And now, things get worse.

Chapter Eighty-Nine: Luna's Gift

Luna slipped her hand gently out of Padma's and stood. They had been studying for the length of time it would take hippogriff teeth to break apart in salt water. That meant that Luna had to go now, and hunt the object that hated the whole world.

"Luna?"

Padma was looking at her with a worried expression, but she had no reason to worry. Luna was walking down friendly stairs, and by now all the portraits and the other wary objects in the castle knew her and would watch out for her. Even if Luna fell out of sight of a thing which could talk to humans, the things that could see her would talk to the portraits, and the portraits would talk to someone else. Luna was carefully guarded as she had never been before, which was good, because Luna found it as hard to talk to other people sometimes as if she were made of stone herself.

"I'll come back when the moon-glass is full," she promised, and flicked her wand at an hourglass that stood on their table and would brighten as the moon arose. The hourglass came to life at the enchantment, singing out gratitude for being used. Luna liked the moon-glass, but she did wish it would be quieter sometimes; it was so loud it drowned other voices out. She kissed Padma and made her way through the Ravenclaw common room, pausing at the door.

The door was telling over the tales of its opening during the day to itself, since it didn't expect any more visitors. To many doors in the castle, curfew meant the time they wouldn't be opened any more. But Luna had to open it one more time. Luckily, the door of the Ravenclaw common room was cheerful and liked to add to its tales. She slipped through with murmured thanks, and heard the count begin again behind her as she started towards the Headmistress's office.

As she walked, she expanded her senses beyond her head like a lion's mane, or a pair of ruffled and pricked ears. She could do this, now; it was new, but it was useful. She would use it to hear the voices of distant objects, and those which normally never spoke even to her unless she directly asked them: the solid, sullen foundation stones, the tapestries whose tempers changed with every passing breeze, the lintels whose oldest grief was at being thought of merely as part of the doorways.

She was trying to hear the object that hated the whole world. It should be somewhere nearby. The other times she'd felt it, it was always in the Headmistress's office, and even if it moved, the way she thought it did, then it should leave some ripples of its passage behind, dark tales incised into the walls.

She was going to find it. The library tables had overheard Harry muttering to himself the other day about dangerous objects, and surely that was the most dangerous object in Hogwarts.

A stone complained when she stepped on it. Luna knelt, stroked it, and then rose and went on her way, feeling its contented purr roll along in the floor beneath her, sending other stones into a paroxysm of contentment. That made her walk a little more joyous than it might have been.

SSSSSSSSSSSSS

"Sit down, Harry."

Harry took a seat in front of Snape's desk, keeping his eyebrows politely raised. His guardian's looks had sharpened today, away from the worry that he'd seen in Draco and towards anger. Harry was sure he must have made a mistake in Potions class or elsewhere to earn that fury, but try as he might, he could not remember it.

"Yes, sir?" he asked.

"How many times have I told you to call me by my first name?"

Harry cocked his head. Maybe that was my mistake? Snape had spoken to him in Potions class today, and Harry had responded with a "Yes, sir," but most of the time Snape didn't want his first name used in front of other students anyway. If Harry had thawed his resentment, he might have felt it then, because Snape had given no sign that the name-use he expected of Harry had changed yet again.

But the resentment lay deep in the icepack at the back of his mind, so he said, "Sorry, Severus. What is it?"

Snape sat in silence for a few moments more, as if considering how best to phrase matters. Then he leaned forward and said, "Harry, I notice that you still have not undergone a breakdown of the kind I would have expected when you learned about Lucius Malfoy's betrayal."

Harry smiled proudly. Oh, that. Well, at least I can tell him he doesn't have to worry anymore. "No, I haven't," he agreed. "I've managed to change things, Severus. My reactions are my own to control now, and I'm no longer obsessing over my latest failure the way I used to do. Draco talked to me about the same thing. I've managed to do most of what people asked me to in the last few weeks." He heard a sturdy pride in his voice. After a moment's consideration, he dismissed it as a harmless emotion. It could stay there.

Snape's frown only deepened. "I can only guess, Harry, that your arrival at this unusual emotional state is achieved through use of Occlumency pools, again," he said, his voice heavy with disappointment. "I cannot permit that to continue. You will allow me to examine you with Legilimency and start up a slow process of leaking through those pools. If you think we cannot permit you to have a collapse about Lucius, still less can we permit the kind of complete breakdown that you had to go through in Woodhouse."

Well, I should have known that any unusual behavior would only worry him. He's never been one to believe in the first signs of my healing, unless he was the one who prompted them. Harry nodded, and leaned forward. "Of course, Severus. I know I'm not doing anything wrong, with Occlumency or otherwise, so you can look at my mind."

Snape blinked, obviously caught off-guard. That increased Harry's hope, a little. Snape was relying on past patterns of behavior to assume things were wrong. When he saw how different things really were, he would have to admit that this time, the past patterns of behavior were completely destroyed.

Of course, Harry knew that Snape probably wouldn't like the image of the ice at the back of his mind that kept his emotions in stillness until he needed them. His particular prejudice against them would be that they were solid encrustations in Harry's mind, and Snape didn't like solid encrustations; he had distrusted Harry's box long before it caused trouble. Snape held to the old view of mental control, that an Occlumens had to embody his emotions in some fluid construct like wind or water, or else he would go mad. But Harry had encountered a book in the course of his reading about some way to get around Unassailable Curses that suggested that was not true. Solid images could work, as long as they were solid images that could change. Ice was ideal, since it could melt and flow into water, a fluid container, and freeze again to keep the emotions out of the way.

But Snape probably still wouldn't like it, even if Harry was able to show him that it worked. So Harry would just not show the ice-banks to him. He would go on for a few more months and demonstrate to Snape how well it worked, without a breakdown, so that he would have to admit his fears had been for nothing, the way he wouldn't do with only a few weeks' evidence.

And to reassure Snape that everything was fine, he intended to use another trick he'd learned from the book about Unassailable Curses. Once, wizards had believed that intense mental concentration on the condition that allowed one to break the Unassailable Curse—for example, thinking like a member of one particular family if the Curse said that only a member of that family could pass the barrier—would work. It hadn't, but the method those wizards worked out was useful to other arts of mental control. So Harry conjured up a curtain of normal emotions and floated it in front of the icepacks as Snape gently blew into his mind.

The Legilimency examined him quite thoroughly. Harry let him see the pools and all the normal areas of his mind, the great steel skeleton covered with budding leaves. The ice was at the very back of his thoughts, curled around the tree's roots, where Snape would only have expected to find unconscious impulses and half-formed desires anyway. The screen of emotions gave the impression that that part of Harry's mind was absolutely normal, unfrozen, untainted.

The wind blew out again. Harry opened his eyes, and smiled into Snape's perplexed face.

"Do you see, Severus?" he asked, keeping himself from formality just in time. To him, "sir" was a more affectionate term of endearment than a first name. He called both his parents by their first names now. He might think of people however he liked, by surname or title or first name, but what he called them face-to-face was a different matter. If Snape had allowed the formal distance between them to persist, an expandable space that Harry could retreat into or come back from as he had need, then Harry thought he might have felt even closer to him than he did now. "I'm fine. I just managed to tell myself that I couldn't break down right now, that people needed me, and so I kept the balance."

And that was true. It was what had decided him on using the ice, which he'd already half-toyed with the idea of doing, but had given up when he realized that he'd need access to all his emotions during the month of April and the Walpurgis ritual. After that, though—well, Draco had been so upset, and Hawthorn had been so upset, and the Ministry was in flux and in chaos, and it would have been so easy to add to Snape's burdens, too, if Harry were not watching out for that. So he slid the emotions into the ice, and waited to tell people until they would have to admit how much more efficient this was, and that it worked for him. He could still retrieve the emotions whenever he liked. He wasn't the cold monster he'd been for the majority of his first two years at Hogwarts. But he was in control of them and how he expressed them.

He thought this perfectly fine.

"I had thought," Snape said at last, "that you were upset from the encounters with Lucius and your parents."

"Upset for Draco," said Harry truthfully. "Upset for Hawthorn. And I wish someone else could have healed Lily. But that didn't happen." He shrugged, and sat looking earnestly at Snape.

He supposed it might be that earnestness that worried Snape and Draco. He couldn't help it, though. His freezing of his emotions had cleared his mind wonderfully. He could think ahead now, and forestall hunger by seeing when he would need to eat, and forestall sleepiness by resting. And since he knew exactly when he needed to do certain things, he freed more time for unexpected crises. This was the way he needed to function, he thought, the way a leader would have to be able to: ready to deal with whatever arrived suddenly in his life, and able to keep the rest of his life foaming about, attending to others' needs.

"I have a potion," Snape said quietly, "that I planned to give you, Harry. It would have healed any gaping wounds left in your mind from your emotions. But now…" He cut himself off and shook his head. "It seems I was mistaken."

"You were," Harry agreed, with a small smile. "But pleasantly mistaken, which is unusual, and good when it happens."

In the end, Snape had to let him go. Harry hummed under his breath as he walked towards his bedroom. One Wizengamot Elder, Hollyshead, had already written back to him in disbelief, demanding how he could want to let wizards and witches who slept with nonhumans "evade their responsibility to the magical community." He listed several points about how wizards were dying out, and more of them should be marrying and having children with humans, not less. Few people would want to marry the half-human children of such unions.

Harry knew exactly how to answer that letter, thanks to the ice. Before the ice, it might have made him so upset that he couldn't think.

He wondered, for a moment, what would happen if months passed and he showed Snape and Draco how he had coped, and they still hated it, still insisted that he should feel every spontaneous emotion that came along.

Well, then I can show them I'm just following the lessons that Joseph taught me, he reasoned. He taught me to take some time for myself and do what I wanted to do. And this is what I want to do, and it helps other people, and it doesn't hurt me. I don't see how they can really object.

SSSSSSSSSS

Luna arrived in the Headmistress's office and stood still for a moment, gazing around. It was late enough at night that the Headmistress had already retired to bed. Luna could see the gleam of her fire under the door on the other side of the room, and hear the soft clucks of the pieces of wood talking to each other, arguing good-naturedly about who had been the most interesting person to watch sleep in the bed.

No wards spoke at her arrival; the walls and the floors knew Luna, and they would get in the way of the wards and keep them from responding when it was necessary to let her slip by. Luna appreciated the gesture, and she thought Headmistress McGonagall would, too. She didn't deserve to be disturbed, not this late, when she had the problems of a massive school to take care of. And things always grew worse near the end of the year, Luna knew, even if she didn't quite understand why. Students kicked stairs more often, and threw books across the room. Padma had tried to explain that it had to do with exams. But Luna didn't think that could be it. One studied, and one got good marks—most of the time, if one was in Ravenclaw—or one didn't. Who would worry so much about it?

She stood in the center of the office and turned in a circle. It hadn't changed since the last time she saw it. Bookshelves stood along the walls, still communing busily with them; the Headmistress had moved them in only a little more than a year ago, and it took wizarding furniture a long time to become acclimated to a new position, let alone an entirely new room. Luna didn't dare think about Muggle furniture, which she had heard was shifted around almost from moment to moment, and without the use of magic, so that it often collided with numerous rugs and bricks. A perch sat in the middle of the room, and sang of the phoenix gone last year. The Headmistress's desk hulked, thick with locks and wards and its own importance. The Sword of Gryffindor hung in a glass case on the wall behind the desk, more dull and unresponsive than most of the others; Luna knew that happened with magical objects who had once seen a life of excitement and service and were now relegated to museum pieces. It had taken forever for her to persuade her father that his little belt knife, with a hilt rumored to have been forged by Merlin himself, would much rather hang on his belt and be used to cut paper occasionally than stay above the mantle and never do anything.

But nothing in the room felt like an object that hated the whole world.

Luna shook her head slightly. She hadn't felt the object here all year. When she had felt it before, though, the night she had come to tell the Headmistress what the chairs said about Gilbert Rovenan, it had been unmistakable, a flare of dark loathing. But Luna hadn't known until she left the office that it was in the object itself. And then she thought the Headmistress knew about it and had attended to it.

She should have remembered that other people didn't listen, except for Harry, who sometimes listened to magical creatures. If you didn't have arms and legs, most wizards disregarded you.

She moved forward and began to examine the walls, running her fingers lightly over them, trying to find some hint of a crack or a seam where the object could be hiding, and trying to attract the walls' attention to talk about the present instead of the past. It wasn't easy. This was an old, proud room, and pone to ignoring people who weren't part of its history.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Snape paced back and forth in his office, deep in thought. Part of him was adamant that he should have forced Harry to take the silver potion—the part that thought there was something off in the picture of Harry's mind. But his son was happy, and healthy, and mentally sound. He should have rejoiced in the news, not been sure that it meant something even more wrong.

A sharp knock sounded on his door. Snape turned, arrested. The person had knocked on the part of his door that had no wards, and only a few people in the school could see spells well enough to do that. He doubted Harry would have come back so soon, or that Minerva would be walking around Hogwarts this late at night.

"Come," he called, lowering the wards with a few waves of his wand.

Peter stepped into the room, his face haggard. Snape examined him in some concern. It was not a surprise that their Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher should be able to see his wards, of course, or use a charm that would make his face look normal to even determined observation. But Snape did not like the fact that Peter's face appeared to have increased to three times the number of shadows he'd last seen it covered in.

"I've tried to stave off the dreams by telling myself they're just images of a time long past, and they can't hurt me," Peter said, his voice raspy. "But I can't do it anymore. I need some Dreamless Sleep Potion, Severus. Please."

Snape nodded and went to his shelves without complaint. He would hardly refuse potion to someone who looked like that.

"What kind of dreams are these?" he asked over his shoulder as he blended the powder with water. He generally kept Dreamless Sleep in a powdered form, except for the supplies storied in Pomfrey's hospital wing. Dreamless Sleep was one of the few potions students would sneak into his offices to try and steal, otherwise. But few of them were good enough at Potions arithmetic to know exactly how much water and powder they needed to mix together, even if they did surpass his wards. "I know you were troubled by nightmares earlier in the year."

"These are nightmares, and worse than nightmares," Peter said. "They're—they feel like the meditations of another part of me, a part that never left Azkaban, and where the Dementors stayed for years longer than they really did. I sit in my cell, and relive my own happy memories, and get angrier and angrier. But this time, there's no phoenix web to break. There's just my rage and hatred against my former friends to stew in. I loathe it. It's terrible."

"You should hate them," Snape murmured, studying the level of liquid in the vial with a practiced eye. There, that will do. He carried the vial back to Peter rather ceremoniously. "What they did to you was inexcusable."

"Not unless I decide it is," said Peter. He looked longingly at the potion, but did not swallow it immediately. He knew better; he would collapse on the floor of Snape's office. "They're a part of my life that's over and done with. Good night, Severus." He turned towards the door.

Perhaps it was the first name. Perhaps it was a real longing to know how the rat had accomplished it. Whatever it was made Snape call after Peter. "How did you do it, Pettigrew? That letting go of your hatred, your reversion into a simpler frame of mind?" He wasn't quite able to keep himself from sneering out the words, but he told himself he had a right to sound like that. This man had been one of his four tormentors in school, and then by all appearances a traitor to the Order of the Phoenix, one who had received only a bit more punishment than Snape for deeds far less laudable. Snape still did not really know him, or at least did not know this calm, patient man as a continuation of the bumbling, sycophantic boy.

Peter glanced back at him. "I asked myself what I would rather live for," he said simply. "Vengeance, or possibility. And the Sanctuary helped, too."

Snape curled his lip.

"I know that you don't think it did," Peter said. "Of course, I actually talked to a Seer at first, instead of simply suffering through the dreams. And, when I did, I came to realize that I blamed my friends less with every passing day. First, I was set on helping Harry, and if that involved bringing my friends and Dumbledore down, well, fine, but they weren't the reason I was doing it. And then I helped kill Sirius because he committed suicide with my wand, not because I wanted him dead. And then I went to the Sanctuary to heal, not primarily to hide from the Aurors. I made all those decisions with someone innocent or myself in mind, Severus, not an enemy. I think that's the problem with too many Dark wizards, really. You let your enemies rule your life."

"I know that you're still bitter, Pettigrew," said Snape stiffly, not liking the implied rebuke in Peter's words. The Light-Declared rat would tell me how to live? "I've seen you show it."

"Yes," Peter said, "but it's one emotion among many. It doesn't control my life." He lingered, eyes on Snape, saying without words whom it did control.

Snape narrowed his eyes. "Get out."

Peter went.

Snape paced in a circle for a moment, then turned restlessly towards the door. He should patrol the dungeons anyway, a task that he never quite entrusted to the Slytherin prefects alone. And if his footsteps happened to carry him to Minerva's door—well, she was one of the few people in the school whom he felt comfortable asking for advice. If she did not sleep yet, he would ask more of her.

SSSSSSSSSSSS

Luna was surprised, but not startled, when she felt the gargoyle leaping aside in obedience to a human voice. Of course someone might wish to visit the Headmistress now, and most people couldn't simply sympathize with the gargoyle's loneliness and ask it to move aside that way. There were a number of professors in the school who had the password.

Luna moved out of sight behind the Headmistress's desk. The wards flickered out and then came back again, stronger, concealing her presence. The locks whispered welcomes to her in voices like little squirts of oil. Luna asked each of them about their tumblers, and listened intently. Perhaps a tumbler in a lock was the object that hated the whole world. But as each lock reported back, she had to give up the idea. No, they would know. Most objects knew the insides of themselves much better than wizards gave them credit for, even complicated ones like watches.

The door of the office opened. Luna looked up and saw Professor Snape coming through, his face set in a scowl. He glanced around, saw the empty and dark office, and hesitated.

And then the object that hated the whole world was there.

Luna opened her eyes wide, but stood still so that it wouldn't notice she'd noticed it. She didn't think this object realized she could listen, or it would have hated her more than anyone else. Instead, it spat passion like venom at Professor Snape, who didn't notice, of course.

No. Wait. It is not angry at him. It is angry at part of him.

That didn't really make sense. Luna had the impression like a hazy bar of shadow wavering away from a light source; it existed, but it wouldn't stay still, and it wouldn't let her get a good grip on it. And she couldn't poke her head out from around the desk to see what had changed, how the object had arrived, because then Professor Snape would see her, and she would get detention, and have to spend it hurting poor defenseless cauldrons by scrubbing them too hard with a wire brush, or drowning the stones in the entrance hall that didn't like to be drowned. Besides, she didn't think the object had suddenly scuttled into the room; Professor Snape would have seen it move and hit it with a spell. He was paranoid like that.

So she remained still, analyzing her impressions, trying to understand. She had to concentrate through the voices of locks and desk and stones and walls and bookshelves, and it reminded her of trying to understand why human things mattered; it was so hard.

Then Professor Snape turned and left again, obviously having decided against knocking on the Headmistress's bedroom door.

And the object that hated the whole world left, too.

Luna carefully put her head out from around the desk and looked about. Nothing had changed. When she asked the floors, nothing had come up through them. When she asked the ceiling, nothing had come down through it. When she asked the walls, they complained of the weight of the bookshelves, but admitted nothing had crawled through them.

It was all very perplexing.

Luna left at last, because the moon-glass would be shining soon, and the office had no more tales to tell her. She asked the stones in the school to watch out for something crawling through them, though, or to tell her tales of abandoned rooms where powerful magical objects might lie. She wanted to help Harry. He listened, too.

SSSSSSSSSSSS

"Through the front door, sir?" Hope's voice was low and tense with excitement.

Rufus nodded, and briefly gripped her shoulder. The Auror grinned at him, and then slipped around the side of the house. Rufus went back to studying it, the Apollonis estate, lying far too still and peaceful under the moonlight.

The Apollonis estate, and the home of the Liberator who had helped Harry against Falco Parkinson, if his speculations were correct. And certainly the home of a man who had had artifacts the Unspeakables had seized in his home.

Hope had brought him the evidence just that morning, waving it proudly around her head. Someone had misfiled the record and done all they could to prevent it from being found short of destroying it, but Hope had finally discovered it. Yes, there had been an Unspeakable raid on the home of Cupressus Apollonis years ago, and many magical artifacts had been carried away during it and taken to the Department of Mysteries. But one had been returned to its owner: a narrow coffin-like box, just big enough for an adult wizard or witch lying with arms folded to his or her chest. The box had preservation spells on it, ones that would keep the prisoner alive and breathing and fed and watered, and also prevent him or her from breaking out.

That's the Liberator's means of confinement, Rufus thought, exultation moving through him like oil as he read the paper. And a law was passed a year later that made that kind of thing completely illegal for anyone to use on a human being. We have a reasonable enough suspicion to raid.

He had brought several Aurors with him, all Light-dedicated. Apollonis was fanatic enough that he was likely to have wards around his house that might destroy Dark or even undeclared wizards.

Hope was spreading around the back of the house, with Berrywise, and Percy shifted from foot to foot behind him like a small boy who had to go to the loo, and other pairs of Aurors were approaching from the sides. Rufus intended this to be a small enough raid that, if they really did find nothing—not that he thought they would—it wouldn't make headlines, or leave much evidence. They would step in quickly, arrest the bastard who'd been abusing his daughter, free the Liberator, and leave.

Rufus stamped his foot, and felt a savage grin break loose across his face as if in response to the movement. Merlin, this felt good, to be in the field again, to be doing something concrete, instead of having to negotiate with the Wizengamot through delicate mazes of influence that might change any moment, and might result in any one of them seeing him as under Harry's thumb. And thanks to Harry's bold, very nearly Gryffindor declaration of political war in favor of half-human children, the headache and the situation had both built to a slow boiling point. Any moment the cauldron would overflow, but there was no saying when.

He'd needed something like this to get him away from both the Wizengamot and Harry for a time.

He saw Hope's signal from the back of the house. She and Berrywise had examined the wards and found nothing they could not overcome, then.

Rufus nodded, and signaled back, waving his wand in a way that made an Augurey's call rise from it. Then he strode towards the front door, Percy tagging along at his heels.

There were wards on the front door, but most of them, as Rufus had surmised, were directed at Dark magic. He used Alohomora to attack the lock, and, when spells rose to protect it, used a special version of the Confounding Charm that old Head Auror Samara Deronda, who'd been killed in the First War, had developed to use on protective spells. The spells tried to deal with what seemed to them to be multiple unlocking charms, and in their dazzlement forgot about protecting the handle itself. Rufus worked through a few more minor wards, and flung the door open.

Cupressus Apollonis was waiting there to meet them.

Rufus leveled his wand at him. The old wizard's eyes widened a fraction, but otherwise his perfect, polished expression never faltered.

"What is the meaning of this, Minister?" he asked. "Why did you invade my home this late at night?"

Rufus suppressed the nasty impulse to ask if he would have been any more welcome if he'd raided during the day. "I have reason to believe that you're abusing one of your children, Apollonis," he said, and cast a time-delaying charm, then whispered the Manacle Curse. A pair of shackles formed in the air in front of him, gaping, awaiting Apollonis's wrists, but not darting forward quite yet. "A young daughter. You have a young daughter, don't you? Younger than Ignifer Pemberley?"

He had the satisfaction of seeing wounded pride touched to the quick in Apollonis's eyes, then. But he fought it well enough, and said, "In this house we do not speak her name. But I have a young daughter, yes. Candor. If you dare accuse me of abusing her—"

"We have reason to believe," said Rufus, as Hope and Berrywise entered through a side door, herding Apollonis's wife Artemis in front of them, "that you have shut her in a Confinement Box. We've received letters whose provenance matches this house too closely to be coincidence. Your daughter has used those letters to be a shining light on the blemish of your honor. And use of a Confinement Box on a human being is highly illegal, Apollonis, as you know."

The old bastard just stared at him, too shocked to utter a word. Rufus felt satisfaction slice him like a knife again.

"Mother? Father? What is it?"

Rufus turned. A young witch with tumbling golden curls, who looked about twenty-one years old, was entering from yet a third direction, escorted by two of his Aurors. She had blue eyes, not the yellow more common to Light pureblood families, but otherwise she looked much like Rufus had pictured her. She was certainly frightened enough.

"Candor Apollonis?" he asked.

Her gaze shot to him, and she nodded.

Rufus drew another breath. "The Liberator?"

And her face returned blackness.

Rufus frowned. She's probably frightened that her parents will punish her. He shot a glance at Cupressus and Artemis, both of whom were standing quite still. "You can speak freely in front of them, Candor," he said. "No one will hurt you."

"You're not here to take us to prison?" Candor's voice was small.

"Of course not," Rufus said. "We want to free you, and to insure that you realize you have a home and friends in the outside world. Your parents won't be able to abuse you again, I promise."

"They've never abused me," said Candor, her eyes flying wide. "What are you talking about? What do you mean, freeing me? Who's the Liberator?"

"If you had listened to me, Minister," Cupressus Apollonis said, his voice low and ugly, "you would have had time to hear me say that I sold the Confinement Box six months after the outcast's miserable departure from this house. I have not owned it for nearly as long as Candor has been alive."

Rufus glanced back and forth between both of them. They are lying. One or both of them. They must be. I cannot—I cannot have made a mistake.

Hope caught his eye. Rufus nodded to her. "Will you agree to take Veritaserum?" he asked Cupressus.

The old bastard lifted his head proudly. "In the name of the Light, I have nothing to hide."

A tense silence succeeded that announcement, while Hope fetched the vial of Veritaserum from her robe pocket and carefully placed three drops on Cupressus's tongue. Candor said quietly that she wanted some, too, and so Hope crossed over and fed it to her. Rufus clenched his hand on his wand, and tried not to feel the wavering certainty behind every Auror's eyes except for Percy and Hope.

"Have you ever abused your daughter Candor?" he asked Cupressus, when the usual test questions to establish known facts like name and location had passed.

"No."

Rufus hissed between his teeth. "Have you ever locked any child of yours in a Confinement Box?"

"No. No Light parent would do such things to his children."

"Have you ever tried to support the Order of the Phoenix? Or Falco Parkinson?"

Cupressus actually laughed at that one, despite the numbing effect of the drug. "No. Why would I want to?"

Rufus turned to Candor without answering. "Did you ever write me letters under the name of the Liberator?"

"No." Candor's eyes were wide, unfocused.

"Did you ever suffer any abuse at the hands of your parents? Father or mother?" Rufus glanced at the silent, watching, white-faced Artemis.

"No. Never."

And that was it. That was over. He'd botched things. And badly.

Hope, nearly as pale as Artemis, caught his eye again, and mouthed Obliviate? Rufus considered it for a moment. He knew his failure would be all over the papers in a few days if he did not.

But his own morals made him hesitate. He'd Obliviated Wizengamot Elders into thinking they'd voted for him to assume absolute power during the Ritual of Cincinnatus, and he'd promised himself solemnly that that was as far as he would walk down that particular slippery road. Could he justify going farther now?

"Don't worry about it, Minister," said Cupressus, his voice icy, but full of absolute truth. "There are wards on this house which prevent me from forgetting anything which happens inside it. I promise you, no Memory Charm will work. The walls and the doors themselves would tell me if I forgot something so important."

Rufus turned to face Cupressus, his heartbeat hollow and fast. The Light wizard's yellow eyes were narrow, and the hatred in them was very terrible.

"I shall not forget this insult, Minister," said Cupressus, the effects of Veritaserum already passing from his voice. "Never."

Rufus inclined his head and wheeled around to leave, calling his Aurors to him with a lift of his hand. There was nothing else he could do. Berrywise let Artemis's arms fall with a slightly lost expression, and the other Aurors who had been standing behind Candor followed him.

"What will we do now, sir?" Percy asked softly as they came out onto the lawn again, under the moonlight that no longer seemed as bright as it had just a few minutes before.

Rufus stared at the sky. He could hear Cupressus telling his wife he wanted to firecall someone in the moments before the door closed.

He sighed. "Go back to the Ministry. Put up with it." Suffer it, as I surely will have to when the news gets out.

Perhaps I should have left the Liberator's rescue up to the Liberator herself, as she begged me to do.

But the idea nagged at him. All the information they'd had access to fitted Apollonis so perfectly. If not him, then who?

SSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Aurora stirred up with a half-shout when her Floo connection opened. She'd fallen asleep in a chair in front of the fire, and her neck was sore and one arm asleep from her leaning on it. She shook it out now, and waited for a familiar face to appear, half-knowing it must be bad news. No one ever firecalled in the middle of the night for any other reason.

However, the face that formed in the fire was only vaguely familiar. Cupressus Apollonis.

Aurora stared for an impolite moment before she found her tongue, and knelt down to be more fairly on his level. "How may I help you, sir? It's an unexpected pleasure to have you contact me, but I fear, from the time, that nothing good has happened to you."

Cupressus gave her what was not a smile so much as a baring of teeth. Aurora knew it could not be directed at her, though. She had not stepped, even obliquely, on the interests of Apollonis. She waited.

"Madam Whitestag," Cupressus said after a few moments, "the Minister has…made a grave mistake with me and mine. And not so very long ago, Harry vates made his third grave mistake with me. The first was taking a child I have sired away. The second was accepting the support of families sworn to me. The third was publishing private correspondence. Now the Minister has made me lose what little faith I still had in Harry's allies, and he said enough to convince me he was acting with the vates's support and cooperation." He paused.

"And?" Aurora prompted, hardly able to believe what this sounded like.

"I find myself much more minded to join the alliance that you and Elder Juniper are weaving between you." Cupressus fixed her with a direct stare. "There are particulars to be worked out. But not the fact of my allegiance."

Aurora caught her breath, and smiled. Sometimes, perhaps, good news does come in the middle of the night.