Yorick Yaxley tapped his fingers against his new face and went over his reasoning again one last time. This was his last chance to back out of his plan to betray the Dark Lord.

It wasn't that he wasn't grateful to the former man. He had rejuvenated the purist cause like no other in centuries. Before his heyday, the ever-so-fashionable egalitarian movement had run completely unchecked throughout wizarding culture. Yorick still remembered, from his youth, the earnest discussions about whether Muggle Studies should be compulsory for purebloods; suggestions that the Ministry should give the Wizengamot's power to an elected body, with as little as twenty-five percent of its membership allocated to purebloods, and even that to be split evenly with the Light families; those ridiculous Meet A Muggle social events, paid for with his taxes; and the catastrophic population drops in Hogsmeade and the other magical hubs, as halfbloods and even purebloods married Muggles and emigrated to their cities.

The Dark Lord had been a powerful warrior, certainly, but more importantly, he'd been a social rallying point. He helped codify the purist philosophies and politics; he wrote the responses one could give at dinner parties for when buffoons like Arthur Weasley got on soapboxes talking about those preposterous outreach programs. Under his leadership, blood purism became cool again. Once again, the old families could hold their heads high and look down on the new magic rabble, as they should. Next to all of that, the fact that he managed to overthrow the Ministry was almost incidental.

And yet … Yorick had spent most of the last year as a senior bureaucrat. He'd done much more than his fair share in ensuring the traditional, sane world order, pushing papers rather than casting curses. And over the course of that year, he had learned one simple, immutable fact, no matter how hard it was to admit to himself, and no matter how unwise it would be to say it aloud.

Voldemort was a really crappy ruler.

Take the wand policy, for example. The Dark Lord had ordered that only those with wizarding pedigrees were allowed wands. Good policy in a perfect world, to be sure, but he ordered it launched and completed within a few months, wiping out half the economy at a stroke. It also created droves of malcontents, many of whom turned to petty crime or even joined the Order of the Phoenix, which Yorick couldn't deal with because he had in fact had to fire something like a third of the DMLE under that same policy. When he reported this (making quite sure not to phrase it as a complaint, of course), the Dark Lord had ordered him to appropriate Mudbloods' Gringotts vaults and use the money to hire mercenaries.

Never mind that most Mudbloods had very little money to begin with, or that Gringotts fought tooth and nail every step of the way and barely gave him a fifth of the amount he needed, but the Dark Lord also demanded that he do this urgently. This meant that he had to post bounties rather than hire professional mercenaries; the Snatchers wildly rorted the system, and the money went to people barely any more desirable than the Mudbloods they replaced. At the same time, the fact that Mudbloods were no longer paying taxes meant that Thicknesse had to sign loan after loan on extortionate terms with Gringotts, and the departments all still had massive funding cuts.

Without money, he could no longer honour bounties, and his remaining DMLE (the Dark Lord's byzantine instructions about hiring were another story altogether) had to spend half their time keeping Snatchers in line; some of the little bastards began robbing halfbloods instead, and one gang was even caught shaking down Fawley's daughter. Even neutral purebloods began leaving Britain after that; it was really a mercy that they went back in time before he saw what that did to his bottom line.

All of this was just one of the Dark Lord's ideas, in one department; obviously none of the Heads dared complain about things, but Yorick was not a stupid man, and he picked up enough hints to know that while the Dark Lord might be a genius at magic or philosophy or at waging asymmetrical war, he actually had no idea whatsoever of how to implement sensible peacetime reform. Even with the Order of the Phoenix largely neutralised, mostly thanks to Yaxley's tireless efforts, Magical Britain was going to fall sooner rather than later.

Even so, the status quo as it was before the Dark Lord's return was no more sustainable. With the Muggle population booms, the influx of Mudbloods was massive and still rising; wizarding traditions simply couldn't withstand the pressure. Everything beautiful about the wizarding world was being destroyed while he watched, and without the Dark Lord, there was nothing he or anyone else could do to stop it. Oh, he could arrange to vote down disruptive bills in the Wizengamot, or to undermine funding for the most odious of Muggle-lover ventures, but this was a war of attrition they couldn't win. Every year, the proportion of the population identifying with the Light over the Dark ratcheted upward another notch.

Really, what was needed was the best of both worlds; a Dark Lord who could bring the cause back to prominence, but who could be quietly retired when they reclaimed the Ministry. Of course, actually assassinating the Dark Lord would be quite impossible; a touch of finesse would be required. But then, Yorick was a Slytherin alumnus; he was an expert of finesse.

It so happened that Yorick had been one of the closest companions of one Archeus Castlewright. Castlewright was quite a lacklustre duellist but a genius at support magics; he was often responsible for raising or breaking Anti-Apparition wards on raids, for example. When he had been shipped off to Azkaban after the last war, Yorick had rescued the man's personal library from the DMLE. He'd never had the time or inclination to read through it, but he understood there were numerous tomes on dark rituals, including the one the Dark Lord used for his resurrection.

If someone were to thoroughly research that ritual, enough to know how to modify it such that the one revived could be controlled, or at least easily stopped at will, perhaps by a secret passphrase …

… well, the Dark Lord hadn't cared at all about the destruction his mismanagement had wreaked on purebloods; he'd do exactly the same thing again. It was practically Yorick's duty as a patriot to keep his country from ruin, be it from dilution by Mudblood or collapse by madman. Really, it was the kindest thing. He had no choice in the matter.

Yorick hadn't done that research yet, but he already knew enough of the general theory to know that it would be vastly easier, maybe even outright necessary, if he physically owned part of the revived one's soul, and he could examine and experiment on it at his leisure.

This brought him back to his present time and place, a tiny island with a pedestal in a coastal cave in the middle of nowhere, to which his Lord had directed him. Apparently, last time, Potter had destroyed most of the Horcruxes, the keys to his Lordship's immortality; on returning to this time, the Dark Lord had immediately dispatched him, Wormtail, and Snape to retrieve them and replace them with fakes. For this task, he had been given a nameless potion, which had taken three hours and over four hundred different ingredients to brew; it was a single-use draught, designed to be all but impossible to reverse engineer. The Dark Lord had also described the locket to him while he Transfigured the copy and bewitched it to act like the original if destroyed, so that even if Dumbledore or any of his lackeys did find it (his Lord knew that it had been found but not when), the timeline would proceed as in the original, and his revival would still be assured. Unless, of course, that girl had made it back …

He reached into his robes and pulled out the potion and one of the fake lockets. He unstoppered the potion and poured it into the basin; it reacted with the liquid already inside, fizzing and swirling, before turning to harmless salt water. He switched the real locket with the fake, making sure to put it in his right breast pocket, then turned back to the little boat.

… … …

"My Lord, I have done as you asked," Yorick said, kneeling to the foul homunculus. He reached into his left breast pocket and withdrew the second fake.

Wormtail was still gone, on a similar mission to Yorick's; something about a ring. It hadn't been Yorick's place to question, and he hadn't. The great serpent dozed before the fire, built up high even though it was mid-morning; the Dark Lord sat on his chair, husbanding his strength.

"Excellent," he said, and reached out to accept the locket. "You have done well, Yaxley."

"I live to serve my Lord," Yorick said. It was a reflexive, meaningless line, like saying Bless You in response to a sneeze.

The Dark Lord admired the trinket for half a minute, before the snake brought its head over and took it from his hand and slithered out of the room to hide it Merlin only knew where.

"I have a new task for you," he continued.

"My Lord?"

"My spies have informed me that Hogwarts' Triwizard champions are Harry Potter and one Su Li."

Yorick blinked. "Su Li, my Lord?" He thought for a moment, but nothing came up. "That name means nothing to me."

The homunculus stared. Yorick wasn't sure it even had eyelids. "They further informed me that the girl postulated a plausible excuse for her selection. Snape may have underestimated the impact his actions had, when retrieving Ravenclaw's artefact."

"I see," Yorick said, not wholly truthfully.

"Snape told me he successfully used Legilimency on her and verified her story. However, if she were in fact from the future, and had spent a year under his tender care, she might have learned how to perform blind spot Occlumency. She is a Ravenclaw, he tells me, with above average grades."

"Do you believe it, my Lord?" Yorick asked. He fidgeted; he was too old to kneel for so long. "It is a difficult art and requires proper tutelage; I doubt this could have occurred with Snape as Headmaster, not without his knowledge and consent."

His Lord steepled his tiny, half-formed red fingers. "It is unlikely … but I would be a fool to discount the possibility when it is the only thing that can still threaten us. Snape says that she could have been the girl from the battle, albeit four years younger and with longer hair."

"If you wish to have her dealt with, would not he or Crouch be better positioned?"

"She is not to be harmed," the Dark Lord said. "Not until we are certain. If her story is indeed true, then she is no threat, and removing her will only see the Triwizard Tournament cancelled, our plans set back, and our knowledge of things to come invalidated. And if not … no, I want you to investigate her family."

"As potential hostages, my Lord?"

"Perhaps, eventually, but for now I only need information. Snape has told me that she is a half-blood; her father is just a Muggle, but her mother is a witch named Blaise Soucy. I wish to know more about them; whether their daughter could be so clever."

"Blaise Soucy, my Lord?" Yorick said in surprise. "I can tell you about her already; she worked for me, in the future. I never met her personally because she was stationed at our embassy in China, but I remember she had a very unimpressive family. As I recall, she herself is only a half-blood, and she has two Squib sons. She was upset with their and her husband's lots under our regime, of course, but she remained a loyal agent. I couldn't say whether this was only because we had her daughter at Hogwarts."

The thing before him pondered this. "Only one magical grandparent … it seems impossible. Even so, we have time. You will investigate this woman. I will know her NEWT results by the end of the week."

"Very good, my Lord."

"You may go, Yaxley."

"Thank you, my Lord."

Yaxley left and Apparated back to his manor, where he wasn't in his workshop ten seconds before he took out the real locket and did a double-take. He'd spent hours Transfiguring the first fake to his Lord's exacting description and corrections, and again, copying that down to the last detail; he knew exactly what the real thing was supposed to look like, and it definitely wasn't this. Baffled, he pressed it open, read the note inside, and began updating his schemes. Possibly it was time to call on his old friend Lucius Malfoy.