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Chapter Thirty-Nine—The Politics of War

Albus shuddered as he made his way down the road towards the small shack that he had identified as belonging to the Gaunt family. There was a wet, rotting smell here, even though he had seen no pools or even fallen leaves. The trees looked too bare to be rotting. The ground was merely bare grass.

But it was probably part of the defensive spells Tom had cast here. Albus willed himself to ignore the scent, and instead drew his wand and rounded the last corner left in the path.

The shack had almost collapsed in on itself. The doorway only showed splinters of wood and darkness. Albus halted, concentrating, and because he was looking for it, he saw it: the way the darkness broke apart for a second, and a lashing tail showed before it vanished again.

"Using serpents to protect your family home," Albus murmured as he readied a spell that would banish the door-guardian. "Not very creative, Tom. But effective. Perhaps."

He twisted his wand in a corkscrew and sang the incantation instead of speaking it. His wand began to glow, and light trailed slowly away from it, spreading through the door. It was thick, rich radiance, as yellow as a lamp seen from far away in a welcoming window as a traveler came home. Albus watched as it ate the darkness, not even leaving a corner of shadow behind for the door-guardian to hide.

There was an agonized hiss, and the creature died. Albus nodded as he stepped through the shack's door, ducking as he did so. Whether the spell had been made of darkness or had simply eaten it, it was gone now.

He found himself in a room so thick with gloom and dust that he had to cast another series of spells so that small balls of light would fly into the corners and hover there, illuminating the floor and the furniture, such as it was. There was a poor, scrubby table here, and a series of broken chairs. The fireplace hadn't been used in years and had partially collapsed. The light showed the remains of a snake's corpse in one corner, the small, pitiful bones perhaps the sacrifice Tom had used to create his door-guardian.

Albus moved in a slow circle. For long moments, he wondered if there was anything here, if perhaps Tom had decided this wasn't a secure hiding place and had already moved it.

Then he felt a stir of power beneath the floor in a corner. Albus smiled and braced himself at the same time. He knew there would be stronger defenses here than there had been on the door.

When he reached down to move the floorboard, his hand burst into flames.

Albus jumped back, swearing before he caught himself back out of habit, even though there were no students around to hear him. He had never before encountered magic that could make the air into a burning curse. Almost every wizard would have to cast the curse on an object, and then it would activate when someone touched that object.

But then, Tom was far from every wizard.

Albus waited until he was sure there was no spark of heat left. Then he eased towards the floorboard again, his wand weaving a soft pattern of defense in front of him. The spell whispered of sleep, of relaxation. Guardians and beasts could lay down their heads and close their eyes. Curses need not burn. Nothing need happen, in fact, but that danger grow less perilous and hard corners be less sharp.

When the spell was humming loudly enough to fill Albus's own ears with murmurs of slumber, he was able to slip underneath the curse and into the corner that it had protected.

The darkness returned at once. Albus ignored the foul mold that seemed to coat his lungs, and reminded himself that that came from nothing physical that existed here, but only the sheer darkness of the spells Tom had cast. He used his wand to tip back the loose wood, extremely visible now that he was close to it.

There was a hollow underneath it, the kind of place that a poor child might have used to conceal his treasures from thieving parents. In it lay a heavy gold ring that had an empty setting. Albus blinked, wondering for a moment why Tom had removed the stone. He didn't seem the sort to deface Gaunt heirlooms.

Then again, it could have been an indigent ancestor of his, selling the stone long ago for what it would fetch. Albus reached for the ring.

The ring uncoiled like a striking snake and snapped at his fingers. Albus barely withdrew his hand in time, with a startled cry. When he could look again, the ring had gone back to tamely lying on the dirt underneath the floorboard, its circle complete.

Albus breathed out slowly. He had never heard of a Horcrux able to defend itself in that way, but then again, there wasn't that much material on Horcruxes available. And Tom had created more than any wizard Albus knew of.

Slowly, he cast a spell that fully illuminated the small space, although it didn't seem to work as well as it should have. The shadows stubbornly pressed in at the corners, and Albus thought he could hear a strained hissing. But he kept his eyes on the Horcrux as he cast the spells, and it didn't appear to have moved.

Albus breathed out. Possibly the trap was only triggered when bare skin touched the Horcrux. He would have to approach it carefully in order to find out. This time, he conjured a long iron rod and reached it out to hook through the hollow of the ring.

The ring promptly uncoiled again and struck with what seemed to be a blunt snake's head that one side of the circle turned into. It bit the iron rod three times before Albus could withdraw it. When Albus managed to get his conjuration back to his side, he saw that the metal had already corroded and flaked away.

Albus shook his head. He had never heard of such powerful protections. Most of the time, such spells needed to be wards that surrounded the area; they couldn't give the treasure within the ability to act independently like the ring had, or the goblins would have long since started using such spells to protect the vaults they guarded.

And the ring had different kinds of defenses adapted to different ways someone might try to fetch it out, at that. Albus was sure that had it managed to bite him, he would have been poisoned, but it had rusted the iron.

After staring down at the ring for a few more minutes, Albus levitated the ring into the air. It should have no defenses against that—

It turned and uncoiled again, becoming an ornamental snake with gaping fangs. Emeralds that Albus thought hadn't been there before made glowing eyes on the head. It darted at him, so quick he had no chance to raise a shield before the fangs sank deep into the webbing between his right thumb and forefinger.

Albus shrieked. Devastating ripples of pain were already making their way up his arm, and the skin was turning black as he watched. Albus shook his hand like someone trying to snap out a wet towel, and the serpent let go and soared back to its place. In seconds, it was coiled up, a ring again.

Albus let the floorboard fall and staggered back. His vision was blurring, his head rotating. He wished, for the first time in his life, that he had brought someone with him as backup.

He did manage to conjure a silvery phoenix. As his Patronus flew overhead, staring down, he croaked, "Go to Fawkes. Bring healing tears—"

Then the pain made it impossible for him to do anything but scream.

Harry jumped back in shock as a silvery phoenix burst through the window in front of him. Fawkes, on his perch, looked up and trilled urgently, but didn't actually take flight.

"Healing tears," came the words, the only words, from the beak of what Harry knew must be Dumbledore's Patronus, before it utterly dissolved.

Harry blinked, and then glanced at Fawkes. Fawkes bowed his head. A few tears leaked down his beak. He still didn't fly.

"I suppose it's up to me," Harry sighed. He reached out and used a potions vial to collect a few of Fawkes's tears, although unless Dumbledore was in a unique situation, Harry wouldn't actually need them to heal. Then he grasped the Elder Wand and turned his head, reaching out through delicate floating tendrils that tightened and turned black as he watched.

Dumbledore was near death now, which made it all the easier for Harry to sense him. He leaped through time and space and found himself outside the Gaunt shack, which had once been very familiar to him. Harry sighed and stepped within.

Dumbledore was writhing on the floor, half his body blackened by the poison spreading through it. Harry blinked. He never would have believed that there was one that virulent in existence. He'd have to ask Voldemort where he got it.

But for now, Harry needed to kneel next to Dumbledore and immobilize him with the Elder Wand. The wand was a little more eager than normal to behave. Harry eyed it, wondering if it had some loyalty to its former master.

The wand made a little protesting buzz.

"Whatever," Harry muttered, and put it down so that he could reach out and lay his hands on Dumbledore's shoulders.

The poison immediately tried to spread to him. Harry shook his head in irritation and drove it back with a wave of magic that was mingled necromancy and healing power. Yes, he would have to ask Voldemort about this, just because it was incredibly annoying.

He kept pushing until the black hue began to ebb from Dumbledore's skin. Once the poison was confined to Dumbledore's arm, Harry sat back and studied it intently before pulling the vial of phoenix tears from his pocket.

He could have healed the injury on his own, but not without studying the poison some more, and then Dumbledore would probably think he was using Dark Arts anyway. Probably for the best to use the method that Dumbledore would trust, the reason he had summoned Fawkes in the first place.

He met the fixed blue stare and said, "I'm sorry for how much this is going to hurt," before he upended the vial over Dumbledore's arm.

Albus thought he must be hallucinating with the pain. There was no way that the darkness could have spread all over his skin in that short time and then into Harry's and then been beaten back by the boy.

Yet it had happened. And when he came out of the maelstrom of burning that the phoenix tears had inflicted on him, it was to see the same boy picking up the wand that had once been Albus's and pressing it gently against the skin between Albus's thumb and forefinger, the same place the Horcrux had bitten him.

What he said wasn't English or Latin. It seemed to be words in the same way that Albus had thought he heard voices in the thunder as a child. The heavy, vast sounds crunched through him and left him reeling and shaken, staring at his clean pale arm, as Harry took the wand away.

The black spot was gone.

Albus knelt there, blinking, for a second. Then he realized the frozen stasis Harry had placed him under was gone and he could move. He turned to Harry. "How did you manage to heal me? That is a unique venom. I doubt that even Tom's obsession with you would have told you how to cure it."

"No, Voldemort didn't tell me."

Harry turned his head, and Albus nearly scrambled backwards, despite how weak he was. Harry's eyes were dark pits filled with swirling stars. His voice was deeper, as well, but Albus had thought that was the hoarseness of exhaustion. Instead, he suspected he was hearing, for the first time, the voice of the creature that hid inside the skin of a normal child.

Harry blinked at him, and the stars disappeared. Then he shook his head with a faint grimace. "I managed to heal you because I came so close to my nature as the Master of Death," he said softly. His voice was again normal, although Albus would not forget what he had heard so soon. "You were close to dying, in return. I managed to push you back."

"But that would make you—it could make you a miracle healer."

"It could," Harry acknowledged, his gaze still fixed on Albus. He didn't look as if he were in a hurry to pick up his wand and go anywhere soon. "I would need to arrive just as the people who were dying came close to the edge of my realm, though. And they would need to want to live. Some people who are dying of old age or terminal illness really don't want to."

Albus frowned at him. It seemed as though Harry spoke from experience, which meant it must be experience from other lives. Albus had heard no reports of him being such a healer in this lifetime. "Then why—why are you still spending time on doing anything other than healing? If you can save so many lives?"

Harry looked at him, eyes bright and wide, and for a second Albus thought he saw the stars in them again. Then Harry shook his head briskly and murmured, "Because I have other things to do," and stood up. In a second, he had the wand in hand and was casting a web of light around the shack. "What were you trying to do, sir?"

Albus had no intention of telling him that. "Things that are more important than saving lives?"

"Sometimes, yes. Unless I want to reveal to the whole world that there are disturbing things about me." Harry frowned at him a little. "Do you want me to reveal that I'm the Master of Death, sir? Or reincarnated? Or even just a miracle Healer? Because that's what people would have to know if I went around healing them?"

Albus said nothing for long moments. He knew what the revelation of Harry's real being had done to James and Lily. On the other hand, it was possible to argue that they had suffered so much because they knew Harry so well. If he had told the Order of the Phoenix, then they might have simply accepted it after some initial disbelief or wariness.

"I wish you to exercise more of your Light talents, Harry," he finally said.

"I'm not Dark in the way you mean when you think of it, Albus. I don't go around torturing people for fun. I don't use Dark Arts because they're the best spells to use. Sometimes I don't even think there is a use for some of them."

"But you know them. And you don't think that fighting Voldemort is the best thing for me to do."

Harry was silent for long moments. Then he shrugged. "I don't think that you should be training my brother as hard as you are, sir. I think that adult wizards who are trained should be fighting him. Or other Death Eaters, if they're the ones who try to torture people or kill them. I don't understand why you depend so heavily on children. I never have."

"Because it is the only way to defeat him!"

"Why, though? I know that you defeated one other Dark Lord, and you did that yourself, instead of relying on children."

Albus found himself at a loss for words. It was rare now that people referenced his win over Gellert, even though he knew the shadow of reverence for that act lingered in the mind of almost everyone who interacted with him. And Harry's eyes weren't like the eyes of anyone else. This child knew secrets Albus had never told anyone.

Slowly, Albus murmured, "Because there was no prophecy at that time, no one who was foreordained to defeat him. I only participated in the war when I had to. I do not enjoy chaos or bloodshed."

"No, sir, I know you want to avoid them." Harry sounded more respectful than he had in a while. "But even in my first life, I thought you put too much trust in that prophecy. And in that one, Voldemort actually did try to kill me, and he marked me with a scar on my forehead, the way I told you. This time, Voldemort and Jonathan never actually came into conflict. There was no mark. Why do you think Jonathan is the only one who can defeat Voldemort?"

Albus flinched. He looked down at his hand where the Horcrux had bitten him. Yes, he was healed, but in a world where the war had gone "normally" and Harry had never been born, or had been born a normal child, then he would have died in this miserable little shack.

"Because I cannot," he said at last. It was the truth, one he had never wanted to voice to anyone. He knew it would be the death knell for the Order's faith in him. "The prophecy offers a bit of hope. Otherwise, we are hopeless. And I am afraid."

Harry was silent for long moments. Then he reached out and helped Albus back to his feet as if he was the older one.

Which he is, in a way, Albus reminded himself.

"Come on, sir. I'll bring you home."