Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!

Here's a break from the mayhem for a while, but it only promises more mayhem later. Sorry about that.

Intermission: Ring the Changes

There should only be two blossoms on that branch.

Indigena paused to wipe sweat out of her eyes. She was in her largest greenhouse at Thornhall, her home for the past thirty years, which she hadn't seen in two months with the way her Lord kept her at his beck and call. The house elves had done well in tending the plants, but her absence had somehow made Indigena forget both the profusion of greenery and the heat inside the place.

She hadn't forgotten the way the plants should look, though, and Grandmother Tourmaline's bell-bush was a matter of special importance. Tourmaline Yaxley had invented the plant as a kind of early warning system. The center of the bush was a mass of hybrid branches, each of them carefully cultivated from a native tree or shrub of every place in the world that had a wizarding community; it had taken most of Tourmaline's life, and a lot of letter-writing, to get hold of them all. Bred together, they created a bundle of distinctive branches, one for each community. But the flowers were all the same, small and delicate bells with a clapper-shaped center that never stopped moving, even without the wind, and created delicate ringing sounds audible throughout most of the greenhouse.

The blossoms showed the presence of Lord-level wizards, and thus of Lords or Ladies, in each wizarding community. In Tourmaline's lifetime, the blossoms had been black for Dark Lords and white for Light Lords. Indigena had found that boring, so she'd changed it to deep green for Dark and gold for Light. Those were ancient and symbolic colors, too; Indigena still remembered reading about the Wars of Green and Gold, somewhere back in the dim mists of European wizarding history just after Merlin, when a Dark Lady and a Light Lady wearing those respective colors had contended against each other. And they made the bell-bush more pleasing to look at.

The bush was not thickly clustered; there were currently thirty-three Lord-level wizards in the whole of the world. Most of the blossoms were golden. Dark wizards might predominate in many other wizarding communities, but they weren't stupid. Light Lords were more likely to retreat into their dreams, while Dark Lords were more likely to blow up their houses. Thus they kept a rather stricter watch on Lord-level wizards than Britain tended to, and nipped the problems in the bud. The Australian branch was unusual in bearing two blossoms right now, one dark green and one golden, but those were two Lords so evenly matched in power and in hatred that they quarreled only with each other—no one else was a worthy competitor—and left the rest of the world alone.

The British branch had had a dark green blossom and a golden one for forty years. Then, fourteen years ago, another blossom had appeared and insisted, to Indigena's annoyance, on slowly becoming dark green stained with gold, like summer leaves in sunlight. She'd searched, to justify her curiosity, but had heard no rumors of another Lord-level wizard. Then the flower had withered into a blackened nub three years after it appeared, and Indigena had begun to suspect that Grandmother Tourmaline's breeding wasn't so flawless after that.

Well, of course she had been in the wrong, and the bush had been in the right, as she'd figured out when the green-gold bell had burst back into bloom overnight in the early summer nearly three years ago. Rumors had reached her, then, of a Lord-level child suddenly emerged into his power. Indigena had confirmed that Harry Potter's parents had been hiding him away—the reason she couldn't find him in the first place—and a bit more poking revealed the news about his bound magic, confirmed by the trial. His flower had died because he hadn't had the magic to act like a Lord, for a while. Mystery solved, Indigena had happily accepted her answers and gone about her gardening. She hadn't imagined then that it would ever be a matter of more than intellectual curiosity to her.

Now, it was rather more than a matter of intellectual curiosity to her, to note that the British branch had one dark green flower—Lord Voldemort's—Harry's green-gold one, and a new blossom, which was apparently attempting to be neither gold nor green and wound up looking rather sick, instead. The golden one had withered.

Indigena bit her lip thoughtfully and stepped forward. Her Lord would want to know about this. He knew about the loss of Dumbledore's magic, but a new Lord or Lady come into play would be entirely unexpected, and very much unwelcome. Indigena's hand hovered over the new flower.

There was a test she could perform to determine the new Lord's name and nature, but it would involve plucking his flower, and thus losing the ability to determine if his allegiance changed. Once picked, the blossom would never grow again. The bell-bush, and not just Harry's flower, was temperamental that way.

Indigena decided the loss of the future information was worth it. They needed information now. She plucked the blossom, and carried it back inside Thornhall, so that she could work with it.

Indigena sat beside the fire in her study and lifted a glass of mulled wine to herself. She thought she deserved it. She'd been clever and loyal, and, in being clever and loyal, secured a task that suited her very well.

Casting the flower into a bowl of pure water and speaking the incantation that Grandmother Tourmaline had recorded in her private journals over it had given her a name and a face. Falco Parkinson, the name was, and he had a long fall of silver hair and intense green eyes. Indigena had searched for information on him, and been surprised to find several books that recorded his deaths—his different deaths. The authors all claimed that the others were lying, of course, or hadn't done their research correctly, but Indigena was thinking now that this could be the work of a Lord-level illusionist, who'd withdrawn from the world for a while. He'd been able to fool Grandmother Tourmaline's bush, too.

He must have taken an active interest in the wizarding world again. That was the report Indigena had given her Dark Lord that night.

And Lord Voldemort had been alarmed, and assigned her at once to the task of obstructing Falco's purposes and making his life as difficult and dangerous as possible, without actually helping Harry.

Indigena had thought a moment, and proposed a way to do that. Her Lord took some convincing to agree. After all, while it fulfilled his conditions, it put Indigena's own spin on them, and Lord Voldemort had a hatred for others' creativity tainting his fine plans.

But, in the end, he had agreed.

Indigena knew it would take some time. But it would use the skills she considered most important, her cleverness and her ability to breed plants, and it kept her from having to participate in torture and killing, which frankly bored her. Well, there would be that one boring but necessary outing in the middle of February; Indigena had to agree that her Lord would need her on that one.

She'd wished, at first, that the Dark Lord had sent her to Durmstrang instead of Bellatrix. She would have enjoyed the challenge of keeping all the students as hostages and keeping anyone from getting into the school, as well as the rest from the blood and the gore. But now she was glad it hadn't happened.

She was already imagining the look on both Falco's face and Harry's when her schemes finally played out.

Indigena drank her wine and laughed out loud. I love it when I can show off my intelligence.