Remus Lupin shows up at King's Cross on 1 September 1991

by PardotKynes

Follows canon in first year and starts to diverge as Remus disabuses Harry of the conditioning that he received from the Dursleys to disregard his own wellbeing, until, in November 1994, Harry, Remus and Sirius move to the USA. After graduation from Ilvermorny and obtaining masteries, Harry and Hermione return to the UK to start a secret school for muggleborns. 1 chapter/year.

10. Chapter 10 Wands, -warts and wards

Chapter 10. Wands, -warts and wards

"Harry Potter."

"Accept. Hi Neville."

After they exchanged pleasantries and news, Neville got to his reason for calling, "would it be alright if I brought another herbologist?"

"You mean a partner? A girl- or a boyfriend."

"A girlfriend, yes."

"Is she wizard-raised?"

"I thought you wanted to grow a society where that no longer matters."

"Yes and no. We, Hermione and I, think that by the time we're adults it's too late, so we want our students to grow up in a school where it doesn't matter, even if for the teachers it will always matter, and the best they, we all, can do is make sure that mistake is not propagated. And partly that's about diversity, so having a Brazilian member of staff would be great, but partly it's about having grown up in a society where people expect, … well, where there is at least a public outcry when equality before the law turns out to be a work in progress rather than a reality. And there, even Brazilian muggle society is not doing so great." "All that to say that I think it still matters whether she's wizard-raised?"

"Yes."

"And is magical Brazil a democracy?"

"Err, a bit."

"Does the whole population … does the whole adult population get to elect the whole go- … legislative branch of the government?"

"No. I guess I see your point, Noêmia and I share a rather cynical view of government. Do you think that's going to be a problem?"

"It's more that I think it needs to be balanced out with a majority of the staff being muggle-raised. I still very much want you to join us, so maybe we just have to take on another muggle-raised member of staff from the start."

"Sorry to complicate matters further, but it might not come to that. I just called to ask whether there was going to be a problem. Noêmia is a year older than us, so she's going to finish her mastery in the next few months. And I'm still on track to finish by the end of the next calendar year. So, we were thinking, if we have extra time, we might as well get extra training. And if we're still together in two years, what training would be most useful?"

"Does Brazil have a magical primary school?"

"No."

"Then getting a qualification for muggle teacher qualification, especially primary school teacher, might not be the best fit for you two. What we need most after that is a wandwright. And, after that, producers of other necessities, clothes, seamstress, weaver, cobbler, a potter, … The list does go on, but we'd prefer to have the most important needs taken care of first."

"Yes, about that. It would really help to have a supply of manure, because nothing will want to grow in the subsoil that the school is going to be dug out of. Do you think next time you're in Britain you could change the runes on the toilets in the Three Broomsticks and the Hog's Head to redirect to the school? And ideally other toilets as well, if the risk of discovery isn't too great."

"Those two, definitely. We'll look into additional sources. Do you have the runes that will be needed?"

"Yes, I'll send you an owl. And I'll keep you up to date about our plans to acquire useful skills."

Harry was starting to appreciate Hermione's love of making lists, as the kanban (just in time) organisation, that was needed to stay on top of 11 OWLs and 7 NEWTs, or the starting of a new school, with a gradual influx of students and teachers, and making sure that no holes appeared in the curriculum or living arrangements as a few multi-talented teachers teaching several subjects each were replaced by single-topic teachers teaching multiple levels of ability that wouldn't completely overlap with the age groups, had revealed one of the details of organisation that needed to happen ahead of time, viz, that the annual ward carving workshop would need to produce twice as many unplottable wards that year for the newly detected British muggleborns, so that they could dedicate next year's workshop to making pensieves.

The tour of Britain was a few weeks later than usual that year, as they would stay until 2 September. Harry had obtained a further 28 wands, mostly by asking his British pureblood friends whether they were prepared to donate some of their ancestral wands, but also by, in disguise, buying wands on the black market in the USA. There were 10 new muggleborns detected that year. His pureblood friends had also provided sufficient portraits that were willing to teach muggleborns in service of the long-term goal of taking back control of British magical society. None of the new muggleborns had any detection wards cast around their homes, suggesting that the detection of a muggleborn by the British Ministry the previous year had been due to a particularly strong first bout of accidental magic. The detected muggleborn had been 8 years old the previous year, which was at the high end of first magic that exceeded the threshold of the Book of Admission, and accidental magic became stronger with age, though that year there was a 9-year-old who had not been detected by the Ministry, so there was also a good deal of happenstance involved.

There had been a few accidents with those students who had gotten a wand the previous year, but nothing bad enough that Opal hadn't been able to handle it or that had broken through the unplottable wards. Harry replenished Opal's potions stock and praised her for taking care of the students and for digging out the floo hub and making a start on digging out the school.

Harry and Hermione met to cast two separate Fidelius charms, one on the subterranean floo hub, and one on the safe house above. It meant that the runes for the floo could be put in the safe house and would not be accessible to those who only knew the secret of the floo hub. Because they were using the simpler floo set-up that only allowed one person to use a network at a time, they were going to use two networks, one that would connect all the muggleborn students' homes to the hub and one that would have a single connection from the hub to the school. Hermione became the Secret Keeper for both secrets because she didn't think she was powerful enough to cast the Fidelius charm, which meant that they had to cast the Fidelii on separate days to give Harry's magic the time to recover. Harry had suggested Opal as one of the Secret Keepers, because she was a less obvious Secret Keeper and was more difficult to pin down with anti-apparation wards, but Hermione had been unable to find enough details about how house-elves interacted with human magic, and had found enough arithmantic details about the Fidelius charm that she'd concluded it could be dangerous to Harry and/or Opal if the charm didn't take. Harry had also side-along apparated Hermione to the main points of the growing network of unplottable apparation points, and had given her a set of photographs of each site to help keep a clear picture of each Destination.

"Harry," Hermione asked, "have you given any thought to where the remaining horcruxes might be hidden?"

"Do we have to worry about that now? We have a lot to do this week, and though the horcruxes are the most important task, they're not the most urgent, and I figured finding them is going to take years, and could wait until we move back here. Unless you think at least one of them is abroad. But if that's the case I would have no idea where."

"Do you have any ideas in Britain? I think it's important not to wait. I need a horcrux that hasn't been destroyed yet for an experiment."

"Dumbledore thought a Gringott's vault likely." After thinking about it, he added, "and his snake, Nagini."

"Hmm. Attacking Nagini would give the game away, and Gringott's is a bit too ambitious. Surely in the 3 years between finding the diary and dying he would have found out more than just the location of the ring?"

"I thought so as well, but that's all I can remember. … I got Dumbledore's speculations from Neville, but I didn't bring his letters with me. Sorry for that, it would have made sense to bring them. Do you want me to check when I get back?"

"I've been remiss as well, I should have thought of it sooner. Did you bring Neville's mirror?"

"Yes." After casting a Tempus, he qualified, "but he might be teaching right now."

Once it was late afternoon in Brazil, they contacted Neville, who had made a copy of the letter he had sent to Harry that said Dumbledore had been going after another horcrux shortly before he was murdered.

Dear Professor McGonagall,

Did Professor Dumbledore have anything on him that could shed any light on what he had been doing the night he was murdered? We think it was important. Maybe the elves were tasked with recovering his body? Did he carry anything other than his wand?

Thank you,

Harry and Hermione

They asked Opal to make sure Professor McGonagall was alone before giving her the letter and to ask, if possible, to wait for an answer.

Dear Hermione and Harry,

It's good to hear from you. I'm sorry that I did too little to stop the currently unfolding disaster. Most of the Hogwarts staff try to protect the students that remain. We're under the impression that even Headmaster Snape tries to keep the two Professors Carrow from doing their worst, but that he, like us, lacks the authority to completely stop them.

I suspect you know as much about what the situation in the rest of the country is as I. The Order of the Phoenix has been helping those who need help emigrating by muggle means. The existence of the Order has always been a fairly public secret, so the consensus is that doing more would get us all killed.

I attach the object that you asked about. I have no idea what it means. The Hogwarts library was unusually uninformative about horcruxes, mentioning only that it's the darkest of magics. Professor Dumbledore had left the castle for several hours before his death, which was not unusual. I don't know where he went, and neither did Professors Flitwick or Sprout. If you want me to risk putting out a feeler to Professor Snape about the note (I've made a copy), please let me know.

If there is anything else I or the Order can do, please let us know. Despite the risks I mentioned, we try to keep resisting the changes that are being enacted.

With warm regards,

Minerva

To the Dark Lord

I know I will be dead before you read this, but I want you to know that it was I who discovered your secret. I have stolen the real Horcrux and intend to destroy it as soon as I can. I face death in the hope that when you meet your match, you will be mortal once more.

R.A.B. (Half-Blood Prince Chapter 38)

They wrote a quick note thanking Professor McGonagall for the locket and note, and for helping people emigrate, but asking her not to talk to Professor Snape until they had exhausted all other avenues.

Harry had found an 11-year-old, Liz Opportell, who had volunteered to sneak into Hogwarts, and to lie to her parents about where she would be on the evening of 1 September, and who didn't have a problem riding the broom that Harry had brought from the USA. As contingencies they had given her a communication mirror, were hiding near Hogsmeade station and had introduced her to Opal, who would try to evacuate her if she was discovered, preferably from behind a closed door so that the noise of Opal apparating would be less noticeable. She would be disillusioned and wear the cloak of invisibility as well, fly through the doors when it was opened for the other first years, going slowly enough not to create a noticeable airflow, and fly up to the seventh floor. There, she would ask the room of requirement for a brightly lit room that would only be detectable and accessible by her and Opal, would eventually be able to silently create a hole through the castle's external wall that she could fly out of, and would have a description of the ward that detected where everybody was in the castle, and an explanation of the rune sequence if one were available. She would also ask for a flag that would be green if the room was able to eventually produce the sorting hat without being noticed by anyone else in the castle, possibly once the headmaster went to sleep, and a red flag if it wouldn't be able to do that. If the room produced the sorting hat, she would ask it to sort her without her being recorded anywhere, nor a bed being added to the appropriate dorm. They were hoping that would make it possible for her to enter the castle over the next seven years without setting off an intruder alarm. They gave her a camera so that she could photograph every page of the rune scheme, because they were not sure whether things the room conjured could be taken out of the room. While waiting for the hat during the opening feast, she would visit some of the toilets to redirect the humanure using the runes that Neville had provided, even though it didn't redirect to the future school yet, because the 3-dimensional unplottable ward hadn't been made yet. It went without a hitch. The only deviation from the plan was that the sorting hat didn't sort her, but gave her the status of a non-residential student, a status that she would retain until she passed her NEWTs, as long as she didn't perpetrate a serious infraction against the Hogwarts rules, such as attacking anyone or stealing school property.

"Harry," Hermione called by mirror after she'd returned to Japan, "there's something interesting in the book of admittance. There is a wizard-born 11-year-old who hasn't been sorted, and no home address is listed. This has happened 9 times over the last 13 years, and all of them either share a last name with a male muggleborn who is the right age to be their father, or they don't share a last name with any Hogwarts graduates who are between 17 and 40 years older than them, suggesting they have a muggleborn mother and a muggle father. The lack of home addresses suggests these muggleborns have exchanged information, or live together under a single ward, to keep themselves hidden and to keep their children from being obliviated when they don't show up at Hogwarts.

Do you think you could try sending Hedwig to try and establish communication? If you're too busy, maybe you could convince someone else to write? Just a first letter that doesn't give away any vital information, and also doesn't ask anything they wouldn't want the Ministry to know. It might help to establish our muggle-raised credentials to include an email address. Do you have one?"

"No, I have no idea what that even is."

"There's a global computer network called the internet, and I can use it to send a message to my parents more or less instantaneously. Why don't you include my email address, which is dentsdelion79 ?"

Harry sent a letter, saying that they had detected the student, but not his home address, and that they were trying to protect the underage muggleborns from the muggleborn registration commission.

He got a non-committal letter back, saying that they knew of Harry Potter, and were happy that he was organising relief. The letter also confirmed that they were a small group of muggleborns who had come together during the civil war in the 1970s to hide themselves. That until recently, they had been able to get supplies from Diagon Alley, but that that was no longer possible, as there were standing checks for muggleborns, and they had had a narrow escape the last time they had tried, and had been unable to buy a wand for their son. That they were too small a group to take in all the muggleborns, and were hesitant to join Harry's group without knowing more. However, that they were worried that Harry's method of detecting them could be reproduced.

Harry answered that they had done their best to sabotage the ability of the Ministry to detect muggleborns, admitting that their method was not 100% effective for new cases, but that they thought behind old wards they should be safe. He sent them the details of the two students about whose home-situation Hermione had been worried, and who had since become wards of child services. He sent them the wands that he had collected, and to please return the ones that didn't suit their son. He also told them they were still in the process of setting up their own group, and that he would keep them informed about their progress.

Although there had only been 30 new muggleborns over the previous three years, as opposed to the 52 under-11s that Hermione had communicated with in 1997, there had been no new cases of severe abuse, and Harry wondered in passing whether telling the parents sooner that their children were magical had helped with that, or whether it was just coincidence.

"Reggie," Sirius said when Harry showed him the note, and cried. When he had himself under control, Sirius explained, "RAB, Regulus Arcturus Black, my younger brother. I knew he had gotten cold feet after he had become a Death Eater. He must have thought defying Riddle was going to get him killed and didn't want me involved even after he'd switched to our side. He refused to talk to me at Hogwarts after I'd run away from home." After giving the note some thought, he said to Harry, "you gave the younger Black elf a mirror, no?"

"Yes." He dug it out of his pocket.

Sirius accepted the mirror and called, "Opal."

"How can Opal serve Master?"

"Please take your mirror to Kreacher, I need to speak to him."

When Sirius asked Kreacher what he knew about the locket, Kreacher confessed that he had tried and failed to destroy it, and had been ordered to keep it a secret. When Sirius asked Opal to bring the horcrux to the USA for destruction, Harry interrupted that Hermione needed it first. Once they promised to destroy it after Hermione had studied it, Kreacher agreed to part with the locket. They left the locket in London, and waited until it was early morning in Japan.

"Hermione Granger."

"Harry Potter."

"Can you put up a privacy charm?" Hermione nodded, but didn't do any spell. Harry concluded she'd already put it up and continued, "we found another horcrux."

Hermione stared at him for several moments while she processed that, "that was quick?"

"R.A.B. was Sirius' brother Regulus."

"Can you send an elf to bring it to me?"

Harry used Opal's mirror to arrange that, while he could see on Hermione's mirror that it arrived safely.

Hermione had one more question, "can I spend a not insignificant part of your fortune on potions ingredients?"

"Of course."

In December, Hermione had asked Harry to lend his communication mirror to Remus and Sirius. After the three had spoken, they had arranged to have a conversation with all four of them.

Hermione explained, "it occurred to me that the ward scheme that Liz retrieved from Hogwarts could have another use in addition to making sure we can detect uninvited visitors to the future school. However, I wasn't sure that this plan could have unwanted repercussions, and I didn't want to ask you because it could compromise your position as an auror. Remus and Sirius agreed with me, though, that we could argue for or against the plan equally well, and that we should ask you, and that we could keep the discussion purely as a theoretical exercise, and possibly ask you to make an unbreakable vow not to talk about it, to protect you from repercussions from MACUSA. The plan is to make a map of the whole UK with all magical individuals on it, and then to make more detailed maps of areas where any of the abducted foreign witches are seen, and to send those to their families. That might get them to attack the abductors. It has the potential of being a blow against the Death Eaters, who are likely to either be or be closely related to the abductors, and could further worsen the image of the UK in the ICW, but I worry that it might have negative consequences, either because my role in orchestrating the counter-attacks could be exposed, or because the British might be able to turn the attacks by foreigners into a bid for legitimacy. Some Mugwumps sympathise with the British decision to exclude muggleborns from Hogwarts, and they might even go as far as justifying the abductions as a necessary evil after the mass poisoning of British witches."

"On the other hand," Harry put in, "if the British get too relaxed, they might repeat their attacks on you. It's good to try and predict how secondary responses by the British or the international community might outweigh anything we gain from an offensive, but I think we have to keep applying pressure. If they get a chance to relax, they might have more resources available to find the missing muggleborns, or the half-bloods might start thinking that things are not so bad and stop emigrating."

"OK."

"OK? That was easy. I thought if you were undecided it would take more to convince you."

"Remus? Sirius?"

Remus spoke for the first time, "We did say that we were asking you to cast the deciding vote. And I find myself agreeing with your argument. We can't afford to wait for them to attack. If there are negative consequences, we can try to deal with those as they come up."

"I guess I was also worried that I had already made a major decision without asking you, with your auror training as an excuse, and I know you initially left Britain in large part because Professor Dumbledore kept you in the dark too much," Hermione added, "but I agree with you and Remus, it's better to keep pushing. I mostly wanted to make sure that your unwillingness to join those who are waging a guerrilla war inside Britain might have meant you preferred an approach that was pacifist or at least less confrontational."

"But I agreed with your 'major decision'. And you've trusted me to take on my own tasks, such as travelling Britain in August the last three years. And my criticism of the Order of the Phoenix and their guerrilla successors wasn't about their willingness to fight, but that their overall plan always struck me as one that had more of us die than Death Eaters. In the 70s, the order and aurors-who-were-not-Death-Eaters outnumbered the Death Eaters; as far as I've been able to figure by at least a factor of three-to-one. They lost because they were unwilling to take aggressive countermeasures until too late. Still, I'm glad you asked. And, about your earlier point, I think an unbreakable vow to protect me from MACUSA would be a good idea. However, Remus, Sirius and I can work on the text for that over the next few days."

As an afterthought, Harry added, "given how effective unplottable wards have been for us, won't the abductees be hidden?"

"Some will be, but unplottable wards increase the risk of splinching, and there can be negative interactions with place-based wards. It has worked well for us because we've used them as stand-alone wards, or in combination with only muggle notice-me-not wards."

"Another thing, Hermione. I think you look tired, so maybe you should ask Lilian to make these maps, or for us to find a new person to take on this task."

"Lilian is as busy as we are, and the most time-consuming bit is travelling to Britain, and there is no-one else who has the knowledge and the time and our trust to do this."

Harry didn't like it, but couldn't think of a solution. Magical Japan, unlike MACUSA, ignored magicals travelling by muggle means, and Hermione had a muggle student visa, so he just nodded, and asked her to not hesitate to ask for their help, and to consider whether Opal could take on some of the work.

Over the following weeks, in response to Hermione's worries, Harry thought about possible Ministry countermeasures, and asked Opal to put up unplottable wards near ferry ports. As those were intended in the first instance for leaving towards the rest of the UK, Harry didn't need to first familiarise himself with the spot before making it unplottable, as he'd been doing with the other apparation spots.

Christmas was similar to the previous year: a small party in Canada with the Grangers, followed by a large New Year's eve party in Massachusetts. Between the two, Hermione told Harry, "Dumbledore suggested I don't tell you, and Sirius and Remus agreed. All I can really tell you is Dumbledore had a different plan, and that both his plan and mine will endanger your life. Do you want me to try my plan, or wait?"

The fact that he had no experience with Hermione making a life-endangering plan was really not a factor; he had ample experience with Dumbledore's life-endangering plans. "Your plan."

"Stupefy."

Something fuzzy was obscuring Harry's view. It was familiar, but not.

He blinked.

The fuzz retreated, and resolved into the hair and face of Hermione. "How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Like I've just killed Quirrell again," Harry croaked.

"Not like Fawkes saved you from poisoning by basilisk venom?" Hermione's face retreated further, revealing a phoenix sitting on the foot of his bed.

"Fawkes?"

Fawkes trilled a greeting.

Hermione's words finally sunk into his sluggish brain. Fawkes saved his life. "Thank you, Fawkes."

Fawkes warbled an uplifting reply, spread his wings and disappeared in a ball of flame.

After a glass of water, Harry got the story out of Hermione. How she had guessed that Harry's scar was a horcrux, and Dumbledore's somewhat reluctant confirmation. How she had been sceptical of Dumbledore's 'plan' to have Riddle cast another killing curse at Harry. How she had stolen the books about horcruxes from Dumbledore's office by summoning them through the open window after his death. How she had speculated that the way the books about horcruxes spoke of destroying a horcrux by 'damage beyond magical repair' might mean that there might be a level of magical force that was strong enough to pierce the protections around the locket, but not strong enough to destroy it, and how she had been experimenting with basilisk-venom-based potions, and created one that stayed within those bounds. How she had called on Fawkes and had him agree to help her. How she had simultaneously damaged the locket and Harry's scar with the potion and used the horcrux ritual that forces a fragment of a soul into a container to force Riddle's soul fragment from Harry's scar into the locket. How Fawkes had then healed Harry. And finally, how Sirius had given the remains of the pure basilisk venom to Kreacher, allowing him to destroy the locket.

"There were 7 horcruxes after all," Harry remarked. After he had missed the importance of Neville's remark that Dumbledore had been on the trail of another horcrux just before he had been murdered, he had reread all the letters and notes, so he could recite the details even after having had a piece of soul torn out of his forehead. "Five down and Hufflepuff's cup and Nagini still to go, and our best guess for the location of the former is Gringott's London."

Hermione nodded, not sure whether to be encouraged by the number they had managed to find and destroy, or dismayed at the prospect of getting something out of the vault of a Death Eater inside a heavily guarded Gringott's in enemy occupied Britain.

During the New Year's Eve party, Harry took Lilian and Hermione apart, "Lilian, I know that you've only just started your mastery, and that organising a workshop to make a large set of pensieves is a major undertaking, but I'm worried about the 3-D unplottable ward. With the current plan, we'd have to put it up by next summer, so that it would have a year to absorb power, and you two didn't sound as if it would be ready by then." Seeing the look on Lilian's face, he was quick to add, "I'm not complaining about the lack of progress. Both of you have been working too hard as it is. I'm just saying that as far as I can see, one of our previous assumptions has to be let go, and, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that means we either change our conclusion that professional help can't be trusted with keeping this secret, that a 3-D unplottable ward is the only way to stay hidden while in the UK, that we don't want to take the students away from their parents between the ages of 11 and 18, and can't hope to keep smuggling them out of and back into the country at least twice a year secretly, or lastly that we're going to start the school on 1 September 2002."

The three of them mulled over that conundrum for a while, until Hermione tentatively offered, "what if I reformulate the first assumption as two separate assumptions, we didn't want to add a whole group of people to those who know the details of our plans, and if we want to only add a single additional person to our group, only a professional ward-smith will have the breadth of knowledge we need, but a professional ward-smith wouldn't agree to an unbreakable vow, since agreeing to one client would lead to everyone asking for a vow, and too many vows will end up contradicting each other." She waited a moment to let that sink in and see if either of the others were going to object to her assessment. When they didn't, she continued, "because it strikes me that we have a whole group of friends and allies who would be willing to abide by all security measure we could think of, and who, between them, would know as much as one professional."

"What I think you're suggesting," Lilian said, "is to ask the participants in the Pensieve making workshop to make an unbreakable vow not to talk to anyone who's not at the workshop about it, and then add on a brainstorming session about the modification needed to make an unplottable ward to cover a volume rather than an area?"

Harry objected, "I agree with most of that, but if we're talking about letting go of some of our assumptions, I think we also need to let go of our assumption that we're going to modify the existing ward, rather than design a new scheme."

Lilian warned, "there's a reason that most developments in wards are modifications of existing ones rather than creating new ones from scratch. The latter frequently leads to mortal accidents."

Hermione qualified, "but mostly, those accidents happen when activating the wards lead to backlash. We want to create a ward that will absorb ambient magic rather than being wand activated, and we can portkey in an object that is timed to portkey back out to test its ability to hide magic without creating a backlash. That would reduce the risk of backlash when it's then tested by a person."

Harry was about to propose setting security measures in place among the previous attendees of their ward crafting workshops, when he noticed the look of concentration on Lilian's face. Hermione had apparently noticed the same thing and knew Lilian well enough to guess what was needed, because she was rummaging in her pockets and handed Lilian paper and a pen. Hermione and Harry then rejoined the party.

Half an hour later, Lilian came to take them apart again, and asked Harry, "can you organise a team of testers who will find non-magical enclosed spaces that can be left undisturbed for a year?"

Remus and Sirius agreed to ask the attendees of the ward making workshops whether they were willing to make an unbreakable vow to keep a secret, and if they agreed whether they were willing to find suitable spaces and put up wards without activating them, and then test whether they gained the ability to hide magic over time.

Lilian told a half-truth to her master, telling him that she was researching the unplottable ward and how it gained power over time if it was not activated by wand, and had gotten a letter to MACUSA that granted her access to the records of the magic detection network. Lilian told her master, quite truthfully, that she would only spend a little time on the project. Otherwise, she continued to spend most of her time on her mastery training. When she visited MACUSA to look through the records, she failed to mention that the runic arrays were implemented and tested by a whole team of part-time assistants rather than by one full-time mastery candidate. It turned out there were quite a few runic arrays that were invented in the past and implemented by amateurs who didn't mind that a ward that was meant to stay in place for generations would need a year to become active, but that had fallen out of favour when warding became a job, and clients were unwilling to wait that long after they had paid expensive specialists to do the warding for them.

Remus and Sirius also organised monthly get-togethers where those participants who could make it would exchange test results, propose ideas for modifying wards that showed promise to turn them into unplottable wards, and come up with a schedule so that everyone who was in the process of setting up a test was being monitored remotely for accidents. Although everyone had busy lives, the group was large enough that someone always had had a bright idea over the previous month, and every meeting had a palpable sense of purpose.

Harry's senior auror partner, Brian Sabean, had told him to talk down a drunk and send him home. It was a disaster. Harry hadn't meant to come across as impatient and condescending, but he couldn't keep his opinion, that if you were a belligerent drunk, that you'd better only go out drinking accompanied by friends who would keep you out of trouble, from shining through. It was the same inability to dissimulate that had kept getting him into trouble with the Dursleys and Professor Snape. It was also how he'd managed to come out of his troubled childhood without becoming either a dark lord or a non-entity, so Harry thought on balance it had worked out for him. It did mean that in the end his partner had to stun the drunk and take him in to sleep it off in a cell.

"That was terrible. Where did all your people skills go?"

"What people skills?"

"Come on. You have lots of friends. I was at your New Year's Eve party. Though it was your godfather's party, almost everybody was there for you."

"I'm good at keeping friends, not at making them. When I was in Britain, I had a grand total of two friends. Albus Dumbledore kept organising these crises, and I'm unable to look the other way, so I always ended up in the middle of it, so everybody else alternated between seeing me as the hero or the villain, both of which I hated. But then Remus had the bright idea of leaving altogether. Which was a godsend because if the conflict is too far away for me to jump into it, I can almost function like a normal human being. Still, most of my friends when we first got here were other quidditch players. It was only once Dumbledore died, and it became clear he hadn't trained any successors, so the resistance to Riddle collapsed, and lots of British came here, that many of them looked to me, because I'd already been here for three years by then." It was turning into a rather long-winded answer, but it was clear why Brian had let him talk, so Harry decided to keep going and answer the implied question, "I guess I'm your ideal deputy. I hate having all the attention focussed on me, which makes people look elsewhere when they need a leader, but once somebody else, or circumstances, have brought people together, I'm good at taking care of people; making sure that all the noses keep pointing in the same direction."

While in the previous year, auror training and his mastery course had followed parallel tracks, they had since diverged. The final 6 months of auror training was dedicated to filling gaps in their knowledge and finding places for them as junior aurors. Therefore, the training was becoming more individual. Harry was the top student in the duelling ring, and did well in other wanded subjects as well, like curse-breaking and temporary warding. This meant he could have his pick of what auror team to join. He was looking at the ones that took on complex cases; the kind of cases that would be acceptable as mastery final projects, hoping to be allowed to take the lead in a major case, and thus achieve two goals at once, advancing his mastery while on duty as an auror. Because he did well at keeping his head while under fire, he was also receiving additional training as a field medic.

By contrast, his mastery training still had a lot more ground to cover. Although he had progressed to the point where he was able to outduel Sirius, he could only win against Remus in the days after the full moon, and he was doing well against June if she broke a sweat to defeat him. In other topics the situation was similar. He may have become familiar with the most common wards and cursed objects that aurors tended to run into, but there were a bewildering array of rarely used bits of magic, that one nevertheless had to learn before one could be considered an adept, either because they were not detected by the usual diagnostic spells, or they were easily confused with more benign forms of magic, or … the list of potential dangers was very long indeed.

After many tries, they had come up with a ward that they hoped would hide the future school. It was based on an Australian ward called a chameleon ward. The original ward was an audio-visual ward, it had to be put up well in advance, during which activation period it would present to the outside world what was inside the ward, exactly as if there was no ward at all. But once the ward had absorbed enough power, it would continue presenting that image even if what was inside the ward changed, thus hiding those changes. Lilian was hopeful that they had managed to modify the ward so that it wasn't only audio-visual, but would also show the outside world the magic that had taken place inside the ward during the activation period.

They set up the ward in a subterranean cave in the USA, so that they could monitor whether it was working as it should. It had the disadvantage that during the activation period Opal wouldn't be able to continue working on the excavations, to prevent the ward from taking on elf magic during the activation period, and the other disadvantage was that they were running out of time, so they had decided to make a trip to Britain to set it up in June, even though they hadn't been able to test it beyond a basic test that it wouldn't create a backlash just from being put in place.

However, there was a problem with that plan. In response to several families of abducted women travelling by muggle means to Britain to attack the homes of the abductees and retrieving their daughters/sisters, the British Ministry had set up monitoring wards in airports and ferry harbours to detect magicals entering the country. Wards had already been in place to detect illegal entry by apparation, portkey or broom. They considered several alternatives. Taking the ferry from Denmark to the Faroe islands and apparating to Britain after the ferry passed through the apparation ward would work fine to get into the country, but to leave the country onto a moving ferry was likely to lead to splinching. And that was if they were lucky, since it wasn't unknown for people to end up where their Determination said the ferry was, and once you were floating around in a cold sea, apparating back out was a challenge and a half. Living inside an expanded trunk while it was shipped as muggle freight might still be detectable by the Ministry's new wards, and if detected it would be too easy for the Ministry to prevent escape of the travellers. In the end they decided that their best strategy was for them to find a way to avoid the wards around the USA, and then hope that Britain used similar wards. Harry got permission to try and get around the wards.

Harry's cloak of invisibility was no help, but using a trunk with an expanded interior while the exterior was shrunk to the point where it could be carried by Hedwig registered on the wards as an owl rather than a person. The British would still want to be able to exchange mail with the rest of the world, and for a ward with a 2000-mile circumference, that could span the whole of Britain, to detect a person inside an enchantment would be much harder than monitoring all the major harbours. So, as long as Harry did nothing while in Britain that would attract attention enough to make the Ministry start checking departing owls, they had a plan.

They asked Dobby to take Hedwig and the shrunken trunk with Harry inside to Amsterdam, where Dobby asked Hedwig to fly to the nearest unplottable point in Norwich. They had concluded that any monitoring charms to test whether they had arrived would increase the likelihood of being detected, so Harry simply waited as long as they had estimated it would take Hedwig plus a safety margin, after which he apparated to an unplottable point outside Hogsmeade. Hidden under his cloak of invisibility, he made his way to the trapdoors over the future wardstones, that Opal had dug out, and carved the wards. When Harry was done he apparated back to Norwich, asked Hedwig to fly back to Amsterdam and apparated into the trunk to go home.

The many hours all their volunteers had put into testing different wards had been stressful, so they had decided not to continue, when they didn't know whether a different ward would be needed. If their current try didn't work they would either start the school in one of the Potter properties, which could fit during the first year, when they would have few students. Or, if they decided that the risk of detection was too great, they could delay by a year. So, now all they had to do was wait. There were auror and mastery training to finish to keep his mind from going round the bend from worrying that it wasn't going to work. Thanks to years spent in a cupboard, Harry both hated waiting and was very good at it. Sometimes, Harry thought life itself should be renamed 'the great irony'.