22: Blood of the Covenant

Theo

They burned Sirius’ body the old way, on a pyre of ash and yew.

Theo, and the other guests, stood in a loose circle. They waited in respectful silence while the deceased’s family took their places around the fire-pit and the square timber frame inside it, built ten feet high and packed with brushwood that would burn hot and fast. From here Theo could see the body laid in state on the pyre’s top. Wrapped in a burial shroud embroidered with the Black crest, no part of him visible save his face, in defiance of the usual tradition, in which a body was to be covered head to toe.

Blacks were always burned at night with faces bare, so that their eyes’ last sight was of the stars.

Theo dimly remembered burnings from his childhood, in which a dozen or more relatives took part. Today there were only five. Sirius’ cousins, Andromeda and Narcissa, stood opposite one another and did not speak or make eye contact. Graham and Rio stood side by side at the southernmost edge of the pit, the former’s arm around the latter’s shoulders. And at the northern point, Harry. Still and bloodless and remote. The winter breeze tugged at his robes and hair but he did not move other than to raise his wand.

On his cue, the other four joined in.

Graham and Rio both whispered the incantation. Harry and the witches cast in silence. Five gouts of flame burst from their wands and landed in the kindling at the pyre’s base. Carved with runes to keep the fire burning, the timber caught nearly as swiftly as the brushwood in its core.

As one, the rest of the gathered guests lifted their wands, all save the youngest children. Father put a hand on Theo’s shoulder and Theo fought the urge to shrug it off.

Incendio corpus, he thought, and his magic leapt gleefully to the task. Theo was only one among nearly a hundred people to lob a ball of magical fire at the timber: he kept his eyes on his own, even when its white-hot brightness hurt to look at. He saw that no other incendiary projectile was quite the size of the one he’d cast, nor quite so eager to start burning.

Fitting, really.

Father’s grip on his shoulder tightened.

The pyre burned hot and furious. Andromeda and Narcissa and Graham and Rio were all driven back—Theo saw the boys retreating to two wizards and two younger girls, one of them a withdrawn Emilia Honeywell, among the circle of guests—but Harry stayed where he was. Stood unmoving in the fringes of a fire that did not scorch his skin or robes or hair, staring blindly into its incandescent heart.

People began to drift away after a few moments. It was expected, normal even, at this point. By the time the pyre burned out only the deceased’s family should be present, to gather the ashes and whisper their last rights for the departed soul. Distant acquaintances—those invited because this was a society event—went first. Many were from Death Eater families: they, like Father, had come out of courtesy, and now, for the same reason, left early. So too, Theo noted, did Julian Potter: Harry’s erstwhile twin hung awkwardly at the back of the circle with an older wizard Theo vaguely recognized as an Auror at his side, and they slunk off as soon as it was remotely possible to do so. The fact that Potter would dare show his fucking face here, that he’d insert himself into Harry’s father’s burning—

Theo controlled himself. Now was not the time.

Friends of the family were expected to say something. Offer condolences. Theo saw Andromeda and Narcissa receiving their share of such. Others approached Harry, who only then stepped back from the pyre and turned to respond. What he said Theo couldn’t tell, not from this distance, not over the fire’s snap-crackle-roar, but in its light Theo could see his best friend’s face clearly.

It had been a long time since Theo looked at Harry and could discern nothing of his state of mind.

“Theodore,” Father said, low. “It is time we left.”

Theo looked around. Yes. Three-quarters of the other guests were gone and more leaving as he watched. The two wizards with Emilia, presumably her family, waited. Emilia herself little resembled the sobbing, insensate child who Theo had found sprawled on the cold stone floors of his ancestral home, who he had hidden in a guest room behind the strongest wards he knew how to cast until Harry sent a Patronus requesting that Theo send her to Grimmauld Place in the floo. He wondered if her uncles knew who’d given her shelter. The Greengrasses lingered too, and a few people Theo recognized as Sirius’ friends. Most everyone else filtered away. The pyre itself had spent much of its fury; the body could no longer be clearly discerned among the slumping tower of timber and coals. It would be done soon. Theo should leave.

His feet refused to move.

Until Harry glanced over and, through the edge of the fire, finally met Theo’s eyes.

Only to look away again without any change in his expression. As if he had made accidental eye contact with a stranger in the street.

Theo wondered if this was what getting kicked in the stomach felt like.

Harry knew. He had to.

“Theodore,” Father repeated, warning. His hand landed on Theo’s shoulder again—when had it left? “Come. Now.”

Theo let himself be turned away. Let Father side-along him back to their home. Let the elves bustle him off to his room, and once there, let his hands do as they had wanted to since he first saw that stack of wood ready for burning, which was summon fire into their cupped palms.

It was hot. It was hungry. Theo cradled it close and sat like that, unmoving, for a long time, but the cold in his chest wouldn’t go away, and it refused to burn him, even if he half-wished it would.

Jules

Thinking about it didn’t make anything make sense. Jules still couldn’t stop.

Sirius Black. Dead.

Wasn’t this what Jules had wanted? He remembered that night in the Ministry with a shudder of pain and rage and guilt. Had he wanted Sirius to die? Or just get arrested, tried, punished?

The memory was blurry and hard to grasp. Jules put his head in his hands. Gave up trying to think back. Who cared? What did it matter what he’d wanted back then? Sirius Black was dead now and Harry’d just lost his only father figure and Jules knew how awful that felt, figured it must have a whole other dimension of awful for Harry because he’d only had Sirius for, what, two years? Three?

He’d have to be such an arse to be glad Harry was going through this, no matter what Jules personally thought of Sirius Black.

But as much as he wanted to fix it, to do something to make it better, he’d also figured that offering his condolences at the burning would probably just make things worse. Jules couldn’t remember exactly what he’d screamed at Harry in his grief but he knew it wasn’t pretty. He’d have deserved it if Harry just threw his apology back in his face. To go up to Harry, at Harry’s adopted father’s burning, with all that lay between them about Dad and about Sirius… no.

Jules wasn’t that much of an idiot.

He’d left. He’d insisted that Roger take him, even though half the Order thought it was a bad idea considering how many Death Eaters probably would (and indeed had) turn up for a Black’s burning, and he had raised his wand and channeled the pyre-magic alongside everyone else, and he had sent with the ball of magical fire an apology to Sirius as well. A wish for peace. A promise to do better than he had for Sirius’ adopted son.

And then he’d grabbed Roger and turned around and left before anyone could notice him or make a fuss.

Still. It didn’t feel real. Jules had been there to see Sirius Black’s bare face on the pyre looking up at the winter stars, he had seen flames lick up and consume the body, and it still didn’t feel real. Black, dead?

The Potter Manor wards twanged in the back of his mind. Jules flinched as a headache bloomed to life. Merlin’s saggy balls. Ever since he’d come home for Christmas this annoying sense of them came and went and came back again unpredictably. Jules knew what it felt like to cast a spell and hold it, to push more or less of his magic into a spell. Practice with Moody had honed that sense until Jules was pretty good at feeling when a spell connected, or whether it failed, if it was countered and if so by what kind of protection, be it shield charm or ward or physical obstacle—but this?

So much battered at him from the wards. More than he knew how to understand. It hurt his head to try. Jules couldn’t even consistently feel them on purpose, or shut them out if they did press in on him, like now. He gritted his teeth and tried to concentrate. It was still magic, after all. Just a really big spell. A really big, really complicated, really layered, really old spell—

“Jules?”

The sense of the wards slipped away like a fish and Jules was left with nothing but his headache to show for it. He groaned and put his head down on the table. “Yeah?”

Roger pushed open the door to his room. “Sorry to bother you, but—are you alright?”

“It’s the wards again.” Jules relished the cool wood against his forehead. “What’s wrong?”

“You have a visitor.”

“It’s almost midnight, who in—”

“The Minister.”

Jules groaned again and sat up. “What’s Kingsley want?”

“He’s here as the Minister,” said Roger quietly, “not as Kingsley.”

Oh. Okay.

Jules pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, which felt hot and tight and swollen. Yeah. He could… he could be the Boy Who Lived, just for a minute. Nothing he wasn’t used to.

Roger led him downstairs and pointed him towards the sitting room across from the floo, but didn’t follow beyond that. Jules knew he was deeply uncomfortable in his role as custodian of the Potter estate, if not Jules’ actual guardian, until Jules came of age: Roger slept in a guest room that he refused to personalize even a little bit and left everything to do with the house and the Potter assets up to Jules. It was a struggle just to get him to have an opinion on stuff that Jules really wasn’t sure about, like some of the financial issues and whatever. Roger definitely wouldn’t want to sit in on a meeting between Lord Potter the Boy-Who-Lived and the Minister for Magic. Meanwhile, Andi, who on a technicality was Jules’ guardian, had her own home and family, and hadn’t pushed when Jules turned down her offer of living with them until he came of age.

Potter Manor was his home. For better or worse, he was the last Potter in it. He couldn’t just leave the place empty, like he didn’t grow up here, like Dad didn’t raise him here, like Dad’s ashes weren’t buried on the grounds.

One last breath and Jules squared his shoulders, did his best to look confident, and opened the sitting room door. “Minister.”

“Jules. It’s good to see you.” Kingsley rose from a seat by the hearth. “I appreciate your hospitality—the hour is certainly less than ideal.”

“War stops for no wand,” said Jules, calling on the diplomacy he had been learning from Andi at Order meetings. Don’t agree but don’t disagree either, she had advised him once, say something noncommittal that they can interpret as agreement. Avoid drawing lines where you don’t need to, so that the things you do stand by will seem more important.

Jules didn’t like the double-talking calculation of it all. But he knew it was necessary sometimes.

“That it doesn’t,” Kingsley agreed.

They both sat. Jules remembered being a child in these armchairs, feet kicking several inches above the carpet; his legs were long enough now for his shoes to rest solidly on the floor, but still he felt painfully young here in a casual robe with a signet ring whose weight he wasn’t used to gleaming on his hand. It didn’t help that Kingsley had a gravity to him Fudge could never dream of. Tall and broad and dignified, wearing a plain but perfectly tailored robe, he might have been at a society tea at high noon or negotiating a detente with a foreign aggressor, and Jules doubted his facial expression would ever change between one and the other.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” Kingsley began. “Things have been difficult in the Ministry lately. Unpredictable.”

“I’ve heard,” said Jules, who got details from Roger, who was representing the Potters in the Wizengamot with grudging goodwill, although the House’s charter wouldn’t let him actually vote on their behalf until Jules was old enough to appoint someone properly.

Kingsley inclined his head. “Naturally. There have been a number of protest resignations from the Auror Corps, though we’ve tried to keep that quiet, and the matter of Azkaban remains unresolved. Sourcing citizen guards was only ever supposed to be a temporary measure but we have been unable to expand the Corps to make up the shortfall in the roster, and in the meantime, certain shifts in the Wizengamot are chipping away at our ability to keep the prison staffed with temporary guards.”

“People don’t really… like working there,” Jules said quietly.

“I know. Believe me. It is a… horrible place. I was there the day we imprisoned the dementors.” Kingsley looked at the fire with a pained expression. “As was Roger. Even with the monsters shut away the stones remember their presence, but… something must be done.”

“It would be bad if more people escaped,” said Jules, again channeling Andi’s advice, because he couldn’t think of anything else that wasn’t either a lie or a direct disagreement.

“Precisely. And then there is that new publication.” Kingsley let some real irritation show. “The Soothsayer—I see you’ve heard of it?”

“Yeah, it’s… been going around at school.” Which didn’t really capture the buzz set off every time a new Soothsayer showed up. Jules personally didn’t know what to think about it—some of the articles just felt like Death Eater propaganda but others hit uncomfortably close to home. Like the one—

“There have been problems for several people since its ‘expose,’” Kingsley spoke the word with enormous scorn, “about a number of high-level Ministry personnel who work with or for the Order—you saw that one, I’m sure?”

“It was pretty awful. I can’t believe people like Skeeter can just… say that kind of thing.”

Kingsley shifted his weight. “Well, it… can be difficult to refute, particularly as reporters who employ that sort of tactic are skilled at twisting truth in ways that present it at a disadvantage, so to speak.”

Jules felt his brow furrow. “Was it true, then? What they said?”

“Certain… core facts were true, yes.”

“Oh.” Jules hadn’t known that. We aren’t perfect, he reminded himself, and not for the first time. “Yes, I can… see how that would be an issue, I guess.”

“And now… well. It’s crass to bring this up,” said Kingsley with a grimace, “but with Lord Black gone, the shape of the Wizengamot has abruptly gotten even less certain.”

Finally they could get to the point. Though Jules still didn’t know what Kingsley thought Jules could do about it. “I don’t really know all the details.”

“Suffice to say that the Blacks have traditionally been a neutral vote, if not neutral voices. The prior patriarch, Arcturus—he voted with the Dark bloc most of the time, but was no Death Eater, nor any particular friend of You-Know-Who. The seat went dormant for years, and since its reactivation, well, Sirius certainly caused his share of upsets, but the Blacks had begun to form a more solid bloc of moderates, with House Greengrass and a few others… we believe he was courting the Ogdens and Marchbankses and so on.”

Jules nodded; he remembered Andi explaining some of this to him in letters over the last few months, though for all his efforts at catching up he still felt wildly out of his depths in the political machinations he would be expected, as the Potter Lord, to get involved in.

“It’s likely that that group will dissolve now.” Kingsley sighed, and Jules saw the older wizard’s tiredness, how much this must all be weighing on him. “We can’t predict which way most of them will jump. The Greengrasses would’ve swung Dark a year ago, but there have been some complications—it’s a long story. Ogden might stick to his position but he doesn’t have the kind of pull the Blacks do, to hold a whole legislative alliance together. It’s unlikely that the Wizengamot will be able to get much of substance done at Imbolc, potentially not even the Ostara session, and with so many people afraid or angry… the Ministry can’t afford to lose the public’s trust any more than we already, and I admit this is somewhat deserved, have.”

“Okay,” said Jules slowly. “And… you know I can’t really do anything with the Potter seat until my birthday. Dad didn’t…”

Leave a very clear will, Jules finished in his head, because his private upset about his complicated legal position was for himself alone.

“I’m not asking you to get involved legislatively,” Kingsley said in his steady, reassuring baritone. “I understand the limitations you’re working with right now. All I ask is that you consider coming to the Ministry now and then, maybe say a few words to a reporter that you have faith we are doing the best we can, that sort of thing. Just to reassure the public while we get the Wizengamot under control.”

Jules hesitated.

Because—it was dishonest, wasn’t it? To show up, let his picture be taken, answer press questions—to use his reputation as the Boy Who Lived, when he wasn’t sure if he really did trust the Ministry right now, when he wasn’t sure if they should put their faith in it—

What it came down to, Jules realized, was trust. He went and poured himself water from a carafe on the sidebar to buy a minute to think.

Sure, he trusted that Kingsley would try to get the Wizengamot under control, that the Order would try, as they already were trying, to protect people from Voldemort’s coercion and line up votes to stand against the Dark. But did he trust that they’d succeed? Did he trust that they’d actually pull it off?

The problem was that if Jules did as Kingsley asked, and turned out to be wrong, then—then whatever influence Jules had as the Boy-Who-Lived, influence he might be able to use to save people’s lives, as much as he hated being famous for losing his mum and almost dying himself, that influence would always be mixed up with the Ministry’s fuck-ups.

But if Jules didn’t do this, he might be dooming the Order’s efforts to failure anyway.

His temples throbbed with a worsening headache.

“If you need some time to think about it, you’re welcome to send me an owl,” Kingsley said after a minute of Jules’ silence. “I know it’s a complicated situation and you have a lot weighing on you. I am… sorry to have to add something else.”

“I understand,” Jules said quietly. “I’ll let you know. Thank you for being honest with me.”

“Always.” Kingsley sighed. “I’ll see myself out. Have a good night, Jules.”

Have a good night? Jules swallowed back a hysterical half-laugh. Right. Have a good night. He was supposed to have a good night, while he was thinking about this, and the DA, and the Order, and what Ethan was up to, and his worries about the group of younger Order recruits who he’d heard wanted to give themselves a separate name, and whether Susan was okay… and about Harry, who tonight had burned his adoptive father, who even right now could be in a Black family crypt or graveyard laying Sirius’ ashes to rest.

I know how you feel, Jules wished he could say, at least a little, and I wish you weren’t going through it, and I’m sorry for everything I said about him, even though he understood now with a sick sort of rage towards his Muggle family why the words I’m sorry wouldn’t mean anything to Harry in particular.

He wondered if Dad ever apologized to Harry. He wondered if anyone who’d hurt Harry, really hurt him, had ever apologized to him and meant it before Jules. He wondered if Harry had liked the Christmas present Jules sent him. He kind of wanted to go find his Muggle aunt and punch her in the face.

In the end he just went upstairs and took a quarter-dose of sleeping draught and crawled into bed. In two days they’d be going back to Hogwarts—the sooner Jules slept the sooner he could get on the train and go back to school and maybe, just maybe, he could be a student a little longer, have just a little more room to breathe.

Barty

Wanted felons convicted of torture, murder, and acts of terrorism generally would not be invited to the homes of upstanding members of society. Luckily, upstanding did not feature in any list of descriptors applying to Lucius Malfoy, so Barty could floo to their private receiving room on the third story whenever the whim struck him. For example, right now, though it was nearly midnight.

No one greeted him. Elves must have been busy. Barty didn’t mind; he knew his way from here to Narcissa’s suite, and traversed the short journey swiftly, ignoring the paintings, who likewise disregarded someone they’d seen enough to find uninteresting. Malfoy Manor itself remained as ostentatious and expensive as always. Barty hated its cold sterile walls and air of falsity. There was putting up a show for guests and then there was being so bland and lifeless the place might as well have been a mausoleum.

Ha. Apt metaphor, today of all days.

Barty reached Narcissa’s suite and knocked gently. Her wards would alert her to his identity if those on the Manor itself failed to do so—Narcissa had always been cagey as to how fully the Malfoy magics had accepted her after her marriage.

Several seconds of silence passed. Barty began to frown. Surely she had returned by now. Had something—

The lock clicked over.

Never let it be said Barty couldn’t take a hint. He turned the knob and stepped through into Narcissa’s private parlor—easily his favorite room in this whole house. An eclectic mix of art hung on the walls, magical and muggle pieces crowded together so tightly the mint green wallpaper was nearly invisible. Narcissa chose pale colors for her furniture in keeping with the rest of the house but there was an unmistakable air of being lived-in and well-loved that set her rooms apart.

Narcissa herself was nowhere to be seen. Barty shut and locked the door behind himself. Bedroom or study? Likely the latter, if she was upset. Narcissa did not like to be upset in her bedroom and today hadn’t been a good one.

Barty knocked again on her study door but didn’t wait for an invitation this time. The knob turned under his fingers. Not locked.

He’d guessed right—Narcissa sat curled up in half of her two-person sofa, legs drawn up under her in a soft winter dressing gown. A lap desk was propped against her knees but the quill on it lay discarded; instead of writing her hands were picking worriedly at each other in her lap. “Barty.”

“Are you okay?” Barty said, bending to remove his boots.

Stiffly, Narcissa shook her head, light reflecting off the wetness on her face.

Barty shed his cloak and sat down on the other end of the sofa. With most people he wouldn’t bother, but for Narcissa, his friend— “Tell me?”

Her throat worked soundlessly for a few seconds, and then, “I… I can’t believe he’s gone.”

“Doesn’t seem real,” Barty agreed.

“He was always…” Narcissa shut her eyes. More tears escaped and she didn’t bother wiping them away. “He was so full of life. The loudest of us. I—he was such a Gryffindor. I told him that, once, and he thought it was an insult.” A choked-off sob. “I never got to tell him I meant it as a good thing. He was the best of his House. Of our House too.”

In lieu of answering, Barty reached over and rested a hand, palm up, on her lap desk. Narcissa stared at it as if presented with an utterly foreign concept before putting one of her hands in his. Barty gently squeezed her fingers.

“Hadrian is so young,” she whispered. “I looked at him and I saw my dragon… he’s too young to be doing so much, they both are, I thought as much before and now this—”

“It’s no more than he’s capable of carrying,” said Barty, because it would take more than suddenly becoming Lord Black at sixteen to break Harry.

Narcissa made a rude noise. “He shouldn’t have to carry it. Barty, be honest. Was this us?”

Did we kill him?

Barty shook his head.

“But there’s more to the story than was made public,” Narcissa pressed.

Oh yes. Quite a bit more. It had come out in the Prophet the morning after Sirius’ death. By then the DMLE had had a chance to go over the scene. Barty knew of two Death Eater assets in the Auror Corps who’d covered up the corpse of a wizard stuffed full of serpentine neurotoxin before anyone in the DMLE got a look at his face. Who even knew what the Order-sympathetic Aurors had done to muddle the evidence.

“I didn’t know in advance.” Barty tried to work out what to say that wouldn’t be a lie but also wasn’t a guess. “Some of ours went to the home of a family who have… opposed some of our Lord’s agenda with respect to squibs.”

“You mean the Lestranges’ agenda.”

Barty hid his surprise. Most of their Lord’s inner circle knew that the Dark Lord himself was ambivalent on the topic of squibs; it was a better-kept secret that the Lestranges had had a shamefully high number of squib births in recent generations, none of which lived past their missed Hogwarts letters. Barty personally was—or at least had been—privy to his Lord’s private deliberations. He knew that the opinions of the Lestranges and a few other powerful families among his colleagues had influenced his Lord’s policy on the matter. He had not known that Narcissa was aware of any of that.

“It is a priority they rank highly,” he said.

Narcissa sniffed. “You think my sister has not spoken to me of her troubles with conception? They are not childless by choice. Consanguinity has a cost.”

That it did. Barty shrugged. “At any rate I think there was more to the raid than simply silencing a few dissenters. They were both old. They had a kid—seven or eight or something. Word was they’d quieted down once they had her, focused on parenting.”

“The child.” Narcissa’s grip on his hand tightened. “Did she—”

“She’s fine. Aurors found traces of portkey magic at the scene. Couldn’t figure out where it went, but she turned up with her uncles the next day.”

“The family?”

“Honeywell. The witch was born a Dunbar.”

“Sirius and Hadrian were present.”

“And Sirius’ paramour—wizard named Ian Meecham.”

“They knew the Honeywells?”

“Social acquaintances.” Barty was unwilling to reveal the connection between Harry’s ward and the Honeywells, not when he had been entrusted with such information in semi-confidence.

“They got there before the Aurors did.”

“Some of ours in the DMLE delayed the Auror response.” Barty watched her think. “There’s a complication. Forensics at the house determined over a dozen combatants. We sent four. Sirius, Meecham, and the Honeywells are another four, collectively. Harry isn’t believed to have participated in the primary fight—the DMLE aren’t bringing charges for underage magic use as it was unquestionably self-defense and no Muggles could see—”

“So who were the others?” Narcissa finished.

“We don’t know. Nor do the DMLE, as best I or our other assets in the Department can determine.” Barty had checked—at his own initiative, not his Lord’s request. “Our Lord questioned those who made it back. They all swore they didn’t kill Black. Claimed another group showed up, red cloths tied over their faces, and turned the fight into a three-way mess. The Blacks and Meecham fled on foot and then on Black’s enchanted Muggle vehicle. We did not pursue.”

“Those who made it back?” Narcissa asked.

Barty smiled grimly. “We sent four. Three came back. Our people in the Aurors found the fourth upstairs in the Honeywell house, dead of a neurotoxin delivered by way of serpent venom. They dealt with the body—didn’t want the DMLE finding a Mark on the corpse of someone they didn’t know was one of us.”

All that had been reported was a Death Eater attack in which two unnamed bystanders and Sirius Black all died. No mention of the location or the bystanders’ names. It had also managed to imply that Sirius had been there with the attackers, not the victims, though never said so explicitly enough to be grounds for a libel suit. Barty fell quiet and gave Narcissa a moment of silence to absorb the new information.

“How did the Blacks know? And why did they intervene in this incident specifically?”

Barty paused. That question, at least, he could answer with near-certainty. Those clever journals continued to serve Harry well. But he had not yet shared that knowledge with anyone else.

“Our Lord suspects they have a way to pass messages between one another over long distances,” Barty said after a few seconds of thought. Narcissa looked at him—she knew him well enough to tell when he was deflecting—but waited in silence for him to continue. “It is not public knowledge yet, but yesterday He made several of us aware that there is a connection between the Blacks and that family. One of the Blacks’ young Slytherin wards is evidently a relative of Dickon Honeywell’s late sister. They recently made contact and had at least one dinner engagement at the Black home.”

“So the incident, as best you have determined, went as follows: several of our people went to the Honeywell home ostensibly to silence several prominent dissenting voices; the Honeywells resisted with more skill than expected and delayed long enough for the Blacks and Meecham to arrive; shortly after they got to the home, another, as-yet-unknown group joined the fray; in the ensuing chaos, the Honeywell child escaped via portkey and the Black party fled via air transport; the unknown party but not our people pursued them; and at some point in the flight, the enchanted vehicle was destroyed and two of its riders fell to their deaths.”

Barty nodded. Mostly true, except for the technicality that Sirius hadn’t died of falling, but he expected Narcissa would have at least one more question—

“How did Hadrian survive?”

There it was. “To be precise, Meecham fell to his death—Aurors recovered what was left of him after he fell near two thousand feet without so much as a cushioning charm—but Harry managed… some kind of midair accidental apparition. Got himself and Sirius out. We don’t know where exactly he went, but Sirius’ official time of death is listed as about ten minutes after our best guess as to the moment they apparated.”

Narcissa’s other hand was over her mouth by the time he finished. “Midair accidental apparition, falling at that speed? And he didn’t splinch himself into the floor?”

“Well, he might have, but it can’t have been that bad. You saw him at the burning—you’d have noticed if he looked injured.”

“He didn’t, no.” Narcissa’s mouth tightened. “I would like to know who I should blame for the death of my cousin and patriarch of my ancestral House.”

“As would I.” Though in Barty’s case it was less personal and more that he hated not knowing who this violent new player was. The Order had never worn red masks and did not fight like that.

Narcissa sighed and stretched out her legs, shoving her feet under Barty’s thigh. He almost smiled. “Still always cold, I see.”

“I hate this house.”

“You usually aren’t that direct about it.”

“My cousin is dead,” Narcissa hissed. Barty didn’t react; her anger wasn’t for him. “My House is in the hands of a sixteen-year-old. My son’s friend has just lost his second father figure in as many years. And my husband’s decisions have hamstrung my capacity to act as I would like!”

Her voice rang in the suddenly silent room.

Barty stared fixedly at his knees. “Those words could see you brought before the Dark Lord under suspicion of treason.”

“Treason is a crime against a liege-lord and he is not mine.”

“He is mine, though.”

In his peripheral vision, Narcissa smiled in almost exactly the same way Bellatrix did with a knife in her hand. “And do you regret it yet?”

Barty’s jaw clenched so hard he could feel his teeth creak. The answer was not yes, but it also was not an immediate no, either.

“Looks like we both could fall under suspicion.”

“Are you satisfied?” Barty ground out.

Narcissa nudged him with one of the feet still tucked under his leg. “It isn’t personal.”

“Fucking Slytherins.” He shifted his shoulders and forced the tension in them to unlock and drain away. Narcissa had every right to play her games, to look for some insurance after giving Barty a point of potential leverage against her. She had a child in the middle of all this. She had someone to protect.

Barty already knew that she had gone to Snape for help protecting Draco in his mission—a mission Snape wasn’t supposed to even know about. He hadn’t reported it. That was sign enough, really, that his loyalties were… no longer as ironclad as had once been true.

“I didn’t get to speak to him,” said Narcissa quietly.

The change of tone drew Barty’s eyes back to her. Who? he almost asked, but followed her gaze down to the mostly-blank parchment on her lap desk, saw the name written at the top. Dear Hadrian—

Oh.

She rubbed her forehead with her free hand. “I don’t know what to say.”

“He doesn’t care for platitudes,” Barty said, “and would not appreciate being treated as a child.”

“I’m a mother. I can’t help seeing him as one. But you are right—it would be presumptuous.”

Barty thought about it. He hadn’t seen or spoken to Harry since before Yule (before the rite, before the sacrifice, before the geas, before his Lord invaded Harry’s best friend’s mind, before Sirius died, before before before) but he knew his former apprentice well enough to predict what Harry would respond to in mourning. “He will see through any false comfort, and he will distrust any overture given now as a potential manipulation of his grief. Don’t expect too much.”

“I’m not. I just… I thought we would have more time,” Narcissa said to her lap, “even though I should know better by now. Harry Black is the last of his House, all I have left of my cousin… and my son’s friend. It would hurt Draco to lose him.”

In more ways than one, Barty knew. The littlest Malfoy was growing a spine, what with publicly courting a Muggleborn and refusing to bow to pressure from blood purists and politics alike, but Barty doubted his ability to stand firm should Harry be forced to bow.

As increasingly seemed to be the Dark Lord’s intention.

Yet another thought that sat ill with Barty.

“Be honest,” he said finally. “And give him time.”

“They’re all too young for this,” Narcissa said, and it sounded like pleading, though to whom Barty didn’t know. Fate? The Dark Lord? The world at large?

At any rate, Barty himself could not help her. The only answers he had were for practical questions and that only went so far.

She sighed and shifted around on the sofa to lean against Barty’s side instead of the armrest. He let her, and did her the courtesy of not peeking over her shoulders at the lap desk and the letter visible there as she painstakingly worked out what to say.

Sirius Black was dead. They both knew that left his heir vulnerable. If Narcissa meant to stand with him, even in secret, Barty would look the other way, and be glad that Harry had such a formidable ally as Barty’s friend could be when she committed.

Especially since Barty himself could not act so freely. Narcissa was confined by Lucius’ choices, but as she’d said, the Dark Lord was not her liege. The Marks bound only their bearers. Barty’s was quiescent right now, inactive and inert, but he swore he could feel it anyway, warm and digging into his skin.

Barty kept his own enchanted journal, the one he used to write to Harry and, on occasion, conduct cordially academic exchanges with Hermione Granger about arithmancy, in his expanded pockets, much as he suspected most of Harry’s little coterie of friends did. Reasonably skilled wixen with a good tailor could anchor plenty of undetectable expansion charms in the fabric with no one the wiser and little risk of the magic failing at an inopportune moment. There was also the matter of security—Barty had told no one of the journal’s existence and didn’t care to risk someone seeing it on the off chance they broke through the wards on his room and went searching through his things. Still, he didn’t actually use it that often, and it tended to stay in his pocket.

Ever since news broke of Sirius’ death, he had been taking it out every few hours to check for new correspondence. The appearance of a tense missive from Harry, the morning after Sirius’ burning, did not come as a surprise. He requested that Barty meet him that afternoon in the same coffee shop as last time.

No explanation was offered. Barty could make a pretty good guess as to why Harry wanted to see him, though.

I’ll wear a blue hat, Barty wrote back.

The appointed hour found him entering the cafe in a body borrowed from an older Muggle man, wearing one of the flat caps Muggles liked charmed bright blue. No one immediately drew his attention or appeared to notice him in particular so Barty got in line to order a coffee. The woman behind the counter took his order with a smile.

He got a table, sat down, and occupied himself with a copy of the Prophet charmed against Muggle attention until another of the cafe’s employees called out the fake name Barty had given. When he came back to his table after retrieving the drink he saw another person sitting in the empty chair across from Barty’s.

“Nice hat,” Harry said.

“Nice hair,” said Barty with a small smirk: Harry had stolen the body of a Muggle man around Barty’s age with an atrocious haircut, short except at the lower back of his skull, where the hair had been left to grow into a tail.

Harry grimaced. “It’s called a mullet and would hardly have been my first choice.”

“I can’t imagine it would be anyone’s, but apparently I’d be wrong.”

“New feeling for you?”

“I’m wrong sometimes. It’s just rare.” Barty raised his coffee to his lips. Too hot. He waved his free hand widdershins over the cup. It didn’t stop steaming but when he lifted it again the temperature was perfect.

Harry watched with a raised eyebrow. “Neat trick.”

“Teach you?”

“Some other time.”

Ah, they’d reached the serious part of the conversation. Barty sipped his coffee one more time and set it down.

He had not seen Harry move, but when his eyes lifted from the saucer, Harry held his wand on the table, half hidden under a cloth napkin and aimed steadily at Barty’s chest. Before Barty could react the incantation was over. Unknown magic sink-settling into his skin.

Barty held himself very still until he could speak around the desire to curse Harry senseless. There was no pain. Also, he didn’t think Harry would maliciously curse him—though if Harry didn’t explain in short order they would have a problem. “You’ve gotten faster.”

“The Death Eaters wanted them,” said Harry with precision, “because of me.”

Tension aside, Barty felt a burst of vindication. He knew there was more to that raid than just silencing dissenters. Immediately on the emotion’s heels came worry: his Lord hadn’t told him, even in the aftermath, that the raid on the Honeywell house had anything to do with Harry. Why not?

“I didn’t know about the raid in advance.” Barty kept both hands visible on the table. Harry knew where he kept his primary wand, but not about the backup in a holster on Barty’s other arm, nor the rigorous training Barty underwent years ago to attain offensive casting competence with his non-dominant hand. The appearance of nonthreatening helplessness was just that, a pretense, but he had no reason to escalate this just yet.

“Don’t fuck with me, Barty,” Harry said with a trace of a lisp bleeding into his voice. “Did you tell him?”

And now Barty knew what the spell did: truth came inexorably, unwillingly, to his mind and mouth and tongue, utterly unlike Veritaserum or any other such spell he knew of, not pulling the words but pushing from inside with a bubble of pressure so great he had no choice but to say, “No.”

Harry looked at him with hard eyes for a second. His shoulders slumped and Barty felt the truthspell fall.

Barty moved. Even before the spell wholly dissipated he’d pinned Harry’s wand hand to the tabletop in a hold that would let him break up to three of Harry’s fingers if Harry tried to pull away. Certainly Harry could not cast in this position.

They both froze.

“Don’t ever assume because someone is wandless they are not a threat,” Barty said. Any more pressure and bones would break whether or not Harry fought the hold. His skin crawled with the effort of holding back. “And don’t ever do that to me again.”

“I had to be sure.”

Barty forced himself to let go. Harry put his wand away, and both of them sat in silence for several minutes, Barty holding his coffee in both hands and Harry looking out the cafe’s windows, giving each other time to recover.

“I had to be sure,” Harry said again, in a quieter, almost plaintive voice. He would not apologize, Barty knew. Barty did not think the words I’m sorry ever passed Harry’s lips unless they were a lie.

Barty also knew what Sirius meant to Harry. Had meant. He would forgive it, this time. “I know.”

“I can count on one hand the number of people outside my immediate household who even knew about the connection between us and the Honeywells. You, the Weasley twins, Neville, Hermione, Pansy.”

“That’s six.”

Harry made a rude hand gesture. “I’m counting the twins as one, in this case, since they tell each other everything. My point is everyone I told knew to keep it private.”

“You’re assuming no one could have learned that information unless you told them,” said Barty in Old English, making pointed eye contact. “You are forgetting that I’m not the only person in your confidence to whom the Dark Lord might look for such information.”

Emotion cracked Harry’s facade. Grief. Anger. Hurt. Tucked away again in a split second but Barty was still better at identifying microexpressions than Harry was at hiding them.

“Who?” asked Harry.

The geas gripped his tongue. Barty remembered that night. The rush, the thrill, when he felt the old magic moving under and through him. The crash, when it was over, when he began to realize what that magic had been used to do.

Not to him. His father and then Azkaban and the Imperius had broken Barty long ago. The worst and deepest parts of himself had already been stripped bare and brought to the surface. There was nothing left for the rite to do. But some of the others… he had seen it in Nott’s face when his Lord sent him to get the younger wizard. Seen it again after his Lord met with both Notts in private—the razor-thin edge of control Nott junior clung to, the badly-suppressed violence just under the surface. His Lord had used that rite to split his people open into their truest selves and then delved into their minds in the aftermath and whatever he’d done had the younger Nott on the verge of homicide.

Anyone could be cruel, given the right push, the proper circumstances. Anyone could be beastly and violent and hateful. Some people, however, needed less of a push. At this point Barty suspected it wouldn’t take much more than the poke of a quill to send Nott tumbling off the edge.

None of which he could tell Harry, because of the geas, his loyalty, his oaths and his obligations. Barty hadn’t been there for the talk with the Notts anyway. Didn’t know for sure whether his Lord had gotten the information about the Honeywells from Theodore, or if Theodore could or would have gone hunting for that information behind Harry’s back. But his Lord had only shown that much of an interest in one person from Harry’s circle, so Barty said, choosing his words with care he knew Harry would hear, “I can’t answer that, but I don’t think you need me to.”

Harry sat so still he may as well have been carved from ice.

Barty wasn’t even done. “There’s also the matter of Parkinson.”

Now Harry reacted, a confused furrow and then angry tension coming to his brow. “Pansy? What—”

Thank Merlin the girl hadn’t run to the Blacks. “Ask her yourself. I’m only warning you—that won’t be the end of it.”

Harry’s wand hand twitched. “Fantastic.”

“Don’t tell anyone about today. I don’t know how much longer I can safely do this,” Barty added.

“Why are you doing this?”

It wasn’t unreasonable for Harry to ask why Barty was committing what amounted to treason. “An honor forced onto the unwilling is no honor at all. Just a shackle.”

Harry’s expression darkened. He understood.

Barty cleared his throat and switched back to modern English. “Are you—recovered?”

“You want to know what happened,” Harry said drily, seeming relieved at the switch back to a slightly less charged topic.

“I’m compulsively curious.” And I worried. Barty numbered Harry among the people he’d be sorry to see die. Unfortunate, given that there was a war on, and people tended to die in those.

“How much do you know?”

Barty gave a quick summary, which amounted to everything published in the Prophet plus the extra tidbits gleaned from a few of his Lord’s loyal Aurors.

Harry nodded. “You’ve a pretty clear picture up until the point we left, then. Ian was—incapacitated. Sirius couldn’t apparate with him, and there wasn’t time for Sirius to do two side-alongs before the pursuit caught up, so we took his motorcycle, but… it exploded midair. Sirius had… some kind of new enchantment on it. I don’t know if that spell failed, or if the people after us hit it with a curse… there were all kinds of spells flying, I couldn’t shield in every direction and I didn’t see what happened exactly. It was too fast. We went from flying to falling like—” He snapped his fingers, expression haunted. “I… we had enough altitude there was a bit of time to… I stabilized myself, oriented my fall so I could grab onto them. Ian lost his wand—he couldn’t apparate or anything—and Sirius took a curse in the fight, he was—it didn’t even register at the time, but.” Harry swallowed. “I cast a homenum revelio. There was just one… just one heartbeat. He was already…”

“Dead,” Barty supplied.

“Yeah.” Harry’s hand tapped restlessly on the table again. “I… think that’s the only reason I could… I apparated once as a kid, did I ever tell you that? Accidental magic. I knew I could, theoretically, but no one’s taught me how to do it properly yet, and on top of that we were falling at near terminal velocity. It shouldn’t have worked except—well.” His laugh was a bitter, ugly thing. “Apparating with a corpse doesn’t count as taking someone side-along any more than transfiguring a corpse counts as human transfiguration.”

Dead bodies were, magically, inert. Barty nodded. Then his brain caught up to what Harry wasn’t saying. “And Meecham?”

“I could only take one,” said Harry quietly.

So he chose his adoptive father’s corpse over Sirius’ still-alive boyfriend. Logical.

Harry took a deep breath. “We landed at—at home. Called our Healer on retainer. He couldn’t… he said I could’ve apparated straight to the spell damage wing of St. Mungo’s and even they wouldn’t have been able to help. As it was I splinched myself so badly I left my left arm in Wales.”

He what? “You’ve just had your whole arm reattached, and you’re using polyjuice?” Barty demanded. “You idiot, I know you know that’s dangerous—”

“The healers cleared it.”

“If your arm doesn’t heal right I will say I told you so.”

“You’re such an arse,” Harry said with a crooked smile, and for just a second things felt normal.

Barty saw the moment everything caught up to Harry: even the small trace of levity disappeared, lines carved themselves back into his forehead, smile vanished, shoulders hunched. The body he occupied might have belonged to someone else but it still showed the grief. The strain.

Which reminded Barty. “Do you… I haven’t heard anything about guardianship or custody cases?”

“Oh,” Harry grimaced faintly, “that won’t be an issue. I claimed the family title in ritual. I am, by the House charter and family magic, Lord Black now.”

Barty blinked. “It worked?”

“Family magic came down on me like a ton of bricks.” Harry rubbed at his sternum. “It’s… heavy. Legally speaking, I’m in limbo—not properly an emancipated minor, but I can’t legally be treated as a child anymore either. Ministry can’t require that I have a legal adult guardian. We’re pretty sure they couldn’t actually charge me with underage magic abuse, but they told us the Trace won’t break until my birthday and I still can’t get my apparition license until age seventeen either. It’s odd.”

Very odd. Also, if Barty was honest, interesting, if you were the sort of person who enjoyed persnickety legal tangles, which he wasn’t, or if you were the sort of person who liked any sufficiently challenging puzzle, which he absolutely was. Unfortunately he did not have time or a good excuse to apply himself to this particular challenge. “At least you don’t have to worry about a stranger moving into your house.”

“I honestly think the house might eat anyone who tried.”

Barty was not surprised that an ancestral house of the Black family had developed behavior like that. He was surprised that the family magic was robust enough for the house to be that active, but didn’t say so. Not his family, not his place. “You’ll be much more in demand as Lord Black than you were as the Heir.”

“My correspondence has already almost quadrupled,” said Harry with artificial humor. Barty had seen the flicker of his eyes, though, and knew Harry heard the subtext, which was that the Dark Lord would be much more interested in him now.

“Hire a secretary?” he suggested.

Harry half-smiled. “Maybe.” He glanced down at his wrist, where a watch Barty didn’t recognize sat heavy and gold under his shirt cuff. Who, he wondered, was the gifter? “It’s getting close to an hour. Do you have a second dose with you?”

“I’ll be missed if I don’t return soon,” said Barty. “And I’m sure you have things to do as well.”

“A great deal. I’ll probably miss the first few days of the new term…” Harry shook it off. “Not that it matters, I’m at least a little ahead in all my classes. I appreciate you agreeing to meet me on such short notice.”

“I figured you’d have questions.” Barty tapped the table twice as he rose. “Stay safe out there.”

“Don’t get arrested,” Harry called after him.

Barty lifted a hand over his shoulder in acknowledgement but didn’t pause or turn back. He wanted to be away from here before the polyjuice wore off. He wanted to go raise the wards on his room and throw himself into an enchanting project until it consumed his mind and left no room for doubt or fear or memory. He wanted to unsee the rage on his Lord’s face when He was told the Parkinson heiress vanished from under her parents’ and the Malfoys’ noses. He wanted things to make sense again.

Unfortunately, Barty rarely got things that he wanted.

Pansy

Taking the train without Harry felt wrong in a way Pansy couldn’t describe.

Prefect duties discharged, raucous first-years pacified, Pansy wandered the length of the train. She should be going back to her friends’ compartment but her feet would not turn in that direction, would not even let her pause as she passed its door on her pointless patrol. When they first boarded the train, she’d stopped by briefly to drop off her trunk before heading for the prefects’ compartment, and that was more than enough of a look at what had become of her friends. Daphne with her eyes gone cold and empty, Hermione working herself to the bone, Draco folding tighter in on himself every day, Blaise failing to pretend something wasn’t haunting him, and Theo—Pansy had only gotten a brief look at him but she had never seen Theo look so brittle.

At least Justin hadn’t changed. So far he was the only one who… knew. And, true to form, he’d been kind enough to let her put the whole matter out of mind as soon as his parents dropped them off at Kings’ Cross, though the periodic concerned looks he sent her way the whole way through the prefects’ meeting made it clear Justin wouldn’t let it go forever.

That was fine. Pansy just needed to hold it together for tonight. And tomorrow. However long it took for Harry to deal with the aftermath of Sirius’ death and rejoin them. Theo clearly couldn’t step up with Harry gone, Blaise wouldn’t, and Daphne shouldn’t have to do it on her own. So Pansy took everything about running away, every echo of Mother’s voice screaming at her from a howler, and buried the lot of it as far down as it would go.

Her composure held.

And held.

All the way to Hogsmeade, and thence to the castle, and through the Welcome Feast, Pansy was her usual self, sneer at the ready, quelling the rowdy second and third years with a single haughty look. Draco, who should have been helping, looked up from his plate approximately four times in the whole meal, and the fifth-year prefect, Finn, had enough on his plate with the fourth years alone, given Ginny was still on probation and had no power to help him.

Pansy needed to keep an eye on fourth-year Nollin Rosier, and on Seaton, and on Theo. Pansy needed to eat her salad without spilling or letting her hands shake. Pansy needed to carry on a normal banal conversation with Daphne and Blaise without giving any hints of strain. Pansy needed to—

“Mud-fucker,” she heard, at the edge of her hearing.

Pansy needed to not insult anyone over pudding.

A look at Draco confirmed that he had heard it too. His shoulders had grown impossibly stiffer and there was a hard cast to his mouth that Pansy, who had known him since they could barely toddle, read as equal parts anger and upset. But Pansy’s stomach had fallen too, her body going cold in all the wrong ways, because Draco wasn’t the only person who could have that aimed at them, could he, not anymore, not—

Keep it together.

She breathed in and breathed out and did not react.

The meal neared its end and Pansy kept a suspicious eye on the Head Table, looking for signs of Dumbledore moving to deliver one of his signature nonsense speeches. She didn’t know if she could sit through one tonight. Especially not if he said anything trite and insincere about Sirius—although, on the other hand, if he planned to say a word about Sirius, better that it happen now, when Harry wasn’t here to listen.

He made no speech. Only sat silent and remote in a chair that Pansy always thought looked suspiciously like a throne considering Dumbledore claimed to not want power. Even when the students began en masse to depart for their dorms, Dumbledore didn’t look up, focusing on the middle distance between his head and the table before him.

Odd, but then, Dumbledore’s distractions were so far down the list of Pansy’s problems as to be absolutely irrelevant, so she put it out of her mind and focused on shepherding the younger students downstairs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Quick and efficient as they were, it wasn’t quite enough. Several muttered comments in the entrance hall sparked small squabbles that Pansy and a few of the other houses’ prefects squashed with prejudice. She had to send two of the lions and one third-year snake off to the hospital wing to have jinxes reversed, and Susan Bones docked them points, and Pansy wanted to scream at every filthy look the other Houses aimed at anyone in silver and green.

Tomorrow, she was certain, would be worse. Tonight might get worse. She saw several older Slytherins missing from the group flowing down to the dungeons and, even once they had mostly gotten everyone back to the commons, some faces were still missing. Jarred Seaton for one. What was he getting up to?

And, for that matter, where were Jordan and Noah? Pansy did another head count of Vipers. Graham and Rio and Veronica, inseparable lately despite Rio being a year lower than the other two, had taken over a sofa in the same cluster as the whole lot of fifth-years, which was reassuring in that at least that group could look after each other and be trusted not to start problems. Anita sat alone in a corner: she and Noah and Jordan usually wound up together by dint of being Vipers and seventh-years and sharing most of their classes.

Daphne caught Pansy’s eye and tapped two fingers on the arm of the chair she occupied. Alright. Pansy tilted her head in a fractional nod and, after completing another circuit of the room, drifted over to sit down with the rest of the sixth-year Vipers.

Here in the common room, they needed to keep up appearances at least as much or more than they had upstairs in the Great Hall. Or at least, here they needed a different kind of appearance to be kept.

Pansy tuned out a staged, if natural-seeming, conversation between Blaise and Theo about their holiday homework in favor of Daphne, who seemed more intense than usual. As if to prove her right, Daphne cast something, wand low and hidden between her leg and the arm of her chair. “Ward,” Daph shortly.

“Something wrong?”

“I don’t know yet. Someone passed this to me earlier.” Daphne tossed something across the space between them.

Pansy caught it in both palms with none of Harry’s or Daphne’s sure coordination. A marble? Oh. Oh a hunch, she hit it with a finite, casting as Daphne had with her wand low, and watched the marble’s transfiguration fade as it turned back into a scrap of parchment folded up until it was a tiny square marked only by a small drawing of what was, Pansy saw when she squinted, an ink sketch of her namesake flower.

“Have you…”

“Not read it, but I checked it for curses. It was a handoff in the scrum getting onto the train—I didn’t see their face.” Daphne raised a brow at Pansy. “I’d have given it to you sooner but someone was avoiding us.”

“Do you blame me?”

Daphne grimaced but didn’t answer.

“Whoever passed it off knew what they were doing,” Pansy commented, fingers working to unfold the parchment while her eyes faux-idly scanned the common room.

“Yes. Imagine having a portkey passed off to you like that?”

“Would that even work?” As far as Pansy knew, portkeys needed some awareness on the part of the user to activate, at least if they were attached to a conscious person, but—

“Not if you trick or force the person to carry out the activation condition.”

Pansy hadn’t even noticed Theo slipping inside Daph’s ward, or joining their conversation. Based on Daphne’s icy glare, she hadn’t noticed either, which was definitely strange, because Daphne was very good at such spells, and had cast the ward in question.

Theo ignored both of their looks and continued, “Especially if it’s a passphrase.”

“And you know this how?” Pansy said with an eyebrow raised.

“Harry sent Emilia to me,” Theo said in clipped tones.

Pansy let her surprise show in the form of two rapid blinks. “Using… the portkey you gave him?”

Theo nodded curtly.

“And… you know for a fact that it… worked how you say?” Pansy said.

“He used imperio on her—she was too much in shock to repeat the words. And before you ask, I know that because I checked her memories when she showed up sobbing and insensate in my foyer and I had to hide a seven-year-old from the Death Eaters who live in my house until Harry sent a patronus to tell me to pack her through the floo to Grimmauld.” Theo delivered this monologue in a flat, tight voice that hid… something. Pansy couldn’t tell what but something. “I made sure to blur her memory of the spell he cast before I sent her off. Merlin knows Harry’d have fucked that up if he had to try.”

Daphne turned fully to Theo with eyes narrowed to slits. “I have a better question. Two of them, actually. Why are you telling us this, and why did you deliberately circumvent my ward to eavesdrop?”

“Because you need to know where my loyalties lie, and because you needed to know I could.”

With that, Theo waved a hand, and this time Pansy felt the ward snap back into place around just her and Daphne, whatever Theo had done to it fading away.

Daphne schooled her face although Pansy could tell she wanted to scowl. “The fuck?”

“Later,” Pansy said, busy looking down at the note.

They’ll know tonight, it read, and was signed with another, larger ink drawing of a flower. One Pansy recognized.

A daffodil. Or, in other words, a flower produced by one of a group of related plants collectively referred to as narcissus.

Pansy resolutely did not react. She had to hold it together. Just a little longer.

“Pans?” Daphne said quietly.

“Not now.”

The words came out small and cracked and Pansy hated herself, hated that she could control her face and body so ruthlessly but not, in this moment, her voice, but they were enough: Daphne nodded, dropped the subject and her ward, and gave every appearance of forgetting the brief conversation had ever happened.

It only helped a little. Pansy would have to tell her, now.

Just not yet.

Pansy excused herself a few minutes later. Probably earlier than she really should have, but she couldn’t bear to stay in the common room longer and wait for Seaton and his cronies to come back, probably having received a message while they were off doing Merlin knew what to Morgana knew who, and start throwing their weight around about Pansy Parkinson the blood traitor.

Because that’s what she was now.

Pansy climbed into her bed and drew the curtains shut and meditated. She was not an occlumens on par with Harry. She could not keep out the Dark Lord, but she could, if necessary, break herself rather than let him properly into her head, a last-resort psychic suicide that she hoped would never be necessary. Whether she would actually be able to bring herself to do that, if backed into that particular corner, she didn’t know, but at any rate he wasn’t the only legilimens in the world and it paid to keep her defenses sharp.

Also, solid occlumency was the basis of good legilimency, and that Pansy had a knack for.

If nothing else meditation passed the time and helped her keep her worry at bay until the others came back to the dorms. Pansy eased out of her meditative trance and tracked them by footfall and the sound of their breath. Millicent usually kept her evening routine short and went to bed without speaking much: the taciturn girl avoided Pansy and Daphne’s attention and had rebuffed all of Pansy’s efforts, when they were younger, to develop some sort of cordial acquaintanceship. By now the three of them existed in a silent accord that the two camps, Millicent on one side and Daphne and Pansy on the other, would mutually ignore the other’s existence in the privacy of their dorm.

Once Millicent had settled into her bed and pulled her curtains shut, Pansy gave it to a count of sixty, to make sure this wasn’t one of the rare evenings when Millicent got up to grab something she’d forgotten, before slipping out of her own bed and ghosting over to Daph’s on silent feet.

The wards weren’t even up: Daphne had been expecting her. Pansy sighed, slipped between the curtains, and sat on the edge of Daphne’s bed. “Am I that predictable?”

“You looked upset,” said Daphne, “and then not minutes after you left, Seaton came back in like the kneazle that ate the pygmy puff, looked at our group, looked around the commons, looked back at us, looked disappointed, and then sat down and made some pointed comments about people who run away from their responsibilities.”

Pansy grimaced, let her shoulders slump, and told Daphne the whole story.

By the time she was done Daphne’s usual cool composure had slipped. “Merlin.”

“Yeah.” Pansy wrapped her arms around herself. “Mother sent me so many howlers at the Finch-Fletchleys’... Father sent one normal letter, one of the things he said was that they planned to keep it quiet so I could,” she made her voice mockingly deep and stern, “come to my senses, but now…”

“Question is, who found out and wants to make it known?” Daphne said.

“The Dark Lord? I’m sure he was displeased by my defiance.” Pansy fought not to show how much she didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the Dark Lord’s displeasure.

“Oh, undoubtedly. But would he go this far? It’s almost… crude.”

Pansy tilted her head, conceding that point. “Someone else then, inside the… inside that circle.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. A spat with my parents, maybe.” Pansy slumped back as the tiredness hit her. She didn’t want to have to care about Death Eater internal politics. “Does it really matter? It’s happened. They… you know what they’ll say. They already said it. Running away from my responsibilities. Traitor to my kin, to my blood—” A bitter laugh forced its way out of her throat. “The Gryffs’ll love it. Look at the pureblood bitch laid low.”

“If the lions say a word along those lines I’ll make them eat it,” said Daphne, “and there are ways to deal with Seaton and his crew. I’m getting fucking sick of them.” She took one of Pansy’s hands in hers and squeezed fiercely. “You protected yourself. That’s what we do—self-preservation, remember? And if He had sunk his claws into you, where would Harry be now?”

Cornered. Pansy hated thinking about what the Dark Lord wanted from Harry, because she couldn’t imagine any other reason why she specifically would be chosen to be forced into the Mark.

Pansy did not have Daphne’s frigid strength. Pansy was not that cold, even though she’d tried to be. But Daphne’s fingers were cool under her own and Pansy gripped her friend’s hand back and steadied herself.

“Ways to deal with Seaton, you say?” she said, and summoned up a mean smile. “What did you have in mind?”

Daphne’s answering smile showed far too many teeth.

Harry

Before he claimed the family title, Harry had thought he knew what the wards felt like. Had thought he understood what it meant to be the head of House Black.

He had been wrong.

It tugged at him now. A pressure, an undertow, that fluctuated but never completely vanished. Stronger than he thought it was supposed to be but that made sense. He was its last Lord. Sirius was—was gone. The family magic, the wards, the elves and the oaths—they were all Harry’s to carry now.

Already he had had to make three trips to Black Manor. The blood wards there had sunk deep into the ground over the centuries, anchored themselves in a confluence of ley lines older than even wixen’s recorded history, and the loss of a patriarch when the family had been whittled down to two people set the magic into an unstable storm. The only thing that calmed it was Harry’s presence.

So far he didn’t mind, really. He had needed to go there anyway. There were so many things to do—from adding his blood to the adder stone set into the house’s foundations as an anchor for the wards, to collecting the family’s records and beginning to go through them, now that he could access the things readable only by the House’s head, to speaking with the Reeve of Riasmoore again. At least the latter conversation had been easy. All Harry had to do was make it clear that he had no more intention of throwing his weight around now as Lord than he had as the family Heir. Riasmoore’s residents had been managing themselves just fine for years and could continue to do so, as far as Harry was concerned. Why he would want to make more work for himself by trying to be the de facto municipal leader of a whole town, he couldn’t fathom.

But, he thought, trailing a hand along Grimmauld Place’s banister, the needy wards might pose a problem once he went back to school. Harry had no idea sure whether his liminal legal status would allow him to leave Hogwarts with impunity as an of-age adult could outside of class time, or if he would need to invoke family business, or if he even could invoke family business to leave without an adult member of his House to do it for him. Did the Hogwarts bylaws allowing that require an adult, or just a Head of House? Did they specify someone other than the student was required to do the asking?

The house creaked and hummed around him. Harry closed his eyes and came to a halt halfway up the stairs to his room. Focused on the rapidly expanding sense of the family wards. It was an odd thing, mostly subconscious, the way one’s kinetic sense of one’s own body was mostly subconscious but could be consciously tapped and understood with concentration and practice. If he hadn’t had some practice already, thanks to the way the wards reached out to him when he was just the Heir, he didn’t think he’d be able to get anything sensible from the wards now. As it was it took effort to parse what the wards were trying to tell him. There was the strain that had been present since—since Sirius—

Harry brutally throttled that train of thought. Narrowed his focus back to the wards. The strain was still there, he’d grown used to sensing that, but beneath it was something else that felt urgent, oddly muffled—

An abrupt discordant note twanged through his mind. Harry’s whole body twitched. That was new and fucking alarming.

Eriss shifted her weight on his shoulders. Harry absently ran a hand along her scales to soothe her. She’d been clingy ever since the… fall… and resulting apparition. Not that Harry could blame her. Eriss hadn’t liked flying to begin with, and then in the span of an hour had gone through a midair chase, the fall, the apparition—had seen Harry almost die of traumatic blood loss, a memory that made his arm ache with remembered pain, and then endured everything he felt afterwards. The panic. The fear, the anxiety, the dread, the hope while they waited for the healers, and then—

No. Harry snarled and smacked the banister with one hand. Merlin’s balls, he was a practiced occlumens, he should be able to not think about it—

Again Eriss shifted, this time with a flex of her powerful body that tightened its grip around Harry’s shoulders and torso. He concentrated on that and rocked his feet against the floor and then, sharply, smacked the banister again. His hand stung.

“That is a strange thing to do,” Eriss said.

Harry shut his eyes. “It’s a distraction.”

“I could bite you. Like with the self-eater.”

Self-eater, in Harry’s opinion, was a better way to describe dementors than the actual human word. He stroked Eriss again. “I don’t think we need to do something that extreme.”

“Good. I didn’t like doing that.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Eventually.”

Eriss butted her cool triangular head against his jaw. “You are a good snake. A survivor.”

“How do snakes feel about death?” Harry said.

“I hardly know,” Eriss said tartly. “I was hatched and raised by you. But—predators come.” The familiar bond conveyed a certain bafflement. “And they take some. Not all. We go on. I don’t think any snakes not around magic think about death at all. The ones who are, they’re smarter. For them it’s just—it happens. You humans overcomplicate things.”

“That we do.” Harry couldn’t help but smile. It felt bitter and twisted on his face: he didn’t think he’d smiled since—

Since—

No.

“Some of us, anyway.” Harry resolutely kept going up the stairs. “I’m going to uncomplicate them.”

Find what was wrong with the wards, and fix it. Find out how Voldemort learned about the Honeywells, and plug the leak. Find whoever chased them and blew up the bike. Hurt that person.

No more distractions.

Eriss’ amusement filtered to him through their bond. “As I said, you are a good snake.”