THIRTEEN

Harry had spend a great deal of time coming to in the infirmary wing. This time he almost knew where he was before he woke up, simply by the feel of the sheets. Part of his face was swollen, feverish, as if the skin were about to burst open from the inside like a rotten piece of fruit, but expert fingers gently rubbed something that felt like damp, fine sand over his cheek and temple and the burned part of his scalp. It was blessedly cool, and the coolness sank into his flesh, numbing the pain.

He opened his right eye--the left was too painful--and the room swam to meet him in a haze. He thought of his glasses and remembered that the lens was gone, which made him uneasy; ever since he could remember his glasses were the first thing he reached for in the morning. It made him vulnerable to be without them. The careful, cooling touch on his face went on and on, a single, continuous pattern of interlocking circles.

Trying to focus, he saw only someone tall and dark, too fuzzy to make out, but the smell of cinnamon filled his senses. He knew at once who was there.

"What are you doing?"

"Scalesafe." Snape sounded amused. "I do hope you did well on this. It was more than a grade."

"Do I look bad?"

"You'll look a little odd while the skin grows back. I wouldn't be making any plans for the Yule Ball, if I were you."

"The Yule Ball's over."

"No. The Yule Ball's in two days. Dumbledore reset things a bit."

"What happened?"

"You did. That Reductor Curse of yours pushed him back down the passageway just as he was going at me with another spell."

He barely remembered firing off the Reductor Curse. The last thing that stood out clearly was that Severus had come for Snape with the death curse--or tried to, until Dumbledore appeared. Somewhere in his mind, his ears still rang with Evensong's last, piercing scream.

"Where's Professor Evensong?"

"Hiding under her own cloak somewhere. Her pride's going to be her downfall. She won't let me near enough to see her. As if she's the only woman on Earth who's never let herself be seen in public without her face on."

"And you?"

"Would you please be quiet, Potter? I do have other things to do rather than satisfy your every curiosity."

He wouldn't answer. Harry had not expected him to do. "How did you know things would work out like this?"

"Dumbledore will no doubt explain things to you. As soon as you are capable of standing on your own feet again, he's called the three of us up for a conference, which is Dumbledore's phrase for a situation where we all crowd into his office and he screams at us for a good hour." From the way he said this last it sounded as if he had been subjected to quite a lot of conferences already. "Now put your head down and let me do my work."

Harry shut his good eye and relaxed, shuttering as the burn faded.

"Did you love her?" he asked.

Snape paused. His hand lifted from Harry's face for an instant. Then the circles started up again.

"Yes," he said finally. "I suppose I very much did."

* * *

"By now," said Dumbledore quietly, "I should hope that everyone knows that they have each been very stupid, each of you in your own exceptional way."

There was a bandage over the left side of Harry's face, with a new pair of glasses resting uncomfortably on top of it. Evensong's hood was drawn to her chin. Snape looked humiliated, and the saucer Dumbledore had provided him overflowed with cigarette ash.

"The clock for this version of Hogwarts," Dumbledore continued, "has been set back four days. Four days. This is not an offence I am willing to take lightly."

Snape spoke at last. "The flow was changed, Albus. Something had to be done to stop it."

"Bloody hell, Severus!" Dumbledore was on his feet, roaring, angrier than Harry had seen him since the horrible night of Cedric had died, the night Voldemort returned to power. "So you took the matter on yourself? For what? Your cussed pride? You of all the teachers in this school shouldn't be dealing with the flow. You're on the verge of paradox as it stands!"

"Headmaster--" Harry began.

"Harry, please understand that I mean this in the kindest of all possible ways. Shut up." He turned his full force back to Snape. "I don't think I have a word for what I want to call you. Irresponsible isn't even close. You came near to destroying everything I've struggled to maintain in this school. The flow was nearly closed; the balance has been disordered. At the very least do you comprehend the sheer amount of paperwork I'll be subjected to in the next few months? I have four days to account for, and a school full of innocent and totally oblivious students. The Ministry's going to be breathing down my neck for years."

"And they won't be breathing down mine?" Snape replied hotly. "Just let me sign my resignation now, Albus. I'd much rather go through you than through them. They're going to think I planned all this."

"Severus, when you came to me saying that an attack was due on Potter some time this year, I held in good faith that you had told me the entire story. It would have been much easier if you'd been more specific. Right now I wouldn't even give you the pleasure of getting sacked."

Evensong raised her hand timidly, almost like a student being called on in class, but Dumbledore turned full force on her. She never had a chance to get a word in before she was besieged.

"And you, Yvaine--you should have come directly to me. I was willing to turn a blind eye to you and Snape carrying on a relationship under my nose, but this is a completely unjustifiable infringement of your duties as a teacher and your position to defend this school." Each word was pronounced with a hard thump against his desk. Evensong's face lowered still further, disappearing behind her hood. "This is your last year at Hogwarts. You will leave at the end of this term. And you can rest assured that if you gain employment elsewhere, this incident will follow you. Seems I owe the Weasley twins some money."

Harry snorted.

Dumbledore shut Harry off with a furious gaze from behind his half-moon glasses. "Don't start laughing yet, Mister Potter, your turn is coming."

"Albus, I talked her into it. I won't have her losing her job at my instigation."

"Your instigation, Severus, and your opinion, mean exactly the same to me at this moment, which is to say they mean next to nothing. Yvaine, you are not a child. You knew where your responsibilities lay, and you disregarded them. You will leave Hogwarts at the end of the year."

A heavy finality hung in the air. Dumbledore fell silent, glaring stonily at both of the professors. Evensong shook visibly beneath her heavy cloak, and her breath had that shuddery, shaky quality that made Harry think she was trying not to cry.

"So why bring Potter into it?" Snape said quietly.

"Harry is here to be threatened. Harry, if word of this incident reaches the ears of any other student in this school, and that included Hermione Granger or Ron Weasley, you will be transferred to Durmstrang. No exceptions. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Headmaster."

Dumbledore returned to his seat behind the desk, straightening his glasses and smoothing back his white hair from his eyes. Some of the warmth returned to his face. "Now, I believe, you will be allowed to ask any three questions that come to mind. You deserve that much explanation. No more than three, please."

The first question was easy. He'd spent his entire night in the infirmary phrasing it. "How did Professor Snape know in advance about my going to the other Hogwarts?"

"Severus? I believe you'd better answer that one."

"I remembered it. But I also retained the memory of how that particular year at Hogwarts had originally taken place. Two discordant memories led me to believe that the flow had been changed."

Harry shoved his chair backwards in frustration. "Well, that clears that up. I think I deserve another question, Headmaster."

"Perhaps I can clarify." Dumbledore refolded his hands on top of his messy desk blotter. "There are several possible histories of Hogwarts, Harry. In some of them, I don't exist; in some of them, you don't exist. However, Professor Snape is a special case. He exists here in this time, but he has had to live a section of this timeline twice over. He exists in paradox."

"Well, that clears that up," said Snape, lounging in his chair. "You're confusing me, Albus, and I'm the one living through this chaos."

"Ask your next question, Potter. I think I might be able to make things a bit more clear."

It took him a moment to come up with another question. "Professor, you told Professor Evensong you'd been teaching at Hogwarts for sixty years. But you were student here only thirty years ago. How--"

"See?" Dumbledore beamed at Snape's unrelenting glower. "Potter's cleverer than you think, Severus. I knew he'd ask the crucial question eventually."

"Technically I didn't ask a question, Headmaster. You interrupted me. I still get two more."

Evensong seemed pleased. "I'm glad you caught that. Good for you, Potter."

"Severus, this one's for you too, it seems. I'll cut in when I'm ready."

For once, Snape seemed entirely uncertain of himself. He didn't look at Harry as he spoke. "When I came back from the Dark Lord, the Ministry was prepared to accept my confession. But they weren't about to allow me to practice magic again. Their idea for a punishment was to strip me of all power--it can be done--and turn me loose in the world as a Muggle."

Harry fixed Snape with a shrewd smile. "Not allow you within six feet of a wand, huh?"

"Yes," said Snape. "And it would have been hell. But Dumbledore decided to step in on my case."

Dumbledore nodded. "I realised that someone with a close position to Voldemort could do us more good as a wizard. But I remembered Snape from his school days. An exceptional mind, but a tendency toward concealment. I suspected you then, Severus. There was always something about you I could never quite put a finger on. I thought you might be like some of the other students I'd known--dappling in the Dark Arts as a lark, as a status symbol--but there was no outward evidence. Seven years, and not one noticeable hint of anything more than an especially talented young man. When all the students in the school were prattling about someone turning Animagus, I assumed that that might have been your big secret. Now that I think about it, I was so concerned with you that I never even noticed Potter and his little group."

"You were not responsible for me then, Dumbledore," Snape said sharply. "And you certainly aren't responsible for me now."

"On the contrary, I am totally responsible for you. But then, you've always had a certain problem with gratitude."

Snape withdrew into himself again.

Dumbledore went back to Harry, a queer, fixed smile on his face. Harry got the impression that Dumbledore had been dying to tell Snape off for ages, and was somewhat happy that Harry had given him the opportunity.

"I wanted to make certain that he was put somewhere where, if he did turn out to be a bad seed, he could be closely monitored. So I sent him back a few years. The war was on then. Some of the best wizards of the time were half-bloods, living in the Muggle world; they enlisted in the war effort. Beauxbatons was occupied and had gone into a state of emergency; they couldn't help us. Bride's Academy refused to do any work for England."

"There was an Unseelie invasion," Evensong said with unexpected sullenness. "Finbheara attacked at Tir-Na-Nog. Our hands were tied."

"Well, there you are," said Dumbledore. "And Durmstrang was behind the enemy lines. Hogwarts and Bride's were the only functioning wizard school in Europe at that time, and Hogwarts had no teachers. So I arranged to send them Snape."

"And it was a nightmare. I had to teach five different classes a day." Snape glared at Dumbledore. "And I still couldn't get the Dark Arts job."

"And you won't. The Ministry was very clear on that. They might relent, eventually, given enough proof of your progress, but I doubt they would after all this time."

Things were coming into place so fast that it was hard to organise his thoughts. The Ministry of Magic would have to be mad to allow a former Death Eater to hold such a sensitive position. Considering all the people who has tried to get the job before--Quirrell, Crouch, both of whom had been in league Voldemort--there must be something to it that the Ministry wanted to protect. From what Harry had seen of the younger Snape, who had been only seventeen, he could understand the Ministry's decision to prevent an older, more talented Snape from getting the job he so desperately seemed to crave.

"You sent him back to 1941," Harry said. "To replace the teachers you lost during the Blitz."

"The Muggle world and our world are not so separate. A major event like that trickles down to affect even us, and there was nothing we could do to help the Muggles with their side of the affair, not without risking public exposure."

Something dawned on Harry. "Sixty years ago would have been just about the right time for Tom Riddle to start at Hogwarts. You sent Snape back to keep an eye on him."

"Exactly. Snape took an especial interest in young Riddle. He sent back many excellent reports during the time the Chamber of Secrets was first opened. Every move Riddle made, Snape was there."

"So he could have done something to stop it."

"I'm afraid not. We can't change the past, but we can learn from it--literally, in this case. Much of what we know of Voldemort today was information received from Severus Snape in the year 1941, his first year as a professor at Hogwarts."

Harry recalled what Hermione had said. "But eventually time would have caught up with him. He would have run into himself as a student."

"When it came time that young Severus attended Hogwarts, I had Professor Snape send to Durmstrang, on a teacher's exchange programme. There were rumours that Igor Karkaroff had allied himself with Voldemort and was training students in his own school in the Dark Arts, and we needed someone there. At the time, Karkaroff had never met Snape. Snape passed himself off as an active Death Eater, still sympathetic to Voldemort's cause, and gained Karkaroff's trust. It was partly on Snape's evidence that Karkaroff was exposed and sent to Azakban. That and Moody, of course."

"Snape doesn't even like Mad-Eye Moody."

"Espionage make for some very strange bedfellows," Snape muttered. "So. I retain two sets of memories. One for the time I really was attending Hogwarts, and another for the time I was sent back. When the memory altered, I knew something must have happened to effect the flow and that there was a risk of a temporal paradox. It only took me a while to figure out just what. When I knew, I acted to prevent both your getting hurt and the greater risk of causing damage of damaging the structure of history."

Snape stubbed his cigarette in the saucer and lit another, raking his limp hair back as he exhaled the smoke. "You have one more question, Potter, and then like it or not, I'm going to bed. This conversation has taken about twenty years longer than I expected, and I need rest if I'm going to have to put up with Neville Longbottom and his idiot sister blowing up my classroom in the morning."

Trouble was, he couldn't think of a single thing to add. "How did I get into the other Hogwarts?"

Snape's eyes flashed at Dumbledore. "Albus? You're up."

"The Memorial Yearbook Shelf," said Dumbledore, "contains volumes from each of the timelines that run through Hogwarts. About seven, all told. But the passageway is only triggered if two books are pulled at once. Then the passage opens to the time of the second book. I thought of that when I installed it. Didn't you notice, Harry, that all of the Yearbooks seem to be the same, uninteresting colour? Books that the eye passes over without remark?"

"One of your more brilliant ideas?"

"I like to think so, yes."

"It didn't work," Harry told him grimly.

"It usually does. We've had students come through the library before, looking for pictures of parents or older siblings in their school days, but Irma Pince always finds the correct edition for them. Oh, we've had occasions where students will pull two books and wander off--not really a problem, unless they wind up in the Plague years--but Irma's always been there to fetch them out before they cause too much trouble. And as far as I know, nobody's ever broken into the library in the middle of the night to steal a Yearbook. Books of love potions and sexual education texts, yes, but never a Yearbook."

"What about the cloak?" Harry shouted suddenly. At this all three teachers turned to stare. Snape put his hand to his forehead and groaned, but Harry wasn't particularly interested in Snape's approval.

Dumbledore held up a finger. "Ah, Harry. You've had three questions, and three should be enough for anyone, I think."

"Begging your pardon, Headmaster," said Evensong, a little too sweetly. "He's had only two yet. Remember? You interrupted him in the middle of one."

Snape looked as if he would like to strangle her. She smiled and patted the back of his hand. Snape jerked himself away and lit up another cigarette, smoking it in rough, fast puffs.

"What about my father's Cloak of Invisibility?" Harry said again, insistently.

"It's safe, Harry. I've got it locked away, somewhere." Under the beard, Dumbledore's mouth pursed. "Somewhere. I'll have to figure out just where before the year's up. Fawkes, have you any idea where I might have put Mister Potter's cloak?"

Fawkes gave a mystified squawk. Harry could have sworn he saw the phoenix shrug a wing-joint.

"I dropped it. When Lucius and S . . . Sev--" The old taboo against calling a professor by his given name was too strong. He jerked a thumb at Snape and went on. "--And one of him were chasing me. I left it in the passageway."

"Oh, that is an interesting story." Dumbledore folded his hands on his desk and leaned forward, settling in. Harry heard Snape mumble something with the word 'windbag' in it. Evensong shifted in her chair. Fawkes shook his head mournfully.

"As I recall, Uriah Heep--Slytherin's prefect at the time--caught wind of a disturbance on that particular night. He went to investigate, but found a Blocking Spell on the passage. He called for Slytherin's headmistress, Johanna Vane, God rest her, to break it, but by the time she did there was nothing left but some bloodstains on the floor. We tried for weeks to figure out what had happened, but all the Slytherins had banded together and weren't talking. All Vane ever found was the cloak, which she gave to me. I knew your father owned such a thing, but he never came to claim it, and he graduated afterwards. So I kept it." Dumbledore smiled. "Then when you arrived at Hogwarts, I decided to he would have liked for you to have it. A souvenir of the old marauding days."

Harry suddenly felt very tired. He wanted a bed. He wanted all these adult eyes off him, so that he could think this over. The past night was a jumble of nightmarish impressions, and the only image he wanted to keep of it was the memory of his father, grinning and giving him the thumbs-up.

"Since you're all keen on explaining things, Albus," said Snape, "I wish you'd explain something to me. Every since I realised my memory had changed, I've been calculating exactly when the attack on Potter would come, so that I would be there before anything happened. Everything added up to next week. Yvaine and I thought that we had enough time to prepare, so what happened?"

Dumbledore folded his arms over his beard and rocked his chair with what could have only been a twinkle in his eye. "Leap Year."

Snape's mouth fell open. "Leap Year?" Then he was on his feet, palms flat on the desk, pushing into Dumbledore's bemused face and roaring, "Leap Year?"

"About thirty years worth of Leap Years, actually," said Dumbledore thoughtfully, as Snape, staggered to speechlessness, fell back into his chair. "The solar year obeys the sun; Hogwarts' school schedule does not. Severus, do you never take a look at that calendar I gave you for Christmas?"

Evensong seemed to choke. At once she covered her face with her hands and bowed her head to her lap, making a stifled, strangling noise. For a moment Harry thought she was sobbing with disappointment, until she threw back her hood and howled, tears of laughter streaming down her face, unabashedly pounding her thighs with her fists. "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

That was the best part of a sorry business. Even back in the infirmary, his face stinging, and with a weird, crackly stretch in his side as his broken ribs slowly knitted together, Harry would occasionally whisper, "Leap Year," to himself and chuckle. As tired as he was, he fell asleep smiling.