With the problems of my godmother and the fae in the hands of the headmaster, I was able to knuckle down on my personal projects for the last few weeks of term. I enchanted furiously to make Christmas presents for my friends. I got dragged to the Ravenclaw vs. Hufflepuff quidditch match. I subbed in for Remus' classes another time. We got in the first couple of sessions of Mathilda's Arcanos game. We made some progress on the soulfire charm.

And somewhere in there, I even worked on my actual classes. The seventh-year winter "exams" were pretty much just a review to check off things they were likely to ask on the NEWTs anyway. My prefect friends were clearly a little annoyed that I wasn't that worried about NEWTs. Oliver was planning to go into quidditch. I didn't really have a plan, but knew I couldn't get a job at the Ministry. So the two of us mostly hung out and slacked off (he would have preferred to be practicing quidditch heavily, but his players took their end-of-term exams more seriously than he did).

Penny's stress level dropped a little when, in the middle of December, she got news that the muggle government had signed the Downing Street Declaration, which looked like it might finally start reducing the IRA attacks. But that got me thinking about whatever the sidhe were up to again, and worried that it was almost back to the winter solstice, which they'd used to bring Maeve into the world the year before, cracking the Veil and screwing up magical transportation.

And for some reason the second Hogsmeade weekend of the year had been delayed until literally right before the solstice. The weekend we'd normally be going home (not that I was leaving that year) was instead last minute holiday shopping time. It had something to do with New Year's being on a weekend, so the students were leaving on and returning on Mondays instead of Saturdays. But it meant that students would be out and about in Hogsmeade two days before the solstice, which worried me…

Especially when Maeve cornered me alone in the hallway between my morning classes that Friday and said, "I take it you finally got Dumbledore moving on the 'faerie problem?'" I tried to close off my expression, and she smirked, "Good job. We're not angry. Quite the opposite. I bet against you with your godmother about whether you would get it done in time. If you hadn't convinced them, we were going to have to try something drastic."

"Huh?" I asked, dumbfounded that she was thanking me for clueing the Ministry in on their plot.

"Can't have a proper conflict if one side doesn't even realize they're fighting," she explained. "That's just terrorism. No one negotiates with terrorists. By the way, this conversation was a secret." She patted me with feigned, smug friendliness on the arm and wandered off.

And I had no idea whether she had actually outmaneuvered me again, or was just trying to mess with my head to make me think she had. When you still didn't know what the enemy's objective was, it was really hard to counter it. I mean, from what we'd been able to figure out they were funding terrorists!

I was still worried about it the next afternoon, when we'd packed into the Three Broomsticks (along with the rest of the students) to get out of the winter wonderland that was the freezing, snowy Hogsmeade. Hermione, Seamus, and Ron had gotten a spot nearby, scrunched into a small table between a Christmas tree and the fireplace, but seemed oblivious to anything other than how excited they were about hot butterbeer on this, their second opportunity to visit the town. And, probably, how sad they were that Neville's parents insisted he stay in the castle while Black was still at large. The noise was overpowering, but that made it easier to be somewhat circumspect, "I think we may have been outmaneuvered," I told my friends. "What do we actually know the sidhe are up to?" It was kind of weird the things my geas let me get away with; anything we'd gotten the lord of the red caps to spill seemed like fair game.

"Supplying muggle terrorists," Penny growled.

"Maybe magical ones too," Percy added, "if the Blacks and Malfoys did not totally abandon their old master, but are instead serving to coordinate."

Mathilda had explained most everything to our other friends after we went to the Order, and the three that had actually met my godmother nearly two years prior were a little sick about being that close to the notorious Bellatrix Lestrange. There also were recriminations about why they'd never pressed me for more information, and we realized they may have been under a lesser geas since she'd shared information with them as well.

"Bringin' down the bloody walls o' reality!" Oliver suggested. That was a big one.

"We assume they want back into this world," Alexis summed up. "But how does terrorism help them?"

Mathilda squinted at me and asked, "Did you learn something else from one of your sources?" I held stock still. The geas could bind my ability to speak or write, but it couldn't seem to force me to lie to protect a secret. Not saying no was the system we'd worked out. "Maeve? Recently?" she asked slowly, taking my lack of negation as a yes. "She said something about what they were up to!"

I tried to talk around the problem, and asked, "What do terrorists usually want?"

Penny clearly bit back her initial anger and drew on the information she'd been researching over the last year, explaining, "They want to scare civilians into believing that their government can't keep them safe to try to force concessions that they don't have the power to get in an actual war."

"And what if, say, the average British citizen didn't even know Ireland existed?" I theorized.

Everyone thought about it for a second, and finally Percy, the most used to dealing with my thought experiments, answered, "There would be bombings, but no one would know why. They would be scared, but would have no idea who to be scared of?"

"And the Ministry and the ICW, until a month ago?" I finished.

"They didn't believe in faeries!" Mathilda blurted out, blanching as she got it. "Did we help them!? Did we make the government realize there was someone it could give concessions to?"

I grinned and gave her a kiss. "You're brilliant!"

"Oy! We helped!" Oliver objected. "You don' have t'kiss us, though."

Alexis, who'd been stranded for the night at my house the year previous when the Veil was cracked worked out the current date, "So now the Ministry knows who to bargain with if things go bad again in a couple of days? When last year they had no clue."

"And they had a year to gather allies," Percy added, frowning. "Last year, it may have just been Maeve and perhaps a small contingent of allies that came through. Perhaps the lord of the red caps and other provocateurs? But now they have allies among the native races, such as the red caps. They may feel strong enough to fight hit wizards."

"Can we just take Maeve hostage?" Mathilda frowned, still hating the sidhe princess.

"Fudge would never arrest a Malfoy on rumors," Percy shook his head. "He depends too much on their patronage. Remember, Lucius Malfoy was very likely an inner circle Death Eater and he went free."

"Speaking of," I told him, noticing Minister Fudge himself entering the inn with several of the Hogwarts professors: McGonagall, Hagrid, and Flitwick. The only clear table in the room was a recently-vacated one next to the third-years. Hermione seemed to realize this and caught my eye. I nodded to the incoming group and pointed at my ear. She nodded back with a conspiratorial look, and waved her wand to move the Christmas tree to obscure her small table from the incoming adults.

I was pretty sure she used the overly-specific tree-levitation charm instead of the general levitation charm because Hermione was always extra.

The group of four talked for a while, just carefully enough that even my listening skills couldn't make out more than the occasional word from their conversation. Especially since, when she caught me glancing their way, McGonagall fixed me with a stare, shook her head, and made a "turn around" gesture with her finger.

Presumably she'd tell me eventually if it was relevant anyway, but I enjoyed knowing that Hermione was working as my spy.

I wasn't going to get that report soon, though. Long before they'd finished talking, the sound of a horn blared across Hogsmeade. Then twice more. One of the middle-year Hufflepuff students whose name I didn't remember without the defense class roll with her name on it poked her head in and yelled to the suddenly-curious tavern, "There's an army gathered out by the ruins of the Shrieking Shack!"

There was, of course, zero chance that a handful of authority figures were going to keep several students from going out to have a look, no matter how dangerous it was, especially since most of them were crammed into a table far away from the door. It took a few seconds before my prefect friends realized they needed to do their jobs and order everyone to stay inside. I was such a bad influence on Percy: when I'd met him, he'd have reflexively started shouting for order before anyone started moving.

I liked to think that it was also my influence that had more students actually listen to him when he finally made the demand. Mathilda and I, however, were among the first out the door.

The burned-down foundation of the Shrieking Shack was some distance away from the edge of Hogsmeade, but there wasn't really much obstruction between it and the Three Broomsticks other than the gently-rolling hills. The large wood that I knew contained the faerie rath took up most of the left-hand side, looking toward the shack, and, indeed, an army had sallied forth from the snow-choked trees. Well, "army" was a big term: it was probably a couple-hundred beings, somewhere between a company and a battalion if you were being technical. But certainly more troops than you'd want a few hundred feet from a civilian town and a school.

Somehow keeping the snow nearly pristine beneath their boots, the loosely-arrayed group was mostly red caps, though quite a few of them were riding wargs and the formation was anchored by ogres and other large, magic-resistant humanoids. At the front and center, astride a clearly-displeased but bridled leucrotta, was the damned lord of the red caps we'd met in Egypt. He held a silver horn in the hand that wasn't holding the reins for his mount, and he gave me a smirk and slight salute with the horn when he noticed me.

At least he was keeping his word and staying out of Egypt?

Fudge, flanked by the three professors, wasn't ultimately that far behind us. I guessed Percy, Penny, and Alexis had been left in charge of keeping the kids contained in the tavern. Besides myself and Mathilda, about a dozen kids had come from inside the tavern, and a couple dozen more had wandered down from the various shops (as well as a substantial portion of the citizens of the town that weren't running shops). I wasn't surprised that the group included Draco and his Slytherin friends. It actually made me feel a little better if he'd been tipped off but had come to town anyway.

"Minister Fudge!" the sidhe in the red ballcap announced. He'd traded the rest of his attire for armor made of blood-red leather with tarnished silver fittings. "We bring a demand: renegotiate and sign the Unseelie Accords. They have languished too long, and must be amended to prevent the injustices your ancestors perpetrated upon our kind. What do you answer?"

I saw the wizard in the green bowler hat puff up, but then realize that there were precisely zero aurors nearby. I watched him glance around at the three professors, try to figure out how many adults in the crowd were in any way combat-trained, and even include me and Mathilda in his calculations. He clearly didn't like the math, even faced with an army with no obvious spellcasters. So he did what he did best: politics.

"I cannot give you an answer without conferring with the Wizengamot and the ICW. Can you give us time to understand your requests and bring this to council?" Fudge asked.

"If you have not made your concession in two days," the sidhe answered, "we will once again crack your Veil and upset your wizarding methods of travel. If we have no concession a turning of the moon after that, we will have to do something grander to get your attention."

"Understood," the Minister of Magic gritted out, clearly not enjoying negotiating in the face of an army.

"Two days, Minister," the sidhe warned, and then a wind kicked up, blowing the snow from the ground into the air and obscuring the enemy fae. When it settled back down, they were simply gone.

It was nearly five minutes later before the aurors started to apparate in. The dementors had been strangely absent the entire time.