Chapter Sixty-Eight: The Advantages of Research
"I did think of one, Harry."
Harry jumped and glanced up from writing the letter to Tony Flotsam, a Muggleborn wizard who'd asked for more information on house elves. By an effort of will, he didn't scatter ink across the parchment, but it was only by an effort of will. "Peter? You thought of another time when my parents defied Dumbledore?" He put the ink and parchment carefully on the table, and glanced towards the front of the library. Madam Pince was scolding two third-year Hufflepuffs for throwing books at each other, luckily, and couldn't overhear them, but Harry cast a privacy ward around the table anyway. "Did it have to do with the ethics of sacrifice?"
Peter took a chair and nodded. "It did."
Harry studied him in concern. His voice drooped, and so did his face, pasty white and with nasty dark circles standing out from beneath his eyes. "Peter, are you all right? Have you been sleeping well?"
A moment passed during which Peter seemed to be trying to decide what he wanted to say. In the end, he gave Harry no more than another nod. "Yes." He sat up. "The memory came back to me when I was trying to remember Defense Against the Dark Arts spells we'd studied in our sixth year that might be appropriate for my class. James had a certain—power in the Dark Arts, you know. They fascinated him. I think that was why he broke when he realized that he'd used an Unforgivable on someone else for ten minutes and enjoyed it."
Peter's voice was full of shards of memories, and Harry didn't particularly want to linger on James's torture of the Lestranges. He nodded, to encourage him along.
"He didn't have as much of a problem with the Dark Arts in school as he did later, when he'd seen them used in the war," Peter continued, musing. "He found a spell that would target purebloods."
Harry frowned. "How?" Thomas's research had shown that even pureblood families often produced wizards and witches of considerably lesser power than they ought to have done, if purity of blood guaranteed that magic was more likely to choose them—which it wasn't, but which was what most of the European families had believed for years.
"It worked on belief," said Peter. "It would attack someone who wasn't a pureblood by birth but believed he was. Or someone who knew the pureblood customs and worked to make himself fit in, like you."
I suppose some spells could work like that. Harry had rarely studied them. Magics of the minds, and visions, and actual spells that would work on the bodies of enemies, had been more of interest to him. "And did he use it?"
Peter shook his head. "He was more fascinated with the theory behind it than what it did. All it would have done was give someone stinging boils. So he read more in the book where he'd discovered it, and then more books. And he brought the books to Lily and showed them to her. She was tempted. She had infused so many of Dumbledore's beliefs by that point that she was ready to fight in the First War. But she hadn't yet come to think, the way she did later, that she had to use only Light spells or she was damned. So she was willing to wield Dark Arts against her enemies."
Harry nodded. He could see how such a willingness would have been a violation of both the ethics Dumbledore taught his mother and the kind Falco believed in. One didn't have to Declare Light, since the Light needed enemies to struggle against, but one couldn't hang in between and use both kinds of magic. Harry sometimes thought that was what irritated Falco most about him, other than his sheer ability to change the wizarding world. "And did they use them?"
"On a few birds we captured." Peter grimaced. "Curses that would have got them expelled if any of us betrayed them. None of us did, of course. We were all fascinated—all but Remus, but I think you know that. And Sirius showed us some of what his compulsive power could do. He took control of James's body and marched him around like a puppet. It exhausted him, but he was competing with James, wanting to show that he could do everything James could.
"That panicked James. He burned the books and, I think, paid the library for them. And he declared that he wasn't going to use Dark magic ever again. Lily followed him; I think he convinced her that time, or she thought about it and decided that a Light witch had no need for those kinds of spells." A shadow passed over Peter's face. "Of course, she would use spells that violated the ancient definitions of Light, like free will, if the spell was technically Light."
"The phoenix web," murmured Harry, thinking how much easier his life would have been if his mother were a bit more technical and exacting in her definitions.
Peter nodded.
Harry sighed the temptation to wallow in self-pity away. He had dealt with his past as well as he was ever going to deal with it. Its major value now was how it could help him in the war, and learning that his parents had defied Dumbledore, and Falco through him, at least two times moved them closer to being the first two Dark Lords in the prophecy. "Thank you, Peter. Please let me know if you remember any other major defiances."
Peter nodded and stood, yawning.
"And get some sleep!" Harry called as he walked towards the door of the library. He turned back to his letter to Flotsam, concealing a yawn of his own. He should probably feel like a hypocrite, he knew, dispensing advice to Peter he wasn't disposed to take himself. In this case, though, he'd been up late turning the advice Joseph had given him about the Unspeakables over in his mind. Harry had gone to him almost the moment he'd come back from the Department of Mysteries, wanting to know if Joseph thought what he had done, killing people and draining their magic in order to break the Stone, was right.
Joseph's gentle questions, as usual, had led him down the right path.
If you had the situation to face over again, would you do it, Harry?
Harry had hesitated, but nodded. "I'd like to find some second road, but I don't think there's a second road to take. The Stone values its servants. It doesn't value much of anything else except what I'm unwilling to give up, like my magic, and werewolves to perform its experiments on, and my allies to drain for their magical power."
What would you want done, if you were in the position of having a family member drained and killed by an enemy?
"I'd want to know why it happened. What motive he had for doing it. If his reasons were good ones." Harry stared at his clasped hands. The silver one felt too cool against his flesh one, even now, but small sparkling trails of warmth moved up it.
Perhaps you should talk to Dionysus Hornblower, then. He may know how much contact Unspeakables still have with their families. Perhaps the Stone forbids them to meet a sibling or parent again when they swear to it, but perhaps not. In fact, learning more about these enemies in general would serve you well.
Harry knew Joseph had been speaking of what might happen should the Stone decide to interfere in the war again. He, though, had considered it a valuable reminder of what the human cost of war might be.
He rubbed at his eyes and picked up the quill. He'd finish the letter, work on his Defense Against the Dark Arts homework for an hour, and then spend an hour on Horcruxes. And then he could go back to their bedroom, and Draco. The thought of that made him smile.
I'm living, I think. At least, I'm trying.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
"Zacharias. You wanted to speak with me?"
Had it not been unwise to do so, Zacharias would have smiled. His mother's voice sounded so much like Hermione's. But he knew neither woman would appreciate the comparison, so he would not give offense.
Even though you are about to give offense in another way, far more deeply.
He shook those thoughts aside and sat up. "Yes, Mother." Miriam Smith's face floated in the green flames of the fireplace in the Hufflepuff common room. As Zacharias was of age by his family's standards, he'd been allowed to use a privacy spell so that others could see him but not hear what he was saying. He felt some curious glances on the back of his neck now, especially from Susan Bones, who appeared more interested in the politics of the wizarding world than Zacharias had ever seen her.
He let out a slow breath. He didn't need to be thinking of Susan right now. He needed to be thinking of his mother, and Hermione.
"What about?" Miriam asked a moment later. Zacharias concealed his start well, he hoped. It had been his intention to wait and draw his mother out, but he hadn't done it consciously, not this time. He'd simply let his thoughts distract him to the point where he hadn't paid attention to the workings of her face.
It could be fatal, he thought, eyes locked on the impatient lines around his mother's mouth, to do that again.
"Something political," he responded. "Something important. Unless you're doing something more important still, Mother, and then I am sorry to have disturbed you and shall wait respectfully until you contact me to speak to you again."
Miriam studied him in silence. Zacharias could feel the balance weighing and tipping in her mind. She was currently engaged in trying to make sure that those Light purebloods who opposed the Grand Unified Theory still had a voice in the Ministry. She would not want to be taken away from it, and she would doubt whether her son's preoccupations concerned anything more important than that.
But, on the other hand, Zacharias was not in the habit of contacting her on a whim.
She nodded, and Zacharias could almost hear her deciding that she would grant him a few minutes of speech. "What is it?"
All his graceful words deserted him. He had planned a few metaphors, vague mountain passes by which he might approach the subject, and now it was upon him, and he could do nothing but gesture towards it.
Unless he walked the direct path.
The direct path would not have annoyed Hermione. She would have thanked him, probably, for saying what was on his mind without prevarication. But his mother and Hermione were two very different people on the surface, however deep the similarities might run.
"Zacharias?"
And he was taken off guard again. That was a grave enough sin for him to deserve whatever punishment his mother might think appropriate for a direct statement. So Zacharias spoke, without trying to clothe it in a sapphire-colored cloak.
"I believe the Grand Unified Theory is right, Mother."
Miriam did not explode. That had never been her way, of course. Bursts of temper were like stars going supernova: all they did was produce a great deal of heat and light and die quickly. More was gained by waiting, by thinking, and by obeying standards of honor and coolness that the Light held dear.
Zacharias thought for a moment that the Dark held them dear, too, and then pushed the thought away. He was not to blame for what his ancestors had valued. The only thing he could affect, ultimately, was his own actions. He knew what would happen when he was announced as a believer in the Grand Unified Theory. Some Light purebloods would shun him, and his influence would lessen.
He had thought, and thought hard, in the last few weeks if announcing his beliefs was worth that. In the end, he could only conclude that it was. The last straw had been reading the words of Muggleborns on the subject, and the words of purebloods, and realizing that the Dark and Light wizards of old families sounded more like each other than the Light ones sounded like the Muggleborns who had come seeking sanctuary in their world.
Zacharias was Light. He was that before he was pureblood, or Hufflepuff, or a descendant of Helga Hufflepuff, or the heir of the Smith family. If he could only have kept those distinctions by doing something Dark, he would not have. And it disgusted him to think he might have more in common with Lucius Malfoy than Hermione.
"You must have received some convincing evidence," his mother said at last. She had no emotion in her voice at all. That was a very bad sign. Still, Zacharias did not close his eyes.
"I did, Mother," he said. Quiet, respectful, rolling with the blows, baring his belly and his throat to her if she wanted to tear them out. In the end, he was beyond her reach, just like Hermione was. The mistake of the Light purebloods lay in thinking this might go away if they clamored enough. And if it had been only a refutation of the old pureblood ways and rituals, then it might have. But this was proof positive, a statement of existence and not refusal of existence. Zacharias did not think anything was going to make it go away. Murder the wizards who believed in it and burn their books, and still someone would do the research. It would rise again. The facts existed whether anyone cared to believe in them.
"Of what kind?"
"I read the books."
"And what did they show you?"
Zacharias spread his hands. "That our most basic and most primal attitudes are right, had we listened to their wording," he said calmly. "That it is magic that matters, not blood and not birth and not wealth. Once, we used that to justify poor pureblood families climbing to the ranks of the great, as long as a sufficiently powerful head guided them. And it was used to excuse the actions of the son or daughter of a poor parent." Miriam's eyes narrowed. Zacharias wondered what tones and inflections she had heard in those particular words. He hoped they were the ones he had meant to put there. "They had their magic, and their magic should shine unclouded, not dimmed by the stupid or thoughtless decision of a weaker mother. Or father."
"And, Zacharias?"
"Hermione is very strong," said Zacharias thoughtfully. "So is Hannah Abbott, a Muggleborn student in my House. And some others, like Justin, whom you've met, aren't that strong, but they can recognize power, and follow it because they know that magic so pure has a claim on them that no other allegiance can. They fought for Harry in the Midsummer battle, Mother, just as we did. The difference lies in that they didn't need rituals to convince them, or alliances. They have native honor, native recognition of magic. They have to, since magic is the only bond that brings many of them into the wizarding world at all; otherwise, they would live out their lives in ignorance of its existence. I have to admire their courage, Mother, riding a ship into uncharted waters. I don't know that I could do it, be taken from everything I've known and loved at the age of eleven and shown that I have one thing—just one thing—in common with many other people, but that a good portion of those other people would despise me for something else I had no control over, my birth."
"There are many other things that matter in our world now," said his mother. "You know this, Zacharias. Or we would simply have followed Dumbledore mindlessly, and Harry as mindlessly now."
"But that's not what we say," Zacharias insisted mildly. "We say that we're not prejudiced against Muggleborns, and that they're welcome among us, and that we would even marry them if they're strong enough." He took a deep breath. "But you don't want me to marry Hermione, Mother, even though she's strong enough."
"That is a consequence of her political attitudes, Zacharias, and not only her blood."
"But her blood is part of it."
His mother was silent.
Zacharias shook his head. "I think I need a wife like that, Mother. I would be bored in five years if I didn't have one. I might get along better with someone like Susan Bones, who's been raised to the duties of a pureblood wife and knows the pace of our rituals, but my life would be little more than dancing, of one kind or another. I am smarter than most of the people in the school, you know that. I want a challenge."
"And when your challenge deserts you to run off with another man, or wakes you in the middle of the night with her arguing?"
"I'll be sure to keep Hermione away from intelligent Muggleborn men who support house elf rights," said Zacharias, dryly. "And I would rather wake because of arguing than because of my political enemies attacking my home. With Hermione at my side, I'll see my enemies coming before they get that close."
His mother sighed. "Take a few days to think about this, Zacharias. I believe you will change your mind." And the flames flickered and vanished as she ended the firecall.
Zacharias shook his head and stood. Yes, perhaps if he had been childishly infatuated with Hermione, he would change his mind. But he had other, more practical reasons to marry her. Keeping himself from boredom for the next hundred and thirty years was a large part of that.
And what could he say? She had been right. He would be stupid to ignore that, and he was not stupid.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Indigena Apparated into being near her house, and then paused. There were lights in Thornhall where there should be none. Only her house elves were in the house, awaiting her return, and they did not need light, their large eyes seeing more clearly at night than ever humans' did.
She sped her steps as she moved forward. The thorns on her back slid out of their sheaths and twined restlessly in the air, looking for someone to stab. Indigena rubbed their bark, letting the bumps beneath her fingers soothe her rage, and then reached out and opened the door.
A lamp burned in the hall. Indigena saw no house elf near it. She paused, looking around, listening, the thorny rose on her wrist whose poison would kill in two minutes lifting its head. Its petals rustled as it sniffed for danger. Indigena could smell nothing, though, save a faint, warm scent that was like her own, if she had visited sometime in the last few days and moved through several rooms.
That made her narrow down her suspicions as to whom it could be, at least. There were only a few people who both smelled like her and were sufficiently powerful to get through the wards. But Indigena could not imagine why they would want to. She had gone to Voldemort, had fulfilled the honor debt that Yaxley had owed him because her nephew Feldspar had refused to return and join him. How dare they blame her now, if they were here to blame her?
With stiff steps, she walked into her study and stood there, regarding the woman in front of the bookshelves silently. She did not look up, but Indigena had no doubt she was aware of her presence. Indigena was not the only one in the family to have made sacrifices in return for gifts, nor even the only one whose sacrifices had made her less than human.
"Lazuli," she said at last.
Her sister set the book she held carefully back down, then turned to face Indigena. She looked as lovely as always, pale, slender. The striped shadows on her face could have come from the lit lamps. Indigena eyed her hands, but Lazuli wore her trademark heavy robes. One would have to go up and feel her arms before one could find the damage done to them.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
Lazuli nodded once, as if she had expected the question. Her eyes were as bright a blue as the gem she was named after, her dark hair heavy and long as the robes were. She and Indigena did not look like sisters at all, but that was only fair; they had had different fathers. "I came to see if you had abandoned the house," she said, voice as soft and fine as drifting dust. "If you had, by rights, Thornhall belongs to me."
Indigena shook her head once, in weariness. "Lazuli, you know where I am. You know what I am. None of that gives you a right to assume me dead, and none of that is sufficient excuse to be in a house where most of the plants would murder you on scent." She moved a step forward. "You have been here for days. And you could always have owled me to ask such a simple question. I asked once before." Her thorns began stirring on her back again. "What are you doing here?"
Lazuli studied her in thoughtful silence. Indigena had never been able to intimidate her when she was fully human, nor even after she began weaving plants beneath her skin, but she had hoped this more drastic change after Parkinson's blood curses would help. It did not seem it did. Lazuli might have been regarding a cat puffed up and hissing at her for all the reaction she showed.
"You surely must know." Her voice had at least a hint of surprise, when minutes had passed with Indigena refusing to answer this time. "Well. Not know. But you know what I did, what gift I chose. Does it surprise you to learn that I am interested to hear a vates is moving about in the world?"
And Indigena had to turn a corner and face something she had never suspected she would. Most of the Yaxley family, though they practiced Dark magic and were unafraid to walk the shadows, did not join in the wars of Light and Dark. Feldspar had been the single, stupid exception, and he was Peridot's son, not Lazuli's, so his stupidity was understandable. Indigena had been the answer to that forgetfulness. She had never thought she would have to face one of her family across a battlefield. Voldemort could offer them nothing, and nor could Harry.
"A vates has been moving in the world for the last year, Lazuli," she said. "Why choose his side now?"
"Did I say I was choosing his side?" Still soft and fine voice, still no trace of a smile. That was what Indigena found hardest to comprehend about her sister, the lack of any human warmth, the refusal to turn a hair. Lucius Malfoy was more human, given that he gloated over his enemies. Indigena would have said she herself was more human, but with the shrubbery growing under her skin, she couldn't claim that any more. "I am merely interested. And the reason I could feel him, Lazuli, was that he stepped into the paths between Light and Dark. He may, someday, grow interested in what lurks there. He may, someday, wish to help Jacinth."
Indigena snorted in spite of herself. "You chose what she was to be yourself, Lazuli." It still stunned her, sometimes, what Lazuli had given up in pursuit of improvement not for herself, but for her child. A Seer had told her, accurately enough, that Lazuli would never bear the daughter she wanted by lying with any man; her fate was to have sons, or stay barren. So Lazuli had found and lain with something nonhuman, a nameless beast that skittered between Light and Dark. Jacinth was born half-human only, and Lazuli would be executed if she so much as mentioned the name of the father's species to anyone else. They were—not native to the paths between Dark and Light, but something wizards had bound there, and feared, and forgotten long ago. But if they found that a witch had summoned one and given it partial access to the wizarding world, even if it was only through the gateway of her body and a child of impure blood, they could remember.
Indigena eyed Lazuli's arms again. "What are you missing today?" she asked.
She blinked in shock when her sister answered the challenge by undoing the sleeves of her robes and pushing them up. Her arms were very slender, not much more than bone. Huge chunks of flesh were taken from them, bloodless, worried by invisible teeth. As Indigena watched, another vanished. They would regrow tomorrow, and be taken again, and again, and every day for the rest of Lazuli's life. She had accepted that as the price for Jacinth's fathering.
Indigena did not want to face her sister on the battlefield. More than that, though, she did not want Lazuli's indomitable will behind Harry.
"He wouldn't be able to do anything for you," she warned. "Not when the beasts out of the paths can't survive except by devouring other things."
"He freed the Dementors," said Lazuli. "He freed the werewolves. He is freeing the house elves, whom many purebloods would claim we cannot survive without." Her voice was water with the moon reflected in it. "I have already freed my elves."
Indigena stared at her.
"They were frightening Jacinth."
"Please, sister." Indigena made some effort to swallow, to speak calmly. "You know that the Dark Lord will win. He is too clever, and Harry is too weak. My Lord knows magic he has not yet used on the battlefield. He is immortal." She knew what the means of that immortality was, and she briefly wished she could tell Lazuli, so she would understand how hopeless Harry's cause was, but her Lord had bound her by oath to say no word about it except to another Death Eater. "He has his methods of building up another cadre of faithful followers. You will doom yourself, and Jacinth, if you join Harry. He will lose, and the Dark Lord will destroy you and the daughter you love."
Lazuli shook her head. Indigena wondered why, until she said, "He will face Jacinth's father if he tries that. I have much to gain from the vates, Indigena, and nothing to lose. You are lost to Yaxley in any case. And if someday my daughter can walk in the sunlight, her heritage acknowledged by all, her father sometimes free to attend at her side—I would pay much."
"We are going to defeat him," said Indigena softly.
"You consider yourself a Death Eater, sister?"
"I am bound," said Indigena, a little more sharply than she meant to. "I had no choice in that, just as you would have had none had the Dark Lord chosen you. And I've always known what my road cost. They call me Thorn Bitch. I know it. Even now I am doing things I would not do if I were free, spinning webs that will upend the world. But, still, sister. Vita desinit, decus permanit. I know the motto of our family as well as you do."
Lazuli nodded. "And if I choose Harry's side, I will hold by him as firmly as you hold by your Lord."
Indigena felt a deep sorrow engulf her as she gazed at her sister. There was nothing she could do, no way that she could end this. She could not have forced Lazuli to do anything even if she were free. Of course, if she were free, Lazuli's determination to join Harry would just be the amusing matter of a joke, not the difference between life and death, as it would be now.
She knew it was irrational, to fear her own sister this much. But ever since Lazuli had chosen as she had, to be devoured each day for as long as she lived and consider it small price for her snake-eyed daughter, Indigena did not think anything could truly oppose her. Let her join Harry, and the Dark Lord's victory had just become that much less sure, Horcruxes and all.
And there were others—wizards and witches, Dark and Light alike, who had mated with creatures other than Veela, the only magical species widely recognized as having the legal right to cross with humans. There were children with glamours on their ears, on their eyes, on their hands to give them the right number of fingers or hide extra ones. If Harry could command Lazuli's allegiance, he might be able to command theirs. It was a force Indigena had not even anticipated him calling on.
"If you were only concerned about honor," Lazuli said, bringing her out of her daze, "you would not care, sister. You would fulfill your oath and leave me to fulfill mine. I do not think you are entirely his, even now."
Indigena lifted her head. "Thornhall is still not yours," she said. "The question you came to have answered is answered. Leave, Lazuli."
Lazuli nodded and turned away, another chunk of meat vanishing from her right arm. Indigena watched her go, then turned feverishly to the shelves and drew forth the books she had come looking for, on the old, old forces of self-sacrifice, of love and hatred and how they could be to used to hold and hurt. Her Lord wished to know if love, after all, was the force that would oppose him, and for that Indigena needed more than Odi et Amo, useful as it had proved in other things.
At least one good thing had come of her sister's implacable behavior, she consoled herself as she turned away. She now knew a threat that might help Harry and oppose her Lord, and could warn him about it before it manifested. Perhaps it might give him time to ensnare those who had mated with Dark creatures as allies. He had once won werewolves by offering them freedom. He could do the same thing this time.
She had almost left the study before it occurred to her to go back and look at the book her sister had laid down when she came in. The title did not reassure her at all.
The Paths of the Lords. It had a section on the vates, and on what it meant to be vates. Knowing Lazuli, she had used the book to look for answers on whether Harry would be likely to help Jacinth, and found them there.
Indigena swallowed. She had to trust in her Lord, in her own honor, and the plans she had made. Harry was likely to fall before the calendar year was out, or perhaps the school year; her Lord had not been specific in his gloating. Then she might never need to face her sister, and Lazuli and Jacinth could remain in the shadows, letting them shelter them, instead of chancing exposure to a disgusted wizarding world and a harsh war
