"You let me look at your grimoire," said Blaise.
Harry stilled his wand, resting it against his patient's inner wrist.
He technically didn't need to do a check-up; Achilles' condition hadn't changed in the past hours. But it helped him occupy his hands, which he sorely needed. Blaise had received a letter from home a few days ago, announcing that help would be coming the next day.
Theoretically, Harry should be sleeping. There was nothing more he could do other than wait for the next morning. He was only exhausting himself and his magic, which wasn't productive.
He should really be sleeping.
Harry glanced at his best friend. He knew Blaise wouldn't go to bed until he did.
But he was too wired to lie still and he needed to do something. So he watched over Achilles for any sign of relapse, of a resurgence of the curse he could neither null nor counter, only stopper its effects for as long as it didn't act up again.
"Of course," he replied simply. "I trust you. And before you say anything, I don't expect you to do the same. Your family wouldn't let you for one. And you're a prince, your grimoires are a little more valuable than mine."
Harry wasn't blind. He might have a few heirlooms and spellbooks people would kill him for without remorse, but some would do much worse just to catch a glimpse at the Zabini coffers.
He found it fascinating when he had the time to think about it more. Blaise called his mother and himself kingmakers, insisting on being supporters rather than leaders. But although they preferred to stand aside, by their very presence the throne cast more gold than shadows.
"But it's not supposed to work like that."
He raised an incredulous eyebrow. "Says who?"
Blaise looked unimpressed. "It's an unwritten rule, isn't it? You do for your friends what you know they would do for you."
"That's rubbish. You don't show trust only to those who can show it back."
He snorted. If it was how it worked, his parents wouldn't have been betrayed. But his father hadn't been wrong to trust Pettigrew. It was the traitor who was wrong to prove himself unworthy of that trust. Sirius Black's existence and his deeds proved that.
"Besides, our situations are different. I'm —functionally at least— the last Potter." For now, he added to himself silently. "If I want to let you look at my grandfather's potion recipes, then I will and no one can stop me." He shrugged. "It's not like it was one of the old ones."
Harry might have given it more thought if it had been one of the Peverell spellbooks, or anything of Aubrey Potter. He would have let him look at it anyway, sure, but he would have measured his action with more gravitas.
He knew that the value of the grimoire wasn't Blaise's issue. It was what he saw behind the gesture. A gift of trust he wanted to reciprocate without knowing how.
It seemed like telling his best friend the truth about the Potters' betrayal had affected him more than it did Harry. The Potter heir was angry, sure, but his parents were avenged and the man who had done so would soon be free. Knowing had settled him, where it seemed to have shaken Blaise who always saw his lies as games rather than breaches of trust and was revulsed by the very idea of someone turning on a friend.
Raised as royalty, Blaise never had to wonder if he could trust others. The answer to that was generally no, save for a few exceptions. He had never had to wonder if he inspired that trust, or if he deserved to have it.
Pettigrew's story made him wonder if he was capable of betraying a friend like that man had. If his penchant for lies meant that he might turn out like the rat.
Harry thought he was being silly, but he knew it was no use saying so. If it bothered his friend, dismissing his worry wasn't going to make it go away.
"You don't have to give me secrets to prove to me that I can trust you," he said in a softer voice. "You show me that by defending me from others and having my best interests at heart. And even if you sometimes speak lies, your face is pretty honest, you know?"
He smirked. "Your high society mask might be good but you haven't used it around me and the others since first-year."
"I don't know what you're talking about," sniffed Blaise.
Harry snickered. "Sure you don't."
The conversation lulled until his friend broke the silence again.
"I would, you know?"
His voice was low enough that Harry had to strain to hear it.
"Hm?"
"Avenge you, I mean. I would. Like Sirius Black did for your dad." He paused, then offered him a sardonic smile. "I would make sure it doesn't come to that, of course. But if it ever happened…" and it might, they both knew, considering how bold the purists were acting and how much louder the whispers of a return to conflict sounded. "I wouldn't hesitate."
"I know." Harry furrowed his brow. Would he do the same? He was only twelve, almost thirteen. It was hard to imagine himself taking someone's life. And yet. "I'd heal you. And if you died, I'd find a way to resurrect you. And we'd go after whoever attacked you together."
Blaise's eyes widened. "Of all things you could have said, I really didn't expect you to mention necromancy." He laughed, some level of tension leaving his body. "But you know what? I like it."
Antea Zabini was excited.
It was rare for any member of her family to request help. Aunt Serafina writing on behalf of little Biagio was intriguing, especially considering how strained the relationship between mother and son had been since the Yaxley debacle. She would know; she had read a few of her cousin's letters when her aunt came back to the Caladrius Palace after the funeral of her Austrian boyfriend, a peddler in creature parts who had set his sights on the non-human community of Mezzogiorno.
Antea sometimes wondered how Serafina's scheme still worked considering her growing reputation in the international magical community. As far as she knew, her aunt didn't use any sort of bewitchment potions. When she had asked, her father had muttered something sardonic about their cambion blood working wonders and Antea wondered if the Principe was jokingly referencing their family's rumoured history or if he was hinting at something else.
She figured she would only find out if she ever needed to follow in her aunt's footsteps.
Unlikely, but one never knew what Fate had in store for them.
As she landed on British soil, dropping the now inert International Portkey into her attendant's hand, she bounced lightly on her feet, offering the official who had paled upon recognising her a toothy grin.
The man introduced himself, but she only offered him a noncommittal hum, her eyes glazing over. If she had to remember the name of every ass-kisser who introduced themselves to her, she'd have little brain space for anything else. Her attendant twitched, though.
Antea grinned a little wider. An important man, then. She wondered what he wanted from her.
Unfortunately, she thought mournfully as she looked at her watch, she didn't have the time to find out what made him tick.
"Would you care to direct me towards a Floo? I have an appointment I really don't want to miss."
Oh, he didn't like that.
"Yes, of course, your highness."
She followed the disgruntled man to a secluded chimney probably made to accommodate foreign dignitaries, her bodyguard and her attendant a step behind her. A sharp flick of her hand had her wand materialising out of its holster and into her open palm. She brushed the length of it in anticipation, wondering what her little cousin needed her for. Hopefully, she would be able to play with a little ritual fire.
Either way, she was sure it would be fun. Blaise's correspondence with the family had been sparse and probably full of lies but she knew him enough to read between the lines.
He was having a lot more fun than she'd had at Virgilio Nero Academy. It seemed he had even made genuine friends.
She was a little jealous, to be frank. It had taken her a lot longer than that to find people she could trust outside of their family. But she had painstakingly collected an inner circle loyal to her and dependable and, unlike her baby sister Crescenzia, Antea hadn't been stabbed in the back yet.
She could afford to be happy for the littlest one in their family without being too suspicious of his foreign entourage.
It wouldn't hurt to test their mettle, though.
"Well, let's see what this is about, shall we?" she asked in the dialect of her homeland as she levitated Floo powder into her empty hand. "Fawley Manor!"
Adrian wondered what changed in the last two years to make the tail end of their Hogwarts schooling so eventful.
When he expressed the thought out loud, Aspen looked at him like he was an idiot.
"It's because of Longbottom. Obviously."
They'd been waiting with the kids — minus Tracey, who was on a family outing — in Gemma's parlour for Blaise's cousin, whom he tried really hard to forget was royalty. Adrian had had no etiquette lesson and while the little Mezzogiornese boy had assured them Antea Zabini preferred informality, it was still a little nerve-wracking. He'd almost asked to stay at Achilles' bedside with Harry's great-uncle but he knew that would have only delayed the inevitable meeting. Perhaps he could get away with feigning sudden illness? It's not like he was needed here.
But Aspen had invited him this morning to plant seeds with his family during Ostara and Adrian needed to stay to clarify if he was being propositioned or if his presence at his side was meant to be a statement for his Death Eater-affiliated relatives. No one in their group had ever stepped inside the Selwyn lands so the invitation was coming a little out of the blue.
"Huh? How?"
Admittedly, he hadn't been paying much attention to the conversation he had initiated. Something else he had to thank his attention deficit disorder for.
Aspen lifted his closed fist before raising a finger. "The first year he arrived, a professor tried to kill him multiple times." He raised another. "Second year, a girl is possessed and sets a basilisk on the students. Both of these incidents are related to the Dark Lord and coincide with the attendance of the boy who defeated him at Hogwarts."
"I'd say it's a coincidence but I wouldn't like being proven wrong. If it does have something to do with him, I'm not eager to find out what seventh year will be like," commented Terence.
Harry and Gemma exchanged a look, which Adrian observed with intrigue.
He remembered his friend had been preoccupied for weeks before she was petrified. When her boyfriend had asked her about it, she'd said something about Harry bringing her unsettling news. They had held their curiosity, all too aware that Gemma handled things better when she could explain things in her own time. They probably should have pried sooner but in their defence, they hadn't expected her to be petrified.
But Hogwarts was supposed to be safe, for fuck's sake.
"About that."
Harry shifted, his lips forming a little pout. The pint-sized kid was cute, dammit. Adrian wanted to smoosh his cheeks like he did his little sister. Unfortunately, the kid was far from comfortable enough with physical contact for him to try. Besides, Laney usually bit his hand when he did that, he doubted a twelve-year-old would appreciate it more than she did.
What he was saying was far from cute, though.
As a muggle-born, Adrian was well aware of the gravity of the situation.
He didn't have the visceral fear of the Dark Lord cultivated in those who had grown up hearing his name unsaid and his deeds only whispered but he had looked at the statistics, and read the trial transcripts. He heard the names of his classmates and he knew exactly which of them had relatives who wanted him either dead or on his knees.
He had embraced their religion and learnt their norms, close to his own yet sometimes so foreign he had to blink and take a moment to process the dissonance, but he'd never bothered to hide or shy away from where he came from. He had been proud of being a Slytherin muggle-born, speaking overtly about his own society's advancements and idiosyncrasies as he settled into his newly earned dual citizenship.
In his friend group, only Terence understood what it was like.
Adrian was a child of magic and science, and he was proud of it.
That didn't stop him from being afraid.
The likes of Marcus Flint were one thing, sneering and taking every opportunity to denigrate those they considered lesser. But the violence perpetrated during You-Know-Who's rule was another.
Casual discrimination was gross and needed to be snuffed out but the dehumanisation, the hatred, the relish in suffering that Death Eaters and Snatchers demonstrated during the First War… it was the stuff of nightmares.
And a twelve-year-old was telling them that this was the future they needed to prepare for.
Judging by the resignation in Aspen's eyes, word had already gotten around among the purists. At least in whispers if not confirmations, words from the continent from those exiled Death Eaters who had sworn their Houses to their cause and were still searching for their master.
He wasn't looking forward to it.
"You must be Harry, the healer in training! I've heard a lot about you," exclaimed Antea.
Antea was pretty. Less imposing than her older brother, she had a bounce in her step that made her seem more personable. She favoured heavy gold jewellery that clinked as she walked up to them, and her hair was cut as short as Harry's own, though it looked a lot more polished. Her smile was a little lopsided, enough for him to spot a sharp bedazzled canine.
Unlike Constantino and Blaise, she had no accent when she spoke.
She had come out of the Floo without leaving a single speck of dust on her silk red pantsuit. Harry was a little jealous. He still had trouble with it.
She had introduced herself to Gemma first, as appropriate for the hostess, before ruffling Blaise's hair in a way that had him whining and engaging her in a rapid conversation in their home tongue. Then she had flitted to the three sixth-years, offering bubbly introductions before visibly losing interest and pinning Harry and his friends with her golden-eyed stare.
It didn't feel like Prince Constantino's politely dissecting look or Blaise's appraising stare — the one he reserved for strangers before determining where exactly they fitted into the mental game of chess he played against the world —, though it had some similar quality to it. It was warmer, yet impersonal.
"Nice to meet you," he said with a small smile, bowing his head lightly. Blaise had warned him ahead not to bother calling her any title.
"And that's Theo and… Daphne, right?"
They nodded more sedately. Theo began introducing himself more formally before she waved him off.
"No need, no need. We're in a bit of a hurry, aren't we? It's not every day I'm getting called to perform a family ritual. My school years certainly weren't this exciting."
Blaise shook his head in exasperation, but his gaze was fond. "If you're wondering if she's always like that, the answer is yes."
"That's a good thing though!" said Adrian. "Slytherins can be so reserved sometimes. We need more Weasley twins energy in our lives."
They all chuckled. Antea observed them, intrigued.
For her benefit, Harry's best friend explained. "They're pranksters in our school that share a brain. They're probably the reason for half the grey hair on our professors' heads. They did the same animated soup prank you did last year, professor Trelawney really didn't appreciate it when her chowder started biting back."
"Sounds like my kind of people. Anyways. What did you need me for, cugino? Your letter was a little vague."
Blaise turned to Gemma, silently asking if she wanted to explain. It was her decision to take in Achilles Carrow, after all. She nodded before offering Antea a seat, unwilling to leave her guest standing in the parlour. They all followed her lead, gathering in the sitting area.
"My family has been in Enmity with House Carrow for about fifteen years. Consequences of the last war," she elaborated with a tight smile. "It hasn't amounted to much since the main family has been on the continent for a while, but it did create an incentive for two of their branch members to talk to me at Hogwarts. They asked for help smuggling their squib younger brother out of their home before his parents killed him."
"You accepted, I'm guessing," she said with a more serious expression, listening attentively.
"I did, though I gave a few conditions," affirmed Gemma with a sardonic smile. Harry hadn't known that but he wasn't surprised. His cousin wasn't suicidal. Antea looked approving. "We got him out at the beginning of spring break. We expected his parents would search for him."
They all grimaced.
Terence continued. "They cursed him instead. And finding a cure might be delicate, on our timeframe."
"What curse is it, exactly?"
They all turned to Harry.
"A family variant to the blood-boiling curse, tied to their bloodline." It was trickier than that, as Harry had found out later. A component of the curse had transfigurative properties; Harry only caught it because he recast a diagnostic spell a few hours after the boy first collapsed. "Since we don't know the specifics of it and I only have two years of training, we can't come up with a cure on the fly and calling in another healer is… difficult, considering we essentially kidnapped him."
He rubbed the back of his neck. Antea's eyes lit up. Harry blinked at her expression.
"I see! Since it's a bloodline curse, you intend to dissuade them from using it by turning the backlash on the caster. Clever." She sighed, looking pleased. "Mutually assured destruction, I like that. That's an unorthodox solution to a thorny problem. I understand why you didn't want to call in another healer. The ones that aren't Oath-sworn are not what you'd call trustworthy and few of them are actually, ah, what's the expression? Worth their salt?"
"That's the one," confirmed Blaise.
"Thank you. We do have a ritual for that, I'm actually proud of you for remembering which grimoire it was on. The thing doesn't even have a name. Oh, I knew bringing all that brimstone was a good idea. Beatrice, if you would?"
Antea's attendant opened the case she was holding and pulled out an old grimoire locked by what Harry recognised to be a hand-eater lock, a ritual dagger before levitating a few jars of fresh blood. Harry pointedly didn't ask whose it was.
(He also tried to ignore the fact that the grimoire was most certainly bound in human skin. He didn't quite succeed.)
She clapped her hands excitedly and turned to Gemma. "Where's your ritual room? We'll need to bring the boy there and place him at the centre of the array. We'll have to use his blood to draw the inner circle too."
The three older boys volunteered to fetch Achilles and tell Ulrich they would be starting the ritual. Harry and his friends followed after her and Gemma. He didn't understand why he was so unsettled by her cheerfulness. He figured that this was probably the healer in him that was bothered. He had hated feeling so helpless in the face of someone's hurt and he wasn't exactly thrilled about gambling his patient's life on a rebound ritual.
That, and his exhaustion made him snappish. After spending the last few days glued at Achilles' side, obsessively monitoring his condition to prevent any further attack as he found himself unable to sleep, worried he would have a younger kid's death on his conscience if he did, he was a little on edge. He'd had to pretend to go to bed so Blaise wouldn't miss out but he hadn't slept a wink.
He bit his tongue and ignored Theo's knowing look. Blaise hadn't noticed; he'd moved closer to his cousin and was absorbed in the grimoire the attendant —Beatrice? — had handed him at his request.
House Greengrass didn't always own the Grimoire of Beara. Before it came into their possession, it belonged to a Scottish clan their ancestors had feuded with, who themselves had taken it from an Irish coven.
No records documented the beginning of that feud but later accounts from that era suggested that the now-extinct clan had obstructed the family's attempts to gain their seat on the Lordly Council. House Greengrass had allied with the MacKinnon Clan and plotted their destruction. They had come out of that fight with a title, an ancestral grimoire and a betrothal that cemented their place in the political landscape of Albion.
Daphne wasn't necessarily proud of what her ancestors had done but she had to admire their ruthlessness and cunning.
Before this master stroke, they were merely merchants of influence with no notable pedigree. Then they were sitting among Houses and Clans old enough to have sworn allegiance to the Pendragon line and survived the end of the magical monarchy of Britain, then called Albion. The very same people they used to bow and curtsy to and whose eyes they were forbidden to meet were now their peers.
All thanks to an ancestral grimoire they took by force and negotiated to keep, whose original spellsmith was rumoured to be the Divine Hag herself.
Daphne wasn't sure how much she believed it. She didn't have much interest in history but she had listened to Terence's rants enough to know that it was custom for Houses and Clans to boast the ownership of ancestral grimoires to boost their family's standings.
The old thing definitely had character but grimoires of that value didn't tend to stay in one family's possession unless knowledge of it was somehow disappeared or if said family had an army to defend it.
It would be hard to tell now since House Greengrass had treated it with more practicality than reverence. In their hands, it had been a learning tool rather than a prize.
A multitude of its spells, ritual arrays and potion recipes had been modified throughout the centuries and a dozen more of them had notes of caution inscribed at the top of their pages, a sign of the time passing and of her ancestors learning as they made of Greengrass House a Noble House of standing and invited winter into their cores in honour of the Cailleach.
Wherever it came from, the Grimoire of Beara was much more now than what its original spellsmith had probably envisioned. Reshaped and transformed by a family who cherished the relic they fought for and made great use of it to lead their House to greatness.
The only page they left untouched was that of their oldest and most infamous spell.
The Frozen Thought charm didn't seem like much at first glance and Daphne had never given much weight to its potential.
(It definitely explained why her mothers moaned so much about her lack of political acumen. She just wished they'd realise that acumen wasn't so much an issue as interest was.)
It was simply habit for children of her House to press their temples to their parents' wands, think of the most memorable parts of their days and let them make a frozen crystal copy of them for later viewing. It was a rite of passage to learn the spell and perform it themselves on their first Yule after receiving their wand, but never something she thought much about beyond it being a cherished family tradition.
Once a year, they reviewed the memories frozen in the crystals before they chose whether to let them melt or make the thought-infused ice eternal. They kept at home the crystals with the most sentimental value and in the family vaults those that were deemed materially useful to their clans.
Political secrets, magical inventions and keys to buried treasures were stored there for later use by descendants of their House, a veritable wealth of information for anyone who was patient enough to peruse it.
Daphne certainly wasn't. She used the charm out of habit and indulgence more than anything, too young yet to appreciate its value beyond the theoretical idea of it. She certainly appreciated it a lot more after the Lockhart debacle and all the discussions that ensued about memory charms but she still preferred to immortalise nice memories by drawing portraits rather than by preserving them.
Expressing that sort of sentiment in front of Terence had made him puff up in so much outrage the sixth-years had gone into hysterics.
She had redeemed herself by saying she would definitely be making use of the charm extensively when she started researching a way for her to become the first-ever magical astronaut.
As she watched Antea Zabini in action, she wondered whether she could get away with keeping today's crystal to herself. And as she looked at her friends for a brief moment, unwilling to turn away too long from the spectacle, she realised that she had signed herself up to make many memories that would make their mark on history.
She thought she understood Terence's point of view better now.
"What language is this?" she asked her designated upperclassman as the Mezziogiornese princess carved the soft soil of the ritual room, her attendant pouring blood into the indents making up words.
The magic she was pouring into her work soaked the room. Daphne was soundly reminded of why Principe Aristeo Zabini was considered a Dark Lord in fifteen countries.
She felt like she was standing over the edge of a volcano about to erupt.
"Safaitic," the history lover replied distractedly, his eyes glued to the ritual. "A South Semitic script used by the nomads of the basalt deserts of Southern Syria. I don't know much about it, I'm afraid."
Daphne watched, entranced as Antea Zabini danced around the room and made the ritual floor a work of art. The design was three-fold and intricate: two outer circles curved around an inner circle where Achilles Carrow lay in a foetal position, sleeping like the dead among candles and brimstones. His expression would be peaceful if not for the tremor in his brow and the way he seemed to murmur his sisters' names at intervals, calling for comfort that wouldn't, couldn't come.
She was silently grateful that blood adoption wasn't a viable option. It wouldn't have done this boy a kindness, him who found so much solace in the last thing he had in common with them. That, and their shared blood. She wasn't there when Harry had explained to him what they were planning to do but she wondered what Achilles thought of the fact that his sisters would suffer the backlash as surely as his attacker would.
Maybe he hadn't thought that far. He was only ten after all.
She felt ridiculous thinking it. She would only be thirteen in a month. But being an heiress made her feel old sometimes, and she knew her friends shared the sentiment. All, except Tracey, who was frankly a breath of fresh air.
Harry, his hands shaking and his expression wan, passed the jar of fresh blood he had just collected from the Carrow boy to the princess's bodyguard, who poured it with meticulous care into the indents Princess Antea had left to surround Achilles' body.
Once this was done, the bodyguard and the attendant stepped back to let their liege work.
Ulrich Fawley put the final touch on the wards he had placed on the walls, containing the magic to this room and avoiding any chance for their enemies to find out where the ritual had been performed.
He then nodded to Blaise's cousin and took his place next to Harry among the observers on the outskirts. They all waited with bated breath for Antea to signal to Blaise to step back as well. After he did so, she smirked and started chanting her incantation.
The Latin surprised Daphne, considering the origin of the script, but perhaps it shouldn't have. The Zabinis founded their Dynasty upon the ruins of the Roman Empire, after all.
The incantation was long, but mesmerising to hear. Antea Zabini spoke in crooning tones, her tongue curling over the words of power like they were a love language. Her magic, thick and heated in the air followed along the intertwined paths of her commands written and spoken, making Daphne dizzy from its potency.
They wouldn't know if the array had worked until the Carrows' next attempt to murder their kin. But Daphne had no doubt that it would.
"... et igne pugnare!" Antea finished with a flair of her wrist, and the circles were set alight.
Flora and Hestia crumpled to the ground at the same time, right after Great-Aunt Scylla did. Their parents followed, the dull thud of their bodies drowned out by the sound of their chocked-off screams.
The spell cut off, forcibly, caught by their Great-Aunt before it could kill them as it sought to kill their brother.
The twins slowly caught their breath and pushed themselves off the floor. They wanted to cry of relief but they knew such a show of weakness was unwise. They contented themselves with a shaky breath and a silent word of gratitude for Gemma Fawley, who had apparently found one more way to save Achilles from certain death.
"Who?" bellowed their elder. Her wand was trembling in her hand. Her eyes were wild, her rage palpable. She looked every inch the Knight of Walpurgis she had been during the war. Her magic pulsed around the room, heavy on their shoulders. Flora and Hestia struggled not to bend to its weight. "Who defies House Carrow?"
They stayed silent as the Lady of their House vowed to take revenge for the insult and grabbed each other's hand for comfort, praying the gods to have mercy on their beloved brother.