Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!

Chapter Thirty-Six: Not Every Problem Is His To Solve

Connor winced as the door slammed. Then he rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling. He and the ceiling were fast becoming old friends.

He had tried, again, to explain to Parvati that there was little chance of Harry coming back and hurting them. She seemed to consider that he'd won his battle. Connor didn't see how. The Daily Prophet kept reporting on the progress of the arguments between Harry and the Ministry, as they tried to hammer out acceptable laws to apply to the werewolves, and debated about beginning to address the other terms that Harry had wanted, including representatives sent to the northern goblins and centaurs. Until that was finished, Connor knew Harry wouldn't think he'd "won."

Parvati had still argued that it was winning, and that Harry would come back all puffed up with pride and expecting the Light pureblood families to do as he bade them, since he'd not only taken their leader away but proven that everything they'd ever done in relation to the centaurs, goblins, and other species was wrong.

Connor couldn't help it; he'd laughed at the thought of Harry ever being proud, and Parvati had stormed out.

"Do you think she'll ever come 'round?" he asked Ron, without looking at him.

Ron uttered a loud grunt. Connor rolled over. Ron was bent over his Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook, studying hard enough that the back of his neck had turned red. Only Connor didn't think that was from the studying at all.

"If you're angry at me about Ginny running off to Harry, you know, you should say so and get it over with," he told Ron, then waited.

As expected, Ron slammed down his book and whirled around. "All right," he snarled. "She hasn't responded to one bloody Howler that Mum sent her. Not one! Does that mean she's happy for what she did? Not sorry for it? That she's not thinking about what's going to happen when she comes home? Mum won't let her out of her sight. And she's blaming me for encouraging her somehow!" Ron's face twisted up. "How could I have? We were both in the dueling club last year, we both fought, but Hogwarts needed us!"

"So your mum's wrong," Connor concluded.

Ron glared at him. "Don't you say that!"

"But you didn't think Ginny was wrong to fight last year," said Connor, as reasonably as he could. "Why do you think Ginny was wrong to run off and fight this year?"

"Because she didn't take me with her!"

Well. That was unexpected. Connor lay in silence for a moment, blinking, and Ron leaped to his feet, so swiftly he almost hit his head on the canopy of his bed—he was growing, Connor thought, getting near as tall as his brother Charlie—and grabbed his book, stuffing it into his trunk. A moment later, he'd grabbed his broom, too, and looked at Connor. "Let's go practice," he said.

Connor was about to agree, since the Slytherin-Gryffindor Quidditch match wasn't far away, when an owl he recognized came fluttering through the window of the tower room. He grinned and shook his head. "Sorry, Ron, got a letter from my friend," he said, and undid the letter tied to the owl's leg.

Ron swore under his breath and slammed the door shut behind him in unconscious imitation of Parvati. Connor tore the letter open, stroking the owl's feathers. She was beautiful, a dusky gray owl with black markings on her legs and around her eyes. Connor didn't know her breed, and neither did anyone whom he'd asked, but that didn't matter. She was affectionate, too, ducking her head and nipping gently at his fingers with her beak when he petted her.

The letter was sloppy, as always. Mark wasn't the best writer.

Hi Connor!

Everyone's all excited here. I don't think most of us know what to do with ourselves while Harry plots and plans. I mean, he must know what he's doing, right? But it's taking so bloody long! But no one else really wants to criticize Harry to his face, except George. And, well, George is all right and all, and I'm sure he misses his family, but they wouldn't want to take him back anyway, he's a werewolf. Try telling him that, though.

But for the most part, it's brilliant here still, it's just all the waiting that I can't stand. And it's a little overwhelming being around your brother, sometimes. Imagine a waterfall that walks around and sometimes grows a little louder than it needs to be and sheds rainbows in one color. That's what his magic feels like to me.

Still no definite answer on when we'll all be coming back. Harry's determined to have the Minister's word before he moves. I can't blame him for that. I want a law that says that we'll never be hunted again, but Merlin knows if we'll get that. The Ministry, bunch of bloody puffed-up fools, doesn't want to commit to anything, and Harry actually tore up the latest version of the laws they sent him because it was too restrictive.

Stupid idiots!

Anyway, I sent you something I was playing with and thought you might like. I carve sometimes when I have nothing better to do, and right now there's a lot of 'nothing better' to do. I know you said you were a Seeker, and I've seen pictures of you in the paper as a Seeker, too, so I hope you like it!

Best wishes,

Mark.

Connor shook the envelope, and a wooden Snitch fell out. The wings were just carved into the sides, and wouldn't actually beat, but Connor thought it could be enchanted to fly quite easily. He tapped it with his wand, and it rose and hovered back and forth, though the wings still didn't beat. Connor grabbed for it, and smiled.

Mark was a young werewolf who'd started to write to him a few days after everyone went to the valley. His first letter had been belligerent, insisting that he wanted to know things about Harry from his brother, because he didn't trust Harry not to lead them into a trap. Connor had snapped back, wondering if he would have to tell his brother about a traitor in the valley.

But Mark's second letter had been much gentler and more conciliatory, and Connor had eventually realized that what he needed was a friend, someone to talk to about events in Woodhouse. He was much younger than the other werewolves; apparently he'd just left Hogwarts two years ago, had drifted from place to place, and finally had been sent to the Ministry by his exasperated parents. Then he'd become part of the Department for the Control and Suppression of Deadly Beasts, and then he'd become a werewolf. His life was hard enough to stir some sympathy in Connor, and he wrote like an—like an ordinary person, the way Connor supposed he himself was in the wake of his revelation of Harry as the Boy-Who-Lived, the way Parvati had been when he liked her. It was nice to have an ordinary friend to talk to, even if Mark didn't tell him all that much that Connor couldn't learn from Harry himself.

And the Snitch made a fine gift.

Connor gathered up parchment and ink to write back, sprawling on his bed while the wooden Snitch darted around his head. Absently, he snatched it out of the air, and then winced. Those stiff little wings hurt.


Peter leaned forward, eyes traveling over the tables while he ate. Next to him, Henrietta Bulstrode made an anxious little noise in her throat. Peter glanced at her, and she caught his eye and jerked her head at the Hufflepuff table. He followed her line of sight.

Two seventh-year students were arguing in low, heated voices. One of them abruptly shook her head, and turned back to her meal. The other watched her with his face set in stone. Then he began eating, too. Peter raised his eyebrows.

"What?" he asked Henrietta. The students could have been arguing over Quidditch, exam marks, or, considering that they were male and female, a dating arrangement gone sour. Neither was in his NEWT Defense Against the Dark Arts, so he didn't know them.

"The boy has a Dark Mark," said Henrietta, as if this happened every day.

Peter stiffened. Henrietta pinched his arm, the left one, just above the Mark. Peter shook himself and remembered the lessons he'd learned during his months in the Death Eaters—hell, the lessons he'd learned in his seventh year, when he'd had to conceal disgust and anger to keep his friends. He picked up his fork and ate several peas. By the time he was done with that, he had remembered how to look calm again. "How can you know?" he murmured, his voice just a breath of air.

"Spell," said Henrietta, and tapped her wand, which rode in her belt, close against her left hip. "It flashes me a vision of a dark green skull with a snake in its mouth whenever someone with a Dark Mark gets close enough. I know about yours, but now that Snape is gone, you should be the only one here who has one. And today that student passed me in the hall, and the skull flashed in front of me."

"He's not in your NEWT Transfiguration, either?" Peter asked, though he knew the answer as he did. If he were, then Henrietta would have sensed his Mark long before now.

"No," said Henrietta. "I think his name is Leo, but that's all I know about him. He wouldn't have wanted to make an impression on many of his professors, I think." She gave a thin smile and stroked her wand. "And now we know why."

"If we try to corner him, he'll run," said Peter. He knew that much, from experience with some Marked Slytherins in his sixth year. Evan Rosier had very nearly killed someone else before he'd fled school grounds, simply because someone caught a glimpse of the Mark under his robe and stopped to ask him about his new tattoo.

"I know that," Henrietta said, in a slightly scornful voice, as if asking him what in the world he was doing, thinking she didn't know that. "Watch." She waved her wand and intoned an incantation that, to Peter, sounded singsong. He saw one of the forks next to Henrietta twitch and grow legs, and then it became an enormous ant, which slipped under the head table before anyone else could see it.

Peter could only make the ant out by squinting as it scuttled its way over to the Hufflepuff table; Henrietta had darkened it when she Transfigured it, so that the silver wouldn't flash and reveal its position. There could be no doubt when it reached the boy with the Dark Mark, though. He leaped to his feet, screaming and waving his arms as though he'd been stung, pulling attention from all over the Great Hall.

"Mr. Harkness!" Professor Sprout was on her feet, no doubt appalled that one of her students was causing such a disturbance in public. "What is the meaning of this?"

"There was a huge bug!" Leo cried back, and Peter wondered if his high-pitched voice was honest fear or good acting. Then he winced. He hated that he had to wonder things like that. "It—" He pointed under the table, but Peter would have given good Galleons on the chance that Henrietta's little toy had already hidden itself in a shadowy corner. Leo's face fell. "Well, there was one right here," he concluded, rather lamely.

"That is no reason to disrupt dinner," said Professor Sprout sternly. Pomona was generally cheerful, Peter thought as he watched her, but then, most of the students in her class paid strict attention, so as not to get eaten by dangerous plants. And she did expect better behavior of her House than this. "You will sit down at once."

"Yes, ma'am," said Leo, sounding thoroughly abashed, and started to.

Henrietta had murmured another spell, however, one that Peter recognized as a cutting curse that did not produce a visible line of light. As Leo sat down, his left robe sleeve sagged, slit down the line of the seam.

And because everyone was looking at him, everyone saw the Mark.

The screams were immediate, and the girl sitting next to him was one of the first to crowd away, the expression of horror on her face so genuine that Peter didn't think their argument had been about the Mark after all. Leo froze for a moment, and then leaped to his feet and drew his wand, obviously intending to fight his way out of the Hall.

Wards lashed out of the wall, blue lines that bound his arms to his sides and squeezed on his wrist until he dropped his wand with a squall of pain. Then Minerva's voice spoke, so cold that most of the screams stopped at once, and Leo turned bulging, miserable eyes on her.

"Mr. Harkness," she said. "I will deal with you now." She left the head table with a sweep of her robes and a curl of color along the edges of them—a result of the wards that foamed around the Hogwarts Headmistress and hissed with her indignation. The wards gripping Leo turned and pulled him straight into the stones, bearing him to the Headmistress's office by the shortest route. The last sound he made before he vanished was a miserable, strangled cry.

"I suppose I should go, too, and inform her of what I know," said Henrietta casually, standing. "Which isn't much." She cocked her head at Peter. "You'll stay here?"

"Yes," said Peter faintly, and moved to join his other colleagues in calming the frightened students while Henrietta strode through them like they weren't there and vanished out the Hall's doors.

Peter shook his head as he walked towards the Gryffindor table to check on his students. Previously, he had divided the entirety of the school into three rough groups, based on their reactions to the Ministry and Harry's negotiations: scornful, the ones who were impatient for this all to be over with and thought nothing would change; frightened, those who thought this would mean things would change fundamentally and were wary of sharing a school with a fellow student so powerful; and supportive, those who understood something about why Harry was doing what he had done and embraced it.

Now, it seemed as though he needed to add potential Death Eaters to the list.


Minerva arrived in her office to find Leo sitting in a chair, his eyes wide and his hands flexing as if he could grip the wards and rip them apart like ropes. He stopped trying to tear them when he saw her, and instead only lowered his head so that his chin rested on his chest, avoiding her eyes.

Minerva opened her mouth, ready to say something, and then decided that it would be best to wait for Professor Sprout and Henrietta; she had noticed the other woman's games at the head table, whether or not Henrietta thought she had. She had not been Transfiguration Professor for nothing. She sat down and waited in the midst of a cold silence. Leo sometimes looked at her as if he would like to say something, but he always turned his head away again, as much as the wards would permit him.

Minerva considered him in the meanwhile. He had been a student in her classes for five years, and she had known him, slightly. He worked quietly, and the only time she remembered him losing points for Hufflepuff was in his first year, when he had a hard time not talking to his friends in class. He was a halfblood, or so she thought; he had said something to her once about his mother being a witch, and how he had thought the spells in Hogwarts would be easier than what she'd taught him at home. He was slight, with brown hair and brown eyes and an altogether unremarkable appearance. It seemed that he'd continued that trend of ordinariness, and turned it into a virtue for his Death Eater status.

Soon enough, Pomona spoke the password for the gargoyle. Henrietta arrived just behind her, according to the wards, and both of them rode the staircase upwards. Minerva composed herself, and put memories of the child Leo had been away. What mattered now was that he was a young man, and he had made this decision, and they would deal with him as an adult.

Pomona arrived and immediately turned and stared at Leo. "Mr. Harkness," she said, and then no more. She simply shook her head. Minerva was glad to see that. Last year, Filius had defended one of his students who attached Harry, and who had turned out to be a Death Eater. Pomona might have done the same if there were no conclusive proof, but not with the Mark glaring black on his arm.

"The extent of his involvement in the Death Eaters is what we are here to determine," said Minerva calmly. "Be seated, Pomona, Hilda." She remembered to speak Henrietta's disguise-name just in time.

Pomona took a seat with such rapidity that she almost tripped over her robes; she couldn't seem to look away from her student. Henrietta sat down primly, sweeping her skirts around her. Minerva could see why she had chosen this disguise. It was almost as far as one could get from the dangerous woman Henrietta Bulstrode was known for being, who would want robes that did not hinder her movement.

"Mr. Harkness," said Minerva then, facing him, "you are accused of being a Death Eater. Do you deny the accusation?"

Leo was silent for long moments, as if trying to decide how much he ought to tell. Then he said, "I never—I've never met the Dark Lord or anything like that. I just have the Mark."

"And why is that?" Considering that she wanted to shout, Minerva thought she did well in keeping her voice just cold enough to crack stone.

"My mother—my mother supported the Death Eaters in the First War," said Leo, and jerked his head nervously. "She spent a year in Azkaban, but she was released, finally. She never really gave up on him, though." He threaded his fingers together and clenched them. The wards that held him would let him do that much. "She talked to me about the Dark Lord. A lot. And sometimes she thought he would come again, and she could do more than she had. But she didn't know what to do about it, until she heard of his resurrection."

The words were spilling out now, and Minerva quietly told the wards in her office to record what Leo said. It might be that they would need it for testimony later, if Pensieve memories did not prove to be enough.

"Then she spoke to one of the Death Eater recruiters when he came. Azkaban broke her. She—she couldn't really do anything to help the war. But she could ask me to take the Mark. I did, this summer, when I turned seventeen. I just—I just wanted to please her, that's all." Leo's lips and eyelids were both trembling. "I've never killed anyone. I swear. My mum's not even Marked. She just supported the Dark Lord and lent money to him. And I don't know if I even believe what he does." He stared miserably at the Mark on his arm, as if it should have the answers.

Pomona closed her eyes. Henrietta, cool as Midwinter, said, "He is lying."

Leo's eyes flashed open, and he stared at her. Minerva frowned. "In what way?"

"Only the Dark Lord can give the Dark Mark," said Henrietta. "And it must happen in an initiation. If he didn't meet the Dark Lord, then he would not bear the Mark. That is the truth of it."

"I didn't meet him!" Leo's voice was shrill with fear now. "I swear, I didn't, I didn't. The recruiter was the one who gave me the Mark. He pointed the wand at me and intoned Morsmordre, and there it was. It wasn't an initiation. I didn't kill anyone. I swear."

"Extend your arm," said Minerva, and he nearly snapped the wards in doing so. She bent forward and stared at the Mark on his arm, frowning. It was true that it looked exactly as it should look, black snake and skull entwined, and it radiated magic that rang as Dark to her senses.

On the other hand, she had wards on the grounds that should have prevented someone with the Dark Mark and hostile intent from entering the school at all. And if Leo hadn't killed someone, it was not a true initiation. That much, the Order of the Phoenix had known since the First War. All Death Eater initiations involved a murder, though the exact method of killing and the age of the victim would vary widely.

"Keep your arm extended, Mr. Harkness," she said, and pointed her own wand at the Mark. "Abi in malam rem!"

Leo gasped as the magic broke over his flesh, gripping his skin and twisting it. Minerva flinched a bit as she listened to his howls, but didn't let it show on her face. It was a painful Transfiguration, but it was also nearly as good a test as Veritaserum would be. The spell banished an unwanted change back to the person who had first cast the spell. If Leo had wanted to bear the Dark Mark—another trait of Death Eaters; the Mark could only come to one who was willing—then the brand would stay in place, and Minerva would arrange with Horace for Veritaserum.

But the Mark shrank and writhed and paled, and then it gathered itself into a hive of black bees that flew, angrily buzzing, at the wall and vanished. Leo stared down at his arm. A faint, white scar in the shape of the snake and skull still showed. Minerva nodded. He had been partially willing, then. And since Henrietta had seen fit to reveal the Mark in front of the Great Hall, they would have to insist that Leo leave Hogwarts for at least a little while. But he was supremely unlikely to be executed or imprisoned, now, and he would be able to return to Hogwarts next year, if no earlier, to finish his NEWTS.

"Thank you," Leo whispered. "Thank you."

Minerva nodded to him again. "You are welcome, Mr. Harkness. However, I believe that it would be best if you stayed away from home for right now? What would your mother do to you when she noticed this Mark gone?"

Leo closed his eyes.

"I have friends who can find him a place to stay," said Pomona, her face bright with relief at not having to expel one of her students. She stood and held out her arm. "Come along, Mr. Harkness."

Minerva didn't relax the wards. "Just one moment, Pomona." She turned back to Leo. "I want your binding oath that you will never truly take the Mark, and that you will not take up arms against Hogwarts," she said.

Leo gave the oath gladly, swearing it in the name of Merlin and his magic, and then Minerva let Pomona lead him away. She was already speaking gently to him as they went. The gentle tone would hide sharp questions, Minerva knew. If the boy was hiding anything else, Pomona would have it out of him before he left school.

That left her alone with Henrietta, who frowned slightly. "So that Mark was a false one?"

"It was," Minerva confirmed. "A Transfiguration. The recruiter, whoever he was, doubtless did it nonverbally, and used Morsmordre to cover that. But it was not an initiation." She frowned at Henrietta. "I wish you had come to me privately with this, instead of confronting him before the Great Hall. He might not have had to leave school."

"And he might have been lying," said Henrietta, without batting an eye. "There was no way to tell, and I take no chances where Harry's safety is concerned."

Minerva told herself this was a natural consequence of hiring someone like Henrietta Bulstrode as a professor, and dismissed her. Then she sat back behind her desk and closed her eyes.

So we have someone giving false Dark Marks to those who might succumb to familial pressure to bear them. And why? To keep the Ministry occupied? To ruin the reputations of ordinary wizards and witches? But most of those who would be most damaged by being exposed as Death Eaters are so opposed to Voldemort that they would never agree to carry the Dark Mark in the first place.

So involved was she in her thoughts that she did not notice the gargoyle beginning to move until it already had. Then she opened her eyes and looked sharply through the wards. A student was on her way up the staircase, a student with long blonde hair and large glasses whom Minerva recognized a few moments later.

Miss Lovegood. And what does she want? There was the possibility that she might have information on Leo, as, last year, she had been able to tell Minerva which of the Ravenclaw students had cast the Entrail-Expelling Curse at Harry. Therefore, Minerva waited until the door to her office opened and Luna stepped inside.

Luna's face was intent, and she moved across the office with a silence and purpose that Minerva found herself curiously reluctant to interrupt. She reached the middle, just before Minerva's desk, and turned around, hands extended and pointing towards the bookshelves. Minerva glanced from side to side, but could see no books rising from their settings in what might be response to a nonverbal spell or accidental magic. She returned to looking at Luna, a bit bemused, but willing to wait. Since learning the girl heard impressions from objects, she was much more tolerant of her foibles, and had instructed the other professors to be the same way.

Luna opened her mouth and moved her lips in round shapes, as if tasting bubbles. Then she gave a little hop forward and held out her arms in front of her. Her fingers poked and prodded at an invisible wall for a long moment before she abruptly opened her eyes and smiled.

"It's gone," she said. "It really is."

"Miss Lovegood?" Minerva kept her voice from sounding irritated, but she was not sure puzzled was that much better. It would have done her incredible harm with any number of sixth-year Gryffindor students. But Luna seemed too far gone in her own concerns to notice if the Headmistress sounded confused, and answered seriously.

"There was an object in your office that hated the whole world, Headmistress," she said. "I felt it when I visited you last year to tell you what the chairs said about Gilbert Rovenan. It was so angry. It hated, and it wanted to tear and rend and destroy." She faced Minerva with a dazzling beam. "But it's gone."

"It is," said Minerva flatly. She was not sure what most disturbed her: that she could have had something like that in her office, no doubt a dangerous enchanted object of some kind, or that it could have moved.

"Yes." Luna smiled at the bookcases. "When you reorganized your office, you must have got rid of it. You got rid of a lot, I think. These shelves are new." She stepped forward and ran one hand across the wood. "And happy with it," she added. "New objects like being in places full of old ones. They can talk and share stories that they might never get to hear, otherwise."

Minerva prevented herself, with difficulty, from deterring into a discussion of what stories her bookshelves might have heard. The thought of the walls, floors, and doors watching her every move of their own accord, without wards, was disconcerting. "Do you know what it was, Miss Lovegood?"

"I never knew," said Luna, her voice already back to its content, dreamy self. "It felt like a Wrackspurt, and I know that Wrackspurts come into people's heads at night and cause evil dreams, or change their actions. But it wasn't a Wrackspurt, because then it would have come into someone's head, not into an object. They can't control objects." She gave a little frown. "Headmistress, could you tell people to stop splashing water on the stones in the courtyard? Several of them spent centuries at the bottom of an ocean, and they don't like the wet. Rain and snow is bad enough. I've tried talking to the people who splash across them dripping from Quidditch practice, but they don't want to listen to me."

Minerva felt the same helplessness that had confronted Luna's professors for so long, before they began learning how to listen. She restrained it, and said only, "I'm afraid that you must take that up with Madam Hooch, Miss Lovegood. Perhaps she would be willing to tell the Quidditch teams that they must dry thoroughly before they come in from the practice field. And, of course, there are the students trekking back and forth from Professor Sprout's greenhouses to consider, and the Care of Magical Creatures classes."

"I didn't think about them," said Luna, brightening. "I'll talk to the professors, Madam. Thank you." She turned and wandered out of the office.

Minerva gave her walls another searching glance. It was true she had moved most of Albus's artifacts out of the office after last year, but she thought she would have known if she had something that powerfully enchanted, and Dark, in here.

She thought.

What could it have been? And where could it have gone? The worse thought was definitely that the thing possessed the power of moving itself about.


Hawthorn opened her eyes with a start. She'd had trouble sleeping, of late. If she wasn't having nightmares of Tullianum Prison, she was having nightmares of the Thorn Bitch's plants tearing Pansy apart in front of her.

She sat up and called Lumos to her wand, which sent flickering shadows around the room—but that was better than the absolute darkness she had tried to sleep in. Once, she had only been able to sleep without light. Lately, it gave her foul dreams.

She stood, scratching her left arm, and walked across her narrow room to stare out the window. She could see the moon from here. It was very nearly full.

She would have to transform, again. Her skin crawled with the thought.

She had become used to being a werewolf, but she would never love it, the way that so many members of the packs did. She would never want anything more than to be a pureblood witch again. Well, and she wanted her husband and daughter, but she knew that was impossible.

The cure might not be.

Hawthorn watched the moon, and remembered what Harry had said of the potion he thought might help cure lycanthropy, and how each werewolf would have to prepare his or her own dose, and how even then it was difficult and stood a sixty percent chance of killing the werewolf.

The thought came sneaking into her head, for the first time. Before, she had only allowed herself to consider brewing processes, and spells that might let her transfer her magic into a liquid.

I would be willing to take the risk.

She had said she was going to live, after Harry came back and after they swore to the Alliance of Sun and Shadow, but she hadn't, had she? A month and a half of blissful life, and then she had been cast into the cells.

Those three days without the sun, at the mercy of the moon, had changed something fundamental in her, Hawthorn knew, something she was still recovering from. She would bear what she had to bear, and she would survive, because suicide was for weaklings and cowards. But she did not want to live as she had been, a beast who could be hunted and hated. The new werewolf laws might make her more acceptable, but she would still smell the fear and disgust around normal wizards and witches, now that they knew what she was.

She could take no pleasure in it, as someone like Camellia could. Camellia had been bitten before she was a year old; she had never known anything else, at least not that she could remember. Hawthorn had spent decades of her life as a normal witch. A little more than three years of being a werewolf was not enough to make her a Camellia.

She closed her eyes. I want to change once more—become a normal witch, with no lycanthropy.

Once, and no more.

She would begin working on the werewolf cure for herself, tomorrow.


Adalrico sighed and bent to bandage his heel again. The Fisher King Curse that Augustus Starrise had gifted him with before he died needed to be regularly tended to and cleaned and bandaged. The wound would not kill him, and it would not become infected, and it would not close. It simply existed, impairing his walking and his life, if he allowed the smell to build.

He had become very good at spells that would conceal foul scents since Augustus died, even from werewolves. There was that to be said for the state of things.

But when one was awake in the middle of the night, troubled by evil dreams of one's own past, learning to conceal foul scents seemed small compensation. Adalrico scratched his left shoulder and yawned, then lay down again next to Elfrida, trying not to wake her. Marian slept in a cot in a corner of the room, and Millicent was in the room next door. Too easy to stir someone to alertness, if he did not watch out.

And then, of course, he couldn't sleep. He lay awake and stared over his wife's shoulder instead, watching the reflections of the moonlight on the wall.

This was not the war he had envisioned when he had joined Harry, he thought. He had thought he would have a chance to fight those who were trying to stifle all independence and change in the wizarding world, whether those wizards were Light or Dark. Part of him had rejoiced at going to war again, after so many years of peace. He had served an unworthy master the last time, but this time there had come one worthy of a Bulstrode. When Harry had built the Alliance of Sun and Shadow, and then cast his defiance in the Minister's face, Adalrico had been ecstatic. Surely, now, he would have a chance to fight.

And he had not. Other than their jailbreak in the Ministry, the fights had ended before he could enter them, and he had not had the time to cast a single spell.

Elfrida stirred and murmured against him. Adalrico comfortingly rubbed her shoulder, still watching the light and shadows on the wall.

He wanted to fight. He wanted to prove to the wizarding world that the Bulstrodes had pride still. Their motto was Duramus, We endure, but he also wanted to triumph. The best way he could do that was in battle, and there was so little chance of that, as long as Harry operated by tact and diplomacy and argument. His daughter was a different case, but Millicent had proven that she was an adult woman to him this summer, no longer standing in his shadow. He could not point to her as an example of his honor; she had her own.

And whose fault is that?

Adalrico took a long breath, wrinkled his nose at the smell that always lingered after he had changed his bandages, and closed his eyes. It was his own fault, his own fault entirely. This was not the war he had envisioned. That did not make it the wrong war. It meant he had something to contribute, if he could look beyond the end of his nose. He had known some tact; he had managed to survive in the vipers' nest that was the Death Eaters, after all. Perhaps he should be thinking about drawing on that experience to serve Harry, instead of expecting Harry's experience to change so he could show off to advantage.

He was an adult, and a wizard, and he had lived through much, including the first rise and the first fall of the Dark Lord. Now was only another change to ride.

It was not long after that before his breathing slowed and deepened to match his wife's, and he fell back into a sleep that, this time, was plagued by no evil dreams.