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The Ward

Part Four

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Plagues and Sorrows

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And so for the second time that day, Harry found himself outside the stranger's door.

Probably, he could figure out how to unlock it if he really wanted. He had seen the key that would open it, had created locks that matched it. But maybe, he thought, that was going a bit too far. Shackled or not, Bellatrix's presence was enough to set the entire Keep's teeth on edge.

Instead, he slid open the square window on the door. The room was nearly dark as night, but he could make out the supine shape of Bellatrix, who lay fixed on the mattress where they'd left her, looking even more like death than she had before. The window was almost entirely blocked by the black forms of the dementors, several of them pressing their rotted mouths to the glass, breathing deeply, feeding.

"Expecto Patronum," he whispered. A silvery stag burst forth, sweeping through the door as though it wasn't there at all. It bucked its head toward the dementors, stabbing furiously with its antlers, and their mouths stretched in wordless howls as they fled. The window cleared, and the room brightened. On the bed, Bellatrix panted, her face covered in sweat.

The stag turned about, circling the room. When it had deemed the space safe, it turned to face Harry, who shook his head. It settled into the corner of the room, folding its legs beneath it, to act as a silent guard until Harry called it back.

When he looked back to Bellatrix, she was staring at him. "Baby Potter," she breathed at last. "An honor." And then: "You did that without a wand?"

"Yes," he said, feeling exasperated by the constant question. "We all can." She said nothing in reply, so he elaborated a bit. "No monsters can enter the Keep, but the Dementors can get close enough that it doesn't matter. They can feed on you anyway. So we all know Patronus Charms. We send them out with people when they go into the woods."

Something about this statement set Bellatrix to laughing. It was a choking, grating sound. "So that's how they survived then. Not by strength, but by spawning it."

Harry's expression must have shown how offensive he found the comment, for she laughed even harder. "Alright. Alright," she said at last, curbing her amusement. "Thank you for the help." To Harry's continued annoyance, she said it facetiously, as if she'd been perfectly fine on her own, after all, and wasn't it cute that he'd come to help her.

If it was impossible for Harry to understand everyone's hatred of this woman, he thought he was beginning to understand, at least, their exasperation with her behavior. Also, he thought, as she settled the same intensive gaze upon him, I'm getting why they think she's so unnerving.

"Your parents didn't tell you much about me," she said.

He stepped little nearer to the window, leaning one shoulder against the door. "What do you mean?"

"Or else I don't think you'd be here," she continued, as if he hadn't said anything. "But they're probably suspicious as fuck. They've told you to leave me alone, I expect."

Not really, Harry thought guiltily. But only because they hadn't needed to. He knew it was expected of him, in the same way he'd be expected not to go after a quintaped alone in the woods.

"The real reason they're mistrustful of me, I'll have you know—well, one of many reasons, anyway—is because a part of them suspects I'm here looking for you."

The statement hung in the air between them for a moment, and it was so bizarre that Harry had to dissect it carefully for other meanings. Finding none, he just stared. "Me?"

"Do you want to know a secret?" Bellatrix asked, her smile growing conspiratorial. She had shifted forward in the bed, almost straining in her shackles to get closer. "I think I am."

"Why would you be looking for me?" Harry asked, bewildered. "You don't know me. I was born here, not before. We've never even met. You don't know anything about me."

"You were born here, weren't you? Tell me—your Weasley girl, she's the youngest, I expect. You and the Longbottom must have been born first. Are you the elder?"

"Younger," Harry said slowly, unsure what it had to do with anything. "Only by a day, though."

"Born on the thirty-first of July, then?"

Harry frowned. "Who told you that?"

Bellatrix leaned back, a satisfied smirk curving across her face. "I told you," she said simply. "I've been looking for you."

"Why would you be?"

"You're someone special. Maybe not here, but on the outside—you're someone very special."

Harry found this hard to believe. "Outside...no one knows me there. And I'm the same as everyone else here. Or, well, the same as Neville and Ginny, anyway."

She was shaking her head. "You're right, no one knows you outside, but maybe they ought to. And you're something...more than your friends. Your parents already know."

At this, he couldn't help but hesitate. There had been something, hadn't there? Last night, there had been something his parents hadn't wanted to tell him. Something in their vehement unwillingness to leave the Keep and venture back into the outside world. Maybe even something beyond a fear of the unknown and a simple attachment to this place, their home. Something more desperate. He stared at Bellatrix.

"Let me out," she said solemnly. "I can show you."

"I'm not an idiot."

"But you want to know what's different about you. You want to know what you are. You want to know your place."

Harry hesitated. She wasn't wrong, not really. Harry was nothing if not curious—about people, about the woods, about the monsters in them. If there was something strange about him, something that set him apart as different, the question of precisely what that difference was would nag at him for ages.

At the same time, Harry was born and raised a child of the Keep, and like everyone else he knew, it was not in his nature to instinctively trust anything that came from outside of it. Especially if that something wanted him to leave not only the Keep but the Ward itself—which was entirely out of the question. "No. I belong here," he said at last. "I'm not whoever you're looking for. And even if I'd be someone else out there…" he shook his head. "It doesn't matter. This is my home."

Bellatrix rolled onto her back to stare up at the ceiling, resigned. "If you knew what was outside the Ward, what things are really like out there...you'd just have made that decision even faster," she said with a sigh. Without the masks she twisted her face into, she just looked wilted, like a devil's snare pulled out into the sunlight. "What will they do to me?" she asked at last.

"I don't know," Harry answered. "I don't think they know yet."

"I'm going to die here," she told him with certainty. "And out there, my family's going to die too. Not a surprise, really. The death part, anyway—knew that bit was coming soon. But I'd hoped we'd do it together. Me and Cissy, at least."

It was a strange idea to Harry that you might die alone, and so far away from your home. He'd never really known it to happen: sure, Frank had died out in the woods, far from Alice. And Ron—Ron had been at his sister's side when he died. But at least someone had been there for them both. At least they hadn't been alone in a sea of strangers. He felt a wash of pity for her roll over him, tied as she was to the bed, locked in an empty room away from any comfort.

He opened his mouth to say something—maybe something consoling, or at least it should have been that way. But what came out instead was, "What is it really like out there?"

Bellatrix closed her eyes and smiled bitterly.

From somewhere far off came a reedy wail. It took Harry a moment to place the sound, which was thinned by distance. Finally, he recognized it one of Neville's runic wards, designed to shriek when something non-human, dementors excepted, crossed the wall. His stomach dropped as he rushed to the window by the stairwell, forcing it open and sticking his head out to peer at the ground below.

He had only rarely been up this high in the Keep before, and it took him a moment to orient himself, but he could see everything as expected on the grounds.

Nothing out of the ordinary. There was the Wolf Den, a squat building butting up against the east wall. One of the graveyards lay just inside the south gate. The wheat fields, shimmering like an ocean of gold in the sunlight, stretched round the side of the building to the vegetable gardens behind; there were also several sheds for food storage whose edges Harry could just see to his right.

A trio of augureys burst from beyond the Keep wall. He could see some movement in that area as well, people hurrying from the main door and starting round the side of the Keep—and there was shouting. At last, from the corner of the building, an enormous creature stalked slowly forward. Catlike, it was probably the size of a storage shed, or even larger, all tawny and covered with black spots...no, black spines, or possibly both. Whoever was already down there below—Harry could only see the tops of their heads—began to back away as it hissed, revealing putrid teeth that glinted a sickly yellow in the light. Its head expanded somehow, and then Harry realized it wasn't a head at all: it was a mane.

He swore under his breath and raced down the stairs two at a time.

Nundus had always been the adults' greatest fear. They were worse than virtually any other creature in the Ward. Harry remembered Hagrid telling him once how they had tried to scour all of the land in the early days, tracking and killing any nundus they found, wiping out litters of them before they could even reach maturity.

A nundu's power lay not in its size, though it was larger than most things they faced here, save the small dragon they'd barely managed to kill when Harry was young. The true terror lay in its pestilence. Nundus spread disease, leaking it through the quills lining their bodies and spraying it out with every breath. And while everyone here could fight physical creatures, plague was something they were poorly equipped to deal with.

By the time Harry had made his way downstairs, his insides were in tight knots. He nearly ran into Alba as he sprinted from the stairwell. Her face was already wet with tears as she hurried past.

"Harry!" He whipped around to find Remus coming up behind. The werewolf had wrapped cloth around his mouth and nose so that only his green eyes showed, glinting shrewdly beneath a few stray locks of hair. He clutched more cloth in his hand, towels from the kitchen, and held one out to Harry. "For what good it will do."

Harry tied it tightly around his mouth and nose and hurried to follow Remus to the door. "What's the—what do we do with it?"

"We've got to get it away from the Keep before we kill it," the werewolf said grimly. On his back, he wore his heavy axe. It was a weapon Harry rarely saw, though he knew from experience that with Remus's strength, he could do great damage with it. "At least outside the wall. The ground where it falls will be poisoned, and it'll let more into the air when it dies. We'll need Ginny to do the pushing."

A thought flitted quickly through Harry's mind, a sudden burst of fear. Not something from the nundu's plague, but from the icy certainty that people were going to die. Even when they brought the creature down, as he knew they would, it was sentencing them all to waste away right behind it.

Death lay in the air all around them. They were breathing it in even now.

Remus seemed to understand the change in him, for he paused to grab Harry's shoulder once they had raced down the front steps and onto the grass. "Hey," the werewolf said, pressing a few of the cloths into Harry's hands. "We're alive yet."

Harry nodded, swallowing. In the distance, many of the adults of the Keep, or at least the roughly three dozen or so most equipped for fighting, were at a standoff with the nundu, which growled angrily, a low rumble that Harry thought he could feel in his legs. They seemed to have gotten the message that it was crucial to get it out of the Keep, as he saw some of the group slowly pressing forward, aiming to get the creature to retreat.

"Shields steady," Moody was shouting, glass eye going wild. "Don't surround it, stay toward the Keep, Em. Steady on, nothing yet—long-range further toward the Keep—"

That was Harry, as well as Ginny and Hagrid and Gideon and a few of the others with bows or crossbows. Remus had slowly picked his way through to the front of the crowd, practically shoving the cloths at people as he went. Harry made his way to the back of it and saw to it that the others at long range covered their faces.

The line in front—Fabian and Lily, Ralf and Alice, Clary and Sturgis and Emmeline—pressed their blades forward, and those behind them did the same. As they paced very slowly forward, covered by their shields, their swords rose like teeth from gums in a protected metal jaw. The nundu growled low, pacing uncertainly without surrendering much ground.

"Good, good," Remus called. "Keep to the line!" Murmurs rose from a few people, or maybe oaths or prayers. The nundu was growling more heavily now, unappeased. It roared once, soundly, right in the faces of the first line.

From somewhere beside him, Ginny shouted some spell, and the beast rocketed back several feet, as though punched by a giant hand.

Before it could fully recover, Emmeline and Alice were upon it, their long lances extended to press the nundu back once more. Roaring in confusion, it stumbled toward the wall—not in retreat, just reconsidering. It crouched, hindquarters tensed like a fox about to spring, and Harry was ready for it, the spell he needed—collisea parcis—at the forefront of his mind. He spoke the words aloud, and his legs became the conduit, or so he imagined, the magic rushing out of him and into the ground below. Just in front of the first line, the earth thrust itself upward like a grassy wall, right in time for the nundu to crash into it, howling. By the time the mound settled itself back down, the nundu had retreated again, uncertain, hackles still raised.

It wouldn't be enough. The nundu was fast, and Harry could tell—they all could tell—that it was smart. Studying them, making moves to test the waters. To walk the fine line between pushing it back and absolutely not killing it on this side of the wall...it would be too slow, just two steps back at a time. It would give the thing too many opportunities to sink its rotting teeth into someone's head.

"Harry—" Ginny began.

"Yes," he replied, realizing that they had both come up with the same plan at once. Maybe others had seen it too, but he wasn't sure. "You and me."

"They're going to kill us," she grumbled. "It goes against the game plan."

The "game plan" being the mandate that Harry and Ginny and Neville were to remain in the back as long-range fighters while everyone else took the main defense. This was something the three of them had never formally agreed to, but it had nevertheless passed down from on high and had been strictly followed the handful of other times that something serious enough to warrant everyone's attention wandered too near the Keep.

The issue with this plan was the obstruction that the front line presented during an attack. It was difficult to do any truly destructive or dangerous spells if the people you loved might be in the way. The last time Harry had brought this up, probably a few years ago when he'd barely been able to do any real transfiguration, Remus had deemed it an acceptable problem to have.

"I'd rather you have a hard time attacking than fight in the front and be dead for it," the werewolf had said bluntly.

It wasn't a surprise, really. Neville, Ginny, and Harry were, of course, children. Having babysat them, played with them, disciplined them, and watched them grow older, the general population of the Keep was fiercely protective of them. Besides this was the stolidly practical consideration that as the eldest of the Keep's children, they represented a source of magical power that was impossible to regain quickly if things went south. The next closest in age, Benjy and Alba, would need several more years before their magic and spellwork had advanced enough to provide any real benefit or protection.

"I think this time we need our own plan," Harry told Ginny as the nundu snapped its massive jaws, just missing Rolf's shoulder.

"Let's," said Ginny, and she darted toward the second line, Harry at her back. They pressed through the others, Harry ruefully shoving Dedalus a little to get by. There was a shout of alarm as they pushed through the first line, dodging past shields and blades; Harry felt someone's fingers just slip past his shirt in an aborted grab. And then they were through. To be safe, Harry half-turned and transfigured a second little hill, pulling a long wall of earth up behind them just over head height, enough to slow the adults down by forcing them over or around.

"Confringo!" Ginny shouted, and a blaze of fire sliced through the air, knocking the nundu backward. It howled in pain and fury at this new and unexpected attack. Shaking its mangy coat to rid itself of the last of the ash and flames, it darted forward in a wild rush.

Harry managed to conjure a shimmering silvery shield, large enough for the both of them. There were screams from behind, and once the nundu was far enough away, a few arrows burst through its back. The others were catching up.

Moody was yelling something like "You bloody idiots—" but Ginny wasn't listening. Another blasting curse shot through her, and Harry blocked the nundu's sideways retreat—which would have been toward the storage huts—with another wall of earth.

"Stay behind!" Harry warned Emmeline and Sturgis, who were pressing too close forward. "We can't do it with you in front of us!"

The orange glow of another confringo lit their faces. Briefly, Harry locked eyes with his mother, whose shield and sword were raised, though she obediently stayed back, looking torn.

"Don't let up!" cried Alice. "Hit it faster, get it back!"

Blasting curse after blasting curse. Steadily, Ginny pushed at the nundu, Harry alternately corralled it toward the open north gate with walls of earth or conjured his shield to defend them from its lunges.

It was exhausting work. Not just for the sheer number of spells, but for their magnitude. On a daily basis, Harry and Ginny rarely needed to draw this much magic, and after just a few minutes, they were sweating heavily with exertion. Harry regretted wasting his magic earlier on those stupid chains for Bellatrix, who obviously didn't require them; he was going to need every drop of magic he could bear for this.

At last, the nundu was through the gate. Harry and Ginny, both panting, stepped through it as well, into the tall grass of the open field that lay between the Keep and the woods. The nundu's shoulder and the left side of its coat were singed a deep back and littered with faint, half-glowing embers; its eyes were hot with hatred, deep pits that fixed themselves on Harry and Ginny. It had stopped its sprinting attacks but still would not go. Harry had entertained the brief fear, when they first began the attack, that it might flee to lick its wounds and return another day, but he saw now that it had been too heavily provoked, too enraged, to let their affront stand.

If it lived, it would kill them all. If it died, it might kill them all anyway. For the barest of moments, Harry could feel rather than see the others' presence behind them, feel their eyes on his back, the heat of them somehow pressing in. He could sense their worry. Their despair.

The nundu made a sudden leap toward them. Caught somewhere between a shielding spell and his horror at the hatred in the nundu's gaze, Harry shouted "Flagittari!" From his pointed hand sprang a rain of arrows, straight into the creature's eyes.

It keened in pain again, and this time, the noise was high and shrill, like the yelp of a dog. He'd got it straight in one eye and at the corner of the other; blood leaked over its face, black and glistening. Blinded, it crouched low to the ground and flexed its ears toward them.

"Careful, Harry," Remus warned softly, grabbing the back of Harry's shirt and gently pulling him toward the wall. The man looked more wolfish than human now, his gaze intense as he watched the nundu's every movement. "Let us do this part."

It was only then that Harry finally felt exhaustion seeping into his bones, like pain that came only a few seconds after the slip of the knife. One leg trembled for the briefest instant. Ginny, too, was being pulled behind the line of defense, her face almost feverish.

Following behind the werewolf, the others crept slowly around Harry and Ginny, smooth as water through rocks in a stream. The fighters were nearly silent as they slipped over the grass to surround the beast, weapons gleaming and faces stony. On his way past, James nudged Harry's arm, either in approval or out of a desire to break his neck for the stunt. Maybe both.

Knowing his limits, Harry was sure he'd be of no use among their number. But he wouldn't go back, to the Keep either: he had another spell or two in him if he needed it.

The nundu burst into movement, darting toward Caradoc, who expertly raised his shield overhead to block its snarling jaw, though it knocked him almost to the ground. Shouts of alarm sounded, but Harry couldn't make out much in the resulting chaos. Swords were raised, and orders bellowed all at once. There were too many moving parts, and in the midst of it, over the ring of heads, the nundu gnashed its teeth like a demon.

Harry turned away, hurrying toward the gate. "C'mon, up the wall," he said to Ginny, who followed him wordlessly. Just inside the gate, there rose a wooden ladder, a shortcut to the top of the wall for those who didn't want to walk round to the stone stairs farther off. They clambered up, one after the other, for a better view of the skirmish.

Moody had rallied them, it seemed, and the nundu was already sporting various cuts. "Confuse it!" he cried, slicing at its hind leg with his own sword. "It's blind, attack it from all sides!"

"Lances and longswords, focus on the neck!" Sirius called from somewhere in the chaos.

Emmeline and Alice, whose long lances made it easier to lunge without getting too close, appeared on the front line. Beside them were Ralf and Dorcas with their longswords.

It was rare that Harry had the opportunity to see the adults fight like this; very often, they did so in the depths of the forest on hunts the children were not yet invited to attend. But the next several moments reminded him just how proficient they were, how deadly in their own way. They worked with unspoken trust between them, wordlessly shielding each other and then lashing out as if listening to instructions Harry couldn't hear. It was an efficiency borne of experience, and Harry felt as awed by it now as he had when he was younger and still learning to manage his own blade.

Even now, with a creature that darted between them swiftly, howling and snapping and lunging, they were steady and cool, almost single-minded in their attacks. Hagrid had loosed more arrows into its shoulder, eventually abandoning his crossbow for the mace he carried on his back. Alice managed a blow to the neck, which Dorcas followed up swiftly with another, deepening the wound before dodging the nundu's snapping jaws. The others were shouting and slicing at it, making noise to distract it in its blindness.

Harry, studying the arrows peppered into the nundu's flesh, had a thought. He felt less like he might collapse, and though it was a distant transfiguration, and on something he wasn't even touching, he managed to slowly change one of the arrows nearest the neck, focusing on setting it aflame. The creature roared again, its throat boiling, legs giving out as it collapsed onto the grass.

In its moment of weakness, Alice and Emmeline were there, lances at the ready. They sliced into its heaving throat even as it growled and raged, blood spilling out onto the earth. And then there it lay, heaving one final breath, two—and it was gone.

There was a long pause, all of them panting in the silence that followed. The ensuing celebration was subdued, no less fierce and joyful for the hush that had fallen over them. Quiet thumps on the back, relieved and wheezing chuckles. Gideon and Emmeline hugged each other; Harry's parents had grabbed each other's hands. Alice looked as if she were blinking back tears.

Amidst it all, Harry saw everyone doing the same thing he himself was. They looked wordlessly about themselves, tallying the bites and scratches. With any other creature, these wounds wouldn't matter, but here, it meant everything. The nundu's poison, clawed into their loved ones' very veins. They all might die, but these people would die faster: Emmeline, Marlene, Clary, Gunter, Sturgis. And, Harry realized, a well of fear seizing in his chest, his father.

At his side, Ginny was thumbing a scratch on her arm, a slice of red that was bleeding into the fabric of her sleeve. "When did you—?" he began.

"I wasn't quick enough," she said quietly. "It was just a little bit faster."

They said no more. No one did. The death sentence was too new to sink in, to feel like the truth. Harry and Ginny climbed down the ladder to rejoin the others.

"We need to know if we missed more of them," Moody was saying below.

"Not sure it matters now," Remus said. "If more come, they come. But we've got other things to worry about."

"Do you think we brought it here?" Harry could barely hear his father over the murmurs of the crowd. "Did we provoke it somehow, looking for that manticore? Or—Merlin, we only saw the paw prints and thought it was a bigger manticore than usual. Were we tracking that nundu the entire time?"

"Probably so. It could have been upset with us encroaching on its territory, maybe it tracked us back by smell once we got back to the Keep yesterday. But it also could have been Bellatrix," Remus said, shaking his head as the expressions of those around him darkened. "Not in the way you think. She was bleeding when Sirius brought her in, and she must have bled all the way here. That could be enough to do it."

"Fuck," Sirius swore, running a hand through his hair. "Fuck."

"There's no way to know, Sirius," Remus said, obviously regretting the bluntness of his words. "And besides that, it hasn't been a problem before. Nothing else out there would track us by that little blood alone, Even red caps would have needed more blood spilled to track her here. And we thought the nundus were gone. We all did."

There was nothing more to say. Hagrid and a few of the others muttered something about getting firewood to burn the creature's remains, and that broke the spell. As they walked back to the Keep, they all pretended not to see Clary's tears as she swept her dark hair from her face, or the way Caradoc wrapped his arms around Marlene and pulled her close.

From the lowest windows of the Keep, Benjy and Alba watched them approach, their faces pale. The youngest children—Harry could make out Peony and Lia at least—were barely tall enough to see over the windowsill.

Neville stood at the entrance of the Keep. Harry realized Remus must have thought to have him use his runic spells to safeguard the Keep, probably rendering it airtight for the time it took the best to stop spewing its disease, not that it mattered now. As the crowd moved up the stairs, Neville's eyes found his mother, dashing forward to hug her tight to his chest.

It was likely that those in the Keep would survive. The food preserved in the kitchens would be fine, and Harry had the feeling that if Remus had thought to have Neville safeguard Keep, he would have done the storehouses as well.

As for the rest of them, there was no telling. Whatever was fated to happen would take its course no matter what they did. There was no cure for a nundu's poison.

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"We don't know anything for sure yet," Lily told him, much later that evening.

In an attempt to pretend everything was normal, or at least an attempt to enjoy the same diversions they always had, most of the residents of the Keep were in the great hall, as was typical on a summer's evening. If Harry ignored the bandages, or the way they clustered more closely together than usual, he might have believed it was any other night. Sturgis and Neville talked about archaic runes at a table layered with maps of the Ward, Clary bounced Peony on her knee, Marzanna and Emmeline sang aloud to Dedalus's harp. Ginny and her father laughed in the corner, heads bent together over some shared joke.

"What do you mean?" Harry asked at last.

Lily hummed. "The land here is poison. Almost literally. We've grown used to the way things are here, but...many of the things we eat are a little poisonous anyway. Half of the mushrooms, wild sweet peas, some of the other beans and legumes that grow here. A lot of our crops. It used to make the more sensitive people sick, before we got used to it. We used to think the ground itself was poisoned here."

Harry frowned. "So you're saying…?"

"I'm saying...we're a sturdy bunch. And we'll have to wait and see," Lily replied. She had her back to the inside of the Keep, staring instead out of the window at the growing darkness. Harry turned to join her, searching for whatever had caught her eye. He didn't need to look hard: just on the other side of the wall, off in the distance, was an orange glow that spat tongues of yellow into the air, letting grey smoke curl into the sky above. "There's no cure for the poison here."

The way she said it was odd. Wistful. Harry seized on the last word. "But maybe there is one out there?"

For a long moment, she said nothing. It was as though she had frozen, or come suddenly undone. "There is," she said at last, turning to him with something regretful in her gaze. "But we won't look for it."

"Why not?"

"Dying is more of a sure thing if we leave than if we stay," she said slowly, as if reciting something she'd heard someone say. "If we make ourselves known outside the Ward, if anyone finds that we're alive...it'll destroy everything. They'll come here and murder us all. If we stay, at least some of us might live."

Neither of them had to say anything, but Harry knew they were both thinking of James. His father was still discussing the events of the day in a low voice with some of the others, long after Lily had tired of it. Harry was as aware of his father's presence in the crowd as he was the position of his own limbs.

"It will take a week or so to start. And a few weeks to disappear. A few weeks before we know for sure what will happen." Her voice shook only a little. Harry took her hand.

On the other side of the wall, shielded by stones, the fire glowed orange into the depths of the night.

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A/N: God, I love the original Order. I like to imagine them as a really tight family, where it would have been hell every time one of them died. I'm so sorry for putting you guys through that again 3

In other news, updates every two weeks? I'm astounded. ASTOUNDED.