Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
Cliffhanger warning. But the clifhanger is easily avoided. Just don't read the last scene.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Jailbreak
Harry woke in a flood of early morning sunlight. He blinked for a moment, wondering why on earth Tonks or someone else hadn't shaken him awake with the dawn, and then realized the warm weight in his arms might have something to do with that.
Shifting, he raised himself on one elbow and looked down at Draco.
Draco slept on his left side, the soft snores that he always denied making emerging from his mouth and nose in little puffs of air. That, in turn, stirred his hair, which stuck up around his face in tiny independent clumps. Harry stared at him for a long moment, then closed his eyes and swallowed.
He had hoped that Draco would choose to come to his side. He had even hoped it would happen without his having to ask, because he did not know what to say in the face of Lucius's opposition. To force Draco to choose between his family and Harry was intolerably cruel.
And now Draco was here, and had chosen, and had explained, last night before they both fell asleep, all his reasons for doing so. The reasons quieted every objection that Harry might have raised against his presence, except for the sorrow that would result for Lucius when he found out.
Harry would have made himself survive if Draco had chosen otherwise, he knew. Transforming every pain, every irritant, every impatience into determination to win this battle had worked for him in the last few days, and was working now. And he would not have shown Draco what he felt; he would have wanted him to be happy, and his boyfriend's brooding would have made him unhappy.
Now, though, Harry could lean his head down until his cheek rested on Draco's, a gesture he wouldn't have dared with Draco awake, and breathe, "Thank Merlin you chose this. I needed you so much."
He closed his eyes and lay there in the sunlight, feeling warmth close around them from above and below.
Lucius was concentrating so intently on a spell that might be just the thing to curb Rhangnara's ambition that he started when the phoenix song warbled. He clenched one hand on the book to keep from dropping it and glared at his left wrist. It went on singing, however, so Lucius forced his voice smooth and asked, "What is it?"
"Father."
Draco's voice, smug in the way that it was when he won a game. Lucius only felt a renewed surge of irritation. Draco knew his morning routine. He should have known better than to interrupt Lucius during the hour that he used for studying spells and writing correspondence.
"Draco," he said. "What is it? Has something happened?" Harry might do any number of mad things in his distraction. Lucius would write a letter for Julius to take to the Department of Mysteries when they occurred, of course, so that the madness would be controlled and contained. The boy needed more guidance than Lucius had ever suspected he did, when he still thought of Harry as someone he could follow without complaint. He was like a wild horse who resisted breaking to the rein.
"You could say that," Draco said, and his voice dripped with self-satisfaction now. Lucius felt his curiosity peak. Whatever it was must have been very good news, and perhaps that was why Draco had interrupted him, because he could not wait to share it.
"Out with it," said Lucius, marking his place in the book of mind-control spells with a peacock feather quill and leaning back.
"I looked carefully at all my options, Father, and made a choice I've been putting off for far too long," Draco began, his voice subtly mocking. Lucius frowned lightly. It must have been self-mockery; Draco saw now that the choice really was simple. That probably means the news is not as momentous as I hoped. "I wanted to let you know at once that I'd made it, of course. As of this moment forward, by your own words, you no longer have an heir."
Lucius felt the breath in his throat turn to frost. His left hand clenched over the arm of his chair until there came a warning creak of wood. "What did you say?" he whispered.
"You heard me." Draco's voice took on a lazy drawl. He has never sounded more like me, Lucius thought, even while he fought to keep his feet in a suddenly reeling world. "You threatened to disown me if I chose Harry's rebellion. And now I am sitting in the same house as Harry, eating the same breakfast, after having slept in the same bed last night. When one chooses a side, it's always best to do it thoroughly, don't you agree?"
And those last words alone were a slap at Lucius, who had always sought to keep his options open, and danced on both Harry's and the Dark Lord's sides for as long as possible. He would not show it, however. Now he was grateful that the communication spells had no visual component, so Draco could not see him clamping his teeth together.
"You will have no money from me, Draco, until you renounce this madness and come back home," he told his son. "You will have no sanctuary in our Manor. You will have no help from those who call themselves friends of the Malfoys."
"Oh, I knew all that," said Draco.
The careless manner in which he said it further infuriated Lucius. "And what do you think this will do to your mother?" he asked. "Your standing among the pureblood circles? Your reputation as a wizard?"
"Mother is the only one of those I regret staining with my defiance," said Draco. "You may tell her yourself, if you like, as I can't imagine that you'll keep this quiet. And she did not raise a son who would cower tamely in front of his father." His voice changed cadences, to taunting. "Really, Father, I only said that I understood your request to keep away from Harry, not that I would obey it."
Lucius, lost in an icestorm of anger and frustration, did not allow himself to lament that mistake. It had been understandable. "You will regret this decision yet, Draco," he whispered.
"I don't think so, Father," said Draco. "A wise woman told me over the summer that I wasn't as much like you as I was like Mother, and I see now that she was right. You would never have defied your father if he made you choose between him and Mother, would you have? But that doesn't matter. I'm with Harry now. I weighed my choice, figured out all the consequences of it, and still chose. I have what I want to make me happy. I imagine you can't say the same."
The communication spell ended. Lucius sat where he was for a long moment, staring at the wall and pointedly not shaking.
Then he stood and went to the hearth to firecall his solicitor. He would not speak to Narcissa about Draco's disownment until he could present it to her as a fait accompli. She would be on his side, of course, because they had raised their son to act a certain way and he was not acting it, but she might still protest such a step. Lucius would ease her pain as best he could.
"Our first goal is to keep the people we rescue from Tullianum alive." Harry said, leaning forward over the table, his hand splayed flat on the surface and his eyes traveling from face to face. "Not to kill Unspeakables. Not to weaken the Ministry. Not to gather information that will be useful for a later attack on the Ministry, as I hope that we won't have to do this again. Is that understood?"
Draco looked from person to person, and saw them all nodding. He concealed a smirk behind his hand. There were many more wizards than had been there this morning. A short argument with Harry, just before Draco had called his father to talk to Lucius about the terms of his disownment, had revealed that Harry was waiting to call on his allies because he wanted to give them time to make up their minds—and, Draco thought, because he was afraid that more of them would act like Lucius if he "took them for granted." Draco had trounced this supposition quite quickly, by pointing out that at least some of them were probably waiting anxiously for Harry's call, not wanting to interrupt in case he was doing something important, and unable to simply Apparate to his side because they had no idea where he was.
Harry had blinked and muttered, and then started using the communication spell to talk to his allies, most of whom responded just as eagerly as Draco had thought they would. He'd shaken his head and rolled his eyes, though he'd been careful not to let Harry see him do it. Sometimes, Harry forgot which way the balance of power tilted. And his assumption that people who would help him in war against Voldemort wouldn't want to help him in a rebellion against the Ministry, or a rebellion undertaken because of werewolves, was, frankly, laughable.
The Bulstrodes were here now, all four, though of course Millicent's little sister, Marian, was bedded down for a nap. Syrinx, Owen, and Michael had finished Apparating an hour after Harry had spoken to them. Thomas Rhangnara and his eldest two children had appeared with pops that sounded gleeful to Draco's ears. Ignifer Apollonis stood stern and tall next to Honoria Pemberley, who would not stop whispering with Tybalt Starrise and his Muggleborn partner. (Draco was proud of himself for thinking the term Muggleborn instead of Mudblood). Delilah Gloryflower was there too, the bells in her hair shaking as she bent over the map. Moody, Draco's changeable halfblood cousin, and the goblins and those few centaurs who could fit into the room, as well as those werewolves who would be helping with the attack, were scattered here and there amongst them.
Draco told himself he was not ashamed that he was the only person bearing the name of Malfoy in the room, and put the thought away as Harry took a step back from the table. Harry's eyes were brilliant with determination, his face so set that Draco thought swords would have broken on him. He didn't seem aware of the fact that people were so fixated on him, or he would have been blushing and stammering. Of course, Draco thought, Harry did his best as a leader when he thought about what he had to accomplish, and not what he meant to the people who followed him. He would never have believed it, anyway.
"We'll be waiting to Apparate until we're outside the Ministry," he was saying now. "The anti-Apparition wards are simply too strong for most of us to tear, a few people excepted." His gaze lingered on Apollonis and Adalrico Bulstrode, Draco noticed. "And then I'll need as many people as possible to take as many werewolves as possible in Side-Along Apparitions. We don't have time to get a detailed explanation of Woodhouse to their ears."
"Is the karkadann coming?" asked one of the goblins, one Draco thought was female, with ornaments of bronze and gold gleaming from her wrists.
Harry shook his head. "She'll remain here to guard Woodhouse, along with some of the pack and a few centaurs, of course." His gaze turned to the tall centaur Draco thought was named Bone, or something else ridiculously simple. "I know that your people cannot Apparate. What—"
Bone laughed, his eyes shining. "We have our own ways of getting from place to place," he said. "Do not fear that. Now that our web has changed and our magic is free, the wizarding world shall learn it again." He folded his arms over his chest and gave a stern nod. Draco concealed a shiver, as best he could. He had grown up on stories of centaur rampages and what they could mean for wizards.
"What about those who get in our way?" Honoria asked, loudly.
All eyes focused on Harry. His expression never wavered, though, and Draco had to wonder if he'd underestimated him.
"Our primary purpose is still rescuing the werewolves," he said. "And by the oaths of the Alliance of Sun and Shadow, causing excess fear is immoral. That means I don't want you going out of the way to seek Ministry people to murder."
They waited. Everyone had known that, Draco thought. The difficult part, the other part, was what they were waiting for Harry to talk about.
Harry let out a harsh breath. "Our primary purpose is rescuing the werewolves," he repeated. "And those who deliberately put themselves in the way of that have lost their right to simply depart, lives intact. Use defensive magic as long as you can, but defend your own lives and the lives of the pack first. If it has to be done, kill them."
A profound silence followed in the wake of Harry's words, and Draco noticed that the faces of all in attendance were solemn. He knew why a moment later.
Acting against the Ministry was one thing; even breaking werewolves out of jail could win them the silent applause of some in the Ministry who stood against the anti-werewolf laws in secret. But killing the Ministry's people would bring them to the brink of open war.
Harry could have evaded that by commanding his people to avoid killing at all costs. He clearly wasn't going to.
Draco took a deep breath and shook his head, feeling a shock travel through him rivaled only by the shock he'd had that morning when he saw the karkadann. Things were changing.
Lucius looked over the last of the documents his solicitor had handed through the Floo connection, and nodded. He reached out and picked up the quill, holding it for a moment over that last line.
He need only sign, and Draco would be disowned.
It was not permanent, of course, because Lucius did not believe Draco's little fit of teenage rebellion was permanent. When Draco realized what it really meant to be alone in the world, separated from his parents, from his name, from everything that made him who he really was, then he would give in. He could not want to be at Harry's side only, Lucius knew. No Malfoy was content to remain in the shadow of another for long. If the Dark Lord's reign had lasted, Lucius Malfoy would have carved himself out a separate name. Draco, however, had no reason to think that Harry would give him position and power and prestige over others. In the end, he would withdraw from his lover because he could not be his own person while Harry overshadowed him. He would have to return to his father and build on the family name to become a power, as every Malfoy for the last ten generations had.
Lucius brought the quill down, and signed. It was only a temporary cut. His son would come to his senses and return. Being in the bed of a Lord-level wizard was not enough to make up for lost money and lost connection, in a world such as theirs where connection was so important.
That done, Lucius bundled the documents back through the Floo connection and went to tell Narcissa.
Harry appeared at the Ministry entrance with most of his human and goblin allies clustered around him, but invisible under Honoria's illusions. Harry spent a moment studying the glamours, wishing he knew how to make them. They shimmered like Invisibility Cloaks, adjusting themselves to their surroundings. In moments, Harry could no longer see his allies, but only the dirty and graffiti-covered alley.
He took a deep breath, and knew he was studying the glamours and how to make them just in order to put this off. He turned to the broken telephone box and pushed the sequence of numbers corresponding to M-A-G-I-C that would let him in.
Nothing happened. No voice, welcoming or otherwise, spoke. Harry narrowed his eyes slightly, then shrugged and stepped away, focusing on the telephone box.
"Modero," he said.
The magic surged through him and, following the path of his will, grabbed at the magic around the telephone box. Harry felt a moment when the Ministry's wards grappled with him, trying to retain control of it. But he repeated the spell, and the box was ripped away. Harry nodded and stepped into it, feeling Draco, Owen, Michael, and Syrinx crowd in behind him; they had agreed those four should go with him first, no matter what happened. The lift slid downward, moving more smoothly than he remembered it doing, and deposited them in the Atrium.
They stepped out to the shrill jangle of alarms. Harry smiled sourly, even as he made the lift rise again to start bringing down the rest of his allies. Well, he had hardly expected to enter quietly. Even tearing apart the Ministry's anti-Apparition wards and appearing much closer to Tullianum—which he'd decided against doing because most of his allies weren't strong enough to do it, so Harry would have had to make multiple trips Side-Along Apparating them—would have caused panic, and probably louder alarms.
The only person in the Atrium at the moment was the checkpoint wizard, who was gaping at them, or, presumably, at him, since Harry was the only one visible. Harry had insisted on that. He hoped at least a few people who might otherwise oppose their mission would stand aside when they saw him, knowing they couldn't face his magic.
Not so the checkpoint wizard. He leveled his wand at Harry and tried to squeak out some sort of challenge.
Harry took a deep breath and dropped all the barriers on his magic that he could, retaining only the one path of focus necessary to get the lift up to the surface of the alley. His power filled the Atrium like a rising tide, sloshing all over the walls and the fountain and the checkpoint wizard. From behind him, Harry heard a half-drunken giggle, and knew it was Draco. He tended to get like that when Harry released his magic fully. Harry still didn't know why.
The checkpoint wizard's eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed in a dead faint. Harry shrugged and moved forward, eyes fastened on the gates beyond him. One less person to fight.
And then the gates opened, and out poured a flood of wizards in dark robes, moving with a battle-trained precision that Harry recognized. Aurors.
He felt a glimmer of magic from behind him, and a tiny mote of light darted towards the Aurors. Syrinx, Harry knew; he doubted Draco or either of the Rosier-Henlin twins would have used Light magic. The Aurors, busy arraying themselves into a battle line, didn't notice as the tiny mote divided into many parts, one for each of them, and drifted up to hover in the corners of their eyes.
They sure as hell noticed when each mote grew into a sunrise, though, blinding them and sending them sprawling backwards, clawing at their faces. Harry glanced over his shoulder and nodded, to let Syrinx know he was proud. Behind them, the lift landed with another load of their allies.
Harry faced the gates and began walking over and between the sprawled Aurors. Everyone who was actually entering the Ministry had memorized the map of Tullianum, and knew how to get there. Besides, with Harry going in front of them, the wards should be broken by the time they reached it, and the hidden prison revealed.
Narcissa knew what Lucius would say to her, when he arrived. She had known from his low, furious voice through the door this morning what had happened. She hadn't heard the conversation, but she didn't need to. Draco had made the choice she always suspected he would, and now the only thing that remained was to go and join him.
Her trunk was packed. She had on a gown that Lucius should recognize, since she had worn it the day when they heard of Sirius's final strike against his abusive parents. Subtle gray, accented with silver on the sleeves and the skirt, it spoke of a great wrong done by one's own family, and the wearer of the gown having the strength to endure and mourn the wrong.
Lucius would recognize it the moment he came through the door into her room, and Narcissa knew one of two things would happen then. She was hoping that she need only stand, hold Lucius's eyes, turn, and Apparate. She could pass out through the wards of Malfoy Manor as Lucius's wife, and she had checked; the wards on Grimmauld Place were still open to welcome her. Regulus had arranged that exception before he left, and Harry had never sought to end it.
She waited.
Rufus stood straight as every alarm in his office, it seemed, began to shrill. These were alarms he hadn't installed, and Fudge hadn't ether; they were old, meant to warn the Minister that the Ministry's entrances were under attack. Rufus reached for his wand, wondering if it was Death Eaters, or werewolves determined to free their pack members, or perhaps Dionysus Hornblower, who had tried this more than once—
And then he felt the wash and sweep of magic from below. A Lord-level wizard was in the Ministry, and his power rose, flooding the rooms, destroying the wards, hitting those who would try to fight him and making a good portion of them cower and whimper in fear. The power did not have the tainted edge that Rufus knew from viewing the left-over remnants of Voldemort's spells, and he didn't think Falco Parkinson, whom the Liberator had warned him about, would try a strike like this, not when he was committed to cautious movement and watchful observance.
That left only one person.
And now he heard the unspoken Not yet on the heels of Harry's promise that he wouldn't invade Tullianum, and damned himself for a fool.
"What is it, sir?" Percy's voice was nearly as shrill as one of the ringing wards, and Rufus reminded himself that the boy was still very young, a trainee Auror.
"Harry," said Rufus, which explained it all, really. He reached into his desk drawer, pulling out a ring of gray metal that contained an old signet in the shape of a flowering rose, and tossed it to Percy. Percy fumbled, but caught it, and stared at him, looking confused. "Go to Burke," Rufus commanded. "Now. Show her that ring. The Aurors are bound to obey me and not Bones in a situation like this. She'll know what this means. Now," he stressed, when Percy went on blinking.
Percy stood straight then, nodded, and ran madly out of the room. Rufus slid his wand into its holster, gathered one more object from his drawer, and stepped out of his office, nodding to the two Aurors who waited on guard.
"You're with me," he said. "Sworn to secrecy, of course. I'll know who talked about this if anyone did, and gut 'em. You understand me?"
Both of them nodded, eyes wide with something between fear and battle-joy. Rufus reached out and slapped the flat piece of stone he held against the wall. Not all the Ministers had used this set of defenses, because not all Ministers had been battle-trained. But Rufus was, and he intended to defend his ground and his people.
Magic embedded in the walls shimmered and hissed in response to the touch of the stone plaque—place magic, based on spells woven in when the building was constructed. Rufus didn't think any modern wizard would know how to weave them, and that was a true pity. The stones ground aside, and opened up a steep descent, something between a staircase and a chute. Numbers along the walls marked where various floors were. Rufus nodded. He would go to the tenth level and wait there. Better than running madly all over the Ministry trying to catch Harry.
Rufus had no doubt that Harry was making for the prison, to free as many werewolves as possible. He forced himself, however, to strip the emotions from that idea, and only consider it as part of battle tactics. It didn't matter that he was facing a man he would have been proud to consider a leader and a friend. What mattered was that he was facing a man making for Tullianum.
His bad leg did not bother him as he went rapidly downstairs. On his way to battle, it almost never did.
The door opened.
Narcissa stood. Lucius was entering with an expression on his face that was the closest thing he could come to gentle, and which he wouldn't have used if there were anyone to see, including house elves. He must have banished them from this part of the Manor. He had bad news to tell her, said the look in his eyes, but he hoped that they would be the stronger for it.
He saw her. He saw the gown. He stopped. Narcissa had never seen him judder to a stop before. She did not think she was ever likely to see it again, so she appreciated it while she could.
She stood there a moment more, letting him absorb the message of the colors and the packed trunk, and the fact that she considered it was he who had done the wrong and not Draco, and then turned, stooping to reach for the trunk.
Lucius's snarl behind her, harsh and low, told her that he was not going to take the dignified way out after all.
Harry had seized control of the lifts as he had the telephone box, commandeering them all to transport his allies to the level below the Department of Mysteries, where Tullianum's entrance was located. The people who had been riding the lifts had given them skittish looks and piled off at once, meaning that the bulk of his allies had reached the bottom with no casualties, except the blinded Aurors in the Atrium. Harry was cautiously pleased.
Granted, they had only gone down two floors, since the Atrium was on the eighth, but Harry was still hopeful.
He stepped out of the lift onto the tenth level, and found a stiff wind of resistance meeting his magic. This close, the presence of the Stone was overwhelming. Harry could feel it like the throb of a living heart—or, no, since many small shocks ran through it, perhaps the throb of a living brain was closest. He shook his head and glanced over his shoulder. Honoria had lifted the illusions, so that they could see who was there and not there, and wouldn't bump into each other. She did circle overhead as a gull, though, ready to cast more illusions as they were needed.
Moody was missing, of course. Moody had explained that while his contacts trusted him, they were reluctant to show their entrances to the Ministry to anyone else, so they would cause havoc elsewhere while Harry and his allies went for the prison. They had provided the current signal that would unlock the room where the prisoners' wands were located, which neither Moody nor Tonks had known, since it was changed every few days. Harry had considered asking how Moody's allies had known it, and then decided not to.
The centaurs were not present, any of them. Bone had continued to smile when Harry asked him what was going to happen, except for mentioning the centaur office in the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures. In the end, Harry had given up and accepted that the centaurs would serve as another distraction.
And Thomas, of course, had his own reasons for coming along. Harry was content to leave him to them.
He faced forward. They were in a dimly-lit hallway of dark stone, similar to the dungeons at Hogwarts, but absolutely dry. Harry snorted. When he first came here with Dumbledore, to watch the vote of no confidence for Fudge, Dumbledore had told him there was no way to reach the tenth level except through the ninth. But both Tonks and Moody had insisted otherwise, and when he had asked the lifts to drop further than the ninth level, they'd done so. So much for secrets that only the Hogwarts Headmaster is supposed to know.
He took a step forward.
The ceiling above them opened, and dozens of tiny glass globes laden with the time-reversing dust that Harry recognized from the attack on the Hogwarts Express fell out.
Narcissa shook her sleeve, and her wand fell into her hand. She turned to face Lucius, holding it, and surprised him again, as the sight of the gown had. He'd taken a single step forward, his own wand already out, lips open in the incantation for the Body-Bind, but he paused when he saw her readiness.
His expression remained surprised after a few moments, even though Narcissa thought it should have changed back by now. After all, he was the one who had started this, had turned this into a duel instead of letting her Apparate away and thinking on his mistakes. She wondered that he thought she was unprepared to face him.
They hadn't dueled with spells since the early years of their courtship. That didn't matter. They had dueled countless times since then, with words and silences and gestures and the way they raised their son. This was only a return to what had been, the eternal blaze of a wheel spinning round.
Lucius found his voice then, and not in a curse. "Why, Narcissa?"
"Do you remember," Narcissa asked him softly, "the question that you put to me on Draco's first birthday?"
He did. Of course he did. Her husband did not forget things like that. His face went blank again, and Narcissa approved. Lucius had made several stupid mistakes in the past few days, but she would truly have worried if he could not have regained his self-control.
"I joked," Lucius said.
"I didn't," said Narcissa. "I always tell you the truth, Lucius, somehow. You are the one who chose not to see it."
He stood where he was, motionless as a sleeping portrait, and watched her. Narcissa waited. The tension in the room washed over them like the tension before a building storm, and she could see Lucius's muscles coiling in response to it.
Narcissa didn't joke about things like this. Lucius had asked her what would happen if she ever had to choose between her husband and her son, and Narcissa had told him she would choose her son. He had kissed her, laughing, and then they had put Draco into the cot and gone to bed themselves. Narcissa had assumed he had listened to her.
He had not, and underneath everything else Narcissa felt a stir of irritation. Lucius was prone to value his own opinion above those of others, but this was ridiculous, not thinking his wife was an equal partner in their marriage, with a will as strong as his own.
And so it had come to this—not because Narcissa or Draco had done anything, not at root, but because Lucius's pride had blinded him to truths he should always have acknowledged as true.
Appropriately, Lucius cast the first spell.
Harry felt his mind go blank, but the emotion there was neither surprise nor shock. It might have been rage.
"Modero," he intoned, as he had with the telephone box, and the globes clustered into a delicate mass and flew at him. Harry held up his hand and controlled their flight. They didn't shatter, but hovered around him, shimmering delicately in the dim light. Harry stared into them, and saw that, unbroken, the dust twirled through shining patterns that had nothing to do with gravity. He shook his head.
Then he lifted his head. The pulses of the Stone were singing again, and Merlin knew what it would command the Unspeakables to do next, now that this first trap hadn't worked.
Harry took a deep breath and opened his absorbere gift. He hadn't been planning to do this, since their first purpose was rescuing the werewolves, but now he didn't care any longer. If the Department of Mysteries was going to attack them from above and behind, he would give them something else to think about.
He drank the magic from the globes, which made the dust stop sparkling and settle into useless rubbish on the bottom of the glass. He drank the power from the chutes that had opened to drop the baubles, and reached behind them, towards a store of rich magic that had nothing to do with the Stone. He swallowed and gulped and absorbed, and he felt himself ring with power, growing swollen with it. He was draining artifacts he had never seen, and he did not care. The whole purpose of this was to put the Unspeakables on the defensive, and make them more concerned with protecting their precious Department than attacking one individual.
He felt the Unspeakables begin to react; the Stone's pulses changed direction and grew more urgent. Harry grabbed some of the magic he'd swallowed and sent it flowing in a massive slap into the Department of Mysteries. Hopefully, that would be enough to knock the Unspeakables silly.
Then he faced the door that Moody's contacts said hid the prisoners' wands. There was a ward keyed to a password covering it, and a strong enough one that Harry would ordinarily have been glad to have the password. Now, though, he was practically bloated with the magic he'd swallowed, and most of that magic had to do with time.
He released it in a narrow beam at the wooden door. The door promptly began to age, the wood turning into puffs of harmless dust that curled around each other and blew away. The room beyond appeared, a neat set of shelves stacked with wand-cases, and showed two Aurors scrambling to their feet, breathless with surprise.
Harry looked them in the eye and said, "I want to know where the wand of every werewolf you've put in Tullianum is. That includes Hawthorn Parkinson, and your former comrades from the Department for the Control and Suppression of Deadly Beasts." When they hesitated, he used his magic to deepen his voice. "Now."
The walls trembled. The Aurors nodded and began to work, one of them pulling wand-cases off the shelves while another flipped through notes on the table, probably to look up names and descriptions she didn't know off the top of her head.
Harry caught a glimpse of a door opening in the side of his vision—further down the corridor, towards the hidden entrance to Tullianum. He turned sharply just as the Minister stepped into view.
Narcissa spun aside from the Cage Curse, and dropped to one knee beyond the table that she usually used to write her correspondence. Sometimes, she had considered telling Lucius about all the traps she'd built into the furniture in this room, and then she had put aside the notion. A woman must be allowed to have her little secrets, her mother had told her once.
Narcissa used one of them now, brushing her fingers along a carved dragon on the table leg.
There was a click, and several holes opened along the table's legs and rim and underside, firing a series of tiny silver darts at Lucius. He had to move his wand fast to deal with them, and in the meantime Narcissa seated herself on the table, legs crossed and swinging idly, wand braced on a knee.
It was one thing to best Lucius in a duel. It was another to make him realize he had lost. She would not do that unless she managed to trounce him with composure, and not only with magic.
Lucius finished off the last of the darts. Narcissa aimed her wand at him and murmured, "Acclaro iactatia."
There was nothing Lucius Malfoy did hate more than showing his emotions.
Thomas had seen the young red-haired wizard duck into the Head Auror's office and then out again, but he hadn't removed the glamour on himself. Nor had he done anything when other Aurors began to rush from behind their desks, milling around like bees with ants invading their hive before they organized and marched out. He waited until the door to her office actually opened from the inside, and then he stepped forward, dropped the glamour, put himself in the way, and smiled at her.
"Hello, Priscilla," he said.
His wife halted in mid-stride. Thomas studied her, rejoicing, as always, in the way she looked. She was taller than he was, and her blonde hair hung to her shoulders, and her face was stern and neutral. Well, not entirely neutral, not right now. She expressed enough shock at seeing him, Merlin knew.
"Thomas," she whispered.
Thomas nodded. "I'm here with Harry," he said. "A lot of us are here with Harry, in fact, including some goblins. Did you know that a vates destroys webs just by being around them? But the goblins' web he broke under his own power. The northern goblins are free again, Priscilla. We're living in the middle of a new age." He cocked his head and smiled. "I always wanted to study history, and now I'm living it. That's much more exciting."
Priscilla stared over his shoulder, as if she expected the Minister himself to come marching up between the desks and scold her for taking a moment to talk with her husband. "Thomas, I can't stay," she said. "I—someone invaded the Ministry—" And then she stopped, doubtless realizing who had invaded the Ministry, and put a hand to her mouth. Her eyes, staring at him, became wet.
Thomas reached out and patted her hand. "We hardly expect you to take wing and follow us, my dear," he said. He was sad to see Priscilla so distressed, so torn. He'd wanted to come and talk to her, make sure she knew that even though they were on opposite sides now, he didn't blame her. How could he? She had been appointed Head Auror long before the Ministry had passed its ridiculous, nonsensical rules against werewolves, and she couldn't have known that things would get this bad. "I won't ask you to call off the Aurors, either. I just wanted to talk to you and tell you about my own decisions. I've decided to remember that I'm Harry's ally first and foremost."
"Thomas," she said again, but this time there was a wealth of pain in her words.
Thomas leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. Priscilla turned her head away, and—was she crying? Thomas hadn't planned on that. He hadn't wanted that. He patted her arm in an awkward attempt at comfort. This choosing of free wills thing was obviously harder than it had looked when he'd seen Harry's Malfoy beaming at his side. He had thought that going to his wife and explaining his choice would be nobler than writing her a letter or leaving her to learn about it on her own. Now, though, she looked as though someone had taken a hot iron to her chest, and Thomas didn't feel much better himself. He wasn't sure if the pain was more like a hot iron or like someone hitting him with a heavy cudgel, however. He wondered how he could find out.
"I love you," he told her. "And I get to see a vates. And I'll understand anything the Minister has you do to the rebellion. Ministers don't tend to like being rebelled against, after all, or take it kindly. Don't be sorry for me, my dear. We are living in such interesting times."
He kissed her one more time, and then turned to go down to the fourth level, where the centaurs had said to meet them. Along the way, he decided that the pain was more like being slammed in the chest with a cudgel. Shock waves seemed to be passing through his body just under his ribs.
Lucius felt his wife's curse strike him, and snarled. He knew what it did, and he hated how he couldn't defend himself because the darts had put him off-balance just long enough for the curse to strike him.
A voice began to wail from the side of his head, the voice of the shock and pain he felt. Then another began to mutter in anger. So soft and heated were the words that only the names of Draco, Harry, and Narcissa could occasionally be made out. And a third voice started crooning about its own stupidity.
Lucius knew his cheeks were flushing, that he was losing control of the impulse to shout at his wife. But how could she have done this? He had known she would understand that Draco's disownment was for the good of the family—and if she had not, why hadn't she come to him at once, so he could explain?
He always struck back when someone hurt him. Always. He had never considered what would happen if Narcissa hurt him, though.
He knew he should plan, and rationally determine the best course. But the betrayal was too great, and too sudden, and the muttering voices around him, showing off the emotions that he wanted to keep buried and controlled, didn't help.
Knowing he should hold back, but no more capable of doing so than of flying without a broom, Lucius whipped his wand sideways and cast a curse that would cause Narcissa's pretty skin to come up all boils. It would not ruin her beauty permanently, but the pain was sharp and stinging. He wanted to hear her scream.
Anything but have her sit there, legs crossed in the dove-gray gown trimmed with silver, quietly laughing, and aware of how very much more in control she was than he was, and having to consider, because of it, that perhaps he had been wrong to disown Draco.
Rufus saw Harry's stunned face turned towards him. He saw the people gathered around Harry in the narrow hallway, including Tonks, identifiable at once by the frizz of blue hair around her head, and goblins, goblins of all creatures, with bows and spears and glowing white chains in their hands.
He didn't allow himself to think about them. He knew Harry, and though he would never have wanted to use that knowledge to battle Harry, now that it had come to this, his wants had very little to do with it. He flicked his wand and intoned the spell that he had to use—nonverbal, of course. Harry would have stopped him at any cost if he heard him utter it.
Draco Malfoy spun out of the line of allies and towards Rufus, summoned by the urgent Accio. He stumbled twice, and once nearly regained his feet and resisted the magic, but the distance separating them was short, and Rufus grabbed his shoulder before he could break free. He laid his wand against Malfoy's throat, and to his credit the boy understood the threat and went limp and quiet. Rufus raised his eyes to Harry's and held them there.
Harry was ablaze. Magic ran around him in colored ripples, blue fading to green and then to indigo and fiery patterns that mimicked the colors of a phoenix. His face was unearthly, green eyes glowing with the force and fury of a suicidal fanatic's. Rufus saw enough power dripping from the end of his left arm to nearly form another hand there, perhaps, if he had paid attention to it.
Rufus took a deep breath of relief. He had managed to reach Harry before he freed anyone from Tullianum, or, in fact, did anything irreparable. And he understood Harry's weakness. So long as Malfoy was in his custody, Harry wasn't about to move against him. Rufus would never hurt the boy, of course, but he had no qualms about using him as a hostage to prevent this—this madness. Just the thought of what would happen if Harry broke the werewolves out of Tullianum was making his head reel.
"Harry—" he began.
Then someone pushed him out of his own head. It was so sudden that Rufus had no chance to resist. One moment he was in control of his body and the next he wasn't, sitting in a tiny prison cell in the very back of his mind. He felt his arm uncurl from around Malfoy's throat and the wand lift. Then he turned and calmly Stunned the two Aurors with him, adjusting Malfoy's body so that it didn't fall to the floor at the same time.
Then he lifted his wand and Stunned himself.
Rufus felt the invading presence leap and pass out of his ears, and then he was the one with the stiffening limbs, the ringing ears, the shriek of protest in his mind that did no good as he felt Malfoy open his eyes and shake his head and step away from him. He did think he heard the presence, the possessing mind of Draco bloody Malfoy, chuckle.
Well he might chuckle, Rufus thought, before he fell and dimness claimed him. He had forgotten entirely about Malfoy's possession gift, which he'd heard the truth of from Malfoy's own lips, and he deserved everything that happened as a result of that.
Narcissa recognized the curse Lucius was using, and, more than anything, that made her sad. Lucius truly had lost control of himself. He probably imagined that she would hurt, and cry out, and then apologize in a little girl voice, and that would be the end of it. She wondered if he remembered that she had stopped being a good little girl a long time ago. In fact, she didn't think she'd been a girl since the first time she saw one of Bella's rages, long before she knew Lucius.
She dropped off the table, her gown tangling around her and incidentally providing a shield of sorts against any other curses that might come her way. She rolled along the floor, back towards her trunk and away from Lucius, and she heard him casting another curse. This one was a pain curse. Narcissa felt some relief. That one would make her scream like a woman, at least, and he flung it with a strength Bella would have approved of.
She lifted Protego, then flicked her wand towards the sound of the voices muttering about Lucius's emotions. She did not need her eyes to hurt him, and she used the Blood Whip, the curse that make shields explode, so Lucius would have to duck or have his throat ripped out. It was the reason she had spoken the incantation aloud. At the moment, lost in the depths of rage as he was, she could have killed him if she used the spell nonverbally and he had no idea what was coming, and she wanted him to know that, and know that she knew.
Narcissa sat up again, and found Lucius on his knees, panting, glaring at her. His blond hair was mussed, and the Blood Whip had hit him on the side of the neck after all, inflicting a long gash that would take some time to heal. Narcissa was surprised and disappointed that he had slipped that far. She shook her head.
"Regain your composure, Lucius," she said softly. "Or I will start to think that you have no Malfoy pride left."
He lashed his wand.
Narcissa's eyes went dark, her hand went limp, and an invisible grasp grabbed her throat and began to squeeze.
Thomas met the chaos on the third floor. He started to see people running madly away from the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures, all of them shrieking at the top of their lungs. He shook his head and wondered why. He would either be running towards something interesting, or trying to ambush it, and so crouching in one place with his voice silent and still. But then, people had always screamed too much, in his opinion.
A witch grabbed his shoulder and tried to drag him along with her. Thomas shrugged her off and turned to stare at her. She stared back, panting. She had dark hair that stuck up straight from the back of her head. Thomas was charmed. He knew from studying GUTOEKOM that that probably meant she had some trace of lightning magic, but he had only seen those kinds of people in dry words on a page, never met any in reality. He opened his mouth to ask her about her family history, but she interrupted him.
"Run!" she screamed in his face, and left Thomas blinking. There was no need to be rude, he thought, even if one was on the verge of panicking. "There are centaurs running up and down the corridors!"
Thomas brightened. So they had managed to find a way into the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures after all, just the way they had promised Harry they would. "How many?" he asked eagerly. "And do you know how they got there?"
The witch stared at him some more, while Thomas patiently waited for an answer to his question. Then she spat at his feet, said, "Fine, it's your funeral," and turned for the stairs, pushing him away. Thomas stepped back to let other people get past, and reached the bottom of the stairs with a little shrug.
When he poked his head into the Department, he grinned. Bone and three other centaurs, all palomino, were indeed galloping up and down the corridor, whooping and stabbing with their spears at the walls. Thomas wondered if anyone else had noticed the small white sparks that were flying from their hooves, indicative of magic. Probably not. A little danger was enough to make sure people never noticed the important things in life, unless they were research wizards.
He hailed Bone by name, and the centaur looked up at him and nodded, without ever stopping his steady gallop. His hooves shook the walls. Thomas listened, and realized there were many more hoofbeats than there should be, with this small a herd in the Ministry. He laughed.
"It's partly illusion, isn't it?" he asked, cupping his hands around his mouth to increase the power of his yell.
Bone nodded at him again. Thomas grinned in excitement. That fit directly into some of the GUTOEKOM theories that he had debated endlessly with Petrovitch. Petrovitch was one of those adherents to the idea that magical creature magic was fundamentally different from wizard magic, so different that no mere wizard could hope to understand it. But Thomas had done what any sensible research wizard would do and looked for clues in the middle of old theories about ancient Grecian magic, since centaurs had come from Greece in the first place.
And sure enough, he'd found ideas about centaur magic there. This was just confirmation of more. White sparks and illusions and magic that fed on fear, probably, since everyone was running around and screaming their heads off. Thomas leaned on the wall and tried to think about the way to word his conclusions to convince Petrovitch, while Bone led his people around in one more grand sweep.
"It was the centaur office, wasn't it?" he asked, just to make sure.
Bone nodded again. Thomas smiled. That settled it, as far as he was concerned. The centaurs could appear in places named after them and dedicated to them, at least once they were free of their webs. The Ministry had practically been asking for an invasion by having a room named the centaur office. It was similar to the way that holy sites had worked in ancient Greece, with the gods appearing at certain places and stirring certain legends. Once a name and a dedication were in place, they could appear. Not that the GUTOEKOM wizards had come to any sort of consensus on just what the Greek gods had been, yet, or how they fit into the magical systems, but that didn't matter. What mattered was working out how they did it. Place magic, Thomas knew, that was the key, but of what kind?
He was engaged in these important speculations when the door on the staircase behind him opened, and Aurors tried to invade the Department, firing curses at the centaurs. Thomas was annoyed. He turned and hit the Aurors with a Mandarin spell that would give them six legs instead of two, so that they could see what it felt like to be interrupted while they were trying to do something important.
Lucius watched his wife struggling to breathe, and swallowed vicious satisfaction like a shot of Firewhiskey. Narcissa should have known better than to challenge him. Really, she had known better. She had to have done so. But what mattered was that he had her under control now. With the last of her breath, she was gasping, "Lucius, I yield." Her fingers could barely stay curled around her wand any more.
Breathing heavily, Lucius released the Choking Curse. He left the blinding one in place, however, because he was not stupid. He walked over and stood staring down at Narcissa. She barely looked as though she'd been fighting, if one excused the few wrinkles in her gown. Lucius, meanwhile, was well-aware of the mussed hair that stood away from his head, and how his breath rushed in and out of his lungs with an audible rasping noise, and how blood trickled over the side of his neck.
Not to mention the voices muttering about his emotions. A fourth voice had joined the others, a high-pitched whine that said how unfair things were, for both Draco and Narcissa to betray him. Lucius did his best to ignore it. He couldn't end the spell; it was one of those pesky ones, like the Fisher King Curse, that only the caster could undo.
He bent over Narcissa and examined her. No, he had been wrong about only the wrinkles in her gown appearing, he saw; there were the bruises of the Choking Curse on her throat. He reached down and laid his own fingers over them, gently pinching the bruised skin and making Narcissa moan.
A fifth voice appeared to talk about his arousal. Lucius bared his teeth in its general direction. He had at least dismissed all the house elves from this wing of the Manor, even if he had originally not wanted them to witness Narcissa's tears.
The first thing he knew of Narcissa's continuing defiance was when her wand hit the side of his leg, and she whispered, "Debilitas."
Harry caught Draco's hand and pulled him close to him, unable to speak, for just a moment, of what it meant to him that Draco had both emerged unharmed from a difficult situation and managed to Stun the Minister and his allies so Harry would not have to fight them.
Draco grinned back at him, a smug curve of his lips, and then kissed him hard enough to hurt. Harry blinked as a cut appeared in his own lower lip, and Draco whispered to him, "When we get back to Woodhouse, I am so fucking you."
Harry shook his head, soothed down the heat that wanted to appear in his belly at the thought, and turned to face the guards in the wand-room again. They had frozen at the sight of the Minister falling, but one look was enough to make them scramble. They had freed perhaps thirty wands from their cases already, Harry saw, and he wondered if they kept the wands organized by recency of confinement to the prison. Or perhaps all the werewolves' had been in one place.
He faced the door into Tullianum. It glimmered with wards, of course, such strong ones that most people wouldn't even notice it was there. Harry had acquired enough power that it was visible to him. And the magic was running through him, anxious to be used. He could destroy the wards with a spectacular blow and protect the people in the tunnel with him at the same time, the magic suggested.
Harry shook his head. He wouldn't do that, on the off chance it would hurt someone. He opened up his absorbere gift and ate the wards instead. They dimmed steadily, and soon the door into Tullianum was just an ordinary door, with a locking spell on it. He heard some of his allies murmur as it appeared.
He glanced over his shoulder, and grinned. Honoria was busy creating illusions, all of big, grim wizards with dark robes and white masks and aimed wands, facing down the corridor behind them. When the Aurors arrived—Harry was a bit surprised they hadn't already, but supposed the distractions were keeping them, well, distracted—then they wouldn't know who was real and who wasn't for a good many moments. Besides, the sight of pseudo-Death Eaters would panic them.
"Trumpetflower," he called. He blinked. His magic had crept into his voice, it seemed, seeking expression any way it could, and he sounded like the karkadann. "I need you here."
The witch was at his side in moments, her nostrils flared. Harry needed her to sniff out the cells that contained werewolves from the ones that didn't. He had briefly considered a plan to free all the criminals in Tullianum, to preoccupy the Aurors with trying to recapture them, but rejected it. It would be on his head if a freed murderer did manage to escape, or someone else who had done something they deserved to be locked away for. It was for those who had committed no crime but suffering that he had come.
"Ready?" he asked, and Trumpetflower nodded. Harry reached out and snapped his fingers.
The door to Tullianum wrenched open, showing the tunnel beyond. The guards standing there cast a massed arsenal of spells the moment it happened.
Harry opened his mouth and drank them in.
Narcissa felt her wand jab home. Really, the moment Lucius had given in to temptation and laid his fingers along her throat, he had been lost. She had known where he was, and he hadn't paid attention to her hand tightening around her wand once more. Then she had been able to jab her wand forward, and the curse she chose really didn't distinguish between which parts of the body it went into. It would weaken him no matter what happened.
Lucius fell, folding over himself with a graceless thump as all strength fled his limbs. Narcissa rolled away from him, and coughed. The grip of fingers on her throat still hurt, and she grimaced to think about what the bruises would look like. But a glamour would cover them, and she had won.
She touched her wand to her eyes and murmured, "Finite Incantatem." In a moment, the blinding curse cleared, and she could see. She shook her head and stepped across the room to her mirror, fixing her hair back into place with several small whispered spells. The face that looked back at her was pale, but still composed enough. She touched her wand to her throat, and the marks of fingers disappeared.
She turned around and came back to face Lucius again. His eyes widened, and his panting was nearly spasmodic as she bent over him. But Narcissa, wiser than he, watched his wand hand, and she saw the fingers twitch and then fall limp, too tired to get a grip of any kind.
"Too bad, Lucius," she said softly. "You should have remembered that, even though you are a stronger duelist than I am, I have won all the duels into which I poured my full heart. All our duels over Draco. Not to mention the one we fought because you wanted me to take the Mark, and, because I won that, you never brought it up again." She pressed her lips to his temple, feeling a surge of pity for him, her proud, handsome husband brought so low. The voices around him were all muttering in various tones of humiliation now.
Pity or no pity, she still kicked his wrist, hard, as he tried to snatch the hem of her gown. Lucius fell back with a moan.
"Think to yourself," Narcissa told him. "Ask yourself why I would have poured my full heart into this, why I wanted to win so badly." She kissed him, bit his lip, and turned, picking up her trunk on the way.
Just before she Apparated to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, she summoned the house elves back to this wing of the Manor. It would not do for Lucius to lie helpless on the floor for the hours it would take the Debilitas curse to wear off.
Hawthorn put her hands over her face and tried to breathe. All her limbs hurt, and her clothes were shredded. She had torn them herself, in the frenzy of her change. Her jailers had made her put them back on, insisting that they had nothing else for her to wear.
She had stayed here, in this narrow cell scarcely wider than she was and without a bed, for two nights without Wolfsbane. She had held out a feeble hope that, because the moonlight could not reach her through the thick stone, she would not transform, but of course she had. Her mind had vanished for the first time in two years, and she had become a ravening beast who would have slain her husband and daughter, had they appeared living in front of her. Denied that, she had clawed at the stone and bitten at herself. She had urinated in the corners of the cell, and the smell of piss was, to her, the smell of degradation.
Known as a werewolf, she had no life left to look forward to. Delilah Gloryflower had survived her revelation because she had a powerful family surrounding her, one that could raise constant legal challenges in the face of the demands that she be turned over to Tullianum. Hawthorn was alone, and the Aurors who descended on the Garden had known what she was, both lycanthrope and former Death Eater. They might have hated her enough for one or the other; with both, their contempt was horrible. They'd only had to scratch her with silver, and Hawthorn found herself becoming weak and sick. The scratch, high on her left shoulder, still hurt like fire, and radiated angry red lines.
She wondered, in a half-daze, if she would lose her left arm. She did not think she could bear it as calmly as Harry had borne it.
The door to her cell opened.
Hawthorn crouched back into a corner, fighting the instinct to yelp and snarl. If she could not face her torturers, or those come to lead her to trial, like a pureblood witch—the torn robes and the wound and the smell made that impossible—then at least she would not face them like a beast.
She blinked. It was a dream. It had to be. Harry stood in the door of the cell, with a smile that faded rapidly as he watched her. Hawthorn knew the smile did not fade because she had displeased him. It faded because, impossibly, in a dream, he was here to rescue her, and he did not like the way she had been treated.
Harry turned his head and spoke words that Hawthorn did not understand, because the daze of wonder was making her heart beat so hard she couldn't hear them. Glamour appeared over her then, cloaking the rents in her robes, making them look whole again. Another glamour spread around the cell, masking the stains and the sharp smell of piss. Hawthorn began to believe that this was real, and that she might come forth from her confinement with some dignity after all.
Harry reached out and grasped her right arm, drawing her to her feet. Hawthorn couldn't restrain a gasp of pain as her left arm was jolted, and Harry's eyes went at once to the wound. They narrowed. Hawthorn held still and let him study it as long as he pleased. The pain was nothing next to the fact that she now knew no one could just gape at her bare skin.
Then Harry said quietly, "Let's go. We still have to get everyone out of here." The eyes he raised to her face blazed with anger, and for the first time, Hawthorn realized the magic around him, thick with a smell like evergreens at the break of day. "And they can never hurt you like this again," he said.
Spoken that way, it didn't sound like a promise, but a certainty, a prophecy. Hawthorn allowed herself to believe, and leaned on Harry's shoulder as he led her out of the cell.
Falco bowed his head. It had come, then.
He'd felt the burst of magic from the Ministry as he worked on spinning yet another dream for Harry, one he would be forced to pay conscious attention to; so far, most of the others were shattering like thrown eggs against his Occlumency, and he never seemed to acknowledge the odd image that remained in his head. The dream split apart entirely as Falco heard the bell ringing from the Ministry.
Clang, clang, clang, it reverberated across the country, and woke things better left sleeping. Falco frowned as he felt Harry's power enter hidden caves and make the creatures bound there stir, as it made the bones of the dead dragon and the bones of the sleeping live one on the Isle of Man shake, as it traveled out into the ocean and roused answering screeches from the Augureys in Ireland.
Harry was raising his magic in the Ministry itself, and this time, Falco knew it was not to combat another Lord-level wizard. Tom was still in hiding, and no other Lord or Lady had yet entered the country, though they were watching, all of them, to see if the reckless youngster in Britain would yet doom them all. Falco knew what reputation his island must be gaining in the eyes of the international wizarding community, as a household of hooligans, and was ashamed.
Tom, Harry's proper opponent, was yet too weak to take him on. Falco had not managed to find any way of healing his wound.
That meant it was up to him.
He changed into his sea eagle form and sped out of the paths of Dark and Light, aiming for the real world. When he reached it, he would Apparate. It seemed that it was time he and Harry met in battle, face to face.
