Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!

Last of the "battle chapters."

Chapter Ninety-Four: The Shining Road

Harry could feel the beast drawing in its breath to sing, if it had a breath. He didn't know how long Draco would be able to possess it, and given how wounded he thought Draco was, from the way he held himself, he rather thought they should save that moment of possession for a more opportune time.

Before the creature could start to sing, then, he drew a stone out of his robe pocket and held it up.

The creature gave a sound oddly close to a purr, and the voice Harry remembered from behind the locked door came back. Will you give that to us? We want it. It is beautiful. We are hungry. We want it. The eyes of all the faces were looking at it, Harry saw. The wing-like discs were drawn up so they could see, and they had stopped screaming for now, as if their meal of Voldemort had eased their pain.

Harry, his heart pounding—the creature could start singing again at any moment, after all—said, "I'll give it to you, but not here. This house is stained with the remains of my enemies. It is only fitting that you go and sing in a new place." With the stone still in his hand, his eyes on the creature, he reached out and pulled at Draco with a gentle Summoning Charm. Draco drifted over to him and settled in the crook of his handless arm. The creature didn't appear to notice. As Narcissa had told him, Harry thought, it was interested only in meals of strong magic. Taking a step backward, Harry continued, "Do you know the Black house Silver-Mirror?"

We do. I do. The nearest face turned to watch the stone, the stretched mouth twitching in yearning.

Harry reached out to the wards on Silver-Mirror and commanded them to fall, now. Luckily, Silver-Mirror was the property that gave him the least trouble. Wayhouse would have been inclined to argue. "Then follow us," he whispered, and tugged gently on the stones and the Midsummer knife, so that they tingled with magic and shone to the creature's multiple eyes. He bowed his head over Draco's and prepared to Apparate with him to Silver-Mirror.

With his face so close to his boyfriend's ear, he could murmur, and be reasonably sure that the creature wouldn't hear. "When we arrive. Possess it, for one moment. Keep its attention. Can you do that?"

Draco said nothing. But a moment later, his hands clasped on Harry's binding arm so hard that they momentarily cut off the flow of blood. Harry nodded in acknowledgment, and then closed his eyes and Apparated.

Side-Along Apparating someone else, especially someone he wanted to be as careful of as possible, hurt. Harry landed on his feet, however, and moved gently back from Draco with the stone in his hand, not allowing himself to think of failure any more than he did when he was chasing the Snitch in a Quidditch game. This was going to work, because it had to work, because it was the plan he had devised and it was going to work. He said so.

The beast appeared, coiled in the entrance hall, beneath the golden pool that slid drops of flame down the chains to the lamps.

Draco leaned forward.

Harry knew the moment when he possessed it, because the creature called out in all its many voices, and he moved.

Draco wanted to do nothing so much as curl up in a corner and go to sleep. His mind hurt, and his head hurt, and his magic hurt. He thought he could still feel the taste of Voldemort's taint in his throat if he spat.

But Harry had asked him to do this, and Draco knew that Harry would not have asked for help unless he truly needed it.

He looked up at the beast and lunged outward, reaching across the gap between them, touching its mind.

It hurt like stretching a cramped muscle hurt, and that was only the use of possession itself. Much worse was trying to grasp a mind so thoroughly alien. Harry had told him that a dragon's mind was alien like a storm, and Dumbledore's had been filled with ideals Draco found foreign, and Voldemort's had been a seething pit of Dark magic so foul even Draco's father would have refrained from using it.

But at least Dumbledore and Voldemort had been human—or had once been human, in the case of Voldemort. This was not. This never had been. It was not a conglomerate, a patchwork, of its victims' memories, as Draco had assumed it would be. It was—

It was hunger.

Draco moaned as he tried to grasp that incredible drive to eat and eat and eat, to consume and swallow magic until nothing was left, and could not. His stomach was already aching, and he knew that was a bad sign, that he could feel his own body and not the creature's. Hunger puddled in him. He wanted to give up his own magic to allay that yearning, or, more, swallow some of the power Harry had stolen. Why did he have that much? He didn't need that much anyway.

The creature came closer. Draco looked up and found himself staring into one stretched, narrow face embedded in a body segment like a great glass bead. The wing-like projections stretched out, trembling, and sniffed at him. Draco felt the interest and curiosity coursing through him like shards of broken glass.

Interesting, said the creature. You are strong in your possession gift. Perhaps we will eat that.

"Singer!"

And Draco knew that meant Harry was ready, and he could let his hold on the creature's mind loosen, and drop back into his body. He shuddered, wrapping his arms around himself. Merlin, he hurt. Hollowed-out and cold and bleeding and oily and befouled. He bowed his head and hoped that Harry wouldn't ask him to do anything else, because he might do himself permanent damage this time.

Harry had already chosen the one he wanted to use, of course. That had been part of the purpose of planning the way he had, all ahead of time. Draco's rune circle and his decision to surrender to the creature's compulsion long enough to free it and the Midsummer knife had all been part of the plan, and so was this.

He threw a subtle brightening spell at the one of the portraits hanging on the wall that he'd chosen as most useful. Then he had to adopt a suitably befuddled expression, and wrap his Complete Vanishing spell around the stones and the knife so that they would appear not to be there at all, and call, "Singer!"

The creature turned towards him, as much as it could be said to turn towards anything when it didn't have a head. The mouths gaped and stretched at him.

"I dropped the magic!" Harry called, and nodded at the portrait that showed a silver road stretching into the distance. "In there!"

The creature needed no instructions from him. It knew that it could enter the portrait. There did come one dangerous moment when Harry thought it might choose to swallow the picture's magic instead of go through.

Harry used that moment to say, in a voice as seductive as possible, "All of these lead to magical worlds. Imagine the feasts that wait for you there."

Many legs drummed. The creature hurtled forward and at the portrait, unwinding its body from the floor as it went, to half-rear. Harry shuddered as he watched the first beads of the body hit the paint and begin to vanish. It was still probably the ugliest thing he'd ever seen, and he wasn't sure whether the stretched faces or the insect-like legs made it uglier.

The creature hurtled through, at last. Harry took his courage in hand and forced himself to step up to the picture, to look and see what it was doing. It could have been waiting on the other side, ready to eat him.

Instead, he saw the green body rapidly making its way into the distance on the starlight road, a part of the portrait now.

Harry took the frame in his hand and gently turned the painting to face the wall. Regulus had told him that if he did that, no one and nothing who had entered the picture could come through again, and Harry trusted Regulus.

I couldn't trap Voldemort in the pictures, because he knew about them, he thought, as he turned away and let himself relax a little. But the creature wasn't a wizard, and could be tricked.

Draco was sitting on the floor, his arms wrapped around himself and his head bowed until his hair completely hid his face. Harry hurried over to him and embraced him. Draco leaned against him, quaking. Harry wasn't sure if it was from cold or pain or fear.

"What can I do to help?" he whispered, stroking Draco's hair. "Tell me."

"I'm so tired," Draco whispered back, which made Harry add weariness to the list of suspects for the shivering. "I just—I felt Voldemort bleeding into me, mingling with me, almost possessing me in turn. He said that he was going to use me against you. And he hurt me—tore part of my mind, I think. And then possessing the creature taught me what hunger means. And I just want to rest, and I don't know who can heal me. Snape, maybe? Madam Pomfrey? I don't know." He pressed himself against Harry like a young dragon blindly seeking shelter.

Harry told himself that now was not the time for guilt. For one thing, it would keep him from doing what had to be done; for another, Draco had chosen to come with him, chosen to fight, and feeling guilty because he'd got wounded in doing so would diminish his sacrifice. "Do you want to stay here while I go back to Hogwarts and fetch them?" he asked. "Or do you feel as if you can be moved?"

"I can be moved. You have to do what you gathered that magic in the stones and the knife for," Draco said stubbornly, and then his eyes widened as he stared over Harry's shoulder. "Where did they go? You didn't really drop them in the painting and give them up to that creature, did you?"

"No, stupid," Harry muttered, gently scooping Draco up with half his own strength and half Mobilicorpus. "I Vanished them. See?" he added, and removed the Extabesco plene so that Draco could see them. "And of course I'll do what I gathered the magic for, but it doesn't have to be here. It would probably be better done in Hogwarts, anyway, because that's closer to my targets. Or I'll ask Connor if I can use Lux Aeterna. Don't worry about it."

"Of course I'll worry about it, Harry," Draco said, with a faint arrogant tone to his words that did more to reassure Harry than any protests about how well he felt. "Until you do that, then you won't want to go to the Sanctuary, and I want to. We are going there as soon as possible. And you're not going to think of anything besides healing and me, are you?"

"Not in that order," Harry said softly.

Draco stared at him for a moment.

"You don't have any idea how magnificent you were, do you?" Harry shook his head in wonder. "Draco, I couldn't have done this without you. There's no way Voldemort would have held still long enough for me to stab him and inflict that wound on him, or wouldn't have sensed what I was doing at once. You fought beside me, and you were wounded in doing so, and you still managed to perform one last feat of heroics." He wished he could have touched Draco's face, but his hand was caught beneath him, supporting his back, so he settled for ducking his head and rubbing his cheek against Draco's. "You're wonderful, Draco."

"Well, I'm glad you realized that, at least," Draco muttered, and closed his eyes.

"How many Apparitions do you think you can take?" Harry asked, forcing his mind to turn to practical matters. "The iron thestral is surer, but slower, and I want to get you healed as soon as possible."

Draco sucked in his breath. Then he said, "I can—I can take four or five Side-Along Apparitions, I think, Harry. Can you jump the distance between here and Hogwarts in that many?"

Harry smiled in relief. "I certainly can." He firmed his grip on Draco with both his arms and his magic, remembering just in time to float the stones and the Midsummer knife back into his robe pockets. "Hang on," he murmured, and pictured Grimmauld Place, and Apparated.

Harry landed, with Draco firmly in his arms, on the road just outside of Hogwarts. He wasn't sure if McGonagall would have restored the wards that made Apparition impossible on school grounds, and he didn't want to risk bouncing from them and injuring Draco if she had.

It looked as if she had, if the buzz in the air was any indication. Harry nodded to no one in particular and tightened his grip on Draco again. He imagined the wards would inform McGonagall the moment he walked in.

"Just a bit further, Draco," he murmured, and then realized that Draco was unconscious. Well, Side-Along Apparition was unpleasant. Harry told himself it was that and nothing else as he headed up the path towards the gates. He would not waste time in useless worrying. He would do something useful instead, like getting Draco to the people who could heal him.

He came in across the Quidditch Pitch, and had to close his eyes for a moment at the sheer destruction. The ground was churned mud and grass, and covered with blood. The slanting sunlight of early afternoon seemed to have lost its power, and the usual sounds that Harry remembered from Hogwarts at this time last year—birds, creatures' calls from the Forbidden Forest, the high singing of the wind—were gone. All this destruction had happened in no more than a few hours, since the battle had started at dawn.

And there were bodies.

Harry performed a small charm to keep his and Draco's faces clean of the stink as he walked among them. The giants were first, great gray lumps too huge to be real, lying sprawled in the mud with clubs and spears close by their sides. Their flesh smelled cooked more often than not, since they'd been the victims of numerous fire spells. Harry avoided one with a cracked skull that lay in a pool of its own brains.

Then came the people.

Harry couldn't close his eyes, because he had to pick a steady path for himself that wouldn't jounce Draco. So he moved, and he looked into faces, and he recognized the dead when he could.

There, sprawled in the mud with a broken half of a giant's spear through her, was the body of a golden-haired witch whom Harry thought must be a Gloryflower. Laura would mourn. Not far from her were two Death Eaters who seemed to have died trying to kill each other. Harry was uncertain why, until he realized that one of them had actually died from a Severing Curse through her belly, and had her fingers clamped on the neck of the other. He nodded. She must have been dead, and someone had summoned her back—Pansy? She had fallen now that the battle was over and she had no more vengeance to take.

He passed the remains of the sirens' tank, and had to step more carefully than ever, over bits of broken glass and strangled bodies. He forced himself to meet the sirens' dead eyes, for the most part pools of blue and green with no pupil anymore. He wondered if their pupils disappeared when they died.

He passed a sprawled mess of tendrils, Indigena's plants. And in the middle of them was a small torn shape in black robes that, even now, winds that didn't exist elsewhere tossed about. Harry checked his step, longing to hesitate further. He knew, though the body's head was missing, who it must be.

Pansy.

He couldn't linger, though, not with Draco possibly suffering more and more pain in his arms. Take care of the living first, he heard, as if from a distance, one of his mother's lessons that had not ceased to matter. The dead will take care of themselves.

He turned and went on, and saw Hogwarts's wards shimmering fierce and tight around the castle. The fire Acies had caused was out, though it had burned a crater into the ground which still smoked. A breeze blew the scent of cooked flesh towards Harry. He blanked his mind, hiding the remembrance of the burning Death Eaters in the Occlumency pools, and went on towards the castle.

Flung hands and squashed golden horses and broken weapons and bodies lying motionless and unmarked from the onslaught of Avada Kedavra. Staring eyes and torn robes and footprints carved in mud as if in stone and blood flung like a new constellations. Dead and doomed plants and the tattered remains of Hagrid's hut and a dead centaur with all his legs broken and the distant, trailing sound of a dog barking, which Harry didn't understand.

All of it crashed into him, wounded him in ways that Draco's wounding and his own desperate struggle against Voldemort and even the death of the dozen students by the lake had not. By the time he reached the front doors of Hogwarts, Harry knew that he had to turn Draco over to those who could care for him and then go and do what he'd collected the stolen magic for in the first place. He needed something good to come out of this battle, something more than defeat and death for his enemies. He needed to have an upsurge of life and freedom.

"Harry!"

That was Honoria, running towards him from the doors of the castle. Illusions of lions danced on her shoulders, all of them with paws spread in welcome. Harry summoned a faint smile for her, and evaded her attempt to embrace him, afraid it would make him drop Draco.

"Can you call Madam Pomfrey, Honoria?" he asked quietly. "Draco is wounded, both in body and in mind, and he needs help."

Honoria managed to tame all the impulses that would have probably insisted she joke with him about this, and just nodded. "And how is he wounded?" she asked, as she extended her arms above her head, ready to form into wings.

"He took a wound from a dragon-tooth on the side of his face. He possessed Voldemort until I could stab him and wound his magic, and then he possessed a strange creature, an alien—thing." Harry still had no name for it. He shook his head. "Tell them to talk to Narcissa Malfoy. She was born Black, and she might know more about the creature than she told me, since it was in the Black house."

Honoria stared at him for a long moment. Harry wondered impatiently why she wasn't going, and then she said, "Voldemort's wounded?"

"Yes. Not dead," Harry added hastily. He could easily imagine how Honoria's exuberance could cause her to exaggerate the news, and what kind of consternation it would cause when the Dark Lord turned out to be alive. "But wounded, with a hole in his magical core draining out every attempt he makes to use a spell. I imagine he'll find something to repair it in time, but he should be quiet for at least the duration of the summer. And all his Death Eaters are dead."

Honoria murmured, "Thank Merlin." Then she nodded briskly to Harry. "Bring him towards the hospital wing. I'll get Madam Pomfrey." A moment later, the gull climbed above him, towards one of the high windows.

Harry murmured, "Extabesco plene," as he cut a small hole in the wards and moved inside the castle, repairing the hole behind him. He didn't want anyone else grabbing him and delaying him on the way to the hospital wing. The important thing was getting help for Draco, not—yet—pausing to explain their defeat of Voldemort twenty-two times.

He saw plenty of people in the corridors as he made his way upward, but, of course, none of them sensed him. Most younger students stood in corners murmuring, as if glad that it was over, or else asked older students questions with wide-eyed curiosity. Some of those older students, their limbs in slings and their bodies moving with the tenderness that marked recent experience with healing magic, bragged about their part in the battle; others simply shook their heads and looked away.

Harry saw numerous faces pale and stiff with tears, and knew it was for the casualties. He saw Hawthorn, sitting near the entrance of her guest quarters with her hands over her face, and his heart gave a steady, throbbing ache that struck all through him. He wanted to stop and comfort her, but, once again, he wouldn't get help for Draco that way, and he didn't think any comfort he could give before someone else saw him would ever be enough. He wanted to wait until she could have the time and attention she deserved.

He reached the hospital wing at last, and saw both Snape and Pomfrey waiting beside an empty bed. Harry let the Complete Vanishing Spell go, and saw Snape's gaze lock on him, first, before it moved to Draco.

"He possessed Voldemort," said Harry, before anyone could tell him anything, and laid Draco gently on the bed. "For several minutes, I think. Voldemort possessed him back. It hurt him—mental wounds. And there's the wound on the side of his face that Voldemort's dragon caused." Madam Pomfrey was already running her wand over that injury, muttering under her breath. Harry continued, though now he was growing aware of the stares from other beds and a few people already edging forward to talk to him. "He also possessed a strange creature locked in the Black house, but only for a moment. It looked like a centipede, headless, with the faces of its victims set into its sides, and it ate magic. Contact his mother about that. She might know details that I've forgotten."

"And what about you, young man?" Madam Pomfrey asked, briefly looking up from Draco.

"Not physically wounded," said Harry. "Exhausted, but I'll live." His training once again came in useful as he felt Snape's attempt to reach for him and ducked it. "I have something else to do right now," he added impatiently. "Where's my brother?" Only after he had asked it did he realize that that question could easily have been answered with a "Dead."

"Here, Harry."

Harry turned. Connor was just stepping away from another hospital bed. Harry swallowed as he saw Hermione lying there. He forced himself to bring his eyes back to Connor's face. So many obligations, and he would prioritize and attend to them, but for now, he needed to do this.

"Can you convince the wards at Lux Aeterna to let me in?" he asked.

Connor, his mouth open to, probably, comment on something else entirely, blinked and said, "Of course. Why?"

Harry took one of the stones from his robe pocket, shining with the force of its captured magic, and held it up. "I owe the northern goblins a debt," he said.

Harry appeared easily enough outside Lux Aeterna. He remembered what it looked like; the memories burned all the brighter in his head for the fact that after the one summer he'd spent there, his bond with James had been doomed, and he hadn't known it.

He carefully undid the locking spells on the front door, but relaxed when the wards slid over him, snuffling like dogs, and recognized the feel of someone their master had permitted. They fell before him, and he could step into the grand entrance hall and look up at the ceiling. The windows were flooded with the light of the setting sun. It had taken Harry that much time to convince Snape and Connor and McGonagall and Peter that he couldn't collapse yet, and yes, Draco was wounded but Harry could do nothing to help him right now either, and no, he wasn't going to retreat into a secluded room and cry on someone's shoulder.

Far better than any retreat or seclusion now, which would let him brood on the thought of the deaths he'd caused, was the thought of what light and life and healing he could still bring.

Just to make sure, he did touch the stump of his left wrist and speak to Tybalt first. Tybalt's voice was lazy and self-satisfied, not that the second was unusual. "Yes?"

"You did secure the linchpin?" Tybalt had said that he was on "the brink of success" in his last communication, but refused to say that he was sure his plan was going to work.

"Harry! Yes." Tybalt's voice grew quicker and more eager, and he sounded on the verge of bragging. "Yes, of course I did. I told you I would. My uncle would scold you must severely, you know, for doubting a Starrise."

"Then I ought not to doubt your brother's ability to fight back, either," Harry retorted, but he could feel one tortured knot in him relax. "How did you take the linchpin away?"

"Simple," said Tybalt. "It's actually a good thing that you didn't persuade our families to forsake the notion of common inheritance, Harry, and just tie our assets to one person, the way you persuaded your brother. Then, the linchpin wouldn't have come to me at all unless I killed Pharos. This way, though, I asked the linchpin which it would prefer: a Starrise more in the mode of my uncle, a leader and someone proud who would help restore the fortunes of the family, or a Starrise who was cowardly and a follower and had been so overwhelmed by my uncle that he would never know how to lead on his own."

Harry concealed a chuckle, the first true laughter he'd uttered in more than a day. "And it accepted you?"

"It did." Tybalt's voice soared to a new height of smugness. "My uncle was careful to designate Pharos his legal heir, so that the estate didn't pass to me automatically when he died, but it didn't matter. He forgot that linchpins are concerned more with the fate of the blood family than any one member of it. The wards listened to me, and fastened to me. Because I asked. Augustus never bothered asking if they actually wanted to be bound to Pharos." Tybalt laughed himself. "That's one of the lessons you taught me, Harry. Sometimes all you have to do is ask, and trust in another being's free will, and you'll get what you wanted far more easily than if you tried to compel them. I don't know why there hasn't been a vates before now. You'd think more Lords would have learned compulsion isn't worth it."

Harry shook his head, knowing he was smiling and not trying to stop it. "I don't know if I would frame my principles in quite that way, Tybalt."

"Oh, that's all right," Tybalt said. "You don't have to, because I'll do it for you."

Harry didn't try to resist the uprush of joy in his heart. That was part of the reason he had decided to do this now, after all: so that he would have the strength of some happiness, of some unalloyed triumph, when he had to turn back and face the mixture of triumph and tragedy that Midsummer Day had become. "Thank you, Tybalt," he said. "Doesn't this mean that you're bound to your family, now, and that you'll have to produce an heir?"

"It does," said Tybalt, sounding entirely comfortable. "But it was never my family name that I objected to, Harry. It was my uncle's stiffness and his trying to live in the past and mourn my mother's memory to the exclusion of everything else. And as for heirs, my other uncle, my mother's brother, has plenty of daughters, and one of them, Portia, is already showing signs of being independent and strong enough to lead. John and I have agreed to adopt her."

Harry smiled again. Sometimes, the Light families' insistence on not having magical heirs does make it easier for them to continue their lines. "I wish congratulations and good luck to you both."

"Thank you," said Tybalt. "You're going to proceed now?"

"I am," said Harry quietly.

"Good luck."

"Thank you."

Harry ended the communication spell and turned to his stones and the Midsummer knife. When he called, they began to revolve around him, the Midsummer knife purring and shining as her blade caught the light.

Harry reached out and began to pull the magic he'd gathered back into him. As it came at him, he separated it into two streams. One was the magic purified by his phoenix fire—the magic that had originally come from Dumbledore, and from Voldemort when he'd drained him in the Chamber of Secrets—and the magic purified by the Light when Harry had called on it. The other was the still-tainted magic he'd drawn from the Death Eaters on the battlefield that morning and had had no time to cleanse.

That was all right. For the purpose he had in mind, this tainted magic was perfect.

Harry reached north. He could feel the northern goblins' web, though he could not see it without the special tools that Helcas had shown him—almost two years ago now. The thought saddened him, until he shook his head and forced himself to ignore how much had changed since then.

In front of him was something else, something that had not changed in much too long.

The streams of magic broke through him, charging floods, one clean and one befouled. Harry could feel himself shuddering with many things: weariness, the sheer power of the magic, the temptation to claim it and use it for himself. But all of them faltered before his determination to give the northern goblins the freedom they deserved.

Once, it would have meant sacrificing his own magic to do this. Now, it would mean sacrificing only magic he had acquired for just this purpose.

Since he had to feel out the edges of the web and the linchpins' wards, he paid more attention to his sensation of touch and less to his sight. That meant that when odd images of streams appeared before him, golden and deep green, pouring away from him and to the north, he could ignore them. Visible musical notes thrummed in front of his eyes; he ignored them, too. Sometimes he saw dangling family crests as he identified which linchpin belonged to which wizarding family. That didn't matter. He pushed forward, and at last the linchpins trembled in his hand like a drop of water ready to fall from a leaf, swollen with power, and the magic played all around him, restless rain waiting to be used.

Harry breathed.

The magic rushed out of him, and twisted, and then separated finally and for good into those two streams. The pure, cleansed one twined around the linchpins. The wards that linked them to the web and the bindings on the goblins turned around in interest. Their owners had already given them permission to look at this magic, and Harry could feel their interest and curiosity growing; it was beautiful magic, vaulting, sunlit, a waterfall or a stream of purity. The wards detached slowly from the earth, and reached out to wrap around the beautiful golden magic.

Harry forced himself to envision how many separate cores of power he would need, several dozen for the several dozen linchpins. Then he broke the golden stream forcefully into many quiet pools, each with a linchpin's wards wrapped around it, rooting in it. They were no longer bound to the web, but to those pools, which, not used for anything else, relaxed and allowed themselves to be used as anchors. The Light nature of the magic blended well with the Light nature of the families' ancient wards, anyway.

At the same time, Harry grasped the goblins' web, which had started to shift and slide and send the land once secured by the linchpins hurtling towards the sea, and slammed the dark green stream of tainted magic into it. These pools, when he broke them off, took the form of false linchpins. The tainted magic did not mind doing that, because subterfuge and deception were often tools of the Dark. In moments, the web was secure, wrapped around and tangled on its new burdens, and never noticing that they were not linchpins.

It was, in fact, so concerned with them that Harry found it easy to reach out and pick up all the trailing strands of the web that were previously connected to the northern goblins, and wind them around the pools of Dark magic instead, letting these strands understand that the pools were Dark. The web had been set by ancient Light wizards to confine creatures they were afraid of and wanted service from. It knew all about confining the Dark, and the descendants of its original owners had given permission to this wizard to change things around, so everything must be well. It hummed to itself as it clutched the new, Dark "linchpins" a bit tighter.

Harry's mind felt strained, the same way it had when he performed the ritual to free the southern goblins. He was seeing several dozen different separate things in his thoughts, holding them all and not combining them, and he made his body an endless conduit for the magic, and he wove and wound and pulled, and by now he had come so far that he had no idea whether he was using his eyes or his sense of touch.

He felt the moment, though, when he freed the goblins. Helcas briefly reached down the flickering strands of the web as they whipped and unwound from his people, and Harry felt a touch like a handclasp.

Thank you, vates.

Harry smiled before the connection broke, and hoped that Helcas had heard his own pleasure and gratitude.

And then he fell, tossed as from a great height by the ending of the magic, and lay on the floor breathing for a moment.

He started when arms came around him. He could have climbed back to his feet when he'd taken a few minutes to rest. He craned his neck, and met his brother's eyes.

"You didn't think I'd let you come alone, did you?" Connor asked in disgust when he saw Harry staring at him. "I Apparated in with Peter a few minutes after you left."

Harry sighed. "Thank you for not stopping me." Gently, he forced himself to stand and step away. "I did tell you I'm not physically wounded, and the strain of pushing all that magic through me will pass in a moment." He called the empty stones and the Midsummer knife to him, and slid them into his pockets.

"It was never even a temptation to you, was it?" Connor asked. Harry couldn't read the emotions in his voice. "To hold on to all that magic, to keep it for yourself?"

Harry blinked. "Yes, it was," he said. "Of course it was. But I don't need to listen to the temptation."

Connor studied him for a moment, then nodded slowly. "All right. I can understand that." He slung his arm over Harry's shoulders again. "And now you're going to come back to the school and rest, right?"

That, Harry thought, as he pictured Draco's still face and Hawthorn's broken one and Pansy's ripped body, is what you think.