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Chapter Ninety-Two: A Body Made of Music

Harry looked down at the battlefield as the sirens' songs began, automatically fighting off their influence as he built a core of concentrated rage and flung the attempts at compulsion into his Occlumency pools, and saw his fighters faltering. One golden horse had been charging and creating carnage, sometimes carrying the flickering image of a woman on its back and sometimes carrying Zacharias Smith. Now the horse slowed altogether as its rider stared up at the sirens. Then he or she nodded obediently and turned in the direction of Hogwarts. Harry wasn't entirely sure if the sirens were going to command his people to drown themselves in the lake or simply go back to the castle, but either way they were targets.

Even Voldemort's Death Eaters were targets, as they began walking towards the castle, and Voldemort did not seem to care. He was laughing exultantly, and Harry spun towards him, glaring. He caught a glimpse of the snake's head weaving around the dragon's neck before Voldemort called across the gap between their mounts, his voice loud and mocking.

"Did you think that you had tamed them, Harry? But they are not for you to tame. What could you offer them but self-restraint, a life of change or of tameness beyond a web? When I explained to them what a vates was, what kind of limits you wanted to impose on the magical creatures, they understood at once. They did not want to ally with you. I offer them more freedom than you ever will."

Harry didn't waste his breath on answering. He swung the iron thestral and rode directly at the tank, wondering, as he went, whether he could smash the tank open and let the sirens plummet to their deaths. A single kick from his mount's hoof might be enough to shatter it.

He had accepted the necessary deaths of Dark wizards who stood to oppose him, and he'd had to accept the same for magical creatures when he realized Voldemort had allied with the giants. He would be sorry to cause the deaths of the sirens, but if they were bent on causing the deaths of his own fighters, he had no choice.

A flung Avada Kedavra nearly made him start, until he realized that it came from a wizard riding one of the winged horses. Harry cursed as he counted a dozen of them, all of them in the dark cloaks and white masks of the Death Eaters, and all of them determined to protect the sirens' tank. They were hindered by their horses' chains, but, on the other hand, they had only to fight defensively. Harry was the one who had to fight offensively, trying both to get past their magic and to break the tank.

Perhaps I don't have to close with them, though, Harry thought, and sacrificed a bit of the magic he'd eaten in a long, curling dark tendril, shooting straight through the impressive array of Dark curses and smashing into the tank.

The glass shimmered, and did not crack. Harry snarled as wards, invisible before, sprang to life, wound into the glass. Layered defensive magic, layer after layer, and not all of them spoke of Voldemort's work, either. Some of it was magic that Harry had never seen before, which he suspected came from the sirens. He tried again, with a stronger bit of magic this time, and realized, as a single sharp-edged ward sprang up to turn it aside, that there could be endless wards strung around it. He might waste moments hammering at the tank before he broke it.

And in the meantime, his fighters were still walking mindlessly towards the school, both centaurs and wizards. Harry cursed again. By allowing the centaurs to fall victim to compulsion, he was abandoning his vates duties.

Only two human figures on the battlefield didn't seem caught by the sirens' song. Harry recognized the tall one as Snape; of course, since he was an Occlumens and had had experience with siren songs once before, he'd probably worked on building his mental defenses. And the other was—

Connor?

Of course, Harry thought a moment later, relieved. You cannot compel a compeller.

And then Voldemort lifted his hand almost lazily. One of the dark cones of light he'd used on Harry earlier blasted down and tore into the back of Harry's defenseless, stumbling allies. A witch who looked like one of the Gloryflowers died without a sound, and others tumbled, bleeding. But they rose to their knees in the next moment and began moving towards the school again, while the sirens' songs played like silver harps around them.

Harry screamed in anger, and abandoned his attempts to get to the sirens' tank. He had to defend his allies first and foremost. He flew towards the school, and heard Voldemort laugh again as he passed him. Harry glanced at him, then pulled the iron thestral up and felt himself go very still.

Voldemort's flesh-dragon had one half-melted paw clamped around the second iron thestral, and Draco sat, glaze-eyed, just under the dragon's jaws. The teeth, jagged implanted spikes of bone, were parted delicately around Draco's head.

"I think we should discuss some things first, Harry, before you go to the rescue," Voldemort said sweetly.

Connor didn't understand what the fuss was about. People started turning around and going back towards Hogwarts, and he assumed he must have missed a general call to retreat. Then he discarded that. After all, there were still Death Eaters walking around, so the battle wasn't over. Granted, the air was full of an irritating buzzing noise, but so? That didn't matter.

Then he realized that buzzing noise seemed to matter to everyone else, and when a shadow passed over him, he lifted his head and saw the block of glass swaying on the end of its chains between the winged horses. The glass was full of water, and swarming shapes with long blonde and red and blue hair, from the glimpses that Connor caught. And fish tails.

Sirens. That's right. Harry said something about Voldemort having freed the sirens last year.

Connor took a deep breath. Well, he had the ability to resist the sirens. He could, maybe, use his compulsion on the people now wandering witlessly towards the castle, which included even Owen, he saw with a quick glance around. He could urge them to come back. But he didn't think he could control that many people at once, and besides, that was still compulsion. Connor winced to think what would happen when he had to explain to Ron how he'd ordered him to do things.

What should I do?

He stared up at the tank, and bit his lip. Harry was up there somewhere, but he couldn't have a solution to the problem, or Connor was sure the sirens would have stopped singing by now. Perhaps he was busy fighting off Voldemort and making sure he didn't hurt anyone else. That left this particular problem up to Connor.

He took another deep breath, laid down the sword on the ground—it didn't protest, now that there were no more Death Eaters to fight—and then drew his wand. "Accio Nimbus 2001!" he shouted, remembering how Harry had summoned his Firebolt during the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament last year.

A quick flicker of movement above the Quidditch Pitch, and then a broom came zooming towards him. Connor occupied himself in the moments until it arrived by staring at the walking mass of people and trying to make out his friends. He caught an occasional glimpse of red hair, but it could have been almost anyone. Some people were crawling on their knees, despite dripping wounds. Connor shuddered, and felt fire fill his eyes and his belly.

That is wrong. It is wrong. I am going to go up there and do something about this to set it right.

There were some people who weren't moving in the general direction of the castle, Connor noticed when his broom finally arrived and he swung a leg over it. They were all in the robes of Death Eaters, but most of them bore the marks of curses: missing limbs, deep wounds in their chests, burned and torn clothing. When one turned towards him and stared with blank eyes, he understood. Inferi, probably, or reanimated corpses.

But though they were dangerous, and had blood on their hands, indicating recent kills, Connor didn't feel threatened or afraid. He thought he heard a distant bark, and felt a lifting-up of his heart. He smiled at them, and then he rose, heading straight for the tank and the flying horses around it. He intended to keep beneath the tank until he was right up close to it. He didn't want the riders noticing him and launching curses at him.

Snape stared intently into the sky, letting the compulsion of the sirens' song slide off him moment by moment, forcing himself to hear it as an ugly buzzing and not a beautiful sound. What was Harry doing? He should have been down among the compelled victims by now, snapping the web of the sirens' song, or he should have smashed the tank.

Then the flesh-dragon drifted into view, a flash of iron visible close against its side, and Harry circling it on his own thestral. His body was so still that Snape knew what must have happened. Voldemort had Draco. No one else would have made Harry react that way, and forget the others suffering beneath him.

Snape parted his mouth in a snarl. I suppose this is up to me, then. I make a poor guardian for anyone but Harry, but so be it.

He turned and began firing binding curses and Body-Binds at the crawling, stumbling, mindlessly walking people—like Inferi, all of them. Snape felt sharp contempt for those unable to resist the spell of a little music, and used that contempt to fuel his incantations. When his victims began collapsing to the ground, wrapped in magic or ropes, he used Mobilicorpus to separate the Death Eaters from the students and Harry's adult allies.

He did not allow himself to think about what would happen if he was unable to capture some of them before they reached the castle—where Minerva would probably feel compelled to open up the wards to them—or the lake, where they would drown themselves. He worked.

Harry circled Voldemort, and felt sickness assault his stomach and bite his throat, his vision burning bright yellow. He kept trying to think about battle, and the thoughts kept sliding away under the influence of those jagged teeth posed around a blond head.

"They make a fetching picture, don't they?" Voldemort whispered. Harry could feel the pressure of his eyes—or, more accurately, the pressure of his snake's eyes—but he refused to look at him. His whole being was focused on Draco.

I have to get him out. I have to tear him free.

"I am tempted to keep them like this," Voldemort continued. "To know that you are helpless to do anything else, look anywhere else, until your lover's peril is resolved. How sweet. Love, the weapon of my enemies, is turned upon them and becomes their greatest weakness. So it has always been." He leaned around the dragon's neck and ran a hand like a white spider down Draco's cheek. Harry shuddered convulsively, as if it had been himself that Voldemort touched, and saw the Dark Lord smile.

"The price is the same as always," Voldemort breathed. "If you come to me of your own free will, if you surrender and bind yourself with an Unbreakable Vow not to hurt me or my Death Eaters again, then I shall bind myself with a similar vow not to hurt your lover."

Harry tried to breathe. His chest was too tight. He tried to think. His mind was too tight. He kept rebounding on the fact that Draco was in danger, and love and fear were such a twined chorus that he honestly couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

"I think I grow bored of this tableau, lovely as it is," said Voldemort. "We must change the stakes."

That was Harry's only warning before the dragon turned and scraped one bone tooth down's Draco's head, parting skin and hair as delicately as the flesh-eating rain had done. Harry shouted, but heard no words in his own shout; it sounded more like a half-strangled sob. Voldemort threw a mock-concerned look in his general direction, and then stroked the side of the dragon's neck, making it gently dislodge its tooth from Draco's flesh.

"Is something the matter, Harry?" he asked. "Something you would like to say to me? Something you would like to promise?"

Harry tried to wake up. He tried to find that level of thought he'd been able to sustain while the children were under the Life-Web. He had managed, then, to reason out that the correct course of action was to kill them, even though he hadn't wanted to, even though it was horrible, and part of the conviction had come from the fact that nothing was more important than saving lives, he could not save their lives, and people were dying behind him as he hesitated.

But those children had not been Draco.

A gap opened as he hovered there, indecisive, a crack in his morality that let him look straight into his heart, and what he saw there made him sick. He did care more about Draco's life than the lives of a dozen children. He was not the person he had thought he was, who, while admitting that some people were more important to him than others, could supposedly accept their deaths and go on. He could not accept this death. It would destroy him if those jaws closed, and those bone teeth came down, and Draco died. He might turn his back on Draco and go into the battle, declaring one life less important than the majority, but he would not live long after that. If nothing else, his self-disgust would deprive him of his will.

But the choice that Voldemort offered him was impossible, too. He could not abandon his allies the way that surrendering himself to that Unbreakable Vow would require him to.

He bowed his head, and heard Voldemort laugh.

Connor paused halfway up to the tank to cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself, because Moody had taught them all how to cast them and, really, one of his best lessons was that your enemies should remain unaware of you as long as possible. Then he went on flying, peering closely at the tank.

It appeared to be made of glass, but Connor's plans to just hurl Concutio at it and smash it that way vanished as he realized that the glass glimmered with the lines of numerous wards. He couldn't break through them with magic—and where there were that many wards, there would be others. That was part of Moody's lessons, too.

He flew in a circle for a moment, biting his bottom lip again as he considered the dilemma. He had to do something, because Harry was unable to do something, or he would have done the something already. But what?

Then he knew.

Connor shifted uncomfortably on his broom. He didn't like the thought of what he had to do, and Harry would like it even less. The only person who had ever given him lessons and thought this was a good idea had been Voldemort himself, in the guise of Sirius. Connor knew, from watching his parents and Dumbledore and Sirius, how what seemed a good weapon at first could corrupt you. He wasn't going to defeat his enemies but lose his soul.

But no one else was doing anything about the tank. When he glanced off to the side, Harry hovered motionless in front of Voldemort's dragon, apparently talking to him. Snape was working to slow people down on the battlefield, but that wouldn't change the balance of the sirens' voices. They would still compel people, Connor thought, and sooner or later the compulsion would include the order to attack anyone who tried to prevent them from reaching the lake or wherever the sirens were really sending them. And what if people in Hogwarts were hearing the sirens? Voldemort would have a whole school of helpless hostages.

He had no lesson to help him, nothing but the decision to take action now and bear the consequences later.

Like Harry, come to that, he thought, and nudged his broom around the edge of the tank's bottom and towards the first of the flying horses. Meanwhile, he was preparing himself for what he had to do, making moral arguments that were discarded almost as soon as he heard them.

Harry wouldn't like this.

But he wasn't doing anything to stop this.

It's not really a Gryffindor or a Light thing to do.

But Sirius was a Light-Declared wizard and a Gryffindor, and he did it, and I don't think the Light rejected him for it.

People might hate you for this.

I don't care.

Connor felt his stubbornness accrue, and then he was rising past the first of the winged horses to get a good look at the wizards on their backs. They all wore earplugs. Connor snorted. He wasn't surprised.

He struck with compulsion like a whip, reaching out and coiling it around the first of the Death Eaters' minds. He felt surprise, and shock, and instinctive struggle, but Sirius—no, Voldemort—had taught him how to handle this when they were practicing with rabbits and rats. Connor brought his own will down like a smoothing hand, and the rippled blanket of the other wizard's mind gradually relaxed into a smooth, quiescent mass, ready to fold or twist the way he wanted it to.

Loosen the chains, Connor thought, pouring all his will into the command. Drop the tank.

The nearest wizard turned his attention to the side of his mount's saddle. Connor turned and caught the next wizard in his net, and smoothed out the rebellion, and gave the same command. The wizards and witches still in the saddle watched with growing bewilderment as their companions obeyed some unknown impulse, but it never had a chance to grow beyond bewilderment to firing curses to stop them. Connor seized them before they could get that far, overrode their wills, and demanded that they listen, too. And the further he went, the easier it was. The last few victims were almost salivating at the chance, as if they thought that this couldn't be evil or contrary to their Lord's commands if everyone else was doing it.

Connor rode his Nimbus up above the tank and hovered there, sneaking glances in the direction of the hovering Voldemort and Harry. He had a bad taste in his mouth, but he kept the compulsion curled near the front of his mind, ready to unlash and inflict trouble if Voldemort noticed anything and interfered.

He never did. Connor turned back as the chains let go with a clinking rush and the tank with its sirens began to plunge towards the ground.

Only then did he realize that perhaps he should have given someone on the ground advance warning against the approach of so much glass and water.

Snape had seen it coming. From the moment that the odd, jerky movements of the Dark Lord's minions in the saddles of the flying horses caught his attention, he had been prepared for it.

Merlin knows how Harry did it, but there it is, he thought, with a flash of pride. Even when he appears helpless, floating in front of Voldemort as if there is nothing he can do, he reaches out and convinces his enemies to help him.

He began chanting the strongest Shield Charms he knew, linking them together as he had observed one could do in Harry's mind, building wards against the approach of the tank. He put them a good distance behind both his prisoners and the sluggishly crawling people still under the sirens' influence. Then he forced himself to turn back to the victims now clawing mindlessly at the castle's walls. The wards were down, faltering, as the sirens probably exerted their influence on the people inside Hogwarts to open the doors to the intruders. Snape had to prevent that from happening, and that meant the wards he had woven behind them would have to be enough.

He heard a snap like the breaking of the world, and turned in time to see the tank falling.

It hit the ground like a windstorm, and Snape fell to his knees. He heard the songs change to shrieks in the moment before he tightened his Occlumency walls again, refusing to let himself listen to the music as it really was. Then the glass cracked up the sides, and crazed, and the water plunged out, turning the field to mud. The sirens were left writhing, most bleeding, in the wreckage of what remained. Snape thought they were still trying to sing in the moments before the dead Death Eaters he had noticed here and there from the corner of his eye rushed upon them and reached out, strangling their slender throats.

And all the singing stopped.

Shouts of dizzy bewilderment popped up across the field as people on both sides of the battle recovered their minds. Hogwarts's wards sprang to life, strong and glittering.

Snape, surveying the castle in satisfaction before he moved to unbind their fighters, did think he saw one figure in a cloak staggering along an upper battlement, but dismissed his automatic concern. Whoever it was, and whatever the sirens had been trying to compel him to do—jump, open the wards, lower a rope to help the Death Eaters up the walls and into the castle—he wouldn't do it now.

The crash and splash of the tank jarred Voldemort's attention away from Draco and Harry, for just one moment. His snake pivoted to stare, taking his eyes away with it and aiming them in one direction only.

Harry moved.

He'd been so afraid to use the magic he contained before, for fear of only making the situation worse; if he jarred or jolted the dragon, then it could drop Draco. Besides, Voldemort was able to feel what he was doing before he did it, and could block it or wound Draco permanently. But he had to do something now, and so he did, unwinding the magic he'd collected and hurling it forward in great whips.

One twisted around the dragon's jaws, holding its head in place, and the other grabbed Draco and tugged him forward. Harry held his breath as Draco's scalp just barely scraped under the bone teeth, and then he swung crazily out into midair, dangling from nothing but Harry's will and magic. Harry hastily reeled his boyfriend in towards him. He could hear Draco, awakened from the daze of the sirens' songs, cursing him and Voldemort and the world in general, but he didn't let it distract him. Voldemort was screaming and hurling magic at him, and Harry had to open up the absorbere tunnel again to eat it.

The whip at last swung Draco up on the iron thestral behind him, and then he was clutching Harry's back and babbling about the pain on the side of his head. Harry nodded absently to show that he was listening, and reached back to brush his hand against Draco's waist. Draco squawked.

"If you'd just listen to me, Harry, and realize that—" he began.

"Do you have the knife?" Harry asked.

Draco sighed and shifted so that the hilt of the knife Adalrico Bulstrode had given Harry came in contact with his seeking hand. Harry nodded his thanks and whipped the blade out, draining magic into it with a sense of relief. The knife was far more magical than the stones, and could swallow most of what Harry was pushing through himself, though if Voldemort kept throwing power like that, heedless of where it went in his rage, it wouldn't be long before this receptacle, too, was full.

"Are we ready?" Draco leaned forward to whisper in his ear.

"I think we are," Harry replied. "This is almost as much magic as I can take, and we need—"

A long, tearing scream claimed their attention—everyone's attention. Harry turned his head, at the same time as Voldemort turned his, or his snake's, and stared at the North Tower.

A single figure was perched there. Its cloak streamed behind it, and from here, Harry could smell smoke and fire. Acies, he thought, full of wonder and unease. What is this? Why has she come out on the battlefield? I thought she wasn't going to fight because of what the songs of the Light and the Dark might do to her.

And then he remembered that there had been even more music than that on the battlefield—the sirens' songs. The air had been full of song. And the dragons were called the Singers.

Harry knew then what was coming.

He kicked the iron thestral into a downward swoop, shouting. Snape looked up at him, and Harry shouted again, invoking Sonorus on his voice. "Get everyone inside! Now!" He was weaving a ward as he spoke—easy, since he was practically leaking magic—a half-circle of white light and phoenix fire around Hogwarts. He didn't know if it was going to be strong enough. He hammered protection against fire into it as hard as he could, and still he did not know if it was going to be enough.

He completed the first half-turn in the making of the ward, feeling how hard Draco's hands clutched at his waist, and as he wheeled, he caught a glimpse of Acies.

Her cloak had flown off. Immense shadows projected above her back, shifting and billowing lazily. Wings, Harry realized, when they turned to the side and caught the light of the storm overhead. Wings larger than those belonging to any dragon he had ever seen.

Acies's body tore open, and her dragon shredded its way free.

Harry had never seen anything like it. Coil after coil, yard after yard, of body unfolded and went on unfolding, overflowing the North Tower—all of it clad in red-gold scales, like blood lit by phoenix fire. The sense of magic and immense strength, the magic it would take simply to support that enormous body and to fly, lapped the battlefield like a second storm. Harry saw the great head twisting, the golden eyes opening, and even from that far away he staggered when he caught a mere glimpse of those eyes. They led into a mind like the sea in storm, alive with wildness. He might tangle with a dragon like that, but he would not win.

This was not one of the living species of dragon, he realized, as she reared on the Tower and opened her wings to their fullest extent, making a darkness under the day. This was a dragon like the one whose skeleton slept on the Isle of Man, making the great hall where the Opallines lived. This was the dragon that had faced St. George, the dragon that wizards had supposedly invented the Killing Curse to kill, the dragon Harry had been interested in enough after the Isle of Man to look up briefly—the British Red-Gold. Extinct for a thousand years and more, and now a living one spread her wings and roared her defiance at the sun.

Harry could hear nothing of Acies in that cry.

Remember me, she had asked of him, when there is nothing human left of me.

The dragon swung her head slowly from side to side. It looked like doom on patrol. Harry caught a glimpse of the stone crumbling beneath her weight, and knew she might bring down the North Tower. He wondered if he would have to attract her attention so that she would fly from Hogwarts before that happened.

Then someone else attracted her attention. One of Voldemort's Death Eaters, recovered from the sirens' songs and staggering about outside Harry's protective ward, raised his wand and cast Avada Kedavra at her.

The curse fell far short, fizzling out before it ever reached the Tower. Harry thought there was too much fear behind it and not enough hatred. But it got the dragon's attention.

She opened her mouth, and she breathed.

Fire charged up her throat like a dozen Hogwarts Express trains and slammed into the ground hard enough to make the castle lurch. The wizard who'd cast the Killing Curse didn't have time to scream before the blast of brilliant white heat overwhelmed him. Harry recalled Paton Opalline saying that a Red-Gold's fire could vaporize, and so it certainly seemed to. The fire leaped once, like a ball of the sun-liquid that Harry had called on to melt Voldemort's diamond-shards, and then slammed into Harry's ward.

He could feel it melting. Nothing wizard-made had had to contend with flame like this in so long that they no longer knew how to do it. The ward was crumbling, and would lose its strength in a moment.

Harry made a decision he knew he would regret. He snapped his ward backwards, exposing the Death Eaters who still lived and who had either separated themselves to the side or been separated by Snape, and wrapped it tight around the students and his allies who were still outside the castle.

The fire roared. Harry heard no cries. The white mass wavered on for a few more feet, then settled to the ground and began to burn out a charred crater. The Death Eaters were gone. They would be less than bones, Harry knew, less than ash. It was a quick death, but a death of immense pain, contracted into a few moments.

Harry fought not to be sick. He felt Draco's hands clutch at his waist, and the iron spikes curl around his legs, both holding him on the thestral's back. He looked up at the dragon just as she lazily spread her wings and soared into the air. Trees in the Forbidden Forest bowed to the ground in the wake of her rising. For a moment she hung there, blazing with such magic that Harry shivered.

He thought of trying to stop her. Then she turned her head again, as if she had heard the wish, and the eye swept across and staggered him, and Harry knew he could not. He could not reach a mind that wild, and if he tried to cage her, she would surely react to the binding with another string of flame. He had no faith in himself to withstand anything stronger than that first lazy blast, nor to outfly the fire.

He had to watch as she turned and swirled up into the gold of the sky, turning almost golden herself as she reached it, and then parting the storm and vanishing into it. Harry shook his head dazedly. Acies is gone. What remains is—undoubtedly a problem I will need to deal with later.

But he had wasted too much time already in indecision. He took a deep breath, and forced himself to commit to the course that would leave Voldemort too broken to raise a second army of Death Eaters. He tightened the ward around the students and adults as they retreated into Hogwarts, checked for a moment to make sure the fire was burning where it was and was already the recipient of water spells from behind Hogwarts's own wards, and then faced Voldemort.

He had anticipated having to taunt the Dark Lord into following him. That was not the case, he saw, as that rage-filled face turned towards him. He merely had to laugh, and he could practically feel Voldemort reaching certain conclusions. The dragon had been planned, he would think, and Harry had destroyed all his Death Eaters.

His flesh-dragon flung the iron thestral away like a toy, and began to scull steadily towards them.

"Hang on," Harry muttered to Draco, using his hand to push the Midsummer knife into a robe pocket and feel the stones. Yes, he had them all, glowing with warmth, and the knife beside them, and Draco at his back. Though originally they'd planned to fly on separate thestrals, perhaps this was better. This meant that Voldemort didn't have a chance to catch Draco and hold him hostage on the way there.

"I'm ready," Draco said, his voice reflecting none of the pain and fear Harry knew he must be feeling. His hands tightened on Harry's waist like claws.

Harry nodded, and then kicked the thestral and turned it. A map of the country unrolled in his mind, and the thestral responded obediently, flowing south faster than the flesh-dragon could fly, but never so fast as to get too far ahead of Voldemort and lose his interest. The whole point was to lure Voldemort, make him think he could win, as neither Apparating nor Portkeying would have done.

And on and on they went, aiming straight for London.