank air.
“Gin? What—oh fuck.”
“Healing potions,” Ginny said, half-breathless, letting Jordan relieve her of Alex’s weight. “For all I know he’s bleeding internally—”
“I am not,” Alex snapped.
“You’ll act as though you are,” Jordan snarled, “until we know for sure that you’re not, Rowle. Don’t move more than absolutely necessary.”
Ginny squinted up ahead but most of the witchlights were out and she couldn’t see anyone in their clusters of makeshift seating by the ugly statue of Salazar Slytherin. “Who’s here?”
“Just me. Needed some of—” Jordan cut off with a yelp.
In a flash Ginny had her wand up, and Alex too, though he had to let go of Jordan to do so and listed alarmingly sideways in the process. “Whoa, sorry!” Noah said, hands up, hurrying towards them. “Sorry, sorry—”
“Merlin, how long have you been here?” Jordan demanded. “I’ve been borrowing the potions setup for an hour, you could have helped—”
“Sorry!” Noah took over propping up Alex so Jordan could charm one of the chairs to stretch out into a mostly-reclined position. “I was reading. I must not have heard you come in, I’ve been here since lunch.”
“Just don’t tell Celesta or she’ll start making us do situational awareness drills again,” Jordan muttered, which got a laugh from Ginny and a smile out of Alex despite the tense situation: when Celesta ran dueling practices, not one person walked away unbruised.
They eased Alex down onto the reclined chair. Jordan snapped her fingers at Noah. “Go write the others, let them know we need healing help. None of us is any good, unless you’ve some skills I don’t know about, Ginny.”
In truth, Ginny had been brushing up on her healing charms since the locker room incident, which still sent twangs of pain through the big muscles in her thighs, arse, and lower back at inconvenient moments, but she was neither confident nor desperate enough to use Alex as her version of the rodents Harry and Theo tested new potions on. “No, not really.”
Alex cocked an eyebrow at her, since he was the one who’d helped point her in the direction of the right books, even though his own interest in healing had waned since they were kids. Ginny made a face at him: he knew perfectly well she wasn’t ready to try fixing this or she’d have done so already instead of dragging his gimpy arse down into the bowels of the school for help.
“I, er, don’t have my journal,” Noah admitted, and her thoughts slid to a screeching halt. All of them had their journals, always. It wasn’t exactly a rule, but considering how many completely fucked situations various Vipers had only gotten out of thanks to their communication system, Ginny couldn’t remember the last time any of them didn’t have their journal in a bag or expanded pocket.
“You blithering idiot,” Jordan hissed in an excellent imitation of Snape, and turned on Ginny with a snarl, but Ginny had already let Alex’s hand go in favor of digging her journal out of her schoolbag.
Come to think of it, Jordan’s reaction was… a little uncharacteristically overblown. Ginny studied the older girl the way Pansy had taught her and Natalie, carefully and without seeming to look up from the words spilling from her quill onto the page. Worry etched itself deeply into Jordan’s mouth and eyes. She didn’t touch Alex, but she hovered, and there was a hunch to her shoulders that Ginny wanted to label protective.
A response bloomed to life in precise lines of violet ink. “Daph’s on her way, and Anita,” she said, relieved. “Daphne says to give him a dose of a blood-keyed healing potion—there’s stuff it won’t fix, but as long as he’s not actively under a curse, it won’t make anything worse.”
“No curses,” Alex said in a voice worn thin with pain. “Just bludgeoners… impedimenta, that sort of thing. Said they… wanted to do it… Muggle, ‘cause of my f-father.”
Ginny took his hand again.
As long as she could remember, her anger had been a fire, snapping and hungry and roaring to life faster than an incendio. When Dad—her mind shuddered—died, it had burned out of control, and had no one to blame, no real recourse for relief. For months she’d struggled to keep herself from lashing out and in the process learned control. So she did not hold Alex’s hand too tightly, nor did she swear like Jordan or blanch like Noah. She sat quietly and gave her friend what comfort she could while Noah retrieved the potion and Alex keyed it using the blood from his split lip. She paid attention, once Daphne and Anita arrived, to how they healed him, and pressed what she saw into her mind to research later.
It was as she thought. Alex would be fine—no internal bleeding, just colorful bruises, a few cracked ribs, fractured zygomatic bone, and loose molars, nothing Skele-Gro and some bruise balm wouldn’t fix overnight. Compared to Veronica, or, fuck, Graham and Millicent, who still hadn’t come back to their classes, he was even lucky.
Then Ginny caught herself, with some horror. Broken bones and loose teeth and she called that lucky. He could have lost his eye, if their bludgeoning curse had hit it dead on instead of off to the side, on the bone. He could have gotten worse if not for the book Ginny forgot she’d loaned him.
She had one comfort. Of the two boys she saw leaning over Alex, one wore red-trimmed robes, and the other blue; and Ginny had landed one jinx on the Ravenclaw, that splashed everlasting red ink over his back. Not to hurt him but to mark.
Luna would get a name. Ginny and Natalie and Evalyn would take that name. They would work out, between the three of them, who his Gryffindor friend had been, and what to do about them.
It would not help catch the Azkaban escapees. It would not stop Wanted posters with the fugitive Death Eaters’ children’s pictures pasted crudely into the frame from appearing up and down the halls, or blood slurs from finding their way onto bathroom tiles and, this week, the cutlery. It would not even lighten the burden that weighed heavier on Harry’s shoulders by the day if you knew him well enough to tell. But maybe it would make those two fucks think twice before they did this again.
Ginny had decided not to focus on all the things she couldn’t change. This, though, this one small thing was within her power to fix, and fix it she would.
Daphne
Denied.
One word. So innocuous. So damning.
This parchment didn’t belong in the hands of anyone other than the House of Greengrass, but fuck it: Daphne owed loyalty to more than her parents and this didn’t concern her House alone.
She caught Pansy’s eye and made to leave with exaggerated subtlety. Pansy immediately launched into a conversation, slightly louder than normal, with Anita and her friend Sonia, about suitors her parents were exploring on the continent. Daphne wanted to smile: perfectly calculated to draw every ear within range, whether themselves interested in foreign wizards or threatened by overseas rivals, even if the subject sent a jolt of cold fear through Daphne’s abdomen. Certainly no one paid Daphne much mind as she slid out of her seat and left.
Harry had a free period first thing this morning, and usually spent it in the library with Theo. The rest of the Vipers had an unspoken agreement not to bother them because it was about the only time Theo ever spent with Harry alone anymore, and that because they only ever talked about academics, or so Theo had apparently told Pansy who told Daphne. But for this Daphne felt an exception was warranted.
At this hour, with most students finishing breakfast or heading early to their classes, the library was mostly empty. Daphne softened the fall of her boots (unladylike, as her grandmother would have hissed, but, in Daphne’s mother’s mind, practical) to mollify Madam Pince as she crossed the open seating in the library’s main study area.
It was just typical of Harry and Theo to squirrel themselves away in the very deepest, darkest, most hidden corner of the library they could find. Daphne wound her way through the stacks and thought uncharitably that they were such fucking cliches. Granted, Harry had a good reason to want some privacy, and Theo at least as much if not more so, but Merlin it was inconvenient.
She rounded the last corner: for a moment, neither of the boys saw her, too engrossed in a rune-covered parchment charmed in place against a bare section of wall. Harry’s robe sleeves were pushed up and a stray parchment shard stuck to his hair. Theo’s robe lay abandoned over his stool, and even from behind Daphne could see his undershirt was rumpled, tie askew from the way he tugged at it when annoyed.
“I’m surprised you don’t have wards up.”
Both of them whipped around in unison, wands flying to their hands. Daphne flicked her own to deflect a curse from Theo. “Really? That was sad.”
“Fuck you,” he said conversationally. “No wards because Pince caught us with them the other day and yelled.”
“She was in quite a mood. What’s wrong?” Harry was, Daphne could see, already sliding into a different persona. No more student in disarray: his shoulders a fraction squarer, feet just slightly braced.
Daphne handed over the deceptively benign scroll in her hand, and both she and Theo watched Harry unroll and read it, his uncanny eyes tracking neatly side to side. He’d been hiding their color less of late. Moving less, too, in favor of a stillness that spoke to someone hiding any and all of his tells.
Sometimes Daphne wondered if Harry would even remember how to relax, when this was all over.
She knew what that was like. They were both what their worlds made them.
“Hmm,” said Harry, giving exactly nothing away, even to Daphne, who knew him as well as anyone.
“Oh, I should go,” said Theo with the air of someone just having realized the time. “Sorry, Harry. We can finish that rune sequence later, yeah?”
“Of course.” Harry waved his wand; Theo did likewise, in tandem, and their study things neatly separated and organized into piles on the desk and bundles that slotted themselves neatly into Theo’s bag. The parchment on the wall came unstuck, rolled up, and settled gently into Theo’s outstretched hand. He lifted it to Daphne in a sardonic salute, grabbed his robe, and stalked away without a backwards glance.
In the silence that followed, Harry just stared at her.
Daphne wasn’t in the mood for games. “You know why I didn’t want to wait.”
“I do,” he agreed, looking, for just a second, vaguely chastened, or as close to it as Harry ever got. “Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think…”
Daphne took the scroll back from him. “If you were right about where that stupid sedition thing came from, then yes, I do think. Sirius wasn’t exactly what you’d call subtle and it was my mother who called for a vote to table it until Ostara.”
Harry’s lips thinned. He wouldn’t apologize and they both knew it, but Daphne shook her head all the same. “It’s not your fault. Exactly. My mother knew what she was doing.”
“But if you were not my ally, it would only appear that she was slapping down something from the other side out of spite,” Harry countered, which was admittedly true. A Greengrass stepping on something proposed by a seat like Peasegood turned no heads. A Greengrass, backing Sirius Black, when the Black and Greengrass heirs were known to be close—that was something else.
“This is bad, Harry. Financially, politically… a huge part of my family’s assets are tied up in trade. If the Ministry avenues are closed to us, the only way to move forward is with a foreign alliance.”
Harry frowned, clearly not getting it.
Daphne closed her eyes and made herself say the words. “They’ll need to look for a foreign-born marriage.”
Air left Harry’s lungs in a whoosh. Daphne kept her eyes shut. She didn’t want to see his expression, not when, on the inside, she felt as fragile as new-formed ice. Harry knew how much that meant to her. Knew that she had been raised, unlike many other children in her circles, to expect a love match or none at all. Knew that she loathed the idea of obligating herself indefinitely to someone she hadn’t chosen. He knew because Daphne told him, years ago.
Several awful seconds ticked by.
Harry cleared his throat. “Astoria..?”
“No,” Daphne said, and hated the roughness of her own voice. She heard Harry move closer and let him take her left hand. Their skin was frigid, where it touched, whether from her or him she couldn’t tell. “I wouldn’t—that’s not hers to carry.”
Daphne would sooner die than let any of this burden fall onto her little sister. Astoria hadn’t been raised to it, wasn’t ready for it. Daphne was the Heir. Daphne had a duty to her House.
“I—if I could…”
That got her eyes open: Daphne studied Harry’s face, and saw that he was sincere. That he’d do it, even though they both knew— “We’re not right for each other, we decided that ages ago.”
“Not like that.” Harry looked down at their hands. “I don’t feel that way for you. But this is partially my fault.”
“You couldn’t anyway. You’re English. It has to be someone foreign-born, from a family old enough to qualify for the trade exemptions grandfathered in for pureblood nobility. And,” this part hurt as much, though differently, “the contract would stipulate that all of House Greengrass’ trade assets and profits would belong half to the family of my—betrothed.” Only then would they be able to dodge the Ministry’s regulations—only if the trade property in question was jointly owned by a British family of landed purebloods and a foreign magical family of equal stature. And even then it could only be transported to the country her betrothed came from. Daphne would have to move across one or more continents just to oversee her family’s business. And it would ever after not be her family’s, not solely.
It wasn’t even the money, so much. Daphne wasn’t Pansy: she didn’t care much for luxury. All Daphne needed in the world was her wand, her self, a bit of gold, and a good pair of shoes, and she’d be able to make her way. But to have the careful work of generations squandered out of someone else’s spite—to no longer be able to provide for her sister, to be obligated to a stranger and a strange family in a strange land—everything in her recoiled at the very idea.
And yet.
“Does anyone else know?” Harry said quietly.
“No.” Daphne took her hand back, and he let her: for that alone Daphne supposed she would say yes, if she had to marry and an English wizard was acceptable. Harry would ignore any implied marital obligation and let Daphne carry on as she wanted. But that wasn’t the point. The potential obligation would be there, always. A leash didn’t stop existing just because the person holding it let it go slack. Daphne wouldn’t voluntarily give up that sort of freedom for anyone less than the absolute right person.
“I think,” she said, surprising herself, “I hate him.”
Harry narrowed his eyes slightly. “Voldemort?”
“You’ve picked up some nasty habits from the Order. Yes, the Dark Lord. I hate him.” Her tone, quite against her will, was savage, and when Daphne clenched her fists frost cracked across her palms. “We aren’t toys for him to fuck with because he’s throwing a temper tantrum.”
“He’s trying to threaten me into line. It’s a clever enough tactic,” said Harry with deliberate mildness.
“It’s stupid, is what it is. You’re one person. Don’t get me wrong, the Blacks are powerful, but seriously? One family, one delay in his plans, and he gets his knickers in a twist like this? The Greengrasses may not be the Blacks but we are not to be made enemies lightly. It’s stupid, it’s foolish, and it smacks of a man enslaved to his pride.”
Harry’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “I don’t disagree.”
But Theo, Daphne’s brain filled in. Theo, Pansy, Celesta. Flora and Hestia and Everett and Draco, Finn and Alex and Natalie and Evalyn.
So many of them, so tightly held.
Daphne was, by those standards, lucky. She might find her future signed away but at least it would be to an equal. Any who took the Mark were doomed to forever serve.
“Pansy doesn’t want it,” Daphne said. “Since the breakout, she—she’s been crying, at night, sometimes. I don’t think she wants anyone to know.” The only reason Daphne knew was that after the attack on the boys’ dorm, Daphne layered extra wards around Pansy’s bed, knowing that Pansy’s spellwork, while perfectly workable, might not stand up to a direct, motivated assault. And in fact Pansy’s wards decayed under Daphne’s to the point that Daphne heard her friend’s quiet sobs almost every night since the escape.
Real pain crossed Harry’s face. His shoulders dipped a bit before he straightened them again. Daphne hated herself for dropping another weight on him.
“Nor Theo,” Harry said, “according to Neville.”
Daphne wasn’t surprised.
An idea crossed her mind. Daphne felt her eyes narrow, and Harry immediately focused on her, attentive, expecting.
“What… exactly is the Dark Mark?” she said, to his unspoken question.
Harry rocked back on his heels. “Ah. Well. A form of vassalage oath, I had assumed..?”
“Assumed? Or known?”
“Barty hasn’t told me about it in any detail. It’s a… taboo topic,” Harry admitted.
That fit. “We should find out. If it is a vassal oath… there are ways around those. Old, illegal, very difficult ways, but—”
Daphne didn’t need to keep talking; Harry saw what she meant with this, and his eyes were alight with the same terrible hope beating behind Daphne’s own breastbone. “I can’t ask,” he warned. “Not Barty, and not Theo.”
Because if Theo knew Harry was poking around for information on the Dark Mark, that might leak to Voldemort, and if that happened, Daphne didn’t want to find out the consequences.
Harry took a breath like he was bracing to get hit. “What if we asked Pansy to ask Theo? As a friend, curious about something of which they both are at risk.”
Huh. Daphne smiled with half her mouth. “I’d wondered if Neville was making you soft.”
“He wouldn’t approve of—essentially manipulating our friends like that,” Harry said lowly. He was so rarely indecisive, but Daphne saw him hesitate now, caught between his goals and someone else’s idea of right.
At least this was something Daphne could fix. She stepped closer, so that he had no choice but to meet her eyes, so that he could see the coldness there below all her masks. “He never has to know. Theo won’t blame you, when this blows over and you can tell him. Nor Pansy. This is a war, Harry, even if it’s still a shadow one. We can’t afford to play by rules no one else follows.”
Daphne saw the moment he decided. Saw the resolve harden his eyes and heart alike, and felt no guilt for doing this, because if nothing else Daphne could help him make hard choices. If nothing else she could shoulder some of that burden.
“Alright. Do you want to talk to Pansy, or—”
“Better if I do it. The Dark Lord overlooks witches,” Daphne’s lip curled, “so it’s unlikely anyone will poke about in her head, but on the off chance they do, my interest won’t be as unusual as yours.”
“I’ll speak to Hermione, in the meantime. Ask her to look into vassal oaths, since we’re assuming that’s the basis of it. If nothing else she’ll have fun.”
Daphne smirked; she would. “If anyone can figure out how to spell someone against the Dark Mark it’s Hermione.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Harry looked at her, steely-eyed and calculating, and Daphne smiled on the inside: there was the Harry she knew, the Harry she would follow right into the Muggles’ hell if he asked. “Could you also speak to Celesta? If her family will tell her anything—we don’t know what could be useful. At this point, any information is more than we have, no matter how trivial.”
So he had noticed Daphne cautiously working with and around the older Vipers. Mentally rearranging some things, she nodded; there should be time to sit down with Celesta tonight in the commons and bring this up.”
“Good.” Harry cast a quick tempus, and he and Daphne swore in unison. “Class.”
“Yep. Here.” Daphne held his bag open while Harry charmed his things into it in neatly organized stacks. He slung it over his shoulder, shook his robe sleeves back down, and cast a wrinkle-clear charm at them so they hung crisply in place. Another charm, meant to work in conjunction with a potion applied daily, got his hair lying flat again. Daphne stopped him with a hand on his arm, plucked the stray bit of parchment away, and flicked it at his nose.
Harry made a face at her as he started walking, and for a moment he looked so much like the boy Daphne met five years ago that time slipped around her and she felt hours upon hours overlapping around her, hundreds of Harrys in the library, smiling and laughing and aging, always aging, but always, somewhen, young again, before all this. Could he see her, too? A younger Daphne, layered over and inside Daphne here and now? What was she like, her younger self? Carefree?
Had she ever been carefree? Daphne held the library doors for Harry and tried to imagine it. Free of cares. Free of things to care about. The concept just didn’t make sense, like trying to make a triangle with only right angles. Daphne half thought she’d just float away without responsibility holding her down. She didn’t know who she was without it.
She would find a way. Daphne took comfort in Harry at her side and in the knowledge that the other Vipers would always back her up. Among their group were many clever minds and a few truly brilliant ones, people with cunning and kindness, clear vision and good judgment. Somehow, between them all, they’d find a way, and Pansy would get only tattoos she chose for herself, and Hermione be judged only on her own merits, and Daphne choose a spouse for no one but herself.
To believe anything else would be to give up. Daphne did not allow herself that weakness: as long as they hoped, they would fight, and if they all fought with all they had—how could they lose?
AN 1: (Long discussion of the Wizengamot ahead, you don’t have to read this) canonically, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the Wizengamot. According to the fandom wiki, it is a part of the DMLE, operating under the auspices of the Director of that department and, after them, the Minister. As far as I can tell, and using US points of reference as that’s the political system with which I am most familiar, this would be like if the Director of the FBI was in charge of the people doing arrests & investigations, the people prosecuting criminals, the people in charge of holding criminals, and all of the people working for/supporting the highest judicial & legislative entity in the land, where neither the legislature nor the judiciary is an independent branch or body.
Canon doesn’t tell us anything about who actually sits on the Wizengamot or how those people are chosen: one could reasonably assume that Wizengamot members are elected, that the Minister appoints them for life, that the seats are hereditary, or some combination of the above. We are also told that Albus Dumbledore occupies a position called the “Chief Warlock” but not what that actually entails: he could be like the US Vice President in the Senate, where he only votes to break a tie and otherwise doesn’t do a whole lot, or he could be like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, exercising substantial agenda-setting and decision-making power among his fellow judiciaries, or probably other interpretations that haven’t occurred to me.
At any rate, in OOTP, we see Harry’s trial but don’t know who replaces Dumbledore as CW. That hearing scene tells us a few other things: Fudge, Bones, and Umbridge sit together in the most prominent position; there are “about fifty” people total; Fudge seems to be in charge of running the logistics of the hearing, calling it to order and generally acting as the judge; they seem to have nothing like the highly codified courtroom procedure of English common law even as it operated circa 1700, when the magical and Muggle worlds separated; the Wizengamot has something called a Charter of Rights, which allows “the accused” to present witnesses for their case; that there are laws, which “can be changed”, that govern specifically magical affairs; and finally that the Wizengamot does not always convene in full for every matter before them. For the most part it does seem like an oddly large judicial body that might dispatch a smaller number of its total members to oversee minor civil cases like underage magic is implied to be under normal circumstances and convenes en masse for major criminal proceedings. Fair enough.
I’ve previously gone on (at length, as some of you may have seen on Discord) about the Wiki describing the Wizengamot as a judiciary body only. Either they updated the Wiki page since I last saw it or, more likely, I misread it—apparently JKR has confirmed it is both legislature and judiciary, so I was wrong on that count. I still think it’s unbelievably stupid to have the legislature and the judiciary be the same body and also to be part of the primary law enforcement arm of an executive/bureaucratic infrastructure.
Regarding the Wizengamot in s&s: I think that I have been both vague and somewhat contradictory on the matter of just how the Wizengamot works in the early works of this series. Frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to go back through works 1-5 and make all the edits that I’d want to make, not least of which would be 1. thinking up and 2. writing down how I conceptualize the Wizgt here. Sigh. Please take this chapter’s discussion of the Wizengamot as the working basis for how it functions in the s&s ‘verse going forward, and sorry it took me until now to actually figure this out.
AN 2: (Legal technicalities, you don’t have to read this either, I just think it’s interesting)
The Alien and Sedition Acts were signed into law by US President John Adams in 1798. The one I’m concerned with, the Sedition Act, criminalized making false statements critical of the government. Full text available here. I used big chunks of the Sedition Act verbatim or near-verbatim as the foundation for the propoal Harry reviews in this chapter for the December Wizengamot session. The whole ‘punishing seditious thought’ thing was a subplot I’d had in mind for a while & then I happened across the Sedition Act of 1798 while doing entirely unrelated research and thought “Hey, this would be perfect for BotC,” because as the infallible Sammialex says, all roads lead to fanfiction. Luckily the original Sedition Act expired in 1800, two years after its ratification, and also was so wholly unpopular that it arguably contributed to Adams’ defeat in the presidential election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson. It’s also worth noting that a hallmark of would-be authoritarian governments of any political bent is instituting legal consequences for seditious or dissenting speech, and, in a similar vein, expanding the scope of libel laws, as both of those can then be used to—completely legally!—bludgeon one’s political opponents, the press, and independent activists into submission. Fun, right?
I’ve taken some liberties with the verbiage and formatting of the proposed bill as Harry reads it. The original language is from the United States in 1798 and as far as I know neither the UK Parliament nor the US Congress writes bills in the same style, i.e. long unbroken paragraphs, today. My undergraduate studies touched on law but from a philosophical and/or interpretive standpoint more so than the technicalities of drafting legislation. I’m assuming that the magical world has changed less since 1700 than the Muggle & therefore that the structure of the Sedition Act isn’t as weird as it would be for the UK Parliament or US Congress to pass something like that now.
Lastly, the US Sedition Act included a section allowing the defendant in a sedition/libel suit to “give in evidence in his defence, the truth of the matter contained in the publication charged as a libel,” i.e. you could get off the charge if you could prove to a jury’s satisfaction that whatever you said was in fact true. This was at the time a deviation from sedition & libel in England at the time, where a jury’s role was limited to establishing the fact of speech or publication, and the truth of the statement was not a defense.
I left this part out because I’m assuming that the UK Ministry would follow English legal tradition more closely than that of the US. I don’t know whether present-day libel suits in the UK accept truth as a defense but canon indicates a very strict split between Muggle & magical societies and also implies that laws passed by the Muggle Parliament don’t apply to magicals, so if the UK has since changed that position I don’t think it would have percolated across that divide into magical law.