WARNING for emotional trauma. After the last chapter, that should really come as no surprise.

Warning also for lots of disjointed scenes from different POV characters, I suppose. This chapter really deserves its name.

Chapter Eighty-Eight: Path of Broken Glass

Minerva stood on the Astronomy Tower and watched with black hatred as Voldemort invested Hogwarts' grounds.

He had returned, scarcely five minutes after he had gone into the Forbidden Forest, with more Death Eaters. In fact, there were several hundred, a fact which dazzled and dazed her. The Dark Lord had never managed to summon that many except in the very last days of his power, just before he fell at Godric's Hollow. His recruiters must have been busy, especially among those students of Durmstrang whom Karkaroff would have had a chance to try and corrupt, but Minerva couldn't understand why. Why would they listen to him? What could he promise them? What made them so certain that he would not merely fall again?

And these Death Eaters had obviously practiced what they were going to do when they arrived in the grounds, or at least been told. They set up neat and immediate camps, lines of tents carefully protected with wards that Minerva recognized as those that would resist both weather and fire. The second kind made her want to laugh. Do they think we're going to be launching fireballs at them from the castle?

Well, they might, she supposed. She continued watching, and in a moment saw the reason why Voldemort and his minions had been able to pass through the Forbidden Forest so freely.

The ground shook as the giants arrived, at least twenty of them, all twelve feet tall and grunting as they set their immense weapons—clubs and spears—down on the Quidditch Pitch. The moment they were settled, one of the Death Eaters strode over to them from the middle of the camp. Minerva couldn't make out who it was from this distance, where he was just a moving dark robe, but thought it was probably Karkaroff, the wizard who had contacted the giants in the first place. Now he appeared to be making some kind of speech to them.

Minerva gave a rapid shiver, and hoped that Voldemort would keep his word, as much as that was possible, and not attack Hogwarts before Midsummer. They badly needed to come up with some kind of plan that would incorporate this many giants. Harry had made a few contingency plans for them, but not even he had suspected that Voldemort would bring more than ten.

Harry…

Minerva swallowed around the pain in her throat. Everyone in Hogwarts had heard Voldemort's final promise, because that was his intention. The adults would know better than to trust him. But the students, even the older students, might not. They might think they could earn passage out of the siege by turning Harry over. Minerva wondered, with resignation nearly as cold as her hatred, how long it would be before one of them would try.

She abruptly swung around, her eyes wide. She had wards up to prevent Apparition anywhere in Hogwarts; she was certain that if that weren't the case, then some of the Death Eaters would already have entered that way. But now the wards were telling her that strangers had entered anyway.

Godric appeared at her side a moment later, gasping as if he'd run. His robes looked rumpled, and his eyes were wide with fear. He was so upset that when his feet passed through one side of the Tower, he didn't seem to care.

"Minerva!" he cried. "There are Death Eaters using Portkeys to appear inside Hogwarts! A supply closet on the fifth floor, an old snogging room near the Prefects' Bathroom, one of the abandoned classrooms on the second floor—"

"I feel them," Minerva snapped, and began to run. "Just three pairs, so far?"

"Yes!" Godric kept pace with her. "But there may be more any moment. After all, many of them are going to know what Hogwarts looks like inside, since they were students here." The bitter undercurrent in his voice was strong.

Minerva nodded, and reached out a hand to him. Godric clasped it, though she felt only the faintest brush of warm flesh; he was most solid near the anchor-stone, and they were far from it.

Concentrating, they brought another ward whipping up, one they'd prepared but hadn't used because they had known Portkeys might be necessary to employ at some point. This one rendered all Portkeys useless within the school itself. The wards on the grounds were so shredded from Voldemort absorbing their magic that Minerva wouldn't have wanted to try and extend this protection there, if it were even possible. Now, though, the Death Eaters who had ventured into the school were trapped.

"Where are Rowena and Helga?" Minerva demanded, when that was done. They were coming down from the Tower now, and she was cursing her old bones. Well, when needs must, dignity is no answer, she thought, and dropped into her Animagus form. A tabby cat could bound down the stairs and around corners much faster than an old witch could.

"Rowena is going after the ones near the Prefects' Bathroom," said Godric, sounding a bit calmer. "And Helga is facing them on the second floor. They left the fifth floor for us, since we were closest."

Minerva mewed to show she understood, and then hurried forward. One of the moving staircases tried to turn on her, but she jumped from one revolving step to another, toe-walked across a banister, and sprang easily to the floor on the other side. She picked up speed after that, as if she had seen a mouse desperate to get away.

She saw the supply closet that Godric was talking about the moment they reached the fifth floor, because it was standing open, and no students would have been on this floor; Minerva had ordered their Heads of House to take them back to their common rooms the moment they were all inside. Two heavyset, unfamiliar men were walking hastily up the corridor, their hands on their wands. They obviously hadn't noticed her yet.

Minerva fought the urge to arch her back and spit, which would only alert them to her presence. She changed back instead, and drew her wand. A nonverbal Body-Bind caught one of them, and the other spun around, his face red, as his companion toppled to the floor.

He called out a curse Minerva knew better than to stand in the way of, and she spun aside as it slammed into the stone where she'd been standing. Godric flew at the man, but he dodged, his attention focused on Minerva. She leveled her wand, meanwhile, and murmured, "Transformo columbae!"

In a moment, the dangerous Death Eater was a helplessly fluttering dove, his wand clattering to the floor. Minerva conjured a cage and stuck him in that. The dove pecked at the bars and glared at her, as much as a bird could. Minerva meanwhile Stunned the other man, then released him from the Body-Bind and Transfigured him into a goldfish, conjuring a bowl of water immediately. She liked Transfiguring her enemies. It didn't kill them, but it kept them from causing trouble.

Carrying cage and bowl, she looked up at Godric. "Do Rowena and Helga need any help?"

"No," he said, drifting down to let his feet rest on the floor again. "Rowena knows so many spells I don't—she handled hers just fine. And you haven't ever seen what Helga's like when a student's threatened, Minerva." He shivered a bit. "She had the stones of the castle eat them."

Minerva nodded fiercely, satisfied. "And there are no other Death Eaters in Hogwarts?"

"No," said Godric firmly. "We felt only three pulls on the wards." He closed his eyes and sighed. "But this means that the students won't be able to use Portkeys to escape, doesn't it?"

"I'm afraid so," said Minerva. The pounding excitement of the battle had faded, allowing her to remember their predicament. "The moment I lower the wards, more Death Eaters would come in."

"Most likely," Godric agreed. "Then the Floo Networks are our best bet, I would think—"

"Not so."

Minerva turned around. Peter was standing behind her, his face pale. Minerva frowned at him. "You aren't at the Tower?" she asked.

"I asked Acies to watch the Gryffindors so I could come and speak with you," said Peter. "And I looked in your office first. The Floo connection's gone, Minerva. Destroyed. A spell I've never seen before, cast on it. The only thing I could tell was that it was a time-delayed one."

"How could you be sure the Floo connection was destroyed?" Minerva asked, not wanting to believe it. She had thought they would manage to evacuate the students somehow, not listening to Voldemort's insane dictum, and that, come Midsummer, only those who had chosen to face battle would remain.

"Because," said Peter softly, "the fireplace collapsed. I lifted some of the stones back to their original places and cast the Floo powder in it, but there's not a spark. No fire will burn in it. I tried every incantation I knew. And then I sent rats to the other Floo connections—the hospital wing, and Severus's rooms, and all the others in the school. They all came back with the same message. Destroyed."

"I—there has to be some mistake." Minerva pressed the goldfish bowl to her face, feeling faint. "I refuse to think that a saboteur could have entered Severus's rooms. A rat might be able to get in, Peter, but he has wards against everything else. Even Animagi."

"If someone managed to cast a spell on your Floo connection, Minerva, that wouldn't matter," Godric said, his face distressed again. "They're all linked to the one in the Headmistress's office, so that she can prevent just anyone from coming into Hogwarts. Remove that keystone, and the others are going to break."

Minerva restrained the impulse to utter some truly vile curses. "We have a traitor inside Hogwarts, then," she said flatly.

Peter nodded. Godric murmured, "It seems so."

Minerva closed her eyes and tried to control the reeling sickness in her belly. She had welcomed all of Harry's allies in her office on Friday afternoon, making sure they understood what was expected of them as long as they stayed in Hogwarts. The professors had been there as well. Anyone would have had a chance to cast a spell on her fireplace, particularly one that she didn't recognize, and one that was time-delayed to have no immediate effect. It could have been any of them.

She took a deep breath, and shook her head, and forced her eyes to open. "Then Voldemort has managed to shut most of the ways out of Hogwarts," she murmured. "I can't lower the wards against Apparition and Portkeys in case his Death Eaters enter. The Floo connections are damaged. Anyone flying over the grounds on a broom will be risking his or her life, and certainly the lives of any students."

"There are still some ways out," said Peter softly. "I was a Marauder, Minerva. I'll send the rats through the secret passages, to spy them out and see which ones are safe. That was actually what I was coming to your office to see you about."

Minerva felt her heart begin to beat again. "Thank you, Peter," she said, and smiled at him. "I appreciate it."

Indigena was beginning to wonder if she would spend most of her days spitting dirt.

She crouched in a large tunnel that led from Hogwarts into Hogsmeade—the inhabitants of the village had already fled, of course, leaving their homes and shops open to Death Eater foraging—and wound it with her vines. Other plants snaked through the soil in all directions, finding and digging into the passages that led across the grounds. The Dark Lord didn't think that many of them would see use, since most of them came up somewhere in the middle of the Death Eater encampment, but he wanted to guard the ones his hostages might use to escape.

It's easier if I think of them as hostages and not victims, Indigena thought, head cocked to the side as she wreathed the tunnel with another hanging drape of green tendrils and white flowers. The white flowers would look harmless enough, even pretty, to anyone who met them. But they contained an incense that would incapacitate any human, dropping them dreaming to the floor of the passage, where the tendrils could grab them and hand them to Indigena.

Indigena had just finished the third curtain of white flowers when she paused. The tendrils that coiled around the tunnel further towards Hogwarts—not much beyond her, really, since the Dark Lord's strict instructions were to leave Hogwarts alone until Midsummer—were telling her about intruders. But not human intruders, or the flowers would already have breathed. Indigena listened to the reports of vibrations for a moment, then smiled.

"I think I hear the pitter-patter of little feet," she remarked to the loops that draped over her shoulders. "Shall we do something about that?"

The vines agreed, and lashed out from her shoulders, traveling fast down the tunnel. Indigena waited, and soon they hauled several squeaking, thrashing rats within reach of her wand.

Indigena examined them minutely, and then cast several spells to be sure. They were all ordinary rats, not an Animagus among them. The traitor in the castle who went by the name of Peter Pettigrew and was a rat Animagus had probably summoned them, though.

She had the tendrils fling them back down the tunnel, and commanded the other plants in the secret passages where the rats had tried to sense a way out for the students to do the same. It would do no harm, and probably much good, to send Pettigrew's little spies back to him and report that there was no way out where Yaxley's vines coiled.

Indigena encouraged her plants to grow even more thickly after that. Naughty traitors, to imagine that there is a way out for them while I am on my Lord's side.

Nineteen. And sixty-three.

"I don't know what the Ministry can do to help us, if anything," said Harry, keeping his voice low. He was pacing in the corridor just outside the hospital wing, where he'd been to visit those who had escaped from the battle with wounds. He'd invoked the communication spell to Priscilla Burke as soon as he left, as she was the only person in the Ministry he'd counted as enough of an ally to have taught the spell to. "We're trapped here with no way out. Someone's destroyed the Floo connections. The Headmistress has to keep up wards against Apparitions and Portkeys, in case the Death Eaters leap inside the moment they're lowered. Brooms are too dangerous, for obvious reasons, and Indigena Yaxley's plants are blocking the tunnels that lead out through the grounds."

He heard Priscilla make a noise of frustration that seemed to emanate from just above his wrist, but she didn't say anything for a long moment. That gave Harry leisure to lean against the wall and make the count in his head again.

Nineteen. And sixty-three. That makes eighty-two. Harry cradled the number in his mind like the key Arithmancy equation that would have allowed him to pass his OWL. Nineteen alive, but drained of magic. Sixty-three dead. Eighty-two people I've hurt. And how many hundreds have I failed?

"You have to understand, Harry," said Priscilla then, "we already have parents going mad and insisting the Ministry do something. They're not going to take it kindly when we tell them there's no way into or out of Hogwarts."

Harry heard a bark of laughter escape before he could stop himself. He bit his lips after that, though, because if he started laughing, he knew he wouldn't stop. He began pacing again, and listened to the way his steps on the floor seemed to bespeak numbers. Sixty-three. Nineteen. Sixty-three. Nineteen. "And why do you think Voldemort is doing this?" he asked her bluntly. "He wants to panic people. I'm sure he'd just love it if parents came onto Hogwarts grounds searching for a way to rescue their children. More hostages, and he could torture them in front of the walls and know that at least one child would see his mother or father dying in front of him. Lovely plan, to let them come. It's all working out for him."

"Harry," said Priscilla, voice growing harder. Harry couldn't tell which emotion drove her more, desperation or pain. "We can't stop them from going, if they choose to. The Ministry doesn't have enough Aurors to encircle Hogwarts and keep people from getting into the midst of the Death Eaters. Not to mention that he would attack if he saw us show up, anyway," she added.

"If you value their lives, you'll issue a warning about how stupid they'd be if they try to come here," said Harry, and rubbed his eyes with his hand. He felt exhausted, and it wasn't much after noon. Of course, the onrush of bad news and what he'd done that morning and the numbers repeating in his head would be enough to tire anyone out, but he needed to remain awake. "Make it blunt, no language spared. People have to know they're risking their lives if they come here, and their children's sanity. I don't care how much they miss their children, against that. They should stay away."

"They won't like it," Priscilla repeated.

"That, frankly, is not my problem," said Harry, and matched the snap in his voice to hers. "You may have missed this, but it's a little hard for me to influence parents when I'm in Hogwarts and trying to make sure that Voldemort doesn't take any of the hundreds of potential hostages around me."

Another little silence, and Harry went back to pacing. Sixty-three. Nineteen. Sixty-three. Nineteen.

"I'm sorry," Priscilla said quietly. "The Ministry's been besieged with owls and visitors since people started Apparating into London from Hogsmeade and reporting that there were Death Eaters at Hogwarts, and it's had me—upset. How's Thomas?"

Harry shrugged, then remembered she couldn't see him. "Well, from what I know," he said.

"That's good, then," Priscilla said, her voice a bit lighter. "We'll do what we can, Harry, to keep people from panicking and people from coming to Hogwarts. I can't promise we'll be completely successful."

"Do what you can," Harry said, and then cut off the communication spell and leaned against the wall for a moment. Sixty-three. Nineteen. Sixty-three. Nineteen. And eighty-two altogether.

Before he could close his eyes and start thinking about what was going to happen next, Draco came through the doors of the hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey had wanted him in the hospital wing to help comfort the wounded Slytherin students, as he was one of the few who hadn't been out on the battlefield himself. Snape was in his offices brewing the healing potions that Pomfrey was already running out of. That, Harry thought, was the only reason he'd been left alone so long after Snape's initial catch and embrace of him.

From the look on Draco's face, though, his solitude was about to end. Harry pushed himself up and tried to brace for the question.

"What happened when you were hovering over the lake?" Draco asked quietly.

Harry winced. Trust Draco to go straight to the heart of the most painful matter. But hiding this wasn't something he could do. He had to let Snape, Draco, and eventually everyone else dear to him—and, of course, the children's parents, when he was able to contact them—know exactly what he'd done, what he'd turned into out there.

"Voldemort had a dozen first-years and second-years in a Life-Web," he said. "He offered to let them go if I would come down to him."

"But you didn't," said Draco, and stared at him.

Harry shook his head. "Only the caster can break a Life-Web. He might have promised to let them go, but then I'd have to depend on him to keep his word. He could will them to die, hurt, go mad, anything, as long as he held that damn web. And he could have broken any spell I put on them, once he knew what it was, spells to heal them or levitate them away or do anything else. And while I hung there trying to decide what to do, people were dying around me." He closed his eyes for a moment.

"What did you do?" Draco's voice was as soft as a prayer.

"I used a spell that he didn't think I would ever use, and so didn't counter in time," Harry answered, opening his eyes. "I killed them by giving them heart attacks."

Draco was staring at him, and Draco's stare filled all the world. Harry stared back. He deserved anything that might appear there, Merlin knew. Disgust, hatred, anger, shock, rejection… The list of possible emotions was so long that he hadn't finished it before Draco moved.

Draco's arms curled around Harry and tugged him hard against him. Harry leaned his head on Draco's shoulder, and wondered what emotion this was. He knew what he wanted it to be, what emotion the warm embrace seemed to proclaim it, but he also knew that he'd changed, and no one would ever look at him the same way again. That meant Draco couldn't have been hugging him in simple love.

"Merlin," Draco said into his neck. "Oh, Merlin. Harry." The next moment, Harry felt hot tears land on the side of his collar.

Harry patted his back then, his own body relaxing. He could deal with this. Grief and horror were feelings he knew well, knew how to comfort and soothe. And if they were directed at him, well, he knew how to deal with that, too. He'd seen them in his parents' eyes during the last day of their trial.

"I'm so sorry," Draco whispered. "I'm so sorry this happened to you. Harry—that can't—I don't know what else you could have done, but I can't—that can't have been easy," he finished, his words choking around the sobs and limping to a halt.

Harry leaned back against the wall with his arms still around Draco, his hand still stroking soothing, comforting circles. He had the feeling he'd be doing this a lot in the next few days. Best to get used to this now.

"Harry, Harry, Harry," were Draco's next words, like a mantra. "Why aren't you crying, too?"

"Because if I begin," said Harry, staring over Draco's head at the far wall, "if I start now, I'm not going to stop."

Draco gave a convulsive shudder, and then abruptly stiffened in Harry's arms. Harry could feel himself frown. What is it? Has he just now realized the full implications of what I've done?

"You think that, don't you?" Draco asked, voice low and tense as an accusation.

"Think what?"

"You think it's your fault. You think you should have made another decision, even though there was no other decision you could make." Draco pulled himself away and grabbed Harry's shoulders, shaking him. "Damn it, Harry, don't do this! That's how he'll get inside your head. He doesn't need to send dreams, not when he can make your own guilt eat you alive!"

"If I don't feel this guilt," Harry said quietly, not resisting the shaking, "then I'd already be gone, another Dumbledore or another Voldemort. This way, I know I'm still human."

Draco said several things a properly-bred Malfoy, in Harry's opinion, shouldn't know. "And what solution would have been better?" he demanded then. "You, giving yourself up? You said it, Harry. You could have done that, and he still wouldn't have released the Life-Web. All you would have achieved was your own martyrdom and a kind of squalling pride that at least you did the right thing. Fine if you want to die a Gryffindor, but damn you, you have to stay alive."

"Oh, I know that," said Harry, mildly puzzled that Draco would think he didn't know that. "Boy-Who-Lived and all that, right?"

"Stop it, stop it, stop it," Draco said, leaning in towards him now, voice low and intense. "Damn you, Harry, please. Don't do this. You're blaming yourself, and that's going to tear you apart, and then how are we going to survive this siege?"

"We're going to survive it because I'll make myself into a symbol," said Harry, and stepped back, tearing away from Draco's grip. "A symbol of hope or a symbol of hatred, whatever they need. You know there will be people who want to turn me over to Voldemort, in hopes that he'll keep his promise. I can't even blame them. I hoped, for one insane moment, that he would have kept his promise if I'd gone down to him."

Draco tried to grab him again. Harry dodged. He'd felt the trembling and cracking of the edges of his control as he stood there. He couldn't stay. Draco would hold him again and try to make him—Harry didn't even know what it would be, but it would involve admission of guilt and perhaps crying, and it would shatter him. He couldn't shatter, not now.

Draco called after him. Harry walked down the corridor and didn't look back. He had to get to McGonagall and offer her his strength to help bolster the wards on the castle itself.

Owen had ears. And he didn't like what he heard.

He and Michael had shadowed Harry for most of the morning and early afternoon, but as Harry spent a large part of the early evening cooped up with the Headmistress, they'd gone exploring. They wanted to know what the school thought of Harry, how many were hopeful and how many hostile and how many too terrified to think.

And so they went to the Great Hall, concealed with Dark Arts spells that Professor Fleur-de-lis had taught them at Durmstrang, and watched as the children brought there for dinner conversed and argued with each other. Many conversations were low-voiced, and choked with tears. Unnoticed, though, Owen and Michael could get close to the various House tables and listen in.

"I can't believe she's gone," was a common theme, with a variation of "He's gone," and Owen learned to ignore them. They were grieving, and grieving was a natural process after what had happened on the battlefield this morning. He himself had endured enough of it at Durmstrang, Merlin knew, after yet another day in which he saw yet another fellow student brutally tortured.

The other conversations were the ones that interested him more. The first he heard was between two older Gryffindor students, talking to each other in voices that the crack of cutlery and buzzed whispers of others would normally have concealed.

"Do you think he's right?" one of them, a pale and rather pretty brown-haired girl, asked the other, a tall boy with dark eyes. "Do you think that if we really gave him Harry, then he'd leave us alone?"

"I don't know," said the boy, but not firmly enough to make Owen think he was Harry's supporter. "We can't trust him, I suppose. I mean—I know we can't. But maybe…" His voice trailed off, and he said no more.

"Maybe," the brown-haired girl whispered, and Owen nearly snorted at what he heard in her voice. Desperate hope, the kind of hope that got in under one's heart and tore it. There had been some students at Durmstrang who thought that doing just what Bellatrix wanted, even torturing others when she ordered them to, would spare them. It hadn't worked. And yet people had kept doing it and kept doing it. Stripped down to a question of their own survival or someone else's, a surprising number of people would choose their own survival.

Owen supposed he couldn't blame them. They were children, true children, even though the girl looked older than he was. They hadn't learned, as he had, that you put aside those niggling little hopes and lived through a situation like this by pushing forward and enduring.

He passed the Ravenclaw table, and noticed the largest knot of students he'd seen yet, focused around one furiously whispering girl. Owen moved carefully nearer. One girl looked around suspiciously at the breeze on the back of her neck, but didn't, of course, see him, so she returned to dancing attendance on the other.

Owen listened, too, and what he heard raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

"—for a reason," the single, intense girl was saying, gesturing with one hand. "It all happened for a reason. The compulsion spell from Dumbledore, the Dark Arts we learned from Rovenan, everything. It was to prepare us for this. For a situation when we might have to do the right thing because no one else would." She sat back and stared challengingly at the others.

"Yes, Margaret," said another, her face troubled, "but the compulsion spell was to make us hate Harry just because Dumbledore hated him. What if this is the same kind of thing? You-Know-Who wants to make us turn on Harry because he hates Harry?"

Margaret shook her head. "Not the same thing," she said, "not at all. Dumbledore was doing it because he'd been arrested for child abuse, and he hated that. He wanted to resume his power. But You-Know-Who just wants to kill Harry. The point isn't getting us to hate him. The point is getting him. And you heard what he said. The moment he gets him, he'll leave us alone. Or he'll attack without mercy on Midsummer morning."

Most of the students huddled around her flinched at that. A boy spoke this time. "Can we really trust him to keep his promises, though?"

"I've read some histories of the First War," said Margaret, insistent. "You-Know-Who would sometimes send warnings to those villages he wanted to attack, promising the Death Eaters would strike at such and such a time. And they always did. He keeps his promises. I think he'll keep this one."

Owen concealed another snort. He had read those histories, too. What the survivors tended to forget was that Voldemort had only made such "promises" when he was fully come to power, and could use terror of his name just as effectively as actual raids. Before the last year of the War, he had never warned, simply attacked. There hadn't been a single survivor of the Battle of Valerian.

"It's something to think about," said Margaret, with a firm nod.

And you're someone to watch, Owen thought, and shifted away.

The Hufflepuff table actually exploded in a row as he watched, one that their Head had to come and break up. As she forcibly separated the two boys in the middle, one of them yelled, "I don't care what you say, Zacharias! He's going to kill us all if he doesn't get him!"

"You're being an idiot, Ernie," the other boy, who looked as cool and calm and unruffled as it was possible to be, murmured. "Of course he won't let us go. Why would he? A castle full of hostages to terrify, to torture, and to use on our parents to make sure they don't fight him? Oh, yes, let us go, wonderful idea. He isn't worthy of the name of evil, murdering bastard if he does."

"Some of us might be able to leave," Ernie insisted. It was patently obvious to Owen that he hoped he'd be among them. "You never know—"

"That is enough, both of you," said their Head sharply. "You are coming with me to my office right now."

Owen drifted over to the Slytherin table while that was settled. He didn't hear much there, though. Apart from anything else, some of them were using spells that muffled their conversations, and he had to be careful lest one of them managed to dispel the concealment charm he was using.

He met his brother back in the middle of the Hall, and looked an inquiry at him. Michael shook his head, eyes even darker than usual.

"It's—going to be hard for Harry," he said.

Owen smiled grimly at his twin. "Good thing that he's got us to protect him, then, and that we have a few less scruples than he does," he said, and Michael nodded back, his hand closing on his wand.

Harry stood on top of the North Tower, barely a few inches from the shimmer of Hogwarts's strengthened wards, and looked down at the campfires of Voldemort's army.

And it was an army, a true one. Harry knew that the Death Eaters Indigena had rescued from Tullianum had swelled his ranks, but only by a small amount. The majority of these men and women were new recruits, culled from other countries; Harry thought that he would have had some advance notice if so many Dark wizards had disappeared from Britain.

His hand tightened on the stone for a moment as he watched an owl, dodging towards the school, spiral to the ground in the wake of an Avada Kedavra curse. He wondered grimly whose owl it had been. A parent, trying to send a letter or a Portkey to a child? One of the Daily Prophet's owls attempting valiantly to bring the paper in? One of the regular pieces of correspondence that McGonagall dealt with in her position as Headmistress? They would never know. The Death Eaters had been killing all the owls that either tried to leave the school or reach it since they arrived that morning. Well, of course they would, Harry thought. The owls might bring a means of escape, and Voldemort wouldn't want that.

He supposed he should be in bed. But there was no one to make him go. Harry had Vanished away from Owen and Michael, and Draco when he had come looking for him, and Snape was still in his offices, this time brewing the Veritaserum that McGonagall needed to interrogate the captured Death Eaters.

There was a traitor inside the school. And Harry had brought him there.

He leaned his head on the stone and breathed in the cool air. This high, he couldn't smell the scent of the campfires, and the stars themselves seemed to make the night frosty and distant. He could pretend, for a moment, that he was reading about this situation in a history book or hearing about it as a story long after it was over, and his head could clear.

And then the numbers came back.

Sixty-three. Nineteen. One.

The "one" was that of a girl who'd slipped into a coma when Madam Pomfrey tried to cure the pain curse she'd suffered. The matron was unsure if she'd done it because of the pain curse, or because she was allergic to the potion used. Either way, she was hovering beside her bed now, trying frantically to bring her back to life and to light.

Sixty-three and nineteen and one made eighty-three. Harry was sure the number would climb before it was over.

He turned when he heard a light footstep behind him on the stone. It took him a moment longer to recognize who stood there, because her black robes blended so well with the night around her. Then he saw one of her sleeves flutter for no good reason, and knew it was Pansy.

Pansy, who had missed breakfast, because she must have known that those students would die on the battlefield this morning, and she was sworn by her oaths as a necromancer not to reveal that.

Harry drew in a deep breath, and then let it out again. He wasn't sure what he could say. Even if he gave her words of comfort, she couldn't respond to them, except in the sign language that he didn't know. And he couldn't blame her for not warning him. She was forbidden to.

She edged up beside him, though, and Harry could read the silent appeal in her body language well enough. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. The tension flowed out of Pansy, and she bowed her head. The intangible wind playing with the edge of her sleeve seemed to slow. Harry was almost sure he had soothed her.

He smiled at her, and then turned to make his way down the stairs. He'd patrol the school, and see if he encountered anyone roaming out of bed. The professors were so busy comforting all the students that they were bound to miss one or two.

And if that person needed to talk to him, then Harry could listen. If that person needed to punch him, he could allow that, too. If that person needed to scream and shriek in hatred because of what he had done, then Harry could take that, because he was ultimately strong enough to resist it, and he was ultimately in the wrong.

Sixty-three, sang his trainers as they whispered against the steps on the way down. Nineteen. One. Sixty-three. Nineteen. One.

Snape was unsurprised to find that the Death Eaters had already been Transfigured back from a dove and a goldfish when he carried the Veritaserum into McGonagall's office the next morning. They were seated in chairs, not only tied with ropes but stuck in Body-Binds that left their jaws alone hanging loose. The Headmistress looked up from contemplating their faces, and nodded to him.

Snape felt a grim surge of satisfaction as he uncapped the first vial. Dumbledore would have objected to this. In the end, of course, he would have allowed it anyway, after admitting that his methods of trying to persuade the Death Eaters wouldn't work, but he would have dithered long enough to cause harm and get him, morally, off the hook. McGonagall charged ahead and did what she had to do to protect her students, and moral consequences could be faced later.

Somewhat like Harry, in fact.

Draco had come to him last night, when he couldn't find Harry, and told him the tale of the dozen dead children. Snape understood as no one else could have. He'd committed murders even after he became a spy, because that was the only way he could have maintained his cover as one of the most vicious and violent of the Death Eaters. Sometimes he'd tried to find a way out, but with Voldemort's eyes always on him, there was usually no other decision to be made. One did what one had to do, secure in both the boiling bile of one's own conscience and hatred and misunderstanding from those who would never have to make such choices.

Snape wished that Harry had come to him. But Harry had not, and though a few of the other professors had reported seeing him in the halls, they had not approached him. Too busy with their own students, Pomona and Filius had told him when he asked.

Or too afraid, Snape thought, as he tipped the Veritaserum down the first man's throat. They think him marked for death already. No one walks too close to a man like that.

The prisoners became slack-jawed and loose-tongued enough when they had swallowed the potion, and willing to answer McGonagall's questions. For the most part, their answers were as expected. They knew nothing of why Voldemort had wanted to attack Hogwarts early, or who might have destroyed the Floo connections, and he had sent them with Portkeys to force McGonagall to bring down wards that would prevent their use. There were others waiting with Portkeys, and with the word Apparate poised on their lips, for the moment when she might lower those wards to try and send the students home.

Then McGonagall asked, "Does Voldemort mean to keep his promise to attack on Midsummer Day, and Midsummer Day alone?"

"Yes," said the one on the left, a man with dreaming, stupid eyes that Snape was not surprised had joined the Death Eaters. Idiots, the lot of them who would join with him now, he thought, curling his lip. "He will destroy everything on Midsummer. Unless Harry Potter is handed over to him first."

The second said the same thing, in almost the same words, when the Headmistress asked him. McGonagall glanced at Snape, to ask if he had any questions. Snape leaned forward. Both men wore identical robes, and had worn identical masks. Nothing to indicate which one of them was higher-ranking, and if they were both newcomers, as demonstrated by the state of their knowledge so far, then neither would know that much about their Lord's plans anyway.

But he did ask, "How will Voldemort use the giants in battle?"

"I don't know," said one, and then the other.

Snape frowned. He'd noticed that the one on the left had a very slight trace of a French accent, so he focused on him. "How has Voldemort been recruiting in France?"

"Through a contact in Beauxbatons," the Death Eater said dreamily. "I don't know who it is. He passes messages on to former students who are sympathetic to the pureblood cause, and they pass messages on to others."

Snape looked at McGonagall, but she was already standing, moving to her desk and scribbling something down. "When we can send owls again," she said, without looking up, "then I will inform Madame Maxime of the problem on her staff."

Snape felt a surge of gratitude that she had said when and not if. Then he told himself not to be ridiculous. The Headmistress might be the best leader for the school in this time of crisis, but that did not mean he had to feel gratitude towards her. Someone had to keep a clear head in what was rapidly turning into an exploding nest of loathing and fear.

As if the revelation had given her fresh strength, McGonagall returned to the interrogation. She still didn't elicit much that had to do with the present battle, but she was learning essential things about the methods Voldemort had used to find his Death Eaters in France, Spain, Belgium, and Germany. When this siege ended, Snape thought—when, not if—they would be armed with information that might enable other nations to join in and prevent more Dark wizards from flowing into Britain.

And when this is done, I am going to find Harry.

Harry moved carefully along a dungeon corridor. He'd nearly run into Connor in the entrance hall, as his brother passed him on his way to the hospital wing to visit Ginny, who'd sustained a nasty cut to the shoulder protecting the Ravenclaw students yesterday. Harry was glad that he'd concealed himself at the last moment, so Connor couldn't see what he looked like. As it turned out, one of the Hufflepuff boys who'd seen two of his friends riding in the same carriage with him die had wanted to punch him, and while Harry had taken the blow on his cheek without much damage, Connor was sure to fuss over it and pretend it was worse than it was.

He'd almost reached the common room door. He intended to be even more careful in opening it. He'd seen the way some of his Housemates watched him last night. It was one thing to unite against Ravenclaw Death Eaters attacking him in the school. He wondered, now that open war had come at last, how many would be thinking of saving their own skins, and how many had relatives outside the school in masks. He would stay only long enough to retrieve some of the ingredients for a common healing potion from his trunk, and then go to brew it. He could give what was left over to Madam Pomfrey.

A hand closed on his shoulder, and Harry nearly panicked before a too-familiar voice said, "There you are."

Harry turned around in resignation. Snape stood behind him, and his eyes narrowed when he caught sight of Harry's swelling cheek. Harry looked away for a moment.

"You know," said Snape, voice soft with fury, "that making yourself into a martyr will not serve to keep the siege at bay. Why are you doing it?"

Well, at least he's not playing sympathetic. That's a relief. "Because Edgar White needed to work out some of his frustrations, sir," said Harry, his voice neutral. "And by hitting me, he avoided hitting someone else. And it's true that I didn't anticipate that Voldemort would attack early, when I really should have."

Snape gave a jerked-off noise that might have been a laugh in another universe. "We should have anticipated that, Harry," he said. "The professors, and the rest of the school. We thought the students safe enough behind the wards as they went down to the Station; it was only a short carriage ride. We were the ones who did not anticipate that the Dark Lord would swallow those wards. Do not rub the stain of blood so deep into your skin that it will never come out." He tugged hard on Harry's shoulder, turning him around. "And come with me, so that I can give you a healing potion for your cheek."

Harry followed obediently, but did feel compelled to say, "You must know what I've done, sir. Draco would have told you."

"I've heard." Snape did not look at him as he strode rapidly along the corridors. That relieved Harry, but at the same time, he couldn't reconcile it with the fact that Snape was telling him not to make himself a martyr. The lack of sympathy made sense. But why was there still some sympathy left?

"Then you must know what I've become," Harry said.

"Become?" Snape stared at him now.

"The same as Dumbledore," said Harry, staring into his eyes, willing him to understand. He didn't open his Occlumency pools, because he didn't want to let Snape into the echoing cavern of grief and pain and numbers that was his head, but he let as much emotion as he could shine on the surface. "Someone who sacrifices a small number of people for what he calls the greater good. Someone who makes horrible decisions because he let himself be backed into a corner, and then justifies it by saying that he couldn't have done anything else. I've tried to prevent the rot setting in too deep by not justifying my decision, sir, but there's no getting around the fact that I did this. The person I was two days ago would not have." He winced as he neared the end of that speech. The swelling at the edge of his jaw was starting to interfere with his talking.

Snape gazed at him in silence. Then he said, "Harry, I committed numerous crimes when I knew what the Light was, when my conscience had been restored to me, because it was the only way I could continue to serve the side I thought was right. I—grieve for it. And I did not let it change my whole perception of myself, because I knew how and why I did it. In time, I came to understand that there are different kinds of courage in the world. This is the courage that a Gryffindor will never understand, the courage to make a decision that the world will hate you for and not hate yourself for it."

"But that's exactly what Dumbledore did, sir, and why my mother said I should believe in him," said Harry. He felt a strand of wondering agitation twine through his brain. Why was Snape doing this? He had changed, he knew he had changed, and Snape, if he had gone through a similar situation, should only know it along with him. "He made the hard decisions that everyone would hate him for—"

"And he tricked himself into believing they were the right ones." Snape sneered. "Always, he justified himself to himself. In time, he minimized the costs, and then he could always choose the road of sacrifice, because the costs meant nothing to him. You have already resisted that by not justifying your decision. You know what those lives cost. You know you will never make a decision like that as a routine matter of course. You are not Dumbledore, Harry."

"Perhaps not yet," said Harry. "But does it really matter that my action was small and his were larger?"

"Yes," said Snape, voice like a hammer. "Yes, it does. If you will not understand me on that scale, Harry, then understand me on this one. Can you see yourself dwindling into what Dumbledore became at the last?"

"Not right now," said Harry. "But I could become that. I could progress along the road of sacrifice until—"

"Then you are not there yet," said Snape. "And you are aware of it. Unless you insist on believing in destiny like a Hufflepuff and thinking that every action we take advances us in a certain direction regardless of whether we want to go there, then you will resist this temptation. It is only a temptation like the others, Harry, a trap set to destroy you. Think yourself evil, or doomed to become evil, and you are doing to yourself what your mother and Dumbledore wanted to do."

"But what I did was evil!" Harry yelled. "Merlin, why can't you understand that? Every mistake of arrogance, recklessness, stupidity I made yesterday, and before—"

"Then let us examine a situation in which you tortured Voldemort until he released the Life-Web," said Snape, voice emotionless now, the way it was when he lectured on a potion he did not particularly enjoy. "You willingly cause your greatest enemy unimaginable pain until he does your will. A use of compulsion, and a use of agony. And meanwhile, behind you, other children are dying while you wait for Voldemort to crack. And what then?"

Harry snarled at him.

"You see what I am driving at," said Snape. "On some level, you even believe it. There were no right choices, Harry. Those who will cry and scream and blame you for this are those who were not in that situation, and had they been, they could well have done something worse. Let them cry and scream and blame you, if that is what you want, but do not encourage things like this." He gestured at Harry's swollen cheek. "That only increases their conviction that they are right and you are wrong, and it will do you more damage than anything else. It weakens you physically, when we need you strong." He sniffed, and then sneered. "And you have not eaten, slept, or bathed since yesterday morning, have you?"

"No," said Harry, knowing he sounded, and looked, very small.

"That is more stupid than anything you did on the battlefield," said Snape, and turned away with a snap of his robes. "Come with me. When you have had the healing potion, you will bathe, eat, and rest. And I do not care if a hundred Hufflepuffs are seeking to punch you for what you did or failed to do yesterday."

Harry trailed after him, mind a kaleidoscope of shattered pieces. Snape should know corruption if anyone should, since he had served both Dumbledore and Voldemort. He should have recognized the corruption settling in Harry. And yet he had refused to acknowledge it. He had even insisted that Harry's plan to let other people take their frustrations out on him was the real stupidity here.

Harry hadn't decided how that made him feel yet.

"I like the idea, but I can't think of anything that would make them swallow it," Harry said, leaning on one elbow as he frowned down at Fred and George's latest creations, a pair of sweets that would cause the people who ate them to go blind until they ate the antidote.

George—well, Harry thought it was George—gave him a fierce smile. Both the twins' smiles had grown more edged since the siege began, Harry had noticed. He held up a vial of what looked like water, or perhaps Veritaserum, at the most dangerous. "We thought of that," he said. "So we're going to—"

"Fly above them," Fred finished. "And scatter the drops onto their heads like rain. Whoever it touches will go blind."

Harry frowned. "And you're sure you won't catch any of our own fighters when they're in the middle of the Death Eaters?"

"Ah, but our side will be carrying the antidote," said Fred, and displayed what looked to Harry like an identical vial. "We'll give it to them before they go into battle, and they'll just have to—"

"Swallow it, if this potion touches them," George finished, and shook the vial he held. Harry drew back from it, a bit warily, though the vial was capped. "We'll tell everyone about that before we go to battle."

Harry nodded. "And you have enough for everyone who'll be fighting next Friday?"

George and Fred gave him identical looks of pity. "Hate to disappoint you, mate," said Fred. "But our army—"

"Just isn't that big," George finished. "We'll have enough for multiple doses of the antidote, come to that."

Harry sighed. "All right. Anything else you have ready yet?"

The twins shook their heads, and left with comments about designing more. Harry leaned back against the wall of the Room of Requirement and watched them go.

It was the third night of the siege, and Harry was letting himself be as cautiously hopeful as he ever got. He was feeling better now that he'd rested and eaten, and both yesterday and today he'd joined Moody in here for intense sessions with the dueling club members. That now included every student fifth year and up—or those students who had been fifth year and up—in the school, though not everyone would be going out onto the battlefield. Some of them would stay in Hogwarts and defend the younger students when Midsummer came.

The days had also included strategizing with the people Harry was absolutely certain he could trust, the twins among them. He had to face the fact that the traitor who had disabled the Floo Network was most likely someone among his allies, and that meant he couldn't talk to them unless they would consent to take Veritaserum and answer a few questions first. Harry hadn't asked them to do that yet.

He pushed himself wearily to his feet. It had been hours since he'd eaten, and once he did, then Draco had demanded he come back to the Slytherin common room and sleep in his own bed. Otherwise, he'd said, Harry would just show the rest of Slytherin House he was afraid, and some of them would begin to think he was weak, and Harry would have people who might try to open Hogwarts to Voldemort just because the Dark Lord seemed stronger.

Harry made his way quietly to the kitchens. He would ask the house elves for a few pieces of bread and cheese to prepare his own sandwich. They would mostly be asleep at this hour of the night, but a few were always awake, cooking the breakfast in shifts and preparing food that would have to last longer periods of time.

He reached the entrance he knew from the Marauders' Map, the pear he would have to tickle, but slowed down when he heard muffled voices coming from behind the painting. Most of them were house elves, but they sounded shrill with distress, and there were the deeper tones of at least one wizard there. Harry hesitated, and then waited, leaning his ear against the painting and murmuring an eavesdropping spell. If the wizard had legitimate business here and caught him, Harry could always plead the security of the castle.

The wizard's voice came into focus first. "…just let me cast the magic that I need to cast, you chattering imbeciles!" His words were so high with nervousness that Harry didn't recognize him.

"But Headmistress McGonagall says good elves is not letting nobody cast magic in the kitchens!" wailed one of the elves, and Harry heard the soft fleshy sounds that came from them tugging their ears or wringing their hands. "Nobody but good elves is supposed to be here! No sneaking food, no nasty tricks, no no no!"

"It will only take a minute," said the wizard, his voice softening now. "I promise. Just let me cast it, and I'll be out of here in a moment."

"No," the elves whined in chorus, but Harry suspected they would lose the argument. A wizard could often trick, bully, or persuade servile house elves into doing what he wanted, because they would punish themselves later, and the web kept them too terrified to protest that much unless the threat was blatant.

Harry thought he'd heard enough. If this was innocent, such as casting freshness charms on the food, then the person inside could hardly protest him walking into the situation. But Harry was beginning to suspect that this was the traitor.

It would make sense for him to go after the food, so that it would be easier for Voldemort to starve us out, Harry thought, and tickled the pear. It giggled and transformed into a handle. Harry pulled the door open.

Mortimer Belville swung around, wand in hand. The house elves around him glanced up from sniffling and tugging their ears and banging their heads against tables. Harry caught Belville's eye.

The man panicked. He whipped his wand towards Harry and chanted something in what sounded like Gaelic, a spell Harry had never heard before. A beam of green light not that far from the shade of Avada Kedavra formed and flew towards him. Harry ducked under a table, and saw the light sever the wood neatly.

Yes, Belville is our traitor, he thought, as he scrambled back to one knee and cast a nonverbal Body-Bind. It recoiled from a shield that Belville had brought up around himself. Harry surprised himself with how calm he was. His anger was a mounting boil on the horizon, though. Makes sense, I suppose. None of us recognized the spell that had disabled the Floo connections, either.

Belville got behind the cover of a table, and pointed his wand at the heaps of pancakes and eggs the house elves had set out for breakfast. Harry didn't know what he had in mind—perhaps a rotting curse, or some kind of poison—and he didn't intend to wait and find out.

His anger had arrived, and that was more than enough for him to will Belville to be still. Belville froze. His eyes gaped, and his hand was stone, despite the awkward position his arm was currently in. Harry watched in puzzlement for a moment as his face turned blue, then realized his spell prevented Belville from breathing, too. He shook his head and released the man's lungs from the spell. Belville could breathe, but do nothing else, as Harry floated him out from behind the table, prized his wand out of his motionless fingers, and nodded to the house elves.

"He was trying to hurt Hogwarts," he told them. "I'll take him to the Headmistress, and she'll deal with him. Now, this is very important. Did he cast magic on any food in here?"

"No, Master Harry, sir!" said an elf who still had his hands clamped on his ears. From the sound of his voice, he'd been the one who had objected to Belville casting the charms in the first place. "We prevented him!" There came a chorus of vigorous head-nods from all around the kitchen, and Harry relaxed.

"Thank you," he said, and the elves' eyes welled with tears. Harry went on hastily before they could begin an outburst. "I'll take him into custody from here, but the Headmistress and Professor Snape might have questions for you later."

"Mistress McGonagall and Master Snape shall always be welcome," the house elf in the lead said firmly, and once again the others nodded so hard it looked as if their heads would fall off.

Harry nodded back, and then levered Belville into the air, deliberately floating him upside-down as he began the trek back to McGonagall's office. There was nothing that said he couldn't "enjoy" the experience of blood rushing to his head while Harry maneuvered him along the hallways. At least it was better than dropping him on his skull, which Harry also had the temptation to do.

"Caught the traitor."

Draco hadn't expected Harry to come and sit at the Slytherin table for breakfast that morning, much less make a declaration like that. He stared, his mouth gaping open in a most un-Malfoyish manner, while Harry began to eat his pancakes, simply ignoring the eyes that watched him from around the Great Hall.

"Well, who was it?" Draco demanded at last, when Harry showed no indication of following up that amazing introduction with anything else. He'd intended to scold Harry for not coming back to the common room last night after all. That had prompted more quiet mutters and shiftings of alliance. At least half of Slytherin, Draco thought, considered Harry afraid now, half-helpless in the face of Voldemort's threat.

Harry swallowed the mouthful of pancake he'd taken, and replied, "Mortimer Belville. McGonagall and I questioned him under Veritaserum last night after I caught him trying to tamper with the food in the kitchens." He rolled his eyes and snorted when Draco gave a nervous glance at his breakfast. "Don't worry, I caught him before he could do anything. He said that he'd written two letters to Voldemort using the name Serpent—the name Burke had used. One was before Midwinter, and the other was a few days ago. He informed Voldemort that I considered him one of my allies, and that he should come to Hogwarts before Midsummer to prepare for the battle. It might have been one of the reasons that Voldemort decided to move and come to the school early, since he didn't want all of my allies to have time to arrive."

Only when Harry stabbed his fork down viciously did Draco realize how angry he was. Harry had rarely showed any emotion but compassion and quiet determination in the past few days, as if he didn't want anyone to realize that their supposed savior could also feel rage. Although, Draco thought, as he watched Harry stab again, hard enough to make his fork skid and shriek on the plate, I suppose that could also be because he thinks he has to be some kind of ridiculous symbol to everyone, a saint or a martyr, someone perfect.

"Indigena Yaxley wrote him back," Harry continued, after another few bites. "He was supposed to report what he could of my activities to Voldemort, and, of course, cause as much pain and trouble in Hogwarts itself as he could. He was the one who disabled the Floo connections." Harry shook his head. "No wonder we couldn't recognize the spell. It was one he'd studied in some obscure book—and that's where he got the fact that all the Floo connections in Hogwarts are linked to the Headmistress's office, too. Ravenclaws."

That was loud enough to make half the Ravenclaw table glare at them. Draco nudged Harry with one elbow and nodded at them when he looked up. Harry, to Draco's intense, secret delight, glared instead of turning away or just bearing the glares as he had for the past few days, and the Ravenclaws were the ones who wound up averting their eyes in confusion.

"Can you repair the Floo connections, now that you know what spell did it?" Draco asked, and then could have kicked himself for phrasing the question that way. Harry didn't need more troubles piled onto his shoulders, as if he were the only one who could relieve them. Draco should have asked if McGonagall or the professors, the ones who would normally take care of those responsibilities, could do it.

Harry's face took on a disgusted expression. "No. He never looked up the countercurse. Hermione's volunteered to research in the Hogwarts library and see if she can find something, but I don't know if she will. I know we don't have the book Belville talked about."

Draco nodded. At least Granger's handling it, doing something actually useful, instead of expecting Harry to save her like the rest of them. As much as he hated to admit it, Gryffindor had been the House most supportive of Harry since the siege began, and the one to argue most vehemently against the idea of handing him over to Voldemort in hopes that the Dark Lord would keep his promise and leave the rest of them alone. The Slytherins outside of those already devoted to Harry were too busy thinking of the politics, the Hufflepuffs were mourning the greatest number of students killed from their House, and the Ravenclaws were returning to their old distrust of Harry with a vengeance. But between them, Potter, Granger, and the Weasleys were browbeating the rest of their House and dragging them along where they might have resisted, as well as urging the upper-year Gryffindors who'd never participated in the dueling club to attend.

"What's going to happen to Belville now?" he asked.

"That'll wait until after the battle's over," said Harry. He swallowed a few more bites, then rose abruptly from the table. "I can't eat any more right now," he said, tossing his head like a restless horse. "Come on. I want to talk to Snape again. Maybe he needs help brewing the healing potions. And then I should visit the hospital wing and see if that girl who fell into the coma is awake yet."

Draco stood, though he wanted to object that Harry should stay and finish his breakfast. He was too relieved to see that Harry had managed to put aside his guilt and self-loathing for the moment, though. Later, when the mood had had some time to settle in Harry, he would nag.

They made it to the middle of the Great Hall, Draco occasionally catching ripples of movement from the corner of his eye as the Rosier-Henlin twins followed under a concealment charm, and then the hex came flying from the Ravenclaw table.

Harry was turning to meet it before Draco recognized it, and the Rosier-Henlin twins were intoning Protego together, so that the hex crashed into three Shield Charms at once and dissolved. Harry stood in silence and looked for who had done it. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. The expression on his face did that for him.

The Ravenclaws shuffled and shifted apart, and then a boy Draco thought was a seventh-year got shoved forward from the middle of them. He stumbled once, but regained his balance. Draco saw, from the corner of his eye, that Professor Flitwick was already on his way down from the head table, his wizened face looking even older than usual.

"Gorgon," said Harry, his voice inflectionless. "Do you know, I did think that we'd taken care of our disagreement last year."

Draco did know the boy. He'd insulted Harry in second year, been terrified of him in third, and dueled with him at the beginning of fourth. He managed to look frightened and sulky both at once now, and his eyes cut back and forth between Harry and his Head of House.

"Gorgon," said Flitwick, halting a few feet away. "What excuse do you have for your behavior?"

Gorgon exploded, his fists clenching. "What excuse do you think I have?" he shouted. "He got my cousin killed, Professor! He did it because he was careless and an idiot and—and maybe he's not a Dark Lord, but does that matter? He had some idiot plan to face You-Know-Who, and he just couldn't leave the rest of us out of it! He had to do this, too!" Abruptly he straightened, eyes darkening further, and his next words came out like a whip tipped with malice.

"And actually," he said, speaking to Flitwick, but with his gaze locked on Harry, "I heard something that makes me reconsider the accusation of Dark Lord, Professor. I heard someone saying that she looked over her shoulder when she was running to the castle and saw some of the first-years dying beside the lake. Harry here just hovered on his broom over Voldemort, and did nothing to save them. What good is he as the Boy-Who-Lived, if he can't even face You-Know-Who the way he's supposed to?" Murmurs of outrage began circling the room in the wake of his words.

Draco looked at Harry, and saw that his face had turned white. His own stomach was missing its bottom now. Shit. Someone saw. And if they know that Harry actually killed those children…

Gorgon looked pleased with the way he'd scored a hit on Harry, but Flitwick interrupted his triumph. "You will come with me to see the Headmistress at once, Gorgon."

"What? We're not allowed to speak the truth now, Professor, even on the edge of dying?" Gorgon demanded. "You'll notice that he didn't deny it!"

"We are not allowed to cast hexes on each other in a situation as desperate as this one." The tiny little professor's voice had grown markedly deeper, and Draco was reminded that he'd been a dueling champion in his day. "The Headmistress has forbidden it outside of actual dueling practice. I do not know which punishment she will choose for you, but I am sure it will be severe."

He led the way out of the Great Hall. Gorgon followed, though he did dare a final scowl over his shoulder at Harry.

Draco looked at him warily. Harry swallowed once or twice, but nodded when Draco caught his eye.

"There are some people who are going to react that way," he muttered. "Let's go find Snape. I'm fine."

No, you're not, Draco thought in exasperation as he trailed Harry to the door, closely followed by the Rosier-Henlin twins. It's one thing to know they blame you, and another to know they're willing to hex you to exercise that blame. What if they do it again? What if someone finds out that you mercy-killed those children, Harry? Will you just stand there and let them curse you?

Connor might not know much. That was one thing Snape had told him whenever they dueled together: that he didn't know much, even when he got one of the Light-based spells right. And he might not know that much about Potions, or Transfiguration, or Herbology, or in fact most of his school subjects. He might only be good at honesty, and flinging hexes, and compulsion, and flying.

But he knew this much.

"You're being stupid," he told his brother.

Harry paused and stared at him between strands of his fringe, which was matted and dripping with sweat. He'd tried to show Connor a fire-based spell that was supposed to seek out every scrap of wood on an enemy's body and burn it—including a wand. Connor couldn't yet master it. Harry had shown no sign of impatience, or of discouragement. He just went on showing it to Connor, over and over again, long after everyone else had left the Room of Requirement and gone to dinner.

It was six days into the siege, Thursday evening, and Connor knew how things stood now. Every day, more and more people in the school got angry at Harry, because they were stupid. He'd largely managed to keep such stupidity out of Gryffindor, because he made everyone who wanted to say it back up his argument, and so far it always trailed off into mumbles of "but someone walking down the corridor's best friend's cousin's sister said" and unfounded allegations about Harry practicing dark spells on helpless spiders in random corners. But it was deeply-rooted in Slytherin, and now it was beginning to affect Harry.

"I don't know what you mean," said Harry, in that monotonous steel voice that Connor hated. "This curse could save your life someday, and on Midsummer, the Light will be overhead. It'll help you if you ask. You have to know this curse, Connor. I know you might not get it right tonight, but you will eventually." He turned away and faced the far wall again, where a stuffed "wizard" made of cloth had lost every bit of wood it owned twice over. "Now. Like this. Ard—"

"You're being stupid," Connor cut in, determined to make Harry acknowledge him this time, "because no matter how much time you spend drilling and dueling and strategizing and catching traitors, there will always be someone who blames you, Harry."

Harry's shoulders stiffened. "I know that," he said.

"Then fucking act like it!" Connor burst out, letting his temper have free reign. He knew Draco and Snape had tried to talk to Harry about this, but they were too content to back off and wait when Harry showed signs of pain, or said that he understood. Connor didn't plan to. Serpents bite on the heel. Lions go for the throat. "Stop treating yourself like a Muggle machine! Stop flinching every time someone mutters about you having caused this! Stop worrying about them so much! We have to have you to win this siege and organize this battle, because you're the only one who can face Voldemort, and that's not even counting the people who want you to live because we love you and would prefer that you not die, please. Driving yourself to exhaustion won't work, and you can't go out there and offer yourself up!"

"What makes you think I would?"

Connor stepped towards him, seized his brother's arm, and spun him around. Harry faced him, looking blank, his green eyes carefully closed. But Connor knew this expression of old. It wasn't blank and it wasn't cold. It was the look Harry wore when he was being a stubborn dumbarse.

"Because I grew up with you, Harry," Connor snapped. "And I didn't know everything, but I noticed this. You acted this exact same way when James or Sirius or Remus said something that you wanted to think deeply about. You disappeared into yourself and let your body function on its own. I noticed because you always played your worst games of Quidditch on those days. And now I think you're working yourself up to go out there and try to settle this once and for all. Or, at least, you're not here, and you need to be here."

Harry blinked, and for a moment, Connor saw a glimpse of something human in his eyes. Then he whispered, "But it's sixty-four now," which made no sense at all, so Connor asked about it.

"What do you mean?"

"She died," Harry whispered. "The girl who went into the coma. Heloise Whitestag. She died this morning. And sixty-three people died on the battlefield. So that's sixty-four people dead now."

Connor cocked his head and waited, eyes narrow, sensing his brother wasn't done.

"Sixty-four people I've killed."

Connor gripped his shoulders and shook him. Harry's teeth jarred in his head, and when his head stopped bouncing, he gave his brother a look of abject astonishment.

"You. Are. Being. Stupid," said Connor, and resisted the impulse to slap Harry across the face when his stare only deepened. "You didn't kill them, Harry." Harry tried to interrupt, but he charged on. "No. I've heard those rumors about the lake, and I don't know what happened there. I'll wait until you're ready to tell me. But for Merlin's sake, Harry, stop brooding and come back. You're not going to give Voldemort what he wants. You know he'd slaughter us all even if you went out to him. You're not going to do that. Say you won't."

"Connor—"

He's reluctant to swear. He was thinking about it. Connor was only thankful that he'd found out about this, and not Draco or Snape. They would have yelled. This didn't need yelling, not now.

"Harry," he said, and softened his voice, and gripped his brother's shoulders so that he could stare into his eyes. "Say you won't. Swear it to me."

Harry stared at him.

"Swear it on Merlin and your magic," Connor insisted.

Harry swallowed, closed his eyes, and said, "All right. I swear it on Merlin and my magic."

Connor wrapped his arms around Harry and hugged the breath out of him. He felt Harry's arms curve around him a moment later, and Harry let out one large sob, but not a flood of tears. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it wasn't. But at least Connor had managed to avert what could have been his brother's most painful stupidity.

"Good," Connor muttered into his ear. "And in return, that oath and this particular piece of stupidity will remain between us."

Harry nodded, his head moving lightly against Connor's neck. Connor sighed, and hugged his brother one more time.

Anyone else, and he'd be the one reassuring him, he thought, stepping away so that he could draw his wand and practice the wood-burning curse again. But because it's him, he thinks there should have been something more he could do, and some way to save us all before Midsummer.

Well, sometimes there's just not.

Hawthorn hugged her daughter one-armed. "You'll get through this, Pansy," she whispered. "And, in the meantime, know that I am incredibly proud of you."

Pansy nodded, and her hands flickered out from her sleeves, speaking in the sign language of the necromancers. Thank you, Mother. I promise that I won't do anything stupid. I'll only do what has to be done. I love you.

"That's my girl," Hawthorn said, and then she let her go, and watched as Pansy walked calmly out of the room. The black robes concealed her motions, her general shape, and her face, but she was still the daughter Hawthorn had raised. In spite of her reassurance, Hawthorn did not truly think she would turn from her path and break her oaths. She had kept silent when she knew that dozens of children would go forth from the school and die. She would get through the coming battle, too.

Hawthorn had long since settled with herself whether it was moral for a necromancer to keep silent when she knew that someone would die. Seers saw the future in uncertain terms, and made prophecies that could shift, but what a necromancer saw was inevitable. Telling would make no difference. Death was absolute, and people would die the way they would die.

She turned and drew the cover off the basin of warm water the house elves had brought her the moment she asked for it, no fuss and no questions. With a sigh, she bathed her left arm in the water, and frowned at the black skull and snake on her skin that was the reminder of an old, old foolishness.

For the last two nights, as the siege turned on through a week since its beginning—it was now Saturday afternoon—her Mark had been steadily darkening and burning. Hawthorn had known when her former Lord was summoning the Death Eaters before, but the pain had never been this bad before, and she feared some new evil. She had caught Adalrico's eye in the past day, and Snape's, and Peter Pettigrew's. Their faces were all grim. They all held their left arms as if they were tender. When pressed, Snape had admitted that he feared it might be something similar to what Regulus Black had suffered—an apparently infected Dark Mark. He had given Hawthorn a potion that helped with the pain and advised her to bathe the Mark often.

Hawthorn was not sure what would halt the Mark's inflammation after the siege. Regulus Black had pursued some arcane method of healing not open to the rest of them. But she was confident that they would find some means of halting it. Snape was a Potions Master, and for the sake of old fellowship, he would share any solution he discovered with them. And Hawthorn herself was no slouch in Herbology, though nowhere near Indigena Yaxley's level. She could look to the plants of her estate, the Garden, after the siege.

After the siege.

The words could sound as if they described another universe, if she let them.

Hawthorn would not let them. She refused to regret when she felt the burning of the Mark, and think about what would happen if she had chosen to accept Fenrir Greyback's coercion and join in the effort to resurrect the Dark Lord three years ago; she certainly refused to surrender. She did not bow to intimidation.

She narrowed her eyes, and knew a small growl was bubbling in her throat.

Of any kind.

She had received a letter from Lupin last week, just before she prepared to Apparate to Hogsmeade. He had detailed his choices in the matter of Loki's pack, laid out the laws against werewolves and the worsening situation, and begged her to come and join him. He hadn't wanted her to know beforehand because he feared she would betray the plans to Harry, but now that he knew anyway, Lupin wanted Hawthorn to consider that she had a choice to acknowledge herself as a lycanthrope.

I choose to define myself, Hawthorn thought, as she watched the water begin to boil around her Mark. I am not a brand on my arm, and I am not a bite on my neck. I follow no master, and I follow no Lord. I give my loyalty where I choose, and I am a pureblood witch, and a mother, and a widow, and part of Harry's circle.

She pulled her arm free of the water and called aloud for another bowl, which had a house elf appear, bowing, at once. Hawthorn thought she rather scared it, since she knew her eyes were flashing amber and the hair on her body was standing up, and she looked as frightening as a werewolf could so near the dark of the moon.

That did not matter, though.

I am myself. I will not back down. I will think in terms of 'after the siege' if I choose to.

And I will go about tomorrow, find the source of this nonsense saying Harry should surrender himself, and put a stop to it.

"Do you think you can really expand the illusion enough to cover all the horses?" Harry asked Honoria dubiously. He had to admit, he hadn't considered using her glamours as a major part of the attack before. He knew she was good with tiny illusions, even good enough to use them unconsciously and in great detail, but the horses would blaze in the storm of the Light and would make quite a lot of noise as they charged. Harry thought even a master illusionist would be hard put to cover that.

Honoria only grinned at him. Currently, she wore an illusion that made her hair look short and black, and her robes flashed with distracting letters in various colors. Harry didn't know why, except that she'd wanted it that way. "I promise, Harry," she said, "I can cover anything you want me to."

Harry nodded, slowly. "All right. But I'll want you to practice before we actually get into the battle."

"Of course!" Honoria looked around at the Room of Requirement, which at the moment resembled a place for planning strategy, with a round table in the middle and the walls covered with maps of Hogwarts. "What do you want me to make this look like?"

"Surprise me," said Harry.

Honoria nodded and closed her eyes, a tiny line furrowing her brow. A moment later, the Room around them vanished, and they were tumbling through the air, in freefall, with the fires of the Death Eater camp beneath them and getting closer all the time.

Harry swore and grabbed for some handhold despite himself. It felt incredibly real, and not only visually. He could hear voices beneath him, the rush of passing air, and Honoria's exultant laughter. He could feel the wind in his hair and the turning of his body, too, so thick that his brain kept insisting he was falling. The smell of cooking drifted up to him.

Then the vision of sky and camps was gone, and they sat in the Room of Requirement once more, with Honoria gazing at him innocently.

Harry found his voice on the third try. "You're right. It will more than do." He was even more impressed than he was letting on. Ordinary illusionists could create sensory effects of all kinds. But to coordinate them so that they struck at the same time and formed a seamless picture took incredible skill.

Honoria stood up and clapped her hands, the illusion around her hair melting to reveal her ordinary bright curls again. "Thank you!" she said, and hurried out of the Room, leaving Harry alone.

He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Exhaustion pounded through him once again. It had nothing to do with ordinary weariness of the body; he'd slept in Slytherin last night, from just after nine at night until well after six, and "shown" everyone who would take the hint that he wasn't afraid of the shifting currents in his own House.

But worry and anxiety were taking their toll. The battle was in four days, five if one counted the Sunday now half past. Voldemort had still not made a move on the castle, but Midsummer's steady nearing, and the announcement about his granting the other students safe passage if Harry came down to him—repeated every morning, now—meant he didn't have to. Fear feasted in the castle, more ravenously than a pack of Peter's rats. Sidelong glances came at Harry from the most unexpected people, including Blaise and some of the others he'd trained with in the dueling club. He could see the promise whispering in their brains. Just give him up. Just give him up and we are safe.

And the words had taken hold in his own brain, as Connor had somehow managed to see on Thursday. Harry had to wonder if there wasn't something he could do to insure that Voldemort kept his promise.

I could trick him into swearing an Unbreakable Vow. That was the sanest of the many plans, mad as a fever dream, that had assaulted him so far. And Harry knew they were mad, even as he entertained them. He was the only one who could face Voldemort. He knew it. He had to stay within the castle, no matter how much others might want him out.

But their fear, and the idea that if he was such a hero and the Boy-Who-Lived he should do something about this, and the urge to do anything rather than increase the numbers pounding in his head, all dragged at him like puppies with a rag between their teeth. Shouldn't he do something? Was his reluctance only because he knew that people who loved him would be upset to see him die, and because he had, perhaps, corrupted himself more than he knew by killing those dozen children near the lakeside? What if Snape was wrong, and he was right? He had changed himself, crossed a chasm he could never cross back over, by killing those children. He had stepped onto a path that would lead him to become Dumbledore, in the end.

If he went down to Voldemort, if he struck, if he tried to end it now and the prophecy was with him, then at least the world might be spared two Dark Lords, or a Dumbledore with absorbere abilities.

"Harry."

He sat up quickly. He hadn't thought someone could enter the Room without his knowing it, but then, he didn't know everything about the Room of Requirement.

Vera stared at him for long moments, then shook her head. "You have another hole torn in your soul," she whispered. "Why did you not come to me?"

"Because I needed to fight through this on my own," said Harry. "I needed to think about it. I have to look at what I did through my eyes, and not just others'. Of course other people are going to tell me that I did the only thing I could, because they want to keep me alive. But I have to decide for myself if this is a crime deserving death."

He blinked when he finished. He hadn't realized until he said it that he had thought of going to Voldemort as much like an execution as like a sacrifice.

Vera took a seat on the floor opposite him, folding her legs under her. "You did something horrible," she said softly. "And it was the only thing you could do."

Harry shook his head. "You can only see the effects on me," he said. "You can't see the thing itself."

"I read your conflicting motivations better than you read them," Vera said, with no sign that she'd been insulted. From what he'd seen of her, Harry almost thought the Seer was incapable of feeling anger. "You know, at bottom, that surrendering yourself is not a choice. You know the true prophecy, and you know that someone must stand at your right shoulder when you face Voldemort."

Harry shifted, and shrugged one shoulder. "Maybe not. My brother might be the one destined to defeat him instead."

"You do not really believe that, either," Vera told him quietly. "You do not know how he could love the whole of the wizarding world. And I have seen him, and he does not—not yet. If the time can come when he can fulfill that part of the prophecy, it is long hence."

Harry lowered his eyes.

"Your soul is shredded, and you are falling back into old habits of thought, that you yourself are evil and deserving of punishment in situations where you will excuse others." Vera reached out and cupped his chin, turning his eyes up to meet hers again. "I do not have enough time to heal you now," she added, voice a dying fall. "But I hope that you will let me try, when this battle is done with—and that you will not kill yourself in the meantime, because you have deluded yourself into thinking you deserve it."

Harry hesitated, then swallowed and said, "I—I haven't told anyone yet, but I had planned to go to the Sanctuary for the summer."

The smile that crossed Vera's smile was warmer than the sunrise. "That is a wonderful idea, Harry," she murmured. "That would be part of the reason that you are so determined to drive Voldemort from the battlefield bleeding?"

Harry nodded. "I couldn't leave the wizarding world for as long as I need to if he was still active and sending his Death Eaters on raids. But if I wound him as badly as I'm planning, he won't dare show his head for months. I am going to make him hurt." His hand was clenched so tightly into a fist on his knee that it hurt, itself. Harry took a deep breath and forced it to relax. "And then I can go to the Sanctuary. I need to get past the lingering traces of these soul-wounds I bear. I'll bring Snape and Draco with me if they want to come, and if they would be welcome."

"Your Malfoy and the Bitter One are more than welcome," said Vera. "And I wish you good luck in the battle. Do not kill yourself, for then I would never see you healed, and that would be a tragedy." She leaned nearer and let her dry lips brush his cheek, then stood. "Do not drive yourself to madness, either. The grief and fear of those around you is understandable, but it is, in the end, grief and fear, not rational thought. Allow them to feel emotions in peace, but not to control your actions."

Harry watched her until she left, and then bowed his head and rested it on his arms for a long moment.

Maybe I can get through this. Maybe I can. More, maybe I'll deserve to get through this, if I try very hard.

Those words ran on the surface of his mind. Underneath it ran another mantra.

Sixty-four. Nineteen. Sixty-four. Nineteen. Sixty-four. Nineteen.

Millicent stared in silence at the dark specks in her father's hand. Then she raised her eyes to his face.

"Does Harry know you have those?" Her voice was smooth and calm and normal. She congratulated herself on it. She would have felt even better if she hadn't felt the need, a moment later, to put her hand out and clutch the wall of the room where her father was staying, once a Defense professor's quarters.

"Of course not," said Adalrico, and put the specks—the Black Plague spores, Millicent corrected herself; she could call things by their true name—back into his robe pocket. "He would forbid me from using them, if he knew. Quite right and proper for the ethical side not to use disease magic."

Millicent watched him carefully. Adalrico sounded—odd. Different. He was rubbing his left arm, and she knew why, so that wasn't the difference. He prowled back and forth from the bed to the room's far wall, and all the while his free hand opened and closed, opened and closed again, as if he didn't know what to do with himself.

"Father?" she ventured at last. "What's wrong?"

"This is all wrong!" Adalrico exploded, spinning around. Millicent noticed him stumble as his weak foot came down, but he recovered in moments and shook his head impatiently at her, so she stayed where she was. "We need to be fighting poison with poison. I know I could reach a few of the Death Eaters from the walls, if McGonagall would drop the wards for one moment. I would give them fear. But she won't, because she is too worried about some of the students getting hurt." He slapped his hands together, snarling. "This is war! They're already hurt! They've seen other students die in front of them. I think it's time that my old comrades saw some of their own die."

"You think Harry should be harsher," Millicent summarized. She should have known this was coming, she thought, reflecting back on little hints her father had been dropping all week. This was Monday, the tenth day of the Dark Lord's siege. She supposed she should be grateful he'd held back from snapping as long as he had.

"Of course he should be," said Adalrico. "Make the other side suffer, the other side sacrifice. That is the way to fight a Dark Lord. It is the way we fought Dumbledore, when I was a Death Eater." His hand slid up and down his left arm in a soothing motion. "Show them that you mean to kill them, and continue killing them until they withdraw from the battlefield. Harry is too hesitant, too gentle. He makes the Dark Lord believe that he can conquer us, and he can. He will destroy us unless we prepare ourselves to carry the battle to him."

"I think we're doing that," said Millicent, feeling as if she watched a stranger. She knew her father was crueler than most people, far crueler than Harry, but watching him actually prepare to betray a formal family alliance was madness. Has he forgotten that that scar on his arm will burst open and bleed him to death if he betrays Harry?

"On Midsummer," said Adalrico. "And what is the point of waiting until then? Why not break the siege now, and charge?"

"Because a storm of Light is coming on Midsummer," said Millicent. "And it will help the Light allies Harry's assembled."

"We should not wait," Adalrico insisted. "We should attack now."

Millicent stood very straight. She felt three loyalties pulling and tugging at her: loyalty to her father, loyalty to Harry, and loyalty to her family. But two of them were pulling in the same direction.

"I am going to Harry now," she said, "unless you swear by our name that you will not attack the Death Eaters on your own."

Adalrico spun around and stared at her. "What?" he asked at last, his voice soft with disbelief.

"You heard me," said Millicent. She felt light-headed, but she had no doubt that this was the right thing to do. "We swore to him, Father. The honor of our family is at stake. And he is my leader, my vates—if you want to put it that way, my Lord. You are doing this because of your own impatience, not because it's the right thing to do."

For a long moment, there was only the sound of noisy breathing. Millicent was vaguely surprised to realize that some of it was her own.

Then her father said, "And is that not betraying the honor of our family, Millicent? To turn on your own father?"

"Not when you would be the one to do wrong by the Bulstrode name," Millicent retorted, and took a step forward. "I've watched Draco's father lose his grip on the Malfoy honor slowly, because his son knows what Harry is better than he does. I don't intend to let you lead us down that same rocky path, Father. Swear now, or I go now." She let a shimmer of black run around her fist, just in reminder to her father that she was his magical heir and could use any of the gifts that he possessed to stop her.

Adalrico held her eyes. She held them, and stared back.

Then he stepped close to her, swept her up in an embrace, and murmured into her hair, "I swear by our name that I will not attack the Death Eaters."

Millicent managed to relax, her head spinning. She put her arms around her father in return and held him. She was already almost as tall as he was.

"My daughter," Adalrico whispered. "My heir. I am so proud."

And that is what being Bulstrode means, Millicent thought. We endure, and we do not falter, no matter what the test.

Hermione paused in her reading of the latest book and wiped her eyes for a moment. They were watering. She'd been reading since dinner the night before, and because not even Madam Pince was going to chase her out of the library under these circumstances, she'd read straight through the night. She thought it was somewhere around dawn now.

Dawn on Tuesday, her helpful calendar-voice piped up to remind her. And the battle begins on Friday.

She bent back over the book with a vengeance. There had to be a way to restore blocked Floo connections somewhere. She was determined that it should exist. This book was a dense history of the way the Floo Network had been first established, and how Floo powder worked. Her eyes ran easily over the long, complex sentences, untangling them.

A pair of hands came to rest on her shoulders, and began to massage. Hermione resisted the pressure for a moment, but then leaned back with a sigh and a groan, and let her head roll to one side, so that her cheek rested on one of the stroking hands.

"You shouldn't read all through the night like that," Zacharias whispered into her ear. "You'll strain your eyes and get dark circles under them, and then where would you be, a pretty girl like you?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Hermione, fighting the urge to close her eyes. "I suppose I'd have to fall back on my intelligence."

Zacharias went on rubbing her shoulders for a moment, then pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. Assuming he'd come to keep her company, Hermione started to turn back to her book, but he claimed her hand. Startled, she turned to look at him.

She was even more startled when he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. The expression on his face was utterly serious.

"Hermione," he whispered. "I never understood before just how stupid blood prejudice was."

Hermione blinked. What brought this on?

"They want to kill you," Zacharias went on earnestly, gesturing towards the walls. Hermione reflected that even when he spoke as if life and death mattered, he was still pompous; it didn't seem to have occurred to him that she knew that. "Not because you hurt them, not because you took a political office away from someone, not because you're better at magic that they are, but just because you're—you. And that's wrong, and it's stupid, and I'm sorry I never really realized it before. I'm sorry."

Hermione reached out and hugged him, closing her eyes as she felt him kiss her neck. She kept them closed, so that she wouldn't let the tears gathering behind her lids roll down her face.

"I love you," Zacharias whispered.

Hermione nodded, choking on sobs of exhaustion and fury and sadness, unable to respond for right now. She didn't fight when he gently pushed the book away from her and led her back to Gryffindor Tower.

Snape had been on edge most of the day. That could have something to do with Madam Pomfrey at last having enough potions to ease the pain of those students still in the hospital wing—including Calming Draughts to dose those who had suddenly become Squibs thanks to the Dark Lord—and so not requiring his skills. It could have something to do with this being Wednesday, the nineteenth of June, two days before the solstice and almost the last day of the promised time Voldemort had granted the school to deliver Harry up to him.

It almost certainly had to do with several potions ingredients gone missing from his store, the locking spells undone by a fairly complicated Dark Arts curse.

Snape had, of course, cast several spells that should provide him with images of those who had crept into his offices and "liberated" the ingredients. He had expected to see the Weasley twins. He had not expected there to be no images at all. Another Dark Arts curse had insured that every tracking spell would fail, including the ones Snape had chosen.

The ingredients gone were asphodel, wormwood, valerian roots, and sopophorous beans—the ones that made the Draught of Living Death.

Snape had gone at once to McGonagall, but when he had told her what she suspected, she had, her mouth tightening, agreed that he should not announce the theft to the school. Instead, she would join him in the place most likely to reveal the students who had taken it. So they were now both waiting, quietly, Snape under a Vanishing Potion and McGonagall in her Animagus form, at opposite ends of the corridor that held the Slytherin common room.

Snape knew, unfortunately for his students, what House that particular skill at Dark Arts was most likely to belong in.

He even thought he might know why the thieves had chosen to brew that particular potion. He wanted to be wrong, however, and if he was, then he need only embarrass his Slytherins instead of—

Instead of do something worse.

His thoughts cut off as the door to the common room opened. Blaise Zabini's head poked out, and he glanced up and down the corridor. Then he nodded and looked back over his shoulder.

"It's clear," Snape saw him mouth.

He could see McGonagall half-close her eyes so that the light from the torches wouldn't reflect in them as two of the seventh-year students, including one of the prefects, who had been in Snape's NEWT Potions class, stepped out of the common room with a bundled shape over their shoulders. If one wasn't looking for it, it would appear to be a set of blankets and a pillow, as if Blaise and his friends were heading to the Great Hall to make a common sleeping pallet among numerous other students. More and more people did so every night, finding their common rooms too claustrophobic and isolated. Snape was sure the three had counted on the deception to save them if anyone saw them on the way. They'd even added glamours to make it look as if the blankets had long, tasseled ends.

As Snape flicked his wand and dismissed the glamours, the hair poking out of one end of the blanket came into view. It was black, extremely messy hair.

White-hot rage consumed him, aided, it seemed, by the throbbing pain in his left arm. He had to fight to keep from simply sending the Killing Curse at Blaise and having done with it. Instead, he sipped the antidote to the Vanishing Potion at the same moment as the Headmistress changed back and said in an extremely cold voice, "Mr. Zabini, Mr. Findarin, Mr. Tipperary, what do you think you are doing?"

Blaise spun around and stared at McGonagall in shock. Findarin and Tipperary were a bit smarter. They raised a Shield Charm against any hexes that McGonagall might cast, then turned and started hurrying up the corridor away from her—

Only to find their Head of House visible again, and waiting for them. They stopped running, and the bundle nearly slipped off their shoulders. Snape waved his wand and caught it with a Levitation Charm, floating it to his feet. He slit the blankets open with his wandless magic. Harry's face, slack with the Draught of Living Death, appeared as the blankets uncoiled from around him.

Snape had to breathe several times to clear the red haze from his vision. He had thought that someone might be arranging to kidnap a student, but he had imagined the victim would be a Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, or Ravenclaw lured into his House's territory and made a scapegoat for Slytherin's increasing frustration with the siege. That there would be people in his own House who would turn on Harry…

It was a good thing McGonagall was here, he thought dimly, as he turned back to hear the explanation. A very good thing. Or he would have killed them. He could feel the words Avada Kedavra waiting at the back of his tongue, and had to concentrate on not saying them.

Blaise had started "explaining" by then. "It was just a prank, Professor," he said innocently, eyes wide. "We were going to put him in the Great Hall and laugh at him when he woke up in a strange place tomorrow—"

"You are lying, Mr. Zabini." The Headmistress could make her voice a whip when she wanted to, Snape admitted. "With any other student, I might accept that as an explanation, but not with Harry. You were going to take him to Voldemort."

Blaise fisted his hands and didn't respond.

"Mr. Zabini?" McGonagall asked. "Or do we need Veritaserum?"

"Fine!" Blaise shouted. He was shaking. Snape saw the frustration and the rage and the effect of twelve cumulative days of pent-up emotion running through him. "Yes, we bloody well were! I've been taking to my mum with the communication spell Malfoy taught me, and she wants me home, and she doesn't trust Harry to win the battle, and I'm—we're all so fucking tired of this! If we give him up, then we can leave!"

"And did you truly believe that Voldemort would keep his promise, Mr. Zabini?" McGonagall's voice was a hiss. Snape stooped and drew out the antidote to the Living Death that he'd prepared, pouring it into Harry's open mouth and massaging his throat to be sure he swallowed. Harry blinked his eyes open a moment later, looking drowsy and puzzled.

"He might!" Blaise yelled back. "Anything's better than this hell we're living through right now!"

Harry heard. Snape saw his eyes close, and his body jolt as though someone had just slapped him everywhere. Then he got slowly to his feet, swaying and wincing. Snape seized his arm.

"How did they get it to you?" he whispered.

"A glass of butterbeer," Harry replied, his voice tired, his eyes on Blaise. He ignored Findarin and Tipperary, who were cowering in place. "Everyone in the House was drinking one, except Blaise, who wasn't there. Even they—" he jerked his head at the seventh-years "—took one. I think Blaise must have had the antidote on him. When he came back, he gave it to them. But I remember most people falling asleep in the moments before I felt the potion overcoming me." He was silent a moment, then said, "He really meant to turn me over to Voldemort?"

"Yes," said Snape.

"Oh," said Harry, and then turned and pressed his face into Snape's robes, and said nothing more. Snape stroked his hair, eyes on his former seventh-years, and on McGonagall, who appeared to have heard all she wanted to of Blaise's story.

She Stunned all three of them briskly, then nodded to Snape. "I'll put them in the room off my office," she said. It had turned into a temporary holding cell for the captured Death Eaters and Belville, as much to keep them from the wrath of the general Hogwarts populace as anything else. "Wake your students up, and then talk to Harry."

Snape nodded, and stood aside so that she could stride up the corridor with the three bound students floating behind her. Blaise's face was still frozen into an expression of panic-stricken anger. Snape studied the Headmistress's expression, thinking she would be weary about having to do this to her students, but it appeared to have only pissed her off.

"Harry?" Snape touched his—yes, he could admit it in the privacy of his own head, his son's hair—and made Harry look up at him. "I didn't brew enough antidote for everyone. I thought I would only be dealing with one or possibly two victims of the Draught. Let's wake up Draco and a few of the other most skilled Potions students. Will you help me brew more of the antidote after that?"

Harry's eyes showed naked gratitude for the chance to put off discussing what Blaise had done. "Yes," he said.

Snape nodded and strode towards the Slytherin common room, his arm and his temper both still burning. At least anger was a distraction from the fear that he could have lost Harry permanently.

One more day.

Behind him, he heard Harry murmuring to himself. When Snape listened, it sounded like a sequence of numbers. "Sixty-four. Nineteen. Three. Sixty-four. Nineteen. Three."

"What is that?" Snape asked, after he had given the password and the door swung back.

Harry jumped, then stared at him, eyes shuttering. "Nothing," he said.

Snape raised an eyebrow, but let it go as he gazed at the common room full of his sleeping House. It is not nothing, and we will discuss it in good time, Harry, as we will young Mr. Zabini's attitude. Be assured we will.