Narcissia Malfoy looked again at the ledger, but nothing about the cruel numbers had changed. The Malfoy Estate, in spite of the polished look and tales of opulent wealth, was near knutless. Only her own apprehension and immediate cancellation of all recurring purchases and pending deliveries while returning whatever she could had saved the property.

"Petty, please inform Draco that I wish to see him in the study. Do not obey his orders or allow him to punish you in any way."

"Yes Mistress." The smiling little elf popped away, her tea towel clean and neat.

Narcissia knew that being dirty and unkempt was the traditional way that a house elf would show its displeasure with its situation. She could sympathize, having been under similar magical constraints herself, until the death of Lucius had released her from the contract. The elves were quick to show their pleasure, but they didn't have to deal with the shambles.

She hummed nervously as she re-read pertinent parts of the tales of woe that compromised the financial statements of the many traditional businesses that had once supported the estate. Once productive fields had been left fallow and overgrown, greenhouses long fallen to ruin, processing sheds collapsed, most of the skilled elves dead with no replacements arranged, others given away or most idiotically killed for the amusement of the cretin that she had been tied to. It was a fine mess indeed and if not for the sake of her son, she would have simply liquidated what she could and abandoned the UK altogether.

The door opened and Draco stalked in and stood angrily before her. "Mother! Did you find out what happened to Father?"

"Do not shout." Narcissia closed the ledger, then put all of the papers away into a secure cabinet. "I did, Draco." She stood and walked around the desk, holding out her hand. "Your wand."

"What? No!" Draco gripped it tightly. "It was the Ministry! The Aurors! I'll kill them!"

Narcissia's wand flicked out and Draco's wand was wordlessly wrenched from his grip, whereupon she easily caught it in her off hand. "You will do nothing of the sort." The imposing witch pointed toward the couch with her wand. "Sit and be calm, lest I calm you."

Draco stopped his raging and stared, having never before seen her act like this. "Mother?"

"Sit, Draco."

Draco sat, silent for the first time since hearing of his father's death. "What is it, Mother?"

"I'm afraid that your days of childish illusion are at an end, my son." Her stern features faded into a worried compassion. "It may seem cruel or even a betrayal that I do this, but trust me, the longer such illusions persist the worse it becomes. Mine were torn away only after I was married and could not escape the glittering trap that I had been lead into."

"Escape? What do you mean, a trap?" Draco felt a sense of unreality that threatened to sweep all that he was away.

"All of this, the house, the lifestyle, was a trap, Draco. An illusion of wealth and power. You exist today because of a business deal between your grandfathers and one Tom Marvolo Riddle, a halfblood dark lord that got the better of us all."

"But… I don't understand." Spoiled though he was, Draco possessed some intelligence.

"I know you don't, my little dragon, but you will." Narcissia sat next to him and lowered her voice. "I will tell you a story of two families, and how a half-blood orphan employed at a shop used the greed and ambition of a generation of foolish old failures to utterly conquer them. This is the story of pureblood ruin, Draco. One that could well end with the death of us all."

lf

Percy rubbed the smooth finish of the trunk thoughtfully, considering his exposure. He had plenty of galleons for the first time in his life and they were burning a hole in his pocket. He hadn't spent any yet though.

The money from Malfoy's bag had been taken for Ginny's treatment, but Dumbledore and the Governors, in an unspoken acknowledgment of a Hogwarts Governor's culpability, had come up with the money. This had only happened after the disappearance of Alton Nott, Llewellyn Baily and Edward Flint, the 'traditional' purebloods who along with Malfoy, had made up the dark aligned minority of the board.

They had vanished into the fog of the latest conflict most satisfactorily, leaving Percy unexpectedly well heeled, if not terribly secure. Feeling grateful to the party behind this social cleanup effort and increasingly proud of his own removal of the cork in that particular bottle of retribution, he was considering the process of upgrading his wardrobe. He needed to obtain all of the accouterments of a proper scion of a respectable Ministry family in order to show well, all without drawing undue attention.

The first thing that he lacked was a secure trunk to keep his goods in. The twins, with their collectivist viewpoint regarding private property, would be all through his old one the moment they noticed his new prosperity. Percy knew that his father had been as aware as legally possible of his two eldest son's illicit enterprise at Hogwarts and he was confident that he could imply the same sort of dealings to explain his sudden liquidity. He was sure that he could achieve the same unspoken understanding so long as he didn't let it get out of hand.

"Hello there, Percy. It's really quite a nice trunk, with three spacious storage compartments, a wardrobe, a potions storage cabinet and a revolving expanded bookshelf. It even shrinks. Would you like to see inside?"

Percy looked up and recognized Rosemond Chowdray, the latest owner of Secondhand Dreams.

A Slytherin, she had been Head Girl when he had been sorted. She had also been both kind and scrupulously fair to all, no matter their house or blood status. All of the boys had been at least a little in love with her. "Hi, Rosy. Yes, I would, please."

Rosy smiled. "It came in on consignment and includes the original keying card, so you can rekey it to whomever you please!"

Percy wanted it badly, but she knew that he shouldn't have much. Perhaps she remembered Charlie and Bill and assumed that he was flush from collecting unicorn hair in the spider infested moonlight. "A trunk like this must cost eighty galleons, Rosy, and as far as I can see it's just as good as new. It's beautiful, but perhaps a bit more trunk than I need."

She leaned in, dropping her voice low. "Well, Percy, I'm sure that you've noticed that our inventory is full to bursting. It seems that a great many upstanding traditional gentlemen are emptying their mansions, desperate for fast galleons to emigrate on. I suppose that it's easy to get names and faces mixed up when one's friends go about wearing fright masks. Somehow, certain people remember that I am an old-line pureblood, but forget that Ben is muggleborn just because he took my name."

Percy frowned. "I read about the troubles in the paper, but I didn't think them so widespread."

Rose smiled. "The fine fellow that left this trunk mentioned something about needing to be ready to travel until the current climate moderates. He is certainly pure of blood but seems a bit weak of mind, one of those gentleman known to be particularly vulnerable to the imperious curse if you get my drift. He came in under an invisibility cloak, instructed us to sell everything 'just as quickly as possible' and then left in a hurry without providing further guidance."

"How very odd." Percy barely managed not to laugh at the thought of them being grabbed off the streets.

Rose shrugged. "Who knows the mind of a psychopath? Now, Percy, due to a Wizengamot faction that shall remain nameless wishing to limit our ability to compete with certain 'traditional' businesses, consignment fees are set by law and limited to no more than the first ten galleons per transaction or per hundred galleons, so make an offer and we'll just see if it's in line with the gentleman's instructions."

"In that case, eleven galleons." Percy had remembered that Rosy was also a cousin of the Prewetts. Though not directly related, they were tenuously connected by his mother's birth family, exterminated by death eaters, maybe even by the scum trying to raise money to flee.

"Oh, Percy, always such a kidder." She laughed as if at a joke, touching him on the shoulder. "I'm sure that you meant to say 'ten galleons and a knut."

Percy blinked. Yes, she truly hated them. "Oh. Um, yes, of course. Ten galleons and a knut."

"Sold. Tell me, Percy, how are you set for a wardrobe? These purse proud fools spend endlessly to look richer than any of them are, then bring in loads of barely used clothing and expect us to flog it off for them as if we were Madame Malkin. What they can't seem to understand is that we're not allowed to advertise or even display anything that could possibly compete with the established shops, so we simply have a flat rate of ten sickles per dozen items. We have oceans of it in the cellar that you can sort through if you like."

Lf

Nymphadora Tonks finished putting away the last of her freshly scourgified new housewares, vanished the boxes they had come in and then called, "Dobby?"

The small elf appeared in the kitchen with a pop. "Harry Potter's Tonksey calls for Dobby?" He was wearing a khaki uniform that wouldn't look out of place in a First World War trench.

Tonks had to smile. "Love the uniform. It looks very practical."

Dobby stamped and snapped off a perfect open-handed salute, causing Tonks to giggle.

"Dobby bees digging in many muddy holeses. Can Dobby help the Cousin Tonksey?"

Tonks wondered at her estranged relatives, driving away such a useful and witty creature. Her mother swore that Narcissia was nothing like that, but maintained that Lucius had lived and died a moron. "I want to talk to Harry. You can tell him that Dumbledore visited and wants him to go back to those muggles. I have no intention of dragging him anywhere, but I want to see how he is and make sure he's keeping safe. Could you bring him over for dinner?"

"Dobby will tell this to The Magnificent Harry Potter! Can Dobby please be making the dinner?" His master fancied himself a cook and it was Dobby's duty to show him just how terribly outclassed even the finest of wizards were in the role of house elf.

Tonks grinned widely. She would surely get a smile out of Bones when she reported on Dobby and 'The magnificent Harry Potter.' "Yes, Dobby, I'd rather hoped that you would."

Lf

Hermione sat at her small student desk, which had been dwarfed by a gargantuan computer monitor, keyboard and a serial mouse in her absence. The beige tower containing the actual computer, a 286 clone that had been replaced by a new 386 clone at Grangers Dental, was on the floor by the desk, along with an annoying and untidy number of cables. Her old daisy wheel printer still sat on its stand next to it, with her trusty old TRS 80 detached and tucked away under the bed. Her parents had given the 286 machine to her with the caveat that it would still be used as a secondary offsite backup machine for the business and she couldn't interfere with its evening modem download.

Peering at the probably bootleg copy of Lotus 123 on the monitor, she slowly navigated the cells, quickly learning the symbolic language with the help of the manual. Occasionally she scribbled in her notebook. Arithmantic concatenations and reductions could be so much easier with a proper spreadsheet.

Snape and the many artisans like him prepared potions in huge volume, forty to ninety liters per cauldron for the most part, with up to seven cauldrons going at once to take advantage of certain economies of scale. They depended on neutral water to cap the magic in the cauldron and hold it down, using their brewing experience to layer the reactions, stirring with metronomic efficiency to control the magical interactions taking place at various depths and temperatures.

They did it that way because most potions heating unevenly simply vanished into gas the instant that they tried to mix in small volumes. She knew that the alchemists had taken it farther, trying to brew in archaic retorts and chemistry glass, but they too had hit a roadblock with the heating, so the cauldron reigned supreme. But had any of them ever tried just a drop at a time, in a test tube heated precisely with a microwave? Thousands of galleons worth of costly potions ingredients were wasted while pursuing any new potion and her scheme could cut research costs down to almost nothing.

Looking up, she met her own eyes in the vanity mirror against the wall opposite the window. Contemplating her frizzy hair and wondering if she could use the proposed technique and the spreadsheet to brew something new in order to help calm her unruly mop down. She had tried sleekeazys at the urging of her dorm mates, as well as a couple of other commercial potions, but she could convert only so much to spend in the magical world and preferred to spend it all on valuable things, like books. There should be something that could be made and it would be a good subject for her development of the new art of microbrewing. She also wondered what effect a proper laser thermometer might have on a potion.

The commercial products that her mother bought were also quite expensive, thirty or forty pounds for a small bottle of conditioning cream. It worked after a fashion, but she was sure that she could do better. Considering the problem, she decided that the first step was to come up with a potion idea before moving on to methodologies. She must investigate just what was known of hair.

Hermione descended the steps with a mission. "Mum, I'm off to the library this afternoon."

Miranda Granger smiled, unsurprised. The library had been Hermione's favorite place since she had discovered books. "Already tired of lying about?"

Hermione nodded seriously. "It's just that I want to see if I can find something on hair. What it actually is and so on. Honestly, look at me, it's a disaster."

"Keratin is the clue that you're looking for." Wondering if it was that boy Harry that had attracted her little girl's eye, Miranda opened her purse and handed over a card for the bus. "You'll grow into it, my dear. Have you any money"

Hermione nodded, making a note of the word. Her mother was a surgeon and knew quite a lot of chemistry. "Yes, thank you, Mum." Hermione smiled at her mother, once again hoping that she would be so lucky with her looks.

Lf

"It's mostly woods with overgrown orchards, fields and what might have been glasshouses, but the estate buildings are just gone. There's little to show that they were ever there." Harry crunched his garlic bread, having used it to mop up spaghetti sauce on the plate.

"Are the bricks still there? Maybe we can get enough people together to cast a 'repario maximus' spell." Tonks twirled spaghetti around her fork and thought about who she could get.

Harry swallowed, shaking his head. "Tonks, have you ever been to the Burrow?"

Tonks took a sip of her Chianti and then nodded. "Yes, it's a bit of a shambles, but what has that to do with it? I found an old photo of Potter Manor in the Ministry records. It was quite a handsome building, with proper proportions and architecture."

Harry snorted. "I had to laugh when I first saw the Burrow, but it's solid as Marble Arch compared to the rubbish that my ancestors figged up. Potter Manor might have looked a proper estate house, but there were only about twenty real bricks in the whole thing. As far as I can tell it was little more than a big tent."

"What, really?" Tonks had thought the Potters one of the smarter families. Hadn't they once been rune crafters?

He nodded ruefully. "They probably stole the bricks from a construction site somewhere. I saw no sign of foundations or even a single floor joist. I know better than they did about houses just from having painted one and I'm twelve. They just set a brick in the dirt and then magicked away until they had a house."

Tonks winced. "I don't mind magical tents or even trunks so long as the ejection sequence is properly managed, but I wouldn't sleep in something up high or underground. You never know what could happen with something as large as a manor house. Rune-locked enchantments will hold so long as someone checks that the magic is still strong every few years, but you could die horribly if some sort of spell interaction caused a cascading matrix malfunction. They probably never gave a thought to what might happen if someone deliberately had a go at the place."

Harry sighed. "I don't know much about warding, but the ward-master that I finally hired to check up on things told me that the old wards were absolute rubbish, barely able to keep muggles out."

Tonks winced, thinking of what Moody would say about that.

The boy shook his head. "Gnashrak said the wards were very primitive, without any notification scheme to detect breaches. Whoever knocked the place down just walked straight through. Whatever was cast at the walls made the stabilization fail, the spells holding up the floors vanish and the interior collapse into the expanded basement. The walls fell in after them and then something heavy, probably the conjured lead roof, smashed down on top of it all. Eventually all but the few real bits vanished, along with the expanded spaces. Either most of the stuff inside was conjured or someone must have cleaned it out, so now it just looks like the site of an old tip."

Tonks looked appalled. "Your grandparents died of Dragon Pox and there was no report of the house being attacked. There was simply no reason for the Death Eaters to bother with petty vandalism, especially of a pureblood estate. If it were just thieves burgling an empty house they wouldn't have bothered knocking it down like that. It had to be someone that had a grudge against your family."

Harry nodded, scowling and breaking a breadstick. "Dobby said the same thing. James Potter was alone in the world by the time this happened and hadn't yet married my Mum. The only one that I know of that had a grudge against my dad at the time was Severus Snape. I wonder if that dark backstabber was involved in delivering the poison that killed my Grandparents."

"You don't know for sure it was him." Tonks rather agreed, but didn't want Harry getting in trouble over the likes of Snape.

Harry shrugged. "I'll find out one day and then we'll just see. What could the Potters have been thinking to live in such an obvious deathtrap?"

Tonks topped off her glass and then conjured one for him, splashing a little of the wine in. "I know that it's hard for us to imagine, Harry, but there were no wars that directly affected British wizards for hundreds of years until You Know Who came along. Grindelwald and that lot were fighting it out in Europe, but Magical Britain was officially neutral in that. No one on the island had really given any thought to defending against another wizard. After all, who would want to harm a fellow wizard?"

"The next Potter Manor is going to be a fort." Harry had to admit to himself that Gramps would have seemed a monster to the Potters, or anyone else that had never had to fight for survival, a bloodthirsty relic best ignored in the vault. Now they were dead and Gramps would be spelled onto the wall of any house that Harry built for as long as it stood. "Such lucky people."

"Luck runs out and it always happens suddenly. It happened to a lot of people just about then." Tonks knew that her mother had been prepared to kill members of her birth family on sight during the war.

Harry barked out a laugh and then continued, "The only properly built thing on the whole estate was an old well that some muggle probably dug before the Potters took the place over. I sort of had the idea that my family had to be smarter than most, but they were thick as any."

Tonks bit her lip thoughtfully. She had attended Madame Bones at the Ossuary and had noticed identical courses of brick, but hadn't understood the significance. She wasn't sure how most purebloods felt about depending on magic, but her parents lived in a sensibly muggle-built house, as had even such muggle-haters as the Blacks. It just went to show that one was not one's ancestors. "I see what you mean, but it worked for them for generations. I suppose they were trying to avoid violating the Statute of Secrecy by suddenly turning up there with loads of money, so they just built it themselves. Anything must seem natural if it's been there longer than you."

Harry had hoped to feel some sort of bond with his ancestors once he stood on Potter ground, but his scorn over their rudimentary defenses got in the way. "There must be a way to build real buildings using magic." Taking a bite of his bread, he tried a tiny sip of the wine as he'd seen her do. "Yuck! That's awful! How do you drink that stuff?" He pushed the wine glass away and it vanished to be replaced by a tall glass of cold lemonade, which he drank happily.

Tonks laughed. "You get used to it. There aren't many of us, Harry, and we don't have a real economy with masons and everything. Daddy fixes up old houses to sell, but he only uses summoning, vanishing, cleaning and repair charms. Conjurations or transfigurations would soon expose the secret. There are Ministry inspectors and other departments that you have to deal with to see that everything is properly taxed, licensed and muggleworthy these days."

Harry grimaced. "Sounds like clearing out the ruin is the easy part."

She nodded. "Oh, it is. Daddy just vanishes the rot, Shores up failing supports, clears the rubbish, cleans away the old paint then hires a crew of skilled workmen, mostly squibs, for the fiddly bits. Thing is, there has to be a proper paper trail for the required Ministry inspection before you can release it for sale. Gringotts will provide one for a price if you can't, but that comes dear and in galleons. I can ask him if he'll talk to you about it, but I don't know of anyplace but the Burrow that wizards have actually built from the ground up for themselves, not even Hogwarts or Diagon Alley. Every bit of it started out with a muggle builder. Did you ask the goblins?"

Harry nodded. "They don't often build above ground, but when the goblins do build something then it's theirs. You can rent it, but you can never actually buy it and they never forget. I paid them for the wards and I'll keep paying until I can make better for myself, but anything on my land will be mine, even if it's just an old caravan and a shed for the mower."

Tonks smiled, pushing her plate away. "That sounds suspiciously sensible. Are you really a wizard. Harry? Where are you sleeping now?"

He followed suit, and all of the dishes vanished, replaced by plates of fiocco with a glass of cold milk for Harry and espresso for Tonks.

Harry took a bite. "Oh, that's good. I found a magic tent in the family vault. It has billiards and even a full on smoking room, all velvet curtains and Turkish rugs with weird couches, tables with hookahs, old swords and muskets hung up on the walls. It's all a bit much, really. My great, great, grandmother made it as a present for her father. If Mum and Dad had been thinking, they would have rented storage lockers all over the country, silenced them and just pitched the tent in a different one every day until the war was over. If they apparated around who would know?"

Tonks frowned. "They must not have thought of it or maybe there was a reason." She took a tiny bite of the pastry and her eyes crinkled. "Dobby is an excellent chef."

"Yeah. I don't know where I'd be without him." Harry smiled at her closed eyes as she chewed.

Tonks took a sip of the latte. "That's just perfect. Potter Manor looked a typical estate house from about seventeen forty. The family knew enough to make the house look right, so that argues that they had some sort of regular contact with the muggle world of that era."

"I don't know." Harry shrugged. "All I have of them is things from the vault that were too old to throw out but unwanted in the house, or too valuable to leave lying about on a shelf. There were also copies of important documents and even the family grimoires."

Tonks nodded. "Wizards live a long time, and we don't like change at all. My dad has friends with muggle grandparents on both sides and he says that even the muggleborn wizards withdraw from muggle affairs once their own relatives and friends pass on. It seems that society changes too fast for longer lived people to keep track of. So even muggleborn wizards ignore muggle affairs and their immediate offspring do the same. They can be almost as ignorant as a pureblood."

"Seventeen forty." Harry remembered his history class. "Wars and rebellions everywhere. There would have been lots to put them off. It wasn't a free country, with bailiffs, crimps and press gangs everywhere. You still couldn't travel easily without a pass." He remembered reading that men could simply be forced into the navy or just accused of a crime by bailiffs or magistrate needing workers and put to labor in the fields. A wizard that had his wand taken would be no better off than any hapless muggle caught in the same situation.

Tonks nodded thoughtfully. "Some wizards grow up terrified, never going out into the real world and become so isolated that they may as well have popped in from outer space. It can turn them into right antisocial little gits, never having had anyone about to tell them to stuff it. We apprehended a wizard for breaching the statute in Kew Garden, a grown man walking about bold as brass in a wedding dress of all things. He got angry and started cursing people for laughing at him. The fool didn't know the first thing about the other fifty eight million people on the island and had just picked the 'muggle costume' closest to his usual robe before setting out."

"Sort of like Vernon Dursley dressing for a walking tour of Diagon Alley. He would pick out a devil costume or something stupid like that." Harry smiled at the thought. "What happened to him?"

Nymphadora shrugged. "He got the bejesus hexed out of him by the Reaction Squad, rolled for his galleons by the hacks in the holding tank, triple fined and charged for the overtime put in by the Obliviators and a month of dementors for breaching the statute."

Harry winced. "Hard to imagine, but then Mister Weasely is supposed to be the Ministry's expert in muggle artifacts and he can't say 'electricity."

Tonks laughed. "I know. I dated Charley Weasely and met Arthur. They're as pureblood as they come, but at least they're trying."

Harry shrugged. "I'll get the telly and everything someday. Best never let the family get so far out of touch."

Tanks nodded. "I suppose it's easier now, but they must have thought the same back then. They might even have been muggleborn wizards." Tonks frowned, considering it. "I'm not really sure how far back the Potters go."

Harry brightened, happy to relate what he'd learned. "The first magical Potter was the son of a muggle from London, a man named James, the third or fourth son from a merchant family that may have either made or just sold pots pans and household items, among other things. They weren't called Potter, but last names didn't really exist for normal people yet."

"James? It seems that name has been in the family for a long time." Tonks sipped her latte, fascinated.

Harry nodded. "We're a dead common lot. He made a delivery of kitchen goods and pottery to a magical estate in the spring of the year 570 and consequently a young witch called Goltha Gudrunsdotter made her own delivery nine months later. They got married and everything was fine. Then her father came home, fresh from war. He was a powerful sorcerer, absolutely hated the muggle and transfigured him in many amusing ways. Fortunately for me, the old man was at least a little bit worried about the muggle family having enough soldiers and money to set the law on him."

Tonks blinked in shock.

Harry smirked. "Yeah, this was long before the statute. He relented a bit after the local Alderman threatened him and he even let them live as a couple after the muggle got rich enough. He adopted his grandson, Harald, as his heir after he proved to be magical, mostly because all of his other descendants had been picked off by his enemies."

"Sounds a right Tartar."

Harry nodded. "When the old man finally passed, James cut his losses and fled back to London with his son and witch to hide from the old man's feuds. He called himself Carter or Potter, or just the name of some random village depending on where he was. You'd think that a family from such humble roots would know better than to buy into any kind of blood purity nonsense."

"Five seventy!" Nymphadora looked at him. "Do you know the old wizard's name?"

"Ignotus Peverell." The second that he said it, Harry wished that he hadn't.

"The three brothers!" Tonks frowned. "You're a Peverell! A hidden Peverell! Best stay that way too. That's not something that you should spread about, Harry. The old legends might attract all sorts of kooks after the hallows."

Harry narrowed his eyes at that. "Those aren't even real. I mean yes, they exist, or did at one time, but they didn't come from some gullible skeleton with a scythe. They were actually souvenirs, magical spoils from a gang of assassins that my ancestors wiped out. 'Death' was just what the crazy wizard gangster called himself. That whole three brothers and death thing was just a bedtime story that Gramp's sister in law made up for her kids."

"So." Tonks blinked. "Beedle the Bard stole bedtime stories. The wand, the resurrection stone and the cloak are actually real things?"

Harry shrugged. "Yeah, probably, if those are the things that were taken by my family, but if Professor Dumbledore can see through my cloak then I think that the grim reaper could too. It all started with this big feud with some Assyrian family, which we won, but before they died off the Assyrians paid 'Death,' and the old man and his crazy assassins came down from their hideout up in some mountains to kill every Peverell. They got some of the family, but the Peverell's soon tracked them down, got the upper hand and went about collecting the bounties on them, which actually got them into even bigger fights later after they ended up killing all the shaman's of the White Huns in a dispute over money. Eventually they all got killed or died and here I am, the last one."

Tonks just stared in shock at this tale. "That's truly amazing, Harry. Can I meet him?"

"No!" Harry shouted, pushing back from the table in horror. He could just see Gramps spotting her metamorphic talent and loudly demanding something terrible. "It's not a good idea. He's not really that um, nice."

Lf

Harry used his now-silent levitation charm to drag the immense enameled cast iron lion's foot bathtub and then an ornate teak and porcelain vanishing commode out of the mud. Partially wrapped in carpet when the floors had vanished, it had all been buried with the reversion of the expanded basements.

Setting it in line with the growing collection of detritus that he'd recovered, Harry was surprised to realize that the carpeting that he'd unwrapped so far seemed to be real and was in quite decent shape, the mud sliding off with no sign of mold. It wasn't an impervious charm as he knew it, but the carpet appeared to have runes woven around the edges. He needed to learn those.

His father's hornbeam wand was not easy to use, but it just needed a bit of effort. The next carpet was much harder to get up, submerged in gluey gray muck and holding many heavy objects, but after some struggle he had it spread on the lawn.

The next five carpets and rugs that he uncovered were much easier and he felt a bit of pang as he spread them out to look at the patterns. They were absolutely real and rather magnificent. Someone, probably a great grandmother, had cared enough to buy quality.

Harry frowned, wondering why such finery would be left in the ground. Someone had cleaned out much of the furnishings and household goods, but they had done a terrible job, leaving a good deal of it in the ground.

Summoning blob after blob of gluey bluish clay, he dug through some distortion and found rock. Throwing the last of the few real floorboards in with the small lumber stack, he stood back to rest and look over the decidedly unimpressive remains of the House of Potter.

Summoning a twisted and stained wooden rocking chair from a stack, he pointed his wand and intoned, "Repairo."

The stains vanished, but the chair remained twisted. Harry frowned and put more effort into it, shouting the incantation, and the chair creaked as it returned to its original form. "That was damned hard."

"Master wastes much magic." Dobby had come out of the tent after finishing the dishes.

"I do? How?" Harry had considerable respect for the elf.

Dobby hesitated. He would never have spoken to a Master like this, but Harry was his friend. "Master is… leaky. Magic flows out of feets, eyes, handses, falls from wand, misses chair and falls into ground." Dobby snapped, and suddenly all of the rugs were dry and in brand new condition on the grass. "Dobby uses master's magic, but less than master fixing chair."

Harry stared at the elf. "How do I learn not to, erm, leak?"

Dobby thought about it. "Dobby does not know. Elfs has no magics inside to leak out. Elf magic is from outside and we's never be growing up if we's be leaking it away." He looked at the wand doubtfully. "Elfs cannot use the wands."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. They lived on magic, used some form of evocation exclusively and wizards were a handy source of nourishment for them. "I can't stand the idea of spewing magic about like Ron with a turkey leg."

Dobby looked thoughtful. "Dobby can be looking for leakses."

Harry considered, remembering a concept garnered from a book on business leadership that hd seen him through one particularly harrowing week of careful rationing and intense thirst before he'd overcome Vernon's new locks. Perhaps he should pay Vernon a visit after all. "Efficiency is the term that we're looking for. I need to find a way to properly measure magical efficiency. Like in a boiler."

"Effishony." Dobby tried out the word, only mangling it a little.

Harry nodded. "I had to look it up. It means the amount of energy producing useful work divided by the total amount of energy used. It's easy to measure with heat or electricity, but I have to think about magic. With wands, wizards get good enough results that we don't really have to properly learn to cast." He frowned, wondering if efficiency was what made Dumbledore or Voldemort better. What made Dobby better? Shrugging, he wrote the question down in his ubiquitous notebook for later consideration.

Squaring his shoulders, he frowned and summoned the remains of an old Victrola, watching his magic flare through his spectacles, some of it connecting with the moldy tatters, most flying past. "I have no solid numbers, but I can see that I wasted quite a lot of magic doing that." Concentrating, Harry summoned the corroded horn, taking care to put as little magic as he could manage into it.

"Master does better!" Dobby capered in the nourishing glow of his master's magic.

Harry nodded, putting away the wand. Palms out toward the horn, he tried to connect with the wasted magic still pooled around it. It couldn't be much different from his own blood. "Time to learn how to do more with less."

Lf

Percy transferred his last book into his new trunk's bookshelf, then closed the top of his now-empty old trunk. Well, Bill's old trunk. Or perhaps best described as Uncle Fabian's old trunk. It was actually quite a nice bit of furniture, larger than standard and heavily customized. Its only drawback was that any Weasely with Prewett blood could open it. Frowning, he considered his options. Ginny already had quite a nice trunk, one that had belonged to her mother, so the next recipient should be George. He and Fred were sharing Uncle Gideon's trunk.

Considering the politics of the situation, Percy sighed. He would much rather hand it off to Ron, but that would incite the twins ire against all concerned. He could certainly handle his brothers but it was probably better to let them have it so that Ron didn't end up suffering unnecessarily.

Carrying the empty trunk through his bedroom door, Percy sat it in front of the twin's room with a thump.

The door immediately opened, revealing a twin. "What is this?"

"An empty trunk." Percy gave what he thought was probably Fred a smile. "I've got myself a better one from the Secondhand Shop, so here you are with my complements."

"Thank you, Perce. Sharing a trunk with a slob like George hasn't been easy." Fred dragged it in. Their mother had decided that they could share a trunk and it had honestly angered him, especially after she had bought one for Ron, shabby though it was, and saved her own for Ginny.

"Hey! It's not like you're any better." George was already turfing Fred's things out of his trunk.

Fred dragged the trunk over and started packing it. "So, Older Brother, how did you manage the financing for this windfall?" Fred was always on the lookout for a dropped knut.

"I have my ways." Percy gave them a smile. "There are a lot of good bargains to be had there. It seems the Death Eaters and their friends are selling everything." Thinking on that, he walked back to his room. His mental checklist required him to examine such a thought. Perhaps there was more opportunity to be had.

Lf

"You'll never last sashaying along like that, Girley. A proper auror proceeds upon his rounds in measured fashion." In spite of the involuntary nature of his return to The Thin Red Line, Charles Calvert was feeling a bit nostalgic to find himself back in harness.

It had been touch and go there at the end, but the war had come along and given Special Investigations more deserving targets than a few underpaid aurors working a fiddle or three on the side to see that the grandkids could afford a proper Hogwarts education. Calvert hadn't lost his nerve, so he had gotten away intact and retired with a pension just in time to avoid being killed in the war.

He had felt neither regret nor any desire to return to the fray during the chaotic decade that followed. He'd spent his time contentedly puttering about his comfy and fully paid for twelve room 'cottage' in the Cotswold, watching his reasonably wealthy family prosper and murdering the odd Death Eater caught probing his illegal blood wards.

Unfortunately, Moody still had enough dirt on him that he was best appeased. Having duly volunteered, Calvert found himself proceeding along the old beat, trying to teach the Girley up from down. It wasn't a bad thing in his opinion, as Moody was her training officer.

In spite of the lunatic's overblown reputation, Moody had never been a street auror. The madman was the type for kicking in doors and putting the fiend fire to a nest of vampires, but he would be lynched inside of a week if he ever tried to take a beat. The purpose of the beat auror was to protect the people on the beat, not to harass them for small offenses, or even big ones that did no serious harm. Calvert was proud that to this day his galleons were no good along the old beat.

Reducing her usual quick stride to match the old man's leaden plod, Tonks frowned. "But… wouldn't that just mean that everyone always knows where we are?" Tonks had only known Calvert for a few hours, but she already disliked her substitute training officer immensely.

Calvert nodded. "Nothing wrong with that in peacetime, Girley. Time was, we carried a bell to ring and make sure any villains knew to scarper. Surprise is risky. Surprises get people killed, yours and theirs. If there's to be a surprise, best you be the one springing it. Otherwise you walk the beat, do yer duty and don't go looking for trouble nobody needs."

"Then how do we catch criminals?" Moody had taught her just the opposite, burst in, take them by surprise and crush them.

"We're beat aurors. Our job is to protect our people, keep our beat running smoothly, know everyone and show the Red Cloak. We will stop petty crime and keep any wrong'uns moving along, but the big flashy arrests, murder investigations and the like are for Special Investigations."

Tonks thought about that. "We don't walk about like this anymore. Most of the time I wait in the alert room and apparate to the scene when we get a report."

"That was fine for wartime after half the strength had been killed, but I'm here to teach you how to handle a peacetime beat." Calvert was well aware of what Moody was doing and approved. Without their Wizengamot protection, the dark lord's little dark sheep were just mutton turning on the spit.

"Why is it called a beat?" Tonks had to admit that she was learning, even if the foul old curmudgeon did keep calling her 'girley.'

"A beat is an assigned patrol, in this case West Diagon Alley. Get out your log book." The old man got his own out and showed her as he made his entry. The date was at the top of the page.

'Comsd Diagon bt, Post one, 0800 Ret Aur C. Calvert w Trainee N. Tonks.'

"You'll make an entry when the patrol commences, when we reach each post in our beat and of any unusual circumstance we encounter. You'll make note in each case of the time, circumstance, persons present, subject statements and any actions you took. We will speak with the public along the way and you'll be writing down complaints as you get them. Go on and make your first entry."

"Yes, sir." Suppressing her protest that keeping a logbook had been covered in her training and that he was doing it completely wrong, a new system of 'shorthand' having been adopted, Tonks filled in the first entry in her log, dutifully using the same form as Calvert.

"Well done. Now let us proceed." Calvert set out down the alley, his trainee continually having to check her natural fast walk. "It's called a beat because each leg of the beat is about thirty minutes of walking. Watches weren't so common then and a cop doesn't have time to look at them anyway. Clocks were always fogged in and the tempus spell was only invented in 1940, so the old plod measured his step and timed his way with his heartbeat. It's usually about sixty beats a minute, so slow it down to one long step every beat. It's a deliberate sort of proceeding that you can keep up for a long time, but watch the shorts steps mind you. Every so often you'll find the watch commander waiting at the next post to make sure you ain't just down the pub."

"Oh!" Tonks concentrated and fell into the slow rhythm of the plod, stepping deliberately along with the old man. "Now that makes sense."

"That's been the way of it for hundreds of years, for good and sensible reasons. Now the main part of the job is to look out for what don't belong." Calvert swept his eyes around, taking in the mostly deserted alley. "To do that you have to know your beat well enough to know what does belong. You're here to learn the beat, learn what's right and then to look for anything unusual, out of place or in serious violation. We talk to people, learn names and faces, make friends, find out who's matey with whom, talk to the gossips, help out in little ways so they'll tell us if aught is amiss and learn what we can of everyone's business. Now in our logs we write down all complaints at once, but we never identify informants by name, lest some villain have his brief get hold of it and find out who grassed him. That's why a good copper never forgets a name or a face."

Lf

Entering Gringotts, Percy stood in line just a little nervously. He'd only been inside of the bank a handful of times, mostly with his mother, and his only personal experience dealing with the goblins had been with Rakeswell, who had been admirably professional. Keeping the goblin's manner in mind, Percy resolved not to waste time. Stepping up to the teller's window, Percy opened his mouth only to be forestalled.

"Key?" The goblin thrust out its hand without looking at him.

Percy instantly resolved to be as brusque. "I don't have one. I'm here to open an account."

The goblin frowned, then scribbled out something and pointed. "Over there, at the new accounts desk. Next!"

Slightly disgruntled at the rapid handling and by the very small placard on the new accounts desk, a placard that was neatly hidden by the wizard currently sitting across from the goblin, Percy walked over and waited behind a rope until that wizard had left.

"Next!"

Percy took a seat across from the impatient looking goblin.

"Name?"

"Percival Ignacious Weasely."

The goblin typed at a rune plaque. "Ah, here you are. Brother to Curse Breaker Weasely. We already have your records, so we can move on. Do you have your bag?"

"Yes." Percy immediately handed it over.

The goblin simply weighed it in his hand. "A pleasing sum. Just under the limit of the expansion charm, but still too much for a draw account. You'll need a vault. Let's see what's available."

Percy hadn't expected this, but then the Weasely vault often contained only a few knuts or nothing at all, so size didn't really count. He waited, looking over the desk. The goblin's name was Jawcrack, and he was a Journeyman Teller. Percy knew the rank emblem from reading Bill's employee orientation scroll.

The goblin looked at him, then back to his scroll, finally pulling a lever and taking a chit that popped out of the desk. "Take this and your bag. Present it to Account Manager Spears. Through the door and third office on the right."

Percy took the chit, rising, wondering if he should bid the goblin a good day or not.

"Next!"

Shoulders slumped, Percy followed directions, coming to a door that said, G. Spears. With some trepidation, he knocked.

The door opened and the goblin at the desk motioned him in. "Come and sit, Mister Weasely. We have much to discuss."

Bewildered, Percy sat.