Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Hills In Their Might
Rufus waited. He had sent Percy and the others on their way immediately after they'd emerged from Courtroom Ten, having handed them the names of Wizengamot Elders he wanted them to find, Obliviate, and tell the story about their having voted Rufus power to. He'd glanced dubiously at the goblins, but Griselda, who was staying with him to support his story just in case someone arrived earlier than they expected, had assured him they could find the Elders and perform the Obliviate.
Rufus suspected that meant at least one of them had a wand, and the ability to use some wizard magic, probably from some wizard blood. It had been illegal for goblins to have wands for several hundred years—a provision that most people accepted as common sense, and which most goblins didn't apparently care about.
He didn't say anything about it. Laws could change, and they would have to.
"What can you feel from the Department of Mysteries?" Griselda asked now. She sat in a chair in front of his desk, holding a cup of magically warmed tea. Rufus had granted permission for any warming spells to be performed in the Ministry, as long as they were only strong enough to warm a cup of tea. It was an odd thing, that granting of permission. He needed to locate the spell spluttering in the back of his mind, unable to form until he agreed to it, and then nod or shake his head. If he nodded, the spell went forward. If he shook his head, the spell died, and no one else could perform that kind of spell in the Ministry, either.
It was a frightening and exhilarating power, even if it was bounded by the walls of the Ministry. Rufus supposed he was discovering what it was like to be a Lord-level wizard.
He wondered that Harry had not gone mad with the power, either with the temptation to use it or with hatred of it.
"Little," he answered Griselda now. "It's closed off. The Stone's pulses are dimmer than before, and vary with my breathing. I think all their artifacts are under my control now." He sipped at his own tea, but it didn't soothe him the way it usually did. He knew what the newspapers would say when he made his announcement. Minister Gone Mad—at least one of them, probably the Daily Prophet, would use that or a variation of it. There would be claims that he was crazy with power, that he was a child playing a game he didn't understand, that he was in collusion with the werewolves to bring the Ministry down. Dionysus Hornblower would be ecstatic, Rufus thought sourly. The man considered himself a rebel oppressed for all his pure blood and his money, and he would love to be able to see Rufus as a personal enemy.
"You think?"
"If they're within the walls of the Ministry, then I can control them," Rufus told her. "They'll have to receive my permission to function, and I won't grant that if I don't know what they do, or if they're intended to harm someone. If the Unspeakables took the artifacts out of the Ministry already, there's not much I can do to prevent the Unspeakables from using them."
Griselda nodded grudgingly, accepting that. Then she said, "And what about this Stone? It's sentient, isn't it?"
Rufus inclined his head. "And I can no more keep it from plotting and planning than I can control your thoughts just because you're in the Ministry. But if it tries to use magic, it has to come through me."
"You're not going to have an easy time of it for the next few days," Griselda murmured.
Rufus shook his head this time. "No, I won't. I'll be taking Pepper-Up Potion and wishing there were more hours in a day before I'm done with this. But that's what I knew would happen when I invoked the Ritual of Cincinnatus. I have no reason to complain." He squinted thoughtfully at Griselda. "I'm more curious about your reasons for being there, Griselda."
The old woman snorted, a formidable sound to come out of such a tiny body. "Why should you wonder, Rufus? You know that I've always been in close contact with the goblins. I was part of the ritual where they freed themselves. This is the best chance for them to make their freedom mean something more than a war against the wizarding world. If they make themselves indispensable to solving your problems, then you'll have to listen to them when they demand certain concessions from you."
"And for you?" Rufus persisted.
Griselda gave him a cold smile. "You think that I must have some tie to the goblins, Minister? A goblin ancestor? A goblin husband?"
"No," said Rufus. "But I've never understood what began your support of them. Why you cared. You can't say it was because you were a compassionate witch. I know many compassionate people who don't think about the goblins, who just accept them as there to be our servants."
She nodded. "But I was the one who looked, and the one who thought, Rufus. And if I had to make compromises and become part of alliances that I found distasteful in my years as an Elder, at least I preserved that one motive uncorrupted. At least I knew I was fighting for one thing purely good.
"And then Harry came. He is vates. He is the actual fulfillment of hopes that we thought were going to be disappointed for as long as we both lived, the hanarz and I." Griselda shrugged. "I'm one hundred and sixty-seven years old. I certainly thought that I would die before a vates arrived.
"I didn't. And now that world is possible, and I may have a chance to see some of the future come true myself, before I have to go." She fixed him with a steely eye. "I'll make the world better for my friends. And I'll make the world better for the vates who freed them, if at all possible."
"I am fighting for the Ministry," said Rufus. "And for your goblins, perforce. That's not the same thing as fighting for Harry."
"You'll restrain his enemies," said Griselda. "You'll change the Ministry's stance towards werewolves. Both of those are enormous gifts to the rebellion."
Rufus said nothing. He had the feeling that Griselda would take what he had to say badly, and he was distracted by the tickle in the back of his mind. A few people were trying to use the Floo to arrive in the Ministry. He granted permission, and let them come in. But he could almost feel their wariness as he felt the magic. Someone would be suspicious about why the Floo connections had taken so long to work, and then someone would try to cast a spell that had nothing to do with warming tea, and then the better-informed would guess.
Rufus intended to tell them the truth before then. His allies had had several hours to reach the Wizengamot members and Obliviate them, so he would have to hope that he could produce the men and women who had "voted" him into power when all was done.
"Come with me, Griselda?" he asked.
She nodded and stood. "Tell me, Rufus," she asked, "when do you have to give the power back?"
"When it doesn't help me any more," said Rufus. "When I know that I've accomplished the task I set out to accomplish. That's not in anyone else's eyes, mind you, but mine. And my mind could change. Something I think is necessary now might turn out not to be necessary after all. If that's the case, I'll need to complete this ritual earlier than I suspected."
"Otherwise, the magic will kill you," said Griselda.
Rufus gave her a grim smile of his own as he opened the door and went to tell his people that he was their dictator for now. "And all our allies, too. There's a reason that Ministers didn't often invoke this ritual, you know. They usually couldn't find anyone to stand with them."
Snape had decided that his first order of business—well, if one did not count rescuing Harry from the explosive potion, and then settling his effects into one room and ignoring Joseph, who took the one next to his—ought to be talking to those who had seen Harry in the past few days, and finding out how bad his use of Occlumency pools was. He stepped into the kitchen, confident that Harry would still be in the shower.
Camellia was sitting at the table, and she stood up when she saw him. "You," she snarled.
Snape didn't wish to be unoriginal, so he simply looked at her and didn't respond. He knew she might have spent time around Harry in the past few days, but he would learn nothing useful from her. Either her hatred or his own fear would overcome what she might say. He turned on his heels to find someone else.
He heard quick footsteps crossing the floor towards him, silent but not silent enough; she was human right now, not a wolf who could pass through the forest without a twig snapping. He turned, and let her see his face, rather than his wand. He wore the expression he had used when he killed victims among the Death Eaters who didn't matter to him personally. He let her see that she didn't matter to him. She was only a piece of flesh and blood that stood in his way. He denied her any independent existence, any past outside this moment.
Camellia flinched and cowered. He had expected that. Harder people than this werewolf had done so, and the werewolf's strength was the pack. Or the alpha, perhaps, but Harry wasn't nearby right now.
That was the best way to shut them out, Snape thought. He couldn't control what they read in his scent, but he could control what they read on his face, and there were few werewolves who trusted their noses over their eyes. They spent most of their time as humans, and humans were visual creatures. Feed them the right expressions and the right gestures, and they would have to question whether he was really afraid.
He said nothing, and left the kitchen with a ferocious stride. A simple Point Me led him towards the bedroom where Harry had spent most of his time, and where he was showering now. Snape was glad to find Draco standing in the half-open door, staring towards the loo as if he couldn't figure out what had possessed Harry to bathe in the middle of the day.
"Draco."
The boy startled most satisfyingly, and then turned around. "Sir," he breathed, his eyes widening only a bit before they narrowed. "What are you doing here, sir?" he asked, with a frigid courtesy that reminded Snape of Lucius. "Have you only come to hurt him?"
"Save him from himself, rather." Snape snapped his fingers and gestured with his head, and Draco responded automatically, moving out of the way so that Snape could enter the room. Snape concealed his smirk. Draco had spent years thinking of him as the Slytherin Head of House and someone with almost parental responsibilities; that he would obey him was a good thing, and let Snape know where the point of control was in their interactions. "I found him in the midst of suffering from an explosive potion that hit him across the back."
Draco caught his breath. "Is he all right?"
Snape nodded. "He'd removed most of it. I applied comfrey, which caused the mistake in the first place, to it, and then sent him to take the shower." He raised his eyebrow and looked at the chair at the end of the bed, and Draco took it. Snape remained standing, as he would have in the classroom. "He will live through it with no scarring and only faint burns," he reassured Draco. "What I want to know is other behavior he's been exhibiting during the past few days."
"Such as?" Draco had his shoulders set tight and his chin lifted. Snape knew he would have to tread carefully. He was Draco's professor and Head of House still, somewhere in that young mind, but Harry was Draco's partner and, by now, surely lover. If Snape ran into too much of a protective wall, he would get nothing from him.
So he would have to show Draco that they were allies in this, that they might need to cooperate in saving Harry from himself as they had so often in the past.
He decided that a bit of bluntness, honesty on a subject Draco wouldn't have known about for himself, was in order. "When I looked into his eyes, I could see Occlumency shields impeding the progress of normal emotions to the surface of his mind," he said, and saw Draco's face twitch. "He's been preventing himself from feeling angry. Most of it simply fades. That which does rise, he sinks. He's been doing the same with other emotions, including fear and desperation. He told me himself that he lets sympathy, compassion, and determination through. What he neglected to mention, and what I could see from the state of his shields, is that it's nothing else. He's been living in a distant shell for the past few days, hasn't he?"
Draco was staring at the far wall, and his face twisted with an anger that did not at all resemble Lucius's, somewhat to Snape's surprise. Then he remembered where he had seen it before: on Narcissa's face, when she told Snape the tale of how Harry had left his mother's house on Christmas Eve almost three years ago. "That's what it means," Draco breathed. "I did notice he was withdrawing, but I thought the pressures were overwhelming him. He wouldn't talk to me, but he always seemed to be working on that damn werewolf cure, or talking to werewolves, or reassuring other people that Woodhouse would protect them whether or not the wards were in place, or—doing something. And then he'd climb into bed and use a Sleeping Charm on himself, because he said he would lie awake worrying otherwise. He's been making himself into someone who can answer the pressures, whether or not he really can." Draco stood and kicked the leg of his chair. "The bloody bastard. Why didn't we notice?"
"You did not know the mechanism," Snape murmured, his mind working hard. He could not simply burst through Harry's shields and insist that he express the emotions he'd been suppressing. That could be disastrous, given the tendency of Harry's emotions to influence his magic. Besides, Harry would probably feel anger at him before anyone else, and that wouldn't help Snape in winning his trust back. "And abuse of Occlumency can look like competence to someone who does not realize what's happening."
"Talking about me behind my back, sir?"
Snape turned swiftly. Harry had come out of the loo, his clothes firmly back in place; at least he'd retrieved a clean shirt. His hair still drizzled and dipped water, and his glare was steady.
Snape chose the truth. There was no other tack that would work. "Yes," he said calmly. "Knowing that you would not tell me this."
Draco stalked past him and halted in front of Harry. Harry stared at him, then looked away.
"Do you think that I, or anyone else, wants you to sculpt yourself into something you're not, just so that we can win this war?" Draco asked him. Snape couldn't tell if his voice was actually calm, or simply bereft of any emotion but a building anger, strong as a tsunami. "None of us do, Harry. We understand limitations. We all have them. We're all human. And that you've been making yourself surpass those limitations, not because you really have the ability but because you can twist your emotions like a puzzle…" Yes, building anger, Snape realized, and the anger was here now. "It's a cheat, and it's stupid, and it's a lesson that you should have learned by now. And it's going to fail, probably at the worst moment."
"I have no choice," said Harry, voice pitched low. That surprised Snape. There was a time when Harry would have snapped back that of course he had changed and learned his lesson, and couldn't Draco see it?
Then he remembered for how long Harry had been sinking his emotions, and grimaced. Harry didn't differentiate now between anger that would do harm and anger that would do no harm. He'd probably sunk any irritation he felt as soon as he felt it.
"I have to win this rebellion," Harry went on, looking up. "I have to be the kind of leader who doesn't flinch anymore. I'm the one who took up the responsibilities, and said I would do them. I shouldn't have done that if I was going to fail, because the people depending on me deserve better. And there's no one else I can hand the task over to. So I'm doing what I have to to get through it, Draco. Yelling at people won't help. Nor will working myself into exhaustion. I understand that, now. I know what I need to do, so I'm doing it." He shrugged, eyes locked with Draco's. "And I won't fail simply because I have the urge to shout at someone else, or lose my temper over something stupid. That's something children do, not adults."
Snape felt a moment of profound sadness. Harry believed that, it was plain to see. He wasn't skating on a skin of rotten ice as he'd been when he tried to ignore his abuse. This conviction went all the way down.
They would have to work hard to get through it.
"You're still an idiot," said Draco. "The reason leaders can get so much done, Harry, is that they delegate. Assign someone else to work on those projects you think you need to sink your emotions for. I know that Mrs. Parkinson would love to work on the werewolf cure. And if certain werewolves do nothing but snarl when talking to you, then have them talk to someone else. You don't need to do everything, Harry. That was the lesson you told me you'd learned and didn't."
"Certain werewolves will talk only to me," said Harry. "That's the way of it, Draco. I know they aren't perfect." He smiled briefly. "They're human, after all. Some don't like me, some don't like other packs being here, some don't like the situation. And that's normal. How can I get upset over that, when the motivations behind it are so normal?"
"Tell them to talk to other people," said Draco. "Tell them to shut up for right now, because you can't just send them home. Or come back and yell in private, if you don't want to yell in front of them."
Harry shrugged. "There isn't a reason to yell later, either."
Snape moved, then. Draco would dash himself against the walls of Harry's Occlumency until he hurt, and achieve nothing. Harry's Occlumency was entwined with his thinking processes to the point that he was saying things he would have known were irrational at once in any normal frame of mind.
But Harry had shown his anger in front of Snape.
He took a step forward, and Harry's gaze came to him. At once, his shoulders tensed and his eyes hardened. He even backed a step away. Draco started and glanced over his shoulder, then moved silently out of the way.
"You shouldn't be here," Harry breathed. "You're not healed."
"And neither are you, if you can speak such nonsense," Snape retorted. He remembered the trick Harry had played on him when he said words he would have taken back a moment later. He waved his wand, and the spell captured the words Harry had spoken a moment before and played them over so he could hear them.
"There isn't a reason to yell later, either."
Harry's face paled as he listened. Snape repeated it, and repeated it, and, before he set it singing for a fourth time, he asked, "Would you agree that that is true of anyone else, Harry? Draco? Myself? Your brother? You who were so understanding of my anger, and Draco's, and your brother's? You, who yelled back at us when you felt unfairly pressed on the matter of Rosier and Durmstrang? You, who found anger a source of strength when you battled Voldemort?"
Harry bowed his head. "Those were all different situations," he whispered. "This has to be handled with diplomacy and tact, or the werewolves are in danger, or people are in danger from me. I already made things worse by yelling at my brother when he fought with Draco, and then ignoring him for two weeks, just because I was angry."
"Your brother is young," said Snape. "And not the standard for all intelligence and all emotional reaction." He was tempted to add thank Merlin, but he didn't want Harry pushed into defending Potter. "That does not mean you must never get angry at anyone else again, Harry. With this example in front of you, you are unlikely to ignore anyone for two weeks now."
Harry's breath was rushing now. For some reason, Snape thought, it was much harder for him to maintain his calm and patience around his guardian—perhaps because he was still so surprised to see him here, perhaps because he knew Snape could read his mind.
"I know I'm going to make mistakes," Harry whispered. "But the mistakes are so much more severe in their consequences now that I have this many people depending on me, and the anger usually makes things worse. How can I be sure that it won't make things worse if I get angry?"
"Decide from situation to situation," said Draco impatiently, before Snape could speak. "You've always said that, Harry. You've always done that. I don't understand why this is so different, why you've locked yourself into this shell. Why?"
Harry shook his head. "I don't know," he whispered.
That took less time than I thought it would. Snape was wary of his capitulation, for that reason. It might be false, and Harry would retreat behind his walls again the moment he was alone. Snape wanted to follow it up, and make sure that Harry's lack of a rational answer meant he had changed his mind.
Draco again moved before he could, catching Harry's chin and tilting it up. He was smiling now, where Snape would have thought he would be scowling. He kissed Harry. Snape raised an eyebrow as the kiss went on, but ruthlessly controlled the several sarcastic comments that he would have used if he had caught them snogging in Hogwarts's rose bushes. If he could control his interactions with others, then he could control his own responses.
"You don't," said Draco. "And this is another mistake, Harry. That's it. It hasn't caused irreversible damage yet. It might, though, if you let it go on. Will you repair it before then, Harry? Yes, it'll be harder than what you've been doing, but—"
"Nothing is ever simple," Harry finished, and he had a smile on his face, and if he avoided Snape's eyes for now, at least it was much better than what he might have done.
Snape could have said many things just then. He might have done so. But then Harry's head lifted, and the blaze that filled his eyes was, if not anger, so passionate that Snape paused to admire it.
And then Harry said, "They're attacking Woodhouse."
Woodhouse was angry.
It could ignore the small rushing things. Why should it care about them? What they did in their lives outside the valley was not its concern. And as long as they were inside the valley and did not try to move or hurt its parts, that didn't matter at all. They might strike at each other. That was almost expected. But Woodhouse would dream around them, and past them, and soon they would be gone and other small rushing things would take their places. They lasted less than the life of one tree, and they could not even dream of matching one of the hills in age.
But its stones and pebbles and blades of grass and air were all aware now, because of the leafless tree that had entered the dream and made itself part of it. And there were small rushing things coming towards it who wanted to hurt that part of it. That was wrong. They could have other small rushing things, but not that one anymore, because it was part of Woodhouse.
Creatures swooped through the sky. They had four legs and feathered wings and other creatures seated on their backs. Those sitting ones carried magic that was not part of the magic of the valley. So long as they only flew, they did not matter.
But then they entered the air above Woodhouse, and it felt their hostility towards its leafless tree. They had four legs, and feathered wings, and creatures seated on their backs.
And they had lungs.
The air above Woodhouse turned around and left them alone. Small rushing things could not survive without air, and winged creatures could not fly without it. They fell. Their legs kicked, and their lungs gasped and cried. Woodhouse did not care. They tumbled on the grass, and the grass turned and swept over them, binding and drowning them. Legs were seized and held. Small rushing movements stopped. Woodhouse was a master of the game of stillness, while small rushing things needed to move. It bound them, held them. They lay still, and that meant they could not hurt anything that was part of itself any more.
Small rushing things appeared on the hills. Woodhouse had shut off the tunnels through nothingness that most of the two-legged things used to reach the valley, but these had opened them anyway, through devices of magic that buzzed and stung like bees not of Woodhouse stinging bees that were of Woodhouse. The valley was angry.
The devices of magic rose, and aimed into the valley. They would strike the grass, if Woodhouse let them. They would hurt the leafless tree.
But the small rushing things had legs, and they stood on the hills.
The hills danced.
Ripple and shake and shudder and shrug. Not a large dance. Nothing like the dances that Woodhouse remembered being part of it when it had been larger than it was now, and the earth had danced for joy to music that played out in the oceans, and the hills had changed their very shape. Just a small movement, and only in the hills, not the grass, because movement in the grass might hurt the leafless tree and the houses and the trees.
Such a small dance, and the outsiders lost their balance. They rolled down the hills, and into the grass. The grass wrapped them in moments, and held them still, and air went out of their lungs, and stones leaped on them. They had tried to hurt Woodhouse. They had hurt it, by carving tunnels where no tunnels should be. That was wrong.
Outsiders came through the pine woods, small rushing things that the stones and the grass let through, because they could not sense hostile intent. And then they reached the pine woods and cast flames at the trees.
Woodhouse did not like flames.
The pine trees lashed their branches and gathered the small rushing things into their embrace, drawing them close. Then they were not small rushing things anymore, because they could not move, but leafless trees. But they had not entered the dream and not asked Woodhouse to protect them. They had attacked.
The pine trees could bear storms, bend and thrash before them, and if they shed needles and lost branches, at least they were still alive when the storm ceased. But Woodhouse knew that the leafless trees could not bear storms. The pine trees gripped them and twisted their branches, and they broke. Then they dropped the leafless ones under their roots and grew over them, and that ended that. They were gone, and Woodhouse looked around for other attackers.
There were others on the very fringes of Woodhouse, sensed by pebbles and grasses, but they vanished, stepping into what was not Woodhouse and carving their tunnels through nothingness. They had learned.
That satisfied Woodhouse. It looked around one more time, and then dropped back into stillness, and awareness, and dreaming.
Harry came out of his trance to find himself kneeling on the floor and Draco shaking his shoulders. He wasn't surprised. He had lost track of his limbs entirely, enveloped in the greatness that was Woodhouse. It would move his arms and legs if it needed them, but otherwise he was no more or less important than the hills and the pebbles and the seed-heads in the grass.
"Harry! What happened?"
It took Harry a moment to respond. He felt settled into his own head once more, but where he could have spoken by means of wind and twitch and leaf-rub a moment ago, now he had to speak with words.
"They've stopped attacking," he said.
He could hear howls through the window, though, and the enraged trumpeting of the karkadann. He stood and led the way through the halls towards the door from the house and thus the outer quadrangle of buildings. Snape and Draco followed, not attempting to prevent him from going. Harry wondered if the very strangeness of the experience had forced them to reconsider their stance towards him. He hoped so.
He knew what he would find when he stepped out into the valley, perhaps the only one who did. He had another example of rage to confront, and another consequence of the course he'd taken.
The werewolves were gathered in a thick clump around the downed winged horses. Harry went to them. Bavaros was the first to notice him, and to jerk his head down in a sharp bow that he'd never given Harry before.
"This is your work, Wild," he said, and there was no question in his voice.
Harry looked at the twisted bodies. They were all Granians, the same swift-flying gray pegasi that had attacked Draco on the Hogwarts Express in September. They lay with twisted legs and wings, barely visible under the tight mesh of grass that covered them. He didn't think he could persuade Woodhouse to let them go any time soon. The land considered that small rushing things were only not a danger when they were still, and it hadn't held these for long enough.
The riders had worn cloaks and hoods, but the hoods were flung back from their faces by the force of their landing. They'd all died choking for air. Harry saw splayed hands that had clawed for it, and the edges of darkened faces and bruised throats and blackened tongues.
They were all corpses. Woodhouse had made them so in the space of just a few minutes, and Harry knew he would have to visit more corpses soon.
"They were from Shield of the Granian," he said, stooping to gently nudge a wooden disk free from the grip of a blade of grass. Since he was part of Woodhouse, the valley didn't object to him taking it. Harry lifted the disk high, to show everyone the flying horse carved on it. "They struck at us twice before—though I never knew for certain what they wanted. They were working with Unspeakables during the last attack." He turned the disk over in his hand. "I suspect that we have made fiercer enemies of them, this time," he added, so softly that he wondered if anyone overheard him.
He had forgotten the keen ears of werewolves. "It doesn't matter," Bavaros told him, voice just as fierce. Harry lifted his head in surprise. "They attacked. We saw them come flying in the moments before the air split and they fell and the grass bound them. You said that the valley would defend us, and it did. It's not your fault that it defended us so well the attackers died."
Harry looked from amber eye to amber eye. A few did look regretful, as though they would have preferred a lesser cost, but most shone like Bavaros's, probably reflecting the dominant mood of the packmind. Or packminds; the group included werewolves who had fled to refuge in Woodhouse in the past few days.
Harry remembered what Hawthorn had said. Some other packs, like the one I helped escape, were attacked out of the blue and are frightened and enraged. They need to know that you take this threat seriously.
Woodhouse had shown them that, Harry realized. He could not see a trace of resentment amid the regret. The people here considered Shield of the Granian enemies, no matter what grudges they might have had against Harry, personal or economic, and they were quite pleased with a defense that cost not a single life of theirs. They were pack. They felt every loss like a gaping wound, and they had lost enough people to make them hate the notion of losing another.
Harry had simply not realized that would be quite so strong.
He inclined his head back to Bavaros, slowly, and moved on to the next group of corpses, the ones spilled down the hills and bound with grass and rocks. He did spare a glance for the pine wood, but he doubted he would find any bodies there. The trees had buried the leafless trees—the attackers—quite well. From what Harry could remember, they'd worn dark robes. They might have been more ordinary wizards with the location of the valley somehow betrayed to them.
They might have been Aurors.
Harry grimaced, and then put the thought away. He'd killed two Aurors a few days ago, or at least been present during their deaths. What he had to worry about now was the living, and those dead he could see. Until he knew for certain they were Aurors, he would not waste time in fear.
The goblins were the largest part of the group clustered around the bottom of the hill. Harry saw why when he drew closer. They stood with their chains blazing white in their hands, facing off against the karkadann, who was snorting and grumbling and swishing her horn back and forth, with an occasional angry shriek to make up for it. Harry frowned and caught Helcas's eye.
The goblin's voice was deep enough that Harry could hear him beneath the karkadann's cries. "She wants to get near and kill him," he said. "There's one still alive. We thought to save him for you."
Harry quickened his pace until he'd reached the karkadann's side. He raised his hand and laid it along her flank.
She planted her forelegs and lashed out with her hind ones. Harry thought it was mostly instinctive. He did manage to duck out of the way in time. But he didn't want her to go on kicking at him, so he sent a small lightning shock into her hide to remind her who he was.
She whirled to face him, and went from enraged to calm in such a short time that Harry blinked. She lowered her head and rubbed him with her horn, which felt cool and slightly scaly. Her snorts had the sound of coaxing to them.
Harry nearly laughed when he realized what she wanted—for him to open the ring of goblins and let her at the living enemy. He stroked her face-fur, still stained with dried blood from the dead Auror, and shook his head. She snorted sadly and flicked her ears forward so that they half-covered her eyes, looking at him and waiting to see if that would do the trick.
"No," said Harry, and the karkadann pulled back with a sulky little stamp of her foot. Harry stepped forward, and the goblins let him pass. The karkadann gave a prance. The ring tightened again at once, and Helcas shook his chain so that it made a sound like falling arrows. The karkadann stepped back and tried to pretend it had never been her intention to come forward in the first place.
Harry shook his head and looked at the prisoner. He lay still bound by the grass of the valley, with tendrils trying to writhe their way into his mouth and choke him, and a constant rain of pebbles bombarding his body. Some magic obviously protected him, however, turning the grass back whenever it reached its goal and making the pebbles recoil with sharp pings. He ignored them entirely, staring straight at Harry. His face was pale, his eyes dark and his eyebrows heavy, and the gray hood of an Unspeakable framed them all.
Harry felt a surge of vicious satisfaction, especially when he glanced in several directions and noticed that all the sprawled bodies wore gray cloaks. They had possessed the magic to Apparate here, despite the protections Woodhouse had set up against that, but not enough to actually combat the place magic.
"Your name," he told the captive Unspeakable.
Scornful silence answered him.
"You realize that you're a prisoner now?" Harry asked. "That you won't be able to leave?"
The silence grew more edged. Harry smiled, and knew the smile had edges of its own. "Woodhouse is very patient," he said. "It won't give up until it breaks through whatever spells protect you. And the only way that you'll get any food or water is if we give it to you."
The man spoke at last, grudgingly, as though speaking was like letting precious diamonds fall from his lips. "You wouldn't do that. We know you. The Stone has told us about you. You would not let me starve, no matter what I said or did."
Harry felt anger trying to rise. There came a poised moment when he nearly shoved it back under the surface of the Occlumency pools and spoke to the man in a hushed, soothing tone, persuading him to see how much better cooperation would be.
And then he remembered what Snape and Draco had said about anger, and he remembered the feeling of the valley's rage. It had certainly not thought it was doing something wrong. Conceptions of morality had little place in Woodhouse's thinking. What hurt it was painful and wrong, and protecting any part of itself, no matter what the small rushing things' motives for hurting it, was right.
Harry had been the one to bond with the place magic and unleash this carnage. On the other hand, he had hardly forced his enemies to attack him—especially the Unspeakables, whose grudge against him he still didn't know the source of, and Shield of the Granian, who had allied with the Unspeakables for equally unknown reasons.
He had said that he was serious about defending his people. That was the reason he couldn't get angry, because they depended on him so much.
On the other hand, if they needed him to get angry, needed him to back up an attack like this, and not undermine it, with sheer fury? Would he still refuse, because he was afraid of what might happen?
I will not let them make me afraid.
Even of myself. Especially of myself.
He let the rage seep into his eyes in answer, and remembered what the Unspeakable time-globes had nearly done to Draco on the train, to everyone when they invaded the Ministry, to him during the initial attack in the Atrium. He remembered the Obliviate they'd used on Erica, and the attack on the Maenad Press, and their influence with Scrimgeour.
His magic flared around his body and hissed like a pit of vipers. The Unspeakable lost his composure enough to look briefly startled.
"I've tried to hold back," said Harry softly, "and all that has done is encourage the Ministry to legalize murder, my enemies to think that I'm too soft to punish them, and you to continue with this."
The Unspeakable snorted. "And you believe that I'll be won by that? That I'll fear you?"
Harry tilted his head towards the man's dead comrades without taking his eyes off him. "Will we torture you?" he asked. "No. Will we kill you? If you try to kill us. Will we keep you and get the truth from you? Oh yes."
The Unspeakable only sneered. Harry knew why. Honoria had told him after the attack on Hornblower that those who worked in the Department of Mysteries were immune to Veritaserum.
"Professor Snape," he called, without taking his eyes from the man's face.
Snape strode forward through the goblins, who let him in without question. He stood looking down at the man for a moment. The man looked back, defiantly, and then started and looked away. Harry smiled. It seemed their prisoner had just discovered that Snape was a Legilimens.
"His name is Croaker," said Snape. "And he believes that more of his people will be along to attack you and rescue him shortly."
Harry nodded. "Do you think that you can get more from him, sir, given time?"
"Yes," said Snape softly, and then undid his left sleeve. Croaker was looking at him again now, though he kept his head bowed so that he didn't make eye contact. Snape didn't try for it. He just held the arm out so that Croaker could see his Dark Mark.
Harry saw the Unspeakable's face turn gray, just a bit. He let his own smile bare his teeth, to add to the impression.
Of course I'm not really going to let Snape torture him. But impressions are useful. And if impressions can keep me from having to actually kill or torture someone, I'm all for them. Harry felt a moment of intense regret. If I'd been stronger earlier, perhaps it wouldn't have come to this open war against the Ministry, and we could have found a more peaceful solution.
But he hadn't done that, and it had come to this. Flinching now, in such a way as to put his people in danger, would be the greatest mistake he could make, Harry thought. Forget rage. Forget upsetting someone who would only talk to him. Losing Woodhouse and the lives of everyone in it would do more damage to his people, his cause, and him personally than anything else.
And did he really think that someone else could never forgive him if he lost his temper and said something unfortunate?
Harry took a deep breath. He knew what was happening now. The Occlumency pools had opened one leak, and he had suppressed so many emotions that they were breaking through in a tide now. In one way, it was a good thing. After all, he could see how irrational his former behavior was. And his recovery period had been much shorter than it would have been if he'd done this last year.
But in a few moments, they were going to rise all at once, and that was rather more of a problem.
He snapped his head at Croaker. "Make him talk as soon as you can, Professor Snape," he said, which was a suitably ambiguous command, and turned around, looking at the goblins. "Make sure that the karkadann doesn't kill Croaker on his way to confinement." Helcas nodded. "Don't bother with the other bodies for right now," Harry continued. "Woodhouse will hold them until it's sure that they're no threat. I'll dictate letters later, letters that I hope will go to Shield of the Granian and the Unspeakables and show them how useless this is. Any attack on Woodhouse will only result in more deaths for them. They may be more willing to talk terms now."
He finished in a rush. His head felt flooded with the same silver liquid he envisioned as lying in the Occlumency pools. Emotions sloshed and stirred in him, joy and rage and irritation and gratitude and so many other things that he wondered how he'd gone a few weeks without feeling them.
He asked Woodhouse if it would open a path through nothingness—a way for him to Apparate—to his bedroom. Woodhouse did it without fuss; he was part of it, after all. Harry leaped, and landed lightly on his own bed a moment later.
He took the time to string wards around the room, and then curled up and let his own mistakes catch up with him. He hoped it wouldn't last very long; from the intensity of the coming storm, he suspected it would be short but fierce.
Gratitude was at the forefront, marching like rain, and Harry thought that was only sensible. If it hadn't been for Draco and Snape and Woodhouse, Merlin knows what might have happened to me.
