Chapter 32: Cat and Mouse
Tonks accompanied Harry to Dumbledore's office come Monday morning, to see him off. Harry and Dumbledore flooed down to Grimmauld Place, where Pansy waited in the parlour.
Dumbledore's eyes glinted as he smiled at Harry. "I'll see you shortly."
He stepped back into the fireplace. Once the flames returned to an orange colour, Pansy squeezed Harry with a contented hum. "I'm glad I get to see you for a few minutes, at least."
"You too." Harry nuzzled the top of her head. "No Ron? I figured he'd be around."
"He is, but he said we can go ahead with all the time you have."
Harry laughed.
"You must be coming to the Order meeting later, right?" Pansy looked up at him. "Maybe you can stick around."
"Maybe," Harry replied. "There's not a whole lot going on at Hogwarts that really needs me. I honestly think I'm only there to make the students feel better."
"Hogwarts needs Aurors, doesn't it?" Pansy let Harry go, holding his hands loosely in hers. "If you're right that Bellatrix Lestrange is running through some sort of to-do list You-Know-Who left behind, then it's a hot target."
"I agree with you and all. Just right now, when all's gone quiet again and I've seen what kind of measures Hogwarts has to protect itself against insurgents, it's hard to believe anyone could manage."
"Well, that makes me feel better about you being there."
"I'm sure."
Pansy's warm smile was infectious. Since Harry was running low on time before he needed to be at the Ministry, the parlour fell quiet spare whatever part of a snog was audible.
Harry had to pull himself back before they could get too carried away. He'd grown accustomed to spending as much time with Pansy as they pleased. Separation, stress, and flirty playfulness via their messenger conversations left him wanting. He could see a similar mood in Pansy's eyes.
A new smile came up over Pansy before she rubbed his hip. "I probably don't have to tell you to come find me later if you can."
"You really don't," Harry replied, "but I like hearing it anyway."
She snorted, pulling Harry down for one last lingering kiss. That Pansy ended it by tugging on his bottom lip with her teeth did about the exact opposite of help Harry settle down.
"Good luck," she sweetly told him.
"Thanks."
The Ministry Atrium was an absolute ghost town. Harry's footsteps echoed off all its walls, as did the water trickling in the Fountain of Magical Brethren. Voices murmured ahead at the security post. Eric and the Magical Enforcement agents posted there hushed as Harry approached.
"Morning," he greeted them all.
"Wand?" Eric asked.
Harry went through the motions of checking in. The other side of security was just as barren. A couple lifts weren't even in use. They just sat open, waiting.
The lift came to a stop at Level Four. Harry blinked when the door opened, then grinned. "Hi."
Hermione brightened as well. "Hey!"
There were three other people with her. Harry's expression straightened out of respect that one was Amos Diggory. The other man was about the same age as Mr. Diggory, but with less hair and slightly stooped. A grey-haired witch with a colourful shawl and a multitude of jewelry accompanied the three of them into the lift.
Her green eyes were bright as she sized Harry up. "We must all be going to the same place."
"Must be," Harry said.
"You've met my superior, haven't you?" Hermione asked Harry. "This is Madam Prickle. She runs the Beings Division."
"Charmed." When she extended a hand to Harry, the bangles on her wrist clacked against each other.
"You know Mr. Diggory, of course," Hermione said a little breathlessly. "And this is Mr. Grimblehawk."
"Heard a lot about you from Hagrid." Mr. Grimblehawk winked at Harry as they shook hands.
"Cheers." Harry managed a brief smile at that, although turned more serious after extending a hand to Mr. Diggory. They'd passed each other at the Ministry, but never exchanged more than amicable nods. "Been all right?"
"Just fine." Mr. Diggory's voice had lost its boisterousness over the past few years. "I think we'd all be a lot better if we didn't have to deal with this bollocks."
"Can't argue with that," Harry replied.
He wanted to ask Hermione why she was coming with them all up to the meeting, but it didn't feel like a good time or place. The thought she could've given him a heads up was followed by Harry trying to remember if he'd even checked the messenger they shared over the weekend. She might have said something and he just didn't notice.
Hermione was a brand of excited that Harry knew well. He quickly got the feeling from the way she shifted her weight and how her face glowed that she was coming to the meeting because she had something meaningful to present. If she'd made some big find about druids, Harry could only hope that his work supplemented it.
The five of them passed through reception. They went into the same conference room Harry sat with Scrimgeour after the honours ceremony. Harry was glad to see that Scrimgeour's old office door was closed. It was only four days ago that his body had laid on the floor in there.
The conference room was full, but it didn't hold as many people as Harry expected. Dumbledore had made it here, as had Gawain and the heads of each Ministry division and relevant offices. Madam Bones had taken the seat where Scrimgeour once sat, and Percy was to her right. The two of them talked under their breath about the parchment they parsed through. Even not being able to hear what they said, Harry could tell they were a little stiff and awkward. Percy looked tired.
Harry headed over to where Dumbledore was. Hermione followed and took the other seat beside him. Madam Bones flicked her wand to close the conference room door.
"That's all of us," Madam Bones said. "Thank you for coming. I'm happy to report that the weekend was quiet. The flipside of that is that we haven't a grasp yet where the Death Eaters have taken cover, or where the dementors retreated to once they left Azkaban. I've alerted Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to keep their eyes peeled for any signs of them. This is of course on top of watching for the Death Eaters themselves.
"My understanding is that a breakthrough in the Beings Division may have solved the mystery as to how the Death Eaters are getting around without detection?" Madam Bones' gaze landed on Madam Prickle.
"It indeed seems very promising. Promising enough to present here and see how it stands up against scrutiny." Madam Prickle placed a hand on Hermione's shoulder. "I should clarify, it ended up a collaborative affair between my division and Abraham's. If Hermione has figured it out, their method of travel involves a very rare beast."
"I made copies of a picture I found." Hermione's hands shook a little as she opened the folder she'd brought in with her. "In the interest of giving credit where it's due, I owe my idea to Draco Malfoy. He's the one that suggested it. There's a miniature one of these in the lobby fountain at Den Sultne Jotunn Inn in Bergen. This is a hafgufa."
Hermione split her pile and passed half to Harry. Harry stalled while looking at the picture before taking the top one and handing off the rest to Dumbledore. His hands started to shake too as he studied the tortoise-looking creature. Where its shell was supposed to be was a tree-covered hill. It had to be massive.
"You think this is what Fantomøy is?" Harry asked Hermione as parchment rustled around the table.
"The evidence I have points toward it." Hermione turned breathless again, excited. "I started with what I knew from everything you learned about it. It's referred to as Fantomøy—Phantom Island—in Trondheim. That's because sometimes it's findable, sometimes it's not. That could just mean it moves around. You and Professor Parasca tried to find it back in autumn by combing the fjord it was supposed to be located in. You never found it, and Hildegard told you it wasn't under a Fidelius Charm when you asked her. Her go-to response about it was that she didn't remember where it was. That's a strange or evasive answer unless it's something with a mind of its own.
"I also got more details out of Malfoy about what his mum had to say about the island," Hermione continued. "They didn't talk about it very much when she was at his house in Bergen, but Mrs. Malfoy said enough. She mentioned to Malfoy that she thought Bellatrix took her off the island because the sun had set for the last time. That implies that where Fantomøy was located experiences polar night. Trondheim doesn't. It's too far south.
"Mrs. Malfoy even told Malfoy she thought it was located somewhere up by Tromsø, but he was more confident about Trondheim because our understanding at the time placed it there. Then I started thinking. It wasn't ever confirmed because there was no legal record of Hildegard living in Tromsø, but Erik Ramstad's brother said she did. We confirmed Erik lived there. He owned a flat, and he and Hildegard were going together for a few years before they bought property in Bergen. We could never go any further back on where Hildegard lived. Tromsø is where she first appeared. So why the leap between Trondheim and Tromsø? It's possible that the hafgufa just swam up along the coast. Hildegard might have let it just roam free in the Norwegian Sea while she came ashore to try and find Magnus."
Hermione opened her folder again and passed around the next stack of parchment. It was a copy of a newspaper clipping. It was in Norwegian. There was a picture of what looked like a boy around five years old attached to the article.
"I didn't have to look very far to find potential evidence of Voldemort and the Death Eaters having recently been in the area," Hermione said. "This is from yesterday's release of Tromsø's Muggle newspaper. This boy's name is Finn Larsen. His family lives outside a tiny village called Tromvik near the sea. Finn was last seen on the ninth of December. His twin brother said they'd seen a big snake a couple days before, but of course it was discounted because snakes that naturally occur in Norway don't get large enough to eat a small child."
"Nagini, you think?" Dumbledore was the one to ask.
"Possibly," Hermione replied. "Most likely, in fact. Based on all this, I reached out to Gawain about perhaps finding evidence that a hafgufa had been present at Azkaban. He had a couple Aurors do a quick dive to see if anything got stirred up on the seafloor. Sure enough, it had."
Gawain nodded. "You can see tracks that look like they were made by fins."
"I can't say its conclusive because I've only been looking into it for a couple days—" (Harry realized then that Hermione looked like she was running on caffeine and adrenaline as opposed to any real rest) "—and I have to stress that hafgufen are very, very rare. At the same time, Hildegard was a druid. We know she associated with other magical creatures, a huldra and a nøkken. I have pictures of those here too, for reference. . ."
Harry along with everyone else was quiet as they parsed through Hermione's evidence. He agreed that it was compelling.
"What I like about the theory is that it explains how they could've approached Azkaban without tripping any alarms," Gawain said. "Creature wards are touchy enough to begin with. If a hafgufa could be mistaken as a landmass instead, it wouldn't register at all. It wouldn't come against any resistance, because why would you need resistance against a landmass? They don't typically move around."
"The Death Eaters would be restricted to travel on the waterways," Edward Scot, the head of International Magical Cooperation, said. "Hildegard Ramstad is with them again, yes? What was her impression of how much the British Ministry knows about Fantomøy?"
Harry opened up his notes, gaze down to ignore all the eyes on him in the room. If Hermione was right, some of the information he'd brought for the meeting was already outdated. "She pulled one over on me, if all this is true. I felt like everything I had on Fantomøy was concrete. My information came from an objective source in Trondheim. It was corroborated by other people who lived there. I never even thought about the island moving, although Kingsley and I had discussed the possibility it might have sunk. Would that be mutually exclusive with it being a hafgufa? What if something similar to a Bubblehead Charm is cast over it?"
That wasn't something anybody wanted to hear. Harry hated to be a killjoy, but he was only trying to be a realist. If they didn't like him saying that much, the rest of Harry's briefing was going to deliver a death-blow to morale.
"We can't rule anything out," Madam Bones eventually said. "We really have no idea what we're up against. All we can rely on is consideration of how Voldemort's mind worked and what his goals were. The siege on Azkaban is, regrettably, predictable with hindsight. Voldemort broke Death Eaters out of there before. He took advantage of Fudge's incompetence the last time. The dementors could be lured away, leaving nothing to stop the prisoners. We didn't expect the Death Eaters to come back to the door. Add this unpredictability to using magic that we're not acquainted with and, well. . ."
Madam Bones didn't have to finish her thought. She segued instead, her gaze landing on Harry now. "Since we're already discussing matters pertaining to druids, what do you have? This must certainly tie in tightly to Hildegard."
"Sort of." Harry chuckled mirthlessly as he went down his notes. "Er, I guess we can skip over what I had on Fantomøy. That was one of the few things I actually thought was confirmable. Hildegard was really good at dodging the truth. Dagmar even said to me once that her mum had an allergy to it. She was never going to trust anyone that talked to her on behalf of the Ministry. Now we know why.
"Bellatrix told Dagmar about a connection that existed between her and Voldemort. We confirmed that it was true when I hit Voldemort with a Killing Curse. Last March, Hildegard and Erik refused to turn to the Ministry for help when confronted. Hildegard had told Kingsley that she needed Voldemort alive. At the time, it was assumed she was talking about Magnus. Parasca pointed out when we viewed Kingsley's memory of the event that Hildegard wasn't specific about which 'he' she referred to.
"The only things I can take away from her as being absolutely true are what came from other sources," Harry said. "We can confirm that Hildegard's a druid. It passes down through the bloodline, and Dagmar had magical abilities that are exclusive to druids. Dagmar was also able to get into contact with an old clan member of Hildegard's. Through Helka we were also able to confirm that Hildegard was centuries old. Hildegard also had a son, Bjorn. Marit Olsen—Magnus Norheim's sister—told me that Magnus was playing dad to him and Dagmar.
"The last confirmable thing is Magnus stole something from Hildegard that contained part of Voldemort's soul." Harry mindlessly toyed with the edge of his messenger page. "Bellatrix confirmed it existed to Dagmar and Malfoy.
"That's where the absolutes end." Harry paused. "Everything else is up in the air. I broke those up into degrees of possibility, as well as things like importance. For example, we can't confirm that Bjorn is actually dead for technical reasons. Nobody has actually seen his body or knows where he was buried. Hildegard didn't even remind Dagmar he existed when she started to forget him. Dagmar had nightmares because she allegedly saw Magnus kill Bjorn, but who knows? Dreams are weird. The only source I have on Bjorn is Hildegard, and she has zero credibility."
"If you're demanding bodies as criteria to confirm whether someone is alive or dead, that's going to put Voldemort back on the table," Madam Bones pointed out.
"I know," Harry said with hesitation. "That's why I have things broken up in degrees. I can't confirm it, but I was the one that cast the Killing Curse. Kingsley was a witness. It's more likely that Bellatrix, Wormtail, and whoever else was there just took his body with them. Just not a hundred percent. I mean, I survived a direct Killing Curse. Why couldn't Voldemort?"
"What about Dagmar?" Hermione asked.
"Same category." Harry wished more now than at any other point during this meeting he'd known Hermione was going to be here. He would've liked to give her a heads up that this would be discussed. "Bellatrix told Malfoy and Dagmar that if Voldemort died, Dagmar died. That's how she worded it. There's room for vagueness in that. It could be that what happened in Bergen was something like what happened to me. There was a weird noise when my Killing Curse hit Voldemort, almost like an elastic band snapping. It might have been a rebound. Voldemort could've been spared if Dagmar took it for him."
"I've become familiar with the Killing Curse in the course of duty," Gawain said in a deliberate tone. "That's not a normal sound."
"I wasn't looking, is the thing," Harry replied. "I didn't see what happened. Only Kingsley did. Malfoy tackled me right after I cast it."
Silence fell over the room. Every face had gone long around the table. Percy removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"It's not certain, just to say again," Harry spoke after a moment. "This is all speculation. Speculating has given me a lot of wrong answers before. This could be another one. It's more likely that he's dead. His body could be gone because Bellatrix would never leave it there for us. Things could still be happening because Bellatrix knew what Voldemort's next moves were going to be. The other possibility is that there's something that could yet be done about the phylactery. It was incomplete according to Bellatrix, but that could mean anything. Parasca taught us in Defence class that liches can regenerate bodies from phylacteries. An incomplete one could just mean that Voldemort needs outside help. That could've been why they chose to hit Azkaban like they did. Hildegard was the one he worked on the phylactery with. If anyone would know what could be done, she would."
The meeting went on like that. Harry hated being such a bearer of doubt upon them all, but the good thing about being in a room with highly-experienced officials was that they took everything in stride. The majority of these people had dealt with Voldemort since before Harry was even born. That this war wasn't over—and could be far from it—wasn't a new concept at all. Madam Bones did express some concern about Scrimgeour having already announced to the wizarding world that Voldemort was dead. Dumbledore agreed that his own endorsement of that idea may have been too rash.
It was coming up on noon when Madam Bones wrapped things up. Harry and Hermione in particular had given her a lot to do for the rest of the day. She mentioned getting back into contact with the Ministers for Magic in all countries that bordered the North Sea. If the Death Eaters could control the hafgufa, then they were most likely heading back north to Tromsø—maybe even further north than that—to hide in the dark while they planned their next move. Nobody had a clue how quickly hafgufen could move. Harry hoped with everyone else that it wasn't fast. If it was, then the Death Eaters could be literally anywhere in the world.
The lift Harry rode down in was pretty full until Level Four. By the Atrium, it was only him and Dumbledore left. They passed by security together.
"Do you need me back at Hogwarts, Professor?" Harry asked. "I was thinking I might just hang around London until the Order meeting later."
"That should be fine," Dumbledore told him. "There was a lot of information in that meeting. It's best to relax afterward so that one can better retain it."
"Yeah."
Harry followed Dumbledore through the floo network back to Grimmauld Place. The parlour was empty this time, so Dumbledore just carried on. Harry headed for the stairs, pausing to listen when he heard voices down in the kitchen. He didn't hear Pansy among Ron, Fred, and George's conversation.
Sure enough, Pansy was laying on Harry's bed in a robe with her hair up in a towel. She had her nose in the latest issue of Witch Weekly.
Pansy perked up. "You're here for the day, then?"
"Yep." Harry would've never in his life said anything of the sort to Dumbledore, but he had something a little better than just relaxing in mind. "Caught you at a good time?"
A gradual smile came up over Pansy. "I haven't even bothered putting knickers on yet. So yes, you did."
She indeed hadn't, Harry found after working Pansy out of her robe and towel through the course of snogging. He felt a bit silly to be so needy for her after only a weekend apart. It was weird to be back at Hogwarts, though. Harry and Tonks had their own self-assigned tasks to do, and they weren't there to socialize anyway. Ginny had caught up to Harry in search for an update on everything and to ask if he would be part of the Defence Association she'd resurrected. Harry didn't have time for that, but Ginny ended up a decent soundboard as Harry put his notes together for this morning. That was about it other than going back and forth with Pansy and Ron in their respective messengers. It was a lonely post.
Focusing on something other than that for a little while was what Harry needed. He'd done all that he could for now. Clearing his head was exactly what he should do. Harry and Pansy even had a good laugh when Pansy stilled long enough while riding Harry to ask him to pass her hairbrush and a hair tie. The way her expression would shift if Harry pressed his hips up against her was a decent way to occupy him during the short delay.
Harry felt better when they were done, but still needed some sort of contact. Pansy's bare, warm body was nice against him.
"So the meeting went all right, then?" Pansy asked.
"Just fine, I think," Harry replied. "I was the downer, Hermione the upper. She might have figured out how the Death Eaters are getting around. I put it on the table that Voldemort is still alive."
Pansy's lax expression fell toward something resembling disappointment. "You can't be serious."
"We just can't confirm he's gone." Harry sighed. "It's one of those things where we might as well assume the absolute worst and then go from there. It goes like this. Best case scenario, I did Voldemort in. Next best case, I destroyed what remained of his soul in that body, but there's a segment still out there somewhere that could be used to bring him back. Worst case, my Killing Curse rebounded off him and hit Dagmar, and Voldemort walked away unscathed."
"That's what you're assuming, then? That he's still out there walking around, basically having faked his death?"
"It's better to be prepared for it than not."
"I guess." Pansy ran her fingers over Harry's upper arm. "That's unnerving."
"I'd rather not be surprised by it. The way I'm looking at it right now, it honestly seems like the most likely option. Gawain said that the sound I heard when I hit Voldemort with the Killing Curse isn't normal. The more I hear about the Azkaban breakout, the more it reminds me of the way Voldemort acts. Bellatrix isn't as organized as he is. I'm sure she could get it together if he left instructions, but to this degree? It's her fault I got him. She saw me, didn't think, summoned Voldemort, and it was over. That's how she usually works."