Chapter Ninety: Learning to Relax

Draco leaned his elbows on the table and studied Harry through the corner of his eye. Harry was reading a letter that had come in by an official Ministry owl that morning, his face grave. Naturally, of course, most of the people at the Slytherin table were trying to see over his shoulder, including Millicent.

Draco wasn't. He was observing the way Harry's face changed instead, how his grave expression melted in a few moments. He tucked the letter into the pocket of his robe where he usually kept most correspondence, and nodded at nothing, and went back to eating.

"What was the letter about, Harry?" Millicent asked. Draco wondered if he ought to despise her for showing her eagerness like that, but he couldn't, not really. If she hadn't asked, someone else would have.

"What letter?" Harry raised his eyebrows.

Millicent laughed, and so did most of the other Slytherins, assuming that Harry was trying to make a joke. And a moment later he laughed with them, and shook his head, and said, "The Minister. Private business, I'm afraid. If it wasn't sensitive news, like the color of his pants, then be assured I'd tell you."

That won him another round of snickers, and Harry turned back to his breakfast, a half-smile lingering on his face that dropped off almost immediately.

It was a small incident. But it gave Draco another piece of the evidence he needed. And if it didn't set the hot anger boiling in him that the thestral incident had, it conjured an icy, needle-sharp anger, which seemed to go in through one of his ears. He sat back and controlled his breathing as best he could.

Harry, of course, even when suppressing his emotions the way Draco was now certain he was doing, was unfairly good at noticing other people's. "What's the matter, Draco? Did something fall into your breakfast?"

"No," Draco breathed, eyes focused on the wall over Harry's head. "It's nothing for right now. Ask me later."

Harry bit his lip, then nodded. Already his face had lost its look of concern. He touched the parchment in his pocket instead, and seemed to be thinking about whatever the Minister's letter had said.

Draco sat back, and plotted his line of attack. He could move now, point out that Harry's Occlumency, or whatever it was, was interfering with his daily life. It wasn't much, but even a tiny lapse of attention could be enough to condemn them all if this happened in the middle of war.

Or he could wait for a few days, and then ask Harry for what he'd always planned to ask. He was going to be seventeen on the fifth of June, coming of age in the wizarding world. The gifts presented on a wizard's or witch's seventeenth birthday were traditionally some of the richest he or she would ever receive, so what Draco wanted from Harry wouldn't be out of place.

Or he could do something else, so that he would know exactly how to phrase it when it came time for his birthday.

Draco decided on the third course of action after thinking about it for a short time. He and Harry had Defense Against the Dark Arts today, and Professor Pettigrew was mostly kind and understanding even to the students he caught sleeping in class. Draco wouldn't pay for inattentiveness there the way he would in Transfiguration or Potions, or even Charms, where almost all their work was practical now.

Defense it is.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Wherever he went that day, walking from class to class or sitting in the Great Hall or working on homework in their room during one of their free periods, Harry saw Scrimgeour's words in the morning letter floating in front of him.

June 1st, 1997

Dear Harry:

I am sorry to have to ask this of you, especially when my own faults have added to the weight of your burden. But I must. If I do not, then we are risking political disaster now or very near in the future.

I will ask that you hold off on your campaign to make other wizards aware of half-human children and how common they may really be, under the glamours, or even under human skins that hold permanent Transfigurations. At the moment, this is throwing the Wizengamot off-balance, giving them another issue to consider when they are already fully occupied with the werewolves and with what they see as my incompetence and my favoring of Dark or undeclared wizards over Light. And it is leading to a paranoia that is linked to and feeding off the kind they feel for werewolves. Werewolves can be distinguished by certain subtle signs if they have borne the curse long enough, and there is always the ultimate test of locking them in a room on the full moon if one must know, but half-human children are savagely protected by their parents, and sometimes they may not even know they are half-human. They could be anyone around us. That has prompted the Wizengamot towards fears that anyone and anything—forgive the phrasing—could be an ally of yours, but look like an ally of theirs.

I do not say that you will never be able to win rights for half-human children. But it will need to wait until the issue with the werewolves is settled, which may be some time. Every emissary we have sent to the packs has returned with the message that they are only interested in listening to wizards who have sworn to the Alliance of Sun and Shadow. This, understandably, is making the Wizengamot more upset.

I believe I made the mistake I did with Cupressus Apollonis because I wanted so badly to win a political victory, one that would prove my fitness to be Minister, which my enemies are now questioning, beyond a doubt. I slipped up through overtiredness and over-eagerness. No one can be perfect, of course, but a Minister must come as close to it as possible, and surely a vates cannot be far behind. Please, Harry. I ask for more time both for my own sake, so that I may more fully acknowledge and repair my error, and for your own, so that you do not fall into the same trap I did.

Yours,

Rufus Scrimgeour.

Harry had to admit he would have been happier with a more definite date and time. "Someday" had been the one word that showed up the most often in correspondence with centaurs, with goblins, with werewolves, with nearly everyone in the magical world who was not a Light pureblood or halfblood. "Someday" the Ministry would alter the laws that forbade Muggleborn wizards and witches' use of magic at home during the summer, even to save lives. "Someday" the werewolves would be acknowledged as full partners in human society, and "someday" the Wizengamot would consider certain cases that could have made the difference and set precedents. This was looking like another case of "someday."

But it was not fair to put Scrimgeour on edge, either.

Worry and anger tried to rise, especially when he considered that he had made Scrimgeour's situation worse without knowing it—and he should have known it, should have been able to study it. But he hadn't, and now this had happened.

Harry shook his head a bit and drained the emotions off, locking them back into ice where they belonged. He absolutely must have a clear mind to deal with this, or anything he did would just worsen the situation again.

"Perhaps you would like to come up to the front of the classroom, vates, and practice your Transfiguration skill on this chair?" Henrietta's sharp tone let him know that she'd noticed the headshake.

Harry produced wry amusement in himself and rose to his feet, coming forward. He had to change the chair into a fly—hard on almost all levels, since it was not only the Transfiguration of a nonliving object into a living one, but a considerable difference in size. And almost none of the students actually knew what a fly looked like, how the legs and jaws bent, at least until Henrietta made them sit down, use magnification spells, and study the results. Harry hoped that he remembered just how the mandibles fitted together, how the wings were supposed to align over the back, and what the buzzing noise it made when it flew was like.

He faced the chair, and though he intoned the incantation Henrietta had given them aloud, he was forcing his magic through different channels, above and beyond the spell. He wanted to change this chair into a fly. He made that the goal of his desire, and sent all his focus towards that.

Halfway through the spell, he realized he was thinking about how to answer Scrimgeour's letter again.

And then he realized that he'd frozen the determination he needed to send the magic to one place, changing it back into ice, and leaving a great deal of loose, unfettered power hanging about in the classroom. The power darted in random directions, great wheels of yellow-green lightning that were not deadly until they touched something, Harry thought, but which he couldn't rein in yet.

He hesitated, trying to decide which emotion would be best to deal with this, trying to unfreeze and unlock it.

"Vinculi!"

Henrietta's magic swept through the room a moment behind the Imprisonment Hex, jumping like a well-trained dog to capture Harry's magic in its mouth. She was nearly as strong as Snape, and the Imprisonment Hex had been designed to allow a much weaker wizard to contain powerful magic, as long as it didn't have a directing will behind it. In a moment, Harry's dancing pinwheels slowed, and then bumped together until they coalesced into a yellow-green fog. Henrietta waved her wand, never taking her eyes from Harry, until he was able to hold out a hand and call the loose magic back to him. He could feel his cheeks flaming; a small leak had burst from the ice at the top of his packed emotions, and embarrassment had trickled out.

"Class is dismissed," Henrietta said.

There was a wave of wondering half-protests; Professor Belluspersona had never dismissed class for a magical accident, and even when Peeves got loose in the room, she had only marched them into another and begun again. This time was different, though. Harry knew it from the way her eyes focused on him.

"Dismissed, I said," said Henrietta, and then people began standing, picking up papers and books and turning towards the door, not willing to stay near their intimidating professor if she actually wanted them gone. "Except for you, vates," said Henrietta, in a tone that made Harry stand right where he was, his head lowered. "But that does include you, Mr. Malfoy."

Harry glanced up. Draco was lingering near the first row of seats, staring at him with an expression somewhere between betrayal and disgust. Harry looked away again, and then Draco was gone, striding out of the room with quick, sharp movements. The door shut behind him with an expressive bang.

"Now," Henrietta said into the silence, "I have only seen a wizard lose control like that when someone else cast a curse that suppresses the will at him. Imperio, I might say, and you could lose your will." Harry cringed, and took a moment to realize she had not actually cast the spell. Henrietta's face remained blank. "Or you might have done it if something suddenly distracted your attention. But no, a mere distraction would not have let the magic go that formless. It would have wavered, and the chair would have changed into something, even if it was only a rabbit. I want to know what happened, Harry, and I want to know right now."

Harry wondered if Henrietta was simply that good at scolding, or if it came from the fact that he'd never really suffered an admonishment from her before that he had to take seriously. Botching a spell in Transfiguration was one thing; he could study and learn how to improve, and he hadn't botched much since he started learning the right way to use Lord-level magic, around and outside the spells. But this—she sounded as if he had done something that hurt or offended her personally.

And the ice wasn't working anymore. Already, some had melted to release more emotions into his thoughts, shame among them.

Quietly, Harry told her about the Occlumency techniques he'd learned from the book on Unassailable Curses, how they weren't supposed to be dangerous unless one never unfroze the ice, and how he'd assumed that everything was working well. He kept his eyes focused on the far wall. He didn't quite dare to meet her gaze, which was judging in a way that he'd only felt from Millicent before. This was one of the few times when Henrietta really had seemed like Adalrico's second cousin.

Henrietta stood when his recitation finished and walked across the room, studying one of the pile of books she'd brought with her that morning. Then she fetched it and came back to him. Blinking, unsure, Harry accepted it. Why would she be carrying an Occlumency book to a Transfiguration class?

He understood when he looked at it. It wasn't an Occlumency book at all. The cover showed a witch who looked rather like Professor Trelawney, except intelligent, holding a mirror in which was reflected a witch holding a mirror, and then a smaller one, and then another, and so on. The title proclaimed it The Changes of the Mind.

"I began to study this when I became interested in mental Transfiguration," Henrietta said, voice almost without inflection. "It is still a new art, but it is bound closely to Occlumency and the other mental areas of control, to the actual changing of a target's mind. And there are chapters that discuss exactly what may happen when someone tries to change his or her mind after years of abuse or torture. The author is from Africa. They deal with their victims of war and abuse more rationally there, I have heard."

She tapped the book. "If I am not mistaken, the page you want is 238."

I don't think she's mistaken, Harry thought, as he flipped the book open. Henrietta's memory was prodigious; she had astounded her students before by being able to remember who had had trouble with what spell back at the beginning of the year, never mind just a week ago.

Page 238 began in the middle of a dense paragraph. Harry skimmed it, and found what he assumed Henrietta wanted him to see at the start of the next one.

One must be careful with some of the more unusual Occlumency techniques—for example, the use of ice, or of the Circling Gyre—in people who have suffered mental and emotional abuse. Such abuse often includes the suppressing of emotions. It is enough to create an addiction to their suppression when a victim is also trained in Occlumency. Fluid containers and the usual practices still work well with them, but they can and will seize opportunities with the less common techniques to push their emotions ever further away. And this can be disastrous, because unusual techniques require close attention, not simple use, for up to a year, until the Occlumens has truly mastered them.

Harry lowered his eyes. "I honestly didn't know that," he said.

"I know you didn't," said Henrietta, and took the book away from him. "That's the only reason I'm not escorting you to the hospital wing now, or to St. Mungo's." She studied him for a moment more. "Am I right in saying that this is the first time that's happened? What technique were you using?"

"Ice," Harry said. "And yes. The determination slipped away in the middle of my casting the spell." He stared blankly at the chair he should have turned into a fly. He thought of what would have happened had it been a charging Evan Rosier, and shivered.

He heard a rustle of robes. Surprised, he turned back to find Henrietta kneeling in front of him. She was so tall that even on one knee, her eyes were still almost level with his. She grasped his chin and tilted it up.

"If you were anyone else, then perhaps you could train in such techniques and use them to help instead of entrap yourself," said Henrietta calmly. "As it is, you will not have the time. You must unfreeze the ice, Harry."

Harry hesitated for a moment.

"I am not going to compromise on this," Henrietta said, misinterpreting his silence. "Or I will tell Snape. I love you as my leader, Harry, but I will not protect you when I think you are doing something stupid." She gave a sharp, shark's smile. "Even your Unbreakable Vows could not guarantee you a tame Slytherin, you know."

"It's not that," said Harry. "I wanted to ask if you would accept a vow from me. Since you're under vows yourself—" he held Henrietta's eyes for a moment more, to acknowledge what lay between them "—I can think of no better oathkeeper. Snape and Draco will yell at me, and they'll be right to do so. But they would not believe a promise at this point, and they wouldn't punish me in the ways they would need to even if I broke it. I know that you can believe it, and you will punish me if need be."

Henrietta's eyes had brightened, the way they always did when he paid sustained attention to her. Harry sucked in a breath through his nose, and reminded himself that he had made her this way. If that caused him unease now, well, so be it. He ought to feel unease when reminded of what he had bound Henrietta to.

"What is the vow, Harry?" she asked. "And what consequences are acceptable?"

"If I do this again," said Harry, "and by this I mean the suppression of emotions, not the use of Occlumency, in any form, then you have my permission to cast pain curses at me. I won't fight back."

"How many pain curses?"

"Five."

Henrietta nodded. Her expression had gone almost dreamy now. Harry wondered if anyone else in the Alliance could have stood in the room with her and not been disgusted. But she and he understood the bargain, and that was all that really mattered. His dealing with Henrietta had always had a different footing than his dealings with anyone else in the Alliance.

"Make the vow, Harry. I want to hear it in a non-conditional form." Henrietta's hand tightened on his chin.

"I swear never to suppress my emotions in such a fashion again," Harry said steadily. "Not with unusual Occlumency techniques, not with usual ones, not with spells or potions. The consequences of breaking this vow are five pain curses to be cast by Henrietta Bulstrode, and which I will not defend against." He felt he should use her real name for a promise as solemn as this, and he could not imagine that someone was listening outside the door; Henrietta's wards would have caught them.

He threw the force of his magic behind the words, and though they did not bind the way an Unbreakable Vow would have, he felt them settle around him, a steel cage. Harry took a deep breath and shook his head. I ought to be able to give an ordinary promise and mean it, but I've tried that and it doesn't work. So we'll try this. Needs must. What I did was stupid, but I thought it would work. I don't think this is stupid. Time will tell if it is.

Henrietta released him at last, and moved away. "You'll come to me at once if you need help or a reminder, Harry?" she asked in a clear voice.

Harry nodded. The grip of the promise was still tight on him, rubbing like iron bars along his ribs. It felt more comfortable than he would have suspected. Well, why not? I agreed to it of my own free will. And I know what happens if I break it. It's like the vow I swore to help the werewolves. You can't really argue with your blood turning to silver in your veins.

"Now, go to your next class."

Harry nodded to her. "Thank you," he said.

"Don't let it happen again, in my class or any other. That will be my thanks."

Harry gathered his books and left the room. He met Draco waiting down the hall, but Draco immediately straightened up and tried to pretend he had only been lounging there by coincidence. Harry gave him a small smile.

In the back of his mind, he imagined a sun, shining with all the fierce determination he'd lost when the focus of his mind changed from the Transfiguration. The icepacks began, slowly and steadily, to melt.

SSSSSSSSSSSSS

Draco did as he had promised himself, sitting carefully back in his seat in Defense while Professor Pettigrew gave a dire warning about the theory that would occupy most of the exam. He didn't need to worry about that. He knew most of what they'd studied this year already, thanks to books from the Malfoy library, practice in the dueling club with Harry, and research he'd done for other classes.

Now, what he needed to do was look into Harry's mind and see how he was repressing his emotions.

He was now sure that it was happening, given the incident in Transfiguration (and what had Harry been thinking? True, undirected magic really couldn't hurt anyone the way a curse with force and will behind it would, but it could have had any number of random and embarrassing effects). He didn't know what to make of the small smile Harry had given him as they walked to Defense Against the Dark Arts together, or the fact that Harry had more emotion in his voice when he answered Pettigrew's questions than he had seemed to have in the last few weeks.

He was determined to find out, though.

His possession had grown stronger and suppler the more he used it, rather like a muscle being exercised. And Harry's mind had been familiar to him since the very earliest days of its use, when he had let Draco possess him to learn. Now, Draco easily drifted past Harry's shields and into the back of his mind, looking for a sign of suppressed emotion or a mind teetering on the edge of madness.

He saw ice.

He saw the sun melting the ice, and as it trickled free and broke back into water, sensations of emotions came with it, ones that Draco recognized from the time when he'd still had empathy. Cold winds of shock, the heat and pressure of anger, the purling sunlight of pleasure, the prickling claws of irritation, were running into the soup of Harry's mind and adding their living presence to what had been far too much calm, ordered blankness.

Draco felt his own stunned surprise, and, a moment later, felt Harry's awareness of him.

Harry didn't try to force him out of his head. And why should he have? Draco asked himself a moment later. He had done nothing wrong. Or, rather, Harry had done something wrong, by freezing his emotions, which meant that Draco's small sin of transgressing the boundaries between their minds was really not a sin after all, only the measure he had to take to be sure Harry was all right.

Harry felt that justification, too, and tolerated it. He showed Draco more and more images of ice melting, the sun blazing, his mind growing thicker and stronger with the addition of the emotions. He showed Draco, without words, the promise he had made Henrietta Bulstrode, deliberately thinking of the images and the vow.

Draco didn't think there were any circumstances under which he would have allowed Henrietta Bulstrode to throw five pain curses at him. But if anyone did deserve them for all the trouble and pain he'd put others through by suppressing his emotions after he'd promised not to do it anymore, then it was Harry.

He drifted back into his own body, and opened his eyes, and waited until Harry turned to look at him. Harry did so, his eyes calm as they met Draco's own. He knew what he had done, and he was sorry for it. Draco could yell if he wished, but that wouldn't change Harry's mind substantially. He was already slowly reintegrating his feelings—the best way to do it, so that he wouldn't have a breakdown like the one he'd had in Woodhouse—and had promised not to do it again.

This time, Draco thought the promise might hold.

He leaned back, and gave Harry a little nod, and decided to rework his notion of what he would like for his birthday.

SSSSSSSSSSSSS

Harry chewed the base of his quill, and carefully arranged phrases in his head. He had quite a bit of correspondence to write that evening, both to Scrimgeour and to the parents of children like Jacinth, warning them why their struggle might take a little longer. He thought most of them would be reasonable. If the choice was between fighting now and helping to oust a sympathetic Minister, or waiting and giving that Minister a chance to find his feet again, Harry knew which he'd choose, and which Lazuli Yaxley would choose, and which most of the people who had been in contact with them so far would choose.

He simply needed to avoid "someday."

"That's another thing you didn't do when your emotions were frozen."

"Hmmm?" Harry glanced around at Draco, not sure what he meant.

"Chew on your quill." Draco watched him with an expression of satisfaction as supreme as if he, and not Henrietta, had been the one to show Harry the truth. "Just like fidgeting in place, or daydreaming. Your mind was so clean and inhuman that you didn't do the little things that make you human."

Harry nodded. "I know."

"Why did you lock your emotions up this time, Harry?" Draco leaned forward. "I think I've heard all your other justifications, but not this one."

Harry set the parchment and quill aside for a moment so that he could totally focus on Draco. "I'd been considering it for a while," he began. "And now, of course, after that passage Henrietta showed me, I recognize that as an excuse for what I wanted to do anyway. After Lucius, I didn't want to suffer my own pain while I helped you through your own, or Hawthorn through hers. And when I went to heal Lily, I warded myself so entirely that almost no emotion got through. It seemed best to adopt a variation of that, once I left her cell."

"Seemed best." Draco shook his head. "I think you're the only person in the world who would believe that, Harry."

"Yes, well." Harry thought about that, then plowed through the next words. "I'm always going to have scars from my abuse, Draco. I think my mistake this time was assuming they were so healed that my new desire to suppress my emotions couldn't possibly have anything to do with my other attempts to do so. It did, and I should have realized that. If I keep in mind that the past happened, instead of putting it away, then maybe I do stand a chance of realizing this when it next tries to happen."

"You promised that you wouldn't suppress your emotions any more." Draco had a line between his brows.

"That, I did," said Harry. "But that's one specific action. There are other things I could do that might be just as damaging, and would be a result of my wanting to escape fully feeling, and which wouldn't violate the spirit of the vow I made to Henrietta." He squeezed Draco's hand. "That's why I rely on you and Snape to speak to me when you notice something odd about me."

"It's bloody frustrating when you keep insisting that nothing is wrong," Draco grumbled.

"I know," said Harry, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. "I know that I'm bloody frustrating, and the fact that you love me anyway says an awful lot about you, Draco. And about Professor Snape. And about Connor." He serenely ignored the face Draco made at the comparison to his brother. "Maybe it will be better now that I'm going to try to think about the past, and wonder if a new action that sounds absolutely wonderful to me has a connection to the past."

That decision hadn't been easy. He'd faced it early this afternoon and forced himself through it. He couldn't undo the past, couldn't make what had happened to him solely a source of strength any more than he could make the centuries house elves had spent under wizards' webs into a learning experience. They had happened, and though his own experience had been of significantly less duration and significantly less damaging than the elves', it was as unchangeable. What Harry could do was watch for its echoes rebounding into the future and close them off when possible.

So my parents aren't strangers to me. I'll never visit them, never see them again, won't give them a second chance to establish a relationship with me, but I can't pretend they never existed. And the fact that I was—abused—he still disliked the word—happened. And not all the effects it had on me are positive. I'll just have to think about that, integrate it in with all the rest.

Maybe that was what had been hardest. At one point, during the months when he'd talked with Joseph especially, Harry had come to think he would reach a time when he could integrate all aspects of his present life and past, including his vates work and his relationships with Draco and Snape and his bond with Connor and his politics and his battle with Voldemort and his memories, and be at peace. And now, every time he thought the integration was complete, there was another shard to be added. He didn't think the peace of completion would ever come.

Well, of course not, he thought, and the emotion behind this thought was a gentle, wry self-deprecation he hadn't felt in a while. It would be too simple otherwise. And I'm not destined to lead a simple life.

SSSSSSSSSSSS

Rufus stretched his arms until they cracked. Then he sipped the last of his tea. Then he signed his name to several small requests for funding that were usual in the Ministry, down to the regularity with which they arrived on his desk.

The whole time, Harry's letter sat in the middle of the desk, and mocked him.

Rufus would have laughed at himself for being afraid of an envelope and parchment, but he had seen what they could carry. It was a piece of parchment, and no official announcement, that had authorized the Aurors to use Unforgivable Curses for a short time during the First War. It was a letter that had told Rufus he was now Head of the Auror Office. It was a newspaper article, an unpublished one even, that had prompted this latest crisis with the werewolves.

But no one was in the office with him, and he did need to know what news Harry had sent in response to his request to delay for a short time on fighting for the rights of half-human children. He slit the envelope open, slowly, and as slowly drew out the letter folded inside.

June 1st, 1997

Dear Minister:

I agree that with the rest of the wizarding world boiling right now, I may have chosen the wrong time to press forward with this campaign.

Rufus closed his eyes tightly, and tried to prevent tears from falling, which told him, once again, how overtired he was, how much he had needed to hear some news like this. Then he let out a long, slow breath and continued reading.

I have sent letters to my allies telling them the truth: that I feel moving right now will cost us an ally and win us no friends. It is up to them to accept this or not. Some may choose to act without me, bringing petitions or challenging the laws. But I think most of them will agree to stay quiet. They know how vital a friendly Minister is to the success of this particular fight. Unlike the centaurs, whose choice it is to live without the wizarding world or within it, these allies of mine all have human parents, or at least human relatives. They wish to be able to stay in our world. They would also like to show their faces freely, that's all.

Distance yourself from me in public and in the Wizengamot, if you must. I ask only that you do not turn "someday" into "never."

Sincerely,

Harry vates.

Rufus sighed. He felt as if he had lived through a bad dream, believing it to be reality, only to wake and find out it was only a dream after all, and he could put those concerns away.

Then his mouth worked up into a smirk he could feel. If anyone had been in the office besides him, he felt sure they would have been flinching, or asking questions.

As it was, now that he had the time and freedom to maneuver, he knew exactly where and how to hit Juniper's groundswell of support in the Wizengamot. The Elders were clinging to Juniper not because he was their only choice, but because he was the one who was saying what they wanted to hear, and he had a fallow political reputation, vaguely good in many people's eyes, not prominent. Now that he was finally choosing to move, their impression was one of power on the rise, having gathered itself by its long dormancy.

Rufus intended to show them that his power, the active and real one, the one present on stage during the great events of the last few years, was the one that would truly rise in a wave, and knock Juniper and his supporters off their feet.

SSSSSSSSSSSSS

It was done.

Indigena glanced around in satisfaction. The last wards were set on her Lord's new home. Spells would twang an alarm if anyone approached within a mile who was not loyal to Lord Voldemort. It had taken Indigena quite some time to figure out how to hook the wards to true thoughts, and not to something physical like the presence of a Dark Mark on one's arm, but she had found a way at last.

She looked once more at where her Lord was resting, and shook her head. Falco, might he be the playing of the wild Dark for the next century, had done a good job carving this place, at least. Tunnels connected three large chambers, one meant as a throne room—currently the resting room—of Voldemort, one meant as a meeting place, and one that Indigena thought would work well for torture, given all the channels carved in the floor to carry liquid. Packed earth made all of those, though her tendrils had found every small hole in the dirt already.

Other, smaller rooms would hold prisoners, or work as bedrooms. Indigena had already claimed one of them for her own.

The wards twanged.

Indigena spun and stretched out her arms. Her plants surged up around her, vines running through her hair and plunging into the ceiling, walls splitting apart as her roots urged them to the sides, the rose around her left wrist rearing and ready to spit its deadly poison. Together, they dragged her straight through the roof of the burrow and out into the open light. Indigena rose, circled past the remains of a shattered wall, and leaped over other chunks of rubble to stand facing the east, where the disturbance had come from.

She saw what it was soon enough. He approached openly, not trying to conceal himself. Indigena gripped her wand tightly, though she had to admit not even a barrier of thorns would have kept her entirely free from fear, given the madness in his dark eyes.

"Why are you here, Evan?" she asked.

"To look," Evan Rosier said, folding his arms. "To see the place where you tried to put a cage around me."

Indigena raised her eyebrows. His madness has advanced. "That was near the Riddle house, Evan," she said gently. "This is my Lord's new lair." She moved her wand in an absent circular motion, wondering if she could begin the golden bridle spell without Evan noticing. Her Lord, for whatever reason, wanted the madman among his hands and feet. They would have to bind him somehow.

"I used the wrong verb tense," said Evan, and laughed at her. Indigena thought it was the kind of laughter a rabid dog would issue, could it do so. "I have a habit of doing that."

He leaned nearer, his face friendly and full of cheer. "You should have killed me the first time you met me," he said. "It would have saved you a good deal of trouble."

Indigena cast the first binding curse, but Evan had already leaped. Never mind that the wards were supposed to prevent Apparition away from her Lord's sanctuary unless Voldemort had given his permission to that person. This was Evan. His magic largely did what it wanted, and always had.

She stood there, shaking, and closed her eyes. She would not let one man who made it his business to unsettle people unsettle her.

A few more days. A few more days, and then you can move. That will rid you of some of this nervous energy.

In the meantime, she would garden. That always relaxed her.