Chapter 42

ESCALATION

It did not take long before almost every Hogwarts student wanted to learn Defence Against the Dark Arts from me; Slytherins because they admired me, Ravenclaws because they always wanted to learn new things, Gryffindors because they wanted to become heroes and Hufflepuffs because otherwise they would have gone against the crowd and failed their studies at the same time. I did my best to keep the sessions in the Room of Requirement a fun way to spend the evenings, almost recreational. The sorry thing about most people was that they were not as studious as I was, and they disliked challenges. I had to do things in a way that appealed to them or I could not have turned them into minions – but this kind of manipulation was easy.

Teaching hundreds of students with differing basic skills at the same time would have been impossible, but luckily most of the students did not come to my sessions every day. Most of them decided to come once or twice a week, but there were some who were always present, mostly those who believed in Voldemort's return.

Many of the young students did not know any of the spells we were going to use. I delegated the teaching duty to a group of willing assistants; mostly Slytherins who had learned the spells in the Slytherin Duelling Club. As I gave each of them a group of younger ones to teach, I had a word with Draco.

"No Slytherins in your group," I said. "This is a good time for you to learn how to lead people from the other Houses as well. If you're going to be the most influential Malfoy who has ever lived, such an experience is invaluable. Teach them spells, but at the same time make sure they will remember you as an authority figure they can trust."

Draco grinned slyly and obliged. That was how I freed myself of the most frustrating task: dealing with annoying little kids. Disputes, quarrels and fights were unavoidable when children were involved, but I would not be the one to deal with such issues. That was what underlings were for. (And if anyone accused me of evading my responsibility, I could point out that I did not have any formal authority over the students while the prefects had.)

However, spells were not the most important thing I wanted to teach my pupils. They stared at me in bewilderment after this announcement, because wizards so often thought that the wand was the one and only solution to every problem.

"Spells are of no use if you won't survive to use them!" I barked. "It is common for people to panic the moment they find themselves in a situation where their lives are in danger. Before I teach you to fight, I must teach you to survive. You must be so used to curses flying at you that you still manage to be in control of yourselves. Only then can you fight back."

I demonstrated this point with a duel with Harry. During the course of two years we had given one another hundreds of dodging drills, practicing our reflexes so well that it had become like a second nature for us to move quickly without losing focus while Stinging Hexes were shot at us. If the rest of my students were not convinced by the demonstration, they surely were after I told them to form pairs and begin dodging drills of their own.

Most of them were actually eager to fire hexes at others with permission for a change, and I silently thanked Umbridge for making them so receptive towards me. Charms was the favourite class of most children with short attention span, because there they could do things with their wands, while more theoretical subjects such a Transfiguration and especially Arithmancy and Ancient Runes were considered tedious. My study group was full of practical work, moving around and having fun, and the children would learn to regard me as their leader with very little effort on my part.

While the younger students were learning basic combat spells and practicing dodging, I gathered a group of the most promising fighters. There were Quidditch players with a lot of experience in chaotic situations such as Harry, the Weasley twins and Cedric Diggory, enthusiastic members of the Slytherin Duelling Club such as Draco and Theo, and exceptionally talented people such as Hermione. They would be my elite force.

"The best way to learn fighting is to fight," I told them. "I will divide you into two groups, and then you will fight until only one group is still able to continue. You are permitted to use the Reviving Charm on your Stupefied comrades and to do whatever you would do in a real fight, except that all injuries must be avoided."

The fight was to take place in the massive maze that the Room of Requirement had created. This time there were walkways high above the maze walls so that I was able to observe the cooperation and tactics of my students. I put Harry and Draco in the same group; it was time for them to have a common goal.

As weeks passed, more students joined the battle simulations in the maze, and soon the battles that I observed from above were larger than any of those fought in Voldemort's First War. Sometimes I arranged battles with more than two opposing armies, just to make the situations more complex. Armies formed alliances and then betrayed their allies, there were spies and double agents and often the armies had to get creative and think hard how they could use their magical expertise to gain advantage over the other armies. Some decided to brew the Strengthening Solution to increase their physical capabilities and some started to practice the Disillusionment Charm in order to become an invisible adversary; my favourite of the tricks they came up with was when one army used spells to distort the voice of one of its members to sound like mine, and started to give false orders to the other armies supposedly from the overseer of the battle.

I had pleasantly little to do, because I could delegate almost everything to my willing underlings. Mostly I just watched the manoeuvres of my students and afterwards told them how they could improve their performance.

One day in October I found out that the Room of Requirement was able to provide a place in which it was possible to Disapparate as long as the destination was within the Room; perhaps it had once been used as an Apparition classroom. I rearranged the armies so that each one had several seventh-year students with the Apparition licence so that they could Side-Along-Apparate their comrades-in-arms around the maze.

"This is a most crucial battle skill," I said. "If you ever find yourself in a situation where Dark wizards storm your hideout and overpower your resistance, you will not be staying there. You'll just Disapparate."

"That sounds cowardly to me," complained a pompous Gryffindor by the name of Cormac McLaggen.

"You are thinking like a young Gryffindor again," I said. "To you the ideal way to lose a battle is to just keep fighting, never to give up and to take as many of your enemies with you to death. You know what it takes to win a battle, but do you know what it takes to win a war? It takes embracing the virtues of Slytherin. A heroic last stand is actually giving up in another way. In order never togive up you must be adaptive and flexible, you must know when to retreat and re-plan your tactics. The Gryffindor way eventually leads to defeat. It is not bravery, but bravado."

"We could fight a battle with McLaggen leading all heroes to make a last stand and someone else leading 'cowards' using flexible tactics," Draco suggested. "That way we will all know which way is the better one."

"By all means," I said. "But with Apparition in your arsenal, you must also include the Anti-Apparition Jinx. It is said that amateurs talk about strategy, but professionals about logistics. Magical logistics offer a vast variety of possibilities, and you must be trained to prevent your enemies from using them."

I had to admit that it filled me with a feeling of accomplishment to watch my students learning so much fighting skills, tactical thinking and general creativity. But their improvement during the evenings was next to nothing compared to how I improved during the days.

Every day I continued my Legilimency sessions with Karkaroff, absorbing the knowledge and expertise he had accumulated during his long life as a Dark wizard, scholar and teacher. Our duels became more evenly matched until Karkaroff no longer could overpower my dual-wanded style, and I proceeded to fight with only one. In December, when the Hogwarts students were preparing for the Christmas holiday and a break in my lessons, I finally managed to defeat Karkaroff with only one wand.

"Impressive," Karkaroff said. "But you will never learn to defeat the Dark Lord by fighting against me alone."

"I almost defeated him half a year ago," I said. "If I'd had a few more minutes to place more Blasting Curses, I would've pierced his Shield. Besides, I don't need to defeat him alone. At Hogwarts I've got hundreds of people who will accompany me. Even Voldemort will have trouble surviving so many people firing curses at him."

One way to increase the challenge Karkaroff offered me was to use Lockhart's wand instead of my own, but I was unwilling to do so. While it surely was a fine wand and I had mastered it, I did not have any kind of personal connection with it. It felt clumsy and not up to my standards, and I was afraid it would never get any better. I needed a new secondary wand, one with at least some kind of connection to me.

One night I had a very lucid dream. In it I slithered around some indoors space, studied nooks and crannies, bit an annoying man who tried to disturb my exploration and slithered around some more. All in all, it was a very pleasant dream. What was not pleasant was that I was woken up by strong vibrations that made sleeping impossible.

The vibrations seemed to originate from my bedside table where I had put the two-way mirror whose pair was with Harry. Grumpy and annoyed, I tried to grab the mirror, but then I realised that I had no arms. I had turned into my snake Animagus form during the dream.

I turned back into a human, and the vibrations that a snake had difficulties to understand clearly became very loud human voice in my ears.

"Hello! Are you there, Tom?"

I picked up the mirror and growled,

"You'd better have a good reas…"

But it was not Harry looking at me from the mirror, but Ron. Suddenly, I was completely awake.

"What's the matter?"

"It's Harry," Ron said nervously. "He's not well, and… er…"

"Tell him your dad's been attacked!" Harry's frantic voice cried from beyond the frame.

"Er… you probably heard that," Ron said, looking sheepish.

"A snake bit him, I saw it, it wasn't a dream, it was a vision from Voldemort's mind!"

The dream! So, it had been like the one where Lucius had told Voldemort about my diary. Had Harry seen this one through his strange connection to Voldemort? He had, I suddenly remembered, dreamt about Pettigrew being in league with Voldemort almost a year before we had encountered the rat-man as a Death Eater.

"Go downstairs and open the portrait door of the Gryffindor common room," I said to Ron and put the mirror down.

Dressing up took only five seconds and a few swishes of my wand, grabbing the Communication Parchment of the Order took a few more, and then I summoned Dobby and told him to Side-Along-Apparate me to the seventh-floor corridor of Hogwarts near Gryffindor Tower. Once there, I ran to the portrait door and reached it the very moment Ron opened it from the inside.

"Wow, you were quick!" Ron said.

"Special Floo of the Order," I said. Telling lies was so natural to me that sometimes I did not need to make them up consciously at all.

Harry was very relieved to see me.

"Tom! I saw…"

"Yes, I already heard everything I need to know," I said. "Come, we're going to Dumbledore's office."

He jumped out of his bed and followed me, Ron on his heels.

On the way to the Headmaster's office I wrote about our coming on the Communication Parchment. Dumbledore was still active at that late hour and wrote in reply that he was ready to meet us. I walked at a brisk pace, but it seemed to be too slow for Harry who had to stop himself from sprinting ahead.

The password of the gargoyle guarding the revolving staircase was 'Fizzing Whizzbee,' and we strode the stairs up two steps at a time.

"Ron's dad – Mr Weasley – has been attacked by a giant snake," Harry blurted the moment we entered Dumbledore's office.

The Headmaster stared at me rather than Harry with a curious expression.

"I believe Harry saw it through his connection to Voldemort, the one that makes his scar hurt when Voldemort is near," I explained. "It seems likely it was a true vision, not a nightmare. If I recall correctly, in the last Order meeting Arthur was given guard duty for tonight."

"That is true," Dumbledore said and leapt into action.

He told two former Heads of Hogwarts to visit their other portraits, to raise an alarm and to keep watch; he sent a message to Professor McGonagall to bring the other Weasley children at once; he gave a mission to his phoenix; and he played with some of his instruments. The former Heads reported back shortly, confirming that Mr Weasley had been attacked and telling that he had been taken to St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. Dumbledore nodded at them in satisfaction and used the Portkey Charm on an old kettle. McGonagall arrived with Ginny, Fred and George, and as the situation was being explained to them, I began to wonder why I was still there. It was not my business in the slightest, and I had a well-earned rest to attend to.

Suddenly a flame flashed in the middle of the office and a phoenix feather was left behind.

"It is Fawkes's warning," Dumbledore said, catching the feather as it fell, and I eyed it with great interest. Perhaps I could stay for a little while longer after all. "Professor Umbridge must know you are out of your beds… Minerva, go and head her off – tell her any story –"

Dumbledore turned to me.

"Tom, I need these five away from Hogwarts in case Umbridge comes, and you must watch over them. This Portkey will take you to the Headquarters; there is no one there at the moment. Once I have contacted Molly, they can move on to The Burrow."

"You will keep us informed about what is going on?"

"Fawkes will see to that."

"Wonderful! I mean, that's all right."

We gathered around the kettle, readying ourselves for transportation.

Just a moment later I was in the living room of Greenane Castle with Harry, Ron, Ginny, Fred and George. They all looked frightened, the Weasleys anxious to leave for the hospital and Harry rubbing his scar absent-mindedly without a pause. I did not take a seat as they did, because I had a vague suspicion that called for serious investigation.

"Harry, I want to speak to you about the vision, alone."

"Yeah, OK," Harry mumbled distractedly.

He followed me into the entrance hall, and I locked the door of the living room behind me.

"Stupefy."

Harry slumped down, and I reached into his scar in the same way I had dealt with Voldemort's Horcruxes the day I had bound them to me in the Chamber of Secrets.

My suspicion proved true: there was a sliver of Voldemort's soul locked in Harry's scar, a totally pathetic sliver. Voldemort's maimed soul had probably begun to spontaneously disintegrate, and Harry had become an accidental Horcrux. The binding ritual of the soul fragment had obviously not been done, and it was probably the reason the scar had hurt. I hastily did the binding ritual, but to me instead of Voldemort, and the soul fragment was immediately tamed.

Four Horcruxes found, but two still remained. I grinned briefly and Revived Harry.

"What happened?" he asked and touched his scar.

"I used some mind magic techniques on your mind to find out why you saw the vision," I said. "I added certain protections on you which will probably prevent your scar from hurting again – but you might still see visions from Voldemort's mind, I'm not sure."

"It doesn't ache anymore," Harry said. "The pain did not go fully away before now."

"Good, that means it worked. Let's go back."

As we returned to the living room, a flame flashed again, and a phoenix feather and a piece of parchment were left behind. The Weasleys and Harry clustered together to read the message from Mrs Weasley, never noticing how the phoenix feather disappeared into my robes.

It seemed my wand problem was about to find a solution.

Mr Weasley survived the attack, and when Harry and the Weasley children left Greenane Castle with Mrs Weasley, I headed home to continue my rest. The next day I had business in Diagon Alley, a special Christmas present for myself.

Mr Ollivander was reading behind a counter when I entered his shop. It was quiet; most of his business took place in July and August, when young witches and wizards purchased their first wands. In the winter, the shop was open once a week or on appointment.

"Welcome, sir," Mr Ollivander said and eyed me sharply. "You were the Triwizard champion for Hogwarts – but unlike most students of Hogwarts, you did not use one of my wands, but an old Persian one."

"I'm originally from New Zealand. However, I'm told you make the best wands."

"High quality is the pride of my family."

"I'd like you to make as good a wand as possible using this as a core," I said and offered the phoenix feather to him.

"It can be done," he said and studied the feather very closely. Suddenly, he drew a breath. "Now this is a surprise… I have handled this phoenix's feathers before, two of them to be precise. Very powerful wands indeed… and both in remarkable hands."

"That's good, I'd like the new wand to be powerful as well. Do you, by any chance, still happen to have in your storage wood from the same tree from which this wand's wood was derived?"

I showed him my yew wand. He turned pale and swallowed audibly.

"How come you have that wand?" he whispered.

"I stole it from the remarkable hands of its previous owner. Surely you've heard rumours of what happened last June at the end of the Triwizard Tournament?"

"I have, but not about that wand changing owners. This feather is of the same phoenix whose feather is in that wand."

I nodded. It was just as I had guessed. Phoenixes were rare, after all.

"And you want me to make a new wand with using material from the same tree as well." Mr Ollivander looked intrigued. "To answer your question, I do not have wood of that particular yew tree in my storage – usually I do not use wood from any individual tree for more than one wand – but I remember where the tree is. It should still be there; yews are, after all, long-lived."

"A perfect copy, if possible."

"As you wish."

"And not a word to anyone about this project. I do not want the owner of certain remarkable hands to know I'm dealing with these materials."

"Of course," Mr Ollivander said. "I have been afraid that he might come for me ever since he returned."

I left the shop with a pleasant feeling of anticipation. Two wands with a strong connection to me were probably better than even the legendary Deathstick that the Dark Lord Loxias had wielded.

Many people in the Order of the Phoenix were intrigued by the fact that Harry had seen into Voldemort's mind.

"Do you understand how useful that could be?" Moody asked in the next meeting. "I bet no one in the history of warfare has had as good an advantage as this! You-Know-Who would sacrifice most of his Death Eaters if it was the price for seeing into your mind, Dumbledore."

"Surely you are not suggesting that we open Harry's mind to Voldemort even more?" Dumbledore asked and popped a sherbet lemon into his mouth.

"Of course I am! We could learn about his plans, his whereabouts, his weaknesses. One of us was saved because of Potter's vision. That's infinitely more than what our actual spy has accomplished."

Snape glared at Moody with an unusually ugly expression.

"But if Voldemort learns about Harry's power of vision, he will use the mental connection against us, to feed us misinformation," Dumbledore pointed out.

"We must make sure he won't learn about it," Moody said.

If he doesn't know now, he will once Snape visits him, I thought glumly.

"Harry's strong intrusion to his mind may already have alerted him to the connection," Dumbledore argued. "I am sure he would not talk about it to his Death Eaters lightly, thus making it unlikely that Severus would learn about it. I have been concerned about Voldemort trying to use Harry to spy on us ever since his return. I think I saw a shadow of his presence in Harry's eyes shortly after the vision."

"In that case we can use the connection the other way too, to feed him misinformation," Moody said. "Let's make a plan and tell about it to Potter in an inconspicuous way, and then the Death Eaters will try to foil the plan, but we will be ready in an ambush."

"If the connection shows one vision every half a year, it won't be of much use," Bill Weasley said.

"That's why we need to open his mind more to You-Know-Who," Moody said.

"That can't be healthy, especially for someone so young!" Remus cried out.

"Health is in danger during wartime, it is inevitable," Moody said mercilessly. "I lost my eye, my leg and a part of my nose in my fight against the Dark Arts, but it was worth it. Many more eyes, legs and noses were spared because I brought so many Death Eaters to justice."

"But it was your own choice. You can't make that choice for Harry!"

Dumbledore shook his head and popped another sherbet lemon into his mouth. "There are far too many risks in this matter. I think it is better to help Harry close his mind from Voldemort."

Moody huffed in annoyance, but most members of the Order agreed with Dumbledore. Moody had a point, but what was surprising to me was that he was so willing to abandon the overly cautious and reactive strategy he had been favouring until now.

After the meeting, when the other members had left the Headquarters, Dumbledore had a word with me.

"Tom, are you familiar with Occlumency?"

"It is one of the mind arts, to protect the mind from external influences," I said neutrally, not mentioning that I had mastered the art in the fear of him. "You're planning of teaching it to Harry, I take it?"

"It would protect his mind from visions from Voldemort's mind and from Voldemort's intrusions to his. But there is the question of who would teach him. I consider it too risky to open his mind in my presence. Alastor is a bit rough, and Occlumency training should be started delicately. Severus and Harry do not get along. But you, Tom – I am sure Harry would trust you with this matter."

I had once made the decision not to tell Harry anything about the mind arts, because then he might have realised that I had studied his memories very thoroughly in order to learn how to manipulate him effectively. Now it seemed that the advantage would be lost.

"The mind arts are complex, but a person as talented and dedicated as you should be able to learn Legilimency," Dumbledore continued. "I am sure I do not need to explain its usefulness during a war. It would be good for both you and Harry; you would learn Legilimency and he Occlumency."

I happened to have some kind of natural talent in Legilimency, and possessing a girl several times was great practice, but Dumbledore did not need to know about these things either.

"All right, I'll do it," I said. "Defending the mind is even more important than regular defence. If, hypothetically, I was teaching Harry Defence Against the Dark Arts behind Umbridge's back, it would only be a part of the job to teach him Occlumency too."

"Yes, hypothetically," Dumbledore agreed. "If, hypothetically, you were doing such a thing, I would hope you were successful."

As I left the Headquarters, I wondered whether it was a good idea to open Harry's mind in my presence. If Voldemort truly had access to Harry's mind and I was the person Harry interacted with during the moments of greatest mental vulnerability, Voldemort might learn what Harry knew about my connection to the diary. And if Voldemort learned that I was his former Horcrux, he would no doubt let Dumbledore know about it.

The attack on Mr Weasley seemed to start a new phase in Voldemort's activities. He was actively up to something, and that something required his personal exploration trip to the Ministry of Magic. It was clear that my time of preparing for war was running out, and during the Christmas holiday I practiced relentlessly with Karkaroff.

And so, in the second morning after the Hogwarts term had started and I had continued my Defence Against the Dark Arts study group, what I had been expecting for months was announced on the front page of the Daily Prophet.

"It's begun," I said darkly and showed the newspaper to Karkaroff. "Mass breakout from Azkaban – twelve Death Eaters have rejoined Voldemort's ranks."

Their pictures jeered at me rudely. There were the two sons of my former dormmate Edmond Lestrange, the son of my other former dormmate Matthias Mulciber, the oldest daughter of Cygnus Black, my old school friend Quentin Travers – and most important of all, Augustus Rookwood, former Unspeakable and the Contact Number 714 of Grindelwald's spy network.

"Oh, look, Antonin Dolohov is one of them!" Karkaroff said.

"You know what this means? We must abduct Rookwood before he regains his strength and uses his prison-break experience on Nurmengard!"

"Yes, you're right," Karkaroff said. "I don't want Grindelwald ever to be set free! But how are you going to abduct Rookwood?"

I let my gaze wander around all the items I had hoarded by the walls of the dining room of my new home. On the topmost shelf of a bookcase there was a small diary purchased from a Muggle variety store on Vauxhall Road, London, over fifty years previously.

"I think I have a plan," I said slowly. "And it serves more than one purpose."

Albus Dumbledore sat in the Headmaster's office, reading the Daily Prophet's article about the twelve escaped Death Eaters. He remembered many of them from their school years; most of them powerful and talented people with great potential to do good things for the wizarding world. But Tom Riddle had dragged them to darkness and made them tools of destruction.

The chess board was waiting on a side table. Dumbledore flicked the Elder Wand, and many more pieces levitated out of a cabinet and took their places on the board. Two black knights representing Bellatrix Lestrange and Antonin Dolohov; two black rooks representing Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange; several black pawns representing the lesser Death Eaters. And finally, a black queen representing Augustus Rookwood occupied the place next to the other black queen that Dumbledore had added on the board the previous June.

The black king still stood alone in a corner.

Posted on the 19th of May, 2021.