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The Ward

Part Three

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Transfigurative Trickery

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A major, if implicit, truth of life in the Keep was the value of every second of light: the castle rose at dawn, people entered the woods only in daylight, and all of the outdoor harvesting, gathering, mending, farming, and hunting became impossible at nightfall. In the short days of winter, they scrambled urgently to finish everything needed for the Keep's continued survival. But now, in the lengthening days of the coming summer, their efforts were not nearly as strained.

Still, the main difficulty was in the nature of the Ward itself. Muralis obscura, Bellatrix had called it, and Harry thought from some of his lessons in spellwork that part of that meant dark.

That was fitting, because the Ward was dark. It was a thin barrier that kept out foreign humans, foreign magic, and—unfortunately—some small percentage of the sunlight that shone over it. They constantly lost some of the light that could have been theirs, though they'd adapted over time, learning to move efficiently in the filtered light.

Harry wouldn't have known any of that, of course: he'd grown up here, and to him, the quality of light was what it always had been. Remus had been the one to explain it, how the sun was fainter here, like seeing candlelight through a thin swath of dark fabric. Remus, of course, had been the only person in the Keep who had, with any regularity, made Harry and the others his age sit down long enough to teach them anything. These lessons, which had transitioned from informal to formal as they'd grown, had mostly been about their magic and how to control it. The werewolf was the only adult patient enough to take the time to explain it to them. Or else, Harry thought, he was the only adult who'd found it within himself to overcome the bitter loss of his own magic enough to take on students. Sometimes, Remus taught them about the creatures within the Ward as well, or other things they needed to know. But sometimes, Harry and Neville and Ginny egged him into straying off topic, bored and childish and curious about nonessentials like that, about the world that was.

But from a practical standpoint, Molly was the one who really taught them the value of their time. The day began at sunrise, they'd learned, but this was from her clear expectation that everyone be present for breakfast at that time, or else the stragglers ate cold leftovers.

When Harry woke the next morning, having spent the previous night tossing and turning in bed, he couldn't remember the last time he'd woken so late that the morning light had gone hard and golden. His second thought was that he'd really rather skip breakfast than have Molly chide him about his punctuality. But his third thought was that Elphias had scheduled him on fishing duty again, and he'd rather not be both hungry and up to his waist in cold water all morning if he could help it.

Fortunately, when he arrived downstairs in the kitchen, the only people in the room were Ginny, who looked as tired as he felt, and Hagrid, who was mending a broken chair at the back table. Molly was nowhere to be seen. Harry let out a guilty sigh of relief and strode toward the hearth to see what could be salvaged.

"Mornin' Harry," the half-giant greeted cheerfully, a few nails clenched between his teeth. He spat them into his hand, not pausing his work, and he didn't seem to take offense when Harry gave a sleepy grunt instead of replying.

"Yes, you missed the lecture," Ginny grumbled as he rummaged through a few of the earthenware pots and checked the hunter's stew, whose broth was simmering over a low flame. Her own plate was mostly empty, but she pushed around some scrambled duck eggs with her fork, absently scraping the plate now and then just for the sound of it. "She's gone out to the field with Marzanna, but she'll be back soon, so we'd best be working before she comes."

"Think she saved yeh something ter eat," Hagrid added, rising to his feet. He was clearing up his tools, and as he passed, he gave Harry a warm wink. "Righ' there, in the corner."

"Oh," Harry said, "Thanks, Hagrid!" He found what Molly had left him: a few rolls of crusty bread, leftover from the night before, wrapped in cloth. To his surprise, there was also some roasted deer, which he'd forgotten about—had that happened just yesterday? He certainly hadn't made it to dinner, and he was starving now. "Did you sleep at all?" he asked Ginny.

"Thanks, you look marvelous too," Ginny said wearily as he sank down beside her. "No, I don't think I did. My brain kept talking to me."

"Yeah, me too. Mum and dad laid it all out, and answered questions, but it still felt so…"

"Impossible."

Harry paused to chew the bread he'd stuffed in his mouth. "Exactly. Yeah, like I couldn't believe it. It all sounds like a story. One of Remus's fairy tales. Before they get butchered by Sirius, anyway."

Ginny was perfectly still. It occurred to Harry that she hadn't really looked at him since he'd walked in. "Mum and dad told me a lot, too," she said quietly. "Mum was crying. She said we had family out there. Or maybe 'have.' They don't know. But there were nine of us in all."

It took a moment for him to understand. "Nine of you? So—seven brothers and sisters?"

Ginny nodded slowly. "Just brothers."

Harry thought she was probably thinking of Ron. It had been eight years since Ron had died, since he and Ginny had briefly wandered from the field beyond the wall and into the woods, and only Ginny had come out. Ron had been ensnared and bitten by a venomous tentacula, newly sprouting and somehow overlooked in the regular surveys of the surroundings. They'd been too young to know what it was enough to fear it, then—or rather, they'd been deemed too young and had never been told. It wasn't until after Ron's death that the adults in the Keep had stopped coddling them, Remus starting their magical training and Lily teaching them about dangerous plants that sulked in the darkness of the woods.

Ron's death was a mistake that had taken everyone a long time to move past, as preventable as it had been. Molly and Arthur, of course, had been stricken particularly hard. Ginny had been virtually silent for months afterward.

And so Harry struggled to wrap his mind around this news that the Weasleys had lost much more than one child. The majority of the family was dead—or else lost to them forever. His chest felt tight.

"So," he said at last, when Ginny didn't respond. "Your mum and dad...they had to leave them? When they came here? Or—right, I guess when they were sent here, I mean."

"Yeah. And I dunno why, it's probably stupid, but I can't believe they didn't tell me about them. I didn't know it wasn't just me. Not that it's replacing Ron, or...whatever." She shook her head solemnly. "I don't know."

"It's just one more thing on top of the whole 'everything's a lie' thing we were already dealing with."

"Yes." Ginny pushed the plate away from her. "There are just...too many things they left out. And I used to think I knew them, and that I knew everything about them, but instead I've come out of it feeling like I'm an idiot and never knew anything at all. I'm sick of being treated like a child."

Harry didn't need to mention that they were children in the eyes of the Keep: the two of them, along with Neville, Alba, and the littles, were the only ones to have been born in the Keep, the only members of a generation that knew nothing of the outside world. He and Ginny both knew it, and they keenly felt how it separated them from everyone else, like a tangible mark rendering them at once second-class citizens and precious cargo to be safeguarded.

"I don't know that there's any way to stop it," Harry said eventually, when the silence stretched longer. "I think all the stuff that happened yesterday will only make it worse. And…" he paused, unsure if he wanted to voice the rest, but at last he pressed on: "I don't think they're telling me everything. My mum and dad, anyway. There's more they're not saying."

"I just don't understand why they didn't just bloody tell us," Ginny scowled furiously. "It wouldn't have changed anything, not really—we'd still be just as stuck here, and we'd still be doing the same things we do now, only we'd know the truth. We'd have always known the truth. Was it just some stupid joke?"

"It wasn't meant to be like that," a voice said from the threshold of the room. Harry and Ginny both jumped, Ginny's scowl doubling at the sight of Gideon and Fabian.

For once, both the twins' faces were sober at the same time, which gave their words added sincerity. Whatever duty rotation they were on—probably farm work today, as Elphias usually liked to make sure people had a "break" in the Keep the day after hunting in the woods—they had already worked up a bit of a sweat. Their red hair was sticky with it, tied back into matching ponytails.

Gideon adjusted the strap of his bow to pull his shirt collar down a bit. "No one covered all this rot up out of malice," he explained.

"That's what mum and dad said, but…"

"Look, Gin." Fabian walked round to sit on the table behind them. "It was just easier this way."

"Would you have ever told us? Would anyone have?"

Gideon winced, but then he crossed his arms. "Not really our place to say. We went along with it, but it's mostly your parents—"

"Oh come off it, you're all our parents," Ginny retorted. "Practically, anyway."

"Sort of," Gideon agreed, quirking a smile that fled quickly. "But you have to remember that we're also just a group of people stranded somewhere we didn't want to be. Maybe not so much now...but especially at the beginning. It was hard. We'd lost our homes. We lost everything we knew. And we lost our families, all in the space of a few hours," he added, looking at his niece. "No one wanted to think about all of that when we got here, not once it was obvious we weren't leaving, and there was a ton we had to figure out really fast if we were going to survive, like food and shelter and weapons and...Well, once we gave up on getting out, it felt like there was no point in talking about all the shit we lost. And at some point, maybe a few years in, when you two were still tiny, way too small to remember, we just...stopped thinking about it. It wasn't as real for us anymore. This place was. This life was."

"Actually," Fabian added thoughtfully, "it was one of you guys—think it was Neville, must have been when you lot were four or five. I remember him asking about what was outside of the Ward. And James just said 'monsters.' Sort of joking, but he wasn't wrong, really. And I think that's when it stuck. That became the truth. Some days, we almost believed it ourselves."

It was quiet when they finished. The twins looked drained, whether from their work or the conversation, Harry wasn't sure. On some level, he thought he got where they were coming from. It felt oddly better to know that there'd been no council meeting, no conscious decision about "what lies to tell the kids." It had just developed slowly, like a puddle deepening in the rain, a way to live with the lot they'd been given.

Ginny was still scowling ferociously, but at least she was scowling down at the table now instead of directly at the twins. Gideon and Fabian seemed to take this as a good sign as well.

"Anyway, we didn't actually come here to mess with your worldviews and whatnot," Fabian said lightly, a half-hearted attempt at humor. He furrowed his brows, which made his long face look especially shrewd. "Where are you supposed to be right now?"

Harry and Ginny exchanged a guilty glance.

"Wheat fields," Ginny said tersely.

"Fishing," Harry added.

"Right. That was a trick question for you, Hal. We've come to gather you. We could use some of your transfigurative trickery."

Harry spared a thought for Neville, who was probably already hard at work—they were scheduled together again today, after all—but they were all used to being pulled out of rotation for odd jobs dealing with their magic.

"Sure you don't need any defensive trickery?" Ginny asked hopefully.

"Not today, spitfire," Fabian said, standing. Ginny's mouth curled in distaste at the nickname. "Go on—Alba was looking for you earlier to help her with the ducks. She's out at the pen now, last we saw."

Ginny rose from the table, her irritable heat leeching away. "Well, see you later, then," she said, and walked out toward the great hall.

When she had gone, Gideon jerked his head toward the stairwell. "Up we go," he said.

The Keep was set on a natural hill, and as such it was already a bit higher than anything nearby. But in addition to this, it rose twenty stories overhead. Mostly, this was empty rooms, with the exception of the lower few floors, in which lived the inhabitants of the Keep.

So when Gideon and Fabian kept climbing seven, eight, nine floors up, Harry realized with a cold thrill that they were going to the top of the Keep. No one climbed that high for a bunch of empty rooms—except if one of them wasn't empty. Except if you wanted to keep an outsider close at hand, but still as far away as possible.

By the time they reached the top floor, they were all three out of breath. "Does she really need to be this high up?" Gideon panted. "If she's going to try something, she can probably do it regardless."

"Talk to Moody about it," Fabian grumbled.

Harry, wide-eyed, said nothing. The corridor looked like all the others, uniform grey stones and windows at either end, near the stairwells, to let in the daylight.

Fabian turned to him. "Alright. I'm sure you've guessed we need your help with Bellatrix. We're right here with you. She's still half-dead, way too weak to try anything even if she had a wand, but we'll make sure nothing happens." At this last, he shifted a little to adjust the sword in the sheath strapped to his belt. Gideon had his bow, Harry realized suddenly, which should have struck him as odd before, given that they'd probably been doing farm work.

Harry was quite sure he wouldn't be here if there were even a remote possibility that they thought something might happen to him. Because if Harry was here, Moody and Remus at the very least had probably approved of it. And he wasn't afraid. It took him a moment to realize that he was almost excited.

As dangerous as they all said this woman was, and as unpleasant and strange as she seemed to be...she was still the only connection he had with the world that was. The only proof that made it all real. He felt curiosity bubbling in him like a pot boiling over.

"Okay," he said. "What do you need me to do?"

"She's asleep," Gideon said, and as if to confirm that fact, he turned to slide open the little eye-level window that adorned all of the doors in the Keep. Harry couldn't see over his broad shoulders, but he assumed this was still true, as Gideon continued talking. "Has been since last night, pretty much. But we'd like some stronger restraints for her than the ropes you made for Sirius."

"Okay," Harry said, when both of them turned to him. "But what do you mean by 'stronger restraints?' Anything specific you can tell me about what they should be like?"

"I'll do you one better," Fabian said, and from his coat pocket, he drew two things: a folded piece of paper and a handful of iron nails, similar to the ones Hagrid had been working with earlier. Harry hummed in surprise.

"The nails are for material," Fabian continued. "There's more where these came from. And Sturgis sketched it out," he added as Harry unfolded the paper to find a drawing of a thick metal cuff drawn around a slender wrist. A heavy chain connected the cuff to a stripe of what looked to be metal, if Harry understood the grey shading.

"One for each hand and leg," Gideon added, coming to look over Harry's shoulder. "It should be bound to the metal bed frame. It's funny," he added with a snort. "We've never needed something like this here. Not till now, anyway."

"Did you need them before?" Harry asked curiously.

"Hm. Well, not us, but—yeah, if you had a criminal you wanted to be sure didn't go anywhere, then this is what you'd use. The iron especially. It doesn't really do much, but it does sap your magic a little if you're in contact with it for long enough."

"Weird," Harry replied, looking back down at the paper.

And then a curious thing happened: Fabian pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and muttered under his breath as he searched for the right one. To Harry's knowledge, no doors in the Keep had ever been locked—as a matter of fact, he'd practically forgotten they had keyholes to begin with. The only thing within the Ward that was regularly locked both by key and runic ward was one outlying building, a shed that had been familiarly nicknamed the Wolf Den or just the Den, as it was where Remus went when he transformed on full moons.

Harry said nothing about this, the strangeness of it all settling thick and heavy on his tongue. Instead, he just watched as Fabian finally found the proper key, twisted it off the chain, and pressed it into Harry's hand. "If you can, it would help if that—" he pointed to a small keyhole in the drawing, "—matched this key."

"When we talked it over last night, no one was sure about that part," Gideon admitted. "It's tricky magic even when you've got a wand."

"I think I can do it," Harry said, his mind diligently organizing all he would need. He studied the key for a moment more, twisting it this way and that to understand its faces, to know what the lock would need to look like. "I'll try, anyway."

"Remus says you can do it," Fabian said knowingly.

Harry smiled. "Then I guess I can."

Fabian took the key back from him and unlocked the door. He strode inside with his hand on the hilt of his blade.

The room was, of course, empty of all decor, just four uniform walls and a window. On the single bed in the center of the room lay Bellatrix, looking even more sickly and pale than she had the last time Harry had seen her. Her eyes were shut, and she was even drooling a little, so Harry thought she probably really was asleep and not just pretending. Her arms were lashed to the bed frame with rope, one to each side, but her legs were unbound.

After a beat, in which the three of them stared down at the woman as though transfixed, Harry broke the silence. "Alright. Give me back the key and a quarter of whatever you've got."

Fabian passed it over and then drew up the bag of nails, pausing to estimate before awkwardly pulling out a handful for Harry. Gideon was at the woman's bedside, bow readied but lowered, and he gave Harry a nod.

Harry knelt down, placing the drawing and key on the bare mattress. He cupped both palms together and settled the iron nails into them, touching them to the bed frame at the woman's wrist.

Before any magic was cast, he pictured it all in his mind. Transfiguration worked to make changes in matter itself. And so Harry first had to imagine the shape of the final piece, smooth and unbroken, thick and strong, and also the keyhole as a perfect match to the puzzle of the key. At the same time, it required him to consider the binding of the molecules, joining everything together, all of it as natural and organic as though it had always existed that way since the beginning of time. This transfiguration was new to him, more detailed than most he did, and since there was no rush, he aimed to do it right. Sometimes, the words he needed for the spell came to him instinctively, allowing him to speak them aloud to ease the flow of magic, but sometimes he solved the magical riddle with his thoughts alone, guiding the spell where he needed it. This case turned out to be the latter.

At last, he let his power flow through him, controlling the flow carefully as Remus had taught him—not a flood, just a stream. The changes took the space of many breaths. He got a little lost in the complex magic, the way he sometimes did when he was concentrating just right, but when he felt the spell reach its completion, the new cuff lay heavy in his hands.

"Perfect," Gideon crowed, a little loudly, perhaps, but the woman didn't stir. "Does the key work?"

Harry tried it in the lock, which clicked open. Fabian took the cuff from his hands and closed it around the woman's wrist. "Good. Three more, then."

The next one was easier. Having done the first, Harry could draw up the image in his mind more easily, as though he were pulling the instructions from a drawer instead of writing them all down. He felt the magic leaving him, his strength wilting a little, but he knew from experience that he was well within the limits of his abilities—he had plenty more spells in him today besides just this, if need be.

When he drew back from the completed spell, he found find Bellatrix staring right at him. As far as he could tell, she hadn't moved at all. Her dark eyes were half-lidded, but still he felt like there was something very much alert in their depths.

"—should shut up," Gideon was growling.

"I only thought that's a pretty bit of magic," she protested weakly. "Wandless, too. Just think what he could do with a wand…"

She said the last bit with a curious sort of hunger that Harry didn't understand. Her wand, what he understood to be the stick he'd mistaken for a twig the night before, was tucked away safely downstairs. But she hadn't taken her eyes off him.

"Do the next one," Fabian ordered him. His face was set into a grimace, and his sword was unsheathed. Harry reached out for the next handful of knives.

"You do all of the magic here, since they can't?" the woman murmured, watching him.

Harry hesitated, pulling the lock and the drawing toward the third binding at her left leg. "No," he said at last. "Only transfiguration."

"And why is that?"

Harry looked to the twins as he knelt. Their faces were set in stone. He closed his eyes and focused on the transfiguration, letting the magic spill carefully over the iron, feeling it stretch and shape itself. When he had finished a minute or so later, he answered her. "It's easier to specialize in one type of spellwork, Remus says. Like learning to play just one instrument instead of trying to learn them all at once. So I only do transfiguration, Ginny does defense, Neville does runes."

Mostly, this was true, if a bit simplified: Harry mended broken fences and plates, adapted rocks and stones into various farm tools, and only occasionally changed people's hair colors without their consent. (Rarely, because it drained much more strength, he conjured things that didn't already exist, like tiny flames to start fires in the cold of winter.) For Neville and Ginny, the story was similar. Neville maintained the wards and long-lasting spells on things that needed them, particularly the wall and the Wolf Den, and occasionally lay snares and traps in the woods to warn of intruding forces. Ginny got to attack things, which she quite enjoyed.

But for the most part, they weren't really supposed to use their magic if there was an easier or quicker way. You never knew when you might need your magical strength, when your life or the lives of someone else in the Keep might rely on your abilities, and so it was better to safeguard your power, just in case.

And besides that, there were some types of spells all of them could do: a few basic defensive spells were necessary for Neville and Harry, and all three of them were adept with Patronuses. Even Benjy and Alba could create passable ones. Remus had made sure they all learned the charm almost as soon as they understood what their own magic was. And though it was a grueling introduction to spellwork, it was also very much needed. None of the adults went into the woods anymore without a Patronus by their sides, as dementors and lethifolds were two of the few monsters that couldn't be fought back through non-magical means alone. It fell to the children, then, to ensure that their parents and the others were well-protected.

Bellatrix frowned thoughtfully. "If you had a wand, it wouldn't matter."

"But I don't have a wand," Harry replied, distractedly moving to her left hand for the final cuff. At some point, Gideon had moved beside him, probably trying to make more of a barrier between him and Bellatrix, but Harry ignored him.

"Only transfiguration, you said?" Bellatrix added. She sounded almost disappointed.

"Only transfiguration," he agreed, looking up at her dubiously.

"Hm," she said, mouth quirking into a smile.

"Harry," Gideon said, sounding strangled.

"Yep." Harry looked down at his hands, setting the last spell into motion. When the last cuff finally took shape, falling open with a satisfying click, he snapped it around Bellatrix's wrist himself. "Done."

"Good," Fabian replied. "Not to rush you, but this isn't exactly my favorite place to be on a sunny day. Shall we?"

Bellatrix muttered something that sounded like "It's not mine either" as Gideon and Harry followed him out of the room. Fabian shut the stone door.

The last thing Harry saw before Fabian slid the window shut was the woman stretched out on the bed, her eyes closed, face lit from the sunlight from the window. For a moment, she didn't look like an impromptu prisoner at all. Her new cuffs didn't seem to bother her. She looked peaceful, unworried, basking in something like prayer.

Fabian locked the door behind them.

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The space between Harry and Neville was so companionable that Harry sidled up to his friend at the riverbank with no words spent between them.

It probably would have been hard not to be this way, Harry thought. They were practically twins, born at almost the same time to different parents and raised together in the family of the Keep. Much of their rotation was done together, Elphias having noticed their unspoken rapport ages ago, the way Harry kept them curious and Neville kept them focused. The balance lay there between them, familiar and beyond doubt.

Their typical fishing spot was about ten minutes' walk from the Keep walls. Neville sat on a large stone where the river met the brackish pool of water they affectionately called Augurey Sound for its popularity with the nesting birds. The Sound separated itself into smaller outlets farther off, emptying out into the woods somewhere farther off, somewhere Harry and Neville had never been.

In some sense, Harry felt as though this place, the stream, was theirs—his and Neville's together. It was where they spent a few mornings each week, at least in the spring to autumn months, fishing and chattering about stupid things. In the shadowed cranny of the rocks, hidden by overgrown heather and low-reaching boughs, they had once sat together quietly for hours in silent vigil, Neville unable to speak about his father's death and Harry unwilling to push him to.

On this particular morning, Neville had already caught a fair amount of fish. One bucket was half-filled with silver-bellied things, and Harry thought he spotted the shell of a turtle as well, all covered by the icy cold water to preserve them for a bit longer. In the summer, the fishing was plentiful, enough that they needn't feel quite so rushed. Neville brought his fishing pole instead of a net today, watching the lure lazily as Harry approached. The sunlight dappled his dirt-brown hair and spilled over his slouched back.

Harry waded into the water. Spear-fishing wasn't necessary, of course, and line-fishing was arguably more effective, but it also put him to sleep. Letting himself adapt to the icy flow, he waded out a little, watching the dark shadows of fish move in the water beyond, and held himself still to wait.

Dragonflies buzzed nearby, flitting between the rocks at the lake's edge. The surface of the water below was partially darkened by the shadows of the tree branches above, but a few feet away, sunlight reflected in shimmering gold.

"When you were younger," Harry said slowly, "did you ever imagine you could actually see the monsters on the other side of the Ward?"

Neville hummed. "I suppose so. Yes. The way it sort of moves?"

At this, they both looked at the sky in the distance to the south, where the trees were thinner and they could see the dark sheen of the Ward.

"I always thought about that," Harry admitted. "That maybe, if you ever went all the way to the edge, you could see through more clearly. Maybe you could see what was out there."

"The monsters?"

"Yes. Or anything."

Neville didn't reply, because he was staring into the forest at his back, his face somber as he lowered his fishing pole. Harry knew that look: something had set off one of his surveillance runes, which he always lay nearby whenever they would be in one place long enough to require them. And then Harry heard it too, a quick rustle of leaves. Both of them were already on edge, and Harry knew that Neville must also be thinking of Bellatrix and her strange newness. The sound didn't repeat itself, but in the Ward, if you thought something was wrong, it probably was.

Constant vigilance, Moody said.

Nothing is nothing, Remus said.

There was another soft, muffled noise, and Harry spotted a flash of greenish-brown scales in the leaves, moving slowly. He groaned. "Kappa. Just a sec."

Neville turned back to his fishing. Harry set down his lance, conjured up a cucumber—as it was the only meal that could appease a kappa, the spell was practically second nature to him now—and flung it into the trees. The creature grunted, the leaves rustled once more, and then there was silence.

"They're multiplying," Neville complained.

"It's spring," Harry retorted, though he remembered it was practically summer now. He was still looking away, off in the direction the kappa had fled with its meal. After a moment, Neville realized this and craned his neck to look as well, though the trees probably blocked his view from where he sat.

"What is it?"

Just over the top of the trees, Harry could make out the upper stories of the distant Keep, the dark rows of windows and the ridges of its roof. At the corner, a few dementors huddled in midair, their cloaks flapping in the wind.

"Bellatrix," Harry said at last, and Neville rose, abandoning his post to look.

"Hm," he said unhappily. "Do you think someone knows?"

Bellatrix had no wandless Patronus, and while the dementors had quickly learned to leave the lower floors of the Keep alone, they obviously had no qualms about going after the defenseless woman in its upper tiers.

"Probably they do," Harry said at last.

Neville bit his lip. "Mum said a lot of stuff last night, but about half the time she was reminding me to be careful and keep to the rules, especially now."

"Like you need to be told that."

"Obviously. But you know how she is, especially after dad."

"Yeah."

"So I'm not going with you...but I'll cover for you."

That was another thing Harry liked about Neville. Sometimes, he knew Harry's mind before Harry himself did. And it was obvious now that he would go. Someone had to, if the adults were being too—what, vengeful?—to ask one of the kids to help. And between the two of them, or three of them, if you included Ginny, he was the most likely to get in trouble for doing something stupid like this. It was almost expected.

"The wards on her cell will hold, as long as the door's closed," Neville added. "It was a basic spell, but I did it myself. She's not going anywhere, even though everyone insists on checking up on her all the time. Just be quick about it: leave her a Patronus, and get back."

Harry nodded. He took his lance—Neville could always say he'd gone back to the Keep to get something—and stepped forward to pick his way through the beaten trail.

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A/N: Hi I would like to formally register my own amazement that there's another chapter within like two weeks, thanks.

Also real talk I am long-winded AF...so sorry. But at least you can prepare for shit to go down next chapter, which is Coming Soon! (TM)

P.S. - The cucumber-deterring-kappas thing isn't made up - apparently it's a thing in the Fantastic Beasts book. Thanks, internet.