23 Blood of the Covenant

Addressed to the Lord Black this thirtieth day of December 1996, by Lord Voldemort of Slytherin and Gaunt.

My condolences on the recent loss of your godfather and patriarch. It is no small thing to lose the Lord of an Ancient and Most Noble House such as Black.

It is of equal weight that you are now the Lord of one such House and the last remaining Heir to another, as claimed by blood and proven by ability. As the patriarch of your secondary House, I would be remiss not to propose a mending of the historical rift between Black and Gaunt according to terms we both find agreeable.

You and I are Slytherins in every sense of the word. We know when it is time to be patient, and when it is time to strike the hot iron. This time is without doubt the latter. The forces arrayed against the future success of the wizarding world are many, multifaceted, devoted, and insidiously misguided. They would see us cast aside our connections to our past and in doing so hamstring our ability to progress in the future. Every year the potential of our magical youth is squandered on shallow wand-waving and hollow promises of grandeur. Every year we lose more of ourselves to the stagnant incompetence of the bureaucracy and the creeping rot of Muggle culture that is antithetical to magical existence.

Well do you know the damage that can be wrought when Muggles have power over a witch or a wizard that they know not how to use—though I am sure you dislike the public nature of the circumstances which taught you that lesson. It is much less known that I myself have personally learned the same lesson in not dissimilar circumstances. I, like you, found in the world of magic a home and a safe harbor, a bastion of belonging in a sea of hostile ignorance.

It is my sincerest hope that we may stand together on this common ground and against those who wish to destroy all that we value about our home.

Trust in Magic.

Lord Voldemort of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Gaunt

Harry thought that if he read the letter a few more times he’d probably memorize it. Different phrases kept catching his eyes as he stared, as if mocking him. Last remaining Heir to another. Creeping rot of Muggle culture.

A home and a safe harbor, a bastion of belonging in a sea of hostile ignorance.

Stand together on this common ground.

A quiet, confident voice whispered in his memory, “I see now, there is nothing special about Jules Potter. I wondered, you know—there are some similarities between myself and your brother… more, however, between myself and you.”

The shade of Tom Riddle had known it in the Chamber. Now here was the adult Voldemort saying the same thing. Both believing themselves orphaned. Both raised by Muggles. Both half-bloods, Parselmouths, Slytherins—though Harry doubted the teenage Tom Riddle would have revealed so much had he known Jules would destroy him mere minutes later.

Common ground.

Unwillingly Harry looked to the side of his desk, at a box that he had left untouched since it arrived on Christmas and he opened it for the first and only time. Even if it hadn’t come with a card, he would have known the gift was from Jules.

A lot had happened between them, much of it bad, but Harry did not want to see him dead.

The quill in Harry’s hand trembled faintly. He put it down, splayed his hands flat to the desktop, and pushed until no tremor could make itself visible. Breathed slowly in and out through his nose.

He thought of Jules. Of Dickon and Amanda Honeywell, both dead; Emilia, orphaned and, according to her uncles, crying herself to sleep at night; Rio, who’d banged furiously around Grimmauld Place for days until the train took him back to school, who Graham reported still had fits of furious temper and grief. Daphne’s brittle strength and the fear that it hid. Pansy’s latest note in the journals hinting that Theo and Blaise had both returned from the holidays humming with badly-contained tension.

Of Sirius, who was—

Voldemort had gone after the Honeywells to get to Harry. Voldemort wanted Harry. And no, Harry would not ever forgive the Dark Lord targeting Rio’s family, nor this blatant attempt to take advantage of House Black’s loss; his rage was a crystalline thing, frigid fractals of emotion splintering through his heart—but it had not been Death Eaters who, he suspected, tampered with the motorcycle, or Death Eaters who chased them and blew them out of the sky and left them to fall.

Voldemort wanted Harry, which meant Harry had leverage. They had common ground, yes. Was it enough to stand on?

Would letting Voldemort think he was getting what he wanted be enough to keep the Vipers safe?

Only one way to find out.

Harry could not fight a war on two fronts.

“Any means necessary,” Harry reminded himself, the words oddly loud in the silence of his study, and, cold with rage, consumed by grief, began to write.

Addressed to Lord Gaunt this first day of January 1997, by Hadrian Lord Black and Heir of Gaunt and Slytherin.

I trust you understand I will need time to acquaint myself with those affairs of my House which are only available to the current holder of its title before I may commit to any formal actions between the Houses Black and Gaunt.

Nevertheless, I agree there is much we might both gain by cooperation. In the interim, I would be curious to know what shape you believe such an alliance might take…

Theo

Cast. Shield. Cast. Cast. There: an opening. Theo struck without thinking. Wand curving into the opening motions of—

No—

His hand spasmed and the spell failed before it could form. Overextended, shaken, Theo couldn’t react in time: Daphne’s next jinx caught him in the ribs and he lurched back with a wheeze. Another spasm went through his wand hand, this time with the effort of holding still.

They were in class. The practice duel was to the first successful hit. He could not retaliate, could not—

“Exemplary work, Greengrass,” Snape said. Daphne nodded and slid her wand back up into its holster. “Nott, a word after class.”

“Yes, sir,” said Theo. He bowed to Daphne, and she to him, as Snape insisted everyone do at the beginning and end of every duel they ran in class. Probably he wanted them all to remember it was just practice and they weren’t each other’s enemies.

Theo had expected to have a hard time remembering that if he got paired up with one of the lions.

He had not expected to face off with Daphne and see only a target.

Daphne settled back down into her usual seat in the front row, spine straight, not a hair out of place. It would take a lot more than the low-level jinxes and hexes Snape let them cast on each other in these practices to ruffle Daphne. Theo idly wondered, as he stepped past her table to the next row back, where he sat with Pansy, whether Snape would ever let them use real—

“Loser,” said a voice from the lions’ side of the classroom, as Snape called up the next pair, “beat by a girl—”

Theo saw red. His chair creaked as he shifted his weight—

Four vicious points of pressure sank into his forearm. Theo looked down. Found Pansy had gripped his left arm with a lot more strength than he’d have expected. Holding him still, distracting him before he could rise, which—which was good. He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek and pretended not to notice the suspicious, unsettled, and contemptuous looks he’d earned from the Gryffindors.

“Keep it together,” Pansy hissed under the sound of—Theo checked—Bulstrode and Thomas practicing their silent dueling. Both preferred noisy spells, and Thomas in particular had a dueling style that leaned heavily towards dodging, with lots of athletic jumping this way and that. It worked against someone like Bulstrode, solid and uncreative, a heavy hitter who pummeled you until you made a mistake. Theo couldn’t help thinking how easy it would be to catch Thomas off-balance and out of position in the midst of one of those dodges.

“I’m fine,” Theo muttered back.

Pansy squeezed his arm one last time and let go. If Theo didn’t have bruises there later he’d eat his wand. “You’re not usually that bad a liar.”

Theo knotted his hands together in his lap. Do not reach for your wand. Do not move. Do not react.

For the rest of class he stayed like that. Mercifully, Snape didn’t call on him again. Theo didn’t move even when they were dismissed and the others got up to leave. Only when the classroom door shut on Blaise’s heels did he unwind his hands, at which point he found his fingers had gone to sleep, and rise to meet Snape by the professor’s desk.

Snape just looked levelly at him for a few seconds with black, inscrutable eyes. “Your silent casting is exemplary.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Your control, however,” said Snape, as if Theo hadn’t spoken, “is not. If you are unable to regulate your threat response you will be asked to leave my class. I will not have one of my students waving his wand about as thoughtlessly as a Gryffindor.”

“Yes, sir.”

Snape kept looking at him. Pins and needles prickled in Theo’s fingers. He focused on that feeling and cut any other thoughts out of his mind with the strongest occlumency he could summon.

“Dismissed,” Snape said at last.

Theo didn’t wait to be told twice. He was in the hallway with his bag over one shoulder less than five seconds after the word left Snape’s mouth, and thirty seconds after that had vanished into one of the castle’s myriad some-degree-of-secret passageways.

Had Snape been there that night? Theo thought back. Couldn’t say for sure. In his memory the Yule rite was a strange sequence of events, at times over-saturated and crystal-clear, at others blurry and uncertain. He could close his eyes and relive how it felt to make his contribution, to tear blood and pain from one of their victims as his part of the sacrifice. He could count the screams that he’d created. Measure time by the memory of his thundering pulse. But when he tried to picture the crowd, to guess who had been there and who not—it slipped out of his mental grasp.

Snape could’ve been there. Theo didn’t know and the not knowing left him with a horrible feeling akin to putting his foot down and missing a stair. He was plunging into unexpected darkness where he’d expected to find solid ground.

And he’d almost hurt Daphne. Theo did know what spell he’d nearly cast at her. Knew too that it would have connected. He had almost hurt her badly.

He snapped his fingers, summoned a flame at their tips. Leaned up against the wall of the passageway and turned his hand back and forth as he stoked the magic pouring into it higher until fire wrapped wholly around his skin from wrist to fingernails and then leaped higher than that, licking at the air. All in silence. The thing people didn’t realize about fire was that it didn’t make noise. What you heard from a fire was not the flames themselves but the cracking, popping protests of the fuel as it burned.

Theo’s breath was loud in his ears.

The fire soothed him, took the edge off, but he couldn’t stay here forever. People would start to wonder where he was if he didn’t return to the common room with the rest of the sixth-years after class. More to the point, it was a risk for any Slytherin to not have a good alibi lately, what with the rising tensions in the student body and shite happening like the three hexed-to-pieces little kids Theo and Harry had found last autumn.

Theo let himself have a minute and no more before he closed his hand into a fist and snuffed the magical flames out of existence. Shadows settled back down around him in the unlit passageway. He conjured an ordinary lumos to light the dusty, uneven ground and, once he got to the steep switchback stair that would take him from here down to the first dungeon level, the irregularly spaced steps worn down by centuries of feet scraping over them in the same places. Boots spelled for silence slipped easily into the grooves and Theo imagined how many people had taken this same path before him.

It should have been comforting. Mostly he just felt alone. What good were the dead when they left the living to solve their problems?

When Theo emerged from the back passageway into the normally-illuminated dungeon corridors, he extinguished his lumos, stowed his wand, and set off for the common room at a brisk pace. The others would be back by now. Slughorn had set them a potions essay and Vector assigned the NEWT Arithmancy class a nasty problem set to work through this week—if he could corner Daphne for the latter it would help take his mind off things.

“Crepuscular,” he told the common room entrance. The visually unremarkable wall slid aside and as he stepped through the familiar ambiance of Slytherin House’s magic welcomed him.

It was the end of the school day, and plenty of students were off in the library, with friends, or heading to the Great Hall early. The common room was, as a consequence, fairly empty, which meant Theo had no trouble spotting his fellow sixth-years, nor did it take him more than a second or two to realize how upset Pansy looked.

“—told us,” he heard Blaise saying, low and angry, as Theo’s quick steps brought him to the group.

“Lay off,” Daphne hissed back, and Blaise recoiled as if stung.

“Unless you’d care for a little heart-to-heart?” Pansy’s voice was taunting. “Any personal matters you want to share, Blaise?”

Blaise sat back into his chair with smooth grace that might seem natural to people who hadn’t known him for half his life. “Not particularly, no.” His eyes, cold and dark, flicked up to Theo. “Some things ought to stay personal, wouldn’t you agree?”

“We all have our little vices,” said Theo, flippant, easy, smiling as he sank back into a chair of his own. Kicked one foot up on the opposite knee. Held Blaise’s eyes in what he knew could be interpreted only as a challenge. “But we also have to answer for them eventually.”

Theo should be the last person to criticize Blaise for keeping secrets, right now, but Theo knew where his own loyalties ultimately lay. He could not say he knew the same of Blaise. He did not trust that his friend had Harry’s best interests at heart.

“And where were you?” Daphne turned on Theo with more ferocity than he had anticipated.

“Snape wanted to speak to me, which I thought you might’ve noticed,” Theo drawled, “seeing as he brought it up right after complimenting you on your dueling form—”

Daphne brought a ward to life around them with a furious slash of her wand. Careless. Theo had cast one as soon as he came into earshot, and no one else had noticed so far. “Snape wanted to speak with you because you almost pulverized my lungs. It is fully your fault that you got held back and weren’t there when we needed you.”

“Needed me for what, exactly?” said Theo through a jaw that wanted to clamp shut. The urge that he’d thought bled off was back in full force, surging restlessly to the surface in response to his irritation.

“Collywode called Pansy things I’d rather not repeat—”

“You don’t need me for that.” Theo set both feet down on the floor with a thump and sat up straighter.

“I believe dear Daphne’s point is that we ought to sustain a united front,” said Blaise, his tone just shy of condescending, “lest anyone think they smell blood in the water, as it were.”

Theo smiled. “If there’s blood in the water, Blaise, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Theo,” Daphne snarled.

“Yes, dear Daphne?” Theo said, mocking Blaise’s word choice on purpose, pushing, pushing, he should stop but the restless angry energy had to go somewhere and it was this or say something worse, do something worse—

Her wand was in her hand again. Theo had rarely seen Daphne this frostily furious. “You are a liability.”

Was she just now getting that? Theo wasn’t just a liability. Theo was coming unwound.

“He shouldn’t have been there, actually,” said Pansy, drawing all their attention. She still looked upset and shaken but her sneer was steady, almost cruel. “Unless we’d rather have a loose cannon along who might’ve cursed Collywode to pieces on the spot.”

At his side, where hopefully she couldn’t see, Theo made his wand hand into a fist.

The worst part was she wasn’t wrong.

“Theo, you may not go and kill her in her bed,” said Daphne, still looking at him with the glittering hardness of a diamond, “or land her in the hospital wing, or curse her to smithereens, or hurt her in any way that would draw too much attention—”

“Oh? Who died and left you in charge?”

Blaise sat up. Pansy cocked her head with a sudden predatory anger. Daphne froze over so still she might have been an ice statue. Theo wanted to regret his words but couldn’t, not with the wild thrill driving his heartbeats, the temptation of violence just out of reach. Yes, he thought, just a little further, come on, I know you want to—

“If you think I will let your recklessness bring Dumbledore down on our heads,” Daphne said in a voice so cold frost billowed from her lips—

Theo didn’t wait around to find out what she’d do. He was out of his seat and across the room in seconds, ward shredded in his wake. His near-sprint out of the room undoubtedly drew attention from the few other Slytherins present but he couldn’t care. He had to get out of there: if he couldn’t stop himself from escalating then he could leave before he made things any worse.

Three levels below the common room and several minutes further away from the high-traffic dungeon passages than anyone ever really went, he let himself slow, though he still seethed with badly-contained energy. The dust under his feet lay thick and undisturbed upon the stone. Panic clawed at him. Made everything worse. Father had taught him self-control since he was a child. Theo couldn’t stop reaching for the trailing reins of his self even though he knew they’d been torn from his mental grasp.

Perhaps torn to pieces entirely. An angry, animal sound wrenched free of his chest and Theo’s pace picked up again. He refused to accept that he might never get back what that fucking rite had taken. He refused to accept that he’d be this—this fragile and furious and volatile forever.

Theo flicked his wand at the nearest door. It slammed open in a puff of debris. Showed him a dank, dark, miserable little storeroom full of half-broken old furniture, expired potions ingredients, worm-eaten parchment rolls, and cauldrons so caked with grime that no amount of Primrose’s Prestigious Cauldron-Scrub would ever get them clean again. It smelled, when Theo entered, of mildew and of things dead so long even the rot didn’t want them.

A charm closed the door. Another made sure no sound would escape this room. A third would alert him if anyone came within fifty feet of him.

Theo stowed his wand, shut his eyes, and loosed all his pent-up energy in the form of one wild, unchecked yell. Even to his ears it was almost immediately drowned out by a roar of flames coming to life around him in a ring. Descending on the old dried-up wood of chairs and desks with ravenous fury.

When he stopped, his throat hurt. Theo swallowed and tasted blood. Smoke stung his eyes and he felt sweat beading at his temples and beneath his robes.

Fuck.

“Aguamenti!” he snapped, sweeping his wand out in a circle. Gouts of water gushed from it, and though the flames fought more stubbornly than normal fire ever should, they did go out, though if the old furniture could perhaps have been repaired before, the scorched and waterlogged wreckage that surrounded him was unquestionably beyond saving.

Theo sat down on the filthy floor with a thud that jarred all the way up his spine and into his pounding head. His muscles were jelly-weak. Hands shaking. Magic as strong as ever but the manic energy drained, at least for now. In its wake he could, if shakily, think back, and wince at what he’d said.

The problem with trusting someone like Theo was that if you ever stopped being able to trust them, you’d have handed them all your weaknesses. Theo knew all the Vipers’ weaknesses. Theo knew Daphne’s terror of losing autonomy. Hermione’s insecurity and the anxiety that sometimes strung her out into an overworked mess. Draco’s equal, opposite insecurity, the softness that his haughty exterior belied. Blaise’s fear that he was just like his mother, of being untrusted, of Harry kicking him out into the cold—

Harry.

Theo knew Harry’s weaknesses too.

Theo had handed one of them over.

And now—

He tried to summon guilt. Tried and failed. It just—wasn’t there. Rage, yes, rage in spades, for Father, who’d prompted this, and for Voldemort, who’d done it, and for himself—but guilt, no.

Harry knew, he had to. But the others didn’t, not yet, that had been obvious as soon as Theo saw them on the train, they weren’t as wary as they should be, weren’t as cautious, didn’t know how right they were to call him liability.

But he couldn’t quite delude himself into thinking that—that whole scene upstairs had been intentional on his part. Could not lie to himself that he provoked them on purpose, to drive them away from him for their own good. Not when, even now, he could feel the part of him that thrilled at danger and violence and pain, temporarily exhausted by lighting this whole room on fire, rearing its head again.

Reins disintegrated into ash. Control tenuous at best. Father, I am becoming what you never wanted me to be.

Hopefully they saw it now.

At least, his Slytherin friends might see. Not the others. Not Hermione, or worse, Neville. Theo pictured losing control in the greenhouses. All of Neville’s beloved projects and plants going up in the stinking, snapping fury of greenwood lit on fire—

No.

Theo sucked in a deep breath, ignoring the smoke that still choked the air. Cupped his hands in front of him. Called a fire into the space between his palms. It helped. It was a way to bleed off the extra magic and itch to break things. Maybe if he just kept it going he could settle himself enough to meditate and maybe if he did that enough he could start to get a handle on his impulses again.

Until he did that he didn’t think he could trust himself around his friends.

Hermione

Ever since Hermione started attempting to combine advanced arithmantic encryption techniques with her occlumency, she had found a different subjective quality to her meditation. All of her quieted, turned and turned with the cool, steady precision of her father’s Swiss watch, dozens or hundreds of carefully calibrated interlocking components working in concert. Never too fast or too slow.

It was a refuge against the restless thrumming anxiety that drove her on, on, on. When she meditated Hermione could wind the sputtering panic up into a spool, like a spring, and apply its energy where it was needed, whether for research on the Mark or sifting through letters to the Soothsayer’s editor or helping Pansy edit the Soothsayer’s next volume or doing her actual classwork or preparing lesson plans to use for the DA and the younger Vipers.

When she meditated nothing felt like more than she could manage.

Hermione took comfort in the steady tick, tick of her thoughts and the shuff, shuff of her shoes on Hogwarts’ stone floors as she walked. She’d managed to arrange the prefect schedule so that, since they’d come back from the holiday, all her patrols were alone, giving her at least a bit of time every day to herself in which she could think in peace.

And avoid Draco, she thought, mind crystal-clear with meditation, all chance of self-delusion stripped away. Hermione made a face at the thought that tumbled through her mental balance like a wrench and threatened to upset everything. Carefully she shepherded it—and the attendant guilt—into its proper place with the rest of her thoughts about Draco and their relationship. That could be examined later. Right now she was busy reviewing transfiguration theorems so that each would be firmly and accurately recorded in her memory for later recall.

Shining strings of numbers and letters, magical symbols and Greek-character variables, marched across her consciousness in orderly rank and file, while another portion of her attention, partitioned carefully away, monitored her surroundings, as she was, after all, a prefect on duty. Hermione had read that some sages who dedicated years to practicing occlumency in near-perfect solitude could fully divide their consciousnesses at will. The implications of such magic for neuroscience intrigued her but she didn’t personally care about any such goal. It was enough, for her, to be able to multitask, alert for noises in broom closets but not so much so that she couldn’t also repeat Cavendish’s Axioms to herself.

A distant noise made her pause the recitation and reallocate some of her attention. It was a raised voice. Trouble? She wasn’t sure: children often shouted when happy or playing. It wouldn’t hurt to check, however.

Hermione sighed as she let slip some of her control. Sustaining that kind of occlumency for too long taxed her, and she knew it wasn’t healthy, as much as she sometimes might like to stay forever at a crystalline remove.

Emotions could be so messy.

And she didn’t care for the guilt.

I don’t have the time, Hermione thought as her feet carried her towards the corridor in which she’d heard the echoed shout. Draco was so—so fragile lately. Brittle. On edge. He needed so much from her, needed her to be soft and sympathetic and other things that she just did not have the time to do.

Another shout from ahead, much louder, ringing with tension, and obviously a young voice, had her picking up her pace. Hermione absently cast a silencing charm on herself. Three days into the new term and she’d already broken up five fights; if she could avoid hauling whoever this was before McGonagall she would. Better to be quiet and wait a minute and see if they could resolve it on their own.

A new voice chimed in. Pitched high with anxiety. Hermione slowed as she drew near a junction between the corridor she was in and a larger one that led vaguely towards the library and had a number of big old empty rooms off of it that people liked to use to study. It figured that some confrontation would start up here.

“She called me a blood purist!” snapped an angry, childish voice. “You heard her!”

“Well you made fun of my necklace ‘cause it’s Muggle!” This voice came higher-pitched and wobbly with unshed tears. “What’m I supposed to—”

“They hunted us and you want to wear that thing around? You heard Professor Rosewood—”

A scoff. “Like we’re gonna trust her, that Death Eater appointed her—”

“He’s NOT a Death Eater! And Professor Rosewood’s right! Which you’d know if you ever opened a bloody book, Sloper!”

Merlin, Hermione knew that voice. Harry was going to kill her if Rio went off the rails in the one week that Harry wasn’t here.

Unsilencing her shoes, she sailed around the corner before this could get worse.

Six pairs of eyes snapped to her. Rio and his Slytherin classmate Yvette Mirren, Hermione knew from the Vipers. A Hufflepuff girl whose name Hermione couldn’t remember stood relatively near to them, with body language indicating she at least didn’t have an issue with the Slytherins. The other three, though—two kids in Gryffindor robes, and a second Hufflepuff—were all geared up for a fight.

At least, they had been. In the fine tradition of squabbling children confronted with an authority figure, all of them took one look at Hermione and wilted.

“Who,” Hermione said, making her voice as crisp as ever Professor McGonagall’s could be, “do you believe is a Death Eater?”

Shuffling feet and downcast eyes were her only answer.

Hermione looked at Rio.

“Selwyn,” Rio said. He and Yvette had not been as cowed by Hermione’s arrival as the others: there was still a fierce, if young, anger plain on Rio’s face. “The Inquisitor bloke.”

“Mister Selwyn is not a Death Eater,” said Hermione, gentling her tone now. “That has been confirmed by the Headmaster, the Board of Governors, and an independent official from the Department of Magical Education. What are your names?”

The Gryffindors introduced themselves as Joanna Sloper and Riley Mitchell. Their Hufflepuff comrade’s name was Phineas Lydgate, and the other little badger, who appeared to be trying to vanish into the stonework now that an older student was on the scene, gave her name as Elspeth Crowe in a voice barely above a whisper. Hermione looked hard at Rio and Yvette too—obviously she knew their names already but it was the principle of the thing. Prefects oughtn’t play favorites.

When they’d all told her their names, Hermione faced Elspeth Crowe, who was probably the closest thing she’d get to an objective storyteller here. “Explain, if you would, Miss Crowe.”

“Oh, er.” Crowe shifted her weight. “We, uh, we had our first lesson today with Rosewood—Professor Rosewood—and she did a sort of summary of what all we’ll be learning for our exams in June, and one of the topics was the witch hunts…”

It figured. “I see,” said Hermione. “And?”

“And… and then, um…” Crowe’s eyes slid sideways to Yvette and then skittered away again. Clearly she didn’t want to point fingers at a classmate who was standing right there.

Yvette lifted her chin. “I told Mitchell I didn’t like it that she’s wearing that symbol around here, ‘specially now she knows what those Muggles did to us!”

Hermione’s stomach sank. Now that she knew to look for it, she could clearly see Riley Mitchell’s necklace, upon which hung a small, plain cross in dull silvery metal.

“And then she called me a blood purist. I’m not even a pureblood!” Yvette jabbed a finger at Sloper for emphasis before mulishly folding her arms.

Crowe appeared to be trying to fold in on herself like origami. “That’s… that’s what happened. Yeah.”

“And you responded…?” Hermione said in the direction of the Gryffindors and one Hufflepuff on the other side of this argument. In the name of fairness she had to let everyone have a say.

There was more indecisive shuffling.

“Let me tell you what I heard, then. At least one person implied that Professor Rosewood was lying when she brought up the witch hunts and the Muggle Catholic Church’s role in them during class.” Hermione would lay money on that comment having come from Sloper, but she’d wait to see if anyone confessed.

No one did.

“Very well,” said Hermione, folding her hands neatly in front of her waist. “That will be five points each from Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and Gryffindor. Hogwarts does not tolerate fighting in the halls, nor slander of its faculty.” She looked directly at Sloper. “Professor Rosewood is a highly accredited magical historian. Furthermore, Inquisitor Selwyn—” that title was so bloody unfortunate— “did not select or appoint her. He merely recommended to the Board of Governors that Professor Binns be replaced immediately by someone whose voice won’t put people to sleep during class.” As she’d hoped, that comment drew some reluctant amusement to the students’ faces.

“Miss Mirren.” Hermione fortified herself. “Hogwarts also does not tolerate any student mocking the religious beliefs of another. Repeat incidents will cost you more points than this, are we clear?”

Yvette stubbornly held her eyes. Hermione waited. If she could not out-glare a thirteen-year-old she had no business being a prefect.

“Yeah,” Yvette muttered at last, and looked down.

Hermione surveyed the little group. Wondered sourly how anyone was supposed to untangle this mess in one conversation. The prefects were taping over the cracks—they couldn’t do a bloody thing about the pressure causing said cracks to form in the first place. Taking points and chivvying everyone off to their dorms felt grossly inadequate, but what else could Hermione even do?

Her heart thrummed like a bird in a cage. Hermione tightened her fingers on one another so that they would not restlessly reach for a quill, a wand, anything. “Return to your dormitories, please, and do not let this happen again.”

They obeyed, albeit with some discontented grumbling. A quick glance at Rio made clear that he had more to say, though, so Hermione waited and, once the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors were out of sight, cast a sound war around herself and the two younger Vipers. “What is it, Rio?”

“You heard them!” Rio burst out. “Calling—calling Selwyn a Death Eater and Yvette a blood purist–!”

“I did hear, yes.” Hermione clung grimly to the tail end of her tattered patience. “I am a prefect, Rio. I can’t unfairly come down on anyone who disagrees with you, as you know perfectly well.”

“All I did was ask her why she was wearing it,” Yvette argued.

Hermione doubted very much that it had been a good-faith question asked in a non-accusatory tone, but the thing was— “I don’t actually care. She can wear the necklace if she likes, and it will be her problem, not yours, if she fails her history exam because she refuses to listen to her teacher. More to the point, you are both Slytherins. I shouldn’t need to remind either of you of the importance of discretion and of not drawing attention by fighting in the halls. People will be all the quicker to believe the worst of you with everything else going on outside the school right now. And if you won’t listen to me on the subject, just ask Graham or Alex or any of the other Slytherins who have been caught in the crossfire of their parents’ wars.”

Her voice did not rise. Her posture did not change. Still, by the time Hermione was done, both Rio and Yvette looked properly abashed for the first time since she had involved herself in their spat.

“You need to stay safe,” she added, more quietly.

“We will,” said Yvette. “Sorry.”

“No harm done.” This time. “Were you going to the library? I can escort you there.”

Yvette shook her head. “Back to our dorms, we just had to pick up some books for a class.”

Rio still said nothing, eyes down, tension settled deep into his shoulders. Hermione did not think she could reach him or help him. Hermione had to stand there and watch Yvette tow him away.

Harry, she couldn’t help thinking, please come back soon.

Pansy

Not once in five and a half years had Pansy spoken directly to Headmaster Dumbledore, let alone been called to his office. The only students who went up the spiral stairs to his rarefied tower rooms were the ones who’d gotten into real trouble, or his special favorites, which was to say, Potter and those Weasleys who wore red and gold.

Yet here Pansy was, repeating the password she’d been given to the gargoyle outside his tower and climbing onto the enchanted self-propelling stairs beyond it. To the best of her knowledge she fit neither category of called-to-see-the-Headmaster people: she’d done nothing wrong lately, or at least, nothing anyone outside the Vipers knew about, but she certainly wasn’t anyone he particularly liked or paid attention to either.

Which was exactly how she liked it. No Slytherin considered Dumbledore’s attention a good thing.

Pansy refused to be impressed by the stairs or the marble walls, chiseled and shaped into a perfect glossy curve, or the ornate door at the top, old solid wood almost shimmering with magic and set with a knocker in the shape of a lion. Honestly, could the old coot’s favoritism get any more obvious?

Also, was he seriously going to make her wait? No way did he not have wards on the stairs to detect people approaching. Pansy hovered on the landing for a few seconds to make sure she wasn’t wrong before, with a sneer, she lifted one fist and knocked with as much sarcasm as she could imbue into a nonverbal gesture.

“Come in!” Dumbledore’s genial old-man voice rang out.

Pansy touched the knob. It turned under her fingers and the door opened of its own accord. More showing off.

“My dear Miss Parkinson!” Dumbledore’s eyes all but literally twinkled at her as she stepped inside. “Delightful—please, sit. Lemon drop?”

“No, thank you, sir,” said Pansy. She kept her eyes firmly on his forehead and refused to so much as look around the room. Dozens of weird arcane instruments in every metal known to stay solid at room temperature and probably some that normally didn’t lined the walls alongside artifacts that she was sure Hermione or Harry or Theo would salivate over given the chance. Pansy herself did not particularly care. Pansy was not going to give in to Dumbledore’s stupid mind games.

Dumbledore set down the dish of lemon candies and selected one for himself. Did anyone seriously ever take him up on that offer? “Thank you very much for agreeing to see me.”

Pansy crossed her ankles, knees tilted precisely twenty degrees to the side and hands folded neatly in her lap, slipping easy as breathing into the perfect posture Mother had taught her from the time she could walk.

She might have run away like a damsel in a bloody novel but she still had her pride.

Almost a full minute passed in silence. Pansy waited and let her vague contempt touch the curl of her lips at the Headmaster of Hogwarts resorting to such cheap tactics against a teenage witch.

“I do not mean to indulge in petty gossip,” he began at last (ha, thought Pansy, I win), “but as Headmaster of this school, I would be remiss not to reach out to those students who I believe may be in danger.”

“You would, yes,” Pansy said.

Dumbledore blinked. Hesitated for a fraction of a second before he carried on. “Word has reached me that you suffered a disagreement with your parents over the holidays. I was so very sorry to hear it—family is a precious thing.”

Pansy cocked an eyebrow but once again waited in silence. She wanted to make sure she was right about where Dumbledore was going with this before she responded. Of course, it was already pretty fucking clear, but why not let him dig himself a little deeper?

“It is a difficult thing, to be so young and all alone in the world.” Dumbledore looked at her and Pansy could almost believe the sorrow carved deep into his face. “Miss Parkinson, I hope you know that you have options before you. People who would work with you to keep you safe so that you need not reconcile with your parents unless you wish it.”

“People,” said Pansy, guileless, innocent, just asking a question, “like you?”

He would be a fool to believe her performance. She watched him refuse to believe it. She watched him soften anyway into an almost smile. “Yes, my dear. Hogwarts has enormous resources at its disposal, all of which could be brought to bear for this purpose.”

Pansy looked at him from under her lashes. “For a price, I’m sure.”

For a split second, Dumbledore’s whole face went blank. Pansy might not have even noticed if she wasn’t, well, herself, but she was, so she did, and the utter lack of expression had her spine stiffening.

“Nothing so crass. A sanctuary does not come with a price tag. There is a war brewing in the shadows, Miss Parkinson, as I’m sure you are well aware, and there will come a time when we all must contribute to the efforts to hold it at bay.”

Merlin. He was smooth. Just like his sorrow and his sympathy, this promise of safety was temptingly, tantalizingly believable.

A slow smile grew on Pansy’s face. She allowed it, gentled her eyes, leaned forward slightly and propped her elbow on the armrest of her chair as she said, “I think I can determine where my contributions will be most effective, Headmaster, but thank you for your kindness.”

His brow furrowed. “Miss Parkinson, let’s not be hasty. I understand your position perhaps better than you might expect. Foolish risks are particularly dangerous at your age, and hubris especially deadly.”

“Wise words.” Pansy rose and brushed nonexistent wrinkles from her robes. “Though hubris might be even more deadly to the old than to the young. I appreciate your concern, Headmaster, but I believe I’ll be better off making my own way.”

“You know where to find me, Miss Parkinson, if you change your mind,” he said.

Pansy paused at the door. Looked back over her shoulder at Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot and Supreme Mugwump of the ICW, Order of Merlin First Class Recipient, war hero, legendary scholar. Sitting up here among his trinkets, looking down on a world full of people rendered small as toys by distance. “If the past were different, I might even have done that. But Hogwarts under your leadership does not extend sanctuary to people unless it can use them.”

“We are all users and used alike.” Only now did Dumbledore’s mein harden into that of a wizard who could plausibly stand against the Dark Lord on the battlefield. “It is in your hands alone which you become. You would find me a far kinder ally than you would Lord Voldemort a master.”

“All due respect, Headmaster,” she said, “I would rather take my chances with the Dark Lord’s cruelty than with your kindness.”

If Dumbledore said anything else, it was lost as Pansy shut the door on her own heels, just shy of a slam.

Fuck the old bastard and his condescending twaddle. Let him stay up here and fossilize and play his little games. Pansy would not be his pawn—she had real work to do.

Old men in towers didn’t win wars.

Harry

Wind tugged at his hair, tore warmth from his skin faster than his body could replace it. Harry lost all sensation in his feet some time ago. He couldn’t bring himself to care. Winter blanketed the world around him, and up here on the craggy hilltop that overlooked Riasmoore and Black Manor, he could pretend it would last, pretend this stillness was forever.

A particularly harsh gust pressed him back. Harry leaned into it. Below his bare feet, the hill fell away in near-vertical descent for a hundred feet or more, a hungry slope of black-grey rock bursting from bleak wind-scoured earth.

And below that, intangible and intoxicating, the ley lines hummed with ancient power.

Up on the hills, the Reeve had told him in a voice as old as the stone currently under his arse, that’s where the rites used to be, that’s where you can feel the leys.

Could he ever.

Harry looked down at his hands. Shallow cuts on both palms had painted the stone with smears of his blood. Most of it was dry by now. He pressed down harder, deliberately, ignoring the sting.

Generations of people had come to these hills and done the same. They’d been coming here before the House of Black was even a dream in its forebears’ ambitions. The people in the town he could see clearly even from here, they’d been coming to this hilltop too, them and their parents and their parents’ parents, coming to give of themselves to the ley so that it would give back.

And it had. Fields that didn’t suffer as much in a drought or a flood year or under the shadow of a blight. Illness that was just a little more curable than it should be. Magic that took and gave in equal measure, and all of it tied up in the heavy weight that sank deep into Harry’s marrow the minute he claimed the Black family title.

That was the trade-off, the Reeve told him. Bind it all up in one family and it was stronger, more pointed, more potent. But once you’d done that, once you took up a spindle and turned and turned it ‘til the land-magic had all been pulled together, well, it made for a powerful rope, and it was not as easy to break as it had been to draw together in the first place.

It constricted as if responding to Harry’s thoughts. He rolled his eyes and, concentrating, pushed magic through the conduit of his bleeding hands down into the land. Felt its grasp on him loosen a bit.

Turned out not-properly-sapient embodied land-magic didn’t want to die once it had been given even the vaguest of shapes.

Harry glanced up at the sky. Slate-grey clouds stretched overhead, unbroken from horizon to horizon, but the quality of the light changed subtly throughout the day, and that plus another, deeper sense that he suspected came from the land itself told him that it was getting closer to evening than afternoon now.

A sigh left his lungs and was almost immediately pulled away into nothingness by the wind. Time’s up.

Harry held his wand carefully to keep its handle clean and healed his palms with a couple of muttered charms. The land-magic under him roiled unhappily as Harry got to his feet. “Oi,” he chided it, feeling a little silly, “I’m not leaving for good, but I have to go back to school sometime.”

Privately he doubted that millennia-old ley magic understood English or the concept of school. It was the reassurance that it wanted and reassurance Harry gave it. The Reeve called it a rope spun of inchoate ambient magic. Fair enough. Harry knew full well that his blood left on the stones was the same as if he’d picked up that rope and bound it to his ribs himself. A sacrifice and a promise and a two-way tether.

Magic like this didn’t come from nothing. You had to give to get.

It let him go because it knew it could call him back when it needed.

Harry tugged a robe back on over the thin undershirt and cotton trousers he’d been wearing for the last few hours, but didn’t bother with his boots, leaving them slung over one shoulder by the laces as he mounted his broom. A few more minutes of cold wouldn’t hurt and he was loathe to wrap himself back up in all the trappings of civilization just yet. Better to pull as much cold, peaceful stillness into himself now as he could, because he knew he’d need it in the weeks to come.

On a Firebolt, getting from the lookout down to the manor took bare minutes. Harry had climbed up to the hills the hard way, on foot, since the Reeve and the family’s old records alike told him that was the proper way to do these things, the effort being half the point. But the getting down was less important and at any rate he was running out of time.

“You,” said Vanessa, waiting for him in the front hallway, “are going to be late.”

“I’m packed already, it’ll be fine.”

“The Headmaster’s waiting! You’re nominally still underage—a week was the most we could wrangle for House business, unless you want to give him an excuse to call you truant—”

“I’ll be fine,” Harry shouted over his shoulder, already taking the stairs two at a time.

Vanessa threw her hands into the air and said something in a complaining tone that Harry didn’t hear.

She was gone by the time he came back down minutes later, changed into a uniform robe with his trunk floating obediently behind him. Harry half-closed his eyes and reached out to the manor’s wards. They reached back immediately and eagerly. None of that now, he told them, gently resisting the way they wanted him to sit down right there and lose a few hours to the connection that he carried.

Pinpointing Vanessa was easy; she waited for him in the receiving room, as he’d expected. Harry disengaged from the wards and jogged down the short side hall to meet her.

“Close,” she said with a pointed look at her watch.

“We have three minutes to spare.” No way did Harry plan to tell her that he was going to milk every last second of freedom possible before he had to go back to being a bloody student. Turning up to class and handing in his homework on time. Saying sir and Professor, may I? and throwing no more than a jinx or an insult when Seaton tried to start shite. Sleeping in the same fucking room as Crabbe and Goyle, as Blaise, as Theo—

Vanessa was staring at him.

Harry corralled his face back into impassivity. “Was there something else?”

“Yeah,” she said, “whatever you were just thinking, pack it away until after Dumbledore can’t see you, Merlin—”

She was still talking when Harry flicked floo powder into the hearth and shouted “Hogwarts Headmaster’s office!”

One nauseatingly long floo trip later, Harry stepped forcefully out of the fire into Dumbledore’s office. The clouds were patchier up here in Scotland and a bit of late sunlight came in through the windows as if specifically to play with all the shiny bits of the old man’s trinkets. “Welcome, Mister Black.”

“That would be Lord Black,” said Vanessa, stepping out of the fire, clearly having heard Dumbledore.

The Headmaster smiled placidly. “We strive to maintain an egalitarian environment here, Master Tate. Those of our students who come into certain privileges early are still, primarily, students.”

“An honorable goal,” said Vanessa.

Harry decided to interrupt before they got into a competition to see who could be most passive-aggressively bland at the other. Once Vanessa got going like that she did not like to back down. “I’m sure everyone will be mature about it. Anyway, I would rather stay a student for a bit longer,” and admittedly telling a bald-faced lie right to Albus Dumbledore was satisfying, “so I don’t foresee any issues.”

“Naturally, naturally.” Dumbledore glanced at the watch on his wrist. Gold and heavy. The kind of thing parents gave to their children coming of age. Harry suppressed a pang. “You’d best be going, then. I’m sure your friends will be eager to see you.”

“Yes,” said Harry, and the cold of the hill winds settled deeper into his bones. “And I them.” He looked at Vanessa. “Give Hazel my best.”

“I will.” Vanessa shot one last challengingly unresponsive look at Dumbledore before she stepped back into the floo for her home, having fulfilled the legal responsibility as his solicitor to see Harry back to school.

As far as Harry was concerned, he and Dumbledore had nothing else to say to one another. Dumbledore evidently agreed or at the very least did not protest Harry leaving without another word.

Dumbledore had been right that Harry needed to hurry, but not for the reasons that he thought. Harry was in no hurry to get to the Great Hall and didn’t give a shite if he missed dinner. Harry needed to get to the Knights’ Room before dinner was over. The others would be meeting him there as soon as they could get away. Harry meant to arrive first.

“It’s too cold here,” Eriss grumbled, burrowing further under Harry’s clothes.

“I’ll renew your warming charm when we’re out of the public corridors,” he assured her, picking up the pace. Scotland in the winter was not a comfortable environment for tropical snakes.

Things were no better in the Knights’ Room, when he arrived and found it empty, the braziers unlit, old warming charms faded into ineffective tatters of magic. Looked like it had been empty at least most of the day if not since the day before. Harry set about renewing the braziers and warming charms, though more for Eriss’ sake than his own.

She abandoned his shoulders almost immediately in favor of a patch of stone near to one of the braziers. A stream of wordless, irritable hissing came from that spot as she shifted around in search of the perfect temperature. Harry pushed a burst of fondness towards her through their bond and got more of the same back with an undercurrent of her bad mood.

“You are so spoiled,” he told her. “Most snakes have to hibernate in the winters.”

“And whose fault is that?” Eriss said haughtily.

Theo’s, absolutely. Harry’s brief amusement and affection cooled. Theo who gave Eriss treats and snapped his teeth at her in playful jesting threats and was Eriss’ second choice for source of body heat if Harry wasn’t around. Theo who Harry trusted with his familiar but lately—

No matter. Not yet.

Harry sat down to wait. Checked the time and, with a small sigh, dug into the leather bag slung over his shoulder. It was new, a specialty purpose with runes stitched all through the lining in hair-thin metal threads, anchoring runes much stronger than leather can normally sustain. Wards for protection against fire, water, temperature, and insects; wards to keep out wandering fingers; wards to protect its contents against anyone other than Harry because he had to deal with everything expected of Lord Black now and that included reams of extremely confidential paperwork.

There were whole shelves of books that would open for no one but the current holder of the title. Records, personal diaries, notes, secrets. Harry hadn’t even begun to make a dent in the personal effects of the most recent Lord, Sirius’ grandfather Arcturus; he was still busy slogging through two decades of backed-up papers relating to Riasmoore and various other investments and properties the Blacks had a stake in. Sirius—Harry forced himself to think his godfather’s name—had made headway into it but apparently no more than the absolute bare minimum necessary.

Harry couldn’t be surprised by that. Sirius didn’t—

No.

Sirius hadn’t liked being the Lord.

At some point his eyes had closed. Harry opened them and found a rime of frost creeping out from his fingers over the leather cover of the book that held records of lease transfers made between Riasmoore residents over the years. He snatched both hands away and flexed them until the chill went away.

“You are distressed,” Eriss said.

Yeah, no shit. Harry didn’t answer her. Just wrestled himself back under control. Resolved anew to keep his thoughts away from—from dangerous topics and firmly occupied with this. Tables of numbers. Potions formulae and arithmancy problems. Homework, student problems. Distractions.

The alert wards on the Knights’ Room nudged at his awareness a few minutes later. Harry, with some relief, looked up from the rows of neatly handwritten transaction records and set the book aside. He had to be familiar with the way the tenancy system on the Blacks’ land worked, but that didn’t mean it was fun to do for any great stretch of time.

Pansy was first in the door. “Harry,” she said, “you’re back,” and there was something dangerously fragile in her eyes, in the relief her voice couldn’t quite hide, but Harry had no time to dwell on it because behind her was Daphne and on Daphne’s heels—

Theo looked no different than when Harry had last seen him, at Sirius’—at the burning. Sandy hair combed the same as ever. Robes neat, tie straight. Blue eyes meeting Harry’s steadily. “Welcome back.”

“It’s good to be back,” Harry said, setting aside his papers and standing to greet them. “Blaise, get the wards, would you?”

Blaise, last into the room, turned to close the entrance wards behind him, as was often done if someone wanted to have a private conversation in the Knights’ Room, and in the moment of his casting, while everyone’s attention was divided—

A twist and a whisper and the spell was cast. The second time in less than a week that Harry had ever used it on a person.

Theo saw it coming, he thought, and didn’t move, didn’t shield or dodge. It hit true. Sank in.

Harry’s eyes narrowed.

“Harry?” Daphne said, one hand on her own wand and looking at Theo, now, with suspicion.

“Time for truth, Theodore,” Harry said lowly, not looking anywhere but at his best, oldest friend’s eyes. “Did you tell him?”

Pansy caught her breath. Blaise swore under his breath.

Harry ignored them all.

Theo sucked in a ragged, unsteady breath, the first crack in his composure, and said through his teeth, “Yes.”

The word struck Harry like a hammer blow, no matter how much he expected to hear it. For a second he found himself reeling though his body did not move.

A second in which Daphne stepped forward, hand blurring as she punched Theo in the face.

The crack echoed through the small stone room.

Theo lifted a hand and lightly touched his cheek, and the corner of his lip, where a bead of blood formed. Slowly his head turned up to look at Daphne. New intensity fairly hummed in his posture.

“Enough,” Harry snapped, and, with a jerk of his wand, ended the truthspell.

Daphne subsided. Theo did not: his head tilted slightly, still studying Daphne, fingers of his hand curling in, ready to summon wand from holster—

Control slipped between Harry’s hands like sand beneath the water. He took two quick steps forward. Got between them, forced Theo to look at him instead of Daphne. “I said enough.”

Theo blinked, twitched slightly, and then reared back as if Harry had struck him, all the lethal intent vanishing and in its place was what Harry could only label fear—and then that too vanished, wiped away and hidden underneath a coolly detached mask.

After so many years Harry could read Theo even at his most composed. Knew Pansy and Blaise could too. None of them called Theo out on it. Instead Harry just studied him. Saw that, for reasons unknown, Theo’s self-control had frayed nearly to the breaking point. Saw the rigid way Theo avoided looking at any of them as though to make eye contact would be to shatter completely.

“You should go,” Harry said quietly.

Theo shut his eyes. Took one breath, in and out, through his nose, and then nodded once, a jerky movement. “Yeah.”

Harry glanced at Blaise, who, with a swallow and a wary look Theo’s direction, brought down the wards he had only just cast.

In a split second and a whirl of robes, Theo was gone.

Daphne recast the door wards with a furious slash of her wand. “What the fuck?”

“Someone told the Dark Lord about my connection to the Honeywells,” Harry said, gesturing towards the chairs and returning to his seat; the others joined him, all looking various degrees of worried and angry. Harry mostly just felt cold. “I thought it was Barty, but I checked.”

“You… checked,” said Daphne skeptically.

“I met with him and truthspelled him when he wasn’t paying attention,” Harry clarified.

Daphne made an angry sound under her breath. “Were you trying to get yourself cursed?”

“He wouldn’t curse me,” Harry said. At least not permanently. “And I had to know.”

“Harry—”

“I had to know.”

Daphne subsided.

“He said—that he was not the only connection of mine who’s close to the Dark Lord.” Harry looked down at his lap. “I hadn’t told Theo about the Honeywells, but—”

“He must have gone looking for something to hand over,” said Pansy in a flat voice. “To buy favor.”

“Or to keep himself from coming under suspicion,” Blaise said, “which to be fair isn’t the worst plan.”

It wasn’t. Nor had Harry been unaware of something like that happening. “I’ll guard myself better in the future. He won’t have another chance like that.”

Pansy and Blaise exchanged a look. “Are you… angry?” Blaise said slowly.

Was he angry? Harry’s hands flexed. The cold sharpened in them. Ice-forming life-sapping cold. “No. I—it—I’m not happy. But no.”

“Bastard,” Daphne muttered.

“The other day, when he subverted your wards,” Pansy said to Daphne, “he said—”

“That we needed to know he could do it? Yeah. Bastard.”

“And he kept Emilia safe,” Harry reminded them—Pansy had told him, via the journals, about that conversation, which was a relief; Harry hadn’t wanted to talk about it, to remember contacting her surviving uncles, to think back on that long bloody painful night and the fear that Emilia would remember him casting imperio, the relief when Harry looked into her mind and saw it blurred into what would look like trauma to anyone else but what he had known even then was Theo’s work.

“He doesn’t want any of this,” said Pansy, “and if you close him out, he has an excuse to provide less information in the future. I get it. But, ah, we… probably should keep that among ourselves.”

“Hermione?” Daphne asked with a frown.

Pansy’s fingers tapped against the arm of her chair. “Might understand, but they’re friends and she’s a poor liar.”

“She’s been lying to Draco for ages now,” Daphne countered.

“Draco isn’t half as perceptive as Theo.”

Daphne grinned, though even her amusement had an undercurrent of strain. “Point.”

“And Neville wouldn’t like it,” Pansy said, “or be able to lie about it, and he and Theo are close… Justin?”

“Justin, fine.” Harry waved that away. “Is it just me, or has Theo gotten…”

The others all traded grim looks. “Worse?” said Blaise eventually.

That was certainly one word for it. Harry nodded.

“He… mentioned something about the Yule rites the Malfoys held,” Pansy said. “Hinted at an oath of some kind—I’m pretty sure he can’t actually talk about it. I got the same sense from Draco and my—my parents.”

Her voice hitched on parents. Harry filed that away to follow up on later.

“Do you think that’s when the Dark Lord…” Blaise gestured vaguely towards his head.

“Likely. But it’s—it seemed to be more than just that.” Pansy shrugged. “That’s all I could get out of him. If everyone who was there was under an oath it’d be difficult to find out anymore… Harry, did Crouch say anything about it?”

Harry shook his head. Wondered if the millennia-old truthspell he’d cast on Barty could have compelled that answer, or if the oath would be too strong. Not that he planned to take that risk, with Barty or, worse, Theo. The conflicting magics could cause serious harm to one person laboring under both.

“I wonder if legilimency would work,” Pansy said, almost to herself. “Or… private correspondence, I suppose, though that would require someone to write about it…” She sat up and looked at Daphne. “We need to talk about the technicalities of oaths later.”

“That’s more Theo’s—but I suppose he’s unavailable for this,” Daphne said. “Yes, of course.”

Harry raised an eyebrow at Pansy.

“Typically oaths won’t even let you knowingly write a letter to someone with whom the oath prevents you sharing anything, but I don’t believe oath-magic is strong enough to, for example,” Pansy smiled like a fox, showing all her teeth, “prevent you from writing a letter to a false identity whom you believe to be ‘in the know,’ as it were.”

“There’s always good old-fashioned mail fraud.” Blaise leaned back, stretching out both legs crossed at the ankles. “Classics become such for a reason.”

Pansy wrinkled her nose at him. “Details. We can work it out later—all of this requires Theo or, I suppose, Draco to actually write a letter to someone about that night, and assumes one of us could intercept it in some way or other.”

“We do share a room with them,” Blaise pointed out, gesturing between himself and Harry.

“I don’t envy either of you the task of breaking into Theo’s personal effects,” said Daphne.

Blaise winced. Harry had to agree; that was an unpleasant prospect. While he believed he could do it, there was no guarantee of doing so without alerting Theo in some way to the intrusion.

“And then there’s…” Daphne took a careful breath. “Harry, you should know—”

“Daph,” said Pansy sharply.

Daphne turned and looked at her. There was a momentary silence while a whole conversation went on between the two witches despite neither of them uttering a word. Harry slid his eyes sideways to Blaise, who caught the look and grimaced; he had an idea what this was about, clearly, but didn’t intend to interfere.

Finally Pansy caved. “Alright, fine. There’s a—situation.”

“Anything to do with that howler Veronica swore she saw you receive?” Harry asked.

“Oh the little snake, I knew she saw something,” Pansy snapped, though she looked more proud than irritated that Veronica had, apparently, lied convincingly enough to make even Pansy believe her. “Unfortunately yes.”

Harry listened to her tale of fighting with her parents, hidden notes, and a desperate flight through the Muggle world using currency gifted to her by Narcissa until she got far enough away to safely contact Justin. All the while Harry did not move a muscle. The cold in him rose up into an angry gale. That Voldemort had tried to control him by marking Pansy—that the Dark Lord would coerce someone into his service, that Pansy had had no choice but to run, barefoot and alone and with hardly any resources, into what amounted to a foreign country—

“You’re alright?” he said as soon as she was done.

“I am now.” Pansy grinned, a flippant expression that Harry couldn’t quite believe. “I left most of my things at—at home, though. I don’t know when or… or if I’ll be able to get it all back. That’s been the most annoying part, really. Look at these.” She stuck out a foot from beneath her robes, and while Harry knew very little about witches’ fashion, he could see that it was much closer to a shoe Hermione might prefer than something to Pansy’s taste.

“I’m sure you will endure this devastating dearth of quality footwear,” Blaise told her solemnly, and Pansy threw a pillow at him, her smile turning fractionally more sincere.

Harry was going to order her a belated extra Yule gift of shoes. Hopefully Daphne would help him pick out a pair. Or as a birthday gift—she’d be turning seventeen before much longer.

“I assume you couldn’t reach out to anyone in the magical world for political reasons?” he said instead of announcing that plan to the room at large.

“That’s what the note said. Here.” Pansy fished around in her shoulder bag for her journal, and then removed two small pieces of parchment from just inside the cover.

Harry looked at the top one. DictaQuill handwriting, as she’d said. Still, a niggling sense of familiarity… he frowned. “And you’ve no idea who this was from?”

“None. Narcissa said she couldn’t warn me—I don’t think she knew about this… interference in advance, but when she realized I was running she decided to help.”

“But this was from her,” Harry said, looking at the second bit of parchment and the telltale ink drawing of a daffodil at the bottom of a brief note.

“Must be. It’s even her handwriting, I think. I’ve seen it on Draco’s letters.” Pansy’s fingers tapped again. “When I find out who leaked this…”

“It wouldn’t have been the Dark Lord,” Harry said, thinking out loud, “he’d be embarrassed and angry… and I doubt your parents either.”

“Oh no. Not them. Mother was—furious.”

Daphne shifted but didn’t speak.

“I think it was another Death Eater,” Pansy went on, “trying to discredit one or both of my parents with… the shame,” she made air quotes, an amusingly Muggle gesture, “of having a blood traitor daughter.”

“Seaton has been causing problems,” Daphne added.

That was—both surprising and not. “What’s Seaton’s stake in all this? He’s not…”

“A blood purist?” Blaise tilted a hand back and forth. “I’ve been turning over a few stones. For him, it’s not about Muggle parents as much as… well, power, to be blunt. Power and the keeping of it in the hands of people who think lineage entitles them to it. Hence implying you’ve somehow usurped the Black title and now accusing Pansy of having betrayed her people and responsibilities and such. You’re both breaking ranks with what he thinks all of us from the old families should be doing.”

“I am a traitor to my blood, in the most literal sense. I rejected their goals and plans wholesale. Ran away knowing that it might bring down the Dark Lord’s wrath on them,” said Pansy in a voice devoid of emotion.

Harry leaned forward and waited until she looked up and made eye contact. “Self-preservation is one of the tenets of our House, Pans. I don’t blame you at all.”

For a second he thought she was going to crack, but her voice, though quiet, didn’t waver when she said, “Thank you, Harry.”

“We’ll deal with Seaton,” Harry said. “Though weakening his position won’t really stop all the… people who agree with him from running their mouths.”

“It’s not one unified ring of Muggle-haters,” Blaise agreed. “What did you have in mind?”

Harry thought of Seaton taunting Pansy, about a fourth-year pushing Veronica in the halls, about slurs painted onto Draco’s vandalized trunk, and smiled. “Step one is getting someone close to him.”

“Blackmail?” Pansy said, sitting up straighter with a new gleam in her eye.

“Or something a bit more guaranteed.” Harry spun his wand between his fingers.

Pansy eyed it, and while Blaise and Daphne both had small frowns on their faces, she at least seemed to understand what he meant. “That’s a very different kind of risk.”

“No more half measures,” Harry said softly.

Daphne crossed one knee over the other. “You’re still in the middle. As am I and… others.”

Now it was Harry’s turn to shuffle around in his things until he retrieved a heavily warded scroll case. His friends’ curious eyes lay heavy on him while he removed the top, shook its sole occupant out into his palm, and handed the scroll, cracked seal visible, to Pansy.

Her eyes widened when she saw it. Daphne swore under her breath.

Harry waited while first Pansy, then Daphne, and finally Blaise took the letter from Voldemort and read it over.

“Fuck,” Blaise said succinctly when he handed it back to Harry. “Have you responded?”

“I did the day I got it. I—he wants something from me,” Harry put the scroll away again, “and he’s clearly willing to go to significant lengths to get it. Pressuring you, Pans. Going after the Honeywells.”

“And you’re going to… forgive that?” Daphne said. Harry looked up at her and she raised an eyebrow. “I’m not arguing, but really, you’re not the merciful type.”

Blaise snorted.

“Not hardly. But if giving him what he wants—or letting him think he’s getting what he wants—keeps us safe?” Harry considered his words. “I… dislike his methods. But if push came to shove, between the Dark Lord’s ends or those of the Order…”

“There’s a difference between what the Dark Lord wants and what he might actually do,” Pansy said. “His power comes from his followers and they have opinions of their own. If Daph and Hermione are right about the Dark Mark being an individualized vassal oath—”

“That magic strengthens when it is reciprocal,” Daphne said, nodding.

Pansy took up the thread again. “Look at his inner circle. The Lestranges. Rookwood. Dolohov. Malfoy—well, formerly, anyway.” She hesitated. “Nott. They all have different agendas and some of them are not what we might want.”

“An alliance with House Black is no small thing. It’s possible I could… motivate certain of them towards a policy shift. But either way—” Harry tapped the paper. “All I am doing is entertaining the possibility of an alliance. He’s shown me the stick; if he thinks I’m open to working together—”

“He’ll want to prove he has carrots on offer too,” Pansy finished.

“What?” Daphne said.

Harry and Pansy looked at her, confused.

“Sticks? Carrots?” Daphne pointed at them. “Have you gone mad?”

There was another beat of silence, and then Pansy cracked up, nearly doubling over in her seat. Her laughter had an edge of hysteria to it but was sincere for all that and Harry found himself smiling too, even as Blaise gave in and started laughing quietly to himself.

“It’s a Muggle saying,” Harry said to Daphne over their friends’ hilarity. “I’m guessing Pansy here picked it up from Justin.”

“Oh. I wonder if Hermione’s ever said it.” Daphne kicked halfheartedly at Pansy. “You can stop now, it wasn’t that funny.”

“No, but—” Pansy sucked in a breath and sat up. “Imagine the Dark Lord just—” She held out a hand and made a gesture that recalled Muggle street magicians fanning out a deck of cards. “Pick a carrot, Lord Black!”

Harry couldn’t help imagining it.

The next thing he knew, he and Daphne had joined Pansy and Blaise in their uncontrolled laughter, and for a few moments the Knights’ Room rang with the sound of it, until it almost stopped feeling empty of the other people who should be with them.