Thank you for the reviews yesterday!
This is not the darkest chapter of this walking-through-hell part of the book, but it does have the worst case of Murphy's Law.
Chapter Sixty-Four: All Fall Down
Albus felt the pull of the boy's magic the moment he Apparated back to the outskirts of Hogsmeade.
There had been indications before then, of course: the sudden roar of rising Dark magic that made him fear Harry had died; the surging, triumphant laughter in his head that he heard, real or not, when Tom called his Death Eaters; the blazing of wards that were meant to alert him in the case of a concentration of Dark wizards in a certain area. But he had been able only to wait and to hope. He had not known what was happening from the moment of Harry's abduction…
Until now.
Harry was radiating uncontrolled magic like light, like heat, like fire, all the way up to the castle. Albus, sitting in his office and trying to think of strategies to combat Tom, felt him start to come closer as he would the tread of a nundu, or a rolling storm. Something had happened, something momentous, and Albus knew he would either fall before it—perhaps—or ride it—if he took the chance.
He closed his eyes and gathered the swirling mist of his compulsion, drawing it calmly back into himself. Perhaps a few people here and there in Hogwarts would blink or stare around in a daze, trying to remember what they had just been thinking about. Perhaps a few others would miss dreams they had grown accustomed to. For most of those who had slowly been turning to meet his opinion like flowers towards the sun, however, the influence had been too subtle. They would not notice it missing any more than they had noticed it present.
Albus had a better use for his compulsion, if what he imagined from Harry's slow approach was true. He held back until the boy was closer to the castle, within the wards, and he could open one of them as an eye on the outer grounds and actually see Harry's face.
The calm stoicism, laced through with pain to those who looked with clear eyes, told him all he needed to know. The constant soft tears of the phoenix on his shoulder—and Albus had to push back a flash of jealousy—were an even clearer sign. Something had happened to deprive Harry of his balance, and he would be some time getting it back again.
Time during which a master compeller might be able to influence Harry's actions, if he acted quickly and ruthlessly enough.
Albus had only moments to choose his course. He did not trust what would happen if he tried to use his compulsion when Fawkes was not distracted by Harry's pain. And without complete information, he could not know that he was choosing rightly.
But he thought he was, acting on what he knew of Harry's past. And if he was wrong, there was at least one chance that could not do anything but help him, no matter how far down the road its consequences might play out.
He acted, and breathed out the compulsion in a concentrated, swirling mass into Harry's mind. Not even then, however, was it going to force him to choose one course of action. It would only make it more likely that he think of something he was probably thinking of anyway…let his thoughts spill to the side, down a certain well-worn track…seek refuge in a place he had often sought refuge in before…
And then it was done, and Albus sat back in his chair and opened his eyes, exhausted. A smile worked its way across his face in spite of himself.
The war had come. Tom had returned.
But the one disaster the Light could not afford—to have two Dark Lords working against it—had probably just been averted.
Harry hated to admit it, but Fawkes's tears were getting on his nerves.
The phoenix would not stop crying. He had not stopped even as Harry walked wearily back towards Hogwarts, noting along the way that no one appeared to have waited outside the castle. Of course, he thought, most of them would have no idea what Karkaroff kidnapping him had meant, or that Voldemort was back, as yet. The students would have retired to the school, and the outside observers would have gone home. His disappearance would be a matter of concern to a very few. Probably Dumbledore had felt that Voldemort had returned, and the former Death Eaters, and the Durmstrang students would be looking for Karkaroff, and Draco and Connor would notice he'd vanished, but otherwise, the wizarding world was in ignorance right now.
A pity that cannot last very much longer, he thought, and then stopped with a sigh as Fawkes gripped his chin yet again in one talon, turned it to face him, and began to sing. Harry stopped, since he didn't trust himself to keep walking forward and guide Dragonsbane's floating body around obstacles when he was like this.
Fawkes tried a softer song, warbling and drifting, ghosting gently across the surface of his mind. This time, the visions that appeared were more like dreams and less like messages. Fawkes was singing of the sun, Harry saw, and long, peaceful afternoons soaked in the sun, and white corridors. The white corridors coalesced as he focused on them. Harry had the impression that they were the image of a specific place, and that he had seen that place before.
Indeed he had. He recognized it in a moment as the Seers' Sanctuary, which Peter's mind had resembled.
Harry jerked himself backward, interrupting Fawkes's grip and sending him fluttering into the air. Harry recovered his balance and his breath, and shook his head at the distressed phoenix.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I can't. I told you that. Please don't ask me again."
"Harry."
Harry started and turned around. He would have expected either Connor or Snape to be the first one running to greet him, since his emotions had probably incapacitated Draco enough to put him in the hospital wing. But Draco, oblivious to what should have happened, stood behind him on the path past the lake instead, and then hurtled forward and grabbed Harry tightly in his arms in the next moment.
Harry hugged him back, letting his hand rest on Draco's spine, and holding his glamoured wrist just off to the side. He would have to be careful. Draco knew his emotions better than anyone alive, and Harry was sure that he was radiating pain and terror and rage and other things he couldn't anticipate even now.
"I felt pain," Draco was whispering into his ear. "But it was so distant. I think the connection between us decreases in intensity with distance. I knew that someone was hurting you, and I wanted to go help you, but Snape wouldn't even let me out of the dungeons until the pain stopped. Then he only told me that I could watch for you, and I had to stay within the wards to do that, and I had to come back inside at midnight if you hadn't shown up, or before then if any danger threatened." He drew back, staring anxiously into Harry's eyes. "What happened, Harry?"
"Voldemort came back," said Harry.
Draco's face paled, and he took a deep swallow.
Harry went on talking, trying to strike a balance between telling Draco what he needed to know and not choosing words that would send him into hysterics. "He took me to a graveyard and performed a resurrection ritual that used my blood to raise himself again." He closed his eyes, and the vision of Voldemort crouched on his chest and biting him seared in the blackness of his mind as if it had never left. Harry jerked his head back, not going far in the tight hold of Draco's arms, and then shook it and went on in a calmer voice. "Then he called the Death Eaters. He gave them—certain instructions." He opened his eyes and looked carefully at his friend. "Draco, I'm so sorry, but Vince's father is going to pull him out of school, and he's supposed to be trained to kill you before next Midsummer."
This time, Draco went white to the lips—yet, strangely, Harry thought some of that pallor was fury and not fear. "I thought he had given it up," he said. "I really thought he had. He told me that his father wasn't willing to follow the Dark Lord anymore, and I thought…I thought that meant…" Draco shook his head, and said, "Never mind. What happened then?"
Tread carefully now. "Voldemort tried to fight a duel with me." Harry laughed at the expression on Draco's face, but cut the laughter off. The sound of it made Draco stare at him and Fawkes let out a sobbing cry of distress. "Yes, I know. Stupid of him. But he's stronger than I am, and he thought he could take me. And he probably could have, because they killed—I didn't tell you that, they killed a little boy, a werewolf ate him, and I couldn't do anything, and I wanted to die." Harry had to close his eyes again, to smother the pressure of the tears on them.
"Harry," Draco said, and squeezed him until he could hardly breathe. "Harry—you're blaming yourself for that, aren't you?" His voice tilted and crashed down into a mixture of anger and horror and pity that hit Harry like a lash and made him struggle to pull back a bit. Draco only tightened his grip, and Harry, weak with magical exhaustion and emotional drain, didn't have much choice but to stay. "Oh, Harry, Merlin, don't. I know you would have saved him if you could, because that's the kind of person you are." He stroked Harry's hair. "So you really couldn't save him. It's not your fault. Please, stop blaming yourself. Merlin, no wonder you hurt so badly."
Harry let his head fall forward so that it rested on Draco's shoulder. He needed this, he told the parts of himself that wanted to stand back and not be so weak, he needed this time to have some chance of keeping it together long enough to fight this war, and it was a convenient excuse. Let Draco think all Harry's pain had been emotional, and he would not look for a physical cause.
"Not only that," Harry whispered. "I was gone during the fight, Draco. I lost control of my magic, and my emotions. My magic still isn't entirely back under my control. Dragonsbane Parkinson showed up, and, well—" He lifted his wand and canceled the Disillusionment Charm.
He heard Draco gag, and turned resolutely to look. It was worse than he had remembered. The carnage had seemed almost natural in the graveyard, a home of death and the dead. In the clear starlight and wan moonbeams of a Hogwarts night, Dragonsbane's wounds—the wounds he had caused and created, he must never forget that—were an obscenity.
"My magic killed him," Harry said quietly. "He came to help, and my magic thought of him as a threat to me, and did that to him. He sacrificed his life to bring me back to sanity."
Once again, he lost his breath as Draco squeezed him, and murmured fiercely into his ear.
"You didn't do it. It's not your fault. You couldn't have known that he would show up like that. They'll understand, Harry. They have to. And meanwhile, you have to understand. You didn't mean to do this. You're not a murderer anymore than someone who accidentally spits someone on his sword is a murderer. You would only willingly kill to protect yourself or other people. Merlin, I love you."
Harry found the words only small comfort—he would until he came to terms with what he had done, he suspected—but he pulled them around himself and held them close nonetheless. At least they meant that he had someone to whom he mattered, someone to whom his comfort was important just because he was him, and not because of the part that he could play in the war.
It would be so different if this were my mother…
He nuzzled his head into Draco's shoulder and soaked up what the warmth and words could do for him, without demanding that they be something they weren't. At last he lifted his head and nodded to show he understood.
"I have to summon Hawthorn and Pansy," he whispered. "I have to tell them about Dragonsbane."
"I know." Draco smiled at him as he stepped away. The smile was wrenched to the side by a sorrow that Harry knew was almost as great as his own, as accepting of the consequences and foresighted about the future. "But, Harry, they'll understand. I'm sure of it."
Harry smiled at him, and then an accident happened, natural and unavoidable. Or maybe it was. Harry would have thought nothing of it on any other day, and that was why he allowed it to happen now.
He scolded himself afterwards, told himself to remember that he was living another life, one in which he had to deal with certain realities.
Draco reached out to take his hands. He confidently closed his fingers over Harry's right wrist.
His fingers passed right through the glamour of the left one.
Draco blinked and stared. Harry jerked his wrist backward, feeling hysteria pounding abruptly in his throat. No. I can't do this right now. I can't. I can't talk to him about this—
Then he heard the warning snarl from the side, and slammed himself back into calm, draining his anger into an Occlumency pool. I can't get upset, or my magic will attack Draco. Merlin, I couldn't bear that. Hold still, Harry. Maybe he doesn't know what this means. After all, it's not like anyone's mind would just turn to Voldemort cutting off your hand as a natural thing to have happen. Someone might think that if he knew the history of Voldemort's War, but Draco had been sheltered in that respect.
Draco blinked a bit more, his face still filled with blank surprise, and Harry summoned a smile. He might get out of this after all. He feigned a laugh. "Can't believe that happened!" he exclaimed, and aligned his hand more carefully this time, so that Draco would grasp the solid part of the stump that was still there. "We must have slipped in—"
Draco made a swift, darting motion, seizing his wrist this time and turning the replica of his left hand back and forth. Harry held still, and even raised his eyebrows as though asking what in the world Draco was doing. He thought he could escape this yet. It was not as if Draco knew his hands that well.
"Your left thumb doesn't curve that way," said Draco, sinking his hopes, and drew in a thick breath that rattled along his throat as though his mouth were made of sheet metal. He lifted his head, inch by inch, and Harry shivered as their eyes locked. Draco's had a sheer intensity that Harry had never seen matched, except by the keenness of the surface thoughts that Harry's involuntary Legilimency showed him. "Harry," he said, each word carefully intoned, "remove the glamour."
Harry could hear his own breathing, rushing along his lungs. He shook his head. "There's no glamour."
"Do not lie to me," said Draco, in exactly the same way. "Harry, remove the glamour, and remove it now."
"I don't—" Harry turned his head away, feeling his face flush and the pressure of tears increase against his eyelids again. Merlin, why does this have to happen? It isn't right. He bit his lip to hold back a sob. "There's nothing there," he said, when he could force his mouth open again.
"I know that," said Draco, taking and twisting his words to have a meaning that Harry never intended for them to have. "Now, Harry."
Harry thought he should have held out against this. He was weak, so weak. Why couldn't he resist what was happening to him? Why couldn't he pass any of the tests that anyone made of him tonight? Should have been stronger, to resist Draco's pleas. Some have been faster, to prevent Draco from ever catching hold of his wrist in the first place and pressing matters this far.
"I'm waiting."
Harry swallowed, and acknowledged the failure, and removed the glamour.
He heard Draco hiss out his breath. Then he took up Harry's severed wrist and moved his arm carefully in a circle, no doubt examining the stump from all angles. Harry bowed his head, shivering. Draco's touch hurt where Bellatrix had cauterized the wound, but not much more than the bite Voldemort had given him. What really cut and flayed him were Draco's eyes, the knowledge that someone was seeing what he really was, and that he was too weak to hide evidence of his failure.
Instinctively, he tried to retreat, to curl his left arm close to his chest. Draco braced his feet and pulled, and Harry found himself stumbling forward, ending up in Draco's arms again. Draco was gripping his wrist with one hand, the back of his neck with the other, and murmuring a ferocious litany in his ears.
"Never hide from me, do you understand? I want to know everything you are. I don't care that you think you failed. You didn't. Come to me with things like this, Harry. Don't retreat." Draco's hand stroked his wrist, and Harry jumped. "Now, we can get a replacement hand—"
"We can't," said Harry. The words sounded choked. He hated himself for that. "Bellatrix cast spells on it so that I couldn't grow another hand there, or heal the wound, or get a replacement."
Draco stood in silence for a moment.
Then he said, "That bitch."
Harry shivered at the vehemence in his voice, and the more so because it was the only word Draco called her, as good as a vow of vengeance. He pulled back a moment later and stared into Harry's eyes, his gaze still strong and honest as a blade.
"It's going to get better, Harry," he said. "We're both going to make it better." He didn't seem to feel the need to add the words I promise or any equivalent. Like his epithet for Bellatrix, Harry supposed, they implied the rest of what they could mean by the simple virtue of being said.
Harry nodded. He couldn't speak around the lump in his throat, but he could nod.
"You'll come to the Manor for the summer," Draco went on, speaking with a calm, absolute authority that reminded Harry of Lucius. "We'll work on breaking the spells on your wrist. And then—"
"What? Draco, I can't!" Harry twisted, using some of the moves Lily had taught him when Draco tried to restrain him, and broke away. They stood there for a moment, Draco with his head cocked slightly to one side and his gaze drifting back and forth between Harry's eyes and his wrist, Harry with his feet braced to resist an attack. His magic stirred around him, then settled uneasily, like disturbed mist. Harry took a deep breath and explained, even as he sprouted the glamour of his left hand again. "Look at it from my eyes. Your parents wouldn't rest until they found out the truth about my hand, would they?"
"Of course not," said Draco, but it was obvious he didn't understand how that connected to Harry's not staying with him for the summer. "There are several rooms in the Manor that are charmed to remove any glamours that visitors are wearing, in fact. It wouldn't be long before they noticed."
Harry nodded. "And while I could trust your mother with that knowledge—" maybe, if I had to "—I wouldn't trust your father. It might even convince him that I'm weak and no longer worth allying with."
Draco opened his mouth. Harry waited.
Draco closed his mouth. Harry nodded.
"Maybe it would," Draco conceded grudgingly, and rubbed his forehead. "I don't think so, but it's at least possible that he would use the knowledge to gain an advantage in some way. He can't abandon you right now. I shudder to think of what else he could do within the terms of the truce-dance, though." Draco nodded, slowly. "Then you'll stay with Snape."
Fawkes gave a sad little croon, and from Draco's startled glance upward, Harry thought he, too, must have had a fleeting image of the pale couches and sunlit rooms of the Sanctuary.
"With Snape," said Harry firmly. "Not with the Seers." He frowned at Fawkes and kept walking. He would meet with Snape as soon as he got back to the castle, if possible. His guardian deserved to know that he had returned safely. Or, if he ran into Connor first, then he would reassure him. Either way, after those meetings, he would need to write a letter to Scrimgeour and one to Hawthorn.
Things turned out rather differently than he expected, though, because the cowled figure waiting for him near the doors to the entrance hall was Hawthorn Parkinson.
Draco had slipped away without a word, other than the faint whisper to Harry that he would tell Snape and Connor he was back. Harry nodded, and followed Hawthorn in silence to a small room he hadn't known existed on the third floor, Dragonsbane's body floating behind him. Hawthorn hadn't yet glanced at her husband's corpse. Harry couldn't tell what that meant. Perhaps she was so angry that she thought she would kill him if she looked?
Hawthorn opened the door to the room. Inside, a fire blazed on a hearth just swept free of dust and dirt. Three chairs waited in a triangle, one of them in front of the other two. And Pansy sat on one of those chairs, her hands folded on her lap and a very faint frown on her face.
Harry would have halted, warned her, cast another Disillusionment Charm, done anything he could to prepare her for the sight of Dragonsbane. Hawthorn did not. She simply took over the Mobilicorpus and guided Dragonsbane into the room, then set him floating in front of the hearth, next to Pansy's chair.
Pansy's face turned the color of whey, and then she began to cry. Harry bowed his head. He had resolved to himself to face this, or he would have run away already, but it was hard to be here. He had to call up images of several quicksilver Occlumency pools to keep himself still.
Hawthorn turned around. Harry saw that she was white around the lips, but the rest of her face was almost normally pale. She crouched down beside Pansy and put her arms around her. Pansy turned and buried her face in her mother's shoulder, winding her arms almost tight enough around Hawthorn's neck to strangle her, all the while weeping and weeping and weeping.
Of all the unworthy emotions to feel in that moment, the last Harry would have thought himself capable of was envy. But he felt it, and he acknowledged it, and then he put it back in the Occlumency pool. He lowered his gaze and waited.
At last, Pansy's tears faded. She sat back up, and her mother conjured a handkerchief for her to wipe her face. While she did so, Hawthorn stood and took the chair beside her daughter. Harry sat down in the one in front of them at her slight motion.
"Tell us," said Hawthorn, her voice clipped and quiet, "what happened in the graveyard."
Harry blinked, wondering how she had known it was a graveyard, but began. He gave them the same recitation he had given Draco, minus the cutting off of his hand, and told the story of Dragonsbane's murder. He never looked away from Hawthorn's face, and she never changed expression.
Pansy's choked little sob in the middle of the story was almost enough to undo him, but Harry told himself he had no right to shed tears. He had broken the alliance. He had murdered Hawthorn's husband, Pansy's father. He had no reason to be here but to face his crime. So he told the story with his own white face and iron determination, and lapsed into silence when it was done. He wondered what they would do with him. He had already resolved to defend himself against nothing but a deadly curse, and then he would run from the room, more to spare his magic attacking either of the two women than to protect his own life.
Yes, women, he thought, teased by a stray thought, as he met Pansy's eyes at last. She is now. Every trace of girlhood was gone from her face.
Hawthorn said at last, "Tell me, Harry, were the signs that my husband repeated these?" She lifted her hands and began to guide them, slowly, through a sequence of motions. Harry squinted, making sure that the way her left palm turned was really the way Dragonsbane's had, and that she had made three snaps with the forefinger and thumb of her right hand, not two.
"Yes," he said at last. "He showed them to me several times. I don't know why he showed them to me, though." He swallowed. "I couldn't understand his sign language."
Pansy hissed, a sound that seemed to start from a long distance away and gradually come closer, rather like Voldemort's laughter at his resurrection. Harry shivered and shrugged away the comparison. "What makes you believe that it matters if you understood it?" she spat. "Selfish—"
"Pansy, that is enough." Hawthorn embedded her last word in the middle of a growl. The look Pansy flashed her mother was full of betrayal, but Hawthorn took no notice. She only went on steadily looking into Harry's eyes, and Harry thought that he was seeing the Red Death for the first time. "Harry. Dragonsbane repeated those signs to you on purpose. They mean, 'Do not mourn me. This is my fate. Thus I die.'"
Harry could feel himself shrinking in his chair. "I—that's not possible. Why—"
Hawthorn closed her eyes, seemingly the only concession to weakness that she would make. "Necromancers foresee the death of any wizard or witch they come into contact with, Harry," she said quietly. "They cannot tell them the time or manner of it, however. It is a lonely life. But they also foresee their own deaths. And they keep living in spite of it. It is a life that takes more courage than I can understand." She opened her eyes, and the first signs of tears marred them. "Did I tell you," she murmured, "that my husband was not in Slytherin, though many people assumed and claimed he was, and even I almost believed so at times? He was a Gryffindor."
"He didn't—" Harry stopped. The conclusion was inescapable. He came to the graveyard knowing he would die.
"I suspected," Hawthorn went on, her voice quiet, implacable. "They are forbidden to tell us lesser mortals outright, but it was there, in his signs for the last year. He wrote many long letters to those he had known and left behind in his former life as—well, it does not matter what his name was now, since he gave it up to choose a name that echoed mine and to take my surname. He prepared his accounts. He spoke often and often with a certain spirit he could not name to me, but whom he said had told him tales of you, because he died defending you from a certain menace."
Harry bowed his head. Sirius.
"I suspected," said Hawthorn softly. "When my Mark began to burn this evening, he had me Apparate with him to Hogwarts, and then he—followed the link between my Mark and the Dark Lord. Somehow. I still don't know how he did that." She sniffed slightly, as though taking in the scent of sorrow. "That was when my suspicion coalesced into certainty."
"How could you have known what signs he would use to talk to me?" Harry whispered.
"Because I have seen another necromancer use them," said Hawthorn. "They are always the same, a sign that any necromancer will give before he or she dies, whether or not there are any around to interpret them." She reached out a hand and held it motionless in the air between them. Harry had no idea whether or not she wanted him to take it, and didn't move. "You must understand, Harry. Necromancers do not regard death as we do. It is not an ending to life, and they know that very well. It is only another stage, and in many ways, they revere it more than life. By saying 'Thus I die,' they are claiming their part in a ritual greater and more sacred than anything the living can grant them. That is why no necromancer would try to step aside from his death, even if that is possible, which I am not sure it is. That is the moment of inevitability, the moment when their vision ends." Hawthorn turned her head away. "Harry, you were part of the instant when my husband closed his eyes to the world. You actually gave him the passage into death. You have done him more honor than you can imagine."
Harry buried his head in his arms. The idea that he was not a murderer was too shattering for him to deal with right now. He had to think about something else instead, and he found it in the words, "How did you know that it would be in a graveyard?"
"I heard his words to you last Walpurgis Night," said Hawthorn. "When he left me to go to you, I knew it would be in a home of his kin. He died in a graveyard, Harry, among those he loved and honored. No necromancer could ask for better." She paused a moment, then said, "Harry. Look at me."
Harry lifted his head, blinking. Hawthorn had her left sleeve pulled up, and was tracing the silver scar that bisected the Dark Mark's skull. Harry shivered as he felt a tickling sensation start along the complementary scar on his own skin.
"The alliance hasn't broken," Hawthorn said, "or this would have burst open, and you would have bled to death. You did not. I think that is because my husband was a necromancer, and knew long before even you were born how and where he would die. You could have killed him deliberately, and that would have kept the terms of the alliance." She tipped her head, amber eyes full of light. "We are still allies."
Harry stared at him, and couldn't imagine what he would say next.
Someone else could.
"I'm not," said Pansy, her voice high and jarring.
Hawthorn looked at her daughter. "What?"
"I don't want to be allies with him any more." Pansy rose to her feet and crossed her arms. Her eyes cut at Harry in the moment before she turned her head away. "He killed my father. And maybe he chose it, and maybe it was always going to happen, but he was my D-Dad, and I loved him, and Harry killed him, and I don't want to be in the same alliance with him any more."
Harry listened in silence as Hawthorn tried to talk her daughter out of it. Pansy would not be moved. Harry had known it before Hawthorn tried to convince her otherwise. It was all right. He had received more than he deserved, with Hawthorn still believing in him. Both of them had known Dragonsbane was going to die, he thought, even as Dragonsbane had, but Pansy had thought of it as "dying someday" and Hawthorn had suspected an actual date. Pansy was doing nothing more now than following her own beliefs and inclinations. It was as it should be. If she was recoiling from the shock that the sight of her father's corpse had dealt her…well, that was also her choice, even as it had been her mother's choice to reveal Dragonsbane's death like that.
In the end, Pansy bared her left arm and pressed it to the scar on her mother's, while Hawthorn murmured in sorrow, "Released from bonds of blood, released from bonds of flesh, released from bonds of alliance. May your solitary path be prosperous, my child."
Pansy staggered a little when the ritual was done. Harry felt the same thing, like the snapping of a cord he hadn't known was taut between them. Pansy nodded coolly at him and turned for the door.
When she reached it, she turned back. "I am going to honor my father," she announced. "I am going to do what he would have been proud of me for."
He met her eyes, and once again his Legilimency darted out in front of him, reading Pansy's intentions there. She was going to become a necromancer.
Harry blinked as Pansy slipped from the room. It was an unusual ambition, and one that he didn't know if she had the tenacity to hold to. But he wished her luck.
"Harry?"
Harry turned to Hawthorn and bowed from the waist. "Thank you," he said simply. "I—perhaps that wound will not go so deep, now." He didn't know that for certain, but it at least might help bleed off some of the venom, to know that Dragonsbane had known this fate was coming, and even embraced it.
Hawthorn eyed him narrowly. "Are you well?" she asked. "There is so much pain and weariness in your scent."
Harry dredged up his smile. "I'm all right," he answered. "In pain and weary, but as soon as I've seen my guardian—" he could not quite deny himself a visit to Snape, not now "—then I'll go to the hospital wing and rest, I promise."
"See that you do." Hawthorn stood, and then reached out for him. Harry let himself be hugged because he was too surprised to prevent it. "Keep yourself safe," she whispered into his ear. "You do not know how glad I am that you are alive, or how much we need you."
"I think I might have some idea," Harry murmured, thinking of what use he could be to the war effort. There was a small part of himself, a very small part, that really was excited at what was coming.
This is the war that I've been training all my life to fight.
Harry met Fawkes not far past the door of the room where Hawthorn had taken him. She had let him go, finally, with one more solemn promise extracted from him to take himself to the hospital wing as soon as he was done with Snape, and gone to bear both herself and Dragonsbane's body to the outskirts of the wards, so they could Apparate back to the Garden. She had shown no sign of noticing his lack of a left hand, for which Harry was profoundly grateful.
Fawkes scolded him with a stream of notes as he walked towards the dungeons. Harry had so many images in his head that he couldn't even tell what he was being scolded for.
"Will you shut up?" he muttered at the phoenix as he passed down the main corridor towards Snape's office.
"I think he is very wise," said his guardian's dry voice. "After all, you bear many wounds that you have shown yourself capable of ignoring."
Harry looked up with quick gladness. Snape was striding towards him from an alcove along the wall. He met his eyes—
And his Legilimency darted out, picking up memories from Snape's mind in a swift trawl. Images sped past Harry's eyes, thoughts of how Snape was guarding him from himself and regrets over having taught him to resist the De Profundis curse and worry that Harry would find out about the compulsion on Draco—
Wait.
Harry felt himself begin to shake. His eyes stayed fixed, though, and now that his Legilimency had a likewise fixed purpose, it sped forward, fleetly snatching more and more of the memories he wanted to look at.
Snape had given the Potions book to Draco. He had known, all the while, that the book bound anyone who opened it to complete a certain potion. It put a compulsion on them, one that made them ignore most other important things until the potion was safely brewed.
It put a compulsion on them.
A compulsion.
And Snape had known.
He had known.
Harry felt his mouth open, so that he was screaming without breath, without sound. His magic blew out past him and grabbed Snape, not hurting him for the moment; Harry was too deeply in shock to wish anyone pain. The magic simply suspended Snape in midair and twisted him around, watching him all the while as if he were some loathsome, tiny insect.
And then Harry's rage came bounding up behind the shock, and smashed into him.
He took a step forward, and saw Snape begin to choke, the magic forming into a pair of hands that gripped his throat. Harry thought someone else was present and speaking for him, until he realized that, yes, that really was his own voice coming out of his own mouth. Apparently, the magic had decided that he needed no help with this particular task.
"You knew," the voice said. "And you gave him the book anyway, and when I gave you the chance to tell me the truth about the compulsion, the night Draco blurted it out, you lied to me. On purpose. Deliberately." Harry could feel his rage rising, knew how easy it would be to kill, and knew exactly why he would kill, too. "And you used compulsion, and you used it on him.
"Do you have the slightest idea of how much he means to me?"
Snape's face was turning black. Harry wondered why for a moment, because the hands hadn't gripped him that long, and then reminded himself that it was the pressure and not the length of time that mattered.
His rage trembled. The magic whispered about him. It would be so easy, so easy to kill him—
But that would only bring him pain, and Harry was in enough pain already, as one of the people he had counted on being able to trust pulled back a mask to reveal a traitor's face, and the trust itself crumbled and crazed and cracked into ruin.
He opened his hand, actually trying to make the same motion with both of them as he showed the magic what to do, and the fingers on Snape's throat parted. Snape dropped limply to the floor, and lay there for a moment. Then Fawkes left Harry's shoulder and soared over to him, shedding tears on his bruises. Harry knew he would live.
And the pain had overcome the rage now, and his magic was simply howling around him, the cry of a maddened, wounded beast.
"I trusted you," he whispered, and then he turned and ran.
He burst out of the school, sobbing, having got his breath back by now. The magic made enough noise for the both of them, though, sweeping around him and rising up into towering wings as they came out from between the walls, howling steadily, the sound of a werewolf in mourning.
Harry stumbled towards the Forbidden Forest, tracing, he thought, the path he had used in second year when his magic had similarly gone out of control and was pulsing around him. He didn't make it that far, though. He fell to his knees and wept, while around him his magic swayed and sang and howled.
Something sang back.
Harry wiped frantically at his tears with his hand and lifted his head to the black sky. The moon had gone behind a cloud. Even the stars seemed dimmer. It was the darkness between the stars that pulsed and shimmered and shook, and Harry could hear the song of the Dark magic growing closer and closer, reaching eagerly out to him.
Come with us. Ride with us. What need have you to hold back now? You know the joys of unrestraint, and they will never accept you back anyway, all those creatures who live so willingly within walls and limits. Come.
Harry trembled, wrapping his arms around himself and bowing his head. He knew that he would never have to worry about hurting anyone again, not if he went into the Dark music. It might still happen, but he wouldn't care. Or he would lose his magic into the great wash of power around him, becoming one with the river, the wind, the song.
He would escape accusations of murder.
He would escape knowing that Snape had lied to him, and that he could only ever trust one person again, and that the refuge he had counted on obtaining was gone, swept away like a house in the flood.
He didn't really want to, not with the part of him that thought he should stay alive for the war and concentrate on his mistakes and making sure they never happened again. But that was not quite as strong as the part of him that longed for escape, any escape, in the wake of this latest fanged epiphany.
He felt the Dark magic land close beside him and pace towards him. Harry looked. It had the form of an enormous black wolf, with his own green eyes, marked with a bolt of silver lightning on its forehead. It snarled at him and danced its forepaws in invitation, tilting its head back so that it could look up at the sky. Harry stood, shivering, and moved a step forward. He would never have to be cold again if he went with it, because he would forget what warmth was.
Fawkes flared into being above him, song loud and defiant. The wolf screamed as the light fell on it, and stumbled a step back, crouching as though it would leap and engulf the phoenix.
Harry gained his sanity back again for the second time that evening. Or should it be third, since he'd slipped from it twice? He thought that, and other such irrelevant things, even as he turned and ran into the Forbidden Forest.
His magic bounded beside him, puzzled but still attached to him. Fawkes soared along above him, singing. Harry could feel magical creatures who might have bothered him ordinarily drawing back from them, not willing to tangle with someone accompanied by the fiercest of both Light and Dark fury.
Then he became aware of movement off to the side, and turned his head. A three-headed snake slid there, heads all turned towards him. A Runespoor.
"Have you come to us at last?" was its excited greeting. "We told you to come back to us when you could hear the singing. We mean you to listen."
Harry caught his breath in a sob, and stopped running. He had not remembered that part of the meeting in the Forest for months, but now it blazed in his memory, hard and clear as lit notes of music. He nodded, slowly. His magic danced beside him, and looked back and forth between him and the snake.
"Follow," the Runespoor ordered briskly, and then slid into the woods. Harry followed, now and then stumbling on holes in the Forest floor. Even with the light from Fawkes's feathers, which was brighter when he actually settled onto Harry's shoulder, it was as dim under the thick branches as it had been under the lake.
He at last reached the hill where he had met the Runespoors in the autumn. They were gathered in a half-circle now, and when they saw him, they lifted their heads and hissed deeply.
"Break our web," said the one who had led him, whipping around and looking up at Harry. All three heads hissed as one, lending the Parseltongue a slight echo effect—comparable to, but not as strong as, the rippling voices of the Many. "It was wrought of song, the Light music that we can hear but not sing. We will teach you the Dark music, the means of hearing it and yet resisting it. The Runespoors were great singers, once. With your help, we shall become so again."
"Very well," said Harry simply, not even sure what he was agreeing to but knowing it would keep his thoughts off the reason he had come out here, and then knelt so that he could rest his body while occupying his mind.
He could see the web almost at once, a thicker-stranded one than the Many's, splitting into small shining threads near each Runespoor, so that it could snare all three heads on each snake—or two in the cases where the Runespoor's other two heads had bitten the critical one off. Harry reached out and laid his magic carefully along the webs. It went along with him, seeming concerned more than sorrowful now, not sure what he was doing.
Fawkes began to sing.
Harry took a deep breath as the song was answered by a hissing croon from the Runespoors, turning to a discordant music like peas being rattled about in a drum. The two songs mingled, flowing around each other and coming in two distinct streams to his ears. One was the frenzied symphony of the Dark music he was already familiar with.
The other was strong, and bright, with an undertone of rage. The song of the Light magic, Harry supposed, and it was angry with Voldemort for tricking it, getting ready to recoil upon him.
He followed the path of Fawkes's song. There was no other way to describe it. As the phoenix was bonded to him through their established connection and to the Light song through his voice, so Harry could follow that three-link chain and find himself in the midst of a roaring golden river, singing as it ran to the sea, as the sun and the moon rose and turned and fell. This was the music of the spheres, Harry thought, generated by the movement of the lights of heaven. The stars sang, too, but in voices too high and cold to be of much use. It was the sun the phoenix especially sang to, and the moon could serve as another chorister, gathering the sun's light and reflecting it back.
Harry wondered how many creatures were singing in the world that he never heard.
A small golden tributary stream ran into the mighty river, and Harry located it easily, not only because it was there at all, but because it was befouled. The web stretched across it as a dam, and streaks of black curled into it. Harry wrinkled his nose. This was a corruption of Light magic. Whoever had done this had been in haste, and had simply slapped tangled webs and bits of twigs and moss together and then dropped the whole thing in the stream.
He gently scooped up the dam, and step by step began putting its materials to the side, on the bank of the stream. He could sense the web's threads around the Runespoors fracturing as he did so, and the Light music itself helped him, the stream eager to run clear and free again. Harry gathered and scooped, gathered and placed, and slowly, slowly, the swirls of black in the gold faded. The tributary chattered at him and sang like a bluebird at dawn.
As he worked with the Light music, the Runespoors touched the Dark song, he thought. They were working it into him, showing him the patterns that underlay the seeming chaos. It was the chaos that made the Dark music so hard to resist. It seemed ever-changing wildness, and as long as that was the case, then a human mind became lost in it—and intrigued by the thought of no two moments ever being the same. But there were some patterns there, some notes insistently repeated, some others coming and going with less frequency, and once he knew what they were, he could listen to the music without fear.
His wandless magic went along with it.
Harry felt the magic pursuing the knowledge of the Dark music inside him, intrigued and impressed and lulled by the thought of understanding it at last. As the Runespoors sang and taught him, chorus by chorus and verse by verse, his magic learned it, too. As Harry stooped and gathered material from the stream to place on the bank, all the while using one hand, the magic became used to the thought of doing labor with one hand and did not find it so bad. As Fawkes sang, his magic nudged at the bond between him and the phoenix, and accepted it, and curled up inside his body again like a restless cat come back home.
Harry sang and worked and learned, refusing to acknowledge the coming of the magic, until it was unmistakable. Then he opened his eyes, and found the Runespoors slithering freely around him, and Fawkes just coming down from the song on his shoulder, and his wandless magic once more bound, part of him, losing its free will in the wonder of knowing what he knew and being his magic.
"Thank you," said the Runespoors. "Thank you. We will not attack the other humans now. We have our song back. That is all we wanted. And now you can go to sleep, little one, now that you are returned."
Harry wanted to protest that he didn't need to sleep—until he tried to stand up and fell over, and Fawkes bit his ear hard enough to draw blood. Then he decided that maybe he did, after all.
He curled up in the middle of the clearing, Runespoors piled warm and lazy around him, and drifted into sleep on a music like drumming peas that did not let him think about anything else that had happened to him that Midsummer night.
No matter what else happens to me, I am still vates. There is still that.