Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
Explosiveness ahead. Harry can't win all the time.
Chapter Sixty-Seven: When Light and Dark Get Together
Harry hesitated.
"Oh, come on," Draco urged him. "It's not as though anything in here will burn, not after we asked the Room for a room that won't."
"That was normal fire," Harry muttered. "I'm not entirely sure about phoenix fire." But on the other hand, he wouldn't learn anything if he never used it, so he extended his hand and concentrated, for the first time, on making the flame spring up instead of simply accepting it when it appeared.
He felt an odd rush of blood in his veins, as though the fire intended to well to the surface of his skin that way, but nothing happened. He frowned slightly and closed his eyes, creating an intricate vision of what the flame had looked like the other times it had sprouted on his palm.
Blue at the center, clear azure, spreading out into orange and white. Harry found, though, that he could not remember exactly what the shape of the flame had been, or how the boundaries between colors looked. Was that why he was having so much trouble? He tried to cudgel his memory into behaving, and reached for a yet better vision of it.
"Harry!"
Harry's eyes shot open in surprise, and he realized he was looking at the world through a blurry, blue-white sheet of flame. Phoenix fire covered his arms and shoulders like a mantle, crawled in his hair, and played around his face. Argutus, around his neck, was uttering a stream of excited chatter, basking in the heat. "Can we do this all the time? I think this is better than the sun. It feels more personal, as if the fire cares that I get warm. Maybe we could sleep like this? I think that's a good idea. So what if you set a few blankets on fire? That's all right. I—"
With an effort, Harry both stopped listening to the Omen snake and calmed the fire. It withdrew into his skin like wings retracting onto a bird's back. Harry let out a shaky gasp, and then touched his hair, his face, and other exposed parts of his skin. The fire didn't seem to have burned him. He had no idea what would have happened if he'd sent the fire at the walls of the large dueling chamber the Room of Requirement had provided them when they'd asked for a room where Harry and Draco could both work on their spells.
"Don't do that," said Draco furiously from the other side of the room.
"Sorry," muttered Harry. "I don't know what caused it, though. I was only envisioning the small flame in my palm."
Draco made a soft, exasperated noise. "Well, think about it later. I want to test my rune circle out." He gave Harry an expectant look, and Harry nodded and looked at the symbols Draco had painstakingly scribed into the stone floor while Harry searched through the books the Room had provided them for healing spells he wanted to study.
Harry hadn't taken Ancient Runes, so he only knew those shapes that bore some slight resemblance to the letters of the alphabet. Based on that, he had no idea what the circle did, and he had to eye it dubiously. The last full rune circle Draco had tried had left him trapped in the room where he'd drawn it until the sun stopped shining on the circle—perfectly safe, of course.
He asked Draco about that, and received a haughty look in return. "That was a circle for binding and confinement, Harry," he said. "This one has a different purpose."
"What's the purpose?" Harry asked.
"You'll see what it is when it happens," said Draco, and then stepped into the circle. At once he slumped to the floor, his head nearly smudging one of the runes, and fell asleep.
Harry blinked. Well, I suppose that could be useful for trapping an enemy, though we'd still have to have chosen the battlefield first. That rune circle took him forever to draw. He inched forward, wondering if the circle had some other property after all, and Draco was about to spring to his feet and catch him the moment he came up to the boundary.
Draco didn't move, though, other than the rising and falling of his chest in slow, peaceful breaths of deep sleep. Harry frowned. If that's his demonstration, how did he plan to get out of the circle without breaking it?
He studied the runes on the floor; they gave him no clue, of course. Harry shrugged and stretched out his hand, concentrating, to lift Draco with a Levitation Charm. He floated over the edges of the circle and landed on the floor.
Harry didn't think the landing had been that hard, but Draco was awake in instants, spluttering about "oafs who didn't realize that dropping someone onto a hard surface from a height hurt." Harry just shrugged again. "Was the rune circle supposed to put you to sleep?" he asked.
Draco's face turned a deep red.
"No?" Harry delicately suggested.
"It was supposed to render me invulnerable to any spells that might try to cross the boundaries of the circle, including your wandless magic!" Draco snapped. He scrambled to his feet and strode back to the circle, working around the runes. Argutus wriggled around Harry's neck, and Harry put him down on the floor. The Many snake poked her head out of the pocket of his robes, too, where, based on the hive's advice, he'd been keeping her lately, but pulled her neck back when she saw no danger to Harry. Argutus started slithering around the outside of the circle, reflecting the runes in his bright scales and staring hard at them. Harry bit his lips to keep from laughing, especially when Argutus mirrored one rune Draco had passed up and then looked at him, saying, "This one is wrong."
"Um, Draco?"
Draco sighed and looked back at him. "What?"
"Argutus found a rune you didn't write down right."
"That's impossible, I can't have come to it yet—"
"This one is wrong," said Argutus. He still couldn't understand English, but he had told Harry he knew from scent when he was being doubted. He flicked his tongue out now, and his hissing took on an annoyed sound. "Have him come back here and look at this one. There is a tiny hook that projects out to the left. In my reflection, it should project out to the right. But it goes right on projecting to the left. Something is wrong."
Harry told Draco that. Draco gave him an extremely doubtful look and strode back, leaning down to peer into Argutus's scales—which of course blocked the light and destroyed the reflection. Argutus hissed in deep displeasure, and writhed one coil that didn't contain the mirrored rune as if he would grab Draco's wrist. Harry raised an eyebrow. Argutus was long enough now to drape down over his shoulders when he coiled around Harry's neck. He might break Draco's arm if he squeezed hard enough.
"Don't doubt him, please," he said.
Draco sighed, and moved, and looked at the reflection from a different angle. Then he said, "That's impossible."
"Tell him he is ugly when he doubts me," Argutus commanded.
Harry sighed. "Apparently not impossible if an Omen snake can sense that something is wrong with your circle, Draco."
"But that's a bit of spontaneously wrong magic," Draco persisted. "I'm sure I didn't draw the rune that way. It shouldn't have gone wrong. Besides, most wrong rune circles just don't work. They don't have an effect so completely different from the one the creator intended."
Harry couldn't conceal a smile now. "I guess you're just talented, Draco."
"Really?" Draco leaned back with an expression very similar to Hermione's when she'd got a potion right in Snape's class and was hoping, against all expectation and experience, to be praised this time.
"Yes," said Harry. "I do think that you're talented, Draco. Prone to rush on small details, maybe. See what happens if you erase the rune and then draw it again. Maybe it'll work this time."
Carefully, Draco erased the tiny hook on the rune and redrew it. Then he stepped triumphantly into the circle and turned around to look at Harry. "All right, Harry. Send your most powerful spells at—"
He collapsed, deeply asleep again.
"Now it's upside down in the reflection," said Argutus helpfully.
Harry had to laugh then—it was not as if Draco were awake to hear him—before he used his magic to float him out of the circle again.
"Potter! What do you think you're doing?"
Harry was so startled that he cut his arm more deeply than he'd intended, and the knife skittered out of his hand and onto the floor, joined by a cascade of blood from the wound. Muttering under his breath, he turned and glared at Millicent, who'd come down the stairs into the common room at an unfortunate time. Nearly everyone else was outside enjoying the first sunny day of February; Harry had thought she'd gone, too. "My name's not Potter anymore," he said. "I know you must have heard that news. Perhaps you disregarded it because your brain was half asleep at the time."
Millicent ignored this, hurrying across and taking his arm. "May I ask why you're cutting your own arm, Harry? And deeply, too," she added, as her fingers became slick with the blood in a moment.
"Practicing healing spells."
Millicent shut her eyes. "I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that."
"Well, it's true." Harry fumbled in his pocket for his wand, muttering under his breath again as it slipped from his grip and fell back into his pocket. He summoned it into his fingers, then aimed it at the wound. He found it better to practice new spells with his wand first, before he tried to make them wandless. "Integro meliusculus!"
The flow of blood slowed, and the wound began to reknit itself, slowly. Harry nodded in satisfaction as a thick scab developed over about half the cut. The cut itself was deeper than he'd planned to make in the first place, but the spell still worked.
"Why didn't it heal completely?" Millicent asked, frowning at Harry's wand as if it were to blame.
"Because I didn't want it to," said Harry. "Integro meliusculus is only meant to make the wound somewhat better. It's used on cursed wounds where too much healing magic at once would just trigger the curse to flare up again. I wanted to see if I could do it, and I can." He nodded at his arm, feeling absurdly proud. The first few healing spells he'd practiced had needed two tries each before they worked. He wondered if healing magic was one of those subtle areas of magic where the passage of certain spells through the wizard's brain and body and wand "prepared" them to handle others of the same kind of spell better.
"You still have to have this healed," Millicent said flatly, looking as if she were about to dash to the hospital wing on her own.
Harry blinked. "Oh, that spell I already know. Integro!" he added, showing off by doing it without a wand.
The rest of his skin knitted over, and became an ugly, but healing, scab. Harry tugged his left arm away from Millicent and flexed it. "See?" he added. "As good as new."
"Not quite." Millicent shook her head, her mouth still so tight with exasperation that Harry thought she was the one who'd been taking lessons from Madam Pomfrey. "You do realize the standard procedure to test healing spells isn't to cast them on yourself, Harry, right? Apprentice mediwizards and mediwitches treat real live patients with their trainers, or they use animals."
Harry laughed. "Well, I'm not about to begin training as a mediwizard—I'm not old enough for it, even if I wanted to—and I'm certainly not about to use magical creatures. I don't see what's wrong with this. I only cut myself that deeply because you startled me when you yelled my old name," he added, feeling the need to defend himself before Millicent's darkened eyes.
"It hurts, though," said Millicent, as if Harry were mentally deficient. "And you could always damage yourself more deeply than you meant to, and be badly hurt or die before someone else finds you."
"That's not going to happen," said Harry.
"Why not?"
Harry indicated Argutus, watching in interest from a nearby couch. "He knows to go for Draco or Snape if I tell him to or if I fall on the ground and don't move. No, they can't understand Parseltongue, but they'll follow Argutus if he's grabbing the edges of their robes and pulling."
Millicent looked as if she were trying to decide between throttling him or herself. "And the pain?"
"I can ignore it easily," Harry said, raising his eyebrows. He would have thought she would have remembered that before anything else. "The training, you know. If I can manage to concentrate through pain to tuck my guts back in, then I can concentrate through most of the pain I cause myself. Besides, it's good practice. A battle that hurts other people isn't going to leave me unscathed most of the time. If I have to heal someone else while concentrating through the pain of my own wounds, better I know what that feels like now, in a non-battle situation."
Millicent still breathed deeply, her eyes fixed somewhere over his head. "I'm going to tell Professor Snape about this," she said suddenly.
Harry flinched. Most of the other adults he had some hope would listen to his side of the story. Madam Pomfrey would cluck her tongue and glare, but accept that he could heal himself, and probably be more professionally interested than anything. Headmistress McGonagall had other things on her mind, given that the wards were starting to melt down into the earth again. Remus might object, but Harry thought he could talk him around. Snape, though, whom Harry had had a coldly polite relationship with for the past two weeks, would go mad. Harry was just starting to work towards reconciliation with him, was in fact planning on it when they could be in the same room for more than five minutes without wanting to bite each other's heads off. This would spoil it all.
"Look, Millicent, don't do that," he said, in the calmest voice possible, as if her threat hadn't affected him. "What do you want?"
Millicent cocked her head. "For not telling Snape, you mean?"
"For not telling anyone." Harry vowed to himself that he wouldn't let anyone catch him again. He didn't want to cast his Complete Vanishing spell, because then Argutus wouldn't be able to bring help if something nasty did happen, but there were out-of-the-way corners in the school where no one would think to look for him. And Argutus knew Hogwarts well enough, from his constant wandering, that he could find his way back to the dungeons from any corner of it.
Millicent bit her lip, chewing it. Harry waited. He could imagine a few prices she might ask from him. She'd been unable to master the last few spells they practiced in Charms. Perhaps extra tutoring was in order. Or perhaps she wanted some specific piece of magic from him? Harry could do that—
"I want you to stop giving yourself injuries to practice the spells on," Millicent said abruptly.
Harry blinked. Then he said, "What? No!"
"Then I tell Professor Snape." Millicent shrugged and turned towards the door out of the common room as if she would go do that right now.
"No!" said Harry in frustration. Sometimes, the world really would be simpler if I could just go around compelling people. "Listen, Millicent, I have to practice them this way," he went on, when she turned back around, distinctly unimpressed. "I can't hurt animals for this, and I don't want to practice on humans when I don't really know what I'm doing and might hurt them, too. This is the best way for me to get battlefield experience without actually being in battle."
Millicent shook her head. "You always insist on doing things the hard way, Harry. You could have talked to Madam Pomfrey, you know. Why didn't you?"
"Because the only way she could have me practice is on other students," said Harry. "I already told you why I objected to that."
"So perhaps you should just wait to actually do the spells, and learn the theory first." Millicent's voice had several shades of sarcasm in it. "I know that your usual method is to throw the spells first and then learn how they work, Harry, except in Defense, but I really think you should treat this like Defense."
Harry controlled his frustration. He couldn't think of any way to sway Millicent. If there had been the slightest softening in her expression, he would have tried, but she looked as stern as she had when she caught one of the third-years talking about putting a love potion into someone else's breakfast. She'd been chosen Prefect for a reason, Harry knew.
And if she told Snape, he really would go mad, and every bit of progress Harry had made with him since the original argument would be undone. Harry valued his relationship with his guardian more than the chance to keep practicing healing spells on himself.
"All right," he agreed.
"Promise me," Millicent said. "Swear by Merlin."
"I promise, in Merlin's name," said Harry glumly. He could admit that, looked at from the outside, this probably did sound like a stupid idea, but the more he read about healing magic, the more he thought that it would be useful, and he absolutely had to practice it. The thought of deliberately injuring someone else so he could practice horrified him, and then what would happen if he couldn't master the spell and couldn't heal the hurt? This had seemed the best compromise.
"Then I won't tell Snape," said Millicent, and made a little dusting motion with her hands. "Now, I'm going outside to watch the second-years. There's a gang of them who've developed a rivalry with a whole group of second-year Gryffindors, and they're all little monsters when they think someone isn't looking—the kind of children to give a snowball a lead core if they can." She shook her head and swept out of the common room.
"Are those lessons done?" Argutus asked.
Harry sighed and Scourgified the blood on the common room floor and the knife blade. "Yes."
"Too bad," said Argutus. "But perhaps we will learn other things now."
Harry nodded and wondered if Millicent would have been more sympathetic if he'd revealed that this was only his second day of practicing healing spells this way. He doubted it.
Harry ignored the glances. He knew how it looked. There were six post owls sitting patiently on the Slytherin table, awaiting their turn for attention, and he was furiously scribbling letters, trying to be diplomatic and persuasive at the same time. Even though a few of his allies wouldn't be coming to this grand gathering on Saturday, most of them would. They were asking questions about when they should arrive, whether they really had to Apparate outside Hogwarts' wards, if they had to bring gifts, whether gifts would be brought for them, demanding that he add just a bit of persuasion to make them come instead of attending to other commitments, and saying other things that Harry was more than willing to answer, as long as it would coax them into actually arriving.
This had been his main political business for the last three weeks, sending letters to all his allies and to all the families, Light and Dark, that his allies had mentioned as being potentially interested in alliance, trying to get them to agree to meet in the Room of Requirement on Saturday the seventeenth of February. First he'd had to overcome objections about meeting with wizards of the opposite allegiance, and then mass efforts to make him choose a different day, and then declarations that they wouldn't arrive if such-and-such a wizard or witch was there, and then, at last, these petty objections. Harry was willing to do almost anything to make it work, except the stupidly obvious things like meeting with only Light or Dark wizards, and now he almost thought it would.
Mortimer Belville wasn't coming, citing family commitments, but Compton Belville, who had now offered Harry adoption several times, was, and several of the minor Light pureblood families Augustus Starrise had told Harry usually did what the Starrises did. There were also several wizards tied in to the Opallines who were coming, strangers, and apparently a French witch had heard of the meeting through someone else and had written to Harry herself, asking permission to come. Harry had been pleased, especially since she told him she sat on the Veela Council. No, this wouldn't encourage them to make a decision about allying with him any faster, but it might at least present a positive impression of him.
If he could pull this off. Harry had never met with this many people before, and the nearest meeting in size had had an overwhelming majority of Dark wizards. At this one, if everyone attended who promised to, then there would be more who claimed allegiance to the Light. There were approximately several million things that could go wrong, but if he could pull it off, then perhaps abominations like the one he'd seen Voldemort performing last night would stop.
Harry grimaced and paused in writing, both to rest his wrist and to rub his scar. He'd gone into vision last night as a lynx and quietly watched, and there had been no sign that Voldemort noticed him. He certainly had never paused in chanting the spells that stitched pieces of cut-up human bodies into a creature bigger and stronger than the worm Harry had seen in the graveyard, a creature that resembled a lumpish dragon if it resembled anything, and had wings.
Harry had a sick feeling that he knew what had happened to the Muggles whom Voldemort had captured, using sirens, on the autumnal equinox.
He took a deep breath and plunged back into his letter-writing, ignoring Argutus's peaceful eating of sausages off his plate all by himself. Let people think he had terrible manners if they wanted. He had to make this work.
"And how does this spell work?"
Narcissa hid a smile as she finished casting the spell that would alert them when someone entered the Room of Requirement. She had come early to help ward the Room, partly with such spells and partly with Black artifacts placed in discreet locations, and Harry had been following either her or Regulus around most of the time, asking questions about the theory behind spells as if he were going to have an exam on them any moment.
"It senses flesh and blood," Narcissa told him now, as she stepped back and considered the light shimmer of the spell across the doorway. "It's one of the spells I used when we were searching for my cousin's body, trying to find out if he was hidden somewhere as himself. If someone enters in an Invisibility Cloak or under a Disillusionment Charm, the spell will tell me—and you. It has its limitations. It doesn't sense flesh and blood surrounded by other flesh and blood, for instance. If a woman came in with a baby in her arms, it wouldn't sense them as separate entities. And it wouldn't sense something like a poisonous spider clutched tight in someone's fist, until the fist open and the spider moved."
Harry cocked his head. He looked so charming at the moment, so incredibly full of concentration, that Narcissa felt any resentment she still carried towards him on account of the violated threefold oath fall away. She still hadn't received an answer from St. Mungo's about what the consequences of breaking the oath might be, but that was all right. It hadn't been Harry's fault—certainly not something he intended to do. And having listened to other descriptions of the incident at Durmstrang now, Narcissa had to accept that Rosier would have killed Bellatrix if Harry had not.
"That sounds like a hard spell to escape detection by," Harry said now. "What's the point of clutching a poisonous spider in your fist for hours?"
"Well, it's rumored to be the way Arabella Zabini killed her seventh husband," Narcissa said, as she began casting the next ward. "He used that spell because he thought she would lure him to a room where her next lover was hiding and have them duel to the death. Instead, she had a spider in her hand, and he didn't sense any other flesh and blood until she opened her hand and it bit him."
Harry blinked. "I'll remember that the next time I see Mrs. Zabini," he said.
"You should." Narcissa gave him a faint smile. "Many of your allies are dangerous, Harry, some of them more so than any wizard or witch left unallied with you—at least in Britain."
"What about Indigena Yaxley?"
Narcissa felt her smile fade. "I misspoke, then," she said. "There is at least one dangerous witch you do not have on your side."
"Is there any way of getting her?" Harry's face was intent. "Lucius told me a little bit about the debt of honor she has, when I asked, but it sounded as though she could choose to get out of it."
Narcissa shook her head. "Debts of honor are a contrivance that very few families respect any more," she said. "They're not like life debts—not recognized by magic itself. In this case, Indigena's nephew swore his loyalty to the Dark Lord, but ran away even before he fell, and pretended he'd never been a Death Eater; he was certainly never suspected in the Ministry. Nor did he respond to the Dark Lord's call when he returned last summer." She saw Harry's hand move to rub the stump of his left wrist, perhaps unconsciously, and briefly let herself wonder if enough of her sister's handiwork was undone to grant Harry a hand now. "Then Voldemort demanded a debt of honor from the Yaxley family, a loyal servant in return for a disloyal servant. He could have chosen anyone he wanted. He chose Indigena, quite sensibly. It is her choice, her will, that binds her to the Dark Lord. And she hates traitors and those who forswear their vows; most of the Yaxleys do. She would look on someone like Severus or Lucius as blasted and damned. I fear you will never sway her, Harry."
Harry's face assumed the mild, stubborn expression Narcissa had seen there a few times just before he went out and did the impossible, including riding a dragon into a storm of the wild Dark. "I still might try, if it's her choice and her magic wouldn't punish her for turning away from Voldemort."
Narcissa sighed. "At least promise me that you won't go marching up to her on the next battlefield you see her on and try to sway her."
Harry gave her a fleeting smile. "I promise."
Then the first of their guests began to arrive, and Harry turned to welcome them, and Narcissa turned back to warding the room, wishing fretfully that she could be sure Harry wouldn't try to persuade Indigena out of her allegiance. Indigena's nephew was the only cowardly Yaxley in the history of the family that Narcissa could remember. If they chose a side at all, they stayed with that side, no matter how doomed it was; a Yaxley had fought at the Eagle Lord's side even when he knew that Calypso McGonagall was bringing an earthquake down on them, according to legend.
And why should this one be different?
Snape knew it was all going to go wrong with the arrival of the first wizards and witches.
Oh, they were polite enough; most of them smiled, and took chairs in the growing circle of seats, provided by the Room of Requirement, with their smiles still intact. But they were separating themselves rigidly, sitting with either Light or Dark contingents, and when they looked at the wizards and witches across the ring from them, their faces wore nothing more neutral than frowns. Snape shook his head as he watched. He was sensitive enough to undercurrents, Merlin knew, after a year of spying among the Death Eaters for Dumbledore and forcing himself to pay attention to not only the tiny gestures but what the tiny gestures added up to. Most people had come here not out of curiosity, but because they felt they couldn't afford to be left out of a meeting their enemies would attend. The dominant emotional tone of the gathering was belligerence, and nothing would persuade them to lay it down, unless Harry agreed to meet with the members of each allegiance separately.
Snape knew that wouldn't happen.
His gaze left the gathering and moved back to Harry, who remained near the door of the Room of Requirement and welcomed the new guests in. His courteous mask never faltered. He had obviously looked up any details of pureblood greetings he didn't know, and Snape had the satisfaction of seeing some of the cold masks falter, for a moment, as the strangers accepted more politeness than they'd counted on.
It wouldn't work, though. Their faces hardened again as they walked towards the circle.
Quietly, Snape cast a spell that would tell him if someone was influencing others with an emotional compulsion. Voldemort had sometimes used that to stir up enthusiasm for killing among his more sluggish Death Eaters, and it would be exactly the kind of tool that Harry's enemies would use to destroy something that he'd worked so hard on.
No trace of the spell came back to him. Snape felt his mouth tighten. So. It's only the fools' natural tempers.
On and on they came, Harry's old allies and new ones. A few Light wizards and witches were exchanging smiles with a few Dark ones now, but too little, too late. The meeting had been spoiled before they arrived, Snape knew. Harry's haste and hurrying probably had something to do with it, as did the fact that the Light wizards didn't trust the Dark ones to actually fight Voldemort, and the Dark ones didn't trust the Light ones not to hide their heads, now that the Light side had been trimmed of its last leader.
Snape allowed himself a single moment of hard satisfaction for that. Dumbledore was gone, and though Snape believed Harry should have absorbed the Headmaster's magic instead of storing it in a tie, of all things, he would not be a threat ever again.
Then he went back to studying the gathering, and shook his head. There were a few wizards and witches here he would have advised Harry not to invite, if he and Harry were on speaking terms that close. Gloriana Griffinsnest was so entirely under the domination of Augusts Starrise that she would do almost nothing without his permission, but in one thing she was firm, and that was her hatred of werewolves, since two of them had killed her parents. Her eyes had not moved from Remus Lupin since she came into the room, and Snape had seen her robes swirl and part, briefly revealing the silver knife she carried. She would kill Lupin in a moment if she thought she could get away with it.
Compton Belville sat like a black swan among the wizards on the Dark side of the circle, murmuring greetings and responses to questions with a blank look on his face. Snape had to fight to keep his snarl from his lips when the old wizard's gaze briefly touched his. Compton was timid in letters, and could sound like a fool; so long as he and Harry had communicated only by owl, Snape saw no reason to encourage his ward to drop the correspondence. In person, though, the foolishness was revealed for the act it was. Compton Belville, though eighty-four years old, was dangerous if he decided to be so. And now he could observe Harry close at hand.
And Augustus Starrise…Snape did not care if he was Harry's ally, not when the man's eyes lingered on several faces around the circle with that special contempt in them. He was looking at Snape that way, currently. Snape knew he would have cast a spell to determine which of the wizards in the room had either Muggle or Muggleborn parents. He would have sensed Tobias Snape's blood in Severus Snape's veins, and that Snape's mother had been a pureblood witch would matter little to him. Starrise lifted his lip as Snape watched. Combined with his eyes, they expressed a perfect, practiced, pureblood scorn.
Asking to have Augustus Starrise behave politely in any room that included halfblood witches and wizards was like asking a Kneazle to play nicely with pixies. Snape watched others become offended as they noted Starrise's scrutiny, and Lucius Malfoy watch Starrise all the while with a fixed air of hatred—they were too much alike for Lucius to do anything else—and ripples spread out from there, as wizards or witches who relied on others to guide them scrambled to adjust their positions to the emotions their guides were expressing.
Snape shot Harry a glance as he welcomed in the last guest, the French witch, who arrived in a cloud of shimmering silver hair and took a seat between the Light and Dark sides. It seemed Harry did suspect that not everything was perfect. Of course, his chin was up and his green eyes incredibly stubborn. He would not back off on holding the meeting now simply because of potential problems. He would persist until it collapsed.
Snape concealed a snarl. He would not be responsible for his actions if Belville or Starrise launched a spell at Harry. He wished that he could have simply stepped over the boy's barriers, or his own, to warn Harry about them, but Harry was stuck on handling their reconciliation slowly, and didn't want to talk about anything except that or Potions. Snape knew his warnings would have been unwelcome.
He concealed another snarl and turned back to the gathering. Harry had moved through a gap between the French witch's chair and her nearest neighbor's, and taken his place in the center of the circle. He turned in a slow circle himself, meeting everyone's eyes. He radiated power and confidence. Snape had to admit it made a difference from the trial, the last time Harry had been on such public display to a captive audience. This was more like his air during the press conference he'd held to warn the wizarding world of the danger of the wild Dark.
"Thank you for coming," Harry was saying, formally. "It has been decades since the last gathering of Dark and Light wizards this large. When I studied the historical records, the last time I could find a mention of one half so big was an alliance against the Dark Lord Grindelwald, in 1944. That fell apart after a few months of dissonance." He paused and gave a sharp smile in Compton Belville's direction. "I hope this one will prove steadier."
"Perhaps it would help if you told us what you intend, Harry," said Paton Opalline, one of the few wizards here Snape would trust to stand at his back with a wand in his hand. He sat with his tattoos exposed and gleaming on his skin, probably to show the others that his family was at Harry's disposal. "What are your goals for this alliance?"
Harry nodded. "I intend for us to fight Voldemort," he said, and a surprising number of Dark wizards flinched at the name. Snape rolled his eyes, and did not care who saw him. "But not only that. When he is defeated—"
"If," said Compton Belville, with the soft-voiced and utterly stalling kind of interruption he was so good at.
But Harry did not stumble and ask what Belville meant, as so many of his victims did. He merely turned to face him and flashed him a dangerous grin. "I plan to defeat Voldemort in a few years," he said casually. "I certainly don't intend for him to run about for decades and wreak havoc on my life and my brother's."
"Perhaps you could see your way clear towards telling us the prophecy, then," said Belville, leaning forward, his face full of bloodless curiosity. "What exactly does it say? Why should we believe that you will defeat the Dark Lord?"
Harry paused for a long moment. Then he said, "Forgive me, sir, but I know that a traitor lurks among the ranks of my alliance. I have reason to believe that this traitor warned Voldemort about a battle that my allies and I fought in the autumn. Unless everyone here will consent to swear an oath promising to speak nothing of this meeting outside this room, then I cannot tell you the prophecy. There is too much danger that it might run back to my enemies."
"To ask us to take such an oath is an insult!" Gloriana Griffinsnest exclaimed, clasping her hands together. "Would you really ask us to do such a thing, Lord—"
"I am no Lord."
Harry's flat declaration stopped Griffinsnest as effectively as Belville could have done, Snape noted with approval, but not for long. Then she was bustling forward again. "I have heard that you call yourself a vates, a guardian of free will for the magical creatures," she said stiffly, raising her head. "Is this a sign that you respect the free will of wizards and witches less, then?"
Harry shook his head. "It is a simple precaution, ma'am. Unless I have that assurance, it would be stupid to let my enemies have that prophecy."
"Then you are afraid of the Dark Lord," said Belville. Had it not been for the fact that Griffinsnest and Belville hated each other too much to cooperate, Snape would have thought they had arranged this, so perfectly were they playing off each other. "I did not know you were afraid of him."
"Of course I am," said Harry, so simply that it was hard to wrestle fear out of his tone. "He is a Parselmouth, in possession of knowledge of how to breed basilisks—"
"Via books he stole from me," said Arabella Zabini, her face gray with rage.
Harry inclined his head to her. "Nonetheless, stolen or not, he has the knowledge now," he continued. "He is also an absorbere, able to swallow magic. He has drained—Muggleborn children too young for Hogwarts, and I think his victims may be legion in a battle. He is a compeller, an Occlumens, and a master Legilimens, as well as able in Dark Arts from years of study between the time of Grindelwald and his return to Britain and first rise. He had an alliance with the sirens, though they may have broken free of him by now, and he has sent negotiators to the giants, though most have failed. He can possess others. Indigena Yaxley fights with him, and I have already seen how much damage her plants can do." Harry took a deep breath. "I also have information from a new source that Voldemort is stitching pieces of dead flesh together into beasts. I faced one on Midwinter that looked like an enormous worm. The one I have been informed of is a dragon, or resembles one."
"That is a Dark Art unpracticed for nearly two hundred years," said Hawthorn Parkinson, who looked sick. "My—my husband, who was a necromancer, told me of the last time it happened. A monster in human form escaped among the Muggles and caused great damage before he could be stopped. One of the Muggle authors wrote a book about it, though of course most of the facts were wrong. Frankenstein, I think it was called."
Harry nodded slightly. "I know he could animate the worm. I am unsure how he will bring the dragon to life, but I have no doubt that he will manage."
Snape sat still in his chair. It might appear to anyone who looked at him that he was considering how much damage Voldemort's beasts would do. He, however, was thinking of how Harry could have learned about the Dark Lord's dragon. He could think of only two routes, neither of which pleased him.
Either Evan has been writing to him again, and he should know better than to believe the liar by now—
Or he has been opening the Occlumency link and stepping into the Dark Lord's head. Damn him!
Snape sent Harry a furious glare just as Harry turned his way. Harry froze for a moment, eyes wide, then shook his head and set his shoulders and glared back. Snape sat back in his chair, suppressing his incandescent rage that his ward had taken yet another foolish risk, rather than coming and asking for help with his dreams and visions.
"How do we defeat him, when he has such armies?" That was one of the wizards from a minor Light family, Dawnborn or something of the kind. His eyes were wide and fearful.
Harry started to answer, but Edward Burke spoke before he could. "Why do you have to worry about that? You'll just cower in your holes, which is the only activity proper to rabbits."
The Light wizard squawked, and Augustus Starrise's voice rang out. "Do you claim that Dark wizards fought You-Know-Who in his first rise, Burke? They did not. They fawned at his heels as his hounds, or ran beside him as leashed slaves." His eyes found Lucius Malfoy's face.
Snape sat back in resignation as he saw Lucius lean forward. The circle was falling apart all along its fractures. Yes, Harry should have considered more carefully whom to invite.
"Some might say that, under the Imperius Curse or not, at least his servants saw battle, and often without him," Lucius murmured. He was using the kind of voice that did not sound loud, but could easily reach across the circle, and was the fiercer for being the softer. "They did not sit in their homes and wait for one wizard to lead them, as happened too often with Albus Dumbledore. Nor did they become first captives and then suicides."
Starrise stood in a single, flowing motion. He did not have the white staff bound with gold he had carried at the trial, or Snape would have feared for Lucius's life. But he was enraged enough that white, glowing sparks of wandless magic leaped about him. "Were you one of them?" he whispered. "Were you one of the bastards who did worse than rape my sister?"
Lucius merely leaned back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. "Did that happen to your sister? I had no idea. My humblest apologies, Starrise." His voice had no tone at all, which was worse mockery than laughter.
Starrise trembled as if he would rush forward. Gloriana Griffinsnest, beside him, fingered her silver knife and eyed Lupin. Hawthorn Parkinson sniffed once, and then focused on the knife; Snape could hear a low growl bubbling in her throat. Tybalt Starrise and Honoria Pemberley were tensed, bright grins on their faces. Snape did not know which way they would leap, but he was certain they would enjoy the chaos of it.
"Enough."
Snape winced. Harry had enchanted his voice to throb in the ears of everyone who heard it. Most wizards and witches fell back clutching their heads. Lucius and Starrise never took their gazes from each other, but they were the only ones who didn't.
"This is obviously not working," said Harry, with firmness and no disappointment in his tone. "Very well. I have thought of another plan, one I that considered as less preferable than this one. However, perhaps it will give you time to restrain your tempers and become accustomed to working beside wizards and witches of an opposing allegiance." Snape turned his eyes to Harry, along with everyone else, and saw Harry shrouded with a mixture of deep green light, one of the colors that symbolized Dark, and blue phoenix flame. It did make a striking tableau, and it kept most everyone transfixed while Harry spoke. "This is an alliance of Light and Dark, and always will be. I will never Declare for either Dark or Light. I am not a Lord. I am vates, and I will work for the rights of magical creatures. That does not mean I consider them more important my own species—and vice versa.
"Paton Opalline asked me what I wished the alliance to accomplish. While the first answer is finding ways to fight Voldemort, the next answer, and the more profound, is to find new ways of living. Most magical creatures are bound under webs that prevent them from coexisting equally, or at all, with witches and wizards. Light and Dark battle generation after generation, with useless slaughter in the name of names. Injustice prevails in many wizarding families, and not only child abuse. Muggleborns and their children are scorned by purebloods." His gaze came to Starrise, and it was hard, but it didn't soften when he looked at Lucius, either. "I would like to change all of that, and anyone who wishes to help me is welcome."
Silence gripped the room for a long time. Then Paton said, his voice still as cheerful as before, "What is this second opportunity for meeting that you were talking about, Harry?"
"On the spring equinox," said Harry softly. "The old day of reconciliation, of ending wars and making up family quarrels. The day when day and night, Light and Dark, are of equal length. I would invite anyone who wishes to come to an enormous gathering, not held in Hogwarts—"
"Where, then?" Compton Belville asked.
"In a place I will reveal to those who choose to come, and only those," said Harry simply. "And I will require oaths, before you enter the area, that you will not cast spells save in self-defense. We are going to talk about revolution, but bloodless revolution only."
"Such a thing has not been done since Merlin's time." That was the French witch, leaning forward and looking at Harry with interest. "The memories of the Veela are long, and such oaths of peace were rare even then. Will people from other countries who wish to attend the gathering be welcome?"
Harry bowed slightly to her. "Anyone who wishes, yes."
"There could be centaurs there, then?" Augustus Starrise asked.
"And werewolves?" Gloriana Griffinsnest asked.
"And Muggleborns?" That was Edward Burke, who looked dismayed.
"Yes, anyone who wishes to attend and will swear the oaths." Harry looked at them and shook his head. "I will remain here until everyone is left, to make sure the remains of this gathering do not explode into violence. It troubles me, indeed, that this had to happen, that so many powerful adult wizards in Britain will surrender themselves to names and no more than that."
His tone was perfect, Snape had to concede, not exactly scolding but full of proud and stern dismay. More than a few people bowed their heads and looked chastised before they slowly began to leave. Snape waited until he was sure that most of them were gone, and the small crowd around Harry had cleared, before he began working his own way forward.
Harry was speaking with Paton Opalline when he arrived. Paton took one look at Snape's face and raised his eyebrows. "It seems that your father wishes to speak with you, Harry," he said, "and I know better than to stand between a parent and child. My brother gave me a scar I still bear for it." He stepped back.
"He's not my father," said Harry.
His voice was querulous, sulky, to Snape's ears, and it was that or it was the words that made Snape lose control of his temper—though he managed to keep his voice soft, so that no one would have reason to look their way.
"You have been going into the Dark Lord's mind in your dreams," he whispered harshly.
Harry stiffened. "What makes you think I've done that?" he asked, and his eyes met Snape's, wide and guileless. Occlumency shields were guarding his emotions, so that Snape couldn't read, even with a focused Legilimency probe, anything to contradict what he was saying. If Snape hadn't taught Harry to do that, and in part to lie, himself, he might even have believed him.
If small winged pigs had been swooping overhead, perhaps.
"How else could you have learned about the Dark Lord's use of a flesh dragon?" Snape snarled. "Unless Rosier has written you."
Harry shook his head. "No, he hasn't."
"Then it was the dreams," said Snape, and other emotions than pure anger were stirring in him now: resentment for Harry's disregard of his own safety, and fear, and resentment of the fear, and a marrow-deep frustration. "You have done many things in the past month that you have not informed me of." And he was thinking, now, of the fact that Harry had obviously made up with Draco and not him, and of Harry becoming Black heir, and of the fact that Harry had mostly arranged this meeting before he bothered to tell Snape about it.
"I didn't want you to worry."
Snape's eyes snapped away from his memories and back to Harry .The words were soft and laden with poison. Harry's gaze sparked with his own resentment and frustration. Snape could see the progress they had made in the past month falling to pieces in them.
"What have I said about that?" Snape said, more softly and more coldly than before. His anger was rending him again. It was one thing not to be able to protect Harry from suddenly appearing dangers like Dumbledore and Evan Rosier, it was another for Harry to have to face one only he could face, like the wild Dark, and it was another, quite another, for Harry to hide information from him that would have aided Snape in protecting him—for Harry to do things that damaged Snape's role of guardian.
"That I have to trust you." Harry's voice rose a notch higher. Snape could see Draco hovering anxiously off to the side, but his mother had her hand on his shoulder and wasn't letting him approach. "You don't see that I do trust you. Merlin! Would I pour this much effort into arguing with you, would I care this much, if I didn't trust you, didn't love you? But that's not the only role I have. I have to be a leader, have to do what I can to protect others. He hasn't sensed me so far; I promise he hasn't. I'm learning to distinguish between the dreams I get, the ones where he's dreaming and the ones where I see what he's doing and the ones where he tries to trap me. I know what the traps feel like, and he's not using them."
If he had ever been more sheerly infuriated at any point in his life, Snape could not remember it. "Perhaps he senses you," he whispered. "Perhaps he is merely waiting you out. Did you think of that?"
Harry snorted. "Would he really let me see his plans that way? I don't think he would. He would use a false vision instead. And I told you, I know what those feel like. He lured me to the Weasleys this summer with a misty dream of him attacking my brother. He's not using those now. I've been watching him, and he can't sense me. I haven't been jumping into the connection like I did in September. I promise."
"Why will you not let us protect you?"
Harry apparently couldn't speak for a moment. Then he snarled, "Because you can't. I'll never be safe. I've got used to that. You still haven't. And I'm not a child, and the ways you try to protect me are all ways you would try to protect a child. If I thought you would take the information I have about my danger and discuss it with me like an adult, then I would give it to you. But you don't, and you won't." He paused, then added, "Maybe that's the way I don't trust you, sir. I don't trust you to remember that this is a war, and I have to do my share of the work."
He turned and strode rapidly from the Room of Requirement, giving his head a single sharp shake when Draco tried to accompany him. Snape knew he was probably going off alone to brood.
He controlled his temper with a combination of Occlumency and sheer ruthlessness. He would go back to his quarters, conjure targets, and destroy them. Then he would brew potions. But not here, not here.
"Trying to raise a child is difficult," said Opalline. He didn't put his hand on Snape's shoulder, merely regarded him with compassion. "Particularly when they begin to insist that they are children no longer."
Snape only nodded once, curtly, and strode from the room. He hated vulnerability, and he hated helplessness, and he felt as if he were helpless on all sides, with his tie to a life that Harry refused to guard.