"There is a reason we chose this place to hide," Flamel says. He's wrapped in a traveling cloak of a style Lily hasn't seen outside of portraits at Hogwarts. Fabric mounds around his shoulders and the huge heavy pin holding it shut is in the shape of a phoenix with a sword in its beak. "It is for the same reason you came to this place. Magic leaves traces, Dark magic most of all."
They are walking side by side through the woods, Sirius and Remus walking a distance ahead and conversing in their own quiet tones. The bright morning air and sparkling dew on the trees makes everything beautiful and new. It's hard to believe this is where the horcrux was made.
"Sirius has said he can sniff it out, so I assume that's what you mean. We didn't come completely unprepared," Lily says evenly.
"Of course. The locket, the diary, the cup, and the diadem. And one more that I do not know of. Do you have a plan to destroy them?"
Something jumps in her memory, something wrong, a scent the doe in her is frightened of, but it goes before she can grasp it. "There are ways we know of."
"That appears to be an answer in the negative," Flamel says.
She lets out the steam of exasperation through her nose before replying. "It isn't. We don't want to do it until we can be sure we have them all. If we try and he finds out, he can just make a rock into a horcrux and throw it into the sea and we'll never be rid of him."
Flamel laughs. "Not unwise. You will never be rid of men like Tom Riddle, but I must say disposing of this particular man seems increasingly urgent."
Lily snorts. "You sound like Dumbledore, but the more I hear you talk, the more I think you aren't like him at all."
"I merely seek the fundamentals of your plan that I may vet them and ensure they do not endanger us." Flamel cuts a glance toward her, and his eyes look bright and sharp in his ancient face. "Albus and I perhaps disagreed over a few finer points of how to fight this war. He, for example, believed it was possible to win a war without blood if one was merely clever enough. I do not. He also believed that self-denial and purity of spirit was a road to salvation and power. A silly and Christian notion if ever there was one. Albus was willing to sacrifice no end of his own people, even his own life, in order to land the correct stroke at the correct moment. I am not so particular. This is a war of attrition."
"And who have you sacrificed?"
"My wife," he answers readily.
Lily recoils. "Is she-"
"No, she is not dead, but she has consented to be part of this war perhaps more than I have. She lives in Paris for the moment."
"Occupied Paris."
"Indeed. I am capable of smuggling in the elixir of life to her, and she smuggles supplies and people to me, and Tom's minions harass our messengers if they grow too bold. A sample or two has been stolen of the elixir and been analyzed two years ago-possibly even by that Death Eater friend of yours-but the elixir betrays nothing of the stone that made it." Flamel reaches out, runs his fingers through a low-hanging branch of a pine. "Have you thought at all of what I told you yesterday? Of the nature of this war?"
Lily smothers the feeling that she's being condescended to and runs through the conversation of the day before, stripping away the color of anger from her recollection. "He lacks a heart. He manipulates the hearts of others." It sparks something. "You called them simple monsters, Fenrir and Macnair, but not the rest."
Flamel smiles as though he's a professor and she's just caught up to the rest of the class. "You understand, then, the nature of this war. His army is made up of people, people who have sought their heart's desires and found them in Tom Riddle's hands. The people who will have to die for this war to be won will be people who are loved by those around them, individuals who have known joy at the birth of their children and grief a the death of their parents and true, selfless love. They not be monsters to slay. And you will be forced to end their happy lives if you seek to even fight this war, let alone win it. You must be ready to bear that cost." He looks up, squinting in the sunlight. "I assure you it is not an easy burden and I beg you to begin preparing yourself for it now. Remus, this is the place."
They stop before a tree so vast and twisted it is impossible to see its top. Its base is so wide it dwarfs even the other trees around them. Even among the old oaks in this part of the forest it is massive, visibly ancient, its vast limbs shattering the light across the forest floor.
"Allow me a few minutes to prepare what you will see here. Remus, if you would assist me?" Flamel extracts a pouch from an inner pocket of his cloak.
Sirius backtracks toward her as they begin sprinkling the powder in a circle around the tree. It's sulfur and rosemary, by the smell, compounded with something that makes her want to sneeze like feathers. Still watching them, Sirius mutters, "What've you got out of him, then?"
"Has a wife in Paris," Lily replies under her breath. "Suggested she might be more interested in the war than he is."
"That could be something. Does she have a name?"
"Nothing yet, but Flamel's in so many books I'm sure Regulus could come up with it. But we don't have a way to communicate with him. Paris isn't nothing to go on, though. You?"
"Remus knows me too well to let much slip. The wards extend far enough that it picked us up as two wizards and Flamel sent Remus out to find out who we were and why we were there, but I can't imagine that's something Flamel wants to keep from us. Makes him look powerful." He scratches at the week of beard on his chin. "I'm rubbish at this. I'm used to people doing their dirty work in clear view while I'm pretending to be asleep on the rug. Doing it as a human is harder."
Lily nods, turning to follow Flamel and Remus as the circle closes and they disappear behind the tree. "Do you trust them?"
Sirius shrugs. "Dumbledore trusted Flamel. That's enough for me unless we see otherwise. He's giving us everything we ask for."
Lily turns fully to face SIrius. "And do you trust Remus?"
Sirius meets her eyes and there's a fierce loyalty in the way his jaw sets, his mouth a thin line of challenge. "With my life."
"If you're done conspiring," Flamel calls from the far side of the tree. "You will want to step out of the circle we have made. There are unpleasant side effects to being in the bounds of this particular spell."
"What side effects?" Lily shouts back, feeling her temper rising.
"Death," Flamel replies.
"Likely a very unpleasant death," Remus adds.
Sirius rolls his eyes before Lily can.
"Now," Flamel says once they join him just outside the circle. "Let me show you exactly what happened."
He draws something out of his robes. It takes a moment for Lily to realize it's a wand, but not like any wand she's ever seen before. It's distant from the polished wands she and Sirius have, in their crafted perfection, carved and smoothed into shapes not inherent in the wood itself. There are knots visible on Flamel's wand, and it's crooked in two places. There are marks from centuries of use on it, marks that his fingers unconsciously find in their grip. The tip is blunt, slanting to the side, as if it was hacked off a tree six hundred years ago and never shaped, merely worn down.
The incantation Flamel begins is long, melodic, and sounds nothing like the spells any of them learned in school. It sounds the way Lily imagined magic as a child: like the forest itself speaking through a man wielding in some ancient druidic dialect of German. His wand touches the circle of powder and it ignites, the flame speeding around the circle, streaking blue fire. It puts off such a stink and whooshing noise that it must be sulfur. But once the circle is complete, the fire appears to flood inward, toward the tree, burning nothing but wrapping it in blue flame.
"Watch," Flamel shouts over the roar of the fire. "This is precisely what occurred in this place, many years ago."
For a few seconds, there is nothing but the heat of the fire on their faces. And then beneath the flames on the branches, leaves unfurl in flame. Despite being the past, it's a vision of the future; the spring this place will go through soon enough. There are signs of it already on the branches, signs of budding. But the tree is slightly smaller in flame this way; a ghostly branch is sketched in the air where it is broken today. A bird made entirely of blue fire flits from one branch to another, nest-building twigs burning in its beak. If its chicks are tweeting, if its mate is calling, it can't be heard over the roar of the flames.
Before them, just beyond the edge of the circle, a man emerges. His features are handsome but twisted, even rendered this way; there is no color to him but the blue of the fire. The face is almost familiar, if she squints; it's not on a statue or a painting but she can recognize it, in a locked-away part of herself. He glances up at the tree and then behind him. If Lily didn't know better, she'd think he was looking right through her. Her vision goes gray at the edges, and a drumbeat begins, and something inside of her pulls-
Then he turns and it's gone, vanishing like smoke in the wind. The man who must be Tom Riddle advances on the tree. When he reaches the tallest root, he stands on it, looking up. With one more glance around himself, he leaps into the air and is propelled forward with a spell, upward, into the limbs of the tree.
It's Severus' trick from when they sparred, Lily realizes. This is who he learned it from.
Before the shock can set in he's scrambling-he's easily 10 years older than Lily, but at this distance and wreathed in blue fire he looks like nothing more than a little boy scaling a tree alone. There's even a half-second of fright for him when his fingers slip off a branch before he catches himself. Of all the things to feel for the man she intends to kill, this is the strangest.
He crests the tree, and his feet catch their landing on two uneven branches. There's a knot there before them, hollowed-out even now, and the fire burns brighter around it as he reaches his fist in and withdraws something that glitters even in the flame-borne memory, something bright and shining and so powerfully magical it hurts to look upon.
A movement across the field snags Lily's attention, and the wandering peasant girl moves into their line of sight. She can't be more than ten but she is confident in her movements, weaving a garland of spring flowers in her hands.
Tom Riddle spots her only just after Lily does. His mouth opens but there is no sound. She smiles back at him and speaks. He leaps from the tree and lands effortlessly, the diadem still shining like a sun in his fist. His expression doesn't change at all when he raises his wand and the bright, burning curse flicks towards the girl.
The fire is extinguished from outside of the ring inward, leaving nothing but her garland flung into the air and its contrail of blue flaming petals. It's like the sun has been doused. All Lily can see is the afterimage: a girl, smiling up at a handsome young man who only seeks to use her death to his own ends.
Sirius beats her to the cursing.
"Is that when he made it?" Lily asks when he's done, her voice shaking more than she means it to.
"It would seem so." Flamel turns toward them both, his face grave for once.
"That wasn't enough," Sirius growls. "We need to know where it is now, not how he made it."
"Ah. That is where I come in. Or perhaps, to be specific, what I can relay from Albus Dumbledore." Flamel gives up a small and kind smile. "Albus confided in me before his death the date that Tom Riddle went for his interview for the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. It was, in fact, the very day of these events."
Lily's breath catches. She thinks she knows what he's saying but she has to be sure. "Say what you mean."
"Of course." Flamel draws himself up straight like a professor ready to offer the absolute final proof of his theory. "It is my belief that Tom Riddle took the diadem of Ravenclaw and hid it somewhere in Albus' own beloved Hogwarts."
"There's no way," Remus objects. "Dumbledore would have known. It could be anywhere between-"
"Such a thing would be sighted, detected." He turns to Sirius. "The horcruxes you have found, they have an abiding affect, do they not?"
"One of them was in a cave," Sirius argues. "It was hidden well enough."
"A remote location may serve, but it is still detectable. And there is his arrogance to contend with: that location is likely of particular import to the young Tom Riddle," says Flamel. "Or didn't you know that? You stumbled upon it by chance?"
The way Sirius' neck turns scarlet under the growth of his beard belies the truth of it. There's no need for Legilimency there.
"And the others," Flamel says, turning to Lily. "Where were they?"
"With loyal servants," Lily says. "Both of them."
"Even now, Hogwarts serves to train loyalists to his order in the vision of Salazar Slytherin. Would you not say the castle is of particular import to the young Tom Riddle?"
"I don't want to understand him," Sirius snaps. "I want to have done with him."
"Then it is your failure that awaits you, and on your head be it," Flamel says, turning to Remus. "If you would like to return to England with your friends to die in their war, I'm sure we could replace you." With a swish of his cloak, he strides over the ring of char surrounding the tree, back toward the hidden settlement.
Lily looks from Remus, who is thunderstruck, and Sirius who-worse-has a terrible kind of hope on his face. She's not a coward, but she has learned to pick her battles, and to pick ones she knows she has a chance of winning, and this is a fight she isn't even sure she has a stake in. She hurries after Flamel, whose long legs have already taken him halfway around the huge and ancient tree.
When she catches up to him, she's panting, and she can hear Sirius and Remus talking behind them both. She doesn't know what to say to Flamel-this all makes her head spin, makes her feel like a child back in school. "That was cruel," she pants.
"That was a reward," he answers, not slight of breath, not apologizing.
"For what?"
"Remus has been loyal, kind, respectful, and helpful." He doesn't have to look over to give the implicit addition: unlike you.
"You don't make it easy," Lily snaps, still catching her breath.
"I am utterly uninterested I am in easy." Flamel glances over his shoulder; Sirius and Remus are easily a hundred paces back, but following, engaged in heated and intimate conversation. "Forgive me if I am presuming, but the memory charm you bear could be broken quite easily if you would like to be whole once more."
Lily stops in her tracks, absorbing what he's said. Flamel stops with her, as if they are merely holding steady for a few moments listening the call of a rare bird, or watching the light falling through the trees.
He goes on, voice low and careful. "Your friend is quite talented, but my skills surpass his. I'm quite sure it could be done safely."
Harry and James. Back. Entirely. All of it, not flashes, not moments. The child in her arms real and hers and connected back to the love she must have felt for him, no longer just a half-remembered weight. James real, loving her, and her loving him back-
"No," she says.
Flamel tilts his head, mildly surprised. "You would choose your friend over your husband? Your child?"
"I choose the war." She falters. "It took me years to recover from the spell's effects."
He looks, for the first time, frustrated. "As I have said, it would be safe. You would be as you were."
And isn't that just the issue. "I wasn't- I couldn't fight, like that. I was nothing, remembering them."
"You are nothing now. You were a wife, then, a mother, loving and beloved."
Lily snorts, folding her arms. "That's retrograde."
"We are not meant to live without our own memories."
She can't help the anger flaring. "I've managed it, thanks."
"You are not so well trained in Occlumency that I did not see the face that caused your refusal." A strange look, both frustrated and terribly sad, passes across his face. "You will have to tell him about it some day."
Lily reaches deep and pulls out a sneer Severus would be proud of. "And how do you make that feel like an accusation?"
"It is not. It is merely a fact. You will have to tell that dear Death Eater friend of yours what you chose today, once you abandon this opportunity, because I do not think you will be back in my company again. You will have to tell him that you refused." Flamel's mouth moves into something not entirely unlike a smile, something not entirely unkind. "And you will have to tell him why."