Chapter 10:
Enemies
"Hermione and Ron and I have been looking at Mad-Eye Moody's Foe Glass," Uncle Harry said as they made the laborious trek through the Willow tunnel. "Did I ever tell you about it?"
"That's the mirror that shows your enemies, right? And when you can see their faces, they're almost there?"
"Exactly. Neville found it in a root cellar - no idea how it got there - and gave it to Ron and me for the Auror department. It's mostly a curiosity, really. You can't very well carry it around with you. But it occurred to me that, if we could figure out how the magic worked, I could use it someplace more practical. Hermione's really been the one trying to break it down all year, though I haven't told her exactly what I had in mind. I'm sure she guesses, but the Map's yours." He reached the open space under the trapdoor and pulled himself up, then smiled down toward Teddy. "So of course, I'm planning to add a few spells to it and haven't even asked."
Teddy grabbed the floor of the Shrieking Shack and hauled himself up into the living room. "You're bound to it, too," he said. "You can use it."
"Well, you're the one who's going to be using it," Uncle Harry said. "I'm just going to work a new little trick into it. The spells on the mirror work for whoever is possessing it, so I think I can only tie them to the bound part of the Map."
"Victoire says that only the map-master should be bound and use Dad's wand. I was going to try and write a spell for that. Do you think I shouldn't?"
"No, it makes sense. I don't know how many ties the Map can take; it may make sense to keep it severely limited." He indicated a chair. "Let's see what we can make of it."
Teddy opened the Map with Dad's wand, bringing up the Marauder's inside view, with their totems at the compass points. The castle spread out, the dots appeared. The first year dormitories all looked like beehives. He got out the Keys to the Castle next and opened it with the Map's incantation - "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" - and lines of handwriting scrawled across it, too fast to read, swirling down into the parchment, hiding themselves, finally leaving five short lists. The original four were from the Marauders themselves, the initial spells that made the Map work. The fifth, added in the center of the left side of the page, was titled "Potter's Proddings," and really only included the spell that tethered Dad's wand to the Map so far. That had been Teddy's idea for a spell, but it had been done over the summer, so it was Uncle Harry's magical work. Teddy imagined that someday, he'd have his own section, if he could think of any good new tricks.
"What I want it to do," Uncle Harry said, tapping his father's list of spells, which included most of the magic that identified people, "is be able to recognize enemies of the... what did you say Victoire called it? The Map-Master?" He grinned. "I like it. It has a good Marauder-ring to it. Sounds like it ought to be in a pirate novel."
Teddy thought of Tirza's pirates in To the End of the Earth and laughed, but didn't explain himself.
"Anyway," Uncle Harry went on, "I want it to recognize people who are dangerous to you, and not wait for you to go looking for them. I want it to point them out to you the minute you open it, if they're anywhere in striking distance." He went into his briefcase - an item Teddy knew was only a year old because he'd helped James and Al shop for it last year at Christmas, but which was already battered and covered with ink spills and crayon marks - and pulled out a folder full of papers, most covered with Hermione's tiny handwriting. "This is what she got analyzing the spells on the Foe Glass. It's quite complicated." He handed it to Teddy.
Complicated wasn't even a start. Teddy looked at the lines of Arithmancy equations and shook his head. "I'm still stuck on Professor Vector's Tension Proofs," he said. "I usually only get ninety percent or so on my Arithmancy homework."
Uncle Harry gave him an odd look. "Only ninety. Yes, you're clearly out of your league in this class. Nearly slow. I'm deeply ashamed. Especially since I never took Arithmancy at all, as it looked a bit too much like work." He grinned. "Don't worry, I don't follow the maths, either. But she boiled it down to some rather simple spells that will work as long as the charmed object is magical enough, and magically owned."
"What do you mean, magically owned?"
"I own my socks," Uncle Harry said, "but there's no special bond to them. If someone else steals my socks, they're not going to rebel. My wand, on the other hand, is allied to me, and the house belongs to me magically, which is why Kreacher had to obey me. Being bound to the Map is magical ownership."
Teddy laughed. "Don't tell James. He'll want to magically own everything."
Uncle Harry looked sheepish. "Too late. I bound him to that quill he uses all the time. Al tried to grab it. It wasn't pretty. So Al insisted that I bind his crayons, and Lily wanted a particular hair ribbon. Anyway... let's get to work."
Together, they bent over the Keys to the Castle. The last spell had been entirely Uncle Harry's magic, but he wanted to make sure Teddy started to contribute, so they came up with a very complicated sort of Charm that worked with Prongs's identity spells and Sirius's security spells, and ultimately even used a few of Dad's display spells. It would be part of opening the Map from then on in.
"So how do we test it?" Teddy asked when neither of them could think of a new way to tweak it.
"Do you have any enemies that are handy?"
"Other than Victoire?"
"What?" Uncle Harry said, losing interest in the Map for a moment.
Teddy shrugged. "She's been a bit keen to curse me since she caught me... well, you know. With Ruthless. I don't know why. It's not like I stopped being her friend or anything. I don't know why she thinks she needs to stop being mine."
"There weren't any... attack birds involved in this, were there?"
"What?"
"Never mind." He turned his attention back to the Marauder's Map. "Close it and re-open it, and we'll see just how badly you've managed to annoy her."
"Mischief managed," Teddy said, and waited for the Map to clear before saying, "I solemnly swear that I'm up to no good." The Map reappeared. Teddy thought the totem animals looked a little irritated at the rush.
As soon as the dots appeared, Teddy could see that the spell had taken effect. A diffuse cloud of reddish ink appeared over the legend, and spread over the Map. It swirled over Slytherin House and paused over the dot labeled "Honoria Higgs," but moved on without leaving a trace, then swung up to Gryffindor Tower, where it moved around the first year dormitory, then followed Victoire's dot down the girls' stairs, through the Common Room, and up the boys' stairs, to where she stood outside Teddy's door. It left a faintly hazy mark around her, then dissipated entirely.
"Watch for Weasley pranks," Uncle Harry said. "I think it's safe to say it works. And that you and Victoire need to have a nice long talk."
Teddy made a face, morphing it exaggeratedly, then cleared the Map. They only had fifteen minutes to work on the Patronus, but he was definitely starting to see a shape now, something winged and powerful. He thought of Dad's hawk, and the one he'd found in Mum's memory last night, and was fairly sure of what it was going to be. He thought he might be able to do it now, but he didn't really want to end the lessons.
Once they'd finished, they went back to the school, and Uncle Harry made him check the Map again before they came up from under the Willow. There was no sign of Greyback, but it did remind Teddy to check his door carefully. He found that Victoire had put a line of Belching Bottle Rockets under his door, set to ignite when he opened it. He fished them out by their tails and left them in a basket at the base of the girls' stairs, then went to bed.
Teddy made a point of checking the Marauder's Map before he left his room each morning for the next few weeks. Victoire seemed to have taken the return of her bottle rockets as a peace offering, and the little red haze around her name disappeared, even though she still wasn't speaking to him any more than she had to. She picked a hex war with Story Shacklebolt instead, and, while her dormitory mates didn't seem to warm up to it, it won her the affection of most of the first year boys, who escalated it to an all out Gryffindor-Ravenclaw war, with Victoire and Story as the respective generals. As November wore on, students in both houses got used to their food doing odd things in the Great Hall, or their clothes suddenly changing colors for no apparent reason. It was entirely a first year phenomenon, using first year spells, so it was easy to fix and wasn't a great bother to anyone else. The teachers sometimes stepped in if things were too vicious, but mostly let the first years sort it out for themselves.
Since being caught, Ruthless had been a bit more circumspect about kissing, though she was certain that Kirk had figured it out, and she'd have to put up with teasing from her brothers the whole time she was at home. "Not to mention Dad," she said, shaking her head as they prowled an anonymous corridor, looking for someplace there was no chance of discovery. "That'll be a right adventure."
"Did you want to break up?" Teddy asked her, alarmed. He didn't feel they'd properly mastered the thing just yet, but it seemed like breaking up was going to happen next, as Lani Khetran had decided that she only wanted Donzo as a friend, and Roger and Jane had started yelling at one another about a book on the weather. Since Lani didn't, in fact, become Donzo's friend and Jane and Roger cordially hated each other these days, Teddy had no desire to break up with Ruthless, who was one of his best friends.
She shook her head. "Not yet."
This wasn't comforting. "Can I make a rule?" he asked.
"Sure."
"If we break up, no stupid wars."
She nodded enthusiastically, then spotted an empty classroom, and the subject of breaking up was dropped in any case.
The next day, Laura Chapman was seen weeping in the Great Hall, and a confused Corky was snubbed by every girl in Hufflepuff. "She asked who I was going to go out with next," he said, shaking his head helplessly. "I said probably Nancy Simon. You know that fourth year in my House?" They all did. She seemed like a good choice to Teddy. "Then she started carrying on like I was trying to drown her in a sack! She said I was rude, and no English boy would have been so awful."
"I thought Canadians were meant to be nicer," Roger said.
"We are. Everyone knows that. Ask anyone what Canadians are like, and they'll tell you, we like hockey and we're nice. No one ever said the sun didn't set on the Empire because God didn't trust Canadians after dark. Though Dad says that's just because He wasn't paying attention."
Out of consideration for Corky's plight, Frankie moved the next Muggles and Minions game to the library, then, when Madam Pince kicked them out, into the empty Divination classroom. Story and Victoire called a truce for the length of the game, as their characters had to work together or they wouldn't have enough points to defeat the terrorist cell that popped up on their film set (Story's character, Lucas Stevens, had become the director of the film that Victoire's character, Jayne Monroe, was in). Still, Teddy thought that Victoire might have slipped a few Weasley products into Story's book bag over lunch.
Frankie had needed to sneak Tinny out of Hufflepuff so Laura wouldn't know she was fraternizing with Corky, and she kept looking guiltily over her shoulder as the group made its way through yet another underground system, battling new sorts of Muggle criminals that Frankie had found in his constant quest. Tinny left ten minutes before everyone else, sneaking off to the library, where she was meant to have been studying all day.
On the way back to Gryffindor after the game, Ruthless insisted on a blood oath that she and Teddy wouldn't be such utter idiots. "A rule," she said, "isn't good enough."
Teddy had sliced his finger open before she even finished making the case for it.
The Patronus lessons continued, and Teddy was quite afraid that he wouldn't be able to keep it shapeless much longer. Uncle Harry seemed to sense this, and took some of the time to teach him other spells. The Patronus itself was definitely becoming a bird, and Teddy knew it would be a hawk, which rather spoiled the surprise.
Donzo began to complain about his upcoming Christmas concert. Teddy had long since stopped believing his complaints, as when Donzo wanted to stop doing something, he actually stopped. The complaints were a lead-in to a generalized invitation to his friends and their families - "Dad's running it from Weird World this year. That's the big house out in Sherwood Forest? Plenty to do, of course..."
Teddy listened to the others make plans and contact their parents and siblings, and didn't bother asking for himself. Donzo's father had already said no to the security Uncle Harry wanted if Teddy were to go to a concert last summer; it had to be even worse if it was his personal home. Or, rather, the band's home. Weird World, as Teddy understood it, was a private little amusement park that the Weird Sisters owned for their own recreation, and that of their guests. Donzo hadn't had time to go for the past two and half years, as he'd done all of the concerts and recordings in London and on tour during holidays, so he'd never been able to invite his friends before. Teddy thought it most unfair that this was the year he'd be able to do it.
It was almost December before Teddy heard from Fenrir Greyback again.
He was at breakfast, chasing down a goblet of pumpkin juice that had suddenly sprouted blue and bronze wings and begun flapping about, when the morning's post owls flew in. He grabbed the goblet just before one of them upended it and took it back to the table. Ruthless took it and broke the spell, but before he could drink, a ragged looking brown owl dropped a clumsily wrapped package onto his plate. He recognized the clumsy block letters this time, and picked it up without saying a word. Uncle Harry was at the high table, talking to Headmistress Sprout. He saw Teddy approach, glanced down at the package, and gestured to Ron, who was keeping watch at the door.
"Come on," he said, nodding toward the antechamber where they'd burned the first note. "We'd best see what's in it. Teddy, you can go to class."
"I want to see."
Uncle Harry considered this carefully, then said, "All right, but Ron and I will open it first."
Headmistress Sprout joined them, and a moment later, Vivian came in, sounding out of breath. "Ne- Professor Longbottom said there was another note?"
Uncle Harry nodded. He set the package down on the table and did several spells over it. A shimmering orange net appeared in a half dome, enclosing it, then Uncle Harry said, "Disamicio."
The wrappings fell away. It was a plain cardboard box. They all looked at it for what seemed a very long time.
"Nothing's picking up on the Curse-catcher," Ron ventured.
"All right," Uncle Harry said. "Slowly, though. Remember the bubotuber pus - that wouldn't have picked up, either." He turned to Teddy. "Look away, Teddy. I have no idea what Greyback is sending. It may be something you don't want to see."
Teddy looked at his shoes as Uncle Harry and Ron leveled their wands at the box. A second later, he heard the sound of the cardboard ripping at its seams, then there was a loud spill of paper. A piece of it seesawed down into Teddy's field of vision. It was from a Muggle notebook, lined in sensible blue ink, with a torn frill at the side where it had been ripped from a spiral wire. It was ancient, and warped by dampness. It seemed to be covered in laborious multiplication problems. A few had been circled, and at the top of the page, someone had written, "You need to work on your threes."
Innocuous, except that it had been smeared from top to bottom with something dark and foul-smelling, running in streaks that were the shape of wide fingers.
Teddy looked up. The papers had spilled out under the Curse-catcher, at least thirty of them. Some had arithmetic on them, others seemed to just have writing. Most were drawings, done with Muggle pens. He saw a scarred child who must have been Vivian, a boy with a skull around his neck, a sullen girl with hair in dirty pigtails. All of them were Dad's; Teddy would have known the style anywhere, and even if he hadn't, why else would Greyback send them?
Each one had been defaced, most of the drawings in particularly hateful ways. A spotty yellow stain had seeped through the whole pile.
At the top of the slide of papers was another choppy note:
Fownd these at hom - gone now, Aurors, ha-ha - Blondin musta hid em. Thawt you should send em back to your Dad. I added wat I thawt.
Teddy crouched down and picked up one of the drawings, carefully keeping his fingers on a part of the page that was still white. This one showed a teenage boy with sharpened teeth and narrow eyes. His hair had been hacked off at the shoulders, and Dad had rendered it with jagged pen lines. He looked familiar.
"That was Alderman," Vivian said. "Before he learned to read, let alone went through seminary."
"And the others?" Teddy asked.
"Coral, Evvy, Blondin... I think it's likely all of us. Father Montgomery got us the notebooks. Your dad drew when he got bored, which I think was any time that Greyback wasn't actively tormenting him. Not much for someone like Lupin to do stuck out in the woods." She toed one of the maths pages. "He tried very hard to get us up to where we would need to be for Hogwarts, but we were quite far behind."
Teddy reached for a paragraph that someone had laboriously written out. It seemed to report the events of the first chapter of The Hobbit. Dad had corrected the spelling, and jotted, "What do you make of Bilbo's Tookishness?" in the margin. "Do you need these?" he asked Uncle Harry. "I mean, can you use" - he pointed at the stains - "to track him?"
"No," Uncle Harry said. "We have all we need to work with magically from what he left in the Overby house. He's not particularly careful about leaving behind bits of himself."
"Can they be cleaned?"
Uncle Harry crouched down beside him. "Teddy, this is vile. It's not a present. It was meant to hurt you."
"Dad's things won't hurt me," Teddy said. "If I could just clean it." He frowned and raised Mum's wand, not sure what spell to use to make sure the old paper wouldn't be damaged by the cleaning. Evanesco might be too strong. He decided to try it on one of the maths papers first.
As he reached for one, the stain on the picture of Pere Alderman suddenly disappeared. He looked up to find Ron standing over him.
Ron shrugged. "Don't tell Hugo I told you this, but he used to have a bit of a problem at night. I asked Mum. Turns out she had a good spell for it. Never lost a sheet." He carefully prodded another one over, avoiding the stains. "The spell is Abluo Clementis. Pretty simple."
"But what if it cleans off the ink?" Teddy asked.
"Well, let's practice on some of the ones that are just doodles first then, shall we?" He nodded to Uncle Harry, who hunkered down with them, and a moment later, Vivian and Professor Sprout joined them as well. Teddy ruined one drawing of a forest stream, accidentally over-applying the spell and shredding the paper to nothing, and Uncle Harry singed the edges of a history timeline on his first try, but in the end, they got most of the filth off. Vivian asked Teddy if she could have the picture of herself - it showed her sitting on a rock beside a waterfall, laughing - and he agreed, but he kept the rest. He decided to put the classroom business in the box with the flotsam and jetsam he'd found with the Marauder's Map in his first year. The drawings would go on his wall.
He had other drawings of Dad's, but there was something he liked about reclaiming these particular ones. They weren't the best - or even especially good - but they'd been meant to hurt him, and it felt good to not let them.
Uncle Harry waited for the others to leave, then Conjured a cloth band to tie the papers together. "Are you all right, Teddy?"
"Fine."
"Are you sure?"
Teddy nodded.
Uncle Harry looked at him like he meant to say something - he'd always been uncomfortable with Teddy's collection for some reason - but ended up just taking a deep breath. "All right."
Teddy went back out to breakfast. Ruthless asked about the package and he showed her the drawings. She nodded politely and didn't rush him, but he could tell that she didn't find them interesting, so he finished quickly. She kissed his cheek and went to class. Across the table, Victoire was craning her neck to have a look. He nodded to her to come over, and she crawled under the table to come up on his side.
"They're like in your nursery," she said, leafing through them.
"Dad drew them."
"Like the you-know-what, too, then."
"Yeah." He showed her a few more. "Are we talking again?"
She shrugged. "Do you really especially like Ruth?"
"Sure."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I wish you liked her better, though. This is sort of a pain."
She wrinkled her nose. "All right. I'll like her if you want me to."
"That's the spirit," Teddy said.
Later that day, he saw her outside the greenhouses, dancing madly until she managed to get her shoes off. She threw them after Story, who was running back up toward the castle, laughing madly, and that evening, he saw her trying to sneak up toward Ravenclaw Tower. Groups of roaming Ravenclaws kept going by. He tapped her shoulder and shook his head, then went on by. The next morning, he went up to the Owlery and used a barn owl to send the Marauder's Map downstairs. Neither of them acknowledged it at the table. As soon as Story entered the Great Hall for lunch, his robes burst into scarlet and gold feathers. Victoire nodded somberly at Teddy as she passed him, bumping against his book bag, and he wasn't surprised to find the Map back inside of it.
On Thursday night, he tucked the drawings into his bag before he headed down to meet Uncle Harry for his Patronus lesson. They talked about the Greyback case on the way to the Shrieking Shack. There was no news, and there hadn't been any new attack. He was working with departments of Magical Law Enforcement in other countries.
"Take languages, Teddy," he said. "As many as you can. I've been chasing down translators at all hours. Anthony Goldstein's more than made up for a little lack of judgment - they've been having a werewolf problem outside Tel Aviv. His parents had him there the summer we were thirteen. I don't think there's a connection, but they've been trading information and I think we may have been able to help them out. Which doesn't help you much, but at least it's something."
"No, it's good," Teddy said. They'd reached the trapdoor, and he pulled himself up easily, but caught his toe on the edge and fell flat down before he could stand up. His nose was nearly in the blood stain. He really wanted to clean it, but he never seemed to get around to it. Maybe Molly Weasley's spell would work on it as well.
He went to the entrance hall and took the drawings out of his bag. The wallpaper was stained, but he thought he could clean it later. For now, he just put the drawings up, in the place where he'd imagined pictures of his family together here. He thought about naming the young werewolves the names Mum and Dad would have given his siblings, but they were real people and had their own names, so he supposed that would be weird. He left room in the midst of them for the photographs he'd managed to collect.
"Are you done?" Uncle Harry asked.
Teddy examined the wall. "I think so."
"Let's have dinner." He had set up the kitchen while Teddy was working, and served out Aunt Ginny's stew. He produced a loaf of fresh hot bread, and Teddy took one of the knives from the mug on the counter to slice it before they sat down across from one another, and Uncle Harry said, "There are three things I want to say to you tonight."
"You don't think I should have put the pictures up?"
"That wasn't one of them, actually. It's your house and your pictures. Is there some reason you think you shouldn't?"
"Well... I know you don't like it when I spend too much time in the past. Dwelling on dreams and whatnot."
"And are you?"
"No. I'm fine."
"All right then." Uncle Harry opened his briefcase and brought out a binder with a lot of heavy pages inside of it. On the cover was the seal of the Auror Department. "Do you know what this is?"
Teddy shook his head.
"This is a collection of defensive spells that we use at work. There are at least ten of them that I think you'd be able to do. Once we finish your Patronus, and teach it to talk, I think we'll move on to them. Keep up our lessons. Unless you're bored with them."
"No, not at all." Teddy looked eagerly at the book, wondering which ones Uncle Harry meant to give him. "What's the second thing?"
"I've had a long talk with Kirley Duke."
Teddy frowned. Kirley Duke was Donzo's father (neither of them was actually named "McCormack," though Donzo used it professionally and Kirley kept it visible, as it was his mother's name). "Why?"
"It seems he's invited all of Donzo's friends and their families out to their concert."
"I know," Teddy said. "I guessed it would be too hard."
Uncle Harry grinned. "Well, as it happens, it's pretty easy to secure Weird World. They already have good defenses, and no one is coming in for the concert other than their guests, and the American band that's performing with them. The Pondhoppers, I think. None of them seem to be spies for Greyback."
"Then I can... What about Granny? Will she let - ?"
"Andromeda has been invited as well, and has said quite frankly that if you don't want to go, she'll just have to go without you."
"I can really go, then?"
"Why do you think your friend asked his father to do the concert there?"
Teddy laughed, not from amusement but from sheer delight. "What's the third thing?"
"As long as you understand that we're going to keep up our lessons," Uncle Harry said, grinning, "will you please just do the Patronus Charm? We both know you can."
Teddy pulled his wand out of his pocket and yelled, "Expecto Patronum!"
From the tip of his wand, a white hawk exploded out, its feathers clear, its beak sharp, its eyes glowing. It flew around the kitchen, doing a loop around the floating candles, then circled down and landed on Teddy's outstretched arm. It dipped its beak to him and disappeared.
Uncle Harry smiled at him, then tucked into their supper. They spent the rest of the evening getting the kitchen cleaned up, Teddy periodically sending his Patronus soaring around, racing with Uncle Harry's, just for fun.