Chapter 14 Expansion East
Harry's efforts to have the people supplying the British smuggling ring arrested had been so effective that criminals from other countries had moved in to take over much of the international trade in black market potion ingredients. This had led Hermione to suggest that rather than go after the remaining countries where British smugglers had less of a presence, they could afford to change tactics, possibly only temporarily, from tearing down more of what supported the ministry controlled magical society to helping their alternative outgrow them. Harry had told Remus that since their effort to contact the British prime minister via MACUSA and the USA president hadn't worked, that they would try in Europe.
Hermione wanted most of their school staff to make a concerted effort to convince the North European ministries of magic, eventually the whole region that Durmstrang drew its students from, but for now the five ministries that the seven of them officially moved to, to let them put up a detection ward to detect children doing their first accidental magic. Ideally, they would then get access from said ministries to the birth records of babies with magical parents, so they could detect the muggleborn by elimination. Hermione had considered going to the Dutch school and ask them for the records of those muggleborns who had been offered a place but didn't enrol in their school, most of whom declined either because they couldn't afford to or because they failed the English entrance exam. While that would work in the short term, she suspected that some children, especially from the poorer East European countries, never bothered to try and prepare for the English exam because they couldn't afford to go anyway. Setting up the same detection ward that fed information to the British Book of Admissions would be much more complicated, but they agreed that it would be their preferred solution.
Ted, Neville, Hermione, Lilian and Harry went by owl in a shrunk trunk to the Netherlands. They had put up an unplottable ward at the coast to escape detection by the British ministry, in case they detected them leaving the country. Ted then apparatus them to the East of the country to let out Hermione. She had a separate shrunk trunk with Lilian and Harry, and she flew them to Germany, where she would apparate to where the borders of the Greater Hungarian and Polish-Lithuanian Ministries of Magic met, to drop off Lilian and Harry. Ted continued back West to the transport hub at the Dutch annex to the Danish ministry in The Hague to take the floo to Denmark.
In Denmark, Ted was arrested for smuggling Neville. Several unproductive hours followed, during which the Danish aurors tried to get him to admit that he had been the one to cause the illegal border crossing incident at the British border earlier that day, while Ted insisted that he needed to speak with the Danish minister of magic in private. It wasn't until the end of the day that the minister became available and the aurors conceded that Ted wasn't going to unbend, and Ted conceded that 5 minutes would be enough to try and convince the minister. After chaining him to a chair with magic suppressing cuffs the minister came and put up a privacy spell.
Ted explained that he and Neville were part of the staff of a school for muggleborn pupils. That to date these had all been British muggleborns who had turned 11 after the British ministry had closed Hogwarts to muggleborns. That therefore they were being hunted by the British ministry, and the Death Eaters had shown themselves capable enough of violence and subterfuge that they could gain access to the records of the Danish ministry. Therefore, Ted would refuse to admit anything that would go into a Danish auror report. For the same reason, the school staff had decided that if they all lived in The Netherlands, this would attract unwanted attention, so they were spread across Northern Europe, with Neville living in Sweden. They had left their school to negotiate permission for their school to admit muggleborns from Durmstrang's catchment area to their school, including those living in the area governed by the Danish ministry. That they were requesting permission to put up a detection ward to identify children doing accidental magic in Denmark, The Netherlands and Norway, though not Iceland and Greenland.
The increased security that had detected Neville had become necessary because of the Death Eaters, so the Danish minister was inclined to co-operate with those who resisted Voldemort's unofficial reign. Ted explained about the taboo, and that his name was Tom Marvolo Riddle. The minister agreed to continue negotiations with Ted as his time allowed over the next days, and to have Neville make an unbreakable vow that apart from illegal entry into the country he had broken no laws, and was not a Death Eater, nor otherwise answered to Riddle. After that, he paid a fine under an assumed Swedish name, and was extradited to Sweden. The Danish minister of magic also agreed to get a communication mirror to the Danish prime minister, asking her to hand it to the British prime minister with instructions not to use the mirror in his office, which Sirius had warned them was being monitored by the British ministry of magic.
In response to the increased security, the five agreed over their mirrors to put up unplottable wards in their respective countries to try and hide their border crossings. Negotiations were still ongoing with the North European ministries about being allowed to take in their muggleborn children as pupils when it was time to return to Britain and visit the British first years, who had been sent their letters the previous week. Therefore, in most cases, they agreed to continue negotiations by mirror. However, the Polish-Lithuanian ministry had allowed them to take in three children, two 11-year-olds and a 12-year-old, who couldn't afford to attend the Dutch school, and whose parents agreed to let them go to boarding school for a whole uninterrupted year. During the negotiations, Harry had been told that self-taught pupils were much more likely than formally schooled pupils to scrape a pass on a wanded subject and thus gain their right to carry a wand, only to later on cause a costly incident by breaking the International Statute of Secrecy. Because of this, the ministry had been willing to overlook the lack of I.C.W. accreditation of their school and allow this small pilot project. Harry would return to collect the pupils for the school year at the end of August.
In addition to the Polish pupils, they were also taking in four witchborn first-years from British emigrants to the USA. These admissions had been brokered by Sirius, who tried to stay in touch with all the emigrants to the USA. Some of the parents had had trouble finding work, and therefore couldn't afford to pay for their children to attend Ilvermorny. Although Sirius was still offering loans to British expats, the parents of the four pupils lived in the hope of being able to return to Britain, and were therefore keen for their children to go to school in Britain, but were wary of the pureblood dogma their children would be exposed to, not to mention the repercussions/ possible revenge that would fall on their children after their parents had fled the country, if they sent them to Hogwarts castle.
Their first class of boarding students to sit their GCSEs, which had been examined at the muggle schools the pupils had started out at, had scored near the national averages. Hermione speculated that this was to be expected as they had only taught this cohort for two out of five years, and in addition that there was a tradeoff between their lack of teaching experience and the small classes they had, allowing them to give more attention to each pupil.
Andromeda had drawn the straw to give the welcome address on 1 September, "Mr Longbottom will start a class in Animal Husbandry, which will be open to first- through third-years. For the foreseeable future, this will complete our magical curriculum with 7 classes that are taught from first year, Animal Husbandry, Charms, Defence, Herbology, Potions, Runes and Transfiguration, and one class from third year, Arithmancy.
The GCSE curriculum remains the same as last year, with 13 subjects taught in regular classes. There will be 12 classes for A-levels: Art & Design and Biology with Mr Longbottom, Business Studies with myself, English with Mr Tonks, English Literature with Ms Viridian, French with myself, General Studies, like the GCSE-level course, will be taught together by the whole human staff, Geography with Ms Granger, History with Mr Potter, Maths with myself, PE with Mr Potter, and Portuguese with Ms Araujo. As before, a range of subjects at both GCSE- and A-levels are available through self-study supported with memories collected in muggle schools. In addition, Mr Potter will start a duelling club, which will be open to anyone who has passed the second year exam in Defence against the Dark Arts, while Ms Viridian will conduct a chamber orchestra and/or choir and/or band for those who have passed their GCSEs in Music or have equivalent experience with their instruments of choice.
Lastly, we have three non-native speakers for the first time this year, and we are looking for volunteers to help them with English conversation."
During the first duelling class, Harry warned, "you may have heard the expression, 'If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.' It's a warning not to try to solve different problems with the same method. If you are a regular dueller, you will be tempted to solve verbal arguments with your wand. Do not fall into that trap. I have a temper myself, so I've fallen into this trap myself. However, when I became an auror in the USA, I quickly found out that if I was called in after a complaint of two drunks disturbing the peace, and the first thing I did was start casting spells, that it tended to turn a small problem into a bigger problem.
Conversely, if you break your shoelace and you're running late for class, you can take off your shoe, tie the two halves of your shoelace together, because that's what you've been doing for years now, and end up late for class. Or, you can cast a Reparo.
So, the lesson is not that you can't do magic, but that we have a whole host of unseen enemies and if we start fighting among ourselves we will lose. With that in mind, I need you to take these rules to heart. If you lose your temper, you will be disqualified from this club. If you fight anyone anywhere without adult oversight, you will be disqualified. If you use other spells than the ones that have been agreed on for a duel, you will be disqualified.
There is a deeper problem here. We are taught to frown on tattlers as much as on rule-breakers. And I don't know about you, but I also tended to be much more offended by my classmate, who I saw every day and who insulted me every chance he got, than by Tom Riddle, who tried to kill me once a year. That lack of perspective, those human frailties worry me. We, your teachers, don't necessarily have the answers to those problems, but we hope to enlist you all in navigating towards a society where on the one hand we can walk home at night without fear of being attacked, while on the other hand I won't get arrested if I chose to wear a piercing.
I hope we can discuss the very real consequences of some of the rather abstract choices we face as we go along. For now, I leave you with an invitation to think about questions of collective propriety versus individual expression, and move on to the practical part. How many of you can cast Expelliarmus?"
The British prime minister had spoken to the queen, who had agreed to place the school under royal protection, which gave their school special status, and would allow them to evade school inspections by the regular institutions, and not raise any red flags when pupils took fewer muggle subjects than usual. Efrain Prewitt agreed to function as a part-time intermediary between the queen and the school to ensure that the children were well cared for and properly educated. In return, the prime minister asked for their collaboration in identifying whether a spree of mysterious violent crimes had been performed using magic, and to either broker a deal negotiating I.C.W. intervention, or to get their help in bringing the perpetrator(s) to justice.
Harry had suggested they proceed with both options. He got Sirius to send the prime minister another mirror to present the complaint of the British muggle government to the I.C.W. Since that was unlikely to lead to a quick resolution of the problem, Harry told the prime minister that they had been monitoring the movement of British magicals over the previous two years, and after the prime minister sent them details of the crimes that didn't make any sense to muggles, that a number of them coincided with the presence of magicals at the same times and roughly the same places. There were four Death Eaters who had been most often found near the crime scenes. However, Harry had to admit that they didn't have enough people to try and capture them, but over the following months they could improve the resolution of their maps, allowing them to monitor the addresses that the Death Eaters visited, and if they could definitely place them at the site of future crimes, and the prime minister agreed that it was warranted, that they could try to execute them. Two of them had already been convicted of murder and torture, and by magical law were subject to execution after escaping from Azkaban.
The prime minister would have preferred to let the issue be resolved with the I.C.W. by the director general of the national crime squad, whose responsiblity it was, but he wasn't read in on the existence of magic, forcing the prime minister into a coordinating role between Harry and the director general. Sirius had had to admit to the I.C.W. that the British police hadn't positively identified magic as the source of the crimes, and would continue to interpret the International Statute of Secrecy in this limited sense, and wasn't going to intervene. In response, the prime minister agreed that a single execution of an Azkaban escapee was warranted, after which they would evaluate whether the magicals had got the message. Harry resolved that he would kill Bellatrix Lestrange, who was the worst Death Eater, both because she was extremely dangerous and quite deranged, but also because she'd been seen on their maps in the presence of magicals under 20 years old, and they suspected that she ran a school for Death Eaters, training them in killing, starting on defenceless muggles.
Their three Polish pupils were struggling with having all their lessons in English, but the three of them were just as aware as the school staff that they would only be allowed to continue when the review by the Polish-Lithuanian ministry at the end of the school year showed they were doing well, so the three of them were all willing to put in long hours to understand all their lessons. As one way to try and empower the pupils, Harry had them teach him Polish, in which he had made only middling progress over the previous two years due to having many other responsibilities.
They had also asked the 4 witch-born first years to help them, as they were less overwhelmed with magic, and therefore, despite never having used a wand either, had a slight advantage in magical classes over the muggleborns at the start of the year. More importantly, the witch-born were much more aware that the school was a bulwark in the fight against Riddle, and it had been easy to convince them that getting more pupils from the rest of Europe to attend the school would help strengthen the ties with the countries those pupils were born in, and thus for them to help in the fight without having to become child soldiers.
When they discussed the problem with English among the staff, Hermione proposed to ask the Polish ministry to identify 10-year-olds in addition to next year's 11-year-olds. They agreed they could give the 10-year-olds a painting each, who would teach them English and exercises to reduce the likelihood of public accidental magic that would require obliviators. They told the Polish ministry that they would prefer to proceed with this plan before the review that would decide whether they would continue to allow Polish-Lithuanian children to attend their school. They could either ask the pupils and their parents to choose between the two schools or homeschooling a year early, or give a mirror to all 10-year-olds.
Hagrid would have been horrified at what passed for animal husbandry, their mixed muggle/magical alternative to Care of Magical Creatures. There were no human-eating animals. In fact, the largest animals were goats, and those were so used to humans that they were positively cuddly. Most of their magical animals were useful as potions ingredients, insects, small mammals (well, padrafellos, which were quite sizeable for rodents, were small compared to hippogryffs, at least) and the like. The non-magical animals, goats and carp, were kept for food. Together with his classes, Neville was setting up some small experimental biomes, in which they were trying to achieve balanced ecosystems. It was a learning process, as human intervention to keep one species from crowding out another could become so laborious that the whole thing had to be given up, and a different combination of species would have to be tested. Neville was determined that, with the limited space they had, no weeds or animals would be introduced that they wouldn't be able to make use of, unless they helped the useful flora and fauna. The global magical population was so small that many species were only collected in the wild, and they were essentially inventing the field of magical biospherics from scratch.
By late winter, the students had finished making the quidditch pitch. As part of PE, Harry started flying lessons. In 2002, before they had decided to let the students dig out their own pitch, he had bought 14 brooms. He had gone to a manufacturer in the USA and got the oldest model they still had in stock at a discount. He hadn't counted on them managing to attract students from both mainland Europe and the USA this early on, so they already had 17 first-years, and they had to take turns during flying lessons. He asked Lilian whether the students might be able to make additional brooms. She said that the earliest she would try was after they had passed their OWL exams, and even then it would take them a long time. She was happy to try, but told him that if Harry wanted brooms by September he might be better off asking the expats who made their unplottable-ward-stones and communication mirrors whether they would be willing to add brooms. Remus and Sirius were happy to do that, as the runes workshop was a way for the expats to stay involved in the resistance to Riddle's puppet regime in the British ministry.
It had taken 8 trips to kill Bellatrix Lestrange. One of the reasons she was such a formidable dueller was that she was always moving, even when she was talking to junior Death Eaters. In the end, Harry had gotten a clean shot when she moved in the direction of his line of sight. She had come with 4 others, so Harry had as well. They put up an anti-apparation ward the moment Harry took the shot, and had managed to overwhelm them before they had fully grasped what was going on and went for their portkeys. The rifle and bullet had been silenced, so Bellatrix falling over without apparent cause had made them hesitate long enough for them to be captured.
Interrogation of the junior Death Eaters with veritaserum suggested that discontent in ministry-ruled magical Britain was high. The economy continued to do poorly, so people did their jobs, bought their necessities and stayed at home. In addition to the emigration that they knew about, an increasing number of people were working muggle jobs. Since no-one had muggle qualifications, these were menial jobs that allowed people to survive, but not to thrive. A law had been passed to forbid working a muggle job, but there was a lot of passive resistance, including of Death Eaters and Ministy workers not reporting the breaking of that law, and other laws, as long as it was not too blatant.
When Death Eaters did well on an assignment, chances were high that they would receive a pat on the head, after which their next assignment would be more difficult, until they failed and were punished harshly. Out of the 4 captured Death Eaters, only 1 was a believer. The others had been volunteered by their Death Eater family members, who increasingly had themselves faced a choice between toeing the line or death.
They had always suspected that Tom Riddle was his own worst enemy, wanting to be in charge, but falling into the trap of discouraging initiative, and the interrogations confirmed that. His most trusted Death Eaters were competent enough, and highly motivated, if only because it was often succeed or be tortured, if not killed. But his inner circle had underlings themselves, and they tended to get selected based on their ability to deflect blame for any failures away from themselves rather than their ability to do the jobs that mid-level administrators in a successful organisation did, such as predicting consequences of the current decisions and head off problems before they arose, making sure that people had the support and freedom to get their jobs done, and training new people in time for them to replace turnover to retirement, promotions and job mobility. But Riddle was the kind of Macchiavelian person to feel threatened by competent lieutenants.
Not that this situation was always a boon for the school staff. If the ministry had been more competent, they could have afforded to take their time about growing their alternative, but with the ministry throwing more resources into aggression than into maintenance, they were forced to keep up the pressure, developing new stressors, keeping their enemy wrong-footed.
No Death Eaters had shown up later in the village where they had killed Bellatrix, making them speculate that, despite the resistance they, and reportedly others, had put up, they were still so over-confident and lacking in logistics that no-one had known where Bellatrix had taken them.
However, it soon became evident that they did organise retaliatory attacks on muggles. Still the I.C.W. sat on its hands. With 60 million potential victims and less than a dozen perpetrators who had access to instant travel and death-rays that were invisible to muggles, the police were essentially powerless. The prime minister had discussed it with the queen and, without mentioning magic, the director general of the national crime squad, and they had agreed that a temporary increase in retaliations from the terrorists were preferable to the slow accumulation of deaths from an unchecked force, and had authorised further executions by Harry.
They were not sure whether their captives could be tracked by their dark marks even through wards, and therefore didn't want to keep them in either the school or one of the unused Potter or Longbottom properties in populated areas, so they had dosed their prisoners with draught of living death and put them in a tent in a warded forest. Harry had wondered out loud whether hitting back harder, for instance by putting the caught Death Eaters under the imperius curse and sending them back to kill their comrades, would serve their goals better, but he hadn't been convinced himself, only wanting them to explore their options. They decided that the retaliation on the muggles was bad enough, and they were better off trying for a more precise attack on the worst offenders, rather than use the rather blunt instrument that the imperius curse was. They had concluded that killing only the cruellest Death Eaters, who had spent the time between 1981 and 1994 in Azkaban, would be more effective than killing Death Eaters indiscriminately.
Although Harry made several more sorties during the rest of the school year, aiming for Death Eaters who tended to go out alone, he didn't manage to hit anyone. No doubt they had realised that it would take wizards and witches to take out 5 Death Eaters at once, and the other Death Eaters had started to put up intruder alarms when they were out satisfying their addictions to torture and murder. Harry always travelled with his ward detector, so he hadn't been attacked, but neither had he managed to get close enough to attack anyone himself.
Once all the pupils had a basic competency in flying, Harry introduced quidditch as part of PE. That meant it would be compulsory, and he rotated everyone through all the positions, so they would all have a basic idea of how the sport worked. Although Hermione made fun of him for it, Harry maintained that knowledge of quidditch was a requirement if their graduates were to avoid attracting undue attention to themselves when they found themselves in, most likely foreign, magical society. Knowing that Hermione could run rings around him if he let himself be caught up in an argument, he quickly moved on to the wider point that he wanted to make, that maybe they should consider making attendance to the 8 rituals marking the annual cycle compulsory, at least for one year, while the other years could continue with the voluntary attendance that Neville had been organising since the start of the school. And that they should maybe introduce a NEWT equivalent of the A-level in General Studies. They decided that the following year, first-years would have compulsory flying lessons, second-years and above would have compulsory attendance to the 6 rituals that fell during the school year, with optional attendance to the other 2 rituals and to all rituals for the first-years. The year after, they would try to introduce an additional initiative to prepare the pupils for finding their way around magical societies.
It had taken half a year to come to an agreement with the Polish-Lithuanian ministry, but in the end they had agreed to ask the 10-year-olds a year early which magical schooling option they were considering, without forcing them to stick to that choice a year later. Before the review of the current Polish students, the ministry wouldn't give them the contact details of the prospective pupils, but they agreed to distribute portraits if Lilian enchanted the portraits with a silencing ward, to prevent anyone outside the ward accidentally overhearing the portrait speak, and to have all the portraits linked to a spare portrait that would hang in the Polish ministry's office for reversing accidental magic. The latter was rather a lot of work, but they agreed it was a reasonable precaution and an investment in the future.
They had 12 pupils, aged between 16 and 19, who had attended the advanced classes and would take their OWL exams. The weekend pupils all took 1 to 3 exams, while the boarding pupils took 2 to 4 exams. The staff had agreed that they would try to grade Exceeds Expectations and Outstandings the way those had been interpreted at Hogwarts, but to be slightly more demanding than Hogwarts to achieve an acceptable. Most of the older weekend students were not continuing to NEWTs, and they had decided that if the OWLs were going to be their final magical exams, that they needed to have some assurance that they would not accidentally blow anything up or break the Statute of Secrecy. Admittedly, the latter was much more dependent on constant vigilance than on sufficient knowledge, and they hoped that after talking for three years about the danger of one careless moment getting all of them killed that the message had sunk in.