"Twelve Death Eaters are in custody," Hermione said. "And three safehouses destroyed."

She'd barely gotten off the train, and all she wanted to talk about was the same thing everyone else was talking about. Nothing else had been making as much news over the past week. Rita Skeeter had apparently been run ragged along with her coworkers.

Apparently Moody was better at getting information that I'd thought. I suspected that the Ministry didn't actually know that there was a surviving Death Eater at all; otherwise his companions in the government would have been trying to spring him.

More likely the Death Eater was at some kind of black site, being drained of every last thing he knew through enhanced interrogation. I doubted that they were torturing him, not when they had access to truth potions and mind reading.

If Voldemort was smart, he was going to have to retreat for a while. He'd need to reorganize and use a cell structure for his organization, like other terrorist groups, instead of a top down plan. Agents couldn't reveal knowledge they had never had.

If I were him, I'd be obliviating my entire organization, starting from the bottom up, making sure that only the leaders knew who else was in the organization. Of course, that ran the risk that spies could infiltrate more easily, but there were costs to every strategy.

"That's great," I said. It really was. "I really appreciated the gift you gave me. I'm sorry I didn't get you yours before you left."

"You didn't have to," she said.

"I really did," I said. "It meant a lot to me."

I handed her the package.

I'd had to ask McGonagall to transfigure wrapping paper for me during my detention with her. None of the professors had been overly critical during my detentions, even when Potter and I had claimed that we'd gotten lost and didn't remember where we'd slipped into the secret passage.

I suspected that Dumbledore knew better, but he didn't know that actual truth, because the Monster was still in the basement, alive, at least according to the bugs that I sent down there.

"It's not much," I said. "They didn't let me out so I couldn't buy anything."

She gasped as she pulled out the handkerchief I'd made.

Given that I'd only had a week, and I'd had to make things for several people, it wasn't a large handkerchief.

Some of the spiders in the castle made golden webs. They weren't Golden Orb Spiders; those were native to Madagascar and the climate was all wrong for them. These were more hardly and resilient than those.

There weren't as many of them as the others, and so I'd had to use the golden thread to weave Hermione's name in the otherwise white cloth.

It was a risk giving her spider silk; I certainly wasn't going to give one to Snape. However, I was reasonably certain that neither she nor Neville would reveal anything that I asked them not to.

It wasn't obvious that the handkerchiefs were anything other than ordinary cloth anyway. They were abnormally tough, but Hermione didn't seem like the kind to try to rip her handkerchief.

"You did these?" Hermione asked. "Did you use the spells in Maergaret's Homemaking guide?"

"I didn't use spells," I said.

I carefully didn't say that I didn't use magic, because that would be a lie. As far as I knew, my insect control ability was magically based. Lying to other people was ok; even lying to Hermione if it was necessary. Lying about this would be wrong.

"You did this yourself?" she gasped, looking back at the Handkerchief. "How long did it take you? When did you do it? It must have taken ages!"

A moment later she was hugging me, while I stood awkwardly.

"I wasn't expecting anything from anyone," I admitted. "Not this year. Getting something on Christmas Day was a total surprise."

She grinned, letting go of me.

"So did you have a good Christmas?" she asked.

"It had its moments."

My conversation with Moody had not been followed up on. I assumed it was because the story had never gotten out into the Ministry proper. Otherwise I would have been inundated with people making accusations about me luring the Boy-Who-Lived out into the woods to be killed, no matter how nonsensical that was.

Moody had presumably been smart, keeping it to a small group that he trusted implicitly.

Although I'd spent much of the rest of the week under close observation, I'd had my bugs working on the secret passages. I'd found a passage that led up to the abandoned girl's bathroom; I still hadn't figured out how to open it.

I didn't tell her about what had happened with the Death Eaters. Hermione was still a little high strung, and facing actual Death Eaters might have given her nightmares.

It had surprised me how well the Potter boy had taken it all, despite literally being tortured. It hadn't lasted long, but I'd seen adult men who'd had more obvious psychological effects. Maybe he was just resilient, or maybe, like me he had a past that didn't make it seem quite as bad.

That was the disturbing idea. The general perception was that the boy had lived a charmed life despite being an orphan, hidden away from Wizarding society.

Comments he'd made during our tutoring sessions had made me think otherwise.

As we were walking down the hallway, I lowered my voice.

"Have you ever heard about a creature like a giant snake that kills things by looking at it?"

"Why?" she asked suspiciously.

"I came across some legends about something like it, and I'm interested," I said casually. "Maybe you could look into it and see what you can find out?"

"And what would you do with something like that if you found it?" she demanded.

I still hadn't decided, actually. The thing seemed to be sleeping in its chamber below the castle, which made sense given that it was winter. I wasn't sure whether it was cold blooded or not; its breath had been warm after all. But a lot of creatures hibernated in winter.

It was a good strategy for reducing caloric needs at a time when calories were scarce. The problem was figuring out just how many calories a thing like that would need. I'd once read that male African Elephants needed 70,000 calories a day. If they'd been carnivorous, that would translate into over a hundred pounds of meat a day.

When the thing awoke fully, would it need the equivalent of a full person a day to survive? Just how vicious was it? Those were questions that I needed answered before I decided whether to kill it, or use it as an ally.

"Get it some sunglasses and ride it into battle?" I said, grinning a little.

She stared at me, and then laughed.

"Where would you attach the sunglasses?" she asked. "Snakes don't have ears."

"Magic," I said knowingly.

It wasn't even a lie. If the snake could be an ally, we'd have to eventually see it in the light, and that meant that there had to be a way of neutralizing its gaze. Killing allies would make it worse than useless in the fight that was coming.

Our detentions were over with; the last thing Dumbledore needed was for people to ask what we'd done to get detentions over the Holidays. He'd given us a slap on the wrist, really. I suspected that he'd have preferred to have awarded us points, except that Moody and the few others in the know expected differently.

Should it get out that I'd endangered the Boy-Who-Lived, it wouldn't look good politically if people knew that I'd been rewarded instead of punished. The punishment had been almost pro-forms; I hadn't been bothered by it at all.

Potter had seemed to understand too. We'd endangered ourselves, after all, even if not intentionally.

"Harry Potter is joining our group," I said casually.

"What?" Hermione asked. "Why?"

"I've spent some time with him over the holidays. I think he'd be a good fit," I said. "And given the circumstances, he's the only Half-Blood that's at much at risk as us muggleborn. He's practically one himself; he was raised by Muggles and didn't know anything about the Wizarding world until shortly before he came here, the same as us."

Hermione frowned.

"You'd have though the Ministry would have taken better care of him than that; after all, he's a national treasure."

"He's a boy," I said. "The same as any other. In some ways, he's had it worse than we have."

"Worse than you?"

"I knew my parents," I said. "And they loved me. That goes a long way to keep you from turning bad."

"And you think he's at risk from that?" she asked.

"I think he's at risk of splatting like a bug on a windshield," I said. It was a reference that a lot of purebloods wouldn't have got, but Hermione did.

She pursed her lips.

"Can he keep the meetings secret from everybody, even his friend Ron Weasley?" she asked.

She had a point. Gryffindors tended to be obsessed with looking brave and with fame. That made them more likely than people from other Houses to want to talk about things, especially if it involved their accomplishments.

The younger Weasley boy seemed fun loving, but he probably didn't have the motivation to join our group. Worse, he seemed prejudiced against Slytherin. While that was actually justified, I wasn't sure that he could look past my inclusion in the group.

"I already let him know what would happen if he did," I said.

I left the implicit threat hanging; actually what I'd told him was that I'd tell Snape about the Monster in Hogwarts basement. He and Snape had never gotten along and he was certain that the man would cut the snake up into potion parts just to spite him.

No, Potter wouldn't be talking to the Weasley boy. Whether he'd be smart enough not to be followed was entirely a different matter. I had some plans to deal with that.

The longer we went on, the greater the chance that we were going to be discovered. It had been a miracle that we hadn't been discovered already. The smartest way to deal with that would be to go public with it, in a way that was socially acceptable.

"I'm thinking that if we should get discovered, we should claim to be starting an underground dueling club," I said.

"Oh?"

"And maybe we should turn it into a legal one eventually," I said. "Or maybe it would be better to start one in advance, and make sure nobody knows we're the ones who did it?"

After all, there might be some people who would boycott it just because it was related to me. If the idea seemingly came from a professor, things might go better.

"Won't that mean that everyone else will get better as fast as you?" Hermione asked.

I gave her a look, and she chuckled sheepishly.

The real enemies weren't the students in this school;; it was the Death Eaters. Getting better in relation to them was the important thing. Still, it showed that she was starting to think strategically. Apparently I was rubbing off on her.

"It's fine sparring with the Weasleys, but you learn better when you have a lot of different styles to fight against. Even for the people who are too good for us, we could learn by watching them fight."

I felt myself getting enthusiastic.

"We could probably even get Travers or Snape to supervise," I said.

"Professor Flitwick was a dueling champion," Hermione said primly. "Just because he's small, you shouldn't forget him."

She still had some house pride. Was that a good thing? I didn't know.

"Do you think people would go for it?" I asked hesitantly. I'd probably be able to convince the muggleborn, assuming I was able to convince them of the danger they and their families were in, but the rest of the students were a lot less likely to join.

"For the chance to fight you and not get stabbed to death?' Hermione shook her head. "Any wizard with an ounce of pride would jump at the chance to join. Of course, there's a lot of lazy duffers at this school."

"Well, you'll never be able to get everyone," I said.

There were always some people who refused to defend themselves, either out of fear or a belief that they weren't going to be the ones affected. Those people wouldn't be useful anyway. Troops who broke and ran left their comrades in a worse situation than if they'd simply never been there at all.

You could plan for a lack of numbers, but a lack of conviction was harder.

I had an ulterior motive for this as well. It was possible that this war against Voldemort might be a drawn out thing; if it was, having a populace who didn't know how to defend themselves was going to be a serious impediment.

Whether Voldemort or the Ministry won, it was possible that either side might turn against me, in which case I was going to need an army. I would need a group of people who were loyal to me, people who were used to listening to me no matter how young or girlish I looked.

Voldemort had sent people to my home in order to kill me and Harry Potter.

It was a violation of the rules that I'd mostly lived by since I was fifteen. The unwritten rules didn't really mean anything; they'd been a way to keep parahumans from killing each other before they could be thrown into the grist mill that was the endbringers.

Yet it bothered me in a fundamental way.

He'd come to my home and he'd tried to have me killed. That made it personal.

Before I'd been fighting one of his minions, in a fight that had been petty and impersonal. This had been ordered by the big man himself, which took him from a distant, impersonal project to something more immediate.

The fact that his bases were being overrun was probably going to make me a somewhat bigger priority,

I doubted that it would be soon, but sooner or later he would be coming for me. At the very least I needed to be training harder. Having people to watch my back would be even better.

"Who should we ask first?" I asked. "Snape, Travers, or Flitwick?"

"Start with Flitwick," Hermione said. "He likes you."

She was right; I suspect that Flitwick saw something of himself in me. He was a creature of two worlds, having to prove himself to a Wizarding population that looked down on him just for what he was. He'd probably become a dueling champion to rub their noses in the fact that their pureblood superiority was pure idiocy.

Also, Flitwick respected competence. In that way he was like Snape, although he was less harsh with people who weren't.

We'd managed to keep Neville's disasters to a minimum, and I suspected that Snape knew we were working with him; he'd backed off of him a little, and the boy had been doing better. It didn't make Snape warm or fuzzy by any means; he was still acerbic.

He was the opposite of Mr. Gladly in a way. Gladly had wanted to be liked by all the students, and he'd bent over backwards to make that happen.

Snape almost seemed to try to push the students away.

I wasn't sure whether this was because he genuinely disliked children, which I suspected was at least somewhat true, or whether it was because as a double agent he couldn't afford to get attached to anyone.

Voldemort presumably had spies among the student population, and anyone Snape favored would make a perfect hostage for his loyalty.

Make a mistake large enough to make Voldemort doubt him, but not enough to eliminate his usefullness as an agent? Use someone he loved as a whipping boy.

It was a lot like that threat I'd made to the Death Eaters. I'd been bluffing, of course. I wasn't going to go after innocent women or children, although it was possible that their families might be following the same path they were.

Voldemort, though, wouldn't hesitate.

"All right," I said. "We'll talk to Flitwick."

I still needed to give Snape my gift. It was a small carving of a Lily.

I'd thought about making a rose; giving him a gift with thorns seemed appropriate. But the romantic meaning behind something like that was a little creepy. I'd seen a book in his office about the meanings of flowers.

Lilies were about purity and innocence. I suspected that he would like the irony of me giving it to him.

I'd created it by taking a branch dropped from the Whomping Willow, and using the cutting spell to carve away at the wood a piece at a time. It had taken a lot of work, but given the gift he'd given me, I suspected that it was worth it.

Cheating a little by having my insects sit on the outside of a real lily wasn't something I felt bad about. It had been like I was sculpting from feel, and unlike a normal sculpture, when I make a mistake, I could use magic to repair it.

The final result had been something I was proud of. I had one more detention with him, and I planned to let him know that I'd cut the wood myself.

After that, I'd have my talk with Flitwick, and maybe we could get the ball rolling.