Chapter 9 Protections and preparations

Harry was waiting for his turn at duelling practice at the MACUSA when one of his mirrors buzzed. Everybody who had a mirror knew better than to make a social call when he was in a training session, so he quickly dug out all the mirrors, spread them on the ground, and said, "accept".

"Harry", Hermione spoke from her mirror, "my home wards are under attack." Harry picked up the mirrors and ran for the nearest point outside the anti-portkey wards, while Hermione continued to explain the situation, "there are two out front doing nothing but preventing escape, and a tight bunch of five to seven attacking the wards at the back. They're at the South-West corner. I'm preparing an unpleasant surprise for them, but I'm afraid it's not going to be enough. Can you please portkey in at attack distance, cast a single maximum effect spell at them and then apparate to safety?"

"Yes. Three minutes. Is that soon enough?"

"Should be. I did quite a bit of work on the wards. Let me know when you're ready and I will try to make my distraction coincide with your arrival."

"Portus." Once he arrived where he could portkey, he said, "30 seconds. Disillusio." He took out his Cloak of Invisibility and put that on as well. Although it was night in Japan, there would be lights from the houses and he might need to move around quite a bit, because he had no intention of apparating away, so the disillusionment was there to keep exposed feet from being too obvious. "Ready when you are."

"Three, two, one, GO."

Harry activated the portkey. Hermione's timing was impeccable; on landing he was greeted by screams from the attackers.

"Flagellum ignei!" The fire whip was one of his more powerful spells, and suitable for attacking more than one person at once.

Before he could get out a second spell he heard the sound of a leaving portkey. "Video ubique. Homenum revelio." A supersensory charm and a human revealing charm didn't show any living attackers, but he did see several bodies, and he knew he wasn't done yet. The Japanese aurors would presently arrive, and seeing how much damage Hermione and he had managed to inflict, they might well be more upset with the two of them than with the attackers. They would check his spell history, so from here on he would try to vanish the most incriminating evidence without doing any more spells. "Hermione," he called as he hurried over to the bodies.

"Yes?"

"A silencing ward please."

He spread his Cloak over the bodies and took out a bag with an expansion charm. He was glad his paranoia over possible attacks had made him come prepared. As he was stuffing the bodies into the bag he could hear people arriving, presumably the Japanese aurors. If they operated anything like the USA aurors they would first establish defences, then look around for fighting. Seeing nobody, they might ask their Ministry for any magical signatures of outgoing apparations or portkeys, all of which would give Harry time. Once the three bodies were gone he decided that he should leave the severed hand, as he wouldn't be able to vanish all the blood. He ran to a likely defensive position across the alley, stuffed both the bag and his Cloak away, and cast a Finite to make himself visible again. "Peace," he called out, "I'm an auror trainee from the USA responding to a distress call."

That got confused babbling in Japanese, which eventually resolved into a question, "English?"

"Yes."

"Wait."

After a few minutes a new person apparated in, who was apprised of the situation by the aurors and presently called out, "did you arrive here not long ago by an illegal international portkey?"

"Yes, my friend, Hermione Granger, lives here, and the wards around her house were under attack. I came here to help defend her."

"Please place your wand on the ground, making sure not to point it at us."

He did that and his wand was whisked away.

"Do you have any other weapons?"

"Yes, I am an auror trainee and I have both a spare wand, several knives and some explosive potions. All of those are hidden away, though."

"Please come out with your empty hands clearly visible."

What followed was a meticulous investigation, which unfortunately meant that it took a long time. In the end, though, the blood and hand, together with remains of a potion that Hermione had used in her counter-attack, corroborated the sequence of events that Hermione and Harry reported, and the fact that Hermione was a muggleborn who had been very vocal against the way Hogwarts and the British Ministry had changed over the last two years established a plausible motive for the attack. The mirrors and an anti-floo ward were accepted as evidence that calling in help from the USA rather than the Japanese Ministry had been a logical step. It was still illegal, but rather than arrest Harry they made both of them sign magical contracts to submit to the punishment that would eventually be decided upon, and after that Harry was taken to the Japanese Ministry and sold a portkey back to the MACUSA. Although his abrupt departure and return six hours later didn't cause quite as much of an uproar in the USA, his energy was already flagging by the time he returned, and once he had explained first to the portkey office and then again to the auror trainers what had happened he was utterly shattered. Fortunately, it was early evening by then, so he could go home, have a light meal, and sleep for 12 hours to be more or less ok for another day of auror training.

The next weekend, Harry called Hermione to ask how she was.

"I've tried not to let it affect me, but of course I'm not as good at focussing only on things I can actually change as I'd like to be. For now I'm staying where I am. If I moved, I'd have to start from nothing warding the place, and that seemed like a bigger disadvantage than hoping I could keep it a secret where I'd be moving to. And it was quite difficult the first time to find a room that I could afford in a house where the landlord allowed me to add to the wards without having a Runes mastery. How were the Americans about you breaking international law?"

"They're waiting for the official Japanese position. The Japanese sold me a legal portkey back, so I didn't break any USA laws. It occurred to me afterwards that it would have been a good idea to call on Dobby and Winky to get you out in case the wards collapsed. In addition to calling on me, I mean. Did you ask if there's any word about possible British visitors who might have been the attackers?"

"I did hear them cast spells that were derived from Latin rather than Chinese, like Japanese people do. But I asked my mistress, and she told me that because we didn't see any of the attackers, there almost certainly won't be any official response against the British, but that the informal position could be diametrically opposed to that. She promised to ask a friend of a friend what circumstantial evidence might influence the verdict against you."

"Thanks. I was wondering how you managed to get the potion to your attackers."

"Can you put up a silencing charm?"

"Done. I don't think Sirius and Remus would rat you out, though, even if you did do something illegal."

"Not illegal. Potentially useful for future use. I devised an enchantment that involves both a transfiguration and several charms to turn the potion into a tiger that would burst outwards if hit be the curses that would be the most likely ones to be used against it, like cutting and exploding curses."

"Bloody hell, no wonder you were always mentally absent whenever we were together. … Sorry, that came out wrong. I mean, of course I knew that what you were doing was important. Was it selfish of me to break up with you?"

"No, it's fine, Harry. I was really grateful that you were already running to come and save me before I was halfway through my explanation of the attack. I think you were right to conclude that this is not the right time for me to be your girlfriend. You know I'm not the best dueller, so it's probably unrealistic to offer an exact reciprocation, and the enchantment will fall apart a bit too easily, so I don't think trying to teach it to you would be the most responsible thing to do, but I did make some warding innovations. I hadn't sent them to you yet because I didn't want to trust them to owl post, but you mentioned calling on Dobby just now, which hadn't occurred to me, but he would be the safest way to get it to you, so I'll write it down in the next week or so."

"OK. Thanks. I'll talk to you when there's any news."

More than a week later Hermione called Harry to report that 8 British tourists had entered the country before the attack, and only 4 had left, saying they had 'lost touch' with the 4 missing persons. And that the blood and hand that had been recovered didn't match any persons that were registered by the Japanese Ministry. Although neither of those facts were conclusive, and would therefore not influence the official Japanese position, they would likely make the sanctions against Harry less severe.

It was another two weeks before the verdict against Harry was decided on, which was a fine. It was a fairly substantial fine at 25 Galleons, but the maximum punishment was a year in prison, so it was clear that they had indeed gone for something close to the minimum punishment.

Harry had gotten Bs for both his Herbology and Ancient Runes NEWTs. The improved mark in Herbology meant he would now be allowed to take on auror cases that required this knowledge, mostly illegal import of potions ingredients and sales of wares that didn't meet regulations. There were some limited opportunities now that he had a Runes NEWT, but mostly it was an initial step towards advanced learning. He was trying to follow the discussion that Hermione and Lilian were having about warding, including the 3-dimensional unplottable ward, hoping to learn enough to start contributing in future.

In August, Harry did another tour around Britain to talk to newly detected muggleborns, setting up wards around their homes, schools and for an undetectable travelling network. The first thing he did was to rent a ground penetrating radar instrument, and used it to do a survey of the land North of Hogwarts and East of Hogsmeade. Once they had designed the 3-dimensional unplottable ward they would need anchor stones to inscribe the wards on, and, because they didn't want to use magic for fear that the Ministry would detect it, Harry had done his homework before the trip and found that the instrument would be able to identify suitable stones below ground.

As part of the tour Harry had visited one of the Potter owned houses he had added unplottable wards to the previous year, and had had the lease terminated. He wanted to turn it into a safe house and a floo hub. Harry had found a book in the Black library about setting up a floo network. He had idly wondered whether a Black ancestor had invented the floo network or had bought the restricted information about how to set up a network. For centuries now the Blacks had been one of the families that jostled for the most important businesses and Ministry jobs, and had alternated between family members working hard at deserving that exalted place and ones that had less talent and/or more political leanings who used the family's connections and vaults to buy that influence.

The book documented that the Ministry needed a whole team of people working full time just to keep the network running. However, what made it so complicated was that the network allowed everyone to travel to any floo. A floo system that had a single hub that all other floos connected to would be much simpler. It also wouldn't allow more than one person to travel through the system at any one time, but it would be an ideal way for underage students to get about undetected.

"Kreacher."

Pop. "How may Kreacher serve the half-blood imposter."

"I want you to dig out a cellar below this house."

"If the Black heir speaks for the traitor master, he could send Kreacher to join his ancestors and ask the grandchild of Kreacher to do as he asks."

"Would any humans besides Sirius know if your grandchild came to work for me?"

"The half-blood is truly an imposter. House-elves keep their masters' secrets."

Harry almost let it drop, but then decided that Kreacher had been sufficiently antagonistic that he didn't feel honour-bound to be sensitive of his pride, and instead should insist on erring on the side of paranoia, so he said, "but I've heard you mumbling to yourself about things. Therefore, I forbid you from ever speaking, or otherwise communicating, about this house, or the reason for considering taking on another house-elf." He then continued with, "please wait while I talk to Sirius, Kreacher." Harry dug out Sirius' mirror and checked it was a reasonable hour in the USA, "Padfoot."

"Harry, how are things in Britain."

"So far, things have been going smoothly, but just now I ran into a snag. I asked Kreacher to do something that would be quite a bit of work, and he said he's too old to do it, and suggested we take on Kreacher's grandchild to do it. Do you think that's a good idea?"

"If that's what Kreacher wants then I think we should do it."

"OK, Kreacher, how do we proceed to get your grandchild to serve the house of Black?"

A new house-elf popped in, "Kreacher asked for Opal?" Opal noticed Harry, and bowed to him, "Opal is honoured to meet the heir of house Black."

Harry showed him the mirror, "Opal, the head of house Black is in the USA, and I brought this mirror so that we can talk to him. Please meet Sirius Black."

"Opal is honoured to meet the head of house Black."

Sirius spoke up, "I'm pleased to meet you, Opal. Would you agree to become our house-elf?"

"Opal would be honoured to serve the house of Black."

"Excellent. I would like you to do as Harry Potter asks you. If at some point Harry has no more work for you, I'd like you to help Kreacher to clean and maintain the house at Grimmauld Place."

"Yes, master."

Harry spoke up, "Sirius, before I called you, Kreacher spoke of joining his ancestors, but I hope you agree there's no need to hurry that along."

"I agree."

"Kreacher, when the time comes when you join your ancestors, I would like your permission to bury you or cremate you and the heads of the house-elves …"

"Hold on, Harry," Sirius spoke up. "Kreacher, what Harry is trying to say is that although the previous house-elves have served the house of Black well, displaying their heads in our home … runs counter to older traditions, traditions that we would like to revert to."

"If master thinks it's too soon for Kreacher to join his ancestors, Kreacher will wait. Kreacher would be honoured to be buried with the heads of his ancestors and predecessors."

"Thank you, Kreacher, that will be all." After Kreacher left, Harry ended the call to Sirius and asked Opal to dig out a room below the cellar of the house, and not to speak about the house with anyone. Harry also told her that, once the radar images had been processed, he would need her to dig access tunnels to four stones to anchor the wards of the future school. He told her to start by installing trap doors covered with the soil and vegetation that was already there. Although the digging would have to be done manually to avoid the risk of detection, Opal could still use passive magical aids, most notably a trunk with expanded interior to put the excavated subsoil into.

Harry interviewed Opal about her attitude towards muggleborns, and was pleasantly surprised that they didn't match Kreacher's vitriol. This solved a problem that he had been hoping to find a solution for while in Britain. They were hoping to collect memories of classes in muggle schools so that they could offer a variety of subjects without having to hire a teacher for each subject. However, Harry couldn't stay in Britain year round to collect the memories, so the pupils would need to learn enough magic that they could be taught the memory extraction charm. He had come up with half of the solution when several of the portraits of his grandparents and other Potter ancestors had agreed to stay with one of the muggleborns and teach them. The part that he hadn't solved before his trip to Britain was who could be on call to undo the damage if something went so badly wrong that the pupils couldn't solve it themselves. He didn't have a direct line of communications to the guerrillas who were still trying to overthrow the current Ministry; they were wary of all the ways that such communications might be intercepted. And he didn't like the risk of asking someone who lived under the Ministry's control, even if not everybody who disapproved of the current regime had been able to emigrate. But now, that problem was solved, thanks to Opal.

He revisited the pupils attending muggle schools where he had installed unplottable wards the previous year. While he was travelling by muggle bus, he was called by Hermione. Her room was under attack by someone who didn't know any curse-breaking. Therefore, she was in no danger, but couldn't get to her floo. Harry called Sirius to ask the USA aurors to call the Japanese aurors. When Hermione called back to report that she was fine, she explained that one of her house-mates had been imperiused to attack her. The attack had failed because Hermione had not only warded the house she lived in, but had additional wards protecting her room. The most likely scenario was that one of the 8 Death Eaters who had attacked two weeks before had been badly injured enough that s/he hadn't been able to leave with the others without arousing suspicion, and had now recovered enough to test her defences. It was typical of Riddle to leave them stranded with a mission that had limited chance of success, rather than try to organise a rescue. Harry convinced Hermione to accept the money to get a private floo connection in her room.

Harry continued his travels. He had found 13 ancestral wands in the Potter vault, and managed to find six students who could use one of the wands, out of the 30 students who would be entering year 5 or above and didn't go to a foreign school of magic (for the years 7 and above) or probably wouldn't be going (for the years 5 and 6). Harry told the new wandowners what one of the auror instructors had told him: "A tool in the hands of a fool is a weapon". He left the students who didn't find a wand with introductory books on Ancient Runes. He would have loved to ask some to have a go at Potions or Transfiguration, but those were much more dangerous to learn without adult supervision, so he left it at Charms and Runes. He left all of them with a portrait each, and introduced them to Opal, instructing her to take them to the magical hospital in the USA in an emergency. He also left Opal with potions for the most common first aid.

When Harry approached the home of one of the newly discovered muggleborns, the ward sensor went off. Hermione had built the sensor two years before. The Ministry was bound to have noticed that the Book of Admissions had disappeared and that after that no or far fewer muggleborns were being detected than in the past. The logical conclusion would be that the underage muggleborns had been invited along for the exodus, even if that conclusion was incorrect. In any case, Hermione had known that sooner or later a student would do powerful enough accidental magic that even the weakened detection ward would detect it, and that they would then place monitoring wards to try and find out if anyone continued to smuggle muggleborns out of the country. Even if the Ministry was glad to be rid of the muggleborns, they wouldn't want the opposition to get away with helping them. Fortunately, there was a minimum amount of magic that was needed to trip a ward, and Hermione had built a detector that used less magic than that and signalled that a ward was present. Harry called the house by telephone and pretended to be from the census bureau to check that the muggleborn was alive and well. They had agreed that if that were the case, then the Ministry must have contented itself with binding his magic and obliviating the family of the accidental magic, and that they would leave the situation be, at a minimum until they started their school.

After the holidays, auror training resumed. They had progressed from dealing with individual fields of magic to the interactions between them, like using transfiguration to make illegal potion ingredients or enchanted objects look like legal wares, and how to non-invasively distinguish between the magic of the transfiguration from that of the original object. The trainees were also being given slightly more demanding cases to solve. They were still being sent out to deal with disorderly conduct, but now they were also dealing with purposely committed crimes.

Harry had also been using his limited unstructured time to worry about repeats of the attack on Hermione, and had called to tell her, "I've been thinking about additional defences, and I was wondering whether disillusioned, poison coated bear-traps would take out at least one of the next group of attackers. Poison that incapacitates rather than kills in case there are further attacks by imperiused people."

"Hmm. If I ward the garden against cats it might work. I like the idea of altering muggle devices to serve as defences. I don't think there are bears in Japan, though, so they might not sell them here."

"I will buy a bunch, shrink them and send them to you."

Harry, Sirius, Remus and the elves spent Christmas with the Grangers in Canada again, though, unlike the previous year, they didn't spend the whole holiday together, but only stayed for two days. Hermione also came to the New Year's Eve party in Massachusetts for a brief opportunity to talk to those British expats with whom she was not close enough to mirror call or owl.

In the end the bear trap precaution wasn't needed. Caucasians were fairly conspicuous in Japan, and in an effort to escape being found, the Death Eater had taken refuge in muggle society, but he had been insufficiently conversant with acceptable muggle clothing and behaviour, had been caught in a situation where he couldn't cast a confundus charm on all the bystanders, and had been flagged as a public disturbance on the police radio, which was being monitored for breaches of the Statute of Secrecy by the aurors. Hermione and Harry took a collective breath of relief.

Since a Japanese national had been imperiused in Japan, and the perpetrator was a British citizen who was shown with veritaserum to be part of the British government, the Japanese foreign policy towards Britain had become much more antagonistic. And other countries were taking note, seeing what had happened as an example of what might happen to their citizens, especially countries that had welcomed British fugitives, which amounted to quite a few countries as various people had chosen to join distant family members, or had sought out opportunities for further education or taken jobs wherever they were available. Although there was no talk of the intervention on British soil that Harry had proposed in the New York Ghost 3 years before, the attitude in the international community, including the ICW, had changed to be more critical of Britain.

Good news could never stand for long, though, and there were disquieting reports of young women being kidnapped in Western Europe. After the poisoning of British women into infertility, the culprits were bound to be British Death Eaters, or, if not Death Eaters, at least men who had the standing with the current regime to keep a slave without being thrown straight into Azkaban for it. Several family members of the victims had been quick to point out who were the likely perpetrators to their domestic media. Consistent with that accusation, most of the kidnapped women were from minor pureblood families who couldn't afford the best protections for their family members. However, there wasn't much governments could do, as there was no hard evidence, so they were limited to more stringent checks at the borders, delays in processing portkey applications from Britain, and looking the other way when enraged family members of the kidnapped took the law into their own hands and made incursions into Britain, which, however, were ineffectual, as the kidnappers were purebloods who lived behind strong wards.

That wasn't to say that things were going well in Britain. The Minister of magic was the highest Ministry official who was weak-willed enough to submit under a prolonged Imperius curse from Voldemort. Every capable person with a higher position had been murdered. Voldemort tried to make much of each member of the Order of the Phoenix that was killed or captured, but the reality was that without a strong opposition after the death of Albus Dumbledore, he had nowhere to direct his inexhaustible anger. He didn't have enough capable Death Eaters to risk continuing to send them into hostile situations abroad, he couldn't risk going himself and being vastly outnumbered, he didn't have the patience to worry much why so few muggleborns were being detected, as they were harmless anyway, and he had no interest in keeping the silent majority in Britain happy, so the cycle of a shrinking economy, emigration and nepotism continued in a downward spiral. Now that most of the muggleborns had either emigrated or been captured, the need for new scapegoats meant that half-bloods were the new mudbloods.

"Hermione Granger."

"Harry Potter. Hello, Harry."

"Hi. Can you put up a privacy charm, please?"

"Done."

"I'd like to put up a Fidelius charm. Would you be able to join me in August to either be the Secret Keeper or to cast the charm on me?"

"I could join you in August, but I doubt I'm powerful enough to cast it, and I'm not sure that you would be able to manage the precision that is required. Maybe you should find someone in the USA to teach you. I don't think there would be enough time during a visit to the UK for me to teach you, as it's a complicated ritual."

"OK, I'll look into it."

"Actually, I was thinking of something that would need a privacy charm as well."

"Yes?"

"The map of Hogwarts must be driven by some kind of ward, but I haven't been able to find a ward that could do what the map does. Can you ask Sirius and Remus if they have the rune scheme for such a ward?"

"Hold on, I will call you back." … "They only have the rune scheme to put on the map, not the runes that would be part of the castle wards. We also asked the map, just in case the information was stored in there, but no luck."

"You got the map back then?"

"Yes, when the Ravenclaws left, they didn't want to risk leaving the map with someone they were not entirely sure they could trust not to either hand the map over to the Death Eater professors or to fail at constant vigilance in keeping it hidden, so they took it with them."

"Hmm, that's unfortunate. About not knowing the ward scheme, I mean; I agree that it was best not to leave the map behind. … It would potentially save a lot of lives if we could find the ward scheme, but that would mean searching inside Hogwarts. And the way I thought would be least likely to be detected would be highly irresponsible, because that would involve asking an 11-year-old muggleborn to enter under your cloak with the other first years on 1 September."

"… I think we should make a plan. If we can convince ourselves that the risk to the student being noticed is low, and we can find a volunteer, then I think we should do it. I think we're simply that desperate that risking a single child to make all the other children safer is something we'll have to learn to live with."

"Yes, I was afraid that was going to be our conclusion. I will make a draft plan. Please have a dictaquill ready next time we talk and I'll read it out to you."

"You're already doing so much. Should I make a plan?"

"No, that's ok. I was already expecting that you wouldn't have the runes for the ward scheme, so I have a vague plan in my head already."

"OK, just call me when you have the draft ready for me to look at."

June didn't know how to put up a Fidelius, but knew enough magical theory, especially defensive theory, that she and Harry were able to learn it together.

Harry had asked the witch-raised expats which British squibs they knew. They had come up with two names without addresses. Harry had sent Hedwig to them, but neither of them knew any other squibs; because there were so few of them they tended to be different in age, and not have anything else in common except that they knew of the existence of magical society without being part of it. So, Harry's hope of finding squibs who were teachers or with other useful skills to a starting school came to nothing.

Harry's mastery was starting to take more definite form. During the first one and a half years, he had mostly learned individual pieces of magic, spells, wards, even some potions, that were more advanced than the day-to-day auror work required. More and more, June was teaching him how to combine them, much like they were in auror training, except again dealing with more complex situations that hardly ever came up in auror work. How to use a combination of wards and detection spells to make sure that an escape route was not being cut off while attacking a criminal stronghold. How to use the terrain to one's advantage when a dangerous magical creature threatened human lives, and how to recognise when that was not possible and it was necessary to go to the extreme step of changing the terrain itself.

How to chip away at a criminal organisation and try to limit the risks of reprisals. He was certainly glad that he had stayed to talk to the Japanese aurors after the first attack on Hermione so that he could disappear the worst of the evidence and control the narrative of what had happened, when the temptation to make a second illegal portkey and return to the USA before he could be identified had been there. Apparently, five years in the USA had succeeded in restoring his faith in justice enough to overcome his experiences with the Dursleys, Sirius' experience with Azkaban, and his own experiences with prejudice and teachers who failed to protect him at Hogwarts. Even though staying to be interrogated by the Japanese aurors had led to a rather unpleasant interrogation and fine, he had come out looking like part of the injured party, who were struggling against criminals working out of Britain, with proof that the British Ministry and the criminals had ties, when they weren't simply the same people. He resolved to return that sense of being a cog in a government machine that resembled a laundromat more than a meatgrinder to Britain. You got tossed about either way, but you came out cleaner rather than bloodied.