28: Blood of the Covenant

Harry

Looking back, Harry recalled the weeks between the disastrous fight at the Honeywells’ house and the moment Sirius woke up as just one miserable blur. Interminable, paralyzing tension crushed any variation between the days. Nothing mattered. Nothing felt real.

Then the waiting ended and time came rushing at him all at once. Every day brought a change. Small changes, really, or at least they looked small on the surface, but deep under his feet, currents shifted.

Draco’s project was just another thing to keep in mind. Harry adjusted. Rebalanced. Added two back-to-back visits to Grimmauld Place to his schedule—the first to get a message sent to Narcissa, and the second to receive her reply. The house—which, while not Black Manor, had ancient family wards of its own—clung to him at the end of both visits. Harry didn’t think he was imagining how the portkey took too long to pull him free of Grimmauld’s enveloping blanket of magic.

Dumbledore watched him at meals. Jules’s mystery book taunted Harry with potions innovations he didn’t have the time to research properly. The politics of Slytherin threatened to collapse any day. Blood supremacist graffiti kept turning up on Pansy’s schoolbag. Narcissa’s answering letter promised a new routine of smuggling illegal books in and out of Hogwarts—things that would get him expelled if caught with them.

But Harry saw Draco’s spine straighten again, and Theo leave occlumency practice with Hermione looking something like calm, and Daphne sit with Parvati Patil at lunch. He met with Jules twice in side corridors to talk about the Half-Blood Prince’s made-up spells and Slughorn and lesson plans for the DA. He sat in the Knights’ Room with his friends around him and knew he wouldn’t go back to the mindless miserable waiting, not for anything, not even to escape the fear of making so much as one mistake. 

At least now he was moving.

Harry clung to that feeling of getting things done. Grabbed it with both hands, and hung on. Spent sleepless nights hunched over financials and correspondence and homework. Yes, he’d given up his apprenticeship, but that could only reduce the load so much, and for all he felt better, the strain showed.

As usual, Pansy called him out on it before anyone else. “You’re still working too hard,” she said, and poked Harry’s cheek. “If these eye bags get any larger you could fit your textbooks in there and leave your schoolbag in the dorms.”

“Carrying a bag is passé,” said Harry. He ducked away from her touch. “Let me finish this letter and I’ll come back to the common room, alright?”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Good.” But Pansy was clearly in a trust, but verify sort of mood. She settled herself in one of the Knights’ Room’s many armchairs and stared pointedly at the side of Harry’s head while he worked over his scroll of fine parchment and careful penmanship.

“There. No more,” said Harry when he was done. Never mind that if Pansy hadn’t come by he would’ve stayed up here another hour at least working through other small tasks. He put the scroll into the pile of things to carry up to the owlery tomorrow and smiled sunnily at her. “See?”

“Mhm. Come on, oh great Heir Slytherin, lest you deprive the masses of our House their opportunity to gaze upon your magnificence.”

Harry slung his schoolbag over a shoulder and prepared to follow her out. “Next time send Justin up. He wouldn’t be mean to me.”

“You’d miss me,” said Pansy with a haughty toss of her short hair.

Certainly he had missed this version of her, all hauteur and humor, that patented prickly charm. Harry cast a mobile sound ward and asked her about the latest Soothsayer articles being edited mostly to provoke the way she smiled when she was most sure of herself, more with the left side of her mouth than the right so only one dimple appeared. In return he found himself talking about Jules: his fear of Jules getting hurt, his relief that Jules’s Potions success had an explanation, his small desperate hope that one day calling Jules brother wouldn’t make him hesitate.

“He should be so lucky as to call you that,” Pansy sniffed, and Harry grinned.

This side of Pansy had grown rare this year. So had Daphne’s abrasive natural laugh, Hermione’s eyes lighting up when you asked about her latest project, or the uncomplicated pleasure Draco took from good music and a glass of expensive wine smuggled into school in his potions kit.

And, much as he valued this small glimpse of the real Pansy, it couldn’t last. Harry saw the dimple disappear first. The rest of Pansy’s smile did the same not long after, and then too her sharp humor and sharper voice. As they drew near the common room she emptied of anything real, leaving a hard glossy shell behind, spun sugar wrapped around a hollow core.

None of the other snakes would see weakness in her, Harry knew. But Harry himself saw nothing of Pansy in her either, and hated it.

“Mandolin,” he said, and the common room entrance rumbled open.

It was late evening, nearing curfew, and most of the student body had returned to their common room and dorms. Accordingly, the Slytherin common room was about as full as it ever got barring House-wide meetings. Heads turned when Pansy and Harry walked in. Mostly this was the unconscious movement of people’s attention flickering to new sources of movement near them, but some of their gazes lingered, and most of those simmered with banked hostility.

“Mudblood lover,” said a whisper to his left. Harry didn’t let his stride falter or his anger show on his face. Just tucked his abruptly chilly hands in his pockets and made a note to set Eriss loose in the common room with a mission to find out who was hissing things like that at Pansy behind her back.

Their group’s usual cluster of chairs and chaises longues was already largely occupied by a number of the Vipers. Daphne and Anita saw them coming and shuffled over to make room for Pansy next to them on a three-seater sofa. Harry himself angled for an empty armchair. Greetings were passed around, wards subtly cast, and conversations paused as the group accommodated its two new arrivals.

Harry waited for the hum of the Vipers’ previous conversations to pick back up again before he leaned over to Pansy and said, in an undertone, “Are you all right?”

“I’ll manage.”

“I’m going to find them.”

Pansy half-smiled. “You can’t curse everyone in the House until they stop being arseholes.”

Well. No. But they had a mole now, in the form of one Tyller Wengrow, and soon Harry would know who among the student body were actively helping fan the flames of blood supremacy as opposed to those who were just following the pull of the crowd. Harry couldn’t curse everyone until they stopped being arseholes, but he could almost certainly make that particular problem-solving strategy work for a narrowly targeted list of the worst arseholes.

“And,” Pansy added, “you can’t single-handedly fix every problem any of us ever has.”

Harry let his irritation show, since his back was mostly to the common room and only the Vipers would see it. “I know.”

“There, there,” she said, patting his hand with all the condescension of a kindergarten teacher faced with a parent of the My child is an angel who can do no wrong variety.

“I will smuggle Justin in here just to sit with someone who would refrain from making fun of me,” said Harry with a theatrical sigh. Pansy grinned, and, pleased with himself, Harry sat back in his chair, content to let the group’s conversation wash over him, now that he’d gotten Pansy to feel amusement despite the strain they all felt in here.

On the surface, the assembled Vipers were carrying out business as usual. Homework. Gossip. Jokes. Complaints. Pansy—who had indeed been delighted to learn of Bobbin and Patron snogging in forgotten broom cupboards—settled in with Anita, Blaise, and Draco to swap rumors, with occasional input from Celesta, who was distracted listening to a dueling tactics debate between Daphne and Theo. Ginny and her year-mates had taken over a sofa in one large mass of tangled legs and stray elbows. But Draco’s skin had yet to lose its sallow cast, and Finn and Alex wouldn’t look at each other, and even gossip couldn’t bring Pansy all the way out of her brittle protective shell. Not to mention Rio’s hunched, hunted posture, the red around Graham’s cuticles from where he picked at them when nervous—hm. Harry sat up and looked closer at the adjacent seating area usually colonized by the younger Vipers and their friends. He saw Rio, Graham, Graham’s yearmates Liam Eirian and Liza Marks… and no sign of Veronica.

Odd. They tended to stick together, Veronica and Graham and Rio. But—Harry glanced around, and spotted Veronica’s other roommate, Lilian Pym, in the common room as well—maybe Veronica just wanted to be alone in the dorms for a while, with both Pym and Marks out of her hair. She and Pym never got on well and Harry knew it had been particularly tense of late.

Still— “Graham,” Harry called. Graham looked up, said something to Eirian quietly, and came over to Harry’s chair in a few quick steps.

“Where’s Veronica?” Harry asked.

“Er, she was going to study with Hortense after dinner, I think.” Graham bit his lip. “I thought she was maybe in the dorms and I didn’t see her come in…”

He was clearly second guessing that now. “Don’t worry about it,” said Harry. Graham nodded, though he did not look much reassured, and went back to his year mates.

Harry, meanwhile, cast a few more vision-obscuring charms and got out the Marauders’ Map. “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good,” he whispered, ignoring some of the other Vipers’ curious looks, and bent over it as its enchanted map of Hogwarts bloomed into view.

Veronica was not in the dorms, that much was evident right off. Harry manipulated the Map with the crude combination of strongly worded thoughts and magic pushed through his fingers that directed it to show different parts of the school in more or less detail. She was nowhere to be found in the dungeons, nor the ground floor. On the other hand, almost no one else could be seen moving around, given the hour. Which gave Harry an idea: he pushed at the Map until it showed basically the whole school, different floors and wings side-by-side and labeled with varying specificity. It would be next to useless to anyone who didn’t already know Hogwarts, on account of oddities like the third floor of the clock tower wing technically connecting to the ground floor of the main part of the castle, but Harry was used to using the Map, and oriented himself easily.

Clusters of overlapping name-labels busily shuffled around in each of the House common rooms. He ignored those, and the teachers’ wing, skimming instead over the more public areas of the castle, through empty hall after empty hall, looking for any point of motion.

There she was. One lone pair of footsteps fading in and out, labeled Veronica Butler, hurrying down the stairs in the Gryffindor Tower wing. Harry cast a quick tempus. No way in hell she’d make it back to the common room before curfew. What had she been doing out alone at this hour?

Well. She was a third year now. Plenty of Harry’s year mates had started dating and such at thirteen. Maybe Veronica was interested in someone from Gryffindor and trying to keep it quiet. Harry wanted to go out immediately, meet her on the way back, make sure she wasn’t walking alone—but if she’d been seeing a secret boyfriend, or, he supposed, girlfriend, she’d be hideously embarrassed.

And, he told himself, Veronica knew how to take care of herself, knew where all the hidden passages were. She was moving fast. The Map showed no sign of prefects, professors, or other students pushing curfew who were likely to intersect her between her current location and the dungeons. As long as she got back safely Harry would make himself wait until tomorrow to say anything. No need to embarrass her in front of her friends and the whole of Slytherin. No need to drop everything and run to protect her from a nonexistent danger. It was fine.

“Harry? What’s wrong?” said Daphne lowly.

Harry glanced up at her, saw that both she and Pansy had momentarily dropped out of their respective other conversations to stare at him. No one else appeared to be paying much attention to either girl or to Harry himself.

“Nothing,” said Harry.

A look passed between Pansy and Daphne that contained volumes of words unspoken. “You look tense enough someone could pluck you like a piano string,” said Pansy.

Well, fuck. Harry needed to mask better than that. Even if he had strategically sat with his back to most of the common room. He made his face blank. “Veronica’s out late. Alone.”

“She can look after herself.” Pansy stretched out a foot and poked Harry’s ankle with the toe of her slightly scuffed Oxford. “If you’d seen her about to run into Filch or something you’d already be out the door.”

“You can’t be everywhere,” Daphne added.

Harry had been telling himself the same. Part of him bristled at their words—I already knew that—but a larger part knew they didn’t mean to condescend, and he found it easier to let his hands and the Map settle on his lap. He breathed in, breathed out. “I know.”

“You’re not going to harass her as soon as she gets back, right?” Pansy narrowed her eyes at him in feigned threat. “Because that kind of public dressing down would not go over well.”

“Not to mention, she’s had enough of older students raising voices to her lately,” said Daphne in an undertone, glancing at Theo with entirely unfeigned irritation.

Harry elected to ignore that, and just responded to Pansy: “I’d worked that much out myself, yeah. I’ll talk to her tomorrow about being more cautious.”

“Don’t be too hard on her. This is still Hogwarts,” Daphne said.

And they were, technically, still students, still children, no matter how much Harry didn’t feel like it lately. He nodded.

Pansy and Daphne dropped the subject, to Harry’s relief, and let him alone to keep an eye on things. Harry manipulated the Map to scan ahead of Veronica’s path. Nothing new had popped up and she was much closer already. Mrs. Norris and Filch were up near the classroom wing, the Hufflepuff prefects on patrol were moving in her direction but on the next floor up, and no stray Slytherins wandered the dungeons. Not, of course, that the Map was infallible, but anyone Harry thought might pick a fight with Veronica—Seaton and his crew, or the fourth-year Rosier with an ego like Hagrid’s hut thinking itself on par with Hogwarts itself—was in the common room.

When Veronica made the turn into the last corridor, Harry deactivated the map and let his obscuration wards fall. Seconds later the entrance rumbled open and her small figure came in. Barely anyone even made note of a random third-year coming back a little after curfew—all of them had been late at least a few times. Harry packed the Map away and privately made a face. Veronica was back and safe and there had not been any problems. Maybe he wouldn’t even talk to her tomorrow. His paranoia felt silly now, out of proportion to the actual situation that prompted it.

But, looking back up from his bag, Harry saw that Veronica hadn’t joined her year mates, or even gone back to the dorm rooms. Her path through the common room angled towards Harry and the older Vipers. Her face was drawn tight with an emotion he couldn’t quite identify. Her fist clutched a half-crushed scroll.

That did not bode well.

Harry straightened. Cast a few wards of his own around his vicinity. If there was about to be a spat in the common room he didn’t need all of Slytherin hearing it, as much as Veronica generally managed to be discreet.

She made it to their cluster of chairs, almost tripped over Daphne’s legs on her way around the coffee table, and stopped next to Harry, her mouth already opening.

“Sit down,” said Harry. Veronica cut off. He pointed: Pansy elbowed Daphne, who took in the situation in a glance and murmured something to Anita. All three girls shuffled closer together to make a space for Veronica on the end of the sofa nearest Harry.

Veronica sat, posture stiff as if she’d been hit with a half-arsed body-bind jinx. “I wasn’t going to yell.”

“We both know body language tells as much as words, sometimes,” Harry reminded her. “How urgent is whatever this is? Because it seems like something we might want more privacy to discuss.” If she had a secret crush and they’d been a shite to her, Harry could see her getting upset, but not running to him for help. There was a bigger problem at hand. Neither of them could get to the Knights’ Room’s wards right now, and he could only do so much in a common room surrounded by three quarters of Slytherin House.

“You tell me.” Veronica thrust the parchment in her hand towards him. “Did you know about this?”

Harry took it slowly. Enough problems already demanded his attention; he didn’t need another one. But unlike Quidditch or Draco’s runes research, he couldn’t delegate this: Veronica, like Graham and Rio, looked to Harry first. Harry had taken on a responsibility. And, in the back of his mind, he flinched from the thought of letting her—letting any of them—down.

The first inch of parchment he unrolled confirmed this was much worse than thirteen-year-old romantic drama. The seal of the Ministry of Magic stood out at the top in stark red, blue, and gold. Jaw tightening, Harry opened it all the way.

Notice of Child Welfare Service Investigation

To Mr. and Mrs. Butler:

The Child Welfare Service of the Ministry of Magic has determined that you may be at risk of failure to conform to our requirements for the minimum standards a home must meet to be considered a safe and nurturing environment in which to raise a magical child. These standards have recently been amended to reflect the needs of a changing modern society.

We at CWS do not wish to disrupt any magical children’s lives more than necessary. Accordingly, we have scheduled an investigation of your home for 16th February, 1996, 11:00. Ensure that at least one parent or guardian of the child in question (Veronica L. Butler) is present on that day.

Our investigatory team will make one of four possible determinations:

• Satisfactory: All standards are met.

• Partially satisfactory: Most standards are met. Parents or guardians demonstrate good faith interest in altering their home and/or lifestyle to conform to any standards unmet at time of investigation.

• Inadequate: Most standards are not met and/or parents or guardians resistant or unwilling to make efforts towards conforming to any unmet standard(s).

• Dangerous: Most standards are not met and/or parents or guardians hostile to magic, magical people, or Ministry of Magic personnel.

Should your household receive a determination of Partially Satisfactory, several forms of assistance, including monetary subsidies and enchantment experts from the Ministry, will be made available to you. Financial hardship or complications presented by the Statute of Secrecy should never come before the welfare of a child. In this case, parents or guardians of such a child will have a grace period of one month, at which point a second investigation will be conducted.

Should you fail to meet the minimum safety and welfare standards at the second investigation, or recieve a determination of Inadequate or Dangerous at the first, custody of the underage magical child will be immediately revoked in accordance with MoM Statute 318.47.2(b). At such time as CWS personnel arrive at one of these determinations, you will be advised as to the available forms of redress, if any, and may request a hearing before a Wizenamot tribunal.

We at Child Welfare Services are honored to safeguard the magical children of the United Kingdom, and thank you for your cooperation.

Signed,

Yvonne DoughtonHead of Child Welfare Services, Ministry of Magic

Harry stared unseeing at the looping blue-ink signature written under the sign-off. He had never heard of Yvonne Doughton. He had known about CWS. Specifically, he had known it as a bumbling and sedentary office even by the Ministry’s standards.

This letter had not been written by anyone bumbling or sedentary or any variation thereof. This letter seemed quite reasonable, actually—but since when was the Ministry this proactive about child welfare?

“Maybe Shacklebolt appointed someone new,” Harry said slowly. “When did your parents get this?”

“Last week. Elisa—their owl—she was sick. I just got it today. But that’s not all.” Veronica started to scowl and then fought her face back to calm with visible effort. “My friend Hortense, she’s in Gryffindor and her parents are Muggles. She found out this afternoon they already had their bloody investigation and got marked Dangerous. Hortense can’t go home, her parents wanted to come get her from school but the Ministry people told them it would be kidnapping!”

Well, fuck.

“I’ll find out what’s going on,” Harry promised. “I don’t know what I can do for Hortense—”

“How could this happen? Her parents are really great, they’re not—not dangerous—”

“Some Muggle guardians are dangerous,” Harry said, more sharply than he’d meant to.

“Just because your aunt and uncle were awful shites—”

“I said I’ll look into it,” Harry said, raising his voice just a hair. Veronica shut her mouth and scowled at the floor. “It may be that this is someone with good intentions being overzealous—especially if they were raised magical and don’t know how to deal with Muggles. You know firsthand how bad the cultural miscommunications can be. All right? I agree that it’s alarming.”

Veronica rocked one of her feet against the floor. “It’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not.”

“But you don’t really disagree, do you?”

Harry tipped his head, considered the question. “I do not disagree that there is a lot of potential for Muggle guardians of a magical child to be really bloody awful at raising their kid. I don’t disagree that the Ministry should be more… proactive about identifying bad situations.”

“Like yours was.”

“Yes,” said Harry tightly, “like mine. Or bad in a different way than mine.”

“Are you actually going to look into it?” Veronica demanded. “Or just pretend? Or did you vote for this and you just don’t want to tell me?”

Harry breathed in, out. On Veronica’s other side, Pansy half-turned towards the conversation, one eyebrow raised. “I didn’t vote for it, no. This is the first I’ve heard about anything of note going on with CWS. And yes, I will actually look into it.”

Pansy put a hand on Veronica’s shoulder. “This isn’t Harry’s fault.”

Veronica shoved Pansy away. “Aren’t you supposed to stop this kind of thing? With all your bloody money and your Wizengamot seat and your lawyer and—and—I have somewhere else to go, Harry, but Hortense doesn’t!” She shot to her feet.

“Veronica—wait—” said Harry, but she ignored him, marching around the sofa and off towards the dorms with her head down and arms stiff. Liza Marks looked after her, frowning.

Harry glanced at Pansy. “Well… fuck.”

“Let her cool down. She knows you have some biases on this subject—she was upset, and wanted something to blame.”

“I know.” It made sense. But Harry imagined going to Veronica tomorrow having done nothing yet—with nothing to tell her—and found the prospect left him uneasy.

So uneasy, in fact, that he reached for his journal almost without consciously deciding to do so, and turned pages until he came to the one labeled Jules Potter. Harry summoned quill and ink, only to find himself staring blankly, wondering what to say. Too much misdirection risked Jules not giving the answers Harry wanted, and anyway, was there even a point? Time, Harry decided, to just be blunt:

What do you know about Yvonne Doughton? Head of CWS, apparently. One of the kids I sort of informally mentor got an unusual letter this week, and I don’t recognize the name.

No response appeared, but it was pretty late, and Jules used the journal exceptionally rarely; no surprise that he didn’t have it readily at hand the way most of the Vipers did theirs. Harry stared down at his lonely message and the letter beside it. Tasted the sour bite of failure. Felt an uneasy lurch in his gut. Sure, this might just be a newly appointed ally of Shacklebolt’s aiming for proactivity and overshooting by approximately the length of Wales. But instinct told him otherwise. Instinct whispered this seemingly isolated event was a sign of something more, of changes gathering force below the surface.

Hermione

Naturally Hermione heard about the Child Welfare Services letter almost immediately: Harry had written her in the journals that very night. On its own the letter was unsettling. It was another thing entirely to find herself now looking on as tiny Dennis Creevey burst into high-pitched tears.

“Oh, bloody hell,” muttered Ron. Luckily it seemed like Dennis was crying too hard to notice. “Er. Here, c’mon—have a toffee—”

He thrust a box of toffees, almost desperately, in Creevey’s direction. Creevey, still sobbing, took one, but didn’t eat it, just clutched it in his fist so hard it had to hurt. Hermione surreptitiously passed the kid a tissue. He took it without seeming to really notice what he was doing.

“M-my parents,” he got out, gasping, and then he was off on another round of tears.

Ron patted Dennis on the back and looked helplessly at Hermione. She stared back and wished she had answers for them.

As prefects, she and Ron had to make themselves available to the rest of Gryffindor House, as support, advocates, and guides. Hermione, at least, had always taken this role seriously. She was just glad that Ron had discovered a sense of responsibility this year and begun to help: normally, the sixth-year prefects took the brunt of the work, so that fifth and seventh years could focus on their OWLs. With the added pressure this year, making everyone’s normal stresses and squabbles worse, she couldn’t possibly have kept doing things alone. But even the support of a second person didn’t make it much better when in the three days since Veronica’s letter about half the Muggleborns in their House had gotten similar upsetting messages from home.

Dennis didn’t seem to want any particular response from either Ron or Hermione. Just sat there, crying. Hermione supplied him with tissues and Ron rubbed small soothing circles on Dennis’s upper back with an unconscious familiarity speaking to years of looking after, and being looked after by, his siblings. Eventually Ron persuaded Dennis to nibble on the toffee instead of just slowly mashing its chocolate layer into his skin. The rest of their House, meanwhile, shot uneasy glancing looks at the prefects’ station near the hearth, unwilling to intrude and uncomfortable with a reminder of the war creeping into Hogwarts that no one could ignore.

After Dennis left, having cried himself out, Hermione sank back in her chair and pressed a hand to her hot, tired eyes. “You’re good at this.”

“I guess. There’s just too bloody many of them,” said Ron, but when Hermione cracked an eye, she saw the tips of his ears had turned pink. “Are you, er… you’re a, you know. Are your parents—?”

“You can just say Muggleborn,” said Hermione. She shut her eye again. The light from the hearth was too bright. “I’m fine. I turned seventeen in September. Technically they’re not the custodial guardians of an underage witch.”

Five months. Just five months separated her from the fate of Dean Thomas, whose mother had gotten severely fined and marked “Dangerous” for calling the Muggle police on the wizards that came to her flat. Dean would be of age before the end of term but the fine was punitively heavy—more so than their family could easily afford. Hermione didn’t think her parents even properly knew about how bad things were getting in the wizarding world; they didn’t take the Prophet and Hermione herself carefully censored what she told them.

“I didn’t know your birthday was in September,” said Ron in an odd tone of voice.

Ugh. Hermione was going to have to look at him again to parse that. She opened her eyes. Ron was staring at the fire with a thoughtful expression. He glanced up, caught her gaze, and flushed. “Look, I dunno, just thought it was funny that we’ve been classmates for years and… I never knew that.”

“We’re not the giving birthday presents sort,” Hermione pointed out.

“Nah… but we should get along, right? What with more of your lot coming to the DA, and all. And we’ve never, er. Been friends. Or even friendly.”

Hermione thought it over. Even the most annoying people could grow up, and if she could snog Draco Malfoy, who’d once said “Mudblood” as easily as “Quidditch,” she could give Ron Weasley the same grace. So she stuck her hand out between them. “Shall we have a fresh start? Hermione Granger, Muggleborn, notorious swot. Pleasure to meet you.”

Ron blinked at her for a second, then, all at once, grinned, reached out, shook her hand firmly. “Ron Weasley, proud blood traitor, occasional prat. Same to you.”

They let go. Hermione sank further into her chair and closed her eyes again. That was one okay thing, at least. One positive note to play counterpoint against everything else today.

“Don’t know what they’re all going to do,” Ron said quietly. “I mean, Dean’ll be fine… Lav said she’s going to get her parents to do something about the fine, so they have more time to pay it… but Colin and Dennis… and that Vane girl, and Zeller, and what’s her face, the one with the hair—”

“Hortense Wrengle, and neither of us really has room to poke fun at anyone for having distinctive hair,” said Hermione drily. Ron huffed a laugh. “I’ve been thinking about it, but…”

Frustration boiled up, hot and sudden. Hermione’s mind ground to a halt. She made a face. Started reciting the Fibonacci sequence in her mind. One, one, two, three, five, eight… until at around 196,418 + 121,393, carrying digits, holding the arithmetic clear, she felt calm again.

Fuck, she hated not knowing what to do.

“I wrote Mum. We can put up the Creeveys if it comes to that,” said Ron. “Don’t have enough room for many more though.”

“That’s good of you.” Hermione checked the time, glanced around the common room. “Prefect hours are over, though. I’ve some work to do—would you mind hanging around for a bit in case anyone comes by late?”

“Not if you’ll do the same next week.”

Hermione studied him, but Ron was smiling, and seemed to have meant it in good will, so she half-smiled back. “Deal.”

She would have to tell Harry and the others about this later. They’d get a kick out of it. Proud blood traitor, occasional prat. It was almost Ron’s birthday—March first, if she remembered correctly, which she was sure she had—and Hermione decided to have that screen-printed on a Muggle T-shirt for him, or maybe on a hat of some kind.

As she made her way out of Gryffindor and towards the Knights’ Room, Hermione sank deeper into her occlumency, wrapping cool streams of numbers around herself until she settled into that place where everything became crystalline and clear.

Already Hermione felt the benefits of honing her mind this way. Last week Professor Vector handed back one of her extra credit Arithmancy projects and suggested that Hermione consider submitting it for publication in a journal intended for apprentice-level research. It had its drawbacks, admittedly, but Hermione could accept feeling detached at times.

She suspected that Theo might struggle with the detachment—or rather, would struggle to come back from the detachment. In a week of work he had already made noticeable progress on the mathematics he’d need to know. Unsurprising. He had always been a talented arithmancer. Depending on how much understanding he demonstrated today, Hermione might guide him through one of the preliminary exercises she had done when first experimenting with this type of occlumency. Or, at least, a highly polished version of said exercise. Hermione had made a number of mistakes along the way and cast aside a lot of things that didn’t work: Theo only needed to retrace some of her steps.

All of which, Hermione told herself firmly, could wait for today’s occlumency practice. She folded up those thoughts, put them away. Right now she had another project—no more important, perhaps, but certainly more urgent.

Theo, chronically early, was already in the Knights’ Room when Hermione arrived. Blaise, chronically late, was not. Hermione paused just inside the entrance and surveyed the room. “Did you see him before coming up?”

“No. I’ve been out of the dorms all day,” said Theo. He shoved a pile of musty scrolls aside to make room on the table and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Getting this lot together, mostly.”

“Anything useful?”

“In two hundred years of accumulated Ministry regulations? Almost certainly. The problems will be, one, reading it all, and two, picking the useful bits out of the chaff.” Theo flicked a scroll, and a small puff of dust went up. Hermione winced. “There’s a lot of chaff.”

At least he hadn’t accidentally lit any of the scrolls on fire. Hermione busied herself unloading books from her expanded satchel onto the table space he’d cleared and watched Theo from the corner of her eye. Lately she had been cataloguing the small tells that gave away when his strange restlessness was getting worse. One of the first signs was a specific, purposeful motion of his hands. Just now his hands were still. But the Knights’ Room smelled faintly of smoke, even though Fred and George had spelled the heating braziers to be smokeless years ago, and when Hermione ran a hand through her hair it crackled with the staticky feeling often left behind by a powerful and recent magical discharge.

Also, Hermione counted four scorch marks on the wall that were not there in her last memory of this room, from yesterday evening.

“Blowing off steam?”

Theo’s stillness changed—where it had been relaxed it now became deliberate. Both trapped prey and wary predator. “What do you mean?”

“Four new curse marks on the wall, magical discharge residue, and smoke. There are tells.”

“Fuck you,” said Theo without any real heat.

Hermione put a book down more firmly than was necessary and raised her eyebrows in his direction.

Theo grimaced. “It—helps. Don’t you ever just need to…”

Not like you seem to,thought Hermione, but that would be an unhelpful response, so she caught and quarantined it. “Is it magical buildup that you need to expel?”

“I’m not five. I know how to regulate my magic, thanks ever so. I just—can’t think straight, and—and I want—” Theo made a frustrated noise. “It’s not magic but hurling curses at a wall is about the best way to bleed it off I’ve hit on, all right?”

Which implied that the destructive potential, rather than the magic, was what mattered. Hermione carefully preserved that thought and set it aside for later consideration. One thing at a time. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t. We all worry.”

Theo’s face did something complicated that even Hermione’s occlumency-induced hyperattention to minutiae couldn’t parse. “Yeah. Right.”

That tone of voice she could parse: it was the token agreement when you just wanted someone to drop a topic. Their worry didn’t matter to him, at least not in the sense of meaningfully helping with whatever was the problem.

But she had already decided to save this for later. Hermione nodded briskly, flipped open a book, changed the subject. “Did you bring any snacks? I’ve a few sandwiches Neville got from the kitchens, but if we’re going to be here for a while…”

“I was planning to steal some of Draco’s,” said Theo with a ghost of his old smile, and pointed to one of the mismatched cabinets that lined the walls of the Knights’ Room. “Up on the top shelf there, he has a stash—”

“Is it stealing if he’s never told us not to?” said Hermione, rhetorically.

“Saying so is funnier.”

“I suppose.” Hermione opened the cabinet and rose up on her tiptoes. “I—ow!”

“What?” said Theo, and then, as she turned around with a thunderous scowl, he burst out laughing.

“I think we can safely call it stealing,” said Hermione, “given that he left a, a booby-trap in there!”

“What even was that?” said Theo, still grinning.

“One of Fred and George’s old things.” Hermione fished the item in question out of the cabinet. “Merlin, I didn’t miss their dummy telescopes.”

“Remember when they swapped all the school telescopes out for those the night before the NEWT Astronomy exam?”

“It would be difficult to forget. Half the seventh years with black eyes…” Hermione prodded gloomily at her face. “This won’t be going anywhere for at least, what, a few days?”

“If that’s one of their earlier prototypes? Yeah.” Theo pointed at a different cabinet. “Some of the later versions wound up in there, I think, with a bunch of the trick wands and whatnot. They got the bruise’s non-healing discoloration down to twenty-four hours or so before they started selling the things.”

“Probably a smart business decision. Ugh. Are all of these filled up with their old experiments?” said Hermione, looking with fresh eyes around the Knights’ Room. For all the hours spent here of late, before this year she and her friends had divided their time between the Knights’ Room and the Chamber. Even now, when she was in the Knights’ Room, she only ever used it to study, really, not hunt around and inventory the contents of every random bit of furniture previously dragged in here.

“Lots of them.”

“That’s… not reassuring.” Hermione remembered why she had been rummaging around in the cabinet in the first place, and, much more cautiously this time, peered up into the top shelf before she summoned the box tucked there into her hands. “Is this what you meant?”

“Yeah, give it here—his mum sends him these posh snack samplers with nuts and dried fruit and shite.”

“There are macarons in this one too,” said Hermione, peering into the box as she carried it back to the table. “Narcissa special orders these from a bakery in Cannes.”

“Of course she does.” Theo took one of the macarons, studied it for a second with an inscrutable expression, and then shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

“At least we won’t go hungry,” said Hermione, electing not to ask why Theo had been looking so seriously at a cookie. Off the top of her head it could well involve Theo’s complicated relationship with Draco or, worse, the reference to a loving mother when Theo had lost his so young. Bringing either of those things up would go poorly at best. At least his mood seemed to have improved marginally. She changed the subject again: “Could you write Blaise? See where he is?”

“Sure,” said Theo around a mouthful of dry French pastry, managing not to spray crumbs across the table. Must be another one of the posh manners purebloods all seemed to learn in infancy: how to indulge in poor manners while staying in the realm of endearing informality.

Hermione bent over the top book in her stack, as much to look occupied as to refresh her own memory, giving Theo time to write Blaise and collect himself in peace. The only sounds for several minutes were the soft crackle of fire in smokeless braziers, the scratch of Theo’s quill, and the soft rustle of paper when Hermione turned a page.

“Pansy says he left a minute ago,” Theo said. “He’s probably in the halls, couldn’t get it out to write me back.”

They could begin soon, then. Hermione sat down at the table and set about organizing her thoughts so that they could do this as efficiently as possible.

Blaise breezed into the room shortly thereafter, bringing with him a faint, pleasant odor of expensive cologne and a razor-sharp tension that threatened to cut whoever next breathed in his direction. “Right. Where do we start?”

Hermione and Theo traded raised eyebrows. “How about with whatever’s got you tense enough to hex a pygmy puff?” said Theo.

“Let’s not.” Blaise threw himself into an empty chair. As usual, he managed to turn what was technically horrid posture into careless grace. “I would much rather talk about politics.”

Maybe she’d have dropped it, but Hermione had known Blaise for years, and spent years watching Harry deal with him. She fixed Blaise with a pointed look and waited.

He scowled at her. “I got a letter from my mother. Are you happy? Can we move on now?”

“Seventeen seconds for you to break,” said Theo, theatrically tapping at his watch. His expression had hardened into a focused attention Hermione did not like. “You’re really terrible at keeping secrets from us.”

“Alas, I struggle to keep secrets from my trusted friends.” Blaise examined his fingernails with a look of magnificent boredom. “I shall have to bear up under the shame of this deplorable personality trait. How I envy those who skip through life without the weight of such problems.”

Theo opened his mouth—

And Hermione clapped her hands together. Loudly. Theo jumped, and Blaise turned his cool gaze to her. “We have something to do,” she said. “So if you could both stop acting like children and focus?”

“That was much more sophisticated sarcasm than a child could pull off,” Blaise grumbled, but he sat up straighter and reached for his bag. Theo likewise disengaged from the budding argument, though in his case it visibly required more effort.

“You both saw Harry’s message this morning?” she said, once Theo had stopped staring fixedly at the wall and breathing in rigid increments. They nodded. “Right. We now know, thanks to Harry’s source—” which she knew to be Jules, but could not reveal in front of Theo— “that this Yvonne Doughton was appointed three days after Imbolc, and not by Shacklebolt or his Office, even though that position is the responsibility of the Minister to fill. She was instead appointed by the current Director of the DMLE, Hestor Savage. Harry’s source could find no indication of prior ties between Doughton and either major political faction. We suspect that those working against that faction both legally and extralegally have not yet identified Doughton as a person of interest.”

“But we have?” said Blaise.

Hermione took out a copy of the letter Veronica had received, and another, copied from Hortense Wrengle’s, which informed her that her parents had been determined to be “Dangerous” and thus that she had become a ward of the Ministry pending their request for a Wizengamot hearing. “Her proactivity is a marked deviation from prior CWS officials, even though she’s been a member of that Office for over ten years. Also, the wording of their criteria—”

“They don’t ever say Muggle,” said Theo, scanning the letter to the Butlers, “but they’re implying that’s the issue.”

“Mmm.” Blaise skimmed the one that had been sent to Hortense, then held it out to Theo, and took the Butlers’ letter in return. “Do we have a copy of the new guidelines that they’ve put out?”

“Here. Veronica got her parents to send along what they received—their poor owl’s exhausted.” Hermione cast a silent geminio and then another so that they had three copies of the neatly tied, Ministry sealed scroll with the new CWS standards.

Hermione, naturally, had read it already, when Harry wrote her in the morning that Jules had answered and could she meet him to work out a plan. Now she watched Theo and Blaise as they read. Neither of them was the most expressive person by nature but they had small tells. Blaise’s eyebrows twitched around every few seconds. Tiny movements of the muscles around Theo’s mouth tended to give him away even when the rest of his face remained impassive. Both boys, she could tell, were taken aback.

As they read she found herself wondering whether Harry had known, when he suggested she deputize Blaise and Theo to help with this project, about the friction between them. It was entirely possible that he wanted to force them to cooperate on something so that they got over their apparent issues. It was also possible that Harry genuinely hadn’t noticed. Hermione couldn’t be sure. Perhaps later she ought to ask.

“At least one custodial guardian with whom the child resides at least 75% of the time must have access to Apparition, Floo, Portkey, or other equivalent travel in the event of a medical or magical emergency,” Theo read. He looked up, grim. “Muggles can’t activate any of the above, even if they paid for a Floo connection to St. Mungo’s.”

“It’s kind of impressive that they managed not to say the word Muggle in that sentence,” Blaise said.

“Anywhere in the document, actually,” said Hermione. “They didn’t include the alternatives in this document, but apparently the Creevey brothers—a pair of Gryffindor Muggleborns—heard from their parents that if a household could not meet that requirement, which of course the Creeveys can’t, the Ministry will cast, free of charge, an enchantment that will monitor your household twenty-four-seven for any magical or emotional outbursts that may threaten the Statute of Secrecy or harm to your child or both. Should such an outburst occur, they will have CWS personnel on-site within thirty seconds to one minute, to intervene on behalf of the Statute or to transport your child and anyone else in need of medical care to St. Mungo’s. It sounds all right, but—”

“Round-the-clock magical surveillance?” Theo looked aghast. “Father would have cut off a leg before he allowed the Ministry to put any such thing in our house.”

“My mother too,” said Blaise.

Hermione nodded. “Not to mention—this document doesn’t say that’s all the enchantment would do. Additionally, Muggles are afforded next to no rights by existing Wizengamot law—I’ve researched the matter before, but I confirmed it today—and at the same time cannot legally seek redress or relief through the Muggle court system as it would violate the Statute.”

“Well, fuck,” said Theo.

Yes, that about summed it up.

“And… Merlin, these are strict,” said Blaise, who had kept on reading. “This whole section about the magical obscuration wards you need for a home in a predominantly Muggle area to be considered safe for a magical child—I’m guessing it would be the Ministry coming to cast and anchor such spells?”

“Yes. They’ll even do it for free should the financial burden of having such wards cast prohibitive. Same for creating a Floo connection, though granted, only one to St. Mungo’s and back.”

“Wait.” Blaise looked between her and Theo. “Violating the Statute is a crime, too. If some Muggle parent gets their knickers in a twist and goes to the Muggle courts—”

“They’ll get a punitive fine and potentially Azkaban time, which for a Muggle is essentially a death sentence, considering they have no innate magic with which to resist the dementor presence. Maybe it’s less than lethal with the dementors technically contained now, but…”

Theo’s mouth had flattened. “Harry’s right. This reeks of the Dark Lord’s influence.”

“I agree,” said Hermione, “but we have to determine how. I have it on good authority that one of Hestor Savage’s relatives is in the Order of the Phoenix.” She would not be saying in front of Theo which of the Savage family that was, even though Jules had told Harry it was an Auror trainee named Leander. “Shacklebolt appointed him to lead the DMLE after Amelia Bones died in a confirmed Death Eater raid last autumn. He’s a respected senior Auror who reportedly had an excellent record against Death Eaters in the last war and has never been suspected of extralegal or criminal activity.”

“How did the DMLE appoint her, if it’s the Minister’s job?” said Blaise.

“Harry’s source heard something to do with the Imbolc Wizengamot session, but no more specifics than that.” Hermione picked up a heavy scroll she’d brought. “This is a copy of the session minutes that was provided to Daphne’s family. We cannot copy or edit it, and I have to give it back tomorrow. My first order of business today is to go through it and find what might have slipped by Harry, me, Harry’s lawyers, and presumably the entire anti-Dark-Lord political faction to allow this. While I’m reading it, I need both of you to start cataloguing the DMLE regulations from the Ministry archives Theo found.” She pointed to the dust-choked old scrolls Theo had brought with him. “Additionally, Blaise, if you could reach out to your,” she waved a hand, “contacts to find out more about Doughton—?”

“I’ll do it tonight,” he promised.

“Right. In that case—” Hermione cast a series of amanuensis charms in rapid succession. The massive scroll of Wizengamot session minutes floated up into the air and unrolled so that the first twelve inches of text were held visible at readable eye-level. “Let’s begin.”

“How long did the session go that day?” said Theo, eyeing the scroll with trepidation.

Hermione peered at the notations at the top of the scroll. “Seven hours and thirty-three minutes. I ought to get through this in about half that.”

“You’re a menace,” said Blaise fondly.

“I think you mean a marvel.” Theo’s lips quirked up in what might be the first genuine smile Hermione had seen from him all week.

“That too,” Blaise agreed.

Hermione noted her blush and attendant embarrassment. Another day she might have been flustered, but her occlumency held and it did not touch her properly. Not now, anyway. Add that to the list of things she would need to address later when she relaxed her mental patterns. “If you’re quite finished—?”

“Most witches like compliments, you know,” Blaise told her archly, reaching for a scroll. “Merlin, these are atrocious. Have we been suffering a dearth of competent archivists since,” he peered at the scroll and winced, “eighteen forty-two?”

“No, it’s just that they’re all employed by people like the Malfoys who will pay well, instead of the Ministry,” said Theo.

Blaise responded, but Hermione did not register it. She was busy reallocating her attention to her task. Their occasional remarks and the shuffling of their scrolls existed only as unimportant background noise: all of her mind, all her cognition and awareness, narrowed to include only the session minutes in front of her and the quill and parchment with which she could take notes as she read.

Time passed.

Hermione’s eyes tracked left and right, left and right, scanning down the scroll.

A corner of her awareness split off to monitor the strain of holding her occlumency with such intensity for so long.

Other hands placed a cup of tea by her elbow. She drank from it. Set it down again.

Hermione’s right hand cramped. She switched her quill into the other and carried on. A portion of her conscious attention shifted accordingly, to manage the greater difficulty of writing with her non-dominant hand.

The empty teacup went away.

Voices came and went, unimportant and so disregarded.

And, slowly, the remaining volume of scroll went down.

Chief Warlock A.P.W.B.D.: Motion carried. The Imbolc 1997 session of this body is now adjourned.

Hermione’s eyes skipped past the line of text and found only empty parchment. No further lines. Irritating. How could she carry on reading when there was no text left to read?

She became aware of a new voice pattern near her, persistent and repetitive. She wished whoever that person was talking to would answer so that the voice would stop.

Then she realized the voice was saying her name.

“—ne? Hermione?”

Another voice: “Is this supposed to happen?”

“No! She’s never—”

“I’m all right,” said Hermione, tongue thick and strange in her mouth. She swallowed. Shut her eyes. The world lurched and swayed around her and she hurriedly opened them again.

“Are you sure?” said the first voice, warily. Blaise’s voice. Hermione flexed her aching hands, pressed her feet to the floor, sucked in a breath so deep it hurt. I am right here. This was her body and it was not happy.

“I’m… I need… loo. I need a loo.”

“Er… can you walk?” That was Theo.

They’d find out. Hermione thought about it. Became briefly fascinated by the precisely coordinated beauty of the biomechanics that allowed the human mind and body to calculate such complex and interacting force and movement vectors with such apparent ease. Just the simple motion of rising to one’s feet—the splay and press of metacarpals on the table, the shift of weight forward, the flex of elbow and wrist and the press of muscle—every tiny piece of the process thrilled her, caught her. And then, of course, walking, a perfectly controlled fall, the almost-miraculous efficiency of bipedal locomotion—

“Okay. No. She can’t,” said Blaise, and then there were hands on her arms, lifting.

Oh, for—

Hermione snapped herself out of it. Got her feet under her properly. “I—just needed a moment. I can walk. Really.”

“Right,” said Theo. “Of course you can. We’re still going to walk you to the loo and back.”

It would have been nice to argue, but Hermione considered the very insistent demands of her bladder to be emptied, and the equally insistent demands of her legs to not be stood upon, and decided not to. “Okay. Yes. That’s—probably wise.”

The boys stood outside the loo— “Just shout if you need help,” said Blaise, followed by “Or send a Patronus if you can remember where your wand is” from Theo, which contribution earned him Blaise’s elbow in his ribs—and didn’t comment when Hermione came out grey-faced and shaking. They also, tactfully, did not mention the tremor in her legs that had developed by the time their absurd little procession made it back to the Knights’ Room.

Hermione collapsed into an armchair. “I don’t think I’ve ever loved a piece of furniture this much,” she said.

“It’s like she’s drunk,” Blaise muttered.

A drink sounded rather nice, but would be a poor idea. “I’m going to… nap. Just…” Hermione waved a hand towards the table. Her head pounded, her eyes wouldn’t focus, and her mind groped sluggishly for words that wouldn’t come. “Just put… whatever you found. On the table. I’ll look at it when… when I wake up. And… can one of you… set… alarm?”

“I’m no good at alarm charms,” she heard Theo say, “but there’s an alarm clock around here somewhere,” and then Blaise responded, but before she could make sense of his words, the portion of her mind set aside to monitor her condition asserted itself, and Hermione fell asleep between one breath and the next.

When Hermione woke, hours later, it was to discover several things: one, that the boys had not set an alarm charm, and so she had slept for seven straight hours, well past curfew; two, that they had instead left a plate of dinner kept magically warm; and three, that they had taken indexed notes on thousands of words of Ministry regulations Hermione had meant to read herself. The notes were weighted down with a carved wooden rooster that had a bit of parchment taped to its side, on which she saw Blaise’s familiar handwriting: Tap twice with your wand and say a time, and it will go off that amount of time later. The rest of us covered for you in afternoon classes. You had food poisoning. Expect McG to lecture you about going to M. Pomfrey. Beneath this, Theo had added, in a typically acerbic expression of care, We know better than to expect you’ll take a proper break but I will come drag you out of there for some fresh air by lunch tomorrow. You’re not the only one who knows how to do research.

Hermione held the rooster in one hand while she all but inhaled the food they’d left. She had never tasted a better meal in her life; and if she had perhaps felt greater appreciation her friends before, it was not often.

When she finished eating, she checked the time, and discovered it was just past one in the morning. Merlin. Hermione chugged half a liter of water, went for a brisk walk in the halls, and, upon returning to the Knights’ Room, sat back down at the table and reached determinedly for the nearest pile of Blaise’s notes.

In hindsight, Hermione really should have wondered where the enchanted rooster alarm had come from. But it never occurred to her to do so until the thing went off, not with a rooster’s cry as one might expect, but with a piercing shriek—“Hermione! Look out! Hermione! Look out! Hermione!” —that made her jump, scream, and reflexively slap it across the room.

It hit the wall with a horrible squawking sound, and went on screaming. A finite didn’t have any effect. Nor did a silencing charm so much as lower the volume. Only when Hermione, in a fit of frustration, shouted “Shut UP!” over its high-pitched howl did it mercifully stop.

Hermione stared at the little device and willed her heart rate to slow down. This was a Fred and George Weasley contraption, it had to be, and she was either going to kill them for making it or kill Theo and Blaise for setting her up like this. Did the twins honestly make these things?

Still disoriented, Hermione yanked out her notebook, flipped pages, and wrote to both of the twins at once: Are you still selling these horrid shrieking rooster alarms? And if so, what kind of absolute masochist would buy one?

She waited. Not that she particularly expected a response this early but the twins kept strange hours and one never knew when they’d be around. The page remained blank. Today, it seemed, they were asleep like sane people should be at not even seven in the morning, so Hermione flipped back to the page that would send messages to just the core Vipers in her year, and considered.

Theo and Blaise, she decided, did not deserve the satisfaction of an indignant response, if indeed they had done this on purpose. And if they hadn’t it didn’t matter anyway. Hermione put her face in her hands and tried to collect her thoughts. Surely there were worse ways to have one’s concentration broken. But all of the worse ways Hermione could think of involved actual bodily harm. Merlin, her head hurt.

It didn’t feel like five hours had gone by, but a quick tempus confirmed that the rooster’s timing had been exact. Hermione fetched a headache remedy from the communal potions stash, downed it, and considered what she’d learned while the magic went to work.

Between the Wizengamot session minutes, DMLE regulations, and a specific clause governing the official powers and duties of the Minister for Magic, Hermione thought she had an explanation for what was going on. She’d even found mention of the origins of said regulations though that would need cross-checking later with books from the library’s history section. What she didn’t yet know was whether this had all been set up on purpose.

Politics. Hermione made a face.

Theo and Blaise would want to know. But before they came back to help pick up the research again Hermione needed to work out what they could know and where to go with this, and for that—she reached for her journal again—she needed to talk to Harry.

I found something, she wrote on the page that just had Harry Black written across the top. Knights’ Room, soon as you can.

Most sane people, especially students, would be asleep right now. It came as no surprise, therefore, that Harry wrote back in less than twenty minutes: On my way.

He arrived looking for all the world like any other Hogwarts student. Robes done up, hair neatly combed, and how absurd was it that they still had to wear their school uniforms when they sat down for conversations like this. Hermione imagined they wore Muggle style school clothes, rather than robes; imagined they had met at the sort of private preparatory school her parents had planned to send her to, once, before Minerva McGonagall appeared in September 1990 and turned Hermione’s world upside down. In another life she and Harry and Justin and Pansy and all the rest of them had no more to worry about than homework deadlines and summer internships.

“Have I got something in my hair?” said Harry.

“What? No.” Hermione shook off her odd reverie. “I’m sorry—my thoughts wandered.”

“Not surprising. I’ve been told you spent the whole night up here.”

“More or less.” Hermione kicked out a chair across the table from her.

Harry sat down in it, eyeing the parchments and books strewn everywhere. “All right. What have you found?”

Hermione took a deep breath. “It’s a confluence of several factors. You know the Minister is responsible for appointing public officials to hundreds of positions throughout the Ministry?”

“Yes.”

“Well—in many cases it’s not the Minister personally who picks people. In practice the head of a given office or department chooses who they hire and the Office of the Minister just signs off on it. There’s far too many roles in the Ministry for any one person to govern all the hiring decisions. But different Ministers have been more or less involved as individuals in those appointments, and the Minister is always the one who appoints people to the really top positions—department-level directors, heads of some of the major sub-department offices, that sort of thing.” Harry nodded along, and Hermione continued: “It turns out that any changes to the Minister’s authority as pertains to personnel oversight are retroactively applied up to six months before the day of the regulatory change.”

Harry cocked his head. “Just personnel oversight?”

“A few other things—that’s the main point. It seems that in the early eighteenth century, when the exact structure and function of the Ministry’s bureaucracy was still relatively new, a particular Minister got it into his head to create a whole bevy of new positions in Financial Affairs and grant them sweeping regulatory powers. The Wizengamot were furious—I couldn’t find a reason in the books I have here, I need to go to the library today—and voted to change the powers granted to the Minister, restricting the Minister’s power to just unilaterally make up new Ministry jobs and fire people at will and so on. But then they went a step further, and decided to apply the new language for six months past.”

“All so they could undo whatever that Minister did that they didn’t like,” Harry concluded. “And this is still in effect? It was permanent?”

“Yes—from what Theo found it is usually a formality, but here’s where things get interesting.” Hermione found the scroll with Theo’s notes on it and passed it across for Harry to look at. “Whenever there’s a change to the Minister’s authority over personnel, a committee gets together to review every action taken by that Minister during the previous six months, and either reverse or endorse anything that would violate the updated rules of the Minister’s duties.”

“Led by… the Director of the DMLE,” said Harry, skimming over the scroll. “Which would be Hestor Savage.”

“Yes. It includes others—two members of the Wizengamot, the Chair of the Ministry’s Personnel Department, a few more—but the DMLE director has final say on everything. It hasn’t come up often, those regulations don’t tend to change all that much, and when the rule has come into effect it’s essentially a rubber stamp operation.”

“Imbolc,” said Harry. His eyes shifted towards the vitriolic bright green most evident when he was upset in some way. “There was something about the powers of an interim Minister—”

Hermione had wondered if Harry would remember once the subject came up. Clearly he had been extrapolating outward from the pieces she had laid out so far, thoughts taking the same path that hers had already. She nodded. “Essentially the newest change restricts an interim Minister’s authority to make any appointments other than those considered critical infrastructure of government.”

“Which… would include the DMLE, obviously, so last fall when Amelia Bones died—”

“Shacklebolt appointed Savage to head the department,” Hermione finished for him. “But anything outside of the DMLE and a few other major roles—any appointment Shacklebolt’s made in the last six months is up for reconsideration.”

“Bloody fuck,” said Harry, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Savage has Order ties, though, we know that—he’s a decorated senior Auror who personally took down multiple Death Eaters in the last war—and Shacklebolt chose him personally, so why—”

“I don’t know.”

“And, wait.” Harry’s hand fell away from his face and he sat up straighter, expression sharpening into concentration. “This Yvonne Doughton—if not Shacklebolt, who appointed her?”

“That’s part two of this. Blaise found an old bylaw—when there is a state of emergency, if the Minister for any reason cannot or will not appoint someone as is their responsibility, the Director of the DMLE may at their discretion appoint people to fill any appointed position left empty for more than a month. The people the Director chooses are only holding those posts in an interim capacity until such time as there is a Minister who can either confirm or change those appointments.”

Harry frowned. “But if this only changed on Imbolc… oh. Oh, are they arguing—”

“That retroactively these positions have been empty for more than a month? Yes. They have to be—it’s the only explanation I’ve found, based on… all of this.” Hermione gestured around the table.

“So to summarize—” Harry’s fingers tapped a staccato beat on the arm of his chair— “we have the Director of the DMLE, who by all rights should be a Shacklebolt ally, making all these decisions about whether to endorse or nullify any appointment Shacklebolt made other than those considered critical infrastructure in the last six months—”

“Yes.”

“—and then another rule saying if a position is empty more than one month during a state of emergency, the DMLE Director appoints someone to fill it—”

“Mhm—”

“—and we assume the DMLE are making the legal case that any appointment Shacklebolt made more than a month ago have technically been empty long enough for the Director’s secondary authority to kick in. So Savage appointed Doughton.”

“That’s about it, yes. I don’t know why he wouldn’t have just confirmed whoever Shacklebolt appointed to that role before.” Hermione shook her head. “It’s odd.”

“Besides which, there’s going to be a referendum this year to confirm Shacklebolt’s position as Minister,” said Harry. “There’s no one who could realistically challenge him, every reasonable measure says he’ll win by a landslide, and at that point he can just replace anyone Savage appointed with his own picks.”

“Maybe Savage is just… being overzealous. People are upset about corruption allegations.” Which, now that Hermione thought about it, was in no small measure caused by the Soothsayer. “If Savage just rubber-stamped all of Shacklebolt’s choices, and since Shacklebolt appointed Savage, too, it could damage both of their credibility if people argued that Shacklebolt had just chosen a crony to lead the DMLE.”

“I’d believe that,” Harry agreed. “The one counterpoint being that Doughton is being proactive bordering on aggressive with the CWS in a way that doesn’t match at all with Shacklebolt and Savage’s politics. Unless I’m missing something major about the Light-aligned bloc.”

“I don’t think you are. Missing anything, that is. Everyone I’ve asked agrees this is odd, out of line with their usual approach.”

“Fuck…” Harry slid down a little in his chair, head tipped back so he could stare at the ceiling. “I knew I should’ve paid more attention to Imbolc. I completely forgot about it until about two days before the session when Jules mentioned it. Of all the fucking people.”

That certainly was some irony. Hermione half-smiled despite the weight of their conversation. “It’s not an unreasonable change to say that an interim Minister should have somewhat restricted powers compared to a Minister elected normally. You couldn’t have known about any of the rest of this.”

“Couldn’t I?” Harry gestured towards the scrolls on the table without looking. “All of this was out there. It’s not like it’s classified or anything, I could have done so much more research in advance about the procedures and whatever for rule changes like this one—or have Vanessa or Hazel do it,” he added, when Hermione drew breath to interrupt, “since that’s what I pay them for, don’t worry, I know I don’t have to do everything personally all the time.”

“You read my mind,” she said, and kicked him lightly under the table. “I won’t tell you that you didn’t let this one slip. But I will remind you that mistakes are inevitable—no one’s perfect. Besides which, would it really have struck you as odd to see this in advance? We’re not concerned that the rules work this way—only that Savage is behaving oddly within the strictures of those rules. If we had spent twelve hours doing research before the Imbolc session I at least would have assumed Savage would just endorse Shacklebolt’s appointments or at the very least select some politically milquetoast replacements.”

“It’s mostly his actions after the fact that make it suspicious. True.” Harry breathed in, then out, with deliberation. One hand began to idly spin his wand around his fingers. “Right. We need to know who else Shacklebolt’s appointed in the last four months, then, and keep track of what Savage does—who he replaces, who his appointed replacements are, and how the people he picks handle their new roles.”

Hermione nodded; she’d been thinking along the same lines. “Learning about their past behavior won’t be difficult—enough of the Vipers have families well entrenched in the Ministry to do that much. Working out a conclusive list of Shacklebolt’s appointments will be trickier… We can go back through old Prophet editions for news, I suppose, but anything conclusive would be from the records kept by the Office of the Minister, and that’s not really confidential but they certainly don’t publish it either.”

“I can request it, I think, through my position in the Wizengamot. The question is whether it would draw the wrong kind of attention if I go through official channels.”

“Isn’t Everett with the Wizengamot Administration Service this year?”

Harry flipped his wand and caught it decisively. “Yes—he’d be able to get his hands on those records without too much risk. Good idea.”

Pleased, Hermione nodded.

“In the meantime, we can start with Doughton’s predecessor… Do we know who she replaced?”

“Yes.” Hermione glanced around and saw no trace of the old Daily Prophet issues that she was sure Blaise had gone to get at some point. Buried in one pile or another of parchment and books, no doubt. “We found two references in the Prophet. His name is Eric Wimbletop.” She closed her eyes and let the memory clarify. “On November twenty-eighth he was on a list leaked from the Auror Office of people being investigated for corruption. No specific allegations were made but there was an implication of malfeasance of office. On January fourth of this year the Ministry Insider section of the Sunday Prophet mentioned that he had resigned—one presumes he did so during the holidays to avoid much attention—in the midst of ongoing accusations that he had taken bribes to overlook certain financial irregularities when the CWS was overseeing the custody and inheritance of war orphans back in the eighties. Nothing has yet been conclusively proven.”

“Your memory,” said Harry, “is terrifying.”

Hermione allowed herself a smile: humility was all well and good but she knew what she was good at, and had worked hard for her skill. “Thank you.”

“So, what, people think that distant relatives of assumed custody of war orphans and took these kids’ inheritance for themselves, and Wimbletop might have just let it happen?”

“So the Auror Office seems to believe.”

Harry tipped his head sideways to look at her. “You have doubts.”

“I have… questions.” Hermione spotted what looked like a stack of Prophet editions, and shoved a few books out of the way, but they were all dated from the previous summer. Ugh. “It’s certainly reasonable that public opinion pressured the Aurors to pay more attention to the corruption in the Ministry.”

“And Merlin knows the place has plenty of it for them to find once they started looking.”

“Yes, precisely my thinking. I’d need to go back over the rest of the papers from that time period to be sure—I was only reading for specific mentions of the CWS, not general political news—but I am wondering how many of these investigations actually resulted in charges being brought. Let alone how many led to a proper indictment. I might be less suspicious, perhaps, if the head of the Auror Corps were someone else, but…”

“Oh, for fuck’s… right. It’s Yaxley, isn’t it?”

Hermione nodded.

“Whose use of the Imperius Defense after the last war was absolute nonsense, just to be clear. He’s a Death Eater through and through.”

“I just assume everyone in a certain income bracket who claimed Imperius was lying, as a general rule of thumb,” said Hermione archly.

Harry grinned. “Off the top of my head I can’t think of any exceptions to that rule.”

“How that kind of slipshod investigative work made it past the attention of the courts I haven’t a clue.” Hermione scowled. “The Mark must be taken voluntarily. One might pressure or coerce consent but use of the Imperius would render the magic null and void. Anyone who had it—”

“They couldn’t prove that to the satisfaction of the court, not in the time they had,” Harry said. “And no one wanted to wait around for closure.”

“No, I know.” Hermione waved a hand. “It just irks me. At any rate—Yaxley being Chief Auror makes me want to look much more closely at who the Aurors investigated and what happened to those people.”

“I agree.” Harry resumed idly spinning his wand. “I’ll reach out to Everett and get a few of the younger kids to come help read through back issues of the Prophet. Theo probably shouldn’t be involved beyond this point—depending on what’s going on here, we may not want certain interested parties knowing how much we know.”

She had meant to ask. Hermione nodded. “Can Blaise know the source was Jules?”

“Best not to specify.”

Hermione studied the complicated little twist of his expression. “What’s bothering you? Blaise? Or..?”

“I—” Harry grimaced. “I want it to be real. Jules. I want him to mean it.”

“For what it’s worth,” said Hermione slowly, mind stretching back over months and years of classes and dorm spaces shared with Jules Potter, “I think it’s likely that he does mean it. And if nothing else, revealing that book to you, and his play with Slughorn, is risking quite a bit for very little gain; I can’t imagine any explanation for that other than the straightforward one.”

“Me neither.”

“But you don’t want to lose someone else,” Hermione said, pushing. “Not after Sirius.”

Again, several conflicting expressions flashed across Harry’s face, minute movements of eyebrows and mouth too small and quick to parse. She narrowed her eyes.

Harry lifted his gaze and looked back at her, apparently not caring that she was studying him so closely. A long moment went by in perfect stillness: Harry coming to some sort of decision, and Hermione waiting for him to get there.

She saw resolve in the set of his jaw a choice a split second before he moved—wand flashing out, back straightening. Hermione raised an eyebrow as Harry layered more wards around them. A truly paranoid number of secrecy enchantments, quite honestly, considering the many wards already woven into this room over the course of years.

“About Sirius,” he said when he was done. “He’s not dead.”

A fresh rush of energy had Hermione sitting up straighter too. She forgot her fatigue all at once in favor of pulling this information into her mind—rearranging things she thought she knew. Racing back over memories in which she now realized Harry had never once personally referred to Sirius as dead.

“The body? —Polyjuice.”

Harry nodded.

“Why?”

She didn’t need to ask any more specifically: Harry knew what she meant. “He’s injured,” Harry said flatly. “Badly. There’s no chance he can be Lord Black, not in this political climate, and he can’t defend himself against anyone who decides they want a nice gift-wrapped bit of leverage over me.”

That was approximately what Hermione had expected. She blew out a breath. “Well… Merlin.”

“Yeah. I—the only other people who know are the healer, who’s oath-bound, and Neville, because I needed his help. We’re moving his parents out of the country to a clinic in Switzerland to recover—”

“And smuggling Sirius out with them. Clever. No one would ever suspect.” Hermione felt herself softening and didn’t disguise it. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Yeah,” said Harry, visibly tense. His jaw worked for a few seconds; in silence, he looked away, then back at her, rigidly controlled. “It doesn’t go beyond us.”

“I know. I promise.” Such promise ought to be taken as given, but Hermione had watched Harry’s trust issues for years and knew it would help for her to verbalize this now. “When are you moving him?”

“In a week or two. It depends on how his recovery goes.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

Harry shook his head. “Not at the moment. I’ll let you know.”

Good enough for her. “Theo will come up here to get me if I don’t show up for breakfast,” Hermione said, giving him an out.

“Yeah, better he not walk in on wards like this.” Harry spun his wand around his fingers in an absent little flourish, then began to take the additional wards down; Hermione smiled to herself, pleased to see even a small hint of Harry’s playful ease and confidence with magic, and to know that Sirius need not be counted as a loss.

Hermione watched him for a moment, then began to tidy up, stacking things into loose piles and writing labels for herself and the others so that, later, they could know in a glance what was in each pile of papers or bundle of scrolls. When Harry had returned the Knights’ Room to only its usual level of paranoid wards, he put his wand away and came to help her, both of them familiar enough with the other’s habits by now for the work to pass in companionable silence.

“Well,” Hermione said at last, standing back and surveying the organized chaos. “That’s as good as it’s likely to get, really.”

“Breakfast?”

Right on cue, her stomach growled loudly enough for them both to hear. Hermione wrinkled her nose, and Harry smirked. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I’d have probably collapsed if Blaise and Theo hadn’t brought dinner up for me last night.” Hermione led the way out of the room and they set off towards the Great Hall together.

“You’re predictable.”

Hermione wrinkled her nose again, but her friends’ consideration warmed her, and her feigned irritation had no real weight to it. In the corner of her eye she caught a fleeting glimpse of Harry studying her with unguarded fondness for the length of a heartbeat before his face smoothed back out into the blankness it usually wore in public.

They separated at the Great Hall, going to their respective House tables for breakfast. Hermione slid into a seat between Neville and Lavender and began loading her plate with enough food for both of them to double take.

“Long night?” said Lavender with an exaggerated waggle of her eyebrows.

“Research,” said Hermione.

Parvati, sitting across the table from them, exchanged a look with Lavender full of all the silent communication that years of friendship allowed. Whatever passed between them had Parvati turn fully towards Hermione and say, “Malfoy not quite keeping up?”

A joke. The kind of joke that Hermione’s roommates had given up including her in years ago. Now Hermione paused, glanced between them and then at Neville, thinking of hours spent in the Room of Requirement, of Daphne and Parvati’s heads bent together talking about dueling.

She knew an olive branch when she saw one, and grinned. “Well, you know how boys are.”

Lavender cackled, Parvati grinned, and Ron, just up the table, choked on his pumpkin juice. Hermione smiled to herself and glanced across the hall under cover of her year mates laughing while Lavender thumped Ron on the back. Draco wasn’t there, no doubt off working on his secret project, but Daphne caught her eye and lifted a hand in greeting. Harry saw the movement, followed Daphne’s attention, and shot Hermione a fleeting half-smile before he turned back to Pansy on his other side. We’re okay, Hermione told herself, we’re all okay, at least for now, and that would have to be good enough, because a full day of classes loomed and her mind was beginning to feel like a wrung-out old kitchen sponge. She shoved everything else away and set herself to just enjoying this moment, bright laughter and good food and friends all safely here, for as long as it lasted.

Harry

The letter did not come via owl post. Just appeared on Harry’s bed at some point during the day for him to find when he came back after dinner, appeared and waited and he stared at it and fought his sudden fear. Any other Slytherin could have done it. Hell, Snape could have sneaked in here and left it, if he were ordered to. Harry tore his eyes away from the parchment scroll and its familiar seal, but now he was looking at Theo, which was worse, because Theo and Draco and Blaise and Crabbe and Goyle, every Slytherin boy his age, knew the one question on Harry’s mind: Was this you?

And they all watched. Wondering if he’d say it. Defensive tension in Theo’s shoulders. Harry could ask so easily. Open his mouth and let the words out. Are you just Voldemort’s errand boy now?

Except then Harry would have to decide if he believed whatever answer he got. Yes or no: his best friend had been reduced to a knife in the Dark Lord’s hand. Yes or no: his best friend had been the opening through which the Dark Lord reached out into Harry’s fucking bedroom with a threat. Yes or no. One answer he feared, one he wanted, two that didn’t really matter in the end.

Harry could truthspell him, of course. Easily. Theo had all but given him permission to do it. But four other pairs of eyes watched Harry watch Theo watching Harry, and no way in hell did Harry plan to humiliate his friend like this.

So he kept his voice light, hands loose. “Clearly someone needs to work on their idea of a prank.”

“Mmm. At least a You-No-Poo poster has a pun in it, however crude,” Blaise drawled. Harry made a mental note to thank him later for being quick on the uptake.

“Did you hear about the one in Snape’s classroom last week?” said Draco. “It just went up overnight, apparently, a third year class saw it before he tore it down.”

“Whoever put that up has got bollocks of steel,” said Theo, and if there was a strained undercurrent to his voice Harry doubted most would be able to tell.

Harry shrugged, walked to his bed, dumped his bag on top of the scroll as though no part of this conversation mattered. “Sounds pointless to me, really. Who even saw it? And it’s not like McGonagall would’ve left that up, either.”

“Careful what you call a prank.”

Crabbe’s voice cut the air and though Harry didn’t turn he felt the attention of his friends sharpen. Knew they would watch his back. “Yeah? This your idea of a joke?” said Harry lightly.

“Nah,” Crabbe said, gravelly, low. “You’re a small fish. Not worth playing pranks on.”

Which was not something Crabbe would normally say. Who had he been talking to about Harry?

“I should bloody hope he’s a small fish, we’re still in fucking school,” said Blaise, sneer audible though Harry still stared unseeing at his bedspread with his back to the room. “Are we done? I’d like to actually sleep sometime tonight.”

“I’m done.” This was Draco’s most contemptuous tone, the one that layered You plebeians as subtext under anything he said. “And if anyone puts a You-No-Poo poster up in here you’re going to find that message applied to you in the most literal way possible.”

With him and, from the direction of the sounds Harry heard, Theo both breaking away to go to their beds and begin getting ready for sleep, the tension eased, dominos falling singularly outwards rather than knocking into one another in an escalating cascade. Harry made himself look busy unpacking his schoolbag and gathering pajamas and perusing his planner until Crabbe’s heavy tread had left for the loo. Then he shuffled his bag aside, picked up the scroll, remembered Goyle was still here even if less of a threat—

“Clear out,” Draco snapped, having clearly thought along the same lines.

“Er, right. Sorry.” Goyle moved towards the door. Then his steps paused. “It wasn’t me. The letter. Prank. Whatever. I didn’t do nothing.”

“Yeah. We know.” Even to himself Harry sounded tired.

More shuffling feet. The door opened, closed. Wards went up immediately, Blaise and Draco casting almost in unison, and by the time Harry cracked the letter’s wax seal his friends had converged on him.

“That’s no prank,” Draco said. “Right?”

“It’s not.” Harry eyed one piece of the broken wax, on which a snake’s head and the letters S L were visible. House Slytherin.

“And based on that reaction,” said Blaise, “either Crabbe put it here or he knows who did.”

Harry waved them off. “Wards down, go to bed. Act normal. We can discuss it tomorrow.”

“You’re definitely not going to read it behind your curtains and stay up half the night analyzing every phoneme, right?” said Blaise.

“No, of course not. I would never.” Harry charmed it invisible and stuffed it under his pillow with a quick hissed instruction to Eriss, already dozing there, to keep it safe.

“That was just insulting,” said Draco, over the sound of Blaise muttering counters to his temporary wards. “If you’re going to lie to us at least make an effort to lie well.”

“Oh, am I not paying enough attention to you, Draco dearest?” Harry said with a grin for the blond that was at least half sincere. “I could go and put constipation hexes on all your pants, if you think I’m not making enough effort—”

“Do Crabbe’s instead, if he’s in the toilet he won’t be bothering us,” said Blaise.

“But just think of the smell,” Draco told him, “we’d all have to deal with it—Merlin knows he’s either too dense or too ill-mannered to cast scent-freshening charms—”

Harry left them to bicker about Crabbe while he looked at last to Theo, evaluating his friend’s silence.

Theo met his eyes, said quietly, almost desperately, “It wasn’t me.”

And how the fuck was Harry supposed to answer that? He groped for words, discarded them just as quickly; they had seconds at most before Crabbe or Goyle could come back, seconds to explain something so much bigger than this moment.

In the end all he did—all he could do—was say, as sincerely as he could, “It doesn’t change anything.” Because it didn’t. If Theo left the letter, he hadn’t had a choice; and if that felt like an extra layer of violation compared to some other random Slytherin being the culprit, well, Voldemort using Theo as his unwitting tool wasn’t exactly a new concept.

Theo stepped away from him. Nodded jerkily, face unreadable. Harry paused, wondering if he should say more, if there was a question waiting to be asked—but the door banged open and Goyle slouched back in, avoiding all their eyes, and Theo went to fetch his toothbrush like nothing was wrong. Harry had no choice but to let it go.

Silence reigned: Harry had rarely seen such studied lack of interaction between a group of people as his roommates demonstrated now. Of course Harry couldn’t watch everyone all the time but he would be willing to bet that the number of times anyone even made eye contact past his exchange with Theo could be counted in the single digits. Even Crabbe took a hint and didn’t antagonize anyone.

This suited Harry fine. All he wanted was to get in bed, wrap its curtains with spells for safety, and crack the letter’s seal.

“What is it?” Eriss asked, disturbed from her sleep by Harry reaching past her for the scroll.

“Another letter from the Dark Lord.”

“He still wants you to help him hunt?”

Harry stared at the serpentine crest. House Slytherin, blood carried down over centuries. Prominent and public in the House of Gaunt. Hidden by traces among who knew how many other families. Awakened in Harry only by purest chance, and claimed by Harry at twelve years old. It was a victory, at the time: proof that he belonged, an inheritance to rival any of those belonging to his peers. The thrill of the forbidden. The promise of independence and safety.

At twelve Harry had not known—hadn’t thought about—the consequences of that choice.

At sixteen Harry rested a hand on the snake in his lap, his familiar, his friend and companion, only one of the many advantages the Slytherin inheritance had given him over the years—and he wondered if it might have been better had he never returned to the Chamber at all.

Because along with all those advantages, House Slytherin brought him this: a threat, a temptation, both, neither. Schrodinger’s letter, he thought, remembering a conversation with Hermione about Muggle physics, and smiled without amusement. If he never opened it he never had to know.

He had to open it.

Addressed to Hadrian S. Lord Black and Heir Slytherin this sixth day of February 1997, by Lord Voldemort of Slytherin and Gaunt. 

I am pleased by your willingness to discuss a greater degree of cooperation between us, and a pooling of resources in pursuit of our mutual interests. One never finds too many allies, and, of course, there is the duty owed to blood; it is only right that you should in time return to your true place, and seek to align yourself with the like-minded.

There is a great struggle underway all around us, a quiet battle, fought for the last decade in hidden grasps for power. Upon its outcome rests no less than the fate of our world and all its wonders. There are those who remain blind to the truth of this struggle and instead cling to a false reality in which the dangers haunting the magical world do not exist. There are those who see clearly but shrink from the difficult choices necessary to guide magical Britain through the shoals of this age. And then there are some who rise to this challenge undaunted. You have the potential to join the ranks of the latter group, the smallest but the most potent of those here mentioned.

Our struggle has been underway for nigh on thirty years. At times it has broken out into open violence. More often it has remained largely out of sight. There have been skirmishes and setbacks on both sides, but now the balance has at last begun to shift decisively in favor of those of us working for the success and future of all wizardkind. You will perhaps have already observed the effects of this shift on those around you. Such small ripples are only small signs of what is to come. Change is upon us: many of our efforts have already born fruit, and more will come. Its momentum grows daily. It will thunder down upon all who oppose it and it will cast aside the indecisive who foolishly hope they can wait for it to pass. It cannot be stopped or avoided. It can only be guided from within to strike only where it should—and nowhere else. You, Heir Slytherin, may, if you choose, become one of the hands guiding this wave of change as it washes our world clean.

You inquired as to the shape of a potential alliance between the Houses Gaunt and Black. To this I can only reply that in a state of such uncertainty and flux as this, no alliance can be relied upon that is not writ in stone or blood. I will require your most absolute sworn service and loyalty. In return I will extend the fullest reach of my protection and support to you and yours. A document will be written to clearly delineate the responsibilities of both parties involved. House Black will remain independent of House Gaunt, but its heirs, its progeny, and its relatives within one degree of the head of the family shall as individuals step into my service at such time as each comes of age.

As you yourself noted, there is much to be gained by cooperation between our two Houses—your primary and your secondary lines of inheritance. The furtherance of our political goals, and the pursuit of our personal desires to protect wizardkind from the hostile ignorance of Muggles, are only some such gains. Consider also the extension of your power, with which you may better shelter and direct the people you have claimed as your own. In this we are similar, as befits our shared blood: once we have made such claims, we do not relinquish them, and we revisit the pain of betrayal on those who spurn us tenfold. I do not believe I am incorrect to judge that many of those who belong to you have already been threatened by this necessary change, or that you would seek any opportunity to better protect what is yours.

In your last missive, you sought time to acquaint yourself with the duties and affairs of your House. I would be remiss to prevent you from doing so. Certainly I have every expectation that any alliance between us and our two Houses will not be the result of careless hurry. I am likewise sure that you will see in the end that your best interest lies where so many of your associates already stand, in my influence, alongside all of us working for a better world. Your choices are now before you, Heir Slytherin, Lord Black. Consider them well.

At such time as you would take the next step forward into your place at the helm of the wizarding world, I will welcome you gladly into my ranks.

Trust in Magic.

Lord Voldemort of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Gaunt

Harry came to the end of the letter. Stopped. Went on staring blankly on the looping signature below its last line. In itself the signature bore no real importance but if Harry let his eyes drift back up he would read and re-read the letter to the point of exhaustion and he could not do that: he needed to think.

“You are afraid.”

“I—” Harry cut himself off: no point lying to Eriss. She could feel his fear down their bond and even if he managed to close that connection off no doubt she could smell it on him too. “He’s threatening me. Us. My friends.”

“You will have to fight him?”

“Not that kind of threat. He…” How to explain this to a snake? “He’s sure that he will win the big fight, between everyone. He wants me because I have a lot of power… and probably also because I could potentially be a threat someday, and he wants to neutralize that. He’s not seeking to fight me or kill me. He wants to bind me to his control. He’s saying that it’ll be better for the people that I care about if I join him because then I can protect them, make sure they come out on top. And if I don’t, we’re all fucked, basically.”

If Harry joined Voldemort, the letter said, he could protect his friends, his wards, his people, against things like CWS taking Muggleborns from their families. He would protect Theo and Pansy and Daphne and Draco from being caught between Harry and Voldemort, if Harry and Voldemort stood on the same side. He could do what he’d thought of doing when Voldemort’s first letter came over the winter: push for policy changes, temper the more violent Death Eaters, shape the ways their world would change.

Because Voldemort was right. The changes couldn’t be avoided or stopped anymore. It didn’t matter what Harry did; it didn’t even really matter who won. Either way change had started already. Either way the impacts would ripple through their system and leave it reshaped in their wake. The only question was who would get a say in the outcome.

And at the end of the day—Harry didn’t want to stop that momentum. Hadn’t he been dreaming of changing the magical world since he was twelve? Hadn’t he stayed up all night lost in conversations with Hermione and Daphne, Justin and Draco, Theo and Pansy about how to make their world better?

It was everything he’d ever wanted: his friends and people safe, his position secure, his hand on the levers of power.

All at the paltry cost of a Dark Mark.

Harry had, at some point, unconsciously wrapped his right hand around his left forearm. He realized now and let go with an unpleasant shock of sick fear. Take the Dark Mark. Bind himself to Voldemort forever. Subjugate himself to another’s control. Everything in him rebelled against the very idea. Experimentally he tried to picture it. Stared at his own bare skin and imagined a skull and snake making a home there. Forced himself to reconcile his nature to such a binding: felt himself start to crack under the pressure.

So he thought of his friends, and of what might happen to them if Voldemort chose to give Harry a demonstration of where his best interest lay. Of Pansy: ashen-faced, hiding flinches from the insults that she could not stop. Of Hermione: worn to the bone by trying to help every Muggleborn in her House terrified of the CWS’s new rules. Of Draco: bags under his eyes and tremors in his hands. Of Daphne: miserable at the thought of tying herself to an unwanted marriage or else losing everything her family had ever taught her to value. Of Theo: braced for Harry to use a truth-curse on him, again.

And just like that it was—simple, if not easy, to see. Himself, Marked. Himself bowing low with all the other Death Eaters.

For them, he could do it, he thought.

“If you don’t help him, then you just have to make sure you don’t lose,” said Eriss.

The mental image shattered. Harry let out a long, shaky breath. “Might not be completely under my control.”

“Would you be any less afraid of him? If he bound you?”

Harry could not say yes.

Sensing his spiking discomfort, Eriss wound her way up his arm to coil around his neck and shoulder, a cool comforting weight. She didn’t push harder.

Voldemort wasn’t known for fairness. Reason, yes. Reciprocal loyalty, sure. But fairness—

Harry would be no less afraid. For himself, or for his friends.

Your choices are before you. Consider them well. Yeah, Voldemort was right about that too. Harry would take what silver linings he could get: Voldemort didn’t expect an answer anytime particularly soon, no doubt because he knew the pressure would only keep increasing, and thought eventually Harry had to give in.

But, Harry realized, Voldemort had made a mistake.

Voldemort had not mentioned Jules.

A chill went down Harry’s spine. It was more important now than ever that he keep his reconciliation with Jules a secret. Voldemort assumed Harry’s neutrality would eventually yield because nearly everyone Harry cared about was already halfway into Voldemort’s grasp already and the exceptions were either Muggleborns like Hermione or from less influential wizarding families, all people who could stay neutral or be accepted as Death Eater allies.

Jules could never stay neutral: Jules could never be an ally. Jules could never be anything but the Dark Lord’s hated enemy, or dead.

Which meant the moment Voldemort learned Harry might still care for Jules, he would forego the carrot in favor of the stick that had so far only been implied.

Then Harry huffed a brief, harsh laugh.

“Is there a joke?” Eriss said sleepily from just below his left ear.

“A bad one. I just thought—Voldemort obviously expects us to catch on to the Ministry doing shite like taking Muggleborns away from their families, if he’s mentioning how my friends,” Harry consulted the letter, “have already been threatened by this necessary change, so—whatever else this means, at least I can tell Hermione we can let Theo help with the CWS project after all.”

Eriss made a strange un-snake-like noise she’d adopted to imitate a human’s skeptical scoff. “You’re right, that is a bad joke. Although I shouldn’t be surprised. You humans aren’t nearly as funny as you think you are.”

At this, Harry laughed properly, and reached up to affectionately run a hand along Eriss’s scaled body. She shifted languidly underneath his touch and settled closer to his throat with a sleepy hiss.

 No, he decided. Harry couldn’t throw his lot in with Voldemort. Not yet, not when it would mean abandoning Jules. For now he would let it lie.

Let Jules prove his sincerity or lack thereof.

Let time show whether whatever power Harry might gain would be enough to shelter Jules too.

Let Harry talk to his Vipers to find out what they would want.

And let Voldemort show his hand by the actions that he took, show whether he was a force willing to compromise—or only to be obeyed.