Chapter 15 Kill the killers

"There is an 11-year-old werewolf, Aloisius Doge, among this year's witch-borns," Hermione reported during the first staff meeting of summer, having gained the information from Hogwarts' book of admissions. "Do we wish to stick to muggleborns, or do we take in all wizards and witches who are being rejected by Hogwarts?"

"Ah," Neville drew their attention while he figured out how to say what he was thinking, "don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I favour this option, but, just being the devil's advocate here, we could choose to wait until the padrafellos are mature, ... which will be in 1.5 years. If we want to make wolfsbane potion before then we'll have to procure the padrafello incisors from elsewhere."

When Neville didn't continue, Harry summarised, "so, we have four options, not to take in werewolves, start taking in werewolves in 1.5 years, having an unprotected werewolf to contain for the next 1.5 years, or buying enough incisors to last us until we start producing our own."

"Actually," Neville rejoined, "I said procure because I was hoping we could barter with the other members of the padrafello breeding network."

Harry, whose turn it was to take the minutes, nodded and wrote the correction down. Separately, Harry also made a note to include habitual expressions in their wizarding culture classes; if pureblood Neville started to pick up muggle-raised expressions like devil's advocate they would have to be more careful about not giving themselves away to the wrong people.

They unanimously agreed to offer the werewolf a place in their school from September, provided he was willing to make an unbreakable vow of secrecy (the same one all the muggleborns made) and stay away from his family for the next 7 years, implying to them that their son would be taken abroad. They contacted Aloisius through Remus and came to an agreement, including payment of 2000 Galleons, which was more than what it would have cost to go to Hogwarts and less than Ilvermorny (which also didn't accept werewolves). Aloisius would be instructed to take muggle transport to the nearest unplottable point from his home, where a house-elf would go to collect him.

Neville had been right about the option of bartering for the incisors; the biggest padrafello reserve had a problem with poachers, and they preferred having a runes mistress upgrading their wards over payment, so Lilian would spend August in Brazil. The reserve managers even agreed that she could dig up some plants, coached by Neville, to take back home, together with 19 incisors. The plants would in due course make them more self-sufficient and even allow them to pay for potions ingredients they didn't grow with surplus they did grow themselves, and thus was a significant factor in why it made sense for Lilian to put in a month of work. Besides, Lilian welcomed the opportunity to exchange the same few acres of school grounds for the Amazonian rainforest for a month.

Three of their advanced OWL students had failed the one wanded subject exam they had sat. All three of them had agreed to continue with the regular classes, resitting their exams in two years. Five of them would stay on to study for their NEWTs, and two of those also additional OWLs. The remaining four of them intended to continue their education or find work in muggle society.

While discussing how the British expats in the USA could help, Sirius and Remus had mentioned they were in contact with Fred and George Weasley, who still lived in Britain. This led to a side discussion of how the whole Weasley family was doing. The twins had done very well out of Harry's initial investment; after supplementing their shop of jokes and other entertainments in Diagon Alley with an owl-order business for 4 years they had managed to buy Zonko's in Hogsmeade as well. Initially, they had come into contact with Sirius and Remus through mutual acquaintances in the Order of the Phoenix (which had died with Dumbledore), and had maintained the contact to talk about their mutual interest in pranks. Reading between the lines, Sirius and Remus had learned that some of the pranks were being used to make the lives of Death Eaters more difficult; something the twins approached with due caution, because the least suspicion would lead to forceful retaliation. After all, Death Eaters were not bound by due process of the law.

When Harry asked about the other Weasleys, he was told that Ron was a semi-professional quidditch player for the Chudley Cannons, who picked up shifts in the twins' shop, Arthur still worked in the ministry, in an increasingly thankless job maintaining the Statute of Secrecy while the rest of the ministry to varying degrees condoned muggle-baiting, Bill had lived in Britain between 1994 and 1996, after which he had moved back to Egypt, Charlie still lived in Romania, Percy had, somewhat to Harry's surprise, given up on the British ministry, and moved to the USA with Penelope Clearwater, but had since broken up with her, while Ginny had played chaser for the Kenmare Kestrels for 3 years and then moved to play on a Spanish team.

Getting back on topic, Sirius said that the Weasley twins had a side business in protective gear, like shield hats and Peruvian instant darkness powder, which they only sold under the counter in order not to supply Death Eaters and Riddle affiliated ministry workers. This led to the twins being commissioned to make the best dragon-hide protective overalls they could manage on an unlimited budget, including two elf-sized ones.

Neville and Noêmia did a hand-fasting. They had decided that getting married in muggle Britain was too risky, and for all of them to go to Sweden would be too inconvenient, and also a security risk, and of course getting married in magical Britain was out of the question. They had preferred to have the whole school staff there rather than going to Sweden alone, especially since Alice and Frank did not deal well with change. Neither Augusta nor Noêmia's family were present, because it was entirely possible that Voldemort's forces were keeping an eye on them.

At least, that's the reason Neville had used. Harry and Hermione suspected that in Augusta's case, her connivance in Neville's poor treatment during his childhood by his great-uncle Algernon to try and force accidental magic out of him was at least part of the reason why the marriage was not taking place at Longbottom Hall, to which they had, after all, a secure floo connection. Frank didn't react to her absence, he still had a hard time dealing with anything that wasn't in front of him at that moment, but Alice asked Hermione about Augusta, and maybe even picked up that there was an unspoken subtext when Hermione gave her the official reason why she was not there.

Harry had asked Hermione if she wanted them to do the same. They had been doing better as a couple. Harry had internalised, at least more than he used to, what he had always accepted intellectually, that it was the Dursleys who were the freaks, and that if something went wrong, it wasn't automatically Harry's fault. Hermione had become less prone to hide her insecurity behind her perfectionism. They actually disagreed more often, because their connection was more robust, so they didn't have to walk on eggshells. They were still the same quite different people, with Hermione loving to argue until everyone agreed she was right, and Harry having a tendency to either try to facilitate the others into coming to an agreement, or decide there was no time for planning and instead jumping straight in and start doing the first thing that came to mind, though, thanks in part to a need to keep from upsetting Hermione, these days his impulsiveness was limited to quidditch and interrupting pupils about to do something foolish, while attacks on Death Eaters were meticulously planned and back-up planned.

Hermione conceded that she had no objection if Harry wanted to do a hand-fasting, but that for herself, if they were not getting married with her parents present, that anything else wouldn't feel much better than what they were already doing: committing to each other in a steady stream of small commitments rather than with one big ritual jump. Harry admitted that he felt no particular need to formalise their relationship either, and just wanted to make sure that Hermione was happy.

The Polish-Lithuanian ministry had agreed to continue allowing children to go to their school. They would have to wait for the enrolment deadline for the Dutch school to pass, but that if the parents couldn't afford that school and couldn't or didn't want to get a loan, they could offer the remaining pupils places in their schools. The ministry would endorse their school to the extent that they would say that if the parents and pupils could live with the fact that their school was so remote that the children would only be able to go home for a month in the summers, that the education was better than homeschooling. The ministry also agreed to recommend them to their neighbours, the Hungarian, Swedish and German ministries. The latter, however, kept to the position they had decided on the year before, that they needed ICW accreditation, and that would take at least two more years.

Neville's opening speech went over the usual safety measures, and had a new staff member to announce, "We welcome Ms Altair, who will be teaching English and English literature. This has freed up Ms Viridian to teach the GCSE classes of maths." Margaret 'Mags' Altair was a muggleborn who had graduated Hogwarts in 1994, and in 1997 had asked Hermione about any non-violent plans to resist the Ministry takeover. When Hermione had explained about their plans to start a school, she'd spent the years since then to obtain a muggle teaching qualification, which had involved going through belated GCSEs and A-levels, followed by obtaining a BA and QTS (qualified teacher status).

"Harry Potter."

"Accept."

Sirius spoke from his mirror on 10 September, "have any of you by any chance seen Rita Skeeter?"

"No, of course not. You know we wouldn't trust her enough to talk to her."

"I wasn't suggesting you had volunteered to meet her. I just wanted to warn you that there was a small announcement in the Daily Prophet that she has disappeared, and it would be just like her to go looking for you guys." Harry had stilled. When he didn't speak, Sirius prompted him, "what are you thinking?"

"Last week the intruder alarm went off in the floo hub. The map only showed one of our pupils, and when I went there, the pupil told me that he had been stunned, and when he woke up he went through his pockets and found this beetle. Neville has been warning the pupils not to bring any living things to the school, because pretty much any plant or animal can wreak havoc on the growing areas, as there are no top predators. So the pupil had tried to vanish the beetle, failed on the first try, despite the fact that it was unresponsive, and then first killed it with a bombarda and then vanished the remains. That didn't make sense, because the alarm for a pest animal should have closed the floo, like it did, but shouldn't have stunned the pupil. And if the pupil had triggered the stunning alarm, he shouldn't have been awake by the time I got there, suggesting that the stunning spell had been directed at something he was carrying. So I went over his luggage with a fine-toothed comb, but didn't find anything, and then, after alerting everyone to be extra vigilant, I had let it go. We thought maybe the warding spells had a minor problem, with some convergence between the human intruder and pest wards. But now I'm wondering, ..."

"... what if the beetle wasn't a beetle, but an animagus?" Sirius finished the thought.

"Exactly."

"A deservedly ignominious end to an ignominious reporter," Sirius concluded.

The previous school year they had covered the basics of quidditch during PE, so Harry decided they should progress to a voluntary quidditch league for those who wanted to play more often. They didn't have enough pupils for multiple teams, so he had had to convince Andromeda, Lilian and Noêmia to play so that they had 14 players, because he had known before he had asked that Hermione and Neville would refuse, and Ted had also shown a disinclination to play. Each player would alternate between the two teams, so they could have a league table in which each individual gained or lost the point difference between the two teams for any match. They would then have 14 matches over the school year.

By November the twins had finished the 7 protective overalls. However, when they reviewed their strategy to resist a superior force, they concluded that Voldemort, and/or the ministry, might well be willing to send so many Death Eaters /aurors after them that they would still be overwhelmed, and they decided that for the time being they would persist in guerilla tactics of making a small hit and disappearing before the counter-strike showed up. Lilian had mentioned that the alarm-ward the Death Eaters were using was most likely designed for humans only. Dobby and Opal expressed their willingness to try and kill a Death Eater between the two of them. Bellatrix's task of training junior Death Eaters had been taken over by one of the senior Death Eaters who had never gone to Azkaban, so the only Azkaban escapee who regularly engaged in senseless torture and murder of muggles was Mulciber, and the attack would be directed at him. Once he showed up in a muggle village for which they had a detailed enough map that they could see whether he was in a house or out on the street. They would put anti-apparation and anti-portkey wards around Mulciber's wards, both to keep Mulciber in and to keep backup out. Once Mulciber was out in the street the elves would apparate in and, using either their rifles or their wands, would kill him. Then, one of them would take away the body to bury it, and the other elf would deactivate their wards and take back the wardstones with them. The discussion about whether two elves without human backup were too exposed to risk them was rather heated, but in the end the arguments won out that doing nothing endangered them as well, and that the humans could be geared up and ready to apparate to the perimeter in the unlikely event that they had prepared wardstones that could be activated to prevent apparation by the elves but few enough Death Eaters showed up that they had a chance of safely extracting the elves.

In the end the backup was not necessary. As Lilian had thought it might, the death of Mulciber set off the alarm, but by then the elves were already leaving, and Mulciber's death had deactivated the other wards he had cast, so without a body the other Death Eaters would have a hard time reconstructing what happened.

They did send in two dozen Death Eaters, which was so many that they were confirmed in their conclusion that they were not yet ready to go head-to-head with the ministry. The Death Eaters then did what essentially amounted to throwing a temper tantrum, and destroyed 9 houses around the one where Mulciber had been killed.

Harry reported the incident to the prime minister, who protested the obvious use of magic to kill muggles to the ICW. The ICW sent in observers, who confirmed that not only had the houses been destroyed by magic, killing the inhabitants of 8 of the houses when they collapsed, but that the inhabitants of one of the houses had been tortured and killed by magic before that. The ICW censured the British ministry of magic. The ministry, to their relief and somewhat to their surprise, had turned over Walden Macnair, Alecto and Amycus Carrow to the ICW. Apparently, Riddle didn't think he could take on the ICW. The surprise came from the fact that Riddle had never backed down before, and sometimes his arrogance seemed to have no bounds. The fact that their surprise was not complete was because Grindelwald had tried and failed to subvert the ICW, and Riddle's support outside Britain was waning, so he had obviously concluded that his control of the British ministry of magic couldn't survive an ICW embargo on imports and exports and that he couldn't muster the international support that would allow him to prevent such an ICW response if Britain were to pretend not to know who had killed the muggles, or, more likely, that his aim was to first make his control of British magical society absolute before venturing abroad. In due course, the three Death Eaters got life sentences in Nurmengard.

On 12 February Kreacher had died. As they had previously agreed with Kreacher, he was buried in the garden of 12 Grimmauld Place with the heads of his ancestors that had been on display in the house. They had added the Black house to their floo network so that those who had known Kreacher could attend the funeral. Harry was there as the Black heir and eulogised Kreacher's devotion to the family in general and Regulus in particular, and his instrumental role in finishing the part of the fight against Tom Riddle that Regulus had taken up. Sirius spoke through the mirror, managing to hold his tongue about his troubled relationship with Kreacher.

The next day Harry had told Opal that when she was ready they should talk about any changes that might be needed, and she indicated her readiness to talk immediately. Harry had hoped that being around Dobby, who had progressed the most in acting like a free person, would have taught Opal to take up more personal space than that. However, all he said to her was that in that case he would talk about a practical question first, and that if during the grieving process she thought of any additional ways they could honour Kreacher's legacy, or discuss any other details concerning the house of Black that had changed now, she shouldn't hesitate to raise them with Harry or Sirius, but that the point he wanted to raise at that moment was that he had never offered to set Opal free, even though all the other elves with them were free, and that he had done this out of respect for Kreacher's feelings. He asked Opal how she would feel about being free as well.

Opal immediately agreed.

Harry expressed his surprise. After Winky had been adamantly opposed to being freed, and the former Potter elves had never been given a choice, when their freedom had maybe not been a punishment, but at least a legacy from Dumbledore's interference.

Opal explained that she admired Dobby for his ability to serve even better despite being free, and that Marny, Okri, Cicely and Opal herself were starting to understand Hermione and Harry's argument that they were able to serve better thanks to being free. However, she wanted to ask permission to have elflings in these last moments that she was still a bound elf, because it would make it easier to find a father if she could tell him she'd been given permission by her master, because when house-elves served as a relatively isolated small group, they preferred to look further afield for fathers, and in their case that inevitably meant that the father would be a bound house-elf.

Harry gave his permission, confirmed with her that after Sirius' original instructions to obey Harry she didn't need him to confirm this permission, after which Harry handed her one of the child-sized t-shirts he had bought at the time he had set the Potter house-elves free.

Despite the British ministry handing over the three who had caused a muggle-wizard incident big enough that the ICW had gotten involved, the other West European ministries had implemented travel and goods transport restrictions to Britain. This had caused a shortage of some goods, most notably certain potions ingredients. The Death Eaters had raided a warehouse in Belgium where they had killed five employees. They hadn't been wearing Death Eater masks, but had nevertheless been recognised as British when one of them had shouted about needing help when he had been wounded.

When the British ministry professed not to have any leads on who had carried out the raid, the other ministries had doubled down on restricting travel. The biggest blow-back, however, had come from within Britain, when a whole extended family of 53 members had emigrated to the USA.

"Retaliation against family members is relatively subtle," Sirius reported after he and Remus had spoken to several members of the family, "but there is definitely an unofficial hierarchy of families who get preferential treatment from the government, and having family members emigrate has a negative impact on a family's place in the hierarchy."

"'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others'," Hermione quoted, and made a face when Harry and Sirius looked as if they wondered whether she was channeling Luna again, mentioning some unknown animals when the discussion had clearly been about humans, while only Remus recognised the quote to Animal Farm.

Remus must have decided that explaining muggle culture to the two Philistines could wait, and continued the report, "Britain will feel this one, because 6 of the emigrants were skilled healers for St Mungo's and won't be easy to replace. The reason the whole family emigrated is tied to the recent raid in Belgium. Some potions ingredients have become so expensive that St Mungo's had stopped providing free treatment for some ailments, and though the raid successfully captured the ingredients that had been in short supply, the free treatment of all tax-paying citizens was not re-instated, but was kept as a privilege for the politically connected. It was the spell that broke the shield charm after years of slowly deteriorating public services despite an increase in taxes."

A whole family emigrating had been a signal, as over the following year a further 5% of the British magical population would emigrate. Not as dramatic as the wave of emigrations that followed Hogwarts closing its doors to muggleborns and the ministry instating its Muggleborn Registration Commission, but still, it brought the total of emigrants to a third of the population. With very little immigration to balance it out and a bout of widespread infertility, it was starting to make a large dent in the population.

The attacks on random muggles had resumed after a three-months' break. After Bellatrix and Mulciber had been killed, and Macnair had been sent to Nurmengard, Nott was the only remaining Death Eater of the initial four who had been responsible for most of the attacks two years before, and he was still staying away from muggle areas. However, the attacks by what appeared to be one senior Death Eater accompanied by three or four juniors were back. The emigrants had confirmed that Riddle, and his puppet-regime in the British ministry, still relied more on torture than on the social contract to get the general population to submit to their rule, but that kind of ruthlessness had to be conditioned into people, desensitising them to cruelty by repeated torture sessions. Moreover, it was something that was mostly limited to young men, so a steady turnover of young recruits was needed as senior Death Eaters now ran the ministry. Apparently, Riddle still thought that the risk of revolt by the average witch and wizard outweighed the risk of further interventions from the ICW or the muggles, and had ordered the attacks on muggles to resume, rather than have the conditioning be perpetrated on hapless witches and wizards.

Hermione had asked the house-elves about their ability to move food from the Hogwarts kitchens to the Great Hall without having to apparate themselves, and whether they could do the same thing to move the magical equivalent of a hand-grenade across the wards the Death Eaters put up. The house-elves said that they could, but were unsure how much the greater distance would affect their accuracy. It turned out that, like with wanded spells and rifle-shooting, they got better with practice. It made no difference to the elves whether there were wards against human apparation, so they practiced inside the school until they got accurate enough to use it as an attack.

The next time the Death Eaters showed up in a muggle village, Hermione and all the elves went after them. Like before, they set up anti-transportation wards on arrival. Hermione then took out an almost finished potion, added the final ingredient that would start making a lot of gas, transfigured the cauldron into a closed globe, after which Cicely, who was the most accurate and silent when moving objects, popped it to the point just behind where they could see the Death Eaters on their map. Hermione had transfigured the cauldron to be thin-walled on the end facing the Death Eaters, both to create a directional charge that would prevent them from blowing up the windows of the house the Death Eaters had just left, and also because they wanted to incapacitate but not kill the Death Eaters. Once the map showed them that the Death Eaters went flying, Dobby and Opal apparated in to stun the Death Eaters, after which the Potter house-elves joined them to take the stunned Death Eaters to join their other Death Eater prisoners, while Dobby stayed behind just long enough to vanish the remains of their grenade, and Hermione took down their wards.

A few weeks later it became apparent that the Death Eaters were not going to let this set-back stop them from attacking muggles. At their next attack they showed up with 10 people who spread out in order not to present a single target. They still only attacked a single muggle house, no doubt to keep from triggering a repeat of the ICW investigation.

The school staff discussed this new strategy. They thought the Death Eaters would not keep this up for years to come, as most of the Death Eaters were just standing around on guard duty, and they were not particularly disciplined, so at some point they would get bored and start cutting corners. The question was, were the school staff callous enough to wait for that to happen while muggles were being attacked? On the other hand, did they have a choice, because they didn't think they could capture 10 of them without any of them escaping. And if any of them escaped they couldn't rely on the house-elves as much as they had, because that strategy only worked so well because it was unexpected.

In the end they decided to kill one or more of the Azkaban escapees, whose lives they considered forfeit. They had all done pretty terrible things during the 1970s and it was clear from their map, and information that reached them from people who had emigrated after Voldemort had taken over that the surviving eight were still some of the more vicious Death Eaters. When they looked over the house-elf written logs of their movements, though, it became obvious that after Mulciber's death they had stopped going anywhere alone...

As usual it was Hermione who spotted the assumption hidden in their conundrum. The Death Eaters may not go anywhere alone anymore, but that didn't mean that some of them didn't live either alone or with partners who didn't know the second thing about duelling. The question was whether the muggle-raised had spread out their attacks enough, both over their economic and strategic targets and spread out over time, that the Death Eaters still felt secure in their warded homes. There was only one way to find out. Their first target was Dolohov, whose wife had left him after he'd been incarcerated in Azkaban.

As one of their potential strategies to attack Death Eaters, once they had enough food waste to grow mice, they had started to breed poisonous snakes, because, unlike conjured snakes, they could be painted with runes to make them more robust and disillusioned. Now, Harry had trained their snakes to carry a harness that contained a small communication mirror and a container with fluoric acid. Hermione had bought this muggle acid because basilisk venom was too expensive when they didn't need its magical properties, they just needed something powerful enough to dissolve enough of the ward-stone to erode the runes away.

Their efforts to keep the Death Eaters wrong-footed by using widely differing tactics and steadfast preparation continued to pay off. As usual, Dolohov's hearth-stone was the ward-stone. Normally, this predictability was not a problem, because the only way a human enemy could reach the hearth-stone was by first destroying the wards. After checking that the wards were down Harry went in, stunned Dolohov, put magic suppressing cuffs on him, stuck him to his broom and flew to their nearest unplottable point, from where he apparated to their prison.

When they tried the same approach on Rookwood they discovered why Unspeakables were held in such high regard, because, even after the wards that were held in the hearth-stone were destroyed, there were additional wards that protected Rookwood's home. Clearly, he was security-conscious enough to either add wand-cast wards every time he came home, or he had a secondary ward-stone. Harry managed to retrieve the snake, but the next time Rookwood tried to use the floo he would find that his hearth-stone had been demolished, so next time they would have to find a new attack strategy.

At exam time all the staff sat their GCSEs, and in some cases A-levels, in the subjects they taught. Although the Royal status of their school gave them a lot of freedom to ignore the rules for normal teachers, they had agreed to make at least some effort to show their commitment, beyond that shown by the acceptable GCSE results of the pupils, to making sure their teaching was up to the muggle legal standards. Not to mention that they had no wish to embarrass Efrain when he had to report back on the school's performance.